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Seungmin, unlike what he believes to be the majority, enjoys a story’s climax the most. Or rather, the beatdown before the climax, the crux of which is drawn in through the main protagonist’s lowest downfall yet. The humble, permeant chunk of time through which reflection of the highest degree can be conducted. The drastically gregarious interpretation of growth.
It was his determinant. How well a writer could shape a character’s lowest moment, and through which means it was presented in, that was most important. The thrill of soaring through the skies on a long-tailed dragon, or wielding pointed machetes, or even investigating the brief flickering of love in its rawest form.
The twists and the turns were fun, but Seungmin couldn’t completely discern whether the story-building yielded and manipulated its scrounging presence well enough, until he’d read of the struggle.
Only then, only through the ever-deepening exoneration of their fragile movements, could Seungmin truly discern his splendour for its tragic familiarity.
A flair for the sorrowful, he guesses he can say.
It almost feels discernibly awful to find himself within the very vicinity of the sleeping lilt of daytime light, Minho’s own reserve cleaner, more kempt, more laden with prideful precision.
Minho dresses well.
Seungmin isn’t quite sure whether his clothes had actually carried an addictive flair in how they’d been constructed, or he’d just made the material lustre more brilliantly by being the one to adorn it. Or perhaps, it had truly just been that Seungmin needed to upgrade the contents of his closet.
Now that he finds it within him to look back down at his clothes from where he’s sat against the branched wall of their small, playground slide pen, the last prospect seems to resound most realistically. His eyes cannot, any longer, register what sort of blue text had been splayed over his grey hoodie, the letters faded and fragmented. His shoes are the same pair he’s been adorning since 10th grade. Even his simple jeans are feebly mundane.
Minho dresses like an artisan.
Like someone who’d attempted to shelve a story – whether through intentional mediocrity or not, it was hard to completely tell – that ran its course through upkeep of its tangibility.
Or maybe, Seungmin made analogies out of routine tasks that he couldn’t figure out the basic executions of himself, simply for the fact that it made him feel better. Those pancakes from the other day didn’t almost set fire to the kitchen by themselves, after all.
‘Pancakes?’ Minho doesn’t hide any indication of impudent disapproval, rather displaying it more readily than had probably been necessary. But, then again, Seungmin makes the mistake of relaying his fascinatingly atrocious day-by-day activities. Plus, he’d found solace in being heard, even if it had been through Minho’s rambunctious filter.
‘Of all the things to royally fuck up, you fuck up pancakes?’ Minho asks, albeit rhetorically, with his eyes already drawn downwards to the clouds brimming with hefty weight under his scribbling hand.
Whenever Minho gets tired of dispatching updates pertaining to his garden’s progression, or how far he’d gotten into reading about bryophytes, or complaining about one of his cats nipping at the indoor spider plant, he resorts to sketching.
Within their first few days together, he sketches out a section of the garden for him, demonstrating how he’s planning on arranging his propagated sprouts. But after a while, or the while that has passed by them flippantly, he’s managed to recollect the remnants of his teachings in order to sketch out his imaginings; the less realistic, more dreamlike.
Minho had been a dream, a thing of unbelievably extraordinary beauty, and Seungmin meant it through the multiple facets in which he’d shine the brightest.
But he’d also been quite annoying.
‘I don’t think you’ve any place to make fun of my cooking skills when you asked me, last week, if Shakespeare was the name of a candy.’ Seungmin retaliates, bunching down his own daydreams amidst their fizzing.
Minho only scoffs at that, hilarity within his grasp at the boy’s consensus for a comeback. ‘You think I feel ashamed for that? What kind of glorious works has this Shakespeare dude even made for me to pay him any attention?’
Then, it’s Seungmin’s turn to deliberate. He’d initially planned on making an off-handed comment at the fact that Minho had absolutely no knowledge of who one of the biggest giants in literature, celebrated across the globe for his works and an unwavering resolve.
But another tentative idea sounds much more fun.
‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’
Minho doesn’t say anything for a moment, a rustle of wind meeting their calmative bubble in one quick swipe, its terrain washing over Seungmin curiously amidst his own worry.
It’s funny how his expression remained so stagnant and unchanging while his heart could thud so erratically. A beaming rhythm at its most basic.
‘Is that your undying confession?’
