Archive of Our Own

{Now}

Drive.

All they ever do is drive.

The roads go on endlessly, unwinding around them. Outside Seoul, the world is different. Outside Seoul, it’s silent and the roads are empty and calm. It’s the kind you crave after living in chaos for so long.

Taehyung has been craving that for a long time. Didn’t even know he missed it until he came across it.

But right now, with Yoongi driving skilfully as ever and Taehyung in his spot on the passenger seat, he wants the chaos back. He wants it ringing in his ears and filling up all his five senses until that’s all he sees.

He’s never satisfied with anything, is he? But how long can he sit in this silence, how long can he pretend that the way Yoongi drives or the way he bristles at Taehyung’s feet on the dashboard isn’t cute, how long?

He wishes for- more. Wishes for time to freeze or something happen, wishes for something that would pound the blood faster into his brain, wishes for the silence to break. But no.

Because all they ever do is drive.

*

{Two weeks ago}

The wind cuts through the sleeves of his leather jacket, straight past the thin t-shirt he’s wearing underneath and into his body, almost making him shiver.

Almost, because he can’t afford to move right now. He has his target on lockdown after two hours of freezing his ass off on this stupid roof, and nothing could distract him now.

Min Yoongi is a man of his word, and when he says he’s maybe the most skilled hitman in Seoul right now, then he is, no arguments.

The target seems to be cheerfully exchanging goodbyes with whoever he was out partying with tonight; too bad cheerful is the last thing he’d feel when a bullet finds its mark right in the middle of his forehead. At least he won’t suffer. Yoongi’s never liked any of his victims to suffer as they inevitably die for the “wrongs” they have done.

Victims. In the brief moment that he waits for the perfect shot, he wonders when that happened, how the body count grew so much that he had a damn list.

He mentally grinds the wheels of his thoughts to a stop. The job came first, and so what if he had a list? It paid. At the end of the day, the people he killed caused trouble, he had no idea who they were beyond a face and he got a big fat pay cheque for each job. He lived well. It didn’t fucking matter.

(But that’s the irony, isn’t it? Oh, how the human mind rationalised the sins the body did.)

Yoongi rests his finger on the trigger, eyes locked on the man. The aim points right at the perfect angle and he’s about to squeeze the trigger when-

When a blade comes the fuck out of nowhere and buries itself into the side of the man’s neck.

Chaos ensues. The people around him scream, some splattered with his blood that’s shooting out in unsightly sprays as the man chokes. Yoongi backs away from his rifle, looking around for the fucker that messed with his target. Took away his prize money and bounty.

There’s no time for that now. Yoongi ducks down behind the wall and packs away his material, keeping an eye out for anybody else. In his world, everything was fair game. In his world, you had to fight tooth and nail to be the top dog and if one wasn’t careful, the beta could take the place anytime.

From the angle of the knife, the attacker was definitely in the same area as he was if he took into account the speed of the blade and the wind’s intensity in the air. There’s only the roof he’s using that’s the perfect spot.

Yoongi takes out the gun he keeps in the back of his jeans, slowly and silently exploring the small but well-protected area. He’s about the put it away when he hears the clang of- something.

He whips out the gun and points it at the figure that’s crouched down low, who’s whispering curses of pain as he rubs his ankle. Yoongi’s been in the field long enough to assess details at lightning speed, and he keeps his gun trained on the guy as he takes in all that surrounds him. The ledge behind the guy. He definitely flung the knife from there; it’s a perfect angle. He also may be hurt himself in jumping down from it. Yoongi almost snorts. Must be a rookie.

“Put your hands the fuck up,” he says instead, hands steady on the gun. It’s not his favourite to kill people at point-blank range but in the eight years since he began his life of immorality, Yoongi’s done a lot of things.

The guy freezes. He seems to be lanky, which already irritates Yoongi, and his dark blonde, almost brown, hair hangs over his face, hiding his face. The boy is dressed shabbily too, and not in what would expect of a fellow killer. He’s wearing simple stonewashed jeans and a denim jacket, a black turtleneck underneath. By his side lies a whole ensemble of blades. Having already guessed the guy’s skill, Yoongi has to make sure the guy is distracted enough not to reach for one of his lethal blades.

“Stand up, raise your hands, and don’t try anything fucking funny,” he rasps. God, he hates his voice and he hates that he has to speak. All he wanted was to go to the pickup point and collect his money, and then relax with his pine bath bomb. Was that too much to ask?

The guy does that, standing straight with hands up. Like this, he is indeed taller than Yoongi, the fuck, but Yoongi can see his face a lot more clearly now. Though still covered with bangs, he can tell that the guy is- pretty. In that totally aesthetic way: soft hair, plump lips, and a soft nose. His eyes aren’t visible but Yoongi could bet his rose bath bomb that they’d be shaped like almonds or something. Pretty boys always fucking had those annoying combination of features.

“Hey, dude,” the guy says, tone placating and pleading. “Let’s calm down a bit. We’ve got no beef here.”

Yoongi huffs and removes his baseball cap, one hand continuing to point the gun while he runs a hand through his hair. The guy gasps, which is a very unusual reaction when facing possible death, but who the fuck cares. Yoongi’s pissed.

“Yeah, we do,” Yoongi hisses back. “You fucking took my kill. Target was mine. What the fuck, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t listed in the bounty track list.”

The guy seems to be having some kind of crisis, eyes wide and mouth open. His hair has been pushed away from his face and his face definitely is gorgeous, holy shit, but Yoongi’s struck by a thought of familiarity. He has a familiar face, but Yoongi can’t recall who the guy reminds him of.

“Kang Jaehyun was added to the list last night,” the guy replies instead, breathing fast. What is wrong with the dude? Is he reacting to the gun? “Hyung?”

Yoongi frowns. “I’m no one to you, why are you using informal speech?”

The guy puts his hands down and Yoongi clicks the gun back into place. The guy raises his hands again but starts coming forwards slowly. Yoongi’s grip on the gun tightens. He may not be the most threatening physically, but that’s an advantage. Because Min Yoongi can kill at point blank very, very well.

But the boy isn’t threatened at all. Instead, his face seems to be pleading with him.

“Hyung. Don’t you remember me? It’s me, Taehyung.”

Now, in his eight years of activity in the field, Yoongi has managed to maintain one thing flawlessly- his ability to maintain his calm no matter what the situation. To be collected as always, and no amount of blood or crushed bones or the echoing wails of his victims ever shook his composure.

But right then, Yoongi’s grip on the gun loosens, and a wall in his mind opens its floodgates.

Taehyung?

Taehyung.

Oh, fuck no, is what he thinks as he faces the memory from his past.

*

{Now}

Taehyung blows the smoke out even as he faces the No Smoking sign in front of him.

Maybe smoking at a gas station is courting with Death, but Taehyung’s long since run out of fucks to give. If an explosion is the way he has to go, he’d love to go out with style.

He snorts at the nature of his thoughts. What a goddamn nihilist he’s turned into.

He takes a drag in as he watches Yoongi fill up the tank, silently waiting. They’re at an out of the way gas station; it’s practically in the middle of nowhere. There’s dust covering every possible surface even though the air seems clean; there’s one run down store where they’ll probably find food. Probably. Nothing’s guaranteed ever since they began driving, and it’s with a bitter taste he realises that the bags full of cash in their trunk does shit to sustain them.

All of those wise old cracks telling the world money doesn’t buy you happiness, maybe they were right because Taehyung would kill (nothing new there) for the greasiest cheeseburger he can find.

But they’re at an empty gas station with an unappealing store with maybe no food, Yoongi’s filling gas, Taehyung’s killing himself with smoke and that’s it. Oh, and that exciting possibility of driving, again, and sitting in silence through it all.

Because even if they’ve been on the damn road for two weeks, the distance between Taehyung and Yoongi increases with each second.

Because all they ever do, is fucking drive.

*

{Two weeks ago: two days later}

The assignment this time is in broad daylight (what was the dude who contacted him thinking), but it’s nothing new. Yoongi’s managed to shoot people dead while walking to the nearest doughnut shop, but it’s annoying as shit. He has the added pain of looking presentable, of making sure he does normal shit like look at stupid flowers and talk nicely to the ahjumma selling them so that he doesn’t appear suspicious.

He hates the person who contacted him. Like, ok, sure, he works with a gang and all that jazz but there’s no lie that he’s also sought out personally, by people who don’t want to get themselves tangled with the ruthless gangs of Seoul. But at least be considerate of stuff like the sun making him visible and the people roaming around like ants around the target.

He’s got his eyes on the girl who’s walking in front of him for quite a while. He makes sure he’s not obvious, carries around a laptop bag and his head nodding along to the earphones he has even though there’s no music playing.

The girl is pretty. She seems to be a working woman and seems ok, and Yoongi doesn’t know who she is or what she’s done to earn such a horrible death (“her wound should be in the stomach, I want her to bleed the fuck out, fucking cunt”) but the paycheck is worth it. And he needs it, considering that the boy the other night (he’s not going to say his name or think it, he’s not) took away his shot at a good payment.

The girl enters a slightly less crowded part of the city, a possible short cut to her place of work. Good for Yoongi; the less people who see or hear her, the better. He checks his surroundings and carefully gets out a handgun from his jacket, screwing on a silencer to it as he walks at a leisurely pace. It’s inconspicuous and hidden well in his gloved hands; there are no witnesses. In T minus ten seconds, the girl will die.

Except that doesn’t happen, because just as Yoongi aims his gun at her a masked figure comes in front of the girl and in a flurry of movement, crashes against the girl. Yoongi’s about to put away his gun when he notices that the man does not fall but stands calmly, and the girl goes down with a cry, clutching her stomach. Something glints in his hands.

A knife.

Yoongi looks up from the girl at the same time the man looks towards him and freezes. He recognises those almond eyes all too well even if most of the man’s face is covered with a mask.

The man hastily adjusts his mask once more before taking off, leaving Yoongi frozen even as the girl screams for help. She’s on the ground now and bleeding in copious amounts; she won’t survive. The angle of the blade was a killing strike; it definitely struck a major organ, though Yoongi can’t yet tell which one.

The girl’s screaming brings attention and then once again for the second time in two days, chaos ensues in Yoongi’s vicinity. He hides his gun even as a couple of people shove past him, and he thinks someone asks him for help or to move aside. He does neither.

Instead, he turns back and takes a short detour, tracking the man. He’s good at it, and he soon comes across a well-hidden alleyway where he sees the figure bending over and catching his breath.

Taehyung.

Fuck, he still can’t believe it’s him. He looks nothing like the boy he left back home in his small town in Daegu (OK, that’s a lie, he’s not that different), but in a way he is. Yoongi shakes his head, refusing to let his thoughts take him down that path. He couldn’t really bear it and now, he has one single goal, which is:

“Why the fuck are you taking my kills?”

Taehyung looks up, mask now off and dirty blonde hair hanging in low curtains over his eyes, which are lit up with some form of manic energy. He grins, but they’re nothing like the grins Yoongi knows are the most beautiful on the boy (fuck, fuck, stop thinking you old fuck). Taehyung’s hands are red with blood and Yoongi blinks at the blatant disregard for cleaning up after a kill. Does Taehyung want to get caught?

Taehyung takes out a simple handkerchief and begins cleaning his hands carelessly, leaning against the wall. He shrugs.

“Everything’s fair in this game, hyung,” he says softly, eyes challenging Yoongi to refute. Yoongi knows he can’t because the girl was on the bounty list. It’s just that, most bounty hunters had high fucking egos with no skill, and most people didn’t actually check the list regularly.

Except apparently Taehyung.

After that dramatic introduction to each other after eight years on the roof, nothing happened. Taehyung had looked like he’d found treasure, Yoongi was sure he looked like he’d seen a ghost. Because that’s what Taehyung was, a fucking ghost to him. He was to remain back in Daegu, what the fuck was he doing in fucking Seoul?

Yoongi had only wordlessly turned and walked away. He refused to believe things could go to shit like this. Nope, he’d simply denied it, locked it away in his brain and done what he did best: cleaned up and walked the fuck away.

This time, it was Taehyung who turned away. “Don’t be pissed, hyung. I’m sure you’ll earn back the cash somewhere else.” He says, back to Yoongi and voice fading away. Yoongi’s left in the dingy alley with nothing but a bloodstained handkerchief and a confused storm of his feelings. And annoyance, a lot of it.

*

When it happens for the third time, Yoongi is convinced the universe hates his guts and wants payback for all the deaths he gave.

Their third encounter happens barely 36 hours after the death of the girl. By then, Yoongi is beyond pissed and poorer by a few grand, not that it affects him that badly but it does affect his personal plan. At work (work, ha, like what he does is any less illegal than murdering people), he snaps at the runners and the lower tier workers, maybe smashes a beer bottle against that annoying secretary who likes to stick his nose in people’s business and just generally. He’s not having the best of days.

When he gets another assignment, Yoongi makes sure that the stupid target isn’t on any goddamn list. It’s not the best of cash but it’s enough to soothe his hurt ego and that’s all he cares about.

But of fucking course when he faces his target in the parking lot of a run-down motel, the poor guy on his knees begging for his life, he isn’t even surprised when a figure dressed in all black strolls behind the man and places a curved blade under his chin, hand over the mouth, shutting down those piteous whimpers.

The scene goes like this: Yoongi in front of the man, gun pointed at his head, Taehyung behind the man with a knife placed carefully on his neck, both of them facing each other and calm. So much calm.

“Are you following me or something?” Yoongi asks. He’s passed into that zone of calm that comes when you blow your fuse. Which is good, he thinks, because he might have shot Taehyung instead.

(Oh, how he lies, as if he could shoot down Taehyung).

Yoongi’s making a joke, but Taehyung lights up instead. “As a matter of fact, I am, hyung,” he chuckles.

“What the fuck,” Yoongi mumbles, momentarily losing concentration before straightening up once again. “Look, kid. You’ve taken two of my kills, isn’t that enough? This dude doesn’t even cost that much.”

Taehyung hums. “Oh, yeah, you could have this one, no problem,” he scratches his head as he says so. “I actually had a proposition for you, but I’m interrupting, aren’t I? Shoot away.”

Yoongi’s steadily getting more and more confused. He shrugs and looks at the target once again, who starts whimpering, praying to whichever fucking god he thinks would save him. He takes the safety off when Taehyung’s back again with the blade on the neck.

“What?”

“How about we both kill him and then split the cash?”

“That your stupid fucking proposition?”

“No, but I have this issue where if I take out my favourite blade and don’t use it, I get very angry.”

