Chapter Text
This house, the house on a hill, is full of pretty things, Jimin thinks. In the past - he had felt like one of those things. Something collected. Alongside the Chelsea Red Anchor china, de Gourney wallpaper, or the library of matching, leather-bound books sitting unread, their gilt pages on floor to ceiling oak shelves, regularly dusted but untouched. Taehyung’s own books, the dog eared manga and art books, the books on birds and fish and aquariums that he cared about, were kept away in his own bedroom, far away from the carefully curated aesthetic that the interior designer set-up. Things displayed in the house were, first and foremost, pretty.
Jimin, for his entire life, has been a small and pretty thing. A wide-eyed child in dance shoes, a teen in clean long lines of perfectly-angled limbs, a figure precisely posed in space. A doll. In Paris, a delicate danseur, graceful and ornamental. His voice didn’t matter. Only his body. He was, first and foremost, a perfect, pretty thing.
That was, of course, before the accident.
Pretty things are so easy to break, after all.
Jimin shakes off the memories, takes another second to fluff his hair in the mirror. It’s an old-fashioned vanity, somewhat incongruous in an otherwise stately home, but then the homes of the rich are often dominated by money rather than taste. He looks at himself in the mirror, eying the line of his jaw, his outfit. His eyes. He doesn’t think about performance, though he knows that he’s about to give one. The past is the past, not as easily fixable or forgettable as he sometimes wishes. The past is the province of the dead. Alibis are the province of the living. He has more important things to deal with than getting lost in reminiscing - like a blood stain on white carpet. Speaking of. Jimin looks down at his pristine robe, making sure that nothing has splashed up on him. That he looks perfect.
His hair is perfect; the key to hair like this is that it must take an hour to do, but it must also look like no effort has been taken at all. That the hair appeared, perfectly sleep-mussed. Fuckable. Jimin is intimately acquainted with the line where pretty meets fuckable meets just-fucked. It’s catnip to men in all kinds of uniform. Jimin’s mascara pulls his lashes high and full. The long V in the front of his robe exposes just enough of his chest. Not feminine, per se, even in black lace and with its long satiny folds - the outright queerness, the way it challenges authority, is somehow part of the allure to boring, straight-laced men. Jimin is undeniably masculine and undeniably delicate. Pretty. The long silk of the robe flows to the floor, a train that will drag behind him. He hasn’t worn an outfit like this - this performative, this curated - since he was on stage.
Jimin looks at the mirror again and smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes. He pulls out a tube of lipstick, siren red, and presses it to his lips. The top lip, around the bow, then along the bottom. Once it’s perfect, he smears it across in a sharp line, patting it messily with his fingers until it is a bright red smudge, a diagonal slash across his full lips.
Perfect.
Showtime.
Jimin walks down the staircase, a grand sweep of marble that never gets any actual use. Above him are the crystals of a chandelier that Tae rarely bothers to turn on. He’s pretty sure the bulbs are burnt out, but it won’t be on today. There’s a simple table lamp he uses when he needs to, a table where he places his keys, but both have been relocated to the closet - they don’t fit the image that Jimin needs to paint. Jimin walks until he has reached the bottom of the stairs, bare feet leaving fading imprints on the matching marble tile. He walks until he reaches the plush Oriental carpet in front of the open double doors. Blood, getting darker with time, is vivid against the pale carpet.
This kind of ugly European-style mansion demands a certain type of image, and Jimin has spent enough years on stage to know the importance of details. He presses his fingers to the slickness of his own mouth, pulling the lipstick out further, smearing it along his face. He looks like madness.
He screams. He screams until his voice breaks.
Kim Taehyung is dead.
Somewhere else in the city
The day Yoongi was fired from the force was the worst day of his life.
The worst part, the part he can’t not think about, is the way Namjoon had watched it happen.
Yoongi spends a lot of time not thinking about that day. Years, maybe. He buries himself in his private detective work, in his camera and cheating husbands, in small time cases he takes to make rent and the cases he undercharges for because he’s too soft to say no to a halmoni who can’t recognize a scam. He doesn’t think about that day. He doesn’t think about the weather, the particular haze the air gets here in the valley, the way it turns the golden-hour sunlight dirty with smog. He doesn’t think about how humiliating it was to scrape the few items from his desk off the sidewalk in front of the precinct, how his fingers trembled, picking up spilled packs of cigarettes and pens and his shattered houseplant. He doesn’t think about how he still gets chest pains when the smog is too thick just before sunset, or the way he maybe quit smoking so he never had to pick up cigarettes from the ground again.
Sometimes, he doesn’t think about it for so long that it almost disappears.
Namjoon, though. Namjoon never disappears. Not even when Yoongi wishes he would.