Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/11366463.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      방탄소년단_|_Bangtan_Boys_|_BTS
  Relationship:
      Jeon_Jungkook/Kim_Taehyung_|_V
  Character:
      Jeon_Jungkook, Kim_Taehyung_|_V, Park_Jimin_(BTS), Jung_Hoseok_|_J-Hope,
      Min_Yoongi_|_Suga, Kim_Namjoon_|_Rap_Monster, Kim_Seokjin_|_Jin, Psy?
  Additional Tags:
      Alternate_Universe_-_Space, Prostitution, Underage_Prostitution, Underage
      Sex, Consensual_Underage_Sex, Bunny_Hybrid_Jeon_Jungkook, Hybrid_Jeon
      Jungkook, Top_Jeon_Jungkook, Bottom_Kim_Taehyung_|_V, Kim_Taehyung_|_V_&
      Park_Jimin_Are_Best_Friends, Consensual_prostitution, Alternate_Universe
      -_Aliens, Anal_Sex, Anal_Fingering, Anal_Play, Blow_Jobs, Hybrid/Human
      Relationship, Shower_Sex, Oral_Sex, Rough_Sex, Orphans, Space_Pirates,
      Space_Battles
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-07-01 Words: 41653
****** Bunny ******
by Kookie_andCream
Summary
     Taehyung is a bounty hunter just in this for the money. Jungkook is a
     bunny hybrid and an escaped former whore. Taehyung is hired to hunt
     Jungkook down, and he succeeds, but…he didn't expect Jungkook to be
     one of the most adorable, broken creatures he's ever met.
     Between space pirates and Easter eggs and asteroid belts, something
     tentative and precious grows between them, and Taehyung learns many
     things: what it means for someone to save his life, what it means for
     someone to care more deeply about him than themselves, what it means
     for someone to give up everything—their dream, their homeland, and
     their pride—to stay by his side.
     But Jungkook learns far more painful lessons. He learns what it means
     to save someone's life. He learns what it means to love someone so
     blindly and foolishly that he doesn't care whether his feelings are
     returned. And he learns, worst of all, the sting of betrayal born out
     of his own trust.
     Because Taehyung may have learned many valuable things, but he's too
     afraid to learn the most important: the heavy responsibility of the
     words I love you. And that failure will cost them everything.
      
     Set in the world of the graphic novel Saga
Notes
     I shall make a confession. I based the head of Sextillion on Psy. I
     am not even sorry
     There may or may not be gazelles in North America in the Yellowstone
     Park region. This is irrelevant now, but come to think of it I'm
     pretty sure there aren't. Bear with me anyway
     This fic contains an embarrassing amount of cuddling don't say I
     didn't warn you
     Links to pictures scattered throughout fic, click on them, they're
     fun; they aren't the highest def but they'll do
See the end of the work for more notes
Jungkook was once a good bunny.
He still remembers. You’d think that year after tired year of being a whore
would erase such tender memories from a mind, but he still remembers what being
safe felt like, surrounded by the arms of his family who all looked like him
and cared for him and loved him. It was always warm in their underground
burrow. The constantly-burning reed fireplaces lit the earthen walls with
gentle yellow light.
Sometimes Jungkook thinks back to that time in his life just to torture
himself, when he was barely just a kit and the hunters came. He’d been the
smallest and runtiest out of his litter. His mother knew—she always knew what
was coming to their warren, whether good or bad—and she knew that they weren’t
going to escape that time. Bunny hybrid ears are sought after by Qesmillion
traders because they’re believed to bring good luck. Everyone on Tokki,
Jungkook’s home planet and the planet of rabbit hybrids, knows it’s a load of
rubbish which costs hundreds of them their lives every year. But Jungkook’s
kind is hunted down anyway, and that day was his family’s unlucky day.
Jungkook hid himself in one of the chimneys until the traders left, the only
kit out of his family small enough to fit there. He couldn’t see what was going
on from where he was wedged, but he could hear all the horrible sounds. And in
some ways, that was worse, because his imagination has not spared him the
details over the years.
When he was sure they were gone, his exhausted muscles gave out and he slipped
out of the chimney. Feeling numb, he stepped over the slumped bodies which had
once been his family on the ground, cruelly truncated stumps still bleeding
atop their heads, and made his way outside to his family’s little ship. It was
a dingy wreck, barely held together by sheets of bolted tin metal and prayers.
The Qesmillion traders hadn’t bothered stealing it. In the distance, fires
burned and screams resounded through the night, and Jungkook knew he couldn’t
stay on Tokki. His people, if there were any remaining of them by the time the
traders were done, could offer no sanctuary to him if his family were not among
them.
Jungkook took the ship and piloted it off Tokki and into space. He realized by
the time he’d been aimlessly flying for hours that he was running low on fuel
and he had nowhere to go.
The truth of it hadn’t hit him yet. His mind ran on gears oiled by
practicality. He needed to eat. That meant that he needed money. That meant
that he needed to earn it.
Almost unconsciously, he turned the ship towards Sextillion.
He’d heard vague stories about Sextillion before. He knew what it was, but he
was too young—he didn’t know the full truth of it. All he knew was that it was
a planet where people worked by giving up their bodies to strangers who
sometimes paid handsomely for the service.
At the time, it was the only place he could think to get a job. Besides, the
fuel tank was running empty and Sextillion was nearby: only a few solar systems
away.
He landed there just as the ship was about to give out. Two huge, garishly
made-up female heads tottering atop life-sized legs in fishnet stockings
greeted him, asking what service a young, adorable bunny like him would like.
He was still numb, and while he normally would’ve been equal parts revolted and
fascinated by the walking heads, he had no space in his mind to think about
that then. He gave them four blank words: “I want a job.”
The suggestive smiles slid off their oversized faces. They began to look
contemplative. Muttering among themselves, they led him to the head of
Sextillion.
No one knows his name, but everyone knows his face. A fat man, three inches
shorter than Jungkook, never seen without a pair of dark sunglasses on his
face. Always wears a suit.
The man got straight to the point. He asked Jungkook whether it was true that
he wanted a job on Sextillion. Jungkook replied emotionlessly that yes, it was.
Then the man slowly, deliberately took off his glasses.
He had no eyes. Jungkook didn’t flinch, only waiting for further instructions.
Satisfied, the man put his glasses back on. You’re hired, he told Jungkook,
changing his life with two simple words. Jungkook would learn later that anyone
who came to Sextillion looking for a job but reacted at all when the man took
off his glasses was refused.
Jungkook signed a contract and was put to work immediately. He understood, in a
distant way, that the strangers with their hands on him were taking something
away from him, something precious, but his mind felt too disconnected from his
body to feel it, or care. By the time his mind caught up, he’d become used to
being used. To being a whore.
He’d intended for it to be temporary. He’d expected to pass under the radar,
blend into the rest of the whores on the planet and just become another of the
millions of faceless prostitutes there. But in his coming there, he didn’t know
that he was the only bunny hybrid to ever work on Sextillion. Rabbits are the
proudest of the hybrids, and all before him would rather have died than become
whores.
People were fascinated with him. Strangers tweaked his nose, pulled his ears,
squeezed his bobtail. The head of Sextillion quickly realized that Jungkook’s
uniqueness meant that he could charge people exorbitant amounts to fuck the
only bunny hybrid on Sextillion, and as the price on his body shot up, so did
his allure.
Public interest in him grew. Under the name Bunny, his popularity blew up. He
rarely had a free moment, and his bed saw more than a dozen people daily.
Anyone who was anyone in the galaxy had had a taste of him. He went to bed
exhausted and woke up exhausted, but he was bound by contract to keep working,
and the pay was unbelievable.
Years passed that way. Jungkook learned to beg, learned to round his eyes and
look adorable, learned to twitch his bobtail and droop his ears until even the
saintliest of people couldn’t resist him. He slipped utterly into the
submissive role his job entailed. There wasn’t a planet in the Milky Way which
wasn’t papered with chibi posters advertising him. His real face wasn’t known
by anyone except his clients—that was part of the irresistible, jaw-droppingly
expensive Bunny’s mystery.
Jungkook grew restless. He had long grown accustomed to giving away his
body—that wasn’t what bothered him. But this wasn’t his dream. As a young kit,
he didn’t look up at the stars and think, I want to be a whore on Sextillion
one day.
The truth was, he wanted to visit Earth. He’d heard about its beauty when he
was just months old and never let go of that daydream, even when news spread
across the galaxy that pollution had made it uninhabitable and its occupants
had been forced to vacate it. He knew it was stupid. No one even really knew
where Earth was anymore. But all his life he’d never seen natural beauty, never
been able to wonder at something which wasn’t artificial and synthetic, and he
was tired of being blinded by neon lights.
So Jungkook escaped.
It wasn’t hard. He caters to clients with a wide range of fetishes, and one
had, for some reason, paid handsomely to teach Jungkook combat. Under the old
man’s eye, he learned how to fling knives, fire guns, throw punches. Of course,
at the end of every session, he actually had to sleep with the old man, but
that wasn’t what Jungkook remembered. Jungkook held on to the knowledge the man
had given him and told himself he would never forget it, because he knew it
would come in useful. He was almost sorry to hear that the man had been torn
apart by vengeful Skuvians, creatures with pincers for hands and a ring of
teeth circling their perfectly spherical heads. He should have known better. No
one crosses a Skuvian unless they have a death wish.
Jungkook waited for a military general to come, one of those old geezers with
jowls and tarnished war medals pinned to his faded uniform. The man had paid
for the barest minimum—half an hour with Jungkook, anal sex and nothing
else—but Jungkook made a trade: for the man’s gun, he fulfilled the man’s
deepest, darkest fantasy.
The man left satisfied and with a lighter belt, and Jungkook parted ways with
him with a newfound horror of spiders. Jungkook doesn’t even want to go into
what the man made him do. He’d thought the sexual acts offered by the menu his
clients chose from was depraved, but it was really nothing compared to what
idle minds can come up with.
Using his well-earned combat skills, Jungkook blasted his way out with the gun.
It was a narrow escape—the gun ran out of charge halfway through, and Jungkook
had to jump out a window while using a pot lid as a shield—but he made it off
Sextillion on a stolen magical ship. The ship could turn invisible, so no one
pursued him. And Jungkook was free.
Or. Well. Sort of.
He piloted to the nearest, most densely populated planet he could find and
booked a motel room whose landlord asked no questions. There, he sits down now
on the bedbug-infested mattress and wonders what the hell he’s going to do. He
escaped under the influence of a flimsy dream, starry-eyed with visions of
piloting the tiny one-seater ship he’d stolen to Earth, where he’d start a new
life and live happily ever after. But he has no idea at all where Earth even
is.
He sighs heavily. Settling on something to do, he reaches up and pushes aside
his hair, untaping his aching rabbit ears from his scalp. He had to hide them
so he wouldn’t be recognized. His bobtail is easier to hide—all he has to do is
wear long tunic tops which cover the top of his pants, and nobody's the wiser.
Suddenly, his nose twitches. His spine straightens as he sits up. His mother
used to say that that was one of his greatest gifts—he’d inherited her ability
to tell when danger was coming.
They’re already on his trail. He must have not been careful enough.
Grimly, he tapes his ears back to his scalp and covers them with his hair. For
good measure, he pulls the hood of his tunic over his head. Instinctively
reaching out before remembering that he left all his possessions and money on
Sextillion to make the escape easier, he runs across the room and jumps out the
window.
Another one of his bunny abilities: he can hop from heights which would kill
other people and land safely. He alights on the ground lightly. It’s been a
useful gift on more than one occasion.
“Maknae,” he shouts, startling the crowd of people milling around the dingy
little motel. Shit. He shouldn’t have summoned the ship where people could
see—what’s the point of having an invisible ship if everyone sees you make it
visible, for God’s sake—but he has no time. With every minute that ticks by,
his pursuers approach nearer.
He jumps into the open top of Maknae and yanks the glass roof down. Grabbing
the controls, he takes off and escapes into space.
~
All is quiet in Taehyung’s snazzy hotel room.
Taehyung’s lived a nomadic life for as long as he can remember. He spends his
life in and out of rented rooms, sleeping light in case one of his enemies
catches up to him.
Or his enemies’ friends. Or his enemies’ lovers. Or his enemies’ enemies, for
robbing them of the chance to kill his enemies. The list goes on and on,
really. The point is that Taehyung has good reason to sleep light.
He rolls over in his sleep, the sheets cool and smooth on his skin. Wow,
bedsheets. This is the fanciest place he’s lived in for a while. The last
mission he completed really fattened his wallet.
Suddenly, the lights snap on. Taehyung jerks out of sleep and out of the bed,
body twisting and reaching for the gun on his bedside table before he’s even
fully conscious. He hears a shout as he aims the gun at the figure beside the
light switch and begins to squeeze the trigger. A blur of motion whips through
the air, and the gun is knocked out of his grip.
He stares at his empty hand, then at the ground. Wow. He just took down a whole
herd of rogue Nascites, and he just got disarmed by a hotel slipper.
“Tae,” someone says, laughing. Taehyung doesn’t look up, staring at the
slipper. He’s not going to give his gloating hotel-slipper-disarmer the
privilege of eye contact. “Tae, relax. We’re not here to kill you.”
And then he has to look up. Because he recognizes that voice.
“Jiminnie!” he yells. He flings himself across the room and crushes his tiny
friend in a hug.
“Ow, ow, let go of me, I’m short, I can’t breathe,” Jimin gasps from somewhere
within his armpit. Taehyung lets go, so happy to see him that he’s nearly
jumping with joy. He rarely gets to see one of his only friends in the galaxy
because they’re all so busy, and when he does get to see one, he treasures
those moments.
Taehyung takes Jimin in. “I don’t know about you, Jimin,” he says teasingly,
“but I feel like you’re starting to look more girlish these days.”
Jimin touches his face self-consciously. He’s an Androgen—androgynous, human-
like creatures from a planet of cold fires which burn on water. His planet is a
medley of opposites, and so are its inhabitants—they have no gender.
“I think it’s the eyeliner,” Jimin says anxiously, voice high and sweet. “Do
you think it’s too much?”
Androgens, for some reason, come in two sizes: Jimin is the smaller one,
standing a full head shorter than Taehyung. Jin, another friend of Taehyung’s,
is the larger size.
“No, you look good.” Taehyung’s eyes wander to the doorway, and his heart
leaps. Jin’s there too! And Namjoon! And Hoseok! Even Yoongi!
“You guys,” he says emotionally as they amble in, the noise level in the hotel
room automatically kicking up. “Why are you all here? What’s this for?”
“Tae,” Jin says, “how could you forget?”
“It’s your birthday,” Yoongi says without enthusiasm, but that’s a lot even for
Yoongi. It’s not his fault—he’s Plutonian, born after the planet wandered away
from the solar system containing Taehyung’s very own home planet Earth when the
sun’s gravity weakened. He’s from one of the few inhabited planets which don’t
orbit a star, so he didn’t come across natural light until he became a bounty
hunter, which the six of them all are. He still scares Taehyung a little thanks
to the adaptations his people have made to survive on such a cold, dark,
lightless planet: his skin is unnaturally white, so pale that in some places
you can see his veins, and his eyes are completely black, all pupil and no iris
or sclera. The last adaptation is so he can see in the near-total darkness
which permanently engulfs Pluto thanks to its lack of nearby stars. Taehyung
flew there once intending to visit Yoongi, but he barely managed to land his
ship—no artificial light is permitted on Pluto because it can blind Plutonian
children. He blundered out, sightless, one hand clutching his ship fearfully in
the immense darkness. He was quite sure he heard a group of Plutonians laughing
at him in the distance. Deciding that there was no point visiting Yoongi if he
wouldn’t have been able to tell if his friend was standing a foot away from
him, he fumbled his way back into his ship and flew away to brighter planets.
Yoongi usually wears sunglasses to protect his eyes. Seeing that he’s squinting
at the brightness of the room, Taehyung turns the main lights off and switches
on a single dim lamp. Yoongi smiles gratefully, uncovering his eyes.
“I completely forgot,” Taehyung says to them, plopping down on his bed. They
sit down around him. “After that mess with the Nascite king coming after me, I
didn’t have any time to think about things like birthdays.”
“Well, lucky we remembered, then,” Namjoon says. He’s from a mining planet.
Small horns poke through his hair.
“And we got you a present!” Hoseok says, bouncing up and down excitedly and
making the whole bed shake. Hoseok’s grandmother was a horse hybrid, so he has
faint traits—namely, if you look at him from certain angles, he looks like a
horse. The rest of his blood is Duiyaman. His skin changes colors depending on
his emotions. Right now, it’s a bright, happy yellow.
“I thought you guys were all busy,” Taehyung says, amazed. “Jin, weren’t you
and Jimin resolving issues between the Androgens and the Xanderians? And I’m
pretty sure I heard that you were hunting down Bronch Acruvis, Yoongi.”
Yoongi shrugs. “Yeah, but what kind of friend would I be if I didn’t take time
off to celebrate my friend’s birthday, huh?”
Taehyung is smiling wide enough to hurt his cheeks. Sometimes he goes weeks
without talking to people. He’d go to clubs and socialize because sometimes
he’s so lonely that it aches, but he can’t do that because it would ruin the
anonymity his job requires.
“Unfortunately, though, we don’t have much time,” Jin says apologetically. “We
all have our work to be getting back to. You know how it is.”
Taehyung does. Bounty will not wait to let their hunters catch up on missed
meals or missed sleep. He nods, understanding.
“So here’s your present,” Hoseok says in a singsong voice, pushing a little
card into Taehyung’s hands.
Taehyung looks down at it. “Huh?” He turns it over. It’s a slim plastic card
with a barcode engraved on it. “You gave me…a credit card?”
“No, no,” Jimin says patiently. “It’s a voucher.”
Taehyung blinks politely. “For?”
“Kid,” Yoongi says, slinging an arm around Taehyung’s neck, because he likes
calling people ‘kid’ for no particular reason sometimes, “have you heard about
Bunny?”
“Bunny?” Taehyung searches his memory. “You talking about that rabbit hybrid
whore on Sextillion? The one it costs, like, a fortune to sleep with?”
Of course he knows Bunny. Everyone’s seen the chibis of an adorable little kid
with rabbit ears and a bobtail, rosebud mouth pushed out in a pout.
“That’s the one,” Yoongi says.
“This is a voucher for me to sleep with him?” Taehyung raises the card.
“That’s exactly it,” Hoseok says cheerfully. “Now I see why you’re one of the
best bounty hunters in the galaxy. These deductive skills!”
Taehyung can’t even tell whether he’s being sarcastic. “Wait, wait, wait. Hold
on a minute. You know I don’t agree with prostitution.”
“Oh, right.” Jin gestures airily. “These Earthling ethics of yours.”
Taehyung was born on Earth until pollution made it utterly unsuitable for life.
He and everyone else on the planet were left with no other option: vacate to
the moon. Taehyung, though, created his own option: he borrowed his father’s
spacecraft and went on a tour of the galaxy, looking for work. He was planning
to return to Earth eventually, but circumstances interfered. While he was away,
he received the news that a rogue meteor had crashed into the moon and utterly
destroyed it, obliterating everyone Taehyung had ever known and loved in one
fell swoop. Taehyung, heartbroken and grieving, suddenly without family or
friends, turned to the chaos of fighting to fill the emptiness of loss.
He travelled from planet to planet, fighting in rings where bloodthirsty
strangers placed bets on him to win or lose against his opponents. He garnered
a reputation: Kim Taehyung, pretty boy Earthling with a past, who fought like
the devil and defeated anyone you could throw at him.
It wasn’t long before his five friends noticed him. It was one of his biggest
fights: he was up against a Colossus, inhumanly strong, green-skinned aliens
with red tattoos who usually come in at over seven feet tall. The one Taehyung
faced that day in the ring looked about eight foot. Fans of the Colossus in
attendance of the fight had brought a coffin for Taehyung.
But Taehyung wasn’t afraid. The destruction of his planet and everything he’d
ever known had numbed something in him, perhaps broken it, and fear was an
unfamiliar concept to him. It’s what most people remarked on when they watched
him fight: he wasn’t overly confident, but he didn’t have a shred of fear—he’d
throw himself at opponents twice his size with what should have been fatal
abandon. And somehow, armed with that utter lack of caring whether he lived or
died, he always emerged unscathed with his opponent on the ground.
Taehyung could see that the Colossus was confident. No—the Colossus was
overflowing with confidence. He’d crushed people feet taller than Taehyung, and
it looked like he could easily snap Taehyung in two, or sit on him and not
notice.
The Colossus should have been terrified.
The most useful thing his experience in the rings taught Taehyung is how to
manipulate. He has a way of worming people’s weaknesses out of them and then
twisting them to his advantage. He also happens to be a good actor. A
combination of these two factors are the reason he doesn’t have a single defeat
under his belt.
He pretended to be weak and fragile, feigned fright of the big bad Colossus. He
fluttered his lashes and blinked large, terrified eyes. When the Colossus
charged and he sidestepped expertly, he made it look like luck, like a stumble.
When the Colossus swung a fist the size of his head at him, he ducked and
pretended he’d tripped. His clear inexpertise infuriated the Colossus, and the
fight dragged on and on. The audience became impatient and the Colossus became
impatient, but Taehyung had mastered the art of waiting.
The Colossus ran at him for the last time. Taehyung jumped to the side, the one
move he made in the whole match which wasn’t deliberately made to look
uncalculated, and the Colossus impaled himself on one of the decorational but
sharp spears jutting out of the sides of the ring.
Death isn’t mandatory in fighting matches. But it isn’t outlawed, and Taehyung
knew that the Colossus was planning to kill him, just because he thought it
would be so easy to. He stood and watched the life drain out of the Colossus as
he sputtered and gasped like a fish on a hook, surrounded by the disbelieving
roar of the audience, and he felt no guilt.
He collected a handsome amount of money for that. He wouldn’t have had to fight
for another few weeks. But as he was leaving, aware that he had to disappear
with his winnings before someone stole it from him, five figures stepped out of
the shadows in front of him.
He learned their names: Namjoon, Yoongi, Jimin, Hoseok, and Seokjin, although
the last one told Taehyung to call him Jin in a gracious, motherly voice he
didn’t know what to do with. He knew who they were, vaguely. People like them
didn’t make their work public, but from the way they moved and the way they
looked at people, assessing and evaluating and calculating, Taehyung knew
instantly that they were bounty hunters.
They led him away from the commotion of the ring, the bloodshed and destruction
and senseless violence of it. This isn’t the life for someone like you, they
told him. Someone with your abilities.
And somehow, Taehyung found himself being scouted as a bounty hunter.
They trained him. They honed his fighting skills, improved his reflexes and
strategies and just about all of the combat measures he had once been confident
in, and taught him the art of hunting a creature down. Taehyung already had a
reputation. It wasn’t difficult to get jobs even as a novice, and ever since
his first successful mission, he’s never been unemployed. Most bounty hunters
struggle for work, but Taehyung turns down pleas for help exacting revenge and
gives his friends work by passing the jobs on to them instead. No one can say
Kim Taehyung does not repay his debts.
He has about six job offers on the table right now, but none of them are
terribly urgent or require that much finesse. He can pass them on to his
friends. Because now he has a voucher in his hands and time to kill, and
although the idea of prostitution has always made him uneasy, he decides that
there’s really no reason not to spend it.
Taehyung is one of the few Earthlings alive after the meteor destroyed the
moon, perhaps—he’s never been sure—the only one. Myths about his kind run
rampant—Earthlings are overly sensitive; Earthlings are thrown about by their
emotions; Earthlings have strange ethics and a rigid code of right and wrong
different from the other inhabitants of the galaxy. But Taehyung doesn’t think
these are true just for him—he thinks these are true for everyone, but he just
so happens to be the only one unafraid enough to show it.
At any rate, he’s never met another Earthling. Sometimes he doubts whether
another one even exists. People are wary of him because they can tell at first
glance that he’s human—he is startlingly plain in comparison to the rest of the
Milky Way’s inhabitants—and the only people who have ever been brave enough to
get close to him are his five bounty hunter friends.
“Those ‘Earthling ethics’ have kept me remarkably alive over the years,”
Taehyung replies now, meeting Jin’s gaze evenly. It’s harder than it sounds.
Jin and Jimin have an unearthly beauty which seems to elevate and remove them
from the rest of the creatures in the galaxy. Sometimes he looks at them and
instinctively labels them as human, but then his eye catches their too-fine
features, their unnatural grace, and he remembers that he’s probably the only
human he will ever know. “So I’d like it if you didn’t look down on them.”
“I’m not looking down on them.” Jin pats his shoulder kindly. “I’m just teasing
you a little. It’s okay to be different, Taehyung, but maybe it’d be good to
let loose a bit.”
Taehyung sighs. “You know what? Fine. Whatever. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I
should let go, huh?”
A collective cheer rises from the inhabitants of the room.
“I knew you’d come around eventually,” Jimin says, clapping him on the back.
~
Taehyung lands his ship carefully on Sextillion.
As he steps out, he looks around. Sextillion is a blinding medley of neon
lights, garish and running together in an effort to look anything other than
tacky. Ships of all kinds are parked around him: huge battleships large enough
to contain armies, tiny, beaten-up one-seaters with dented wings and scuffed
engines. Sextillion caters to any creature with money and boasts whores of
almost every kind in the galaxy. It’s also massive—it’s a gigantic brothel
which sprawls across the surface of a whole planet, filled with prostitutes and
composed primarily of bedrooms. There are the cheap, and there are the
reasonable, and there are the luridly expensive. Bunny is one of the most
expensive. Taehyung doesn’t normally agree with prostitution, first because the
strange vacancy in the eyes of whores always make him uncomfortably guilty, and
second because he thinks it’s a waste of money. Why pay for a service your hand
could easily carry out for free?
He sighs, setting off across the runway in the direction of what he hopes is
the entrance. Oh, well. Maybe his friends are right. He’s quite sure he’s the
only living being in the galaxy who takes issue with Sextillion at all. Perhaps
he should just change with the times.
He stops in his tracks when two giant female heads leap into his path, balanced
precariously on life-sized, fishnet stocking-clad legs which look spindly under
their massive skulls. They aren’t an alien species—they’re workers grown in a
lab specifically for the purpose of welcoming guests to Sextillion, perfect
because they’re virtually the only unfuckable thing on the planet. They grin
widely at Taehyung. One is African-American, with tight, kinky curls coiled
close to her scalp, and the other is Caucasian and blonde, blue eyes
unnervingly wide in her pale face. Both of their huge faces are coated with a
thick layer of makeup: unnervingly red lipstick smeared over their thick lips,
mascara brushed onto their unnaturally long and bushy lashes. Taehyung idly
wonders how much makeup just one of them uses in a day.
“Greetings!” they say in creepy unison, smiling as if Taehyung’s arrival is the
most exciting thing to happen on Sextillion. “What service would you like to
indulge in today?”
Taehyung lifts the voucher, showing them the barcode. “I have a voucher to see
Bunny.”
They stop smiling with frightening abruptness. One of them walks forward and
snatches the card from Taehyung with her teeth, holding it out. The other’s
eyes briefly glow green as it scans the card’s barcode.
They look up at Taehyung, movements uncannily in sync. “Kim Taehyung,” they
say, voices flat monotones, all suggestiveness gone from them. “Follow us.”
They lead him away. Taehyung trots after them, bewildered.
~
The room is empty.
Taehyung wonders whether the voucher was some kind of prank the others pulled
on him, although it doesn’t seem like something they would do. He swivels
slowly, taking in the empty, made bed with red and black covers, the closet in
the corner open to reveal a large collection of sex equipment, the bedside
tables covered with an impressive assortment of lubes (Taehyung spots one
labelled just flesh and decides to stop reading the labels). The famous Bunny
is nowhere in sight.
