Taste of ink (VKOOK) (KOOKV)

Christ

Jungkook stared up at the sight of the sky visible through the glass ceiling. It was a murky purple and he could still see stars faintly nestled in the spaces between the thick banks of clouds even when the sun was starting to rise on the horizon. The moon would be out too, as it often was, hanging in the sky and never wanting to leave: clinging on pathetically.

Looking at the moon made him think of Taehyung and he hated it.

Once he had spoke to the boy about how there were no stars in Busan and yet he could see entire constellations down on Jeju Island. He didn't need to leave the house and sit on the expansive porch to look at them and that was good. The night could get terribly chill on the island and he didn't like that. Looking up at the black sky often made him feel cold and insignificant even when lying in the bed beside his friend; having the freezing air on his skin would make it even more so.

It had been another restless night without much sleep. Jungkook was used to them by now, after three years, but he was starting to feel himself fraying from it all. It was as if there had been a little thread somewhere on his body that had been pulled on and had started to make him unravel, and now that unraveling was getting faster and faster. Soon enough he would be falling apart, nothing more than a puddle of thread on the floor. He would need to start taking pills again, maybe ones a lot stronger than a doctor would prescribe. Hoseok wouldn't like that at all but Hoseok was sleeping perfectly fine and he didn't understand.

Jungkook turned his head slightly and he studied his friend's face. Hoseok was lying on his side and just like always he had one arm folded under the pillow and the other curled up on the mattress in front of him. His black hair was fanned out on the pillow rather than on his face, a loose vest hanging off his frame. The lengths had rode up in his sleep to show a hint of his stomach and one of the sleeves had been shrugged down too. It revealed another tattoo on his inner left upper arm, a black and red sparrow with a split tail, but it didn't show their gang tattoo. Every member of the J.M.J. Pa required the initials of their leaders on their flesh JJK MYG JHS. Even in death Yoongi would live on on the flesh of every member. The placing didn't matter so long as it was on the body, but he and Hoseok had their tattoos on their chest exactly where Yoongi had gotten his one.

The tattoo on his chest was not the only one that Jungkook had gotten over the last three years. He had amassed quite the amount just like Yoongi had always been aiming to do. His entire left arm was a tribute to his friend, his sleeve painfully replicated from memory and effort to ensure that it

was exactly the same. It had taken hours and hours of work to get the outline exact, the colour and the location of every line to match up on his flesh like it had on Yoongi's. He had had the dragon on his back coloured in in blacks and golds and reds too, no longer the outline of a god dragon but a fully formed and living one. Along every finger on his left hand he had skulls, grinning little skulls, and on the back was a sparrow just like Hoseok's tattoo. Jungkook liked to match his body art with his friends whenever he could, whether it not it would end in regrets.

Maybe a little too much.

On the back of his neck there was a crucifix. It was kept well out of sight by the collar of his shirt so very few people had ever caught sight of it. It wasn't a copy of Taehyung's but he would be lying if he said that it wasn't greatly influenced by it. But the crucifix wasn't the one that he wanted hiding the most, oh no. That tattoo was hidden away from absolutely everyone except him and Hoseok, as far below his navel as it could possibly go: a tiny black star.

Hoseok made a soft noise in his sleep, lips twitching slightly. Jungkook dropped his gaze to study this before looking back up at his closed eyelids. There was just a few inches of space between them and he could feel his warmth faintly, smell the faded scent of his cologne. Three years had passed and even now he couldn't sleep in a bed alone. He had tried it at some point and woke up screaming in the middle of the night covered in sweat, so no more sleeping alone for him. Jungkook needed the warmth, he needed the feeling of a body beside his so that he wasn't left alone. He couldn't stand being left alone during the daylight hours lest his thoughts take over, and in the nighttime hours being haunted by nightmares wasn't at all a pleasant idea. But it wasn't just the nightmares that he didn't want to avoid. Jungkook was terrified of the thought of someone leaving him. When he was asleep, curled up against another body, it was very hard for someone to leave without waking him up. Back then, if he had just stayed in Yoongi's arms that night and not went wandering then what had happened might never have happened. Jimin might just have died but was that really a great loss to him? He had saved Jimin and lost Yoongi and the boy had since vanished off the face of the earth.