Archive of Our Own

~~~~~

“Ever drifting down the stream—

Lingering in the golden gleam—

Life, what is it but a dream?”

Poem by Lewis Carroll — “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky”

~~~~~

How long do I have to wait

And how many sleepless nights must I go through

Before I see you?

Jeon Jungkook always arrived early.

Even when the halls were still yawning awake, even when the sun barely dusted the cityscape outside the glass windows of Seoul National University, he was there.

Today was no different.

He smoothed his cuffs even though they didn’t need it. His dark suit fell neatly across his frame, his black hair swept back just enough to reveal the sharp line of his jaw. A worn leather satchel rested on the desk, heavy with annotated papers, handouts, and the quiet gravity of a life meticulously curated to not feel too much.

Philosophy 101: The Self, the Soul, and the Shadows In Between.

He’d chosen the title himself. Most of the students wouldn’t understand its weight until the semester’s end, if ever.

His memory traced the six names and faces from last week’s introduction. He was good with names, good with faces. It helped, in this line of work, and in life. Though, lately, life had little need for remembering anyone new.

The first-years were a breath of unfamiliarity he welcomed. Still unformed, raw around the edges, not yet poisoned by the cynicism that upper-level philosophy sometimes bred. Wide-eyed and eager, as if the world was still waiting to be understood instead of escaped.

The door creaked, voices floated in before bodies followed. 

Jungkook leaned against the edge of the lectern, glancing over his notes one last time. Then he looked up. Six students, six names, exactly as expected.

Except— no.

Seven.

Jungkook’s gaze landed on the back of a figure he didn’t recognize.

Someone sat in the second row, slouched slightly, chair tilted back, long legs casually sprawled beneath the desk. The figure’s back was to him, but even from here, Jungkook noticed the relaxed grace of it. One hand spun a silver ring idly along his thumb, the other was gesturing animatedly toward student Park Jimin, who was chuckling at whatever the boy had said.

He was tall, lean, dressed in a caramel knit that draped off one shoulder like it belonged there. There was something almost performative in the way he occupied space. 

Not one of the six from last week. Which meant this was the missing seventh, the absentee.

Happened every year. First-years thinking the introductory session didn’t count. He often used it as a silent lesson: no one is ever truly unseen. Philosophy, at its core, starts there.

Jungkook cleared his throat lightly, voice smooth from practice. “Ahh. Looks like our final traveler has found their way to us after all. Good.”

The chair tilted forward. The boy straightened, turning as he did.

Jungkook stopped breathing.

For a second, maybe two, maybe a lifetime, his vision tunneled. The edges of the room fell away, the light flickered like something celestial had gasped.

It was impossible.

The boy’s face was…

No.

No, no, no.

This couldn’t be real.

Jungkook’s heart knocked once, hard, against his ribs like a warning bell. His blood turned cold and hot at the same time, flushing across his skin like fever. It wasn’t just resemblance, wasn’t similarity.

It was him.

Cheekbones he had once memorized with his fingers; slowly, reverently, as if learning a coastline in the dark. The upper lip with its precise, impossible curve, like it had been made to keep secrets and then confess them with one small  smile. A small mole high on the left cheek, punctuation so exact his vision stuttered. The same deep, honeyed skin that had once shimmered under sunlight on water.

Melo.

The name slammed into him with the force of a wave, then, because survival is cruel, another truth followed.

It couldn’t be. Melo was…

No. Don’t say it. Don’t think it.

Jungkook’s body was frozen, breath locked tight in his chest in a way that it almost hurt. He wanted to speak. He needed to say something, anything, but the words clawed at his throat and refused to rise.

The boy (no, the ghost) offered a sheepish smile and said, “I thought your assistant told you I’d missed last week? He said he’d pass it on.”

His voice.

Jungkook felt it in his knees. Smooth, deep, like silk dragged slowly across skin. Melo used to talk that way; lazy, amused, like everything was a secret he already knew. And he had smiled like that too, a little sideways, like he was sorry but also never really was.

Jungkook opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He coughed once, covered it with a hand. “I… I don’t have an assistant.”

Silence fell. The class shifted, unsure. Most students would’ve flushed or apologized, maybe even looked away.

But not him.

No, he just laughed softly and gave a grin that lit up every damn nerve in Jungkook’s spine. “Ohh. My bad then. I must’ve made that up.”

The class chuckled lightly. Park Jimin nudged him with an elbow, Jung Hoseok snorted. The moment passed, for everyone, but Jungkook.

Jungkook moved, stiffly, toward his desk. His hands trembled slightly as he flipped through his notes. The words were just ink on paper now, meaningless.

This isn’t happening. It’s not him, it can’t be him. People don’t just come back.

He tried to ground himself.

Count the students. One, two, three… seven.

Touch the desk. Wood, cool.

Breathe. In. Out.

But his body wouldn’t obey.

Inside, a storm was rising, pulling up pieces of a past he had buried so deeply it should have stayed silent forever.  Outside, he was still the profesor, still in control, still watching seven pairs of eyes wait for his next move.

So he looked up, swallowed hard. And met his eyes, warm brown, lined with something ancient and familiar.

And the boy, Kim Taehyung, his roster had said, just smiled again.

A smile Jungkook had once kissed, before its owner went on a boat that never made it back to shore.

~~~~~

Jungkook made it through the rest of the lecture on autopilot.

His voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, detached, rehearsed, barely tethered to the present moment. His body moved out of habit, gesturing, writing on the board, pausing for questions, but his mind… his mind was tearing itself apart.

Every time he looked up, he saw it again.

That smile.

Soft, knowing and lazy around the edges like it belonged on another face and another time. But it wasn’t just the face, it was the way the boy moved. How he tilted his head when listening, how his fingers toyed absently with the cuff of his sleeve. The exact rhythm Melo used to have when he got bored but didn’t want to show it. The way he sat, legs stretched out like he had nowhere else to be, like time folded around him.

The classroom blurred at the edges, the walls felt too close, the lights too sharp. Jungkook stumbled once over a sentence about Locke and the self, and student Min Yoongi tilted his head, gaze narrowing in that quiet, almost unsettling way of his.

Jungkook didn’t meet it, couldn’t.

He clenched the lectern with white knuckles, forcing air into his lungs through his nose.

Just finish the damn lecture. One more slide, two more questions, five more minutes. You can fall apart after.

Chairs scraped, voices rose. Two students lingered to chat near the door, but Jungkook barely heard them. The boy stood and stretched, knit sweater slipping down one golden shoulder. Jungkook’s stomach turned at the sight.

And then it was gone.

He was gone, out the door with the others.

Jungkook didn’t remember walking to his desk. One moment he was standing, the next he was there, bent over it, both hands flat on the surface, breathing like he’d just sprinted.

The silence rang.

He sat.

Time passed. Or maybe it didn’t. He wouldn’t know, he only knew his hands were shaking and his chest ached and something monstrous was crawling up his throat, trying to break free.

He should go home, should lie down, should tell himself he’s sleep-deprived, that he hasn’t slept more than four hours in any given night for the past month. That he’s seeing things, projecting things, hallucinating in the hollow spaces between grief and memory.

But his fingers moved before he could stop them.

He turned on his laptop, logged into the internal student system, and pulled up the database. It took him three tries to type the name. The first time he hit the wrong keys, the second time, his fingers trembled too hard to press Enter.

Kim Taehyung.

He stared at the screen, a loading bar spun once.

And then the file opened.

He was real, not just a ghost conjured by grief, not a trick of the light…

A real student, enrolled, majoring in Literature. First-year, Seoul National University. Photo taken this fall; faint smile, soft gaze, one hand tucked into his blazer pocket. The background a standard grey, but still, something in the boy’s eyes leapt through it. Something old, something almost too alive.

Jungkook scrolled through the details.

High school: Daegu Arts Academy.

Grades: Above average.

Languages: Korean, French, some Latin.

Then he saw it.

Date of birth: September 3rd, 2004.

He blinked.

Then blinked again.

No.

It was a coincidence, had to be. Coincidences happened, the world was strange, cruel and random. That date meant nothing.

But his body told a different story. Because every part of Jungkook remembered that date.

It was carved into the underside of his ribs; it echoed behind his eyes when he lay sleepless in bed, hearing water lap at invisible shores. It was the date he had whispered into the waves, over and over, screaming it through salt, and bloodied palms.

The day Melo died. September 3rd, 2004.

A coldness like winter slid down his spine. The room felt heavier now; walls looming, ceiling pressing, like the universe had tilted on its axis just slightly, just enough to make him sick.

This is impossible.

People don’t come back.

Time doesn’t bend, souls don’t recycle.

He had spent years building a life around that logic, around loss and around absence.

But that logic was shattering now, cracking in real time, because Kim Taehyung existed. And the data said he was born the very day Jungkook’s first love sank below the water and never rose again.

Jungkook pressed a hand to his mouth. His heartbeat thundered in his ears like waves crashing, like footsteps running along a dock, like a scream caught in his throat, swallowed by time.

No one survives grief this long only to be undone by a smile.

And yet… here he was.

Outside, in some corner of campus, Kim Taehyung was likely laughing at something dumb Kim Seokjin had said or tossing a coin to decide which café to haunt that afternoon.

But Jungkook?

He was still staring at that birthday, that impossible, unchangeable line of text.

~~~~~

By the time Jungkook fit his key into the apartment door, the sky over Mapo had colored into evening. He took off his shoes, lined them neatly against the wall out of sheer habit, and stood in the corridor like someone who had walked into the wrong life.

He had sworn, sometime between the last question about Locke’s memory theory and the clatter of chairs, that he would be rational.

Insomnia, he told himself. Side effects.

The new pills left his mouth dry and the edges of things unnaturally bright, colors too loud. A hallucination would be the logical answer, the safe answer, and he clung to logic the way a man grips a railing during a storm.

Okay. Routine, then. Anchor points. If he couldn’t trust his head, he’d trust his habits.

Jungkook changed into a faded black tee and joggers, rolled out the mat in the living room, and started his workout. The first ten minutes were punishing, the next twenty were penance. Sweat pricked the nape of his neck, slid down the line of his spine. Push-ups, planks, lunges; each rep counted with metronomic precision as if numbers could press the day into compliance and normality. But when he looked up at his wall clock, when he caught his own reflection in the dark TV screen, hair damp, chest heaving,  his control began to thin. He looked like someone caught right before a panic attack.

After the shower Jungkook chopped garlic and spring onions, heated sesame oil, and stir-fried cold rice into something edible. He ate standing at the counter, barely tasting anything. He put the bowl in the sink and stared at his hands until the tremor subsided.

Movie, book, bed.

He knew the pattern, knew he needed it.

And yet…

His mind kept ricocheting to a single point in space, a second-row chair, a slouched posture with careless grace, a smile that just didn’t belong to the present. Each time Jungkook blinked, the image blurred, then sharpened, then blurred again.

If he could just prove himself wrong, maybe he’d be able to breathe. See something solid, hold it in his hands, and tell himself see? You made it up. Then maybe the day would loosen its grip a little.

That thought  carried him down the hallway to the bedroom. Jungkook opened the closet, moved the winter coats aside, and reached for the plain cardboard box on the upper shelf. He had not touched it in years, had not dared.

It was the closest thing he owned to a reliquary and a curse.

His fingers hesitated on the lid.

“Don’t,” logic said.

“Open,” grief answered.

The cardboard rasped as he lifted it. The smell rose up, old paper and ocean, salt preserved in fiber, the ghost of sunscreen, the faint metallic tang of a chain.

Jungkook froze.

On top lay a photograph from a disposable camera. Glossy, slightly overexposed, the colors warm. 2004 in its edges: the thick white border, the imperfect focus. Melo sat on a boat’s gunwale, white tee plastered to his skin, hair dark and disorderly from the sea. Sun had gilded him into myth, tanned shoulders gleaming, a silver chain catching a blade of light at his throat. He was turned three-quarters to the camera, mouth curved into that intoxicating, sideways smile that always made Jungkook feel like he was the only person in the world who knew a secret; and that the secret was him.

