Love Maze | TK°

(22) Reciprocated

Third Person's POV

Love Maze is still a strange state, one that Taehyung is tentative to move within. He spent so many years dressing himself in suit jackets and the role of a polite young man who charmed everyone he met and pretended to have no pain, played out his cards and hid parts of himself in order to fit in, into families and companies so that he could gain as much as possible and keep all the pain to himself.

Moving back to Korea felt like moving home to Jungkook, back in Austria he never quite got the hang of what a home could be, of what it could mean beyond the pressure to be something better than he was and to act in ways that didn't feel natural then but that had become instinctual by the time he set foot back in Korea again.

Love Maze is strange. Sand is softer than it looks to be and Taehyung wiggled his toes in it unconsciously, sighing at his phone and biting back a string of profanities. New business contacts- nothing he wants to deal with right now or act like he cares about when there's much more important things waiting, undemanding, for him right here on the same stretch of sand.

Office had been neglected a lot but did he care? 

No, not right now. 

He locked the phone with its stack of emails, dropped the device onto the blanket on the ground next to his feet and didn't even watch it fall and didn't care if it broke. Emails can wait and socks have been discarded and he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, had undone several buttons because there is no costume that needs to be worn anymore– nothing to force himself to fit into because he found out two minutes into Jungkook's return that home means Jungkook. Jungkook and the way Taehyung doesn't have to halt his own instincts or plan his sentences in advance in order to fit in because he just does.

They do. 

Together.

Jungkook was confused earlier, when Taehyung packed them into the car and drove. Jungkook hated how he couldn't interpret the twitch of a mischievous smile upon Taehyung's lips after all this time, yet loved it simultaneously because maybe he knows now that he'll spend the rest of his life watching it, doing his best to coax it out as often as possible and giving in and getting into the car was the least he was willing to do for it today.

Now, standing on the beach by their discarded belongings, it made more sense. Jungkook stood by the waterline with his jeans rolled up to his ankles and Soo held safely between his wide palms made sense, made a beautiful painting highlighted by the setting sun on the horizon and it didn’t matter that Jungkook hadn't asked a word about where this idea came from. All that mattered was that they're here.

Jungkook had been out there with Soo for a good half an hour at this point, while Taehyung's attempt to look at the screen instead of his love and son have failed spectacularly. There are photos on that discarded phone of Jungkook walking out towards the ocean with Soo in his arms, of him crouching down in the wet sand and talking animatedly with the boy about the flow and ebb of the water, all of it golden and gleaming and beautiful.