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OPINION – Back to School Special

April 29, 2015

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD, Ferry Isle Sentinel

Ten years ago, the County Board of Education released a plan promising upgraded facilities and technology in the classroom, increased funds for teacher training, and reduced class sizes. Today this dream of scholastic excellence is further than ever before – a joke, a rimshot with no rebound.

This year’s round of damaging cuts to local school budgets will eliminate 7 full-time instructor positions and vital after-school programs in sports and music. All those sitting on the sidelines and shaking their heads in disbelief need to snap out of it. This is more than a fourth quarter collapse, and we’ve run out of time-outs. 

For years local politicians have screwed over our schools in a jungle of back-room deals and secret handshakes made with the entrenched commercial interests that run this town. In this vicious cycle of money laundering, funds earmarked for school improvements – already shortchanged thanks to eternally popular caps on property taxes – have been funneled into the twin teats of tourism and construction, buying our silence as citizens and permitting those at fault to escape even the court of public opinion.

Time and time again, we have allowed ourselves to be sedated by promises of instant prosperity. In doing so, we have thrown away the futures of the next generation. Any sudden onslaught of shock at our schools’ looming reality is hypocrisy pure and simple. As a poet once put it – “the lies get me vexed-er.”

We’re eating our young. Our students – your children, trapped inside aging classrooms where their only education is neglect – are the real victims of the status quo. As bystanders, we are complicit with the perpetrators, and we’ve lost the right to cry foul.

Are you happy now?

~

Maybe, Jeongguk thinks as he gets off the phone with Jimin, the place would feel more authentic if it smelled a little sweatier, like a proper gym. Not that he actually likes the smell of sweat himself – he’s always been sensitive to scents – but this vaguely cedar-y spritz they use in the dojang space masks any trace of effort in the whole enterprise. And a lack of effort is definitely not what Jeongguk is about.

The Jeon-do Method. Namjoon suggested it late one tipsy night out at a bar when the whole crazy idea was beginning to come together. True to form, Yoongi objected. “You give people too much credit, Joon,” he’d said, pausing on his fourth bottle of soju, “Guk’s not aiming to train nerds like you – he’s going for amped-up finance guys and skinny-ass socialites who are gonna stop dead in their tracks trying to pronounce ‘Jeon’ before they even get to the shitty pun.” But then Hoseok jumped in, chin tilted and brows knit slightly like they always did when he shifted into serious mode. “No, no, Yoongi, that’s not the target audience here. The clever little name is for all those magazines and lifestyle sites he needs for the initial wave of press. It conjures up all the key phrases, you know – mental clarity, physical rigor, spiritual purity – all packaged into Mr. Hot Bod over here as brand ambassador. You gotta show’em just enough of a pseudo intellectual veneer that they write it up as exclusive and hip, and that’ll bring the real clients in. No offense, Gukkie.”

“None taken, hyung.” The hot bod thing made him grin a bit, he couldn’t help it. 

“And,” Seokjin put in from the corner where he sat pink-cheeked and with his sleeves finally rolled up past his forearms, “the whole Korean ethos could actually work in your favor. Hallyu and all that. Play that up for all it’s worth.”

Namjoon groaned into his hands. “I can’t believe I’m a party to this crass commercialization of our collective heritage.”  The table collectively rolled its eyes, Seokjin elbowing him in the side for good measure.

“But Joonie-hyung,” Taehyung piped up, “you’re looking at this all wrong. Think about it – our maknae here could become a veritable Trojan horse of Korean culture for this fair city. His clients’ll think all they’re getting are super ripped abs and buns of steel, but while he’s making them do endless reps of one of his weird taekwondo-y moves he can distract them from the pain by teaching them all about the postcolonial history of martial arts––”

“Oh like that won’t kill the vibe, Tae, c’mon.”

“––and he can talk all about traditional medicinal practices and alternative theories of the body while he’s forcing them to do those funky cool down exercises and––”

“Way too ambitious for the bounds of the dojang, buddy––” 

“––he could even tweak his elite membership spiel to work in a bit on homosociality and hwarang culture! Seriously!”

“Those are noble goals, Taetae,” said Jimin, uncurling himself from Yoongi’s arm and leaning in with laughter writ large on his cheeks, “but maybe he should focus on the things that will actually help him pay his rent. The kid’s got to eat once he graduates, and you know how much Jeonggukkie can eat.”

Maybe what he does sounds a little stupid, a little superficial compared to everyone else’s postgrad trajectory, but Jeongguk’s turned it into something respectable, successful. Yes, he knows personal training is a counter-intuitive career path for someone who’s got an honors degree from a respected institution of higher education hanging up on his wall, but within just a couple years Jeongguk’s managed to transition what began as a single-roomed studio into a sleek complex in a much wealthier neighborhood with three employees working underneath him. (It was actually a late-night conversation with Taehyung that made him go for it, Taehyung who’d asked him point blank whether biomedical engineering was just a placeholder for him, and what would he actually like to do instead. Jeongguk, scholar-athlete to the core, had shyly replied that he’d recently gotten a personal training certification on the side, just for the hell of it, since he couldn’t stop himself from correcting everyone’s posture on the machines whenever he went to the gym.) His clients, among them the uber-wealthy and not a few celebrities in the mix, come for the martial arts-infused instruction he provides and stay for both the results and the strict anonymity he guarantees. The hyungs were right, in the end – beyond that initial brief burst of orchestrated features in the all the right outlets (free, thanks to Seokjin cutting his teeth in the industry), he’s never had to advertise. In fact, he’s going to have to start turning away clients unless he opens another location, which, he won’t deny it, could be in the cards if he crunches the numbers properly. It’s been good fortune to go debt-free so quickly, but there’s also been a ton of sweat equity on his part.

But as much as Jeongguk’s trying to build something here, it’s not the business end that satisfies him the most. He actually gets a lot out of helping his clients reach their fitness goals, develop proper form, get stronger, find discipline. He’s proud of them, in a way. Sure, he has to deal with any number of shallow, image-obsessed people in his day-to-day, but that’s the nature of the industry. A lot of his clients are driven, committed individuals – they feel like equals, and they respect what Jeongguk has to offer beyond some astringently-scented, fashionably austere space in which to strip down to overpriced workout wear. 

His seven o’clock this evening, the last appointment on the books, is Sara, who he thinks must be in-house counsel somewhere, given that she’s a lawyer who still manages to show up for all her sessions. Maybe 30, he’s not sure, and lean like a marathon runner. She probably has the mentality for it, he thinks. Jeongguk appreciates the days when Sara’s his last client – she’s reliably focused from start to finish, unlike the majority who get progressively sloppier as their day finally catches up to them, and she’s got a calm demeanor he’s always thought well-suited to his particular brand of physical fitness.  

She seems to be in a particularly good mood this evening. There’s an advanced degree of relaxation in how Sara’s flowing through her forms today; her shoulders are down more, her extensions cleaner. When their eyes meet in the mirrored wall opposite, he notices a flicker of a smile before she schools her face.

Jeongguk generally tries to avoid too much personal conversation with his clients – which works with the alluringly aloof vibe he’s become famous for – but this change is marked and noteworthy. He waits until they come to an end with the forms, when Sara pauses for feedback before they move on to sparring. “Something go well recently?” he ventures, “You look nice and loose today.”

She looks up at him sideways with a full grin from where she’s bent over to take a quick sip from her water bottle. “I’m getting a promotion!” she says, a slight bounce to her voice as she sets the bottle down and straightens up, stretching her arms out over her head with palms facing the ceiling before bringing them down again by her sides. “I just…made it happen! Somehow. After waiting for months, I decided to walk into the room and straight up ask for it, and they gave it to me. Just like that. So I’m kind of feeling like I can make anything happen today.”

Her face is tilted up a bit and shining brightly, so he laughs and smiles back. “I’m absolutely sure you could,” he says as he moves to the corner to retrieve the light protective gear they need for the sparring portion, “so channel that feeling – come and get me.”

This is, Jeongguk realizes only moments later, an unforced error. He spends the rest of the hour with a growing dread in the pit of his stomach, pretty sure of what’s coming, and sure enough, as the session wraps up, co-stretching done, Sara lingers on the edge of the mat, like she’s gathering up the courage to say something.

“Is everything alright?” he asks, knowing full well that for him, at least, it’s not.

“I was wondering,” she begins, and sure enough, he can tell exactly where this is going and there’s no stopping it, “I mean, I know, I’m a lawyer, so of all people I should know about conflicts of interest, etcetera, but it’s my lucky day and you’re hot so…do you want to get a drink sometime?” She runs through the end of the sentence like someone completing the last three reps of their fifth set of pushups, a little rushed and shaky but pushed through by sheer force of will. Jeongguk gathers up what remains of his own willpower to keep the cringe off his face and inject what he can only hope is a dose of Suave Jeon into his voice. (This is usually achieved by asking himself What Would Seokjin Do?, but there’s no time to think through that right now.)

“I, uh, don’t really drink?” He’s had most of this session to think up the right way to turn her down, and the best he can squeeze out in the panic, once the moment is actually upon him, is both a total lie and easily vulnerable to counterattack, with, like, a bowling date or something. It’s not a clear refusal, more of a delay tactic, and he can just see the gears turning in her head as she tries to spin it positively. She thinks he’s hot. He’s got to put an end to this. “And, uh, I’m just trying to focus on my career right now, so I’m…not really great with conflict resolution off the mat?” The lamest of the lame. Hopefully it’ll be enough.

Sara’s got a final round left, though. “Well, You know what they say,” she says, though a wry resignation has already seeped into her voice, “all work and no play makes Jeongguk a dull boy.”

“Uh, yep. I’ll keep that in mind,” Jeongguk squeezes out as he makes for the door, thinking that he, too, would give his god-damned soul for just a glass of beer and a better way out of this. “See you next week?” he manages, before ducking into the relative safety of the men’s changing room.

He’s already regretting it later, playing it back over and over as he yanks on his light jacket, locks up, and walks thirty blocks home under a dusky sky and one flight up to his affordably-priced one-bedroom. He’s regretting it as he changes out of his work sweats into his home sweats (there is a difference, he swears). He’s regretting it when he orders in a large pizza he plans on mostly polishing off that evening because on days like these, nutrition can go fuck itself. And by the time he’s halfway through his ultimate pepperoni and a rewatch of the first season of Rick and Morty, it occurs to him exactly what he’s regretting, and that it’s all Jimin’s fault.

