Artist!Nanami Kento who....
art cred: spider tam or maezanilla
Long version: it's here.
hasn’t picked up a brush in six months. Not because he doesn’t want to, but because the inside of his skull is empty. Blank canvases everywhere. He stares at his hands and they feel like foreign things, useless things, and his agent keeps fucking calling.
“Kento, people are waiting. You’re not some niche little street painter anymore, you’re Nanami Kento. The Nanami Kento. You can't just—disappear.”
He can, and he does.
He ends up in a countryside town so old it’s practically rotting. A skeleton of a village clinging to tradition by its fingernails. He rents a house that might collapse in a strong wind. Tatami eaten by mold, sliding doors barely sliding, a garden overgrown with weeds that look more alive than him.
And god—he tries. He sits for hours, brush in hand, sketchpad on thigh, ink bleeding into paper and… nothing. No curses come, no blood-slicked dreams, no grotesque beauty. Not even landscapes. Just static. His hands tremble and his jaw aches from clenching. The house groans in the wind like it’s mourning something.
He walks the town like a ghost. In slacks and a turtleneck, cream linen coat over his shoulders, glasses sliding down his nose. A little too polished for this place, too handsome, too tense. He doesn’t speak to anyone. Just walks. Takes photos of rusted bike chains and shrines blackened with time.
And then.
He sees you for the first time through the glass window of a crumbling book café. You're shelving something. Maybe coffee-stained poetry, maybe a cookbook from 1987. Doesn’t matter.
Because suddenly everything matters.
You move like a quiet hymn. Your hands speak in soft phrases. You pour coffee like a ceremony, you breathe like you’re made of silk. He forgets how to breathe entirely. His spine straightens like he’s been struck.
And he knows what this is. He’s painted obsession before. He’s dissected it, hollowed it out on canvas. But this? This is maddening.
Artist!Nanami who…
starts bringing his sketchbook everywhere. And suddenly, he’s not drawing rusted gates or decay. He’s drawing your hands. Your hands slicing cake. Your hands tying your apron. Your wrists bent to pick up a teacup. Your shoulders when you stretch, your spine when you bend to organize the bottom shelf, your fingers curled around the spine of a Murakami.
No face. Never your face. Too intimate. Too much. But your presence is in every page now. Every sketch a fucking confession.
He starts showing up at the café at the same time every day. He claims the seat by the window. Orders black coffee. Never drinks it. His sketchpad lives open in his lap. He never speaks to you. Just nods. Eyes dark, sunken, flickering. Watching. Worshipping.
Your voice, when it floats over to him—some gentle “Will that be all?” or “Thank you”—is gospel.
Artist!Nanami who…
paints again. Oh he paints like he’s possessed.
Your hands in chiaroscuro, dripping with ink. Your profile turned away, soft and blurry. Your apron hung up like a flag of surrender. An abstract piece: the hue of your eye color melted into a storm of golds, browns, copper, with a vein of violet through it like lightning.
He paints your shadow on a tatami mat. He paints a coffee cup you touched. He paints a room he imagines you sleep in.
And the canvas is wet for weeks.
He starts dreaming again. Not of curses. Not of disemboweled gods or nightmarish holes in the earth. But of you. And those dreams are just as violent.
You, biting your lip. You, whispering something he can’t hear. You, curling your hand around the back of his neck. He wakes up sweating, palms stained with paint, heart racing like he ran through hell.
He sends the pieces to his agent with no explanation. No names. Just a title: “She Pours Coffee.” Another: “Still Life with Apron.” Another: “Untouched.” And the most sold one: “Softest Violence.”
“Kento. Who is she?” “A muse,” he says, deadpan. “Christ. This woman’s not real, is she?” “She’s the only real thing I’ve ever painted.”
He refuses to explain you. Not with human words. He speaks of you in metaphors. You are light filtered through lace. You are silence just before the thunder. You are the taste of something you can’t name but you miss for the rest of your life.
And his agent eats it up because the collectors are starving. The art world falls to its knees for you.
And still, you don’t know. You don’t know what he’s done. You don’t know he’s turning you into oil and canvas and paper and dreams. You don’t know that every breath you take is being archived, turned into divinity.
Artist!Nanami who…
is losing his goddamn mind because he’s never touched you, but he knows the exact way your hand folds over a pen, and how your shoulders twitch when you laugh. He knows you like your tea lukewarm, and that you dog-ear your pages even though you feel guilty about it.
He knows you’ll be there at 8:03am every Tuesday. He knows the shape of your silhouette against the morning sun. He knows the distance between you and him like it's a wound.
He doesn’t want to ruin it by speaking. Because how do you talk to God? How do you say “I need to paint you until my fingers bleed” and make it sound like anything other than a confession?
Artist! Nanami who...
gets caught.
