MY PAST. hyunlix

8.

By the time orientation draws to a close and the first taste of university freedom begins to occupy Felix's  life, he's given up on trying to crack Hyunjin. He's resigned himself to it; they'll just be two people who happen to live together, cordial and polite, friends maybe, but not good friends in any way. It's not the ideal ending, but it's time he accepts that not everything in his life can have a happy ending, no matter how much he wants it to.

With the amount of time he spends hanging out with the new friends he's made in his dance classes and his old friends from his youth, he's barely ever in the dorms anyway, which he supposes works out well for him. He sees Hyunjin sometimes in the morning when he doesn't have early classes, or at night when he comes back late, but even then their interactions remain at a minimum.

He doesn't bother hyunjin anymore, and in exchange — hyunjin leaves him be.

It's a little sad to come home every day to an apartment without much warmth within its walls, but Felix will learn to live with it.

He's somewhat envious of how well his friends are getting along with their roommates; Han and chan have long since become fast friends despite their rocky start, aswell with changbin who's roommates with Minho.

He'll be able to switch roommates next year, once he finds someone who's willing to swap with him. His bet's on chan, though from the way Han talks about them Felix worries they'll be unwilling to part from each other as well.

Doesn't matter, he's got the rest of the year to find someone anyway.

The first graded assignments come in somewhere during the third week of the semester. It's only five percent of his final grade, but the professors claim it's a benchmark for them to see the current standard of everyone's work, and insist they work their hardest on it. Felix has taken up the habit of dancing in the kitchen, instead of the practice room, something to do with the lighting in the kitchen being better than the practice room, which he'd anticipated would cause some kerfuffle considering that's where hyunjin does his work, but the other boy seems to be fine with it, and Felix keeps to his own space as well as he can.

He sits down at the dining table now, having just returned from a late lecture, not bothered to finish his homework, so instead he's staring at an open-faced sketchbook. He tries his best to recall if he left his sketchbook open; he tends to avoid doing that in case he spills something, a lesson learned the hard way, but he drops the thought. It doesn't matter, as long as nothing happened.

He picks up one of his sketching pencils and lets his fingers roam until inspiration strikes him.

An idea floats into his mind somewhere in the middle of his daze and he jumps to focus, a ruler in one hand and a pencil in the other, precise lines blooming across the page as his ideas spill out faster than his hands can move.

It takes a couple of trials and errors before he's satisfied with it, but he ends up with something he's mostly happy with, two little bunnies.

Gyuvin doodles a little frog making a winky face right at the top of the page before closing the sketchbook. It's a habit he's picked up over the years, he draws a little frog at the top corner of every page representing the mood he's been in while drawing, just a simple one with easy, cartoony strokes. Today he's happy, ergo, winky face.

Felix's just coming out of the shower when he hears keys being put down on the marble countertop. He takes a minute to draw a little frog face in the condensation left on the mirror before going back into the living room when he notices Hyunjin's standing there, still in his jacket, standing silently over the table, eyes fixated on something - Felix's sketchbook, open to the drawing he'd just finished an hour ago.

"Why are you-"

"You drew in my book," hyunjin interrupts,
looking up.

"What?"

The other boy picks up the sketchbook and flips through the rest of the pages, all sketches of different types of flowers, interspersed with one or two anatomical studies on hands and fingers, very decidedly not Felix's sketchbook.

"Oh, shit. I'm sorry, I have one with the same cover, I thought it was mine," Felix says quickly. "I'm really sorry. I didn't notice."

Something unreadable lights up behind Hyunjin's dark eyes for just a second. It comes and goes quickly, but Felix thinks he sees something that almost looks like...longing?

Hyunjin straightens out his expression before he can think any more, detaching Felix's drawing from his book with a neat, practiced movement and leaving it on the dining table.

"It's alright."

Oh? I'd have imagined he'd be angry.

It infuriates him a little how unpredictable hyunjin still is to him, but he swallows the thought as he sandwiches his drawing between two sketchbooks he double-checks t make sure are his, before heading into the room to get ready for bed.