Continuum

스물 여섯

As soon as he asked the question, the other boys, most noticeably the oldest ones, flushed pink. So they had an idea of what Taehyung ought to do, they just didn't like the idea. Jeongguk, in his dazed state, was the only oblivious one.

"Hmm, Tae?" Jeongguk asked, still looking far away. "What are," he seemed to think for a long moment, "well, we like where you're from?"

Taehyung didn't know how to answer that. How do you tell someone every little thing that made up a person that you care about? Because that's what people are. They're not their employment. They're not their names. They're the little things that they do every day, from whether they choose to dye their hair to which cereal they eat to how they get to the place where they work. It's those little things, the little tics about people that describe who they are. It takes years of close proximity to learn all those things, and it would take years to describe it to someone else.

But you can try, Taehyung supposed.

"Well," he said. "They get me, for one. Most of the time."

"Now there's a talent we don't possess," Yoongi muttered.

Taehyung shrugged. "It takes time, I think. Because..." he trailed off, not sure of the right word to say.

"You're different," Jeongguk supplied. Taehyung frowned.

"He's unique," Namjoon corrected. Taehyung liked that idea a lot more. But he still had to answer Jeongguk's question.

"I could show you pictures," he said without meaning to. "I could show you pictures from over there."

They seemed curious enough, so Taehyung looked around for his mostly useless phone - after all, one of the phone numbers on it lead to anywhere, probably because that phone number was active in an entirely different universe, but at least it had photos... right? - and unlocked it. When it found that all the pictures that were in his gallery were still there, he let out a small sigh of relief. Those photos were proof that he wasn't crazy, right? Because at this point he was starting to wonder if he was actually just imagining everything he thought was his life. But those photographs were proof. They couldn't lie.

He tapped on a photo of Yoongi and Jimin that Jeongguk had taken the summer previous. The four of them had gone to the sea on a day off in the dog days of summer. Yoongi and Jimin hadn't noticed that Jeongguk was taking their photo, and Taehyung hadn't noticed that Jeongguk had gotten hold of his phone and was taking pictures with it. He was too busy speaking with strangers. The picture was a good one - twilight was falling on the sky, and the two boys were sitting on the roof of the truck they had driven there and staring at the colors over the sea. They were mostly silhouettes against the lavender sky, but there was just enough light that you could make out some discernible features about them. It was a good photograph. Most of the photos that Jeongguk took seriously were good.

He handed the phone to this world's Jeongguk. The boy looked at the photograph intensely, as if the answer to the Universe were somewhere written on the sundown skyline in it. He handed the phone to Yoongi when he was done, and soon enough all of the boys had seen the photograph.

"Well, that's fucking creepy," Jimin commented as Seokjin held the phone in front of the boy.

"Isn't all of this?" Yoongi challenged.

Seokjin rolled his eyes.

Once everyone had seen the picture, Taehyung took the phone back and slid his finger across the screen to the next photo.

This particular photograph was a different type of image than the one before it. Taehyung didn't know who had taken it. Probably either Yoongi or Jeongguk.