#idk how france will do from now on but once the wc finishes i hope he focuses on his mental health | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

yeojaa · 4 years ago

Text

( LOVED YOU BETTER. )

You put your love and trust into people not things, you tell him.

They’ll leave, he says about humanity - about that precarious nature that both beguiles and terrifies him.

But they’ll love you back, you remind him.

pairing. kth x f!reader.

genre + rating. slice of life. an angst angel food cake with a fluffy, strawberry centre. general.

tags / warnings. minor (ish) character death, heartbreak, kim taehyung is bad at feelings, summer romance, abandonment issues, moving on, healing. idk.

wc. 4.3k

beta reader(s). @hobi-gif @snackhobi @midnighttifa 💖 i love y’all!

author note. this was written for the 'a long hot summer' event hosted by @thebtswritersclub. my member was taehyung (obviously!) with the sense being sight. this is my first project for a net, so i hope you enjoy it! 💖

He spends most of his childhood in Lyon, skirting the rivers in search of inspiration. It isn’t Paris, his mother tells him, but it’s just as lovely - quieter and more peaceful. She insists, one day, she’ll take him home, where his maternal grandparents are buried and she’ll show him all the parts of her world.

The first time he paints - eleven years old, seated at the edge of the Saône with a brush held between his teeth and pigment smearing his hands - his mother is delighted. He fills the house with his works: pretty watercolours that mimic the blue of the river, the white of boats, the amber of the sky. She loves them and she loves him and she tells him day in and day out, offering praise as readily as he offers his heart on canvas.

He’s sixteen when he migrates stateside, to where his father grew up and his mother’s accent stands out. He hates it there. It’s boring and bland and it stifles his imagination. There are no sail boats, no rivers, no pretty girls. The days turn grey and so does his mother, as if she’d left the best parts of herself back in France. She still tells him she loves him, promises that they’ll go back someday.

At twenty-one, he learns love isn’t real. His father files for divorce and his mother withers away. When he goes, he packs his bags and doesn’t look back. It’s a slamming door in an already abandoned home. Beautiful as it might be, love is nothing but infatuation - fleeting and easily broken and fit only for the books that line the study. It exists truly, wholly, only in the blood that runs in his veins.

At twenty-two, he realises absolutely nothing lasts, for his mother leaves too, taking her lilting laughter and rose perfume with her, buried six feet under soil she’d never called home. Her death is a nail in the door, sealing his childhood shut.

His father does not attend the funeral. Hardly anyone does.

The paintings - lovely portraits of her wide eyes and full lips, of Parisian sunsets and paved streets - are all he has. They serve as memories, painful reminders of the woman his mother once was, of the life he’d once lived. They fill the house that’s no longer a home - hasn’t been, for years - tucked away in a room he refuses to enter.

His mother had called him her petit choux because he was born with dough-soft cheeks, sweet as pie. As he grew older, the name stuck - even if the fat hadn’t, slipping off his face with each passing year. By the time he’s eighteen, he’s uncut edges rather than honey brioche. At twenty-seven, he’s hardened far more than she would’ve ever expected of her beloved boy. He is week old bread, stale and hard to the teeth.

But he is still her petit choux and he thinks she’d love him regardless.

So Kim Taehyung promises to go back. For her - to find all the pieces she’d left behind and fashion them back together. What he doesn’t expect is to meet you along the way.

He discovers you on a day that scorches his bones, Parisian sun shimmering pavement and cobblestone. You are a whirlwind of colour, every shade of the rainbow presented in the glory of your smile. You treat the Seine like a lover, living at the edges of its shores with bare feet and bare legs and a bare face that begs to be memorised.

You laugh and it’s radiant, pealing bells that ring in his ears long after noon has struck.

You call him mon chéri like it means something.

It reminds him of his mother and he wonders whether she ever did these same things, dancing across the grass with an apricot caught between her teeth. He hopes so.

“Come, come,” you coax, with a mouth that threatens to tear his chest wide open. It presents pretty, in shades of ruby and wine; it draws him in, sticky sweet, and he’s defenseless to your whims. He goes where you go, following the flow of your hair, the curtain that draws back and has him seeing in technicolour.

He laughs when you laugh, smiles when you smile. You bring him to all the places he’s never been: the cobbled streets his mother once roamed, the darkened bars filled with champagne, the sunlit warmth of your bedroom where wisteria branches hang low. He paints you in all of them - sweeping watercolours into the silk of your hair, the curve of your lips, the swell of your hips when his palms grip them tight.

