Silence is so accurate. ~ Mark Rothko

Yifan was used to silence. The silence of his office, only the muted sound of a touch keyboard like the tiptoes of a small child. "Shh. We mustn't wake mother..." and a small boy nodded, his eyes bright stars as he placed a drawing of a happy family on a white nightstand. The silence of his commute, a sound-insulated drive, the sounds of traffic and horns muffled muffled shouts and tears behind closed doors and a torn-up picture in a wastebasket. The silence of his apartment, white walls and clean floors a small boy sitting alone in the hospital corridor, watching as doctors and nurses rushed by in the numb blankness, forgotten. He was used to silence and it kept things nice and safe and predictable.

He liked the silence. He didn't have to feel anything.
 

There was whispering going around the office. It was strange, a tension and undercurrent of emotion to disrupt the calm waves of his usual day.

"What's happening?" He finally turned to Jongdae, the interior designer one desk over. Jongdae pushed his black-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose and smiled. Yifan just looked at him expectantly.

"Ask Baekhyun," the brown-haired man finally sighed, obviously disappointed at Yifan's lack of curiosity. Yifan just wanted his silence back.

Baekhyun worked with AutoCAD like everyone else but he liked to dabble in throwback miniatures "because I get stressed staring at a screen too long," he always said, so that was why he supposedly got his own small office. No one knew that Yifan had pulled strings to get it for him. He talks too much.

So there was a crowd in the small room as usual, too much noise and it was giving him a headache. Yifan turned to go it isn't worth it but the shorter dark-haired man spotted him in the doorway.

"Yifan! Speak of the devil!" Yifan sighed. Baekhyun had a way with words that stabbed harder than most.

"Yes, Baekhyun?"

Baekhyun either always chose to ignore Yifan's suffering expression or never noticed it in the first place. Yifan was of the opinion that it was the latter.

"I was walking by that new apartment building we just wrapped up, the one you designed, and someone had painted a huge mural on the side wall! So I had to take a picture." He tilted the screen of his computer to face Yifan.

At first he was mildly annoyed more vandalism! but when he actually saw the photograph, the feeling that flooded him was jealousy.

The mural was a vast dream, bright colours swirled over the grey cement of the apartment walls. It was a vision of the apartment building, not as it was but rather as it could have been.

It broke his heart.

"Isn't it gorgeous?" Baekhyun asked, turning back to face Yifan. "Have you ever seen anything like it?" He stopped abruptly when he saw Yifan's face, surprise showing in his eyes.

Yifan was furious. "Who painted this?" he asked, not realizing that his voice was loud, hitting the walls and bouncing off the glass table Mommy! Mommy! Come see my painting! everyone stopped to stare.

"What's going on here?" It was Kyungsoo in the doorway. Kyungsoo, the head of the design department who kept everything in line. He was a quiet, solemn person and Yifan liked that.

"I was showing Yifan the mural?" Baekhyun's voice trailed off hesitantly. Kyungsoo was the only person he was afraid of. Another point in his favour.

Kyungsoo turned to look at Yifan and gave him a strange look. "Don't you live in that apartment building?"

The room went quiet as Yifan mumbled in agreement and escaped into the hallway.
 

The drive back home wasn't the numb muffled commute he was used to. Somehow everything was loud and bright and that offending picture kept intruding into his thoughts. I hate everything about that picture, it's a complete insult to architecture! But the declaration rang false in his ears, disturbing the white noise he had settled into.

He parked his car in the underground parking lot as usual but instead of taking the elevator up to his penthouse, he stopped at the ground floor. It was strange seeing it in real life, he'd only ever seen the mock-ups on AutoCAD. Everything was white and cement and he felt himself slipping back into his comfortable haze.

And then the doors opened and he stood in the sunlight. My eyes hurt.

After being momentarily blinded, the colours were oddly bright, or maybe it was just the fact that he was used to seeing the world through tinted glass ... when he saw it at all.

He rounded the corner hesitantly, everything was so big outside his safe little computer display, and collided with something.

