Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/9539837.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Major_Character_Death, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      방탄소년단_|_Bangtan_Boys_|_BTS
  Relationship:
      Jeon_Jungkook/Kim_Taehyung_|_V
  Character:
      Jeon_Jungkook, Kim_Taehyung_|_V
  Additional Tags:
      Anal_Play, Gay_Sex, Anal_Sex, Barebacking, Bottom_Kim_Taehyung_|_V, Top
      Jeon_Jungkook, Anal_Fingering, Blow_Jobs, Oral_Sex
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-02-01 Words: 15909
****** We Were Together (The Rest, I Forget) ******
by Kookie_andCream
Summary
     Jungkook has always been able to see ghosts. When he meets Taehyung
     and falls in love, the last thing he would guess is that Taehyung is
     one.
     But somehow, in a world neither of them truly belong to, they walk
     the boundary between life and death together and make it work.
Jungkook has always been able to see them.
He is young. He can’t remember how young now, but it’s five at least and seven
at most. The point is that he’s young, and he’s standing in a playground, and
the teacher’s trying to convince him to go on the monkey bars.
Except he can’t. Because a woman hung herself on them.
He can see it if he concentrates hard enough, which he doesn’t want to. But
it’s not like he has a choice anyway, so he knows that she snuck into the
school grounds at night with a rope and her pain. She stood on the deserted
rubber playground tiles for a while and stared up at the bars, at her death
waiting for her in purple and blue metal. She’d considered a tree, but the
monkey bars were easier to attach the rope to—she’d have to do it one-handed,
one hand hanging from the bar, but she’d been an athlete before It happened and
she knew she was strong enough.
Jungkook doesn’t know what It is. It’s too hard to untangle, a messy, black,
pulsing mass of pain and anguish which clots his vision like black licorice.
They found her the next morning. She’d died in the darkest hour before the
dawn, when the sun had seemed like a forgotten memory and happiness was even
further away. Her body was removed furtively, hurriedly, and school was
cancelled without a reason so the children and their parents wouldn’t find out.
But Jungkook—Jungkook always knows.
For him, she never truly left. He can see her now, neck hanging at a crooked
angle, arms limp at her side, rope digging into her neck. Her face is slack in
death, face purple from choking. He wished she’d chosen an easier way to go,
like pills. Then he wouldn’t have to be standing here today and having to
refuse a concerned teacher because he can see something no one else can.
“Jungkook,” the teacher says in a low tone, “please. Play with the other kids.”
“Freak,” one yells. He hangs from the bars by his legs, face slowly reddening
as the blood rushes to his face. His upside-down body is an inch away from the
body of the woman’s.
“Deokhwa!” the teacher shouts.
“He is,” a girl says, arms folded as she watched from the side of the
playground. “Even you know that, seonsaengnim.”
“No one is a freak,” the teacher says in a low, hissing tone Jungkook supposes
she thinks he can’t hear. “Don’t you dare be unkind again.”
Someone pokes him in the back. “There’s something wrong with you,” a kid
whispers. Jungkook half-turns. The kid is a head shorter than Jungkook, but his
face is streaked with mud and ugly with the cruelty of children. “You think the
teachers don’t know, but you’re always staring at something no one else can see
in class. They whisper about you. Everyone does. About how weird you are.”
Jungkook turns back at a gasping rattle. The dead woman is trying to breathe,
trying to suck in air past the noose strangling the life out of her, but the
air refuses to be drawn into her bruised throat. Jungkook knows what’s coming
when she opens her eyes.
“Help me,” she gasps, eyes pleading with him, begging him to fix her. To fix
It—whatever happened to her to make her hang herself. Jungkook expected it.
They always want him to fix something.
They never understand that just because we see someone’s pain, it doesn’t make
it our job to fix it. Some things cannot be repaired.
“Jungkook, this is ridiculous,” the teacher says, exasperated now. “You’ve
never been on the monkey bars. What in the world are you afraid of?”
“No,” Jungkook says, unable to look away from the dead woman as she lifts her
hands to scrabble at her throat.
“Help me,” she rasps, trying to pry the rope away from her neck.
“I can’t,” he says, helplessly, hopelessly, and he doesn’t know whether he’s
talking to the teacher or to the woman.
“You can,” the teacher says firmly. Suddenly, there’s a hand on his back,
pushing him forward, and Jungkook begins to panic. Every foot closer to the
dead woman heightens his fear.
“No!” he says, voice high and desperate. “No! I don’t want to!”
“Help me!” the dead woman cries, reaching out her hand to him.
“You will!” the teacher shouts. Her forearm is around his neck now, pressing
against his chin as she forces him forward and his shoe soles skid on the
playground tiles.
“No, please, you can’t make me!”
But she doesn’t stop. And just as he’s nearly reached the monkey bars, just as
the dead woman’s fingers have nearly brushed his face, he takes the route of an
animal cornered and bites down hard on the teacher’s arm.
~
“You bit a chunk of her flesh out.”
His mother is sitting with him outside the principal’s office. She’s doing that
thing where she digs her nails hard into the flesh of her palms, jaw clenched
and eyes pained. Jungkook hates that look. That’s the look she gets when she’s
trying hard to stay in control, when she’s the closest to breaking he ever sees
her.
“You bit a chunk of her flesh out, Jungkook,” his mother grits out. “Her flesh.
Your teacher’s flesh. What in the world were you thinking?”
Jungkook doesn’t know. Jungkook doesn’t know. All he knows is that the teacher
had let him go, and amidst the screaming and the shouting as the teacher
collapsed to the ground while she clutched at her forearm, he’d spat out the
bloody chunk of whatever-it-was on the playground tiles and ran as far away
from the dead woman as he could get.
He was caught before he could escape out the school gate. The security guard
was stronger than the teacher, and he’d kept his forearms well away from
Jungkook’s mouth. The blood on his teeth, smeared all over his face, must have
clued him into it. Jungkook still can’t wash the taste of blood out of his
mouth, sanguine iron, an unpleasant tang.
“She was trying to make me do something I didn’t want to,” he mumbles at the
floor. The fluorescent lights shine brightly on the tiles, reflecting a glare
into his eyes. He shuts his eyes to block it out, rocks back and forth. “She
was trying to make me go on the monkey bars.”
“Why was that reason for you to bite her?”
“I’m afraid of heights.” Jungkook knows to lie by now. He learned early on,
when he was three and trying to tell his mother to stop the car because there
was a man standing in the middle of the road with blood streaming from his
wrists, and his mother had gone right on and run the man over. But when
Jungkook twisted back in his seat to look, the road behind them was empty.
“You are not afraid of heights,” his mother says, voice shaking and just barely
under control. “You are not, Jeon Jungkook. When we were on holiday on Jeju
when you were only four, you climbed all the way to the top of the dome which
was twice as tall as I was, and you stood on it and didn’t come down until your
father had to go up and get you.”
Jungkook looks away, at the end of the corridor. He just wants to be gone from
here. He just wants to be away, someplace where he doesn’t have to lie about
who he is every moment of every single day.
A man with a hole in his head walks past the doorway, head rolling towards
Jungkook, and he looks away from that too.
“You’re lying.” Jungkook musters the courage to look at his mother. Her eyes
glitter with unshed tears. “You’re lying. I don’t know why, but you are.”
Jungkook stays silent. He stares at his hands.
“I don’t understand you,” his mother says, voice trembling. “You’re not the son
I used to know. There’s just—there’s something wrong with you.”
The word hits Jungkook like a gunshot to the heart. Wrong. There is always
something wrong with him, the fundamentally dissonant chord which forces him to
see a world he never belonged to.
His mother shakes her head. She stands, fists clenched in the skirt of her
dress, and walks down the hallway. Just as she turns the corner, the man with
the gunshot wound to his head turns it too, brushing past her and heading
straight for Jungkook.
~
They can’t actually touch him. Most of them, anyway. But the first time
Jungkook meets a poltergeist is when he’s ten.
He’s at the market on a school trip, surrounded by kids with rucksacks wearing
his school’s uniform of white shirts with purple logos, black pants for the
boys and gray skirts for the girls. His teacher is saying something indistinct
about the food pyramid, but he’s distracted, looking at the fruits with their
vibrant colors. He wonders whether plants feel pain, whether they’re in agony
in the moments when the fruits are hacked from their branches and their trunks
are sliced open by careless swings of the axe. Whether they are cursed to
suffer their whole lives in silence.
“The fruits look good, don’t they?” a voice behind him says.
Jungkook turns. A middle-aged man is standing there, hair graying at his
temples, a few wrinkles carved into his skin. His hands are tucked behind his
back.
“Pardon, ahjussi?” he asks politely.
“Here,” the man says. He brings an apple out from behind his back. “Have this.”
Out of an ingrained respect for his elders, Jungkook reaches for it,
surreptitiously making sure he can still see the rest of his school group. But
his fingers pass right through it, the apple dissolving into oily black smoke
at his touch.
He freezes. That’s what happens to things ghosts possess when he touches them.
“Damn,” the man says. “I didn’t know it would do that.”
“You,” Jungkook says, taking a slow step backwards until his back hits the
wooden edge of the fruit stall. His number one rule is to never talk to ghosts.
But sometimes, they don’t look like they’re dead at all, like this one.
Jungkook would have bet anything that he was alive until now, when he can see
the marks of sickness on the man’s face: the hollow cheeks and the sallow skin,
the dark circles under his eyes like bruises. “You’re a ghost.”
“Wasn’t immediately apparent, was it?” the man takes a step closer, and
Jungkook shrinks back. “I died of food poisoning. I still look good, I
suppose.”
“I should get going,” Jungkook says, ducking around him and walking quickly.
Just a few meters to his school group.
“Not so fast,” the man says, appearing in front of him. “I need something from
you.”
“I don’t do favors for your kind,” Jungkook says. He dodges the man and strides
at a brisk pace.
“You’ll be one of us someday, child,” the man says, materializing in Jungkook’s
path again. “You don’t understand what it’s like to have unfinished business
binding you to this earth yet.”
“It’s not my job to fix you,” Jungkook insists, trying to sidestep him. “I
didn’t kill you.”
