From the river to the sea

The room is smaller than it was this morning.

Which doesn’t make sense, architecturally, because rooms don’t shrink. Walls don’t migrate inward while you’re downstairs eating drugged brownies and letting boys in bath robes corner you against kitchen counters. That’s not how buildings work. That’s not how physics works. You took a science elective. You passed it. Barely, but the point stands.

And yet.

The blue suite feels different. The ceiling’s lower or the bed’s bigger or the air is thicker or maybe—maybe it’s just that Jason closed the door behind him with a click instead of letting it drift shut, and the click had a sound to it. A punctuation.

You didn’t like it.

You haven’t liked any of it walking behind him up the stairs.

He didn’t reach for your hand. Didn’t put his palm on the small of your back the way he usually does in hallways.

He just walked. And you followed.

And now you’re standing three feet inside the door and he’s by the window and the bed is between you like a negotiating table, and everything was fine earlier. It was fine when you got dressed in this room. It was fine when Irya did your collarbones and Jason called you incredible and held out his hand and you took it.

It was fine twenty minutes ago.

So why does the wallpaper look like it’s breathing?

…Okay. That one might actually be the weed.

This was definitely not your best pharmaceutical decision.

Jason turns from the window. Faces you. Brings both hands together in front of his mouth—fingertips touching, pressed to his lips, the prayer gesture. The one people do when they’re organizing a thought they’ve already finished thinking and are now just choosing the delivery method.

He holds it there.

Drops his hands.

“Okay. So.”

A breath. Through his nose.

“What’s going on with him?”

Something catches in your throat. Not a sound—a shape. The shape of a word you weren’t ready for, or the shape of being caught, or the shape of every single moment from the last forty-eight hours compressing into a single syllable that sits behind your tongue and refuses to move.

Fuck.

He noticed.

Fuck fuck fuck.

He saw you at the counter. He saw the way you were standing—how close, how angled, the chocolate on your fingers, the laugh you didn’t authorize—and now he’s standing in this room with the door clicked shut and his hands in that prayer thing and he’s asking, and—

The shower. The orange. The hallway.

«Circles, Nix.»

The bracelet. The fucking bracelet that’s still on your wrist pressing the little rain charm into your pulse point.

He knows. He doesn’t know how much but he knows something.

Act normal.

You are a normal person who does normal things and has normal friendships with her normal roommate and none of those things involve coming in adjacent shower stalls or the word cookie being used as a double entendre in a kitchen full of witnesses.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Nailed it. Completely nailed it. Meryl Streep would weep. Oscar-worthy. Standing ovation.

Jason looks at you.

“Don’t do that.”

Okay. Fuck.

No. Don’t be discouraged bitch. Make Meryl proud, come on.

“Do what?”

“The thing where you act like you don’t understand the question.” His voice is level. Measured. Patient in a way that somehow makes it worse. “You know exactly what I mean. He’s constantly in your space.”

Okay, Meryl, girl. There was an attempt.

Your fingers find the bracelet.

Automatic. Unconscious. The way your hand goes to a bruise to check if it still hurts—you don’t decide to do it, you just do, and by the time you realize you’re doing it you’re already pressing the charm into your wrist and looking to the side, away from his face, at the lamp on the nightstand that is doing absolutely nothing wrong and doesn’t deserve to be stared at this hard.

“We’re friends.” You say it to the lamp. “That’s it.”

“Friends.”

“Yeah. Friends. People who talk to each other at parties. Groundbreaking concept.”

“Y/N.”

“What?”

“Can you look at me?”

You look at him. Force yourself to do it—drag your gaze from the lamp to his face like it’s a physical act, like your eyes weigh something they didn’t weigh ten minutes ago.

He’s not angry. That’s the thing. He’s not doing the thing you’re braced for—no raised voice, no visible frustration, no clenched jaw or sharp edges.

He looks calm. Concerned. Reasonable.

For some reason, it feels like his most dangerous version.

“I’m not trying to start a fight,” he says. Opens his hands. Palms up. The universal gesture of ’I come in peace’ that people only do when peace is not, in fact, what they came with. “I just—I think it’s worth having a conversation about boundaries.”

“Boundaries.”

“Yeah. About what’s appropriate. In front of other people.”

Something hot flickers in your chest. Not guilt anymore. Something meaner.

“What exactly was inappropriate?”

“I didn’t say inappropriate. I said—”

“You literally just said what’s appropriate, Jason, which means something was inappropriate, so what was it?”

He takes a breath. The patient one. The one that says ’I’m going to let that tone slide because I’m the mature one here.’

And god, you hate that breath. You hate it the way you hate being corrected by someone who’s technically right but fundamentally missing the point—that specific, grinding frustration of being managed.

“I just don’t think it’s a great look,” he says. “Having another guy’s hands all over you at a party where we’re here together.”

Hands all over you.

Hands all over you?

The kitchen counter flashes—Jungkook’s palms flat on either side of your hips, the heat, the proximity, the vanilla bottle sitting there like a prop in a play about your bad decisions—and your stomach drops because okay, maybe from across the room that did look—

“That’s not what was happening.”

“From where I was sitting—”

“Then maybe you were sitting at a bad angle.”

“Y/N.” The patient breath again. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just saying—as someone who cares about you—I don’t think you realize how it looks. To other people.”

His eyes drop. To your wrist.

“And—I wasn’t going to bring this up, but since we’re talking about it.” He gestures. A small tilt of his chin toward your left hand. “That thing.”

You don’t need to look down to know what he means.

“What about it?”

“You’ve been wearing it all week. I couldn’t help but notice.” His voice is still calm. Still measured. Still wrapped in enough reasonableness that the words almost sound like concern instead of what they are. “And I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to—but it’s a bit childish, no? The colors. The beads.”

Yellow. Orange. Red. Little silver letters spelling ‘Rogue’ across.

“It’s a bracelet, Jason.”

“It says Rogue.” He says it amused in a way that’s worse than mean—condescending, like he’s being generous by only finding it slightly embarrassing. “What does that even mean?”

“It’s an inside joke.”

“With who?”

“With—people. It’s a friendship bracelet. People have those.”

“At your age?”

The question hangs. Rhetorical. Already answered by the tone he used to ask it.

His eyes move from the bracelet to your hand. To the back of it. To the fleshy part below your thumb where—

“And—is that a bite?”

Your hand snaps behind your body so fast you nearly throw out your shoulder.

Too fast. Way too fast.

The speed of it is its own confession—nobody hides an innocent injury like they’re palming evidence at a crime scene—and you watch Jason clock the reaction the way he clocks everything: slow, but sure.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s a bite mark.”

“It’s not. I just bumped into something.”

“That’s teeth.”

“It was—the brownie thing. In the kitchen. It was stupid, someone was—it was a joke.”

“A joke.” Flat. “Someone bit you. As a joke.”

And the way he says it—someone—makes it clear he doesn’t need you to fill in the name.

His jaw works once. Controlled.

“So you’re out there getting drunk and high and—what, bitten by people at a party? Randomly? While we’re here together?”

“It wasn’t—”

“That’s the kind of behavior you think is—”

“It was a joke, Jason, we were fighting over a brownie and it was dumb and it lasted two seconds—”

“I just—”

He runs a hand through his hair. Looks at you with an expression that’s trying so hard to be gentle it comes full circle into something sharp.

“That’s not the girl I know. The beads and the nicknames and the—getting bitten in kitchens at midnight—it’s not you.”

Not you.

Not the version of you he knows.

Not the version he built in his head from seminar answers and coffee dates and the careful, polished, composed woman who shows up when he’s watching.

The version that wears matching jewelry and speaks in complete sentences and doesn’t have an inside joke with her roommate spelled out on her wrist in colored beads like a kid at summer camp.

“Maybe you’ve just never known me.”

You say it quiet. Looking right at him.

His mouth opens. Closes.

And for one second—half a second—surprise cracks in the diplomacy.

Then the composure reseals. The crack plasters over. The expression returns to its default setting: concerned, measured, slightly wounded.

“I think you should be more mindful. That’s all. About how you carry yourself. I think you should—”

A pause. Careful. Choosing.

“—respect yourself a little more.”

Respect yourself.

Your mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.

“You deserve better than being someone’s—I don’t know—physical prop. Being grabbed and hung on and—it’s not how someone treats a person they respect. And I think you know that.”

The hot thing in your chest is spreading. Climbing up your throat. Making your heartbeat louder in your own ears, which might be the weed or might be fury or might be some volatile combination of both that’s going to end in either tears or property damage and you genuinely do not know which.

“Nobody was grabbing me. Nobody was hanging on me. I was talking to someone. At a party. Like a person. With a social life.”

“You were—”

“What? Finish that.”

“Can you let me finish a sentence?”

