spring, summer, winter, fall [2]
***
Jungkook wakes up with a pounding heart and a sweater draped over him. He finds Seokjin’s note stuck on his forearm: going to the presentation. Stay here. x
He checks his phone and it’s noon. Seokjin should be done soon.
The stand without the machine looks empty, purposeless. Jungkook slips on his pants and lab coat and pads out-
Seokjin almost knocks into him trying to get to the room. “He took it, that fucking bastard,” he mutters to Jungkook. “We’re going.”
“Where?”
Seokjin’s already walking away. The lab is completely devoid of people, and Jungkook feels a strange coldness, an icy sense of foreboding. They go to the elevator and Seokjin waits until the doors close before muttering, “I swear I’m going to kill him.” He punches the “P” button hard. “He had the others turn on me, fuck.”
“What’re you doing?”
“Asking for it back,” Seokjin says.
“Hyung-”
The elevator pings and the doors slide open. Jungkook doesn’t even have time to reach out to shield Seokjin.
As though in slow motion, Jungkook’s seized by the arms and dragged out, like a rag doll. The men holding him have him in a vice-like grip. It’s impossible to break.
Seokjin’s shouting and fighting, but Jungkook knows it’s useless. The men drag Jungkook through a door and Seokjin’s voice cuts off abruptly. He’s hauled to another elevator-a private one, and is ceremoniously tossed out of KGI’s backdoor.
“Don’t try coming back in,” one of the suits say, as if Jungkook needs further warning. They stalk away, leaving him breathless in a backalley of Seoul’s most profitable industrial park. Jungkook didn’t even know they had backdoors.
His phone beeps. The message is from Seokjin.
I need to talk to you. Dinner where we spoke about.
Yoongi might have intercepted Seokjin. Jungkook hits dial and reaches voicemail.
Another message pops in.
Don’t try anything. I’ll know.
At the bottom of the text is a small x. Taunting him.
Jungkook takes two steps and wrenches open the backdoor before his phone beeps again, like a warning.
Don’t.
The guards from before march over to him and take him to the edge of the industrial park this time.
***
Jungkook hangs around the park like a hound, perking up whenever someone in a lab coat walks past. The sun sets slowly over the mass of steel and glass buildings, and by evening Jungkook’s stomach is roiling with tension. He must have texted Seokjin, or Yoongi, fifty times.
His phone beeps for the first time since his unceremonious exit, and he scrambles to pick up.
He’s with me. Be on time.
Jungkook settles into a seat at the restaurant ten minutes early, fingers clenched hard against his pant fabric. He has no way of knowing if Yoongi is going to honor his agreement, except to wait for the time of the accident to pass.
The clock in the corner ticks up, rounding the minute. Ten minutes pass, and Jungkook pulls out his phone to call Seokjin.
“This number cannot be reached at this time, please-”
Jungkook runs of the restaurant, already redialing.
There’s only five minutes left and he’s on the outskirts of the city. He flags down a cab and doesn’t wait for it stop before he pulls the door open. Seokjin is probably already at the curb, standing and looking at his watch right now. Jungkook chokes down a sob and redials again.
“Jungkook?”
“Seokjin, hyung-where are you?” Jungkook nearly collapses onto his seat with relief.
“I’m-”
“Don’t move, okay. I’m coming to get you.” And to the driver, he calls, “can you go a little faster?” The cabbie nods and speeds up.
“Jungkook, I have to tell you something.” His voice is firm, and for a moment it makes Jungkook’s chest squeeze, because this was-is still his hyung, the one who took him under his wing and protected him. “I don’t want to get you deeper than you already are into this mess, even though I know you will. It’s already happened.” Seokjin chuckles, but it sounds hollow, even though the receiver.
“What’re you saying?” The taxi stops at a busy intersection. They’re so close, just one more traffic light and Jungkook will be there but-
“I'm the one who made the machine the way it is. I have to pull it from the roots,” Seokjin murmurs. “So it never happens.”
