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Seokjin leans lazily against the mantelpiece, little whorls of smoke unfurling from the tip of his lighted cigar. “Pity,” he says, exhaling deeply, one fist sitting comfortably snug in the front pocket of his two-piece trousers, the dark blue vest that highlights the cruel endless night of his pretty, immoral eyes hugging his slender figure, wide at the shoulders and tapering almost indecently at the waist. “Pity,” he says again, every rise and curve of his body screaming comfort and luxury, every glass of wine he has downed since dinner and every cigar he has smoked right alongside them declaring a certain sense of uncaring, reckless self-fulfillment, the dulcet tone of his voice belying the blatant awareness of yet casual amusement for every iota of morality that exists in the world. “He’s a pretty little thing, isn’t he?” he says, sounding immensely bored, words dripping with honey and poison-laced sarcasm, full and breathy and swathed in exposed, unashamed sensuality. “Would’ve made a fine toy for a while, don’t you think?”
He laughs then, the sound mild and quiet, ricocheting through the long golden hallway like a freshly-bubbling springtime brook; cruel, indelicate, filled with bustling, vibrant life.
“Do be a little sensitive, Hyung,” murmurs Jungkook quietly from behind his canvas, paintbrushes tucked into place above his ear, stray patches of colour glinting on his rounded cheeks. He raises his head ever so slightly to frown disapprovingly at Seokjin, who looks back at him with his cool, unfazed eyes, amused mockery shining from their twin fathomless depths. “Jimin-ssi is a very fine man,” says Jungkook softly, dropping his gaze back to the canvas, a dull timbre creeping into his tone now, peeking out from under his usual enticing lull. “The crowds all love him and I’m going to see him tomorrow. Taehyung’s quite mad about him, you know.” The normally placid voice that Seokjin knows so well wavers a little, barely just filled with many, many unspoken, unpronounced words and unkept promises, and he doesn’t miss the mirage-like, illusory, barely-there moment, freezing in time, in which his young friend pauses for a split second, right hand hovering over the canvas before he exhales sharply and dips his head back to it again.
“How is Taehyung lately?” Seokjin asks, flicking the last of his cigar into the fireplace and walking up to Jungkook, who immediately looks up at him with wide eyes, terrified and dilated, something akin to fear dancing in their mirroring irises. “Hyung, please just… Please. We’ve talked about this –”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Kook-ah,” says Seokjin, and his voice rumbles over with unconcern, dismissive and uncaring, yet ever so slightly pointed with the faintest smidge of curiosity. “You think you can hide from me? Kim Seokjin knows everything, child. Did you really think your little escapades would go unnoticed?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Jungkook, hard spots of colour beginning to bloom on his pristine white cheeks as he hurries to cover the still-wet canvas with a thick sheet of tarpaulin. Seokjin grabs his wrist, bringing his actions to a halt, staring at him with that burning sort of fiery intensity that he is so well known for, and Jungkook freezes at the proximity, hand locked in Seokjin’s grasp as supple and pliant and easy to control as one of his beloved paintbrushes. Seokjin’s gaze burns his eyes and fire spreads like melting stardust beneath his skin, bubbling like despair in the hollow of his stomach.
“How is Taehyung lately?” and the question is soft, quiet, dangerous; laced with barbed wire and dipped in deadly poison. Jungkook shakes his hand free, snatching his canvas up as he scurries away from Seokjin and tosses it into the fire.
“He’s fine,” he mumbles, voice barely audible against the merry crackling of the newly-fed yellow-blue flames, and Seokjin sinks to the floor, resounding waves of barely-suppressed laughter reverberating through the house.
“Poor, poor Jungkookie,” he cries, reaching up to wipe away the stray tears that cut several glittering crystal pathways on his snow-coloured cheeks, over his high cheekbones, just caressing the edges of his aquiline nose. “Oh, you foolish, foolish boy. Don’t you understand? He has never cared for you.”
