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For as estranged as they are, Taehyung’s known his entire life.
When he was a young child, he thought it was a funny bedtime story. A little older and he thought it was a fascination of his parents that he was expected to feign interest in. As a young adult, an annoyance that became a horror story.
“Why bother with any of that?” his younger sister always asks, sometimes over studying, sometimes over making friends. “Why bother when you’re meant to be a bride for a dragon!” she’d laugh, or his little brother would chortle from a room over.
“Or a meal!”
In this day and age, sacrifices were no longer maidens left at the top of a mountain in a white tunic left to their fate, sometimes fettered down with actual chains.
Rather.
Taehyung is dressed in white lace from head to toe. The veil they put on him is not just floor length, but it must denote him appropriately. When he stands at the altar, it trails behind him down the stairs out the front door of the building.
The dragon standing in front of him hides behind a tailored suit, but his eyes give him away. Taehyung is afraid to look into them.
They might hypnotize him.
“You don’t need to be scared,” he says. Namjoon. That’s his name. Kim Namjoon. A modern day dragon hiding in a chaebol family like they all do. That’s where they hide their riches, and for as long as they’ve existed, they’ve been promised certain things. Sacrifices. Taehyung’s known his entire life.
He is the eldest of the only family that survived a tsunami in their coastal town many generations ago. Their family was chosen, their family was spared, and for generations to come, they will demand a sacrifice.
Once, when Taehyung was still a teenager, he asked his mother if their family could simply end. “Why did you choose to have children? You could have - it could have been over! You chose this! You chose to have children!”
But this mother merely cupped his cheek at the time and smiled. “You will know things that none of us may ever dream of.”
On his wedding day, there are no friends or family to witness, other than his mother who stood at the doors and helped him into his veil. Inside, it is merely the two of them. What do dragons know of matrimonial ceremony?
Namjoon kisses the back of his hand first. “I will honor your sacrifice as long as we both may live, so long as you are here to give it freely.”
As if there was such an option. “I do,” he says, mustering a line between sarcasm and genuity. The side of Namjoon’s mouth quirks; Taehyung can’t help but notice the sharper canine there.
“Is this your lair?” Taehyung inquires, nestled into the backseat of something in between a limo and a stretch caravan. A limo must be too gauche for dragons. Outside their window, a large house on a hill stands taller than anything in eyesight. They’re outside the city now, but close enough. Still the farthest by far that Taehyung has ever been allowed away from his family; he was considered a flight risk by the age of fourteen.
“Where I hoard all my treasure,” Namjoon replies as he opens the door for him.
Inside, the ceilings are high and the rooms seemingly never ending. “For your comfort, I’ve prepared a room adjoining mine for now. You are always welcome in my own quarters, but if you prefer…”
Namjoon stands aside at a doorway. Taehyung doesn’t mean to gasp when he looks there in.
Marvelous is the loveseat nestled under a tall window, and the curtains around it. Ornate hand painted figures line shelves and an open facing wardrobe peeks out with every color of prepurchased garment within. The wallpaper would be exactly what every person his age decries as tacky, but Taehyung loves. The bed? Massive and piled high with tufted pillows in pale blues and pinks.
The entire thing might as well be wrapped in a bow. It is exactly to his taste.
He might ask about it, but rather he steps inside and closes the door promptly.
There are two other doors besides the one at his back. An adjoining bathroom, and -
At night, Taehyung hears rain.
It isn’t raining.
No matter how hard he peers out the windows, there isn’t a single drop of rain on the glass, but he hears it so clearly. It’s unmistakable. When he peels himself away from the window, in his long white gown of a different model for the wedding night, Taehyung nervously approaches the door to his husband’s room.
The rain sound gets louder.
When he lays his palm flat against the dark wood, it comes away wet.
The door is weeping.
Taehyung was scared as a child who was told one day he’d belong to a dragon. He was scared as a teenager when he mourned the life he’d never choose. As an adult, a waterfall door in the middle of his room scares him the most. He stumbles away with a thump, laid out flat on his back. He scurries to the door, the one that leads to a hallway and outside, but where would he go? This is his lot in life. He lives and dies by this dragon. If he leaves, no doubt his family will offer to find him for the beast and drag him back.
Taehyung cowers under the covers in bed until a new morning comes, and with it, a suspiciously dry door.
He stands in front of it for a long time, until there is a knock outside of his bedroom door. “Morning,” Namjoon greets him, fully smiling today. “Breakfast, if you’d like, is served.”
