Chapter Text
“catch, superstar,” namjoon calls out, tossing a wrapped burger to taehyung. perched on the rusting steel beams on the dock, the boy catches it with ease, fingers numb with autumn cold eagerly pulling the paper undone. as soon as namjoon sets it down beside him, jimin rumages in the bag dotted dark with grease, emerging with a handful of fries.
hoseok makes a face, “ugh, can’t you just take the fries out before you get your dirty germs all over everybody else’s?” jimin smiles beatifically around a partially chewed mouthful of fries.
jeongkook stares out into the water on the ledge. the dock is dark and its waters darker, the color of a rotting apple core. the fine mist sinks into the coarse leather of his jacket like hoseok’s laughter and namjoon’s deep voice curving around the words on his tongue.
the soccer ball taps his heel gently.
turning, jeongkook startles when taehyung stands, almost nose to nose with him.
“knock, knock,” he says and before jeongkook could ask him what he was talking about, taehyung pushes and jeongkook falls - back, back, back...
--
the flame in his hair by daylight dies in the slavering, persistent night, his eyes flickering lifelessly behind charcoal lashes. yet, yoongi’s head bobs with the steady run of sound coming from his fingertips, lit by the shadow the stars cast in the window then plunging fearlessly back into the darkness.
jeongkook watches, watches, watches. his head is cushioned by his backpack, a carelessly thrown uniform jacket a size too small for him over his side. the numbness in his shoulder that digs into the thin cot spreads a frost of cold down that arm. jeongkook doesn’t move.
he doesn’t want to give away that he’s awake, that he’s been awake for the past hour. he’d opened his eyes and saw rotten apple core dredge. he’d opened his eyes again and sees the room, sees the gridded windows he once drew cartoon bunnies and flowers on in the fog of his own breath. he sees yoongi there, the brown piano that was never tuned right in jeongkook’s ear - the strip of pale wood revealed by peeling varnish down one leg and the creaky bench and yoongi, always yoongi.
he clenches his hand into a tight fist, once, twice - again and again until a sickly yellow-white bleeds into the paper thin flesh of his knuckles. yoongi leans to the left, the right, a pendulum of his own keeping. tick-tick-tick. creak-creak. tick-tick-
jeongkook nearly falls asleep to the symphony, the orchestra of yoongi’s body. he blinks when the edges of a dirge bleeds out in to a lingering calore of sparkling high notes, slow and hesitantly warm like a confession. so lonely, jeongkook thinks, but who can, what can accompany the tenderness you bear?
cédez . yield. wait for the chord progression jeongkook knows so well. remembers singing nonsense to it, to yoongi, to a shrill summer like cicada cries.
jeongkook’s fist only releases to stick itself in his pocket, sluggish movement as if he’s caught in a current. he knows the ivory he feels, blackened along the side by fire and chipped at the end. jeongkook knows it like the palm of his hand, the rivers and lakes of his fingerprints. a tear escapes jeongkook’s eye, slides down his cheek, and trails into the shell of his ear.
the man at the piano thunders along with all the stumbling of a flower blooming in the cool of morning, a trumpet blare of passion, hurt, shyness like a boy, a boy in love. a boy like jeongkook. like yoongi.
“don’t give up, hyung,” jeongkook shouts into the canvas in his mind. his mirrored face is then splattered with multitudes.
and a beam of light carries the sound forth - the continuity of one line, one phrase, the same word again and again and again like a confession of love.
and jeongkook’s gone.
--
jeongkook stands on the ledge. he imagines the roar of the sea, the lap-glug of the river and the bay. the piano key is in his hand, his pocket.
safe.
he lets himself fall.
--
jeongkook sits up straight in a nightclub, silk draped on his hot skin and a hand attached to a beautiful boy who smells like peonies traveling up his inseam.
the strobe lights wave and wave and wave.
jeongkook looks the boy in the eye as he shatters a liquor bottle and slices the shard of glass across his wrist.
--
jeongkook turns and finds the library quiet, other students' heads bent over their books. jeongkook gets up from his own textbooks, footsteps purposeful. the pencil that had been lodged between his index finger and thumb when he woke drops to the ground just before he slams the doors open.
he climbs the stairs, sets the fire alarm off as he pushes the emergency rooftop exit door open, and runs forward off of the ledge.
his blood is stark against the golden yellow of his jacket.
