watch the stars (and see yourself running with them) || baepsaeved

"I already am."

Time, like space, is just another physical dimension. A measurement, a label put onto something so big, so far beyond our comprehension that it should not be so easily summarised in just a few letters, the real implications of it squeezed tight in the spaces in between characters and spilling out where a mere word can't contain them, like colourless ink adding to an empty sheet of paper full of things we cannot understand.

Time is relative, but such has never mattered on earth; it doesn't matter that six years passed on some nameless star further away than our imagination stretches while someone made and finished their breakfast and maybe got to work. It does not matter that a lifetime here might be six lifetimes there.

Time, so it has been said, is inevitable. It runs silently in the background, like a spring that never dries or a tree that never stops growing, and though it seems to pale in comparison to phenomenons so much more imminent- hunger, poverty, suffering- in the end, it is the only thing that no one can escape.

Next to the sheer vastness of the universe, a single planet such as the earth, hidden in a galaxy comparatively small, seems terribly insignificant. But underneath layers of space and atmosphere and physical dimensions, concealed by all the hard facts and the science behind, lie the different fates of an entire population- each man, woman and child has their own. United and over time, the suffering of the single person amounted to a general state, to catastrophes on first national, then international scale. Perhaps there were too many of them, those unfortunate fates, and all together they flooded the land and drained the ocean and almost pulled time- on earth- to a stop.

Overpopulation, that was the diagnosis to a seemingly incurable disease, so many years ago. Called and predicted, years before that. In the end, not finding a cure led- leads- to gripping the disease by the root and ripping it out, forcefully so. Solutions are often found by trial and error, and this, some whisper, is a drawn out trial that has long revealed itself as a mistake.

None of this- the physical theories, the cosmology and mathematics behind, and maybe not even the past that led up to this, is of any concern to the people trapped in the now. Time, nevertheless, is the first and foremost thing on their minds. Most of them spend a considerable amount of it throwing glances at the numbers on the inside of their arms, always moving, always counting down.

Time may not be alterable, but it can be influenced in other ways, after all.

Jungkook hasn't spared his numbers so much as a look for quite a while. He takes to catching glimpses of other people's instead, an unsettling habit he can't quite shake. Right now, he's eyeing Taehyung's as the other pushes a shot glass across the table and towards him.

"My eyes are up here," Taehyung jokes, and he's smiling, but there's an underlying seriousness resounding with the words. Jungkook takes the glass and looks up to meet Taehyungs gaze.

"You're running out," he states.

"Cheers", Taehyung replies, and throws his shot back.

-

Jungkook's dreams mostly consist of numbers. Colourless and mechanic, thousands and thousands of numbers running before him like a code he can never decipher. He tells his mother, once, and she assures him he has nothing to worry about; their family won't run out of hours any time soon. Jungkook thinks of long nights spent in the other part of the city, down by the river, he thinks of bright eyes and flashed smiles and the warmth induced by alcohol and laughing for too long, and he doesn't say anything.

For all the endgame theories that people came up with back in the day, sometimes on the brink of madness, none of this was ever predicted. Not even considered. Had it been, it most likely would have been written off as sheer insanity.