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Taehyung was six years old the first time he understood that the numbers meant death.
Before that, they had only been light.
Not pretty light, exactly, because pretty things were usually soft and the numbers had always possessed a certain sharpness, a quiet insistence that made them impossible to ignore once his eyes found them. They hovered above every head he saw, pale and luminous, following people with the same devoted cruelty as shadows. His mother had 41 years, 3 months, 18 days floating above the soft black of her hair when she bent over him at night to tuck the blanket beneath his chin. His father had 36 years, 9 months, 2 days when he lifted Taehyung onto his shoulders at the market and laughed because Taehyung kept trying to grab at the shining thing only he could see.
His grandmother had 00 years, 00 months, 00 days, 03 hours, 12 minutes while she stood in their kitchen humming an old song and peeling an apple in one long red ribbon.
Taehyung remembered that day with a clarity that never dulled, no matter how old he became or how many other clocks he saw run empty. He remembered the smell of steamed rice. He remembered the rain pressing silver fingers against the window. He remembered sitting at the kitchen table with his socked feet swinging above the floor, staring at the numbers above his grandmother’s head while she carved the apple into little rabbits for him because he liked the ears.
“Halmeoni,” he had said, frowning. “Yours is almost gone.”
She had smiled at him without looking up from the knife. “What is almost gone, my love?”
“The light.”
His grandmother had only chuckled, warm and indulgent, because adults were always fondest when they believed children were saying nonsense. “Then maybe I should hurry and give you your snack before it disappears.”
Taehyung had not laughed.
The numbers had kept falling.
Three hours became two. Two became one. One became minutes. Taehyung had cried so violently before dinner that his mother thought he was feverish and sent him to bed early, despite his pleading, despite the way he clung to his grandmother’s skirt and begged her not to go anywhere, not even to the bathroom, not even to the garden, not even to the front door where the world waited with its ordinary teeth.
His grandmother died in her sleep before midnight.
After the funeral, Taehyung stopped talking about the lights.
Not because he stopped seeing them. He never stopped seeing them. If anything, growing older only made them worse, because age taught him context, and context gave the numbers claws.
At six, 00 years, 00 months, 14 days above a stranger’s head was confusing.
At sixteen, it was unbearable.
At twenty-six, it was simply Tuesday.
Taehyung learned to live with death. He made room for it. He adjusted around it. He developed habits so deeply ingrained they became personality: never stare too long, never touch a stranger whose clock was nearly empty unless absolutely necessary, never let his face change when someone smiled at him with three weeks left above their head.
People mistook this for calmness.
They called him aloof, private, hard to read. Friends joked that Taehyung always looked like he was thinking about something far away, and Taehyung let them believe it because the truth was impossible. How could he explain that sometimes he fell silent mid-conversation because the waiter refilling their water had eleven months left to live? How could he explain that he hated hospitals not because of illness but because the clocks inside them glowed like a sky full of dying stars?
And the clocks did not lie.
That was the first law of Taehyung’s life.
The second was worse:
They could not be stopped.
He had tried, of course. Anyone with a heart would have tried at least once.
At fourteen, he had seen a delivery driver step toward the street with 00 years, 00 months, 00 days, 00 hours, 00 minutes, 14 seconds above his head, and Taehyung had thrown himself forward without thinking, grabbing the man’s sleeve hard enough to tear it. A bus screamed past so close the wind slapped tears into his eyes. The driver stumbled back, perplexed, cursing, alive.
For one shining second, Taehyung thought he had won.
Then the man clutched his chest.
Seven seconds later, he was on the pavement.
Dead before the ambulance arrived.
After that, Taehyung understood that fate did not appreciate loopholes. Death could change its clothes, perhaps, could step out from behind one door and enter through another, but it did not forget appointments. It did not forgive interference. The clock reached zero, and the world collected what it was owed.
So Taehyung stopped trying.
He grew up. He became careful. He became kind in distant, manageable ways. He fed stray cats but never named them. He remembered birthdays but avoided promises. He let people love him only as much as he could tolerate being eventually bereaved by them, which meant most people received very little.
