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In a world where time is, quite literally, money, the digital numbers displayed on your forearm demonstrate both how much time you have left in your lifespan, and how much money you have.
At twenty five, humans stop aging; at twenty five, your clock starts ticking, with one year of life left.
That is, unless you can make more money (time).
In this world, time is money, and money is time. Goods are purchased and sold, not with paper bills, but with the time left remaining on your clock. The wealthy, in this world, can live forever.
This is a story about two boys.
It’s a love story.
Well. It depends on who you ask.
Most of the world would likely call it a horror story, racked with violence and bloodshed and a terror wrought on the highest, most deplorable level.
But to the two people at the subject of this story, well. It’s a love story. Their love story.
Kim Taehyung is born to a single mother in the poorest, most crime-infested neighborhood at the fringes of society. Since the day he turned twenty five, he’s rarely had more than a day left on his clock, punching in and out of his dead-end job in a smoke-riddled factory to live - not paycheck to paycheck, but from day to day.
Around these parts, that’s normal. It’s a rare day if you meet someone who has more than a day remaining on their clock, and there’s always a frantic, manic sort of rush to people’s movements, around here.
But Taehyung is only all too aware that on the other side of the coin - past the walls separating the ghettoes from the glittering world of the rich - in Seoul, people have enough time to be immortal.
In this world, the phrase genetic lottery takes on a whole new definition, if you catch the drift.
At twenty six, Taehyung finds himself the sudden owner of a whopping 218 years, courtesy of a desperate and suicidal old man he’d had the random coincidence of helping. It’s more than he ever expected to live, in his entire life, but the only thing he can think of in that moment is—
—his mom.
His mom, who’d been trapped under the near-fatal debt left behind by the deadbeat man Taehyung will never refer to as his father. His mother, who’d worked her fingers to the bone tirelessly seven days a week, to manage to have just enough time to spare to afford the bus fare between their home and her workplace.
His mom, who deserves the time more than anyone.
But here’s the thing, about living hour to hour, out in these parts.
All it takes, is something as trivial as the bus fare being raised from sixty minutes to ninety, for your time to be called.
Something as trivial as a half hour, and suddenly, the mother you’d adored as the sun and the sky and the only person who mattered, could be gone.
For thirty fucking minutes.
Taehyung cradles his mother’s body still and lifeless body with the same arm that blinks with 218 years; and feels something crack inside of him, resentful and angry and poisonous.
Taehyung sees him from across the grand ballroom, at the stuff party of some nameless millionaire.
It’s impossible to miss.
The boy is dressed in all the same finery and jewels and glamour as the rest of the immortally wealthy around him, but there’s a distinct lack of bullshit in his features that makes Taehyung pause and take a second look.
And then a third, and a fourth.
On the fifth glance, he finds a pair of bright, doe eyes staring back.
Rimmed with kohl, blazing with a vivacity that stands out among the sea of dead, bored eyes.
The stare holds, until the boy is called by another gentleman in a sharp suit. And as he turns away, he looks over his shoulder, eyes gaze lingering on Taehyung where he continues to stare back.
He wins the boy’s name in a game of high stakes poker.
Well.
He wins his attention, first, from across the poker table, where the boy is sat beside his father; a time-loaning businessman with nearly an eternity on his clock.
His father drones on and on about how the distribution of time across the classes is simply the inevitable result of evolution; Taehyung thinks of his mother, dying in her arms for the lack of thirty minutes, and that broken thing inside of him cracks a little more.
He cares little, he finds, whether he lives or dies.
All he wants, is to make these arrogant, privileged bastards pay.
So when the man raises him two centuries, Taehyung calls.
He places his arm on the bet machine, and it sucks up all the time he has remaining on his arm, leaving just twenty four seconds left.
The table falls into stunned silence.
But the only thing Taehyung has eyes for, is the kohl-rimmed, doe gaze sitting across from him. The ones that stare back at him, wide and shock and riddled with something a lot like…admiration.
With that spark of life, again.
They turn the cards.
The businessman holds a trips, queens.
Taehyung has played a straight.
And then, with hardly four seconds left on the clock, Taehyung calmly, and slowly, places his arm over the machine.
The numbers spin up, up, until there’s a millennia sitting emblazoned across his forearm.
The beautiful boy’s - Jungkook’s - lips curve into a small, barely perceptible smile.
