Work Text:
The exhibit opens.
Five pm on a Monday night.
A stranger in a gray hoodie wanders through the crowd looking for something.
Someone.
***
Run.
Aki gasps.
He claws at his bedsheets, somewhere between waking and drowning, as his body tries to make sense of something it shouldn’t know.
Run far, far away.
The ceiling comes into focus, and he finally surfaces from the clutches of a sleepless dream.
It’s only after the sunrise slices through the curtains that he notices the way his hair sticks to his skin, and the way his heart pushes against his ribcage – running far, far away from something. Or at least trying to.
With some effort, he manages to sit up, and… Nothing.
The dream slips away as quickly as it struck.
He pushes his hair out of his face and pulls at his sweat-dampened shirt.
He gets ready to head to his studio.
***
A hermit crab moves into a new shell. Is it enough to call home?
The sea breeze tells him there’s a storm coming this week, but Aki doesn’t flinch at the warning.
Having grown up by the ocean, he has seen a storm or two in this life, more if you count the other lifetimes, but he doesn't know that. Not yet anyway. That is for neither here nor there.
Instead he watches the hermit crab skitter away to the dunes like it understands something he doesn't.
In his periphery, the sun sets, and there's a boy about his age with crimson hair.
The boy runs into the sea, into the sun, beckoning with arms winged open. Come into the water! It's nice here.
His voice calls to him like a memory, like the inside of a seashell. Hold it up to your ear, and it’ll sing to you the secrets of the seas and tell you where you came from before you were skin and bones. Before the boy was a son, a friend, a boy.
Aki believes the other child and runs towards him, screaming until there’s no air left in his lungs.
Wait for me, Angel!
***
A Comet passes by planet Earth for the first time in their life.
The planet’s surface is crimson. They have yet to know of oceans and sky.
When the Comet departs for the first time, the Earth bids them goodbye (but not farewell).
Long time no see.
It’s nice to meet you.
***
You’re a brave one aren’t you, Aki?
Angel lets Aki help him out of his hospital gown. “Lets” because Aki had to coax the stubbornness out of him and refute every it’s dangerous and you stupid human even though the nurses always hesitated by the doorway to his room, and no one else was willing to put their lives on the line to be kind to Angel.
But Aki puts on a pair of hospital gloves anyway because apparently he isn’t allowed to give his life away even though they both know how this ends.
He holds his breath and unties the knot on the back of the faded gray hospital gown.
Then, Angel calls him brave , and it echoes like waves in a seashell, like something he’s heard before. And it doesn’t stop even as his fingers tremble, peeling away at the fabric until it slips to the ground.
And there’s Angel – raw, vulnerable, almost humanly so – and suddenly Aki is drowning at the sight of where Angel’s arms used to be.
I’m really not.
Yes you are.
Angel doesn’t take no for an answer.
Aki hugs him from behind and holds him like he’s on the verge of slipping away. Through layers of fabric, Aki feels the heat radiating off of Angel’s body – battle-worn yet somehow still very much alive. He’s smaller than Aki remembers. No, not because of the missing limbs. It feels like Angel has collapsed in on himself - fallen, or maybe he’s landed.
Angel sinks into Aki’s embrace and rests his head on the latter’s shoulder.
When Angel doesn’t try to push him away, Aki’s eyes brim with tears.
You always have been, Angel whispers and kisses him through fabric where he can reach .
For the first time, Aki cries for the living.
***
It's easy to give purpose to pain. Aki has done this many times before. Dip a paintbrush into old blood wounds and paint the canvas red. When it fades, paint it again. The wound will stay open whether he wants it to or not. And on the off chance that the wound heals into a scar, wait. Be patient, and it just might split itself open again.
There will always be ink for the canvas.
Some days, when he swipes his brush across a canvas, he hears his mother’s voice and his father’s record player. He hears the traces of a brother he never had, the sound of ocean waves, the fluttering of angel wings. Sometimes he hears nothing at all. Just empty black space.
The canvas preserves the past, and the artist makes it permanent – every brush stroke an homage to yesteryear and then some. Aki likes this. It’s… familiar. Not the past, but the act of holding onto it and finding new ways to never let go.
He paints the anguish he knows and, sometimes, what he does not know – things he feels but cannot name. He has never been brave enough to visit the ocean, and he has never had a brother. He has never experienced a bloodbath, and he has never met an Angel.
But if he dips his brush far enough into the past, he just might discover that…
***
He can open his eyes underwater.
