Work Text:
There was a boy who had been slowly traversing the second floor of the museum for nearly an hour now.
Hoseok wasn’t watching him, exactly. He was technically there to see the art.
It was just, the boy was so much more interesting.
Yoongi would say he had a stalking problem. But Yoongi wasn’t there, and Hoseok had only followed one or five other people ever, in his entire life. That hardly qualified as a problem.
"That’s kind of a problem, Hoseok,” Namjoon told him, the one time Hoseok used that exact logic to defend his behavior.
“Shut up,” Hoseok said instantly. “I still remember the week of your life you wasted hanging out at Jimin’s favorite café just in the hopes he would show up when you were there.”
Namjoon blushed, but Jimin, coming out of the kitchen, smirked at Hoseok as he took Namjoon’s hand. “Not exactly wasted time.”
“Just don’t be creepy, Hoseok,” Yoongi drawled from the couch.
Don’t be creepy.
It was advice Hoseok had taken to heart, though he would never tell Yoongi that.
Still, he couldn’t seem to stop watching the boy. He supposed he wasn’t being overly weird about it, since he was sitting on one of the artistic, blocky benches in the middle of the exhibit while the boy moved slowly from painting to painting.
Anyway, he thought that the boy might not even be able to see him. He was carrying a long white cane that he slowly glided over the floor in front of him as he moved. He definitely couldn’t hear Hoseok, because he was wearing a pair of ancient headphones that the museum rented out to guests who wanted to take listening tours of the exhibits. It was safe to assume that he was completely unaware of Hoseok’s presence.
So Hoseok felt pretty unobtrusive. There was no one on this floor but them, and it was eerily quiet aside from the small noises that the boy made as he moved around the room.
He was exceptionally good looking, which was what had drawn Hoseok’s eye to begin with.
He was wearing layers of black and white, and his hair was floppy, held back by a headband. It was dyed a light brown, which contrasted nicely with his lightly tanned skin. Hoseok found himself wondering who had dyed his hair; if he had a friend do it for him, or if it was professionally done. He was tall and sort of lanky, loose-limbed, as if he had never quite gotten used to the way his body moved.
His face was flawless.
Hoseok was a little bit in love.
Granted, Hoseok tended to fall in love with a lot of things:
Puppies. There wasn’t a puppy he had yet met that he didn’t love.
Blended coffee drinks. He loved blended coffee drinks.
Girl group songs. Girl group dances. Girl groups.
He had fallen in love, separately and on more than one occasion, with both Yoongi and Seokjin, and once, after a little too much soju and a crazy dream, with Namjoon.
He had fallen out of love with all three of them just as quickly, though, and they had all agreed never to talk about it again (except for that time he drank one too many shots, and then the whole story came out over dinner, to the mortification of everyone but Jimin, who seemed to relish it).
Jeongguk liked to joke that Hoseok’s heart was over-sized. If he kept all of the love he felt on a regular basis bottled up inside him, his heart would overwork, and then it would just stop.
So sure, Hoseok was generally a happy person. He tended to make big gestures too soon. He gave a little too much, too quickly. Sometimes he fell in love without really meaning to.
But he hadn’t ever hurt anyone (except maybe himself, once or twice). And what was the alternative? Sadness? Loneliness? Heartache?
No, thank you.
Hoseok had never been selfish. Maybe he moved a little fast for some people. But Hoseok thought it was better to share your happiness than to keep it closed away, like he had seen Yoongi do more than a few times.
Besides, Hoseok was afraid of concrete things, like rollercoasters, and snakes.
Love was like a glass of cool water on a hot day. There was nothing to be afraid of in that.
“Just don’t be weird about it,” Hoseok murmured, and stood up.
He approached the boy carefully, not wanting to scare him, but he thought that maybe the boy wasn’t completely blind after all, because he turned to Hoseok as he approached, eyes shifting restlessly.
He had beautiful eyes. They weren’t what Hoseok was expecting. His irises were very dark, darting all around, never quite landing on Hoseok.
Hoseok reached out and touched his arm, and the boy slipped the headphones off so that they were slung around his neck instead.
“Yes?” he asked, and okay, wow.
