Chapter Text
ekphrasis • /ˈɛkfɹəsɪs/
noun
1. (rhetoric) A clear, intense, self-contained verbal description of an object, especially of a work of art. From the Greek meaning "to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name."
Each night the gallery wakes with a symphony - footsteps and the swish of fabric and yawns sourced from across millennia swelling to louder chatter as church bells chime across the street. The day-to-day preserved silence of the museum is replaced by the bustling sounds of a community of masterpieces coming to life and echoing footsteps as artworks leave their frames in a mystery that may never be solved.
The sculptures step down from their plinths and the lines of pencil, bronze, marble, and paint become human flesh - just for the night. The rooms full of paintings old and new burst to life, and their midnight lives start up again giving way to friendships centuries old, and romances decades in the making.
Children with clothes covered in swirling Impressionist brushwork scamper through the halls, playing tag and screeching in delight after a long day held in static. Butterflies with smudged wings play over the heads of two figures, a marble girl given a pink blush by the night and her lover, who plays a violin for her, she and her instrument are a swathe of moving cubes all from different angles; two figures from opposite ends of history finding love in each other's arms.
A group of athletes throw a bronze discus between them in an empty hallway, their dynamic musculature all flesh and blood, but dusted with a sheen of bronze in places, telling of their dawn form. A lithe Calico cat leaving trails of ash from her fresco chases a fat dog in a Victorian collar between their feet, yelping and scrapping playfully under the light of the moon filtered in through the skylights.
Though it is loud, and far from the pristine order of a museum that you may know, the gallery at night is never mayhem, but rather very familiar, organised chaos.
The community of beautiful things that inhabited this space has been years in the collecting, growing slowly over time as the gallery earnt prestige, donors and a thirst for new works to hang (and wander) in the halls.
Once, many years ago, the collection had been haphazard in its organisation. It's numbers of works still small enough that everything had to be displayed together to impress those who came to view its meagre foundations.
The ancient silk painting of the doe-eyed Joseon boy-king, regal atop of gilt throne and swathed in robes of royal blue, had originally hung in the main hall for all to see. There was no doubt that he was a monument in the collection's shallow breadth and the original portraitist’s skill.
The king's sparkling eyes have entranced many a viewer in their time, long after his name had been lost to the ages. The noble set of his features had been preserved like a mosquito in amber in the beauty of his youth, bright eyes were left to stare intently out of his portrait, as if across the room itself.
He sits on a red throne, it’s back elaborately carved in the shape of a golden dragon, with enamelled flowers, and delicate birds that dance behind his shoulders. He is straight-backed like a king, but there is no mistaking his youth from his posture - one arm propped up against the arm of the throne in a manner that gives away how little of life he had seen when he sat for his portrait.
His lips are blossom pink, his robes a deep blue, billowing around him lavishly. Brilliantly embroidered dragons glimmer on his breast as if to tell anyone looking that this boy controls a kingdom - or rather, once did.
Opposite him in this main hall, stood a warrior born of marble, a paragon of strength and beauty, the sculptor's hand surely blessed by the kiss of Aphrodite herself when he pulled the nude figure from the solid marble. He came from the peak of Empire, a power spanning the Mediterranean and the East seemingly without bound, thousands of years before the boy-king's domain had been even a twinkle in anyone's eye.
The angular glory of his features - the plush lips, broad shoulders, slim waist and long legs - had kept him famed in his own time when he took to the sands of the arena, and though forgotten largely in the modern day, he remains still dearly loved, by one.
At night when the moon replaces the sun in the sky, the boy-king stirs and steps down from his throne, silken-slippered feet careful on the floors, while the swathes of his robes teem like an ocean around him. His steps, after so many years of nights, are sure, though it was not always this way.
Each evening he reaches the place where his gladiator stands, and smiles as marble gives way to fair skin, freckled in places, scarred in others. He removes his cloak and stands on the tips of his toes to drape it across the naked man's frame, shielding him from other's eyes, and fighting off the chill that lingers in the night air.
The warrior smiles, and presses their lips together, rendering the boy-king merely a boy.
"Seokjin." The king would breathe, strokes of ink made flesh and blood and bone and desire.
"I'm here, Jeongguk. Like always." The warrior would reply, enveloping his lover's frame into his embrace.
Night after night, the two would meet in the centre of the vast room to hold each other. They do not remember falling in love, it was many years ago, but there is little question in the warm blush that colours the prince's cheeks and the desperate way that the gladiator holds him as the nights draw to a close is that yes, this is love. Albeit in the most unlikely of forms, between two people who should never have met on opposite sides of the desert of time.
