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daebakinc · 5 years

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I Still - Pt 2

Pairing: Jimin x Reader/OC Genre: Fairytale AU, Angst, Romance Word Count: 3.9K Summary: Jimin’s punishment for offending a goddess is confinement to the Garden of Loneliness. Doomed to spend all eternity there, alone and hidden behind a mask, only Fate herself can intervene to aid his redemption discover him: his one true love. A/N: Inspired by The Untold Truth by BTS. Parts: Prologue, 1

All the books you had read could not have prepared you. Nor all the love songs ever sung, nor the stories of true love told by the generations. No human creation could ever encompass or convey the spark of power held in a single kiss. That simple press of soft lips against soft lips set a tingle through your nerves, set them ablaze. If one could drink lightning, you imagined it would still pale in comparison. You felt alive.

Although you had never kissed a man in your life, you knew you were ruined for any other. Although you did not know him, did not even know his face, you knew this man was as much yours as the ruins you found him in. There was no other truth in the world but this.

As suddenly as he kissed you, Jimin pulled away as if torn from you. His chest labored to rise and fall and those miserable eyes held only shock. You could only imagine your face held some kind of the same dazed look. How else could one look when their world was turned on its head, never to return to the ignorant innocence of how it once was.

“I-” his tongue flicked out of his mouth to lick his lips, “I always know her creations. They’re cold. They have no warmth. But you…”

Your hand reached up to graze your quivering lips. How could a single kiss affect you both so? Was it the magic of this place or something more? You leaned against the tower, your legs too weak to hold you upright any longer.

Jimin stepped closer again. His voice was unsteady with wonder. “You… you are warm. You are human, are you not?”

You nodded.

Jimin yanked you from the tower to enfold you in his arms. The mask was cold against your shoulder where your cloak had slipped to expose it. Jimin pressed his face closer, all but burying it in your skin as a child does to his mother’s in the wake of a nightmare. Without conscious thought, your hands found his back, anchoring him against you. As your mother did when she still showed you tenderness, you ran your fingers delicately up and down his back. Slow strokes to draw the trembling from his skin and the desolation from his heart.

For how could there not be when he clung to you so after learning you were a daughter of Eve. How long had Jimin been alone for him to react as if you were the dearest person in his heart? How long had he been tormented by the silence and an isolation so complete it would starve the soul and reduce the mind to the delirium of speaking of thousands of years and inhuman creatures of cold?

“Jimin,” you whispered. “Who did this to you?”

When he did not answer or stir, you shifted to try to see his eyes. Jimin’s grip tightened, an animal whimper escaping his lips.

“I’m not leaving, I promise. But Jimin, who did this? They must be punished—”

“No.” Jimin stumbled away from you. His eyes were wild, holding the same mindless panic of a spooked horse. “We cannot speak her name! She must not find you here! She will punish us both! Go!”

You reached out to him, your own heart infected with Jimin’s palpable terror. “Jimin, what—”

“Go!” Jimin scrabbled at your shoulders, pushing you towards the outer wall. “However you came, go back! Do not return! Leave before she finds us!”

“Who?” you shouted back, whipping around.

But all you saw is Jimin’s back as he fled into the tower, melting through the wall of sand.

“Wait!” When you tried to follow, the tower wall rebuffed you, solid as the stone surrounding it. “Jimin!”

The window at the top of the tower remained dark and not a sound but your own breath and heart broke the stillness. No rush of storm or attack heralded the immediate coming of that or who Jimin so dreaded. Indeed, all was just as it was in all its strangeness.

You circled the tower, searching with your hands and eyes for another entrance, but it remained as obstinate as you. No door or window appeared, no weakness beneath the churning sand. The mystery of the man and this place did not allow you to give up so easily, but even though its golden threads had not pierced the sky, dawn had to be fast approaching. You had to return; the penalty for being caught out of bed during hours no respectful lady would be about would be confinement to your room for a week. More if your parents were not in a forgiving mood.

Stepping away from the tower, you shouted, “I will be back tomorrow! I’m not afraid of anyone!”

The door into the tower was just as you left it. As you crossed over its threshold, you looked back over your shoulder. The unearthly flowers still glowed, the tower and statues still stood. You could not hope dearly enough that it was not all a dream.

“I’ll be back,” you promised yourself. You would.

Cutting two strips from your petticoat after you closed the door, you tied one to the handle. The second went around a bough of wisteria above the door. In such a place, you could not be sure if it would let you find the door twice unaided.

