𝐑𝐄𝐓𝐑𝐎𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐃𝐄; ʜᴘ

𝟎𝟎𝟒; sᴇǫᴜᴇʀᴇ ᴘᴇᴄᴜɴɪᴀᴍ

AURELIAN FELT HIS body screaming at him that he needed to do something, anything. It pleaded for him to tear down his walls of his room, crush bones, rip worlds to shreds.

To completely destroy.

It felt so off seeing the person who they envisioned as the pinnacle of perfection, to actually be so destructive.

Their rose tinted glasses had shattered.

They see Aurelian behind the façade he made.

His hands twitched for a blade for the sake of watching someone's blood spill onto the marble floor, for their breath to cease, for their heart to stop breathing.

It was so morbid but for them, it was art after all it was Aurelian.

It had ended up with him making gashes along the wall facing his canopy bed with the wallpaper peeling from where blade sword had made its mark. With priceless porcelain that found their way smashed on the ground. Even then, the ache to raze countries to the ground could not be quelled.

Tom has seen the world burn and born anew in Aurelian's eyes. He thought he imagined it. Now? Now he knows he wasn't.

He had not been in a more similar state than when he lived the first time, and even then, it could not even hold a candle to the absolute destruction running in his very veins.

So, he did the opposite.

He created.

Everyone took a sharp breath.

With watercolor sketches, oil paintings, charcoal etchings, graphite drawings. Sketchbook upon sketchbook, canvas after canvas, leaving a trail of empty paint tubes and lead stubs in his wake. The wall he had torn apart the wallpaper from was fully stripped of objects and coverings, and spray paint had become his new medium. When the spray paint ran out, he got out the acrylics and oil paint. When even that ran out, he took out the chalk and charcoal, breathing life into the piece.

He assumed it would tide over as he exhausted himself, both in his imagination and physical body. Yet his body never grew tired, even after a million sketched lines or sweeping fans of his brush. He never ran out of inspiration, and that was the problem.

Every brushstroke was centred around swirling colors with depths he never thought existed before. A never ending swirls of colors and shades that went beyond what could possibly be created.

The gashes on the walls curved dips and nicks into the ocean of colour, making it come alive. Nothing was permanent, changing by the second.

Merlin— the art work was breathtaking, a scene they wanted to keep treasured for years

Each time he stood back to look at it, it held something from him.

It was missing something.

Missing? What could be missing?

It was perfection.

His hand grabbed the paintbrush, looking for another spot to fill, another shade to discover.

Nothing.

Nothing that felt right.

He grabbed the dark tub of black paint he had flung to the side in search of more color, or maybe it was the shades he was looking for? It screamed against the colour theory ingrained in his artist mind, went against the scientific facts that red would do nothing but ruin the work—