Since then, when the collection was small and undivided, they have been moved. The gladiator of marble was taken to stand in a hall of Classical sculpture, and the king to form the beginnings of a growing Eastern art collection housed on the opposite side of the labyrinth of rooms.
The first night he woke to find himself in a new place, the sparkle in the king's eyes had been the beginnings of a tear, thinking he had been exchanged and transported to some other museum with warm red walls and a scarcer population and, most alarmingly, no Seokjin.
His slippered feet had been cautious as he traversed territory never traversed before, there had been too much time spent coiled in Seokjin's arms, being kissed by Seokjin's mouth, to do much exploring past their own hall. There had been no time, not with whole days to catch up between each dusk and each dawn.
It had seemed like more than one night of running, and some residents of the populace might still remember the night the prince in blue had torn through each and every room looking for his marble gladiator.
Others, in the west wing of the gallery, might tell you of the way the gladiator had stumbled, confused, between the spaces calling, calling, calling for a boy-king who only answered back mere minutes before dawn.
The next night they knew where to find each other, and not unpurturbed by the shock of aloneness, they found their way back into each other’s arms with most of the night to spare.
The boy-king led his love back through the halls and to the room where his work had been hung, wholly unoccupied other than by a playful little sparrow from a tapestry and wrought golden snake content to sleep in the warm light cast by one of the spotlights.
It was private, and quiet, and gave the two lovers a chance to know each other without the prying eyes of rest of the collection. For years it was just the two of them, the deep red walls cast dancing shadows across Seokjin’s fair complexion and a deep red blush rose up Jeongguk’s chest at his warrior’s ministrations.
They learned every angle, line, and curve of each other's bodies, given to them eons ago by the most skilled of hands. Jeongguk's luxurious blue robes were slipped off his frame and repurposed to create a soft surface on the gallery floor for Seokjin to lay him down and the surrounding space was filled with their cries from the throes of pleasure.
Each night, the little gold snake would lift its head and give a metallic hiss of distaste, and the sparrow would take to the rafters, and Jeongguk would sigh in delight while Seokjin's lips left marks on him never intended by his painter so many centuries ago.
And so it went, years passed, seasons changed, and the marble gladiator and the boy king had lifetimes together.
Their isolated bliss did not last forever, though, as the original curators of the gallery retired, and another set took their place - another set who had their eyes on expansion. Soon enough, companion works were located to sit with the boy king, the snake and the sparrow in their wine-dark sanctuary, and one evening, without warning, Jeongguk was not the crown jewel anymore.
Two terracotta soldiers were bought to keep him company - life-size and noble atop horses sculpted to mirror the finest pedigree. The soldiers, too, were of a fine breed as they sat with spines as rigid as they had been rendered so many years ago.
They were an impressive acquisition for this gallery of wonders, and on the day they were placed in the gallery there was a line outside to come in and see them for the first time.
More feet traversed the floor of the Eastern collection in one day than there had been in years. Some were so wrapped up in the soldiers, so large and lifelike atop their plinth that they barely spared a glance for the beautiful boy-king in blue. Others, the more observant among those who had come, took the time to stop and watch him for a moment, a few even commenting on the way a galaxy seemed to have been captured in his big brown eyes.
The air of reverence in the gallery dissipated as the gallery closed and the hours crept closer to darkness. When the prince stepped delicately down from his throne, and both his feet landed on the white, slightly scuffed gallery floors, there was little reverence in his gaze for their impressive forms, but rather confusion.
The soldiers, too, seemed confused. Their resting place before here had been a dark, unremarkable storage space, and before that the vast tomb that was not their own that their terracotta likenesses had been buried within. These places certainly hadn't allowed them this - this chance to come alive, awake, aware at night as they were now.
Before they even noticed that they were not alone in the room, they faced each other in awe. Smiles grow from nothing, and armour clinks as they close the gap between each other as best they can with joints used to disuse and layers of archaic clothing between them.
Thousands of years buried below ground is enough to forget many things, but definitely not a lover's embrace.
One of the two let out a sob, though, with their faces pressed into each other's hair, it was impossible to know who it had been. They clutched onto each other like some unseen current threatened to rip them apart, and Jeongguk eventually averted his eyes, unsure that he should be witnessing something so intimate.
