ᴄʀᴜᴛᴄʜᴇs || ᴊ.ᴊᴋ + ᴋ.ᴛʜ ✔️

six: to know more about you

Without Taehyung's even realizing it, thoughts of Jungkook had gradually begun to invade a large portion of his mind, occupying the space typically crowded by meaningless things like what was on TV last night, or the occasional bizarre questions about space that would surface at random times. And the thoughts of Jungkook were vague, nothing he could really put into words or write down. He just...wondered about him. Perhaps it was the work of concern. Or curiosity. Maybe both. Probably both, Taehyung decided.

"Lookin' spacey there, Taetae," Hoseok teased, giving his friend's head a gentle push as he sat down beside him on the bench. It was the start of PE. In less than five minutes, the students would be urged to begin running laps. Taehyung was taking an awfully long time to tie his running shoes.

"Spacey," he whispered to himself. "Am I spacey?"

"Well, sometimes, yeah." Hoseok laughed. "And sometimes I am convinced you're from space. So like, you're double spacey."

"Oh my gosh, Hobi, what if I'm an alien and I don't even know it??"

"...what?"

"Yeah, like what if I was sent to earth as punishment for disobeying orders from the alien higher-ups, and they wiped my memory so I wouldn't even remember being an alien??" Taehyung's eyebrows skyrocketed. "I could deny it all I want but in reality I wouldn't know, 'cause my memory was wiped!"

".......are these-"

"The kinds of questions that keep me up at night? Yes."

"You're something else, Taetae."

"Thank you. But real talk, though, what if I'm-"

"Taehyung! Hoseok! Let's go!"

"Oh my gosh, there's our principal. What's she doing out here??"

"Don't know. But she scares me. We should probably get moving."

"Yeah. You right."

"Your left shoe is still untied, though."

"What? Oh, come on."

As Taehyung bent over to tie his shoe which he had unconsciously untied due to being distracted, Hoseok rose to his feet and stifled a laugh, then gave his friend a firm pat on the back. "I'm going ahead," he said, doing some quick arm stretches. "Try to catch up with me later, 'kay?"

"'Kay."

So with that, Taehyung resumed--quickly, in fear of his chihuahua-like principal--the act of tying his shoes. Then with great determination he rose to his feet, jogged in place for about five seconds, then started off on the track at a steady pace. Hoseok had already gotten too far ahead for him to catch up at this point, at least not without draining a decent amount of his energy, so instead he decided he'd run on his own. And he thought about it, that perhaps that was the wiser decision: if he ran with Hoseok, he would probably goof around with him rather than focus solely on jogging, and he certainly did not want to get scolded again by his principal or the PE teacher, who, at the moment, was sipping orange juice casually on the sidelines while the chihuahua lady took over his job of yelling at the students.

His eyes wandered as he jogged, at one point falling on Jimin who Hoseok had joined up with, then to a certain classmate of his with mint-green hair who was jogging just about as slow as you could without being accused of walking, and finally to the benches that were scattered along various areas of the track field.

He saw Jungkook. Jungkook, and some other boy with equally dark hair who was sitting beside him, talking to him.

It wasn't anyone he recognized. Though that didn't really surprise him. What was the most surprising thing about this was that anyone at all was talking to Jungkook. Moreover, that Jungkook was responding. Kind of. Taehyung caught a glimpse of the boy's lips moving, but his head was still turned downward and his words were most likely being uttered under his breath, and with little to no animation. Of course, seeing as he was jogging and couldn't stop without it being conspicuous, Tae didn't get to watch them for very long. But he wondered as he continued past them.