chapter twenty-three ;; bath bomb
jeongguk's perspective
°☆.。.:*・°☆

Watching the colors swirl through my dreams, glitter infused and turning the skin a blue masked sheen, I felt like I was lucid dreaming. I was very aware my body was not placed in the same bed it fell asleep in. And my god, I was dreaming. For years, my brain was deprived from the feeling, from the flying feeling that makes you feel like you're about to fall any moment. People would usually revolt at the way my body fell for hours on end, but I was relishing in the wind breaking through my fingertips.

Glitter soaked my body, entering every crevice and pore of my pure and opened being. The eyes are the window to the soul, and right now my whole body was glass. I felt immaculate, settled, free, no longer prompt with nightmares of undeniable darkness. It's like the stars on my white ceiling that had begun to fall, dying off the with the stickiness on their backs, were finally forming something, helping me the way I always desired, a light, a guide, a hand.

A warm hand, a firm hand, a hand with no distinct owner outstretched towards me with the glimmer of a thousand stars. His face was blank, shoulders broad and arms strong. Hands almost as coarse as bark took hold of mine, drawing me up and up until we broke through water the held in a pond situated in the sky, only to be met with a galaxy of pink. It swirled and swirled, and at the same time my eyes mixed with hues of green and blue, sending an overdrive of exuberance to break about. My skin shimmered a mint tinge as my eyes mixed with a rainbow.

Deepened air that held an undeniably shivering expression drew across my neck in a softened manner, my rainbow eyes beginning to settle into a clear crystal blue, and the man I decided to call Mr. Tan, due to his skin on undeniably lean arms around my waist, drawing me backwards as we both stumbled like drunks. Instead of disgusting liquor coursing down my throat with a burn so powerful, I tasted lemonade devilishly cherry. As the elixir ran down, Mr. Tan drew closer as a heated touch was pushed onto my forehead-

My eyes spring open with a gasp, breath heavy and chest rising with such a velocity it was confusing. Light from stars streamed through my blinds, casting highlights of organic shapes across me and whoever had their arms wrapped around my waist. It really was no mystery, looking down to see tanned arms, soft with the exception of the hands. Taehyung brings his face away from mine after planting a soft kiss onto my forehead. Secretly, I adored them, enjoying how they felt against my skin.

Whatever dream of expression filled bath bombs my mind had conjured completely dissipated and left me in a state of nostalgia. It's like if I still reached my skinny arm up now and twisted my finger around, I'd be able to swirl it in the upside down pond that unleashes into a world of pink glitter.

"Go back to sleep and rest some more." He finally whispers into my shoulder, circling his thumb around my protruding hipbone, "It's still early." Taehyung allows his eyes to flutter back shut, long eyelashes spilling over like butterfly wings.

"What time is it?" I hesitantly ask into the quiet, blank room.

It was an attempt to keep Taehyung awake with me as long as possible, not wanting to be left in a lonely darkness where my mind would be bound to wander. Right now was not the time for me to deeply think like always. Taehyung opens his eyes once more with a slight struggle. It was the same as being met with organic honey and somehow made me tired in the process.

He lifts his head up, leaning over me in order to look at the clock. A tanned neck thinly showcased in front of me eyes, tendons showing with the tilt of a head. It looked pretty, and I was about to reach out and trace the intended lines that looked winsome with my tongue until he lazily laid back down. The sound of pillows and sheets being smacked down with force followed as he let a slight exhale escape his lips, eyes shutting but instead facing the plastic stars and not me.

"It's 4:36." Since his arms were no longer keeping me warm, chills ran down my spine, and I reluctantly crawled closer to his side, accepting the limb wrapping around me and drawing my body closer.

"Please stay awake." I whisper after a moment, my head on top of Taehyung's chest.

His heart was steady and slow, a deep pumping sound thumping through and through that reminded me of his voice. Kim Taehyung was in fact human, a fact that was sometimes hard to grasp onto when he is the way he is. No matter how many times he's too annoying for me to handle and throws me around with some of the words that pass his mouth in a shock, and the actions that leave me going in all directions, it'll always be hard to accept it.

The most prominent words were from the time he called me beautiful.

All of that felt like ages ago, when it had only been a week and a half, maybe two. The word was one of the things he whispered into my ear when I was a ball in his lap. Beautiful. He said I was beautiful like a mantra. I don't think he realized I caught along, but it always came back into my thoughts every now and then.

Since then, Taehyung has been out less and less on the football field and more with me. I felt extremely bad, like I was stripping away one of his strong passions. It was sad to think all of this would one day be over once we would both age and change. Taehyung would find interest in new, better things, than a helpless boy far too deep in a relentless darkness to be taken out, although I solely believed I was getting better, distracting myself with the one who was currently running his fingers through my hair.

"I didn't plan on going back to sleep." Taehyung says back, letting out a throaty chuckle.

A nice silence fell over and enveloped the both of us in a fall blast of chill and dying trees that looked beautiful through the slow death, that is until I spoke, "I dreamed." My eyes were looking down at Taehyung's hand, laying limply on the bed that I couldn't know if it was classified as just mine now.