Upon noticing the fact that they were not in fact alone, they unravelled themselves from their tight knot, the taller one shrinking behind his smaller companion, and their horses, now without riders, pawed nervously at the new, artificial ground. The animals did not stay long, spooked by the warmth of their own limbs and the sight of the snake as it slithered down off its case, leaving the room quiet and the air within it tense as they bolted.
The soldiers and the prince stared at each other for a moment, all three unsure of how to progress.
It wasn't until Seokjin arrived, carrying a bunch of grapes stolen out of a still life, that anyone dared speak.
"I see we have company," Seokjin said, a wry smile on his face, vaguely amused at the stagnant air in the room. His prince was regal, and confident when he sat within his silk, but at night he was shy, wary, easily startled by change ever since the night he had been moved from the main hall.
The high slant of the tall soldier’s cheekbones dusted a shy pink as he took in Seokjin in all his naked glory. The other man averted his vulpine stare, and Jeongguk was shocked out of his stupor at the men’s discomfort to swathe Seokjin’s frame in his cloak as was his nightly ritual.
Jeongguk felt himself flush with embarrassment, though Seokjin didn't seem phased in the slightest, merely popping his stolen grapes into his mouth and watching the scene unfold with an impish expression on his features.
The soldiers eventually get their bearings and bow politely.
"I am Jung Hoseok of the Hando Jung clan." The tall one says, his top-knot messy and his smile telling of mischief as he bows his head in introduction.
"General Min Yoongi of the Yeoheung Min clan." The shorter one echoes, his gaze calculating and his movements elegant as he watches the sparrow flit about around Hoseok's head.
They have the rigid backs of well-trained soldiers, and Jeongguk's heartstrings pull at the way their dispositions remind him of being back in his own time. Men like this would bow to him, fight for him, and now his name is barely remembered by anyone not buried in old, crackling pages or within the earth.
One night alone is not enough to learn about each other in turn, and to calm the hearts of the newcomers feeling their own heartbeats for the first time in millennia. It takes several, with the four of them sat cross-legged in the centre of the room, sharing whatever morsel Seokjin had stolen from the hall of still lifes on his way to meet them.
Yoongi and Hoseok are years older than even Seokjin, two boys from the same land that Jeongguk would inherit thousands of years after their death. They met on the road, they tell them, both leaving the small towns they had been born in pursuit of glory, a chance to make a name for themselves.
They had first laid eyes on each other in an inn, under the cover of shadows - two farmer's sons with heads too big for their shoulders - and travelled together into the newly unified lands of the Great Qin to the west of their homeland. For two poor boys with pockets much too light, the stories of the fortunes to be found behind the battle lines of the emperor’s army were too alluring to ignore.
Yoongi rode up through the strict hierarchy to attain the role of general, while Hoseok proved his prowess on the battlefield, mastering skill with both a sword and crossbow. They had found separate paths, and yet the bond they had formed in the dining room of a cold, leaky inn was one forged from iron - unbreakable even throughout centuries.
They fought, lived, ate, laughed, slept together. Their lives were intertwined just as their fingers were as they told their story for the first time in eons.
Yoongi spoke of the battles they had fought, and Hoseok rose to his feet to expertly remove Yoongi's heavy armour as if completely in tune with the other man's needs as his shoulder’s began to hunch from the weight. When he had finished, they switched places, creating a little stack of burnished metal plating against one of the wine-red walls that glinted in the light and clinked ever so gently as the little gold snake slithered within the cave of their curves to sleep in the dark.
Seokjin smiled at how in sync these two were. He wondered as he listened whether or not he and Jeongguk seemed like that from the outside looking in. They had had more than a human lifetime together, after all, but only under the fall of dark.
As his prince leaned against him, deeply in awe of these new people with new stories to tell, and let Seokjin run his fingers idly through his long, silky hair, he thought that yes, they probably did seem much the same.
Seokjin took joy in seeing the soldiers realise that they would see each other every night from now on. The world they had last drawn breath in had no place here, and their shoulder’s seemed to relax as the quiet calm of the gallery’s midnight interior held no resemblance to gritty, loud battlefields where they had met their ends.
After their stories had been shared, and Seokjin and Jeongguk, in turn, had given over their own, Yoongi and Hoseok disappeared for a few nights. Traversing the halls of this new place, exploring, walking off thousands of years inanimate stillness.
Some nights Jeongguk and Seokjin accompanied them, surprising the other living jewels in the gallery’s crown to see them out of their private little nook where they bathed mostly only in each other’s company.
The general and the archer took on their new world together; Yoongi with a reservation and calculation, Hoseok with a wide smile and a greeting for every person they met.
