𝙱𝚎𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚎 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚊𝚠𝚗 - 𝚃. 𝚃𝚘𝚢𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚝𝚜𝚞 𝚡 𝙾𝙲

Chapter One

𝐀/𝐍: 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐭.

With her eyes focused on the flickering lantern that hung on the brick wall outside the karaoke bar across the street, Ivy Izumiya clenched the black marker in her hand and tapped the lid on the wide pad of paper in her lap. The trembling light periodically worked well enough to illuminate the name of the business painted along the bottom of the light to a readable state, not that she needed to know what it said anyway - she'd stared at it every night for the past six weeks.

A chilly late-night breeze wrapped around her like the world's worst blanket, sending a shiver up her spine and picking up the corners of her sketchbook - bending them just enough to be annoying but not enough for her to actually give a shit about it. With one arm holding her page in place, the other reached around her neck and pulled the hood of her oversized black Adidas' sweater up and over her head. A normal person probably would have grumbled about the cold, but a normal person also wouldn't have been found on the second-story roof of a just-scraping-by mixed martial arts studio at three in the morning like Izumiya was.

Biting off the cap of her marker, she finally let the felt tip connect with the thick paper, its porous surface soaking up the ink as she constructed an outline of the lantern as well as the strip of connected businesses below. Hardly missing any details of the stretch of real estate she'd studied for the past month and a half, the large metal shutter that secured the bar's eight-foot door taunted her once again. It was missing something; a splash of colour or a funky design, maybe even a cute doodle of a lucky cat - anything to fill that damn near perfect urban canvas. If she hadn't made a promise to her uncle Itsuo, she'd have thrown a piece up on her first night staying with him but now it teased her with endless possibilities and she found herself once again drawing something she'd have liked to paint on it.

Capping her black marker once she was satisfied with her outline, Izumiya fished around in her sweater's massive pocket and pulled out a different one, letting chance dictate the colour scheme she was going to create even though she only had half a dozen stashed away.

Hm, navy... that'll do, she thought to herself as she flicked the cap off and caught it in her free hand. Beginning to add depth to her image, Izumiya carefully filled in some of the blanks and faded the nearly midnight shade into the outline before she pulled out a crimson and began to work on the details she wanted to pop.

After an hour, the brunette tagged the curled bottom right corner of the page with a sharp V within a ring-shaped vine of ivy. Wisps of her overgrown bangs fluttered along with the wind as she tilted her head up and turned to the east, admiring the way the molten sunlight began to bleed into the night sky. The woman may have become a creature of the night by habit, but there was always something comforting to her about watching the break of dawn and she often wondered if it was possible to be both a night owl and an early bird.

By the time the blushing sunrise brought her a sneak peek of the sun, Izumiya shoved the markers now scattered around her back into her hoodie's pocket and closed her sketchbook. Brushing off her black yoga pants after she stood up, Izumiya walked to the far side of the flat roof and crouched down. With her sketchbook tucked between her arm and her side, she gripped the protruding loops of the metal ladder that was secured to the structure and took a few steps down until her feet were next to the sill of her new bedroom's window. As if it were a dance she'd rehearsed a thousand times, Izumiya effortlessly extended her foot and stabilized it on the concrete sill before letting her other join it and slipping into the open window, landing on the fleece blanket that laid otherwise untouched on her bed.