Kyuhyun sat with his back against the rough bark of his favorite willow tree, wind tousling his hair and grass tickling the fingers of his left hand. The fingers of his right hand were curled around the smooth wood of his two-inches-too-short-pencil, hand poised delicately above the barren page of his overused sketchbook.

The wine colored school building, about a yard from where Kyuhyun was sitting atop the hill, had a wide, elaborate stone walkway leading out from its main, dirty-windowed automatic doors. Stone-washed, two-foot high walls separate the pathway from the elevated ground that Kyuhyun’s grassy hill is a part of – housing a collection of benches along each side. On these benches, the sun beaming down warmly on them, are students. Its lunch time and most of these students are out here for lunch; unless they’re like Kyuhyun who comes out to draw.

One particular student, on the bench almost directly across from his willow tree, has Kyuhyun’s eye. His dark, artistic irises are trained on a figure he knew all too well. Kim Jonghyun.

He’d been Kyuhyun’s muse the past few times he’s drawn. Each time, Kyuhyun would start off wanting to draw something different – but, again, each time, Jonghyun’s face would be the picture that ended up taking the space of the paper that was so precious to him. At first it had irritated him, but now he didn’t mind. He just had an odd knack now for making sure everything, every and every detail was perfect...because it was Jonghyun after all.

Jonghyun was seated with a group of his friends - about four of them today - and, from Kyuhyun’s view point, he must be cracking a joke. That was typical. Jonghyun was always the jokester, always the one longing for the center of attention. However, this wasn’t what had Kyuhyun’s eyes trained on him. The angle Jonghyun was at, bent over at the elbows, tips on his knees and his chin resting on his fists, was perfect and screaming to be drawn. The sunlight was lighting up Jonghyun’s blonde hair perfectly. Fire. That was the first thing that came to Kyuhyun’s mind as he began to sketch the boy’s outline. Jonghyun’s crooked grin lit up his face and his chocolate eyes in such a way that it stole the breath from Kyuhyun’s lungs; he was certain Jonghyun could stop a war with that smile, so bright and radiant and surprisingly innocent despite his reputation.

God damn this kid...

Determined to catch this moment perfectly, Kyuhyun’s eyes snapped back down to his paper and nimble fingers went to work, sketching every little detail they could. He had known Jonghyun long enough by now that capturing every detail was easy. He had long ago observed the slight scar above Jonghyun’s left eyebrow from a tree-climbing incident as a boy and drew that, as well as other minor flaws (which really weren’t flaws at all, in Kyuhyun’s opinion) in unconsciously.

His eyes kept flicking up from the page to Jonghyun’s face. He’d moved quite a bit and that irritated Kyuhyun because that perfect angle he’d caught before was gone. He still looked breath-taking, but before he’d looked...well...perfect.

Despite this, being experienced in the act of drawing quickly around Jonghyun for he was constantly on the move, Kyuhyun had captured enough to be able to finish the rest without having to rely on Jonghyun himself to do so.

It took an estimate of a half an hour for Kyuhyun to feel satisfied with it. It wasn’t perfect in his eyes, because nothing could have compared with his appearance in that moment, but it was alright.

With a sigh, Kyuhyun dropped his pencil to the paper with Jonghyun’s gray-scale portrait and took the time to stretch his legs, rotate his cramping wrist, and study Jonghyun some more.

It’d been about three months since Kyuhyun had begun to realize that he had true feelings for the younger boy. It was safe to say, at least, that Kim Jonghyun was the man that had turned him from questioning to straight-on gay and was also the reaper of his heart.

It was also safe to say that Kyuhyun hated him in the same breath that he said he loved him. Why? Well, the reasons were obvious to him. The love Kyuhyun felt for the other was definitely one-sided; the only time they had ever talked was when Jonghyun had asked him cruelly if he knew how to speak. He was a downright , which was, again, obvious. He went through relationships like candy, being with them just long enough for , and made it his personal goal to terrorize the younger students. Add all this up with the competition of the other students and Kyuhyun stood no chance. But he loved him…and he was willing to try. Because he knew, just knew, that there was a side to Kim Jonghyun that he wasn’t ready to show.

Kyuhyun, his messenger bag slung over his shoulder and his eyes downcast, walked slowly down the hallways. He would have gone faster, but he was too busy looking through his sketchbook to do so without risk of serious injury due to a collision – either locker door or student.

So no one could get a glimpse of his drawings, Kyuhyun was just barely lifting the paper between his thumbs to gaze at them. Most were of Jonghyun (which, even Kyuhyun had to admit, was a little creepy), but the remainder of the pages were filled with sketchings of wolves and woods drawn as far back as the eye could see. Kyuhyun had always dreamed of being free, of being – wait. Kyuhyun’s lips suddenly turned down in a frown, eyebrows narrowing as he flipped back a page to something he’d just briefly caught as he leafed through the book. Kyuhyun folded the current page back all the way, leaving the one that caught his eye in all its glory. It was a picture of Jonghyun with his eyes closed, head thrown back towards the sky and lips slightly parted, with a brief overlay of the outline of a howling wolf, its position mirroring Jonghyun’s exactly. That hadn’t been what’d caught Kyuhyun’s attention though – it was the words sprawled across the bottom of the page in a handwriting that wasn’t his own. It was Mir’s; Kyuhyun’s best friend. Mir, naturally, was the first person to find out about Kyuhyun’s feelings for Jonghyun.

