JUNGKOOK

Days on trial: 73

A chill of winter air whispered against my scalp, the sensation unnerving me slightly. I was yet to grow used to it, and I didn't think I would anytime soon. The shrill buzz of clippers echoed in my ears still, as if they were still vibrating against my skull, cutting away part of my identity.

Pressing my lips into Annie's hair, I absent-mindedly found myself wanting to protect it. Bleach damaged and definitely in need of a hair mask or two, it always smelt like coconut. I'd grown to love the fact that it wasn't entirely healthy, and the fact that she never seemed to ease up with the grievous bleach harm she administered on a far too frequent basis. Like her, it was a little rough around the edges, but still oh so soft. 

"I like it, by the way," she spoke quietly, not wanting to interrupt the atmosphere. "Your hair, I mean. You look like a prince."

My smirk muffled in her hair, quietly pleased that she felt that way about it. 

I had a horrible feeling that if she knew how my haircut had really come about, that she wouldn't feel quite so favourably about it.

Surrounded by sterile white walls, stainless steel tables and surgical tools, I didn't really think you could have called the location of my initial hair clipping a 'salon'. 

No, it had definitely been the surgery suite of the research wing at the University Hospital. There was no escaping that fact.

I had been sent for scans similar to the ones that I had had at the beginning of the trials, just to check over the receptors linked to love. 

At the time, I hadn't really thought much of it, too focused on being accepted into the trials in the first place. I had just agreed to whatever they had asked of me, signing my body away to science.

My preliminary scans had just been CATs, but the Doctor had scheduled me in for both CAT and MRI scans this time, amongst other things. 

I was hooked up to machines that I couldn't even guess the function of - something to do with checking my prefrontal cortex, not that I fully comprehended what that actually meant, either. There were whispers of Latin words, and words which just sounded too damn smart for me to decipher, so I just let the researchers do their thing.

It had gone pretty smoothly, nothing too obscure.

At least, it had, until they started setting up scalpels and surgical drills in a chrome tray next to the rigid table they had me sat down on.

"Contractually, you have an obligation to allow us access," the nurse who had been tending to me said with a shrug of her shoulders, as if I shouldn't have been alarmed.

"To my brain?!"

"You signed along the dotted line, Mr Jeon. The clauses were all stipulated in clear black and white."

My hands were tied. They had legal access to my brain - so I had to grant the physical access whether I liked it not.

The discussion stopped there. 

Clippers were buzzing behind my ear within 30-seconds, and there was nothing I could do about it. I could feel my brain rattle against the drone of the clippers, shaking me to the very core.

I'd never even broken a bone, let alone had fucking brain surgery. The thought of them prodding about inside it like a lobotomy made me want to hurl. 

Hands on my knees, my fingers dug in until my knuckles were white, sweat beginning to pool on my back. I could feel the serrated blades of the clippers brushing through my hair and I just wanted it all to stop.

I felt so helpless. Had I not been terrified, I would have been in tears.

What if they did something that affected my vision? 

What if they stopped me from seeing Annie in full colour?

Oh God, Annie. 

What on earth would I tell her? She'd be furious that I hadn't told her what had been going on, but I just hadn't wanted to give her any cause for concern. She had been working when I'd seen her last, so it wasn't the time to chat. She'd looked so gorgeous in her element, doing her job, so classy and yet still so-

"STOP." 

A muffled voice boomed through the intercom speaker, addressing the nurse I was with. 

"This session is terminated." 

I hadn't even realised how tightly my eyes had been shut until they popped open, darting to the two-way window. The switch had been flicked, turning it from a mirror into a window, where I could see a gaggle of researchers in white coats looking at me with bated curiosity. 

The nurse beside me put down the clippers and headed to the door, leaving me alone; scared and confused. 

I wished so desperately for Annie to be there, so that she could have held my hand and told me that everything would be okay.

"Jungkook," I heard a familiar twang in the tone of the voice now coming through the speaker, and quickly realised it was my regular trial check-up Doctor. He sounded out of breath, as if he had ran from the clinic to the hospital specifically for this moment. Weird. "What were you just thinking about?"

I pressed my lips shut, brows knitting together. The change in expression caused my skin to pull tightly where I had sensors held in place by sticky circular pads, hooked up to a machine that was beeping sporadically beside me.

"Erm, my girlfriend," I admitted. I had to hold back a grin, not wanting to look like an idiot in front of medical professionals, but still being obsessed with the way it sounded. "Annie."

There was chatter between the nurses, not that I could hear any of it. The Doctor looked at me in a contemplative manner, as if he was putting two and two together, realising that it might have been his fault for setting us up in the first place. I should have been thanking him, really. 

"Sit tight," he nodded at me through the speaker. "I'll need to do another scan on you, but no-one's touching your brain. I'll get you out of there in a second."

