Chapter Text
The light turns green.
Jimin eases on the gas pedal, careful of his tires on the slick pavement as he accelerates. The crescendo of his tires on the wet road in his silent car is something not unlike the oncoming rush of waves on a beach.
When he was eleven, his mother got him a white noise machine for sleep. He liked the sound of the waves best, and his father had said it was because the ocean was in his blood. Laying awake awash in the steady ebb and flow, Jimin had imagined it living inside him, the weight of it in his fragile veins, a tidal pull that might physically rock him like a boat, inside out.
Right turn.
There’s something about knowing you are on the precipice, on the cusp of something. Toes hanging over the lip, scrunching around the crumbling edge of the thing, trying desperately to hold onto the safety and comfort of the known, regardless of how inevitable the fall may be. The world is tipping under him.
The last months have felt like a steady march downhill, footing becoming more and more unsure as the ground grows slippery and wet and the incline sharper, steeper. Only to find himself here– at a summit instead. At a zenith instead of the expected nadir he has been lumbering towards, and what he thought was a descent has been a climb all along.
Early the previous year, quarantined inside the institutional bareness of his apartment and going out of his mind with itchy, anxious boredom, Jimin had binge-watched every nature documentary on Netflix. In one, a clutch of fledgling chicks leapt one by one from their nest perched on a cliff high above the sea, stubby wings frantically flapping as their little feet pedalled helplessly in the wind. This would probably be a fitting metaphor, he thinks, pulling his turn signal up with his pinky and climbing hand-over-hand on the wheel after a quick shoulder check.
There was another part in that same nature series, though, that has stuck in his brain like a niggling little worm ever since; an ant, twitchy and jerking, marching up, up, up the stem of a vine to its very highest leaf. Clamping its mandibles into the woody centre vein of that highest leaf, its joints locked up, and it appeared to die. Hours condensed into seconds via timelapse, and suddenly, like something out of a sci-fi thriller, bone-white tendrils erupted from the ant’s body, reaching grotesquely skyward before ballooning into bulbous pockets which eventually burst and dusted spores across the rainforest floor below. That feels more apt, somehow, and he considers the mental image of himself waving goodbye to his family and hyungs and accompanying staff, moving on auto-pilot, falling into place within the neat rows, and promptly exploding in B-horror gory fashion with brain-eating monstrous parasitic fungus.
He misses the left turn light and gets aggressively honked at before recognition slides over the irate young driver’s face in his rearview mirror as he realises he’s road raging at BTS Park Jimin. Jimin looks away before the expression has time to shift into whatever emotion follows.
Anyways.
His head is so fucking itchy.
The winter darkness, sun having set before he even left, at least means the roads are relatively empty, with folks eager for the warm havens of their homes in the December cold. He wonders again why he agreed to dinner halfway across the city on the eve of his enlistment. Even with the roads clear, they’re wet, and it’s a good forty-five minutes from home.
Catching the signal this time, he pictures this as well: parking his car in its familiar spot in the garage (for the last time). Unlocking his door (for the last time). Flicking the lights on (for the last time). The spartan emptiness of his home, something that never really bothered him, now sparks a new twist of anxiety in the pit of his stomach. He imagines himself tucking the last few items into his bags, wiping down the counters, filling a glass with water, turning the lights off and settling into his big wide bed (for the last time).
Another right turn.
It felt like a conscious choice, somewhere along the way, after years of living on top of six other boys with six other boys’ clutter and mess and stuff, after years of being adorned and powdered and bejewelled like some vividly iridescent butterfly pinned and mounted for all to admire… it had felt like a statement. A rebellion, even. Correspondent to his simpler wardrobe, the retirement of shining drawers of well-loved jewellery, and rows of flashy designer shoes, coats, and shirts, stamped with logos. The minimalism had felt unassuming, passive, mutable. Namjoon had nodded encouragingly when Jimin, six bottles of soju deep in their first all-present-get-together after the initial pandemic shut-down, tried to explain how he just wanted to feel like A Real Person instead of something made only for others to consume.
(Yoongi had leaned across Taehyung on Jimin’s left and plucked gingerly at the shoulder seam of Jimin’s chunky knit sweater, asking, mildly, does your three million won Loewe sweater make you feel like A Real Person, Park Jiminie? Jimin had stomped on what he assumed was Yoongi’s foot under the table but was, in fact, Seokjin’s, who then proceeded to complain about it at far beyond socially acceptable volumes for the remainder of the evening while Jimin glared at Yoongi, who in turn refused to make eye contact, the corner of his mouth tucked firmly into his round cheek.)
His whole scalp is tingling. He roughly scrubs his knit beanie across his head, which only makes the tingling worse, makes his head prickle with sweat from the friction heat.
Another right. Then left.
Having briefly abated to a misty sprinkle, the downpour returns as the clock on his dashboard ticks over to 10:00 and he crosses the Han.
Just a few kilometres, a handful of turns, and he’ll be home.
For the last time.
(He knows he’s being dramatic– it’s not the last time, really, just… for now. For a while.)
He imagines turning off the lights and locking the doors tomorrow morning and his home sitting there, cold and empty, imagines the shift of daylight into night and back again, over and over in timelapse, like in the movies, like the zombie ant, eighteen months of sunrises and sunsets, sped through until that lock clicks and the handle turns and the heavy dark wood swings inwards. He imagines stepping back into that apartment and wonders, the thought abrupt and sickening like a fishing line hooking into his navel and yanking, if it will feel like coming home at all. His bare, months-vacant apartment, purposefully void of personality, purposefully a blank slate, a place he wanted to build something new upon once he really felt like he knew himself enough to do so, only to realise it’s too late. He didn’t think of this, of having something familiar and comforting and personal, to come home to.
It lodges in his brain like a parasite—how can you come home to a home that’s not a home—driving on muscle memory as he takes the usual exit, climbs the usual road into the hills of Hannam-dong, and makes the usual left turn home into Nine-One.
Except he hasn’t taken the usual left turn, because he’s already turned right. A familiar right, one that really did, for years, lead to Home.
A red light gives him a chance to catch up with himself. He takes his hands off the wheel and flattens his palms over his thighs, flexing his fingers. It’s late, dark; he can pull a U-turn at the next light, just needs to shift to the left lane. There are no other cars with him at the light to manoeuvre around.
Both hands, heated steering wheel warm under his palms, green light, foot on the gas. All he has to do is move his left hand, tick down the turn signal, and shift over.
He doesn’t hit the turn signal, doesn’t shift over, doesn’t crank the wheel around in the U-turn. Instead, he hooks the turn signal up at the last second and wrenches the wheel the opposite direction, turning right.
Turning left could have taken him any number of places: Home. Namjoon-hyung’s. Jin-hyung’s. Hobi-hyung’s. Even back across the bridge to Taehyung’s or Jeongguk’s. All of which would be stupid places to go, empty as his own is about to become other than Jeongguk’s, who is out with his own family and saying goodbye to his friends and his dog, and who Jimin doubts will be home til the early hours anyways, desperately cramming every hour of freedom he has left with things that feel worth the price of entering boot camp on no sleep the next morning.
Turning right, however, only meant one person, the only person whose home won’t be empty.
Maybe he really is like that ant afterall, because he doesn’t feel in control of himself in the slightest as he pulls into the parking garage entrance, sidling his car close to the intercom security. Go back, he tells himself, fucking– reverse! His hand is immediately drenched as he lowers his window and reaches across to punch in the private code, watches himself do it like he’s outside his own body, screaming at himself, this is so fucking stupid!
He has to go home. He needs to tidy up, and close up his bags, and sleep, because he has to go to the fucking military in the morning.
The intercom is already ringing, though, and before he can convince his own body to get on board with getting the fuck out of there, after barely a single ring, comes, “Hello?” thin and muffled through the intercom speakers.
This is so fucking stupid.
His voice is stuck somewhere below his larynx, lodged acrid and sharp in his chest like heartburn.
“Hello…?” the intercom crackles again, more demanding.
Words come out of his mouth, he supposes. He has no idea what they are, only that he’s blessedly cut short by a single, “Jiminah,” and then, into the abrupt ensuing silence, “It’s fine. Come up.”
And then the gate is opening, and his car is moving forward, angling into the familiar visitor stall he always parks in, the third one to the right next to the concrete pillar on the driver’s side as he backs in.