He grinned at the marble nymphs who lived next to Seokjin’s plinth and made them blush, fed a kitten from the palm of his hand, bent down to help a little boy tie his shoe.
Yoongi mostly just looks on from behind, smiling slightly when the mood takes him. He speaks only to some, but mostly lets his lover lead him across the floors on a whim.
“Are you not excited to have a heartbeat again?” Jeongguk asked one night when they found themselves standing alone together as Hoseok and Seokjin marvelled at a beautiful bird of paradise flitting it’s way across the tops of the empty gilt frames. The naivety of his question made Yoongi smile - this boy had seen more years than most, and yet had somehow retained a gentle concern, a quiet uncertainty.
“I am, little prince.” He replied, his voice still gravelly with disuse, watching Hoseok as he spoke and realising that his reserved nature had come across to Jeongguk as sadness. “It’s just, I have seen the world through his eyes most of my life.” Their lines of sight fix on the other two men trying to coax the songbird down. “Why would I start doing something different now?”
Jeongguk thinks he understands as Seokjin’s hiccuping laugh fills the cavernous hall, empty but for it and the twittering of the bird.
Over the years they become fast friends. Eventually, the four of them make a full round of the gallery, seeing everything there is to be seen, and becoming known to everyone who put themselves in their path. After, they return to their red-walled haven where night after night they amuse themselves with talks of their own lives before they had been brought here.
Seokjin tells the stories his mother told him - the ones she collected moving between empires, crossing borders to eventually settle half a world away in the precarious tenements of a glistening marble city. He told of finding work as an gladiator in the arena where his feet met blood-clumped sand and his ears heard nothing but the screaming of those who had perhaps come to watch him die.
Jeongguk shared the songs of his time, once or twice even plucking up the courage to dance for his friends with the delicately placed steps he had been taught as a little boy. He cried as he told them of the fear that had gripped his heart as a treacherous uncle’s poison flowed through his veins, ending his short stint on a coveted throne.
They learn a game of dice from Yoongi and Hoseok, who procure a pair from the desk in the back of a vacated portrait, and share stories of their men in arms and their homes that they had left on the peninsula to chase war.
Yoongi, eventually, told them of the way the world stopped when he turned his head mid-battle to see Hoseok fall from his horse, clutching an arrow in enemy colours. Hoseok smiles when he says that he doesn't regret that Yoongi’s face was the last thing he ever saw - until their reunion in this very room many nights ago.
They are not lonely, they have each other. They bring bread from other paintings to the sparrow sometimes. The gold snake remains seemingly disappointed in the fact that it has to share their company - as does Hoseok, who always eyes it warily. Things become routine, and things become familiar - life is good, but much the same as it always has been.
Enough time passes for dust to accumulate on the rafters, and for an assistant to be tasked with brushing it away. It crosses her mind that it seems odd that the dust has not fallen on the two terracotta soldiers, nor their mounts, but she barely thinks anything of it after she moves on to the rest of the space.
On this night, in particular, the four of them are gambling - trading off things that they have found on a quick round of the nearby collections in a game of cards. The goods being betted on are of little importance as they will materialise back into the paintings they had been pilfered from come dawn, and yet, argument rises between them.
It is a matter of winning the argument now, more than anything else. The game itself has been forgotten - the new test of skill is preserving their own dignities amongst an onslaught of accusations about slight of hand, cheating and stupidity.
So caught up in their principles as they were, they barely noticed that another person had entered the room, drawn close like a moth to the moon by the guttural sounds of playful teasing and impassioned yelling in the language of his homeland. They didn’t get many visitors - by this point in the gallery’s long life the inhabitants had long decided whose company to keep - but their guest was used to being the odd one out.
His smile was wry, and he watched the motley bunch of human treasures reclined in a circle in the centre of the wine-coloured room he had never encountered before with the analytical stare of a man who saw things as they were not as they appeared.
He was quiet and slightly shy as he hovered in the doorway. Unsure how to make himself known to a prince, an archer, a general, and a gladiator who had swum so far through the sea of time.
As formidable as they seemed, the onlooker admired them so. They were the figures of the stories he had been read as a child, the lessons he'd had at school, and the living, talking, breathing figures he himself had viewed in countless galleries during his lifetime before.
It was Yoongi who noticed him first, catching the man’s silhouette in his peripheral and leaning back on the heels of his hands to watch him. His gaze was careful and yet the man in the doorway did not shrink beneath it.
