⟡ RUNNING ON RAGE - Prologue ⟡
PAIRING: Jungkook x Reader ft. Mr Kim Seokjin getting on Jungkook's last nerve.
SUMMARY:
Jungkook is a mechanic. He fixes high-end cars. He has a wrench in one hand and approximately three ounces of patience left in the other.
Y/N is an art school dropout who works in a call center. She takes eighty angry phone calls a day and somehow remains the most unbothered person to ever exist.
A match made in… hell? Perhaps?
TROPE: Childhood Friends to Lovers
RATING: 18+ There will be a considerable amount of smut in this fic later on. I have a friend helping me write it hehe. Kook is a very angry man if I haven't made that clear. A Lot Of Crash-Outs. Swearing. Weed Smoking. Strained Father-Son Relationship. Angst. Sex Being Used As An Unhealthy Coping Mechanism.
INSPIRATION: 2003 Anger Management Movie lol. The song Angry by the Rolling Stones. Every angry person on the planet. Every Mechanic I've met whose had a stick up their ass. Every person who's pissed me off personally.
WORD COUNT: 4.9k
M⋆LIST: Right here
The seaside city looked beautiful from a distance, though it hangs beneath a blanket of humidity, and lately the air feels charged with something impossible to ignore, something smoldering, as though an inferno is waiting to erupt, and it’s like everyone is feeling it.
Or maybe everyone was carrying something they didn't know what to do with.
The Monday morning rush had barely started, and Jungkook is already contemplating a prison sentence, not because he committed a crime. Yet. Though it feels like he’s treading dangerously close to the thought.
He is lying flat on his back beneath a VW Phaeton, a wrench in hand as he tinkers away. Unfortunately, standing directly beside the vehicle is Mrs. Park, and Mrs. Park has questions. The same question, in fact. Repeatedly. For the last three weeks.
"So what you're telling me," she starts again, her voice carrying effortlessly across the garage, "is that my car is just going to sit here until God knows when?"
Jungkook squeezes his eyes shut for a second before forcing himself to answer. He's had this conversation with her too many times.
"Ma'am. What I've been trying to explain to you is that Porsche suffered a cyberattack. Their systems were compromised, production stalled, parts distribution is backed up, which means replacement components are taking longer to source than usual."
There was a pause, then came the response from her lips he knew was coming.
"Well, that's unacceptable."
His jaw tightens.
"With all due respect," he said, keeping his voice level through sheer force of will, "Porsche didn't give me a heads up before they got hacked."
Mrs. Park huffs dramatically.
"I paid a lot of money for this vehicle. This is not fair."
The wrench stopped moving and for one brief, dangerous moment, Jungkook considered telling her that life hadn't exactly been fair to him lately either.
That, a month ago, a drunk driver had turned his entire world upside down. His father was lying in a hospital bed after being hit, now suspended somewhere between life and death, meaning he'd been forced to abandon his degree without warning, and take over a garage he was never meant to inherit this young. At twenty-one, he should have been worrying about deadlines, nights out, and what came after graduation.
Or maybe he should mention how his mother rarely made it out of bed before noon these days, leaving him to raise his thirteen-year-old brother Jiwon between shifts, school runs, and half-burnt dinners eaten standing at the kitchen counter.
Or even better, he could mention that you, the girl he'd been in love with as long as he can remember, have a mother with a temper somehow worse than his own, yet still looked at him like he was the unstable one. Like he wasn't good enough for her daughter. Like one day he'd explode and ruin everything he touched. He couldn't shake the feeling that you were slowly putting space between yourselves.
The thought sits bitterly at the back of his throat, but instead, he swallows it down alongside the rest of his frustrations and forces himself to keep going.
As irritating as her persistence was, Jungkook couldn't entirely blame her. Life had taught him that everyone was carrying something. Mrs. Park needed her car, and to her, this problem was just as real and frustrating as any of the ones weighing on his shoulders.
"Yes, ma'am. I'm aware you must have spent a lot of money buying your vehicle." He tries a softer approach.
