Chapter Text
Taehyung could never locate the exact moment Jeon Jungkook became unbearable and that bothered him more than it should have. A proper hatred deserved a clean origin, a date, a motive, a neat exhibit labeled and filed away for future use, yet Jungkook had slipped into the category of intolerable without giving him the courtesy of a beginning.
Back in Busan, during fifth grade, Taehyung had sat in the second row by the window with his pencils sharpened, his notebook margins ruled straight and his whole body arranged around the exhausting duty of being correct. Jungkook, meanwhile, entered rooms the way weather entered open windows, loud and bright and impossible to keep out, all chubby cheeks, wind-wrecked black hair and a laugh that arrived before the rest of him.
He handed out stolen cafeteria candies like contraband charity, made jokes so stupid half the class folded over their desks and somehow dragged reluctant smiles out of teachers who usually looked one unpaid bill away from snapping. Taehyung hated the way everyone made space for him without being asked, hated the ease of it, hated the careless confidence of a boy who seemed to believe the world would soften if he grinned hard enough.
Why is he always like that? Taehyung used to think, fingers tightening around his pen until the plastic hurt. Why does he act like nothing in the world has ever required discipline?
Order made sense to him. Notebooks belonged in clean stacks, pens belonged in a hard case sorted by color and homework belonged in clear plastic sleeves labeled by day and subject, while Jungkook treated school supplies like temporary guests in his life, lending pencils he never recovered, forgetting textbooks under chairs and leaving crumbs across his desk with the shamelessness of someone born without legal accountability.
Taehyung sent him murderous looks whenever his laugh cut through class. He muttered for him to shut up through clenched teeth when Jungkook commented out loud during lessons, then ignored him with the full force of a boy who believed silence could become a weapon if used with enough dignity.
The problem, naturally, was that Jungkook barely noticed. He lived, talked, laughed, shared candy and moved through the classroom with the maddening freedom of someone who had no idea Taehyung was waging a private war against him from two rows away, and the invisibility of it made Taehyung angrier than any direct insult could have.
High school should have improved things by giving both of them new schedules, new rooms and enough adolescent misery to dilute the old irritation. Instead, Busan handed Taehyung the same run-down public school, the same scratched blue lockers, the same cheap disinfectant smell tangled with instant ramyeon leaking from lunch bags and a Jungkook who had come back from one summer looking like life had personally decided to reward him.
His shoulders broadened, his jaw sharpened and his voice dropped enough that people turned in the hallway before they realized they were doing it. He started disappearing to the municipal weight room near the beach after class, then returned with damp hair, rolled-up sleeves and that clean-sweat smell clinging to his uniform, and Taehyung considered it one of the universe’s more vulgar jokes that Jungkook had also acquired confidence.
That was when their hatred learned to speak both ways. Jungkook stopped laughing off Taehyung’s comments and began throwing them back with a lifted brow, a gleaming look and that smile that had grown sharper around the edges, so when Taehyung muttered, “Done making noise yet?” in a crowded hallway, Jungkook could answer, “Done sulking for free, Kim?” without losing a step.
It was unbearable. Jungkook always laughed afterward, never with enough cruelty to justify open violence, just enough amusement to make Taehyung’s face burn while his fists curled inside his blazer pockets and his nails carved small red crescents into his palms.
University, Taehyung had decided, would finally free him. Seoul had distance, anonymity, giant lecture halls, libraries that smelled of old paper and silence and a law program at SNU large enough for him to disappear into procedure, routine and a version of himself untouched by Busan salt, adolescent grudges and Jeon Jungkook’s criminal existence.
Then he opened the door to dorm room 613 with his rolling suitcase in hand and found Jungkook sitting on the right bed, calm as a parasite that had already paid rent, plugging in a curved monitor while his headphones rested around his neck. For one clean second, Taehyung’s lungs forgot their function, and the universe, which had spent years pretending to obey rules, revealed itself as a hostile institution.
A year later, the situation had evolved exactly nowhere. Proximity had sharpened everything until the hatred felt less like an emotion and more like a domestic appliance running constantly in the background, powered by chip crumbs, door hinges, laundry detergent, shared air and the mattress creak that announced every time Jungkook dared to roll over in his sleep.
Taehyung pushes the door open and the room greets him with cream-onion chips, stale Red Bull, artificial pine detergent and the thin sourness of air that has been trapped too long between two people who should never have been assigned the same fifteen square meters. He pauses on the threshold for half a second, letting the evidence assemble itself around him, and immediately decides the room deserves a formal complaint under several branches of public health law.
