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It had been months since that night. Taehyung never spoke to Jungkook again about it. Their interactions slipped back into the professional: nods in rehearsal, lines exchanged in the studio, nothing more.
But Jungkook noticed. He noticed Taehyung leaning into Jimin again, laughing with him, letting himself be comforted. He noticed him drifting through museums with Namjoon, the way he used to when they were still just boys. Taehyung was reaching out, and Jungkook was relieved. He had people. People who were holding him when Jungkook no longer could.
One evening, after practice, Jungkook was zipping his bag when he heard it.
“Koo.”
The name stopped him cold. The name he hadn’t heard in years, the name Taehyung hadn’t used for him since everything broke.
He looked up, startled. Taehyung stood there, a diary and a USB drive in his hands. He didn’t meet Jungkook’s eyes.
“This is what he read,” Taehyung said softly. “This is what made him think I was with you. The diary. The video. I just… I want you to know you weren’t the cause. It was my thoughts. Just mine. My therapist suggested I give this to you. So I am.”
Jungkook nodded, unable to speak. He took them gently, slid them into his bag. By the time he looked up, Taehyung was already walking toward the door, toward Jimin waiting in the hallway.
At home, Jungkook set the diary and USB on the table. He stared at them for what felt like hours, as if they might vanish if he blinked. As if opening them would split him open.
Finally, with trembling hands, he opened the diary.
The first line stopped him cold.
“You were sixteen when you cried into my hoodie backstage. I thought my chest would split open just holding you.”
And suddenly Jungkook was there again — in that tiny greenroom, shaking from exhaustion, voice cracking as he pressed his face into Taehyung’s shoulder. He remembered the steady hand rubbing circles on his back, the warmth that had steadied him.
Another entry:
“The night you burned with fever, I couldn’t move from your bedside. My feet refused to carry me away from you.”
Jungkook saw the tour hotel room again — sweat plastering his hair to his forehead, his body shivering under blankets. He remembered waking to Taehyung’s hand on his wrist, checking his pulse, the soft voice whispering, I’m here, Koo. Just sleep.
Another page:
“No one else looks at me like I’m worth saving. Not even myself.”
Jungkook remembered the empty practice room mirror, the way he’d torn himself apart after a mistake. The reflection of Taehyung’s eyes behind him, steady, unflinching, as if Jungkook wasn’t broken at all.
Page after page. Moments Jungkook had forgotten, but Taehyung had carried — written down like prayers. His hands shook so badly the paper crumpled beneath his fingers. His chest tightened, a vise closing in until he couldn’t breathe. This was love — unguarded, unashamed, unconditional — and he had shattered it with one reckless mistake.
Tears blurred the ink, fell onto the margins. His breath came in ragged bursts, his whole body folding in on itself.
Still shaking, he reached for the USB. Slid it into his laptop.
A voice, raw and unguarded, filled the room. Taehyung’s voice.
“I’m going under and this time I fear there’s no one to save me…”
The first line struck like a knife. Jungkook’s mind flashed back to that bruise on Taehyung’s jaw, to the hollow laugh he carried for weeks.
“I need somebody to heal, somebody to know, somebody to have, somebody to hold…”
Jungkook saw Taehyung’s arms around Jimin, the safety he used to find only with him. He remembered the nights Taehyung curled against him in sleep, the warmth he hadn’t cherished enough.
“I let my guard down, and you pulled the rug…”
His body convulsed with sobs. He saw again the bed, the lipstick-stained shirt he’d shoved under the pillows, Taehyung’s wide, stricken eyes when he had found it.
“I was getting kinda used to being someone you loved.”
Jungkook broke. He pressed a fist to his mouth to stifle the sounds tearing out of him, but it was useless. He cried until he collapsed sideways onto the floor, the diary clutched to his chest like a lifeline.
This wasn’t a love song. It was a requiem. A gravestone carved into melody and paper.
Taehyung had handed him not hope, but finality. Proof of love that still lived, but no longer belonged to him.
Jungkook cried himself into a broken sleep on the floor, the words echoing in his head long after the song ended:
You were somebody he loved. And you destroyed it.