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It’s late.
It doesn’t matter what time it is, it’s just late.
That time of night when being awake means tip-toeing the thin line between dreams and reality, where everything’s too hot or too cold and the world goes all distorted and blurred like it’s too tired to keep up the illusion anymore.
Jungkook lies awake, staring at the plastic stars on the ceiling in a poor imitation of the night sky. There’s no stars here anyways, the closest they get is the one they make themselves.
A clock ticks naggingly in the background, always a beat or two too quick, and the room is shrouded in the dark funeral dress for the past day.
Jungkook lies awake, and just breathes.
There’s nothing in his head. Just a sort of static, stuck in between two stations and left drifting in the unknown and unreachable space.
He has to get up early in the morning.
No matter how many times he calculates the exact number of minutes of sleep he’ll get if he falls unconscious right now, it doesn’t work, and no matter how heavy his bones are or how exhausted his mind is, sleep is a slippery fish escaping his grip.
In the morning, he has to find the energy to do back to back photography shoots for all the models. He has to smile and contort them this way and that until he thinks they’re ready to be shoved into the gaping, open maw of the photoshop team. In the morning, Jungkook has to be something he isn’t, and the tiredness doesn’t fade.
The blankets shuffle next to him, making an indescribable sound as they crunch and slither, and all of a sudden Jungkook’s jolted back into his body from where he was floating a million miles away on the tip of those plastic stars. Back into the too-small bed and the suffocating, constricting coils of his own mind.
A bony hand fishes in the silk of the sheet like it’s water, reaching and reaching until it grasps tightly around Jungkook’s wrist, mooring him tightly down on the ground, unable to float back into the gooey semi-consciousness when he’s held down by those bones that are half-way buried.
Come back to me, that grip says.
Jungkook lets out a sigh, feeling all the air ooze out of his lungs until he’s as limp as a deflated balloon, wishing wishing wishing on false stars that he would wake up feeling different. Wake up a new man in a new life, working that white picket dream where he doesn’t hate himself enough for his guts to crawl and he isn’t haunted by the ghost of himself. Wake up with someone who can love him enough for the both of them, love him when he himself doesn’t.
A thin finger settles on his face, gentle and skittering like the legs of a butterfly, slowly turning his head to face the pocket of shadows that is his lover.
Taehyung is barely visible through the slithering darkness around them, but Jungkook’s been staring emptily into it long enough to see through into the heart of it.
“Jungkookie?” Taehyung whispers loudly in the quiet, always breaking whatever peace had settled. He licks his lips, a dark stripe against the plush, grabbing Jungkook’s wrist ever so tightly, “Are you awake?”
It’s a meaningless question, just one you’re supposed to ask and one Jungkook’s supposed to answer.
Jungkook doesn’t answer. His voice is too far away, buried under the cotton candy nothingness behind his eyes and the barbed wire wrapped around his throat until he’s choking on the sweetness of his own sadness.
It’s hard to see in the dim light, but Jungkook can see Taehyung’s face bring itself a little closer to his own, seemingly examining him for something. He must not find it.
Hidden in the dark, Taehyung is shapeless, formless, another thing crafted out of the shadows of Jungkook’s half-awake midnight thoughts. His eyes are liquid, disappearing when he blinks, and there’s no mistaking the bones in the dark for anything but what they are.
With his eyes, Jungkook traces the jutting angles of Taehyung’s face, how his cheekbones could cut glass, how the elegant curve of his neck shows off the skeleton biding its time beneath it.
This isn’t the time. This isn’t any time at all.
Jungkook doesn’t answer, but Taehyung doesn’t care.
The silence speaks more than the two of them ever do.
There’s a deliciously dark thought creeping in the background of Jungkook’s mind, one tempting him with sugar sweet intentions and all too easy provocations. They come back at night after he’s shoved them deep into the marrow of his bones. The thoughts, the weight on his chest, the nothingness behind his eyes. In the day, he has to pretend, but in the night, there’s only himself to lie to.
He won’t give in, not tonight. Maybe it’s the chill of Taehyung’s skinny hands sucking the warmth straight of his skin, or the stinging in his thighs that tell him he’s already slipped under the surface of temptation and choked on its ambrosia, too recently to indulge again.
Maybe it’s the fact that Jungkook’s too tired to disappoint himself again.