“But you can help me,” the man presses. “You can set me free. Help me move on.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t,” Jungkook says. He darts around the man and has just
begun to break into a run when the man appears an inch from his face, stopping
him dead in his tracks.
“So you won’t help me?” the man says, eyes flashing dangerously, but Jungkook
has learned not to heed these signs. Ghosts can’t touch him. They have no real
effect on the physical world. That is their eternal curse: they’re doomed to
walk land they can leave no true mark on.
“Don’t make me walk through you,” Jungkook says, trying to sound threatening
but sounding pleading instead. Ghosts dissipate into smoke when he touches
them, but he tries to avoid it because he slips out of his body for a while.
The first time he remembers it happening took place when he was six: he
accidentally walked into a ghost, and when he stumbled, he left his body
behind. He’d panicked and tried to step back into it, but it pushed him back
out, unresponsive. The world had become dark and indistinct around him, and he
couldn’t touch or move anything. However loud he shouted, no one heard him.
However hard he tried, he couldn’t step out of the spirit form and back into
his body.
Just when he’d begun to believe that he’d never get back, he was in his body
again with a blink of an eye. He took a ragged, gasping breath, falling to his
knees, filling his lungs with air there had been no one to breathe for minutes.
Now he avoids touching ghosts as much as he can. He only uses it as a threat
when they’re being particularly stubborn or he can’t run away fast enough.
Only some can appear in different places like this one can. This one is
particularly powerful, but still, Jungkook knows, not to be feared. However
terrifying ghosts may be, it is often the most frightening which are the most
harmless.
But what Jungkook doesn’t know is that it is also often the most harmless-
looking who deserve the most fear.
Jungkook resigns himself to the fact that he’ll have to enter the spirit world
momentarily and walks resolutely forward. The wind is knocked out of him when
he walks straight into a solid chest.
The man looks down at him, eyes furious. “So that’s how you want it,” he says,
voice dangerously soft.
A sound—the smooth slide of metal on wood—makes him turn. Every knife in the
surrounding fruit sellers’ stalls is rising slowly into the air, their blades
pointed towards him, quivering slightly.
“No,” Jungkook whispers. “No, you can’t do that.”
“Ever heard of a poltergeist?” the man smiles thinly. “Tell me you’ll do it and
I won’t let them move.”
The people around him have noticed and are screaming, backing away from
Jungkook like he’s poisonous. They’re pointing right at the blades and yelling.
So they can see them. This is no trick.
“I won’t,” Jungkook says, voice pitching upward in panic. “I can’t, you have to
understand that—”
The blades fly forward.
“I’ll do it!” Jungkook screams, shutting his eyes tight.
He opens his eyes when he remains whole and unharmed. The blades have stopped
an inch from his skin and are hovering in the air. The biggest of all is a
hair’s breadth away from his neck.
“Good,” the man says softly.
The blades clatter to the ground.
The teachers immediately rush forward. “What did you do?” they shout, halting
before they can reach the circle of blades which surround Jungkook like a
pentagram. But all Jungkook has eyes for is the man.
“Remember your promise,” the man says, eyes dark.
~
Jungkook ends up having to go to an abandoned house.
He tells his parents he’s going to play at a friend’s house so he’ll be back
late. They’re delighted that he’s finally making friends. Jungkook would feel
guilty if not for the ghost hovering right behind their shoulder, eyes locked
on him.
Right after school, he leaves immediately. The walk is a few miles long, the
man tells him, and he needs to be quick if he’s going to get home in time.
The man leads him to an abandoned house. The furniture inside is still intact,
but as Jungkook picks his way through the debris, broken bricks and chunks of
plaster littering the floor, he sees that anything of value has been looted.
“It’s in here,” the man calls, standing in the doorway of another room.
Jungkook walks in. It used to be a bedroom. The metal bedframe is still there,
rusted through in some parts.
“In the chest of drawers,” the man tells him.
“Why do I have to do this if you have effect on the physical world?” Jungkook
complains, crossing the room to get to the drawers.
“It takes a lot of my energy,” the man says after a pause. “I can’t do it very
often. That stunt with the blades nearly erased me.”
“Isn’t that what I’m doing this for?” Jungkook reaches the drawers. “To erase
you and let you die in the next world?”
“No, I mean a different kind of erasure,” the man says softly. “I meant it
would turn me into every other ghost, no longer able to have any effect on the
physical world. That’s what happens if I overuse my ability.”
“Why can you do it?” Jungkook rests his hand on the knob of the top drawer.
“I’m not sure,” the man says. “Someone somewhere just decided to give me a
second chance.”
A silence.
“Not that drawer,” the man says finally. “The one below it.”
Jungkook pulls it open. “There’s nothing in here.”
“No, pull it all the way out.”
Jungkook does. Taped to the back of the drawer is a paper heart. It’s colored
red, and Always is written on it in black marker in shaky child’s handwriting.
“This?” he asks.
“Yes,” the man says. “Unstick it.”
Jungkook pulls it off carefully. The tape holding it to the wood is dusty and
comes off easily without taking any paper off with it.
“What do I do now?” he asks, holding it up.
“Now,” the man says, “we’re going to the graveyard.”
~
Jungkook stands over the grave. It took him a long time to walk to the
graveyard and climb over the wrought iron fence, and it’s evening already, the
slightly chilly air making him pull his uniform jacket tighter around himself.
The paper heart is clenched tightly in his fist.
“Lee Sumin,” he reads off the gravestone. He looks up at the man. “Who was
she?”
“My childhood love,” he says softly. “But she died before I could ever tell her
how I felt.” He looks at Jungkook pleadingly. “Please, put the…put the heart on
her grave.”
Jungkook bends and places it on the grass. Its faded felt-tip colors seem at
home amongst the blades of green.
“A paper heart,” the man says, looking down at the gravestone sadly. “A paper
heart for a love which never got its chance to be written in stone.”
When Jungkook looks up from the heart on the grass, the man is gone, burned
away by the last rays of the setting sun.
~
Jungkook makes it a fundamental rule to not deal with ghosts after that. He
gets better at distinguishing sickly people from actual ghosts, although it
leads to a few awkward situations when he mistakes real people for ghosts and
gets in trouble for trying to walk away from them.
His parents tell fond stories of when he was a baby and could see ghosts,
always playing with people only he could see. Some ghosts are kind—he knows
that, although it’s the kind who want something from him whom he meets most
often. He smiles wanly at his parents’ tales and ducks his head. In Asian
cultures, it’s considered normal for babies to be able to see ghosts, but full-
grown children? That’s just bad luck.
Most of his classmates have forgotten the odder aspects of his childhood which
couldn’t be explained away, such as the incident of floating blades in the
marketplace. But they still remember with the long-lasting memory of children
that Jungkook is a freak who bites teachers and needs to be avoided at all
costs. That’s a pity, because company sometimes keeps the ghosts away.
He’s a loner. There are so many ghosts, so many souls who want something from
him, and he spends as much time as he can in crowded places full of other
people in an effort to keep them away. The worst thing is being alone. His
parents get irritated when they try to leave him at home to go out and he
clings to them, begging them not to go. He’s relieved when he grows up enough
to leave the house and walk as quickly as he can to the most crowded place he
can think of. The pressure of bodies in overstuffed malls and crowded rooms has
always symbolized freedom to him. The offer to forget.
But no matter how hard he tries, Jungkook will always be alone. Because however
good he gets at pretending otherwise, at looking through the ghosts, people
still notice when he gives second glances to things which aren’t there, when he
makes wide berths around nothing in particular and mutters to thin air. And
people don’t like what they don’t understand.
The concept of friends is alien to him. Even when people try to be kind, he
scares them away. He shies away from human touch, afraid that one of them will
be a ghost, and the only people he properly talks to are his parents. His
classmates don’t want to mingle with him. He would be bullied if not for the
fact that people feel an uneasy sort of fear when they come too close to him,
and no one wants to look into his haunted eyes for too long.
His parents don’t know what to do with him. They seem to give up as he enters
his teens, accepting that he is strange and always will be. There’s nothing
they can do about it, so they do their best to ignore it when he stares, wide-
eyed, down a deserted street like he sees monsters they can’t even imagine.
He does.
~
Jungkook’s developed a deeply-ingrained mistrust of strangers. So it’s no
surprise that when the boy at the bus stop tries to make conversation with him,
he turns away and slides to the other end of the bench.
The boy is persistent. He follows him. “I’m Taehyung,” he says. “I’ve never
seen you around before.”
I try not to leave the house except if I have to go to school, Jungkook thinks,
but he mutters, “Me neither.”
“What’s your name?” Taehyung asks hopefully.
Jungkook eyes him distrustfully. His mouth stays firmly shut.
“So I have to earn that, huh,” Taehyung says, smiling ruefully.
“The bus is here,” Jungkook says shortly, standing as the bus pulls up with a
squeal of tires and a puff of exhaust.
Taehyung follows him up the steps and sits next to him. “Why are you being so
quiet?”
“I don’t want you talking to me,” Jungkook says, staring out the window and
deciding to be honest. An old woman bent double over a walking stick turns to
stare at him on the sidewalk. Blood runs in rivulets from the corners of her
mouth. “I thought I’d made that obvious.”
“Oh,” Taehyung says dejectedly. “I’m sorry.”
A silence punctuated only by the rolling of the bus’ wheels on the asphalt.
“Do you want me to leave?” Taehyung asks after a tense minute has passed.
“Very much.”
“But would you mind if I stayed?”
“Very much.”
“Would you mind terribly?”
“Look, Taehyung,” Jungkook says, turning to look at him exasperatedly, “I don’t
know what it is with you, but don’t you have something better to do other than
trying to talk to a hostile stranger on the bus? Like, I don’t know, friends?”
“You just looked lonely,” Taehyung says, fidgeting with the hem of his hoodie.
“Lonely and too scared of the world. You looked like you needed company.”
“I don’t,” Jungkook says tersely.
“That’s exactly what lonely people say,” Taehyung says, trying for a watery
smile.
Jungkook doesn’t buy it. “Please leave. You’re making me very uncomfortable.”
The smile falters. “What’s wrong with me? I mean, what am I doing wrong?”
“If you’re another one of those people society has excluded, then I advise you
to stop trying. You’re only digging yourself deeper into eternal isolation.”
Jungkook fixes him with a hard glare. “We outcasts work alone.”
