Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/9388718. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Underage Category: M/M Fandom: 방탄소년단_|_Bangtan_Boys_|_BTS Relationship: Jeon_Jungkook/Kim_Taehyung_|_V Character: Jeon_Jungkook, Kim_Taehyung_|_V, Kim_Seokjin_|_Jin, Park_Jimin_(BTS), Min Yoongi_|_Suga Additional Tags: Orgasm_Delay/Denial, Anal_Sex, Anal_Fingering, Anal_Play, Vibrators, Sex Toys, Blow_Jobs Stats: Published: 2017-01-19 Completed: 2017-01-20 Chapters: 2/2 Words: 29578 ****** Fifty Shades of Happiness ****** by Kookie_andCream Summary Taehyung's plan is simple: fall in love with Jeon Jungkook and ace his final assignment. (Spoiler: it isn't that simple.) Notes For the record there is a political joke about Trump in here and I am neither an American citizen nor have ever stepped foot in the US I do not hold any opinions on the man who will be president tomorrow and the joke was for fictional purposes only. I also do not know anything about photography or painting and Taehyung is an unrealistically fast painter in here but stick with me Yay ***** Chapter 1 ***** For someone looking for love, Taehyung does not meet Jungkook very gracefully. He walks out of the art building with his mind spinning with possibilities. Your final assignment is love, Professor Kim Seokjin, intimately known as Jin by his favorite students (Taehyung included, thank you very much) had said. This counts as 50% of your grade, so I strongly encourage you to throw everything you have into it. What? They asked him. Isn’t there anything more? No, he said simply. Love. That is the only word in your prompt. Taehyung’s brain is already groaning under the weight of his thoughts. Love, he thinks. There are so many kinds. Familial love—maybe I could paint portraits of my family? No, that sounds like a middle school assignment. Romantic love, obviously. I could find couples around campus and do quick sketches to touch up later. Or maybe I could go on a road trip through Korea and find weddings. But that would make me just as good as a wedding photographer, only my medium is paint. There’s also the fact that I don’t believe in marriage. His legs are carrying him towards a coffee shop he doesn’t normally frequent because it’s filled with quiet, serious kids who don’t like to socialize—math majors and accounting majors who study everything Taehyung steers his life away from. But maybe the quiet will help him now. He laughs quietly to himself. Also, taking pictures of my family to show love? My family is too broken by money to even pretend to care for each other, much less love. He pushes open the door, the bell jingling merrily above the doorframe. The smell of coffee and productivity and cold, hard facts hits him the moment his foot crosses the threshold, and he recoils from the stench of math and science. But then he steels himself and walks in. What? He wonders. What, what, what? I don’t love anyone that way. I can’t paint anyone. What do I do? What can I paint to earn that sweet, sweet 50%? “I’ll have a hazelnut latte,” he tells the cashier, a skinny guy who reads a textbook while he enters Taehyung’s order. Taehyung catches sight of the title—Statistics—and bodily flinches away, resisting the urge to cross himself in this place of evil and numbers. Maybe I should make this an abstract project, he thinks, but it’s halfhearted. One of those pure white canvases with a single splash of color in the middle. Or maybe I could go for modern or pop art—no, I don’t think soup cans and Andy Warhol would work for this. He collects his drink and looks around for a table. Nearly everyone is wearing glasses. They all look brisk and are typing away on computers, keys clacking crisply into columns of Microsoft Excel. Taehyung can stand the writing majors and their dreamy turns of phrase—he might not have a hand for literature, but he’s artistic enough to see the beauty some of them can create out of words. But he cannot, cannot, understand anyone who would dedicate their lives to money. Money, he thinks bitterly, spotting a table and heading towards it. Money. Everything bitter and rotten in the world came from money. Broken families and loveless marriages and forgotten children. And then he stops. He’s about to brush his way past a high, round table, but he halts in front of it. A boy is sitting on the barstool, typing feverishly away on a silver Mac, scribbling numbers into a notebook when he manages to tear his eyes away from the computer screen. His feathery black bangs have been pinned under a beanie and flop in his eyes, which are doe-shaped and dark and almost exactly what Taehyung draws on his skin when he’s bored. Taehyung’s artist eye picks up on the perfect dip of his Cupid’s bow and the soft, pliable line of his mouth, the hint of bunny teeth when he gnaws on his lip. And in that moment, Taehyung wants to throw his hazelnut latte at the world for doing this. Because what the actual fuck is someone this beautiful doing crunching numbers alone in this cafe away from the world? He makes a mistake with his calculations, and his nose scrunches in frustration. He sighs and closes his notebook, shutting his laptop with a snap. Taehyung is still staring at him, motionless, hazelnut latte clutched in hand. The aroma of coffee wafts between them, beckoning. The boy stares back. “Um,” he says finally, in a voice which is uncertain and smooth and makes Taehyung want to cry at the unfairness of it all, “can I help you?” “Do you model?” Taehyung blurts. He doesn’t know what possesses him to do it. He regrets it as soon as the words are out of his mouth, but he holds his breath anyway, watching expressions flash across the boy’s face like little detonations of beauty: confusion, hesitation, and then…panic. “No,” the boy says, voice shaking now, sliding off the stool and grabbing his Mac. He tucks it under his arm with an air of finality. “No, I don’t model.” “Wait, I—” Taehyung begins, reaching out. But the boy is already heading out of the shop, the movements of his body graceful even in haste, and all Taehyung can do is stand there as someone runs away from him for the first time in his life and wonder what makes him so repulsive. ~ He’s grateful for Jimin sometimes. Jimin isn’t an art major—he’s majoring in biological sciences, which Taehyung decides is okay. He despises numbers as much as Taehyung does unless they’re population counts, so he’s off the hook. He gives Taehyung his opinion on lots of Taehyung’s work. Taehyung knows Jimin doesn’t have a trained artist’s eye, but the reason he became an artist is to paint for the public, and the majority of the public doesn’t have a trained artist’s eye either. So Jimin will do. Jimin will do just fine. They’re sitting in a cafe, the one all the art students go to. The air is alive with chatter and laughter. Jimin as a science major is regarded with some suspicion here where everyone knows everyone, but Taehyung vouches for him, so he’s allowed in. Jimin’s shuffling through a stack of watercolors on paper Taehyung did for his last mini-project. He pauses when he comes to one of a bird with broken wings. There’s a tiny shackle around its ankle with the chain snapped, but still the bird shuffles pathetically along the grass, its wings hanging broken and mangled at its side. The bird is a shade of blue it took Taehyung ten whole minutes to mix. It drips golden blood from the ends of its feathers. “This is sad,” Jimin says, holding it up. “This is really sad.” Taehyung looks at him not, really seeing him. All he can see is beautiful boys clothed in beanies and lost chances dancing behind his eyelids. “What made you draw this?” Jimin runs his finger over the beak, open in a desperate call for help, or perhaps a last, defeated chirp as it accepts its fate. Paper will never tell. “Whenever you do something symbolic like this, it’s always for a reason. Your emotions show through your art clearer than your face.” “My mother,” Taehyung says, twisting his fingers together under the table to stop himself from tracing doe eyes on his thigh. “She called me yesterday to tell me not to come home for Christmas.” “What?” Jimin blinks at him. “Why?” “My father has a conference in Switzerland,” he says. “Big business deal, apparently. And my mother is…going to be out. Probably to visit that boy toy of hers.” His voice is more bitter than he expected. He’s a little surprised at himself. He thought the fact that his parents’ marriage is for business only and they’re both allowed to see other people stopped stinging a long time ago, around the day that he walked into the manor to see a woman twenty years younger than his father splayed on the couch in lingerie. The woman had had her back to him and thought Taehyung was his father, inviting him to “come and get his money’s worth”. His mother was in the kitchen. She quietly left the house, closing the door behind her, and got into the car to drive away. She wasn’t back for three nights. Taehyung was fourteen. “You know you can come back to my parents’ house if you want, Tae,” Jimin says gently. “They love you more than they love me. They would be overjoyed to treat you to dinner and gifts and even a room if you want it.” But Taehyung is already shaking his head. “I’d rather not,” he says. “I love your parents, but being around your family for too long reminds me of what I can never truly have.” Jimin’s smile is painful, stretched over dry lips and empty canvases. “I know you don’t want to hear this,” he says, the bird’s blood glittering coldly on the paper in his hands, “but maybe love will come to you if you only believe it will.” ~ Taehyung thinks about the assignment as he goes about his day, walking back to his apartment and doing his homework and brushing his teeth and going to sleep. I’m not going to half-ass this assignment, he thinks to himself. This project has to be huge. I mean, love. There’s nothing bigger than love, right? Perhaps it’s foolish that he still believes in love after what he’s been through. But he believes in love the way a blind man believes the world around him is beautiful even though he cannot see it, the way a deaf musician trusts the instrument to produce music he will never hear. Taehyung is a child at heart, but mostly, he’s human. And humans will always want to believe in something better than what they have. There’s just figuring out what to do. He closes his eyes, turning on his side restlessly. The silk pajamas his parents sent from home with the price tag still attached slide coldly over his skin. He doesn’t normally wear it, but tonight is a warm night, and this set of pajamas always makes him feel cold. There’s just deciding on— It hits him so hard his eyes fly open and he sits up in bed. He stares into the darkness at the foot of the bed, mind racing to compete with itself. Your emotions show through your art. Jimin’s words ring in his ears like church bells. Your emotions show through your art. So many possibilities, sparking and burning behind his eyelids like supernovas. I’m going to find someone, he thinks, and I’m going to fall in love with them. And I’m going to paint them and sketch them and worship them with my brush, and the end product is going to be so astounding that Jin will give me 101%. How hard can it be, right? He tells himself, settling back into his bed. His chest feels so much lighter now he knows what to do. Falling in love. If my parents can buy a marriage with money, I can get an A by falling in love. I won’t need them to love me back. He nods to himself. Because love is meant to hurt. That’s what all the novels say. And the more profound and authentic this love is, the higher my grade. But who? He wonders. Who can I fall in love with? Who can I hang the weight of my graduation upon? His mind wanders back to the boy, elusive but so real Taehyung wanted to reach out and touch him, disappearing like a dream the moment Taehyung tried to. That, he thinks slowly. That is someone I’m willing to fall in love with. ~ Taehyung starts hanging around the coffee shop where he first met Jungkook more often. The shop is called Coffers. Taehyung chuckles almost reluctantly when he sees the sign, complete with a design of a coffee cup filled with coins. He doesn’t see the boy again, but that’s alright. He realizes, much to his chagrin, that Coffers is actually a good place to get work done—quiet, productive, and without disturbances besides the gentle whoosh of good coffee being made. The artsy cafes are way more judgmental and distracting and also, Taehyung grudgingly admits, a tiny bit pretentious. But that’s basically everything the more outgoing art students live for, so he isn’t going to judge. Taehyung is aware that the deadline hangs over his head, so he takes his laptop there and does research. He knows it’s dumb, but he types “how to fall in love” into Google. He knows it’s going to lead to a dead end when the top result is a Wikihow page helpfully titled “How to Fall in Love (With Pictures)”. He shuts out of the tab and tries a new tactic. For the next hour or so, he reads people’s accounts of how they fell in love. There are some good stories, sure, but none which would apply to an art student just trying to ace his final project. He gives up on the Internet for the time being and steps out to the bookstore. A book leaps out to him from the shelves, auspiciously titled How to Fall in Love by Cecelia Ahern. Taehyung buys it along with Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, shrugging as he thinks, Why not? It’s not like I don’t have the money to spare. He reads the books over the next few days in the coffee shop, book propped on top of his closed laptop. They’re good books, and he enjoys them, but he can’t help but feel like something is missing. In an especially low moment, he opens his laptop again and looks for fanfiction. A few hours later, he’s sobbing into his latte over a story of a mermaid and a human who fell in love, both gay men, and he’s exactly nowhere further from where he started. But he does find a new fanfiction author, reading all her 23 works hungrily in one fell swoop and bookmarking and giving kudos to all of them. A story about a rich college student who finds love through Tinder has him smashing the kudos button at every new chapter, and another about the heir to a gangster empire who falls for another man forced into prostitution actually makes him walk outside and cry to the streetlamps, face buried in his hands with the force of his emotion. He doesn’t know why fanfiction communicates the idea of love better to him than a bestselling author of romance novels. Maybe it’s how effortlessly the authors of the really good works avoid cliches, stepping around them with flourishes of metaphor and simile and keeping Taehyung hooked on every word. Or maybe it’s just that every fanfiction he reads is about gay men and gay fanfiction in general connects to him on a spiritual level. But he closes his laptop believing, perhaps foolishly, that love will find him if he only looks for it himself. If only he had any idea where to start. ~ He’s listening to Seafret in Coffers when Jungkook comes back. Seafret calms him down immensely. He doesn’t know why. It’s something about how plaintively the music sings about love, raw and unconcealed, that always gets to him. He makes a little happy leap in his chair when he sees a new music video by them. Notification squad, he thinks triumphantly as he clicks on a music video titled Wildfire. He knows it’s going to be awesome even before it loads. It opens onto a shot of two chairs facing each other across a table, then people walking in and shaking hands, greeting each other. Soft music starts playing in the background. The screen cuts to black, words in white dominating it: In 1997, psychologist Arthur Aron conducted an experiment to see if strangers could fall in love. Taehyung blinks. A few more shots of people talking to each other, and then: Single volunteers were arranged into pairs. They were asked to work through 36 questions and stare into each other’s eyes for four minutes. Taehyung leans closer to the screen, intrigued. Aron’s experiment worked. Taehyung feels goosebumps flood down his arms as he reads the next line. Six months later, two of his participants were married. Taehyung lets out a little inadvertent gasp. The singing starts, and Taehyung is carried up in the song. But he’s leaning so close to the screen his nose is nearly touching it, watching wide-eyed as the participants start asking each other questions. They’re mundane questions at first, nothing invading their privacy, but the tiniest bit sweetly, quietly personal. When did you last sing to yourself? Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? The partners begin to smile each other more as the questions slowly become more personal, a little poignant. For what in your life do you feel most grateful? The camera focuses on their hands a lot, being wrung on top of tables and being twisted in laps. Taehyung admires the camerawork, how the expressions of the participants are captured, those little tweaks of their mouths and the looks in their eyes which make everyone unique. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life? The questions are a little different now. They would be considered a little too personal at the beginning, but now the shift towards them was gradual and almost expected. Tell your partner something that you like about them already. The participants smile shyly, sneak glances at each other from behind their hair or under their lashes. It seems like they look at each other more and for longer times. If you were to die this evening, what would you most regret not having told someone? At the end of the video, the participants put on headphones and listen to a track from an old-fashioned music player, what Taehyung assumes is the song he’s listening to himself, while trying their best to maintain eye contact. Taehyung doesn’t want to be cheesy, but he can see them grinning at each other, laughing, that slow fade of a smile which happens sometimes when couples look at each other and are so captivated by what they see that they forget even to smile. He can see them falling in love. The music video ends with the participants shaking hands and walking away from each other. Some hug. And Taehyung…Taehyung is a lot of things, emotional and hooked on the song and itching to do more research, but mostly he feels like this has helped him more than any of his other futile Google searches and fanfiction browsing did. He just isn’t sure how. And then the shop bell jingles as someone comes in. Taehyung doesn’t look up. He’s not going to break his concentration for another math buff. He frowns hard, trying to work it out. How can this help him? How can he use it to help him? A pair of scuffed Timberlands comes to a stop in front of his table. Taehyung stares hard at his computer screen, willing them to go away and stop creeping him out, but he has to look up when it’s been a good, solid minute and the tension in the air is so palpable you could cut it with a knife. He looks up, ready to deliver the telling-off of a lifetime. And then he does a double take, mouth hanging open comically, when he sees that it’s the boy he asked about being a model. The boy looks as beautiful as Taehyung remembered, so beautiful that Taehyung has to stop and gawk just to appreciate how finely made he is. “Are you an art student?” the boy demands abruptly, like Taehyung has wronged him already. He’s taken off his beanie and is twisting it in his fingers, stretching the poor material. His hair falls in dark waves over his unreadable eyes. “Yes,” Taehyung says, slowly shutting his laptop. His eyes go to the beanie, which is now being crushed in the boy’s fist, as he wonders what the beanie ever did to him. The boy seems to realize this and folds his arms, beanie dangling rather anticlimactically from his fingers. “You asked me whether I’m a model,” he says, and it strikes Taehyung how walled-off he seems. His face is utterly, immaculately blank, mouth an almost perfectly flat line and eyes empty. He is beautiful, Taehyung won’t deny that, but in the way marble statues are beautiful, carved by long-dead Greek sculptors, staring out at the world through empty, milky blind eyes. He seems unreachable, and Taehyung doesn’t know what made him think that he could approach him on that first day. The boy seemed human then, bent over his laptop and notebooks just like the rest of them, humbled by professors brandishing their deadlines, time steadily marching on against them. He was one of many. Understandable. But still shining brighter than anyone Taehyung’s ever seen. But now…he seems to carry himself above all of them, in a place colder than any Taehyung will ever desire to go. “Why?” “I was wondering whether I could get you to model for