Archive of Our Own ^beta

~

If experience taught Taehyung anything, it was what course of action to take upon noticing a beautiful person looking his way. So when he realized the most handsome man in the room was staring at him, he knew exactly what to do—he peered down at his shirt and checked for food stains.

Earlier, he'd recklessly tried an appetizer with sauce, and he'd dripped most of it on the waiter who'd served it to him—and he was sorry about that, and he learned his lesson, and now it'd been over an hour since he last ate something because he was too anxious to try again, lest he court further disaster.

As far as he could tell, his shirt was clean. His trousers were zipped—he'd checked that earlier. His shoes were still tied tightly enough to feel the stinging pressure of the knotted laces whenever he moved his feet. (Why had he tied them so tightly? Had he been so afraid he'd lose them? That they'd fall off his feet and leave him shoe-less and embarrassed in front of his new boss and his new co-workers—the limited few people he knew in the city, if the word "knew" even applied to people he'd barely spent five minutes with so far—and all the rich and important people who'd been invited to this impressive party? Yes. Yes, he had been afraid of that, precisely.)

He ran a hand across his face. He felt no crumbs or sauce on his chin or on his lips, and his nose was in its usual place, not gallivanting off to his forehead. (Taehyung had many irrational fantasies when he was nervous.)

He braced himself before looking up again. He had seen the man's face for only half a second before looking away; it was possible he wasn't that handsome and therefore that intimidating.

Oh. Taehyung blinked. He was wrong. The man wasn't the most handsome man in the room.

He was the most handsome man Taehyung had ever seen in his whole life.

Dark eyes locked on to his, and Taehyung—who hadn't even been moving, who'd already been frozen against the wall for at least three minutes now—felt every atom in his body go still. The handsome man was absolutely staring at him, with rich brown eyes and a tilt to his lips that wasn't quite a smile but also wasn't not a smile and perfect eyebrows arching like they fully expected Taehyung to understand what they were saying. This was not a man whose nose was in danger of wandering off. This was not a man whose shoes were tied too tight.

This was not a man who should be making his way over to Taehyung.

He crossed the room so certainly, so confidently, and so lightly that Taehyung was struck by how he was even more handsome in motion than he was standing still. He moved like how Taehyung would paint moonlight: a clear light glow cutting through dark colors, a bright reflection that both blended with its surroundings and somehow also held itself ineluctably separate.

And, unfathomably, he made his way to Taehyung.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello," Taehyung said, mouth moving before he knew what he was saying. "I'm alone."

Handsome Man's eyes widened. "Nice to meet you, Alone. I'm Jin."

For a moment, Taehyung's mind went completely blank. "I mean," he said, after a silent but tremendous mental struggle, "I'm by myself for a reason. I'm not someone you want to socialize with if you're at this party. I'm new to the city, I don't have any connections except to Jimin, but if you're at this party, you probably already know Jimin, because he organized it."

"Actually," Handsome Man—Jin, Taehyung reminded himself—said, "I don't know Jimin."

Oh. Right. Because important people, which this man obviously was, had their own assistants deal with other assistants, which Jimin was. Taehyung didn't know why he brought up Jimin. Jimin was nearly as lowly as he was—just better connected and probably wearing better shoes.

"But I'm not trying to network or socialize with people," Jin continued. "In a way, I'm here because I'm trying to escape those things." He smiled, and it was…it was a nice smile. That was the word for it: nice. It wasn't sleazy. It wasn't pushy or overconfident or assuming. It wasn't a hitting-on-you smile. It was the kind of smile strangers gave him at the grocery store when he helped them reach something from the top shelf. It was the kind of smile neighbors gave him when he saw them across the street but couldn't stop to say hello. It was the kind of smile that felt as comfortable and normal as sinking into a well-loved sofa with a drink in one hand and a friend's hand in the other.

This stranger was giving Taehyung that kind of smile, and Taehyung hadn't even done anything except babble incoherently. He dug deep for something he could give in return. Reassurance? Distracting small talk? He certainly didn't trust himself to smile back.

Why would someone as easy and undemanding as this man need to escape socializing? Why would he need to escape anything?

Oh! Escape! Taehyung did, in fact, have some experience with that topic. He could share insight. "The thing about escapes," he said, starting to get excited even as he was aware of how dangerously he was living by trying to speak and think at the same time, "is that when you're in the middle of them, they're all about what you're trying to escape from. Every bit of your escape is dictated by what you're trying to escape from, sometimes to the point you can't even keep in mind what you're trying to escape to."

Jin moved his mouth—his beautiful, striking mouth. He didn't say anything, though.

"I used to work for a company that designed escape rooms," Taehyung said, realizing he could've opened with that fact, rather than launching straight into philosophy and/or psychology. "You mentioned trying to escape. I just thought I'd share what I know about escapes, because I've thought a lot about them."

"You design escape rooms?"

"I used to. The company folded."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Don't be. Our escape rooms were terrible."

Jin's face lit up, and somehow, he grew even more beautiful. "Please tell me more. I love escape rooms, and the worst ones make the best stories."

Taehyung was delighted to oblige. Recounting the chaos of his previous career was comfortable territory for him, and here, at least, if he said something deranged, it was on purpose and also truthful. "On our last day, we were in the middle of designing a room where you're supposed to pretend you're a mouse in a house where there's an exterminator who's going to catch you if you don't escape, and I asked too many questions about whether mice can actually solve the kind of puzzles we were creating and whether it was ethical of us to make this situation into a game, and I started pulling up research articles about how mice are actually vastly overrated as champions of going-through-mazes, and one of my coworkers started questioning why mice would even try to solve puzzles when they could just chew their way out through the walls, and so I started brainstorming ways for our guests to chew through the walls, metaphorically, in case the puzzles got too hard, and then my boss started crying about how actually, this room was a metaphor for her career and then she quit, and then the next day, we were all informed the company was shutting down."

Jin pressed his lips together tightly, his eyes sparkling. Taehyung was actually a bit breathless from delivering that story as an absolute tumble of barely connected clauses, and he could feel a little giddiness bubbling up inside him—the glee of finding someone sharing in his exact strain of humor.

There was nothing less ordinary, nothing more extraordinary, than finding someone who was delighted by the same things as he was. All his mental sensors were going off, detecting the possibilities in front of him, telling him: this is someone you make happy.

This is someone who could make you happy.

"Alone," Jin said, a deep seriousness in his voice at odds with the barely concealed delight on his face. He held Taehyung's gaze with his, and it took Taehyung a full five seconds to realize that by "Alone," Jin was referring to him. Jin was still running with that silly joke. Jin, the most handsome man with whom Taehyung had ever interacted, was committed to the most brainless joke Taehhyung had ever heard. "I have admittedly not talked to everyone at this party, but I know with one hundred percent certainty that you are by far the most interesting person here."

"Oh," Taehyung said. "Thank you?" Was spewing out the chaos inside his head actually…was it actually working out for him, for once in his life? (What weirdo parallel world had he fallen into, and could he stay here forever? He was absolutely uninterested in escaping.)

"I mean it." Jin reached out, and with the lightest of touches, he brushed his hand against Taehyung's wrist. If it felt like as soft and cool and soothing as being kissed by moonlight, Taehyung was going to force his brain to skip right past that thought, lest he blurt it out loud and break the spell. "I'm so glad I found you. Please, tell me more about your philosophy of escape rooms."

~

They talked about Taehyung's philosophy of escape rooms. ("It's about the dynamic of pleasant frustration and the feeling of eventual satisfaction being just out of reach until it feels gloriously inevitable," Taehyung said eagerly, waxing poetic about the concept for a full minute. Jin gradually raised his eyebrows practically to his hairline, and eventually Taehyung realized that everything he'd just said also applied to sex, and he burst out laughing just as Jin did the same. Jin's laugh was squeaky and sweeping, and Taehyung instantly memorized the sound and needed to hear even more of it. And he did get to hear more, as the two of them started riffing on the topic of escape rooms and sex, so inappropriately but so hilariously.)

They talked about Jin's philosophy of escape rooms. ("Don't bring anyone in with you who's going to be a control freak about it. Don't bring in couples who you so much as suspect as having relationship issues, because it will not be a good bonding experience for anyone, but especially for them. It'll be miserable. Every puzzle will be a proxy fight for their own issues, and before you know it, they'll be hogging the phone, demanding that the game-master act as a neutral third-party to rule on whose fault it was that the trash didn't go out that week.")

Taehyung was so into this conversation, he unthinkingly accepted an appetizer when a waiter paused near them. Unthinkingly, he put it in his mouth, and unthinkingly, he kept eating and, miraculously, he didn't make a mess. Some kind of magical force field of elegance must have been created by Jin's presence, and Taehyung benefited from just by standing near him. (He'd taken a couple steps closer during their conversation. Seokjin liked to grab on to his arm when he laughed too hard. Taehyung simply wanted to make that easier for him. It was the kind thing to do. No ulterior motives at all.)

Eventually, Jin asked, "So you're out of the escape room business now?"

And Taehyung was brought crushingly back to the present. He was here as a representative of the architecture firm he'd just joined, and while he didn't think he was about to find out that Jin was in fact his boss (he'd met his boss, actually, and he'd met his supervisor, and he'd met his nearest coworkers, and Jin hadn't been any of them, either), he still didn't want to find out who Jin was. He was clearly an important person, and Taehyung didn't want to learn why it'd be inevitably impossible for him to follow up on this fun they were having together.

And he was having fun. So much fun.

The thing was, Taehyung usually liked parties. He liked getting to know strangers, and he liked feeling connected with people. But this work party was on a different level from the parties he was used to. He knew his purpose here was to impress, and he didn't know how to do that. He knew his purpose here was to fit in, and he didn't know how to do that, either. He was finally working in the field he studied and trained for, in a paid job with benefits and stability and no metaphors about mice (that he was aware of), and he didn't want to mess it up before he even got started.

He was just so grateful to Jin for showing up and giving him an easy way to impress just one person, and he wanted so badly to just focus on that. "I'm out of the escape room business," Taehyung said. "That was my old job. Now I'm here." He hoped that was vague enough. "I'm new here, but I'm here."

"Wait." Jin peered at him, as if trying to read underneath Taehyung's words, and Taehyung held his breath. "Did you just move here? Are you completely new to Incheon?"

"Yeah," Taehyung said, relieved at the easy topic. "I've visited before, of course, but now I'm living and working here."

"And you're Alone." Jin, making a gentle point of the joke—their inside joke—nudged him with his shoulder. (With one of his gorgeous, broad shoulders, a shoulder that Taehyung was just itching to run his hands along, to know that frame down to the millimeter.)

"Alone," Taehyung agreed. "Except for Jimin. He's looked after me, helped me secure an apartment in his own building, and he's told me I'm going to fit in fine. And even though right now I'm very far away from fitting in, I trust him. I'll probably be okay and less awkward, eventually. But he's very busy tonight, so I wanted to stay out of his way and not bother him and not let him worry about me being a complete outsider tonight."

"Not an outsider at all," Jin said easily. "You're the one bringing me in. You're the one making me feel included."

"But you're not new here, are you?"

Jin hesitated, licking his lips. (Taehyung had to press his own mouth shut to avoid instinctively copying the gesture with his own tongue. It'd have been an inferior alternative to tasting Jin's mouth, and also, it would have made his fledgling crush even more painfully obvious than it already was.) "I've lived here most of my life," Jin said, after a moment. "But I've been a new person in a new situation before. I can offer you tips."

