A/N: This takes place the same night as the previous chapter

- - -

He’d woken up in the middle of the night; or, to put it better, he’d woken up in the middle of the early morning, since the night had practically already passed when he’d fallen asleep in the first place. Feeling like a lost spirit in search of something he didn’t know; his hands were inexplicably shaking and he felt like there was a heavy burden on his shoulder, he was almost brought to tears, his mind filling with thoughts he didn’t want to have.

He’d gotten up from the couch, careful not to wake Daesung, who was sleeping sprawled on his lap, and had found his way to his main hallway; the house was dark, the only source of light was the pale sun, which was slowly rising on the horizon, hidden by the tall buildings of the city.
 
The surroundings were extremely familiar to him, so he managed to get where he wanted without any additional light; upon seeing the expensive paintings hanged on the walls of the corridor, he calmed down. He’d never known why, exactly, but art had always had the power to ease his sometimes-troubled mind; he sighed contently and only looked around for a couple of seconds, before stopping in front of the first artwork that had caught his eye and observing it.

He knew many people didn’t understand that kind of art, and he really couldn’t see the reason; pretending that something didn’t have any meaning just because you couldn’t understand it was an ignorant behaviour.
 
The swirl of colors, which to a vulgar mind would seem randomly splotched on the canvas, was drawing him in, and it was the second time he found himself falling into something; and he thought that maybe that was just a part of him. To get through life, he’d to have something to fall in, to forget everything else, focusing all his attention in it; he didn’t have to think about how much his mind was messed up, that way.

The pigments mixed together were mesmerizing; he asked himself how it was possible that every time he spent a moment observing the paintings he passed by every day, he found a new part of a meaning to them, something to glue together with all the other thoughts, maybe even completely separating from the idea the painter had. Perhaps that was what he liked of abstract art: it could have many more meanings that it initially intended to, it depended on how you saw it.
 
He jumped slightly when he felt a pair of strong arms wrap around his waist from behind, but relaxed right away, recognizing the touch as familiar and welcome; he sensed him rest his head against his shoulder, breathing slowly.

Neither of them said anything, they just remained still, enjoying each other’s presence; Seunghyun kept looking at the painting, a smile forming on his lips, holding tightly to everything that surrounded him, that enveloped him completely, filling his mind.
 
“I really don’t understand art.” Daesung said, and the older could feel his breath near his ear, his voice invading his personal space more than he was already doing, shaking him to the core, permeating his veins and his bones. It was strange; he always declared himself someone who didn’t like physical contact, but it felt comfortable and natural with Daesung, and had been like that since the start.

He scoffed, faking annoyance, while in reality he was fairly amused; because he knew that, even if he didn’t get the point of owning so many masterpieces, the younger didn’t judge him for that, he understood that they helped him keeping his mind stable, he understood that he couldn’t live without them and the meaning they had for him.
 
The problem was that he also needed his dongsaengs. And he knew that he would soon be ripped away from them, and he didn’t know if he would survive it; he didn’t know how to survive without them.

All of them were like a masterpiece on their own, with different colors and different meanings to everybody who saw them; everybody who heard them sing, sing the words they wanted to give them, leave in history, leave in the air hoping someone would catch them. All together they made a single artwork, an incredible masterpiece that had no price, and would always be marked with fire on his heart, on his soul.

They were incredibly different and somehow fit together perfectly. Without them he felt like a misplaced puzzle piece, forgotten under a cabinet, never to be found again; but what gave him hope was that he knew that without him the puzzle couldn’t be completed and couldn’t make sense. That was the truest thing he knew; Big bang was nothing even if one of them was missing. They could work perfectly when they were alone, all separated; they were their own masterpiece, with their own story. But they were five, and forever would be; they had to be five, or the puzzle would keep being a meaningless piece of cardboard. Four pieces didn’t make a whole, they just awkwardly tried to fit in the empty spaces, without success. Nobody, nobody could divide them forever, they would always find their way back, as they’d done many times before that.
 
Five. Crossing rivers, on top of a mountain, burning in a raging fire, in a blooming garden, hated and insulted, loved and cherished, through good and bad; but together. Always.
 
Youngbae was more like the mother of the group than his little brother, trying to be the voice of reason between them and, considering those things, it wasn’t so hard to see why he was the only one who had gotten a wife; he was both the shyest of all of them and the boldest, always taking off his shirt on the stage.

Seungri really was the little brother he never had, and, even if he pretended to dislike him more often than not, everybody knew he was just taking to heart his job as a big brother, which was annoying him as much as he could; he was extremely loud on stage but had even the ability to become serious when needed to, for how much incredible it seemed.

Jiyong was his partner in crime, somehow the other part of his soul; not in a romantic way, of course, but he was the one who brought out the weirdest side of him –well, they brought out the weirdest side of each other, to be precise -, and only with him he could produce songs that had no sense to basically everybody else. And he understood how it was like to be lost in your own mind more than anyone else, since he was always in balance between G-Dragon and himself.
 
And then, there was Daesung; he didn’t even know how to describe their relationship.

He felt like saying that they were best friends, or even brothers, would be demeaning. It was different and the same as for Jiyong, all together. Daesung always seemed to get him, and yet he didn’t entirely understand him; he just accepted him as he was, with his odd personality and even odder hobbies, as annoying as he was. Another thing he knew was that they were somehow connected; he couldn’t stand seeing Daesung sad, or unhappy, because, when he did, he felt the same, it almost physically hurt and he wanted nothing more than make him feel better, and he hated it when he couldn’t do anything. When instead he was happy, he always felt warm inside, like his personal spring was bursting inside his soul, flowers growing all around him and protecting him from everything.

They were one; sometimes it was hard to remember they were two different people, with different lives and different paths to follow. Maybe that was why holding him, touching him every chance he got didn’t seem strange; it felt natural, right. Because it was.
 
He snapped out of his thoughts when he sensed Daesung move his arms away from his waist and felt his hands softly resting on his back, slowly rubbing circles on the spot, out of habit. He tore his eyes away from the painting and turned around, so that he was facing the younger, blindly pushing forward in the darkness and grabbing his hands, intertwining their fingers, like he’d done so many others time, even in front of hundreds of people without caring what they thought, that it was almost an involuntary gesture.

They didn’t say anything, they just found their way back to each other’s arms after a moment and stood still, holding on tightly; Seunghyun buried his face into Daesung’s neck, breathing him in. A thought passed through his mind like a lightning and he didn’t even know what it meant: ‘you’re so real’. He didn’t stop thinking about it; his mind was still too foggy to ask himself what he’d meant.
 
They somehow swayed back until Seunghyun’s shoulder hit the wall behind him; he would’ve probably freaked out if he didn’t trust Daesung completely. He knew he would never risk ruining one of his paintings, knowing how much he’d spent on them and how much they meant to him. He was squeezed in the empty space between two of them, and he knew they weren’t in danger.

His dongsaeng slid away from his embrace, but didn’t move away completely; he put his hands on the wall, near either side of his face –obviously he wasn’t touching any of the artworks hanged on there, because he knew that doing that wouldn’t just be an insult to the art community, but it would also be like touching a part of Seunghyun that he didn’t want to show to the world, like touching a part of his soul he was trying to keep protected; and he knew he didn’t want people to get that close to him, they were already an exception -and stared him down.

He didn’t know why he kept staring at him with those unreadable eyes, but he found that he didn’t mind; he could do it for all the time he wanted, for the rest of his life, if he could look back at him.
 
“But I don’t matter. As long as it makes you feel good...” he furrowed his eyebrows, as if he found it hard to formulate a phrase that made sense. The older man felt like he had the same problem. The only thing he could think was: ‘Of course you matter to me. And you make me feel good, too’. Which wasn’t odd per se, it was the truth, but he felt like he wanted to say so much more and that was everything he had in his mind; he opted for silence, finding nothing clever enough to say.

Daesung got slightly closer, maybe he wanted to see him better, maybe he was trying to find a meaning on his face, as if he was a masterpiece himself; Seunghyun’s breath caught in his throat for no apparent reason and he found his eyes moving without his consent, lowering themselves slightly and fixating on the other’s lips. Had they always been so plump, had they always looked so inviting? It wouldn’t hurt anybody if he just…
 
Okay. His eyes fell on a random patch of the floor, and he tried to focus on the emptiness. Enough with uncoherent and drunken thoughts; he had to stop his mind from wandering in unwanted places. He looked back up and noticed that Daesung hadn’t moved closer, but he hadn’t pushed himself back, yet.

For some reason, he realized again how much of a masterpiece he was, too; he calmed him down, he made him forget everything else, he couldn’t help but focus all his attention on him. Right now, it felt truer than ever: there was only him. His presence, his warm embrace, his arms, his hands, his face, his lips, his eyes, his breath against his skin, his voice. Him.

Out of sudden, the younger pushed himself away from the wall and looked over at the painting Seunghyun had been analyzing, probably trying to find a meaning in it himself. Seunghyun, instead, tried to even his breathing, finding it harder than it should’ve been; he couldn’t understand why something so simple had had such a strong effect on him.

He got up on his inexplicably shaky legs, feeling like he was falling without the wall to support him; he stepped beside Daesung and tried to focus on the painting as well, but his eyes kept being irremediably drawn back to him. He was so beautiful it would be a waste not to watch him every moment; he recognized a masterpiece when he saw one, and Daesung definitely was.