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CLANG. BANG. CRASH.
The noise is loud in the otherwise silent apartment. Once the ringing in his ears stops, it resumes its quiet stillness, the silence so thick Yoongi can almost hear the cake melt on the kitchen counter. He’s sitting upright at the dining table, back so painfully straight it’s almost unnatural. The others sit opposite, murmuring amongst themselves. They can tell that he is afraid. He’s afraid of the person who will round the corner today. Will it be the Taehyung from the wasteland, hard eyes and quick lies so easy on the tongue, the Taehyung that the wasteland cultivated to be mean and to hurt?
Or will it be the Taehyung who loves Yoongi, who is gentle and grows green beans out on their balcony, who puts sprigs of mint into their water and kisses people on the nose as liberally as he breathes.
Yoongi doesn’t know, but he loves both — the Taehyung who holds his jaw tight in one hand, gentleness giving way to the remembrance of old tightness of muscles and constant, fearful paranoia broken only by spiels of momentary relaxation, his mercurial and capricious nature only adding to the anticipation, and the Taehyung who kisses his nose and names his frogs after the three girls in Totally Spies.
He’s greeted with a beautiful, boxy smile as the man rounds the corner and Yoongi relaxes almost immediately, his smile widening to mirror his boyfriend’s. It’s the Taehyung of now — good, because the Taehyung of now has been appearing more dominantly and for longer periods of time.
Maybe, Yoongi’s heart soars a little. Maybe he’s finally returning to normal, maybe he’s really getting better.
“Hyung,” Taehyung says, walking up to him and kissing his forehead, hand coming up easy to rest on his waist. “Sorry, I dropped my bottle. Are the others coming soon? The cake is going to melt if you take it out beforehand, love.”
Yoongi blinks at the cake slowly. He says, “I could’ve sworn they were right with me,” and his voice sounds very distant and far-away. Taehyung looks at him worriedly, taking his hand and placing it over his heartbeat. There is nothing there, no matter how hard Yoongi concentrates. Maybe he’s not feeling it right.
“No one is here,” he says. “It’s just you and me.”
Yoongi breathes out and when he looks at the counter there is no one there. He blinks; where did they go? He supposes he must’ve imagined them, imagined Hoseok’s smile and Seokjin’s wink. The way their breathing harmonised. “What would I do without you?” He asks, half in jest, half in seriousness, as Taehyung picks up the cake and puts it back carefully in the box. The apartment air is heavy.
Taehyung laughs. He rubs the back of his head and looks a bit abashed. “Well, hyung,” he says. “You wouldn’t be dreaming now.”
Yoongi blinks at him. The world spins over in a circle. The cake falls out of the box and onto the floor with a squelch, the strawberries falling out of place and burying deeper into the cream. He says, “no heartbeat,” as Taehyung throws back his head and laughs — it sounds like the screeching of nails on a chalkboard — Yoongi claps his hands over his ears, the world keeps spinning —
— He opens his eyes.
The room he is in is dark and quiet. There is the distant swoosh of cars as they drive by the road outside, their shadows flitting through the curtainless windows. Yoongi sits up, and Taehyung stirs by his side, rolling over to open an eye sleepily at him. He is naked from the waist up, and the night light casts his skin in hues of red, orange and blue. They mark him in a pretty pattern, a pattern of beauty and peace.
“Yoongi,” he says, sitting up. He unfurls Yoongi’s clenched hands and places them over his left side. His skin is warm from sleep and his heartbeat is distinct, slow and steady. He can feel it thrumming beneath his hand, and Yoongi stifles a sob into Taehyung’s hair. “This is real. You’re awake.”
Yoongi clutches onto him; feels his warm hands slide up his shirt and rest against the small of his back. “Taehyung-ah,” Yoongi exhales, the name a bright light in the dark. “I’ve told you I’m sorry, right?”
“You say it every night,” Taehyung says gently, his voice a slow, lulling burr. “I hear it every morning. Will you ever stop being sorry?”
This Taehyung, Yoongi notices, is His Taehyung, the Taehyung he tried so hard to keep alive. The Other Taehyung has been appearing less and less often as their two halves reconcile, and Yoongi is grateful for it.
