Taehyung drinks in the white of the room; the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the door, the sheets and him- everything about him. And he's rocking himself back and forth, back and forth and over again. He's bored but there's nothing that can be done. There's nothing in the room at all, aside the essentials for his everyday life. Nothing to sate his boredom.

And Taehyung feels choked until he feels a familiar presence. His face breaks out into a smile as he looks at the boy sitting across from him.

“I was getting bored all alone."

The boy only smiles at him and Taehyung can only drown in perfection. He leans forward and kisses the boy, the mole on the boy’s upper lip being covered only for a second. Even though it’s a chaste kiss, simply arising from Taehyung’s fondness for the other, he basks in the warmth that it provides, the butterflies going rabid in his stomach. He only looks at the other boy and smiles again.

And Taehyung pretends; he pretends that he didn't just kiss air.

Taehyung is animatedly conversing with the other boy when a knock on the door interrupts his rant. And he has to stop talking about how cows are related to aliens because in all cartoons it’s the cows that are abducted first.

“Food. Eat up, 15 minutes before turn in."

A loud voice announces monotonously, imperiously. He walks over to the door and picks the plate up. Looking at the food he can only sigh, thinking how anyone can even call the substance on the saucer food. But he knows it's all he'll get and he's not exactly in a position to complain. He sits on his bed to consume what he has been provided with.

When he's about to take the first bite, he motions to the boy sitting across from him. The boy shakes his head in refusal and Taehyung isn't surprised. He never eats and Taehyung always offers, at every meal. It’s their routine and Taehyung prefers not breaking it. He eats and continues their previous conversation while the boy supplies occasional smiles and silent laughter.

It’s night again, not that Taehyung would know unless the guards announced it or the lights went off. Lying in bed with the other boy, he turns to face him. He traces his features with his hands, gently as if caressing an ancient artifact, scared that the boy might turn to dust at the slightest touch. Midnight locks fall into warm brown eyes while Taehyung trails a finger down his nose bridge. His hands ghost over the boy’s lips as he whispers, more questioning to himself,“How are you so perfect?"

The boy looks at him with the answer in his eyes but the words never leave his lips. And Taehyung wonders when this happened. He would talk before, would laugh and hold Taehyung in his arms. But now he just stays and smiles. Taehyung blames himself, blames himself for not remembering the exact octaves of his voice. He blames himself for not remembering how the boy’s slender arms would wrap themselves around his waist and the other tiny details of the boy’s features and expressions that had been forced out of  his mind. But he cuts off his thoughts again and focuses his attention on the one beside him.

And he pretends again; he pretends that all this while his hands weren’t floating through air.

It’s the same routine every day; one Taehyung is bored to death of. The lights come in and he wakes up to a color he has come to hate: white. He had never thought that he could ever come to hate a color, not when he loved each and every one. The yellows of his smile, the orange in his laughter, the blue of his sadness, the red in his love, the pink in his childishness and he has to stop himself before things get out of control; because even those colors have faded and turned white. Sitting up in bed, he sees the other boy sitting on the floor. He stares for a while, losing himself in his own mind once again before he snaps out of his revere.

It’s well after breakfast when a voice outside his door announces that he has a visitor. The door opens and two people enter, dressed in white, and he is once again reminded of how sick he is of the color. They hold his arms behind his back and him to the meeting room. It’s only after his arms are free and the men have left that he raises his eyes from the ground.

“Jimin!"

Taehyung screams and throws himself into the arms of the older boy and giggles when an effort to spin him around is made. But Jimin's significantly shorter than him and it doesn't turn out so well. They giggle in sync, blocking the exit of words that are waiting to flow out, to be exchanged. It’s when they sit down on the chairs that Jimin gets to start talking.

“How are you doing, Tae?"

"We’re doing well, Jimminie. How’ve you been ? You look skinnier than last time."

A puzzled expression briefly settles itself on Jimin’s face before he realizes what Taehyung meant by his curt reply. He sighs and rubs his temple. They've been through the same thing so many times and Jimin is left to wonder how stubborn someone can be. And how much one can love another individual. From what he could see in Taehyungs case, love definitely was infinite.