He takes Taehyung’s arm and leads him down the grand staircase to a dining room, laid out with a banquet for two that would put most the world to shame. “Please take your fill. Make yourself at home.”
He isn’t sure how to do that, sitting at the head of such a long table on his own. Namjoon sits on the other side, watching him eagerly. One of his teeth sticks out over his bottom lip at one point. Once again, Taehyung notes that many of his favorite culinary items are out on display, despite most of them not deemed suitable for breakfast.
There’s more.
There is a library, a section that Namjoon instantly draws him to where so many of the titles look familiar. Outside, a stable, large in size and meticulously cleaned even if there are only a few horses within. A garden with hand carved benches. Confections left at every twist and turn down hallways. Creature comforts that Taehyung scarcely knew of but knew he wanted as a young person.
He knows this is part of it.
This is why he’s meant to make peace with it.
Dragons have treasures. For Namjoon, Taehyung is the treasure. For Taehyung, the treasure is everything Namjoon’s human wealth acquired.
“Anything in the world, you’ll have it,” his mother told him more than once as a child when he demanded something they couldn’t give him. His brother and sisters looked at Taehyung with jealousy even when he looked the same as them. Now, Taehyung fills his days with horseback riding, painting by the river, reading in the library. He eats what he wants, when he wants. He comes and goes to the city and back, escorted by a driver and a security detail. People open doors for him when he shops, they pull out secret collections from the back.
Taehyung lies on a pile of treasures of his own choosing in his bedroom and tries to think what any of it means.
At night, every night, the door adjoining his room to Namjoon’s rains.
The water that hits the floor doesn’t go anywhere or do anything. Taehyung likes to lie on his stomach on the floor, chin on the back of his hands, waiting for droplets to collect and pool.
They never do.
They vanish as soon as they hit the floor.
“A sacrifice is called a sacrifice because something is given, something is taken,” Taehyung says, wearily eyeing Namjoon. He’s come down to the river to watch Taehyung paint. He’s quiet, always so quiet when he comes and goes. He came today to sit down behind him with no greeting and when he leaves, it will be with no goodbye.
“What are you taking from me?” he asks, demanding to know.
Namjoon looks up at him from his lap, quiet hands and an equally quiet mouth. His hair is a little longer now from when they met. It hangs in his eyes, moves in the breeze. “Nothing that isn’t freely given.”
“What can’t a dragon take for himself?” Taehyung asks, unintentionally moving his brushstrokes a little too roughly over the lighter parts of his canvas.
“You know.” Namjoon stands silently, but Taehyung feels it without watching him go.
Namjoon isn’t just a dragon. He’s a twenty-first century dragon, a chaebol. He dons sleek and modern suits made of leather; Taehyung touches the jacket and wonders if it’s made from his own skin. When he accompanies him to the city for so-called work functions, the men in the room often have no idea who and what they’re talking to. Namjoon stands so tall without trying. He shelters Taehyung from their view when Taehyung has nothing to say to them. He wears what he wants, sometimes a suit to match his husband or if he prefers, a long silky dress with a slit up to his hip.
No one dare say a thing to him. He’s even purchased a new wedding ring, this one a traditional diamond ring designed for women. He wears it over fitted elbow length gloves that match his dress, and when people stare, he smiles, hand cocked up close to his face and jade drop earrings.
“You shouldn’t tease men like that,” Namjoon remarks, hands in pockets of his baggy yet tailored trousers.
“Why? Because boys will be boys?” Taehyung quips back, but inwardly, he shakes. He can’t always tell who is who, and if some of them might be like Namjoon. Not all dragons contain themselves with all civility, or so he’s heard.
Namjoon grimaces, but says kindly, “You look lovely.” He lifts Taehyung’s gloved hand to kiss, then walks away.
“How old is he, anyway? Namjoon-ssi, couldn’t you have fallen in love with an older sugar baby?” one man jeers and leers, up and down towards Taehyung where he’s resumed hiding behind Namjoon.
“We’ve been promised to each other for a long time,” Namjoon replies. Marriages in these circles are almost all arranged, public facing or not. This man more than likely did not choose his wife himself.
“He was promised to you at birth, eh?” the man jabs with his words and elbow, then exits the conversation. Taehyung uncrosses his arms; he wonders if it makes him look as young as he feels.
