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“Is it good, friend?” Namjoon asked the naked man that was eating a heart.
“It is bitter, bitter,” he answered, giving him a red smile as the blood was sliding down his chin and his chest and onto the golden sand of the desert, the fat droplets painting it crimson with secrets and the heartbeats of a life that clung to the bestial man’s teeth. “But I like it. Because it is bitter. And because it is my heart.”
“Are you some sort of undead thing?” Namjoon asked, taking a few steps closer, inhaling the coppery stench of blood.
The man barked a laugh and said, “My, but who knows? Maybe I’m alive. Maybe I’m dead. Maybe I’m all in your head. All I know is that my name’s Yoongi. But come closer, stranger. Come and take a bite of my heart. Come and learn my secrets and memories and tragedies.”
He held out his heart to Namjoon and he took it in his hand, warm and wet and still beating despite being half eaten. It was moist and soft and still dripping with blood as he asked, “Why would you eat your own heart?”
“Because nobody else would take it. And I had to make use of it.”
Yoongi had a funny way of holding himself, hunched and bent and almost broken by the weight of his skin, his limbs as far from his torso as possible, as if they were too long for his body to hold, too strange, foreign. His skin was white as milk and blood coated his cheeks and mouth and chin like a mask, and his hands like crimson gloves. His hair was blond, almost white, blending in with his pale skin and contrasting starkly with the blood and the dark circles under his eyes. He seemed to have a terrible smile etched onto his face, as if it had been sewn there by force and the only way one could tell how agonising it was for him to keep it there was by looking at the hunted look in his dead eyes.
Namjoon lifted the pulsing heart to his mouth and took a bite of the warm muscle, his teeth tearing through the tissue and ripping a big succulent chunk of it. Blood flooded his mouth, and it really was bitter, so bitter that he had to stop himself from gagging or spitting the mouthful. He chewed and chewed until it was a mushy paste, and when he swallowed it, he realised that all that bitterness came from an unkind life; it was a heart that had not been loved, but it loved and loved so deeply and passionately that all that adoration, all that sweet, sweet longing for a returned feeling, had turned it black and bitter and sad.
It tasted like broken dreams and hollow promises. It tasted like melancholy and eternity and emptiness. It tasted like life. It tasted like death. It tasted loveless and lost and dark, like night and shadows and nothingness.
“Now I think it’s only fair for you to give me your life and secrets,” Yoongi said and Namjoon nodded, tasting on his tongue the remnants of Yoongi’s heart. It was bitter, but addictive, and somehow eating it felt right and so he took another bite, blood dripping and secrets of a wasted life flooding his body.
Yoongi reached his hand with long sharp nails inside Namjoon’s chest, tearing through skin and tissue and snapping ribs, breaking his ribcage, and somehow it didn’t hurt, and so the wild and wicked man grasped his heart and brutally ripped it out.
Namjoon felt everything, but no pain came. And before he knew it, he was looking at his own heart in Yoongi’s hands, felt his fingertips on it. Yoongi took a bite and Namjoon felt his teeth snagging the chunk and ripping it as if his heart were still inside his chest, and yet he felt no pain. Instead, he felt exposed, bare, naked in front of the other man, as if he knew every dark corner of his being, every mistake and shameless dream of his, every secret and every lie he’d told.
And a bond stronger than words and ageless stories and timeless myths was formed between them.
“Yours is also bitter, stranger, but it’s sweeter than mine,” Yoongi said with the same crimson wide smile of his. “You have loved and you have been loved. Saying that I’m jealous is an understatement,” and with this, he let out a broken harsh laugh that made Namjoon’s heart twitch in Yoongi’s hands.
Namjoon took another bite of Yoongi’s heart, more and more secrets and memories spilling into his body, and he had to admit that it was tasty, almost delicious.
“Where am I?”
Yoongi laughed again, loud and obnoxious and hollow.
“But don’t you know?” Yoongi greedily sunk his teeth into Namjoon’s heart to rip yet another bite as he talked through the mouthful. “Were you to dig in the sand, you’d find rotten flesh. Were you to travel a little farther from here, you’d find buildings made of morrow. Were you to fall asleep, you’d wake up buried in stinky carrion.” He gulped and let out that terrible laugh of his again. “Can’t you hear the screams?”
Namjoon shook his head and swallowed the last bite of Yoongi’s heart as he watched him doing the same, feeling the muscle reassembling inside his own chest and starting to beat again in tune with Yoongi’s life or death or eternity, whispering stories that no mortal was allowed to dream about and tugging at the strands of the remaining sanity he still had left until they came loose.
As if pushed by some other force, he took the naked man into his arms, smearing the blood of his heart on his back with his palms, and kissed him deep and passionate and desperate, feeling their blood stained cheeks rubbing together as the metallic taste danced on their reckless tongues.
Namjoon felt both his heart and Yoongi’s beating in both their chests as their naked bodies pressed together and become endless and edgeless and eternal. The sheer intimacy of it all made the world spin and crumble around him.
When they parted, Namjoon was shocked by the sight of Yoongi smiling genuinely at him, eyes aflame with stars and darkness and something that looked like home reflected in them.
“I finally know how love tastes like.”