Well, maybe it’s his own fault for suggesting the bet in the first place, but Jimin’s totally complicit in having agreed to go along with it so enthusiastically. And Jeongguk’s just screwed up yet another perfectly good chance to take care of things once and for all. 

It’s not that he regrets turning down Sara specifically. She’s perfectly nice, inoffensively nice, it’s just…nothing, the latest in a long string of nothings whose invitations he’s been dodging with excuses about fake relationships or conflicts that don’t really exist. That was the whole point to begin with, this vast sense of nothing that’s been Jeongguk’s actual life ever since he graduated and they all began scattering apart, first Hoseok to D.C., then Taehyung back home to California, Seokjin off to London, then Namjoon to Seoul, and Yoongi…well, Yoongi…and now Jimin headed out West too. Because for all Jeongguk plays hot and mysterious personal trainer by day, real life, life outside work, has become an endless marathon of killing time – binge watches and takeout and extraneous workouts and video games to fill the space in his living room where he falls asleep more nights than in his bedroom now. In college he used to be someone, someone with a schedule full of tests and club meetings and nights out with the guys and end-of-semester showcases. Now he has a routine that’s not even worth putting on a calendar, and he’s not sure where all the rest of that went.

It’s not that he doesn’t want hobbies, everyone wants hobbies, but in the two-decade-long quest for excellence that took up his pre-now existence, he never really had the time to figure out how to develop them. (He doesn’t think video games and TV count.) It’s not like he can join one of those adult intramural things that seem designed to pave the way for awkward twentysomethings to talk to each other – he’s professionally athletic, it’s unfair. He could maybe work on some original choreo and post it online – he was in dance club in college, after all – but he’s not really sure that fits with his personal brand anymore. He even thought about getting a tattoo until Seokjin told him it “wasn’t professional” and Hoseok pointedly asked him if he even had an idea of something he wanted and he’d come up blank.

None of this is really the problem. 

The real problem is this: at age twenty-three, with a lease and a business to his name, a body he’s grown into, and a flattering haircut maintainable with a minimum of styling products, Jeongguk’s never had a relationship. Nothing serious, anyway. An awkward kiss way back in high school at one of the few parties he’d gone to, but nothing further than that. And it’s just…it’s embarrassing, is what it is. He’s supposed to be an adult, and while he knows this isn’t everything, that “normal” is just a fiction in the world of human sexuality (at least according to Namjoon, on any number of occasions), Jeongguk can’t help thinking that finally taking care of this virginity-in-every-way-imaginable, adding in this important dimension of existence, might be the kick that he needs to start running toward a life that feels like something again.

It’s not like he’s not attracted to people – he’s retroactively realized that he probably had a sort of love-hate dynamic with Neera, his rival for valedictorian all throughout high school, and, slightly wiser but no less awkward in college, he spent an entire semester freezing up in front of the cute guy who made his coffee every morning before organic chemistry until Jimin called him “more hopeless than Namjoon.”

The intervening years haven’t given him much more practice in approaching men or women – it’s fallen along the wayside with hobby-acquisition in terms of Skills Jeongguk Didn’t Have Time to Hone, Thank You. Namjoon’s not even that hopeless anymore, so it’s just Jeongguk stuck in the only-sexually-active-when-solo basket, and he wants out. He doesn’t want to be the only one with this still hanging around his neck. He thinks the hyungs have their suspicions – they’ve always teased him for being shy when they all go out together – but Jimin’s the only one who really knows for sure. And that’s because he had an epiphany at 3am one night back in February (maybe around Valentine’s Day, whatever) after going down a TED Talk rabbit hole.

He needed to incentivize this whole process. 

So that evening, when Jimin had dragged him out to a comedy show to celebrate his latest med school acceptance, Jeongguk had come clean in the interest of unstunting his personal growth and made Jimin a proposition that he couldn’t refuse.

1) That night he would give Jimin a signed check for $500, and

2) if, within 6 months, he had failed to either get laid OR enter into a serious relationship, Jimin could cash it, but

3) if he succeeded, he’d get to be Jimin’s first guest at his new place out in San Francisco, before Taehyung or anyone else.

Standing in line, face tilted upwards above way too much scarf, Jimin had listened, expression slowly morphing from initial skepticism into suppressed mirth, with a gleam in his eye and a quirk to his lips that told Jeongguk that the lid was fully off this particular Pandora’s box. Jimin even spent the next day screwing around at work in order to draw up an authentic-looking contract in perfect legalese that he’d made both of them sign, with a confidentiality clause that Jeongguk had insisted he include so that word of this didn’t leak out to the other hyungs until he’d proven himself for good or ill. It was kind of awesome of him, honestly. Jimin’s a good friend; if he’s going to stab you in the back, he’ll at least try to make it an enjoyable experience. Jeongguk’s going to miss him way more than he wants to admit.

Now that this ticking time bomb of blackmail has been sitting in Jimin’s drawer for over two months, it’s clear that Jeongguk’s Incentivization Initiative has not been going according to plan. It’s almost had the opposite effect, dialing his social anxiety up to eleven. Far from proactively going out to meet people, Jeongguk’s now even dodging interest when it’s thrown directly at him, like it’s some reflex he hasn’t unlocked the key to deprogramming yet. It’s the weirdest thing; he doesn’t even know why he flips the switch into panic mode on this when he’s spent a whole lifetime facing the things he’s afraid of and coming out on top.  He jumped off the high diving board at summer camp when he was eleven. He sang a three-minute solo with his high school choir in front of a sold-out concert hall. He ate those chocolate-covered spiders that Hoseok brought back one summer and dared him to try. But those were all known quantities: 7.5 meters, two thousand season ticket holders, four whole spiders. When you get people alone, one-on-one, they rapidly go from being a one to an unknowable, infinite amount of thing, and there’s something a little terrifying about that. Jeongguk isn’t even sure he’s ready to handle his own infinity, wherever he makes contact with it again.

Isolation comes with its own perils, though, and an infinite stretch of loneliness isn’t looking any better these days. Jeongguk sometimes worries that he’s heading toward that bleakest of cliché futures in which he dies alone in his apartment and it takes three weeks for the smell to alert the neighbors, who will end up writing his obituary. It’s the ultimate problem, of course, with being the maknae – everyone’s bound to kick it before you do.

And this is the thought that leads him back to his phone call with Jimin earlier and the words which, if he thinks about it, were probably the fatal snowflake in today’s thought-avalanche.

She thinks Yoongi’s doing worse. 

Yoongi’s doing worse.

Even though they broke up over a year and a half ago, Jimin’s stayed in touch with Yoongi’s parents, though the social etiquette that allows for that kind of connection is beyond Jeongguk’s comprehension. It’s fortunate, too, because that weird little grapevine is now one of their only sources of information on Yoongi himself, who has seemingly vanished from the face of the earth. After Yoongi had moved out of the city a couple years ago to edit a newspaper in a little coastal town down south, he and Jimin had done long distance for over half a year, the two of them visiting each other every other weekend. Namjoon had still been in the city, building up his portfolio before they sent him off to the Seoul bureau like everyone expected they would, and Seokjin hadn’t yet been transferred to London, so between that and well-timed visits from Hoseok and Taehyung when those two could get back to the city, it almost didn’t feel like the circle had broken apart at all.

Until the winter holidays that year, though he’s always been a little vague on the timing of how it went down. He knows Namjoon witnessed some of the worst of it firsthand, and Taehyung probably heard even more from Jimin though he was all the way out in California (those two have always been joined at the hip, in a way Jeongguk kind of envies). Jeongguk still feels more like a bystander than anything.

Yoongi and Jimin broke up – mutually, as far as he knows – over the phone sometime before the New Year. Hoseok had said afterward that they’d been having some problems, though Jeongguk hadn’t seen any signs of it whenever they all got together. Maybe the usual wear and tear of long distance, he thinks in hindsight, but nothing more than that. Yoongi and Jimin had known each other for years already, and it should’ve taken something darker or more permanent to unsettle that kind of deep-seated comfort with one another. Jeongguk would watch the little gestures with which they would touch each other in public, little moments of unspoken, intuitive reassurance. Out with the rest of the group, they’d sit next to each other in a booth whispering side commentary in a shorthand derived from experiences only the two of them had shared. To Jeongguk, it had looked like love, like something that made life better and smoother and safer.

Which made it weird when, after a couple weeks of self-imposed hibernation, Jimin had emerged looking decidedly non-heartbroken. A little brittle on the subject of Yoongi, sure, which makes Jeongguk suspect “mutual” might’ve been more wishful than was broadcast, but otherwise himself. Almost more so, strangely. Jimin had gone through the roster of typical things you do post-breakup – drunken karaoke, better haircut, new workout regimen courtesy of Jeongguk himself – but he’d taken them a turbocharged step further. He’d convinced his bosses in the lab where he was biding his time as a research assistant to give him a raise. He’d steeled himself and taken the MCATs he’d been saying for years he would fail, aced them, applied to his top choice medical schools and gotten into all of them. He walked taller, spoke more assuredly, and honestly sounded like the new and improved version of the confident sophomore who had once patiently walked Jeongguk through the worst of his freshman-year retrosynthesis problem sets. He’d even said, wistfully but resolutely, to Jeongguk one evening when they were out to dinner, just the two of them, that he thought he and Yoongi might even be better off apart, pursuing their own paths independently. Jeongguk isn’t sure he would have the courage to say that, in Jimin’s position.

Jimin might be wrong, though, in a Newtonian sense, because it was like Jimin’s sudden surge of forward momentum had somehow pushed Yoongi farther and farther away into the dark. One day early in that same winter, he’d quietly left their group chat. Emails from Hoseok and Namjoon went unanswered; he didn’t pick up a call from Taehyung on his birthday. Given Yoongi’s history, everyone had started to worry – he’d taken a leave of absence from school for some sort of mental health stuff his senior year, back when Jeongguk was just a freshman still getting to know everyone. But back then he’d eventually broken radio silence and come back to the city to finish his degree, date Jimin, get a job – everything.