“Can you stop starting sentences that end with me not respecting myself?”

“I just don’t think Jimin sees it like that.”

Everything stops.

The room. Your breathing. The weed-warped wallpaper. The hot angry thing in your chest.

All of it hits pause, mid-stride, like someone yanked the needle off a record.

“What?”

“I said I don’t think Jimin sees it the way you think he does.”

Jimin.

Jimin?

He’s talking about—

This entire—every single word of this conversation—the boundaries, the appropriateness, the respect yourself—

“You think Jimin has feelings for me?”

It comes out flat. Incredulous. Like someone asked you to confirm the sky is blue.

Jason’s expression doesn’t change.

Same steady, reasonable, measured look.

Same concerned furrow between the brows.

Same ’I’m saying this because I care about you’ energy pouring off him in waves of cedar and bergamot.

“I think Jimin knows what it’s like to be a guy,” he says, “and have a girl draped all over him.”

Draped.

He said draped.

Like you were fabric. Like you were a decoration. Like the arms you had around Jimin’s shoulders—warm, platonic, the kind of casual affection you give to someone who just did your eyeliner and trusted you with the shape of his questions—were some kind of tactical maneuver. Some calculated display that poor innocent Jimin couldn’t possibly interpret as anything other than sexual, because you’re a girl, and he’s a guy, and apparently that equation only has one answer in Jason’s math.

Your fingernails press half-moons into your palms.

“Draped,” you repeat. Testing the word. Tasting it.

It tastes like your mother.

«You’re too much, you’re too loud, you’re taking up space in a way that makes people uncomfortable, and you’d know that if you’d just stop and think about how you look from the outside for once in your life.»

You feel the beginning of a compression in your chest.

One that you recognize from a long time ago, from fights in kitchens with marble countertops, from sitting at dining tables where every fork was placed at the correct angle and every word was placed at the correct volume and every version of you that didn’t fit the blueprint got folded up and put away.

Your lungs feel smaller.

That’s the weed. That has to be the weed.

“Jimin is my friend.” You say it slow, clear. “He did my eyeliner. I hugged him. I hug my friends, Jason. That’s a thing people do.”

“I’m not saying you can’t have friends—”

“Oh, good. Thank you. Permission granted. Really appreciate that.”

“See, this is what I’m talking about.” He gestures at you—at all of you, the sarcasm, the crossed arms, the whole defensive architecture of your posture. “This. Right here. I try to have an adult conversation and you immediately go to—”

“To what?”

“To this. The deflection. The sarcasm. The making me the bad guy for expressing a concern.”

And the fucked up thing—the really truly fucked up thing—is that he’s not entirely wrong.

You are deflecting. You are being sarcastic. You are making him the bad guy because the alternative is engaging with the actual content of what he’s saying and you can’t do that because the actual content requires you to either (a) explain that Jimin is not interested in you because Jimin is currently navigating something about his own identity that is private and sacred and none of Jason’s goddamn business, or (b) admit that the real problem isn’t Jimin at all, it’s the guy in the Ghostface robe who said circles to you across a kitchen like it was a promise—

And you can’t do either of those things.

Option A outs Jimin. Option B outs you.

So you’re stuck.

Trapped.

Standing in this room that’s getting smaller with every sentence, defending a position that isn’t the real position, fighting a fight that isn’t the real fight, and your chest is doing the thing and your hands are doing the thing and the wallpaper is definitely breathing now and you can’t—

“He was sitting down,” you say, and your voice is thinner. You can hear it. “I came up behind him and put my arms around him. The same way I’d hug Yeji. The same way I’d hug Irya. Are you going to tell me that’s inappropriate too?”

“Yeji and Irya are women.”

“So?”

“So it’s different.”

“Why?”

“Because it is. Because whether you want to acknowledge it or not, there is a difference between how men and women interpret physical affection, and I’m not being old-fashioned by pointing that out, I’m being realistic.”

“You’re being controlling.”

Jason’s face does something you’ve never seen it do before.

He looks hurt. Real, actual hurt, the kind that flashes across someone’s face before they can catch it and tuck it behind something more presentable.

“I’m not controlling you,” he says. “I’m asking you to think about how your actions affect the people around you. That’s not control. That’s consideration.”

Consideration.

Your mother’s favorite word. Your mother’s number-one, gold-standard, go-to weapon for every single time you did something that embarrassed her or surprised her or reminded her that you were a separate person with separate wants—’have some consideration. Think about someone other than yourself for once.’

You can feel your heartbeat in your fingers, in your wrists, in the base of your throat where the gold chain sits against your skin.

You want to scream that Jimin is already interested in someone else, that possibly he doesn’t even like girls.

But you don’t.

Because it’s not yours to say. It’s Jimin’s. It belongs to him the same way the pink nail belongs to him, the same way the question in the bathroom belongs to him—’what if none of it fits, what if there isn’t a word for it’—and you don’t get to hand that to Jason Calloway like a hall pass just because you’re cornered and scared and your lungs won’t open all the way.

You don’t get to sacrifice someone else’s secret to win your own argument.

So you stand there. Hands shaking. Jaw shut. Pulse hammering against the rain charm on your wrist.

And you have nothing.

No defense that doesn’t betray someone.

No explanation that doesn’t expose something.

“I shouldn’t have to justify hugging my friend,” you say, and it comes out cracked.

“Nobody’s asking you to justify anything. I’m asking you to be aware.”

“Aware of what?”

“Of how you come across. Of the signals you’re sending. Of the fact that you’re at a party with me—with me—and you spent the last hour hanging off other men and barely looked in my direction.”

The compression in your chest is getting worse. Heavier. Like someone’s stacking books on your ribcage one at a time—each sentence another volume, another weight, another reason you can’t get enough air into your lungs to fight properly.

Your eyes burn.

No. Nope. Absolutely not.

You are not going to cry in front of Jason Calloway in a Medusa costume with two pot brownies dissolving in your bloodstream. That’s not happening. That is a thing that will not occur.

“I think,” he says—and there’s a softness to it now, a careful softness that’s worse than the accusations because it sounds like kindness, it sounds like concern, it sounds like someone who loves you explaining for the fifteenth time why you’re doing everything wrong, “that sometimes you don’t realize the way you act around men. And I don’t think that’s your fault. I think it’s—a pattern. And I think if you were a little more self-aware about it, a little more…”

He pauses. Looking for the word.

“…mature, you’d...”

You tune out the rest of the sentence.

Because that word.

Mature.

One single, careful, well-chosen, precisely deployed word that lands in the exact center of the thing your parents built inside you—the architecture of not-enough, the blueprint of every dinner table correction and every lowered voice and every ’when are you going to grow up and start acting like the person we raised you to be’—

And inside you something buckles—a load-bearing wall giving way, a structural failure that’s been building since the shower, since the orange, since circles, since the prayer hands and what’s going on with him—and you are not going to cry here.

You are not going to cry here, you are not going to cry here, you are not—

“I need to use the bathroom.”

“Y/N—”

“I need to use the bathroom, Jason.”

He opens his mouth. Closes it.

His expression is doing the thing again—the hurt, the confusion, the genuine inability to understand why his reasonable words keep producing unreasonable reactions—and part of you, the part that’s still rational, knows he doesn’t get it.

Knows he thinks he’s being fair.

Knows he genuinely believes that everything he just said came from a place of care and concern and wanting the best for you.

And maybe that’s the worst part.

That he means it.

That the cage is lined with good intentions and the bars are made of ’I just want what’s best for you’ and the lock is turned by someone who thinks love and management are the same thing.

You grab the door handle. Pull.

“Can we at least—”

The door closes behind you.

The hallway is empty. The sconce flickers. The fog machine’s output has crept up the stairs and is hanging in thin wisps along the baseboard and you walk through it on legs that don’t feel entirely connected to your body—one foot, then the other, mechanical, automatic, the way you used to walk from the dining room to your bedroom after the conversations that left you feeling like this, small and wrong and taking up too much space and not the right shape and never, ever, ever enough—

The bathroom door.

You push through it. Lock it behind you.

Slide down the door until you’re sitting on cold tile with your knees pulled up and the Medusa skirt bunching around your thighs and the snake cuff digging into your bicep and the gold chains in your hair pressing into the back of your skull against the wood.

The first sob comes out silent.

The second one doesn’t.

It’s ugly. Wrenching. The kind that starts in your stomach and rips upward through your chest like something with claws, and you press your hand over your mouth to contain it because there are thirty people downstairs and the last thing—the absolute last thing you need—is someone hearing you fall apart in a bathroom at a Halloween party because a boy used the word ’mature’ and your nervous system couldn’t tell the difference between him and your mother.

Tears streak through Jimin’s perfect eyeliner, wings dissolving, the careful symmetry ruined, and you think stupidly, absurdly, through the wet gasping wreckage of your breathing, that he’s going to be so disappointed when he sees what you did to his work.

