Chapter Text
Taehyung presses his forehead against the glass. Bubbles of rain race down in competition. The road home from Seoul is long, unchanging, a monolith of tarmac cleaved through farmland and forest, and his old life fades into the distance without ceremony. He knows inside that he’ll never return to that apartment or those lecture halls, but he forgot to look back at the buildings and it’s too late now.
“Everyone is excited to see you. We’ve never had so many dinner invitations. The Parks—Jimin’s family—and Namjoon’s parents have already arranged things.”
“I haven’t seen Jimin since we graduated high school,” murmurs Taehyung, though he knows how much his mother would like to see him reunited with all of his school friends, like the perfect 18-year-old she said goodbye to, as if that photograph could erase the last few years.
She tuts and taps carefully manicured nails on the wheel. “That’s why this will be good for you.”
Ever since Taehyung was young, his mother has presented herself like the neatest computer render of a person. No matter what happens, no matter how bad things can get, she appears with a smile on her face and coiffured hair and mulberry lipstick. He admired that, until the day they rowed in the hospital and he screamed over the beeping of his monitor for one human reaction, any sign that she was in the kind of pain that he was.
The drive takes over three hours. Taehyung would have preferred an awkward silence, but any gaps are filled with chatter about the news, the town, or the weather (“unseasonably rainy, but good for the hydrangeas”). By the time they pull up at the old house, inherited from four generations ago, Taehyung thinks he might have aged almost as many years as those which have bowed the wood. Every year, the front porch hangs a little lower.
“Taehyung.” His father says his name like it reminds him that he’s alive. He pulls him into a gentle embrace, cautious to pat his back, and then holds his face between his hands to examine him. “Did you lose weight? Are you eating well?”
“I’ve been eating mom’s cooking for weeks.”
“Then you definitely aren’t well,” he smiles, before he’s silenced by the thrust of bags against his chest.
The house never changes. Taehyung thinks he can hear the whispers of his grandparents’ ghosts in the rafters. Graphite measures of his height are etched on the door panel before the kitchen. Evidence of his elementary school crafts still litters the walls and surfaces. It’s something of a shrine to him. Though Taehyung understands, it fills him with unease. His parents couldn’t have more kids after he was born, and the pressure of that has weighed heavier than the bags of books he lugged around college for years.
“I’ll make a pot of pine needle tea.”
Taehyung misses coffee, but he gives an encouraging smile before escaping to his bedroom, the last room down the long hall. The same floorboards creak as when he was a child. The door is ajar, and he knows his mother has been cleaning. His things have moved, a centimetre or less out of place but he knows where they should be. The hoodies and abandoned socks that he must have left strewn when he last left have been tidied into drawers.
The walls are still baby blue, though little of the paint is visible through the collage of memories. Teenage Taehyung papered almost every inch of surface visible with polaroids, posters, and paintings. He admires the handiwork and smiles to himself. Some of the friends in the photographs are so forgotten that he has to search around in his recollection for their names. Most of the music groups in the posters have long-separated and the sportsmen retired. Only his paintings haven’t aged.
Their subject remains the same: this town, the traditional houses, the sprawling lake and its surrounding thickets of trees.
Nothing ever changes here, just as nothing ever happens.
He strokes his fingers over the patterns of youth. They burn his skin. The Taehyung of his photographs is radiant and hopeful and he wonders how much of that he took with him to Seoul, and how much he brings back.
“Tea.”
Taehyung looks up and tries to paint an expression on his face for his father. “Thank you.”
To his dismay, his father sits down on the edge of the single bed. His spacecrafts sheets have been replaced with something more adult. “How was the drive?”
“Confined to a car with mom for nearly four hours?” he laughs, the way he has always joked with his parents, but then he looks down, guilty. “It was cool. We talked about the election and stuff. Things from the town, too. She said lots of people want to see me which is just about the worst news I could have got.”
“You were a popular kid.”
“Like that’s why they want to see me.”
“That’s the only reason. We haven’t told them anything.”