By the time Jeongguk had gotten around to meeting him, he’d found it hard to believe there’d ever been a dip, even a temporary blackout for the guy lounging across from him with the wry sense of humor and don’t-give-a-fuck cool that rolled off his shoulders and onto anyone sitting next to him. Because Yoongi was (is? still?) that untouchable badass that the awkward in all of them aspired to be, a presence that commanded attention and respect without any effort or desire for it. Sure Seokjin had all the charm and connections in the world, Namjoon the most obvious brain for putting pieces of the larger puzzle together, and Hoseok was who you turned to when you needed someone to get shit done on an average day, but when a true, honest-to-god crisis actually hit? Yoongi would be the one to lead you out of it, heave a single, well-measured sigh afterward, then roll over into a three-hour nap before getting up for dinner around 2am. Jeongguk once bought a leather jacket because of Yoongi’s legendary leather jacket. It’s in the back of his closet, but he’s thinking of wearing it sometime soon.

The only crisis Yoongi couldn’t get them out of, of course, was the stubborn mystery of his own disappearance. Eventually Namjoon had found the website for the paper that Yoongi was supposed to be editing, and while Yoongi himself never explicitly showed up in any of the bylines, there’d be op-eds and occasional filler pieces simply by “News Staff” that were so clearly Yoongi writing that they could allow themselves to believe that he was getting by enough to hold down a full time job and make rent out there by the beach. Whatever else Jimin could get out of Yoongi’s mom on the phone seemed to support that theory as well. 

Until now, that is.

Jimin’s got a habit of, when he has something big to drop in a conversation, allowing the other person to talk themselves out first and then offering up all his own secondary material before actually getting around to the Thing, whatever it is, as if he wants to give all the other news a chance to run for cover before it gets blown up in the bombshell he’s about to release. So today he and Jeongguk had spent a good fifteen minutes on the phone chatting about nothing in particular – workout tips, office gossip from Jimin’s lab, stray bits of pop culture – before Jeongguk began to pick up on that faintest tell-tale slow down that presaged something lurking on Jimin’s end.

 “Okay, hyung, what’s up? There’s something, I can tell – I can hear you holding your breath even while you’re talking. So as your personal personal trainer, I’m going to remind you to breathe from your diaphragm – y’know, in, out, in, out – let it all go. And now, now that you’ve gotten all that tension out, hit me, baby…”

 “…one more time, Jeonggukkie? Okay, here it is. I, um, ended up having a long talk with Mrs. Min yesterday evening. And, I don’t quite know how to say it, but she thinks Yoongi’s doing worse.”

The silence is given a moment to creep in. “What…what does that mean, hyung?”

“I don’t know, really. It…I mean, it seemed like she was having trouble putting it into words, more of a feeling than an actual diagnosis? She says he’s not picking up her calls most of the time now, and when he does, his voice just sounds kinda…flat? He didn’t go back home for his birthday. She last got him on the phone about three weeks ago, I think?” Jeongguk can hear Jimin’s voice speed up, pitch higher. “And she doesn’t know anyone out on Ferry Isle, so she and Mr. Min might be…God I hope not, but...relying on the newspaper like the rest of us? Like, to make sure he’s still alive and all. I mean, I don’t think he’s in danger of imminent death or anything, but I don’t know, it just sounded off...and weird. She usually tries to be so upbeat about him, like he’ll somehow stop being fine if she stops talking about him like he’s fine. But it wasn’t fine, Jeongguk, not yesterday. And I don’t know what to do. I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear from me – that would make it worse, trust me, he doesn’t want me going back to see him. So there’s nothing I can do, and I just, I...I don’t know what to do about that anymore.”

Well, no wonder he’d been holding his breath.

Ignoring, for a moment, the fresh crater in his own emotional landscape, Jeongguk had tried to give Jimin as much as he could over the phone, something along the lines of “don’t worry about it, we’ll think of something,” but it’s not like there is a real plan to be had here. Yoongi is drifting out in the cartographic ether somewhere, willfully cut off from the rest of them, and Jeongguk was never one of his main confidantes to begin with. 

Jeongguk can’t solve this alone, and that’s what it feels like right now, that everyone is gone and he’s out here alone and he can’t fix this without them, this circle of friends that it hurts so much to miss now that they aren’t what they once were. Haven't been, honestly, since Yoongi left them. Sure, everyone was going to leave eventually anyway, and it’s not like they don’t keep up their little networks of communication across distances. But no one’s here when he needs them anymore, especially when he’s sitting here and being asked to face the ghost they edge around so carefully in all their conversations nowadays.

Deep breaths, he tells himself, and remembers to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth (learned that in a yoga class once – it’s paid dividends ever since). It’s okay – he just needs to give himself a little space to think and the answer will come to him. He needs to calm down, progressively relax his body, soften his gaze, go blank for a bit. It’s just a physical thing, Jeongguk thinks, and he’s always been on firmer ground with things that are strictly physical.

 After a few minutes staring into the pepperoni eyes on the last slice of pizza like it’s his lone companion on the desert island of his life, Jeongguk refocuses and tries to get some desperately needed perspective on this situation. Fact one: he desperately needs backup on this thing with Yoongi. Facts two and three: he can’t show up randomly on Yoongi’s doorstep alone, and Jimin’s implied that for him to do so would almost have the opposite effect of the one intended. But if, if, Jeongguk thinks, there was a way to get everyone back together again, all six of them, and go down there together to see Yoongi, power in numbers and all, maybe that would be enough to get through to him and make a difference. They could catch up, hang out, tell stories – have a couple unspeakable adventures, like they all used to. It wouldn’t be easy – they’re all successful professionals with schedules to match – but it is plausible that with just the right amount of pressure, from the right source, everyone could be convinced to clear a week somewhere in the summer, and it could come together somehow. 

Plus, Jeongguk thinks, he could kill two birds with one stone here. He needs to find a way to re-incentivize this bet with Jimin so that he’ll actually get off his ass and do something before he’s out half a grand and most of his pride. The prospect of having to face Jimin’s announcement of his failure  directly in front of all the hyungs definitely ups the stakes. According to the terms he and Jimin agreed to, he’s got until August 15th, right before fall begins in earnest – so there’s time. In fact it’s entirely possible that everything could fall perfectly into place. There’s a glimmer of hope that he can actually make something happen for once instead of let life just pass him by.

But Jeongguk also knows his limitations. He can do anything, not everything, and social coordination has not been one of his strong suits historically speaking. (He may be the golden boy, but he’s not infallible.) He executes, he doesn’t plan, and with everything on the line here he can’t have critical responsibilities falling into the wrong hands. Fortunately, he knows exactly who to hand this off to.

He picks his phone up off the coffee table and unlocks the screen.

~

The thing about airports is, once you get past the congestion at security – and it still amazes Hoseok that most people don’t realize how far a genuine smile can get you in situations drained of human patience – they contain an immense amount of open, empty space. Maybe it’s because they’re not really built to human scale, but rather to that of the giant, sleek machines that circle outside, waiting to whisk passengers across invisible distances.

When Hoseok travels for work, he usually volunteers to be the one on the team who will hang back to oversee the final wrap up with their clients. This way, he gets to indulge in the solitude of returning home solo after a few days’ worth of solving other people’s problems. While most people waiting in a terminal try to grab the most advantageous seat at their gate, one with an unobstructed path to the ticket counter or next to an awkwardly placed outlet, Hoseok prefers to spend his time strolling up and down the open concourse between the restaurants and souvenir stands, slowly elongating his muscles as he breathes the knots of accumulated tension out of his lower back. He likes pausing to look past the myriad screens flashing numbers and acronyms, out through the full-length glass windows at the gates to where time isn’t numerical but rather registered only in slowly shifting gradations of light and color. In a world that runs purely according to the sky, all time is vast and beautiful – the sharp bright of early morning, the buttery tones of early afternoon, the viscosity of evening mixing into sunset, or now, the night finally settling over San Francisco in sedimented greys and blacks with a few stars flecked in.

The sudden vibration of the phone in his pocket makes him jump. Though he makes a living by being the calmest, most collected person in any given room, Hoseok still startles easily if something – a noise, a touch – catches him unawares when he’s letting his mind fuzz out like this. After he gives himself a second to regain his balance and let his heartbeat drop back to normal, he fishes the phone out of his pocket and smiles when he sees it’s Jeongguk calling. He swipes his thumb across the screen and tilts his ear against the warm glass surface.

“Jeonggukie?”

“Hey, hyung.” Jeongguk spoke the least Korean of any of them growing up, not much beyond a few basic expressions, but once he’d gotten to college and fallen in with their group he’d started picking up little words and phrases from the rest of them and eagerly inserting them into conversations whenever he could. It was cute, especially when his pronunciation carried just a little bit of the Southern accent that still slipped into his voice from time to time.

“What’s new with my favorite celebrity dongsaeng?” Hoseok says with a grin in his voice, the initial irritation he’d felt at being jolted out of his reverie soothed by the affection he feels for this kid on the other end of the line. 

“Nothing much.” Even though he knows it’s just a pleasantry, Hoseok winces at the unintentional truth. “I didn’t know if I’d catch you – I can’t keep up anymore with where you are in the world any given week.” 

This is fair. As a consultant, Hoseok spends most of his time living out of a suitcase, sitting in identical conference rooms on different continents trying to get buy-in from key stakeholders so he can turn best practices into actionable strategies. He’s home so little he’s been thinking about listing his apartment on Airbnb. 

“Well,” Hoseok says, “you’ve got me for about ten minutes before I have to board a flight. What’s up?”

“I was thinking,” and here Jeongguk pauses long enough that Hoseok quickly reclassifies this call as premeditated instead of casual, “what are your plans for the summer?" 

“Work, work, and more work,” he says a little too automatically, “though I was thinking I might try to visit Jin-hyung on one of the long holiday weekends. He adds, as it occurs to him, “You’d be welcome to join, if you can get away.”

“Yeah, I could maybe make that work,” says Jeongguk, “though I actually had a different idea that I wanted to run by you.”

“Yeah?” says Hoseok. This is good, Jeongguk proactively coming up with a plan to do something, anything. Maybe there’s hope after all.

“What would you say to all of us, all six of us, getting back together for, like, a week or so?”

Oh. This is not progress, at least Hoseok doesn’t think it is. 

While all of them have had to adjust to the fact that they’ve grown up and moved away and built lives that the others don’t get to fully see, Hoseok knows that, deep down, the thought of being the only one left in their old city terrifies Jeongguk. The last time a bunch of them had managed to get together – this past New Year’s, when Hoseok and Taehyung had flown in to hang out and celebrate the latter half of the winter holidays together – they’d had a late night out at one of their old haunts and then crashed at Jeongguk’s place because it was within walking distance. The next morning Hoseok and Jimin had been hunched over their phones in Jeongguk’s cramped kitchen having a slightly hungover argument about where to go for brunch when all of a sudden Jeongguk had exploded at them from his corner of the breakfast table.