“You see, you are lonely. You talk so bitterly.”
“The difference between me and you is that I have accepted it whereas you are
still trying. It’s what divides the coping and the pathetic.”
“No. It’s what divides the defeated and the hopeful.”
“Hope doesn’t get you anywhere,” Jungkook says gritted teeth. “Stop trying.
You’re just making this painful for everyone.”
“I’m not. I’m trying to reach out to you. You look like you need someone to
talk to.”
“I’ve managed fine alone for years, thank you very much.”
“You look terrible,” Taehyung says after a pause of studying him. “Like, not
just normal-rate terrible. You look like terrible 2.0. Like you’ve reached an
advanced state of depression.”
“Nice to see that I display how I feel on the inside.”
“You look haunted,” Taehyung goes on determinedly. “Almost like you’re
already—”
A man walks down the bus aisle then. Jungkook is careful not to look directly
at him, at the horrible burns melting his skin and the gleam of bone showing
through the scraps of ruined flesh, but Taehyung stares openly at the ghost as
he walks past.
Jungkook stares at Taehyung. The pieces click slowly together as Taehyung
stares back. “Wait,” Jungkook says slowly. “That man. The one who walked down
the bus aisle just now. Did you—did you see him?”
“The one with the burns?” Taehyung asks.
The blood drains out of Jungkook’s face. “Let me through,” he says, standing up
and beginning to shove past Taehyung. Taehyung’s a ghost. He should have known
it straight away, he should have known it the moment a strange boy approached
him out of the blue and tried to talk to him. No one ever talks to him unless
they want something from him. “Let me through!”
“No, wait, wait, where are you going?” Taehyung’s legs are tangled all over the
floor, long and gangly, and every time Jungkook tries to step over them, a new
knee seems to be in the way for him to trip over.
“You’re a ghost,” Jungkook hisses under his breath. “A poltergeist, right? So
you still have some effect on the physical world? What do you want from me?”
“I’m not a ghost!” Taehyung flails as Jungkook kicks futilely at his legs. “Ow,
don’t do that! Think! Ghosts can’t see each other!”
Jungkook goes still.
He’s right. It’s one of the parts of the curse of being a ghost: you walk this
world you will never belong to, and you walk it alone. Forever.
“See?” Taehyung watches his face as it changes. “Sit down. You’re bruising my
shins.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” Jungkook says, renewing his efforts. “I’m not
talking to you. Whatever you are, you’re not something I want to be mingling
with.”
“No, I’m—I’m human!” Taehyung struggles back as Jungkook tries to get around
around him. “Why won’t you believe me?”
“You can’t prove it!” Jungkook twists away as Taehyung reaches for him. “I
don’t trust you! If being what I am has taught me anything, it’s not to trust
anyone!”
“I’m human,” Taehyung says, grabbing his arm and pulling him close. Jungkook
flinches at the touch, at his warm skin. “I can’t prove it to you, but you’re
not alone. Because I can see them too.”
~
Jungkook sits on the curb, Taehyung next to him. He’s unused to spending time
with another human being. It unsettles him.
He’s firing questions at Taehyung. “How long have you been able to see ghosts?”
“For as long as I can remember.”
“Where do you live?”
“A few streets away.”
“How old are you?”
“17.”
How come people can’t see you if you say they’re human?” None of the passersby
acknowledge Taehyung.
“They act like we’re invisible anyway,” Taehyung says, smiling a little
bitterly.
Something in his voice strikes a chord within Jungkook. He lets down his guard
the slightest bit, his voice softening.
“I’m Jungkook,” he offers, a little tidbit of personal information like a
sacrifice to the gods of uncertainty.
“There it is.” Taehyung smiles faintly. “I’ve earned it.”
Jungkook exhales. “You have no idea how relieved I am to find someone else
like—like me.”
“Me too.” Taehyung leans back on his palms. “I thought I was the only one of
our kind out there.”
“It’s so lonely,” Jungkook says in a rush, desperate to get the words out
before life takes the only person who might ever understand away from him.
“It’s so lonely being able to see all these horrors no one else can, you know?
All the ghosts who want something from you. They always want you to help them.”
“Well, yeah,” Taehyung says. “I mean, they wouldn’t still be hanging around
here if they didn’t have some unfinished business.”
Jungkook sighs. “Why do you think we can see them? Are we supposed to help
them? Because if we are, we’d never have enough time to help them all. I see at
least one every day.”
“Some people can’t be helped,” Taehyung says. “A lot of those ghosts are murder
victims. It’s not like we can go murder those other people to make them feel
better. That would only make the guys we murdered ghosts.”
“An unsolvable equation,” Jungkook murmurs, scratching his nails against the
scuffed concrete of the sidewalk.
“It’s okay,” Taehyung says, trying hard to sound bright. “It’s okay, right? At
least we have each other now.”
Taehyung tries to put his arm around Jungkook. The movement is stiff, tense.
Jungkook stares at him until he withdraws it.
“Okay, that will never not be awkward,” he mutters.
“How are you still so happy?” Jungkook asks him. “After so long of being
shunned by society? After so long of seeing horror upon horror you can’t even
tell anyone about unless you wanna be locked up in an asylum?”
“Well,” Taehyung says, rearranging his limbs, “someone’s got to hold the candle
which doesn’t go out in the darkness.”
And Jungkook wonders whether he’s right.
~
The woman is next to him. The woman is standing right next to him in class,
screaming for Jungkook to help her, and he can do absolutely nothing about it.
Her voice is deafening and the smell of decay which hangs about her is
disgusting, but all Jungkook can do is stare straight ahead at the blackboard
and try to block it out.
It’s immediately apparent what killed her: torture. Her clothes are from
wartime-era Korea—a tattered traditional hanbokwith a wide, grubby sash. Her
body is horrifying, all her nails and teeth missing, one eye socket empty with
half the optical vein dangling out of it. Some of her fingers are stubs. Her
bones are twisted at odd angles.
“You need to kill the Japanese!” she yells at him. “The Japanese! The ones who
come from the north with their ships and swords!”
This woman is dumb, Jungkook thinks as he scribbles notes he doesn’t process
blindly in his notebook. As if one boy against the world can kill off a whole
race which once bore monsters.
“You know them?” she shouts into his ear. “With their ugly uniforms and loud
guns? You know what they did to me?”
Nuclear fission takes place when a neutron is shot at a uranium atom, Jungkook
writes.
“I was a comfort woman,” she says, voice dropping lower, and Jungkook stops
writing despite himself. Comfort women were the sexual slaves of the Japanese
soldiers during the war. “I look like this because I tried to escape and I was
tortured and killed for my efforts.”
Jungkook forces himself to keep writing.
“I wanted a baby,” she says softly. “A baby of my own. But when I was forced
into the Japanese assholes’ dirty hands all day and night, the baby I had was
not mine. It had a Japanese face and already bore the marks of their ugly
cruelty. So I tossed it in the well and ran away.”
Jungkook flinches.
“The ghosts helped me,” she says, and Jungkook’s head snaps up. “They were the
ghosts of past comfort women, and they said they knew a way out, but I never
realized that if they had succeeded in escaping, they wouldn’t have been
ghosts…”
Jungkook raises his hand. “Excuse me, seonsaengnim,” he says when the teacher
looks at him inquisitively, “but may I go to the bathroom?”
“You may,” the teacher says.
He walks between the tables to get to the door. The woman follows behind him.
Just when he thinks that he’ll get away scot-free, a kid leans forward
slightly, and the inevitable whisper comes: “Freak.”
Jungkook lets the insult hit him and walks right out.
He walks to the back of the school building where no one can see them. “What
did you say?” he hisses to the woman. “The…ghosts helped you?”
“I could see them too,” she says, and her one remaining eye seems to glitter
for a brief moment.
This week is just full of surprises.
“Then you know that I can’t help you,” Jungkook says, exasperation entering his
voice now. “The times have changed. The Japanese aren’t demons anymore.
I’ve—I’ve been to Japan, and it’s a nice place. Clean. Neat.”
“No,” the woman hisses, face whitening. “You traitor to all Koreans!”
Jungkook rolls his eyes. “Look around you. Everything has changed. This isn’t
your world anymore. So stop asking for help, because the people who hurt you
are long dead, and you are too.”
He turns and begins to head back.
But the woman isn’t done. “Trust no one, young man,” she calls, and when he
turns back, her face is twisted into a leer. “We who are not of this world can
still pretend we are.”
~
“I wish you could follow me to school,” Jungkook says while Taehyung sits on
his bed, swinging his legs like a little kid and looking around the room with
interest. Jungkook had a few qualms about letting a near-total stranger into
his room, but after he took a walk with Taehyung through town and Taehyung made
them stop for 20 minutes to pet a stray cat in addition to pestering Jungkook
until he gave the ham in his sandwich to the cat, he’s now well and thoroughly
convinced of his harmlessness. Taehyung’s attention span is about as long as a
fly and his train of thought is as random as…well, Taehyung, and it’s
entertaining to talk to him. Sometimes Jungkook just stops saying anything at
all so he can listen to Taehyung hold a one-sided conversation entirely with
himself, prancing around and posing next to statues and smiling at babies.
“I wish too,” Taehyung murmurs.
“Where do you go to school?” Jungkook asks.
“Twenty minutes’ drive away.” Taehyung glances at him. “And before you can ask,
yes, my classmates are terrible to me.”
“Oh,” Jungkook says, relief flooding through him. “Mine—mine too. When I was
young and I didn’t know how to deal with ghosts, I got in so many sticky
situations.”
“Tell me,” Taehyung says, rearranging his limbs on the bed and staring at
Jungkook intently.
So Jungkook does. He sits on the bed next to Taehyung and folds his hands in
his lap and tells him about when he bit a teacher and when he took a paper
heart to a graveyard, and by the time he’s done, he feels like he’s
relinquished some of the burden.
“That’s terrible,” Taehyung says, frowning, “that a teacher forced you to use
the monkey bars like that.”
Jungkook sighs. “Well, they’re a lot more on edge around me now considering I
literally bit a chunk out of my teacher’s forearm. They leave me alone.
Mostly.”
“So your parents don’t know that you can still see ghosts?” Taehyung tilts his
head to the side.
