Chapter Text
When Taehyung feels alone, he speaks to the stars. It’s a habit from childhood, from sleepless nights in gentle suburbia when the night sky unfolded like a jeweled cloth above him. In Seoul, the stars appear diluted, few and far between the twinkling TV towers and skyscrapers, but Taehyung always manages to find the ones he needs. They take him back to days colored pink by kismet, to first smiles and stolen kisses, and to hands held under blankets with faces turned up to the first evening star.
They met by chance in a small cafe in Seoul, the type of place where neither would usually be caught dead. Yoongi had stopped in when the rain had started, not wanting to risk his notes being ruined by the downpour. He had spent too many hours working on his compositions for class to lose them now. Taehyung had wandered in almost by accident. He had meant to meet Jimin at a cafe across town so they could review their portfolios for the freshman creative writing seminar, some place with a similar name and the same bank across the street. Crossed wires and lost time deposited him there instead and he had been lingering, reordering the same cycle of drinks in an effort to stake his claim on the tiny table tucked away by the corner window. He had lined three paper cups in front of his books and laptop, each clinging to some remanent of foam or caramel syrup, and had been musing about purchasing one of the shop’s signature mugs to spare poor barista the task of fishing out another take-away cup. Yoongi had come barreling in, shaking rain water out of his ash white locks, and walked head first into Taehyung so that his first words to the boy had been a startled curse and a distracted apology.
It was beautiful.
In the rearview of Taehyung’s memory, it had been a slowing of time, a narrowing of light until Yoongi appeared to him as little moon entering his orbit. Taehyung could still remember the sudden stop-start pounding of his heart in his throat as his eyes had met Yoongi’s over the lip of the mug he had been examining. Cool brown eyes, but the gaze was like honey, and it was all he could focus on around the barrage of blue and pink ceramic in his hand.
Taehyung recalls that moment fondly, and often.
“Hyung, have I ever told you that you walked head first into my heart?” Taehyung will ask periodically, and Yoongi will roll his eyes each time.
“Yes, you have,” he will say, but in the end he’ll smile regardless, no doubt whisking himself back to the memory of that day, to the small bubble of warmth and companionship that enveloped them at their first meeting.
So, when Taehyung searches for the stars in Seoul, those double stars that appear so close together even when they’re so far apart, he has that memory ready to share. He speaks it into the cosmos, to the lightyears between him and them, as if sharing it over such a distance will keep it anchored in his heart. He speaks to the stars a lot now, with him here and Yoongi so far away. For the moment, it’s enough to hold him over. When he speaks to the stars, it’s like Yoongi’s there in his peripheral, just as he’s there in his heart. Like Yoongi’s the sun hiding just beyond the horizon, getting ready to rise into view.