Wonder || JiKook

18

"So are all these flowers for him? So he won't have to wonder if a sheep has eaten his flower? There are too many flowers for any sheep to eat here!" and as if to illustrate, the boy waves his hands towards the massive expanse of the greenhouse, acres and acres of land, acres and acres of cherry blossoms.

Jungkook laughs, "Smart--yes. These are for him. So he can look up at the sky and see the stars a-bloom with flowers."

"Must be lonely, all by himself..."
The Glietian boy says, wrinkling his nose as a petal falls on it. He goes briefly cross-eyed, staring at the tiny pink thing before he shakes his head and it flutters to the ground.

Jungkook heaves a sigh and nods and tries not to think (as he has done so many nights, so many days, so many weeks and months and years) about how small Jimin must have looked curled up on that couch, wonder if Jimin sang himself to sleep that night, with his eyes squeezed shut, pretending that it's Jungkook's voice and if Jungkook had to name one regret in his whole entire life (sans the obvious one of letting Jimin--if he had only held on--if he had--if--) he would say that it was not singing more when he had the chance. Not singing for Jimin when he had asked, not singing him awake and singing him asleep and singing him through the paces and prints of every single day they had together as boys. Still as boys now.

"He has my favorite book to keep him company, and if he can see it, this whole garden in the sky."

Jungkook says, and smiles to himself. Because he has to hold onto something to keep himself sane, funny that it's the very thing driving him to what the people of old would have called insanity--believing, deluding himself into--no, believing that maybe, there's a chance that Jimin is still alive, and looking up and wondering if Jungkook is there too.

"Well if these are his flowers, then where are yours?" the Glietian boy asks.

Jungkook presses his fingers over the book in his hands, tracing the tattered outline and tries to imagine sunrise. There are two suns here, and too many moons to count, so no sunrise or sunset, as the rotation of suns and moons and so many stars it's nearly impossible to chart them.

He tries to imagine a sunrise as beautiful as those on Earth and can't, and then he wonders if the sunrises themselves were beautiful, or if they were made so by the way Jimin's face would light up when they happened; he tries to remember a sunrise without Jimin by his side and can't. There are none to be remembered.

"He's my flower," Jungkook says, "just the one."

"Oh," the boy says, and then recedes into silence. And then, "Then how do you know that he's still there? That the 'sheep hasn't eaten the flower', that's what the book says, right?"

Jungkook nods and places the book back in its case, lock clicking into place with a small hiss.

He looks back up at the makeshift sky, projected across the greenhouse ceiling and tries to imagine the universe beyond, the direction that Earth might be in, and he sighs, deep and heavy, lacing his fingers over his lap.

The ground below is covered in fallen flowers.

"That's why I'm still a boy... because I wonder if my flower is still there. And like the book says, that's a kind of pain, a kind of importance that no grown up will ever understand."

Wonder

A sad story in which Jimin, was left behind, afraid, lost, and alone - as the last person on Earth.