Suddenly, he senses a presence behind him. He whips around, hand flying to the
gun at his belt. But when he sees who it is, he takes his hand away.
“Sorry, sir,” he says, bowing his head in respect. The head of Sextillion
stands in front of him, instantly recognizable with his round black-tinted
glasses and his slicked-back hair. A bowtie rests at the base of his neck and
his suit is a sequined, glittery blue. “Always have to be on my watch.”
“That’s alright.” The head watches him. Taehyung feels a shiver of unease. He
never trusts someone if he can’t see their eyes. “I’m sure the job of bounty
hunting does not come without its dangers.”
“Very true.” Taehyung hesitates. “Sir, if I may ask—what’s going on? I was led
here because I have a voucher for…for a session with Bunny. But Bunny is
clearly not here.” He waves his hand around at the empty room.
The head studies him for a while, then seems to come to a decision. “Taehyung,
I’m going to tell you something the public absolutely cannot know, and I need
you to keep this a secret.”
“Of course.”
The head heaves a sigh. “Bunny has escaped,” he says heavily without preamble.
“Just yesterday, he shot down the guards with a gun he’d somehow managed to get
his hands on, and he stole a ship and flew it off the planet.”
Taehyung makes the appropriate sympathetic noise.
“The ship is enchanted so it can turn invisible and reappear at different
places than it was landed when summoned. This, as you can imagine, does not
help.”
Taehyung makes a more sympathetic noise.
“I’m telling you this because I need you to get Bunny back,” the head says.
“His contract was not over, and we take violations of contract very seriously
here on Sextillion. He draws in the most profit out of all our prostitutes.
Hunt him down at any cost within a time span of five years, bring him back
alive, and you will be paid handsomely.”
Taehyung hesitates. “With all due respect, sir, this…doesn’t seem possible.
He’s disappeared, hasn’t he? And he has an invisible ship. How in the world am
I supposed to find him? What if he just lives on the invisible ship?”
“The ship is a small one-seater,” the head says. “He cannot live in it. I have
heard from numerous sources that you are the best bounty hunter to be hired,
Taehyung. If you can’t do this, who can?” He pauses. “I am not being
inconsiderate. I understand that a galaxy is a gigantic amount of space of
search. You have five years to find him for a reason.”
Taehyung sighs. “How much will you pay me?”
The head tells him.
Something stirs in Taehyung’s stomach—reluctant excitement, the excitement he
always feels at the beginning of the hunt. Of the chase. He has not failed a
mission yet, and the more challenging they are, the more he enjoys them. This
will be his hardest mission yet.
The reward is not something to sneeze at, either. This could be Taehyung’s last
mission. It’s enough for him to retire once he’s succeeded, if he wanted.
There’s absolutely no doubt in his mind that he’ll succeed. Five years? Nothing
can hide from Taehyung for five years. And definitely not a helpless little
bunny hybrid, come to think of it, probably leaving a breadcrumb trail for
Taehyung to follow wherever he goes. This is going to be a breeze.
“I’ll do it,” Taehyung says, thinking with slight disappointment but also glee
about how easy this will be.
FOUR YEARS LATER
As it turns out, maybe nothing can hide from Taehyung for five years, but
something can definitely hide from him for four.
He swigs his drink, depressed, leaning his elbows on the counter in a dingy
little bar. It’s too loud and too dim, and the counter is unpleasantly sticky
under Taehyung’s skin with the past remnants of spilled drinks, but Taehyung
needs a distraction. He doesn’t know what he’s drinking, and he doesn’t care.
The barman’s seven eyes on stalks waved when he walked in, sweeping Taehyung up
and down, and he wordlessly pushed a fluorescent green drink towards him.
Taehyung accepted it without question, pushing a small pile of coins back.
Maybe he should just give up. Declare the mission a failure. Over the past four
years, he’s barely rested, searching every corner of the galaxy which is
connected to Bunny, even if in the flimsiest way. He’s been to Tokki, where he
asked around about whether Bunny had any close friends who might know where he
is, but the rabbit hybrids were wary of him—they mistrusted his obvious
humanness. He took the picture of Bunny the head of Sextillion showed him, a
picture of a cute little kid with chubby cheeks and feathery bangs, the
innocent doe eyes and pouty lips and bunny teeth all whacking Taehyung in the
face whenever he looks at it, and showed it to inhabitants of countless
planets. But no one, its seems, has seen Bunny.
He’s begun to accept it: this is a wild goose chase. He’s been looking for four
years and he hasn’t seen even a hint of rabbit teeth where they shouldn’t be.
He’s nearly driven himself to exhaustion. He’s not stupid, and he knows that
soon, he’ll have to renounce his pride and the reward or lose all semblance of
a life entirely.
He sighs, pushing away his empty glass, and slides off the barstool. He stalks
out of the crowded bar and out into the snow. It’s night on Lumi, where it
never does anything but snow, and the light from the bar spills onto the
sidewalk, painting the snowdrifts piled by the side of it yellow. This isn’t
the picturesque kind of snow. It’s wet and loose, mostly slush as it puddles on
the path, and some of it is dirty.
Perhaps he could go to Kapal, he thinks moodily as he heads towards his ship.
Kapal is a port planet, basically a giant post office, which manages and
redirects all interplanetary mail and packages. Kapal hires hundreds of workers
every year with no questions asked. Bunny could be earning a living there.
But he knows, even as he begins calculating how much fuel it’ll take to get to
Kapal, that Jungkook won’t be there. He’s down to the thinnest of leads at this
point. Bunny would have absolutely no reason to be on Kapal.
A hint of movement in a darkened alleyway makes him stop. The snow falls softly
on his hair and shoulders as he squints into it, trying to make out the two
figures tangled together between two buildings.
It’s a female Arachnid, creatures with armless torsos and the lower bodies of
spiders, and a man who at first appears human to Taehyung. A powerful wrench of
loneliness stabs through his gut, the primal yearning to find another like him.
Is the man an Earthling? A human? Is he like Taehyung?
Taehyung knows it’s a waste of a good enchanted rune, but he quietly wills
himself invisible and walks closer to the alleyway, making sure to avoid
snowdrifts so his disembodied footsteps won’t show, standing at the entrance
and watching the two figures. They’re kissing quite enthusiastically. Arachnids
eschew clothes for some reason, and the man seems to appreciate that—Taehyung
sees a large hand cupping the Arachnid’s breast. She opens her mouth, and her
forked, long tongue strokes over his cheek, swiping over his plump lips. Her
narrow frame is engulfed by his broad shoulders.
Taehyung looks blankly at her bare breasts, wondering idly whether she’s cold.
Women have never really held any appeal for him.
Suddenly, he sees the glint of sharpened metal in the man’s hand. Taehyung
almost opens his mouth to warn the Arachnid, detached alarm jumping into his
mind as he realizes what the man’s planning to do, but it’s too late: the man
slashes his knife across her stomach, blue blood pouring out of the deep wound.
She screams, high and piercing, clawed nails reaching out to rake down his
face, but he moves so fast his arm is a blur, slicing her throat open to
silence her. The light goes out of her eight beady eyes. She slumps to the
ground, spider legs a broken, tangled mess beneath her, neck and stomach bloody
and gaping.
Taehyung closes his mouth. He doesn’t interfere in the business of others. In
this galaxy, if people are careless enough to get themselves murdered, then
it’s by no fault of his that they’re killed. Besides, the Arachnid is already
dead. He wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of someone who can swing a
knife that fast for no reason.
He eyes the man with newfound curiosity and awe as he kneels in the dirty snow,
slitting the abdomen of the Arachnid open. Arachnids store their possessions in
their abdomens, including their wealth. Taehyung watches the man lift a pouch
of coins out of the Arachnid’s gashed-open body and stand. The man, whose face
Taehyung is yet to see, lifts his tunic to stuff the pouch into his trouser
pocket.
Taehyung catches sight of a bobtail.
He blinks, and the tunic drops back down, covering the back of the man’s
waistband again. It happened so fast that anyone who wasn’t a bounty hunter and
trained to notice these tiny details would have missed it, but Taehyung is sure
that he saw a bobtail. He steps closer, and because he has nothing to lose, he
peers at the top of the man’s head. It might be his imagination, and it’s dark
in the alleyway, making it hard to see, but Taehyung thinks he can make out two
bumps where they shouldn’t be on top of the man’s head. Exactly where rabbit
ears would be.
All creatures are forbidden by galactic law, the only galactic law in
existence, from hiding the traits which mark them as a member of their species.
For example, horned creatures like Namjoon can’t legally hide their horns,
although Namjoon regularly violates that rule on bounty-hunting missions, and
hybrids can’t conceal their animal traits. Due in part to this law, rabbit
hybrids, the only hybrids with bobtails, rarely leave Tokki. Their ears are
regularly chopped off by Qesmillion traders for good luck, the earless bunnies
left to bleed to death later. Even Tokki, the home planet of rabbit hybrids, is
frequently attacked by the traders. A bunny hybrid unable to conceal its ears
on a planet other than Tokki would be like a lamb waltzing into a pack of
wolves. If a bunny hybrid’s traits were out in the open on a shady planet like
Lumi, it would be dead in minutes.
So the appearance of the bobtail is suspicious for two reasons: one, if the
bobtail and ears weren’t imagined, the man would be breaking a major galactic
law, punishable by death if his transgression were discovered. Hybrids don’t
run that risk unless it’s absolutely necessary. Two, it’s incredibly dangerous
for a rabbit hybrid to be here on Lumi, and Taehyung is, quite frankly,
surprised that it’s even still alive. That means the man, if he really is a
rabbit hybrid, has strong motives to be off Tokki and hiding his traits.
And what rabbit hybrid would have motives that strong except…
Bunny?
Taehyung’s slightly crazed train of thought is broken when the man sets off
abruptly in the opposite direction down the alleyway. Taehyung’s interest has
been piqued, and he isn’t letting the man go, even though this is probably a
lead flimsier than Kapal. Careful to tread soundlessly, he follows the man.
The man navigates the city through its alleyways, avoiding the crowds. Taehyung
can’t imagine why he’d want to stick to the narrow, dirty, gloomy crevices
between the buildings, but he follows him stealthily. He trails the man until
they come to a motel tucked at the corner of two deserted streets. They’ve
moved into the least densely populated part of Lumi, the seediest area of the
city where people don’t walk the streets because they’re too afraid to show
themselves. The man walks straight through the tiny doorway of the motel, half-
hidden behind piles of trash.
Taehyung knows he can’t tail the man through the entrance—even invisible, it’s
just too risky. His eyes scan the dilapidated building, chipped brick walls
streaked with grime and listing markedly, and catch sight of a rickety metal
fire escape winding its way up the side. He starts towards the fire escape and
begins climbing even as the entire structure sways dangerously under his feet.
It seems to be clinging precariously to the building by just a few rusted,
ancient bolts. Taehyung doubts it would be able to hold up under panic and
pounding feet in the occurrence of a real fire.
All the windows in the building are dark, but one lights up on the very top
floor. Taehyung climbs with renewed speed, doing his best to be silent on the
practically tin-metal steps.
He reaches the lit-up window. Fighting the instinct to crouch and hide himself
since he knows he’s still under the influence of the invisibility rune, he
looks into the room. It’s bare, austere. A single bed. One cupboard. One vanity
with a mirror above it, and nothing else.
The man stands in the middle of the room, back facing Taehyung. He's fiddling
with something in his hair. Taehyung watches, hardly believing his luck, as the
man shucks off his tunic, revealing a fluffy little bobtail poking out of a
hole cut into his pants, and untapes gray rabbit ears sticking out of his hair.
Suddenly, the bunny hybrid stiffens, hands still at his ears. The muscles in
his back tense. Taehyung wonders what happened until he catches sight of a man
in the mirror who looks awfully like Taehyung himself, peering in at the room
through the window.
A lot of things happen at once. Oh, shit, Taehyung thinks, watching the bunny
hybrid whip around and begin to draw something from his belt. The invisibility
spell’s worn off.
Taehyung’s body acts without his mind not necessarily giving it the order to,
fine-tuned for survival at all costs after so long of dancing hand-in-hand with
danger. He flings himself down to the floor of the fire escape, a knife flying
through the air where his head was just a heartbeat after. He touches the top
of his head with a kind of horrified awe. Several strands of hair have been
sheared short.
He could run down the fire escape now, disappear and stay safe. But this—this
is most probably Bunny. And murderous or not, armed with the ability to move
supernaturally fast or not, Taehyung has finally found him after four years of
searching, and he can't let him go.
Even if there's a very real chance that he'll get killed in the process.
Cursing himself and the universe, he straightens up and leaps back into the
motel room.
The bunny hybrid looks momentarily thrown, but not for long. He pulls another
knife from his belt and flings it deftly at Taehyung. Taehyung barely manages
to leap aside, the graceless desperation of the movement making him stumble, as
the knife buries itself in the windowsill.
Taehyung scrabbles for his blaster gun, pointing it at the hybrid. “Put your
knives down,” he shouts. The hybrid’s eyes narrow, and Taehyung takes the
opportunity to scan his face.
The doe eyes, the feathery bangs, the plush lips: Bunny’s defining features are
all there, and this is definitely his bounty. But Taehyung is confused. The
hybrid in front of him looks like he’s gone through several growth spurts and
hit—no, slammed into—puberty. His jaw has grown wider, muscle has piled onto
his frame, and he stands a few inches taller. There's a maturity and authority
to him the Bunny he saw in the pictures lacked. This looks like someone lethal,
someone who could and has killed—galaxies away from the untouched, unblemished
innocence of the Bunny he thought he was hunting down.
“You can't use that gun,” Bunny sneers. “You’ve been hired by the head of
Sextillion to hunt me down. You need to bring me back untouched.”
Taehyung just now realizes that this is, in fact, true. Goddamn. It's never a
good sign when the bunny has more foresight than he does.
Taehyung chooses not to reply to this. However, the gun begins to feel awfully
ineffective in his hands, like a plastic toy weapon.
“Face it.” Bunny draws another throwing knife. “I have the advantage here. I
will not hesitate to kill you whereas you can't lay a finger on me if you want
a single coin of the reward for my return. Leave now and spare yourself. Never
bother me again.”
Taehyung draws his own knife from his weapons belt, only putting his blaster
back when his knife is poised and at the ready. This will have to be hand-to-
hand combat until he figures this mess out. “I'm not leaving until I have you,
Bunny.”
Bunny’s eyes flash. “Have it your way,” he says.
Suddenly, another knife is slicing through the air, traveling at a speed which
seems close to that of a bullet. Taehyung is forced to bodily throw himself
down to the ground to avoid it. It thunks into the wall behind him.
“Stop throwing your knives,” Taehyung yells, flinging himself back on his feet,
knife warily held in front of him. “You’re just gonna run out.”
Bunny doesn’t reply. They size each other up, Taehyung quickly assessing the
knife Bunny holds now, which is different from the others: it’s longer,
wickedly sharp, light glinting off the blade. It was clearly made for hand-to-
hand combat. Taehyung considers his own knife. It’s barely longer than a
dagger.
Taehyung is used to being able to fire his blaster, goddammit. He’s only done a
handful of capture missions before. People mostly hire him when they want
someone dead.
Suddenly, Bunny lunges forward. Taehyung barely manages to deflect the stab of
his knife. He suddenly finds himself under attack from a knife which moves so
fast that it seems to be in two places at once. He is abruptly, genuinely
afraid for his life, a feeling he has not felt in a long time. This rabbit is
terrifying. His ability to handle a knife is unbelievable, better than anyone
Taehyung’s ever seen, and his accuracy when throwing them is astounding.
The knife flies towards his neck, and he's forced to leap aside to avoid it,
parrying awkwardly with his shorter blade. He needs to figure something out. He
can’t keep this bunny off him for long, goddamn it. Why didn’t the head of
Sextillion tell him his whore was so good at combat? Where did he even learn
how to fight so well?
Bunny growls, his gray ears laid flat along his hair, and advances
threateningly toward Taehyung. Taehyung had a rabbit once on Earth. He still
recognizes the body language signals. And, he thinks as he’s forced to run to
the other side of the room to preserve his life when Bunny slashes down
savagely, this is one exceptionally pissed-off bunny.
“You’re afraid.” Bunny slices the knife through the air, aiming for Taehyung’s
stomach, and Taehyung knocks his blade away just in time. Where does all this
aggression come from? Bunny was advertised as the cutest little thing on
Sextillion, the ultimate submissive! Taehyung isn’t well-versed in all that
stuff, but he’s quite sure that submissives aren’t supposed to come after you
like a whirlwind of sharpened blades and snarling bunny teeth! “Give it up. Run
out the window and maybe I won’t hunt you down and kill you.”
“Just—give it up,” Taehyung gasps, struggling for breath as he ducks and dodges
and blocks incessantly to keep himself from being torn to ribbons. “Sextillion
isn’t gonna leave you alone. You’re their most popular whore.”
“I am not a whore,” Bunny snarls, and the next rip of the knife through the air
nearly finds its target. Taehyung feels the air it misplaces as he jumps back,
stumbling over the carpet. “And please. If you’re the best they can send, they
aren’t ever going to catch me.”
“You can’t run forever,” Taehyung pants, parrying a slash towards his chest.
Bunny’s blade skitters along his and scrapes along his knuckles, and Taehyung
grits his teeth in pain. That cut probably took the top layer of skin off.
“Fucking watch me.” Bunny slices the air horizontally over where Taehyung’s
throat would have been if he didn’t duck desperately, throwing himself backward
once the knife has passed.
Suddenly, it hits Taehyung. Net! He has a net spell! He remembers getting the
rune, a tattoo in the shape of a spiderweb. It hurt like hell to ink all those
fine lines into his skin, but he endured it because he knew it would come in
useful.
If only…he could remember…the incantation.
His stomach sinks. Bunny sees his moment of distraction and takes advantage of
it, going in for a stab. Taehyung leaps to the side to avoid it. It’s an
ungraceful aversion, but the only way to prevent himself from getting impaled
by a stab that fast.
“Run now,” Bunny taunts. “Save yourself. You know how this will end.”
“No,” Taehyung says. He narrowly avoids being stabbed, parrying Bunny’s blade
with a hurried flick of his wrist. “I don’t.” What’s the incantation, what’s
the goddamn incantation?
“Whatever Sextillion is paying you, it isn’t worth being killed.” Bunny’s knife
flashes through the air towards him again. Taehyung blocks it with his knife,
but he is tiring: his movements are getting more clumsy, losing their edge, and
Bunny senses it.
“I’m not getting killed. Stop—” And then the incantation comes back to him in a
rush. He leaps backward to give himself some space and points his index finger
at Bunny, shouting, “Lorax!”
A net flies out of Taehyung’s index fingertip, the rope spiraling directly out
of his skin. Bunny’s eyes widen. He raises his knife a split second before the
net snaps shut around him, but Taehyung, left with no other alternative, whips
off his own boot and throws it at Bunny’s hand to disarm him.
The boot knocks into the knife and sends it spinning across the room. Taking a
page out of Jimin’s book, Taehyung thinks as he checks to make sure Bunny has
no more knives tucked into his belt. He doesn’t.
He walks over to the bundle of netting and limbs. Bunny, forced into an awkward
crouch by the small constraints of the net, snarls and bares slightly oversized
front teeth at him. His fingers clench in a white-knuckled grip around the rope
of the netting.
“Magician,” he hisses.
“Not magician,” Taehyung says, reaching for the handle of the net. “Just plain
old human.”
Something changes in Bunny’s face, something resembling, in a twisted way,
hope—but Taehyung does not notice.
~
Taehyung dumps Bunny off the wheeled cart and onto the floor of his ship. Bunny
tumbles off, hissing in discontent as his elbows and knees take the brunt of
the fall. Taehyung ignores him.
Taehyung’s original plan was to drag Bunny, in the net, through the city back
to his ship, but he quickly realized that Bunny is too heavy to drag more than
a few feet. Besides, dragging a living creature over the rough, dirty ground
like that is a little too cruel even for him.
To solve the problem, Taehyung took all the knives in the room with him and ran
out to find a market. He bought a wheeled cart used for carrying fish and took
it back to the motel room, loading Bunny onto it with his safely boot-encased
feet, because he’d tried to do it with his hands and Bunny had nearly bitten
him.
Bunny’s nose wrinkled as he rolled ungracefully onto the cart. “Hate fish,” he
hissed, ears laid all the way back.
“It’s either this or get dragged over the ground all the way back to the bar,”
Taehyung said, not looking at him, “so take it and shut up.”
Bunny stared at him with pure hatred in his eyes. Taehyung shrugged it off.
He’s used to that look by now.
Taehyung leaves Bunny on the ground and goes to the control board, turning his
back on the netted hybrid and trying to find where he left the coordinates for
Sextillion. He grumbles, sifting through various sheets of paper and memos
strewn all over the controls. Why isn’t he a more organized person?
Suddenly, he hears choking, gasping sounds from behind him where Bunny is
trapped in the net. He tries to ignore it at first, but when they up in
intensity, he is struck by the horrible thought that Bunny might be suffocating
and whips around.
Bunny is curled in a ball with his bare back to Taehyung, the curve of his
spine sad and vulnerable. Taehyung remembers that he never got a chance to put
his shirt back on after taking it off while he believed he was alone. His bunny
ears droop, gray tips touching his shoulders. His shoulders shake. Taehyung
hasn’t seen this in a while, so it takes him a few moments to figure out that
Bunny is crying.
He crosses the room slowly and walks around the net to where Bunny’s face is
turned. He hears a sob, and Bunny hides his face, turning the other way.
“Hey,” he says awkwardly. He hasn’t needed to comfort someone in decades. “Hey,
uh…don’t cry.”
Bunny turns a tearstained face up to him. His eyes are large, liquid pools of
sadness. His lip wobbles. “I just—don’t—want—to go back,” he gasps, hiccuping
in that way people do when they cry uncontrollably, and then his face crumples
and he hides it again.
Taehyung’s heart wrenches despite itself. He is seized by the primal,
uncontrollable urge to reach out and pet Bunny, smooth down his ears until he
stops crying. It’s an utterly human urge: the instinct to reach out which made
the first man tame an animal, the instinct to comfort which is the basis of all
sympathy. Earthling ethics, Jin’s voice echoes dryly in his mind.
He crouches so he’s level with Bunny. “Hey—um—“
But Bunny doesn’t stop crying. He seems to collapse, body caving in, as his
sobs trail off into quiet, hopeless weeping.
“Who are you?” he mumbles into his hands.
“None of your business,” Taehyung replies automatically.
Bunny turns his anguished face to him.
“Kim Taehyung,” he says just as automatically, his brain kicking him to say
anything needed to get the poor thing in front of him to stop looking so sad.
“I’ve h-heard of you,” he stutters out between his tears. “You’re—you’re from
Earth.”
“Yes.” He feels impressively inadequate—do something, get the bunny to stop
crying. “Hey—Bunny—it’ll be okay.”
Bunny turns his face away and mumbles something.
“What?” Taehyung leans closer, shuffling on his haunches so he can hear better.
“I said,” Bunny spits, turning his suddenly furious, animalistic face to glare
at Taehyung, “my name is not Bunny.”
He lunges, too fast for Taehyung to catch. Taehyung’s mind has just registered
the feeling of a hand snatching his knife out of his belt when his eyes inform
him that Bunny has slashed his way out of the net.
Taehyung leaps back. Bunny runs at him, knife poised, dagger-like, in his fist,
and Taehyung is tired. He knows he isn’t going to scrape through this one
alive. He closes his eyes and stays motionless, bracing himself.
Bunny slams into him and pins him to the ground. Taehyung feels the cold,
razored kiss of the serrated edge of the knife at his throat. This is how you
end.
“Any last words?” Bunny snarls.
Taehyung thinks, Wow, I did an impressive amount of nothing with my life. And
then he thinks: I didn’t know bunnies could cry.
The blade presses down harder. Taehyung holds his breath, preparing for the
slash. The end.
It does not come.
He opens his eyes. Bunny is frowning down at him, his rabbit ears turned
towards Taehyung, his nose twitching as he thinks. This is what Taehyung’s
bunny looked like when it was intensely mulling something over. Bunny
contemplation does not look all too different from human contemplation.
“What?” Taehyung asks, feeling like a fool for being sat on like an ottoman by
a bunny and waiting to die.
Slowly, not taking the knife away from his throat, Bunny reaches down and pulls
his blaster out of his weapons belt. He makes sure it’s charged and ready to
fire and then lowers the knife, aiming the gun right at Taehyung’s head.
“Killing me by gun instead?” Taehyung says weakly. His brains aren’t going to
be easy to clean off the floor.
Bunny stands, still pointing the barrel at him. “Get up,” he tells Taehyung
coldly.
Taehyung’s eyebrows draw together in confusion. “But—“
“I said get up!”
Taehyung scrambles hurriedly to his feet, putting his hands on either side of
his head for good measure. The rabbit is terrifying.
“Listen,” Bunny says, shaking the gun at him for emphasis. Be more careful,
don’t squeeze that trigger, don’t squeeze that trigger, Taehyung screams
silently in his head. “You are taking me to Earth.”
Taehyung gets even more confused. “Earth? But there’s nothing there—“
“Shut up and listen!” Bunny shouts at him, and he clamps his mouth shut.
“You are taking me to Earth,” Bunny restates, “and you will do so without
question. Fail to obey my orders, and I will kill you. Attempt any trickery,
and I will kill you. Step a toe out of line, and I will kill you. You
understand?”
Taehyung nods silently.
Bunny steps forward, gun still trained on Taehyung’s head, and unbuckles his
weapons belt, kicking it into a corner. He grabs Taehyung’s shoulder and shoves
him, making him stumble, then pushes him across the room and into the pilot’s
chair. He quickly ties Taehyung to the chair with a pile of rope he finds in
the corner. Taehyung’s arms have been left free, but every other part of his
body has been restrained.
He pulls on the ropes to test them—they don't budge an inch—then lowers the
gun. He begins walking away. Taehyung loses sight of him. “Bunny—” Taehyung
begins.
Suddenly, the gun is back, pressing right into his temple. Taehyung stiffens in
alarm. “Call me that again,” Bunny snarls, “and I will cut your tongue right
out of your head.”
Taehyung feels fear stab through him, acute and insistent, sharpening his
thoughts. “What do you want me to call you, then?”
“Jungkook,” he hisses, pressing the barrel harder into Taehyung’s temple. “My
name is Jungkook.”
He lets the blaster drop and stalks away.
~
It unnerves Taehyung that he can’t see what Bunny—Jungkook—is doing.
The pilot chair can swivel, but he has a feeling that Jungkook won’t take it
kindly if he turns to look at him. He’s been listening to scuffling and the
rustling of cloth behind him for the past few minutes. He thinks Jungkook is
pulling on one of his shirts.
Jungkook instructed him to take off for Earth a while ago. Taehyung keeps his
hands on the controls even though the ship is on autopilot—he’s afraid that if
he looks idle, Jungkook will threaten him again or tie his arms to the chair
too. His legs are already going numb.
“Jungkook,” Taehyung begins tentatively when it’s been about an hour, “why do
you want to go to Earth? It’s on the other side of the Milky Way. It’ll take us
more than a month to get there.”
All is quiet behind him. Taehyung is quite sure that Jungkook isn’t going to
answer when he speaks up, surprising him. “When I was a kit, I heard that Earth
is the most beautiful planet in the galaxy. I’ve always dreamed of going
there.”
“Kit?” Taehyung asks, bewildered.
“Kitten.”
“Kitten? I thought you were a rabbit hybrid.”
“Kitten is the name for rabbit young,” Jungkook says, irritation filtering into
his voice.