Room 613 is small enough to turn every object into an accusation. Jungkook’s bed sits to the right, shoved against the wall with the black duvet twisted into a lump and his pillow crushed in the center, while the wardrobe beside it waits with its creaking doors and the faint threat of gym clothes, damp towels and whatever biological disaster Jungkook calls “worn once.”
Taehyung’s bed faces it from the left, white sheets pulled clean, pillow centered and blanket folded at the foot with the kind of precision that should have brought peace to the room. The shared desk runs along his side like a border, scarred beige Formica split into two nations: his law textbooks, tagged notebooks and fountain pens in rigid alignment on one side, Jungkook’s monitor, mechanical keyboard, cables, empty cans, Post-its full of dense code notes and chip crumbs on the other.
The bathroom door sits between Jungkook’s bed and the wardrobe, offering chipped white tiles, a yellowed shower curtain, double sinks that have never known justice and Jungkook’s peppermint body wash standing next to a toothpaste tube strangled in the middle. The window at the far end looks over the inner courtyard, where scrawny trees, rusty benches and orange streetlights try and fail to make cracked asphalt look romantic.
Everything hums under the sickly ceiling neon. The dirty glass filters the courtyard light into the room, the linoleum looks tired of human contact and the beige-yellow walls still carry ghost tape marks from old posters, as if previous residents had also tried to leave evidence that a life once happened here and lost.
Jungkook is sprawled against the wall on his bed with massive headphones over his ears, legs crossed and cheeks puffed around another mouthful of chips. His hair falls too long over his brows, dark strands messy in the exact way people call effortless when they want to reward chaos, and the tight white T-shirt across his shoulders makes it unfortunately obvious that he keeps going to the gym three times a week.
Taehyung does not care about Jungkook’s shoulders. He simply notices them as relevant spatial information because those shoulders take up room, and this room, already a moral failure in architectural form, has no space to spare.
Jungkook glances up, dark eyes bright with the immediate satisfaction of sensing irritation before it has been voiced, then pulls one headphone slightly away from his ear.
“Breathe quieter, asshole,” he announces, chip dust clinging to his lower lip with the confidence of a man who has never faced consequences for anything that truly matters.
Taehyung closes the door behind him and sets his jaw around the reply already trying to climb out.
“Air doesn’t belong to you, Jeon,” he returns while sliding his bag off his shoulder, and he keeps his tone flat enough to suggest the conversation is beneath him.
Jungkook’s mouth curves around the edge of another grin. “Good thing. You’d already be dead of suffocation if it did,” he answers, and the worst part is the lazy ease of it, the way he settles deeper into the pillow afterward as though Taehyung’s blood pressure is a harmless campus hobby.
Taehyung could stay. He could unpack the insult, sharpen it, hand it back with enough force to ruin both their evenings and possibly the structural integrity of the room, but he has spent the entire day feeling one comment away from committing a crime worthy of a footnote in a casebook. Instead, he turns around before Jungkook gets the satisfaction of a full explosion and leaves again with his phone already in his hand.
The corridor outside is fluorescent, narrow and stale with the smell of dust, cheap deodorant and someone’s instant noodles from the communal kitchen. Taehyung heads for the stairs to the third floor with the determined pace of a man on official business, quietly praying that none of the resident advisors materialize from whatever administrative void they inhabit.
In a year of living here, Taehyung has seen fewer RAs than shooting stars. They exist mostly as a threat whispered to freshmen, a myth designed to prevent public indecency, excessive noise and drunken stairwell death, but tonight his luck is fragile enough that one might decide to appear just to ask why he looks ready to sue a building.
Taeri opens her door after his second knock, hair loose around her face and surprise softening her features before the shape of him makes it fade.
“Tae? What are you doing here?” she asks, one hand still on the handle, and the slight pause before she steps aside tells him she already knows the answer.
“Jeon’s pissing me off again, so I came here,” Taehyung replies, walking in before he can consider how terrible that sounds. He removes his shoes with more precision than necessary, as though the neatness might compensate for the fact that he is once again entering his girlfriend’s room with another man’s name in his mouth.
Taeri is a second-year psychology major, calm-voiced and soft-eyed, the kind of person who had approached him during freshman orientation with non-alcoholic punch in hand and a smile that made him feel briefly less ridiculous for standing alone against a wall. They had met during a stupid icebreaker involving sticky badges and forced social courage, and she had saved him from the indignity of pretending he enjoyed it.
Back then, she had tilted her chin up at him, all hazel eyes and quiet amusement, and told him, “You look bored to death, so come on, let’s pretend to play this stupid game together.” Taehyung had liked her immediately for the sentence, for the ease, for the way she did not demand brightness from him before offering company.
