"No, oh my god, Chanyeol take your dirty hands away from my panels.” The guy named Kyungsoo slaps a taller boy’s arms away from the papers on the biggest desk in the apartment 3B.

Apartment 3B just so happens to belong to the shorter of the two guys; whose name, Do Kyungsoo, is also plastered in neat handwriting on the doorbell. The big desk also belongs to the same Do Kyungsoo. He bought it especially so that it would fit that comfortable corner of his office with the window facing a busy street in Sinwon-dong. Because Do Kyungsoo likes watching the cars drive by, just as much as he hates smudged ink on his panels.

“My hands are not-” The taller, lanky guy huffs and rubs his hand.

“Of course they are, Chanyeol. Your hands are always dirty. And when they’re not dirty, they’re just flailing around my manga and that is even worse.”

Do Kyungsoo has three regular assistants and a second team of helpers, on stand-by, for those bad times when he’s about to miss his editor’s deadline and he really needs extra hands. Unfortunately, the tall, lanky assistant called Chanyeol, is one of the regulars. Kyungsoo clearly told him to just stick to digital touch-ups, but soon it became obvious that Chanyeol’s fascination for manga was stronger than his obedience to the artist in charge.

“I was only looking-”

Kyungsoo cuts him off with a scoff. “Like I’d believe that! I know you were trying to nitpick on my drawing. I just know it!”

“Well, your characters are ugly.” Chanyeol, shakes his head defiantly, brown hair messing up in the process.

“I’ve told you a million times, this is an adventure comic. The people who read it, don’t care to see pretty faces. As long as I make the guy beat everyone up, no one will mind about the shape of his face.” Kyungsoo enjoys watching cars racing by his window and then draw car-chases in his manga. He enjoys sketching machine guns firing from inside Rolls Royces and bullets flying everywhere.

Spending three hours to make a single frame of the protagonist’s face, up so close that you can count his eyelashes… let’s say he doesn’t enjoy that very much.

“That might be so, but Chanyeol has a point. It wouldn’t hurt to make those characters a bit more aesthetically pleasing. We could attract some female audience that way.” Kyungsoo glares at a second boy, who is hunched over another desk and is chewing an ink pen thoughtfully. He is Kyungsoo’s second assistant, who helps with the inking and is in charge of hatching.

“Who would want female fans? I’m glad I don’t have a lot of those. Otherwise, the company would ask me to create a love story and all that hassle, to keep them satisfied.” The editors in Park Publications are good people, yet, Kyungsoo is sure, not good enough to let him ignore a big group of readers just to satisfy his own whims. For some reason, when a manga artist has some very specific convictions about his manga, the editors call him temperamental and childish and completely ignore him.

“Black Falcon is not going to become that kind of boring manga.” Kyungsoo finishes, stubbornly, pushing Chanyeol towards the general direction of the computers and looking away from his assistants.

“Being nice to the eyes is not boring. You’re an artist for crying out loud.” The second assistant whines, as Kyungsoo stares out of his window with a frown. 

“And I know you can draw handsome faces. Don’t lie to me, Do Kyungsoo. I’ve seen your sketches of that hot guy from Econ I.”

Kyungsoo feels the hair at the back of his head rise, while he snaps back, “Yah Byun Baekhyun!”

Apart from being a regular assistant in the production of Black Falcon, Byun Baekhyun is also Kyungsoo’s college mate who majors in Fine Arts and has a bad habit of mixing work with fun. For Baekhyun fun happens to be, making Kyungsoo feel uncomfortable and/or homicidal, a minimum of ten times a day.

“Why are you blushing? It’s true. You like pretty boys and you’re good at making them look hot on paper. What’s there to blush about?” 

Buyn Baekhyun is also shameless.

Completely and utterly disgraceful.

So Kyungsoo just widens his eyes and gapes shocked and tries to throw all his condescending disbelief in that single expression.

“This conversation is not happening.” He finally declares, after a minute of intense staring down at his colleagues. “Go back to your work.”

It’s not like Kyungsoo is ashamed of being gay. He simply doesn’t want other people to think that all he ever can be is a guy who dates other guys. There’s more to him than that. He likes action-packed movies and fast cars and spaghetti with kimchi. His life is more than just a series of BL scenes.

Yet the moment he mentions being into guys, every other part of his character is forgotten. People see him as just that gay guy, you know I could tell by the way he moves his hips, maybe he’s hitting on me.

Which is stupid, because romance is not even a big part of Kyungsoo’s life. He hasn’t had a boyfriend since highschool and he stopped going to gay bars ever since some creepy old man locked him in the toilets and tried to take his shirt off. And that was years ago.

Point is, Kyungsoo is just a guy. He’s a manga artist and a film noir enthusiast and a cooking amateur and a dog lover and a ton of other things, except for being gay.