The elevator is a sensory nightmare; blindingly bright after the darkness of the roads and further nauseating with its lurch upwards. The flatscreen panel above the rows of floor numbers is flashing an ad for a popular restaurant chain, its well-known jingle ringing tinny in his ears through the tiny speakers as their popular cartoon mascot rapidly cycles through viral dance choreos. It’s in the middle of EXID’s Up and Down when the elevator dings, Jimin escaping just as it transitions into Idol.
His brain feels like scrambled egg, actively on the griddle, popping and fizzing and boiling. He feels acutely aware of his own mind, of its container, the shape and the curve of it.
The door is open, its occupant pushing himself out of his lean on the door frame as Jimin rounds the hallway corner into view, unhooking his palms from opposite elbows where they were hugged loosely around himself. He’s cosy in a dark sweater and joggers, feet bare the way he likes to be in his own home. Jimin can already smell him halfway down the hallway, the same shower gel that’s travelled from bathroom to bathroom, dorm to dorm through the years, his damp hair confirming a recent shower.
When Jimin visits, he never waits at the door. Most of the time he doesn’t even bother unlocking it and Jimin has to fish around for his spare key, knocking a pointless effort as he’s more likely than not holed up in the sound-proof home-studio he converted the office into, or asleep.
“Jiminie,” Yoongi says, voice familiar and deep and scratchy—nighttime Yoongi-hyung voice, Jimin thinks, 10pm Yoongi-hyung—the unfiltered real thing, the opposite of thin and muffled, itching at a particularly satisfying spot deep in the folds of his brain
Yoongi doesn’t acknowledge in the slightest that Jimin’s current energy is clearly on the deranged end of the functionality scale, clearly closer to ‘mental breakdown’ than any other emotional highway marker. Doesn’t ask him why he’s here, or poke fun at him, or any of the things that would be normal on any other day. He just pushes himself out of his lean and steps inwards, holding open the door. The fact that he’s there, in his comfy clothes, post-shower, standing with his door wide open to the hallway says enough.
The door closes behind Jimin like the cutting of strings on a marionette. All his frantic, keyed up energy immediately scatters like roaches into dark nooks and crannies when a light turns on. It leaves him feeling strangely paralyzed, ineffectual without sheer hysteria powering his limbs.
Yoongi has already turned away, bare feet making gentle shff shff sounds against the hardwood as he shuffles down the short entrance hallway to the kitchen, clearly expecting Jimin to follow, which is how visiting Yoongi’s place always starts the rare times he bothers to come unlock the door for him. Jimin stays rooted to the doormat, filling his lungs and emptying them. Yoongi’s apartment smells like him, like the shower he just took, like the dinner he recently ate, echoes of morning coffee and the pack of cigarettes tucked in the furthest end table closest to the balcony that Yoongi always says is the last pack but ranges from full to empty every time Jimin sees it. He can see, further down the hall beyond the kitchen, that the ceiling lights are off, living room bathed in the quiet glow of the reading lamp, the TV paused on some drama. The latest incarnation of Yoongi’s eternal yellow notepad of scribbled and crossed out lyrics and half-baked chord progressions is laying open on the coffee table next to a pen.
Yoongi’s head pops around the corner, clearly checking for what the hold-up is. Jimin half expects some gently snarky, annoyingly perceptive call-out, but instead he simply asks, “Do you want a pair of slippers? I can grab a pair from the closet.”
(Jimin has never worn guest slippers in Yoongi’s apartment ever in his life.)
Something unsticks, dislodges in the centre of him, breaks off into the internal sub-zero gravity that has replaced his vital organs like ice calving off a glacier.
“No,” he says after too long a beat. “No thank you, I’m good.”
He busies himself getting out of his shoes, tucking his socks into the empty heels, shedding his woollen peacoat. Yoongi hums in response, and his face has disappeared back around the corner when Jimin slides the closet door closed. The lack of teasing despite ample fodder, like a striker bypassing an empty net, is disorienting.
Jimin glides his feet flat along the smooth hardwood and circles past the kitchen, coming round the island as Yoongi is messing around in his fridge. Like this is normal. Like they might see each other tomorrow passing in the hallway outside the studios, both not having realised the other was around that day, Yoongi on his way out after a long night and Jimin on his way in. Like this is any number of times Jimin has dropped by Yoongi’s apartment with little to no notice, like he hasn’t just shown up unannounced after only seeing him earlier that day, spending the day together—literally holding Yoongi’s hand wordlessly through Seokjin and Hoseok sharing the solemn duty of shearing his hair as Jimin silently wept, his fingers laced tightly through Jimin’s own, the warm pads of them pressing bruisingly into the tendons and veins on the top of Jimin’s hand—sharing lunch, saying their goodbyes. Like it’s not 10 PM the night before Jimin enlists.
“Are you hungry? I made some extra jiggae to take to work for lunch, but you can have it if you’re hungry,” Yoongi says, head still buried in the depths of the fridge.
(Yoongi, who needed to be actively presented food at the company otherwise he would forget to eat entirely, whose studio door Jimin has knocked on armed with bags of fried chicken and convenience store kimbap countless times.)
“I’ll be full from hotpot for the next week, I’m good.” The poorly attempted smile goes blessedly unseen as Yoongi still hunts around for whatever he’s looking for, which turns out to be the aforementioned leftover jiggae. It’s in a little green container that matches a handful of others sitting out on the counter next to the soft-sided case they clearly each slot into like little tetris blocks. Yoongi’s work bag is slung over the back of the barstool in front of them. He presents the container to Jimin like he’s showing off his newest acquisition for his home studio setup, or maybe a particularly good picture of Holly.
(Yoongi, who now does meal-prep Sundays and packs himself jiggae in little matching tupperwares in a lunch box for work. Jimin wonders if there’s a communal fridge in his office, if his coworkers ever contemplate stealing BTS Suga’s homemade jiggae.)
“You sure? Passing up your last chance at hyung’s home-cooked kimchi jiggae?”
Oh, ok. So they’re not pretending it’s not happening.
“If I eat more I’ll explode and you’ll have to explain to everyone that it was your fault and make an embarrassing apology video to the fans in your dorky work glasses with your dorky work haircut in your dorky work suit.”
Yoongi shakes out his unstyled hair in response. It’s not really dorky, but it does make him look a bit like the trainee Jimin first knew before they all got their pre-debut haircuts. The round little wire-frame glasses are definitely dorky, though. They’re currently sitting about half a metre from the lunch paraphernalia on the counter.
“You’ll regret this after about two weeks of bootcamp cafeteria food,” Yoongi says loftily as he slides the container back into the fridge, deep voice arcing upwards through an octave or two with playful chiding. “You’ll be dreaming of hyung’s kimchi jiggae from your bunk and crying tears of regret.”
He glances at Jimin over his shoulder as he slides things back into place, checking, making sure he’s playing in bounds here. Another chunk of the sharp thing inside Jimin’s chest, sitting just where his heart is supposed to be, breaks off. He’s not sure what his face is doing, but Yoongi’s eyes linger momentarily.
“I saw your live,” Yoongi comments, turning back into the fruit and veg drawers of his fridge, apropos of nothing.
“Uh huh,” Jimin says, noncommittal.
“You didn’t cry like you said you were worried about.”
Jimin hums, flattens his hand against the cool stone of the countertop, spreading his fingers and pressing like the pads might suction to the flat surface like a frog’s.
“And how was dinner?” Yoongi finally shuts the fridge and instead wanders over to the pantry to root around some more.
“It was fine. A lot. Good food.” He’s excruciatingly aware that he’s acting weird. “My dad cried.”
Yoongi responds with his own hum. Just an acknowledgement. He finally emerges with the bag of Paldo crab chips that he always fishes out whenever Jimin’s around, and regularly restocks, even though Jimin barely likes them. He tosses it onto the counter between them where it lands with an overly-loud smack like some sort of ill-mannered peace-offering.
“Did you cry, too?” he says, voice warm, lightly teasing, but also like Jimin could say he did and that would be okay too.
“No,” Jimin says truthfully.
“I see,” Yoongi says in that mild, lofty voice again, eyes shifting away. “So you came to your dear hyung to unleash all your pent up angst,” his voice goes thin and reedy and weird, “You come to my house, on this, the day of my daughter’s wedding–”
He’s cut off by Jimin lobbing the nearest non-breakable thing within reach at him, which happens to be a spotty overripe banana, clearly a recent lunch reject, bruised and lying forlornly apart from the clean, empty lunch containers.
