Themed Writing Contest #45: Keep it Hidden
Jul 8, 2018 20:29:35 GMT
Mikauzoran and sgamer82 like this
Post by doctorpeggy on Jul 8, 2018 20:29:35 GMT
Themed Writing Contest #45 - Paint: Keep it Hidden
(I started this fic over so many times, and finally I wrote it down all at once. I doubt it's entirely coherent, but I tried my best with it, I've had trouble writing for the past couple of weeks. I left out a lot of description I wanted to put into this one because I got the feeling it would drag too long and become difficult to read. And then there is the fact that I can never make up a good enough title or summary. Also that I can't write angst but I tried to anyway.)
Word count: 2496
Summary: When Haibara Ai buys a sketchbook, she doesn't know she's bought a heartbreak.
Keep it hidden
Ai was not sure at what point Agasa-hakase had started giving her allowance, but one day she came to the realization that whenever it was, it must have been a long time ago, because she found that she had a considerable amount of money saved up, and nothing to spend it on.
She’d have to save up for years together if she wanted to buy designer purses and handbags, and then wouldn’t be able to use them anyway in the current circumstances.
And she didn’t like her chances of being alive long enough to buy herself something expensive like that, anyway.
Ai had considered spending on the Detective Boys. Maybe she’d treat them to some nice cake, she knew that would make them happy, but she could almost imagine the smug look on Kudou-kun’s face as he would lean in close when the kids were too busy eating their cake and whisper in her ear that she was becoming soft, and it was something she really didn’t want to hear, even if she could find safety in the knowledge that her intentions were to only find a way to spend her money.
And that is how she found herself buying art supplies and a large sketchbook. She hadn’t really been thinking when she bought the sketchbook, all she knew was that she was browsing the shelves in the stationery store and found a brown hardcover sketchbook and she had just wanted it, though she wasn’t sure why. After that she thought it was only natural to buy paints and brushes and sketching pencils.
Now she was sitting at her desk, pencil in hand, sketchbook in front of her, and wondering what in the world she could draw, because she had never really done anything like this before. She had worked on a lot of things, sure. She’d written notes on the APTX formula over and over again because she was constantly revising them, and then she’d written notes on the antidote, and maybe she could draw the diagrams for those, but she didn’t think she could draw anything more.
She closed her eyes and tried to picture something, anything. An image of a laughing Kudou-kun popped into her head and she cursed herself for falling for someone she could never have and tried to push away the picture in her head, but it stayed there behind her eyelids.
So she opened her eyes, and went back to staring at the blank paper in front of her, wondering what she could draw.
It wasn’t until two weeks later that she finally started using what she’d bought.
It was a Sunday, and Ai had spent the morning as a referee for a soccer match for the Detective Boys and Kudou-kun. They had been lucky, and no murder had cropped up halfway through the small game. Ai had felt an immense amount of relief the second she had stepped back into the house after standing outside in the sun, bracing herself for an ear-splitting scream that probably meant some poor soul had stumbled across a murder. That was how she spent most of her time around Kudou-kun; waiting for murders to happen. Especially when she wasn’t talking to him or someone else.
Now she felt safe again, inside the house, away from Kudou-kun, although she knew that if she thought about it she would find that she only felt truly safe when she was with him, but she wouldn’t let herself think that. Not until she was tucked into her bed with the pale glow of the night filling up her room. Not until she felt alone enough that she was no longer afraid that someone would eavesdrop on the thoughts inside her head.
She was back at her desk, back to tapping her pencil lightly against her sketchbook page like she had been doing every day, trying to think of something to draw.
She knew what she would see if she closed her eyes to think. She didn’t know what face he would be making or if he’d have his glasses on or what he would be wearing, but she knew who it was that she would see and so she didn’t let herself close her eyes, because she had to stop loving him if she was going to keep herself from breaking.
Except… it was so easy to picture him in her mind. She had always had too good a memory for it to be of any use to her in a life where she couldn’t escape the trail of dead bodies that seemed to follow her, some even that she had created, and now it didn’t let her escape her feelings.
She growled in frustration, and felt an irrational urge to hurl the pencil across the room. Instead she put it against the paper and scratched out the first thing that came to her mind as if she didn’t know what it was going to be.
In the end it didn’t look so bad for a first attempt. It was good, even. She had more control in her hands than most anyone, years of working with toxic chemicals had made it necessary for her to have it. And Kudou-kun’s face had for a long time been burned into her mind, into her imagination and her midnight fantasies where he loved her instead of that other girl, so the likeness that she had drawn in her sketchbook was eerily close to the real thing.