--
jeongkook turns his head, the blankets warm and the pillows soft under his head; it's 5am.
he wearily rubs his eyes, ignores the name brand suit hanging on a hook on the back of the walk in closet's door. he smells eggs and bacon from the kitchen downstairs. he enters the hallway, reaches for the bathroom door.
"daddy?" the four year old sleepily rubs at his little face. jeongkook inhales sharply as he walks towards the toddler.
"what are you doing up so early," jeongkook pretends. the child shakes his head, shrugs clumsily.
"let's go back to bed," jeongkook almost sobs as he picks the boy up and pushes the door ajar. the little room is decorated in glow in the dark stars, posters of space cartoons, the bedposts heavy with racecar stickers and monsters inc characters.
jeongkook gently lays the boy down, "sleep just for a little while, okay? mommy will come upstairs to get you for breakfast."
"daddy," the boy whines, already half asleep, "i don't want to go to school."
"then why don't we both play hooky today," jeongkook suggests, running his palm down the blankets he's tucked around the little boy's chest, "we can play all day today, something special for the two of us."
"okay," the boy nods, “will you tell me the story about the flower? and the garden?”
jeongkook pauses, “i don’t think i know that one.”
“the man locked in the castle,” the boy murmurs before nodding off, “his heart was a star… he pulled it out. for the one he loved.” jeongkook presses the heels of his hands hard into his eyes for a moment and gets up to empty the contents of the bathroom's medicine cabinet into his mouth.
--
jeongkook opens his eyes into the open air, a sky left ravaged bruise purple by a setting sun. he can hear the ocean. he sits up, there's no one. no one but the hooded man and the door. jeongkook grips the piano key in his pocket and hopes.
--
“a train comes careening down the track,” the other says in his ear, accompanied by the strident call of steam and whistle. the art room washes itself in jealous yellow light and casts shadows, long, creeping ones from the marble casts, the statuette models, and the tall easels stacked to stand carefully in the corner.
taehyung’s voice is catching now, a hoarse chugging noise, “a man stands on a platform, the exact middle -”
jeongkook’s hands shake but they don’t stop moving across the canvas, black paint sharpening features and contrast.
“both ends, crackle-snap!” jeongkook jerks as taehyung’s hand slaps his shoulder hard, jimin smiling knowingly beside him. the shiny, polished hallway echoes with voices, students rushing for the windy taste of freedom, dance in the dust of the yard and go home.
the bodies part and yoongi, shrugged with his hands in his pockets, listens to music. he passes the trio without a second glance. jeongkook’s heart sings a familiar melody.
taehyung tilts his head, his breath like the gentle wrinkling of petals under jeongkook’s fissured skull, “lightning strikes, the man knows they are simultaneous. it’s the truth. it can’t be anything else.”
“but a passenger sits by the window on the train itself,” taehyung’s lips are so close to jeongkook’s ear, “the very middle between the train cars.”
“the distance between the lightning is the same, isn’t it?” taehyung walks with jeongkook down the halls of their school, jeongkook’s brows gathered to work the words in his mind, “but the train’s moving, you see. that changes everything.”
the image that haunts him, no matter how many times jeongkook dies, stares back at him from the canvas. it’s yoongi. it’s him. it’s taehyung. jeongkook shivers as if buried in sharp snow.
“the passenger has no choice but to think that the lightning on the end of the train had to travel further to catch up and therefore,” taehyung sits in the chair opposite the canvas, a cruel imitation of modeling for jeongkook, and he spins on the stool languidly, “the truth is that the passenger thinks the lightning in the front of the car hit first, the back second.”
his sneakers squeal as he drags his feet to stop. taehyung smiles so beautifully at jeongkook, “relativity of simultaneity all down to infinite movement, finite light, and the bracketed spectrum of individual perspective. crazy, huh?”
the painting changes - it’s a bird, its feathers dripping from its outstretched wings like wax.
jeongkook pushes the canvas aside and it makes a thunderous crackle in the air as the canvas rips and the wood clatters, broken. he lunges for taehyung and grabs him by the collar, the fabric of the shirt straining in between jeongkook’s hooked fingers.
