Work Text:
the morning sunlight cuts across the sheets, spilling over jungkook's bare shoulder where it peeks out from under the mess of blankets.
he’s still asleep.
breathing slow, lashes skimming his cheeks, mouth parted just slightly like he’s dreaming something good.
maybe about her.
maybe about nothing at all.
her fingers twitch at her side, wanting to reach out — to trace the shape of him just to make sure he’s real.
but she doesn’t.
she just watches instead.
outside the window, the city hums to life.
buses sigh at their stops.
someone yells two streets over.
somewhere, a dog barks, sharp and lonely.
but in here, it’s just him.
just jungkook, folded into the silence of her tiny rented apartment, tucked into her ribs like he belongs there.
some mornings are like this.
when the schedule lets him stay.
when the world forgets about him for long enough that he can be hers, just for a little while.
it’s selfish, maybe.
but she clings to these mornings with both hands.
jungkook shifts, groaning low under his breath, before his hand finds her waist under the blankets — warm, certain, still half-asleep.
he drags her closer like it’s second nature. like breathing.
“morning,” he murmurs, voice gravelly and wrecked with sleep.
he doesn’t open his eyes.
doesn’t need to.
her heart stutters anyway.
“morning,” she whispers back, softer than the light.
he hums, nose nudging into the curve of her neck like he’s trying to chase the cold away.
his hair is messy, flattened on one side, sticking up wildly on the other.
there’s a smudge of sleep still clinging to his features, loose and unguarded.
it hits her all over again — how he lets her see him like this.
how he wants her to.
later, when the real world claws him back — when the stylists fix his hair and the cameras find the perfect angles and the fans scream his name loud enough to drown out everything else —
he’ll be different.
still him, always him, but tucked behind a thousand polished versions of himself.
she’s never once asked him to be anything else.
but somehow, here, in the sticky morning air, in the way he holds her like he’s afraid she’ll slip away —
he’s the truest version.
“what time’s your flight?” she asks eventually, voice low, threading careful through the stillness.
he makes a noise that sounds suspiciously like a whine.
if she teased him about it later, he’d deny it with his whole chest.
“not till three,” he mumbles, squeezing her hip lightly. “plenty of time.”
he says it like they have forever.
like the clock ticking on the nightstand isn’t already eating away at the edges of their morning.
she lets herself believe him for now.
they stay like that, tangled up, breathing each other in like the world outside doesn’t exist.
like the city isn't waiting for him.
like he doesn’t belong to millions of other people too.
the coffee goes cold on the counter.
the messages pile up on his phone.
the sun climbs higher, flooding the room with a lazy, golden kind of warmth.
jungkook hums a song she doesn’t recognize under his breath — something sleepy, something half-made — while his fingers tap a quiet rhythm against her side.
“you’re writing again,” she says, not a question.
he peeks an eye open, a tiny smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“always.”
she smiles too, tucking her face into his chest.
this is the version of him most people don’t get to see.
not the jungkook with stage lights burning behind his eyes.
not the jungkook who tears through arenas like he was born for it.
but the jungkook who writes love songs in the spaces between, scribbled in notebooks with torn edges and bad handwriting.
the jungkook who makes pancakes at 2am because he can’t sleep.
the jungkook who traces her spine absentmindedly with his fingertips like he’s memorizing a map he’s afraid to lose.
the jungkook who loves, quietly and fiercely, when no one’s looking.
he kisses the top of her head — soft, fleeting — like a period at the end of a sentence he’s too tired to say out loud.
she squeezes her eyes shut, anchoring herself to the feeling.
because she knows.
they both know.
soon he’ll have to leave.
soon there will be planes and hotel rooms and oceanfuls of distance.
soon it’ll be video calls and text messages and sleeping on opposite sides of the world.
but for now —
for now it’s just him.
his heart under her ear, steady and real.
his arms around her, stubborn and sure.
his breath brushing her hair like a secret.
somewhere, quietly, they are building a life out of mornings like this.
and it’s enough.