Taehyung doesn’t believe that. His father, he could envision keeping to himself, but his mother is a gossip. This sort of small town suits her. In Seoul, with no gardens, she never could have survived. She lives to look over the shrubbery and talk to the neighbours about the latest city-folk to set up shop, or about the Mins and their new car on lease, surely more than they can afford!
“I need to rest,” says Taehyung. Weak excuses are too easy now.
“I’ll cook tonight. Grilled fish, thin broth, just the green vegetables. It will be good for you.”
Taehyung closes his fingers on the window frame, flaking white paint, and shakes his head. “I could murder a fucking burger.”
-
Sunlight sprays the bedroom. As a teen, Taehyung would throw the pillow over his face and lament the thin curtains. Today he opens his eyes and blinks at the ceiling. Fine cracks threaten a cave-in. Nothing is housed in the small attic except his dusty memories, locked in plastic boxes, and he thinks he’d laugh if he were buried alive under them. Yesterday’s rain has dried in silvery streaks on the windows.
Taehyung nudges the net curtains aside to look at them, like spiderwebs. Beyond, he can see the sun rising over the Christian church. They built it in the 1950s. About half of the town sit in mass. For Taehyung, after so many years spent in Seoul where the religion is good food and the efficiency of the metro line, it blots the sky like a strange spectre. Attendance at the church is a constant point of contention between his parents, along with everything else.
He flicks through his phone for ten minutes before rising. Murmurs carry through the house. Already he can smell something on the stove. Has he slept late?
As he crosses to the window, he stretches out stiff limbs, and he becomes aware of a strange clicking, shivering sound, like whispering crickets. He leans closer, curious, peering out into the garden. His mother’s pride and joy looks as magnificent as ever despite her weeks spent in Seoul. Flowers bloom radiant pink, yellow, white and purple. Butterflies and bees break up the still air. But the sound continues.
A spattering of water hits the window and he jumps back.
For a second, he imagines rain rising up from earth to fight back against the sky which expelled it, and then he recognises the rhythmic churn of the hose at last and another spray hits the glass.
Before he can move, a figure appears in front of the window. Tall but not too tall, in a black vest despite the cool morning that exposes the mottling of dark black tattoos over his right arm. An outdated set of silver matte headphones plays something inaudible, and he bops his head along in time with the music. His lips move in words that Taehyung can’t hear, but he knows they’ll be sung beautifully, because singing is just another thing that Jeon Jungkook was always so good at.
Jeon Jung-fucking-kook.
Here.
The world tilts just enough to throw Taehyung off balance. Mouth dry, frozen to the spot, he tries to force himself to do anything, at the very least duck from view, but his feet have put down roots. Panic rushes white hot in his blood but none of his limbs obey him.
Jungkook looks so much older, filled out in the shoulders and neck with a new mop of long black hair, and like he hasn’t aged a day, baby-faced as ever. Taehyung would recognise him in another fifty years without a second of doubt. No matter how cocky he was—and cocky he was—Jungkook always carried an aura of innocence with him, and it still lingers in the air and the soft pout of his lips, and the look of sweet surprise in his wide eyes when he turns to the window.
Shit.
Their eyes meet. Jungkook gives him the world’s most awkward wave, and goes to slide off his headphones, but at that moment Taehyung regains control of his body. He shakes his head, frantic, and dives forward to close the curtains. Sanctuary restored, he breathes heavily, watching the shadow beyond the window pause and then resign itself to movement once more. The imprint of Jungkook’s face flashes against his eyelids. Taehyung manages to regret the day he was ever born.
He stands in his cotton shorts, grazing the tops of his thighs, and the baggy, embarrassing comic tee that he found somewhere in his old drawers. He might as well be naked. Quiet presses in. Snatching for a hoodie and sweats, Taehyung stalks out into the hall. The scent of delicious broth bubbling away is almost enough to placate him, but the memory of Jungkook’s astonished face, eyes flicking up and down his body, will be burned onto his retinas until the day he dies.
“Taehyung? Did you smell the pork?” His father beams, stunned to see him out of bed so early.
Though they don’t deserve it, Taehyung glares at both of his parents. “There’s a man in the garden.”
“A man?” his mother sniffs. “You must be talking about Jungkook. Surely you remember him? His older brother used to babysit the two of you together when we were working.”
