I have no idea how this got so....however it is, nor why editing one line I didn't like meant putting this aside for a month.  Kind of leaning towards something new? Let  me know what you think <3 Criticism on this style would be realllly appreciated.

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Something flashes by the corner of Donghae’s eye.

Palms white and grey, he shoves away the hair tickling at his eyes and draws a path outside to confront the blinding streak of red that cuts its way across his periphery.

“Hey.”

Donghae is not much to behold, powdered stains littering the front of his sweater and his things gathered messily into both arms, hugged tight against him.  He realizes this even as the other boy raises his eyebrows above the line of his glasses and steps back from the crumbling brick, fingertips still shining like they’re full of lapis lazuli and scuffed emeralds.  

“You’re not supposed to be doing that.”  It’s been a long day and all his smooth lines had been fading awkwardly into scribbles and he is just not in the mood for the way this, this delinquent is looking at him.

“Of course I am.  Who says I’m not?”  And with that Donghae storms off, rolling away on his dark little thundercloud and mumbling rude things,  while the boy with the sharp bones laughs to himself and grabs another can, shakes it in his hand like dice and sprays a gamble in black across the wet paint.  

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A sticky round bun is at him the next day, and Donghae is looking owlish and contrite behind his own glasses.  “You could have explained, you know.”

“Yes, well. I’m Hyukjae.  Nice to meet you.”  With his clean hand he accepts the token, warm in its rustling butcher paper, and he wonders if Donghae is capable of doing something that isn’t cute.

Donghae ignores him in turn and grumbles, “If the shopkeeper’s paying you to paint out here, what kind of teenage rebel are you?”

Hyukjae has bright,straight, even teeth that he flashes easily, but even still Donghae can’t help wishing he’d do it more.  “Do I look like much of a rebel to you?”

Donghae looks him up and down, eyes tracing the stark lines of his jaw and the stiff collar of his jacket.  The sharp points of Hyukjae’s hair cleave the light shining from the bakery behind him, a broken halo resting somewhere around his head.  Before Donghae can say um, yes, you do, and as a matter of fact, Hyukjae laughs and it is unspeakably warm.  “I don’t care much for rebellion.”

And that’s how Donghae abandons his coffeeshop still life for the first time in sixteen consecutive days, forgotten canvas stretched across his legs as he sits criss-cross on the lumpy pavement and watches Hyukjae spritz patches of color into the still air, studies how they hang there for a millisecond and then flee.  The entropy of his work disturbs Donghae, and he opens his mouth to say something but then the abrupt lines of Hyukjae’s body are chopping through the air, and things that are sharp and fragmented begin to appear.  Hyukjae blots at a triangle that he has pasted over the sloppy scrawl of son ga-in is a ing wh -- and shakes his head.  Donghae sees how even his short, uncalculated movements are clean and precise and wants to be envious, but he takes another look at the geometry unfolding on the wall, and it’s like he’s being shot through with those drying lightning bolts that spark from Hyukjae’s fingers, drawn into the liquid origami that’s taking shape in front of his face.  It’s unreal.  Everything is hard lines and razor edges and Donghae wants to eat it all up,  but it looks like it will hurt on the way down.  The softest thing is the glow that everything is imbued with, every polygon and intersection and just, everything, bathed in an unplaceable light.  Hyukjae is Midas in moderation, and everything he touches shines, and so Donghae jumps when he feels a hand wrapped around his arm.  Hyukjae’s eyes are big and unsure, and Donghae can’t find the words to explain all the different things he’s feeling.  But he promises himself that Hyukjae will never, ever see a painting of his, not until the day he dies.

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The fact that he forgets to tell Hyukjae this slips his mind, and even if he had, the chances of Hyukjae listening to him are slim to none anyways.  So when he swaggers through the door Tuesday morning, coppery orange streaked through his hair and down his fingers for the day, he almost knocks over the rosy glass of iced tea that Donghae has left for him on the edge of the counter.