That thought makes you cry harder.

Which makes you laugh.

Which makes you cry again.

You pull your knees tighter. Press your forehead to them. Let the gold chain belt dig into your thighs.

On your wrist, the rain charm catches the fluorescent light.

You don’t take it off.

He can taste purple.

Not like—grape. Not like candy or medicine or anything that’s supposed to be purple. Just the color. Just purple, sitting on his tongue like a frequency, and the ceiling is doing something interesting with its textures and Jungkook is pretty sure the decorative cobwebs have been moving for the last ten minutes but in a chill way. A friendly way. Like they’re also at a party and having a good time.

He shouldn’t have eaten that third brownie.

He knows this.

He also shouldn’t have taken that last shot of whatever Hobi poured out of a bottle with no label—a liquid the color of antifreeze that tasted like someone dissolved a green apple Jolly Rancher in paint thinner and then blessed it with a prayer and a middle finger.

But rational decisions have never been his forte and they’re not going to start now.

Not when the ceiling has this much going on, anyway.

“Hoseok deserves jail,” Taehyung mutters next to him.

He says it to the ceiling too. Both of them, heads tipped back against the couch cushions, staring up at the crown molding like it contains the answers to questions neither of them are smart enough to ask right now.

Jungkook chuckles. “Federal.”

“Minimum.”

“Consecutive sentences.”

“No parole.”

They sit with that for a moment. Satisfied with the verdict.

This lounge is on the far side of the house—quieter, dimmer, tucked away from the main party like a VIP section nobody asked for. Somebody dragged a floor lamp in here at some point and aimed it at the wall, which means the light is amber and indirect and makes everything look like a memory. There’s a smaller couch, an armchair with an afghan thrown over it, and a coffee table covered in jack-o-lanterns that Jungkook carved this morning with a steak knife and what he’d considered, at the time, artistic vision.

He looks at the decorations. The cobwebs he stretched across the doorframe. The battery-operated candles on the mantle. The little plastic spiders he positioned along the bookshelf with deliberate spacing because—film major.

Composition matters. Even in novelty arachnids.

“You know what,” he says. “I did a pretty good job with all this.”

He gestures broadly at the room. The gesture is meant to encompass the whole house but his arm is heavier than expected so it mostly encompasses the lamp and half of Taehyung’s face.

Taehyung snorts.

“Sure. If you don’t count the pumpkins.”

Jungkook’s head rolls sideways on the cushion. “What’s wrong with my pumpkins?”

Taehyung stops staring at the ceiling. Lifts his head. Rights himself into something approaching a seated position, which is a production—because Taehyung is currently dressed as Gomez Addams and the costume is committed.

Pinstripe suit. Actual pinstripe, not printed. A burgundy pocket square folded into something that probably has a name—triangle? pyramid? fabric origami?—that matches the deep red of Irika’s dress because of course it does, because Kim Taehyung looked at his girlfriend’s Morticia costume and said ’I will restructure my entire wardrobe around your color palette’ without a single beat of hesitation. The mustache is drawn on with eyeliner. Thin, precise, curling slightly at the ends. His hair is slicked back—every strand cemented into place with what smells like an entire can of product—and there’s a fake rose pinned to his lapel that Jungkook watched him steal from a vase in the entryway and present to Irika on one knee in the living room while she pretended to swoon and Hobi filmed the whole thing for Instagram.

Disgusting. Truly disgusting behavior from a man Jungkook respects and loves.

“Are you kidding me,” Taehyung says.

Jungkook rights himself too. Sits up. Squares his shoulders. The Ghostface robe shifts around him like a bathrobe at a very dramatic hotel.

“The pumpkins are perfect.”

“They’re not perfect. They look stupid.”

“They don’t—”

“Dude.” Taehyung points—hazily, finger drifting slightly left of center—at the jack-o-lantern sitting on the coffee table directly in front of them. “Look at it. Actually look at it.”

Jungkook looks at it.

It’s… okay, the mouth is a little wide.

And the eyes are slightly different sizes, which he’d thought was characterful at the time but might, in the current lighting, read more as neurological event.

And the nose—he’d tried for a triangle, landed on something more rhomboid—

“It looks like Willy Wonka,” Taehyung says. “Or some shit.”

“Willy Wonka’s attractive.”

The words leave his mouth before his brain clears them and he hears them land in the room and thinks, ’well, that’s a sentence I just said with confidence to another man on a couch.’

Taehyung’s entire head rotates toward him. Slowly. Like a surveillance camera.

“What.”

“What? He is. Didn’t you see that TikTok guy? The one who dressed up as Wonka and got like—millions of followers?”

“What the fuck is on your For You Page, dude.”

“Bro, I swear. He went viral. Hold on.”

Jungkook pulls out his phone. Unlocks it. The screen is brighter than the sun and he squints against it like a vampire encountering daylight for the first time—which, given the costume, feels thematic.

“Look. Wait.”

He opens TikTok. His thumb is slower than usual. The letters in the search bar are behaving strangely.

“How do you spell Wonka.”

“How do you—Jungkook.”

“No, I know how, I just—is there an H?”

“There’s not an H in Wonka. There has never been an H in Wonka. Where would the H go.”

“I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking—”

“W-O-N-K-A. Five letters. No H. You went to college.”

“Technically I’m still going to college—”

“You—“ Taehyung groans, snatching the phone, “gimme the phone.”

Somehow, his friend manages to write with the efficiency of someone who doesn’t have three brownies and Hobi’s prison cocktail dissolving his neural pathways.

Two seconds later he’s scrolling through results.

Jungkook, on a sober note, would call that blasphemy.

“This one?”

He holds the phone up. A guy in a purple velvet coat and a top hat, abs out, doing a grinding motion to some remix of ‘I wanna love you’.

“That’s him! See?” Jungkook takes the phone back. Points at the screen. “Tell me that’s not attractive.”

“I’m not telling you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not going to sit on this couch, in this suit, and confirm or deny the attractiveness of a TikTok Willy Wonka to you at midnight on Halloween. I have limits. I have a pinstripe situation happening.” Taehyung tugs his lapel. “Gomez wouldn’t do this.”

“Gomez would absolutely do this. Gomez would rate every man in a room if Morticia told him to.”

“That’s—” Taehyung pauses. Snatches his phone again. Narrows his eyes. “That’s actually accurate and I’m mad about it.”

“So the pumpkin looks like an attractive man. What’s the issue.”

“The issue is that a jack-o-lantern is not supposed to look like an attractive man, Jungkook. It’s supposed to look scary. That’s the—that’s the whole assignment. Scary face. On a gourd.”

“A gourd?”

“A pumpkin is a gourd.”

“Since when?”

“Since—botany? Since agriculture? Since the dawn of gourds?”

“I feel like you’re making that up.”

“Google it.”

“You Google it. You have my phone.”

Taehyung looks down. He does, in fact, still have Jungkook’s phone. He stares at it for a long moment, like he forgot how it got there and is now reconstructing the timeline.

“…Your wallpaper is still Griffin,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“From when he was a kitten.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cute.”

“I know.”

They look at each other. Two grown men on a couch. One dressed as a fictional serial killer, the other as a fictional husband. Both profoundly, catastrophically, beautifully stoned.

Taehyung hands the phone back.

“Your pumpkins still look stupid.”

“Noted. Rejected. Moving on.”

“The one in the hallway looks like it’s having an allergic reaction.”

“That one’s abstract.”

“It’s abstract in the way that a car accident is abstract.”

Jungkook opens his mouth to argue, but his brain has already lost the thread—gone, dissolved, replaced by the observation that the cobwebs on the ceiling are still moving and he’s kind of into it. Like a mobile. Like a very goth baby mobile.

He tips his head back again. Taehyung follows a beat later.

Ceiling.

Cobwebs.

“Hey,” Taehyung says.

“Yeah.”

“The decorations are good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Not the pumpkins. Everything else.”

Jungkook grins at the ceiling. “Thanks, man.”

“The pumpkins are, like, honest-to-god dog shit.”

“Got it.”

“But the rest is solid.”

“Appreciate that.”

They sit with it. Content. The kind of silence that only exists between two people who've known each other long enough that not talking is its own form of conversation.

Somewhere in the house, someone drops a glass. A cheer goes up.

Neither of them moves.

Then Jungkook's thumb finds the silver ring. Starts turning it.

He doesn't notice he's doing it. Never does. It's the kind of habit that lives below the threshold of awareness—a background process, automatic, the way some people tap their foot or chew their lip. He just spins the ring. Round and round. The pad of his thumb catching the flat edge, pushing, rotating, catching again.

"Jason bothers me."