She is a full head shorter than him, with long brown hair that falls to mid-back when she leaves it loose and faint freckles across her nose when the sun gets to her. Her softness has always been real, made of slow gestures, warm silence and patience that once felt inexhaustible, though lately it begins to crack whenever Jungkook enters the room by name.
Tonight, Taeri closes the door behind him with a little more force than usual. It is not a slam, because Taeri does not slam doors unless something truly ugly has happened, but Taehyung still hears the message in the latch and pretends, for both their sakes, that he does not.
She crosses her arms, leans back against the desk and studies him with the exhausted tenderness she now reserves for Jeon Jungkook-related disasters. “What happened this time?” she asks, and her voice stays gentle, though the question has edges from being used too often.
Taehyung paces once between her bed and the desk, already building his case. “He told me to breathe quieter and then acted as if he invented oxygen. Yesterday he also threatened to strangle me until I passed out, by the way, so if I die in that room you have prior notice.”
Taeri looks at him for a long moment, the corner of her mouth doing something complicated.
“And what did you say before he threatened that?” she asks while reaching for the mug on her desk, and Taehyung deeply resents the fact that psychology majors are trained to notice the missing part of a story.
“I may have suggested that his chewing violates several international conventions,” he admits, then lifts one hand before she can speak. “In my defense, it does. You haven’t heard the man eat cream-onion chips at midnight. It’s a sound designed by the state to extract confessions.”
Her expression softens despite itself, but the amusement does not last.
“Tae, I’m not saying he isn’t annoying. I believe you. I have believed you for over a year, actually, with the patience of a very tired saint,” she replies, setting the mug down with a controlled little click. “I’m saying you come here upset about him more often than you come here to see me.”
The sentence lands too cleanly. Taehyung looks at the neat stack of textbooks by her lamp, then at the sleeve of his sweatshirt, because her face offers no escape route and he has already used all the legal ones.
“That’s unfair,” he answers after a second, though he can hear the weakness of it. “He’s always there. He sits there with his stupid face, his stupid puffed cheeks, that ugly bunny smile and those shiny eyes like he’s waiting for me to notice him so he can ruin whatever microscopic peace I’ve managed to collect that day.”
Taeri’s brows lift in a way that would be delicate if it did not make him feel accused by a mirror.
“You hear yourself, right?” she asks, and when he scowls, she adds more softly, “You give him so much space. Maybe try ignoring him for once.”
Taehyung almost laughs, except there is no humor available in his chest. “Ignoring Jeon Jungkook is like ignoring a fire alarm taped to your skull,” he replies, and he tells himself the fact that Taeri sighs afterward is only irritation, something temporary and ordinary, rather than a warning light he should stop pretending he cannot see.
When Taehyung returns to room 613, the hallway outside feels colder than before, as though the building has absorbed his girlfriend’s disappointment and redistributed it through the concrete. He pauses with his fingers on the handle, exhales through his nose and opens the door into the same chemical tragedy of chips, detergent and Jungkook.
Jungkook is still on his bed with headphones on, still eating, still existing in a way that suggests deep contempt for everyone who has ever valued silence. Taehyung steps inside carefully, already planning to ignore him with the maturity of an adult, then his foot catches on a stray sneaker abandoned directly in the walking path.
He goes down hard. His palms smack the linoleum, his knee hits first, his bag slides off his shoulder and a flare of pain shoots up his leg with enough humiliation to make the room tilt red at the edges.
Jungkook pulls one side of his headphones away, and the smile that appears on his face should be illegal under several human rights conventions. “You good down there?” he asks, voice bright with contained laughter, and Taehyung scrambles upright with the dizzy rage of a man who has been personally attacked by footwear.
“Fuck, Jeon, you’re such a pain in the ass,” he snaps, brushing dust off his palms with violent little movements. His knee throbs, his pride throbs worse and Jungkook’s sneaker sits there on the floor with the innocent expression of evidence planted at a crime scene.
Jungkook touches a hand to his chest, theatrical enough to belong on a cheaper stage.
“Watch where you’re going before you accuse my shoe of attempted murder,” he replies, then nudges the sneaker with his toes instead of moving it properly. “I can’t be responsible for your tragic lack of survival instinct.”
Taehyung breathes in. Taeri’s voice returns in his head, calm and devastatingly reasonable, telling him not to give Jungkook more importance than he deserves, and for one second he tries to build himself into someone who can follow that advice.
