Chapter Text
In September of 2007, Jeongguk has just barely turned ten years old. In September of 2007, his mother passes away.
Orphan. This is what that makes him. Technically, he has a father. Realistically, his father doesn’t know he has him. Jeongguk doesn’t quite understand what the system is, but it sounds all big, governmental and, frankly, scary. If it weren’t for people telling him that he was going in the system, though, perhaps it could have sounded cool. The system.
The System. Sounds like something out of an action film, and currently, at the vulnerable age of ten, that is his genre of choice, favorite movies necessitate a large dosage of action. The System. He imagines spies when he hears it, doesn’t know why, but he doesn’t let fantasies run too wild in his head, because he starts picturing the bad guys as well and he doesn’t know how to fight them without his mother.
The System.
It’s him that’s going in it. Him. Alone. Without his mother. He’s always had his mother. His mother has always held his hand whenever he needed it, at the dentist, when he had to get shots done, when he watched that horror movie he wasn’t supposed to and she was marginally angry, but she still let him sleep next to her because he was scared.
He doesn’t really understand death. But he knows it means she will no longer be there. Like it was with his grandfather. He died and he was no longer there. When a person dies, Jeongguk knows, they become a memory. They become as virtual as the movies he watches, conceptual, they join the fantasies in his head as a figment of his imagination. They still exist, if he thinks of them, they do. But they can say nothing new, do nothing new. They can no longer hold his hand.
The lady smiles at him and he doesn’t know what she means to gain out of it, however it does anything but put him at ease. She speaks to him in a voice he is not dumb enough to think is her natural one, but he doesn’t tell her to stop. He doesn’t tell her anything. He doesn’t speak. For three days straight he says nothing.
It annoys the woman who takes him in. A foster home for boys, that’s what he’s taken to. Currently there are six more of him there, of orphans, he’s told. He’s an orphan now. That means he doesn’t have a mother and a father anymore. Most of the boys there, most of the orphans, are around his age. The lady explains all this to him with that same voice and that same smile. When she hasn’t taken it off her lips for two days straight, it starts to border on creepy, like it was in that one movie he wasn’t supposed to watch but he did. His mother isn’t there to hold his hand this time when the grinning lady’s lips pull and her shiny teeth bare with a sparkling glint.
Dinner is when he is supposed to meet everyone. People he is apparently going to live with before they find him an actual home. This is temporary, the grinning lady promises as she steers the wheel, but Mrs. Park will do anything to make him feel comfortable.
Quite frankly, Mrs. Park does not at all make him feel comfortable. Her palm is very wide and her fingers are short but big and he does not at all want to hold her hand.
Not that she offers.
Without introductions, he is put at a table with six other boys and this woman and he already feels she hates him. She has asked him seventeen questions. He has been counting. He counts, sometimes. He’s answered none. Zero. Still, she puts him at the table. Some other boy places the food in front of him, in a ceramic patterned plate that is chipped off at one side. He isn’t exactly hungry, but his mother would want him to eat, so he does. He stares down at the plate and eats.
The house he is in is big, but it isn’t huge. It’s old. The floor is authentic wood and it makes a very distinctive creaking noise when people step. All eight inhabitants eat together. The tables are two, pressed together, and the chairs they sit on aren’t a set. They’re different. Jeongguk wants one with a cushion, but he doesn’t get one, and he certainly isn’t about to ask for it, so he settles on hard outdoor McDonald’s metal and struggles not to move too much, because it makes sounds. The boys are not loud, but they aren’t quiet either. The noise of their presence is like a buzz to him. It’s unintelligible to his ears, just a noise, perpetual and humming, a very solid presence in his senses.
Senses. He sees bland food, tastes bland food, smells a myriad of indistinct scents, touches the rigid metal of a rusting fork, hears the sound of those boys.
Jeongguk stays there for two days before they find him an aunt.
He stays there for two days and yet he still manages to miss it, or rather, him. He manages to miss him. The him who sits across from him on the table, watching him with wide, glazed eyes. His face is round, cheeks full and his hair is cut wrong and crooked over his forehead. The him has a pout on his lips when he chews. His lips pucker up, press together as his teeth move over whatever he’s stuffed puffy cheeks with. He’s barely blinking and Jeongguk wants to tell him to look away, he can almost feel the glassy gaze on him.
The eyes make him wary when Jeongguk himself is gnawing down food. The first bite makes him aggravatingly aware of his hunger. As he swallows and food slips down in his stomach, he feels it shift, bowels growl and suddenly he wants to maul it all, no matter how it tastes of nothing other than the overwhelming salt of soy sauce.
All the boys eat fast, shoveling down food, directly into their throats. Some of them fail to even chew. The boy in front of him is slow. He savors the food in his mouth. His lips smack a bit with it, it’s almost noisy, but the chewing doesn’t bother Jeongguk. The incessant looking does.
He raises his own eyes to him under bangs several times, peaks at him to question with a gaze why this ceaseless observation is necessary, but the boy simply remains—shameless and staring. Jeongguk cannot hold his eyes for too long, meets them for barely seconds before he stirs his chin down brusquely, hair falling over his forehead and he remains focused on the food in his broken plate.
Chores. Mrs. Park explains to him about chores first thing after dinner. He has to do his part for this household, she instructs most sternly, looking at him nearly haughty over a raised chin and a long nose. And to teach him the importance of chores she assigns to him dish duty that very night. Some other boy carries the dishes from the table to the sink. He has to wash.
