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jumping from a third storey won’t kill you, but maybe it should.
the white hot pain that shoots through his entire body isn’t nearly enough, yoongi thinks. it’s not nearly as explosive as he thought it would be. there’s nothing satisfying about it. all it does is hurt. but yoongi doesn’t want it to hurt, he wants it to kill him.
he can’t even name the class it was—something in the business department.
it’s a dramatic way to leave, a statement in itself, who the fuck jumps out a window mid seminar, but the repetitive routine of it all was beginning to sound less like getting an education and more like signing himself up for a life he never saw himself in anyway.
jumping out a third storey window won’t kill you, but another group discussion of white people talking about the ethics of capitalism will.
𓆉
there are many things jungkook sees on his way home from class.
it’s usually bugs.
this might be because he’s looking at the ground, but it’s a lot easier than looking up at faces. at the end of the day all he wants is to go home and get his work done and sleep, he doesn’t have the energy to be looking at faces.
he sees bugs, he sees feet, he sees the cracks in the sidewalk.
but today -
he sees someone freaking jump out the third storey window.
jungkook drops his drink in shock.
the boy lands in front of jungkook in a terrible heap, frowning in pain, looking unbelievably pissed.
the first sentence that comes to jungkook’s mind is are you dead????
which makes no sense, because the boy is decidedly not dead.
he’s far, far too alive, for someone who just jumped out a freaking window.
the next sentence that comes to jungkook’s mind is why are you not dead?
he doesn’t ask that either.
instead, with all his intellect, what he actually asks is—
𓆉
“class get out early?”
what the fuck. there’s a boy down here. yoongi’s knees had buckled beneath him when he landed, the entire world becoming the blue sky and then a blur and then the dirt.
now, this boy. who’s staring at him. drink spilled at his feet.
it’s one thing to jump out a window unceremoniously, it’s another for someone else to witness it. if he knew this boy was there he would’ve tried to make it look cooler. but, at the time, the only thing on his mind was the gray tiles then the window ledge then the brick wall then the sky.
“did i land on you?”
“uhhhh, no?”
there’s an awkward moment where they stare at each other, realizing there are many things wrong with this situation.
“my knees hurt,” yoongi says, a bit obviously.
“did you jump out on purpose?” the boy asks.
yoongi blinks. “do you jump out by mistake?”
“i don’t jump out?”
“wasted potential,” yoongi says. and then, “could you help me up?”
the boy reaches a hand out, and yoongi takes it, gripping it too tight. his knees hurt like shit trying to stand, but this is how he pays for his small victory. he wonders what a professor would do to someone jumping through the window to get out of their class. it must be embarrassing.
yoongi will take that as a win.
𓆉
class get out early? jungkook thinks he’s too good at holding casual conversation that it prevents him from being able to react correctly to anything beyond his few go-to sentences and conversation closers.
his favorite: i have to go feed my turtle.
it works every time. nobody knows enough about turtles to question him, and he can abandon an interaction whenever it starts getting bad.
this, though, he doesn’t even know why he started a conversation, and not only did it start, it’s still happening.
“let me—” he reaches down to take the boy’s hand in his own. he had asked for help, but what else can jungkook do.
once the boy’s on his feet again, he drops his hand quickly, and jungkook’s brain starts spinning through the reel of his pre-saved conversational sentences.
“it might rain soon.”
that one, like the first, doesn’t quite land.
maybe it’s the circumstances.
the other boy doesn’t reply immediately, and jungkook’s thoughts short circuit.
“i have to go feed my turtle.”
“because it’s about to rain?” the boy repeats his own words back to him.
“he’s hungry.”
“did you know turtles eat each other’s legs?”
jungkook makes a turn to leave, feeling like he can’t escape the interaction fast enough, but ends up kicking his spilled drink.
𓆉
the boy’s name is jungkook.
yoongi learns this when he tries to buy him a drink, to make up for the one he spilled.
jungkook is simultaneously trying to buy him a drink, to make up for what, yoongi falling out the window?
yoongi doesn’t quite understand the logic, but it’s sweet in a way.
the boy’s name is jungkook, he has a pet turtle, and he has never in his life seen someone jump out the window. this is about as much as yoongi knows about him.
“how did you know you wouldn’t die?” jungkook asks.
“i did the math,” yoongi says. this is a lie. he didn’t know he wouldn’t die. his brain only thought as far as i can not sit here a moment longer and then went to the most natural solution.
“that’s… nice, i guess,” jungkook says.
he orders something with far too much sugar, and far too much cream.
yoongi makes a big deal of judging him, and then orders the same.
they don’t stay at the shop for longer than they need to. jungkook tells him to take care, and leaves to feed his turtle. or make sure he has not been eaten. yoongi takes a sip of his drink with far too much sugar and far too much cream, realizes he likes it an unhealthy amount, and leaves in the opposite direction.