"Don't go into an escape room with someone you're probably going to break up with," Taehyung said dutifully.

"That is my best piece of life advice, yes," Jin said. "But, also, when you're worried about things and what people might think about you, you can try thinking like a scientist. Pretend what you're doing is experimenting. That way, if you find out you did something incorrect or not good enough, you've still learned something. You've learned what doesn't work, and now, you get the chance to try another hypothesis."

Normally, unsolicited advice was something Taehyung did not want and did not need. He didn't require extra voices in his head, thank you very much. But right now, it felt like a gift, being given Jin's thoughts like this.

And it wasn't bad advice. It was, in fact, good advice, the kind of thing that appealed to Taehyung on a ridiculously deep level: that pretending to be someone else was actually a good thing, not a bad thing.

It was something Taehyung indulged in more often than he liked to admit, stepping into a role-play, a game of "What if I were that person, instead of myself?", and giving free rein to his imagination. He'd been that way since childhood. He understood, from his parents and from his teachers and from his friends from school, that this was something he was supposed to outgrow. That he was supposed to have outgrown. But for Taehyung, pretending to be someone else expanded the boundaries of his own life just a little, and pretending to be someone else was Taehyung's best way of growing up. Growing forward.

Hearing that advice from Jin? Jin, who clearly had his life together?

Taehyung felt seen. He felt as firmly stable as a portrait, captured in the moment that he was most himself—and that moment was not just acceptable, but art. Beautiful.

Taehyung was pretty sure he was now staring at Jin with some combination of stars and hearts in his eyes, and if his crush was hidden before, it definitely wasn't any longer.

"But you probably don't need to know that," Jin said. He shuffled his feet and looked down at his glass of champagne. The tips of his ears had darkened, and he was pursing his lips in a way that looked shy. Was he embarrassed? By being smart and cool and helpful and funny? "But just in case, that's the best advice I have."

Taehyung's head was full of those kind words and with the image of Jin being shy, he nearly forgot to be nervous when their little huddle was disrupted by the entrance of an older couple, a man and a woman dressed so expensively that Taehyung knew instinctively that they were the sort of rich people he was supposed to suck up to, philanthropic heavyweights or CEOs or other luminaries. He probably shouldn't have been surprised that they greeted Jin like they knew him—and ignored Taehyung completely.

Jin turned to the couple, and Taehyung's eyes (and brain) latched on to the sudden awkwardness of his movement. Jin stiffly set his shoulders and feet into a proper placement, as if needing to be braced for what might come out of these people's mouths.

Which made Taehyung realize that Jin hadn't been that way before, when the two of them were alone. Taehyung was actually rather used to people dreading what he'd say, because he was the sort of person who would sometimes just say anything, and sometimes he rambled, and sometimes he said things that made sense only to him. Not everyone vibed with that, and anytime someone did—and Jin, Taehyung was convinced, very much did—it was a connection Taehyung didn't take for granted.

And right now, he didn't like seeing Jin go cold and quiet the way he did when these people greeted him. (Yes, he'd known Jin for only a half hour, but he could still tell.)

He was jolted out of his protective thoughts by the touch of a hand at his shoulder. "Can I introduce you to my friend…" Jin's voice was still tight, and then it fell when he realized—and Taehyung realized—that he'd never actually given Jin his name. And these people weren't the sort of people who you'd induct into the "Alone" joke.

Taehyung bowed and the couple responded with the slightest of movements, and just as Taehyung was about to introduce himself, he raised his eyes only to freeze under the chill of their twin gazes: cold, cool, looking straight through him like he was the one made of ice. Before the pause grew even more awkward, the woman turned to her husband and said, "Dear, I think I see someone over there we need to talk to. Jin, it was a pleasure to see you here. Tell your mother I said hello."

The couple glided right past them, and they didn't spare Taehyung another glance.

"Wow." Jin stared at them before looking at Taehyung. His eyes were so quiet now, and that was the only word Taehyung had for it: quiet. "I'm so sorry."

"You don't need to apologize," Taehyung said. Yes, he was feeling a pinch of hurt, but that wasn't Jin's fault. "You're not the one being dismissive."

Jin sighed. "This is what I mean, wanting to escape socializing and networking."

"I just hope they don't work at my company."

"Oh, no. People like that? They don't work, and if they owned your company, you'd have known them by sight before you even started. You've nothing to worry about."

It was a nice thought, but probably overly optimistic. If they were at this party, they were at least somewhere on the outside of his new professional constellation. Even if they were the rude ones—which they were—Taehyung knew that was still something to worry about. People like that, they blamed their rudeness on you, no matter the fact it was their choice and you did nothing. (And, yes, even as he thought this through, Taehyung felt a sliver of doubt about whether he was being judgmental. But he knew how it felt, being first pinned by their freeze-ray glare and then dismissed by their snobby indifference at his existence. He knew he didn't make that up—Jin witnessed it, too, and apologized when he wasn't even responsible.)

Again, Jin sighed, and this time, something about that sound's softness and resignation tugged at Taehyung's own lungs, and he swallowed down his own anxiety as he remembered Jin's own need to escape. Taehyung couldn't blame him, if those were the sort of people he'd otherwise be socializing with, but those people had wanted Jin's attention, even if they hadn't bothered with Taehyung's. Taehyung knew that for all of Jin's dad jokes and squeaky laughter and escape room delight, the man carried himself with the calm and confidence and charm of someone important.

He could ask who he was, but that quiet apprehension was still keeping Jin's body taught and his face strained, and the softer parts inside Taehyung ached with the memory of how he'd made Jin happy earlier. He could still feel it, actually, the tingle under his skin, the magic he held simply by not knowing who Jin was, simply by giving Jin the room to be someone aside from what other people wanted him to be.

By being Jin's escape.

Beside him, Jin adjusted his shoulders, his posture, his breathing. He transformed back into the charming, confident, chatty man he'd been almost—almost. Taehyung could still still feel the lingering ghost of Jin's sadness and unhappiness, and it reminded him to be careful. "I need to step out for some air," Jin said, a forced cheerfulness in his tone.

"Okay," Taehyung said, wondering if it'd be too aggressive if he made sure they exchanged numbers and, oh yeah, probably his actual name, and he realized with a twinge of dread that the party would be infinitely worse now without Jin here, and—

"Do you want to come with me?" Jin asked.

Taehyung stood up straighter. "Really?" he asked, before he remembered to be cool. "I mean, yeah. I'd love to."

~

The venue the party was held at flaunted its expensiveness with every centimeter of its polished floors and gilded finishings and windows large enough to require their own area codes. Taehyung had been impressed when he arrived, impressed when he was just one tiny person inside the grand ballroom, and impressed again now as he and Jin descended down an expansive outdoor staircase to the brilliantly lit gardens full of plants that probably had individual monthly upkeep budgets bigger than Taehyung's own. He and Jin walked among elegantly arranged rows of night-blooming flowers that gleamed bright in the moonlight.

"I hadn't expected the gardens to be this beautiful at night," Jin said. "I've seen the gardens during the day, and it's a entire riotous racket of colors, but the night shift is impressive, and beautiful in its own way."

"I've never thought much about night-blooming flowers before," Taehyung admitted. He tucked aside the knowledge that Jin had been here before. He tucked aside the knowledge that Jin was someone who admired flowers. He was being greedy with these details, because he wasn't going to demand knowing any more about Jin than he wanted to share. "I like painting night scenes, so I probably should have."

"You paint?"

"For fun, not for serious," Taehyung said, though he immediately questioned why he had to be so dismissive of himself. Jin hadn't asked him if he had paintings in the national museum or anything, after all. Just because some people at this party were arrogant jerks didn't mean Taehyung had to absorb their snobbery toward him. He squared his shoulders and said, "It's my favorite hobby. I really like it."

"I'm jealous. I don't think I've painted anything since I was a kid. Why do you like painting night scenes?"

"I like how I have to really pay attention to light. How it hits, where it hits, the shift in color values. The way warm and cool colors interact. I really like light, and that's why I like night."

"I have barely any idea what that means, but I'm impressed. That makes you sound like a night-blooming flower yourself. When they bloom, it's under unique sources of light that most plants don't even get to experience. They get to appreciate moonlight." Jin was bent low, examining the blossoms of a ground-level bunch of flowers, but then he looked over his shoulder, and the smile he shot Taehyung was melted-butter warm and firework-spark hot at the same time.

Oh. Taehyung's head buzzed and his heart hummed. He couldn't tear his eyes away from Jin's smile, and he certainly couldn't get his throat to work.

Jin's smile turned gentler, and the spell didn't break—but it shifted. Jin's voice was gentler now, too. "Are you going to paint the night-bloomers, now that you've seen them?"

Taehyung swallowed, and he dug deep for his own voice. "I should. I should take some pictures for reference." He dug his phone out of his pocket, and for one thoughtless moment, he was about to direct Jin to pose for him, standing in front of the flowers. He tried not to feel the little bite of disappointment when Jin said, "Oh, sorry!" and dodged out of the way of Taehyung's camera. Taehyung didn't have the courage to ask Jin to stay in the picture, to tell him that no matter how pretty the flowers were, they weren't as pretty as he was.

He dutifully took pictures of the flowers as Jin stood aside and read out loud some of the explanatory plaques, both of them learning more about why some flowers bloomed at night. Something to do with moths as pollinators, basically—Taehyung was only half-listening, despite his interest in the subject, because he was trying to commit to memory that compliment Jin had given him, that he was like a night-blooming flower, blooming under the kinds of light that most plants didn't even get to experience.

He'd like to think that was true.

"So you've never been to this place before, right?" Jin asked.

"Never."

The look on Jin's face was thoughtful, and Taehyung had spent enough time with him (spent enough time staring at said face) to recognize the way a tentative joy was slipping out from behind his eyes. Jin was happy again. Jin had recovered from that run-in with those rude people.

And maybe Taehyung had a little to do with that? He hoped so.

"I've toured it a couple times," Jin said. "If you like paintings that play with light, there's something else out here you might like. When you're finished taking pictures, do you want to go see?"

"Absolutely," Taehyung said, pocketing his phone. "Lead the way."

~

At Jin's urging, Taehyung entered first. He laughed out loud and then slowly spun around the well-lit courtyard, taking in the full effect. "Okay," he said. "This is pretty cool."

"I suspect they commissioned these to be Instagram bait," Jin said, "but I thought you'd like it, since you're interested in paintings that pay attention to light."

Taehyung stepped closer to the nearest wall to examine it more closely. Convincingly realistic bricks were painted onto the wall, a light backdrop for what the real draw was: over-sized painted shadows. One wall contained silhouettes of shadow puppets created by unseen hands, ranging from the simple that Taehyung had known how to do since childhood—a bird with fluttering wings, a howling wolf—to the more complex, like a gliding swan, which he and Jin both immediately attempted to figure out how to create, and other creatures Taehyung was unsuccessful at parsing. The idea, he supposed, was for someone to pose for a picture in front of the silhouette as if there were a spotlight on them, as if they were casting those elaborate, gigantic shadows with their own small hands.