It was his eyes that undid him now, as always.

Eyes that gathered light, not quite dark brown, something warmer, more honeyed. The kind that narrowed when the wind changed; the kind that softened when his hand found Jungkook’s under the table; the kind that, last, had been open to a sky Jungkook could not reach.

The photograph trembled between his fingers.

His breath deserted him, the room tipped a fraction. He pressed his thumb to Melo’s jawline in the picture as if he could steady the world. Jungkook could not call this a trick anymore, not after the second row and the sweater off one shoulder, not after those eyes.

Whatever had happened today, whatever shape reality had taken, it had not been an invention of exhaustion or pills.

The boy in his lecture hall had looked exactly like Melo, down to the light that lived in his gaze.

Jungkook’s stomach rolled. He felt suddenly, horribly, like he might throw up.

Beneath the photograph, the box yielded other reliquaries: a letter crinkled soft at each fold, the ink feathered where tears had once touched it;  a receipt for Tteokbokki from a stall that no longer existed; a ferry ticket, half-torn; a scrap of paper with a doodled fish wearing sunglasses. Jungkook found the chain among them. Melo’s thin silver, warm somehow even after years in the dark.

Enough, he told himself. He needed to stop, if he wanted to keep his sanity.

But memory, once loosed, is a tide. And the tide dragged Jungkook backward.

It had been a summer that smelled like salt, hot asphalt and watermelon rinds. 2004. Tongyeong, where the land broke into a scatter of islands, like someone had tossed stones into a lake and frozen the ripples into geography. The port was all blue and rust, sun-bleached buoys, rusted bellies of boats, nets hung to dry.

Melo’s uncle kept a small fishing boat that lived between larger ones, a tank of diesel and a heart that coughed to life with a shudder. They called it Haedam, “Sea Dawn,” though no dawn that summer seemed as bright as those afternoons they stole for themselves.

They went out whenever they could. School obligations dissolved in the heat. Tongyeong’s harbor thinned behind them into a postcard, low roofs, market awnings, a scatter of gulls. Ahead, the islands rose soft and green from the water, hills like sleeping bodies.

On that particular day, the heat had a weight. He remembered that clearly because even the air had felt heavy. The sky was a ruthless blue with no mercy in it. Jungkook sat cross-legged on the deck, bare shoulders slick, hair pressed flat by salt. Melo had just hauled in a net and laughed at a crab that raised its claws like a tiny, furious god.

They were both wet to the waist, simple as boys, gleaming like they’d been dipped in sunlight.

They had jumped in a few minutes earlier, dared each other with grins and then fell over the side on three, surfacing with shouts when the water shocked hot skin with its cool hand. Melo had whooped, pushing his hair back, eyes disappearing into crescents; Jungkook had sputtered and laughed because Melo’s joy had always been catching and mesmerizing, because there had been something unbearable in the way water ran from his skin, as if the sea itself were reluctant to let him go.

Now the boat idled just off a quiet cove on the lee of an uninhabited islet. Pine and rock cupped the water into a privacy the world could not see, the engine ticked as it cooled. Somewhere, a bell on a buoy clanged, slow as a heartbeat.

They sprawled on the warm wood to dry, the planks printing faint lines onto their backs. Jungkook lay on his side, one arm crooked beneath his head, his eyes closed. The sun soaked into him like benediction, drawing the damp from his skin, loosening the tightness that living sometimes required. He could taste salt at the corner of his mouth, he could hear Melo breathing, the soft, even sound of it, and the whisper of his silver chain when he moved.

Time on the Haedam was elastic. Here, they didn’t have to police their laughter, didn’t have to pretend a brotherhood that was love, didn’t have to worry about what their hands were doing or what their eyes were giving away.

On land, eyes were everywhere. 

On water, only the sky watched, and the sky had always, mercifully, looked away.

Jungkook opened his eyes because he felt it, that prickling sense of being watched.Melo lay on his stomach, propped on his elbows, head tilted toward him.

The look on his face was one Jungkook had learned to crave. His eyes wandered over Jungkook’s torso, over the droplets that collected at his collarbone and hurried across his chest, pausing at the stupid little scar on his rib from that bike crash in middle school.

It made Jungkook feel exposed and weirdly safe at the same time.

“You’re staring,” Jungkook said, voice a little rough and lazy with sun.

“I am,” Melo answered, unabashed. “What are you going to do about it, mmh?”

Jungkook huffed a laugh that was almost a sigh. “Close your eyes and pretend to be decent for once?”

Melo’s mouth curved wider. “When have I ever been decent with you?”

He scooted closer across the hot wood, the boat rocking under the shift. Jungkook felt the shadow of him first, a coolness on overheated skin, and then the ghost of breath along his bicep.

“Salty,” Melo murmured, and then leaned in and dragged the flat of his tongue slowly along Jungkook’s arm, from the inside of the elbow to the swell of muscle. It was the kind of audacity he only dared in the space they had carved for themselves out of noon and sea.

Junkook startled, laughter tearing free of him, bright and shocked and happy. His hand shot out, automatic, fond, and found Melo’s damp hair, fingers combing back through it.

“Behave,” he said, trying for stern and failing.

Melo looked up, mouth glistening, eyes half-lidded with triumph and tenderness. “I never do.”

The boat, perhaps eager to be complicit, swung lazily on its rope, the horizon tipping a degree. Everything smelled like pine resin, diesel, and two boys too in love with each other to name it.

Melo moved first. He always had more courage.

He leaned in, slow but sure, and touched his mouth to Jungkook’s. The first contact was cool from sea and warm from sun, the second open, salt-bright, tasting of summer and youth; and Jungkook, dizzy with it, thought absurdly of salt on his tongue and how there were some flavors the body learned once and never forgot.

Jungkook kissed back without thinking. His body knew what to do before his brain had the chance to catch up. His hand slid from Melo’s hair to the nape of his neck, thumb rubbing that familiar notch of bone, feeling the quick thrum there. Melo made a sound, small and raw, that Jungkook would later recognize in his dreams.

They stayed like that for a long time, mouths finding each other again and again and again, heat building under the sun.

Melo smiled into it, always smiling, even when he deepened the kiss, even when he pulled back just enough to speak against Jungkook’s mouth. “I like you best like this,” he whispered, words shaped by affection and ache. “Sun-drunk and honest.”

“Don’t make poetry at me,” Jungkook said, so full he thought his ribs might crack. He chased Melo’s mouth again.

“I can’t help it,” Melo replied, that laugh again, the one that loosened the knots inside Jungkook’s chest, that brightened his whole face and made Jungkook stare helplessly. “You make it too easy.”

They rolled onto their sides, foreheads touching, noses brushing. The world shrank to breath and warmth and the fact that their fingers where still threaded together. Jungkook watched Melo’s lashes cast small shadows on his cheekbones; watched the way his eyes softened and sharpened when the wind moved; watched the sea reflected there, as if he had swallowed part of it and kept it safe.

On land, the year was 2004. The world was not patient. Love between boys had to be folded small and held close. But here, it could stretch its limbs and lie out under the sun.

“Do you think…” Jungkook said after a time, voice low, “that there’s a place where this is easy?”

Melo traced the line of Jungkook’s jaw with a fingertip, reverent. “If there isn’t, we’ll make one.”

“You always say that like it’s… simple.”

“It’s not,” Melo said, and then grinned. “But we come here and we call this place ours. We keep calling it that until the world believes us.”

A gull cut the sky with a ragged cry, the bell on the buoy sang again. Jungkook closed his eyes and let Melo’s words climb into him, let them root there. He didn’t know how long they would remain there, nor that they would eventually blossom into an ache as insistent as summer cicadas.

Later, they swam again, because Melo insisted he could teach the fish to come when he whistled. Melo threw his head back and laughed when they didn’t. Later, they lay on their backs and counted the contrails of planes ripping thin white seams in the sky.

Later, Melo threaded their fingers together and said, without looking, “If I go first, I’ll come back and find you.”

“Don’t,” Jungkook had said, half a joke, half a prayer. “Please. Just don’t go first.”

Melo squeezed his hand. “Then we’ll go together.”

“You’re an idiot,” Jungkook whispered, because the alternative was saying I love you in a world that had not given them language for it yet.

“Well, I am your idiot,” Melo corrected, smug but still soft.

The afternoon stretched, and then snapped back toward evening. They wiped brine from their faces with the same old towel. Melo tossed a handful of water at Jungkook’s chest and dodged when Jungkook lunged to catch him. They kissed again because habit had already become devotion.

When they finally turned the boat toward the harbor, the engine woke with its reliable cough, and the Haedam curved back through the blue. The islands slid past in green humps, while Melo leaned against Jungkook’s shoulder and hummed an aimless tune.

Jungkook held that day behind his ribs the way some men carry relics in lockets. He did not know, then, that the sea keeps its own calendar, its own promises and its own truths.

The present came back like a door slamming.

Jungkook was on the bedroom floor, the box open beside him, his knees drawn up, the chain looped in his fist. He pressed his forehead to his wrist and breathed until the stutter in his chest gentled, until the boats and the sea vanished from his inner eye.

When he lifted his head, his eyes fell to the photograph again. He was too weak not to look at it again. Melo on the gunwale, smile too bright to survive the gloss. It was an image of a boy who believed in simple solutions and homemade places, who had said We’ll make one like he could bend the world with his words.

Jungkook swallowed, his eyes tearing up. He let them, there was no one here to see.

Kim Taehyung’s face rose to meet Melo’s in his mind, aligning like transparencies. The exact same tilt of smirk, the same way light seemed to choose him and only him. Even the habit, ring worry at the thumb, that had no right to echo into the present.

And the date. Oh god, the date. September 3rd, 2004. Birth and death cloven on the same mark of time.

He could not out-argue what he had seen, could not logic the way his hands had shaken when Taehyung had smiled at him. 

Jungkook slid the photograph back into the box with careful fingers and, before closing the lid, placed the silver chain on top. He did not wear it, not yet. He was not ready to carry that weight against his skin. Jungkook slid the box back onto the shelf and shut the closet.

In the kitchen, he poured a glass of water and stood at the window. Seoul’s pulse went about its business, buses driving through traffic, a motorbike’s staccato, a couple walking close, their laughter rising like sparrows.

Jungkook watched his own eyes harden and then soften in the glass, watched the city light press around him.

He imagined, against his will, a boy in a caramel sweater stepping out of a café onto a campus path, his mouth curving as if the day had been generous to him. He imagined the boy turning as if summoned, his gaze fixed on something ancient and invisible, as if some thread in the fabric of the world had pulled.

Jungkook set the glass down with care.

Next week would come whether he slept or not, would put Taehyung in a chair in the second row, would put a syllabus between them like a shield made of paper. Next week would ask him to be a man who believed in boundaries, evidence and the limits of what a soul can do.

Jungkook turned off the kitchen light. In the dark pane of the window, his reflection vanished, and the city alone remained, small, bright,alive.

Behind him, the closet door whispered shut.

