Chapter 61: The Boy Behind the Canvas
The studio was uncomfortably sterile.
It smelled like cold wires, fresh tape, and the lingering
scent of something industrial that no one could quite name. Lights perched on
long mechanical arms were being angled, tested, flicked on and off. A boom mic
hovered overhead like a curious bird.
But Jungkook barely noticed any of it.
His palms were pressed tightly in his lap, ringless fingers
fidgeting beneath the silk fall of his sleeves. His bare feet brushed the
polished wood floor beneath the low velvet couch. The moment was real now—too
real—and though he’d said he wasn’t nervous, his throat felt like it had
swallowed fire.
Taehyung and V were standing just off-camera, watching.
Not looming. Not instructing.
Just there.
That alone was the only thing keeping Jungkook grounded.
The interviewer, a well-respected woman from an elite arts
journal, sat across from him with calm, polite eyes and a tablet in her lap.
Her voice was warm, curious, but respectfully quiet when she finally said, “You
don’t have to answer anything that makes you uncomfortable. This space is
yours.”
Jungkook nodded slightly. “Thank you.”
“And… do you want to begin with your name, or still go by
‘Koo’?”
He hesitated.
Then his voice came soft. “Koo. That’s who they know. And I
think… I like that.”
She smiled.
A silent signal passed to the crew. The lights
adjusted—subtle but purposeful—and the red light above the camera blinked on.
“We’re rolling.”
In the first five minutes, Jungkook barely looked at the
camera.
He stared at the floor once, at his hands twice, and at the
interviewer’s eyes the rest of the time. His voice was quiet, sometimes
drifting, sometimes too fast. But it was him.
When she asked, “How did your first painting come to
be?”—his eyes lit with something ancient.
“I was seven. I wasn’t supposed to use the walls. But I
did.”
A laugh slipped from his lips, fond and sheepish.
“My mom cried. But she didn’t yell. She just stared for a
long time and said, ‘I think… he sees something we don’t.’ After that, she gave
me paper. I haven’t stopped since.”
“What do you see when you paint?”
Jungkook blinked slowly, chewing on his lower lip before he
answered.
“I see sound,” he said. “And emotion. Sometimes I smell
color. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s not… normal, I guess. But it’s
mine. And the things I can’t say? They go onto the canvas for me.”
His fingers curled tightly around the hem of his sleeve.
The interviewer was still, absorbing his words.
“And your recent exhibition—it felt different from your
earlier works. Deeper. More personal. Would you say… something changed in your
life before that collection came to be?”
Jungkook hesitated for the first time.
A moment passed.
And then, as if summoned by some instinct, his eyes flicked
toward the edge of the frame—where both Kim Taehyung and Kim V were watching.
He didn't need to speak their names.
He didn’t need to say how much.
But he nodded.
“Yes. Something… changed. Or maybe I changed. I think I
learned what it meant to belong somewhere. To someone. Or… maybe to two
someones.”
His voice cracked just slightly.
“And I stopped painting only from pain. I started painting
with love.”
Off-camera, Taehyung’s hands were in his pockets.
But his knuckles had turned white.
V’s jaw was set, his expression unreadable—but the tips of
his ears were red. They didn’t speak. Didn’t move. But something in both of
them screamed: he is ours.
And the world was seeing it.
By the time the interview wrapped, the entire studio had
fallen into silence.
No one clapped. No one rushed in.
It was a silence of reverence, like watching someone take
their first steps across a frozen lake—and realizing the ice was strong enough
to carry them.
Jungkook stood, nerves still coiling in his belly as he
approached the two men waiting at the edge of the lights. His eyes were wide,
anxious.
“Was that… okay?” he whispered.
Taehyung didn’t answer.
He stepped forward, cupped Jungkook’s cheeks with both
hands, and pressed a long kiss to his forehead.
“It was perfect,” he said into his skin.
V was behind him already, wrapping his arms around both of
them from behind, burying his nose in Jungkook’s hair.
“No one’s going to forget this,” he whispered. “Not ever.”
That night, the internet caught fire.
Clips from the interview were everywhere—translated into
multiple languages, turned into edits, soundtracked with emotional piano music,
dissected frame by frame. But what stunned the world most was not just the art.
It was the soft curve of Jungkook’s smile.
The trembling edge of his voice when he said, “I used to
think love was something you only painted. But now… I know it’s something you
live in.”
The world had seen countless artists.
But they had never seen this boy—this angelic, haunted,
radiant boy—wrapped in the silent protection of two silent, powerful men.
The mystery of the twins only deepened.
People speculated about their roles. Their power. Their
closeness to the artist. Were they his protectors? Were they his lovers? Were
they just patrons?
But no one knew.
And that was how it would stay.
Later, in the privacy of their bedroom, the soft silk sheets
returned like a ritual.
Jungkook had curled between them again, smaller than before
somehow—tucked into himself, eyes tired but wide, vulnerable in a way only the
two of them had seen.
Taehyung was trailing lazy circles on his stomach with his
fingers. V had one hand cradling the back of Jungkook’s neck, the other under
the covers, holding his thigh possessively.
“Did I do the right thing?” Jungkook asked again, voice
barely a breath.
V leaned in, brushing their noses. “You changed everything.”
Taehyung kissed the dip beneath Jungkook’s ear. “And you’re
ours.”
Jungkook smiled sleepily.
“Yours,” he echoed. “Only yours.”
They didn’t make love that night in a frenzied way.
It was slow. Reverent. Fingers threading through hair.
Kisses so deep they almost bled. A worship of skin, of soul, of breath. Every
moan Jungkook gave was swallowed between them, muffled against mouths and
collarbones and hands that held him like something sacred.
By the time he drifted off to sleep, warm and stretched
between their bodies, the world outside had turned colder—but inside the
mansion, inside that bed, everything glowed.
The boy behind the canvas had stepped into the light.
And he was no longer alone.
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