Seungmin’s gulp gets caught up in his throat, and he can only hope it hadn’t been too audible despite the swivel of ruffling leaves nearby, just against Minho’s treasured window of light.
‘Don’t flatter yourself. It’s just a memorable quote and I needed to ground in the fact that everyone knows it and you clearly don’t.’ Seungmin is oh so thankful he doesn’t redden easily because there’s a distinct pinch in his cheeks that nips at his heart just the same.
‘Sure,’ Minho airily chuckles, brushing away a tuft of hair blocking his vision before doodling a sun behind his cumulous clouds, defining its radiance ‘I’ll pretend to believe that if it makes life easier for you.’
Seungmin rolls his eyes, but his lips stretch out into a grin all the same, its light brimming while through the odd ways of life, the sun sets in the bleak distance. Minho’s window of light draws away some of its perfected glow, but he accepts its freshly mingled colors just the same.
☼ ☼ ☼
Seungmin begins to treasure the slide construction hangouts more than he’d ever anticipated he would. Even amidst Minho’s lack of an explanation whenever Seungmin elected to ask why he’d chosen the structure in the first place, if he’d only been living in the city for a matter of a few months, he finds solace in referring to it as their own shared space.
Plus, it’d felt like their interactions and entire relationship could only be based through the hearty structure. They hadn’t shared contact information and had never seen one another outside of the familiar park, so it’d always felt a little too odd. Or, at least, Seungmin hadn’t wanted to disrupt it, it had always been hard to read Minho.
Despite the aforementioned, however, he feels the motion of moving towards his table less difficult to overcome since he’d gestured him over to begin with.
A small café sat within a small intersection separating the busier shops in the city from ones specific to downtime. This hadn’t been Seungmin’s downtime as much as it had simply been his first resort after having officially completed the first week back to school. Through its complete maelstrom and an instigation of heavier knots brimming within every muscle in his body; the notion that he’d procured Benjamin Button’s disease but only in the form of a de-aging mentality felt more and more realistic with the passage of time.
Minho had been sat somewhere within the back, only within view after Seungmin places his order and waits within the required spot for pickup. Their eyes had, within the blight forces of hilarity and fate, find the other at the same time. While Seungmin elects to widen his own pair, in deep ponder over the imperativeness of every action he made, Minho just passively motions him over.
Seungmin just about manages to send the worker shocking him out of his quick torpor a small ‘thank you’, pick up his drink, and quietly shuffle to Minho’s table.
‘Hey.’
As Seungmin had already become accustomed to, Minho had never been one for pleasantries or introductions. But it had been a prospect he’d easily adjusted to outside of unusual atmospheres – that is, on days when he’d step into their creaky fortress and camp out next to him in his usual spot, listening intently as Minho promptly divulges into the day’s source of malcontent.
It seems it didn’t truly matter where they were. Seungmin hadn’t quite adjusted to the idea that Minho liked talking to him as much as he’d just seen him as the only person to seek out the attention of at the playground.
He’d already begun relaying his newest idea to Seungmin, and as he’d restated a thousand times before, he’d always listen. That was his strong suit; listening, interpreting, and sometimes commenting, encouraging, whatever fit the situation best.
But it’d felt like his internal clock had begun cracking, close to completely shattering and dumping its remaining fragments at his feet.
He’s sure that time is still moving, that much can easily be relayed in the way that he can still see Minho’s lips moving. He can still see the flittering movement of his eyes. Still see how he casually looks up amidst pondering, the glare of the lightbulbs above their heads settling perfectly within his irises, painting it a gilded ember before he finally finds the words to continue.
Time is still moving, but Seungmin almost wishes it didn’t. He almost wishes that time can be stopped with each movement his playground friend makes. That, somehow, he’ll find the opportunity to capture each one in a resounding shot from his old, worn camera.
He’d found it, the other day, amongst a few other miscellaneous items, discovering piles of old photos along with it. Each one captured a significant moment in time, conveying its stories and translating them through prim camerawork, ensure that whoever got the chance to hold it between their hands and stare back at its aged overlay can read it as it was meant to be read.
There had been one from a particularly sunny day at the Kang’s farmhouse. The glare of which stuttered the exposure so greatly that the flowery fields he’d captured photos of gleamed unnaturally. Still, it’d made his chest twitch happily.
