𝗺𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗺.

introduction.

kim taehyung has always been a dreamer.

his lips, seamstresses that weave together reality and fantasy like two long-lost siblings once joined at the hip in a happier world, still long with every curl and pout for the return of a better time. one where it was not laughable to believe in fairy tales; to chase the moonlit skyline in the hopes of a treasure unfathomable; to bask in the golden sunlight as though it were a gift from the god's themselves.

because he still believes.

despite the ridicule, he doesn't let go of his childhood fantasy. won't forget the story he'd begged his father to retell each night when the moon was hollow and the city was silent for a just a second. for a moment that he could just breathe, lose himself amongst something beautiful, take each crystallised syllable as a mantra, and hear of something he so desperately wanted to attain.

he could tell you it off by heart if you asked him, and you would be amazed at the way he'd recite it like a passage from some holy scripture; pure adoration on his features, desire dripping from his chest.

the words, long forgotten by most inhabitants of the small town, still read as if they had been freshly told to the boy with honeyed skin and irises deep like the thickest caramel. alas, his father has long passed by now, and his absence has changed many things, but each night taehyung still makes the time to read the passage of the book he adores.

arguably, knowing on the seventh day of the seventh month that he lives only a few yards from the boy mentioned in his fairytale has been hard; but it's in his mother's mourning that he is confined to his own house these days. she's afraid she'll lose him. lose him like she lost her husband. but taehyung kept his faith all of these years until he turned sixteen and was finally allowed more freedom.

but tonight he can't help himself.

because he heard humming coming from the woods.

and so he shimmies from the window of his family's bungalow and breathes in the smell of petrichor through brightened lungs, stretching his limbs in the warm embrace of sweetened air.

the beams of the moon smile down at him as he takes his first thoughtful steps through blades of emerald grass, glinting below trees that all dance to a melody so quiet that one would have to take the time to hear it. and on any other night he would, but today he has a mission.

he is going to be the one to find the boy from the fairytale.