“Can you both just shut the fuck up?” he’d snapped. “Just shut up. It doesn’t fucking matter where we go for brunch. It’s not like you really care anymore, you’re just going to go off and leave  – you too now Jimin – just go off and be somewhere else when I need you here!” A hush had settled over the room in the immediate aftermath, and a concerned-looking Taehyung poked his head past the edge of the doorway leading out to the living room, eyes wide and toothbrush dangling loosely from his lips. Jeongguk just sat there perfectly still, swamped by his oversized t-shirt and looking a little dazed and heavy, as if he wasn’t yet conscious that his mouth had let go of all those words. After a beat of silent understanding between them, Hoseok and Jimin and Taehyung had averted their eyes and continued with what they had been doing as if nothing had happened, giving Jeongguk the privacy he wasn’t completely aware he needed to collect himself.

They hadn’t spoken of it since.

So now that Jeongguk’s proposing they all get together again, Hoseok thinks it might be a rearguard action against the impending reality. But it’s not like he himself wouldn’t jump at the chance for a reunion, so he says, “Well, it’d be great to see everyone again, but it might be tough to swing a whole week. What did you have in mind?” He bends down to scratch at an itch on his ankle as he looks up at the departures to check if his flight is boarding yet.

“Well,” Jeongguk says, almost like he’s been rehearsing this in his head, “it wouldn’t be just for us. I was talking to Jimin earlier, and he said that he’s been talking with Mrs. Min, and she told him that something’s going on with Yoongi. Like, he’s worse than usual, or something. So I thought we could all go down there and see him, check up on him. You know, make sure he’s alive and still Yoongi.”

Hoseok wishes he didn’t remember what still Yoongi meant. It hurts, thinking about that, and it’ll rip him apart if he lingers on it too long.

“Hyung?”

“Yeah, Gukkie, you’re right,” Hoseok says, slowly. Anything else is the wrong answer. “We should, we really should. Why don’t I figure out when we can all get away at the same time, and then I’ll get back to you, okay? I’m thinking, probably sometime in August? I know that’s when things typically slow down a bit for Jin, and school won’t have started up for Tae and Jimin yet.” He pauses. “I think Namjoon can justify the time off if we can give him enough lead time to build in some meetings back stateside.”

“Awesome, hyung,” Jeongguk says, a note of self-satisfaction slipping past the slightly calculated mask that Hoseok’s been trying to put his finger on this entire conversation. “I know you’ll be able to figure it out. Keep me posted, and have a safe flight tonight!”

The call disconnects abruptly just as Hoseok realizes that Jeongguk, manipulative little bastard that he’s been for years, has tricked him into planning this entire thing.

The thing is, Hoseok knows Jeongguk, but Jeongguk also knows Hoseok. He knows that the reason Hoseok wakes up in the morning is so that he can take bad situations and try to make them better for people. He knows that Hoseok will reliably set aside his own quiet if he can see a way to help that no one else can. He knows that life has yet to teach Hoseok how to properly say no. And even as Hoseok stands there and thinks, you can’t do this to me, Jeonggukkie, he says to himself, but maybe I can do this for him.

Hoseok closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose for a few seconds before straightening up and walking off in the direction of his gate, where people are already massing in front of the ticket counter. Beyond them, the lights on the runway cut little shapes out of the dark.

~

The sky is blue and the sun still shining when Seokjin gets out of work, so he decides to take advantage of the surprisingly nice weather at the end of April and walk the long way home along the Thames. He makes sure to wave goodbye to Shannon at reception before slipping out into the brick-lined streets of Bloomsbury, passing the leafy stretch along Russell Square and then skirting the hum of the West End as he makes for Waterloo Bridge, cutting left on Savoy once he hits the Strand and eventually reaching the pavement of the Victoria Embankment.

It takes a little over an hour to walk home from the office – half an hour by Tube, which is Seokjin’s usual commute. Now that they’ve been dating almost a year, Carlo has started dropping hints about Seokjin moving into his loft in Soho once his lease ends in October. Seokjin has to acknowledge that this would be the most convenient option, he’d only be ten minutes’ walk away from work, but he’s loathe to give up the distant quiet of his little garden flat in Pimlico, where everything is adorably quaint and orderly and there’s an excellent farmers’ market on Saturday mornings that helps Seokjin stock his surprisingly decently-sized kitchen.

There’s nothing on the social calendar this evening, so he takes his time, eyes grazing over the sights across the river while he imagines the ones mostly hidden from view off to his right. Covent Garden. Charing Cross. Trafalgar Square. Big Ben and Parliament up ahead, before he turns right just after the Tate Britain into the rabbit warren of little lanes that he now calls home. Sometimes, when he’s been steeped too long in client dinners, campaign launches, and the cabs in between them, Seokjin forgets how amazing it is to be able to walk past world-famous landmarks on a daily basis. Now that he’s in the mood to pay attention, it’s like he’s wandering around in a pop-up version of the guidebook he’d bought a little over a year ago, when the agency asked him to transfer to their London office because their K-Beauty clients were gearing up for a push into European markets and Seokjin’s expertise in cosmetics was sorely needed.

As he passes yet another iconic red phone box, Seokjin thinks that, maybe, being a tourist isn’t so bad from time to time, though it’s not like he hasn’t begun to put down roots since he’s been here. He has a perfectly nice boyfriend to take on dinner dates and mini-breaks, and, through him, a growing group of other friends for brunch and aspirational antiquing on the weekends. He’s found a gym that’s open early, a neighborhood butcher who knows to reserve a pound of pork belly for him each week, even a dentist whose approach is mercifully more American than British.

But sometimes, when he pauses to reflect, it feels like he still hasn’t settled into this city, like London is a uniform for him to put on each morning and change out of every evening once he’s home. When he first moved here, Seokjin went out and bought a wardrobe full of beautiful, immaculately tailored suits because that was what one did in London when one was well-salaried and fuckable. Now he barely notices which one he has on any given day, not until he shrugs out of his jacket as soon as he gets in the door at night and his shoulders can finally breathe.  

Seokjin doesn’t mean to complain. He knows full well how good he’s got it in life. People would kill to be in his shoes before age thirty. He’s established a lucrative niche for himself in the advertising industry – handling some multinational accounts with real momentum – and the life he’s managed to build outside of work offers every comfort he could ask for. He’s not about to let people see him shed tears for problems that don’t exist.

Seokjin reaches his favorite bench on this route, the one under a particularly splendid plane tree and directly opposite the London Eye, and takes a seat. The clouds are beginning to turn just a little pink as the sun dawdles toward the horizon, and the air feels a few degrees cooler on the back of his neck than it did when he started out this evening. Seokjin leans back a little and looks out across at the Eye as it revolves clockwise in barely perceptible increments. He knows Ferris wheels are cheesy and touristy, especially compared to all the other important historical sites he’s just passed, but Seokjin really likes this one, how it injects a little whimsy and carnival into an otherwise staid riverfront. He idly watches its revolution for a minute or two, lips parted just a fraction as he lets his mind get carried along with the lap of the Thames.

Then, almost out of nowhere, he remembers – the email from Hoseok earlier, which he told himself he wouldn’t look at until he’d finished with work for the day, as a reward. He pulls out his phone and thumbs his way into his personal inbox.

From: Hoseok Jung <[email protected]>

To: Seokjin Kim <[email protected]>, Namjoon Kim <[email protected]>

Subject: CONFIDENTIAL – 4 Your Eyez Only

Agents Kim & Kim,

Thanks to recent intelligence efforts spearheaded by the dynamic duo of Agents Guns and Buns, it has come to my attention that our deactivated comrade-in-arms, MIN YOONGI, a.k.a SUGA a.k.a. D-BOY a.k.a GENIUS, has been experiencing some difficulties lately readjusting to civilian life.

While it appears his journalistic cover story remains intact, confidential sources – including the family member being handled by Agent Buns – say he has taken to “legitimately not giving a fuck when he says he doesn’t” and “mumbling verses from ‘Life’s a Bitch’ under his breath whenever he has to get up for coffee from the office break room.” (Note: despite editorial liberties these statements approximate a fair representation of the dire situation on the ground.)

I am sure you will agree that this kind of behavior merits an upping of the current alert level from Guarded to Elevated, and a requisite response from HQ. 

Therefore, I am announcing the launch of OPERATION CYPHER, a joint rescue mission to be undertaken probably sometime in August, exact dates subject to the availability of all essential team members. Objectives include reestablishing contact with SUGA, offering him temporary operational support if required, and, in general, gathering further intelligence on just what the fuck has been going on with him for the past year and a half. I’m thinking we all meet up in the city first for a couple days, then road trip it down the coast to show up unannounced on his doorstep and finally force him out of hiding.

While I’m happy to take point on ops planning, I’m counting on you two co-hyungs for help in pulling this together. Your assistance, beyond wrangling time off from your respective employers, is required in the following key strategic areas:

Kim Possible –

            I need you to keep a tight rein on Agent Guns, who, as I’m sure you can imagine, is the evil mastermind behind all of this and will drive me crazy if I have to deal with him on my own. Since you’re the only one of us he even halfway respects anymore, please do everything in your power to keep him from becoming way too invested in the outcome of this expedition. He needs to learn how to grow his own hobbies, not shoot himself in the foot getting completely wrapped up in saving someone else.

Kim Impossible –         

         Please reach out to the California office and brief Agent Lil’ Kim on these developments. (I’d do it, but I’ve trying to delegate more lately and your time difference is at least fixed, if not way easier than mine most days.) In addition to securing his participation, I’d like you to ask if he’d be willing to broach the topic with Agent Buns, who I’ve left out of the loop so far given the sensitivity of his history with SUGA. I don’t anticipate major problems in getting him to go along for the ride, but it should come from the right person.

With your combined efforts, I am confident we can make this mission a success and, hopefully, an unforgettable experience. 

Bros thru souls,

Analyst Carl

P.S. Seriously  – send me your availabilities in August ASAP so we can get this show on the road.

Seokjin sets his phone down to rest on his knee, breathes in as he closes his eyes and lets a sigh drop down through his chest. He feels a quick flicker of guilt as his serious concern for Yoongi, who sounds like he’s really not doing well, gets shoved to the sidelines as he’s hit by an overwhelming wave of nostalgia. He misses everything about this – the stupid secret agent speak, the nicknames evolved from years of in-jokes, the fact that they still use each other’s embarrassing teenage email addresses, which Seokjin thinks is one of the hallmarks of enduring friendship. This entire little world that belongs only to them.