Another picture was of his mother, her hair held back by a big, blue ribbon, the brightest of smiles stretched across her supple face. Seungmin distinctly remembers gifting her with that ribbon, having found it wound around a basket of treats from the bakery. It was all she’d wear for months following that day.
Seungmin sifts through the pictures, and a distinct, hollowing bittersweet melody plays in his ears.
He wonders, if Minho really is just a temporary friend, when he’ll get the chance to capture him in one of his grandiose images. To remember him by.
Now, while he elatedly gazes back at the very same boy, a gaze laced with wonder, enlightenment, hope. Seungmin wants to capture this moment, but he doesn’t want to make a temporary friend out of Minho.
Seungmin doesn’t want to let this glorious moment go.
☼ ☼ ☼
The day had run much longer than Seungmin had anticipated it to, and the main attraction of the day had yet to truly settle.
Following their short interaction at the café, Minho had made a point out of how strenuous of a job his next personal project would be. Outside the eccentricities of school life, Minho spent his free time entertaining the possibility of more work, except it’d actually been work he’d strived to perfect his craft in, and one that he found great solace in.
The next project, as Minho had explained to him, would be to begin his ventures in growing his very own flowering plants, starting with Gardenias – as per Seungmin’s request, because of course Minho had went and asked him what his favourite flower was, and Seungmin didn’t have one so he’d just answered with his mother’s.
The next row forward, as Minho had meekly decided, would be for daffodils.
And, of course, under the pretence of being a good friend, Seungmin had offered to help Minho out in initiating this new venture.
Which is exactly how he’d landed himself under the binds of a very heavy bag of soil. At least it’d obstructed the heavy sunlight from his eyes, he thinks.
Thankfully, it isn’t too long until Minho drops his own box of gardening items down and helps Seungmin gently settle the heavy bag down, exactly where he needed it to be.
‘I’ve already watered everything for the day, and settled a few of the Gardenias,’ He motions over to the two, small hedges of greenery and white, gently swaying with the springtime mist. They’d already been settled into the soil, three feet apart.
‘Why are they so far apart from each other?’ Seungmin asks, like a fool. If Minho’s expression of disbelief is anything to go by.
‘3 feet is barely that far. Every flower has its own requirements, and planting Gardenias around 3 feet apart is most ideal, especially as the hedges will grow wider with time.’
‘I don’t know anything about plants or gardening,’ Seungmin affirms, although the notion seems to have already been understood by Minho long before.
‘I know, flower. As long as you’re good at following instructions, we’ll be fine.’
Seungmin isn’t sure if it’s the sudden direction of a pet name, that of which he’d only ever heard from his mother, and maybe his sister when she felt like it. It’d been an entirely new feeling, to hear it from the marvellous Lee Minho, of all people. The boy who he’d already muttered a copious number of dumb phrasings to in the minimal amount of time they’d known each other.
Flower. Seungmin had never been someone’s flower.
Unfortunately, but not at all a surprise, the thought continues to settle into his head and froth feverously amidst the pair’s handiwork. While he’s scooping out the amount of soil Minho instructs him to or patting down at the watery ground, all he can significantly hear at the back of his busy mind is that one, horribly affective word.
Flower.
His stupor does not go unnoticed.
‘Seungmin? Seungmin…? Seungmin!’
Said boy finally blinks himself back into the physicality of shifting time, much to his dismay, and is immediately met with the bright, burning gaze of the boy that had already been in the forefronts of his thought for the past 30 minutes, or so.
How much time had passed? Seungmin couldn’t say for sure.
‘You keep zoning out.’ Seungmin barely registers any of what’s taking place now, as Minho crouches forward, taking the small shovel out of Seungmin’s hands and placing it back into their less-weighted bag of soil ‘At this rate, I might have to find a new partner, flower.’
‘Please don’t! I’ll be better, I promise.’
What the hell was that?
Seungmin genuinely feels as if the inner workings of his brain, that of which usually ran much more smoothly, had begun crumbling. He’s practically lost all control of whatever ship rode itself through the tumultuous, crashing waves in his own head.
Thankfully, despite his own habitual overthinking, all Minho does is chuckle heartily, chest heaving forward with each subsequent giggle. Seungmin could melt into the soil, and join the flowers, if it meant he could listen to Minho’s bursts of joy every second of the day.
‘Don’t worry, flower, I’m just messing with you. I could never replace you.’