“No. They think I stopped being able to when I began to talk. That’s how it
goes for babies who can see ghosts—or at least I’ve heard.” Jungkook picks up
his Rubik’s cube and begins twisting it around restlessly. He’s never been able
to solve it. “Also, you know what happened today?”
“What?”
“I was approached by a female ghost—typical stuff, she’d been tortured, no
nails, only had one eye, that sort of thing. She was yelling at me to kill the
Japanese in class—said she’d been a comfort woman. But then she said that the
ghosts of past comfort women helped her escape but failed.”
Taehyung blinks slowly. “She could see ghosts too?”
“Yeah. Anyway, she was tortured and killed, she told me, and the Japanese had
to be stopped at all costs, so on and so forth. I told her I couldn’t help her
and the Japanese are pretty alright people now. She got really weird as I was
leaving. She was saying stuff like—like ‘we who are not of this world can still
pretend we are’.”
Taehyung has gone still.
“I have no idea what she meant.” Jungkook shakes his head. “Even the
poltergeist guy was less cryptic than her, and he made me walk halfway across
town just to unstick a paper heart from the back of a drawer. It’s probably
typical ghost gibberish, right? Just a ghost trying to matter more than she
does.”
“Yeah,” Taehyung says slowly. “Yeah, just typical ghost gibberish.”
~
“Taehyung,” Jungkook says, bouncing on the bed the next day. He feels unusually
energetic. Maybe it’s the fact that he has an actual friend now, and while he’s
thought of himself as some hardass loner his whole life, he hates to admit that
no man is an island and friendship is actually nice. “how do you feel about
going swimming in the lake?”
He freezes. “What? What lake?”
“Munhwa Lake.” Jungkook gestures animatedly. “You know—it’s in the woods,
you’ve got to walk ten minutes through the trees to get to it. It’ll be
deserted at this time.”
“Like…now?” he asks uncertainly.
“Well, yeah. I’m sure my parents are happy to get me out of the house. Unless…”
Jungkook hesitates. “Your parents don’t let you go?”
“No, no, they’re happy to get rid of me too. It’s just…”
“What?”
He falters. “I’m not sure whether…”
Jungkook frowns. “Whether you can go?”
“No,” he says helplessly. He gestures aimlessly. “No, I just—I’ll go.” He nods,
seeming to come to a decision. “I’ll do it.”
Jungkook blinks as Taehyung stares back at him resolutely. “Okay? I don’t
understand you sometimes, Taehyung.”
“Neither do I,” he says with a rueful smile, but Jungkook doesn’t miss the way
he examines his hands like he’s unsure whether they’re really there.
~
“The water won’t kill you,” Jungkook calls, floating on his back in the middle
of the lake while Taehyung hovers at the far bank, dipping his toes cautiously
in the water. “There’s no seaweed or anything to pull you down and drown you.”
“I know, I just…” he trails off as he takes the first step into the lake. “I
haven’t done this for a while.”
“What? Gone swimming?” Jungkook treads water to watch him.
“Yeah.” Taehyung takes another step in, and another, and another, until he’s
submerged to his waist. “I expected the water to be cold.”
“Not in summer.” Jungkook swims over to where Taehyung is walking falteringly
into the lake. “Come on, you’re deep enough to start swimming now.”
Taehyung leans forward until his body is horizontal in the water and kicks his
legs hesitantly. He warms to it at Jungkook’s encouragement, fanning out his
arms until they’re treading water in the middle of the lake.
Taehyung turns to beam at Jungkook, legs kicking. “This isn’t as bad as I t—”
He disappears underwater.
Jungkook blinks. “Taehyung?”
He swims to where Taehyung last was and sticks his head underwater, opening his
eyes with some effort. The mostly clear depths of the lake are empty. He can
see all the way to the bottom if he squints, and Taehyung is nowhere in sight.
He sticks his head back above the surface of the water, the beginnings of panic
setting in. “Taehyung?”
He hears a tremendous splash of water and a ragged gasp. He turns. Taehyung has
just appeared a yard away, hair wet and plastered to his forehead, eyes wide
and afraid. Jungkook swims over to him as fast as he can and grabs his arm.
“Hey, what happened?”
“There’s something down there,” he says, staring into the depths of the lake
with fear written into the tense lines of his body. “Something—pulled me down.”
Jungkook’s eyebrows knit together. “What—what? Nothing lives in this lake. Not
even fish.”
“I do,” a horrible voice says, raspy and forced out through drowned lungs, and
they both turn. An old woman’s torso is hovering above the water, the rest of
her underwater. Her white hair is sopping wet, face and stomach bloated from
inhaling water, and her eyes are glaring and crazed. The water passes right
through her—Jungkook can see it rippling through her slightly transparent body.
From her soaked hanbok, Jungkook would say that she died at least a century
ago.
“A poltergeist,” he whispers.
“A weak one,” Taehyung says, voice shaking, “if she could only grab me and pull
me down for a minute. Look at how the water flows through her.”
He’s pale, still trembling from the shock, and Jungkook has to hold him up to
keep him from sinking. “You drowned here,” Jungkook asks the ghost, “didn’t
you?”
“Yes,” she hisses. “I was killed by two boys just like you two. Pestilences.”
“Why?” Jungkook says, buying for time as he tries to edge Taehyung towards the
far bank of the lake. But Taehyung’s body has locked up, and it’s hard to
maneuver him when he’s mostly unresponsive and focused singlemindedly on
clinging to Jungkook and staring at the woman, who admittedly does look
frightening with her wide, maddened eyes.
“They hated me,” she says, a bitter smile deepening the wrinkles on either side
of her mouth, “because I told on them to the authorities. They were murderers.
Small things then, like cats and dogs around the neighborhood—nothing anyone
would miss—but I could see the beginnings of evil in them. And look what I got
for my troubles.” She lifts her arms. Rotted scraps of rope still cling to her
wrists and, presumably, her legs. “Tied up and thrown into the lake. I sank
like a weight.”
“We didn’t do that, ajumma.” Jungkook plants the salutation of respect between
them like a barrier while he tries to force Taehyung into motion. “You lived a
long time ago. Those boys are long dead now.”
“It doesn’t matter!” she screams, switching to incandescent rage in the blink
of an eye. “You’re all the same to me!”
She flies at them, sleeves trailing, mouth with all its rotted teeth open wide,
and Jungkook acts out of reflex: he flings the arm which isn’t holding Taehyung
out, turning his head aside and shutting his eyes.
The world goes muted.
When he opens his eyes again, he’s in the spirit world. He can’t hear the
gentle lap of water or the rustle of tree branches. It’s just dark, dark
nothingness, the silhouette of the real world the only thing which keeps him
believing that he’s not entirely dead.
The ghost is gone, the remnants of oily black smoke still lingering in the air.
But Jungkook can see his own unconscious body, head lolling back, mouth
slightly open. Taehyung is holding him, desperately trying to tread water hard
enough to keep them both afloat, and he’s shouting down into Jungkook’s face.
His words filter vaguely through the fog. “Jung…kook! What…happened?
What’s…wrong?”
“I’m here,” Jungkook shouts, but his words are swallowed by the emptiness. He
moves until he’s standing right beside Taehyung’s ear and yells, “I’m here”,but
Taehyung can’t see or hear him.
He’s not a ghost, then. He’s somewhere in between. Someone who belongs to less
than even ghosts do.
“Jungkook,” Taehyung sobs, slapping the cheek of his physical body. “Jungkook,
what the fuck, why did you have to touch her, what do I do now—you’re not even
breathing!”
The head of Jungkook’s body rolls on his limp neck as Jungkook watches
helplessly.
“No,” Taehyung whispers. He looks around desperately, maybe for help, and then
takes a huge breath. He leans down and plants his mouth on Jungkook’s. His
cheeks puff out as he blows air into Jungkook’s lungs.
And Jungkook is wrenched back into his own body.
When his eyes fly open, he can feel the sunlight on his own face again, can
feel the water dripping into his eyes from his wet bangs. He raises his arms,
meaning to push Taehyung away and tell him he’s fine, but instead he wraps his
arms around his neck and pulls him closer.
And then, somehow, somewhere after Taehyung’s eyes open and he realizes
Jungkook is conscious, the desperation of revival and last-ditch efforts turns
into a just as desperate kiss. Jungkook still isn’t entirely sure of how it
happened when Taehyung tangles his hands in his wet hair as best as he can and
cradles his face.
Taehyung is afraid, he can tell. Afraid of what he wants and afraid of what can
be born from it. So Jungkook doubles his efforts, pressing harder against his
body until the warmth of it overcomes the slight, wet chill of the water,
sliding his tongue into his mouth just so he can hear Taehyung gasp.
It’s great, kind of fumbly and slippery, until Jungkook’s head sinks too low
and water rushes up his nose. His eyes snap open and he twists away at the
burn, coughing and snorting to try and get it out of his nostrils. Damn. That
isn’t going to help his rhinitis at all—it’ll probably manifest itself in a
savage case of the sniffles for the next week.
“I’m sorry,” Taehyung says, panicked, as Jungkook holds up a hand and wheezes.
“I’m so sorry! I don’t know what came over me, you were just, you were dead,
and I just reached for what I always thought you should do—”
“It’s okay,” Jungkook says, coughing weakly. “Let’s just—let’s just get to
shore, okay?”
They do, Jungkook leading the way. The silence hangs thick between them.
Taehyung is still a little weak, wobbly-boned from the shock of being yanked
underwater, so Jungkook grasps his hand, slippery from the water, and helps him
up the bank. They stand together there. Jungkook realizes belatedly that he
doesn’t want to let go.
“You too, huh?” Taehyung says, laughing throatily, and Jungkook looks down.
They’re both half-hard in their swimming trunks.
“Ah, sorry.” Jungkook half-turns away, embarrassed. “I’m such a virgin.”
Taehyung pulls him back gently, fingers slipping in his. “It doesn’t have to
stay that way.”
They find a soft spot in the grass and lie down. The rest of the afternoon is
spent kissing, kissing, kissing while their hands roam up and down their
bodies, kissing while the water laps at the banks of the lake, kissing until
their lips are so swollen that it kind of hurts to slot their mouths together.