He supposes that this is some of what he’s missing over here across the pond: being part of a group of people way more creative than he is who still make him feel alive and invigorated and like he’s one of them. He’s tried going out for drinks with the creatives from his agency a few times, but he’s always left feeling like he’s the most boring person in the room, the stereotypical accounts manager who’s little more than a handsome face and a firm handshake.

Seokjin doesn’t even know if what he’s looking for is recreatable – a time when the shared pressures of higher education forged intense friendships of an almost impossible kind of intimacy. Maybe that way of relating to other people was supposed to fall away as you got older and grew up and moved on. But sometimes, Seokjin wonders, if he had made just slightly different choices, maybe then he wouldn’t feel like he was sitting out here alone on a bench so viscerally far away from Yoongi and Hobi and Jeongguk and Jimin and Tae and—

This is where he typically cuts himself off whenever he gets this way. Otherwise, left unchecked, his mind wanders too far down the garden path to where it shouldn’t, down to a firmly locked door in one of the back alleys of his brain, down to Namjoon. Namjoon. It always, always winds up coming back down to Namjoon, Namjoon and the night they don’t mention. Ever. Which is probably for the best, because if Seokjin were to dwell on it for too long, he’d invest it with way more meaning than it was ever supposed to have, a whole alternate universe with an alternate life and an alternate Seokjin in it. Another problem that doesn’t exist. 

Still, as he taps over into his calendar to check for dates in August, careful not to scroll back up to the header where his name sits way too close to someone else’s, he gives himself a moment to think into the silence, Why is it you? Why did it have to be you? Why can’t I leave you?

~

When Namjoon wakes up in the middle of the night like this, he doesn’t come back to the world all at once. Instead, he tries to stay in the dream world as long as possible, memorizing as many details as he can while still tucked into the dense, hazy warmth of the comforter that shields him from the onslaught of full-on consciousness. He’s never perfectly successful at capturing everything, though, and by the time he inevitably opens his eyes and takes in the night-lit dimness of his small studio he’s left with mere fragments, vague impressions of the maze-like environment he found himself in just a few moments ago. He was leading a small group of people – he doesn’t remember exactly how many – through this weird tunnel made up of a thorny jumble of microphones and cameras, no operators in sight, just endless flashes and eruptions of feedback as he and the people with him ran on and on, pursued by something unseen but never too far behind them.  

Funny, given that Namjoon’s normally on the other side of that equation.

The dream isn’t wholly panic-inducing, but it still leaves him with an unsettled feeling. So, as he typically does on the nights that go this way, he reluctantly pushes off the covers, swings his legs over the side of the bed, and shuffles over in his pajama bottoms to the small galley kitchenette by the entryway, using the heels of his hands to scrub the sleep from his eyes. The microwave glares 3:20am at him. He opens the door of the mini-fridge, even though he’s pretty sure there’s nothing beyond a six-pack of beer to be had in there. Sometimes he remembers to stash away a thing of gimbap for emergency breakfast, but all domestic foresight got shoved to the side in the midst of the political turmoil he had to cover this week.

He settles for a packet of dried squid and salted nuts that he finds at the back of one of the cabinets, bought who knows when, grabs a can of Hite, and makes his way over to where his laptop sits on top of the  minimalist desk set in front of his studio’s one, albeit rather large, window overlooking the neighborhood. Seongsu-dong at night is a war of color and monochrome, neon and graffiti scrawled over the utilitarian grey lines of the factories and warehouses that have been steadily transformed into sleek cafes and alternative workspaces in the past five or so years. It’s both hip and a little forced, not unlike how Namjoon himself has felt here in Seoul this past year or so.

Look, it’s still the opportunity of a lifetime. Much as working on the metro desk his first three years at the paper really helped him grow as a reporter, taught him how to listen to the hum of a city and honed his eye for a good lead, when his editors had offered him a job at the Seoul bureau he’d leapt at it. Deep down, there’s a part of Namjoon that’s always felt indelibly Korean, much as his resume and passport might say otherwise. His parents were careful to make sure that part of his identity stayed with him – speaking to him as much in Korean as in English at home, sending him to spend summers with his cousins here in Seoul. Even though he definitely feels more at home in the States, even though he sometimes feels he spends every waking hour at odds with the society here, he still feels this weird, unshakeable obligation to it. Like he’s got a responsibility to make it better, somehow.

Which is the beauty of his current situation – working here but for a foreign publication, he has so much more freedom than his counterparts at the domestic dailies do. He gets to report more honestly, directly, on issues that matter: endemic political corruption, too-cozy relations between chaebol and the American military, LGBTQ discrimination, an education system that condemns younger generations to endless hours of exploitation and desperation. He’s proud of how he’s slowly built trust with sources who were initially incredibly reluctant to go on record, who now see in him an outlet to the kind of audience they struggle to find domestically. Occasionally Namjoon wonders if he really lives up to that, if any of what he does makes a concrete difference or just provides five minutes’ entertainment for the casual reader back home. Ultimately, though, he really does believe in what he’s doing, that he’s found his own small way of speaking truth to power.

It comes at a price, though. Namjoon knew he’d be giving up his professional networks when he moved out here, but he wasn’t fully prepared for how isolated he still feels sometimes in a city that can take its time warming up to you. Underneath the tall, styled exterior, Namjoon’s still more than a little bit of his awkward kid self, and it’s even harder to make friends from scratch when you’re an adult – not to mention a perpetually part-foreign one who has the habit of bringing obscure philosophical analogies into conversations where they mostly just confuse people. His cousins are all married with babies now, steeped in material concerns that Namjoon frankly finds kind of boring. It can be even more uncomfortable hanging out with his colleagues here, watching them slowly drink themselves to death after hours.

So recently he’s tried to summon the investigative spirit that drives him professionally and put it to use in his personal life. On his days off wandering around different neighborhoods in Seoul, he’s been striking up casual conversations with random people he meets – cashiers in independent bookstores, people next to him in line for coffee, fellow customers in stores where he’s been trying to build a wardrobe that says “avant-garde but approachable.”  He hasn’t built a full circle of friends or anything like that yet, but he now has a few more numbers in his phone that aren’t strictly professional contacts. He’s learned not to be surprised when people ask what he does for a living and then seem impressed by it. He’s learned it’s possible to go out drinking in a group and not necessarily regret the company along with the hangover the next morning. He’s learned that, if he catches a stranger’s eye in a bar just so, if he lifts his chin just a little and throws in a smile that asks a silent question, they’ll more than likely come over to talk to him, even (on the few occasions when he was feeling it) go home with him. Namjoon thinks it’s been important to learn these things. 

That’s not the whole story, of course, but when did the whole story ever make it into print?

On nights like these when he knows there’s little chance of falling back asleep, Namjoon likes to kill time scrolling through feeds from various Western news outlets, jotting down short story ideas he’s probably never going to have time to flesh out, catching up on personal emails that have fallen by the wayside. He’s halfway through a forward from his mother that he’s reading more out of duty than interest when the bold number next to his inbox ticks back up by one. He can’t help the smile that comes instantly when he clicks over and sees it’s from Hoseok. Given the subject line, it promises to be good. He gnaws off a string of squid and dives in. 

He can feel his arms go all tingly for a moment when he sees who else it’s addressed to. It’s stupid, Namjoon knows, he thought he’d be over it by now, but it’s a reaction he’s never managed to shake. He hasn’t really put all that much effort into shaking it, to be honest. He’s gone round and round on this point, and yeah, maybe he feels a little foolish about it, but...he can’t help it. Seokjin is Seokjin, is always going to be Seokjin, and given how unlikely it is that he and Namjoon are ever going to be alone together in a room again, Namjoon thinks he can allow his heart to not listen to his head on just this one thing. Agents Kim & Kim – he gives himself a moment to feel it. To imagine it. To wonder where he went wrong.

Somehow, the following paragraph is worse, for all the joke framing of it, because it goes right to the other thing Namjoon occasionally pulls out of his heart when he needs something to torture himself with. Yoongi. The other monumental screw-up in his life that he doesn’t understand and never knew how to fix. Namjoon knows he’s not responsible for what happened – no one is, not even Jimin – but it’s still so hard to take that he could’ve just let him slip away like that. He should’ve seen signs; he should’ve been able to say something that could’ve pulled Yoongi back from whatever he’s fallen into.

He and Yoongi were close, maybe not in a bare-your-soul kind of way, but still. After years of late nights together up in the offices of the school paper rushing toward print deadlines, hunched over each other’s computers offering editorial comments and wisecracks, they’d built up between them something unique in their group of friends. A kind of implicit trust, something more than just mere professional understanding or respect – a mutual validation that they were each actually worthy of what they were trying to do. Namjoon misses the feeling he’d get after agonizing for hours over a piece, only to look up over his shoulder at Yoongi’s face, lit pale by the screen, turning up into the faintest hint of a smile that told Namjoon he’d finally got it down. It’s an ache that, on nights like these, drives him to the janky little website of the paper Yoongi works for, where Namjoon reads through article after article just so he can hear Yoongi’s voice bleed through the page. Even if Yoongi isn’t saying anything to him, specifically. Even if Namjoon is just talking to himself again.

Namjoon can’t imagine how Jimin must feel about the whole thing. Which, no – that’s kind of a lie. Namjoon actually does have an inkling about that, but thinking about it takes him back to a part of the past that he tries really hard not to revisit in perfect clarity. For his sake, as well as for Jimin’s.

Agent Buns indeed. Best not go there.

This is why Namjoon loves Hoseok. Hoseok makes the hardest stuff seem bearable, possible, even fun. He makes stuff happen. Namjoon really admires that about him – envies it, even. Hoseok’s always been the guy behind the microphone, whereas Namjoon’s more the guy in the scrum holding the microphone out to someone else. Maybe that’ll change one day. For now, though, he’s content to take marching orders, which in this case means getting Taehyung on board. That’s great, actually – he’s been meaning to catch up with Tae for a while now. Namjoon’s eyes drift up from the screen, cheeks dimpling as he imagines Taehyung back in his full Californian glory, hair probably gone a bit long and wearing some obnoxious Hawaiian shirt that he still manages to make look unfairly good.  Namjoon knows it wasn’t his first choice to move back home, but he hopes Taehyung is happy with the life he’s making for himself. He’s never said otherwise, and Namjoon always thought he’d make a fantastic teacher anyway. All of his students are probably in love with him.