Taehyung blusters. “Of course I remember him! But why is he here?”
Jeon Jungkook is supposed to be far away, six thousand miles away to be precise at some fancy American college, or playing in some baseball league by now. Most importantly, he’s meant to be so far away that Taehyung ought never need to think of him again, and not in the morning in his childhood bedroom when his skinny, scarred body is too on-view and the whole town is talking about him in whispers. Jungkook is supposed to be great, signing sponsorship deals and advertising cereal on electronic billboards.
Instead he’s back here, like Taehyung.
This town is a maelstrom, sucking its victims back into depths they may never escape.
His mother’s voice borders on haughty when she replies. “He’s my gardener!”
“Gardener?” That’s not the Jeon Jungkook that Taehyung knew at school. Knew might be a strong word. Rather the Jeon Jungkook that Taehyung played with when they were little kids, and the Jeon Jungkook whom he mooned after like a lost lamb by the time they were old enough for one to become an athlete and the other captain the chess club. The Jungkook that Taehyung worshipped then would never have come back here. He hated the town. He always talked about escaping.
Taehyung remembers a hero, confident and loud, so charismatic that everyone fell at his feet. The world too, laid out in a golden path for him.
“But he’s supposed to be in Texas.”
“Didn’t I tell you? He came back months ago, for some reason or another,” his mother shrugs as if the details are insignificant, but Taehyung isn’t stupid. If she wanted him to know, he would know. Her skill for gossip is unmatchable. This is a coup. “A good thing, too. He’s a fabulous gardener. My roses have never looked so lovely and he knows water plants like no one else I’ve ever met. He’s creating a lotus pond.”
“You should have warned me,” Taehyung mutters. Of course Jungkook knows his water plants. The house he grew up in backs onto the lake. They used to dangle their feet in the cool water in the summer, supervised by Jungkook’s older brother, or not supervised when he plonked them down, told them to stay, and disappeared to admire the girls sunbathing on the opposite bank.
“I’m sure he’ll tell you all about coming home. I always invite him in for coffee in the mornings.”
“Not today. I’m going back to bed.”
His stomach rumbles, empty and aching, but he ignores his parents’ protests to stay. It’s not to punish them, or even himself, but because the thought of seeing Jungkook face to face, looking like this, is more haunting than any earthly hunger. No amount of his mother’s cooking has helped him put any substantial weight back on, and he’s been prohibited from exercising for so long that there is no tone to any of his lax muscles. Tiny, pinprick blood spots disturb the smoothness of his skin. His lips are dry and his eyes tired.
The ghost of a sixteen-year-old-Taehyung that still lives somewhere inside him blanches at the thought of Jeon Jungkook seeing him like that.
Instead, he crawls under the covers in his childhood bedroom and pretends that he’s a fox or a badger, curled up in an underground den where the weather above ground can’t touch him. The morning sun dapples his comforter orange and red with glow, but if he squeezes his eyes shut tight enough he can pretend it’s night-time. Things are easier away from the light of day.
His hibernation isn’t enough of an envelope to prevent him from hearing the friendly knock on the front door.
Or Jungkook’s bright, ever-playful voice. “The peonies are blooming, Mrs Kim. You know tradition suggests that means riches are coming your way, don’t you?”
Taehyung hears his mother laugh. “With the way you care for them, we might find ourselves drowning in gold.”
“It would only be what you deserve, after everything you’ve done for the town.”
Jungkook always did know how to ingratiate himself to grown-ups. Taehyung scoffs and tries to cover his ears with his sheets. But it’s an old house and sound travels.
“And what with everything you’ve been through this year…”
They drop their voices. Taehyung sits bolt upright and crosses to the door, pressing his ear against the wood. If they’re talking about him, then he wants to know exactly what they’re saying. How much has his mother told him? If Jungkook knows it all then Taehyung might as well never leave this room. The murmuring of voices permeates the walls, but he can’t make out the words anymore. They’re lost amongst all of the other whispers and the other secrets that have saturated the wood.
By the time they say goodbye, Taehyung has given up on trying to listen.