"So can you tell me when you'll get the part?" She circles back round, clearly wasn't listening the first time.
That did it, it was just enough for something behind his eyes to twitch violently. He thought he explained quite thoroughly that nobody at Porsche could even give him an estimate right now, and somehow she wound herself right back to the beginning as if the conversation had never happened?
To hell with this lady, she probably has three more cars sitting at home.
Slowly, Jungkook rolls himself out from underneath the VW, about to give this lady a peace of his mind, but unfortunately, he misjudged the distance.
Completely.
Because halfway through attempting to get up, it happens.
CRACK.
His face, the spot just below his eyebrow, hits the edge of the car.
Hard.
Jungkook freezes.
Every mechanic in the building wince in sympathy, the sound echoes through the garage, but the pain shoots through something deeper. A violent throb blooms at the base of his skull, followed by a ringing so sharp it seems to split the world in two. It feels so diabolical that for a moment, everything else disappears beneath it.
It felt like an engine pushed well past its limits—overheated, overworked, and on the verge of catching fire. He could feel the anger climbing with it, hotter and hotter, until it threatened to consume everything else.
He eases himself to sit up, slowly, properly.
Then, only half a second after, he dashes the wrench at the wall and curses in frustration.
"FOR FUCKS SAKE!"
His voice echoes through the garage, sharp enough to make everyone within earshot stop what they are doing.
Hoseok (Jungkook's father's most trusted mechanic) was the first to look up. He pauses mid-task and turns toward him, his expression unreadable but wary. He knows Jungkook well enough to recognise the signs. The tight shoulders. The clenched jaw. The look of a man hanging onto his patience by a thread. There is a quiet hope in his eyes that whatever was brewing would end here and not become something worse.
That’s what everyone was afraid of these days.
Across the workshop, Jiwon, Jungkook's younger brother, looks up in silent alarm. He had been lingering around the garage all afternoon, pretending to help while mostly getting under everyone's feet. The moment he hears the wrench hit the wall, he makes a decision.
A smart one.
Without a word, he grabs his bike, swung a leg over it, and pedals away from the garage with surprising urgency, deciding that whatever was going to happen next was a problem best avoided altogether.
The garage suddenly feels ten degrees hotter than it had five minutes ago. Sweat clung uncomfortably to Jungkooks skin, his black T-shirt sticking to his back and shoulders. Without really thinking about it, he grabs the collar and pulls it over his head in one swift motion, using the fabric to wipe grease and sweat from his face and neck.
The silence that follows is different, not the usual garage silence. This one felt strangely suspicious.
Jungkook lowers the shirt and looks up. Mrs. Park is staring in a way that couldn’t be dismissed as her eyes simply wandering.
She's openly, unapologetically drinking him in. Her gaze lingers on the broad planes of his chest, traces the definition of muscle built from years of physical labour and time spent working out, and settles on the sheen of sweat glistening across his skin from hours spent working beneath cars in the summer heat.
When she finally looks back up at his face, there wasn't a shred of embarrassment to be found. If anything, she seems perfectly content to have been caught.
Jungkook blinks, and let's his gaze drift over her for a moment.
She’s attractive. Her heels accentuate her calves, the fitted skirt probably rides a little higher than most women her age would dare, and yet she wears it with the kind of confidence that suggests she couldn't care less what anyone thinks. She could be Forty-five? Fifty? He has absolutely no idea.
Whatever her age, she's turning heads.
The throbbing at the front of his skull reminds him that he'd just nearly concussed himself, but he shoves the pain to the side. Mrs. Park clears her throat and tosses her blow-dried hair over one shoulder. She begins to fan herself with her clutch (definitely not worked up from the heat, fyi).
As she did, the diamond on her wedding ring caught the sunlight and flashed obnoxiously. Jungkook stared at it for a moment, between the ring, the blowout, and the expensive perfume, Mrs. Park looked every bit the part of a rich housewife. The type who probably spent her mornings at pilates, her afternoons gossiping over iced lattes, and her evenings reading raunchy romance novels hidden inside the covers of respectable literary books so her husband wouldn't ask questions.
