Work Text:
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. [...] You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood...
Barbara Ras, You Can't Have It All
Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, Yoongi falls asleep. It isn’t difficult, even on the cramped plane, even with the noise of Taehyung and Jungkook goofing off one seat behind. His body drained from the tour and the travels and a lot more besides, all of which can be neatly summed up in the sideways smirk on Jimin’s face. Yoongi rolls his eyes but drifts off on his shoulder anyway, neck lolling at an awkward angle, because there’s something comforting about the scent of citrus clinging to Jimin’s skin, and also because Jimin lets him do it. Once in a while he can feel more than hear Jimin hum along with whatever music he’s listening to, a soft thrum of the throat, reverberating through them both. He falls asleep like that, tuned to the rise and fall of Jimin’s chest, half-blurred images flashing before his closed eyelids, slow-moving and strangely familiar, like they could be dreams.
They’re not.
*
He wakes up to laughter and thinks, what’s a man gotta do for some peace and quiet thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean. He grumbles and burrows deeper into the softness pillowed under his cheek. More laughter, louder this time; a finger pokes at his face, grabs his chin.
“Knock it off, Jimin,” Yoongi says.
“Who’s Jimin?”
Yoongi opens his eyes. A child is perched on top of his chest, staring round-eyed and curious down at him.
“Um,” Yoongi says, so that he doesn’t say What the fuck? in front of a baby.
The child pokes his face again. Ow. That hurt. “Who’s Jimin?” he repeats, mouth twisted into a pout. He’s not really a baby. A toddler, maybe. Chubby-cheeked and gap-toothed and whine in his voice. For an absurd moment Yoongi thinks Jimin’s gone and turned into a kid, before he realizes that even less sense than whatever’s happening right now. Wherever he is. And also, the kid doesn’t look like Jimin at all. No. He looks more like...
“That’s enough,” says a woman Yoongi’s never seen before in his life, tone soothing as she scoops the child off Yoongi’s chest into her arms. “Appa just had a dream.”
“What the fuck?” Yoongi says in front of a baby.
It’s a room with yellow-painted walls and a bed for two. Pictures hang on the walls, of a woman with sleeve tattoos and a penetrating gaze, of a boy with a grinning face and a gap in his teeth, and of Yoongi. Because the room is, apparently, his own. So is the house it belongs to. So is the family that calls it home, and the life that they live. Have lived, for years now.
“Honey,” says Jien. “I think we should go to the hospital.”
Yoongi stares down at his hands. They’re seated at the kitchen table. A mug of tea is placed before him, but he can’t focus past his fingers curled around the handle, the glint of silver at his knuckle. A wedding ring.
On the wall, a clock ticks.
“You really don’t remember anything?” Jien presses. “Anything at all?”
They met while working on one of Yoongi’s albums. Hours spent in the studio, she jokes, and we only had eyes for the music. It was electric. A once-in-a-lifetime connection. And who knows—it might never have even amounted to anything, if Yoongi didn’t ask her out one day on a dare or a bet or an act of spite; that part of the story’s a little fuzzy. The wedding came years later, after he returned from enlistment. The ceremony was beautiful. They still have the photos. He can look at them, if he wants. If it would help.
“What about the band,” Yoongi says, and she’s only a stranger, but he can tell when something in her eyes shutter closed, wary. Wrong question.
“The band ended a long time ago,” Jien says carefully. “You’re married. You have a new life now. We still meet Namjoon for dinner, sometimes. Taehyung when he’s in the country. You really don’t remember?”
“And Jimin?” Yoongi blurts, grip tight around the handle of his mug.
Jien pauses. For the first time, she looks unsure of herself.
“I don’t know,” she says slowly. “You never bring him up. Or at least, you never did until now.”
A hum in his ear. Warmth under his cheek. It couldn’t have been more than two hours ago, Taehyung and Jungkook making stupid sound effects to the in-flight movie they were watching in the row behind, Seokjin and Hoseok engaged in hushed conversation in the row in front, nothing but neverending blue outside the window.
Nothing was made to be forever anyway, he can hear Jimin saying, in another life.
“Honey,” Jien says.
“Stop calling me that,” Yoongi says, and Jien falls silent.
