Chapter Text
The moment Taehyung stepped out of his house, he knew he had forgotten something that he had already known and remembered this morning. Not that it didn’t feel that way every day.
‘Maybe if I walk back in and walk out the same way I’ll remember.’ he thought and turned around closing the door behind him.
___________
Whatever he had forgotten had bothered him the whole morning making him unable to concentrate on the main reason he was called out in a study group.
“Taehyung, I know it’s a weekend but you have to an exam next week, don’t you?” Jin says as he serves them coffee at their table. “Study while you have the time, I’m not giving you these seats in my cafe to be wasted when I have customers.”
“He said he can’t remember something he forgot.” Jimin comments picking up his order from the tray.
“Remember what?” he asks curiously, handing Namjoon and Hoseok their last drinks above the notes and textbooks.
“If he knew he wouldn’t be wondering.”
Seokjin slaps the back of Jimin’s head lightly before turning around to serve his customers and scolds him playfully, ‘Don’t sass me’.
Taehyung flips through his notebook several times without giving the writing a single thought and stops at a random page to find a name scribbled in black ink. Jeon Jungkook.
“Jeon Jungkook.” He thinks aloud and the attention from the textbooks gather towards Taehyung.
“Who’s that?” Hoseok blinks, twirling his pen in his fingers.
“It’s written in my book.” he says, the boredom previously shown in his face was replaced with slight desperation and he removes his chin from his palm. “Do you know who it is?”
He was responded with several ‘no’s and shaking heads leading to disappointment. They resume their work and discussion although Taehyung was hit with a sense of familiarity and is once again distracted from his book work.
_________
On the way home, Taehyung turns off the aeroplane mode on his phone knowing it would’ve distract him from his studies, and opened the notifications. He scrolls and finds a birthday notification, ‘September 1st, contact name’ and taps the unknown contact. He stops for a second, confused and sends a message without thinking twice about who it was.
‘Happy birthday!’
After realising what he’d done, he shoves his cell back into his jacket pocket out of embarrassment and only hopes he hadn’t done anything unnecessary, muttering a ‘crap’ as he proceeded home.
_________
Of all the ‘junk’ Taehyung owned, there was a certain photo album and diary he couldn’t help keeping. He had ended up reading the journal almost everyday as if were a story book, one entry a night, over and over.
Each note he read from the journal was written in first person, was always about a certain group of friends whose names were never mentioned, his school life and each page was signed the initials J.JK. It would be said that if a different person had read the diary entry like Taehyung did, they would probably stop reading halfway. Taehyung however felt drawn to the stories written in each page.
The photo album however he was certain not to touch. As much as he had already invaded a diary, he had decided he shouldn’t go about looking at someone else’s personal pictures. But of all the days that had passed, he couldn’t resist the urge to open the thick book and did so, wary of whose it was.
He skims through the pages, stopping to look at the bookmarked writing and photos and immediately recognises the boy with a box grin and another with chubby cheeks. In the photo were him and Jimin. They stood with a boy, Taehyung’s arm hooked into the arm of the ‘stranger?’ Remembering the uniform he wore in high school and in graduation, he realised the boy in the photo wasn’t in his year. ‘So he’s younger than me? I don’t even know this kid...’
He felt a sudden longing emotion looking at the face of the bunny toothed boy and pushes the feeling aside as the result of ‘using my brain too much today’, and lands heavily on his bed.
The second Taehyung closed his eyes, he knew he had forgotten something he had already known before. Not that it didn’t feel that way every day.