The same goes for Black Falcon. This manga is his masterpiece, a story he’s been developing ever since he was a kid. He’s poured his heart into it; all his awesome ideas about freedom and bravery and true wit. He’s not going to turn it into another mushy, boy-meet-girl (or even boy-meet-boy) lovestory. He’s just not.

End of story.

“Someone’s moody today.” Baekhyun mutters, but turns to his panels anyway and the argument deflates slowly.

For the rest of the day, Kyungsoo works on sketching the new chapter and checking the shadowing on the previous chapter before his editor comes to pick it up.

At seven in the evening, Baekhyun stands up, picks his backpack and bids them goodbye with an airy, “I still think you should consider making your characters prettier. Think about it.”  He laughs. “Sleep on it, you know.”

Kyungsoo stabs his favorite pencil at a panel angrily and doesn’t say a single word, until Chanyeol gets up to leave, as well, half an hour later.

“Kyungsoo-yah,” Chanyeol starts while picking up his red . “I understand why you’re making your manga like that. I do. But, I-I think it’s not fair.”

“Not fair for whom?” Kyungsoo asks pointedly. “I’m the artist here. I don’t have to answer to anyone about how I work.”

“Yes. Yes you do.” The tall guy insists with an intense expression on his face. “You have to answer to Black Falcon.”

“A lot of fans say your work is sloppy and unrefined. You try so hard to focus on action, that your characters seem empty. Like they have no personality; no feelings, you know.” Chanyeol speaks more quietly, in embarrassment. “Sometimes… Sometimes it looks like you have no feelings either.”

Kyungsoo draws in a breath and takes a moment to think about it.

Maybe they’re right. Perhaps he’s avoiding to portray his manga’s characters well, just like he’s hiding his own thoughts behind busy schedules and grumpy tantrums.

“I’m not blaming you. Or anything.” Chanyeol says and it’s the most he’s talked to him in weeks. “I’m only saying I think your life and your manga would get better. I-If you were more honest.”

“Just sleep on it, okay?” He adds with a tiny smirk, before running out of the room, bag flying behind him.

Kyungsoo sighs and goes to close the front door, which both his assistants left hanging open. Then he heads to the kitchen for some cup ramyun.

The kitchen in apartment 3B is not a small, office kitchen. It’s a fully equipped, house kitchen, with a fridge, a rice cooker, an oven and cupboards with actual silverware and plates. This is so, because Kyungsoo actually lives in his office. Out of the four rooms of the apartment, only one is furnished with desks and spinning chairs and covered in papers. The rest (a bedroom, a bathroom and the fully-functioning kitchen) are the artist’s personal space, which gets covered in papers only when Kyungsoo feels like drawing in his free time.

It’s not that Kyungsoo feels like drawing tonight. Even so, he’s frustrated and insecure and he contemplates calling the tall boy and giving him a piece of his mind. Say, my manga was in the top 10 most popular action comics of October I don’t need to change anything, or something in those lines.

But he doesn’t, because that would be defensive and petty and would sound a little bit like admitting everything.

Kyungsoo does not admit being wrong about his own damn manga.

He makes a list, instead.

Lists are not things Kyungsoo makes, as a rule. Usually, he plans the story and the characters in his head and the parts he hasn’t sorted out beforehand, he just let’s his inspiration take care of. That’s how Black Falcon came to life and that’s part of its charm.

Still, Kyungsoo needs a list for insurance purposes. To ensure that Kai, the enigmatic and fierce protagonist of his manga, is not empty, but actually a well-rounded and complete character with real feelings. To ensure that nothing is missing.

The list goes something like that;

Black Falcon

real name: Kim Kai

age: 21, born January 14

family: unknown, raised in orphanage

occupation: works in a detective office, in charge of following criminals

good qualities: fast, agile, excellent in camouflage

bad qualities: hot-blooded, impatient, unsociable

special talents: trained in judo, has gun license

future goals: find evidence and bring down the Scorpion Syndicate.

Kyungsoo pauses, looks at the list and muses. It covers pretty much every aspect of Black Falcon related to the plot. Sure, but could there be more?

Does his protagonist need more?  

He struggles with the questions for a while, whispering to himself petulantly that, Kai is good the way he is, he doesn’t need more personality than he already has,  until he gives in to the temptation and adds,

future future goals: quit his job, start dancing lessons, buy a toy poodle and call it ‘Monggu’

favorite colors: black and blue

favorite movie: Pirates of the Caribbean

motto: Better bend than break

hobbies: music, superhero movies, eating fried chicken

ual orientation:

Kyungsoo stumbles again. Since the beginning he’s been planning to make his protagonist straight. Black Falcon (and also the guy named Kai who exists under that alias) is rigid and masculine, dark and rough. Kyungsoo cannot imagine him crying over another guy, or blushing and confessing his heart. That’s how it is and yet-

And yet.