me,” Taehyung says. “I have a project coming up which I need a model for, and you look about right.” The boy seems to be searching him for something. Whatever he does or doesn’t find, he seems satisfied. “How much would you be paying me?” “Oh, um…” Taehyung hadn’t thought about this. Money is no object in his life. He scrubs one hand through his dishevelled hair and waves the other one. “I don’t know. As much as you want.” The boy looks taken aback at this. “I mean, as much as you want within reason,” Taehyung adds hastily. He’s not an idiot. “By model,” the boy says slowly, “you mean you’ll be painting me?” “Yup.” Taehyung grins amiably. “Just a project I need to brush up for.” He laughs at his own joke. The boy stares at him, unimpressed. “Okay, yeah, you’re not one for jokes,” Taehyung mutters, trailing off. “So, will you do it? Will you model for me?” “How much will you pay me?” “Name a price.” The boy gnaws his lip, hovering. “20,000 won an hour.” [Author’s note: About $17.] “Done,” Taehyung says. His father makes more than that every minute. The boy looks, for a brief, fleeting moment, happy. Hopeful. Then the expression slides away to be replaced with the blank brick of his walls. “We have to trade numbers,” he says, businesslike, brisk. “Where do you want me to write it?” “Oh, uh,” Taehyung looks around for a piece of paper and fails to find one while the boy rummages in his rucksack and pulls out a pen. Taehyung’s napkin is crumpled and soiled with coffee he spilled when he accidentally knocked over his mug. “Um, here.” The boy looks down at the palm Taehyung offers him, pen uncapped and poised in the air. He looks at Taehyung, expression saying, Seriously? Taehyung holds his hand out more insistently. The boy finally sighs and takes Taehyung’s hand, writing his number in black ink. The tip of the pen scratches over Taehyung’s palm. When the boy is done, he releases Taehyung’s hand. Taehyung draws it back into his lap. His skin burns where the boy touched it. “Tell me your number,” the boy says, pulling his phone out of his pocket and hovering his thumbs over the keypad. Taehyung does, and he enters it in. He pauses, looking up at Taehyung. “What’s your name?” “What?” Taehyung asks dumbly. “Your name,” the boy repeats. “Oh—Taehyung. Kim Taehyung.” The boy types it in and clicks his phone off. He makes to leave, stuffing his phone back into his pocket, but Taehyung scrambles after him. “Wait!” When he catches the boy’s sleeve, the boy goes completely motionless. He looks down at Taehyung’s hand on his sleeve, then up at Taehyung. Taehyung can’t read his face at all. “What’s your name?” Taehyung asks. “Jeon Jungkook,” the boy says after a pause. He opens his mouth as if to say more, then closes it. Taehyung releases the sleeve a little belatedly when the awkwardness builds to unbearable levels around them, stumbling over its own chains as it rattles them. “Right,” Taehyung says. “I’ll, um, text—? No, I mean…can you meet me tomorrow at my apartment at ten in the morning? I’ll text you the address.” “Okay,” the boy says impassively. His hand reaches out as if to rub at his arm, but he clenches it into a fist and draws it back to his side. “I’ll be there. Bye…Taehyung.” He says Taehyung’s name almost hurriedly, as if he’s not supposed to and it’s a taboo word, and then he stalks out of the cafe, Timberlands making hardly any sound on the fashionably cement floor. Taehyung watches him go. “Bye, Jungkook,” he says softly. ~ Longing “Hi,” Taehyung says, beaming his biggest grin at Jungkook when he opens his door. Jungkook is wearing a huge, plain white shirt and sweats, a black beanie over his hair. He slides off his Timberlands at the door, stepping in in his black socks. He doesn’t carry a rucksack and keeps his arms defensively folded over his chest, which makes him look a bit like a critic on House Hunters. Taehyung’s grin has stopped wars and ground the earth to a halt. Taehyung’s grin has broken hearts and convinced strict headmasters. Epics, probably, have been written about Taehyung’s grin. One day, a constellation will be named after Taehyung’s grin. But Jungkook simply keeps his arms folded over his chest, unimpressed and decidedly not starstruck, and Taehyung pouts to himself. Taehyung’s apartment is simple, messy, perhaps a little more comfortable than what you would expect from a college student, but enough. His parents wanted to rent a house for him, but he drew the line at that. He’d had enough of living in luxury. He didn’t want to run away from his house of won bills just to find himself trapped in another one again. Strange, discordantly expensive objects are scattered around it, though, things his parents sent without a note or warning which he feels too guilty about to shove to the back of a drawer or cupboard. The expensive, handmade rice paper screen they flew all the way from Japan, every branch of the cherry blossom tree in full bloom on it meticulously painted on. A golden water pitcher with intricate designs etched into it. The supremely uncomfortable armchair which Taehyung never sits in made out of shining, painstakingly polished wood with gold inlay lining the armrests and excruciatingly pompous clawed feet, out of place amongst the other sagging couches Taehyung bought from a yard sale and lugged up the stairs himself. He was tired of other people doing things for him. Jungkook eyes them curiously, a line appearing between his dark eyebrows as he frowns, but he doesn’t comment on it. Taehyung sits down on the saggiest, most comfortable couch and motions for Jungkook to sit across from him. Jungkook skirts around the armchair, running a finger over the almost reflective wood as he passes, and then sits down in a blue one-seater with red and white stripes and white stars with Taehyung loves for how little it matches the rest of the apartment. A symbol of patriotism of a country he’s never even been to. There’s a metaphor somewhere, he just knows it. Taehyung enjoys the expression of alarm on Jungkook’s face when he sits down in the armchair and it swallows him up, sucking his body into it. Jungkook struggles back out of the grip of the pilled, slightly rough material and leans forward gingerly. “So,” Taehyung says. “We’ve settled the price—20,000 won an hour—so let me tell you about the project I’m doing which you’re modelling for. It’s titled—” he hesitates. You don’t—tell someone that you’re trying to fall in love with them, right? That’s creepy. That’s just off. That would scare Jungkook away, and he’s on edge enough as it is, his walls up and blaring in Taehyung’s face. “—Emotions,” he says finally, slowly. “The prompt was just emotions. So I was thinking I could paint you feeling different emotions.” Jungkook blinks. “Emotions?” he asks. “Yes,” Taehyung says unnecessarily, “emotions. It should be simple enough, right?” “But I’m not a good actor,” Jungkook says uncertainly, hands twisted in his lap. “To be frank with you, I’m pretty shit at it. You might have the wrong man for the job.” But he looks wistful, and he’s pleading with Taehyung, as if asking him to take him on even so. “That’s alright,” Taehyung says. He has this figured out. “I was thinking the way I could get this to work is—say, to get you to feel sad, I ask you to tell me about something sad, or to remember something sad which happened to you.” It’s something like the Wildfire music video, he thinks. Jungkook tells him things about himself, he’ll fall in love with Jungkook, and it’ll show in his paintings. Simple as that. Telling Jungkook it’s emotions he’s supposed to model for makes sense too. Love is seeing someone for who they really are including all their emotions and all their ugliness—their pains, their joys. He knows that much. So documenting Jungkook’s expressions and demeanor really isn’t too far off the mark, and Taehyung will get to know him in the process. From there, how far can it be to love? Jungkook’s lips part. “This sounds very…personal.” “I can increase your fee if you want,” Taehyung says. Jungkook hesitates only for a split second. Then—“25,000 won,” he says, face wildly hopeful as if he thinks Taehyung will refuse, but it’s worth a shot anyway. [Author’s note: About $21.] “Sure,” Taehyung says. His father still makes more money than that every minute. Jungkook looks taken aback. “Oh,” he says, and Taehyung knows he was expecting to be turned down. “Oh. Okay.” “So, any questions?” Taehyung bounces up and down on the couch in barely suppressed excitement. “Um, no, I guess not,” Jungkook says reluctantly. “Okay, can we start now?” Taehyung asks. Jungkook is surprised. Taehyung can tell because he stops wringing his hands. “Now?” “Yes, now,” Taehyung says. “Wait, actually, hold on a minute.” He disappears into his art room, leaving Jungkook sitting stiffly on the laughably American couch, then comes back in with a canvas on an easel. He drags the coffee table out of the way to make room for it, then leaves and comes back again with a cup of water, his brushes, and his paints. He pulls his painting stool in front of the canvas, sits down, and thinks for a while. Happiness should be easy, right? Happiness isn’t that complex. It’s the most universally used emoji. It’s the easiest emotion to fake, but sometimes the hardest to find. Taehyung nods and begins. “Okay. Is there anything which really, really makes you happy?” Jungkook hesitates. “Jungkook,” Taehyung says after the pause has gone on uncomfortably long, “you have to open up if you’re going to model emotions. Emotions. You can’t just be a blank slate.” “Okay,” he says finally. “Okay, yeah. Um. I love my family, and they make me happy. Obviously. There’s other stuff too, like—” He falters again, and Taehyung can see where he censors himself. It’s alright. He’ll open up. “Yeah. My family.” “Tell me about them,” Taehyung says, painting the stool he’s sitting on himself first. He has a feeling Jin won’t appreciate the profound metaphorical potential of a saggy stars and stripes-patterned couch, so he’s changing the background. One of the perks of working with paint and not photography—it’s so much more easy to manipulate. “There’s Eomma and Appa,” he says as Taehyung begins to start on the outline of his body, his hands folded in his lap like curled leaves, his crossed ankles, his slightly hunched-forward shoulders. The stool is a bit wonky, one of the legs shorter than the other and the surface uneven, but small details will always be sacrificed in exchange for speed, and Taehyung can always touch it up later. Now he has to work quickly. “And I have one older brother, Junghyun.” Jungkook hesitates. The shadow of something Taehyung does not know him well enough to decipher passes over his face. “Junghyun’s…in the army.” “Do you miss them?” he asks. “Yes,” Jungkook says, and there it is: that vulnerable note in his voice which catches Taehyung off guard. “So much.” Taehyung looks up, surprised. Jungkook’s face isn’t happy. Jungkook’s face is wistful, filled with longing deeper than Taehyung can understand, and Taehyung thinks, And I thought happiness was simple. But it’s okay. He can work with this. He quickly fills in the soft waves and falls of Jungkook’s hair with the darkest shade of brown paint he has, hastily mixed with black in his palette with the end of his brush. “Do you have any pets?” “A dog,” Jungkook says. “Cloud. But he’s old and has breathing trouble. The doctor tells us it’s just his breed. I want to go and see him because every time my mom calls me she tells me his breathing is getting more and more labored and he could go any day. But college is really busy, and I can’t afford the time or money to go south back to Busan, so…the best I can do is tell him I love him over the phone and listen to him bark at the sound of my voice.” Taehyung glances up again. Jungkook’s face has grown sad. Oh, lord. Jungkook’s expressions are like paint under a leaky faucet which drips different colors with every drop: just one word and an emotion Taehyung thought they had settled on changes into something else, diluted and concentrated and mixed into another shade. “Tell me about Busan,” Taehyung says, brushing in the outline of Jungkook’s face quickly. He’s already settled on longing since most of what makes Jungkook happy is obviously not with him right now, so he’s just going to roll with it. “Tell me what you miss about it.” “The seafood,” Jungkook says, and his gaze gets far away. “The city lights. The lack of skyscrapers, not like here in Seoul—in Busan we have space to spread out and relax, and there’s none of the frantic rush to build upwards there like there is here. Every night I’d fall asleep to the sound of barking dogs. We lived near the sea, so there was always sea air on my tongue.” His voice is soft, low, heavy with the weight of memories. “I miss the beaches—the sand, even though you’d come across a bottle or a washed-up flip flop sometimes, always felt so at home between my toes. And the temples. Did you know that Busan has a lot of temples?” “No,” Taehyung says, biting his lip as he tries to capture the exact shape of Jungkook’s eyebrows. “Tell me about them.” “I loved going to the temples. I’m not a religious person, but some of them are over a thousand years old, and at this point they’re less temples and more monuments of Buddhism enduring through the ages. All the tourists go to Beomeosa, but I love Haedong Yonggungsa. It’s built right on the rocks by the seaside, and the water is so clean there because it’s surrounded by forest you need to hike through and only hardcore tourists will go there—tourists who care about the environment, not taking selfies and buying souvenirs. Sometimes when I leaned on the railing and looked out to sea, I closed my eyes and imagined what the temple would have been like in its heyday. The murmur of pilgrims praying. The smell of incense burning. The air of fervent faith hanging around the place, religion tinged with the tiniest hint of desperation.” He breathes out slowly. “But now it’s just a house for forgotten gods. And all it is is a nice backdrop for selfies and a bunch of reviews on TripAdvisor.” His voice is colored bitter now, and so is his expression. Taehyung pauses, tortured. He was just going to start on his eyes. He’s finally managed to capture the exact downward slant of his eyebrows, complex and expressing so much more than Taehyung’s entire face can. He picked the right model for this project. Jungkook’s face is so expressive when he isn’t closing it off. “What else makes you happy?” Taehyung asks, brush hovering over the canvas. “As in the small things which all come together to make one big thing, but which you don’t get to have often. The things you tell yourself you’ll do someday but you never manage to find time to.” “Oh.” Jungkook’s teeth appear as he gnaws on his lip. “Going to dog cafes. I love dogs. They just have…they have so much love to give, and they don’t care about your color or gender or age or talents. They just bound up to you and give you all they have. Simple creatures.” His voice is fond, and Taehyung again halts. This isn’t what he’s looking for. It’s so hard to pin down Jungkook’s expressions. “But I get to go to dog cafes once in a blue moon. There’s one not far from campus, but schoolwork means I don’t get to go much.” There it is. Taehyung works as fast as he can, starting on the shape of his eyes, the way the corners droop, the way his eyes are downcast in memory. “What else?” he asks after a moment of silence passes and he finishes Jungkook’s right eye. “I just want a rest, sometimes,” he says, tucking his crossed ankles closer to the bottom of the armchair. “There’s so much work to be done and it never seems to end. All the professors know is work. My life isn’t even a life right now—it’s all deadlines and work, deadlines and work. I miss the simpler days of childhood, you know? In middle school I complained about an essay I had a month to write along with teacher help. But now I have five to write in a week and that’s with other things added in. I just miss the peace of being a kid. How easy it was to just slow down and stop and drop it all when you had nothing resting on your shoulders.” Taehyung finishes the left eye. Nostalgia sits on the curve of Jungkook’s eyelid where it is absent from the right, but it’s not too obvious to be noticeable. “I miss my kid days too,” Taehyung says, because he’s working on the nose now, and he doesn’t think the nose expresses particularly much, so it’s alright to distract Jungkook. “People paying for you. People taking care of your life for you. People cleaning up after you. But I think everyone reaches a stage where they have to grow up. Some people reach it earlier than they should and others later. But I think no matter on which side of the fence people stand, we’ll always regret not being on the other.” He finishes off Jungkook’s nose with a flourish, noting how it’s a little big in proportion to the rest of the face, and sees Jungkook looking at him askance. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “You could say that.” The mouth now. The mouth is important. He can’t afford for Jungkook’s expression to change halfway. “Tell me about something you long for but don’t want to admit to yourself,” Taehyung says. “The kind of thing which whispers in your ears late at night when you want to go to sleep. The kind of thing you drown in alcohol and bad decisions.” Jungkook’s mouth turns down almost instantly. Taehyung begins as quickly as possible, using the lightest shade of grey to shadow in the dip of his philtrum, and then picks up the brush he dipped in the shade of pink closest to Jungkook’s lips he could mix. He’s glad he prepared it before, because Jungkook’s mouth is always changing, always moving, and there’s no time to mix colors when the profoundest depths of feeling and the subtlest notes of sadness are being lost every second in the shift of his mouth. “I hate my major,” he says quietly, almost whispering it. “I hate that every second I spend on it is a second I feel is wasted. I hate that it kills me to sit down every day and prepare myself for a life I know I’ll despise. And I hate that I feel that way, because the hopes and dreams of everyone I love is resting on me succeeding at that nightmare, but all I want sometimes is to escape. Run away from everyone clutching at me to save them. And that makes me…the worst person that can ever be. And the worst thing is that I don’t even have it in me to feel guilty about it.” But Taehyung can see it. He can see the guilt splattered ugly and black all over his features, although the longing overpowers it enough that he can skim it off the way you skim oil off a container of frozen soup. There is want written all over his features, the want which kills you inside and rips apart your soul for keeping it in you, and Taehyung feels like he can’t breathe for fear of letting it loose as he finishes the last stroke of Jungkook’s mouth. He sets down his brush, closes his eyes. When he opens them, two Jungkooks are watching him, one on the canvas and one on the armchair, one with terrible longing written all over his features and another with a clean slate of a face again, wiped blank and empty. “Are you done?” Jungkook asks him. “Not quite yet,” he says, surveying the wobbly edges of the stool and the odd dent beneath Jungkook’s cheekbone where Taehyung narrowed his face a bit too much. He winces at a stray stroke of pink running into the pale peach of the skin of his face in the middle of his mouth. That’s going to be tough to cover up. “But I don’t need you to model for the next part.” “Oh, okay.” Jungkook stands awkwardly, then wavers, trying to decide what Taehyung wants from him. “Um…can I leave, then?” Taehyung’s lips part. He almost tells Jungkook no, stay, stay because I’m as lonely as you sound in this empty apartment which echoes with the chill of my parents’ riches. Stay so I can catch another glimpse into your oddly vulnerable heart. Stay so I can have another excuse to have art on my metaphor of a couch, beauty overlaid on stars and stripes. But he doesn’t. Because Jungkook is a model and he is an artist, Jungkook is an employee and he is the employer, and the price of 25,000 won hangs above them like a death sentence, like a guillotine blade. “Okay,” Taehyung says. “How long was that?” “Why?” Jungkook asks. “I need to pay you,” he says. “Do you think it was, like, one hour?” Jungkook clicks his phone on to look at the time. “Yeah, about one hour.” “Here’s your 25,000.” Taehyung reaches for his wallet and draws out a few bills, leaning forward in his stool to hand them to Jungkook. Jungkook holds them gingerly, examining them from every angle, as if he’s simultaneously astounded at that much money at once and also afraid that it’s going to vanish. Taehyung laughs. “No need to look like that.” Jungkook