Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Hey, team, just a head’s up; new tech debrief in five!”

Jungkook nudges his coworker with the end of his pencil and smiles. “Are you ready for this?”

“Honestly, my boy, I’m still trying to get my head around the Bluetooth. I’m lost with this- this…Clack?”

“It’s called Slack, Mr. Watson; it’s basically just online messaging. Like texting, almost. They’re implementing it because it’s supposed to make us more efficient.”

“Not sure how they can do that with an old man like me on the team.”

Jungkook scoffs. “What? You’re like, the best associate in the office. If we didn’t have you we’d be sunk. You’re our ideas guy.”

Watson raises an eyebrow. “When did you start saying ‘like’? Don’t tell me you’re one of the youth now too, JK.”

Jungkook has been sitting across from Watson ever since he started working here, three years ago. A middling ad agency in the less glamorous part of London isn’t exactly what he had in mind, when he left Korea after college to work abroad, but this was the first job he could get that didn’t care about his accent and was willing to pay him enough of a salary that he could afford a cheap one-bedroom a few Tube stops away.

The firm works collaboratively, which means everyone’s all-hands-on-deck when they have a pitch coming up, but people still stay in their areas of expertise when they can. Which is why Jungkook sticks to things on the back end, running A/B tests for different campaigns and crunching numbers when the presentation team asks for a cost estimate. He doesn’t have to talk much, and that’s the way he likes it. After three years among native speakers, his English has improved exponentially, but he’s still shy about mispronouncing a word or two, especially in front of clients.

When he has to stand up at a pitch meeting and explain the most recent poll he conducted about whether customers prefer blue or red striped toothpaste, he about shits his pants every time. So he’s okay to spend most of the time behind a desk, or over with the other data analysts in their separate conference room.

Watson is Jungkook’s first and oldest friend at the firm. Literally old—Watson just had his seventy-fourth birthday two months ago. He didn’t tell anyone but Jungkook, who made him a funny card and bought him a cupcake on their lunch break.

It’s not much, this job, but Jungkook likes Watson, and that’s enough. The work itself isn’t strenuous, and that’s the way he likes it. He tells his parents he’s working hard, when they call him, but the truth is that he’s kind of just hanging out. He’s efficient, but there’s not much to do, especially when he’s waiting for results from the research team. He thinks he’s got Solitaire up on his monitor more than a spreadsheet, but management is spread so thin no one ever notices. Not to mention he gets his work done, so they don’t have any complaints anyway.

He doesn’t have a lot of friends here, other than Watson, but he’s never had a lot of friends anywhere, to be completely honest. Crippling shyness paired with distinctly geeky interests made him an outsider at school, and even when he found a nice group at college, they’re all back in Korea. He’s not entirely sure why he decided to move, but he was starting to feel suffocated at home. And he’s always liked a challenge; he finds he’s pretty talented at the most surprising things. Jungkook didn’t know he was good at ice skating until he tried it at a classmate’s birthday party when he was twelve. So he thought a move to London could be cool.

That’s the reason he does a lot of things—it could be cool.

“JK. Time for the meeting.”

Jungkook nods and stands up from his desk with a stretch, grimacing at the twinge in his shoulders. He went a little too hard at the gym yesterday, and now he’s paying the price. Another thing he didn’t know he was good at. And it’s fun, tracking his progress. Plus everyone at his gym doesn’t talk much, and he can get behind that.

“You ready, Mr. Watson? You’ll be fine. Just think of it like email, but faster.”

“I don’t know. Seems a little above my paygrade. To be perfectly honest, I might be nearing the end, my boy.”

“Don’t say that,” Jungkook scoffs. “You’ve got at least ten more years in you.”

“Well, that’s a lie and you know it.”

“Come on,” Jungkook says, pretending to beg as they walk towards the conference room. “For me? I don’t think I’d want to partner with anyone else.”

Despite the company’s holistic approach, they usually work in groups, especially on smaller projects for clients, stuff they want a quick turnaround on. Jungkook’s never not worked with Watson for those types of things—he’s the numbers guy, and Watson does all thinking. He comes up with the campaigns, writes the copy, and most importantly, pitches the final product. They work with Jen on occasion when Jungkook is too swamped to do any design elements they need, but usually it’s just the two of them. And that’s the way Jungkook likes it, so he doesn’t see the need for that to change.

Only things do change, and all too quickly for Jungkook’s liking.

He’s out the week after their little meeting, sick with a nasty bout of flu that has him heaving all hours of the night and coughing like a thirty-year smoker. It’s something he’s unfortunately used to, having a trash immune system. He thinks moving to a new country didn’t help, especially one that’s so cold and damp. But he just has to white-knuckle it through every fall and winter, hoping his healthy eating and strict workout regime are enough to earn him at least a little bit of a pass. It normally works, but this year when he gets hit, he gets hit hard.

He’s on his fifth consecutive sick day when there’s a buzz on his intercom, someone wanting to come up. Jungkook, huddled in his bed comforter and a sweatshirt with snot on the cuffs, stumbles over to answer.

“Hello?”

“JK!”

“Mr. Watson?”

“Got it in one. Let me come up?”

Jungkook is struck with a minor coughing fit before he can answer. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I’m really sick—probably contagious.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll be fine.”

“I’d feel terrible if I got you sick, really.”

“Then I’ll just stand outside your door, how’s that?” Watson says. “I brought you some soup.”

“You did?”

“I did.”

Jungkook’s stomach wins out, because he hasn’t eaten anything over the last ten hours, and he’s ravenous despite the bouts of nausea. So he buzzes Watson up and leans his forehead against the wall as he waits. His nose hasn’t stopped running since yesterday morning, but his head still feels stuffy.

There’s a knock at the door, and Jungkook forces himself upright to open it.

“Oh, JK, you’re having a time of it.”

Jungkook nods, trying to stay a good distance away from Watson. He’s old enough that Jungkook thinks he could end up in the hospital or something, with what Jungkook’s got. Though in the three years they’ve worked together Watson’s never missed work once.

“Here’s your soup. Chicken noodle, just the way my mother used to make.”

“And what way was that?”

“A load of garlic powder,” Watson says. “It tastes wonderful, but don’t go kissing any pretty girls right after, hm?”

Jungkook takes the plastic bag Watson’s holding out with a grateful nod. Not that he’d like to kiss a pretty girl anyway, but he’s too sick to bother correcting the assumption. Watson always throws out little jokes like that, saying Jungkook’s a handsome young man, and with so many women in the office, he should be able to at least practice some flirting. Jungkook thinks the last time he flirted was in junior year of college, and he ended up puking on the guy’s shoes right as they were leaving the party.

“When did you have time to make this?” Jungkook asks. “This is really nice of you, Mr. Watson, you didn’t have to-”

“Oh, nonsense. We’re partners in crime; I couldn’t just leave you in a lurch.”

Jungkook squints. “We haven’t committed any crimes.”

“Just an expression, my boy. We’re in cahoots.”

“Cahoots?”

“Another expression.”

Sometimes Jungkook wishes he was better at English. He’s certainly not bad, but he’s missing those little quirks and slang that would make him really sound like a native speaker.

“I had time to make it,” Watson continues, “because I was let go on Monday.”

Jungkook, busy peering into the bag, takes a second to register what he just said. “Let go?”

“Axed. Fired. Terminated. It’s the end of the line for me, JK.”

“What? But- why? You’re great; you’re the best-”

“I’m also an old man,” Watson breaks in, “and I just cannot get my mind around all this new technology.”

“But I can teach you,” Jungkook says. “Slack isn’t too hard, if we just sit down when I get back then-”

“No, no, not just the Slack. The way of the world is changing, JK, and I, unfortunately, will not be changing with it. Our agency’s been leaning towards this for years now. It’s my own fault, really, that I haven’t gotten these things down.”

Jungkook understands what he means, even though he doesn’t want to. Watson still has to ask him how to send an email at least three times a day, submits all his creative proposals by either handwriting or faxing them to Van’s office, and when they had their meeting about Slack, couldn’t seem to figure out how to send even one message. It’s sad, and Jungkook thinks may be ageist, that he’s being fired, but at the same time it’s hard to argue that Watson is good with technology. And their company does digital marketing, so it’s a little difficult to spin, no matter what. Jungkook isn’t good enough with words anyway.

“That’s still unfair,” Jungkook says. “Beth and Lori can’t just fire you.”

“Sure they can. They’re head partners, aren’t they?”

“But-”

“Don’t worry yourself about it, you’re sick enough already. I think we parted on very good terms; I’ve got a nice severance, and I’ve already made plans to go see my daughter.”

“What- really?”

Watson’s daughter is his favorite topic of conversation, and Jungkook always obliges him. She’s his only child—he and her mother divorced when she was ten. She’s a travel journalist, so she’s not in London much, and when she is she typically stays with her mom and her step-family. So this makes Jungkook feel a little better, if not still bitterly disappointed. It’s all happening so fast too.

“So I just- you won’t be there on Monday?”

“Afraid not.”

Jungkook frowns. He’s not really sure how to proceed, because he wouldn’t necessarily say he and Watson are close enough that they’d hang out outside of work. Not to mention there’s a fifty year age gap between them, so he doesn’t know what they could even do, anyway. It’s not like he can take Watson to the gym.

“Well…send me a postcard from your trip, okay? Like your daughter does to you.”

Watson flashes a smile. “I’ll send you many. Don’t be too down about it, alright? Besides, my replacement may very well be your new best friend.”

Jungkook snorts, then promptly regrets it when he feels a glob of mucus slide down his throat. “I doubt that.”

“Don’t be so shy,” Watson advises. “Took me three months to get a full sentence out of you, remember?”

“That’s because you couldn’t understand me, Mr. Watson.”

Jungkook’s accent was pretty heavy when he first came to the company, and Watson, with the combination of being old and extremely British, really struggled to make out what he was saying. He was nice about it, asking Jungkook to repeat things, but it was still embarrassing enough that Jungkook spent a few nights crying himself to sleep. He thinks over time both of them were able to meet in the middle—he speaks more clearly and Watson’s better at anticipating his pronunciations.

But all that work is being tossed out, because Watson won’t be working with him anymore.

“Well, enjoy the soup, I won’t keep you up on your feet any longer.”

“Oh, you don’t have to go-”

“No, no, no, I couldn’t intrude any more than I already have. Good luck to you, JK. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be just fine. Eat all of that soup now, it’ll have you feeling better in no time. Goodbye, my boy.”

“Bye,” Jungkook says, still a little dazed at how fast all of this is happening. Watson throws him a cheery wave and makes his way down the hall. Jungkook watches until he disappears down the stairs, then closes the door with a shiver at the cool air that’s spilled in. He’s got three space heaters running, but the building itself has been having issues since September. And Watson’s right, Jungkook shouldn’t try to get any sicker than he already is. He wouldn’t think it’s possible, but when it comes to the flu, he’s learned nothing’s out of the question.

Jungkook forces himself to heat up some soup in the microwave and eat it (it does have a lot of garlic powder) before he falls face-first back into bed with a miserable huff. Sick, tired, and now, officially friendless.

Yeah, Jungkook really hates change.

Jungkook musters up the strength to drag himself to the office Monday, despite the fact that he’s still running a low-grade fever. He’s not really sure why he’s forcing himself, because Watson won’t even be there, but he just can’t sit and stare at his TV any longer. He’s almost positive he’s getting sores on his ass from lying around, and even though he likes doing nothing, he’s over it.

He got to work on his comic, which was nice, and he thinks he can have a new chapter out by the weekend, if he’s lucky. He’s banking on things slowing down for a bit while Beth and Lori hunt for Watson’s replacement, who Jungkook has vowed to blatantly dislike as soon as they meet. For Watson’s sake.

But when he stumbles through the elevator doors, already planning to crawl under his desk and sleep until lunch, Van catches him before he can take more than two steps.

“JK, welcome back!”

He makes a vaguely nice grunt in response, before coughing into his elbow.

“Ouch.” Van makes a face. “Still under the weather, huh?”

“Little bit.”

“Beth and Lori asked to see you.”

“Why?”

“Nothing bad,” Van promises. “Then I need to grab you for a few minutes around lunch if that’s okay. Get you up to speed on what we’ve been doing.”

Jungkook frowns. “Shouldn’t I meet with Shivu?”

Shivu runs the analytics department—Jungkook normally reports to her about things. Van is technically Jungkook’s boss too, but she hands the creative. Stuff Watson does. Well, did.

Yeah, Jungkook’s really going to hate his replacement. At least it’ll be a few weeks, and Jungkook can enjoy having the back of the office all to himself. Bekkah sits nearby, but as the firm’s payroll rep she’s not really involved with anything they’re doing. Jungkook likes her though; she always keeps the coffee pot full and brings bagels when they have to sit through one of her boring meetings about healthcare plans and tax forms. She also makes all that shit easier to understand, which Jungkook appreciates.

But they don’t talk much—Jungkook gets away with wearing headphones when he can and she’s constantly fielding questions from everyone else—so Jungkook is ready for a quiet week with lots of slacking off, now that he’s completely alone. He thinks about the stack of papers in his file drawer,  sketches for his comic that he forgot to bring home last weekend.

Jungkook’s one passion has always been drawing, but he’s also a practical person, and he knew he wouldn’t really make a career with it. He likes numbers well enough, so he saves the fun stuff for side projects. Specifically his web comic, the one he started a year ago. It’s slow going, and he only manages to post updates about once a month, but he’d rather be slow and have it actually look like he wants it to.

The story isn’t anything too special, and he knows it’s a little obvious, making himself the main character. But it’s gotten some traction, the adventures of JK and his trusty dog Bam as they travel around London solving mysteries. What people really seem to like is that JK can see ghosts, and so can Bam, because, like everyone knows, all animals can see ghosts. So it’s the ghosts that help them out, providing clues and sometimes the cases themselves, either seeking revenge or absolution or just some kind of closure.

Each chapter has a different mystery, and they’re all kind of trite—it’s always the jealous brother or the quiet neighbor or the best friend. But he’s gotten a lot of positive feedback, and he loves doing it. The idea itself isn’t so interesting, but the way he executes it is, according to some of his more honest readers.

The other part that people seem to enjoy is that with each mystery comes one of JK’s own personal crises. These are always the more lighthearted parts, and the ones that Jungkook lets more of his personal life bleed into. Scouring the city in search of a decent Korean grocery store. Failing at laundry when Bam’s trademark red bandana gets mixed in with a load of whites. Trying out a dating app and promptly regretting it.

‘So relatable,’ someone had commented once. ‘Wish I could meet you in real life!’

Jungkook isn’t sure that’d be such a good idea, one because stranger danger, of course, and the other being the sad truth that Jungkook isn’t all that interesting to meet. Sure, he can carry on a conversation, but he knows it’s hard to get a good first impression of him. Usually he’ll warm up around a month later, but it’s rare he has someone stick around that long.

At the moment, his fictional characters are enough for him, and the friends he’s made online that don’t mind his typos and three word responses.

First thing Jungkook plans on doing when he gets a bigger apartment is getting a dog. Bam, to be specific, never mind that having a dog as big as a Doberman is a horrible idea in the city. It will happen. Just like he’ll get his comic published someday, and he’ll be able to draw full-time, like he wants.

Keep dreaming, JK.

Yeah, it is just a dream, but at the moment Jungkook doesn’t have much else.

“Shivu said you guys will catch up tomorrow,” Van says, and Jungkook blinks at her. “You and me are going over things with the new hire today.”

Jungkook blinks some more. “New hire?”

“Well, I- you heard about Watson, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. His replacement starts today.”

“That’s a really fast turnaround” Jungkook comments. He wipes his nose on his sleeve and hopes he doesn’t look too gross. Not that it matters; it’s obvious he’s still sick beyond belief. Why did he come in again today?

“Not really,” Van muses. “Beth and Lori had this in the pipeline since last month.”

“What?”

Jungkook feels a bolt of shock, quickly followed by a spike of anger. If they’d already hired this new person, then Watson must’ve been fired in order for them to come on. And Jungkook doesn’t find that fair, not at all. Not that he can do anything about it, but it just sucks even more.

Van tosses him a smile. “Got to jump on a client call, but go talk to Beth and Lori, okay? Lori’s office.”

Jungkook tries to smile back, but he’s too busy fighting down a wave of nausea. Seriously, why did he come in?

He doesn’t bother to drop his bag at his desk, because excessive walking will probably make his head spin even more. Instead he just goes straight into Lori’s office and almost collapses into the chair opposite her desk that Beth isn’t already sitting in.

“JK!” she says. “We missed you last week!”

Jungkook’s nose twitches and his eyes water, and Lori leans across her desk to offer him a box of tissues. He takes one just in time to sneeze into it.

“These seasonal colds are the worst,” she comments, and Beth nods in agreement. Jungkook knows they both have kids, and they’re always talking about how they’ve brought home the latest germ from school to spread all over the house.

Jungkook gets treated like one of their kids more often than not, but he doesn’t mind. They’re both nice, and he likes that they give really good benefits and time off. So he can’t imagine why they would fire Watson to make room for a new hire.

“So,” Lori starts, after Jungkook finishes with the tissue, “first I’d like to say we’re both sorry we had to let James go.”

It takes Jungkook a second to realize who they’re talking about. Jungkook always called him Mr. Watson—a lot of people in the office did. It would feel almost disrespectful to say anything else.

“He told us he was planning to retire in the next few months anyway,” Beth adds, “so I don’t think there were any hard feelings. And we know you two made a great team, but we wanted to let you know the guy we’re bringing in is going to be a wonderful addition to the company. And we definitely took you into consideration; we really think you’ll complement each other.”

Jungkook frowns. “Is that a new teambuilding thing we’re doing?”

“What?” Beth asks.

“Complimenting each other.”

“Oh,” Lori says, clearly trying to fight back a smile. “No, complement. C-o-m-p-l-E-m-e-n-t. As in, you complete each other. Your strengths align nicely.”

Jungkook hopes they attribute the embarrassed flush of his cheeks to his persistent fever. “Oh.”

“But if you want to compliment him,” Beth says warmly, “you’re more than welcome to.”

Jungkook gives a stiff nod.

“Anyway,” Lori interjects, clapping her hands, “we just wanted to make sure you were all set for today. I can see you’re still feeling a bit iffy, if you’d rather we have him go with someone else.”

“Sorry, what am I supposed to be set for?” Jungkook asks.

Beth and Lori exchange glances. “The new guy,” Beth explains. “We’re having him shadow you today. Sorry, I assumed you got the message.”

Jungkook wipes his nose with another tissue. “No, uh- no, I haven’t been checking my email.”

“It was on Slack.”

“Haven’t been checking that either.”

“Must’ve been one hell of a stomach bug.”

Jungkook thinks back to a few days ago, when he was bent over the toilet for hours. “You have no idea.”

“Well,” Lori says, “it’s his first day, and we thought since you’re just coming back as well, you could show him around the office, tell him about how things work. Since you’re not stuck in with anything yet, I assume?”

“Uh- uh, no, Chaya’s been helping me out.”

“Good. He should be here in…five minutes?” Lori stands up from her desk and walks towards the door, leaving Jungkook no choice but to follow her. Beth walks back to her own office, shutting the door behind her. “I’m headed downstairs to meet him; I’ll send him over to you once we get him set up with security.”

“Okay.”

Jungkook splits off when they get to the elevators, ready to head to his desk and try to get through the next eight hours without puking. Today is not a great day for him to meet his new coworker. Watson’s replacement, no less.

“Oh,” Lori calls, like an afterthought, “he’s from Korea too!”

Jungkook just nods, not sure what to do with that piece of information. Maybe he’s not great with English; Jungkook can relate to that. He walks through the office and waves at the ‘welcome back’s and ‘glad you’re feeling better’s until he gets to the back. He drops into his chair and promptly buries his head in his arms. His sinuses are throbbing, and he’s really wishing he’d called in sick. But it’s the start of a new week, and he really shouldn’t be missing more work than he already has.

With a groan, he lifts his head and turns on his computer, pulling out his water bottle and other necessities. His pencils are sharpened and his papers are organized, just the way he left them last Friday. He doesn’t want to look across from him, at Watson’s empty desk. His nature photos are gone, along with his Buckingham Palace snow globe. No postcards from his daughter, and no Sudoku book with his familiar green pen. It’s all gone, and Jungkook doesn’t like the idea of someone else filling the space.

Jungkook takes a minute to glance around, making sure no one’s looking, and opens his file drawer. He pulls out the file marked ‘BAM Inc.’ which, yeah, is a little stupid, but nobody else gets to look at it. He’s honestly proud of it; anyone would assume it’s just another report on one of their clients. But Jungkook knows it’s full of rough sketches for his comic, ones he works on when he has free time at the office. Which is a lot. He always takes the file home at the end of each week and scans them onto his laptop, because as much as this job bores him, he still respects the company and doesn’t want to use their tech for his own personal shit.

He slides the file into his bag and vows to put it out of his head until the end of the workday. He’s had a week off—he really should try today.

He’s scrolling through the ‘general’ thread on Slack to catch up on the messages he missed, when he hears footsteps behind him. He spins his chair around to see who he can only assume is the new hire, a guy about his age. Jungkook thinks if Watson was still here, he’d ask if they were brothers—the same black hair and the same dark eyes. But Jungkook can see from a mile away this guy looks nothing like him.

He can also see this guy is handsome, and for some reason, his palms start sweating.

“Annyeonghaseyo,” Jungkook says, standing up hastily and bowing.

He waits for the guy to say it back, but he just sticks out his hand with a bright smile.

“I’m Taehyung. And I speak English; I’m from Canada.”

Jungkook turns bright red and straightens up to shake Taehyung’s hand, who he prays doesn’t notice the clamminess.

“Um- sorry,” he says, “Sorry, Lori told me- I just assumed-”

“Don’t worry about it,” Taehyung responds, still smiling. “I do speak Korean too, but my mom’s always crying at my pronunciation.”

Jungkook nods stiffly, and realizes he’s still holding onto Taehyung’s hand. He lets go. “You seem to pronounce your name okay,” he says, and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

Taehyung just quirks an amused eyebrow. “Well, I would hope so. It is my name, after all.”

Jungkook just shoves his hands into his pockets and wonders if he should eat his stapler, so he won’t say anything else so completely idiotic.

“I heard everyone calls you JK,” Taehyung says.

“Nobody can say Jungkook.”

“Jungkook?” Taehyung repeats.

“Jungkook,” Jungkook says, stressing the first syllable.

“Jungkook.”

“Yeah. That’s the right way.”

“Do you mind if I call you that?” Taehyung asks.

Jungkook shrugs. “I don’t care.”

“And you should call me Taehyung,” Taehyung adds. “I have a feeling I’ll get a name change too. We have to stick together, you and I.”

Jungkook hopes the smile on his face doesn’t feel too forced, but it certainly is. He knows Taehyung is trying to be nice, but he just feels like shit, and he’s still mad about Watson. “Let me show you around,” he says. “Lori said I’m supposed to give you a tour.”

“In English or Korean?” Taehyung jokes, and Jungkook pretends to laugh.

The tour Jungkook gives is lackluster at best, nonsensical at worst. He’s starting to feel delirious, by the time they get back to their desks, and Taehyung has stopped to say hello to pretty much every single person in the office.

“Are you okay?” Taehyung asks, when Jungkook finally collapses into his chair again. “You look a little beat.”

“I’m getting over the flu,” Jungkook says, resisting the urge to vomit on Taehyung’s shoes. “You might not want to sit back here for the next couple days. Might be contagious.”

To his disappointment, Taehyung just laughs and plunks his bag down on Watson’s desk. “Well, we’ve spent the last hour together, so if I’m going to catch anything it would’ve already happened. And I haven’t gotten sick since I was in college, don’t worry.”

“Was that a long time ago?” Jungkook asks, not really interested but trying hard to be polite. Anything to keep him from thinking about puking.

Taehyung snorts. “Well, I’m twenty-five, so no, not that long ago. Why, do I look old?”

He leans forward with his elbows on Watson’s desk, cradling his chin in his hands. It’s now that Jungkook really gets a good look at Taehyung—he spent the tour mostly staring at the ground. He’s still handsome, Jungkook’s first impression was right, but he’s also got strong, almost strange features. Everything about Taehyung is big, Jungkook notices. Big eyes, big nose, big mouth, big hands. But somehow he also looks completely delicate, like some kind of magical woodland sprite in a fairytale.

Jungkook tells himself it’s the fever talking.

“No, you don’t look old,” Jungkook responds. “I was just wondering.”

“And how old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Ah. That makes me your hyung, right?”

Jungkook bites his cheek to keep from saying ‘I don’t think we’re friendly enough for that yet.’

“You want me to call you Taehyung-hyung?” he asks. It’s not unheard of, but it’ll sound stupid here in the office.

Taehyung smiles. “Good point. Just Taehyung then. I’ve never been into the whole seniority thing anyway.”

“Cool.”

Taehyung’s smile gets a bit wider. The shape of it is strange, like the rest of him. Rectangular.

“Not big on talking, are you? Or is it just the flu?”

“I’ll say it’s a mix of both.”

“Well, Jungkook,” Taehyung says, leaning over Watson’s desk, “I hope you feel better soon, because I plan for us to talk. A lot.”

“Oh?”

“Of course. We’re about to be best friends, after all.”

It’s been a month, and Taehyung is decidedly not Jungkook’s best friend. He’s not Jungkook’s friend at all; he’d hardly classify them above coworkers. The only edge Taehyung has on anyone else in the office is that Jungkook spends almost every second of the day with him, stuck facing each other in the back.

But Jungkook wouldn’t say that makes Taehyung a friend. It only makes him even more infuriating.

What friendly, outgoing, nice Taehyung failed to reveal on his first day is that he’s a huge pain in the ass, and a complete know-it-all. Not to mention a perfectionist, which is absolutely unbearable, because he’s constantly coming over to Jungkook’s side and leaning over his shoulder to offer his own opinions.

Like right now.

“I think you should move it over more,” Taehyung says, breath hitting Jungkook’s ear and making him squirm to the side. “And the text should be a darker blue—that’s hard to read.”

Jungkook swallows down a flood of angry Korean, because as much as Taehyung claims his pronunciation sucks, he can still understand the language perfectly. Jungkook found that out when he called his mom during lunch, and Taehyung said afterwards, ‘I didn’t know you were from Busan!’ Apparently Taehyung’s best friend grew up there, Jungkook came to learn, in a twenty minute tangent from Taehyung Jungkook really did not care to hear, but had to hear anyway. Because Taehyung’s desk is opposite his, and Taehyung himself is only a little more than an arm’s length away.

And Taehyung is so loud. He’s loud when he comes in each morning (always late), loud when he answers client calls, loud when he types on his keyboard (he only uses two fingers, and it’s maddening), and loudest of all when he laughs.

He’s usually laughing at Jungkook, some dry comment he’s made. And Jungkook doesn’t really get why Taehyung laughs, because it’s not meant to be a joke.

The other day, Jungkook had asked him if he wouldn’t mind keeping his papers on his own desk, thanks very much, and Taehyung cracked up like Jungkook was the most hilarious person on the planet.

That’s another thing Jungkook can’t stand—Taehyung is so messy. He doesn’t have an organized system for anything, either at his desk or on his computer, and Jungkook constantly has to wait for him to sift through stacks of files or scattered desktop icons to find whatever document he has to share with Jungkook.

They’ve got their first joint presentation coming up in three days, and they’re both trying to get everything finished in time. Jungkook wasn’t really sure why Beth and Lori thought it would be a good idea to give them a big client to handle, and a new one at that. But Shivu had just squeezed his arm reassuringly and said, ‘trial by fire,’ which Jungkook had to wait and google later before understanding what she meant.

She’s right, and Taehyung seems to be a little over his head, with all this. Jungkook’s privately happy about it, because not only did Taehyung replace Watson, but he’s also just beyond irritating, and Jungkook wants him gone.

Taehyung’s lack of experience here keeps spilling over into Jungkook’s work, and he has pull both their weights. He hasn’t drawn a single thing for his comic in a week and a half, because Taehyung keeps asking him how to log into the client management portal, and to work through lunch so they can make progress on their pitch. Jungkook finished his data analyses two days after Taehyung arrived, at least the ones Shivu had outlined for him, but then Taehyung glanced over it and dumped about thirty other things on him to do.