“Hyung, please. Please, just stop –” begins Jungkook, voice barely above a hushed, muted whisper, dipped in awe and regret and guilt and so many other intense yet fleeting emotions that he visibly begins to tremble. Seokjin merely laughs at it all, roars of mirth growing louder at the obvious discomfit that Jungkook is in, going as far as to walk up to him and draw him away from the fire, reaching up to sweep what he can of his dark fringe behind his ear, trailing his hand down from his cheek and drawing his face up to his own, chin held secure between his long, crooked fingers. “So young,” Seokjin drawls, gaze fiery glacial, sharp and scrutinizing as it searches Jungkook’s face, the latter refusing to look him in the eyes and chewing on his bottom lip in unspilled agony. “So vulnerable… miserable, Jungkookie, miserable. Absolutely pathetic. I don’t blame you though,” Seokjin laughs, holding Jungkook’s chin a little more firmly, bringing his other hand up to rest against his cheek, holding his face firm in his grasp. “He is extraordinarily good-looking, isn’t he?”
“Let me go!” snarls Jungkook, and he wrenches himself away from Seokjin, stumbling backwards blindly before he manages to hold himself upright again. “You—you don’t know what you’re talking about, you don’t know anything! Tae has always been very good to me –”
“Whom are you fooling, child?” says Seokjin, and his voice sounds cruel, even as his facial features fall back together to create that curiously indifferent mask, unmoved and uncaring as gilded marble. “Me? Yourself? Jimin? The whole damn city? Don’t lie to me, Jungkookie – you’re better than that. And try not to lie to yourself, too. Your Tae does that enough.”
He turns on his heel and walks up to the armchair he had previously occupied and bends to snatch up his hat and cane and cloak, and before Jungkook can think up something credible to say, or ask him to stay and explain himself, the French window overlooking the vineyard hurls open, and the chill evening breeze softly waltzes into the room, effectively managing to put out the fire. Charred remains of the painted canvas steadily smoulder in its depths to create unkind, scorching ashes crumbling like sand at the bottom of the fireplace, and Seokjin is gone.
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“He wasn’t wrong, you know,” muses Namjoon, barely looking up from his book, eyebrows furrowed as he reads. “Word on the street is… not good, Jungkookie. People – well, you know they talk…”
“Damn them all,” exclaims Jungkook fiercely, throwing himself down on the grass he has nearly trampled pacing so fervently over for the past hour, taking off his hat and flinging it into the bushes in frustration. “Damn them all to hell. What do they know? Why do they care? Why should they care? Do they know Taehyung the way I do? Think of him the way I do? Worship the very ground he walks? They know nothing,” he spits out, rage in his voice and burning like amber fire through his skin even as he trembles a little, an old reflex in the face of the slightest humiliation. “They know nothing, and Seokjin hyung knows nothing. Taehyung isn’t what everyone thinks him to be! He’s… he’s beautiful,” he says softly, and an odd dream-like expression settles on his face, drawing his eyes open a little wider, a little more awe-daubed. “So what if he’s dreadfully insincere? What, if he doesn’t care for anything but himself? He’s beautiful, Hyung. All-encompassing. Did you know he had that portrait I did of him hung up in his parlour? Oh, yes, Hyung, he did – I saw it! On the wall that the piano stands by... but it wasn’t there last night. He was flipping through that dreadful photo album of his, have you seen it? The one he had made the day Jimin-ssi died, filled with all his photographs… and he still looked as beautiful as ever when I went to see him. Not a wrinkle on his forehead, and Jimin-ssi not a week in his grave! He’d written to me that night, you see, the night Jimin-ssi went missing – ‘Oh, Jungkookie,’ he’d written, ‘I am afraid I have made a terrible mistake!’ I went over to his rooms immediately, of course, but the butler told me he was out. And he refused to see me since! I forced myself in last night – God knows what the poor boy must have done! What he must have been feeling, going through! He adored Jimin-ssi,” Jungkook’s eyes are blown enormous, wide against the crystal porcelain of his face, swimming with the trembling sort of vibrato that ran unnaturally all through his voice. “And when I walked in, there he was, fit as a fiddle! Sitting in his armchair, calmly looking at the photographs, not an iota of sorrow in his face. ‘Oh, Jungkookie,’ he said to me, rising to shake my hand, ‘You’re just in time for dinner! Let’s go to the club,’ and not a hair out of place. Yet the man he wanted to marry just died! I felt it, Hyung,” Jungkook says, scrambling up to Namjoon and prizing the book away from him, grabbing him by the hind arms. “His hands were so cold. And the portrait was missing! I asked him about it; I said, ‘Where’s the picture, Tae?’ and do you know what he did? He laughed.”