And Ai hated it. It didn’t make her feel anything she felt when she was around him. It just made her angry. In her sketchbook it was just a face of a teenage boy and nothing more.
Still she couldn’t help but touch the pencil against the paper again to correct the mistakes she had made; on his lips, on his eyebrows, on the line of his jaw. She couldn’t help but take the eraser and rub out the messy lines and put cleaner ones in their place.
It made her angry knowing that she hardly ever got to see him like this, in his real body. It made her want to create a permanent antidote more than anything. The first time Kudou-kun had taken the antidote… she had hated it, because he had been reckless and stupid, but seeing him grin like a maniac made her feel warm and happy in a way it shouldn’t have when she knew that if he returned to his old life it meant he would walk out of her life.
She didn’t paint it that day. She didn’t trust herself to do it right, and her mind was such a mess she knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate if she tried to teach herself now, so she put her sketchbook away, locked it in the drawer where she had been keeping her allowance along with a couple of other things for the sake of keeping things in it, and now she had an actual use for the lock.
She practiced painting almost religiously, using the pages in the back of her sketchbook and then ripping them out to keep them in a folder so her trials and experiments wouldn’t be in the same book as her portrait of Kudou-kun, and in doing so she had ripped out nearly a fourth of her sketchbook. She tried to justify it by telling herself that she had been using the back of the book and therefore it didn’t show her progress properly so she had to arrange them from first to last rather than the way they’d be arranged from last to first normally, but it was a bad excuse and she knew it.
Agasa-hakase had caught her painting a few times, but Ai was sure he knew from the glares she shot him that looking at anything she made was not something he could do.
It was a day when the whole lot of them, her and Kudou-kun and the kids, had almost died at the hands of a woman who had killed her only child because she thought the girl was trying to kill her, when Ai came home, made small talk with Agasa-hakase, put away her school bag, pulled out her paints, and opened the first page of the sketchbook.
Her hands were shaking because they’d all almost died and she should have been used to things like this by now but she wasn’t, though she never let it show.
And besides, she never needed to let it show if Kudou-kun was there, because he never seemed to be scared of anything except other people dying when he could prevent it, and for Ai there was a certain sense of security in that, in the fact that he would protect her even when she didn’t want or need him to.
Ai clenched her fist, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.
When she opened them her hands had stopped shaking.
And then she painted.
It was a mess, at first. She had practiced, sure. She had tried painting so many little portraits, pictures she had found online, that even with her memory she couldn’t remember them all, but now she was painting his face, and the drawing was so much bigger than the ones she had tried before, too.
And slowly, so very slowly, it came together. The more shadows and details she added, the more it came to life.
And then she came to a point where she didn’t want to touch it anymore. It wasn’t perfect, it would never be perfect, but she had made it and it looked like him and she didn’t know if anything else really mattered.
The sketchbook was quickly filled up with pictures not too different from the first. Some, Ai had tried in monochrome, others were in false colors, and a few of them were made up of only shadows on white paper and nothing else.
And then came a Sunday in the summer when Yoshida-san, Tsubarya-kun and Kojima-kun were all out on vacation visiting relatives, when Ai sat herself down with her sketchbook and didn’t go for the pencil, but started with the paint.
She was tried of making a frame, an outline for what she had to paint. She had spent so many hours making portraits of Kudou-kun, and every day she told herself she would stop, and every day she couldn’t do it because she couldn’t help it, and painting was proving to be a better escape from reality than even sleep, and now she had grown almost tired of doing the same thing over and over again.
Almost.
But she hated the idea of not wanting to do it anymore, so she knew she would have to start with something different.
It felt strange, touching the brush to the paper without lines to guide her. It felt strange when she left white spaces where she knew something would go but she didn’t have the drawing to tell her.
And it felt more real than anything else she’d done before. She could see a ghost of an image on the paper, a glimpse of what her painting would look like, and it felt so right, it was making her giddy.
She almost missed the doorbell, and she would have if she had still been absorbed in her work, but she wasn’t. She was pouring out the water from her mug into her her bathroom sink. Her mind was filled with a haze of satisfaction over completing the portrait in such a short time, and all of it disappeared when she stepped out of the bathroom and heard Kudou-kun’s voice coming from outside. She shoved all of her painting materials into one drawer, and had only just about managed to slam her sketchbook shut when her bedroom door opened.
