It wasn’t a good day. It never was whenever it rained. Heavy drops slowly crawling down the glass of their french windows are clear against the chaos of the merciless wind. Tears of the skies, crying in the wake of a lost love. Chanyeol never cries.

It is the paintings that do.

He isn’t seeing him today.

Yellows and oranges have paled as time takes away the last bits of their story. Smiles and laughter have diminished, now only fondness and nostalgia. The warmth that’s left in his home were from the canvasses he would never expose.

Chanyeol wants to hear the voice, ecstatic and obnoxiously loud.

“What are you working on?”

One that he used to argue with the most.

“Baekhyun, not now-”

“I wanna see it!”

Stubborn but endearing.

The dry brush is rough on the surface, paint lapsing over texture dents. Navy stark against the white primer. Chanyeol only wishes to hear the habitual bothering again.

Peace of mind is silence of heart.

Assurance is presence above kept promises.

Love, a blanket of exceptions.

A cold forefront hiding an alternate ending.

Beyond is a continuum of what could have been.

The canvas is full. The distinct odor of oils and paint saturate the heavy ounces of breaths he take. It's suffocating. Familiar. Another memory to leave afloat in the crevices behind the mouth of a black hole.

He hates painting indoors.

It reminds him of life.

The painting is left brutally unfinished.

Spring should be over soon.

The sweltering heat of summer leaves a layer of glimmering sweat upon his skin. The aroma of dried flowers remain, stale and gratifying. The garden would have lived if he listened, if he learnt how to take care of it. It would have been a lasting echo.

He bathes in the sting of sun rays on his reddened skin and paints a solemn scenery.

Eyes don’t reflect purpose but sincerity. The same way an artist’s hand doesn’t always satisfy the expression of the heart. Chanyeol misses the way Baekhyun would sit on the couch in his studio and quietly watch.

He remembers the slow process of getting used to eyes boring stares into the back of his form. He misses the soothing tone of his voice when he sings while he worked. He wants to go back in time and record every moment.

If only he had known.

But that’s the thing about perfect love.

It ends more mysteriously than how it begins.

Hurts more unpredictably.

Plays an uneven field of fate versus perseverance.

The pinks and purples of dawn blend into the orange sunrise. The bed is empty, cold, and soft, a chaos of strong coloured, hand-printed textiles, in contrast to the walls of the palest grey.

He lets the warmth soak into the room. Imagines what used to bring life and technicolor wavelengths across the landscape of big city dreams and skylines breaking through frozen fields of ice in hell. Cruelty doesn’t choose, it merely plunges into the most brightly red blood streams. Puts everything to a blank halt.

He believes in fighting. If not for the love he’d lost, for the reason he had found that love.

He stands on the deck with a paint brush in hand. Poised to continue where fulfillment was taken away.

He knows he’s watching.

He wouldn’t paint for anyone else.

Time and money, an orthodox together.

He has long established his name. The Kaleidoscope Ambition, coined from the way he uses colours—awkward contrasts and mixes of inexact shades from the in-betweens of the wheel. People ask how he does it. He smiles, focus solely on the only person who knows.

Chanyeol is colour blind.

The pressure builds. Baekhyun is tired. Chanyeol is unrelenting.

Within the grey area between time and money, people often lose sight of what’s priceless.

Dust accumulates on the surface of his studio desk. Paint tubes and palettes dry, brushes making a sturdy foundation of spider webs, pencils growing molds at the tips. The calendar is pinned in the past. Chanyeol stares at the painful reminder.

He misses the way Baekhyun’s elegant digits turn their pages.

He misses the comfort, the warmth, and the touches of sin.

He doesn’t want to forget what it’s like holding and kissing those hands of his.

It was high time Chanyeol relents. All the hard work falls into nothing. He begs and begs, to find a way, find a cure, find another chance. He realises that money is powerless, after all. He wants things he couldn’t pay for. Purchase another life, buy another smile, sell his very own soul for the sake of the one he loves.

It is too late for time waits for no one. Time runs faster towards the end when regret catches up to drag you back heavy and tired.

Baekhyun has only a little of it left.

Chanyeol only has pleas for payment.

People are a witness.

Things fall into place the same way they fall through.

In the real world, happiness comes with a price.

In the real world, love is also irrevocable pain.

It is human to let these things float into the abyss. For a romantic, absolute happiness although temporary is better than never experiencing it at all.

A suppressed vision is a nightmare. The disconnect between the hand that delivers the message and the mind that creates its masterpiece is a tragedy.

In the grand scheme of things, the happiest bonds that appear perfect have patches. Numerous dark scabs and scars, blood magentas mended into rosy wise bittersweetness. Every beginning, once a blank white canvas, primed to carry the substantial weight of impaired reason and fears, risks and destructive honesty.

Countless fights have ensued. Understanding takes a step back, arguments affront. Thunder claps, a murderous slash of lightning runs across the navy sky as purple rain plummet mercilessly onto the pavement. Voices are loud, vicious words thrown, clear-eyed perception out of sight, syllables of fiery red on their tongues, heavy with attribution.

