Logically Yoongi knows that Taehyung’s handsome. He has eyes, and they’ve confirmed the man’s undeniable good looks. However, right now, right now, framed by candle light, Taehyung’s freaking stunning. The younger man defies description, but Yoongi tries anyway. Taehyung’s soft eyes are sparkling with laughter, and it’s beautiful. He’s excitedly chattering nonstop about kittens, sunshine, and his best friend Minnie, and it’s beautiful. Taehyung’s blushes, embarrassed, tinting his cheeks and ears a lovely shade of pink, and it’s beautiful. No matter what other characteristics Yoongi thinks to add, it boils down to one undeniable truth: Taehyung’s ing beautiful. And it’s distracting as hell.

“Do I have something on my face?” Taehyung asks and raises a hand to wipe his face.

“No,” Yoongi answers too quickly.

Yoongi knows something now that he didn’t know before. He knows bright eyes and boxy smiles and excessively excited chatter that makes his heart flutter. Something’s changed, everything has changed, maybe nothing’s changed at all; he’s not sure. All Yoongi knows is that Taehyung’s busted into his world and broken through the walls he didn’t know he’d built around his heart, around his soul.

“Are you sure? You keep staring. Are you disappointed you came here with me and not your crush? You didn’t hav-”

“No,” again, said too quickly, but he needed to cut Taehyung off. Yoongi thinks to himself that he’s feeling a lot of things right now, more than he can voice or explain, but regret’s not one of them. “I’m staring because your eyes are striking in the candle light. I’m staring because you’re different somehow and I can’t quite put my figure on it, but I’m not staring because I'm thinking about someone else or wanting you to be someone else. I can assure you, that is not the case.”

Taehyung blushes, full-on blushes, and Yoongi wants to take a picture of the moment, frame it, and hang it in his bedroom on the ceiling above his head. Since their arrival at the upscale restaurant some twenty or so minutes ago, Taehyung has been the one talking, and it’s not because Yoongi has nothing to say. The thing is, Taehyung’s rendered him speechless, dumbstruck by the man’s ethereal beauty. It makes no sense to Yoongi, none whatsoever, that the angelic being sitting before him should be in a class to learn how to deal with conflict. In Yoongi’s humble opinion, Taehyung’s smile can cure all the world’s issues. He needs to know why, what happened in Taehyung’s past.

“Taehyung.” The younger man looks up from the menu at the mention of his name, and he looks so innocent that Yoongi feels guilty for the question he’s about to ask. “How’d you end up in the class?”

Taehyung stares silently for a moment, and Yoongi wonders what thoughts are going through the man’s head.

“My roommate signed me up,” he starts before sighing so deeply Yoongi feels it in his soul. “I wasn’t always like this, scared of people. I like interaction; I like talking and touching. I like touching a lot. It's comforting to me. It’s not usually ual, it’s just how I’m wired you, know?” It’s a tangent and Yoongi knows it, but he makes a note of the information for, uhm, science. “I dated my boss for a while; he’s older by few years. He was gentle and loving and really nurturing when we first met. I’d just moved here from my hometown, Daegu. I missed my family, especially my dad. Looking back now, maybe he was just a surrogate-”

Taehyung sighs again, and Yoongi wishes he could take the boy’s burden and bury it in the depths of the sea. He wants Taehyung to continue, but at the same time, he doesn’t want the man to rehash memories that are painful to him.

“-which, thinking about it now, was unfair to him. Anyway, one day it dawned on me that I wasn’t in love. I loved him, but didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with him. I thought, what’s the point of staying together if I knew it wasn’t forever, so I broke it off. I mean, what if our soulmates came but didn’t approach because we were together?”

Taehyung looks so serious that Yoongi thinks he could believe in soulmates. Hell, right now he’s willing to accept anything Taehyung says, he finds the younger man so mesmerizing.

“Things were okay until-” Taehyung sighs again for the umpteenth, “until he started spreading rumors about my character. He’d tell people almost truths. At first, I ignored it. You know, rumors don’t tend to stick around, but then people started to look at me differently, began to whisper when they saw me. Stories then became truths that people believed, and I couldn’t fight them, so I guess I shut down, you know?”

Taehyung’s quiet for a bit, and Yoongi nods, looking at the younger man. The shine from earlier has left the younger man’s eyes, and there’s sadness and what looks like regret in its stead. Words of comfort have never been Young's forte. Right now, however, he wishes he had that gift.

“It went from just thinking people at work were talking about me, to believing that everyone, even strangers were. Logically I know it’s not true, but I just can’t shake it off. The fear has become a habit, I guess,” Taehyung says wistfully, and it’s the saddest tone Yoongi has ever heard.

“Taehyung, I’m at saying the right things. But anyone that believes lies about you is an idiot. What I don’t understand is why you believe things you know aren’t true about yourself?”

“I don’t know, to be honest. I thought it would blow over, and when it escalated instead, it was overwhelming. Other people believed it so wholeheartedly that even when I told them it wasn't the truth, they'd say I was lying. Then I guess I started to wonder if it was true once it got to that point. I lost all control.”

“Taehyung, no one should ever have so much power over you that they can make you believe things about yourself that aren’t true. Also, your boss is an A plus , and I hope I have the pleasure of saying that to his face someday,” Yoongi states angrily.

He looks up to find Taehyung staring at him; there’s a Look on the younger man’s face that’s hard to read. There’s a flutter, a rumbling, a flurry of butterflies taking up all the space in Yoongi’s gut; there’s something in Taehyung’s look that he wants to understand, that he wants to ask for further clarification on, but he’s worried the answer may not be what he wants to hear. Yo