Namjoon goes to grab his phone, but thinks the better of it right before he’s about to make contact. Flipping his hand over, he frowns at the salt and grease coating his fingertips from the snacks he’s been picking at. He has a second or two of serious debate about simply licking them clean before the adult in him wins out and he reluctantly pushes his chair back and trudges over to the kitchen sink. As the cool water splashes over his palms, Namjoon turns to look out the window, where there’s finally enough blue in the sky to call it morning. 

~ 

A small watermelon goes flying through the air, tracing a brilliant green arc against the cloudless sky. It lands a few meters left and short of its target, a gaudy orange scarecrow set up across the field behind the new gym.

Taehyung squints a little past the edge of his phone screen, where he’s been diligently recording each attempt, and ducks his head into his shoulder to catch a bead of sweat threatening to drip down the damp edge of his bangs into the corner of his left eye. There’s no shade – it’s unbearably hot in the direct sun, and even though it’s close enough to the end of the school year for Taehyung to get away with an oversize Aloha shirt (though not the one with the hula dancers on it) and cargo shorts as a teacher, he can still feel the sweat prickle where it’s stuck the thin fabric down the full length of his spine. This heat is part of the reason he gives extra credit for dressing up for this project. There are a lot of improvised bedsheet togas clustered around the giant wooden catapult behind his left shoulder, even some hastily-decorated cardboard swords and shields propped up against its base next to the cache of perfectly round watermelons he handpicked at the supermarket yesterday. Taehyung has decided that he can let physics allow for this rather casual Fridays interpretation of history, just this once.

Taehyung glances back at his students, most of them beginning to flag as the lack of a breeze finally sinks in. “Julius Caesar survives this round, everyone,” he says, trying to pump some much-needed energy back into the group, “but just a little adjustment and I think you’ve got him!” They’ve been at this for an hour now, and the opposite end of the field is now pockmarked by little piles of jagged green and pink steaming in the afternoon sun. It’ll be an absolute pain to clean up, but it’s better than last year when he didn’t fully think through the placement of the target (that one named Brutus, by popular vote) and an unintentional direct score on the side of the gym itself had interrupted basketball practice and almost got the entire exercise cancelled. There’s always a learning curve. “Remember,” he continues, “the sooner you topple him, the sooner we can feast on our remainder watermelons and celebrate our glorious victory.” They perk up at that, and soon enough the hum of animated debate starts up again as they put their heads together to recalculate torque and angles over the machine they’ve spent the better part of a month building together. Taehyung smiles. He’s been them, before.

A couple more tries, and Orange Julius meets his demise in a magnificent, cinematic spray of fruit and rind. Large whoops and shouts break out amongst the students, including a few cries of “Long live the Republic!” Everyone starts to gather around the catapult for a class photo, but then someone yells out, “Wait, Mr. Kim!” and Andrew takes off across the field, grabs the plumed helmet that’s tumbled away from its former perch atop Julius’s head, and races back triumphantly to place it, still dripping watermelon guts, on Taehyung’s before Bill the janitor snaps the final shot. The rest of the watermelons are cut, divvied up and passed around, each student receiving their slice as a reward for correctly answering a review question Taehyung throws them for the upcoming test on Monday. Soon enough, before he knows it, it’s 4 o’clock already.

He sends most of the class stomping across the field with garbage bags to scoop up battlefield casualties and lay Julius to semi-ceremonial rest, but asks Casey and Kwame to help him wheel the catapult back into the gym’s maintenance room for the weekend. Though they’re among the more studious, quieter students in class, they’ve been making moony eyes at each other all quarter. Taehyung’s always rooted for nerds in love. He pretends not to notice how hard they’re overthinking this physical proximity to each other as they awkwardly maneuver the catapult into a back corner of the cramped space, all gawky gestures and clumsy circumnavigations, and thinks to himself that, at this rate, they might actually fumble their way into being each other’s senior prom dates by the end of next year. Taehyung teaches physics, but he also knows the force required to traverse those few inches between teenage hands far exceeds the one launching watermelons across the field earlier. 

Once he’s made sure everything’s cleaned up and no school property has been irreparably damaged, he has everyone form a circle and once again congratulates them on a job well done before releasing them to the weekend. Usually he’d join them as they drift off in an uneven pack toward to parking lot, swapping jokes that tread that lazy Friday afternoon line between astute and absurd, but today he’s still got bits of watermelon in his hair and a shirt he wants to change out of, so he says goodbye to them and walks back across the quad on a path he could navigate with his eyes closed. 

It’s weird. When he’s with his students, he totally feels like he’s Mr. Kim, even if he’s cool, young Mr. Kim who chooses edgy plays for the drama club to perform and has a plastic T-Rex duct-taped to the front of his old brown LeSabre where the hood ornament fell off. But when he’s alone walking around campus, once all the students have gone home and it’s just him in these halls after so many years, he feels like he’s all the way back in high school, this high school, again. He’s pretty sure some of his students have gone through old yearbooks and figured it out. Sometimes they’ll try to drop hints without bringing it up directly, like they’ve stumbled on a big secret that they’re trying to keep to themselves, but it doesn’t seem to affect his authority, to the extent he claims it, in the classroom. It doesn’t really play into his relationships with his co-workers either, especially the ones on the math and science faculty. Most of the teachers who taught him have since retired, though he can tell that Mrs. Lanson – who once watched him reenact a scene from Moby-Dick, complete with homemade prop whale, in 11th grade English – gets a real kick out of having to call him Mr. Kim instead of Tae in front of students, though she’s never slipped up once.

Taehyung makes his way back to the science building, absently spinning his key ring around on his index finger as he walks. As it occurs to him, before his reaches his classroom at the end of the hall, he ducks into the chem lab (used to be Ms. Lee’s, now Mr. Deakin’s) and, after quickly glancing around to make sure no one’s still there, he sticks his head down into one of the deep-set sinks and turns the faucet on full-blast, letting the cool hiss of water run its fingers through his scalp. He thinks he feels his phone vibrate in his pants pocket, but he’s not going to deal with it right now. He lets his head hang upside down for a while, washing off the baked-on salt-sweat residue, breathing in the black hollow of the sink with his eyes shut tight, before blindly reaching forward to push the tap back off. After giving himself a second to reorient and make sure he won’t bang his skull on the faucet (he’s done it before), he whips his head back up in a full arc, flinging his hair back to drench the collar of his shirt. It’s been almost a year and it’s grown well past his ears now, long enough that Eomma gently chided him about it the other day, mentioning that he might want to think about a haircut now that he’s supposed to be the object, not the source, of teenage rebellion. Taehyung had pulled her into a side hug and replied, not without humor, that she hadn’t been a fan of the last haircut he got. She’d leaned back just enough to be able to look him in the eye, searching, voice betraying no particular inflection to send it one way or another, and said, “That was different.” 

Halmeoni died at the beginning of last summer, just as the weather had begun to spike into something unbearable enough to rival traffic as the favorite topic of complaint in LA, a heat wave strong enough that sucking on ice chips began to seem like a perfectly reasonable activity instead of one restricted to the seriously ill. After a long series of discussions with the doctors, they’d made the decision – actually, it was more Taehyung’s decision, Taehyung translating as much as he could for his parents and trying to explain what he thought was best was based on what he’d heard – to place her in hospice care. The cancer had spread, her body was too frail to endure any more treatment, and above all, to Taehyung’s mind, she was in pain, unavoidable pain. She hurt – everywhere – and while Taehyung wasn’t prepared to lose her, he couldn’t ask her to hold on just because he hadn’t had enough time to think through how to let her go yet.

And he hadn’t. Even though he moved back home explicitly to do this, to be here for her. To stand in an endless parade of antiseptic hospital rooms, to translate, as calmly and positively as he could, the progressively worse updates the doctors gave him, each new complication added to the list of complications. To look up translations for obscure medical terms on his phone even though he knew his parents wouldn’t even know them in Korean and his siblings were too young to understand in any language. He’d occasionally sneak off to a common bathroom out in the hallway if he felt his chest becoming too tight, squeezing in three minutes of crying here and there so that his family wouldn’t have to see it on his face and feel even more disoriented than they already did. It was smart, letting himself take those small breaks to feel it, but between subbing for the school and then racing over to the hospital or one of the rehab centers, or watching Jeongho and Jieun if his parents were staying late at the store, it had been hard to carve out time to sit down alone and really think it through. A world without her. A world with him, but without her.

He’d just signed a full-time, one-year contract with the school when terms like palliative (he’d hadn’t known that one in Korean) and comfort and pain management started to pop up in conversations, and it was three days after the graduation ceremony that they’d decided to bring her home for good. She was still lucid, in the beginning, and Taehyung brought in all the bright green plants she used to tend so carefully and placed them on the sill by her bedside. Spent nights curled up against her in bed like he was still a kid and not twice her size, rewatching Sandglass from start to finish like they had way back then, when she was his everything, Taehyung asking her the all same questions about her life and her memories that she’d answered time and time again, talking about Harabeoji and her favorite classic movie stars and old recipes she wanted him to remember as he nuzzled into her side and she stroked his hair and told him he was a handsome boy and they traded unvoiced i’m sorrys and i love yous as they dozed off until the sun got bright again.

The day after she died, he shaved his head. It was the one thing he allowed himself to do, just for himself, because somehow none of it felt right up there anymore. It totally shocked his parents when, without any preamble or warning, he came downstairs into the living room completely bald, looking like an alien with all that new whitish scalp showing. In the space of their stunned silence, Jieun, young enough to be more curious than concerned, had asked him, with new knowledge wide in her eyes, “Oppa, did your hair die too? Like Halmeoni?” Taehyung had crossed the living room, knelt down in front of her, taken a moment to try and break off a digestible piece of what he was feeling and said, “Hair is dead to begin with, Jieunie, it can’t die twice. ”

Taehyung thinks he’ll know when the right time to cut it again comes, it just hasn’t happened yet.