Slowly, each instrument in the chorus of voices subsided, as Yoongi’s companions noticed his distraction.
“Are you going to come in, stranger?” Seokjin asked, head tilted to one side and eyes sparkling with kindness and curiosity in equal measures.
The silence in the room was broken by the wide grin that split the stranger's face and stepped a little closer, wringing his hands together.
“I heard your voices and, well, I thought I would come and see what all the fuss was about.” He said shyly, the timbre of his words deep and well-pronounced. His words were gilded in a Parisian accent, and smudges of paint lined his face as a remnant of his daytime form. “I want to know everyone in this gallery. I like hearing their stories, and I have never met any of you.” His eyes glittered with intrigue. “I would very much like to hear yours.”
“I see no problem in that,” Yoongi answered, resting his chin atop Hoseok’s dark hair. “You must tell us yours in return.” Yoongi’s voice had commanded armies, spurned men away from their deaths, advised emperors - the boy stood no chance at refusal.
“What are you?” Jeongguk asked, eyes kind and curious as he drank in the newcomer’s appearance - his modern dress, the peculiar lines across his face.
“I am a cubist!” The boy said, swiping his own thumb down the side of his cheek and pulling at the paint there - the artworks here took human form, and when the collection of the gallery had been small there would have been nothing to distinguish them from the naked eye.
Now, the halls were full, and whatever untold magic it was that kept their hearts beating under the cover of darkness was stretched thin. Almost every living thing that wandered these halls carried reminders of their daytime form - the skin of Seokjin’s chest remained a pearly marble some nights, cold to the touch and stark against the golden glow of his natural pallor. Some nights, plates of Yoongi and Hoseok’s armour would remain fragile terracotta clinking bluntly against each other. Jeongguk had been here the longest, and perhaps the magic favoured him for that, but even he noticed that often the dark blue silk of his garments was pale at the edges, like the corners of the silkscreen he was depicted on.
These physical remnants of the forms they were forced to retake at daybreak were a sometimes alarming; a reminder that they were not entirely alive in this place, merely lending a lifeforce from this place night by night. Their old lives were now reduced merely to stories, and yet held a piece of it so close to them it became physical.
Each one of them was a product of their own time and the fashions of it, a material object passed down through the centuries by loving hands or lucky hiding spots.
Though Jeongguk was used to what he knew from the time he had been transposed here from, he decided he very much liked the wide-smiling boy who came to sit with them that night. His attentions were flighty, and he often seemed at times to blur in the low lighting as he took in their surroundings.
“I am Taehyung.” He said, stretching his legs out in front of him so that his cropped, black trousers ride up his legs to expose a very loud pair of spotty socks that make Jeongguk giggle.
They go around the circle, introducing themselves in the stiff manner of their times gone by that makes Taehyung’s eyes crease at the corners. He seems intrigued, more-so than they all had been when they met each other. It seems that Taehyung comes from so long after the rest of them that their lifetimes are revered as almost the things of myth.
“You lived in Rome?” Taehyung asks one night, almost in disbelief.
“All my life.”
“And you were a gladiator?”
Seokjin nods. It’s hard to believe that this man, who gives his laughter and his gentleness generously, had ever had any business in the business of death.
“I was popular. Trained since I was a boy to make money for my mother. At one point I had the favour of the Emperor’s younger brother. He would pay my Ludus to spend time with me - it was him who commissioned the sculpture - said I deserved to be immortalised for all the centuries.” His smile is wry and there is little modesty to be heard of, and yet he gets away with it.
“I suppose you have a thing for royalty.” Taehyung jokes absently, and Jeongguk scowls without malice.
“Back then, I ‘had a thing’ for whoever had enough money to buy my freedom. In that life and in this one there has been no one for me except Jeonggukie.”
Jeongguk preens, the tense set of his shoulders disappearing after the talk moves from Seokjin’s past lovers to the only one in his future.
“And you, you were really a prince? Of Korea?” Taehyung says, his voice wavering in reverence
Jeongguk nods. “It was called Joseon, and I suppose I didn’t last very long on the throne but yes. Essentially.”
“And you two are from a terracotta army? It must have been unearthed even since my own time.” He thinks for a moment. “I wish I could have seen it.”
Hoseok and Yoongi share a sad look. “So do we.”
“You did not want to die heroes?” Seokjin asks, chewing thoughtfully on the inside of his round cheeks. He knew well of men in his lifetime willing to go all the way to Pluto’s doorstep to stamp their names in the histories.
