Chapter Text
Day 3
March 9th, 2026
He had pulled himself so far beneath the bed that the wall pressed cold against the back of his skull. Dust coated his hands and stuck beneath his fingernails where he had clawed at the floorboards. The space under the mattress was barely high enough for him to breathe comfortably, yet every breath still felt loud. He tried to take them slowly, silently, but panic kept interrupting the rhythm of his lungs. Each inhale caught halfway, sharp and uneven, and he could hear the wet tremor in his own throat no matter how tightly he covered his mouth.
The room remained almost entirely dark apart from the narrow light slipping through the shutters. Outside, the farolas burned with their dull orange glow in the early morning, and their light reached weakly across the bedroom floor in thin bars that stopped just short of the bed.
Then the hallway floor creaked.
The sound halted him completely. Not just his breathing, but thought itself. He listened as the steps approached with no clear rhythm to them, slow and uncertain, bare feet dragging lightly against the wood. There was hesitation in every shift of weight, as though the body had to remember what came next before taking another step. When the bedroom door finally opened, the hinges gave a low, familiar groan that might once have meant nothing to him. Now it seemed loud enough to split the night apart.
At first he saw only feet emerging into the faint light from outside. Pale skin. Narrow ankles. Soles darkened with blood. They moved carefully across the room, pausing often. She was searching for him.
When it finally made a noise, his entire body tightened so violently it hurt.
Jungkook-ah, are you here?
The voice that drifted through the room belonged to his mother so completely that for one terrible moment his mind accepted it before the rest of him could resist. The softness of it, the tired warmth in it, the shape of each word; all of it was hers. Yet beneath the familiarity there was an emptiness that made his stomach turn. The pauses lasted too long. The tone arrived a fraction too carefully, as though the voice had been assembled piece by piece instead of spoken naturally.
The bed gave a quiet creak overhead as weight settled onto the mattress.
His mother began to sing a lullaby.
He pressed himself flatter against the floor, though there was nowhere left to move. The smell reached him before anything else did, damp and metallic, carrying the faint sweetness of decay underneath it. Something brushed against the blanket above him. Fingers, searching slowly across the fabric. He could hear the subtle cracking of joints each time the hand flexed. Tears slid silently down his face, disappearing into the dust beneath him. What horrified him most was the part of himself that still reacted to that voice with recognition, the instinctive need to answer it, to crawl out from hiding and believe this was still his mother standing in the room.
Then the movement stopped entirely.
In the silence, he understood that she had heard him.
A strand of dark hair slipped through the side of the mattress first, hanging motionless in the narrow gap between bed and floor. Slowly, impossibly slowly, a face lowered after it until one eye became visible in the darkness beneath the frame. The eye did not look human anymore. It was too wide, red, fixed on him with patient certainty. Yet the mouth beneath it carried the shape of his mother's smile so perfectly that something inside him gave way at the sight of it.
In that moment he no longer felt fear as sharply as before. Fear required the belief that escape remained possible. What settled over him instead was a sickening certainty that whatever had entered his bedroom was wearing his mother's voice, her face, her gestures, and that somewhere downstairs the real version of her had already stopped existing.
He wished then, with sudden and unbearable clarity, that he had died before seeing any of it.
⸻
Day Zero
March 6th, 2026
The morning had the colour of wet cement.
Clouds hung low over the city, flattening the sky into one uninterrupted sheet of grey that made even the tallest buildings seem smaller. It had rained sometime during the night; the streets still carried the dark sheen of it, and the air smelled faintly of soaked pavement and cold metal. At that hour the roads remained mostly empty apart from the occasional bus dragging itself through intersections with dim headlights glowing against the mist.
He ran through it all at a steady pace, breath controlled, hands tucked loosely against the sleeves of his hoodie. The cold bit pleasantly at his face. Seoul always felt different before the city fully woke up. So much quieter and so much less crowded.
A cluster of birds burst from the edge of a rooftop ahead of him, their wings beating sharply against the air. The sound startled him enough to break his rhythm for half a second. They rose together in a frantic shape against the grey sky, circling once before disappearing between apartment blocks. Their cries lingered in the silence afterward.
He kept running.
The route had become habit months ago. Down the narrow streets behind the convenience stores, across the small bridge over the drainage canal, around the fenced sports field belonging to a nearby middle school, then back uphill toward the student housing blocks near campus. His legs burned pleasantly by the time the familiar buildings came into view. Rows of concrete and glass stacked tightly together, practical and ugly in ways he had learned to appreciate. There was something honest about structures built without any intention of impressing people.
He liked architecture for the same reason.
Most of his professors at SNU treated it less like engineering and more like problem solving through shape and material. That suited him perfectly. He liked creating things with his hands, liked the quiet concentration of sketching until hours disappeared unnoticed. His notebooks were crowded with drawings that had little to do with coursework most of the time: castle towers with impossible foundations, old cathedrals with narrow corridors hidden beneath them, strange mechanical artifacts covered in tiny structural details only he cared about. Even during lectures his fingers rarely stayed still for long. If he was not drawing, he was folding paper apart or carving absentminded patterns into eraser corners with a penknife.
The student block stood at the end of a narrow incline, seven stories of stained concrete and small balconies cluttered with drying laundry. He slowed to a walk near the entrance, breathing harder now, sweat cooling uncomfortably against his back. Inside, the stairwell smelled faintly of dust, instant noodles, and somebody's cigarette smoke drifting in from an upper floor.
The elevator doors stood open on the ground level as if inviting him to reconsider his usual hatred of them. He ignored the offer immediately. The thing worked maybe half the time, and whenever it did move, it crawled upward with a miserable metallic screech that sounded less like machinery and more like an animal dying inside the walls. He had once been trapped in it for forty minutes with grocery bags and a girl from the fourth floor who cried the entire time. Since then he preferred the stairs.
By the time he reached the apartment door, his breathing had turned uneven again. He unlocked it and stepped inside just in time for a pair of underwear to hit him.
He stopped, stared down at the fabric hanging from his shoulder, and immediately recognised the pattern of tiny red cars scattered across it.
Across the room, Kang Minjae, his best friend of many years, sat cross-legged on the couch with his laptop balanced against one knee. The blue light from the screen reflected dimly across his glasses. Empty snack wrappers and energy drink cans covered most of the coffee table around him.
Minjae studied cybersecurity and spent most nights awake until sunrise doing things he described vaguely as lab work, though from the sound of it he was either preventing cyberattacks or actively causing them. He was one of those irritating people who managed to look relaxed no matter how little sleep he got. Even now his hair stuck out unevenly in every direction, yet somehow appeared intentional.
His underwear had apparently been sitting abandoned beside the washing machine long enough for Minjae to become personally offended by it. He peeled it off his shoulder slowly, still catching his breath from the run, while Minjae returned his attention to the glowing screen as though nothing unusual had happened at all.
"Good morning to you too," Jungkook huffed, tossing the underwear toward his bedroom door. "Did I piss on your cereal and I didn't know about it?"