He says it to the ceiling. Same way he said the thing about the pumpkins. Same way he said Willy Wonka was attractive. Just out there. A sentence released into the room without a permission slip.

Taehyung doesn't move. Doesn't look over.

"You've mentioned."

"No, I mean—" The ring spins. "He bothers me."

"Yeah. You've mentioned that too." Taehyung shifts on the couch. Gets slightly more upright. The jacket creaks. "Multiple times. Extensively. At length. I believe the phrase 'trust fund guidance counselor' was used. And 'discount therapist with a cologne budget.' And my personal favorite—"

"I'm not joking around right now."

Something about the way he says it—the flatness, the absence of the usual punchline, the punchline that should be there because Jungkook always has a punchline, that's the deal, that's the contract between him and every serious moment he's ever been in—makes Taehyung's head turn.

Jungkook is still looking at the ceiling. But he's not seeing the cobwebs anymore.

"Something's off about him."

"Off how?"

"I don't—" His tongue pushes against the inside of his cheek. Searching for the word. The right word. "I don't know. Off. Just off, bro. The way he—"

He stops. Starts again.

"She used eucalyptus soap."

Taehyung blinks.

"...What?"

"Earlier. The showers. Y/N. She used the eucalyptus soap that was in the stall instead of her own stuff."

Taehyung stares at him. The Gomez mustache—what's left of it—crinkles with the specific bewilderment of a man who was just having a perfectly good conversation about gourds and is now being asked to care about shower products.

"I'm gonna need, like... significantly more context than that."

"She's vanilla, Tae." Jungkook says it like it's obvious. Like it's a fact of the natural world, on par with gravity or the boiling point of water. "She’s vanilla everything. Everything. Soap. Lotion. The stuff in her hair. She's got like six different vanilla products in the shower caddy and she didn't bring any of it. She used the generic eucalyptus shit in the stall and she doesn’t—she still smells like vanilla underneath because it's basically her, like her actual—"

“Jungkook.”

"—but it's off. There's this—this layer on top of it that isn't her and I'd bet you anything—anything—that he said something. About the vanilla. That he made some comment about it being basic or juvenile or whatever the fuck and she just—adjusted. Without even—she probably doesn't even know she did it."

The silence that follows has a specific quality.

…The quality of someone deciding whether to call an ambulance or a therapist.

"Jesus, man. The weed really did a number on you. You’re having an episode over body wash, are you hearing yourself—"

"It's not—" He swats at Tae. "It’s not about the body wash. It's—" He drags a hand down his face. "Okay, the body wash thing sounds insane. I know it sounds insane. That's the problem. Every individual thing sounds insane if I say it out loud. It's only when you put all of it together that it—"

He makes a vague, frustrated gesture at the air. Like he's trying to grab the shape of what he means and it keeps slipping.

"She doesn't do her tea thing anymore."

"Her tea thing."

"She used to leave the tea bags in the sink. Every morning. Just—sitting there. On the sink. Drove me insane. I texted her about it. Twice. She left me on read and then told me where I could shove the tea bags. It was a whole thing."

He's talking to the ceiling again. His thumb hasn't stopped.

"And then she starts seeing this guy and the tea bags are gone. Just—poof. Not in the sink. Not anywhere. And the thing is—I should be happy about that, right? I wanted them gone. But they didn't stop because she decided to stop. They stopped because he—"

No, but that doesn’t sound right. Because he doesn’t know for sure, does he?

Did you stop the tea bag situation after Jason?

Was it before him? Was Jason the reason?

He wishes he could trust his memory. Or his own brain.

"I’m really trying to follow the thread here, Jungkook."

"It’s—it’s just—the way she is after she's been with him for a while. Like she’s been adjusted or something."

Taehyung is quiet for a second. Processing.

Runs a hand across the back of his neck, seemingly choosing words carefully, which is very unlike him.

"Look, man… She's a grown woman. People date shitty guys all the time. That's, like... a universal experience. It's not really—"

"I know."

"—your problem. She's your roommate. You guys argue about milk. It's not—"

"I know, Tae."

"So then why are you—" Taehyung's hand comes off his neck. Gestures at all of Jungkook. The ring spinning, the jaw set, the whole rigidness of a man who's clearly been carrying this around for longer than tonight. "Why are you like this about it? Since when do you even—I thought you guys just coexist. She leaves her shit around, you leave your shit around, Yoongi mediates. That's the dynamic."

The ring stops.

Spins again.

"We're friends."

Taehyung's eyebrows go up. Genuinely up.

"You're friends?"

"I think so. Yeah. I've been trying to convince her of that for like a month and she basically just gave in earlier tonight—anyway, that's not the point, dude—"

"No, I—I'm just—since when? Last I heard she was 'the menace in room three' who used all the hot water—"

"She's not a menace, she's—okay, she is a menace. With the hot water specifically. But that's a separate issue and it has nothing to do with—"

He's losing the thread. Can feel it unraveling. The way it always does when he tries to explain something that lives in the space between what he sees and what he can prove—the words come out wrong or come out in the wrong order or come out sounding like a conspiracy theory narrated by a guy who's had three pot brownies and a shot of Hobi's antifreeze, and he knows that, he can hear himself, but the alternative is shutting up and the alternative is worse because shutting up means the thing stays in his chest and eats.

"Okay. Forget the soap. Forget the tea bags. Forget all the—the individual things, because individually they're all nothing. Right? Each one is nothing."

He sits up. Slightly. Enough that his feet plant on the floor and he's not talking to the ceiling anymore. He's talking to his hands.

"But it's like—when you watch a movie. And you can't point to the one thing that's wrong with it. The lighting's fine, the acting's fine, the script is fine. But you walk out and you feel bad and you don't know why, and then two weeks later at three in the morning you sit up and go 'the pacing'—it was the pacing the whole time, the pacing was off and it made everything else feel wrong even though everything else was technically fine."

Catches his breath.

"Jason is the pacing."

Taehyung opens his mouth. Closes it. Tilts his head.

"That's..." he says slowly, "genuinely one of the most unhinged analogies I've ever heard you make. And I was there for the 'risotto is emotional labor' speech."

"It made sense in context—"

"It didn't, but go on."

Jungkook's face is on his hands now, resting his weight on his elbows. The way he does when the frustration of not being able to translate the thing in his body to the thing in the air hits critical mass.

"I'm not saying this right."

"You're really not."

"I just—I see her, Tae. I see her before she goes to his place and I see her when she comes back and she's different. And I can't—I can't point to the exact frame where it changes. But she's smaller when she comes back. Not like—not physically. Just... the volume on her goes down. And it comes back up when she's home for a while and then she goes back to him and it goes down again and I—"

He stops. Presses his palms flat on his thighs. Pushes down. Grounding.

"Something about him makes my skin crawl and I don't know if that's real or if I'm—"

«…making it up, Jungkook. You’re seeing things that are not there, baby. You’re projecting.»

"—or if I'm just... seeing shit that isn't there because of my own stuff. I'm aware that's possible. I'm aware I could be the problem here. But every time I try to talk myself out of it something else happens—something small, something that doesn't matter by itself—and the feeling comes back and it's—it's—"

He makes a sound. Not a word. The verbal equivalent of throwing a pen across the room because the sentence won't cooperate.

"I'm really not saying this right."

"Hey." Taehyung's voice has changed. Not all the way. Still casual, still on the couch, still Kim Taehyung at a Halloween party. But the tone is softer. "You don't have to get it perfect, man. Just say the part that matters."

The part that matters.

The ring spins.

"He—" he gulps down, the pronoun stumbling over itself, "he reminds me of—"

And the sentence stops. Not because he chose to stop it. Because the word that comes next has a weight to it—actual, physical, gravitational—and the weight wins. Holds it in his chest. Behind the sternum.

In the exact place where things live that he brings to Dr. Liao's office and puts on the table between them and says ‘I don't know what this is but it won't leave.’

He doesn't finish. Just turns his head. Looks at Taehyung.

The look does what the word won't.

Taehyung, who knows what lives on the other side of sentences Jungkook doesn't finish, nods softly.

"Mia?"

Jungkook takes a couple seconds. But then he nods.

Taehyung sits up. All the way up. Elbows on his knees. The stolen rose on his lapel bends sideways.

"What do you mean he reminds you of—like, specifically. What is he doing?"

"It's—it's just a hunch, man. I don't know him. I've barely talked to him, so for all I know I could be paranoid. I'm aware of that." He sighs. "But something about his presence makes my skin fucking crawl and—when I see her—when I see her after she's been with him for a while, every time she's..."

Loses it. The sentence. The thread. The bridge between the thing he can feel and the thing he can say.

Starts over.

