scintillating ; lee minho

𝓹𝓻𝓸𝓵𝓸𝓰𝓾𝓮

✧.*

There was something about the autumn evening that Seungmin felt nostalgic about.

The way the wind gushed past the ground coveted with dry gold and scarlet leaves scattering away in the distant horizon. The lonesome grey hue inhibited the sky, towering over the empty oak trees with it's murky and sorrel bark. A fulvous and ageless brown that welcomed homeliness within the serene hymn of autumn.

It truly is a gift to see colors.

To lay your eyes anywhere and everywhere and recognize exactly what it is.

Seungmin reaches for an old cookbook that sat on his dusted shelf for years. He skims until he finds a recipe that read: Bungeoppang for Days.

His fingers grazed across the frigid crimson cover outlined in gold. I can't wait to see you again, his heart ached just by holding the book in his hand. Suddenly the weight of the book felt unbearable, and he was forced to put it down.

"Should I even bother to try?" he debates, utterly confused if he should waste his time making the traditional dessert. The taste has been stuck on his tongue for months now, longing to devour the same buttery dough he used to have during his adolescence. He remembers the first time he ever tried the bread, it was humiliating.

The memory was as clear as a dew absorbing jade grass. Seungmin never liked bungeoppang, or anything related to fish. It reminded him of his goldfish that his sister accidentally killed when he was five. She blamed it on the fish's poor reflexes and then proceeded to say it drowned.

"Uncle!" A sudden wailing of a child echoes in his ears.

"Minhyun," he says softly as the child pounces in his arms.

"I missed you uncle," his voice could barely leave the room as his face was stuffed in Seungmin's chest.

"I've been gone for not even ten minutes."

"Yeah, and that's like..." he counts his fingers, "three decades!"

Seungmin laughs, and places the boy on his lap, hands stroking down his back gently. There was a certain rhythm to how Seungmin caressed him. Four long strokes down, and then his fingers circled around the area. It always made him fall asleep without the aid of a tiresome nursery rhyme.

A sudden mark on his arm catches Minhyun's eye, "Uncle what's that?" he points to the tattoo carved on Seungmin's forearm.

"It's a Chrysanthemum," he says, memories flooding back and forth like a hole poked through a barricade. "An old friend of mine loves this flower."

"Chris...Chris the mum?" the five year old struggles to pronounce the flower and it makes Seungmin emit a loud laugh that made the dim room scintillate.

"It's pretty isn't it?"

"I've never seen a yellow flower look so pretty," he gapes, fingers grazing onto the orange splattered onto the dusty yellow petals encircling each other.

"That tickles," Seungmin smiles a bit too hard, his grin itinerant as the room expands in his blissfulness. Minhyun pays him no attention as his finger continues to circle around the tattoo like it was a real flower.

"Uncle I always wondered...How did colors come to be? Mom says I'm lucky to be able to see them since birth."

Seungmin's heart pounded at the question. It was innocent, but far too reminiscent.

His hands are stroking Minhyun's hair now, fingers brushing through the soft and thin brown strands.

"Let me tell you a story," he begins, "A story of how two rivals became the heroes of the world."

✧.*