Taehyung chews over his non-answer and swallows it nonchalantly. He has to get up early as well. He’s one of the models, and beauty never sleeps.
Jungkook lets his head roll uselessly back against the pillow, gaze trained on those plastic stars, leading him towards a home that doesn’t exist anymore.
Taehyung lets go of his wrist, and Jungkook floats away.
__________
The shoot is what it always is. Blurry, out of focus, too narrowed into too many singular details for him to wrap his head around.
He wonders how he still has this job. He doesn’t give good enough directions, his photos are mediocre at best, and he’s fucking one of the biggest models the company has.
Not that they’re aware of that last one.
It would be a huge scandal, splattered across every trashy newspaper and spilled out from the lips of bored housewives, that the Kim Taehyung was romantically involved with some low-class photographer.
People like Taehyung weren’t supposed to go for people like Jungkook, and the whole world knew it. Even the two of them knew it, which is why they snuck around like kids playing a game and kept to the shadows where no one turned to look.
It hurt sometimes, to remember that Jungkook was just deadweight to Taehyung. A stepping stone to someone better. What else would be be? Jungkook didn’t help him. Didn’t chide him about skipping meals, didn’t point out the lie Taehyung fed him just as often as he fed it to himself, didn’t say anything at all.
Taehyung tried to help Jungkook, in his own roundabout way. Tried to make him meals that he himself would never touch, tried to wash his clothes and clean when Jungkook didn’t have the energy to do anything but drag his heels between the photo booth and his bed, showered him in compliments and wiped his tears that Jungkook was too numb to realise were even falling.
Taehyung didn’t help, not really. He was too scared to toe over the line, to throw the truth in Jungkook’s face at the fear of Jungkook throwing it right back at him. At least the effort was appreciated.
The weight of the camera in his hand is familiar, constant. Etched into his bones. He knows this camera like the back of his hand, knows each button to push and each filter to add, but all of a sudden, Jungkook’s lost.
The concept is something Jungkook could care less about. But whatever it is, Taehyung’s utterly glowing, completely at ease in the basking rays of perfection.
Jungkook’s supposed to be taking the pictures. He isn’t.
Taehyung looks at him under his eyelashes, lips parted in that small suggestion, showing off the sharp angles of his face and the contours of his body, and all Jungkook wants to do is touch, grab, feel the false confidence under Taehyung’s skin and greedily lap it up in exchange for just a hint of affection, but he pushes the capture button instead.
Lips painted a deep red, the jewels dangling from his ears sway with each motion, the bones of his hands glimmering and shining.
Taehyung arches a brow, and Jungkook fumbles with his camera.
This isn’t his Taehyung in front of him, and it never was. That honey thick suggestion and seduction wasn’t for him. It was for the eyes behind the camera, the ones waiting hungrily to tear their way deep into his heart to see it bleed, the invisible numbers that determined everything.
Jungkook cleared his throat, adjusting a few controls before taking a few more photos.
They never saw the real Taehyung behind all those jewels and all that makeup and all those smiles.
The real Taehyung that Jungkook found collapsed in the bathroom, crying on the floor as he forced himself to shave off more of the fat only he could see. The real Taehyung with his soft skin and hard bone, his strange jokes and all too real affection.
Taehyung had to be perfect for a living. It made sense in context.
Right now, he was Kim Taehyung, the face of the company, and he’d shed blood, sweat, and tears to claw his way here. The cost was too high. He’d sold himself to the camera, sold whatever life he had.
There was nothing Jungkook could do to help him. He was too tired to force Taehyung to eat when he didn’t want too, he’d given up on trying to get him to look in the mirror and see the real thing.
So Jungkook did what he did best.
He took pictures, and he pretended.
___________
The face in the mirror isn’t his.
Logically, Jungkook knows that it is his reflection. It wouldn’t be anyone else’s, but it might as well have been.
His face is alien and strange, slug trails of smudged pixels coming together to form an image he didn’t recognise. A stranger with his voice and name.
Jungkook tried to imagine this face being what everyone else saw. The face that his colleagues spoke to, that Taehyung woke up to, but he couldn’t. His own life was out of reach for him. In his mind, he was shapeless, blurry at the edges like he’d been creased with Vaseline.
The Jungkook in the mirror stares back, waiting waiting waiting for him to do something. To put his money where his mouth was, to finally jump over the ledge of the river, to throw himself right in the fucking deep end just to feel it hurt.