"Yah, do your laundry," Minjae did not look up. "I'm not your mother, I should not have to wash your underwear."
"Come on, hyung," he bent to untie his shoes. "I was going to do it just now after my run."
"Yeah, sure. Whatever."
Jungkook pushed himself upright again and wandered toward the kitchen, grabbing the carton of milk directly from the fridge before Minjae could complain about that too. His thoughts moved too quickly most mornings, one thing colliding into the next before he could properly hold onto any of them. Laundry became sketching halfway through picking clothes up from the floor. Sketching became reorganising his desk. Reorganising his desk somehow turned into spending an hour researching medieval staircases because he suddenly needed to know how defensive spiral designs worked in old castles.
Then Minjae would come home and ask why there were socks in the freezer again.
In Jungkook's defence, that had only happened twice.
He heard the couch creak as the older man stood and crossed toward the kitchen.
"I found this apartment in Hanam," this makes Jungkook furrow his eyebrows in surprise.
"Hanam? I thought you weren't planning in staying in Seoul after graduation."
The older hummed. "I was thinking about it for a while. Seoul is some bullshit, I won't take that back ever. But it will give me the best opportunities career-wise. Plus, you are still here."
Jungkook rolled his eyes. "I'm just a plus?"
"A big one," Minjae poked him on the cheek. "Aren't you happy now? I know you would have missed me to death."
"You think too highly of yourself, Minjae."
The older almost pouted. "I thought I was hyung."
The apartment settled into a comfortable quiet afterward. Rain threatened somewhere beyond the windows without fully beginning, and the hum of distant traffic drifted faintly up from the street below. Minjae moved around the kitchen preparing coffee with the same unhurried precision he applied to everything else. Jungkook watched him absently from the counter stool and felt, unexpectedly, a small heaviness settle somewhere beneath his ribs.
April was close.
Only a few more months before Minjae graduated and moved out of the student block for good. The thought had existed vaguely in the background for weeks now, but suddenly it felt sharper standing there in the dull morning light. Someone else would take the empty room after that. Some random student he would have to pretend to get along with while they left dishes in the sink and played videos too loudly at night.
He already knew it would not be the same.
Jungkook tried imagining this apartment without him in it and found he disliked the picture immediately.
"You smell terrible, seriously," Minjae complained. He will miss his complaining the most. "What crawled under your armpits and died?"
"Yah! You've smelled worse!"
"Don't talk back to me, I'm older. Show hyung some kindness and go shower."
By the time Jungkook grabbed fresh clothes and a towel, Minjae had already returned fully to his work, shoulders slightly hunched toward the glow of the laptop. The rapid clicking of keys followed Jungkook out into the hallway, he was sure he heard an and for God's sake, do your damn laundry! before the door closed.
Doors lined both sides of the corridor in identical rows, most of them still closed, though muffled movement drifted occasionally through the thin walls: running water, a cough, music playing quietly somewhere far down the floor.
As he walked toward the shared bathrooms, a guy stepped out from the door that leads to the stairs. He recognised him, he lived right across the hall. He was followed closely by a girl Jungkook had never seen before. She kept her hood pulled low despite the warmth inside the building. The guy laughed quietly at something she murmured and reached back to tug her along by the wrist.
Jungkook knew immediately he was one of the students constantly slipping cash to the front guard so girls could stay overnight despite the building rules. The old man downstairs pretended to care for exactly long enough to negotiate the price.
The couple passed him without much attention until the girl glanced up.
Their eyes met only for a second.
There was a large, red mark spread across the white of her left eye. It was dense, deep in colour, sitting against the sclera like spilled ink beneath glass. It seemed almost swollen. The kind of redness that made the eye look feverish.
She blinked once, and the strange pulse of colour shifted faintly with the movement.
Then she looked away and continued down the stairs without acknowledging him further.
The shared bathroom at the end of the hall was bright enough to hurt his eyes after the dim corridor outside. White tiles reflected the overhead fluorescent lights harshly across every surface. A row of sinks and mirrors stretched along one wall, while the showers stood opposite behind faded green curtains. The room smelled strongly of soap and steam trapped permanently inside old ventilation.
He dropped his towel and clean clothes onto a plastic chair near the farthest stall before turning the shower on.
Warm water hit the back of his neck almost immediately, drawing a long breath from him before he could help it. The heat loosened the lingering tightness in his muscles from the run, melting slowly through his shoulders and spine while steam gathered thickly around him. He tipped his head back beneath the spray and closed his eyes until he couldn't think anymore of red.
By the time Jungkook finished dressing and gathered his dirty clothes into a loose pile beneath one arm, the steam from the shower had already begun cooling on his skin. His hair still dripped faintly at the ends as he stepped back into the corridor.
Then he stopped.
Both apartment doors ahead stood wide open.
Students crowded the narrow hallway outside the room across from his, some standing frozen near the entrance while others spoke over one another in sharp, confused bursts. The noise spilling from inside was chaotic in a way that immediately tightened something in his chest. Furniture scraped violently against the floor. Something shattered. Someone yelled in pain, raw and panicked.
Jungkook's grip loosened.
The laundry slipped from beneath his arm and hit the floor in a soft heap he barely noticed.
He was already moving before he fully understood why.
The students near the doorway shifted reluctantly as he pushed through them, and the scene inside struck him all at once so hard his mind struggled to arrange it into something understandable.
"Hyung?"
The word came out thin and strangled.
Minjae was bent over the girl on the bed, one knee dug hard into the mattress to keep her pinned down while both hands forced her upper body flat against the sheets. His face was drawn tight with effort, hair hanging loose into his eyes as he struggled to hold her still. The muscles in his arms shook visibly with the strain. She thrashed beneath him with frightening force, twisting violently enough to make the entire bedframe slam against the wall over and over.
Her mouth was covered in blood.
It glistened wetly across her chin and teeth every time she snapped her head sideways, jaw opening wide with sharp animal sounds that did not resemble screaming anymore. Red streaked the sheets beneath her face. Red soaked Minjae's sleeve where her mouth had brushed against him during the struggle.
For one suspended second, that was all Jungkook could see.
Red.
Then his eyes dropped toward the floor.
The boy sat slumped against the side of the desk, shirt half hanging off one shoulder, one hand clamped desperately over the other. Blood spilled thickly between his fingers no matter how hard he pressed down. The wound across his shoulder looked wrong in a way Jungkook's brain resisted processing at first: too deep, too uneven, skin torn apart rather than cut. Beneath the blood he could see exposed flesh shifting as the boy trembled violently against the floorboards.
His face had gone pale grey with shock.
Jungkook felt his stomach lurch so suddenly he nearly gagged.
A sharp metallic smell flooded the room, thick enough to taste. His pulse began hammering against his throat painfully fast while his vision threatened to narrow around the edges. He hated blood. Always had. Even small injuries made his body react before his brain could catch up, nausea rushing through him hot and immediate.
The girl jerked upward again with enough force to nearly throw Minjae backward.