“I would rather have had my life with him,” Yoongi says dolefully. Hoseok kisses his cheeks and hums something of an agreement into his cheek. “There is no glory in the world that could ever be worth seeing the one you love fall from his horse, and with him every dream you had of a life together.”
Hoseok rubs a calloused thumb across Yoongi’s knuckles and is uncharacteristically silent.
Seokjin chuckled fondly at Taehyung’s awe - something that may have fit just as well on an overwhelmed child, as it did on an eccentric young man.
“And you, what of your life, Taehyung?”
Taehyung grins, and it is nothing but infectious.
“I am a painter, of course. I was born on the Korean Penninsula, but my sister and I moved to France when I turned 18. She wanted to be a ballet dancer, and I wanted to paint like they did in France.”
Even talking about it, Taehyung’s eyes are starry.
“I wanted to see something new, to make something new. I got a job cleaning up a bar where they did cabaret shows.”
Four eyebrows shoot up, and Taehyung remembers his audience.
“It’s a type of show. With women in not many clothes and big feathers. It’s racy and fun. I loved it. There were boys too, where I worked. The dancers would let me paint them before my shifts. They were all very beautiful, so it was good practice.
“I couldn’t afford to join a school, but I experimented, and I saw everything I could. My sister moved home, but I stayed. I just wanted to show people beauty the way they’d never seen it before.”
“And did you?” Jeongguk askes.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Taehyung smirks.
“You painted yourself?”
The nod that is given is one of both answer and pride.
“What else?” Jeongguk presses, ever curious.
“Portraits mostly. One used to be here at this gallery. But that was a long time ago.”
Taehyung’s brusque pride recedes like a tide, and Yoongi and Hoseok share a glance between them at how sad he sounds.
“Who was that? What happened to them?” Jeongguk asked, his eyes clear with worry.
“That sounds like a story for another night, little prince,” Yoongi says.
Taehyung looks relieved. That wound is still raw, and Taehyung is not ready to let speak the way it was inflicted into existence. Not yet. He sends a grateful look in Yoongi's direction, and receives a warm little smile of reassurance in return.
<hr>
The open end of this first conversation is forgotten quickly, swiftly brushed under the rug by Taehyung’s unwillingness to break his silence and his careful manipulation of their nightly talks away from any possible reminder.
Instead, they talk of happiness, of their experiences, teaching each other the ins and outs of times that passed out of their lives’ reach. They explore the rest of the gallery, sometimes all together, and other times paired off in odds and evens.
One night, as they walk, hand in hand, behind Taehyung, Yoongi whispers in Hoseok’s ear. “He is lonely.”
It is not an immediately obvious observation of the bright young man they have taken to calling 'nabi' now that it has become clear to them both that Taehyung flits from person to person like a butterfly, never letting his wings settle completely before jumping to the next thing that catches his fancy.
He has many acquaintances, and everyone always seems happy to see him - their eyes light up at his presence when he wanders about. He is generous with his time and the warmth he exudes comes in tones of deep orange, yellow and red to match the smudges often left on the angular planes of his face.
Hoseok, who had never imagined such a thing to be true of the one person who did not limit friendship within the museum to a select few, had to consider Yoongi's suggestion, but it made sense, of course. Yoongi had risen so quickly up the ranks in their own time for his incredible military skill, but also the innate ability to read another person for more than what they presented at face value.
Every child who ran under their feet had spent time playing with the young painter, the marble nymphs who preened themselves in the reflections of the shining window-panes had all known the taste of his cherry lips, and the harsh brows of the young men in the portrait gallery had nearly all been lifted by his charming, pretty words meant to remove them from their clothes before dawn struck. But Taehyung did not love any of them, nor did he want them for anything more than a distraction from the quiet around him.
It took a few nights for Hoseok to come to the same conclusion as Yoongi, but unsurprisingly he did. Taehyung was, indeed, a lonely soul.
Hoseok couldn’t say what it was for sure that confirmed the suspicion for him - perhaps the vacant look on Taehyung's face when he was left standing alone, or the way the sparkle he delivered to other people’s eyes never really painted itself into his own. Mostly it was the almost hungry, desperate way he sought out their company - he was never alone, almost as if the loneliness would be all the more able to break him if he let it creep too close.
“There is something - someone, I suspect - missing for him,” Hoseok told Yoongi the night he realised that he had been right all along. “He always seems to be looking for something the way you do you when you’ve known it so intimately it is impossible to live without it.”