𓆉
the boy’s name is yoongi.
jungkook learns that when they meet a second time.
he was counting the ants on the bench outside his communication design class. they follow each other in line around a french fry jungkook had placed there the period before.
as an experiment.
“jungkook-ah.”
the voice had startled him at first.
most anything that doesn’t fall into his daily routine startles him.
there are many ways to reply, but the correct response to a single name address is one in return.
“window-jumper-ssi”
“sorry?”
he must’ve got it wrong. “sunbae?”
“yoongi.” then, as if the other boy doesn’t think it sinks in enough, he verifies. “you can call me yoongi.”
jungkook’s usually well versed in talking to new people. the typical what’s your major? what part of campus do you live on? do you know which way to the cafeteria? gets him by just fine.
but he can’t wrack his brain for a proper response, looking at yoongi.
it’s then that he really takes the other boy in. black hair. two silver rings in his ear. ripped jeans. not just any ripped jeans, though, absolutely distressed. like there were holes originally, and then they were picked at and now jungkook’s looking at the contrast of blue on pale unblemished skin. there’s so much of it. he feels like poking it. in a curious way. like the way he wants to give a bug a kiss sometimes, specifically the psyllobora vigintiduopunctata. it’s strictly scientific and academic.
yoongi clears his throat, and jungkook can feel the panic start to rise much like the first time they met and the urge to run away overpowered his desperation to stay, to talk to people, to feel like a person who can talk to people.
“my turtle’s subservient.”
it’s an unusual thing to say. jungkook cannot file it away into his pre-saved sentence log. jungkook can never say this again.
“it listens to me and doesn’t eat turtle legs.” he doesn’t realize he’s explaining until he’s explaining it. “even if you dangled one right in front of it, it wouldn’t.”
yoongi’s mouth does this thing where the corner quirks up for the briefest second. “do you go to this school?”
jungkook mistakes a genuine question for joking. “no, i hang out here.” but when he sees yoongi actually consider it he realizes their interactions have been too weird for him to seem anything but weird. “wait, no. i do go here.” he smiles, then. because that’s what people do when they want to appear non-threatening. “do you?”
“yes.”
jungkook hopes, for yoongi’s sake, that this is the last of their exchanges.
𓆉
yoongi’s sitting in his business class again.
it feels like a surrender to just sit there and take it. there’s something inherently wrong letting a group of business majors talk about inclusivity and accessibility like it’ll ever affect them.
but he can’t hate them. his roommate’s a business major. in fact, his roommate’s in the room with him.
“i just think that the commercialization of the approximation is a necessity of the marketing company because it becomes panopticonal in the presence of—” yoongi’s mind cuts off the rest of seokjin’s sentence.
kim seokjin has his own ways of fucking with the class.
yoongi looks out the window. he sees the blue sky and the telephone wire and, for a brief moment, he thinks about turtles.
after the class, seokjin knocks into his shoulder, laughing in the way only kim seokjin can laugh. “i saw you smiling during my class discussion. i fucking nailed that on the head, right?”
𓆉
when jungkook first googles how tall does a building have to be for you to die when you jump off of it? he gets an alert for a suicide crisis line.
he wasn’t thinking about ending his life, but, staring at the notice at the top of his google search result, he wonders had he?
did min yoongi want to die?
the answer is six to ten stories according to reddit. because that’s where the real people are at.
three stories isn’t lethal.
some of their university buildings are up to twelve stories high.
he never thought of building floors as just different levels of getting hurt and dying.
jungkook has his history of design class on the eleventh floor.
he looks at it now as his history of design class on the floor of instant death.
𓆉
- nest temperatures determine the sex of sea turtle hatchlings
- some turtles can swim for up to 14000 km from baja california to japan
- a dog was trained to sniff out clandestine sea turtle nests
- sea turtles use earth's magnetic field to navigate
- the alligator snapping turtle lures in fish with its tongue, which looks like a worm. it wiggles its tongue to attract a hungry fish and then snaps down on it with its strong jaw.
- sea turtles don’t have ear holes. their ears are covered by a thin layer of skin called the tympanum
- sea turtles eat so much sea grass that by the time they’re an adult their fat deposits can be green
- a turtle’s lungs has two functions: to store oxygen and to help the turtle stay buoyant and float at the surface of the water
when seokjin asks him why he has a notes app of turtle facts, yoongi doesn’t know what to say.
there’s no way to explain without seokjin laughing at him.
“i like turtles,” he says instead. “did you know they don’t have earholes?”
upon hearing himself say this, yoongi, in a knee-jerk kind of way, wonders how the hell do they listen to music?
seokjin just stares at him.