"Hold her legs!" someone shouted from the doorway, though nobody moved.
Jungkook stumbled back instead.
His breathing turned shallow as instinct overtook thought completely. He rushed across the hall toward his own apartment, nearly slipping against the floor before catching himself on the wall. His hands shook so badly he almost dropped his phone trying to unlock it.
Ambulance? Police? Building security?
His thoughts collided too fast to organise properly. Which one came first? What was he even supposed to say? There had been a fight, except it did not look like a fight. The wound on the boy's shoulder replayed violently in his head. Torn skin. Blood. Teeth.
He pressed the emergency call button anyway.
The operator answered calmly, voice practiced and level against the panic swallowing the room around him.
Jungkook tried explaining, but the words came out fractured. There was a girl attacking someone. No, maybe not attacking anymore. Minjae was holding her down. Someone was badly hurt. There was blood everywhere.
The operator began asking questions in quick succession.
Was the victim conscious?
Yes.
Was the attacker restrained?
Barely.
Was there a weapon involved?
Jungkook looked instinctively back toward the open doorway across the hall. Through it he could still see Minjae struggling to keep the girl pinned as she writhed beneath him with unnatural violence. One of the students had finally stepped forward to help hold her legs down. Her head twisted suddenly toward the doorway, mouth opening.
Even from where he stood, Jungkook caught sight of blood shining between her teeth.
"Does she have a weapon on her?" the operator asked again. "Anywhere nearby? Anything you can identify as the object used in the assault?"
Jungkook swallowed hard against the nausea clawing up his throat.
"No," he said unsteadily. "I don't think she used a weapon."
Another crash sounded from the room.
His grip tightened painfully around the phone.
"I think—" His voice nearly failed him then, "I think she bit him."
⸻
He had never believed in God. Not in one God, nor in any of the hundreds humanity had created for itself across centuries of fear and hope. He never understood how religion became the center of some people's lives, how they surrendered themselves so completely to the comfort of being watched, judged, forgiven. The idea had always unsettled him more than it reassured him.
Yet it takes reaching this point for him to finally understand belief.
The desperate need for something waiting at the end of all this. The hunger to think suffering means something. That there is still hope beyond terror. That death is not simply an ending, but a passage toward something larger and kinder than the world they were left with.
Maybe this is his punishment for never believing. For never looking beyond himself. For thinking the world began and ended only with what he could touch and see.
His turn to pray has come.
He still knows it will not save him.
⸻
The ambulance arrived within minutes, but the police never did.
Sirens cut through the block in a thin, distant wail that grew louder as the vehicle turned into the narrow street below the student housing. For a brief moment, everything outside the room seemed to contract around that sound. People in the hallway shifted back instinctively, making space without fully understanding what they were watching anymore.
The girl had been sedated after a long struggle that left the room in disarray. The bed was skewed off its frame, sheets twisted and stained. Minjae's arms bore red smears where she had managed to scratch or bite during the final moments before the paramedics restrained her properly. The boy was conscious by then, though barely. He kept his shoulder clamped with a makeshift bundle of cloth while one of the emergency workers stabilised him, asking him short questions he could only answer in broken fragments.
Jungkook stayed near the doorway for most of it, unable to move further in.
At some point, someone guided him back into his own apartment without him really registering it happening. Minjae followed shortly after, silent, his expression locked into something controlled but distant, as though his mind was still replaying the force of what had just happened and refusing to settle on any single interpretation of it.
Now they sat on the couch.
The apartment was quieter than usual. It felt suspended. Jungkook sat hunched forward, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped but still faintly trembling. Minjae leaned back with his head tilted against the wall, eyes fixed on nothing in particular.
They had been sitting like that for several minutes when a knock came at the door.
One of the paramedics stepped inside when Minjae opened it, still wearing his gloves, mask pulled down under his chin now that the immediate intervention was over. His gaze moved briefly between them.
"Are you both alright?" His eyes lingered slightly longer on Minjae's sleeves, still marked faintly from the struggle earlier. "Do you need medical attention?"
Neither of them answered immediately.
Jungkook realised he did not know how to answer a question like that in a situation like this. His body felt intact, but everything inside him was still catching up to what he had seen. Minjae, on the other hand, gave a small shake of his head.
The paramedic exhaled slowly, then spoke again, tone lower this time.
"There had been an unusual number of violent incidents reported since the previous night across the city." He did not elaborate further, but the implication sat uncomfortably in the air between them. "I advised to stay inside unless absolutely necessary, keep your doors locked, and avoid contact with anyone behaving erratically. Don't try to get involved again."
"Are you saying I should just let it happen?" Minjae raised his eyebrows. "He was screaming for help."
"I'm saying don't try to be a hero."
Jungkook finally spoke, voice low and steady in a way that did not quite match the situation. "What about the police? Why did they not come?"
"I'm not too sure. I believe police units are currently busy."
That detail lingered after he finished speaking. He repeated the instructions once more, more firmly this time, before stepping back out into the corridor.
The door closed quietly behind him.
For a moment neither Jungkook nor Minjae moved.
The apartment seemed smaller than it had been that morning.
Eventually Jungkook leaned back against the couch, staring at the ceiling as if expecting something there to explain what had just happened. His mind kept trying to reorder the memory into something understandable, but every attempt stopped at the same point: the girl's mouth.
Teeth. Teeth. Teeth. Teeth. Teeth. Te—
Jungkook let out a quiet breath through his nose.
"What the fuck, hyung. What the fuck was that?"
"I don't know, Kook-ah. I really don't know."
⸻
The first thing Jungkook noticed was the colour leaving Minjae's face.
It reminded him unpleasantly of fruit forgotten too long on a kitchen counter, the kind that softened from the inside before the skin fully gave it away. Until all you can see is white. He kept looking at the older man throughout the morning and finding small changes each time he glanced back. His skin seemed duller. His lips drier. There was a strange heaviness settling into his features, as though exhaustion had sunk beneath the surface of him and was spreading outward.
Jungkook believed it must be an infection.
That made sense. The scratches on Minjae's arms had broken skin. The girl had been bleeding from the mouth. Human bites were dangerous; he remembered hearing that somewhere before. Full of bacteria. Easy to infect. Maybe that was all this was.
Three hours after the ambulance had left, Minjae developed a fever.
At first it was only slight. Enough for Jungkook to notice the warmth radiating from him whenever he passed nearby, enough for sweat to begin gathering faintly near his temples despite the cool air inside the apartment. Minjae brushed it off when asked, though his voice sounded rougher than usual.
Eventually Jungkook forced him into bed.
The older man looked strangely subdued beneath the blankets, dark hair damp against the pillow while the weak afternoon light flattened across the room in pale grey shapes. Jungkook sat beside him with a wet cloth he kept rinsing under cold water in the bathroom sink every few minutes. The apartment smelled faintly medicinal now from painkillers and antiseptic cream spread uselessly across shallow wounds that did not look severe enough to justify this kind of fever.