A moment passes. Tea cooling in Yoongi’s mug. The clock ticks.
“Honey,” Jien says again, more firmly this time. “I know you don’t remember me, but you’re my husband and I love you and I’m asking you to trust me. You’ve lost years, maybe a decade’s worth of your memories. I can’t imagine what’s going through your head right now, but we have to get to the hospital and see how to fix it.”
Yoongi stopped hearing anything after I love you. Spoken so casually, like it’s nothing out of the ordinary, like she says it a hundred times a day, easy as anything. Whittled down from the wild unspeakable tangle of the heart into something bearable, something bloodless, something presentable in front of the neighbours. No longer a savage creature but an animal hunted and tamed and bared out in the open. No longer the indecent lump of the throat.
Yoongi would know. He said it once, too.
“I’m sorry,” Yoongi says, lurching to his feet; the mug totters, but does not spill. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I’m not him, okay? I was on a plane on the way back to Seoul and I’ve got my whole life ahead of me and I need to know where everyone else is, I need to find them—”
“Yoongi, please,” Jien says, hand reaching out for him, “you’re scaring him.”
Him—the boy in the backyard, kicking a ball around in the grass, watching through the window.
And her voice is steady, but Yoongi realizes: he’s scaring her, too. This stranger white-faced and solemn across the table. The one who loves him.
Maybe Yoongi really has lost his head. Maybe the plane landed safely in Seoul, and they fought their way through the crowds of fans waiting for them there, and they got into the cars that drove them back to their dorms, and life went on and somewhere along the way Yoongi made another album with a stranger and they got married and had a kid—
They must have broken up. They must have broken up, and then Yoongi got over it, because that’s what you do when you break up with someone you love, someone you have to share every stage and every song and every second of your life with. Do or die.
How didn’t it kill him? Yoongi wonders.
The clock ticks.
Somewhere between the ride to the hospital and the emergency waiting room, Yoongi falls asleep.
*
He wakes up to laughter and thinks, a dream, it was a dream. He opens his eyes.
A child is perched on his chest, grinning gap-toothed and pleased down at him.
“Appa! You’re awake!”
Yoongi stares at him so long the grin slips off his face.
“Appa?”
“That’s enough,” says Jien, coming into the bedroom and scooping the child up into her arms. “Appa was sleeping.” She turns her gaze on Yoongi, then, and—smiles. “Good morning, sleepyhead.”
Yoongi stares at her. The smile wavers, slightly.
“Yoongi?” she says.
“Good morning,” Yoongi croaks back.
She doesn’t say anything about the hospital, or his memories, or his lack of them. She doesn’t say I love you, either, for which Yoongi feels relieved, then ashamed. She just saunters out the bedroom with the kid—their kid—in her arms, saying something about breakfast, while Yoongi holds his breath.
Her footsteps fade down the hall.
He lets out his breath.
There, on the bedside table: a phone. His phone, presumably. The lockscreen is yet another family photo. He quickly presses down with his thumbprint, and the phone unlocks, which means it belongs to him, or to him in the future. Which means they’re both the same person. Or they will be.
He opens Naver and types into search.
BANGTAN SONYEONDAN (BTS): Artist. Members: RM (leader), Suga, Jin, J-Hope, Jimin, V, Jungkook. Company: BigHit Entertainment. Debut: 2013 (2 COOL 4 SKOOL). Disbanded: 2023.
Yoongi stares down at the disbandment date. At the smiling faces of his members.
Slowly, he clicks on one of them.
JIMIN (PARK JIMIN): Singer. Birthday: 1995.10.13. Member of: Bangtan Sonyeondan (2013-2023), XCV (2023-2027).
But Yoongi isn’t looking at the bio. He’s looking at the photo, a face slightly more rounded than he remembers. His hair is longer, dyed a silvery shade, though the roots are beginning to show. His lips are quirked up, a relaxed expression on his face, like he isn’t smiling for a paparazzi camera or a photoshoot, but for someone he knows.
“What’re you looking at so serious-like,” Jien says, and Yoongi blanches; he hadn’t heard her come back into the room. But she’s already seen his phone screen, and she pauses.
“Jimin? What are you searching him up for?” She yawns, walks over to the dresser, where she starts rummaging for something. “Is he bringing the twins over today?”