“so, tell me, jeongkook,” seokjin chokes out, “are you the man on the platform or the man in the train?”
the scene changes - it’s a beach. jeongkook knows the grains of sand under his feet like a lover’s body. he recognizes the peculiar song the tide brings, measure upon measure upon measure. he’s been here before. they all have.
jeongkook grits his teeth, tears running down his pale face, “how could you do this, hyung?”
“what else could i do?”
jeongkook releases seokjin, all strength leeching out of him like the warmth being robbed by the ocean winds. he stumbles a little but seokjin, a marble statue against the backdrop of a pale blue evening horizon, remains still.
“your threads keep fraying at the ends,” the older man calmly reasons, “i’m only trying to -”
“do you know,” jeongkook’s voice croaks, leaving breathy spaces between his struggling words, “what i had to do to get here?”
“yes,” seokjin replies easily.
“then why -”
“it doesn’t matter, jeongkook,” seokjin’s arms are loose and relaxed, “it doesn’t matter.”
at that, jeongkook threw himself against seokjin and clinging to his collar once again. he snarls, “where's taehyung hyung?! what have you done to him? where's yoongi hyung, namjoon hyung, hose-”
“do you know how black holes are created, jeongkook?" the thing asks in taehyung’s voice, taehyung’s eyes becoming a hovering separated, half-mask on seokjin's left brow, "a star has to collapse into itself and die. they say a door opens in the center of this deformity in space-time, a compressed point with enormous mass and gravity and where all the law of physics become nonexistent."
jeongkook releases this hybrid of faces, this monstrosity with sharp pants of fear. the hole in the man’s chest expands in pulses, then contracts.
"strands of time, matter, universes curved and twisted behind this door," taehyung-seokjin chants, "a door is a door and the flash of light remains the same."
--
a breeze, warm and soft, courses through the trees like thread woven tightly between each other. sunlight streams down past the leaves above, turning verdant green spades onto their silver underbellies for just a brief moment.
jeongkook sits, rigid, on the lump of root exposed by wind and rain, by drought and flood.
seokjin leans his head against the trunk’s bark, the camera limp in his lap.
they let the sunshine pass over them like stabs of sudden violence. the distant call of the boys roughhousing and laughing doesn’t move them.
“i can take the strands and divert them, tie them together, undo them,” seokjin whispers, “but we always. always. find each other.”
“is it frustrating?” jeongkook is cruel. his face falls when seokjin swings the camera lens towards him.
“sometimes,” seokjin captures the play of shadow on jeongkook’s features.
--
the silence in the remnants of namjoon and taehyung’s fight sizzles and crackles like the small bonfire in the middle of the circle of bodies they made. jeongkook leans on the armrest, knees tucked to his chest and the long length of warmth radiating from seokjin.
yoongi’s eyes are far away as he stares at the fire.
“what are you?” jeongkook breathes.
“i’m seokjin,” the man beside him says, “i’ve always been seokjin.”
“what about him?” jeongkook jerks his chin towards the tawny haired boy across the way from them.
“he’s always been taehyung.”
jeongkook scoffs, “that’s impossible.” a fierce anger that near blinds his vision with hot red builds in cascades behind the bone of his sternum, “what you’re doing is impossible.”
seokjin’s eyes reflect a negative of the glowing fire in front of them, the pad of his index finger runs down the edge of the polaroid, and doesn’t reply but to turn to hoseok to say the words he’s said a million, million times.
--
yoongi stares ahead.
at what, jeongkook doesn’t know but he can only take a moment to watch how the huffs of hot, humid summer breezes makes yoongi’s hair shift. lifting the last of their dirty briefs and sweat damp t-shirts into the washing machine, jeongkook leans forward on the lip of the giant metal drum, palms turning pale yellow.
he sighs, takes several deep breaths before he drops some detergent inside, closes the lid carefully, then kicks the metal side before pressing a button that makes it whir resentfully to life. it is the second load today so jeongkook clasps his hands together and begs (like time and time again), please work until the clothes are clean, at least.
later, jeongkook lays their clothes on the drying rack outside, in the garden under the large bent oak tree. shirt after shirt, sleep pants after sweatpants come up from the basket at jeongkook’s feet. he shakes the blanket cover last, carefully, making sure it doesn’t skid along the ground. after some struggle, he manages to hook it across the two lines he had tied to some clasps on the wall that were meant originally for a hanging outdoor light to be installed and wrapped around the other end to the trunk of the tree. panting a little, jeongkook checks on yoongi.
the man holds a towel limply in his hand, eyes up into the leaves that grant him undulating shade. he sits so still, jeongkook’s heart can’t help but to drop to where his stomach is. he walks gently towards yoongi, hands out and trembling with the effort to be gentle.