When Namjoon gently settles a hand on his waist, Taehyung looks up to count the fine lines around his eyes. From smiling. Namjoon smiles anytime Taehyung catches him looking, and if they’re in a room together Namjoon tends to be looking. Despite the strong physique, there are grays peppered in his dark hair right around the temple. They don’t subtract, only add. Taehyung understands that technically Namjoon is older than he, perhaps of an age gap that some would find questionable if not for the fact that he has money or this, the very nature of being something not human for those in the know, but when he looks at Namjoon, he sees dimples combined with sharp teeth, sharper eyes, muscles in his arms as large as his head.
They’re all things he finds difficult to look at. He looks away.
Taehyung makes friends with Hoseok, or perhaps truer to say Hoseok befriends him.
Hoseok is also a dragon bride to one Min Yoongi, a smallish man with a looming presence. He takes up spaces larger than Namjoon, but Hoseok never looks afraid, rather, he is almost always laughing and certainly always smiling.
“I’ve grown too used to him,” Taehyung laments, head in Hoseok’s lap while they sit in the sauna at the most exclusive bath house. “It’s his eyes! All that hypnosis!”
Hoseok giggles, delighted as ever. He would be just as delighted with a rock as a pile of fine jewels, although perhaps not the insect that might accompany said rock. “Silly. Dragons can’t hypnotize. Besides, Joonie is a water serpent. The most he does is bring water into the city.”
Or save a family or a tsunami.
Dragons are tricksters in their own right. Sometimes, Taehyung wonders if the tsunami wasn’t of a water dragon’s making, just to insure a new offering.
Taehyung listens for rain.
He only hears it at night, never outside, only on the other side of Namjoon’s door.
They’ve been married for the better part of a year, almost happily companions at this point if little else, when Taehyung finally tests the door. The sun has set, they’ve both retired to their rooms, and Taehyung turns the knob between their bedrooms while water slides down his hand.
On the other side of the door it is dark, wet, and raining.
Raining from the ceiling, which is inky black with flecks like the night sky. There is no ceiling to be seen, just the dark, and the drops that appear out of nothing and nowhere, no clouds, nothing.
Taehyung gasps, immediately stepping across the threshold. Rain slicks his hair down and runs into his open, smiling mouth as he tips his head back, eyes closed, palms held up. He giggles, twirling around, arms spread wide and wider. There is rain on his head, rain on the bed to his left, rain on giant tomes of books and flickering lit candles that don’t extinguish. There is rain everywhere, collecting in tiny puddles that never get larger or smaller, nor do they escape through the open door into Taehyung’s bedroom. Everything is contained, right here.
Thunder rumbles through the room in a way that Taehyung immediately recognizes as grumbling. He slows then stops his twirling. He waits in an empty and wonderful room, breath abated.
From the corner, from the darkness of which Taehyung can’t see the end, a clawed foot emerges, black talons curled around themselves as a dragon slithers down the wall and lands on the floor with a great thump.
The size of the room is now known as a necessity, for Namjoon’s dragon body is huge, coiling like a snake in places to more easily fit. Mostly white with pale blue to his hide, he cranes his neck out toward him. His face is long and thin with spiky points along his back and spine, whisker like tendrils near his snout.
Taehyung remains as still as possible, water dripping off his eyelashes as a magnificent beast presses his snout, teeth exposed, into the softest parts of his belly. Hot breath flares through his soaked garment, Namjoon’s eyes slowly closing.
When he does nothing, Namjoon suddenly jerks, the tip of his nose easily lifting Taehyung’s feet from the floor momentarily. Taehyung shouts in surprise, then erupts into laughter as Namjoon more aggressively nuzzles in like a cat. Perhaps emboldened by his response, more of Namjoon uncoils and instead loops around Taehyung’s waist. He’s so long he can loop around several times and it is nothing to him.
It might look like a giant snake ready to ensnare and squeeze its prey, but Taehyung always has wriggle room, able to bring up his arms and pet the hard, leathery back of Namjoon’s neck. He turns, trying to follow Namjoon’s great big head as he moves in circles and Taehyung moves in circles too. He laughs, sure he sees the equivalent of a smile on draconian teeth.
This time when his feet are no longer pressed firmly to the floor, Taehyung isn’t surprised. He holds on, wrapping both arms around a section of Namjoon’s long back as he crawls up a wall and around the room, Taehyung swinging a leg over. It’s a slow ride that ends not long after it begins, Namjoon pressing himself flat on his belly so Taehyung’s feet touch the floor once more in the center of the room, a clear and open space of wooden floors differing from the hard floors in Taehyung’s room.