“Oh.” Taehyung wants to say cute, but he gets back on track because he’s quite
sure that saying that will get him shot. “Look, that’s half true, but—Earth was
the most beautiful planet in the galaxy. It’s uninhabitable now. It’s just
barren desert and polluted oceans. That’s why we had to move to the
moon—there’s nothing left on that planet anymore.”
“No,” Jungkook says stubbornly, “I’m sure there’s some part of it which is
untouched. It’s an entire planet. Surely you humans couldn’t have ruined
everything.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jungkook says, voice becoming snappish. “I want to go to
Earth and you’re taking me there. Clear?”
“But what will you do when you’ve arrived?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“There’s nothing to do there. There’s nothing, period. It’s just empty.
Lifeless.”
“I’ll dig that burrow when I come to it,” Jungkook snaps defensively.
There is a moment of silence while Taehyung squashes down the irrepressible
urge to coo over adorable Bunny and his adorable bunny idioms. He sees now why
he was the most popular whore on Sextillion. Even snarling and threatening to
kill Taehyung every few seconds, he’s the cutest fluffball Taehyung has ever
seen.
Maybe it’s some kind of bunny magic, Taehyung thinks, pushing away daydreams of
feeding Jungkook baby carrots with effort. Like some cuteness voodoo.
Another hour or so passes of Jungkook puttering around behind him, occasionally
making random snuffling sounds which irrationally make Taehyung want to pat him
on the head. Taehyung can’t see him, but he’s quite sure that he’s looking at
his things and examining his clothes. “Don’t touch my stuff,” Taehyung says
weakly at some point, but Jungkook ignores him.
Finally, all falls silent behind him. Taehyung dares to swivel around. Jungkook
has curled up on his bed, wearing one of Taehyung’s large white shirts, and has
fallen asleep.
Adorable baby bunny smush,the idiotic part of Taehyung’s brain coos, but the
more logical part thinks: I’m not going to stay tied up until we get to Earth.
“Jungkook,” Taehyung says after a few minutes of watching his chest rise and
fall gently, bunny teeth visible between his parted lips. He looks like a
cherub in sleep, his face cleansed of anger or worry, completely relaxed and at
peace. “You know I can get out of these ropes, right?”
Jungkook startles awake. “Mmwhat?”
Taehyung repeats himself patiently.
Jungkook huffs skeptically. “No, you can’t.”
Taehyung raises an eyebrow. “Motullah,” he says, and the ropes fall away.
Jungkook grabs the blaster off the bedside table and points it at Taehyung.
“How’d you do that?” he hisses. “You are a magician!”
“No, I’m not. With the reward from my last mission, I went and got enchanted
runes tattooed on me. I can do a bunch of mundane spells thanks to them.”
Jungkook’s eyes narrow. “Where are the tattoos?”
Taehyung remembers that enchanted runes are rendered ineffective if cut out of
the wearer’s skin. “Nowhere you’d find them.”
Jungkook pouts, probably unconsciously. Pet the bunny, Taehyung’s idiot brain
screams at him. For the love of all that is good and holy, pet the bunny.
Shut up, Taehyung tells his brain. Bunny wants to kill me.
The enchanted rune tattoos are inked into the roof of his mouth. It hurt like a
bitch to get them and cost him nearly the whole reward, but he knew it would be
worth it.
Jungkook keeps the gun trained on him and quickly reties his ropes. “Well, you
can’t get out of them now,” he says smugly.
“Motullah,” Taehyung says again, and the ropes come loose, sagging to the
floor. Jungkook’s expression morphs into a scowl as Taehyung folds his hands in
his lap. “It has unlimited uses,” he tells Jungkook.
That’s a lie. It has five uses, and Taehyung just used the fourth. But Jungkook
doesn’t have to know that.
“Why didn’t you capture me, then?” Jungkook snaps at him, throwing himself on
the bed and crossing his arms. Taehyung’s eyes distractedly trace the veins in
his forearms before he drags them back up to Jungkook’s face. “I was sleeping.
You could have taken the gun and trained it on me while you tied me up.”
Taehyung hesitates. Shit. He doesn’t have an excuse. Come to think of it—why
didn’t he? “Uh…”
Jungkook’s ears rotate, one turning to Taehyung and one turning sideways, and
he looks askance at him in suspicion. His body language is so similar to
Taehyung’s pet rabbit that Taehyung feels like he has a pet again. “Answer me.”
“I…was…lonely,” he stammers stiltedly.
Jungkook blinks slowly. His ears rotate like radars, turning in all directions
as if they’ll pick up a signal they can make sense of. His ears are more
expressive than most creature’s eyes. “What," he says flatly.
“Humans, we—we need company,” Taehyung explains in fits and bursts, making it
up as he goes along. “To survive. It’s a basic need like water and food—we need
to be around people, to socialize. I do have friends, but they’re busy all the
time and I never get to talk to them. I haven’t had someone to interact with in
ages.”
Jungkook’s ears slowly turn so they face to the sides. Taehyung hopes this
means he believes him. “This sounds highly implausible.”
“Look, you know Earthlings are weird,” Taehyung says, beginning to warm up to
his idea. “We have strange ideas of right and wrong. We like beautiful things.
We can’t tolerate temperatures which are too high or too low. We have terrible
night vision. We only live about 80 years whereas other creatures live about
double that time. We have needs other creatures haven’t even heard of. And I
have a need for company which hasn’t been properly fulfilled for the past
decade.”
Jungkook shakes his head. His gray ears flop around. “I don’t believe you.”
“Why else wouldn’t I have recaptured you?” Taehyung asks, desperate to be
believed. “This is it. This is why.”
“You’re staying with someone who could kill you at any moment,” Jungkook says,
rich disbelief entering his voice, “and giving up a massive reward, a fortune,
because you’re lonely?”
“Yes,” Taehyung says, praying that Jungkook will believe him. “That’s exactly
it.”
Jungkook stares at him. His ears and nose are motionless.
Finally, he turns away. “You Earthlings are the weirdest goddamn things in the
galaxy,” he says, and Taehyung knows he has succeeded.
He tries not to let his relief show too much.
~
A few days pass. Jungkook doesn’t bother tying him up again. He seems to have
accepted Taehyung’s excuse of loneliness, although dubiously. Now they sit
across from each other at the table and eat their lunch, Jungkook obviously
tensed and ready to flee. Taehyung’s blaster lies next to Jungkook’s plate.
Taehyung sneezed once, and Jungkook had the gun in his hand and pointing at
Taehyung before he could react.
“You don’t trust me,” Taehyung whined petulantly.
“Of course I don’t,” Jungkook said, putting the gun down.
Then Jungkook sneezed adorably, his ears flopping wildly all around his head,
his nose scrunching up. Taehyung laughed, sitting on his hands to stop them
from reaching across the table and patting Jungkook’s head. His urge to fawn
over Jungkook is almost visceral. He thinks it’s a human thing.
Taehyung snorts now as he sees Jungkook’s plate. It’s covered in vegetables.
Jungkook ransacked his vegetable drawer and filled his plate with what he
found: a carrot, lettuce, a tomato, spinach, and even an aubergine Taehyung
forgot he had. He gnaws on a steamed cob of corn. “What?” Jungkook asks
indignantly, biting a chunk out of the corn threateningly.
“You don’t eat meat?” he asks, laughing.
“Of course not,” Jungkook says, sniffing. “I’m a bunny. Have you ever seen a
bunny eat meat?”
“How did you grow so much, then?” Taehyung takes a generous bite out of his own
burger.
Jungkook stares at the meat of Taehyung's patty, dripping juices and grease
onto his plate, and shudders. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t look like the pictures I got from the head of Sextillion. You look,
like, ten years older.”
Jungkook shifts his eyes away, studying his corn as if it suddenly got a whole
lot more interesting. “I was on growth and hormone suppressors in Sextillion,”
he says eventually. “They didn’t want me looking too manly. They wanted me to
stay a kid.”
“That’s…terrible.”
“Yeah, well, business was business, and people paid to fuck a cute little
bunny, not a rabbit buck which could kick their teeth out,” Jungkook snaps.
He’s evidently touchy about this subject. Taehyung has deduced this because
he’s intuitive that way.
Silence descends on the table. Jungkook strips the cob of its kernels and moves
onto the raw carrot, savagely snapping the end off it. Taehyung didn’t know
someone could make eating vegetables look fearsome, but apparently it’s
possible.
“Is it just me,” Taehyung saye eventually, “or have your teeth gotten bigger?”
“I had to file them down to keep my bunny-ness hidden when I was on the run,”
Jungkook says, a touch resentfully. “If I don’t file them down regularly or
wear them down by gnawing on things or grinding them together, they just keep
growing. Like nails.”
“That’s why you grind your teeth,” Taehyung says, understanding dawning on him.
“Sometimes I see you sitting in the corner and staring at nothing and just
grinding your teeth, and I think you’re angry, so I avoid you.”
“If you’re there, then I probably am angry. That’s good, keep avoiding me.”
“Why?”
“You’re annoying.” His overlarge teeth sink into the pulpy flesh of the tomato.
“Am not,” Taehyung says defensively.
“You ask too many questions. You look at me like you want to pat me on the
head.”
“I don’t”—Taehyung considers—“really want to pat you on the head.”
“You always try and talk to me.” The tomato, astoundingly, has been finished.
Jungkook picks up a handful of spinach and pushes it into his mouth.
“I’m a sociable person!”
“I’m not sociable.” Jungkook pauses. “Or even really a person.”
Taehyung pouts. “That’s not my problem.”
“If you need something to chatter at, the wall will do just fine. Don’t chatter
at me.”
“The wall can’t reply!”
“You’re so needy.” Jungkook rips the end off the aubergine.
“Yeah, well, you eat vegetables like they killed your grandmother!”
“I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten properly in days.”
“If you go on at that rate I’m not going to have any vegetables left to eat.”
“Serves you right. You can eat your meat like a barbarian.”
“I’m not—” Taehyung begins, but Jungkook has scooped up his empty plate and
stalked off to the kitchen.
“Why is he so angry at me?” Taehyung asks the room, sitting alone at the table.
~
Weeks pass. Jungkook softens by increments, but is by no means as fluffy as his
bobtail.
Taehyung built his ship expecting to lead a solitary life, so it’s open-plan,
with only a curtain fencing off the toilet and two-in-one shower and bathtub.
Jungkook does not like this at all. Taehyung idly wonders how he stays clean
because he never sees Jungkook showering, and he knows rabbits are pretty
meticulous about grooming. In addition to that, whenever Jungkook lets him get
close enough, he can always pick up on the faint scent of soap.
He figures it out sometime during his second week with Jungkook, when
Taehyung’s turned all the lights off and went to sleep. A faint yellow glow of
light spills from the kitchen doorway. Jungkook seems to have commissioned the
kitchen as his den since it’s the only partially walled-off area in the whole
ship. Taehyung stumbled blearily in there once for a midnight snack and got a
faceful of angry bunny. He quickly learned that Jungkook is territorial, like
most bunnies—he got chased out by a flying carrot.
There was only one lamp on, making the room dim. He assumes that, like his pet
rabbit, Jungkook can’t see very well in dark or light but sees best in half-
light. These past few weeks have made him very grateful that he once owned a
pet rabbit—it makes it a lot easier to interpret Jungkook’s body language and
know why he does what he does.
Taehyung is woken by metal rings scraping along a metal rod: the sound of the
shower curtain being pulled aside. He looks to the foot of the bed, where he
can see a silhouette. He tenses and is about to lunge for his blaster when he
realizes that the silhouette has bunny ears.
He relaxes back into the pillows. Maybe Jungkook just wants to sit in the
bathtub and eat apples (seedless—Taehyung chopped apples for him once as
apology for dropping a glass in the kitchen and spreading shards of porcelain
over the floor, and Jungkook nearly threw a fit when he saw that the seeds were
still there: “Do you know what apple seeds do to rabbits, are you trying to
killme?”). He watches through half-shut eyes as Jungkook blunders around,
groping for the rim of the tub and huffing in frustration when he fails to find
it. His night vision is worse than Taehyung’s.
Finally, Jungkook manages to climb into the tub without killing himself. He
draws the curtain, obscuring Taehyung’s view. Taehyung sees him drop his
clothes over the top of the curtain, where they fall soundlessly to the floor.
The sound of the water being switched on reaches him. He begins to drop off
again as Jungkook bathes, humming tunelessly to himself.
The sound of the curtain being drawn wakes him back up from his half-slumber.
Jungkook fumbles his way out of the bathtub, snuffling. Taehyung isn’t sure why
he snuffles so much. Either he has allergies or it’s a bunny thing.
His eyes pop out of his head when he realizes what he's looking at. Jungkook
isn’t wearing anything. He can’t see his body fully because of the dark, but he
can see his silhouette, the muscle piled onto his frame, the narrow trim of his
waist.
Jungkook gropes blindly for a towel. He snatches the closest one he can find
and wraps it around his waist. Taehyung mentally huffs indignantly. That’s my
towel.
The next day, all is silent in the ship. Taehyung switches off the water, done
showering, and towels himself dry in the bathtub. He hangs the towel back up
and crosses the room naked, like he’s used to doing.
Jungkook chooses that moment to walk out of the kitchen, gnawing on a carrot—he
snacks constantly. He catches sight of Taehyung before Taehyung sees him and
yells in shock.
Taehyung jumps. He looks for the source of the noise and sees Jungkook, eyes
covered, half-eaten carrot on the floor.
“Oh,” he says, unconcerned, as Jungkook stands in the middle of the ship with
his hands clapped over his eyes. He’s shaking slightly. “I forgot you were
here.”
“Cover yourself up,” Jungkook hisses, scandalized. “You can’t just—you can’t
just walk around naked like that.”
“This is my ship,” Taehyung says, walking to the dresser beside the bed and
opening it. He rummages inside for clothes. “I do what I want.”
“It’s an offense to my sensibilities!”
“Did you learn English from a Jane Austen novel?” He leans further into the
cupboard, frowning. “Where’s that sweater I like?”
“With the little bunnies?” Jungkook asks.
He looks up, suspicious. “You’re wearing it,” he gasps accusingly, betrayal
tinging his voice.
“It has bunnies on it,” Jungkook says, trying to walk backwards with his eyes
covered. He bumps into the wall and startles badly. “It’s practically mine
already.”
“Look, just uncover your eyes,” Taehyung says. “You aren’t getting anywhere
with them covered.”
“Yes I am,” Jungkook snaps, mistaking the space in front of his face for a
doorway and trying to walk through it. He promptly stubs his toe on the foot of
the bed.
“Bet you’re too chicken to look,” Taehyung sniffs.
Jungkook goes still. “I’m not chicken. Bunnies kick chickens’ feathery butts.”
“Chicken,” he taunts.
“You can’t see it,” Jungkook says, tone turned sour, “but I’m glaring at you.”
“You can’t see it,” he says, “but I’m laughing at you. Because you’re chicken.”
Jungkook uncovers his eyes. He glares venomously at Taehyung, keeping his eyes
furiously on his face. “Am not chicken. See?”
“Gotta go the whole hog for me to retract my accusation of chicken-ness,”
Taehyung says, fully aware of how childish he sounds. But he likes riling
Jungkook up and making him flustered probably much more than he should, so he
turns his body to face him and spreads his arms wide, exposing himself.
Jungkook scowls fiercely, then slowly, reluctantly scans up and down his body.
Taehyung lets him look. He’s not ashamed of it. A life of bounty-hunting has
layered his bones with lean muscle, and regardless of how he looks, he knows
he’s healthy and strong and confident.
Jungkook meets his eyes triumphantly. “There. Done it.”
“Fine. You aren’t chicken.” Taehyung turns and pulls out a shirt, tugging it
on.
Jungkook huffs, turning on his heel and walking away. “Don’t look so bad for a
human,” he says under his breath as he walks away. Taehyung hears it, and he
grins.
~
Another week passes by. Taehyung wakes up.
He sits up in bed, the blankets falling away from his chest. Jungkook is
sitting cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the bed and sketching. It’s
unusual for him to leave the kitchen. Taehyung hopefully wonders whether this
means Jungkook is warming to him.
He gets out of bed and goes over to where Jungkook is sitting. He waits for
him to cover up what he’s doing and glare defensively at Taehyung, but it
doesn’t come.
“Why are you drawing a forest?” Taehyung asks. An ancient nature brochure lies
open next to the sketchbook Jungkook dug out from somewhere, a pamphlet
advertising something called Yellowstone Park. Soaring cliffs dominate the
picture, thick woods surrounding them. Nature in all her unabashed, unhindered
glory.
“I felt like drawing a forest,” he replies. In the picture, it’s either dawn or
dusk, Taehyung’s not sure, but Jungkook drew his sketch at nighttime. A large,
bright moon hangs in the sky, and when Taehyung looks closer, he sees a bunny
perched on top of it.
“Is that the moon rabbit?” he asks, delighted. It’s a mythological figure in
Korean folklore, where he was raised when he still lived on Earth.
Jungkook blushes. “It’s stupid,” he mumbles.
“How did you hear about it?”
“On Tokki,” he mutters, “the elders told the kits like us a story that the
Mother Rabbit came from the moon. Earth’s moon.”
“Could be true. Who knows?” Taehyung stares down at the sketch: its skillful
strokes, its meticulous attention to detail. Every pine needle is rendered with
extreme care, every shaft of moonlight on the forest floor shaded in with
painstaking precision. “This is really good. You’re so talented.”
Jungkook’s ears rotate towards Taehyung, flattening back in happiness.
“Your ears reflect every switch in emotion,” Taehyung says, amused.
“I can’t really control them when they do that,” Jungkook says, looking down
and staring at his sketch. He’s clutching the pencil, but he isn’t drawing.
“It’s mostly unconscious.”
“It’s adorable.”
Jungkook flushes redder.
“Can I touch them?” Taehyung reaches out. “They look soft.”
Jungkook’s ears flick. “No.”
“Please?”
“Don’t want you to.”
“Please?”
Jungkook sighs. Taehyung takes that as permission and reaches out, petting
gently.
They are soft. The gray fur is unimaginably clean and sleek under his fingers,
and Jungkook’s ears give willingly under his hand, flattening back.
Taehyung remembers how he used to pet his rabbit and scratches gently at the
bases. Jungkook's eyes slip closed. Taehyung tugs on them gently, and the
pencil rolls out of his loose grip as he sighs, this time in contentment.
“You like that?” Taehyung asks. He pulls again, running his loose fist from
base to tip. Jungkook arches up into the touch, corners of his mouth curling up
happily.
Taehyung keeps on at it, and Jungkook begins to make a sound in his throat,
almost like a purr: but the kind rabbits do, which is accompanied by slight
teeth grinding. Taehyung tugs his ears more deliberately, taking a longer time
to do it, and he lets out a soft “ah”.
Taehyung can’t resist. “Cute little bunny,” he coos.
Jungkook’s eyes fly open. His cheeks flood with pink. He stands, flicking his
head to get his ears out of Taehyung’s grip, and dashes to the kitchen.
Amused, Taehyung watches him go, then kneels on the ground to take a closer
look at his drawing. A man who bears an awful resemblance to Taehyung stands
among the trees, looking up at the rabbit on the moon, shining bright as hope
in the night sky.
~
Taehyung stares into the fireplace. They haven’t flown close to a star for a
while, and it’s especially dark outside. Taehyung was feeling mellow, so he
knew it was time to light the fire and sit in the large armchair he keeps
specifically for these occasions.
Jungkook comes stumbling out of the kitchen, where Taehyung assumes he was
sleeping. He’s made a kind of nest there: Taehyung walked into the kitchen one
day, which Jungkook now allows him into, to see him dozing curled up in a ball
on a pile of blankets in the corner, ears tucked to his shoulders. He couldn’t
stop himself—he walked across the room and patted Jungkook’s soft gray ears
gently, and he stirred, murmuring in his sleep.
“Why’s it so cold?” he asks accusingly now, shattering the memory.
“Because I lowered the thermostat.” Taehyung waves his hand at the fireplace.
“Come on. Sit by the fire.”
Jungkook, grumbling faintly, crosses the room. There’s no space on the armchair
for him with Taehyung sitting in it, so he sits on the ground beside it and
holds his hands out to the fire, warming them. His ears have been tucked close
to the sides of his head to keep them warm. “Why do you do this?”
“I miss Earth’s seasons sometimes, even winter. I do this to remember how it
felt like to be warm. You can’t really be grateful for warmth until you’ve been
cold.” Taehyung sips from his mug of hot chocolate.
Jungkook sees the chocolate and perks up. “Can I have your hot chocolate?”
“No.” Taehyung holds the mug away from him. “Isn’t chocolate toxic to bunnies?”
“I still have a human digestive system. Can I have your hot chocolate?”
“Then why don’t you eat meat?”
“By my own choosing because meat is disgusting. Can I have your hot chocolate?”
“Yah, don’t snatch it!” Taehyung jerks it away from Jungkook’s reaching hands.
Jungkook pouts, face crumpling as his ears droop. Taehyung’s fallen for that
adorably sad look once, and he’s not falling for it again. “But I want hot
chocolate,” he whines.
“Beg for it.” Taehyung holds the hot chocolate above his head when Jungkook
makes a grab at it.
Jungkook wrinkles his nose stubbornly. “No.”
“No begging, no hot chocolate.” Taehyung takes a long, satisfied gulp of it.
Jungkook huffs. Then he gets up on his knees, draping himself over the arm of
the chair and placing both hands on Taehyung’s thigh. His nose twitches as he
pushes his lower lip out, eyes widening into liquid pools of want. His bunny
ears droop pathetically. “Please?” he asks, voice pitching up sadly. He looks
like a bunny without a single carrot in the world to his name. Even his bobtail
seems to go listless and limp, sagging down.
Something in Taehyung dies at how cute the whole display is. Jungkook knows how
to work his looks, and he works them well.
Taehyung hands him the mug. Jungkook takes it in both hands and gulps greedily,
ears perking back up again.
Taehyung pats his head, smoothing his ears down. “Cutie.”
Jungkook’s eyes flutter closed. He nudges his head up under Taehyung’s hand,
wriggling closer.
“What?” Taehyung asks in alarm, thinking that Jungkook’s trying to headbutt
him. “What did I do?”
“More,” Jungkook whines.
Understanding dawns. Taehyung rolls his eyes as he scratches gently up and down
Jungkook’s ears. “You’re so thirsty for petting.”
“I’m a bunny,” Jungkook mumbles. “Of course I like being petted.”
Taehyung smooths down his hair too, patting down flyaways, and then he returns
to his ears. Jungkook does a little happy wiggle.
“You’re too adorable,” Taehyung murmurs.
Jungkook doesn’t reply, but his mouth curls up at the corners. He pushes his
head in more, then abandons pretense entirely and clambers over the arm of the
chair, flopping on top of Taehyung.
“Hey!” Taehyung gasps as his weight lands on him. “This armchair isn’t big
enough for both of us!”
“There’s space,” he says dismissively, curling up against Taehyung’s side and
pushing his head against his shoulder. “Continue.”
Taehyung sighs, squashed into the side of the armchair, but he resumes stroking
his ears and carding a hand through his hair. Jungkook seems to melt under his
ministrations, going boneless. He snuffles happily into Taehyung’s shoulder.
Taehyung finds it a little weird when he rubs his chin against him, but then
remembers that his rabbit used to do that too—to mark its territory—and feels a
little pleased rush.
“Hey,” Taehyung says softly, unwilling to break the reverent hush which has
settled over them. The fireplace crackles quietly in the background. “You’re
really needy, you know that?”
Jungkook opens his eyes and looks up at him, heavy-lidded. Their faces are very
close together. Jungkook’s hands are curled against his chest. Slowly, they
uncurl and catch ahold of Taehyung’s shirtfront, the cotton bunching up in his
fists.
Jungkook kisses him softly. It’s just on the corner of his mouth, hardly a kiss
at all, but Taehyung shuts his eyes and holds his breath. When Jungkook’s lips
come again, pressing more firmly and directly against his this time, he summons
the courage to kiss back.
It’s funny. He can face down a Colossus twice his size without breaking a
sweat, but holding Jungkook in his arms like something fragile, something
precious, is so many times more terrifying. Taehyung’s heart rate picks up,
pounding in the cradle of his ribcage, and Jungkook feels it. His mouth curls
against Taehyung’s as he smiles.
Taehyung kisses him this time, boldly. Jungkook reciprocates. Their lips press
together, mouths slightly open, and Taehyung falls in love with how softly
Jungkook touches him. He brings his arms up around Jungkook, spreading his
hands over the wings of his shoulder blades, and suddenly, this isn’t just
Jungkook snuggling against Taehyung: this is Jungkook snuggling with Taehyung,
Taehyung snuggling with Jungkook, both of them holding each other in ways more
complex than they can yet fathom.
Jungkook tilts his head and parts his lips, and Taehyung is so grateful when he
lets him in. Taehyung kisses him tentatively, tongue curling around his like a
question mark. He cannot remember the last time he kissed someone. He has never
slept with a whore, and he has never kissed anyone who was anything but
willing. There are not many willing people to be found in his line of
occupation.
It’s strange, the sounds two mouths can make together. Like music. Taehyung
hasn’t heard that in ages, either. He exhales slowly, parting briefly from
Jungkook to inhale, then presses his lips against Jungkook’s again when his
body cries out at the loss. Jungkook flicks his tongue out to taste him.
Him head spins. This is a special kind of madness: everything you have ever
wanted being within reach, and too much time to indulge yourself.
“Taetae,” Jungkook breathes quietly into his mouth, saying it like a gift. Like
it’s an act of grace simply for Taehyung’s name to rest upon his lips.
Taehyung's heart dissolves into gooey mush under the weight of how absurdly
happy he is that Jungkook has a pet name for him.
“I’m here.” Taehyung presses in closer, suddenly desperate to show his need, to
show that he needs Jungkook even if Jungkook doesn’t need him. He cups his
hands around his jaw, stroking his cheeks with his thumbs, and repeats, “I’m
here.”
Jungkook opens Taehyung’s mouth with his own, then licks in eagerly, searching.
He drags his tongue over Taehyung’s and Taehyung gasps at the unfamiliar
sensation.
“You’re inexperienced,” Jungkook murmurs softly, pulling back to look at him.
Taehyung’s thumbs smooth idly over his soft, slightly chubby cheeks.
Taehyung feels himself blush as heat rises in his face. “Yes,” he admits
quietly.
“You’re adorable,” Jungkook says, and he surges forward, kissing him harder.
Taehyung’s heart wrenches.
~
Taehyung sleeps.
Somewhere in the night, he found himself dropping off, eyes slipping shut as
his lips slowed against Jungkook’s. Jungkook sensed the change and pulled back.
He slipped his hands under Taehyung’s body, one under his knees and one under
his back, and carried him to the bed. Taehyung was hardly awake, but all he
could think as Jungkook laid him down was that he couldn’t ever remember
feeling this safe.
Jungkook left him there, going to the kitchen. Taehyung was disappointed, but
his eyes closed without resistance.
He’s woken up now by a weight sinking into the bed beside him. His eyes drift
half-open as Jungkook curls up beside him, tucking his head against his
shoulder. Taehyung groggily lifts an arm and puts it around his shoulders,
pulling him close.
Jungkook snuffles happily. Taehyung thinks that he never dreamed about the
future as a kid, but if he had, his dreams would have looked something like
this.
~
Everything’s going smoothly.
Taehyung sits in bed and reads a book. It’s ancient—Attachments by Rainbow
Rowell. The cover’s falling off and the pages are either hopelessly gummed
together or collapsing whenever Taehyung picks it up. But Taehyung likes it for
its impossibility, its easy, condensed idea of love through email.