The attempt fails before it becomes noble. “Fuck this. I’m out,” he mutters, grabbing his bag again, and this time the door closes behind him with enough force to communicate restraint, fury and the fact that he deserves credit for leaving before violence.
The corridor is empty, blessedly empty, and Taehyung takes the corner fast with his chest already too tight. He has no desire to explain to anyone why he is fleeing his own room like it contains a jacked, perfectly coiffed version of Satan, and the fluorescent light above him flickers with a sound he immediately interprets as institutional mockery.
Don’t explode. Don’t go back. Don’t think about him.
The instructions arrange themselves in his head with the neatness of an emergency procedure, but Jungkook’s face keeps appearing between them, smug and dusted with chip crumbs, as if his brain has decided sabotage is a recreational activity.
Taehyung turns into the left wing too sharply and nearly collides with a mountiain of energy drinks wearing an oversized gray hoodie. The cans wobble, a bright voice yelps, and Hyeri appears behind the precarious stack with her backwards cap, auburn bangs and the betrayed expression of someone almost flattened by a law student in crisis.
“Hey! You almost turned me into a pancake, seriously,” she complains, clutching the cans to her chest while two of them try to escape under her elbow. She is tiny enough that Taehyung always has the absurd first thought that the university should install height-warning signs for her protection.
Hyeri is dressed, as usual, like three separate aesthetics got into a fight and reached a treaty through sheer confidence. Perfect auburn hair, doll-like makeup, rosy cheeks and an oversized hoodie that probably belongs to one of her rotating boyfriends, all paired with wide jeans dragging along the floor in a way that makes Taehyung’s entire sense of order itch.
She squints at him, then gives him the kind of scan usually reserved for crime scenes. “Whoa. Tae, you look like you either committed murder or lost the legal right to do it and deeply regret the missed opportunity,” she observes, adjusting her grip on the cans.
“Sorry,” Taehyung mutters, though his voice does not contain enough apology to convince either of them. He moves aside, then stays there because walking away would require a destination and his entire plan had been to stop breathing the same air as Jungkook.
Hyeri looks him over again. “Roommate?” she asks, and when his face changes, she nods with grim satisfaction. “Right. The divine punishment in human form. I should start charging consultation fees.”
“He isn’t my roommate,” Taehyung corrects automatically, taking one can from the top of the pile before gravity wins. “He’s an environmental hazard assigned to my sleeping quarters by administrative negligence.”
Hyeri laughs, quick and bright enough to loosen something in him against his will. “That’s still a roommate, legally speaking,” she replies, then lifts her chin at him. “Did you two fight again or did you escape before the ritual sacrifice?”
“I left before I killed him,” Taehyung answers, and the can feels cold against his palm, grounding him in a way he wishes a person could without requiring a conversation. “The evening is young, though, so I’m not ruling anything out.”
She nods with deep seriousness, as if his homicidal ideation has been accepted into evidence. “So where are you going with your shattered dignity and whatever is happening with your face?”
Taehyung looks down the corridor, then back at her. The truth is humiliating in its simplicity: he has nowhere. Taeri will either worry or call him out, his few campus friends do not deserve a late-night monologue about Jungkook’s shoe crimes and the room behind him has become a pressure chamber with one bed too many.
“I just wanted to get out,” he replies, quieter than he intended. “Breathe a bit, preferably somewhere Jeon Jungkook’s bad energy hasn’t contaminated the oxygen supply.”
Hyeri shifts the cans against her chest and gives him a look that is too amused to be pity, too perceptive to be harmless. “So, to summarize, everything is still because of Jungkook,” she comments, and Taehyung’s temper flares with the precision of a match struck in a dry room.
“Yes, Hyeri, everything is because of Jungkook,” he fires back, throwing one hand up. “This university, the weather, my sleep schedule, the decline of civilization, the fact that I can hear a man chew through noise-canceling earbuds. Everything in my life currently has a Jeon-shaped fault line through it.”
Hyeri snorts, though she does not mock him cruelly. “You two are catastrophic. Two magnets repelling each other so hard the room should come with a physics warning,” she replies, then thinks for a second and adds, “Actually, maybe you’re an anomaly. Something in the system keeps failing around you.”
Taehyung stills around the word despite himself. “Anomaly?” he repeats, and he hates the way it settles neatly into a place inside his head that had been waiting for language.
“Yeah,” she continues, pleased with herself now. “You’re supposed to ignore each other, but instead you spend your entire lives monitoring each other’s breathing, snacks, socks and emotional crimes. That’s not romance, before you look at me like that. That’s a roommate allocation failure with cosmic consequences.”
Taehyung exhales, the laugh coming out thin and tired. “Anomaly,” he murmurs, testing it again. “Fine. That works. Jeon Jungkook is a fucking anomaly, and I want compensation from the universe.”
“Maybe he’s just an asshole,” Hyeri offers, holding out another can like a sacrament. “Sugar prevents murder urges. I read nothing about that anywhere, but it sounds useful and I’m choosing science.”
Taehyung accepts it with a silent nod, and she pats his hip because his shoulder is too high to reach without athletic commitment. “Hang in there, Tae. Toxic people are like black holes. They suck everything around them if you stay too close.”
He stares at her. The sentence feels far too poetic coming from someone dressed like a stylish gremlin carrying enough caffeine to power a small rebellion. “What?”
“Saw it on TikTok,” she replies with a shrug, instantly ruining whatever accidental depth had entered the corridor. “Good luck with your creature. Try not to get arrested unless you call me first so I can wear something cute for the police station.”
Then she trots away with surprising speed, cans clinking against each other, and Taehyung watches her vanish around the corner while the word anomaly keeps circling in his skull. It should make him feel better, having a category at last, but the problem with categories is that they invite investigation.
He walks for a while with the unopened can in hand, taking the long route through the dorm corridors and then out into the inner courtyard where the night air carries wet asphalt, cigarette smoke and the pale sweetness of early spring. He does not think about Jungkook’s line from earlier, his smug face after the fall or the fact that even away from the room Taehyung’s attention keeps curving back toward him.
He thinks, instead, about homicide prevention. It feels more dignified.
Eventually, the time on his phone becomes impossible to ignore. If he wants any chance of surviving his 9 a.m. class tomorrow, Taehyung has to return to the room and face whatever fresh form Jungkook’s existence has taken, so he drags himself back through the courtyard, past the rusty benches and the scrawny trees, and climbs the stairs with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man approaching a poorly maintained scaffold.
When he opens the door, Jungkook is on his bed with headphones still on, though his computer is off and his thumbs move quickly over his phone. He does not look up, which should be a relief, but Taehyung finds a new irritation in being ignored by the man whose attention he allegedly does not want.
“Done throwing your tantrum?” Jungkook asks without lifting his gaze, voice casual enough to make Taehyung’s back teeth lock together.
Taehyung closes the door and gives him a smile polished thin enough to cut. “Don’t worry. Next time I’ll fall down the stairs so you can enjoy a full evening without my dramatic presence,” he replies while setting his bag down with extreme control.
Jungkook snickers, finally glancing up. “I’ll push you if it helps. Roommate service,” he offers, then returns to his phone like he has provided a kindness instead of a threat.
Taehyung climbs onto his bed before his body can choose violence on his behalf. He pulls the duvet up, opens his phone and tries to bury himself under fabric, darkness and manufactured indifference while Jungkook’s chewing resumes in the background with the obscene persistence of a legal violation no court will hear.
The ceiling above him is stained near the corner, shaped vaguely like a country that should have collapsed by now. He stares at it while Hyeri’s word keeps repeating, quiet and irritatingly precise, and decides that anomaly is the only accurate classification available.
A bug in his life. A force that bends everything around itself. A presence he cannot ignore even when ignoring it is the only rational option.
When Taehyung’s alarm goes off exactly five hours and twenty-seven minutes later, he makes a sound into the pillow that should never be heard by another living person. His hand shoots out from under the blanket, slaps the phone screen until the noise dies and he vows, with the sincerity of a chronic liar, that tonight he will go to bed early.
The night has been a sequence of minor institutional crimes. Footsteps in the hallway, doors banging somewhere down the floor and Jungkook getting up three times, or at least that is what Taehyung counted in the dark, each bathroom trip accompanied by a hinge, a latch and enough noise to convince him Jungkook had been trained by demolition experts.
Across the room, Jungkook sleeps curled under his duvet with his mouth slightly open and a faint, stupid smile visible in the gray morning. Taehyung studies him for half a second, just long enough to imagine ice water, a stolen hoodie collection, a campus dumpster and other perfectly reasonable disciplinary measures.
He gets out of bed instead, because prison would interfere with his degree. The linoleum is cold under his bare feet, sending an unpleasant jolt up his calves, and he grabs clothes from the chair with less precision than usual before locking himself in the bathroom and shutting the door hard enough to provide a modest public service.
The mirror is fogged from last night’s shower and the permanent dampness of the tiny room. Taehyung wipes it with his palm, then regrets looking, because his reflection has the hollow-eyed delicacy of someone being slowly consumed by a curse with excellent cheekbones.