catches himself. “I should go.” He looks down at Taehyung. “Yeah. I should go.” “Can you be back here tomorrow?” he asks. “Same time?” Jungkook nods. “I’ll do that.” A moment passes while they stand, suspended in time, in that brief silence of possibility while the third hand on the clock stays still. And then it moves forward, and they both jolt into motion. Taehyung reaches to pack up his paints, and Jungkook heads towards the door. “Bye, Jungkook,” Taehyung calls as he collects his brushes and places them in the cup. “Bye,” he says, after a heartbeat’s hesitation, “Taehyung.” And then the most beautiful thing which has ever stepped foot in Taehyung’s cold, loveless apartment is gone. ~ Taehyung works on the painting after he eats lunch. He doesn’t taste the takeout he gets with Jimin. It’s Chinese, the noodles greasy on his tongue, but deliciously unhealthy and fried. His mother would gasp if she saw her son putting such horrors into his system—she’s one of the hippie-food buffs, a vegan, who eats all-organic and gluten-free just because she can and has the money to. But Taehyung doesn’t care. Taehyung likes the oil sitting low in his stomach sometimes, likes how it dirties away the overly- perfected clean-cut corners of being born with a silver spoon stuffed in his mouth. “What’s your latest project?” Jimin asks as he slurps his soup noisily. “It must be big, because I just told you that the sky is green with chimpanzees and you made this noncommittal kind of humming sound.” “Oh,” Taehyung says, jolting back into focus, pulling himself away from the dips and curves of a lovely, soft mouth and back into the Chinese shop. The cheap shine of the white tiles on the walls fills his consciousness again, the smell of grease and the sound of ladles on woks filtering through from the kitchen. “It’s—oh. Seokjin gave us a prompt which was just one word: love.” “Love?” Jimin asks in confusion. “Yes,” he says. “Love.” “What are you doing for it?” he asks. “Painting couples? Maybe one of those artsy-fartsy abstract color-splash things you art buffs go for?” Taehyung doesn’t even counter the insult. “I have a guy modelling for me,” he says. “Jeon Jungkook. He’s really, really beautiful, and I told him that the prompt was emotions so I could paint him with different expressions. So far, it’s turned out quite well, I actually kind of wanted happiness but it turns out that it’s harder to get him to stay on one feeling long enough, so it—” “Wait, wait, wait,” Jimin cuts in. “Why are you lying to him? You told me the prompt is love. And how will having him as a model help you meet the prompt?” Taehyung presses his lips together. “Okay, long story short…I know basically everyone in my class is going to be doing couples. It’s such an obvious choice, and there’re so many of them. I don’t want to do that. I’d basically be the painter equivalent of a wedding photographer. So I had an idea and I acted on it.” He leans forward on the table, the plastic cover crinkling under his elbows. Jimin eyes him uneasily. “What was the idea?” “Well, you kind of gave it to me,” he says. “Something you said caught up to me: my emotions show through my art. So I thought, simple. I’ll just paint something I love.” “Wait,” Jimin says, with the air of someone struggling through swamp with ropes holding him back, “you’re—you’re in love with Jungkook?” “Okay, the thing is,” Taehyung says, feeling a sore need to elaborate, “I read about an experiment which was conducted by this scientist called Aron and then replicated in a music video. Basically, they put two people of opposite gender—I guess same gender if they were gay—together, and they made them ask each other 36 questions and answer them. Then they listened to the song the music video was accompanied by and stared into each other’s eyes for four minutes.” “Okay?” Jimin asks. “Where are you going with this?” “In the original experiment done by Aron, the experiment worked,” he says, excitement entering his voice. “A while after, two of the participants were married.” “So you’re saying…” “The experiment was to see whether strangers could fall in love,” he says, words tripping over each other in his haste to get them out, “and it worked. They just had to get to know each other, their fears and hopes and dreams. In the proper conditions, they fell in love.” Jimin is frowning hard, trying to put the whole thing together. “So,” he says with some effort, “so what you’re trying to do is…” “I’m going to fall in love with Jungkook,” he says. “And it’ll show through my paintings of him.” Jimin can’t seem to hold it in. He throws his head back and laughs. “What?” Taehyung asks, confused. “What is it?” “Tae,” he wheezes, wiping soup droplets as they fly from his mouth, “Tae, it’s not that easy. How could you think that it’s that easy? You can’t just fall in love like that. Love isn’t something you can create or facilitate. Love isn’t something you can engineer. It has to work in its own time in its own mysterious ways, and definitely not in time for your project deadline.” “No,” he says, feeling like a stupid little kid for believing in fairy tales woven out of wistful dreams. “No, it can be done once I get to know him. The experiment proved it. And to get him to feel the emotions, he tells me about them. Like, when I want him to be happy, he tells me about things which make him happy, and I get to know more about him. I will fall in love with him and it’ll show through my work and I’ll ace this project.” “Tae,” he says, disbelief and skepticism leaking into his voice, “how can you think that? It’s not that simple. Love will not be held down and controlled by human reins.” “What do you know about it, Jimin?” Taehyung says, a great wave of exasperation rising up in him. It is that simple, it is. He knows it. He believes it. “Have you ever been in love?” “No,” he says after a pause, “but I know enough about it to know that it doesn’t work that way.” “I love my parents, Jimin,” he says, and he’s just tired now. “I love them even though they’ve never shown a sign of loving me, even though they’ve never tried to hide the fact that I’m just an accident because the condom broke. And not even a happy accident. What have they ever done for me other than pour their money into me? When have they ever cared for me? When I burned myself trying to teach myself how to iron clothes because I wanted to do something on my own for once and not just leave it to the servants, it wasn’t them who held it under running water. When I cut myself trying to use a knife, it wasn’t them who plastered it up. When I broke my wrist, it wasn’t them who drove me to the hospital. It was me. It was all me.” He pushes his noodles away. “I’ve mothered and fathered myself my whole life.They’re paper cutouts of parents, and our family is so broken I laugh to call it a family at all. But I love them anyway. I love them for all they’ve hurt me and for all they’ve never done. So don’t make out love to be some kind of soft fairy tale thing which only happens in specific conditions and only happens out in the rain on Valentine’s Day. Because it isn’t. Sometimes it’s everything and sometimes it’s nothing at all. If it can come when unwanted, it can come when wanted. And it really is as simple as that.” He stands up, chair legs scraping harshly over the floor, and stalks out of the shop. ~ Now Taehyung is back at his apartment, sitting in front of his easel and finishing up the painting. He’s filled in the background more, made it a bare white wall with a smooth cement floor, and touched up the stool—added the shine of light on the wood, made the curve of the round top more precise and realistic. He’d thought the wall looked too bare, so he added hanging plants, leaves and fronds spilling over the rims of their bowl-shaped pots, which hang from chains from the top of the canvas above Jungkook’s head. But they’re all poisonous colors: neon pink and blaring orange and alarm yellow, and their tendrils are more hungry than graceful. A single butterfly rests on Jungkook’s lips to cover up the stray stroke of pink. Its wings seem to almost flutter off the canvas, shining with the iridescent, toxic colors of an oil spill: greasy pink and green and blue. Taehyung sets down his brush. He’s done. Jungkook stares with unspeakable, crippling longing at the polished concrete floor in front of him, and Taehyung’s heart can’t decide which to hurt for more—the one on canvas or the one in real life. Taehyung will take all of his poison. Taehyung will take all of the darkness he hides inside of him, all the venom he keeps locked away. And he will turn it into art. Laughter “What are we doing today?” Jungkook asks, stepping in through the front door. Taehyung leads him into the art room, because he feels like Jungkook is uncomfortable in the mismatched living room. The art room always calms Taehyung down with its smell of acrylics and paint—it’s the only room in the apartment which is wholly his, and he purposely left it undecorated at first, with its white walls and polished concrete floor, to draw attention to the paintings ranged around the room. The ones on canvas are propped against the walls on the floor and the watercolors on paper are tacked to the walls. Nearly every square inch of space on the walls as high as Taehyung can reach is covered in drawings and paintings. A new one is added about every week. Soon he’ll need to start using a stepladder to fit in more. “We’re doing happiness,” he says, motioning for Jungkook to sit down on a stool backing a bare wall, the easel and canvas positioned in front of it. He’s wisely already done the background for this one: currently, the canvas is painted with an empty swing hanging from a tree branch. A hint of the tree’s canopy can be seen above it, and the sunlight filtering through the leaves dapples the grass with liquid gold. The tree trunk can be seen at the very side of the picture, although it isn’t noticeable in contrast to the rest of the scene, the grass and the leaves and the hints of brilliantly blue sky peeking through the green. Taehyung meant for it to be like that. Etched faintly into the bark like a message in a bottle for the observant to find is a heart with butterfly wings. “I thought we did that yesterday,” he says, puzzled, as he sits down. “We were supposed to, but we got derailed and it turned into longing instead. It’s alright, it went fine.” Taehyung putters around the room, looking for what he was sure he saw just yesterday, and eventually he comes up with something with satisfies him. “Hold this,” he says, giving Jungkook a broom and a rake. “One in each hand the way you would hold onto a swing. It isn’t rope, but it’ll do.” Jungkook takes them from him in confusion, holding them aloft stiffly although Taehyung knows they’re light. “Why am I doing this?” “The background is you on a swing,” he says. “I don’t have an actual swing, which would be optimal, so this will have to do. Don’t hold them so awkwardly; lower your shoulders. You need to look relaxed.” Jungkook obliges, then hesitates. “Can I—see it?” he asks as Taehyung moves to sit on his stool. Taehyung pauses. “See what?” “The finished painting. The one of…longing. It is finished, right?” “Yeah, yeah, of course.” Taehyung crosses the room to a drying rack, where he picks up the canvas and carries it over carefully. He holds it up for Jungkook to see. “Here.” Jungkook’s eyes widen. “I look…” he hesitates. “Like what I see when I look in the mirror, but…is that what I looked like when I was saying all those things?” “Yes,” Taehyung says softly. “This and more than I could ever paint.” The canvas is large and unwieldy, so he props it up against the wall where Jungkook can see it. Jungkook can’t take his eyes off it. “Shit, Taehyung, you’re really talented, you know that?” He looks up at Taehyung with wonder painted into every line of his face. “With the butterfly and the plants and all. You made me look beautiful.” “You are beautiful,” Taehyung says without thinking. Jungkook looks away. He blushes, color slowly rising on his cheeks, and Taehyung feels a twinge in his chest. It’s not love, but it’s a start. Taehyung slides his right hand into his pocket in readiness, feeling for the smooth plastic of his phone case, and transfers his brush to his left hand. He starts painting, filling in Jungkook’s hair and the shape of his face. “Aren’t you going to ask me to tell you about something?” Jungkook asks. He hesitates. “And I thought you were right-handed.” “I’m ambidextrous, actually,” he replies. “I’m naturally left-handed, but the school system forced me into using my right.” Jungkook blinks. “I’ve never met an ambidextrous person before.” “Now you have,” Taehyung says with a smile. “So do you prefer one hand in particular, or are they equally favored?” “I prefer my left hand, since I’m naturally left-handed,” Taehyung says. “But I write naturally with my right hand because that’s how I was taught, and I paint with my right hand sometimes just to switch things up. It’s important to keep things fresh and avoid your style from going stale when you’re an artist.” He peers around the canvas, sliding his phone surreptitiously out of his pocket behind cover of the canvas, and shoots Jungkook a grin. “Also, it’s nice to watch people freak out sometimes when I write or draw with both hands. They look like I sprouted a new head and told them Trump’s America will really be great again.” Jungkook laughs. Taehyung whips out his phone, the camera app already open, and lets it focus for a second before taking a picture. Immediately, Jungkook’s face shuts down, his mouth flattening out like a heartbeat monitor after tears have been shed and hope has been lost. “What was that for?” he asks, looking like he’s ready to bolt at any minute. “I lied,” Taehyung says, inspecting the picture. A little blurry, but he can paint from it just fine. “Kind of. We are doing happiness. But I needed you to laugh and I needed it to be spontaneous, because it isn’t like I could just sit here and tell you jokes until you laughed. There’s also the fact that if I told you about it, you’d never laugh properly. You’d be too awkward and stiff to manage it.” “How do you know that?” he asks, indignant and a little miffed. “I think I’ve seen enough of you to be sure,” Taehyung says. Jungkook sighs. “You shouldn’t have taken it with an iPhone,” he says. “Compared to other phones, iPhone cameras are one of the best along with, say, a Nokia Lumia, but it’s not a DSLR, and you still can’t adjust exposure the way professional photography cameras can.” He waves his hand at the nearby window. “I bet with this light source, there’s terrible blooming going on, and the IS with a hurried shot like that is probably nonexistent. The lag time probably compromised the shot horrendously. The focus is crap with rushed movement like that and the contrast would make a blind man wince. There might even be fringing going on. I wouldn’t put it past a smartphone camera.” He seems to realize he’s said too much around the moment Taehyung’s jaw hits the ground. “What the actual hell,” he says, “was that?” “I…” Jungkook mumbles, shuffling his feet and looking down at the floor, “I used to be a photography major.” “And now what are you?” he asks. “Finance,” Jungkook says, wincing. Taehyung would give him a hard time over it, maybe groan and pound his head slowly against the wall if he were feeling especially melodramatic, but then he remembers. I hate my major, Jungkook’s voice echoes in his head. I hate that every second I spend on it is a second I feel is wasted. I hate that it kills me to sit down every day and prepare myself for a life I know I’ll despise. He remembers the guilt staining Jungkook’s features like an oil spill, polluting the soft beauty of his face with its dark, ugly fingers. He remembers how much Jungkook’s voice dropped in shame when he cut his heart into little strips and laid it out for Taehyung to see, all the demons he keeps inside which Taehyung still doesn’t understand. He remembers, he remembers, he remembers. And he feels bad, suddenly, for making fun of people who do majors which involve numbers when sometimes people need to do what they need to do, and Taehyung doesn’t deserve to stand between them and that. “Why did you switch?” Taehyung ventures. Jungkook’s head snaps abruptly up to him, and Taehyung can tell he’s crossed a line. He stands, shooting up from the stool and folding his arms over his chest. Taehyung closes his eyes briefly. I’ve lost him. “If we’re done here,” Jungkook says stiffly when he opens them again, “and all you wanted was a laugh, can I go?” “Yeah, just—” Taehyung fumbles for his wallet and pulls out a few won bills. “Let me pay you first.” He tries to give Jungkook 25,000 won, but Jungkook leans away from the money uncertainly. “But I’ve hardly even been here for half an hour,” he says, mouth an unsure curl. “I haven’t earned the full pay.” “Nonsense.” Taehyung holds the money out more insistently to him. “Take it.” “No, I—I don’t deserve it.” Taehyung sighs. “Jungkook.” “Give me half, Taehyung.” “No. You need the money.” “And you don’t?” There is something a little desperate in his voice now, panicked and defensive with the air of someone forced into a corner. Taehyung closes his eyes for a moment. “No, actually, I don’t. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I live in the lap of my parent’s luxury and off the money they give me, so no, I don’t need the money. It’s probably what I need the least. I’m as good as piggy bank with a silver spoon stuffed into its mouth, and piggy banks don’t need the coins they keep. So can you just take it?” He didn’t intend for it all to spill out like that, but his words are tired, bitter, with an acidic snap to them he rarely lets make its appearance. He opens his eyes to see Jungkook wide-eyed and frozen, confusion and beauty paralyzed in amber. “Taehyung—” he begins. “No, just—” Taehyung shakes his head. He feels sick. “Just—take it, okay? I know you need it. I don’t mean it condescendingly.” He shakes the won bills. Jungkook doesn’t move. “I know we don’t really know each other,” he says hesitantly, falteringly, “but is there…something you wanna tell me?” “No, not particularly,” Taehyung snaps, “but basically, my parents are loaded and I’m just that son who isn’t interested in money or business and left home to become an art student because he runs away from his parents’ castle of won bills. I’m pathetic, maybe. But I’m trying to create something beautiful out of the meaninglessness of my life and that’s already more than my father and his stocks can say. So can you just take the money, Jungkook, and leave me alone to my messed-up life, and just let me be?” Jungkook flinches. But Taehyung is too exhausted and angry and done to see it or care. He reaches out tentatively and takes the money. Then he backs out of the room, facing Taehyung the whole way as if he’s afraid the slumped mess of a boy sitting in front of the easel will attack him. A moment later, Taehyung hears the click of the door closing behind him. Taehyung realizes belatedly what he’s done. He’s scared Jungkook away. He’s chosen the worst moment of all to let out his problems which are so ridiculous he stops believing in them himself sometimes—who would see it, the son of a rich family suffering and suffocated by won bills?