Pathways

A Chain of Colors

Untangling the knots in his stomach proved to be a very tedious necessity, yet Jungkook gracefully postponed it. His guts had finished playing an elaborate game of twister and he needed his energy and focus to be able to marvel instead of overthinking.

He watched the clock on the wall, with its mechanism stilled, counting nothing, creating a sort of smudge of misplaced eternity in the fabric of time. The batteries were dead for ages and it never bothered him until he missed the old tick-tock sound. Annoying or not, it was grounding, fixating everything in a time and place, giving everything veracity. Without it, the room was similar to an unknown realm, unbent by laws of temporality and what human doesn't fear the Unknown?

Jungkook only had brief notions about the fact that it was past midnight and he needed to wake up early to go to work. He knew how his life was supposed to unfold naturally, but he was faced with another path altogether. Truthfully, he wondered where the path had started, where he had lost his way, and how much blame his awfully golden sprayed closet should take for the change. He had seen a movie about closets opening other, magical worlds just by speaking some sacred words, teleporting the owner out of the mundane. Only as he sat on his bed, waiting for Tae to come, did he grasp why the concept wasn't as silly and childish as he first thought. Perhaps his own closet would have done the same if Jungkook knew precisely what he wanted or how to vocalize it. He would have sung if need imposed... and he hadn't sung seriously in ages.

The only thing he was sure about was that somewhere, mingled between his desires was Taehyung. Jungkook couldn't tell exactly how he had crawled there or in what proportion he overpowered other needs. Lying and claiming it as a coincidence changed none of the involuntary spell work and wish-obtaining rituals that he was sure he attracted. He felt bad but then again, he wasn't the most angelic creature either. It surprised him how much he didn't care that Tae was a man when they were in the living room, but the thought still surfaced like a tidal wave of ice-cold water from time to time.

Each time he tried to distance himself mentally, his body retaliated and he eventually fell right back under the never-ending fascination with how Tae moved and spoke and lived, sucking him back into the casual and familiar exchanges, morphing him into another version of himself.

They bickered briefly about who sleeps at the edge of the bed and who will be pushed toward the wall. The verb "push" was used appropriately since Jungkook's bed was so small that they needed a bit of coordination to fit in it. Tae probably slept in such beds only in hotels since he moved from Seoul, but the possibility of him sleeping on the couch had never even come up. Also, he effortlessly and unsensationally won the privilege of sleeping at the edge.

As soon as he slipped under the covers, his place in Jungkook's house was revealed. He fit next to the maknae better than he fit the chair in the kitchen or the spot near the window and the couch could just keep on dreaming to ever hug him like Jungkook did, letting him rest his head on his chest.

His perfume resembled chimes in the night air, heard in the distance. The tickle in his nostrils triggered a rapid succession of sensations and Jungkook cursed his foolishness and incapacity of slowing down his rampant being. There was a decency in him that he struggled to preserve, defend. If anything, he ultimately didn't want to make a fool of himself. It could have been ego, telling him to act in a certain way, the right way, but Jungkook couldn't tell right from wrong from the moment he kissed Taehyung. Pleasure and darkness danced together on his skin whenever Tae drove his long fingers on the veins of his arms.

The maknae stared at the blackness above him as he couldn't see the ceiling even with the faint light coming from outside. He could only distinguish things in his immediate proximity but he didn't need to do that with Tae's body because he preferred to feel him rather than focus his gaze. Weirdly, the void in which he stood didn't scare him with nightmares of claustrophobia but made him feel freer than he usually did. He drifted. An image of a dandelion seed flashed before his eyes as an explanation.