Jungkook didn’t see the point, but there’s kind of an unspoken rule around the office that in the teams, the associate is the one running the show. The analyst is more of a support role. And that worked, when Watson was here, because he wasn’t anal like Taehyung, wanting to try forty different ideas and then nitpicking everything until it falls apart and they have to start from scratch.

Jungkook thinks he’s done more work in the past month than he has in a whole year, and it’s pissing him off. If Taehyung wanted to be a try-hard, he should’ve gone to work somewhere else.

“Does that look better?” Jungkook asks.

Taehyung hums. “Yeah, I think. Maybe a little to the left…yeah, there. Good. Can you show me the demographics chart?”

Jungkook tamps down a groan and hits the up arrow on his keyboard a few times until they get to the slide Taehyung wants. Taehyung leans closer to the screen, frowning.

“We already agreed on this one,” Jungkook reminds him. “You said you liked this format.”

Taehyung, as usual, ignores him. Yet another point against him, Taehyung seems to suffer from selective hearing, when Jungkook says something he doesn’t like. It’s either his way or no way at all, and most of the time Jungkook doesn’t care enough to fight him on it, but when they’ve redone a graph eight times, he has to put his foot down.

“I already added the bullet points,” he continues. “You literally just have to read them for the presentation.”

Taehyung squints at the screen. “Show me the notes?”

Jungkook clicks on the bottom of the PowerPoint to show the notes he typed in the other day, after Taehyung finally deemed the slide good enough to be finished. Taehyung reads over them quickly, frowning harder.

“We need to rewrite them.”

“Why?”

“Just- I mean, you have all the important stuff, it’s just not really…I think we need some stronger copy.”

“Maybe next time I should just write it in Korean,” Jungkook snaps, “and you can translate it however you want.”

Taehyung laughs directly in Jungkook’s ear, and it baffles Jungkook that Taehyung doesn’t seem to understand sarcasm.

“Is the rest of your stuff in already? The notes for your part?”

Jungkook notes, biting back a retort that he already told Taehyung that yesterday. Selective hearing.

“Okay, I’ll check over them for you, don’t worry. I’ll probably spice up some words but you can ask me if you have any questions.”

Jungkook frowns. “I don’t know if that’s a great idea, Taehyung. I don’t really want you-”

“-putting words in your mouth?”

Maybe the most annoying thing of all—when Taehyung finishes his sentences. Taehyung talks at the speed of light. Excuse Jungkook for not doing the same, but it actually makes him want to throttle Taehyung with his bare hands, whenever Taehyung rushes him to the end. And it’s even more annoying that Taehyung almost always gets it right.

Jungkook settles for a tight nod.

“Don’t worry,” Taehyung repeats. “I’ll still make it sound like you. Just with a little more flair.”

He tosses Jungkook a wink that goes unanswered, but he’s not fazed. Jungkook doesn’t think Taehyung’s ever fazed. He wonders what it would look like.

When he looks over Taehyung’s edits later, and finds Taehyung wants him to say, ‘trends in user data would suggest an inherent bias towards noniterative experiences, clearly in support of dynamic involvement spirals over more antiquated, static loyalty loops,’ Jungkook vows to find out.

He does find out, ten minutes before their presentation. Jungkook is setting things up in the conference room when he realizes he hasn’t seen Taehyung yet, and considering he’s giving most of the presentation, it’s probably important that he’s here.

“Have you seen Taehyung?” he asks Shivu, who’s helping him run through the slides and making sure the projector’s working okay.

“Maybe he’s in the bathroom,” she says. “Not like any of us can check.”

True enough. Jungkook and Taehyung are the only two guys in the office, other than Chris, but he’s always out on client calls. He’s the acquisitions officer, so it’s his job to bring in new leads for the company. Jungkook’s only spoken to him a handful of times.

“I’ll go look,” Jungkook says. “Van’s bringing them up, right?”

“Yeah. They should be here in five, so tell Tae he should hurry up.”

Taehyung, it turns out, was right about the office shortening his name as well. Jungkook finds it kind of terrible that they’re the only two to call each other by their full name, because it just makes Chaya want them to get together even more. She came over that first day Taehyung started to catch Jungkook up to speed on the projects she’d been covering for him, and she wasted no time mentioning that Taehyung wouldn’t be interested in anyone but Jungkook or Chris, according to what she heard him say to Jen at lunch.

The last thing Jungkook wants is to go out with Taehyung. He’s pretty sure their date would start with Taehyung ordering for him, and end with Taehyung critiquing his kissing technique.

Not that he’s thought about kissing Taehyung. God no.

Jungkook walks into the men’s room to find Taehyung pacing back and forth in front of the sink, muttering under his breath.

“Taehyung?”

“Hey.”

“What are you…what are you doing?”

Taehyung smiles at him, but it’s more of a grimace. “Practicing.”

“What- we already practiced,” Jungkook points out. “All of yesterday.” They ran through the presentation eleven times, eight more than Jungkook ever did with Watson. And Taehyung nailed each one; Jungkook might dislike him, but he will admit Taehyung’s got good speaking skills. He’s really articulate (a word he learned after Taehyung said it), and he’s damn charming. Enough that everyone in the office seems to worship the ground he walks on. Jungkook also suspects it’s because he’s so good-looking.

Not that Jungkook really notices, or cares. God no.

“I know,” Taehyung says. “I just need it to be perfect.”

“Are you nervous?”

“No.”

“Then stop practicing and come to the conference room,” Jungkook demands. “They’re gonna be here any minute.”

“Shit, already?”

“Yes, already.”

Jungkook thinks if Taehyung was half as obsessed with time management as he was with their slide deck, then maybe he’d stop being late for literally everything. Jungkook thinks it’s completely unfair Taehyung slides into work at least twenty minutes late every day, and all he has to do is wave at Beth and Lori for them to shrug it off.

Taehyung pulls on Jungkook’s sleeve right before they walk back into the conference room, and it takes a lot of effort for Jungkook not to jerk away. He doesn’t appreciate Taehyung’s disregard for personal space either.

“We’re gonna do great,” Taehyung says with a smile. “I’m glad you and I are working together, Jungkook.”

“Mhmm. We don’t want to be late, come on.”

The presentation goes about as well as Jungkook expects it to, mostly because he throws out Taehyung’s whole script and just says what he was going to in the first place. He can feel Taehyung glancing at him when he goes through his part of the slides, but he ignores it. Jungkook already gets so nervous to talk that he doesn’t need any added pressure, not to mention extra fancy words from Taehyung that are a nightmare to pronounce, and he doesn’t even understand anyway.

Taehyung still sits down at his desk (Watson’s desk, Jungkook corrects himself) with a puzzled frown afterwards.

“What?”

Jungkook’s come to learn over the past month that if he doesn’t ask, Taehyung will just go on pouting until he leaves for the night, and sometimes into the next morning too. Taehyung always makes the same stupid face, eyebrows scrunched together and lips pushed out to make him look like a six-year-old that didn’t get any candy.

Taehyung’s eyebrows scrunch harder. “I thought you were gonna say what I wrote for you.”

“Yeah, well. I can’t really say that stuff,” Jungkook replies, hiding behind his monitor so Taehyung won’t see his flaming cheeks. “It’s too complicated.”

“You just need a little practice. I can totally help you, I don’t mind.”

“I think what I said was fine, thanks.”

Jungkook stares at his computer screen and waits for Taehyung’s irritated huff.

It comes not a second later, and Jungkook just knows Taehyung’s still making that stupid face. “I really think we should do it the way I have it.”

Jungkook elects not to respond, something he knows drives Taehyung crazy.

“Jungkook? Did you hear me?”

“Mhmm.”

“So can you please read from my notes next time?”

No.

“Is it going to make your brain explode if I don’t?”

Jungkook suppresses a groan at Taehyung’s laugh. Jungkook’s surprised they haven’t had the walls cave in, with how loud it is.

“Kinda, yeah. Sorry, I know I’m controlling sometimes but I’m a little bit of a perfectionist.”

“Couldn’t tell.”

More laughing, and seriously, is he just immune to insults?

Jungkook vows, once again, to find out.

Jungkook’s had a pretty awful Christmas. He was planning to go home to Korea for ten days, but his Christmas Eve flight got grounded by the massive snowstorm that swept over most of the United Kingdom and he couldn’t get another one until the first of January. He didn’t have to be back in office until the sixth, because both Beth and Lori were taking a joint New Year’s cruise together and decided to close down for the duration. But there was no point in still going, because he would’ve missed all the holiday celebrations and most of his friends would’ve started work again. His parents are coming to London to visit this summer, so there really wasn’t any reason he should still try to go.

Other than the fact that he was bitterly lonely, of course.

Christmas by yourself is pretty terrible, Jungkook’s discovered, especially when the heat’s broken in your apartment and every restaurant is closed. He didn’t have any food, because he’d assumed that his plane wouldn’t get grounded by a snowstorm and that he’d be out of the country for ten days.

But no, all he had was a jar of pickles and some stale pretzels, and he figured it must be his lowest low, ordering McDonalds on Christmas.

At least he got to work on his comic, so small blessings there. There must be some other lonely people out in the world, because the chapter he posted on New Year’s Eve, just an hour before midnight, got several thousand hits in the first few minutes.

Despite the way he tries to temper his expectations, he really does think he’s getting somewhere with the whole thing. And he likes doing it, so he doesn’t plan to stop any time soon. He just wishes he had more time to work on it, but now with the nightmare that is Taehyung as his partner, he’s pretty much only able to draw in the few hours he has when he gets home in the evenings after the gym.

So even though his Christmas was a bust, and New Year’s, he got to spend the next five days in a drawing frenzy before he had to start up with work again, and worse, Taehyung.

He doesn’t really know how he gets in such a good headspace, but he somehow finds the zone, and by the time Sunday night rolls around, he’s finished in five days what normally takes him two months.

Though, of course, not everything in Jungkook’s life can go right, not even for a minute, and he finds his scanner is broken when he tries to upload everything. It’s not a huge deal, he could just sneak in early tomorrow and scan them at the office, or he could even take them to the nearest public library. It’s just a hassle, and now he has to figure out how to manually fix a busted scanner.

So it’s with a strange mix of happiness and annoyance that he goes back to work on Monday, his file folder tucked in his bag and filled to bursting with all his progress.

Jungkook is the second person in the office, to his dismay.

“Jungkook! How was Korea?”

Jungkook has to forcibly stop himself from turning on his heel and walking right back into the elevator.

“Hello, Taehyung. I didn’t get to go.”

“Oh my god,” Taehyung gasps. “What happened?”

“All the snow. My flight got canceled.”

“Wow, that sucks,” Taehyung says, and Jungkook finds it annoying how sincere he sounds. “What did you do instead?”

“Uh, you know. Just hung out.”

Taehyung nods as they walk towards their desks. “That’s cool.”

Jungkook resists the urge to roll his eyes. “What about you?” he makes himself ask.

“I had an amazing break,” Taehyung says, and really, just kill Jungkook now. “My birthday is on the thirtieth—I don’t know if you knew that—but some of my friends back home organized a virtual surprise party, how nice is that?”

“Very nice.”

“Yeah, I’m twenty-six now. Which is crazy. Ah, Jungkook, you really should’ve told me you were stuck here, I would’ve invited you to come out with us!”

“Us?”

“Yeah, me and some my friends went out on New Year’s Eve; it was really fun.”

Jungkook squints at Taehyung as he starts unpacking his bag. “Didn’t you just move here like, a month ago?”

“Mhmm.”

And you already have friends?

Jungkook isn’t sure how Taehyung has friends, to be honest. They must not mind getting bulldozed over in every conversation and bending to every single one of Taehyung’s endless whims.

Speaking of-

“So I was thinking about some stuff for us to try out this week, for the client with the…shit, what’s the name…whatever. The account Chris just brought on. They said we can do whatever; I thought it might be interesting if we set up some focus groups before their launch. And then we can tailor the ads after.” Taehyung gives Jungkook a hopeful look over the top of his monitor. “Do you think you can put that together?

Jungkook frowns. “It might take a while. And that’s more of a job for Research.”

“Yeah, I know, but I think if we handled it ourselves it would go way better.”

“I don’t know, Taehyung. Maybe just let everyone do the jobs they’re supposed to.”

Another thing Jungkook hates about Taehyung—he has to be involved in literally everything, and then so does Jungkook, by association. And now Taehyung’s making that stupid face again.

“I’ll email you that report after lunch,” Jungkook says, before Taehyung can belabor the point. “On the buyer personas.”

“What buyer personas?”

Jungkook rubs his temples. “For the Merrick account. And the one you’re talking about with the focus group is the Brendel account.”

“Oh, oh, oh! Yeah, I don’t need that anymore.”

“What?”

“I want to change our pitch. I think we should tell them to rebrand.”

“Don’t you still need buyer personas for that?”

Taehyung shrugs. “Not really. They already have all that; they just have to change how they market to those audiences.”

Jungkook tries not to bang his head on the desk. “Taehyung, when did you decide this?”

“Mmm…a few weeks ago? Didn’t I tell you?”

“No,” Jungkook grinds out, “you didn’t.”

Jungkook spend two days on that report, painstakingly making sure every pixel was to Taehyung’s specifications, because he really couldn’t stand the thought of Taehyung leaning over his shoulder and saying ‘hmm, can we move that textbox a hair to the left and change the cover photo and Jungkook could you wipe my ass while you’re at it?’

And now that’s completely useless.

“I definitely did,” Taehyung says, and Jungkook knows it’s useless to argue with him.

“Are you an only child?” Jungkook blurts out. Maybe that would explain the entitlement. A word Jungkook looked up when he needed to think something other than asshole asshole asshole on a loop every time he made eye contact with Taehyung.

“Nope. I have an older sister. What about you?”

God. Jungkook did not mean for this to turn into a conversation.

“Just me.”

“And you moved all the way to London? Your poor parents!”

“Mmm.”

Jungkook doesn’t really need to tell Taehyung his parents were more than happy to see him go, because they’re under the impression he’s making them proud, their uber-successful son climbing his way to the top. And Jungkook thinks he’d rather scrape by in a foreign country than suffer embarrassment at home for how middle-of-the-road he is, career-wise.

It’s just that Jungkook doesn’t like his job very much—he didn’t like his college major very much—and he just can’t force himself to work hard at things he doesn’t care about. He’ll stay up until four in the morning finishing a panel for his comic, but here, Jungkook can hardly be bothered to check for spelling mistakes on his presentation slides.

There are many, he’s come to realize. Taehyung doesn’t ever let him forget it. ‘Hey, I noticed you wrote…‘ and then Jungkook wants to stab Taehyung’s leg with a pencil.

Taehyung lets the conversation drop, mercifully, and focuses on his own work for once. Jungkook reflects that this is horrible timing, because nosy-ass Taehyung will most certainly ask what’s in his file, and why he’s using the scanner. So Jungkook waits until Taehyung gets up a few minutes later and walks into the breakroom before pulling out his folder.

He sets it on his desk and is about to stand up when his phone starts ringing. He’s getting a call from his mom.

Of course he answers it—otherwise it’ll send her into a frenzy worrying he’s been kidnapped or murdered. She probably thinks he’s still at his apartment. He would be, on most days. And Taehyung probably wouldn’t even be awake yet, most days. Again, Jungkook has to wonder how his luck is so damn bad.

“Eomma,” he answers, trying to sound bright and cheerful even though he hasn’t had even one drop of coffee yet.

Taehyung comes back over with a mug of tea soon after, but thankfully seems to understand Jungkook’s busy and doesn’t ask any questions. Jungkook is just about to hang up when he hears something hit the floor with a loud smack, and Taehyung’s muttered ‘oh, shit.’

Jungkook glances around his monitor to see Taehyung’s dropped his planner, a gigantic mess of a thing with colored tabs sticking out every which way and crammed from edge to edge with Taehyung’s horrible handwriting. Jungkook had to ask for typed notes, after a week of working together. It’s already enough that he has to interpret a Romanized alphabet, but Taehyung’s penmanship melts it into a flowy, illegible mess.

‘It’s cursive,’ he’d said. ‘You’ve never seen cursive?’

Jungkook didn’t think a pencil would be enough, at that moment. He needed goddamn Excalibur.

Jungkook hangs up as Taehyung grabs his planner and straightens again.

“Success,” he says, smiling at Jungkook.

Jungkook doesn’t smile back.

Taehyung drops his planner on his desk again, still grinning. “Well, I should at least get points for- oh, watch out-”

Jungkook looks down just in time to see Taehyung’s mug full of hot tea tip over when his stupid brick of a planner slides across a mess of papers and bumps it a little too hard.

It almost happens in slow motion, the way Taehyung’s tea spills out of his mug and runs in a nice little river all over Jungkook’s folder of drawings. Nice little tidal wave, more like.

“Oh, geez,” Taehyung says, “I’m sorry. I hope that isn’t too important.”

Jungkook wonders if Taehyung would mind terribly if Jungkook hurled him out the window.

“Here, let me get some napkins.”

“It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?” Taehyung stands up, reaching for Jungkook’s now-soaked drawings. “What’s in here anyway? ‘BAM Inc.’ What’s that?”

“Nothing,” Jungkook mutters, pulling the soggy file away from Taehyung’s hands. His big, stupid, clumsy hands that knock his stupid, wet tea everywhere and ruin fucking everything.

“Is it one of our accounts? I don’t remember that from my onboarding.”

“It’s one of Chaya’s,” Jungkook lies. “I told her I’d mock up a report.”

“Oh, Jungkook, I’m really sorry,” Taehyung apologizes again. “I didn’t mean to ruin it. You can just print another one, right?”

“Mmm.”

“I can help you, if you want. Look over spelling, or whatever.”

The window’s too good. Taehyung’s getting thrown off the roof.

Jungkook doesn’t find anything particularly special about January fourteenth, but to Beth and Lori, it’s a bigger deal than Christmas.

“The day we met-”

“The day we started our business-”

“The day Lori got married and I-”

“Got drunk and spilled red wine all over my dress-”

Beth laughs into her margarita. “I’ll go to my grave telling you it wasn’t my fault. The floor was slippery!”

“I looked like Carrie’s unfortunate cousin,” Lori says, and Bekkah laughs loudly from her seat next to Jungkook.

On January fourteenth, no matter what day of the week it falls on, Lori and Beth take the company out for a fancy dinner to celebrate another year at the firm. Most companies do that type of thing in December, at the end of the year and the last quarter, but both Beth and Lori get so swamped with Christmas they don’t have a spare second to breathe until after New Year’s.

So it’s always January fourteenth that they close the office for the day, and the day after that, because it’s kind of company policy that everyone gets rip-roaring drunk and lets off some steam. All the steam really. Jungkook still remembers his first year, when Jen revealed to everyone that she was going to break up with her deadbeat boyfriend, and they all convinced her to call him ten minutes later and put him on speaker while she did it.

Afterwards they all took shots to toast to her freedom, and Jungkook drank so much he couldn’t see straight when he fell into bed later that night.

Maybe it’s not exactly professional, and maybe taking so many days off isn’t a good business model, but Jungkook agrees with Beth and Lori that it brings everyone closer. And they treat their employees well—that’s the main reason he’s lasted as long as he has.

This year is extra special; it’s the firm’s ten year anniversary, and Lori’s twenty-fifth anniversary with her husband. He’s a nice guy, even if he does keep mixing up Jungkook and Taehyung every time he asks them a question. It’s happened with more than a few clients too, and Jungkook’s a little bit over it. He can tell Taehyung is too, because he’s started doing this thing where he meets Jungkook’s eyes across the table and makes this deadly little raise of his eyebrow that Jungkook would hate to be the cause of.

Jungkook’s started doing this thing too, this really strange thing, where he actually finds it kind of funny, when Taehyung gives him that look. But otherwise Taehyung’s completely unbearable.

At least he’s not sitting directly across from Jungkook tonight. Lori and Beth rented out a private room at this fairly upscale restaurant a few blocks from the office, known for its seafood and more importantly, its signature cocktails.

So far Jungkook’s had something called a Blue Hawaiian (fantastic), a key lime pie martini (revolting), and he’s currently working on the ‘Bloody Mary Murder Mix’ (potentially hangover-inducing).

He’s definitely enjoying himself, like he always does at these dinners, and Bekkah’s been fun to sit next to, whispering bits of gossip in his ear about everyone else at the office. The more shots she takes, the juicer it gets.

“Did you know Beth used to date a guy in a rock band?” she whispers.

Jungkook snorts into his drink. “Really?”

“Mhmm. He played drums, and he had all these tats and piercings and drove a motorcycle. Total cliché.”

“She dated a drummer like, recently?”

“No, no, no,” Bekkah says. “When they were in college. Lori told me about it. Beth’s rebel phase. But apparently the band was horrible.”

Jungkook laughs, and feels a little flustered when most of the table looks at him. Maybe he shouldn’t have anything after this last drink.

And yet, when dinner winds down, he somehow finds himself being roped into another round of drinks out at the bar. Beth and Lori peel off, claiming they’re too old to stay out so late, but are generous enough to keep the company tab open. And, well, Jungkook’s not going to turn down free drinks.

It’s nice, hanging out with his coworkers. Hanging out with people in general, really. Sometimes Jungkook doesn’t think about how lonely he is until he’s not anymore.

Bekkah’s the one to suggest the game, the six of them that are still left crammed into one booth and all plied with various cocktails from the kind of eccentric bartender. ‘You look like a gin man,’ he’d said to Jungkook, when he went up to order. Jungkook had no idea what a gin man looked like, and when he asked, the bartender just winked and told him, ‘if you have to ask, that means you are.’

So Jungkook’s got a rather plain gin and tonic now, despite trying to order a vodka sour. He’s not sure that’s allowed, the bartender dictating what people drink, but the guy looks kind of scary and he’s also got such a thick Yorkshire accent Jungkook found it near impossible to understand him.

“So,” Bekkah says loudly, slapping her hands on the table. “This is called Paranoia.”

Jungkook frowns into his gin.

“Pyeonjibbyeong.” Jungkook glances up to see Taehyung already looking at him from across the booth. “Pyeonjibbyeong,” Taehyung repeats. “Yeah?”

Jungkook nods. “Yeah, okay.”

“JK, you got it? The name isn’t that important anyway, what matters is how you play.” Bekkah waits for Jungkook to give her a thumbs up before continuing. “Basically, we go in a circle, and you whisper into the person’s ear sitting next to you, and ask them a question. Then they say someone’s name out loud, and afterwards we flip a coin. Heads, you say what the question was and tails, you move on to the next question.”

“I’m lost,” Chaya breaks in, and Taehyung nods beside her. “This already sounds too complicated.”

“Okay, okay, wait,” Bekkah says, “let me explain it better. So for example, I’d whisper to JK and say something like…um…okay, ‘who’s the hottest person in the office?’ And then he’d have to say someone’s name out loud. Oh, and it has to be someone here in the circle, and you can’t say yourself. Or the person who asked you the question.”

“Can we do a practice round?” Jen breaks in.

“Sure. Okay, so I’ll ask JK a question, and then he answers it. Does anyone have a coin, by the way? Doesn’t matter what kind.”

While Van fishes around in her purse, Bekkah leans over and whispers to Jungkook.

“If you had to wear someone else’s clothes for a week, who would you pick?”

Jungkook tilts his head as he thinks. “Chaya,” he whispers back. She wears a lot of black, so he thinks he’d be pretty comfortable.

“You’re supposed to say it to everyone,” Bekkah reminds him, poking his cheek. “Keep up, JK.”

“Chaya,” he repeats, louder.

“What about me?”

“We have to flip the coin,” Van breaks in, before Chaya can continue. “He can’t say what the question was until we flip the coin.”

It lands on heads.

“Bekkah asks me whose clothes I would wear for a week.”

“Aww,” Chaya says, hands over her heart, “that’s so sweet.”

“He’d look good in one of your turtlenecks,” Jen says. “Show off that rock hard chest of his.”

“I think if JK’s shirts got any tighter they’d be painted on,” Chaya teases, gesturing to Jungkook.

Jungkook looks down at his shirt and shrugs good naturedly. He works hard to look good; so what if he wants to flaunt it a little? Chaya winks at him, and he grins back.

“Your turn,” Bekkah prompts.

They make it around the circle several times, and Jungkook starts to understand why the game is called Paranoia. Pyeonjibbyeong, he thinks. Unsure if he’s bothered by Taehyung’s help or not. They get kind of rowdy, voices rising when the coin lands on tails and people want to know what the question was. The questions quickly turn either pointed or raunchy, as Bekkah gets called out on her terrible habit of splashing water all over the office bathroom mirrors and Van winning the ‘most likely to go home with the weird bartender’ distinction.

There’s a point where Chaya whispers something to Taehyung, and he turns uncharacteristically red before he answers ‘Jungkook’ and blushes into his cosmopolitan.

The coin lands on tails, and Jungkook is left to wonder. Pyeonjibbyeong indeed. Not that he cares, he tells himself.

By the time they’ve made it back to Jungkook for a fourth time, Bekkah is, to put it politely, totally bombed. Halfway through they decided to turn it into a drinking game, making each other take a sip when their name got called out. Bekkah was chosen for a lot of questions, as one of the circle’s more outgoing personalities, stuff like who would go streaking in the office and the person most likely to be late to their own wedding. Jungkook would’ve answered Taehyung for that one, personally.

But Bekkah leans over and whispers in Jungkook’s ear, and he already knows this is headed for disaster.

“Who’s your least favorite person in the office?”

And Jungkook must be, to put it politely, totally bombed too, because he doesn’t even think before he blurts out his answer.

“Taehyung.”

Taehyung’s gaze snaps to Jungkook with such intensity Jungkook thinks he’ll melt into a puddle on the spot.

“That was fast,” Jen comments.

She’s right; every other question they’ve had to wait at least a minute while Jungkook debates what to say, mostly because he doesn’t want to offend anyone. But this was immediate, and loud, and if the coin lands heads up, Jungkook might have to quit his job. Not really; he’s sure it’ll play as a joke, but still, this is a terrible question. And a terrible answer, because it’s so fucking true.

“I can flip the coin,” Taehyung says.

Jungkook watches as Taehyung takes it and flips it off his thumb. It clatters onto the table unsteadily, and everyone stares as the coin rolls off the edge right into Taehyung’s lap. Jungkook feels like he can’t breathe, when Taehyung picks up the coin and puts it on the table. If it had landed tails, he could’ve flipped it just now and no one would know. Jungkook is so screwed.

“Tails.”

Jungkook meets Taehyung’s eyes, and he’s really not sure what he sees in them. Disappointment? Relief? Confusion? Maybe that’s just Jungkook’s reflection. Taehyung does have big eyes.

Pretty eyes.

What?

He definitely needs to stop drinking.

They get through two more questions before the game peters out, everyone too riled up to continue. Taehyung slides out of the booth a minute later with an offer to get more drinks, and he’s bombarded with requests.

“Jungkook?” he asks. “You want anything?”

“Whatever you’re having is fine.”

Maybe Jungkook feels a little bad about the question, even if Taehyung didn’t hear it. And Taehyung’s been acting weird all night, nothing like his usual, brash, grating self. He’s been quiet, which in and of itself is cause for alarm.

“Okay, wait,” Chaya says, over Jen’s loud story of how she broke up with her boyfriend, a story they’ve all heard and were there for, minus Taehyung. “We have to say the questions we didn’t get to hear.”

“No!” Bekkah protests. “That ruins the paranoia part of it.”

“Oh, come on.”

The conversation devolves into a drunken debate over whether they should reveal the unknown questions or not, and Chaya eventually just starts shouting hers, while Bekkah tries to yell over her. Jungkook tunes them out and finds himself watching Taehyung, over by the bar. He’s leaning over it, one arm stretched out as he points to something on the shelf behind the bartender with a quizzical expression.

He really is good-looking. He would’ve been Jungkook’s answer, if Bekkah had asked that practice question for real.

Taehyung takes his time getting everyone’s drinks, and it’s when he’s coming back that he catches Jungkook staring. Jungkook hastily looks away, but Taehyung’s already shot him a smile that somehow doesn’t come with the pang of annoyance it usually does.

Maybe it’s the drinks.

It’s definitely the drinks.

There’s a general mad dash for everyone’s refills, and Taehyung patiently stands at the end of the table to hand out the armful of drinks he’s carrying. He shifts closer to where Jungkook’s sitting at the edge of the seat and pushes a glass of something bright green towards him.

“What is it?”

“Absinthe.”

