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jungkoode · 26 days ago

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ALTARS IN SHALLOW WATERS | 05

➔ PAIRING: Taehyung x Y/N (ballerina x stalker AU)

➔ MOODBOARD

➔ RATING: Mature, 18+, explicit themes and content.

➔ DATE POSTED: June 18, 2025.

➔ SUMMARY: Altars crumble faster in shallow water. But he still knelt like it was sacred. No one ever warned you that worship could look like love. Or that love could look like drowning.

➔ TAGS: second person perspective, female reader, ballerina!Y/N, stalker!taehyung, obsessive devotion, psychological tension, fixation, worship dynamics, Paris setting, religious imagery, voyeurism, sacred/profane dichotomy, slow burn, touch starvation, ritualistic behavior, gradual corruption, power dynamics, mirror imagery, water symbolism, sensory details, clean/unclean fixation, contamination OCD, professional dancer, self-destructive patterns, compulsive behavior, unhealthy coping mechanisms, possessive tendencies, praise addiction, spiritual yearning, toxic attraction, dangerous adoration, self-loathing, body discipline, mental health issues, self-harm, mental deterioration, unresolved sexual tension (for now).

➔ CONTENT in this chapter: ritualistic behavior with stolen ribbon, escalating obsession, voyeuristic elements at reader's apartment, sexual tension and arousal, religious/profane imagery, compulsive counting, mental deterioration, stalking behavior, trespassing, contamination obsession, self-flagellation themes, discovery of reader's address.

➔ AUTHOR'S INTRO AND TRIGGER WARNINGS

➔ MASTERLIST | TAGLIST REQ | WORDCOUNT: 4,7k

➔ A/N: WOAH. OKAY. So here’s where it starts getting twisted—like actually, visibly, irreversibly twisted. I know a lot of you were waiting for this shift and yeah. Yeah. We’re here. The ribbon. That ribbon. Taehyung is not okay about it (shock and awe, I know), and spoiler: he’s going to get worse. Much worse. (See you in ASW 6, you unhinged creatures.) After Chapter 4, I answered some asks clarifying that ASW!Taehyung is not Joe Goldberg from You. They are not in the same moral orbit, not even in the same psychological universe. Yes, Taehyung is a stalker. But he’s not narcissistic—he’s self-loathing. And that’s the core of this fic’s emotional architecture: the dichotomy between someone who sees themselves as filth, and someone who has been told she must be perfect at all times or else she ceases to exist. You (reader) are not idolized because you’re believed to be chosen, you’re held to impossible standards you’ve internalized as worth. Meanwhile, Taehyung is clinging to the only clean thing he’s ever known—you—and punishing himself for even looking. This isn’t romanticization. This is exploration: of obsession, of shame, of how mental illness contorts perception into scripture. That ribbon has become his holy relic, his proof of closeness, of desecration. He knows it’s wrong. He feels sick about it. He repeats profane like a prayer because he still has a conscience, but it’s being eroded by compulsion, not delusion. The moment he sees the number 307—ending in seven—his brain needs it to mean something. That’s how OCD roots itself. Not in logic, but in craving: for patterns, for signs, for tethering a chaotic world to meaning. The ribbon is a tourniquet, the watch a mask. The burgundy leotard scene was one of the hardest things I’ve written emotionally because it demanded I plunge into the mind of a man who is drowning in his own hunger—for cleanliness, for beauty, for her—and who knows, deep down, that he’s already crossed the line. The language is meant to reflect that too: sweet metaphors wrapped around rot. Cloying, saccharine descriptions that melt into grime. Because she is soft, sweet, sugar—and he is rust, mold, contamination. This is about the slow corrosion of restraint into justification. The moment at the end—“he will never be absolved. he never wants to be.”—that is the death of devotion and the birth of possession. The horror of obsession isn’t ignorance—it’s awareness, and the inability to stop. And now we’ve crossed the Rubicon. Stay sick. Love y’all. <3

➔ SERIES : PREVIOUS | NEXT

PLAYLIST

(ribbon, ribbon, ribbon)

The ribbon. Blue ribbon. Navy ribbon.

It doesn't belong in this room.

Not draped across the mattress, not clutched in his raw, trembling hand, not wound around the pale underside of his wrist like a ligature or a secret.