Jesus fucking Christ, what happened to Taehyung? This wasn’t him. Yoongi thinks briefly, a pang of pain shooting in the middle of his chest. This wasn’t the Taehyung he knew, who couldn’t bear to kill even a mosquito. Now he had special blades that he sacrificed things to, the fuck?

Yoongi groans lightly and just nods. At the count of three, Yoongi pulls the trigger, Taehyung slits the target’s neck and shut down the oncoming scream.

The target drops next to them, gurgling on the leaking blood and staining the parking lot. Good thing this shitty place doesn’t have cameras. Yoongi puts away his gun, barely glancing at Taehyung who’s cleaning his blade and hand. He contemplates putting away the body but decides he doesn’t give a shit. Two people were involved anyway, and the police wouldn’t find the guy for days on end. Decomposition should do most of the job, hopefully. He begins to walk away.

“Wait!” He hears Taehyung call out and restrains the groan threatening to come out of him. There’s a goddamn reason he doesn’t want to interact with the kid ever again.

“What.”

“My proposition is left,” Taehyung breathes close to his ear and Yoongi almost slams him away. When did he get to him so fast?

“Spit it out, then.” Yoongi faces Taehyung and once again, he’s taken aback by how much Taehyung has changed, how much he’s grown in the eight years since he last saw them. The boy became a beautiful man, and sure he looks like he’s fucked in the head (aren’t they all?) but wow.

Taehyung runs his tongue over his lips (so that habit didn’t change), eyes wide and hopeful, and damn, Yoongi wishes he didn’t have to see that. To be reminded of Taehyung like this. But Yoongi is a weak man, he’s always been so.

“I think we should team up,” Taehyung breathes out. His voice definitely became deeper and in a whisper something about it sounds…charming. Enchanting.

“No.” Yoongi doesn’t even blink or think. There’s no way he’s going to get Taehyung wrapped up with him again, no way is he going to…show him just how depraved his hyung became. Even if they’re on the same platform, despite the best of his efforts.

“Why not? We’re both clearly very skilled, we’re both in demand. We’d earn more together, hyung, c’mon,” Taehyung says earnestly, some of that childlike passion entering his tone.

“No,” Yoongi says again. “You’re messy as shit and I’m obviously better, just never thought I’d have competition. Goodbye, Taehyung.”

“Oh, so you’re finally going to acknowledge me, huh, hyung?” Taehyung says, a saccharine smile painted on his face. Smart fucker, wasn’t he?

Yoongi doesn’t deign to reply, choosing to walk away again, leaving Taehyung behind with a dead, bleeding body. Pretends not to hear when Taehyung whisper-yells, “I never forgot you, hyung!”

He wishes he had. Yoongi wasn’t someone to remember. He was nothing at all.

*

{Two days later}

Yoongi collected the money and he’s now in the middle of a gang meeting, running over specifics and the money and profit and all that fucking bullshit that he doesn’t give a shit about, not anymore.

He has no family in this gang, even if they make a big deal about loyalty and trust and “all for one, one for all”. He’s made sure not to. He has the dragon tattoo on his arm, sure, as well as the helix piercings that mark him as a member, but it means shit to him.

They gave him safety and an earning when he first came to Seoul and that’s all.

He exits the meetings and makes to leave for home (and finalise everything) when his phone buzzes. He frowns because people don’t usually call him; his work timings for his other life are always to be made in the dead of the night.

The screen shows an unknown number with a Seoul area code. Cautious, he picks it up and is immediately met with ragged breathing.

“Hello-”

“Hyung? Hyung, please, don’t cut the call, it’s me, Tae,” the barely corrigible voice speaks out, sobs echoing a little. Hearing Tae like that squeezes his heart but focus, Min Yoongi, what the fuck.

“Taehyung? What happened?”

“Can you please come here, hyung, please I just-”

“Taehyung, I have somewhere to go-”

“Yoongi hyung, please,” Taehyung pleads and something inside Yoongi breaks. He hasn’t heard that in so long, and it transports him back to a place he never wants to return to. “Please, hyung, it’s this body and I don’t know what the fuck to do, fuck, I don’t what happened and I can’t-”

“OK, Ok, deep breaths first,” Yoongi whispers into the phone, going outside. The chill of winter is upon Seoul and Yoongi shivers. Allows himself to do so. “Send me your address and don’t panic. I’ll be right there.”

What the fuck is he doing? He should be far away right now, he should be on his way and never look back. But unfortunately for him, when it comes to Taehyung, Yoongi has always only been fucking weak.

He follows the location that pings on his phone and finds himself in a broken, unused warehouse, and to say that it’s a mess is an understatement. The dude lying at Taehyung’s feet is unrecognisable; his face a mess of stabs and clothes heavily stained in blood. What the fuck did Taehyung do?

“What the fuck?”

Taehyung looks up and Yoongi regrets his outburst. It’s clear that this wasn’t an intended kill, that this was definitely an- ambush, of sorts. Or maybe a mistake. Taehyung gripped a knife tightly in one hand, the blade making a dripping sound. His clothes are sprayed with blood droplets as are some parts of his face. His eyes are moving around in panic and sweat shines on him.

“Hyung, thank god you’re here, hyung, I don’t know what happened, I just-”

“Relax.” Yoongi squeezes his shoulder, the first sign of contact in eight years. “Talk later. Let me clean this shit up.”

Cleaning the mess has always been the second skill Yoongi has been extremely good at. He’s sought after because he leaves no trails. Any bodies found have all been either closed cases or unsolved. In addition, the cleaning process always helped get him under control.

He opened his bag and got out the products, and soon enough the smell of bleach was strong in the air. He wrapped the butchered body in clear plastic and tied it up with rope, then cleaned the blood on the floor. Taehyung had done well not to step into blood; his shoes were clean.

“You’ll have to help me carry the body. The Han River is close by.” Taehyung looks up and nods. His hands still shake and Yoongi wonders why, because not even two days ago Taehyung had confidently slit a living man without remorse.

The warehouse is indeed close to the river. Yoongi tracks any cameras in the area and finds none; perhaps it’s an abandoned area, long dead. They carry the body and it is dark outside. It’s not that much of a struggle. They reach the edge and throw the body after weighing it down with rocks.

It sinks without trouble, and it’s just them again.

This is when Taehyung breaks down, and Yoongi has no words. The man simply sobs, body shaking with the effort of it, and Yoongi can’t do anything, not like he used to once upon a time. He can only stand and wait because he’s lost all rights to Taehyung.

Eventually, he stops and the sobs become sniffles. “Sorry,” Taehyung utters monotonously. Yoongi waves it off and takes pity, just a little bit.

“Come, let’s get you something to eat.”

*

He doesn’t know why the fuck he’s here, but Yoongi has a suspicion it’s because of one Kim Taehyung and his ability to make Yoongi weaker than anyone.

Kim Taehyung.

The name means so much, honestly. It means so much now when Taehyung is sitting in front of him and eating his meal carefully, and it meant something eight years ago when they were stupid kids in a small town. It meant a lot when Taehyung was four and Yoongi was six and their mothers became best friends, so they had to become best friends by proxy too.

Kim Taehyung was his childhood.

It’s so fucked up. He was seventeen when he left Taehyung to protect him, but here they are again, people stained with the blood of hundreds, trying to be normal. Trying to act like they’re OK.

Yoongi failed, he thinks bitterly. All he wanted was Taehyung to be the bright boy he was, but he’s a killer like Yoongi and it’s fucking with Yoongi’s head big time. He failed.

He watches the way Taehyung inhales the food, hands shaking even now. He managed to get broken parts of the story; it was a mistake, and Taehyung was at the right place at the wrong time. What triggered such a violent reaction, Yoongi doesn’t know, but he thinks Taehyung’s definitely done some fucked up shit in their time apart. Perhaps, at a more terrible level than Yoongi even.

He feels the familiar protective drive he’d buried deep, deep inside rise to the occasion. What did his walls and his values matter when in front of Taehyung, they were nothing? Even as children he’d let the younger get away with a shit ton of stuff, and it wasn’t any different now.

(Except the games they played were the games of life and death, not skipping stones in the summer sunshine.)

Against his better judgement, Yoongi sighs. They’re alone in the empty diner and he knows no one can hear them. He rubs his face before facing Taehyung, who’s looking at him curiously.

“Fine, let’s team up,” Yoongi mutters. He doesn’t want to admit that he’d thought about the offer, but now, it feels like an obvious thing to do. Leaving Taehyung in such a state would be worse than anything.

“What?”

“Your proposition. Let’s team up. You’re right, it’s better that way.”

Taehyung keeps his burger down and wipes the grease from his mouth. “Are you serious, hyung?”

“Yeah,” Yoongi sighs again. “We’re clashing anyway and well, shit like what happened today can happen again, so teaming up would be nice. Plus, I think we’re top dogs here and that would be, well, an insane amount of cash.”

Taehyung nods absentmindedly. “OK, hyung. Thank you.”

“However,” Yoongi says, and Taehyung looks up again, curious. “I have a condition.”

“Which is?”

“It’s more of a…one time deal,” Yoongi mutters, then shrugs, leaning close. They may be alone and out of prying eyes but Yoongi will not take any chances. “Taehyung, I’m planning to leave.”

Taehyung gulps. “Leave?”

“Yeah. Leave the gang behind, exit, whatever. I don’t really want to be a part of it anymore and that’s why I’ve been taking so many kills lately, building up the income. So, if you want to team up…you’re going to have to leave, too.”

He waits for Taehyung to back off, to refuse. He won’t blame him either. He knows how dangerous gangs are, how they can ruin lives forever for the pettiest of reasons, so for the betrayal they were about to commit, they would ruin all generations.

Finally, Taehyung nods. “OK, hyung. Sure.”

Yoongi gapes at him. “Taehyung. I’m not sure if you’re considering this properly. Leaving a gang is fucking impossible and dangerous as fuck. I could die, or you could, or even both of us. Please tell me you at least considered this.”

Taehyung gives a soft smile, going back to his burger. “Sure I did. Don’t you know yet, hyung?”

“Know what?”

“I’ll go anywhere with you, hyung. I trust you.”

*

{Now}

The car crosses the speeding limit as Yoongi floors the accelerator.

Taehyung had it on good authority from an insider in his ex-organisation that they’d gotten close to sniffing out his true location, different from the fake one they’d left behind.

So they had no choice but to pack and run like they had been for a week straight.

He doesn’t think they’re in any real danger, even if Yoongi is being paranoid about it. The elder did have a penchant for paranoia and thinking one step ahead, even when they were children. Taehyung, what if I fail? Dad will kill me. Taehyung, do you have to climb that tree? What if you fall and break your neck?

It was good to know that some things didn’t change. Even if Yoongi, brilliant, talented Yoongi, went down the path of killing and blood and guns, at least this one part was recognisable in the man Taehyung couldn’t recognise anymore.

They’re somewhere on the outskirts and Taehyung has no idea about the place they are in or the place they’re escaping too. He only knows that he’s with Yoongi again and that’s all he cares about. So much of his life spent with Yoongi and then spent missing him after the elder left, at this point Taehyung maybe has a Yoongi problem and he doesn’t deny it.

When he’d seen the elder on the rooftop the first time, he thought he’d die with how fast his heart had been beating, almost as if it wanted to escape the walls of the rib cage. It hurt that Yoongi couldn’t recognise him but then, a lot had happened in eight years. Taehyung had grown from the gangly, awkward teenager Yoongi had last seen him as into a fucked up college graduate/killer. Yoongi had changed too; his once sickly face sharp and alert, covered with a variety of cuts, and blonde hair with an undercut. Yoongi looked- good. Really fucking good, and it didn’t help that nothing had changed since he was fifteen.

He was fucked.

They drive (because that’s all they ever do, and worse, they never talk. Ever.) Taehyung has his feet on the dashboard; he knows how much Yoongi hates that. But Yoongi never rises to the bait, never says a word and feed into Taehyung’s need to do- something. Anything. Even curse or yell at him.

He thinks about how all the shit that happened in their lives led them to this moment. He thinks about Yoongi leaving (why, oh why), he thinks about the mess he was after his rock had abandoned him, he thinks about the shit he did in high school and then college. Thinks about how he stopped giving a shit and one day he had a knife in his hand, and how his second major was learning to severe arteries and killing people with the kindness of a fast death. But also the slow ones, for the ones that deserved it.

Here was Taehyung, twenty-three, recently out of college and earning not through his degree in fashion but through killing people who had the misfortune of pissing off- whoever. He earned through being a member of one of the notorious gangs in Seoul even though he only wanted to be a bounty hunter. But isn’t that what life is? You make one small (bad) decision and it leads to a chain of bigger fuck ups until what you began with is a small dot and what you’re left with is a tangled web of messes. A butterfly effect, is that what they called it?

He killed once, now his soul was stained red.

He wonders what Yoongi’s story is. Yoongi wanted to do so much; so why is he here in the same car as Taehyung, running away from gangs that employed them? Yoongi had been brilliant, had so much potential. It’s not a surprise that he thrived in this game, but it wasn’t a game for Yoongi. He was soft and kind; when did the gun take over?

He hums when Yoongi slows down, perhaps deeming them safe enough once he takes a detour. Taehyung did manage to get food, although it wasn’t the burger he wanted. He’s OK for now.

He thinks about their childhood. It’s a dangerous land to delve into, but in the past two weeks, his encounters with Yoongi and then the constant driving around, has opened up the well of his past and with it, the pain. The happiness too, because there isn’t one single moment or emotion, it’s always a mess when it comes to Taehyung.

He thinks about meeting Yoongi, struggling to adjust to his shy personality when Taehyung had been nothing but loud. Of how they stuck to each other and how Yoongi looked out for him in school, how Taehyung had many friends but that at the end of the day, he felt at home only with Yoongi. Yoongi and his skinny body, his pale skin always in contrast to Taehyung’s deep golden one.

Of how they struggled through- a little bit of everything. First crushes, first dates, and first detentions. Oh, not with each other, they weren’t brave enough- or maybe Taehyung wasn’t brave enough- but the mess of it afterwards. Of puberty and confusion and fights and makeups. Of being friends, of sneaking out at night just to watch Yoongi play on an old piano in a closed music shop they broke into, of Yoongi suffering through Taehyung’s demands of photographing him.

Then he thinks about how Yoongi left and- no, he can’t. He doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to open the door to that particular room of secrets. Of the implications they carry.

So they drive. The sit in silence and think about the feelings that they hide.

*

But then that being said, the tricky part about human feelings is that they don’t listen to the supposed master.

They still kill people, but not as often as they used to. They have to be careful, they have to make sure they don’t leave behind calling cards that would point towards their location to the people pursuing them.