But he doesn’t. He doesn’t feel much of anything nowadays, save for the delicious satisfaction of giving in, of letting metal kiss at his skin until it raises blood.
Taehyung has been going through a rough patch. Jungkook tries, he tries to kiss down his body and show him how beautiful it is, but it falls upon deaf ears. He won’t see it, or maybe he doesn’t want to see it.
It’s only a matter of time for the both of them, until one of them finally cracks.
Like he knew Jungkook was thinking about him, Taehyung appears behind Jungkook’s reflection, face thin and haggard, bags under his eyes and his hair flat and greasy.
“I made you dinner. Come and have some, Jungkookie,” Taehyung says softly, avoiding his own gaze in the mirror as he tugs Jungkook away, prunes the roots he’d formed on the spot in his spaced-out haze.
Taehyung loves cooking, because the universe loves bad jokes.
He even eats some tonight, just a little. Jungkook watches him eat, and his stomach churns with a warning as the rest goes cold.
Jungkook doesn’t say anything. Not even when Taehyung gets dressed later that night and each rib strains against the skin, a rung to the ladder of success he’d built from his own pain.
Taehyung doesn’t ask about the bandages on Jungkook’s skin.
___________
It’s a rare day off.
Jungkook’s chopping vegetables for dinner. He just hopes he won’t be the only one eating it.
His hand moves without him, making a loud chop chop sound as he watches, detached, as the vegetables fall into little organised piles.
Looking out the window, there’s no birds, no sun. There’s nothing. It’s still, holding its breath. Like how there’s no stars. There’s nothing in this city, nothing. And there’s nothing in Jungkook either.
The future is nothing. The past, nothing. There is only the inescapable, painful now.
He’s thinking, as he usually is, about Taehyung.
About how he lies awake at night and listens to the sound of Taehyung breathing and thinks about how he doesn’t deserve it, doesn’t deserve any of it. Taehyung should have someone to love him, to help him, not someone who pretends both their problems don’t exist and someone who can’t possibly offer what he deserves.
But Jungkook is selfish, so he stays. He ignores Taehyung’s lies because he’d rather have the transparent dishonesty instead of not having Taehyung at all.
A flash of pain drags him out of the abyss of his head, his ears ringing faintly, the satisfaction nowhere to be seen. Mooring him to the ground, the pain is fickle, always letting him go back under right when he’s about to catch his breath. It never lasts.
He’s bleeding all over the carrots. Jungkook blinks once, twice, and sighs.
In that moment, Taehyung walks in. He’s still wearing the coat he wears when it’s windy, meaning he didn’t want to wait to take it off to see Jungkook. Meaning that he was in a hurry to see him, meaning that it meant something that he didn’t take off his coat.
Taehyung stops, eyes going all wide and his face going all scared and Jungkook remembers that he’s not used to blood like he is. Taehyung doesn’t have the same deliciously tempting thoughts late at night when the sadness gets too much and he just wants to breathe.
“Are you ok?” Taehyung asks, hurrying over, still worried. His hands hover uselessly over the chopping board and the carrots, horrified at the steady stream of blood trickling from Jungkook’s fingertips and horrified at Jungkook’s lack of concern or movement. He repeats, “Are you ok? It looks deep.”
Taehyung’s eyes briefly flick to his clothed legs and Jungkook wonders if this is it. If they’re finally about to stop their silly game of play pretend and stop dancing around the fire to finally put it out.
Neither of them want to say anything, too scared of what they’ll find. Jungkook wonders if Taehyung will mention the bandages and wonders if he’ll have to mention the blood he saw Taehyung throw up, wonders if all their houses of cards will finally collapse under the weight of the obvious.
Taehyung deserves someone to help him, not sit back and watch him destroy himself.
Hesitation makes Taehyung grimace, making him look frightening from how boney his face is, and the moment’s passed, the bubble popped, the shooting star out of sight.
“Make sure you use antiseptic,” Taehyung advices, gently prying the knife from Jungkook’s limp grip. The pain has already gone, the buzzing of static returned. “You need to be more careful Jungkook-ah.”
Then Taehyung walks out, taking off his coat.
The clock ticks ominously in the empty space.
________
It all comes crashing down eventually.