“Say, Haibara, do you have some time? I’m kinda bored, since Ran is out with Sonoko, and I didn’t know what to do so I came here.”
“You… came here. Because you were bored. Why?”
“Well, if I’m totally honest, I thought I’d have a chat with Hakase or something, but he was about to go out and get groceries. Oh yeah, he told me to tell you he was going out to do that. Well, so here we are.”
“It’s nice to know you didn’t actually want to see me.”
“Lighten up, Haibara. Anyway, I don’t know what you do for fun, so you tell me.”
Ai pursed her lips. I paint portraits of you for fun, sounded like a terrible thing to say.
“Kudou-kun, if you’re here to amuse yourself, I suggest you get your soccer ball or something and go outside.”
“It’s too hot outside. Say, Haibara, do you have any juice?” She sighed. It was so strange, how sometimes Kudou Shinichi, when he was in the middle of solving a crime or chasing after a murderer or devising a plan could seem so serious, so much older than seven, or even seventeen, and how other times he acted about as old as he looked.
“I’ll check in the fridge,” she said to him, throwing one last glance at him as she left the room.
She came back holding two cans of orange juice, just about managed to get the door open, and stepped inside.
“Here’s your—what are you doing!”
The cans fell from Ai’s hand and were forgotten on the floor. She flew to her desk where Kudou-kun was standing, wide-eyed, with her sketchbook open in front of him, and slammed the book shut. She felt her face, her limbs, her chest heat up in fury and shame, and without thinking she pushed Kudou-kun away from her, pushed him hard. She didn’t notice she was crying till the tears were dripping off her chin, and Kudou-kun just stood there, a couple of meters away, mute with shock.
“Don’t say a word,” Ai warned hoarsely.
He didn’t. He just looked at her, and then slowly, so very slowly, picked up a can of juice from the floor and opened it.
Ai stood frozen. She didn’t move when he finished the can, didn’t move when he came up to her desk to toss it into the bin, didn’t move when he walked towards the door. And just before he left, he looked back at her, and offered her a smile. Just like that.
He didn’t mind. Perhaps he didn’t even care. Ai would never know what was going on in his mind that time.
And then, when he left, she still stayed where she was, right up till when she heard the front door of the house close.
Agasa-Hakase found her later, curled up in the corner where her desk met the wall, fast asleep with red-rimmed eyes and tearstained cheeks, sketchbook clutched in her arms.
(I started this fic over so many times, and finally I wrote it down all at once. I doubt it's entirely coherent, but I tried my best with it, I've had trouble writing for the past couple of weeks. I left out a lot of description I wanted to put into this one because I got the feeling it would drag too long and become difficult to read. And then there is the fact that I can never make up a good enough title or summary. Also that I can't write angst but I tried to anyway.)
Word count: 2496
Summary: When Haibara Ai buys a sketchbook, she doesn't know she's bought a heartbreak.
Keep it hidden
Ai was not sure at what point Agasa-hakase had started giving her allowance, but one day she came to the realization that whenever it was, it must have been a long time ago, because she found that she had a considerable amount of money saved up, and nothing to spend it on.
She’d have to save up for years together if she wanted to buy designer purses and handbags, and then wouldn’t be able to use them anyway in the current circumstances.
And she didn’t like her chances of being alive long enough to buy herself something expensive like that, anyway.
Ai had considered spending on the Detective Boys. Maybe she’d treat them to some nice cake, she knew that would make them happy, but she could almost imagine the smug look on Kudou-kun’s face as he would lean in close when the kids were too busy eating their cake and whisper in her ear that she was becoming soft, and it was something she really didn’t want to hear, even if she could find safety in the knowledge that her intentions were to only find a way to spend her money.
And that is how she found herself buying art supplies and a large sketchbook. She hadn’t really been thinking when she bought the sketchbook, all she knew was that she was browsing the shelves in the stationery store and found a brown hardcover sketchbook and she had just wanted it, though she wasn’t sure why. After that she thought it was only natural to buy paints and brushes and sketching pencils.
Now she was sitting at her desk, pencil in hand, sketchbook in front of her, and wondering what in the world she could draw, because she had never really done anything like this before. She had worked on a lot of things, sure. She’d written notes on the APTX formula over and over again because she was constantly revising them, and then she’d written notes on the antidote, and maybe she could draw the diagrams for those, but she didn’t think she could draw anything more.
She closed her eyes and tried to picture something, anything. An image of a laughing Kudou-kun popped into her head and she cursed herself for falling for someone she could never have and tried to push away the picture in her head, but it stayed there behind her eyelids.