These are planks with natural grooves and spaces to them, and when Namjoon curls and scratches one taloned foot at the floor, green sprouts grow between the cracks. Taehyung drops to his knees in a hurry to put himself at eye level with magic, right in front of his eyes. The rain is softer now, more of a mist, but the petals that bloom open are dewy, soft.
There’s a noise that Taehyung should pay attention to.
He doesn’t, and the pale blue flower in front of his nose, too perfect and too pretty to exist outside in nature, gets plucked by a hand other than his.
Namjoon hands him the tiny bloom.
Taehyung sits back and looks at him. Human him. Here, his skin is just as golden as Taehyung’s, but this flower perfectly matches his pale, cool dragon hide. Something to remember it by, something to hold lest he forget this isn’t a dream.
“You know.” Taehyung wets his lips, already wet from the rain that has stopped. “I forget.”
Things in the room are dry already: the books on the bedside table that somehow were never dampened, or the paintings on the wall that looked the same as the door with a waterfall running over them.
Namjoon is wholly dry. His hair, the loose pants on his hips. He was never touched by the water at all. “What?” he asks.
“I forget dragons are magic.” Taehyung can only think about his past - his mother and father who assured him no harm would come to him while his siblings tormented him with morbid jokes. Time weakens everything, including familial relationships, and by the time chests of gifts arrived at their doorstep, his youngest sister had to defer school due to payments and his little brother never bothered to finish secondary school. They rejoiced while Taehyung silently wept upstairs.
Now, he can’t think of the future for entirely different reasons.
“Can you make it rain while like this?” Taehyung asks, reaching for Namjoon’s hand. He threads their fingers together as if that will keep Namjoon from transforming.
Namjoon flushes. A thick drop hits at the crown of Taehyung’s damp curls, then it showers suddenly. “Oh!” He smiles, the widest smile Taehyung’s ever seen. “I’m sorry! I-”
It rains even harder.
Taehyung can’t hear anything over the water. Rain isn’t meant to be contained within four walls; it is deafening.
“Namjoon! Hyung!” Taehyung can’t stop laughing, because Namjoon writhes next to him, looking around as if he doesn’t know where it’s coming from when he is the only one who knows precisely.
He turns to Taehyung with a shy smile, looking so boyish that he surely looks younger than Taehyung’s meager years. Now he’s wet too, and the candles that were lit before go out under this torrential downpour. “Apologies. Sometimes it’s harder to turn on and off.”
“When you’re excited?” Taehyung teases. What a magical feeling it is to feel like teasing one’s husband for the first time.
“When I’m happy,” Namjoon might say. Taehyung couldn’t be sure. It’s too loud. What he knows is that the hand in his squeezes.
The rain lightens up enough eventually they can more easily hear each other. “Can I sleep here tonight?” Taehyung asks.
Namjoon looks between him and the bed. It is extraordinarily wet. “You can sleep wherever you’d like, but you might not be comfortable.”
“You will be here. I will be comfortable.”
Namjoon warns him. “I might shift back in my sleep, since I’m so -” He makes a motion over himself. Taehyung isn’t entirely sure what he means. It seems to him Namjoon must be perfectly capable of containing himself most of the time.
“That’s okay, too.” Taehyung crawls into bed, dripping wet. While he lies flat on his back his husband crawls into view above him.
“Are you sure? You don’t mind?” Namjoon asks; like this, they aren’t so different. Taehyung reaches for him, smooths both of his hands down from the shoulders to his hips. His skin is smooth, soft. Taehyung can hold it between his hands unlike dragon hide.
“Come now, we’re married,” he says, and when he falls asleep, it’s stretched over the chest of a man, but when he wakes just hours later, it’s over the back of a coiled dragon draped off the sides of the bed. Taehyung reaches to rest his hand over one of the clawed feet, feeling himself the smallest he could be yet feeling the biggest he’s ever felt.
That day, Taehyung is not in a rush to the library or stable or anywhere else. “What else can you do?” he asks, seated on Namjoon’s end of their long table next to him. “Can you fly?”
Namjoon chuckles. “No.”
“Grant wishes?”
“Absolutely not.” There’s something in the way he ducks his head when he smiles for real that makes Taehyung scared and livid at the same time, too much in his chest with nowhere to go. “I can swim really well though?”