Yoongi’s racing thoughts grind to a halt.
“What?”
“The twins,” Jien repeats without even turning around. “Is he bringing them over today? We should clean up a bit if they’re coming, the house is a mess. Also, we’ve got that doctor’s appointment at three...”
Yoongi’s gaze drops back down to his phone, where the article continues: Married: 2028.
“Yoongi?” Jien’s turned around, her back against the dresser. She’s wearing a tank top that bares the ink on her arms, across her collarbones. Her head is slightly tilted as she raises an eyebrow at Yoongi, expectant. The line of her neck long and curved.
Yoongi thinks, he could have fallen in love with her, given the time, given the connection. What was it she had called it? Electric.
He thinks, twins. Fuck.
“No,” Yoongi says, “no, he’s not coming, but—” He struggles for a way to pose the question without sounding completely insane. I thought—You said— “He often does? Come over, I mean?”
He might’ve failed that task, if the look Jien is giving him is any indication. “Depends on your definition of often, I guess,” she says, eyebrow still raised in a manner that suggests her straightforward answer is more than generous. “Every once in a while. They’re busy, right? And they live further out. Why?” A grin slides over her face, dimpling her cheeks. “You miss him?”
Maybe the plane crashed and Yoongi died and he’s in purgatory. It’s better than the alternative: he’s fast-forwarded over ten years into the future and his wife is lightheartedly ribbing him for what she believes is a friendship with a band member. A band member Yoongi fucked into a hotel bed just a morning ago. Two mornings ago? Fifteen years ago?
“Honey?” Jien’s staring. “You alright?”
“Fine,” Yoongi says. “I’ve got a bit of a headache.”
Jien’s face twists in sympathy. “You did stay up really late last night. Go back to bed and quit worrying—it’s a Sunday, alright? I’ll make some tea.”
You shouldn’t be so kind to me, Yoongi should say. I’m not who you think I am. I’m not the one who was promised to you. I’m sorry.
But he’s a coward, so he crawls back under the covers and closes his eyes.
Somewhere between eight and nine o’clock in the morning, Yoongi falls asleep.
*
“So,” Yoongi says. “Jimin.”
Jien stares at him, back against the dresser. Eyebrow raised, expectant.
“When’s the last time he came over?” Yoongi says, real casual. “With the twins?”
Jien frowns. “What twins?”
Which is when Yoongi begins to suspect he doesn’t have as good a handle on this whole purgatory business as he thought he did when he woke up to laughter, to a familiar boy sitting on his chest, to Jien coming in and scooping him into her arms. Even if he did lose years of his memories, time should still operate the same way. It shouldn’t repeat itself over and over again.
But maybe that isn’t what’s happening after all.
“Uh, his twins?” Yoongi says. He doesn’t know their names; didn’t ask, last time. “His kids?”
“You mean Dani?” Jien says slowly, eyebrow still raised. “Dani—and Miles, maybe?”
“Yeah,” Yoongi says, relieved. “They’re the ones.”
Jien crosses the room, leans over the bed, and places a hand against Yoongi’s forehead.
“Hey!” Yoongi jerks away from her touch. “What are you doing?”
“Honey,” Jien says, looking like she’s struggling to decide between laughter and genuine concern. “Are you feeling alright? Dani and Miles just visited yesterday. You taught Dani more of that piano piece. And they aren’t twins. They just act like they’re joined at the hip, but they’re not even related. Are you pulling my leg or something?”
“But...” Yoongi’s voice trails off. But I thought. But you said. “Yes. That’s what I was doing. Ha, ha. They may as well be twins, right?”
Jien isn’t laughing. Her brow is furrowed. “Okay,” she says, but she doesn’t sound convinced. “Are you getting old on me, Min Yoongi? What’s going on in that thick skull of yours?”
You have no idea, Yoongi thinks.
“Well, don’t forget you’ve got that meeting with Jungkook at one today, for the restaurant.”
“Right,” Yoongi says, latching onto the only part of that sentence he recognizes. “Jungkook! Yes.” He jumps out of bed and shuffles over to the closet, where he stops and stares at the hangers of unfamiliar clothing.
