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If you asked him, he’d tell you he’s going insane, that he’s imagining things. Because there’s simply no way this is actually happening. His head keeps going from his sketchbook to the man that just walked into his class, up and back down again, mouth gaping open.
He probably looks really weird right now, Minho knows he does, but he can’t help it, not when he recognizes oh so well the face of a man he just saw for the first time.
The human mind cannot generate a new face.
He’d seen that quote being thrown around before, knew it wasn’t exactly true. The human mind cannot generate new features, but it can make new faces by mixing up the features it knows exist.
But this is… definitely something new. It’s one thing to think of a man, of his face, and then just putting pen to paper.
It’s another entirely to draw a man three years before ever meeting him.
Minho’s always liked drawing and painting. It was calming, picking up a pen or brush and then just letting his mind take him somewhere else. He’d done it when his fathers had adopted Brenda, an easy gift to welcome her and something that he kept doing anytime her birthday came around.
He’d drawn out his scars, after the lightning scars. Had spent hours, sat between two mirrors, tracing them with his eyes and copying them onto paper to the best of his abilities. Once. Twice. Three times. Rivers. Vines. Roots. When he drew them, they were whatever he wanted them to be—he still couldn’t bring himself to draw them as scars.
So, Minho liked to draw. He’d been doing it for years, doodling in the corner of notebooks when teachers would talk, piles upon piles of sketchbooks filled to the brim. The sky was blue, the birds would sing, and Minho liked to draw.
But one thing that kept coming back since he was young, that he never forgot and always drew the same way, was a group of boys and a maze. He never named them, never found out where the idea came from, but he draw those things almost everyday.
The maze was… kind of scary. He drew it differently, day by day, like the walls that made it moved on their own free will—but always with four walls that led to a center he could never bring himself to fill out.
And then, there was the boys—well, not just boys, there were a few girls, but he never drew them as much. He never named them, didn’t know their voices or what they liked. But he drew them, almost compulsively. Two faces in particular came up way more often than the others.
Long, blond hair, usually in a pony tail, pretty brown eyes and a necklace he looked weird without. Minho usually drew him from the waist up, didn’t like the nausea that would hit him anytime he’d draw his legs, one of them only just slightly out of place. Not once had he ever drawn him another way. Only once did Minho draw him differently, with blood seeping out of his mouth, dead eyes, and dark blue veins snaking up his neck.
He’d thrown that sketchbook out as soon as he was done.
And then there was messy, brown hair, rosy cheeks and freckles, shoulders adorned with either a harness or jacket and always with a bright smile and a curious glint in his eyes.
The same, curious glint that stare at him from the other side of the class right now, though it’s tinted with concern, now.
Minho finally turns his head down and leaves it there, staring down at his sketchbook—at the man he was just drawing, identical to the one sitting by the window down to the mole on his cheek.
Crazy. You’re going crazy. He tells himself, putting away the sketchbook and, for once, actually focusing on the lesson, if only to chase away the dread that hasn’t left him since the man sat down.
Just ignore it. You’ll settle down eventually.
Minho hadn’t settled down. If anything, he’s freaking out even more now that both the brunet from earlier and the blond are standing in front of him, asking him what his deal is, why he won’t stop staring.
It’s lunch time, there’s no one around, and Minho can’t stop thinking about his sketchbook filled with those exact faces long enough to answer them. None of them are moving beyond the closing and opening of Minho’s mouth as he scrambles for an answer, for anything that doesn’t make him sound insane, or crazy or- or like a damn stalker or something.
“You’re pretty!” Is what he ends up blurting out.
Well. Infatuated is better than insane, right?
At least they must think so, because they’re surprised for just a second before they both start laughing loudly.
Not at him, though. He can tell from their grins and the glints in those damn brown eyes he can’t stop staring into as the brunet grabs his hand to haul him up.
And, well, Minho did blurt that out without thinking, but he thinks his heart does start beating just a bit faster when the other guy tells him, “Minho, right?”
He files the english accent away for later, even though he knows there’s no way to show that on a piece of paper.
Thomas and Newt.
Those are their names. They told him as they were dragging him along to another spot outside the school, equally as empty as where Minho usually spends his lunches, save for the small group of students seemingly waiting for them.
Minho proceeds to meet Sonya—a doodle in the corner of his notebook, a bright smile over a shoulder—Newt’s younger sister, as well as Gally, who just waves a dismissive hand his way—bone breaking under his knuckles, a head drawn on the back of homework sheet—before going back to his conversation with Frypan—the smell of stew, a painting of a cook in a hut.
Thomas shakes his head with a sigh and grins at him, “Don’t mind him, he’s a grouch and doesn’t like new people.”
Gally doesn’t react, even as Newt adds on that he sometimes can’t believe he and his little brother are related—round face, rosy cheeks, a bright smile that went out too soon.
Minho grins and waves, settling down in the grass beside the small group and immediately starting up a conversation with Sonya as Newt and Thomas settle beside him. He shoves all the thoughts about his sketchbooks and the paintings he never finished to the back of his mind, determined to put off that freak out until later.
During a lull in the conversation, he does end up drawing the group—a different, broken version of them—with tattered clothes and sunken eyes, lounging around by the sea.
Looking from the paper to the people around him, it’s all the same work of art.