Taehyung blinks, then bursts out laughing. He can only imagine - Namjoon in his long serpent body swimming through water, making waves of his own the way he twists back and forth when he moves. “Well, I’d like to see it sometime.”
“I’ll take you. To the sea - the river here is too small. It’s barely enough to wet my feet.” Namjoon puffs his chest out, but when Taehyung insists, drags him by the hand down to the river, he delights in nothing as much as watching Namjoon transform into essentially a giant, giant lap dog.
One moment his husband stands beside him, then the next a flash of light like the one catching the ripples of water from the sun high above them. It is flawless and natural. Out here, without flooring to creak, silent. There is just as suddenly a dragon with him, and when he goes off gallivanting through the shallow river, splashing up enough water to scare off every bird in the vicinity, bounding up and down on his belly like a seal, all Taehyung can do is watch and laugh.
Taehyung was a bride for a dragon.
Here he is.
In the later summer sun, Namjoon dries himself, stretched out farther than Taehyung can see, with his great big head in his lap. Taehyung gently presses down Namjoon’s eyelids with his thumbs, then leans over to kiss him square on the forehead.
Namjoon snorts, then makes some sort of noise close to whinny. Further down his body he stomps his feet manically, body undulating until he takes off stomping around in circles, a little dust trail rising like a cloud with Taehyung in the middle of it.
“You’re like a pup,” Taehyung says to him, scratching under his chin. Namjoon collapses to the ground with his eyes shut and a look of contentment, a great thud that would be heard by any around if they had neighbors. “Or a lap cat. If you could purr -”
Namjoon purrs.
Or, at least, there is a gentle rumbling that moves through Taehyung’s body and vibrates against his hand. Happy, Taehyung leans into him, nuzzling his tiny nose to Namjoon’s massive neck. “Come. Let’s be happy now.”
Taehyung sees more of his dragon, and other dragons, with time. The ones Namjoon works with, certainly Yoongi the dragon, who is as dark as night to contrast with Namjoon as the two of them chase each other about during their visits. Mostly, Taehyung learns to be cautious of the people Namjoon introduces him to with a tight smile while in the city.
“Not all of us retain any abilities. Some can’t shift, some can, but go mad after they successfully turn, because they’re no longer connected to anything,” Namjoon explains. “I may be able to conjure up water, but I must always be near it.”
“Good thing you were born in a sea bordered country then, hm?”
Namjoon hums. “You remind me of the sea,” he says, curling down even as just a man to kiss behind Taehyung’s ear. “Quiet and resolved most of the time, but when the tide turns? Momentous. A force not to be reckoned with.”
He must be joking, Taehyung thinks.
It isn’t until Taehyung meets a dragon of an old family, at a wedding of all places, that Taehyung finds himself cut off and dragged away from the crowd in between the ceremony and dinner. He wears a thinly strapped silk camisole tucked into trousers with long strands of pearls up and down his chest, something straddling the line for polite society but doesn’t rile the old world folk as much, when a wind so strong knocks him off his feet. Any time he tries to stand, he is blown a little further away, far away from the crowd and into the shelter of the woods nearby.
“Kim Namjoon’s bride,” a voice sneers. Taehyung was introduced to this man, but he forgets the name now. He’s older, shorter than Namjoon, but like most of the attendants, of dragon blood, although he comes from another country. “What does he do with you?”
The man pinches and pulls at Taehyung’s bare arms to see them flush and pebble; when Taehyung tries to yell, he seals a hand over his mouth so firmly it feels suctioned there. “You are pretty. You are worth guarding. It doesn’t always take much to catch a dragon’s eye, but then again - you were promised, weren’t you? Never had a chance to pick for yourself.”
His hand slides down his neck, fingers brushing under the top of Taehyung’s low cut blouse. Taehyung bites him when he has the chance; he falls away from the man, his hand snatching at the long necklace so that it chokes Taehyung as he tries to get away. They break apart, of course, all of them, probably hundreds of pearls, scattered in the grass where they don’t belong.
They belong to the sea and to Taehyung, and Taehyung belongs to -
Thunder rips into the countryside.
What was a sunny day turns overcast quickly.
Namjoon walks down a hill towards them, slowly, composed. The wind wrestles against him, tries to force him back, but he just keeps walking towards them, and when Taehyung runs to meet him, rain kisses his face first.
