new canvas
to my lovely girl @owmichi happy birthday! i wanted to write more and more for you, but i still hope you like this short, late piece. ilu ♥
new canvas | baekyeol | 2267w | pg | | 12/30 | art by lovely @sulbipage
“I don’t think this is the way a prince is supposed to be painted.”
“Don’t move.”
“Chanyeol…”
Baekhyun whines and Chanyeol wishes he could capture it, the color of Baekhyun’s voice, the way he trembles at the end with excitement. He tries to mask it as discomfort, but Chanyeol has known Baekhyun long enough to realize when he’s really tired from posing for him and when he’s just acting coy and thinking naughty.
“I’m tired, Chanyeol.”
“I don’t think this is the way a prince is supposed to complain.”
Baekhyun laughs. Golden, the color of endless what fields with just a tip of green, the sky as blue as it can get. Baekhyun’s laughs are always sunny.
“You’re right, a prince is not supposed to complain. A prince is supposed to give orders, right?”
Teasing is purple, turning to violet when he smirks. Baekhyun is so many colors and Chanyeol wants to paint them all. But if he were to choose a color, only one, a color to paint Baekhyun’s boldness and his innocent sensuality, his childish streak, the storms in in eyes and the blush spread on his naked skin, Chanyeol would choose red.
“Then, as a prince, I order you to come here and kiss me, Chanyeol.”
Baekhyun is not a real prince, Baekhyun is an art project gone terribly wrong, a random twist of fate, a red splotch of paint on Chanyeol’s black and white canvas.
It all began during a windy, ill-fated morning, the air still with static electricity and smelling distinctively like the five minutes before it starts raining. The sky was dark with thick clouds, a promise of storm that Chanyeol would’ve sketched with lampblack and brimstone over cream colored paper.
Chanyeol used to be a black and white kind of guy. He liked the safety that came from turning a two dimensional shape in a solid figure just with the use of a charcoal pencil. Color only dilutes the pure, raw beauty of a drawing, blending it until the shape loses its importance, choked by an unnecessary range of shades. Chanyeol didn’t like colors. He liked order and elegance, calligraphy and geometry, abstraction over reality – because reality can never be only black and white.
But reality is unpredictable, reality is confusing, reality is colorful. Reality meant Baekhyun, a random face stolen from Chanyeol’s past and thrown in front of him in his art class as his teacher told him, “This is Baekhyun from the Theatre class. He’ll be your model for this project.”
Chanyeol didn’t have to make an effort to remember him. Baekhyun had a regular face, pale under the unforgiving, aseptic light of the classroom, a face Chanyeol had already seen a few times, not around the campus, but at home.
“Byun Baekhyun, right?” he had asked, already taking the measurements of Baekhyun’s features, of his body proportions – this is a body that will come to live in paper under Chanyeol’s brush.
Then Baekhyun had smiled, a full blow of colors exploding right in Chanyeol’s face and making him startle, overwhelmed.
“Yes, and you’re little Park Chanyeol, right? My grandma has always a lot to say about you when I come to visit.”
They weren’t friends, they didn’t attend the same school and they didn’t even live in the same part of the city. Baekhyun was just the young nephew of the old lady living next door to Chanyeol. He visited her two or three times in a year and Chanyeol couldn’t have guessed what color his eyes were if someone asked. Baekhyun wasn’t part of his life and he wasn’t ever going to be.
“I’m really excited to work with you.”
Chanyeol had simply nodded, shortly blinded by Baekhyun’s dashing smile.
The theme was ‘royalty’. It was part of a joint project within the Visual Arts Department. No one really wanted to do it but it counted as forty-five per cent of their final grade. They had to learn how to cooperate and work together, or they were screwed. Baekhyun and Chanyeol were, in fact, really screwed.
“What should I do?”
“I don’t know. You’re the muse.”
“I thought you were supposed to be my muse, Chanyeol. You draw, I take inspiration and I create the character.”
“How can I draw a character you haven’t created yet?”