Outside, far away where the land broke into islands and the sea licked at their edges day after day, water kept doing what it always did, making and unmaking places, remembering promises, forgetting names.

~~~~~

A week went by and pretended to be progress. Jungkook helped the lie along, stacked his classes neatly like books on a shelf, ticked off his to dos on lists, filled the hours so there was no room left to think, no room left to feel.

He taught five lectures, graded twenty-eight essays, signed two departmental forms Namjoon slid under his office door with a sticky note that read don’t let the bureaucracy drown you, and ate dinner twice standing over his sink.

Whenever his thoughts strayed toward the calendar, he redirected them with the discipline of an old soldier. Tomorrow felt like a cliff he refused to look over. The next first-years lecture was a date on paper, nothing more, not a door to the past.

And yet, despite Jungkook’s efforts, every hour that cliff grew closer.

Jungkook took the longer, outer path around the humanities quad, checked the reflection in glass doors before he pushed through, cut across the faculty lot rather than risk the student commons. Seoul National University was a city styled as a campus, big enough to hide in, big enough to be found by pure accident. He scanned corners without appearing to look, trained instinct more than eye to flag certain colors, a caramel knit, an oversized blazer, silver at the throat.

Luck, which had no stake in human affairs, took his side.

Well, until it didn’t.

It was the noon lull that wasn’t really a lull at all, when the canteen filled to its fluorescent brim. The air smelled like gochujang and steamed rice, metal trays chimed, plastic chairs scraped across the floor in that awful squeak. Sun made a white rectangle of the far windows; beyond it, gingko leaves flashed like thin coins in the autumn wind.

Jungkook sat across from his colleague Namjoon with a tray of kimchi jjigae cooling and a mound of rice he’d been absentmindedly sculpting with his chopsticks into a small, doomed mountain. Namjoon was talking, something about the ethics committee’s new guidelines, the first-years’ surprising fixation on trolley problems this early in the semester. Jungkook nodded at the right times without really hearing the content. It just happened; he didn’t do it on purpose. His mind had gone skilled at sitting in the room and not being in it.

A dozen students streamed in and out in the peripheral blur that a crowded space becomes. He didn’t register them, too caught in his own thoughts.

Until his body did.

It started as a shift in the air, a balancing at the edge of attention, a prickle that says turn. Jungkook didn’t think, he looked. Across the room, midway down the line, a smile cut the chaos like a soft blade. Not even at him, bright and slightly sideways, offered to the boy at his left, but his bones recognized it before his mind arranged the parts.

Kim Taehyung.

Jungkook went very still. Chopsticks paused halfway to the tray, frozen in shock of seeing him again. The sound around him thinned—the crowd, the clatter, Namjoon’s calming voice—until only one frequency remained, the hum of an old, impossible recognition. The present blurred at the edges and pulled tight at the center, as if Taehyung were on stage and Jungkook the only one in the audience.

It felt like being pulled in. Jungkook didn’t want to, but his brain still catalogued the details.

Today he wore a smoky blue cardigan and black trousers that fell loose and straight. A thin leather belt cinched lazy at the waist, rings were stacked on his fingers, silver and a tarnished gold that suggested habit, rather than display. His hair had been tamed and then allowed to misbehave again,  one curl fell defiantly over his brow until he pushed it back with the heel of his hand. Warm dark brown eyes, somehow bright even at this distance, a mouth that couldn’t help inflecting into dare even when it was full of laughter.

He wasn’t alone. Park Jimin at his right, platinum hair tucked under a beanie, cheeks pink from the cold, was lecturing the queue with the fervor of a small general about why the japchae portioning was an ethical failure. Taehyung laughed, tipping his head back and revealing his long throat. The light caught the cartilage at his ear, where a tiny hoop flashed.

Jungkook felt the recognition like heat under his nails, goosebumps rising on his skin. The laugh, not identical to Melo’s (nothing could be, he wouldn’t allow it), but close enough to wake the archive.

Memory broke surface as if called. Jungkook could see it clearly, as if it were happening again. Melo flinging his head back on the Haedam, water beads scattering from his lashes into sunlight. Melo’s mouth shaping a grin around the promise of mischief, the silver chain slipping when he threw his weight to one hip. Melo’s way of listening with his whole face and then smiling right as he answered.

Taehyung stole a tteok from Jimin’s plate mid-complaint and winced theatrically when Jimin smacked his wrist. He leaned to say something to Hoseok, mouth close to his ear, the intimacy plain as breath.

Jungkook’s chest hurt in this dull, stupid way that wouldn’t let up. Not enough to make him gasp, just enough to to sit there and throb every time he breathed in. It was the feeling of standing outside and see a life happen without you.

Taehyung was right there, and he existed completely without him. The realization  stripped him, the boy who looked like his first love, laughing at a story Jungkook would never hear the end of, hands animated in a language Jungkook had forgotten how to speak.

He fit so easily it hurt to look at him. Like he’d always belonged in that circle, in that world— not next to Jungkook on a boat.

A world where Jungkook was a single narrow role: professor, once a week, second-period on Tuesdays.

He watched Taehyung sit. Watched him fold into the chair with that relaxed grace, one ankle hooked over a knee. Watched the cardigan slip down, be tugged up again.

Jungkook’s hand closed around his chopsticks so tightly the wood complained.

A soft nudge at his shoulder slid the world back into its place.

“Hey. You with me?” Namjoon asked, the line between his brows a crease of concern. His gaze flicked to Jungkook’s untouched jjigae, then up. “You zoned out a bit.”

Jungkook dragged his eyes from the far table as if pulling something hooked out of his own skin. He forced himself to breathe, let his shoulders drop a fraction. “Sorry,” he said, voice a step behind him. “I had… a long morning.”

Namjoon studied him the way only someone who had known you since your second life could. The assessing glance softened a bit. “Bad night again?”

The lie was ready. It had the decency of being adjacent to truth. Jungkook let it out with a sigh. “Yeah. The new pills need… time.” He lifted his chopsticks, pushed rice, failed to follow through. “Side effects.”

Namjoon’s hand landed on his shoulder, warm and steady. “If you need to crash in my office between classes, do it,” he said, his tone practical, but with affection tucked inside it. “Or steal my spare couch blanket. I won’t tell on you to the dean.”

Jungkook managed to produce a smile. “Thanks. I’ll survive.”

“You always do,” Namjoon said gently, and let it rest there, the knowledge of insomnia but not the story beneath it. “Eat. Even if it’s just the rice.”

Jungkook tried. The mouthful tasted like a mouthful of nothing. Across the room, Taehyung threw his head back and laughed again, and Jungkook forced his gaze to remain contained in the geography of their small table, the steam lifting from his soup, Namjoon’s chopsticks tapping patterns into their conversation about scheduling and assigned readings.

By the time he left the canteen, the sky had turned the usual shade of blue for an afternoon in Seoul. Ginkgo shadows formed a checkerboard pattern on the pavement.

Jungkook walked back to his office, counted the steps, unlocked the door, and sat very straight behind his desk until the world matched the line of his spine.

The night before the Tuesday lecture did not so much fall as accumulate, building up layers of darkness until the apartment was filled with breathing shapes. Jungkook lay in bed, watching the ceiling as if answers were hidden there. The ticking of the clock was the only proof that time was moving at all.

00:13.

01:47.

02:26.

Each time he turned, the sheets rasped, a dry sound that made the room and his chest feel smaller. He counted breaths until numbers lost their edges, tried box breathing, tried the old trick of cataloguing objects in the dark: chair, bookshelf, window latch, the faint glow of the clock bleeding down the hallway. His mind had its own errands. It returned to a canteen and a cardigan and a smile he had no right to keep.

At 04:58 Jungkook gave up the pretense. He swung his legs over the side, padded to the living room, and rolled out the mat. Once his hands had stopped trembling, he lay in Savasana and listened to the sounds of the city: the distant noise of traffic, the hum of an elevator cable, the sound of a neighbour's faucet and the ghostly presence of a motorcycle on the early morning-shift, moving along the avenues.

He showered cold until his skin pebbled, until the shock carved him out clean. He dressed in silence, chose a charcoal suit with a softer drape, a white shirt with a collar that did not cut. He knotted a tie and then loosened it, let the top button breathe.

Later, at the desk in his office, dawn a thin silver at the edges of the blinds, he pulled the course folder for the first-years and arranged the day’s plans. He had intended a simple discussion, Locke and identity continued, a detour into Parfit. Instead, his hand moved toward a thin photocopy he hadn’t touched in years. A fragment he used to bring out when the semester needed a seam unpicked.

Sappho, translated from the ruin of time:

Someone, I tell you, will remember us. Even in another time.

The page felt indecent in his hands. He hesitated, then slid the copies into the stack. He could argue, if he had to, that it was perfectly curricular: memory, identity, the persistence of self. He could not argue with the part of him that wanted to hear the words in Taehyung’s mouth like a litany he once knew by heart.

He lined up the handouts. He capped his pen, uncapped it, made a note in the margin: discuss memory as promise vs. memory as prison. He stared at the note until it blurred.

By eight, the city had fully woken. Delivery scooters whizzed along the street below. Across the way, the building's windows flashed back. He shrugged on his coat, gathered the stack of papers and stood by the door, hand on knob. He closed his eyes, bracing himself for the day. In the darkness behind them bloomed a boat’s deck, sun on damp wood, a boy’s mouth curving, a promise that had not survived the sea.

Jungkook opened his eyes and stepped into the corridor.

Students moved in purposeful tides, accompanied by the sounds of scarves, laughter, rustling paper and clicking heels.

Jungkook reached the lecture hall early, as he always did. Inside, the air was the particular blend of old wood and new marker, of bodies and book bags and the faint ghost of last semester’s debates. He placed his satchel on the desk, he placed the handouts face-down. He wrote on the board in neat, block letters:

THE SELF, MEMORY, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF RETURN

They came. In twos and threes, the seven first-years drifted in, their chatter a low rain, their energy the bright, unstable weather of youth. Park Jimin ducked through the door ribbing Min Yoongi about something he’d written, Hoseok beamed at the world like it had delivered a particularly good joke overnight, Seokjin carried a pastry he did not intend to share. Jungkook greeted each by name .

He did not look at the doorway. He looked everywhere else in ways that allowed for the doorway to occupy the very center of his attention.

Taehyung came in shrugging off a camel coat, cardigan replaced by a slate blazer draped like water over his shoulders, soft beige knit beneath. A scarf, a thin, almost feminine thing, hung at his throat, a pale stripe against the warm gold of his skin. He paused to scan the room like he always did, caught Jimin’s eye, waved, and slid into the same second-row seat with that slouch, long legs folding under the desk.

Taehyung didn’t look at him. He was busy pulling a notebook from his bag, mouth quirking at something on its cover, a sticker, a scrawl. He unscrewed a pen with his teeth, recapped it, twirled it once, then set it down. He glanced up at the board and there, visible only if you were watching for it (Jungkook was, he hated himself for it), a flicker of something in his eyes. Recognition, a prickle of déjà vu.

“Good morning,” said Jungkook, addressing the room. His voice sounded like his own, a small victory. “We’re continuing our conversation about identity. how much of who we are is held together by memory, and what, if anything, persists when memory falters. We’ll start with Locke. We’ll end with a fragment, very old and very stubborn.”

A ripple of attention, pens at the ready. Hoseok already smiling in anticipation of argument. Yoongi’s calm, appraising gaze. Jimins bright expectancy. Taehyung, elbow on desk, cheek in hand, regarding him with that lazy intelligence that never felt lazy for long.

Jungkook moved through Locke as if laying track while the train was already rolling. He asked a question, listened, wrote a name on the board, underlined a phrase. He did not look at the second row until he had no choice. When he did, Taehyung was watching him, expression unguarded for a breath; curious, yes, and something else beneath it that made Jungkook’s pulse miscount for a beat.

They detoured into Parfit. Identity as relation, not essence. Jimin argued that love was the continuity; Yoongi, that continuity was the lie. Taehyung said nothing. He turned his pen between his fingers and looked at the word RETURN on the board.

Jungkook distributed the pages with practiced economy, avoiding the second-row desk until it was the last one left. He set the fragment down in front of Taehyung without sparing him a glance.

Back at the lectern, he said, “Read it first, once. Then again. Out loud, if you can stand to hear it.”

A beat. Then voices, one by one, each student sounding Sappho’s stubborn promise into the air. The words changed in different mouths, as all old poems do: became question, became dare, became prayer.

When it was Taehyung’s turn, he did not immediately read. He looked down at the two lines as if he tried to decipher them first. Then he lifted his head and spoke in that low, velvet register Jungkook had been pretending all morning not to wait for.

“Someone,” Taehyung said. “I tell you, will remember us. Even in another time.”

His consonants softened the edges, his vowels stretched just enough to make space inside the sentence. The room did not change. But Jungkook did.

The boat was there before he could stop it. Melo leaning over him, tongue dragging up his arm and grinning wide like he knew the future and refused to be afraid of it. Someone will remember us, Melo had promised with everything but words.

Jungkook had, god help him, he had. For twenty years. Against his will; in spite of it.

“What do you hear in it?” Jungkook asked, a professor again by the sheer effort of will. “Promise or threat?”

“Mmh. Both,” Taehyung said, a small smile plastered on his face, almost apologetic, then not at all. “A promise that refuses to become a threat. Or a threat pretending to be a promise, so the person it’s addressed to doesn’t run.”

A ripple. Yoongi’s mouth quirked. Jimin whispered, “woah,” to his notebook. Jungkook wrote PROMISE/THREAT on the board and underlined both with equal weight.

“Memory as claim,” Namjoon once said over whiskey, late, when the department spilled its bones open. “Memory as debt.”

Jungkook let the room carry on; he listened, responded, guided, survived. Barely. It wasn’t until the hour was nearly over that he realized he had been breathing like a man who had just reached shore.

“Next week,” he said, gathering the thread back into his hands, “we’ll read a modern echo. Borges, perhaps, or—” He stopped himself, thought better of it, smiled faintly. “We’ll decide.”

Chairs scraped, papers slid into bags. Taehyung stood, slipped the fragment into the inner pocket of his blazer as if it belonged there, and turned to say something to Jimin.

He did not look at Jungkook on his way out.

It should have made it easier.

Jungkook rolled the cap onto his marker with a click and watched the door swing slow, then settle into stillness. The room, emptied now, held the echo of a few words from a very old island. He imagined those words folded in a blazer pocket, warm now from the heat of a living body.

