Episode 3

His hand raises a tiny bit and Jeongguk thinks maybe he will offer it for him to hold, but he seems to change his mind, draw it back to his thigh, perhaps because Jeongguk flinches away from all his touches, anyway. He doesn’t think he would have pulled away from this one, but it’s too late for that.

Jeongguk’s eyes are a bit wide as an aftermath of the suggestion, but his heart seems to relax in his chest. He pulls his lips fully into his mouth, makes them a thin line on his face, a short moment of hesitation, contemplation, but he nods. He has no other place to sleep and this boy with the big eyes is the only person he knows who definitely isn’t a bad guy. 

He isn’t, Jeongguk establishes. Bad guys tend to be distorted, unshapely, often they are ugly, and their eyes are certainly not so big. They are slits, evil like a serpent. The only unshapely thing on this boy is the hair. 

The boy juts his head again and starts walking. Jeongguk bends his head down but follows, taking exactly the same steps that the boy takes, same pace, same width. 

The boy pauses in front of a short wardrobe of drawers, turns to him again. “Do you have a change of clothes for tonight?” He whispers to him.

Jeongguk shakes his head. He has a suitcase of his things but there is apparently some adult stuff, as the grinning lady had so maturely put it, in fact some legal procedures to take care of, before she can give him anything that was taken out of his mother’s apartment. 

The boy nods, turns back and pulls at one of the drawers. They’re old and wooden like the rest of the house, noisy like the rest of the house, it creaks, and the boy’s lips hiss a bit with it, draw back and flinch as he tries to do it as slow and quiet as he can muster. He rummages a bit through it before he pulls out something with a tug that messes up a couple of the nicely folded fabrics above it. He hands it to Jeongguk, who takes it with minimum reluctance. The boy presses his palm on top of the rest of the clothes, stuffs the fabrics back in and simply closes the drawer with the mess in it. 

He glances at Jeongguk again, sees his nervous stare downwards as he shifts the shirt he’s given from hand to hand, rubbing it together. He blinks at him, pulls his lips slightly into his cheeks. “I won’t look,” he promises, reaches a lanky arm up and turns the night lamp off. Jeongguk is shy enough to want the boy to turn away. He’s too shy admit it and it is a bad combination, so he is very much glad the boy reads it on him, though it does make his cheeks heat up a bit that he is that obvious. 

He changes his shirt, slips off his jeans. His boxers are long enough to fall over half of his thighs, so he doesn’t mind it all too much, although the prospect of getting into the bed does make him gulp. 

“Do you want the inside?” The boy whispers and Jeongguk is quick to shake his head. The bed is pressed up against the wall and sleeping on the inside will leave him essentially trapped. 

He only sees the boy nod in the outline the moon creates of him where it peaks through a light curtain in front of the window. He hears him move more than he witnesses it himself, the shuffle of fabric, somehow distinctive as sheets sliding into place. 

“Okay,” the boy says when the sound halts. He’s settled, he means. It’s Jeongguk’s turn. He needs a moment, but he’s tired, so awfully tired. His body is desperate for the warmth of a bed, his eyes needy for a long rest.

He presses a palm into the mattress, lifts one knee up and gingerly gets into the bed, as far away from the shape he sees of the other boy. It’s virtually impossible not to touch him at all. The bed is single. They share a blanket; they share a pillow. He knows the boy has his back almost entirely pressed into the wall, flush against it to allow for the most space possible for Jeongguk. When he lies down finally, sideways and facing him to track with his eyes how far he is, to know he isn’t touching too much, the boy lifts the blanket and throws it over Jeongguk’s shoulder.

Their opposite cheeks rest into the same pillow. 

Jeongguk thinks his eyes adapt to the darkness because slowly he starts to see more of his face. He sees his lashes as they fall over his big glinting eyes. Mostly, he sees them, those enormous eyes. They seem to shine. 

He feels more comfortable than he reckoned it was possible for him, but the darkness makes it all easier. The fact that there is someone next to him, whose smile is genuine and who doesn’t keep him away from adult stuff makes it easier. This boy is not one of the bad guys in The System.

“My name is Taehyung, by the way,” he mumbles to him, mouth squished slightly by the pillow. His cheek is mushier like this. “What’s yours?”

He isn’t one of the bad guys.

“Jeongguk,” He says. Speaks for the first time since he was told his mother was dead. He can barely recognize his own voice. It’s dry and it gives him the incentive to clear his throat, but his name feels easy to pronounce, nevertheless.

“Goodnight, Jeongguk,” the boy yawns, his mouth stretching as wide as his eyes. They close easily in the darkness.

He has to learn so many things anew. That first night teaches him gratitude. Sadly, it also teaches him trust, trust for this boy. He should know better. 

He’s ten. He can’t know better. 

In that very moment, after all, all his senses become him, that him, Taehyung. He sees him, sees the outlines of his face and body in the moonlight. He feels him, feels the heat of his presence and their toes knock together. He hears him, hears him breathe as his breath shallows and evens. He thinks he can also taste that breath. Jeongguk doesn’t brush his own teeth that night, but the taste in his mouth is that of mint. And he smells him. The most powerful sense, the scent. It is entirely encompassed by this boy and it shapes a memory in his head, the memory of Taehyung being there where he was most alone, of Taehyung giving him a shirt to sleep in, a bed to sleep in, of Taehyung giving him a presence beside him. 

“Goodnight.”

Sometimes, in retrospect, Jeongguk wishes that following morning he had known waking up next to Kim Taehyung is a unique experience. He wishes that boy had somehow hinted to him that he needed to savor because life will teach him not to allow it. But at this point Jeongguk doesn’t care who he wakes up next to as long as they don’t have a twisted grin with shiny teeth bared.

The boy smacks his lips twice when he wakes up with his eyes still closed. Jeongguk has been awake for two hours and thirty-four minutes before the other’s lids blink to awareness. He has been counting.

The boy—well, Taehyung, now he is Taehyung—is extremely difficult to raise off of bed. He groans, he rotates around the sheets, bundles the blanket and clutches at it with both his arms, stripping it off of Jeongguk to raise one leg on top of it. 

He is a messy sleeper as a whole. Jeongguk at that age believes he would never want to sleep next to him if it weren’t for necessity and the comfort of a warm, human presence. Jeongguk at that age is wistfully wrong. 

Breakfast is cereal. There are two types. Jeongguk chooses for himself the less sugary one. Taehyung who gets up seventeen minutes after everyone else has finished eating chooses the other. 

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