Watching Jungkook walk away was like having another piece of his soul peeled away, a portion of his heart ripped still beating from his chest. As the sob worked it's way up, he allowed himself to slide down onto the floor, knees bending and coming up, forehead resting against them as he tried in vain to hide his tears.
...
Walking away from Seokjin felt like he was breaking. Like everything that was left inside of him was shattering and there was going to be nothing left. All that remained were the smoldered out ashes of a heart that had loved too much and too deeply and could no longer hold on to so much emotion. That the sound of a sob would tear from his throat half way down the stairs only made him run faster, until he was locked away in the safety of his car, forehead pressed against the steering wheel as the tears came.
...
"You were right. It mattered a lot."
"I'm sorry, Seokjin. I really wish I had been wrong."
...
"You smell awful." Yoongi wasn't the first person to comment on the way his scent had soured, turned from sugar sweet to nearly rancid in the span of days.
"So I've heard." Laying belly down on his bed, face buried in his pillow, he didn't even bother to look up.
"Want to talk about it?" Normally Yoongi would simply allow Seokjin his own time and space to work through whatever this was. But it had been nearly a week and absolutely nothing was getting better.
"Not really." Likely all that was going to get him was a giant spoonful of 'I told you so', and he really didn't feel like swallowing it down.
"Fine. But if your scent stays like this much longer I'm gonna need you to start using blockers." It was truly awful, wave after wave of staleness that seemed to never end.
"I'll see what I can do."
...
He didn't know or understand why it hurt so badly. Only that it did. A deep ache that had settled down into the very core of who he was, infected his entire being all the way down to bones. And he doubted it was ever going to fade.
...
Irony was a strange concept, and despite his current level of upset, it wasn't entirely lost on him.
Jeon Jungkook and Park Jimin had been all of sixteen when the crazy notion that they would one day be mates had settled into their minds. They had barely managed to make it to their eighteen birthdays before they were sinking their teeth into each other's scent glands, marks embedded so deep that there was no chance of them failing.
Jeon Jungkook and Park Jimin had been twenty six when they realized that sixteen was entirely too young to be making such important commitments. To make those kinds of soul searing promises.
Jimin had realized it. Jungkook hadn't. Because when he had spoken those words he had meant each and every one of them. Despite how he was apparently too young to know what love actually was.
He had loved Jimin, of that he had been completely certain. So why couldn't Seokjin be certain of this? What made them so different?
Because he was on the other side now, and he knew better. Hindsight was both was a blessing and a curse he didn't want. But he was the only one who currently had it.
So he made the decision for them.
...
"Are you doing to look for him?"
"What's the point? I wasn't worth waiting for, Namjoon. I wasn't worth two months. I'm definitely not going chasing after some alpha who couldn't even give me that."
"There's my Jinnie. I knew you were still in there somewhere."
...
It wasn't that he wanted to leave.
Every single thing inside of him was begging to stay. To wait. To give it time. To realize that he was being irrational. That he was making a choice that would effect the direction of two sets of lives, without ever once stopping to think if it was what the second truly wanted.
Of course it wasn't. It wasn't what either of them wanted.
But it was the choice he had made, committed to, and now he had to face the consequences, whatever they may be.
So he left. Removed that temptation for both of them.
Somewhere deep within the recesses of his own mind, the knowledge that it was two months kept presenting it's self, a nagging thought that he couldn't rid himself of. But two months would only change Seokjin's actual age, not his maturity. Or the fact that he had his whole entire life still lying ahead of him. To spend it wrapped up and tied down to a mate as broken as Jungkook would be an unfair fate that he didn't deserve. Experience told him that it would only ever end badly.
Seokjin was not Jimin, and there was that ironic little mental tally he had been secretly keeping to remind him of that fact. But even that didn't change his mind.
He made the decision for them.
Even if he would come to regret it.
...
Time healed all wounds.
Only it didn't. And anyone who said it did was lying.
All time did was turn wounds into memories, and eventually those faded.
Seokjin was filled to the brim with faded memories. With people who had once been important but no longer were. Slowly, Jungkook transformed from a wound to a memory, and then began to fade, rapidly falling into the recesses of a mind that had learned when to let go.
And he let go.
