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pantoneyoongi · 2 years

Text

i love you

title ; i love you but you let me down

notes ;

part of the till the night is over drabble series. drabbles are not released in chronological order, but the masterlist is set up as chronologically as possible. :)

title is from alessia cara’s “you let me down”

this is the last one!! well except the epilogue that i last-minute spun up… honestly i can’t believe i made it this far. i can’t believe y’all kept up with this for this long. this more or less closes out the series - i actually wrote this chapter ages ago (with… several edits along the way LOL) but i always intended to release it last, so… thank you for reading, and i hope you guys enjoyed the story. i’ll see y’all for the author’s afterword in a little bit… and the epilogue! :)

word count ; 1.5k

tags ; angst, it’s really just a bunch of angst, but like a soft ending, thank u for being here, pls go to masterlist for more / general tags

taglist ; @mwitsmejk @doublejeon @landl7xoxo @notvantaes

sitting jungkook down and telling him you can’t be friends anymore is one of the hardest things you’ve ever had to do in your entire life. your hands shake and your voice trembles and for a second you want to cave and take it all back and tell him it’s all a bad joke, that you can still be friends, that this was a mistake and you’re not leaving him but -

but you have to. looking at jungkook shouldn’t feel like bile in your throat and deep-rooted pain in your chest. looking at your friends should never feel like that. it should never hurt this bad.

you wish you were angrier. anger is the easiest emotion to feel; it always has been when it comes to jungkook. you always hid behind your anger when you were upset with him, but it’s too little too late for that. there’s a void inside you that jungkook caused and the anger just dissipates into emptiness.

you put so much of yourself into jungkook and here you are, letting it all fall away. erasing jungkook from your life, clutching the memories even as you set them aflame one by one, watching them go up in smoke. when you talk to him you know that he’ll always have a part of you. he’ll carry a piece of you that you know you’ll never be able to get back.

you hate that he can just rip a part of you out of your chest like this and you have no choice but to call it love. because you let him. you let him do this to you, let him use you and take as many pieces of you as you have left to offer, until there’s nothing left that you can give him. that you got lost in his smiles and all of your history and everything you shared with him and forgot to make room for yourself.

the truth is that you can’t keep going like this. that you can’t keep loving him in the hopes that it’ll be enough one day for him to change. leaving him is the only option you have left, even if the broken look on his face is one that you’ll never be able to forget, a cut that’ll run deep through you, fresh enough now that you’re convinced it’ll never heal over.

it hurts that he doesn’t deny it when you tell him you know he cheated again. it hurts that he can’t come up with anything to say when you remind him of all the ways he’s hurt people, yourself included. it hurts to know that he wouldn’t even ask you to stay, even if you’re the one who’s already decided that you won’t - can’t - even if he begs you.

“i love you,” is what you leave him with. “i just want you to be happy.”

you don’t tell him how much it pains you knowing that you can’t be by his side when he is.

when you stumble back into your empty apartment, taehyung’s worried eyes lingering on your back as you close the door, you manage to make your way into your bed before it all collapses on you.

you tug the sheets over your head, emotions storming in your head violently. it’s too much. you’re curling smaller, smaller, smaller, hands tearing at your hair, silent sobs ripped out of your throat as you cry.

we can’t be friends anymore.

it hurts. it hurts so much to leave.

your eyes are squeezed shut, nails tearing at anything you can get your hands on, anything to divert the pain, get out of your own head, but you can’t, apologies spilling out into empty air. he can’t hear you. jungkook can’t hear the way you gasp out i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m so sorry over and over and over again, desperate for him to know the way this is killing you inside.

you can’t stop seeing his face, helpless and broken. like he can’t believe you’re really doing this to him.

a fresh wave of pain consumes you, and you claw at your chest, because this is killing you. leaving him is destroying you.

i’m so sorry. i love you. i’m sorry.

