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“Taehyung.” He puts emphasis on the last syllable. “I’m always a little bit in love with you.”
Over their dinner, Taehyung’s mouth hangs open before he thinks to snap it shut. He swallows thickly, an easy current to follow as it moves down his throat. Namjoon watches and knows there is no other place he’d rather be.
The candle on the table flares up, the flame engulfing it and the table beneath it. Wax cannot melt all at once, but the cloth napkin catches. “Sorry!” Taehyung shouts, stomping it out with his bare hand. “Sorry!”
He meekly waves at a few others in the restaurant, grin wide enough to be his real one, even if it’s far from. Taehyung takes his time clearing his throat, big hands on the scorched table flexing before he asks, “Why couldn’t you have told me another day, then? An earlier day?”
Namjoon leans back in his seat. In the near distance, static roars as a radio channel flips. Namjoon doesn’t think it’s him. It might be him.
“You’re always a little bit in love with me, but you couldn’t have told me yesterday, or any day in the past five years?”
Namjoon can’t look at him. “Sorry.” The hand that picks up his chin is hotter than most, of course. Taehyung always forces him to look at him.
Their gaze meets for as long as Taehyung holds his face up. When he lets go, Namjoon curls into the chair sideways, hands in his sleeves.
Taehyung stands. “Let’s go.”
On the city streets, it’s cold enough that everyone wears heavy coats, but Taehyung walks leisurely in a thin long sleeve shirt. “Give me your hand,” he demands, fingers stretched out for his as he looks back over his shoulder with one eye.
“I don’t think-”
“It’s freezing out, Namjoon-ah.”
Namjoon slips his fingers between Taehyung’s. The lights overhead flicker, faster and faster, until the LED sign directly above them explodes.
Taehyung doesn’t say a word.
Three years ago, Namjoon moved out of the city. There were many excuses as to why, but only one reason would be true. “Hyung,” Taehyung calls out, taking Namjoon’s coat off his shoulders and even stooping to remove his shoes once they’ve arrived. He taps at his ankle until Namjoon lifts one foot. “We’re back!”
Taehyung never addresses Namjoon as hyung. Hyung is reserved for him. “Hello, Joon-ah. It’s been too long.”
Too long might mean Namjoon could move on. Too long might mean he’s learned something about containing himself, but even from a distance, but Min Yoongi jolts. “I’m so-” Yoongi waves him off, the hairs on the back of his arm standing up straight and his shoulder length hair flaring out in a halo.
Namjoon notices that the glasses of water kept all around the house are gone.
“I would never hold it against you,” Yoongi replies, but he disappears back into the hall from which he came.
Taehyung pulls him into the living room and pushes him down onto the couch. “Why’d you wear these?” he asks, yanking on Namjoon’s jeans.
“Um.”
“Neither of us have any pants long enough to fit you.” Taehyung breezes past the kitchen, several candles lighting as he passes. Namjoon misses the lack of smoke when Taehyung lights them like this. Spontaneous combustion. One day, that will be him, too.
Especially when Taehyung says things like arms up and yanks his sweater off. Namjoon controls his hands to put them down slowly, as if slow motor control translates to slow control over anything else.
A lot of Taehyung’s city dwelling seems Namjoon proof.
He doesn’t say anything, but Taehyung’s fingertips fall to the tops of his shoulders. If Namjoon could look at his face, he’s sure he would not look happy. “What are these from?” he asks, pressing his thumb into one of the spots on his shoulders where he’s been digging. Namjoon mumbles something that ears might mistake for real words, but he can’t make real words.
“You’ll sleep here tonight.” Taehyung sits next to him with arms that bind and wind around him. Skin too warm. Namjoon’s skin can burn.
“But-” Namjoon’s eyes shift over to the hall.
“Right here.”
It’s impossible to say no to him. Namjoon wouldn’t want to, but if he did, he couldn’t.
He’s not sure how this can be allowed. Taehyung cards his fingers through his hair and scrapes his scalp until Namjoon can’t keep his eyes open. Come morning, one half of Namjoon’s face is bright red and remains hot to the touch for as long as it takes to silently exit and walk to the train station.
