Chapter Text
They’re trapped in between the pages of a worn notebook, the kind you use for everything and anything.
There are math equations in the margins and budding rhymes in the corners, fragments of Hoseok’s soul inked into the slightly crinkled paper. The silence of the bedroom is only broken by measured breaths, a beat he’d learned some time ago; partly to make the heaviness of his heart a bit more manageable, but mostly to keep up the imaginary walls that held others at a manageable distance.
Five in total, regular sized pictures–probably developed from one of the single-use cameras Jungkook had a habit of carrying around–there’s one of him and the photographer, posing with kissy faces. It makes the corners of his mouth rise a little. Another is of Hoseok sound asleep on the floor of the dingy dance practice room they frequented, his mouth wide open and his arms thrown haphazardly above his head. Two others of various friend groups from the early years of university.
It’s funny, he thinks, the Hoseok in the pictures is always wearing a bright smile. He idly wonders at what point it had begun losing its gleam. Was it when reality had shackled him to the grey cubicle, he calls work–or when he had realized that the grains of time had slipped through his fingers without him noticing?
It doesn’t really matter either way. It is what it is.
He picks up the fifth picture, this one a grainy polaroid. He can barely make out what it is supposed to be, and so he rises to go flick on the light, the sun slowly waning through the window of his childhood room. Looking over it for a moment, trying to piece together the bursts of colors, the blurry silhouette of a man in motion, his mind comes up blank. Maybe it’s one of Jungkook’s that got put there by accident, he reasons.
Gliding his finger over the glossy image, there’s a nicking feeling in the back of Hoseok’s mind. An itch under his fingertips, as if his hand remembers the event despite his mind’s failure to.
Hoseok shakes his head and lets it go. Mulling over stuff like that never leads you anywhere anyways. He’s about to put the polaroid back in between his younger self’s attempts at bars (He’s too embarrassed to read them) when a knock rips through the quiet, jolting him out of his thoughts.
He jumps up, the notebook and the pictures falling to the floor, and makes a beeline for the door to his old room. It’s his sister. She looks beyond tired, skin pale and smile in a tight line–Hoseok supposes he looks much the same if her concerned look is anything to go by. The exchange a few quick words, and he quickly hurries back to the fallen notebook afterwards, mind set on going to sleep.
As he picks up the photos, his eyes catch on the polaroid. It’s facing down and on the back in faded handwriting is the words, The Wallflower.