The blue is too deliberate against his skin—navy satin in a world where nothing soft survives, a strip of color that catches the yellow light and refuses to become invisible, even when he tries to hide it under the fraying elastic of his watchband.

Taehyung knows it's wrong to have it.

No—worse than wrong.

He doesn't remember picking it up (lie) but he remembers the press of your thumb as you stripped it from your warmers, the way it fell—lazy, perfect spiral—onto the wooden floor.

You left it behind.

The ribbon is an afterthought, a thing without value. Discarded, like the crusts of bread he's swept under his mother's table, like the #41 bus tickets still creased and yellowing in his coat pocket, like the things that never count for anything in the brief accounting of a day.

It shouldn't matter. It shouldn't feel like proof.

(but it does it matters it burns)

He tells himself the same things he always does: you never looked at him, you never meant for anyone to see it. Picking it up was reflex. Cleaning the floor, as always. Maintenance. Sanitation. Salvage. You drop, he retrieve. World as it's always been. Filth and order.

But his hands know better.

His hands, red with nerves and compulsive effort, can't let this particular piece of refuse go.

Ribbons don't last here—nylon fibers fray, stains settle in—yet in his palm it's as soft as wet hair between his fingers, as alien as forgiveness.

He's sitting on the edge of his bed, knees pressed together, back humped, the same way he used to shrink into himself after his father's bad days. The covers are thin, yellowed at the edges.

He stains everything he touches; there's no point pretending otherwise.

The room smells of bleach and must.

Damp wool, tired lungs.

The window is shut against the rain, but he can feel the temperature buffering up in little shudders along the glass.

Fifteen minutes until work. Thirty-seven minutes until the room with the glass, the one that nerves him up so sharp that his wrists pulse with heat, anticipation, dread.

He tracks the minutes because they're easier, cleaner, than tracking want. Minutes break into sevens, sevens stack into hours, and hours mark the gaps between the rare moments he feels chosen, if only by accident, if only as a collector of things nobody else wants.

And now this. The ribbon.

He ties it slowly, methodically, looping once, twice, three times around his left wrist, then again the other way, tugging until the ends lay flush, trembling in the airless light.

The knot is careful. The knot is essential. The knot means it will not fall, even if the rest of him does.

He threads the battered black watch over it, buckle scraping the bones of his wrist. It presses the satin into his skin, hiding the color from the world.

Only he knows it's there. Only he feels the drag—tight, secret—when he turns his hand over, feeling the pulse flutter beneath flesh and new devotion.

Why the watch?

He never wore one before. Used his phone, the clock on the register at work, the screech of the metro beneath the floorboards, marking time by sound, not weight.

Watches collect bacteria—he can recite the numbers, the studies, each one a slab of proof about the dangers of contamination trapped beneath plastic and steel.

But now: watch as imperative. Watch as excuse. Nobody asks about a watch. Nobody asks what he hides beneath it.

Nobody asks about the way the blue edge peeks out sometimes, how he fidgets with the hard disc on his arm whenever he feels eyes on him, real or imagined.

How he feels safest when the ribbon is tightest, marking the skin in a faint seam that echoes all the other places he's tried, and failed, to excise dirt and memory and want.

It's not enough, having it. Not really.

When was the last time anyone chose him for anything but labor or blame?

His stomach pitches, hollow with disgust, that familiar lurch like swallowing a chunk of rotten apple.

Profane, profane, profane—wanting to belong, wanting to matter, wanting to be held in the same equation as someone like you.

He shouldn't want that.

There's something shameful about even imagining it: your attention landing where it shouldn't, on someone who was never meant to be witnessed.

He tastes bitterness, mouth dry, tongue heavy.

He presses the watchband down, hard, until the buckle pinches. There, that's punishment. There, that's the line between suffering and sin.

The blue edge disappears under the watch—a secret now—and the throbbing at his wrist feels halfway to honesty.

He checks the time again.

Five minutes gone, spent thinking of you, of the ribbon, of the terrible possibility that one day you might notice what's hidden.

That moment—almost as sharp as terror—sends a flicker of hope up his throat so fast he wants to gag.

To be seen is to be ruined, to be named, to be known as the thief of things you've discarded.

But maybe to be seen is to be chosen, too.