By the time he is home, it is raining and cold again.
The house isn’t so far off the beaten path, but it sits back in a heavily wooded enough area that a passing friend told him it looked a little haunted. Namjoon liked that. The lights flicker on before he touches the door, a short zap through his fingers tips from the rain left on his skin.
Namjoon smiles to himself.
Before moving to his house in the country, nestled between trees and not so far from a small stream, Namjoon lived in the city and met someone who blew outlets for fun every time they entered a room. Such behavior wasn’t tolerated among anyone, city folk or not, past a young age. Namjoon later learned she was a product of the same system as he, but that’s where the similarities ended. She didn’t manipulate energy the way he did. She only pulled magnetic waves, and she killed someone, purportedly by accident, in the same refuge they lived in.
There had been no river close by them, but waters rose high enough they met them at the front door the next day. Namjoon always wondered if Min Yoongi was the ancestor of some great river god. To pull that much water through the city?
He was a match made for Taehyung, the foil to his fire.
Taehyung burnt down an entire building to pull Namjoon out. To Namjoon it was a city, for them it was just one building, albeit a fortress on the border that Namjoon lived in for so long he forgot what other places looked like. They kept him down in the basement, though. The locks were supposedly from kingdoms past, heavy ones and Namjoon didn’t manipulate physical matter like that. At a certain point, even if he could, he probably wouldn’t want to.
The day they met, Taehyung walked in with a group of the usual men, an observer they said. He looked too young to play the part of researcher that he went with. How or why they bought it, Namjoon doesn’t know, but there are alliances Yoongi keeps with powers Namjoon knows not. Perhaps he looked so young because of how wide his eyes were when they saw him.
Taehyung later described the scene to him with more words than Namjoon recalls, but he knows there was this: they allowed Namjoon books, so he used to line the floors with books cracked open so there would be something soft in his room. There was virtually nowhere to step without stepping on one, a walking path not of stone or concrete but much friendly paper.
When Taehyung walked in, the pages of every book fluttered back and forth like an endless sea of waves to which Namjoon sat on the other side. Taehyung said he could hear something before entering his cell, but he had no idea what it could be that sounded almost like rainfall in the basement of a complex.
It makes sense to Namjoon why Taehyung was a little intrigued by him. Anything that reminds him of the water is dear to him. Namjoon makes no mistake that the waving waters of books momentarily entranced him enough to take pity on him.
The books made for perfect kindling later, however.
Namjoon smelled the burning embers long before they could reach him, and when the door to his room came down and Taehyung stood on the other side with flames from the floor to the ceiling rolling in their own waves, Namjoon looked away. How could he look at something so devastating?
“Come with me now, jagiya,” he crooned with his hand outstretched. Namjoon could see each individual page of his library as it caught fire all around them. For so long, those pages were all he had. “You will not be harmed as long as you are with me.”
Taehyung even covered the top of his head with one hand as they walked out the halls, flames parting ways for them. The hand on the back of his neck felt far warmer than any of the fire could.
The halls went on and on. The complex was much larger than Namjoon ever got to see. By the time they reached the exit to the exterior, Namjoon balked at the air on his skin. “It’s alright.” Taehyung took his face into his hands and when Namjoon refused to move, blinded him to his chest and pulled him along.
There were others evacuated that night. Namjoon never met the majority of them, even in the time after. Taehyung remained close enough to him that Namjoon never looked at anything else. He spent his first weeks out in Taehyung’s apartment, and only later moved into the dorms after meeting Yoongi.
The man was quiet. He exuded the kind of aura that made everything quiet around him. He asked Namjoon to show him a little, but Namjoon wouldn’t dare. In those days, being around Taehyung resulted in damage to every little thing, like he was a newborn who couldn’t control it. He always thought it strange that Yoongi never reacted to the way Namjoon followed Taehyung around, destroying things, like he wasn’t afraid that Namjoon might destroy him too. After Namjoon found out about their romantic link, something that Namjoon can only ever think of as a proper bond, it all made sense.
Taehyung was fire and Yoongi was water and those weren’t opposites, those were the complimentary life forces meant to quell each other, comfort each other, and fill each other.