Minjae kept his eyes closed most of the time.
Jungkook pressed the cloth gently against his forehead again.
"You're burning up."
A faint sound escaped Minjae that might have been amusement.
"I feel like you're the hyung now," he murmured eventually, voice hoarse from dehydration. "Feels nice to be taken care of."
Jungkook clicked his tongue softly and adjusted the cloth.
"I always had to take care of you when we were kids," he said. "Always getting into fights with older boys. Why would I stop now?"
Minjae smiled slightly at that, though the expression barely lasted before exhaustion swallowed it again.
The hours that followed stretched strangely.
Outside, the city continued existing somewhere beyond the apartment walls, but it felt distant now. Muted. Jungkook tried the television at one point, only to find emergency broadcasts interrupting regular programming every few minutes. Reports of assaults. Riots. Violent incidents spreading across different districts. The anchors themselves looked unsettled beneath their professional voices.
He turned it off eventually.
Five hours after the attack, Minjae's fever became frightening.
The heat coming from his body no longer felt normal. It radiated through the blankets in waves strong enough that Jungkook could feel it the moment he entered the room. When he touched the older man's forehead, instinct made him pull his hand away almost immediately. There was something burning beneath his skin.
He tried everything he could think of. Cold water. Fever medication. Nothing changed. Sweat soaked through the collar of his shirt and dampened the bedsheets beneath him while his breathing grew uneven and shallow.
Sometime after afternoon he slipped fully into delirium.
Jungkook sat beside the bed listening to him mumble through restless sleep, unable to make sense of most of the fragmented words leaving his mouth. He spoke about Jungkook often without seeming aware of it. A rough, exhausted sentence wondering what his life would have looked like if Jungkook had decided not to befriend him at all.
The words lodged unexpectedly deep beneath Jungkook's ribs.
Then Minjae began mumbling about his father in a voice Jungkook had never heard from him before. Younger somehow. Vulnerable in a way that made Jungkook look away instinctively, as though overhearing something private. There was no mention of his mother at all.
The fever continued climbing.
At some point Jungkook tried calling emergency services again. His hands shook while holding the phone, exhaustion and anxiety beginning to blur together after hours spent watching Minjae worsen in front of him. The call did not even connect this time. The line remained dead no matter how many times he tried.
A pressure had settled over the building during the past few hours, something difficult to explain but impossible to ignore. Student housing was never truly silent. There were always footsteps in corridors, distant conversations through thin walls, doors opening and closing at odd hours. Yet now the entire floor seemed emptied of movement. No voices. No music. No plumbing humming behind walls.
Nothing.
Jungkook had just finished replacing the cloth against Minjae's forehead when the older man stirred suddenly and opened his eyes.
Relief rose instinctively before freezing in Jungkook's throat.
There was red.
It covered nearly half the sclera in branching crimson fractures. The colour looked unnaturally vivid against the whites of his eyes, dense and inflamed in a way Jungkook had never seen before. As Minjae's gaze drifted unfocused toward him, Jungkook found himself remembering the girl from the hallway that morning with sickening clarity.
His stomach turned so violently he thought for a second he might actually vomit.
Something was terribly wrong.
"Try to sleep," Jungkook said quietly, forcing steadiness into his voice he did not feel.
Minjae's eyes slid shut again almost immediately.
Jungkook stayed frozen beside the bed for another minute before standing abruptly. He knows there is a medical student living one floor below them, he might know what to do.
The hallway outside the apartment felt colder than before. Every light still worked, but the building itself had gone unnaturally still. His footsteps echoed against the concrete as he descended the stairwell and crossed onto the lower floor. Door after door remained shut. No sound came from behind any of them.
When he reached the medical student's apartment and knocked, the noise rang sharply through the silence.
For a moment he considered stepping back, trying another door, maybe even going back upstairs and figure something else. But the thought didn't have time to settle properly before the door in front of him shifted.
It opened only a fraction at first, held on a chain. Just enough just enough for Jungkook to see a strip of the room inside and the face of the student behind it.
His eyes were framed by dark hair that hung loosely and uncombed. The student on the other side looked like he had been pulled out of sleep too abruptly, or had not been sleeping at all. There was a dull heaviness under his eyes, the kind that came from too many days without sleep, but it was the way he looked at Jungkook that made him freeze.
Jungkook realised too late that he must look like a mess.
Hair still damp from earlier, clothes hastily pulled on, face pale. His hands were trembling, fingers flexing slightly against his own palm as if trying to steady themselves. When he tried to speak, the word caught on the way out and came softer than he meant it to.
"Please."
Then the chain slid loose.
The door opened wider.
The boy stepped back without a word, letting him in.
The room inside was dim, curtains drawn despite the early hour. A desk cluttered with notes, textbooks, and an open laptop suggested interrupted work rather than sleep. The air smelled faintly of instant coffee and something metallic, like a coin left too long in someone's pocket. The student closed the door behind him more carefully this time, eyes never fully leaving Jungkook. On the bed was a medical intern ID Card, he read a name:
Kim Taehyung.
"What happened?" he asked finally, voice low and cautious.
Jungkook tried to answer, but the sentence fractured before it could properly form. He started with Minjae, his fever. Then the attack, the girl. The blood. Each detail came out uneven, out of order, as though his mind kept rearranging them while he spoke. He hated how little control he had over it, how the memory of it still felt unreal even while it had clearly happened.
Taehyung listened without interrupting, expression tightening gradually the longer Jungkook spoke. At some point he moved closer to the desk, resting a hand against its edge, like he needed something solid nearby.
When Jungkook finished, there was a pause that felt heavier than anything before it.
"You said she bit him?" He asked carefully.
Jungkook nodded.
"I promise I'm saying the truth."
"I wasn't thinking you were lying. I heard about what happened this morning."
"Still. I know it can be hard to believe."
Taehyung exhaled slowly through his nose, looking away for a moment as if trying to organise thoughts. When he spoke again, his tone had changed slightly, less uncertain but not more comforting:
"Take me to your friend."
⸻
Jungkook didn't really know Kim Taehyung personally.
They had exchanged greetings before, brief nods in the hallway, the kind of polite recognition students develop when they share the same building long enough to stop being strangers but not long enough to become anything else. Hey. Good morning. A glance in passing. That was all. This and Jungkook's intrusive thoughts about him. Now, walking beside him through the corridor and up the stairs, Jungkook was suddenly aware of how strange it felt to rely on someone like that. Someone he couldn't place properly in his life, someone he had never needed before this moment.
Taehyung walked slightly ahead, not rushing him, matching his pace. He didn't ask unnecessary questions while they moved. He had only said he would come, grabbed his small kit, and followed without hesitation. That alone settled something faintly uneasy in Jungkook's chest, though it didn't remove it completely. Trust didn't come from familiarity. Instead it came from the fact that Taehyung didn't behave like someone trying to prove anything.
