Archive of Our Own

hoseok can feel the hum of late-night anticipation on his skin as he waits. he waits in yoongi’s bedroom, but he isn’t there. the room is dark, and it’s the same, aesthetically pleasing level of shabby it’s always been. photographs and posters that don the walls are haphazard and strewn, but placed carefully in that order. you can tell by the meticulous placement of everything to maintain structural and color balance that has come to be yoongi’s perfectionist trademark. the bed is never made. it would look odd and out of place if it was. everything is there to look like it fell into place that way. but really, when you think about it, everything in the room had been placed there by someone. they had done it on purpose.

there’s blood in the curtains, but it doesn’t look like blood. the red has lifted too much. it’s too bright. too pink. it’s smeared into the fabric like red lipstick on a child’s face or smudged crayon, from where the two of them poured ice water on it and rubbed at it until their knuckles were the same shade of red, possibly from transfer or possibly from their own blood rushing to the rawed skin. it looks as fake as a bloodstain can. but it isn’t fake. it’s real. it came from yoongi’s nose after one drunken stumble into a door. he remembers every cyanosis-lipped, i'll-stay-until-you're-okay night, every hungover morning, and he's lost count.

car lights cast shifts over the surface of the ceiling and hoseok turns his attention to the window.

yoongi’s car pulls into the pool of yellow the street lights cast and he knocks, that way he does, on the window, and tells him “let’s get out of here”. he steps outside, per his instruction, his body illuminated orange for a brief period before he steps into the passenger seat. this used to be an invitation of freedom, of escapism and hedonism, but now, it feels more like a drive to a court hearing.

yoongi begins to drive, away from the buzz of the piss yellow suburb lights and further into the city, into the blues and purples and blacks and whites, and pale blue spills all over him.

it’s winter. the type of winter where the cold bites into your skin so bad you can’t tell if it hurts or if you like it, and his fingers are slightly purple at the ends. his knuckles are still torn and pulled up from when his fists launched against a brick wall too hard. the wounds are red and angry around the edges and it hasn’t quite settled yet. he pulls into a parking lot in an area eerily close to hoseok’s sister’s house. hoseok can hardly breathe, almost choking on possibilities that haven't happened yet, and will never happen.

“what happened to your hand?”

“it’s fine. it doesn’t hurt.” he replies, curtly. “it bled a lot.”

“didn’t you bandage it or anything?”

he shakes his head. he let himself bleed, the same way he lets hoseok give him hickeys and marks, because it reminds him of his own humanity.

hoseok looks at him. he’s always looked so striking. he matches the strewn, pulled-apart nature of his bedroom, hinting at chaos enough to be intriguing, but, at the same time, purposefully arranged that way, by lifestyle more than anything else. under the pale blue wash of the moon, he almost looks like something completely unreal. but people have looked at chaos and called it god for centuries. hoseok is, in no way, the first to do so. he also knows, now, that he’s nothing close to unreal; he’s as human as hoseok.

yoongi turns to face him, and they look at each other, both been held under duress by the fear they'd collectively spent so long cultivating. it’s only for a second, but it feels like it’s for years.

“why are we here?” hoseok asks.

yoongi looks like he’s been waiting for something. he’s been waiting for the glass to shatter around them and end the illusion, but the chain won’t break.

his lips part slightly as he intakes a breath, like breathing is easy, revealing the edges of two front teeth. there's sandpaper in his breath. the bruise on his neck has lifted, fading from the deep purple it had been to a lighter red, rimmed with green and yellow.

“i’m leaving, hoseok.”

he says it coldly, like he always does, like he hasn’t figured out by now that hoseok knows that that isn’t true. he isn’t cold — he burns like white rum on the way down, or cognac on a fire.

“leaving?” his voice comes out as a hoarse, dull whisper. he’s disappointed, but not surprised.

yoongi doesn’t look at him with the same limerence he once did. his eyes, in general, are no longer his. instead of fixating on the one, single star that is jung hoseok like they used to, they focus on the moon, waiting for it to swallow them whole. they focus on success, on his dream. he isn’t wrong for that, but it doesn’t mean it stings any less. he wants it, so bad, to be a lie, but he knows too well that they've avoided it for so long that it has to be the truth.

this is the chain finally breaking and the glass shattering.

“i have to do this.”

“you said we’d do it together.”

he doesn’t say anything. he did say they’d do it together — pursue their individual dreams together. he had said a lot of things in the heat of certain moments, and maybe, then, he did mean them, but that didn’t mean he was still tethered to them like he had been before. they had spent so long looking at who the other used to be, instead of at each other.

“i know.” he mumbles. “i’m sorry.”

“you said you loved me.”

“i did. i wish… i wish i still did.”

it’s not as easy as just loving someone. it’s not as easy as wanting to love someone. sometimes you know you should stay, but you can’t. sometimes you hurt the people you love the most because, in that moment, you can’t do anything else, and sometimes the same people hurt you, and sometimes you hurt yourself. and despite this being the truth, it still hurts when you find out you’re the backseat to someone’s plans, regardless of how selfish you know that is. they were in love enough that they thought they could get past the inevitable.

they did love each other. god, when they loved each other… it was enough to drive them both out of their minds. to love someone, really love someone, enough to not care about yourself at all, is terrifying. there were moments across the years where hoseok was nothing, and yoongi was everything. and vice versa. there were moments where yoongi was more important to him than anything, anything, else. how his touch was enough. how hearing him talk was enough. they used to be all each other thought about, unable to sleep without each other, unable to eat without feeling strange that the other wasn't beside them. unable to have a thought without wanting the other to hear it. they had known each other more than they had known themselves. but knowing someone is meaningless: people always change. and love, true love, that kind of love, is, in reality, too destructive to keep going. other things get in the way. living gets in the way. loving someone is a liminal space. it’s like the way an eclipse can blind. or like the bottom of a swimming pool, and it’s nice enough that you feel like you don’t even need to breathe, but you have to come up for air or you’ll drown. 

their heads were finally above water, even if both of them didn’t want to admit it. they’d tried to make it work, make it the way it was before. they gave each other as much as they ever could, all of themselves; filth, dirt, proof, all of it, shoving anything into each other's arms to get it to work, make it okay, stop it from changing. but it’s never as easy as just wanting to love someone.

they had been smiling as brightly as they could, laughing and holding hands, both with eyes on the exit sign. you can't change the way you feel about things.

but that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt just as much. nothing feels right anymore. nothing comes without the taste of guilt, and hands can't hold onto something for dear life for this long without bleeding. they'd been holding onto what's left, but they're both getting older, both longing for the time they know they're losing. it hurts like choking noises and silence. it hurts like pulling matted hair apart. it hurts like missing someone who's right beside you. it hurts like apologies. it hurts like they had both been pulling each end of a rubber band. they were too inextricable, too much a part of each other, to not lose a part of themselves when they lost each other.

“i wish i still did, too.”

if yoongi is the moon, then he is the sun, and an eclipse can only last so long.