Jungkook doesn’t want to think, but he has to, so he doesn’t tug Taehyung back
when he pulls away. Taehyung rolls off his body and lies next to him on the
grass, panting. The sun has moved past its peak in the sky and dipped a little
lower in the time it took for them to lose themselves and find themselves
again.
“Do we have to talk about this?” Jungkook asks, turning his head aside to look
at him. The blades of grass partially obscure his view of Taehyung’s profile,
slicing Taehyung’s tired grin into little rectangles divided by thin barriers
of green.
“Do you want to?” Taehyung smiles lazily at him. The air is warm and balmy
around them as summer begins to relinquish its hold on the weather to spring.
“Not really.” Taehyung is beautiful, he thinks. As beautiful as the feeling you
get when you listen to a song you’ll have on repeat forever for the first time.
As beautiful as the first bite you take of something marvelously calorie-
packed, oily, and fattening after you’ve been on a diet. As beautiful as
finding yourself, finding your light amongst the darkness.
“Then let’s not,” Taehyung says, rolling onto his side until his nose is nearly
touching Jungkook’s. His hands lay curled like they’re cradling something
precious between their chests. “Let’s just let whatever’s happening happen.”
“Okay,” Jungkook breathes, and he thinks he’s in love with the twinkle of
Taehyung’s eyes when he smiles.
~
It’s ridiculously easy to sneak Taehyung into Jungkook’s room. The tree outside
is easy to climb, and even if it weren’t there, the windowsills provide
generous hand- and footholds. They can be up in a minute, and then it’s only a
matter of closing the window and drawing the curtains before they can turn to
each other, breathless in a way neither of them have been before.
It’s clear that they’re both inexperienced. Jungkook nearly cuts his lip open
on Taehyung’s teeth when he surges forward too hard, and Taehyung is a little
sloppy, missing Jungkook’s mouth sometimes and dragging his mouth over his
cheek instead. But it’s not like they’ve felt anything better. And the fact
that this has happened, that Jungkook has found someone, is miraculous enough
to make him forget that Taehyung is less than stellar at kissing.
Taehyung makes up for it, anyway, in the sheer softness and warmth of his body
under Jungkook’s, in the needy grasp of his hands around Jungkook’s wrists.
Jungkook loves how he’ll take anything Jungkook has to give him, how he never
protests if Jungkook has to turn his face away to gasp for breath or
accidentally bites his tongue.
They don’t do anything more. Jungkook is too awkward, too clumsy when he holds
Taehyung’s face still, and he’s almost terrified to slide his hands under
Taehyung’s shirt. Taehyung is surprised but laughs indulgently when he tries,
hooking his leg around Jungkook’s hip and pulling him closer.
Jungkook…is a little afraid of what he wants, to be honest. He’s afraid of the
new opportunities which have suddenly been presented to him and how to manage
them. So he does what he always has: he pretends they don’t exist and all they
can do is kiss.
He’s quite sure his parents suspect something. He’s spending so much time up in
his room and they still don’t know about Taehyung. He hasn’t told them because
he hates the wild looks of hope on their faces whenever he mentions a
prospective friend, the smiles they share with each other which say our
Jungkookie is finally fitting in. He hates that he’s the son who worries them
and keeps them up at night. He hates that it shouldn’t be normal for him to
have friends, and even just one friend is something to be celebrated.
But he’s not normal. He never was and never can be. And sometimes there’s just
no getting around that.
~
“You watch me so much,” Taehyung says, licking his ice cream. “It’s creepy, you
know.”
Jungkook looks away automatically, blushing a little. “Sorry.”
“Why do you do it?” Taehyung has chocolate ice cream smeared at the corner of
his mouth. He refuses to eat any flavor other than chocolate. Jungkook reaches
out automatically and wipes it away with his thumb.
“It’s just…the way you look at the world. Fascinated. Full of wonder. Like you
were born yesterday and you haven’t had enough time to admire things.”
Taehyung blinks at him slowly.
“Like—like you know the way babies look at the world? How they just stare at
people and objects and how they’re fascinated by the simplest things? That’s
what you remind me of.” Jungkook shuffles his feet under the table in the
Baskin Robbins, a little embarrassed. “I don’t know. You just have that vibe.”
Taehyung looks amused. “I wasn’t born yesterday, if that’s what you’re
wondering.”
“Of course not,” Jungkook mutters, face flushed.
Taehyung softens. “I just see the beauty in things, I guess,” he says, pulling
back to study his ice cream. “Every day when I wake up, I think, this is a day
I will never live again. I will never again be as young as I am today, at this
minute, at this second. And that just…blows me away, I guess. So I try to get
what I can out of every day. While I still have the time.”
He sounds surprisingly sad.
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” Jungkook says, watching as Taehyung licks his
ice cream again. He delivered an indignant tirade against people who bite their
ice cream when he saw Jungkook eating his. Jungkook just laughed and opened his
jaws wider. “The way you talk and act is so…whimsical. Like Alice in
Wonderland.”
“What can I do?” Taehyung spreads his arms, the customary smile back on his
face. “I’m a whimsical person.”
Jungkook laughs.
~
When Jungkook kisses him when they get back, Taehyung tastes of chocolate and
second chances. Jungkook tilts his head so he can lick the sweetness out of his
mouth, fingers steady on his jaw. Taehyung clings to him like he’ll never know
anything else, and they stagger from the window to the bed, Taehyung falling
until his back hits the mattress and Jungkook can crawl between his legs.
Neither of them really notice at first, too distracted by their hands mapping
out each other’s bodies under their shirts, but Jungkook pulls away for air a
while later and realizes that they’re grinding against each other
unconsciously. He stops and Taehyung groans, spreading his legs wider and
lifting his hips to try and regain the friction.
“Taehyung,” he says, breath ragged, “do you want this?”
Taehyung’s eyes open. Their irises are turned light brown by the sunlight
spilling in through Jungkook’s window, as addictive and sweet as mulled cider.
“Of course,” he says, softly, softly, and it doesn’t even feel like a sin when
Taehyung’s voice is low and quiet like that.
“Oh,” Jungkook says dumbly, but he doesn’t resist when Taehyung moves his hips
tentatively again. And then they’re gasping, Jungkook’s hand firm on Taehyung’s
back, their hips moving at a desperate, heated pace. Taehyung’s long fingers
are fumbling at Jungkook’s zipper, but by the time he’s gotten his pants
undone, Jungkook still hasn’t formulated enough coordination to return the
favor. Taehyung laughs and does it himself.
“Shit, don’t you need…lube for this kind of thing?” Jungkook mumbles when
Taehyung straddles him.
“Let me guess,” Taehyung says cheerfully, “you don’t have any at all.”
“No,” he says, heart sinking.
“That’s okay.” Taehyung takes hold of his cock, tugging, and Jungkook’s entire
body jolts closer to his touch. “There are other ways.”
Jungkook feels useless when Taehyung maneuvers him gently to sit with his back
against the headboard as if he’s an invalid. But he feels like one, gaping
dumbly when Taehyung gets into his lap, thighs on either side of his waist, and
takes both of their cocks in his hand. He gets the distinct feeling that
Taehyung knows what he’s doing a lot better than he does when he rocks up into
his own grip and their cocks slide over each other, the friction making
Jungkook’s twitch in Taehyung’s hand. Jungkook groans and scrabbles for
purchase on Taehyung’s hips, digging his fingers hards into the crests of his
pelvis. Taehyung smiles as if even the pain of his nails scoring his skin is
something to be admired.
Jungkook comes first. He’s a little embarrassed that he does in front of
Taehyung, come drooling out of his cock and pooling in the dip of Taehyung’s
palm, but Taehyung is fascinated, running a finger through the white and
sticking it into his mouth for a taste. Jungkook’s cock jerks hard at the way
he runs his tongue over his fingers.
After that, Jungkook pushes Taehyung down by his shoulders and puts his mouth
to work between his legs, listening to his protests turn into moans. He’s never
blown someone and only ever seen it in porn, but he’s sure he’s doing at least
one thing right from the way Taehyung fists his hands in his hair and bucks his
hips up into his mouth.
“I’m coming,” Taehyung says in a hoarse, rasping moan, and Jungkook startles.
He pulls back a little too late—some of it lands in his mouth and more on his
lips and chin. Jungkook coughs as it slides down his throat, licks tentatively
at the drops caught on his lips. It’s tangy and a little salty and definitely
not something Jungkook would like tasting on a regular basis, but from the way
Taehyung’s eyes darken, he thinks he can make an exception.
“I’m sorry,” Taehyung says once the aftershocks have tremored their way through
his body, sitting up to wipe the come off Jungkook’s face. He sweeps his thumb
over his chin, face contorted with guilt. “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Jungkook wants to tell him, but he likes being fussed over by
Taehyung more than he’d like to admit. He lets Taehyung wipe it off with his
shirt even though he knows the stains will be hell to get out later, and he
responds eagerly when he puts the shirt down and kisses him. If this were a
movie, he thinks, they wouldn’t play music to accompany this. The soft sounds
of their mouths moving on each other speak loud enough.
“You may forget, but let me tell you this: someone in some future time will
think of us,” Taehyung says abruptly when he pulls back for air.
Jungkook looks askance at him. “Say what now?”
“It’s a quote by Sappho.” He shifts, a slight blush dusting his cheeks. “She
was a lesbian poet in ancient Greek times. She wrote poems about her love for
women, and a lot of her work has been lost, but the bits we have are damn
good.”
“That was okay?” Jungkook asks, bewildered. “To be lesbian back then?”
Taehyung shrugs. “In ancient Greece, people weren’t defined by the people they
loved.”
“I like that,” Jungkook says, stroking a thumb over the sharp angle of
Taehyung’s jaw. “That sometime, somewhere, two men or women could walk down the
street as a couple and no one would bat an eye.”
Taehyung smiles faintly. “We’re getting there, Jungkook. This world is full of
judgement and hate, but we’re getting there.”
~
It’s weird and awkward and takes a fair amount of maneuvering, but somewhere
between gruff thank yous at the local convenience store and suspicious glances
from the cashier, Jungkook procures the lube.