“Don’t you dare quote The Godfather to me,” Jimin says severely as Yoongi resurfaces from his hasty duck. He gives it a beat. “On this, the eve of my enlistment.”
It earns him a grin, gums and all. “Not your daughter’s?”
The dorky glasses probably don’t qualify as non-breakable, especially considering the little Prada logo that winks in the light from one arm as he flings them. Yoongi catches them easily anyways, like Jimin knew he would, one of those seemingly incongruous little physical aptitudes Yoongi is full of, and slides them back across the counter closer to his office-job-accoutrement and out of Jimin’s reach.
Jimin had come over uninvited the evening of Yoongi’s first day at his desk job, wanting to see him in his office-worker-outfit, hoping to make fun of him a bit, but also feeling strangely voyeuristic. He’d let himself in an hour before he knew Yoongi would be home, and immediately felt foolish as he sat quietly on Yoongi’s couch in his empty apartment. He covered it by lurching to his feet and pulling out the frozen tteokbeokki he’d seen hiding behind the whisky-ice earlier that week. It would be funny, he’d felt so sure of it, matching Yoongi’s salaryman costume with the apron he found crammed in the back of the baking drawer; the dutiful housewife with the table set and dinner bubbling on the hob as her beleaguered bread-winning husband came home from his office job. The apron was too utilitarian for the bit, though, and instead of Yoongi’s modest grey suit and rain-spotted trench reading like a silly costume, something from a RUN episode, he’d looked tired and slightly stressed and painfully normally, like someone’s husband or coworker, a person he’d pass on the street and not look twice at despite his perfect skin and the tailored cut of his clothes. It hadn’t been funny, but Yoongi had leaned into it, forced the joke, collapsing onto the couch with a geriatric groan and wheedling at Jimin to bring him a drink and rub his feet until Jimin finally told him off.
The familiarity of late-night-at-Yoongi’s plays out easily from there, Jimin reaching across to retrieve the crab chips and settling into one of the bar stools as Yoongi searches out two cut-crystal tumblers from his fancy glassware cupboard. They’re his two favourite ones, Jimin knows, and he still gets the same kick of satisfaction the inherent approval and trust their selection signifies as he did receiving Yoongi’s rare, borderline-surly compliments back in their early days. It makes him feel needy and indulged all at once, simultaneously not-enough and too-much, the way most things do when it comes to Yoongi. But he’s generous, in his own oft-quiet ways, more and more the last few years.
It’s been many years since Jimin—since all of them—became accustomed to each of their individual ways of showing they care. He can rely on Seokjin, for example, to take him by the hand and hold it, swinging his arm vigorously, borderline aggressively, but not letting go, all the way to Jimin’s favourite restaurant where Seokjin will order enough food for ten and then loudly and repeatedly refuse to let Jimin pay regardless of whether he offers.
With Namjoon, it’s the comfiest corner of his couch (the side with the Good Pillow, which forever gets fought over), bottomless cups of tea, an open ear, and a number of kernels of nebulous advice sourced from whatever book he’s currently got split open on his coffee table.
Hoseok, a good ear in his own right, is still the best person when Jimin just needs to get out of his own brain and move, dance, run; a familiar late-night co-haunter of every evolution of practice studios and gyms of varying size and sophistication over many years.
Taehyung is for full-body octopus hugs, for unquestioning love and support, and for Yeontan, who upon adoption was passed around the group like a revolving communal soft-tongued eucharist to anyone needing unjudging and uncomplicated furry salvation.
Jeongguk is for violence. (And karaoke).
Yoongi is different. Has been different, all along, and changing, constantly, though Jimin’s sometimes not sure if it’s Yoongi changing, or himself, or both, or something else entirely.
All of the above, he suspects.
Where most of his other long-term relationships, platonic, familial and romantic alike, feel like they settle like sediment in a vast, steady body of water over the years, becoming more and more solid and real, Yoongi is a river, the ocean, tidal and mercurial and shifting. Something that is both enveloping and elusive, slipping between the spaces of his fingers the more he tries to fasten a grip.
In the beginning, Min Yoongi was to be avoided; too acidic, too astringent for the open wound that was Jimin’s entire existence in those first months as a Big Hit trainee. And then, unexpectedly, in the 3 AM darkness from the mirroring top bunk as Jimin tried to stifle his sobs into his thin pillow and beneath the sound of Namjoon and Jeongguk’s snoring– whispered approval, encouragement. So impacting, so unexpected it had somehow felt illicit, under cover of dark and in the slight unreal-ness of those early hours.
It had been confusing then, and even though time and age has dulled both their sharper edges, it still feels unsettled. A snowglobe never given the chance to come to rest. Even before there was the time-earned net of trust and safety, the intensity with which Jimin craved any attention from Yoongi at all, even his ire, felt frightening and uncomfortable. Made Jimin feel itchy and overheated, like having an allergy to one’s favourite food. And the bone-deep relief and pleasure upon receiving it, liquid and wriggly and equally fervid, was no less frightening.
It had been everything he could do, using up every last ounce of waking energy he had, to work hard enough to satisfy the managers and producers, much less impress them. It took everything he had to pretend to be the person they told him he was supposed to be. Looking too closely at the squirming, calescent feeling in the pit of his stomach that 18-year-old Min Yoongi’s attention—more often scathing than not back then—evoked… well. As naive and green as Jimin was, and he had been plenty, he had known enough to be sure that way danger lay.
Things had eased, obviously, had become less immediate and occupied less space in his overtired and overworked brain as debut drew nigh. Those first few years of white knuckling through the rookie experience left even less space and energy to think too much about it, and by the time it felt like as a group they were finally, finally, getting somewhere, and Jimin was finally, finally being allowed to be something approximating himself, the stakes of their success loomed far too high and perilous to risk picking at any single thread of the net that held them all together.
At first he thought it would pass, that he’d get over it, whatever it was. First when Yoongi stopped trying so hard to come across as intimidating, and then when he finally started to let his guard down. Again, when Yoongi, too, started to have more freedom to be and express himself.
(Sometimes Jimin looks back on those years and how they were each all trying so damn hard to be anything, to be all the things, and it feels like the oldest of wounds, the type that he’s not sure ever heals, eternally tender and weeping.)
At some point, though, Jimin accepted that strange, confusing little seed wasn’t going away. Lubricated by time, exposure, and eventually solidified by shared experience, like the hardening of brittle clay in a fiery kiln. Life, and even their friendship itself, eventually grew larger and deeper and more important around where that seed nestled deep in his belly, dormant under the roots and towering branches of something far safer and more cherished.
So– Yoongi can be relied upon to be reliable. To be solid and steady and constant when everything feels liquid, wavering, temporary. For all his mercurial mutability, for all that he was the river and the ocean and the tide, he was also, unexpectedly, the island.
Yoongi, who Jimin watched fearfully from the corner of the room while others fretted over his bleeding hands and bleeding head, grinding his jaw so hard Jimin imagined he could hear it, gritting out between clenched teeth that nobody was to tell any of the managers anything on pain of death. Yoongi, who had only let himself cry over it when everyone else had fallen asleep, in the bathroom, with the tap running to cover the sound, barely audible behind the door both their backs pressed against as Jimin bore silent witness, awoken only by his bladder, and not yet brave enough to offer anything in return. Yoongi, who Jimin couldn’t figure out but who for years talked about his parents and brother in a vague, glossy sort of way, like he was telling a children’s story, and under whose pillow Jimin’s clumsy fingers unearthed a half-empty bubble pack of tramadol once by accident while complaining under his breath that he had been the one to do bedding laundry just two weeks ago. And then again not by accident, just two empty bubbles, and again, a bottle instead of the blister pack, chalky white pills clicking dully in their plastic prison, until he stopped looking because it made him feel so worried he ended up being sick, lying to Seokjin and Hoseok who hovered in the doorway of the bathroom with concern that he had unknowingly eaten shrimp fried rice.
Yoongi, who liked to hear all about everyone else’s problems but kept his so close to his own chest Jimin once suspected, still smarting from Yoongi snapping at him for goofing off with Taehyung during recording right in front of PDogg-nim and Bang PD-nim, that they must take up the space where Yoongi’s heart once lived. Min Yoongi who rapped about money and jewellery and cars instead of girls and drugs and fucking around, who took Jeongguk out for samgyeopsal every other week even though he was too broke back then to order for himself, feigning fullness and then hoovering down the leftover week-old spam kimbap at the back of the fridge nobody else would touch but were too lazy to just throw out as soon as soon as Jeongguk passed out in a food coma upon their return.
