@quidbitch sent a 🏁 to get a teaser from one of my ocs uwu
𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚕𝚕 𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚙𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚢 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚘𝚗𝚜, the most simple one of them being to earn the money he needed to survive, of course. another one was that he simply had the talent others didn’t have. and that he wanted to preserve a job that had started to die out, saving old paintings no one else wanted to save, and painting new ones no one else wanted to paint. and to make himself less lonely without having to interact with real people. but the most important reason to odell was the trance-like state in which he fell every time he enchanted his wand into a paintbrush. it meant walking around in endless circles and loops to the soft rhythm of the classical music playing on his record player; swirling his wand through the air, drawing colour from the palette lying next to the canvas, mixing them together until the colour looked exactly right; the colours moving all around him, charging with his magic, before taking their exact position he wished for them to be on the canvas; the pure amount of concentration it took; and forgetting the whole world around him, with the only real things being himself, the paints and the person forming on the canvas. it was better than any drug to him - it distracted him from all the things that bothered him about the outside world, just like that, without any side effects. he could not be happier with his choice to have made painting his profession, for it meant that he could fall into this state for a living.
if anyone could see odell in this kind of state, all that he was and all that he stood for could be forgettable. which, unfortunately, made this the only state of mind that could make odell anders likeable, bearable even.
too bad he hid hid from everyone but his own paintings. this was a side of him he didn’t want anyone to know.
except for, maybe, the young man he was painting today.
usually, he was pretty good at clearing his mind and denying everything that was happening outside to focus on the demanding magic it required to make a painting come alive. today, however, he was struggling. he just couldn’t forget the conversation him and that man had had, and how it had only showed him such little part of that beautiful soul yet enough to give him so much inspiration already. when he started to paint, his magic felt so much stonger yet very off.
he didn’t know what to do with him.
he wandered back and forth around like a trapped animal, closing his eyes, in an attempt to make himself focus more, and opening them again to not lose track of the enchanted paints. no - that colour didn’t feel right, he had to mix a new one. he forgot a dimple, he forgot a dimple, he had to repaint the entire face now. oh, he got that part of his personality wrong, meaning he had to make a significant change in the magic floating into the painting. and that background wasn’t good enough for this beautiful man, he had to put something better over that too. oh, this was a mess. but it just had to be perfect. he had no choice, for everything else would be a disgrace to the person he was putting on canvas.
although odell could never tell how long he had been painting - multiple hours, the whole night through, or even another day- he knew it had taken him far longer than it usually took him to finish a portrait of this size, and he was more than just tired when he finally put his wand away and stared at the finished project, which blinked back at him. he was gorgeous; only a shadow of the person he was based on, yet still practically glowing from beauty. and he was staring back at odell, with these big, kind, eyes of a colour he couldn’t put a name on, sending chills down his painter’s spine.
he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t move either; if odell couldn’t feel his own magic in the painting, he would have assumed it was a muggle portrait. only when he approached it and gently put his fingertips on the freshly dried colours, the man proved that he was alive when he looked down on his painter and, after hesitating for a short moment, moved his fingers to where odell’s were resting.
and more than ever before, he was reminded of the difference between real people and those people he painted to be his company. he couldn’t feel any movement beneath his fingers at all.
he took one last gaze at the painting. their eyes met, and odell had once again the feeling he’d had when they met that the man knew him like no other person did, while he knew nothing about him, but nothing else than finding out everything about him seemed to matter. then, he turned away, leaving the atelier behind. every fibre of his body needed to rest now, and finally, after such a long day, he would let them.
