Elias walked Micah to the studio door as if he cradled something irreparably fragile, its packaging already suspect.
The hallway's breath was a stale exhalation of old paint and dust, a particulate memory that clung to the lungs like a stubborn ghost. The building, usually a thrumming hive of artistic ambition, was hushed at this hour, the distant gallery's hum swallowed by the soft, hollow acoustics of a space designed for solitary, often agonizing, creation. Elias lingered, keys a cold weight in his palm, his gaze raking Micah's face as if searching for hairline fractures that hadn't been there moments before.
"You good?" he asked, the casual query weighted with an unspoken dread.
Micah's nod was too swift, a brittle thing. "Yeah. I'm fine. Just tired."
Elias's skepticism was a palpable thing, but he didn't press. Instead, he stepped closer, his hand a brief, solid anchor at the back of Micah's shoulder—grounding, familiar, a contact that steadied him more profoundly than Micah would ever confess.
"Text me when you're settled," Elias said, his voice a low rumble. "Or don't. Just… don't unravel."
"I won't." The lie slipped out, smooth and cold, too easily.
Elias hesitated, his mouth parting as if to unleash something sharper, something ugly and true, but he snapped it shut. He gave Micah a final, searing look, then turned, his footsteps receding down the hall like a fading heartbeat until the silence, vast and suffocating, closed in around them both.
Micah locked the door, the click a stark punctuation in the quiet, and leaned his forehead against the cool, unyielding metal, savoring the momentary press of cold against his skin.
The studio breathed around him, a living, dormant entity.
High ceilings, stark and angular, slanted upwards, dissecting the night sky into brutal, geometric fragments through wide panes of glass. Moonlight, thin and spectral, bled into the space, painting the drying canvases in shades of silver and shadow, glinting off jars of cloudy, pigment-laden water, and delineating the spindly, skeletal forms of easels waiting in the corners like patient sentinels. This place was his, every stain on the floor a testament, every smear of pigment ground into the venerable wood a familiar, earned scar.
Safe.
He exhaled slowly, a long, shuddering release, and crossed the space, shedding his coat like a discarded skin, his shoes, the last lingering, burdensome weight of the gallery. But even as he moved, something followed him—not a sound, not a tangible presence, but an awareness that clung too close, an invisible second skin he couldn't peel away.
In the bathroom, he turned the tap, the water a sudden rush, and scrubbed his hands with a frantic intensity, as if to scour away more than just grime.
His palms slid together, skin over skin, and he froze, a tremor running through him.
There—again. That sensation.
Not warmth, not a ghost of memory, but something sharper, more insidious. As if his hands had been steeped in a solution too caustic to burn outright, leaving only that faint, insistent, deep-seated sting beneath the surface. Lucien's gaze rose unbidden in his mind, the way it had traced him, cataloged him, lingered like a spider's silk.
Micah rinsed his hands, then rinsed them again, the water cold and indifferent.
The feeling stayed, a persistent, phantom ache.
He slammed the tap shut and pressed his palms flat against the porcelain, breathing through the spike of raw unease. It was nothing. Residual adrenaline. Nerves frayed thin. He was tired. Elias had seen it.
He moved through the rest of his routine with the mechanical precision of a sleepwalker—brushing his teeth, changing into worn clothes that carried the faint, comforting scent of turpentine and soap. When he finally lay down on the mattress tucked beneath the slanted ceiling, the studio felt too vast, too exposed. The windows loomed above him like unblinking, obsidian eyes.
Sleep, a distant shore, refused to draw near.
He shifted, tangled himself in the thin blanket, then kicked it away in a frustrated tangle of limbs. Every time his eyes drifted closed, the sense of being seen returned—not watched, not followed, but known. As if somewhere, something had already mapped the exact, intricate shape of him in the dark, every curve and hollow.
He sat up, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs, and scanned the studio, eyes wide and searching.
Nothing.
The door was locked, a solid barrier. The windows were untouched, their glass unbroken. The canvases stood where he'd left them, silent and still. Yet, the feeling persisted, coiled and patient, tightening with every shallow, desperate breath.
Micah rubbed his hands together again, a futile gesture.
The sting flared, sharper this time, a cold fire.
"Stop," he muttered to the empty room, his voice raw, as if his body might, miraculously, obey.
It didn't.