With quick steps, you raced back through the forest and into the village. It was as you left it with not a soul awake or about. The hearth was still cold, not yet awoken from its sleep to provide the meals of the day, when you passed it. You hid your clothes beneath your bed, slipped your discarded nightgown over your head, and crawled into bed. As you rolled over to settle in for the few hours of sleep you could steal, you glanced out the window. And froze.

The moon should have been sinking below the horizon in meek deference to the day. But she had not moved. She still hung high in her nightly reign, scarcely moved since you escaped your home. As if time had stood still the entire time you were in the garden.

Goosebumps crept across your skin despite the down blanket cocooning you. Jimin’s words arise and ring in your mind.

The door was sealed thousands of years ago. As I cannot leave, no one may come unless by her will….

Could you truly have encountered… magic?

The ghost of Jimin’s kiss lingered on your lips when morning finally came, Sleep having withheld her blessings. Yet you could scarcely believe it to be real for magic did not exist in the world. Not in yours…

You waited until your father had ridden to his office and your mother went to call on the other town matrons to enter the kitchen. After your mother had deemed you no longer a child and instead a young lady, it was forbidden territory. No need for gentry to mingle with the help. In fact, quite the opposite.

But you preferred it to any other room in the house. Herbs hanging from the rafters and lemon water used to clean filled the air with a welcoming earthy smell, the kind that instantly sets all hearts at ease. There was no fussiness, nothing that had to be kept clean and polished and perfect. Everything had its place and function, beautiful in its simplicity and value.

When you were younger, you played under the table, pretending to be a hungry dragon, kept at bay only by the sweet scraps slipped to you. The stool is where you sat with a cup of tea, sniffling as your scraped knees were tended to. To you, it is everything a home should be.

In the center of it was Noemi. Your nursemaid, your teacher, your mother more than the woman who bore you. Although you were now too old for a nursemaid, she had been retained as cook and head of household. She was the one who asked after your day, encouraged your zest, showed you what love could be. One of the very few.

“Not even midday and you look like a nymph,” Noemi smiled, waving a flour covered hand to wave you over. She wiped her hand on her apron before gently plucking at your hair. “Wisteria? I didn’t see you go out into the garden.”

“I walked around the house,” you lied, eyes on the purple petals in her hand.

So last night might not have been a dream. The tower in the garden… the man in the mask… Jimin… the kiss.

“Unescorted?”

You rolled your eyes at the teasing twitch in Noemi’s smile. Sitting at the table, you carefully avoided the flour and took an apple slice from a bowl. “I don’t need someone to escort me around the garden within my own walls. Mother’s being ridiculous.”

“She’s just worried about you looking the part of a proper lady so you can make a match. I’ve heard tell your father is looking about for one for you.”

“He can look all he likes, but there’s no one around here rich enough for him. I’ll end up an old maid.”

The apple started to taste sour in your mouth. Other girls your age were already wedded and bedded with flocks of children, this you knew. But you had far better plans, much more to do before you were willing to be tied to a man, let alone one you did not love.

To change the topic, you asked, “Noemi, do you know of any stories about a man cursed to live in a tower for eternity?”

The older woman did not stop kneading the pie dough. “You devoured my myths when you were younger, but what has you interested in them again all of a sudden?”

“No reason. Simply an odd dream I had.”

Noemi paused thoughtfully. “A man locked away in a tower. Now that’s not the sort of thing you hear every day. I can’t say I have heard of it.”

“Oh. Well, it was only a dream.”

That night, you ran faster than you had ever before to your ruins. They appeared unchanged, giving no indications anything had happened the night before. No tiny bejeweled bird darted from the flowers and vines as you tiptoed around the central enclosure. At the bend, you hesitated with your toe just out of reach of the moonbeams. Your heart pounded, dropped into your stomach. You could not tell which caused its unease: the possibility you had indeed dreamed a fantastical dream, or that that dream was an actuality.

You stepped forward, turned your head, and there they were. Your two strips of petticoat marking the door to the garden. The Garden of Loneliness, Jimin had called it.

Your fingers trembled as they wrapped around the handle. Dangerous hope wound tight round your chest. What if the door would not open? What if the space beyond was a normal garden and the tower within a decaying ruin like the rest? What if Jimin was not…

The door swung open on its own, pulling you along with it, deeming your spiraling thoughts intolerable and making the decision for you.

Just as the night before, the same sight greeted you. A blanket of flowers shining with their own light surrounding ghostly statues and in the center of it all, the tower of sand. But tonight, a light was in the high window. Your heart jumped involuntarily. He was there.

The light moved then faded, like a lantern being lifted and carried away.

You jumped behind a battered statue of a youth with a billowing cloak, pressing to its chilled side, and waited.