Namjoon isn’t sure why Taehyung allows him near. He tries to be so careful, but the jolts that zap those around him happen and most do not stick around for it to happen a second time. He turns a raven headed girl to premature white, and he leaves scars that look like leaves all the way down the body of a man once known for his beauty. He takes a tongue from a child.
“Hyung.” Taehyung found him and draped himself over his back, both of his hands covering his own. “She will live. We’ll find the right person to help her speak again.”
“Don’t touch me.” He saw the static when he pulled away. Taehyung’s hair stuck up straight all around his head.
In solitude, Namjoon pours water into a kettle then holds it over the palm of his hand until it steams. Taehyung slipped tea into his pockets when he took his coat the night before. He puts the kettle back on the stove and lies down with the bags in his hand tucked up under his nose and his knees under his hands. As small as possible.
He spends most of the winter alone, just him and the birds. Greeted in the morning by a woodpecker alarm and sung to sleep by a nightingale. Packages arrive to his doorstep and often contain foodstuffs, but he makes sure to share those with his feathered neighbors as well.
A semi-regular visitor is Hoseok, and Namjoon always knows when he’s been around. He can tell when he wanders close to the house one day because in the middle of the pure white snow banks, there is a trail of freshly bloomed flowers in a neat line as wide as an adult.
Namjoon plucks a marigold. It wilts immediately in his hand.
His best visitor is Taehyung, of course. It’s always Taehyung. “Joon-ah,” he croons at the sight of him on the front step. “You’ve cut your hair again!”
They sit outside because Namjoon insists it will be good for the birds to build their nests with, and Taehyung attempts to even out his bitched haircut. “It’s a little shorter than you like, but.” Taehyung brushes his fingers through it leisurely. “Better.”
They hike up the mountain the next day because they can start bright and early. Taehyung keeps him warm by stopping at intervals to drape himself over Namjoon. He feels Taehyung’s lips over his ear, then cheek. “I wish you’d move back,” he says. “You shouldn’t be out here alone.”
“I hardly know the difference.”
“Isn’t this nice though?” Taehyung asks with the alarming and beseeching look of someone who would take everything from him, and Namjoon thinks he knows that, too. It’s sinful the way he holds Namjoon’s face, pinches one earlobe between two fingers.
“Taehyung-ah, will you part the path?” Namjoon loves watching him do anything, but winter is Taehyung’s season. He looks like a god walking in frigid air, steam rolling off his body. Namjoon worships at his feet, certainly.
So he toes off his boots and walks barefoot through the mountain, and snow sizzles and melts faster than the eye can see. Namjoon sits in a cleared path until Taehyung comes back to him. “I wish I could grow flowers,” he remarks.
“Namjoon.” Taehyung crosses his arms over his knees in front of him. It’s easy to sit outside for long stretches of time next to him. They walk back down the mountain at night, and this time, Taehyung says he holds his hand to keep him from tripping or falling.
“You always send me so many things,” Namjoon protests when Taehyung unearths a new record for him out of his bag.
“Perk of being in the city.” Taehyung puts it on. It’s the sort of thing he likes and wishes Namjoon liked too. Still. It’s pretty. The insects seem to like it too. A cluster of spiders gathers in the corner of one window to listen. When it is cold, Namjoon lets every insect in.
“If we were in the city, I’d take you to Jimin.” Jimin had healing hands, the best of their generation. Too bad he never could fix him, even if he might heal the decorated wounds on his body.
In the cabin, Taehyung tends to wear more clothing. His long jacket nearly sweeps the floor while he dances with himself. His hair is long - the longest Namjoon’s ever seen it, long enough to tie back if he wants, which he does in the morning while his face is still a little puffy and crusted.
They wake up in the same bed, Namjoon curled on his side towards Taehyung flat on his back and mouth open. All the covers, gone. “Your cheeks are red,” Taehyung remarks. Namjoon sweats too. Taehyung is used to a water god for a bedmate.
Taehyung hooks an ankle around one of his and looks out the window. When they venture out, there is a little ring around the house that’s clear of snow. Namjoon finds snow to throw a snowball at him because he can; Taehyung retaliates by chasing him and tackling him to the ground. He has both of his wrists in his hands over his head, body pinned, and Namjoon accidentally moans.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean that. Sorry.”