~~~~~

Jungkook learned to measure time not in days but in distances: from the lecture hall to the exit; from the canteen line to the table by the window where Namjoon liked to sit; from the second-row seat to the edge of the lectern.

He saw Taehyung once a week for certain, and sometimes in the spaces in between, a flash of warm brown eyes at the far end of a hallway, a tanned shoulder brushed by light in the canteen. Jungkook avoided the canteen where he could, but Namjoon had a talent for gentle insistence.

“Human beings require nourishment,” he’d say, nudging Jungkook’s elbow until his feet started toward the smell of soup and kimchi. “And company. In that order.”

Jungkook would go, sit, eat exactly enough to appease reason, and keep his gaze trained on Namjoon’s face like he was the only person left alive.

The world disagreed, loudly, cheerfully, at a table two rows over.

~~~~~

Jungkook gave the first-years individual texts: “take a fragment,” he told them, “or an essay, or a page from a novel, and tell me what it does to the Self.” They drew lots or chose by whim. He told them to keep it under a thousand words.

Thursdays were consultation hours, usually placid. The same three regulars: two bachelor’s students he was shepherding toward the shore of a first thesis, all jagged questions and sudden clarity; one master’s student whose topic ate her sleep and who luxuriated in the safety of a door with his name on it.

Jungkook did not prepare himself for the possibility that Kim Taehyung might knock.

It was near the end of the hour, the building half-quiet, the afternoon light starting to slope toward gold. Jungkook had his chair angled so he could watch the gingko tree outside the window flip a few last coins in the wind. He was making a note on someone’s draft, choose one metaphor and commit to it, when the softest interruption made the air tilt.

A knock. 

“Come in,” Jungkook said, because that was what a person in this room with this name on the glass said when someone knocked.

The door opened, and Jungkook froze.

Kim Taehyung stood in the hallway, backlit by the hallway light. Slate overcoat button, a charcoal sweater underneath that hung loose enough to be distracting, dark trousers that fit a little too well. A book tucked under his arm, notebook in the other hand. His hair had been tamed and then let loosed again; a few strands had escaped over his forehead. The earrings were small today, one silver hoop and one stud, catching the light when he moved.

“Professor?” he said, the word cradled in that velvet register that made a noun into an instrument. “Do you have a minute?”

Jungkook’s office was not large. It had never needed to be, until now. A desk with too many pens in a cup, two chairs facing it, a low bookcase that pretended at minimalism and failed, a plant that had not died yet out of sheer stubbornness, the window with its gingko and its slice of sky. His office wasn’t built for this much awareness of another person.

He watched Taehyung step inside, bring the outside with him. The door clicked shut behind him and the room accepted a new shape.

“Of course,” Jungkook said, simply; hated how formal it sounded in his own ears.

He gestured to the chair opposite. Taehyung shrugged of his coat, draped it over the back of the chair with easy care.

The space between them was exactly the width of the table. Which, as it turned out, was too narrow to be safe.

“You gave us our texts,” Taehyung began without preamble, sliding the book from under his arm and placing it on the table like an offering. “I drew Borges. The river bench one.” He smiled, quick and a little sheepish. “I think it’s trying to eat me.”

“‘The Other,’” Jungkook said, grateful for the solidity of a title. “A good appetite, that story.”

Taehyung leaned forward, forearms on the table, the sweater’s cuffs bunching at his wrists. His hands were elegant in a way that had nothing to do with jewelry, long fingers, a pale crescent scar at the base of the thumb on his right hand, a mole near the knuckle of his middle finger. His nails were clean, bluntly cut. He wore three rings today: thin silver on the forefinger, a knotted band on the ring finger, a battered signet on the thumb that he worried when he searched for a word.

His face was worse up close, in the sense that it did nothing to calm Jungkook down. The bones were delicate, but not fragile, cheekbones that caught the light, a jaw softer when he wasn’t smiling. His skin was the same warm tone that made Jungkook think of late afternoon light, even in the fluorescent ruin of his office. His lashes cast actual shadows on his cheeks. It felt ridiculous to notice that.

Jungkook shouldn’t be noticing that.

And his eyes… Brown deepened in proximity into a thing you might mistake for amber. They were warm without being soft, watchful without being wary, old in ways that made Jungkook feel young and tired at the same time.

He was close enough that Jungkook could see the faint dryness at the corner of his lower lip, could see where he’d bitten it earlier and the skin had not forgiven him yet. He smelled faintly of citrus rinds and something woody, a cologne that wasn’t expensive so much as particular.

Taehyung opened the book and revealed a page folded at the corner, lines underlined lightly in pencil. “So, he meets himself,” he said, tapping the margin where two men sit on a bench and disagree about who is which. “But it’s not time travel. Or, it’s not only that. It’s like… memory travel?” He grimaced at his own phrasing, then laughed at the grimace, and the laugh was a thing Jungkook felt first in his throat and then in the soles of his feet. “I keep thinking the bench is a bridge.”

Jungkook allowed his mouth the smallest curve. “That’s not the worst thing to think.” He leaned forward in reflex, then caught himself and folded his hands on the desk as if the body could be reminded that boundaries existed. “What’s the bench bridging?”

“Two versions of a person. But also two ways of talking about yourself.” Taehyung’s hands had a choreography when he was excited, sketching shapes in the air. “The younger one wants to be original. Special. You know? The older one knows he’s already a story other people tell. Or—” He paused, eyes flicking up to check if Jungkook was with him. “Or the older one is relieved he doesn’t have to be original anymore. Like, okay, fine, I’m a repeat. At least that means I existed once.”

There is was again… that weird, sharp recognition. Melo used to talk like that, skipping the safe thought and saying the one that hurt a bit more but felt right.

Jungkook swallowed. “So who’s right?”

“I think they both are,” Taehyung said, chewing on his lower lip for half a second while Jungkook pretended not to notice. “We all start out thinking we’re going to be the first of something. Then we eventually realize we’re mostly a remix.” He looked up, suddenly self-conscious. “Is that too cynical?”

It wasn’t.

“You’re allowed to be cynical.” Jungkook said. “What are you going to argue?”

Taehyung flipped to a passage and slid the book slightly toward Jungkook. The gesture brought his wrist close to the table’s edge; a vein rose blue and delicate under the skin. “Here. He says he recognizes himself because of a detail, but also because of… a feeling.” He looked up again, and his eyes had that wild, old clarity that made Jungkook feel seen and mercifully unseen all at once. “I keep getting stuck on that… What do we do with feelings as evidence?”

Jungkook could have spoken for an hour and not said anything he meant. 

Taehyung wrote quickly, head bowed, hair falling along his temple in a soft curve that made Jungkook’s fingers ache with memory he had no right to. His handwriting was neat in the way of someone who had forced it to be so, a few letters still wanted to be unruly. Jungkook watched the crease appear between his eyebrows and then withdraw again when something clicked. He wanted, stupidly, to smooth it with a thumb. He hated himself for that thought.

It was like watching someone wear Melo’s face and voice and also not. It hurt in a way Jungkook didn’t know how to categorize yet.

Taehyung kept talking, because that’s what he did when he was circling a conclusion. He worried at the distinction between self and story. He confessed, with a grin that wanted to be more confident than it was, that he was nervous he’d write something “too romantic” and that professors would either love it or hate it depending on whether they’d been in love recently.

Jungkook, who had not been anything recently, tried to give him something to work with. “I think it is important if you’re honest about what it is.”

Taehyung nodded, satisfied. He was a student who recognized when a path had been pointed out, even if it still needed walking.

“Thank you. Seriously,” Taehyung said finally, closing his notebook with a soft slap. He stood, the chair legs made a brief complaint against the floor. “I think I can keep the bench from eating me now.”

“Remember to bite back,” Jungkook said before his better judgment could intercept, and Taehyung’s smile flashed; the quick, delighted kind you can’t plan.

He’d almost reached the door when he turned. The motion was small, unhurried. He pivoted on his heel, one hand on the strap of his bag, and asked, “Can I… ask you something weird?”

Jungkook felt the room narrow. He nodded because his body still knew how to do that.

“Where did you grow up?” Taehyung’s head tilted, curious in a way that never felt impudent. “I keep… I don’t know. I have this feeling I’ve seen you before…” He gestured vaguely to the building, to a place only he was able to see. “Maybe from a neighborhood.”

Jungkook swallowed, suddenly aware of his own tongue in his mouth, his own teeth. “I was born in Busan,” he said, because that was the easy part. “Raised in Tongyeong.”

He watched the name cross Taehyung’s face. A flicker. Taehyung hummed, a low thoughtful sound.

“Mmh. Not it, then.” He half-smiled, but something moved behind his eyes. “I’m Daegu. Born and raised.” He shrugged. “I’ve heard Tongyeong is beautiful.”

“It is,” Jungkook said, “Islands. Boats. Bells on buoys.”

At bells, Taehyung froze, just for a second. His eyes went a little distant, then sharpened again, like he’d heard something no one else could hear.

“Bells,” he repeated quietly, almost to himself. His fingers tightened briefly on the strap of his bag. “Right. Sounds…nice.”

It didn’t sound nice. It sounded like every summer he’d ever lost. But Jungkook just nodded.

“Goodbye, Professor,” Taehyung said, the last word wrapped in an undertone that was not entirely academic. Respectful, yes. A little too warm at the edges.

“Goodbye,” Jungkook said, fighting the impulse to return the warmth with currency he could not afford.

The door opened. Cold air moved in, then out. Taehyung stepped into the corridor and was briefly framed by it, the rush of student life passing like a river.

Jungkook’s hands were steady. His pulse was not.

He looked at the spot where Taehyung had been sitting a minute ago. A small smear of pencil remained on the corner of the desk from where Taehyung had turned his notebook. Jungkook reached out, dragging his thumb over it. Graphite came away in a faint gray smear on his skin.

It was such a stupid, small thing, but it made his chest ache. He rubbed his thumb against his palm until the gray blurred away.

He closed his eyes, heart still stuttering and let Sappho’s fragment climb uninvited into the room he kept for things he could not admit.

Someone, I tell you, will remember us. Even in another time.

Jungkook didn’t say it out loud, but the thought rose anyway, uninvited, thick with grief:

I remember you. God, I do. That’s the problem.

Outside, the corridor filled and emptied and filled. Office hours ended. Papers waited their turn.

The sea, invisible from here, absurdly far and also unhelpfully inside him, kept its calendar and its secrets.

