dressed in white
summary: He took one last shaky breath and watched with a tight, sour feeling in his chest as you turned away from him and faced your groom, smiling even wider, so wide he was sure your cheeks would rip.
genre: oneshot, marriage!au, readerbride!au, bestfriendjk!au, angst, fluff
wc: 1.2k
rating: pg
cw: unrequited love
an: first post : >
—
When the doors finally opened, Jungkook swore he'd never been more breathless in his whole life.
There you were, the woman of his dreams, looking as beautiful as the day he realized he loved you.
It had been such a simple moment: The first time he'd brought you to his favorite burger place. You had met a few months earlier through mutual friends, and had become close almost instantly, having bonded over a shared deadly sin: gluttony. You'd gone ahead and spent countless weeks taking turns inviting each other to your favorite restaurants, and that week it had been his turn.
After being seated, he watched you browse the menu and proceed to order the biggest and most expensive burger they had. The waitress left and you shot him a cheeky smile. He remembers thinking how pretty you looked that day, laughing to himself as the food was brought out. Your eyes went wide as you stared at the monstrosity of a burger in front of you, but before he could process your expression, you picked the burger up off the plate and bit into it, brows instantly furrowing and mangled sounds of satisfaction escaping your throat.
You looked up at him with your mouth full of the biggest bite he'd ever seen someone take, and in that moment he knew no one else in the world would ever compare to you. Eyes sparkling and face covered in spicy mayonnaise, you were the love of his life, and for every second since that moment, he had adored you more than he ever thought he could adore someone.
The dress you wore now quite literally knocked all the air out of his lungs, transforming the space inside them into a vacuum which no oxygen could enter, nor escape: Fitted at the waist and flared outwards towards the ground in a mesmerizing arrangement of white fabric. The creamy material fell loose around your shoulders, exposing your neck and collarbones, arguably the most kissable parts of you. The moles on the column of your throat were arranged in a near perfect line, a line which he itched to drag his lips down at every waking moment. Jungkook cursed the veil covering your face, as from a distance it shielded his eyes from the beauty he had become so addicted to all these years, but he could not for the life of him deny how the undeniably bridal garment made his stomach flip.
As you inched further down the aisle, he felt his heart beat impossibly faster. In the most subtle of ways, he attempted to wipe his now sweaty palms on the sides of his pants, and all of a sudden, the tuxedo he donned seemed to suffocate him. His throat was scorchingly dry, so much so that the several nervous gulps he swallowed down watching you walk closer towards him did nothing to soothe the lack of moisture in his airways.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of waiting for you to reach the altar, you stood before him. You looked up and smiled. Maybe his favorite smile he'd ever seen on you. Eyes crinkled at the corners and lips tugged upwards beneath rosy cheeks. He had imagined this moment countless times before, flashes of white tulle and saccharine sweet promises tainting every corner of his dreams.
He smiled back at you, praying to every god and every religion he could think of that you couldn't see the way his eyes prickled and welled up as he stared into your own.
He took one last shaky breath and watched with a tight, sour feeling in his chest as you turned away from him and faced your groom, smiling even wider, so wide he was sure your cheeks would rip.
He had assimilated this fact a long, long time ago: you would never be his. Not in a million years.
And even though he knew this, he had let himself indulge in one more selfish, impossible fantasy. He had watched you waltz down the aisle and for those scarce minutes, he imagined it was him you were walking towards. He imagined it was him who had asked you out that day in your junior year of college, that it was him who'd met your parents, and that it was him who'd fallen to one knee four months ago.
He imagined it was him who held your heart.
No one would ever know that the tears painting his face in that instant were not happy tears, but the effect of the bitter realization that now more than ever, it was clear he would never have you. The realization that one day soon he'd learn to braid hair or buy a toy truck to please children that were half yours but not half his. The realization that you would grow old with someone else. The realization that Jungkook would spend the rest of his life searching for the most perfect, beautiful girl, and hate her because she wasn't you.
His chest burned while you read your vows, his face all but crumpled as the ring was slid onto your finger, and any piece of his heart that had remained intact throughout the ceremony, shattered into a thousand piercing shards when your lips met your husband's.
But his lips were alone, slicked with salty tears and being chewed between his teeth as he watched his biting and lonely fate be sealed with one singular kiss. Cheers erupted from the atendees, but he didn't flinch. He only stared blankly forward, chest empty, watching you throw your head back as that familiar melodic laughter echoed in his throbbing head.
Before today, he had thought many times of leaving. Of silently cutting you out of his life so as to stop the suffering and maybe, just maybe, have a sliver of a chance at happiness. But he never did do it. Why? Because watching someone else kiss you and touch you and love you from a distance the way he had always dreamed of doing, was a much more desirable alternative than the frigid emptiness of existing without you. So thanks to that epiphany, he will live the rest of his life in a dizzying apex between fulfillment and agony, a bittersweet existence beside you, seeing another man give you the life he wanted to.
And maybe during said existence there will be a time where he comforts you after a fight with said man, selfishly, horribly hoping against hope that the disagreement will lead to separation, and that separation may [finally] lead you into his arms. But Jungkook realizes that those perverse fantasies are only the handiwork of the ugliest facets of himself. The parts of his being that would condone anything, even your pain, in order to see those fantasies become reality. So for now, he will try as hard as he loves you to withstand the excruciating blows of unrequited love, just to make sure you can live the life you deserve, the life he always wanted for you, even if that doesn't include him.
Jungkook watches, tears dried (for now), as you walk back down the aisle, arm linked with the love of your life, and he basks in the fleeting contentment he feels in that moment.
It seems the universe decided to mock him one last time, for you turn to look over your shoulder, scanning the crowd. He is confused for a moment, until your eyes find him, still glued to the altar and flash him another dazzling smile.
As you disappear out the doors, he thinks for maybe the hundreth time that day, and the millionth since he met you, how truly beautiful you are.
© vi061313, 2022. do not copy, repost, or translate.