Hoseok fidgeted where they sat, watching two courtiers with coiled blond hair dancing in the centre of the mostly empty room they had decided to occupy on that night. The swishing of the woman’s skirts and her occasional giggle as her partner swept her off her feet made the tone of their quiet conversation all the more poignant.
“He will share it with us when he is ready, my love. There is no need to be impatient. We have forever.” Yoongi soothed with a small laugh, in tune as always with Hoseok’s internal dialogue. “Now come. Dance with me, you were always so good at it, and I do believe those two might be getting lonely out there all alone.”
Hoseok’s eyes flashed with excitement, and he was up within a moment, pulling Yoongi along with him.
----
There was no more talk of Taehyung that night, but he was hard to forget. Hoseok watched him carefully in the nights that followed, sought him out often, and tried to build the bridge of trust that only Yoongi had ever extended to him in his own life.
Whatever the cause, or cure, for Taehyung’s loneliness, Hoseok itched to find it.
Days pass - or rather, the nights do, in a murky, endless way that leaves nobody within the gallery’s walls able to truly keep count of how much time has been spent.
The world outside flows at its usual mortal pace, and Yoongi and Hoseok delight in watching it pass. More often than not, they can be found seated next to each other with their backs against the wall of the gallery’s suspended hallway, relishing in the flickering view of the motorways in the distance, and the checkerboard pattern of apartment lights on in the skyrise buildings beyond.
Quite a sight they make, armour left behind, hair unbound, voices lowered as they watch something they should not be seeing, something beyond impossible that they have found it easier not to try to comprehend.
Yoongi had opened the window ever so slightly, and the night air that filters through to rustle the linen of their clothes and the wisps of their hair is a godsend.
As much as this place gives them life, it also traps them, and Hoseok has long been banned from waxing sentimentally about the feeling of grass on his feet or rain sliding down the slope of his nose or the way it felt to jump into a freezing cold river after a day's ride baking in the heat. It is too much to remember something that they could never return to, and unfair to dwell on.
They are happy, of course, but there are some things they crave between each other’s touch and a promise of eternity hidden away in their private paradise. Butterflies, Taehyung called them all once, beautiful and together but still with pins in their wings. Yoongi had laughed sadly and told him that he was more like a butterfly than any of them.
Taehyung often spouted things like this, most of them flowery and philosophical and with not much sense to be made of them at all. Sometimes, just sometimes, he would hit home. Seriousness did not fit him well, however.
The four of them had grown fond of the little painter, with his flighty attentions and cavernous heart and incredible wit. Most nights he came to sit with them to talk, mostly, and sometimes to listen. The nights when he didn't leave his companions to worry, and though they admitted to him that his absence was deeply felt, he never revealed with whom he spent those nights.
No one, Hoseok suspected, occupied this time. Only thoughts and ghosts and the ticking of the clocks.
The root of Taehyung's unhappiness lay with more than the lack of grass at his feet or rain on his face, and ran deep within him like veins within marble - it seemed, sometimes when Hoseok watched him carefully, it was just as permanent.
The painter, however, had taken a liking to the two soldiers, drawn to their long conversations like the moths that used to hover around their campfires on their way to the Great Qin. Their wings had been beautiful and geometric in earthy tones that seemed a good match to the soft browns of Taehyung’s clothes, streaked with the palette of the cubists in dusty golds and burnished bronze. Hoseok remembered them well, and the way Yoongi’s warm laugh had made him a little less fearful of their large shapes in the dark.
There was nothing to be afraid of when Taehyung emerged from the shadows one night in particular. He looked worn, a telltale sign he’d been alone for too long. There was a smear of gold paint on his forearm, which he worried at with his thumb until the gilding transferred itself to the calloused skin of his hands.
"Your thoughts are too noisy," Hoseok complained, sitting up from where he was slung across Yoongi's arm and rubbing his eyes. "Come here and make them be quiet."
Taehyung fidgeted in the doorway, unwilling to impose on their time alone together. Yoongi reached out and beckoned with his fingers for him to come, pulling him out of the shadows with an invisible string.
As flighty and erratic as Taehyung was, he was solid and warm and constant where he folded himself up at Hoseok's side, his arms wrapped around his waist while Yoongi's seated form held them both upright.
"I'm sorry for intruding," Taehyung said, his face buried in the crook of Hoseok's neck. He seemed small and young. Fragile. "I know you two value your time alone."
Hoseok shushed him, and Yoongi chuckled quietly. "You are lonely, nabi. Exceptions can be made."
Hoseok gave him a scolding look. "Yoongi is joking. We like having you here with us."