“Jungkookie,” murmurs Namjoon softly, the unrelenting grip on his biceps starting to hurt as Jungkook smiles at him, regret and sorrow, the beginnings of guilt swimming in the tears that pool in his big brown eyes, colour the roses that bloom in his cheeks, flushed bright red against the pale of his skin. “He loved Jimin-ssi, Hyung. I know he did – I saw it, I felt it. The way he spoke of him, held his hand, went to all his shows – he never did any of that for me. He never stayed up to read Shakespeare with me – hell, I’m only just a poor artist but damn if he couldn’t have taught me the language of the Gods, the way he did him; damn if he ever came running whenever I needed him, the way he ran whenever Jimin-ssi called; damn if all the roses I painted for him didn’t fade away to nothing in comparison to the ones Jimin-ssi picked for him from his garden. He has never loved me, Hyung. He has never held my hand the way I wanted him to, never seen my paintings in the light I see them in, never looked at me the way I look at him… he has never whispered my name in the dark the way I have his. But there is no one else for me, Hyung. I can never have another muse again. I can never love anybody else ever again. Not the way I love him.
“And I thought something changed the night Jimin-ssi died. We went to see him; do you remember his last? Romeo and Juliet… and he looked so lovely. So beautiful up there on stage, glowing white and gold, pretty cheeks and pink lips and so, so delicate, so refined… so fragile when Romeo died – and I thought my heart would break. It was already breaking, you know, ever since Taehyung told me he wanted to marry him – but that last stage really drove a nail into everything, right into the core of all my sorrows, and I thought I would cry a river, even there, in the middle of the theatre. But Taehyung seemed so… unfazed, he didn’t smile or weep at all – and I didn’t understand it. He even refused to return to the club with me later. And then at two in the morning, my butler brought me his note! And, Lord, how I thought I’d been a terrible friend! How I thought he would never forgive me! Never even look at me again, and I nearly died of heartbreak… but there he was last night, absolutely uncaring! And I know, Hyung,” says Jungkook, his long, delicate fingers quivering on Namjoon’s arms, trembling with the steadily-weakening force of his grasp. “I know everything you’re going to tell me, what everybody else has been trying to tell me all along. He’s dreadfully insincere; I know, insincere to a fault – but I love him, Hyung. I love him. And you cannot, must not deny me this, must not refute it or take it away from me, for I have never asked for anything as sweet in all my life.”
“Oh, Jungkookie,” says the scientist-philosopher, searching the young man’s face before him and finding nothing left in it of the boy he once knew. “I shan’t take anything away from you. I only pray you know what you are getting yourself into.”
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“Ah, Namjoon! So glad you could come,” says Taehyung lazily, rising languidly from his armchair, pipe curled in his long, dainty fingers. “Long time, no see, eh?”
“Yes, I suppose so. But I must make it clear that I wouldn’t have dropped by if Jungkookie hadn’t praised you so much to me the other day. I’m not here because you asked me to come. I am here because my friend,” hisses Namjoon, his voice tight and as smooth as velvet, rippling through the acidic atmosphere of Taehyung’s parlour and settling like wisps of shadowy smoke around them, “Holds you very dearly.”
“Oh, is that right? Jungkookie said he holds me dearly?” says Taehyung, raising a perfectly-pencilled eyebrow in amusement. “Well, who would have guessed?”
Namjoon clenches his jaw, nostrils flaring a little as he holds Taehyung’s gaze. “How shameless you are,” he says quietly, rosy flush working up his neck to the apples of his cheeks, dancing like cherries in the centre of his twin dimples, fire burning in his eyes. “What do you get out of it, Taehyung? Kicks? Laughter? Men are not pawns in your game – sooner or later, word will get around and people will know. What will you do then? Where will you hide? Surely not even Jungkook will protect you forever. You can’t hold him captive for so long.”
“Oh, but perhaps I can,” whispers Taehyung softly, taking the steps needed to close the distance between the two of them till they’re nearly nose-to-nose, chests ever so slightly brushing, both their gazes spitting hostility, hatred, despair at the other – except the shine in Taehyung’s eyes is all dark, dark and speckled with faint yellow dots that make his irises seem not quite human. He smiles up at Namjoon, wicked mirth and uncaring humour in the curve of his mouth, the slope and dip of his beautiful, cruel Cupid’s bow, and the stray remaining cherry pink of the wine he had been drinking earlier glitters like blood at the corners of his lips.
