Chapter Text
The call is for seven in the morning, which means Yoongi arrives looking like a man attending his own funeral and Jin arrives already talking.
“You know what nobody warns you about,” Jin says, lowering himself onto a flight case with the care of a man twice his age. “Seven a.m. used to be a time I’d see on my way to bed. Now it's a time my back has opinions about.” He rolls his neck; it cracks. “Did you hear that? That was my twenties leaving.”
“Your twenties left a while ago, hyung,” Jungkook says, the corner of his mouth curling.
“And whose fault is that?” Jin retorts, eyes wide and accusing. “I spent them raising you.”
Jungkook just pats his shoulder on the way to warm up.
The venue’s cold the way big empty venues are before anyone fills them, the kind of cold that lives in the floor and comes up through your shoes. They run the parts that need it — a transition that was sloppy two cities ago, the staging on a newer song nobody quite trusts yet. Hoseok counts them in too brightly for the hour, gets a chorus of groans, and does it again louder.
Jungkook works the way he always does, head down, running his own corner of it past the point anyone asked for, until Namjoon tells him twice to drink water. By the second hour the cold’s burned off and they’re loose, the rehearsal turning into seven people messing around in a big room because it’s theirs for twenty more minutes.
Taehyung sits on the edge of the stage, legs hanging off, watching Jungkook try to teach Jin a footwork thing his feet refuse to do.
They break for brunch, and after that the day goes soft.
The afternoon’s free and the seven of them are dumped around the suite with nowhere to be. Jin’s got a show on about people buying houses and he’s taking it personally.
“They have eight hundred thousand dollars,” he says, to the room, “and they’re complaining about the backsplash.”
“What’s wrong with the backsplash?” Hoseok responds, not really asking.
“Nothing. That’s my point. There’s nothing wrong with it. They’ve just chosen to suffer.”
“Turn it off, then.”
“I can’t. I have to see if they pick the bad-backsplash one or the one by the highway.” Jin settles deeper into the couch and jabs the pen in his hand at the TV accusingly. “It’s the highway one. It’s always the highway one.”
Namjoon’s reading a book. Yoongi’s got his headphones on, working, Jimin draped half over his shoulder watching.
Jungkook’s on the couch, knees up, phone an inch from his face. Reading. Not quite a book, though.
It started as curiosity, honestly. Years back he wanted to know what people were saying…about them, about him, so he looked. No harm done. Most of it was nothing. Some of it was weirdly good. And then he looked again, and again, and at some point it stopped being a thing he did once and turned into a thing he just did, especially when there was nothing but time to kill. The good for my English line came later, for if anyone asked. Namjoon had asked once and said, “Dude, just read the news,” so that was the end of that, but he kept the excuse around anyway. It’s mostly bullshit. Whatever.
A lot of it he reads for fun. The wild stuff—soulmate marks, mafia AUs, the one where he had wings, that stuff’s fun, people go all out, and he likes seeing the swings they take. Screenshots the unhinged ones to send around.
In the process, Jungkook’s realized that there’s a specific kind of storytelling that sticks with him, and it’s the ones with a bit more reality that feel like they could’ve actually happened; as if someone takes a real day, nudges it a couple inches, and hands it back. He doesn’t sit there picking apart why he’s taken that…preference. He just keeps going back to it, probably more than he should. And more recently, to one writer more than the rest.
The stories are about him and Taehyung. Most of the good ones are; that’s just what people write. And those are the ones he goes for, when it’s quiet and he wants to feel something without doing anything about it.
He checks. Nothing new. He scrolls a while longer anyway, then drops the phone on his chest.
Jin lets out an exasperated sigh from behind the TV. “It’s the highway one,” he announces, devastated. “They never learn.”
***
The Art Institute is Taehyung’s idea, which surprises no one.
They go in the evening, after the building’s emptied of everyone who isn’t them. Taehyung was quiet in the van over, watching the city go gold and then blue through the window. Jungkook, beside him, kept glancing at him and didn’t say anything.
An empty museum is a strange place. Too big, too still, the lights kept low, so seven men’s noise feels almost rude. That serenity lasts about four minutes.
Hoseok stops in front of a stern old portrait and goes quiet. “He looks like our manager when we’re late.”
A pause while everyone considers it.
“He does,” Namjoon admits.
“That’s exactly the face. That’s the ‘the cars are leaving’ face.”
They move on in a loose clump that keeps stopping. Namjoon reads every placard out loud until people start walking faster to escape him. Jimin stops in front of a big abstract thing, all color and no picture, and tilts his head.
“I could do this.”
“You could not,” Hoseok says.