"I feel like he makes her think she's the problem. Like the way she is—her personality, the way she takes up space, the way she's loud and leaves tea bags everywhere and wears vanilla everything—like all of that is this flaw he's generously helping her with. And she just—she takes it. She adjusts. And she doesn't even know she's adjusting, that's the—"

His hands are moving now. Not gesturing. Just moving. Restless energy that needs an exit.

"—and I can't say anything because we're barely—I've been her friend for like five hours, I don't get to walk up and be like 'hey, I think your boyfriend is psychologically dismantling you one tea bag at a time.' That's insane. That's—"

"Hey." Taehyung's hand on his knee. Firm. "Slow down. Start from the beginning. What specifically has he—"

The door to the lounge swings open hard enough to bounce off the wall.

Jimin comes through it like the hallway spat him out—fast, slightly off-balance, costume rumpled. The quill pen is gone from behind his ear. His eyes are wide and scanning the room with the specific urgency of someone who needs something and needed it thirty seconds ago.

"Sorry—sorry, is there water in here?"

Jungkook lifts one hand from the armrest. Swallows. Rubs the back of his neck. Points vaguely at the side table where someone abandoned a cluster of bottles and cups sometime around the second hour of the party.

"Over there."

Doesn't take long to notice Jimin's chest is moving too fast.

"Yo." Sits up.

The weed is still there—still fuzzing the edges, still making the room feel like it's wrapped in felt—but something underneath it is starting to sharpen. An instinct. The one that monitors rooms, reads exits, clocks the difference between someone who's out of breath from running and someone who's out of breath from something worse.

"What's up, Jim?"

Jimin picks up the cup. Puts it down. Picks it up again.

Licks his lips.

"It's—"

He says your name.

Everything in Jungkook's nervous system goes from THC-saturated haze to full alert in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

"She's—" Jimin swallows. Runs his hand through his hair and the careful side-part collapses, which he doesn't notice, which means whatever this is ranks above vanity. "She's in the bathroom. Crying. And Yeji and Irya are outside the door but she won't—they can't get her to come out. I think—I think her and Jason had a fight or something."

Jungkook is standing before the sentence ends.

He doesn’t remember deciding to stand. His legs just did it—unfolded beneath him, pushed him vertical, and now he’s crossing the room toward Jimin and Taehyung is sitting up behind him making a sound that means ’what’s happening’ but Jungkook’s already there, already in front of Jimin, already close enough to see the specific kind of worry on his face—not the general kind.

“What did he say?”

“What?”

“What the fuck did Jason say to her.”

Jimin blinks. Opens his mouth. Shuts it. Opens it again.

“I don’t—I don’t know exactly, she was crying and talking really fast and not making a lot of sense through the door and the music, but she said—” He stops. Regroups. His fingers are gripping the cup and the plastic crackles under the pressure. “She said something about feeling trapped. That he was being controlling, or she felt controlled, or—I couldn’t hear everything, she’s high and emotional and Yeji was yelling at someone to turn the music down so—”

Trapped.

The word hits different than the others.

The others—fight, crying, bathroom—those are bad, those register, those go into the filing cabinet under urgent and get processed accordingly.

But trapped doesn’t file.

Trapped doesn’t go into a cabinet.

Trapped goes into his chest.

Right next to the place where a different face lives—a word from a different room, a different year, a different woman, except it’s not different, it’s the same fucking word, the same four walls closing in, the same air running out, the same—

“—and so I wanted to grab some water because I thought maybe if she just has some water and—Jungkook?”

He’s already at the door.

“Jungkook, wait—”

He doesn’t wait. His tongue presses into the inside of his cheek—hard, pressure that’s keeping something behind his teeth that wants out, something with a shape and a heat to it that he recognizes from a long, long time ago.

Not anger. Anger is manageable. Anger is a thing he’s learned to sit with, to breathe through, to hand to Dr. Liao in pieces and say ’I felt this, I didn’t act on it, are you proud of me.’

This isn’t anger.

This is the thing underneath anger.

The thing that has no name in his vocabulary because he’s never let it stay long enough to need one.

The thing that only shows up when someone he cares about feels trapped.

His jaw clenches. The silver ring bites into his finger where his fist has curled without permission.

He rounds the corner into the hallway and the party noise swells and none of it reaches him.

Footsteps behind him. Fast. The pinstripe suit wasn’t built for pursuit but Taehyung’s making it work—long strides, dress shoes clipping the hardwood, and his voice has lost every trace of boneless ice and Willy Wonka and ceiling cobwebs.

“Jungkook.”

Doesn’t stop.

“Jungkook—wait.”

Doesn’t stop.

“Wait, man. Think this through—”

He cuts through the living room like it’s not there.

Beer pong table, fog machine, centurion, bunny, bodies in costumes he registers as shapes and colors and none of them are the shape he’s looking for.

The music is too loud and someone’s laughing near the speakers—high, a sound that scrapes the inside of his skull—and his hands are at his sides and his jaw is locked so tight the pressure reaches his temples.

Trapped.

The word keeps playing. Looped. Skipping like a scratched record.

«This is what men do.»

Not now. Not fucking now.

He reaches the french doors to the garden. Open. Night air. Cold enough that it should register but doesn’t. Patio stones under his boots. String lights overhead making everything amber and warm and the warmth is wrong—everything about this scene is wrong because it looks like a party and sounds like a party and somewhere upstairs you’re on a bathroom floor and the door is locked and you said trapped—

“You’re not doing this.”

Jungkook doesn’t turn. Steps off the patio onto the lawn.

“Hey. Hey. I’m talking to you.”

Doesn’t turn.

The grass is wet. His boots sink.

None of it registers as information worth processing because the only information that matters right now is the distance—a hundred feet, closing—and the shape of Jason’s silhouette against the string lights and the sound the word trapped makes when it loops inside a skull that’s stopped filtering anything else.

“Jungkook—you’re gonna catch a charge. You understand that? A criminal charge. At a Halloween party. In a costume. That’s what you’re walking toward right now. An assault charge in a Ghostface robe. That’s the legacy. That’s the headline.”

Eighty feet. The fountain is to his left now.

“And you know who’s not catching a charge tonight? Him. You know why? Because he didn’t do anything illegal. He was an asshole to someone. That’s it. That’s all it was. And you can’t break someone’s face for that, Jungkook, not—not in the way that counts, not in the way that a cop is gonna care about when they show up and see—”

A breath. Not a pause—a reload. Taehyung’s stride lengthens. He’s beside him now, not behind, shoes squelching on wet grass.

“—when they show up and see you. Standing over him. With blood on your hands. And they’re gonna look at you and they’re gonna look at him and who do you think—” His voice trips. Catches. Goes harder. “Who do you think gets the benefit of the doubt in that scenario? Huh? You? Asian? With the tattoos and the—and him with the PhD program and the glasses and the fucking vest? You think that’s a coin flip? You think that goes fifty-fifty?”

Jungkook doesn’t answer. Doesn’t slow down. Seventy feet.

“His parents probably have a lawyer saved in their contacts. You know that, right? People like him—they don’t fight back, they call their dad’s buddy at whatever firm and suddenly it’s not a Halloween party anymore, it’s depositions and court dates and you trying to explain to a judge why you—” Taehyung’s hand cuts through the air. “A judge who’s gonna see the exact same thing the cops saw. Who gets believed. I shouldn’t have to spell this out for you.”

He shouldn’t. They both know why.

They’ve both been in the rooms where it gets spelled out without anyone saying a word—where looking a certain way in a certain zip code means the margin for error shrinks to nothing and the assumption of guilt arrives before the explanation does.

Taehyung knows. He’s been in those rooms with him.

Same parking lots, same bloody knuckles, same cops who looked at two Asian kids with split lips and didn’t ask who started it.

“This is exactly what he’s not worth. You’ve been saying it for weeks. You said he was a prick, you said he was a snob, you said he gave you bad vibes—great, you were right, congratulations, and now what? Now you’re gonna prove it by giving him a reason to press charges? By handing him the one thing he actually needs to make you the problem? That’s the play?”

Sixty feet. Jungkook picks up speed.

“Because that’s what happens. That’s exactly what happens. You know this. I know you know this because we had the same conversation in high school after Joey Cho got expelled for defending himself in a fight he didn't start. Remember that? Remember what his mom said? She said it doesn't matter who started it. It matters who they believe. And they're not gonna believe you. Not over him. Not when he looks like that and you look like this."

A beat.

“You hit him and he’s the victim, Jungkook. He’s the guy who got attacked at a party by his girlfriend’s unhinged roommate and he gets to tell that story for the rest of his life and she—” He stumbles on the word. “—she becomes the girl it was about. The girl whose psycho roommate couldn’t keep his hands to himself. And that’s his version. That’s the version that wins. You get that, right? You get that his version wins?”

Taehyung is still talking and talking and talking and none of the words are landing because words are noise to him right now.