Wetting his lips, he lifts his eyes back to hers and clears his throat, a small, knowing smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth. No one would see it, but it’s at this precise moment that his anger reaches it’s boiling point, and he’s looking for the worst possible way to manage it.
"Heat getting to you?" Jungkook rasps, his voice lower now, carrying a teasing edge that hadn't been there a moment ago. "Happens to the best of us."
His eyes shamelessly oggle her legs now, before it flicks briefly to the clutch she was using as a fan before returning to her face. He stands up completely, towering over the lady. She bites her lips and takes in the broadness of his chest, the scent of oil and sweat, mixed with the electric hint of his cologne.
"Could do with a cold beer myself." He says with a slow smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth. There was a familiar glint in his eyes now, the one that tended to appear whenever professionalism started losing a fight against temptation.
He nodded toward the office behind him.
"Got a mini fridge 'round back if you'd like to escape the heat for a minute?"
-
A while later, Mrs. Park emerges from Jungkook's office. She adjusts the front of her skirt and fixes a stray strand of hair that had escaped her immaculate styling. She’s carrying herself with the effortless grace of a woman who had absolutely no intention of letting anyone find out that she was just spread-eagled over the desk of her mechanic's office.
A few moments later, Jungkook follows, and the bastard looks entirely too pleased with himself.
He’s whistling a tune under his breath as he crosses the garage floor, hands tucked into the pockets of his work trousers. To his credit, he managed to wipe most of the lipstick from his face, but not all of it. There are still faint traces lingering near his jaw and the side of his neck, subtle enough that most people would miss them.
But not Hoseok. He's always had an eye for detail, so when he sees that? He shakes his head with an unamused huff.
"That's one way to tell a customer to get fucked." Hoseok says, raising an eyebrow at him.
Jungkook doesn't respond, so Hoseok continues.
“You also ordered the wrong battery for the Skoda.” He says, popping his gum and staring at his younger colleague, in a way that Jungkook reads as: you’re too incompetent to be running your fathers garage. His moment of bliss was cut short as soon as those words left his mouth. Hoseok has a knack for doing this, pointing out little things Jungkook is doing wrong.
He never misses a trick.
Never.
Jungkook simply nods, and offers a twitch of a smile.
“Thanks, Hobi.”
But inside?
He's spent the last few seconds inventing increasingly creative ways to tell his father's favourite mechanic exactly where he should stick that spanner, and not one of them was anatomically recommended.
-
Meanwhile, across town, in an aged office building that looks like it needs more than just a hint of TLC, you’re sitting by the window, with a well-loved sudoku book open across your desk. Some grids had been completed with impressive determination, neat numbers filling every square, and others had clearly lost your attention halfway through, abandoned in favour of elaborate doodles creeping through the margins. Vines curled between the grids. Flowers bloomed. Entire corners of pages had been transformed into intricate little drawings.
Your worn-out trainers had long since been kicked off beneath the desk, and despite your manager's repeated objections, you were sitting cross-legged in your chair as though this was your living room rather than a place of work.
A headset rested over one ear while the other remained free, allowing you to eavesdrop on the office gossip whenever necessary. The plastic frame was decorated with tiny fruit stickers you'd added during a particularly boring shift months ago.
“Can you please tell me what the issue is with your dishwasher?” You ask simply.
“It’s not an issue.” The caller snarks, clearly taking your tone and choice of word deeply to heart over a household appliance.
You glanced up at the clock and it has only been ten minutes since the start of your shift. In your ear, the customer continued his rant, passionately explaining why the company should absolutely cover a list of repairs and replacements that sat well outside the terms of his warranty. You'd stopped trying to interrupt them three minutes ago, while he complained, you clicked through your inbox.
More complaints. Shocking.
Your eyes skimmed over a familiar collection of dissatisfactions, most of them relating to things entirely beyond your control. Then one particular complaint caught your eye.
You opened it to find the customer claimed you sounded "too monotone" and "like you'd just rolled out of bed."