Then Jeon Jungkook walked into his life and ruined him completely.
— — —
It happened at Seokjin’s birthday dinner, which Taehyung nearly skipped because he was tired from work and because restaurants exhausted him. Too many faces, too many clocks, too much knowledge hovering above too much laughter. He arrived late enough to avoid the first wave of greetings and early enough that nobody could accuse him of being rude, sliding into the booth beside Jimin while Yoongi and Namjoon complained about the price of cocktails and Hoseok waved a menu at him like a flag.
“You came,” Jimin smiled, sounding pleased in a way that made Taehyung feel faintly guilty.
“I said I would.”
“Yeah, but you say lots of things when you want people to leave you alone.”
Taehyung accepted this with an apologetic grimace and reached for the water glass someone had already ordered for him. Across the table, Seokjin was wearing a paper crown and pretending not to love it. Above his head, 54 years, 2 months, 8 days glowed steadily. Jimin had 51 years. Yoongi had 45. Namjoon had 55, warm and grounded in the dependable way he seemed to be about most things. Hoseok had 62, as bright and generous as his laugh.
Normal numbers.
Good numbers.
Then the restaurant door opened behind him, letting in a rush of cold air and city noise, and Seokjin shouted, “Finally! The baby has arrived!”
Taehyung turned because everyone else did.
So this was the new coworker Seokjin had spent the last month describing, with frankly excessive affection, as “adorable.”
The man near the entrance was breathless, red-tinged cheeks flushed from the cold, dark hair falling messily over doe eyes as he bowed in apology while trying not to drop the ridiculous armful of convenience-store desserts gathered against his chest. Pudding cups, packaged cakes, banana milk, two bags of honey chips — all of it clutched with the grave urgency of someone transporting emergency supplies rather than snacks.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed, voice bright with embarrassment. “The train stopped, and then— I felt bad for being late, so I brought— um, stuff.”
“You brought snacks to a restaurant?” Yoongi deadpanned.
The man looked genuinely stricken. “I— was that weird? I’m sorry, should I have brought flowers?”
Seokjin burst out laughing, delighted, and waved him toward the table. “Stop panicking and let me introduce you properly.”
The table dissolved around Taehyung.
Seokjin’s laughter, the restaurant noise, the scrape of chairs against tile — all of it receded.
Because above the newcomer’s head, glowing with impossible serenity, was a clock so vast it made the room tilt.
89 years, 4 months, 17 days, 06 hours, 22 minutes.
Taehyung stared.
He knew he was staring and still could not stop.
The man slid into the empty seat across from him, still apologizing, still arranging snacks in the middle of the table like sacred offerings, still entirely unaware that he carried more time than anyone Taehyung had ever met. Eighty-nine years. Almost nine decades. An entire lifetime stacked on top of an already living body.
It was absurd.
It was beautiful.
It was terrifying.
“Everyone,” Seokjin announced, gesturing around the table with royal authority. “This is Jungkook. Jungkook, this is— well, everyone. I’m not doing a full seating chart. You’ll figure it out.”
Taehyung should have said hello like a normal person. He should have looked away from the clock, smiled politely, returned to his water, and filed Jungkook away as another friend of a friend, another person with another ending.
Instead, he breathed, “You have a lot of time.”
Silence landed briefly around the table.
Not alarmed silence — merely the familiar pause of people long accustomed to Taehyung occasionally saying things that sounded profound, unsettling, mildly disconnected from the conversation at hand.
Jungkook blinked, then smiled uncertainly, like he was actively choosing to be charmed rather than confused. “Thank you?”
Taehyung realized, belatedly and with mounting horror, what had actually come out of his mouth.
Heat rushed abruptly into his face.
He looked down at his water glass. “I’m sorry, I just meant— you’re young,” he blurted, scrambling to salvage the interaction before the beautiful stranger across from him stopped looking pleasantly puzzled and started looking concerned. “You’re young. What are you doing hanging out with this old man?”
