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the first time they met was on a tuesday afternoon. the air was cold and biting, winter just around the corner. the streets were busy, as always, and once again he found himself lost in them. the crowd swarmed around him and pushed and pulled and he just let himself be led by the current, drifting aimlessly through. eyes wandered, scanning buildings and faces and signs as if hoping for a glimmer of recognition yet nothing came. this part of town was unfamiliar to him; the streets were not home, he had no memories of this place, no knowledge of tall buildings and glass windows and busy roads and a bustling crowd. this was not familiar to him.
they hadn’t meant to meet, really. an accident, probably. something that could’ve been avoided, given the chance. not on purpose, never on purpose. they could’ve never met. they could’ve avoiding everything if they could, given the chance. one of them would have chosen this path, would’ve made the same decision to follow fate, throw caution to the wind. the other would have run, would have cut the string tying them together and left while he still had a chance, would’ve avoiding the young boy with stars in his eyes and galaxies in his hands and would’ve run.
but it never happened like that. instead they collided; one rushing out into the busy street and the other crashing into them. muffled curses were thrown about carelessly, frustrated phrases directed towards each other. he apologised, blinked, and apologised again. he looked down. red string, knotted onto one finger, dropping towards the ground before swooping back up in a graceful ark, connecting to the strangers hand. he apologised, he didn’t know for what.
“stop apologising kid. it’s alright, jesus.”
their voice was low, full of thinly veiled anger it seemed. he didn’t know, couldn’t tell, he was too busy trying to process the fact that he had just bumped into his soulmate. they were taller than him, only slightly. straight blonde hair, bangs stopping just before the covered deep brown eyes. golden skin, contrasting the black of his outfit. the subtle hints of frustration stood out in the way he moved and talked, the emotion seemingly out of place with his soft appearance.
“you’re my soulmate,” he replied, lips moving on their own before he could really focus on what he was doing. before he could really focus on any regrets he might have.
“fuck.”
a sigh, his shoulders slumping, anger giving way to a weariness that seemed bone-deep. an unexpected reaction, he supposed. although he did expect happiness, an excitement that would light up his expression. it never came. he felt disappointed, surprisingly, although he wasn’t entirely sure why. but there it was, a bitter disappointed that filled twisted around his heart and squeezed it tight, refusing to let it go. it was an entirely unpleasant feeling, one that he wished he never had the pleasure of experiencing.
his discomfort must have shown on his face; brows furrowed, lips drawn tight, a faint hint of pain peeking through his relatively guarded expression. the man before him frowns, open his mouth to say something, thinks again, and flees. he blinks. frowns. shifts in place, a pillar of solitude amongst the bustling crowd. the feeling of disappointment may be gone, but something darker takes its place as he watches the opposite end of the red string fade into the crowd.
they somehow end up meeting again and again and again. he would find it funny but every time he catches sight of that red string he feels a lurch in his stomach and he has to brace himself to stop from falling over. it’s like an open wound, he convinces himself, it’s painful and it hurts and you want it to go away so badly and it will soon but you’ve got to look after it first, you’ve got to be careful. it’s half formed connections and flimsy ideas and second-hand logic but he makes it work, he makes it work because the only other option is embracing the pain and losing himself in the process. he doesn’t want to be lost but when home is in the arms of a stranger who’s love you will never feel you learn to take what you can get and appreciate it; appreciate the glimpses of someone who doesn’t want you and appreciate the ache in your chest you get when he gets too close. maybe, if he tries hard enough, he can forge a new home in the wreckage of his heart, surrounded by fragile bones that bend and break and offer as much support as they know how.
they meet too many times and he would call it fate if he could but that is cruelly ironic and he cannot handle pain like that. their interactions are short, mostly because he’s developed a habit of fleeing before anything can really happen. it’s cowardly, he knows, but he’s trying to protect himself the only way he has learned how.
it takes a while, but they end up spending longer periods of time together. it’s unusual to say the least, he never really expected this to happen. he’s not going to complain though, despite the fact that it causes the barbed wire around his heart to tighten, reminding him of possibility he has lost in a rather cruel turn of events with ever beat of his fragile heart. it reminds him of what could’ve been had the universe not played this cruel and elaborate prank. it was a constant what if, a constant reminder that what you got was never what you wanted.
