Cicero_Serio
Legacy Name: Cicero_Serio

People say that when every color you can see—and all the ones that you can’t—mix together, you end up with white.

That's wrong. There will always be the colors that were put into it. They're waiting at the edges for the white to fray away, waiting for their chance to burst into the world once again.

That is what Cisero Serio proves with his paint. Streaks of drying color adorn him, covering fabric and skin indiscriminately. His index finger and thumb are permanently bent, now, thanks to long hours hooked through a wooden palette's hole. He paints and paints and paints until colors run together into brown, gray, black—and maybe just a glimpse of that white. And then it's gone and there are the thousand rainbows again, leaping into your eyes, colors laughing and clashing and melting against each other. He slathers each painting with several coats and layers of more colors than could ever be counted, but it's never quite there.

Cisero knows, leaning against a still-wet canvas to keep himself standing because he's been in front of the easel for seventeen hours straight. Cisero knows, waking up with wet paint dried on the tips of his hair because he fell asleep in the middle of a piece again. Cisero knows, because that is what he lives for. His life is defined by the scrape of a worn brush against canvas, the feel of paint flecks drying under his fingernails, and the escaped drippings of acrylic on his palette from the countless nameless new colors he has mixed.

He has found color fascinating for as long as he can remember. Outside of art, he struggles to remember any other details—the heady fragrances of his favorite meals get discarded in favor of the way a hearthfire can turn a brown burger towards copper, and the sound of his mother’s voice is unfamiliar in favor of the variances of hue in the strands of her dyed blonde hair.

Cisero’s own hair, white as the acrylic primer he uses almost exclusively, helped draw his attention to the world's spectrum as a child. Smooth brown next to shimmering gold next to Rumplestilskein's unspun straw-yellow next to so many different kinds of red! One of his earliest memories is of the time he hoarded watercolor paint sets from his kindergarten class and tried to use them to dye his hair all the colors of the rainbow. His teacher found him in the bathroom, and told him laughingly that if it worked it would still be white, treating little Cisero to the simplest physics explanation ever uttered. He wouldn’t let the kindly old woman wash his hair out, though, and pranced through the rest of the day crowned with green-brown-purple-orange-pink-back-blue-yellow splotches.

And so Cisero searches for color. Everything and anything that could change his current muddy mixture to that ultimate combination, that true colorless rainbow. One day, Cisero knows, he will look at a finished painting: a white canvas.