—and now Jungkook is never coming back. As if he didn’t have little enough people in his life already, he’s chased away the one he was pinning his dreams on. Maybe he shouldn’t have. Maybe the hopes of a broken boy is too much to lean on anyone. Taehyung digs his paint-crusted nails hard into the palms of his hands, just barely suppressing the urge to scream. And then he stands up with a violent movement. He stalks through the apartment, tearing it apart until he finds paper and the expensive set of pencils he hasn’t used in ages—paint is his preferred medium. But now he thinks graphite, with its colorless hues and its grainy lines, will do perfectly. He sits down at the dining table and starts to draw. Instead of letting out his feelings like art usually does, he feels the rage inside him building and increasing until it’s overflowing over his walls and he’s slashing the pencil into the paper. He swipes the tears angrily out of his eyes as he works, pencil held like a dagger, and half an hour later, he sets it down, panting with fury. It’s a mummy. But instead of being wrapped in bandages, it’s bound by won bills, merged at the edges into a continuous length, covering every inch of its skin. A circular indent in the won bills covering its face outlines its screaming mouth as it fights to draw breath the world will not permit it. Its hands are outstretched, but they’re bound by paper chains made of money. Money trails behind it, a train of greed and painful luxury. Taehyung leaves it on the table along with the pencil, whose tip has been snapped off from the force with which he was using it. The mummy grasps blindly, ever-screaming, reaching for a salvation it will never see. Sadness Jungkook barrels into his apartment with the force of a bullet train the next day. Taehyung slept in since he doesn’t have morning classes on Mondays, so he’s still in that fuzzy state between waking and dreaming, hair mussed and eyelids drooping. The night before, he dreamt of boats sinking in seas of paint. He was trapped on a raft of canvas and could only watch as they capsized. “We’re doing sadness,” Jungkook says, standing defiantly in the middle of Taehyung’s rug while Taehyung squints at him from the breakfast counter. “Today. We’re doing sadness.” Taehyung nods, yawning, and stands up. “Okay, let me just…” He putters towards the art room, beckoning towards Jungkook to follow. “Come on.” He directs Jungkook to kneel on the hard, polished concrete floor and to hunch forward so that from the easel, he’s seen from the side. Taehyung has some idea for the backdrop, and the cement isn’t dirt, but it’s close enough. Taehyung steps back to appraise it. “Fists in your lap,” he directs. “Clenched. Yes, like that.” He hesitates. “Do you…do you think you could take off your shirt for this?” Jungkook stares at him. “It adds vulnerability,” he says. “Your gigantic white tee right now is very invulnerable and screams college kid.” “Okay,” he says reluctantly, and he moves his hands to the hem of his shirt. He pulls it off and tosses it into a corner. Taehyung looks at him with an artist’s eye and also his own eye. His artist’s eye tells him that Jungkook’s body is perfect, the hint of ribs showing through his side, but also abs—just the kind of lean muscle he needs, with that telltale concave dip in his stomach. His own eye tells him that Jungkook is beautiful and every kind of hot he can think of. Taehyung blinks to dispel his thoughts and says, “Um…okay.” He sits down behind the canvas. “Tell me about sadness, then.” Jungkook takes a deep breath while Taehyung starts on his hair. Golden sunlight sparks along it, streaming in from the window in front of him, and the setting is so beautiful and perfect that Taehyung would do a little dance of happiness if he didn’t have to actually paint it. “I’ll tell you about why I switched my major,” he says, and he halts. Taehyung carefully, carefully draws the naked curve of his back in one clean stroke, the vulnerable, pained slump of his shoulders. His shoulder blades stand out like severed wings against his skin. “Go on,” Taehyung says, and his voice is soft as he shades in Jungkook’s ribs showing through his side. A hint of the broken bones which lie beneath. “I used to be a photography major,” he says, voice tight and painful. “I loved it. Photography is art, and I read manuals and textbooks like they were bibles, memorized angles and exposure settings like they were what I needed to survive. My photographs were the best in my class—my professor said so himself. Ever since I’ve managed to get my hands on a camera, while other kids took selfies, I walked miles to take scenic shots. While other people took pictures of their manicures, I waited hours in the marketplace to find the perfect picture. And it all paid off. By the time I went to university, I had this entire portfolio of photos, and that’s what got me my scholarship and helped me get in.” He pauses. The corners of his mouth droop down. Taehyung flicks his wrist for the bottom of his chin and paints in his neck, the slight bump of his Adam’s apple, the slope of his chest like a mountain after a landslide. When he reaches his stomach, he includes the slight, unavoidable rolls of fat which bunch over his abs. Flaws are important to remind us that we can never be perfect. “My family didn’t support my decision to be a photographer,” he says, head lowering to stare at the ground. Taehyung sucks his lower lip into his mouth in concentration as he draws the incline of his thighs, his knees, curving against the hard ground. “My family isn’t…very well off. I’ve always known as a kid that when I grow up I’ll have to support my parents when they’re old, and no way can photography pay enough to support me and two others. But I was selfish. I told them they couldn’t hold me back from pursuing my dream.” He closes his eyes. Taehyung follows the curve and valleys of his profile with his brush, the bump of his closed eyelids. His lashes are curls of ash against his pale, sunlight-jewelled cheekbones. “What about Junghyun?” Taehyung asks, remembering the older brother Jungkook mentioned. “Doesn’t he support your family too?” “Junghyun is dead,” Jungkook says flatly. “He left for the army and contracted some kind of disease. He died in a foreign hospital, alone, with a sickness which no one could diagnose. He wasn’t even offered the grace of knowing the bringer of his death. When we arrived at his bedside, he was already long gone. We buried him in Busan. And it was my—it was my birthday.” Jungkook takes a shuddering breath. His stomach contracts as he fights to hold it in. “Oh, Jungkook,” Taehyung says softly, pausing in the rounded tip of his nose. “I never got to see him,” Jungkook says, and it sounds more like a sob now. “I never got to—I never got to run to him and hug him and ask him whether he was okay—” His eyelids flutter. His mouth pains Taehyung to paint in, the twist of it, the line running from the edge of his nose to the corner of his mouth filled with the terrible pain of silence. Jungkook opens his eyes. They are empty as marble, and with the movement, the wetness he harbors in his lashes breaks free. A single tear trails down his cheek. Taehyung adds it in swiftly, the pearlescent, transparent drop lit on fire by the sunlight on his skin. Taehyung is done with everything except color, so he stops painting, watches it as it slides down the plane of his cheek and collects on his chin. It drips off with the soft sound of cities crashing to the ground. Taehyung imagines he can hear the muffled plink of it hitting the cement. “So that happened,” Jungkook says dully. “It was a child’s argument before that I be allowed to continue my photography, but suddenly I bore the burden of supporting my parents alone, and it became so much more. I was solely responsible for my parents then. My dream of becoming a photographer—that couldn’t go on.” Taehyung waits. Jungkook winces. “So I switched my major to Finance.” Taehyung can hear it as he pushes himself into motion and colors in the soft peach of Jungkook’s skin: the soft crackle of a little boy’s dreams burning. “I’m good at it,” he says. “It turns out that I have a hand for monitoring investments just as much as I have a hand for monitoring saturation. But…you don’t have to like something you’re good at, and I don’t. I hate it.” His voice breaks, faltering with diluted hope. “But at least it’ll mean that my job will be secure. At least it means that I’ll—that I’ll never have to worry about how to make ends meet and pay for my parents. And I don’t mind sacrificing my dreams if it means my parents live in comfort.” He bows his head. A hush falls over the room, and just as Taehyung finishes the last stroke of black in Jungkook’s slacks, he knows that Jungkook is done. “Thank you,” he says. He starts work on the dirt floor which Jungkook will kneel on, golden blood running in rivulets over the ground. “You can stand up now.” Jungkook straightens up shakily. He sniffs and wipes at his eyes and nose. “Sorry,” he says. “For breaking down on you like that.” “Sorry for making you kneel on the floor,” Taehyung says, eyeing the red which will turn into bruises on Jungkook’s knees. “You’ll have bruises. I didn’t realize.” “It’s alright.” Jungkook hovers. He seems to be reluctant to leave. “Sit for a while,” Taehyung says, motioning to the squashy, light green couch pushed against the wall. It doesn’t go with the sparsely white-painted walls and the bare cement floor of the room. But Taehyung needs somewhere to sit which isn’t his stiff, backless painting stool when he isn’t working, the couch was cheap enough not to remind him of the luxury ones in his parents’ mansion, and the green calms him down. “You don’t have morning classes?” “Not on Mondays.” Jungkook sits down on the couch tentatively, looking relieved when he doesn’t sink two feet into it like the American armchair. “We’ll have to change the times we meet on other weekdays, though. I have classes then.” “Yeah, me too.” Taehyung kind of wants to sit on the couch, but he feels like Jungkook raises his guard if he comes too close, so he keeps on painting, pausing before starting on the wings. From this angle, Jungkook can see his canvas. “You’re giving me wings?” he asks, bewildered. “Yes,” he says. “But they’re folded, and there’s a shackle around your ankle. You can’t fly away.” He motions to said shackle. It trails across the dirt and vanishes out of the edge of the canvas. “Why is there gold stuff on the ground?” he asks. “It’s your blood,” Taehyung says, brushing in the feathers with the purest white paint he has. “Ichor. Angels’ blood is called ichor.” “You made me an angel?” he asks, a little dazed. “No,” Taehyung says, dipping his brush into the white. “I’m just bringing to light what you already are.” There is a silence. Taehyung looks over his shoulder, wondering if he’s offended him somehow. Jungkook stares at the ground, an abashed blush painted on his cheeks. “Why do you just drop compliments on me like that?” he mutters. “You know they’re not true.” “They are, Jungkook,” he says, finishing with the feathers and picking up a thinner brush to add lines at their edges and give them the appearance of being frayed. “You just don’t see it in yourself. You could become a proper model.” “I hate people staring at me.” He twists his hands together in his lap. “I hate them looking at me and judging me for what I can’t change.” “I don’t judge you,” Taehyung says softly. He dips his brush generously in the gold paint and, with a decisive flick of his wrist, splatters it over Jungkook’s wings. Blood drips off the feathers now. “And if you hate being looked at, why did you agree to model for me?” “I need the money.” He looks down. “Oh.” Taehyung’s hand holding the brush falters, and then he goes on. He’s just touching up now. Soon he’ll be done. “Taehyung.” “What?” “Can I ask you something?” “You just did.” “Are we friends?” Taehyung swivels slowly in his seat to look at him, his brush held aloft. A drop of earth-brown paint drips onto his bare thigh—he likes painting with watercolor on top of oil paint when he uses canvas, just to achieve that dreamy, soft, blurred-at-the-edges look he aims for—but he doesn’t notice. “Are we?” he echoes. “I wouldn’t mind being friends, Jungkook, but it’s really your walls which are most in the way.” “You have walls too,” he says, hands folded into one another in his lap. “You act happy and enthusiastic most of the time, but there’s something beneath that. I think the only reason you put so much effort into being energetic and shining brighter than everyone else is to cover up what’s inside you. You have walls too, Taehyung. They’re just covered by golden theater curtains.” Taehyung opens his mouth and finds that he has nothing to say. He closes it. Opens it again. Another drop of brown falls, unnoticed, on his thigh. “You could tell me.” Jungkook looks up at him, gaze steely but hopeful. “It’s not like I have any friends to tell your secrets to.” “I think you already know,” Taehyung says. “From the last time you were here.” “I’m not sure, though.” “Tell me and I’ll tell you whether you’re too far off the mark.” “Your parents are rich,” he says hesitantly, “and you hate that for some reason. You live in this apartment which is in the price range of the average college student, but you drink from golden pitchers and sit in armchairs which cost enough to pay off my student loans. I think you’re an art student to prove something to them and yourself.” “Yes,” Taehyung says. “That’s the rundown. Congratulations, Jungkook. You can now lecture future generations about the life and times of Kim Taehyung.” “But why do you hate it?” Jungkook asks. “What could be so bad about having money?” His voice is wistful, and Taehyung can see the memories of his family’s financial instabilities underlaid beneath the words. “My parent’s marriage was a business deal,” he says. “My father was the heir to a big company and my mother was the daughter of a rising company, so it was logical that they marry and bond the companies together. Their companies are now merged into a massive supercompany which generates billions of won every year. But they’ve never loved each other. My father sees prostitutes and keeps mistresses and my mother doesn’t even try to hide her affairs with men decades younger than her. They’re hardly ever in the house. I was raised by servants, but mostly myself. My parents have never given any sign of caring about me besides funnelling enough money into me to keep me shut up. In my family, love is measured in won bills and stock prices and sentiment is the appreciation of their investments. We run on gears fueled by money, on train tracks which never meet. And that, Jungkook, is why I hate it.” Taehyung wipes the brown away from his thigh and turns back to his easel, brushing it over the darker brown of the oil paint to soften the dirt. He mixes colors for a while to generate rust brown and paints rust onto Jungkook’s shackles. “Why did you become an art student, then?” Jungkook asks finally. “My parents wanted me to go into business, but I’m not going to spend my life doing the same thing which poisoned my childhood.” He picks up a fine-tipped brush and dips it in grey, then dots tiny pebbles into the dirt, digging into Jungkook’s knees and scattered on the dusty ground. “I’m an art student firstly because I love art and anything beautiful without a price tag attached to it, and secondly because I want to prove to my parents that a life lived without more money than you can ever wish for is not necessarily a life lived without happiness. No one is happy in my family, Jungkook. All they can do is work. They don’t allow themselves time to see through their precious contracts and business deals to how unhappy they are. When I was a child, I made a vow to myself. I won’t live in a mansion. I won’t have servants at my beck and call. I’ll live a perfectly happy life doing what I love, and money will be the least of my worries.” He looks at Jungkook. Jungkook looks sad. “This is probably an alien predicament to you,” Taehyung says, setting down the rust-dipped brush and leaning back in his stool to look at the canvas. “What with your family’s—I’m sorry—financial troubles and all. But trust me—the grass is always greener on the other side, whether it be with happiness or won bills.” “It’s alright,” Jungkook says. “I understand. Kind of.” “How was your childhood?” Taehyung picks up his brushes and moves to the sink to wash them. “I sincerely hope your parents are nothing like mine.” “No, no, they’re the best parents I could ever wish for,” he says. “It was tough sometimes to make ends meet and pay the bills, but my household never felt anything but loving. On days when my dad didn’t work, he took us out to the public park or to the beach. We ate our dinner on the pier and sometimes if one of us had a birthday, as a treat, we ate in a proper restaurant, not just takeout, or—or went to see a movie.” In Taehyung’s house, a Michelin-starred chef is employed 24/7. He could order a feast at two in the morning if he felt peckish. He used to play with his toys by himself in their movie theater, the looming screen and the rows and rows of empty seats testimony to the cold, lonely power of money. “I love them,” Jungkook says, gaze far away, “and I would carry the weight of the world for them. Switching my major and giving up my dreams was nothing.” But his shoulders slump and his slight smile disappears, and Taehyung knows that he’s lying to himself. And he knows, too, what emotion the next session will be based on. Delight Do I know any photography majors? Taehyung wonders as he walks through campus after his last class of the day has ended. I’m not sure. They always make me feel bad for taking selfies. He scrolls through his contact list, pursing his lips, as he sits in a shaded alcove set into the wall of the arts building beneath a tree. Oh, there it is. Min Yoongi. Haven’t talked to him for a while. He pulls up the messaging app and texts Yoongi. Taehyung Hey, can you come meet me at the east side of the art building? It takes a minute for the reply to come through. Yoongi What for? Taehyung I’m getting a present for a photography major and I need your help deciding on a camera Yoongi A camera? Wow Must be some really good friend you’ve got there I should start mixing with new people What I wouldn’t give to have a friend who buys me a new camera for my birthday Taehyung XD When will you be here? Yoongi Gimme a few minutes I’m waiting in line at Dunkin Donuts on the other end of campus Btw do you want a donut? Taehyung Yeah a peanut butter one wouldn’t hurt Get me a jam one too And a chocolate I’ll pay you for them so keep the receipt Yoongi Ok A few minutes of radio silence. Taehyung kicks his legs idly, dreaming of the soft flour of a donut giving way and tearing beneath his teeth, warm and slightly greasy. Visions of the creaminess of the peanut butter, the fruity sweetness of the jam, and the crack of the chocolate casing as he bites down fill his mind. He’s dreamed himself into a donut haze by the time Yoongi slinks out of the shadows by the end of the outside corridor. “Oh,” Taehyung says, surprised. “I expected you to cut across the grass if you were coming from Dunkin Donuts. Why’d you come through the corridor?” “ROLS,” Yoongi says shortly. He walks briskly through a patch of sunlight and into Taehyung’s shadowed alcove sheltered from the sun, boosting himself up onto the ledge. He bears a cardboard box stained and damp with grease. Taehyung reaches for it eagerly. “Is that a photography term?” he asks, opening the cardboard box and setting it between them. “No,” Yoongi says, reaching for a donut with rainbow sprinkles. “It stands for ‘route of least sunlight’.” “Ah.” Yoongi is as small, skinny, and pale as Taehyung remembers, only he has silvery grey hair now. He squints at the donut for a while before biting into it. Taehyung is already halfway through a jam one. “So,” Yoongi says conversationally after Taehyung has bulldozed his way through the chocolate donut, “you want camera recommendations?” “Yeah,” Taehyung says, wiping his mouth and licking his fingertips. “What’s the best camera in the world?” Yoongi snorts. “Which doesn’t cost, like, a million won?” “No, it can cost a million won if it has to,” Taehyung says brightly, lifting the peanut butter donut out of the box with worshipful reverence. “Money is no object here.” “Goddamn, Taehyung. That’s some friend you’ve got there.” Yoongi shakes his head and sits back on his haunches, starting on his second donut. “Well, there are a few cameras people argue over for the title of the best camera in the world, but I know what my personal favorite is. You’ll probably get a few different opinions if you took a vote among the photography majors, though, so keep in mind that you should consider other options too.” “It’s okay,” Taehyung says amiably, taking the first bite of the donut and closing his eyes as the peanut butter melts in his mouth. “I trust you. It’s not like I know anything about photography.” “Okay, my personal uncontested favorite camera, which I dream of and lust after and tear my cold, shrivelled heart apart over, which I believe I will find in heaven and hardly manage to hope I will ever hold in these unworthy hands…” “I get it,” Taehyung says, taking another bite. “Your first wet dream was about it and you probably still jack off to it. What is it?” Yoongi closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “The Canon EOS 5D Mark IV,” he says, all in one breath, voice hushed and face glowing with devotion. “Oh,” Taehyung says. “How much does it cost?” Yoongi’s face grows shadowed. He looks at Taehyung with a kind of wounded sorrow. “You just had to shatter the daydream,” he says. “It’s 4,599 US dollars.” Across campus, college students lift their heads hungrily at the mention of so much money in one breath. The instant ramen noodles in their bellies growl. “That’s roughly…” Taehyung does the calculations in his head. “5,404,146.93 won,” Yoongi says sadly with the air of someone who has opened a laptop and stared at the price of something they will never be able to buy but would sell their kidney for for hours. “Not including shipping.” “How fast can it get here, do you think?” Taehyung