As the sun takes away the colours and leaves them in an overture of faded words. Apologies are black and white. Baekhyun saves the tears, looks past the grey clouds and puts Chanyeol’s fragments together.

The muse saves the parched artist once again.

Chanyeol has Baekhyun memorised like his own sequence of colours. When the palette is not in right order, he drowns in the inexplicable peculiarity of an off-beat soundtrack, stumbles over inexact shades of mixed pigments. He works around the errors, comes out dissatisfied, irked by the smallest of misplaced details.

It was disaster picked up from minuscule peeves. Eating up the ugly shades on the palettes of awfully bright royal teals and yellows lacking luster.

Baekhyun is layers of pastels underneath the whirlwind of a neon masquerade. At the end of the day, when the party is over and the walls cease, he welcomes the soft caresses of a tender warmth, depends on it to pull him out of the pettiness of it all.

When trust is easy and comfort sets in, moving in together is a breath of welcomed change. Adjusting is almost seamless and lives intertwine into a more intricate weave of strings. Attachment takes a deeper meaning. Disagreements surface and understanding becomes mundane as conversations over breakfast. Imperfections, discovered.

There are tiny arguments with an unconscious running tally of how often they play nag at each other’s petty problematic habits. The breakfast cereal bowl that’s still in the sink by evening. The toothpaste tube squeezed in the middle. Bottle caps left off. A late reply to a text message. The list goes on, but it’s all funny how these things are baby steps towards compromising on bigger things.

It isn’t perfection that brings two people together but the human condition.

Between unspoken words and unnecessary promises, two souls find solace in liberating quiet isolation. The magnitude of conversations in body language, assurances from hands that have memorised where touches matter most, and lips. Lips whispering the present, the sound resonating against walls despite changing angles.

Chanyeol whines about the physical evidence of artist block.

Baekhyun stifles his laugh, a soft press of lips against the other’s. Bad days turn around before they end. The face of love and meaning, and everything else he needs right in the palms of tired, calloused hands, eyes looking into his.

“Can I watch you paint?”

Chanyeol remembers the first time.

“What— No— Please don’t—”

Words quick in panic, wide eyes slowly glossing in overwhelming fear, swallowing him whole, the redness crawling from his ears to his neck and jugular, almost suffocating.

“Why not?”

It felt like a test.

“I’m uncomfortable being watched— Can’t properly work,”

He stills, forgets where the next dab of paint should be placed, fingers fidgeting on the handle of the brush.

“Next time then?”

He nods, eyes closed. He breathes heavy with eyes growing moist. Completely immobile, overthinking, swallowed whole by the growing thought that this is a form of intimate rejection. He couldn’t place Baekhyun’s reaction and it rendered him into fear.

He forgets the hours and the minutes. Absorbed in his own time and space, Chanyeol progresses along another piece until he notices the shivering of his own hands, chuckles softly at the sound of his grumbling stomach. The isolation bubble pops at the sound of knocking against the wooden door.

He finds Baekhyun timidly smiling, halfway behind the door, “Please take a break, I made buttermilk pancakes,” his soothing tone and sweetness replaces Chanyeol’s tensed expression with softness.

He is pulled away from the canvas to get some fresh air out in the balcony, enjoys the fluffy sweet breakfast for dinner at sunset, revels in the stolen hugs and kisses in the middle of a whimsical tirade of ideas on works in progress.

Pearlescent pigments mix into the turquoise of shorelines upon white powder sand. The subtle twinkling of a brand new border. Chanyeol doesn’t notice how Baekhyun smiles quietly, he passes by him and a few meters away he sits in front of the flourishing work, he continues to paint.

Baekhyun takes it upon himself to walk the extra distance. He remains fascinated. Of ornate surrealist landscapes, bleary of transparent faces, perspectives and illusions of light, another dimension of his lover’s mind.

Unknowingly, the consistency eases him into routine.

Quietly, Baekhyun slinks away from the studio to leave Chanyeol to his own devices when the soft, low murmur of the very familiar voice stops him halfway.

“Stay.”

An invitation, a smile, an assurance. He smiles back.

Baekhyun sits on the couch. It swallows him into a trance as he watches the painting come to life. The sound of the radio is soft in the background, he hums along. The tinge of red on his lover’s ears comforted by the sound of his favourite voice.

When Chanyeol tells him it’s time for bed, Baekhyun forgoes words.

Noses touch, smiles spell undivided attention, hands crawl, and bodies marry.

Moonlight dims as thin layers of clouds overlap.

The evening ends in tangled limbs, sweet slumber running in their dazed afterglow with the pink and purple hues of sunrise breaking behind closed curtains.

The nearest semblance completed work gets to its utopia is satisfaction from expression in tangible form. Chanyeol knows that no matter how many portraits of Baekhyun he puts on canvas, the face he has memorised by heart will remain a fading memory that he fears losing.

Love doesn’t deserve to die twice.