Chapter Text
Once.
The times that Taeyong has been in love, in all his young years of life. Once. Once in his years both long like the legs of a dancer dragging out a spin to a final note and years short like the hasty breaths of lovers at night.
He owed all his dancing notes and loving breaths to that man, his once-love, that glimpse on a gray night that plunged his heart into a whirling of color, running rife with every hue the sky might ever show.
He’d seen him on a day where Seoul had turned to mist, it’s characteristic skyscrapers as gloomy pillars indistinct from the huge swaths of fog that lumbered past in agonizing inches on heavy feet. Every curtain was drawn, the city folk dragons hoarding light in their homes like gold. The denizens unlucky enough to be about in a day cold as this were huddled into gowns of padded coats, so long that the tips almost brushed the sidewalk stones, or squinting desperately for a glare of red taxi light turned pink by the haze of ashen smog that blanketed the roads.
He had stepped out and shivered as the air hit him in pinpricks of ice, meaning to complete some unimportant errand or chore, now long forgotten in the brilliance of the meeting that followed.
It was over in a second, in a blink of an eye, a beat of a heart. A face on the other side of the sidewalk emerged from brume and his breath was stopped in his chest, hard and compressed into a lump in his throat as he tried to call out to the man. His shining dark hair, brighter than any lamppost that could line a street, fell in waves across his forehead to frame what surely must be the most regal features known to humankind with such a perfect, high nose and almond eyes, long and round and clear.
What is your name, stranger? Who are you, stranger? How, stranger, have I met you out of millions, my perfect dream?
Where are you, stranger?
For the man was gone, fog engulfing him yet again. Taeyong had lost, lost to the flighty temperament of such thick smog. He was rooted to the ground, he couldn’t lift his feet, move, run to the spot he’d seen that man and gasp out the request for his name. He tried to shout, but Seoul was Seoul, and cars and taxis and sirens run and run and run and blare and blare and blare, Taeyong’s voice lost among them as the lights turned green and cars suddenly sped past them, a flurry of sleek black and white figures rushing past.
And so Taeyong stood, dumbstruck until his nose was frosted from the dull winter air, wondering at the man who’d crossed his path.