Yoongi and he are hands down the most skilled, at least in gritty Seoul. He doesn’t know about Yoongi that well but he knows the elder is skilled with a gun, can see far and always, always meets the target. Yoongi makes a clean cut and he leaves no trace behind. He’s meticulous and careful and so very Yoongi.

Taehyung, on the other hand, thrives in the mess of it. Somewhere along the way, he stopped caring. Somewhere along the way he enjoyed the deep red of the blood (not quite the stench of it, but oh well), loved the shininess of the blade or how clean it cut, sometimes the slice of it against the skin. He was fucked in the head and he knew it, but Yoongi wasn’t. Of course, he wasn’t. Even when they were children, Taehyung was the oversensitive baby while Yoongi kept his cool.

He knows that it’ll be difficult to catch them. They’re both much too skilled and there’s a damn reason they’re top dogs. So they killed anonymously and took on only the rich clients, the one that would pay a fucking lot and keep them set for a good amount of time.

They live in out of the way motels and take separate rooms under fake names, even if Taehyung wants nothing more than to be close to Yoongi. The nights they can’t find a motel they sleep in the car; it starts with them sleeping in their own seats and ends with waking up to drooling on Yoongi’s shoulder (his very stiff shoulder), and Taehyung knows that Yoongi didn’t sleep once again.

Taehyung offers to drive, he’s good at it but Yoongi always refuses, as if in driving he regains some form of control. But for how long? How long can he pretend that there’s a lack of sleep or food or energy and that they’re running on some leftover adrenaline sometimes, how long can Yoongi pretend that Taehyung doesn’t exist?

They drive and they’ve been driving for two weeks almost, and the proximity is driving (ha) Taehyung insane. He can smell Yoongi, and he tries to remember Yoongi from their childhood, but Yoongi has changed. Yoongi smells like pine and gunpowder; sometimes, he smells like the metal of the guns he owns. Nowadays they both maybe smell like dust and petrol and greasy food, but it feels like home.

Taehyung wants to laugh at how fucked up he is. Look at him, imagining smells and scents and wanting home, and he does have a chance because Yoongi has always been his home, his safe space, but Yoongi doesn’t think so, thinks of him as a menace and a nuisance. Makes sure to create distance. Is he having a delusion when he thinks he can feel Yoongi staring at him a moment too long? He wouldn’t put it past himself to imagine things.

He thinks a lot, and that is one of his biggest flaws. Even as a child he had an entire universe for himself to play in, and Yoongi was the only one he allowed inside. He remembers all the adults laughing, at how Yoongi never did but looked at him with fondness, told him to tell him the stories he made in his mind.

He thinks a lot, so is it any wonder that driving for hours and hours on end makes him think about Yoongi? It was inevitable. Yoongi was like a drug to him, a drug he needed to be OK, and Taehyung is his regular junkie. He thinks about being fifteen and realising the ways in which he loved Min Yoongi and everything that came with that realisation. The pain, the anguish and the drama. The loneliness when Yoongi left.

He thinks about being fifteen and remembering a time he thought he’d been in love with his best friend.

*

{Eight years ago}

He can’t remember a time when being around Yoongi didn’t make the butterflies erupt in his stomach, didn’t make the blood rush to his face or his voice stutter whenever Yoongi asked him a question.

Taehyung is fifteen, Yoongi is seventeen. Despite the age gap between them, the two have never let it control their relationship or create a distance. He thinks things like age and respect and all that adult jazz comes when you’re old, but not when you’re four and make a new friend. Yoongi’s never made a big deal out of it, though he does get a hyung complex from time to time and has a “hyung should take care of you, come to me OK?”

It’s an endearing quality of Yoongi’s. Everything about Yoongi is endearing (but sometimes, undeniably hot) these days, like how he talks in a rasp or has a pout when he speaks normally, how he smiles only for the most special of things (and Taehyung tries not to preen that Yoongi laughs in his presence the most. He’s the recipient to that precious gummy smile.). How Yoongi looks like he doesn’t give a shit but he does, he cares oh so deeply that sometimes Taehyung thinks no one in the world is more sensitive than his hyung.

He can’t point out when he began feeling this way. Maybe it was always there. One moment Yoongi was his best friend in the whole world; the next moment Yoongi was the reason he screamed into his pillows or had scrapbooks filled with his photos (from his modelling project, he totally wasn’t a stalker). He lived for the days when school would end and they’d go to their tree house, their spot and bask in each other’s presence, no words needed. Sometimes Taehyung would speak and ramble and then he’d stop, thinking he was being annoying again (like the children at school told him he was) and he’d turn back, only to find Yoongi looking at him with fondness and warmth and acceptance. And he knew that with Yoongi, he didn’t have to be of scared of anything.

But then, like most good things, everything went to shit.

See, here’s the thing about having a crush on your best friend: if you make a mistake, it’s over. It’s over because you can’t go back to how things were. You could try, sure, but the mistake would hang over them and make things awkward. The things you did after would remind you painfully of that mistake and you’d sit in silences that are no longer comfortable.

So you both never make a move and suffer, or you make a move and suffer. Only, in the first one, there’s an option of having a friendship.

Yoongi began to grow distant, and Taehyung noticed, of course, he did. How could he not? He was so entwined with Yoongi, not having him around felt like the most obvious of gaps. He tried not to feel bad about it; after all, Yoongi was a senior and he had things to do outside of Taehyung. He wasn’t obsessed with Taehyung like Taehyung was obsessed with him.

But he noticed. He noticed that he met sporadically instead of every day, he noticed the way his clothing changed or how if Taehyung hugged him too tight he’d wince. He noticed that they met in dark corners so that they couldn’t really see each other’s faces. It drove him mad but he took it.

I need you. I’ll do anything for you. I trust you, hyung.

This, he left unsaid.

But there were good days. Days when Yoongi was with him all day and laughed like he used to, that cat’s chuckle, would sometimes hold Taehyung’s hand like it was nothing (it was, it was so much) and Yoongi would tell him about the scandals happening in senior year and how much he hated Lee Donghae or how much he wanted to escape their shitty town.

He talked about wanting to do music or maybe photography, that he wanted to tell the world to stop looking down on teenagers, he wanted to rap and that couldn’t happen in their town. He needed to leave, and Taehyung would play along. Yoongi always made it sound like he never could, there was a sort of pessimism in the way he spoke of his dreams. They were days when Yoongi had a cut on his face and Taehyung assumed it was his father again.

Yoongi always made it sound like it would always be the two of them against the world, and there was nothing more that Taehyung wanted.

So it’s just one of those really good days again. It’s the end of another torturous school day and they’re at their tree house, the one they built by themselves painstakingly. It’s old and parts of it are maybe falling apart but it’s theirs and Taehyung could spend the rest of his life here with Yoongi if he wanted to. If he could. But that’s unrealistic, even he with his fifteen-year-old dreams knows that.

Yoongi’s got out the bottles of alcohol that he stole from his old man and Taehyung giggles. Truth be told, Taehyung doesn’t really care for the typical experimentation that teenagers go through but Yoongi’s are shining after a long time and Taehyung won’t put a damper on it.

Yoongi’s done a lot of things, and while some of it is not with Taehyung, Yoongi always makes sure to tell Taehyung, to paint the world of drugs and alcohol and how it all works. Taehyung doesn’t correct Yoongi and tell him that he’s a teenager too and not the thirty-year-old man he talks like.

In life, there are these moments where things can go to shit in a split second and no one sees it coming, no one predicts it. It just happens.

It tastes funny, it tastes bitter but it warms him up, and he’s not particularly fond of it but it makes him want to do things. Like, maybe climb that tree branch and scream in happiness. Taehyung’s never giggled more, and Yoongi’s never been this red, holy shit, it’s a whole new world of them.

An hour goes by, two. They’re lying on the floor of their tree house. They’d cut out a section in the roof of it that they could open for stargazing and that’s what they do now, they lie on the floor, wrapped together and they gaze ahead. Taehyung’s head is on Yoongi’s bony arm but it feels like the best pillow there is. He can smell the pine and the alcohol and the boy smell of his and he feels: warm. Feels: calm.

Feels like he could do anything in the world if he has Yoongi with him.

Somewhere along the way, the stargazing turns into gazing at Yoongi; his pale skin flushed red, the boniness of his face, how small his eyes are but oh so calculative. The small nose covered in freckles. The new additions to his face like the cut above his eyebrow and the corner of his lips (when did he get those) and is that yellow colouring his left eye?

Controlled by something else entirely, Taehyung finds himself running a fingertip across Yoongi’s cheekbone, and he feels Yoongi take a deep breathe in. It’s alright for best friends to do this, right? Taehyung touched Yoongi plenty of times but something about this moment feels more, feels like its crossing a boundary they never realised had been there, that it was perhaps a little more malleable than Best Friends.

What is he doing? Even if Taehyung feels this, has been feeling it for a long time, Yoongi doesn’t. Yoongi sees him as a younger brother, someone to take care of, so what is he doing? Why can’t he stop tracing Yoongi’s lips?

Why doesn’t he look away when Yoongi looks at him and they stare, and everything is so much but also so little?

Why doesn’t Yoongi stop him when Taehyung leans in and kisses him?

There are no good answers, only an understanding that on that day, things went to shit.

Yoongi’s lips are soft. They’re soft and they aren’t full but they’re perfect, they mould perfectly around Taehyung and make him feel needed and wanted and beautiful. They make him feel like he’s OK.

They are friends, best friends. Do best friends kiss, do they pry open each other’s mouths with their tongues and taste each other, do they spill a moan in between and lap it up?

Friends. Friends. Friends.

They let go of themselves and then Taehyung doesn’t know how much time has passed, only that they stop suddenly when he feels Yoongi gasp and pull away.

So there they are, breathing heavily, hair messed up and lips swollen, their shirts askew and guilt shining in Yoongi’s eyes. Guilt and pain and…and rejection.

Taehyung fucked up, didn’t he?

Here’s the thing about having a crush on your best friend; you make a mistake and it’s over.

“Fuck, Tae, what the fuck,” Yoongi says, hands clutching his hair. “What the fuck just happened-”

“Hyung, it’s OK, calm down-”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” Yoongi says, eyes frantic as he moves to pack away their bottles, their blankets. As he moves to pack to get away from Taehyung. “Fuck, Tae, this wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Taehyung feels hurt. He feels slighted. Is it really so bad to be with him? He knows Yoongi the best, and Yoongi knows him the best, how much worse could it be?

Turns out, it could be a lot worse.

“What’s the matter, hyung, it’s just me-”

“Precisely! It’s you!” Yoongi intones again. He looks desperate, his hands are shaking and Taehyung’s never seen Yoongi like this, not even when his father had hit him again and he’d run away and called for him under his bedroom window. His Yoongi is always calm, the guiding light. Not the broken lamp he’s being right now.

“Hyung, I don’t understand, what did I do-”

“Nothing, b-Tae. Nothing, you did nothing wrong, it’s me, hyung messed up big time, OK? We can’t do this, Tae, got it? We can’t. It’s not right. Shit, I fucked up.”

Taehyung feels tears piercing through. “Hyung-”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, love, but there’s other shit at play here and we can’t do this. So please, please forget this, OK? Please. For hyung.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I know, baby, I know but- Jesus, hyung will call you, OK? Get home safe.”

Those are the last words Yoongi ever says to him.

Because he never calls back. Yoongi simply leaves.

*

{Present}

Slowly but steadily, their silence becomes theirs. It becomes comfortable and it becomes how Yoongi and Taehyung used to be. They still drive and they hide, they have their own pride and neither says a word, but it’s there. Taehyung always had a penchant for being open about how he felt, and it made people uncomfortable. And Yoongi is no stranger to it.

There are years between them, there are secrets and pain and it sometimes gets unbearable but it also gets bridged, like how Taehyung makes a comment at a passing billboard and Yoongi’s lips quirk up, and Taehyung beams. It gets bridged in ways like Yoongi no longer minding that Taehyung naps on his shoulder or that sometimes he plays with Yoongi’s hands on the stick shift.

It’s them. They could never really resist. The gap is gone when Yoongi gives him the extra share of food or the way Taehyung wakes up with two jackets on him instead of the one he slept with, it’s covered in the way they now share one motel room and one bed and sure, the distance between them then is palpable but it’s OK. Taehyung will take it.

But it frustrates him too, their silence on the things that matter, which is: they kissed, and Yoongi left. He left and he didn’t get in touch, and the matter is like an elephant in the room, sometimes stifling their presence. They avoid this, they choose to laugh and brush it under the carpet.

They avoid it and hide it when Taehyung makes a reference to it (Oh, hyung, those two over there must be a couple, right? They kissed and everything) and it’s not much but it’s enough to make Yoongi shut down again, to raise his walls, and Taehyung wants to slam against it, scratch his nails down and tear it down.

But no. All they do is drive, they think about their feelings and they hide. And now, they sit in all that silence waiting for a sign.

(Like most flawed humans they don’t understand that the sign is often one of them, not someone else.)

*

“How do you feel? When you kill?”

“What?”

He shifts on one leg, suddenly nervous. It’s a stupid question. But he wants to know. He wants to know what led Yoongi to this place, this time in life where he had to kill people too.

“When you kill someone, do you, like, feel anything?”

Yoongi looks at him right in the eye and Taehyung struggles to meet it. He feels the ants crawling on his skin again.

Yoongi finally looks away. “No. It’s just another body. It caused an issue. It needs to go.”

It’s so mechanical, so cold, and Taehyung knows that Min Yoongi of all people is not cold. He never was. People thought he was but they could fuck off. Yoongi was warm like the desk light he had to keep the nightmares away when he was ten. He’s warm like the marshmallows they roasted on their mini campfire and ate together when they were twelve through fourteen. Yoongi is home.

It’s silent once again. Between them, it was always silent, if he thought about it; Yoongi lying around in the background, music everywhere and keeping a watchful eye on Taehyung as he slid down slippery floors or climbed the trees in his backyard. Always there. They never really talked but their silence spoke million times more. A brief touch here and there, a quirk of an eyebrow that said you okay? And Taehyung nodding with bright teeth.

With Yoongi, there was subtle or direct, no in between. If Taehyung felt something he needed to say it to his face because Yoongi simply didn’t care to read body cues and actually answer them. He was perceptive as hell but he always pushed for a confrontation of issues.

“I’ll bite. Why did you get into this?”

Yoongi looks again even as his hands skilfully pack up the body in the bag, following muscle memory from years of cleaning up. Taehyung would always leave his victims as he killed them, just making sure that there was nothing that pointed to him. That was his clean up. But Yoongi was thorough. The smell of bleach was strong in the air as they manoeuvred the body around them.