You find him with his head bent over a sketchpad, one long-fingered hand twitching with a charcoal pencil, the other pressed flat against the paper like it’s the only thing tethering him to earth. You're just doing your job. Another slow, soft day in the book café. Pouring tea. Tucking novels back on sagging shelves. Breathing. Existing.
And he’s—watching. Drawing. Eyes flicking up and down between the page and you like you’re a fucking eclipse. You look over, finally, and his hand freezes mid-line. Like a deer. Or a man caught with blood on his teeth.
“Are you... drawing me?” “—No.” (Yes. Yes, God, yes.)
You cross the room, curiosity painted across your features like light through lace curtains. You tilt your head, your voice gentler than he deserves.
“Can I see?”
He feels his ribcage collapse.
Because he never planned for this. Never planned for you to look back. You were supposed to be myth, motif, silhouette. A sacred thing from a distance. The moment you see, the fantasy becomes flesh and that terrifies him more than all the curses he’s ever painted.
But you’re looking at him now, and he’s not struck down. He’s just a man. And you’re just… smiling.
You, who end up sitting across from him. You, who laugh a little and say,
“You draw like you’re in love with your subject.”
And fuck. He’s never been more exposed in his entire life. He almost says it. Right then. Just lets it spill: “I am.” But his tongue is a coward and so instead he swallows glass and says:
“It’s… a habit.” “You’re good,” you reply. “I mean, really good.”
And somehow, that hurts more. Like praise from the divine.
Artist! Nanami who...
talks to you for hours after that. The café closes. Neither of you care. The sky bruises with cloud, wind bending through narrow streets like breath. Rain starts to fall. Heavy, urgent. No umbrellas. You bite your lip, laugh, shrug.
“Well… I live just upstairs. Want to come in until it stops?”
Does he want to? Nanami would let himself drown in a flooded street if you asked him to.
He follows you up the creaking stairs like a man being led to the gallows. And your place? It’s a womb. Warm and soft and cluttered with books and plants and cat hair. The fat black and white cat on the window sill judges him immediately. He bows to it.
“That’s Soba,” you say. “He bites.” “I deserve it.”
He means that.
You make tea in a chipped porcelain pot. He watches your hands like he always does. Your rhythm, your grace, the way you blow gently into the steam before sipping. He thinks about painting that, too. He helps with dinner. You laugh at how precise he chops vegetables. You talk about art. Life. Regret. Loneliness.
“I used to paint,” you say, offhand. “Just a little. Studied it in college. Nothing serious.”
And that sentence alone shatters him. You understand. You could see him, truly see him. He feels like a boy again, desperate to impress.
Artist! Nanami who…
goes home after dinner in a daze. Hair damp from the rain. Fingers twitching. And then— He snaps.
He paints for three days straight. No food. No sleep. Just brush, oil, canvas. The world disappears. Only you exists. This isn’t a portrait. This is a fucking seance. The aura of you. The frequency. The breath. Light hitting your eyes like holy fire. The unspoken softness. The goddamn divinity of you.
Paint under his nails. Sweat on his neck. A high like nothing he’s ever tasted. Three canvases. Six. Twelve. He’s losing count. The countryside. The cats. The curve of the river. But you are in every frame.
You, who walk through his unlocked door on the third day. Left Soba home alone. He hasn’t shown up at the café. Not even to stalk. You’re worried.
The house is a cathedral of art now. You step into the shrine he built out of you.
And Nanami— Nanami is on the floor, eyes bloodshot, shirt stained with paint, brush twitching in his hand like he’s holding a match about to burn him alive.
He looks up like he’s caught mid-prayer.
“You— You weren’t supposed to see this.” “The door was open.” “I was… working.” “Clearly.”
You walk slowly, looking around. Paintings stacked against the walls like confessions. You recognize yourself in all of them. Not literally. Not always. But… the curve of your spine, your shadow, your hands. The light in your living room. The slope of your cat’s tail. Your essence. Your being.
You crouch beside a canvas still drying. You squint.
“Your color composition is insane,” you murmur. “That’s… that’s gorgeous linework.”
Artist! Nanami who...
nearly dies on the spot. Because instead of screaming or running or calling him a fucking psycho— You see. You understand. You start talking about brush strokes, composition, saturation.
He could cry. He might.
“You studied art,” he says, dumbly. “I told you I did.” “I forgot.” “You were too busy sketching me while I made coffee.”
He chokes on nothing. And then, because he’s riding the high of total creative surrender, because he’s sleep-deprived and madly in love, he asks:
“Will you pose for me?” “Like… now?” “I’ll make tea.” “Then yes.”
He sets you up in the golden light of late afternoon. Nothing dramatic. Just you, in your everyday skin. Perched on a stool. A book in hand. Your hair tied up lazily.
You’re not trying. And that kills him.
The painting he makes is real. Like, dangerously real. No abstractions. Just you. Exactly as you are. Rendered in painful, fucking devotional clarity. Your eye-liner. Your lips parted slightly. The small mole he only ever saw once.
