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jungkook can’t really tell if the world ends, or is just beginning, when he almost gets splashed with scalding hot coffee.
and it’s a very close ‘almost.’
the only thing that saves him is someone in line behind him grabbing him by the back of his hoodie and pulling him back out of the way when the drink he’s reaching out to grab hits the counter with a loud, ominous thud and then tilts forward to spill out in his direction.
the stranger is the only thing that keeps jungkook from getting scalded, because in the second before the cup falls, jungkook locks eyes with the person handing it off to him, and he thinks to himself later on - sitting in the library, sniffing guiltily at the stale scent of coffee that’s soaked into his sleeve - that he could have found himself facing down an oncoming train, right then, and he still wouldn’t have been able to make himself take a step back.
it’s getting to the deepest, darkest point of one of the longest weeks of jungkook’s life, honestly, and jungkook has crawled so far into the tunnel that he’s not sure even coffee can be a bright light in the doom and gloom of general existence right now, but it’s his last ditch attempt to recover the path back to happiness, and taehyung has been going on and on about this ‘GUSH’ place for so long now that jungkook thinks it’ll make him happy even just to be able to tell taehyung that one of them has finally, at long last, finally made it inside before jungkook is snatched from this life by the jaws of impending academic doom.
the line is long, which doesn’t surprise jungkook given the buzz that surrounds the place on instagram, but it moves really really quickly, which he’s not entirely sure isn’t actually just his brain checking out for huge chunks of time while he’s waiting to get to the counter.
he doesn’t even really remember ordering, but it’s probably a good thing because he only has one coffee order and this way he’ll be able to give taehyung a fair assessment of it, assuming jungkook ever actually makes it out of this coffee shop and home again, because he’s honestly on the fence about whether he’s even still technically alive as he stands (he hopes) and waits at the pick up counter for his drink.
normally, watching baristas make coffee is jungkook’s very favorite part of the whole experience, even if he’s very careful to observe in a very laid back but also supportive and encouraging way, but he’s barely aware of the bodies moving around one another behind the counter as he waits. he’s been awake for days now and everything in his field of vision feels kind of like being at an aquarium and standing in front of a tank that’s dark and full of things that only actually become properly visible to jungkook when they swim up almost nose to nose with the glass.
except when the barista steps up to the pick up counter and finally comes fully into view to hand off jungkook’s drink, jungkook is the one that makes the dolphin noise.
because the barista is wearing a backwards snapback. and they've got ash blond hair pulled back underneath it, the buzzed sides of the haircut clearly visible. and that alone would be enough to get jungkook’s breath locked up in his chest like someone has just stuck a key in him and turned it to confine in him something that feels too big to fit within him.
but then jungkook’s eyes fall to the hand that’s holding his coffee out to him, the broad palm and the big knuckles and wide, neatly trimmed fingernails with very healthy looking nail beds. there are no rings on these fingers, but even as he registers this, jungkook finds himself thinking that maybe that’s because they’re clearly themselves meant to be worn as a necklace, instead.
and it’s the shock of that thought, the shock of finding himself having that thought so immediately, so viscerally, that makes jungkook’s eyes spring back up into the barista’s face, and it’s right then that the whole world explodes around them.
or, like. the barista drops the coffee. which in the wider scheme of things is fine, and happens all the time.
but to jungkook specifically, in that moment, it barely registers as an event at all and sees him having to depend on a total stranger who just happens to be behind him in line to pull him out of the way and to relative safety.
because jungkook just laid eyes on the prettiest face he’s ever seen in his life, and his feet are very firmly planted. he would grow roots right here on this spot, if he could.
whatever happens next is a total blur, for jungkook.
presumably for the barista he’s in love with now, too, because as he watches - feeling helpless, feeling very oddly frustrated and put upon to not be the person that is helping the barista away from the counter with gentle hands and soothing noises because the barista is just standing still and blinking and it really doesn’t seem like they are in any way okay - all jungkook really has a sense of is bafflingly strong longing.
a couple of people say something to him, and then someone pushes another cup of coffee into jungkook’s hand and only sighs when they have to physically curl his fingers around it to get him properly holding it.
when jungkook next blinks, he’s outside the coffee shop and he’s got a cookie now too that he doesn’t remember the source of or reason for, but all things considered, that is an incredibly minor detail in terms of all of the everything that has just unfolded.