Kyungsoo leaves the space empty and decides to fill it when he’s certain.

He scans the list and bites down on a satisfied smile. No one can say his hero is not complete now.

Only… the hard part starts after that.

He needs to take this list and turn it into pencil , angle outlines and screentones. Put the boy from his head to the panels of his manga.

He could do it, two hours ago; draw Kai with such ease. The frames with the protagonist standing there, tall figure illuminated only by the street lights, were the easiest to make. He pulled off the shoulders with steady , broad and clear and then just let the long lines of his legs run down effortlessly, like drops of ink down the paper. When it came to the face, Kyungsoo always worked quickly; not like it mattered, but as a necessary evil.

Kai’s face in the manga is not ugly, definitely not, regardless of what Chanyeol might say. He has piercing eyes, a strong jawline and a straight nose. It’s a charming face, often dressed up in cunning expressions and intense glares.

However, there is no place on it that speaks about Kai’s love for small dogs called Monggu, or about his fascination with dancing and fried chicken.

Kyungsoo takes a blank paper and starts anew. He decides to begin with a close-up and sketches the outlines of Kai’s head. Unconsciously, he almost draws the usual pointed corners at the ends of his jaw and the chin. But something stops him. His fingers cannot bear to put any more pressure on the lines.

Cannot bear to give this face such raw and unforgiving cuts. So Kyungsoo relaxes his hand and makes the outline of the face rounder, almost like Kai’s got puffy, boyish cheeks. He fixes the eyes, narrowed in concentration, with their dark pupils gleaming mischievously. Then the nose and lips.

The lips are troublesome -have always been troublesome- for Kyungsoo, because a guy’s lips can either be attractive, or plain. And he doesn’t want to have to make that choice for his protagonist. So he usually brushes past them with faded tones, as if he’d rather forget about them altogether. Forget, maybe, that Kai is the first hero he ever made and also the most precious one.

For a second he is tempted to ignore the lips again. They’re just a little detail anyway, he’s already improved his sketching so much. But then Chanyeol’s unnecessary words flash before his eyes, you’re not being fair to Black Falcon. Kyungsoo tries to pretend he doesn’t hear them and fails.

Of course the lips are a total disaster. The moment he finishes them, he wants to erase everything and go back to drawing without lists and detailed close-ups. He’s got a rubber in his left hand and it’s looming over those lips dangerously, coming closer and closer-

Kyungsoo sighs and messes his hair. He can’t wipe them out now, it’s too late. Luscious and delicate, made of smooth, silky lines, those full lips are beautiful. They’re lips you want to kiss and taste, not lips you erase and forget about.

Honestly, Kyungsoo forgets a lot of things. He forgets Baekhyun’s birthday and he forgets to go pick up his clothes from the dry-cleaners and once he almost got all the way to the bus stop wearing slippers.

However, as an artist, he has acute memories of emotions. Even if he cannot recall a person’s name, or even their face, he remembers the way it felt when he met them for the first time. He remembers the way the touch of a lover burns on his skin, compared to the hands of a friend that feel just warm and comforting.

Kyungsoo cannot forget emotions, so he recognizes this twisting in his gut immediately.

This is longing.

He tells himself that it’s longing for lips like that. Longing for any random, hot stranger in the street, as long as he has a pair of those lips. And he really, honestly, wishes that there is such a stranger in the streets of Seoul, because otherwise he might just end up longing after a sketch on a panel.

Kyungsoo ends up longing after a drawing.

Winds up spending half the night on the kitchen table, with an empty cup of ramyun and his pens and pencils thrown around him, together with messy papers and erased sketches, like a small explosion of office supplies happening right before his eyes.

Kai’s sketch lies at the eye of the storm, for reference, and Kyungsoo drafts half a chapter just by looking at it.

It’s not a very action-packed chapter, to be honest. Black Falcon is following one of the lowest members of the Syndicate around Seocho-gu and there are a lot of pages with him taking pictures and hiding in shadowy alleyways.

Kyungsoo draws the target entering a nightclub with a large neon sign, spelling Cosmo in cursive, and a dozen badly dressed people (Kyungsoo has  no sense for fashion, so he just gives, men and women alike, glittery clothes and low cut necklines) looming around its entrance. Baekhyun would call them debauchee, like the refined, art’s git that he is and that’s okay, because Kyungsoo wants to make Cosmo look, cheap and infamous, a place people would go to buy drugs from or gamble.

No matter what, it doesn’t feel right to frame Kai in that decadent setting. So, Kyungsoo figures, Black Falcon can watch from a distance and paints black, worn-out converse shoes leading to a cheap hotel across the street.