“Kim Taehyung!” Seokjin squawked indignantly from somewhere to his left.
Across the table, Jungkook laughed — soft, surprised, shoulders loosening with it — and the sound settled somewhere behind Taehyung’s ribs like golden warmth poured into a place he had forgotten was cold.
That was the first warning.
Taehyung ignored it.
— — —
For a while, Jungkook was only a number.
That sounded cruel, and perhaps it was, but Taehyung had never known how to meet people any other way. Before name, before voice, before smile, there was always time. Time shaped everything. Time told him how much distance to keep, how carefully to speak, how much future a person had available for foolish things like dreams.
Jungkook had so much future that Taehyung found himself relaxing in his presence before he even liked him.
It was shameful, really, how quickly his body accepted the promise of all those years. When Jungkook leaned across the table to steal a piece of pork belly from Seokjin’s plate and nearly burned his fingers, Taehyung did not feel the usual sharp panic that accompanied sudden movement near heat. When Jungkook laughed too hard and choked slightly on his drink, Taehyung did not immediately imagine disaster. When Jungkook jogged backward down the sidewalk after dinner, waving goodbye with both hands while Jimin shouted at him to look where he was going, Taehyung did not taste fear.
Eighty-nine years, the clock said.
Eighty-nine years, his body believed.
Safe, whispered some starving, treacherous part of him.
Safe.
Jungkook became a regular presence after that, though Taehyung suspected regularity was simply what happened when Jungkook wanted something. He appeared at group dinners with his sleeves too long and his sparkling eyes too bright. He sent memes to the group chat at three in the morning and then apologized at noon because he had forgotten other people slept at reasonable hours. He brought snacks everywhere. He listened with his whole face. He had the deeply irritating habit of looking at Taehyung as though Taehyung was not difficult at all, merely interesting in a way worth patience.
“You’re really quiet,” Jungkook said one evening, three weeks after Seokjin’s birthday, while they stood on the balcony of Hoseok’s apartment because the living room had become too loud.
Taehyung leaned against the railing and watched cigarette smoke curl from someone’s window three floors below. Above the street, clocks drifted with their owners, dozens of private dooms moving beneath neon signs.
“I talk.”
“Sometimes,” Jungkook allowed, standing beside him with two soda cans tucked against his chest. He offered one without making a big deal of it. Peach. Taehyung’s favorite, though he did not remember telling him. “Usually after someone else does most of the work.”
Taehyung took the can. Their fingers brushed. Jungkook’s clock glowed above him, outrageous and steady.
89 years, 3 months, 26 days.
“You do enough talking for both of us,” Taehyung said.
Jungkook grinned, nose scrunching. “See? That was mean. You’re secretly mean!”
“Not secretly.”
“No, secretly,” Jungkook insisted, opening his soda. “You have this whole mysterious handsome thing going on, so people assume you’re being poetic when really, you’re just bullying everyone in an insanely deep voice.”
Taehyung looked at him despite himself.
Jungkook was smiling around the rim of his can, pleased with his own assessment, cheeks faintly pink from the cold. He had a small scar on one cheek, another near his knuckle, a tiny mole beneath his lower lip. Details, Taehyung thought helplessly. He was noticing details.
Dangerous.
“You think I’m handsome?” he asked.
Jungkook choked.
It was so immediate that Taehyung laughed before he could stop himself, a real laugh, startled out of him and into the night.
Jungkook stared as if he had been handed something fragile. Then he smiled, slower this time, softer, and said, “You should do that more.”
The warning came again.
This time, Taehyung felt it.
He looked away first.
But feeling danger and avoiding it were not the same thing, and Jungkook, unfortunately, was very easy to want.
Not all at once. Taehyung might have survived all at once. Sudden things startled him into retreat. Jungkook happened gradually, which was far more lethal.