“Do I ? Well I’m eating well, better than you at least. Look Taehyunggie. We've been through this. He was important to all of us, not just you. But it's been so long now and…"

The glare that Taehyung is giving him sets him back a little before he decides to continue, even though he knows it'll end like all those times before. He can't see his best friend wasting away like this.

“Tae, you just have to accept it. I heard about what happened when your parents came to visit the week before."

Jimin stops himself when he sees the look Taehyung is giving him, and he knew that if looks could kill, he'd very dead and buried long by now.

“Okay, fine. Let's talk about something else. I brought you doughnuts. I know the food here's , so…"

He holds open a box of treats and Taehyung takes two. Jimin can only watch with a pained heart as Taehyung eats one himself and offers the other to someone who's not there. To someone who's not been there for some time. And the validity of that sentence is proved soon enough, as Taehyung mutters an unsure ‘for sure?’ and shrugs before putting one doughnut back into its place.

He decides to not talk about this today and just spend time with Taehyung. Jimin ignores Taehyung’s insistence and decides to make small talk.

Soon enough, Jimin is doubled over in laughter across from Taehyung who's on the floor. It's an hour or so into their meeting when a guard announces that time's up. Jimin holds Taehyung in a tight hug and he feels himself tearing up.

"Take care of yourself Taehyung. Please."

“Oh god! Who called my mother here?”

Jimin snorts at that. He pulls Taehyung in for another hug and just before letting go he whispers into his ear, “Let him go, please."

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Taehyung can only smile at the other boy when he's back in his room. As he walks towards him, his mind wanders back to Jimin’s words, and something raw, like guilt, eats at his being. His parents had been here a week or something before, and Taehyung is forced by his conscious to think back upon the event. The quite atmosphere and polite exchange of words were exactly what he had been expecting, till his mother decided to touch up on that topic. He remembers memorizing each and every crack, line and mark on the floor while his mother droned on, undeterred by his silence.

“Taehyung, we let you have the boy. Your father and I, we were so compromising considering the situation but this? This is absurd! You’re such a talented boy and for you to be wasting away like this... it isn’t fair. You know that right?”

His mother is met with silence, one she is very much used to after all those previous visits. She can only sigh and continue; hoping that eventually one word or other will penetrate through the barricade her son has built around himself.

“Taehyung, man up and face what was happened. We liked him too, you know? He became like a second son, so warm and kind hearted and…”

Taehyung looks up to see tears cascading down his mother’s face while his father holds her hand. And somewhere in the back of mind, the realization, although late, settles in. ‘They did like him.’ But then he’s left to think that it’s hard not to. He doesn’t remember meeting one such person who wasn’t in love with Jung Hoseok. His mother’s voice brings him out of his trance.

“Look at what he did. The little girl lived, her mother was so thankful. The poor woman didn’t know whether to rejoice or mourn. Taehyung, he’s dead. He has been for 6 years now. You have to stop this pretence that...”

“Get out.”

“Listen to me, Taehyung, please.”

“GET OUT. I SAID GET OUT. GET OUT RIGHT NOW.”

And it’s only when he’s being forced down onto his knees that he sees the table, which had been in the middle of the room, lying upturned in one corner. He sees the horrified look on his mother’s face, as she visibly shakes, while his father holds her. He sees the chair he was sitting on, lying in two pieces against a wall. And it’s only when he’s being dragged outside of the meeting room that he realizes what he’s done. Once this memory is done, Taehyung is forced to live another.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

He can make out Jungkook, standing by himself, dressed in black. And he can also make out the tears flowing down his cheeks. Absent mindedly, Taehyung thinks that the look doesn’t suit the younger because he’d rather see a smiling, mischievous look on his face any day. He watches as Jimin goes up to him and puts an arm around his shoulders, trying to comfort the younger; even though he himself is crying. And Taehyungs heart aches, because no one likes seeing people close to them hurting.

His heart, however, shatters when he sees Yoongi.

The man looks dead, the pale skin having lost its usual suppleness and glow. He remembers the first time he saw the other, thinking that he was freedom carved into skin; the defiance in his eyes and how the world for him was numbered only to a selected few.