“it’s okay, hyung,” jeongkook whispers, the shrill song of cicadas overpowering the words, “it’s okay.” he takes the dry towel from yoongi and folds it fast, places it on the pile jeongkook had already folded. he puts his hands on his waist, shrugging his left shoulder to wipe away the sweat welling at his hairline. this town had always been quiet but in the summer, it doesn’t even dare to breathe for fear of letting the wetly suppressive heat enter their mouths, their houses. jeongkook likes it this way, silent and calm. for yoongi.
he squats, to meet where yoongi’s gaze is resting on the one thick root that sticks up in a half circle from the golden brown dirt of their front yard, “hyung, do you want more ice?” the sound of water disturbed by yoongi’s listless feet, pale under the breaking prism of it back and forth. the red rubber tub had been a lucky find at the dump; jeongkook had immediately thought of their first summer in this house – yoongi and his eyes as big as dinner plates, shirt off, and thin skin absorbing the sickly light from the tv.
but so slowly, yoongi’s hand comes out to brush jeongkook’s disheveled hair from the man’s eyes. jeongkook smiles reassuringly, his breath held tight to his throat. yoongi looks away. jeongkook does, too, and gets up and into the house. he brings out two ice trays and lightly breaks them in his big hands, hitting at the bottom of the trays as he flips them upside down into the churning water. the ice falls in with a plop and almost melt right away.
--
jeongkook runs, the hermit crab tucked between his index finger and thumb wriggling to be free. hoseok shrieks, “go away, go away, jeon jeongkook!” the shell is worn and smooth and jeongkook drops him down into the mire.
namjoon’s breathy, hoarse laugh squeaks at the end and taehyung wraps himself around the man’s waist, tears from laughing so hard dripping down his cheeks. yoongi’s pointing from his perch in the back of the truck while jimin blinks awake, sliding out of the back seat while smacking his lips tiredly.
jeongkook finally stops, chest heaving with blood pumping like wildfire in his veins and straining for more. he barks out a laugh, eyes crinkling into half moons and his mouth upticks in quick succession. turning to the white sun, he shades his narrowed eyes with a palm along his brow.
his hand drops. seokjin stands under the light, half hidden in mirage with a wistful smile, an image there and not there at the same time, on his face.
is this what you’re looking for, jeongkook wonders.
and finally. finally, seokjin beams ever brighter.
yes.
--
seokjin stands on the edge.
the tower is old and rusted but the platform is sure under the pads of his feet.
he looks down at the dock. no one is there. no one waits for him.
he takes a few steps back, then forward - faster, faster, faster -
--
yoongi wakes up to no one beside him. he is sure that he woke only because jeongkook pressed a kiss to the first knot of his spine, the tender skin-blue space right in the center of his shoulders.
he sits up in bed, his fingers and palm seeking the residual heat of the other boy’s body on the thin cotton sheets and is disappointed each time to find something that just isn’t there.
he hears jeongkook puttering around in the small kitchen, can see his heels under the door as he moves about. the smell of rice is nauseating. the kimchi jjigae that bubbles on the stove makes it worse.
he doesn’t remember how long this has been but he know jeongkook’s been with him, even before the reel of film coiled in his skull breaks and is cut in half.
there was a fight, no, a disagreement. a man. he was big. yoongi protected jeongkook. he hit his head. something about a fever. no. the envelopes from the hospital jeongkook hides in a purple folder in the shed. a jumble of letters that has jeongkook pouring over numbers he didn’t seem to know how to fit into which box.
yoongi was good at math once. that, he remembers.
yoongi gets up, pushes the blankets into a mound of fabric against the wall and left the futon just as it was on the floor. he scratches his stomach lazily and enters their kitchen/living room/second bedroom. the breakfast table is set right against the lower cabinets, six inches away from the mini-fridge, the tv is on low.
he sits, pushes around his rice in the little chipped bowl that fit right in the palm of his hand. jeongkook asks him things, he replies with some kind of sound, jeongkook laughs and yoongi doesn’t know why.
jeongkook excitedly lays a slice of spam on top of the rice on yoongi’s spoon. yoongi looks at it, then at the boy. he is smiling like the moon. is this love, yoongi wonders, as he puts the rice, the ham in his mouth.
when yoongi turns on the stove later, jeongkook nearly bowls him over to push him away. the boy’s face is no moon but a sun, burning and burning. he slaps yoongi across the face.