Sometimes, when two people meet, it’s simply two people with different - but stable - personalities that simply interact.
Sometimes, it’s like two fires meeting, and merging into a larger, bigger fire that burns down entire forests and empires.
Sometimes, though.
Sometimes, it’s unexpected.
Sometimes, it’s two chemicals, perfectly harmless and stable on their own. But when they meet, they’re…an explosive catalyst, for one another.
Into something like a disastrous, raging inferno that no one could have ever predicted.
When Jungkook meets Taehyung, it’s a thousand times worse (better) than that.
It’s a heart-stopping, cataclysmic collision; enough to burn out stars and galaxies both. Certainly, enough to make Jungkook feel as though he’s been born again.
Better, this time.
Like he’s actually alive.
"So," Jungkook looks up when a deep, rumbling drawl of a voice sends a shiver down his spine.
Right into those eyes that he’d been subconsciously searching for, all throughout the party; ever since they’d calmly stared death and his father both in the face, with nothing but an insouciant little smirk.
When the man speaks, it feels like a spark of electricity, running down his spine. "Are you someone’s great-grandfather, a son, a husband…?" That smirk widens into something lurid. "The wealthy man’s gigolo, perhaps?"
It’s difficult to tell, when everyone looks not a day over 25.
Jungkook, heart hammering and feigning a nonchalance he doesn’t possess, lifts his chin. "I’m his son."
He chooses not to mention that he’d only turned twenty five last week; that his clock has only been running for six days, now. But judging by the little amused edge to the man’s smirk, he seems to be all too aware.
"Jungkook, right?"
Jungkook’s blood races at the sound of the man’s voice, rolling over his name. "And yours?"
Taehyung smiles.
"Taehyung."
The rest, as they say…was disaster.
The best (worst) kind.
Jungkook’s shriek of delight gets cut off by the roar of the engine and the howl of the wind as the car barrels down the chaotic street. His right hand is pressed up against the ceiling, the other clutching at Taehyung’s hand, as Taehyung maneuvers the sports car with his free one.
They share a manic grin.
"Faster, baby?" Taehyung asks.
If Jungkook asked, he’d even go so fast as to burn everything down; the rubber, the road, and the entire world in between.
Jungkook makes his heart beat, and his blood pump through his veins, in a way that he hasn’t felt in a long time. Makes him want to burn the entire world down, but no longer out of mere vengeance, but out of devotion.
"Fuck yeah," Jungkook laughs.
Taehyung, one hand gripping the steering wheel, reaches in to pull Jungkook’s jaw in for a rough, messy kiss, full of clashing tongues and teeth and a wild mania. They break apart when Jungkook squeals, the car swerving dangerously before Taehyung regains control of it.
Jungkook laughs again, pumped full of adrenaline.
Taehyung holds his gaze, smiles, and presses harder on the gas pedal.
Jungkook’s whoop of euphoria makes Taehyung laugh in tandem.
They rob Jungkook’s father, first.
Jungkook is the apple of his father’s eye (a little bird in a gilded cage), and he never sees it coming. So much so, that they make it all the way to his top floor office with his private vault, without even raising a single alarm.
Jungkook is the one to hold the gun to his father’s head, as Taehyung enters the combination.
"Jungkook," his father hisses. "Come to your senses, boy-"
"He’s not your boy," Taehyung interrupts, smooth and unhurried. (They have all the time they need now, after all. Eternities of it.) "Not anymore."
He steps out of the vault, the time capsule containing several millennia tucked securely under his arm. He rejoins Jungkook where he presses the gun into his own father’s neck, beautiful eyes glowing with a euphoric thrill.
His boy likes it, Taehyung can tell; the adrenaline rush. Taehyung wraps his arm around Jungkook’s waist, and nuzzles his temple. Jungkook leans into it with a sigh. "Aren’t you, darling?"
Jungkook grins.
It matches Taehyung’s perfectly; razor sharp edge, for razor sharp edge. All teeth. "No," he agrees. "‘m yours now," he says, sweetly and not at all concerned with the growing fury on his father’s face.
His smile turns a tad wild. "And you’re mine."
"Yes," Taehyung murmurs, wrapping his hand around Jungkook’s where it holds the gun. He moves their hands to point the gun at the entrance, where Jungkook’s father’s guard stands with his own weapon raised.
Together, they pull the trigger with a kiss.
