UNTILL I MET YOU || JIKOOK

22

JIMIN POV

The meal went better than he had hoped.

Jungkook was more relaxed, chatty even, talking about things that were a little more personal than the bland topics he normally stuck to.

He seemed genuinely interested in his new home and Jimin was surprised to find he'd read several books on the history of the island.

It was an easy topic to get stuck into.

"Yoongi is the real expert. Liable to talk your ear off about it if you give him a chance. Everything I know that's not found in a book, I learned from him."

"Like what?" Jungkook asked.

"Well, for a long time, we believed the original settlers stayed on the coast."

"Which made sense since they were sailors and fishermen."

" But more recent discoveries have challenged that belief."

"One of the oldest settlements we've discovered is right in the center of the island."

"It really threw our historians when it was found because it suggests so many possibilities."

"Like what?" Jungkook asked, his eyes lighting up.

"Well, the arrival of the settlers over a thousand years ago coincides with the exodus of the western kings from the old kingdom. We'd always assumed that we were their descendants."

"But it's beginning to look like the island was inhabited before this. Were the original population gone before they landed?"

"Or did their arrival lead to them being wiped out? An even more intriguing possibility is that the two populations intermixed."

"And we are in fact descendants of both. Most of our historians flatly deny that last possibility."

"They put a lot of stock in our being directly descended from the western kings. But there is one, Lee, who dissents."

"Years before the settlement was discovered, he theorized that we were a blend of two civilizations."

He had Jungkook's rapt attention, their food forgotten.

"How did he come to that belief?"

"He compared the characteristics of our modern population with that of other populations descended from those western settlers. There are divergences, more than can be accounted for just by separation and time."

"For one, our language has a lot of words not found in other groups.You must have noticed by now. We also have peculiarities in our writing sentence structure, grammar. And we have a second written language. It has almost completely fallen out of favor."

"The other historians long believed it was a language of the elite among the western kings, carried here in the boats but they've never been able to find other examples of it outside this island."

"Then there's the physical characteristics. Normally, colonized islands are derived from a small number of settlers."

"There's a tendency towards homogeny hair color, eye color."

"Other western descended islands have very similar traits in similar proportions across their populations. Not so us."

"Then who were they?" Jungkook wondered. "These natives?"

"That's the question, isn't it?"

"Who were they, how did they get here, and what, ultimately, happened to them?"