Wicked Ones {bxb}

{Chapter 7: Art Major}

That night was only one of many. Kailan had been spared of the repercussions, managed his way out of the place and gotten home before his parents had even stopped their bickering. It wasn't the worst thing they'd done, not by a long shot—but it was one of the few times they'd ever gotten caught in the act.

Johnathan was never one to punish Vincent. He never cared enough—he didn't have the time for it. So he wrote a quick cheque and instructed Suzy to purchase a high-scale penthouse on the other side of town. It was intended to squeeze some distance in between the ruffians, and in some ways, it worked. Kailan was no longer within walking distance, and meeting up proved to be a challenge on most occasions, but the move did little to separate them. Vincent lived in lesser-luxury for nearly a year before the place was burned down to rubble and the entire complex bulldozed. There wasn't much left to save, so the city knocked down the last remaining walls and started fresh.

Not long after that, Kailan left.

After reading the ceiling for a long while, Vincent finally decided that any additional sleep wouldn't be in his favor. It was nearing ten anyway, the sun pestering him as it poked through the gaps in the blinds—panels that Archibald had so courteously bent and snapped off in his many ventures to the window sill.

Since Kailan had shown up again, his dreams had been relentless. They were always memories, some vague, some as detailed as the first time he'd experienced them. Some made no sense to him—strange things, like the days when Kailan had taken up tutoring him. He only remembered staring with dreary eyes into a perplexing math formula, Kailan's words swimming in one ear and out the other, like salmon too mentally incapacitated to make it upstream. Dreams came to him all the time. Sometimes they were nightmares, sometimes abstract fantasies. Lately though, they were all of the past.

He turned his attention to Kailan's bed, but it had been left vacant. The sheets were an unkempt mess, and Archibald laid curled up in whatever warmth was left behind. It'd been two days since Kailan had dropped in unexpectedly, and Vincent still couldn't differentiate dream from reality. Just a week ago, he wasn't all that sure that Kailan was still alive. It made more sense that he was just some strange figment of Vincent's imagination. But he was very much alive. Alive, awake and making clatter in the next room over.

Tired and groggy, Vinny rubbed at his blurry vision and slipped out of bed. As he left the bedroom and turned the corner, he froze in a double-take. "The hell is this?"

Kailan sat on the floor, a plethora of colorful paints surrounding him. As he looked to Vinny, he smiled around the paintbrush he held in his mouth, his hands busy tying his hair up out of his face.

"A mess." His voice was muffled as he gazed upon the canvas that lay damp with paint on the floor in front of him.

Organization was never a strong point of Kailan's, and it showed in the messy array of paints and brushes strewn about—and the colorful splotches that sprinkled his skin. At least he had thought to keep paint off of the floor.

Taking the paintbrush out of his mouth, Kailan wiped at his cheek, leaving a small streak of purple. "Oh, yeah, you never knew I was into art," he said with a small laugh, moving back to view the unfinished painting. Despite the array of colorful paints he chose, the work itself seemed dismal.

A man with a wolf's skull as a head was the main focus of the painting, its hands covering the eye sockets as it sat on what appeared to be a couch. The table beside it had pills spilled over, a cocktail of drugs laid about. The colors were bright and pleasant; ironic choices for such a distressing piece.

He chuckled a bit. "The concept was cool in my head, I dunno now."

Vincent was still blinded by sleep, and it made the painting all the more difficult to understand. He assessed it with one cocked brow, like he was trying to comprehend a piece of ancient literature. "Military school really fucked you up, didn't it?"