“Honey?” Jien’s still staring at him. “I said it’s at one.”
“Right,” Yoongi says again, weaker this time.
He can hear a clock ticking.
“Hyung,” Jungkook says. “Are you sick? You’re not looking so great.”
Yoongi watches him warily from across the table. Jungkook continues eating, oblivious to his scrutiny. Everything about him is broader now, no longer a slim, muscled young man, even further from the scrappy, wide-eyed teen he was when they first met. It isn’t the Jungkook he remembers, but the expressions are the same, minute shifts over his face, movement of his eyebrows, wrinkle of his nose. His hair is black, undyed, grown out. He’s a father.
“You are sick,” Jungkook accuses, scooting his chair a few inches back. “Don’t infect me, if I come home with your germs Taehyung’s gonna quarantine me from Miles for days—”
“I’m not sick,” Yoongi says. That’s another thing he would never have predicted—Jungkook and Taehyung, grinning with some sour-faced kid sticking his tongue out between them from the screen of Jungkook’s phone wallpaper. His head is spinning. When did this happen? How? Last he checked they were making stupid sound effects to the in-flight movie they were watching, and now—Yoongi’s missed everything, or else had it all, then had it all slip out of his fingers like sand—
“Then why do you look like something just died?” Jungkook tactfully chews and swallows before speaking. It’s a marked improvement from the Jungkook of the present. Of the past? “Cheer up, hyung—the restaurant’s doing really well in the U.S., you know. Seokjinnie hyung sent over some new menu options, have you taken a look yet?”
“Jungkook,” Yoongi says, in the middle of a restaurant that belongs to the both of them, in a future where the waitstaff bow their heads and greet him as sajangnim. “Hey. Jungkook-ah. How are you doing?”
Jungkook stops eating, chopsticks halfway to his mouth. Yoongi’s a bit tired of being stared at. Jien’s assessing gaze. Jungkook’s open bewilderment.
“How am I doing?” Jungkook repeats. The scrappy teenager would scramble to answer as quickly and tactfully as possible, as though it were a trick question; the young man would laugh it off and play it as a joke, because Yoongi would never have really had to ask. Because he would have been able to tell.
This person sitting on the other side of the table—Yoongi can’t tell.
But this older Jungkook looks at Yoongi for a moment, at this older Yoongi he’s grown used to, and maybe he can see the genuine intent lying under the words, that he’s looking for an honest answer, because he scratches the back of his head and gives it.
“I’m good, hyung. More than good. Never a dull moment, you know, with those two, but what can I say?” He flashes a smile; gleam of white teeth. “I’ve got nothing to complain about.”
Yoongi’s bowl is half-eaten. He stares down at it, at his hands. His wedding ring.
He thinks, maybe it doesn’t turn out so bad.
“Ahjussi,” Jungkook says.
An old jibe, but his tone is gently questioning. Yoongi grimaces, because it’s true.
“Hey.” Jungkook frowns. “Are you all right, hyung?”
If it doesn’t turn out so bad, why does it still feel wrong?
“Hyung,” Jungkook says, insistent, and Yoongi has to know—
“Have you heard from Jimin?”
Surprise blooms across Jungkook’s face. “What do you mean? We just saw him yesterday.”
Yoongi wants to laugh. Sure, they were on the plane, all of them, still young. Still together.
But wasn’t that years ago, now?
“I know, but—” Yoongi runs his thumbnail against the crease of his paper napkin, flattening it. “Does he tell you—has he ever said—” He swallows. “Do you think he’s happy?”
“Of course he is,” Jungkook says without hesitation. “Why wouldn’t he be? He’s got Haneul noona and Dani. And us.” He snorts. “Jiminnie hyung’s living the life, isn’t he?”
Yoongi wouldn’t know. He does now. He nods, still smoothing out the napkin under his fingertips.
“Good,” he can hear himself say. “That’s good, then.”
“Why are you worrying about him all of a sudden?” Jungkook laughs. “Guess he didn’t make you his best man for nothing.”
The napkin catches under his thumbnail and rips.
“Hey, aren’t you the guy from that band?” the taxi driver says, peering into the rearview mirror.
Yoongi sinks back into his seat and pulls his jacket up over his face.