He bends back down over the the sink and tries to shake out all the excess water like a dog so that he won’t drip all the way across the floor. Then he makes his way out, crossing the hall to his own classroom – which used to belong to plump Mr. Garza, one of Taehyung’s personal heroes who originated the catapult tradition that Taehyung has revived during his tenure here – and sits down at the desk he used to face every fourth period. It’s not exactly where he saw himself five years ago, but hell, it’s way closer to his actual major than theater ever was. He unlocks the bottom drawer, grabs the messenger bag he has stowed in there, and shucks out of his damp and faintly watermelon-scented shirt so he can pull on a slightly rumpled white tee he’s unearthed from the bottom of his bag. He tries to find something to put his sticky shirt in, eventually settling on a plastic trash liner from the supply closet before hitching his bag up on his shoulder, giving the room a final once-over, and then locking the door behind him on his way out. As he heads for the parking lot, he dips his hand into his cargo pocket for his phone, letting out a pleased little grunt when he sees the vibration earlier was a KKT notification from Namjoon that simply says, really love – d’angelo.

Taehyung smiles over his phone as he walks down the last stretch of covered walkway between buildings on the way to the parking lot. He and Namjoon started doing this thing about a year ago, when they’d both been swamped with their respective obligations and each had to beg out of any number of prescheduled video chats. Taehyung was feeling weirdly mopey and isolated one day, he knew Jimin wouldn’t be out of lab and free to chat for another couple hours, and he suddenly realized a whole month had passed since he and Namjoon had last talked. The most recent lapse in communication wasn’t really anyone’s fault, so he decided to send Namjoon a brief message saying, i know neither of us can do a full catch-up right now, but just send me a song title that tells me how your day is. Thirty minutes later, Namjoon had replied with i’m so bored with the usa - the clash and Taehyung laughed a good couple minutes about just how Namjoon that sounded before sending him back pictures of you – the cure and he suddenly didn’t feel like he was stuck talking to himself again anymore.

The little exchange echoed the first major conversation they ever had, the first important one, the one that really cemented their friendship. There was this secret party on the rooftop of one of the buildings on campus, loud college kids drinking smuggled cheap alcohol against a stunning cityscape, and Namjoon and Taehyung were on opposite edges of a friend circle that was just beginning to take form. Namjoon recognized Taehyung on the other side of the party, raised his hand in a tentative wave and his lips in a smile before coming all the way over to stand next to him, which Taehyung has always thought was a really nice thing to do. The two of them stared out at the little squares lighting up downtown while cycling through fairly general conversation topics – not unpleasantly, but with the slightly forced feeling that can happen when there’s social pressure to get to know someone a little sooner that you would naturally – before finally landing on music. While their tastes didn’t exactly originate in the same places, Taehyung a fan of an eclectic span of jazz and Namjoon more on the old school hip-hop side of things, they’d recognized in each other a similar sort of passion for what they loved and an openness to new sounds. By the end of the night they were a little drunk and a lot friends.

So now, whether it’s a quick ping of hello or the prelude to a longer conversation, they always open like this, song title for song title, answers to the assumed how are you?s. Taehyung snorts a bit, reading Namjoon’s most recent missive to mean horny, but pensive, before pausing a moment to consider how he himself is feeling in this particular moment. He realizes his mood’s a little more somber than an afternoon of flying fruit would lead you to expect, and types in hollywood - the black skirts, not thinking too hard about it. The read notification appears almost immediately, shortly followed by got time for a quick chat?

Taehyung makes it to the LeSabre and opens the driver’s side door to let out the blisteringly hot air as he types sure, bro my bro, pausing to hit send before tossing his bag into the passenger seat and sliding in next to it. He’s a little surprised when a call notification shows up on his screen; he had thought Namjoon meant a conversation by text. So he takes a moment to check – and yep, he’s still on the school WiFi – before he picks up, pressing the speaker button as he lays his phone on the dash.

“Hyung!”

“Oh, Taehyungie. What’s shakin’ over in SoCal besides the ground?” Namjoon’s voice is just a touch raspy, like he hasn’t sleep well or something. It still sounds so good to hear him, though.

“It’s not what is shaking, Joonie, but who’s doing the shaking. Today I supervised fifteen teenagers mechanically flinging balls of fruit across a field at an oversized doll for two straight hours, obliterating all fake life in an earthquaking shower of exploding pulp. This is my current contribution to society, Joonie.”

A throaty chuckle comes through the speakers, and Namjoon switches over into Korean. “Saving the world one melon at a time, huh? Someone should give you an award.”

“You’re doing it too, hyung, article by article. I read that piece on defense kickbacks the other week – really solid piece of writing!” It was, too. Taehyung felt viscerally outraged by the time he finished reading it.

“Oh, you saw that? Yeah.” Taehyung can hear in his voice how pleased Namjoon is by the praise, and Taehyung feels good – honored, even – that he can make him feel that way. “So,” Namjoon continues, “you feeling alright despite the moody choice in tunes? Because I’ve got a thing I need to talk to you about.” 

Taehyung assumes that whatever follows is going to account for the pensive side of D’Angelo. “Shoot,” he says, not for the first time this afternoon.

“Okay, long story short, Hoseok heard through Jimin – or no, wait,” Namjoon pauses like he’s taking a moment to frown this through, “maybe Jimin, but through Jeongguk – that Yoongi’s definitely alive, which is great, but also really not doing well, which is...not. And so, we were thinking we could all meet up back in the city this summer, like late July or early August, and roadtrip it on down the coast to bang on his front door and tell him to finally come the fuck out of hiding so we can stop worrying about him. And I got tasked with securing your RSVP. Well, inviting you first, but then counting you in, of course.”

Taehyung gives himself a rare moment to be a little pissed off at his best friends. Not all of them grew up rolling in it like Seokjin, but most of them grew up pretty comfortable, nowhere close to the much more modest upbringing Taehyung had once his parents, like Yoongi’s, immigrated after the financial crisis in ‘97 and staked their family fortunes on the single convenience store they still run to this day. And now everyone’s out of school, even Jeongguk, they’re all making perfectly good money on their own. Nothing like Taehyung, who spent that first year out of school doing the broke actor thing, sleeping on people’s couches and running from audition to audition before moving back here and trying to help out with what was initially only a part-time teacher’s salary. He’s managed to save a little bit over the past year, even managed that vacation back to the city for New Year’s with some planning, and he’ll probably be able to afford this flight too, but the fact that it was just assumed he’d be able to make this work while he’s sitting here in a barely running car from the ‘80s with a bunch of student loans on his desk back home reminds Taehyung of just how differently the rest of them grew up – still think, in some ways. Ultimately, it’s okay – they’re great people, if a little...unintentionally thoughtless sometimes, and they would probably feel terrible if this were pointed out to them. They’re doing this for a good cause, for Yoongi, even if Yoongi is ironically the only other person who would understand how Taehyung feels about this kind of carefree ignorance, who Taehyung secretly thinks may have been even more pissed off by it at times. It’s something Taehyung and Jimin have talked about before, when Jimin would turn to him as Yoongi-translator when the two of them were having problems. (“I don’t speak Daegu, Tae – what’s going on with him?”) And...oh shit, that’s the part that didn’t make any sense before he got distracted by finances.

“Joonie-hyung,” Taehyung sounds a bit sharper than he means to, but there’s no fixing that now. “I’m in – I mean, I love Yoongi-hyung and I wanna be part of this thing you’re doing – but you can’t possibly expect me to believe that Jimin has already agreed to it. It didn’t, it didn’t come from him, right?  How is that, even, like, what?” 

Yeah, there’s no way. Taehyung would’ve heard about it before this, from Jimin himself, and plus Jimin would never suggest something like this in the first place. Taehyung knows better than anybody how it ended. It did not end well, and Jimin’s long given up any hope of reaching out to him. Jimin’s entire brain chemistry would’ve had to rearrange itself – and since Taehyung talked to him a couple nights ago – in order for a policy reversal this drastic to be within the realm of possibility. It is possible – as a scientist, Taehyung doesn’t like to deal in absolutes – but highly, highly improbable.

Namjoon manages to sound incredibly sheepish, a talent he’s never grown out of, when he says, “Yeah...about that.” Taehyung can hear a little preparatory intake of breath on the other end. “We, uh, kind of wanted to hold off on telling him about it until we knew everyone else could make it work. It would be all of us, not just him and Yoongi alone together – ever, I promise – and it might even be good for the two of them to, you know. Talk. And you know he would hate being the only one left out if the rest of us were doing something about it.”

Taehyung shifts around in his seat and stretches his legs to air out the sweaty backs of his knees, idly tapping his right foot against the brake pedal a few times before he says anything. “And of course you all want me to be the one to tell him, right?” It sounds a little bitter. He softens. “I don’t know, hyung, you’re putting me in an awkward position. Jimin’s in a really great place right now, I’m not sure forcing a reunion is necessarily going to turn out the way you all hope it will. What if it doesn’t go well? Or makes things worse, for both of them?”

“Do you think it will?” Namjoon asks him. It’s a genuine question, soliciting Taehyung’s particular expertise. So he pauses to run it through his head. 

Most people looking at Yoongi and Jimin’s relationship thought they were a real opposites attract kind of couple, Yoongi all aloof smirk while Jimin let sunshine in through his smile. But Taehyung was always more adept than most at seeing the areas where they were actually very similar. They’re both avoidant types, the kind of people who’ll hide away a hurt they can’t ease to worry at it in private until it starts to eat away at them. For all that Jimin’s been running full steam toward his dreams recently, blooming under a surge of self-confidence, Taehyung knows he’s got a little abscess tucked away in his heart with Yoongi’s name on it. Yoongi’s probably no different down there in his fortress of solitude; whatever crippling anxiety has cut off the lines of communication between them likely stems from a conviction that he’s fucked things up beyond repair. Neither one of them is ever going to fully heal unless they’re forced to open up old wounds and wash them clean, and damn it if Taehyung can’t think of another way of doing that besides making them stare each other in the face again and speak words. He wants Yoongi to be at peace; he wants Jimin to feel whole.

So he says, “I think it’s worth a try.”

“So,” says Namjoon, “you’ll talk to him, then?”

“Yeah,” Taehyung says, more casually than he feels. He looks out through his windshield, past Marc stuck to the front of his hood out to the mostly empty parking lot and thinks, forgive me, Jimin.

“Okay,” says Namjoon, “Good. Good. I’m, uh, gonna loop you in on the calendar – Hoseok set up a calendar for this thing, ‘cause, surprise surprise, he’s taken it upon himself to plan everything. You should see the email he sent to me and Seokjin roping us into this whole ‘rescue Yoongi’ operation, whatever he’s calling it. I’ll forward it to you, it’s pretty good. You are henceforth Agent Lil’ Kim, by the way.”