When Jungkook’s told that Taehyung collapsed after a shoot and was rushed to the hospital, the white hot surge of pure fear is enough to shove the heavy shroud of numbness off his shoulders, molten adrenaline running through his veins with an energy he hasn’t felt in months.
It was only a matter of time until one of them couldn’t pretend anymore.
Truthfully, Jungkook was hoping it would be him. He’d made a plan, organised his money, started to discreetly sell his few possessions of value. Finally, his future had a deadline, one only Jungkook knew, but that had taken a backseat to Taehyung’s obvious decline.
No matter how useless and empty he felt, Taehyung had asked for Jungkook specially, and Jungkook couldn’t let him down.
It hurt sometimes, to realise that he really did love Taehyung underneath his sadness telling him he didn’t deserve to.
The press had no doubt already heard about Taehyung’s collapse, but they didn’t know Jungkook, didn’t bother to shove their cameras into his face as he walked past them to enter the hospital, too busy salivating at the prospect of selling Taehyung’s vulnerability.
He felt like an imposter, his shoes too loud and heavy in the reflective hallway, body too tight and too on edge, a live wire about to explode.
Taehyung’s room was tucked away down a corner, out of sight but not out of mind. The nurse had told him to go right in, so Jungkook only hesitated a moment before silently slipping inside.
The sight before him made guilt squeeze around him like a snake, the coils right around his heart.
Taehyung was too thin and too pale, tubes hooked up to his face and in his arm.
In the dark of their room, it was easy to hide, easy to gloss over. The hospital was blindingly white, everything undeniable and obvious, nowhere to turn a blind eye.
Jungkook knew that Taehyung was disappearing before his eyes. He didn’t push. He didn’t tell Taehyung to eat when he needed to, he didn’t poke holes in his lies, he enabled him through his passiveness.
It was hard to escape the truth now.
“Jungkookie,” Taehyung coughs weakly, hands twitching in the sheets like he’d wanted to reach out but didn’t have the strength to, “Jungkookie.”
Jungkook’s by his side in a heartbeat. He’s not aware he’s crying until he feels the tears drip from his chin, blinking them back to better see Taehyung in front of him.
This is the real side that the cameras didn’t touch, and neither of them touched either. No longer confident and imposing, Taehyung’s small, weak, eyes liquid and hands trembling.
“I’m sorry,” Jungkook whispers, trying to feel the cold skin of Taehyung’s arm through the vines of the wires, “If I’d tried a little harder-“
“No,” Taehyung croaks, brows pinched, and he’s so thin he looks like he could snap in two, brittle and bone, “I wouldn’t have listened. Don’t blame yourself, please.”
“I didn’t help.”
“Neither did I,” Taehyung tries to smile, but it’s a poor attempt at one, one that’s more deprecating than anything, and the knife in Jungkook’s heart twists. This pain is unbearable, “I didn’t help myself and I didn’t help you either.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t,” Jungkook admits, unable to tear his gaze away from Taehyung’s face, still so beautiful no matter what he looks like. If only Jungkook could make Taehyung see what he did.
“I’ll help you now. You’re going to get better, Tae, I promise,” Jungkook swears, and the numbness around him breaks into icy shards ripping him into pieces and it hurts, it hurts too much, and this pain isn’t the type he’s used to.
Taehyung laughs, a hollow, empty thing, “We’ve both screwed this up. If I get better, you get better.”
A challenge, or a threat. It’s hard to tell. Neither of them want that, but neither of them want the other to die. They’re at a standstill.
Jungkook doesn’t know what to say to that.
He doesn’t want to get better. He wants to drown, drown on his own self-loathing, he wants Taehyung to float with the stars where he belongs while he chokes on the dust of his failed future. His future that he’d planned not to be there for.
There’s only one thing he can say. The thing he’s supposed to say. Jungkook doesn’t say it.
“Jungkook,” Taehyung says softly, staring at Jungkook like he means something, “I love you.”
It’s the first time he’s ever said it.
In a hospital bed, dying by his own hand.
This time, Jungkook doesn’t let the silence speak for him.
“I love you too,” Jungkook murmurs feather light, letting it drift in the air, uncaring of its own importance. Taehyung smiles, and it’s so sad that it makes Jungkook’s heart break.
The game’s up now. Back to square one. Clean slates.
Jungkook grabs Taehyung’s hand, pressing it to his lips.
Come back to me, that kiss says.
Come back and let me love you.