Jungkook blinks. “Absinthe?”

Taehyung nods. “Well, not just that. Some other stuff; I can’t remember. But I’ve never tried it, and the bartender said I should. Kinda made me, actually.”

“Yeah, he’s a little…”

“Domineering.”

“What?”

“Pushy.”

“Oh.” Jungkook taps a finger against his glass. “Yeah, that.”

“Do you want me to get you something else?” Taehyung asks.

Jungkook shakes his head. “I’ve never had absinthe either.”

“Cheers, then,” Taehyung says, raising his glass in a toast. “To…to our next adventure, Jungkook. Let’s hope it’s a wild one.”

Jungkook’s not sure he could handle Taehyung at ‘wild,’ if everything they’ve done has been considered tame so far. He has a feeling wild involves a lot more work.

But he still clinks his glass against Taehyung’s and takes a hesitant sip.

It’s kind of disgusting, kind of good. He’s definitely getting licorice, but there’s a really bitter undertone that makes him wince. Taehyung full-on gags, shuddering as he swallows.

“God,” he coughs. “That’s strong.”

“Not a big drinker?”

“Not if it’s this, no.”

Jungkook finds himself smiling, somehow.

“Hey, Jungkook,” Taehyung says, voice suddenly soft, “can I talk to you?”

“Aren’t we talking now?”

Taehyung gives him a half-smile. “I meant privately.”

Jungkook glances behind him to see his other coworkers still engaged in a heated debate over the game questions, all shouting over each other and drawing nasty looks from the few other people still in the bar. Minus the bartender, who catches Jungkook’s eye and winks, for some reason.

Jungkook swallows, a little nervous. Taehyung really is acting weird tonight. “Sure.”

Jungkook stands up with his drink and follows Taehyung to a free table a few spots over. It’s a testament to how loud their group is that Jungkook can still hear everything Van’s saying. No one’s seemed to notice he and Taehyung moved over though. Jungkook takes another sip of his drink and suppresses a grimace.

“What’s up? Honestly, if it’s about work, do you think we can wait until after the weekend?”

“It’s not about work.”

“Oh. Uh, okay.”

“I…” Taehyung traces a finger around the rim of his glass, and Jungkook can’t help but stare at his hands. He wonders if Taehyung’s an artist too.

He doesn’t know much about Taehyung, he realizes. Just what he’s like at work. Maybe he’s completely different outside the office.

‘It’s not about work.’ Does Jungkook want it to be about something else in particular?

“Jungkook, we’ve known each other for a little while now, and I- um, the crazy thing is that I don’t normally do this—well, I don’t ever do this—but I just wanted to tell you that I- Jesus, that I-”

Jungkook watches in something like awe as Taehyung acts completely rattled, stumbling over his words in a way he never has before. Jungkook doesn’t know what happened to confident, cocky Taehyung, but this is making his stomach twist.

“Jungkook,” Taehyung says, taking a sharp breath. “Jungkook, would you ever want to-”

“JK!”

Taehyung cuts off to look at Jen, who’s screamed over at them and caught most everyone’s attention in the bar. Jungkook tries not to slide off his chair and hide under the table.

Jen points to Bekkah with a wide grin. “She’s evil, making you answer that.”

Bekkah slaps Jen’s arm and makes a shushing motion, but it’s too late.

“Answer what?” Taehyung asks.

“He didn’t mean it, Tae!” Chaya calls, and everyone bursts into laughter. Jungkook might hide under the table anyway.

Taehyung turns back to look at him, and yeah, the floor’s looking pretty nice right about now.

'“What are they talking about?”

“Nothing,” Jungkook says hastily. “Just one of the questions.”

“The one you said my name for?”

Jungkook debates if it’s hazardous to his health, to down the rest of his drink in one go.

“Yeah.”

“What was the question?”

Jungkook takes a sip before answering. “Can’t tell you. Paranoia.”

Taehyung leans forward. “Paranoia.”

Ah, there’s the annoyance. “Can you stop doing that?” Jungkook snaps.

Taehyung frowns. “Doing what?”

“Correcting me.”

“I’m not correcting you, I’m just helping.”

“Okay, well, don’t help anymore.”

“I- um, okay. Sorry.”

Jungkook stares down at his drink and kicks himself for the tension that’s now sitting thick between them.

“I’m…I’m gonna go to the bathroom,” Taehyung says. “I’ll be right back.”

“Okay.”

Taehyung stands up and walks away from their table, leaving Jungkook with a bad taste in his mouth. It’s probably the absinthe. Jungkook takes another sip.

“Oh my God.” Chaya slides into Taehyung’s vacated seat, reaching out to grab Jungkook’s wrist. “I can’t believe you hate Tae!”

“What- I don’t hate him-”

“He’s so nice though!” This from Jen, who pulls Jungkook’s drink from his hand and frowns at it. “What the hell is this?”

Jungkook sees that everyone migrated over to their little table now, and he struggles not to turn completely red.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Van says, plucking Jungkook’s drink away from Jen. “You don’t need anymore drinks, you loudmouth.”

Van puts Jungkook’s drink back on the table and ignores the face Jen pulls. “Do you really not like Tae?”

Jungkook fidgets in his seat. “No?”

“That’s crazy! He’s awesome.”

“He’s really not,” Jungkook mutters.

“What do you mean?”

Jungkook glances around for a second. No sign of Taehyung. “He just- he’s so- he’s so…entitled.”

Bekkah frowns at him. “You think?”

“I’m not saying he’s a bad guy or anything, I just- I don’t like him.”

“I guess you don’t have to,” Bekkah muses, and Jungkook is a little confused at the way Chaya’s staring daggers at him right now. “But I think we’re all just surprised. You seem like you get along really well.”

Jungkook can’t help but snort with laughter. Maybe it’s the drinks, or maybe it’s that he hasn’t gotten to rant about Taehyung to anyone before this. Since he’s friendless. Friendless because of Taehyung, he reminds himself, because Taehyung came in, and Watson got fired.

“We don’t” Jungkook assures everyone. “He’s thinks he’s better than me.”

“What?” Van gasps. “Really?”

Jungkook nods.

“Well, what do you think about him?” Chaya prompts. Jungkook still isn’t sure why she looks mad.

“I think,” he says, “that Taehyung’s one of the worst people I’ve ever met in my life.”

He groans at the end, something fabricated to soften the truth behind his words, because as much as he dislikes Taehyung, he still likes everyone else at work. And he’s not so horrible of a person that he wants to convince everyone to hate Taehyung too.

He’s excepting smiles, a laugh here or there, maybe a fond eye roll from Chaya. He’s expecting everyone to think he’s joking, even though he’s really not. He’s expecting the topic to shift, to hear about the other wild questions people asked one another. He’s expecting the night to go on, and his opinion about Taehyung to remain just between the four people around him.

He’s not expecting everyone to be looking at him, expressions an array of faint horror and profound dismay. They’re not looking at him, he realizes, they’re looking at a point just past him.

He’s really not expecting to turn around and see Taehyung standing right behind him.

Fuck.

Jungkook isn’t big on confrontations, and he’s certainly too drunk to have this one.

“I think…it’s getting pretty late, I’m gonna head out.” Jen is the bravest (and probably drunkest) of the group, breaking the tense silence. “See you guys Monday.”

She tosses them all a stiff wave and doubles back to the booth to get her coat. Van and Bekkah are quick to follow, and Jungkook watches as Taehyung walks over to pull on his coat as well, Chaya on his heels. She rubs his arm and murmurs something, but Taehyung just shakes his head.

“Just a game,” Jungkook hears him say.

Jungkook is frozen in his seat watching everyone leave, but he finally jerks into action after Chaya chases after Jen to share a cab, and only Taehyung is left. Jungkook stands up and walk over to the booth so he can get his own coat as well, swallowing down the dread he feels. It’s his own fault, for saying that out loud. It’s fine to be honest in his thoughts, but maybe voicing it wasn’t such a good idea.

“Taehyung,” he says, “I-”

“Which drink is mine?”

“What?”

Taehyung points to the table they were just sitting at. “Which drink is mine?”

Jungkook looks over to see their drinks sitting side by side; after Van had pulled Jungkook’s away from Jen she must’ve dropped it right next to Taehyung’s. Jungkook, for the life of him, can’t tell.

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly. “Look, Taehyung, I’m sorry-”

“I’ll just guess then.”

Taehyung strides over and seizes one of the drinks before he downs it in one go. Jungkook blinks at him in shock.

“You better finish the other one,” he says, voice hard, “or I’m going to- oh, holy shit-”

Taehyung lists to the side, clutching at the edge of the table with one hand as he stumbles and puts the other to his chest.

“Are you okay?” Jungkook asks, rushing over. “Shit, what happened?”

“I’m- I’m fine,” Taehyung pants. “Fine.”

“Let me help you-” Jungkook tries to help Taehyung straighten up, but Taehyung shoves his hand away.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re clearly not-”

“Get off me-”

“I’m just trying to help-”

“Okay, well, don’t help anymore,” Taehyung quotes, his impression of Jungkook’s accent scarily accurate. “I’m leaving.”

“Wait, but, Taehyung, what I said-”

“Forget it. Everyone’s drunk, right?”

Jungkook bites his lip. “You don’t seem like you’re going to forget it.”

“Of fucking course I’m not,” Taehyung snaps. “You just said I’m one of the worst people you’ve ever met.” He shakes his head, a wild kind of laugh slipping out. “God, and to think I was going to- I mean- you know, Jungkook, you aren’t that great either.”

“Oh, I’m well aware,” Jungkook snaps back. “You criticize every single thing I do.”

“Maybe if you did it right I wouldn’t have to.”

“Maybe if you weren’t such an asshole, I would actually want to.”

“Fuck this,” Taehyung mutters. “I’m going home.”

He spins on his heel before Jungkook can get another word in, and storms out of the bar. Jungkook watches him go, seething mad and definitely not concerned at the way Taehyung still looks a little unsteady.

Jungkook blows out a breath. Things at the office are about to be a lot more tense. Though he’s relieved, almost, to have everything out in the open. He’s not sure if Taehyung ever thought they were friends, but it seems he thought Jungkook at least liked him. But Taehyung’s an arrogant asshole know-it-all, so he probably expects everyone to fall at his feet.

Jungkook stares down at the untouched drink still on the table, next to the other now-empty glass. Whether the remaining one is his or Taehyung’s, he doesn’t know.

Fuck it.

Tonight can’t get much worse; what’s a killer hangover in the morning?

Jungkook downs the rest with a shudder, trying not to imagine that bright green liquid sloshing around in his stomach.

He bursts into a fit of coughing not a second after, and maybe tonight can get worse. He feels an almost searing pain in his chest, the absinthe burning in a way no other alcohol has before. His eyes are watering, and he finds it impossible to breathe. His throat feels like it’s closing up, and he wonders if using his EpiPen would work in this situation. He didn’t eat any peanuts, but maybe it’ll help anyway.

“You alright there?” Jungkook looks up to see the bartender standing in front of him, a concerned expression on his face. “Need some water?”

It’s then that Jungkook feels the knot in his chest loosen, and he can breathe again.

“I’m okay,” he gasps out. “Just a strong- God- a strong drink.”

He waits for the bartender to smile, maybe clap him on the back before clearing the table and walking behind the bar again. Instead, he fixes Jungkook with such an intense look Jungkook almost hiccups in fear.

“You didn’t mix these, did you?”

Jungkook blinks. “Um- we…no?”

“Good. It be a nasty business if you did. Very bad.”

Jungkook blinks again. He’s not a particularly unhygienic person, and, as far as he knows, Taehyung isn’t either. Drinking each other’s backwash by mistake doesn’t really matter, in the grand scheme of what’s happened tonight.

“Okay then.”

The bartender hums, tapping his chin. Jungkook doesn’t want to be here anymore—the room feels like it’s starting to spin, and this man is too weird and too scary for him to comprehend at the moment.

“Did you know absinthe comes from a plant called wormwood? It was used in the olden days to symbolize regret.”

Jungkook tries to edge away as discreetly as he can. “Mhmm.”

“Do you regret anything, Jungkook?”

Jungkook freezes. Not because the bartender called him by his name. But because the bartender just spoke in perfect Korean.

“You speak Korean?” Jungkook asks, feeling, as always, his native language taste almost sweet on his tongue.

“It’d be a strange thing,” the bartender continues, ignoring Jungkook’s question, “to disrupt the process. Very messy, that.”

“What process?”

“Ask your friend.”

“We aren’t friends,” Jungkook says immediately.

“No? Well, I suggest you become friends, and quickly. It’ll be hard to get through this alone. A team effort, as they say.”

Jungkook has had enough of this, even if he gets to speak Korean. He feels like he’s only seconds from vomiting, and he can’t stop thinking about Taehyung, if he’s feeling just as shitty. Maybe if Jungkook runs he can see if Taehyung needs help getting home.

A team effort?

“Something to think about,” the bartender says. He tosses Jungkook a wink.

“Just in case you did mix them up.”

Jungkook’s never felt worse in his life. After spending the rest of the night over the toilet, puking up green liquidy chunks of shrimp and bar pretzels, he passes out on the bathroom floor and wakes up in the morning to a spectacular hangover.

From there it’s standard operating procedure. He drinks lots of water and treats himself to a greasy burger for lunch. It’s a Friday, but since Beth and Lori closed the office he doesn’t have to drag himself to work. Small miracles, he supposes.

He still feels awful, but he decides to use the free time to work on his comic.

Three disastrous hours later, nearly in tears, he gives up. He’s not sure what’s wrong with him, but the images in his head just aren’t translating onto the page. His lines are shaky, proportions off, and he doesn’t understand why it feels like all his artistic ability has been snatched away in a matter of hours. He drew just fine the day before, and now he can’t even get Bam’s tail right. It’s two lines, and he can’t do it—everything just looks wrong.

He tries to work on some lettering, but that isn’t any good either. His handwriting keeps coming out loopy and slanted, and he has to resort to tracing things to finally make them work.

He turns to his file of ruined drawings, the one Taehyung spilled tea all over a few weeks back. They’ve dried now, and he’s been meaning to see if they can be salvaged, but the truth is that he’s been too scared to look.

He does now, and pleased to see that despite the paper being cracked and an unsavory brown, the sketches themselves are relatively unharmed. Some of the pages are stuck together, and he spends each second in tense agony, trying not to tear them. He doesn’t want to brag, but he’s pretty strong. The downside is that sometimes he has trouble handling delicate things.

But he manages to unstick most of them; only one is really ruined beyond repair. He feels a little bad now, being so angry with Taehyung about it. It was an accident. But then again, Taehyung didn’t seem particularly sorry, and he still puts his tea right on the edge of his desk, within spilling range.

Jungkook puts all thoughts of Taehyung and his dip in artistic talent out of his mind, and spends the rest of the day quietly tracing over his tea-soaked pages. He gets through a fair amount of them and is able to upload them onto his computer, thanks to the brand new scanner his parents bought him for Christmas.

Well, his parents sent him the money, and then he went out and bought it himself, but it’s the thought that counts. He hasn’t told his parents about it, his silly little comic, but he might, one day. He isn’t trying to hide it; there’s nothing inappropriate. It’s just that they might be a little disappointed to find out their son spends more time on his passion project than he does on anything work-related.

Saturday and Sunday are a mess.

He tries to go to the gym, but after running for five minutes he’s suddenly gasping for air. He can’t lift even a quarter of what he normally does, and his pull-ups are a complete joke. He can’t touch his toes, and his back is so stiff he feels like he’ll snap in half when he bends down.

He’s craving sugar, strangely enough, and after he fails at the gym he finally gives in and devours a frankly dangerous amount of supermarket ice cream cake. He also discovers, to his horror, that coffee now tastes like shit. Even when he drags himself out of bed Monday morning, feeling gross and bloated from all the processed sugar, he can’t take a sip without gagging.

It’s scary, what’s happening, though he manages to convince himself it’s just a fluke. He does like sugar normally, so it’s not like, completely shocking. It’s just that he’s never wanted it this badly before, like if he doesn’t have it he’s going to turn into a cranky toddler. And he’s had bad days at the gym, but never anything like this. Trying to deadlift just the bar was too hard, not to mention embarrassing.

It’s just a fluke, all of this, but he wishes it didn’t make him feel so awful. His body aches, and he’s noticed that ever since he left his apartment this morning he’s gotten progressively itchier.

Taehyung isn’t here yet, but that’s typical. Everyone keeps finding excuses to walk past their desks, probably waiting to see what the drama will be. Personally, Jungkook plans to just put his head down on his keyboard and wish for death.

He forces himself to stand, winces at the ache in his knees, and walks to the breakroom to make a cup of coffee. He guesses it’ll still taste terrible, but he’s desperate for anything to distract him from how much he wants chocolate.

Jungkook spends the next ten minutes googling his symptoms, switching the browser language to Korean just in case anyone happens to pass by. He gags down a few swallows of coffee, but it does nothing to lessen the throbbing between his temples. The itching keeps getting worse, especially around his neck and down his back. Jungkook keeps squirming in his chair, and finally resorts to scratching everywhere with the end of his pencil. It doesn’t help much; in fact, it seems to make it worse.

“You think you’re pregnant?”

Jungkook whirls around to see Taehyung behind him, bag slung over his shoulder and squinting at Jungkook’s screen.

“You know that’s not possible, right?”

Jungkook flushes and quickly exits out of the tab. Obviously he didn’t think that, but medical sites always jump to the worst and strangest causes for the things Jungkook’s feeling. Fatigue, unusual eating patterns, excessive sweating, itching, soreness—the list goes on.

“I do know that, thanks. You-” Jungkook pauses, gaze sweeping over Taehyung.

“I what?”

If Jungkook looks bad, Taehyung looks dead. He’s pale, dark bags under his eyes and hair a completely tangled mess. He seems jittery as he meets Jungkook’s eyes, and Jungkook is just about to ask if he’s okay when his mouth pulls down into a scowl Jungkook’s never seen him make before.

“I’m the worst person you’ve ever met?”

Jungkook scowls right back. “You sound surprised.”

Taehyung mutters something under his breath and walks around Jungkook to sit at his own desk. Jungkook notices his hands tremble, when he picks up a pen. Jungkook watches from behind his monitor as Taehyung opens his ridiculous planner and starts to write.

“Shit,” he mutters. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Jungkook leans forward a little to see Taehyung’s hand jerk across the page, leaving a trail of blocky, actually legible letters behind. Jungkook notices the mess of words above it, still in that same hand. None of his terrible cursive, and Jungkook wonders why Taehyung’s worried that he’s actually writing normally.

“Can I help you?” Taehyung snaps.

Jungkook tries not to startle. “Can you be quiet?”

Taehyung throws down his pen and slams his planner closed. He slides his chair to the right so they can look each other in the face.

“What’s your fucking problem with me?”

“Oh, gee, where do I start?” Jungkook scoffs. He’s trying to keep his voice low, so no one else will eavesdrop. He leans forward, and Taehyung does too. Taehyung smells like vanilla, and Jungkook’s seized by the wildest impulse to bite him.

“That’s a really mean thing to say,” Taehyung mutters. “I hope you know that.”

“And all the stuff you say to me?” Jungkook asks. “That’s not mean?”

“What?”

“Jungkook, your spelling is an embarrassment. Jungkook, you have to do everything I say. Jungkook, I’ll write your parts for the presentation because you’re too fucking stupid.”

Taehyung’s face falls, ever so slightly. “I’ve never said that.”

“But you’ve thought it.”

“I haven’t-”

“Oh, come on, Taehyung. You think you’re better than me! And that’s why I don’t like you.”

“I don’t think that I’m better than you,” Taehyung interjects. “I don’t; I- Jesus Christ, Jungkook, I think you’re-” Taehyung stops, eyebrows scrunching together, and he leans closer to Jungkook. “What is that?”

“What?”

Taehyung points to Jungkook’s mug. “That. What do you have in there?”

“Coffee?”

“Give me it.”

Jungkook narrows his eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Obviously you’re not drinking it. Come on.”

Jungkook doesn’t bother to tamp down the angry spike in his chest as he hands Taehyung his mug. “This is why you’re the worst,” he says, but Taehyung just throws up his middle finger.

It’s kind of satisfying, to see that Taehyung’s finally showing his true colors. At least now Jungkook doesn’t have to endure his smothering bullshit, all the fake positivity and encouragements while he critiques every aspect of Jungkook’s existence.

Taehyung takes a cautious sip of Jungkook’s coffee.

Then he lets out something Jungkook can only describe as a moan, and Jungkook absolutely does not feel a tiny bit of arousal.

“Oh my God,” Taehyung whispers. “What the fuck is wrong with me.”

Jungkook watches as Taehyung proceeds to drain the rest in a few swallows, throat bobbing as he drinks it like water. He can’t help but feel envious; that’s normally how he drinks his first coffee of the morning.

Taehyung stands up, ignoring the way Jungkook’s eyes trail after him, and walks to the breakroom, the door swinging shut behind him.

“Stole my fucking drink,” Jungkook mutters. “First the absinthe, and now-”

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

‘You didn’t mix these, did you?’

Jungkook knows it sounds crazy, but everything that’s been happening is crazy too.

He stands up and walks as fast as he can to the breakroom without looking suspicious. Taehyung is filling up his mug again from the coffeepot, and he doesn’t even wait for the steam to disperse before he starts chugging it.

“Taehyung,” Jungkook says carefully, “have you been feeling weird?”

“What makes you say that?” Taehyung asks between gulps.

“I thought you liked tea.” Enough to spill it all over my sketches.

“I do.”

“But now you like coffee?”

“Fucking hate coffee,” Taehyung mutters, even as he keeps drinking it. “Can’t stand it.”

“Yeah, sure.”

The gears in Jungkook’s head are turning, as he sifts through everything the bartender said, how strange his weekend was, and Taehyung’s kind of terrifying coffee consumption happening right in front of his eyes.

“When you finished your drink,” Jungkook says. “At the bar. It burned right? Like, in your chest.”

“That’s what happens with anything I drink.”

Jungkook scrunches his nose, trying to stay calm. A team effort, as they say.

If that’s the case, he and Taehyung are screwed.

“But afterwards,” Jungkook presses. “You almost fell over.”

“Yeah, well. I’ve never been that drunk before.” Taehyung’s still absorbed with his coffee, but Jungkook can see the faint embarrassed blush on his cheeks. “The night didn’t exactly go the way I’d planned.”

Jungkook is about to ask him what he means by that, but Taehyung puts his mug down on the counter with a sharp clink and crosses his arms.

“Yes, I have been feeling weird. Really weird. I haven’t been able to get out of bed for the past three days, my body feels like it’s shutting down, and the only thing that’s made me feel better is this coffee.” He glares at Jungkook. “And the only reason I’m telling you this is because you look just as shitty as I feel. I’m still fucking pissed about what you said.”

Jungkook rolls his eyes. “You definitely look worse than I do.”

“I don’t have powdered sugar on my nose.”

Jungkook’s hand flies up to his face and he curses himself for the box of mini donuts he bought on his way to work this morning. He ate all of them in under five minutes, and clearly, he wasn’t as neat as he thought.

“Look, whatever was in those drinks clearly fucked us up,” Taehyung says. “Because everyone else seems fine, and this doesn’t feel like just a hangover.”

“Exactly. I think-”

“I’m going back to that bar after work to have a word with that bartender.” Taehyung finishes off his coffee and immediately fills it up again. “He must’ve…spiked them or something, I don’t know.”

“He talked to me in Korean.”

“Mmm. Weird.”

“Taehyung!”

“What?”

“Can you focus, please? It’s absolutely batshit crazy that a random British bartender spoke to me in perfect Korean, called me by my name, and said I should ask you what the fuck the ‘process’ is.”

Taehyung blinks once, twice.

Then he seizes Jungkook’s wrist and starts pulling him towards the door.

“Hey, what are you- Taehyung, let go of me-”

Taehyung ignores his protests and drags him all the way to the bathroom, pushing him inside none too gently and locking the door behind them. It’s a smart move—no one else has reason to come in here and overhear them.

“This weekend,” he starts, voice low, “have you just felt like- like everything you can normally do-”

“You can’t do it anymore.”

“Yes,” Taehyung says. “Yes, and like you’re almost- God, this is crazy- like you’re…”

“In someone else’s body.”

Jungkook and Taehyung stare at each other for a long moment, sizing each other up. It’s hitting Jungkook in waves, this realization.

“I think there was something in those drinks,” Jungkook says. “And I think that we mixed them up, and now we’re switched. Or parts of us are.”

Taehyung looks skeptical. “You’re saying we drank a- what, a magic potion? Jungkook, come on.”

“Crazier things have happened.”

“Have they?”

“I don’t know,” Jungkook sighs. “I have no idea, Taehyung, I’m just trying to find any reason at all that this could make sense.”

“No. No, there’s no way.” Taehyung shakes his head. “Nope, this all just has to be…to be- shit, what’s the word…”

“Psychosomatic?”

Jungkook blinks. He’s never heard that word in his life, not in English. Taehyung blinks back.

“What- yes, that’s exactly what I…how did you know that?”

Jungkook frowns. "You don’t think…”

“No,” Taehyung protests, “no, it’s-”

“Nonsensical? Inane? Preposterous? Asinine?”

Again, words Jungkook’s never said. And maybe he’d be more freaked out, but at this moment it’s just making his magic potion theory seem more and more plausible.

Plausible?

“I was going to say crazy.”

Jungkook crosses his arms. “That’s a pretty boring word.”

Honestly, if what he thinks is happening is in fact, happening, Jungkook is about to have the time of his fucking life. ‘Write your notes for you,’ my ass.

Taehyung narrows his eyes. “Well, sorry I can’t think of anything better.” His mouth drops open. “Oh God. I can’t think of anything better.”

“Mhmm,” Jungkook nods, fighting down a smile. This might be the best day of his life.

“No. No, no, no,” Taehyung pleads, “you’re not serious.”

“Afraid so,” Jungkook says. “Serious. Grave. Resolute. In earnest-”

“I get it,” Taehyung snaps. “Shut up.”

“It would behoove you to address me with a modicum of decorum,” Jungkook says, gleeful at the torrent of words rushing out of his mouth, words he’s never known but somehow make perfect sense in his head. “Seeing as we’re intertwined on this great journey of introspection and indeed, speculation, as to how we find ourselves in such a predicament-”

“Shut up,” Taehyung repeats.

Jungkook raises his eyebrows. “Make me.”

“Just- fucking- I don’t-”

“C’mon, Taehyung,” Jungkook croons, “use a word with more than two syllables.”

Taehyung glares at him, and the part of Jungkook that isn’t having the time of his life registers how attractive he looks when he does that.

“Sorry you’re like the rest of us now,” Jungkook continues. “I guess you’ll have to get by with words like- ow!”

Jungkook rubs his arm with a scowl, and Taehyung pulls his fist away with a smirk.

“Ow,” Jungkook says again. “Shit, that hurt.”

“Did it?” Taehyung asks, and Jungkook doesn’t particularly appreciate how his smirk looks just as hot as the glare, if not hotter. “Hmm, I wonder why?” It clicks for Jungkook even as Taehyung nods. “Brains for- um, muscles-”

“Brawn?” Jungkook supplies drily. “Ah, no, no, don’t-”

Taehyung comes at Jungkook with a growl, wrapping his arms around Jungkook’s waist and lifting him clean off the ground. Jungkook struggles in vain to escape Taehyung’s iron grip. He guesses this means his time at the gym is paying off. Though it’s paying off for the wrong person, at the moment.

“Unhand me!” he hisses. “You uncouth bastard!”

Taehyung just grunts and staggers over to the sink, where he turns on the cold tap and promptly dunks Jungkook’s head under it.

“I don’t fucking talk like that,” he growls. “I’m not some-”

“Highborn nobleman?” Jungkook splutters. “Fuck you.”

Taehyung lets him drop to the floor, and Jungkook stands up, the ends of his hair dripping down the back of his shirt. He wiggles uncomfortably at the feeling while Taehyung rakes his hands through his hair.

“We drank a magic potion,” he says, in disbelief. “We drank a magic potion. We drank- what the fuck-”

“I don’t know if it was a magic potion, per se,” Jungkook muses.

Per se? Jeon Jungkook, who are you?

Taehyung looks up at him sharply. “What do you think it was?”

“Um, well…I mean…”

“My brain just reverted to a Grade Four reading level,” Taehyung snaps. “I’m open to literally any possibility.”