Hoseok needed a minute, because that was not the voice he had expected either. To be fair, he wasn’t really sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t a voice that deep, deeper even than Namjoon’s voice.
“I’m Hoseok,” Hoseok introduced, a smile stretching across his face. He had always been told that people could hear his smile when he spoke. He hoped it was true.
The boy didn’t smile back. His eyes stared just over Hoseok’s left shoulder.
“Can I help you with something?” he asked, a little unsure.
“I was just wondering,” Hoseok began, keeping his smile, undeterred by the boy’s hesitation, “how’s the listening tour? Does it accurately describe the paintings?”
“Excuse me?” asked the boy, incredulous.
“Is the listening tour good?” Hoseok repeated.
The boy stared in his general direction for a moment more, and then shrugged and plucked the headphones off his neck. “Listen for yourself,” he said, holding them out, and Hoseok took them.
He slipped the band over his head and settled the ear pads over his ears. He turned to the painting directly in front of them, a Monet, Impression, Sunrise. It was one of the most famous paintings in the world, and Hoseok swallowed heavily as he looked at it, awed.
But the voice on the listening tour was rattling off important dates, when it had been painted, how long Monet had worked on it, the first exhibition it had been shown at. There was no description of what it looked like or how it made anyone feel.
Hoseok pulled the headphones off, disgusted.
“No,” he said, shaking his head and holding the headphones away from him by his thumb and index finger. “Oh god, no, that’s awful. Have you been listening to that this whole time? That’s just terrible.”
Hoseok shook his head again and made a terrified noise, shuddering, and finally, finally the boy smiled.
And what a smile it was. Sort of boxy, a little odd, it changed his entire face, made him even more stunning, like artwork himself.
“Well,” began the boy, “how would you describe the painting?”
“Tell me your name,” Hoseok said, bargaining, “and I’ll describe it to you.”
The boy huffed out a laugh. “Taehyung.”
“Okay Taehyung,” said Hoseok, nodding. He took the headphones and set them down on the bench behind them, and then turned back around and looped his arm through Taehyung’s.
“This is a Monet. One of the most beautiful paintings ever created.” Hoseok thought for a minute, and then smiled. “You know when you’ve been walking in the shade, and suddenly you step into a patch of sunlight, and it warms your entire face?”
Taehyung hummed a noise of agreement.
“That feeling is what this painting looks like.”
Hoseok traced his fingers up Taehyung’s arm. “It uses cool tones. It’s like when you’re walking in the sunlight, but suddenly a breeze wafts by, and you get goosebumps even though it’s a warm day.”
Taehyung nodded, and Hoseok glanced at him. He was staring, as much as he could be, at the painting.
“But it’s sort of lonely, too, because nothing is clearly defined. There are boats, but they’re shadowy. And yet, it’s hopeful. The sun is bright, and it’s starting to light up everything around it. Just like that moment when you can almost feel winter turning into spring.”
He chanced a quick look at Taehyung again. His boxy smile had turned serene, and there was a suspicious sheen to his eyes.
“Can you see it?” asked Hoseok.
Taehyung sighed quietly and nodded. “Now I can,” he said.
Suddenly, for no apparent reason, Hoseok found himself blushing. He cleared his throat and stepped away quickly, worried that this had maybe been one of those big gestures that made sense to him, but not to anyone else.
“Wait,” said Taehyung, his low voice a little too loud. He reached out as if afraid that Hoseok had already left, his reach off just a bit and coming up short.
Hoseok stepped back toward him, so that his arm intercepted Taehyung’s hand. “Yes?”
Taehyung bit his lip. But his head turned longingly around the room.
“Can we do another?”
Hoseok laughed, a little breathless and a little relieved. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s do another.”
Hoseok described the next painting, and then the one after that, until they had made a circuit of the entire room, and even then he let Taehyung pull him into another exhibit, and he talked and talked about all of the paintings around them, until his voice felt a little hoarse and scratchy.
“Oh,” said Taehyung, finally hearing the restriction in Hoseok’s throat. “I’m sorry. You’ve been talking for too long.”
“No,” Hoseok immediately denied. “It’s fine. I wanted to.”