To be fair, you had just rolled out of bed. The complaint was a call you took at eight-thirteen in the morning a week ago. At that time, you considered it a miracle you sounded conscious at all.
You snort softly, unable to hide your amusement.
“Oh… so you’re laughing at me now?!” The caller you momentarily forgot about challenges you.
Shit.
"No, sir, I just had something caught in my throat. My apologies." You slipped effortlessly into your customer service voice. "Would you mind repeating that for me, please?"
Unfortunately, this man is no longer looking for a solution. He's looking for a fight.
“You call-handlers are some of the most lazy, useless—“
Your phone pinged against the desk.
The sound was subtle, but enough to pull your attention away for a moment. You glanced down discreetly, shielding the screen from view as you checked the notification. In your headset, the customer continued talking. Or yelling. At this point, it felt unimportant.
You scroll past a string of messages from Hoseok, who was almost certainly trying to determine when you were next available to hook up.
A couple more messages sat beneath his. Different names, but the same question. Two men who you'd matched with on Tinder had reached the exact same conclusion and were now checking whether you had any free time in your schedule.
You would argue you’re finding ways to keep busy.
“Kook got mad again, in front of a customer.” You read the message Jiwon sent you. The latest one you were looking for.
Jiwon messages you a lot these days, sometimes it’s silly gifs or YouTube videos. Sometimes it’s to ask if you’ve watched the anime he recommended to you, and other times it’s to ask for help on his homework. He’s a sweet kid, a little chaotic and maybe even a little lonely, and despite never hearing it from him personally, you know he’s feeling overwhelmed by everything around him at the moment, and Jungkook is too busy to talk to him half the time, so you quietly stepped in, just to make sure Jiwon didn't have to navigate all of it by himself.
You weren't even sure if Jungkook knew.
The truth was, the two of you hadn't properly spoken in over a year, despite spending most of your childhood attached at the hip.
Back then, you were inseparable.
Jumping off the harbour wall into the sea after school. Spending entire summer afternoons exploring every corner of town on your bikes, usually wherever Jungkook decided to lead. He'd been an absolute menace at ten years old. Fearless, reckless, and completely unconcerned with curfews, common sense, or the fact that your mother would be pacing the house convinced you'd both been kidnapped.
You'd follow anyway.
Always.
It was the kind of friendship that felt permanent. The kind that made you believe there would never come a day when you wouldn't know exactly what was happening in each other's lives.
When university happened, you left for different cities, and somewhere along the way, the distance became more than geographical.
The thing was, Jungkook seemed to thrive. Every update you heard painted the picture of someone finding his place in the world. Making friends. Building connections. Growing into himself.
You wanted that too. God, you wanted it. You arrived at university convinced you were about to begin the best chapter of your life. You were excited. Ambitious. Certain you'd found the thing you wanted to spend the rest of your life doing, instead, it felt as though the ground slowly disappeared beneath your feet.
Not all at once, that would've been easier. No, it happened gradually. One small disappointment after another. One bad day bleeding into the next until eventually you couldn't remember the last time you'd felt excited about anything.
The fine art course you'd once loved became something you dreaded attending. People talked about university as though it expanded their world. For you, it felt like the walls were closing in, and the harder you tried to make things work, the further behind you seemed to fall.
Then out of nowhere, to add to the cherry of the already collapsing cake, your mother called, she was crying so hard you could barely understand what she was saying, until you made enough sense of her sobbing to understand your father had been having an affair with someone from his workplace.
Someone only a few years older than you.
Mind, body, and soul, you felt in all the ways fucked up. Everything had boiled over long ago.
The stress.
The disappointment.
The loneliness.
The constant feeling that no matter how hard you tried, somewhere along the way, you lost your sense of direction. Then your sense of purpose. Then, little by little, the parts of yourself you'd always thought were permanent.
The passion that had once driven you towards art had dwindled into a faint flicker before disappearing altogether. Things that once mattered deeply barely registered anymore. As though someone had turned the volume down on your entire life.