“It paid good cash. I was skilled enough. Seemed like a no brainer at that time.”

At that time. As if he was desperate or bored or escaping something and decided to dip a toe into depravity and thrive.

He was no one to speak, of course, but Yoongi had a bright future and hope so...where did it go?

Yoongi wanted to photograph things. Yoongi wanted to go into underground clubs and feel the music. Yoongi’s smile- the real one- came out when he spoke about making something one day.

He vanished and Taehyung hasn’t seen his smile ever since.

They work in silence again and Taehyung only watches, the meticulous way in which Yoongi cleans the body and the area, gloves stained red with blood, body bag ready to be transported. He zips it up quietly and shoves it to the side, getting down to sweeping the area for any fingerprints or so. The person they’ve killed tonight is an important person in an important political party that Taehyung doesn’t give a shit about, but the money was insane. It would see them through for a good three months at least unless they got bored-

Taehyung stops his thoughts in their tracks. Since when did he have to kill people because he was bored? Since when was it ok?

When he looks down, he finds Yoongi looking at him silently. They pick up the body together and walk it slowly to the car trunk- the time of the night is dead and no one is about. It’s good. It’s quiet.

It’s too quiet.

“Why did you?”

Taehyung looks up from the body. Yoongi watches him in that non-expressive way of his, all emotions locked in his eyes or the curl of his lips. Right now they’re a straight line.

“Why did I what?”

“Why did you start killing people?”

That’s the question, isn’t it? Why did he? He has no clue. He was alone and messed up and he saw an ad for it and did it. Then he did it again. And again, until red was his skin colour and the tan was long gone. Until reason left his brain and there was unbridled joy.

He thinks it was boredom. He was close to broke but he could have managed. Jimin and he had shifts at good cafes and it paid.

So why did he pick up the knife and stab someone? What about their family or pets or children? Who were the people he killed?

So he shrugs. He shrugs because he has no answer or maybe, he does have a reason that he doesn’t want to face. Doesn’t want to face that high school happened, that Yoongi had left without a word and his world had stopped at that moment.

“Same reason. It paid. I was bored. Win-win.”

Yoongi gives him a look that says “I used to smell your bullshit and I can still smell your bullshit from a mile away”. It’s a look that spoke of, well, care. Yoongi hasn’t looked at him like that ever since they crashed paths. Occasionally, maybe, but not like this.

There’s pain in his eyes, tight but there. As if Yoongi never wanted this for Taehyung, and Taehyung feels him getting silently defensive. Taehyung didn’t want this either but shit happens.

Yoongi doesn’t call it out, not like he used to. He looks away and hums, shuts the trunk and dusts his hands off.

“Well. Let’s dump this in the Han River then.”

And like that, they’re back to leaving things and their feelings unsaid.

*

Here’s another thing about life: it gives you moments to rethink decisions, to make the correct choices. It’s simply there, it’s not obvious. You just have to be smart enough to make the right decision. That’s why they call it instinct.

After dumping the body in the Han River somewhere near Daegu (Daegu, fuck), they drive to the pickup point, a storage room where the client has dropped off the payment. They reach the place and Yoongi makes a few rounds, makes sure it isn’t a trap.

It’s not. Still, they walk towards the area, Yoongi armed with a gun and Taehyung with a blade in his hand. They take defensive positions near the locker, the passcode delivered to them the moment they confirmed the kill.

Yoongi enters the code with a gloved hand and waits for the lock to open. Carefully he opens the door to it and finds a huge bag filled to the brim with clean, crisp notes.

It smells like heaven, really. Taehyung’s always loved that scent and once upon a time he worked solely for the high that he got off the notes. Now, it’s just meaningless and boring but maybe not. Maybe with Yoongi, it can mean something again.

They take the bag, heavy enough that it has to be carried by the two of them and put it in the car trunk. The money definitely is enough to see them for three months if they live frivolously; more if they’re careful. Taehyung doesn’t know what it’s going to be like if they’d- live together. Yoongi did say they’d team up and that means they’d be together right? Or did he mean something like running away and settling somewhere, only to team up when a client called?

Taehyung didn’t want to hope.

They settle into the car again and drive towards somewhere, only this time the landscape seems familiar to Taehyung. It’s Daegu or something like it, he can see the countryside and the fields and he wonders what happened to his grandparent’s farm now that they’re both dead. A major reason for him being the way he is, he thinks, in addition to Yoongi, was his grandparents. With them, there was a little bit of hope. When they left the world Taehyung had truly, finally, lost himself.

Perhaps it’s compensation from the universe that he got Yoongi back. A key to his past, to the little, naïve boy he left behind, the one who still cared about things like clothes and photographs and stars.

Impulsively, he looks away from the window and the view of the dusk and turns to look at Yoongi, whose blonde hair flies from the force of the wind. It’s honestly gorgeous to look at if Taehyung’s being honest. He recalls sharply the moment he saw Yoongi on the roof and felt his universe aligning again after feeling lost for so long, he remembers feeling like he’d never stopped loving Yoongi.

Loving. Loving Yoongi, not crushing or something impermanent, but something that mattered. In their tale of childhood nostalgia, with a mix of blood and violence painting it, Taehyung realises that it wasn’t just a crush. He loved Yoongi then and maybe, he loves Yoongi now.

Maybe, because what if Yoongi left again?

“Hyung,” Taehyung whines. They’ve gotten more comfortable. It’s not awkward or a back and forth kind of struggle (on most days), and it breeds familiarity. “We should celebrate.”

Yoongi looks at him and Taehyung thinks maybe only he can feel the electricity between them. “Celebrate? What?”

“We won big today,” Taehyung continues, twirling a dark lock at the back of his neck. He thinks he feels Yoongi react to that but maybe he’s seeing things. He’s known to have the occasional dreaming boy syndrome. “Like, hyung, this is almost a million won. I think we can afford to be a little reckless tonight.”

Yoongi smiles. “Brat, do you want to get caught? Reckless means either my or your gang catches up to us and fucks us up. I didn’t get the million won for nothing.”

“Hey, give credit where credit’s due,” Taehyung pokes Yoongi. A few weeks ago they couldn’t even do this. But like magnets, they can’t resist but fall back into their old patterns. “And hyung, you’re one of the most careful people I know. I trust you. Just relax for once.”

Yoongi gives him one of those looks again, the one where he’s looking deep and contemplative as if he wants to strip Taehyung’s thoughts with his mind and Taehyung blushes. Looks away. He wills himself to calm down, to remain focused. Yoongi didn’t want him that time. Left him because of it and Taehyung won’t risk it again, no matter how much he’d like nothing more than to wrap himself up in him again.

“Fine. There’s a nice hotel nearby, I’m sure they’ll give us a nice time,” Yoongi admits, and Taehyung beams, that moment momentarily forgotten. Yoongi takes a detour and takes another cut, and it amazes Taehyung how well Yoongi knows not just Seoul but most of South Korea. He thinks Yoongi’s travelled a bit more than him; Taehyung himself stuck to Seoul or at most, its nearby regions and districts. But they’ve in their almost three weeks been around Seoul, neared Gwangju and back, and are now near Daegu.

They come to one and both suddenly contemplate their appearances. It’s not like they’re not clean but they could do better. Out on the road, they get dirty faster. Taehyung’s hair feels greasy and he’s sure he’s got dust in places he didn’t think should have dust. He and Yoongi exchange looks before nodding.

They need to be fucking spoiled.

Yoongi takes charge, as always. It’s suspicious to pay in cash, maybe, but the receptionist doesn’t blink an eye, simply gives them a bored glance as she types in their names, checks their fake IDs and gives them a suite. She wishes them a lovely stay, whatever the fuck that means.

It’s silent on the way up to the top floor, where the suites are situated. It’s not awkward but it’s the first time they’re not locked up in a car or a badly lit motel, the luxury around them feels unreal. Back in Seoul, even though Taehyung earned a lot from killing, he preferred to live a frugal life, to keep himself down on the radar.

But tonight is the night to pretend, to spend and to go insane.

They enter the suite and their mouths drop. It’s huge, of course, it is; Taehyung could fit in five other grown college men and still have comfortable breathing space, and this one is just for the two of them.

Taehyung sees the bathroom and loses whatever little sanity he had left.

“Fucking hell, hyung,” Taehyung breathes as he begins to strip. Peeling off these clothes that he’s been using and reusing, trying to get them clean in the washing machines of motels feels like a gift in itself. He can just imagine how heavenly soaking himself in hot water would feel like. Cold water in the winter is a fucking bitch and he can’t wait.

He doesn’t even notice that he’s half naked; only that someone chokes behind him. He belatedly realises that Yoongi is in the room too and OK. Maybe he, like, choked on the air, it happens if you breathe wrong.

He turns around and Yoongi’s looking at him with wide eyes. “Hyung?”

“When the fuck did you get a tattoo?”

Oh. Oh right, he choked because of that. Because of the lily he has on his back, a requirement of his gang, yes, but also an ode to them. He remembers telling Yoongi how much he loved lilies. They’d once promised they’d get matching ones together.

Did Yoongi remember that?

“Uh, mid-sophomore year at college,” Taehyung says carefully, tries not to betray the fact that he wishes to tell Yoongi how long he waited to get one. He looks away again because he can’t bear that look on Yoongi, one where he shows pain. He takes off his pants and then enters the bathroom, locking the door behind.

He takes his time, scrubbing away at his skin. He needs to change the water twice with how dirty it is, and rubs in the lemon body wash into his skin. He comes out in a bathrobe when he’s done and feels clean finally.

“Hyung, holy shit,” Taehyung says as he dries his hair. Yoongi’s collapsed on the bed with eyes closed, but they open upon Taehyung’s exclamation. His face is composed again. “The bathroom is the best thing that’s ever happened. Also, fair warning, it smells like lemons in there.”

“Fuck,” Yoongi breathes, then gets up, swiftly removing his shirt and Taehyung can only gape. It’s not that Yoongi’s built, but he’s lean and sharp, skin pale and marked with cuts here and there. And on his arm, there’s a tattoo of a dragon, bright and green, stark against the paleness. “I really wanted a pine bath bomb, but whatever.”

“Nice tattoo,” Taehyung comments lamely, in an attempt to hide the fact that he was totally checking Yoongi out.

Yoongi looks at his shoulder, glaring at it. “I’m going to get it removed someday.”

“Why?”

“Gang bullshit. I’m cutting off everything from them,” Yoongi mutters before shutting the bathroom door.

Taehyung wears his clothes, a clean set of it that he didn’t touch throughout their journey. In the time that he had been away, Yoongi had ordered room service it seems, and there’s actual food waiting for them and a sparkling bottle of champagne. Fuck yes.

Taehyung doesn’t wait for Yoongi as he inhales in something other than cheap and salty fast food. In the middle of his meal, Yoongi comes out and wordlessly joins in.

They decide to open the champagne bottle and that’s the moment, the moment life gives a choice. But they’re young fools. Or maybe not. Taehyung pours them both a glass and for the first time in eight years, it’s them again, simply drinking in happiness. Only with a lot more experience between them

Mixing drinking and Yoongi and the fact that things are a mess around them is never a good idea, right? Too bad, they make the choice and it goes to shit again.

They get drunk. Taehyung remembers the way Yoongi drinks and the silent ways in which he enjoys it; he dances in the room to the classical music Yoongi plays through his phone. It’s Taehyung twirling around by himself and when his unfocused gaze lies on Yoongi, he sees the way Yoongi smiles so fondly, so warm.

He remembers the last time they were like this, comfortable and OK until Taehyung fucked up. He’d been so happy and Yoongi had smiled and they’d kissed, oh god, it’s a kiss he can’t forget but also doesn’t want to remember because it signifies in equal balance the worst and the best moment of his life. Taehyung feels adoration course through him, the soft smiles Yoongi gives and the sleepy face and he stumbles forward, takes Yoongi’s hands in his own and pulls him forward.

“Taehyung, what the-”

“Hyuuuunngg,” he whines. He hasn’t been this close to Yoongi and it affects him. He knows it affects Yoongi too if the twin spots of red mean anything. “You can’t just be boring and sitting there, you know. We have to have fun!”

Yoongi gives him an unimpressed look. Up so close, Taehyung towers over Yoongi by a good couple of centimetres and Yoongi has to look up at him. Taehyung laughs at the look. “How’s manhandling me supposed to be fun, Tae-ah?”

Tae-ah. Oh, how long it’s been since he heard that, how he refused to let anybody call him that but Yoongi. It settles something inside him. “Relax, we’re just going to dance a little, hyung. Stop being so grumpy.”

He twirls Yoongi around and Yoongi grins after struggling to hold it in and allows himself to be pulled in as well. Maybe he’s drunk too, too drunk to keep control or his walls up or how he’s usually uncomfortable with proximity between them.

Because tonight, they can just pretend. Right?

Slowly, the dance turns slow and then it’s just them standing close and swaying side by side. Taehyung has his chin on Yoongi’s sharp shoulder and smells in the lemon (he misses the pine) and it’s so close. When he pulls back Yoongi’s looking at him with such an open expression and Taehyung feels it pierce his heart. Thinks he could cry because he’s missed Yoongi so much, cried for him and cursed him and everything in between, and here they are again, two sad, lonely criminals with a fuck ton of cash and their love stained red. Here they are again trying to believe so hard that they can be normal and OK when it was inevitable that they were never supposed to be.

He does cry. “Hyung, why? Why did you leave, what did I do wrong? How did I mess up?”

Yoongi blinks and he looks shocked like he didn’t expect the question to arise. How couldn’t he, though? Yoongi knew Taehyung better than anymore. He was a curious boy then and he’s a curious man now. Yoongi looks pained, can’t hide or bring up his walls fast enough, not when Taehyung is so, so close to breaking a little more.

“No, Taehyung, please, I told you, you did nothing wrong-”

“But you left because of me, and you didn’t want to hurt my feelings by telling me the truth, oh god, hyung, I’m so sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologise for, baby, please, I-”

Yoongi stops short, at the term of endearment that slips out of him, that Yoongi had called him only one other time. When he was leaving. Taehyung holds on tighter and tries to not drown in his own tears but it hurts so much. Is history repeating itself?

“Hyung, what did you say?” Taehyung asks. Yoongi looks away, breathing fast.

“Fuck, Tae, no, can we please not do this-”

“No, tell me, please. Say it again, you can’t do this. You can’t do it again and then leave, I won’t be able to survive it again. Hyung, please.”

They look at each other. Can a human being feel so many emotions at the same damn time?

“I’m not going to leave you again, Taehyung,” Yoongi says instead.