Yoongi, who had loudly and defiantly declared he had been in therapy since he was thirteen when Donghyuk had made a casually cruel remark about a fellow trainee who had requested to see a counsellor, and who then made a point of loudly announcing his departure to his bi-weekly sessions until Donghyuk had shoved him and rolled his eyes all the way through a stilted half-voiced apology. Yoongi, who had been the first person to suggest Jimin talk to a therapist where it hadn’t felt like a thinly veiled barb or an insinuation of something Jimin had still kept hidden deep in the bloody, tender darkness of his chest cavity, lodged like a silver bullet somewhere fatal between his lungs and heart. Yoongi, who left yellow notepads of lyrics increasingly unattended around their dorms as the years passed, the contents of which felt so painfully personal the one time Jimin had had the guts to surreptitiously flip through one that he couldn’t fathom what could possibly be in the actual journals he kept under lock and key under his bed.
Yoongi, who had been the first person Jimin had properly come out to, entirely incidentally when he walked in on Jimin kissing one of the guest choreographers in an empty and foolishly unlocked meeting room while arguing on the phone with Namjoon. Yoongi, who had hung up immediately and started in on Jimin about being careless until Jimin had abruptly burst into tears, who had gently ushered the petrified choreographer out and gingerly patted Jimin’s back as Jimin soiled the shoulder of Yoongi’s favourite white t-shirt with a myriad of facial fluids and muttered the obvious confession, voice gummed up and muffled against the wet cotton over his clavicle.
Yoongi, who had brought his previously-secret boyfriend back to the dorm the following weekend when he knew everyone was home, jaw in the same defiant jut he had given Donghyuk years earlier, his members all goggling at him frog-eyed as he towed said boyfriend into his and Seokjin’s room without a single glance at Jimin, fingers loose and tender around the wrist of this unknown boy whose face Jimin still remembers with crystalline clarity. He had been taller than Yoongi, golden-skinned and dark-haired next to Yoongi’s bleached-out, chalked-up paleness, and he’d had a small soft mouth and large wary eyes. He was wearing a leather jacket Jimin recognised from Yoongi’s closet and jeans that were a few years out-of-style.
Yoongi, who knew from the start Jimin liked physical touch, and whose hands frequently take up residence on his back, his arm, his waist, the nape of his neck, and who also knew upsettingly swiftly that Jimin needed assurance, and praise, and who became more and more likely to do so, not because it was what came naturally to him, but because he chose to, because he wanted to, and because he made the effort to learn how to despite it clearly being something so rarely afforded to him in his own young life. Yoongi, who is as tough as he is gentle, as confronting as he is indulgent, who when everything started falling apart as their international profile exploded, was the first one to the table, the first one with the pen in his hand, and who through all the uncertainty of the last few years, has been making plans which each of them separately, bumping their group chat when it goes silent for too many days, present and mindful and steady.
Yoongi, who is like a gas and adapts to fit whatever container he’s in at any given moment.
Yoongi, who has always seemed to know what Jimin needs, even if Jimin hasn’t been ready to receive it.
Yoongi, who has chosen to be everything he is now.
Sometimes, Jimin thinks as he watches Yoongi pour two neat glasses of Hibiki, Yoongi is too steady. Too solid and too real and seeing too much of Jimin’s white and soft underbelly no matter how much he tries to hide it. Sometimes Jimin wants the chaos and the volatility back, wants to pick the scab, his whole body sick and alive and itching to see the blood.
Yoongi rarely feels like the easiest choice. Jimin thinks, if each of the homes on the list he could have turned around to were currently warm and bright with their owners, he likely would have ended up somewhere else, but in every scenario would have wished, eventually, that he’d come here. He feels grateful, suddenly, for the lack of choice.
Yoongi’s putting the whisky back in its special little box-home, and Jimin notices it’s not the usual Harmony blend he often pulls out, but the limited edition Kacho Fugetsu he brought home from his tour stop in Tokyo. Instead of making a comment on Jimin appreciating the treat (it tastes no different to his less-refined palate) the way he does every other time he pulls out anything non-standard, Yoongi simply takes both glasses and silently makes his way over to the couch, placing Jimin’s on a coaster on the coffee table next to his notebook. Jimin waits for a moment to be beckoned, to be needled at for requiring an invitation, but Yoongi just sips his own glass and pats around the couch cushions for the remote.
Jimin abandons the bag of crab chips on the island and lets his feet slide across the hardwood to the couch. The cleaner has waxed recently, and he glides across the surface like skates on ice until his toes hit the edge of the rug. Jimin flexes his toes around the uneven border of it. Yoongi had brought it home from Berlin during their last real world tour and spoke excitedly about the 19th century wooden loom the artisan he’d purchased it from wove it on the entirety of Jimin’s first visit to his new apartment once it had been set up. Jimin had teased him that he was slowly becoming Namjoon.
Taehyung had once brought a bottle of sangiovese to a group hang Yoongi had hosted, where for some reason Namjoon had been allowed to uncork and pour the first glass which, of course, immediately was upended directly over the rug as he tried to pass it to Seokjin. Yoongi had sighed and waddled off to find a stain spray and rag, and the rest of them had stared silently after him until Hoseok turned to Namjoon, saying, “Remember when you two used to throw your underwear at each other?”
The spot is still there amongst the woven shades of creams and greys and soft heathery greens, close to Yoongi’s bare left foot, slightly pink and slightly oblong. Jimin had realised several months after that the shape of it roughly matched his own footprint, and he places his foot on top of it like he does every time he sits on this couch. His toes overlap Yoongi’s, and Jimin feels them flex twice under his own as he settles down on the couch, before stilling benignly, not pulling away. He tucks his foot up under himself instead as he reaches forward for his glass and settles back into the cushions.
When they’d gathered the evening before Seokjin’s enlistment the year before, Jin had poured them each a glass of the takju he had made over the summer months and demanded they each deliver a personalised send-off toast in his honour. Beside him, Yoongi had raised his glass first, intoning sombrely, “To your last hours as a free man,” and Jimin had wanted to reach across the table and throttle him. Jin, however, had closed his eyes, brow deeply furrowed, shook his head, mouth stretched in something halfway between a grin and a grimace around an extended khhhh, and solemnly clinked his glass against Yoongi’s. He had then downed his glass, slapped Yoongi on the arm while crowing with squeaky laughter, poured himself another glass, and held his arms open in invitation for Jeongguk who was next in line.
Earlier, in diminished numbers around the familiar table of a favourite fried chicken spot, Jimin had sped through it all with a hasty, “‘Til 2025,” before anyone else had the chance and then downed half his bottle of soju in one go. When he tipped his head back down, Yoongi had been watching him carefully from the far end of the table and Seokjin and Hoseok showered him with friendly slaps, the same expression he wore a couple hours after when Jimin had met his gaze through the mirror from the corner of the room as Hoseok reassuringly pet the newly shorn half of his head while Soekjin lined up the razor with Jimin’s hairline. He was beside him then, between one breath and the next, hand wrapping around Jimin’s own, watching him intently through the mirror instead of directly at him.
It was during his toast that Jimin’s father had cried over dinner, his brother on Jimin’s right patting him firmly on the back while his father’s lower lip trembled and his lined and veiny hands gripped the stem of his wine glass too tightly. His mother, both hands wrapped around Jimin’s left arm on top of the restaurant table, had peered searchingly at her son’s empty face and dry eyes, fingers squeezing around him like a vice.
Now, though, Yoongi merely clicks the rims of their tumblers together and then dumps the remote onto Jimin’s lap. “Whatever you feel like.”
It's an olive branch, accommodating, but Jimin wishes Yoongi would just turn on whatever boring show he's into lately without asking, like he normally would, the ensuing cycle complaining and bickering expected and wanted.
Jimin wonders what it says about himself that he wants Yoongi to be a little mean to him. That for so many years he craved softness and now that he has it he wants the opposite. He wonders if the softness too-closely approximates something that he's never allowed himself to want or need.
He takes the remote and turns the television on, bringing up the directory. He considers just flicking through long enough that Yoongi loses his patience and confiscates the remote altogether, but his eye catches on a listing – that same nature series he'd been watching. He pauses on it, the preview popping up, and Jimin considers showing Yoongi the chicks, the ant, asking which one reminds him more of Jimin.