Using it is clumsy, fumbling, but never awkward. Jungkook fingers Taehyung open
painstakingly slowly with a quarter of the entire bottle of lube, treating him
as if he’s made out of porcelain, and Taehyung gets so impatient that he
wrenches Jungkook’s fingers out of himself and forces his hips down on his cock
until Jungkook cries out for him to stop, that he’ll hurt himself.
Taehyung is insanely tight, wet, warm, so many things Jungkook thought a boy
could never be. He gasps when Jungkook holds him, moans when Jungkook drags
inside him, and later, when the remains of their pleasure are drying on their
stomachs, Taehyung whispers to him as if the bed is their stage and the world
is listening.
“He was poetry,” he breathes, staring at the ceiling, “in a world which was
still learning the alphabet.”
Jungkook looks at him. “Are you going to dispense a profound quote every time
we have sex?” he asks, laughing a little.
“Yes,” Taehyung says, eyes meeting his, “because everything good deserves
something beautiful in return.”
~
“My parents aren’t at home,” he tells Taehyung, “so you can come in through the
front door.”
Taehyung jumps nervously, staring uncertainly at the door as they stand on the
porch steps. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. They told me they were leaving to see a movie.” Jungkook opens the
door and yanks Taehyung in by the hand. “Come on. My house isn’t going to eat
you.”
Taehyung stumbles down the hall. Jungkook has nearly reached the steps when he
hears voices coming from the kitchen—his parents’.
“So they are home after all,” he murmurs, not noticing the look of utter terror
on Taehyung’s face. “Hey, wait, this is a great opportunity! Let me introduce
you to them!”
“No!” Taehyung says with a surprising amount of panic in his voice. He tries to
tug his hand out of Jungkook’s, but Jungkook holds on tight, frowning and a
little confused. “No, please, I don’t want to!”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Jungkook says, dragging him over the carpet
towards the kitchen. “They’re nice people, I promise.”
“I can’t!” Taehyung tries to break free and Jungkook grasps his shoulders to
prevent him from twisting away. “Jungkook, stop, please.”
“Mom, dad,” Jungkook says once they’re past the doorway, ignoring him, and
Taehyung freezes. His parents are sitting at the dining table, bent over bills
and official-looking documents. They glance up, blinking, when he calls them.
“There’s someone I want you to meet.”
“No,Jungkook,” Taehyung pleads, but Jungkook frowns at him.
“Yes?” his mother asks, looking around expectantly.
Jungkook blinks when she looks right through Taehyung. “This is Taehyung,” he
says, holding up the hand which grasps Taehyung’s. Taehyung makes a last
attempt to wrench out of his grip and fails.
Jungkook’s father squints. “What, son?”
“Taehyung,” Jungkook says, exasperated. “The guy whose hand I’m holding. Can’t
you see him?”
They both stare at the place next to Jungkook where Taehyung stands. “I don’t
know what you’re talking about, Jungkook,” his mother says eventually,
confusion coloring her voice. “There’s no one there.”
“This is a trick of some kind, isn’t it?” Jungkook says, thoroughly irritated
now, and he drags Taehyung over to the dining table. He picks up his mother’s
hand. “Look.”
But when he pulls it towards Taehyung’s arm, it goes right through it.
Jungkook startles. Stops. Stares. And tries again. The same thing happens: it’s
as if Taehyung really isn’t there.
“I think you’re the one playing a trick on us,” his father says gently.
“Right?”
“No, this is—” Jungkook stumbles back, releasing Taehyung’s hand. Taehyung
stares after him helplessly. “What? What’s going on?”
“I tried to warn you,” Taehyung says pleadingly, reaching out a hand, and it
all clicks.
Jungkook’s parents can’t see him. Jungkook’s parents can’t touch him.
Jungkook’s parents can’t do any of these things, because they’ve never been
able to see or touch ghosts.
“You,” Jungkook says in a horrified whisper while his parents look on in
confusion. “You’re a—you’re a ghost.”
“What?” his mother asks.
Jungkook shakes his head and stumble-runs out. Dealing with it in front of his
parents will lead to too much explaining which has to be done later. Taehyung
follows him, trailing behind him like an unwanted puppy, palms upturned as he
reaches for Jungkook. But Jungkook, for the first time since they discovered
the eternities to be found within each other, jerks away from his touch.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jungkook yells the moment they’re out of the house.
He’s walking down the street furiously and attracting glances from passersby.
Of course, he thinks bitterly, it must have looked like I was talking to myself
the entire time.
Taehyung has to run to keep up. “I can explain—”
“Explain, then.” Jungkook rounds on him. “Explain! Tell me one thing which can
make the fact that you didn’t tell me you’re a fucking ghost okay!”
Taehyung flinches. “I—”
“I don’t know what you are, really,” Jungkook spits out, words bearing sharp
barbs in his anger and betrayal. “You can see other ghosts. You can pick things
up and have effect on the physical world without running out of energy. Maybe
you’re a—maybe you’re some kind of half-human half-ghost thing. But you
couldn’t tell me? You honestly couldn’t find the time, just one minute, to say,
‘hey, Jungkook, I’m a ghost’?”
“I didn’t—”
“What do you even want from me?” Jungkook is angrier than he’s ever been with
Taehyung, and at another time, the way Taehyung wilts under his rage would hurt
him. But this is not that time. “Everyone who bothers to talk to me wants
something from me. You’ve got to be one of them. So come on, tell me what you
want. Just use me as the tool I was meant to be.”
“It’s not like that,” Taehyung says, struggling for words.
“What is it like, then?” Jungkook shouts.
Taehyung winces again. “I have to…start from the beginning. To make you
understand. About how I died.”
“Okay,” Jungkook says bitterly, “okay, sure. Just—just uncover all the
betrayals one by one, yeah?”
“But I can’t do it,” Taehyung says, voice rising, “if you keep shouting at me!”
Jungkook falls silent grudgingly, glaring at Taehyung. He folds his arms and
waits.
“In life, I never loved anyone,” Taehyung says, talking fast, as if he’s making
sure he gets it all out before Jungkook cuts him off again. “I hated my parents
for no good reason at all, and I hated life, unable to see the privileges it
had bestowed on me. I was ungrateful. I was cold. I was a horrible, selfish
person, and when the housemaid slipped sleeping pills into the food I only ever
complained about, it was a mercy to the world.”
Jungkook doesn’t say a word.
“I died in sleep, so you can’t see the marks on me,” Taehyung says, gesturing
at himself. “I look perfectly fine. The unfinished business binding me to this
world is—is what a cold, loveless person I was, how hollow and empty I was in
life, full of bitterness and spite. The only thing which will set me free is if
I fall in love.”
Jungkook takes an involuntary breath.
“I'm a poltergeist,” Taehyung says, “and poltergeists can see and have effect
on other ghosts, which is why that one in the lake could see me and pull me
down. But normal ghosts can't see us. Poltergeists terrorize everyone—the
living and the normal dead. In a way, being a poltergeist is a greater
punishment than even being a normal ghost, because it hurts more to belong to
the world of the living in all ways except the ones which matter compared to
being a normal ghost. I knew that I couldn't fall in love with another
poltergeist, though. Most of them are middle-aged or elderly. There are no
poltergeists my age." He hesitates. "I knew you hadn't figured out that
poltergeists can see and have effect on other ghosts too when you told me about
the poltergeist who made you bring a paper heart to the graveyard. So…this must
be a shock to you, I guess."
It is, but Jungkook isn't going to give Taehyung the satisfaction of looking
surprised. He fights to keep his expression hostile.
"The only being I could really imagine myself falling in love with was a human
who could see ghosts," Taehyung continues. "But those are few and far between,
and I gave up on the prospect of ever moving on to the afterlife and being free
of this world.”
He pauses.
“And then you came along,” he says, more softly. “I was just sitting at the bus
station and watching everyone look through me as always when you saw me. The
feeling was indescribable. Of finally being noticed. Of finally belonging, in
however small a way, to the human world. Sure, you only noticed me briefly, and
I was only another guy waiting at the bus stop for that one second. But I knew
I couldn’t let you go. I knew I had to try.”
He takes a deep breath. “So I talked to you. I talked to you, and as I got to
know you, as you came to accept me, I felt my powers strengthening. Like normal
poltergeists, before, I’d only been able to have some effect on the physical
world before my abilities were exhausted. But then—the colors were brightening,
the range of sounds and smells I could perceive was widening. And I found that
I didn’t have to strain to have an effect on the physical world anymore. To
exist on the human plane of existence, if only temporarily.” He smiles, a
little pleadingly, a little sadly. “That’s what you do to me, Jeon Jungkook.
You make the world I left behind mine again. You help me feel what I refused to
acknowledge in life. You’re my second chance. And if I fucked it up by being
too afraid to tell you, I’m—I’m sorry.”
He bows his head. The silence is deafening.
“Are you angry?” he asks quietly, face downcast.
“Yes,” Jungkook says, voice a flat monotone.
Taehyung looks up and smiles a little painfully. “So this is…goodbye, then?”
Jungkook releases a ragged breath. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to admit
that he doesn’t want to let Taehyung go, even after he’s lied to him and the
only reason he befriended him is so he could use him as a ticket to the
afterlife. And his pride stands in between him and honesty. “Yes,” he says,
feeling a jagged disconnection between his brain and his mouth as he does.
Taehyung smiles again in that way only people who are hurting terribly do, with
shards of broken glass rattling in their chests and cold freezing them into
ice. It looks like a grimace to Jungkook. Taehyung blinks quickly, trying to
control his breathing—why does he even have to breathe, isn’t he a ghost?—but
Jungkook still sees the tears sparkling in his eyelashes. He stands up and
turns away from Jungkook, the curve of his back and spine painfully vulnerable,
and stuffs his hands deep into his pockets. He walks away quickly, breath fast
and ragged and barely kept in check.
And Jungkook doesn’t stop him. He watches him go.
~
The next few days are terrible.
Life without Taehyung, it turns out, is…no life. Jungkook didn’t realize how
much time he spent with him until his days had no one to laugh and dance and
spin through them like a whirlwind of happiness. He talks to no one, he
realizes. And now he has to deal with that feeling whenever he sees a lame joke
and looks up to share it with Taehyung, or stumbles over a rock and reaches out
for Taehyung to steady himself—that feeling of wanting something, of knowing it
used to be with you, and having to come to terms with the fact that it is no
longer there.
