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"I, Kim Taehyung, take you, Jeon Jungkook, to be my lawful husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part."
As generic and simple as their wedding vows were, Jungkook had loved them. It had felt, like since the moment he met Taehyung - when Jungkook tripped over his own feet and sent his cup of coffee splashing down Taehyung’s crisp white oxford shirt, and Taehyung had only asked if he was alright with a smile - that he’d been waiting, all that time thereafter, until the moment he said I do.
And in the first six months of their married life, Taehyung took to his vows to every letter of the word. Jungkook married the love of his life, and it turned out that he was an even better husband than he’d been a lover, and Jungkook had spent the days in a rose-tinted haze, happy and in love and being loved.
And then.
Something, somewhere, changed.
Taehyung changed.
Not in the sense that he wasn’t every bit the loving, caring and attentive husband anymore, but that he wasn’t around to be that loving, caring and attentive husband anymore.
It started with a few “late nights at the office”, though Jungkook began to notice “late nights” often turned into “early mornings”, and he no longer knew what to make of those. He hadn’t doubted Taehyung, then, simply for that.
Just a bit lonely, and sad, but still wholly ( stupidly ) in love ( blind ).
Then came the erratic behavior.
The way he’d storm into the shower first-thing after coming home, without even sparing a glance for Jungkook, who’d been waiting in the living room for his customary “I’m home, darling” hug and kiss. The way he’d subtly leave the room to take any phone calls, and, sometimes, even text messages. The way when Jungkook - he isn’t proud to admit this, but he’d been terrified and desperate, at that point - had checked his phone, he’d found it completely clean of any messages.
As if Taehyung had regularly erased them all.
What did he have to hide?
And then, slowly, Taehyung’s “late nights” turned into “three day long business trips”, which then turned into “week long business trips” and, once, even two weeks.
Two weeks, during which Jungkook had zero communication with his husband, despite constantly sending texts and leaving voicemails. It had felt, then, a little like screaming into the void - shouting and kicking up a fuss, desperate for some kind of response, any response, and receiving none at all.
Jungkook still hadn’t doubted him then, not yet. He had faith in his husband, because he loved him. (Perhaps it was denial; perhaps it was as simple as the piteous fear that grew in him, the part that thought, maybe it’s still better to have an illusion of him, than nothing at all.)
The fact that whenever Taehyung was home, his affection had suddenly tripled - incomprehensibly, given that Taehyung’s displays of love had already been grandiose and constant and fervent - had assured Jungkook, for a while, that nothing was wrong. That Taehyung still loved him, and that they were perfectly fine.
Except.
Except, Jungkook had been stupid enough to open up that dumb magazine at the grocery store while waiting for the checkout aisle.
The one that said, 7 Signs of Cheaters.
He’d snorted, but something in him had compelled him to open it anyway, and looking back, maybe it’s because he’d known, deep down, that something was amiss.
“#4. Intense and Overdone Signs of Affection. Has he suddenly been more affection than ever before? Buying you big gifts for no reason, making grand gestures and exaggerated displays of affection? This is one of the biggest markers of a cheater, ladies! It’s guilt. Almost 97% of women have reported that when their man was cheating on them, they noticed a marked and heightened sense of affect--”
Jungkook hadn’t been able to bear reading any further.
Still.
Jungkook loved Taehyung. He’d married him, for fuck’s sakes.
And denial was just a river in Egypt.
He’d continued on, bravely putting on a cheery smile every time Taehyung did manage to come home, despite the fact that his hands would tremble as he accepted Taehyung’s hugs and lavish presents he brought back. He’d even tried harder for a while, to be better.
A better husband, better in bed, a better cook, anything and everything he could think of, that might return Taehyung’s affections to him. (And it had felt like the strangest, most insane thing, to be sitting there, going mad with the effort to try to be better so that Taehyung would love him again , when Taehyung was doling out one exaggerated display of affection after another. Like living in some warped, alternate reality, where such signs of affection from Taehyung meant the opposite thing, and that he had to try harder.)
It comes to a head the night of their first wedding anniversary.