Jungkook comes out of the kitchen. He clambers onto the bed and snuggles up to
Taehyung. Taehyung lifts an arm to let him in unconsciously. Now he can,
Jungkook is always looking for affection, and Taehyung is more than willing to
give it. “What are you reading?”
“Just a book.” Taehyung pets his hair, looking down at him. “What are you
doing?”
“Looking at you.” Jungkook grins idiotically.
Taehyung shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “You’re so—”
Suddenly, something smashes into the side of the ship, the impact making the
ship rock dangerously. Jungkook tumbles right over Taehyung’s body and over the
other side of the bed. Taehyung has to fist his hands in the bedsheets to keep
from falling.
Jungkook springs back up, wide-eyed. “What was that?” he asks wildly, eyes
darting around the room.
“I don’t know,” Taehyung says, alarmed. He’s on his feet, reaching for his
blaster. “Maybe it was just—”
And then the impact comes again, harder this time. A lamp falls off his bedside
table. Jungkook tumbles sideways and rolls across the room, and Taehyung falls
to his knees, losing his balance. The blaster flies out of his grip and
skitters across the floor.
When the ship has settled, Taehyung shoots to his feet and runs to the control
board, snatching up the blaster as he goes. He turns on the external cameras
and squints at the screen, waiting for them to come online. “What in
tarnation—”
The picture zips onto the screen. Taehyung’s face drains of blood.
“Taehyung?” Jungkook comes up behind him, trying to peer over his shoulder.
“What is it?” He catches sight of the screen and flinches back. “Oh, for the
love of greens! What the hell is that hideous thing?”
A horrible, disfigured face fills the screen. The skin is black but the eyes
are white, with tiny red dots in the middle where the pupils are. The flesh
appears to be melting directly off the face, rolls sloughing off the yellowed
surface of bone. The mutated face is framed by shoulder-length frizzy black
hair.
“The agma,” Taehyung whispers. “Space pirates.”
Jungkook tears his eyes away from the horrifying face dominating the screen.
“You’re kidding, right?”
Another impact quakes the ship. Jungkook grabs ahold of the seat to stop
himself from falling, but Taehyung falls over, hitting his head on the edge of
the control board as he goes down with a sickening crack.
“Taehyung?” Jungkook’s panicked face looms over him as he lies on his back.
“Oh, God, you’re okay, right? You’re okay? That sounded terrible!”
“I’m fine,” Taehyung says, gritting his teeth through the lancing pain in his
temple. He gets up with some effort and staggers to the control board, fighting
to keep his balance as the ship rocks. He starts flipping switches and pulling
levers, pressing buttons whose surfaces are dusty from disuse. “No, I’m not
kidding. The agma are planetless creatures who earn their living through
piracy. No one really knows where they come from, but rumor says that they come
from black holes. Rejected by and unable to live on the very thing which spawns
them, they turn to piracy for purpose.”
“Why do they look like that?” Jungkook stares at the screen. The agma the
camera is focused on is sitting behind the windshield of a ship made of a
strange, glassy black rock, clawed hands wrapped around the controls. It either
doesn’t know it’s being filmed or doesn‘t care.
“Agma spend their lives in a constant state of decomposition,” Taehyung says,
manipulating the controls with lightning-fast expertise. On the screen, the
agma’s head jerks in a different direction at the same time that the sound of
whirring fills the ship. Taehyung has just deployed the laser guns, which are
emerging from their storage cavities. “They die when their bodies fall apart
and simply can’t hold themselves together anymore. They travel in groups. A
group of agma is called a conjuring of agma.”
“That is too appropriate,” Jungkook mutters. “What are they doing?”
“They’re ramming our ship,” Taehyung answers. “This is a common strategy with
agma. They hope to create a hole in the side of our ship, conveniently
disposing of us and sucking our possessions out into space. Then they’ll use
large, trawler-style nets to capture our possessions while our bodies collapse
in the vacuum and we die gruesome deaths.”
Jungkook shudders. “That’s horrible.”
“Well, look at them. Do you think things which look like that are capable of
kindness?” Taehyung yanks a chair up to the control board with his foot. “Sit
down. You’re gonna have to help me operate the guns.”
“What?” Jungkook pales as Taehyung forces him down into his seat. “But—but I’ve
never fired spacecraft guns before.”
“You’ll have to learn,” Taehyung says grimly. “Now, this is heavy artillery.
When I fire these guns, the ship will shake, so hold on.”
“But—”
Taehyung presses the button. The ship rocks as if struck by an earthquake as a
dull booming sound emanates from outside. The camera is shaking, but Taehyung
sees the agma ship shudder as if struck by something.
The agma look enraged. More cluster behind the main pilot, egging him on. They
prepare to ram the ship again. “Taehyung—” Jungkook begins.
Taehyung cuts him off. “There’s nothing we can do but let them ram us and
pray.”
Their ship sways as another impact smashes into the same side. Jungkook seems
to throw caution and hesitation to the wind, finally pressing down on his
controls.
Taehyung commissioned him to operate the heavy-duty machine gun. It must be
weird as a novice to be maneuvering using the camera at the angle it’s set in,
which displays the gun he’s operating from the side, but Jungkook crows in
triumph when bullets spray across the agma ship windshield. The expressions of
the agma change distinctly to alarm. He sees several wide cracks spread across
the glass before the agma hurriedly fly their ship away.
“Good job!” Taehyung shouts. He’s trembling slightly from the stress of holding
the controls, which are fighting him. They’re stiff from disuse. Some of the
inner workings have probably rusted over. Taehyung hasn’t had to fend off an
attack to his ship in years—most creatures steer away from the obviously sturdy
build and the gun wells, choosing instead to attack smaller ships. Either these
agma are stupid, very lucky, or both, because Taehyung hasn’t had these weapons
serviced in years. Operating at full capacity, the agma would've been easily
dispatched, but the scales have been tipped evenly now that the weapons have
deteriorated. “You know how to operate a machine gun?”
“Have they left?” Jungkook asks. His voice trembles. His ears are laid back
flat in fear. Taehyung realizes with a pang of sympathy that Jungkook must
still be new enough to fending for himself that he instantly equates a fearsome
appearance with a fearsome foe. But that isn’t true: the agma are no more
harder to defeat than the lembut, which are literally giant balls of fluff.
Taehyung’s seen a lembut in action. They travel in groups like piranhas and
most predatory animals. A group of provoked lembuts can strip a creature’s
flesh off its bones in seconds, then go back to being adorable fluffballs while
chewing contentedly on the meat.
“No,” Taehyung says. “They’re just choosing another side to attack. Little do
they know”—Taehyung reaches over and presses a few buttons on Jungkook’s side
of the control board, pulling a lever—“that I have machine guns installed on
that side too.”
Jungkook’s fingers tighten on the controls. The camera switches automatically,
displaying a clearer, better view of the agma ship: positioned right above the
machine gun. His face hardens as he appears to steel himself. “Fire?”
“Fire,” Taehyung confirms.
Jungkook presses down on the buttons with his thumbs, pelting the weakened
windshield with bullets. Taehyung pushes his control stick forward, shooting
powerful slugs at the enemy ship’s engines and trying to put them out of
commission. An engine explodes, flames crackling within the warped metal as it
peels off the main body of the agma ship, and the agma look furious.
The agma ship reverses quickly. It occurs to Taehyung that he should be bracing
himself at the exact time that the ship shoots forward, maxing out the speed of
the one remaining engine, and Jungkook reflexively grabs the edge of the
control board in preparation for the impact.
The ship rams into theirs. Taehyung is thrown out of his chair, his head
smashing into the edge of the control board in the same place as before. His
vision weaves dizzyingly, cutting to black, and when his sight swims
lethargically back to him, he finds himself in a crumpled heap on the floor.
Jungkook relinquishes his white-knuckled grip on the edge of the control board
and rushes over. “Taehyung,” he says, shaking his shoulder. He sounds worried,
afraid, but Taehyung can’t pin down his expression: his face is too blurry. His
eyes can’t seem to focus on any one object. They keep wandering to the ceiling.
“Taehyung, oh God you’re bleeding, Taehyung you’re bleeding, you’re bleeding.”
Taehyung feels his eyes roll back. His eyelids come down to cover them. He
tries to rouse himself, to open them, because he’s sure he’s needed for
something, but his eyelids feel like they’re made out of cement and he can’t
for the life of him think of a good reason to lift them.
“Taehyung!” Jungkook shouts. Distantly, the ship rocks under his supine body.
Rag doll. Like a rag doll. He hears, feels, Jungkook get flung clear across the
room. They are both rag dolls in a metal dollhouse.
Taehyung tries to open his eyes again. They catch a slice of reality: Jungkook,
fighting his way back to the controls over the wildly swaying floor, grabbing
the control sticks and pressing down on the buttons so hard that the blood
drains out of his thumbnails. Taehyung’s eyes close. He forces them open, and
he sees the windshield of the agma ship fracture and shatter. Taehyung’s eyes
close. With a supreme effort, he makes his stone eyelids lift, and he sees
Jungkook racing across the ground to him, sliding his hands under his body and
lifting him up.
Taehyung’s eyes slide shut for the last time. He has no energy to revive
himself. He has no energy to fix himself, least of all anything or anyone else,
least of all broken bunnies with sad, drooping ears.
~
Taehyung wakes up.
His mouth and throat. Are dry. As sandpaper. He cannot think beyond the
dryness. He cannot fathom anything beyond the absence of moisture. Of water,
the blood of life.
He opens his mouth, tries to speak, but the rawness of his vocal cords does not
permit it. He tries to swallow, and the pain of his tonsils rubbing against
each other makes him wheeze.
A face looms over him. “Taehyung,” Jungkook gasps. “You’re awake.”
Taehyung turns his face away, draws breath into parched lungs. Soon he will
stop being able to breathe. The dryness is all-reaching, all-consuming. His
lips move to form the ghost of a word. Water, he pleads silently.
“Oh!” An arm, reaching across his field of vision to a glass of water on the
bedside table. The hand the arm is connected to tips the glass against
Taehyung’s lips. Taehyung swallows greedily, feeling the dampness coat his
shrivelled throat—water, water, have you ever tasted anything as beautiful as
water—and then coughs when it goes down the wrong way.
“Don’t drink so fast! You’ll choke!” Taehyung struggles up. He’s sure that
Jungkook means well, but right now he just wants to punch him. Don’t tell me
how to die.
Strong hands support him, pushing pillows between his back and the headboard,
propping him up. The cold kiss of the glass against his lips comes again.
Taehyung drinks slower this time. This time the water flows down his throat
without protest.
When Taehyung has drained that glass and another, and another, his mind has
been washed clean enough to take stock of his surroundings. He sets the empty
glass down on the bedside table with shaking hands and looks around. He’s
sitting in bed, dressed in his most comfortable pair of pajamas, Jungkook an
anxious bundle of doe eyes and laid-back bunny ears beside him. He touches a
hand to his temple, feeling the odd heaviness of his head there. The rough
gauze of a bandage meets his fingertips.
“What happened?” he asks.
“We were attacked by space pirates,” Jungkook explains in a rush. “The agma.
Remember? You hit your head and passed out. I bandaged you up. You’ve been
sleeping for a day.”
“I remember all that except for the sleeping for a day part. But…” Taehyung
looks down at his body. “You changed me?”
“I had to,” Jungkook says, looking slightly guilty. “There was blood all over
your old clothes.”
Taehyung smirks. “Liked what you saw?”
“This is not the time,” Jungkook says hotly, blushing furiously. “How are you
feeling? Are you okay?”
Taehyung coughs weakly. “Throat hurts like a bitch, but yeah, I’m fine.
Conscious.”
“Oh,” Jungkook says, and he seems to collapse forward, tipping his head against
Taehyung’s shoulder. Taehyung suddenly feels like the stronger one as Jungkook
buries his head in Taehyung’s pajamas. “I was so worried,” he says, voice
breaking, “that—that you wouldn’t wake up.”
“Hey,” Taehyung says, warmth trickling into his chest, smoothing Jungkook’s
hair back. It looks like Jungkook hasn’t bothered to comb it and instead been
running his hands frenziedly through it, making it stick up, full of cowlicks
and flyaways. Jungkook shudders against his chest, body sagging. “I’m here. I’m
okay. There’s no need to worry.”
Jungkook pushes his head harder into his chest, clinging to Taehyung’s waist
tightly. The crush of his arms seems desperate to Taehyung. Like a man who was
faced with losing everything but emerged from the other side unscathed.
“Wait,” Taehyung says, something occurring to him. “Jungkook?”
Jungkook lifts his head. His face looks thinner, as if he hasn’t been eating
properly. His nails have been gnawed down.
“Why didn’t you eject me into space,” he says softly, “and go on to Earth
yourself? You could’ve. The coordinates are already in the autopilot.”
Jungkook’s face blanks out. His mouth opens and shuts. “Because—” he says,
struggling to get words out, “because—”
Taehyung begins to get worried. “Jungkook?”
His face crumples. “B-because then you’d be lonely,” he chokes. He knocks his
forehead against Taehyung’s, their noses touching, and laughs painfully.
Taehyung feels a lump form in his throat.
“You did that?” Taehyung asks softly, giving the words to the space between
them. “You’d do that for me?”
“I would give up Earth,” Jungkook hiccups, “if it meant you could laugh another
time.”
Taehyung feels pain stab through his chest. He fists his hand in Jungkook’s
shirtfront and pulls him close, pressing his mouth against his, and then pulls
away and laughs, just as painfully as Jungkook.
They stay there like that, foreheads tilted together, tears slipping down their
cheeks.
~
Taehyung wakes far later when he should.
It’s a little luxury. Opening your eyes the first time and having them resist,
and then being able to just close them again and sleep on.
But eventually, he has to wake up—his stomach feels empty and scraped out and
the uncomfortable dryness is creeping up on his throat again. He sits up and
his elbows promptly give out, sending him thumping back into the covers. A wave
of dizziness swamps him, momentarily making his vision go black. He’s weaker
than he thought.
Someone rushes over to him. “Tae?” They help him up, propping him up with
pillows and making sure he can’t fall again.
Taehyung smiles weakly at Jungkook. He didn’t notice it before, but God, his
head hurts. “Hi.”
“Hi—you—are you okay?” Jungkook’s ears flatten back anxiously, his eyes wide
and concerned. It’s an adorable display.
“I’m fine.” Taehyung laughs and reaches out for him, and Jungkook barrels into
his arms, hugging him tightly. Taehyung closes his eyes and savors the weight
of Jungkook’s chin hooked over his shoulder.
But eventually, he has to open them. He spots strange, oval dots of color on
the floor. His eyes refuse to focus, but eventually, he manages to force them
into submission. They look…like…Easter eggs?
“Jungkook,” Taehyung asks, letting go slowly, “what are those?”
“Oh.” Jungkook flushes as he looks over his shoulder. His ears rotate so their
insides are facing away from Taehyung, embarrassed. “Um…I…made them to make you
feel better. When you woke up.”
“Are those Easter eggs?”
“Yeah,” Jungkook mumbles.
“Wait, wait, what? How do you even know about Easter eggs? How do you even know
about Easter? I thought that was an Earthling tradition.”
Jungkook draws himself up to his full height, ears bristling indignantly.
“Maybe,” he says stiffly, “but it began with us bunny hybrids.”
Taehyung’s brain stutters to a stop. “Explain,” he says weakly.
“Okay, first,” Jungkook says, holding up a finger, “I have to enlighten you on
us bunny hybrids’ long and illustrious history of chicken-rearing.”
Taehyung sputters out a laugh. “What?”
“Before us, chickens were wild, unholy creatures,” Jungkook says in a dramatic
voice. “They scratched like demons. They pecked until they drew blood, without
provocation. They laid their eggs everywhere without regard to personal space
and enjoyed it when people stepped on them and got an unpleasant eggy surprise
on their soles.”
Taehyung keels slowly over in bed, beginning to laugh helplessly.
“But the bunny hybrids knew something had to be done!” Jungkook pounds his fist
into the bed for emphasis. “Tokki is a peaceful planet! We couldn’t have rogue
feathery henpeckers running helter-skelter all over the place! Think of the
elderly! The children!”
“Stop,” Taehyung gasps, unable to breathe.
“So one of our bravest warriors went out into the wilderness which had sprung
up in the wake of the chicken invasion. His name was Arnab Fluffypaws—”
“I am 101% sure you just made that name up.”
“No, I didn’t, the Fluffypaws are a respectable, honorable clan of bunnies
dating back to olden times, don’t interrupt—now, Arnab Fluffypaws didn’t return
for 8 days and 8 weeks. People began to worry. People began to think he was
dead, that the chickens”—Jungkook sucks in breath—“had dominated him.”
“This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” Taehyung chokes, wiping
tears from his eyes.
“But!” Jungkook leans forward, widening his eyes. “On the ninth day of 8
weeks—”
“You mean nine weeks and two days—”
“Arnab Fluffypaws emerged!” Jungkook slams his palm into the mattress with
emotion. “He held a chicken in either hand, upside down by the feet, and the
chickens were hanging utterly placidly and willingly! We asked him how he
survived! He told us that the chickens willingly gave up their eggs for him to
eat!”
“Wait, wait, wait. How come you don’t eat eggs then?”
“That’s just because I personally don’t like eggs. Back to the story! Arnab
Fluffypaws was hailed far and wide as a hero. The rabbits of Tokki shouted his
name, and the galaxy shed tears of gratefulness. At long last, the feathery
beasts, the egg-laying troublemakers, the—the sharp-beaked monsters, had been
tamed! Reared! Domesticated!” Jungkook leans in close and raises his eyebrows
in Taehyung’s face. Taehyung falls over, wheezing with laughter.
Jungkook leans back, calmly folding his hands in his lap. “And that is the
story of how the rabbits of Tokki became chicken-rearers. We rode them into war
with neighboring planets. We harvested their eggs. We sold their meat to other
species. They became our main trade, and that which had once plagued us was
suddenly our lifeblood.”
“That was a great epic and all, but it doesn’t explain how you know about
Easter eggs.”
“Patience!” Jungkook tuts, holding up a hand. “I’m getting to it. One day, a
contingent of Tokki royalty visited Earth, the planet which all the myths said
was the most beautiful in known existence. Earth’s prince saw our princess and
fell in love. Her name was Kkoch. In the ancient, noble language of Tokki, that
means flower.”
“It doesn’t sound like it means flower. It sounds like the sound you make when
you get a fishbone stuck in your throat and you’re trying to gag it out.”
“You disrespect my history,” Jungkook hisses, scandalized, and Taehyung
giggles. “Now, tales of the princess’ beauty are even told today. Her bunny
ears had the roundest tips on the planet and her nose-twitching was as graceful
as the finest dance. Her bobtail was perfectly spherical and composed entirely
of fluff so soft it felt like cotton candy.”
“You are so making this up.”
“Am not! Stop interrupting! Earthlings can be wonderful people”—he reaches out
and tweaks Taehyung’s nose teasingly—“full of kindness and compassion and love,
but they can also be greedy and selfish and inconsiderate. The prince was one
of the latter. He demanded that he have the princess, and if she was not
delivered, he threatened to wage war on Tokki.”
“Rude.”
“Very. The people of Tokki didn’t want to marry their beloved princess to a
boorish pig like that. But they knew they had to do something to appease him,
so they combined two of their most valued resources—eggs and chocolate—and
turned it into a gift.”
“Chocolate? You guys are chocolate farmers too?”
“Number one, you can’t farm chocolate, you farm cocoa, and number two, we were,
thanks to this princely idiot. Don’t cut in. From that wonderful union of two
heavenly ingredients, the Easter egg was born. We made them by boring holes in
eggshells and draining the contents out, then pouring in liquid chocolate and
letting it solidify. Once that was finished, we painted the eggshells bright
colors and mesmerizing patterns to make them even more alluring.”
“I do not believe a word of what you’re saying.”
“Your loss. The bunnies of Tokki gave the eggs to Earth as replacement for the
princess. The people of Earth were at first enraged, but when they tasted the
wonderful chocolate, they cried tears of joy and accepted the gift. No other
planet in the galaxy had cocoa trees at the time. Only Tokki held the secret of
chocolate close to their rapidly-thumping rabbit hearts.”
Taehyung really can’t breathe. He needs to stop laughing at the absurdity of
this story or he’ll go into shock.
“However, Earthling royalty at the time were greedy.” Jungkook’s eyes darken.
“One day, the noble cocoa farmers rose from their beds and found their fields
stripped of their trees. The Earthlings had come in the night, snuck onto our
farms, and stolen all our cocoa plants. Just like that, we had been robbed of
our most precious secret thanks to greed and the Earthlings’ perceived
entitlement to what was not theirs.”
Taehyung feels a brief pang of guilt even though he knows this story is
probably a load of rabbit droppings.
“The Earthlings eventually domesticated their own chickens through barbaric
methods such as stuffing them into tiny cages and drugging them, and they
figured out how to make their own Easter eggs, although of course these eggs
were inferior to ours. They stole not only chocolate, but the idea of Easter
eggs for their own. Because bunny hybrids are a peaceful race, we accepted that
we had been stolen from and too trusting of these no-eared monsters—”
“Hey! I have ears!”
“—and chose not to wage war.” Jungkook sniffs loftily. “However, in a fit of
inadequate remorse, the prince decided that the bunnies of Tokki had to be
given somecredit. He was still in love with the princess, see, and he wanted to
honor her name. That was how the Easter bunny was born.”
Taehyung shakes his head, gasping for air. “I’ll give you one thing. Earthling
fairytales can’t hold a candle to bunny hybrid ones.”
“This isn’t a fairytale! This is a true and righteous story of us bunnies’
struggle against the tyranny of Earthlings!”
“Do I look like a tyrant to you?”
“Sometimes.” Jungkook huffs disgustedly. “You with your—with your tail-less
tailbone, and your flat ears, and your small teeth—”
“Just because I don’t look like you doesn’t mean I’m ugly!” Taehyung laughs
uncontrollably, clutching his stomach. “I like you even though you don’t look
like me!”
“And I like you,” Jungkook says shyly.
Taehyung shakes his head, grinning so wide his face may split, and kisses him.
The chocolate fillings of the Easter eggs cool inside their eggshells.
~
“Jungkook.” Taehyung shakes his shoulder. Jungkook curls up tighter in
Taehyung’s bed, hugging Taehyung’s pillow closer to his chest and burying his
nose in it. He abandoned his blanket nest in the kitchen while Taehyung was
recovering and migrated to his bed, “to check up on him”, but Taehyung knew it
was just an excuse for prolonged midnight cuddle sessions.  “Jungkook, wake
up.”
“Why?” Jungkook grumbles. He tightens his arms around Taehyung’s pillow.
“We’re approaching Earth,” Taehyung says quietly.
Jungkook jerks upright. He lets go of the pillow, which falls sadly onto the
bed, and follows Taehyung to the windscreen. In the star-dotted blackness of
space, a marble hangs, desert-colored orange and dusty beige land rising out of
polluted murky brown oceans. Taehyung remembers sadly how the planet was once
green and blue, how it was once so beautiful that passing traders would abandon
their cargo just to land on Earth and take a look around, but how humans robbed
nature of all her splendor and squandered it on themselves—paper, meat,
coal—then spit the waste those stolen gifts created back out into the ocean.
“Where do you want to land?” he asks Jungkook softly. He is
uncharacteristically subdued today. Jungkook never specified what he would do
with Taehyung after he brought him to Earth, and Taehyung doesn’t want to find
out now, with all that is tender and precious still hovering between them. He
doesn’t want to find out for fear of breaking.
“T-the place in the brochure,” Jungkook stammers, unable to take his eyes off
Earth as they near it and it slowly grows bigger. “Yellowstone?”
“It doesn’t exist anymore,” Taehyung says, turning the wheel, “but I can take
you to where it used to be.”
They are both quiet as land approaches. Taehyung pulls up, and they land
softly, dust clouds billowing around them. The dirt has not had tree roots to
hold it in place for decades, and the loose soil surrenders to the wind,
unfettered.
“You might want to wear a face mask and goggles,” Taehyung tells Jungkook
quietly. “The dust will kick up. It’ll be hard to breathe.”
Jungkook pulls on the mask and goggles obediently. He sees Taehyung strapping a
rolled-up pack to his back. “But this is the only planet where our rune won’t
be working, right?” he asks, referring to the permanent magical rune all
newborn creatures get at birth. It allows them to breathe in any atmosphere.
“Yes,” Taehyung says, staring out the window at the desolation of his planet.
“I’m not sure whether environmental pollution has messed with it, but Earth
should still have oxygen.”
Taehyung opens the door for the first time in a month, slowly completing the
complicated process of turning knobs and pulling levers. Jungkook watches him
silently and doesn’t rush him.
The door swings open with a hiss as the stale air of the ship’s interior meets
Earth’s. Immediately, dust roars into the ship, the sound of the wind carrying
it deafening. Tiny, gritty particles sting their exposed skin. Taehyung motions
to Jungkook, telling him to come outside, and then shuts the door as quickly as
he can, digging his heels into the dirt against the wind.
They stand and look around. The land has been worn utterly flat around them, a
massive cliff jutting out in the distance the only remarkable geographical
feature. The buildings all collapsed when humans left, and the trees were all
gone anyway, so there was nothing to hinder the wind. It swept over the land
and eroded away any uneven lumps or bumps, making Earth a mostly perfectly flat
sphere and erasing all that made it interesting and different in the process.
Taehyung shuffles his feet around. There’s a thin layer of soil still, nearly
gray from unhealthiness, but below that is sand. He’s surprised any soil
remains at all. He’d thought that the wind would’ve blown it all into the
oceans.
He catches sight of Jungkook walking off, fighting the wind and holding his
mask to his face. Taehyung follows him. Jungkook falls to his knees after a
while of struggling, and Taehyung comes up beside him.
He’s stopped where a streambed is still visible, the mingled dirt and sand of
the land dropping off in a faintly visible riverbank to a ditch-like depression
in the ground. The dirty brown water has dried up to just a foot-wide trickle
at the bottom of the trench—evaporation rates must be insane with wind speeds
like this. Animal corpses choke the riverbed. There are fishbones stripped of
their flesh, a great many of them, but there are bigger bones too—what Taehyung
thinks is a bear, deer, maybe a pack of wolves. They must have come here
looking for water and died of thirst.
He feels a pang of sympathy. His nose stings. Jungkook touches a bone as thick
as his arm, probably belonging to the bear, and jerks his hand away when he
touches a chunk of dessicated flesh still clinging to it. He stares in horror
at his fingers, dust crumbling away from the tips: all that remains of Earth’s
majestic animals. A little distance away, a skull with twisting, curved horns
lies in a drift of sand. Its hollow eye sockets judge the both of them for
daring to hope that in coming here, they could find some sort of redemption,
could find anything but the ruin of death and decay.
Jungkook tears off his mask and retches. He lifts his face and tries to take a
breath, gagging when he accidentally breathes in the sand carried on the wind.
He falls over, clutching his throat and trying to breathe, failing miserably as
he chokes. Taehyung has to do something.
He rummages hastily in his pockets, finally pulling out a little pouch of
magical powder. He throws it against the ground, screaming at the top of his
lungs to be heard over the wind: “Memento!”
Peace descends on the world.
The wind dies down. Water, clean and blue, fills the streambed. Flesh grows
back onto the bones as they knit themselves together into bodies, cover
themselves with scales and skin and fur. Trees sprout around them, reaching
leaf-filled branches into the star-dotted night sky. The newly-rebirthed
gazelles prance away from the bear. The wolves shake the water off their
muzzles. The bear stalks away into the woods, snorting slightly. The fish
wriggle down the river, sleek bodies like silver arrows in the water. The air
is fresh again, sweet on Taehyung’s tongue. He wants to cry. He didn’t know how
much he missed the smell of nature, sweet as flowers on the wind; the feeling
of it, grass and leaves crunching under his soles; the sound of it, birdsong
winding like ribbons between the trees.