Someone he corrected himself after he managed to collect his thoughts again, elbows scraped and lying on the ground. The other person laughed before helping him up.

"Hi, I'm Chanyeol!" The cheerful face wrinkled smiling eyes at him as the man dusted off Yifan's blazer before handing it back.

"I'm Yifan," he replied, polite manners running on autopilot before his body could catch up to the fact that he was talking to a stranger. Who happens to be my height, he noticed in passing. It was a little jarring speaking to someone who could look him directly in the eyes, he felt ...I feel. That's the problem.

They stood there, Yifan lost in his thoughts which seemed to be hiding in Chanyeol's collarbones.

He was surprised when Chanyeol laughed and touched his shoulder. "Are you okay? You look a little dazed. Maybe you should get out of the sun."

Yifan allowed himself to be led to a neighbouring coffee shop since when does this apartment complex have a coffee shop? and spent a bemused afternoon watching Chanyeol smile.

He forgot all about the mural.
 

"But if your childhood dream was to be an artist, then why are you an architect?" Chanyeol sounded geniunely curious and Yifan felt cautiously flattered, even though he couldn't believe he had let that small piece of personal information slip out. I never tell people about myself. But he had, and it had been all too easy, the warm coffee breaking though the white numbness that usually aded his senses, Chanyeol's obtrusive laugh, the sun shining in the window.

"It...didn't work out," he said finally, white walls and white paper and fingers that don't dare smudge the surface because the red and looked at his hands that were more used to the artificial textures of computer keyboards and tablet styluses now. His fingers had all but forgotten the smudge of pastels and the soft wood grain of paintbrushes.

Chanyeol frowned over his cinnamon latte. "It's not too late you know," he said firmly, the encouragement in his voice bright and piercing. Yifan had to hide his eyes in the depths of his americano.

"But I can't find the colours anymore," he said into the liquid darkness.

Chanyeol only laughed. "Get out of your white apartment and muffled office and go find them again!"
 

He was at the office the next morning, the calm silence interrupted only by the numbing staccato of clicking keys and humming florescent lights, when Baekhyun swung by whistling, blue trails of sound following in his wake, and he remembered. I never did get to see the mural. Yesterday's Yifan would have brushed the thought away like eraser remnants are brushed off a once again pristinely white page, but today's Yifan had been lightly stained by Chanyeol's colours.

"Baekhyun?" he called out.

The entire floor froze, holding their breath, and even Baekhyun's airy blue tune turned navy as he stopped and slowly turned.

"Yes?" His tone went up a little higher than strictly necessary for a question, but Yifan only noticed peripherally.

"That mural," he said. Baekhyun paused, right foot hanging slightly above the ground.

"I assume it's still there, right?" Yifan didn't feel the need to explain how much he needed to see it, after his conversation with Chanyeol. He couldn't even articulate it to himself.

Baekhyun nodded and Yifan dismissed him with a wave, ignoring the collective sigh of relief in the office and Kyungsoo returning to his office from the doorway around which he'd been peering with large dark eyes.

Today is so ... strange.

There were too many colours.
 

He thought about the mural on the way home, how the colours would look in the sunlight like what Chanyeol had said and he almost felt.

Could I really do it?

He thought about picking up a paintbrush. He thought about the colours lovingly onto the page. He thought about the resulting masterpiece of personal satisfaction.

He parked in the underground parking lot as usual but he didn't even have to consciously remember to stop at the main level instead of going all the way up.

The sun was bright today and the shadows turned the white of the lobby into a fanciful mix of blues and greys.

He walked through the sliding doors as they whooshed shut behind him, the sound silver.
 

What hit him first was the joy; the complete and exultant abandon with which the colours had been flung and brushed and sprayed across the grey concrete canvas.

And then he stepped back and took in the entire view and saw who was painting it.

"You?" Chanyeol turned, small drops of red trailing out from his paintbrush to spot the floor. A small boy, white paper with a painted rose, white sheets with the same blossoms. The boy says.

That was when the despair hit. I will never be able to do this.

"Yifan?" Chanyeol smiled, stepping over.