asks thoughtfully. Yoongi stares at him. “You’re not serious.” “I am. I think if I paid a little extra I could get it here in a few days…” “Taehyung, I would actually, literally have to sell my organs and all my limbs to be able to buy that. How are you even entertaining the thought of buying this? As a birthday present? I wouldn’t give this to my husband at our wedding! Even if that husband were myself!” “He really matters to me,” Taehyung says, thinking of how rarely Jungkook smiles, the corners of his mouth pulled down by the weight of responsibility and the burden of conditional love. “Money is worth more than that.” Yoongi shakes his head. “You’re crazy, Taehyung.” “No,” he says softly. “I just have more than I need and less than I could ever wish for.” ~ “Sit down,” Taehyung says, positioning Jungkook to sit down in the art room on the stool. “Lean against the wall and get comfortable, then close your eyes.” “What are we doing today?” Jungkook asks, sitting down, resting his hands loosely in his lap so his hands dangle between his knees, and placing his feet flat on the ground. “Sleep,” Taehyung says. The camera lies hidden behind the paint-splattered drop sheet he draped over the countertop behind his easel. “Is sleep an emotion?” He settles against the wall and closes his eyes. He’s wearing a white sweater and black slacks again today. Taehyung resists the urge to walk forward and run his hands over his broad shoulders. “No, we’re actually doing peace,” Taehyung says, the half-lie rolling easily off the tip of his tongue. “I just assumed that you look most peaceful when you’re sleeping.” “Hmm,” Jungkook murmurs. “You can actually fall asleep if you want,” Taehyung says, lifting the drop sheet with a rustle and picking up the camera carefully. “Also, I’m going to be putting something in your lap, and you can’t open your eyes or touch it.” “What? Why?” He frowns, eyes still closed. “It’s glass and it’s fragile, and I don’t want you to drop it.” Taehyung places the camera carefully in Jungkook’s lap between his forearms. Jungkook’s fingers twitch and his hands creep towards the camera, but Taehyung warns, “Don’t. Touch.” Jungkook pouts sulkily, moving his hands back. “Okay, stay still. I’ll be quiet. You can go to sleep.” Taehyung moves back behind the easel and sits down on his stool. He decided to kill two birds with one stone. He actually will be painting Jungkook asleep, but the primary focus of today’s session is delight. Once Jungkook opens his eyes and sees the camera, Taehyung will paint him taking a picture or playing with it, maybe pointing it at Taehyung himself. The picture of Jungkook’s elusive happiness. The canvas is already prepared. Against a backdrop of dirty, white-painted walls, paint chipped and warped by water stains, and a pitted, cracked concrete floor, a nightmarish thing stands behind the empty bench, lank, greasy black hair hanging in curtains and obscuring its face, shoulders hunched, clothed in a grubby white dress. Taehyung took his inspiration for it from Samara from The Ring. This meant that he had to watch the movie over and over again to inspect the way she moved and also study pictures of her on Google Images. Taehyung considers this one of the biggest sacrifices he’s ever had to make in the name of art. He had to put his nose up close against his computer screen to inspect Samara, and his heart was pounding loud enough to be heard in his ears as he imagined her clawing her way out of the laptop. He’d had a heart attack when his phone rang midway. He’d expected it to be a whisper of “seven daysssss”, but it turned out to be just Jimin, apologizing for making fun of Taehyung and asking whether he wanted to meet up at the Thai place later. Taehyung apologized for losing his temper and accepted, and somehow, it was a lot easier to look at pictures of Samara after that. Although Taehyung still made sure to always keep the TV in sight. Because, you know, you can never be too prepared. He starts work on Jungkook now. It’s fast and easier to capture than the other emotions, because his face is relaxed in sleep, and his expression doesn’t change. Taehyung is pretty sure he’s actually went to sleep by the time he’s filling in Jungkook’s bare feet. By the time he’s painted Samara’s pale, dead, dirty hands cradling Jungkook’s face almost tenderly, long, earth-caked nails digging into his skin, Jungkook has begun to let out soft, snuffling, adorable snores, confirming Taehyung’s suspicions. As a last touch, he adds a circle of golden rings around Jungkook’s feet. Taehyung leans back to appraise his work. The effect is haunting with a note of terror: a boy rendered vulnerable and unguarded in sleep in the clutches of an instantly recognizable horror movie figure. Jungkook looks angelic, innocent, soft cheeks held by the clammy grip of a monster. Taehyung carefully sets the canvas aside to dry and puts a fresh, blank one on the easel. He opens his mouth to wake Jungkook up, but he catches sight of Jungkook’s face, perfect and cleansed of worry in his slumber, and he hesitates. He stands, trying to make as little noise as possible, and crosses the room. He stands in front of Jungkook. Jungkook’s pink, plush lips are slightly parted, and they look so soft that Taehyung reaches out. He stops himself, curling his hand into a fist. He can’t do this. Jungkook is asleep. He’d almost certainly push Taehyung away if he were awake, and Taehyung is taking advantage of his unconsciousness. But his heart is traitorous, pounding away in his chest, and Taehyung feels dizzy and drunk off the high of possibility. He cups Jungkook’s cheek softly, the skin smooth and warm under his palm. When Jungkook doesn’t wake up, he sweeps his thumb over Jungkook’s lower lip. It dips under the pressure. Perhaps it’s because Jungkook’s sleeping and dreaming that it’s someone else touching his face, but he murmurs and turns his face into Taehyung’s touch, and for the briefest of seconds, every nerve ending in Taehyung’s body comes alive with sensation when he presses his lips to Taehyung’s palm. It physically hurts to pull away, but Taehyung steps back, body flushing hot and cold and skin tingling all over. He stares at his palm. He can still feel the warm, soft ghost of Jungkook’s lips on it. He closes his eyes. “Jungkook,” he says, voice strained and barely audible. He tries again. “Jungkook. Wake up.” Jungkook’s eyes open muzzily, then close again. “Oh, sorry,” he yawns. “I forgot that my eyes are s’posed to be closed.” “No, it’s okay,” Taehyung says, chest hurting with how close he came, how he touched him. “You can open them.” Jungkook opens his eyes lazily. “I was wondering what was in my lap,” he mumbles sleepily, looking down. “Is it still—” He stops talking. He picks up the camera, eyes slowly growing wider and wider. “Is this…” he says faintly. “Is this a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV?” “Yes,” Taehyung says. He knows he should be moving behind the easel and starting to paint, he knows he should be capturing this moment on canvas, but he can’t quite bring himself to see through his brush and not his eyes yet. “You didn’t tell me you had one,” Jungkook says, looking at it with painful wistfulness. “I don’t,” Taehyung says. “Wait,” Jungkook says slowly, looking at him with confusion. “Are you saying that…did you steal this?” “No.” “Then if it isn’t yours, whose is it?” “It’s yours.” Jungkook is struggling to keep up. “No, it’s not. Do you know how much this costs?” “I bought it for you,” Taehyung tells him. Jungkook’s face changes so perceptibly that Taehyung is almost blown away by the clarity of his expressions. Confusion, disbelief, skepticism…and finally, overflowing, immeasurable joy. “Why?” Jungkook says, but he’s smiling so wide it looks like it hurts. “Why would you do something that nice?” “Because I wanted to,” Taehyung says, “and you looked like you needed a little joy in your life.” Jungkook looks like he’s nearly in tears. He stands up and crushes Taehyung to his body in a hug, the camera held safely behind Taehyung’s back. Taehyung gets a faceful of white sweater and broad chest, and he takes an instinctive breath, his lungs filling with the smell of freshly laundered cotton and an indescribable smell which seems to be just Jungkook. There’s the feeling of Jungkook resting his chin in Taehyung’s hair. “Thank you,” he says, voice muffled, and Taehyung can almost imagine the press of his lips to the crown of his head. His chest aches at the thought the way it does when you want something so badly it hurts. “I don’t deserve it and I don’t know why you’d do something so nice, but I’m not complaining. Thank you.” “It’s okay,” Taehyung says, closing his eyes. Memorizing how this feels. Jungkook pulls back after a moment, beaming. “I just don’t understand!” “Money can’t buy happiness,” Taehyung says, “but I’ve got more money than I need anyway, so I thought, why not buy as close as I can get for someone else?” “I’m happy,” Jungkook crows, holding the camera aloft. “Can’t you see that I’m happy? Is it really mine? Mine to keep forever?” “Yes,” Taehyung says. “It’s got an SD card and that special lens and all. I just got the most expensive version they offered.” “Tae,” Jungkook says, eyes shining, and his chest twinges again at the pet name. “Can I take photos with it?” “It’s yours, Jungkook. Do anything you want.” “Oh my God!” he yells, taking off through the apartment with the camera cradled to his chest. Taehyung trails after him patiently like a parent following their child through a candy store. He follows the palpable trail of excitement which leads through the apartment and finds Jungkook positioning the rice paper screen in front of his louvred bedroom window. Light falls through it in slanted bars, muted and turned into something softer by the translucent rice paper. The rest of his bedroom is dim, shadows dappling the floor, sheets of the bed rumpled and unmade. “Taehyung, stand right there,” Jungkook says giddily, already taking a stance with his camera. “What?” “I’ve been your model for nearly a week now,” he says, eyes glittering. “Now it’s your turn.” Taehyung shakes his head in amusement, but he stands where Jungkook asks him to anyway. He can feel lines of warmth on his face where the sunlight falls on his skin. “Move forward just the tiniest bit,” Jungkook directs from behind the camera. “To the left…no, not too left. Like that. Yes.” He gives Taehyung a thumbs-up with his free hand. “Stay right there.” Taehyung tries to remain as motionless as possible. “Now smile for me, Taetae,” Jungkook says, finger resting on the button. Taehyung can’t help it—he smiles, the shadow of pain tingeing the stretch of his lips even though his mouth lies in a bar of sunlight. He feels tired and sad, mind blank from painting, heart stretched from having to accommodate yet another thing he will never have, and he can’t help but think that the click of the camera shutter sounds like the snap of breaking hearts. ~ He’s on the way back to his apartment to meet Jungkook when it happens. He’s lost in his own head, eyes soft and unfocused with the memory of a laughing mouth and crinkled eyes, a nose too big for the rest of the face scrunched up with mirth. He tells himself that Jungkook is a beautiful boy, and beauty is what he lives for, what he dreams of. But he thinks that it’s more than that. Of course, of course, his success will be bittersweet. He nearly misses the crowd of people gathered around something on the road. He’s crossing the road when he hears a gasp and the words “someone help him” and the cry “someone call an ambulance!” Frowning, he jolts himself out of his memories and pushes through the crowd of people standing on their tiptoes and craning their necks to get a look, and when he sees what’s in the middle of the circle of people, he stops. It’s Jungkook. His body is crumpled on the road, limbs ungraceful and flung out. He’s unconscious, his eyes at half-mast, crescents of white beneath his lashes where they’ve rolled up. Blood trickles from a cut on his forehead and red is splattered on the tarmac nearby where he must have knocked it. But Taehyung knows with every fiber of his being that more is wrong than what he can see. No one can lay that still in such an uncomfortable position like a discarded puppet and still be fine. “There aren’t any ambulances available,” someone says. “They say that—they say that they can have one here in thirty minutes, maybe.” Taehyung doesn’t think. He bends down and scoops Jungkook up. He’d thought Jungkook would be heavy for all his muscle and sadness, but Jungkook is light, hanging limply from his arms as if he’s half out of this world already. Taehyung’s vision narrows and weaves dizzyingly at the prospect. No. No. Not when the memory of Jungkook’s smile still burns bright and insistent against the backs of his eyelids. “You shouldn’t move injured people,” someone insists. The crowd surrounding him is faceless, their features blurring together and merging into a meaningless sea. Taehyung doesn’t have time for this. Taehyung doesn’t have time for anything besides getting help. Jungkook is so broken that he knows he’ll never be able to heal all of him, but this is something he can fix, and by God, he’s going to fix it. “She’s right,” another voice pipes up. “Put him back down.” “Let go of him!” “Who even are you?” “If you have ever cared for anyone in your life,” Taehyung says coldly, daring anyone to challenge the ice in his voice, “if you have ever wanted everything in the world and more for someone, then you will move aside and you will let me through.” No one moves. A guy with broad shoulders steps in his path to block his way, chin large and square, features brutish and determined to be the hero in this situation. All these little people. All these little people with their paper hearts. “Put him down, man,” he says. “LET…ME…THROUGH,” Taehyung roars, and the guy flinches. Taehyung’s never been more grateful for the deep volume of his voice until now. The guy steps aside. Taehyung cuts through the people, shoving his shoulder into the chest of anyone who doesn’t move, and the moment he’s free of them, he starts running. Jungkook’s head lolls against his chest. Something meaningful with my life, he thinks, Jungkook’s black hair rustling like spilled ink against the blue knit of his sweater. Maybe making something meaningful out of my life is happening now. He sprints to the student hospital, trying not to jolt Jungkook, conscious of the hands of the clock chasing him at his heels. How much time? How much time does he have left? How much time has Jungkook lain bleeding and unconscious on the road, surrounded by a crowd of useless gawkers trying to feel important? How much time before Taehyung loses the boy who has come to matter to him so much more than he planned? The automatic sliding glass doors don’t open fast enough for him. He kicks one, leaving a black rubber boot mark and making the receptionist inside jump, roaring something incoherent. The doors move open maddeningly slowly. Taehyung runs to the receptionist, barking, “Get me a doctor, now!” A blur of activity and hastily made phone calls, and someone takes Jungkook from him. He watches Jungkook being wheeled away on a gurney, throat bare and exposed to the ceiling and eyes half-shut, and digs his nails into his own arms as he tries not to scream. ~ Taehyung doesn’t know whether it’s an okay thing to do, but he paints Jungkook lying in bed in the hospital room. It’s all he can do to calm himself, so he brings a small, square canvas, a few brushes, and his paints into Jungkook’s hospital room as he waits. When he’s done with the painting of Jungkook lying motionless under the covers, he writes in the best calligraphy he can muster across the bottom of the painting in black paint: In sickness and in death. He dots the period. When he looks up, he’s startled to see that Jungkook is awake. “What are you painting?” he croaks through his dry throat. “Jungkook.” Taehyung rushes to pick up his glass of water and hold it to his chapped lips, and Jungkook swallows a few times before turning his face away. “Jungkook, you have a cracked rib.” “It’s what I’d expect,” he says, voice still a hoarse whisper, “from being hit by a car.” “You were hit by a car?” Taehyung’s heart sinks, and his hands shake as he replaces the glass of water on the nightstand. “A car?” “What are you painting?” Jungkook repeats. “Jungkook,” Taehyung says, holding back tears. He can’t seem to stop repeating his name, and the syllables have never sounded more sweetly painful in his mouth than now. “You got hit by a car and you ask me what I’m painting?” Jungkook looks at him, eyes half-lidded with exhaustion. “Yes.” Taehyung shakes his head and bites his lip. He crosses his room and picks up the canvas, the paint still drying on it, holding it up for Jungkook to see. Jungkook looks at it and smiles, dry lips stretching. “It’s beautiful.” His smile fades a little. “I like that. ‘In sickness and in death’.” Taehyung puts the canvas down and walks back to his bedside, standing over him. His hair is startlingly black against the clinically white cotton of the pillow. His skin is pale. “Does it hurt?” he asks, a lump rising in his throat. “No.” He shifts and his face contorts with pain. “Yes.” “Tell me how to make it better,” he says, desperation entering his voice. “It’s not your job to fix me.” “But it’s my fault you need fixing,” he says, voice bleak. “You were on the way to my apartment, weren’t you?” “Yeah, but I was also going through the pictures I’d taken on the camera you gave me,” he says softly. “So it’s my fault.” “Why were you doing that while crossing the road?” Taehyung asks, not sure whether to be exasperated or cry. “You—you weren’t paying attention. Now look what’s happened.” Jungkook doesn’t answer him. Instead, he turns his head to the side to search the nightstand. “Is the camera okay?” His eyes rove over it. “I threw it onto some grass to save it before I got hit, I think.” “It’s fine,” Taehyung says, sniffing, moving around the bed to pick it up from the other nightstand. He shows it to Jungkook, whose face lights up with relief. “Look. It’s not even scratched. I don’t know how you managed it.” Jungkook smiles. “Look at the photo I took of you.” Taehyung finds the power button after a second. He clicks it on and the word ‘Canon’ fills the screen. He finds the photo gallery and looks for the photo. Eventually, he finds it. It’s his own face with two bars of golden sunlight slanting across it. Only his mouth and his eyes are in the light—the rest of his face is in shadow. His mouth is smiling, but his eyes are sad. “I just realized after I took the picture and left your apartment,” Jungkook says voice quiet against the oppressing silence of the room, “that your smile doesn’t reach your eyes.” Taehyung looks up at him. “I look like a Sephora ad,” he blurts, and then he starts crying. “Hey, hey, hey.” Jungkook says with some confusion. “I’m the one with the cracked rib, not you.” “I know,” Taehyung babbles. “I know, I know.” “Come lie down with me.” Jungkook shifts to make room for him, wincing. “What—in the bed?” Jungkook stares at him. “No, on the ceiling.” He huffs tiredly. “Yes, in the bed.” “You idiot,” Taehyung says, tears rising to his eyes again. “You idiot. You’ve been hit by a car and hospitalized and you’re still being sarcastic.” But he gets under the blanket anyway, falteringly, tentatively, unsure whether Jungkook is being serious. Jungkook watches him as he arranges his limbs in the narrow bed and pulls the covers over them. He turns on his side to face Jungkook. “Happy?” he asks. Jungkook blinks slowly at him. “Yes,” he says, mouth quirking up at the corners in an exhausted smile. “Happy.” ~ (Later, Jungkook’s eyes will fall shut, his breathing evening out and growing slow. Taehyung will ask him, “Are you asleep?” and he won’t reply. Taehyung will curl up closer against his side, his clenched fists just touching his shoulder and his knees drawn up against Jungkook’s hip. He will stare dully at Jungkook’s profile: his slightly parted lips, his chest rising and falling as he breathes, the dark crescents of his lashes against his cheekbones. He will reach out a shaking hand and draw his knuckles down the side of Jungkook’s face. And even though he knows it’s wrong, he will lean forward and he will press a kiss to his cheek. Jungkook’s skin will be soft and warm beneath his lips. The guilt will catch up to him then, roaring above him in dark, looming waves. He will jerk back and swing his legs out of bed, trying not to disturb Jungkook, and he will collect his rucksack. Casting one last glance over his shoulder the way a lost wanderer looks at an oasis before he ventures back into the desert, he will leave. Just as the click of the door shutting