He happened in messages that began as practical questions and unraveled into hours of conversation. He happened in convenience-store runs after midnight because he had declared, with complete seriousness, that ramen tasted better when bought with someone else’s money. He happened in the way he learned Taehyung’s silences without resenting them, filling some with chatter and protecting others with quiet.
He happened one rainy afternoon when Taehyung had absentmindedly admitted, over text, that he had forgotten lunch again.
He opened his apartment door an hour later, bewildered, to find Jungkook standing there soaked through and holding soup.
“Jimin said you do this,” Jungkook announced immediately, stepping inside before Taehyung could decide whether to be touched or mildly horrified. “The whole forgetting-you-have-a-body thing. It’s stupid. You need nutrients.”
Taehyung stared at the wet ends of Jungkook’s hair dripping shamelessly onto his floor.
“You came across town?”
“I was nearby.”
“You live forty minutes away.”
Jungkook pointed accusingly at the soup container in his hands.
“Just eat.”
Taehyung should not have smiled.
He did.
Jungkook caught it instantly.
Something brightened visibly in his expression — sudden and helpless and unbearably pleased — before he shoved the soup into Taehyung’s hands.
“Eat,” he repeated, more forcefully this time.
“You’re bossy.”
“You’re malnourished!”
Taehyung laughed again, and Jungkook’s face did something dangerously soft in response, something Taehyung found himself thinking about hours later with one hand pressed absently against his own chest, as though he could flatten the feeling before it spread.
It spread anyway.
— — —
Soon Jungkook was everywhere.
On Taehyung’s couch with his socked feet tucked beneath him, yelling at dramas. In Taehyung’s kitchen, burning toast and pretending it was a valid cooking method. At Taehyung’s side in grocery aisles, dropping strange things into the cart and arguing that dinosaur-shaped nuggets were a necessity.
“Absolutely not,” Taehyung said, removing them.
Jungkook gasped. “You hate joy.”
“I hate freezer clutter.”
“You hate childhood wonder!”
“Need I remind you that you are twenty-four years old.”
“I’m healing my inner child, what about it?”
Taehyung put the nuggets back in the cart, because he was stupid and weak and because Jungkook’s victorious little smile made something inside him fold over in surrender.
He began learning Jungkook against his will.
The foods he pretended not to like but always finished. The songs he hummed when sleepy. The way he rubbed at his left eye first thing in the morning. The way he became quiet in crowded places, not because he disliked people, but because he spent so much energy trying to be bright for them. The way his confidence came and went like stormy weather. The way he liked being praised but became shy when praise was too sincere.
Taehyung learned that Jungkook cried during animal rescue videos and then denied it with wet eyes. He learned that Jungkook slept curled around blankets like he was afraid they might leave. He learned that Jungkook liked being taken care of but rarely knew how to ask.
Worst of all, Taehyung learned how it felt to be needed by him.
“Hyung,” Jungkook mumbled one night, half asleep on Taehyung’s shoulder while rain softened the windows and some forgotten film played to nobody. “You’re so warm.”
Taehyung looked down.
Jungkook’s lashes rested against his cheeks. His mouth was slightly open. One hand had curled loosely in the fabric of Taehyung’s shirt, not gripping, exactly, just holding on with the unconscious trust of someone who believed he would be allowed to stay.
Above his head: 89 years, 1 month, 04 days.
Taehyung’s throat tightened.
“Sleep, Jungkookie,” he whispered.
Jungkook made a small sound and burrowed closer.
Taehyung sat there long after the movie ended, one hand hovering uselessly before finally settling in Jungkook’s hair. Soft. Warm. Real. He touched him as if committing evidence to memory. As if some part of him still expected the universe to accuse him of theft.
Eighty-nine years.
He had time.
They had time.
For the first time in his life, Taehyung allowed himself to imagine love without immediately imagining a funeral.
That was when he knew he was lost.
— — —
From that moment on, he tried, briefly, to resist.
It lasted nine miserable days.
On the tenth, Jungkook showed up at his apartment with a cake he had clearly dropped at some point, judging by the way the frosting had collapsed into one corner of the box. He looked so devastated by it that Taehyung forgot every noble plan he had made about distance.