The bubble over Kai’s messy hair will state, do you have a room facing the street, and the old hotelkeeper (Kyungsoo draws him glasses) will reply, third floor, first room to your left and hand Kai a single key.

The key is simple, not a card key, not even a double-sided key, but a plain one, just like the one Kyungsoo uses for his bedroom door. In fact, Kyungsoo grabs his own key and quickly copies the design on paper. Then, for the hotel room, behind that door, he just uses images from his own room.

A double bed with light-colored sheets and three pillows, since Kyungsoo cannot sleep without a second pillow trapped under his arm. Naturally, Kai won’t use all of them and can probably sleep with no pillows at all, if he has to. There’s not much more in Kyungsoo’s bedroom, except for a white wardrobe and he doesn’t hesitate to put that in the sketch too.

Drawing familiar places in his manga makes Kyungsoo all the more connected to Black Falcon. Some artists call it a cheap trick, but it’s only an unimportant hotel room, one that may only appear in this chapter and never again. It’s not like he copied his place and made it Kai’s apartment, or made Kai wear the same clothes he has on right now. Cause that would be… ew.

Ew, weird.

Kyungsoo rubs his eyes and considers wearing his late-night glasses. On normal days, he tries not to use them too much, cause the doctor said his eyes would only get used to it and he’d end up wearing them all the time.

He puts them on anyway.

It’s already one in the morning and he’s been working the whole day, so what’s the point in pretending things are not looking blurry?

Now he can’t have blurred lines in his sketches, because Baekhyun will probably jump right into the challenge and hatch entire nets of shadows on those lines.

Actually, Kyungsoo thinks, he doesn’t want anyone to play around with these frames. He’d rather finish the drawing and inking all on his own.

Still it’s late, so late, and his wrist is starting to hurt more than it should. Perhaps Kai’s feet would hurt and his eyes would get blurry too, after a whole day of chasing a criminal around the city. He’s never considered that, when he wrote Kai’s lines before, but right now, on an impulse he writes in one of Kai’s speech bubbles,

I’m tired.

Kai has to be worn out. In last month’s chapter he went to Busan and got involved in a gang fight and even though he was hurt (bruises and a cut on his cheek) he didn’t go to the hospital. It’s only natural, his character is stubborn like that after all. Still, Kyungsoo feels a bit cruel and guilty as he sketches Kai looking out of the hotel room window and puts a small cut on his face, no blood running down, but a wound nonetheless.

Then, he draws Kai’s converse shoes taking a step away from the window and towards the bed.

“He was tired. It would only make sense to lie down for a bit.” Kyungsoo says and his voice echoes in the empty kitchen.

He’s never pictured how Black Falcon would lie in bed exactly, but it seems too stiff to make him sit on it, so Kyungsoo just goes with the flow and drags Kai’s long legs up the mattress, hands behind his head while his face is turned to look at the ceiling.

The easiest angle for this would be from upwards down. Kyungsoo is stubborn, though, and prefers to make the frame realistic.

In the end he focuses on the way Kai’s body sinks in the soft bed and the way his jaw slacks a bit, like it should, when the face relaxes.

He draws Kai naturally. Like he would have if he was sitting on that bed, beside him. And the result is great.

It’s beautiful.

Which makes the feeling of longing that had been pushed at the back of Kyungsoo’s chest, spring forward.

He grimaces and stops sketching. “This can’t be healthy.” He mutters, frustrated, and drops his pen next to his open hand.

The clock ticks half past one and the reality of the mess he’s created in his kitchen, sinks into his vision. It’s almost a week’s work, done in a single night and it feels like a bullet train went through his head.

Taking off the glasses and grabbing the sketch of Kai on the hotel bed, he heads for his bedroom. He puts on a t-shirt and a pair of boxers and sneaks under the comforter, still holding the drawing in his hand.

There’s only a small light from outside the window lighting the sketch, when he stares at it again.

It’s still one of the best things he’s ever drawn.

And then he thinks, it’s the best thing I’ve ever made.

And thinks again, why didn’t I think of those lips before?

And again and again until he’s fast asleep, next to the drawing.

Kyungsoo wakes up in the morning, his back worryingly cold, his comforter nowhere to be seen and a handgun pointed at his face.

“Who are you? What are you doing in my hotel room?”

A boyish voice comes from a pair of full lips.

A/N: Okay... so this was sort of long. A lot of narration and not much action. Hm. Sorry about that, I guess. I just got comfortable talking about Kyungsoo, is all. 

Next chapter will probably be a lot more interesting and eventful. So watch out for that. 

Right, I still cannot believe there are actual subbies for this. T_T I'm very thankful.