Not indefinitely, no. He is, afterall, only a boy. Only human – not even four feet tall submerged under infinite waters with his small young heart beating fast against his ribcage, and his lungs arduously holding onto that last gasp of air before he dove in.
He tries, just for a second, to open his eyes.
And there he is – red locks flowing like fire underwater, wide gap-toothed smile – like he’s seeing Aki for the very first time. Like he’s saying, there you are and also where have you been?
On land, he calls the boy an earthly name. Underwater, he calls him Angel .
Yeah, that feels right. With the other boy’s hands in his, he says it again – water in his mouth and life in his lungs – Angel .
Angel, Angel, Angel.
As Aki holds onto his hands, he touches the sun on Angel’s skin, and for a moment, the waves around them feel like feathered wings.
Water becomes air, and they drink in the sea the way they were always meant to – in its entirety, mouthfuls at a time.
As Aki holds onto Angel's hand, he becomes infinite – he becomes the water and the water becomes him and he is becoming. Aegean sea in his bones, starlight in his marrows.
And Angel, the finite point he'll always return to.
His singularity consumes Aki whole.
***
At no point in space is there the absence of gravity.
From the opposite side of the solar system, the Comet feels the Earth, pulling, beckoning. No matter how far the Comet flew away from Earth, they could tell that they were undeniably tethered to the planet; every atom that has ever been theirs is now also the Earth’s.
The Comet wonders amidst their wandering, why a planet would take interest in the remains of the universe – a body never made whole, left to drift through empty space with mouthfuls of the ashes of themself. No one ever cared for comets, only the dust trails they leave behind.
Yet, Earth saw them – the rough uneven surface of them – and saw something in them. Wanted them, even.
The sun gave the Comet orbit, but the Earth gave them direction.
I’ll be waiting for you , the Earth said.
What choice does the Comet have but to bow their head and return home?
(Maybe, maybe while in the darkest pockets of the universe where only gravity pierces through the absence of everything, the Comet has been waiting for Earth too.)
***
I’m not making a contract with you, Aki.
Why not?
You’ve already given me everything.
There has to be something.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
(You forget, Aki. You’ve already given me the entirety of you.)
***
Seven pm.
Aki watched the person approach the centerpiece of his collection, watched as he stood there, unmoving against the crowd of onlookers.
Watches him as he stands as still as the piece itself.
He looks at the painting, and the painting looks back as if they've known each other from before the brush hit the canvas.
Aki wonders what the painting sees.
***
Aki wakes up gasping, water in his lungs, blood in his throat, ashes in his mouth – the world under his skin.
On the surface of his memory: an Angel bathed in gold.
The Angel sits there on the edge of oblivion and permanence, coming in and out of focus like a body bobbing up and down at sea.
He grabs a sketchbook and frantically sketches the figure into existence, unmistakable desperation in every stroke of graphite.
When Aki tries to hold onto him, he is reminded of small children trying to cup the ocean in their palms – their first memory of how small human existence can be.
(Aki has never been brave enough to go to the ocean. Never been brave enough to feel small.)
The Angel came to him as his mind teetered on the precipice of understanding death. Or rather, the Angel returned to him. Like he has always been there, waiting for just enough gravity to draw him out of Aki's subconscious and into waking thought.
Or perhaps he was planted, like a sapling, like a memory watered with time and only now were his blades sharp enough to pierce through the veneer of Aki's mind and land on a blank canvas.
Or perhaps he was a dream- is, a dream. He is , a dream. One Aki has over and over and over – another something he can feel but cannot name.
He draws the Angel a second time and then a third and well, he lost count after that. As he shades in a feather, Aki comes to the realization that this Angel won’t leave his mind in this lifetime, seashell wings steadfast against nihility – like he won't let Aki forget him.
(Like he wants Aki to remember.)
***
Aki is still terrified of the ocean. It’s the largest entity he knows of after the sky and from a distance, he thinks the two could be one.
Day after day, he watches them – everlasting blues stretching until the event horizon. He watches the way the waves stretch towards the sky only to fall back down over and over again, only to rediscover the ruthlessness of gravity. Through all of time, the sea beats within and against itself – the cruel fate of longing.
Yet, who is more devout towards the heavens than the ocean? Who else can gaze into the sky so fearlessly, so ardently, so persistently that all of the cosmos finds themselves longing too?
When the sky looks into the sea and the sea looks into the sky, they become true – when the sky turns azure, the ocean follows; when the ocean reaches towards the heavens, the sky kisses it with sunlight.
In searching for each other, they find themselves.