“It was pretty before,” Jungkook whispered sadly.
Taehyung opened the door wider. “Did it insult someone on the way here?”
“Stop, hyung, I tripped.”
“Over what?”
“...Air.”
Taehyung shook his head, helplessly amused. “Naturally.”
“I just— you’re always doing things for me,” Jungkook mumbled quietly, and there was enough genuine disappointment in his voice that any further teasing died before it reached the tip of Taehyung’s tongue. “I don’t know. I just wanted to do something nice for you, too.”
He took the box from Jungkook’s hands as though it were something precious. “Bunny, it’s perfect.”
They ate the ruined cake straight from the box with forks, sitting on Taehyung’s kitchen floor because Jungkook insisted it felt like a picnic if they were delusional enough. Frosting smeared the corner of Jungkook’s mouth. Taehyung noticed it, told himself not to notice it, then noticed it so violently he lost track of whatever Jungkook was saying.
“What?” Jungkook asked, blinking.
Taehyung reached out before he could think better of it and wiped the frosting away with his thumb.
Jungkook went still.
The kitchen seemed to draw a breath.
Taehyung’s hand lingered half a second too long near Jungkook’s mouth. Jungkook’s eyes dropped, dark and startled, to Taehyung’s lips.
The clock above his head ticked down by one second.
Taehyung leaned in.
The first kiss was soft enough to be mistaken for a question, except Taehyung already knew the answer by the way Jungkook exhaled into him, shaky and sweet, his fork clattering somewhere onto the tile as he reached for Taehyung’s sleeve. He kissed like he had been waiting without letting himself know he was waiting, hesitant for one breath and then eager, warm, alive beneath Taehyung’s hands.
Taehyung had kissed people before, but never like that.
Never with the terrible luxury of believing there would be more.
When they parted, Jungkook looked dazed. His cheeks were flushed, his lips damp, his eyes wide in the kitchen light.
“I brought cake,” he whispered.
Taehyung laughed, endeared, and rested his forehead against Jungkook’s. “You did.”
“Was that why?”
“No, baby.”
The word slipped out before he could stop it.
Jungkook froze again, but differently this time. Softer. Pinker.
Taehyung should have apologized. Instead, he watched the way Jungkook’s lashes fluttered, the way his mouth tried and failed to hide a smile, and felt something in him kneel.
“No?” Jungkook asked, voice small in a way that made Taehyung want to give him everything and more.
“No,” Taehyung murmured, brushing his thumb over Jungkook’s cheek. “I’ve wanted to do that for a while.”
Jungkook smiled then, bright and shy and devastating.
Taehyung kissed him again.
— — —
After that, loving Jungkook became the easiest and most frightening thing Taehyung had ever done.
He was pathetic about it. He knew this. Jimin told him this regularly.
“You look at him like he personally invented sunlight,” Jimin teased one afternoon while Jungkook stood across the room helping Hoseok assemble a shelf with more enthusiasm than skill.
Taehyung did not look away. “Maybe he did.”
Jimin groaned. “Absolutely disgusting.”
Jungkook laughed at something Hoseok said, head thrown back, whole body folding around the sound. The shelf wobbled dangerously. Yoongi, from the couch, closed his eyes as if praying for either patience or death.
Above Jungkook’s head, 88 years, 10 months, 12 days glowed faithfully.
Taehyung smiled before he could stop himself.
Jimin softened beside him. “You’re really in it, huh?”
Taehyung watched Jungkook attempt to hold three screws in his mouth while Hoseok panicked. “Yes.”
The simple honesty surprised them both.
Jimin bumped his shoulder gently. “I’m happy for you, Tae, I just— I’m so happy. This is really, really good for you.”
Taehyung wanted to believe that.
