Work Text:
Perhaps D should not have been so bemused when Adrian requests of him to sit one morning in the study for a portrait. He certainly shouldn't have been that surprised.
He watches as Adrian sets out his paints, as he trails his finger across rows of brushes to select the one most suited to his needs. Sunlight streams in from the window, casting half of the room in shades of gold.
It is always a wonder to watch him work. To prepare to create something beautiful and new. So rarely does D get to enjoy creation, rather than desolation and destruction.
His are not gentle talents. His calluses are from battle and blades, not from years of sitting in a workshop holding a brush or a chisel. In D's hands, things are merely tools for killing.
Adrian's hands pick up a paintbrush with same grace which appears whenever he picks up his sword. Both instruments become beautiful simply because he is one to hold them.
Adrian is an artist. In many ways that is the human half of him. In many ways it fits with his vampiric nature even more.
Vampires are vain creatures. That was just a fact. For centuries, mirrors did not show their reflection and cameras would not capture their image. And so, in lieu of a simple way to admire themselves, they turned to art.
Portraits, tapestries, statues. It was through art that vampires learned to view themselves, and through art that they learned to view the world. If vampires had any claim to a culture wholly of their own, it was their dedication to the arts that would make up the majority of it.
When one could live for millenia, it was easy to dedicate lifetimes to mastering any sort of skill. Even easier to perfect a craft when you often become the oldest practicioner.
Adrian has dedicated centuries of his life to art. He is as much an artist as he was a warrior. It is a privlige to watch him now. D might be the muse this day, but he is certainly not the only one admiring. His eyes linger on the curve of Adrians fingers, on the way golden hair slips from the black ribbon holding it together to frame his face, on the way he seems to glow in amidst the warm shafts of sunlight.
So easily, does he embrace the light of the sun. So easily, does he let it illuminate him.
D has never had trouble with motionlessness. He has heard enough humans compare him to a statue in more ways than one to know his propensity for stillness is not common. And yet now, under piercing golden eyes, he resists the unfamiliar urge to fidget.
Another important note to be made regarding the relationship between vampires and art: a vampiric artist does not typically request to paint. They are by and large commissioned one way or another -with one exception. It is considered a great display of affection and devotion to create art of another voluntarily and without compensation. To do so expresses how highly one values another.
Typically, that request is reserved for family members, or for lovers. It's quite common for vampires to make art of each other during a courtship, a sign that the relationship is not merely a fleeting entanglement that will not last more than a few decades.
Both D and Adrian are old, even by the standards of Nobility. D knows Adrian has had lovers in the past, knows he has spoken of them fondly and remembers many of them well. But he has only ever painted two.
He has seen their portraits before. A woman in blue, with short auburn hair, graceful and beautiful. A rugged man with dark hair, a child in his arms. Adrian in that portrait too, clad in white and gold like an angel from the holy texts, young and at ease. That one had been comissioned.
His first loves, Adrian had said when he showed D the portrait. Back when the world was young and so was he, long before the weight of immortality made itself known to him. When Adrian had half-believed his lifespan would be a mortal one.
D has seen the ones Adrian had painted himself. There are many, far less formal than the other portrait. The man and the woman sitting together on a plush velvet couch, smiling. The man riding upon a horse, whip in one hand. The woman, laughing in a meadow. Dozens of paintings of the two line the walls of a corridor dedicated to Adrian's loved ones. To his family. Adrian is not in any of them.
Adrian will not be in this one either.
Ten thousand years of life, and there are only a handful of portraits of Adrian in the entirety of Castlevania. Less than five, actually. Every single one was comissioned. None were painted by a lover, despite him having had many.
D is not an artist. His are not gentle hands meant to make rather than destroy. And yet this is an injustice he wishes his skills were gentle enough to set right.
He sits for the portrait quietly, so Adrian can focus. Slow, steady strokes move across the canvas, allowing something to take shape . Millenia of practice makes it a much quicker affair than if it were a mortal holding the brush.
D is the third person Adrian ever paints.
Adrian had been delaying his request.
He had been waiting a while for the right moment, a justification that sounded weak even alone in the confines of his own mind. A while was maybe a century at most. Adrian had been putting off asking this for far longer than that.
In truth, this is not the first time Adrian has made art of D. He has sketchbooks filled with ink and charcoal recreations of his likeness, deep sweeping lines that have held his attention for many years. They lay buried in amongst his shelves, studiously unpresented and unacknowledged.
But he has never asked for D to pose before.
