"You should have seen it coming." ㅡ @voiures
A camera and a gun were nearly two-like things. The barrel likened to a sprawling lens, the bullets held captive and cozy within the magazine basically equivalent to a roll of film anyone could purchase from the filmlog machine erect around the corner. In this way they would’ve been entirely identical, only if it weren’t for their bittersweet almost; because as alike as they were, so keen to take something from the world, the purpose of which they could be wielded were entirely reigned polarities of one another.
Midway through the recital, sitting amidst a plethora of straight-backed bodies dressed taut and proper for the show, Taeil wondered what it would’ve been like if it were a gun he were aiming at Jimin instead, rather than his digital film camera—loaded full with bullets that can’t hurt; about thirty-six exposures on a 35mm roll. He held his weapon and wondered if these people knew what it were like to strip one bare of his sound and soul without the assistance of a single bullet.
If Jimin only knew what he would do.
But none had paid him heed, not while Jimin, ethereal as divine revelation yet precise as a hot-red blade, swept the stage on nimble toes and in his wake, their breaths. The performance began to unravel and Taeil pointed his lens in earnest wherever he could see the dancer’s shimmering soul, welcomed in exposure and translated language of a succinct heart into precisely seventy exposures. Before the grand jeté’s ceased entirely and the curtains felled in silence, red as blood, Taeil had a story of scarlet to tell. Jimin disappeared backstage before he could empty his last two rounds, and after another moment of good measure, the entire theatre hall collectively drew in the very first, reinvigorating breath after what had felt like a lifetime of enchantment. No one moved, as if none could dare part so soon with whatever they’d just seen. Taeil drew his gaze back to his camera and emptied the last two monochrome shots between his feet.
It’s not congratulatory flowers and treats that he carries with him some days later, passing the hyung’s threshold like a phantom seeking a host; greeting the tasteful art on the walls, flicking at shiny medals and trophies neatly kept on display shelves. Jimin had asked for something worth keeping, a one thing that couldn’t ever slip from or pass in his grasp, or melt on his tongue. So Taeil had brought him his soul in seventy parts, tucked safely between two hundred and eight pages worth of an epistolary novel, as one would flower petals for preserving.
Taeil presses the cold hardcover over the crest of Jimin’s forehead. On his face there’s a smile that tells mischief as it reaches endlessly towards the sharp, winged corners of his eyes. He jests, seeking quarrel. “Here’s your gift, my Lord. Like it? You can’t open or read it now though–”
Jimin swiftly swats him back, not without salvaging the book first. His small, deft palms skim across the cover and Taeil can see it clearly in the way he draws his eyebrows that he’s curious to nose his way towards the margins without his help. Under the bright cascade of his living room lights, Jimin looked nothing like someone who’d been shot seventy times.
Then Jimin does the perfectly expected and points up his chin at Taeil, tone a soft brushstroke against listening ears as he insists, “I like it. Now I command you to read it to me.”
“What? Right now?” Taeil blurts out, tone jumping an octave. Those eyes of brown, crystalline beauty beckon his disbelief, which arrests any trace of smugness remaining across Taeil’s refined profile and rips it off at once.
He watches Jimin side-step around him and understands then, only after the other man rests on the arm of his sofa, that he should’ve expected this.
“Oh so we talked about it for nothing?” Jimin offers a humourless smirk, but shrugs as if conveying disappointment with Taeil’s idiocy. “You should have seen it coming.”
And Taeil blindly takes the bait in stride, but in his head he labels it as a mere challenge to test his ability to apply his word. He almost instantly clamours into the seat with a boyish huff, bun coming slightly loose during the impact of his plopping. He snatches the book back, cracking it open to the fresh first chapter.
“Fine. But only the first chapter, not because you’re making me but because I want to be the first to show you how to read this.”
“Whatever you say, loser.”
Taeil clears his throat and begins to read. But the chapter comes and passes his throat so rapidly that it ends almost jarringly, with an abrupt slash of cruel red underlines. Designed to intrigue, much like the felled curtains in the theatre hall. This letter was only meant to be read once, then destroyed. In the moments before the world comes apart, she reads it again.
The very first piece of Jimin’s soul slips into the dancer’s lap as Taeil finally gives way to silence. It flutters and flails as it tumbles through gravity, like delicate little butterfly wings, until Jimin in a perfect développé lands flush by bruised up knees that still recall those movements as their prayer.