You’re an ingenue, a muse, everything he’s ever wanted. But he doesn’t love you - because love doesn’t exist. Not in the ways they portray on the silver screen, with heartfelt declarations and bundles of overflowing roses. He can’t give you those things; he’s grateful you don’t ask.

Sometimes, he thinks you might dare to. Can see it lurking in the lovely shade of your stare, how you study him when you think he isn’t watching. Furtive glances, made beneath the thick line of your lashes, behind the brocade of your sun-drenched strands.

But he’s Kim Taehyung and he’s always watching - always aware. He hates to miss a single thing.

Don’t ask me to love you, he tells you without words.

“Should we go to Lyon for the weekend?”

You’re draped across the bed, drenched in lavender and warm like baked pastry. Your tongue licks cream from your lips, sweetness touched with honey. He drinks in your every movement, dedicating them to canvas. There’s a freckle on your knee and another just below. One more on your ankle and three along the top of your foot. A constellation he hasn’t named yet.

“No,” he answers, devoid of the same delight that frolics behind your teeth.

“Why not?” You press, because it’s what you do - forcing each button until you find the one that stirs something to life within him. A coin-operated boy, rusty and in terrible disrepair. He thinks you’d be wary of the bright red warning light but you seem almost colourblind, looking through rose-tinted glasses that dress all of his actions in warmth he doesn’t deserve.

He doesn’t answer, sweeping his brush back and forth. Lilac filters into water, a lovely shade that grows lighter and lighter with each pass of bristles. It’s not quite the same as your dress - a silk creation that begs to live on your skin - but it’s close enough. He’ll settle for it.

It reminds him of the flowers in the garden back home. Back when his mother was alive and she still breathed life into the greenery, trimming stems and drying petals.

“I don’t want to.” A simple enough answer.

You wait for him to elaborate, pouting and pleading like you might break him down with the sheer force of your beauty. If he were any lesser man, you might have.

“Please,” you purr, too persuasive for your own good. You’d settle into his lap, twist his honey strands between your fingers, if not for the stare he levels you with. One that screams be good and stay still because the last thing he wants is you ruining the painting. He doesn’t want to start all over and the light is already waning, sun lost somewhere behind drooping branches and the gauzy softness of your drapes.

“No.”

“Please.”

Brush to water, then to colour. A sweet orange - the flesh of a fresh cantaloupe without seeds. “No.”

“Mon chéri—”

He booms out “No!” like a cannon. It’s akin to being scolded, stilling the playfulness in your hands. You’re ignorant to all the reasons he refuses to indulge you but you think of it as nothing but selfishness, a cold you can’t weather. One you refuse to when flowers are in full bloom and the air outside lays a salt-crown atop your brow. This is your kingdom, your rightful place - you bow to no one.

You stiffen, rise from the bed in a motion that disrupts every part of him. Motions still, knuckles white. No no no. You’re ruining it. You’re ruining—

“Get out.”

Taehyung can’t quite believe his ears - staring at you in such aghast you almost laugh right in his face. He has the audacity to perform such theatrics after yelling at you? How dare he! It enrages you, brings your blue blood to a boil beneath your skin.

“Pardon?” The sound rolls, trips, and stumbles, dirt on his palms and knees as he stares up at you.

“I said get out, mon chéri.” You’ve unbuttoned the rumpled shirt - his, with his initials embroidered across the cuff - allowing it to drop from your shoulders and into his lap. He glares down at it, stained now with the watercolours in his palette. It’d be pretty if it weren’t so infuriating.

“I’m not done.”

You tch, a derisive sound that bites worse than your love, your nails painted in Chanel. “I don’t care.”

“I’m not done,” he repeats, perhaps a little lost. It crawls out between his teeth, a lost man seeking solace. He needs to finish this. He hasn’t painted you this way yet, bathed in faded light. It’s an empty slot in his album of memories. He can’t let it go.

You’re unrepentant, dismissive. A table turned. “I don’t care.”

He hates you then. He doesn’t realise how close the emotion is to love.

He doesn’t know when his boyhood waned away, lost itself to the wind and the rivers. He only knows, suddenly, he was not a boy but a man, a miserable soldier made to walk the plank. He thinks it might’ve been when she died, taking the last traces of his youth with her. Gone was the innocence, the gentility, the voraciousness; all at once, the ease - the glory, the good - had evaporated, leaving in its place a broken boy too angular, too angry.