"Too sad, choose something else," Yoongi says.
Jimin pouts and half-heartedly pushes his thigh against Yoongi, causing him to rock gently, body lazily absorbing the motion.
"It'll make you cry. The bit with the leopards."
"You mean it'll make you cry." Jimin retorts.
"Yes," Yoongi agrees, and then leans over and snipes the remote out of Jimin's hand.
He's annoyed with himself when he feels the immediate internal spike of irritation at it, despite everything, and then flops back into the cushions and laughs at himself. Yoongi pays no attention, just expeditiously flicks over to the movies section.
"Don't you dare put on The Godfather."
–––
His attention falls apart less than an hour and two drinks into some new release that on any other day would probably hold his interest. Instead of providing his brain something to mindlessly sink its gnashing teeth into and hold onto for a short while, an autopilot vehicle to pile into and check out, instead he feels increasingly aware of every inch of his body, of the shift of his beanie on every shorn follicle on his head, of Yoongi beside him, uncharacteristically focused on the movie.
Or maybe not, because he suddenly sighs and reaches for the remote on the coffee table, plunging the room into darkness as he hits the power button.
Jimin hadn't even noticed Yoongi turning off the lights earlier.
He doesn't call Jimin's inattention out, though, or comment at all, just briefly stretches out his lower back, rolls his bad shoulder once, and heaves himself off the couch. Normally, this would be when Jimin would make noise about heading home, getting out of Yoongi's hair. Neither of them are naturally early risers, both night-owls with bedtime still a ways off, but Yoongi's nine-to-five is a thing now, and even before, Jimin was always conscious of overstaying his welcome, conscious of how Yoongi valued his solitude.
Before he has a chance, though, Yoongi is pulling open the drawer of the end table closest to him, closest to the wall of windows and balcony, and nodding his head towards the sliding door. The LED cabinet lighting in the kitchen is still on, a pale glow reflecting on the windows like a mirror, obscuring him as he slips through the door and out into the winter darkness without waiting for a response, verbal or physical. Jimin gets to his feet, drains the dregs of his whiskey, and follows.
It's fucking cold, obviously. Yoongi is huddled against the windows in the centre of the balcony, in the sparse cover the twin balcony above offers from the wind and the still-spitting rain, thumb working on a cheap red Bic lighter. Jimin cups his hands around it, follows the movement as Yoongi brings the fragile flicker to the end of the cigarette clamped between his thinned out lips. He sucks as it catches, cheeks hollowing slightly in the scant light. They're fuller than they've been in the past– leaner than they've been, too. Jimin likes them. Likes the curve and shadow of them when they're sunken like this, likes the bulge of them when he grins hard, the roundness when he pouts.
Yoongi offers him the pack and Jimin shakes his head, but plucks the cigarette from between his pale fingers after his third drag. Yoongi rolls his eyes but says nothing, tucking his chin under the warm lip of his sweater collar and shrugging his cuffs further down his hands so that just the knobby ends of his fingers are bare to the cold when Jimin passes the cigarette back.
This is sometimes part of late-night-at-Yoongi's, too, depending on the day Yoongi's had. Jimin has a feeling this, tonight, is less about the day that Yoongi's had and more about the day Jimin's had. At least mostly.
Jimin thinks again about the way Yoongi's fingers had pressed, almost brutally, around his own earlier that day in that fluoro-lit nightmare room filled with the sound of angry buzzing. Hoseok had been doing a bit with Seokjin about Jimin being their prized lamb they were shearing, the blonde tufts fluttering to the floor his expensive golden fleece that they were going to take to market to sell for a fortune. Yoongi had just stood silently behind them, and then when the tears came, had sat silently beside him. When his head was fully sheared, Seokjin and Hoseok had rubbed their hands lovingly over every exposed curve and bump, telling him with almost aggressive fervor how handsome he was, "our Jiminie".
Yoongi's hand had remained interlaced with Jimin's until it was time to go, his other in his lap, pointer finger worrying at the dry skin around his thumbnail but refraining from digging the nail in. It occurs to Jimin that Yoongi hadn't said a single word the entire time they were in that room, not when Jimin was going a million kilometres an hour with nerves as Jin and Hoseok had eventually had to physically bully him into the chair, not at any point during, and not after it was done.
He's quiet now, too. It's not abnormal, entirely mood-dependent, but he's curved like a bracket into Jimin's space in the cold air, with his eyes caught somewhere around the collar of Jimin's own sweater. Jimin reaches up and pulls his beanie lower over his cold ears and turns his body further in towards Yoongi's, wind and stray droplets of rain pushing at his back in occasional gusts. The back of his neck feels acutely exposed, makes him shiver.
Yoongi’s right hand, fingers still curled around the lighter, twitches towards him, like he might reach out and sling it around Jimin’s shoulder, rub his arm or his back. Instead he wraps it around his own body, tucking his fist into his own armpit, eyes casting to the side off into the darkness. A moment later, though, the solid weight of him rocking against Jimin’s arm once, the shuffle of bare feet, and then a long line of warmth from shoulder to waist. He’s still looking off towards the wavering flicker of city lights on the river, visible in long gaps between neighbouring buildings, sucking aggressively on the dying butt of the cigarette. His eyebrows are slightly knit, frowning with the push of the wind now against both their backs. Jimin steals the last few drags on the cigarette, but Yoongi immediately pulls out another, jostling against him but not pulling away.
The thing with him, Jimin thinks, is that he always wants. No matter how much he has, how much he gets, Jimin wants. That greedy feeling is back, the one that gets fed a snack and craves a meal. The one that wants and wants and wants, and gets, and then only wants more. He’s so used to shoving it away, shoving it down, not even letting it enter his brain exactly what he wants, so much so that he often feels completely blind to what it even is that he wants, just that he does. He wants.
He allows himself to think it.
He wants to curl into that warmth, burrow his face into the hidden crook of Yoongi’s warm neck. He wants to wrap his arms around someone solid and safe and hold on like a life preserver, to have their arms wrapped around him, reciprocal, wanting him too. He’s been told a million times by a million people that it’s going to be fine, he’s going to be fine, he’ll get through it, people including Min Yoongi, even. He doesn’t want to be told it’s going to be fine, he wants to know someone else will miss him as much as he’s going to miss them. Wants to be shown, not told. Wants the physicality of it most, just when it’s thinnest on the ground.
There’s a lot of ways in which Yoongi is reliable, can be counted on, but Jimin– Jimin is afraid. Afraid of asking too much, afraid of pushing too far. Afraid of being too much. That old, tender, eternal wound dug deep into his belly long ago still festering.
He feels pathetic, embarrassed, utterly transparent when he scrunches his bare toes left, inchworming them over and onto Yoongi’s. Hopes it’ll read as playful, teasing, trying to get a rise out of him. Maybe get told off for how cold they are, for being a weirdo, that solid line of weight shoving into him and knocking him off-balance, voice sharp and aggravated in his ear.
The reaction he gets, however, is Yoongi’s eyes snapping up to his own over the cigarette held to his mouth, mid-inhale. There’s a moment, a catch, Yoongi holding the smoke in his lungs as the look holds, suspended. Jimin’s belly swoops, like a hook though the navel on line cast miles away and years past.
(Jimin wants. Wants more than the solid warmth along his side, the bare toes, the eye contact. Wants all of him, everything, everything he has and is. Wants his pale face, his round nose and his pink lips, his broad shoulders, blunt fingers, knobby knees, the four stubborn hairs on his big toe. Wants his deep voice and sharp tongue and cutting humour and unexpected tenderness, his angles and his softness. Wants the essence of him condensed down, bite-sized, so he can hold it in his hot mouth, hold it hot in his lungs and his guts, never swallow, never exhale, hold it—hold him— there inside him forever like a talisman, like a prize, the pinnacle, the holy grail of all his wanting.)
Yoongi is the one who looks away first, though Jimin has no idea why that feels satisfying. That break is offset, though, by Yoongi profering the new cigarette instead of just passively allowing Jimin to steal it. A mental image of leaning forward to drag on it—still wedged between Yoongi’s pale fingers, his lips warm and dry pressing against his cold fingers—flashes through his mind and is immediately discarded. That’s not what’s happening here. Jimin’s own existential crisis has no bearing on the fundamental rules of them. He might play that sort of pseudo-provocative game with almost any of the other members, but not Yoongi. Not when the cover of the cameras, of performance, has been turned off, and certainly not alone, in his home in the late hours of the night.