How the other always looked rather fragile, given his pale skin and small stature, but there had always been an edge to the fragility. Taehyung remembers thinking he was like a porcelain doll, beautiful but deadly; in the sense that he was breakable but the person breaking him wouldn’t go unscathed. He would shatter into pieces but those pieces would draw blood from the perpetrators hands.

But the man in front of him now... just looked as if he had been kissed by death. Eyes red, no doubt from all the silent crying he had been doing, filled with sadness; one emotion that seemed to multiply itself inexorably. He watches as Yoongi fists and unfists his hands, watches as his lips move silently near the casket he’s standing. And Taehyung can almost hear the apologetic words roll of his tongue, he can hear the emotions that Yoongi likes to keep buried deep inside him.

That was not all. Taehyung wished that he was the only one suffering, but he wasn’t.

Out of the corner of his eyes, he notices Namjoon walking up to the makeshift stage with unsure steps. He wonders what the older boy will say; he always was rather good with words.

Namjoon’s deep voice sends shivers down Taehyungs spine and he wonders since when there was the cracking edge to that stable voice. The speech starts off with the usual: an introduction, all the formalities and such. It’s when he gets to talking about the person that Taehyung feels something die inside him.

“About Hoseok… I might score high points in linguistics, but when it comes to this particular person I’m left speechless. But I know I need to say something, even though no words can ever describe this man.”

After a brief cessation that Namjoon took to contemplate and reconsider his words, he started again, “You don’t need to actually be close to him in order to grasp the meaning of my words, because when you’re walking through a road at night, you can see a source of light from hundreds of miles away. Many of us, me included, have walked that path, so full of darkness and three steps away from suffocating, when that inkling of light had been our salvation.

The brief glance Namjoon threw Yoongi’s way didn’t escape Taehyung’s view. Almost subconsciously, a smile crept up his face at the remembrance of the fondness Yoongi had for Hoseok. Taehyung knew how everyone adored Hoseok, but none as purely and deeply as Yoongi, maybe other than himself.

“And for a brief moment, the light was brighter than ever. Bringing the sort of happiness only found in fairy tales in our lives, before… before it burned out like the wick of a candle…”

At this point, Namjoon’s voice had given way. It was almost physically painful to see the man, whose eloquence never betrayed him struggling with words, and it was all the more painful to see him forcing himself to just persevere, no matter how meaningless and repetitive the words were, just for the sake of the others, who were completely reliant on Namjoon to voice out what they were screaming in their heads.

“I might… I might be taking this low quality analogy that can never do Jung Hoseok justice, a bit too far. But that’s the image of Hoseok I will forever have ingrained in my heart. Not loving Hoseok is harder than carrying The Himalayas on your shoulder, that much is certain. Not getting along with Hoseok is harder than discerning the exact location of a chameleon on a tree trunk. Ah… look at me, speaking in present tense… as if he was here.

“That’s expected, because… because it has been… infinitely easier to accept the abandonment of my own dream upon my parents’ insistence, than it has been to accept Hoseok’s death.Throwing away a part of me has been more doable than coping with this loss. ”

The astonished glances thrown his way from his own family weren’t able to deter Namjoon, who spoke with some sort of a renewed determination, tears that had been prickling at the corner of his eyes falling profusely, shaming even the Niagara.

“The best things in life are volatile, including life itself- everyone often says. I contradict. Hoseok’s death proves nothing but the contrary, he has been the best thing in life indeed, but he has never been volatile. He won’t disappear even in his death, he will forever surround us like the lingering smell of a rose even after it has withered.

“This speech has gone on long enough, apparently the words that refuse to arrive always refuse to leave. I hope Hoseok’s death would not be enough to kill him, and I hope we won’t be the murderers. But I want to move on, move on with Hoseok’s being surrounding my life until I finally meet him, perhaps before all of you.”

With a minor grateful expression, he calmly stepped down from stage, as if his eyes weren’t flooding his cheeks with salt water.      

As Namjoon steps of the stage, he furiously rubs at his eyes with the sleeves of his coat. Taehyung watches as he walks up to Yoongi, Jimin and Jungkook and all of them wrap themselves in an awkward but warm looking group hug. He watches as Hoseok’s mother goes up to the casket and places a kiss on the forehead of the body. The tears flow down her face and she repeats the words, “I’m sorry.” like a prayer.

