jungkook and taehyung, and the habit of looking
I think Chapter 32 might be one of the chapters that means the most to me personally as a writer, and I didn't fully understand why until I went back and reread it.
Because this chapter is, on the surface, basically just me writing a really long history lesson about Jungkook and Taehyung's relationship 😭
But I think what I was actually trying to write was something much more specific.
I wanted to write about the person you learn to look for before you even understand what they will eventually mean to you.
Because Jungkook and Taehyung were never childhood best friends.
And I really want to emphasize that because I think it's such an important distinction for their relationship.
They knew each other as children because their families moved through the same circles. The Jeons and the Kims have been tangled up in the same political and financial networks for generations, which means Jungkook and Taehyung kept getting shoved into the same rooms together.
But they didn't grow up together.
They didn't go to the same school.
They didn't spend their afternoons together.
They weren't calling each other every night.
They weren't inseparable little childhood companions.
They were just two children who kept finding themselves in the same incredibly suffocating rooms, surrounded by adults who already knew exactly who they were supposed to become.
And somehow, they noticed each other.
That's what the opening of Chapter 32 is about.
Seven-year-old Jungkook sees nine-year-old Taehyung sitting alone by a window, and the important thing isn't that Jungkook thinks, oh my god, I have found my best friend.
Taehyung isn't even doing anything particularly interesting.
He's sitting there with a stolen spoon, bouncing light off the ceiling because apparently that is a perfectly reasonable way for a nine-year-old to survive a High Council reception.
But Taehyung is also the first person in that entire room who isn't looking at Jungkook.
And Jungkook is exhausted from being looked at.
He's been taught how to stand, how to bow, how to answer questions, how to represent his family.
Everyone in that room is looking at him and seeing something.
And then there's this weird Kim kid sitting by the window who doesn't seem to care.
So Jungkook sits beside him.
They complain about the food.
They complain about how late their parents are making them stay.
Jungkook watches the light move across the ceiling.
And for twenty minutes, neither of them asks the other to explain himself.
And I think that was the beginning.
You understand why I don't want to be in here.
I don't have to explain that to you.
And that becomes their thing.
They keep finding each other at these events.
They don't necessarily know everything about each other's lives.
They don't necessarily see each other outside these occasions.
But when they walk into a room full of people who already know their surnames and their families and their futures, they know where to look.
And I really love that because their closeness isn't based on proximity yet.
It's based on recognition.
They are two people who understand what it feels like to be introduced to a room as a future before you've even figured out who you are.
And then eventually they go to the same high school.
And THAT is when they actually become best friends.
Because suddenly they have something they never had before:
They aren't just seeing each other at family functions every few months.
They're in the same school.
Same stupid teenage environment.
They get to actually know each other.
And I think that distinction matters SO MUCH to me because I didn't want their eventual friendship to feel inevitable simply because they were children from the same social circle.
They had to actually become friends.
They had to choose each other.
They had to spend enough time together to discover that the person who made those awful formal rooms easier was also someone they genuinely loved having around when there wasn't a formal room at all.
So by the time they're adults, Jungkook and Taehyung are genuinely best friends.
And then the seven of them start moving toward the relationship.
And this is where their story gets a little painful in a way I really love.
Because the seven of them aren't all the same age.
They can't all enter the romantic relationship at the same time.
There is a very clear boundary that everyone respects: nobody joins the relationship romantically until they're an adult.
Jungkook is the youngest.
So he's the last one to actually join.
Taehyung gets there before him.
And at first, Taehyung still tells Jungkook things.
He's Jungkook's best friend.
But slowly, Taehyung starts thinking about what it must feel like for Jungkook to hear about all these romantic things happening between everyone else when he technically can't participate yet.
And Taehyung doesn't want his best friend to feel like he's standing outside the relationship.
He doesn't want to make Jungkook feel left out.
So he starts telling him less.
Not because he trusts him less.
Not because he loves him less.
Not because Jimin is suddenly more important to him than Jungkook.
He just thinks he's protecting him.
And because Jimin is already part of the relationship with him, Taehyung naturally starts talking to Jimin about those things instead.
And then something really tiny happens.
Taehyung and Jungkook stop having quite as many conversations about that part of their lives.
And then it becomes a pattern.
And that slowly fractures their best-friend bond.
And I think THAT is something I really wanted Chapter 32 to make more meaningful in retrospect.
Because when you read the childhood sections, you know that these two eventually become best friends.
You know they eventually become lovers.
But the chapter is showing you the thing underneath both of those relationships.
Jungkook has been looking for Taehyung for years.
The relationship changes.
The people they rely on change.
And then Jungkook turns eighteen.
He joins the relationship.
And the thing that had been creating that particular distance between them is suddenly gone.
The seven of them are finally together in the way they had been waiting for.
The fracture gets tidied over before it can become something irreparable.
And THAT is when everything becomes irreparable.
Because now there isn't some external circumstance explaining why they aren't as close as they used to be.
There isn't an age boundary.
There isn't a reason for Taehyung to hold back.
There isn't something temporary that can simply be waited out.
There is everything that happened between them.
Everything that went wrong.
Everything they failed to say.
And that's why I love the ending of Chapter 30 so much.
Because after all of that history, after everything that their relationship has become and everything it has ceased to be, Jungkook gets an assignment.
And everyone else can look at that name and see a professional designation.
A useful asset for the Omni-Z investigation.
Because there has never been a useful designation for what Taehyung has been to him.
Not childhood best friend.
Because all of those things are true at different points, and none of them actually capture the whole history.
Taehyung is the person Jungkook learned to look for.
He's the person Jungkook started searching for before he even understood friendship.
He's the person who eventually became his best friend.
He's the person who became his lover.
He's the person he lost pieces of his friendship with even while loving him.
He's the person he eventually lost entirely.
he's coming through that door again.
And Jungkook's first instinct is to look toward the entrance.
And I think THAT is the thing I love most about this chapter.
The habit is older than he is willing to admit.
Because Jungkook's relationship with Taehyung has never been a straight line.
childhood friends → best friends → lovers → breakup.
Oh, you're actually my best friend.
Oh, somewhere along the way we stopped being quite as much ourselves with each other.
And that last part is what Chapter 32 ends on.
Not some huge revelation.
Just Jungkook looking toward the door.
Because that's what he's always done.
And I think there is something almost devastatingly simple about that.
The seven of them are going to change so much throughout this story.
Their relationships with each other will change.
Their understanding of themselves will change.
The ways they love each other will change.
And Jungkook and Taehyung's relationship in particular has already gone through so many different forms.
But somewhere underneath all of it is this tiny, stupid, deeply ingrained instinct:
And I think that's what I was actually writing when I wrote Chapter 32.
Not a childhood friendship.
A person becoming so deeply woven into the way you experience a room that you don't consciously realize you're looking for them anymore.
And somewhere, automatically, you're looking for the one person who has spent half your life making the room feel less impossible.
And maybe that's why this chapter feels so special to me.
Because Taehyung has been many things to Jungkook.
But before he was any of them—
he was simply the person in the room.