"No." Yifan held out a hand, fingers spread out as if to ward him off. Chanyeol looked confused and Yifan hated that he could look him straight in the face without looking up. We're not the same.

"How could you tell me that it's as easy as finding the colours, as going outside and starting?" He wasn't shouting but the tension in his shoulders and the slight trembling in his fingers stretched the sound into red.

Chanyeol stood there, shock and surprise written plainly across his normally smiling features. Yifan's concience twinged slightly or was that his heart? but he let the red fill him.

"You must never have had anything worse happen to you than a stubbed toe or a broken crayon!" He didn't know why he was doing it, he was usually so quiet and calm and whispers and quiet and adults crying and his hands were still sticky there was too much colour. "Some of us have things that we just can't get over, no matter how hard we try!"

But he was finally getting to Chanyeol; he could tell by the crack in his smile and the sudden wetness in his eyes Yes! Share my pain because I don't want it anymore!

And then Chanyeol opened his mouth. "Don't think, just because you have pain, that your pain is that much greater than anyone else's." He dropped the brush on the cement in a splash of red before all the colour drained away.

Yifan was left alone on the sidewalk.

My world is white and grey and numb silence.
 

He enveloped himself in the dimness, going back to work like usual the next day and if Jongdae looked at him strangely or if Baekhyun was slightly quieter than usual for a week, Yifan pretended it was just the weather. The sun does seem dimmer than usual. He took the elevator straight up to the penthouse and didn't even look at the lingering wisps of red hanging around the M button on the menu panel.

He heard it first as a whisper. "The mural....the one on the apartment ... it's not finished? ... no it just ... stopped ..."

Baekhyun finally stopped by his desk, expression set as though walking into the lion's den when he knew the lions were starving. "The mural ... did you ... do anything about it?"

Yifan knew what he was talking about. He felt secretly guilty but he wasn't about to admit that to anybody, especially Baekhyun. "I didn't get around to seeing it. Why?" The lie stuck in his throat; a sickly mustard yellow.

But Baekhyun seemed to have been expecting this answer and turned away. "Never mind." His footsteps were grey.

Yifan stopped by the mural on the way home. It looked sad in the cloudy light, the unfinished edges trailing into the grey cement which greedily drank up the colours. He picked up the paintbrush, red flakes scattering in the cold wind. Why are all these things still here? He thought absentmindedly about complaining to the caretaker but he knew he wasn't actually going to do anything. Why disrupt the silence?

Except he needed to break the silence. To finish the mural. To find the colours again. A small boy who didn't dare interrupt the solemn dimness of the room.

He pried open the can of blue paint with his short fingernails and dipped in the brush, disguising the red with brightness of the sky. Maybe it can be this easy.

Yifan lifted the brush, hesitating before dabbing the blue lightly onto the wall. It didn't work. Every brushstroke was a smudge on the former perfection; soon the red came through and he threw the brush against the wall in frustration, watching the rusty blue splatters scar the dream. It will always come back to this.
 

Chanyeol's words before he left kept running through his head, streaks of sharp light through the white numbness, and before he knew it he was sitting in front of the computer, entering search queries. The first few links were a website and private galleries hosting exhibitions I just thought he was a street artist but... and then bookstores? Yifan was confused until he clicked on a link to see: Phoenix from the Ashes: A Memoir of a Childhood. His eyes skimmed over the Publisher's Weekly review: An agonizingly sad yet brilliantly triumphant story of a boy who lived through the death of his parents and both physical and ual abuse by various foster families as the system repeatedly let him down, yet was able to rise from this trauma and become a shining beacon of hope for us all, no matter what pains we may have endured in our lives, "because we can all rise from our ashes and face the day head on."

He bought the ebook because he didn't feel like waiting a small boy waiting outside a door he wasn't allowed to enter, trying to listen for he read all through the night, tears digging tracks down his face, eyes mirroring the screen.

"And I can tell you this. All of you. I am not defined by my past. I am not defined by my pain. I will take it and eat it and make it into a most beautiful expression of my happiness and my joy and my hope for the future. My pain is not greater than yours. Each of our pains are as big as the universe but we can still scale their heights and reach the sun."