He nods when she speaks, but he stands helpless and confused before the sink as the others pile out of the room, chatter erupting as their mouths are no longer full of food. There is something so very lonely about it all. He thinks he didn’t feel as lonely when he was alone the past three days. Today when all the others speak and he stands, mute and perplexed, unfamiliar, the stranger to these strangers, he feels the solitude blur into harsh loneliness.
He used to help his mother with the dishes, yet a sink was never as intimidating. He stares ahead with his lids stretched to the very corner. His mouth quivers. It’s ridiculous. He’s not really a crier, he has hardly cried during his first ten years of life, and he has not shed a tear since the death of his mother. His sadness is poignant, perhaps too much to be channeled into just salty water. But right now he simply cannot find the detergent and he has to ask where it is, but he can’t and he doesn’t think he has ever felt so helpless before, so utterly helpless and he knew neither loneliness nor helplessness before and his whole chin is trembling with his need to just break down, but he holds it.
He holds it until a hand pushes at him gently. Long, thin fingers touch at his shoulder. They allow him to flinch as he turns, blinks away moisture as his gaze finds the boy from across the table. He says nothing, just permits his hand to gently suggest he moves away. The boy pushes him until he frees the space in front of the sink, and squats before it. He opens a drawer underneath it, takes out the detergent Jeongguk desperately needs and straightens on his feet.
“Here,” he says, stretching his hand forward. Big eyes blink at him. The boy has an inch or two on him certainly. Tall, he’s tall. He’s incredibly skinny, bony and tan, the bone of his wrist protrudes as he holds it out towards him.
Jeongguk layers his eyes over him, searching for any clear sign that he is one of the bad guys, but by all indication, he seems to be just a boy. He’s wearing a big, grey t-shirt, certainly not his size and there is something mildly comforting in how bad his haircut is. His eyes are big, but he isn’t scary.
So, Jeongguk reaches forward, wraps his fingers around the detergent, careful not to touch his own. He wants to say thank you, but he doesn’t, only nods. The boy lets go, long fingers peel off and he lets his arm fall down to his thigh. Jeongguk’s eyes trail after if for some reason. His hand perhaps looks a bit nicer to hold.
He pries his eyes away, snaps them up to his face to venture another nod that he hopes conveys enough of his gratitude. The boy grins back at this as if he has spoken to him. His lips stretch to corners, stretch so far back Jeongguk thinks he sees all his teeth. It makes his eyes crease slightly, his cheeks getting even rounder to accommodate the pull of his mouth.
Jeongguk blinks at him, confused. He hasn’t seen a genuine smile in a while. He’s uncomfortable with how it makes him feel comfortable, so he spins away, gets on his tip toes to reach the faucet and starts the sink. The sound of water running blurs the boy’s presence, blurs his exit from the room.
“Find a bed.” That’s what Mrs. Park says. Find a bed. She doesn’t tell him where to sleep, doesn’t take his hand and lead him to a warm bed. Find a bed.
There are two rooms for the boys, both of which are full. There are six beds and he doesn’t know if she knows this. There is no bed for him. He has never felt more awkward in his life, hanging by the door of one room, head tilted down toward the floor as his eyes take subtle glimpses around the space to find an empty bed. His fingers coil around each other, pulling at the end of the fabric of his shirt. He’s twisted it so much at this point, palms sweating into it and it makes it all the more wrinkled. His mother didn’t use to like it when he walked around with wrinkles in his clothes, but he needs to do something with his hands.
He shuffles his feet across the hallway to the next room. He doesn’t lift them too much off the floor because it creaks loudly if he does and he would rather his own presence was as small to the others as he feels himself to be. He would very much like to disappear completely if he could. He wants to be where his mother is, he misses her. He wants her to hold his hand and he doesn’t understand why she can’t come back and do just that. She’s always there when he needs her and he has never needed her more, never felt more alone.
He hovers with raising emptiness at the doorstep of the other room, his fingers twirling restless, palms stretching the fabric of his shirt. He doesn’t know how emptiness can be so full. He knows little about feelings as a whole, mainly the basics, so he cannot put into words what goes on in him entirely. Mostly he feels lost.
Slowly, he does start to learn about emotions like this, one by one. He feels as if he forgets all he knows by now and he needs to start all over. Today he learns loneliness, learns helplessness. He learns loss.
There is one empty bed in that room, but the sheets are thrown off as if someone had been recently there. Two of the boys in the previous room had been murmuring to themselves, but both that are currently in this one are asleep, one of them whistling a soft snore in his slumber. Jeongguk thinks he remembers from the dinner table that he had a runny nose.
He rubs at his own, chasing away a curious sensation there, too. It feels itchy.
The sound of a toilet flushing makes him jump slightly where he stands, his eyes peeling wider as he hears running water and then a door open. The steps are distinctive on the parquet flooring. They near. Jeongguk’s heart runs wild in his chest, thumpthumpthump, and he keeps his head down. If he looks down, maybe they won’t notice him.
He counts. Counting helps, counting always helped. He simultaneously counts the steps taken and the beats of his heart.
He loses the number when he feels a palm on his shoulder. He sinks his body immediately down, ducks away from the touch and spins. He’s almost not surprised to see the boy with the big eyes standing there a few inches from him. His eyes shine in the darkness of the hallway, but he recognizes him with the dim light of a night lamp that is turned on in the room he had been observing.