“No,” Yoongi laughs, breathless in guilt. “No, I won’t be.”
“It’s okay,” Taehyung holds him tighter. “I’ll say I forgive you as many times as you need me to. Do you need me to call the others?”
“No,” Yoongi says. “It’s alright,” and he lets go of Taehyung, pulling back to kiss his forehead gently. “How is your leg?”
“Less painful than normal, hyung,” Taehyung pulls the blanket aside and shoves up his pant leg to show his right leg — in the center of his thigh, a wide, riddled scar, three fingers wide.
Yoongi’s biggest regret, one he is certain will haunt him till the end of his life. Yoongi presses his palm over it — it’s long since healed over, or — healed over, but it looks like this, and it rises out of his skin like a brand. “It’s a clear night tonight.”
Yoongi brushes his index finger over it and sighs. A car drives by and his words are stolen, lost to the noise, but Taehyung smiles because their hearts beat the same song.
They’re both thinking of the night when they look at each other again. It is not a night it is The Night, it is a night Yoongi will dream about forever, a night that will have Yoongi constantly looking over his shoulder. It is the night when Yoongi nearly lost, again, a person who mattered so much to him, he would move every planet and shake the light out of every star to make sure he would never lose him.
It had been a clear night that night.
Jimin told him to look away but Yoongi couldn’t, hit when it involved Taehyung. A sharp cut on his wrist by the aid of a sharp scalpel had been enough to jolt him awake, screaming and yelling hoarsely, his eyes wet with tears not for himself but for Yoongi, god, for him. As if he deserved tears after what he’d done to them because he was selfish. Taehyung had seen him, held his face in his hands, but they’d not done anything because they had to go. Every fibre in Yoongi’s body screamed to kiss him, to take him into his arms and hide him from a world that wanted him dead but he couldn’t, not yet. It was always not yet when it came to Taehyung and Yoongi.
(“What did you do to us?” Seokjin asked, when he woke. His eyes were wide with horror, and he’d turned over to the side and retched when he remembered everything. “Oh my god, Yoongi, what did you do?”
“What I had to do,” Yoongi brushed the hair out of his eyes. “What I had to do, I’m so sorry hyung. You were dead; now you talk. The sacrifice was worth it.”
“You should’ve let the dead stay dead,” Seokjin snarled, but he’d leaned into Yoongi’s touch anyway. “Oh, Yoongi-chi. I should never have left you alone.”)
They’d gotten everyone but Jungkook awake before the doctors arrived, alerted by the mass loss of signals, at the detached IVs. They’d all stayed to wake him up but that cost them time and time they did not have — the first bullet caught Yoongi in the arm, grazing his side. The second hit the IV bag, sending the drip spurting everywhere — and the third.
The third caught Taehyung in the leg and his scream, god, his scream — visceral and full of pain and everything Yoongi never wanted to hear for him in a single uttered sound.
The world had narrowed down to him and the two guards in front of the door. Taehyung’s sobs and moans disappeared into the background and Yoongi doesn’t know what he did, doesn’t want to know either, but it’d ended with him having murders on his hands.
Real life murders. These were real life people he killed, people who probably felt like Yoongi did and thought like Yoongi did, but it rapidly occurred to him he had no choice, that a broken Taehyung was behind him and Yoongi would defy gravity to keep him alive.
They didn’t have time to think, though. Jimin stitched Taehyung up poorly, grateful for the clean exit of the bullet that belonged to a weapon Yoongi was intimately familiar with, the Daewoo K5. They’d found it occasionally during their excursions in the wasteland, but once they’d run out of ammunition, the gun had become completely useless. Yoongi never wants to see one again.
They’d carried him out, the others too weak to help, and chucked him into a car.
And now they’re here.
Thailand is not where Yoongi thought he’d end up, but it’d been the only cargo plane flying out of the small military base, the only one that their only friend remaining could help them on once Taehyung’s leg was better cared for — not the best, but better.
The government had their data, their information. They could chase them to Thailand, but for what? So many people would sign the same contract Yoongi did — death is as infinite and lingering as the light from the sun, and so many people would give everything for the moon. Here in Thailand, Yoongi worked in a bakery down the block with Seokjin, and they were surprisingly good at it. Taehyung had jobs flower store a couple of blocks down from Yoongi. The others found jobs here and there but their new identities were foreign on their tongues, so when it’s just the two of the in the apartment above the pizzeria, they were Yoongi and Taehyung, and Yoongi and Taehyung only.