Taehyung sniffled and pulled away from Hoseok slightly. "I thought I hid that well." Clearly uncomfortable, he played idly with the ends of Hoseok's hair.
"You don't need to hide it, nabi. Not from us." Hoseok had been lonely for a long time before he met Yoongi. The children in the village he had come from had never really accepted him as one of their own - they thought him too boisterous and loud, unfocused and distracted. Until he met Yoongi on that fated night centuries ago, it had been him against the world.
He'd been lonely often when they'd reached the Qin Empire too. Yoongi's quick rise through the ranks had separated them, left Hoseok sitting around campfires with men who barely cast a look in his direction as the long, cold evenings slewed past while Yoongi was kept in long tactical meetings with the other generals night after night.
He had known a different kind of loneliness then, a harder kind now that he knew what it felt to feel full of someone else's love. The glassy, yearning look he had no doubt had in his eye then was the same he saw in Taehyung's eyes now.
"You miss someone, don't you?" Hoseok asked, long fingers tipping Taehyung's chin upward so that he had to make eye contact.
Taehyung nodded, letting Hoseok's fingers brush the soft skin of his neck. He swallowed hard, anticipating Yoongi's unhappiness at his lover's intimate touches. The former general instead, looked at Taehyung with the same warmth as Hoseok did, and made no move to admonish either of them for their behaviour.
Instead, his eyes were kind, and the pull of his little lips reminded Taehyung of the rosebuds that had grown on the balcony of his tiny, shared apartment in the dingy suburbs of Paris.
At first glance, Taehyung had assumed Hoseok was the more immediately attractive of the two. He appeared like a handsome, charming soldier of the storybooks Taehyung had coveted as a young boy. His skin was a burnished gold and his smile glowed even in the low lighting of the gallery at night time.
Yoongi, on the other hand, was smaller, always the second to be noticed of the two of them, though Taehyung thought him just as beautiful. His love for Hoseok seemed reverent, the way he looked on with watery fondness in his eye whenever Hoseok’s head was turned, and often also when it was not.
The general, for all his reservation and unobtrusiveness, was actually rather sweet, Taehyung had found. He had a killer sense of humour and a gentle manner, paired with a viciously mischievous streak that had fast found him a permanent place in Taehyung’s heart, never far from Hoseok as usual.
Taehyung had missed the way it felt to have a constant - the way it felt to rely on others. He loved these two, or rather, he was growing to love them. That did not heal the gaping hole in his heart left long before these terracotta lovers had become part of the thrumming veins of this gallery.
"I do. I miss someone very much.“
"From your life before?" Hoseok's voice was warm like honey, curling around Taehyung's heart and coaxing the shards of his old life out.
"Yes."
There was a pause, the gallery was midday-silent.
"Who is it that you miss so terribly?"
Taehyung closed his eyes and sighed. The memories he had of his life before came flooding back when he let them, transporting him to another time, another place, truly another lifetime.
A laugh like fizzing champagne, the pendulum swing of a pearl earring, a shift of beads shaking like a rainstorm, the smell of absinthe and sugar and cigarette smoke pooling in the rafters hand in hand with the brassy notes of a jazz band. He had loved it all so, and yet he would give up all the memories of it in an instant to have the only person that made it all worthwhile back in these warm, safe hallways once again.
“He was my best friend. His name was Jimin." Taehyung’s voice choked even thinking about him, verbalising such a hallowed name in halls he no longer walked.
Taehyung signed, closing his eyes and relaxing at the feeling of a sturdy hand snaking around his waist, pulling him close and safe. The only thing to do was to let himself be enveloped in the arms of the soldiers, and try not to get carried away on the tide of memories that made him sick to the stomach.
“When you are ready to tell us about your friend, we will listen, little nabi. But not until you are ready.”
Taehyung nodded and sunk into Yoongi’s embrace. Hoseok’s lips pressed a kiss to his temple. “Until then we are here.”
“You are not alone in this place anymore, our butterfly.”
They sat, coiled up in each other’s arms all night, facing the window and watching the lights of this new, unfamiliar world fly past. When the glow of dawn brushed the sky yolk-yellow, they drifted back to their respective haunts in the gallery not by choice, but by the pull of the magic of that place, telling them it was time to go.
Yoongi and Hoseok departed hand-in-hand to their plinth, and Taehyung returned to the Hall of Cubists with the warm memory of two pairs of lips on his own instead of old, stagnant recollections that tinged the colours of his painting a murky, sad blue.