“don’t ever do that,” jeongkook snaps.
and yoongi knows, can’t say it as his cold fingertips traced the flush blooming on his cheek. but yoongi knows this is love. this burning, cracking, smoking thing.
--
“don’t blame me, jeongkook,” seokjin and jeongkook watch taehyung stab his father, again and again.
“who should i blame?” jeongkook’s voice is accusatory, cruel. seokjin gestures to taehyung.
taehyung’s face flickering in and out in place of namjoon’s. hoseok lunges for taehyung’s hand but he’s nowhere to be found when namjoon thrusts the green bottle into the man’s stomach. taehyung pants, cries, presses down on his father’s stomach - to help? to rush things along? jeongkook can’t tell in the dim light of the apartment.
“no one told him to collapse,” seokjin places two sympathetic hands on jeongkook’s shoulders, “to die. i did what i had to so i could protect him.”
“to protect yourself,” the heat behind jeongkook’s eyes hurts but seokjin’s nails digging into his flesh as jeongkook pulls away hurts more, “that’s not fair.”
“life’s not fair.”
the pair’s attention turns back to the scene.
“when you love something,” seokjin speaks, “something so much, you’d do anything for it.”
“anything,” jeongkook can feel the scrape of the pavement against his cheek before his head broke open. taehyung slumps against the wall, wailing and hands drenched in blood trembling as he covers his eyes.
“and i loved,” seokjin sounds choked, for the first time, “i loved. my heart. you, with all my heart.”
“no,” jeongkook gasps, watching hoseok shake taehyung, scream something into his catatonic expression. run away, hoseok’s lips say. i can’t, namjoon replies. run, taehyung shrieks, desperate tears run down his face. i can’t. taehyung replies.
“so i did it,” seokjin admitted coolly, “i did what i had to."
“i can’t,” jeongkook shakes his head slowly.
“you can’t,” seokjin agrees in a whisper.
“i can’t!” jeongkook yells, bursting out of the apartment and leaving behind the scene only to find himself atop the tower.
“jeongkook, don’t!” seokjin calls, scared, from behind him.
can you hear it ? yoongi’s voice asks. jeongkook whispers his response to seokjin’s outstretched hand.
a skeleton. turning with a smooth pivot of his ankle, jeongkook runs harder towards the edge.
--
jeongkook falls.
he falls into snow.
his footsteps make crisp sounds as he makes his way next to seokjin. the man’s back is to him and he barely acknowledges jeongkook.
they watch the group of boys, seven in total, make their own footwells in the cold. towards what, jeongkook knows, but he wonders if they do. if seokjin does. jimin’s stupid knit hat is glaring from the distance, a mess of different patterns and colors. taehyung deemed it cool as he pulled the hat further down to cover jimin’s ears and eyes. jimin had laughed and so had he. the smell from the laundry detergent followed th -
no, that’s not true. jeongkook shakes his head - they’ve never been here.
the spindly branches of the great tree weave spells with no name and perhaps it is this movement that makes the wisps of clouds move fast across the piercing blue sky instead of the wind. jeongkook blinks furiously to keep the dust of ice and unsettled snow from his eyes.
when the air dies, jeongkook asks, “do you love us, hyung?”
the tip of seokjin’s nose is red with cold - what an odd thing. “i’ve been here before,” he speaks finally, “but i can’t seem to find it again.”
“it’s gone,” jeongkook says, “it’s never been.”
“you can’t say that,” seokjin’s tone belies the speed and blade edge of his words with which he answers, “you don’t know.”
the group grows closer, namjoon bringing up the rear and yoongi’s shoulders up to his ears with hoseok’s gloved hand on the small of his back.
“stop this, hyung,” jeongkook begs.
“what makes you so special, jeon jeongkook,” seokjin ignores him.
“what?” jeongkook finally turns to him.
“they’re just as aware as you or they will be or they were,” seokjin tells him, “they knew, will know. they’re the passenger on the train, the platform, just like you but not like you at all.”