"What was it about?" His fingernails draw light patterns into my back that was no longer sore, only a cool toned yellow on the skin.

"A really magical world. If it even was a world...M-Maybe it was a galaxy lightyears and lightyears away that still hasn't been touched by Man. It was pure, I'll give it that, and it had this sheen over everything. There was this...man? I don't even know his name, but he was faceless yet extremely warm and shined brighter than anything else. He was made up of the stars on my ceiling, and god, I wish the world was real, a world where ponds are in the sky and pink spreads throughout like a bath tub with a recently placed bath bomb." I spoke quickly and quietly, doing all I could to wrack my brain and pull the books in my mind written on the dream out of their shelves in The Library of Important Thoughts.

"That sounds really nice." Taehyung smiles, "I'd take you to that world, and we'd discover all of the upside down ponds we could find."

A silly grin forms onto my face at his sleepy thoughts. Taehyung always spoke fantasies and, sadly, lies when he was tired or just awoken from a deep slumber. He spoke as if we were a couple- and we were. We were a couple of fantasy and fiction, not quite a reality but not quite a dream.

It was stuck in between like ghosts are in between life and death, lost in an unknown dimension. Surely, Taehyung and I were more than friends...but we weren't together. I wasn't the one on his arm, metaphorically, but I was the one on his arm physically almost everyday. It gave me a bittersweet comfort that made me especially not get my hopes up.

"Hey...Taehyung?" I call out into the sound-slumber that had returned. When I first said his name, my intentions were to ask him about us, but quickly backed down and immediately conjured up another idea.

"Hm?"

"What...What are th-the, um, wings on your- your keychains for?" His fingernails stop dragging across my small back. It wasn't my business, and I definitely did not have the right to bring it up so bluntly, not even softening the blow.

"It has to do with my...uh...family." He softly says, looking up at the plastic star stickers. I closely watch his eyes jump around, looking at each star scattered about and observing them, counting the edges and mentally tracing their form. I've done the same thing he's doing right now millions of times before but not in a while. Taehyung reaches into his pocket, pulling out the keys that jingle. I didn't even realize he was sleeping with them, "See, there's three of them." Taehyung shows me the angel wings, and I slowly take them out of his hands.

"They look pretty." I quietly say while running over the engraved details with my thumb.

He slowly breathes in, like he was going to make a comment, but seems to back out last second and carefully continues, "Each pair is a family member that passed away." The words were spoken firmly and with precision, making me listen even closer and finally take the limp hand on my bed to hold.

"Are the smallest wings for your sister?" I ask, no longer laying down but sitting criss crossed in front of Taehyung. Actually, I was sitting on his outstretched legs. As Taehyung rested his back up on the headboard of my bed, he smiled bittersweetly and took them out of my hands.

"Little sister, yeah." Taehyung stares down at the silver engraved wings for a moment before meeting my curious and still tired eyes again, "See this one?" He picks out the medium sized one, my assumption that it was his for his mom, "This one's my mother's, and hers was the most expensive one."

"Really, why?"

"I was always the closest with my mother and decided to get hers in gold. I never liked the color of it, so instead of getting a complete silver one, I got her gold painted silver." Taehyung quietly informs, outstretching the silver- or rather gold -charm, and to see it better, I leaned forward to run my eyes over the details making each feather have its own texture. Even with it being a mold that thousands of others had, these three seemed so much more special and better than all of the others, probably because I now understood the backstory.

"That's very sweet, Taehyung." I quietly say, looking up from the charm suddenly becoming so much lighter with the gleam of daylight reaching over the horizon to create a breathtaking twilight outside of my house.

There was a world outside full of billions of other people, and for some reason, I was in my bedroom with Kim Taehyung at this time of morning, the Mr. Tan from my dream. It had taken me all of this time to have the revelation that should've come much easier and quicker. A boy seeming to be made of stars, a warm hand that connected to a loving heart.

A quick kiss is felt on my lips, and it happened so quickly that it took me a moment to realize what had happened. I'd been swept out of my thoughts by the same boy I'd been thinking of. Even if the kiss lasted two seconds, it left me dazed and felt so much better than the one shared on the car hood.

"Thanks." Taehyung whispers as my face turns a shade of pink when realizing the lips that just moved while talking were the ones that planted the faint and impactful kiss onto my own.

And instead of being cut off by Taehyung saying that he should take me home, I return the gesture onto his cheek instead, too afraid to bring my lips back onto his. The fear was that I wouldn't be able to stop once I did.

"Welcome." Mumbling his same tone and in return earning a harsh yank to my hand, with a yelp, I was laying down on top of Taehyung, my head placed onto his chest with the steady heartbeat, while the rest of my body laid across his. Once again, a comfortable silence outstretched over the two of us.

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idk i felt like you guys needed a break from the angst + they weren't even supposed to kiss in this yikes

originally, tae and kook were supposed to share a bath w a bath bomb bt i had no idea how to get them there nd it didn't fit v well oops

aLSO THANK YOU FOR 5K wtFF hOw