Or rather, given that Taehyung is entirely absent for it, he should say, the night that was supposed to be their first anniversary.
Jungkook sits on the couch in the living room the entire day, and then, the entire night, waiting for Taehyung to show up at some point. In the first few hours, he tells himself that as long as Taehyung does come home - no matter how late it is - it’s fine, and that he’ll forgive it, and that he’ll just be happy to have him home. Then the hours bleed into night, and as it approaches midnight - and with it, the realization that Taehyung is not coming home - these pathetic thoughts turn into something more angry.
Furious. Betrayed.
They’re married. Taehyung had made vows to him. He’d promised, in front of all their friends and family and God himself, that he’d be Jungkook’s husband. To be faithful. To love him and cherish him.
All it takes is less than a year, and where the fuck did those vows go?
By the time morning dawns, Jungkook progresses into grief.
All encompassing, sobbing, choking grief. Because the worst part of all this - the part that sucks, the part that makes him feel like there’s this black hole growing in the middle of his chest - is that Jungkook still loves him. It’d be easier, if the betrayal had made it so that he no longer felt love for Taehyung, that he no longer wanted him.
But Jungkook does. He wants. He wants his husband back, he wants Taehyung, he loves him so much he’d give Taehyung his own still-beating heart if he only asked, so the fact that Taehyung didn’t feel that back?
Is devastating.
By the time Taehyung finally stumbles through the door, at 2 in the afternoon, Jungkook is just...exhausted.
His anger is drained. He’s all cried out. He just feels empty inside, after nearly six months of running himself ragged, nearly mad with anxiety and grief and betrayal but trying to lock it away so that he might be able to be a good enough (better) husband to coax Taehyung’s affections back to him.
But it’d finally dawned on him, that that wasn’t possible.
That Taehyung - his Taehyung, the one that looked at him as though nothing in the world even existed when Jungkook was in the room - is gone.
Taehyung comes up to him, holding a ludicrously massive bouquet of flowers, his shirt untucked and clothes generally in an unkempt disarray, and Jungkook feels something hot sear behind his eyes and nearly blind him, because-- did this bastard just walk in here, after missing our anniversary, holding some fucking flowers for me while he still looks like he’s just been fucking his mistress?
Jungkook doesn’t even give him time to speak.
“Who is it?”
Taehyung looks confused. It only makes Jungkook angrier.
“Who is it, that you’ve been sleeping with for the last five months?”
Taehyung gapes. “What?”
And it’s that - that sheer, dumb confusion on his face, that audacity to act as if he doesn’t know where on Earth this accusation could possibly be coming from - that does it. That makes something snap inside of Jungkook.
“I know you’ve been cheating on me, so the least you could do is admit it!” he cries, feeling the devastation well up inside of him like a dam had broken, tears spilling down his cheeks.
Taehyung’s expression grows frantic.
Good. He should be scared.
Jungkook is going to- is going to-- divorce him?
The thought of it sends a terrifying chill down his spine, and it makes him cry even harder, because he’s so pathetic he doesn’t want to divorce Taehyung. He wants Taehyung to love him, he wants Taehyung to-
“-by, baby, sweetheart, no, I’m not cheating on you, how could you ever think-”
But Jungkook doesn’t have the wherewithal to listen to his babbling. He collapses back into the couch, weeping inconsolably into his hands, exhausted and tired and heartbroken.
Taehyung’s at his side in an instant, voice urgent and insistent as he pleads with Jungkook to please, believe him, he swears he’s not cheating.
“Then where were you,” Jungkook demands, peering up from his hands. “Yesterday. And all those nights when you’re away? You- you’re in IT, why the hell would you ever have a business trip, let alone one every week!”
Jungkook is choked up with all the devastation and rage coalescing in a single moment. “You- and you always come home, looking- looking like you’ve just been f-f- fucking someone,” Jungkook’s voice breaks on fucking, as if having to say the words aloud are destroying him from the inside out (it is). “-and you- and you-- and I’ve been trying s-so hard, I thought, I thought it was just a phase, that you just needed to get it out of your s-system--”
Taehyung looks stricken as he sits there, gaping at Jungkook while he has the breakdown he’s been putting off for months.