— — —
Being with Jungkook rearranged the architecture of his life so gently that he barely noticed until everything had moved. His apartment acquired Jungkook’s spare hoodies, Jungkook’s toothbrush, Jungkook’s favorite cereal, Jungkook’s ugly yellow mug with a chipped handle that he refused to throw away because it had “emotional value,” though the emotion appeared to be stubbornness.
Taehyung’s mornings changed first.
He had never liked mornings. They made the world too honest. But Jungkook in the morning was a private miracle, soft-faced and incoherent, hair wild, voice ruined with sleep as he shuffled into the kitchen and attached himself to Taehyung’s back like a sleepy animal.
“Coffee,” he would mumble into Taehyung’s shoulder.
“You don’t even like coffee.”
“I like yours!”
“You take three sips and abandon it.”
“Rude! Why are you always so mean? Rude, hyung.”
Taehyung would roll his eyes and make him tea instead.
He learned to cook breakfast because Jungkook forgot to eat when left unsupervised and became sad about it later. He learned to keep extra blankets on the couch because Jungkook liked nesting under them during movies. He learned that Jungkook’s bad moods were often hunger wearing a dramatic coat, that his silence after long days meant he wanted closeness but not questions, that rubbing slow circles between his shoulder blades made him melt.
And Taehyung, who had spent a lifetime refusing to need, became shameless in his devotion.
He bought strawberries because Jungkook liked them even out of season when they were too expensive and not sweet enough. He charged Jungkook’s headphones without being asked. He carried an extra umbrella because Jungkook always forgot one. He kissed the scar on Jungkook’s cheek when the boy felt anything less but beautiful. He tucked cold hands into his pockets. He answered ridiculous midnight questions with solemn seriousness because Jungkook deserved to be taken seriously even when asking whether ghosts could get embarrassed.
“Hyung,” Jungkook whispered once in bed, face hidden against Taehyung’s chest. “Do you think I’m too much?”
Taehyung had been nearly asleep. The question woke him instantly.
He shifted, gathering Jungkook closer beneath the blankets. “Too much what?”
“Just too much.” Jungkook’s voice was muffled, careful. “Too loud. Too clingy. Too childish sometimes.”
Taehyung stared into the dark, anger blooming slowly and coldly and steadily toward whoever had taught his boyfriend to make himself smaller.
He slipped a hand beneath Jungkook’s trembling chin and tilted his face up, though he could barely see him. “Listen to me, darling. I love your loud. I love your clingy. I love your silly questions and the way you steal my fries after saying you’re full. I love when you are confident and when you are shy and when you don’t know what you are. I love you.”
Jungkook made a tiny wounded sound.
“Oh,” he whispered.
Taehyung kissed his forehead, then his eyelids, then the damp place where a tear had slipped toward his temple. “My baby,” he murmured, because the words had become inevitable by then, a tenderness he could not keep contained. “My sweet boy.”
Jungkook cried quietly for a while after that, not sadly, exactly, but as if something old in him had been touched with care. Taehyung held him through it, one hand in his hair, eyes fixed on the faint glow above him in the dark.
88 years, 7 months, 3 days.
A lifetime.
Taehyung pressed his mouth to Jungkook’s hair and let himself believe in it.
That was his mistake.
— — —
The morning everything changed was horribly ordinary.
Later, Taehyung would resent that most. He would think some part of the world should have warned him. The sky should have split open. The floor should have trembled. Every clock in the city should have screamed.
Instead, it rained.
A quiet, gray rain softened the edges of the windows and turned the apartment silver. Taehyung woke slowly beneath the weight of warm blankets and the absence of Jungkook beside him. From the kitchen came the faint clink of a mug, the low hum of a song Taehyung recognized only because Jungkook had played it obsessively for weeks.
Taehyung smiled before opening his eyes.
That was how gone he was. The mere evidence of Jungkook existing in another room was enough to make him happy.
He found him in the kitchen barefoot and bare-legged, wearing one of Taehyung’s oversized shirts, hair sticking up at the back in a way that made Taehyung’s heart ache with fondness. Jungkook was standing at the counter, squinting at the coffee machine as if it had personally betrayed him.