He doesn’t know when his boyhood waned away, but he remembers all too well when her death had eclipsed the light, leaving him in perpetual darkness.

It makes sense then - that his whole life is a charnel house, built on the foundation of someone else’s bones. It’s only fitting it becomes a memorial to a long-gone mother, a weeping wife, a star burnt out too soon.

He’s somehow still surprised when his kingdom - formidable, impenetrable, guarded - comes crumbling down, an overgrown old city ruined. As if he’d expected those skeletons to hold him forever, to carry the weight of his desolation within their hollows. He begs for absolution when it falls beneath a thousand leagues, lost to saltwater and liquor. He drowns within it and it seeps, sticks, stirs - catching in his stare and trembling his fingers.

Nostalgia comes like ghosts - old men lost at sea.

They’re dim, twilight, held behind a heavy fog. Old memories on a carousel ride, spinning in perpetual motion. They’re snapshots of his mother, his youth, his home. They pass too quickly; he can never catch them.

Years old misery claws its way up his chest and he chokes on it each night, lying awake listening to the city groan, straining like a dying beast on its last legs. He misses her, he misses you, he misses the person he used to be. He aches for it - a nameless thing just out of reach.

Something Taehyung begs and cries for until he’s blue in the face.

Something you’d given him, in the form of kisses and promises. Something he’d only shoved you down into the dirt for - right where she was. Because no one kept promises, and he didn’t want to hate you later. (For loving, for leaving.)

Instead, he hates himself, and that is a neater, cleaner way to end the story.

He is bereft, drifting between days he has neither the desire nor wherewithal to consider.

He sees women just like you - girls that run barefoot through the grass, fancying themselves dancers, muses, inspirations. They laugh, they kiss, they cite vague poetry. They preen when he asks to paint them, throwing exaggerated shapes with the lines of their necks, the flutter of their lashes.

Still, none of them are you - too soft and rounded.

None possess the same insolence, polite phrases toeing the line of sophisticate and street urchin. They are all wind-up ballerinas, dancing on rotation, with smiles not right, too tight. They’re too flat, too freckled, reminiscent of rotting cherries and mint-green Ladurée bags you’d scoff at. They leave his canvases better off bare, boring and one-dimensional. Taehyung resents them.

But he doesn’t love you, and he tells himself that whenever he misses you.

A victim of ennui, he slips into a pattern he abhors. Supine lounging in the evenings, preceded only by listless wandering during the long hours of the day. He drifts with the rise and fall of the sun, eyes blind to the beauty around him.

Nothing feels quite right anymore - not in the way it used to. There are no memories of his mother, no sweet tales told by a ghost. It’s empty empty empty, only shit-stained streets and hollow bodies.

He prays for an answer, a sign, anything.

It comes in the form of you - nearly three weeks later, beneath a stream of sunlight that casts you in chiaroscuro. For the first time, he itches to paint. The need thrums in his fingers, a million little nerve endings firing off. He itches to touch you too, but he ignores that, shoves it into the deepest, darkest recess of his thoughts as he can. He needs to focus on one thing and one thing only: doing what he came here to do.

“Bonjour.” It comes bare, undressed and vulnerable. By the look on your face, it isn’t what you want.

You twist away, entire body angling uncomfortably in your effort to ignore him. “What do you want?” You’re cruel, capricious - a god looking upon a lowly farmhand with no offering. It stings in a way it shouldn’t, pulls his expression into a frown before he can mask it.

That’s better, you think. He can practically read the smug emotion dancing in those pretty irises.

“You haven’t called.”

“Neither have you.”

“You told me to leave.”

“And you left.”

For every excuse, you have a rebuttal. It’s a game of chess he’s bound to lose. It’s as frustrating as it is enticing, stirring something warm and heavy in the cavity behind his ribs. A little hummingbird come to life, wings beating relentlessly and kicking up all the dust of his childhood trauma.

“I’m sorry.” It’s hardly an apology, too greedy to come the way it should. Taehyung does this for himself, for his promise, for memories he refuses to let go.

You see right through him. “Are you?”

“I am.”

“You’re not.”

“I am.”

“Tell me what you’re sorry for.”