☙
taehyung gives jungkook plenty of shit about being in love with someone he has never spoken to and doesn’t even know the name of, but probably not as much as jungkook actually deserves, because as taehyung knows well enough to point out - it’s a pretty jungkook-esque thing to do, to fall in love with someone like that.
it’s not like jungkook hasn’t dated before.
which isn’t to suggest that whatever that was with jaehyun wasn’t a horrible trainwreck, but sexuality and attraction and romantic appeal have always been a complicated sequence of equations for jungkook, who is tragically bad at math.
for a time, jungkook was pretty sure he didn’t experience physical attraction in a way that made him want to act on it, sexually. and then for a while he’d thought that he was romantically attracted to people, and he was physically attracted to a lot of people, even sexually attracted to some of those, but that the romantic and sexual parts of that didn’t really overlap for him. and he’s still not quite sure where his workings have landed him, on that one.
he’d been physically attracted to jaehyun, and the sexual side of things had generally been a worthwhile experience for jungkook. but he’d also felt - both in that relationship and outside of it - a crippling kind of loneliness that no amount of closeness to or time spent with jaehyun or anyone else could ever truly satisfy.
“you’re just a horny, needy little baby,” is taehyung’s assessment of jungkook. in whole. at large.
“you’re intense about literally everything you do, and it’s somehow even worse when it comes to the really messy shit in life, like sex and love and proving to yourself and the world that you can take anything on and win.”
somewhere in there, jungkook knows, taehyung has probably hidden a compliment. but he’s in front of his easel right now and there’s corresponding paint splotches criss crossing between his canvas, his skin, his clothes, his hair, and least two walls in this corner of the studio space. so jungkook knows well that whatever he gets out of taehyung while he’s like this, it’ll be true, but it probably won’t be pretty. it certainly won't be baby-proofed.
jungkook sighs, half in exasperation at himself and his terrible, mysterious-even-to-him ways, and half an exhalation of love for this hyung who saw jungkook on campus alone one more time than he could bear to handle and immediately accosted him with full and sometimes criminal intent to befriend him.
“right, hyung,” jungkook says, because nothing taehyung has just said about him is by any stretch of anyone’s imagination untrue. “but this time. with this person … it’s like those feelings i have are reversed? or on the outside, instead of the inside? i still feel them, but not from me. not for me?”
taehyung tilts his head at his painting, but jungkook knows he’s really tilting his head in consideration of what jungkook has said, because taehyung might always know exactly what he’s trying to make materialize through his art - even if he experiences varying levels of success with realizing that - but always knows exactly what he’s doing, whereas he’s not always quick or in fact able to follow along with jungkook’s logic, at times.
“you feel it … for this nameless but allegedly god-like barista?”
“exactly!” jungkook says, swinging his feet where he’s sitting up on a desk, ostensibly to keep taehyung company while he knocks out the last piece of this project, but in reality because it means taehyung is a captive audience for all the cool new music jungkook has discovered this week and has a burning desire to share with someone. “i’m not lonely simply as a means of existence anymore. it’s specific. it’s specific to this person. i’m lonely for them. except like … more lonely than i was before. lonely like a feral thing that has never known the touch of kindness except if that touch was specifically this barista's mouth on my mouth and i could know somehow that it would solve all of my problems.”
“yeah,” taehyung says, stepping back up to his easel and lifting his paintbrush, “this sounds exactly like something you’d find yourself grappling with, honestly. just regular tuesday afternoon stuff for you, ‘guk.”
“hyung,” jungkook says, as gently as he can. “it’s friday.”
“‘guk,” taehyung says without turning around, and not gently - like - at all. “you only have two days to get your shit together for your tech development final.”
and just like that, jungkook forgets all about baristas and explorations of attraction and romance and love and lust and literally everything else.
☙
for twelve hours, that is.
or.
well.
twelve minutes, maybe.
he punches taehyung gently in both butt cheeks in fond farewell and then scurries back to the library, where he lives now. honestly that couldn’t be any worse than sharing a suite with his roommate, even if he had to sleep on the floor. just the thought of how many people walk across the library floor with their dirty outside shoes on makes jungkook shudder. but still, preferable to his actual living arrangements.
plus he has become a pro at making his study space comfortable after three semesters here, this being his fourth. he’d spend the first two semesters longing for the security and homely familiarity of hagwon and having a permanent space that was his for the whole year, but he hadn’t let that make him slow to assemble a portable comfort pack and just get the fuck on with it.
he unrolls his thinking cushion and sets it in the first free seat in a relatively quiet spot that he can find. and then he sets out his study supplies in the exact order and placement that most settles him.
and from there, it’s a straight descent into madness.