So she opened her eyes, and went back to staring at the blank paper in front of her, wondering what she could draw.
It wasn’t until two weeks later that she finally started using what she’d bought.
It was a Sunday, and Ai had spent the morning as a referee for a soccer match for the Detective Boys and Kudou-kun. They had been lucky, and no murder had cropped up halfway through the small game. Ai had felt an immense amount of relief the second she had stepped back into the house after standing outside in the sun, bracing herself for an ear-splitting scream that probably meant some poor soul had stumbled across a murder. That was how she spent most of her time around Kudou-kun; waiting for murders to happen. Especially when she wasn’t talking to him or someone else.
Now she felt safe again, inside the house, away from Kudou-kun, although she knew that if she thought about it she would find that she only felt truly safe when she was with him, but she wouldn’t let herself think that. Not until she was tucked into her bed with the pale glow of the night filling up her room. Not until she felt alone enough that she was no longer afraid that someone would eavesdrop on the thoughts inside her head.
She was back at her desk, back to tapping her pencil lightly against her sketchbook page like she had been doing every day, trying to think of something to draw.
She knew what she would see if she closed her eyes to think. She didn’t know what face he would be making or if he’d have his glasses on or what he would be wearing, but she knew who it was that she would see and so she didn’t let herself close her eyes, because she had to stop loving him if she was going to keep herself from breaking.
Except… it was so easy to picture him in her mind. She had always had too good a memory for it to be of any use to her in a life where she couldn’t escape the trail of dead bodies that seemed to follow her, some even that she had created, and now it didn’t let her escape her feelings.
She growled in frustration, and felt an irrational urge to hurl the pencil across the room. Instead she put it against the paper and scratched out the first thing that came to her mind as if she didn’t know what it was going to be.
In the end it didn’t look so bad for a first attempt. It was good, even. She had more control in her hands than most anyone, years of working with toxic chemicals had made it necessary for her to have it. And Kudou-kun’s face had for a long time been burned into her mind, into her imagination and her midnight fantasies where he loved her instead of that other girl, so the likeness that she had drawn in her sketchbook was eerily close to the real thing.
And Ai hated it. It didn’t make her feel anything she felt when she was around him. It just made her angry. In her sketchbook it was just a face of a teenage boy and nothing more.
Still she couldn’t help but touch the pencil against the paper again to correct the mistakes she had made; on his lips, on his eyebrows, on the line of his jaw. She couldn’t help but take the eraser and rub out the messy lines and put cleaner ones in their place.
It made her angry knowing that she hardly ever got to see him like this, in his real body. It made her want to create a permanent antidote more than anything. The first time Kudou-kun had taken the antidote… she had hated it, because he had been reckless and stupid, but seeing him grin like a maniac made her feel warm and happy in a way it shouldn’t have when she knew that if he returned to his old life it meant he would walk out of her life.
She didn’t paint it that day. She didn’t trust herself to do it right, and her mind was such a mess she knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate if she tried to teach herself now, so she put her sketchbook away, locked it in the drawer where she had been keeping her allowance along with a couple of other things for the sake of keeping things in it, and now she had an actual use for the lock.
She practiced painting almost religiously, using the pages in the back of her sketchbook and then ripping them out to keep them in a folder so her trials and experiments wouldn’t be in the same book as her portrait of Kudou-kun, and in doing so she had ripped out nearly a fourth of her sketchbook. She tried to justify it by telling herself that she had been using the back of the book and therefore it didn’t show her progress properly so she had to arrange them from first to last rather than the way they’d be arranged from last to first normally, but it was a bad excuse and she knew it.
Agasa-hakase had caught her painting a few times, but Ai was sure he knew from the glares she shot him that looking at anything she made was not something he could do.
It was a day when the whole lot of them, her and Kudou-kun and the kids, had almost died at the hands of a woman who had killed her only child because she thought the girl was trying to kill her, when Ai came home, made small talk with Agasa-hakase, put away her school bag, pulled out her paints, and opened the first page of the sketchbook.
Her hands were shaking because they’d all almost died and she should have been used to things like this by now but she wasn’t, though she never let it show.
And besides, she never needed to let it show if Kudou-kun was there, because he never seemed to be scared of anything except other people dying when he could prevent it, and for Ai there was a certain sense of security in that, in the fact that he would protect her even when she didn’t want or need him to.
Ai clenched her fist, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.