“Hey,” the boy murmurs quiet. It’s a whisper, sounds private. Jeongguk cocks his head, stands there silent, but he is almost convinced by now this boy is not one of the bad guys, so he lingers, nods to him again.
“What are you doing up?” The boy asks yet again in a murmur. “Bed time has passed,” he shakes his head, his wide eyes growing somehow wider, “Mrs. Park doesn’t like it when we’re up past bed time.”
Jeongguk’s teeth gnaw at his lip, eyes finding the floor once more. He inadvertently sees his palms rub into his shirt, twist more wrinkles into it, nervous.
The boy’s eyes dart behind him through the opened door, flash across both full beds before they land on his own. He raises his brows slightly and glances back at Jeongguk. “You don’t have a bed, do you?”
Jeongguk’s teeth sink into the flesh of his mouth harder. He shakes his head, blinks at the floor.
The boy watches him silently for a couple of moments which to Jeongguk are filled with the sound of his own heart drumming loud into his rib cage. The boy taps a finger on his chin, once, twice, mulls it over.
“Come on,” he says next, and Jeongguk’s eyes spark up just in time to see the motion of his head, small and inviting towards the room. “You’re small,” the boy nods to himself. “You’ll fit. Sleep next to me.”
His hand raises a tiny bit and Jeongguk thinks maybe he will offer it for him to hold, but he seems to change his mind, draw it back to his thigh, perhaps because Jeongguk flinches away from all his touches, anyway. He doesn’t think he would have pulled away from this one, but it’s too late for that.
Jeongguk’s eyes are a bit wide as an aftermath of the suggestion, but his heart seems to relax in his chest. He pulls his lips fully into his mouth, makes them a thin line on his face, a short moment of hesitation, contemplation, but he nods. He has no other place to sleep and this boy with the big eyes is the only person he knows who definitely isn’t a bad guy.
He isn’t, Jeongguk establishes. Bad guys tend to be distorted, unshapely, often they are ugly, and their eyes are certainly not so big. They are slits, evil like a serpent. The only unshapely thing on this boy is the hair.
The boy juts his head again and starts walking. Jeongguk bends his head down but follows, taking exactly the same steps that the boy takes, same pace, same width.
The boy pauses in front of a short wardrobe of drawers, turns to him again. “Do you have a change of clothes for tonight?” He whispers to him.
Jeongguk shakes his head. He has a suitcase of his things but there is apparently some adult stuff, as the grinning lady had so maturely put it, in fact some legal procedures to take care of, before she can give him anything that was taken out of his mother’s apartment.
The boy nods, turns back and pulls at one of the drawers. They’re old and wooden like the rest of the house, noisy like the rest of the house, it creaks, and the boy’s lips hiss a bit with it, draw back and flinch as he tries to do it as slow and quiet as he can muster. He rummages a bit through it before he pulls out something with a tug that messes up a couple of the nicely folded fabrics above it. He hands it to Jeongguk, who takes it with minimum reluctance. The boy presses his palm on top of the rest of the clothes, stuffs the fabrics back in and simply closes the drawer with the mess in it.
He glances at Jeongguk again, sees his nervous stare downwards as he shifts the shirt he’s given from hand to hand, rubbing it together. He blinks at him, pulls his lips slightly into his cheeks. “I won’t look,” he promises, reaches a lanky arm up and turns the night lamp off. Jeongguk is shy enough to want the boy to turn away. He’s too shy admit it and it is a bad combination, so he is very much glad the boy reads it on him, though it does make his cheeks heat up a bit that he is that obvious.
He changes his shirt, slips off his jeans. His boxers are long enough to fall over half of his thighs, so he doesn’t mind it all too much, although the prospect of getting into the bed does make him gulp.
“Do you want the inside?” The boy whispers and Jeongguk is quick to shake his head. The bed is pressed up against the wall and sleeping on the inside will leave him essentially trapped.
He only sees the boy nod in the outline the moon creates of him where it peaks through a light curtain in front of the window. He hears him move more than he witnesses it himself, the shuffle of fabric, somehow distinctive as sheets sliding into place.
“Okay,” the boy says when the sound halts. He’s settled, he means. It’s Jeongguk’s turn. He needs a moment, but he’s tired, so awfully tired. His body is desperate for the warmth of a bed, his eyes needy for a long rest.
He presses a palm into the mattress, lifts one knee up and gingerly gets into the bed, as far away from the shape he sees of the other boy. It’s virtually impossible not to touch him at all. The bed is single. They share a blanket; they share a pillow. He knows the boy has his back almost entirely pressed into the wall, flush against it to allow for the most space possible for Jeongguk. When he lies down finally, sideways and facing him to track with his eyes how far he is, to know he isn’t touching too much, the boy lifts the blanket and throws it over Jeongguk’s shoulder.
Their opposite cheeks rest into the same pillow.
Jeongguk thinks his eyes adapt to the darkness because slowly he starts to see more of his face. He sees his lashes as they fall over his big glinting eyes. Mostly, he sees them, those enormous eyes. They seem to shine.
He feels more comfortable than he reckoned it was possible for him, but the darkness makes it all easier. The fact that there is someone next to him, whose smile is genuine and who doesn’t keep him away from adult stuff makes it easier. This boy is not one of the bad guys in The System.
“My name is Taehyung, by the way,” he mumbles to him, mouth squished slightly by the pillow. His cheek is mushier like this. “What’s yours?”
