attention | gyuricky

eight.

By the time orientation draws to a close and the first taste of university freedom begins to occupy Gyuvin's life, he's given up on trying to crack Ricky. 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 architecture 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 Ricky 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 Ricky anymore, and in exchange Ricky leaves him be.

It's a little sad to come home every day to an apartment without much warmth within its walls, but Gyuvin will learn to live with it. He's somewhat envious of how well his friends are getting along with their roommates; Junhyeon and Zhanghao have long since become fast friends despite their rocky start, Gunwook's roommate is a senior called Jiwoong who helps him with all his film assignments because he did the same ones a year ago, last Gyuvin heard Taerae's good friends with his sculpture major roommate, was his name Matthew? Something like that.

He'll be able to switch roommates next year, once he finds someone who's willing to swap with him. His bet's on Zhanghao, though from the way Junhyeon talks about them Gyuvin 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. Gyuvin's taken up the habit of working at the dining table instead of at his desk, something to do with the lighting in the living room being better than the bedroom, which he'd anticipated would cause some kerfuffle considering that's where Ricky does his work, but the other boy seems to be fine with it, and Gyuvin 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, 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. The assignment is to create a model of a functional apartment building of five stories or more, and he needs to submit a sketched draft with a full set of measurements, a digitally modelled softcopy and a final piece within three weeks, which seems like a lot of time but he's learned actually isn't.

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, a pleasant surprise considering he was expecting to toil over the initial design for days.

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.

Gyuvin'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. Ricky's standing there, still in his jacket, standing silently over the table, eyes fixated on something- Gyuvin's sketchbook, open to the drawing he'd just finished an hour ago.

"Why are you-"

"You drew in my book," Ricky 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 Gyuvin's sketchbook.

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

Something unreadable lights up behind Ricky's dark eyes for just a second. It comes and goes quickly, but Gyuvin thinks he sees something that almost looks like...longing? But Ricky straightens out his expression before he can think any more, detaching Gyuvin'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 Ricky still is to him, but he swallows the thought as he sandwiches his drawing between two sketchbooks he double-checks to make sure are his, before heading into the room to get ready for bed.