Between Truths ║Dahkook║K.DH J.JK

coming home

CHAPTER XIX

He hesitated. Long. It was well past appropriate to be making home visits. Alas. Here he was. Parked outside the tall gate. The lights came on as he did. Now, it slept again, not sensing movements. Like the rest of the house.

He deliberated his options in the darkness. Leave the car with the keys in? Or wait until morning for her to come out?

Something shifted in the bushes, and the lights came on again. The figure moved, slow, muscles entrenched with sleep—a boy, Seungmin. Pulled himself off the ground to wind up at the gates. His fingers curled around the brandished iron. He peered into the distance. Jungkook followed his gaze.

Dark stones built into neat stacks rising to a second floor—it was not the prettiest one in the neighbourhood with its old stonework, but it looked the cosiest, nestled in the nook of the slumbering mountains. 

Long minutes must have passed. Curiosity and sympathy bid Jungkook out of the car; near the unnaturally still boy.

"Locked out?" He asked the boy.

Silence. Not even a twitch of a brow at Jungkook's unexpected presence. Up this close, he could trace his resemblance to Dahyun. The slope of his cheeks, the depth of his eyes. But apart of that, his face was nothing he had ever seen before—a tumble of weirdly drawn emotions. His mouth was grim, yet his cheeks were almost a smile. No one would pull that bizarre expression, or hold them for so long. No, there was something wrong with Kim Seungmin.

He clapped Seungmin's back, friendly, steady, "I'm going to press the bell, yeah?"

He had nothing to say to that. Well until silence lapsed after Jungkook rang the bell for the second time. Seungmin told him then, "No one will open the door for you."

"Is that why you slept out here?"

The boy only shrugged.

"You're better than me, Seungmin. It seemed only yesterday that I was young, and home felt like hell. I was wrong, of course. It's not. Far from it."

"You know my name."

"It's on your chest. You're wearing it so proudly."

He touched the batch pinned over his heart mindlessly. "Hell...I don't want to go there." Quiet. "Home is a scary place too. Where do I go?"

He was asking it so earnestly. Jungkook did know any answer that would not break his heart more than it already did.

"You could stay here. Just outside. Just as you've been doing."

"No one's here."

"I'm here."

"You'll leave."

"I won't," Jungkook promised. "Not before you do."

"It's painful." For a barest moment his eyes shifted to focus, but it was hard for him to hold on to that moment of lucidity. But he did not reek of alcohol. Just a boy in a deep well of sorrow. He did not pretend to understand Seungmin's anguish, but it was easy to see it; be saddened by it too.

"Everyone's leaving. I'm not good. I want to be good. I can't. Nothing I do is good. Will you tell her I'm good? I know I can be. Help me. I'll be good to you too. I know I can."

The heart—when it fell, shattering into tiny pieces, could you hope to put it back together?

"Seung—"

"Seungmin." Jungkook turned to find Dahyun standing in the middle of the empty road. War clashed in her eyes—anger, relief, impatience, weariness.

"I didn't run. I came home. But no one is here." Seungmin told her.