The shadow silhouettes on the other walls were all of full-body poses, ranging from superhero stances to historical warriors to a pair of silhouettes in which one person was down on one knee, holding a ring out to their counterpart. Taehyung stepped closer to that one. "I wonder if couples pose here during their proposal, or only after," Taehyung mused. "Because wouldn't that ruin the surprise?"

He turned to look at Jin, surprised to find that he'd moved farther back, away from this wall. "Not all proposals are surprises," Jin said. His voice was high as if he were speaking lightly, but there was a tightness to it again.

Maybe, Taehyung realized belatedly, he shouldn't have zoomed in on the most undeniably romantic silhouette. He didn't mean to imply anything. Even if he was feeling this connection between himself and Jin, that didn't mean that it existed for Jin, too. It didn't mean something could or should come from it.

Taehyung could pretend otherwise, but he wasn't the sort of person who that kind of enchanted romance happened to.

He stepped back from the painting, too, and smiling brightly, he took up the mantle of a joker. That was always a safe, easy role to play. "And I bet this place charges an arm and two legs for the privilege of proposing here. Not my idea of romance."

To his relief, Jin smiled. "There's a mural around the corner," he said slowly, "that's not as classically romantic, but it's more to my taste. Want to see it?"

"Very much," Taehyung said.

There was a bounce to Jin's step again, and as he led Taehyung out the other side of the courtyard, he kept glancing over his way—not hesitant, not anxious, just checking—and that gentle little reassurance had Taehyung believing again in the possibility of something between them.

He could see pops of color from other murals along all the other walls, more Instagram-worthy shots to be had. Jin immediately skipped over to one that made Taehyung laugh without hesitation.

The mural was of an open-jawed shark on the verge of attacking the viewer. There were even convenient splatters that looked like blood dotting the aquamarine blues surrounding it. It was silly and bright and Taehyung could tell why it tickled Jin's funny bone. People would pose in front of it, pretending to be moments away from being eaten, and while it wasn't romantic and it certainly didn't fit the vibes of the venue's stuffy insides, it was a fun discovery.

"Nice," Taehyung said. "I can't believe you said this isn't romantic. Isn't getting attacked by a shark together the pinnacle of romance?"

"If I had a shark costume, I'd dress up and take a picture of my shark self proposing to the shark mural." Jin gestured to the wall like the two of them were art critics exchanging intellectual comments at an art gallery. Taehyung took up a corresponding pose, tipping his head and stroking his chin as if he were a pretentious art critic, and Jin grinned at him. "Peak romance. Then I'd take wedding day photos, with me dressed up as a shark groom. Then I'd take a series of pictures with a baby stroller and a baby shark plushie inside it. I'd post them all on social media without explanation and ignore all the nosy questions I'd inevitably get from my relatives, my friends, and my therapist."

"Wow."

"Well, I don't actually own a shark costume. So it's not going to happen."

"You can rent one. You can definitely rent one."

"If you're going to tell me that you know that because one of the escape rooms you designed involved being chased by someone wearing a rented shark costume, I will…well, I will absolutely believe you, because that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Someone out there with initiative would absolutely bite that shark before it got the chance to bite them. That's another one of my best pieces of life advice, by the way. Bite the shark before it bites you."

Taehyung giggled, but when he turned his gaze back to Jin, that laughter caught in his throat, because Jin was looking at him.

Jin was looking at him.

Every doubt Taehyung had entertained this evening fled his mind.

Jin was looking at him.

Jin's eyes were so bright, and the softness of his gaze made Taehyung feel as shivery as a candle flame.

And then his lips—those lips—slipped into a smile, and Taehyung actually did shiver. He looked at those lips and told himself: I want to kiss this man. I am going to kiss this man. And this man, this man who looks like the lead in a romantic drama, this man who likes dad jokes and silly antics involving shark murals, this man wants to kiss me, too.

Taehyung took a step closer. Jin's eyes fluttered closed, and Taehyung's heart trembled at the sight.

And then, somewhere behind them, someone shrieked.

Jin flinched. Taehyung jumped.

"There it is! The proposal mural! Propose to me, propose to me!" The wail was gleeful and alcohol-soaked. The unmistakable sounds of a rowdy crowd of party-goers tumbled from the courtyard out to where Taehyung and Jin stood, their solitude shattering like glass.

Taehyung swayed forward just a little bit more, as if he could save the kiss from disappearing, but Jin shut his eyes tighter and wrinkled his nose, just as some drunk stranger rounded the corner, belting out "Baby Shark" as the sight of the shark mural.

For more than one reason, the moment was gone.

Jin opened his eyes again, his expression apologetic. "Want to get back to the party?"

"Not really," Taehyung said.

"Me neither."

They held each other's gaze. The almost-kiss felt like an invisible link between them, wrapping itself around Taehyung's heart.

But now that Taehyung knew for certain that both he and Jin wanted that kiss, that kiss could wait. He could be patient.

Jin shot Taehyung a smile so soft and subtle, like the moonshine of the night-blooming flowers, and a bubbly anticipative fizzle hit him like champagne.

Waiting for a kiss, Taehyung thought, could be even better than getting one.

~

They went back inside the building, though, away from the irreverent hipster art and back to the expensively sparkling splendor. Taehyung considered checking on Jimin, to make sure he was surviving his responsibilities for the night, but a glance around the main ballroom didn't reveal any emergencies (or Jimin himself, for that matter), so he happily settled at a table with Jin, where they talked and talked and talked.

They talked about painting, about visiting mural villages, about public art.

They talked about sharks, about beaches, about fishing—fishing was Jin's favorite hobby, Taehyung learned.

They talked about their parents, about their siblings, about their family pets. They showed each other pictures.

They talked about their shoes—Taehyung had completely forgotten about how his had been hurting him earlier. Jin had literally made his pain go away—or distracted him from it, which was pretty nice. (He didn't laugh about Taehyung's fears of his shoes deciding to leave him, which was kind of him, because even Taehyung understood that was a bizarre thought he shouldn't share so freely, but Jin proved to be understanding and sympathetic, just as Taehyung suspected.)

They talked again about escape. Jin asked him whether he ever tried designing a room where the intent was the opposite of escape.

"Like breaking in?" Taehyung asked. "Or like a haunted house where people are always jumping at you and scaring you, but you need to make it to the end and not use an emergency exit?"

"Or maybe like one of those video games where you're laying siege to a castle to rescue a princess or something."

"That could be fun."

"I guess I'm just thinking about what you said earlier," Jin said slowly, "that we don't think enough about what we're escaping to. We just want out. And I wonder if people would like a puzzle where the point was the opposite of escaping. Like, maybe learning how to stay. I don't know how you'd build a room out of that, though."

"I mean, I was terrible at the job in the first place, so I don't know if it could work, but it's interesting to think about," Taehyung said encouragingly. He could happily listen all night to Jin's ideas, whether they involve scientists or sharks or escape rooms. "A puzzle about wanting to stay, about figuring out how you can stay. That's nice, philosophically, since the human race as a whole could probably use some practice at committing and not running away."

So they talked about a lot of things. But they didn't talk about his job. They didn't talk about Jin's job, either. Taehyung still wanted to remain ignorant about what was probably a gigantic canyon of a gap between their professional statuses. It wasn't that he thought Jin would make him feel inadequate and young and inexperienced—having spent the previous hours with the man and his obvious sincerity and generosity, Taehyung was convinced that Jin would never do that, at least not on purpose—but Taehyung didn't want to know. He didn't want to break this spell, where someone like him could spend the length of an absurdly fancy party feeling as if he was part of the sparkle and the magic, not some outsider wallflower. (He was, instead, a night-blooming flower. Jin said so.)

And he still wanted to be Jin's escape, too. He wanted to let Jin be whoever he wanted to be, not who he was supposed to be.

He hadn't realized he was exhausted. He knew he'd yawned once or twice, and Jin made fun of him for that, self-deprecatingly calling himself boring, but Taehyung didn't realize he was in danger of falling asleep until he realized he was laying his head down on his arms on the table.

"Is your friend Jimin your ride home?" Jin asked.

Taehyung couldn't remember what they'd been talking about a moment before that. He blearily looked up as Jin laughed. The party was starting to thin out. It was getting late.

His first thought was disappointment that he'd dozed off, wasting time he could have otherwise spent talking with Jin.

"I can go find him for you," Jin said. "Or we can message him, to let him know where you are, and you're falling asleep."

"Oh," Taehyung said. He had promised Jimin he'd help him drive some stuff back to the office after the party finished. He pulled out his phone before remembering that Jimin, the super assistant that he was, had turned off his personal phone and was only using a work phone during this event. And Taehyung didn't have that number. "I forgot, he won't be answering his personal phone. I'll get up and look for him. I probably shouldn't be sleeping here, anyway. That's rude."

"No, stay. No one's looked over here at all, and you're the least rude person here, I promise. Tell me what he looks like, and I'll go hunt him down." Jin stood up, looking like a man on a mission, and even as tired as he was, Taehyung's heart did a cartwheel out of pure affection. "I'm very good at finding good people. I found you, didn't I?"

He flashed a smile, another one of his lovely smiles, at Taehyung, and he winked.

If Taehyung had known that that was the last time he'd see Jin's smile that night, he'd have paid better attention. He'd have basked in that glow, in that effortless and undemanding radiance.

In that moment, though, only one thought broke through his exhaustion: there was no way that this night was real. He could believe Jin was real, sure, but believing that he was actually into Taehyung this way?

This was a dream, and Taehyung really didn't want to wake up.

Ironic, considering he promptly fell asleep again after Jin bounced off, armed with a description of Jimin and leaving behind a promise that he'd come back afterward.

~

"Taehyungieeee." Someone poked at his arm, and Taehyung jerked upward.

Right. He'd fallen asleep at the party. And he was awake again.

Jimin was sitting in the chair beside him, looking rumpled and exhausted. The ballroom around them was nearly empty. The people who remained were clearly the venue's staff, starting to clean up.

"Where's Jin?" Taehyung asked.

"Jimin," Jimin said. He pouted dramatically. "I'm Jimin. Did you forget my name?"

"No, I'm talking about someone else," Taehyung said. "Though I'm glad to see you. How did your night go?"

"It went." Jimin's voice was tired, but Taehyung could hear the pride and satisfaction in it. "It was successful. That's all I care about. So who's Jin? Did you actually pick someone up at a work party?"

Taehyung's head was still a little bleary. "Wait. You didn't meet him? He didn't find you? He was supposed to go find you, and I wasn't supposed to fall asleep again."

"It appears neither of those two things happened. I didn't run into anyone named Jin."

Taehyung stumbled up out of his chair. "Oh! He went looking for you, to find you, for me. He must still be looking for you."

Jimin looked at him curiously, tiredly. "Whoever he was, he's probably left. Everyone's left, except the staff and us."

"No," Taehyung said, suddenly feeling awake. Very, very awake, and just a little bit panicked. Jin said he'd be back. Jin wouldn't have left without saying goodbye, would he? He was so nice. He was so polite. And he'd liked Taehyung. He did, Taehyung was sure of it. He wouldn't have just disappeared on him. "He said he'd be back."

"Maybe he left you a message?" Jimin asked.

Taehyung grabbed his phone excitedly before realizing that he'd never given Jin his number. His contact details.

Or his name.

He'd never even given Jin his name.

Jin had spent the whole evening calling him "Alone," and Taehyung had been delighted by their inside joke, and now the night was over, and Jin didn't even know his name.

