Work Text:
Painting is the one thing in his life Noeru loves the most, and hates even more.
He loves the feeling of capturing a perfect moment, holding it in his hands, re-shaping and rearranging it in his mind, then laying it down on the empty canvas as if he's invented that moment himself; a single frame of this world suspended still in time, like there was nothing before and there will be nothing after that one second.
He hates that he's not old enough to be tired of the world yet, but everywhere he looks, he sees nothing and no one worth painting anymore - not a second in time worth capturing.
He would stop drawing altogether, but his hands don't think he has any say in the matter. He was drawing before he knew how to write, and his hands don't know how to do anything else. They move on their own, pulling strings inside of him and laying them in irregular lines on any piece of paper, and Noeru just lets them do as they will, lacking the passion to make lines meet at the ends, to straighten skewed angles, to fix disproportional perspectives, to make the wild colors match, or not blend into each other when the overly wet brush loses angle and runs across the whole paper.
His pictures look, at their best, like those old doodles from elementary school they keep in a box in the closet back at his father's house, and Noeru staples them to the wall still wet, letting the ¥200 watercolor ink run down and stain the plaster while the ¥9500 oil paints dry up in their sealed pots over the cluttered drawing table, and the empty canvas he left open for whenever inspiration hits turns from clean white to stale yellow over the months.
Before Noeru notices, he's surrounded by an universe of bunnies, flowers, birds, blue umbrellas and pink teapots. And after Chidori casually says one day that the living room reminds him of when they were kids and Ken-chan and him would cover their bedrooms' walls with the drawings Noeru gave them, Noeru sometimes finds himself sitting back and staring at his walls, wishing there was a way he could make this moment stop and stand still in the space of a painting he doesn't know how to start.