He’s still heavenly beautiful though, Namjoon notices, even as relentless, unwavering dislike boils like freshly-brewed poison in the pit of his stomach, the empty hollow beneath his ribs, thrums like electricity in his veins. Taehyung smiles up at him, faint amusement in the tilt of his head, in the unruly raven hair that falls in waves over his forehead. “Perhaps I can keep Jungkookie captive forever,” he breathes, and the words settle inside the minute space left between the two of them like the coils of a deadly serpent, Namjoon breathing them in like tainted air. “You think Jungkookie will ever raise a finger against me? Accuse me of anything? Why, only a few hours ago he told me he liked me very much. Wasn’t even a compliment, really – but then Jungkook has always been so absurdly easy to read, you know. Pity nobody will ever read him again. Because, you see,” says Taehyung softly, tongue peeking out to wet his bottom lip, slow and sensual, “You, Namjoon – you will be the last.”
Namjoon’s mouth runs dry. “What – what do you mean?”
“Did he ever tell you about that portrait he made of me?’ Taehyung asks, and his voice is low, dipped in charcoal bonfires and cigarette smoke, ashy and as deep as the ocean under endless skies. “Did he tell you why I had it removed from my parlour?”
“No, he didn’t...”
“Come with me,” whispers Taehyung, his face is devoid of smiles, reaching out to grab Namjoon’s hand and lead him out through the parlour door, and the icy-cold nature of the long, beautiful, delicate fingers wrapped around his wrist makes Namjoon feel like he is drowning.
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“You do carry on too much, Taehyungie.”
“Nonsense, Hyung. I’m disappointed in you. Some would say call this the only way to live.”
“Not like this, Taehyungie. I do wish you weren’t so wasteful. I really don’t care what you do with yourself, but I don’t like how you seem to have no qualms about hurting others, and using them for your own benefit. You’ve got quite the biggest ego I’ve ever seen – and I’m a proud man myself! Your grandfather wouldn’t have approved, you know.”
“My grandfather is dead,” says Taehyung softly, the tip of one finger running in circles over the rim of his wine glass as his foot finds Seokjin’s under the table and grazes it lightly. Seokjin smiles back at him, his face soft, inviting and languid, sarcasm etched into every barely-just-visible line. His plump lips are swollen, more so than usual, and his cheeks are rosy, blending into the fiery brown of his eyes.
“Speaking of the dead,” he says lightly, propping his chin up on a hand and gazing intently at Taehyung, who just raises an eyebrow at him, signalling for him to go on, the beginnings of a smirk growing at the corners of his lips. “Did you hear? That hotshot scientist dude from 43rd shot himself two nights ago.”
“Which one again?”
“The tall one, glasses and dimples. An awful bore, if you ask me. I met him at Hoseok’s a couple years ago, just science-and-books-talk through and through, couldn’t name a single card game when I asked him if he played. I really don’t know how Jungkook managed to collect all these miserable people – personally, I rather think the two of us were the only fun folks he was ever friends with. And you were equally miserable when we first met!”
“Don’t remind me, please,” groans Taehyung, dropping his face into his free hand before he draws it back up again, eyebrow yet raised in bemused realisation. “So… I’m guessing they didn’t find him?”
“Who, the scientist dude or Jungkook?”
“Screw the scientist dude, I don’t care about him. Jungkook. I thought they’d have found him by now…”
“No, they never found him,” says Seokjin, and the beginnings of a frown bloom at the corners of his plush mouth, dragging them down along with the crease that appears in between his brows. “You know, they keep saying he might have drowned… but I don’t really believe that, it can’t be right. There must be something we’re not seeing…”
Lost in thought and head swimming with questions that he finds no answers to, Seokjin picks up his fork again despondently, not noticing when the bare foot that had been gently caressing his own under the table withdraws and returns to Taehyung, the latter drawing his glass of wine up to his lips again in an effort to hide the wide smirk now spreading across his face.