Taehyung let his phone drop from his hand back on to the table.

"What did you say his name was?" Jimin asked. "We can track him down, but if he's ghosted you, my first impression of him isn't a good one, I'm sorry to say."

"Jin," Taehyung said. "He was…he was amazing. He made me feel amazing. He wouldn't have ghosted me."

And then, even though he knew Jimin probably had better things to do, like going home and sleeping, Taehyung told him about his night. About meeting Jin, about how they'd made each other laugh, how they'd talked and talked and talked, how they visited the gardens and the murals.

Jimin listened. His eyes widened when Taehyung summed up the details of their almost kiss, and then he said, "Oh." He whistled softly. "Okay, then. We'll find him for you, even if I have to go through all our company's contacts. If he was at this party, he's affiliated with the firm somehow. We'll figure out who he was, and I'll kick him for abandoning you like that."

"He didn't abandon me," Taehyung said. Though doubt was starting to creep around the edges of his certainty: hadn't he thought the whole night had been a dream anyway? Hadn't he thought Jin was obviously too far above him? He swallowed and shook his head. "We really got to know each other. He wouldn't have abandoned me."

"Okay," Jimin said, very kindly though clearly still committed to violence. "We'll find him."

~

They didn't find him. Not that night, not the next day—even though Jimin had come over to Taehyung's apartment and they scrolled through all the social media evidence of the party, fruitlessly—and not the next week, either.

Taehyung ran through the events of that night, over and over, in his head and with Jimin. He couldn't square his idea of Jin—so obviously sincere in his kindness—with the idea of Jin ghosting him so carelessly.

Even if he didn't want to trade contact details, even if he didn't want to know what Taehyung's real name was, there was no reason for him not to say goodbye.

Taehyung had theories, because of course he did. Maybe Jin got cornered by more rich arrogant people, and he had to escape, and the only way to escape was to leave the party. Maybe some of those rich arrogant people made him leave.

Maybe he got abducted by aliens.

The problem with his theories was that Taehyung couldn't even play scientist, couldn't generate data to test any of those hypotheses.

All he had were theories and possibilities, and no evidence except for his own memories.

~

Two weeks into his job at the architecture firm, Taehyung was settling in. That was the term for it: settling in.

He liked that he was actually putting his architecture degree to work. He liked that he was working in health-care architecture, specifically, a field he hadn't even considered when he was a student but one that he'd been drawn to as soon as he'd heard about this job opportunity. Doing his job right meant helping out people during some of the most vulnerable times in their lives, meant helping out people doing the work to save lives. That all mattered to Taehyung immensely. (It was certainly better for his soul than designing escape rooms.)

And he liked the people he worked with. It turned out that the fancy party had been completely irrelevant to the day-to-day life at his job. That was their annual gala for their contacts in the industry and the rich philanthropists who made big donations to various medical institutions and efforts and research projects. Jimin told Taehyung that this year's party was even bigger and more lavish than it usually was, because they'd gotten a great deal when they switched to that specific venue at almost last-minute. (There'd been a wedding cancellation for some society upper-crusts, Jimin's boss had heard about it through the rich-people grapevine and told Jimin to negotiate a late-hour discount for oh so generously filling that spot on the schedule. It'd worked out well, it seemed.)

The biggest disappointment in his life wasn't professional. It was personal.

It was the fact that two weeks after that night, Taehyung still hadn't gotten any closer to finding Jin.

Jimin knew the company up and down, and he knew right away that Jin didn't work at their firm. It was more likely that he was connected to someone else within the industry—one of the engineering firms they worked with, or one of the medical organizations—or, Taehyung admitted, maybe just one of those fancy rich people invited along to be impressed enough to donate to various medical projects. (Jimin said half of his duties during the party involved ensuring the comfort and happiness of the people who donated enough to fund entire hospital wings. It was nice of those people to spend their money that way, but Taehyung was still resentful that their wealth was that extravagant in the first place.)

Jimin dragged Taehyung's coworker Yoongi into joining their daily brainstorming sessions, spending their lunch hour in an empty conference room. Taehyung arrived at their first meeting apprehensive, because despite the fact he and Yoongi technically already bonded over both being from Daegu, Yoongi was competent and clever and the sort of person who would not have fallen asleep at a party and misplaced the gorgeous man he'd sort of kind of maybe fallen for over the course of the evening. Taehyung knew instinctively that Yoongi would not have done that. (Jimin was not that sort of person, either—he'd have locked down that gorgeous man right away, no delay—but Jimin did have a wildly romantic streak that was becoming increasingly clear to Taehyung. They'd marathoned a whole bevy of romantic movies over this past weekend, cementing their friendship and exposing Jimin's unsubtle belief that Taehyung's experience at the party was the start of his own romantic drama series.)

But not only did Yoongi bring home-cooked food to share with them, he also brought a miniature white board and markers and promptly designated himself project manager, because he'd thought of angles that neither Taehyung nor Jimin had considered. It was still embarrassing that someone he barely knew was over-thinking Taehyung's romantic quest to this extent, but Yoongi was surprisingly non-judgmental.

"It's possible he came as someone's plus-one," Yoongi said.

Jimin gasped theatrically. "No! And he was cheating on them with Taehyung?"

Taehyung's stomach dropped.

"No, people bring platonic plus-ones all the time. A friend to keep them company. Or a friend who tagged along because of the open bar. Happens all the time."

Jimin grabbed the white board to start taking notes of his own. "Okay. I'll ask around about plus-ones."

"Discreetly," Taehyung said, not wanting to have strangers gawking at his situation.

"Discreetly," Jimin agreed.

"Have you gone through photographs of the night?" Yoongi asked, grabbing the white board back as he went down his list. "You said you don't have a picture of him, but other people might have taken pictures with the two of you in the background. And if we know what he looks like, that'll help a lot."

"Just what other people posted publicly," Taehyung said. "I didn't see him at all. I didn't even see any pictures with me in the background." He already knew he might as well have been invisible, but he didn't know how Jin could have dodged all the cameras. (Jin was real, Taehyung was sure of it. He was neither a ghost nor a vampire. There was probably a reasonable explanation why no one caught him on camera, but Taehyung couldn't think of it, aside from luckiness.)

"Oh!" Jimin pulled the white board back from Yoongi while Yoongi was still writing on it. For his trouble, he got a streak of dry erase marker lined down his arm, but he simply busied himself adding something else to the list. "I know exactly who we need to consult, because they definitely took pictures that night, and I know they definitely took a lot of them, and they probably didn't post all of them."

"Who?" Taehyung asked.

"Our engineer besties." Jimin drew something on the white board that looked like a happy face, and then he primly passed it back to Yoongi, who was still waiting with an uncapped marker. "Hoseok-hyung and Jungkookie. They're with one of the engineering firms we work with. Let's invite them for lunch and a consult."

Yoongi groaned. "I'm not bringing lunch for everyone."

"That's fine. I'll order in. I think they're supposed to be here this week for the children's hospital project. We'll coordinate."

"I'm not sure I want more strangers to know about this," Taehyung said hesitantly. "Especially if I'll be working with them professionally in the future."

Jimin immediately looked contrite. "Oh, sorry. I didn't think about that. How about we introduce you to them, and if you're comfortable, you can decide if you want to share this project with them? But no pressure. I'd have made sure to introduce you to them anyway, because they're great, but you're right, that's a lot to share with strangers."

"Next question," Yoongi said, clearly moving on. "Have we considered this person might have been a corporate spy, and infiltrating our firm's party was the first phase of a complicated industrial espionage plot?"

Taehyung gulped down his bite of food. "Excuse me?"

Jimin jumped up. "Oh! And you think this guy abandoned his plan to spy on us because he met Taehyung and fell in love?"

That was a very overwhelming thought. Taehyung sat back in his chair, too stunned to protest. (Though he knew he ought to protest. Jin couldn't possibly have been a spy.)

"No, I don't think that's the case. I mean, well, sorry. I'm sure any spy would be lucky enough to fall in love with you and abandon his mission," Yoongi added, giving Taehyung a conciliatory smile. "I just don't think this guy was spying on us, if he was a spy. Spies know better than to approach their target so directly. His ultimate target might have been someone only tangentially connected to the party. Maybe he made a contact out of someone on the catering crew, who he'll use to lift an important document at their next catering job."

That was more ulterior motivation than Taehyung ever inscribed on anyone, spy or not, and it was tiring to think about. "That's…a lot," he said cautiously, glancing at Jimin to confirm that this was, in fact, a bizarre theory. Jimin looked as if he was mentally scriptwriting the first episode of the drama that he'd base this situation on, so he was no help. That left Taehyung on his own. "Do…do you know a lot about spies?"

"Oh, I'm not a spy myself," Yoongi said quickly. "In case you're wondering."

Taehyung began wondering exactly that.

"I've just read a lot about spy-craft, and I'm throwing out the possibility that your man was a spy." Yoongi set aside the white board with a huff. "You two asked me here to think creatively to find out who he was. I'm just doing what you guys wanted."

"No, it's a good idea," Jimin said encouragingly, snapping out of his scriptwriting reverie. He turned to Taehyung. "Maybe he was a spy? Who genuinely fell for you despite his assignment? So maybe not a very good spy?"

"I'd prefer if he weren't a spy at all," Taehyung said. "And I think it's an unlikely possibility. But it's still an interesting idea." In the event Yoongi was a spy trying to accuse someone else of being a spy in order to deflect attention off himself, Taehyung wanted to stay on his good side, so he smiled at him. "You're a very creative thinker. The next time I need to know something about spies, I'll be sure to ask you."

"Hmm. Thank you." Yoongi seemed mollified by the compliment. "We can set aside that theory for now."

"We'll focus on photographs and asking about plus-ones," Jimin said. "I'll invite the engineers for lunch whenever they're here next, and ask them to bring their pictures of the night. And don't worry, I won't tell them anything about what we're doing. They're going to want to show off their photos anyway. You can wait to see if you're comfortable with them knowing your deep dark romantic secrets."

"Thank you," Taehyung said, though he doubted he'd be willing to initiate any further strangers into this matter.

~

"And then, when I woke up, the only person there was Jimin. I never saw Jin again."

Hoseok clutched a hand to his chest. Jungkook made a sound of grievous disappointment. Both of them looked at Taehyung with wide, sad, puppy dog eyes, and Taehyung felt that he never made a better decision in his life than to tell them his life story. Or his life-since-he-arrived-in-Incheon story.

"We'll find him," Hoseok said, opening up a laptop—apparently a personal one, not a work one, based on the bright array of stickers adorning its case. "Let's get to work!"

The five of them were in a conference room for their lunch break. The engineers were there for the day, meeting with a department that wasn't Taehyung's and Yoongi's. Taehyung learned that his firm frequently worked with the engineering firm that Hoseok and Jungkook worked for, and when Jimin referred to them as their engineer besties, he wasn't kidding. Both Jimin and Yoongi perked up when they arrived for lunch, and they'd all enfolded Taehyung into their circle of friendship without hesitation. Within minutes, Taehyung felt comfortable enough to tell them about how he'd spent the night of the party.

Hoseok pulled up a folder of photos he'd taken during the party. Most of them appeared to be of him and Jungkook. "Oh, you two look very nice dressed up," Taehyung said.