Jungkook feels like he can’t breathe. He doesn’t know if it’s from the force of his cries, or from this despair, that’s been growing slowly and steadily in his heart.
“--I learned how to bake pies!” He finally screams.
In his head, it makes sense - that he’d been trying desperately to be a better husband, so that perhaps Taehyung might return to him, to the point where he’d even learned how to bake pies, like some goddamned stepford wife. It doesn’t make nearly as much sense aloud, the way he’d screamed it, but here’s the thing.
The way Taehyung’s face collapses in on himself, crumpling into abject misery and self-loathing, tells Jungkook that he’d understood exactly what Jungkook was trying to say. (And that hurts, too, because- because they’re so good together, Taehyung gets him, so why doesn’t he love him anymore?)
Jungkook slumps.
“Why aren’t I enough?” he finally says, shuddering, voice small and broken.
“Jungkook, darling,” Taehyung starts, voice shaking. But Jungkook shakes his head.
He doesn’t even want an explanation, anymore. He doesn’t want to know, anymore, who it is that had stolen his husband from him. He just doesn’t want to be here any longer; he can’t sit here, on this sofa that he and Taehyung had purchased together when they were happy and deliriously in love, giggling and getting kicked out of IKEA for making out on the couch displays.
He can’t stand here, in this goddamned house, that they’d selected together, that they were supposed to have built a life in together, but that had ended up a solitary prison for Jungkook and Jungkook alone when Taehyung fucked off with whatever homewrecker he’d found.
Jungkook gets up.
He deserves better. He doesn’t want to be here, with a man he loves, who doesn’t love him back, for whom he isn’t enough.
So Jungkook gets up to leave.
“-kook, I swear, I’m not cheating on you, I’ve never cheated on you, I-”
But when Jungkook levels him with a quiet stare, Taehyung falters, no satisfactory explanation springing from his mouth as he’d just been swearing. Jungkook doesn’t even know why he’d expected anything, anymore.
Jungkook turns back around. He has to pack his bags, he has to call his hyung, he has to-
“I’m a spy!” Taehyung’s panicked shout makes him pause.
Jungkook whirls around, eyes blazing. “Y-You, you asshole,” he hisses. He grabs the stupid flowers Taehyung had brought, and promptly hits him with it. Rose petals go spraying everywhere. “You- you’ve been out there, cheating on me, and you think- you think you can just-”
Anger consumes him. Jungkook hits him again, and again, with the flowers, each thwack sending another dramatic shower of petals up into the air. “A spy?!” he shrieks. “Is this a joke to you? You fucking-”
“-weetheart, I swear, I’m not lying!”
And then Taehyung pulls out his gun.
A gun.
A motherfucking gun.
Jungkook freezes.
Stares, wide-eyed, at the shiny black firearm his husband is holding, like he’s not quite sure what he’s looking at.
“What...what the fuck is that,” Jungkook whispers.
Taehyung places it on the coffee table. Their coffee table, the marble one, the one Jungkook had selected from Pier 1. The fact that there’s now a goddamned gun resting innocuously on it is a sight so strange that Jungkook fears he might have just gone crazy from the grief.
Taehyung then pulls out one thing after another, from Jungkook doesn’t even know where on his body he could’ve been keeping these things --
Another gun. Another fucking gun.
Some sort of odd thing, shaped like a watch but way too many extraneous buttons for Jungkook to understand what it actually is.
A phone that looks like it’s from the 2000s. (There’s a hysterical, subconscious part of his mind - the part that had watched all the Bond movies - that whispers, burner phone.)
A passport.
A Romanian passport. Jungkook’s never even fucking seen a Romanian passport before, in his life.
“What,” he wheezes, stumbling a step backwards. “What the hell is this? What the fuck, are you a criminal on the run, Taehyung, what--”
“No!” Taehyung leaps up and flies to Jungkook’s side, clutching his hand with a desperation that Jungkook’s never seen on him before. “Jungkook, I- I told you. I’m...I’m a spy.”
