“Did you know that you often just stare off into space?” Jeongguk’s voice broke through Taehyung’s thoughts.

Blinking slowly, Taehyung drew his attention away from the still-wet painting on the wall. It seemed that Jeongguk had purposely used too much paint in an attempt to make the colors drip down, so now the vibrant green eyes of the painted boy were crying and his smile becoming somewhat grotesque. He looked at the younger boy, who was watching him with interested eyes.

“You painted me.”

Jeongguk looked confused for a second, then glanced at his newly-created artwork. “Did I?” he paused, glancing between the painting and Taehyung’s face. “Huh. I guess I did.”

“You didn’t know?”

The boy shrugged. “I don’t think when I draw. My brush thinks for me.”

Taehyung glanced around at the other pieces of artwork around the room, be it painted on the walls, on actual paper, or on fancy canvas boards; at the seemingly normal-looking drawings that all had something bizarre about them. “Your brush is crazy.”

“Why, thank you!”

Forgetting his place, Taehyung rolled his eyes at the chipper response.

“So, question,” he said.

“Shoot.”

Taehyung fumbled around for a moment, trying to decide what to say. He had already sort of asked the question to Hoseok the night previous, it shouldn’t be so difficult with Jeongguk. “Why are you guys being so… comfortable around me? Like, why isn’t the stranger danger alarm blaring in your head?”

Jeongguk eyed a brown-tinted bottle of some sort of liquor that was on the table. “Well,” he began, “you don’t seem threatening. You haven’t tried to steal from us, hurt us, or otherwise caused us bodily or emotional harm. We were honestly more freaked out by you when we thought you were Korean. But, seeing as how the two resident linguistics here - myself being one of them - have ultimately decided that your accent is very Japanese, we have concluded that you are not Korean. You’re probably just really weird. Or you are weird, is probably a better way to say that.”

Taehyung bit his tongue to prevent himself from saying ‘But I am Korean!’ Instead, he sighed and decided to change the subject. “Speaking of brushes, you should brush your hair,” he said, pointing to the tangled mess of black hair that was more of a rat’s nest than a bird’s nest… a bird’s nest was too short.

The younger boy scowled and went back to the bedroom, where he came back a few seconds later yanking a hairbrush through his tangled tresses.

“I thought you didn’t want to talk to me,” Taehyung said.

Jeongguk winced at a particularly difficult tangle ripping out a lot of hair. “I did yell at you last night,” he said. “It would be kind of ridiculous of me to avoid talking to you after that, wouldn’t it?”

“You can control your shyness like that?”

“‘Shyness’ sounds so childish,” Jeongguk grumbled. “Children are shy. What are adults?”

“On with the question?”

Jeongguk growled at his hairbrush as if that would make it go through his hair easier. All it did was make it more tangled. “Yeah, I can control it like that. Didn’t you see me speaking to those men last night?”

“I happened to notice you singing and then one of them making out with you.”

The boy’s face morphed into one of utter disgust. “ing hell, Tae! We don’t talk about that stuff during the day!”

Taehyung scoffed, falling back unceremoniously to sit on the couch. “So, what?” He challenged. “It happens and you just never talk about it again? That’s how that works?”

Remnants of the fury Jeongguk had displayed the night previous came back into his eyes. “We-”

“Not exactly,” Namjoon’s much calmer voice cut in. He walked through the door, laundry in his hands, and threw them onto the opposite side of the couch from where Taehyung sat. He pulled the hairbrush from Jeongguk’s hair and began brushing the dark locks himself with much better luck. “We accept what has happened. We realize it, we understand that it’s a part of what we do, and we move on with our lives.”

Taehyung sighed and sat a little straighter. “Don’t you ever want to leave?”

The two stared at him in surprise.

“You do realize that you are speaking to the two out of the six that have no choice but to be here, right?” Jeongguk asked.

Taehyung looked up. “Huh?”

Simultaneously, the two raised their right hand, revealing the trackers that Taehyung had seen for the first time the night previous. “We were forced to come here,” Namjoon said. “That, or stay in prison. We got lucky to be pretty enough and to know music to be let out.”

“And now we can’t leave,” Jeongguk said before his entire body shivered. “Not that I would ever want to. I don’t want to go back to prison.”

“Why were the two of you in prison?” Taehyung asked. “Why do you have to wear trackers?” Cold realization ran through him. “Did you two-”

“No!” they both shouted at the same time.

“We never-”

“I didn’t-”

“They never-”

The two of them sputtered over their own words. Taehyung jumped up and started waving his hands. “Okay! Okay! I believe you!”

The stopped shouting.

“What I meant to say,” Taehyung said, sitting back down, “is why did you guys get stuck in prison?”

The boys looked confused. “Because our families committed crimes,” Jeongguk said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Yeah, but you didn’t do anything wrong…” his voice trailed off.

“So what?” Namjoon asked.

Taehyung didn’t have an answer. He didn’t know how to explain how unfair it was that these boys had to live with the consequences of what their families had done. It was something so intrinsically obvious that he didn’t know how to say it.

Obvious or not, the two of them seemed clueless.

“Nevermind.”

The boys gave him an odd look but then went back to what they were doing. A few minutes later, Jeongguk had his usual silky hair back and Namjoon went to go clean the kitchen, humming as he did so. Jeongguk went back to the mostly-finished painting and picked up his paintbrush again. He stood there, silently staring at the painting for a minute.

“What’s wrong?” Taehyung asked.

Jeongguk shrugged. “I know what I’m painting now,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“What do you mean?”

The younger boy sighed, then set the paintbrush down. “I’ve never thought about what I was drawing or painting until I was done with it. Now I know I’m painting you and I don’t know what to do about it.” He walked away from the painting and unceremoniously flopped onto the couch across from Taehyung.

Taehyung nodded in confirmation, then dug around in his pockets for his phone. He froze when an odd sensation ran through him - the feeling of someone touching his face. He looked at Jeongguk, who was gently running the tips of his fingers over Taehyung’s cheekbone, his eyes downcast. The fingers ran down his jawbone, following the curvature of the bone to his chin. There, they raised and ran over his lips. As they felt the side of his nose, he had to speak up.

“What’cha doin’?”

Jeongguk didn’t answer, just stood up and went back to his painting.

“He’s creepy like that,” Namjoon said from the kitchen. “Give him a minute, then you’ll understand what he did.”

The youngest boy picked up his paintbrush and began adding various colors to the painted face on t