Even after a handful of weeks of living in the Jeons' family house, Petra still felt it was a little too big for just the two of them.
The porch of the almond-white duplex led to a wooden shoe rack sitting atop cream-coloured mosaic tiles. At the end of the hallway beyond three large steps, an abstract painting hung on the right wall while an intricately designed staircase on the left led upstairs. The living room was majestic in every sense of the word -- on one side a maroon terracotta divan rested beside an Oakwood table, atop which two Korean lanterns of copper hung from the ceiling.
Behind the dining table outside the kitchen, far against the wall, was a huge landscape painting depicting an orange sky on a summer evening, with two miniscule letters, JK, carved in the corner. Right beneath it, on another Oakwood chest of drawers, was a Lego model recounting The Tortoise and the Hare from Aesop's Fables -- a miniature hare sleeping under a Lego tree and a miniature tortoise crossing the finishing line. Jungkook had told her that was something he made in elementary school, one of the many weekend projects his artist mother assigned to him with an eagerness to keep art alive in a family of scientists.
Lavish, long curtains decked the house in shades of saffron, ruby and off-white. Artefacts, portraits and show pieces occupied every free space on the shelves or walls. The basement was another surprise in itself, housing Dr Jeon Jaewha's personal laboratory equipped with the most high-grade technology of the period. Jungkook said that they could work there instead of staying extra hours in the university, which was no longer a very safe place anyway.
The house was meticulously clean the night he first brought her there, as if even the dust of time feared to touch an abode so palatial and magnificent. Petra had wondered then, why Jungkook chose to room with six other young adults in a cramped apartment when he could twirl the keys of such a lavish house in his two fingers.
House.
That's what it was. A house.
And in the confined, congested humdrum of his apartment, alongside six other noisy, messy men that he called his brothers, he had found his home.
Out of all things, what bothered her most was the marble bust of the global feminine icon and Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, sitting atop the oakwood table in the living room, regarding Petra with her almond-shaped, sumptuous gaze, as though thoroughly judging the way she was so unladylike in dragging her feet to the kitchen.
"Honestly though," Jungkook once remarked in passing, when he saw the human girl and marble Queen glaring at each other, "I thought it'd be more difficult to convince you to move in with me, knowing how relentless you are. I even had a whole speech prepared, you have been the last dream of my soul and all that Charles Dickens' shit. I even practised it like, a hundred times, pretending that bust of Nefertiti was you."
"Why did you ditch it then?" she had asked, begrudgingly looking away from the sculpture to glare at him instead.
"I was gonna tell it all to you, but all I could see when I looked at you in the car was Nefertiti's poker face, and I almost laughed. Not the best way to convince your girlfriend to move in with you, I guess?"
The next day, Petra replaced the sculpture with a ceramic vase of African daisies.
A sequence of renovations and revamping followed, including painting their bedroom walls with a new layer of ivory white, sticking Iron Man magnets and daily post-its on the refrigerator, restocking the storeroom cupboards with cartons of candles (not scented; Jungkook was sensitive to smells), hanging fairy lights on the curtains and fixing baby Jungkook picture frames on the walls (when he was asleep and didn't know, of course). Thanks to Petra's exceptional cooking skills, Jungkook's diet now consisted of more than just instant ramen, and he was in for a lecture when she caught him balancing a Burj Khalifa of cup noodles in his arms into the storeroom.
YOU ARE READING
Dark Matter | JJK
Fanfiction"If you had to choose between wrong and very wrong, what would you choose?" When two young scientists decide to decode the secret behind a very millennial-looking zombie roaming the streets of their city on a moonless twilight, they are faced with...