I nodded, baffled by what fuck had gone on. Back turned away from the window, I could see the Doctor lay into the other people in the room, muffled statements loud enough to rage through the relatively soundproofed room.

Why was I not consulted on this?!

He never should have been in there in the first place.

Fucking amateurs. 

I'd only ever seen him jolly and bright, so to hear him rage like that was quite something. The wide eyes and cowering expressions from the medical professionals suggested that it wasn't his usual character.

He remained tight-lipped and incredibly apologetic in the aftermath, assuring me that I had nothing to worry about - but it was kind of hard not to worry by that point.

Easing back into the machine that scanned me earlier, with him now at the helm instead of a nurse who I had never met before, my heart was beating at a mile a minute. 

My hair felt uncomfortable as I laid my head down. There was empty space where I knew a good chunk of hair should have been. The cool plastic of the table that I was on seemed to radiate crisp air up to my scalp. I could feel it on the shaved area, but not where my long hair protected the rest of my head. I hated it. 

"Right, Jungkook," the Doctor voiced through the speaker. "Tell me about Annie. Tell me how she looks in colour."

Where to start?

"Annie," I sighed, lips coming to rest on my bottom lip. "Red. She's red."

It wasn't long until I was rambling on and on about my affections for Annie. Looking up at the plain ceiling of the machine I was in, I didn't even really have to think about what I was saying; the thoughts just rattled off and into the air around me. 

I spoke of the first time I'd seen red, how she'd been raging on at me and how all I had wanted to do was to scream back, but when I saw her lipstick fade into colour, everything changed. The passion burning inside of my veins - which I would later learn matched the red shade of her lipstick - didn't change, though. My blood felt hot, warm, homely. I had been kidding myself at time, confused by prior commitments and the trials, but I knew that it was because of her. It couldn't have been a coincidence.

My mouth moved autonomously, almost always with a smile, prattling endlessly about the blush in her cheeks, and the way I'd started seeing lilac in the middle of the ocean with her, and the first sunset she had made me hike to watch.

I was insufferable. 

It was funny, almost, how I'd started a drug trial and ended up addicted to a girl instead.

"Kook?"

Annie's voice drew me from my thoughts of the past few hours, as I realised I had been zoned out for far too long. I considered telling her about what had happened, but there was no point.

Not until I got the results back from the clinic, at least. 

The Doctor had asked me to come back in a couple of days, to fully discuss the tests and where to go from there.

Notably, he'd asked me to stop taking the pills until we reconvened. "Testing a theory," he had assured me with a warm smile, before sending me on my way.

In the aftermath of such a nightmarish day, all I had wanted was to see Annie, and forget about everything that wasn't her - so I'd gone home via the barbers, picked up a blazer to match her dress at a Mono clothing store, and jumped straight in the shower once I got home, washing the feelings of dread and doubt from my skin. 

"Sorry, was in my own world for a minute, there," I smiled, walking alongside her, hand draped around her shoulders. She clutched at my waist as we walked, keeping me safe.

"How much longer till we get there?"

"Literally just around the corner," I promised. 

It had been a bit of a trek, I'd admit that much, especially since I'd taken us via the botanical gardens that Hobi worked at. She'd cooed and awed at the intricate greenhouse designs, even if it had been the wrong time of the year to see things in full bloom. 

Steering our bodies, I could feel her little head dart around trying to figure out where exactly I was taking her. It was a part of town that I didn't frequent too often, but Hobi had been raving about a hotel that had opened up last year since before it had even launched. 

Rooms on the top floor had a view of the diamond bridge running across the harbour, which could be viewed by balconies that weren't exactly 'balconies' in the traditional sense. They were still accessed via large glass doors, and still immersed you in the beauty of Busan's bay - they were just also private balcony sized pools. 

Booking a room there was pretty tricky, due to the exclusive nature of it, but by a stroke of luck (and a lot of begging to the hotel receptionist, who had probably only let me book it to get me off the phone), I'd managed to snag a last-minute cancellation.

"You haven't..." Annie gasped, realising where we were going as I tugged up the stairs to the establishment.

Smirking, leading us into the elevator and putting our key card in the slot to give us access to the top floors, I raised and dropped my shoulders. 

"Oh, but I have."

a/n:  we've got another bucket list bullet point to tick off in the next chapter :) might be a bit spicy lol whoops 

the hotel is based on an actual hotel in manchester which looks incredible (although I think it's a general use pool, not private, but that's not important lol). But yeah, it's beaut. There's a hotel in busan called hotel 1 which is like the most aesthetic hotel I've ever seen in my life lmao, so that's what the view will be like.

here's a visual for ya because i don't trust myself to do it justice in the next chapter lol

the pool:

the views: