Chapter 5
The Real BeautyJungkook had spent a lot of time on the phone that whole day. He kept subtly asking about Sori’s condition to those who were still at home and trying to suggest what they could do to attend her without giving himself away. It was difficult for him to know that someone as weak as Sori was at home, with a fever at that, in the hands of those crackheads... not that they were necessarily bad at taking care of her, but he didn't really trust them with Sori. Actually, Jungkook didn’t really trust anyone next to her, because she was too frail for the way they behaved around her. He only considered Jin and Narae, except himself, to be safe around Sori. At times Jungkook really wished Sori was a born-werewolf, because then everything be easier. Because then he wouldn’t have to feel ashamed whenever his feelings for her stirred inside his chest, giving him butterflies in his stomach. Jungkook even tried suggesting her ways in which she could at least improve herself to lean more towards the type of girls he liked, but somehow his suggestions were always perceived as insults, so he had mostly given up. Jungkook could swear it was only because she’s a turned-werewolf, and people like her don’t use their brains properly, otherwise she would have noticed he had no ill intentions towards her and he just wanted her to feel more accepted into their world. Let alone that in their pack Sori was pampered like a baby all the time and everyone acted like they were her bodyguards, so she had no real idea of what it was like outside of their lands. From his point of view, after having heard the stories Sori shared with him, it was more like Sori never had the chance to stay with people aside from herself and she never learnt how to behave around people, and it was showing.
Ever since that morning Jungkook kept doing the same thing: checking the time on his phone. Fortunately, it was almost time for him to leave from the BBQ restaurant and go back home, so that he could finally see how everything was going with his own eyes. He spent the last ten minutes of his shift serving a couple of costumers, cleaning tables and putting of the dirty plates in the dishwasher just to avoid getting scolded for having wasted time until it was time to leave. Then he checked the time once again and saw it was finally time for him to leave. Thank God.
Just as he was closing the car's door, Jungkook had the idea to stop at the nearby supermarket and buy some of Sori’s favourite dark chocolate bars to raise her spirits. She loved dark chocolate the most, and since she had baked muffins some days ago, he could use that as an excuse to justify the fact that he bought Sori’s favourite brand of chocolate. Not to mentions that Sori always got a little bit moody when she was feeling sick or down, so... well, he could just do that and not look weird or be interrogated about his intentions by his packmates, right? And maybe that way Sori would forgive him or something. Lately she had been acting so cold to him that he didn't even think she was giving him the cold shoulder, at this point she was just acting like a corpse. Jungkook sighed and checked the time again on his phone to see if he had any new notification. Weird. No new notification positively meant there was something wrong at home. He had to hurry.
Sori felt really tired, but she couldn’t sleep nonetheless. There were many reasons as for why she couldn’t simply close her eyes and sleep her fever away: she had a splitting headache, was sore and parched, her limbs hurt... and maybe the biggest reason was that the guys had decided to hangout, loudly, in her room. Technically they should’ve been helping her and keeping her company, as Jin ordered them to, but in the last hour or so they had decided to revive their best memories together. The beta of their pack had also left a list of meds and foods to give her and at which time she was supposed to take them, but no one had checked the it. Wasn't it just a cold anyway? All Sori had to do was sleep the fever away and by tomorrow she was going to be fine. Despite Sori's wish to sleep the fever away, the guys had been shrieking since they had arrived at lunch to bring her the soup Jin had prepared for her, and then never left. At first it had been quite okay and entertaining, because albeit she had been with them for almost four years, there were still so many stories she had never heard about, however Sori didn’t wish for company at the moment. She didn’t want to be rude and ask them to leave her alone, but she wanted to be alone. She had an headache and she wanted to be free to let her thoughts run without having to pay attention to anything else or be disturbed by anything in general.
All Sori wanted was to be alone and to her wounds until she felt okay with herself again, but the guys were acting all cute and were very sweet as they forced her to eat all of the soup to make her heal faster, so she couldn’t bring herself to tell them off. They already cuddled her, slept with her, and only when they all fell asleep Sori found a minute of peace. Sori just hoped that when they woke up, they would take the hint and leave her alone for a while. Things hadn't gone they she wanted though, and Sori’s biggest wish at the moment was for 4 p.m. to arrive fast, so that Hoseok and his loud, annoying voice would finally leave her room. Her second biggest wish for the others to follow Hoseok’s example and leave her alone to deal with her splitting headache. Moreover she was feeling nauseous again, but she didn’t dare throw up, because she knew they’d force her to eat again. Sori looked at the clock on her wall and sighed.
To no one's surprise, Taehyung’s laugh pierced her ears a moment later. Oh, how Sori wished Yoongi was there to make them shut up on her behalf. At this point she was only hoping for Narae to come back home soon and shush them from her room before cuddling with her for what was left of the day. That would actually be nice, if Sori had to be honest.
