dissolve. ✓

THREE

jeongguk couldn't sleep anymore. or maybe the problem was that he couldn't wake up; maybe it was all just one long nightmare and sometime soon he would wake up screaming to find that everything was fine and yoongi was alive and he hadn't spent the last however long as a meat puppet for chaos incarnate. but then, waking up hadn't been very effective of late, so even if he did it wouldn't do him a lot of good.

the world—what he thought he knew of it, at least—was in shades of blood-tinted grey and counting his fingers did no good when he knew he couldn't trust them.

they weren't his and not in the sense that they had done awful, horrific things outside of his control—guns and blood and a rush of savage pleasure, perverse and unforgettable—but they weren't his. not his hands, not his face, not his body. everything that he was was fake, a magical construct vomited up by his demons and left to approximate life in a world that didn't make any fucking sense to him anymore.he couldn't look in the mirror, couldn't look at the thing he had become and see it staring back at him with his face.

jeongguk didn't tell his friends any of that either. sometimes he thought he could still taste their fear, could feel it like a sick thrill in his gut. the way his dad seemed ready to dive headfirst into a bottle of jack daniels every time he looked at jeongguk. the way hoseok was skittish and nervous around him. the way jimin flinched sometimes when he caught sight of him before reminding himself that it wasn't the same him. the blank look in namjoon's eye and the palpable grief that jeongguk knew all too well—the loss of a soulmate he had recently received, though jeongguk knew that seokjin's name had replaced yoongi's on namjoon's thigh.

none of them seemed to notice how jeongguk watched them, searching out for their fingers to count when he could because he knew his own were unreliable. how he stared at books and fought down the panic when the words shimmered and shifted before his eyes that didn't quite see the way they used to. how he scratched, clawing at the skin that dared to claim itself as his when it wasn't, wasn't even real, wasn't him at all but something foreign and wrong and inescapable.

jeongguk did his best to forget about it, covered up as much of himself as possible in layers of clothes just so he didn't have to see himself. he still showered when he had to, because it drew unwanted attention to him when he started to offend the others noses, even though all vulnerable, traitorous skin on display made him sick to his stomach, made his borrowed head spin.

or maybe that was exhaustion, hunger, whatever; he wasn't sure how long it had been since his last meal, whether his last real awakening had been that morning or a month ago, but what did it really matter? even with him dead—and jeongguk along with it, the real him, anyway—he was still in the nightmare.

the skin felt the same, at least, still transmitted all the same signals of pain and pleasure even though it was all felt through the heavy blanket that seemed determined to smother him these days. when his hands rubbed soap across his stomach—scarred from the evisceration he could still feel sometimes, the buzzing of flies loud in his ears—he could feel the slip and glide of it, up his chest to his neck, along his shoulder and down one arm to the other hand. he didn't let himself linger there; if he did, he would scrub until he broke skin trying to wash away the remembered slick of blood and the fresh blood it brought would send him into a new panic.

the hands were dangerous territory in a lot of ways, so he avoided those as best he could. better to focus on the innocuous things, the few parts of him that had never been used to kill and maim and torture his thoughts. legs were relatively safe. feet were fine, no guilt to be had there. knees that only shook sometimes, thighs as blank and featureless as alw-

jeongguk nearly slipped and bashed his head in trying to get a closer look because there was no way he had just seen what he thought he did. that spot had been empty for months, ever since her, and it had been weeks since his most recent life-changing experience; why would it all change now? he hadn't thought about his own soulmate status in a long time.

when jeongguk finally managed to contort himself the right way without causing injury, he stared. and then he stared some more, long enough for the water to grow cold around him, wondering if this was part of the dream. finally he decided that it had to be real only because his subconscious was not creative enough to come up with this.

there, in freckle-brow letters stark against pale skin, was the name kim taehyung.

—

uwu this chapter is shorter than the last one but probably more confusing uwus!!

i promise this story will make more sense as it goes on. the first few chapters are sort of confusing mainly because i sort of only elude to everything that happened beforehand.

&& ily bitches