Baekhyun was witty, unnecessarily loud and extremely dramatic. Chanyeol could’ve spent half of his life drawing and organizing all the possible expressions that boy was able to make into his mental folder, and Baekhyun would’ve still been able to pop out some more faces just to spite him and keep him from doing his job right.
“Could you please stop?”
“I am perfectly still, Chanyeol.”
“You’re scrunching your nose too much! What are you thinking about?”
“I like your nose. Why aren’t you the model? You’re so pretty! Hey, do you want to join the Theatre class?”
They decided Baekhyun would be the prince. He wasn’t dignified enough to be a king, though Chanyeol had bitterly suggested Baekhyun was pretty enough to be a princess during one of their late, after class fights about the project. That comment had earned him a big bruise on temple and Baekhyun a long scratch on his forearm. Chanyeol’s bruise was a deep purple, Baekhyun’s scratch was angry red and Chanyeol fumed all his way home, thinking about Baekhyun, his extreme obnoxiousness and the way colors were slowly slipping into his life because of this insufferable boy.
Two weeks into the first sketch of the painting, Chanyeol had a major freak-out.
“It doesn’t work. It just… It doesn’t work.”
“What is not working?”
Baekhyun wasn’t working. He had an average face, easy curves, easy angles, Chanyeol could’ve drawn it with his eyes closed, but whatever effort he put into tracing those few lines into the canvas, the final result would look nothing like Baekhyun.
“You’re right, it looks pretty dull. Doesn’t look like me at all.”
“Oh, thank you, I hadn’t really noticed.”
“It lacks…” Chanyeol really hoped Baekhyun wasn’t going to say what Chanyeol thought he was going to say. “It lacks color, Chanyeol.”
“It doesn’t lack color. It lacks definition.”
“It’s too definite. Looks, my cheekbones aren’t that sharp!”
“Ok, fine! I will add some shades here to make your face look fuller, is it alright with you?”
Baekhyun’s eyes said it wasn’t and Chanyeol knew he was right. He could keep adding grey shades, caking the charcoal on top of Baekhyun’s cheeks, but it would’ve only made him look dirty and lifeless.
Baekhyun needed something else. Bright red on his cheeks, warm brown turning fire on his hair. Chanyeol stubbornly held the pencil tighter and added more shades, focusing on blending it with his thumb to avoid Baekhyun’s eyes.
They decided to go for sculpture as their main theme. Chanyeol had decided.
“I want you to look like the beautiful statue of a prince.”
Because statues are solid, statues are still, statues are universes of white stone and dark shadows.
“Did you know statues were not originally white when they were created? Most of them were painted.”
“Your point?”
“You’re just running away from the problem.”
Chanyeol didn’t answer. Arguing with Baekhyun was a defeat in itself. That boy had a way to twist every argument against Chanyeol.
“And anyway, you’re a painter. Why would you draw a sculpture? If you liked statues then you should’ve studied to be a sculptor, don’t you think?”
“Undress.”
Bold, too bold, but unexpected enough to throw Baekhyun out of his reverie. It took a moment for the boy to regain his composure and his teasing smile.
“Why so fast Chanyeol? I thought we were still working on knowing each other.”
“I am knowing you. I need to know your proportions if I have to draw the rest of your body properly.”
“Is this everything I am to you? Do you only like me for my body, Chanyeol?”
As stupid as it was, it made Chanyeol smile.
“So you can smile, Yeol, I’m surprised.”
“Did you just call me Yeol?”
“Do you prefer Chan?”
“Baekhyun? Please shut up and let me draw you.”
Drawing Baekhyun soon became easier than breath but Chanyeol still couldn’t get him right. He asked Baekhyun to undress, again and again. He studied his lines, the axis of his shoulders, the soft bumps of his spine emerging like little hills from the milky expanse of his back when he arched.
Chanyeol memorized the way his palms clenched and unclenched when he was too cold or too restless or simply too bored. He practiced until he owned every single movement of his elegant fingers.
