It is far, far easier to make someone viewed as perfect, feel flawed, than to make someone viewed as flawed, feel perfect.

Myungsoo is a pretty face to his class.

He’s just quiet enough to not draw attention to his words, and just talkative enough to not draw attention to his silence. It’s a complicated art, but one that he’s mastered. He purses his lips. It’s more than can be said of the other pretty faces in the class.

But to him, there’s only one person who is pretty.

And for someone so pretty, so perfect, Myungsoo is willing to become more than a pretty face.

Sungjong is flawed in every way. He speaks too brightly, with an enthusiasm and happiness that can only come from someone completely ignorant of the horrors of the world. He lacks the common sense to be afraid, the bashfulness to retreat, the virtue to back down.

Myungsoo thinks it’s perfect.

But as the slender legs trip over a carefully calculated, extremely dirty, and ridiculously oversized foot, Myungsoo can’t help but remember that not everyone thinks that way.

Today, when those overly large and overly bright and absolutely unpatriotically beautiful eyes of Sungjong’s mist over, Myungsoo very nearly gets caught staring at the glint in the bottom right corner. But with a quick leap to his feet and the quiet whisper of a neighbor, “Page 14. Paragraph 8,” Myungsoo manages to dupe his class once again.

Not that he was worried.

After all, if they can be fooled into thinking that Sungjong is flawed, then they can be fooled into thinking anything.

When he sits back down, he mutters a quiet thank you to his right while trying very hard not to look towards his left, where uncharacteristically bright eyes would no doubt be waiting for him. And yet, he still can’t remove that sweet twinkle from his mind.

Myungsoo is supposed to be perfect.

Intelligent, a careful converser, brilliant in looks and just as much so in personality.

But as he rubs the callous starting to form on his left thumb, he knows it isn’t so. He’s terrified, too scared to deviate from the norm to remember how to stick out like his own sore thumbs. But as he rubs that ridiculously red thumb, better late than never, he still can’t stop the smile spreading from his lips to the corner of his eyes.

He practices late into that night and the next and the one after that, and how his homework ever gets done is a mystery to him.

But that doesn’t matter, not when the far more important mystery tantalizes him so.

Myungsoo is known for one thing.

His presentations are, if nothing else, different. This is allowed, simply because presentations are boring and any sort of entertainment is very well received.

And yet, the classroom bursts into clusters of chatter and gossip as Myungsoo bounces into the classroom, an acoustic guitar strapped to his back, just seconds before the clock chimes behind him.

“Sorry, had to pick this guy up,” his smile speaks for him, and his tardiness is quickly excused. The rest is not.

The morning classes may as well have consisted of watching grass grow, or more accurately, watching paint dry –because between the heat in the classroom and the laser eyes concentrated on the spruce sitting not-so-innocently by Myungsoo’s desk.

Five failures to start class later, even the professor is intrigued, and the possibility of having Myungsoo present earlier than scheduled begins circulating. The bobbing Adam’s apple signals Myungsoo’s disagreement, but as his eyes drift to his left, to Sungjong, as they always have and always will, he’s left with no option but to pick up his guitar and saunter bashfully to the front.

After all, he isn’t presenting early. He’s confessing years too late.

Myungsoo’s first statement sends the class in flames.

“I had a difficult time picking something perfect because –well, frankly, because there is no such thing as perfection.” He has to ignore the bickering in the classroom, the shouts of agreement and the desperate moans of dissatisfaction. He has to ignore the smirk spreading across his teacher’s face, and the gentle nodding motion that begins to accompany it. But all this is made easier by the widening eyes and gently dropping jaw of the boy sitting in the back row.

“Well, perfect isn’t something someone can be. Therefore, perfection can’t exist.”

The girl in the front row, the one with the oversized glasses and fourteen pages of research on her perfect person, begins dissecting the prompt in an attempt to discredit Myungsoo’s words. But when the class quiets and her voice begins to echo throughout the room, Myungsoo’s silence overpowers anything she can say.

“Perfect is something that people can only feel.”

And his logic overpowers anything these students have ever thought.

The first chord Myungsoo plays is major, the feel is happy and he progresses sweetly through the circle of fifths. “Perfect.” The clarity provided by the spruce, and hours of practice plucking the strings so the sounds will ring just so, add to this perfect chord, this perfect sequence.

And as his fingers dance across the strings, his eyes probe the twinkling ones he can’t stop thinking about. “I want you to feel this perfect.”

The students are tempted to gossip, and Myungsoo isn’t sure if they don’t out of respect to the clear chords or they’ve begun gossiping hours ago and he just can’t hear it. But as he loses himself in those eyes, loses himself mentally mapping the course from those lips down to the nook of his neck, Myungsoo can’t doubt the latter option.

“Perfect is destroyed with a single flaw.”

He plays an augmented chord, the cacophony screeching in comparison to the sweet fifths previously lilting through the room. He stops playing.

He stands up, walks very slowly but surprisingly surely, towards his desk. Then he walks a little more, and places the guitar in a pair of slender hands that have no clue what they’re doing surrounded by all these strings and spruce.

Myungsoo lifts a slender finger to the top string, and pinning down the notes with his other hand, guides the slender fingers in a sweet, clear chord.

“But it only takes one person to make you feel perfect.”