Somewhere in the slow traffic between Sinchon and Hapjeong, Yoongi falls asleep.
*
He opens his eyes to laughter and three children sitting on his bed.
“Appa, wake up,” they’re saying.
He stumbles to the bathroom and throws up.
Slumped over the toilet bowl, bathroom tiles digging into his knees, he feels a gentle hand in his hair, brushing it out of his eyes. He keeps his gaze down, on the glint of silver at his knuckle that grounds him here.
“Honey,” says Jien. “Are you all right?”
His throat hurts. He doesn’t answer.
Later when he cleans himself up and comes back out, he realizes it’s not the same bedroom. It’s not even the same house. It’s an apartment, cramped and spilling over and lived in, toys scattered on the floor and an electronic keyboard set up next to a secondhand suede couch and shelves upon shelves climbing up the walls to allow for as much floorspace as possible. There are brightly coloured cups in the dishrack and bug screens on the open windows and he doesn’t have to check his phone to know that if he searches on Naver, he won’t find any results for BANGTAN SONYEONDAN (BTS). He has the urge to throw up again, nausea rising in his throat. He swallows it back down and tells himself, but this isn’t so bad, then immediately regrets thinking it like a concession when the kids are chasing each other around the table and the bathroom towels are Pororo-patterned and in all the pictures stuck by magnet to the fridge, they’re smiling. He traces the edge of one of the photographs, his own face. You were happy here, he thinks, then corrects: you are.
On the balcony, Jien is outside smoking a cigarette. The kids are making a clamour in one of the bedrooms; he should check out the commotion. But he doesn’t want to see what their faces look like. He doesn’t want to find out what their names are. He knows too much already. None of this belongs to him, and he can’t tell if what he’s feeling is regret, or relief.
He tries not to think about Jimin. In a life like this, even remembering his name seems like a transgression, stepping into somebody else’s home when he’s got his own. When he’s a stranger.
“I gotta,” he says to nobody at all, “I gotta go,” and he steps outside, takes the elevator down, walks onto the street without worry of recognition for the first time in years.
Outside is some overcrowded Seoul suburb he doesn’t recognize, but smog in the air and old ladies taking their morning strolls and deliverymen riding past on motorbikes are a familiar sight as any. He stands there for a moment, hands on his knees, and just breathes. Then he walks into the first convenience store he comes across and picks up a newspaper. The date says it’s the future. The weather says it’s going to be overcast. Snatches of sunlight.
The guy behind the counter is eyeing him up. “Ahjussi, are you going to buy that?”
Yoongi is hit by the strongest, most unexpected wave of déjà vu. The force of it almost bowls him over. Or not quite déjà vu. Not quite nostalgia, either. It’s just that the guy behind the counter looks so young, and images flash through Yoongi’s mind—Jungkook peering at him closely from across a table, Jungkook bowing at him for the first time in their dorm, Jungkook backstage before a concert set to start with a grin on his face like a dare, Jimin marching up to take it and mess up his perfectly styled hair, Jimin—
He puts the newspaper back on the shelf. “No,” Yoongi says, “I don’t have any money on me,” and laughs a little at the irony. The guy behind the counter continues to eye him until he leaves.
He finds a spot on a bench, near a park. Watches this strange new world move past him, unhurried and slow. River water around a stone.
Somewhere in the midday rush, Yoongi falls asleep.
*
He wakes up to silence.
In a way it’s more unnerving than anything he’s dealt with so far. He’s almost afraid to open his eyes, but when he does he sees he’s in a bedroom, another apartment. Sounds of traffic through the window. The walls are bare, the bed is a single, and the desk is stacked with takeout containers and beer cans.
Huh. He sits up slowly, carefully, blankets falling around him, and listens for a sound. There’s none. He’s alone.
“Huh,” he says. His mouth is dry. He wets his lips. Says it again, louder: “Huh.”
Checking his phone by the bed confirms it: this isn’t the future.
It’s the past.
But Yoongi doesn’t recognize the apartment, though the mess cluttered on his desk is a painfully familiar sight. There’s another bed on the other side of the room, sheets made, and he can’t think of which of his faceless roommates from his early adulthood it could belong to. He walks through the rooms trying to sleuth it out: dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, empty fridge, two toothbrushes in the bathroom—he has no idea which is his own. There’s a tiny houseplant on the windowsill. It looks out of place in the rest of the mess. Yoongi scratches his head. Picks it up by the blue ceramic pot and peers at its waxy green leaves, when the buzzer sounds.
“Hyung,” comes Kim Namjoon’s staticky voice through the intercom, “it’s me,” and Yoongi nearly drops the plant. “Hyung, sorry I forgot my keys again, please let me in, I gotta pee—”
Yoongi sets the plant back down, very carefully. His hands are trembling. He moves through the apartment like it’s a dream until he finds the intercom and buzzes Namjoon in.
“—and I swear I put my keys in my bag this morning but—oh, hey, you let me in!” Namjoon sounds surprised, like he hadn’t been expecting it. “Thanks, hyung, see you in a minute!”
Silence fills the apartment again, water rushing into a vessel. Yoongi doesn’t move. Stands there, and stares at the door, until there’s banging on the other side of it and he fumbles to open it. Until he isn’t staring at a door anymore but Namjoon, arms laden with grocery bags, hair up in the frizzy mohawk Yoongi hasn’t seen in years.
“Hyung?” Namjoon says, blinking.
Yoongi can’t help it. His first reaction is to laugh. The tension bubbling out of him, as he doubles over and shakes.
Namjoon stares at him, face twisted up in confusion. “Uh, okay, hyung,” he says, dropping his bags on the floor, and makes a mad dash for the bathroom.
By the time he comes back out Yoongi’s recovered somewhat, enough to stop his wheezing and sink himself down into a chair. Namjoon continues to stare at him like he’s been replaced by a body double in the night. He’s right, of course, but he doesn’t know that. Yoongi gives him a giant shit-eating grin. God, he’s missed him. Missed this.
The Yoongi of this universe might have fucked some shit up on the way to getting married with one-to-three kids, but he must be doing something right, if he got himself here.
“Joon-ah,” Yoongi says. “Let’s go out for dinner.”
“Now?” Namjoon watches him warily, like Yoongi-the-body-double is about to attack. “Um, did you just wake up? Also, isn’t it movie night tonight?”
Yoongi waves his hand dismissively. “Whatever.” He still can’t stop grinning, for some reason. Nothing about this situation is funny, except that it absolutely is. “C’mon, let’s go. My treat.” He pats his chest convincingly.
Namjoon gives him a skeptical once-over. “You have money?”
“Shut up,” Yoongi says, but it’s a good question. He has no idea. From the looks of it, this Yoongi doesn’t, and Yoongi can’t blame him. Those days are so far removed from him now, but he can still taste the sharp metallic emptiness of hunger in the back of his throat, feel the steam of ramyeon on his face warming him up on winter nights spent in a room without heating. He moves his arm; there it is, the twinge in his shoulder, the shadow of an old friend. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got it taken care of.”
Namjoon is still looking at him dubiously, but he gives in easy. Because he wants to, Yoongi can tell. “Okay, hyung,” Namjoon says, and, generously, “you can pick the place.”
They end up in some crowded stall by the side of the street, feasting on skewers and fried fish cakes and mandu. “Should’ve known this was what you meant,” Namjoon grouses, but he doesn’t look displeased, cheeks pink in the warmth of the stall. Yoongi’s too busy eating to reply; he feels ravenous all of a sudden, like he hasn’t eaten in days. Maybe he hasn’t. He doesn’t know how this works—whatever this is. Maybe he’s still—still—in a dream and when he wakes up somebody’ll ask what he dreamed about, and he’ll have no idea what to say.
“You look good, hyung,” Namjoon comments, too casually.
Yoongi is silent. As opposed to what?
“Like you’re doing better,” Namjoon goes on. He pauses. “Are you?”
Yoongi wipes the grease from his fingers with a napkin. Suddenly he wishes he hadn’t eaten so much; the nausea is creeping back, a reminder of reality. He’s forgotten that none of this belongs to him, not even Namjoon, no matter how achingly familiar he is, no matter how much Yoongi wants him back. He’s buying food on someone else’s dime and wearing someone else’s face and giving someone else false hopes over a shared plate of food. And he isn’t the one who’s going to have to stick around to face the aftermath.