He kneels next to Jungkook. Jungkook is coughing, trying to scrape the sand out
of his throat, sand which no longer exists in this vision of the past, and
Taehyung thumps him on the back. “It’s okay,” he soothes softly. “It’s okay,
get it all out.”
Jungkook wheezes for the last time. He sits back on his haunches and looks
around, eyes as wide as dinner plates. His ears rotate hungrily to pick up on
all the sounds, back and forth, back and forth, like furred periscopes. His
nostrils flare as his nose twitches incessantly, and his mouth opens,
unconsciously dragging deep gulps of the sweet air into his lungs.
“I told you not to take off your mask,” Taehyung chides gently.
“Taehyung.” Jungkook grips his shoulders, steering him so he looks around.
“Taehyung. Look.”
“I know.” Taehyung reaches out and plucks a delicate white flower off a bush,
settling it between Jungkook’s rabbit ears.
“Why didn’t you tell me it was like this? I—I didn’t—” Jungkook crawls around
on his hands and knees like a baby, sinking his fingers into the grass and damp
dirt, grabbing tufts of it, disbelief cloaking his features. “I didn’t know it
was so beautiful.”
“Come on,” Taehyung says, guiding him gently to the riverbank. “Drink. It’ll
make your throat feel better.”
Jungkook stares down at the stream water, so clear in some places that you can
see right down to the pebbly riverbed. “I can drink this water? Just—just
running over the ground like this?”
“Yes. It’s clean. One of the cleanest and purest things you’ll ever taste.”
Jungkook leans down and cups his hands, sipping it tentatively. Then he drinks
more of it, gulping greedily, water running down his chin. Taehyung watches
him. He knew what Earth looked like, but seeing it through Jungkook’s eyes is
like experiencing it all over again.
Suddenly, Jungkook screams and jerks back. He points a quivering finger at the
water. “What—what’s that?” he yells.
Taehyung looks. A school of fish darts past, bodies skimming just underneath
the surface of the water. “Oh, Jungkookie,” Taehyung says, wanting to cry and
laugh at the same time. “Those are fish.”
Jungkook approaches hesitantly. “What do they do?”
“They swim. Lay eggs. Get fished, sometimes. They live.”
Jungkook looks around. “What—what is this whole set-up? Why does everything
look like this? It looked terrible just a while ago.”
“I used a time rewind spell. They’re cheaper than the others and easier to use,
so I have a whole bunch of them.”
Jungkook shouts in alarm again, running and hiding behind Taehyung. The bear
has emerged from the trees and is making straight for them. However, it lumbers
right past them and stands on the riverbank, batting clumsily at the fish in
the water. “What’s that?”
“It’s a bear. If we were really here, it would be attacking us right now.”
“Why isn’t it?”
“We don’t exist in the same plane of existence as them. This”—Taehyung waves
his hand around—“this is all dead. Past. Gone. They’re just ghosts. We’re still
alive. We can affect things in this world, but things in this world can’t
affect us. The bear can’t see us.”
Jungkook relaxes. He walks around the clearing, touching the tree trunks, the
rough rasp of the bark under his fingers. He sniffs the leaves, rubbing them
between his palms. Taehyung feels a rush of sadness as he looks at him. He
can’t imagine how empty the other creatures in the galaxy are because they’ve
never witnessed this.
“Can we stay here?” Jungkook pleads, turning around. “Please?”
Taehyung sighs. “I thought you’d want that.” He slips his pack off his back. “I
brought a tent.”
Jungkook runs to him and folds him tightly into his arms. “Thank you.”
Taehyung hugs him back. Then he disentangles himself and begins setting up the
tent, driving stakes into the soft ground with his boot and draping waterproof
cloth over the framework.
Jungkook wanders from tree to tree, looking up at their leafy canopies. He
presses his ear to the trunk of one as if hoping that he’ll hear something.
“Don’t go off too far,” Taehyung calls. “You might get lost.”
He goes to collect water from the stream in a metal pot. The tent is magical,
so when it’s set up properly, it contains camping equipment and bedding.
Jungkook comes back. “Can I eat these?” he asks in a curiously muffled voice,
holding up a handful of berries, cheeks oddly full. “They look really nice.”
Taehyung squints at them, taking a moment to identify them. Blueberries. “Yeah,
you can eat them.”
Jungkook smiles sheepishly at him, revealing teeth stained blue and cheeks
stuffed with half-chewed berries. “Oh, good.”
Taehyung laughs. “You can’t just go around eating and touching everything in
sight, you know. Some plants are poisonous.”
Jungkook’s expression is eclipsed by alarm. “Huh? Really?’
“Yeah.”
He stares down at the berries with horror and tiptoes over the grass, setting
his feet down carefully as if he’s afraid that he’ll step on a mine.
Taehyung giggles. “There’s no need to be like that.” He stands. “Look, I’ll
follow you, okay? I’ll be your guide.”
“Okay.” Jungkook holds out his free hand. Taehyung takes it, and they wander
off into the woods, exploring a world which is already dead.
~
Taehyung’s sleeping in the tent when he hears a shout.
He wakes up. He can hear the roar of wind and the grittiness of sand being
thrown against the sides of the tent, so he assumes that the time rewind spell
has worn off.
He sits up and looks around the tent. Jungkook. Jungkook isn’t here.
That means he’s outside.
Taehyung yanks on his mask and goggles, stumbling out into the wind. It roars
deafeningly in his ears and throws itself against the lenses of his goggles,
threatening to peel the skin off his face. Jungkook stands outside with his
shirt pulled up over his mouth as a rudimentary mask, squinting to see.
Something is clutched in his hand. He raises it high above his head. His voice
carries faintly over to Taehyung: “Memento!”
Alarm, flashing behind Taehyung’s eyelids. “Jungkook, no—!”
He brings his hand down. The gales subside. The woods spring back up around
them. The gush and trickle of the stream, newly refilled, replaces the all-
consuming roar of the wind.
“Jungkook,” Taehyung says, striding over the rebirthed grass towards him, “you
can’t just keep using my time rewind spells. They’re gonna run out eventually,
and besides, our supplies are finishing—we have to leave Earth soon to go to
another planet and stock up. You have to accept that this world is gone. You
can’t just keep using magic to bring it back.”
“But I can’t—” Jungkook turns desperate, wild eyes on him. They’re filled with
tears. “I can’t just let it go,” he says, voice small and ragged with
hopelessness.
Taehyung feels his nose burn. This is why he didn’t mention the time rewind
spells to Jungkook. He knew Jungkook would be too raw from being gifted the
past to give it back.
Taehyung sighs. “Fine, Jungkook,” he says, turning to go back into the tent.
“But when the spells run out, we have to go.”
Jungkook doesn’t hear him. He’s too busy staring, glassy-eyed, at the inky blue
canopy of the night sky spreading above their heads.
~
“Taehyung.”
A whisper. A soft one. Taehyung opens his eyes and closes them. Someone nudges
him again.
“Taehyung, look. Look what I found.”
Taehyung opens his eyes. Jungkook kneels in front of him, a bunny rabbit in his
lap. It’s gray, the exact same color as the fur on Jungkook’s ears, and it’s
purring contentedly, eyes closed, as Jungkook strokes its ears and caresses its
back. “I think it can actually see me,” Jungkook whispers.
“But that’s not possible,” Taehyung mumbles blearily, sitting up. “The spell
doesn’t allow that.”
Right on cue, the bunny opens its eyes and stares devotedly up at Jungkook.
Jungkook twitches his nose at it. It twitches its nose back.
“Maybe there are things stronger than magic,” Jungkook says quietly, scratching
its forehead gently.
Taehyung reaches his hand out tentatively. He draws a hand down the bunny’s
back, fingers sinking into the soft fur. It arches up into his palm, purring
more loudly.
“You have a way with bunnies,” Jungkook says, smiling down at the rabbit in his
arms.
Taehyung looks at Jungkook, listens to the affection in his voice, and feels
his heart break. He’s already in love with this world, with the past he can’t
have. And when he realizes that there aren’t enough time rewind spells in the
galaxy to bring back what’s already dead, it will break him.
Taehyung does not want to see the pieces.
“Maybe I do,” Taehyung answers softly.
~
Taehyung realizes later that night, when he's given up on sleeping because
Jungkook kept capering in and out of the tent to excitedly regale him with
stories of Earth's wonders and waking him up, that he still has some old songs
from Earth downloaded onto his ancient phone. He has no idea why he kept it or
how it survived. He has no idea why he brought it, either.
He’s immensely surprised to see that the phone still has battery. It’s been
switched off for more than a decade. He would’ve thought that it’s run out.
Jungkook hasn’t heard music before. Creatures other than Earthlings aren’t big
on music that isn’t instrumental, and the inhabitants of Tokki aren’t big on
music at all. He leans close to the phone, wide-eyed, as they sit around it
outside the tent on the grass, ears turned towards it attentively.
Taehyung chose the song which used to be his favorite: Glory by Bastille. The
singer is long dead, and so is everyone else who ever knew this song exists,
but Taehyung remembers. The music envelopes them, drifting between the trees,
and Jungkook watches the phone in fascination while Taehyung watches him. The
song speaks so strongly of nostalgia and the past that sometimes Taehyung can
feel the hopeless weariness of it down to his bones.
“Looking up forever,” Jungkook sings softly.
“No,” Taehyung corrects gently. “It’s looking up for heaven…waiting to be
buried.”
Jungkook looks at him. “That’s depressing.”
“The song is depressing if you listen to the lyrics. It talks about past
happiness, happiness achieved and lost. And there’s never anything happy about
missing something.”
Jungkook looks at him. “Sing more,” he says softly. “You have a nice voice.”
“So do you. I’ll only sing it if you sing it with me.”
“Fine.”
Jungkook attempts glaring at him, mouth twitching. Then he grabs Taehyung’s
hand and tangles their fingers together, pulling it into his lap.
I’ll take my chances on the curb here with you
We watched the planes leave us behind
“What are planes?” Jungkook stops singing to ask.
“Big metal flying ships which took you places.”
And then you put your hand in mine
Pulled me back from things divine
Stop looking up for heaven
Waiting to be buried
“That’s better,” Jungkook says, smiling, and Taehyung laughs. He squeezes his
hand.
Way down here upon the ground
When we’re lying in the dirt
There’s no looking up for heaven
Looking up…
The song trails off, dying down, and then it ends. Taehyung blinks up at the
sky, stars scattered over dark blue blurring as he looks at them. He didn’t
know he was crying.
Jungkook laughs and sweeps a thumb clumsily under his eye, catching the tear as
it falls. He rolls on top of Taehyung and kisses him, and Taehyung wishes so
badly that this weren’t in the past.
“Taehyung,” Jungkook whispers. “Hey. Taehyung.”
“What?” Taehyung tries to reach for his mouth, but Jungkook pulls away. He
huffs. Jungkook never refuses him.
“Do you want to?”
“Want to what?” Taehyung settles for his neck and peppers it with little
butterfly kisses, making Jungkook giggle and swat at him. He licks at his jaw
and Jungkook jumps.
“Want to…you know.” Jungkook catches his face and pulls it away, making
Taehyung look at him. “Do it.”
Taehyung finally cops on. “Are you asking me whether I want to have sex with
you?”
Jungkook flushes. “Yes. Please.”
“I can’t believe this,” Taehyung says, laughing. “You, Jeon Jungkook, who
worked at Sextillion for years and years, couldn’t just ask me straight up
whether I wanted to sleep with you? You asked me whether I wanted to do it?”
“I was trying to be polite,” Jungkook says defensively, cheeks blushing
furiously red.
Taehyung laughs and pinches his cheeks. “You’re so cute.”
“Will you?” Jungkook asks hopefully, letting Taehyung kiss his bunny ears. His
fur is soft under his lips. “Will you sleep with me? I mean—do you want to?”
“Of course I want to.” Taehyung shoves a thigh between his legs playfully. “How
could I refuse this?”
He doesn’t expect the reaction Jungkook gives him. His mouth opens, lips
forming a perfect O, and he spreads his legs wider, grinding down. Taehyung
feels something twitch against his thigh. His mouth goes dry.
Jungkook puts his mouth against his ear. “I haven’t gotten off in a month,” he
whispers, “because you would’ve heard me.”
Taehyung isn’t sure whether he can actually form coherent sentences anymore.
“N-neither have I,” he stammers out eventually.
Jungkook moans breathlessly, crushing Taehyung’s hips closer with a hand
against the small of his back and fucking down onto his thigh. Taehyung’s
breath catches in his throat. Jungkook has went from cute to sinful in a flip
of a switch.
“Want you so bad,” he groans, and Taehyung shivers at the warmth of his breath
on the side of his neck.
“I—” Jungkook cuts him off, pressing his mouth against Taehyung’s. Taehyung
melts as Jungkook takes control, using his tongue to open Taehyung’s mouth and
wrapping it around Taehyung’s. He clutches wordlessly at Jungkook’s shirtfront
and cants his hips up, clumsily trying to meet Jungkook’s midway.
Jungkook moves away from his mouth and attaches his mouth to his neck, finding
a sensitive spot and sucking on it. Taehyung feels a rush of arousal when he
bites down, catching the skin between his teeth. His fingers tighten in his
hair. His tongue is the warmest, wettest, softest thing which has ever touched
him.
Jungkook pushes his shirt up to his collarbones, and Taehyung only feels the
cool air hit his skin for a second before Jungkook’s mouth descends all over.
He writhes as he kisses his sternum, his nipples, his flat stomach. “You’re too
skinny,” he murmurs, spreading a large hand over Taehyung’s ribs. Taehyung
wants to shrink, wants to mewl. He feels small and cared for in the best way
possible under his touch.
“Because I’m always stressed about you,” he says, panting slightly. He feels
Jungkook’s smile against his skin when he kisses one slightly jutting hipbone,
then another. He sucks a bruise into the skin right below his navel, over where
all the heat in Taehyung’s body seems to be pooling, and the heat flares to a
bonfire.
His hips jump. Jungkook pins them down with one hand and pulls at the waistband
of both his pants and boxers with another. Taehyung lifts his ass off the
ground to help him, hissing when the cool air meets the heat between his legs.
Jungkook ignores it, pulling his pants and underwear off completely and lifting
one leg. He kisses at Taehyung’s ankle, up his calf, behind his knee, down the
backs of his thighs, stopping to lick at his inner thighs. Taehyung wriggles
impatiently. Then he does the same with the other leg. Taehyung is ticklish,
and he giggles when Jungkook flicks his tongue over his thigh.
“Hurry up,” he whines.
Jungkook doesn’t seem to hear him. He crawls back up his body and kisses
Taehyung’s stomach again, thumb rubbing circles into his hipbones. Taehyung can
feel his throat against the tip of his dick, goddamn it. What inferior power
made Jungkook such a tease?
“Jungkook,” he whimpers.
He finally takes Taehyung’s cock in his hand, gripping it loosely by the base,
and Taehyung moans in appreciation. Then he rubs it against his cheek, smiling
infuriatingly.
“What are you doing?” Taehyung asks in exasperation. He cannot with him. “It
goes in your mouth, Jungkook, not against your cheek.”
“I know,” he says in a singsong voice. He kisses the tip, licking slowly and
deliberately into the slit, and Taehyung has a mini heart attack.
“Fuck,” he hisses when Jungkook takes the whole thing into his mouth.
“I—oh—God.”
He feels his length hit the back of Jungkook’s throat, and then Jungkook keeps
going, letting it slide all the way down until his nose touches Taehyung’s
belly. Taehyung’s eyes are squeezed shut. Taehyung’s eyes are squeezed shut,
because if he looks at Jungkook with his cock stuffed down his throat, he might
come right then and there.
No one’s ever done this for him before, ever liked him enough to do it for him
before, and it’s all soft and wet and tight and Taehyung doesn’t know how
Jungkook is breathing or not gagging or choking or wait those are unsexy
thoughts Taehyung should not be thinking unsexy thoughts because his dick is
down Jungkook’s throatoh God oh God oh God—
“You okay?” Jungkook asks around his cock. Taehyung whimpers when the
vibrations travel down it right into his bones, forearms flung over his face.
Jungkook’s thumb keeps rubbing into his hipbone, the touch making him
delirious.
“Think I’m gonna come,” Taehyung whines.
“That’s okay,” Jungkook says. Rather nice of him, Taehyung thinks. He can’t
look at him. “But I haven’t even moved yet.”
“How are you talking?”
“Practice.” Jungkook pulls off, then swallows Taehyung back down cleanly, and
the friction and wet slide of it is almost too much. Taehyung feels himself
teetering on the brink of losing himself before he forcefully digs his nails
into his own thighs, spread on either side of Jungkook’s head, and pulls
himself back. “You like this?”
“Like?” Taehyung gasps. He thinks he might combust, might explode into a
million particles and transcend the boundaries of physics to become light
itself, and Jungkook asks him whether he likes it?
“How about this,” Jungkook says conversationally, and Taehyung feels his tongue
draw back along the underside of his length. He swallows hard around Taehyung,
throat clenching tightly and wonderfully around all the most sensitive parts of
him, and Taehyung cries out, pushing at his head.
Jungkook pulls off, eyeing him with concern. “Did I hurt you?”
“No, just—don’t wanna come yet—was too close.” Taehyung clenches his legs
together and takes several deep, gulping breaths. “I’m sorry, Kookie. This is
my first time doing this. You’re probably impatient.”
“I can wait,” he says, drawing patterns on Taehyung’s soft belly. “Aw, that’s
cute. You hardly have any muscle here.”
“I haven’t got time to work out,” Taehyung grumbles, eyes still screwed shut.
The white light burning behind his eyelids begins to subside slowly, waves
drawing back from the shore, and Taehyung exhales, his lungs deflating. “Okay.
Okay, I think I’m okay.”
“Can I start again?” Taehyung doesn’t dare open his eyes, and his world is a
tapestry of sensations. Grass against his back. Jungkook’s soft hair brushing
his inner thighs. Jungkook’s lips, softer than anything, pressing up and down
his length in kisses which are too gentle and too much.
“Please.”
Wet warmth surrounds him again. Taehyung stifles a moan with his fist and
spreads his legs as far apart as they’ll go, trying to hold on despite Jungkook
slowly taking him deeper and deeper. Does the man have no gag reflex? Once he’s
reached the bottom, he flicks out his tongue and licks Taehyung’s balls, licks
his balls, and the light nearly crests the peak of his release.
Taehyung gasps out a curse. Jungkook begins moving his head, the wet warmth not
just there but moving against him too, and Taehyung dissolves into a babbling
delirium of begging for more and pleading for him to get off.
Jungkook quickly finds that edging Taehyung is the easiest and fastest shortcut
to breaking him down. He gets Taehyung to the point where he would sell his
soul for another swallow, another lick, another anything, but Jungkook’s just
tightening his fist around the base of his cock to cut off his orgasm and
grinning down at him.
“Fuck you,” Taehyung spits, trying to fuck up into the tight circle of his hand
and wanting to cry when Jungkook just clenches his hand tighter. “Fuck me. Fuck
us both!”
“Don’t think that’s physically possible.”
“Don’t be smart with me!” Taehyung’s voice cuts to a whiny edge. “Please.”
“Wanna hear you beg for it.”
Taehyung rolls his eyes, recognizing his own words being repeated to him.
“Please,” he whimpers.
“Mmm. Acceptable.” Jungkook swallows him down, possibly for the millionth time.
They’ve had to use more time rewind spells because he was taking so long—they
used two so they wouldn’t have to be interrupted again later.
Taehyung gasps, and it’s only been a minute when he’s pushing at Jungkook’s
head again. “Jungkook, get off, I’m gonna—I’m gonna—”
But Jungkook only hums and ignores him.
“Jungkookie, please—” Taehyung shuts his eyes. “I don’t wanna come down your
throat, Kookie—”
“I’m okay with it,” he says, voice muffled.
“Jungkook,”Taehyung moans desperately when he swallows, every muscle in his
throat contracting around him. He tenses up, and he comes hard, his body
wringing itself dry. Pleasure pulses spasmodically between his legs. Jungkook
pulls off and rests the tip of his cock on his tongue, pumping it, and Taehyung
groans from oversensitivity when he milks a few more white drops out of his
spent cock.
When he comes down from his high and can see again, Jungkook is tonguing at his
slit like a cat licking the last drops of milk from a saucer. He huffs and
pushes Jungkook off, and he tumbles away, laughing. His tongue is white with
Taehyung’s come. Taehyung blushes furiously when he sees it.
“Not so bad, huh?” Jungkook teases, chucking him under the chin.
“Ugh,” Taehyung groans. “That was fucking amazing. I wanna—I wanna keep you
under my bed, make you blow me every time I want one, make you goddamn—”
He shuts up when Jungkook flips him over and pulls his ass flush against his
hips, rubbing his clothed erection into Taehyung’s ass. Taehyung’s words
sputter and die out.
“I want,” he manages, grinding his ass back into Jungkook’s crotch, “that too.”
Jungkook turns his head, kissing him, the sounds of their mouths coming
together and separating wetly filling the clearing. “You got lube?” he asks,
after he’s licked Taehyung’s tongue over so thoroughly that Taehyung is weak in
the knees.
“In my pants pocket,” Taehyung whispers.
Jungkook reaches over, rummages in the pile of clothing beside them. He pulls
out a small, transparent bottle and flicks the cap open with his thumbnail. He
shucks his clothes off quicker than Taehyung’s ever seen anyone disrobe. Then
he squirts the clear liquid over his fingers and places them against Taehyung’s
rim, making him jump. “When was the last time you had anything in you?” he
asks.
Taehyung shakes his head. “Before I met you. You’ve been driving me up the
wall.”
“Just fingers?”
“Yeah.”
“Ever had anything else?”
“No,” he admits quietly.
Jungkook huffs out a laugh. “I’m gonna have fun with you.” He resettles his
fingers against Taehyung’s hole, and his toes curl as he squirms at the
unfamiliar sensation of slick wetness in such a private place. “Try to relax.”
Taehyung’s body is used to being penetrated, and it lets Jungkook’s finger in
without protest. Taehyung sighs and spreads his legs a little wider, given up
on being embarrassed. “Oh, that feels good.”
“You could have just gotten yourself off in the shower or something,” Jungkook
says, pushing his finger in until the knuckle. “I would have heard you, but I
probably would’ve enjoyed it.”
“Why jerk myself off when you were right”—Jungkook curls his finger, hitting
his prostate directly—“there!”
Stars pop in his vision. Jungkook pushes his finger deliberately into that spot
again, and Taehyung groans, heat pulsing through his stomach. He clenches
around his finger, body seizing up with need.
“How did you do that so fast? Even I-I’ve never been able to find my own that
fast,” he stutters, nails digging into his own thighs. Jungkook gently prises
his hands away and kisses the nail marks, the finger still working inside
Taehyung a stark contrast to the softness of the gesture.
Jungkook edges a second finger against the rim and pushes it in, and his body
doesn’t protest, pulling it in eagerly. His stomach is a coiling mess of need.
He gasps when Jungkook scissors his fingers wide and then curls them harshly
against his prostate. “Jungkook.”
“I’m here,” he murmurs. He leans over Taehyung, pushing up one leg to get a
better angle, and Taehyung arches up. He lowers his head obligingly, letting
Taehyung kiss him hungrily, obscenely, tongues licking out of their mouths to
meet in the middle and separating with loud, wet smacks. “Shit, Tae, you’re so
needy.”
“Haven’t had this for a month.” His breath has turned shallow and panting, his
hips canting down restlessly to fuck themselves on Jungkook’s fingers. He just
came from a blowjob, but his dick is plumping up against his stomach again, all
the blood in his body slowly trickling downward and filling his crotch with
tingling heat. “Of course I’m fucking needy.”
Jungkook presses a third finger down on his perineum, prompting another flood
of pleasure through his body as he silently asks for permission. Taehyung
spreads his legs wider, eager.
Jungkook pushes it in. It burns a little bit. But his body is used to it, has
walked this beat many times although it hasn’t done so for the past month, and
it knows how to relax and let go of the pain. Jungkook thrusts all three of his
fingers into his prostate, cruelly hard, and Taehyung’s entire body arches off
the ground.
But it still isn’t enough. Fingers can’t ever get as deep as he wants them to
go, needs them to go, and his body has always known it.
“Stop,” Taehyung moans. “Stop, I want you.”
“You have me.”
“You know what I mean. I—” Jungkook presses his fingers deliberately into his
sweet spot, and he breaks off in a cry. “W-want you. Not your fingers. Please,
Jungkookie.”
He feels Jungkook falter. “Tae…”
“What?”
“I’ve never really been inside someone.”
Taehyung blinks his eyes open. “Huh?”
“On Sextillion”—he winces—“I was advertised exclusively as a bottom. I’ve never
topped someone before.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’ll learn. Still got more experience than me.” Taehyung is
impatient, and it shows in his speech: fits and bursts, words chopped into
segments. He writhes away from Jungkook’s fingers. “Please let me have you.”
Jungkook pulls out his fingers. The space they leave is frustratingly empty,
and Taehyung clenches around it, the pit of his stomach screaming in agony at
the loss.
There’s the wet squelch of lube being squirted out of the bottle, and Taehyung
raises his head slightly off the ground to see Jungkook kneeling, slicking up
his cock. His mouth goes dry, then immediately fills with saliva. He’s never
really looked at Jungkook’s dick before. But, God—it’s nice.
Jungkook looks up and catches him staring. “What?”
Taehyung takes it all in hungrily, the plump girth of it, the length which
reaches all the way up to his navel, the heavy balls, the vein running up the
side. The flushed, hard thickness of it. He feels a brief fit of remorse. He
wants that in his mouth, but he can’t now it’s dripping with lube. “Nothing.”
Jungkook smirks. “Like what you see?”
Taehyung nods fervently.
“So eager.” Jungkook crawls up his body, pressing his mouth to Taehyung’s, and
their tongues wrap around each other wetly within the cradles of their mouths.
They kiss hungrily for a while, and then Jungkook lets out a harsh exhale and
pulls away with a wet noise. A string of saliva hangs between their mouths.
Jungkook’s lips are shiny with Taehyung’s spit. It’s sloppy and messy and all
kinds of gross, but Taehyung likes it.
“Get inside me,” he whines.
Jungkook huffs out a quiet laugh. He lines his cock up, rubbing the tip against
Taehyung’s rim just to be a tease, and Taehyung bucks up into it impatiently.
“Kookie,” he moans in frustration.
Jungkook smirks. He presses a quick kiss to Taehyung’s lips and then pushes in
slowly.
It doesn’t really hurt that much. It burns a little more than three fingers,
maybe a bit more than that, even, but it’s nothing like the horrifying visions
Taehyung entertained of being ripped all the way up his ass crack. Taehyung
sighs contentedly and wriggles down until Jungkook is fully seated inside him,
his balls resting against his ass.
Oh, it feels so good to be full. Taehyung waits for Jungkook to move, then gets
confused when his hips remain motionless. Jungkook’s face is bowed, his bangs
hiding his face.  “Jungkookie?” Taehyung brushes his hair aside with a finger.
His face is screwed up, eyes shut, and he’s panting harshly through his nose.
Taehyung giggles and clenches around him as tight as he can, and Jungkook
curses, grabbing Taehyung’s hip and digging his thumb in hard.
I’ll have a bruise, Taehyung thinks with satisfaction. He interlaces his
fingers with Jungkook’s and squeezes lightly. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
“Too tight,” Jungkook grinds out. “Gonna come if I move.”
“Come, then.”
“No! Unfair…to you.”
