vớ vẩn 2

chap 10 - Street Smarts

Jimin was aware of the fact that he always missed things, usually important things, because they always seemed to happen whilst he wasn't there, or when he was asleep. It was incredibly irritating that he was constantly left asking 'what?' ten minutes after everyone else already knew, after it had already happened and no one wanted to talk about it. Sometimes it wasn't important but rather something amusing, a joke he hadn't heard because he had been distracted, something cool like Jungkook singing those few days ago in the back of the now broken car, the one thousands of miles away. This time it was neither of those things, it was something very important and he finally hadn't missed it, or at least not entirely.

He hadn't really been asleep when the knocking on the door had loudly sounded but rather trapped between his dreams and reality. He had been sleeping when Yoongi had climbed into the bed beside him and had accidentally woken him up. That had been rather disorientating because it had taken him a moment to remember that he had fallen asleep in their room, curled up on the floor with a stomach full of hot food for the first time in near a week. At first he had felt the sensation of the bed shifting and then a waft of cigarette smoke coming from whoever had climbed in the bed beside him. Could have been Taehyung, who he usually shared with, for the boy often smelled of cigarettes, but there had been no obvious scent of booze coupled with it. That had been the first hint that it hadn't been the boy. The second had been the fact the covers hadn't been wrenched off him rudely, and the third had been the sensation of someone actually lying beside him. Taehyung either spread out like a starfish and hogged all of the mattress or he stayed on his side, back against his. He most certainly didn't share the bed in such a manner; a manner Jimin had greatly appreciated because it meant not waking up on the floor and discovering he had been pushed out of the bed at some point in the night. He had felt the young man settling down beside him, doing so gently to try and not disturb him, legs brushing against his and his tee against his back, and he had closed his eyes again and felt himself drifting off once more. Well, at least until the pounding on the door had jolted them all awake and Yoongi had climbed back out of bed to answer it. He had just gotten comfortable too. So Jimin had pried one eye open to see Namjoon sitting up in the bed facing them, looking as wrecked as he felt, and their friend hastily pulling the lock back with fumbling fingers.

He had been caught too much by surprise to have even guessed who had been knocking on the door because he didn't even have time to sit up before Yoongi was dragging someone inside, someone that looked and sounded like Jungkook. Then the young man hit the light switch hard and plunged the room in a harsh yellow light. Jimin squinted with a hiss of pain to see that it was indeed their friend, but he looked drastically different than he had when he had last seen him.

The boy's hoodie had been worn from use but in a pretty decent shape with just some scuffing on the elbows, but there was now a massive tear in one of the sleeves, on the shoulder seams so that he could see the grey of his tee-shirt sleeve peeping through the hole. For some reason his eyes focused on that first, as if that was the most obvious and shocking thing about his appearance. Dark hair a tattered mess that looked to be the result of snagging hands, from a few hard tugs that would have hurt a lot, but not as much the bruises and grazes all over his face. There was a blemish on his right cheek that looked like it would darken into a hideous bruise and a similar one on his jawline. No black eyes but a split in his lower lip that was deep enough to be bleeding profusely. It was just a little off centre, to the left, a slice that looked like a trench to his eyes: angry red against his lips. There was blood all down his chin and throat soaking into the neckline of his tee and making a rusty crimson bib its wake.

He had been in a fight again, perhaps something more closely described as a brawl.

Jimin knew that Jungkook had a tendency to get into fights and it was no secret. It came about because the boy was always wandering the streets in the dead of night and bumping into drunks, or at least that was what he told them. He always made it sound like they picked the fights first, that he was just walking when they crashed into him, all slurred words and waving fists, and he tried his hardest to avoid the confrontation. Except Jimin knew that that was not the case at all and he was pretty certain that the others did too. Maybe the drunks started it, but he certainly carried it on, let it escalate to the point of blows just because he wanted it to happen. Jungkook liked to pretend that he didn't want the trouble but he did. The boy carried around a lot of anger, anger that he kept in check around them, but that he certainly vented somehow, thanks to his fistfights on street corners with complete strangers. Why he had so much aggression he wasn't sure because he didn't want to ask but it was there, just beneath the surface. Sometimes it was visible in the brief downturn at the corners of his lips, the narrowing of his eyes, but then it was gone as quick as it had appeared. And tonight it had burst free and gotten him into a spot of trouble.