For the first time Yoongi wonders—what would this Yoongi think of him, rather than the other way around? This stranger trespassing upon his life, knocking clumsily through the hard-earned private corners of solitude and safety? Yoongi remembers youth; remembers hopelessness and hunger and fear. Remembers clinging to his pride because there was nothing else within his reach he could grasp. Would he sneer in his own face—a fuckin’ sellout, living in complacency, in comfort? Would he feel the same sickness in the gut, jealousy and bitterness and half-formed wonder—is it going to turn out this way? Was it supposed to be this way?
Namjoon doesn’t press the subject. Maybe he’s sensed Yoongi’s shift in mood; maybe he’s just forgotten he brought it up in the first place. He’s switched the topic of conversation to something else with such ease that Yoongi’s sure he’s talked about it a lot before. Something about a collaboration he’s working on with some mainstream pop idol. A prickling feeling on the back of Yoongi’s neck.
“What’s his name,” Yoongi says.
Namjoon gives him a look. “I’ve told you a hundred times—his name’s Jungkook, you told me you’d check out his stuff—”
Yoongi scrunches his napkin up into a little ball. “Makes sense,” he says, and then, “hey, Joon-ah. I’m glad.”
Namjoon’s staring at him again. He’s got a bit of sauce stuck to the corner of his mouth. “For what?”
“For the two of you,” Yoongi says. That you found each other, he means. “You’re going to make it, you know.”
Namjoon snorts. “You don’t have to say that,” he’s saying, but Yoongi shakes his head.
“Kim Namjoon,” he repeats, so that Namjoon falls silent, so that he listens. “You’re going to do great things. Trust me. Things you can’t even imagine.”
Namjoon doesn’t say anything for a while. Then, when he finally does: “You, too, hyung.” He peers at him through the smoke and steam of the cramped stall, strangers’ conversations filtering in through the cracks. “You know that, right? You have to know—you’re capable of so much.”
Yeah, and I only did it with you, Yoongi doesn’t say. He busies himself with finishing the last mandu instead.
They take a walk after, down the streets of the city. Yoongi can’t remember the last time they could take a walk like this, faces bare and uncovered to the night breeze. Namjoon’s chattering a mile a minute, about how much Jungkook likes the stuff Yoongi’s made and how he really wants to meet him and maybe they could all collab on a track together. Yoongi’s not really listening; on one hand these are all things he already knows—already lives—and on the other, he’s more content just to watch, to look at everything around him and take it in. The shops letting blasts of air-conditioning through their open doors as they pass by; the meandering crowds; Namjoon with a bounce to his step, open and carefree. Yoongi doesn’t tell him about the sauce on his mouth. Great things or not, he still looks ridiculous like this, especially with that hair. And maybe it’s a little selfish, too; that this part of this version of Namjoon with the sauce stain and the pleased smile on his face belongs to him alone. The real Yoongi will never see it. Will never know what he’s missing.
They’re passing by a GS25 when he hears it, through the open door. Strike of lightning. Yoongi stops so suddenly Namjoon collides into his back.
“What the—” Namjoon curses. “What’s wrong, hyung?”
Yoongi can’t speak. Can’t move. Can only stand there, numb and unseeing, as the voice of Park Jimin croons some godawful lyric: HEY GIRL I REALLY WANT YOU ’CAUSE YOU’RE SO PRETTY!
“Hyung?” Namjoon says. But when Yoongi finally regains his senses, it’s to break into a run, straight into the convenience store. The girl behind the counter looks up at his entry, startled.
“Um... welcome?” she says.
The song is blasting on the speakers, one he’s never heard before, but he’d know that voice anywhere.
“Hyung, what is it,” Namjoon says, following him in. “Did you remember you needed something—”
“That’s Jimin,” Yoongi says inanely. His heart is pounding in his chest.
Namjoon stares at him. “Who? You know this group? Wow, I didn’t know you listened to this kinda stuff—”
It isn’t only Jimin. It’s Hoseok’s rap and Taehyung’s low croon and Yoongi’s knees almost buckle right there between the aisles of breath mints and shampoo bottles. “Hyung, are you okay,” Namjoon’s saying, panicked, and Yoongi has to huff a breath of laughter, resisting the urge to rest his head against the shelves. He’s okay. He’s more than okay.