you blame yourself for a lot of things. of course, it makes sense when jihyo tells you none of it is your fault. but also it doesn’t make sense. it doesn’t make any sense. it feels like your fault. you blame yourself for letting jungkook hurt the way that he does, so deeply and so intensely. you blame yourself for the way your friends have been hurt because you loved him too much, so much so that you couldn’t bear to let him go. you blame yourself for letting yourself think that you could fix him.

some days you wonder. if you could’ve saved him. if maybe you’d been less scared. less stubborn. you wonder if you’d been able to confess sooner - maybe by some absurd measure you could’ve been among the first jungkook had fallen in love with, so then maybe you would’ve also been the last person he hurt the way that he did.

but you know better. you know love isn’t enough to save somebody, never mind the fact that saving him isn’t a concept that could ever be possible. jungkook made his own decisions and all of them were aimed to hurt. that can’t be on you.

but it feels like it is.

you wish you could’ve been enough. you wish you didn’t feel like you let him down, like all the work you put in to make sure jungkook could be happy - you wish you didn’t feel like you’d thrown it all away. like you were the one who messed it all up because you chose to walk away.

the guilt tears at you for a long time. the first month feels the worst. you see him on every corner and in every place you go to because he was there with you. all of your memories have jungkook in them and it haunts you.

some days are better than others. some days the heartache is just that - an ache. a dull feeling in your chest that you think you stand a chance of locking away safely, never to be touched again. the kind of ache that will sit in your chest as a gentle reminder, not as a violent wound.

happiness feels like an offense. like something you don’t deserve. you certainly don’t deserve the patient way taehyung cares for you, the way he gives you space when all you can think about is the way jungkook looked at you when you told him you couldn’t be friends anymore. you hate yourself for selfishly clinging to taehyung when you can’t even properly say whether or not you’ve gotten over jungkook.

jihyo thinks you have. she says the horrible pain jungkook left you with isn’t because you’re in love with jungkook - it’s the crushing disappointment of believing in someone for so long and having them rip it to shreds in front of you, like it means nothing, over and over again. it’s grief. it’s putting so much of yourself into someone only to find they don’t really care at all.

it makes it hard for you to feel okay when every laugh taehyung pulls out of you feels like stepping further away from jungkook. why are you allowed to be okay when you have no idea if jungkook is?

but every step you take away from jungkook is a step towards realizing you were never going to be able to change him. no matter what you did or didn’t do, nothing would’ve changed what happened.

taehyung whispers promises into your ear and for once, you feel like it’s okay to believe him.

taehyung takes your hand and spins you in a circle and it makes you feel light. he leans in so close to you that you forget how to think straight. he pulls you into his chest and you can’t even remember what it felt like to hug jungkook anymore.

there’s relapses, of course. particularly on the days when you accidentally catch sight of jungkook on campus. taehyung gently holds your hand, brushes his thumb over your knuckles. “you loved him. as more than friends, but especially as friends. i don’t have a lot of rights to say anything because i wasn’t a part of so much of your history with him. but i get it. it hurts sometimes. it’s okay.”

when you cry, it kind of feels like a weight lifting off your shoulders.

you loved jungkook. you did. in a devastating way, in a way that ripped the air from your lungs and your heart out of your chest. you loved him, but he let you down. over and over again.

jungkook has left almost a decade of your life with his imprint on it but you have time. you have time to find who you are without him next to you, time to settle with being okay laughing without him by your side. you have time to learn what it’s like to put yourself first, again.

the happiness slips back into your life. a quiet, subtle change, one that you don’t notice at first. it ebbs and flows, and it takes a lot of work. it’ll probably be something you work for your whole life.

and for once, that’s okay.

fin.

#jungkook x you #taehyung x you #jungkook x reader #taehyung x reader #jungkook #taehyung #angst #series: ttno #switched up the formatting a teeny tiny bit since it's the finale #will be posting the author's afterword soon!! either today or at least within the next couple days #epilogue and playlists will come shortly after that probably #thank you all for reading all the way through to the end

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