Taehyung tilts his head and doesn’t get off him. “I know what you mean, jagiya.”
“Don’t call me that. I love you. You can’t just call me that.”
“You think I don’t love you?”
Namjoon’s face becomes so wet he worries Yoongi is there, has joined them at some point to watch and see all their transgressions. Taehyung loves Yoongi the way Namjoon loves him. He insists on holding his hand on the way back and even makes him sit next to him on the threadbare couch holding hands.
“You have to get back.”
Taehyung sighs. “Lie down,” he says, one hand massaging the back of his neck. Namjoon goes down, and Taehyung presses his eyes closed. Puts on music so he can’t hear his footsteps, or the door opening. When Namjoon opens his eyes, there is food on the table for him and Taehyung is gone.
That spring he doesn’t come back, although packages arrive. Packages without letters. A massive herd of deer come through the valley, and the flocks of birds grow so large that it hurts his ears. He meets Jeongguk by accident, on his way searching for Hoseok, and it becomes clear he is the reason for the vivacious wildlife, a fox winding between his feet like a housecat while a pack of wolves goes belly up for him in the distance.
“You can talk to them?”
“Something like that.” Jeongguk takes his directions and sings a song as he goes, a raven touching down on his shoulder to nip at his hair. Namjoon would have liked to invite him in for a cup of tea, but Taehyung just sent him glass spun ornaments that he hung in the windows.
In the summer comes a letter from Yoongi, the contents of which are sparse. It is Seokjin, the man who he struck with lightning two years ago that collects him in the city. Namjoon falters at his face. “It’s all white now?”
Seokjin twirls a lock of hair around his finger then blows it away. “I miss the stripe sometimes, but I’ve been told I’m even more striking now.” He laughs at his own joke. The ride is not long, but the radio frantically flips through channels until Seokjin turns it off and then the car stops running.
“Namjoon-ah-”
Namjoon zaps a fingertip on top of the room and it revs up again with a jolting shudder.
In their city apartment, Yoongi greets him. Water rolls down his arms and fingertips, falling off his body into puddles that Namjoon tries not to slip in.
It is the only time he has seen Yoongi lose control.
In their bedroom, Taehyung lies in a metal rodded bed. Namjoon balks at the sight of it, but Yoongi waves him on. “I know you won’t hurt him.” Taehyung can’t hear them, Taehyung’s harsh panting breaths and writhing on the bed looks like something possessed him, hair plastered down in sweat. Steam rolls off his body. It was hot outside, it is hell inside.
“Can’t you - ?”
Yoongi picks up Taehyung’s hand with a sizzle, water evaporating immediately so the steam becomes so thick no one can see. “I cannot help him.”
“What makes you think-” The steam lifts enough that Namjoon realizes Yoongi is gone.
On his own, Namjoon sits on the floor, legs crossed, hands on his knees, back straight. The amount of moisture in the air all threatening, he concentrates on his breathing the way Taehyung taught him all those years ago.
“They’d love nothing more for you to lose it all, but you won't, will you?” Taehyung said to him down in that cellar. He touched him. Hand in his hair, he touched Namjoon when he was sure no one would ever again.
“Wake up, sleeping beauty.” Namjoon won’t dare touch him. “Taehyung-ah. Wake up.”
Yoongi comes back later and nothing has changed. He drags Namjoon up and out of the room and there is soup. “Something light. I expect you to drink it all down.” He then disappears with a bowl to the back bedroom.
When he comes back, Namjoon does drink it at the end of a pointed look.
They sleep lying on the living room floor. Namjoon isn’t sure why Yoongi sleeps next to him and not Taehyung. “Why did you ask me to come?”
“What do you mean?” Yoongi laughs. Namjoon always thought he had a charming smile to match Taehyung’s charming smile. “I thought you might help.”
“How could I help?”
Yoongi hums, turning onto his back. His skin is dry. “You know we come from the same place? We both came from the same ocean waters, and Taehyung’s energy pulled fire instead of water.”