Jungkook’s mouth flattens into a hard line, because even though he hates Taehyung, he still has fucking feelings.

“I’m sorry,” Taehyung blurts out. “Shit, Jungkook, I’m sorry.”

“Forget it,” Jungkook mumbles. “Just forget it.”

He turns to walk out of the bathroom, dripping hair be damned, but Taehyung darts forward and seizes his wrist. Jungkook yelps at his grip, and Taehyung lets go with a wince.

“Shit, sorry again. I guess I just don’t-”

“Know your own strength?”

Taehyung tilts his head. “Is it this annoying when I do it? Finishing your sentences?”

“Worse.”

Taehyung scrubs his hands over his face. “Look, right now we should just go back out and start working. But at lunch, let’s go somewhere that’s not here, so we don’t seem like crazy people, and then you can tell me what you think happened.”

“Fine.”

Of course Taehyung wants to work. A potentially life-altering event they could probably squeeze several made-for-TV movies out of, and Taehyung wants to fucking work. Whatever.

“And just- hang on.”

Jungkook waits as Taehyung reaches past him to grab a handful of paper towels from the dispenser. He starts wiping Jungkook’s face dry, and Jungkook is left to swallow uncomfortably as he does.

“Ow!” Jungkook exclaims, when Taehyung presses too firmly against his eye. “Ow, ow, ow.”

Taehyung bites his lip. “I’m sorry,” he echoes. “This- God, this is gonna take some getting used to.”

Jungkook lets Taehyung finish with his ministrations, refraining from crying out again when Taehyung’s still too rough. He’d rather just get Taehyung’s hands away from him.

They walk out of the bathroom and back to their desks, where Jungkook goes back to scratching his neck and Taehyung keeps mainlining coffee. The next few hours pass quickly, somehow, and Jungkook spends most of the time plumbing the depths of his brain and all the words he finds he knows now.

Verbose. Meritocracy. Genome. Astronomical. Squalid. Bare-knuckle boxing.

When everyone starts to break for lunch, Taehyung sends Jungkook a furtive glance before standing up and pulling on his coat. Jungkook follows suit, and the two of them leave the office a few minutes later. The itchy heat Jungkook’s feeling is almost unbearable, at this point, and he musters up the courage to ask Taehyung if that’s something on his end.

“Yeah. It’s chronic- well, now I can’t think of the word,” Taehyung says, looking forlorn. “Chronic hives, basically. I can’t wear tight clothes or my skin gets irritated. Let me see your chest.”

“What?”

“Let me see your chest,” Taehyung repeats, grinding to a halt on the sidewalk. “Just unbutton the top part of your shirt; you’ll be fine.”

Jungkook looks around warily at the people streaming around them on the sidewalk, other office workers in search of the same lunch they are. Taehyung rolls his eyes.

“I see you didn’t get my-”

“Licentiousness?”

Jungkook thinks he catches a faint blush coloring Taehyung’s cheeks, but it could just be the cold. “I was going to say confidence. Your shirt, come on.”

Jungkook unzips his coat and dutifully unbuttons the top two buttons of his shirt, tugging it open so Taehyung can see.

“Mmm. Yeah, you’re getting some.”

Jungkook looks down at his chest, normally smooth skin now red and splotchy.

“What do I do?” he asks, looking up again wildly. “Do I need to go to the hospital?”

Taehyung gives him a crooked smile. “Relax; you’re fine. They’ll go away eventually.”

“But they itch,” Jungkook complains.

“When you get home tonight, change into some looser clothes. Until then, try not to scratch.”

“What- this is a raw deal. You get super strength and I get chronic urticaria.”

Taehyung snaps his fingers. “That’s the word.”

Jungkook just grumbles and rebuttons his shirt. They start off down the sidewalk again, Jungkook stealing glances at Taehyung every other step.

“You seem to be handling this pretty well,” he says.

“So do you.”

“Truthfully,” Jungkook says, struggling to keep pace with Taehyung’s quick stride, “I’m just glad I’m not the only one.”

Taehyung smiles humorlessly. “Even if the other one is me.”

“I- can you slow down?” Jungkook asks, breathless.

Taehyung blinks, as if surprised he’s been walking so fast. Jungkook thinks bitterly that this is why he was so terrible at the gym this weekend—he’s got Taehyung’s endurance now. Which seems to be shit.

“I’m sorry,” Jungkook says. “For what happened on Thursday. What I…”

“Sorry for what you said, or sorry I heard it?”

“You know- I’m trying to apologize, Taehyung, okay? And you can’t seriously have thought we were friends.”

Taehyung’s only response is to quicken his pace again, leaving Jungkook to swear under his breath and jog to keep up. Taehyung stops abruptly in front of what looks like a Thai restaurant, and turns to Jungkook with a blank expression.

“Have you ever eaten here?”

“No.”

“Me either.”

Without another word, Taehyung opens the door and walks inside. They’re seated within the next five minutes, Jungkook toying with his water glass as Taehyung glares down at the menu.

“So,” Jungkook starts, “do you want to hear my idea, or-”

“Of course I thought we were friends, Jungkook,” Taehyung bursts out. “Obviously I thought we were friends!”

“Why?”

“Because- why- because I was nice to you,” Taehyung exclaims. “I was nothing but nice to you, and you seemed to be nice back, and I thought- never mind.”

“It’s hard to be friends with someone who got your actual friend fired,” Jungkook mutters, and Taehyung’s glare goes from annoyed to murderous.

“I’m sorry,” he snaps. “Is that what you want to hear? I’m fucking sorry, Jungkook, that your friend got fired. Because it was me that walked into the office and told Lori and Beth to fire someone, yeah, that’s exactly how it went. Fuck you, okay? You can’t hate me for something that’s not my fault.”

“Yeah, nothing’s your fault.”

Taehyung narrows his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I worked really hard on that report, Taehyung. And you ruined it.”

“Oh. My. God. Jungkook, that was a fucking accident! I’m sorry I spilled my tea on your stupid goddamn report. I don’t understand why you can’t just print out a new one.”

Jungkook bites his cheek to keep from telling Taehyung what was really in that file. At this moment, he’s not sure Taehyung wouldn’t use that as leverage to get him fired.

“It’s not just that,” Jungkook says instead. “You’re fucking mean, Taehyung.”

“What?” Taehyung explodes, and they’re starting to draw stares from the table next to them. “What are you talking about?”

“You criticize every single thing I do! I can’t even make a bar chart without you breathing down my neck, and if you aren’t in control then it might as well be shit, because if Taehyung doesn’t get his way, it just won’t happen at all.”

“I- Jungkook, what?”

“Are you kidding me?” Jungkook asks back. “Do you not know how goddamn anal you are? It’s been a nightmare to work with you; of course I was going to say you’re my least favorite person in the office.”

“I- just- what?”

“I guess we need to add completely ignorant to the list,” Jungkook mutters under his breath.

“Excuse me?”

Jungkook is just about to respond when a waitress approaches their table, and the two of them decide to act civil for the minute and a half it takes for her to get their orders. The last thing Jungkook wants is to sit and have lunch with Taehyung, but the sooner they figure this out, the better.

“Tell me your theory,” Taehyung says, after their waitress leaves. His arms are crossed, and he looks like he’s about to throw a temper tantrum, eyebrows scrunched and mouth twisted into that pouting frown Jungkook can’t stand.

“The bartender,” Jungkook says immediately. “I think he put something in our drinks.”

“I already said that.”

Jungkook’s going to strangle him. “Either way,” he bites out, “whatever’s happening, I don’t think it’s supposed to.”

“Obviously this isn’t-”

“What I mean, if you’d shut up for a one second, is that something else crazy was supposed to happen. And we messed it up when we switched our drinks. Which-” He holds up a hand to stop Taehyung from interrupting, and it miraculously works. “Which clearly happened, since I’m turning into you, and you’re turning into me.”

“Or what if we were supposed to actually body swap?” Taehyung asks. “And this is like, the half-assed version.”

Jungkook nods. “Definitely doesn’t feel like my body.” He narrows his eyes. “Why do you like sugar so much?”

“Because it tastes good?”

“It makes you fat,” Jungkook counters.

“Well, technically,” Taehyung drawls, “if we’re going by this new logic, it makes you fat.”

Jungkook clenches his jaw. “Any other food habits I should know? Other than clearly you hate coffee, so thanks for that.”

“Yeah. Tea with sugar.”

“How the hell do you not have diabetes?”

Taehyung shrugs. “Good metabolism, I guess.”

“Yeah, good luck when that runs out.”

“Let me know how it goes, will you?”

Jungkook scowls. “Well, have fun with my…um…with my night sweats.”

Taehyung wrinkles his nose. “Your what?”

“Night sweats. I wake up and it’s just- puddles, everywhere.”

“Ew,” Taehyung says. “Jungkook, that’s so gross.”

“Yeah, well…” Jungkook trails off. He didn’t really manage to come out on top with that one. “Okay, look, back to the bartender. He told me there’s a process, and that we disrupted it. And that you’d know what the process is.”

Taehyung nods. “I don’t know why he’d say that. All he told me was that I should try absinthe.”

“That can’t be all he said,” Jungkook presses. “What’s the process, come on. We’re going to have to figure this out together; he also said that too.”

“I don’t know,” Taehyung says. “Honestly, Jungkook. I don’t. But clearly he said stuff to you, so. Can you think of anything else?”

Jungkook gives Taehyung a hard look, but Taehyung just blinks back. As much as Taehyung is loud and gregarious (new word! Jungkook thinks), he’s got a damn good poker face. So Jungkook just sighs and starts to comb through his memories of Thursday night. They’re pretty hazy, thanks to the drinks.

He remembers Taehyung asking if he wanted a drink, and bringing those green monstrosities back. Remembers Taehyung pulling him aside to talk. ‘It’s not about work.’

What was it supposed to be about? Everything had gone to hell after that.

“Well?” Taehyung prompts. “Anything?”

“Uh…just that- well, he spoke to me in Korean. And he knew my name. So I think that might fit our magic theory.”

“Your magic theory.”

Jungkook glares at Taehyung. “You’re either all the way in, or I’ll just figure it out myself. I’m over the ‘impossible’ bullshit. I think we’re pretty far past impossible.”

Taehyung holds his gaze for a moment, but nods in the end. “Okay. Okay, fine. Magic bartender gives us magic potions, and now we’re in a half-body swap.”

“Right.”

“So how do we swap back?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Jungkook grumbles. “But you keep interrupting me.”

“You’re the one who-”

“Wait, shut up.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Shut up, I’m remembering something.”

Taehyung waits impatiently as Jungkook thinks back to his conversation with the bartender. The night is hazy, but for some reason that part isn’t. The burn in his chest, and then the Korean afterwards.

“He said…he told me absinthe is made with wormwood.”

“Yeah, everybody knows that.”

Jungkook wants to say that everyone does not, in fact, know that, and that Taehyung is just once again being an insufferable know-it-all, but the waitress comes back with their orders, and he starts stuffing his face instead. He’s starving, and honestly he’s not sure if he’s still got his own appetite or if this is Taehyung’s hunger. From the way Taehyung’s inhaling his own food, it’s virtually impossible to tell.

“He said it symbolizes regret,” Jungkook adds, around a mouthful of pad kee mao.

“Okay.”

“So I’m wondering…I guess…follow that train of thought?”

“Sure,” Taehyung says slowly. “Not sure I do though.”

Jungkook tries not to bang his head on the table. “Like, what if we- ah- what if we- Jesus, what- if we- oh fucking shit-”

Jungkook drops his chopsticks and lunges for his glass of water, panting. His mouth is on fire.

Taehyung watches him drain his water in two seconds, and only raises an eyebrow when Jungkook steals his glass as well.

“We already swapped spit,” Jungkook reminds him. It’s supposed to sound snarky, but the way he’s gasping kind of ruins it.

“Too spicy?”

Jungkook shakes his head. “Shouldn’t be.”

“I’m bad with spice. So it probably is.”

Jungkook gapes at Taehyung, before he realizes he’s run out of water to drink and his mouth is still burning. Taehyung doesn’t look fazed in the slightest as he hands Jungkook a spring roll.

“You didn’t think to tell me that when we ordered?” he demands, and Taehyung has the audacity to shrug.

“Thought you would’ve figured it out by now.”

That’s enough to get Jungkook to pause. He ate some tteokbokki on Saturday with no problem, and now he’s dying. And the advanced vocab, that didn’t surface until this morning. Maybe-

“-Jungkook.”

“What?”

“I said we should go back to the bar after work. Are you free?”

“Yeah. Mhmm.”

Jungkook’s always free. The last time he had plans was four months ago. He had a dentist appointment.

“Okay, good. I think we should just try to act normal until then. And then we can freak out, or whatever, but for now, just…business as usual.”

Anal Taehyung, at it again. Jungkook pushes his noodles away, annoyed he can’t eat them and pissed that he’s still hungry. Taehyung doesn’t offer to switch, which Jungkook finds incredibly rude, since he’s the reason Jungkook can’t eat in the first place. He glares at Taehyung through every bite, and Taehyung doesn’t look at him once. Fantastic.

By the time Taehyung’s finished, and Jungkook is seconds away from just eating his napkin, they leave the restaurant to head back to the office. Taehyung pays the check, and Jungkook is more than happy to let him. He’s the only one that got to eat.

It doesn’t help that Jungkook’s craving something sweet, that he knows won’t have any nutritional value whatsoever. He really doesn’t understand how Taehyung hasn’t already had a heart attack or something.

They walk back to the office in silence. Taehyung doesn’t rush ahead this time, but Jungkook still struggles to keep up. Taehyung coughs into his elbow a few times, and Jungkook wonders if he should mention he gets sick easily. Maybe he won’t. Taehyung didn’t mention the spicy food.

Jungkook puts his head down on his desk when they get back, and tries not to think about his stomach eating itself. He won’t give in to its stupid demands of cake. Red velvet sounds good, the kind with cream cheese icing and- stop.

Taehyung keeps moving around—Jungkook can hear him. He gets up and sits down again, slurps his coffee and coughs afterwards. Scribbles in his stupid planner. Coughs again.

Jungkook’s about to ask him to consider shutting the fuck up when he hears Taehyung breathing. Well, trying to breathe.

Then Jungkook lifts his head in time to see Taehyung wheeze out, face bright red and a hand clutching at his throat.

“Oh my God,” Jungkook says, already out of his chair. “Taehyung, oh my God.”

“Th- throat,” Taehyung manages to wheeze. “Can’t- closing- can’t-”

Taehyung’s scrabbling at his neck now, like he’s trying to claw his airway open. Jungkook notices his lips are swelling. He promptly un-notices it when his traitorous brain thinks it makes Taehyung look really hot.

Jungkook’s seen the signs often enough, and considering the way things are going, he should’ve guessed this would happen.

“Did you have peanuts?” he asks, but Taehyung shakes his head.

“Are you sure?” The calm Jungkook felt for a brief second is quickly melting back into panic. As much as he hates Taehyung, he doesn’t want him dead. Does he need to call an ambulance? “Because I’m allergic to peanuts. And it looks like you’re having an allergic reaction.”

Taehyung stares at him for a moment, eyes wide as he keeps gasping. Jungkook doesn’t really think as he takes Taehyung’s wrist and pulls his hands away from his throat. It won’t help, but Jungkook’s EpiPen might.

“Pad-” Taehyung coughs harshly. “Pad thai.”

“Does that have peanuts?”

Taehyung manages a nod.

“Shit, okay.”

Jungkook walks back around to his desk and rifles through his bag to get his EpiPen. He’s only had to use it twice in his life, but he’s been trained for this exact situation. Well, maybe not this exact situation, but still.

He pulls Taehyung to his feet and nudges him towards the bathroom. He really has no desire to do this in front of the entire office.

“Don’t- want to- get- stabbed- by your- EpiPen,” Taehyung wheezes, as he stumbles through the bathroom door.

“Yeah, I don’t want to waste a dose on you either. Go sit on the toilet.”

Taehyung complies, going into the handicap stall and sitting down quickly. Jungkook kneels on the floor and ignores Taehyung’s panicky glance.

“You’ll be fine,” he says, uncapping the pen. Blue to the sky, he thinks, orange to the thigh. “On my count, okay?”

Taehyung nods.

“Three…two-”

Jungkook jams the pen into Taehyung’s thigh before he gets to ‘one,’ and Taehyung grunts out something that sounds like a swear. Jungkook knows from experience that tensing your muscles makes it hurt worse, and that’s exactly what Taehyung would’ve done if Jungkook hadn’t surprised him.

Though, Jungkook will admit he wasn’t exactly gentle with the application. It felt really good, poking Taehyung with a hypodermic needle. Maybe he’ll get to do it again.

“Okay,” he says, feeling a little remorseful. He should at least talk Taehyung through this. “It might take a few minutes, but I promise your airway should clear in a little bit. Just keep breathing. And your leg will be sore, but that’s normal.”

It does take a few minutes, but Jungkook waits with Taehyung until his breathing slows, each gulp of air slower and more even, until he can finally speak again.

“You got mad I didn’t tell you about-” Taehyung pauses to cough. “About spicy food. And somehow you forgot to- huh- tell me I’d have an allergic reaction?”

“I told you about the night sweats,” Jungkook complains. “Sorry my allergies weren’t the biggest problem on my mind.”

“It’s your bed I’m going to sweat in,” Taehyung mutters, and Jungkook knows how he means it, but he can’t help interpreting it in a different context. And normally he’d throw that idea out the window, but Taehyung’s lips are still delightfully swollen—they look so lush and full—and Jungkook is kind of occupied, staring at them.

“Jungkook!”

“What?”

“Any other huge allergies I should know about? Dust, pollen, dog hair, any of that?”

“Just peanuts.”

“That’s a relief,” Taehyung sighs.

“Well, what about you?” Jungkook asks defensively. “You have a whole skin condition, and you hate spicy food, and you’re going to make me fat.”

Taehyung yawns into his forearm. “Just don’t eat it then. But I do have a bunch of chocolate in my desk drawer if you want it.”

“You- I-” Jungkook stutters, wondering whether he wants to hit Taehyung or hug him instead.

Taehyung stands up, wincing when he puts his weight on his thigh. “Thanks for saving my life, I guess. I’m going to get another cup of coffee. Fuck.”

Jungkook waits until Taehyung’s out of the bathroom stall before he drops his head in his hands. This is going to be a long day.

By the time they leave the office, Jungkook is about to claw his skin off. Taehyung notices—Jungkook thinks all of London could probably notice—and pulls his hands away with a tsk.

“Stop scratching; you’ll just make it worse.”

“How do you live like this?” Jungkook complains, twisting his hands out of Taehyung’s grip so he can tug at his collar. He doesn’t have to look to know he’s got hives all over his entire body. And even if he doesn’t, it certainly feels that way.

“How do you live not ever having peanut butter?”

Jungkook scrunches his nose, before grinning widely. “I guess I can try it now.”

He’s had it before, but he was too young to remember much about the taste and too busy sending his mom into hysterics over his allergic reaction. Maybe he can make a banana smoothie or something. He’s heard mixing in peanut butter is supposed to help make protein shakes taste better, and he’s suddenly really excited about his workout tonight.

But then, he reminds himself, he’s practically Taehyung now, so he’ll probably just get a milkshake and melt into the couch instead.

Taehyung ignores him and keeps walking. Jungkook tries his best not to completely fall behind, but he’s sweating from this stupid little half-run he’s doing, and now he’s itching worse than before.

By the time they get to the bar, Jungkook is in extremely poor spirits, newfound freedom to enjoy peanut butter aside.

Taehyung seems to be just as annoyed, as he stalks through the restaurant without even bothering to glance at the hostess that calls after him to wait. Jungkook is kind of excited to see mean Taehyung—God knows he’s hidden under all those fake smiles and smooth words for too long. This is the real Taehyung; the one that got Watson fired and the one who rides Jungkook so hard Jungkook swears his ass is sore when he leaves the office every night.

God, stop with the sexy stuff, I mean, what is that-

“Excuse me,” Taehyung says, already at the bar. He leans against it just like he did the other night, and Jungkook can’t help dropping his eyes to look at Taehyung’s long legs. “Excuse me,” he repeats, and the bartender stops cleaning the sink to turn around with a confused look.

Jungkook matches Taehyung’s frown; it’s a different guy. This may prove to be a bust, because Jungkook isn’t about to tell a stranger all the weird things that’ve happened, no matter how itchy he is.

“What can I get you and your boyfriend to drink?”

Jungkook sputters at the sheer insinuation. “I’m not- he’s- no, we aren’t-” Him and Taehyung? Okay. Sure. In your dreams.

Taehyung looks Jungkook up and down, and then Jungkook suddenly finds himself on the receiving end of that horrible eyebrow raise. Taehyung turns back to the bartender, and Jungkook’s realizing that maybe he overreacted a little bit.

But who is Taehyung to give him that once-over? He’s a catch and a half, thanks very much. Sure, he’s a little shy, and maybe kind of rough around the edges, but he’s still hot. Maybe not with powdered sugar all over his face though. And hives up and down his neck.

Okay, maybe he’s a catch and a quarter, but still. Fuck Taehyung. It’s not like he’s much to look at- well, okay. That’s a lie. But as good as Taehyung looks, his insufferable personality ruins any possible attraction Jungkook could have to him.

Boyfriends? Us?

“-unfortunate,” Taehyung is saying. Jungkook finds it unbearable that he stands so close to people when he talks. It honestly looks like he’s about to make out with the bartender. Good for them. “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

The non-creepy, non-old (shit, kind of handsome) bartender scratches his eyebrow while he thinks. Jungkook’s tempted to ask for a beer. Or something sweet. Dammit.

“Next week, he said. Though I wouldn’t put money on it; he’s a little…”

“Eccentric,” Jungkook supplies, and he bites back a smile at the way Taehyung looks annoyed.

“I was gonna say flaky, but yeah. He’s been here for ages though, so he always gets a pass. You know, you aren’t the first to come here asking for him.”

“Oh?” Taehyung says, leaning even farther forward.

“Mhmm. You are the prettiest one though, I have to say.”

“Oh.”

Taehyung doesn’t lean back, but Jungkook can tell by the set of his shoulders that he was thinking about it.

“Can I get you a drink? On the house.”

“Um…no, I can’t stay.”

“Your friend can have one too, I don’t mind.”

“No, I- we really do have to get going.”

“Yeah,” Jungkook throws in. “We’ve got…Zumba class.”

Nobody buys that, least of all Jungkook, but the bartender seems to get the hint. “Maybe another time, then.”

Taehyung gives him a noncommittal smile and thanks him for his help, and then Jungkook is jogging after him again back out onto the street.

“Hey,” Jungkook asks, once he manages to catch up. “Hey, why didn’t you stay for a drink? He was hot.”

He was. And it was clear they had chemistry, with Taehyung’s whole ‘leaning-over-the-bar-please-kiss-me-Mister-Bartender’ thing.

Taehyung shrugs. “Not really my type.”

“What is your type?”

“I don’t know…artsy guys, I guess.”

“Artsy guys?” Jungkook asks, unable to keep the disdain out of his voice. “Like, sit-in-a-coffeeshop-and-do-slam-poetry artsy guys?”

“No,” Taehyung huffs. “No, like actual artists, and- look, I don’t really date all that much, to be completely honest, and I- why is this important?”

“Well, because if I’m going to start developing your taste in men, I want to know what I’m in for.”

Taehyung grinds to a halt, studying Jungkook intensely. Jungkook waits for him to say something, but he only nods.

“I like really old guys myself,” Jungkook says, when it’s clear Taehyung isn’t going to talk. “The older the better. Sometimes I’ll troll the nursing homes and see who I can pick up.”

That gets Taehyung to roll his eyes. “Okay, okay. What’s your type?”

Jungkook shrugs. “Never thought about it.

“What? Jungkook, come on.”

“I haven’t,” Jungkook says. “Honest. I- well, I don’t date that much either.”

“Then I guess we probably won’t have to worry about any of this.”

“Probably not.” Jungkook sighs. “Except that bartender is supposed to be gone for an entire week. I think we should- I mean, we have to figure this out, right? Are you sure he didn’t say anything to you?”

Taehyung nods. “Positive.”

Jungkook rakes a hand through his hair. It’s not something he normally does, and he kind of freaks out a little when he remembers seeing Taehyung do that in the bathroom this morning. He decides to put it aside for now.

“Okay, well, then all we have to go off of is what he told me. And he said that we’d have to do this together.”

“Think you can handle that?”

“Can you?”

“I’m not the one with the problem.”

Jungkook bites his tongue to keep from saying something mean. A team effort, he reminds himself. It’s just hard when your teammate provokes you into hurling him off a cliff.

“I’m gonna go home,” Taehyung says. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? And we can…we’ll figure out what to do.”

“Taehyung, I really think we should try to-”

“Tomorrow, okay? I’m exhausted, Jungkook. I’ve just had the worst weekend of my life and I- please? Let’s just talk about it all tomorrow.”

Jungkook wants to protest, because prolonging this even one second longer than they have to sounds like a terrible idea. But something in Taehyung’s face stops him. He looks so tired, all of a sudden. And Jungkook has to remind himself that even though Taehyung sucks, he didn’t know Jungkook knew it too, not until the other night. So maybe he’s still a little shaken. And Jungkook will be nice today, even if Taehyung doesn’t deserve it.

“Okay,” he agrees. “Tomorrow.”

Taehyung doesn’t quite sag with relief, but it’s close. “Thanks. I’ll…guess I’ll be going now.”

“Have fun with the night sweats,” Jungkook reminds him.

“Can’t wait. Enjoy the hives.”

Jungkook almost forgot about those. And now he’s itching again. “Fuck you.”

Taehyung just throws him a tired wave. “Bye, Jungkook. Stay safe, okay?”

“You too. No peanuts.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I can assure you I won’t.”

And yet, watching Taehyung walk away and disappear into the crowd of people crossing the street, Jungkook finds that he will. He does. What if something happens?

Jungkook scratches at his chest with both his hands, sighing at the momentary relief and wincing at the sting that comes after. He’s definitely buying some chocolate on the way home.

After today, he deserves it.

Jungkook was half-kidding about the night sweats, but it is nice to wake up in the morning to dry sheets and clean pajamas.

What’s not nice is that when Jungkook opens his eyes, he can’t see.

Alright, he can see, but not well, and his palm looks blurry even when it’s only a few inches from his face. He tries a few things before panicking—blinking a lot, rubbing his eyes, even finding some old eyedrops under his sink and plopping a few in. All that does is make his eyes burn. He still can’t see, so he decides now it’s time to panic.

And Jungkook swore when he got this number he’d never call it, because God knows he gets enough texts asking about their progress on the latest graph or if he’s read the new presentation notes yet, but Jungkook’s panicking. So all promises are out the window.

“Hello?”

Taehyung’s voice is rough with sleep, deeper than Jungkook’s ever heard it. But he doesn’t have time to dwell on how sexy (what?) it sounds, not when he’s having a crisis.

“Taehyung,” he snaps, “I can’t see.”

Taehyung yawns into the phone. “What?”

“I can’t see!” Jungkook doesn’t mean to yell, but he’s panicking.

There’s a rustling noise, and suddenly Taehyung’s voice comes over clearer, much more alert. “You can’t see?”

“No! No, everything is blurry and fuzzy and I didn’t- I didn’t know who else to call; I’m freaking out and I assume everything weird now is from you but if it’s not then I need you to take me to the hospital because I can’t see-”

“Hey, Jungkook,” Taehyung breaks in.

“What?!”

“I wear glasses.”

“What?”

“I wear glasses,” Taehyung repeats. “And I-”

There’s a long pause.

“And you what?” Jungkook demands. He just wants to see clearly, and Taehyung’s not helping him achieve that goal.

“I- you have really good vision.”

“I know, which is why I’m freaking out that I can’t see-”

“I think we switched.”

“What do you mean we switched?”

“I think we switched,” Taehyung says calmly, “because I just woke up, but I can see perfectly right now.”

Jungkook flops back onto his mattress with a groan. “This is awful. What’s next, I start speaking with a Canadian accent?”

That wouldn’t be so horrible, actually. It would be nice to not worry about his pronunciation. He may have Taehyung’s vocabulary, and speaking skills, but that doesn’t mean he suddenly sounds like a native speaker.

“Send me your address.”

“Huh?”

