Midnight in Paris || Kim Taehyung

Shoutout to @Lyn_67 for being encouraging, appreciating my story, and offering an idea for this narrative. I hope this one meets your expectations.
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Prologue

Before Paris

Every love story looks inevitable in retrospect.

People like to imagine that meaningful moments announce themselves-that fate arrives with certainty, that beginnings feel extraordinary while they are happening. But most real beginnings are quiet. They happen on ordinary days, inside ordinary decisions, while people are too busy living to realize their lives are changing.

Before Paris, there were two people who had built lives many would envy.

Kim Taehyung had spent years moving from schedule to schedule, stage to stage, becoming someone recognized everywhere he went. Success had become routine. Applause had become familiar. Yet somewhere beneath the performances and expectations, he began wondering something he had avoided for years: who was he when nobody needed him to be BTS's V?

Far away, Lin Xiaoran lived a different version of the same life. Her world was filled with cameras, scripts, promotions, and constant visibility. She became different people for a living, but sometimes wondered whether she had become too good at appearing fine. Her life was full, successful, and strangely lonely.

Neither was searching for love.

One wanted quiet.

The other simply wanted to breathe.

Neither knew that a city they had chosen for entirely different reasons would change everything.

Because this story did not begin with a confession.

Or a kiss.

Or certainty.

It began with a bridge.

A gust of wind.

Scattered pages.

And two people who did not yet realize they were about to become each other's favorite place to return to.