when jungkook finds himself present in his own body and aware of that again, he’s standing in front of a shelf full of books that definitely aren’t for any classes he’s taking. he’s disappointed but not surprised to find, when he checks his phone, that somehow time has worked its way back around into morning again, and it is now the next day.
from the small mountains of notecards and heaving piles of notepaper that span across jungkook’s workspace, he knows that he has worked all night. and yet, he doesn’t feel like he actually knows any more of what he needs to pass this exam, or has in any other way managed to spend this vital time at all productively.
and so it’s thinking that he’s going to fail this exam so badly that they kick him out of school - even though the rest of his grades are okay - just on the basis of the fact that he is an embarrassment to them as an institution, that jungkook decides all he can really do in this situation is go back to GUSH, because if this is his last semester on campus then he has to get in as many sightings of the love of his life as he can, before he has to leave them behind forever, alongside all of jungkook’s academic hopes and professional aspirations.
on his way there, he very narrowly manages to avoid getting shit on by a bird, and for a second he’s honestly starting to think that his luck is changing. and then he remembers that having a bird poop on you is actually supposed to be considered good luck. and yeah, narrowly avoiding some good luck definitely sounds about par for the course that jungkook currently finds himself on.
by the time jungkook is pushing through the doors of GUSH, he hasn’t even got his wits about himself enough to register that not only is there no insane line this time, but actually there’s no line at all. there’s plenty of people sitting down inside, and it’s nice enough out that the patio seating out front is pretty busy too, but jungkook is able to walk right up to the counter, towards the person who is standing there doodling something on a little pad of paper next to the register. they look up when jungkook walks in and strangely, break out into a huge grin immediately and then turn to shout something over their shoulder.
it’s only when jungkook actually gets to the counter that he realizes that the other person who is behind the counter - but has until now been hidden from jungkook’s view tucked away at the coffee machine, which is sheltered from the front on view by the display cases on either side of the register - is the love of his life.
the first glimpse jungkook gets of them is them leaning back against the counter, looking at their phone with their ankles crossed and an incredibly focused expression on their face. they’re wearing flannel today, and jeans that fit them really really well. and then when the person at the counter yells at them, they fumble their phone and it goes skittering across the floor. they bend down to retrieve it, and jungkook can see right down the neckline of the loose tank they’re wearing under their flannel and oh, okay, jungkook is bursting into tears.
and that’s embarrassing, sure, if not entirely unexpected, because it’s not like jungkook hasn’t cried roughly six times a day every day for the past week. sometimes even in front of other people. but this time, instead of getting a look of vaguely disconcerted concern or mild annoyance, both the terrifyingly attractive person at the register and the love of jungkook’s life look at him like their hearts are broken by the sight of him in tears.
“are you okay?” the love of jungkook’s life asks him - speaking to him directly - and no!!! jungkook is not okay!
“yeah,” he says anyway, because what else can he say? ‘no i’m not okay i’m in love with you and i need you to hold me until i feel better?’ sounds like a great way to start competing with taehyung for most visits to the local police station.
“i’m - ” jungkook is going to say that he’s fine, even though he absolutely isn’t, but when he starts to wipe at his wet eyes, the love of his life actually holds a hand out like he means to touch jungkook, only to jerk said hands back and reach for some tissues instead. sucks, because for a second there jungkook thought maybe he was going to have his tears lovingly wiped away by the only person he’s known real and true romantic feelings for, but before he can cry harder about the loss of that particular dream of his, he’s being gestured down the counter until he reaches a set of waist high swinging doors that separate the boundaries of the store and behind the counter. he doesn’t know what’s expected of him, or why he’s here, and then he’s being held very gently with a hand cupped up under his elbow and led through the doors, led further down a short little corridor until a little space just seems to open up out of a random stretch of wall.
before jungkook and the love of his life disappear around the corner, out of view of the space behind the counter, jungkook glances back just in time to see the person at the register hold up a pad of paper across which he has scrawled ‘if u let him hold ur hand i will pay u ₩50,000!!!!! :D’
which is … a lot.
jungkook blinks, and finds himself sitting at a table facing … well, his soulmate.
jungkook’s soulmate sits across from jungkook and puts both hands on the table, to ask jungkook what’s wrong.
jungkook doesn’t know how to explain that currently what’s wrong is that he’s wondering if this person has a hand holding fetish, and can’t comprehend the extent to which they really and truly seem to have been created just for jungkook; especially and specifically for him.