The words I am are poised on his tongue and reduced to ash with your question. He’s never had to try so hard a day in his life. It feels wrong, messy, awful. Every part of him compels him to rebel - to wax poetic about the things he’s done right, how what you’re asking is too much. I cannot love you, he thinks.

“I thought so.” There’s nothing but disdain in your stare, turning it sharp like a knife that threatens to glide through his armour. “You’re selfish, Kim Taehyung. All you want is to take and take and take. You refuse to give.”

You’re not wrong. He wears his sadness like a solid steel plate; it curls around his vertebrae, writhing in his belly until he’s full, aching, complete. He doesn’t know how to exist without it, apart from it. It keeps him safe, satisfied, out of harm’s way. It’s both a blessing and a curse.

As you leave, he wonders whether it’s worth it.

Six long days pass. Six too many, drawn out and miserable. He aches to create, to sketch, to paint. He calls you in a moment of weakness; you come, nonetheless.

“What do you want?” You repeat, mouthful of thorns and scar tissue.

This time Taehyung has an answer. He’s ready, confident in his recital. It spills forth loosely, with abstract brazenness. “I want you.” There’s no room for uncertainty, zero leeway to be found in between the syllables. It’s the most sincere he’s been all season, made true by the summer sun and your focused, unyielding stare.

“You want moi?” It’s a dance with the devil - question poised like a hand. “Do you even know what wanting someone means?” You’re steady, unwavering, just as he is.

He hesitates then, just barely, with a tick of his jaw, fingers curling around nothing. You take that as weakness, delicate mouth curling into a sneer. He sees it - all the I told you so’s poised on the tip of your tongue, ready to silence him. He beats you to it, crashing his mouth against yours with a recklessness that thrums in his veins, sending his heart on a wild chase for that something.

He’s spent his whole life in pursuit of a feeling, a spectre, a bittersweet memory. He thinks he might’ve lost himself along the way.

“I want you. I want you - and us.”

What he means to say is he wants all the things that come with it: the bratty rebuttals, the early morning eagerness, the taste of you every night. He wants the eyelashes on his pillow case, the lipstick stains, the scent of your perfume - citrus and nectarine blossom, cocoa butter, fresh cream. He wants the trips to the countryside, the new memories, the paintings full of you. He wants it more than he’s ever wanted anything. He needs it like he needs air, light, art.

He needs you - his muse.

He tells you, shamelessly, around a lump that forms in his throat and makes it hard to breathe. “We’ll go to Lyon. If you want to go, we’ll go.”

The place where he grew up is different, wrapped in ivy and devoid of light. Windows are drawn and everything leans grey, weeds sprouting beneath his expensive leather loafers. They curl around his ankles, creep up the back of his knees; they threaten to crush him beneath their weight. He imagines his insides look the same - neglected and vacant.

He wishes he hadn’t come. This isn’t his home, his kingdom, his heart. Not anymore.

“Come, mon chéri,” you hum, stirring him from his reverie, pulling his thoughts through the seven circles of Hell until he’s back in the present, stiff at your side with your fingers interlaced. You offer an affectionate smack of your lips - wine-stained and pretty - to his cheek. He does not soften.

“Let’s go.” It comes despite himself, before he can help it, in a voice that isn’t his. It’s too soft, too unsure - fifteen years younger and vulnerable.

You regard him closely, with a careful narrow of your stare. He can read the pity there, the frustration that swims in the depths - circling sharks seeking out the scent of his blood. It’s inescapable. He wishes you’d stop. He doesn’t need you to lecture him.

Misery rises, licks up his throat like bile, and he worries it might spill out, red as the crimson sea. Part of him wants it to - a defense mechanism he can’t control; the other part of him knows he should swallow it down. He has no reason to fight you.

“Come,” you repeat, and he’s defenseless, lost to your siren song. He steps back in time, white-knuckled and terrified.

There are no longer peonies in the kitchen, nor roses in the front hall. Dust settles over every surface, dry soil kicked up beneath his feet.

Taehyung tries to recall the way his mother would busy herself in the garden, bent over her flowers like an altar. How her knees were perpetually scarred, dirt caught beneath her nails, dark hair a braided wreath worn like a crown. It was the only time she was anything but composed - full of light and laughter and a love for the alive. He’d eat breakfast with her in the front yard, a shadow that would follow her every move. Back and forth, he’d go - on his feet, with his brush, in his thoughts.