Namjoon does not respond. He’d give anything to be brave enough to leave Yoongi and go to Taehyung, consequences be damned.
Taehyung wakes the next day in that his eyes open, but he remains delirious and unresponsive. Yoongi takes him to bathe, but when he returns he drops Taehyung into Namjoon’s lap. He’s never been a caregiver before. It was always Taehyung taking care of him, but he brushes his hair out and practices braiding. When it’s dry, he undoes it, wondering if the waves will remind Yoongi of where they come from.
“Maybe you should take him back,” Namjoon says to him. “To Daegu. That’s where you’re from, right?”
Yoongi turns his head to look at him silently. Taehyung’s slumped into Namjoon’s side, head on his shoulder. He leaves the apartment shortly thereafter, and when he comes briefly in the evening, says that work calls and he’ll leave Namjoon to stay with him indefinitely.
Alone, Namjoon moves Taehyung from room to room himself, lying Taehyung down in the sun and then taking him on the roof to lie in the rain too. Must be comforting. Must remind him of Yoongi. He sighs and Namjoon waits with bated breath, but Taehyung’s eyes don’t open again for him.
It’s after Yoongi comes back in a frenzy, hair standing up straight as soon as he enters. “Can you take him home?”
Namjoon frowns. “He is home.”
“Take him with you. Take him-” If there is anything more to be heard, Namjoon can’t hear it, but Yoongi stops to turn his ears toward the door. “Anywhere out of the city. Go!”
It is his own fault that Namjoon does not heed Yoongi’s words, but left in bewilderment, he anxiously wrings his hands wondering what to pack for Taehyung or if he should pack at all or if he should try and find someone like Seokjin to take Taehyung.
He is too late. They come for them, front door exploding in a storm of splintered wood and metal decoration - the old lock strikes Namjoon in the face. It’s many men and women, the air whipping around them so it’s hard to see, and Namjoon feels his body yanked by an invisible form.
Oh.
They come for him, not Taehyung. Taehyung lies in the bedroom and the bodies swarming him don’t look interested in anything else. If they take him, if they leave him alone -
He recognizes the clothing, of course. There is no insignia on their arms like the men who pried Namjoon away when he was old enough to read but just barely, but the boots and the hard canvas jackets give them away.
“Good dog. You like to bark, but you never bite, do you?” Namjoon recognizes his voice. Most of his face is covered, but in the swath of skin visible, it is red and mottled. Burns. Namjoon would have thought he died in the fires, but he’s there to drag Namjoon across the floor. They break an arm when he struggles, and the lights go out in explosive rain, the sparks of which bounce across the floor. He laughs while others shout to put the needle in.
They’ll tranq him and he’ll wake up somewhere in some time. It could be days or weeks from now, and what about Taehyung? The last time this happened, Namjoon had already been buried in concrete for years and didn’t have anything to leave behind, but what if he never sees Taehyung again?
The wall next to them crumbles, at first into large pieces, then into swirling spirals of dust. Pieces of paper ripped from books whip around them and someone shouts, and Namjoon is frightened. Frightened for himself, but frightened for Taehyung. He doesn’t ever intentionally search for it, but today he searches for it - with a push, the roof caves in, unfortunately taking with it two of the guards under it, but the hall to Taehyung is barricaded safely from them and it looks like a messy accident.
Rather than a needle prick, the distinct sensation of his vertebrae pulling itself towards his skin immobilizes him. Namjoon chokes for air, eyes watering, vision swimming. He can’t feel anything under his cheek, his hands bound behind his back. He should feel the boot in his side. It moves him off the ground. He should feel it.
What he feels is phantom sensation, would be cold if he ever really knew what cold was to others. What Namjoon thinks of as cold is this, a fizz in his bloodstream, a static in his ears. It isn’t anything real, it isn’t anything tangible, and yet - he can feel it. If he wants to.
Everything else is there, like an impressionist painting. Background color and sounds. Objects speed up, then slow down. Namjoon flies through the air when his sense of smell returns.
Ashes.
Namjoon blinks.
Fire has a scent that he would find hard to describe, but the way his body reaches for it, so familiar it aches? It isn’t even an extraordinary warmth that he feels, it is the same feeling reaching back to him that is always there.