“Whatever battle is brewing right now, I’m pretty sure you’re losing,” Taehyung said, voice rough with sleep.
Jungkook turned, a pretty frown downturning his lips. “Is that any way to greet your boyfriend?”
Taehyung crossed the kitchen and pressed a kiss to his cheek because he could, because Jungkook was his, because mornings had become places where joy lived. Jungkook leaned into it automatically, pleased and warm.
“Good morning, sweet baby,” Taehyung murmured.
Jungkook’s pout softened into a smile. “Morning.”
Taehyung reached past him for a mug.
Habit made him glance upward.
Only habit.
One tiny, thoughtless movement of his eyes.
The mug slipped from his hand and shattered against the floor.
Jungkook jumped. “Shit— hyung!”
Taehyung did not move.
Above Jungkook’s head, the clock was changing.
Not ticking. Not the gentle, steady descent of seconds and minutes, not the ordinary arithmetic of a living body moving through time.
Changing.
Collapsing.
88 years, 6 months, 21 days—
Then 87 years.
Then 83.
Then 74.
Numbers tore themselves away in chunks, months and years vanishing so rapidly Taehyung’s mind refused to understand what his eyes were giving it. For a suspended second he thought he was hallucinating. He had to be hallucinating. Clocks did not do this. Clocks did not break their own laws. Clocks did not take a future that had existed yesterday and butcher it in the morning light.
“Taehyung?” Jungkook stepped forward, concern sharpening his voice. “Baby, don’t move— there’s glass, shit—”
52 years.
Taehyung’s lungs locked.
No.
31 years.
No, no, no.
14 years.
Jungkook was still coming closer. Bare feet. Broken ceramic. Taehyung’s body reacted before his mind returned, and he grabbed Jungkook by the waist, lifting him bodily away from the shards.
Jungkook made a startled sound, hands flying to Taehyung’s shoulders. “Hyung, please, I don’t— what’s wrong?”
6 years.
Taehyung set him on the counter.
His hands were shaking.
1 year.
Jungkook’s face looked near tears. “Hyung.”
3 months.
The rain kept falling.
1 month.
Taehyung could hear his own heartbeat, brutal and panicked, drowning out everything else.
00 years, 00 months, 29 days, 11 hours, 52 minutes, 08 seconds.
The clock stopped falling.
It resumed ticking normally.
One second at a time.
Twenty-nine days.
Twenty-nine days.
Twenty-nine days.
Jungkook reached for his face with both hands. “Taehyung, please, please, baby, look at me.”
Taehyung looked at him.
That was worse.
Jungkook was alive. Warm beneath his hands. Sleep rumpled and worried, sitting on the kitchen counter in Taehyung’s shirt, entirely unaware that eighty-eight years had just been ripped from above his head. He still had a faint pillow crease on one cheek. There was a little mark near his collarbone from where Taehyung had kissed him too hard the night before. His hair was ridiculous. Unshed tears glistened in the corners of his eyes.
He was Taehyung’s whole life.
He had twenty-nine days left.
“Baby?” Jungkook whispered.
Taehyung broke.
His face crumpled before he could stop it, all the muscles of restraint giving way at once. He folded forward, forehead collapsing into Jungkook’s chest, and made a sound he had never heard from himself before.
Jungkook’s arms came around him instantly.
“Hyung,” Jungkook cried, shaking and confused and so, so scared. “I’m here. I’m right here, Taehyung, you’re okay, baby, I’m here, I’m always here.”
Taehyung clutched him hard enough that Jungkook’s breath caught.
Twenty-nine days.
He wanted to say it. He wanted to scream it. He wanted to drag the glowing numbers out of the air and force Jungkook to see them too, because bearing them alone suddenly felt impossible.
But how could he?
How could he look at Jungkook, sweet, sleepy, still smelling faintly of their bed, and tell him that he was— that he was going to—
Above them, the clock kept ticking.
Twenty-nine days, eleven hours, fifty-one minutes.
And falling.