Taehyung begins grinding his hips down, hooking his legs around Jungkook’s
torso for leverage. Jungkook gasps and grasps his hips, forcing him to stop
moving.
“You can’t just sit here with your dick in me,” Taehyung says playfully,
enjoying having the upper hand. “I honestly don’t care if you come in five
seconds. I just need something.”
Jungkook holds up a finger. “Just gimme a second.” He tips forward slowly, and
Taehyung tilts his head to the side to give him room. He buries his head in
Taehyung’s neck and breathes hard for a minute. “Okay.” He pulls his hips out
and snaps them back in, and Taehyung mewls in pleasure. “I’m good.”
“Don’t go gentle,” Taehyung says, then a memory strikes him. “Into that good
night,” he chuckles softly.
“What?” Jungkook gasps. He seems to be having mild difficulty breathing. His
breaths are loud, harsh, bouncing around the clearing and delighting Taehyung.
I can have that effect on someone.
“Nothing. Movie geek reference.”
Jungkook opens his eyes to look suspicious. “Movie? What’s that?”
“Earth thing.”
Jungkook groans. “Is it actually possible for you to not go off-topic while
we’re having sex?”
“I don’t think so, no.” Taehyung blinks placidly up at him. “I don’t really
feel anything. I mean, I can feel you moving, but I don’t feel anything…earth-
shattering.”
Jungkook’s hips slow as he considers him. Then he grabs Taehyung’s legs without
warning, pushing them back until they rest on his shoulders. He thrusts his
hips in hard, and Taehyung feels him slide deeper than anything’s ever been
inside him before.
Jungkook shifts and thrusts again, slamming straight into Taehyung’s prostate,
and he arches off the ground, mouth opening in a silent cry. His legs tense up
as wild electricity fills his body. Suddenly, he’s breathing just as raggedly
as Jungkook, panting as he strains closer, trying to fuck his hips onto
Jungkook’s dick.
“Better?” Jungkook asks between his harsh breaths, smiling.
Taehyung pulls him down. It sandwiches his legs painfully between them, his
knees touching his own shoulders, but he gets to kiss him and he doesn’t really
care about anything else. Jungkook lets him for a while, and then he bows his
head to lick and bite at Taehyung’s neck, catching the skin over his jugular in
his teeth and sucking a bruise into it. Taehyung groans loudly, relishing the
way it bounces around the clearing, relishing how filthy he feels as Jungkook
fucks him.
He wishes he could see them. He’s sure they make a spectacle: two bare bodies,
twisting on the grass of a forgotten world.
“God, yes,” Taehyung moans, grabbing Jungkook’s biceps and holding on, his own
knees knocking against his shoulders. He can feel Jungkook all the way up to
his stomach. “Fuck.”
“Filthy mouth,” Jungkook grinds out, snagging another patch of skin between his
teeth. Taehyung’s neck is going to be covered in bruises.
“Only ‘cause you’ve kissed it,” Taehyung says cheekily. Jungkook thrusts harder
for that, making the backs of Taehyung’s thighs sting, and Taehyung gasps in
pleasure.
It doesn’t take much. Jungkook’s been hovering on the edge for ages and
Taehyung has exactly zero stamina or chill when there’s anything hitting his
prostate, and Taehyung feels it coming like a thunderstorm. “Jungkook,” he
says, releasing a ragged gasp when Jungkook nips at his jaw. “Gonna come.”
Jungkook grunts incoherently.
And Taehyung does, slowly and with immense relief, head thrown back against the
grass. He feels himself clench tightly around Jungkook as white splatters over
his own belly. Jungkook releases a ragged gasp and a muffled curse at that,
grasping Taehyung’s hips hard with his free hand, and Taehyung feels a flood of
warmth inside him, and then it’s over.
They stay there, panting, Jungkook’s head tipped against Taehyung’s bangs. Then
he pulls out and lets Taehyung’s legs down, kissing him long and hard.
Taehyung pulls away with a smack. “We’d better get back to the tent,” he says.
“I think the spell’s wearing off soon.”
“Sure.” Jungkook nods, suddenly shy. He gets up and stands awkwardly, fiddling
with his thumbs as Taehyung pulls on his clothes. “I—hey—Taehyung.”
Taehyung looks at him, shirt half-over his head. “What?”
“Did you—um—like it?” Jungkook bounces on the balls of his feet nervously. “I
mean, did I do good? Was I okay?”
His ears are flattened back in embarrassment. Taehyung feels something in him
go disgustingly gooey.
“You were great,” he says warmly, catching Jungkook’s face and kissing him.
~
Taehyung switches on the water.
He reaches for the soap before seeing that the shower curtain is still open. He
shakes his wet hair out of his eyes and shifts to pull it closed, then pauses.
“Kook!” he yells in the direction of the kitchen. “When was the last time you
took a shower?”
“This morning, why—” Jungkook walks out of the kitchen, then halts.
“Need one now?” Taehyung asks innocently.
Jungkook blinks at him. “You forgot to close the shower curtain.”
“Looks like I did.”
Jungkook stares.
Then he grumbles indistinctly, shucking off his clothes. “All these needy
people asking me whether I need to shower these days. I’m a busy man. I have
things to do.”
Taehyung grins in victory, moving aside to make space as Jungkook steps into
the bathtub. “You just snack on my carrots. Busy my ass.”
Without warning, Jungkook grabs Taehyung and yanks him against his body, hand
on either side of his ass. Taehyung inhales sharply when he squeezes. “It’s a
nice ass,” he says, so far from smooth Taehyung doesn’t know whether to laugh
or moan.
“You’re gonna bruise me up again,” Taehyung whispers. There are already bruises
littered all over his body, splotches of purple and blackish blue: on his hips
in the shape of fingerprints, all over his neck and collarbones, faint ones on
his hips and the backs of his thighs. Sometimes Taehyung finds himself
unconsciously reaching to press on them, then jolting with arousal as the pain
hits him.
“Mm, I like that. You have my marks on you.” Jungkook spins him around and
pushes him hard into the wall, shoving Taehyung against the tile until he gasps
at the impact. He kneels and bites Taehyung’s ass, making Taehyung flinch and
wriggle closer to him at the same time.
“Why are you treating me so rough today?” Jungkook licks over his rim once and
Taehyung giggles, pleased. “Gonna rim me?”
“Nah.” Jungkook stands and loops his arms around Taehyung’s waist from behind,
crushing his thinner body to him until Taehyung’s back is pressed to his chest.
They kiss over Taehyung’s shoulder, Jungkook’s tongue darting out to run over
Taehyung’s lips and teeth. “Got other things on my agenda.”
Taehyung rolls his eyes. Jungkook catches it and smacks his ass hard, harshly,
right over the bite mark. Taehyung gasps at the unexpected sting, then feels
the impact shoot straight to his dick, his cock plumping up with impressive
speed.
Jungkook reaches around and jerks it roughly, the water pouring between them
making the surface of his hand wet and slick, and Taehyung’s eyes go unfocused.
He sags bonelessly against Jungkook’s chest, moaning faintly, ass still
smarting, while Jungkook pumps him.
Jungkook releases him suddenly, leaving it to flop painfully against his
stomach. Taehyung whines.
“Bend over, back to me,” he says. “Brace your arms on the edge of the tub.”
“Switch off the water,” Taehyung manages, following Jungkook’s orders. “The
stuff doesn’t fall from the sky.”
Jungkook turns the knob, and the water shuts off, shower forgotten. He searches
the rack of shampoos and soaps before drawing the little bottle of lube out
from where it sits, half-hidden and abashed, behind Taehyung’s flowery-smelling
conditioner.
“Why is there lube in the shower?” he asks, amused.
“Why do you think there’s lube in the shower?” Taehyung snaps back, impatient.
“I had to wait a lot less to get off when you weren’t around.”
“Yeah, but now you have me to do the job for you.” Jungkook gets on his knees
behind Taehyung, setting the lube on the floor of the tub, then skims his palm
over the untouched ass cheek. “This could use a mark.”
Taehyung senses what’s coming. “Don’t you dare—”
Jungkook bites down hard, sucking at the skin between his teeth, releasing it
once Taehyung is weak at the knees with arousal. He licks at the skin
appreciatively. Taehyung has absolutely no doubt that every time he sits down
tomorrow, he’ll be feeling the bruises from that and the smack. “Better.”
“I’m gonna start looking like an Easter egg,” Taehyung grumbles. “An Easter egg
decorated with bruises. Why do you mark me up so much?”
“It’s a bunny thing,” Jungkook explains, sounding far too smug about it. “We
like marking our territory.”
Taehyung huffs, secretly pleased that he’s Jungkook’s territory. But he
dissolves into putty, gripping the rim of the tub hard to stay upright, when he
feels the wet pleasure of Jungkook’s tongue swiping lightly over his hole.
“Thought you said you weren’t gonna rim me,” he gasps, clutching the porcelain
for dear life.
“Changed my mind. Your ass looked good enough to eat so I figured I would.”
Jungkook licks harder, pushing his tongue past the muscle of Taehyung’s rim,
and Taehyung moans at the alien sensation, feeling himself clench. It feels a
bit slippery and weird and kind of pokey, but it feels good, and Taehyung can
deal with the strangeness if it feels this oddly wonderful.
“Oh, praise Jesus,” Taehyung gasps when Jungkook begins thrusting his tongue in
and out, shoving his face closer to get more leverage. He didn’t know he could
feel this good from being licked. His body has so much more capacity for
pleasure than he could imagine.
“Nice to know I haven’t lost my touch,” Jungkook says, voice slightly muffled.
Taehyung leans his head on the cold rim of the tub and makes a loud,
indeterminate groan. “Fucking fuck,” he moans, legs feeling like jelly. “If you
don’t stop I’m gonna come all over myself.”
Jungkook obediently stands, picking up the bottle of lube as he goes.
“I didn’t mean stop stop,” Taehyung says desperately, beginning to turn around.
“I wasn’t really ser—”
Jungkook kisses him and shuts him up. Taehyung melts into it, pliant, while
Jungkook clicks the lube open and pours it over his hand, pushing a slick
finger into Taehyung.
Taehyung whimpers, wriggling his hips back. “God, I love listening to you,”
Jungkook says lowly, thrusting the finger in and out quickly and then adding
another one. He’s rough today, impatient, and Taehyung writhes in delight. “You
sound so pretty moaning with that fucking deep voice of yours.”
“You should meet my friend J-Jimin,” Taehyung stutters when Jungkook scissors
his fingers. “He’s so cute. He’s got such a high sweet voice and small tiny
hands and—”
“Don’t talk about other men when I’m with you,” Jungkook growls, and Taehyung
receives another hard smack on the ass. He cries out.
“He’s not really a man,” Taehyung says, voice tiny. “He’s an Androgen.”
“Don’t care.” Jungkook pushes in a third finger, and Taehyung goes ha-ah at the
abrupt stretch.
He thrusts them in harshly a few times before pulling out. Taehyung feels the
head of his cock nudging against him, and he lowers his head, bracing his arms
on the rim of the tub and screwing his eyes shut in preparation. Sure enough,
Jungkook slams into him without letting him adjust, and Taehyung cries out at
the unexpected burn of being stretched too fast.
Jungkook’s hips quickly set up a punishing rhythm, and Taehyung’s hands curl
into fists, nails digging into his palms, as his mouth opens in a silent
scream. He stares down at the floor of the bathtub, eyelids fluttering.
Jungkook pounds into his prostate with every thrust, and the loud whimpers he
makes which punctuate every snap of Jungkook’s hips are mortifying. But he
can’t stop himself.
Jungkook reaches around his narrow hips and grasps his neglected cock, jerking
it hard and fast, and Taehyung nearly screams. His legs give out entirely.
Jungkook pulls his hips up with his free hand and yanks his ass flush against
his body.
Taehyung is not going to last. His release is approaching at the speed of a
bullet train, and he can feel himself clenching around Jungkook already.
Judging by the low, startled moans behind him, Jungkook feels it too.
Taehyung slips a little and Jungkook yanks his ass up, folding him at an angle,
and suddenly he’s striking Taehyung’s prostate directly. Taehyung sinks his
teeth into his fingers, his loud, desperate moans bouncing off the walls. He’s
never been treated this roughly before. And he likes it.
Jungkook spanks his ass hard, making his hips jump. Why are people always
smacking him? Jimin always works at least one spank in every time they meet
each other. Taehyung can’t describe how ridiculous he feels getting spanked by
someone a head shorter than him.
“Gonna come, Kook,” he grinds out.
In answer, Jungkook only pumps his dick faster. Taehyung bows his head, and his
body locks up when he comes, white spurting out of his cock and onto his own
belly. He feels a rush of warmth as Jungkook comes inside him from the
resulting clenching. He feels weak, pleasure galloping through his body, waves
of ecstasy drawing back from the shore and leaving exhaustion from being bent
over the tub for so long.
Jungkook catches him as he slides to the floor of the bathtub. He reaches for a
towel and dries them both (Taehyung never managed to take that shower, goddamn
it) and then hefts Taehyung up into him arms, carrying him to the bed and
depositing him gently on the rumped sheets.
Taehyung curls up, comfortably spent and wrung out, and closes his eyes. He
hums at the warmth of Jungkook’s arms coming around him as he curls up with him
too.
Taehyung falls asleep with his head on Jungkook’s chest. He never thought he’d
ever find himself in a situation as domestic as this, but he’ll be damned if he
doesn’t enjoy it.
~
They wake slowly. Taehyung likes this—being wrapped around and within someone,
slumbering the hours away as if time has no consequence.
Jungkook nuzzles into his neck, searching out affection as always. His bunny
ears are soft against Taehyung’s cheek.
“Hey,” Taehyung says suddenly when Jungkook’s eyes have slipped closed and he’s
drifting off to sleep again, “can I touch your bobtail?”
Jungkook opens his eyes. “What? Why?”
“I don’t know. It just looks really…soft. And fluffy.”
Jungkook grumbles indistinctly. “That’s like asking me whether you can touch my
ass.”
“You let me touch your ass, though.”
“Yeah, but you just made it weird.”
“I didn’t wanna just grab your bobtail. I don’t know bunny etiquette, but I’m
pretty sure that counts as bobtail molestation.”
“That’s because it does. If a stranger touched my bobtail, that stranger would
get fucking nutted.”
“I’m not a stranger,” Taehyung whines.
Jungkook eyes him skeptically. Then he mumbles reluctantly, “Fine.”
Taehyung presses a quick kiss to the top of his head, then reaches down. His
fingers meet soft fluff which twitches against his palm. “It’s so soft!” he
says in delight.
Jungkook sighs, probably resigning himself to getting his bobtail fondled.
“What—what even—” Taehyung cups it in his hand, and Jungkook flicks it out
irritably. “How did you even grow this? It’s like cotton candy!”
“I don’t know. How did you not grow rabbit ears? That’s what your question
sounds like to me.”
“I don’t know. Wait—” A sudden, horrible thought occurs to him. “Jungkook.
You—you have human ears, right?”
Jungkook sighs again longsufferingly. “Check for yourself.”
Taehyung brushes his hair aside, half-dreading seeing creepy, smooth expanses
of skin on either side of his head. He exhales in relief when he sees that
Jungkook has perfectly normal human ears in addition to his bunny ones.
“Whoa, so you have four ears? Does that mean you have really good hearing?”
“Yeah. When I hole myself up in the kitchen, I can hear everything you do.”
“What?? That’s so cool!” Taehyung pokes his bobtail. “You know your ears rotate
like radars when you’re listening hard?”
“Yes, Taehyung. I do.”
“And your—hey! Your bobtail just jumped out of my hand!”
“That was deliberate.”
“And your nose twitches. And you snuffle. Is that a rabbit thing? Do all
rabbits snuffle as much as you do?”
“No,” Jungkook says, voice weary, “I just have allergies.”
“That’s so cute,” Taehyung coos. “Can you communicate with another full-blooded
rabbits? Like, animal ones?”
“When are you going to stop being endlessly fascinated with my body?”
“It’s a nice body. I’m never going to stop being fascinated by it.”
“Tae—”
And the ship crashes hard into something, throwing them both forward.
Jungkook picks himself up off the floor. “If this is fucking space pirates
again!” he shouts menacingly at no one in particular.
Taehyung scrambles to his feet and looks out the windscreen. His face goes
completely pale. “Oh…shit.”
“What?” Jungkook looks to the front of the ship and is confused by what he
sees. Massive rocks, floating in space, surrounding the ship on all sides. And
they’re all moving sideways from left to right. “What’s that?”
“The asteroid belt,” Taehyung breathes.
Suddenly, Jungkook notices that the ship is approaching one of the huge rocks
at dangerously fast speed. “Tae!” he yells.
Taehyung throws himself across the room, lunging at the controls. He grabs the
controls and just barely manages to swerve the ship to the right, but even so,
the side of the ship clips the rock. The impact makes it turn forcibly, sending
Jungkook tumbling head over heels to the other end of the room, and suddenly,
they’re facing a different direction entirely, another rock zooming towards
them with alarming celerity. “Tae! The rock! There’s another one!”
“I know!” Taehyung bellows. He struggles with the controls, weaving in between
the rocks. Jungkook is thrown back and forth by the abrupt changes in direction
of the ship. He has no idea how Taehyung is managing to stay on his feet. The
rocks vary in size, some about ten feet wide, some several times the ship’s
size.  They’re all moving sideways, making navigating them even harder.
Taehyung is sweating visibly as he zooms through the rocky maze.
“Taehyung!” Jungkook shouts. “What is this?”
“The asteroid belt! Between Mars and Jupiter! I thought these goddamn asteroids
all floated away a long time ago when the sun’s gravity weakened!”
“Can’t you slow the ship down to make navigating easier? Or turn us around?”
“I don’t have any hands free to lower the speed!”
Jungkook dashes across the room and hovers uncertainly over the control board
with its countless panels and switches, feeling frustratingly useless. “H-how?”
“That dark blue lever! Pull it down!”
Jungkook yanks it, moving it too far down out of panic, and a right turn
Taehyung made to swerve around an asteroid which they were zooming at before is
suddenly sending them right into an asteroid beside them. They both scream
while Taehyung yanks the controls to the left. The ship narrowly avoids
crashing into it, the nose scraping the rock, and they’re both thrown against
the right wall of the room.
They were going extremely fast before, and they’ve slowed down considerably,
but they’re still going quickly. They both struggle up, Taehyung scrambling to
the controls as fast as he can. “Tae! Why can’t we stop entirely or go at a
snail’s pace?”
“You see how the rocks are moving sideways? We go too slow, and the rocks
beside us will smash into us.” His knuckles are white on the controls. The
stress of navigating is taking a toll on him. He grits his teeth as he jerks
the controls and the ship narrowly zips past an asteroid so pitted and cratered
that it looks like cheese.
“Why can’t we turn in the same direction the asteroids are going so we can go
slow?”
“Then the asteroids behind us would smash into us!”
“Then can’t we turn in the opposite direction of the belts’ orbit?”
“They’d be going too fast for us to avoid!”
“You can’t do this forever!” Jungkook bellows.
“Maybe I could if you stopped shouting at me!”
“Am I the one who got us stuck here? Try and turn us around!”
“I can’t! Do you see how much I’m struggling just to go forward? Do you know
how quickly”—Taehyung gasps as the ship nearly careens into an asteroid and he
barely manages to avoid it by tugging the controls hard, sending Jungkook
crashing painfully into the wall—“we’d be pulverized if I tried to turn
around?”
“Why are you swerving so much?”
“I’m not! Some of the bigger asteroids have gravity! They’re pulling us in as
we pass!”
“That is so fucking helping right now!” Jungkook screams, the stress making him
want to tear his ears out.
“You aren’t helping either, asshole! If you’re not going to do anything, then
shut up!”
That hurts, but an idea hits him and erases the memory from his mind.
“Taehyung! Why don’t we try and land on the biggest asteroid we see? An
asteroid with gravity strong enough to keep us there?”
Taehyung opens his mouth to protest, but he seems to change his mind. “Okay,”
he says tensely. “I’m too busy steering. You look for one big enough.”
Jungkook immediately stands on his tiptoes, pressing himself against the
windscreen and peering out. It’s terrifying to see the asteroids rushing at
him, knowing that one slip of Taehyung’s hands and it could smash through the
windscreen and turn his face to a pulp, but he withstands it. His whole body
shakes with fear. “How big am I looking for?”
“A small planet. Like a moon of another planet.”
“Do ones that big even exist?”
“Yes! Be quiet and look!”
Jungkook falls silent, searching so hard his eyes sting. The ship is filled
with the sound of Taehyung cursing, fighting to move the ship quickly enough to
avoid the incoming asteroids. They brush close with death so many times that
Jungkook thinks he feels the bone of his ribcage restraining his wildly
pounding heart from thudding right out of his chest.
“There!” Jungkook says finally, pointing a trembling finger. “Northwest from
us!”
Taehyung steers the ship in that direction, swearing as the side clips an
asteroid in his haste. The asteroid looming in front of them is huge, massive,
pitted with craters it probably got from getting hit by other asteroids. It
fills their windscreen as they approach. Jungkook feels the ship subtly lurch
forward as they approach and pass into its gravitational field. They speed up
even more, making it harder to avoid smashing into the smaller asteroids which
orbit this monster of asteroids. “Fuck,” Taehyung yells with emotion as an
asteroid he isn’t fast enough to avoid scrapes over their right side.
Jungkook gnaws endlessly on his nails. He’s never felt so useless and
inadequate in his life.
“Okay, hold on,” Taehyung shouts. “We’re gonna speed right at it, and then I’m
gonna pull up really sharply. It’s the only way to do it because there’s this
goddamn long asteroid above us right now and I can’t veer up earlier. You’re
gonna get thrown around. I—I don’t know whether we’ll manage to land, but I
have to try.”
Jungkook nods, hearing the unspoken words. I don't know whether we'll survive
this. He’s never been more afraid in his life as he kneels and grips the pilot
chair, which is bolted down to the floor, bracing his forearms and head against
it. These might be his last minutes in the galaxy. These might be his last
minutes alive.
He looks at Taehyung. A great surge of emotion rises in him. Tell him, his
mind, his soul, his heart screams at him, but Jungkook has no idea what to tell
him, has no idea how to express this sudden, unfound wealth of heaviness inside
him. Taehyung looks beautiful, isbeautiful, sweat shining on his temples and
the muscles of his skinny arms straining as he fights to keep them alive for
one more day, and Jungkook has never felt the cord stretching between them more
acutely than now, when it could be severed in seconds.
Jungkook does not want to be free floating again. It felt so good to have
someone. He’s made Taehyung his anchor, let himself be reassured by his
gravity, but now it might all be coming to an end.
He looks through the windscreen. The planet-sized asteroid—planetoid?—screams
towards them, large as life, as death, in the even larger black emptiness of
space. He looks back at Taehyung. If he’s going to die, he wants the man he
loves to be the last thing he sees, not some great big chunk of rock which will
quite possibly kill them.
His brain stutters to a stop. Love? When did you decide you loved him?
And he knows it’s big, knows no one else believes in love anymore, knows that
in the olden days love was a word which was bandied and thrown around so much
that it lost all vestiges of meaning, but he explores it with the tentative
hands of his heart and knows that it’s true. It’s the only word, small as it is
in its single syllable, which could ever encompass all the tangled, messy,
lurching feelings which grow warm in his chest every time he looks at Taehyung.
How cruel this world is. This galaxy. That in my last moments, my blindness
lifts enough to see that I’ve been harboring love for this strong, brave,
broken man all along.
And Jungkook has never felt so deeply for someone before, but in that moment,
he wants to give Taehyung the planets. He wants to give him the stars. Even if
they burn his hands when he picks them up.
He opens his mouth. “I love you,” he tries to whisper, but it’s swallowed by
the roar of the ship’s engines as Taehyung fights to apply the brakes and slow
them down. Of course it isn’t enough. How could someone like Jungkook ever be
enough for beautiful, wonderful, incandescent Taehyung?
They are going to die. They are going to die in this star-studded grave, and
Jungkook’s bones will strain forever for the man he never got to have.
Jungkook lowers his head and shuts his eyes.
The ship pulls up harshly, the engines screeching in protest. He’s vaguely
aware of Taehyung yelling with effort over the deafening sound. Jungkook feels
everything in him dragging him downward, down now being the back of the ship,
but he clings onto the chair as tightly as a beggar clinging to his only
tarnished coin. And then there’s a judder, and a slam, and everything in
Jungkook’s world tips hopelessly and madly.
It takes a few long minutes for the ringing in Jungkook’s ears to die down.
Everything is suddenly quiet. They aren’t moving anymore. The stationary state
makes Jungkook nauseous after being in accelerated motion for so long. He opens
his eyes and stares at the back of the chair. He didn’t know the walls of the
afterlife looked like scratched, brushed metal.
And then it hits him. He’s alive! He’s okay! He can tell Taehyung!
He stands as fast as he can, collapsing back to the ground in a heap when his
knees give out. His elbows and knees are all bruised, the crown of his head
smarting where it must have slammed into the back of the chair. But it doesn’t
matter. It doesn’t matter. His chest is filled with bright, golden, singing
joy. He gets a second chance.
He struggles up again. Stares at the empty space in front of the controls where
Taehyung once stood, gripping the back of the chair and leaning on it for
balance as dizziness makes his vision dip and spin. Looks around in confusion.
Where is Taehyung?
Slowly, dread yanking his stomach down like a stone, he directs his gaze
towards the floor.
Taehyung lies crumpled in an ungainly heap of limbs, blood trickling down from
a wound in his forehead. The same half-healed gash he got when he got thrown
around during the agma attack, reopened. His eyes are closed. His face is pale
as death. He isn’t moving at all.
Panic cracks sickeningly through the cold cavity of his chest, making his
vision cut to black. His heartbeat is suddenly audible, thudding nauseatingly
in his ears, in the fever rush of his blood. No. Not again.
“Taehyung.” Jungkook crawls over to him on weak hands and knees and shakes him.
“Taehyung.”
This time, Taehyung doesn’t open his eyes.
“Taehyung, you’re okay, right?” Jungkook asks deliriously. He pulls his body
into his lap and slaps his cheek gently. “Hey. T-Taehyung?”
He accidentally loosens his grip, and Taehyung rolls right onto the floor, eyes
half-open to reveal crescents of white, head wound leaving a smear of blood on
the floor. He comes to a stop face down, as if he can’t feel or care that his
limbs are trapped uncomfortably under him and his feet are turned at painful
positions. Jungkook’s heart lurches in terror. No better than a rag doll of
flesh and blood. Humans fail to withstand the barest discomfort—sometimes he
observes Taehyung tossing and turning endlessly in bed and grumbling because he
can’t get his position just right, and sometimes he spends inordinate amounts
of time on his hair. Only a body without life can come to rest so ungracefully.
“Taehyung!” Jungkook shoves a hand under his nose and feels the tiniest whisper
of air against his fingers. He’s breathing, but barely. “Taehyung, no, don’t do
this to me! Wake up!”
He doesn’t move.
Water drips onto Taehyung’s forehead, and Jungkook realizes that he’s crying,
big, fat drops rolling off his chin and nose as his chest freezes over with
pain. His shoulders shake with the force of it, and a terrible taste rises in
the back of his throat. No one told him that desperation tastes bitter as bile.
That being on the brink of losing everything will push you closer to breaking
than anything else you’ve ever endured. “Taehyung.” He shakes the soulless body
in his lap. “Please, Taehyung, I need you.” His voice breaks, becoming thick
and garbled as his throat fills with desperation and loss and grief, the raw
agony of it, the raging loneliness of it. “I n-need you.”
You’re holding a corpse, his mind whispers. There is no life in that shell of
skin and bones.