He isn’t one of the bad guys.
“Jeongguk,” He says. Speaks for the first time since he was told his mother was dead. He can barely recognize his own voice. It’s dry and it gives him the incentive to clear his throat, but his name feels easy to pronounce, nevertheless.
“Goodnight, Jeongguk,” the boy yawns, his mouth stretching as wide as his eyes. They close easily in the darkness.
He has to learn so many things anew. That first night teaches him gratitude. Sadly, it also teaches him trust, trust for this boy. He should know better.
He’s ten. He can’t know better.
In that very moment, after all, all his senses become him, that him, Taehyung. He sees him, sees the outlines of his face and body in the moonlight. He feels him, feels the heat of his presence and their toes knock together. He hears him, hears him breathe as his breath shallows and evens. He thinks he can also taste that breath. Jeongguk doesn’t brush his own teeth that night, but the taste in his mouth is that of mint. And he smells him. The most powerful sense, the scent. It is entirely encompassed by this boy and it shapes a memory in his head, the memory of Taehyung being there where he was most alone, of Taehyung giving him a shirt to sleep in, a bed to sleep in, of Taehyung giving him a presence beside him.
“Goodnight.”
Sometimes, in retrospect, Jeongguk wishes that following morning he had known waking up next to Kim Taehyung is a unique experience. He wishes that boy had somehow hinted to him that he needed to savor because life will teach him not to allow it. But at this point Jeongguk doesn’t care who he wakes up next to as long as they don’t have a twisted grin with shiny teeth bared.
The boy smacks his lips twice when he wakes up with his eyes still closed. Jeongguk has been awake for two hours and thirty-four minutes before the other’s lids blink to awareness. He has been counting.
The boy—well, Taehyung, now he is Taehyung—is extremely difficult to raise off of bed. He groans, he rotates around the sheets, bundles the blanket and clutches at it with both his arms, stripping it off of Jeongguk to raise one leg on top of it.
He is a messy sleeper as a whole. Jeongguk at that age believes he would never want to sleep next to him if it weren’t for necessity and the comfort of a warm, human presence. Jeongguk at that age is wistfully wrong.
Breakfast is cereal. There are two types. Jeongguk chooses for himself the less sugary one. Taehyung who gets up seventeen minutes after everyone else has finished eating chooses the other.
The day is loud, and the day is a blur. Taehyung has a friend and he tries to introduce him to Jeongguk, but both of them together have too much energy for him to handle and he recoils away from interaction. There is another boy who is quiet, not as quiet as Jeongguk as in borderline mute, but he allows him to sit next to him and watch TV in silence. Jeongguk doesn’t learn his name until he crosses paths with him again several years later when both of them have changed so much.
The grinning lady brings him his suitcase. The first thing he does is brush his teeth with his toothbrush and not with his finger.
At night Jeongguk is too shy to ask Taehyung to sleep next to him again. He is still next to that boy on the couch and they are watching an American cartoon that is not meant for children, but Mrs. Park does not necessarily care as long as they are entertained enough not to interrupt her business of arranging newspapers in her basement. There is a gentle tap to his shoulder from behind and he turns to a yawning Taehyung.
“I’m going to bed,” he says. “Are you coming?”
They fit themselves in it easier this night and when all the lights are out and the boys are sleeping, Jeongguk feels better.
He knows by Taehyung’s breathing that he has yet to drift off. Then, he knows by his whispers, “Do you like it here?”
Jeongguk opens his eyes. He thought if he held them closed for long enough, he’d trick himself into falling asleep. He held them closed for one thousand a hundred and forty-two seconds before Taehyung spoke. He shakes his head into the pillow. “I don’t know,” he murmurs back to him.
He doesn’t know, but he is certain he prefers Taehyung to the grinning lady. There is some familiarity in slipping into that bed the second night. It smells the same as the previous one, smells like Taehyung.
“You’ll get used to it,” Taehyung mutters back to him, whisper ghostly on Jeongguk’s nose. “I always do.”
I always do, he says, and it is the first time it hits Jeongguk that those other boys are actually orphans, too. They have as much as he does, suitcases of their belongings and simply memories of their parents that cared about them and not about outdated newspapers. I always do, he says, and suddenly it is even easier for Jeongguk to lie next to this boy.
He speaks his name for the first time. “Taehyung,” he whispers tentatively when he sees his eyes fall closed.
They part again. Taehyung has his hand between their cheeks, resting gingerly on the surface of the pillow and Jeongguk cannot stop staring at the outlines of his fingers.
“Yes?” he prompts into the silence that follows.
Jeongguk swallows. “Can I hold your hand?”
Taehyung says nothing and, in the darkness, Jeongguk gets so nervous he almost turns his back to him. He cannot gauge anything but the shininess in his eyes, the moon seems weaker today. He’s almost told him to forget it when he sees the hand between them move. It slips down the mattress, searches the space between them, meets Jeongguk’s shuffling one by their stomachs. Their palms slide together, fingers touch. He doesn’t know if it is too bold to intertwine them, but Taehyung is doing it before he can consider.
His palm is wide, and his fingers are long, thin. The skin of it is a little dry, but so very soft, warm. It’s universally different from his mother’s hand, but Jeongguk clings onto it, perhaps he squeezes too hard, but he can’t not.
He holds his hand. He holds Taehyung’s hand, finally has a hand to hold, and he thinks, maybe, perhaps, doubtfully, but yet possibly, he could get used to this as well. Maybe things will get better.