“Don’t move, please.” Jungkook’s voice is cracking-his urgency making his throat so tight he can barely speak. The taxi is going too slow, he’s not going to make it there in time-he pushes out of the cab and starts running. “Hyung, please, don’t move, stay out of the road-”
“I love you very, very much,” Seokjin whispers. He’s never, ever said that, in all their time together. Jungkook squeezes his eyes shut as the call cuts off on the other end.
He hears the screeching of the tires before he sees it, and this time he looks head-on and watches as time replays again.
***
Leaving Seokjin-and his other self-behind, knowing the outcome, knowing the rest of the story, Jungkook goes to the park. It feels like he’s floating, and he’s only half-conscious of where he’s going. The Seoul traffic flies by beside him in an endless stream of colour and light, and so when he reaches the park, its stark quietness sparks something in him. He finds the man sitting on a bench opposite the one where they first met, and goes to join him.
“It didn’t work,” he says. “You said I was going to go back and fix things. You said-” And his voice bubbles up uncontrollably into a warble. “You knew what’s going to happen.”
The old man blinks at him. “Yes,” he says simply.
“What’s going to happen to me now?” If Jungkook’s going to disappear, vanish like he’s never existed, then he welcomes it. He failed after all. Time can’t be changed.
“I’m only the messenger, Jungkook,” the man says. “I can’t know where you’re going. You decided that for yourself.”
“I didn’t...I didn’t decide anything for myself. God. What was the point?”
“The ecosystem needed the input. You fed the system so it could thrive.”
“I don’t care about that,” Jungkook bursts out. “Let me go back again.”
“You will.”
“When?”
The old man looked at him with sad smile. “Don’t you want to know my name? It’s tiring to call me sir all the time, am I right?”
“Look, if you’re not going to tell me anything-”
“Ask me,” the man implores.
Jungkook works his jaw, and asks, dutifully, “hat’s your name, sir?”
The old man smiles and the sight of it makes Jungkook’s skin crawl. It looks broken and wrong, somehow, like it isn’t supposed to belong there. The man opens his mouth, like breaking open a seal, and says, “My name is Jeon Jungkook.”
***
“You’re lying.”
The man retrieves his wallet from his pocket, and hands Jungkook his driver’s license.
Name: Jeon Jungkook
Birthdate: 1 September 1980
Date of license: 22 February 2001
The person in the photo was around his thirties or forties, but it isn’t him. He knows that face, though. It’s hard to ignore if he’s so unwillingly well-acquainted.
“That’s Min Yoongi, not me.”
The old man leans in, and points at the photo of himself. “The eyes, and the nose.” And now Jungkook sees it. It’s Jungkook-it was Jungkook. He must have done something to his face-surgery, or something-to become this. He looks back up at the man-his other self-with his chest constricted. It’s impossible, it must have been a fake-
“I’m an old man, Jungkook. What would I gain out of lying to you? Anyway.” The man-Jungkook-stands up with a loud sigh. His eyes reveal a hint of amusement, like he knows something Jungkook doesn’t. “My loop is almost complete.”
A few paces away, the other Jungkook stumbles into the park, his breath ragged and loud, eyes unseeing. “Goodbye, Jungkook. I believe this is the last time you’ll see me.” The old man says, and goes to tend to the other Jungkook.
Jungkook starts moving forward-to tell his younger self to stay out of it-but someone grabs him by the collar and covers his mouth with a hand.
He’s turned around to face Min Yoongi. “Don’t interfere,” Yoongi says. “We need to talk.”
***
Jungkook did ask once, and only once, why Seokjin started seeing him. It was after one of the biggest fights they had, when Seokjin was still wavering about dating him.
Seokjin shouted at him, “he used to be like you.” And then his face crumpled with shame. Jungkook still doesn’t know if it was because Seokjin was shocked at how much he wanted to hurt Jungkook, or at how ready he was to show him the truth.
***
They sit in Yoongi’s Maserati in the basement of Yoongi and Seokjin’s home. Yoongi’s fingers play against the steering wheel. Jungkook has his hands by his side, because there’re bodyguards surrounding the car, coiled and ready to spring at the slightest wrong move.
“I think you know what you should do when the next turn comes,” Yoongi says finally. His lips curl into a grimace. “The backwards turn of the machine.”