“I could. I think I have an artist in me that never got a chance. Maybe after we retire.” He considers his future on the wall. “I’d have a studio. Natural light.”
“Jimin-ah. You drew Joon once and he cried.”
“That was expressionism.”
“He cried, Jimin-ah.”
“He was moved!”
Taehyung trails a little behind, not in a hurry, looking at things properly. It’s rare to be anywhere with the lights low and nobody rushing him, so he takes the time, and the others let him, used to it by now.
Then he finds it. The rainy Paris street, huge and grey-gold and somehow still wet-looking after a hundred years, all those people under all those umbrellas going somewhere in the cold. He stops in front of it the way he stops in front of things — hands in his pockets, head tilted, the noise of everyone else getting further away until it isn’t really there.
He doesn’t hear Jungkook come back for him. He feels the arm first, slung across his shoulders the way it’s been slung a thousand times.
“You found the one you like,” Jungkook says.
“It’s the rain.”
Jungkook takes it in. “It’s people walking.”
“It’s people walking in the rain.”
“Why’s it so big, though? If it’s just people walking.” He tilts his head, matching him. “You’d save the big one for a battle or something.”
Taehyung doesn’t answer right away. Jungkook is warm against his side, his face turned up at the painting, and Taehyung keeps his eyes on the canvas because that’s safer than the alternative.
“This is why they don’t let you pick the album covers.” he says.
“At least mine wouldn’t be a sad man standing in the rain.”
Taehyung huffs a laugh. They stay like that, the room gold-lit and empty except for the two of them, and Jungkook’s thumb finds the back of Taehyung’s neck and starts moving in slow idle circles, not meaning anything by it, the way he touches Taehyung and only Taehyung like it’s nothing. And that’s the whole problem, isn’t it — that he gives this away for free, this closeness, and has no idea what it costs on the other end. Taehyung has gotten very good at holding still and letting it be nothing. He’s gotten very good at wanting it to be something else and not saying so.
“You’re doing the thing,” Jungkook says.
“What?”
“The thing where you go somewhere.” He squeezes the back of Taehyung’s neck, easy, and lets his hand fall. “You’ve been staring at the rain for like ten minutes. Come on, Jimin found snacks and he’s not sharing unless we go now.”
Taehyung looks at him then. Lets himself, for a second. Jungkook looks back, open, already thinking about snacks.
“Okay, Kookie.”
So he lets Jungkook drag him to the gift shop.
“Tae, look.” Jimin holds up a tote bag with the rainy Paris painting on it. “It’s your boyfriend. The rain one.”
“I’m buying it for him,” Jungkook says, taking it out of Jimin’s hands. “He stared at it for a year. He has to have it.”
“I don’t need the bag,” Taehyung says.
“You’re getting it.” Jungkook’s already at the register, fishing for his card. “It’s a gift. You’re not allowed to say no to a gift.”
Jimin gives Taehyung a toothy grin and turns to advise Hoseok on whether he’s a fridge-magnet or a postcard person.
***
Jungkook lies in the dark with his phone over his face. He opens the app out of habit and checks.
Something new, posted in the evening while they were at the museum.
LavenderVante.
He opens it. It's longer than the last few, another Taekook, the way LavenderVante always does them, late and quiet, everyone else asleep, that loose honesty you only get past a certain hour. The two of them on one bed, talking about nothing, neither wanting the night to end and neither saying so.
And then the atmosphere goes quiet in that other way. Where neither of them’s talking and the not-talking is the entire essence. Taehyung looking at him. Him looking back.
Jungkook's not going to be the one who looks away first, because looking away first means he wanted something and lost his nerve about it. So he stays where he is and waits to be met, the way he's always waiting to be met, the brave thing left for somebody braver.
Jungkook feels like he’s tipsy.
He reads that part twice.
Okay, weird thing to read about himself. Not because it was wrong or anything… he reads it again. That's the issue, a little... it's not wrong. He doesn't think of himself as someone who waits for other people to be brave; if anything he'd say the opposite, he's the one who pushes, who says the thing. But sitting here in the dark with it on the screen, it reminded him of some night last week-ish, when his Marvel movie marathon with Taehyung stretched late and turned into the kind of talking you only do when you’re half-asleep and your guard’s down, everything gone soft and a little unreal. As if…yeah. Tipsy.
The brave thing left for somebody braver.
Huh.
He's never thought about himself like that. And it seems that some stranger thought about him like that in one line and got closer than people who've known him for ten years.
He scrolls back up and reads the whole thing again from the top, slower this time, and tells himself it's because the writing's good.
It is good. That's not why.