Still, every step up the stairs made Jungkook more aware of what he was doing. Bringing a stranger into the one place that was supposed to be safe. Into Minjae's room. Into whatever was happening there that he still couldn't properly name.
By the time they reached the apartment, the corridor outside it felt unchanged, but Jungkook no longer trusted that appearance. The door was still slightly open from earlier, just as he had left it in his haste. He pushed it fully open and stepped inside first, Taehyung following close behind without comment.
The apartment was quiet.
Minjae was in his room.
They found him lying on the bed as Jungkook had left him, only now he looked deeper into sleep, as if the fever had pulled him under completely. His chest rose and fell slowly, steady but shallow, and his mouth was slightly open, breath slipping out in soft intervals. The tension that had been in his face earlier was gone, replaced by something disturbingly peaceful. It almost looked like rest. Real rest. The kind that made Jungkook hesitate for a second before stepping closer, as if approaching too quickly might disturb his peace.
Taehyung moved first.
He sat down near the bed and reached for Minjae's wrist, trying to find the pulse there. After a moment of adjustment, he shifted, fingers moving to the side of his neck instead, more careful this time.
"His pulse is low," Taehyung said after a few seconds, "but stable."
Jungkook stayed standing near the edge of the bed, watching without fully realising he was holding his breath. Taehyung carefully lifted one of his eyelids for a closer look.
Jungkook saw it fully then.
The eye was not just red in patches anymore. It had spread, unevenly but steadily, like a stain seeping through paper. The colour wasn't bright. It was deeper than that, heavier, almost dull in places where it had thickened. It gave the impression of something spreading rather than bleeding, slow and internal, changing the surface without breaking it.
Jungkook felt something cold settle in his stomach.
But Minjae still looked peaceful.
That was the worst part.
He didn't look like someone in danger. He looked like someone finally allowed to rest after too long without it.
An hour passed in pieces.
Taehyung stayed nearby, checking temperature, observing breathing, adjusting the cold cloth. The apartment remained quiet, but it wasn't the same oppressive silence as before. There was movement again: human presence.
At some point Jungkook realised he had stopped bracing himself for the worst outcome every few minutes.
And then Taehyung spoke again, after checking Minjae's forehead once more.
"The fever is dropping."
Jungkook blinked at him, as if he hadn't heard correctly. "Dropping?"
Taehyung nodded slightly. "It's still high, but it's coming down."
Something inside Jungkook loosened. He looked back at Minjae, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest, the steadiness of it compared to earlier. For the first time since the morning, he felt like he could breathe without forcing it.
Maybe it wasn't getting worse.
He didn't say it out loud, but the thought was there anyway, fragile and untested.
Things might not be as terrible as he had thought.
⸻
The clock had crept past ten, and the apartment had settled into a kind of uneasy stillness that didn't feel like rest so much as waiting. Minjae remained in bed, unmoving except for the slow, steady rise of his chest. The fever had not returned in the same violent way as before, but neither had it disappeared completely. It hovered somewhere beneath the surface now, contained but not resolved.
Taehyung sat on the sofa, posture straight but relaxed in a way that made him look slightly out of place in the room, as if he had been placed there rather than having chosen to sit. Jungkook kept catching himself noticing it while he moved around the kitchen preparing tea. The sound of the kettle filled the silence between them, loud in a way it wouldn't normally be. Every now and then, he felt Taehyung's attention on his back, steady and quiet, and it made him straighten without thinking, like his body was adjusting itself to being observed.
When the water finally boiled, Jungkook cleared his throat, more to break the silence than anything else.
"I'm Jeon Jungkook, by the way," he said as he reached for the cups. Then, immediately regretted how unnecessary that sounded.
There was a small pause from the living room.
"Kim Taehyung."
"I know," Jungkook said quickly, then immediately winced at himself. "I-I mean, I saw it. On your ID. So I already— yeah."
A faint hum came from the sofa, not quite amusement, not quite anything else.
Jungkook busied himself pouring the hot water, focusing too hard on the motion. The tea bag dropped in, slowly darkening the liquid into a warm brown. He stared at it for a moment longer than necessary. Sugar? He wasn't sure if Taehyung took sugar. It felt like the kind of detail he should know before offering someone something, but there hadn't been time for anything like that. Everything had been urgent since the morning.
"No sugar, please," Taehyung said calmly, as if reading the thought directly.
Jungkook froze for half a second before continuing as if nothing had happened.
Right.
Of course.
He stirred the tea awkwardly anyway, then carried it over on a small plate, careful not to spill. When he turned, he finally saw Taehyung properly. The light from the room was softer here, and it caught his face in a way that made his features stand out more clearly than before. He looked tired, but not strained. Just observant. Present. His eyes met Jungkook's as he approached, and there was something unsettling about how direct that contact felt.
Jungkook looked away first.
"Which year are you on?" Taehyung asked.
"Fourth year," Jungkook said, then realised the mismatch immediately. "Wait— no. First. I mean I'm first year of architecture. Minjae is in his fourth, cybersecurity."
Taehyung's eyebrows lifted slightly. "First year student living with a fourth year?"
Jungkook nodded, placing the tea down carefully on the table in front of him. "Minjae sorted it out. I don't really know how. He said it would be better to stay together, it makes things easier when you already know someone in the building."
Taehyung nodded slowly, like that made sense to him in a way Jungkook didn't fully understand yet.
"Both from Busan, right?" Taehyung asked.
"Yeah," Jungkook said. "You can tell?"
"A bit. It's the accent."
Jungkook let out a quiet breath of relief at that. At least something normal was still recognisable.
He leaned back slightly against the counter, watching Taehyung take the cup. The silence that followed wasn't uncomfortable in the same way as before, but it still felt unfamiliar. Jungkook wasn't used to filling space like this with someone he didn't know well. With Minjae it never mattered.
Taehyung took a sip of the tea before speaking again, casual but precise. "I'm third year of medicine."
Jungkook blinked, then straightened immediately without thinking. "Ah— I'm sorry, Taehyung-ssi. I didn't know you were older. I shouldn't have spoken informally."
The words came out too fast again, stacked on top of each other before he could slow them down. He felt his ears go slightly warm the moment he said it, already anticipating how unnecessary it sounded.
Taehyung paused, cup halfway lifted.
Then, after a moment, he simply said, "It's fine—"
A sudden sound interrupted him.
It hit through the apartment with enough force that Jungkook felt it beneath his feet before he properly understood what he had heard. A heavy impact from Minjae's room, followed immediately by another. Like furniture being shoved hard against concrete.
Both of them looked toward the hallway at the same time.
Another impact followed, harder now.
Jungkook was already moving before his thoughts caught up with him, his pulse beginning to hammer as he crossed the apartment. The sound came again while he reached the bedroom door, and this time there was no mistaking it. Something wet underneath it. Flesh striking against something unyielding.
The door stood half open.
Minjae was standing at the far side of the room facing the wall.
For a second Jungkook could not understand what he was looking at, because the movement itself was so stripped of instinct or hesitation that it did not resemble anything recognisably human. Minjae's body swayed once, slightly, and then he drove his head forward into the wall again with enough force to shake the frame hanging beside it.
