A soft piano melody drifts into Jungkook’s ears, and he automatically begins gravitating towards it. It sounds… familiar, somehow, yet he knows he’s never heard it before. Something about it, though, just draws him in, enthralls him entirely, and he’s unable to focus on anything other than the pretty tune floating through the air until finally, the next turn he makes leads him to an old brown piano, standing worn out and tired in front of a music shop, but the song the man behind it brings out of it is no less soulful. There’s a small gathering of a few people around the pair, and Jungkook finds himself joining them until the song comes to an end. The people around him applaud, causing the pianist to smile shyly, but Jungkook stays standing frozen where he is. The tune continues to resonate in his mind, and he can’t shake the strange sense of deja vu.

—The strange feeling that he knows this piece.

The pianist’s eyes lock with his, and Jungkook almost reels. Glimpses of a burning room, a car crash, a rooftop, and those same eyes flash across his mind so quickly he’s hardly certain he saw them at all, and he finds himself suddenly breathless.

“How much?” Jungkook manages to ask, nodding to the box of CDs next to the piano, his voice seeming far away and not much like his own.

“Whatever you can spare,” the pianist replies softly, almost forlornly.

Jungkook drops nearly all the change he has on him into the man’s hands and takes a CD, reality dawning on him again and realising he’s now late for his meeting. He hastily thanks the pianist before rushing off to work, the pianist’s gaze following long after him.

Busy with work, the CD gets forgotten, and even when he returns home, he sets it aside for later—

—But later never comes.

It isn’t until years later when he’s cleaning out his apartment ready to move out that he finds it again. The case has an image of piano keys on the front, ‘Min Yoongi’ written in cursive font in the top right corner, song titles listed on the back. He opens it and takes the disc out delicately. It’s plain white, nothing but ‘Yoongi’ scrawled in small handwritten letters on the edge. He vaguely remembers the encounter, but for the life of him, he can’t remember the tune he heard that day, nor the face of the pianist.

He thinks he still has a CD player somewhere, so he digs around for a bit until he finds it, covered in dust in the back of a cupboard. He bites his lip, feeling a little nervous for a reason he can’t explain.

The music begins, and a wave of nostalgia washes over him instantly, so powerful he almost feels seasick. For a moment he thinks he remembers something, remembers a group of boys and sparklers and laughter in an abandoned building, remembers playing this song on a broken piano with a boy there.

But, that… never happened, did it?

He sinks to the ground as the music continues to play, and does nothing but listen to it. Doesn’t even think of anything else, as if he temporarily exists only in the music. 

There was a school, a song a boy played in an empty classroom, a kiss on top of that piano stool. There was a new apartment, a brown piano the first thing to go in there, hours playing a song, their song, in that empty apartment. Far more than simple kisses. A whistled tune, a fight, a fire.

A tear slips down Jungkook’s cheek.

The last song fades out, the CD whirring to a stop, and for a moment it feels like Jungkook’s world comes to an end with it. He lets his head hang down, trying to compose himself from… whatever it is he’s feeling. He’s always liked music and been sensitive to sounds, but that doesn’t explain the tugging in his heart, the flashes of scenes across his mind’s eye that seem more like memories than imagination—like he’s reliving someone’s life—

—The tears that won’t stop pooling in his eyes.

He shakes his head a few times, tries to blink the tears away. 

What was it he saw? 

There was a boy, and… what?

The more he tries to grasp at the remnants of the visions, the further away they seem to slip from his reach—as though they were nothing but a meaningless dream.

He dries his tears on his sleeve, unable to shake the strange feeling coursing through him, but continues on with sorting through his things, continues on with life.

He’s since ripped the CD to his computer and downloaded all the tracks to his phone. No matter how many times he listens to them, the feelings they invoke never lessen. He can’t help but feel like it means something to him—reminding him of something, something he lost, something he loved.

—But he can’t think what.

He doesn’t get any more visions, for lack of a better description of them, and the previous ones have long faded from his memory, nothing but the lingering feeling that he’s forgetting something— missing something—remaining. It’s stronger sometimes, like at the motel room he took a man from the bar to. He’d been hit with wave of nausea and a clenching in his heart so strong he feared he may be having a heart attack, though he knew that wasn’t it.

He sighs, getting up to look out the window of his office, the piano music drifting into his ears through his headphones. If only he knew what it is exactly that he’s looking for, what it is that he’s missing.

