Chapter Text
Jungkook has never been to Korea before.
He never got the chance to step foot in the country his parents called home. He only heard stories about it. Stories told at dinner tables and during long car rides. Stories that always felt distant, like they belonged to someone else’s childhood, not his. They sounded like they came from a different world, one he was never meant to touch.
He was born in America, after all. His father worked there. That was always the explanation. Simple. Final.
His mother brought him into the world there and never stopped reminding him where he was really from. She insisted he speak only Korean at home. Corrected his pronunciation. Repeated words until they sounded right to her, even when they felt wrong in his mouth. Jungkook obeyed. He always did.
He took the extra classes. Weekend lessons. After-school sessions. Reading. Writing. Grammar drilled into him with patience that felt endless and pointless. Korean became something he performed, not something he owned. A task. A duty. A way to keep his mother from sighing and saying he was forgetting himself.
At seventeen, she told him they were going back to Korea.
She was smiling. Genuinely smiling. As if this was something she had been waiting for. As if this was good news.
To Jungkook, it sounded no different than moving to Mars.
We’ll be back as soon as business is done there, she said. A promise wrapped in reassurance.
Jungkook nodded. He did not argue. He never did.
The next thing he knew, there were airports. Long flights. Too long. Hours folded into each other until time stopped making sense. When the plane landed, the air hit his lungs differently. He noticed it immediately. Heavier. Thicker. Like breathing required permission.
People spoke to him in Korean, fast and sharp and confident. The language he had learned only so his mother would stop nagging him. The language he had never needed outside the walls of their home. Why should he even bother, he thought bitterly, when he already spoke the first language of the world as his own?
Korean rolled off his tongue metallic and wrong. It tasted unpleasant. Made his jaw tense. His mouth felt unfamiliar to him when he spoke it, like it was doing something it was not built for.
The people were strange. Not openly unkind. That would have been easier. They smiled too much. Polite. Pleasant. Their expressions felt rehearsed, like masks worn out of obligation rather than warmth. Friendly in a way that made his skin crawl. Fake in the most literal sense. Smiling, but hollow. Smiling, but sharp.
Was this the country his parents talked about constantly? The place they missed every second of every day?
He would go back to America soon. He would go back and never look at this place again. He would have no reason to.
And then he started going to the new school.
The building was larger than he expected. Too clean. Too orderly. Long corridors that echoed every step, every laugh, every whisper. Jungkook walked through it like a ghost, backpack hanging from one shoulder, eyes forward, already tired. New school. New people. People he would not talk to. People he would not let get close enough to ask questions.
The night before his first day, his mother sat across from him at the dining table and told him something else, like it was an afterthought.
“You’ll be using a different surname.”
Jungkook looked up from his plate. “What?”
“Just at school,” she added quickly. “It’s easier this way.”
“But what’s wrong with my own?” he asked. His voice wasn’t sharp. Just flat. Curious in the way that meant he already knew the answer wouldn’t satisfy him.
His mother paused. Smiled faintly. The kind of smile that ended conversations instead of opening them. “Nothing is wrong with it. This is just something you should do. Don’t worry about it.”
And that was that.
Jungkook nodded, because that was how things worked in their home. Decisions arrived fully formed. Questions were tolerated. Answers were optional.
So his name became Jeon Jungkook only in his head. On paper, at school, he was someone else. Park Jungkook. A clean, common name. Forgettable. Safe.