they learn stuff about each other. names come first, murmured syllables sounding out kim taehyung and jeon jungkook. then comes details; favourite colour, favourite ice cream, favourite animal, what do you think of star wars, do you play video games, do you drink, do you smoke, do you think you’ll ever love me. the last one is never spoken yet always heavily implied by the younger of the two. taehyung never answers, he never expects him to because he never asks. what use is an answer when you don’t even know what you’re asking.
they find themselves on a roof somewhere, one night. winter is in full force now, and it is much too cold for them to be outside yet still they remain, spread out on the cool concrete as they watch the sky. it feels like they’re waiting for something, though he isn’t sure what. the cold seeps through his jacket. he shivers. beside him, taehyung pays no notice to his suffering, too busy watching the stars. he watches taehyung, taehyung watches the sky. it’s a cycle. it’s a painful cycle, one that goes round and round and round and never stops but just keeps collecting casualties along the way. taehyung is charming, that is a fact. taehyung’s smile could melt even the iciest of hearts, that is a fact. taehyung rejects the idea of love almost religiously, that is a fact. taehyung never wanted a soulmate, that is the most painful fact of all. he has been rejected by the one person on the planet that has been, quite literally, made for him, and has been for years now. he doesn’t know how to feel about this. doesn’t know how to process the grief and the heartbreak and the loss despite the fact that he never had anything to lose in the first place.
he sighs. taehyung looks at him. he looks back.
“stop staring at me.”
above them, a shooting star passes by. he wishes for someone to love him. he wishes for taehyung to love him.
“’m not staring.”
“yes you are.”
he turns back to the stars. he wants a thousand more shooting stars, so he can make a thousand more wishes. he wants to wish for a new beginning, to wish for some way to quiet the rapid beating of his heart, to wish for taehyung. somehow, someway, all of his wishes relate back to the boy sitting next to him. he thinks this scares him, he can’t be sure.
“what did you wish for?”
“you.”
the truth. it hurts, almost, to tell him. an open wound, he reminds himself. he needs time to heal but time to heal means time away from taehyung, the boy he’s in love with, the one who will probably never love him back. it hurts, but he embraces it. he wants taehyung to know. he wants him to experience the ache in his chest and the pounding of his heart and the way everything hurts when he’s near him. he wants to tell him so many thing. he wants to tell him how his smile could rival the sun, how he was born from apollo and raised in a golden chariot flying above the earth because there’s no way someone as perfect as him could be mortal. he wants to tell him about the stars that he sees in his eyes, how they burn bright, each containing its own story just be waiting to be told. he wants to tell him that his voice sounds like music and that his presence anchors him and that his touch is like being welcomed home after being away for so long. but instead, he waits. waits for a reply that he knows will only hurt him, but he’s long past the point of caring.
“darling, wishes should never be wasted on monsters like me.”
“i’m sorry,” he says.
i love you, he means.
the stars blink.
he blinks back.
“you talk to me as if you’re afraid you’re going to fall in love,” he says.
“i am,” the boy answers. “but i know i’ll never love you.”
and in that moment he felt himself falling, and realised soulmates were never supposed to be like this
the feeling of heartbreak soon became familiar to him. it was like taking a sledgehammer to the ribs, he supposed, though he doubted that would even come close to the aching inside his chest. it was a dull pulse, something subtle, unnoticeable. it throbbed with every beat of his heart, it pumped poison through his veins; it grew flowers in his lungs until he was no longer able to breathe through the rose petals and thorns that tore at his insides and every breath made him feel like he was choking. it was a whisper in the back of his mind, a constant litany of he never loved you he never loved you he never loved you. with every heartbeat his name was tattooed on his ribs; the name taehyung being etched over and over and over until it was part of his very being, until it was part of who he was. and even on the days when he screamed and cried and begged the universe to stop this because this wasn’t what soulmates were supposed to be they were supposed to love each other they were supposed to care it never stopped because fate was like a storm and he was a raft being tossed about at sea.
he got used to it. every time taehyung would shy away from his touch, would shrug off his hand, would offer a tight lipped smile. it hurt; it ached and it burned and it hurt so much that sometimes he wished he never knew what love felt like, never knew what it was like to dedicate your life to someone who you now knew would never want to love you.