He withdraws into himself again. He scuttles away, afraid, whenever people come
too close, and he takes long-winded detours on his walk home to avoid running
into his classmates. The constant insults and slurs thrown at him hurt more
without Taehyung beside him.
Unfortunately, children are good at spotting vulnerability. And that, like so
many other things, works to his disadvantage.
Friday. Friday. Jungkook thought he’d be able to get through the week unharmed,
the second week without Taehyung, but as he walks home, taking his winding
route through alleyways and side streets, he can sense a pack of kids following
him. Bullies—broader at the shoulders than him, taller than him, with mean
streaks wider than Gocheok Dome.
And he is the epitome of easy pickings.
“Yah,” they call, once they’ve laughed and guffawed behind him for ten minutes
and Jungkook has taken enough abrupt turns to try to shake them off that he no
longer has any idea where home is. “Yah, you!”
Jungkook turns, his school bag heavy on his back. He raises his hands with his
palms turned up: the universal gesture of I surrender. “I don’t want any
trouble,” he tries to say, but his voice comes out in a hoarse whisper after so
long of not speaking.
“Aw,” they jeer. “Calling for mommy now? Or maybe your imaginary friend?”
Jungkook goes still. They know about Taehyung?
“Walking through town, laughing and talking with nothing,” the meanest and
fattest says, mouth twisted into a leer. “You think we didn’t notice, freak?”
Jungkook tries to back away. His back hits a wall. Of course I had to corner
myself in a dead end.“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re so fucking weird,” one says. “So lonely that you had to imagine a
friend for yourself? You know why no one wants to be friends with you?”
Jungkook has long learned not to listen. He scans the surroundings for paths of
escape, body tensed and on high alert. He can’t put up a fight. There’s one of
him and five of them, all bigger than him. So the only remaining option is
flight.
“You’re a freak,” the same one who spoke earlier says. “And no one wants to be
friends with a freak.”
Jungkook sees it. The massive one shifts, creating a gap between him and the
alley wall which Jungkook thinks he just might be able to squeeze through, and
he darts forward. He twists past the buffoons, the idiots, and he can tell none
of them have even processed his movement yet. He’s almost there, he can taste
the freedom, sweet on the tip of his tongue—
And an arm ropes around his middle. He’s half-lifted into the air, struggling,
legs kicking, as the largest of them all holds him up. “Trying to run away so
fast, freak?” he asks, face cruel and ugly. “Pity. We wanted to talk to you.”
Bullshit, Jungkook has time to think as he’s thrown to the ground.
He curls up on his side when the blows come. There’s grit digging into his
right cheek and dirt in his mouth, but it’s nothing compared to the pain
attacking his back and ribs. His belly. He has to protect his belly.
I wish I were stronger, he thinks dully.
“What are you gonna do now, huh?” one yells. “Gonna bite us?”
“Who’s gonna come rescue you?” one crouches close to his face. Jungkook opens
his eyes stupidly to look and gets a faceful of dirt and sand kicked into his
eyes and mouth, stinging and burning. He wheezes and blinks hard, turning his
face into the dirt. “Where’s your imaginary friend now?”
Taehyung, he thinks, beyond the pain, beyond the boots kicking his back, beyond
the stamps on his arms and sides. Taehyung.
There’s a yell.
He opens his eyes and looks, tentatively. A brick is lying on the ground close
by, its corner stained with blood. One of the boys is staggering, eyes
unfocused. Blood runs in a thin rivulet down his forehead.
“What was that?” they stop kicking him. Jungkook tries to uncurl, to get up,
but one of them steps on his cheek and pushes him back down. He takes a ragged,
gasping breath and inhales a mouthful of dirt.
“Someone threw a brick at me!” It’s all a hazy mess, incoherent and illegible,
and Jungkook closes his eyes. Maybe if he does this will all be over quickly.
“It wasn’t the freak. We were kicking him.” The boot on his cheek grinds down
harder. Jungkook feels his jaw crack painfully, hoping it’s nothing serious.
Another shout, definitely of pain this time.
“Did you see that?” the boot on his cheek eases slightly. Jungkook half-opens
his eyes. He knows better than to try and raise his head this time. “That brick
fucking flew through the air!”
“Look at Namhyuk, man, he’s fucking out like a light!”
“No bullshit, guys—who threw that brick?”
“I didn’t throw that brick! Why would I throw a fucking brick?”
Someone hauls Jungkook up by his collar. He looks through swollen, bruised eyes
at a face which is definitely tinged with fear. “‘Fess up, freak, and we’ll go
easy on you,” he hisses. “How did you throw those bricks?”
“I didn’t fucking throw shit,” Jungkook spits in his face, and the guy’s face
contorts in disgusted rage. He draws his fist back. Jungkook closes his eyes
and waits for the punch.
But it doesn’t come. There’s the sickening thud of brick meeting flesh, and
Jungkook is released, just managing to catch himself on his elbows in time. He
looks up, bewildered, into the face of the man who asked him to bring a paper
heart to a grave, all those years and years ago. He extends a hand and helps
Jungkook up. “Run, kid,” he says, face neutral. “We’ll take care of them.”
Jungkook looks around. A pretty woman is skipping around the alley, picking up
bricks and throwing them at the bullies or occasionally walking casually up to
them and bashing them with them. She looks gleeful, but manages to look
graceful even as she flings bricks at the bullies, who cower and yell at
nothing, unable to see her. Her mouth is smeared with blood, so red Jungkook
had thought at first that it was lipstick. She looks at Jungkook and smiles,
lifting a slim hand to wave. The paper heart Jungkook laid on her grave is
pinned to the breast of her white gown.
“Why?” Jungkook manages to say. The movement of his jaw makes blood flood his
mouth. He must have a split lip. “Why did you come back? I thought you two had
moved on.”
“Ghosts never forget the kindnesses done to us,” the man says, gazing down at
him. “The things humans do for us mean so much more when we know how little
time you have compared to us.”
Jungkook can’t move. He can’t believe it. Around him, the bullies cower and try
to run, but the woman pelts them with bricks whenever they try. She, he
notices, is enjoying herself immensely.
“Go, boy,” the man says, lifting his gaze to the woman. His eyes are filled,
briefly, with a love transcending the boundaries of life and death. “He can’t
be found unless you look for him.”
And Jungkook knows with a heartful of certainty who he means.
“Thank you,” he says, scrambling to his feet. “I—thank you.”
The man nods, bending to pick up a brick. And Jungkook runs.
He pulls on a beanie and a face mask as he does, bag jolting on his back, in
case he sees anyone and they stop him to ask about his beaten-up face. He can’t
afford that kind of time. But he needn’t have bothered—he meets no one, dashing
through alleys and side streets, some so narrow he has to turn his body
sideways to get through them.
He doesn’t know where he’s going. But for once in his life, he trusts. He
trusts that his legs will carry him to where he needs to be, who he needs to
find.
After he’s been running for a few minutes, he hears, jarringly discordant
against the sound of his sneaker soles pounding against the dirt, meowing. He
turns in the direction of the sound. It’s bizarre and totally out of place, but
then again, so is Taehyung.
He slows to a walk before he enters the alleyway, footsteps quiet and barely
audible over the meowing. Sure enough, Taehyung is sitting right on the dirty
ground, legs folded, face transformed by a smile as he feeds the crowd of stray
cats clambering over him bits of salami from a blue packet. He doesn’t see
Jungkook.
Of course. Cats can see ghosts.
“Hi,” he coos, scratching one behind the ears. It purrs, arching into his
touch. “Hi, there—hey, hey!” He lifts the packet of salami away from a black
and white cat which tries to nip at it. “Don’t be greedy! I didn’t get this for
nothing. You know how hard it is to get food for you as a ghost? I have to open
the freezers while no one is looking and put money on the counter. It isn’t
easy to find that money, either. People don’t drop enough for an entire packet
of salami on the street all in one go.”
Jungkook edges closer silently.
“This is kind of pathetic, isn’t it?” Taehyung murmurs. “I’m sitting in a dirty
alleyway and talking to cats. But you’re the only animals who can see me.
Humans are blind.” He catches himself, smiling a little painfully. “Well—not
all of them.”
A cat meows at him. He feeds it a bit of salami.
Jungkook takes another step and something crunches under his boot. Taehyung
looks up, eyes wide, and carefully lays the packet of salami down on the
ground. He stands, pressing himself against the alley wall and trying to edge
past Jungkook. The cats meow indignantly and follow him in a furry calico wave.
He doesn’t recognize Jungkook. But truth be told, Jungkook wouldn’t either, not
with a beanie pulled down low over his hair and a mask covering half his face.
Jungkook reaches out and catches Taehyung’s arm. Taehyung makes a tiny,
terrified squeak of alarm. He tries to twist away, then stops, frowning as he
looks more closely at Jungkook’s face. “Hold on…” he stops struggling, moving
closer to Jungkook. “Jungkook?”
Jungkook lets him reach out and draw his mask down his face. Taehyung gasps.
“Your mouth—your—your face! What happened?”
“Bullies,” Jungkook says. He feels blood trickle down his chin from his cut lip
when he smiles. “I’m the freak, you know.”
Taehyung’s eyes are suspiciously wet. He pulls Jungkook’s beanie off his head
and uses it to dab at the blood. “Why?”
“Because teenagers are little motherfuckers.” The cats wind around Taehyung’s
legs, purring, and Jungkook is careful not to move so he won’t step on one.
“No, I mean—why did you come back?” Taehyung sniffles as he sweeps Jungkook’s
bangs up to inspect him. “Oh my God, Jungkook, your face. It’s all—it’s all
bruised and bloody.”
“I came back,” Jungkook says, eyes fixed on Taehyung’s as he dabs gingerly at
his lip, “because I realized how stupid it is to leave someone I love because
of one little lie.”
“It isn’t little,” Taehyung says, but he stops wiping at the blood and looks
up. “It was a matter of—of literal life and death. I had no right to hide it
from you for so long.”
“And I had no right to—”
“Wait,” Taehyung says, eyes wide as dinner plates. “Wait, did you just say—did
you just say ‘someone you love’?”
Jungkook thinks back. “I…did?” His heart tremors and then stills. “Yes. Yes, I
did.”