Jungkook’s eyes grow wide. “F-For who?! ”
Taehyung looks chagrined . Like he’s... sheepish . “For...the government.” At Jungkook’s panicked expression, he hurries to add, “Our government! Ours. I’m not like, a foreign sleeper agent sent in here to make a false temporary life, I promise. This is mine.”
Jungkook chooses to ignore, for the moment, the implication that there are such sleeper agents, somewhere, elsewhere, sent in by foreign countries to assume normal lives here until the day they’re called upon.
Jungkook gapes. “You- you can barely drive without running into something, like hell you’re a spy, who the fuck would trust you with a gun -”
Taehyung looks apologetic. “I hold the highest scores for the precision obstacle course,” he admits.
Jungkook looks - laughably - betrayed. Almost moreso than when he’d thought Taehyung was cheating on him. “You...you’re not a bad driver?!”
Taehyung nods.
And then, he rushes in, pressing his forehead against Jungkook’s, his hands clasped in both of his, murmuring frantically, devotedly, “Jungkook, sweetheart, I love you, you’re the love of my life, I’ve never ever looked at a single person other than you, I swear, I-”
Jungkook shoves Taehyung off. Taehyung falls back, looking devastated.
Jungkook is livid.
“Kim Taehyung,” he grounds out, ominously. “Are you telling me, you’re a motherfucking spy?!”
Taehyung gapes. Dumbly, he nods.
Jungkook lets out an unholy shriek of rage.
He throws himself on top of Taehyung, straddling his waist, slapping him on the chest with a frenetic fury over and over again. “You- you fucking- you asshole,” he shouts. Taehyung lets him. “A spy?! ”
“To be fair,” Taehyung tries to say, wincing, but not at all trying to stop Jungkook’s hits in the least. “It’s better than me cheating-”
“Says who?!” Jungkook resumes the slapping.
Taehyung, grimacing, trying desperately not to get slapped in the face by his civilian husband, says “I- can I ask if it’s the fact that I didn’t tell you I’m a spy that you’re mad about, or that I am a spy--”
“Kim Taehyung,” Jungkook says slowly, through grit teeth. “You’d better show me your fucking birth certificate, right now, because if Kim Taehyung isn’t your name, and I’m married to some random fucker who isn’t you, I’ll--”
It takes Taehyung three days to make it out of the proverbial doghouse.
There’s a lot of groveling. There’s some tears, a lot of shouting, some angry storming out by one Jeon Jungkook. There’s even some official proof, in the form of formal papers and, at one point, even a government agent coming in with the requisite paperwork that Taehyung now needs to file on the fact that his spouse has been “cued in” to the situation.
There’s more groveling.
There’s some revelations - like the hidden panel in the bathroom wall, where Taehyung stores most of his weapons - that makes Jungkook livid.
But at the end of the week, Jungkook allows Taehyung back into their shared bedroom, at last.
Thank god.
If Taehyung spent one more night on that stupid couch, his back would’ve been out of commission forever.
He slides in gratefully, and not at all embarrassed about his complete lack of dignity, and curls up around his husband who, mercifully, resists only a little bit this time.
“Jungkook,” he sighs with relief, nuzzling into the crown of his husband’s hair. “I love you, darling. More than anything. More than my own life. I would never cheat on you.”
Jungkook - who’s unknowingly married a spy; who’s spent five months thinking his husband was cheating on him; and who’s had to come to terms with the fact, that Taehyung tore into his beautiful bathroom walls, so he could store stupid guns in there - makes Taehyung work for it. He sniffs. “Whatever,” he mutters, suppressing the smile that comes bubbling up when Taehyung whines and nuzzles in closer.
“You’re just lucky you married me with your real name, Taehyung, or I’d have fucking killed you.”
Taehyung - high-ranking spy for the government; who can kill a man six ways to Sunday with nothing but a paperclip; whose long-range and close-range combat skills both rank in the top percentile of the agency’s history - smiles indulgently, as his soft civilian husband claims to threaten to kill him. “Of course, baby,” he hums.