“You tempted fate coming here today,” Namjoon addresses this man, brandishing Taehyung behind him. Hidden from sight. Namjoon likes to do that in public. “Pathetic. Your cheap parlor tricks stand for nothing here.”
Namjoon holds his breath; Taehyung feels the muscles tense below his hand where he clutches at his husband’s back, recognizes it as the beginning of a shift. “I could bite your head off and no one here would miss you or report it, but I’ll settle for a hand if you willingly sign over your subsidiary in this country and never return.”
The man laughs, high and haughty. “You must be mad! The lot of you - you think that because you still retain less man and more beast that you’re better than the rest of us, but we all share the same ancient blood. Does your bride love waking up to cold skin, cold blood? Tell me! You, boy, tell me-”
He makes the mistake of stepping up, attempting to step around Namjoon to get to Taehyung. Taehyung is knocked back, not by the sudden gust of wind from this older man, but from Namjoon’s tail whipping him up and away from the roaring cry of a man in agony.
He lands gently, cradled around the waist from a looped tail accompanied by rain. Taehyung keeps his head bowed down under its gentleness.
When Namjoon’s tail disappears and a weary husband approaches in its wake, Taehyung looks up at him.
He has a bloody mouth.
“I don’t think the bride and groom will appreciate the sudden change in forecast,” Taehyung remarks.
“They’ll forgive me,” Namjoon replies. It’s a darker red in the crevices of his teeth. “Dragon business.”
He holds out his hand; Taehyung takes it. He thinks about all those pearls scattered to the wind.
All night long, Taehyung stares at Namjoon’s face. The blood is gone, long since washed away and all of his apologies about their now missing guest seemingly dismissed in good nature. There are rules in every society, Taehyung supposes, and what’s a hand or two between old dragon feuds?’
But with the light all gone now, just sparsely strung lights over a dance floor because apparently some dragons do believe in more contemporary affairs for their wedding day, Taehyung’s mother would cease to wonder, all he can do is stare at his husband’s face, his jaw. His lips. The lights pulse and change color as the music switches to something with a more sultry beat, and Taehyung swears he sees smears of blood pulse on the lower half of Namjoon’s face in time with the dimming lights.
Quickly, Taehyung aborts Yoongi’s side to meet his husband where he stands with some others that he knows by name now - Jimin, Jeongguk, and Seokjin, he’s pretty sure, Jungkook being the only non-dragon of the group there but jokingly referred to as the dragon tamer.
He takes Namjoon’s face between his hands. “I love you,” he says to him. Namjoon startles, despite the full eye contact for the thirty or so seconds it took for Taehyung to reach him, the slow smile and the full attention he gave to Taehyung with his body when he reached for him to join them.
“Taehyung - ”
“I wasn’t freely given to you,” Taehyung continues. “Freely given to you by my family, perhaps, but I never gave myself to you. Not properly. So. I’ll tell you this, now.”
Namjoon swallows. The lighting above them is still red, but it wouldn’t matter to Taehyung if Namjoon had blood on his lips or not, if he was human or not. “Taehyung - ”
“I love you,” Taehyung says again. He notices the others fade away to give them privacy. “I give myself to you freely. I give you my love, freely.” He then kisses him, something not so unknown to them by now. Namjoon always tastes like rain water, even now, not a hint of metallic on his tongue.
A sudden wind strikes up fear in Taehyung’s heart, worried that their foe from early evening returns for revenge. Rather, in a spectacle only to be seen here at one of the most secretive and select weddings of the century, Namjoon’s dragon body unfurls into joyful ribbons, floating in the air for a good few seconds before dropping to the ground unceremoniously, knocking over a table with desserts.
Taehyung laughs. “You can fly after all!”
Namjoon stomps his feet up and down while stationary, rearing his head up and down, then before Yoongi can make it over to him, scowl on his face, Namjoon flips Taehyung over his head onto his neck and takes off running down the hill.
He runs fast enough it feels like they’re flying.
Just a dark night sky and all the lights fading behind them.
They glide through the countryside all the way home.
They trample down their front door and stampede up the stairs. Inside his bedroom, Namjoon bounds up and down, literally bouncing off the walls until Taehyung can’t hold on any longer, shaking too much with laughter.
He lands on a very soft bed.
When he opens his eyes, forced shut in their own merriment, his husband is there, leaning over him.
It’s raining around them, of course.
Namjoon cups his face this time and tells him that he loves Taehyung too.
That night it rains both inside and outside their bedroom.