Sori usually liked to listen to their discussions and watch the guys play, even when she wasn’t really paying attention, because hearing their voices always helped her relax. When they were loud and annoying, they were still her anchor, the proof she wasn't alone anymore. There were also times in which Sori had hoped to be playing with them or be part of their conversations, instead of just watching from the side, however now she was also fine with being a bystander. You don't have to be part of something to enjoy it. Despite that, today Sori found them insufferable. She tried again and again to block the sounds of their voices off of her head as she concentrated on relaxing without thinking to anything, and hoped for Jin to come home soon and do her that massage he’d learnt to ease headaches. The beta's low nagging was still a better sound than Hoseok's obnoxiously loud voice.
To be honest, Sori wasn't just annoyed because they were being loud, but also because they were talking about things she didn’t know. If at first they had explained briefly how things evolved until they reached the point of the story they wanted to tell her, after a while she had lost the concentration to listen to those episodes and the more her headache got worse, the little she understood about their conversation, and then the guys had started ignoring her and focusing on their funny stories. Also, she felt like it wasn't fair that both Hoseok and Jimin were telling Minyoung that many episodes Sori had never heard before, albeit she had been in the pack for way longer. Couldn't they just stick to their good old stories?
She turned again in her sheets, just in time to see Minyoung excuse herself and leave the room. Well, that didn't bother her in the slightest. She wasn't a fun of showing her weakness in front of people, not to mention those she didn't really like or know, and Minyoung was part of both categories. Sori didn't even know how long had it been since the guys had arrived in her room, but it was high time they took Minyoung's example and followed it. She couldn't wait for the moment her room would be silent again, and she would be able to focus entirely on the same thoughts kept swirling in Sori’s mind again and again. By that moment she had already sifted all the possible and valid excuses she could use to leave her room and go hide in Yoongi’s, lock the door to guarantee they couldn’t follow her. In the midst of her silent speculation, their voices caught her attention again. Sori really wished she knew what they were talking about, so that she could laugh with them, instead of just listening to their endless chatters and feeling awkward in her own room.
“Do you remember that time Namjoon broke the chair and the window at the same time in the palace of the duke during the party for his daughter’s birthday?”, Hoseok said almost tearing up by how hard he was laughing. He, Taehyung and Jimin had been reminiscing about the good, old times ever since they awoke from their little nap. Sori liked hearing the description of places she hadn’t seen nor heard about, both of far and near lands, since she never travelled when she was human nor now as a werewolf, and some of the places they told her about didn't exist anymore. Actually, their stories and descriptions made it all seem like some sort of weird fairytale. It was easy to be caught up in the descriptions of dresses and personalities of famous characters, although they didn't exactly look completely human-like in her mind. It was hard to imagine her packmates in such regal places, despite knowing that, with the exception of Narae, they had all seen so much more that her. As for Narae, she was older that Sori, but she was actually born only two years before her, in fact she was younger that all the others born-werewolves of the pack. Narae was really 23. The others were way older, yet they didn’t age, so all of them looked real young in spite of their real age, and each time they moved to a new town, they all decided the age to tell to any human who asked.
Taehyung was in hysterics rolling on the ground, while Jimin was silently laughing while holding onto her bed to avoid falling face first on the floor.
“I think those were the worst five minutes of hyung’s life”, Jimin managed to say when he could finally breath again. Namjoon was often the subject of the stories the guys told her, because his clumsiness was a legendary trait of his, and it was painfully easy to imagine his mortified face as he caught up with the amount of damage he had caused just by moving around too freely. The second hand embarrassment was real.
“Do you remember that little girl’s expression when she realized Namjoon had ruined both her party and her dress by falling on the table? I remember it like it was yesterday. The sound of hyung’s chair breaking and then wine glasses falling down as he brought the tablecloth with him”, Taehyung couldn’t stop the tears that were falling from his eyes as he was laughing too hard. Hoseok’s mouth was hanging open and he was holding his stomach like it hurt as he laughed at the top of his lungs again, shrieking all his amusement. “And - and then the chair bouncing back as hyung jumped up as fast as he could, only to smash it against the window behind him”. They were hysterical.
Sori’s headache was pulsing at every high shrill they let out, but she kept quite in anyway. Under normal circumstance, Sori loved listening to the happy sound of her pack mates laughs, just not that day. She forced a smile on her face to show them she was enjoying the story too, although she was pretty sure the guys didn’t even remember she was still there at that point. Sori wished she knew the expression that girl’s face too, the way Namjoon managed to break both the window and the chair, as well as what the chair looked like. Back then, when there were no girls in the pack aside from Narae, it didn't feel like she was the only clueless one, however now Sori frequently felt left out in comparison to the two other girls, because they were always given a bigger frame of the episodes or more clues about what happened than they gav
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