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❦

2017

taehyung took slow, hesitant steps, feeling the dry grass that has lost its color make crackling sounds beneath his feet. it was the middle of autumn.
squeezing tight the bouquet of flowers in his left hand, taehyung stopped. his cold, dull eyes lost their color months ago... or was it more?

crouching down, taehyung carefully layed the flowers as his eyes filled with tears.
"jeon jungkook..." he whispered. "I miss you."
the last three words came out sounding much more vulnerable than taehyung had expected them to be. a lone tear rolled down his soft cheek, falling onto the cold ground of the grave.

his long, slender fingers glazed across the carved out name on the gravestone. jeon jungkook; 1997-2016; murdered.
each time taehyung read this out, the realization hit him harder then before. he couldn't believe he lured the love of his life into darkness and so mercilessly stabbed him with a knife. and then... he just left him on the cold forest floor in pain.
"no! NO!" he screamed grabbing onto his head so hard, almost tearing his hair out. he hated the memories that constantly occupied his mind, memories of that night fled to him like a river, except instead of pure water, there was blood.

that night he came back home as if in a trance. he spent hours in the shower trying to wash off the blood from his body, he scraped himself with the sponge harshly, leaving vivid scratches all over his body. he took it as a punishment.
letting the water flow over himself as he sat at the bottom of the shower thinking what he has just done.
he couldn't sleep properly, waking up from nightmares every hour. in his nightmares he saw jungkook who cried blood and blamed taehyung, words like 'I loved you', 'I trusted you', were always there, but the phrases that spinned in taehyung's head most frequently were 'I hate you', 'you never loved me', 'you killed me'.
the last drop of hope evaporated like a miserable perl of dew on the bright sun when namjoon told taehyung that his grave was seen at the cemetery.

people say that it may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. taehyung didn't know if there was something wrong with him or with the saying, because the pain seemed to get worse day by day.
taehyung thanked that at least he was barely asked to do any missions, as if he exchanged placed with namjoon. now sitting in the archives all day seemed better than anything else. the strip club started paying him less because he could never focus on his work, his mind was occupied by jungkook.
tae felt like an outcast in his gang. the word of him killing his rival spread out fast and commotions between gangs calmed down, everyone was doing their thing.

in the last month taehyung's best friend was insomnia. because of the nightmares he was so scared to see, he ended up walking the streets with emptiness in his head and in his heart.
coming to the grave daily it seemed like taehyung wanted to hear jungkook. he just wanted to see jungkook run out from behind some tree and tell him that he was alive and this all was simply a nightmare.
a never-ending nightmare...
but in the end, nobody came out, nobody spoke.

the cemetery was the quietest place on earth where dead people bled silence.

❦

taehyung never wanted this day to come, but it wasn't something you could run away from. today would be exactly a year since jungkook's death.

taehyung woke up and didn't even bother to open up the curtains, he hasn't bothered to do so for months.
after monotonously stirring his coffee for five minutes, taehyung took out fish food and dribbled some of it into the aquarium. he realized that he never asked jungkook the name of the goldfish and after it was left by jungkook in his house, he had no other choice but to take care of the nameless creature. he kind of hated it... but he also cared about it. it was weird, but the fish reminded taehyung of jungkook and at some points it made him feel better, at other times he hated the burning feeling it created in his chest.
memories are powerful.

"it's been exactly a year, goldfish." tae spoke in a half-whisper to the pet. he tended to do this quite often.
"if things don't change I might even get schizophrenia, right? I've read about it in some dusty book under namjoon's desk I found in the archives. at first, you drown in depression and then you start seeing things that drive you crazy, hear voices..."

the fish swam around picking up every piece of food given while taehyung sipped on his coffee.

"a lot of people look alike, right?" he exhaled. "but I'm sure I saw jungkook a couple of times... maybe it was my imagination? maybe I'm really starting to hallucinate."

the silence was broken by the ring of the doorbell taehyung haven't heard in a while.

"if it's the guy who offers cockroach repellent for three bucks I'm slicing his hands off." taehyung muttered to himself and unwillingly stood up, walking to the door.
he lazily opened it and looked around, but saw nobody... which was weird.
"hello?" he called out but there was no one. the street was completely empty.

right before closing the door, taehyung noticed a package on his door mat. after picking up the strangely light package, he brought it inside, deciding to open it in the kitchen.
he ripped open the cardboard packaging and dropped it to the floor in shock. his hands started shaking uncontrollably as he slid down to his knees and looked at the object closer. his eye sight wasn't betraying him – on his wooden floor really laid the knife he used to kill jungkook, covered in blood. the blood stains dried long ago, but it was still ridiculously obvious what the dark brown substance was.
taehyung picked up the knife and stared at it with tear-filled eyes.

where did this come from?
more importantly, who did it come from?

❦