Yifan took a deep breath and then reached for his laptop.
 

He couldn't remember feeling so much about anything he'd ever done before. He worked days and nights that whirled by, not in grey and white but bright splashes of green and yellow and blue.

"You seem, I don't know, different lately," Jongdae said tentatively when Yifan didn't even look up to glare at Baekhyun walking through the office playing a kazoo. Yifan only hummed and kept working. The sharp sound had just the right colour to finish the stairwell he was working on.

He handed in the final blueprint to Kyungsoo, worried for the first time that something he did might not be accepted. But the imposing head of the design department just looked over the design, eyebrows raised slightlly, an expression of admiration hovering over his solemn features.

"You did this?"

Yifan would be offended but he cares too much. Why do I feel so strange?

"Yes," he said, almost anxious. Not that anyone can tell, I hope.

Kyungsoo nodded once. "Keep up the good work." Yifan beamed for a brief moment, Baekyun, who was passing by on his way back from the coffee shop, choked.
 

He felt the need to see the mural again, running the colours through his head on the way home. It made him feel sad, to see it unfinished, but at the same time he owed it and its creator so much.

He rounded the corner and stopped.

In a stray beam of light, Chanyeol stood, brush in hand as he cocked his head to one side, surveying the damage.

"Chanyeol" I'm sorry? He didn't know what to say. But the man, who was exactly the same height as him, turned; their eyes locking gazes across the sidewalk.

"I like what you did with the blue," Chanyeol said, smiling. Yifan searched his expression for any hint of anger, red to mar the gold, but there was nothing.

"I'm sorry about what I said before..." his voice trailed off. "I thought..."

Chanyeol laughed, the sound bursting like the bubbles that children blow in the park in summer, over the green smell of cut grass and the faint muskiness of charcoal barbeques. "Of course not!" He shook his head, eyes sparkling. "I just had some things to do."

Yifan didn't understand the immense feeling of relief that flowed through him; the breath of summer air to chase out the staleness of hospital corridors and antiseptic and sticky iron, or the sudden flushed warmness that spread over his cheeks as he once again found himself deeply interested in Chanyeol's collarbones.

"I thought about what you told me before" he began, words stumbling over each other shyly, "but since I'm used to designing buildings now I thought I'd start there first..."

Chanyeol tilted his head, genuine interest filling his eyes. "Can I see?"
 

Yifan invited him up to his apartment for coffee, his voice hesitant, but there was none in Chanyeol's happy nod of agreement. Colours splashed across the once white walls of his home as Chanyeol sat beside him and looked at the blueprints, asking for mock-ups, admiring lattices and clapping at particularly delightful details.

"When I saw this apartment building for the first time, I saw a phoenix trying to break out of its shell," he said, shoulder warm as it brushed Yifan, sitting side by side at the kitchen table to look at the laptop screen. "That's why I had to paint that mural, even though I was in the middle of too many things."

Yifan looked down at his hands, remembering the white numbness that still lurked sometimes at the corners of his vision, in the dark mornings when the sun didn't shine. Sometimes it's still hard, not to get lost in looking back.

"But I look at this now, and I know that the bird has broken free and spread its wings in the sun." Chanyeol turned to look into Yifan's eyes, his proximity suddenly all too apparent. Yifan's heart skipped a beat. But then I look at you...

"I can't wait to see it when it's finished!" he grinned, nudging Yifan affectionately, who managed to smile back around his racing heart.


"I'd be happy to show you, if you want..." The invitation in his voice was tentative but definitely there. I want to keep you in my life.

"I'll be here!" Chanyeol leaned forward to whisper conspiratorially into Yifan's ear, even though there was no one else there. "I bought the apartment downstairs so I can finish the mural more easily." He smiled, leaning back in his chair; Yifan couldn't tell if the wink was accidental or on purpose.

He looked around the apartment, at the white and the grey being replaced by the soft green of hope and the brilliance of gold.

I can't wait for a lot of things.