“You know I already own the pasties,” says Taehyung.

“Never doubted you’d be prepared for all eventualities,” says Namjoon.  “And Tae,” he adds, in English this time, “I love you, man.”

“You too, Joonie,” Taehyung replies, in the same language, before his phone screen lights up with the disconnect that then fades back to blackness. Taehyung grabs it down from the dash and sets it on the seat next to his bag before he turns the key in the ignition, reverses out of his faculty parking space, and ponderously circles the edge of the parking lot until he makes it out past the school entrance. When he reaches the first light, he decides that, today, he can afford to give himself an extra twenty minutes to take the long way home.

~

 Scrawled across the bottom of the Polaroid is Methought I was enamoured of an ass, not in Jimin’s handwriting. It’s a snapshot from the afterparty for the Midsummer Night's Dream production their junior year in which Tae played Puck – a role he was born for, definitely got laid for, if Jimin remembers correctly. (He does.) He and Taehyung are standing in the slightly overexposed foreground, Jimin with eyes squinched up in a full smile and arms around Taehyung, who’s giving the camera a cocky wink. Taehyung is wearing a baggy grey sweatshirt, having changed out of his costume as soon as the performance ended, but you can still see the full body glitter that, along with that ethereal pale purple hair he’s sporting, makes him look like some fabulous fantasy creature randomly crashing a college party. Jimin, on the other hand, has on a white sleeveless muscle tee that he now thinks is rather unfortunate, though he notes that his arms actually look pretty good, not nearly as soft as he remembers them being.  Behind the two of them, sticking out from the thick of the crowd in the common area of the dorm suite, is a sliver of a hand mid-swig on a bottle of Arbor Mist. That’s Jeongguk, who Jimin knows is going to drink that whole bottle all by himself this evening and get massively sick later on. The feet propped up nonchalantly on the coffee table in front of the sofa that’s cut off by the right edge of the frame belong to Hoseok, who’s wearing Birkenstocks in fucking February. If Jimin squints, he thinks he can make out Seokjin and Namjoon standing in a group way in the back of the room, Namjoon with his back to the camera and Seokjin in his pink button down straight from work, not yet fully loosened up and party sweaty. It’s such a moment in time, Jimin thinks, lips quirking into a smile as he softly shakes his head at all of them. He’s definitely got to snap this one for Tae. This, and the cardboard fortress that has now taken over Jimin’s living room. Jeongguk is totally going to make fun of him the next time he comes over, though when he does Jimin can always remind him that the clock is ticking on his Secret Celibacy Cessation Challenge.

To be fair, Jimin hadn’t intended to start packing this early. But when he stopped at the bodega on the corner to grab something for dinner, he inadvertently let it slip to Eduardo, who he has been low-key flirting with ever since the weather began to thaw out, that he was going to be moving to San Francisco for med school. There had been a gratifying flash of disappointment across Eduardo’s face from behind the deli counter before he quickly moved to cover it with a We’re gonna miss you around here, man, followed by Hey, you need boxes? I got you – let me check in back. You gotta use the ones they make for the fruit. Fruit’s a lot heavier than you think. Eduardo wouldn’t take no for an answer; it was like he had to apologize for the date he was no longer going to ask Jimin on.

Jimin ended up schlepping a dozen or so things of broken-down cardboard back home and leaning them up against the little bit of wall space in his kitchen so he could wolf down his dinner before deliberating where to store them until he actually needed them. As he ate, though, he couldn’t ignore them. The sight of them slumped next to the refrigerator kept nagging at him as he made his way through forkfuls of salad. They made everything look so...transient. So, Jimin thought, he might as well get a jump on the packing – just stuff he wasn’t going to use every day for the next few months. It would be one less thing to deal with at the end of the summer, when he’d be caught in a whirlwind of saying goodbyes and Craigslisting his furniture and deep cleaning the apartment so he could make sure he got his deposit back. It started innocently enough, just him tackling obvious categories of things like “under-furniture storage” and “top shelves in the kitchen,” but you know what? It’s amazing how much crap you can accumulate, even in a city that advertises closets as second bedrooms.

It’s not been completely tedious, though. In addition to the full trash bag of expired cleaning products and plastic cutlery by the front door, and a box of winter clothes he thinks he’ll just send home to his parents’ basement, Jimin had unearthed a dusty box under his bed full of old college memorabilia – ticket stubs, old party decorations with messages scribbled on them, the occasional photo or two. He’s been up late sifting through them on the living room floor and Snapchatting the best ones to Taehyung, who spent a good portion of the early evening sending Jimin videos of exploding watermelons and teenagers running around draped in bedsheets. Until he actually picked up the phone and called a couple hours ago, and it wasn’t all fun and games anymore.

Ever since he got accepted into med school, Jimin’s been in this kind of dizzy, celebratory mood. He finally feels validated, knowing that he can, and did, make his dreams come true. It’s generated this warm bubble of success that gave him confidence to really kick ass in the lab, get back in shape again, and, most importantly, go out and meet enough guys in order to work through insecurities that piled up in his last relationship. Jimin’s been able to prove some things to himself. He’s not constantly in need of someone else’s protection. He’s not only “cute” (god, he got so sick of being called that) – he’s also hot, sexy, powerful on his own. He, too, can be wanted, needed. It has felt good, after all this time, to have hands and eyes on him confirming that.

 Looking up from his seat on the floor at the towering cartoon banana fortress that he bets would withstand one of Tae’s watermelon bombardments, Jimin is overwhelmed by the sense that his living room is both claustrophobic and yet somehow void of the things that made it his these past couple years. Maybe this packing spree was a mistake; it’s too early to feel this out-of-place at home. And ever since Tae’s phone call there’s been a pit at the bottom of his stomach that’s kept him from fully sinking back into the pleasant nostalgia fog brought on by the contents of the memory box.

 He decides there’s nothing for it but a walk. The night is almost balmy and his neighbors are out on the stoop again playing dominoes and bachata music after a long winter hibernation. Jimin throws on a jacket and heads down the block toward the park that edges its way all along the river. The weird, unsettled feeling persists as he walks, a low buzz of something almost panicky as Jimin sets a course uptown under the trees and lamplight. But once he reaches the overpass about ten blocks north, where the high rises fall away and there’s nothing but space up above, this big oceanic thing wells up inside of him, overtakes him. Everything in Jimin has to stop moving and start crying as he comes to a stop against the stone railing overlooking the dark river and lets himself feel...sad. Empty. Scared.

All of which, he tells himself, it shouldn't be possible for him feel anymore. Not these old, rootless feelings – not now that he's about to go live a life he’s dreamed about for years. Why is he out here in this beautiful, warm night air feeling so cold, hurting out here alone?

But then Jimin stops and thinks that maybe, in order to move on, you've got to grieve for what you're about to lose. Maybe that's why he's feeling this way. It's about to be the real end of an era, the era of this city where he and all the rest of them came of age together. Once Jimin goes, that whole world and all those memories are gonna be firmly in the past for him, embedded deep in the architecture, fossilized, instead of dynamically swirling around him in the fresh air like they’re doing now.

Taehyung had laid it out for him – the grand road trip plan for the end of the summer. He read Jimin the best parts of Hoseok’s email, gently talking around Hoseok talking around Jimin, even though they both knew what he was doing. When he finished, Tae asked him what he wanted to do. Did he want to be part of this? Instantly, almost reflexively, Jimin asked for his opinion. What did Tae think about it all? Taehyung being Taehyung, he had paused for just a moment before saying, with a solemn sincerity in his voice that made him sound both seven and seventy at the same time, that he thought Jimin should do what made him happy, but that he also thought that sometimes you need to shake hands with what makes you unhappy in order to find happiness that will last.

They smiled at each other, saying I love you and goodnight before hitting end. Mind drifting toward another, earlier phone call, Jimin opened up the old group chat  – fairly quiet, recently – and simply texted Agent Buns, reporting for duty before throwing himself back into packing. Until, of course, he found that box and got stuck in all the memories inside it.

That, Jimin thinks now, has got to be what he's crying about. It's been so exhilarating – to get viscerally swept up in his success, to imagine this whole new life in San Francisco where he’s going to be a hot and eligible (though exhausted) med student – that until now it never occurred to him to stop and think about everything he was leaving behind here, in this place that became home without him even realizing it. This city he can navigate by memory and memories.

Standing there, forearms braced against the balustrade, looking out across the river at the orange lights cast down into the barely perceptible current, Jimin lets it all come out. Lets his face get hot and red and wet, lets his chest get tight until it can't tighten anymore and his throat chokes up as it releases a thin little sound that wavers out into the night air. He’s going to miss all this. Not just living in a place he knows, but everything his knows about this particular place. The different people he’s come to know and love during his time in this city. The different people he himself has been in this city. That kid in the Polaroid, with the chubby cheeks and the eyes disappearing into his smile. Next to him Tae, fully aware how much he looks like sex and yet in no hurry to do anything with it. Jeongguk in the background, well on his way to the worst hangover Jimin's ever seen. Namjoon awkwardly chatting up that girl from his philosophy class he was so sure was his Miss Right, even though everyone else could predict how that would crash and burn. Seokjin taking full advantage of his first year on the job to bring back gossipy stories about the utter stupidity going on behind the scenes of some major ad campaigns. Hoseok impressing the entire party by doing a blindfolded backflip lengthwise over the coffee table, those ridiculously season-inappropriate sandals staying on the whole time. And Yoongi, long, rangy fingers caging either side of the camera, bright red fringe visible even through the flash as his eye framed the scene just so.

So Jimin gets it. Maybe they've all been feeling the drift from each other, and this rescue mission is secretly a big, elaborate excuse for everyone to come together and say hello a lot better than they've managed recently. To recapture the closeness of that time when they were unbelievably young and knew each other as well as they knew each block of the old neighborhood.

The faintest chill seeps into the air as Jimin zips up his jacket, wipes at his eyes and thinks, he’s going to do this. He would never let any of them down, and Tae had a point. Which, of course he did. Tae always knows just how much of a point he has, though he rarely feels the need to hammer it home. Unlike for the rest of them, this road trip isn’t going to be some fresh start for Jimin, but rather the mother of all farewells. To this city. To all the years he spent becoming a person in it. To all the people he was along the way. To all the people his friends were when they were here, and aren’t anymore.  

To the one person he never quite figured out how to say goodbye to.