The air in the room puffs up like clouds clogging the sky.

He bends forward, elbows on knees, face in hands, breathing through the panic tight in his chest.

The pressure soothes, a little. His eyes press shut.

The afterimage of your dance flickers beneath his eyelids—the turn, the fall, the blue ribbon spiraling to the floor like a dropped line from shore to deep water.

Maybe you choose things for a reason.

Maybe toys get discarded because they're broken, but even broken things have stories.

Maybe this is his—blue satin, hidden under plastic, marking time by your indifference, his devotion.

Thirty-one minutes until the room with the window. Nine until he has to walk beneath the flickering signs to the store where the world will forget he exists.

The ribbon tightens again at his pulse: reminder, tether, confession.

He doesn't know if he's ready to be chosen.

But he knows, at last, what it feels like to hold proof of having been wanted—if only once, if only by accident, if only by you.

Burgundy burns through the glass like a wound.

The color sits wrong on his retinas, darker than the navy that came before, deeper than anything he's prepared for.

Burgundy—not red, never just red, because red is too simple a word for what wraps around your torso like a second skin, for what pulls taut across your sternum when you extend into another sequence.

(burgundy burgundy burgundy)

His mouth fills with copper. Like he's bitten through his tongue again, though his teeth stay clamped shut.

The ribbon at his wrist pulses—navy against burgundy, yesterday against today, what you discarded against what you chose to wear.

Color was nothing before you. Gray convenience store, beige walls, black uniform.

Now each shade feels like scripture.

Navy first, the soft surrender of something you let fall.

Now burgundy, deliberate as blood.

Blood under nails. Blood in spit. Blood on thighs.

The associations stack up fast, faster than he can count them away.

His forearm itches where yesterday's scratches have scabbed over—seven parallel lines, precise as staff paper. His knees ache from last night's penance, two hours on bathroom tile until the bruises bloomed purple-black. His thighs bear their own map of restraint, crescents where fingernails dug deep enough to break the monotony of wanting.

Because it hasn't even been a week—four days? five?—since he first saw you through this window, and already his thoughts have curdled into something unmanageable.

They're worse at night.

(always worse when the lights go out when he can't count ceiling tiles when there's nothing but darkness and the memory of)

He counts your pirouettes.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven.

Perfect, as always. Perfect as he is imperfect, clean as he is contaminated, holy as he is profane.

When you pause to drink water, the burgundy fabric rises and falls with your breathing. He tracks each inhale, each exhale, timing his own breath to match until his chest burns with the effort of synchronized devotion.

(macarons macarons goddamn macarons)

The craving hits him like a fist to the sternum.

Rose macarons, powdered sugar dissolving on his tongue, the ghost-taste of how you smell when you pass close enough to contaminate his air with perfection.

He doesn't know hunger—has trained himself to exist on emptiness and obligation—but lately the want gnaws at him, hollow and horrible and all-consuming.

Feed him sugar. Feed him sweetness. Feed him the phantom flavor of your skin.

(profane profane profane stop thinking about taste about skin about)

You're finishing now. He knows your timing like scripture—ninety-three minutes of practice, seven minutes of cool-down, four minutes to gather your things.

The clock above the register reads 6:47.

Time to leave.

His hands shake as he counts the till. Seven stacks of bills. Count them again. Seven. Again. The numbers blur but the ritual remains.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven.

The paper feels dirty beneath his latex gloves, contaminated by every hand that's touched it, but that's nothing compared to how dirty he feels watching you, wanting you, breathing the same air you've blessed with your presence.

Marcel left early—he always does on Thursdays, something about his daughter, something about life beyond this purgatory of fluorescent lights and expired goods.

Taehyung prefers the evening shifts alone.

No witnesses to his vigil.

No questions about why he stands at the back door, why he watches the narrow alley between buildings, why his breath fogs the window in careful patterns of seven.

Through the store window, he sees you emerge from the academy's side entrance.

Burgundy covered now by that oversized cardigan, but he knows what's beneath. Knows the way fabric clings to your waist, the precise angle of your collarbones, the mathematics of your beauty that he'll never solve.

(shouldn't know can't know knows anyway)

You pause at the corner, adjust your bag. The movement is economical, necessary. Everything you do is necessary. Nothing wasted, nothing excessive.