He has lost weight again. His cheekbones look sharper, his wrists too narrow beneath the cuffs of his cardigan and the purple under his eyes has developed the kind of depth people usually study in ocean documentaries, all because annoyance kills his appetite and Jungkook has apparently made annoyance his declared major.
The concealer tube Taeri left behind sits near the sink, pale and accusing. Taehyung stares at it, imagines her placing it there on purpose after noticing the catastrophic state of his face and puts it back without using it, partly from pride and partly because some disasters deserve public witnesses.
He splashes cold water over his face until his skin stings. The shock wakes him for two full seconds, then abandons him, leaving him with damp hair, bloodshot eyes and the malicious awareness that Jungkook somehow looks better every semester, broader, cleaner, more rested and more pleased with his own existence.
It is deeply suspicious. Taehyung has no proof that Jungkook feeds on his vital energy, but as a future legal professional he understands that absence of proof and absence of guilt can be inconveniently separate.
When he leaves the bathroom, Jungkook remains asleep. Taehyung grabs his bag, jacket and earbuds, then gives the room door a final firm closure on his way out, not quite a slam and certainly not enough to be called immature in a court of law, though he allows himself the smallest smile when he imagines Jungkook jolting awake.
Breakfast would require the communal kitchen and the communal kitchen would require people. Taehyung chooses starvation with the sober confidence of someone who has weighed the risks and found social interaction more dangerous.
The hallway outside smells of burnt toast, reheated noodles and the raw optimism of morning people. A monstrous racket spills from the kitchen as he passes, laughter and clattering dishes and someone calling another person by a nickname that should have been illegal, and Taehyung keeps walking with his earbuds in before anyone can commit the violence of greeting him.
Outside building D, early spring air hits his face and clears a thin path through the fog in his head. His first class is astrophysics, an elective wedged into his law schedule with the stubbornness of a secret, and the thought of it steadies him in a way breakfast never could.
Astrophysics is useless for his degree, according to several people who enjoy being wrong in public. For Taehyung, it is oxygen, a sanctioned escape route, one room on campus where no one mentions constitutional law, relationship maintenance or Jeon Jungkook’s chewing habits.
Hyeri waits by the amphitheater doors with coffee in one hand and a croissant in the other, her eyes narrowing the moment he appears. “You look like someone beat you with a shovel and then asked you to thank them for the character development,” she comments, handing him the croissant before he can deny anything.
Taehyung takes it with more gratitude than dignity. “I had a shit night,” he mutters, and the buttery smell reaches his stomach before his pride can interfere.
“Ten thousand won on Jungkook,” Hyeri replies instantly, walking beside him into the lecture hall. “I’d bet more, but you look financially and spiritually unstable.”
Jaebum has saved them seats halfway down, one arm stretched over the back of the bench and an iced coffee already sweating onto his notes. “Hey, Tae. You still look half-dead,” he greets, then glances at Hyeri. “Catastrophic cohabitation or recreational insomnia?”
Taehyung sits with the croissant in hand and gives both of them a flat look. “I am begging the entire academic community to stop using Jeon Jungkook as the default explanation for my face,” he replies, though the denial loses impact when Hyeri and Jaebum exchange the exact glance people exchange when they are correct.
Dr. Na enters before they can make him worse. She moves with the calm authority of someone who could explain the death of a star without raising her voice, black hair clipped up, glasses low on her nose and coffee balanced in one hand as she writes on the board.
BLACK HOLES: SINGULARITIES AND POINTS OF NO RETURN
The words sit there in white chalk, clean and merciless, and Taehyung feels his attention lock onto them before the rest of the room has even finished settling. Around him, notebooks open and chairs scrape, but the title has already pulled him into a quieter part of himself.
The room shifts into the shared silence of half-awake students pretending intellectual curiosity. Taehyung, however, sits straighter, croissant forgotten near his notebook, because the word singularity catches inside him with the bright precision of a hook.
He has loved space since childhood, though love feels too small a word for something that never asks him to perform, explain, soften or make conversation. Black holes interest him most, those places where certainty fails and the universe stops pretending its laws are permanent.
Dr. Na taps the desk once with the flat of her hand and the room settles. Behind her, a luminous disk appears on the screen, light warped around a perfect black center, and Taehyung feels the old fascination open inside his chest, silent and almost reverent.
“Let’s begin simply,” Dr. Na starts, her voice low and clean. “A black hole is a region of space where gravity is intense enough that escape becomes impossible. Matter cannot leave. Light cannot leave. Once the boundary is crossed, direction loses the meaning we usually give it.”