resounds through the room, Jungkook will open his eyes.) ~ While Jungkook recovers, Taehyung works on the painting of laughter. He’s decided to base it on Jungkook’s photograph of him, which Jungkook sent him a printed copy of, instead of using the background of the swing—he’ll figure out what to do with the painting of the empty swing later. He replaced his own face with Jungkook’s, which he refers to from the picture he took of him laughing. In the painting, Jungkook’s smile reaches his eyes. When Taehyung is done, he props it up against the wall and takes a few steps back. The original photo was mostly shadow and Taehyung didn’t want that much black in his painting, so he magnified it until Jungkook’s face dominated the canvas and omitted the rice paper screen, showing the edges of the slats of the louvres. The only colors he used were black, a warm yellow aptly named Tuscan Sun, and dark brown for his hair and irises, lit on fire by sunlight. The bars of sunlight which fall across his face illuminate his laughing eyes and mouth. He looks unrecognizable, face transformed by laughter. Taehyung’s heart pangs traitorously. Anger Jungkook walks into his apartment when Taehyung is watching TV. He switches the TV off and shoots to his feet immediately when Jungkook enters, rushing around the couch to stand in front of him and scan him up and down. “What are you doing here?” Taehyung asks, concerned. “Are you all healed up?” “Yeah.” Jungkook steps further into the apartment, closing the door behind him. “The doctor gave me the green light, so I was thinking maybe we should start the sessions again.” “Are you sure you’ve recovered?” Taehyung looks him up and down. “The x-rays showed that the crack in my rib is gone, so yes.” “Oh,” Taehyung says, the seed of an idea already beginning to form in his mind. “Okay, then. We’ll do this in the art room.” They walk there in silence, and Jungkook sits down in the stool without having to be asked. “What have you been doing while I was recovering?” he asks. “I finished up the painting of laughter,” Taehyung answers, bending over to pick up a canvas he’s already prepared, “and I painted backgrounds on a bunch of other canvases. I figured it would save time. They’re just waiting for you to model their emotions.” “Where is it?” Jungkook asks. “The painting of laughter?” Taehyung points as he puts the canvas down carefully on the easel. The painting of Jungkook laughing is propped up against the wall on the countertop next to the sinks, in plain view of the stool where Jungkook sits. “You based it on my photo,” he says, pleased. “But you changed yourself to me.” “Yeah, my apparently shitty iPhone-taken photo came in handy after all.” “That’s good.” A pause. “What are we doing today?” “No emotion in particular,” Taehyung lies. “I just want you to look how you normally do around strangers. Basically, the human equivalent of the Great Wall of China times two.” “Hey!” Jungkook huffs. “But why?” “It’s a bit late for it, but I need a normal, relatively emotionless face from you to show the contrast to the other ones. People who don’t know you very well might not really see much of a difference, so I’m hoping that this will help them compare.” “Oh. Smart.” Jungkook shuffles his feet. “How do you want me to sit?” “Just sit the way you normally do. Face me, please.” Jungkook feels, of course, awkward, so he sits with his feet flat on the floor and his hands placed on top of his thighs, back ramrod straight. “Jesus, Jungkook, I didn’t say sit like a Victorian man,” Taehyung says, adding sparks of light off the shards of multicolored glass which litter the bottom of his canvas. Jungkook scowls. “Since according to you, I’m the Great Wall of China times two, this is me being stiff and formal and Great-Wall-of-China-ing you.” “Wow, who knew you were so great at rhyming,” Taehyung says, flicking his wrist carefully so only the tip of the brush moves. “Although I can’t blame you. I’m sure with your childhood, you had to wall yourself off to deal with your parents’ regrettable financial troubles, hmm?” Taehyung fills his voice with sickly sympathy. Jungkook’s expression goes still, and he wonders whether he’s laying it on too thick, but then Jungkook frowns. “What?” “Love is nice, I suppose.” Taehyung starts on the waves of his hair near the top of the canvas. He’s sure that he can drive Jungkook to his feet soon. “I’m sure it was good to be born into a family the way you describe it. But at the end of the day, it really comes down to who has money and who doesn’t, and there’s no way love can feed hungry mouths. You have to know that.” He wants to wince at the dollops of pity in his voice, as revolting to stomach as mountains of clotted cream, but he can see Jungkook’s face reddening. This is necessary, he reminds himself. This will all be okay later when I explain it. “‘I have to know that’?” Jungkook asks, disbelief colored with irritation filtering into his voice now. “What are you saying, Taehyung?” “You know, Jungkook, if you ever have financial troubles, I wouldn’t mind helping you out,” Taehyung continues, deliberately ignoring him. “It’s not like I’ll ever have to struggle to make ends meet, but I guess you grew up like that. I mean, think about it: my parents could probably buy ten of the house you grew up in without batting an eyelid, but I bet yours had to take out a loan just to buy one.” “What’s going on?’ Jungkook says, anger underlying his words now. “Why are you saying all this?” “We have to talk about it.” Taehyung waves his free hand airily. “The difference in our social status is going to come to light sometime, and it would be proactive to discuss it now so we can avoid the pain and embarrassment of it when it does. I’m sure you’ve noticed, Jungkook, that we were raised very differently. But don’t get me wrong, two people as different as us can still be…” He sniffs. “Friends, I suppose. With some effort. I mean, you see the difference in our levels, don’t you?” Jungkook is flat-out furious now. His hands are clenched into fists in his lap, and he looks like he wants to punch Taehyung’s face in. “No,” he says, voice seething with rage. “Do tell, Taehyung, what the difference in our levels is.” “I wouldn’t expect you to know, of course, what with the public school education you no doubt received, the fees being cheaper and all,” Taehyung says, smiling sweetly as he paints Jungkook’s eyes, dark and burning with incandescent anger. “But simply put, you are poor and I am rich, and the bonds of friendship are sometimes not strong enough to defeat a setback like that. I’ll make an allowance for you, though, since I need you to model for my project.” There it is. Jungkook shoots to his feet, and Taehyung finishes the ugly, furious slash of his mouth in his face, cheeks flushed with rage and jaw clenched. “You asshole,” Jungkook hisses as Taehyung draws in the telltale hint of muscle corded in his shoulders beneath his t-shirt, the clench of his fists at his sides denoting barely withheld anger. He begins the knife Jungkook will grip in his right hand by the time he’s done, blade made of delicate, deadly sharp glass. “You sit there and paint and tell me about how much better you are than me just because of your fucking money. Well, you can take it back. Billions of won isn’t enough pay for me to deal with your bullshit. Have fun alone in your pretentious golden castle, you fucker.” “I will,” Taehyung says while he paints the muscle standing out in Jungkook’s legs, exposed by his shorts, as he leans forward to spit the words out at him. “I’ve used you for all I need, anyway. Products of low quality must be expected to expire.” Jungkook stares at him for a moment, lip curled in disgust, while Taehyung paints his muscled calves and his bare feet, toes curled against the cement. Taehyung is the very  picture of unconcern. But what surprises him is the pain on Jungkook’s face as it crumples, as sudden and hard to watch as a tower collapsing. Jungkook’s eyes brim with unshed tears in the second before he turns away, shoulders stiff and hurt, and Taehyung knows he’s gone too far. That he’s truly hurt him. “Jungkook,” Taehyung says, throwing himself bodily out of his stool and into Jungkook’s path the moment he finishes the last toe. “Jungkook, stop.” “Move aside, you arrogant, self-important pile of shit,” he snarls, and Taehyung feels a twinge of fear. Perhaps Jungkook really will shove him aside and throw him into the wall. Perhaps Jungkook really will deliver what he deserves for manipulating him. “Let me explain,” he says, talking fast. “I needed anger, but I couldn’t ask you to just look angry. I had to bait you into it. Now it’s done, and I am so, so sorry. I would never say those things to you. I would never belittle you or look down on you like that. You mean so much more to me than just a pretty face or a model for my paintings, and you are worth worlds more than me. Money isn’t something to brag about or elevate status. Money is—money is the poison we need to survive, and I would give all of mine away if it meant I could truly escape it.” He stops talking, pleading with Jungkook to understand. Pleading with him to see. He wants to reach out and touch him, feel the soft warmth of his cheek beneath his palm again, but Jungkook’s walls are up and tall. He stands motionless as he stares at Taehyung, measuring him, evaluating him for truth with narrowed eyes. And then his shoulders lower. Taehyung releases a relieved breath, and he steps closer to him. “I shouldn’t have manipulated you,” Taehyung says hesitantly. “I’m sorry.” “No, you need to do what you need to do for your project.” Jungkook sighs. “I should have realized something was up.” “If you had, though, I never would’ve been able to finish the painting.” “Can I see it?” he asks tentatively. Taehyung leads him behind the easel. Jungkook towers over the viewer on the canvas, standing on a bed of shattered, multicolored shards of glass, face ugly and contorted with anger with a glass knife gripped in his fist. Jungkook takes a step back. “Whoa, do I really look like that?” “Yes,” Taehyung says, inspecting the twist of his mouth. A bit unrealistic, but not so much to be able to be called exaggerated. “I mean, obviously not the glass knife and the shattered glass you’re standing on, but yes.” “Why did you use glass?” “Because peace is something fragile and beautiful, and it’s so easy to shatter it by losing your temper.” Jungkook looks at him, upset. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten angry.” “No, actually, thank you for getting angry, or this painting wouldn’t have been possible.” Taehyung pauses. “You’re scary when you’re angry. But also, you know, kind of hot too. So it’s okay.” Jungkook ducks his head, staring at the ground, the usual flush burning on his cheeks. Taehyung tries to slip a compliment into every session. He enjoys watching Jungkook get flustered. “Why do you do that?” Jungkook mumbles. “Lie to make me feel better.” “I’m not lying.” Jungkook looks up at him, eyes wide and vulnerable. “You know it’s not true.” “Of course it’s true.” He hesitates, wavering. And then: “Why did you kiss me on the cheek at the hospital?” Because I wanted to, Taehyung stops himself from saying. Instead, he says, “You were asleep. You must have been dreaming.” He preens. “Although I’m honored to be included in them.” “You’re lying,” Jungkook says with absolute certainty. “Your smile is forced when you lie, and you talk to please people. Normally you don’t have to try.” Taehyung hesitates. “How would you know?” “It doesn’t have to be an admission of weakness, Taehyung,” Jungkook says softly, stepping closer. “What?” Taehyung’s voice is tense and tight and just barely kept in check, because no, no, no, I’m falling for him and he can’t return my feelings. It would ruin it all. It would only hurt us both when he finds out why. “Let me,” he says quietly. He reaches up and cups Taehyung’s cheek, and he hates himself for closing his eyes briefly, if only just for a second. “Not everything has to be a fight.” Taehyung turns his face away from his palm. It feels like he’s stabbing a knife into his own chest to refuse his touch. “I don’t feel about you that way. You’re imagining things.” Jungkook cradles his face with both hands, and Taehyung has nowhere to go. He looks at Jungkook bleakly. He can tell his face is pained. “No,” Jungkook says. “I don’t think I am.” Taehyung’s stomach lurches when Jungkook leans forward. He closes his eyes, squeezes them as tightly shut as he can, because this doesn’t happen to people like him. This doesn’t happen in real life. But he gasps like an idiot anyway when Jungkook’s lips brush against his mouth. His stomach flips mightily when Jungkook pulls away, the disappointment crushing. Of course it was too good be true. But then Jungkook’s mouth returns, pressing harder against Taehyung’s, and the wave of relief he feels is so massive that his head spins. He fists his hands wordlessly in Jungkook’s shirt, pulling him closer, yanking his warm, firm body against his. A hand comes to rest in the small of his back, pulling him closer to Jungkook’s body, and Taehyung is so happy and full of disbelief that he could float. Jungkook is a good kisser. Maybe a little tentative at times and a little rushed at others, but good. Taehyung would never have expected it from the boy hunched over his books and laptop in Coffers, scribbling and typing numbers down to carry his parents on his shoulders away from the darkness of poverty—would never have expected the warm, eager press of his mouth against his lips, the slick wetness of his tongue grazing the inside of his mouth, would never have expected something this perfect from someone so broken. Jungkook pushes him backward, chest and stomach flush against Taehyung’s, until the backs of Taehyung’s knees hit the green couch and he falls. Jungkook’s weight presses him into it, the pressure addicting on top of his body. Taehyung moves his hands to his waist. His body is broad at the shoulders and tapers to a narrow waist under his oversized tee. The flex and twitch of his muscles under his hands is irresistible, unparalleled to any other high Taehyung’s had. Taehyung loses track of time. All he knows is the movement of the mouth on his, the warmth of hands wandering up and down his body, tracing the shape of it through his shirt and jeans but never touching skin. When Taehyung tries to catch hold of Jungkook’s hand and slide it under his shirt, Jungkook pulls it away and fits it to Taehyung’s waist instead. Taehyung understands. Not yet. He contents himself with hooking a leg behind Jungkook’s waist, pulling his body down until there’s nowhere closer to go so he can feel every line and dip of it fit against his like a puzzle piece. Like they were meant to be. By the time Jungkook pulls away, it might have been ten minutes or an hour. But Taehyung’s lips are swollen and his cheeks are warm, and he can’t meet Jungkook’s eyes. He doesn’t want to tell him that this is the first time he’s ever done this—properly made out with someone for more than half a minute—and he’s running more on instinct and the want burning in his chest than experience. Jungkook strokes the back of his hand down Taehyung’s face, and Taehyung’s eyes fall closed, the sensation so wonderful that he has to relish it. “Next time,” he whispers, and he swings his legs off Taehyung’s body, the weight and warmth of him easing and disappearing. When Taehyung musters enough courage to open his eyes again, Jungkook is gone. ~ Jungkook appears at his door at the same time the next day. Taehyung is pacing the apartment nervously, raising his nails to his mouth to bite before remembering that he broke the habit long ago and he isn’t going to start again now, when the door opens and he jumps. He looks around wildly for something to do instead of looking like he was waiting for him, which he was, and throws himself over the back of the couch to land on it with a thump. When Jungkook has closed the door behind him, he’s pretending to read a book he dug from the recesses of its sunken cushions, doing his best to slow down his breathing. He puts down the book casually when Jungkook leans over the back of the couch. “Oh,” he says, “you. I haven’t actually got anything planned for today.” “That’s okay.” Jungkook smiles lazily, eyes glittering with wickedness, and Taehyung feels a twinge of mingled anticipation and nervousness ring through his body. “I took the liberty of doing it instead.” They quickly realize two minutes in that the couch is too sunken and sagging to do much of anything in it without getting hopelessly swallowed into its musty depths, so they move to the floor instead. The floor is hard beneath the arch of Taehyung’s back when Jungkook presses his lips to his neck, grazing his heated skin with just the barest hint of teeth. Taehyung claws down his back over his oversized white shirt, trying to strain closer and get Jungkook to bite down, goddamit, bite down until he’ll find the bruises on his throat the next day with his lust marked in purple and red, but the most Jungkook will do is scratch his teeth lightly down his skin and kiss softly. Taehyung almost sobs. His toes curl with how badly he wants him. When Jungkook’s weight disappears, Taehyung doesn’t want him to go. He fists his hands in his shirt and pulls him back down, pleading wordlessly, but Jungkook pushes a finger against his lips and disentangles his hands. “I’ve thought about it,” he says, standing above Taehyung as his chest heaves for breath, Jungkook’s fingers still burning on his neck, “and I’ve decided that we can do the actual neutral comparison painting, provided you don’t trick me into getting mad or something again.” “No,” Taehyung pants, “no, wait, get back down here—” “Patience, Tae,” he says, walking towards the art room. “Nothing long-lasting in life is achieved without patience.” Taehyung stuffs his fist into his mouth and bites down hard on the knuckles to keep from screaming. ~ It turns out that Taehyung paints differently when he’s hard. His style is more rushed, but not in a sloppy way. It helps him realize that his normal style is a little too painstaking, a little less allowing for imperfections or flaws which make the painting unique. Jungkook takes shape on the canvas, but his edges aren’t as defined and the portrait of him seems to have more depth. Less laid out on the surface and more for the viewer to wonder about. Jungkook keeps his eyes on him the whole time. Taehyung gets more and more desperate as the hour passes, and the tension coiled throughout his body is unbearable by the time he finishes and shoots to his feet. “Done,” he gasps, dropping his brush with a clatter on the shelf of the easel. “Done, now can we—” Jungkook stands up, perfectly composed, and brushes lint which isn’t there off his shirt. He gives Taehyung a placid smile. “Actually, I have a lecture in two minutes,” he says, brushing past Taehyung, who stands dumbfounded with disbelief. “I’ll accept my pay tomorrow. I have to run now.” Taehyung digs his nails into his palms hard when the front door of his apartment clicks shut. He closes his eyes and grits his teeth, imagining another twenty-four hours before he can feel Jungkook’s weight pressing down on his body again. Taehyung hates jerking off in the shower. His release is muted now he’s had a taste of what it could feel like with someone else, and the white splattered on the shower walls feels like it’s mocking him. Even the colors bursting behind his eyelids seem like a parody of paint. Fear Taehyung’s determined to keep his composure the next time Jungkook comes to his apartment. He’s got it all planned out: when Jungkook opens the door without knocking as always, he’s already in the art room. “Come in,” he calls. Jungkook shuffles into the room and plops down on the stool without being asked. He regards Taehyung expectantly. “Today,” Taehyung says, squirting paint onto his palette, “we’re doing fear.” Jungkook doesn’t blink. “What are you afraid of, Jungkook?” He knows it’ll be a lot harder to trick Jungkook into being frightened now he’s already used that trick once with anger, so he’s decided to ask him straight. He thinks. “Rejection.” His eyes wander to a point near the ceiling. “Isolation. The people I love in pain.” “I meant, um,” Taehyung waves his hand, “more material things. Easier to replicate.” “Oh,” Jungkook says placidly. “You mean like darkness and spiders and that sort of thing?” “Yes.” “I don’t really have any phobias.” Taehyung frowns. “Not even ghosts?” “No.” He crosses the room and picks up the canvas where Jungkook is sleeping. He holds it up to Jungkook, motioning to Samara. “Not even this?” “Not really. That’s a good painting, by the way. I like the symbolism.” Taehyung pouts and puts the canvas back. “What are your