When she opened them her hands had stopped shaking.
And then she painted.
It was a mess, at first. She had practiced, sure. She had tried painting so many little portraits, pictures she had found online, that even with her memory she couldn’t remember them all, but now she was painting his face, and the drawing was so much bigger than the ones she had tried before, too.
And slowly, so very slowly, it came together. The more shadows and details she added, the more it came to life.
And then she came to a point where she didn’t want to touch it anymore. It wasn’t perfect, it would never be perfect, but she had made it and it looked like him and she didn’t know if anything else really mattered.
The sketchbook was quickly filled up with pictures not too different from the first. Some, Ai had tried in monochrome, others were in false colors, and a few of them were made up of only shadows on white paper and nothing else.
And then came a Sunday in the summer when Yoshida-san, Tsubarya-kun and Kojima-kun were all out on vacation visiting relatives, when Ai sat herself down with her sketchbook and didn’t go for the pencil, but started with the paint.
She was tried of making a frame, an outline for what she had to paint. She had spent so many hours making portraits of Kudou-kun, and every day she told herself she would stop, and every day she couldn’t do it because she couldn’t help it, and painting was proving to be a better escape from reality than even sleep, and now she had grown almost tired of doing the same thing over and over again.
Almost.
But she hated the idea of not wanting to do it anymore, so she knew she would have to start with something different.
It felt strange, touching the brush to the paper without lines to guide her. It felt strange when she left white spaces where she knew something would go but she didn’t have the drawing to tell her.
And it felt more real than anything else she’d done before. She could see a ghost of an image on the paper, a glimpse of what her painting would look like, and it felt so right, it was making her giddy.
She almost missed the doorbell, and she would have if she had still been absorbed in her work, but she wasn’t. She was pouring out the water from her mug into her her bathroom sink. Her mind was filled with a haze of satisfaction over completing the portrait in such a short time, and all of it disappeared when she stepped out of the bathroom and heard Kudou-kun’s voice coming from outside. She shoved all of her painting materials into one drawer, and had only just about managed to slam her sketchbook shut when her bedroom door opened.
“Say, Haibara, do you have some time? I’m kinda bored, since Ran is out with Sonoko, and I didn’t know what to do so I came here.”
“You… came here. Because you were bored. Why?”
“Well, if I’m totally honest, I thought I’d have a chat with Hakase or something, but he was about to go out and get groceries. Oh yeah, he told me to tell you he was going out to do that. Well, so here we are.”
“It’s nice to know you didn’t actually want to see me.”
“Lighten up, Haibara. Anyway, I don’t know what you do for fun, so you tell me.”
Ai pursed her lips. I paint portraits of you for fun, sounded like a terrible thing to say.
“Kudou-kun, if you’re here to amuse yourself, I suggest you get your soccer ball or something and go outside.”
“It’s too hot outside. Say, Haibara, do you have any juice?” She sighed. It was so strange, how sometimes Kudou Shinichi, when he was in the middle of solving a crime or chasing after a murderer or devising a plan could seem so serious, so much older than seven, or even seventeen, and how other times he acted about as old as he looked.
“I’ll check in the fridge,” she said to him, throwing one last glance at him as she left the room.
She came back holding two cans of orange juice, just about managed to get the door open, and stepped inside.
“Here’s your—what are you doing!”
The cans fell from Ai’s hand and were forgotten on the floor. She flew to her desk where Kudou-kun was standing, wide-eyed, with her sketchbook open in front of him, and slammed the book shut. She felt her face, her limbs, her chest heat up in fury and shame, and without thinking she pushed Kudou-kun away from her, pushed him hard. She didn’t notice she was crying till the tears were dripping off her chin, and Kudou-kun just stood there, a couple of meters away, mute with shock.
“Don’t say a word,” Ai warned hoarsely.
He didn’t. He just looked at her, and then slowly, so very slowly, picked up a can of juice from the floor and opened it.
Ai stood frozen. She didn’t move when he finished the can, didn’t move when he came up to her desk to toss it into the bin, didn’t move when he walked towards the door. And just before he left, he looked back at her, and offered her a smile. Just like that.
He didn’t mind. Perhaps he didn’t even care. Ai would never know what was going on in his mind that time.
And then, when he left, she still stayed where she was, right up till when she heard the front door of the house close.
Agasa-Hakase found her later, curled up in the corner where her desk met the wall, fast asleep with red-rimmed eyes and tearstained cheeks, sketchbook clutched in her arms.