Minho appreciates pretty things. Beautiful things. He records them and stashes them in his room with clicks of his camera- so overused that he has to press the button a particular number of times just to be sure that he’s got the shot taken. He’s got images of cherry-blossom trees and the moon and well-cooked pancakes and just, things that would make one pause, stare, and then try to move on with life.

He is never without his camera, even when he’s at school and lugging along the halls with his books in his bag and his friends scrambling alongside him. Always tucked away in his bag or in his pockets, would be a camera or a digicam; either one would be fine, really, as long as he has one with him. Just in case he comes across something too good to not have posted up in his room.

¼ of his room’s four walls is collaged with pictures pasted upon pictures. The first one that he had stuck on there was the unfocused, blurred photo of his mother and his sister. When his father had complimented his ‘good eye for photography’, his snapshotting had been unstoppable. The Wall has been his self-proclaimed masterpiece since then, and only his best shots are deemed worthy to be posted.

But despite the abundance of the images in his collection, at the tender age of 7, he had grown to be very picky with the things he considered to be beautiful enough for his camera and to be fixed on The Wall. By the time he had reached 19 and university, he was quite certain that he had seen it all.

He’s seen meter showers and Paris and a lot of other places and things too difficult to pronounce. They were all works of art, if he had anything to say about the grandiose sights and sceneries.

But as he stands a distance away (staring and maybe a tad breathless) from a sleeping figure under a random old tree on campus, he is struck to think that this- him- he was something else altogether.

It’s all so unrealistic, the way that his brown hair is flitting with the almost non-existent blows of wind every so often, the way that he’s slumbering so peacefully as if he isn’t sleeping in the middle of campus on a 30-minute lunch break with students passing by, chattering and noisy.

His hand was inches from his pocket where the camera that he had snatched from his sister was stowed away. It’s for moments like these, ones where he is pushed into a sudden state of breathlessness that he keeps his cameras with him. The thought that he is perhaps a tad more out of breath this time around lingers at the back of his mind, but he chooses not to dwell on that too much.

He’s whisked away by his friends before he has a chance to lift the camera from his pocket’s confines. We’re late for class, they say with mouthfuls of buns and their convenience-store-bought lunches, and in that moment he had never wanted to hit anyone as much as he did then.

---

It’s at his favourite coffee shop that he sees him again, donning a beanie and a large scarf and honestly, he’s dressed like one of those pretentious fashion-douches Minho’s come to hate since going into university; but right now, the beanie and the almost-hipster-like ensemble are unbearably appealing under the brown hair and the morning light streaming through the shop’s windowed walls.

Onew, his favourite server (who just so happened to spill yet another cup of coffee on him the other day), comes up behind him. “Minho, are you sure you don’t want to order anything? You’ve been under there for quite a while now and some customers are starting to stare-”

“SSH!” Minho hisses, before yanking him down beside him, under the table. Onew’s head misses the table by a few centimetres, but he’s too busy trying to adjust the focus on his camera to ask if the other was alright. “I can’t have him seeing me-”

“Who?” Onew sticks his head up, peers at where Minho had been staring for ‘quite a while now’.

Minho none-too-gently pushes him back down, hand to the top of his head. “DON’T DO THAT! HE MIGHT SEE YOU!” He hisses loudly, and so he kind of thinks that the hiding is probably useless at this point. But after a few minutes of waiting for anyone to come over and tell them to shut the hell up- especially not any brown-haired scarf wearing dudes- he sighs, relieved for now.

Onew stares at him with furrowed brows, and then sticks his head back up again. Before Minho is able to push him back down, the other’s eyes were already fixed ahead, smiling at the beanie and the scarf and the brown hair.

When he goes back down to their ridiculously arranged hiding place, he smiles at Minho, knowing and approving, and it creeps him out to be honest.

“He’s quite pretty, isn’t he?”

Nah. More like beautiful, he wants to say, but doesn’t. He turns red, against his will, as he gives a quick nod that he half-hopes Onew doesn’t see and turns back to fiddling with his camera.

He finally takes the first shot, and it’s perfect.

But he’s feeling greedy, wanting to make up for when his idiot friends had dragged him away for what might have been a perfect snapshot of his muse (YES, his MUSE) sleeping under the shade of a tree. So he clicks and clicks and clicks, stealing shots of a coffee cup to plump lips and misty eyes staring out the window and it’s like something out of a movie.