Whatever that moment was, though, that momentary catch, like a hitch or a snag in a delicate silk, Yoongi’s eyes flit back to his repeatedly as they trade the dwindling cigarette back and forth. They’re close enough that Yoongi’s eyes are flickering back and forth between his own, searching, then sliding away again before Jimin can fixate too much on what his own face is doing.
Eventually, the butt is stubbed out in the little black ashtray half-hidden behind a bare planter the realtor left behind from the staging years back. Yoongi doesn’t pull out the pack or offer another, doesn’t tender any verbal acknowledgement of any sort, just pushes the little dish back behind the planter and slides around Jimin towards the door. It’s not dismissive– he sidles closer than necessary as he passes, allows his fingers to brush the back of Jimin’s hand, short of taking it in his own and leading him back inside, but an invitation, and acknowledgement all the same. He pulls the door closed behind him as Yoongi replaces the pack in its drawer.
Now is the time, Jimin knows it. He makes himself say the words. “I–” his voice comes out scratchy from the cigarettes, unused. “I should get out of your hair.” He realises belatedly they didn’t speak the entire time out there. Not since putting the movie on.
Yoongi is still moving, tidying up the couch, collecting their empty whiskey tumblers. “You’re not in my hair, Jiminah.”
“No I– you have work tomorrow.” It seems like a slightly ridiculous thing to say, considering what morning is bringing. Yoongi’s raised eyebrow seems to agree. “I have to pack, I’m not finished packing” he finishes lamely.
That eyebrow inches higher. “You’ve been fully packed for a week now, you told me yesterday.”
“I am. Just– just the last bits, you know.”
Yoongi waggles the empty glass in his hand pointedly before setting it in the sink.
“I’ll call a company car.”
“At–” he glances behind himself at the clock on the oven display. “Eleven-thirty at night?”
“That’s not even late!” It isn’t.
“Jimin.” It isn’t!
Jimin doesn’t understand what Yoongi’s trying to do here. Needling him to stay longer– for what? Just postponing the inevitable?
“I’ll call a cab.”
“Park Jimin.”
“Min Yoongi.”
Jimin can feel the way his face is colouring, frustration raising his volume. Their normal banter feels cruel in this moment.
“Stop being ridiculous,” Yoongi says dismissively. He rounds the corner into the hallway, disappearing altogether. His voice comes slightly muffled but a little louder as he calls out, “You’ll stay here tonight.”
Oh. That’s–
Jimin feels stupid.
The powder bathroom lights turn off, the glow of light from the hallway extinguishing. Yoongi comes back around the corner, not looking at Jimin, puts the crab chips back in the pantry.
Yoongi presses on in the ensuing silence. “You can swing by your place in the morning.”
There’s several reasons why this is a bad decision. They’re all highly practical. Jimin can’t mentally get his fingers around a single one of them.
Yoongi’s already flicking off the kitchen cabinet LEDs, still not making eye-contact, and it would all be pretty presumptuous from someone else, pushy even, but–
But.
Jimin trails a few steps behind him as he heads down the hallway towards the bedrooms, stopping at the hall closet to pull out two extra pillows. The bed, when he turns on the lights in the guest room, is already plush with four pillows at the head, but he pulls up the bottom corner of the bedding and slides the two pillows in a third of the way up the bed, and Jimin wants– wants to throttle him or kiss him or– because Jimin was complaining two days ago about an old lower back injury that was flaring up, worrying about the firm pallet beds Seokjin and Hoseok had reported. Because whenever he had a flare up, Jimin had specifically stolen the unused extra pillows from Yoongi’s bed back in their dorm as bolsters under his right knee to relieve the pain.
For someone who wants so, so much, it’s almost unbearable to be taken care of like this. So precisely, but so casually, like it’s nothing, like it’s somehow inherent.
Jimin wants to throw himself on the bed and suffocate himself in the 600 thread count feather pillows.
Yoongi is humming, Jimin realises, as he putters about. He’s pleased with himself. Jimin hasn’t said anything, hasn’t even replied.
Let this be nice, he tells himself. Let yourself be taken care of.
Yoongi seems to take his silence as the matter having been decided and proceeds with this novel routine. Because it is, Jimin realises, a routine. It’s novel to him, but there’s an easiness to the way he readies the bedroom, fluffing pillows and the duvet, economical and sure as he opens the closet and reaches for a specific set of towels amongst the folded stack. Jimin’s never been a guest in Yoongi’s home like this, but others have. This man, this boy who he lived with for a decade, with whom he jockeyed for space with in front of the single bathroom sink in their first dorm, who groused at him for stinking up his and Seokjin’s third-dorm-bathroom while Taehyung took too long shaving his legs in theirs, now with a whole nighttime routine outside of Jimin’s purview, guests secret and known. It’s uncanny, watching him lay the towels on the foot of the bed, refolding the washcloth neatly on top.
Jimin half expects him to pull out guest pyjamas and toiletries, the full nine yards, but instead Yoongi brushes past where Jimin still hovers near the doorway, hooks his pointer and middle finger around Jimin’s wrist as he passes and says, “Come on, you can borrow my stuff.”
Jimin has seen Yoongi’s bedroom– of course he has. Jimin is the type of person who tends towards delineation. He eats in his kitchen. He reads in his favourite chair. He works, when he’s forced to, at his small desk in the den. He socialises in the living room. He sleeps, fucks, dresses in his bedroom. It’s not a space he spends his time in otherwise, but it’s private, separate.
Yoongi isn’t like that, Jimin knows. Every facet of him bleeds into every corner, every last pyeong. Yoongi’s home is fully saturated with himself in a way Jimin found surprising when they all started their exodus from the last dorm. Where Jimin has struggled, even years later, to build a home, unequipped at every aspect like a college student fresh from their childhood bedroom, Yoongi seemed to immediately fill up his own space with himself. A man who is like a gas, Jimin thinks again.
Yoongi eats anywhere, works everywhere, writes, reads, meanders through the entirety of the space. Jimin thinks it’s probably got good feng shui. For guests as close as the members, nowhere is closed or off-limits– they’re just as likely to end up in Yoongi’s office listening to his latest project or draped across his bed telling stories of their new lives as solo artists. He’ll sleep, too, anywhere, honed by years of catching whatever scant moments they were able to shut their eyes between schedules.
(Jimin does not think about if Yoongi is equally liberal about where he does his fucking.)
So following Yoongi to his bedroom isn’t something out of the ordinary. He was just in here four nights ago with Jeongguk, the three of them stretched out across the duvet laughing to the point of crying over stupid TikToks Jeongguk had bookmarked. And the week before, with Namjoon, quietly voicing their worries while Yoongi did his best to be a good hyung, swallowing his own bitterness that Jimin knows he carries at being left out of this experience. And only three days before that with both Taehyung and Jeongguk, until the soju-lubricated cheer devolved into a threeway wrestling match which ultimately got them kicked out to slink up the hill to Jimin’s complex where they all passed out on his couch.
It’s not out of the ordinary, so there’s no excuse, no rationality for the way Jimin’s palms feel sweaty suddenly, swallowing around the gumminess in his own throat. There’s nothing notable at all about the way Yoongi goes to his dresser, pulls out a pair of nondescript and inarguably chaste charcoal grey pyjamas and tosses them towards Jimin. He’s not got reflexes like Yoongi, but he’s following so closely behind him they’re practically dumped directly into his arms. An oversized tshirt and the same type of soft pants Jimin often buys himself. He thinks he’s probably worn this exact pair once or twice, victim of a spill or being too dressed up and not stopping at home before coming over. They feel different in his hands now, given with the intention of sleeping, spending the night.
Alone, Jimin sleeps nude at home. He knows Yoongi does too.
He doesn’t think about this when he’s in here stretched across Yoongi’s clean white duvet gossiping about the stylist that’s having an affair with Hobi’s PT, but he’s thinking about it now.
Yoongi’s getting out pyjamas for himself though, a sagey green shorts-and-tee set. He pauses, the both of them standing too close, arms full, a bit awkward, but on the verge of smiling, like he knows a secret Jimin doesn’t.
“Do you need help with those,” Yoongi asks mildly, gently teasing.