~~~~~

Jungkook did not sleep so much as survive the hours. Every time he closed his eyes, the office returned:Taehyung in that too-small room, voice low and bright, that smile Jungkook hadn’t done a single thing to deserve.

Melo threaded himself through it without asking permission. The two of them, past and present, moved in and out of each other like waves cross-hatching a shore until Jungkook honestly didn’t know whose face he was seeing anymore.

Sometime after two, he gave up on the bed and stood. The room swayed, a soft, punishing tilt, as if gravity had remembered an old grudge. He lay down on the carpet, starfish-wide. His breath came too fast, then too shallow, then stalled altogether. The ceiling fan above him was motionless and still had the audacity to look like it was moving. He pressed his palms to the floor, as if he could steady the apartment from underneath.

It didn’t steady anything.

Memory did what memory does. It picked him up and threw him.

Back to the Haedam, back to being eighteen and stupid enough to think summers like that lasted forever.

Melo had been Jungkook’s first in so many ridiculous, holy categories.

First real friend. First person to look at him like a question worth asking. First time Jungkook discovered that butterflies were not gentle: they were unruly, beating their wings against the ribs as if the body were a cage.

First person he’d ever wanted so badly it scared him.

He hadn’t named himself anything yet. Gay was a word he’d heard other people throw like stones: flat, skipping, intended to sting. He only knew he liked Melo. Not just his mouth, his waist, the reach of his shoulders, but how he laughed with his whole chest, how he read signs aloud like they were poems, how he held a silence until it turned into a promise.

The first deliberate touch had been small, fingers too close when passing a bottle of water, knees grazing under a shared towel. The first kiss, months later, was a stutter; shy, then bold, then shy again as hormones and hunger took turns driving. Jungkook remembered the first time he had made a sound he didn’t know he could make because Melo’s hand had found the small arch of his back and pressed. He could still feel the way embarrassment and pleasure had tangled in his throat.

The boat rocked, a conspirator.

Melo took Jungkook’s mouth with an ease earned over months, patient and sure, tasting of brine and heat and that laugh he always half-swallowed. Jungkook opened for him, no hesitation now, meeting, answering, pulling him closer until Melo’s shirt, wet from their swim, printed a cool ghost on Jungkook’s stomach and made him gasp.

They had learned restraint in all the wrong places. This was not one of them.

Jungkook’s hand had shaken when he shoved Melo’s shirt up, not from nerves, not really. More from the sheer shock of getting what he’d been daydreaming for months. The shirt stuck and then peeled away, and suddenly there he was, all golden skin and water droplets and the silver chain Jungkook had stared at all summer.

“God,” Jungkook blurted, because he had no other word for the sensation of skin answering skin.

They laughed as they fumbled each other out of the rest, wet cotton, the squeak of fabric against salt-dry thighs, then went quiet when bare heat finally met bare heat. Jungkook had never felt anything like it. He’d arched without meaning to, a raw, involuntary offering, and Melo swallowed the sound straight from his mouth, still smiling, but his own breath suddenly not so steady.

They should’ve been scared of the intensity they felt. They weren’t, not there, not then.

Melo took his time with Jungkook, like he’d decided Jungkook was something worth to learn, to not rush though. Every place his mouth found pulled a different noise from him. When Melo’s hand slipped lower, Jungkooks fingers clenched in his hair on instinct, torn between yes and please slow down and don’t you dare stop.

They moved together, hips finding a rhythm of their own. When it built too fast, Melo slowed it deliberately, laughing a little when Jungkook swore at him, embarrassed and desperate, then kissing the complaint shut. When it threatened to stall, Jungkook rolled them with a clatter and a startled whoop, ending up astride, palms flat on Melo’s ribs, breathing like he’d run for miles.

When Melo slid down Jungkook’s chest, when his mouth finally replaced his hand, Jungkook’s hands hesitated at his hair in a plea and an agreement. Melo answered with a low hum that traveled up through Jungkook’s bones. He did nothing quickly; set a rhythm like rowing, deep and even, hands steadying Jungkook’s thighs when they shook. When Jungkook warned, voice a wrecked thread, Melo only looked up, eyes soft and intent, and didn’t stop until he pulled Jungkook over the edge with a cry sharp enough to send a gull skittering from the rock.

Jungkook folded down as if the air had been taken from him, laughter breaking in his throat, half apology, half benediction. He kissed Melo’s cheeks, his mouth, the damp chin he’d made wetter, tasting himself and summer and the unreasoning joy of it. Melo tugged him into another kiss before Jungkook slid down, a mirror of devotion that left Melo arching off the deck, chain clinking like a small bell. He came with Jungkook’s name mangled and beautiful on his tongue, breath catching, eyes bright and startled.

They pulled on boxers afterwards and nothing else, too lazy for more. Jungkook sprawled on his back; Melo tucked along his side, chain cooling against Jungkook’s sternum. Their hands found each other without thinking and stayed that way. The Haedam creaked as it turned to the faintest breeze.

“Does it always feel like this?” Jungkook asked, the words barely breath.

Melo pressed his mouth to Jungkook’s throat. “Only with you,” he said, and meant it, and ruined Jungkook for any reasonable future by meaning it.

At some point, between the heat and the rocking of the boat and the afterglow,Jungkook must have drifted off. Because the next thing he knew, he was back on his apartment floor, a rug pattern pressed into his forearms.

His body felt used up and stiff, his heart felt worse, too full and complete hollow at the same time.

He dragged himself upright and moved through the motions of getting ready.

The lecture that followed might as well have been a recording. By the time the hour ended, Jungkook could not have recounted a single sentence, only the impression of having kept the train on its tracks while his mind rode the rails underneath.

“Leave your essays on the desk,” he said, and his voice sounded fine, like any other week.

Papers started to pile up, titles circled, names underlined, the light pressure of too-earnest staples clinging to corners.

Of course Taehyung was last.

If Jungkook had not known better, he might have thought the boy took his time on purpose. He tucked his pen into his notebook with the attention of someone putting a bird back in its cage, he rolled his scarf around two fingers and slid it into his bag, he shrugged into his coat like he was remembering how. The room emptied in pieces, eventually, it was only Taehyung crossing the space toward him.

Taehyung approached the desk with his essay held carefully, as if paper could bruise. He stopped a respectful distance away.

“Thank you,” he said, and there was no performance in it. “For the time last week. It helped. The… cages and bridges?” His mouth tipped up at one corner. “It made something click.”

Jungkook’s brain lined up the safe answers in a row. “Glad it was useful,” he said. “I look forward to reading it.”

Taehyung extended the pages. Jungkook reached.

Skin met skin.

It wasn’t dramatic, a light brush, the heel of a palm to the side of a knuckle, but Jungkook’s body reacted like a creature that had been startled near a cliff. He jerked back without meaning to, hip crashing into the table behind him. The worn satchel he left there wobbled, then tipped,then went over with the edge. The sound was absurdly loud; the slap of leather, the scatter of contents, a pen rolling toward the front row, a bound notebook flopping open to blank pages, a slim plastic bottle skittering like a fish desperate for water.

“Sh—sorry,” Taehyung blurted, dropping to a crouch before Jungkook could say no, it wasn’t you, it’s a ghost. “I didn’t mean—”

Jungkook was already down too, the desk groaning as his knees hit the floor. He reached for the notebook, Taehyung trapped the runaway pen with the flat of his palm, they both reached at once for the small white bottle, but Taehyung got there first.

He stilled when he read the label. The world narrowed to that stupid plastic in his hand.

Jungkook’s heart, which had been panicking, abruptly discovered new territory. He watched Taehyung’s face for the reflexive scripts, surprise too bright, a wince of embarrassment on someone else’s behalf, the mortal sin of pity. He’d seen all versions before.

None arrived.

Taehyung only looked up, mouth softening, not downturned, not startled. He turned the bottle so the label faced his palm, made it private, and held it out with two fingers.

Jungkook’s hand closed around the plastic. It had a cheap, ridiculous give, and he hated that his eyes closed on an inhale as if he’d been dunked and someone had hauled him up. “Thank you,” he managed, because manners still lived somewhere under the mess.

Taehyung’s gaze had weight without pressure. It lingered, then retreated a respectful step, which somehow felt worse. Jungkook hated the part of himself that wanted the weight to stay.

“I…” Taehyung began, then seemed to make a choice. “I get it. The sleep thing.”

Jungkook’s head snapped up.

Taehyung went on, shoulders hunching just a fraction. “Not the pills, exactly. But I… have bad dreams. Or one bad dream, over and over.” His laugh was light, embarrassed without being ashamed. “It’s very boring of my subconscious.”

He glanced down then, as if to ask permission of the floor to go on, and when it didn’t object, he looked back at Jungkook and gave him the rest.

“In my dream, I’m drowning,” Taehyung said quietly, voice dropping a little. “In blue water. Not dark but bright. I can see the sun up there, the way it breaks into pieces and dances. But I can’t get to it. I’m moving, and I’m not moving.”

As he spoke, something cold slid down Jungkook’s spine.

Taehyung laughed, soft and crooked. “It’s stupid. My parents couldn’t figure it out. I told you I grew up in Daegu. Closest I got to the sea was a documentary and a fish market. So, who knows.” He shrugged, and the shrug tried to say it doesn’t matter and failed.

Jungkook went very, very still. It was that or shake apart.

Bells, boats, a boy under water with his eyes open. The dream crawled under his ribs and sat down, he could almost feel the shape of the Haedam under his palms, the way a deck holds heat and the way grief holds time. 

Something must’ve shifted on his face, because Taehyung’s gaze flickered. Something careful came into his expression, a gentling he wore as easily as mischief.

“The mind is wild,” he said, tone nudged toward light but set on honesty. “It picks things up and stitches them into something that looks like meaning. Doesn’t mean we’re tangled forever, though.” His mouth quirked, softness in the corner. “Some nights we lose. Some mornings we win anyway.”

The line landed like a hand on Jungkook’s shoulder, warm and ordinary and unfathomably precise. It was the kind of sentence Melo would have loved;part comfort, part dare.

Taeyhung rose easily, knees unbending in a line that made it look like gravity had less jurisdiction over him than it did over other people.

He then slid his essay onto the pile with ritual care. “I hope it’s not too romantic,” he said, lips tipping, the joke those words always wore. “The bench became a bridge whether I wanted it to or not.”

Jungkook surprised himself by actually huffing out a small laugh. “We can forgive a bridge,” he said, words feeling oddly true as he said them. “If it holds.”

“It holds,” Taehyung said, like a quiet oath.“Goodbye, Professor.”

“Goodbye,” Jungkook answered, his voice sturdier this time. He watched Taehyung cross the room, the slow, unbothered way he shouldered his bag, the brief pause at the threshold as if listening for a cue only he could hear. Then he was gone, the hall swallowing him into the tide of footsteps and laughter.

On top of the pile, Taehyung’s essay sat with its title underlined twice.

Jungkook slid the paper into his satchel. He touched the ring on his index finger once, habit and hallowing in the same motion, and let his hand fall.