“Oh, Jungkook,” Taehyung says quietly, eyes soft and huge with the wonder of
galaxies. “You love me?”
“I do,” Jungkook says, there in a dingy alley with cats wound around their
legs, no one but the dirt and the silence to listen to them.
“But I’m a ghost.” Taehyung’s voice is a whisper now. Even the cats have
stopped meowing. They look up at them with large, shining eyes, as if they know
that what’s going on is beyond them. “I don’t belong to this world or anything
of this world. I can’t. And you are…something of this world.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Jungkook’s breath catches like cloth on a nail. “You don’t
have to worry about that. Because whatever happens, however many barriers come
between us, I’ll—I’ll always belong to you.”
Taehyung’s eyes fill with tears. “Always,” he whispers, and the sound is so
small and broken against the huge, huge world that Jungkook has to pull him
close.
~
They’re already kissing when they get back. They have sex in the most chaste of
chaste positions—missionary, and yes, Jungkook would kick himself if he weren’t
such a virgin—with Taehyung on top in a sort of awkward riding position. It’s a
little fumbly and weird, but they make it work, and Jungkook wouldn’t trade the
desperate press of Taehyung’s lips on his or the hot rush when he comes on his
stomach for anything.
Jungkook’s already dropping off later, Taehyung curled up in his arms, when
something wet drips on his fingers and he opens his eyes in surprise. Taehyung
is crying, eyes wide open as he stares at the far wall, and Jungkook is awake
in a flash. “Hey, hey, what’s wrong?”
“I just—” Taehyung sniffles. It’s the quiet kind of crying, the one which tears
you apart softly and slowly. “I just—I don’t know. I don’t want to be a cliche,
but I really—I never—” He drags in a deep breath. “I never want this to end.”
Jungkook strokes his thumb over his cheekbone, catching a tear on the pad of
his finger. “Why is that a reason to cry?”
“Because,” Taehyung says, and he manages to muster a watery smile, “what cannot
be said will be wept.”
“Ah, I forgot,” Jungkook says, smiling. “You didn’t slip in a profound quote.”
“I have now.”
Jungkook leans down. They kiss for awhile, mouths quiet against the hush of the
room, and Jungkook has to pull away. “Yah, I need to get some sleep.”
“It’s okay,” Taehyung says, wriggling back against Jungkook’s chest more
securely. Jungkook feels his ribcage expand whenever he breathes.
“I just don’t understand why you were crying,” Jungkook murmurs as his eyes
close. Sleep swoops in immediately on muted wings, covering his eyes with its
silent feathers.
“Because everything has to end,” Taehyung says, but it’s so soft and so
defeated that Jungkook passes it off as a dream.
~
Jungkook wakes up alone.
He panics at first. Then he reasons to himself, Taehyung probably had stuff to
do. Ghost stuff.
The fact that he’s okay with Taehyung being a ghost jars him. He swings his
legs out of bed, loose-limbed and satisfied from last night, and putters around
his room, pulling on his clothes. Taehyung’s side of the bed is still warm.
Jungkook wonders where he went.
He’s pulled on boxers and a pair of sweatpants when he sees the sheet of paper
on his study table. That wasn’t there the night before, he thinks quizzically.
He crosses the room to the desk and picks it up.
His heart sinks as he reads it.
Dear Jungkook,
I lied to you. Again. Well, it wasn’t a lie—I just didn’t tell you the whole
truth.
Remember what I said about being able to move on to the afterlife once I found
someone to love? You never asked for a specific time that would happen, so I
didn’t tell you, because I didn’t know myself. I think you thought that I could
choose when to move on—that it’s a voluntary thing.
It’s not, Jungkook. I don’t have any control over the time. I’m writing this
while you’re still asleep, so I don’t know when you’ll wake up, but it might be
a minute or even hours after I leave. I have to go soon. I have to fight just
to finish this letter.
I love you. I found something beautiful to love in a muted world, and that
something is you. You made the colors real again. You showed me how to be alive
in a way I’d never had the chance to when I really was. Now I’m moving on to
wherever souls go when they’re done with this world, and I can’t thank you
enough for that.
I’ll miss you so much. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but I have to be
selfish. I have to move on past this half-life. The living world is no place
for me.
If it’s any consolation, you’ll join me eventually. I don’t mind the wait.
Because wherever I am, I’ll be where all living souls go, and that means you’ll
end up there too.
You’re not a freak. You’re not weird. You’re special, wonderful, unique, and
you will never be someone I would shun or jeer at. If you only remember one
thing from being with me in the brief time we had together, remember that they
laugh at you because you’re different, and you should laugh at them because
they’re all the same.
We were together. The rest, I forget.
Love,
 Taehyung
Jungkook reads it again. Again. And the reality hits him—the fact that wherever
Taehyung is, it’s not here, and the fact that wherever Jungkook is, it’s not a
place with Taehyung in it.
He collapses to his knees. The sheet of paper slips from between his fingers,
fluttering to the ground. He stares at the carpet. This is the part where the
tears begin to flow, he thinks. This is the part where he feels his chest being
torn apart into bloodied strips. But he feels too empty to cry.
~
In the end, like any self-respecting medieval tale, Jungkook dies of a fever.
It’s unheard of. Unheard of. His temperature spikes up to 38 about half a year
since Taehyung left him, and he goes to school with it the first few days, face
flushed and eyes half-lidded with illness. When he plods back home, his
temperature has climbed to 39. His mother wonders whether she should be worried
and puts him to bed the rest of the day. He sleeps, gladly, and he dreams of a
boxy smile and a deep laugh.
When he wakes, his temperature is 40. He shivers constantly and his mother
decides that it’s time to admit him to the hospital. So he is, lying in a
sterile white bed all day, staring at sterile white walls. He turns pale as
paper, secreted away from the sun, and his eyes become dull. He sleeps most of
the time. When he’s awake, he stares at the ceiling and doesn’t respond when
his parents try to talk to him. Neither of them really think that the fever is
anything serious, that it’s just a particularly stubborn one, but when it’s
been a week and Jungkook’s body temperature slowly but surely climbs up to 41,
they start to become concerned.
The doctors fire drug after drug at him. He takes a different pill every hour
and swallows more glasses of water tipped against his lips than he can count.
He loses all internal track of time—the rise and set of the sun mean nothing to
him when it doesn’t shine on the smile he would quite literally trade his life
to see.
The doctors are baffled. The drugs have no effect. They don’t tell the already-
bereaved parents, but quietly, in hushed tones while they think Jungkook is
sleeping, they talk about how they’ve never come across a boy so young who
seems so leached of life. The machines around him, they agree, are more
animated than he is. Not a word has passed his lips since he stepped foot in
the hospital.
Grief, one whispers. This is always what I imagined someone dying of grief in
the fairy tales would look like.
Has he lost anyone dear or close to him recently? They ask his parents
tentatively, unsure how to broach the subject. A loved one, perhaps? A friend?
But his parents shake their heads. No, they say, casting upset glances towards
the bed. Their eyes are red-rimmed from crying more tears over their son than
any parent should have to bear. No, not to our knowledge.
Jungkook passes in the middle of the night. His parents have stopped staying
overnight at the hospital. They have lives too, they reason pleadingly down at
their motionless, unresponsive son. They can only take leave from their jobs
for so long, and it’s been weeks.
They brush his hair back, kiss his hot forehead. We’ll be back, they promise.
We’ll never leave you.
Jungkook already lives more in dreams than he does in real life. Reality holds
nothing for him—not outside in the grass and fresh air, not inside, surrounded
by beeping machines and detached nurses. His mind is less painful a place than
the world he lives in, where he has to acknowledge the gaping hole in his chest
where his heart should be like a bullet wound. This, it seems, is the
consequence of loving someone who is not of this world. It’s so easy to slip
all the way into his dreams, smile back at the grin shot his way, and leave his
body forever.
His parents cry when they arrive the next morning and hear the news. They hold
his dead hands and squeeze them, desperate with the need of parents whose child
has been robbed from them, but Jungkook doesn’t feel the tears which drip onto
his skin. In the afterlife, with Taehyung next to him as promised, he is beyond
that.
He doesn’t realize how sad Taehyung was until he meets him in the world beyond,
where he’s supposed to be. He thought Taehyung was bright on earth, but back
then, he was like a light with a lampshade on. In the afterlife, where he truly
belongs, he shines as bright as a supernova. There, they can truly promise
never to leave each other. It’s the end of the road for them. There is nowhere
further to go.
Jungkook sits and watches his funeral, just for the kick of it in that morbid
way all the dead do. Taehyung leans into him, their hands intertwined tightly
in his lap. It hurts Jungkook, vaguely, to see his mother get up on the podium
and only manage to say that he was a good son before she breaks down into
tears. But the pang is faint. Here, all their pain has been left behind.
“Do you regret anything?” Taehyung asks next to him. “Anything at all which led
to this?”
Jungkook is silent for a while. He watches tears wind their way down his
parents’ cheeks, watches his father quickly swipe at his eyes. “I don’t know,”
he says. “I don’t think so. Because honestly, it seems to me that whatever
happens, someone’s going to get hurt. And I guess I was just fed up of that
person always being me.”
“I’m sorry,” Taehyung says, staring at Jungkook’s mother as she sobs into her
handkerchief. “I—I broke so many lives. You would still be alive if I’d never
met you. If I’d never talked to you.”
“Don’t think like that,” Jungkook says softly, nudging him. “I made my own
decisions. You can’t accept the blame for everything bad in the world.”
“I wish I could,” Taehyung says quietly. Jungkook’s parents cling to each other
as his coffin is lowered into the ground. “People down there break so easily.”
Jungkook stands. “It’s not our responsibility anymore,” he says, looking down
at Taehyung. “We’re not…alive. We’re past that. Now, truly, we’re both free.”
Taehyung stands too. Jungkook holds out a hand and helps him up, less because
he needs the support and more because he offered it.
“Do you really think that?” Taehyung looks at him. “That we don’t have to
bother anymore?”
“We don’t,” Jungkook says with conviction. He hasn’t let go of Taehyung’s hand;
he squeezes gently. “We’re done hurting.”
Taehyung smiles.
And they walk away, hand in hand, finally in a place where they both belong.
Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed
their work!