Chapter Text
Jungkook couldn’t fathom why his mother was crying on his first day of school. He was sixteen years old, just three years shy of claiming legal adulthood. And yet she stood at the front entrance of their apartment that day, seeing him off in a withering mess, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with the back of her hand.
“I’m not a baby, mom,” he had assured her, all the while sipping on a box of banana milk.
His new school was just a short ten minute walk from his complex. And so on that chilly March morning he slung his backpack over his shoulder, raised the volume in his earphones, and followed the meandering sidewalk to the front gates of his new high school, kicking little pebbles in his way as he went.
It had only been a week since he and his family relocated from Seoul to the city of Busan. Jungkook had only been to Busan once before via the bullet train, and his stay had been brief and unremarkable. He recalled the sight of the ocean, the smell of the fish market, the inotations of the funny dialect he couldn’t quite understand. But never did he think that his father would find a new job in this strange town, prompting the entire Jeon family to pack their belongings into the back of a truck and drive four hours south, away from the only life he had known in Seoul.
It wasn’t particularly difficult for Jungkook to bid goodbye to his classmates. A couple of the girls cried upon finding out the news. His friends had merely shrugged in response. “We’ll visit you in the summer. July and August.”
But as their rickety moving van pulled off of the curb and rolled down the familiar streets of Seoul, he oddly enough found it difficult to part ways with the ahjussi from the tteokbokki stand on the corner, the PC bang just a minute walk from his old high school, the annoying neighborhood kids that terrorized him on his daily walks home. Perhaps they would be touched to hear that out of the ten million people occupying the place he’d called home for the last sixteen years, that he would miss them .
And now, as his new teacher greeted him outside of the classroom door and led him into an unfamiliar room, as the buzzing of the fifty or so students came to a pause and all one hundred eyes zeroed in on him, he found himself missing Seoul more than he could’ve ever dreamed of.
“Stand!” A smallish boy in the middle of the room cried out upon the teacher’s entry. Like soldiers the rest of the class rose onto their feet, only sitting down upon the teacher’s nod of approval.
“Class, we have a new student with us this year. Transferred all the way from Seoul. Introduce yourself.”
He wasn’t sure why speaking suddenly became such an endeavor. Why he desperately wanted to dig a hole in the ground and bury himself there for the remainder of the day.
“Jeon Jungkook,” he finally mustered, bowing politely to his new clan.
“Thank you, Jungkook. Please sit down in that empty seat.” She gestured towards a vacant desk smack in the middle of the room, inciting within him another serious bout of nerves and nausea. Be cool , he thought to himself as he wiggled his way down the aisle, avoiding any eye contact with the curious onlookers, eventually settling into his seat with a casual plop. The teacher had already made her way to the podium, opening her book to jump start into another year of lessons.
It was as Jungkook fumbled with his backpack, searching for his own textbook and pencil case that he felt a particularly piercing set of eyes upon him. And sure enough, as he whipped his head to the right, he could see a boy smiling in his direction. The same boy who moments earlier had asked everyone to stand at attention.
“Hi?” Jungkook mumbled.
“Hi!” The boy replied cheerfully, a grin still plastered onto his face.
He didn’t know what else to say, and what more the boy could’ve wanted from him. So with a curt nod he turned to the front of the room once more, eyes honing in on the teacher who had begun scribbling on the chalkboard.
“I’m Jimin,” the boy whispered, albeit loudly.
Pursing his lips, Jungkook merely nodded in response, hoping that Jimin would get the hint; that he wasn’t the talkative type, and he had no intentions of changing that.
---
His first friend at school had a heavy Daegu accent. And although there wasn’t a terribly huge difference between the Busan and Daegu dialect, it helped this particular classmate to stand out in the crowd a little more than the rest. He too had moved to Busan just last year, on the cusp of middle school and high school.
He sat to Jungkook’s immediate left. Like Jungkook he enjoyed listening to music through his giant headphones before class. It was one morning, perhaps a week into the start of the semester, that his music was playing particularly loud, so much so that Jungkook could hear the pounding bass and instrumentals of an artist he was quite fond of. So with a tap of the shoulder and an innocent question, the two began chatting animatedly about said artist, quickly becoming quite acquainted. “I’m Min Yoongi. Nice to meet you.” Thus ensued eating lunch together everyday on school grounds, devolving into lengthy discussions surrounding music, oftentimes spiraling into nonsense and raucous laughter.
Jungkook loved to doodle in class. It was a bad habit he’d developed in elementary school that he just couldn’t kick. His mother would groan upon seeing his notebooks and textbooks lined with silly drawings. “Aren’t you paying attention?” She’d snap at him indignantly. To which he responded, “Yes, mom. It actually helps me focus.” A blatant lie.
It was the first class of the morning; literature. The teacher was holding an open discussion concerning a piece they had just read, a translation of the classic Hamlet, to which Jungkook had little to no interest. And yet the student to his right, the one who had a knack for staring, was perhaps the most active participant, his hand shooting up every couple minutes to answer another question with triumph. “Good job, Jimin,” the teacher would respond. It seemed that the boy thrived off of these compliments and only grew stronger and more powerful with each one.
Jungkook found himself feeling a mild annoyance to this, but he couldn’t deny that Jimin was exceptionally intelligent, hard working, and fully deserving of the class president title. A small part of him wondered how far he could go in life if only he put forth half the effort Jimin did. But with a furtive chuckle and the shake of the head, Jungkook knew that would never become his reality.
And it wasn’t that Jimin was blind to Jungkook’s ceaseless doodling. In fact in between answering questions and receiving praises, Jimin often leaned over to take a look for himself, observing in piqued curiosity, never once scolding him.
“What,” Jungkook mumbled, sensing Jimin was once again peering at his paper.
“What is that?”
“A bunny,” Jungkook replied curtly before shielding his artwork with his hand.
“Cute,” Jimin mumbled.
“Huh?”
“The drawing, not you,” he chuckled before straightening himself up.
---
Every month the entire school underwent an intensive deep cleaning; scrubbing the floors, dusting the courtyard, tidying the bathrooms. Cleaning duties rotated by year; this month, it was the second years. A third of Jungkook’s class was assigned to the hallway, whilst the other two-thirds to their own classroom.
They sectioned off the hallway into five parts, split amongst other classrooms occupying the same hall. Students that Jungkook saw in occasion, in passing but never got the chance to say hello to.
Yoongi and Jungkook stuck to their corner of the hallway, first sweeping up any dust before readying the mop and bucket. As tedious as the task itself was, Jungkook found it to be quite entertaining in Yoongi’s company, his friend frequently making sarcastic comments, causing the two to burst into fits of giggles.
There was a great deal of commotion happening at the other end of the hall, a familiar voice in particular rising over the madness. Squinting to get a better look, he saw that it was in fact Park Jimin himself, broom in one hand and the other arm wrapped around another boy in headlock. “Say sorry!” Jimin bellowed, stifling a laugh.
“NEVER!” The other boy protested amidst his struggle. With one strong tug he escaped from Jimin’s grasp, then proceeded to grab a nearby broom and whack the boy on the back in revenge.
“Who is that?” Jungkook asked.
“Kim Taehyung. He’s Jimin’s best friend, in classroom #7.”
“I see.”
He wanted to look away from the scene unfolding before his eyes, but he simply couldn’t. He watched as Jimin climbed back up from the ground and tackled Taehyung once more, nearly knocking over the bucket of water behind the two.
“Watch it!” A fellow classmate cried to no avail.
“For someone so smart, he sure is an idiot,” Jungkook mumbled.