Jimin makes a face and gives him his privacy, retreating back to the guest bedroom. He changes, peels off his crewneck sweater, careful not to dislodge his beanie, steps out of his trousers, his briefs, and folds them lengthwise to drape over the back of the small chair beside the door. The pyjamas smell like Yoongi’s laundry detergent when he puts them on, like they’ve been freshly washed. Like he wore them himself only a few nights ago. Jimin examines himself in the full length mirror next to the chair, tries to imagine Yoongi in this same set, how it would look different on his body compared to Jimin’s, despite their matching height. Less roomy in the shoulders and chest, the drape of the shirt hung on broader shoulders than his and pooling around narrower hips. The way the pants fit gently to Jimin’s thighs but would flow loosely around Yoongi’s slender legs, the poke of bony knees and ankles.
Yoongi’s door is still slightly ajar down the hallway as he crosses to the bathroom, but he feels the demarcation in his own mind, the threshold drawn now that he’s put himself on the other side of it. This is what happens when you sleep over at someone’s house who isn’t your lover; you retreat into your own spaces, prepare for bed, wash up, call a quick goodnight through the door. Jimin opens the vanity drawers in search of a spare toothbrush and finds none. Wonders if the last guest used the last one. Wonders who they were.
It gives him an excuse, though. Instead of a quick “goodnight” called down the hallway, it’s a chance to knock gently at the frame, to step inside when he hears a muffled response from the en suite over the sound of running water.
Yoongi is brushing his teeth, electric buzz competing with the running tap. “Why’re you knocking,” he says around the toothbrush, squinting at Jimin through the mirror.
Any answer he could give would sound stupid, so he shrugs, asks, “Do you have a spare toothbrush?”
“Top drawer?”
“Nope,” he pops the p. He’s light. This is all fine. He’s fine. He leans against the doorjamb, forces his shoulders a few more inches down from his ears.
Yoongi makes a sound, digs one-handed through the middle drawer of his own vanity, and produces a plastic-wrapped replacement matching the one currently in his mouth. “Gimme a sec.”
He deposits it in front of Jimin on the countertop, then scoops the same large hand behind the collection of narrow white bottles and slides them towards Jimin wordlessly. It’s the same skincare routine Jimin was assigned, along with Seokjin, dryer than Namjoon but oilier than Hoseok. A fluffy washcloth is dropped next to them. Yoongi is peering at his back molars in the mirror, working the brush around them. He blindly twists the tap round to hot and steps to make room in front of the sink for another body, an invitation.
This is fucking weird.
Foreign and deeply familiar at once. A million different dorms and hotel bathrooms over a whole decade, and Jimin feeling like an intruder more than ever. How do you go from fighting over who has to shower together to feeling invasive simply watching the same person brush their teeth? He’s seen Yoongi do exactly this thousands of times. He’s showered with him in the same cramped single stall, naked, seen him naked countless times, knows, without ever having purposefully looked, the small mole on the bottom curve of his left ass cheek, the way the dark hairs they used to routinely shave off thinned out and disappeared into smoothness three quarters of the way up his pale thighs, the exact shade of pink of his dick and balls.
He feels like a pervert even thinking about these things now, knowledge benignly and inadvertently gained. He imagines showering with Yoongi now, of the same necessary and casual nudity that featured through their dorm lives, and can’t even picture it in an innocent way. Like this is a different person altogether. He feels hot and embarrassed and ashamed. Yoongi is taking care of him, his hyung, and Jimin is a pervert. A bald pervert.
He laughs abruptly at the thought, realises he’s already halfway through washing his face on autopilot and has sprayed cleanser foam onto the mirror. Yoongi looks at him through the speckles like he’s gone insane. Jimin is a mess.
“I’m sorry I–” Jimin runs the warm washcloth over his foamy lips. “I think I’m losing my mind.”
Yoongi nods, mouth still full of toothbrush. He spits into the sink, rewets it. “I’ve suspected for years.”
“I need to redo the fitness test.”
“I can put in a good word at my office,” Yoongi offers agreeably, and puts the toothbrush back in his mouth. “We need a coffee runner.”
“I think I’d be good at shredding documents.”
“Sounds advanced.” He sticks out his tongue, getting at the back of it with the spinning head, nose scrunched against the sensation.
“I’ve never used a paper shredder.”
“Not dangerous for you,” he spits again. “Fingers too short.”
Jimin flicks the expensive niacinamide serum coating his fingers at him. Yoongi doesn’t react, pretends not to have noticed as he bares his gums in the mirror, inspecting.
“I’ll tell your coworkers all your embarrassing stories.”
“My coworkers love me.”
“They don’t know the real you. They don’t know their coworker is a demon who leaves toenail clippings in the sink and ate nothing but shin ramen and expired kimbap for a decade.”
Yoongi is avoiding his eyes in the mirror again, but he’s holding back a smile, removing the brush head and rinsing the base under the warm water. It was in Yoongi’s mouth and now it’s going in Jimin’s mouth.
“They don’t know you cry over baby leopards and have the worst morning farts on the planet.”
“This is slander. You’ll be hearing from my lawyers.” He punctuates himself by placing the wet toothbrush base on the counter in front of Jimin with a loud thunk.
It’s working, is the thing. Jimin still feels a little crazy, a little on the edge, but he thinks his face is doing something almost normal for once this evening. He keeps it up, barely intelligible around the toothbrush as he scrubs away, listing off a whole host of accusations, truths and lies, Yoongi placidly denying them to the last as he does his own skincare routine. He’s pushed his fringe back in a little headband that makes it stand straight up, choppy and fluffy, like he’s been electrocuted. His skin is pink, shiny and glass-like with serums, like glazed mandu. Jimin doesn’t stop talking.
He finishes faster than Yoongi, despite the running monologue, turning to asking increasingly absurd questions about Yoongi’s own office duties. Yoongi, for his part, dabbing creams delicately onto his nose and forehead, has equally improbable responses for what he gets up to on the daily, including an office-wide battle with the daily hwarang convoy, swimming to Norway to retrieve mineral testing reports that can only be delivered in morse code by Svalbard polar bears, and weekly communing with the Craig, the office ghost, via ouija board to select their satanic wastewater purity sacrifice of the month. Jimin lingers, busying himself with re-rinsing the toothbrush, not thinking about the seam of the brush head both their lips wrapped around, folding the wet washcloth four different ways, wiping the cleanser foam off the mirror.
It’s time to go, his cue to leave has passed about a dozen times already, but his mouth won’t stop. He realises he’s talking about the ant, the parasitic fungus ant, has no idea how he got here but his hands are empty and Yoongi’s are too and he’s standing in his en suite bathroom staring at Jimin blundering through the absolute worst retelling in history with a tenderness that makes Jimin want to take a running leap off the balcony into the cold wet darkness.
“Jiminah.”
It’s the same tone that was crackling thinly through the intercom an hour or two ago. The real thing is devastating. Jimin realises he’s been talking without Yoongi saying anything at all for the last few minutes at least.
“Jiminah come here.”
He’s dropped the stare, but there’s a hand extended into the empty air between them, looking away like it’s grace he’s allowing Jimin, a politeness, and it is. The grace to not be seen. If he doesn’t take that hand he’ll drift into dust and never find form again. The thought isn’t even half-formed as he watches his hand slip into the space shaped perfectly for the size of his, some sort of weird muscle memory. It’s horribly romantic, even in an entirely platonic way, Jimin thinks, for someone to be so used to holding your hand as to have unconsciously memorised the exact shape of it in their own.
The words have dried up on his tongue and he’s mute as Yoongi leads him from the bathroom, flicking the light off as they pass through the door. His bedroom is lit softly by two matching lights suspended over the bedside tables, the curtains drawn against the rain and wind. It’s cozy, intimate. Jimin loves Yoongi’s bedroom.
He’s led past the doorway to the hall and the guest bedroom, around to the right side of the bed where Yoongi, still holding his hand, still not looking at him, peels back the duvet in a neat triangle. The hand around his squeezes once, twice, and Yoongi steps away, moving about the room to adjust the thermostat, ducks into the hallway to turn off the lights. Jimin feels like he’s on autopilot again as he unsticks his feet from the floor and climbs into Yoongi’s bed. He sits, pulls up the blanket to pool at his waist, watches as Yoongi putters about, closing the bedroom door, then his closet door. He still won’t look at Jimin and Jimin isn’t sure who’s sake it’s for.
