Yandere! Painter husband x dead!restlessghost!Wife! Reader
Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence, body horror, mutilation, and psychological distress, explicit imagery, mention of death , fire, use of dead body parts to make things, gore. Reader discretion is strongly advised. If you are sensitive to gore, death, or disturbing imagery, please proceed with caution or avoid this content altogether.
Authors note: Don't hate me for this it just came to my mind.
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The room always smelled like turpentine.
Not the sharp kind....not fresh... but old, sticky, baked into the floorboards. The walls were yellowed with it. The windows had long stopped opening, sealed shut with salt-white dust and forgotten seasons.
Lucian sat in the center of the room, hunched before a canvas.
The light from the tall oil lamp behind him flickered .... not from wind, for there was none.... but from something colder, more interior. The flame wavered as though it, too, had begun to tremble at the things painted in this room.
There were many canvases. Dozens. All of them leaned face-first against the walls as if in shame, their backs warped with time and dampness. If you pulled one out.... carefully.... you might see something that once resembled a face. But none remained intact. The paint had bubbled, or melted, or split, as if the subject had clawed its way out from inside.
Lucian did not remember painting most of them.
But he knew who they were all supposed to be.
He hadn’t been mad when he met her.
She was nothing extraordinary by any standard. She had a way of speaking softly, with care, as though everything she said might be the last thing you’d hear before dying..... She touched things as if they bruised easily. Flowers. Paintings. His heart.
He had found her in a gallery, oddly...... not in front of his work, but in front of someone else's, frowning. She wasn’t impressed. She didn’t pretend.
He fell in love before he even learned her name.
Y/N had this way of moving through his studio like she belonged there. No announcement. No hesitation. One day, she stood beside his easel, watching a half-formed figure emerge beneath his brush.
Her smile curled slightly. "Why do all your faces look so sad?"
He hadn’t realized they did.
But then she smiled at him.... warm and full of some sun he hadn't painted yet.... and suddenly, he understood what had been missing from his work. From him.
They were married by the fall.
By spring, she was painting the rose garden in real color..... soil under her nails, leaves in her hair, humming softly in sunlight that looked like it loved her back.
By summer, she was pregnant.
Lucian never stopped painting her. Every line of her face. The curve of her smile. Her belly rising like the moon under linen.
Their daughter arrived, wailing like she already knew what world she'd been born into.
But for a time, there was peace. Lucian had everything.
No warning. No reason. Just a sound in the night.... a scream too raw to be his own.
He remembered smoke.... thick as wet velvet.... and the heat of flames licking at the nursery door. He remembered tripping on a remaining of his 5 year old daughter's bed. He remembered Y/N’s silhouette in the garden, half her face swallowed in orange light.
She had carried the child.
He never saw his daughter again.
Y/N survived, somehow. Her face didn’t.
He never painted her again after that.
She didn’t ask..... not at first. She wore scarves in the mirror’s absence. Stared at the floor when he entered the room.
But she still wandered the house. She still tended the ash where roses had once bloomed. And then, one night.... after weeks of silence.... she looked at him with those half-burned eyes and asked:
"Lucian… can you paint my face again?"
The way her voice cracked on the word face should have shattered him.
And when he woke the next morning, she was gone.
He began to hear her again. Footsteps in the hall. A faint whisper beside the window.
Some days, she hummed in the garden. Some nights, she laughed... just once.... at a joke he hadn’t told.
She was with him. Watching. Encouraging. Waiting.
He opened the trunk where the child’s bones had been carefully wrapped..... not buried. Not mourned. He had Just kept them.
He ground them into powder for white... it shimmered, like moonlight on porcelain skin.
He took ash from the garden where her roses once grew, crushing them with his own hands. He wanted to capture the red of her lips ...... but the ashes turned every hue black.
Desperate, he added his own blood.
He carved a brush handle from the child's tiny femur. Tied Y/N’s hair to the end, pulled from her old comb.
Unburnt. Taken from the parts of her corpse he could still look at.
"Just once more," he whispered, breath fogging over cold oil and stretched dermis.
The first painting looked almost alive. Her eyes shimmered. Her lips, full.
But then… the face began to sag.
The mouth melted. The nose collapsed. The skin bubbled.
She screamed from the wall.... not with voice, but form. As if her soul rejected the image.
Lucian tore it down. Burned it.
"It’s not me. Not anymore."
He covered his ears. Painted harder. Faster.
Three days passed. Then twelve. He stopped counting.
Y/N’s voice became more frequent. And yet more distant.
Sometimes, she cried from the attic. Sometimes, she knocked from inside the walls. But he couldn’t stop.
Each new painting started with beauty… and ended with horror.
He blamed the materials. The temperature. The light.
But deep down, he knew: she was rejecting him.
Then, finally, the silence came.
He wandered the halls. Her scent was gone. Her presence.... gone. Even the garden was still.
And that's when the truth hit him like a blade through the spine:
She had died in the fire.
There had never been a voice.
Only guilt. Only memory. Only madness.
Then who had asked him to paint her?
The match felt warm in his hand.
The studio was soaked in turpentine and filled with canvases..... every one a grave. He lit the first corner of the room, and flame caught with an eagerness that felt personal.
As the fire spread, Lucian sat before his final canvas.
He painted her as she once was.... young, smiling, heavy with child, sitting in a rose garden untouched by ash.
For the first time… he didn’t use bone.
As the fire roared louder, he smiled.
And in the glow of death, he saw them.
Y/N, whole and luminous, hair glowing like the flame behind her.
His daughter, tiny hand in hers, giggling, pointing at the painting.
"Look, Mama! Look what Papa made!"
Y/N turned toward him, smiling.
"It’s beautiful, Lucian."
Tears slid down his cheeks, and he laughed..... the sound choked but real.
“I finally got it right,” he whispered.
And then everything was light.
The manor burned. The paintings cracked and curled to dust. The brush fell from his hand, rolling to the ash-covered floor.
But in that final moment.... in that last, quiet breath before the flames took him.... Lucian was not a madman.
finally he was able to set them free.
©️ Littlephoenix 2025 , do not plagiarize, distribute to other sites or translate any of my work , or ideas without my permission it's strictly prohibited.
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