nightmares about?” “My parents as beggars.” He huffs a broken little laugh. “My brother dying, before I realize that he’s already dead.” “Don’t you ever have nightmares about shadowy figures coming for you? Phantoms? Deep, dark holes? Being eaten alive by fire ants?” He thinks. “Not really. I usually just tell them to piss off and they go away.” “Do horror movies scare you at all?” Taehyung asks, frustrated. “Not really?” Taehyung slouches morosely back behind his easel. “Well, look what we have here. A macho man. How in the world am I supposed to paint fear?” “Or maybe,” Jungkook says mildly, “you could paint yourself feeling fear.” Taehyung blinks slowly at him. “What?” “You said the prompt is emotions, right?” Jungkook leans forward. “It doesn’t specify who needs to be feeling the emotions, exactly.” Taehyung stares at him. ~ “No, no, no,” Taehyung whimpers as Jungkook plugs his computer into the TV. A picture of the glowing circle with the ring scrawled in it in untidy child’s handwriting fills the screen. “No, why—no!” “Haven’t you already watched it?” Jungkook clicks the spacebar to play the movie, returning to the couch, as Taehyung’s face contorts in fear. A video camera is recording on the TV cabinet, focused on Taehyung. This is a bad idea. This is a very bad idea. He never should have agreed to it. “That doesn’t make it any less scary the second time around!” Taehyung looks around wildly for a cushion to cover his face with as the opening sequence starts. “I’m here.” Jungkook plops down on the sofa. “I’ll kick that girl’s ass back to her dingy little well if she tries anything funny.” “No,” Taehyung moans. “I don’t wanna watch it.” “It’s for the sake of art,” Jungkook says, eyebrows raised. “Sacrifices must be made.” Suspenseful music starts playing, and Taehyung shuts his eyes. “And open your eyes,” Jungkook’s voice comes from beside him. “You can’t look afraid if your eyes are closed.” ~ About an hour later, the girl is climbing out of the TV screen and towards Noah, and Taehyung has reached peak terror levels. Jungkook’s been forcing him to keep his eyes open through the whole movie, even through the jumpscares and through the horrified faces and through the first time Samara’s made her appearance, and Taehyung is whimpering, curled up in a ball on the couch with his eyes half-shut and his face turned away from the screen. “Eyes on the TV,” Jungkook says. Taehyung sneaks a look at him. He’s holding his phone up to the TV screen. “Remember the footage. Remember the painting.” “What are you doing?” Taehyung gasps, flinching, eyes glued to the screen in the way only the utmost fear and dread can rivet them. “Why are you taking pictures of the screen?” “Snapchat-worthy,” Jungkook says with satisfaction, pressing the blue arrow button. “I’m dying here,” Taehyung wails, “and you Snapchat this? I’m going to cry.” “Don’t. You’ll get tears on my shirt.” This makes Taehyung realize belatedly that he’s clutching Jungkook’s arm for dear life, his face half-hidden in his shoulder. And Jungkook…Jungkook hasn’t pushed him away. He releases his arm and inches towards the other side of the couch inconspicuously, then scuttles back in fright when the girl stands still and begins to raise her head. “No,” Taehyung whimpers, fingers digging into Jungkook’s (muscled, firm) arm. The sheets of greasy black hair shift slowly. “No, no—” Her face is revealed, contorted into an ugly expression of pure hatred, and Taehyung lets out a little, muffled scream. He throws his dignity to the wind and buries his face in Jungkook’s shoulder as a terrible soundtrack of screams and classic horror-movie music which Taehyung knows means jumpscares assault his ears. Ten minutes more while Taehyung keeps his eyes squeezed tightly shut, breathing in the smell of Jungkook, absorbing his warmth. And then Jungkook says, “It’s over. It’s done.” Taehyung exhales. He noses his way up Jungkook’s shoulder, zeroing in on the mole on his neck, and attaches his lips to it. Jungkook makes a small sound and shifts, tilting his head slightly. “Are we finished?” “Yeah.” Jungkook points in his peripheral vision. “It’s just a black screen now.” Like an idiot, Taehyung looks, and his heart stops when he registers the paused screen of Samara leaping towards the camera, fingers clawed, mouth open in a furious scream. “You—!” Taehyung shrieks, and he flings himself out of the couch. He hits the power switch for the TV faster than he’s ever done anything in his life and leans against the wall, panting. When he dares to look again, the screen is truly black, and all which greets him is his terrified expression. “You,” he growls, stalking towards Jungkook, who lounges on the couch with a wicked smirk on his face, “asshole.” “Think of the footage we have,” Jungkook says, laughing and halfheartedly trying to push Taehyung off as he swings his legs over to straddle him. “Think of how priceless your expressions were.” “Fucking sadistic little shit,” he hisses, lowering his head to Jungkook’s neck. He aims for the mole and bites down hard, revelling in the surprised gasp he draws from Jungkook. When he pulls away, his teeth marks have been etched into Jungkook’s skin. “That’s no punishment.” Jungkook spreads one hand over Taehyung’s back, touch burning through the thin material of his shirt, and cups the back of his head with the other to pull his head down. “Do that again.” Taehyung bites down on the other side this time, sucking. Jungkook’s skin tastes clean with a hint of soap when he swipes his tongue over it, and his hair smells like shampoo. Taehyung pulls back to watch the red spread over his skin. Jungkook’s eyes are unfocused, a flush burning on his cheeks. His lashes flutter like ashy butterfly wings against his cheekbones. He spreads his legs slightly, raising his hips up, and Taehyung grinds down. The stiffness under his ass is encouraging. “Are you serious?” Taehyung asks, half-exasperated. “All I had to do was bite?” “What can I say?” Jungkook hums low in his throat when he bites down over his Adam’s apple, catching the skin between his teeth. “I’m a masochist.” Taehyung kisses him. He pulls his lower lip into his mouth and digs his teeth into it, and the involuntary gasp Jungkook releases spurs him on. He tangles his hands in Jungkook’s hair, holding his head steady, and kisses him with all he’s got, his knees on either side of Jungkook’s thighs so he can grind down and satisfy the hungry heat pooling in his stomach. The tension is coiling in his belly tighter and tighter, and the friction between his legs is unbearable, and— “Seven daysss,” comes a whisper in his ear, and Taehyung leaps off Jungkook. He stumbles over the coffee table and falls flat on his back, curling up on his side like a stink bug, heart threatening to pound its way out of his chest as he expects the hair-covered face to loom over him at any minute— And he realizes that it’s Jungkook who spoke. He gets shakily to his feet as Jungkook rolls around on the couch, cackling his ass off. “You fucking piece of shit,” he says flatly. “My boner has never died faster in my life.” “It was hilarious,” Jungkook gasps, clutching his stomach. “It was hilarious, you fucking flew off me like an Olympic high jumper—” “Get out.” Taehyung picks up his rucksack and throws it at him. “Get out.” “You’re not serious, are you?” his face falls a little. “No,” he says. “But I’m not going to look at your idiotic face for another twenty-four hours. I won’t be able to stand it. Get out and come back at the same time tomorrow. I have stuff planned.” Jungkook collects his things and exits, still giggling, and Taehyung turns towards his computer determinedly. He has research to do. Shame “Where’s the stool?” Jungkook asks, bemused, as he walks into the art room and looks around. The stool has been replaced by a straight-backed wooden chair placed a few feet in front of the wall. Taehyung sits at his easel, finishing up the last bits of his painting of fear. It turns out that curling up against the back of the couch was helpful—in his painting, he replaces the couch with a padded cell, shadows of hands reaching over the walls out to him. He thinks he’s done with the genre of horror for a while. “Replaced.” Taehyung jerks his chin at the chair. “By that.” Jungkook moves to sit down as he stands up, picking the canvas up off the easel and setting it aside to dry. “No,” Taehyung says when he catches sight of Jungkook sitting down. “Don’t.” Jungkook stands, bemused. “I’m not sitting?” “Strip down,” Taehyung says, eyeing him evenly. Jungkook blinks. “What—take off my shirt?” “No. Strip completely down.” He frowns. “This wasn’t in the agreement.” Neither was kissing and horror movies and 5 million won cameras, Taehyung thinks, but he says, “Consider this the price of the camera.” Jungkook’s eyebrows shoot up, and he grabs the hem of his shirt, pulling it off and tossing it into a corner. He pauses when his hands are at his zipper. “Wait—you’re not going to paint me fully, actually nude, are you?” “No, I’ll figure something out.” He waves his hand. “I’ll paint a sheet over your hips or something. Or maybe the classic leaf.” Jungkook snorts. The crisp sound of the zipper being pulled down rings out through the room, and he steps out of his pants. He’s wearing black boxers underneath. “I’ve always looked at those Greek statues and laughed.” “It works.” “Sure, whatever you say.” He hooks his thumb into the waistband of his boxers and pauses. “Mr. Master Artist.” “Mr. Master Artist who bought you a five million won camera. Strip.” Jungkook huffs out a laugh and pulls his boxers down his hips. Taehyung isn’t directing his gaze to the ceiling pointedly, but he’s finding places to look other than Jungkook, of which there are many. He hears the swish of Jungkook’s boxers being kicked aside, and then a presence moving up behind him. “Can I sit now?” Jungkook breathes into his ear, a warm body suddenly being fit against his back, and Taehyung jumps. “Yes,” he says, keeping his voice neutral. Jungkook laughs and heads towards the chair. Taehyung’s eyes stray traitorously up his calves and his smooth, pale thighs and—he drags his gaze away. “What do you have planned for me?” he asks, settling back into his chair with complete ease. His legs are spread slightly. Taehyung wishes he would close them. Taehyung reaches behind the easel and produces a few lengths of soft but strong cloth. They’re black. He walks behind Jungkook’s chair, taking his wrists and tying them behind the back. “Is this okay?” he asks before he pulls the knot tight. “Yes,” Jungkook answers. Taehyung yanks it tight firmly, and Jungkook tries to move his wrists, testing it. He has some space, but he can’t break free. “What’s this for?” Jungkook asks when Taehyung bends down to tie his ankles to the chair legs. “Ow, not so tight.” “You’ll see,” Taehyung says, loosening the knot a little. He finishes tying them and stands, inspecting him. “Something’s missing.” “Nipple clamps, now we’re all BDSM-ey?” Jungkook suggests sarcastically. “Hot wax? Maybe a blindfold?” “Don’t give me ideas,” he says. “No—wait here.” He leaves the room, walking down the hall to his bedroom and opening the small box where he keeps his jewelry: rings and earrings and bracelets, the occasional necklace. He lifts out a simple, thin black choker with a golden oval-shaped pendant and walks back to the art room. He’s really trying not to look, but Jungkook’s cock is standing flushed and erect against his stomach, impossible to ignore, and his pupils are dilated. His cheeks are flushed slightly, and his breathing has gotten deeper. “Hah,” he says victoriously as he bends over Jungkook to fasten the choker around his neck, the tendons standing out beneath his fingers. “You like being tied up, don’t you?” Jungkook stares at him impassively. His erection speaks for him. “Poor little baby,” he says sympathetically, patting Jungkook’s soft cheek, and Jungkook’s eyes narrow instantly. “Don’t worry, there’s more coming.” “What now?” Jungkook calls when Taehyung crosses the room to reach for something hidden behind his easel. He pales when Taehyung reveals the long, thick, electric blue vibrator. “What the hell is that?” “Sorry,” he says, picking up the bottle of lube too and heading towards Jungkook. Jungkook strains away from him, trying to turn the chair away, but held by his restraints, he can’t do anything. “They didn’t have any other color left.” “What?” “The sex shop,” Taehyung clarifies. “I had to walk halfway across the city for all this, you know. You should be thankful.” “Taehyung,” he says in a strained voice, “don’t put that in me.” Taehyung pauses, vibrator in hand. “Really? You don’t want any of this?” “No, I—” He turns around. “Oh, shame,” he says, disappointed. “I was really hoping we could have some fun.” His footsteps are brisk. “Just hold on a minute while I put these back, and then I can untie you—” “Wait—stop!” he yells. Taehyung pivots. “Hmm?” “Don’t—” he closes his eyes briefly with the air of someone throwing their dignity to the wind. “Don’t…go.” Taehyung holds the vibrator up. “You want this?” Jungkook stares at him, then looks away, unable to meet his eyes. “…yes.” “Huh.” Taehyung goes back and drops to his knees in front of Jungkook, uncapping the bottle of lube. “You could have just said.” “Wait,” Jungkook gasps, trying to twist away from the steadying hand Taehyung places on his thigh. “Wait, what are you doing?” “Prepping you.” Taehyung meets his gaze evenly, coating his fingers with lube. “When was the last time you fingered yourself?” Jungkook is silent. “You have to be honest, Jungkookie, or I’ll hurt you.” “Last…night,” he mutters to the floor after a tense minute. “I’m proud of you. Raise your hips for me, Kookie.” “I—” he stutters. “I—” “Raise them,” Taehyung says patiently. “And try to relax.” Jungkook closes his eyes briefly. And then he raises his hips as high as he can, his quads standing out on either side of Taehyung’s head. Taehyung smiles and reaches forward, running his fingertips over Jungkook’s rim. He startles horribly at the contact. “Just relax. I’ll take care of you.” ~ Taehyung enjoys fingering Jungkook more than he should. Jungkook keeps his eyes screwed tightly shut the whole time. It takes Taehyung a minute to find his prostate, but when he does, Jungkook jerks so violently that he nearly tips the chair over. “Steady,” Taehyung says, pressing down on his thigh with the hand which isn’t buried knuckle deep in Jungkook. He curls his fingers again, and Jungkook lets out a desperate, gasping sob of a breath. “Steady, nothing’s happened yet.” “Tae,” he groans. He rocks his hips forward, onto his fingers, slick leaking down his cock. “Tae, please—hurry up.” “Sorry.” Taehyung tries to work him faster. He spreads his legs further, mouth opening, and his hips rise into the air as if he has no control over them. It takes three fingers for Taehyung to be satisfied. By that time, Jungkook is writhing against the chair, and his flush has spread down his neck to his collarbones. When he pulls his fingers out with an obscene pop, Jungkook looks like he doesn’t know whether to be relieved or desperate. Taehyung picks up the vibrator, the silicone hard to grip with his slippery fingers. “Hold still,” he warns, holding Jungkook’s hips steady. “Hurry,” Jungkook whines, pushing his hips forward insistently. He eases it in slowly. Jungkook’s eyes stay tightly closed. He jerks when Taehyung pushes it into his prostate, nestling it so it won’t shift. “You can lower your hips now,” he says, and Jungkook drops them down immediately, relieved of the strain of having to keep them up himself. He looks down, rolling his hips experimentally. His eyebrows draw together in frustration when it hardly moves. “You said it’s a vibrator, but does it move?” he asks sharply when Taehyung sits down on his stool behind his easel, bending over briefly. “Yup,” he says brightly, popping up again and holding a remote the same color as the vibrator. He presses a button. ~ Of course, Jungkook thinks as electricity floods up his spine. He can feel the vibrator buzzing inside him, and he’s afraid to move, afraid to accept the pleasure it forces upon him and afraid to writhe away from it. Of course it’s remote-operated. “Ah,” he gasps when the buzzing increases in intensity. His hips lift off the chair, his muscles tightening to keep the vibrator from slipping out, but it’s not enough, goddammit. He drops his hips back down and grinds against the chair. The vibrator slips just a tiny centimeter deeper at the time Taehyung ups it another notch, and the perfect press of it against his prostate has lights bursting behind his eyelids. “Ah!” And then the buzzing stops. He pushes down desperately, but the vibrator is motionless. “Taehyung!” he yells, seeing Taehyung pause to paint on the canvas, the end of his brush moving busily. “What?” he asks. “I can’t let you come immediately.” “Please,” Jungkook cries. “Please, I’m nowhere close.” “That’s a lie and you know it, Jeon Jungkook.” “Tae!” “And to think you were reluctant about it at first,” Taehyung pouts, reaching for the remote. It turns on at what seems to Jungkook like the highest setting, pushed up right against his prostate. Fireworks burst in his vision when his back arches off the chair, and his mouth opens in a silent scream. The waves of pleasure ripping through him are unbearable. And then it stops, just as suddenly as it started. Jungkook falls back against the chair with a thump, his eyes snapping wildly to Taehyung. “Sorry,” Taehyung says, squinting at the remote between brushes on the canvas. “I still haven’t gotten the hang of how to use this. There are so many buttons and they all seems to do something different to you.” “Press any one, I don’t care!” Jungkook shouts. “Just not the off button! Anything but the off button!” “Hmm,” Taehyung says thoughtfully. “Maybe—this?” The button he hits seems to do absolutely nothing. All Jungkook can feel is a tiny, low hum, hardly noticeable. It generates a few weak throbs when he shifts to press the vibrator deep into him. “Too low,” he says, gritting his teeth, but Taehyung has returned to painting and he’s taken on that absorbed look he only gets when he paints. “Too weak!” “Sorry,” he says, reaching over without looking and hitting a button at random. This is somewhere in the middle. Jungkook keeps as still as possible once he’s found the perfect position, and the buzz of the vibrator feels so good pushed against his sweet spot like that that he rocks shamelessly onto it, forgetting the fact that Taehyung is there. The tightness between his legs is clenching and unclenching the way it only he does when his release is in sight, and if it continues this way he thinks he can come without Taehyung noticing— And it switches off. Jungkook was ready for it. He was half-expecting it. He closes his eyes briefly as the disappointment crushes him, breathing harshly through his nose. “It’s off,” he says, voice strained. “Taehyung. Do you know it’s off?” “Yep.” Taehyung paints cheerfully, glancing at Jungkook occasionally around his canvas. “I’m getting the hang of this!” “Taehyung, please.” “Sorry, Kook. I’m still painting your torso. I’m a fast painter, but not that fast.” Jungkook bites his lip hard and grinds down, a hair’s breadth away from sobbing when the vibrator hardly moves inside him. “Please, just turn it on again—give me, give me something—” “You can be pathetic when you want to, Jungkook. You’re good at begging.” Taehyung reaches over, the hand holding the brush still moving over the canvas. He presses a button on the remote without looking. It’s that high setting again. Jungkook cries out as his body writhes off the chair uncontrollably, his ankles straining against the restraints which tie him to the chair. If he hadn’t been tied down, he would have yanked it out instantly. It’s overstimulation to the point that it’s almost painful, but when Jungkook grits his teeth and blinks away the tears pooling in his eyes, he finds that there is a peculiar pleasure to be had in being pushed past his limits. He fights it and struggles for more of it at the same time, alternating between wanting to shout and wanting to sob, the electricity tearing him apart and reforming him simultaneously. He’s never been a fan of fast, rushed, intense releases, preferring to finger himself open slowly and get himself off with measured strokes, but he half-sees why some people are fans of the faster route. His body twists off the chair, fighting against the ecstasy the vibrator forces upon him, and then slams back down when too much becomes too little. He can’t be sure whether to cry or moan. It’s all too much, too much, but he’ll take everything and more Taehyung has to give him. Suddenly, it dulls, decreasing to a low buzz. Jungkook collapses back onto the chair, panting. His