He sobs, an ugly sound torn out of the hollowness in his lungs, and shakes
Taehyung harder. He would do anything to relive those last moments when
asteroids were thundering towards them from all directions and fear and panic
rested bitter on his tongue. He would sell his soul for them, for every ounce
of terror and madness, because at least Taehyung was alive then. He can feel
himself breaking under the weight of the deafening silence which suffocates the
air in the ship now. His world is so painfully quiet without Taehyung’s voice
singing the beat of his heart, the thrum of his blood.  “I can’t do this,” he
cries. “I can’t do this without you. Don’t tell me I’m alone.”
When you tear a man away from all he’s ever loved, you crush him.
Jungkook’s heart crumbles to dust when Taehyung’s silent lips do not make a
sound.
~
Taehyung wakes to pain in his right shoulder.
It’s terrible, not because it’s particularly excruciating, but because it’s so
repetitive and faltering at the same time: the punch, punch, punch of what
feels like needles stabbing into his skin. Taehyung has felt far worse, but
this is irritating because he can’t tell when the next stab will be—for some
reason his pain can’t decide on a rhythm—and that in itself is agony.
He makes an agitated sound through a throat drier than the desert—oh, God, he
thought the other day was bad, but this is horrible, like grains of sand
rasping in his vocal cords—and tries to shift away from the punctures of the
needle. But something closes around his lower bicep in an iron grip, preventing
him from moving.
Panic rises slowly in him, fumes of smoke coiling through his addled, exhausted
mind. Is he being attacked? Is this—is this some intricate form of poison or
torture being carried out by one of his enemies?
He makes a desperate sound, tries to open his eyes. He can’t talk, but his
vision is in even worse condition. Everything is blurred, smudges of
indeterminate colors smeared and weaving in front of his eyes. And his eyelids
are so heavy that they slip right back closed again.
Sounds in his ears. Sounds which sound like words, but words he can’t make out
through the white fuzz in his ears. Are his captors taunting him? The pain
hasn’t stopped. Why won’t the pain fucking stop?
And then—his vision sharpens. The white static clogging his hearing clears.
Even the sand in his throat is washed away, as if someone poured water down his
throat.
He blinks and sits up. The leaden heaviness which prevented him from moving has
left his limbs all at once. He looks around.
Jungkook kneels beside him, looking like an orphan who’s been given a family
for Christmas: mouth open, eyes wider than Saturn’s rings. He holds a device in
his hand which Taehyung at first mistakes for the bastard child of a torture
device and a fountain pen, then realizes is a tattoo gun.
Taehyung looks down at his right shoulder, where the pain still burns, but the
stabbing has abated. He has a simple tattoo in the shape of a bunny silhouette
there: a round circle with two rabbit ears.
Is this the equivalent of when people passed out drunk and their friends drew
mustaches and dicks on their faces? he wonders. He thinks the situation is
rather inappropriate, although he can’t figure out why. He can’t really
remember…anything. He remembers leaving Earth and getting pounded in the
bathtub and cuddling with Jungkook and touching his bobtail, but after that
point his memory just drops off into an abyss of blankness.
He has so many things to ask Jungkook that they all crowd onto his tongue,
fighting to get out. What happened? Why did I feel like I was on the edge of
death just now? Why do I feel fine now? Why is there a bunny tattoo on my
shoulder?
But instead he says, “Your bunny ears are drooping.”
And it’s true: Taehyung’s never seen them so listless, so devoid of life. They
flop right over Jungkook’s hair and rest on his shoulder blades.
But at the sound of his voice, they perk up impressively. Jungkook is still
staring at him with an openmouthed expression on his face. Perhaps he hasn’t
heard him.
Taehyung clears his throat. Tries, carefully, to articulate words. “Were you
gonna draw a dick on my forehead next?” he asks, then wonders why he did.
Jungkook’s ears flop back down. “Oh, God,” he gasps to himself. “I knew it
wasn’t possible. He’s alive, but—but—he’s crazy. He’s spouting nonsense.”
Taehyung’s eyebrows scrunch together as he tries to deduce meaning from this,
then it hits him that Jungkook is talking about him. “I’m not a lunatic,
Jungkookie,” he says. He makes his voice soft. Maybe Jungkook is the crazy one
here and he’s got to be a bit gentle. “I’m just confused.”
Jungkook’s face crumples.
“Tae,” he says, and then the tattoo gun is clattering to the ground and
Taehyung is getting crushed tightly into Jungkook’s body and his ridiculous
bunny tattoo is stinging because Jungkook’s bicep is squeezing it, but he
thinks he feels the wetness of tears dripping into his hair, and he’s so
bewildered he doesn’t know what to protest first.
“Ow, ow, ow,” he gasps. Jungkook is hugging him like his life depends on it,
like Taehyung is a ghost come back from the dead. “Kookie, what’s going on? Why
do I have a rabbit on my shoulder?”
“Because you were dead,” Jungkook chokes out, squeezing him harder.
“I—can’t—breathe,” he gasps.
Jungkook releases him quickly, scuttling backwards like the galaxy’s most
panicked crab. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry.”
“Okay, start from the beginning,” Taehyung says, holding up both hands and
wincing as his right shoulder aches. “What the hell happened?”
The words all tumble out of Jungkook’s mouth in an illegible rush. “It, it
started when you were lying on the floor and you were like a ragdoll, and I was
like, he can’t be alive if he’s in that position, and I started panicking
because you weren’t moving, and technically I know you were breathing but you
looked so”—he takes a deep, panicked breath—“dead—”
“Wait, wait, stop. Why was I lying on the floor?”
Jungkook stares at him. “You steered us into the—into the asteroid belt. The
one you forgot about. We managed to land on one of the biggest asteroids, but
you got thrown around really badly.”
“Why are we…” Taehyung looks around. “How are we in the tent, then? We’re not
on the asteroid still, are we?”
Jungkook takes a deep breath. “No.”
“Then where are we?” Taehyung asks in frustration, feeling like the story is
progressing far too slowly for his liking.
“We’re actually…” Jungkook seems reluctant to explain. “We’re on Callisto. A
moon of Jupiter.”
The blood drains out of Taehyung’s face. “Who brought us here?”
Jungkook gnaws on his lip. “See, um…” he seems to brace himself. “I did.”
~
Jungkook has nowhere to go.
He has no idea what he’s doing. He doesn’t even know how he managed to get the
ship off the asteroid. But he had Taehyung crumpled in a useless ball of limbs
on the bed, and he had too much silence filling the ship, and he couldn’t stay
still or he would go mad from indecision.
It’s a pity he doesn’t know how to use the autopilot. He has to steer manually,
and the experience is so harrowing that he’s sure he’s knocked a few years off
his life in addition to the asteroid belt ordeal.
By an enormous stroke of luck, the asteroid they landed on came to the edge of
the asteroid belt. Jungkook knew he couldn’t miss his chance. He did his best
to copy what he saw Taehyung doing with the controls when they lifted off from
Earth, and he nearly got them killed, but he managed to escape the belt.
They emerged on the Jupiter side. He wasn’t going to land on any more planets
in this solar system after the horrors it’s yielded, and when he searched
Taehyung’s old, battered copy of the Intergalactic Planetary Guide, he read
that Jupiter has insanely fast wind speeds. He gave the planet a generously
wide berth, and now he’s here, wondering what the hell to do as he heads
towards Saturn.
He consults the Intergalactic Planetary Guide again. He can’t take Taehyung
with him, wherever he’s going. Jungkook might get attacked. He might lose
control of the ship and steer right into a star, going up into a ball of
flames. If that happens, he wants Taehyung to have at least a shot at life, and
he doesn’t want to be his prospective murderer.
And then he sees it. Callisto, a moon of Jupiter. Uninhabited, although it says
that Earthlings who were still unaware of life outside their planet once
thought that it could support life: gentle wind speeds, temperatures not so
extreme that the tent’s magical temperature control can’t keep it at bay.
He turns around and lands on Callisto. It’s a rocky landing, but he manages.
WIth a heavy heart, he sets up the tent and lays Taehyung gently down on the
bedding. He presses a quick kiss to his forehead and wonders whether this is
the last time he’ll see the man he loves, but then berates himself. He can’t
think like that. He has to go out into space and find something to cure
Taehyung as well as replenish their diminishing supplies, and he isn’t just
putting his own life at stake—Taehyung’s life is resting on his shoulders as
well.
Praying that he’s made the right decision and that Taehyung won’t breathe his
last breath without Jungkook by his side, he pilots back into space. The tent
is a pitifully small smudge against Callisto’s brownish, white-
speckled surface.
The moment he’s flying smoothly again, pondering on where to go, what he can do
to stitch the ragged edges of this mess back together, it hits him.Tokki.
Surely my own people can’t reject me.
He’s almost forgotten how to get to Tokki, but he reaches it after just
minutes—it’s not that far away, backing the myths that bunnies came from
Earth’s moon, which is now smashed into space dust drifting uselessly around
the solar system. When he sees the pale white planet, shining luminously like a
pearl in the vast, dark emptiness of space, a rush of memories so powerful
seizes him that his hands falter on the controls and the ship lurches. He
hasn’t laid eyes on his motherland for years and years.
He lands. Stumbles out. The people are instantly suspicious of him, fear and
hostility chasing each other across their faces as they most probably brace
themselves for another Qesmillion raid—but they lower their hoes and shovels,
pitifully makeshift weapons, when they see Jungkook’s bunny ears and bobtail.
Bunny hybrids are a peaceful farming race. They refuse to develop or use
weapons even though they’re constantly under threat of attack. Jungkook is glad
of that, because if they’d had weapons, his ship would’ve been shot out of the
sky the second he came into view.
“Please,” he pleads. He recognizes some of them—these were his neighbors, his
family’s friends. Some of the farmers are kits who lived in the same warren as
him, kits he used to play with. Murmurs break out as they recognize him as
well. The memories rise up and threaten to engulf him, but he forces them back.
He has to be strong. “I need help. I have a man dying alone on another planet
and no supplies.”
They bring him to the elders, the oldest rabbits on the planet. Jungkook falls
on one knee and repeats his plea. He’s exhausted, black creeping at the corners
of his vision, but he won’t let it hinder him. He’s running on the inhuman
energy of the truly desperate.
“Why would we help you, Jeon Jungkook?” the head of the elders asks, leaning
forward. She’s so old that her voice is cracked and broken in more places than
Jungkook’s innocence, and the words it speaks makes his stomach drop. “You
abandoned us, your own people. We needed you to help defend our planet in a
time of need, when the Qesmillion scum performed the worst raid on our people
in history, and you fled.”
“He was just a kit,” one of the other elders murmurs, but the head holds up a
silencing hand to cut him off.
“I have no excuse,” Jungkook says, staring at the dirt floor of the elders’ hut
and praying that, stars and stars away, on the moon of another planet, Taehyung
is still breathing. “All I can say, elder, is that I just lost my family and I
felt that I had no one. I took my father’s ship and left.”
“And what did you do?”
“I became—I became a prostitute on Sextillion.”
Everyone within hearing range flinches back. “You,” someone behind him hisses.
“You were Bunny.”
“Ah,” the elder says, sitting back. “We wondered which one of our people had
abandoned his pride so fully that they whored themselves out to anyone with the
money.”
“Please, elder,” Jungkook begs desperately. “I’m not here to atone for the sins
of the past. There’s a man I care for very much dying on Callisto. I have no
supplies. I have no medicine for him. I’m at the end of my luck, and I can only
hope that my people will help me, no matter how many mistakes I’ve made.”
“You turned your back on us,” the elder says calmly, “and you still dare to
call us your people.”
It isn’t a question. Her voice rings through the hut, and Jungkook stares at
the dirt floor, tears rising in his eyes. That’s it. He’s lost his chance.
And then the elder waves her hand. “Fill his ship with all the spare supplies
you can scrape together,” she instructs the bunny hybrids standing around the
room and listening, and they rush off to obey her orders. Jungkook’s head jerks
up. He hardly dares to believe. Could it be true?
“Elder,” he says, tears spilling over now and streaming down his cheeks, “I—I
can’t thank you enough.”
“Come into this back room,” she says, getting up from her throne with a effort,
leaning heavily on her walking stick. “I have something to teach you. To cure
your man.”
Jungkook hurries after her, tripping over his own feet.
Later, Jungkook hastens towards the ship, arms loaded down with tattoo
equipment and extra baskets of supplies, when the elder reaches up to put her
hand on his shoulder. He stops and looks down at her, impatience simmering in
his blood.
“Kit,” she says, every wrinkle on her face a testimony of the things she’s seen
and endured, “you can still stay with us. We are a forgiving people. We would
take you back if you truly wished to be a part of us again.”
For a moment, Jungkook wavers. Could he really? Could it be as easy as staying
on this planet, populated by creatures who look like him and whom he grew up
around, and just become a functioning part of society again? Live a quiet life,
become a farmer, raise a family, forget his past? Belong somewhere?
But he looks at the sky, at the stars dotting it, eyes resting on the far-off
twinkle of Jupiter, around which the moon where the man he loves might be
living his last moments orbits. His resolution hardens. He knows whom he
belongs to, and it is not the bunnies of Tokki. It never really has been. He’s
always been drawn, irrevocably and inexplicably, to the wonders of Earth.
He has a human life to save.
“No,” he says softly. “I’m sorry, elder. Thank you for the generous request.
But there’s a man who’s dying somewhere whom I might still be able to save, and
I can’t stay here.”
The elder nods. She releases his shoulder.
He runs into the ship, and a moment later, the ship lifts off the ground. The
bunnies watch it go, clothes and ears flapping in the wind it produces. The
roar of its engines fades slowly away.
“Elder,” one asks the elder hesitantly when it’s just a speck in the sky, “with
all due respect—why did you help him?”
The elder looks at him. He’s taken aback by the heavy sadness in her eyes.
“Because that isn’t just any man,” she says. “That’s a man he loves.”
She turns and goes back into the hut.
~
“So what you’re saying…” Taehyung begins hesitantly, pointing at his right
shoulder, “is that this is a magic tattoo?”
“Yes,” Jungkook says, smiling idiotically now. He’s so happy to have Taehyung
back, so happy that he wasn’t too late, that he wants to sing. His chest
overflows with joy. “It’s old bunny magic. We used to put it on warriors who’d
been injured during battle so they’d have the strength to get up and fight
again.”
“Does that make me a bunny warrior?” Taehyung asks, smiling weakly. “When do I
get my mighty chicken steed?”
And then Jungkook is laughing, and he’s laughing, and they both hug each other
tightly as their laughter trails off into tears.
~
Jungkook kisses Taehyung softly, supporting himself over Taehyung’s body on the
bed. The ship is still parked on Callisto, and they packed up the tent, moving
back into it. They had sex face-to-face this time. Jungkook’s never been with
someone in such an intimate way, but the way it made him feel, like he was
falling and falling but the happiest man in the galaxy to be doing so, was
addictive.
Taehyung smiles sleepily up at him. Taehyung always falls asleep after sex.
Jungkook’s not quite sure why—maybe it’s a human thing. But whatever it is, he
finds it adorable. Taehyung’s bare skin looks beautiful swathed by the white of
the sheets.
Jungkook lies down beside him, turning his body to face him. Taehyung’s hand
searches for his, and he gives it to him. Their fingers interlace like it’s the
most natural thing in the world.
Jungkook’s never held anyone’s hand aside from Taehyung’s.
“Taehyung,” he says softly, and Taehyung opens one eye. “I realized something
when—when we were trapped in the asteroid belt and you were fighting to keep us
alive. When I thought we were going to die.”
Taehyung shifts his body to face Jungkook. “What was it?”
“I—just—I was watching that asteroid come towards us like a hare being chased
by hounds”—Taehyung chuckles softly; he laughs at every one of Jungkook’s
rabbit similes and sayings—“and I thought that there was no one else I’d rather
die with, if I had to, than you.”
Taehyung’s smile goes motionless. It slips slowly off his face as the look in
his eyes changes, becomes contemplative.
“I know it sounds stupid,” Jungkook stutters out, “but—but I think I love you.”
Taehyung stares at him.
“You don’t have to say anything.” Jungkook is speaking fast now, making up for
the obvious confusion written across Taehyung’s face. Oh, God, he shouldn’t
have told him. It was too early. Why did he tell him? “I j-just want you to
know.”
He releases Taehyung's hand and turns on his other side, facing his back to
him. He shuts his eyes. He won’t torture Taehyung with the silence of
expectancy, with the weight of his idiot hopes.
Taehyung shakes his shoulder gently after several long minutes have passed and
Jungkook has begun to feel sick. “Jungkook,” he says, voice faltering, but
Jungkook pretends to be asleep.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if Taehyung doesn’t feel as much as he does. Maybe just
having him is enough.
But that doesn’t stop the pain from spreading through Jungkook’s chest when
Taehyung gives up and thumps back into bed beside him.
~
“Jungkook,” Taehyung says softly the moment Jungkook opens his eyes again.
Crap. He shouldn’t have woken up so visibly. Now Taehyung’s going to have to
say something and he’s going to smash his shattered hopes even further and it’s
going to turn stagnant and awkward between them. Why couldn’t he keep his mouth
shut? The rabbit who blabs about his carrot is the rabbit who gets his carrot
stolen, his mother always used to tell him. But no. He had to go and let it
burst out of him in an ugly, unreciprocated mess of words and emotions.
“I wanted to tell you that…” he begins, and Jungkook braces himself.
“There is another Earth-like planet,” he finishes, and Jungkook blinks.
“What?” he asks.
“It’s called Gehenna,” he says, looking away and not meeting his eyes. Of
course. He can’t look at him now Jungkook has made his feelings clear. Jungkook
hates himself with a passion. “It’s really similar to Earth—it’s got trees and
oxygen and water and all. I didn’t tell you earlier because I wasn’t sure if I
had the coordinates and I didn’t want to give you false hope, but I just found
its location. I’m pretty sure that I can take you there.”
He holds up the Intergalactic Planetary Guide. He’s standing by the side of the
bed, studying the bedsheets as if they’re the most interesting thing he’s come
across. He won’t look at Jungkook.
In truth, Jungkook doesn’t want to go to Earth, or any planets similar to it,
anymore. He’s realized that it isn’t the planet which pulls him to it—it’s the
people it’s birthed. Or rather, one person. Jungkook doesn’t need to travel
across the galaxy to find the most beautiful thing Earth has ever created. It’s
standing right in front of him.
But he’s not stupid. He knows that this is Taehyung’s way of apologizing: for
not saying I love you back, for not returning his feelings. Jungkook just wants
Taehyung, not another planet, but he doesn’t want to hurt him by refusing,
either. He’ll take anything Taehyung has to give him.
“Okay,” he says. Taehyung nods, relieved, and turns his back on him, walking to
the control panel to enter in the coordinates.
~
When Jungkook first sees Gehenna, he wonders why it looks so much like cheese.
“…why does it look so much like cheese?” he asks Taehyung, face pressed to the
windscreen of the ship as they approach.
“Gehenna is a rocky planet,” he explains. “It’s unique in that its ‘first’
surface in covered in a layer of rock pockmarked with holes to form a gigantic
cave network. The forests which make it similar to Earth are below the rock,
growing on the actual ground of the planet, fed by streams trickling down
through the caves and protected from the harsh windspeeds by the rock layer
above it.”
“That’s so cool. Like a shell.”
“Yeah, pretty much exactly like that.”
Taehyung hasn’t quite looked at him directly since his confession. Jungkook is
desperate for things to go back to the way they were before, but he’s never
felt so powerless to change things in his life. He would sell his bunny ears to
Qesmillion traders to be given the chance to erase the memory of his I love you
from Taehyung’s mind.
They’re silent as Taehyung flies into the huge, yawning mouth of one of the
caves and lands the ship. They get out. Maybe it’s just Jungkook’s imagination,
but he thinks that the air tastes fresher already.
He runs his hand over the rock wall as he goes. The rock is sedimentary, the
layers of it clear: brown stone striped with pale white lines. It feels
reassuringly solid in his hands. The air is cool and comfortable against his
skin. He hasn’t seen any trees yet, but the temperature certainly feels like
Earth’s.
He thinks the caves are beautiful. He’s never seen anything like them in his
life—Tokki is a completely flat planet, and the ground is too chalky and
crumbly to make proper rocks, much less areas of higher elevation. He gapes at
each chamber they pass through in awe, greedily drinking in the formations
carved into the rock. The ceiling is riddled with even more holes, and every
chamber they pass through has more passages branching off from it. It’s like a
city, or like the planet has built a natural cathedral. He’s never been in a
place which feels as holy as the caves (excuse the pun)—he feels the urge to
sit and meditate, or just explore the passages in the rock until he grows old.
He loves the feeling that the cave system is so vast and filled with so many
corridors and chambers that it’d never be possible to know them all.
He turns his head quickly and catches Taehyung staring at him out of the corner
of his eye. Taehyung looks away and pretends to be studying the wall beside
him.
He doesn’t know what Taehyung’s playing at, but he knows they can’t dance
around each other forever.
“This way.” Taehyung walks into a narrow passage, the darkness inside it
impenetrable. It’s barely a crack in the rock compared to the spacious room of
the high-ceilinged chambers they’ve passed through so far, and even skinny
Taehyung has to turn sideways to get through it. Jungkook hesitates, glancing
back at the light and comfort of the larger chamber behind him. The crack
feels…sinister.
“Come on,” Taehyung’s voice echoes from inside it, tinged with impatience.
Jungkook lets it go. Wherever Taehyung goes, he goes. He takes a deep breath
and inches through the crack, crabbing along for a few yards. He’s grateful
when the narrow crevice opens out.
He’s standing in a massive chamber, the largest one of all. Jungkook gasps as
he takes it all in. It’s so large that it could be a hangar for warships, the
colossal, city-sized spacecraft he’s only seen gliding menacingly through space
once or twice, and the walls on either side of him look like it would take him
a minute’s run to reach them each.
The far end of the cave, where he expects there to be a wall, opens out
abruptly onto blank space. Light streams through it. “That’s the forest,”
Taehyung calls, voice breaking for some reason, as he runs to look.
Jungkook stops on the lip of the overhang and looks out.
~
Taehyung waits for it. He watches Jungkook’s gray bunny ears droop slowly in
confusion.
“This isn’t forest,” he says, turning around. Taehyung knows from experience
that the surface of the planet isn’t covered in trees: it’s covered in craters,
mini-volcanoes, lava spewing out of the ground at random times. The ground is
black, dry, and cracked, orange magma glowing with heat running in rivers and
thin rivulets over it. Temperatures on the surface, far, far below the lowest
point of the cave systems, are hot enough to melt lead. The cave systems are
inhabitable, pleasant, even. But the surface of the planet is possibly the
least hospitable thing in the whole galaxy. “This is…”
Jungkook stares at the people ranged on either side of Taehyung. The head of
Sextillion stands with his hand on Taehyung’s shoulder, dark sunglasses in
place, suit impeccably pressed. On either side of them, armed, muscular
Colossus bodyguards stand at attention, waiting to receive the order to seize
and capture.
“This is hell,” Jungkook whispers.
“Bunny,” the head of Sextillion says, “how nice to see you again. However, as
you know, I’m afraid the punishment for violation of your contract is severe,
so the feeling is probably not mutual.”
Jungkook stares. His eyes slide slowly over to Taehyung, full of disbelief.
Taehyung looks away, his heart cold and silent in his chest. He hasn’t felt
anything since Jungkook told him he loved him.
You? the voice in his mind echoes every hour or so, rich with amusement. Why
would he love someone like you? That’s just ridiculous.
“Colossus,” the head of Sextillion orders, “capture.”
The Colossus walk forward, leisurely in their knowledge that Jungkook is
trapped between them and the hellish surface beyond the overhang, several
kilometers down. Jungkook watches them uncomprehendingly, barely struggling as
they catch ahold of his arms. “Tae?” he asks, confused. There’s so much trust
in his eyes, trust that Taehyung would never hurt him, trust that Taehyung
would never do something like this, that Taehyung finally feels something: his
heart, breaking just a little. “What’s going on?”
“Go with them,” he says, unable to hold his eyes for the millionth time. He
hasn’t looked straight at Jungkook since the confession, and Taehyung knows
he’s noticed. But Jungkook, innocently trusting as he is, has played right into
his trap. “You don’t have any other choice.”
And he doesn’t want to look, but his eyes are riveted to Jungkook’s face as an
internal battle rages on his features. First comes disbelief, then confusion,
then realization, then…
Taehyung is taken aback. He expected anger. He expected dark, unrestrained
fury. But Jungkook’s face crumples, the light in his eyes dying out entirely,
and the ice freezing over Taehyung’s ribcage finally melts.
What am I doing? he thinks with faint panic. What have I done?
“I trusted you,” Jungkook says in a shaky voice as he resists the Colossus
trying to pull him away, tears glittering in his eyes. “I saved your life so
many times. I—I gave up everything for you.”
Taehyung opens his mouth. Swallows. Licks his dry lips. “You shouldn’t have
trusted someone like me,” he says, and he’s surprised at how even his voice
sounds, almost like everything inside him isn’t breaking and burning.
“Oh, Taehyung, I forgot,” the head of Sextillion says, handing him a large,
heavy sack. “Your reward.”
Taehyung opens it. Inside glitter unmarked platinum ingots, freshly mined by
the looks of them. Jungkook stares.
“Good work,” the head says, clapping him on the shoulder.
“Taehyung,” Jungkook says, voice breaking, and Taehyung can’t believe that this
is how it ends. Not in screams, not in anger, but in cracked disbelief. The
tears finally slip down Jungkook’s cheeks. Taehyung dares to look at his eyes,
and what he sees stabs him to his core: all the love in the world shattered to
pieces. “Taehyung, did you—did you ever feel anything for me? At all?”
The Colossus drag Jungkook past him. Taehyung turns to look, still drawn to
Jungkook with his bunny ears and his bunny teeth and his ridiculously fluffy
bobtail, and he wants so badly to tell the truth that he can feel it clawing
out of his throat and screaming to be unfettered.
But he has to spare Jungkook this. He has to bestow this last mercy in the face
of what he’s beginning to fear is the biggest mistake he’s ever made, the
biggest sin he’ll ever commit. He opens his mouth, and everything hangs
balanced on the weighted scales of his corroded morality:
“No,” he says.
Jungkook blinks the tears out of his eyes. He turns his face away, and he goes
limp, letting the Colossus drag him away without resistance.
~
I miss the way you smile.
I miss the way you laugh.
I miss the way you cry. Like the angels in heaven are crying with you too.
I miss you. I miss you. I miss—
“Taehyung?”
Taehyung looks up, pausing the writing on his leg. Jimin hangs from the edge of
the doorjamb, staring down at him. Oh, right. He’s sitting in the kitchen like
a loner at his own party, the party he threw for the only seven friends he has
in the galaxy to celebrate his birthday, and writing all his stupid wishes out
on his thigh.
“Yeah,” he says. His voice is quiet and tired from disuse. He barely talks
anymore. Jimin’s eyebrows draw together, his eyes filling with concern as
Taehyung picks himself up off the floor with effort. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing, we’re—” Jimin glances out the doorway. “We’re just cutting the cake
now.”
“Oh. Okay.” Taehyung trails him out of the kitchen.
With the reward for capturing Jungkook, he bought a huge manor on one of the
most expensive planets in the galaxy: Emas. A swimming pool takes up most of
this floor, and his friends splash around in it now, laughing. The lights are
turned down low so Yoongi won’t have to wear sunglasses. Taehyung spots him
bobbing calmly on top of the water on an inflatable chair, reading a book.
“Really rolling in it now, huh, Taehyung?” Hoseok yells from the other side of
the pool. He’s tossing a ball around with Jin and Namjoon. Namjoon’s fumbled
the ball or accidentally thrown it at Jin’s head more times than anyone can
count. “Who would’ve thought that you could ever afford enough water to swim
in?”