Outside, the air was bright and colder than it looked. Gingko coins skittered across the paving stones, bought by a wind that never paid in full. Somewhere on campus a bell marked the hour, clear and indifferent. It sounded, for a moment, exactly like a distant buoy calling across water he’d never really left.

~~~~~

Home arrived in a way it always did, by elevator that exhaled at his floor, by the soft click of his lock, by the particular dark that belonged to his apartment. Jungkook set the satchel on his desk and stood for a moment in the doorway of the room where he did his grading, listening to the city seep in through the window seams.

The stack of essays sat by his elbow. He worked trough them one by one, pen moving almost on autopilot. The pile thinned. Jungkook straightened a paperclip, stared at the last essay as if it might take mercy on him and slide off the desk on its own.

It didn’t help that he knew exactly whose name was on it.

Kim Taehyung.

The title, underlined once in pencil: “Bench, Bridge, Mirror: On Meeting a Self That Isn’t and Is.” 

Jungkook’s stomach did a small, ridiculous twist. He told himself he was a professor doing his job. He put the page flat on the desk, smoothed the edges with his palm, and began.

A bench is not furniture. In Borges it is an event disguised as a place. Two men sit; a person happens.

Jungkook felt his mouth twitch. He’d said nearly that aloud in the office, a week and a lifetime ago. He made no mark, read on.

Recognition is usually narrated as vision: “I saw.” Borges cheats. His older narrator recognizes the younger not by sight alone, but because a feeling stands up inside him and points: There.

He paused. A feeling standing up inside him. He thought of the canteen, of the precise moment when a smile at the far end of a line cut the room in half. He still didn’t pick up his pen.

The younger Borges wants to be original because he has not yet learned that originality is a story older men tell young men to keep them lonely. The older Borges is relieved to be a copy. A copy is a kind of proof you belonged to the world at least once already.

He had to set the pen down, rubbed his thumb along its barrel. Melo at eighteen, insisting they would “make” a place if none existed. Jungkook’s throat tightened around nothing, then turned the page.

We treat feelings as bad evidence because they embarrass us. I propose a mercy: let feelings be data the way weather is data. Not predictive, but descriptive; not a verdict, but a map of where you are standing when you point and say “I.”

Identity is performance, yes, but who do we think we are performing for? The other man on the bench? The future we’re trying to convince? Maybe the performance is for the body: the first audience, the one we can’t walk out on.

Jungkooks chest ached and he shifted in his chair like that could shake it loose. He thought of Taehyung’s wrist close to the desk edge, veins faint under the skin.

I have not met an older version of myself on a bench by the river. (Not yet.) But I have felt myself arrive in a room after I am already seated there, as if a truer draft caught up and took my chair back gently.

Jungkook pressed the back of the pen to his bottom lip and tasted metal and a coppery thread he recognized from mornings after too little sleep.

He thought of Melo’s voice, how it had always filled every corner of the room, and of Taehyung’s quieter tone, how it still found him no matter where he sat.

The bench is a bridge. (I was warned this metaphor is indulgent; I cannot let it go.) What does it connect? Not the same man at two times, but the possibility that the person we are becoming can forgive the person we were brave enough or foolish enough to be.

Jungkook turned to the last page, half-afraid of it.

Evidence is often a tremor before it is a name. I felt a tremor this week reading Sappho in a room full of strangers. Someone, I tell you, will remember us. Even in another time. I don’t know if I believe in return, but I believe in the grammar of it, the way a sentence can fold across a gap and still be whole.

He stopped seeing the words for a moment because his eyes flooded and everything blurred to light. He blinked fast, once, twice. It didn’t work, a tear slid out anyway, tracing down the same old path his tears had always taken. He swiped at his face with the heel of his hand, annoyed but at the same time weirdly relieved.

He read the final part through that blur.

Meeting yourself is perhaps a kind of reincarnation that happens while you are still alive. We return to what we have been, and if we are lucky, we are kinder this time.

His breath hitched audibly in the small room.

He put the pen down carefully and pressed both palms to the desk. Tears pooled faster than he could fight them, he gave up trying and let them stand. Salty warmth slid along his jaw; a drop fell onto the page and made a small, imperfect star.

Melo would have loved this.

No, he closed his eyes, Melo would have written this. Melo, who turned everything into a metaphor when words weren’t enough. Melo, who had said If there isn’t a place for us, we’ll make one like he wasn’t building a sentence so much as a bridge.

How was any of this possible?

The goddamn date on a screen: September 3rd, 2004, the day the sea decided. The tilt of the mouth, the light in the eyes, the ring-worrying thumb, the habit of laughter that rose at the end of a sentence like a dare. The nightmare of blue water, bright, the sun breaking into coins above a boy who could not surface.

Jungkook let his forehead touch the edge of the desk. The wood was cool. He breathed there, unhandsome and human, and asked a question he had argued against for two decades.

Reincarnation.

He had taught against it, around it. He had held it up to the light of Locke and Parfit and watched it thin like paper under a lamp. He had told rooms of nineteen-year-olds that souls were stories we told to survive ourselves. He had filled margins with tidy denials.

Jungkook had chosen this field because he wanted to understand why he couldn’t understand the thing that kept happening to him every time he shut his eyes and saw a boy on a boat.

He lifted his head. On the wall, the small framed photocopy of the southern coast’s map looked back, Tongyeong’s name printed in tiny black letters over a stippled sea. His right hand found the silver ring on his index finger, turned it, turned it, turned it again.

His eyes dropped back to the page. Taehyung had added a small postscript under the last line, squeezed like an afterthought.

Sometimes the copy remembers a song the original did not finish. Perhaps the remembering is the point not the proof.

He laughed on an inhale, which turned the sound into something between a sob and surrender. The tear tracks cooled on his cheeks, his eyes ached in that clean, exhausted way crying gives you when it finally lets go.

How could this be real life? How was he supposed to live in it? How was he supposed to go on pretending this was all mere coincidence and stress and a brain that wouldn’t sleep?

Jungkook had spent twenty years interrogating fate, coincidence, the soul. He had mostly found more doors. Tonight, too, there were only questions multiplying like vowels in a whispered prayer.

Except for one answer.

Eyes, dark brown, honey-warm, looking at him across a boat deck, across a lecture hall, across the narrow width of a desk. Melo’s, then, and now Taehyung’s, asking the same impossible, ordinary thing:

Do you remember me?

He closed his eyes and answered, not aloud, not yet.

I remember you. In another time, and this one.

Jungkook turned off the lamp. The window glass became a mirror and offered him himself in the dim. He lifted a hand to his face; his reflection did the same.

He gathered the essays, squared them until their edges made a clean line, and held them for a moment against his sternum as if paper could steady bone. Then he set them down and, against his better judgment and exactly because of it, opened the closet where the small cardboard box lived, the one that smelled like suncream and old sea.

He did not lift the chain out. 

~~~~~

By early afternoon the light over Seoul National University had gone soft and golden, as if October were playing at July. Students sprawled on the humanities lawn, lying on their backs, shoes off, textbooks half-open. The kind of day that made being young look easy.

Jungkook taught through it; two morning lectures, one discussion. He signed an attendance sheet, nodded at a question about Parfit, and tried to ignore the dull ache behind his eyes that felt like a hangover without the alcohol.

Then the weather remembered its job.

Cloud slid over sun, one fat raindrop hit the pavement in front of the building. Then another. Within minutes, the entire quad was covered in sheets of rain. Umbrellas unfurled like dark flowers, everyone else ran.

Jungkook, who had forgotten his umbrella in his office and forgotten that he’d forgotten it, was one of the latter.

By the time he reached the campus café tucked under the humanities building, the rain had rearranged his hair and the shoulders of his coat were dark and heavy.

The place was packed: hoodies steaming gently, a small forest of backpacks under tables. Windows fogged, the world outside rendered to water and rumor.

Jungkook found a corner table where a potted ficus had given up trying, and cupped both hands around a paper cup of hot cacao, the kind of sweetness that used to be a reward and had since become an end in itself. He hadn’t drunk coffee in months. Each time he’d tried, his heart had turned into a trapped bird. Cacao was a truce with a younger version of himself who still thought the world might be simple if you added chocolate.

Jungkook opened his laptop more from habit than intention. He stared at a half-written email to the department secretary about classroom reservations and let the café wash around him. He listened instead. Wet sneakers squeaking on the tile, the bell on the door chiming with a new arrival, the rain drumming against the windows with soothing insistence.

He was starting to unclench, just a fraction, until the door opened and a familiar voice slipped on with the rain, low and lazy.

Jungkook didn’t look up first, he stared at the blinking cursor on his screen and tried to pretend he didn’t already know.

Kim Taehyung.

He stepped into Jungkook’s line of sight like he’d been conjured. No umbrella, no hood, rain clung to him without shame. The sweater he wore, which might have been cream at some point earlier in the day, was now darker in patches where it clung to him. It hugged his shoulders, chest and the dip at his collarbone. His trousers, ink-black, had gone slick along his thighs,  rain darkened the hem as if he’d waded through something deeper than puddles. His dark hair had curled at the ends, like small commas over his forehead, a few strands stuck to his skin, almost pointing at the small silver hoop in his ear where droplets hung stubbornly.

He collected a tray with a ceramic cup and a croissant that glistened with a brush of syrup, scanned the room, and angled toward Jungkook’s table with a look that was half question, half inevitability.

“Professor,” he said quietly when he reached him, lowering his head so the word landed between them and not on the room. “Would you mind if I—?” He tipped his chin at the chair opposite. Every other seat was occupied, and a couple near the door had already started playing rock-paper-scissors for a stool. 

Jungkooks first instinct was to say no, for entirely selfish reasons. Then he nodded, it felt both too quick and not quick enough.

Taehyung’s smile flashed, just a second before he tucked it back in.

“Thanks,” Taehyung said. The chair squealed as he pulled it back; he grimaced at the sound, then set his tray down with more care. He folded into the seat, long limbs finding their place.

Jungkook redirected his eyes to the laptop screen, read the same line three times and did not absorb it once. His shirt clung to him cool and clammy and he became uncomfortably aware of every place his own clothes were touching his skin.

Taehyung did not take up a book, did not reach for his phone. He wrapped both damp hands around his cup, cradling heat, and blew. Steam fogged his face for a second; when it cleared, he wasn’t looking at the cup anymore.

He was looking at Jungkook.

It wasn’t rude. It wasn’t anything so simple. The same alertness Melo had possessed when he wasn’t moving, the same restful air of interest.

Jungkook’s eyes sat on the email, pretending to read. His thoughts, unfortunately, had other plans.

The boat flashed up so cleanly in his mind he could smell diesel under sun, saw Melo sprawled on his stomach on hot boards, chin in his palm, the look that began in mischief and softened into something almost admiring, mapping Jungkook’s chest with his eyes the way a swimmer reads tide on the surface.

You’re staring.

I am. What are you going to do about it, mmh?

Jungkook exhaled slowly. He could not keep doing this. He could not keep throwing time like a net across the present and hauling the same boy onto the deck of now.

He’s your student. Nothing more. That’s all.

That’s all...

Still, his eyes betrayed him. Jungkook let them flick up helplessly—one, two seconds—to inventory the unprofessional details and then put them away. The sweater’s damp cling had made a topography of Taehyung’s torso; the knit loosened at one shoulder to offer a sliver of skin golden under café light. A small mole on his throat startled him with its familiarity, and then he punished himself for using that word. His hair was doing that soft curl thing at the ends, promising it would hold onto the rain all afternoon; a bead of water sat stupidly pretty at the corner of his lips. His mouth, not smiling exactly, but living near it. The look he gave Jungkook, not a student looking at a professor. Something human measuring something human.

Jungkook didn’t know what to do with it.

He should leave, should invent a meeting, close his laptop with apologetic efficiency, and step back into rain and let it cool his nerves.

Instead, he made a mistake. He looked up again and let his gaze meet Taehyung’s fully.

If eyes could anchor, these did.