Taehyung’s head titled down slightly, exposing the long line of his neck. He looked very unsure of himself, and it made Hoseok feel irrationally angry at anyone who had ever treated him badly enough that he now looked this way.
But Taehyung was brave, because even though he looked like he was ready to fold in on himself, he found the smallest edge of a smile. “Can I maybe buy you something to drink? To thank you?”
Honestly Hoseok wanted to fall to his knees and hug Taehyung’s legs and shout yes. But he could picture Yoongi’s horrified face, so instead he just smiled happily.
“Yes. I would like that very much.”
Taehyung raised his head, his expression surprised and joyful with his boxy smile reaching his eyes.
“I know a great little coffee shop,” said Hoseok, taking Taehyung’s arm again. “It’s near here. Want to go?”
Taehyung nodded. “Yeah, let’s go.”
There were only a few other patrons in the café when they arrived. They ordered coffee and two muffins and sat at a table in the window. The sunlight sparkled on Taehyung’s skin and Hoseok couldn’t stop staring at him.
“I need to tell my sister I’m here,” Taehyung said after a moment, pulling out a mobile phone the likes of which Hoseok had never seen before. Taehyung’s fingers moved easily over the keys, and Hoseok realized they had braille on them.
Taehyung kept his phone out on the table as they talked. Hoseok learned that Taehyung had two siblings. His family owned a farm. When he was younger, he had dreamed of being a k-pop idol, and it had been a tough conversation, the day his parents sat him down and told him that it would be a difficult path with impaired vision. They hadn’t told him he couldn’t do it, but Taehyung had grown out of that dream. He still liked to sing, though, and he danced sometimes.
He wanted to be an artist. He usually carried a camera with him, and he was drawn to loud crowds and noisy street corners, where it sounded like he might be able to take good photographs. According to his friends, he was getting better at it.
Hoseok felt a little bit unworthy to be sitting across from him.
When Taehyung abruptly changed the conversation by leaning forward and asking, “What do you look like?”, Hoseok blushed and fumbled his coffee cup, and then took too big a sip and nearly choked.
“Oh,” he said, biting his lip. “I don’t know. Normal, I guess.”
Taehyung laughed at him, the sound deep and pleasant. “You just spent a couple of hours beautifully describing paintings to me, but all you can say about yourself is that you look normal, you guess?”
Hoseok shrugged before remembering that Taehyung couldn’t see it, and then mumbled a bit. “I mean, yeah, I guess. I’m normal. Average.”
Taehyung tilted his head curiously. He held up his hands slowly and asked, “Can I?”
Hoseok wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but he said “Yes,” and was so distracted by the lovely length of Taehyung’s fingers that it came as a slight shock when those same fingers pressed lightly against his cheeks.
He relaxed his face as much as he could as Taehyung’s fingers moved gently over his skin, but it tickled a little, so he ended up smiling, and then laughing, and Taehyung beamed at him.
“You’re gorgeous, Hoseok,” he said.
His voice was so open and honest. No had ever said it like that to him before, so genuinely. Hoseok felt himself choking up a bit.
“You are, too,” Hoseok blurted, and Taehyung laughed again, pleased.
Taehyung’s sister, Eonjin, arrived before they were finished with their coffee. She looked suspicious and ruffled, like an overprotective mother bird. Hoseok bought her a blended coffee drink and a cookie. She ate the cookie in three bites, and slurped her coffee while staring at Hoseok critically.
Hoseok liked her instantly.
Eventually, Eonjin told Taehyung that it was time to go, and Hoseok panicked.
“Wait,” he said, standing up in a rush and hitting the tops of his thighs on the table. “Can I call you?”
Taehyung grinned.
They exchanged phone numbers.
Hoseok promised himself he would wait a reasonable length of time before messaging Taehyung. Maybe until the next day.
So when Taehyung messaged him first, just a few hours later while he was reclining on Yoongi’s couch, he got so excited he dropped his phone on his face.
“Really, Hoseok?” asked Yoongi dryly.
“What’s happened?” wondered Seokjin, coming out of the kitchen and then gasping as he caught sight of Hoseok. “Hoseok! Your nose!”
Yoongi waved a hand lazily. “He’s fine,” Yoongi said easily. “It’s just love.”
fin