And you hold still. For him. For him.
He invites you to stay for dinner. As a thank-you, he says. Casual. Awkward. He tries not to sound like he’s begging.
“It’s nothing fancy. Just soba.” “Fitting.”
You stay. Of course you do. Because now you’re in the painting. And he thinks—maybe, just maybe—he’s in you, too.
Artist! Nanami who…
spends the week like it’s borrowed time. Like God might notice he’s finally happy and rip it away with bloodied hands. He sees you every day. Every fucking day. No excuses. No self-preservation.
You come over for tea and never leave before midnight. You cook in his cursed kitchen with music playing on your cracked phone. You try to teach him to dance in the garden. He sketches you as you water the plants, as you nap under open windows, as you scribble grocery lists.
He kisses your wrist once. Just to see. You don’t flinch.
And that — that is the beginning of the end.
Artist! Nanami who…
kisses you again. Properly.
It happens like a break. Like the world finally splits.
It’s dusk, and you’re laughing at something he said. (He wasn’t even trying to be funny. You just make him feel clever.) You tilt your face up. Hair a mess. Shirt slipping off one shoulder. You reach for your cup and instead his hand finds yours, and then — he’s kissing you.
Desperate. Sharp. Too much, too fast. His glasses bump your cheek. You don’t care. His breath is hot against your mouth. You moan into it and that ruins him.
“Fuck—sorry,” he rasps. “I shouldn’t—” “Do it again.” “God—okay.”
Artist! Nanami who...
carries you to the bedroom like he’s afraid you’ll vanish if he looks away.
Clothes fall like feathers, like sins shed at the altar. You pull his shirt over his head, and he exhales like you’ve cracked open his chest. He touches your skin like he’s scared it’ll burn him. It does.
Your hands on his shoulders, his back, his ribs—he shakes. Like he’s never been held. Like this is the first time someone touched him without expecting blood. He moans when you kiss his throat. He gasps when you kiss his sternum.
He hasn’t had sex in a year. Maybe longer. He doesn’t even remember. No one’s touched him since he became Nanami Kento, The Artist. But you — you undress him like he’s just a man. Like you want him, not the name.
He’s rough, and he’s soft. Fingers digging into your thighs, then brushing your cheek so gently you almost cry. His mouth is everywhere—neck, chest, stomach—he kisses like he’s writing sonnets with his tongue.
“Tell me you want me,” he groans, teeth at your shoulder. “I want you.” “Say it again.” “Kento, I want you.” “Holy fuck.”
You slide onto him and his hands tremble. His head falls back. He groans like it hurts.
“You feel—Jesus, you feel like fucking—art.”
Artist! Nanami who…
makes love like it’s penance. Like he’s praying with every thrust. Worshipping. Adoring.
He keeps whispering your name like a refrain. Keeps kissing your chest like he’s afraid this is all a dream and he’ll wake up back in the silence.
Your hands cradle his face. He stares down at you like you’re a sunrise.
“You’re real,” he says. “You’re real.” “I’m here.” “I love you.”
And you kiss him so hard you taste tears.
Artist! Nanami who…
can’t stop painting after that. He paints with your scent still on him. Paints with his back sore and lips bitten and body raw from being so, so alive.
His house becomes a temple again. You — naked under moonlight, laughing in the garden, asleep on his chest. But it’s more than you now. It’s what you’ve done to him. Color. Movement. Joy. Fire.
There are still dark paintings. Sure. The trauma doesn’t vanish. But now they sit beside portraits glowing with golds and warm browns. Beside a still life of your breakfast, half-eaten. A study of your cat curled on your lap. An abstract of your voice. A fucking echo in oils.
And months later—
His agent comes to see the collection. It’s hanging in a private space. A small gallery, just for the press and collectors. Nanami stands near the back, your hand in his. You’re beyond happy for him, glad to see him happier and calmer than before. You're calm, exited. His anchor.
The agent takes one lap around and stares. Mouth open.
“This is— Kento. This is… different.” “Yes.” “There’s—God, there’s light now.” “There is.” “What changed?”
Nanami glances at you. Just briefly. You smile. He could die from it.
“I found new inspiration,” he says. “Is she real?” “She’s the realest thing I’ve ever known.”
Artist! Nanami who…
doesn’t tell the world it’s you. He keeps you sacred. The muse behind the curtain. The reason color returned to his life.
But everyone knows. Everyone feels it. The critics talk about “tenderness” and “yearning” and “a turn toward intimacy.” They compare it to love. To divinity. To rebirth. They weep in front of his work now.
Artist! Nanami who…
goes home with you that night. Paints your back as you sleep. Wakes up next to you like it’s the first morning after the world ended.
This was devotion. Of the purest kind.
A/N: wee woo idk what i'm writting, i hope this was okay, i think its kinda creepy
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