“by rights, you shouldn’t even be talking to me,” seokjin goes on, “but why? aren’t you afraid i might leave you behind?”
a reel spins wildly against the screen in the sky - the dock with black water, the abandoned train tracks, the little room with feathers on the ground, the sea at the sudden break of morning. namjoon’s bleeding face as he turns his back on them, seven branches like fine veins separating from the source and dying like a disease.
jimin spinning and spinning in front of a mirror. yoongi at a piano, staring up at the ceiling while his mother patiently coaxes him back to reality. the clanging of bells, fairground chatter, the smell of cotton candy fused to children’s hands.
an old, grizzled hoseok sitting in a wheelchair in an echoing hall, confused and alone. the safety bars on the window casting shadow on toddler jeongkook’s face.
then, the night sky littered with stars.
no, it’s lights, round, white things, of a different kind. voices, hundreds and thousands of them, so many of them join in chanting a name jeongkook doesn’t recognize. they’re waving now, again and again like pale flowers in a field, to a melody and chorus that only they know and jeongkook’s wonder changes into horror as it all warps into a star.
the star dies, again and again, taking with it the images. then, reborn. then dying. again and again.
“you can’t cut away sadness, hyung,” jeongkook reasons, panicked and pale, “or splice suffering. that’s not about time or space or whatever power you have to control them!”
seokjin stays still, silent. he’s seeing what jeongkook can’t - his palm lifts, the fingertips curled a little as he reaches out.
“hyung,” jeongkook pleads, his fingers digging into seokjin’s arm, “you can’t change us. we aren’t strings of yarn to tie in one way or undo in another. we’re people. and we were happy, just not happy enough for you.”
seokjin doesn’t speak, lets his arm drop to his side lifelessly and jeongkook’s hold falls away.
the star implodes in brilliance behind him again and again. a door somewhere swings open. hoseok stops in his tracks, turns as if looking at them - really looking.
“you’re wrong,” seokjin’s voice whispers like shifting sand, “you’re wrong.”
the wind carries the grains with a hiss and jeongkook hears it - a confession of love murmured in the dark, a deep, unabiding love, mottled and twisted adoration like knotted string, slithering in perfect rhythm in the space that grows between them.
--
they don’t talk about it again, how the crack of skin against palm echoed in the hut they call home. the bruise stays for weeks.
jeongkook goes on with the days as if his leg is missing, limping and wounded. yoongi does too, but in different ways. he’s been refusing to eat, to be showered while jeongkook’s in the bathroom with him. afraid to touch him, jeongkook lets him not do things. he watches balefully as yoongi sometimes drips ice cold water from the bath on the patio floor.
tonight, the tv is turned off, jeongkook slinks into the bedroom, and yoongi remains backlit by the outdoor light hinged onto the side of the house.
he stays there for a time before going back to melt into the humid, rotting walls. his feet take him to bed but they stop on the edge of the futon.
“hyung,” jeongkook blearily groans.
yoongi doesn’t say anything but take his shirt off, his pants, his underwear. he stands there, waiting for jeongkook to look, to look .
he does but not in the way yoongi needs. his hand shakes as he drags it down the center of yoongi’s chest to his belly. then lower before retracting the limb as if he’d been burned. yoongi’s fingers are tight around jeongkook’s wrist and pulls the palm back onto his skin.
when jeongkook pulls him to lie down underneath him, yoongi goes quietly. it’s tender, warm, and real. yoongi closed his eyes when jeongkook pushes inside after what feels like a million, million years. he clings even after jeongkook’s done and so does jeongkook.
“jeongkook,” yoongi rasps. jeongkook’s head jerks up, his large round eyes seeking yoongi’s.
they stare for a while, the quiet stretching up and around them like a breeze. a splash of a tear falls on yoongi’s collarbone and he reaches up to cup jeongkook’s face, thumb working across the road it made from jeongkook’s eye to his body.
“i’m all right,” jeongkook laughs, his throat hitching wetly on the words, “i’m just so happy.”
yoongi doesn’t understand how, when this had been a goodbye. they move together to pillow yoongi’s head on jeongkook’s shoulder and hook jeongkook’s arm around his shoulders.
how sweet it’ll be to see the light again, yoongi thinks before he drifts off, the light that is white and shining and constant and jeongkook on the other side, where i can protect him this time.
