One annoying thought in the back of his head milled the grayish clouds above into snow over and over again without any real success. Hopefulness did not guarantee victory when planetary alignments were against him and what was left of his life. He wanted to be in meadows of whiteness since, if he sat in the snow for long enough, it would have buried him. He would have finally become pure.
Purity, denied. Heaven, forgotten. He walked on the streets of Milano with his phone in his hands. He was another speck of a mutation in a sea of flawed humanity and flesh that crowded the sidewalk. There was nothing excessively special about him except for his conscience. His rationality always reminded him how insignificant he was although his unending psychoses of greatness smiled at him from time to time, making him turn his chin upward in defiance and flirting. If he was to Fall, he'd do it in handsome attire.
His walk was too fast to be pleasurable although he wasn't running. He was exhausted and consumed although he had never experienced peace as he did in all the days next to Jungkook. But he couldn't focus on the smallest of tasks that day. His routine was so suddenly disrupted that he hadn't had time to adjust. He thanked all the gods (he didn't believe in) that walking and breathing were automatized or he would have collapsed, dead in the middle of the street for no apparent reason except sudden lung failure. Perhaps that would have been better, he concluded, going out of the world just like he arrived, loved and wanted, but by a choice which was not his.
He thought about the man he left at home. Jungkook in his sweat pants and sleeveless shirt, working on his laptop or moving around the room so misplaced and perfectly filling a void Tae never realized existed. Each time he closed his eyes, he could see the younger boy's frame, strong, skin burning hot and arms that could grab hold of an entire world and hold it still, making it ageless.
"Eppur si no muove" if Jungkook so desired. He could scramble all the logic in Tae's mind with a single glance and he could make Tae smile even if he didn't particularly want to. Every unspoken word, every endearing action was a laud, none more obvious than the moments when the maknae looked at him. His clear eyes, unable to lie or understand that they served a false god, with each blink stepped further and further away from the sacred commandments.
The desert was dangerous and there was no God wandering through dunes. Present there was the spectral image of the Devil in songs coming from below, in the temptations of sirens. He and Jungkook meddled with the most hidden alcoves of the other, seducingly destructive in their wants, and Tae was tired because of all the happiness of being known.
He slowed down when he saw his agency's building in the distance and he dialed Jimin's number, borderline unmoved by the fact that it was close to midnight in Korea. Jimin never slept early, never surrendered hours of his life willingly in front of tiredness so Taehyung was surprised when a hushed voice answered.
"Hey, Taetae, everything alright?" his best friend asked in something above a whisper, keeping Taehyung locked up in his alternate reality, disconnected.
He couldn't answer. He knew he should have had no problem with such a question but the right words dispersed with the first car that flew past him at a higher speed than permitted. "Hey," he said back as politeness overtook him - another automatization.
He felt uncomfortable and a woman turned her head for a second at the sound of the foreign language and, uninterested, she continued with her life. A feeling lingered within Tae like a bad omen of impossibility. It was only Jimin on the other end but his whispers came from shadows.
He cleared his throat forced to acknowledge his surroundings and focus on something else than infinity. "Were you sleeping? Did I wake you up?"
It was futile to ask about the importunity of the call because there was nothing well-timed in the Universe except the birth of cosmos. Was the void just as unwilling to live between stars as he was to exist between beauty?
YOU ARE READING
Pathways
Fanfiction"Taehyung is the definition of flawed art and Jungkook is rebellion." Jeon Jungkook is in his last year, studying to be a filmmaker. He's career focused, smart, responsible but restless. In a country as religious as Korea, he had no contact with hom...