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“Th’ man tha’ died? Aight, ‘is name war Yoongi, saw i’ i’ th’ pap’rs, now, didn’ ah? Folks say ‘e war Pa’k Jim’n’s broth’r – ye rem’mber, th’ P’rk Jim’n tha’ dis’ppeared one night an’ nobody saw nev’r ag’in till ‘e turn’d up dead in a pa’k soon a’ter’. Yeah, th’ ve’y same! It’s a li’l suspic’ous, ye kner… th’ gov’nor said ‘e war lurkin’ in th’ gar’ens… pr’tendin’ ter be a bea’er or som’thin’. Ah done tol’ ‘em, ma’y a time now, laddie – ah tol’ ‘em, ‘Suh, yer ain’t got no biznez leavin’ th’ gates op’n fer ev’ryone ter trespass inter...’ i’ war trespassin’, laddie, i’ shore wuz! Mistah Taehyun’ found ‘im now, didn’ ‘e – a stron’ youn’ man, Mistah Taehyun’, real propah an’ all – great frien’s wi’ th’ gov’nor, yer kner… said ‘e wuz lyin’ o’ th’ bare grass, bleedin’ ter death. ‘E’d ben shot, poor lad… Mistah Taehyun’ look’d real shak’n, ‘e did. Th’ gov’nor sent ‘im back ‘ome. Lawd knows ‘e nee’ed ter rest…”
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He would live forever.
Taehyung paces his parlour, chewing on his bottom lip as he walks, hands clasped tight behind his back. None of the deaths would matter. None of the lives he had taken would count. None of it would amount to anything, ever – he was doomed. Doomed to walk this planet drowning in his sins, in all the blood he had shed, the blood of Jungkook shining like a beacon amidst all the other countless, invisible stars that he had similarly put out. Poor Jungkook, who had loved him, had worshipped him, idolized him in ways only he had known… and the numerous others that had followed, that had fallen for the portrait’s, Seokjin’s cruel curse’s, hallowed charm, loved him, loved Taehung as though it were the last thing they would ever do, the last kiss they would ever receive, the last breath they would ever take. They had all died. Died or gone to waste, like poor Hoseok, who had ended up barely alive at the rehabilitation centre after a dose too many after Taehyung washed his hands of him, like the young man from the club who would bring him his daily papers and cry his name so loud in the darkened alleyways outside that Taehyung had had to gag him their last time, the last night that the boy had ever breathed. He hadn’t been meaning to cut his oxygen… but apparently the gag was too tight and the boy was too needy, and by the end of the night, Taehyung had had a fresh, new corpse in his hands and an unbothered, even bored, conscience playing his soul.
But it wasn’t like the boy didn’t know who he was, anyway.
He didn’t really care about the deaths, the killings, the – oh, alright, murders – that he had committed – hadn’t Seokjin hyung told him his only concern should be his beauty? That the world would love him if he were beautiful always? Well, the world loved him. The world loved him now, loved him so desperately, so hauntingly, echoing in its bones and soul and conscience in reverberating waves that did nothing to thaw the ice in his heart, put out the relentless fire that burned within him. He didn’t love the world; not one bit. They were all boring, all of them, with their talk of love, and beauty, and art – there were no such things. There was nothing called love, because not even love had saved Jungkook in the end, there was no beauty that Taehyung knew but himself, and as for art – well, all art was quite useless. Seokjin hyung had said so himself – besides, wasn’t art always supposed to reflect reality? And what was reality if not this, him? What was reality if not the libertine life he had lived for so long, all these past eighteen years since Jimin died? What was reality if not the most sensual of all existences, the most appealing of all truths, the most devastating of all extremes? What was reality if not himself? This was reality. This was his reality, and this it would always be – and that summer day, eighteen years ago, in Jungkook’s parlour, by his French windows, with Seokjin hyung before the portrait – Taehyung knows that was reality, too. Reality of a different form, from another dimension in a different universe, one in which Taehyung was not aware of himself, or his power, or the various vistas of life and possibilities that could have opened before him. That was another reality. But here, in this world, in this reality – shadows screamed at him from the dark, mocked him in the morning birds’ cries, looked him straight in the eye and trembled with the leaves that just barely managed to stick to their branches in the winter. Glorious golden rays of the sun fell on his soft black hair and cried to be taken away, led away from the cruel torment that smiled serenely from the innermost core of his soul, the same torment he had made his own, learned to live with, learned to claim as indivisible from himself; water touched his lips and died at the base of his throat screaming for mercy, praying for the redemption that he knew would never come. Flowers withered wherever he walked and the grass turned brown under his feet, and the moon wept when he looked at her for too long, for even from so far away, some light years and some more – she felt for him and pitied him, afraid that he would never know happiness, nor love, nor friendship, afraid that it might already be too late. But Taehyung didn’t care, because he was greater, better, far more beautiful than any of them, and all of them combined.
