Chapter Text
"TAEHYUNG! I said NO sledging down the stairs, you fucking idiot!"
You watched amusedly as a furious Jimin hauled a cackling Taehyung to his feet with a thunderous look on his face. Stood in the corner of the lodge and sipping a mulled wine, you took a moment to observe the chaos that was unfolding in front of you.
This was the weekend you looked forward to the most, all year long. One of your friends from school, Jimin, owned a country house about an hour outside of the city, in a quaint little village covered in snow. It looked like it could be on a festive postcard. Every year, a week before Christmas, your entire friend group descended on the house for a whole weekend with enough food supplies and alcohol to keep a small army going.
It was like a mini-Christmas, before you all went home to spend the real holidays with your families. A weekend filled with dinners, competitions, Christmas movies, country walks, and more laughs and love than you could bear. You left on the Sunday evening physically exhausted, but mentally replenished, full of food and alcohol and a whole heap of Christmas spirit from a weekend spent with your most cherished friends.
It was pure joy, from start to finish.
And yet this year, you surveyed the people unpacking and settling in for the weekend all around you, and wondered why there was such a tight knot of anxiety in your stomach.
Perhaps it was just the anticipation of having to be so social for the next two days. Even though the people here were your closest friends, friendships had never come easy to you. School? Yes. There was nothing difficult about studying for hours on end, or reading a book front to back in a day, or watching A grades line up on your results sheet like they were doing a conga.
But putting yourself in a room with a total stranger, someone with their own rules and emotions and quirks... it was hands down the most stressful part of being a human being. You felt a knot tied tight around your tongue when you spoke to them, as if your throat were choking the words as they made their way from your brain to your mouth. When you were a kid, it was particularly hard - other kids seemed to have no problem just mixing, whereas you found it difficult to spend more than an hour in company before retreating to the solace of a quiet room with a good book.
Then, aged thirteen, you came to school one day to find a new kid sitting at the desk next to yours. He was quiet, and painfully shy, hiding behind a mop of raven black hair. He told you his name was Jungkook with wide, dark eyes that betrayed his nerves. When you smiled back awkwardly, he seemed to relax ever so slightly.
It was like magic. When you spoke to this new kid, there was no tongue-tied nonsense. No mental block. No wondering if you were picking the social cues up correctly, if you were boring him to death with your conversation. You knew him, right from the very start, the same way Jungkook seemed to know exactly how you were thinking and feeling without ever having to say anything.
From that moment on, you were best friends.
You still were best friends, fifteen years later.
And yet tonight... something was off.
He was here today, of course he was. He never missed it. Like you, he had stayed in touch with your friends from school, hanging out with them regularly in the city when he could get away from work. Jungkook saw them more regularly than you did - he was more social than you.
Still, though, both of you were fairly introverted. You were happy to spend hours with him, tangled on the couch in either of your apartments, he with his eyes on a video game or a sketchpad and you with your nose in a book, barely speaking except to decide what to have for dinner. You could waste away entire days like this, entirely at ease with one another.
But now, as you spied him across the room - dressed in a dark green knit sweater and jeans, and laughing at Jimin scolding Taehyung - you found the knot in your stomach tightening again.
Panic washed over you once more. What the hell was wrong with you today? You had never panicked about being around Jungkook before, not once.
"Sulking again?"
You turned, finding Jin wandering towards you with a glass of wine in hand, an easy smile on his face. He was as handsome as ever, and wearing a bright red jumper that read 'I'm Sexy and I Snow It'. Quickly, you painted an easy smile onto your face, but it didn't fool Jin for long. Besides Jungkook, he was the friend who knew you best, and his gaze quickly turned to one of concern.
"Something wrong?" Jin asked, bumping your shoulder lightly with his, turning to stand by your side and observe the room with you.
"I don't know," you sighed, shrugging it off. "Can't put my finger on it. I'm just not in the mood today."
"Really? But you always love this weekend," Jin narrowed his eyes ever so slightly. "You're not still thinking about Colonel Fuckhead, are you? How many times have we talked about that assho-"
"No," you cut Jin off decisively with a swipe of your hand and a shudder of memory. "Fuck no, I'm not thinking about him. At all."
"Good," Jin grumbled, narrowing his eyes even further as if the man in question had suddenly appeared in front of him, and he was plotting ways to murder him without being caught.
Colonel Fuckhead was actually Jin's pet name for your ex-boyfriend, Jiwoon. It was fair to say that Jiwoon entirely deserved this distinguished title. You were together for two and a half years, and you were fairly serious about him. You'd met through work - he was an agent for a publishing company that you had sent a brief of your new book to. In the end, you ended up choosing a different agent, but Jiwoon had invited you to dinner regardless, and the whole thing had begun there. It was a happy, healthy relationship.
Until three months ago.
One night, you received a message from a girl on Instagram claiming to have slept with Jiwoon a month prior. At first you dismissed it as a prank - and then another message arrived.
And then another.
And another.