In life, there will be moments when you’re given a chance to choose again, to take a different path. It’s not obvious and you have to be a smart fucker to make the right choice.

Taehyung pulls him in for a kiss.

Magnets. Isn’t that what he thought of them? They couldn’t help it; like repels like and the unlike attracts. They were nothing like each other but when they fit, they fit so well. If he was the south then Yoongi was his north, the one that guided him to happiness.

Yoongi gasps for a second before he moulds his lips again to Taehyung’s after eight years. So much has changed in eight years; they’re no longer teenagers but grown men with open desires and bleeding hearts and sad stories. They’re grown men with experience and knowledge and their wants.

How they’d clashed teeth together the first time and how now there was expertise in the way their tongues danced. He tastes the bittersweet of the champagne and the warmth he holds inside, he feels Yoongi bite his lower lip and Taehyung moans.

They say distance often makes the heart grow fonder; in their case, it makes them hazy with lust. There’s fondness, of course, there is, and maybe only Taehyung can feel it, feel it in the way Yoongi caresses his cheek or runs long fingers through his hair, the way he pushes Taehyung gently back towards the bed.

When he was fifteen he didn’t even know what it was like to explore the human body; eight years later and it’s his pleasure to show Yoongi how well he’s learned things. He’s eager to know how Yoongi is, and he can tell already the expertise with which Yoongi climbs over him, the way a hand is loosely pressed on his shoulder, pressing him down on the mattress.

Yoongi shivers when Taehyung runs fingertips underneath the hem of his t-shirt, scraping the skin above the waistband of his pants. They’re still kissing, sometimes going rough and sometimes going slow and languid, deep and learning. Learning each other once again. The fragility of their trust hanging between them.

Taehyung has to remind himself not to get used to it, but it’s Yoongi. His first love, his first kiss, and his first heartbreak. He takes a break and catches his breath and they’re so drunk, so, so drunk, but the happiness bubbles within him like the champagne they drank.

In that eye contact, they’re presented with another choice, and they make it. Maybe drunk, maybe hazy with lust, but they make it. The clothes are off, the roughness of hands marking their way up bodies, the lips clashing with fevered skin. Taehyung bucks his hips up when Yoongi latches his lips on his neck at the same time as he rolls his hips down. Fuck, he’d dreamed about this so many times but nothing compared to the reality.

The reality of getting fucked by Min Yoongi was something else. How careful he was, how he took his time tearing Taehyung apart on the bed, how he brought him to the edge and then took him back again. Love was an explosion; who called it a safety net?

But maybe whoever did that was right in a way, because Taehyung felt safe for the first time in a long time. Protected and revered, as he’d always had with Yoongi. Felt safe even as he cried out when Yoongi entered him, made him feel like a god.

Again and again. He wanted all of Yoongi and he didn’t want to stop; he didn’t stop when Yoongi was done. Like a vicious cycle, they started again. In Japan, when he’d once visited, he’d learned there was a culture of filling cracks on bowls with gold. And that’s how Taehyung felt. He felt like with Yoongi, all his bleeding cracks, his broken wounds, were being filled with the gold that was Yoongi’s warmth and care. He felt whole again.

They didn’t stop when both were satiated; they kissed and kissed because this is where they began and ended, didn’t they? Naked and covered in sweat and marks littering their bodies like paint on a canvas, never getting enough of each other. What their silences could not speak, their bodies did that night. And it was OK. It had to be.

They fall asleep like that. Side by side and entwined in each other, sleepy and drunk and coming down from the high of each other.

*

But maybe Taehyung should learn by now. Some lessons are meant to teach you things that you refuse to accept. Like how just because Yoongi was soft once doesn’t mean he’d be soft again.

He wakes up the next morning at the same time as Yoongi does, naked as the day they were born and he supposes he should have been prepared for what followed.

“Fuck, fuck, no, please- shit. Shit.” Yoongi curses as he scrambles away from Taehyung, hastily collecting his clothes and putting them on. There are red scratches on his back (Taehyung), his neck is littered with hickeys (Taehyung) and his hair is all over the place (Taehyung).

“Hyung, you’re freaking out-”

“Yes, I am!” Yoongi’s tone takes on a shrill nature as he tries to look okay. “Fuck, Taehyung, this wasn’t supposed to happen!”

“But it did. Stop acting like it’s the end of the world.”

“It fucking is,” he growls back, and Taehyung shrinks at the look in Yoongi’s eyes. There’s regret and pain swimming in them, and anger and Taehyung feels like filth again for touching Yoongi. For fucking up again.

“Jeez. I didn’t know fucking me was such a bad thing, thank you, Yoongi hyung,” Taehyung says, dressing himself up. He’s afraid of seeing his body, of seeing the marks. But he thinks, even if he hides his body from himself he’d never be able to get the memory out of his mind.

“You know that’s not true,” Yoongi mumbles back. The regret is still strong and Taehyung senses pity and looks away. Maybe once upon a time he was a dog licking his wounds but not anymore. Never again. “It’s just wrong, Taehyung. It’s dangerous.”

History has its way of repeating itself, doesn’t it? Because here they are again indeed, facing each other and regret threatening to choke the room, Taehyung a mess and Yoongi born with his stupid moral meter.

“Yeah.” Taehyung shrugs. “Yeah, whatever. Let’s pack and be on our way.” The choice he’s made is this: he’d rather have Yoongi in any form, even regretful like this, than not have him at all.

They pack and shower and leave. They stride towards their car with a certain sort of purposefulness although Taehyung feels lost again. All his life he thought that Yoongi was his compass, so why does he feel untethered?

They get into the car and they drive again. It’s Yoongi at the steering wheel and Taehyung with his feet on the dashboard and it repeats.

All they ever do, is drive.

*

An addictive habit is one where the use of a substance or a behaviour gives rewarding effects and so the person wants to engage again and again repeatedly, is compelled to do so to feel the same way again.

So even if they plan to drive and remain in silence, more often than not, it doesn’t happen. Maybe they don’t want to engage but they can’t stop.

It starts with anything. Maybe Taehyung cracks a joke and Yoongi laughs and they realise that they’re being them, and then it becomes a clash of lips and teeth. Or maybe they look at each other too long and suddenly Taehyung is climbing over the gear onto Yoongi’s lap and riding him on the side of the road, where anyone could see them.

But they can’t stop. They become the strangers who know each other, they become the people who fog up car windows and leave kisses on the pane. They try, they really do. They try to maintain boundaries, their hurts and egos and regrets, but they can’t.

Once they start, they can’t stop. Then Yoongi apologises and shuts down, and they pretend they’re strangers again.

It’s exhausting, if Taehyung is being honest, how they push and pull each other. It’s wrong of them, Yoongi says, even as he takes Taehyung’s lips between his and bites playfully, even as he draws out a moan out of Taehyung himself. Taehyung wonders if they’re fuck buddies or something and it breaks his heart. Was that all he and Yoongi were?

It leaves him angry and hurt and a little bit in love. He won’t even deny that his feelings from his childhood have come out in full force.

If only they could be a little brave. If only they could talk and not just fucking hide like this in plain sight.

Maybe he didn’t really ever have a chance.

They’re in an empty gas station close to Busan. It’s unmanned (it’s startling how so much of South Korea has these decrepit, dead towns that don’t look like they ever breathed) and it’s meant for self-service. But they’re taking advantage of it in a completely different manner than intended.

Yoongi throws his head back as Taehyung works on him down below, and Taehyung reveals in the firm hold in his hair. Maybe the pain is part of the pleasure principle, he thinks, as he moans around Yoongi. He hears Yoongi curse out (“fuck”) and Taehyung grins.

Like all their encounters, it wasn’t supposed to happen. With them, it seems like a haunting theme: it wasn’t supposed to happen. This is wrong. Then as humans attracted to vice, they give in to their vile intentions. Today Yoongi had buzzed in a fresh undercut and he smelled like pine; today Taehyung had worn that wide collared sweater of his and watched the way Yoongi hunted his neck with his eyes and now, they’re here.

“Fuck, fuck, Tae, this isn’t enough, get in the back,” Yoongi barely gets out and it’s with a little bit of satisfaction that Taehyung pulls back and climbs behind. Min Yoongi may have a list of morals and ethics but when it comes to Taehyung, they don’t exist.

So they’re here, in the small cramped back seat of their car, Taehyung on his back and Yoongi on top of him, struggling with the zips of their pants. It’s getting hotter and he thinks their breath could steam but then Yoongi kisses him and Taehyung is lost again. He arches his back when Yoongi gets a hand down on him and strokes him to hardness.

“Hyung-”

“Shh,” Yoongi whispers into his mouth, hand skilfully moving down his length. Their voices sound heavy with lust and their eyes are lidded. “Let hyung take care of you, Tae-ah.”

Fuck. He moans at this and Yoongi presses heartbreakingly soft kisses along his jaw, even as he removes his hand and lines both of them together. In the small cramped space they can’t do much but for now (for now?) this is enough. It’s short but intense and when they’re both coming, their moans mix together into a lovely harmony.

“Fuck,” Taehyung whispers into the air, the smell of sex heavy in their noses along with the pine and the lemon (what, Taehyung stole the lemon bath wash, sue him). He basks in it before he waits for the inevitable- regret cutting through the haze in a sharp stroke and laying out their bad decisions for them neatly in a row.

“Why the fuck do we do this,” Yoongi mutters before he pulls away, taking out tissues to wipe them clean. Yeah, why do they?

“Because you’re a stuck up asshole who can’t own the fuck up,” Taehyung snaps, taking the tissues and doing the job himself. OK, he’s in love but he’s also pissed. He knows Yoongi knows he’s pissed. He also knows Yoongi won’t take the bait and will remain silent and brooding.

Then they’ll drive, halle-fucking-lujah.

Here they are indeed, a team of skilled killers with a fuck ton of cash in the trunk of a dirty, beat down car, trying to survive. Trying to not fall back into the same patterns. And failing pretty miserably.

*

And things went to shit again should be a life motto for Yoongi at this point.

Except unlike all the other times, things really went to shit this time, really badly.

In all honesty, Yoongi should have seen this coming. He should have known that he may be skilled and all that crap but if you’re not fucking careful or if you leave breadcrumbs, the witch in the forest will catch you.

They didn’t need another assignment. They were drowning in money they didn’t know how to put to use (yet) and they were doing OK but they were also newly escaped somewhat former gang members and maybe, the bad decision was because of boredom.

Simply put, their next assignment (“It’ll be fun, hyung, I’m bored) was a trap.

It was someone from Yoongi’s gang; Yoongi would recognise that tattoo anywhere. The person they were assigned to kill was a runner from back home and things when to shit (ha) the moment Yoongi recognised the kid; he heard the click of guns followed by rapid-fire bullets. Taehyung had been in front of him and Yoongi simply dragged him, running for his life.

But maybe they didn’t run fast enough. Yoongi’s almost to the car when he hears a cry of pain and feels Taehyung fall down, sees the bullet wound at his left shoulder and gapes in horror. Taehyung clutches the wound and cries, and Yoongi- blanks out. The noise of the oncoming bullets and the people fades from his brain as Yoongi watches Taehyung, his Taehyung, bleeding out on the ground.

“Hyung, what the fuck are you doing!” Taehyung yells, teeth clenched tightly as tears stream down his face, mixing with the sweat. “Don’t fucking stand there, fucking move!”

Yoongi gets out of his daze and picks him up, heart clenching at the way Taehyung cries out again. He hastily belts him in, careful of making sure his shoulder is okay, then he gets in and floors it. He can hear bullets hitting around him and drives in a zig-zag pattern, making sure they can’t find a proper aim. The speed leaves behind a cloud of dust and by the time the fuckers behind can aim again, Yoongi’s left them far, far behind.

“Fuck,” Yoongi curses, allowing himself to come back to the present moment. He watches as Taehyung bites his lip hard to stop himself from shouting in pain from the jostle of the car, and his eyes are tightly shut, eyelashes fringed together. A shirt is pressed up against the wound to stop the bleeding and fuck, and Yoongi’s close to freaking out.

“Hyung, where are we going?” Taehyung breathes out. He doesn’t know. He’s been to Busan and its surrounding regions couple of times but doesn’t quite know it like he knows the other cities of South Korea.

“A fucking hospital, Taehyung,” Yoongi grits out, although a hospital wouldn’t be a good idea considering his gang might be tracking a person who has a fresh bullet wound.

“No.”

“What the fuck do you mean, no?” Yoongi snaps then tries to control his breath. “Your shoulder’s been fucking blasted through, you need surgery for that.”

“Yeah, I know,” Taehyung says and then winces in pain. “Fuck, this shit hurts like a fucking bitch. Anyway, hyung. You and I both know the hospital’s out of the option. They’ll follow us there.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you want me to do, Taehyung,” Yoongi runs an irritated hand through his hair. Shit, shit, everything went to fucking shit-

“Hyung, calm down-”

“Do not tell me to calm down-”

“Can you listen to me for once in your stupid life?” Taehyung snaps. His eyes are wound tight in pain; there’s blood everywhere, all over the car seats and his hand and his shirt is red. “I know someone who can help us. We’ll be safe there.”

Does his breathe sound laboured? Fuck, was the blood loss too much? Yoongi feels his breath choke his very self at the idea that he wouldn’t be able to save Taehyung in time.

Taehyung doesn’t say anything and Yoongi looks away from the road in a panic. “Taehyung?”

“Yeah, yeah, just, fuck, blanked out there for a minute,” Taehyung mumbles. His breath is getting faster and Yoongi can see blood come out in globules and engulf the shirt. “OK. Yeah. My college friend, Jimin, he lives here.”

“How the fuck is he supposed to help?”

“He’s a med student- ah, fuck- and he recently moved to Busan. He’s from here. I have his address somewhere, fuck- hyung, can you reach my pocket? It’s in there.”

Yoongi stops on the side, certain that the detour he took would not keep him in his gang’s search area. He slowly struggles to get the phone out of Taehyung’s tight jeans (goddamn, this kid). His hands shake as he unlocks the phone with the muttered password and looks up the contacts.

The address is added there and it doesn’t seem to be far. Yoongi puts it on location and begins to drive.

“Taehyung?” Yoongi whispers again, but this time he gets no response. He checks the pulse and it’s beating furiously, which is also bad because it’s sending more blood to his shoulder and causing more blood loss. Taehyung is passed out in his car and Yoongi, he floors it.

*

He arrives at a pretty complex somewhere in Busan, though he can’t recall the name. It’s late in the evening and thankfully there aren’t many people around, otherwise, there would have been chaos at Yoongi carrying an unconscious man who until a few moments ago had been heavily bleeding.

