#mdrabble.zip

“I’m not.”

“You are.”  It’s two voices at once, Hoseok chiming in with his girlfriend.  

You resent Jung Hoseok too.  He’s the whole reason you’re stuck here on this Friday night, seated in the kitchen of the frat house.  He’s the one who’d tangled everything together, turning your group of girlfriends into literal girlfriends.  (You’re happy for them, you swear.  Joon is a sweetheart and Yoongi might always seem like he’s bothered but he’s nice too.  Even Hoseok is actually okay.)

“He’s being an attention whore,”  you retort, probably more petulantly than you need to, with needles sticking out of syllables, two year’s worth of history slipping alongside vowels. 

“He’s literally just sitting there.”

Mina’s not wrong - but he’s also flirting.  Shamelessly.  With one of the girls that seem to always be at these things, all chiming laughter and brilliantly white teeth.  You’ve seen her a handful of times, almost always at Jungkook’s side for at least some portion of the evening.  

“Give it a break, ____.”  

You wish you could.  In fact, you’d like nothing more than to not care about Jeon Jungkook and his infuriating antics.  It’d save you a lot of frustrations, make it so much easier to exist on the same campus as him.  

Because as it stands, it’s next to impossible not to be reminded of him, to go a single day without hearing about how great he is with his stupid boopable nose and sparkly eyes.  Every day, from friends or strangers, it’s simp central. 

You hate it.

Jeon Jungkook is good at many things:  passing classes he barely attends (which isn’t that many, because he is actually pretty studious all things considered), making jungle juice that could knock out an elephant, dying his hair pink.  

He’s also apparently really good at pissing people off when he doesn’t mean to.  Call it a skill of his.

One he’d honed with you, nearly three years ago now.  Back when he’d been young and stupid and uncertain, when he hadn’t quite grown into well, much of anything, when he’d had his priorities all messed up.

Maybe he shouldn’t have broken up with you within two months - citing needing to focus on school - and then dated someone shortly thereafter.  Maybe he shouldn’t have seemed to find himself in every class of yours, sitting across the lecture hall listening to the professor drone on and on about statics.  Maybe he shouldn’t have introduced one of his fraternity brothers to someone he knew you knew.

(He says maybe but he knows they were all bad choices made by an underveloped brain, too addled by Thursday night pub crawls and a grass is always greener on the other side mentality.)

Sometimes, he feels bad.  He doesn’t miss the way you pointedly ignore him when he’s around, how your expression seems to be stuck in a permanent scowl any time you catch sight of him.

(He’d have to be dumb to not notice all of that and while Jungkook is many things, dumb isn’t necesarily one of them.  Immature maybe.  Impulsive definitely.)

“Where’d ____ go?”  

Someone else asks the question he wants to but keeps caged behind his teeth, hidden past his molars.  

Mina sighs dramatically, pats her boyfriend’s cheek, and shrugs.  “Who knows.” 

But Jungkook knows.  Thinks he knows, anyway.  You’ve left, because you always leave when he does things you hate.  (And you hate everything he does.)  

One day he’ll get the courage to apologise to you, to explain that he still misses you.  He knows it won’t be well-received (why would it be?) but he’ll offer it anyway, awkward and stilted and not nearly as apologetic as it should be.

“Do you want me to stop?”  It’s innocent enough, paired with big glossy eyes and a smile that makes his heart stop, tripping over itself in its haste to return to normal.

Did he?  Of course not.  He’s wanted this for much too long, dreamt about you for years and years until you’d finally become a reality, fully-formed and beautiful.  You’re undeniable and he knows you know that.  There’s no one that could do to him what you do to him - drawing him from his shell, wiping that painted scowl away as easily as chalk on a broken sidewalk.  It’s you, because it’s always been you.

(But then again, it’s always been him, too.  Your brother.  His best friend.)

(He wishes it meant something, that it held any weight when put up beside you.)

(Sometimes, Yoongi feels like a bad friend.  Like he’s crossed some invisible line and now he’s all but thrown himself off the cliff it led to, treading water, trying not to drown.  You’re holding his hand though - always are, whenever you can get away with it, whether it’s under the table or in the few hours your brother’s away - and it’s not that scary.  He’s never tired.  You keep him going.)

“You’re the worst,”  he hums, terribly tender.  Defenseless, as if every layer has been stripped from his shoulders, as if you’d reduced him to nothing but a heart that beats with you, for you.

“Can you blame me?”

Frankly, he can’t.  He wants all of these moments just as bad, if not worse.  Craves them like he does cake - layers of it, syrup-drenched and saccharine.  (Something to soothe his cravings, though nothing’s quite as sweet as you.)  He just needs to be careful, doesn’t know how to turn that side of his brain off.  It whines and whirs all through the night, keeping him awake even when he should be focused on only one thing.  (You.)

A sigh comes in tandem with his surrender, a white flag held aloft as he takes you as wholly as he wants, cages you against his chest and buries his face into the silk of your hair.  “Five more minutes.”

“Ten,”  you argue, because you’re infuriating and endearing and—

It turns out to be one.  Less than one.  Less than zero.  

Because your brother’s standing in the doorway, sneakers half-off and the strangest expression on his face.  A blend of gobsmacked and horrified, not a single sound breaking the sudden silence.  Yoongi swears he could hear a pin drop;  he feels the way you practically jump out of your skin when Namjoon’s bag hits the tile.

“What—”

“We can explain—”

In true sibling nature, your words run into each other.  Your brother’s get lost in the hysteria of your own, a sharp laugh tripping off your tongue and cracking into a thousand little pieces.  For a moment, Yoongi thinks you might scramble out of his arms, form together a handful of excuses.  You’ve always had a terrible poker face.

(Did it matter though, when your hands were laid out, clear as day?  Probably not.)