His hair was a lustrous gold. Curving around his face, one would have almost forgotten he was human, and would have assumed him to be but a wild-flower, a vivid blossom, that lay intertwined with the grass beneath his body. Beset against the pristine greens of the grass, he was as if a tranquil hadeharia, a halcyon embalm that spoke wreaths of bliss in a world of dysphoria. His lips were rose-tinted; his eyes flaunted candour more flamboyant than God’s; his body was lithe, supple and pallid; his irises were hazel, flecked by strings of gold. As he lay, Jinki carefully intertwined his fingers with the strands of the young man’s hair, soft as it was against his often calloused skin. He wanted to bend down and nibble the rim of the younger’s parted lips, wanted to run his fingers across the gaunt cheekbones and trace the line of his jaw, however, Jinki remained motionless, remained stoic, in the breeze that threatened to waver him.

 

 

“You're so beautiful,” Jinki relished, words glances against the whispers of the clouds. The grass around him rustled, in lieu to the serenity of the sky above. It was so blue it seemed in patriarchal countenance, though Jinki knew not what a patriarch to. The sun, potentially, or the clouds. Possibly even the very world itself, the sky’s blanket the constant coating, the constant paint, that separated Earth from the outer-discrepancies. Reaching out gently, the young man clasped Jinki’s tepid hand in his own, and kissed it once, quietly, a mark that spoke more than it would have in verbiage. Contentment proliferated outwards from Jinki, ivy wrapping around every bone, every vein, every organ, the emerald greens striking through the reddened hunks of flesh. Such foliage could only inspirit him in partiality, however, for the skin could never be pierced by ivy’s seed. “You get more beautiful every time I see you,” Jinki continued, and the young man hushed him then, for Jinki had a way with exaggeration, and a way of conserving flower-petals far beyond their lifetime.

 

 

Jinki could never get enough of the younger, and, intrinsically, he knew it. The love he felt was a cosmological one – a catalyst, potentially, where the flourishing supernovae would eventually elapse upon a night too slate for purpose – and entranced every move he made. Like a florist preening thorns or a gardener hewing from loam, he was a man perfecting the image of beauty before him by simply observing. He would never touch, for the beauty was so vast, and as entrenching as a mire, and he would never try to understand, for Jinki knew not how to. There was something so ethereal, so serendipitous, so quaint, about the man who rested against him. A sensual epoch to be told for many years, one who held the scent of lavender though the grafting impression was much stronger. Jinki lavished each thoughts with his ardent passion for the man – no, ​the wildflower.

 

 

“Can I hold you closer?” Jinki asked, tentatively, unsure. The man simply nodded, before shifting his position, barely a graze against the views of the world that encompassed them. The maudlin tresses of nature that allured him were all but lost to Jinki, as the young man rested his head against Jinki’s chest, hair so delicate, so mellifluous, on the tame blue of the elder’s shirt. A leg either side of the narrow-framed younger, Jinki carefully slid further back against the tree he lay by, the brittle bark near-inconceivable, unseen through the canopy of love, of contentment, of purpose. The younger’s body complied with respiration as he breathed subtly, completely cast in a blessed ardour beneath the wide tree’s shade. It was colder than in sunlight here, a sequestered patch of dark that cut through the halo of luminescence, but neither man truly felt ​cold. They felt each other. As the young man nestled his head back, the beautiful bridge of his pale neck exposed, Jinki murmured an expression foreign to even his own ears. Words failed to endow him with their usual altruism, leaving him stranded, clinging to the withered leaves of winter.

 

 

“I am just like any other,” the young man whispered, and his voice was hoarse, his voice was frail. Eyes two temporal buttons against the face of well-woven fabric, the young man blinked, knowing his expression went unseen by Jinki. To contrive his spirits from the realms of pity’s bursary, and to salvage what could be lost were the young to speak again, Jinki confessed, “No, Taemin, you aren’t. You're a wild-flower.” Time passed with an inherent stillness then, one that Taemin would refuse to acknowledge. Occasionally, he cast his eyes across the field, where the blades of grass intermingled, a ravine of gorgeous green that talked louder than any human. Jinki would never move, form succumbed to the tree he balanced by, and simply held Taemin closely, as if he were caressing the finest petal. Finally, Taemin breathed, thought dispelled before he could halt it.

 

“No,” he replied slowly, “I'm just a blade of grass.”