It is daunting, painting someone. To put their likeness onto paper or cloth in the right way. So they will feel seen, feel beautiful, understand exactly how treasured they are. There is a reason portraits are so intrinsic to a successful courtship amongst vampires.
Adrian wishes he were as bold as he was in his youth, when he had painted Sypha and Trevor dozens of times. He had committed to his first loves with everything he had, assuming he would not outlive them beyond maybe a century or two. That he would age and die just as they did.
He has certainly aged, even if he barely looks it. Time has left him weary. Even now, when he has forgotten the exact timbers of their voices and their graves are long gone, he still has a place in his heart for them. He had not committed to anyone the same way after them, even if he had let himself love and lose over and over again.
Adrian had not painted any of his lovers following them. He could not bring himself to do it again after Sypha and Trevor passed. It is an act of devotion, a promise of forever. It is a gift he does not give lightly, not when he would outlive every lover he took one way or another.
But D is not young either. He is almost as old as Adrian himself, and just as strong. Mortality cannot sink its fingers into him and steal him away. Perhaps time might, but they have plenty of that.
D is a vision to paint. He is also, very, very difficult to capture on canvas. Beautiful and handsome, a symmetry to every feature that belies his inhuman parentage. Doing him justice is a challenge Adrian welcomes.
D is like the ocean, he thinks. Grounding like bluffs rising from the shoreline, ethereal as a moonlit sea. A person who has become as constant as the tide.
Perhaps that is why Adrian had delayed this for so long. Trevor and Sypha had been constants in his life too, until they weren't. D is still hunting for his sire, hunting for the Sacred Ancestor responsible for the blight of Nobles that rule the world. He will not stop until he succeeds, or dies trying.
Adrian does not want to bury him too.
But he does not want to forget him either. He does not know if he will survive it.
The brush feels heavier in his hand than it actually is. Paint stains his fingertips in small flecks of black and blue.
"What do you think?" he asks, finally turning the canvas around. The paint is not yet dried. He cannot wait longer to be judged, or he will never let D see his work.
D shifts from his stillness, like a shadow rippling into motion. Adrian considers himself fairly good at reading the minute changes in his expressions, proficient in reading the emotions tucked behind the porcelain mask he wears, but now he cannot be certain.
The painting is fairly simple in its composition; D, sitting poised facing him, clad in his usual black armour. His hat rests on his head as always, tilted back to leave his face visible, one hand graps the hilt of his sword, slender fingers holding it to the center of his chest. The light of the study illuminates him like a dream, bleeding across his torso and his shoulders and the pale line of his neck. His hair glows like the inky space between stars, spilling down his back. The dark blue of his eyes cuts deep.
It is difficult to paint perfection. Adrian just hopes D doesn't mind that he couldn't capture everything.
Words fail him, as they always have.
D has seen his reflection before. He has seen himself in lakes, and in mirrors and in the occasional photo. He'd never thought much about his appearance, simply moving onwards. His human half made his reflection a normalacy, rather than something he'd never know.
Enough humans and Nobles and monsters alike have commented on his looks to know he isn't unattractive, even if he doesn't quite understand the way they fall over themselves.
And yet now he wonders.
D has never been a vain creature. He has more important things to concern himself with than something as trivial as his appearance, but now, for the first time, he feels very, very conscious of himself.
Adrian made him look beautiful.
There is a tangle of emotions, like thread, wrapped around his slow-beating heart. He cannot begin to determine each one.
"I…" D starts, hand lifting towards the canvas, fingertips poised to brush against the image of himself, until he stops, unwilling to touch the glistening paint and ruin it. "this is how you see me?"
"Yes." he says simply, easily. As if it is nothing. As if he has no idea how the strings cut into D's heart as it drums in his chest like a hummingbird.
This is proof that Adrian's skill is without equal. To portray a thing like D as something so unmonstrous is a display of true talent.
He should say something. Anything. Weave the thread away from his heart and turn it into a tapestry of words.
"Thank you." he says at last
Adrian blinks. D pries his gaze from the painting slowly, turning it over onto him. There is a fleck of blue paint on his cheek, right under his eye. Gently he lifts Adrian's stained fingers to his lips, and presses a kiss to his knuckles.
"It is an honour to be depicted like this." he says softly, folding as much sincerity into the syllables as he can manage. Adrian's portrait is an honour, a gift, a show of love D neither deserves or knows how to reciprocate. How blessed is he, that this enchanting creature finds him beautiful? How wretched is he, that he cannot find better words to voice his gratitude? "Thank you."
His words have always failed him, and his are not gentle talents. D is no artist, but he has time to learn how to hold a brush.
Adrian will be the first person D paints.