“Jungkook,” Taehyung explains patiently, “you can’t see anything. I have to come over to give you my glasses. Or my contacts, if you want to try that.”

“Contacts,” Jungkook says immediately. “I want those.”

“Send me your address then.”

Jungkook doesn’t really think about what having Taehyung come over actually means, not until he’s on his way and Jungkook realizes Taehyung’s going to see the inside of his apartment. He trips over furniture no less than five times trying to make his bed and clean up his candy binge from last night, wrappers still strewn over the couch. When he goes to wipe the chocolate stains from his mouth, he has to lean so close to see his nose touches the mirror.

There’s a sharp knock on the door just as he’s finished brushing his teeth, and he gropes his way down the hall to answer it.

“Glasses,” Taehyung says, by way of a greeting. “Hold still.”

Jungkook closes his eyes, feeling something settle over the bridge of his nose and hook over his ears. Taehyung’s fingers comb through his hair, moving it out of the way, and Jungkook is decidedly not calmed by it. He’s horribly conscious of how close Taehyung is. He smells like vanilla again, and Jungkook wants to ask if he wears cologne.

Jungkook’s also horribly conscious of himself, barefoot in his sweatpants and old t-shirt. He probably smells like sleep. He doesn’t know what that smells like, but an old boyfriend of his (two months, sophomore year of college) told him he smells different in the morning. He said it was a good smell, but he also told Jungkook they should meet each other’s parents, and then broke up with him via text the night he was supposed to come to Jungkook’s for dinner. So it’s hard to know what’s true.

Maybe he should ask Taehyung if he smells good.

“Okay,” Taehyung murmurs, “open.”

Jungkook lets his eyes flutter open slowly, seized by the weird impulse that it’s going to hurt. But all he sees is Taehyung blinking back at him, face as clear as it normally is.

“Better?”

Jungkook nods, then frowns when he feels the glasses slip down his nose. Taehyung is nice enough not to laugh.

“Are you gonna invite me in?” Taehyung asks. “I brought contacts too, if you want to try them.”

“Uh- um, yeah. Yes.”

Jungkook moves to the side so Taehyung can walk in. Jungkook doesn’t miss the way Taehyung’s eyes start combing over every inch of his apartment, and he bites his tongue to keep from making a snide remark. Hopefully Taehyung won’t make one either.

He doesn’t, just hefts the travel kit in his hand and gives Jungkook a questioning look. “Bathroom?”

“Right over here.”

Taehyung follows Jungkook towards the bathroom. Jungkook steps in and flips on the lights. He catches sight of his reflection in the mirror and freezes.

“Taehyung.”

“Yeah?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Serious about what?”

Jungkook points to himself in the mirror, to his face. Taehyung leans to the side so he can look.

“What?”

“These are ridiculous!”

Taehyung’s glasses are like something out of a comic book. Thick black frames and lenses so dense they actually make Jungkook’s eyes look bigger. He looks like a cartoon geek, and there’s no way he can walk around like this. No wonder Taehyung wears contacts to the office.

Taehyung frowns. “They’re my glasses. They look fine.”

“They look insane,” Jungkook protests. “I look like a bug.”

“My eyesight is bad, okay? They’re the prescription I need. Or- you need, I guess.”

“I can’t believe this,” Jungkook groans.

“Do you want to try the contacts?” Taehyung prompts, and Jungkook nods so vigorously the glasses slip down his nose again.

He pulls them off and sets them haphazardly on the edge of the sink while Taehyung hands him a contact case. Jungkook opens it—his dad wears contacts, so he’s familiar with the process—and scoops out the right lens.

Turns out, watching your dad put in his contacts proves to be worlds apart from having to put them in yourself. Jungkook only succeeds in poking himself in the eye four times.

“It helps if you hold your eyelids open,” Taehyung says, giving his input from where he’s slouching in the doorframe. “And don’t blink until it’s settled over your eye.”

“Yeah, that’s completely reasonable.”

Taehyung shrugs, undeterred. “It just takes a little practice, that’s all. Here, do you want me to do it for you-”

“I got it,” Jungkook mutters.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure, Taehyung. It’s fine- no, no, no, shit.”

The contact slips off Jungkook’s finger and lands in the sink, where it promptly swirls down the drain. Jungkook looks up at Taehyung helplessly, who doesn’t seem too bothered.

“Oops.”

“Did you bring extras?”

“Nope.”

“What- well, can you bring me some tomorrow then? I’m not wearing these for a whole week.”

Jungkook gestures to Taehyung’s clunky glasses with a scowl, but Taehyung shakes his head.

“I wear monthlies.”

“What?”

“Monthlies,” Taehyung repeats. “You’re supposed to wear them for a month before changing them, not every day.”

Jungkook gapes at him. “Taehyung. I cannot wear these.”

“Looks like you have to.”

Jungkook would rather just stay home indefinitely, eating chocolate on the couch until he gets a call from Bekkah letting him know he’s been fired. Maybe then he can go hang out with Watson. Jungkook reminds himself to look out for a postcard this week; he and his daughter are traveling to Spain.

If Jungkook’s being honest with himself, Watson seems much happier now than he ever did when they worked together. Maybe it’s because he’s with his daughter, or maybe it’s because he finally retired, but either way, Jungkook has to admit that he can’t use Watson’s termination as an excuse to hate Taehyung, not anymore.

Good thing Taehyung’s given Jungkook about a thousand other reasons, these glasses being chief among them.

“How do you ever wear these?” Jungkook asks.

“What- they don’t look that bad.”

“They really do.”

Taehyung’s been pretty static this whole visit, but that, for some reason, makes him deflate. “Okay, well…I’ll just see you at work, then. Here’s the case. There’s a rag in there for you to clean the lenses, and then- um, sometimes they can hurt here-”

Taehyung reaches out to brush the spot just above Jungkook’s ear, and Jungkook thinks that Taehyung’s been touching him a lot, since this all started. He wonders why he doesn’t really mind. Taehyung tucks a stray piece of hair behind his ear before pulling his hand away.

“It might start to hurt there a little bit,” he explains. “After you’ve worn them for a while. I can read fine without them, like, close stuff, so you should be okay there.”

“Okay.”

Jungkook’s ear is tingling from where the pad of Taehyung’s finger traced along its edge.

“So I’ll just- I’ll see you at the office.”

“Okay.”

It’s only after Taehyung leaves that Jungkook realizes he probably should’ve said thank you.

Jungkook tries to keep his head down when he walks into work, but he was only fooling himself that no one would notice.

“Did you get glasses?”

Jungkook looks up to see Jen staring at him from her usual spot by the elevators. She’s a people person, so Beth and Lori have her desk be the closest to their office entrance. She’s always got a smile for everyone, something Jungkook could never do. He prefers the back. He can smile as little or as much as he pleases; Taehyung’s the only one who will see it. and with Taehyung, he hardly smiles at all.

But Jen’s normally bright smile dims when she makes eye contact with Jungkook, and sees him in the world’s ugliest and most ridiculous glasses.

“Oh, wow, JK. Those are-”

“I know.”

“But you look-”

“No, I don’t.”

Jen gives him a different smile, one that’s supposed to look sympathetic but Jungkook can see is teetering right on the edge of hysterics. He does look funny, he knows. He just wishes he actually found it funny. He hopes Taehyung had the sweatiest night of his life, last night.

“What’s in the bag?”

Jungkook shrugs. “Work stuff.”

It’s not work stuff. But as much as he likes Jen, she’s a huge gossip, and he doesn’t really want her telling people he brought a bunch of stuff from his apartment to give to Taehyung. She could get the wrong idea. Not that he wants her getting the right idea, that he and Taehyung half-swapped bodies and now they’re in this weird limbo of sort of themselves but sort-of-not, and it’s all weird and confusing and bad.

Jen doesn’t need to know what. So it’s ‘work stuff.’

Thankfully she drops it, just tells him to have a good day like she always does, and waves at him as he makes his way back to his desk. He gets a few strange looks, which can only be about the glasses, and just smiles tiredly when Shivu tells him they look good. They don’t.

Taehyung’s already at his desk, miracle of miracles, but Jungkook figures he probably just came straight from Jungkook’s place. He looks tired, and Jungkook feels a little bad about making him rush over.

“Oh, hey,” Taehyung says, absorbed with something on his monitor. “I’ve got a few notes for our pitch on Friday.”

“We’re pitching Friday?”

“Yeah, Chris just told me a few minutes ago.”

“Why are we doing it?” Jungkook asks. They’re already maxed out on accounts, in his opinion. The last thing he wants is more work, especially right now. “Shouldn’t it go to Chaya and-”

“I asked for it. We can do it no problem.”

Jungkook tamps down a colorful swear. “Taehyung,” he says, voice tight, “don’t you think we should focus on- on this-” he gestures between them, “whatever this is, before we take on more projects? What about the focus group you wanted to put together? I sent you a list of potential participants; did you look at it?”

“Hmm?”

Jungkook thinks maybe if he bangs Taehyung’s head on the desk, instead of his own, maybe they’ll actually get somewhere. This has to be the four hundredth time he’s done something for one of Taehyung’s ideas, only for Taehyung to drop it and move on to the next. Jungkook doesn’t know how much longer he can keep doing this.

“Look, can we just focus for a second on our…situation?”

Taehyung straightens up in his chair and spins to look at Jungkook. “Sure.”

“Because we have to spend at least a week like this, unless we can figure it out without the bartender, and I kind of doubt that.”

“Right.”

“So I brought a bunch of stuff that hopefully will get you through at least until Friday…” Jungkook opens his bag so Taehyung can look inside. “My extra EpiPen, in case you accidentally eat peanuts again—I can show you how to use it if you need to, but there’s like, a million videos online—and then I…what?”

Taehyung isn’t looking in the bag anymore, instead he’s staring at Jungkook’s face with a stupid grin.

“You have chocolate on your face.”

“No I don’t,” Jungkook says automatically.

“Yes, you do. C’mere.”

Jungkook’s too surprised to jerk back before Taehyung’s hand is on his face for the second time in one morning. He scrubbed off all the chocolate from last night when he brushed his teeth; he’s sure of it.

But then he got a chocolate croissant on his way here.

Okay, he got two.

Alright, he got three, and he enjoyed every damn bite.

It really doesn’t help that he hasn’t allowed himself to eat this kind of stuff for years, and now that he wants it more than ever, it’s just a giant mess. Jungkook eats a lot of food anyway, it’s just usually healthy.

Taehyung’s hands are warm, and Jungkook notices his own have been getting colder. Jungkook normally runs hot, but it’s been a steady drop since Thursday night. Which makes sense now, of course, and only further proves the theory he’s been slowly working towards. The glasses really solidified it this morning, and he’s planning to share with Taehyung. The implications are kind of terrifying, if he’s honest, and maybe it’ll jumpstart Taehyung into focusing.

“There,” Taehyung says, after wiping away whatever smear Jungkook still had at the corner of his mouth. “Good as new.”

Jungkook gives a tight nod and tries not to think about how damn soft that whole interaction was. Taehyung’s soft touch. Soft voice. Softer eyes. What the hell is happening?

“Just because you want sweet stuff doesn’t mean you have to eat everything in sight you know.”

Jungkook rolls his eyes. “And how many cups of coffee have you had today?”

Taehyung scrunches his nose.

It makes Jungkook pause for a second. He’s having an out-of-body experience (well, he’s been having one), but it’s beyond strange to see Taehyung doing something Jungkook’s done all his life. It’s like looking in a funhouse mirror. Though he’ll begrudgingly admit, just to himself, that the reflection looks a little better. It’s not smudged with chocolate, at least.

“What else is in the bag?” Taehyung asks, peering inside.

“Shampoo. And some of my skincare stuff.”

“Why?”

“Because I have really oily skin. And unless you want massive zits you should use it.”

Taehyung leans back in his chair, raising an eyebrow. “My skin’s fine.”

“For now.”

Taehyung crosses his arms. “Meaning?”

Jungkook glances out over the office, but most people seem to be engaged at their desks. Jungkook still kneels down by Taehyung’s chair to whisper in his ear, just in case.

“I think we’re turning into each other.”

“Yeah, we already established that.”

“No, I mean, like- it’s gradual. But it’s not gonna stop.”

“What?”

Jungkook draws back and points to the horrible glasses balanced on the bridge of his nose. “Taehyung, I could see fine last night. And you weren’t allergic to peanuts until yesterday.”

“So you’re saying…you think- no, this can’t be the ‘process,’ can it?”

Jungkook shrugs. “What other evidence do we have? I think you’re right about the body swap. We didn’t do it all the way, so now it’s just happening more slowly. And more…strangely.”

“You think we’re going to keep switching stuff. Until there’s nothing left to switch.” Jungkook nods. “But we’d still be us, Jungkook-”

“Just without everything that actually makes us us, Taehyung. And I don’t know about you, but that scares the shit out of me.”

Taehyung blinks at him for a long moment. “Me too.”

“Okay, so we’re agreed. We have to figure out how to stop this.”

“I thought that was a given. But yeah, we can put our heads together after work.”

“After- Jesus fuck, Taehyung, is work the only thing you ever think about?”

“No,” Taehyung says evenly. “I think about the future too. And I know that if we blow off work, when we finally solve this we won’t have jobs to come back to.”

Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

“Look. Let’s make a deal—no talking about this at work.”

“Taehyung, we can’t not talk about-”

“We can talk after.”

Jungkook finds himself about to run a hand through his hair, a distinctly Taehyung move, and clenches it into a fist instead.

He wants to say: ‘I don’t want to spend any more time with you than is absolutely necessary.’

What he ends up saying is:

“Okay. After work.”

“You can come to my place,” Taehyung decides. “I have a few things I could give you too.”

“Don’t tell me you have dandruff or something.”

“No. But my hair gets frizzy with humidity. Looks like- mhmm. You’re getting there.”

“What?” Jungkook’s hand unclenches to fly up to his hair instead.

Taehyung gets there first, and that brings the count up to three. “It’s fine. Your hair’s long enough you won’t turn into a mop.”

Jungkook frowns.

“But maybe a triangle.”

Jungkook frowns harder. “Is that all?”

Taehyung’s hand is still in his hair. If Jungkook didn’t know any better, he’d say Taehyung wants to keep it there. It doesn’t help that Jungkook seems to be leaning into the touch.

“That’s all,” Taehyung says softly.

“Okay then.”

“You should probably stand up now.”

“Then you should probably let go of my hair, Taehyung.”

“Oh.” Taehyung startles, like he just realized that. “Oh, um, right. Sorry. Shit, sorry.”

Jungkook opts not to say anything as he sits down at his own desk. Taehyung’s acting weird. he’s been acting weird since they had that drink, but Jungkook guesses that’s not so unbelievable. Jungkook’s been acting weird too.

Except no, he thinks, it was even before that. Because Taehyung had pulled him aside, and asked to talk.

‘It’s not about work.’

What the hell was it about?

“Ignore the mess.”

“Kind of an impossible task.”

Taehyung’s apartment is…well, it gives Jungkook a headache just looking at it. There’s piles of clothes, clean and dirty, stacked on chairs and flung into corners; books in tottering towers and lots of takeout containers in the trash. Jungkook tries not to judge, but- who is he kidding, of course he’s judging. Taehyung’s a messy slob, and it’s kind of delightful. It’s nice to see he has a flaw.

He has lots of flaws, in Jungkook’s opinion, but this is one that pretty much anybody would be able to identify.

Taehyung doesn’t seem too embarrassed, just gestures to the couch. Jungkook has to move a stack of books off so he has room to sit. They’re all written by authors Jungkook’s never of heard, but that’s not surprising. They’re also each about as thick as Jungkook’s bicep, but that’s even less surprising. Taehyung is a walking dictionary. Or, he was.

“Do you want something to eat?” Taehyung asks. “I know it’s late.”

It is late, and it’s Taehyung’s fault. Back when Watson was still around, Jungkook left the office at five every day, sometimes even earlier. But with Taehyung, Jungkook doesn’t have any hope of getting out until at least six. Sometimes, like tonight, they stay until almost eight. They needed to work on their Friday pitch, the one Taehyung asked for, and now Jungkook has to sift through about nine-hundred screenshots of data tables, and manually copy them into his own spreadsheet. It’s mind-numbing work, and it’s really time consuming, and Jungkook wishes like hell the account had used a better marketing firm before this landed in his lap. Really, who sends screenshots?

Jungkook spent a long time trying not to rip his hair out (his frizzy hair, he noticed, after lunch) while he stared at an email for their account rep saying that no, they didn’t have any data files. Just the pictures. And now Jungkook’s ill feelings towards Taehyung, which were maybe lessening a little, with all the hair and face touching, are ratcheting back up again.

“Yeah,” he says. “That would be good.”

“Okay, let me see…” Taehyung walks into the kitchen and opens the fridge, bending down to look in.

Jungkook has a really unhelpful, really unwanted thought.

Taehyung has a fantastic ass.

Very unhelpful. Very unwanted.

“So, um…maybe some…do you like toast?”

Jungkook gives Taehyung an unamused look. “Is that seriously all you have?”

Taehyung straightens up with a sheepish shrug. “Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not- I don’t usually cook. We could order out; there’s a really good-”

“I can make something,” Jungkook says, to both Taehyung and his own surprise. He walks over to join Taehyung at the fridge and looks inside to take stock. “For someone that loves sugar,” he comments, “you have a lot of vegetables in here.”

Taehyung smiles drily. “I’ve got your tastebuds now. Speaking of which, I’m gonna give you all my peanut butter. I can’t have it in here or I’ll eat it.”

“No impulse control.”

“You’re one to talk.”

Jungkook decides to ignore that. He did maybe raid Taehyung chocolate stash at work today. But only because he’s at the end of his rope with all those screenshots. He can totally stop eating like shit if he wants to.

“I have some ice cream in the freezer if you want it.”

“Yes.” Taehyung is nice enough to stifle his laugh, but Jungkook glares at him just the same. “Stop tempting me, not when I’m about to make you dinner.”

Jungkook opts for making pasta; it’s simple enough, and Taehyung seems to have all the ingredients.

“You really don’t know how to cook?” he asks, while he waits for the water to heat up.

Taehyung shrugs. “I mean, I could get by. But I just get really distracted. And I hate doing it.”

“Gee, can’t wait for that to switch over.”

“Huh. Me either, I guess.”

Jungkook worries he’s going to have to spend time actually talking to Taehyung, but he leaves the kitchen a few moments later to gather up some essentials for Jungkook to take back to his place. Jungkook’s boiling the pasta when Taehyung comes back, a tote bag in his hands.

“Okay, so…I gave you some shampoo also—I’m not sure it’ll help with the frizz that much, sometimes it’s just up to the weather gods; um, some lotion? You probably have your own but just for the itching. I have some antihistamines I threw in, just in case, but try not to use them unless it’s really bad. They knock you out for a while, so. And then I have-”

Jungkook looks up from the pot on the stove to squint at Taehyung through the steam. “You have what?”

“Nothing, just- let me…”

Taehyung pulls his (or are they Jungkook’s?) glasses off Jungkook’s face and wipes them with the hem of his shirt. Jungkook doesn’t realize they went foggy from the steam until Taehyung settles them back on his nose and he can see much more clearly than a few seconds ago.

“Occupational hazard,” Taehyung says.

“Thanks.” It feels weird to say that and actually kind of mean it.

They stand in awkward silence for a long moment, Taehyung looking at Jungkook and Jungkook looking at a spot just above Taehyung’s shoulder. If anyone asks, he has vision problems, okay? That could easily include depth perception. Taehyung shifts his weight from side to side.

“Drink?” he asks.

“God, yes.”

Taehyung nods, maneuvering around Jungkook to get to cabinet behind him. They’re close, close enough that Jungkook can feel Taehyung’s presence without turning around. If he did, they might actually press together, and then Jungkook wouldn’t know what to feel.

Jungkook wonders if maybe there was something else in that drink other than their body-swap juice.

Either that, or it really was just absinthe and this whole thing is a shared hallucination complete with psychosomatic ideations and strong indications of insanity.

Jungkook kind of wants to say that out loud, to bother Taehyung.

Jungkook frowns in distaste when Taehyung pulls a bottle of strawberry soju out of the fridge. Way too sweet; he’d prefer a nice glass of whiskey any day.

“That’s all you have?”

“That’s pretty much all I like. You’ll like it, trust me.”

Jungkook sighs. This switching thing is bad enough, but he might have to draw the line at not enjoying whiskey anymore.

Jungkook makes quick work of the pasta, dumping it into bowls and mixing it with the sauce he threw together. Not spicy, because he’s learned his lesson there. They sit at Taehyung’s kitchen table, after Taehyung moves a basket of what seems to be yarn into the living room.

“I’m trying to make a sweater,” he says, when he comes back in.

“Why?”

“Well, I was looking around online the other day, and there was this really gorgeous one for like, five hundred dollars—I don’t know what that is in pounds—but yeah, I didn’t want to spend that much, so I figured I’d try to just make it myself.”

“But you’ve never knit anything before.”

“Nope.”

“And you’re going to make a whole sweater.”

Jungkook hopes he doesn’t eventually get Taehyung’s ambition; he probably wouldn’t know a second’s peace.

“Yeah, why not? This is amazing, by the way.” Taehyung nods at his pasta, eating with the same gusto Jungkook normally does. It does taste good, but Jungkook can’t stop thinking about the ice cream Taehyung mentioned earlier.

Taehyung seems to know what he’s thinking, because he nudges Jungkook’s glass of soju closer. “I promise it’ll taste good.”

Jungkook eyes his glass warily for a moment, before knocking it back with a practiced swallow. It burns more than he’s used to, but Taehyung’s right. It’s the perfect amount of flavor exploding across his tongue without a hint of its normal sickly sweetness. He fills up another and drinks it before Taehyung can get a word out.

Taehyung drinks his own and scrunches his nose. That expression is really going to take some getting used to. It doesn’t help that Taehyung looks kind of cute when he does it.

“So,” Taehyung says around a mouthful of pasta, “absinthe means regret.”

“Wormwood, technically. That’s what he told me anyway. And that we’d disrupted the process, and that I should ask you what that meant. But you don’t know.”

Taehyung shakes his head. “No. But if we’re running with this magic thing, I guess we can assume that whatever’s happening, it should unhappen when we complete the ‘process.’ Whatever that is.”

“And how do we do that?”

“That’s the million-dollar question. I’m wondering if…”

“If what?” Jungkook prompts.

“If maybe…” Taehyung tilts his head, absently twirling bits of pasta around his fork. “Maybe we’re on a spirit quest.”

Jungkook rubs at his eye. Well, tries to. He ends up hitting the lens of his (Taehyung’s?) glasses instead. “What the fuck is a spirit quest?”

“Like in the movies,” Taehyung explains. “When someone has something magical happen and it only stops after they’ve like, learned their lesson or whatever. And then everything goes back to normal, but they’re forever changed. That kind of thing.”

Jungkook takes another drink. This is making his head hurt, and he doesn’t even really understand what this is. “So we just have to figure out what our spirit quest is, and then do it, and then we should be fixed.”

“Yeah. But most of the time when you try to figure out your quest it ends up being something completely different than what you thought. So it might just be an exercise in…”

“Futility.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“How many spirit quest movies have you watched?” Jungkook asks.

“More than one, less than a hundred? I don’t know. This is all guesswork anyway. Unless you’ve ever experienced something like this.”

Jungkook shakes his head. “I don’t think anyone’s ever experienced anything like this.”

“We could probably get famous off this, don’t you think?”

“No one would believe us. And I don’t really want to be famous.”

Taehyung nods thoughtfully. “Me either.”

“Regret,” Jungkook says, trying to steer them back on topic. He takes another shot of soju. How has it never tasted this good before? It’s starting to go down easier too. One more. For the road. “Maybe our spirit quest has to do with that.”

“Like, things we wish we could change?”

“Sure. Like you said, it’s guesswork.”

“We could just wait and ask the bartender.”

“No, Taehyung, come on! We should think about this. I don’t want to keep wearing your glasses.”

“Yeah, how are they?” Taehyung asks.

“Well, I don’t want to keep wearing them, does that give you enough of an idea?”

Taehyung laughs. For some reason Jungkook finds it attractive. And for some reason he wants to make Taehyung laugh again.

“Things I regret…once I tried to bleach my hair in college, and then almost all of it burned off.”

Jungkook’s the one to laugh now, and it’s only when Taehyung looks at him strangely that he realizes it was out of character.

“Are you drunk?” Taehyung asks.

“What? No. You’re drunk.”

“I’m clearly sober.”

“Me too.”

“My ex was a train conductor.”

Jungkook’s eyes water, he laughs so hard, and he’s forced to confront the fact that maybe, okay, he’s a little drunk. But just a little.

“I don’t understand,” he says. Slurs, maybe.

“Jungkook,” Taehyung admonishes, holding up the soju bottle, “how much did you drink?”

“Alright, Eomma, calm down.” He tips his head from side to side, thinking. He thinks he’s never been this drunk this fast, that’s for sure. “Four?”

“Four?”

“Four.”

“Oh, no, Jungkook-ah, I can’t drink that much.”

“You didn’t.”

“No, I mean you can’t drink that much. I have a really low tolerance.”

“Five.”

Taehyung gapes at him. “What?”

“I had five.”

Taehyung crosses his arms, nose scrunching, and Jungkook really can’t watch him do that anymore.

“Relax, Taehyung-hyung.”

Jungkook blinks. Did I just call him hyung?

It’s then that Jungkook realizes they’ve spoken half of the past exchange in Korean. Yeah, he’s drunk. But it’s nice, and Taehyung’s voice sounds even sexier speaking Korean than English.

Okay, what?

Did he call me Jungkook-ah?

Jungkook wakes up in Taehyung’s bed, and his first thought is:

Who topped?

His ass says it was him, but his throbbing dick says it must’ve been Taehyung. And then his second, more coherent thought, is that no one topped at all, because they didn’t have sex.

Submitting the first piece of evidence for the jury—Taehyung isn’t in bed with him, and it doesn’t look like he ever was. Only one side, the side he’s on, has been slept in, and there’s a pillow missing.

Evidence part two—Jungkook’s previously mentioned, throbbing dick.

He’s no stranger to morning wood, he’s a guy, after all, but he knows himself well enough to know that after a night of good sex, he feels refreshed in the morning, not backed up as all hell.

And he knows sex with Taehyung would be good. Mind-blowing even.

(Jungkook lets himself have that one; everybody knows hate sex is the best kind.)

Back to his dick, Jungkook has a new piece of evidence to grapple with. He’s got his face buried in Taehyung’s sheets, the smell of vanilla flooding his nose, and it’s making him hard. So it’s two things to grapple with, really. One, that he’s getting hard over how Taehyung smells, and two, he’s getting hard over how much he wants a vanilla cupcake.

Jungkook will not let himself have this one, no matter how much his dick aches.

He rolls out of bed before he can overthink it, planting his feet on the floor and standing up.

Mistake.

Jungkook rocks back to sit on the edge of the bed, clutching his forehead with a groan. He’s never been this hungover in his life, not even when he got drunk for the first time at his seventeenth birthday party.

There’s a soft knock on the door, and Jungkook hastily throws the covers over his lap to cover what’s completely obvious, with him just in his underwear.

Why am I just in my underwear?!

Maybe they did have sex.

But who topped?

Jungkook isn’t sure why that’s such a pressing question. He’s never had a preference in the past. But something about Taehyung makes Jungkook think he does, and for some reason Jungkook’s dying to know. He’d imagine Taehyung would probably like being called hyung, and-

Fucking stop, what?

Jungkook might need to get a brain scan. These intrusive thoughts are getting completely absurd.

“Hey,” Taehyung greets, poking his head into the room. Jungkook doesn’t know whether to melt at how Taehyung’s face is puffy, or worry that it’ll start happening to him. “We should probably get up now so we can make it to work.”

Jungkook settles for a grunt and flopping back down on the bed, an arm thrown over his eyes.

“Let’s skip.”

“We can’t skip.”

“Let’s do it anyway. I feel like death.”

Jungkook can hear Taehyung’s footsteps across the floor, and the mattress dips as he settles next to Jungkook. “I tried to tell you.”

Jungkook doesn’t want to look at Taehyung, so he keeps his arm over his face. “How bad was I?”

“You don’t remember?”

Jungkook fights the urge to shriek. “I remember sitting on your couch and eating ice cream. And I remember saying I was too hot.”