And he would live forever.
He smiles to himself as he flops into his armchair, lazily reaching for his wine glass and raising it to his lips, just wetting his mouth with the sweet, savoury bitterness of the plum, the slight tang of the cherry, the age-old delicacy of the grapes. This used to be Jungkook’s favourite wine, he remembers, only because Seokjin hyung had taken him to Paris one summer – oh, way before Taehyung had met him – and Jungkook had always recollected such fond memories. Poor boy, he thinks, smiling a little as he takes another sip, gaze locked outside the window where the sun was just so slightly dipping away behind the brick-and-tile rooftop of the house opposite, the sky stained red and pink and purple, steadily-growing patches of dusk orange spreading to the ends of the horizon. A beautiful sky, with beautiful colours and beautiful clouds – Jungkook had been good with skies. He’d been good with a lot of things, Taehyung remembers; forests and waterfalls and landscapes – but he had been the best at portraits, deliberate yet effortless finesse painted onto the canvas with every careful brushstroke, every hour bleeding into another to create the most stunning of human countenances onto his parched white canvas, staining the pristine skin of his delicate fingers with the fruit of his labours. Jungkook’s portraits had been – exquisite, Taehyung had seen so many of them for himself. But his masterpiece had been Taehyung, in all his sweet summer glory, encased in that homely parlour eighteen years ago, when he had felt as old as he had looked, as young as he had seen himself mirrored in Jungkook’s portrait. Oh, the portrait! The portrait that had been Jungkook’s best, his most stunning, most lordly and most immeasurable in quality – his portrait, his picture. Taehyung’s picture. The picture that had ultimately let Seokjin hyung tell him what was most important in all this world – youth and beauty, and how Taehyung had both, had displayed both that summer afternoon in Jungkook’s garden, the laburnum blossomed and gilded in all its golden glory, purple stars of the clematis bushes nodding in the mellow afternoon breeze as they reclined on the grass, the two of them, the strawberry drinks in their hands just starting to sweat in the sun. Taehyung remembers all of it, remembers it all as though it were yesterday – how could he ever forget? He hadn’t aged since, not one bit – still looked not a day over twenty, the vibrant scarlet plush of his mouth unaltered, cheekbones high and proud, not a blemish visible that would so much as subtly hint at all the changes that had taken place within him, with him, because of him for the past eighteen years. His youth was still the same, the only thing he still held desperately onto, really – and the portrait rotted in the attic upstairs, away from the eyes of civilization, mankind, Taehyung himself; eyes that would, he is sure, look at it with horror and trembling apprehension, scrutinize it down to the very last detail and decide that the portrait was never Taehyung’s to begin with. Fiddlesticks. What did they know? They had never known Jungkook as he had known him – oh, he was awfully boring, it was true; knew only art and the eras and the muses of Apollo. But art was useless, and Taehyung had lost interest in him very soon after they first met – but, all the same, he supposes that his young friend had been a good man, begrudgingly admits that perhaps he was, even, the best of the three of them, with all his serious, moral talk about what was good and what was not, what was kind and what was not, what constituted life and what did not. But – oh, but he was such a bore! Taehyung never cared very much for his kind; and besides, soon after meeting Seokjin hyung, nearly everyone else had failed to impress him. Jimin had killed himself after that awful altercation between them the night of his last show because he had ruined whatever impression Taehyung had had of him, and even Hoseok, poor Hoseok, with his beautiful face and exquisite words had failed to vitalise Taehyung enough. Besides, it wasn’t Taehyung’s fault that Hoseok’s family had cut him off after finding him guilty of forging multiple cheques to feed his opium addiction – Taehyung had simply done with him what he had always planned to do, and the rest of it wasn’t his responsibility anymore. Seokjin hyung always said people who claimed responsibility for other people would never have anyone to claim theirs – not that anybody would ever claim responsibility for him, he smiles to himself, refilling his wine glass and nodding his head in satisfied amusement. There was nothing he had done that was wrong. All the deaths and killings that had happened were necessities, simply a product of the circumstances that had risen due to certain actions – but they were nothing, and nobody would ever claim them. Certainly not Taehyung. What was there to claim? Who would dare presume his association with them? What evidence did they have? The dead bodies? A drug addict? Ghosts, perhaps? No, there was nothing to fear, nothing to claim. Nobody would ever know.
