Summary: You put your love and trust into people not things, you tell him.
They’ll leave, he says about humanity - about that precarious nature that both beguiles and terrifies him.
But they’ll love you back, you remind him.
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pairing. kth x f!reader.
genre + rating. slice of life. an angst angel food cake with a fluffy, strawberry centre. general.
tags / warnings. minor (ish) character death, heartbreak, kim taehyung is bad at feelings, summer romance, abandonment issues, moving on, healing. idk.
wc. 4.3k
He spends most of his childhood in Lyon, skirting the rivers in search of inspiration. It isn’t Paris, his mother tells him, but it’s just as lovely - quieter and more peaceful. She insists, one day, she’ll take him home, where his maternal grandparents are buried and she’ll show him all the parts of her world.
The first time he paints - eleven years old, seated at the edge of the Saône with a brush held between his teeth and pigment smearing his hands - his mother is delighted. He fills the house with his works: pretty watercolours that mimic the blue of the river, the white of boats, the amber of the sky. She loves them and she loves him and she tells him day in and day out, offering praise as readily as he offers his heart on canvas.
He’s sixteen when he migrates stateside, to where his father grew up and his mother’s accent stands out. He hates it there. It’s boring and bland and it stifles his imagination. There are no sail boats, no rivers, no pretty girls. The days turn grey and so does his mother, as if she’d left the best parts of herself back in France. She still tells him she loves him, promises that they’ll go back someday.
At twenty-one, he learns love isn’t real. His father files for divorce and his mother withers away. When he goes, he packs his bags and doesn’t look back. It’s a slamming door in an already abandoned home. Beautiful as it might be, love is nothing but infatuation - fleeting and easily broken and fit only for the books that line the study. It exists truly, wholly, only in the blood that runs in his veins.
At twenty-two, he realises absolutely nothing lasts, for his mother leaves too, taking her lilting laughter and rose perfume with her, buried six feet under soil she’d never called home. Her death is a nail in the door, sealing his childhood shut.
His father does not attend the funeral. Hardly anyone does.
The paintings - lovely portraits of her wide eyes and full lips, of Parisian sunsets and paved streets - are all he has. They serve as memories, painful reminders of the woman his mother once was, of the life he’d once lived. They fill the house that’s no longer a home - hasn’t been, for years - tucked away in a room he refuses to enter.