“Are you listening? Can you even hear me right now? Because I’m talking and you’re walking and I’m running out of ways to say the same thing which is that you’re about to fuck your entire life up and he gets to watch. He gets to stand there with his busted lip and watch you get put in the back of a car and that’s—” Taehyung’s voice goes mean with the effort of keeping it whole. “That’s not justice, man. That’s not protecting her. That’s not gonna make you feel any better, Jungkook, you know that. You know why you know that.”

Jungkook clicks his tongue and picks up speed.

Taehyung swears under his breath and matches it. “You’re not hearing me. You’re not—okay. Okay.”

Taehyung cuts in front of him. Gets there fast—one long diagonal stride and a pivot—and plants himself in the path with his hands on Jungkook’s chest.

“No.”

Hands. Flat on his sternum. Holding.

“No. I told you, bro. You’re not doing this.”

Jungkook tries to step left.

Taehyung shifts left. Blocks it. Doesn’t budge.

Tries right.

Same thing. Mirror image. The hands stay on his chest.

“Do not.” Taehyung’s pointing finger finds Jungkook’s chest. “Don’t play me right now, Jungkook. Back the fuck up.”

He grabs Taehyung’s wrist and shoves it off his chest. Sidesteps.

Gets two steps.

Taehyung grabs a fistful of the Ghostface robe from behind and hauls him backward.

Jungkook’s balance goes—boots sliding on wet grass, the robe yanking tight across his throat—and the stumble turns into a pivot and he rounds on Taehyung and swats the grip off the fabric, forearm connecting with Taehyung’s wrist hard enough to crack, and Taehyung doesn’t let go, just tightens his hold and braces and Jungkook shoves forward into his chest and Taehyung pushes back and for three ugly seconds they’re tangled—grunting, grabbing, both of them too angry for technique.

Taehyung gets both hands on the front of the robe and pushes—hard, this time, the full force of his weight behind it—and Jungkook’s back foot slides out and he catches himself and surges forward and Taehyung meets him and pushes again and they break apart.

Three feet of grass between them. Both breathing through their teeth. The pinstripe jacket wrenched sideways on Taehyung’s shoulders, pocket square crushed, and the Ghostface robe twisted half off Jungkook’s frame like someone tried to unwrap him.

“Alright, you know what.” Taehyung spreads his arms.“Come on then. You wanna fight so bad? Fight me. Right here. Let’s go. I’m right here, Jungkook.”

His chest is heaving. His hands are open. His chin is up in the specific way that means he isn’t bluffing and Jungkook knows damn well he’s not bluffing.

“Hit me. Come on. Hit me. Get it out. Because I promise you—I promise you on everything—you’re not getting within ten feet of that guy tonight. Not while I’m standing. So either you put me down first or you stand here and breathe like a fucking adult. Those are your options. Two options. Pick one.”

Jungkook’s tongue pushes against the inside of his cheek. Copper taste. His whole body is a live wire looking for ground and the ground is just some feet away laughing and Taehyung is in the way.

He takes a step.

Taehyung takes one to match. Closes the gap. Gets in his space.

“I’ve had your back in every stupid fight since we were sixteen, dude.”

Quieter now. Which is worse. Taehyung getting quieter means the real thing is coming.

“Every single one. I was there. So believe me when I tell you—if you try to get past me right now, I will lay you out on this lawn and I will not feel bad about it. Not even a little. Not tomorrow, not next week, not ever. Because the alternative is watching you throw your entire life at some guy who’s not worth the skin on your knuckles, and I’m not doing that. I’m not watching that. That’s my line. You’ve found it. Congratulations.”

Jungkook’s chest hurts. It hurts and he wishes he could rip what’s beating underneath his chest out.

“You’re better than this.” Taehyung’s throat works. “You know you’re better than this. So act like it or I swear to god I’ll drop you myself, Jungkook. You know I will.”

The silence feels like the canteen, like sixteen, like bloody knuckles behind a 7-Eleven after someone mocked Jungkook’s mom and Taehyung took care of it.

“I did not spend two years watching you put yourself back together just to let you blow it up tonight. Not over this. Not over him.” His jaw flexes. “You wanna get to Jason? You’re going through me. And I don’t go down easy. You know that.”

A beat.

“So help me god, Jungkook, test me and find out.”

“What’s happening.”

From the left, from the direction of the garden wall where the smokers are thinning out—

Yoongi.

“One of you talk.” He stops. Positions himself at Taehyung’s shoulder. “Now.”

Jungkook is a locked system. Nothing’s coming out of him that isn’t breath and body heat.

Yoongi looks at Taehyung.

Taehyung runs both hands through what’s left of the slicked-back hair. Wreckage. His chest is still heaving but his voice comes out forced-steady, the way it does when he’s physically holding himself together to deliver information that matters.

“Jason. The TA. Him and Y/N had a fight—she’s locked in a bathroom upstairs. Jimin came in, said she’s crying, said she told him she felt trapped. That he was being controlling.”

The word lands between the three of them.

Trapped.

Yoongi’s gaze tracks to Jungkook. To the fists. The jaw. The set of his shoulders. The readiness.

He looks at this for a long moment.

Then he looks at the direction Jungkook’s body is pointed. At Jason fifty feet away.

Then back at Jungkook.

He steps forward. Even with Taehyung. Shoulder to shoulder.

His hands go into his pockets.

“Okay.” He sighs. “Okay, Jungkook, tell me what happens next. You get past us. Then what. You feel better for ten seconds and then you’re the guy who assaulted someone at a Halloween party and she’s the girl it was about. That what you want?”

No.

That’s not what he wants.

What he wants is to go back in time fifteen minutes and be in whatever room Jason took you to and stand between you and whatever sentences made you say trapped.

What he wants is to have been there.

He wasn’t.

“Use your head for a second here, Jungkook.” Yoongi hasn’t moved. Hasn’t blinked. “Come on.”

Jungkook’s jaw works. The pressure in his chest is unbearable—a full-body hum of something that needs to go somewhere and has nowhere to go because every exit is blocked by friends who are right, and that’s the worst part, he knows they’re right, and knowing doesn’t do a single fucking thing about the voltage running through his body looking for ground—

Over Yoongi’s shoulder, past the fountain, Hobi.

Standing near the garden wall. Drink in hand. Mid-conversation with the Mia Wallace girl.

He catches Yoongi’s gaze across the patio and Yoongi does something—small, barely visible. A head tilt. A jaw set. The kind of signal that exists between people who’ve done this before and have a protocol.

Jungkook knows this and hates it.

Hates it more because Hobi’s smile drops and he knows he’s read the entire scene in the time it takes to set his drink on the wall and say something short to Mia Wallace and start crossing the patio.

He tries to cut between Yoongi and Taehyung.

To no avail.

Because an arm suddenly loops around his shoulders.

“Hey!”

The specific weight of Jung Hoseok’s arm, which has the density of someone who’s been dancing professionally for a decade and casually manhandles grown men like it’s a love language.

“Have you seen the music room?”

Jungkook’s whole body is rigid under the arm.“Hoseok—let go, I swear to god—”

“The music room.” Hobi doesn’t let go. Steers him. Smoothly, like they’re two friends walking somewhere together, nothing to see here, just guys being guys at a party. “Other side of the house. Past the library. Tessa’s grandfather was apparently some kind of collector.”

He’s walking Jungkook away from the garden and Jungkook is aware of the maneuver, so he tries to sidestep with all his might because he will not be persuaded this time—

“There’s an electric guitar in there.”

Jungkook’s stride falters.

“I’m serious.” Hobi’s voice drops a half-register. “Vintage, I think. Hanging on the wall. Looked expensive.”

Over his shoulder, Hobi makes a gesture. Quick. Two fingers, a direction.

“Come on.” Hobi squeezes his shoulder. “Show me if it’s any good. I can’t tell with guitars. They all look the same to me.”

“They don’t all—” Jungkook’s voice comes out scraped. Ruined. He clears his throat. “They don’t all look the same. That’s like saying all dance styles look the same.”

“Exactly. Terrible. Tragic. I need you to educate me.”

The arm stays around his shoulders. The garden gets smaller behind them. The french doors pass. The hallway opens. The party noise dims.

His hands are still shaking.

Hobi doesn’t mention it.

You’re still hiccuping and you feel so stupid.

That’s the worst part. Not the crying—the crying has a reason, the crying has a source, the crying is a physiological response to emotional stimulus and you can rationalize it later into something manageable.

But the stupidity of it. The exact specific humiliating stupidity of sitting on a bathroom floor at a party in a costume you felt good in thirty minutes ago, mascara running, eyeliner destroyed, hiccuping like a child who lost her balloon at a county fair because someone said a fucking word.

A word.

It doesn’t get more embarrasing than this.