Not like him with his compulsions and his counting and his stolen ribbons hidden beneath watchbands.

6:51. Time.

He locks the register. Checks the lock. Checks again. Seven times total before his brain permits him to step away.

The store keys feel heavy in his pocket—responsibility he never wanted but can't abandon because abandoning things is what his parents did, what everyone does, what he'll never do to you even though you don't know he exists beyond the anonymous exchange of coins for cotton pads.

(pathetic pathetic pathetic)

The door lock requires another seven checks.

His reflection in the glass shows what he always sees—hollow face, unwashed hair, the uniform that never quite fits because he's the wrong shape for normal life.

How does someone like him dare to exist in the same world as your burgundy divinity?

You're already past the convenience store when he emerges.

He shouldn't watch you. Shouldn't know your pathways by heart.

But his feet know the route. Have memorized it through weeks of careful observation from the loading dock, from the alley shadows, from the safe distance of someone who understands his place in your universe.

Not following—following implies intent, implies threat, implies he has any right to share your path.

This is just... alignment. Synchronicity. The inevitable gravity of the unworthy toward the divine.

The street is damp from afternoon rain, reflecting neon in oily puddles. Beautiful. Ugly. Both.

The city can't decide what it wants to be, just like him—torn between the urge to disappear and the need to witness you existing in real time, in real space, in burgundy that makes his chest tight and his thoughts fragment into prayers he'll never voice.

One hundred meters ahead. Safe distance. Sacred distance.

The number matters—close enough to ensure your safety from the world's contamination, far enough to prevent his own corruption from reaching you.

He knows this route only to the first cross-street, where you turn left and vanish into territories he's forbidden himself from mapping.

(not yet not yet but maybe soon)

This time, however, the corner pulls him forward like thread through a needle.

He doesn't decide to follow—his feet simply continue their pilgrimage past the boundary he's drawn in his mind, past the invisible line that separates permitted observation from (wrong wrong wrong) trespass. The burgundy burns behind his eyelids even though you've vanished around the corner, even though all that's left is the echo of your footsteps on wet pavement.

(macarons in windows, macarons in dreams, macarons dissolving like communion wafers)

His body moves without permission. One block becomes two, two becomes three, and suddenly he's standing at the base of a building he's never seen before, watching you climb exterior stairs that spiral up like vertebrae.

You're going home.

(turn back turn back turn back)

But his eyes track your ascent—stairs, rusted gray, curve up to a door. Sage green, chipped and dignified, holding itself together by force of will.

And then—your door.

307.

A seven.

His palms go clammy—lucky number, holy number, not a coincidence, can't be a coincidence. The world doesn't offer signs to men like him unless it comes with warning.

But this is a warped blessing, a number flashed like prophecy: you live behind a seven, while he lives in a tangle of sevens and filth, fate and want knotted tight enough to cut circulation off at the wrist.

(walk away walk away now now now now now walkwalkawayawayWALKAWAY)

He should.

He doesn't.

Feet soft as shadow, fingers twitching, he moves.

Not the front steps. Never where someone could see. He hugs the wall, skirts the patch of mint overgrown at the foundation, finds the metal back stairs that curl behind the building. They hum with old rust, grease.

He can't tell if the churning in his chest is terror or hope.

He doesn't breathe as he mounts each tread—one, two, three, up to seven, then again, and again.

His pulse is a counting game, his hands are pillows of sweat. Everything blurs except for the balcony.

Not much of a balcony—just iron rail, shallow space, concrete dust. But it's outside your window. It's liminal, not entrance, not street: a soft diluted sin.

The curtains are parted. Not wide. Enough. Enough for a sliver of light to slip out, for a slice of the room, for him to press close and peek.

And there—you.

Blush blossom of your profile. Your back curved, arms rising, that mauve cardigan slipping from your shoulders like a cloud.

Burgundy. Burgundy everywhere.

The maillot hugs you in places his vocabulary fails to name. Across chest, between thighs, the shadowed V where the fabric vanishes between legs.

He forces himself not to swallow, not to blink, afraid to lose even half a second's vision.

He doesn't mean to watch. He doesn't mean to linger. He doesn't mean—

But he's pressed so close to the glass he's a smear, breath fogging, hand clamped over his own mouth.