“That’s what happened,” Taehyung says, and Jungkook moves his arm. Maybe it wasn’t so terrible. “And then after you said it was too hot you ripped off your pants and threw them at me, and told me to invest in an air conditioner. And then you switched to Korean, and it got pretty hard to follow.”

The arm goes back over his eyes. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine. I’m a messy drunk, I get it.”

“I…hey, yeah; this is your fault.” Jungkook sighs. “I’m guessing I don’t have time to go home.”

“Probably not, no. I washed your clothes for you.”

“Oh. Uh, thank you.”

“Mhmm. Do you want anything to eat? I probably have some cereal.”

“No- um, no, I can get something on the way.”

“Okay. I put an extra toothbrush in the bathroom for you. And your clothes are just finishing in the dryer…you might not want to wear them though.”

“Why not?” If Jungkook puked on himself he really will shriek. He moves his arm again.

Taehyung just gestures to his chest. “I think you’re getting a flareup.”

Jungkook looks down to see his skin is red and irritated, and now that Taehyung pointed it out, he’s so fucking itchy. At least he’s not hard anymore. Well, not as hard. Taehyung still smells like vanilla.

“Another reason I don’t really drink.”

“Maybe you should write me a manual.”

Taehyung just raises an eyebrow at Jungkook’s belligerent tone. “Maybe you should write me one. Considering I almost died yesterday.”

“Shit,” Jungkook sighs. “Shit, sorry. You’re being nice and I’m…” he trails off, unsure how to finish the sentence. Thankfully, Taehyung doesn’t finish it for him. “So I shouldn’t wear my clothes.”

“Too tight, I’d say.”

“So I should just go naked.”

“I think there’s more than a few people at work that would like that, yeah.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?”

Taehyung coughs nervously. “What?”

“What?”

“What did you just say?”

Jungkook really didn’t mean to say that. Maybe he needs a mouth scan, along with his brain. “Nothing. Never mind. Ignore me; I’m still drunk.”

Taehyung’s face is as red as Jungkook’s feels. “I like artsy guys, remember?”

Jungkook thinks about his comic, and wisely keeps his mouth shut.

“You can borrow some of my clothes,” Taehyung continues. “They’ll probably feel a little more comfortable.”

“Okay.”

Jungkook doesn’t like that Taehyung’s being so genuinely nice. It feels weird. Wrong. Definitely makes it harder to hate him.

It’s a lot harder to remember, when Jungkook spends the whole day in his clothes and smelling that intoxicating vanilla scent, why he ever hated Taehyung in the first place.

The next few days pass without incident, except for a comment from Bekkah about Jungkook coming to work in Taehyung’s clothes. Of course she would notice; rare is the thing she doesn’t notice, but Jungkook just shrugs and says he stayed over at Taehyung’s to work on their pitch. It’s believable, but he doesn’t appreciate how her eyes light up and she gives him a knowing look. There’s nothing to know.

The only other thing that’s interesting (more satisfying, really), is when Taehyung leans over Jungkook’s shoulder, but this time he asks if Jungkook can help him with his notes, instead of the other way around.

Jungkook doesn’t tease him about it—he was nice when Jungkook was drunk, and he already looks mortified enough. It’s surprisingly easy; he just looks at what Taehyung’s written and writes it better. And he can kind of see how Taehyung’s such an overbearing asshole. If he wrote this well all the time, maybe he’d think he should be in charge too.

But other than that, it’s business as usual. Jungkook wears Taehyung’s glasses every day, wears his loosest, most breathable clothes, and eats like he’s got a tapeworm genetically engineered by Willy Wonka himself for maximum sugar consumption. Taehyung doesn’t seem to change much of his behavior, other than mainlining coffee all day. He gets a few pimples that Jungkook is also nice enough not to tease him about—but only because Taehyung doesn’t say anything about his frizzy hair. It starts to look like he’s stuck his finger in a light socket.

Jungkook goes home every night and thinks about what he regrets. He tries to write it out, but it seems kind of pointless when the only things he can think of are accidentally shoplifting when he was nine and going through a goth phase in middle school. He doesn’t even regret that, really. He hates to agree with Taehyung, that they just have to wait, but he doesn’t see what else he could possibly do. And he’s not sure if they’re even on the right track, with this whole ‘regret’ angle.

What’s the spirit quest?

Spirit quest. Kill me.

Though, he reflects, the adult onset diabetes he’s steadily racing toward might kill him first. As for Taehyung, he’ll probably eat more pad thai and die from an allergic reaction.

Jungkook laughs at the first thought, but the second one only makes him immeasurably sad.

He needs a brain scan.

And probably a cardiologist appointment, just to be safe. Maybe an intervention.

On Friday, Jungkook decides to brave the itching in favor of wearing something more formal for their presentation. He finds, to his horror, that his nice work pants cinch more tightly around the waist than they ever have, and he has a moment of sheer panic that they won’t button. They do, but he opts for a loose sweater just in case. He stares at himself in the bathroom mirror dejectedly before leaving, his reflection staring miserably back at him. Frizzy hair, thick glasses, baggy clothes—he looks like the nerd in a bad American high school movie.

They really need to find a way to switch back. He’s tired of this already.

Despite the pants scare, and the way he feels uber-conscious of his abs, flexing them every other minute to check they haven’t softened too much, he still stops at a Tesco and buys a bag of strawberry sour straws. He’s eating them at his desk when Taehyung comes in for the day, late as usual.

“Fuck you,” Jungkook says right away, jostling his bag of candy. “Your terrible diet is making me fat.”

Taehyung just drops into his chair with a groan. “Yeah, well, your coffee addiction is no joke either. I have the worst headache right now.”

Jungkook nods. “Might be an espresso day, then.”

Taehyung groans again. “Give me one of those,” he says, gesturing to Jungkook’s bag. Jungkook shakes his head. “I don’t like sour stuff.”

“You don’t like anything,” Taehyung protests. “All the green shit I’m eating still tastes awful.”

“Well, yeah,” Jungkook says. “Kale’s not supposed to taste good.”

“Why the hell,” Taehyung sighs, “do you eat it then?”

“Because it’s good for you.” He eats another sour straw. “Unlike this stuff. Seriously, Taehyung, you’re ruining my body.”

Taehyung glances up from where he’s been rubbing his temples and leans forward. Jungkook does too. Taehyung hasn’t stopped smelling like vanilla, and Jungkook hasn’t stopped wanting to take a bite of him.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Taehyung whispers, “I’ve been shitting my pants since this started.”

Jungkook snorts with laughter, and Taehyung tries to fight a smile, even as he keeps complaining.

“Your whole diet is coffee and fiber! Everything just falls out of my ass, it’s a nightmare.”

Jungkook snorts again, feeling surprisingly better about his own problems, now that he knows Taehyung’s having a worse time than he initially let on.

And it’s kind of nice, joking with Taehyung. Maybe.

Their presentation is scheduled for just before lunch, so they spend the morning making sure their slides are air-tight. Taehyung seems to have memorized his slides, which Jungkook commends him for, but secretly wishes he didn’t. It’d be fun, to see Taehyung bomb at least once.

Van sits with them in the conference room while Shivu brings up the clients. Jungkook is focused on making sure the clicker is functioning when Van breaks the silence.

“Tae? Are you okay?”

Jungkook looks over to see Taehyung pacing back and forth in front of the conference table. Taehyung pacing isn’t anything new—sometimes he’s got too much energy, in Jungkook’s opinion—but this looks less energetic and more…nervous.

Terrified, actually, because Taehyung meets his gaze with pupils blown wide and shaky hands. Jungkook doesn’t know what he’s freaking out about.

“It’s just a presentation,” he whispers. “You’re fine.”

Taehyung’s already done over twenty of these, in the two months he’s been here. But he’s never looked like this, twitchy and nervous and completely at a loss for words. It’s too late for Jungkook to ask anything else, because the clients are coming in and the room is full before Jungkook can take another breath.

This is a fairly big account; if they don’t like the audit Jungkook and Taehyung did, and the suggestions they have, it’ll be no problem for them to walk. There’s about a hundred other agencies lined up and waiting to bring them on, and if Jungkook and Taehyung fuck up this presentation, it’s potentially a lot of money lost for the company. Not all presentations are this nerve-wracking. Typically, after the initial pitch and the first audit, their clients stay for the long haul, and then each meeting gets more and more casual, the more familiar they become. One of Jungkook’s favorite accounts just sends one guy every month, and he just says, ‘show me the numbers,’ before grunting at them and walking out. Definitely Jungkook’s easiest presentation; he just has to move his computer mouse a few times. No talking, which is ideal.

This presentation is a big deal though, and it’s sort of a big problem that Taehyung isn’t saying anything. He’s supposed to start them off, but he’s staring at his shoes instead of the clients. Jungkook waits awkwardly with the title slide showing on the screen, unsure what to do. Maybe he should throw something at Taehyung.

But then he sees Taehyung’s shaking, full-body tremors, and Jungkook puts together what must’ve happened.

They switched.

What an inopportune time. But it happened, and now Jungkook is getting exactly what he wanted. Taehyung’s going to bomb, and bomb hard. When Jungkook first started working here, he could hardly even say yes or no in these meetings without feeling sick. The shaking, that was pretty standard too. So Taehyung must be really feeling the brunt of Jungkook’s stage-fright. Interesting. Certainly entertaining, as Taehyung, the loudmouth who’s so cocky it makes Jungkook see red, just opens and closes his mouth like a dying fish, and can’t even lift his head to say hello.

“Hello. First, I’d like to thank you all for coming today, and walk you through the topics we’ll be covering during this meeting. As you know, we conducted a full-scale, deep-dive audit of all your marketing channels, from organic search to paid social, and we’ve come up with a few recommendations of how we can grow your reach and your revenue. We’ve also highlighted a few key areas that are showing a lot of unnecessary spend, which we’ll cover later in the presentation.”

It takes Jungkook almost a minute to realize he’s the one speaking, standing right next to Taehyung at the head of the table and making direct eye contact with almost everyone in the room. He’s not sure if the stunned faces are because of his accent, or maybe the way he looks in these stupid glasses, or that Taehyung is now fading into the back wall, but Jungkook keeps talking.

And talking, and talking, and talking, until the whole experience starts to feel like a fever dream. He’s never been able to do this in his life, not even in school.

He tries to leave a gap for Taehyung to come in, but Taehyung just stares at him frantically, and after it happens twice Jungkook takes the hint. It’s obvious to him what happened, but Van and Shivu are watching like Taehyung his head’s been cut off. It kind of has; Jungkook kind of has it now. But even kind of is noticeable, and after the clients leave Van is quick to ask Taehyung to step into her office.

Jungkook gets a dazed ‘good job…phenomenal job,’ from Shivu and goes back to his desk. He’s starving, but he wants to wait for Taehyung before he leaves for lunch. He might just leave for the day; it’s Friday, and he and Taehyung don’t have any pressing deadlines. And he just nailed a presentation, for the first time in his career, and he kind of wants to get a drink to celebrate.

But when Taehyung comes back to his desk, Jungkook suddenly doesn’t feel like celebrating anymore.

“Are you crying?” His voice is too harsh, compared to the odd ache in his chest.

“No,” Taehyung whispers, wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist.

“Taehyung, it’s fine.”

“I know.”

“You don’t look like you know. It’s obviously just my stage fright. Once we switch back it’ll be gone.”

“What if we don’t switch back?” It’s so quiet Jungkook almost doesn’t hear it. Taehyung won’t look up from his lap. “I can’t…”

“It’s fine. It’s just one presentation.”

“It’s- I don’t-” Taehyung cuts himself off, and Jungkook’s chest hurts even more, seeing Taehyung’s eyes filled with tears. They threaten to spill over, and Jungkook’s worried about what he’ll feel if they do.

“Let’s go get some food,” he says, standing up hastily. “Just you and me, come on.”

Taehyung shakes his head. “I should probably do some work-”

“Fuck work,” Jungkook proclaims. He stands next to Taehyung and holds out his hand. “Just this once. Come on, Taehyung. If not for you, then for me.”

Taehyung’s eyebrows draw together in confusion.

“I just nailed that; you have to admit.”

Taehyung smiles, which is what Jungkook wanted. “You definitely could use a few pointers.”

“Oh, yeah? Like what?”

“Not mixing up which slide you were on and then saying, ‘oopsie.’”

Jungkook rolls his eyes. “I didn’t say that.”

“Yes you did.”

“Under my breath,” Jungkook defends, and Taehyung’s smile gets just a bit brighter.

“Come on,” Jungkook presses. “We’re getting lunch. And maybe a drink.”

Taehyung’s back to frowning, and God, he’s such a killjoy.

“You have my tolerance, remember? You’ll be fine.”

Taehyung glances at his computer, then back to Jungkook, like he’s debating. At least he isn’t crying.

“Fine.”

Jungkook makes it through Saturday okay. Minus the terrible eating, of course. He’s officially gained weight, he can tell. It doesn’t look like it, but it feels like it. And it’s Taehyung’s fault, obviously. They don’t talk, save for a few messages from Taehyung about work things, and one to ask Jungkook if his peanut allergy extends to peanut oil as well.

It doesn’t. Jungkook texts back and asks Taehyung if he ever has the desire to eat anything healthy.

He doesn’t.

Jungkook breaks on Sunday. He dropped by the restaurant earlier, but the bartender wasn’t back yet, according to the waitress he briefly talked to. He told Taehyung about it, who confessed he’d gone yesterday and heard the same thing. It’s probably easier if they just do things together, but that means spending time with Taehyung. And that means feeling a lot of complicated feelings Jungkook isn’t prepared to sort through, not when all he wants to do is stuff his face with vanilla pudding all day.

I’m starting to look like vanilla pudding, he thinks sourly.

That’s not the problem though. The issue is that he’s run out of sketches to trace for his comic, and he cannot draw any new ones. He’s tried, and tried, and tried and tried and tried, but all that comes out is a big, unusable mess.

And he doesn’t want to call Taehyung, but he’s got a sneaking suspicion Taehyung is the only one that can help.

“Hello?”

“Taehyung? Are you busy?”

“No, not really. Everything okay? You sound upset.”

Does he? He is, kind of. This comic is sort of his life’s work. No big deal. No need to be upset that his one passion has disappeared. And it’s now (literally) in the hands of his mortal enemy.

“Can you come over?”

“What- to your apartment.”

“Yeah.”

“Now?”

“Can you come?”

There’s a long pause, and Jungkook actually holds his breath while he waits for Taehyung’s answer.

“Yeah, of course. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“Okay. Thanks, Taehyung.”

When Jungkook opens the door thirty minutes later, Taehyung is standing there in the softest-looking sweater Jungkook’s ever seen, and he just wants to bury his face in Taehyung’s stomach and never move. The sweater probably smells like vanilla too.

“I brought these,” Taehyung says, after he steps inside.

Jungkook frowns at the small plastic box in his hands. “What are they?”

“Dark chocolate caramels. With sea salt. There’s this really amazing bakery a few blocks from me that makes them fresh every day.”

“Is that why you like sweets so much?” Jungkook asks. “Because you live next to a bakery?”

Taehyung laughs. “I like them because they taste good. Anyway.” He shakes the box. “I brought these because they always cheer me up. And you sounded like you need that.”

It’s taking a lot of willpower not to jump Taehyung and rip those mouth-wateringly delicious-looking caramels out of his hand.

“Yeah, I…um, do you want to sit?” Jungkook gestures to his couch, and Taehyung complies, taking the caramels with him. Jungkook follows a second later, booting up his laptop that’s already on the coffee table. He takes a breath and hands Taehyung the file he pulled out a few minutes before Taehyung got here.

“‘BAM Inc.’ Oh, is this…” Taehyung flips open the tea-stained file and turns the pages slowly. “Did you draw these?”

Jungkook hums in affirmation, fidgeting nervously with the seam of the couch cushion.

“Wow, Jungkook, these are- these are amazing. Bam is the dog, right?”

“Mhmm.”

“Do you have a dog? Bam?”

Jungkook shakes his head. “No. No, he’s just made-up for now.”

Taehyung looks up with a smile. “For now?”

Jungkook shrugs. “I can dream.”

“Jungkook, I…God, I’m sorry; I had no idea what was in here. I never meant to- oh, now I feel horrible-”

“It’s okay,” Jungkook breaks in. “It’s fine, you didn’t know.”

“But I barely even apologized-”

“Because it was an accident, Taehyung. And I wasn’t supposed to have these at work anyway. It was probably just karma, or something.”

Taehyung looks unconvinced, but thankfully he drops it. “You should do something with these.”

Jungkook gives Taehyung a sheepish grin. “I kind of already have.”

He hands Taehyung his laptop, open to the site he publishes his comic on. Taehyung stares at it, not saying anything as he scrolls through. Jungkook chews his lip anxiously as he waits for Taehyung to comment, but the next ten minutes pass in silence until Taehyung finishes the first chapter.

“Jungkook, these are- this is incredible.”

Jungkook ducks his head. “You think?”

“What- yes! I love it; Bam is so cute. And it’s clearly popular. Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”

Jungkook’s head gets lower. “I’ve never told anyone before,” he confesses.

“Why not?”

Jungkook shrugs.

“Then why’d you tell me?”

“Because I need your help.”

Taehyung looks confused.

“I can’t draw right now,” Jungkook clarifies. He sounds a touch miserable, but that’s appropriate.

“Oh. I see. And you think I can.”

“You must,” Jungkook says. “Could you try?”

Taehyung shrugs. “Sure. What do you want me to draw?”

Jungkook spends the next half-hour in a role reversal—he’s the one leaning over Taehyung’s shoulder making comments. Taehyung doesn’t seem to mind though, following Jungkook’s directions with ease. It’s a relief to see that Taehyung did in fact get Jungkook’s skills; at least they weren’t lost to the ether.

“When did you start doing this?” Taehyung asks after a while. He’s drawing a sketch of Bam licking an ice cream cone he found on the ground, and it looks pretty much exactly like how Jungkook would’ve done it. Jungkook wonders if Taehyung’s got any artistic talent of his own—he is trying to knit a sweater, after all.

“About a year ago?” Jungkook says. “I’ve always liked to draw, and I just…I don’t know. This idea fell into my head one day.”

“It’s a good idea.”

“Thanks.”

There’s another stretch of silence, Taehyung now adding a disapproving JK behind Bam, arms folded. Jungkook leans closer.

“He wouldn’t be upset.”

“Hmm?”

“Don’t draw him looking upset. JK lets Bam do whatever he wants.”

Jungkook can see Taehyung hiding a smile as he erases JK’s face and tries again. “Is that the kind of dog owner you are? You just let them do whatever they want?”

“I don’t have a dog.”

“But if you did?”

“Then no. I’d be a good disciplinarian.”

“But comic Bam can do whatever he wants.”

“Comic Bam is a comic,” Jungkook points out. “So comic JK has to deal with the comic consequences of a spoiled dog. Not me.”

Taehyung hums. “Would you ever want to get a real Bam?”

“Yes.” The answer is immediate. “I just don’t have time. With work and everything.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Taehyung starts sketching in the background; an empty street on a cold winter night. Jungkook likes to keep pace with the seasons each chapter, a benefit to publishing as he goes. “Hey, Jungkook, why do you do what you do?”

“What?”

“I mean- like, you like drawing. And you’re clearly good at it. And you obviously don’t like what you do at work. So I’m just not understanding the breakdown there.”

“Work isn’t always fun,” Jungkook says. “Sometimes we have to do stuff we don’t want to.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

He wouldn’t, Jungkook supposes. Taehyung rarely does things he doesn’t want to.

“I’m serious,” Taehyung continues. “I know you have to make money and everything, and I totally get that. I just don’t understand why you would choose to do something you don’t like when there’s something you love right in front of you.”

Jungkook lets his head drop onto Taehyung’s shoulder with a sigh. Taehyung stiffens for only a moment. Jungkook wonders what that says about their relationship. It has to mean growth, of some kind. Even a few days ago, Jungkook would never want to be this close to Taehyung.

But what are we growing towards, exactly?

“I’ve never thought about it, really,” he admits. “I like where I am. In my life.”

Taehyung snorts. “No, you don’t.”

“I do,” Jungkook insists. “Life isn’t just work, you know.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Taehyung doesn’t reply, and Jungkook doesn’t press him for an answer. It’s a little mean, what he said. True, but maybe a little too pointed. And besides, Jungkook can’t really talk. He’s got more than work, but not much. At least Taehyung has friends.

What are we growing towards?

“How’s the sweater going?” Jungkook asks. He gets a whiff of vanilla, and rests his head more heavily on Taehyung’s shoulder. He stops himself from wrapping his hands around Taehyung’s arm.

“Oh, I stopped doing that.”

“Stopped- Taehyung, it’s only been a week!”

“I know. But I just couldn’t get it down. It kept coming out wrong.”

“Mmm.”

“You don’t sound surprised to hear that?”

“Hear what? That you’re a perfectionist?”

Taehyung tenses under him. “I am not.”

“Okay.” Jungkook taps the page Taehyung’s drawing on. “Why have you been drawing the same streetlamp five times?”

“It’s not right yet.”

“Looks fine to me.”

“I don’t want fine.”

Jungkook allows himself a smile, and Taehyung’s weary sigh follows a second after when he realizes what’s happened.

“Okay, fine. I just- it’s hard for me to finish things. Like this comic you’re doing; you’ve said it’s been a year? I would’ve given up probably a month in.”

Jungkook nuzzles his cheek over the soft fabric of Taehyung’s sweater. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Perfectionism, I guess. And I…I get really frustrated, when I can’t do something right away.”

“Lots of things take time,” Jungkook points out. “Practice makes perfect, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I just hate the practice part. And I just- I guess if I can’t have something come out the way I want it, I’d just rather not have it at all, you know?”

“Not really, no.”

Taehyung puts down his pencil. Jungkook isn’t sure how much is too much, when it comes to asking for Taehyung’s help here. Ideally he could just sketch everything until they find a way to switch back, but Jungkook thinks he could get by if Taehyung just finishes the chapter for him. There’s not much left, just a few panels.

Jungkook hadn’t realized how important this is to him, and he feels an odd sense of obligation to put out a new chapter by the end of the month, like he always does. Maybe he likes feeling relied on, even if it is by a bunch of strangers on the internet. Maybe he likes feeling like he has a purpose, even if it’s to draw a quiet little spinoff of his quiet little life.

Maybe Taehyung’s right, to question why he’s living the way he is. Without drive. Without passion. Without life.

“I’d rather quit before I can fail,” Taehyung says quietly.

Is he going to quit this? Whatever this is? Jungkook isn’t sure he should care. He and Taehyung have been thrown together by insane circumstances. When all that’s over, it’s anyone’s guess as to what will happen. If Taehyung’s scared to fail this, whatever this relationship is, well, Jungkook hasn’t exactly given him any reason to feel otherwise.

What are we growing towards?

“Taehyung,” Jungkook murmurs, “let’s be friends. Or…maybe not friends, but at least not enemies. Okay?”

There’s a long silence, but Jungkook can hear the smile in Taehyung’s voice when he finally responds.

“Yeah. I’d like that.”

“Taehyung! Taehyung, he’s back.”

“What?”

“Did you hear me? He’s back!”

“Who?”

“The bartender!”

“Oh.”

“Oh? Oh? Taehyung, Jesus- what- it’s kind of a huge deal, you know!”

“Jungkook,” Taehyung sighs, “it’s two in the morning. On a Wednesday.”

Jungkook pulls his phone away from his ear to check the time and see that Taehyung is right. Jungkook didn’t mean to be out so late, but he went to bed and woke up ten minutes later with the strangest feeling. And he didn’t understand it at first, not until he found himself walking to that restaurant. He didn’t even have to walk in before he just knew.

And maybe that should freak him out, but Jungkook’s given up on freaking out since he started having to wear Taehyung’s glasses.

The old man is at the bar again, and he met Jungkook’s eye with a wink before serving whatever unlucky customer just ordered something. There’s a part of Jungkook that wants to scream to everyone they shouldn’t touch anything this man serves, because it’s infused with magic body-swapping spirit quest juice.

But there’s a bigger part of Jungkook that doesn’t want to end up in the mental hospital, so he keeps his mouth shut. Besides, not everyone got the magic body-swapping spirit quest juice. Just him and Taehyung, as far as he can tell.

And Jungkook wants to know why.

“I’m gonna go talk to him.”

“What?”

“I’m gonna talk to him; I’ll let you know what he says.”

“Wait, Jungkook, hang on, wait for me to get there-”

“It’s fine. Go back to sleep, I’ll handle it. Don’t worry, Taehyung, I’m gonna get answers out of this guy.”

“Wait, Jungkook, I have to tell you-”

Taehyung’s words register, but only after Jungkook’s already hung up.

“Hey,” Jungkook says, when he gets up to the bar. “Remember me?”

“Jungkook, how are you?”

He says it in Korean, and Jungkook feels a tiny bit of reassurance that he didn’t just imagine the entire thing when it happened the first time.

“Not great, actually. What the hell did you give us?”

“You don’t remember? Absinthe.”

“Yeah, I know that. But what else did you put in it?”

“Oh, a little gin, some lemon, a splash of vermouth-”

“No, fuck you, you know what I mean.”

“Ah. The process.”

“The process,” Jungkook repeats, clenching his jaw. “What is it? And what did we do wrong?”

“You seem to be taking this well. Don’t you want to know who I am? What I do?”

“Not really. I’m numb to surprising things at this point, so let’s just skip all that, and you tell me how we can switch back.”

“I already told you. Follow the process. Together.”

“But what is the process?”

“Your friend knows, like I said.”

“He said he didn’t.”

The bartender raises his eyebrows. “Now that’s interesting.”

“What? Interesting why?”

“Hey! Hey, I’m here, I-”

Jungkook turns around to see Taehyung tear into the restaurant and over to where he’s standing at the bar. Taehyung’s wearing pajamas under his coat, his feet half-jammed into shoes that don’t match. He’s breathing hard, cheeks pink from the cold.

“You’re so fast,” Taehyung says. “I mean, I guess I am, but I was running here, and- yeah, wow.”

Jungkook feels oddly complimented.

 “Taehyung,” the bartender says, still in Korean, “I heard you haven’t shared the process.”

Taehyung’s cheeks, so pink a moment ago, drain of any color. “What?”

“Come on now, don’t be shy. Tell Jungkook here what I told you.”

“I…you didn’t tell me anything.”

“Oh, but I did.”

“Taehyung, what’s he talking about?”

Taehyung looks at Jungkook miserably. “I- Jungkook, I-”

“Wormwood,” the bartender breaks in. “A symbol of regret.”

“You already fucking told us that,” Jungkook snaps.

The bartender throws Taehyung an exasperated glance. “Is he always like this?” Taehyung doesn’t say anything, so he continues. “So often we look back in our lives to find things we regret. And it’s hard to see those things clearly, without the right perspective.”

“So that’s what this is supposed to be?” Jungkook asks, gesturing between Taehyung and himself. “Perspective?”

“Not quite. Taehyung, you really should tell him.”

“Tell me what?”

“I told you,” the bartender says, looking at Taehyung, “it wasn’t anything to play around with.”

“What wasn’t?” Jungkook breaks in. “Can someone just tell me what the hell is happening here?”

“You weren’t supposed to drink it,” Taehyung says, so quiet Jungkook can barely hear him over the general din of the bar. “It was supposed to be just me.”

“What?”

“Yours was- yours was normal, and I- Jungkook, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mix them up but I never imagined anything would actually- I didn’t-”

“What’s the process?” Jungkook asks. As far as he’s concerned, they’re way past the point of accidents. So they weren’t supposed to share drinks, okay. All Jungkook cares about now is fixing the mistake.

“It’s- I…”

“To see your regrets, you must have the right perspective,” the bartender says, and really, Jungkook might just hit him over the head with a beer if he says any more cryptic, unhelpful shit. “You have to strip away everything that makes you you, and take a look at what’s left. That’s the process.”

“What- so we drank a- like, the reverse of a power up? We powered down?”

“Well, not quite. The mixing mucked all this up, I must say. And these things are never an exact science anyway.”

“But how do we fix it?” Jungkook presses. “You can’t go back and change the past.”

“Ah, the past. There’s your problem. You must look to the future.”

“Oh, that’s it,” Jungkook grumbles. “What the fuck-”

“What do you guys want to drink?”