Every painting was of her - of tulips and daisies, bare ankles and sun-kissed skin. The shape of her mouth, the freckle on her nose. Her delight when his father would come home.

He swears he smells her perfume now, standing in the place he’d grown up. He’s reminded of hot coffee and fresh bread, her fluttering laughter and brass watering can. He’ll dream about it for days, memories rolling like a Super 8 film through his mind.

He cries I’m fine when he isn’t. You hold him until he is.

You sleep together on a Sunday afternoon.

When you wake, the sun is low on the horizon and you’re the prettiest Taehyung’s ever seen you, features thrown in stark relief. You’re salt-sweet and striking, dressed in linen whites and the shape of his mouth.

He paints the pale soles of your feet, drawn against your leg, and the shade of your nails, a pretty colour he attributes to springtime and sonnets. He indulges in the sound of your voice, soft and hazy in his ear. You kiss him like he isn’t broken and you taste like memories - ones he hasn’t made yet, but desperately wants to. He is both sinking and floating, as if you’ve taken his heart from his chest and hold it, beating, somewhere high above his head.

He carries your perfume for weeks after, heavy on his skin. Lingering, like you’ve become a part of him, like he’s fallen in love.

Kim Taehyung had once surrounded himself with beautiful things - paintings and drawings and girls. He’d thought if he fenced himself in with all things good, there would be no cracks for the outside world - the real world, full of misery and deceit - to seep through. He’d kept his hands occupied by brushes, by thorns, by a million little material things.

He hadn’t realised all he needed was yours, warm in his.

You put your love and trust into people not things, you tell him.

They’ll leave, he says about humanity - about that precarious nature that both beguiles and terrifies him.

But they’ll love you back, you remind him.

The confession comes at the end of summer, edges past the cage of his teeth into the quiet of the evening. It comes and comes, so softly he thinks you might laugh, corners of your eyes wrinkling like the sheets in which you’re bare.

Maybe it’s the way your hair falls over your shoulders, a curtain he aches to part, to feel beneath his hands. Maybe it’s the way you look at him with hungry eyes and wet lips and teeth that could crumble all of his walls as if they were made of papier-mache.

Maybe it’s just you, skin like silk and eyes like the night sky.

“I think I love you,” Taehyung states, careful, with his entire heart in his hands.

“You think?

He nods, although he mustn’t. He can’t, he reminds himself.

And yet he does, because there is no denying how well you fit each other’s curves, the truth that you are two pieces of the same puzzle. He wakes up early each day with the taste of you still on his tongue, the memory of you seared into his palms. Your body has become his home and it is real, flesh and blood, not broken bones buried six feet under.

You fill his silence with your laughter; it sounds like redemption and feels like hope.

Before he knows it, seasons change.

Autumn becomes a waiting room, a time between the unyielding heat of summer and the unbearable cold of winter. Taehyung loves the quiet of it, the progression as steady as the chill that creeps beneath his clothes, within his bed - everywhere but in his head.

He remembers his mother, his home, all the things he’s lost. He pays homage to the woman who had raised him right but left too soon. He finds the places she’d told him about and folds secrets into their corners. He creates new memories, introducing his present to his past. You call her mamman and tell her not to worry, promising that you’ll take care of him.

He lives beneath the fading leaves that serve as a benchmark for which to measure the growth he’s undergone. He imagines his life in film, in rolling scenes laid out in sepia tones. He imagines weeks passing by and versions of himself doing the things he loves most.

Laid out under the copper sky, your head in his lap and a brush in his hands. He doesn’t need to look at you - can fit you among the pages purely from memory. The turn of your smile, the twinkle in your stare, the little freckle just beneath your lip. He sees you in his dreams and he commits them to paper, filling his sketchbook as you fill his thoughts.

Wandering the streets, hand in hand, guided by your laughter and the smell of warm pastry. Bare legs, echoing footsteps, the sight of your smile when he’s said something particularly funny. You cry Mon chéri! and force a cherry between his lips, savouring the tart taste under the afternoon sun.

Upon your balcony, skin searing beneath high noon and the feel of your mouth. He lets you paint him - sits terribly still as you show him who he really is - stripping his pretenses with each pass of your brush. He is bare but not broken, a beautiful boy painted in earth tones and paired with intense eyes.

Taehyung tells you your painting is beautiful and that he loves it - that he loves you.

tag list. @neverthefirstchoice @youwannabelostandnotbefound @snackhobi

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