Donghae’s canvases are hanging on a wall tucked into the corner of the shop, a few dim lights speckling their borders and not much else.  But Hyukjae feels like he’s being swallowed alive by the flood of beauty in front of him.  All he can see is billowing curtains of ink shrouding these panels, with not a fiber out of line, or out of curve, or whatever it was.  Webs of draped patterns and swirls of loose color spread out and seeped in, and it's impossible to tell where a single line starts and where it becomes a pair of lips, a feathered wing, a gust of wind.  No still life had ever been so full of movement.  Woven leaves tessellate softly, boundaries blurred and irrelevant.  Hyukjae doesn’t know when Donghae had come out of the back room and started watching him, but he notices him standing there, melting smoke-like into the shadow, and everything was suddenly so perfect that Hyukjae wanted to shake him for leaving him in the dark so long.  To see if he would mist up and swirl back together again, like one of his exquisite paintings that he had so conveniently forgotten to mention.  It makes Hyukjae want to perforate all his own paintings along every line and neatly tear them up, heaping their scattered pieces and setting it all on fire.  

“Can I watch you paint?” he says, unexpectedly comforted by the understanding in Donghae’s eyes.  

Donghae rolls up his left sleeve to match his right, tries to put some control back into his life.  “Yeah. Okay. I mean, it’s the least I could do.”  But he is relieved that their gratitude is mutual, overjoyed that he has something to offer Hyukjae other than fresh pastries and an astonished audience.

The walls outside the cafe have become other dimensions, hued portals of time and space, and Hyukjae is running out of both.  He doesn’t have somewhere else he needs to be, but he thinks he might need a reason to stay, to hang out around the shop, until he realizes that no, maybe it’s Donghae that needs him to have a reason, need him to have a tabula non-rasa to cover up with gloss and angles.  

They’re halfway between the shop and Hyukjae’s home, heads bent awkwardly against his backpack filled with chilly cans, and Donghae is holding up Hyuk’s skinny arm against the backdrop of the sky and mapping mazes from his left elbow out.  Hyukjae nods when Donghae pulls out a marker, the pungency of fake permanence distinct in the air, and forces himself to keep his eyes open despite the lazy draw of tingling on his tired skin.  Donghae covers him in doodles, pretty faces and rushing water, and Hyukjae is taken aback by the curves along his skin.  Hyukjae was not made for curves.  Donghae was, with his small mouth that quirked upwards and his round eyes and tousled hair and slouching sweaters.  Donghae was the one who projected that onto him, the whiteness of his own skin as good as any canvas.  

Hyukjae’s arm is falling asleep, but his mind is electric and alive.

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“Donghae.  I want to paint you.”

Donghae scoffs.  Hyukjae is not offended, because he knows what Donghae would say if he could.  Hyukjae has never painted a person for him, and even if he did, he’d be better off looking in a mirror than trying to paint the likes of Donghae.  

“I don’t want to sit for you,” he finally says, scowling a little at the prospect of letting Hyukjae examine him, craft him into a subject and maybe  an object and really anything but Donghae.  

“Neither would I,” says Hyukjae reasonably, and so they come to a conclusion.

To paint each other painting the other is simple in theory, egalitarian at best, and lopsided at worst.  Hyukjae’s brow furrows.  It is hard for him to contain his flurry of movement while painting Donghae, his arms wide and expansive and moving in jagged paths.  

Donghae just smiles and watches Hyukjae’s arms dance, dashing inky curves along his thin paper to capture what he’s seeing. What he draws from the paint and from Hyukjae is anything but still, and he doesn’t mind.  He paints Hyukjae in his essence, calming the angled harshness of his face with frantic swoops of his own hand, eventually rendering him in soft lines that might not be real but look good on him anyways.  He looks up from his work again and suddenly he himself is there, upon the wall in what seems like a million blocks of color, the space between the slashes creating chiseled lines in his face.  Hyukjae has torn him apart and  patched him together along the cracking brick in colors that aren’t real, in purple eyes and turquoise cheekbones and a jewel-like smile.

“Is this how you see me?” he whispers to Hyukjae, who nearly misses it hidden behind the hiss and rattle of his emptying cans.  “Is this what you see when you look at me?”

Hyukjae just looks at him, torn, because Donghae is soft swoops and smoky eyes and everything intangible that he wants to hold, but there’s also this.  The way Hyukjae expresses things and the way they are -- it’s so hard to find a difference in any other way, and he hopes that Donghae will see that he’s said all that he can say.

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Donghae’s thumbs are sore, and so are Hyukjae’s wrists, but he’s getting paid to reinvent this wall, which happens to be particularly horrible and drab.  And the chemicals zooming to his brain are making his head light, and he grins down at Donghae, who has whiled away the day with him.  “It’s kind of a rush, right?”