But they find him an aunt.
She is his mother’s cousin apparently, and she gets paid to take him in, just like Mrs. Park does. She gets monthly payment for having him as she is not his legal guardian, just a foster parent. That’s how the system works. The money is supposed to be used for caring expenses for Jeongguk. Mrs. Park gets the same amount for every boy she takes in. But this aunt of his apparently has more rights to have him. He doesn’t want anyone to have him really.
He doesn’t get to say goodbye to Taehyung. The grinning lady is glad he says words from time to time now.
His aunt wears a lot of mascara and it gathers in the corners of her eyes. She smokes a lot inside the house. This is what that house smells like to him in the construct of his memories, smokesmokesmoke. He doesn’t like cigarettes.
One of the boys in the school he goes to smokes as well. He is thirteen, but he is in his grade. Jeongguk does not like smoke at all.
It starts to settle in his head what it means that his mother is gone. That she is dead. She doesn’t come back. She doesn’t physically, materially exist anymore. She can’t hold his hand. Taehyung can’t either. With the state of his aunt’s nails, he gives up entirely on hand holding. Instead, he starts running.
First, he starts running track. Next, he starts running away.
He doesn’t know where he expects the latter to take him—he always ends up in the car of the grinning lady. The former does him better. It gets him teammates and it gets him medals. Apparently, he’s good at running.
He’s good at running track, not that good at running drugs, but that doesn’t become a problem until later.
The second foster home he goes to, when his aunt marries and gives up on him, is different. It’s larger, has as many as fourteen boys and bunk beds for them all. Jeongguk is number fourteen and this time there is a bed meant for him.
He stays there for a week and a half when one of the boys gets adopted.
Adopted.
Capital A, adopted. Supposedly that’s the dream when you’re in the system. It means you get permanence. This permanence, of course, can be a gift and a curse. You can get loving parents who are unable to have children who will appreciate you. You can get a broken home.
The problem is, people love babies. No one likes twelve-year olds like Jeongguk. His cheeks are chubby, but not chubby enough. They want someone to coo at, someone to raise as theirs, someone who will believe they care, someone who will believe they are parents.
Jeongguk will never believe someone else is his mother.
The boy who gets adopted is a replacement. Parents lose child. Parents want another one. The boy is ecstatic. Jeongguk himself does not want to fill shoes. He does not want his home to be a consequence of tragedy. He does not want people who call themselves his parents to look upon him with a sadness in their eyes. Or maybe he just does not want to confess his envy.
His adoption frees up a bed. That means the Gyeongs have a spare bed to fill. The Gyeongs are nice-er. They are three people, three adults in this household. There is a Mr. Gyeong, a Mrs. Gyeong, and a Miss Gyeong, who is a sister. Mr. Gyeong works. He does not communicate with the children in the house too much. Himself and Miss Gyeong are orphans and they are not actual siblings. They were adopted by the same family by mistake because of their shared last name and ever since they have clicked as if it were fate for them to meet, so they repay the karma of the world for bringing them together by setting up a foster home to give children the same opportunity to find their destiny.
Destiny. Jeongguk, at this point in his life, does not believe in destiny. It’s difficult to believe life has a plan for you when it steals your mother at 10. People who believe in destiny tend to be happy people. Jeongguk is twelve, knows little about life, yet more than other boys who are twelve, boys who are not in the system. Mostly he knows he doesn’t know, mostly the difference between him and boys with happy families is that he is aware of his own ignorance to what life holds. One thing he is sure of, however, is that he is not happy.
He’s okay, that much he is, he’s okay. But he’s not happy. He’s been trying to learn new feelings, but happiness, he thinks, is something he knew before and is slowly starting to forget. With his time at his aunt’s, he learns a great deal about anger, frustration. He learns more about loneliness, less about trust. He certainly does not learn happiness.
The thing that is closest to it that he learns is the pride and cocky joy of victory. Jeongguk counts the times he’s won a race. Fourteen. When he tells his coach he has to leave the team because he’s moving to another school, the coach almost offers to adopt him. What he feels at that is certainly not happiness. He doesn’t smile. He smirks. It’s not an appreciation of him, it’s an appreciation of his ability to run. That, he is proud of, that, he is confident with, but that, he knows is not as whole hearted as he thinks happiness should be, as it was with his mother in the simplest moments.
So no, on paper Jeongguk does not believe in destiny. Though a small portion of him finds it hard to believe that it is a coincidence that this very same week, miles away from the Gyeongs, Mrs. Park is deemed unfit to raise children and stripped off her rights to be a foster parent for a little while because her hoarder OCD is acting up too much.
One bed free and six boys needing new allocation. Yet, the boy that ends up at the Gyeongs is none other than Taehyung. This has to be somehow predetermined, Jeongguk feels, when they bring him in for introductions with this ladybug suitcase.
His hair is better. It’s nicely cut, falls slightly over his eyes. He’s grown taller, lankier. He’s still bony, but there seems to be more meat on his stomach. His clothes don’t fit him, still, so Miss Gyeong takes him to the mall the following day and buys him a few t-shirts.
This time round, Taehyung is the one that doesn’t know anyone and Jeongguk is the one who knows where stuff is. With pride at his knowledge and comfort of his surroundings, he wants to return the favor, show him around, offer him a bed and hold his hand. He’s outgrown hand-holding personally. There isn’t much room for hand-holding in this world, really, but if Taehyung needs it, he’d be ready.