When he is dropped, sound rushes in first in time to hear the immediate combustion of the room. Agonized screams echo around what could hardly be called a standing room. The wall he constructed to protect burns in ruin, but a figure pushes through it until he can stand tall on their side of it.
Taehyung.
Namjoon would cry in relief if he could.
Gone is whatever illness haunted him, and gone are the shackles of fatigue or malaise. Flames curl in Taehyung’s hair the same as his strands. When his masked assailant knocks Namjoon’s head down to the floor, flames ignite at Taehyung’s fingertips, a sight he has never seen. He is always beautiful, but perhaps the most beautiful yet.
There are gunshots.
“Fall back!”
Namjoon hasn’t heard gunshots in years and years.
People don’t often dare to use guns these days.
“Tae-” He isn’t sure if his voice works. The bullets are hard to see in the dark smoke, but one explodes close enough to Taehyung’s face that a gash across his cheeks appears. Namjoon screams.
The next bullet would be even closer - would be, but it dissolves to sand like particles.
Then more of the ceiling comes down and this time, everyone goes down with it.
Namjoon hears more - more shouting, high pitched ringing. He remembers now how noisy the fire was when Taehyung first rescued him. Underneath a large piece of building, Namjoon tries to move. Doesn’t get far. A gust of wind strong enough picks up the ceiling slab, and then a juggernaut of a man heaves Namjoon up like he is nothing, and over his shoulder, Namjoon feels like a newborn.
His thoughts are not just fuzzy, but pitch black on and off again. Concussion, or someone who can suppress thought? He’s outside, knows he must be outside now, because he feels night air on his jostled body, but it’s just as stifling as flame. His lungs burn either way.
“Taehyung!” this person is not him. Someone calls for his love who isn’t Namjoon. “Stop! You’ll burn down the whole goddamn city!”
Pressure builds on his body until he screams. It disappears, then reappears. There are more hands and more heat; when he opens his eyes, the wall of flames is so high it pierces through the night sky. It licks at his skin now, he feels the burn; never has any of Taehyung’s fire harmed him, but the coughing figures around him hunch over, one of the figures ripping off their coat so bubbling skin can be seen. Where is Taehyung? Namjoon tries to push himself up to find him. Juggernaut screams on the ground not far from him, unprepared to die by fire. Namjoon is. He cannot see Taehyung, and Taehyung must have lost track of him too, because where is he?
This time when the floods come, they cover all of the street, rising from the ground up, slithering with a quiet sizzle that grows in volume as fires extinguish. The anguished cries quieten too, and the smoke remains but thins, the walls of fire over the city buildings still burning and raining down ashes.
It is a sight that makes Namjoon scarcely believe his eyes are open, but then he is forced to close them when the waters rage and overtake him. They’ve risen so high on the street that the top of it covers park benches and cars, but everything underwater feels more peaceful. Everything is tinged blue, including his kidnappers being swept away downstream from him despite Namjoon floating peacefully in place.
Sluggishly, he swims in place, twisting his body so he finds them. Yoongi, long hair loose and free in the water, looks otherworldly. Of course, Namjoon is in his world, an intruder. He’s always been an intruder. In Yoongi’s arms, Taehyung flails. The water looks darker around him, the smoldering embers of his fire struggling to stay lit, even submerged.
When their eyes meet, Taehyung stops writhing for a moment. His hair waves like seaweed in front of his eyes, his mouth open with pockets of air escaping. He is dressed in what Namjoon last dressed him in except splintered and smudged - never before has he seen Taehyung’s fire touch anything on his own body.
Yoongi blows a bubble and pushes it out to him. When it pops in Namjoon’s face, it is like breathing in a fresh gulp of air. When his vision clears, Taehyung swims frantically towards him, eyes focused on Namjoon while Yoongi’s remain serenely locked on Taehyung’s retreating back. Namjoon cannot move, cannot swim, is held mostly in place by Yoongi, but the water drifts around and past him. It pulls his body along more gently than the tree pulled from its roots and floating far away. Yoongi too, seems to have lost control.