Warm brown shot through with golden flecks where café bulbs found them; pupils widened a fraction. For a long moment—longer than courtesy, longer than safety—neither of them looked away.

Jungkook felt the skin along his forearms tighten. His heart stuttered and then ran a little faster. He held the look because it was too late not to. He watched as Taehyung’s mouth lost its prepared curve, as if what he saw in Jungkook required him to set the performance down carefully. The light along Taehyung’s cheekbones shifted, a rosy color gathered high there, flush or heat or the simple human fact of after-rain.

Taehyung broke it first, a small shake of the head. The grin returned, the real one, yes, but tempered now, its edges knocked in a fraction. He reached for something in his bag without breaking the thread entirely and came up with a small paper packet, off-white, stamped with a sketch of a flower and Hangul in a font that looked hand-cut. He hesitated, then began to slide it across the table toward Jungkook.

Jungkook blinked. The packet came to rest against his laptop. Chamomile & Linden.

“I…” Taehyung said, and the shy came into it now, not embarrassed, just careful, as if he were walking in a room with a sleeping animal. “It helps me. With the dreams. For sleep.” He lifted one hand, palms up, mock-innocent. “Consider it the least threatening contraband I will ever offer a professor.”

Jungkook looked from the packet to Taehyung and back.

He could say no. He should say no. Draw a line, remind them both who he was supposed to be in this equation.

Instead he slipped the packet into the inner sleeve of his satchel with the part of his hand that still remembered slipping a silver chain off his palm and into a box.

“Thank you,” he said, and the words were steady enough to embarrass him with their normalcy.

Taehyung’s shoulders unhitched by a degree. “I’m trying to be a good student,” he added lightly, performing levity for both of them now. “Have all the authentic university experiences. Be disillusioned by grades in new and exciting ways.”

Jungkook bared his teeth briefly in what was close enough to a smile to pass. “Temper your expectations where possible.”

“Never,” Taehyung said, soft and certain, and finally picked up his croissant, tearing it with long fingers.

Jungkook typed. He typed because the posture of typing is useful when you are trying not to think. Words arrived and arranged themselves into shapes that looked like a sentence but were only the footprint of one. The rain beat against the windows, relentless, conversations rose and fell around them.

After a while, Jungkook stood, more abruptly than he intended to. He had no plan beyond standing. Boundaries, he told himself. You set them or they set you. He slid his laptop into his bag, slung the strap across his shoulder, and looked one last time at Taehyung.

“We’ll… see each other Tuesday,” he said, it came out more formal and stiff then he meant it to. He gave the sentence a professor’s cadence.

He did not wait for a reply, didn’t trust himself not to.

The rain hit him fully when Jungkook stepped outside. He did not hurry. He let it have him, coat soaking to heft, shirt going cool along his shoulder blades, hair undone again without pretense. The campus looked briefly like a harbor, paths turned into shallow channels, students hopping between drier spots like sailors. He walked across the the quad at a measured pace, eyes on the slick paving stones, breathing in that wet concrete smell that always reminded him of summer rains he’d tried not to think about.

Home was both a relief and an accusation. He peeled himself out of damp fabric, shed the day in clumsy increments across the bedroom floor. He turned the shower on as hot as the pipes allowed and stepped under the spray; the water hit his skin hard enough to sting. He braced one palm against the cool tile, head bowed, and let the heat pound the rain out of his muscles, the café noises out of his ears, the sight of Taehyung’s eyes out of his frontal lobe.

It didn’t worked, not completely at least, but the edges blurred.

Back in the kitchen, the tea packet waited on the counter. He picked it up, turned it over. The ingredients were unromantic, chamomile, linden blossom, a suggestion of jujube. He almost did the sensible thing and pushed it into the back of a cupboard where other well-meant solutions go to wait a century. Instead he set the kettle on the hob and waited for water to heat.

Steam curled. He poured the water, watched the bag darken, color bleeding into the cup. The smell was a little dusty, like dried grass with a hint of sweetness.

Jungkoo didn’t talk himself into anything, but he didn’t talk himself out of it, either.

He took the cup to bed, propped himself on pillows, and sipped.

He drank half in four slow swallows, then the rest in three. The cup left a damp kiss on the wood when he set it down. He rolled onto his side. His mind, which usually waited at the threshold with a dozen stories and a handful of knives, seemed to have wandered off.

On the nightstand, the sleeping pills watched with their dull white eyes. Jungkook reached out of habit, finger finding the familiar shape of the cap, then hesitated. The apartment creaked once in that old-building way, and the rain softened from wall to curtain. He let his hand fall back to the sheet. He turned his face into the pillow, felt the cotton under his cheek, and closed his eyes.

Jungkook woke to light.

He blinked. The clock on the dresser read 7:12. His brain did the math out of habit, then again just to be sure.

Seven hours.

Jungkook lay very still as if sound might crack whatever spell had been cast. His body felt like something returned. He rolled onto his back and took a deep breath. His throat stung briefly, he lifted knuckles to his eyes and found the small soreness there. He swallowed. He laughed, a single, unrepeatable note.

On the bedside table, the white bottle sat untouched. Next to it, the tea cup held a little cold amber, the tag from the string had torn free and lay on the wood. He pressed the pad of his index finger to the small square, felt nothing but paper, experienced it as miracle anyway.

It was only tea. It was only sleep. It was only rain and a crowded café and a student with a ridiculous smile offering a small kindness.

It was also a bridge.

He thought of the bench. He thought of Sappho, stubborn as tide. He thought of Melo in sunlight and Taehyung under café bulbs.

“Tuesday,” Jungkook said into the quiet.