But the Gyeongs have a bed for Taehyung and he isn’t half as shy as Jeongguk used to be. He meets the rest of the boys quickly, flashes that toothy, boxy smile at them almost immediately, and Jeongguk has to wonder if the boy even remembers him. It makes him curiously sullen that he might not, that he doesn’t appear to need him at all.
He doesn’t know then how many times Taehyung has gone through transitions like this, that it is an instinct for him to blend in, that new surroundings are something common and he’s developed a fluidity to his personality that allows him to chameleon himself into a space almost disturbingly quickly. He doesn’t know Taehyung last had a home when he was four years old.
Jeongguk refuses to be the first one to talk to him, but Taehyung seems to be talking to everybody but him. Maybe it is then he learns the unflattering flutters of jealousy. The sensation of Taehyung next to him, of his palm slipping into his own was his first experience of some semblance of comfort after he was thrust into the System. It was small, a small gesture, a short moment, but it was peculiarly meaningful. To him.
Taehyung himself does not seem to care much. He speaks to everyone. He smiles at everyone. Taehyung is special, but Jeongguk, apparently, is not.
Everyone experiences feelings differently. For Jeongguk, jealousy is angry and strangely vengeful. He is almost pointed in speaking to one of the boys he’s formed a tentative friendship with.
“I’m Taehyung.”
It’s the first thing he actually hears him speak, after an hour and 46 minutes of being there, not directed at him, or perhaps not only directed at him. When Jeongguk turns, looks at him, he finds his eyes focused on the boy he’s speaking with, rather than on him, and he’d glad and mad at the same time. He certainly doesn’t want his introduction, obvious proof he’s forgotten.
But he hasn’t.
“Hoseok,” the other boy shakes his hand, flashes a smile as equally bright as Taehyung’s to him. Jeongguk thinks he gravitates to people who are not afraid to genuinely smile. It puts him at ease. Hoseok, for one, rarely stops grinning.
Jeongguk feels mute all over again when big eyes blink at him, twinkle under longish hair, messy hair. His head tilts slightly when he captures his gaze, those never fearing eyes bold as they fall over him, study him. He raises his hand, his palm and his fingers. They seem longer. He wears a thin ring at the middle. It is strangely fascinating to Jeongguk, that hand. He’s moved on from hand holding, really has, so he tends not to focus on hands, but this one he watches as it shakes in a wave.
“Hi, Guk,” he greets before he’s taken away by Miss Gyeong.
The name makes Jeongguk feel warm, a redness slipping over his cheeks. It’s endearing to him, makes his eyes widen and fall to the ground of the back yard under the curious observance of Hoseok.
It lasts less than an hour until, at dinner, he learns Taehyung simply does not remember the first half of his name.
“Would you pass that to Jeongguk?”
“To who?”
“Jeongguk.” A finger points at him sitting at the other end of the table, gullible eyes stretched wide and awkward. He spent an hour thinking Guk was affection when it was forgetfulness.
“Ah, that’s right,” Taehyung nods to himself, hands slipping under the bottom of the bowl as he stretches cold potato salad to him. “Jeongguk.”
Perhaps it’s stupid that he doesn’t talk to him for several days after this. Perhaps it’s stupid because Taehyung doesn’t seem to want to, but he himself desperately does. He’s only punishing himself, essentially, but victory teaches him to be slightly prideful. He admits nothing and refuses to talk to him first.
Jeongguk is really much too pointed in his pride, his resolve he’s uninterested to see that Taehyung is always, always looking at him.
When Taehyung’s own grinning lady asks him if he wants to go to a foster home that currently hosts three of the boys that used to stay at Mrs. Park’s, one of who’s fingers is adorned by the very same ring that he has on his, on a whim he accepts.
The next day, just over a week after he moves to the Gyeongs, he will leave.
Jeongguk doesn’t know this then, but a couple of days before the children get taken away from Mrs. Park, a friend of Taehyung’s, this Namjoon who is a bookie at fifteen, admirably smart, something Taehyung aspires to be, tells him what it is like to kiss a girl. Jeongguk doesn’t know this then, but Taehyung, at thirteen, still has not had his first kiss, but with the tales of the mighty Namjoon he grows extremely curious.
However, he has no particular curiosity as to what kissing a girl feels like. He wonders mostly about kissing in general, lips to lips. It seems simple, not too interesting at all. He looks at girl’s lips at school, but there is nothing too alluring about them.
There is just one certain pair of lips that he feels the urge that Namjoon describes to press his own to.
He knows he’s leaving the next day. He knows there will be no consequences.
On another whim, he does. He kisses those lips.
Jeongguk feels even less of a desire to speak to Taehyung after he finds out that he chooses to leave. Of course, it is ridiculous of him to expect that Taehyung would have an incentive to stay based on his unspoken thoughts about him, hidden confessions that he makes him feel comfortable and he has a deeply rooted appreciation to the very scent of his presence, which on its own is utterly ridiculous and has no place being true in the System.
He is certainly surprised when shortly after Hoseok goes to bed after Jeongguk gets too cocky about beating him at the Poison basketball game in the back yard of the Gyeongs, another person appears.
“Good shot.”
He recognizes his voice. It makes him miss his next shot. It bounces off the hoop and tumbles defeated to the ground, but Jeongguk only hears it, because his eyes are immediately trailing, startled, to the voice.
