5: Someone once said there is no art without inspiration. Yixing became an artist the day he met Junmyeon. Pairing!Sulay, ArtForger!AU

Yixing was used to the name calling. When he was little, people used to say he was a genius, a child prodigy, an artistic master. He could copy even the most difficult of pieces with ease, and it was predicted that he would grow to become one of the most lauded artists of his day.

But then his parents died and he got older and that was all he could do: copy. It was painfully simple for him—art was just lines, after all—but he lacked vision and inspiration and creativity. After that, people just started calling him a washed up misuse of wasted talent. He was eleven.

He lived on the streets for a while, stealing what he could and making friends with whichever black market dealers came his way. One day, he knew, his abilities would come in handy, and he could be more than the teenage delinquent people said he had become.

Yixing had never cared that his greatest talent was copying the work of someone else, but as he neared twenty, he started to worry that the labels he'd been given were actually true. He tried everything he could at that point, but the blanking out and spacey personality people once attributed to genius were only amplified by the drugs. Though those habits did a lot of damage to his wallet, they didn't help his art at all, so Yixing decided the cost wasn't worth the payout.

It wasn't until he was 23 that Yixjng found his calling. His inspiration remained nonexistent—there was no helping that—but his connections finally came in handy—like he'd known they would. Sure, the guy who approached him was a little shady, but Yixing's life on the streets was ten years old at that point so he wasn't bothered. And since the shady gentleman was Yixing's ticket into the equally shady world of black market art dealing, he figured he was no better.

Yixing worked like that for a while, more or less content to be alone, but at least surrounded by his paints and ink and charcoals and brushes. The lack of imagination was nearly forgotten, buried deep beneath stacks of unmarked cash and piles of bulging portfolios. Life was fine like that, partly because he's struggled for too long to complain now, but mostly just because Yixing didn't know what he was missing. He'd never had the luxury of creativity. The marks and lines of the work he replicated were done in bright hues of blues and reds and yellows, but Yixing saw the world in only gray because he didn't know it existed otherwise.

Until the day he met Junmyeon. Before that day, Yixing was called a forger; afterward, he could truly be called an artist.

Junmyeon was a dealer, like most of the people in Yixing's circle, but the man was relatively new to that harsh world and his tentative approach was refreshing. Junmyeon didn't know that deals were made promptly and as heartlessly as possible, so he didn't know better when Yixing told him to include a date or the contract was off the table.

By the time they got around to having dinner, he'd learned better, of course, but that didn't stop him from enjoying himself, or letting Yixing kiss him passionately, or blushing madly when Yixing shared that for the first time in his life he wanted to make something brand new. After that, Junmyeon didn't do anymore deals with Yixing because the latter had become an actual artist with the former as his muse. Yixing still copied, of course, because he could finally see a life for himself that was built on original happiness and not on duplication, but the money was in forgeries and he needed enough to get out.

It'll take a while before he has enough to move on, to forget, to paint for himself and not for other people, but Yixing is willing to wait if Junmyeon is by his side waiting with him. He'd finally found his inspiration, and he was going to wait a lifetime if that's what it took.