--
“you think we were ever happy?” seokjin asks, smelling of brine, the sea.
jeongkook and seokjin stand at the bottom of the stair, jimin staring into space, hunched at the bottom of a stair tiled in fake marbled white and black, a pool of blood at his feet. the yellow of his own jacket hurts jeongkook’s eyes.
“you don’t even remember it,” seokjin whispers, suddenly harsh as his wet hand clawed tightly on jeongkook’s shoulder.
jeongkook wails, wrapping his arms around namjoon’s legs, the man dangling from the place where he’d hung himself.
“we were never happy.”
jeongkook pulls hoseok from the water though his shirt, the delicate silk, weighs him down with the river, pulling at the already cold hand.
“but we will be,” seokjin disappears in light, “because i do.”
--
the whistle comes easy from jeongkook’s pouted lips, easy and sweet like a summer in which lovers want to linger. the plastic bag handle rubs the tender flesh of his fingers and jeongkook hopes the melona bars don’t melt before he gets home. it’s a metronome with a scratchy sound, tick-tick-tick -
he wants to see yoongi’s face when he holds the box aloft like treasure.
the smell doesn’t come easy - it’s sudden and raw, the smell of smoke. jeongkook’s eyes lift to the peak of the hill. faint traces of it curl in the air. the bag falls from his hand and jeongkook runs.
runs up and up the serpentine of the old, crooked road until the townspeople begin to thicken around the ashen house.
“what happened,” jeongkook cries out, “ where’s -” he doesn’t finish and runs past the gates. no one stops him. the wood breaks apart as he passes by, arm slung over his nose and mouth to keep the ash from invading his lungs, the wet tissue of the back of his throat.
the fire blinds him, making him scald his hand and arm in order to find his way through the ruins of what was once so claustrophobically familiar. the door hangs diagonally, dragged further and further down by the blaze and jeongkook kicks once, twice at it to crumble it completely.
yoongi is so small there, limbs askew as if he’d simply gone to sleep, leaving something to burn on the stove. his nose raw with the smell of gasoline, jeongkook thinks that’s what yoongi wanted them to believe.
he goes to his knees on the bedside, pats yoongi’s cheek, “please, please!” yoongi stirs, a muted twitch of his eyelid. it’s what makes jeongkook stand, pull yoongi off the bed; he loses strength for a moment, sagging, until he stood up taller to lift yoongi in his arms and go back.
the air is sweeter than ice cream and jeongkook is greedy for it, swallowing it up in a hurry. his chest inflates to the point where it might break but it doesn’t and sinks back down. he stumbles in the yard and falls to one knee.
they are under the shadow of the gnarled persimmon tree now, its wooden branches singed, not yet burning. what an odd thing, jeongkook dizzily thinks as his heavy eyelids struggle to lift back up, what an odd thing.
because they’re not outside and jeongkook never gets to his feet.
he stays there, knelt on the floor, as yoongi opens his eyes. jeongkook smiles then, tear tracks making his soot-drenched skin clean in the places they decide to settle in. his hand clasps yoongi’s tightly and jeongkook shifts as the leg of his jeans grates against the hyperfeeling skin of his knees.
yoongi squeezes weakly and jeongkook laughs under his breath.
“i’m happy,” he says thickly, “i am.” yoongi’s eyes mirror the flame - it’s a flickering thing, an image of a bird rising with its wings wide in flight.
“i am,” jeongkook speaks again.
“i am,” jeongkook says to seokjin, the figure in the doorframe. to taehyung beside him. he sniffles hard, wiping his nose and face with his charred sleeve. jeongkook swallows, nodding as the fire grows taller, brighter around them.
yoongi continues to stare. jeongkook bows his head, places his forehead against the covers as the light encroaches, the building shakes.
but as he lifts his head, jeongkook is determined - his love is not dark and tangled. he can see it clearly - the sea, the rolling of the water, yoongi’s blue eyes. that is real.
he can undo all of this, he’s sure. he can do what seokjin can’t. he can remember too. he needs to fall. yoongi squeezes his hand again, harder.
and with that, jeongkook dives back into the deep waiting for him without fear, into the sea as the low valleys and hills of his and yoongi’s song roars like the whistle-rush of blood in his ear, like the bone snap of fire, like a car speeding recklessly past sidewalks in a quiet city.