Underneath them, the cement cracks, rumbling bubbles brushing up against him. Namjoon gasps for air he doesn’t have. Unconsciousness presses down upon him, he is more frightened than before, because the roads buckling under them may not be the water or the heat before them, they might be him.
Namjoon manipulates energy, and everything has its own energy. That’s what they told him as an explanation when he was still growing. Taehyung told him, down in the basement, under the guise still of one of them, that Namjoon could snuff out life itself in a thing, in a place, in a person, if he wanted to. They put everything in front of him - weapons that disintegrated to nothing, plants that wilted, and the dog - the poor dog -
Taehyung said it so casually, so evenly. It was the first time he woke to someone brushing back his hair gently. “You wouldn’t harm a fly, would you?” he asked with a sweet smile even when he had seen himself how untrue it was. It was in the aftermath of Namjoon being electrocuted for more than a day or two. He couldn’t say how many days. Namjoon knew what they wanted.
If he wanted now -
If he allowed himself now -
Namjoon could pull Taehyung to him and push Yoongi away as forcefully as the other can push with water. Namjoon fears he already has without ever trying to, like the flowers that wilted in his presence, like the glass walls that shattered and the bones that once disappeared.
Rather, Yoongi watches Taehyung swim and lets him go. He swims towards Namjoon, the water around them rushing in a current around them while Namjoon remains still and Taehyung moves slowly towards him. As soon as Taehyung has him in his arms, they break towards the surface of the water, and this time, Namjoon is sure there is a push to assist them. He turns back to look, can barely make out Yoongi just there, drifting away. He watches them steadily and just as they break the surface, he lets a new current take him in the opposite direction.
Their heads break over the rapids with gasps. Above water, the peaceful spell has broken, but Taehyung looks and sounds himself when he cries out his name. Limbs still leaden, Taehyung pulls him against his chest and floats them along.
“We drowned the city,” Namjoon tries to say. He knows what Taehyung would say. He would say - I don’t care. They’re in gentler rapids that recede, levels lowering until Taehyung can stand, floating Namjoon’s body along as he walks until his body plants itself in soggy soil. Namjoon turns to watch the stream leave them - it rolls down the hill and into the river where it lays to rest.
Everything is gentle again.
“Namjoon-ah.” Taehyung traces his face, but all Namjoon can think is that Taehyung came back to him. Where did he go? “They hurt you, and I promised you, didn’t I? I promised they would never touch you again.”
“Tae.”
“Can you stand?” He helps him with Namjoon slumped into his side, his broken arm dangling between them.
“Your skin isn’t warm,” Namjoon mumbles.
“You can’t feel it over yours. You burn, jagiya.” Taehyung cups the back of his neck, feels his forehead.
“Yoongi-”
Taehyung doesn’t reply. They slip down the hill and wander a soaked street, some people cautiously stepping out of their safe and high refuge spots. The evidence of Yoongi is largely what is left behind despite he only aimed to quell what they started, and Namjoon barely remembers the newspapers of his grandparents before selection, but he remembers a history book with a great earthquake caused by one person. This flood will be news tomorrow.
They walk far enough to find a dry car to zap awake even while Namjoon falls asleep. Taehyung wakes him when they are at the cabin. Inside, everything is dry, and Taehyung lights the fire and candles and nothing is buzzing.
“I love you, too.” Taehyung sits with his feet in the fire. In his lap, Namjoon stirs. Frowns.
“Yoon-”
“He forgave me when he drowned out my foolishness.” Taehyung laughs once, but the tears on his face are wholly his water. “I would have burnt more than one city down to have you.”
If the city becomes a legend, they do not linger long enough to tell. Taehyung and Namjoon spend a handful of days resting, mostly in slumber, then pack a bag each. “It’s dangerous in other places too.” Namjoon rubs his injured arm, cold. He’s always cold, but then Taehyung rubs his arms for him.
“I will care for you,” Taehyung says, and Namjoon knows it to be true, although he isn’t sure about this part. “Perhaps, like you, I have always been in love.” He looks up to Namjoon as he says it.
The moment passes.
The lights above explode to sparks.
When Taehyung laughs, he glows. It is his hands. He opens his palms to give Namjoon a fire.