"Thank you," Hoseok said brightly, pushing the laptop closer to Taehyung. "Now, I don't think we got complete coverage of the ballroom in any of our photos, but you can scroll through them, and if you have any distinct memories of places the two of you were, or if you see him in the background of any these photos, speak up."

Taehyung focused as he viewed photograph after photograph. It was kind of fun, seeing the mix of posed and candid shots taken by Hoseok and Jungkook. It was fun seeing Yoongi and Jimin pop up in some of the pictures: Yoongi looking relaxed but reluctant to be photographed, a blurred Jimin darting in the background with a walkie-talkie in hand, looking more like he were actually the spy and not just the harried administrative-assistant-cum-event-planner he actually was. There was even a photograph of Yoongi looking at Jimin in a way that had Taehyung wondering just what was going on between the two of them.

Taehyung saw no sign of himself, though, nor did he find a single trace of Jin.

No trace of those dark eyes and magnificent brows.

No trace of those exquisite shoulders.

No trace of that smile, the one that melted all of Taehyung's anxiety and felt like coming home.

Taehyung wished he'd actually been brave enough to ask Jin to pose for a picture, back when they were in the night-blooming garden. Then he'd at least have evidence that he existed. (But what good would that do? Taehyung knew he existed. He knew Jin existed, and he knew Jin had left the party without saying goodbye, even though he said he'd come back. It was partially Taehyung's fault for falling asleep, but it was also…if he thought about it too hard, he didn't understand how Jin could do that, after they'd connected the way they did, and so he didn't want to think too hard about it.)

"Hey." Jungkook tapped Taehyung's arm. "I have a question."

Grateful for the distraction from the thing he didn't want to think about, Taehyung turned to him eagerly. "Yes?"

"Are you absolutely 100% certain that his name was Jin?"

"Yes," Taehyung said. But then his heart clenched, because there was a tiny sliver of doubt there now. "I mean, that's what he told me his name was."

"And it's not possible that you might have misheard?"

"I…I don't think so." But he could hear the little twinge of uncertainty in his voice. He hated the feeling that everything he thought he knew about that night was being undermined.

He hated that Jin had disappeared without a trace, and he hated how much he still thought about him, how much he still thought about the advice Jin gave him, how much he still thought about the way he made Taehyung feel like he was special.

But not special enough to even say goodbye to.

"Why are you asking?" Jimin asked.

"It's just a theory," Jungkook said. "But what if you misheard his name, and his name wasn't actually Jin? What if his name was…Joon?"

There was complete silence in the room for a moment, and Taehyung was about to say something kind about the names being similar but he knew the difference between them and was certain that Jin's name wasn't actually Joon, but then Hoseok gasped and slapped the table. "It was Joon!"

Jimin gasped and slapped his hands down on the table as well. "It was Joon!"

Yoongi neither gasped nor slapped the table. "I don't think it was Joon."

"Who's Joon?" Taehyung asked, bewildered.

"Joon," Jungkook said, "is exactly the sort of person who enjoys corny jokes and marine wildlife."

"Joon," Hoseok said, "is exactly the sort of person who would take you to see flowers and paintings."

"Joon," Jimin said, "is exactly the sort of person you'd call tall and handsome, and he finds socializing with boring people extremely tedious and would happily avoid it by sticking to someone actually interesting, like you. And did I mention that he's tall and handsome?"

"Oh," Yoongi added, a little wonder in his voice. "And Joon is exactly the sort of person who would make a life-changing connection with a complete stranger, where they'd both fall for each other dramatically, and then in a series of unexpected mishaps, he'd wander off and never manage to return." He gasped and slapped the table. "It was Joon!"

"None of this answers my question," Taehyung said. But everyone's growing excitement was contagious, and he found himself wondering—maybe it was possible that he'd mistaken Jin's name. "But…do you have a picture of him? I can tell you if he's who I met."

"Yep! Not from the night of the party, actually, because I barely saw him," Hoseok said, pulling the laptop back toward himself. "Which makes sense, if he was hanging out with you. But I do have some recent ones, and I'll—"

"No, wait!" Jimin shut the lid of the laptop decisively, just barely missing snapping Hoseok's fingers off. Hoseok glared at him, but Jimin was clearly too excited to care. "Let me call him! We'll video chat, so Taehyung can see him live, and it'll be the most romantic moment of my entire life."

"You mean the most romantic moment of Taehyung's life," Yoongi said.

"Yeah, that too," Jimin said. (But now that he knew what to look for, Taehyung noticed that, underneath the table, Jimin ran his hand down Yoongi's thigh. He'd need to tease Jimin about this later.)

While Jimin messaged Joon to see if he was available to video chat, Jungkook helpfully filled in Taehyung. Joon, apparently, was short for Kim Namjoon, who was an architecture librarian affiliated with the university's architecture school, and he did freelance work with their firm sometimes, and he was a long-time friend of them all. "He's so smart," Jungkook said fervently, "and he's so handsome, and honestly, it's possible that he might have just accidentally wandered off after falling in love with you, and then he was too embarrassed to go back once he remembered, because that's such a ridiculous thing to do and he gets that way, but if he sees you again, he'll probably apologize as long as you don't make fun of him for it. Please don't make fun of him for it."

"I won't," Taehyung promised, sitting up straight in his chair and starting to feel strangely dizzy. What was this feeling inside him? Hope? Actual hope? Not only did everyone think Joon fit the description, they also thought it was plausible that he had a non-cruel reason for ditching Taehyung. His heart was starting to beat just a little faster.

"And he's really handsome. I bet it's him." Jungkook's voice turned a little wistful. "He's easy to fall in love with."

"Okay!" Jimin nearly pushed Jungkook aside in his haste to sit beside Taehyung. He busied himself with finding a good angle as he waited for his call to connect.

Taehyung held his breath.

"Hello? Jimin-ah?"

Oh. Nope. As soon as he heard the man's voice, Taehyung's heart dropped.

The voice was deep and smooth, strong and well-rooted, but it wasn't Jin's voice, that melodic roll and bright rumble.

It wasn't Jin. Taehyung didn't have to see Joon's face to know that.

Sapped with disappointment, Taehyung slumped back down in his seat.

"Hi, Joonie-hyung. I have a surprise for you! He's—" Jimin looked over at Taehyung, and his eyes went wide before turning wet and sad. Taehyung smiled sadly back at him, and Jimin reached over and squeezed his knee, then continued his conversation with Joon. "We're all having lunch together and we were talking about you, and I wanted to introduce our new friend to you."

"Oh! That's nice. Hi, whoever's there!"

"I'm here!" Jungkook said, leaning over in range of the camera. "Hyung, are you free this weekend?"

Jimin passed the phone to Jungkook, and the rest of them happily chattered to him, showing off their food and talking about weekend plans. With his hands free, Jimin leaned over to drape himself around Taehyung in a hug. "Not him, huh?" he asked quietly.

"Nope. Soon as I heard his voice, I knew."

"I'm sorry we got your hopes up. I really thought it was him."

"I'm happy to make a new friend, at least," Taehyung said, which was true. "You've all made him sound fun."

The phone got passed back to Jimin, and Jimin introduced Joon to Taehyung. Joon was dimpled and just as handsome as the others claimed him to be, and he was enthusiastic about getting to meet Taehyung and hang out with him, too, and tell him about the school of architecture's library resources.

But he wasn't Jin.

To be fair, most people in the world were not Jin, and Taehyung knew he shouldn't hold that against them, but he let himself feel that disappointment, just a little.

Taehyung knew life was unfair. He knew the world was unfair. But it still hurt, that in a city of three million people, he had met someone who he had clicked so perfectly with, and then that person simply disappeared without a trace.

He wasn't asking for fairness. He wasn't even asking for a happy ending to this ridiculous potential romance.

He just wanted a chance at it.

~

It wasn't that Taehyung had insomnia.

It was just that he had a lot of thoughts at two a.m., and when he was alone and staring at his ceiling in the dark, he filled the endless march of time with memories.

Jin, kneeling in front of those night-blooming flowers, saying Taehyung was just like them. The way he turned and smiled at him, and how the softest of fireworks bloomed inside of Taehyung.

Jin, giggling in front of the shark mural as he planned out a ridiculous prank.

Jin, his hand on Taehyung's shoulder as he said he'd find Jimin for him and come back.

Jin, and the way his eyes lit up and his voice bubbled with amusement when he called Taehyung "Alone."

And the way that inside joke felt now…it shouldn't have been funny anymore, not when "Alone" was literally the only name Jin knew Taehyung by, not when Taehyung felt even lonelier now than he did that night, now that he'd lost Jin and had no chance to find him again. But it still made Taehyung smile to think of it, because that had been their inside joke, and it had clued him into Jin's sense of humor, and it had been Taehyung's first flash of insight that Jin wasn't as intimidating as he appeared to be.

He liked remembering. He didn't like how lonely he felt afterward.

One night, Taehyung forgot to close the curtains on his window before getting into bed, and he was too lazy to get out from under his blanket to fix it. The moonlight was bright, but it filtered into his room so gently, and Taehyung pretended he was a night-blooming flower, blooming underneath a source of light that most other plants never even experienced. There were was something soft and bittersweet about that, wasn't there?

He was just about to fall asleep when a thought jolted through him. Eyes wide open, he stared at the ceiling. He really stared at it, at the emptiness of it stretching before him, and suddenly, all that sweet gentle pain of missing Jin—that sweet gentle pain of missing out on Jin, on losing him before he ever found him—was overshadowed by a deeper, wilder wave.

An unexpected yearning: he wanted to paint.

After all these weeks of being depressed and lonely, this new swell of emotion hit him hard. He untwisted himself from his blanket and hurried for his art supplies. The tiny size of his apartment demanded that he keep everything contained when not in use, and as someone more inclined to find a sense of peace in messiness than in order, Taehyung had to really work at keeping things in their correct places. His paint and paintbrushes were stored in a container inside a drawer, and his canvases were stored in the back of his closet, and—

An ordinary canvas wasn't big enough. Not for what he was feeling. Not for how he was feeling. Taehyung's eyes snapped back up to his ceiling, even though he knew that was a ridiculous idea. (He liked his landlady. She tended to the ferociously beautiful gardens around the building, and Taehyung appreciated the floral landscape he got to live in. He didn't want to get on her bad side by recreating the Sistine Chapel on his bedroom ceiling.)

But maybe…

Taehyung grabbed his phone and keys, threw on his coat and shoes, and fled his apartment. He let his burgeoning, slowly growing idea guide him around the outside of his building, to the back gardens his landlady cultivated.

It felt a little like escaping: escaping his empty bed, escaping his silent room, escaping the parade of memories that he lovingly tortured himself with.

The place he was escaping to was less of a physical place—although as soon as he saw the empty stretch of wall behind his apartment building, a blank canvas stretching out behind the flowers (non-night-blooming) his landlady had planted there, he knew this was the perfect location for his plans.

But this wasn't his actual escape.

His actual escape was the feelings inside of him. He wanted to paint. He wanted to paint about the night he and Jin had shared. He wanted to paint night-blooming flowers and the way the moonlight had kept Taehyung's heart aglow. He could feel the colors and the light and the shapes inside of him, and the feelings behind each of those things were so big. Big enough to demand a canvas bigger than Taehyung himself.

Big enough to demand a whole wall.

