Continuum

스물 둘

"Did you know that you often just stare off into space?" Jeongguk's voice broke through Taehyung's thoughts.

Blinking slowly, Taehyung drew his attention away from the still-wet painting on the wall. It seemed that Jeongguk had purposely used too much paint in an attempt to make the colors drip down, so now the vibrant green eyes of the painted boy were crying and his smile becoming somewhat grotesque. He looked at the younger boy, who was watching him with interested eyes.

"You painted me."

Jeongguk looked confused for a second, then glanced at his newly-created artwork. "Did I?" he paused, glancing between the painting and Taehyung's face. "Huh. I guess I did."

"You didn't know?"

The boy shrugged. "I don't think when I draw. My brush thinks for me."

Taehyung glanced around at the other pieces of artwork around the room, be it painted on the walls, on actual paper, or on fancy canvas boards; at the seemingly normal-looking drawings that all had something bizarre about them. "Your brush is crazy."

"Why, thank you!"

Forgetting his place, Taehyung rolled his eyes at the chipper response.

"So, question," he said.

"Shoot."

Taehyung fumbled around for a moment, trying to decide what to say. He had already sort of asked the question to Hoseok the night previous, it shouldn't be so difficult with Jeongguk. "Why are you guys being so... comfortable around me? Like, why isn't the stranger danger alarm blaring in your head?"

Jeongguk eyed a brown-tinted bottle of some sort of liquor that was on the table. "Well," he began, "you don't seem threatening. You haven't tried to steal from us, hurt us, or otherwise caused us bodily or emotional harm. We were honestly more freaked out by you when we thought you were Korean. But, seeing as how the two resident linguistics here - myself being one of them - have ultimately decided that your accent is very Japanese, we have concluded that you are not Korean. You're probably just really weird. Or you are weird, is probably a better way to say that."

Taehyung bit his tongue to prevent himself from saying 'But I am Korean!' Instead, he sighed and decided to change the subject. "Speaking of brushes, you should brush your hair," he said, pointing to the tangled mess of black hair that was more of a rat's nest than a bird's nest... a bird's nest was too short.

The younger boy scowled and went back to the bedroom, where he came back a few seconds later yanking a hairbrush through his tangled tresses.

"I thought you didn't want to talk to me," Taehyung said.

Jeongguk winced at a particularly difficult tangle ripping out a lot of hair. "I did yell at you last night," he said. "It would be kind of ridiculous of me to avoid talking to you after that, wouldn't it?"

"You can control your shyness like that?"

"'Shyness' sounds so childish," Jeongguk grumbled. "Children are shy. What are adults?"

"On with the question?"

Jeongguk growled at his hairbrush as if that would make it go through his hair easier. All it did was make it more tangled. "Yeah, I can control it like that. Didn't you see me speaking to those men last night?"

"I happened to notice you singing and then one of them making out with you."

The boy's face morphed into one of utter disgust. "Fucking hell, Tae! We don't talk about that stuff during the day!"