When Yoongi finally, finally peels back his side of the duvet and slides in across from him, the words come out without forethought. “You don’t have to humour me.”
The dresser has a wide mirror above it that reflects them both from the foot of the bed. Jimin watches as Yoongi folds his hands in his lap, looks at them, and refolds them. “I’m not humouring you, Jiminie. I’m being greedy.”
They look funny, in the mirror, the space between them in Yoongi’s king bed, the way they’re both sitting upright in echoed stiff postures, like two uncertain newlyweds on the night of their arranged marriage. Jimin turns and looks at him next to him. “What do you mean?”
Yoongi’s still watching his own hands twisting over themselves in his lap. He looks so young with this haircut, Jimin thinks again.
“I’m being greedy,” he repeats. “Everyone is leaving, and I’m–” he cuts himself off, swallowing. He looks up, not at Jimin, not exactly. “Are you going to sleep in that?”
It takes him a second. His hand is halfway between the bed and his own head, freezes there when he realises he’s still wearing the hat. He forgot he was wearing it. He forgot his head was bare and shaved and he was going to have to lay it down on a pillow for the first time tonight of so many nights ahead, he forgot that it’s already begun, that already this body doesn’t belong to him anymore. He looks back to the mirror, actually sees himself. He looks ridiculous, in a hat in Yoongi’s bed.
“I turned the heat up for you.”
It’s… it’s stupid, really, it’s so stupid, because Yoongi was right fucking there in the room when Jimin had it done. He’s embarrassed, recognises the feeling of it like nausea and sunstroke, which is so, so stupid. Yoongi was there, he’s seen it. In fact, seen it twice; once in that room before Jimin jammed it on his head as soon as Seokjin and Hoseok allowed him to, and then again slipping it off his head like he was slipping a rope around his neck in front of the entire fucking fandom. And Yoongi, apparently. Lying and saying he was fine while trying to work himself up to showing the fans without fully falling to pieces, touching his head, again, again, again before finally managing to rip the bandaid off. Lying about not crying. Trying to be reassuring instead of alarming.
It feels worse. Right now, it feels worse. Scarier, somehow, to take it off only for the second time, in front of just Yoongi, to take it off to lay down to sleep for the last night. He can feel his breathing picking up, shoulders moving with it. This is so stupid, to be more afraid of taking it off in front of Yoongi than the entire fucking fandom.
A sigh from across the bed, the shifting of the mattress.
Jimin looks up and finds Yoongi looking directly at him. His body unconsciously twists towards Yoongi’s like a flower unfolding towards the sun. He’s scooched over, cross legged, facing Jimin directly.
“Can I?” His hands are halfway up already, but they wait, because the answer isn’t a given, and Yoongi’s a good listener. Jimin knows, without a doubt, that he could say no, and it would be ok. Really ok. And for someone who’s gut instinct is to always say yes, to please, to appease… it matters.
He nods, and Yoongi takes it off. Slides it off in a single motion, like a pet or stroke, the way you might run your fingers through someone's hair when they're sick and feverish. He does it quickly, gently, spares him some measure of torture, and immediately busies his hands and eyes back down in his lap, folding the black scrap into a squishy knit square. He reaches across Jimin, half in his lap, and puts it on the bedside table. It’s the same grace as the extended hand, the same grace Yoongi’s gotten so good at expressing these past years but has always intuitively held.
There’s not enough grace in the world that will get him together, though, and when Yoongi finally settles back and cautiously glances up at him, Jimin knows the way he feels like he might cease to exist altogether on the next exhale is writ clear across his face. He hesitates for a moment, searching Jimin’s face on that held breath, before his eyes cut to the side. He forces them back, though, and asks, carefully, “Can I touch you?”
It’s a weird thing to ask, not least for the fact that Yoongi knows Jimin always wants to be touched, and always gave it unspoken, liberally, freely. Something feels tenuous and fragile here, and he’s never seen Yoongi so cautious, like Jimin is a feral creature he’s trying not to spook.
It’s weird, too, to be asked that, by the one person he wants it from the most.
He knows that’s not what Yoongi means, though. Jimin knows what he’s asking, and nods again, ducks his head down and closes his eyes so he doesn't have to watch the way Yoongi's fingers are already curved to the shape of his skull before he even touches him, the way Yoongi's eyes are heavy lidded and soft and gentle the way he only gets after midnight and after a specific number of drinks, not too few and not too many.
And then those big hands are on his head, moving in a way that is familiar but not, nothing to run through, no drag and pull on the follicles, but just the right amount of weight, of firmness. Grounding and secure and soothing and careful.
Everything–
Everything that Yoongi—thirty-year-old Yoongi with his sharp eyes gone soft, sharp mouth pouted and lax and hiding that sharp tongue now dormant and tempered and aged like suntory whiskey, with his legs that are still thin like they always were and his shoulders broader than they've ever been, with his scars and his little anomalous 7 placed so tenderly on top of the most significant one—everything that thirty-year-old Yoongi is. Grounded, secure, soothing, careful.
Everything he needs right in this moment.
It’s not Seokjin and Hoseok’s aggressive onslaught from earlier, or even the heavy-handed loving pets that it turned into, sweet and trying so hard to broadcast something that was far from reach then and even further now. Yoongi’s moving with purpose, like he’s taking notice of the exact shape of the container of him, like what’s inside is beyond precious, like understanding where the bumps and the grooves and the ridges lie will give some further insight into what it’s protecting. It’s perfect. It’s exactly what he needed, the sensation grounding him, settling him back inside his own body.
That constant itching sensation from the past hours fades. It feels odd, feels foreign and strange, bright and immediate, but still. The sharpness is tempered by the warm dry weight of his touch, the span of his palms, the way he stretches both hands, all ten fingers, so that Jimin’s entire head is cradled between them. He thinks, suddenly, of the familiar image of Yoongi’s hands around a basketball, and it’s a funny thought, but instead he’s back on the edge of tears.
Yoongi must be watching his expression because his hands slip down to cup over his ears, then forward, both thumbs sweeping in tandem over either temple, then each cheekbone, as if wiping away tears that have yet to fall. He schools his expression back into passivity, and the hands split their path again, sliding back up and around.
He does it for several minutes, Jimin going through a whole three cycles of thinking he's going to burst into tears to feeling deeply, deeply tended to and centered, and then all the way back to the verge of tears again and again and again, until finally one hand slides down the back of his skull, briefly cradling the roundest curve of it before slipping down to rest across the nape of his neck, weighty and warm from friction. Jimin breathes through it, Yoongi lets him, gives him an eight count, and then gently squeezes before sliding away completely
Jimin is still just breathing, bowed like in prayer. He registers the shift of the blankets, loud in the room now comparatively, the gentle sway of the mattress shifting, and then the click of the bedside lights and the enveloping cover of darkness.
Yoongi is an economic bed partner. Jimin knows this. There's no fanfare, little fuss, laying down and immediately making himself small, shoulders rounded and knees drawn up and hands sandwiched between them. Tonight, the sheets rustle and shift noisily. He’s making a show of it, a whole bedtime performance, a semi-silent broadcast: time to settle down, time for sleep, it's bedtime now. Fussing with pillows. You too, Jimin-ah. Fluffing the comforter. Get comfy, Jimin-ah. The springs of the mattress shifting and jostling him as Yoongi turns and turns again. Come on, Jimin-ah.
Jimin lays down. He notices, immediately, the way his shorn hairs scrape against the pillow oddly, loud in his own ears. He shifts over onto his side to find Yoongi facing him instead of turned away like normal, waiting.
Jimin sighs and lets body melt, works from neck to toes and consciously relaxes every muscle, feeling his body sink into the forgiving plushness of the mattress. Yoongi is just watching him, silent, waiting still, until Jimin gives him another nod, a small smile, which he returns.
He closes his eyes then, one final shift into his comfy sleep-position, Jimin can feel the shift of his knees coming up like usual. His hands, though, stay curled up near his face, under his chin.
Jimin watches him for some time, the way the smoothness of his unlined face slackens into something bordering on cute, cheeks rounder and lips poutier and lashes longer contrasted against the paleness of his skin, even in the dark. His dark hair—which will go, too, quietly and without fanfare or reveals at some later date—shorter lately but still long enough to ruck up against the pillow, makes him look even paler in the light of the city seeping past the edges of the curtains.
Jimin breathes.
In, out.
Again.
In, out.