“Can I try?” Taehyung asks and Jeongguk stares at his approach, his body moving closer in the grass to his. He has his eyes pinned to him, blinking, dropping to his hand that stretches out to ask for the ball, at his hair that falls in messy strands above dark eyebrows and huge eyes.
Stares, really that is the only way to call it. He’s staring and it is his fault for avoiding looking at him all week because now he can’t look away, knowing that it is essentially his last chance to do it. Taehyung is leaving tomorrow. He has his ladybug suitcase, the one he has been dragging around, unbeknownst to Jeongguk, since he was just four years old, packed and ready and propped against the front door in the hallway at the Gyeongs. Jeongguk avoided looking at Taehyung, but he has been glimpsing at the damned suitcase all day long. The spots of the ladybug shine with the artificial lighting of the lamp in the corridor, reflect it in black circles, and it feels like it glares at Jeongguk every time he passes by.
He tears his gaze away now just as suddenly as he kept on doing in his staring contests with the suitcase. He rips it away and looks down at the ball that has rolled conveniently right to his feet.
“Whatever,” he shrugs. He bends, grabs the ball, dribbles it easily straight into Taehyung’s waiting hands.
He catches it, bounces it off the ground without looking, eyes fixed on Jeongguk. “You seemed to be quite good,” he tells him, shameless both in observing and vocally admitting to it, “before with Hoseok.”
Jeongguk slips a hand in his pocket, finds a pebble on the ground he feigns interest in as he listens to the distinctive sound of the ball hitting the ground, kicks at it to see it move. “Yeah.”
The ball dribbles. “Bet I’m better, though.”
Jeongguk’s eyes roll and end up at him as the circle is complete, a snort escaping his nose as he bathes his gaze over Taehyung’s lithe frame. “Yeah, right,” he snickers, arching his lips into chubby cheeks with a smugness he only has reserved for sport.
Despite his natural athleticism, as his previous coach praised, his cockiness is currently groundless. Basketball is not his area of expertise. Running is. However, above all, what’s in his area of expertise and what summons the sudden attitude is competitiveness.
Taehyung’s hand is large. It grips the ball easy as he bounces it to the ground and catches it for a moment, eyes almost narrowing now. “I can prove it.”
Jeongguk’s smirk spreads. He slips his hand out of his pocket, stretches his arms to the side, beckons with a haughty nod. “Be my guest.”
The other’s boy head tilts. “Fine.” He grasps at the ball with both hands, holds it tight before his chest as challenge glints bold and unrelenting in his big eyes. “What does the winner get?”
“He wins,” Jeongguk answers simply.
It motivates a brow raise from Taehyung. He curls it up into his hair, the cock of his head deepening as his nose arches slightly in perplexed skepticism. “That’s enough for you?”
Jeongguk’s lips flatten, form a line. He shrugs.
Taehyung pulls his own, arches the corners down in consideration. “Gyeongs must be treating you well, then,” he concludes with a small nod to himself, the reasoning behind the words slipping over Jeongguk’s head, but he’s not about to question. “Gotta learn to ask for things, though.”
Jeongguk courses his eyes over him. His comments feel subtly condescending, him speaking words as truths that Jeongguk is unfit to understand, saying things private to his own intelligence and experience aloud just to mock and it is aggravating enough for Jeongguk to compete with the haughtiness as well. He flutters his lids almost judgmental as he rolls his gaze over him, says, “Nothing that I want from you, really.”
“Fine, then,” Taehyung shrugs with a thoughtful purse of his lips. “Think of something if you win. It’s useless now.”
“You have something in mind?” Jeongguk cocks his head, looking more closely at him, slightly irritated that he has an answer to everything.
Taehyung fixes his own attention on him, pupils sliding with underlying provocation, but his attitude remains a semblance of indifference. “Maybe,” he says. He tosses the ball with no warning towards Jeongguk’s stomach, and he almost doesn’t catch it at the unexpectedness and subtle aggression in the force of the toss. “Let’s shoot. You go first.”
He doesn’t ask. He instructs. Jeongguk is much too competitive to risk seeming he’s afraid of going first. He clutches at the ball with his fingers, tightening digits slightly as he narrows his eyes. He doesn’t bother with an actual answer. Jeongguk is not as good at words as he is with his body, his legs, arms, hands. He bounces the ball twice. He scores.
Jeongguk’s lip quirks in time with Taehyung’s eyebrow. It curls in interest.
He scores, too. He scores until Jeongguk’s lips are pulling in a straight line, then the edges are curling down, eyes narrowing more, forehead creasing. He feels the perspiration break out on his skin, his fist clenching. He wants to be confident enough not to glare at Taehyung every time he bounces the ball, pokes his tongue to the corner of his lips in concentration, shoots, scores, and smirks, but he isn’t. He’s frowning in his glare, something tight rounding in his stomach.
He misses once. Jeongguk misses once.
Taehyung doesn’t miss. At all. Jeongguk would count shots, but there’s no point. He does not miss a single one.
“Do you play?” Jeongguk asks gruffly through gritted teeth, though his glare has subsided to something different, eyes wide in a little fascination. Is it skill or luck or both, Jeongguk doesn’t know, and he hopes Taehyung is secretly as versed in basketball as he himself is in running for the sake of his pride which swells every time the ball falls through the ring.
