Two Outcasts in Love || Tylorpe

Ch 10: The Painting

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Warning: mental anguish mentions of trauma. Skip if you don't want to read

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Two days later, it's the middle of the night, and Xavier can't sleep.

After he told Tyler he loved him, he slept through the whole night. It was amazing. He had forgotten what it was like to get good sleep.

However, tonight, Xavier is tossing and turning. He keeps having nightmares, but the second he opens his eyes, he forgets them.

Tyler rolls over in his sleep and tries to hug Xavier. Normally this would be comforting, but Xavier's feeling too jittery. He needs to get up and run or draw.

Xavier sits up in the dark, and the room is quiet except for the heat whirring in the distance. A little moonlight streams in from their window, and Xavier sees a thin crescent moon high in the sky.

Xavier's eyes have been adjusted to the dark for a while now, and he slowly gets out of bed. He pauses when the floor creaks, and then he continues to putter around, grabbing a pair of joggers and throwing on his hoodie, coat, and some sneakers. He pauses to stare at Tyler's peaceful sleeping face before he heads out. He'll probably be back before he wakes; if not, Tyler'll know where he is.

The hallways are dim and cold, but when Xavier gets outside, it's freezing. He can see his breath in the cold air and regrets not bringing a bigger jacket. It feels like something is scratching at the back of his brain, and Xavier needs to get it out on canvas. When he reaches the woods, he turns on his phone flashlight to guide him over the roots and branches on the forest floor.

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He arrives at his art studio with the image of a flower burning in his mind. So he creates a pallet of purple, black, and green with highlights of white and yellow. He puts on his apron and gets to work, and it comes to him after some time. How could he have been so stupid? It's a nightshade flower, like his secret society. But as he finishes the painting, he sees no other signs of a clue: no blood, tracks, or secret books in the background.

The next canvas he grabs is huge because he wants to gather as much detail from this next one to see why it's important. Then, he opens his mind up and lets his mind catch on to the next vision. Over the weeks, he's gotten a knack for telling the difference between paintings that come to him because they are interesting and ones that come to him because they predict the near future or depict the recent past.

The first thing that catches his mind is a dark coat, and his heart beats fast, and he wonders if it's the hyde. He's been painting for weeks, dying to find clues and hints as to who might be the hyde. But it's like his mind isn't letting him see. It takes longer and longer to remember his visions after he wakes up, and sometimes he wakes up in a cold sweat, and he never remembers the dream. He can't just quickly sketch what he remembers to get hints anymore as he did at first with the dead hikers. Instead, he has to go into a trance and paint until it's all out on canvas, and only then, when the picture is complete, will his brain allow him to see the vision in his mind. So seeing himself in pain, this coat fires him up and spurs him on.

The next thing his mind is drawn to is the shoes of the figure he's begun to paint. They are bright red boots covered in mud and seem nearly black in the lighting in his vision. Xavier continues to paint, adding what he realizes is an assortment of animal bones on the cave floor.

He's almost relieved. It could be scarier. It's no disemboweled hiker. But he can feel something looming in the back of his head.

He feels a bit feverish as he paints, and he dips in and out of reality, falling into the rhythm of the trance. He channels so much of his power at once that he sometimes skips real-time hours.