In total, there were six other women that you knew about. Women that Jiwoon would pick up when you were out of town on press tours for your latest book, or at home visiting family. He would bring them back, get them drunk, have sex with them and then never speak with them again. He blocked them on his social media afterwards. He ignored them if he saw them in public.
One of them even told you, in a teary phone call, that she was nearly certain he had targeted her deliberately, because she was alone in the bar. She was upset that night, and she felt sure that Jiwoon had seen that she was vulnerable.
The thought nearly made you physically sick.
Sickened, you confronted Jiwoon. He denied it all. Told you that they were liars, attention-seekers, women who were just jealous of what you had together. When that didn't work, he turned the blame onto you. It was your fault that he'd had to seek pleasure elsewhere. You were gone so often with work. Holed up in your study writing books all day long, with no time for anyone else.
His words of vitriol stung, but you refused to let them manipulate you. You tossed all of his shit onto the sidewalk, changed the locks, and told him never to contact you again.
When Jungkook found out, it was the only time you had ever seen him angry to the point of violence.
Jungkook had never been large, as a kid, though he was never small either. But when he was fifteen, he discovered boxing at school, and fell in love with it, training every day in the ring. By the time he was 21, with a sleeve of tattoos and a rock-hard sheet of abs, you couldn't help but tease him about how much his appearance contrasted his shyness, and his humble career as an illustrator.
When he got the lip piercing, you told him with an amused grin that he looked like an emo lumberjack. He rolled his eyes and punched you in the arm, which actually hurt now compared to his punches from when you were teenagers.
If you teased him about his new appearance, the reaction of others around him was different. Girls went from barely noticing him in the school corridors, to worshipping at his feet at art college - not that he ever seemed to really know what to do with this change. Even when he went into the workplace, he kept himself to himself. According to Yoongi, another of your friends who worked in the same office as him, Jungkook received about one offer of a date a week. As far as you knew, he never took any of them up on it. Not that he never had sex - he did - but you knew that a man who looked like him could get far more, if he wanted it.
This made sense to you. Being a womaniser wasn't really in Jungkook's nature. Deep down, he was still the same easygoing kid from school who loved to draw.
But there was nothing easygoing about him on this particular night. When you had sat him down in your apartment and told him what had happened with Jiwoon, he had gone pale as a ghost, and his eyes darkened to thunderclouds. He paced your apartment like a stalking panther, and swore he was going over there to confront him. He was so angry you could see his hands shaking. It unnerved you to see him like this.
You'd had to beg him not to go. In the end, his reluctance to leave you while you were so upset was what stopped him from marching over there and caving Jiwoon's face in with his bare hands. Instead, he dropped onto the couch, gathered you into his arms, and let you sob into his hoodie, silent and steady as an anchor in your darkest hour.
Now that you thought about it, you realised that it was around this time that you had started to get this odd, stilted feeling with Jungkook. It wasn't something you could put your finger on, but something was definitely different, and not in a good way. When you hung out, it tended to be with other people, never alone. He answered his phone less. He met your eye less frequently.
Something palpable hung over your friendship now, something heavy and suffocating. Was it something to do with Jiwoon, or something else? But then, it hadn't been like this during your breakup. You'd only noticed this new dynamic to your friendship in the last month or so.
And then, in a sudden wave of terrible realisation, it hit you.
You realised what it was that felt off. Why you were so anxious.
Because for the first time in fifteen years, you were nervous to spend time with Jungkook.
What the hell did you feel nervous for? And what did it mean? Were you losing him? Was he distancing himself deliberately, or were you just growing apart?
You didn't know. All you knew was that the thought of him coming over here right now sent an electric shock down your spine and a warm somersault of emotion into your belly.
And you hated it.
You felt a tightness in your throat, eyes pricking with emotion. It wasn't supposed to be like this with Jungkook. He was your safe person. Your go-to. The only one you felt at ease with. He was part of you, like an imprint on your heart.
Losing him over something as trivial as growing apart was simply not an option. And yet you had to admit that things had been disconnected between you lately.
Jin seemed to sense this introspection as you went quiet on him, staring at an oblivious Jungkook across the room. He glanced at you, and then followed your line of sight - but whether he noticed the object of your staring, you didn't know. Eventually he bumped your shoulder again in encouragement, taking your hand this time.
"Come on," he said, tugging you into the fray of people moving around the house, chatting excitedly. "Whatever it is, forget it. We have literal gallons of wine to drink, and that gingerbread house making competition has our names all over it."
You giggled, shifting your vision to where Yoongi and Hobi were unboxing the piles of gingerbread, icing and sweets onto the kitchen table in preparation for the first competition of the weekend. You and Jin were the reigning champions of that contest, and had been for years.
The thought of some healthy competition put a small smile on your face, despite the anxiety still tight in your stomach. Jin was right. This was a weekend about being with your friends, and spreading some Christmas cheer.
The best thing to do was throw yourself in head first, and try to take your mind off of your best friend.