Chapter Text
Hermann goes largely uninterrupted when he paints. It is no different than his usual fare—large swathes of time up in the tower or on the grounds taking stock of what must be maintained, what supplies they should ask delivered. The difference now from when he attempted this once before is that Newton seems unable to keep himself from knocking on Hermann’s door every two minutes. When Hermann answers it, blocking the way, Newton unabashedly attempts to peer over his shoulder. It creates the strange sensation that Hermann is not really being spoken to, but at. Unlike Jillian and Caleb, Hermann still does not take to intrusions in his life kindly, and this kind of disregard for Hermann’s privacy makes him more waspish than he might have been otherwise.
Nevertheless, Newton leaves without sating his curiosity, and Hermann’s pride remains quite intact. He is not, fortunately, painting Newton, but he is embarrassed all the same. He’s lost it, as he told Karla that handful of years ago. This time, however, what he’s lost is that dauntless eagerness to share what he’s done, to timidly present it to someone else’s assessing eyes. It is a fear of what the other person will see as much as it is a fear of the canvas itself.
There are no rules there, and yet he is scared to break some. He is afraid that the landscape he blocks in may be transformed. That the rock-face will be muddied, ground turned to slippery trap, and the water into fire cover. He would not dare expose someone else to something so voracious.
When the canvas seems too vast, too full of possibility and open field, Hermann pulls out his sketch pad and thinks back on Newton, who surely, as he thinks himself unwatched, does not think of war in moments like these. That surely only has eyes for the precious things he grasps in his hands and lifts into the light, to hold there on a pedestal. The infinite joy he has for unspoiled milk, for a fresh loaf of bread—it is unparalleled. If Hermann could grasp it, just a bit, perhaps some of the mystery would be unspooled. If there was, in Hermann’s sketches, but a gleam of the secret fulfillment Newton derives from working dawn-to-dusk until his shirt clings transparent to his form, Hermann would know, then. He would be able to dip his hands in this fountain that has somehow eluded his knowledge. Just out of reach, it is on the periphery. Is it clairvoyance that Newton carries on his broad shoulders—sun-beaten and salt-stung? What is it about him that makes it so that even in the darkest nook he is a penetrating beacon, rotating on its axis and blinding with its focus?
Memory is not—could never compare to—study, and there is an uncanniness to the Newton on the paper that is in turns unsettling and intriguing. Not so much unlike the man himself. The charcoal smears against Hermann’s skin, a part of him as much as he is a part of it with each smudged shadow on a jaw or inner-ear.
A canvas—a canvas is easy to hide. It is large, expansive, and it’s easier to conceptualize the effort to keep them from sight. The sketchpad is so much more intimate and feels, for it, all the more illicit that Hermann should keep it close to his person at all times. By dint of slow and studious attention, he is mapping Newton. He may have to rend parts of his geography from his memory, tame his shaking hands into performing the gestures necessary, but there is a recognizable figure coalescing from the seafoam and the gloom.
In little time, his pad is filled with studies of the man. Some done in the privacy of his room, once the day has wound down and it is he and the sea, the only reckoning Hermann must do. Some are done quickly, clandestine in their expeditiousness and little more than a silhouette. Newton, sitting on a flat, jutting rock over the water, wet from his swim and hair curling forward onto his forehead and down his back. Newton, hair pulled back in one ribbon, and looking down at some unperceived thing with his hands on his hips. Newton and the splash of color down his very bare back, and his very bare arms. It seems that where his head ends, and entirely new body begins—some sort of reverse theriocephaly where Newton’s head is the only recognizably human part of him.
This is, after all, the part that Hermann knows best. The rest is hidden under few layers, enough that Hermann could speculate. He does not—cannot. Not even when he spies Newton bathing in the shallows on occasion. He'll submerge himself and shamelessly come out of the water, white drawers sticking to him like a second skin, and Hermann’ll be forced to look away with heated cheeks. Surely, surely, he must think himself unwatched.
Hermann, cheeks blazing, fidgets with the charcoal in his hands, knocking the black onto his lap, and he’ll glance back out the window just briefly. Just a second. Just to see.