Painted-tcl

Painted -- Ch 5

Stood in the middle of the room, inspecting the doodles from the previous evening that were scattered across my workbench, was a remarkably familiar boy. His head snapped up at the sound of my entrance, eyes narrowing in on where I stood in the doorway, poised for a confrontation. It was those same dark eyes and the same curve to the nose and the same dark hair that were still looking at me from the giant canvas leant against the table leg, but now when the figure turned this way and that he revealed angles I hadn't even thought about yet.
Forgoing my fear for confusion, I rushed closer to the equally disquieted figure, brazenly lifting my hand and tucking the dark strands of hair behind his right ear, revealing the same piercings that I'd decorated the image with barely five minutes ago.
The boy jolted away from my touch in surprise, eyes wide as he looked down at me.
"Who said you could touch?" His voice flowed naturally from his lips, shocking me all over again. This boy—this thing—could talk?
"Did you... did you come out of the canvas? Are you the painting?"
He quirked an eyebrow, "You should recognise somebody you created from scratch, Sam."
"How on earth do you know my name?"
"I know everything you know. Everything that's inside your head, is inside mine."
"What the fuck? You can read my thoughts?"
He scrunched up his nose, whether it was at the notion or my language, I couldn't tell, "No, stupid. I have all of your knowledge up until the point that I... materialised? Would materialised be the right word?"
"Do I look like I have any idea what's going on here?"
"No, you don't," he admitted, "so, by extension, I'm also clueless."
"What the fuck."
"You said that already."
I placed my wooden spoon down on the workbench and shot him a withering look, "Shut up—what's your name?"
He blinked at me, before glancing around the room until his eyes landed on a cluster of dirty paintbrushes in a cup by my semi-dried paint palette. He quickly counted them, before turning back to me.
"Ten."
I stared at him blankly for a moment, before pointing to the paintbrushes. "Did you honestly just do that?"
"Yes."
"Fine," I muttered, warily taking a couple of steps back from him, "just remember that was your decision."
I couldn't decide if Ten was a stranger or not. I had created him, and he claimed to know me just as well as I know myself, and I had spent the better part of the last twelve hours painting every freckle and hair on his body, but I couldn't immediately shake the obscurity of the situation.
"You're a painting?" I attempted to clarify once more.
"Well, I was, but I'm quite real right now. Do I smell food? I'm starving. I haven't eaten in forever."
I frowned in distaste at his joke, before tentatively holding my cup noodles out to him.
"You can eat?"
"Don't all people?"
"You're not a person."
"My anatomy would beg to differ."
"I wouldn't bank on that," I rebuked, leaning against the wall in a desperate attempt to steady my slightly shaking body, "my knowledge of anatomy is pretty shit."
He ignored my doubts, taking the styrofoam container and metallic fork from my hands and seating himself at my workbench. I watched him in awe. I had been expecting some of that childlike clumsiness kids always had to overcome when they first wrangled forks, but he pinched them between his fingers as if he'd been doing it for twenty years and not two minutes.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, wondering if it was my lack of sleep that had me hallucinating. I reopened my eyes to find Ten watching me already with noodles dangling from his lips, wearing an expectant expression.
"What?" I asked irritably.
"I was going to ask you that. Why do you look so stressed?"
I released a short bark of disbelieving laughter, "Because this entire situation is absurd and I'm three seconds away from putting it all down to a lack of sleep."
He rolled his eyes, "It's not a dream or whatever. I'm here, you may as well accept that."
"What do I do with you now, then?" I asked, pushing off the wall and coming over to lean against the workbench opposite from him, mostly to get a better look at him. He was entirely realistic, down to the pores and eyebrow hairs and long eyelashes that rimmed his dark but undeniably friendly eyes.
He shrugged and shovelled another mouthful of noodles between his waiting lips, "I dunno, keep me? Feed me? Love me?"
"If by 'love you' you mean interact with you as little as possible until I figure out what the fuck is going on, then sure, that too."
Ten shot me a wry smile and propped his elbows on the table, gesturing in your direction with his fork, "You're forgetting that I know how you work. I may not be inside your head anymore, but I know plenty well that you're not that much of an asshole. An impulsive dumbass, but not an asshole."
"Who on earth are you calling an impulsive dumbass?" I shrieked in indignation, snatching my noodles away from him in a petty gesture.
"No, don't. I'm still really hungry."
"You should have thought about that before you were an impulsive dumbass, right? Another word and I'll send you back into that canvas."
"You don't even know how I got here in the first place, let alone how to put me back."
"That's beside the point."