Taehyung’s breathing- but sometimes it feels like he’s not. He doesn’t allow himself the possibility of losing Taehyung, focuses only on getting him to this Jimin’s apartment which is apparently good enough for surgeries, and prays. He’s never believed in god, but right now he prays to all of them.

Just keep him alive. Please.

He hopes he doesn’t leave an obvious blood trail. Jimin lives on the second floor, which is a small mercy, and very close to the elevators as it turns out. Yoongi drags Taehyung’s heavy body to the door and knocks forcefully.

On the fourth impatient knock, the door opens to reveal someone.

“Jesus, wait, I was right here-uh. What the fuck?”

The man is taller than Yoongi and looks confused as heck to see two dirty people on his door, one covered in blood.

“Hoseok? Who’s there?” A shrill voice comes from behind this Hoseok.

“It’s some dude and uh- fuck wait, fuck, is that Tae?”

Yoongi does not have time for this. “Hey, is there a Park Jimin here? I need your fucking help.”

A man smaller than Hoseok comes in view and he’s about Yoongi’s height. He watches with horror at Taehyung’s limp figure and opens the door wide open.

“Shit, get him in,” Jimin says. He takes Taehyung’s other side and helps carry him towards a hallway; Hoseok is ahead of them, opening the door to a room that in all honesty looks like a mini operation theatre.

“Put him on the bed, I’ll go get my stuff ready. Hoseok, you know what to do.”

Hoseok nods, though he looks shaken. Yoongi takes a step back as Hoseok arranges the room, switching on a strange white light and taking out instruments from the cupboards on the side- surgical blades, gauze, a box full of liquids and a stand that seems to have a drip attached. What the fuck did Park Jimin do in here, butcher up body parts?

Hoseok looks shaken but he cleans down the whole surface, straightens Taehyung’s figure and cuts open the shirt, leaving his torso bare. Jimin enters the room wearing a pair of scrubs, gloves and a mask over his face.

“I’ll have to ask you to leave, please,” he says politely but firmly, determination set in his eyes.

“I’m not leaving Tae-”

“Listen, dude, whoever you are, Jimin knows his shit and you’re just going to interfere. Let’s give him space.” Hoseok speaks and maybe Yoongi would like to punch someone.

Jimin seems to notice his hesitancy because his eyes soften by 0.1%. “He’s in safe hands, I promise he’ll be OK.”

Yoongi looks at Taehyung and feels pain and anger and sadness finally hit him really, really hard. “If- if anything happens to him, and I mean anything, at all, I’ll-I’ll fucking end you, you hear me? Keep him alive.”

Hoseok takes him out into the living room, makes him sit on the couch. He sets to making some kind of tea in the kitchen and brings Yoongi a cup. Yoongi can’t fucking focus, which beats the point of this tea. Fuck.

Hoseok sits across him and neither exchange a word, which is awkward as fuck. Occasionally, he gets up to enter the room and comes out with bowls of dirty, bloody gauze and red-tinged water. The smell of iodine is strong in the air.

Yoongi can’t handle this. He feels the wait, the uncertainty gnaws at his mind and heart, along with the guilt and the fear. He isn’t ready to admit a lot of things, he knows he pisses of Taehyung on the daily but he isn’t ready to let him go either.

It’s only been an hour. According to Hoseok’s quiet answers, in a proper hospital it would take three hours, but here, in Jimin’s makeshift room, it could take more. It’s only Jimin, after all.

“Trust Jimin. He’s skilled at his job,” Hoseok says. Yoongi stops himself from snapping back or rolling his eyes because the poor guy hasn’t done anything, and clearly knows Taehyung and is worried himself. It makes Yoongi realise how little he knows of Taehyung after he left, how he never sought to understand. It makes him feel sick.

He checks his surroundings and realises that he does have someone to distract him. Someone he hasn’t met in a long time but someone who he considers his closest friend.

He drops the friend a text and upon receiving confirmation, gets up.

“Hey, uh, Hoseok,” Yoongi says. Hoseok looks up. “Thanks for the help, but Taehyung’s thing will take time and I’m going to go insane waiting so, I have a friend nearby who’ll keep me distracted. I’ll leave you my number, call me immediately the moment he wakes up, OK?”

Hoseok nods and accepts the paper scribbled with Yoongi’s number. Yoongi goes down the flight of stairs and gets to his car. It stinks of blood and the memory of the afternoon strikes Yoongi afresh. Fuck, he almost Taehyung. He could still lose him, and he thinks his life will truly be over if that happens.

He drives to the location he received earlier and arrives at another apartment complex that looks far grander. Yoongi snorts. Of course, he would want to live in absolute luxury.

Yoongi gets to the floor and rings the doorbell. Waits patiently as he hears footsteps inside.

“Hey, hyung,” Yoongi says as soon as Seokjin opens the door.

Seokjin gives him a sceptical look before sighing. “Let me guess. Something happened to Taehyung.”

If Yoongi was doing the stereotypical drinking water-choking-on-it, he’d do that. He can’t, though, so all he can do is stare. Really wide.

“What the fuck, hyung, are you a psychic?”

“Maybe. Maybe I’m Yoongi-sick.” Jin cackles then, rather loudly. “Get it. Yoongi psychic. Yoongi sick. Because I’m sick of your dumb ass too.”

“Did you. Did you just make a pun? Out of my suffering?”

“Yes.”

“I hate you,” Yoongi spits out as Jin finally gives him passage to enter and he pushes past him. There’s no bite in the words, though. Yoongi doesn’t think he can actually hate Jin. Jin is like- like a fundamental part of him now.

But he does think he can punch Jin, him being elder damned.

The apartment he enters is clean and shiny, and Yoongi feels absolutely filthy standing as he is in the middle of it. The living room reveals Namjoon, Jin’s husband of almost three years now, who’s looking up at him and assessing him, face in a frown.

“Hey, Yoongi hyung. Wasn’t expecting a visit so early.”

“Sorry, Joon-ah,” Yoongi replies, suddenly feeling bone tired. He lets himself relax here. It’s not like he has a choice; for some reason, Jin’s home always made him feel better and OK. “Things went to shit today.”

“I can see that,” Jin echoes, getting out a wet washcloth. “Jesus, wipe your face, you look like that girl Carrier from that horrible movie. Joon, could you be a dear and get Yoongi some tea. From the green kettle, not the blue one.” Jin adds.

“I don’t need fucking tea,” Yoongi mutters even as he wipes his face, shivers at the cool contact of the cloth against his skin.

“Yes, you do,” Jin fires back. “It is chamomile, your favourite. You need it.”

“Fuck off,” Yoongi mutters defensively. “Why the fuck do you know me so well.”

“You love it that I do, Yoonie,” Jin cooes and Yoongi is this close to chucking the now dirty washcloth at Jin, but he knows he can’t.

Namjoon enters with a cup of tea and gives it to Yoongi; he wraps his hands around the cup and allows the warmth to seep into his cold hands. He sits on one of the wooden chairs so as to not ruin the other furniture.

“So,” Jin begins, settling down with his own cup of tea, gaze questioning. “What happened to Taehyung?”

“Before we start, do I want to know?” Namjoon asks. Yoongi’s always liked this about Namjoon, that unlike a lot of couples he’s seen, he doesn’t insist on knowing every facet of Jin’s life and gives him the complete privacy and space to reveal it or not. Honestly, Namjoon was the best thing that happened to not just Jin, but Yoongi too.

Namjoon wasn’t from the gang life, but he was the one that helped Jin escape years earlier, helped fake his death and then escape to Busan, far, far away from Seoul. Seeing them made Yoongi want to leave behind his life of depravity.

“Yeah, it’s not a big deal,” Yoongi says. Jin shrugs.

“Really long story short, our Yoongi used to have a childhood best friend that he was a total dick to-”

“I wasn’t a dick, what the fuck-”

“- and they met again eight years later, decided to team up and now something’s gone and happened to the kid. His name is Taehyung, by the way. And Yoongi’s realised some deep teenage feelings and has been eating my brain for the past three weeks through stupid cryptic texts. Continue, Yoongi.”

“I hate you,” he hisses again, and Jin winks. Yoongi sighs.

“He got shot at. Don’t worry, he-he's ok. Or at least, he should be.”

“Is he at the hospital?”

“No. Hospitals are dangerous.” He sees Namjoon’s confused expression but the understanding on Jin’s face. “He told me his college friend, who’s a senior medical student, lives nearby. I took him there.”

“Isn’t that reckless? Why not a hospital?” Namjoon asks. Jin taps his shoulder calmly.

“Gang will be on a lookout there, they’ll get caught.” He nods at Yoongi while Namjoon gulps. He feels really bad for Namjoon sometimes. He never asked to be involved in all of this, even if Jin quit years ago, only had to pay the price of falling in love with him. “Was the ambush- bad?”

“Took us by fucking surprise,” Yoongi mutters, feeling self-loathing erupt within him. He got too carried away with how safe he was, he should have been more careful. “It’s my fault anyway.”

“No, you’re not doing that shit where you blame yourself and hate yourself, no sir, not in this household,” Jin says firmly, a saccharine smile painted on his angelic face. He really was too handsome for the life of violence.

“Yeah. It’s just. He could have died, hyung. Because of me. I fucked up his life and now he dies because of me, I just couldn’t handle it-”

“I know,” Jin says soothingly. “But neither of you saw it coming. Shit happens in this field, Yoongi-yah, you know that. If we began blaming ourselves for everything, would we really be sane at the end of it?”

Yoongi doesn’t think he’s that sane as of now, but he’ll play along. He needs that false sense of security.

“Where’s Jungkook?” He asks after a break.

“Sleeping inside. School night and all that jazz. He overheard me saying you’re coming over and it was a struggle to get him to sleep.”

Yoongi smiles fondly. Two years ago, he and Namjoon had decided to adopt a three-year-old boy from an adoption centre. Jungkook was five now, and Yoongi hadn’t met him a lot but he loved the little kiddo- and according to Jin, maybe spoiled him a bit too much. Sue him, it was his right as a godfather.

“Good. I’ll meet him again in better circumstances.”

“Get him that Iron Man doll, he’s been going after me for ages.”

“Sure thing.”

A moment of comfortable silence passes. Yoongi checks his watch; two hours have passed and one hour to go. He knows Hoseok will call him anything happens, so he tries not to worry.

“So, you wanna tell me what happened with your little boy toy?” Jin asks.

“Don’t call him that,” Yoongi bristles.

“Yoongi-yah, spill.”

Jin knows everything. Jin was his support back in the days he joined and he continued to be one after he helped Jin leave. Jin knows about Yoongi’s childhood, was the only person who knows about that messed up kiss from when he was seventeen.

He’s the only person who knows why Yoongi left in the first place.

Now, if he thinks about it, after all the shit he’s done and been through, it feels like fucking nothing. But back then, it felt like the worst possible thing ever. He was seventeen, he over analysed shit and he got scared easy. He cared so much about Taehyung, too much even, and he wanted to protect that little boy.

The thing is, Yoongi had already gotten into a shit ton of petty shit while he was still in school.

Honestly, it wasn’t supposed to be this bad. He was a broke kid, his dad was an abusive asshole and he needed to save up to leave, to take his mom away and then Taehyung. He got into some shit. He did things to earn cash.

It just got worse. He kept spiralling deeper and deeper, and by the time he could finally realise how he’d fucked things up, he had other shit to worry about like how Taehyung noticed his scars and wounds but kept quiet, how he worried about Yoongi’s distance. Fuck, he could read Taehyung like the back of his hand back then. In some ways, he still can, but Taehyung isn’t that naïve, innocent open book anymore. He’s lethal in his own way.

He prayed the kid didn’t like him like that. Before, Yoongi would have been over the moon. He liked Taehyung, was overly protective of him. But the cost of entering and crossing the wrong side of the track was that the people he loved were in danger. Specifically, Taehyung was.

The leader then often messed around, jokingly threatening how if Yoongi messed up Taehyung would be gone. Then he’d laugh, and say that Taehyung didn’t even matter since he was just a friend.

So when Taehyung kissed him in the treehouse that fatal night, he freaked out, he freaked out bad. He wanted nothing more to give in, but the implied threats hung in the air above him. If Taehyung was a significant other, he would always, always be in danger.

Pure, innocent Taehyung didn’t need a fuck up like Yoongi around him. And so, Yoongi left. And while Yoongi isn’t one for regrets anymore, it’s the one thing he regretted most in his life. He left without an explanation, too chickened out to owe his best friend the truth. He was too afraid he’d drag Taehyung down with him.

He left for Seoul soon after. Time passed and so did the distance but Yoongi never developed the courage to pick up the phone, to call Taehyung, to check up on him. He was poisonous and he needed to be far away from the brilliance the boy deserved.

Why did you leave, hyung? What did I do wrong?

Turns out, by leaving Taehyung he poisoned him anyway.

He sits in silence, nursing his tea as he would a glass of whiskey. Neither Jin nor Namjoon says anything, giving him the time and he’s grateful. He sighs.

“I messed up again,” he finally says into the air. “We kissed and we fucked. Last week.” He hears Jin take in a breath and let out a disappointed sigh, and Yoongi closes his eyes.

“And how did this happen, Yoongi?”

Yoongi shrugs, refusing to look away from the ceiling or the pretty but small chandelier that adorns it. “We made a kill and we got good cash. He wanted to celebrate. Got drunk.”

“Damn,” Namjoon says, and Yoongi looks at him. The younger looks uneasy yet impressed. “Sorry, probably not the best response.”

Yoongi waves it off but Jin clears his throat again, levelling him with his Look. The famous one, the one that made him spill everything out.

“What else, Yoongi-yah. You’re not telling me something.”

“That’s it, hyung.”

“Yoongi.”

He groans. He hates how well Jin can read him but also loves it (Jin was right, duh). He’d always felt so burdened as the hyung, as the one people looked up to even if he liked taking care and being reliable, so when he’d met Jin, he’d allowed himself to feel like a child again. The bratty, desperate dongsaeng and Jin had freely given him that.

“We kept fucking, alright? I didn’t want to but Jesus fuck, I can’t stop. I wish I could but a part of me doesn’t want to, even if it’s the last thing Taehyung deserves.”

“Glad to know you’re aware of some decency,” Jin fires back, unimpressed. Namjoon takes it as a cue to leave and backs off, and it’s just the two of them.

“Hyung-”

“What are you, a sixteen-year-old horny teenager with a raging boner that he needs to take care of immediately? You’re twenty-five, Yoongi. What the fuck are you doing?”

