rain » vkook

seventeen

When we get inside, I gather my blankets just like the first time. Unlike the first time, he takes his shoes off and sits down on the couch, and I sit in the kitchen and knock over the junk on my table in my frantic efforts to get my paints set up. My hands freeze for a split second as they come close to the vase of dead flowers, but only for a second. Just a second.

I see Taehyung wrap himself in the blankets in my peripheral vision, and I look down, scrabbling for my brush, dipping into the paint, dragging, standing back. When I look up again, Taehyung is sitting across from me at the table, chin resting on both his hands as he watches me.

"These are –" He says, sentence ending in a hitched breath and choked sob; a new form of punctuation that I hope I never have to hear again. He's staring at the wildflowers, at the brown blood, with a trembling, fragile, fractured-plastic expression.

"I - I wanted to pick wildflowers on the night I disappeared," he whispers and my brush stops moving as my eyes stop at his. "To bring them back. But my boyfriend - my ex-boyfriend - his brother and friend jumped me. Jeongguk, I - I'm never safe." And he pulls the blankets up at the same time he collapses, burying his face in his arms and sobbing.

I drop my paintbrush, ignoring the rainbow splatters on the floor, and rush around to crouch next to him.

"Taehyung, please look at me," I beg, over and over until he does, raising his unfairly tormented eyes and why is the world so cruel – "It's not your fault," I say, remembering when I asked him about the first bruise I saw.

"And you are safe. If you'll just stay with me, I'll do my best to keep you safe," I say earnestly, searching his eyes desperately for any reaction.

"Why?" He whispers, exhaling the word on a rush of pure hurt.

"Because I care."

And he slides off the chair and scoots into my lap, and I wrap my arms around him, feel him shaking and flinching and I feel overwhelmed.

Because this boy who once must have felt terrified to let anyone touch him ever again trusts me.

"I can't stay with you forever," he mumbles.

"Of course you can," I reply immediately.

"It's just that... what are we?"

Oh.

He doesn't want to be a burden if we're nothing to each other. Suddenly, I feel that sickness in my chest, like I've done something wrong because - what if I'm nothing to him? He is so much to me; why can't he see that?

"I don't really know what we are," I say. I am not Ernest Hemingway. "But I don't think that matters that much because I've somehow grown to care about you so much in the short time we've known each other."

I realize that he's shaking, and then I hear him sniffling. I want to tell him that it's okay, he'll be okay, but I don't know if he would believe me. I want him to.

"It's just that - I've never really had a friend before," he admits, sounding broken and small, like the young boy he was years ago, the young boy that it is probably trapped inside the mask of forced adulthood.

"Then let's call ourselves friends," I whisper, and he expels a long, shaky breath and sits up.

"Friends," he says, staring into my eyes. The look on his face is somewhere between confusion and pure happiness, and I'm staring back, enthralled as I watch the confusion disappear, because this is the happiest I have ever seen him; the sun shines out of his dark circles and lights up his whole face.

(The Sun Is A Falling Star That Landed In Your Eyes And I'm Blinded.)

"Screw that," he states, the words blurring together, because he's leaning forward and planting a kiss on my cheek.

Before I can process the feeling of his lips against my skin, the feeling of a rose palette exploding across my eyelids, he's sitting back again and I am left up high in the sky alone, floundering because I want him to be with me.

My eyes don't leave his, even though he's so far away, and oxygen is thinning out.

"C-Can I?" I ask, and he understands a second after the words leave my mouth and nods, and then he joins me in the sky.

He joins me because my lips are against his now and we're so gentle, so soft, so periwinkle and light yellow; his gray and green and blue tones melting into me until it's raining in my head and I'm breathing him in.

When our feet touch the earth again, he laughs as if offering up his hurt and pain to the sky, as if letting me know that he's trying to let go.

"I will always be here," I tell Taehyung. I tell Taehyung about the rain and the paintings and himself as the sky. I tell Taehyung about the concrete jungle.

I tell Taehyung that I am someone else when I'm with him; I'm not Picasso, I'm someone better.

I am Ernest Hemingway.

a/n: ahahaha im emo