And yet…
And yet the portrait knew. Taehyung had not laid eyes on it for the past eighteen years, had had it removed to his attic soon after Jimin died; he had not even let Jungkook see it the last time he had been to visit – pity the poor boy never walked out again. Well, it was necessary. He could not afford his secret being out, and Jungkook would have ruined everything. The outcome could have been devastating; what if Seokjin hyung never spoke to him again? It was too much to risk. So the portrait had remained upstairs, locked safe in the confines of the attic, and the knife on the lone, bare, dust-smitten table in a corner of the room had been delicately polished multiple times till all the red had been wiped away. Nobody had ever guessed, nobody had known. Nobody except the portrait.
The portrait knew everything. The portrait knows everything, and suddenly, the wine tastes bitter in Taehyung’s mouth.
The picture, the wine – all of it reeked of Jungkook, of his, Taehyung’s destroyed youth that had never really left him, but never accompanied his steps anymore. It reeked of his sins, if there was anything such as sin; staining his life with the misery he had let himself live, with the aggressions and delights that only a fool would label pleasure, happiness, the quest to be whole. The portrait knew, had seen him dissolve into poison, delve in and live in it for the past eighteen years, and so blinded had he been by his pride, by the mortal fear that dogged his reckless steps, day after day since Jungkook died that he had managed to successfully pretend it didn’t exist, that the portrait didn’t exist, had nearly managed to convince himself that its cursed charm didn’t exist, had never existed, was not real. He lived most of his life steeped in all the blood he had shed and no perfume of Arabia would sweeten his hands anymore, no amount of polishing would make the blade as perfectly clean as it once was ever again. As he turns away from the window to face the wall opposite, an effort to hide away from the sun, which had always brought him new opportunities for delight, his gaze lands on the tall, glazed mirror that reflected the dying hues of Apollo’s chariot, sees himself bathed red and gold and orange in the last lingering dregs of the day. That mirror was what he had turned to the first night that the picture had changed before his eyes, disastrously afraid that the same blemishes on the suddenly-unknown, fearful canvas had found reflection on his very face. But it hadn’t – he had still looked just as himself, just as beautiful as he had always been, and even today, wine glass in hand and a slow, dream-like sense of realisation growing like silvery mist in his eyes – even today, steeped in the sins borne out of the sorrows he refused to claim, take responsibility for – he still looked beautiful.
And in his heart of hearts, he knew the portrait looked anything but.
And the portrait was evidence. Evidence of what he had sold, given away – the innermost core of himself, no more his. The portrait was evidence; the portrait knew – and suddenly he’s on his way out of the parlour, heading up the stairs straight to the attic, unknown fire simmering in his blood, in his veins, beneath his skin, and a pair of large, brown eyes that he has not really thought of in years weighing deeply on his conscience.
It was true he did not care about any of the others. Not Jimin, nor the poor boy from the club; not the unknown beater who had bled to death; not Namjoon, whom he had blackmailed days before he shot himself, and not Hoseok, who always been barely just a plaything to him, an object that had never held much worth. But Jungkook – was this murder going to weigh on him always? Was that what the portrait wanted? Well, it would be denied, refused, refuted – he would not let it get the better of him anymore. He had sold his soul to it, and it would not take his conscience away, too. Friend or no friend, muse or no muse, artist or no artist, Jungkook was dead, had died eighteen years ago, and Taehyung had killed him himself. No inanimate product of his creation would ever have any power over him. He would make sure of that. He would destroy the portrait, and no evidence of it would remain.
The knife that is driven, angry and passionate, into the picture’s gold-framed canvas ten minutes later pierces right through the hemp, and blood washes clean the floors of the dust-stained attic, as red as the first roses of winter, as splendidly vermillion as the evening sky.