The sound cracked through the room.
Blood marked the wall in dark uneven streaks where his forehead had already split open. It spread across the white paint in smears and spatters, fresh red layered over drying red, and every new impact widened it further. The skin above Minjae's eyebrow had torn badly enough that Jungkook could see the edges of it separating each time he moved. Blood ran down the side of his face and dripped steadily from his jaw onto the floorboards below him.
But Minjae did not react.
That was the thing that rooted terror properly into Jungkook's chest. The complete absence of pain. There was no hesitation in him, no reflex trying to protect himself, no confusion after the impact landed. He simply drew back and hit the wall again.
"Minjae?"
Jungkook barely recognised his own voice.
Another impact.
The wet crack of bone against concrete turned his stomach so sharply he lurched forward on instinct, desperate to stop him before he fractured his skull open completely, but before he could reach him, fingers closed tightly around his wrist.
The grip stopped him hard enough that he stumbled slightly.
Taehyung.
Jungkook looked down at the hand around him and then back toward Minjae in disbelief, panic surging hot and immediate through him. "Let go—"
"Jungkook."
Taehyung's voice stayed low, but the firmness in it cut through him.
Another impact slammed into the wall.
"Hyung!" Jungkook shouted instead, louder now, the word tearing painfully from his throat.
Minjae stopped.
The silence afterward felt monstrous.
He stood completely still facing the wall, shoulders rising and falling slowly, blood continuing to drip from his face in thin streams that pattered softly onto the floor. For one terrible moment Jungkook thought he might do it again.
Then Minjae turned around.
Relief hit first. Fast and instinctive. Relief at the simple fact that he had responded to his voice at all. That somewhere inside whatever this was, Minjae had still heard him.
And then Jungkook saw his face properly.
The wound across his forehead had opened deep enough that blood covered nearly half his face now, darkening his eyelashes, gathering at the corners of his mouth before sliding down his neck. But it was his eyes that made Jungkook feel fear settle fully into him for the first time that night.
The red had spread almost completely across them.
Veins swollen beneath the surface until the whites of his eyes looked drowned in blood. The colour gathered thickly around the pupils, branching outward in ruptured lines. And yet still, his expression remained empty in a way that frightened Jungkook more than violence would have. Minjae looked at them without recognition for several long seconds, his breathing slow and uneven, as though he had surfaced briefly from somewhere very far away and had not yet remembered how to return properly.
Then, almost absently, he lifted one hand and touched the wound on his forehead.
His fingertips came away wet with blood.
Minjae stared at them for a moment with distant curiosity, as though the injury belonged to somebody else.
"Did I do this to myself?"
Minjae's voice came out uneven and thin, stripped raw in a way Jungkook had never heard before. The words trembled apart halfway through the sentence as if speaking itself hurt him. Blood continued running from the wound on his forehead, sliding over his mouth and chin in slow dark streaks, but now his hands had begun shaking too. Small tremors at first until they spread through the rest of him. His lower lip quivered once. Then his chin.
And suddenly he was crying.
The tears mixed with the blood already covering his face, turning everything wet and red as they rolled down his cheeks. Jungkook stared at him in shock because the sight felt impossible somehow, more frightening than the violence from moments earlier. Minjae did not cry. Jungkook had known him since they were children, through fights and funerals and the exhausting years where they both learned how to leave pieces of themselves. He had seen Minjae angry, exhausted, drunk once and deeply regretful after, but never this. Never crying with his whole body shaking around it like something inside him had finally cracked open.
For one strange moment Jungkook was reminded of a statue he had seen as a child while sitting through endless church services his grandmother forced him to attend. A woman carved in pale stone with tears sculpted down her face, frozen forever in grief so complete it seemed to deform her.
Minjae looked like that now.
Like something caught halfway between breaking and becoming.
"What the fuck did I do?" Minjae's voice rose suddenly, rough with panic. "What did I do?!"
The sound tore through Jungkook completely.
He realised too late that he had started crying too. His vision blurred without warning as he looked at Minjae standing there covered in blood, eyes ruined red, crying openly with a terror so naked across his face that Jungkook could barely breathe around it.
Minjae looked frightened of himself.
"Hyung, it's not your fault," Jungkook said quickly, voice shaking hard now. "You need help, okay? We'll get help. We'll figure this out."
He took a step toward him instinctively, wanting to hold onto him somehow, wanting to pull him away from the blood on the wall and the terrible confusion in his face.
Then Minjae's gaze shifted past him.
Toward Taehyung.
The crying stopped almost immediately.
Minjae's expression emptied while he stared at the man standing behind Jungkook near the doorway. The tears still clung wetly to his face, blood still dripping steadily from his chin onto the floor, but something in his eyes changed with terrifying speed.
"M-Mum?"
Minjae's voice cracked so badly around the word that Jungkook almost didn't recognise it at first. The movement forward had stopped as suddenly as it began. Now he stood only a few steps away from them, staring directly at Taehyung with his eyes stretched painfully wide, pupils trembling inside all that terrible red. One hand had fisted itself into the front of Taehyung's shirt before anyone realised he had grabbed him, fingers clinging so tightly the fabric twisted beneath them.
"Mum, did you come to see me?"
He sounded terrified.
Jungkook felt it immediately in the way Minjae's breathing had changed, shallow and uneven like he could not pull enough air into his lungs. His whole body had gone tense around it. Even his shoulders seemed drawn inward slightly, as though some instinct deep inside him expected to be struck.
Taehyung looked caught between shock and uncertainty, his body held rigid beneath Minjae's grip. Jungkook saw his throat move sharply when he swallowed, eyes widening just slightly as Minjae leaned closer.
Minjae tilted his head to one side slowly.
"You came now?" He whispered.
His voice shook harder with every word.
"Now?" he repeated, almost breathless. "After all this time? You come now because I'm finally dying?"
Jungkook felt his stomach twist painfully.
Minjae's face had begun crumbling apart again, terror pulling visibly at every feature. Tears mixed with the blood running down his skin while he stared at Taehyung with desperate intensity, like he was looking at someone he hated and needed at the same time.
"Is that why?" he asked. "You couldn't even look at me before, but now you can? Because I finally look ruined enough for you?"
"Minjae—" Jungkook tried quietly.
But Minjae didn't hear him.
His grip tightened harder around Taehyung's shirt.
"You used to look at me like I was a burden," he said, voice rising unevenly now. "Do you remember that? Every time I walked into a room, you looked at me like I was the biggest mistake of your life."
Taehyung stayed completely still.
Jungkook's chest tightened sharply.
Minjae's face twisted with something so openly wounded that Jungkook almost could not bear looking at him. The grief inside him seemed to peel everything else away — the anger, the confusion, even the terror — until all that remained was a man standing in the middle of his bedroom bleeding through his own tears while staring at someone who was not there.
Taehyung finally spoke.
"I'm not your mother."