Jungkook shifts, so they’re eye to eye. “What did you say to him, you fucking bastard.”
“I didn’t have much of a choice.” Yoongi speaks so casually, like he’s discussing the weather, as if his husband didn’t just kill himself an hour ago.
“You-” Jungkook grits his teeth. “You had a choice not to go back-”
“Jungkook...please calm down.” Yoongi sighs. “Time will move no matter what. It’s something you have to come to terms with. You will, eventually.”
“If you didn’t meddle, then things wouldn’t turn out like this.”
“It’s not that simple,” Yoongi says, and his tone is so gentle that it prickles at Jungkook, challenging him to erupt, lose his cool, and Jungkook bites down on that instinct. “How many of you do you think are out there right now? You’re just at the start of this loop.” Yoongi drums his fingers against the steering wheel. “You, or some version of us, jumped the gun and started the cycle just when we were beginning to explore time’s possibilities, before we were ready.
“Do you understand? We created the ecosystem.”
Jungkook opens his mouth to speak, but there’s nothing to say.
“There will be different things that you need to take care of in each turn, but we need to find the original one. We need to change time from there.”
“But he said time can’t be changed.”
Yoongi has a bitter smile of his face. “I found something new in this timeline that fucking old fool doesn’t know, apparently. He must be from an older branch, split before my age, and god knows how many branches there are right now.” He scoffs and raises his eyes skywards.
“I loved Seokjin very much,” he continues. “When he created that mistake that rippled time, I knew what I had to do: stop it from the beginning.”
“I have to pull it from the roots.”
The weeds in the river, drifting downstream, separating into strands.
“Couldn’t you have…” Jungkook utters, floored. “Let him go? He wasn’t part of this. If you love him, why...”
“There’s so much love in this world, Jungkook… What people would do to get it and keep it. The last two days proved that, didn’t it?” Jungkook looks away, abashed. “This machine will erase our entire species, if we let too many people meddle with the past. Do you understand now, why I did it?”
Jungkook stares at his lap and grips the ends of his shirt in his hands, crumpling the material. He wants to speak, to show that Yoongi’s a fucking liar, but he has been in the lab and seen the machine. He has listened to Seokjin’s rapid-fire muttering as they worked feverishly for a solution-a solution that perhaps was never supposed to exist.
He knows this to be true. He exhales like the air has been punched out of him, a silent, gentle acceptance.
Yoongi looks at his watch. “Your turn is soon.” A soft dismissal.
Jungkook nods numbly, and starts to get out of the car when a final question makes him turn back.
“So why renew the vows?”
“I thought.” Yoongi- or Jungkook-pauses. “I thought I could change this tiny part of his life. Who made him happy in his last days. But I guess I didn’t have to."
“It’s always been you.”
*** *** ***
Years pass, or just fall into place. Jungkook has waited for a long time for this moment. He enters the ballroom of the annual physics convention and greets his colleagues and business partners dutifully, playing the role of the host perfectly.
It’s only after a few hours that he sees him. Kim Seokjin stands in a corner, eyes downcast, his hands clasped in front of his hips. He doesn’t know Jungkook, but Jungkook knows him, remembers him.
A part of Jungkook wants to change this very moment, to walk away from Seokjin after all, and the other part, the larger part of him, rises up inside him and demands to see Seokjin alive again. That part of him, Jungkook knows now, will set the past-future. Right now, there’s only one decision to make, that he made, that he is making.
Seokjin looks up at his approach, eyes widening. So he knows who Jungkook is, who Jungkook will become.
“Hello,” Jungkook says. “I’m Min Yoongi.” And he puts his hand out for Seokjin to shake.
“Kim Seokjin.” Seokjin smiles bashfully. “I’m studying physics in SNU.” His hand is just as warm as Jungkook remembers.
Time clicks into gear.
Spoiler: Seokjin will die twice in this fic but offscreen. All other characters remain alive at the closing point of the story.
Inspiration:
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (2003), Timecrimes (2007), Primer (2004), and that jinkook interview about their reverse age gap ♥
Additional Notes
I would love to know what you think.