𓆉
“did you know turtles can swim up to 14000 kilometers,” yoongi says, because that’s how normal people say hello.
jungkook blinks at him. “without sleeping?”
yoongi is thrown, because he doesn’t actually know. he could search for it right now, but then he’ll look decidedly less cool and knowledgeable about turtle facts.
“yup,” he says instead. “they just swim all night. every day. all the time.”
“that’s exhausting.”
“also they can hold their breath for five hours.”
“they only swim holding their breath?”
yoongi doesn’t know this either, but he’s in too deep now. “yup,” he says again.
jungkook looks at him with a strange sense of wonder.
yoongi doesn’t know if it’s for the turtles or for him.
𓆉
“psyllobora vigintiduopunctata, it’s the most kissable bug. it’s a type of lady bug.”
“lady bugs bite.” yoongi wonders if jungkook thinks about kissing humans like how he thinks about kissing bugs.
“psyllobora vigintiduopunctata are yellow and they have twenty two spots. they’ve never bitten me.”
“how do you know the difference.”
“context. it’s the same way two people can say the same thing but mean different. you just have to be there, hyung.”
and what is a bite but a kiss with teeth.
yoongi blinks twice.
“you should invite me next time you go kissing bugs, then.”
“i don’t kiss bugs anymore, hyung.”
𓆉
“what’s your turtle’s name.”
jungkook doesn't have a name for his turtle. he doesn’t even have a turtle. “udi,” he says with utmost confidence as if this is a simple hello, how are you? conversation. “short for testudines.”
𓆉
jungkook is dying.
jungkook is seriously dying.
if he has to sit in this class a moment longer he will actually combust and die and explode and kill himself and burn the class room down.
but instead he’s carving into his desk with a pencil, as if that’ll make him want to be alive somehow.
he glances towards the window, without really thinking. and then he pauses.
could he do it?
he isn’t sitting near the window. he’d have to get up, walk across the room, and, assuming he got that far with no questions asked, jump out.
he could do it, right?
or he could sit here and die.
someone shifts, in the corner of the room, and jungkook looks up.
it’s - yoongi?
he’s shutting his notebook, his laptop, packing everything up carefully and methodically. the class is only half over, but he doesn’t seem to mind. he zips his backpack shut carefully, and sits for a moment with it on his lap, and then catches jungkook watching him.
his eyes widen, and then he grins.
it’s a grin too out of place for this stupid business class.
he grins like he knows exactly what jungkook is thinking, knows that he’ll never do it, and is like ha. i’m going to do it instead.
in a moment he’s up, darting across the room, and before jungkook can say what the fuck he’s jumped out. of the third storey window.
and jungkook’s professor fucking sighs, like this happens every day.
“he’s going to die someday,” the guy next to jungkook says, shaking his head sadly.
someone else nods in agreement, and continues taking notes.
everyone in this classroom is insane.
jungkook waits for someone to say something normal. to realize that jumping out a window should not be a common occurrence. to say holy shit that guy just tried to kill himself because he didn’t want to use the door like a normal person.
no one does.
so jungkook packs his stuff up, zips his backpack. his heart is beating out of his chest, but he walks calmly to the other side of the classroom. he gets a few odd looks, and the professor looks annoyed, but he makes it to the window.
puts his hands on the ledge, braces himself.
then he vaults over it, from the third storey window, and realizes a little late that he probably should have checked to make sure yoongi wasn’t still on the floor.
𓆉
yoongi’s knees hurt like hell.
he’s used to it at this point.
what he isn’t used to, is someone crash landing right next to him. yoongi scrambles out of the way, after jungkook has landed, which makes no sense but his reflexes are a little slow, sue him.
“what the fuck,” jungkook says. “that hurts.”
“well,” yoongi says. “yeah.”
they sit there on the concrete, quietly mourning how much everything hurts.
“why would you not use the door,” jungkook asks, like he’s accusing him.
“why would you not use the door,” yoongi counters.
“there’s a whole door. a literal door. why would you not use the door.”
“why would you not use the door?”
“i don’t know okay,” jungkook says, looking distressed and a little confused at himself. “you made it look easy.”
“you saw my knees nearly break, how did that look easy to you.”
to be honest, yoongi knows why he didn’t use the door. he’s just not sure if it’s a socially acceptable thing to say.
i jumped out the window because it was as close to dying as i could get and that class made me really need to die, doesn’t sound very nice when he actually puts it into words.
i really like the feeling of crashing into the ground, doesn’t sound very nice either.
falling makes me feel alive and i am weirdly convinced that i’m immortal, is pretty much admitting being insane.
“won’t your turtle be hungry?” is what he says instead.
“i fed him already,” jungkook says.