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Jungkook had always believed there was only black and white. Good and bad. Light and dark.
In a world where people only saw themselves and their doings, that was normal. People think in categories, they never learn to distinguish. They learn to fit in and function. Or they don’t.
He had also believed he was black. Bad and dark, twisted in a way not even he himself understood.
And when he met Jimin, he thought he was white.
Jimin was good and light and all the things Jungkook wanted to be but never could.
When he fell in love with white and realized how much he hated black, he thought it would never work out.
Their personalities couldn’t go well together, could they? But that didn’t keep him from wanting, from being selfish – another black trait in his eyes – and trying to get the slightly older boy. Jungkook wanted to bathe in the light but he knew it was wrong because when he did that, Jimin would be in the dark because of him. He’d end up as the literal light in the dark, engulfed by the scary blackness. Displaying hope for Jungkook, but for himself nothing more than a trap that keeps him from living.
Only Jungkook wanted too much. Even when he knew he shouldn’t, he reached out when Jimin confessed and held him. Held him so close. He couldn’t let go of the light when all he ever had was darkness.
What he didn’t know is that if Jimin knew about his thoughts, he would disagree. In the elder’s eyes Jungkook was the brightest light, illuminating his own suffocating blackness. The one he thought had swallowed him forever. The one he found brightened up when Jungkook became his boyfriend.
And after a while, they both learned it wasn’t true what they thought.
Neither of them was black or white. Because even in a society that only saw sharp lines and harsh differences, there was more to it. They were all shades of grey, sometimes lighter, sometimes darker, sometimes white and sometimes black.
They weren’t stuck with brightness or darkness, they weren’t good or bad. They were just themselves.
It had taken a love for them to learn that. A love they planned on never letting go again. Because it was as deep as their own black had always appeared to them, but as bright as the other’s white that they had felt unworthy of.
No one is just black or white, Jungkook knows now. No worthy or unworthy. There was no light without darkness and no darkness without light. But there was Jimin and him and all their shades.
When it comes to Jimin, he loves them all.
And thanks to Jimin, he learns to love his own, too.