Taehyung bounces the ball again, now subtly smug with the victory written on the features of his face, the curve of his mouth and the glint in his eyes under the light of the moon under which he always seems to see him. He doesn’t know whether he has ever truly looked at him in broad daylight. “No, not really,” he seems to take pleasure in shaking his head. “Despise team sports.”
Jeongguk’s brows furrow. “Why?”
Taehyung’s eyes fall away from his, trail to the ball and watch it fall onto the hard ground. He doesn’t touch it again, lets it bounce into rest as he teases his teeth over his bottom lip for a moment, blinks up. “Each for their own, Gukkie.”
Jeongguk regrets how that sentence, the meaning behind it bypasses him at the moment. He is too irritated at the use of the nickname, it irks somehow offensive at him and he disregards the entirety of everything else he says as some shit justification to satiate more of his condescension at the fact he is the older one in the situation, the wiser one who gets to say ominous, wise things he’s heard some adult say or he’s conjured up from a mixture of things adults have said. He cannot imagine it is one of the mottos Taehyung absolutely lives by, his own mindset that makes him entirely unattainable.
No, Jeongguk does not heed that warning. Taehyung does warn him then, in the backyard of the Gyeongs, he supposes, in retrospect. He chooses, though, to focus on the Gukkie part, the part that warms him with affection because his mother used to call him that and also spikes his blood with irritation because Taehyung doesn’t get to forget his name when he himself, whenever he couldn’t sleep missed him so inexcusably, irrationally much.
“My name is Jeongguk,” he tells him, attempts to say it loosely, but he tastes the ounce of spitefulness on his tongue.
Taehyung blinks between his eyes, studies his face. It’s brief, but it’s there. He nods. “I know.”
He’s still looking, staring at him with this big-eyed curiosity he subjected him to when he was across the table from him that first night two years ago and Jeongguk can really barely take it. He angles his chin to the ground almost sharply, shuffling one foot around mindlessly to give himself reason to look at its motion. “So,” he starts, withholding an urge to clear his throat, “what do you want for winning?”
He peaks back up at him and finds Taehyung’s face more settled than before, softer. He still gazes at him almost unnerving, but his features are loose, light, and just nice. He glances at him in silence for a short moment.
He breathes and his chest fills. “Stay still,” he says and with the words he himself moves, stepping closer to him and Jeongguk is inadvertently stepping away. One of his heels buries in the ground further behind him, he angles his body away, but he cannot commit to a full-hearted step, as if he’s scared. He isn’t. He’s a big boy now, big eyes don’t scare him.
“What?” Jeongguk exhales as Taehyung nears, pausing when their toes line together.
“Stay still,” he repeats, voice soft and low now, no competition, no nothing, just a murmur. He raises his hands, touches his shoulders, palms cupping over their edges. “Can you close your eyes?”
Jeongguk darts said eyes all across his face helplessly when he sees his from so close, his own hands dangling limp by his thighs. “Yeah,” he breathes.
He can. He doesn’t particularly want to.
But Taehyung whispers, “Close them.”
So he does.
Taehyung’s lips are cold, but soft when they press to his. The first touch is barely such. He just brushes them against his, releases a breath and it hits him gently, raises a tingle over his own skin, arouses in him an urge to part his mouth, but he can’t muster up courage to move any part of himself. He stays still and confused as Taehyung’s nose comes closer and so do his lips, applying slight pressure over his own.
Jeongguk feels warm. He feels so warm. The beat of his heart escalates in his chest, a warning he’s too stumped to acknowledge. His cheeks feel like they’re on fire, his ears ablaze, something fiery sliding and wrapping around his neck. The press of Taehyung’s lips is startling, and he wants to open his eyes, but he doesn’t, only sends his brows into his hair and sucks in a breath through his nose.
Technically, it is a kiss. Technically, Taehyung kisses him. Jeongguk has never before kissed anyone nor has he ever had any interest in doing so, but the sensation, although cripplingly overwhelming is more nice than it is not. It’s foreign, so sudden. Jeongguk would have never in a million years guessed that this is what Taehyung wanted from him, and he likes to think had Taehyung tried to make it last longer, he would have pushed him away.
But he doesn’t get the chance to. The kiss is brief. It’s so brief Jeongguk has enough time to just figure out what it is and then Taehyung’s lips are gone and his are left tingling with the remains of the foreign sensation. The last person to ever kiss him was his mother and it had been colossally different, a promising peck on the forehead, an everything will be alright kiss from a mother to son.
This kiss, this completely absent of promise or reason kiss is startling enough that Jeongguk cannot even count the seconds for which it lasts, so all he knows by the end of it is that Taehyung gives Jeongguk just enough time to sense him all. He gives him time to be deprived of sight under his instruction, last memory of an image being his big, flashy eyes. He gives him time to feel his big palms, long fingers curled around his shoulders and his lips on his own. He gives him time to hear his own breath hitch as he listens to him come closer, time to almost taste that kiss, and to smell him, his nose invaded by the scent that to Jeongguk stands for having someone by your side when you are at your loneliest.
He gives him just enough time for that, just enough reason to miss him again, and then he pulls away to meet perpetually wide eyes with wider ones, Jeongguk’s hand flying to his mouths, two fingers pressing with cautious wonder, trying to soothe the prickly tingles left to promise him this happened.
He offers no explanation, offers nothing really, no word, no goodbye this time either. He parts his own lips with his stare, but then he closes them shut, spins and leaves him utterly bewildered in the backyard of the Gyeongs.
And on the next day, Taehyung’s once more gone.