And Taehyung has to drag himself out of his own mind as his breath catches in his throat. He looks at the other boy in the room and forces his attention onto him. He pretends, he pretends that he didn’t just see all of that.

The older boy is sitting on the lone bed, legs swinging to and fro. Taehyung extends a hand towards him and watches the older boy take it. He, however, waits to feel it. A deep frown settles itself on his face when minutes pass and yet there’s nothing, whereas they're still holding hands. He stands there, just looking at the man across from him. He watches as his apple cheeks blossom as he smiles and the way his hair falls in straight, silk locks as he tilts his head. He has to take in a deep breath before he voices out his request.

“Will you...Will you dance for me, please?”

It comes out in a whisper but Taehyung gets it out before the words can die in his throat. He pulls his hand back to wipe away the tears forming in his eyes as he watches the boy laugh silently. He can hear him say the words, even though no sound comes out.

“Where’s the music, darling?"

"You know you don't need the music."

And surely soon enough, he is twirling around the room, giggling as he's being spun around. He's wrapped in a hug as they sway side to side and Taehyung's heart breaks when he hears humming. Because how many more times will this happen, before he breaks completely?

"Tanananalalalala. Da dun da dun.”

“I remembered, again." is the only Taehyung can croak out before the first tear falls from his eyes.

He looks into the older boy’s eyes, ones that seem warm and yet so sad. He sees the front lights of a car reflected in them, sees another swerving. Instead of the pleasant humming, he hears the scream of a woman, of a mother. He hears honking and another voice. This one's also screaming as well but it doesn't feel like it’s someone else.

And as the voice keeps screaming, to try and stop what has already happened from happening, he feels his own throat go dry. And he feels warm liquid on his face, his hands and sees it running in a river of red on the road. And his screaming increases in pitch. He feels his arms cradling a limp body, one that had been functioning just seconds ago. And it all happened so quickly.

The little girl on the crossing, the green light, the feeling of warmth leaving his hand in a sprint- it all keeps repeating itself in his head even though they’re his memories and not a playback from a broken film reel.

It’s relentless in the way it replays in his head till the lights are on and there are hands on him holding him down. A loud voice, one he knows, is commanding other people. He sees the familiar face of his doctor, Seokjin, come into focus. And it's when warm hands are pressed to the sides of his face that he realizes he's still screaming.

It’s thanks to Seokjin that his hands and legs aren't tied down to his bed and that he is excused with just medicine being shoved down his throat. And once more, darkness envelops him, the kind that creeps on you. But he doesn't have to worry about the darkness, not tonight, when the drowsiness from the medicine is already kicking in.

He turns to his side, and there he is. But present with him, is the medicine. And the older boy looks like a scratched record being played, something Taehyung would rather not see. So he closes his eyes and turns on his back.

“Can I ask you something?"

"Hmm."

And Taehyung has to stop his stomach from doing backflips. Because his voice is back; now laced with sleep, just like back then. And it’s the same voice that Taehyung loves no matter if it’s when it’s whispering sweet nothings to him, or screaming at glass breaking pitch because there's a cockroach flying, laughing or even when it’s pronouncing the simplest of words, uttering strings of endearing terms for Taehyung.

“Do you love me?"

“I do, more than anything else in the world, Taehyung. It should've been obvious when I left my parents for you."

“More than dancing?"

And Taehyung holds his breath as he asks this, because maybe, just maybe, he's crossing lines. But then he wants to laugh at himself because what lines hasn't he crossed already? He’s in a mental ward for god’s sake.

He hears a breathy laugh before his response. “Yes, more than dancing."

And warmth blooms in Taehyung’s chest and spreads across his entire body. The weird feeling pooling in his stomach has him wondering if it's him or the medicines. There are more questions but then they aren't really questions because he knows the answers to them. But there's this one he wants to ask, one he hasn't had the courage to even ponder on. This is a line he still hasn't crossed, he thinks idly. Maybe he's feeling bold, or it's the medicine as he'd like to tell himself but he knows he's just tired. And he might be nearing his breaking point; it has been 6 years.

“How real are you, Hoseok?”

“I’m as real as you are Taehyung."

"Liar," is the only thing Taehyung can whisper before sleep whisks his conscious away and he can stop his tears from flowing.