Team (discontinued for now)

Chapter 51: Colors

(At this point staying consistent with the update day has gotten kinda hard :') So although y'all should still expect updates on Sunday, if they're later, don't be surprised :'''/)

So, painting was apparently Mai's thing now. Her therapist said they'd been making a lot of progress, in a fairly short span of time. Not like her addiction was cured or anything, but Mai started having the urge to set a whole-ass house on fire way less now. She'd occasionally burn a paper in between working hours, if she was stressed due to lack of customers, but sometimes Puppet caught her doing it and he'd manage to distract her for a while.

As it turned out, Mai was actually pretty good at painting. Not like, phenomenal "I've had years of practice with this" kind of good, but more a "I give it my all during art class at school" good. And for whatever weird but ultimately awesome reason, Mai and Puppet both just seemed to be immediately decent at any hobby presented to them.

Admittedly, Mai was a pretty shitty dancer. She could do the worm, though. And Puppet on the other hand, could only draw stick figures.

There was something incredibly calming about dragging a brush across a blank canvas, watching as the colors brought it to life. And that was an odd feeling, because one word you simply couldn't associate with Mai was calm. She was always energetic about something, or crazy. Never sat still for even a second. But doing artsy stuff like this, made Mai feel like a different person entirely.

A collected, serious, calculating kind of person. Like Maggie.

Painting had somehow managed to make her pay more attention to detail as well. She now took notice of things like the dimples Usagi got when she smiled, or the way the purple neon sign outside the shop made it possible to look into the sewer, or how Spring's cheeks would occasionally dust a color when he and Puppet crashed into each other at work, boxes full of clothes stacked in their hands.

The new eye for detail was the reason Mai had been making a lot of portraits lately. Well, by a lot she meant about seven, but still. She had a few self-portraits here and there, some of Puppet, some of The Nightmares. She'd even drawn a picture of Joy, after she'd seen her at a cafe one day, with pink sunglasses pushed up to her nose and a badass hair-cut.

She planned on painting Owynn or Cami too sometime soon. Their hair colors were just too gripping for Mai to not try and bring them to life on a canvas.

But right now the main focus was Spring. He was leaning against the arm of the couch with his back, sitting on the floor. One arm was thrown over the couch whilst the other rested on his knee. One leg was folded neatly under the other. She'd decided to sketch him instead of painting, sketching was more personal to her, after all. Her eyebrows furrowed in concentration as she moved her pencil over the pale paper.

Thankfully, Spring was an easy model. Where Puppet was constantly bouncing around to whatever music was playing in Moon's Mystery's basement, Spring just sat still, posture relaxed. Mai's thoughts kept drifting towards ginger hair and obnoxious laughter, so to keep that train from going too far, she decided to ask Spring a question she asked at least twice a week.

"Why don't you sleep in Moon's Mystery? Your house is super small and the basement's huge. There's also no bills. None that you gotta pay for alone, at least." Mai drew the outlines of Spring's messy hair.

Spring's response was patient as always, despite having had this same conversation since the start of the summer.

"Gangs often try to break in here. Remember what happened to the previous couch? Totally got shot up. Also, we're three teenagers running a store that sells jackets to street gangs, if the cops found me sleeping in here I bet it wouldn't look good for any of us, especially me." Spring ducked his head as Puppet jumped over him, with the sole purpose of trying to snap Mai out of her concentration.