An arch opened in the tower, sand peeling away in a curtain of diamonds. Jimin, clothed and masked as he was before, stepped out into the moonlight. You stopped breathing, worried the sound would give you away.

A little longer, you would wait. You needed to speak with him, find the answers to the questions that slept like hot coals in your soul. But if he ran away again, you might not have the chance.

“Goddess?” Jimin called.

You ducked your head in alarm. He had seen you.

Looking down, you searched for the stray edge of cloak or dress that gave you away. You saw none. You were completely hidden behind the expanse of the statue.

“I know you can hear me,” he said, his voice roughening with impatience. “Goddess!”

His bootsteps moved away from you. You risked a peek around the statue’s shoulder.

Jimin stood on the edge of the garden in a patch of open grass just large enough for his feet. He was looking up at the wall, or perhaps up at the muted heavens.

“Is this some new trick of yours? Making me dream you sent love to me at last? Is it?”

He grasped at the vines that formed a mass of woven branches stretching towards the sky. Against your bated breath, they held his weight.

Jimin called to the goddess again as he climbed. It was not a cry of devotion or supplication. His voice dared demand an answer from the gods, cracking in its anguish.

You dared not move from your place even as Jimin climbed higher and higher, beyond the height of his tower.

“Goddess, you have taken everything from me! I have nothing left!” Jimin screamed, sobs choking his words that plummeted down to your ears. “Why can’t you just let me die?”

He reached for the topmost vine that curled over the wall in its escape from the garden. It broke as his fingers closed around it. Jimin fell, his cloak billowing beneath him like the useless wings of a silenced songbird shot down from its perch.

Heart in your stomach, your feet ran though you knew you were not fast enough. “Jimin!”

He landed with a nauseating thump in a thick bed of roses. The flowers’ heavy perfume burst to life in the air and their delicate petals had not yet finished alighting on Jimin’s body when you crashed to your knees beside him.

He could not be dead. Yet he laid unmoving and noiseless.

Careless of the thorns that pricked your skin through your skirts, you moved closer. Your hands fluttered over his chest, useless in your hesitation to cause him pain. “Jimin? Jimin?”

Jimin’s eyes were closed beneath his mask that miraculously remained on his face. But as you reached to remove it, his lips moved.

“What?” You leaned your ear to his mouth, holding your breath in the hope of feeling his on your skin.

“It did not work,” he murmured. “She still keeps me here.”

“The Goddess?”

Jimin’s eyes bolted open. They fixed upon yours that were so close. His eyes reminded you of earrings of tiger’s eye stone you saw in a traveling market. The darkest of umbers streaked with flecks of unearthly copper like captured stars.

“You?” Jimin scrambled away. He stood, quaking. You prayed he wouldn’t leave again. “You… came back? How?”

“I said I would. I walked through the door on my own two feet as I did last time,” you replied. You sat still as you would when approaching a wild animal despite the trepidation in your own legs fighting to make them flee. You saw people die from falls a third the height, yet Jimin lives. “How can you be standing right now? You fell…”

“I cannot die,” Jimin said, bitterness weighing down his voice. “I could fall from that same height a thousand times and not suffer the least injury. I am cursed with immortality.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You saw with your own eyes. I do not lie.”

“Magic, or whatever this is, doesn’t exist!”

Jimin laughed and spread his arms. “This place does not exist! The Garden of Loneliness exists outside of Time itself. It has no anchor to anywhere in the earthly world.”

“Then how did I get here twice?” you retorted.

His lips pursed and his gaze lowered. “I don’t know. It should be impossible.”

You rose to your feet, but Jimin did not notice. His eyes seemed fixed on the roses. You looked down and sprung back with a racing heart.

Where they had been flattened by Jimin’s body, the flowers grew straight and whole without a petal missing. Perfect.

“Did you do that?” you asked, thankful your voice did not shake.

“No. Things don’t change here. Watch.”

He snapped a rose’s head from its stem and as you watched, a new rose grew, the exact twin of the one pillowed in Jimin’s palm. Your lungs could not remember to breathe. An illusion, your mind said, but the pain of the rose’s scratches on your legs and hands prickled unlike any dream injury you could remember.

“Nothing changes, nothing dies,” Jimin said softly. “From inside this tower, I watched my friends, my family, age and grow gray with it, and die. I watched them live. They laughed and wept, found new families and friends. Without me. All without me while I stayed here unchanged and alone.”

Common sense told you to run from this madman, but you did not move. “Who are you?”

He dropped the rose and met your eyes. “I told you. I am Park Jimin. I am the man foolish enough to deny the Goddess of love and thus condemned by her to a life without love of any kind in the Garden of Loneliness for all eternity. After all you have seen, do you doubt me still?”