Eventually, he gave in, rising with the soft, defeated movements of someone conceding a small, private battle. He padded back to the bathroom, opened the cabinet, and stared at the rows of bottles inside—melatonin, anxiety meds, the neat, clinical evidence of coping strategies carefully rationed.
He hesitated, the pills a stark white against the dark glass.
He knew better than to stack exhaustion on top of chemicals, knew the risks, knew the precise, authoritative warnings printed in small, unforgiving fonts. But he also knew this feeling—this spiraling, hollowed-out edge—and how much worse it could become if left unchecked, allowed to fester in the dark.
"I just need to sleep," he whispered, a confession torn from him.
He swallowed the pills dry, a gritty swallow, and returned to bed, the studio a dim, watchful presence as he lay back and closed his eyes.
The dark folded over him, thick and suffocating.
Sunlight, brutal and unforgiving, burned through his eyelids, a searing white-hot pain.
Micah groaned, a sound torn from his throat, and turned his head away, only to be met with more light—a brilliant, relentless assault spilling through the wide panes above him. His head throbbed dully, a slow, insistent drum, his mouth was a desert, his limbs heavy in a way that felt profoundly wrong, as if gravity had increased its hold while he slept, pressing him into the mattress.
He raised a hand to shield his eyes, a desperate reflex.
It stuck.
His fingers came away tacky, stained in thick, viscous streaks of pigment—a deep, arterial red, a stark, obsidian black, smeared together into something darker, something sickeningly primal. His breath caught, a jagged gasp in his throat.
Slowly, carefully, he pushed himself upright, each joint groaning a protest against the leaden weight of sleep.
The smell hit him next, a visceral assault. Paint. Not the gentle whisper of yesterday's oils, but a raw, metallic shriek, sharp enough to flay the inside of his nose. He looked down, dread coiling in his gut.
More color marked him, not as an artist's caress, but a violent scrawl. It dragged across the hollow of his cheek, a crimson smear like a fresh wound. It stained his collarbone, a bruising purple, then bled down his chest in streaks that felt less like accidental splashes and more like deliberate, possessive strokes. Uneven, intimate, they mapped territories across his thighs, a roadmap of a forgotten, frantic journey.
"No," he whispered, the sound a ragged breath torn from his throat.
His gaze drifted, pulled by an invisible tether, dread blooming cold and heavy in his stomach, a stone sinking into a murky well.
The easel stood near the mattress.
Too near.
A violation of the sacred geometry of his space, the careful distances he maintained between waking and dreaming, between self and other. This wasn't a studio; it was a cage.
Micah turned, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird, vision still swimming in a sickly haze. As the light sharpened, the studio resolved into a brutal clarity, each shadow deepening, each object taking on a sinister edge.
The canvas waited.
It stood upright, a sentinel, freshly worked. The paint, still wet, glistened with an unholy sheen, catching the scant light like a predator's eye. The figure on it was unmistakable—Lucien, rendered with a chilling precision that stole the breath from Micah's lungs, leaving him gasping for air. Not abstracted into a pleasing form. Not symbolic, but real, brutally present. Every line precise, intentional, etched with an almost surgical devotion. The haunting curve of his mouth, a secret smile playing on lips that would never speak. The depth of his eyes, pools of obsidian that seemed to follow Micah, seeing everything. The stillness that had unnerved him hours before, that quiet, watchful intensity, was now captured, pinned to the linen like a specimen.
Across it, carved in violent, oversized strokes that seemed to bleed into the very fibers of the canvas, was a single word.
MINE.
The room seemed to tilt, the floor shifting beneath him like the deck of a storm-tossed ship.
Micah stared, chest tight, a cold vise squeezing his lungs. His hands trembled, not with fear, but with a strange, primal echo of the act. The implications pressed in from all sides, a chorus of silent accusations. He didn't remember painting this. Didn't remember waking, standing, choosing color or form, the precise angle of a wrist, the brutal sweep of a brush. And yet—
And yet his hands knew the weight of the brush, the familiar heft of it, the way it yielded and resisted. His body remembered the motion, the urgency, the desperate, consuming need.
Something inside him, a dark, hungry thing, had moved without permission.
Micah looked down at his palms again, smeared and stained with the same defiant colors that marked Lucien's painted form, and a cold realization settled deep in his bones, a glacial ache.
He had not been alone in his sleep.
Not lost.
Not yet.
But no longer untouched.