Step one, tell me what have I done

The first thing which Jungkook notices about him are his collarbones—so fragile, they almost make dragging himself to class worth it. He doesn't know his name, of fucking course he doesn't—had missed that piece of information somewhere in between the buzzing in his head and the throbbing behind his eyes. But as he—italicized he—scribbles notes in a stocky, blunt hand across the whiteboard, Jungkook pays him more attention than he's paid anyone in a long while. Pictures the slow seep of ink into skin and finds himself idly wondering at the bleed-out of kiss marks just so on the curve of his neck.

And maybe that should be enough in itself—the first premonition in and of the observation that this ridiculously unassuming professor can talk so huge and gesture so expansive—even as he looks to Jungkook nothing more durable than a porcelain doll. It puzzles him, yes. It sends a sharp shard of contempt bolting through him, even. And it should scare him, too, something tells him much later when—irony notwithstanding—every goddamn allegorical implication of that slow, poisonous waltz drives home to him in the rhythm of the iambic pentameter.

For now, though, it doesn't bother him. In fact, he's relegated the classroom to a tiny corner of his mind even as his gaze flickers over the cut of his sweater, fixating on the hollows of the clavicle, then the bone itself, winging away from the sternum like a wish— thrown into sharp relief whenever his arm moves a way.

Jungkook tilts his head up a bit. If he pretends hard enough, there's a breeze hitting his face, and the varnished wood and plastic morphs into the texture and feel of rough-hewn grass. He's sure what the guy's saying is interesting enough, but words just glance off him like hailstones in a storm even as he knows that he'll think about it later. Maybe run some strange mix of rueful and frustrated when he sprawls, half awake, in the blinding white of sun hitched high on the sky— with no background track to when he tries to quantify that esoteric aesthetic of him in the confines of black and white, of charcoal against paper.

But he goes to class again.

What does he sound like? It's something of idle curiosity after so many lectures filling in the colors with grey and slashes of pencil in the spaces between— it's something of the sterility of his room pressing in on him one day where the blankness of the walls suddenly grows hands and teeth. It's something of his only brush with humanity— him not wanting it be ghosting past his flatmate with the interaction of muttered, half-heard greetings and stilted pauses in a layer of ice an inch thick.

And that last sends a buzz sparking electric under his skin— there's little he knows about Kim Taehyung apart from his name and that his parents had found him an eligible rent-sharer— and the silences are of his own volition. Which truth makes days like this even more unbearable, because things aren't supposed to be like this.

He isn't supposed to need.

He trudges his way onto university grounds with the itch of it sewn to him like a garment and sets his jaw against the utter onslaught of humanity milling around. It takes almost more than he has to make his way to the classroom, to take the third seat from the left corner which some cognitive distortion has led him to perceive as somewhat safer than the two hundred-odd identical ones populating the expanse of the room. Like always, there's a radius around him, students keeping a careful distance from what they know now to be his utter taciturnity.

It's uncomfortable to think of why that just sets the ache in the pit of his stomach to throbbing today, so he doesn't.

He breezes in just as the bell rings, brandishing a worn copy of Shakespearean tragedies, and Jungkook's gaze catches on him like fabric on the stray edge of a corner. It's nothing substantial—Jungkook can't describe what he's thinking when his eyes lock on a particularly riveting angle the slender curve of his waist makes when he's turning. Or the insistent, childlike tug at him to commit to memory and to paper the way his lashes flutter feather-soft when Jungkook can tell he's tired.

It's not a good day—Jungkook can already feel himself slipping away. Something inside him laughs at the paradox even as Jungkook's mouth crowds with the bitter of it. So much, it crows in triumph, so much for his voice.

So much for people.

It's all an impossibly skewed equation— the sterility in his head a haven at best and unendurable at worst—and even with that bipolarity, he'd never trade the familiarity of it for the dubious nature of social interaction. And there's a word he's thinking of, shying away from thinking of, but there it is, bold blood red in his mind.

Couldn't.

So he'll deal with the misery of it—thankful that it's just a persistent, dull ache today, because the humiliation and the uncertainty that people warrant hurts so much sharper. And fuck actually listening, trying to piece together the sound of his voice—the class is starting to melt, the hum of muttered conversation and voices talking, talking, talking starting to press in on him. It takes him right back to hours upon hours of endless, pointless conversations logged on fee registers, of people saying things and saying things and saying things until he could scream at the banality of it all.

To help him, they said, before—

He cuts off that train of thought in a violent shake of his head. It'd be just opening the floodgates—and he's neither prepared nor willing.

So he heaves himself away, willing himself to focus on the professor, that calm place inside his head where he so often finds himself when he has nowhere else to go—and notices for the first time that the class is eerily silent. He raises his head, then, and startles. He— the professor whose stills Jungkook wants to put on a minimalist frame and hang up in his room, is glaring directly at him.

"Honored to have you join us—?"

It takes a moment for Jungkook to register that he's phrased the end of his sentence like a question, marveling as he is at the sound of his voice, just that end of hoarse, rough like a cat stroked the wrong way. When he does, though, it's a testament to how far out of it he is that he has to cast about for the words.

"—Jungkook. Jeon Jungkook." Even as he's embarrassingly glad for not tripping over his words as he—tiredness aching—pushes himself to his feet, the professor raises an eyebrow at his lack of honorific.

"Well, Jeon-ssi, since you obviously know nothing about Hamlet, and, as is evident by your lack of attention during class, have no desire to learn, either, maybe you should do everyone a favor and search for a class more suited to your interests, yeah?"

Jungkook feels his fists balling even as he fights back the word vomit that's clawing its way up his throat— and, fuck, it's no good, his thoughts overdriving as his mouth seems to open in a decelerated haze.

"Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's three great tragedies, written in his characteristic Iambic Pentameter, with Macbeth and Othello being the others. It is the story of the prince of Denmark, and the fatal flaw of the protagonist—a feature in each of his tragedies which causes the downfall of the hero—was indecision, as characterized by his famous 'to be or not to be' speech, where he's contemplating suicide."

As he finishes, with his heart racing and his breath shorting out, he immediately decides that the look on the professor's face has made it all worthwhile.

"Good enough, seonsaeng?"

And shooting him a saccharine smile, he gathers up his possessions and walks out.