When Taehyung and his best friend turn twenty-seven, their families decide it's time they settle down. Together. Or with someone, at least.
To survive the pressure, they do the only thing that makes sense to two lifelong friends who are out of optio...
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TAEHYUNG HAD BEEN painting since before the sun came up. The world outside was veiled in the blue-grey hush of early winter morning in Seoul, and the only light in his apartment came from a single antique lamp perched precariously near the easel, casting the soft gold pool around him like a spotlight on a man unravelling.
The canvas in front of him was a war zone – deep oxblood smeared over bruised purples and murky greys, layers and layers of paint hiding whatever tenderness had once existed beneath. He couldn't even remember what he'd painted at first. A quiet landscape, maybe. A window. Something beautiful. But, now all that remained was the aftermath: textured, grey, angry, loud in a way his voice never was. He hadn't meant to destroy it. Only to keep working. Only to make sense of the chaos in his head.
But at some point, the gentle intention had curled into something messier, something that mirrored the gnawing undercurrent inside him.
If he looked, like, really looked, the way he tried not to, he could still make out the shape of two hands beneath it all. Faint outlines, nearly buried under the storm of colour, like ghosts from a dream he no longer trusted or believed in. The hands had been reaching once, not quite touching, suspended mid-air with a stillness that felt sacred. One hand had been slightly smaller, sketched with softer strokes and a delicate suggestion of bracelets around the wrists. Hers.
He'd painted them weeks ago, back when things still felt possible, back when he'd just freshly moved, all the way from home, before time and distance and silence scrawled at the edges of everything he'd built up in her absence. Back when he thought she'd reach back maybe more than a week. The hands weren't perfect, not symmetrical or anatomically correct. But they'd been honest, vulnerable.
A snapshot of what they almost were.
What he wanted them to be.
Now that softness was buried, swallowed up by pigment and doubt and the kind of aching learnt to carry in silence. What was left wasn't a painting – it was a reckoning. A haunting piece of tenderness he couldn't bear to look at directly, so he'd covered it until it became something else entirely. Something louder. Something angrier.
His bare feet were cold against the wooden floor, paint sticking to the pads of his toes. The shirt he wore hung off one shoulder, frayed at the edges, blotched with years of pigment like a wearable archive of every late-night spiral. He'd been up for hours, couldn't even remember if he slept at all. And the hours had bled into each other without warning, the way the colours bled and mixed into the canvas, unevenly.
He exhaled slowly, then stepped back, surveying the mess he'd made like it might rearrange itself into something comprehensible if he looked hard enough. Instead, he saw a reflection of everything he couldn't say out loud.
His phone buzzed from the kitchen counter twice, then once more. He didn't reach for it. Not yet. He already knew who it was. Probably Jimin, checking in before the day began, reminding him to get dressed, to eat, to go pick her up like he wasn't counting down the minutes already. Or maybe it was his mother, with some carefully phrased birthday wish that would eventually loop back to questions about marriage, about settling down, about what he was doing with his life. But right now, Taehyung didn't want any of it. The calls, the expectations, the pretending.