But there were still things he couldn’t grasp in his drawings. Baekhyun’s blush, taking over his chest whenever Chanyeol stared at him a bit too long and a bit too intensely, coloring his cheeks and ears and the bridge of his nose. The nice contrast between the red cape Baekhyun had draped on his body and his slightly flushed skin, the gold of the fake plastic crown he wore on his head, reflecting a rainbow of light against the floor every time Baekhyun tilted his head just so.
“You’re a prince, Baekhyun, act princely.”
“You’re a painter, Chanyeol, stop staring at my ass and just paint it already.”
They weren’t destined to collide. Chanyeol could’ve submitted his dull, black and white painting of a boy trying too hard to balance the heavy crown over his head and he could’ve just been happy with that. Baekhyun could’ve brought on the stage his own piece about a prince who was too bored to pose for hours for a painter. They were both so talented their teachers would’ve loved their project anyway, as incomplete and lacking as it was.
They weren’t destined to collide, but Baekhyun’s lips were too red – slick with spit and half bitten –and his face was so flushed and the way he looked up and stared at Chanyeol, his eyelashes casting shadows over the pink rose of his cheeks, was impossible to ignore.
Three days before the deadline of the project, as they met for the last time to look over the final painting and say their own goodbye, Chanyeol stopped fighting the attraction between them. He stopped fighting the onslaught of color slamming against his eyelids, opening doors he didn’t even know existed. Chanyeol stopped fighting and splattered the front of his canvas with red. Red in Baekhyun’s eyes, red in his lips, blended, soft red in his cheeks and his collarbones, red in his hair from the reflection of the sunset. In the canvas, Baekhyun had started to change. He was not a statue anymore but a spirit of fire, a dancer, a magician, a warrior and a lover. He was a prince, wrapped in red and white and gold.
When he was done, Baekhyun looked at the ruined painting.
“I’m pretty.”
“You are.”
“Would you like to kiss me?”
“You’re a prince. Your wish is my command.”
Baekhyun smiled, blinding bright, open and colorful and Chanyeol was suddenly aware, deep inside, that he was going to spend the rest of his life trying to find the right colors to paint that smile.
But there was time for that. A lot of time.
In the end, the project is a disaster. Changing the theme three days before the deadline was one of the stupidest ideas Chanyeol has ever had, but as his teacher tells him his (somewhat terrible) grade, he also pats Chanyeol’s shoulder.
“The technique was rushed and mediocre, but there was something in that painting, something that any of your previous paintings lacked. So I’m giving you this terrible mark now, but if in the next three month you can show me a decent, not half-finished project, I may think about changing it to a slightly less terrible mark. All right, Park?”
And this is how he ends up staring at Baekhyun again, wearing white and red, splayed on an ancient looking sofa with a fake, plastic golden crown that is barely hanging there, ready to fall off his head.
The white cloth is too big and the hem keeps slipping and showing Baekhyun’s throat, collarbone and shoulder, and the nicest, faintest hint of blush.
Baekhyun tries to put the cloth back, but Chanyeol stops him.
“Don’t move.”
“But I’m half-naked.”
“Don’t fucking move.”
“I don’t think this is the way a prince is supposed to be painted.”
“Don’t. Move.”
“Chanyeol…”
Baekhyun whines and Chanyeol wishes he could capture it, the color of Baekhyun’s voice, the way he trembles at the end with excitement. He tries to mask it as discomfort, but Chanyeol has known Baekhyun long enough to realize when he’s really tired from posing for him and when he’s just acting coy and thinking naughty.
“I’m tired, Chanyeol.”
“I don’t think this is the way a prince is supposed to complain.”
Baekhyun laughs. Golden, the color of endless what fields with just a tip of green, the sky as blue as it can get. Baekhyun’s laughs are always sunny.
“You’re right, a prince is not supposed to complain. A prince is supposed to give orders, right?”
Teasing is purple, turning to violet when he smirks. Baekhyun is so many colors and Chanyeol wants to paint them all. But if he were to choose a color, only one, a color to paint Baekhyun’s boldness and his innocent sensuality, his childish streak, the storm in in eyes and the blush spread on his naked skin, Chanyeol would choose red.
“Then, as a prince, I order you to come here and kiss me, Chanyeol.”
a/n: forgive me for this