Jungkook and Taehyung both jerk back at the sight of a completely different bartender standing in front of them. He’s much younger, and isn’t speaking Korean. Jungkook would swear on his life he only blinked, and Taehyung seems to feel the same way.

“Anything?” he asks again. “If you aren’t gonna order you should move out of the way.”

They exchange dumbfounded glances before walking away from the bar. Jungkook said he couldn’t be surprised by anything anymore, but that might’ve just tipped him over the edge.

“We have to look to the future,” Taehyung mutters. “What does that mean?”

“Good luck figuring it out,” Jungkook spits. “I’m done.”

“What? Jungkook, we have to do this together, we can’t just-”

“Yeah, real team effort, Taehyung. This whole time you knew exactly what was happening to us, and you didn’t say shit.”

“No, it’s not like that.”

“What is it like, then? Tell me. Because to me, it seems like you, for some strange fucking reason, ordered a magic potion at a bar, and didn’t think to disclose that information after I drank half of it.”

“I- obviously I didn’t believe him, okay? I was just- I wanted to- I-”

“Fine, you didn’t believe him at first. But Jesus, Taehyung, afterwards? How could you not tell me?”

“I didn’t…I didn’t want you to be angry-”

“Well, I’m angry now!”

Taehyung looks at his shoes. He blinks a few times, like he just realized they’re mismatched.

“Fuck this,” Jungkook sighs. “I’m leaving.”

He turns on his heel and starts storming out of the restaurant. He can hear Taehyung behind him a moment later, and he curses himself for giving Taehyung so much speed to work with. He trained hard for that, and now Taehyung’s using it to be even more annoying than usual.

“Jungkook, wait!” Taehyung says, grabbing his arm. Hard. Jungkook swears in pain and Taehyung lets go like he’s been burned. “Shit, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry, just let me explain-”

“You knew, Taehyung! I asked you, like, a million times! And you knew! What, you just wanted to watch me walk around shoving fucking candy in my face and making a complete idiot out of myself?”

“I- no, Jungkook, that’s not-”

“Whatever, I don’t even care. Just- you couldn’t tell me? Did you just want to figure it out first, is that it?”

“No, no; Jungkook, I was going to tell you, but I just-”

“You just what, Taehyung? Make this make sense.”

“I…I…” Taehyung stares at Jungkook, mouth open as he tries to give an explanation that apparently just won’t come out. Probably because there is no explanation, other than Taehyung’s a selfish asshole who has to control everything.

“Do you just like bossing me around?” Jungkook asks, when it’s clear Taehyung won’t be making a coherent response. “You have to be better than me, don’t you?”

“No, of course not!”

“Could’ve fooled me, Taehyung. I thought we were past all this, but I guess we aren’t.”

“What- Jungkook, come on.”

“No, okay? You’re so confusing, and I can’t- I don’t want to do it anymore. Just- we’ll figure this out on our own.”

“But he said we have to-”

“I know what he said. And I don’t care. I’d rather do this alone and be stuck wearing your ugly ass glasses for the rest of my life, than have you keep treating me like this.”

“You’re the one who said you hated me,” Taehyung snaps, eyes blazing. “That I was the worst person you’ve ever met.”

“God, you’re never gonna let that one go, are you? It was a fucking game, Taehyung, it’s not a big deal.”

“It’s a big deal to me!” Jungkook jumps at the volume in his voice. “It’s a big deal to me,” Taehyung repeats, softer. “It’s a big deal, because I- because-”

“Because if not everyone likes you you’ll die?”

Taehyung’s face closes off. “Fucking forget it.”

“Gladly.”

“I’ll see you at work.”

“Whatever. Think about all your regrets, Taehyung; I’m sure you have fucking plenty.”

“Yeah, I can think of one.”

Jungkook doesn’t understand what Taehyung means until he’s already down the street, but he still yells a loud and angry ‘fuck you’ that startles the poor woman leaving the bar behind him.

Taehyung doesn’t turn around, but Jungkook can see from the hunch of his shoulders that the insult landed.

Jungkook spends the rest of the night wondering if that’s something he regrets. And why Taehyung ordered that drink in the first place.

Jungkook’s workday takes place with the other analysts, brushing up on a new software they’re going to start using. He normally hates training days like this—everything moves so slowly and he’s so bored—but today he’s grateful for it. He hardly sees Taehyung at all, who, by some miracle, is already gone for the day when Jungkook gets back to his desk at 4:30.

Thursday he doesn’t have a good excuse, so they work in tense silence across from one another. Jungkook tries to type as loudly as he can to be annoying. If it bothers Taehyung, he doesn’t say anything. They don’t say a word to one another the entire day.

In Jungkook’s opinion, there’s nothing to say.

The next day comes, and Taehyung is nowhere to be found. Well, Jungkook did just get into the office, but Taehyung isn’t there. And it shouldn’t be surprising, but it is. He’s got an uneasy feeling, but he’s not sure why. Taehyung could just be late, and Jungkook’s overthinking it for no reason. Why does he even care, really? He’s got his own work to focus on. And he’s fucking pissed at Taehyung right now, so.

And yet, and fucking yet, when Lori makes her way back to their corner of the office (strange, that he no longer thinks of it as just his), he turns to her with sweaty palms and a bouncing knee, hoping she knows where Taehyung is.

“Hey,” she says, far too casual for Jungkook’s internal crisis. “I just got off the phone with Tae.”

“Is he okay?” Jungkook blurts out.

Lori gives him a quizzical look. “He’s not, actually. He called in sick.”

“Sick?”

“Flu, from the sound of it. Reminded me of what you had a while back. Either way, I came to ask if you need someone else to help you for the day. Or week.”

“Week?”

“However long Tae’s out, yeah. Though I’m sure he’ll be in as soon as he can. He wanted to come in later, but I had to talk him down.”

“Oh,” Jungkook says. He’s not sure why his heart is racing. Maybe because Taehyung’s sick, and it’s probably Jungkook’s fault. Well, his immune system’s at least. “Well, I- no, never mind.”

“You what?”

“I just- maybe I can go over? If he’s up to work then we can get some stuff done. And if not I can take him some- uh, some soup or something. I feel bad.”

Lori raises an eyebrow. “Do you have any meetings today?”

Jungkook shakes his head. His only meeting was with Taehyung, to go over the slides for their presentation.

“Sure,” Lori sighs. “Whatever you want. Honestly I think we’ll all go home early today. It’s Friday, it’s raining, and I wouldn’t mind a glass of wine before five o’clock. Or right about now.”

Jungkook smiles awkwardly.

“It’s nice to see you two getting so close,” she adds. “I think you’ve really helped Tae feel at home here with us.”

“Really?” The question slips out before Jungkook can stop it.

“Well, yeah,” Lori says. “I brought him in for a little catch-up last week and you were about the only thing he talked about.”

“All bad, I assume.”

“On the contrary.” Lori looks a little too probing for Jungkook’s liking, so he starts to pack up his stuff.

“I’m gonna head out,” he says. “Thanks for letting me leave early.”

“Give Tae our best. And try not to catch anything!”

That’s the last thing Jungkook’s worried about.

He stops at the grocery store before making his way over to Taehyung’s. Racing might be a more accurate word for it. He’s still not entirely sure why he’s feeling so anxious, but he finds himself completely gassed by the time he buzzes Taehyung’s intercom. Curse Taehyung’s endurance, and curse the four cinnamon rolls Jungkook ate for breakfast.

“Hello?”

Taehyung’s voice is raspy and thick with congestion, the way Jungkook’s normally is when he gets sick. Jungkook’s chest gives another squeeze, but he tells himself it’s just the layer of cholesterol that’s been steadily building up around his heart these past two weeks.

“It’s me,” he says.

“Hi.”

“Let me up?”

“Why?”

“We have a meeting.”

There’s a brief pause, long enough that Jungkook thinks Taehyung’s genuinely going to leave him outside in the rain, but then the door buzzes open and Jungkook hurries inside.

Taehyung’s apartment is on the second floor, and Jungkook knocks softly when he reaches it, not wanting to aggravate the pounding headache Taehyung probably has, going off Jungkook’s experience.

Taehyung opens the door a few moments later, and Jungkook almost wants to coo at the way his hair is mushed up on one side of his head, and the red tip of his nose.

“This is your fault. I never get sick.”

He shuffles to the side so Jungkook can step in. The place is a mess, crumpled tissues and fuzzy blankets strewn over the couch and empty mugs littering every flat surface in sight.

“You haven’t been drinking coffee, have you?” Jungkook asks.

Taehyung shakes his head. “Lemon tea.”

“Oh, yeah, I like that one.”

“So I discovered.”

Taehyung scowls and gestures towards the kitchen, where Jungkook can see his cabinets hanging open and box after box of tea riffled through.

“I brought you some stuff,” Jungkook says, holding up his bag of groceries. “Stuff I like when I’m sick, so if you want that…”

“You brought food?”

“Uh-huh.”

“If I even look at food I’m going to hurl.”

“Oh, well, I’ll just- I’ll put it in the fridge then.”

Taehyung gives a miserable huff and staggers over to the couch. Jungkook didn’t even notice the pajamas. Blue with yellow polka dots. God.

When Jungkook’s done in the fridge, Taehyung is wrapped in one of his blankets. His bed comforter, Jungkook realizes belatedly.

“What’s our meeting?” Taehyung asks around a yawn.

“Just to go over the slides.”

“Oh, okay.”

“But you look kind of tired,” Jungkook says. “Do you want me to come back later?”

“No, no.” Taehyung waves him off, burrowing deeper into his comforter. “You’re already here. Let’s do it now.”

“Okay.”

Jungkook walks over to the couch and stands awkwardly for a second, unsure what to do. Taehyung’s sprawled over the length of it, and Jungkook isn’t exactly about to sit on his head. Taehyung sits up, thankfully, but he groans in protest as he does.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Jungkook asks, after he’s settled onto the couch and opened his laptop on the coffee table.

“M’head hurts,” Taehyung mumbles.

Jungkook hums in understanding. His sinus headaches are no joke. “I can help with that.”

“Mmm?”

“Come here; lay down.”

Maybe Taehyung wants to put his head in Jungkook’s lap, or maybe he’s just so sick he’ll do anything he’s prompted to. Either way, Taehyung reclines with no complaints, head warm on Jungkook’s thighs. A little too warm, but that’d be the fever. Jungkook starts gently combing through Taehyung’s hair, scratching here and there and pressing lightly near his temples. Taehyung’s hair is damp with sweat, but Jungkook doesn’t mind.

Taehyung sighs contentedly and nuzzles his cheek against Jungkook’s stomach. “Huh.”

“What?”

“I am making you fat.”

Jungkook yanks on Taehyung’s hair and he yelps.

“I was just kidding!” He settles more comfortably in Jungkook’s lap. “Thank you for this.”

“It’s my fault,” Jungkook murmurs. “Like you said.”

“I know. It’s still nice of you.”

“I’m a nice guy.”

Taehyung snorts. “No. No, you’re not.”

There’s that funny little squeeze again. Except this time Jungkook’s chest is so tight he feels like he can’t breathe.

“So who does this for you?” Taehyung asks, changing topics.

“Does what?”

“You know, all the…” He makes a vague gesture. “All the TLC stuff. Who makes you soup and washes your sheets, when you’re sick? Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

Jungkook shakes his head. “Just me.”

“What- just you?”

Jungkook focuses on his hands, scratching lightly at Taehyung’s scalp with his nails so he doesn’t have to see the sad look on Taehyung’s face.

“I don’t…my parents are back in Korea. And I don’t have friends, really.”

It’s embarrassing to say out loud. Even more embarrassing to admit to Taehyung, of all people.

“Except Watson.”

“Except Watson,” Jungkook agrees.

“And I got him fired,” Taehyung says softly.

Jungkook doesn’t respond; he’s not sure how. You were the only thing he talked about.

“I’m sorry,” Taehyung whispers, and Jungkook looks to see Taehyung’s eyes locked onto his. “Jungkook, I’m really sorry.”

“There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. You’re not the one who fired him.”

“But I took his place. And I don’t think- I don’t think I’ve done a very good job.”

Jungkook looks back to his hands again. Taehyung’s eyes are too intense. Too bright, though that may just be the fever.

“Sure you have,” he says. “We landed three new clients in the last month-”

Jungkook’s voice dies in his throat when he feels Taehyung’s hand, skin dry and blazing hot, brush over his cheek.

“I meant about being your friend,” he whispers. “I haven’t done a very good job of being your friend.”

“What- no, it’s fine,” Jungkook mumbles. “You’re- um- you know…”

Taehyung’s hand slides down his face, his thumb resting in the hollow of Jungkook’s throat. “I don’t know.”

“You’re my- you’re Taehyung,” Jungkook finishes lamely. “The guy I switched bodies with. Kinda.”

Taehyung’s hand is gone now, and Jungkook isn’t sure if that’s a relief or not. Taehyung shuts his eyes with a sigh, and Jungkook keeps stroking his hair. He wonders if he should stop.

“Don’t stop,” Taehyung murmurs, like he’s read Jungkook’s mind. Maybe he can, at this point.

“Okay.”

“Tell me about the presentation.”

Jungkook obeys Taehyung’s request, trying to keep his voice soft as he explains what he worked on earlier in the morning. It takes about ten minutes for him to realize Taehyung has fallen asleep, breath wheezing past his lips and a faint snore issuing from his nose. Jungkook isn’t sure if the snoring is one of his own traits, or if it’s something Taehyung does too.

Jungkook feels a bit creepy, having Taehyung’s head in his lap while he’s asleep, so he gently eases out from under Taehyung and slides a pillow beneath him instead. Taehyung doesn’t stir, though that doesn’t surprise Jungkook. Whenever he’s sick, he sleeps like the dead.

Jungkook stands in the middle of the living room for a second before he decides he can’t abide this mess any longer.

The next hour passes in silence, save for the occasional sniffle from Taehyung, as Jungkook cleans up used tissues and rinses out dirty mugs, straightens blankets and puts away all the loose tea. He debates remaking Taehyung’s bed, but that seems like a step too far.

He ends up back on the couch with his laptop, typing quietly so as not to disturb Taehyung. Not that he really can, he thinks.

It’s another hour before Taehyung stirs, lifting his head blearily and looking around the room. His gaze lands on Jungkook and he frowns.

“When did you get here?”

“I’ve been here.”

“I…did I let you in?”

Jungkook nods. “We were supposed to go over our presentation. And I wanted to make sure you hadn’t died.”

“Yeah.” Taehyung pauses to let out a yawn. “This is all your fault.”

Jungkook nods again.

“Would you miss me?”

“What?”

Taehyung’s buried under the covers, and Jungkook can barely see his face as he asks again. “Would you miss me? You said you wanted to make sure I hadn’t died.”

“You’re not going to die, Taehyung. You’re just sick.”

“I know. But would you…if we didn’t- if we weren’t friends. Would you miss me?”

Jungkook stares hard at his laptop and tries to look neutral. He probably fails. “Sure.”

“Good,” Taehyung sighs, snuggling further into the couch. “I’d miss you too.”

It’s a frigid and blustery Wednesday morning as Jungkook makes his way into the office. He gets there before Taehyung, as always, but Jungkook thinks he should get a bit of a pass. After Friday, Jungkook stopped by Saturday and Sunday as well, just to check in for a half-hour. Whether or not Taehyung retained much from those visits, Jungkook doesn’t know. He does know that Taehyung missed Monday too, but dragged himself in yesterday so they could practice their presentation.

More so Jungkook could practice. Taehyung’s on slide duty for now, until they manage to switch back.

And Jungkook knows it upsets him, because he’s working without his two biggest assets, his brain and his charm. Jungkook’s not totally sure how to use either, so their power is a little lost on him. Though he’s sure Taehyung’s not maxing out on deadlifts at the gym either.

Jungkook’s spent a long week thinking about what the bartender said. Something he might come to regret. It’s hard to think about, because it involves him being brutally honest with himself about his life. So far he hasn’t made much progress. He’s not sure if Taehyung has either.

Taehyung rushes into the office twenty minutes before they’re supposed to present, but for some reason it doesn’t bother Jungkook like it normally would. Maybe because he’s got Taehyung’s calm presence, and still hasn’t managed to catch his perfectionism streak yet.

Taehyung gives him a hesitant smile. “Are you ready?”

Jungkook sends a hesitant smile back. They haven’t talked about what happened at the bar. With Taehyung being sick, it kind of just fell by the wayside. “Yeah. Are you?”

Taehyung shakes his head. “Not at all. I think I might puke. But it’s fine. I brought you these, by the way.”

Taehyung rummages around in his bag and pulls out a little purple case Jungkook recognizes from a few weeks ago.

“I can’t put contacts in,” Jungkook reminds him. “And I don’t have time to figure it out.”

Even though he’d gladly wear those over Taehyung’s glasses any day. It’s strange though. He’s started to forget he’s even wearing them.

“I can help you,” Taehyung says. “Bathroom, come on.”

Jungkook stands up and dutifully follows Taehyung through the office. When they make it to the bathroom, Taehyung sets his contacts on the ledge of the sink and washes his hands.

“What- are you going to put them in?” Jungkook asks.

“Mhmm.”

“I- Taehyung, I don’t know if I want you touching my eyes.”

“It’ll be fine.” He dries his hands with a paper towel before turning to Jungkook with a half-smile. “Do you trust me?”

“Yeah.”

He’s not sure when that change happened, only that it did. He does trust Taehyung. More than a lot of people in his life, if he’s being honest. Maybe because there aren’t many people in his life.

“Okay. Hold still.”

Jungkook feels Taehyung fingers fluttering softly against his eyelid, before he gently opens it wide. Jungkook tries his hardest not to blink, but he probably can’t anyway. Taehyung seems to know what he’s doing.

Jungkook braces himself for the hard poke that’s surely about to come, but he only feels something soft and wet land oh so gently on the surface of his eye.

“Blink,” Taehyung instructs. He stares at Jungkook’s eye for a moment. “Good. Now the other one.”

Taehyung moves closer for this one; Jungkook can feel his breath. Everything is vanilla.

“I’ve been thinking,” Taehyung murmurs. “About what our regrets are.”

“Mmm?”

“Yeah. And I think…I think mine is that I need to- um, I need to finish something.”

“Finish what?”

“Don’t talk,” Taehyung whispers. Jungkook closes his mouth and stands as still as he can.

“Jungkook, I- it’s hard for me to say, but I…” There’s a long pause, and Jungkook feels the second contact settle over his eye.

“You what?”

There’s a loud knock on the bathroom door, and Beth’s voice filters a second later. “Hey, you guys! Showtime!”

“You what?” Jungkook repeats, ignoring the warning.

But Taehyung just shakes his head. “We should go out.”

“Taehyung-”

Jungkook cuts off when Taehyung surges forward and envelops him in a hug. “Good luck,” he whispers, and then he’s letting go and walking out of the bathroom before Jungkook can even process what happened.

The last time they were in here like this, Taehyung hugged him, but that was to lift him up and dunk his head in the sink. The last time they were in here like this, they were enemies.

What are they now?

“That was amazing, JK! I don’t know where this confidence has come from, but I’m loving it.”

Jungkook smiles graciously as Lori gives him an enthusiastic thumbs up. The presentation went well—more than well—and Jungkook hardly remembers any of it. He just knows that Lori and Beth called him into the office for a ‘quick chat,’ and now they’ve been gushing over him for the past ten minutes. He doesn’t totally hate it. It just feels a little wrong, because Taehyung’s the one who should be hearing all this. It’s his skill, after all. Jungkook’s just borrowing it for a little while.

What would I regret?

“That’s two in a row that you’ve nailed,” Beth adds. “We wanted to ask you if you’d like to be an associate.”

“What?”

“We would’ve asked a while ago,” Lori says, “because you’re a good worker, and I think you’ve got a nice creative streak in you. But if we’re being honest, we thought you wouldn’t feel as comfortable, since it’s a lot of public speaking. And we try to make sure our employees aren’t pushed beyond what they want. But I think you’ve just proved pretty spectacularly that you’re ready for a push.”

A big push. Associates make more than analysts, Jungkook knows. It’s not quite a promotion, but it’s a step up, in a sense. A half promotion. Moving forward, which is something Jungkook can’t ever have claimed to do here.

“You don’t have to decide right away,” Beth says. “We just wanted to throw it out there.”

“Would I still work with Taehyung?”

“Well, no, we’d give you your own analyst. But you’d still be collaborating; you know how this office likes to work all together.”

“Right.”

What would I regret?

This would make his parents happy, probably. It’s a smart decision, to be sure. Good pay. Stable.

What would I regret?

‘I like where I am. In my life.’

‘No, you don’t.’

What would I regret?

‘I just don’t understand why you would choose to do something you don’t like when there’s something you love right in front of you.’

“JK? I know we said you don’t have to answer now, but do you think you could give us an idea? If you say yes we’d like to get on hiring another person to fill your spot.”

“Yeah,” Jungkook says. Time’s seemed to slow down, in this moment. “Yeah, you should start looking for someone.”

“So you want the job?”

Maybe it’s because the moment is so important. What would I regret?

“I want to quit.”

“Oh my God,” Jen whisper-yells. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”

Jungkook bites back a sigh. “How did you already hear?”

“Beth and Lori told all of us while you were out. We had a meeting.”

“I was only gone for twenty minutes!” After he talked to Beth and Lori, he ran out to get some lunch.

“It was a short meeting.”

“So everyone knows I’m quitting?”

“Mhmm. We’re all happy for you, of course, but we’ll miss you like hell, I hope you know that.”

“I know.”

Jungkook spent maybe the longest hour of his life talking with Beth and Lori, explaining that he wasn’t happy here, doing this. Wasn’t satisfied, and if he stayed, he’d regret it later in his life. It’s not that he doesn’t like the people, or the environment. It’s the work itself—he can’t find any passion in it.

He was expecting pushback, but he didn’t get any. Just concern over whether he really wanted to do this, because it came out of nowhere.

It’s kind of crazy, Jungkook knows. Risky. But crazy is sort of commonplace now, with everything that’s happened over the past month. And maybe it was the push he needed. Maybe it was the process. Spirit quest.

Jungkook didn’t put in a two weeks, which is maybe an asshole move, but Beth and Lori said he could leave as soon or as late as he wants. So Jungkook’s going to pack up his desk now, and never look back. Well, that’s not true. He did promise to come visit.

But now that he knows what he wants—what he doesn’t want—there’s no point in wasting another minute.

He doesn’t have much to take, just his BAM Inc. file and a few knickknacks from his desk. He shoves all of it in his bag without much thought, ready to go home and start this new chapter of his life.

“You quit.”

Jungkook turns around to see Taehyung standing behind him, arms crossed.

“Yeah,” Jungkook says hesitantly, “I did.”

“Good.”

Jungkook smirks. “Fed up with me, huh?”

“Oh, undoubtedly.” There’s something behind Taehyung’s eyes right now. Jungkook doesn’t know what. “So what are you going to do instead?”

“Honestly,” Jungkook says, “I have no idea. I just know that I want to do something I love. Like you said; I want to live with passion, you know?”

“Still, quitting seems kind of extreme.”

“So does a spirit quest.”

Taehyung smiles. “That’s fair.”

“And maybe it won’t work out, but maybe it will. And that’s what really matters, I think. I won’t have any regrets, because at least I’ll have tried. And if I fail, at least I did it passionately.”

The second the words leave his lips, Jungkook feels a bolt of pain in his chest. It feels like the night he had the drink, but ten times worse. Taehyung must feel it too, the way he’s grimacing. It intensifies for a second, and then disappears all together. They stare at one another, panting.

“Was that…”

“I think so. I think I-” Jungkook cuts off at the new wave of feeling sweeping through him. But unlike before, this is entirely good. Like sweet relief, and when it ebbs away he just knows. Everything settles. Everything that’s him.

“You felt that, right?” he asks, eyes wide. He flexes his hands, looking at them in wonder. He can feel the power in them. “We did it.”

“Felt what?”

“The- just now, after the bad one. The good one.”

“Yeah,” Taehyung says. “Yeah, I did. I feel like me again, you’re right.”

“So we did it.”

“We must’ve. You found what you’d regret.”

Jungkook wishes Taehyung would stop being so hard to read. “But what about you? Did you- I mean, you said you wanted to finish something.”

“Yeah, helping you through your spirit quest.”

Jungkook scrunches his nose. Almost cries, because he can scrunch his nose again. “What?”

Taehyung looks at the floor. “I remember what I said to you when I was sick. About not being a better friend. And I…I wanted to- um, to help you through this. Help you find what makes you passionate, you know? And I guess I did.”

Jungkook bites back a quip that Taehyung didn’t help at all, really. He just sucked at presenting enough that Jungkook got offered a promotion, and that kickstarted the whole deal. But that’s not the full truth of it, and Jungkook said they shouldn’t be enemies anymore. Maybe not quite friends, especially now that Jungkook’s leaving.

“I- um, I’m going out to get lunch,” Taehyung says. “But congrats, Jungkook. We did it.”

“We did it,” Jungkook agrees.

Why does it feel like we didn’t?

After his big revelation, Jungkook is delighted to find that he finally feels like himself again. Nothing seems out of place, and he goes on a celebratory run once he gets home. Full-out sprinting, lungs bursting and chest heaving as he runs as fast and as far as his body will allow, just to prove he can.

Jungkook spends the night in something close to bliss, rediscovering all the parts of himself he’d lost over the past few weeks. Sure, he can’t eat peanut butter anymore, but he’s also itch-free for the first time in what feels like forever.

It’s not until the next day that he realizes he still has Taehyung’s glasses. Jungkook still has a few things from Taehyung, but he figures out of everything, Taehyung needs his glasses back.

So that’s how Jungkook finds himself knocking on Taehyung’s door that evening, glasses in hand and butterflies in his stomach. He was able to slip in behind one of the other tenants, so Taehyung doesn’t know he’s here.

The longer he waits at Taehyung’s door, the more nervous he feels. He’s not sure why. He just saw Taehyung yesterday.

Taehyung answers a minute later, looking disoriented and groggy, like he’d just woken up from a nap. But his face is lacking that distinct puffiness Jungkook’s come to know, so it must be something else that has Taehyung looking so rundown.

“Jungkook? What are you doing here?”

“I came to give these back.” Jungkook holds out Taehyung’s glasses, smudged and dirty but still intact. “I had to throw the contacts out.”

“That’s okay,” Taehyung says. “I have more.” He takes his glasses from Jungkook’s hands, and Jungkook notices his are shaking.

“Caffeine withdrawal, huh?”

“What?”

“Your hands are shaking.”

“Oh.” Taehyung slips his glasses into his pocket before covering his hands with his sleeves. “Yeah, mhmm. It’s kind of rough. But I hate the taste again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well. I’m sure there are things from me you’re still getting over.”

“The sugar.”

“The sugar.” Taehyung repeats.

Jungkook doesn’t say anything. He’s waiting (hoping, praying) Taehyung will invite him in.

“Is there anything else?” Taehyung asks.

Jungkook tries to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “No. No, that was it.” He flexes his hands open and closed, trying to play for time.

Ask me to come in. Ask me to stay for dinner. For the night.

“Alright.”

“Taehyung,” Jungkook says. Raw, desperate. Enough that Taehyung’s hands shake even from where they’re hidden in his sleeves.

“Yeah?”

“I- Taehyung, I’m sorry for getting angry. I never apologized, because you got sick and then we had the presentation and then I…just- I’m sorry. I don’t think you’re the worst person I’ve ever met.”

Taehyung laughs weakly. “That’s good to hear.”

“And I- if there’s anything you need to say to me, or want me to say to you, I just- well, I hope you’d say it now.”

“Why?” Taehyung crosses his arms. His hands are still shaking.

“Well, because I’m not coming in to work anymore. And this may be the last time we see each other.”

“You think?” Taehyung’s voice is soft. There’s something else behind it, something repressed. But Jungkook can’t decipher just what it is.

“Probably. Right?”

“Um, yeah, I guess so.”

Jungkook feels something building in his chest, something that feels like a scream. He’s not sure why.

“So, this is where I leave you.”

“This is where you leave me,” Taehyung agrees. “It’s for the best. I think you’re going to be a lot happier in life, Jungkook. No regrets, right?”

“Right. You’ll be happier too, I hope.”

Taehyung gives him a dry smile. “I’ll try.”

Jungkook waits another long moment. Ask me to come in. Ask me to stay for dinner. For the night.