“Carpe diem,” Kyuhyun breathed, voice choked as his delicate fingers reached up to trace the neatly written words over and over again – as if to prove they were really there. Kyuhyun’s brain instantly translated the Latin words into ‘Seize the day.’  It was a sign. A sign from Mir, his best friend along with the first and only person to know of Kyuhyun’s feelings for Jonghyun, that he had to make a move. “Carpe diem….” Kyuhyun looked up from the sketchbook, letting the pages fall and the book close on those two words.

He knew exactly what he was going to do. Mir was right, idiot or not, and he wouldn’t ever get Jonghyun if he didn’t do something.

After a long day of classes, Jonghyun was more than ready to go home. Lips pursed, Jonghyun scrolled in the combination to his locker combo and ripped the lock off after hearing the satisfactory click that said he’d gotten the combo typed in correctly.

“So, Jong, we’re all heading out to Yunho’s for the party tonight once Minho grabs his dad’s truck...” Heechul said, his tone slightly bored as he looked down at his fingernails with a frown. He was leaning his shoulder up against the locker next to Jonghyun’s with his boyfriend Hankyung, Eunhyuk, and Kris by his side. “You’re coming with us right?”

Four pairs of eyes were trained on Jonghyun as he grunted in response and tugged his locker open. “Yeah, whatever,” he grumbled. “I don’t know why we have to take Choi’s ing -hole of a truck though….”

Jonghyun shoved his textbooks inside his locker and was just about to take out his science book for homework, when he noticed a tablet of some sort scrunched up near the back. Jonghyun paused and reached for it, removing it from the locker and bringing it out to examine it better. His eyebrows narrowed in confusion. 

“What is that?” Hankyung asked in his thick Chinese accent, leaning over Jonghyun’s shoulder to look at it. Jonghyun shrugged his shoulders. “A sketchbook?"

“Well, open it. See what the hell it is,” came Kris’ voice, leaning over the other shoulder. Jonghyun obliged and flipped through the pages, his frown only deepening. There were pictures of wolves everywhere. Whoever had drawn this, he had to admit, was really good.

“Whoa, wait a minute! Was that a picture of you? Go back, go back.”

Confused, Jonghyun did as was told again and was astonished to find that Heechul was right. That was a picture of him. Jonghyun’s eyes widened and his lips parted in surprise. The quality of the picture was amazing but he didn’t care about that right now. Someone was drawing him. Someone was drawing him.

“Look, there’s more. This whole ing book is filled with them!” Kris had snagged the book from Jonghyun’s hands and was now roughly thumbing through all of them.

Heechul scoffed, eyes flicking towards Jonghyun with a look that spoke wonders. “What a freak. Looks like you’ve got yourself a stalker, Jong.”

Jonghyun glared at all of them and ripped the book from their hands to look at it again. “I agree, what a loser,” he said, pretending like he didn’t care. It was amazing - it was creepy as hell that he was being drawn without consent, but…it was also flattering in a way.

“You’re not going to keep that are you?” Eunhyuk asked, giving Jonghyun an incredulous look which was returned with a snort. “Are you kidding me? I don’t want some kid’s trash.” With that, he threw it in the trashcan nearest to them. His friends laughed but Jonghyun didn’t pay them a whole lot attention. “I’ll meet you guys out front,” he told them, not aware of the steely note that had entered his tone, dismissing them while he pretended to dive back into his locker to fetch something else.

The second they were gone, Jonghyun threw his bag over his shoulder, replaced the lock on the locker, and immediately went to the trashcan. He took the lid off of it and was immediately attacked by a variety of different smells, the combo nearly making him gag. Grimacing, Jonghyun reached his hand in and removed the sketch pad from it, pleased to see it wasn’t in too bad of shape. He brushed off some coffee grinds and a sticky candy wrapper from the front and let the book fall open in his hands. The first page he came to happened to be the one containing its newest entry and he smiled, the tips of his fingers running against the page much as Kyuhyun’s own had done earlier. “Wow…” Jonghyun breathed, tearing his gaze away from it to flip to the front. He was looking for a name – and he found one.

Property of Cho Kyuhyun.

Kyuhyun had just left the school gates behind him, messenger bag slung over his shoulder, when Jonghyun found him.

That was a surprise in itself, but then he did something else unexpected. He gave him his sketchbook. It wasn't ripped to shreds. He wasn't yelled at or abused for being creepy. “Thank you,” was all the younger boy had said, giving him a brief and unexpected smile, before he was gone as quick as he’d come, though, he paused briefly, turning around and taking in Kyuhyun’s shocked form as he watched Jonghyun start to leave.

“Catch you later, Cho?” Jonghyun asked, raising an eyebrow. It seemed wrong, to leave without really speaking to him.

Kyuhyun, momentarily shell-shocked, nodded his head with a swallow. “S-Sure…” he mumbled eventually, causing Jonghyun to grin a little. He nodded in return and waved briefly to Kyuhyun, shrugging his shoulders up to adjust his leather jacket as he sauntered away from the still-surprised junior.  Really…what the heck was that about? Why was Kim Jonghyun being kind?

Perhaps there really was a side to Jonghyun that he didn’t want to be seen. “…And that just makes me love you more,” Kyuhyun whispered to the air around him, eyes staring blankly ahead, where he’d watch Jonghyun’s cocky form disappear. He slumped against his bike and remained standing, trying his hardest to wrap his head around what just happened.