His cock throbs stupidly behind zipper, blushing heat gathering at the tip like shameful cream, thick pillow ache in his groin.

He's dizzy.

He's pathetic.

He's—

You're real. You're there. You're not a statue, not divine marble, not the idea of perfection—you're pulling off your sweater and the static makes your hair fuzz at the crown.

One spaghetti strap falls, a shy red line across your shoulder. It sticks for a moment, caught on the ridge of your scapula, before sliding down with a whisper.

Your spine is a line of small freckles, a secret celestial map.

Left shoulder blade, three small speckles like chocolate dots on a macaron. Hollow of your back, a soft dimple just above the curve.

He wants to press his mouth there, roll his tongue over each freckle one by one, pillow-soft, until you're gasping clouds into the crook of his neck.

(blasphemous, blasphemous, blasphemousblasphemousblas)

The second strap drops.

You peel the maillot slowly, awkward, skin catching briefly on elastic.

He's shaking—palms, knees, eyelids, cock so hard it aches against his thigh.

The fabric skims lower, lower, revealing the narrow of your waist, the small of your back, the place where spine melts into soft round hip.

He learns you by inches. He is a student at the altar of you, face burning, breath caught, body strung tight as a pulled bow.

The burgundy bunches at your waist and for a sticky, sick moment he sees the edge of your backside, the upper swell, curves like blushing meringue; and he groans, quiet—so quiet—cock leaking, thighs pressed together hard enough to bruise.

You step out of view.

Bathroom. The door shuts.

He slumps against the iron rail, chest heaving, forehead pressed to cold glass.

Breath returns like a storm—rushed and ugly, rattling.

He almost sobs.

(shouldn't, mustn't, it's disgusting, divine, divine, divine, sickening)

Precum pools sticky in his briefs, making a mess that feels like penance, embarrassment flooding every cell.

He'd never. Can't. Won't. He doesn't.

(yes he will he will—)

No, no, no—he's frozen.

Breathes in, tastes his own hunger.

He fingers the navy ribbon tied under his watch, feels the texture, the threadbare softness pressed tight against his frantic pulse.

He mouths a silent prayer: forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, over and over, seven times.

You are gone behind the door and he (shameful, sick, twisted) imagines the rest: maillot pulled past your thighs, the part of you unseen, all the secret warmth, the little dimples at the base of your spine leading to places he's never permitted his mind to go.

He wants to melt into the floorboards. He wants to peel off his skin and dissolve into the night air. He wants to be nothing. He wants to be everything you touch, everything you throw away, everything you leave behind.

He's never felt this particular brand of hunger—raw and cotton-candy-sick, craving and revulsion at once.

Wants to be consumed by you, wants to pray to you, wants to bow his head to your ankles and ask for ruin.

He's a monster. He's a parishioner. He's a child. He's a thief.

And still the want doesn't fade.

He stands sticky and shaking, forehead pressed so hard to the glass he leaves a halo when he finally pulls away.

His legs are weak, cloud-soft. His cock is wet at the tip, every throb agony.

He doesn't dare move. Doesn't dare breathe, in case you come back.

In case he's caught in the act.

(desecration, desecration, desecration)

His lungs crackle—he's been holding air too long.

At last he inhales, ragged and shallow, and the cold slices through him, quelling the heat just enough to let him move his hands back to his sides, the navy ribbon cold and slick under his fingers.

Through the bathroom door, he hears water running. You're washing away the day, the sweat, the city's touch. Everything he's too contaminated to ever wash clean.

When you emerge, will you be wrapped in white? In nothing? Will he have the strength to look away, or will he sit here like the garden-variety pervert he's become, cataloging more pieces of you that don't belong to him?

(leave leave leave while you still can)

But the seven on your door holds him pinned like an insect to cork.

Seven. His number. Your number.

The universe's cruelest joke, making him think for one delirious second that this means something, that he means something, that a coincidence of brass could transform him from waste to worthy.

Holy number on your door. Holy sin at your window. Holy trembling in his chest.

He has trespassed. He will never be clean again.

He stumbles backward, legs jelly, his whole body flooded with sick joy-ache-ruin.

He knows, beyond a doubt, he will never be absolved.

He knows, beyond a doubt, he never wants to be.

goal: 300 notes

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