Giddiness sparkled inside of him. This wasn't just an awake-at-two-in-the-morning good idea. Taehyung knew when he woke up in a few hours to go to work—that was, if he could actually fall asleep after this, if he didn't spend the rest of the night sketching and planning and dreaming—he'd still think this was a good idea.

He was going to put that night back into the world, so that even if he never found Jin, at least the memory of that night would be something real. It'd be out in the world, not just in Taehyung's head and heart.

He was going to make art out of that night.

~

It was funny, how so many pieces of his life fell into place once he started the wall mural.

For one, he had a morning routine. He no longer had to drag his reluctant self out of bed every morning; instead, he woke up excitedly as soon as the first rays of dawn slipped past his curtains. In the hours before he had to be at work, he skipped down the stairs and to the back of his apartment building, where he worked on his art as the sun rose.

His landlady often came out to watch him paint. She'd been surprisingly enthusiastic when he approached her with the idea; she was a fan of mural villages, it turned out. He could see the ambition firing up inside her when he showed her examples of his work and she saw that he could, in fact, paint something beautiful. He promised he wouldn't trample on her garden, and she promised if he became a famous painter and she could charge people to come see his early work, she'd give him a cut of the profits.

Taehyung didn't admit to her that he'd never actually painted something as big as a wall mural before, but he happened to think he adapted marvelously to the expansive scope available to him. He always had a good sense of proportion and balance, of knowing how to fit into a space and knowing how to shapeshift, whether in his artistic endeavors or the rest of his life. He could apply it to this, the project that was making him happiest.

They didn't talk much while Taehyung worked, but Taehyung would play jazz music on his phone as his landlady either caught up on her gardening or sat in a lawn chair as she drank her coffee. After finding out he didn't drink coffee, she started bringing him fruit smoothies, and she ordered him to drink them dutifully or else she'd track down his mother and tell her that her son wasn't eating breakfast.

(Jimin was supportive of Taehyung's mural, although he was less supportive of the concept of hours prior to eight a.m. existing, and so he didn't come watch Taehyung paint, but he would peek at Taehyung's progress when they left for work together.)

The second piece of his life that fell into place was that Taehyung was now less alone.

There was his landlady, of course, who designated herself as something in between art patron and informer to his mother. (If anyone in Taehyung's life was a spy, it was probably her.)

There was Jimin. Another lovely part of Taehyung's new morning routine was getting to talk to Jimin as they commuted to work. Sometimes, they did discuss their lack of progress in tracking down Jin, but it didn't make Taehyung as sad as it used to, and now that Jimin was making progress with his relationship with Yoongi, he was a little less fascinated by Taehyung's thwarted love life. They talked about that, and they talked about everything else they had in common: their co-workers and friends, their favorite television shows, their favorite and least favorite songs, their misadventures in cooking.

There were his new friends. Jimin and Yoongi at work, engineer besties Jungkook and Hoseok, and Namjoon who turned out to be nothing like how Taehyung assumed a librarian would be. (Except for possibly the absent-mindedness. It took only one meeting for Taehyung to realize he'd met a kindred soul, and that yes, Joon was also someone who could accidentally misplace a potential soulmate, and given how smart and tall and handsome he was, he probably did so on a regular basis. People were probably pining for him all over the city, and Joon had no idea. Certainly, he had no idea that Jungkook, rarely more than a few yards away from him when they were all hanging out, was pining over him.)

His social life started to feel more like what Taehyung had always kind of hoped his adult life would be like. Museum trips with friends, drinking in as much art as his eyes and heart could handle. Laughter and actual drinks over barbecue late into the night. He helped Hoseok with his Instagram photo shoots. He and Jungkook threw things at Yoongi and Jimin when their public displays of affection got too much. He led the rowdy cheering section at Jimin's dance troupe shows. He led an even rowdier cheering section at Namjoon's poetry reading. (That subsequently got him and Jimin kicked out by the stuffy, uptight poets leading said poetry reading, which he was sorry about, but the way Namjoon enjoyed retelling that story for weeks afterward made Taehyung feel more than ever like he belonged.)

Sometimes, his friends brought up Jin. They knew he was painting a mural based on that night, but to his relief, no one thought it was weird. (Or if they did, they didn't mention it to him.)

"When the time is right, he'll come back into your life," Jimin said, which sounded like a sweet sentiment, but then he added, "That's why I'm not setting you up with anyone else in the meantime. That way, you'll be single when you reject him for ghosting you, and it'll hurt him even more."

"I don't want to hurt him," Taehyung said. "I still think there was a good reason why he left and didn't say goodbye. When you all thought it was Joon, you were all convinced there was a reasonable explanation."

"Well, not reasonable, maybe, but not malicious," Yoongi said. "And I still think Jin could be a spy. So if you do see him again, you should be careful."

"Have we considered he was an actual ghost?" Jungkook asked. "You've heard stories about ghosts who become corporeal only on the anniversary of their deaths, right?"

Hoseok shuddered. "Don't say that."

"And what kind of ghost would crash a boring architecture firm's company party on their one day of corporeality?" Jimin made a face. "What a waste."

"Hmmm." Namjoon turned to Taehyung. "What if he was a non-spy, non-ghost, normal human party crasher? Have you considered that?"

"He didn't seem like the sort of person who'd crash a party for any reason," Taehyung said. "He could clearly afford his own alcohol. And there were people there who recognized him, so even if he didn't belong there, he didn't not belong there, either."

"There are other reasons for crashing a party," Namjoon said.

"For example, being a spy," Yoongi muttered.

Jimin rolled his eyes. "Give up the spy theory, hyung. All it does is make you sound like you're covering up for the fact you're a spy, too, and then I start thinking you're only dating me as part of your cover."

"Wow. That's exactly what someone who's trying to hide his own spy-ness would say. I knew there had to be some ulterior motive to you dating me."

As Jimin and Yoongi happily threw around their accusations of only dating each other as part of a secret spy mission, Taehyung mulled over the fact that all the theories people had about Jin didn't distress him the way they used to. He was getting used to the idea that he'd never actually figure out what Jin's deal was. The sadness and disappointment were still there inside him, but now that he'd spent weeks painting those feelings into his wall mural, that sadness and disappointment were slightly less heavy.

He was still a little drunk and reflective, though, when he and Jimin returned to their apartment building that night. They took a detour around the back, just to look at the mural in the moonlight.

"Is it finished yet?" Jimin asked. He tilted his head far back, even though the painting wasn't that high—Taehyung only needed a short ladder for his work—but Taehyung liked that Jimin acted as if the painting were immense.

"No, not yet."

"What's left to do? It looks really beautiful, especially the flowers. And the moon." Jimin yanked his gaze back to the actual, real life moon, then back again to the painting. He was clearly more drunk than Taehyung. "You painted a really nice moon, especially. I want to smash my face into it and make out with it."

"Thank you. That's very kind of you." Taehyung did, indeed, feel that compliment in his soul. "There's not much left to do, but I know it's not finished yet."

"I might be moving out," Jimin said abruptly.

Something sharp poked through Taehyung's slight tipsiness. "Don't! I like having you as my neighbor!" Okay, maybe he'd developed some abandonment issues post-Jin—who could blame him, really? "You're my first connection in Incheon. I'll miss you if you don't live next door to me forever."

"I'll miss you, too," Jimin said, pouting. "But my lease will be up soon, and Yoongi's roommate is moving out, and…I might be moving in with him."

Oh. Taehyung hadn't realized that Jimin's and Yoongi's relationship had progressed that far. He couldn't begrudge Jimin—ridiculously romantic Jimin—that.

"Anyway, I mostly have you to thank for our relationship, you know. We've been friends forever and I've had a crush on him for years, but ever since we took up your project of finding Jin, we've gotten to hang out everyday at lunch and we've gotten closer, and, well, you know." Jimin shrugged. "So you and your mysterious spy-ghost-abandoner Jin are to thank for it, really."

Taehyung thought about Jimin and Yoongi arguing about being a spy, about how much time they spent verbally tussling, and he wasn't really sure if he wanted to take responsibility for them moving in together. But Jimin and Yoongi clearly liked the relationship they were in, even if it was nothing like the relationship Taehyung wanted for himself, and as Taehyung's grandmother often told him, the crayfish will always side with the crab. Like will find like, eventually. That was the way of the universe.

Lucky for the crayfish and the crab who actually managed to find each other. Lucky for the crayfish and the crab who didn't get swept away by the sea. (Or get eaten by sharks. Or who maybe ghosted each other.)

He looked at his mural—it was almost complete, but like he told Jimin, it wasn't finished yet. Something wasn't right yet. He didn't know what, nor did he know how to make it right, but he trusted that it would come to him eventually.

~

Pause. Rewind.

~

"The thing about escapes," Alone had said, "is that when you're in the middle of them, they're all about what you're trying to escape from. Every bit of your escape is dictated by what you're trying to escape from, sometimes to the point you can't even keep in mind what you're trying to escape to."

A full month had passed since that night, but Seokjin could repeat those words to himself by heart. He could remember perfectly—maybe too perfectly—so much of that night.

But those were the words that had stopped him in his tracks. Those were the words delivered by someone who had no idea who he was and how much he needed to hear them. Those were the words that Seokjin repeated to himself now.

"I now know what I'm escaping to," he declared out loud, and then he clicked the submit button for his application.

His phone pinged a minute later, and Seokjin grabbed it and even though he knew the email was simply an automated confirmation, he still read it aloud with relief and delight. "The Department of Marine Science thanks you for your application for our Master's program in Marine Chemistry. We will review your material and notify you when…"

It was happening. It was really happening.

Four months ago, he told his parents he wanted to go back to school. Years ago, they'd been supportive when he decided as an undergraduate to get a dual degree in business, as they wished, and in chemistry, as he wished. He'd sold it to them as a smart way for him to help take care of the family company: knowing both the business part and the science part! A win for everyone, even if he spent those years in a state of permanent exhaustion! They were supportive of this decision, too, because they knew learning new things made him happy, and he always put his knowledge to good use, and he'd assured them he could handle working full-time as well as pursuing his advanced degree.

Then, three months ago, he and Sujin canceled their wedding. His parents were far more confused by that decision.

And then, one month ago, he told his parents he was quitting his job with the family company, and they were even more confused by that.

Seokjin had only been able to make that decision because of that night he crashed a party being held at what would've been his wedding venue on what would've been his wedding night. All because he crashed that party and fell for a stranger who was as smart as he was gorgeous and funny.

Seokjin hadn't intended to do any of that. He'd only meant to wander the venue, walk through its gardens and through the stories of its mural walls, and in doing so, he would shed some ghosts while he thought over the choices he'd made and the choices he still needed to make. He didn't even realize he was crashing a party until he was already in the middle of doing so. He probably should have expected that the venue had been immediately snapped up by someone else after Seokjin's and Sujin's cancellation—according to the signs outside the ballroom, it was some kind of health care or medical company. No one stopped him when he wandered into the ballroom—he was dressed up and he was tall and handsome and confident and he radiated wealth, so admittedly, he didn't look out of place—and while he was planning to just pass on through to get to the gardens, he found himself stopping and enjoying watching people be happy.

It was nice, that despite the fact Seokjin and Sujin had frustrated their parents so much by calling off their wedding, their cancellation meant that all these strangers were able to have a lovely time here instead.