The sentence had barely left his mouth when Minjae moved.
One second he stood clutching Taehyung's shirt with shaking hands, and the next he shoved him so hard across the room that the desk overturned beneath the impact. The crack of wood against wall filled the bedroom as Taehyung's body slammed sideways into it, papers and pens exploding across the floor around him. Taehyung let out a sharp groan as he collapsed awkwardly against the floorboards, one arm immediately pulling toward his ribs.
A sound crawled out of his throat then, low and wet and wrong. It vibrated deep inside his chest as he began walking toward Taehyung across the scattered papers, blood still dripping steadily from his forehead onto the floor.
"Minjae!" Jungkook shouted.
The name cracked through the room.
Minjae stopped.
Then he looked at Jungkook instead.
"Hyung—"
Minjae lunged at him.
The force of it knocked the air clean out of Jungkook's lungs. He stumbled backward into the edge of the bed hard enough to send pain shooting through his thigh before Minjae crashed into him fully, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt with enough strength to nearly tear the fabric. The smell hit him immediately: blood and sweat and something sour beneath it, something feverish and rotten trapped in the heat of Minjae's skin.
"Hyung, stop!" Jungkook shouted, panic tearing through his voice now. He shoved hard against Minjae's shoulders, but it barely moved him. "Please, stop!"
Minjae made that sound again.
That horrible choking growl deep in his throat.
And then his teeth snapped inches from Jungkook's face.
Jungkook recoiled instinctively, horror shooting through him so violently his vision blurred. Minjae's jaw clamped shut again with an audible crack of teeth before lunging forward once more, mouth open unnaturally wide now, blood and saliva smeared across his chin while he tried desperately to bite him.
Jungkook shoved at him harder, adrenaline finally kicking fully into his body. He managed to wrench one arm free and drove his fist straight into Minjae's face.
The impact hurt him more than it seemed to hurt the other.
His knuckles cracked painfully against bone, but Minjae barely reacted beyond his head jerking sideways for half a second before snapping right back toward him. There was no shock in his expression. No pain. Just that same terrible hunger widening his ruined red eyes.
"Fuck—"
Minjae slammed him backward onto the mattress.
The air burst from Jungkook's chest as his spine hit the bedframe. Minjae climbed over him immediately, movements jerky but horrifying, pinning Jungkook beneath him while his teeth snapped repeatedly toward his throat and jaw. Jungkook could feel the heat radiating from him, fever burning through soaked clothes and skin alike. Blood dripped from Minjae's forehead onto Jungkook's face, warm and sticky.
Minjae's mouth closed around the shoulder of his shirt instead, teeth sinking through fabric hard enough for Jungkook to feel the pressure bruising underneath. The sound he made while biting down was animalistic, frantic and wet.
Jungkook shoved both hands against his face, trying to keep the snapping jaws away from his neck. Minjae fought him with terrifying strength, head jerking violently as he tried to wrench free enough for another bite. Their faces were so close Jungkook could see blood pooled in the corners of Minjae's eyes, could smell the metallic heat of his breath.
And worst of all, Minjae still looked like Minjae.
Beneath the blood and the ruined eyes and the growling breaths, Jungkook could still see him. Still recognise the shape of his face, the familiar line of his mouth.
Minjae lunged downward again, teeth grazing dangerously close to Jungkook's jaw—
Then suddenly the body above him was ripped sideways off the bed.
Taehyung stood over him holding the broken base of Minjae's bedside lamp with both hands, chest heaving violently. The lampshade had split apart from the impact, wires hanging loose beside the fractured metal stem. For a moment Taehyung looked almost shocked by his own strength, breathing hard as if the act of striking another person had physically hurt him too.
Then Jungkook saw Minjae on the floor.
Blood spread beneath his head in uneven streaks where the lamp had struck him. He lay twisted awkwardly against the overturned papers and broken desk chair, groaning low in his throat while one arm twitched against the floorboards. Jungkook's stomach lurched violently at the sight. The room smelled thickly of iron now, the metallic scent of blood soaked into everything.
"Get up," Taehyung shouted.
Jungkook couldn't move.
Minjae was bleeding so much.
For one terrible second all Jungkook could think was that they had killed him.
Then Minjae moved.
His body jerked upright with horrifying suddenness, fingers clawing against the floor as he pushed himself back onto his feet. Blood poured down the side of his face from the fresh wound on his scalp now, dripping from his chin onto the scattered papers below him, but his eyes remained fixed and horribly awake.
Jungkook felt fear hit him so hard it almost numbed him.
Taehyung grabbed his wrist before he could freeze completely.
"Run!"
The word snapped something inside him back into motion.
They stumbled out of the bedroom together, nearly crashing into the hallway wall in their haste. Jungkook's legs felt weak beneath him, his heartbeat so violent he could hear it inside his ears while Taehyung dragged him toward the apartment door. Behind them came the sound of furniture crashing aside.
Minjae was following.
Jungkook looked back once as they reached the corridor.
He wished he hadn't.
Minjae emerged from the apartment doorway with blood covering all his face now, chest rising unevenly while he stared directly at Jungkook. There was no confusion left in him anymore. No trace of the crying man from minutes earlier. The look in his eyes was fixed entirely on Jungkook with a terrible, starving intensity.
Then another apartment door opened farther down the hall.
A student stepped halfway out, blinking sleepily into the corridor at the noise. His face still looked dazed with interrupted sleep when he glanced toward the commotion.
Minjae moved down the hallway with terrifying speed.
The student barely had time to react before Minjae slammed into him hard enough to drive both of them against the corridor wall. The boy screamed before Minjae grabbed him by the shoulders and sank his teeth straight into the side of his neck.
The scream turned wet.
Jungkook stopped dead.
Blood burst across the student's collar and sprayed the wall behind them in dark streaks while Minjae tore into him with violent, desperate movements. The boy's hands clawed uselessly at Minjae's shoulders, body convulsing in panic while horrible choking noises poured from his throat.
And through all of it, Minjae kept looking at Jungkook.
His mouth remained buried in the student's neck, blood running down his chin in thick streams, but his eyes never left Jungkook's face. There was something unbearable in that stare. Something almost wounded inside the violence of it, as though some buried part of him still recognised who he truly wanted standing there beneath him.
Jungkook felt nausea climb violently up his throat.
The sound of flesh tearing reached them even from halfway down the corridor.
Taehyung pulled hard on his wrist again.
"Don't look," he said sharply.
But Jungkook already had.
⸻
October 3rd, 2016
The final bell rang through the school building in a long metallic whine that made every classroom erupt at once. Chairs scraped against the floor, bags zipped shut, voices rising louder. Jungkook stayed seated for a few seconds longer, pencil still resting between his fingers while students pushed past his desk toward the door. He always waited a little. The rush of bodies made his head feel crowded, anxious.
Outside, the afternoon sky had already gone grey with incoming rain. The classroom windows reflected the fluorescent lights overhead, turning the glass into pale mirrors where Jungkook could see himself hunched over his desk, tie loosened, dark hair falling into his eyes.