Sometimes, what frightened you wasn't the sadness.
It was the indifference.
Because sadness meant you still cared.
Indifference was something else entirely, and lately, you found yourself wondering how dangerous that could become. To drift through life feeling disconnected from everything. To wake up each morning with no particular desire for anything and no particular fear of losing it.
As though nothing mattered, or perhaps worse, as though no one did.
The friends you'd managed to make didn't understand it either. At first, they were sympathetic, then concerned, then by all accounts, (which you couldn't blame them for), they were frustrated with you.
As your grades slipped and your enthusiasm disappeared, their patience seemed to disappear with it. You explained what you felt comfortable explaining, but there were some things you couldn't put into words. Some things were too messy, too personal.
From their perspective, though, none of that mattered. All they saw was someone letting opportunities slip through her fingers. Wasting a talent you wasn't sure you had in you anymore.
That was perhaps the most excruciating part of it, watching people you cared about slowly lose sympathy for your pain because it had lasted longer than they thought it should, but for the life of you, you couldn't just snap your fingers and suddenly become the version of yourself you used to be, with ideas flowing freely and inspiration spilling from your fingertips once again.
So then came the picking apart, because apparently it wasn't enough that you were already struggling to keep your head above water. Now there were new complaints.
You said the wrong thing.
You reacted the wrong way.
You weren't there when someone needed you.
You'd become too distant and every conversation seemed to turn into a list of things you'd done wrong. Eventually, you started to realise that your apologies didn't matter anymore, nor did the explanations, because by that point, some of them had already made up their minds. They weren't looking for reasons to understand you, they were looking for reasons to let you go.
So the conclusion is, you came home, and almost immediately, you felt like the biggest failure in the world. Worst of all, some people seemed determined to make sure you never forgot it.
There was always a look or a comment disguised as concern.
Oh.
She couldn't hack it.
What a waste.
They made you feel lazy. Incapable. Weak. As though you'd simply lacked the discipline to push through what everyone else managed just fine.
Even your own mother struggled to understand, not because she didn't love you, but because she genuinely couldn't relate. Miran was the kind of woman who built her salon from nothing. The kind who took every setback personally and responded by working twice as hard.
When life hit her, she adapted.
When life hit you, it felt as though you'd forgotten how to stand back up.
Like you'd allowed one bad chapter to consume the entire story, and maybe she meant well and she does try to help you, but how do you explain to someone who has never lost her spark what it feels like when yours goes out?
How do you explain that there are days where getting a single chore done feels like climbing a mountain? Compared to being sat on your phone watching porn and rotating three men whenever you can make time for them?
You ended up losing contact with Jungkook, because each time he tried to check in on you, you felt too ashamed to respond, not when you saw how much he was thriving on his social media.
Soon enough, you figured he probably realised that you were starting to become really boring, and you could sense it in yourself too. So the messages stopped for a year, until his fathers accident happened, which forced him to take a year out of his studies to come back to his childhood home and try to keep his fathers garage afloat.
The reality of the situation is, from what you'd gathered, he was angry because life had yanked him backwards. One minute, he was building something for himself: a future, a career, a life beyond the boundaries of this little seaside town. The next, he found himself right back where he'd started, carrying responsibilities that were never supposed to be his this soon.
'He’s under a lot of pressure at the moment. Don’t worry about it. If it happens again, try not to engage or stick around, just keep your distance from it.' You text Jiwon back, eyes fixated on your phone with a look of a young woman who doesn’t know if she’s giving an adolescent boy the right kind of advice.
‘Ok. I did. I don’t like it when he does that.’ He messages back, and you feel your shoulders slump at his confession.
“Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?” The caller you... again, forgot about, says repeatedly through the headset.
“I’m sorry Sir. It seems like we’re having trouble with our systems. Your voice keeps breaking up. Could you please repeat what you were saying again?” You lie in an indifferent tone.
-
Back at the garage, around twenty minutes before closing time, a car pulls into the forecourt. Jungkook glances up automatically, then immediately does a double-take, because it's a Porsche Carrera GT. His dream car.
