dissolve. ✓

NINE

jeongguk stabbed half-heartedly at his laptop's keyboard, getting through another half-sentence before deleting the last paragraph entirely with a huff. he shoved the computer back until it nearly skittered off the other side of the coffee table and pulled the reading packet closer. the words made sense, they did. all the letters were in the right order and they even stayed still and everything, they just weren't sticking in his head. really, that probably had as much to do with his adhd and his shitty mood as anything nightmare-related, but that didn't make it any less frustrating when he had a deadline for this essay.

fucking summer school. jeongguk had never needed summer school before, hadn't been below the 98th percentile in any of his classes since he had his adhd diagnosed and gotten properly medicated for it, and it chafed at his pride something fierce to be subjected to it now. and it seemed so disgustingly mundane after spending two years fighting for his goddamn life to be tutted at by teachers and told he needed to do better. fuck them, they didn't know jack shit.

he buried his face in his hands and sighed.

really, it was a miracle he hadn't flunked junior year outright. with the way his grades had taken a spectacular nosedive in the second semester, convincing the necessary teachers to let him make it up over the summer and still move on to twelfth grade in the fall had not been easy. his dad called in some favors, dropped a few names, thrown his weight around. they had leaned heavily on losing her as an excuse—not something that sat well with him, but a soulmate's death was undeniably traumatic and garnered sympathy like nothing else—and then yoongi's death  too, as well as citing some fabricated changes in his adhd medication and the equally fabricated side effects that came with it.

so now he had summer classes to make up for his abysmal speech and algebra two grades last semester, all online thankfully. he'd managed to skate through his final exams in history, economics, and biology by virtue of already having an unnecessarily large knowledge base in those subjects before he had taken him over and forced him to completely abandon all his real life responsibilities, but english and math had stymied him. it was all the reading, the way the letters and numbers need to be in the right order to make sense. he just couldn't make that happen sometimes, even now.

it didn't help that he had already been in a bad mood when he'd sat down for this little study session. the lunch with friends had gone about as well as he'd expected it to, which meant there was a lot of very uncomfortable tension. namjoon was still side-eyeing him hardcore for being bonded to kim taehyung; of all people, their former nemesis. jimin kept patting him on the arm whenever he passed him with this smile that was half-pitying and half-supportive. seokjin asked very well-meaning questions, expecting him to be as excited and dewy-eyed about his new soulmate as he was about his, and hoseok. jeongguk loved him, he really did, but hoseok still hadn't gotten the hang of the whole tact thing yet and by the third time hoseok said, "well, he sounds like a dick to me," he was about ready to punch him.

there was just altogether too much attention on him, like a spotlight hot enough to give him a sunburn, skin feeling tight and itchy. so he'd left the taco bell early. it had only been an excuse for his friends to snoop and pry anyway, not like they were actually hungry or anything, so he didn't feel bad using his english essay as an excuse and heading out. taehyung hadn't been there when he got home, which he wasn't sure if he should be disappointed or grateful for, so actually working on the essay had seemed like a good idea.

he was regretting it now. jeongguk sort of wanted to smash his head through the coffee table and set all his reading materials on fire. sort of.

he was almost certain that the words on the page were starting to shift around again. maybe math would be better. if nothing else it would be different, and it couldn't really get a whole lot worse anyway.