Forever.

“Okay, well…bye, Taehyung.”

It’s hard. It hurts.

Taehyung’s so good with words, and now, in the final hour, he has nothing to say. And Jungkook guesses it’s his own fault, for being so rude and harsh. But Taehyung is totally silent, and Jungkook can only do so much to bridge the gap. A conversation takes two people, after all.

Why can’t you ask me to stay?

It’s been a month since Jungkook quit, and he’s never been happier.

Which seems absurd to say, because he’s unemployed, but he’s really enjoying his life. He thinks he’ll start looking for a job, but right now he’s got enough savings to fall back on. And now that he has more time to draw, he has more time to publish his comic. Its traction doubled, and now Jungkook’s getting emails from fans asking if he’s got a Pay Pal or something they can send money to. It’s beyond flattering, the amount of support.

For now, it’s still just a hobby, but the passion behind it is more alive than ever. If he doesn’t make it big with this, that’s okay. He’s doing it because he loves it. And if he needs to get a more steady job he will, but one that’s more fulfilling than his last one. He needs passion in his life; he knows that now.

It’s a dismal Tuesday, rainy and stubbornly cold, when Jungkook bumps into Chaya.

He’s on his way back from the gym when they cross paths. It’s a total coincidence; they happen to pass each other on the sidewalk.

“JK! How are you?”

Jungkook gladly stops to talk for a few minutes. Now that he’s not interacting with people in an office every day, he finds he kind of misses it. Chaya fills him in on what’s happened since he left, and he asks all the right questions.

Except the one he wants to ask the most, of course. He can’t bring himself to do that.

Chaya doesn’t make him. “Tae misses you.”

Jungkook tries to pretend he expected that. “Sure.”

“A lot.” Chaya’s pleasant expression is getting frostier, like it has ever since that night at the restaurant, whenever Jungkook and Taehyung are in the same sentence. “It’s really affecting him.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Beth and Lori had to call him in for a performance review.”

“What?”

They have (well, had, in Jungkook’s case) performance reviews once every six months. And Taehyung already had his along with everyone else’s. So to pull him for another one can only mean that something’s wrong.

“Is he- what- they aren’t going to fire him, right?”

Chaya shrugs. “I doubt it. But he’s really fallen off, I mean, they took him off pitching.”

“They did?”

“When they put him the room he could barely talk,” Chaya says, and Jungkook can hear the sympathy in her voice. He’s positive it can’t hold a candle to how much his heart bleeds, hearing Taehyung is struggling.

“I don’t really know what’s going on with him, to be honest. It’s like he’s just-”

“Not himself.”

“Exactly.” Chaya gives him a look that’s only a few shades off a glare. “You know, JK, I haven’t intervened in anything. Office drama and all that; either it sorts itself out or we shouldn’t involve ourselves in it in the first place. But I’m going to tell you this one thing, because honestly, Tae misses you, and I think you don’t understand just how much.”

Jungkook doesn’t know how to explain that it’s not Jungkook he’s missing, but core parts of his personality. Simple misunderstanding. But hearing this from Chaya just confirms Jungkook’s suspicion that Taehyung didn’t complete his spirit quest. Not fully, anyway.

“Do you remember a few months ago? That game Paranoia?”

Jungkook shoves his hands in his pockets and nods. He’s wondering if maybe he should check up on Taehyung later. Jungkook doubts there’s anyone else he can talk to about this.

“And remember how I asked him something? And he said your name?”

Jungkook nods again.

“Well, you said he was the worst person you’ve ever met. And I asked him who he’d marry.”

“I- what?”

“I asked him if he had to, that night, marry someone, who would he choose. And he said you.”

“Chaya, you can’t think that’s serious-”

“Obviously, I don’t think it’s serious, JK. But his feelings are. You’d have to be blind not to see it.”

Jungkook wants to protest that he was blind, at least for a few weeks. “I don’t…he…he never said anything.”

Chaya rolls her eyes. “He didn’t have to.”

He definitely did. It’s hitting Jungkook out of nowhere, this revelation. And it’s wonderful and satisfying and somehow exactly what he wanted to hear, but he needs to know for sure. Needs to ask Taehyung, who somehow thought it was okay to keep this a secret for so long.

‘It’s not about work.’

‘Would you miss me?’

‘I like artsy guys.’

‘I’d rather quit before I can fail.’

‘Bye, Jungkook.’

God, how could Jungkook have missed it? With everything laid out before him, it makes so much sense. And Chaya’s question was the final piece of the puzzle. It feels good, to know Taehyung likes him. It feels better to finally admit to himself that he likes Taehyung back.

Their last meeting has been weighing so heavily on him, and he didn’t even realize. So many things left unsaid, unresolved. And Jungkook used to not like talking, but now he’ll try. For Taehyung’s sake. For his own.

‘Jungkook, would you ever want to-’

Want to what? Be friends? Kiss? Go out? Spend the night together? The rest of their lives?

Jungkook doesn’t know. But he’s going to find out.

Jungkook pounds on Taehyung’s front door for a whole minute before he remembers he has to buzz the intercom.

“Hello?”

“Taehyung,” Jungkook gasps out, “it’s me; please let me up.”

“What- Jungkook?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you- what are you doing here?”

“Just let me come up? I’ll explain everything.”

“Um, okay.”

Taehyung buzzes Jungkook in, and he runs up the two flights of stairs in record time. Now that he’s got his strength back, he’s been able to start hitting the gym again. His abs still aren’t quite what they used to be, but if he’s honest with himself it’s because he’s held onto Taehyung’s awful eating habits a little bit longer than he should’ve. Sometimes he still has ice cream for breakfast, sue him.

Jungkook’s heart is pounding, and not from his mad dash here. He’s got so much adrenaline he can barely stand still.

Taehyung opens the door a second later, and Jungkook wants to melt.

He’s wearing his glasses. It’s the first time Jungkook’s ever seen it, and they magnify Taehyung’s eyes just the way they did Jungkook’s. Only he manages to look hopelessly endearing, and Jungkook can’t look away.

Taehyung notices him staring and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, they’re a little…well, you know,” he says self-consciously. “Come in, I guess.”

Jungkook does, opting to sit on the couch when Taehyung gestures to the living room.

“Do you want anything to drink?” he asks. “I was just about to make some tea.”

“Yeah, maybe some-”

“Coffee.”

“Right.”

Jungkook leans over the back of the couch and watches Taehyung in the kitchen, flitting here and there as he tries to make tea and coffee at the same time. How could Jungkook ever have missed it? It’s so obvious to see now, the way Taehyung blushes and looks at the floor, the way he seems to be teetering on the edge of something. The way that when he does meet Jungkook’s gaze, he stutters and sounds breathless.

How did Jungkook miss it?

It feels good to know that at least now, he feels the same way. Because if he’d discovered it earlier, back when he didn’t know his own feelings, he can’t imagine what he would’ve done. Hurt Taehyung more than he already has, most likely, and it makes his chest hurt to think about what he might’ve said. He’s already said enough to make Taehyung act like this, and maybe it’s not his fault, but he didn’t help either.

But that was the past, and Jungkook’s learned over the past few weeks that living with regret isn’t any way to live at all.

Taehyung’s hands are trembling again.

He’s fumbling with the coffee, grounds spilling out onto the counter as he tries to scoop them into the filter. Jungkook is up off the couch before he really thinks about it, walking into the kitchen and gently taking the bag of coffee from Taehyung.

Taehyung shudders when their fingers touch, and how did Jungkook miss it?

He’s scratching at his neck, Jungkook notices. Jungkook hated living with Taehyung’s little quirks and ailments for a month; he can’t imagine what it’s like to live with them permanently. He can’t help but brush Taehyung’s hair aside to see a few red patches. Taehyung tries to pretend like he doesn’t notice, but Jungkook sees the way he stops breathing for a moment.

“I found this lotion,” Jungkook says casually, “when I had them. And it worked really well. I still have some left, if you want it.”

Taehyung dunks his teabag into his cup, swirling it around. “Sure, yeah.”

“You aren’t wearing tight clothes, are you? Or hanging out in damp places? I know Lori makes the office pretty warm in the winter, but you could probably ask her-”

“I’m fine,” Taehyung breaks in quietly. “It’s just stress.”

Jungkook rolls his eyes. “Stress isn’t fine, you know.”

“I know.”

A long silence stretches between them, before Jungkook decides Taehyung’s had enough agony. Maybe there’s still a little piece of Jungkook that likes to make Taehyung squirm. He’s sure there’s still a little piece of Taehyung that’s dying to boss him around.

“Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t get everything back?”

Taehyung’s eyebrows knit together. “I don’t know what you’re talking about-”

“I saw Chaya today. She told me you’ve been bombing your presentations.”

“Wow, that’s nice of her.”

“Taehyung,” Jungkook says softly. “I know you aren’t okay.”

Taehyung flinches.

“You haven’t done what you’re supposed to,” Jungkook continues. “You haven’t let go of your regrets.” He wants to put a hand on Taehyung’s arm, but he doesn’t want Taehyung to accidentally drop his tea.

How could Jungkook have missed it?

“You told me,” he says, “that you needed to finish something. For once in your life.”

“I know.”

“And you haven’t.”

“I know,” Taehyung repeats miserably. He won’t look up from his tea. “I- I tried, and I can’t- Jungkook, you don’t understand what it is that I need to finish-”

“I think I do, Taehyung.”

Taehyung shakes his head. “No, um- it’s- Jungkook-”

“Chaya also told me the question she asked you. For Pyeonjibbyeong.”

Jungkook doesn’t have Taehyung’s language skills anymore, and as much as he’s been mourning the loss, he’s also decided to not be so hard on himself. He’s noticed himself slipping into a mixture of English and Korean lately, figuring it’s better to say a word in his native language than just not saying anything at all. Not talking, that was definitely one of his regrets.

Taehyung’s head snaps up to meet Jungkook’s eyes. Jungkook reaches out and pulls his cup from his hands. They don’t want another spilling incident.

“Jungkook.” Taehyung’s voice is strangled. “Jungkook.”

Jungkook steps closer. “I’m sorry I’ve been rude. And mean, and didn’t- Taehyung, I didn’t even know that you felt that way. And I don’t know what I would’ve done, if I had known then, but what matters is that I know now. And it matters that I…that now I feel the same way.”

“Jungkook.”

“I really want to kiss you, Taehyung. But I think you’re the one who needs to kiss me.”

Taehyung’s hands are still shaking. Jungkook can feel them on his arms, as Taehyung slowly, agonizingly, traces his fingers along Jungkook’s sleeves, up to his shoulders. Taehyung looks like he’s going to be sick, and Jungkook almost wants to laugh. He’s already given Taehyung the greenlight, now he just has to floor it.

Jungkook has to remind himself that Taehyung’s confidence isn’t what it normally is. He doesn’t have it, doesn’t even have Jungkook’s anymore. He has to do this without anything, and all Jungkook can do is what he’s already done. Assure Taehyung that this is what he wants. What both of them want.

So he’ll wait for Taehyung to make the move, because it’s really his move to make. It has been, ever since he ordered those drinks. Jungkook can wait. God knows Taehyung’s been waiting.

It seems to take hours, for Taehyung’s hands to cup Jungkook’s face. Jungkook has the absurd thought that Taehyung’s hands are so big he could probably knock Jungkook out with one smack. But no, he’s cradling Jungkook’s face with such gentleness, and how could Jungkook have missed it?

“Taehyung,” Jungkook presses, “finish this.”

Taehyung drops his head to Jungkook’s shoulder. “This is so not how I wanted to do this.”

“Well,” Jungkook says, prodding Taehyung’s side with a smile, “this is how it’s happening. And it’s fine. Forget perfect, okay? The perfect comes after. When you actually kiss me.”

Taehyung makes something close to a squeak and shoves his face deeper into Jungkook’s shirt.

“Taehyung!” Jungkook laughs. “Come on, I actually want to kiss you now, okay? All you have to do is lean in.” Taehyung doesn’t move, and Jungkook prods him again. “Don’t think. Just do it.”

Taehyung raises his head slowly. Readjusts his hands. Swipes his thumbs across Jungkook’s cheeks so tenderly it makes Jungkook’s chest ache.

“Just lean in,” Taehyung whispers.

“I’m right here. Just lean in.”

“I can’t do it.”

“You can. Jesus, Taehyung, if I’d known you were such a wimp I would’ve never put up with any of your bullshit in the first place-”

Taehyung kisses him.

And it feels…it feels right. Like they’re supposed to do this, and not just because of some stupid magic potion or spirit quest or whatever. But because Taehyung likes Jungkook, and Jungkook, against all odds, likes him back. Jungkook lets Taehyung take the lead, because if there’s one thing he doesn’t want them to fight over, it’s this.

And maybe it’s not quite perfect. Standing in Taehyung’s kitchen on a foggy Tuesday evening, the coffeemaker beeping shrilly as it sputters and spits Jungkook’s coffee into his cup. Taehyung’s hands are too cold, and they’re still trembling against Jungkook’s cheeks. Jungkook’s not even doing anything with his hands; they’re just hanging limp at his sides.

It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t have to be.

And that’s what Taehyung realizes.

He must, because he breaks the kiss to gasp against Jungkook’s lips, a shudder running through his whole body. And Jungkook knows he must’ve just felt what Jungkook did, after quitting. Not the sharp, painful clench in his chest, but after that. After he let go of everything that was Taehyung, and everything that was him, only him, came back. It was a sweet rush of relief, and he felt whole again.

Taehyung must feel like that now, the way he’s looking at Jungkook and smiling.

“You finished it,” Jungkook says.

“Yeah.”

“And how do you feel?”

“I- I mean, I feel like myself again.”

“But?” Jungkook prompts. He has a feeling he knows what Taehyung will say, and he’s got an answer ready for him.

“But I…it’s over.” Taehyung meets Jungkook’s eyes, unsure. “Isn’t it?”

Jungkook smiles. “It’s over, yeah. But this…”

He gestures between Taehyung and himself. Pulls Taehyung close again, so their lips can brush. It’s not perfect, but who fucking cares?

“This is just getting started.”

“Bam! Bam, down.”

Jungkook sighs as he watches his dog jump all over Jen, who doesn’t seem to mind one bit. Jungkook’s scared she’ll get knocked over. Bam is big for his age, and at four months old he’s still got so much puppy energy to expend. It’s a dangerous combination sometimes, one that’s destroyed three separate lamps in Jungkook’s apartment.

Jungkook still can’t believe he even has Bam. It’s only been two months, but he can’t imagine life without him. It is tough, having a big dog in the city, but they’ve been getting by okay. Now that Jungkook spends most of his time at home, it’s not difficult to make sure Bam’s getting his daily exercise. And he’s such a sweetheart Jungkook doesn’t mind when he accidently pees in the kitchen. They’re both learning, and he’s been taking Bam to doggy training classes on the weekends.

But Bam seems to forget all his manners whenever Jungkook takes him to the office, jumping all over everyone and begging for treats.

“Bam,” he tries again. “Sit.”

“Oh, he’s fine,” Jen says, crouching down to let Bam lick her face. Jungkook decides not to mention Bam just licked a public trashcan on their way here. “I assume you’re here for him.”

“You’d assume right.”

“Never here for anyone else,” Jen sighs dramatically. “At least Bam still loves us.”

“Is he in his office?” Jungkook asks.

“Is he ever anywhere else?”

Fair point.

Jungkook leaves Bam to keep attacking Jen’s face, knowing he’s in good hands. As Jungkook walks down the hall, he can hear the familiar squeals of his old coworkers, all delighted that their baby came to visit again. Jungkook’s basically invisible, whenever Bam’s around.

Jungkook gets to the end of the hallway and stops for a minute, pausing to stare at his boyfriend through the glass door.

Taehyung is so beautiful.

He’s wearing his glasses today. Jungkook likes when he does, because Jungkook’s the one that gets to slide them on his face in the morning, kissing him awake and forcing him out of bed so he won’t be late for work.

Taehyung is squinting at something on his monitor, completely focused. Jungkook doesn’t bother to knock, just pushes the door open. Taehyung can always tell when he comes to visit; he said once no one else bursts in the way he does. Now that Taehyung’s a junior partner, he’s gotten much scarier. Everyone knocks when they come in, lest they distract him from something important.

It makes Jungkook laugh, because Taehyung’s not scary. Sometimes his face is a little intense, sure, but the real Taehyung is just a softy that likes having his hair played with while they watch The Great British Bake-Off.

(And then he always says, ‘I could do that,’ and Jungkook comes over the next day to find he’s set off his smoke detector and ruined the inside of his oven. Taehyung’s ambition hasn’t wavered in the slightest.)

“Hey,” Jungkook says. “Busy businessman.”

Taehyung looks up from his computer, already smiling. “Hi.”

“I don’t know what you’re looking so happy for. You were supposed to be at mine an hour ago.”

Taehyung’s smile slides off his face and his eyes go wide. Jungkook struggles not to smile himself; with the glasses Taehyung looks almost like an anime character, his eyes are so big. Not that Jungkook minds.

“Oh my God,” Taehyung panics. “Oh God, I’m sorry, I totally lost track of time, it’s just this project and I was trying to-”

“To make sure it’s perfect, mhmm. Good thing I’m here to make you forget about all of that.” Jungkook walks over to Taehyung’s desk and turns Taehyung’s chair to face him, slotting himself between Taehyung’s thighs. “We’ve got a dinner to go to. An important one, remember?”

“Of course I remember, but I-”

“Nope. Don’t want to hear it. The project can wait, Taehyung. And I’m sure it’s perfect already.”

“It’s really not,” Taehyung mutters, but he still closes his tabs (Jungkook cringes at how many he has open), and powers off his computer. Jungkook occupies himself with running his hands through Taehyung’s hair. It’s gone frizzy from the rain.

“You look cute today.”

“I look like a stack of hay. With googly eyes.”

“I like your googly eyes,” Jungkook counters.

Taehyung just scoffs and pushes his glasses up on top of his head. Jungkook frowns at the red indents on the bridge of Taehyung’s nose and strokes a finger over them gently.

“You’ve been working too hard.”

“You always say that.”

“Because it’s always true.”

Taehyung hums and wraps his arms around Jungkook’s waist, pulling him closer. Jungkook bends over and kisses the top of Taehyung’s head, hands busy smoothing out the tension in Taehyung’s shoulders.

“I hate that you don’t work here anymore,” Taehyung mumbles, voice muffled against Jungkook’s shirt. “I liked seeing your face every day.”

Jungkook snorts. “No you didn’t.”

“I did,” Taehyung insists, hugging him tighter. “You were the one that didn’t like me.”

“Well, thank God I like you know.”

“Thank God.”

“Come on,” Jungkook urges. “Dinner.”

“Dinner’s not until 7,” Taehyung complains. “Let me cuddle you for just another minute.”

“It’s 6:45.”

“What?” Taehyung lets go of Jungkook and straightens up in his chair, glasses comically falling back onto his nose again. “It’s already 6:45?”

Jungkook doesn’t bother to hide his smile this time. “That’s why we came to get you, jagiya.”

There’s a moment of silence, and Taehyung goes red. “What did you call me?”

Jungkook shrugs, pretending to fix Taehyung’s hair. “Did I call you something?”

“Jungkook.”

“Yes, jagiya?”

“Oh my God,” Taehyung groans. “I can’t handle it.”

“Mmm. I guess I’ll stop, then.”

“Don’t you dare, yeobo.”

Jungkook scrunches his nose. “No.”

“No?”

“That’s for like, old people. Married people.”

Taehyung nods. “Guess we have to get married then.”

“Guess so.” Jungkook waits a moment before flicking Taehyung on the forehead. “Taehyung, stop thinking about it. We’re not getting married.”

“Why not?” Taehyung pouts, and Jungkook is almost swayed.

“Because we’ve only been dating for five months.”

Taehyung’s pout gets even more pronounced. Jungkook can’t believe he ever thought it looked stupid. “We’ve only been dating for five months, what?”

“What?”

“We’ve only been dating for five months, what?” Taehyung repeats, and then Jungkook understands.

“We’ve only been dating for five months, jagiya.”

Taehyung collapses back into his chair, hands pressed over his heart. “I love it. Never stop.”

“If I say it again, will you get up? We’ll miss our reservation.”

“I can’t believe I have to go looking like this,” Taehyung sighs.

Jungkook pokes his cheek, even as he takes Taehyung’s arm and heaves him upright. “Learn some time management, jagiya.”

Taehyung beams, his smile wide enough to split his face in two. Jungkook has been planning to say it for a while—he knew Taehyung would react just like this. But Jungkook’s found it’s more special to just slip in these little moments wherever they happen to fit. He’s still trying to show Taehyung that, that not everything has to happen perfectly and according to plan. So making it casual, that helps. Plus, Jungkook loves seeing Taehyung get knocked off-balance. It makes him feel good that he can still do it. It makes him feel better that he can do it by saying sweet things, instead of sharp.

Jungkook has his fingers crossed Taehyung will start calling him something nice too, but he’s not going to push anything. If he does, he’ll most likely just send Taehyung into a tailspin that will see him up all hours of the night on a word doc with about a thousand different options.

Jungkook’s also planning on pulling out hyung, at some point, but that seems like something Taehyung would like more in the bedroom. Maybe for their six month anniversary.

“You brought Bam?” Taehyung asks. He probably heard Bam’s barking out in the hallway.

Jungkook nods. “We’ll drop him off on our way over.”

“Please tell me I left some contacts at yours.”

Jungkook shakes his head. “Nope.”

Taehyung groans. “Fine.”

Jungkook tangles their fingers together as he shoulders Taehyung’s bag and pulls Taehyung out of his office. It’s common practice, that. Taehyung’s still learning how to live, not just work. But it makes Jungkook’s heart flutter when he says Jungkook’s the one teaching him.

They’re planning a vacation at the end of next month, after Jungkook’s parents come visit. Taehyung’s wildly nervous about that, even though Jungkook already assured him it’ll be fine. Taehyung and his parents have talked over the phone, and Jungkook got a glowing review afterwards. They like that Taehyung’s so career-driven, and they love that he speaks Korean.

Bam is lounging on the floor by the elevator, thoroughly satisfied at the amount of petting he’s received, and, Jungkook suspects, human food that he isn’t normally allowed to have. Bam perks up at the sound of Taehyung’s whistle, and he’s sniffing Taehyung’s legs in the next second.

“Hi, baby,” Taehyung coos, scratching behind his ears. “Hi, hi, hi. Did you miss me?”

Jungkook rolls his eyes. Taehyung’s such a sap.

“I think your dog likes me better than you,” Taehyung teases, bumping Jungkook’s shoulder. Jungkook squats down to clip Bam’s leash to his collar.

“I’m sure he does. You let him do whatever he wants.”

“Because he’s an angel.”

“He peed on your shoes last week.”

“He’s still an angel.”

“Sure.”

Jungkook manages to get his puppy and his other, bigger puppy into the elevator and out of the building without any more interruptions. He really doesn’t want to be late for dinner; he and Taehyung haven’t had a proper date in three weeks, with Taehyung so busy at work and Jungkook focused on everything else.

They make it there only a few minutes late, which is almost unheard of, when Taehyung’s involved. Jungkook is surprised when their appetizers get delivered with a bottle of champagne, but Taehyung just winks at him and raises his glass.

“To my published author,” Taehyung says, and Jungkook rejects the urge to hide under the tablecloth. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Taehyung,” Jungkook complains. “I’m not published yet; don’t jinx it.”

“I’m not! All they have to do is actually print the damn thing. And then I can go buy every copy.”

“It’s stupid,” Jungkook mumbles. “People can still read the whole thing online.”

His comic is far from finished, but he’s got enough to make a two volume set so far. And enough of an audience that he got contacted by a publishing house last month, asking if he’d like to work out a contract. He’s still got full rights, and he’s going to keep putting it up online, but it’ll be nice to see his work in a physical format. Not to mention he gets a nice chunk of the profits, if anyone actually does buy the printed version. He’s staying skeptical, but Taehyung seems convinced it’ll go well.

“Hey,” Taehyung says, “we’re celebrating, aren’t we? Be positive.”

“Okay, well, don’t buy every copy.”

“At least ten.”

“One.”

“Eight.”

“One.”

“Five.”

“One, jagiya.”

“One, but you sign it.”

Jungkook shakes his head. “Fine.”

“With a personal note.”

Jungkook just nods. He hasn’t told Taehyung what he wrote on the dedication page.

‘To the worst best person I’ve ever met.’

It’s later that night, both of them brushing their teeth in Jungkook’s bathroom, when Taehyung turns to him.

“I have something for you.”

“Oh?”

“In my bag, hold on.”

Jungkook finishes up in the bathroom and crawls under the covers to wait in bed while Taehyung walks out to the living room. Bam whines from his crate on the floor, but Jungkook just shushes him gently and he settles again. Taehyung’s been pleading for Bam to sleep in bed with them, but Jungkook refuses. He already has one overgrown puppy sprawled on top of him each night; he doesn’t need another.

Taehyung comes back in, a brightly wrapped package in his hands. “Ready?”

“Mhmm.”

Taehyung climbs into bed too, and Jungkook immediately burrows into his side. Taehyung squeezes his shoulder. “Open it.”

Jungkook does, careful not to tear the paper too much. He unwraps a plain gift box, filled with white tissue paper. There’s a card on top that reads ‘Congratulations!’ and Jungkook opens it to find Taehyung’s written him a note. He still writes in cursive most of the time, but for Jungkook, he sticks to print.

“‘Congratulations,” Jungkook reads. “I’m so proud of your achievements, and I wish you all the best in your coming success.’ Taehyung,” he frowns, “this is terrible.”

“What?”

“This sounds like a business memo!”

“I- what- I tried,” Taehyung says. “You know I’m not good with words.”

“You’re great with words, actually.”

“Feelings,” Taehyung amends. “I’m not good with feelings.”

“Yes you are,” Jungkook murmurs, snuggling into Taehyung’s chest. “You just overthink it.”

Taehyung presses a long kiss to the top of his head. “Open your gift.”

Jungkook lifts the tissue paper to find a swath of red fabric at the bottom. His eyebrows knit together as he draws it out, confused. But then he sees the heavy black stitching sewn in, and he understands.

“Taehyung…”

“You like it?”

“I love it.”

Jungkook shakes out the bandana and smiles at the letters that spell out ‘BAM.’ Just like the bandana Bam wears in the comic.

“Where did you get this?” he asks. It must be custom, unless someone’s profiting off his work. In which case Jungkook thinks Taehyung probably would’ve been more likely to threaten legal action, not contribute to their copyright infringement.

“I made it.”

Jungkook blinks. “You made this?”

He can tell Taehyung’s blushing from the way he buries his face in Jungkook’s hair. “S’why it looks so bad.”

“It does not.”

It does. One hundred percent. The B is crooked, and the M has one line longer than the other. It’s clearly a novice job, but Jungkook doesn’t care. Taehyung made it, and it’s perfect.

“It does,” Taehyung sighs. “But I…I wanted to finish it for you.”

It means a lot, Taehyung saying that. Because there’s so much Taehyung doesn’t finish, so much he deems ‘not good,’ and leaves behind for his next attempt at perfection. It means everything, that Taehyung still pushed through to the end, even though it didn’t turn out how he wanted.

So Jungkook shifts enough to wrap his arms around Taehyung and kiss him sincerely, trying to show how grateful he is. How happy he is.

“See,” he says, when they break apart. “You are good at feelings.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely. Now you just have to take your feelings, and your words, and mash them together.”

“Mmm.” Taehyung slides down so his face is pressed into the hollow of Jungkook’s throat. “I think I can do that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Taehyung inhales softly. Kisses Jungkook’s neck. “I love you.”

Jungkook blinks. They haven’t said that yet. He wasn’t expecting that yet, to be honest. But he still grins when he hears it, and tugs on Taehyung’s hair fondly. “You love me, huh?”

“Mhmm.”

Taehyung’s face is burning where his cheek is pressed to Jungkook’s skin, and Jungkook just might love him too.

“You don’t have to say it back yet,” Taehyung murmurs. “I know it’s kind of early. But I’ve liked you a lot longer than you’ve liked me. And now I love you.”

Taehyung’s face is still tucked into his neck, and Jungkook strokes a hand down his back, still smiling.

“Hey, jagiya,” Jungkook whispers, after a moment.

“What?”

“Now I love you too.”