#7724

Zhou stares up at the blonde man haunting his mind and his artwork for the past who knows how long. 

He just can’t help it, y’know? It feels like every time he lifts a pen to paper, he’s drawing the same milky white complexion contrasted by an unearthly tan, the same pale eyes that switched from blue to green when the light hit them just right, and the same horrifyingly bleached blonde hair with long curls draping over the back of the nape.

So, Zhou stands there, staring up, nervously wringing his hands together as he critiques the recent additions he’d painted on. The hair could use some more definition; it could also look a tad more bleached. Plus, the man needs nipples, how did he even forget to add those? Zhou makes a few more mental notes of what to change for the future since he’s been working on this for too long and is starting to become ugly and muddled in his head. 

Zhou doesn’t know where this man even came from. He’s never even met anyone who even remotely looks like this (minus the Australian tv clips that Oscar’s shown him or some random guys he’s seen on Daniel’s instagram reels but that’s besides the point). 

It honestly doesn’t matter how the man came into existence, Zhou just had to embrace it at this point otherwise his art inspiration would fizzle down the drain, leaving only forced and lifeless sketches that look so ugly that he would have to replace the entire sketchbook. Plus, he only works in retail and the good mixed-media sketchbooks he likes are slightly too expensive for his liking to be continuously replaced.

(Zhou has come this close to ripping out a page from his newest sketchbook but there was such a pretty gouache doodle that he’d done on the backside he couldn’t bring himself to destroy the entire page)

The worst part of it all was his friends making fun of him for it regardless of the fact that most of them were artistically inclined. Logan has a penchant for taking jaw-dropping landscape photos while Oscar, despite being a man of fewer words, was breathtaking in the way he could put them down on paper. Liam loved music and his guitar skills were really good. Jack-, well, Zhou doesn't actually know if Jack has any artistic abilities other than the ability to draw dicks while tracking his runs on strava. And Fred, god bless Fred. The man is willing to research any niche topic or make any pose for a sketch if it means good art comes from it. 

Also, Zhou knows for a fact the others have “muses” even if they themselves dismissed the notion simply because of the fact that it wasn’t one person or thing that they always focused on like Zhou seemingly does. He knows for a fact where each of them, minus Jack and maybe Fred, draw inspiration from and yet, they still make fun of him for having a muse who doesn’t even seem to exist.