“Come on,” Taehyung says. He pushes Yoongi back down and kisses him softly. “Go back to sleep, Yoongi. When you wake up in the morning, I’ll be here.”
Yoongi blinks at their ceiling, stained orange by the streetlights outside. He says, “I love you,” and Taehyung laughs.
“I love you too,” he says.
The first time Yoongi told Taehyung he loved him, he was nineteen and Taehyung was sixteen. They’d been messing about — walking home from school, eating melon bread and joking. Taehyung had caught Yoongi’s phone as he dropped it and it was so easy to say it. Thank you, I love you.
The first time Yoongi meant it differently, meant it a little more than he should, he was twenty-four and Taehyung was twenty-two and dying. Yoongi had held his hand and said I love you and Taehyung had given him a good scolding for telling him this just as he was about to die, managing to sound annoyed even as his grip on Yoongi’s wrist slackened. Yoongi never said it again. It hurt to do it, and it hurt to remember how many times he did, so the tally marks increased but his I love yous never did. In the wasteland, there’s only death, there’s no time for love.
The first time Taehyung said it back, they were on the plane and Taehyung was still dying, but slightly less so.
He said, “I remember everything,” and looked at Yoongi with intent.
“What is everything?” Yoongi asked, closing his eyes. He felt Korea running away from him and struggled to let go of the hold he still had on it. Everything to Yoongi was all the deaths he’d seen. Everything to Yoongi was the sight of Taehyung’s bloodstained mouth, of Jungkook’s terrified scream — young and full of pain — when the enemy had caught them.
(“Promise me,” Namjoon said one night, when they’re all sitting on the roof. The noise of Korea’s streets, the last thing Yoongi had seen of his country before they’d left, threatened to drown out his voice. “Promise me when we next die, you let us stay dead, hyung.”
Yoongi looked down at his feet. “No promises,” he said, and Namjoon huffed and rolled his eyes. “Look at you. You breathe. You speak. I would die a thousand deaths to give you all a single breath.”)
Taehyung’s hand was on his knee; his palm was warm and burnt hot through their thin clothes. “You said you loved me,” he said. Everyone else on the plane was asleep, and Taehyung’s voice carried through cleanly. “It sounded like it had a lot more meaning than before.”
Yoongi stopped breathing.
“If I said I loved you too,” Taehyung grimaced as he moved his bad leg. “Would you be sad?”
Yoongi had taken a while to respond. “No,” he said. “No, I wouldn’t be.”
“Then I love you too,” Taehyung said, closing his eyes. He leaned his head on Yoongi’s shoulder and breathed out sharply through his nose, and that had been that.
Now Taehyung is there when Yoongi wakes up from a nightmare, a soothing word already on the top of his tongue, and Yoongi is ready for him when Taehyung cries in his sleep, quiet sniffling that breaks Yoongi’s heart when he wakes up to it.
But above all — above all, they have each other, and the five people scattered throughout the apartment block. They have each other, and that is enough.
(Namjoon pursed his lips and considered that. “Hyung,” he said. “Death is but a sliproad of life. It is not so finite, not so dark, he continued. His words felt like they’re made of the stuff of poetry. “It’s just the next street running parallel to us. We’ll wait at a crossroad till you come by, and the world will burst into colour.”
He tilted his head back. “Death doesn’t have to be permanent,” he gestured at himself. “But it should be.”
“And when I die, and see you again, winter will end?” Yoongi raised an eyebrow, leaning back to lie on his hands.
“Sure,” Namjoon said, cheesing a little. “Winter will end, and I’ll see you again. We’ll see you again.”
“Okay,” Yoongi breathed. The sound of a door opening filtered into the roof, and Taehyung, followed by the others, step onto it. Taehyung offers him a small, sweet smile, and Yoongi closed his eyes.
Okay.
He’ll wait. Next time he’ll wait. But for now, he’ll gather everyone he loves and keep them in his heart, for when the days turn long and the wasteland steals into his memory on little cat feet.)