Her pen moves to the dark center on the slide. “At the core, mathematically speaking, we refer to a singularity. Density becomes infinite. Our equations fail. The tools we trust everywhere else stop working there.”
Taehyung leans forward without meaning to. He loves that exact moment, the place where logic admits its limits, where collapse becomes so complete that explanation has to bow its head and step back.
“Around it sits the event horizon,” Dr. Na continues, drawing a circle in the air with her pen. “The boundary of return. Outside it, movement remains negotiable. Past it, every path points inward.”
Jaebum bends toward him and whispers, “That’s how my mother described seeing my grades last semester,” and Taehyung presses his mouth together to trap the laugh before Dr. Na’s terrifying grace turns on them both.
“Popular images exaggerate the idea of black holes as cosmic monsters,” she adds, moving slowly along the front of the room. “They don’t chase the universe. They obey gravity. Yet an object close enough will have its trajectory altered, and at a certain point the alteration becomes irreversible.”
Taehyung writes the sentence down before he decides to. His handwriting is smaller than usual, pressed deep into the page, and he underlines trajectory twice.
“A singularity is an anomaly,” Dr. Na concludes, turning back toward the screen. “A place where the familiar rules cease to apply. Physics doesn’t become meaningless there, but our current language becomes insufficient.”
The room stays quiet after that, though several students are probably quiet from exhaustion rather than awe. Taehyung breathes out slowly and feels, for the first time since waking, that something in the world is large enough to make his life temporarily irrelevant.
Hyeri leans closer, her voice lowered. “Fascinating, right?”
Taehyung nods, eyes still on the black center of the projected image. “Yeah,” he murmurs, turning the page without looking away. “It feels good to hear something that admits when it stops making sense.”
Hyeri smiles at him, missing the full sincerity of it, and Taehyung lets her. For the remainder of the lecture, he writes, listens and allows the word anomaly to sit beside singularity in his notebook, two precise terms for two very different disasters.
The rest of the day collapses slowly. Constitutional law becomes a blur of voices and fluorescent light, coffee break becomes a cup trembling slightly between his fingers and every route across campus becomes an elaborate attempt to avoid going back to building D too soon.
By late afternoon, his body has begun issuing warnings with the persistence of an ignored alarm. His palms alternate between clammy and cold, pins and needles travel up his fingers, his heart beats too fast and then catches on odd pauses that make him focus on breathing until breathing becomes another thing to fail at.
He takes the long route around the gym, then the library, then the courtyard, earbuds in, volume high enough to press bass against his ribs. The idea of returning to the room waits at the edge of every thought, and each time it appears, his chest tightens as if the corridor outside room 613 has already wrapped itself around his lungs.
When he finally opens the door at 9:30 p.m., Jungkook is there. Shirtless, back against the wall, one knee up on his bed and phone placed beside him, he looks too awake and too furious to be casually existing, and Taehyung understands before either of them speaks that he has been waiting.
Jungkook stands, jaw set and eyes dark with the ugly fatigue Taehyung has spent all day pretending belongs only to him.
“You done slamming every fucking door like a psycho?” he demands, voice low enough to make the words cut cleaner.
Taehyung closes the door softly on reflex, which somehow makes the room feel more dangerous.
“Psycho?” he repeats, and the laugh that comes out of him has no humor in it. “You kept me up all night with your chewing, your bathroom trips, your door slamming and your general talent for existing at a volume banned under basic decency. If I’m a psycho, you’re the clinical cause.”
Jungkook steps closer, fists flexing at his sides. “I barely slept, Kim. You slammed the door twice this morning after spending half the night making the room feel like a fucking hostage situation. I put in earplugs, counted backwards like an idiot and still woke up every time you decided the door needed to suffer for your personality disorder.”
Heat shoots through Taehyung’s chest, but panic rises beneath it, black and fast and harder to control. “My personality disorder?” he fires back, gripping the strap of his bag until it bites into his palm. “You’ve turned this room into a landfill with Wi-Fi and a protein subscription. Your chips are on the desk, your socks are everywhere, your gym bag smells legally dead and you act offended when I object to living inside your personal dumpster.”
Jungkook laughs once, dry and nasty. “You object to everything. My food, my clothes, my keyboard, my breathing, my friends, my bed, the fact that I have blood circulation and need to move sometimes. You look at me like my existence is a fucking contamination and then act shocked when I stop trying to be nice.”
The word nice lands in a place Taehyung refuses to examine. His pulse jumps, his hands shake harder and he curls them into fists so Jungkook cannot see. “You were never nice. You were performing nice because it made you look better when I lost my mind.”