“I didn’t even know you could swim in water,” Namjoon says, drawing his hands
through it in disbelief.
“Yeah, it’s an—” Taehyung coughs when his voice comes out feeble and inaudible.
“It’s an Earth thing,” he says, volume just above a whisper.
Jimin eyes him sadly, but he doesn’t comment on it. “Guys!” he yells. “Out of
the pool! It’s cake-cutting time!”
Hoseok squeals in delight and splashes loudly out of the pool, leaving a trail
of water over the gold-veined marble floor. Jin calmly and primly extracts
himself from the water, helping Namjoon belly-flop ungracefully out of it once
he’s done. Yoongi shuts his book and uses his hand to paddle his inflatable
chair over to the edge of the pool, stepping off it onto dry ground, careful
not to let a single pale toe touch the water.
They cluster around Taehyung’s dining table. Jin baked a huge cake for him,
large enough for the seven of them to share. It’s chocolate—Taehyung’s
favorite—dripping with cream and extra chocolate sauce just for good measure.
Someone pushes Namjoon forward. Because he’s from a mining planet, his people
have evolved the ability to light fires on their fingers, which helps them melt
minerals down to molten liquid. This is a precarious talent in the hands of
Namjoon, and no one’s really sure whether the heavens knew exactly what tragedy
they were inflicting on the galaxy when they gave him of all people the ability
to literally commit arson with a snap of his fingers. He’s burned down homes.
Factories. Relationships. He’s even managed to set fire to his own horns
once—no one knows how.
He snaps his fingers clumsily, failing to create a flame on the first try, and
scrunches his face up in concentration. He tries again, and this time a small
fire ignites on the tip of his index finger. Looking proud of himself, he
touches his finger to each of the candles on the cake to light them and steps
back.
They begin singing the birthday song, albeit clumsily—birthdays are an alien
concept to everyone except Earthlings, everyone long given up on trying to keep
track of the day they were born because the lengths of the years change
depending which planet you’re on. Taehyung used to keep track of Earth’s 365-
day cycles, but he stopped caring awhile ago, and he was mildly surprised when
Jimin called him up one day and chirped that his birthday was coming.
A sudden thought occurs to him. This is how it all started. With my birthday,
too.
They clearly did extensive research to get this traditional down to the letter.
Taehyung’s faintly impressed that they managed to come up with the cake and
candles and even teach themselves the birthday song. He suspects  Jimin’s
handiwork. Jimin might be tiny, but when he’s determined to do something, he’s
a force to be reckoned with—he once succeeded in waking Yoongi up from the
inhumanly deep hibernation Plutonians fall into every 50 hours, the sleep which
is supposed to be unbreakable, so he could help plan a party for Hoseok. And
Yoongi didn’t even protest.
When the song is over after numerous false starts and badly sung, out-of-tune
notes, Taehyung summons the energy to lean forward and listlessly blow out the
candles. “Thanks, guys,” he says weakly. He isn’t really feeling any of this.
Since Jungkook’s capture, he’s just been…numb.
“Make a wish!” Jin says brightly, seemingly oblivious.
Taehyung sighs. But inadvertently, a thought pops into his head: I wish I could
have Jungkook back.
He’s startled by it, the first true emotion to puncture the fog surrounding his
memory for weeks. He’s the one who handed Jungkook over in the first place. Why
in the world would he want him back?
But he knows it’s true. He would give anything to have that precious span of
time with him back, to relive it again and again for the rest of his days. To
have him by his side, traversing the stars. Because even though Jungkook made
him cry and hurt and feel inadequate sometimes, he made him feel. He made him
feel alive.
His friends are fun, but all their lame jokes and laughter pale in comparison
to waking up in Jungkook’s arms.
He cuts the cake and puts the slices on plates, doling it out—custom, Jimin
insists—and then they sit on comfy couches around a table made entirely of
glass. “Taehyung,” Jimin says after ten minutes of mindless, familiar joking
around and teasing, setting down his plate of cake with the familiar spark of
Park Jimin determination flaring in his eyes, “we have something we need to go
over with you.”
Hoseok guffaws loudly at a joke Jin makes. Namjoon drops his plate, which
shatters, and begins panicking quietly. Yoongi prods his cake suspiciously.
Jimin clears his throat loudly and glares at all of them, and expressions of
realization slowly cross their faces. They put down their plates and cough in
embarrassment, settling down.
Jimin turns back to him, satisfied. “Right. I—we—all feel that you’re not
happy, Taehyung. We’re your friends. We only want the best for you. And you’ve
never been doing better than you have now.” Jimin waves his hand around at the
luxurious mansion for emphasis. “But you never smile or laugh or joke anymore.
All the life’s gone out of you, and it’s making us worried.”
Taehyung looks at them. He doesn’t have the energy to deal with this. “What do
you mean?” he asks, expending an inordinate amount of effort just to raise his
voice above whisper volume. It’s true, of course: before he was vibrant,
outgoing, always happy to see them, but now he’s like a shell of his former
self. Like a shell, Jungkook’s wonder-filled voice echoes in his head, and
Taehyung feels a stab of pain. “I’m fine.”
“Don’t try and lie to us, Taehyung,” Jin says gently. “It’s clear to us that
you’re not okay.”
Taehyung wonders why he bothers to lie anymore.
“That’s because I’m not,” he says, and sighs. He thought admitting it would
lift the weight from his shoulders, but it only presses down heavier.
“I knew it,” Yoongi says lowly. Namjoon carefully tries to pick the broken
shards of his plate off the floor without anyone noticing.
“What can we do to make it better?” Jimin asks, concerned. “I—I mean, I don’t
mean to pry, but you haven’t been the same since your last successful mission
returning Bunny. Is it something to do with all that?”
“His name is Jungkook,” Taehyung says automatically.
“You aren’t answering the question.”
But Taehyung shakes his head mutely. He’s not ready to go into the tangled mess
of pain and regret which was that horrible day. Maybe he never will be.
Jimin understands, in the inexplicable way he gets unspoken things about
Taehyung sometimes, and sighs. “Do you know what you need to do to brighten up
again?”
“Why should I?” Taehyung mumbles.
“You can’t live like this forever.”
Jimin’s right, Taehyung reflects distantly. He can’t.
And then it hits him. He sits bolt upright, revitalized with energy he hasn’t
felt for a month. Five pairs of eyes follow him, wary.
“I do,” he gasps. “I know. I—I know what I have to do.”
He calms down a little. Sees the flaws in his plan. This will not be a one-man
job.
He looks around at each of them in turn. They stare back, Namjoon with pieces
of shattered plate in his hands, Yoongi with a smear of chocolate cake at the
pale corner of his mouth. He suddenly realizes how lucky he is to have them. He
just hopes that they’ll agree.
“But,” he says carefully, “I’ll need your help.”
~
Walls make the strangest sound when they’re bombed inward.
For some reason, that’s all Taehyung can think of as he steps through the
gaping hole in the wall, picking his way over the rubble on the other side. His
five friends follow silently behind him, all with full-face masks hiding their
visages to protect their identities, healing, explosive, and protective spells
tucked into their belts, blaster guns clutched in their gloved hands. Taehyung
isn’t wearing a mask, because why bother? No one would try rescuing Jungkook
except him, anyway. If they ever manage to get out of this prison building
alive, people will work out that he has the strongest connection to Jungkook
out of everyone in the galaxy faster than you can say bobtail.
Taehyung motions to the others to follow him. Without the aid of his friends,
the blast of the wall imploding would’ve been enough to alert the guards of
their presence, but Yoongi cast a net of silence over the area. It’s one of his
creepy Plutonian abilities: he can cast silences, pause time, and freeze
objects with just a touch of his finger. When Taehyung indignantly asked him
before why he had kickass Plutonian magic but Taehyung didn’t even though they
both came from the same solar system, Yoongi answered simply, Strange things
are born of the dark. The answer made Taehyung too uneasy for his liking, so he
stopped prodding.
Not for the first time, he feels a pang of gratefulness that his friends are
risking their necks and putting their jobs on the line if they’re recognized to
accompany him. He glances at Yoongi, wearing protective dark goggles over his
eyes to defend his vision from the bright fluorescent lights lining the ugly
concrete corridor. Taehyung thinks the pile of debris from the ruined wall
makes the place a little more interesting. This is the most featureless hallway
he’s encountered in a while.
Ever since the idea struck him, he’s been feeling more alive. Finally, he has
purpose again, direction. He knows what his goals are and the obstacles he has
to overcome to achieve them. It didn’t take too long of threatening the right
people and interrogating others to find out where Jungkook is being held: Sui,
a planet with a surface which, by some weird twist of physics and chance, is
made completely out of metal. It’s an ideal place for a prison planet and has
long been used as one, because the prisoners, who are kept in underground jail
cells, have absolutely no chance of digging their way out. Even a creature with
the ability to summon flames on their fingertips like Namjoon can’t melt
through miles and miles of solid metal.
As they pass cameras set into the wall, Jin calmly raises a hand and wipes the
air between them as if he’s cleaning a window. Some lucky Androgens are born
with special abilities: Taehyung strongly suspects that Jimin has one
although he’s never been able to worm it out of him, and Jin’s is manipulating
electronic devices. Honestly, Taehyung couldn’t have chosen a better crew of
friends.
They turn a corner and run into a platoon of guards. They grimly raise their
weapons; they were half-expecting this. Jin waves his hand at their
communication devices as they reach for them, and Yoongi raises a fist into the
air to cast a silence.
The creepy thing about Yoongi’s silences is that it doesn’t just effectively
soundproof an area from the outside world—it also plunges it into utter
darkness. Taehyung’s been outside one of his silences before. It looks like a
dome of pure black, only it isn’t still or smooth: its surface roils and rages
like a storm, like an animal barely contained.
Taehyung, and the guards with decidedly more fear, watch unholy black lines
coil from Yoongi’s closed fist and take the shape of a dome surrounding all of
them, bringing silence with it. The four of them pull the night vision goggles
they brought along for this purpose down—Yoongi doesn’t need one because he’s
perfectly at home in the dark, and instead, he slides his light-protective
goggles up. The darkness is an advantage to them in this case. The inky
blackness slots into place like a curtain, and the guards blunder around
blindly, shouting into electronics which don’t work. A few stuns with their
blasters, and the guards are down on the ground and unconscious.
Yoongi draws the darkness back into his fist, and sound returns to their world.
They slide their night vision goggles up while Yoongi pulls his protective ones
back on, and they proceed soundlessly down the corridor, the guards’ prone
bodies slumped on the ground behind them. They’re six of the best bounty
hunters in the galaxy. The prison doesn’t stand a chance.
Half an hour and many dispatched guards later, the six of them come to a stop
in front of a barred cell at the very end of yet another of the building’s
dismally colorless and monotonous corridors. A slumped shape sits against the
far wall, back turned to them with his head leaning against it. It just looks
like a lump of clothes and thin shoulder blades pushing through fabric. But
Taehyung would recognize those bunny ears anywhere.
He knows he should be quiet, but a great surge of emotion wells up in him,
unstoppable. “Jungkook!” he shouts.
The other five jump and shush him. He apologizes lowly and starts towards the
lump, who’s turned around, startled.
For a moment, they just stare at each other. Taehyung sees with a jolt of anger
and sympathy that Jungkook's clothes and bobtail are dirty, as if he hasn’t
been allowed showers, and his cell is rudimentary to the point of being
austere: a metal toilet in the corner without a wall for privacy, and an
ancient, uncomfortable-looking, stained mattress on the floor.
“Let’s get you out of this cell,” he says, trying to force calm when he wants
to jump and sing for joy at the chance to see Jungkook again. He uses a thin
laser pen to slice through the lock on his door and swings it open. Jungkook
steps out, face utterly blank.
He looks at Taehyung, and then it slowly clouds over with frigid, barely-
controlled anger.
Taehyung physically flinches back. Jungkook’s never looked at him like that. He
didn’t think the man whose arms he’s been wrapped in so many times could turn
an expression like that on him.
But I bet he didn’t think that the man who’s given him every indication that he
cared deeply for him would betray him and turn him over to the people who used
to sell his body, either, a voice in his head echoes hauntingly, and a roaring,
ravenous abyss of guilt opens up in Taehyung’s chest.
“Jungkook,” he begins, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am—”
“Why did you come?” he says coldly. Taehyung’s heart, swollen with hope and
fond affection, shrivels.
“Because—” he stutters, seeing his friends turn their backs on them out of the
corner of his eye to give them some semblance of privacy. “Because I—”
Because I felt guilty, his mind offers, spitting endlessly inadequate
suggestions at him. Because I felt empty without you. Because you gave me
reason and I threw that reason away. Because I’m not a bad person, I’m really
not, and even though I’ve made mistakes, everyone’s made mistakes—
“Because I love you,” he whispers.
Jungkook’s face doesn’t change. He stares at Taehyung as if he’s an alien. And
then he steps away from him, steps back, closer to the cell, as if—between
Taehyung and imprisonment, imprisonment is the better option. Taehyung feels
something inside him break and struggles to keep his face from crumpling. What
did you think? cruel, sinuous voices whisper in his ear, winding around his
consciousness and strangling it with disappointment. That he’d forgive you?
That just because you came to bust him out of the same jail you landed him in,
you could both ride into the sunrise together with all of your sins magically
forgiven?
Of course not, Taehyung thinks to himself, staring at Jungkook and the flat-out
hostility on his face. I came here for unselfish reasons, not to absolve myself
of guilt. But it’s not true, and he knows it: he came here without thinking,
because he was so unshakably confident that Jungkook would forgive him like
always. That everything would turn out alright just because he made a bold
move, a show of bravado. But of course it wouldn’t. Life doesn’t work like
that. Hearts don’t work like that.
“I—I know it’s too late,” he stutters, “but…I…lied. When you asked me whether
I’d ever felt anything for you. I’ve loved you since you chose taking care of
me over Earth. I loved you even more when you risked your life and flew a ship
you had no idea how to pilot to save mine. But when you were brave enough to
tell me that you love me, I got afraid. I thought about how I’d met you and how
I had this thingwith you now, this precious, breakable thing, when the only
reason I knew you was because I’d set out to capture you for a reward. I
panicked. Because I’ve never cared for anyone as much as I care for you, and no
one’s ever returned the feelings like you, either, and it was terrifying. But
calling it ‘love’ and realizing what that implied just pushed me over the
brink. I acted in haste and set up the trap with Sextillion because I knew you
trusted me enough not to suspect, and I know it’s no excuse but I thought—”
“Loved,” Jungkook says suddenly.
Taehyung reels to a stop. “W-what?”
“When I was brave enough to tell you I loved you,” he says, voice freezing
enough to turn water to ice. “Past tense. Gone. Like how you kept reminding me
Earth was when I was trying to enjoy myself and reclaim a lost piece of my
heritage. Get your tenses right.”
Jungkook’s never spoken to him so harshly, so uncaringly for how he feels.
Taehyung feels like a slapped child. He can’t stop the bewildered, hurt tears
rising in his eyes.
Jungkook sees them, and he raises an eyebrow. “Crying now? That’s funny. I was
crying more tears that day and hurting more than I ever have in my life, but
you didn’t care. You stared at me like you didn’t know me. Although I suppose
that’s to be expected. You always were a coward.”
He doesn’t even spit the words out at him. He’s stating them like they’re
facts, like he’s always known them but didn’t mention them because he knew
Taehyung would just cry and panic and spoil everything, and that more than
anything makes Taehyung want to curl into a ball and wither away.
“I want your ship,” Jungkook says, counting off on his fingers, “I want your
gun, and I want the supplies on your ship. This is not recompense. This does
not make everything okay. Don’t think that just because you’ve generously
provided these things to me, as I’m sure you’re going to do, we’re even. We’re
not. I saved your life twice, and you repaid me by betraying me. Nice. There’s
really no better way to make someone feel like nothing.”
Taehyung loses the battle, and he feels his face crumple. His chest is a
cavity, screaming with the pain of emptiness. His heart is a ball of regret and
ashes choked within the wizened stranglehold of his ribcage.
Silently, fighting back tears, he plucks the keys to his ship from his belt and
holds out his blaster. He tries to hand them over to Jungkook, to touch him one
last time before he never sees him again, but Jungkook snatches them from him
in such a way that their fingers don’t brush in the least. As if he can’t bear
to touch him.
Jungkook shoves past him without a word. Taehyung’s friends part to make way
for him, looking away and studying the walls of the corridor, and Jungkook
turns the corner and disappears.
Instantly, his friends cluster around him. “Tae,” Namjoon says softly. “Hey.
Look. The things he said were harsh. He was deliberately trying to hurt you. He
shouldn’t have said them.”
Taehyung shakes his head. “But they were true,” he says softly. He bows his
head. Tears slip down his cheeks and drip onto the concrete floor.
~
The next decade is the loneliest Taehyung has ever had to endure.
His friends drop in to check on him every once in awhile, to make sure he
hasn’t went over the brink and just ended it all. They’re desperate to make him
happy again, to fix the depression constantly hovering over his head and
choking all their interactions, making them stiff and awkward, but they know
there’s no cure for a shattered heart.
Taehyung, without any idea what to do with his money, goes into retirement
early and takes an unnecessarily extravagant and luxurious tour around the
galaxy. He accumulates a bit of a reputation, and not the one he had as a
fighter: word gets around the galaxy that once he passed a beggar child and
dropped enough money to buy a house into their lap. Once he saw a whore for
sale and bought it just to set it free. No one understands the Earthling
forging a path of gold through the planets, almost carelessly spent money
trailing in his wake. No one understands the heavy look of sadness constantly
etched onto his features and making him look several years older.
another rumor, whispered at docks and landing pads, drifting in murmurs between
the stars: Taehyung went to see a fortune teller, one of the Bo, a race of
exclusively female creatures with clairvoyant abilities. The moment he gave her
his hand, she hissed in pain and dropped it like a hot coal. You are the
emptiest person I have ever met, she told him. And if you do not something
about that emptiness, you will be searching for the rest of your life for
something to fill it up.
Is the search pointless? he asked her.
She looked into his eyes and did not like what she saw. Only creatures who have
committed a great sin, who harbor a guilt within them so bottomless that it
consumes them, can look that haunted. The regret did not even leave room for
desperation. Only time will tell, she said, which is one of the mysterious,
vague things fortune tellers say when they are faced with a question no force
in the universe can answer, and she shooed him out of her tent.
But no rumor tells how Taehyung abruptly halted his intergalactic tour and went
back home. No rumor tells how he sat in his luxurious house, built with money
earned in cold blood, filled with yawning emptiness so vast that sometimes he
wants to scream and tear his hair out, and thought about what the fortune
teller said. No rumor tells about how he thought that Jungkook had made his
feelings clear, but he’d never said that he never wanted to see Taehyung again.
Not explicitly.
No rumor tells how Taehyung piloted his ship off the planet, and, stupid,
fluttering hope beating against the walls of his ribcage, turned it towards
Earth.
~
Taehyung hardly dares to hope.
The last decade…he can’t describe it any more accurately beyond the word empty.
He didn’t know you could feel so hollow. He didn’t know anything could.
He’s flying a new ship he bought after Jungkook took his old one, one with gold
fittings and marble floors. Even though he knows he owes Jungkook that and so
much more, he wishes so badly that he still had his old one. Maybe if he pushed
his nose into the bedsheets and sniffed, he could’ve convinced himself that he
could still faintly smell Jungkook. Because Jungkook has disappeared from his
life utterly, but if he’d had the ship where they lived out nearly their whole
time together, it could’ve been his last tenuous connection to him, the only
thing to remind him that it really happened on the horrible days when he
wonders whether it was all just a delirious dream. It’s been ten years, and new
lines have appeared on his face, and his friends have almost utterly given up
on him, but he still can’t let go.
And now he’s steering towards Earth.
From a distance, he sees Earth approaching. It’s just as barren as he
remembers, the oceans perhaps a bit bluer as nature laboriously heals herself
from her wounds of pollution, but the continents as scoured dry and lifeless as
always. He switches off the engines and orbits around the planet, suddenly
realizing that he has no idea what he’s doing here.
Are you going on a tour of all the places you’ve been with Jungkook to try and
relive it now? a snide, mocking voice in his mind sneers at him. Are you headed
off to go kill yourself in the asteroid belt next? God, that’s pathetic.
Taehyung grits his teeth. Maybe I should turn around, he thinks. Abandon this
attempt to revive the past. Like I kept telling Jungkook over and over
again—the world which was ever anything close to beautiful is dead. Gone. And
so is the one where Jungkook and I were together. So is the one where I was
happy.
But then he sees it.
A speck of green. Tiny, miniscule, infinitesimal against the scorched orange
and brown of the North American continent. But it stands out because of its
color, its stark contrast, its defiance against the faded, exhausted blankness
of the rest of the land. And Taehyung can’t help but notice that it’s right
where Yellowstone used to be.
Taehyung flips the engines back on, moving faster than he’s moved in years. He
grabs ahold of the controls—his mind can’t resist telling him that if this were
his old ship, it would be the controls Jungkook once touched, the controls
Taehyung himself once gripped as he fought for both their lives—and speeds
right for that miraculous, unbelievable spot of green.
It enlarges as he grows closer, getting bigger. So he wasn’t imagining it. It
wasn’t just his mind, crazed with loneliness and regret, playing tricks on him.
Somehow, in the barren ruin of Earth, the destroyed remains of what was once
his planet, there is life.
He pulls up, skimming the surface of the green and hardly daring to believe his
eyes. It’s a forest, all the trees relatively young: probably about ten years
old. They grow in ordered rows like rings, radiating out from what he assumes
is a central point he’s currently speeding toward. Irrigation machines have
been set up between the rows to water the plants. Taehyung doesn’t know how
it’s possible for the trees to put down roots in the thin layer of topsoil he
saw with his own two eyes when he was last here, but it’s happened: instead of
parched pale brown or yellowed sand, the ground at the bases of the trees is
composed of rich, dark brown soil.
These trees could not have grown without a human hand.
~
The people of Tokki are farmers, Jungkook thinks, looking out at the forest he
grew out of his own toil and tears. It’s a miracle. A living, bristling
impossibility. And yet it stands.
He hasn’t farmed a day in his life, but perhaps the art of coaxing life out of
all the seeded fruits he could find on Taehyung’s ship runs in his blood.
~
Something in Taehyung lurches. He piles on the speed, accelerating as fast as
he dares. Something is tugging him to the center of this impossible forest, a
bond he hasn’t felt for a decade: a connection he’s long thought severed.
A memory rushes back to him, abrupt as being doused in cold water. His mother,
whose face is only a smear of kindness in his mind now, an imprint of a smile.
When you love someone, Taehyungie, she said, touching the left side of his
small, thin chest, you feel it like a rope pulling you to them. Here.
But rope can be cut, Mom, he said, fed up and exasperated of her constant
stories of love and friendship. He was a kid. He didn’t need to worry about
these things.
Yes, she said, smiling, not scolding him even as he fidgeted with obvious
impatience and only half-listened to her. But why would you want to sever that
connection when the world is getting bigger and bigger and emptier and emptier
every day?
Taehyung goes faster.
~
He still calls it Taehyung’s ship. He knows it’s his now, that Taehyung handed
it over willingly, but he can’t bear to be in there unless he absolutely has
to. He sleeps outside, in the makeshift shelter he’s built, where he is now.
Taehyung has never been in the shelter. He can lie within its wooden walls and
stare at the ceiling, and he can be momentarily free from the barrage of
memories which attacks him every time he steps foot in a place Taehyung’s been.
The tent is used to store seeds. The ship has most probably fallen into
disrepair.
He’s spent a decade trying to forget the only man he’s ever loved. He’s
accomplished what everyone else has given up on, what the planet itself has
given up on, but no one ever told him that it would be so difficult to forget.
His past has hounded him more persistently and doggedly than any captors could.
Why is it that we love people even as they commit the unforgivable? Even after?
He lifts his head, frowning. Is that a roar of engines he hears in the
distance?
~
Taehyung finally sees the end of the sea of treetops. A clearing. His old ship,
jarring in his familiarity. His old, worn tent, standing at the very edge of
the clearing and half-concealed by trees. And in the middle of it, a wooden
shelter.
Taehyung nearly sobs. He punches the button for the brakes, forcibly slowing
the ship down, and lands in the clearing. He runs out of the ship. He is half-
blinded by memories. He needs this to be true, needs this to be real. Or he
might just break and never be able to put himself together again.
~
What the hell is that? Is that a—ship? Landing on his planet? In his clearing?
His home?
How did they find him? No one knows Earth’s coordinates. No one alive.
Except…
He knows he should grab the ancient, outdated blaster he never touches anymore,
knows he should be prepared if this is Sextillion coming to capture him again,
but he forgets as he stumbles out the door. The past plays like a broken film
reel in front of his eyes. He’s long forgotten the faces of his family, but
Taehyung’s smiling face has burned itself into his mind and refused to leave.
It flashes before his eyes now as he shoves the door of the shelter open and
runs out.
His tired, tired heart, it turns out, still has the capacity to hope.
~
Taehyung staggers to a stop in between his ship and the shelter. The wind
produced by his ship landing has kicked up a fine haze of dust, and he can’t
make out the face of the indistinct figure who emerges from the shelter.
Taehyung covers his mouth and nose and coughs, blinking tears out of his eyes
as he waits for the dust to settle. He can’t wait. He’s been waiting for ten
years, and if he waits any longer he will crack. He hasn’t had this much to
hold onto in years. He clings to it with the desperation of the dying. The
breaking.
The dust settles grudgingly. Taehyung stands still. His heart leaps, a puppy
reunited with its master, when he sees the face of the figure.
“Jungkook?” he asks, voice breaking as it fills with wild, galloping, unbounded
hope.
~
Jungkook stares at him.
“Taehyung?” he asks in disbelief.
And despite everything, despite the sins man commits against man, despite all
the unforgivable mistakes and the marks they’ve left on each other which could
never possibly be healed, elation rises in his blood.
~
“Taehyung,” he repeats. The world is silent around them.
And then Jungkook smiles.
End Notes
     This fic was inspired almost exclusively by the fanart the word
     'chibi' is linked to, so kudos to whoever drew that up—combined with
     a chance reading of the graphic novel Saga, which left such an
     impression on me that I had to go and write a fic about it, that
     artist is the reason this fic exists. The world this fic is set in
     may not be entirely accurate to the world of Saga because I only read
     a bit of one issue, but I made a decent effort. I have also been
     mildly obsessed with space exploration ever since I watched
     Interstellar for the second time. It's a great movie. Go watch it. It
     gave me chills and I nearly cried.
     This fic was not meant to be as angsty as it was, and it also somehow
     turned into a rant on the effects of pollution on the environment and
     the future of Earth if we don't take care of it when I wasn't
     looking. However, I do really love our world. I love forests and
     woods and I could probably write a whole book just rhapsodizing about
     my immense love for caves. You didn't have to pay a single cent to
     read the story you just read, but please, for my sake—turn off the
     tap when you brush your teeth. Don't litter. Only take as much food
     as you can finish, and don't waste leftovers. Haul ass a little to
     throw your paper waste or plastic water bottles into a recycling bin
     instead of binning them in a regular trash can where they won't get
     reused. If everyone just tries a little harder to be considerate of
     the world we live in, the future of our planet will be a lot less
     grim.
     Sorry for not posting since March :( The smut for this story was
     especially hard to write because thanks to the events of the last
     three months, I cringe every time I think about a dick going near a
     mouth (yo authornim has grown up). But I struggled through. I hope it
     wasn't terrible T_T
     I love you all <3
     one day the words "the crack looks…sinister" will echo back into my
     mind, and I will laugh
     This picture is your reward for making it through this fic
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