“I know, I know I fucked up bad, I-”

“That’s not the fucking issue. You told me this kid idolised the fuck out of you, loved you or whatever sap it is that teenagers consumed back then-”

“Not that you were that much older back then, hyung-”

“Shut up. An adult is talking,” Jin says firmly, putting Yoongi in his place. “When we first met you told me how much you regretted messing with his feelings, do you think just because he’s a grown up now he’s OK?”

“I know, alright? I get it, I fucked with his head and I fuck with it now but I don’t know what to do.”

“Own up, prick. Colour me this: you’re a hormonal, overthinking teenager and your crush and first love or whatever leaves you, comes back into your life, gives you little scraps of affection and he takes it because he never stopped loving you and he’d rather have you like this than not at all. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

He does. He sees it all too clearly, but having it spit back in his face is a whole thing else. He knows it’s bad. He knows he’s killing Taehyung a little bit more when they wake up naked and he looks at him like that, like he holds the entire galaxy in his hands and Yoongi looks away, ignores him. He knows it in the way Taehyung looks at him even as he takes him in deep in the car seat, and the hurt he shows when Yoongi shuts down.

But what can he do? He didn’t want to. That night in the hotel was the best thing Yoongi ever did but then he remembers, remembers that he left a fifteen-year-old boy alone and still does. He tries to use it to hold him in place but then how can he deny that the way Taehyung looks at him makes something bubble deep inside, the way his fingers tracing his skin as he drives makes him go insane, that his quiet moans of “hyung, please” sound like the purest harmony in the world?

How?

“Yeah. Yeah, I do,” Yoongi says. Jin’s eyes soften a bit, pity and warmth colouring his face.

“I know you, Yoongi. You’re too fucking soft-hearted, but you also know when to know your boundaries. Which is why I know you’ll make the right decision.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” Jin insists, eyes earnest and- so believing in Yoongi’s worth, as he’s always done. It causes a different kind of hurt inside him, alongside the one he’s had since he’s met Taehyung again. “I do, because the Min Yoongi I met and loved and sheltered even when he was a little bitch to me, was always honest. Do you ever wonder why I chose you out of all the ratty brats in that recruitment room? Because I saw it. In our world of lies, I knew you wouldn’t lie when it matters most and that’s the kind of trust people like you and I need, Yoongi-yah.”

Yoongi closes his eyes and wills himself not to cry at that. He feels small, feels like a child and being thrust into the cruel, big bad world too early and too fast, but unlike when he was seventeen, he’s not that angry anymore. He’s not just pain and hurt and spitting words; he’s a little bit older and full of regrets but also, a tiny bit of hope. It’s fragile but it’s there.

“I don’t know if I can. I know I have to but I’m so scared, hyung.”

“I know, baby, I know. It’s OK. Being honest takes courage and you’ve been the bravest of them all. So stop hiding and be honest. You owe that to each other after all this time.”

A tear does slip out and he takes a shaky breathe in. It really fucking hurts but Jin’s right (again). He owes Taehyung that at least. Jin makes a tutting sound and Yoongi feels him shuffle close, feels him grab hold of his hand and squeeze tight. He feels better and he knows Jin knows that, that’s why he did it.

In their world, they could never be weak. So they sought each other out in the most subtle of ways possible. They sit like that for quite some time, in comfortable silence, enough that they can hear Namjoon’s snores beginning to infiltrate. They chuckle.

Yoongi’s phone rings, a sharp, shrill sound and he jumps, sees the unknown number flash on it and accepts it, the calm and tranquillity of earlier cracked as he remembers the reality.

“Hello?”

“Yes, hi, uh, I don’t know your name but well, Taehyung’s surgery is done. Just wanted to inform. Jimin said he’ll wake up soon.”

“Ah, thank you. I’ll be there in a few,” Yoongi mutters, pressing end. Sighs.

“He OK?” Jin asks, gives a few back rubs while Yoongi rubs his face.

“The surgery finished and that Jimin dude says he’ll wake up soon, so,” He gets up and wrings his hands together. Jin gives him a comforting smile. “I guess I should get going. Don’t know when I’ll see you next.”

“Yeah. Just have that damn doll the next time you come by,” Jin says, getting up and guiding Yoongi to the door. “And don’t forget what I said. You know what happens when I’m annoyed.”

“Yes, hyung, jeez. You’re barely four months older, stop acting like my dad.”

Jin hugs him tight. “See you soon, Yoongi-yah. Update me.”

Yoongi gives a thumbs up, Jin shuts the door and it’s just Yoongi in an empty hallway. Shoulders light but his heart somehow all the heavier.

He drives back, mind blank. He feels drained but in that way of “I got everything off my chest” way, which is a good thing. Right? But then, he also feels drained in that “but fuck, I have one more added responsibility as a human being and I just fucking can’t”.

Yeah. It’s a fucking mess.

He knocks on Jimin’s door; winces at the tiny blood droplets while he waits. He hopes Jimin doesn’t have the most observant neighbours or suspicious ones. Maybe they’ll chalk it up to him being a medical student.

It’s Jimin who opens the door this time, and he looks downright exhausted. There’s still the remnant of sweat on his face, his eyes blink slowly and his hands shake. He’s still dressed in those dirty scrubs.

Yoongi enters and it’s just- awkward. He shuffles from foot to foot. Jimin sips on his tea while he keeps looking at Yoongi; Hoseok looks like he wants to ask questions and he wants to bolt.

“So, uh, is he alright?” Yoongi finally asks.

Jimin nods. “Yeah, he’s doing- he’s doing well. It would have been better at a hospital but,” Jimin gives Hoseok a careful look and then gives a meaningful one to Yoongi and sighs. “I know you couldn’t. The bullet thankfully hit the soft tissue and not his bone or a nerve and it can be managed.” Jimin shakily runs a hand through his hair. “You want tea?”

Yoongi nods. He’s had so much fucking tea but he thinks it would be rude to ask for a drink. Jimin enters the kitchen and arrives a moment later with a cup.

“I never caught your name,” he says as he offers the cup. Yoongi gulps and feels nervous. He abhors small talk but he doesn’t really have a choice.

“It’s Yoongi.” It’s clear that the name means something to Jimin because he visibly freezes. Clearly, Taehyung must have told him about them. Thankfully, Jimin doesn’t ask him to clarify.

Half an hour later they hear something from the room and Jimin gets up to leave and do the last bit of the procedure, maybe. He seems to hesitate to leave Yoongi with Hoseok, now that the urgency of saving a life is not hanging over him, but then he nods and walks away.

Yoongi simply waits.

*

When Taehyung wakes up, the first thing he sees is the dim bedroom light.

The second thing he sees is Jimin’s face hovering over him, not as clear as he feels heavy under and light. He begins to catch up to his surroundings, however, and then feels- pain.

It’s a lot of things at once. There’s a numb but sort of throbbing feeling in his shoulder, his mouth feels drier than the Sahara and his head feels so light, he thinks he can pass out again. The room he’s in is unfamiliar, but he guesses what he sees that it’s Jimin’s room.

“Hey, sleepyhead. Good morning,” Jimin murmurs, cool fingers fluttering around him, checking his pulse, his temperature. Cool fingers that feel like home, a different sort of it.

“Hi,” and Taehyung winces at how bad his throat sounds. It’s croaky like he’s chain-smoked ten packets of cigarettes or something. He feels Jimin press a glass of water to his lips and he drinks it in greedily, lapping it up like some damn dog.

“How do you feel?”

“I’m okay,” he mutters. His arm feels heavy and the smell of the antiseptic solution is strong around him. He feels cold air hit him, notices that he’s naked from the top. “Arm feels a little heavy. And I’m cold. How did it go?”

The last question is directed at the surgery. Taehyung knows it was a risk, but he also trusted Jimin. He trusted Jimin, because, well, Jimin has helped Taehyung out. Multiple times.

It’s kind of shitty, honestly. They were best friends, or rather, he was the first person Taehyung allowed himself to open up to, to be close with, after Yoongi Jimin just had that sort of personality and Taehyung craved someone to tag as his person.

Jimin wouldn’t ever be Yoongi, but maybe that’s how he could tell the difference. Jimin was the true best friend, and Yoongi was always going to be the one who got away. The one who made his heart beat differently, whose smiles fed the butterflies in his stomach.

He knew when he met Jimin that he’d always loved Yoongi.

Jimin knew him. Jimin knew his sad life story and dealt with his sorry ass and his fucked up head better than Taehyung did on some days. Loved and accepted him.

He was the only one who knew that Taehyung was a student by day, a cold, ruthless killer by night.

Maybe not exactly. But he knew in the subtle clues Taehyung unintentionally sent, like stumbling into their shared dorm at odd hours of the night, clothes sometimes stained with blood, Taehyung’s sudden growing collection of knives. He knew it in the way Taehyung sometimes answered questions about anatomy he should have had no fucking clue about as a design student or even a normal human being.

He definitely knew it in the way Taehyung would sometimes come back with injuries that you simply couldn’t explain with “Oh, ha-ha, I walked it into a pole, how clumsy, right?” Knew it when he had to patch up Taehyung’s wounds or stitch it, set a sprained ankle and what not.

Taehyung never told him explicitly that he was in a gang to spare his best friend, but Jimin wasn’t stupid. They both knew that was Taehyung was doing was immoral, horrible and maybe even evil (but hey, it paid the rent on time), they both knew it but didn’t talk about it, let it be the elephant in the room between them. It was that one thing they couldn’t do shit about. Taehyung was in too deep and Jimin loved him too much to let him go.

“You’re lucky it was a soft tissue would, Tae. I couldn’t have handled it otherwise. I still don’t know if I did and I’m scared.”

“I’m sure you did great, Min. You always do.”

“Not fucking bullet wounds,” Jimin hisses, eyes flashing. Taehyung gulps. Jimin reaches for his shoulder and checks the dressing; takes out a couple of supplies to dress it better as well as a spare shirt. “Fuck, Taehyung, you and I both know I know, I don’t know why but you do it. But this is dangerous, Taetae. Just…I think I’ve done OK but please show it at a proper hospital. Please.”

“You know I can’t, Minnie,” Taehyung mutters regretfully. He hates that look on Jimin, the one where he begs for answers or logic and Taehyung knows he can’t give either. “I’ll try, okay? I can’t give guarantees, not with the way things are, but I’ll try if it’s bad or anything goes wrong, which I know it won’t because you’re that fucking talented.”

Jimin shakes his head. “What even happened?”

“Bad decisions. Bad consequences. It was a trap, I didn’t escape fast enough. Only knew you’d be here and asked Yoongi to take me here. Sorry to impose on you and Hobi hyung.”

“Shut up,” Jimin says, now carefully putting Taehyung’s head through the shirt. It’s soft and clean and smells like tangerines. Jimin cuts away the left arm of it so as to not shift Taehyung’s arm to fit it. It’ll have to do for now. “Hoseok hyung doesn’t know much but we’re pretty much following a don’t ask, don’t tell thing, so. It’s fine. You know we both care for you.”

“I honestly wonder why. I’ve done nothing but use you.”

“I’m not going to handle your self-worth crisis when you’re a patient. Just be damn grateful.” Taehyung smiles. Maybe this is why he’s okay with them, found a home in them. It wasn’t exactly the island he wanted but it was okay.

It’s silent again when Jimin hums.

“So, Yoongi’s pretty hot.”

“Oh my god. No, stop. It’s okay, it’s chill.”

“Was it not chill before?” Jimin smirks, and Taehyung glares. Stupid gossipy best friend with a penchant for making him spill.

“I met Yoongi on one of my assignments, alright?” At the mention of assignments, Jimin’s smile dims down but he nods. “It just felt like some of that fate bullshit. We teamed up.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah,” Taehyung scratches at his chin, frowns at the dried flakes of blood he feels crusted under his nails. “Jimin, I’m leaving it behind.”

Jimin gives him a look. “Leaving what behind.”

“The gang, all of it,” Taehyung says. When he’d agreed to Yoongi, he’d said it solely to be with him. Now he didn’t know where they stood but as they’d driven around, just being- some semblance of normal, he supposes- he was okay. Content not killing frequently or even at all. Craved normalcy, not dark alleys and high rooftops, or doing things when he was high as fuck. He just wanted to be a normal kid, not a lurking killer.

It would be hard to leave that behind. But in order to leave something behind, you had to make that choice to take that step.

“You are?”

“Yeah, maybe I realised it too late but I’m kind of done. Maybe the bullet was the last straw. It’s why I was shot, actually. We’ve been on the run from both our gangs and today was the consequence of not being careful.”

Jimin is silent for some time. Then he nods, comes close and gives Taehyung a kiss on his forehead. “I’m proud of you, no matter what. I’ve never said anything but…I’m glad. Really, really glad.”

“I know, Jimin-ah. I know.”

It’s with this Taehyung gets up, hugs Jimin as much as he can. Jimin gives him a box full of medicines and a list with more listed on it, in case he runs out, and also a whole notebook with instructions for Yoongi. He still begs him to go to a hospital if and when he can.

When he comes out of the room, he feels like one could cut the atmosphere with a butter knife and still make sharp cuts. Hoseok sighs out in relief and hovers around him but doesn’t touch. And Yoongi.

Yoongi looks like he could cry, like Taehyung is the only man in the room and maybe his world, and that seeing that he’s alive and breathing is the only gift he could ever ask for.

It hurts.

He thanks Jimin and Hoseok, as does Yoongi, and they’re on their way. He can walk but the pressure makes its way to his shoulder, and he feels Yoongi wrap an arm around his waist. He can’t refuse it, because it helps, but he feels like that much close contact could burn straight through the thin layer of his shirt and imprint on his skin.

How strange he is; how strange they both are. Here they were, barely two days ago, fucking each other and trying to mark the other’s body, and now a fucking touch makes him feel like he’s going to combust.

How strange love is, indeed.

His side of the car seat is marked with blood; the car stinks of it. Driving with the windows down helps a little, but the marks are a strange reminder of how he almost lost his life. It’s a reminder not only to Taehyung, but it seems to Yoongi as well. As if…as if he remembers that he almost lost Taehyung too. That he cared so deeply, was so scared for Taehyung’s life and not his own.

It certainly explains the return of the little bit of distance between them. Push and pull; that’s their tragic life story. Once upon a time, being with Yoongi was like breathing air, and now it felt like the oxygen mask was regularly getting cut off from time to time. It was maddening how careful Yoongi was being.

But he’d made a choice to deal with it, didn’t he? He’d told the universe that as long as he had Yoongi next to him, he’d be fine. But he wasn’t.

Two nights later and they were at a motel again. It was moderately clean and hygienic enough for Taehyung’s wound redressal. Earlier, Yoongi had done it once in the restroom of a bathroom for a hotel. The wound hurt like a bitch, and it looked ugly and horrible and had sometimes begun to itch, which had led to Yoongi slapping his hands before they even reached his shoulders.

