Notes: Written for Heroes Holidays Spring Joyathon.
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The first time he drew something that came true, he was ten years old.
It was a scribble in the margin of his notebook, drawn in a daydream, in a haze. His father's car, tipped over by the roadside. It meant nothing, just that he liked the smooth lines of the underside of the car, the motion of the spinning wheels, the drops of moisture still flying off the tires into the air. It was just an exercise in drawing, just practice.
A week later, at the funeral, he didn't cry.
He ripped that page out of his notebook and burned it, leaving a mark of ash on the driveway to remind him every time he left the house.
He stopped drawing after that, for a long time.
The drugs started in high school, and when he woke one morning to find a sketchpad full of drawings beside his bed, he nearly ripped it to pieces and threw it away. Instead, he stuffed it under the bed and left it for a week, two weeks, a month. But nothing from it happened. He didn't hear anything about any of the people or events he drew, and he began to think that maybe�maybe his father was just a fluke. Maybe it was just the overactive imagination of a grieving kid.
So he began drawing again.
He was good at it, like he had never been good at anything else in his life. And gradually, out of the pieces that appeared mysteriously around him when he woke from a drug-induced haze, a story began to emerge. He didn't feel like he was writing it, but rather that it was telling itself through him, through his hands and his paints.
It was a story that others wanted to read, a story that would make him money.
And a story that, in time, he would find to be completely true, every word of it.
He found himself painting destruction more and more often. Death, fires, explosions. All the horrible things that occur in everyday life that are glossed over and forgotten. But he would wake to find them scattered about his apartment, drawn by his own hand, and he would open the paper in the morning to see his visions come to life.
Drugs were supposed to be an escape. To him, they brought only more nightmares.
He drew Simone, before he ever met her, and then, in time, he drew himself losing her. He lost everything eventually. That was his real power. Not revealing the future, but losing every piece of it he wanted to hold on to, one painting at a time.
When he drew the final chapter, it was nearly a relief. He knew how it ended now, knew what was to come.
Finally.
Finally it would all be over.