The ocean can never touch the sky and the sky can never touch the ocean, but if Aki watches them from a distance, they just might be real.
***
The comet passes by Earth for the second time.
It’s been millennia since they last saw each other, but only moments since they were on each other’s minds.
You’ve changed.
You’re still as beautiful as the last time I saw you.
I like this version of you too.
I think I simply like you.
And neither of them are brave enough to say this out loud in this lifetime.
***
Two devil hunters sleep side by side. Rest comes to neither of them.
How does one rest when they are haunted?
Aki stares at the ceiling wondering how lonely it must be to be so close yet untouchable. If he reaches his hand up in front of his face and stares at the roughness of his palms, he can see the ghost of Angel’s hand. He can pretend like he did something meaningful.
He lives for those who died, if smoking a pack a day and crashing at cheap motels can be called living. But the drumming in his chest and the thoughts racing in his head must mean that he is at the very least, undeniably alive.
So how does one live for the living?
Next to him, Angel murmurs something, sleep having finally found him. Aki turns to look at him and thinks, maybe this is enough living . Whatever this is – shared motel rooms, warm bodies, the capacity to dream of a comet slicing through space, the ocean touching the sky, and Angel.
His dreams always ellipse Angel.
He carefully reaches out a gloved hand and brushes Angel’s hair out of his face. When Angel doesn’t flinch, Aki dares to sweep his thumb across his cheek.
In the cover of darkness, with the universe as his witness, Aki whispers.
I think I simply like you .
***
Nine pm.
I don’t know how to feel about this piece.
It’s not his usual style.
It’s… How do I put it… It’s…
Experimental?
Peculiar?
Not my taste.
Sui generis!
Singular.
Only the stranger in the gray hoodie has yet to say a word.
***
For the first time, Aki paints with something other than ink from his wounds. He doesn’t dig bristles into the wreckage of his past, he doesn’t search for scars seeking closure.
Instead, he paints a dream and douses it in gold.
And if his dream looks like an Angel…
***
The sunrise halos the boy’s figure, auburn hair turned golden under the watchful eye of the sky. From the sea, he beckons to Aki, the latter still on land, stifled in his own skin.
From the shore, Aki watches the boy splash around the waters, so free and unafraid of the waves crashing against his knees. The boy becomes seamless – perimeters blending into the sky and sea as if the confines of a body could no longer define him.
Aki, himself, is still a boy, a body – a singular moment bound by a frame and a sadness he calls fear. He runs towards the other boy.
Come back! It’s dangerous!
It’s only water , but the boy walks out of the sea anyway.
I can’t swim.
But you’re brave.
No I’m not.
Too bad. You already are.
Aren’t you afraid of drowning?
No.
Why?
They meet where the waves never cease to kiss the shore.
You’d run to save me without question.
***
The Comet falls out of orbit. They see Earth for the third and last time, but they don’t fear death.
The Comet didn’t exist before the Earth, the ocean, the Angel. They were black matter and nothingness until they saw their reflection in gold, in the center of another’s eye. Only then did they become real.
The Earth gazes back, watches as they slowly approach their atmosphere, setting everything ablaze in beautiful mutual destruction.
I didn’t mean to make you wait.
The Earth smiles with open arms.
The Comet approaches Earth…
***
One step at a time.
In a dark room,
Their eyes meet.
It’s you , Angel whispers, recognition in his eyes.
Aki stares back. If he hears Angel’s words, he doesn’t show it. If he hears the ocean and sees the whole world before him-
Well, it only makes sense, as a devil hunter, that he finds his end in a devil. That he finds his end in the wings of an Angel, the center of an eye, two hands held underwater, the meeting of two celestial bodies. Two pieces made whole.
Two…
***
Strangers meet on an empty museum floor for the first time.
10 pm.
All the visitors have cleared out except for one – the stranger in front of his centerpiece.
Aki runs towards him without question.
Afterall, a body is the past persevering – flesh and bones beating against ocean waves. It's a comet plummeting towards earth, a hunter and a devil, the sky and sea. An artist and-
The stranger turns around at the sound of his footsteps.
Aki stops in his tracks and looks between the stranger and the painting.
The stranger looks back at him and tilts his head. The gold of the painting haloes his crimson hair, and his figure is framed by the entire history of them.
What is a canvas if not humanity’s best effort at holding onto the past? What is a body if not the past persevering?
Two pairs of eyes conjoin on an empty museum floor. Only then did they become real.
"Nice to meet you," Aki says.
The stranger smiles.
"Long time to see."