Words desert your dry mouth and leave your tongue heavy. Be practical, do not believe in the fantastical for it cannot be true: that is the lesson beaten into your being with word and hand. Dreams and magic of all kinds are for silly children. And you were not to be one.

But here magic was standing before you, surrounding you. Wonder at your fingertips if you only extended your hand to touch Jimin. It invited you to believe as you so wanted to in your most secret of hearts. The same heart that clutched to the memory of Jimin’s kiss with the fierceness of a lioness.

In their dark recesses, Jimin’s eyes begged you to believe in him as well.

Jimin’s gaze dropped to your hands held tightly together in front of you. His mouth popped open. “You bleed.”

You looked down to find droplets of blood, robbed of their scarlet color by the night, trickling down the backs of your hands. One drop traveled to the tip of your ring finger, hung, then fell to the grass. It landed on one of the flowers, a dark spot on the glowing petal. A breeze like a sigh drifted through the garden.

Jimin’s eyes went to the sky, scanning the stars like a rabbit inching from the bushes searches for the hawk. He darted closer to you and drew a handkerchief from his cloak, rending it in half. Rings of twisted silver twinkled on his fingers as he wound the fabric round your hands.

“You should go,” he whispered urgently. “I do not know why the Goddess has not come, but if she does and finds you, she will kill you.”

“She did not come last night and I see no goddess now,” you replied. The tiny sparks flowing from your hands whenever Jimin’s fingers brush your skin emboldened you. Goddess or no, he was yours. “Come with me. Out of this place.”

Shadowed by the mask, you could not see his eyes, but his tone was final. “I told you I cannot leave.”

“You also said no one could enter.”

Denying him the time to counter, you wrapped your hand around one of his and ran towards the open door. Blood roared in your ears with the unknown as you neared it. Elation sang in your bones with your first foot over the threshold.

Then it shattered when an invisible force wrenched your body to a halt. You turned. Jimin still stood in the garden, those tiger eyes blank in their resignation. No. You did not admit defeat so easily. Gripping your own wrist with your other hand, you pulled and heaved with your heels digging into the soft earth. Praying to whoever heard, you willed Jimin through the door, saw him walking with you on the road to the village and his freedom.

“It’s no use,” Jimin said when you at last gulped for air after wiping the sweat from your forehead, muscles weak from fruitless exertion. “See?”

He pointed behind him.

You followed his finger. A delicate rope of silver that began within the tower of sand stretched taught through the air. It ended in a loop tight around Jimin’s ankle like a suffocating snake. How you had not noticed it before escaped you.

“That?” you panted. If that was all…“I’ll make short work of that.”

No barrier thwarted your reentry into the garden. Still clasping Jimin’s hand, you knelt at his feet and pulled your pruning knife from your skirt pocket. You trapped one end of the rope beneath your foot and with a practiced movement, slid the knife beneath it and jerked the knife upward. The rope caught on the curved tip of the knife and snapped.

Warm with triumph, you smiled up at Jimin. A corner of his mouth lifted upward in a sad cousin of yours. He shook his head. You looked back down and cold drenched you.

Just as the revived rose, the rope shackling Jimin to his prison was once again whole.

“No.”

You cut again, and again, and again, hacking at it with movements driven wilder and wilder with each frustration until you threw your knife with an infuriated cry.

“It isn’t your fault,” Jimin said soothingly. Beneath the sudden tenderness was an ancient defeated submission, the kind that destroys the hearts of the strongest and those who witness it. “What are the powers of a human compared to the enchantments of the gods? Go. Forget this place and live.”

Forget me, his silent words said. Forget me as all others have while I always remember you.

Jimin’s grip on your hands loosened. But you did not allow him. You gripped his hands tighter and straightened so quickly you forced him to take a step back.

“I won’t forget you, Park Jimin,” you proclaimed passionately, staring into his widened eyes. “I will come back every night—”

“You cannot—”

“Don’t you dare tell me what I cannot do.” Too many people dictated your actions in the past, but not in this. You refuse. “I don’t care what god or goddess keeps you here. I will come back every night until I determine how to free you from this place. I promise!”

Jimin stared at you like you were a creature he had never seen before and one he did not know if he should be glad or feared of. For all that his face is hidden behind the vacant white of his mask, you saw the struggle in the tightness of his mouth and the storms in his eyes. The punishment of a god battling one of the most treacherous forces known to man: hope.

His hand hovered over yours before lightly laying on top of it. Hesitantly, he brought them to his lips and branded your fingers with his second kiss. “Come again tomorrow. If she does not strike you down then, perhaps she truly has forgotten this place... and me.”

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