"Now what?" Jungkook asks, straddling Taehyung’s lap in the parked car in the middle of nowhere in particular.
Their arms glow with the bright-green of millions.
Eons.
Taehyung brings him in for another kiss, trailing his tongue along Jungkook’s lip and huffing a laugh when Jungkook bites down and tugs on his lip. "Whatever you want, baby. We have all the time we need."
Jungkook pulls back, gorgeous and disheveled, like a tempest. "Did you know," Jungkook says conversationally.
"Know what?"
Jungkook’s smile gleams like a wicked lure in the dark. "There are bigger banks."
There’s a game that people (thugs) play, around these parts; like arm wrestling, but with time. Lock your forearms with another person’s, and see who can twist the other’s arm below their own - and for how long.
Pin the other person’s arm below yours for long enough, and you just might drain them of all their time.
That’s what happens, when some old acquaintances of Taehyung’s comes to hunt them down, in the shabby little hotel room they’ve holed themselves up in. Jungkook had wanted to see the other side, and Taehyung’s grown a little too weak to his pretty pout and wicked smile to deny him a thing.
The boy’s only grown more willful since running off from his father’s side, though Taehyung supposes he’s played his part in corrupting him.
So when Kwon saunters in, his customary two henchmen armed and violent, and pins the barrel of a gun to his boy’s head, well.
Taehyung can’t help the bloodlust that simmers, low and delicious in his gut.
He lets Kwon think he’s winning; down, down, until he’s down to his last minute. He shares a dark glance with Jungkook, who, from the chair he’s pinned down on, stares back with a visceral sort of savagery in his own gaze.
His boy wants to play.
Jungkook doesn’t take lightly, after all, to thuggish men trailing their dirty hands along his jaw and telling Taehyung they’ll take good care of him when Taehyung is dead.
Taehyung grips Kwon’s arm, and twists.
Kwon’s face freezes in disbelief as Taehyung pins his arm beneath his, and begins to drain his time.
The man holding the gun to Jungkook’s head begins to shift, but Jungkook is faster. (He always is, Taehyung’s boy.) He snatches the gun right out of the thug’s hand, and blows a bullet in his brains before the man can so much as grunt.
In the meantime, Taehyung’s managed to grab the gun on the table and shoot a round into the remaining thug’s chest.
Jungkook steps lightly over the bodies to get to Taehyung where he sits, still holding Kwon’s arm underneath his. The numbers continue to run on both arms.
Taehyung, still pinning Kwon’s struggling arm underneath his, turns sideways in his chair. Jungkook swings a leg over, straddling Taehyung’s lap as Taehyung’s arm comes up to secure his waist. Jungkook leans his forehead against Taehyung’s and gazes through lidded eyes at Kwon.
Kwon’s arm blazes with the depleted time, down to his last three hours.
"Taehyung," Jungkook drawls. "I think we should leave him some time."
Taehyung’s lips split in a grin. "Yeah, sweetheart?"
Jungkook hums, and kisses him. "Yeah," he says. He grins, savage and unrepentant. "He said he was gonna play with me," he hums. "So we should play."
Taehyung releases Kwon’s arm when it’s down to the last hour.
Kwon stumbles back in his chair with a wild gasp, clutching his arm to his chest, eyes roving the room for a chance of escape. But the only guns are in Jungkook and Taehyung’s hands.
Taehyung raises his gun in between them, a devious little smirk on his lips. "You want to play, baby?"
Jungkook, eyes locked on Taehyung’s, parts his lips and trails his tongue slowly, languidly, along the barrel of Taehyung’s gun. The taste of cold steel hits his tongue, and the corners of his lips quirk upwards.
Taehyung’s blood pounds for this boy.
"Mm," Jungkook hums. He plucks the gun from Taehyung’s hand and he lets him.
Taehyung sits back in his chair with a wicked smile, and watches as Jungkook saunters towards Kwon, a gun dangling from each hand.
What a beautiful, beautiful terror.
The two of them spend most of their time hitting banks and corporations with Jungkook’s inside information and Taehyung’s clever smarts, a growing arsenal of firearms and violence and bloodlust between them.
They distribute much of it to the ghettoes and the poor, given that they have more time than they know what to do with.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t keep some for themselves.
Taehyung, after all, loves to see his darling dressed in gold and emeralds and silks and laces.