And as he was thinking that, as he was scanning the ballroom and appreciating the joy and the elegance and the drunkenness, his eyes fell on the most handsome man in the room, and everything—his body, his emotions, his sense of time's forward motion—froze in place.

It was as if a spotlight was shining on the man. He was standing alone and awkward off to the side. He was ridiculously handsome, waves in his hair that looked windswept even here indoors and a brightness in his eyes that didn't come from the room's crystal chandeliers. And, for some reason, his nervousness was palpable, from the way he was breathing to the way he was twisting his fingers together as his gaze hesitantly darted around the room.

That combination of movie-star gorgeousness and new-kid anxiousness compelled Seokjin into immediately crossing the room to him.

Seokjin yanked himself out of his memories abruptly. He'd already daydreamed about that night enough.

There was no use to daydreaming further, not when he ended the night by abandoning Alone.

The guilt Seokjin felt over leaving—over being too scared to stay, over being too scared to let someone so great see what a mess Seokjin and his life actually were—meant that he couldn't forget that night. But he sure hoped that Alone, whatever his name actually was, had moved on. He hoped that handsome and smart and delightful man, whoever he actually was, had settled into his new life in the city and that said life was as wonderful as he deserved.

~

As time passed, Seokjin found there were so many things to enjoy about his new life.

Firstly! The fact his parents had stopped insisting he socialize with the awful chaebol clichés that infested their social circle. After canceling his wedding and leaving his family's company, he'd been labeled a loose cannon, and all those meddling matchmaker parents ignored him, despite the fact he and Sujin both used to be considered quite eligible, thanks to their family wealth and connections.

The marriage had never been his or Sujin's idea. Their parents, long-time friends, had been orchestrating the match since childhood, and both Seokjin and Sujin had been resigned to it for years. He was grateful they were both eventually brave enough to face the fact they didn't want to be married to each other, despite their friendship and despite what that union would bring to their families (and their family's finances and business empires).

He and Sujin still gleefully compared notes about their newfound freedom from society nonsense, and more soberly advised each other on how to lessen their parents' frustrations. They were both lucky that their parents, while bewildered and saddened by their choices, didn't want to force them to do anything they didn't want to do. Their families even held a joint party—among just themselves, thank goodness—before Sujin left for Australia, where she'd be studying linguistics and living with a friend she met gaming online (a friend, she confided in him, for whom she might have those romantic feelings that she'd never actually felt for Seokjin). There was a photograph from that night of the two of them holding their acceptance letters to their respective master's programs and preening, and it was happier than any wedding photograph ever would have been.

Secondly! He liked his job, working for an organization that researched marine pollution, and he knew it was amazing luck to be able to work in the field before he finished his advanced degree. One of his responsibilities involved liaising with local environmental organizations for various citizen science efforts, and every person he met through that was an absolute energizing delight. (He loved so much that he was doing work he loved, work that made the world a better place. He wondered if Alone was feeling the same way with his new job—some kind of nurse or maybe a medical researcher, if he was at that party—which was obviously far better than designing terrible escape rooms.)

Thirdly! He made new friends through all those new connections. Full offense to the people who he had to socialize with his in his old life, but Seokjin preferred people whose ambitions were not limited to themselves and their bank accounts. He and Kim Namjoon met when he was facilitating one of those citizen science projects, and they became such good friends that Seokjin even went to one of Namjoon's poetry readings (a poetry reading) to support him. (Admittedly, Seokjin arrived late, which actually worked out well, because Namjoon's other friends apparently got kicked out earlier for trying to get the staid literary crowd to fanchant for Namjoon's reading.)

And it was Namjoon who knew Seokjin was looking for a new apartment and so tipped him off when one of his friends was moving out of his current one. Seokjin hit it off with the landlady and his application was accepted.

It felt like moving from his old apartment—too close to his old life, and not to mention too expensive—was his final step in being this new person he was. He'd escaped his old life, and he'd escaped into a new one. A new one he was brave enough to stay in, despite its challenges.

A fresh start.

Or almost a fresh start, because as much as Seokjin tried to live a life with no regrets, he still felt deep guilt over that party he crashed. More precisely, over abandoning Alone at the end of it.

It hadn't been his intention to abandon Alone. Not at first. He'd spent a few minutes looking for Alone's friend before finally asking one of the venue staff to let Jimin-the-party-organizer, whoever he was, know that when he was ready to leave, his friend would be waiting at a table in the corner of the ballroom.

Seokjin was planning to go right back to Alone. He really was.

But something shifted inside him when he turned around. When he turned back. When his eyes immediately sought out Alone at the table, cuddled up safe in his chair, nodding off.

Alone looked handsome and awkward and elegant and rumpled all at once. Seokjin didn't even know the man's name, which was funny and sad and scary at the same time, because it didn't matter what the man's name was: Seokjin was falling for him.

Seokjin had fallen for him.

In that moment, Seokjin's heart raced out of his chest, and in its wake, fear flooded his chest. His lungs. His head. His feet were too heavy to move, and he couldn't take a single step forward.

He could feel the weight and the fear of the precipice he stood on. He could feel his own precariousness, the terror of his wide-open future. The connection that they'd built between them that night felt so big and so fragile, Seokjin could feel how vulnerable it was in his clumsy, inadequate hands.

He could feel what it would have been like, had they managed to actually complete that kiss earlier. It would've been far more than he deserved. It would've been far more than he could handle.

His life was a mess. He'd been seeking emotional closure that night. He wasn't supposed to fling open a new door. All he knew was that he was escaping, and he didn't know yet where he was escaping to, just like Alone had philosophized about, and Seokjin couldn't drag that lovely man with him, that lovely, sweet man who made him laugh and who made him think. Who made him smile more than he'd smiled in months. It'd be selfish. It'd be terrifying. He couldn't do that.

And he couldn't take a single step closer to the table where Alone was sleepily waiting. He couldn't. His heart had found its way back to his chest, and it was beating frantically, and in his panic, Seokjin turned around and left the ballroom. Left the party. Left Alone.

Later, he told himself it was the best thing for both of them. He needed more time and space to himself, focusing on growing. He needed to not be in a position where he'd hurt someone else by being the mess that he was. It was pragmatic, cutting off the path that would have lead to falling in love.

But it was still the most cowardly thing he'd ever done, and a decision he wasn't forgiving himself for any time soon.

Months had passed from that night, and now he was more stable. He felt stronger. He knew where he'd escaped to. He knew who he was. Alone had helped him find his way there.

And Seokjin knew who he wanted to be in the future. If he ever had a chance to find Alone and apologize, he'd do so. The chance to reconnect might be too much to ask for, but if he could make up for the pain he must have caused, he would do that work. He would make sure Alone knew how smart and amazing he was, how big of an impression he'd made that night.

How no matter what, Seokjin was so glad they'd met each other.

~

Seokjin moved into his new apartment on a ghastly humid day. After hours of marching up and down the stairs with boxes and furniture, he and Namjoon were exhausted, sweaty messes, and Seokjin wanted nothing more than a shower and a few hours of lying on the floor, dead to the world.

But before he left, Namjoon wanted to show Seokjin something. "Taehyung, your new next door neighbor, paints for fun. He's painting this amazing mural in the back garden," Namjoon said. "We should go see it."

"I like murals," Seokjin said gamely. He thought of Alone. He hoped Alone was out there finding surprise art in his own life. "Let's see it."

For the billionth time that day, they took the stairs back down to the ground level, and Seokjin hoped to himself that this mural would be worth it. If he didn't have the physical or mental strength to take the stairs again, maybe the garden would be a nice place to take a nap, at least.

"He's just finished it," Namjoon said, leading Seokjin outside and around the corner of the building. "Or almost finished it, he says he doesn't think it's complete. But it looks really cool. He's really smart about public art. If you like murals, you should talk with him."

Seokjin didn't quite catch what Namjoon said. He'd stumbled to a stop and froze, staring at the mural before him.

Flowers. Giant, painted flowers on the wall behind his new apartment. And not just any flowers, but ones he'd seen before. Seokjin actually knew little about flowers in general except that he liked them, but he recognized these ones in all their glorious diversity. They were all the different kinds of night-blooming flowers he and Alone had appreciated in the night garden: bright white petals, fluttery red heart-like bells, delicate lilac trumpets, all shining under the glow of the moon that had been painted in the opposite corner of the wall, hanging heavy and glowing.

Seokjin might have been literally melting under the blaze of the afternoon sun, but he held his breath as he looked at those giant flowers, and he could almost feel the soft, cool moonlight on his skin. He could almost smell the thick fragrance, earthy and light as it cut through the dark night.

And he could almost see Alone, and the way he lit up so shyly and so clearly when Seokjin told him he was like a night-blooming flower himself, because clearly he appreciated unusual sources of light.

Sure, art was supposed to make the viewer consider their own life experiences, but this one cut a little too close to the bone.

Something twisted in Seokjin's heart, and he looked away and sighed. It wasn't this gorgeous mural's fault that it reminded him of the worst thing he ever did, but there was no way he could live beside it and not break his heart every time he saw it, remembering that night and the way he'd betrayed Alone. Obviously, he would need to break his lease and move away. Namjoon was going to hate him for making him do all that heavy lifting today for nothing.

But Namjoon misinterpreted Seokjin's sigh. "It's beautiful, isn't it? Taehyung thought really hard about how to make the moonlight look, but he says night scenes are his favorite things to paint anyway. He says he likes the challenge of painting light at night."

For the second time in as many minutes, Seokjin froze.

He knew those words. He'd heard those words before.

Slowly, he turned to face Namjoon. There was a possibility this mural wasn't just some wild coincidence. "What did you say your friend's name was?" he asked, his breath coming up short.

"Taehyung. Kim Taehyung. He works with Jimin, who used to live in your apartment, and we're all good friends. I'll make sure to introduce you."

Seokjin's heart pounded. It pounded like it could punch itself out of his chest, and probably slap him in the face, for how much the truth was currently acting like a wrecking ball. "Is he tall and handsome? Floppy hair, boxy smile, convinced his shoes are going to leave him at an inconvenient moment and will very sweetly tell you about that at length?"

"Yeah. That sounds like him. Do you know him? Do you—" Namjoon stopped himself and he stared at Seokjin for a beat before his jaw dropped. "By any chance do you sometimes go by a nickname? Do some people call you Jin?"

"Yeah," Seokjin said, though he felt a little like he was no longer in his body. This mural was definitely not a coincidence. Seokjin standing in front of it was not a coincidence. "I think I might know him. We bonded once over night-blooming flowers, actually. I never found out his name."

They stared at each other for another moment, and then Namjoon burst into a cheer and punched the air. "I won! I found you! We've all been looking for you!"

Seokjin took a cautious step back from Namjoon's overenthusiastic fist-pumps of victory, but excitement was bubbling up in him, too. "He's been looking for me?"

"He has. He really, really has. I'll message him. He should be home from work in the next hour or so, and—"

"Wait, don't. Let me…" Seokjin needed a moment to gather his thoughts. "You said he lives next door to me?"

"Yeah. Which is an absolutely bizarre turn of events. Because, in all seriousness, we're been running a six-man search team trying to find you for him."

This was a second chance he wasn't going to let slip through his fingers. He'd messed up, and he'd make things right with Alone, if Alone would let him. "Can you not tell him about me yet? I want to talk to him first. I want to apologize, face to face."