Donghae frowns, the valleys of his mouth sloping and sweet.  “I don’t think I like it, Hyuk.”  He had borrowed Hyukjae’s jacket once and underneath the residue of paint, he could smell sweet grass and bright citrus, earthy smoky bits of nature that wouldn’t surprise only the people who were curious enough to come and take a whiff.  Now Donghae’s nerves are all drizzled with carbon disulfide, n hexane, methyl benzene, trichloroethylene, and something unnamed.

“There. It’s done.  Come look.”  Another squirt, and Hyukjae is pulling him up by the arms,

and suddenly Donghae is coughing into his kiss in a cloud of noxious purple.  Particles that faded to leave them blue-tinged and breathless. Like they’re drowning in summer mist.  Donghae prays that his fingers aren’t too smudged as they find their way unbidden to cradle Hyukjae’s head, but he kind of forgets when Hyukjae opens his eyes for a second and then, suddenly, his lips.  So feathered thumbprints lie gold and green on Hyukjae’s hair, and Donghae isn’t thinking about anything any more except the way his mouth tastes like fleeting shards of light.  Warm and biting and blinding.



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The days pass colder and cleaner, the air losing its smell to the impatient snow, and every time the sun tumbles over the edge of sea, Donghae knows that their time under the sky is running out and soon they’ll be wrapped up at Donghae’s fireside, paints sweating in the heat.  He starts to paint flames and embers in sweeping shades of warmth and when he steps back to assess them, he’s not sure if these are for Hyukjae or about Hyukjae.  He daydreams about Hyukjae painting flickering shocks of scarlet and black, the light dusting his pale skin with motes of autumn’s end, and smiles until he realizes how little he’s been somewhere inside with him.  How little Hyukjae seems to belong in a box with six sides and twelve edges when he is the one shattering cubes and prisms into infinite pieces and scattering them throughout the streets.  Donghae’s nameless worry evaporates when Hyukjae stops by the shop one day and smiles wide over Donghae’s flames, them with fingers deliberately curved and soft and shyly asking maybe, if Donghae had time, could he paint one for him too?  “I feel warm inside just looking at it,” he murmurs, and then and there Donghae decides that perhaps they can be for him but also about him, because that’s how he feels when he looks at Hyukjae.

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The day that the wind sweeps the last of the crumbling leaves from the streets is the day Hyukjae teaches him to tag his name in English, and his own HYUKJAE is shockingly full of sharp lines and corners. Donghae wonders how much of it is a foreign alphabet wrought from steel and angles,  and how much is due to Hyukjae’s own crisp movements.  donghae is comfortingly round and soft,  even in his quick hands, and Hyukjae smiles with his mouth full of it, donghae donghae donghae.  Trying to see if it tastes like the Donghae that he tastes and feels and smells everyday.

They had clambered over a wall and squirmed into an alley to find this mass of stone, hidden behind branches that framed the edge of the quiet park.  “I thought you could help me with this one,” Hyukjae had said, and Donghae shivered a little under his warm hand on his forearm.  That was an hour ago, and now they were here weaving a chain of letters that spilled easily from HYUKJAE to donghae and back again.   Donghae jolts when he feels Hyukjae steady himself with a gentle hand leaning on his thigh..  “Wait, we can’t do this.  This is your job, you can’t just turn it into -- “

Hyukjae’s calm smile stops him before his words do.  “Yeah?  Who says?”

Donghae almost huffs and it’s like they’re back at square one, spiraling back until their first meeting until the intangible edges snap back into their place in time and space, but then he realizes that this wall is for them.  

Donghae’s mouth turns up slow and surprised, teeth glinting like rare gems in the fading light.  Hyukjae’s nerves are crackling fast and hard, but he makes himself slide a hand around Donghae and slips it into the other boy’s downy coat pocket.  Full lips that are chapping in the cold quickly press to the skin along Donghae’s cheeks, and Hyukjae breathes out and watches it cloud like paint against the other boy’s face.

“Do you like it?”

And that’s when Donghae decides he’s had enough of words for today.  He leans up and kisses Hyukjae himself, breathing in his blue-green and setting free a little bit of love that somehow drowns every color out.

          Standing there on a carpet of leaves that once fit together like sheaves of paper, they close their eyes and let their own boundaries blur and become irrelevant.  And for the first time, Donghae thinks he’s truly feeling without seeing.