Jungkook loves it when he’s draped in jewels - not the ones he’d had in his old life, the ones purchased with time at department stores and jewelers; that’s boring. No, he likes the ones Taehyung pulls from the necks of sobbing, hysterical wealthy people who are being robbed, swiped from vaults and safes and deposit boxes, occasionally splattered with blood.
He likes the ones that Taehyung drapes lovingly, carefully on him, but only after he’s undressed Jungkook with teasing hands, so that Jungkook is wearing nothing but the jewel collection Taehyung had personally curated for him, one piece at a time.
He likes the one Taehyung picks out for him as they dress up to attend another grand, lavish party among the upper crust, so they can scope out new targets. Likes it when he puts on something sleek and sexy and often times revealing, so that Taehyung’s hand lingers when he drapes Jungkook in a string of diamonds and pearls.
Jewelry had never felt so romantic, as when Taehyung goes out of his way to put a bullet in someone’s head for it, all so he could slip the ring from the limp hand and place it on Jungkook’s.
With Taehyung, Jungkook feels alive.
They spend their time in outrageously expensive hotels and casinos and back-alley rundown motels. Sometimes they chug thousand-dollar champagne and nibble on caviar in between fucking on silk sheets with a grand view of the sprawling metropolis; and other times they slum it with pizza and beer in shitty motels with yellowing walls and make love with grease-stained fingers.
It doesn’t really matter where they are, to Jungkook.
Anywhere with Taehyung makes his heart stop and start, makes him feel like he’s about a breath away from combusting into one of those bright-spinning stars in the night sky. Anywhere Taehyung trails his fingers along Jungkook’s skin, makes it feel like it’s bursting with heat and fire and electricity, makes Jungkook feel like his heart is being jolted to life with an electric spark.
It’s love.
It’s love, somewhere in this euphoric, adrenaline-filled haze of hitting banks and parties and vaults and sometimes, run-down gas stations just because they’re bored and wanted something to put a bullet in.
It’s love, when Taehyung presses kisses on every inch of Jungkook’s face as he squeals with giggles, all the while draping string after string of diamonds all around his neck already laden with emeralds and rubies.
It’s love, when the one time they’re a little too careless with their time and have to kill a timekeeper to steal the time left in his car because they’re both only down to a minute, Taehyung tries to shove his remaining sixty seconds onto Jungkook’s arm so that Jungkook can make it to the vehicle.
It’s love, when Jungkook shoves Taehyung to the car instead.
It’s definitely love, when Taehyung runs faster than he’s ever run in his life - in the ghettoes, being chased down by thugs for his very life, and in the glitzy streets of Seoul, from the endless parade of cops that can’t ever seem to catch them - to get to Jungkook, both their arms outstretched.
When their hands meet at the last ticking second on Jungkook’s clock, for a moment, Taehyung sees his mother.
Sees that moment, when he’d seen the light seep from her eyes in his lap.
But this time, is different.
This time, Taehyung had been fast enough.
He clutches Jungkook to his chest, both of them trembling, his arm sharing his minutes with Jungkook, his heart pounding painfully in his chest. With a shaking hand, Taehyung brushes the hair from Jungkook’s face, and looks into the one and only thing he fears losing, anymore.
Jungkook smiles.
Taehyung kisses him.
All over the world, news stations broadcast the handsome faces of two young men: one from the poor, slum neighborhoods at the dregs of society; the other, born with a golden spoon in his mouth, a blue-blooded socialite.
The two of them have stolen an eternity from the wealthy and wreaked havoc on the system.
Every cop in the country are out patrolling the streets for them; even thugs and civilians, too, given the sinfully large bounty on their heads. Dead or alive.
But the two men in question are standing - one in a dashing suit, the other in a pair of leather pants too tight to leave anything to the imagination - outside a massive, sprawling marble building.
Jungkook turns to face Taehyung, twirling his gun playfully in his hand. "I told you there were bigger banks."
Taehyung smiles. "So smart," he croons. "What would you have done if you never met me and turned to your calling life of crime?"
Jungkook shrugs, but steps closer, until their noses nudge together.
"Dunno. Waited for some gross old man to come pick me up as his gigolo, maybe."
Taehyung laughs. Pulls him in by the waist, until their lips crash together, and it’s like gasoline on a fire.
They break apart, and walk up the steps to the massive bank, hand in hand.