so he skips to problem #2 on his laundry list of them, and spills his guts about this final that’s looming on his horizon and threatening to end him.
and then jungkook’s soulmate laughs right in his face, but it’s somehow the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to jungkook actually? and then jungkook’s soulmate is saying something quick and bright in a rush and pulling out a phone and disappearing back into the body of the store. and then they come right back, honest to god grinning now, though it turns sheepish as they tell jungkook that just as jungkook has suspected right from the jump, everything about them is tailored precisely to jungkook’s wants and needs. jungkook’s soulmate is going to help jungkook study, and they are calling in reinforcements, and oh my god now they’re holding jungkook’s hand. it’s happening. it’s all happening!
when jungkook is already overwhelmed to the point of bursting right back into tears, he gets an actual introduction, on top of everything else.
“i’m namjoon, by the way. born in 94,” and oh no. oh fuck. the love of jungkook’s life is his hyung. that’s it. jungkook isn’t going to survive this. jungkook is one and done in romance. he’s so attracted to this person it’s actually going to kill him.
he mumbles a response, and then immediately sets about trying to talk namjoon out of what he’s trying to do, which is completely rearrange his whole day to help jungkook, and also offer up his friend in doing so.
but namjoon will hear none of it, and makes it seem like jungkook letting them help him will actually help them somehow too, and it’s not so much that that convinces jungkook as it is the fact that he simply doesn’t want to refuse anything that namjoon wants to give him.
they’re still holding hands by the time the cavalry arrives, and at this point jungkook probably would have been more surprised if a member of namjoon’s entourage showed up and wasn’t blisteringly hot, to be honest. this new person is wearing a snapback that might actually be the same snapback that namjoon had on the other day, when jungkook first met him slash fell for him instantly. and seeing it and connecting too many dots at once sends a shower of shivers down jungkook’s spine for sure, but he doesn’t have time for that right now. he’ll have a personal crisis about namjoon possibly being already in love with someone who is not jungkook after he’s had the academic crisis that had been previously scheduled for today.
yoongi introduces himself as jungkook’s hyung, and then they get to work.
the person who offered to pay jungkook to hold namjoon’s hand - even though it should definitely be the other way around - shows up periodically to bring them coffee and snacks, and introduces himself as jimin, also jungkook’s hyung. a while later, a sunshine bright boy bounces in and tosses a backpack at namjoon’s head while he grins at jungkook and introduces himself as hoseok while jimin is tying an apron around his hips for him. every single person who works here is not only stunningly attractive, but also so kind to jungkook that it’s very almost suspicious, but again - he hasn’t got time to look too closely at that, or think too much about it. they’re on the clock here.
and they really make the most of their time.
the three of them manage to get through so many of the problems that jungkook has been having, so quickly and easily now that jungkook is talking to people who understand both the way his brain works and how it needs to work in order for him to pass this exam.
by late afternoon, he’s caffeinated to the point that he’s capable of positive human emotion again, and he’s so grateful to these hyungs who over the course of a only few hours don’t feel at all like strangers to him anymore that he could burst into happy tears now, he’s pretty sure.
and then he finds out that yoongi is ‘agust d.’
and then he finds out that namjoon has produced for some of jungkook’s musical heroes. and also writes and performs his own music, too.
and just like that, jungkook’s minor problem has become a full blown Situation.
☙
“and then when i'd left, i found a ₩50,000 bill in my back pocket? that has to have been jimin hyung, but he never even touched me. i don’t understand?”
taehyung had pushed his sunglasses up onto his head as soon as jungkook had thrown himself at his feet. literally. he’d texted jungkook to meet him at the stretch of grass next to the gses building when jungkook was done with his exam, and upon spotting taehyung sitting under a tree with his back against the trunk of it, jungkook hadn’t been able to help himself or stay upright for a single second longer.
“so,” he’d begun, and then the whole story of the best day of his life had just come spilling out of jungkook. and now he’s lying there, starfished on the grass, staring up at the clouds and wondering what in the fuck he’s supposed to do now.
“so what you’re telling me,” taehyung says slowly, bringing his knees up so he can prop his elbows on them and steeple his fingers in front of his face, “is that you found a cool coffee shop with great coffee and snacks, that’s staffed entirely by incredibly and eccentrically attractive individuals, and they collectively not only housed, nourished, and educated you for a day completely unprovoked, but also held your hand and gave you money? and you’re in love with … only one of them?”
it’s confusing for jungkook, to see taehyung so confused. for all that most things he does and says and thinks confuse jungkook, at least at first, taehyung is very firm in his own very special understanding of things. all kinds of things. sometimes things that simply his understanding of makes terrifying for jungkook, honestly. but one thing jungkook has never seen is taehyung struggling to understand something, whether that’s in his own special way or not, so to see him puzzled kind of scares jungkook purely instinctually.
