Baekhyun only saw gray. He delved in light and practically fed on it because it was what gave him meaning, depth. The light was the reason he could dissect his surroundings and draw the differences within them. And without light, he wouldn’t have seen darkness.

Baekhyun loved the dark, loved the contrast between black and white…he had to. There was no ‘otherwise’, for such an option was only probable for the ones who were lucky enough to see. Baekhyun wasn’t one of those people.

Baekhyun found it fun to examine the depths of gray spectrum that was his abode, studying brightness and dullness; the system of hue and saturation enigma to his eyes that only filtered grays. It was his only past time.

Colors were a mystery to Baekhyun, so when he read poems describing the ‘red’ of the roses or the ‘blue’ of the violets, the meaning was lost on him. Baekhyun could understand for a fact that the sun was bright, because when he looked to its direction, he had to squint his eyes; he saw nothing in the intense brightness.

Baekhyun’s life was like staring at the sun for too long, or lingering in the midnight bedroom with the lights off. It was constant, unchanging; monochrome. It was also like having your feet on two separate places. It was like being lost.

Blue, yellow and green…Baekhyun didn’t know which was which, but he traced the intricate design of the wall as though the colors would come alive and introduce themselves to him at the touch of his fingers.  It was only in that cramped room that Baekhyun exposed himself to so many colors, even when the random horizontal lines and the spirals didn’t make sense to him most of the time. It was in that room where he let himself just…be. He could be anyone in that room, he could be powerful and create places and scenes that were unknown to his eyes. He could pretend that he was great at art. In that room, no one could for coloring his tree trunk blue.

His ears pricked up at the sound of the doorbell that already became foreign. He paused for a moment, head whipping to the direction of the sound. No one had visited him ever since he moved in, which was six years ago. And it wasn’t like his parents or his friends would do that for him because they were nonexistent.

His parents had long been gone, and sometimes Baekhyun wished that he recalled their memories more frequently, but there was almost nothing to remember. His parents were strangers to him. They were a couple who only knew how to quarrel. Baekhyun was a puzzle to them as much as he was to the next person. They eventually pushed up daisies in a car accident, and Baekhyun was still wondering if it was unfortunate luck that he didn’t pass with them.

Baekhyun had always known that he was meant to live alone. No one could understand him, no one would see him as ‘normal’ because he really wasn’t. On second thought, someone did, but it never meant that he would stick around. The outcasts turned heroes only ever breathed in movies and fictional books. In Baekhyun’s gray world, that was impossible.

The doorbell rang again, and Baekhyun left the room and headed to open his door.

It was like the sting on one's tongue after taking a sip of a too-hot coffee, like the break of cold sweat after waking up from a nightmare in the middle of the night; it was like the faint sun rising to melt the winter snow: anticipated yet sudden and unexpected all the same; vivid.

Baekhyun knew in his heart that he had been hoping for this day since forever, but it had always seemed like a pipe dream.

“Baek,” the way his name was enunciated by the man standing outside his door was familiar. Everything about the man was familiar, actually. Baekhyun would never forget; how could he? The man was still a head taller than Baekhyun, his voice was still the low tone that Baekhyun so loved; he still wore that permanent smile on his lips—his red lips, Baekhyun corrected himself. The man’s eyes were still measly huge as Baekhyun remembered, but they had never been that brown.

It was surprising that the man appeared at his door out of nowhere, but what was more surprising was the fact that Baekhyun recognized that the man’s hair was brown, that his cheeks were tinted pink, that his lips were a vibrant red and that his eyes were chocolate brown.

Baekhyun couldn’t remember seeing colors, and he couldn’t remember how to find his voice either.

“Baek,” the man repeated in his low tone, brown eyes strained on Baekhyun.

Baekhyun couldn’t explain how he felt, but his heartbeat was abnormally fast, his feet seemed to be frozen in place, and his eyes couldn’t leave the tall man’s face. Suddenly, there was a tidal wave of feelings that Baekhyun thought he had forgotten.

Baekhyun opened his mouth to speak but no sound came out until a second later, “Ch—Yeol.”

“Have you been living well?” Chanyeol’s question sounded warm, as though they were old friends, which they