dissolve. ✓

FIFTEEN

i am so sorry that this chapter is so long

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jeongguk hated essays. okay, not really, or at least he didn't used to. there was a time when he would write essays just for the fun of it, choosing topics out of thin air and making the essays as long as possible as a challenge to himself. he made some good money selling them online before his dad found out and made him stop, but he kept writing them anyway because he was always going to be strangely fixated on random subjects, he was always going to overthink them to the extreme, so why shouldn't he have something concrete and scholarly-looking at the end of it?

now he stared at the blinking cursor of his laptop until it blurred before his eyes and couldn't make a single word come to his fingertips. he'd had this assignment for three weeks and he still had barely more than an intro paragraph. it had never taken him so long to write anything ever, even on subjects he knew nothing about! this was a book he'd already read twice before, one he had thought he knew inside and out, but here he was with seventeen tabs of articles and peer reviewed journals and still not so much as a thesis statement in mind. the frustration was getting to him, making him itch all over, and yet again, he considered throwing himself out his bedroom window.

he sat back in his chair—yes, his actual desk chair at his actual desk, because taehyung had taken one look at him sitting on the living room floor and started nagging about his bad posture again in his strangely antagonistic way of showing concern—with a huff and absently twisted the ring off his finger.

he was getting better at it. he hadn't been able to put it down all evening, fiddling and frowning until a burst of inspiration led him to turning the rings upside down and twisting instead and everything fell into place. his whoop of triumph had been loud enough to have a recently returned taehyung running into his room in alarm. jeongguk had been startled into dropping the ring and there had been some staring, some stammering, and maybe a little blushing before he'd scooped it up and said, "i figured it out on my own, i swear! no instructions needed!"

taehyung had snorted and called him a geek but he said it with a smile on his face and none of the usual heat, and when they climbed into bed together an hour later, taehyung had run his thumb along the smooth metal before lacing their fingers together.

jeongguk shook the ring apart and took a moment to focus all his attention on that, eyeing the gentle curves and the way they sparkled in the light, feeling how the metal had warmed to his skin, hearing the gentle click of the rings together as he moved them carefully around each other. it took some finesse to get the fourth ring into place, squeezing it in between the others without bending it or shaking the rest loose, and he was still getting the hang of it. watching it slot in to make a perfect whole was satisfying on so many levels that he couldn't even name and he slid the ring back onto his finger with a flourish for no one's benefit but his own.

with renewed purpose, he dove back into his research. he was good at this, reminding himself stubbornly. this was his thing and there was no way he was going to let a stupid little thing like...whatever the fuck his problem was...keep him from doing his thing. he was gonna come up with some clever shit and write the fuck out of his essay and be witty and insightful and he was gonna get an A+ and pass summer school with flying colors and it was gonna be-

jeongguk jerked back nearly hard enough to knock his chair over entirely as everything tilted around him. The air had gone thin and blackness crept into the edges of his vision until all he could see were letters—no, symbols—nonsensical shapes shimmering, sliding, crawling across his computer screen where there had been normal words just a moment ago.

a dream. it was a dream, it was all a fucking dream, just another twisted trick of the imagination and any second now he would scream himself awake to do it all over again just like last time because none of it was real.