Except it does, because you’ve been here before.

Not this bathroom. But this exact posture. This exact tile-against-spine, knees-to-chest, face-in-hands architecture of feminine collapse, because you are apparently a person who processes her worst moments in bathrooms, and that’s—

That’s a pattern, isn’t it?

Sophomore year of high school. Alicia Gutierrez’s house party. You wore the denim skirt you’d been saving for something that mattered and David Morrison kissed Noor Adil in the living room with his hand on the back of her neck, the exact hand that had been on the back of your neck two hours earlier behind the bleachers, and you walked to the bathroom and sat on the floor and cried.

Different tile. Same posture. Same girl.

Everything big happens in a bathroom. Everything that matters, everything that shifts the axis of your stupid little life—it all happens against porcelain and tile and horrible lightning.

The day Jungkook propositioned you in 6B. Leaning in the doorframe like he owned the square footage, smelling like rain and bad decisions, saying words that should’ve made you slam the door but instead made you stand there with wet hair and a racing pulse trying to formulate a comeback while your brain buffered.

The day he mentioned your cologne before Emma’s birthday. Just—said it. Casually. Like noticing what someone smells like is a thing you mention to your roommate while she’s brushing her teeth.

«You changed it.»

Two words that sat in the steam of the bathroom for three seconds too long and rearranged something behind your ribs that you’ve been pretending didn’t happen.

The first time Jimin did your eyeliner, it was in that bathroom too. And today as well, in the bathroom of the suite you might no longer share with Jason, quill pen behind his ear and his careful fingers on your jaw and the question he asked that wasn’t really about labels or aisles or boxes on shelves but about whether it’s possible to exist without a name for what you are.

All your big moments happen in bathrooms.

There’s something poetic in that, if you ignore the toilet.

The brownies are definitely hitting now. Everything has a shimmer to it. The grout lines between the tiles look deeper than they should.

Also your fingers feel very far away from your body. Like they’re suggestions. Theoretical fingers.

Great. You’re having an emotional breakdown while slowly becoming one with the bathroom tile. This is the human experience at its most dignified.

A knock. Soft.

“Hey. It’s me.”

Irya.

Not Yeji—Irya, which means Irya got to the door first or elbowed Yeji aside, and there’s a difference between those two arrivals that matters.

Yeji arrives like a SWAT team. Irya arrives like an EMT.

Both are trying to save you. Only one is going to kick the door down to do it.

“I brought your phone,” Irya says. “You left it on the loveseat.”

You don’t answer.

“You don’t have to open the door. I’m just going to sit out here, okay? Just me.”

A pause.

Then, farther away, Yeji’s voice—gritted like it comes between her teeth.

“And me. I’m also here. With knives.”

“She doesn’t have knives,” Irya says.

“I have metaphorical knives. I have the energy of knives.”

“Yeji.”

“What? I’m being supportive. I’m supportively enraged.”

You press your forehead into your knees. Hiccup.

A sound against the door. The soft thud of someone sitting down on the other side—Irya, you think, based on the gentle way it happens. Yeji sits down the way she does everything: with intent and aggression toward the furniture.

“Babe.” Irya’s voice is close now. “Can you tell me what’s happening? Just—whatever you want. Even if it doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s okay. That’s totally okay. Tell me anyway.”

Something about the way she says that—’tell me anyway’—like your not-making-sense is not a problem to be solved but a thing to be held.

“He said I should respect myself more.”

Silence.

Then, from further back: “He said what?”

“Yeji—” Irya, steady.

“No. No, repeat that. He said she should respect herself? Those words? In that order? From his mouth?”

“Yeji, hold on—”

“I’m going to kill him. I’m going to walk downstairs and I’m going to commit a crime that will be studied in law schools—”

“You’re not killing anyone. Sit down.”

“I wasn’t gonna stand up—”

“That’s only because I’m holding your wrist down.”

A huff. Yeji sits quieter.

“Okay.” Irya again. Closer. You can hear her shifting, getting comfortable against the door, settling in for however long this takes. “He said respect yourself. What else?”

You swallow. The hiccups are slowing but your throat is raw and everything tastes like salt and chocolate.

“He said—that I should be more mindful. About how I act around other people. That I was being—”

You search for the word.

It comes back coated in cedar and bergamot.

“Inappropriate.”

“Inappropriate how?”

“He said I was draped all over—that I was hanging on someone and it looked bad. In front of people. That I need to think about how I come across.”

“Draped,” Yeji repeats from behind Irya. She says it the way you’d say ’cockroach’. “He described physical affection between friends as draping?”

“And that I should have more consideration. And be more—”

The word.

“More mature.”

Silence. A long one.

You hear Irya exhale.

“Can I say something?”

You nod.

Then realize she can’t see you.

“Yeah.”

“I’m not going to tell you he’s wrong about everything. Because that wouldn’t be helpful, and I think what you need right now is honesty, not just someone being angry on your behalf.” A beat. “That’s Yeji’s job.”

“Damn right,” Yeji mutters.

“But I want you to hear this. The way someone says something matters as much as what they say. And a person who frames their discomfort as your character flaw—who says you need to respect yourself instead of saying I felt uncomfortable—that person is not having a conversation with you. They’re managing you.”

The word cracks something open.

Managing.

That’s—

That’s exactly what it felt like. Not a discussion. Not two people navigating something messy and complicated.

A performance review. A parent-teacher conference.

‘Here’s what you did wrong, here’s what you need to fix, here’s the version of you I’d prefer to be dating.’

“He’s not—” You stop. Start again. “He’s not a bad person.”

“Nobody said he was, babe.”

“He’s not—it’s not like he was mean. He didn’t yell. He was calm. He was being—totally reasonable—”

“Totally reasonable is how they get you.” Yeji. “Totally reasonable is the whole con. Being calm while you say controlling shit doesn’t make it not controlling. It just makes the other person feel crazy for having a reaction.”

You know that. You know that.

You’ve read the articles. You’ve had the conversations.

You just didn’t think you’d be sitting on the other side of it with mascara on your chin.

“Can I ask you something?” Irya. Gentle. “And you don’t have to answer.”

“Yeah.”

“When he said those things—the maturity thing, the respect thing—did it feel new? Or did it feel… familiar?”

You swallow.

Irya waits. Patient in that way she has—not passive, not absent, just genuinely unhurried, like she’d sit outside this door all night if that’s what it took.

“Familiar,” you whisper.

“Okay.” Soft. Like she expected that. “Okay, that’s important. That’s really important. Because when something hurts more than it should, it’s usually because it’s landing on something that was already bruised.”

The sob comes before you can stop it. Just one. Hard, sharp, ripped from somewhere below your sternum.

“I know,” Irya says. “I know.”

“It’s—it sounded like my mom.” You’re saying it before you’ve decided to say it—the words just coming, tumbling out through the crack in the door like water through a broken seal. “The way he said it. The tone. The calm. She used to—she used to do this thing where she’d sit me down and explain, very patiently, why everything I was doing was wrong. Very gently. Very reasonably. And I’d sit there and just—take it. Because how do you argue with someone who’s being nice about it? How do you say stop, you’re hurting me when they’re smiling?”

“You can’t.” Yeji. Not angry now. Quiet. “You can’t because the smile is the point. The smile is what makes you feel insane.”

“I feel insane,” you say, and it comes out small.

“You’re not insane.” Irya. Steady as gravity. “You’re having a very sane reaction to a very specific kind of hurt. And the fact that you can name it—the fact that you can say this felt like my mother—that’s not insane. That’s the opposite.

You press the heels of your hands into your eyes. Gold shimmer and black liner smear across your skin.

“Babe, please.” Yeji’s voice is closer now. She’s moved up. Right beside Irya, if you had to guess. “At least drink some water. You had Hobi’s drinks and those brownies and you need to hydrate or you’re going to feel even worse.”

“I don’t want water.”

“You say that, but—”

“Yeji. I’m fine.”

“You are audibly not fine.”

“I am choosing to be not fine in private, which is my right as a—”

“If you say ‘as a feminist’ I’m picking this lock.”

Shuffling outside the door. Footsteps, the clipped sound of dress shoes on hardwood.

A male voice: “Hey, is she—”

Yeji is on her feet so fast you hear the combat boots squeak.

“No.”

“I just—”

“No. Absolutely not. Turn around.”

“Yeji—” That’s Irya. Mediating.

“The last thing she needs right now is another fucking man outside this door.”

“I’m not—I’m just trying to—”

“Oh great. Another man who’s just trying to. Fantastic. Groundbreaking. Never heard that one before.”

“Can you stop for one second—”

“Can you stop? Can you maybe read the room and understand that a girl who’s crying because a guy made her feel like shit does not need a different guy showing up to—”

“I’ve been where she is.”

That stops Yeji.