Onew tries to help him out in his clicking frenzy, telling him to take a shot at this angle, or maybe this angle looks better, and they’re beginning to get pretty noisy because although Mr. Beanie hasn’t spotted them yet, Key (his never-been-favourite server) is already pulling at their ears and telling them to stop being idiots or else he’s kicking both of them out.

But it’d be fine because Minho’s already got the perfection in his camera, finally.

---

He’s become hyperaware of sleeping figures under trees on campus since then, and suddenly it’s not enough. He needs to see more of him. That beauty isn’t something to be kept from Minho’s eyes.

He actually decides on aggressively looking for Mr. F­ucking-Beautiful (Onew had helped him come up with the name) halfway through one dreary afternoon in school. But then he doesn’t have to, because as he was dragging his feet home through the empty hallways of the main building’s third floor, there he was.

Sweaty and dancing and fierce and what the are those hips even legal-

Mr. ing y Beast (he came up with this one just now) is suddenly looking in his direction and Minho all but leaps from the doorway’s view. His hand flies to his chest as he leans on the lockers he had jumped back against, winded and feeling particularly blessed at this chance turn of events.

He’s only confident enough to take one shot though the dance room’s door’s window before he gets weak at the knees from the ing hips and the exposed arms. What the hell kind of dance allowed for such- such vulgarity?!

But eh, who was he kidding. His pants were feeling particularly tight and for the next days, he ends up coming back to that building, to that floor, to that (thankfully) empty hallway, to that room with the blasting music and the hips. Oh, the hips.

---

His sister has always been a nosy one.

“Minmin, who’s the pretty girl?”

She’s pointing to the artistically blurred photo on top of all the others on The Wall, and Minho gulps, pretty sure he knows what she’s talking about.

“N-nothing.” He shifts on his bed, skilfully tucking the picture in his hand under his pillow. “No one.”

“No one? She’s all over here! You have like… what,” She steps back from The Wall, hands on her hips, eyes roaming. “ pictures of her?”

“No I do not! Shut up! I don’t like him, okay?!” and then he stands and storms out of his own room.

At dinner time, his sister isn’t merciful and teases him with knowing looks and suggestive raises of her eyebrows as she brings up the topic of Minho’s pretty new additions to his Wall to their parents. Minho groans in despair when his parents offhandedly suggest that Minho show the pictures to them sometime.

‘You should, you should! They’re the prettiest ones yet!’ his sister had said. ‘I think Minmin really likes him.’

His parents don’t notice the discrepancy of ‘they’ and ‘him’, thank goodness. And he doesn’t miss his sister’s foot under the table, so that was something to be happy about.

---

His friends aren’t around to whisk him away to any unknown places for today, since school’s been out since half an hour ago and he should be home, too.

But Mr. ing y Beast is watering the plants in school for some volunteer work or something, so that’s reason enough to stay behind, lag on some school work and take some well-needed photos.

He’s hidden himself behind a tree this time, not having found any better sufficient hiding places. He hears a melodic humming from the figure watering the plants, and though he has no clue what song was trying to be sung, he still finds himself taken.

Camera poised to take a shot of FSB’s back, (Mr. ing y Beast is too long a name, now that he thinks about it) he makes the mistake of clicking too loudly. Brown hair and brown eyes swivel in his direction and he doesn’t know how he does it, but he succeeds in jumping into a bush somewhere beside him without damaging his most expensive camera yet.

He sighs in relief when Mr. Dancer-turned-Gardener turns back to the plants, resuming his humming, this time a tad louder. After a while of catching his breath, he checks his camera amidst the leaves and the twigs poking him all over, satisfied at the absence of any scratches.

Pleased with himself, he brings his camera up, closing one eye and looking through the viewfinder, intent on getting another shot in before merrily making his way home.

He is met by wide, blinking brown eyes staring right at him and dammit, he might as well throw himself off a cliff right now because the unmanly yelp that he lets out is anything but appealing. He’s standing right in front of him, hose in hand, looking, blinking, staring.

Smiling.

“Hello.”

click

That smile doesn’t get a place on The Wall. It gets a place on Minho’s bedside table, in its own frame along with that one other special, framed picture, where Taemin (aka Mr. ing y Beast Who Was In All Actuality Just Really Dorky and Adorable) had his arms wrapped ‘round his neck from behind and was pouting up at the camera for reasons long forgotten. It was on their third anniversary, if Minho remembered correctly, that he took that shot.

I enjoyed writing this one / yay for awkward first meetings