The sea, for once, stayed outside the glass and let him breathe.

~~~~~

In lecture, Jungkook looked at the board, the back row, the clock, anywhere but the second row and its gravity. He told himself he was a man doing a job.

It didn’t really matter, Taehyung’s attention still found him.

The boy listened with more than ears; he listened like Jungkook was a fire he was trying to understand. Every now and than, against his will, Jungkook’s gaze slipped, glanced off the second row, and landed on Taehyung as if by accident.

Taehyung always met it. He let his eyes map Jungkook without shame: the bracket line near Jungkook’s mouth when he was suppressing a smile, the small, tired shadow under his eyes that have lately lightened, the way his hand fitted a piece of chalk, forefinger inked in white.

Those were the moments Jungkook felt the strange, clean pressure of being compared. Not tp other professors or other men, but to a phantom only Taehyung could see.

Once, midway through a sentence about personal identity as a relation and not a core, Jungkook made the mistake of looking directly into that gaze. He watched color rise along Taehyung’s cheekbones, fast and helpless, like a secret caught in the act of existing. Jungkook finished the sentence perfectly and forgot his own point for the next three minutes.

He slept, though.

Six hours became a number that visited most nights if he brewed the chamomile-linden concoction and set the cup down like a small vow. Sometimes, drifting, he felt himself briefly held by a twin presence: Melo’s laugh from the sun-stunned summer of eighteen and Taehyung’s careful warmth threaded through café steam, overlapping like transparencies. He did not examine the mechanics too closely. He let sleep have him on any terms it offered.

On a Friday that wanted to be winter and couldn’t yet commit, Namjoon decided Jungkook required extracting.

“We’re going out,” he announced at five, leaning in the doorway of Jungkook’s office. “One hour. Two if your company improves my mood.”

“The last time you said that,” Jungkook replied, shutting his laptop with a practiced palm, “we ended up arguing about trolley problems with a stranger at two a.m.”

“An unforgettable evening,” Namjoon said, unrepentant. “Come on. We’ll hydrate with soju.”

The bar had a nostalgic feel to it, chipped lacquer, posters for bands nobody followed anymore, a flickering neon sign in the shape of a fish. The counter was dark wood, carved with initials and the ghost of keys. The house playlist couldn’t decide between early R&B and ballads that had broken hearts before Jungkook had been born.

They took two stools close to the bar, where you could watch the bartender’s hands at work. Namjoon ordered soju and dumplings for both of them, Jungkook did not protest. The first shot burned a path down his throat and loosened something in his chest, the second made the rooms edges blur softly. By the third, that constant grinding ache behind his eyes stepped back a little, like it was taking a break.

“Sleeping any better?” Namjoon asked after the plates arrived, chopsticks poised.

“A little,” Jungkook said. It felt dangerous to name it too precisely, as if the mind were a skittish animal that would bolt at the first loud truth. “Maybe the pills finally….I don’t know.” He let the sentence end in a shrug that was not a lie and not the whole of anything.

He thought of a paper packet on a counter and of how easy it had been to sleep while thinking of a boy who was not allowed to be anything but a student, and of another boy who had once been allowed to be everything.

He did not tell Namjoon that part. He tipped soju into their glasses instead. “To bureaucratic mercies,” he said dryly.

Namjoon clinked, smiled, and let it be.

When they finally stood, the room had warmed their cheeks. Namjoon touched Jungkook’s shoulder at the door. “Text when you’re home,” he said.

Outside, the night air was cool in that way that makes you aware of the skin under your jaw and the inside of your wrists. The bus stop across the street glowed under its strip light; the bench inside was the unremarkable gray. He checked the schedule pinned behind plastic. Of course he’d just missed the bus that would have made things simple. Another was coming. They always were, on paper at least.

He sat.

Neon from the bar slid across the road, painting it purple. The convenience store two doors down thew out a harsh square of light, catching moths and students and a couple who didn’t want to go home yet.

Jungkook leaned back, hands in his coat pockets, and felt the alcohol loosen the knots he had tied to keep himself contained.

A bench is not furniture. Taheyung’s essay drifted back to him, uninvited. In Borges it is an event disguised as a place.

Jungkook looked down at the simple plank and metal, and the present flickered.

Maybe he’s right, he thought, mild astonishment turning the sentence into something almost prayerful.

Maybe he is older where it counts.

Maybe a bench could be a low, stubborn bridge. Across time, across selves, across a twenty-year span that sometimes felt like a lifetime and sometimes like a single wrong turn.

Scooters feathered through traffic, music leaked around the corner from a karaoke room. The city made its usual noise, Jungkook let it set its grace note and closed his eyes.

Tongyeong came back on the first breath. The harbor light, wide and flat, the day scorched bright. They were boys in their school shirts, sleeves rolled, bags bumping their spines as they wandered, past the fishmongers hosing flanks with a practiced flick, past a row of ajummas gossiping with crossed arms and eyes like radar. The day smelled like diesel and salt and tangerine peels thrown at gulls for sport.

They had stopped at an ice-cream shop, Jungkook had chosen vanilla out of habit, Melo had chosen melon. Outside, in the brightness that makes everything forgiveable, Melo leaned over and took a too-large lick of Jungkook’s cone, tongue a quick, audacious swipe. A smear remained, Melo wiped it away with his thumb and sucked it clean with a gaze and a grin that almost made Jungkook push him against the wall and forget the town existed.

Almost.

They walked to the end of the harbor where the hulls were fewer and the eyes quieter. A bench waited, sun-bleached and slightly crooked, bolts bright against gray wood. They sat with their shoulders almost touching, close enough to share the same patch of air and far enough that anyone watching would see only two boys cataloging boats.

Tongyeong was small, Tongyeong was rumor. Hands stayed civil, mostly. Melo’s smallest finger, treacherous, hopeful, performed its own minor rebellion: it brushed Jungkook’s pinky once, twice, then stayed.

To Jungkook it was everything.

The sun dropped slowly, painting the water in gold streaks. Boats wrote small diagonals across the blue. They talked about train rides they hadn’t taken, books they would insist on leaving for each other in libraries they hadn’t found, a cheap apartment someday with a lemon tree on a windowsill that absolutely would not thrive but they would pretend it had agency.

The day took its time leaving.

When it was finally safe, shadows thrown long enough that the world forgot to monitor, Jungkook let his hand move without asking permission. He took Melo’s fully. Fingers laced. Melo’s breath caught, soft, astonishing. To this day Jungkook could still hear the sound echoing around his ribs.

A boot scuffed near his knee pulled him back.

Jungkook opened his eyes. For an unkind half second, the bench performed its trick too well. Melo, there, walking up the sidewalk, hair messy from the wind, grinning the way someone grins when a song they love has just come on.

Then the lens corrected, the overlay slid, and his vision corrected itself.

Taehyung.

He paused just outside the bus shelter, adjusting his balance. Not completely drunk but loose enough around the edges that Jungkook could tell he’d had a good night. Color burned high across his cheeks, his eyes had that glossy look alcohol gives when it’s stripped off your last layer of performance.

When he saw Jungkook, he faltered. That in itself was new, Taehyung didn’t usually look unsure of himself. Then their eyes met and Jungkook watched him make a decision, small, but visible.

He stepped closer.

Near, his flush read more intimately, a heat that sat exactly where it was supposed to on his cheekbones .Up close, the expression he wore was almost painful in its honesty, unguarded without being unkind, like if Jungkook asked him a real question, he might actually answer it.

Jungkook realized he was staring and cleared his throat, a stupid and small sound, but it gave him something to do besides gawking.

“Professor,” Taehyung said, careful with the word, as if he knew it had weight. “Enjoying your weekend?”

Jungkook produced a nod that could be identified as such. “Went out with a colleague,” he added, ridiculous how quickly loneliness demanded an alibi. “I…um…missed the bus.”

Taehyung’s mouth tugged as if this had been fate’s plan all along. He glanced down the empty road, then sat beside him, leaving only a hand-span of space.

The bench had room and then it didn’t.

Silence pooled. Jungkook watched the way the sodium light kissed the contour of Taehyung’s jaw. His thoughts started and stopped, unwilling to risk the wrong sentence. Alcohol made him slightly braver and also less elegant.

He said the wrong thing for the right reason. The soju had shaved his caution thin.

“Thank you again,” he blurted, a beat, a swallow, “for the tea.” He looked down as if the bench had instructions carved into it. “It helps.”

He heard the joy hit Taehyung before he saw it, a small breath and then the grin, unguarded and boyish.

Taehyung looked like he might say something and didn’t. He looked like he might not and did.

“Can I…tell you something strange?”

“Of course,” Jungkook said carefully, his chest tightening.

“The class,” Taehyung began. “Philosophy, your lectures, they… I don’t know. It’s… it did something.”

Jungkook turned his head. “To your writing?” he asked, because he still knew how to be a professor.

Taehyung shook his head once, huffed a small laugh to himself. “To my nights.” He toyed with the hem of his sleeve, eyes down, then back up with a practiced courage that looked new even as he wore it. “I’ve had this nightmare forever. Since I was small.” He swallowed. “But since the semester started, it’s different.”

Jungkook’s heartbeat picked up.“Different how?” He did not know which answer he feared more, he did not know how to want less.

“I still dream of the sea,” Taehyung went on. “But… I’m not drowning. I’m on a boat. The sun is stupidly bright. The water is too calm. I can hear…” He smiled, shy, like he knew he was about to say something that would sound like fiction. “…some little bell, somewhere.” He shook his head as if to unclench sense from sentiment. “And I’m… not alone.”

Jungkook couldn’t bring breath in for a moment. The Haedam rocked once in memory. His hands stayed where they were.

Taehyung swallowed. Fear and desire remodeled his face in real time, his eyes looked suddenly unsure, as if he was about to step off something high.

“You are there, too.”

The sentence came out so simply it disarmed itself.

Taehyung’s eyes widened the barest fraction after the words were in the air, as if he’d only just realized what his mouth had done on his behalf.

His tongue darted out quickly to wet his bottom lip, leaving it a little shinier, a little bitten. A nervous habit Jungkook had already filed in the archive.

The bench became the narrowest kind of bridge.

“And…” Taehyung broke on the word and then patched himself back together. “I keep trying to turn it into a metaphor because that’s safer. But it’s not. It’s just… you. And me. There.”

He met Jungkook’s eyes again and something in him steadied.

“In the dream,” he said, words narrowing to a whisper that had to be carried by the space between their bodies or it would not make it at all, “it’s the two of us on that boat. I can’t figure it out.”

A small pause. “It’s driving me crazy. Because it feels like I know you.”

Taehyung leaned in, not much, too much, enough that Jungkook could feel the warmth coming of him. “There’s one sentence,” he said. “I say it to you. On the boat. Over and over. Like a prayer. Like a rule.”

He gave it back to the only person who could recognize it.

“If I go first,” he breathed, voice low but steady, “I’ll come back and find you.”

The world fell out from under Jungkook, the bus stop, the bar, all of it went thin around the edges. That one line cut through twenty years and landed exactly where it had started.

“And when we read Sappho…” Taehyung shook his head, as if scolding himself for believing in literature, “that line. Someone, I tell you, will remember us. Even in another time. It felt like an answer to a question I had just…forgotten.”

He looked at Jungkook like the answer might be sitting somewhere on his face. Something softened in him, almost unbearably kind.

“In this dream,” Taehyung said very quietly, “I remember you.”

He looked at him fully then. “Do you…”

He searched Jungkook’s face one more time, the question barely more than breath.

“Do you remember me, too?”

Every muscle Jungkook owned, every nerve and old hurt and small gladness, lifted its head and shouted Yes so loudly he could feel it in his teeth.

Yes, across a cove and two decades.

Yes, on a boat with a bell and a boy and a promise he should not have known he couldn’t keep.

Yes, in a lecture hall with a poem and a blazer pocket and a mouth that curved around Professor like the beginning of a different noun.

Jungkook opened his mouth to say it. The yes was there, ready, almost out.

Then the world snapped –

~  
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Jungkook woke like a man thrown to the surface.

His chest bucked, breath jackknifed into him, his heartbeat slammed around. He lay still, cheek stuck to cotton, light pressed through the window in a pale slab, the kind that turns dust into snow.

He knew this room and didn’t. A bed not quite a double, generous for one body, a negotiation for two. A desk against the wall under the window, with scuffed wood, a pen cup stolen from a café, a cracked plastic ruler, a stack of photocopied worksheets clipped neatly in the corner. A poster over the desk, edges curling where the tape had given up: g.o.d in blue-toned glory, the paper shiny in a way posters stopped being later. A calendar pinned beside it with a cartoon puppy in the corner, Sundays printed in red. A Soccer ball near the door, scuffed and scribbled on.

Jungkook ran his fingers through his hair and across his face, palms braced as if he could catch whatever the story had left behind.

He knew something important had just happened. No, not just happened, been given to him. A dream, vast and rinsed with meaning, he could feel it receding, the way an ebb tide retires from sand, irrefutable wet left behind.

The lecture hall, the chalk dust on his fingers, the boy in the second row with Melo’s face, all of it tore away like paper in water, leaving only the ache.

The feeling was still there, but the details were already slipping away.

Water sounded, then stopped. The bathroom door opened with the protesting creak of old wood. A boy stepped out in nothing but boxers, a towel slung around his neck and one end dragged over his hair.

Melo.

Sun had painted his skin golden. Even rinsed of salt and slicked by fresh water, he still smelled faintly of sea, beads of water tracking the lines of his ribs. His hair, ordinarily a messy thesis, now lay in dark, obedient waves until the towel mussed it back into its native mischief. The silver chain at his throat caught a knife of light and threw it back. A faint nick on his left knee remembered a fall from last week that had made them both laugh.

He grinned when he saw Jungkook watching, the grin that always began in his eyes and lit his whole face from the inside.

“Finally awake, Sleeping Beauty?” he said, voice bright. “You were so out, I was gonna check you still had a pulse. I almost thought the Chamisul did you in.” He made a face that was half pity, half pride. “That last round at the pojangmacha was your hubris talking.”

Jungkook swallowed. The word Chamisul clicked into place with the clink of green bottles, laughter blown warm under a tent’s red plastic, Melo’s hand sneaking under the table to squeeze his knee.

His mouth was dry, his head felt thick, but not in the usual hangover way. He’d dreamed something. The knowledge of it was everywhere, the content had gone wherever important things go to wait.

Melo tiptoed into the chaos with practiced ease, retrieving a T-shirt from the back of the chair with two fingers and inspecting it as if it might have grown a stain in the night.

“You can sleep more,” he said, glancing over with a smirk as he yanked the shirt over his head and it tried to cling to damp. “But I have to go or my uncle will kill me. He wants me out on Haedam before the tide turns. Old men and their calendars.” He rolled his eyes with filial affection, scrubbing at his hair with the towel again.

The word Haedam hit like a bell.

Something stirred in Jungkook that was not nausea and not guilt;more a prickling urgency that ran up his spine. He lifted on an elbow, voice still rough from sleep. “What’s the date?” he asked.

Melo laughed. “Wow. You were drunk-drunk.” He padded to the calendar, towel around his neck like a boxer between rounds, thumb skimming the paper. “September third,” he announced.

The number looked ordinary in ink. The calendar’s header, which Jungkook had not truly seen, came into focus all at once.

2004.

The room tilted. 

2004. September 3rd.

Jungkook could not have said why the plea rose, only that it did. His heart hammered like a thing in a trap. He lifted his head fully, looked at Melo and said, hoarse, “Stay. Stay with me.”

Melo’s laugh came instantly, the sound he always made when Jungkook was clingy for fun. He crossed the room in three long steps, bent, and ruffled Jungkook’s hair into an even more improbable architecture, fingers warm against his scalp.

“It’s only a few hours,” he said lightly. “I’ll hop on Haedam, listen to my uncle shout about nets and be back before you can miss me. You, sir—” he poked Jungkook’s sternum “you need to sleep off your war with soju. Blink, and I’ll be here.”

He turned again, reached for his jeans crumpled on the chair, for his socks on the windowsill. Panic surged through Jungkook so pure it stripped him of eloquence. He didn’t know why in a way he could explain, he knew why in every way that mattered.

He said his name.

“Taehyung.”

Jungkook almost never did. He had christened him Melo —Melody—because the boy moved like music and spoke like it too, because laughter looked better on him when it had a note, because the first time he had taken Jungkook’s hand and pulled him onto the deck, the sea had kept time.

Kim Taehyung belonged to report cards and scoldings, to birthdays sung awkwardly in living rooms; Melo belonged to summer and secrets and a boat with a name that meant daybreak.

Taehyung only ever heard that name when Jungkook wanted him to really listen. When something serious sat between them instead of jokes and pet names and the safety of “Melo” whispered into sun and skin and salt.

Taehyung froze, then turned back. The room shrank, bed to doorway and nothing but the thread between them.

Jungkook’s voice dropped on its own. He tried again and it came as a whisper, which somehow felt more like truth. “Please, Taehyung. Don’t go. Stay here. With me.”

Something old and deep moved behind Taehyung’s eyes. For a breath the sea was there, his eyes looked darker, wider, like they were holding more years then he lived.

“Okay,” he said. He didn’t argue, didn’t tease. “Okay.”

His jeans slipped from his hand back to the chair, he let the towel fall on top of the abandoned soccer ball. Then he walked back to the bed and slid under the covers like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Taehyung fit against him the way he always had, like the bed remembered them. Back to chest, his spine warm along Jungkook’s front, their legs winding into a familiar knot. Jungkook’s arms came around him on instinct, he found Taehyung’s forearms and laced their fingers.

The room smelled like mint soap and boy and the warm breath of the sea that had slipped in somehow and decided to be gentle for once. The poster’s corner lifted and fell with the breeze from the old fan; the calendar hung very still.

Jungkook pressed his mouth to the place where Taehyung’s hair met his forehead, breathing him in. His voice came out low, almost soundless against Taehyung’s skin.

“I know I’ll find you in every life,” Jungkook whispered, a promise he had no idea he’d already started, “but please… stay a little more with me in this one.”