That night, things change again- and maybe this time, for good. It begins when Taehyung tries to initiate their usual, tries to scoot closer to Yoongi and kiss him and Yoongi turns away, tells him not to strain his wound.

And maybe it’s just how everything’s been this past one month, how it has all been slowly collecting and building up, but Taehyung finally breaks. It’s not like that time in the hotel, where he was just desperate, it’s the kind of breaking where it’s too much and he’s too tired and he feels like the mountain on his shoulder (and his heart) could crush him.

He wails. He honest to god sobs and wails and he feels like a petulant child when he asks, no, when he begs, “What happened to us, hyung? Why did you leave me, why?”

And unlike last time, Yoongi isn’t caught off guard. Yoongi’s heartbroken too. Yoongi looks at him like he’ll break if Taehyung continues to crack and so, the scene is like this: it’s the two of them facing each other on a motel bed, so close yet so far away, and silently crying.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so, so, sorry.”

That’s all he says. Taehyung cries harder and feels Yoongi tightly hold his hand and it hurts so badly. He just wishes the ground could open up and swallow him and make the pain stop, all of it.

Yoongi keeps saying sorry over and over again but it’s not enough. They fall asleep like that, Taehyung’s tears not yet dry on his face and Yoongi rubbing circles on his hand. But it’s not enough.

The next morning, it’s awkward. Of course, it is. With them, all it ever is impulsive actions and regretful reactions. Its skin meeting skin and then silence within pouring out.

Yoongi changes his dressings again and it doesn’t hurt as badly as it used to. It’s a whole process, a process that requires Taehyung to be seated on the bed and Yoongi standing in front of him, too close to be comfortable because of the proximity grates on them, reminds them of what they can’t have because their life story is just that: push and pull.

“You never told me,” Taehyung starts.

“Tae-ah, please. Not now. I can’t do this.” Yoongi says, expression pained. His hands are quick and meticulous when it comes to cleaning, soothing on his fevered skin.

“But I can. Hyung, please.”

“Taehyung, you’re hurt, can we maybe focus on that?”

“Don’t do this hyung. Don’t avoid this shit again and use my injury to protect- whatever the fuck you think it is you’re protecting. I need to know. I deserve to know.”

But it doesn’t work. Yoongi purses his lips and continues with the wound and Taehyung feels desperate. He feels messed up and angry and hurt, he feels so close to the brink again and he doesn’t think when he does what he does, which is pull Yoongi in and kiss him harshly, maybe fill the hole deep in his heart, maybe borrow some of that gold to fill his cracks. Yoongi kisses back, nips at his lips and opens his mouth but then he stops, he pulls back, regret and pain dancing in his eyes.

“Taehyung. Please.”

Taehyung gives a derisive, bitter laugh even as a tear slips out, even as he rubs his swollen lips. He’s all over the place and he knows it and Yoongi knows it and just.

It’s just push and pull with them.

They leave and drive again. They’re back to their routine of driving around in their (now clean) car, watching the roads unwind around them, see normal people living normal lives from their windows, keep low on the radar and drive.

But it’s not enough. Taehyung can’t handle this, can’t handle the hiding and the waiting for the explosion to happen. He’s bone tired all the time now as if the bullet maybe only hit his shoulder but the vibrations were felt by his entire body, that the vibrations shook something awake deep inside of him. A disdain for the despondency of them.

So one day they’re god knows where (maybe Gwangju? Maybe Seoul outskirts, maybe home?) And Taehyung has had enough. He made a choice but that choice is hurting him more than ever and maybe he should get it through his thick skull that it was never fucking meant to be.

“Yoongi, stop the car.” Yoongi does so. Taehyung opens the door, walks up the trunk and takes out the bag of cash out. “Split this.”

“Now?”

“Yeah. Now. Then I’ll leave.” Yoongi looks at him with that, and Taehyung can see the panic and sadness all in one go in his eyes. He can see the way Yoongi’s hands shake, tightly gripping the steering wheel until he goes paler than usual.

But mostly, he can see the way Yoongi doesn’t intend to stop him or say anything, and that’s what hurts the most, that’s what’s the last straw.

Maybe they weren’t meant to be, because maybe at the end of all this, all Taehyung ever was, was a convenient fuck. A fuck buddy, even.

So yeah. This how their tragic life story of push and pull ends when the cash is split, Taehyung has his share and he’s coughing in the dust the car leaves behind as Yoongi leaves, once again.

*

{Three months later}

Taehyung jogs on the long stretch of the Haeundae Beach, the crisp cold of the morning air biting his cheeks.

He takes a long way out, jogs until he feels his lungs replaced with flames and the pain shoot sporadically in his legs. His shoulder wound is mostly healed, though it occasionally throbs, reminding him of how precious life is. It throbs more when he exerts himself, like now, and this is when he tells himself to stop.

This is where he begs himself to stop thinking of running as running away from his all too familiar, all too despondent thoughts.

He reaches his small but cozy apartment in a complex close to Jimin’s own apartment. He’s in Busan. After getting off the car and being left in the middle of nowhere, somehow Taehyung managed to get his ass back to Busan, back to his second home.

He gets inside and strips off his sweaty t-shirt, winces as he rotates his shoulder a little. He looks at the mirror and tries not to flinch away from the scar that marks him, ugly and ragged but healing, no longer red but a soft baby pink. He’s able to do most things now, but he knows that he’ll always have to be careful.

He gets into the shower and groans when the hot water hits his face, runs over his back and washes him clean. He soaks himself and stands there for a few moments before making a move to grab the shampoo and the body wash.

Inevitably, this where his thoughts catch up to him. Not quite during the day, when he’s busy setting up his design website or taking online orders, and not quite during the night when he plays bartender (a rather good one) at one of the busiest clubs in the city.

He’s doing okay. He’s living an okay life, he doesn’t kill anymore, hasn’t been tempted to kill or return to his old life or ways. He knows, from years of habit, that Busan has its own gangs and its own crime life that it seethes with, but Taehyung keeps himself far, far away.

He enjoys his job. He enjoys the normalcy that he once thought he’d lost for good. The money he’d split has been invested rather than spent and he’s doing okay. Even in the heart department.

Of course, he thinks about Yoongi. Sometimes cries about him, sometimes calls Jimin up and sobs and then shuts the phone, sometimes records voicemails but never sends it to him. He made the choice to take a step back and he has to deal with it. Things went to shit but if they did once upon a time and he came back from it, then he can do it again.

That’s life, really. A cycle of ups and downs, of happiness and sadness and push and pull. It’s gotten easier to breathe each day once he accepts that fact and lives by it, and he’s doing okay. Really.

He takes customer orders and works on them during the day. After his mandatory once-a-day call with Jimin, he gets ready for his bartending shift. This also he enjoys. Taehyung’s always been good with people and always somehow managed to gain their trust, and taking care of drunk people or flirting with them, listening to hilarious (and sometimes heart-breaking) stories of the people who come by- make him feel good. His boss loves him there and he earns in a great number of tips; sometimes really hot people try to woo him and sometimes he agrees to go home with them and fuck.

But he knows that won’t ever fill the hole that will always be present, that only one person could ever hope to fill. He created it, after all.

Tonight is a slow night, it being a weekday, and it’s an easy night. It’s fewer tips but Taehyung doesn’t mind. He was never really desperate for money when he chose this life three months ago, not like he was back in college, broke and not being able to pay rent and as a result, taking up a life of extinguishing others.

He serves a few of the club and bar regulars, greets them with familiarity, and updates himself about their lives. He gets more break time and enjoys the guy playing the piano, tries not to think about his childhood and how beautifully Yoongi played.

When he turns his attention back to the counter he notices an unfamiliar customer and rushes forward. The man is dressed in all black and is wearing a snapback, hiding his face.

“What would you like to have?” Taehyung asks politely.

“Whiskey on the rocks.”

He nods mechanically and prepares to serve the drink when he stops short. He could recognise that raspy voice anywhere.

He turns away from the bottles and faces the man again, just as Yoongi removes his snapback and looks at him. After three months.

The glass in his hand begins to shake.

“Hey, Tae. Been a long while, huh?”

*

He meets Yoongi at a small alcove at the beach.

He wanted to say no when Yoongi asked to talk to him, he really did. Because he was doing okay. He was living and beginning to know the satisfaction and trying to keep himself afloat, and trying not to miss the raw wound that was Yoongi.

But of course, he said yes. He meant to say no but out slipped a yes and a nod and it was done.

He sees Yoongi sitting on a small, flat rock, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke out. Taehyung takes his time to appreciate what he sees, to see where he stands and…he’s doing okay. It doesn’t hurt like salt being rubbed into a wound, not anymore.

Yoongi looks up when he gets close and puts out the cigarette, crushing it under his boots. He looks different- not bad (honestly, really fucking good) - but different. His blonde hair has grown out and his roots show their natural black.

“So,” Taehyung starts after an abnormally long gap of silence. The silence that had been their thing for as long as he can remember. “What’s with the surprise visit? And how did you know where I was putting up?”

“An old friend from the gang. Jin hyung. He lives nearby. Told me about it.”

Taehyung wonders if it’s that easy to get caught and it seems Yoongi sees that panic, rushes to placate it. “He left a really long time ago, don’t worry. He’s not in this shit anymore.”

“That’s- that’s good.”

“Fell in love with this computer geek, faked his death and now he has a five-year-old. He’s really cute.”

“I’m sure he is.” Taehyung sighs, hands deep in his pocket. “Why does any of that matter?”

“Just. I wanted to tell you that I asked the computer geek and well, we’re kind of dead. Our gang identities, that is.”

Taehyung startles. It’s not to say that he hasn’t been happy, but a part of him always looks over his shoulder, always double checks when he sees faces. Changed his hair colour so he’s unrecognisable. He never really used his real name in the gang but people have a way of finding out. Knowing that he’s, well, dead is- a relief.

“That’s good to know, hyung. You could have texted me that; didn’t have to come all the way here to tell me.”

Its Yoongi’s turns to sigh. He looks like a deer caught in the headlights. Afraid, but also hopeful. “You know I didn’t come just for that.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t know. But you can enlighten me.”

“I came to apologise.”

“I think I’ve heard enough apologies from you for a lifetime, Yoongi. So, no, thank you.”

“Goddamn it, Tae,” Yoongi hisses. “Fuck, fine, I came back to tell you the truth. Okay? I want to tell you everything if you’d want to listen.”

Taehyung gapes. He also kind of wants to punch something or someone (Yoongi) because could he not have told this months ago? Why now?

“Why now?” He echoes.

“Because I finally got the courage to do so,” Yoongi whispers, sitting down on the rock. Pats the space next to him, asking Taehyung to join him. “I’m maybe eight years too late but I’m here and I feel brave enough.”

Taehyung gives him a silent assent.  And so out it spills, the story of them and how it went to shit. Yoongi tells him about the petty crimes he did when they were still together. He tells him about how afraid he was, how he couldn’t bear the possibility that Taehyung could get hurt because of him.

He tells Taehyung about how much the kiss made him happy and then how reality hit him like a brick and he just couldn’t do it.

“I was a coward, Tae, alright? I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t get you into this. So I left, I left like a dog with its tail behind its legs. I packed my shit and I moved to Seoul. And I’m sorry about that. I truly am.” He moves as if to take Taehyung’s hand and then stops himself. “Leaving you was the hardest thing I ever did, even harder than killing someone for the first time. And every day for the longest time, building the courage to even call you, to ask how you are- I failed each time. Then I got used to it and I told myself I was doing the right thing by cutting you off when really, maybe I was just avoiding the issue.”

“As you are known to do,” Taehyung jokes, and Yoongi glares. “And yeah. It fucked with me big time, hyung, but I don’t want you blaming yourself for the things I did, the choices I made. Sure, I made so many of-of these bad decisions in your memory, because I missed you so much, but at the end of the day, I made them. I chose to. I had ten different alternatives each time and every time I chose wrong.”

“You deserved more than this, Tae-ah.”

“Yeah. But you were the one who told me once that there’s no point in regretting things we’ve done. We can’t turn back time and make it right, we can only hope to learn and make better choices.”

They fall silent again. A part of Taehyung finally, finally feels relieved and at calm, like all the destruction left behind by the storm of his feelings has gone by.

“When you got shot is when I realised what a fool I’d been,” Yoongi says suddenly. He does take Taehyung’s hand now, weaves his fingers through it as they used to when they were kids. “When you came back into my life I couldn’t help but want our childhood back. It was my safe space as well. And when we fucked, and again and again- don’t get me wrong, I loved it, each time. I felt better each time like I was doing something right. But the way we’re doing it, Tae-ah…”

“Yeah, I get it. I wouldn’t want to have a fuck buddy thing with you either.”

“Right. But you got shot and I realised I had to get my shit together, really fast. I could have almost lost you. I was terrified. I prayed that you were alive just so I could tell you what I’ve wanted to tell you for years.”

Taehyung looks at Yoongi then. Feels the beginning of a smile break out on his face, which he restrains. “Go on, then. I’m here now, not dead and very much alive. Tell me.”

Yoongi scowls. “Fucking brat. You already know.”

Taehyung holds his hand tighter, feels his blood dance in his vein, a grin break out on his face. “I do. But I want to hear your grumpy, emotionally constipated and socially awkward ass say it.”

“Fucking fine, here it goes,” Yoongi clears his throat. “Kim Taehyung. Literally the most annoying person in my life since I was six. I love you.”

Taehyung responds by taking Yoongi’s face in his hands and smashing his lips to his. It’s not even a proper kiss and it’s more like attacking and bruising each other, but that changes.

Yoongi takes charge and controls it, both wrestling until Yoongi wins and they fall on the gritty sand below but Taehyung doesn’t even care, would fall into sand a hundred times over if it means that he can have Yoongi with him like this, not scraps of passion and regret as he had been for a month.

The stars shine above them, the waves of the sea provide a continuous harmony as if their universe is beginning to breathe again. It’s a little like when they were young and kissing for the first time like the balance is restored. This time, the only thing they’re drunk on is each other.

They kiss for a long time. They take breaks and lie side by side, stargazing and pointing out constellations with their joined hands. They kiss again and just talk, really talk.

In life, sure, you get the choice to make the right decision and it’s unpredictable. But what no one tells you after that, is that sometimes, in life, you can click a reset button too. Make the same choice with different consequences.

They’re no longer driving but they’re on a new journey: the road trip of them afterwards and beyond. The road trip of one Min Yoongi and one Kim Taehyung.

It’s bliss, at last.

*

The End.