"Oh right, you ghosted him. I forgot." Namjoon's face fell.

That frown slammed into Seokjin hard, and his heart heaved itself lower. If that was Namjoon's reaction, Seokjin could only imagine how hurt Alone was. Had been. Would be, when he saw Seokjin again. "Yeah. I need to apologize for that."

"You should. But at least he's not the one threatening to kick you for it. That's Jimin. Jimin's who you need to be worried about."

He filed that information away for later. "I'd just like to make sure I apologize properly to him, and it should be private. But I'll talk to him tonight, if I can, so you won't have to keep it a secret long."

Seokjin took one more look at the mural, at the beautiful nightness of it, the way the light and dark interplayed, the way the colors shifted from cool to warm. He thought about Alone—Taehyung—and how much work it must have taken, painting this mural. How many hours.

Hours he must have spent thinking about Seokjin, about the night they fell for each other, and about how Seokjin had disappeared without a trace.

Seokjin might not have been ready to fall for Taehyung the night of the party and that had scared him enough to run away, but now, his life was different. He was different.

He needed to apologize, and he hoped so badly he'd have a chance to make it up to Taehyung.

~

The knock on his apartment door startled Taehyung. He'd been home for barely five minutes, and he'd had time just to change and crash face-down on to his sofa, and now someone wanted to talk with him?

And he knew it wasn't even going to be Jimin, because a) Jimin always warned him before he came over, and b) Jimin no longer lived next door to him.

Right. Maybe it was his new next-door neighbor. In which case, Taehyung wanted to be helpful and to make a good first impression. He dragged himself off the sofa and trudged to the door.

He looked out the peephole.

His heart stuttered to a stop.

Was the weird fish-eye lens playing tricks on him, distorting who was really there? Or was his brain just straight-up lying to him? Taehyung scrambled to unlock the door, his hand slipping on the door knob as he tried to open it, and by the time he threw it open, he felt as if he had run a marathon.

He had, actually. He'd spent the last few months running a slow emotional marathon, and if he was out of breath now, it was for good reason.

Because this was the finish line.

He stared at Jin. Jin, in person. Jin, wearing loose, casual clothes and a tight, anxious look. Jin, looking gorgeous and nervous and relieved to see him.

Jin, real and at Taehyung's door.

"Hello, Alone," Jin said.

"Not anymore," Taehyung said hoarsely. "Taehyung. Kim Taehyung."

"Kim Seokjin. Nice to meet you."

"More than nice." Taehyung stared at him still, because he was real, and he was here. "I've been looking for you, and you just turn up at my door like this?"

"It was a little more complicated than that." Jin smiled at him, and the depth and the seriousness of that smile hit Taehyung like a sack of bricks. Had Jin been this handsome the last time he saw him? Or did he manage to grow even prettier these last few months? "Can I apologize to you? I understand if you don't accept it, and if you don't forgive me, but you deserve an apology, and—"

Taehyung interrupted him. "Can I give you a hug first?"

Jin blinked, but some of the tension in his shoulders eased. (Oh goodness, those shoulders, Taehyung had forgotten how much he wanted—nay, needed—to get up on them.) "Yeah," he said, sounding a little choked.

Taehyung didn't think. He just threw his arms around Jin. There was barely a pause before Jin was hugging him back, the gentle crush of those strong arms better than anything Taehyung could have (and had) dreamed. Jin tucked his head against his, and it felt like coming home. He hugged Jin back so hard and with his entire life force, both of them struggling to keep their balance as he tried to express just how much he wanted to never let him go ever again.

~

"I wasn't my best self that night," Jin said.

Taehyung looked at him. He couldn't stop looking at Jin, actually, because he was here, he was here in Taehyung's apartment sitting on his sofa right beside him, and Taehyung couldn't tear his eyes away. "No, you were so lovely that night," he said.

Since inviting Jin into his apartment, he'd learned a few things. To start, Jin was his new next-door neighbor. Jin was the person who moved into Jimin's old apartment. And if that wasn't hard enough to wrap his mind around, Taehyung was shocked to learn that Jin was a friend of Namjoon's, and Namjoon had taken Jin to see Taehyung's mural, and Jin saw it and figured out that Taehyung—that the man he knew as "Alone"—had painted it.

Oh, and Jin wasn't a spy, but he definitely was a party crasher. He hadn't been invited after all. The wedding cancellation that allowed Taehyung's firm to book the venue had been Jin's own wedding. (Other tough truths Taehyung struggled with: the idea that anyone at risk of marrying Jin wouldn't have wrestled a ring on his finger as soon as possible. But luckily for Taehyung, not everyone in the world thought that way.)

And he'd learned why Jin had left.

"I was scared. Everything in my life was up in the air. I was a mess. A party-crashing, about-to-quit-his-job mess. I didn't have any safe ground to land on, and I knew I was falling for you, that I'd fall for you so hard if we kept in touch." Regret was clear on Jin's face, but the way he looked at Taehyung was still so gentle and so undemanding. It was like the way he smiled at Taehyung, the first time he did: no pressure, just comfort. "You were so smart, and so fun, and so amazing. How could I not fall for you? And I couldn't do that."

"Because it scared you. You weren't ready." Taehyung pictured that night, pictured how overwhelmed Jin must have been, and how much he'd hidden it. How he'd funneled that fear into spending time with him and being kind and the two of them having fun together, exploring gardens and murals and that thread of connection weaving itself between them. They'd both felt it, known it, wanted it—but Jin had also wanted to feel safe. And love hardly ever started out that way, did it? "You were scared."

"I was scared, and selfish, and I panicked, and I'm sorry."

"I wish you had been brave enough to at least say goodbye," Taehyung said. "If you'd given me a chance, I would've given you space to be a mess. We could have moved slowly, or not at all. Even if I did really want to make sure we managed to kiss, eventually."

Jin snorted a laugh. "I know. It was wrong of me, and I know I hurt you, and I'm sorry. I understand if you don't want to give me another chance."

"I want to give you another chance," Taehyung said. He wanted to give Jin all the chances, actually, but he'd start with one, and he'd see where they went from there. He trusted Jin. He trusted Jin because Jin shared his fears with him, even if it took months to clear it up. "I hate that you didn't say goodbye, and I hate that you were scared, but I'm glad you took the time to let yourself grow quietly on your own. I've done a lot of that, too, over these last few months."

"Do you like it here? Do you like your job?"

"I'm so happy here." Taehyung couldn't help the way his smile grew even better. He was happy. Even before Jin returned to his life, he'd been happy, and now that Jin had returned, Taehyung was even happier. "I have friends I love. I've had the chance to make amazing art. The work I do matters." He paused. "I never told you what I do, did I?"

"Aside from no longer designing escape rooms? No. Are you a nurse? Or a medical researcher?"

Taehyung laughed. "No. I'm an architect."

"What? I thought the party I crashed was a bunch of health-care people. Here I was, imagining you performed heart surgery by day and painted flowers by night."

"I'm a health-care architect," Taehyung said, still giggling. "I'd been drowning on the job market for months, trying to land a position where I could put my degree to use, and I was just lucky, I guess, the firm thought I was the best candidate and that I love the work I get to do."

"That kind of sounds like me," Jin said. "I quit my job after that party, after you and I talked about escaping from something and not knowing where you're escaping to, and I applied to graduate school to get an advanced degree in marine chemistry, and I work in the field now, and it's…it's just one of the ways my life is so much better now."

"I'm glad," Taehyung said. And he was. The idea that the conversation he and Jin had played even just the littlest part in making Jin's life better…well, it wasn't so difficult to think, not when Taehyung's own life had been changed by that one night they hung out together.

They talked. They talked about how Namjoon had known Jin for months and yet failed to realize he was Taehyung's legendary Jin. Taehyung told him how his friends had all heard the description of Jin and jumped to the conclusion he was actually Namjoon. ("What?" Jin asked. "We are nothing alike. I like sharks. He likes crabs. How in the world could we be confused for each other?") They talked about Jin's near-marriage, and how Jin's relationship with his parents wasn't the same as it once was, but they were all working on it. They talked about their landlady and her art patron ambitions and Taehyung's mural.

And after night fell, they trooped down the stairs together to look at the mural in the moonlight.

Taehyung was proud of the work he'd done. He'd spent so much time researching flowers, poring over the pictures he'd taken in the night garden so that he could identify and recreate the ones they'd seen there. He'd spent so much time getting the moon just right. He'd worked so hard, and now—

Now that he was standing in front of it with Jin, the whole scene finally felt right.

"Namjoon said it's not finished," Jin said. "What more are you planning to do?"

"I wasn't planning anything specific," Taehyung admitted. "I just knew it wasn't complete, but I didn't know what it needed to be complete. Now I know, though."

"Is it a shark? Are you going to add a shark?" Jin laughed at his own joke, and Taehyung wanted to put that sound in his mouth and bite it, he loved it so much. "I hope it's a shark."

Taehyung smiled too. "It needed us to be looking at it together. That's all. Now it's complete."

Jin's laughter quieted, and he met Taehyung's gaze.

"But I'll add a shark for you, if you want. I'll add two sharks. Ten sharks. All the sharks."

"Save that for your next masterpiece, Michelangelo," Jin said. "If us being here together completes the mural, then I think it's perfect as it is."

"Me too," Taehyung said.

This felt so much like that night, when they stood in front of the shark mural and made each other laugh, and then they looked at each other, and Taehyung knew how badly they wanted to kiss each other, and he knew—he knew!—they would.

He just hadn't any idea how long it would take for them to make their way back to each other.

I want to kiss this man, Taehyung thought to himself again. I want to kiss this man, and this man wants to kiss me. This man who worked so hard to make his escape into a life he wanted, this man whose job is literally saving the oceans, this man who admitted how scared he was to fall for me before he was ready to…this man who prompted me to make the best piece of art I've ever created, this man whose existence helped me make new friends and new connections, this man who I've waited for not because he left but because it felt like he never left me…I'm going to kiss this man.

"We should kiss," Jin said. He sounded just as breathless as Taehyung felt. "We should kiss before someone comes out and interrupts us again."

"Good idea," Taehyung said, and he took a step closer before he leaned in to kiss him.

Soft, Taehyung thought, as his lips met Jin's. Jin's lips were soft, his breath was soft, the kiss was soft. Champagne soft. Flower petal soft. Moonlight soft.

Jin pressed even closer to him, and Taehyung wrapped an arm around him, so they were heartbeat to heartbeat now. They deepened the kiss, and Taehyung knew in his blood and in his bones that this was what forever felt like. This was what his forever felt like, at least: no more wondering, no more missing pieces.

It was a kiss worth waiting for.

Jin drew back gently, his expression soft and quiet. "Hey."

"Hey," Taehyung said, still catching his breath.

"Thanks for looking for me. Thanks for giving me another chance."

"Thanks for finding me."

He pulled Jin's hand into his, and Jin tucked his fingers tightly around Taehyung's. "I know I should have said goodbye to you that night. But this time I'm not planning on saying goodbye," he said, "because I'm not going to leave. Is that okay?"

Taehyung lit up. He lit up like a firework. He lit up like a chandelier throwing glittery light over a ballroom. He lit up like a night-blooming flower under the moonlight. "That's better than okay," he said. "I don't actually want you to say goodbye, and I'm not leaving, either."

They'd found each other, finally, and neither of them would be going anywhere.

~