House Rules (BTS fic)

Rules: TaeSeok

"Wow, I really love that jacket on you."

"Thanks, I bet you loved it equally as much when it was on Jin two days ago." Tae let his eyes roll like he had been doing all day, stooping down to pick up another rock and toss it into the rock pile that had been gaining momentum since Friday.

It was Sunday.

Sunday, and Taehyung still hated Hoseok.

Hobi watched every move Tae made carefully, searching for at least a piece of the old Tae, the one that was quiet at some moments and sporadic in others, a smile that brightened up a room, or an island if need be. Hobi wished he could see that Tae again, promising that he had a glowing smile to match it. He had begun to believe it was a mirror race, that if Hobi smiled then Tae would too...but he found it so much harder to smile lately. Tae was supposed to bring the smiles to him, was supposed to carry his own weight in this...but he didn't and Hobi had no idea why.

Their home had been completely destroyed. They hadn't started calling it a "home" until it was gone, the storm washing every bit of structure made with mud, stick, or rock away with the flooding water. They had to be careful when they walked, the ground still—days later—saturated so much with liquid that Jin had gotten stuck in a sinkhole twice just that day. It wasn't just Fire Hill that had met its match, but the entire island had to recover. Trees had fallen and blocked off paths, the paths they had known before had all been ripped to shreds and unidentifiable. The once organized and purposed island now seemed like a blackish canvas, still in some ways empty despite how full it appeared.

And Hobi wanted to fill it, Tae didn't disagree with that...he just didn't want to fill it with this man.

His friend.

"Okay," Hobi said, catching his breath and cracking his back from the pressure of lifting rocks all yesterday and probably today. This new pile of rocks—the sticks having been lost in the waterfall—was what their home used to be. "Now what?"

Tae couldn't believe he was asking him, him of all people. It took him a minute to realize that there was nothing wrong with that and braced himself to answer. "Well...our old shelter is now a pile of rocks," Tae stated, puffing out his cheeks. "I don't know how long we'll survive without a home, even though it does seem to be warming up again." Tae held his palm up to the sky, checking for rain. The storm had left a sort of trauma in him ever since, fearing that the rain would come again to ruin something else he had worked so hard on. It was this thought pathway that reminded Tae why he was so mad in the first place. He cleared his throat, dreading Hobi's next words. "We should probably build one just in case. It could be fun."

"Stop saying that," Tae breathed, avoiding Hobi's gaze. His anger was expressed so much differently from the others. If he got too loud then he would get too emotional, and if he got too emotional then he would start to cry. He usually said harsh things in a soft voice when he "wasn't feeling up to it," and then nothing more. Hobi wished he could read his face, but Tae made it all too easy for it to be impossible.

"Hey," Namjoon greeted as Tae collapsed next to him, grunting as he did. He looked up briefly, expecting Hobi to be somewhere nearby the younger boy. Seeing as he wasn't, Namjoon gaged the younger male. "What's wrong? Where's Hobi?"

Namjoon wasn't sure if he could properly describe the way Tae was looking at him, he could only recognize it as the way a bee looks at a flower, and even that was vague to him. "I just didn't really want to be near him," Tae said so bluntly, making Namjoon do a second sweep around him, now to check if anyone else heard him speak. "So you wanna go?" his friend followed up with.

Namjoon raised his eyebrows. "Go where?"

"Fix the island, be my partner, come on," he said, pulling Namjoon's wrist upwards with great hesitation. Namjoon didn't mind it—that wasn't the problem. The problem was he knew it was for a dumb reason, or it most likely was. Namjoon couldn't help but look over at Hobi as he watched him and Tae disappear behind the messy tree line. "Are you sure?" Namjoon asked, shaking off Tae's grip but not slowing his pace. Tae just nodded, responding with a very low voiced, "I'm sure."