they still spent time together. almost every day they met up and talking and smiled and he pretended like nothing was wrong when everything was falling apart. taehyung still smiled and still laughed and still wrote stupid poems in the little notebook that he carried around. he still documented everything, including the bad memories. he had explained it to jungkook once, told him how it made him remember who he was and who he was not. he had understood, in a way. sometimes you felt like you were losing yourself in the mess of who you wanted to be and who everyone else wanted you to be and who you actually were. sometimes you need to anchor yourself, he understands.
the ache in his chest grows each day. there are some days he can’t hang out with taehyung because the pain is too strong so he lies in bed all day and cries and wishes for something better than this. he still wishes for taehyung, though. he doesn’t think he couldn’t wish for him, it would be impossible. he cries so much he gets physically sick sometimes, and he has to drag himself to bathroom to throw up and cry some more and then the whole process repeats itself.
taehyung asks him about it once. he asks about why he’ll just disappear for days at a time. he seems concerned, almost; brows furrowed and lips pursed as if he actually cares, although jungkook doubts that. tae asks a lot of questions but jungkook doesn’t have a lot of answers and he really doesn’t know what to do, so he does the only thing he does best. he tells the truth. he ruins everything.
“why do you keep hiding from me? is it something i did or do you really just hate me that much?”
“it’s because i love you, okay? i love you because you’re soulmate and also because you’re you and you write poetry and you smile and you never apologise for anything and fuck i love you so much. and it hurts, okay? it fucking hurts because you don’t love me and every time i look at you i find it hard to breath because i know that you’ll never fucking love me. i want you too and i wish every night that you would but you don’t so i’m trying to deal with that. i want to know what it’s like for you to tell me you love me, for you to kiss me, for you to hold me when i cry. but you don’t and it aches and i go home and cry because my fucking soulmate doesn’t fucking want me and that’s possibly the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
they don’t talk after that.
there’s a note on his door when he wakes up in the morning. there’s a note on his door and it reads “i never told you but i was falling in love with you. i’m sorry.” he cries when he reads it. he cries when he reads it, because he recognises tae’s messy scrawl from all the times he would flick through the book of poetry that taehyung was always writing in; he feels as if he’s memorised the worlds in the journal by now, the rushed curve of the letters and the hastily scratched out lines that never quite made the final cut. he cries when he reads it, because there is a love heart in the lower corner and taehyung had said he was sorry when he never said sorry for anything, not to jungkook, not to anyone. he cries when he reads it, because it means that taehyung is gone.
taehyung always said that love would be the death of him; the final bullet in the gun or the last pill swallowed, whatever way he chose love would always be the driving cause. it was something he mentioned many times during their late night conversations. the early morning air always seemed to make the older more honest, more open to talk about things. he learned a lot that way. he learned about his family and the abuse and how he dropped out of school and things that were too personal for him to know.
there’s this sinking feeling that hits him then, we he realises that he could ultimately been seen as the cause of taehyung’s death. he sparked this situation. he wanted to start a fire, to warm himself, but instead he burned down the entire house. a vicious cycle of bad thoughts and his fault and he’s dead because of you and everything negative he never wanted to feel. he sits down, looks at the piece of paper in his hands. tear marks stain the surface, some recent others dried. he runs his fingers over the ink. taehyung was crying when he wrote this. taehyung was crying because of him. taehyung was crying because he loved him.
everything is sort of a blur after that.
he turns on the tv. turns on the news. a car crash, they say. drove his car straights into traffic, they say. one dead, three other injured, they say. kim taehyung. 24. gone forever. he’s pretty sure he throws up. he can’t really remember.
he cries more, he remembers that. he spends most of his days in best with tearstained cheeks and a broken heart. the string on his wrist is cut. it trails behind him now, no longer red and vibrant but rather a dull grey. he avoids going outside, knowing people would look and stare and he would break and it would be obvious that the guy who drove into traffic was his soulmate and he doesn’t want pity he wants to be alone.
he tries to write. tries to write something for taehyung, some way to remember him. instead he just writes his name over and over and over again, ugly sobs bubbling forth. he keeps writing through it all, refuses to stop. his hand shakes and his pen slips but he keeps going, he can’t stop now. somewhere along the line i love you’s and i’m sorry’s get added into the mess. it’s his fault, and he’s never going to forget that.
kim taehyung, he writes.
you deserved better than me,
kim taehyung, he writes.
you were so much more than just my soulmate.
kim taehyung, he writes.
i always wondered how it would feel for you to tell me you love me. now i’ll never know.