“is that - did i get it all? am i reading this right?”
jungkook sighs so deeply that it feels like maybe if he tried just a little harder, he might be able to sink right into the grass and get absorbed by the earth itself.
god, he wants to lie down on top of namjoon and have that happen to him.
he wants to be inside namjoon every single way it’s possible to be.
he wants to count namjoon’s teeth with his tongue. he wants to know what namjoon’s ear canal looks like. he wants to hold namjoon’s jaw in the cradle of his hands and get namjoon’s mouth open wide enough that he can say ‘hello’ to his tonsils. he wants to find out once and for all if bellybuttons are really a portal into a special sphere of someone’s being, the way taehyung says they are. he wants to do a whole lot of getting inside namjoon below the waist, but it feels rude to think about the particulars of that when the sun is still high in the sky. that stuff is just for jungkook and the conversations he has with the moon from the roof of his apartment building, when he’s really going through it and needs to address the planets about his problems.
“how do i solve a problem like being in love, hyung?” he asks, dreading the answer immediately and in sheer anticipation of whatever taehyung is about to say, because while neither jungkook nor god themselves could predict what that will be, they both know it’s going to knock someone flat on their ass.
“well, jungkook, there’s a very simple solution to that,” taehyung says, standing up and reaching for his bag and dropping his sunglasses back down onto the bridge of his nose. he holds a hand out for jungkook, and jungkook only takes it because he knows that literally any other course of action can only result in taehyung pulling his hair, and it’s not that jungkook isn’t into that anymore, it’s just that jungkook only wants namjoon to pull his hair, now.
“step one,” taehyung says, hauling jungkook to his feet and then … patting him down? for what exactly, jungkook isn’t sure, but this is hardly the strangest thing taehyung has done to him today, so he stands still and allows it. knowing taehyung, this is probably just his way of asking jungkook if he’s got gum.
“step one - reconnaissance.”
jungkook physically startles, because if there’s one thing jungkook has learned during the course of his friendship with taehyung - and honestly, there’s been thousands, and yet so few of them that he had actually willingly learned or wanted to - it’s that when taehyung starts talking in military terms, absolutely nothing good can come of anything that follows.
“right now, we’re going home so we can get you into bed to catch up on some of the rest you’ve skipped out on this week” and oh no. oh god. it’s worse than jungkook had imagined, if taehyung is actually trying to take care of him in traditional ways, instead of trying to ‘hack’ jungkook the way he usually does.
“tomorrow, we put step one into action. be at my place by eleven hundred hours, copy?”
and now jungkook is positively aghast, because nothing in his friendship with taehyung to date has suggested to him that taehyung knows that a time before midday exists.
“sleeves? no. sleeves will only hold us back,” taehyung is muttering to himself as he marches jungkook away, and jungkook doesn’t ask what he’s talking about, because he really, really doesn’t want to know.
“don’t worry, jungkook-ah,” taehyung says as he pats jungkook down again outside of his building now, and rounds it out with a hug that’s at least forty per cent butt grabbing. jungkook reciprocates, because jungkook is a considerate friend and taehyung has a really nice bouncy butt that he’s generous enough to let jungkook use as a stress ball sometimes.
“we’re going to get our men.”
and then he claps jungkook hard as fuck on the shoulder, and whirls around and walks away.
‘our’?
‘men’ plural?
yeah. okay.
jungkook is just glad his the one-two combination of having an exam almost kill him and meeting his purpose in life face to face has left him dead on his feet, because if he spent even a second longer thinking about what taehyung might mean, he’d be fit to spend the next twelve hours lying flat on his back staring up at the glow in the dark stars and planets on his ceiling and questioning literally everything, his outlook on all of it very reasonably grim.
as is, jungkook gets upstairs and shucks his bag and all his clothes off as soon as he’s behind closed doors.
he grabs a quick shower, during which he gets himself off in less than a minute by thinking about how the hand he has on his own cock has touched namjoon’s hand, and then he dries off and climbs into bed and falls asleep to his new favorite fantasy - waking up to namjoon wiping his morning breath-y mouth across jungkook’s cheek and asking jungkook to make him breakfast in bed.
tomorrow seems, all things considered, a long way away.
☙☙☙