skin is slicked with a sheen of sweat and his muscles are sore and burning from tensing and contracting as hard as they can, but he still feels the quiet throb of disappointment from the fall in stimulation. There is, though, a decided amount of relief. “Are you okay?” Taehyung asks, concerned. He alternates between looking at his canvas and looking at Jungkook, his hand still painting even when his eyes aren’t fastened on his movements. “That was a pretty high setting, and you were on it for awhile.” “Yeah.” Now the frenzy of the intense vibrations have mostly faded, the urge to come has returned, restless and burning deep in his bones. He shifts, wiggling down. “More—come on.” It increases slightly. Jungkook takes a breath and adjusts, spreading his legs as wide as he can and sinking down onto the seat of the chair to push the vibrator deep inside him. He closes his eyes and focuses on the buzz. This is something he’s acquainted with: low, steady stimulation, as quietly satisfying as the extinguishing of a silent candle. He can ride this small wave all the way to its end. When faced with a tsunami, he flails and is pulled under. The room is quiet for a while as Jungkook squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates on amplifying the golden buzz in his bones, spreading and growing slowly. The quiet scratch of Taehyung’s brush moving over the canvas accompanies the soft hum of the vibrator at work. Jungkook digs his nails into his palms, cock twitching against his stomach, teeth digging into his lip. He’s cresting the wave, he’s almost over, he can see his release so sweet and clear that he can taste it— And the vibrator shuts off. He moans piteously, bouncing up and down shamelessly to try and replicate its buzz, which leaves a gaping space where it used to sit in his bones, but the vibrator is off and there’s nothing he can do about it. “Tae,” he cries, trying not to sob. “You were close,” Taehyung says, frowning at the canvas. “I could tell.” “What—how, why—?” “Your toes were curling and you were trying to straighten your legs. Are you one of those people who find it hard to come unless they’re tensing their legs? That’s cute.” He resumes painting, whistling. Whistling. Jungkook’s release has just been ripped out from under his feet at the hands of a ridiculously bright blue vibrator remote and he whistles. “Tae,” he groans, “please tell me you’re nearly done.” “I’m just working on the sheet covering your legs. Cloth folds are hard, you know.” “I don’t care,” he grits out, desperate for something, anything, to resume the burn between his legs. “And that inconsideration is what earns you another minute of lack of stimulation.” “No—no, Tae, please!” “Think of this as payback for all the times you teased me with a fucking hand down my pants and then left me with balls bluer than the Pacific Ocean.” “Please don’t leave me like this, I was so—” He drags in a ragged breath. “Please, come on, I’ll do anything.” “Anything?” Taehyung asks, eyes glinting. “Such as letting Taehyungie come and actually fucking him instead of just teasing him to the point of suicide?” “Why do you refer to yourself in the third person, that’s so cree—” Taehyung raises one eyebrow and moves his hand away from the remote. “—yes, sure, whatever!” “To think a vibrator up your ass would have saved me all those lonely nights of jerking off in the shower,” he says unsympathetically, picking up the remote but not pressing any buttons. “Tae!” “All by my lonesome,” he says morosely, thumb sweeping over the buttons lightly. “Tae, shit, please.” He huffs. “At least I’ve taught you some manners.” He sticks his tongue out and presses a button. It’s not the high-intensity setting Jungkook was half-bracing himself for, but it’s close. Jungkook lets a broken little whimper trip out of his mouth as he grinds down, using the hard surface of the chair bottom to press the vibrator deeper inside him until it’s buzzing right against his prostate and he can feel himself shaking apart. Shocks are running through his body, crashes of cymbals and bursts of fireworks, and he can hardly keep up. Taehyung isn’t painting anymore. He sits back and watches Jungkook, holding the remote thoughtfully, long fingers wrapped around it. “Why aren’t you painting anymore?” Jungkook gasps. “I’m done.” Taehyung presses a button and Jungkook’s back arches when the vibrations increase a level. “I’m just playing with you now.” “It’s not—” The buzzing kicks up, and Jungkook breaks off in a shout. “Shit.” His legs strain against his bonds; Taehyung was right—his legs do tense up when he’s close to coming. “Shit.” “Haven’t tried this button yet,” Taehyung muses, and the vibrations stop abruptly. For a moment, Jungkook thinks he’s turned it off, but then a few seconds of high-intensity buzzing scream through his body and catch him off guard, followed by a crushing period of no vibrations. It’s vibrating in bursts. Jungkook’s body lifts off the chair and slams back down, lifts off the chair and slams back down. “Judging by the way you’re reacting, I’d say I just set it to bursts,” he says thoughtfully, watching Jungkook’s hips jump erratically. “No fucking shit,” Jungkook yells, body writhing through a length of frenzied buzzing right against his prostate. He slumps when it cuts off abruptly as it started, panting for breath in the brief seconds before it starts again and his back arches off the chair. “Let’s try this,” Taehyung says, and he presses another button. It’s the highest-intensity one. Jungkook’s body twists and shudders, trying to accommodate the mingled pain and pleasure of overstimulation, ripping and shrieking through his body in blinding shockwaves. Every brush of it against his prostate is like a flash of lightning through his body. He feels like he’s being electrified. His toes are curling so hard that his nails are scraping over the floor and the muscles are standing out livid in his thighs, his body rising and falling onto the chair over and over again. The wood of the chair digs into the tendons behind his knees when he clenches his legs together, fighting to contain it. Vaguely, he registers Taehyung watching him with interest. Jungkook isn’t used to this, he always fingers himself hesitantly and falteringly since he still doesn’t really know what he’s doing, and when he comes it always feels like jerking off would have been a quicker, easier, and more satisfying release. But this—this is different. This is every color on the rainbow and the colors Jungkook has never seen. This is light, pure light, crashing and rending through him and blaring in his eyes, driving his hips to jerk up, up, like they could escape and get more of the wonderfully fatal electricity running in his veins at the same time… And Jungkook comes. He feels it, the peak of the high and the crash back down to earth, the descent just as exhilarating as the ascent. He can’t breathe. He shakes and shudders apart with the wood of the chair pressed into his back as his cock spills white all over his own stomach in erratic bursts. The stickiness is unpleasant, but the pleasure cracking through him like a whip more than makes up for it. The light fades, fades, and Jungkook starts to squirm as the overstimulation becomes unbearable. Taehyung lowers the setting, and he relaxes back into the chair as the vibrations reduce to a dull hum which satiates the throb in his bones. He closes his eyes and leans his head on the back of the chair. The room grows quieter as the thunder in his ears silences, only filled with the sound of his harsh breaths. A minute passes. The last blissful clench passes through his body, and Jungkook slumps on the chair, utterly spent. Now he’s just a boy tied to a chair with come on his stomach and a vibrator shoved up his ass. Oh, how far I’ve come, he thinks, then groans at himself for his unintended pun. ~ Taehyung switches the vibrator off completely and comes forward. He drops to his knees in front of Jungkook, taking hold of his base with callused fingers and licking the come off his softening cock. It twitches weakly with interest at the tongue swiping over it. When he’s lapped it clean, he moves to Jungkook’s stomach and licks the come off it too, white splattered in pretty ribbons on pale skin. He sits back on his haunches and watches Jungkook’s breathing slow, his cock droop until it’s lying on his thigh. Eventually, Jungkook opens his eyes and looks down at him, drunk and muzzy from the shock of an orgasm. “Untie me,” he says. “Untie me and I’ll repay you.” Having a vibrator in his ass and Jungkook sucking him off at the same time, it turns out, is worlds, galaxies, universes better than jerking off in the shower. The strands of hair slipping between his fingers are soft and the bites on his inner thighs sting, but he thinks that this is something which could evolve, out of the sin and filth and inhuman drive of sex, to love. ~ “It’s really less shame and more flat-out lust,” Taehyung says, studying the finished painting a few days later. “I was expecting you to be more ashamed of having a vibrator up your ass in front of me, but no.” “All is fair in love and orgasms,” Jungkook says peacefully. If he thinks back, he can still remember the incomparable calm he felt curling up with Taehyung in Taehyung’s bed afterwards, when they were both sated and loose-limbed, almost like a heartbeat monitor flatlining. The last letting go of pretence. The satisfaction sits deep in his bones and isn’t planning on budging. “I wonder what Jin will make of this. It’s basically porn. Painted porn, but porn.” “So is painting nude women. And that sheet is very artistic. It adds a touch of—what do you artsy-fartsy people call it?—unpresumptuous sophistication.” Taehyung shrugs. “Well, I’m turning it in and that’s all that matters, so.” He turns away from the painting. “No point regretting what’s already said and done.” Jungkook follows him into the sitting room, where he plops down onto the couch. “I don’t think there’s any more emotions for you to model,” Taehyung says thoughtfully. “Are there?” “No.” Jungkook stretches out on top of him and noses his way into the curve of his neck. He breathes him in. Taehyung has always smelled like something sweet to him—like cotton candy and spun sugar and anything else pink and white and delicate. “I don’t think so.” “What are you doing?” Taehyung asks warily when Jungkook nudges his thigh between Taehyung’s legs. For all the note of caution in his voice, Taehyung spreads his legs a little wider, letting Jungkook push his leg into his crotch. “Mmm.” Jungkook turns his head to kiss at his neck, bite down on the already- marked skin. “Jungkook.” He attaches his lips to the crook of Taehyung’s neck and sucks, rubbing his thigh in between his legs. He feels Taehyung’s gasp more than hears it, smiles smugly into Taehyung’s skin when Taehyung splays his legs wide so he can rut up against Jungkook’s thigh. “Bedroom?” Taehyung pants, tilting his head the other way to allow Jungkook better access when he works his way up the side of his neck and nips at his ear. “Okay.” Jungkook pulls him up. Taehyung finds his mouth, and they stumble towards his bedroom together, eyes half-closed, arms held out to prevent themselves from bumping into things. The backs of Jungkook’s knees hit the edge of the bed first, so he falls down with Taehyung’s weight pinning him to the mattress. Taehyung sits up and straddles him, grinding down until the friction of their bulges rubbing against each other is somewhere close to enough. Over the course of the afternoon, Jungkook learns many things. Taehyung looks beautiful bouncing on top of him and even more beautiful pinned under him, wrists trapped under his hands, eyes shut and head tipped back as he moans. Nothing can compare to the heat and wetness and tightness of being inside someone. And even when he’s having the dirtiest, loudest sex he can imagine, the looks they share and the kisses they press to each other’s mouths can still convey an awkwardly affectionate love. ~ He doesn’t actually lug all his canvases to show Jin. The art students have an exhibition where Jin goes around grading their paintings, dropping compliments or praise where they’re merited. When he arrives at Taehyung’s, Taehyung likes to think that he spends an extra-long time on his paintings. He’s rearranged them so they begin with the empty swing, proceed to the one of Jungkook with a neutral expression, cycle through the various emotions, and finally end in happiness: the one of him smiling with the light falling in bars across his face. Viewed like that, they seem to tell their very own love story. Jin looks for a long time at the painting of Jungkook laughing—the last one. He reaches out and traces a finger over the whorls and bumps of paint on the canvas. This is the number one (#1) thing you are Not Supposed To Do to paintings, but Jin holds the power of Taehyung’s grade in his hands, so Taehyung holds his tongue. “Explain this,” Jin says quietly, staring at the creases at the corners of Jungkook’s eyes. Taehyung startles. “Um, well, the assignment was love. And someone once told me that my emotions show through my paintings. So I decided to paint something or someone I love in various emotions, because love is seeing someone at their highest and lowest points and loving them anyway, right? And this guy—uh, this model—is someone I love. So. Yes.” He swings his arms back and forth nervously. Jin studies his painting so hard that Taehyung worries that he’s going to burn a hole in it. He lingers an especially long time on Jungkook’s face. And then he smiles softly, a little sadly. “I’m glad Jungkook’s finally found love,” he says. Taehyung does a double take. “Wait—wait, how do you know—?” “I teach the photography class too.” Jin traces his thumb over the painted line of Jungkook’s mouth. “When he dropped out, it was…heartbreaking. He was such a bright boy and he had such a passion for photography.” He glances at Taehyung. “He doesn’t smile like this for everyone, you know. He smiles like this when he looks at his camera after he’s taken a good shot. He smiles like this at things he loves. People he loves.” Taehyung is agape, trying to process this information. “What—you—?” “I give you an A,” Jin says, marking it on his clipboard. “And Taehyung?” “Huh?” Taehyung says dumbly. “I’m proud of you. Less because you’re a brilliant artist, although you are. But more because you shine light in the life of the loneliest boy I’ve ever met, and that alone is a bigger achievement than any other you will ever make.” Jin walks away, leaving Taehyung staring after him, speechless. ~ Jungkook and Taehyung are on a Date™. They’re not having sex and they’re not kissing. They’re so PG that they’re probably a couple Jimin would watch in a movie. It’s nice, Taehyung thinks, just walking through the city holding hands. They aren’t really saying anything, but it’s a companionable sort of silence. They wind their way up and down sidewalks and pedestrian lanes, slowly working their way through the streets, the hubbub of the city punctuated by Taehyung’s excited comments and Jungkook’s footsteps as he plods along behind him like a comet tail. When they find themselves at the entrance to a small park, Taehyung drags Jungkook in by the hand, skipping and dancing beneath the green canopy of trees, and Jungkook watches him with a soft smile playing around his mouth as natural as his breaths. “Look, Jungkookie,” Taehyung says, pointing. “There’s a lake nearby.” “Lake?” he echoes blankly, looking around. He doesn’t see any hint of water beyond the trees, the brown and green all around. “The sign says so. Can we follow this path? We have time.” Jungkook considers the trail winding through the trees. “Alright,” he says, and Taehyung pulls him down it. About ten minutes later, they emerge at a lake. A pier stretches out over the water. Taehyung pirouettes down it as Jungkook follows behind at a slower pace. Taehyung’s already sitting down on the edge of the pier, swinging feet dangling just above the water, by the time Jungkook reaches its end. He pats the wooden boards next to him. Jungkook sits down. “Jungkook,” Taehyung says after seconds and minutes and eternities have passed. The birdsong around them is a lulling soundtrack to their conversation, the ripples of the water lapping against the stilts of the pier and the sunlight on Taehyung’s face its accompaniment. “I have…something to tell you.” Jungkook looks at him. “Don’t tell me,” he says wearily. “There’s a carnival nearby and you want us to go there.” “No, no, nothing like that.” He twists his hands together in his lap. “Listen, I—I lied to you.” Jungkook goes still. Around the lake, the rustle of the tree branches seem to cease their swaying to listen. “What?” “I should have told you earlier, but I didn’t dare.” Taehyung decides to focus his gaze on the reflection of Jungkook on the lake’s surface. It’s easier to face than the real Jungkook, who is staring at the side of his face. “It’s about the project. The one you modelled for.” Jungkook doesn’t say a word. “The prompt wasn’t emotions,” Taehyung says, words rushed and tripping over each other. “The prompt was—the prompt was love. My emotions show through my work, and my idea was to paint something I love. But the problem is that I didn’t love anything or anyone that way other than…other than art itself, and I couldn’t paint a painting. The only reason I asked you to model for it was because I intended to fall in love with you all along. I saw you in Coffers and I thought, I don’t love him yet, but this is someone I could fall in love with.” The silence next to him is overbearing. “It wasn’t part of the plan for you to return my feelings.” Taehyung hangs his head. “I thought love was something which could be summoned and dispelled at will. I was foolish. Naїve. But it isn’t. It’s—it’s something which has the power to warm you and give you meaning and also freeze you and break you. It’s not something you can turn on and turn off. And I guess—I guess it all turned out well, but I can’t stand the fact that what we have is built on a lie.” He doesn’t dare look at Jungkook. “If you’re mad, that’s okay,” Taehyung mutters. “It’s fine.” He musters the courage to look at Jungkook. Jungkook is looking back at him, but Taehyung can’t read his face. He never thought he’d be blocked out by that same expression ever again. “Taehyung,” Jungkook says finally, “that isn’t…a very big lie.” Cold and warmth simultaneously rushes through Taehyung’s body. “It’s not?” “No.” Jungkook blinks slowly at him. “I mean…it doesn’t really change much. Sure, you would have scared me off if you’d told me straight up that you were trying to fall in love with me, but it isn’t like you killed my parents or something. This isn’t a skeleton in the closet. It’s like a—it’s like a dust bunny.” “Oh,” he says, the relief overflowing over the edges of his voice. “So you don’t mind? At all?” “No.” His mouth breaks into a small smile, Taehyung’s favorite—soft and pliable, like melting chocolate. He nudges Taehyung’s side. “Yah. I think what we have is too strong to be uprooted by a small hiccup like that.” “Of course, I mean—” Taehyung’s voice breaks. “Of course.” “I still love you.” Jungkook presses a kiss to his temple. “Even for all your drama and histrionics.” Taehyung laughs. “I love you, Jeon Jungkook,” he says, smile wider than the lake. “There are fifty shades of happiness in my life, and you are all of them.” ***** sorry ***** Chapter Summary sorry I am extremely sorry that the last chapter cut off, it's been updated now and if you go back and ctrl+f Dunkin Donuts and scroll up about two lines that's where it stopped There was a laugh-cry emoji there and for some reason AO3 Does Not Like Emojis so it decided to just flip out and delete tens of thousands of words (way to be a bitch AO3) I couldn't change it sooner, I was awake and I was in agony because I was at school and my laptop is at home I would insert a crying emoji here but GUESS WHAT AO3 would probably overreact and cut off the rest of this apology too I'm sorry But I have learned many new things from this 1) A bitch in an indeterminate Spanish/Portuguese/Idk I'm sorry language is called puta and I know this because I was called one in the comments 2) I do not blame you for suffering, I was fucking suffering too because I couldn't even go to the computer lab to fix it because the lab was locked BECAUSE THE TEACHER FUCKING FLEW TO ANOTHER LANDMASS WAY TO GO 3) There is a special, exquisite kind of pain to be found in knowing that only a quarter of your fic is on the Internet and you can do nothing to fix it. Think of it as sending only your child's head and torso out into the world This apology is too long already the point is I'm fucking sorry Yay Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!