Not completely—you can feel her resistance from inside the bathroom, can practically hear the argument building behind her teeth—but the sentence cuts through the momentum the way a stick cuts through water. Not by force. By changing direction.

“Yeji.” Irya. Quiet. A hand on an arm, you imagine. “Let him.”

A paus, long enough to contain a full conversation between two people who love each other so much they can negotiate in microseconds.

“If she says go away, you go away,” Yeji says finally.

“Yeah. Got it.”

The boots retreat. Not far—you know Yeji, she’s pulling back ten feet and maintaining line of sight like a Secret Service agent in Doc Martens—but far enough.

Then a sound.

A sigh, long and gusty and annoyed, like he’s been personally inconvenienced by the existence of feelings and the floor and gravity and the entire concept of sitting down in a suit.

Then the thud of a body dropping against the other side of the door with the grace of a man who committed to this before he fully thought through the logistics.

“Hey.”

Taehyung.

His voice is different than it was ten seconds ago with Yeji. Quieter.

“You don’t have to talk. I just—I’m gonna sit here for a minute. If that’s okay.”

You don’t answer. Your throat is raw from the crying and your sinuses are packed with concrete and the hiccups have slowed but not stopped, punctuating the silence at irregular intervals.

“I’m not gonna ask what happened. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

A beat.

“I just know what that door feels like from your side.”

Something in your chest clenches.

“I locked myself in Hobi’s bathroom once.” His voice is steady. Calm. But there’s a grain to it—something rough, something lived-in. “For like… three hours? Maybe four. Hobi sat outside the whole time. Didn’t leave. Didn’t push. Just sat there.”

You hear him shift his weight.

“I was—going through something. Something bad. And I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t think and I felt really, really stupid for not being able to just—handle it. Because it’s breathing, you know? You’ve been doing it your whole life. How hard can it be.”

A hic escapes your mouth before you can stop it. Loud in the quiet.

“That was a good one,” he says.

And despite everything—despite the mascara and the tile and the word mature still rattling around in your skull like a bullet in a tin can—the corner of your mouth twitches.

“Hobi didn’t try to fix it,” Taehyung continues. “He didn’t say the right thing or give me advice or tell me to come out. He just… sat there. Told me about this dumb thing that happened at rehearsal. Some dancer who accidentally kicked another dancer in the face during a lift. And I was crying and laughing at the same time and it was—really messy. But it helped. Just having someone on the other side of the door who wasn’t trying to make it better. Who was just… there.”

He pauses.

“So I’m just here. That’s it. That’s the whole pitch.”

You press your lips together. Hard. Because if you open your mouth right now what comes out is going to be ugly—not sarcastic-ugly, not defense-mechanism-ugly, just real ugly, the kind of honest that has no style to it, no wit, just a girl on a floor who doesn’t know how to stop feeling too much about everything all the time.

“I don’t even know why I’m crying this hard,” you say.

It comes out broken. Scratchy. Barely above a whisper.

“You don’t have to know why.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. He didn’t even—he didn’t yell. He didn’t do anything wrong, technically. He was—” Hic. “He was being reasonable. That’s the fucked up part. He was being totally calm and rational and saying things that sounded right and I just—”

“Sometimes it’s the calm that gets you.”

The sentence stops you.

“The loud stuff—the yelling, the throwing things—that’s easy to point at. You can say ’that, right there, that’s the problem.’ But when someone’s calm…” He exhales. Long. Slow. Like he’s letting something out that’s been sitting in his lungs for a while. “When someone’s calm and reasonable and says things that sound almost right, it makes you feel crazy for being upset. Like the problem is you. Your reaction. Not what they said.”

Silence.

“That’s worse,” he says quietly. “That’s so much worse.”

Your chin is trembling. You clamp your jaw around it.

“Taehyung.”

“Yeah?”

“How did you—” Hic. Fuck. “When did it stop? The feeling like—like you were too much. And also not enough. At the same time. How did that stop?”

The door is quiet for a long moment. Long enough that you wonder if he’s deciding whether to answer or deciding how to answer, and you know the difference because you live in the gap between those two things.

“I’ll let you know when it does.”

Your breath comes out in a rush.

First one since you locked yourself in this room.

“But it gets—I don’t know. Quieter? It doesn’t go away. You just get better at hearing other stuff over it. People who actually mean it when they say you’re enough. People who don’t need you to be less.”

A thump against the door. Soft. His head, you think. Tipping back against the wood.

“And you learn who to listen to. That’s the hard part. Because the ones who make you feel small usually sound the most reasonable. They’ve got the best arguments. The best vocabulary.” A pause. “Real ones don’t need a vocabulary. They just show up and sit outside your door at midnight dressed as Gomez Addams and hope it helps.”

That breaks you.

Not the word mature. Not Jason’s calm reasonable hands folded in prayer. Not even the memories of marble countertops and correctly angled forks.

This. This stupid, quiet, honest thing from a guy you barely know who’s sitting on a hallway floor in a pinstripe suit because he once locked himself in a bathroom too and somebody sat outside for him.

The sob that comes out is different from the ones before. Softer. Rounder. Less like something being ripped from your chest and more like something being released. A pressure valve opening. Steam instead of shrapnel.

“Okay,” you manage. Watery. Wrecked. “That was—you can’t just say stuff like that to someone who’s—”

“Too late. Already said it. No returns.”

“I hate you.”

“That’s fine. I’m very hateable. Ask Jungkook. He has a list.”

You laugh. It comes out wet and awful and it hurts your ribs and it’s the best sound you’ve made in an hour.

On the other side of the door, you hear him exhale. Relief. The kind someone makes when they weren’t sure it was going to work and then it did.

“For the record,” he says. “Your eyeliner’s probably ruined.”

“I know.”

“Jimin’s going to be devastated.”

“I know.”

“Like, genuinely distraught. He might never recover.”

“Please stop.”

“I’m just preparing you for the grief.”

You wipe your face with the back of your hand. It comes away black and gold and wet.

“Can you just—” Hiccup. “Can you sit there for one more minute.”

“Yeah.” Immediate. “Yeah, I’m here.”

So he sits.

And you sit.

And the door stays between you, and that’s fine.

That’s actually the whole point.

Sometimes the best thing a person can do is be close enough to hear and far enough to not see, and let the wood do the work that words can’t.

A minute passes. Maybe two.

The hiccups stop. Your breathing evens out. The brownies are still doing their thing, but the room doesn’t feel like it’s shrinking anymore.

It feels like a room. With a floor. And a girl on it who cried the right amount for the right reasons and is probably going to feel embarrassed about this in the morning but right now, in this specific minute, feels something closer to emptied out than broken.

Your hand finds your wrist. The rain charm, cool against your pulse.

You flick it.

Then you stand up.

Your knees protest—stiff, cramped, the tile having done nothing for the cramps that are still low and persistent in your abdomen—and you catch yourself on the sink.

Your reflection in the mirror is a horror show. Mascara tracks. Eyeliner smeared into grey-black smudges beneath your eyes. Gold shimmer streaked across your cheeks where the tears dragged it. The dark berry lipstick is mostly gone, bitten off, leaving just a stain at the edges.

Medusa, post-battle. Snakes wilted.

Whatever.

You unlock the door. Pull it open.

Taehyung looks up at you from the floor.

He looks like a 1920s husband who got left at a train station and decided to wait.

His eyes move across your face. The damage. The evidence.

He doesn’t comment on any of it. Just gets up. Unfolds himself from the floor, brushing off the back of his trousers with one hand, and stands there. Not too close. Not too far.

“Do you know where Jungkook is?” comes out of your lips.

“Yeah,” he says. “I know where he is.”

next | index

if you liked this chapter, please consider buying me a coffee!! ♡'⸌⸌'♡

✧ taglist✧

@Mina4556 @latinxbipride @kokochxnel @libra04 @yoongssi @gaebestie @yoonxmint @kenickieshickies @rockstarjeonjk @mikrooms @xcallmetaniax @lilbitcherries @bangpink3gen @indyuhhhhh @sadiayn @elinaki92 @jimineepaboya @odetomeringue @yooniepot @jeonmaleficent @jksusawife @kimyishin @silverozy @svnk1ssd @idontsayblehblehbleh2010 @endlesssolace @army7-013 @yeahimacapricorn @6rnde @mimi1097 @whothefuckisthishoe @akirawhore @cherryreadsfics @sassyshyt @nemelkawar @dreamersparacosm @tremblementdesfleurs @bonzoirparis @vialattea00 @safira9497 @celliez @megatroncam07 @Asstaeticcc @melizzzie @kookie96 @coletaehyung @unbibiased @sexyevilkitten @maralodiaal @my0hmary @butterymin @quhrtz @lachlaniah @jhopeloverrr

© jungkoode 2025