He’s in a restaurant with his third date of the month, since he’s been hoping to find someone to fill the emptiness he so often feels, when he hears a familiar piece of music. On instinct, he looks around for the piano, the pianist, but he can’t quite see them from the position of their table in the restaurant.

“Are you okay? Are you looking for someone?”

“Huh?”

“Do you want me to call the waiter over or something?”

“Oh, uh, no I think I’m just gonna go to the bathroom a sec,” Jungkook says distractedly, still trying to make out the figure upon the piano stool.

“Oh, alright,” he smiles, but Jungkook doesn’t wait long enough to see.

He’s focused solely on the piano, making his way as if through a tunnel to it, barely registering how he maneuvres through the tables to get there. There’s a man playing, eyes closed, lost—or maybe found—in his own music, swaying with the crests and falls in the melody, fingers dancing skillfully across the keys. Jungkook just stays where he his, barely breathing. The song is one of those from the CD he’d bought a long time ago; he knows it like the back of his hand now. Yet, he also feels he knows this man, though logically he knows he doesn’t.

The piece draws near its end, and the pianist’s eyes open, looking down at the keys for the last few notes. He sighs, places his hands on the stool either side of him and slumps forward a little, head hanging, like he’s… lost, perhaps. Maybe disappointed. He mostly just looks sad.

He looks around him briefly and his eyes meet Jungkook’s. His mouth falls open a little, and Jungkook can only assume he’s feeling the same thing he is—the same pull, familiarity, the fire.

The sense that he knows him.

That he’s home.

Jungkook’s phone buzzes in his pocket but he hardly registers it.

“Min Yoongi?”

“Y-you, know me?”

“I think I do.”

“Do I… know you?” Yoongi asks, biting his lower lip.

“I, um,” Jungkook pauses, steps a little closer, “This probably sounds insane, but I feel like I’ve known your music, you, for a long time, like it’s important to me. I feel a connection to it when I listen to it. I feel like you’re supposed to mean something to me. I feel like it’s you I’ve been missing, been searching for. I… is that, weird?”

“No,” Yoongi replies to Jungkook’s surprise, and he notices his eyes are glassy with unshed tears despite the smile gracing his features, belatedly realises he’s tearing up himself. “No, it’s not weird at all. I always felt like those songs were meant for someone, I felt like they were already written inside me before I actually wrote them. Then, you bought my CD all those years ago off the street, didn’t you? When I saw you, I can’t explain it, I just knew you. It was the same just now.”

“Can I hug you? Is that okay?”

Yoongi nods and stands up from the piano stool, allowing Jungkook to wrap his arms around him. He’s shorter than Jungkook, easily manages to bury his face in Jungkook’s shoulder as he circles his own arms around Jungkook’s waist. 

“Babe, there you are!” a voice says just as the two pull apart. “I was getting worried, and you didn’t answer my text.”

“Oh, Minseok,” Jungkook says, coming back to the present, remembering where he is. “I just ran into a…” He glances at Yoongi, who’s tugging on the sleeve of his blazer, gaze fixed on the floor. “An old friend.”

“Oh right, well are you coming back or not? The food’s getting cold.”

“Right, yeah.” Jungkook looks back at Yoongi once more, hesitant.

“Let me get your number, at least, first?” Yoongi asks, voice small. He looks kind of, sad. Jungkook feels the same.

They exchange numbers and Jungkook heads back to his table with Minseok, but he’s distracted throughout the rest of their dinner date, still thinking about Yoongi, more focused on the piano music that Yoongi’s resumed playing, instead of what Minseok is saying.

“Thank you for today,” Minseok says once they reach his flat, smiling sweetly.

“No problem,” Jungkook replies, “It was nice.”

“Yeah,” his date agrees, “But I don’t think this is going to work. You seem like a nice guy and everything, but I don’t think it’s me you’re after, is it?”

Jungkook sighs. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry, you seem lovely too, I just…”

“It’s okay,” Minseok smiles. He leans up and presses a fleeting kiss to Jungkook’s cheek before turning to head in to his flat.

“You, um,” he calls over his shoulder just before closing the door, “You should call your friend.”

Jungkook does exactly that.

---

A/N: hello! thank you so much for reading! if you want, please check out the video i made as a visual representation of this fic uwu: https://youtu.be/9Z9XmfCafv8