Then the classroom quieted.
Four boys stood at the door.
They were older. Their uniforms sat differently on them, sleeves rolled carelessly to the elbows, shirts untucked beneath dark blazers.
Jungkook felt his stomach sink immediately.
The boy at the front stepped inside first. Lee Hyunsu. Fourth year. Son of the school director. He smiled when he reached Jungkook's desk, but there was nothing friendly in it.
"Come outside," Hyunsu said casually. "Back of the grounds."
"I have cram school."
One of the boys behind Hyunsu laughed. "No, you don't."
Hyunsu leaned one hand on Jungkook's desk. "Don't make us drag you there in front of everyone. It's embarrassing."
The classroom had mostly emptied now. The few students left kept their heads down carefully, pretending not to notice. Jungkook had seen that look before. The look people wore when they were relieved something bad was happening to somebody else instead of themselves.
He considered running.
The thought flashed through him quickly and disappeared just as fast. Hyunsu and the others were older, taller, faster. Jungkook was not athletic. He hated running because he could never breathe properly after a few minutes, his chest tightening painfully while everyone else seemed built for it in ways he simply wasn't.
Jeon Jungkook was not a runner.
Much less a fighter.
So instead, he nodded once.
"I'll come."
Hyunsu grinned wider at that and straightened away from the desk. "Good."
The boys left first, still laughing among themselves while Jungkook packed his bag slowly. His fingers shook while he zipped it shut.
The back of the school grounds sat behind the gymnasium where teachers rarely walked unless they absolutely had to. The concrete walls there were stained dark from years of rainwater, and weeds pushed through cracks in the pavement beside old bicycle racks nobody used anymore. Jungkook could smell cigarettes before he even turned the corner.
The boys were waiting there exactly as expected.
Two sat on the low wall looking at something on a phone while another smoked beside them. Hyunsu stood near the building entrance with his hands in his pockets, talking lazily until one of the others noticed Jungkook approaching.
"Jungkook-ah!"
All of them looked up together.
Jungkook tightened his grip on his bag strap and forced himself to keep walking.
Hyunsu approached him slowly, smile gone now. Up close he smelled strongly of smoke and cheap cologne. Before Jungkook could stop, the older boy shoved him hard against the wall, forearm pressing across his throat with enough force to pin him there.
"You got it?"
Jungkook swallowed carefully against the pressure. "No."
Behind them, the others were already digging through his bag, throwing notebooks and pencil cases carelessly onto the ground. One unzipped pouch spilled pens across the pavement.
"There's nothing here," one of them complained.
"Check again."
They are looking for money.
"I said there's nothing."
Hyunsu pressed harder against Jungkook's throat. "Where is it?"
"I didn't bring any."
That earned him a sharp spit across the face.
Jungkook flinched instinctively.
"You think this is funny?" Hyunsu snapped. "My mother gave your teachers enough chances to deal with your attitude."
Something hot and humiliating twisted in Jungkook's stomach at that. He had told teachers before that he was being bullied. They always nodded sympathetically and promised to speak with the boys, but afterward nothing changed except the bullying became meaner, harder.
"You're not getting any more money," Jungkook said before he could stop himself.
The punch came immediately.
It slammed across his face so hard his vision burst white for a second. The side of his head cracked against the wall before gravity seemed to disappear underneath him completely. By the time he realised he had fallen, his knees and palms were already scraping against dirt and concrete.
Voices shouted around him, but they sounded far away now, muffled and distorted like his head had gone underwater. Jungkook blinked rapidly trying to focus. His ears rang painfully.
When he wet his lips with his tongue, he tasted blood.
Warm liquid dripped steadily from his nose onto his mouth and chin.
"Fuck, his nose!"
Someone laughed loudly.
Jungkook looked downward dazedly and realised he was staring at their shoes. White trainers. Scuffed black loafers. Dirt ground into the soles.
One of the boys crouched beside him then.
"You know what I heard?" he asked with cruel excitement brightening his face. "I heard you're a sick fucker."
Jungkook stayed still.
"You're on pills, right? My mother talked to your mother." The boy grinned wider. "She said you're all fucked up in the head."
One of the others laughed behind them. "Seriously? Jungkookie, is that true?"
Something hot spread through Jungkook's chest.
For the first time ever, he really wants to punch his face. He really does. He knows he could do it just for the satisfaction of shutting him up, but he knows he will have it worse if he does. But in a way, they were not wrong.
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.
ADHD.
The word floated uselessly through his mind while blood continued dripping down his mouth. Was that what they meant? Was that how adults spoke about him when he wasn't there? Wrong in ways other people were not. Did his mother say that? Did his mother really say he was a fucked up sick fu—
Then came the sound of running footsteps.
Before anyone reacted, a body crashed violently into the crouching boy beside Jungkook. A foot slammed straight into the side of the boy's head hard enough to send him sprawling sideways across the dirt. Jungkook gasped and scrambled backward instinctively until his spine hit the wall.
"Fuck, it's Kang!"
Kang Minjae.
Everybody knew him. Third year. Fighter. Detentions stacked endlessly behind his name. Rumours about gangs, suspensions, broken noses. Teachers spoke about him with exhausted frustration and students spoke about him with something between and fascination.
Minjae moved through the boys like he had been waiting for a reason to fight with somebody. There was fury in him that went beyond the fight itself, something old and buried too deep to belong only to this moment. Every hit landed brutally fast. A fist into someone's jaw. A knee into another boy's stomach hard enough to fold him in half. One of them tried grabbing him from behind and Minjae slammed him backward into the wall with enough force to knock the breath out of him completely.
The boys dropped around him one after another.
Jungkook sat frozen against the wall watching it happen.
Minjae's face terrified him.
He looked completely focused. Like hurting them was the clearest thing he had done all day.
Then Hyunsu grabbed something from the ground.
A rock.
Jungkook saw him step behind Minjae quietly while the older boy fought someone else near the wall. Hyunsu lifted the rock high in one hand, face twisted with panic and rage as he moved toward Minjae's blind spot.
Jungkook reacted before thinking.
He launched himself forward and shoved Hyunsu with all his weight. The older boy stumbled hard and crashed back onto the pavement, the rock flying uselessly from his hand.
Hyunsu looked up at him with murder in his eyes.
"I'm gonna kill you, Jeon Jungkook."
Then Minjae turned around.
For one awful second Jungkook thought that anger would land on him next. Minjae's eyes burned with it, chest heaving hard while blood darkened his split knuckles.
Their gazes locked.
"Run," Minjae said.
Jungkook didn't move.
"Run!" Minjae repeated sharply. "Run and don't look back!"
So Jungkook grabbed his bag and ran.
He ran harder than he ever had in his life, lungs burning painfully, blood still dripping from his nose onto his collar. Behind him he could still hear shouting and crashing and somebody screaming, but he never turned around to see.
Ten years after, Jungkook is still running.
He does not dare look back.