The driver squeezes through the tightly parked cars and finds a spot, he maneuvers, backs up, reverses, goes forward, reverses, goes forward again, and with each move, he’s burning the hell out of his clutch. The Carrera lurches backwards once more before creeping forward at an angle that has absolutely no relationship whatsoever with the actual parking space.
Jungkook sees red.
It goes on, and on and on…
“How the fuck can someone be so shit at parking?” He grumbles under his breath as he tosses his dirt rag on the hood of a car he was working on. He steps out, and the air may be cooler now but there’s red hot steam coming out of his ears as he approaches this atrocious driver.
“Excuse me—“
The tyres practically do a wheel spin, kicking dust in Jungkook's direction, and the smell of burning clutch fills the air once more. The driver tries to reverse into the parking bay again and almost hits the car next to it.
"HEY!" Jungkook barks and claps his hands once, sharp and loud, trying to flag the driver down to stop the clutch taking another beating.
The driver winds his window down, and Jungkook finds himself staring at a pair of dark sunglasses and a man who can't be more than a few years older than him. He's dressed simply. A crisp white T-shirt. Blue jeans. Nothing flashy. Nothing that screams: I own one of the nicest cars in the world, and he even looks like if he wasn’t such a dumbass, could be someone you’d approach for a friendly chat.
To make matters worse, the man has some god-awful song blasting through the speakers in Jungkook's opinion. The kind of music that feels completely at odds with a Carrera GT.
Loud and Unapologetic.
Jungkook glances at the car, then at the driver, then back at the car again as "Zou Bisou Bisou" by Gillian Hills pours out of what should be a very respectable sound system.
Absolutely not. A car like this should be listening to rock, or maybe RnB. Hell, he'd even accept silence, but this feels wrong on a burning level.
"You're ruining your clutch!" Jungkook shouts over the music.
“What?” The man yells, barely audible over the music.
Jungkook pinches the bridge of his nose and tries again with a deathly stoic expression.
“Turn that shit off—“
“—What?!” The man exclaims, nose scrunched in a way that makes Jungkook think he could possibly consider murder.
He slams his palm flat down on the hood of the car, almost enough to dent it altogether.
“I said turn that SHIT OFF!” He yells.
The man pauses, his mouth slightly agape, and the pause only lasted a few seconds but it felt like a painful eternity for Jungkook with this jarring music playing in the background. The two men stare at eachother, and then he reaches over and turns the music down. Not off. But he turns it down.
“Geez, say it don’t spray it. I’m looking to get my brake discs replaced, not a car wash.” The man has the audacity to flash a charming smile and takes his glasses off.
“The names Jin. Kim Seokjin. I’m not from around here. Do you reckon you could get the brakes fitted tonight?”
Jungkook is too distraught to respond right away.
“No. I can’t. I’d have to order the parts… and judging by the fucking smell of your clutch I might need to check that too.” Oh how he wishes he could actually throw that swear word in there.
Jin blinks, and a soft ‘hm’ leaves his lips. “Fair enough. Let’s do that.” He puts his gear in reverse again, chest puffed with confidence that he’ll actually manage to park his car this time, but Jungkook halts him.
“No no no!” He warns, and his hand reaches to grab the steering wheel to stop him from moving, but it’s already too late. Jin reverses in lightening speed, and the back of the car collides with the wall behind him. Jungkook cringes and turns around, like he doesn’t want to even look at what just happened right now. His hand runs slowly down his face, dragging the bottom of his eyes down like his face is about to melt off.
Hoseok has been quietly snickering to himself inside the garage, lips perked up into a devilish smirk as he watches the scene unfold in front of him.
Jin cranes his head with a small ‘oops’ leaving his mouth.
“Well… looks like you need to add that to the list of things to fix.”
Jungkook whips back around and puts on his best performance. A strained laugh escapes his withering lungs, his laugh alarmingly similar to the Joker at this point. He’s got half a mind to drag this man out the car by the collar of his shirt.
It's only Monday evening.
The week has barely...
Started.