“There it is,” Jungkook shoots back, pointing at him now, his voice rising. “Everything I do becomes proof in whatever insane trial you’re running in your head. I leave a shoe out and it’s evidence. I laugh and it’s evidence. I eat in my own room and it’s evidence. You decided I was the problem years ago, and now you need me to stay one so your whole miserable system doesn’t fall apart.”
Taehyung’s vision flickers at the edges. The room is too small, the light too yellow, Jungkook too close, too bare-shouldered, too solid and too loud against the static rushing through his ears. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snaps, though the words come out thinner than he wants. “My system was fine before the administration locked me in a cage with you.”
Jungkook’s mouth twists. “A cage,” he repeats, and something in his expression changes so fast Taehyung almost misses it. “You really think living with you is freedom for me? You think I enjoy waking up angry every morning because you’ve decided the way I exist is an attack on you?”
Taehyung breathes in and gets almost nothing. His ribs feel cinched, his throat tight, sweat cooling under his sweatshirt while his stomach lurches. “You take up everything,” he forces out, voice shaking now. “The air, the desk, the bathroom, the night, every single space I try to keep clean enough to survive. You squat in my life and smile like I’m the one being unreasonable for wanting one corner that doesn’t belong to you.”
Jungkook goes very still for half a second, then the anger rushes back over his face like a door slammed shut. “You’re unbearable,” he replies, quieter now and worse for it. “You’re a silent tyrant with matching stationery. You want control so badly you’d suffocate both of us and call it peace.”
Taehyung feels the sentence strike somewhere too deep for anger to cover cleanly. His heartbeat stumbles, then races, and the room seems to tilt around the shared desk, around Jungkook’s bed, around the border they have spent a year defending like a war front.
“I hate you,” he blurts, and the rawness of it humiliates him before the sentence finishes. “I hate you so fucking much I can’t breathe when you’re in the same room.”
Jungkook stares at him, chest moving hard, and Taehyung expects a laugh, a smirk, some unbearable little victory. Instead, Jungkook’s face empties into something colder. “And I hate you because you make me wake up angry every damn morning,” he answers. “You’re toxic, Taehyung. Toxic enough to kill the room around you.”
For a second, Taehyung hears only the neon hum. The words do not enter all at once; they break apart, sink under his skin and drag air with them until his lungs feel useless.
“Go fuck yourself, Jeon,” he mutters, grabbing his bag before his shaking hands give him away completely. He leaves before the room can watch him become something worse, the strap slipping once against his shoulder as he crosses the narrow space without looking back.
The door closes behind him with a hard, final sound. He makes it halfway down the stairs before the panic catches him fully, and by the time he reaches the ground-floor hallway his breath has become a jagged, useless thing scraping at his throat.
He presses his back to the wall, slides down and folds forward with his knees drawn up, bag still trapped against his side. His fingers tingle, his heart hammers hard enough to hurt and every inhale arrives too short, too thin, as though the air has to pass through a narrowing tunnel before failing him.
He hates me. I hate him. We’re never getting out of this. I’m never going to sleep. I’m going to break down.
The thoughts loop until they lose grammar and become pressure. Taehyung buries his face in his arms, shaking without tears, and lets the panic take what it wants because fighting it would require a kind of strength he does not have left.
Time behaves badly after that. Ten minutes or an hour could pass in the flickering hallway while someone laughs far away, a pipe groans inside the wall and Taehyung tries to count his way back into a body that feels borrowed from a person on the verge of collapse.
Eventually, he manages one deeper breath. Then another. His pulse slows enough for him to stand with one hand braced against the wall, legs unsteady and head light, and he stays there a few seconds longer because pride is useless if he faints before reaching the exit.
Outside, Seoul’s early-March air cuts through his sweatshirt and pinches his skin. Pale pink petals spin under the streetlights, sticking to the wet asphalt, the benches, his shoulders and the damp strands of hair at his temples, and the world has the audacity to look calm.
Taehyung walks without choosing a direction. His earbuds are still in, music pounding against his ribs like a second heart, and the dorm recedes behind him with all its thin walls, rotten lighting and impossible gravity.
He crosses the inner courtyard, passes the rusty benches covered in petals and follows the path toward the main gates. He might end up in Yeouido Park, he might circle campus until dawn or he might simply keep moving until the pressure inside him forgets how to follow.
In his head, the loop returns softer than before, slower and more dangerous for it. He hates me. I hate him. We’re never getting out of this.
Taehyung clenches his teeth and quickens his pace. Pink petals cling to his hair like cruel decoration while he disappears into the cold night, still trying to put distance between himself and the thing bending every trajectory he thought he controlled.