Jimin’s right here, in the air around him, his voice bright and alive and real.
“Are you a GLORY, too?” the girl behind the counter pipes up.
Yoongi and Namjoon both turn to stare at her. “A what?”
“A Victory fan,” the girl says, and she holds up her phone. There’s a photocard tucked into the clear case; a selfie of a familiar face puckering his lips at the camera.
“I’m Jimin biased,” she explains, a tad unnecessarily.
“Of course you are,” Yoongi says. He feels lightheaded.
The song ends. Something else comes on; a peppy-sounding girl group. The girl behind the counter loses interest, stowing her phone back into her pocket.
“Hyung,” Namjoon says, voice cautious. “What’s wrong?”
Yoongi’s left in the crowded store aisle, empty-handed. He stands still as though paralyzed. Some world he’s stuck at the edge of, and can’t get in.
But he’s getting closer. He has to be.
Somewhere in between the sounds of Namjoon’s breathing on the other bed and his own restless tossing and turning, Yoongi falls asleep.
*
He wakes up in a dark hotel room to a rumbling snore.
Yoongi holds himself still. Doesn’t even breathe. Doesn’t dare—as though if he keeps as quiet as possible, none of this can be taken from him. But even his highly focused effort must be enough to disturb the universe, because on the bed, a weight shifts. The snoring stops.
“Hyung?” a voice mumbles in the dark.
Yoongi thinks he might be shaking. He doesn’t say anything.
The other figure sits up. “Hey, Yoongi hyung? Are you all right?” He leans over to switch on the lamp, and suddenly Yoongi can move again, lunging forward to grab his arm before he can turn on the light. The body startles beneath him. “Hyung, what—”
“Don’t turn it on,” Yoongi says; it comes out as a croak. “Leave it off.” A pause. “Please.”
“Okay, hyung,” Jimin says cautiously. He doesn’t take his arm out of Yoongi’s grip. “Are you freaking out? It was your idea to share the bed, remember—”
Yoongi runs a tongue over his lips. That’s not... that’s not what his Jimin would say. Not after everything they’ve been through. So this is—someone else. Someplace else. Okay. He can do this. He can just turn over, go back to sleep, wake up somewhere closer. He can do that.
“Is it the song?” Jimin says. His voice sounds smaller, now. A little less sure of itself. “If you really wanted Jungkookie to feature instead of your own rap, we could do that, you know—”
“Jimin.” Yoongi cuts him off, because he has no idea what he’s talking about, and also because— “Quit worrying. Everything’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“Well, if you’re so sure about that,” Jimin says, but he sounds pleased. He burrows back under the sheets, shifts a little bit closer. A figure in the dark. Sleep-rumpled hair and puffy eyes. A glimpse in the light now, at this point—Yoongi’d never recover. He grips the bedsheets tight in his fists and squeezes his eyes shut.
“Hyung,” Jimin says. His voice concerned, but also curious. “Did you have a dream?”
“Yeah,” Yoongi says. An exhale; letting go.
“What was it about?”
“I’ll tell you when it’s over,” Yoongi says.
Jimin huffs a laugh. “Okay, hyung. You’re so weird when you’re half-asleep.”
He shifts another inch closer. Distance lessening in degrees. Yoongi can feel the pull in the air, magnetic and inevitable. Only a matter of time, for these two strangers in the same bed, in their own corner of the universe. There’s an ache in Yoongi’s chest that isn’t envy—he’s already been through this, after all. Maybe it’s just old-fashioned longing. For the future that he fought for. He hasn’t earned it, yet. Hasn’t seen it through to the end.
Is there an end?
Somewhere in the dark, Yoongi falls asleep.
*
He wakes up alone.
Or so he thinks at first, jerking up from where he’s slumped in a chair, shadows and voices passing him by. He’s in some kind of changing room; a group of performers in matching black outfits are arguing loudly in the corner. Clothes and costumes are strewn everywhere. A girl is applying pale white makeup, peering into a vanity mirror.
He must have nodded off for just a second—whoever he is. This is no idol stage, no professional performance. The black-clad performers look no older than university students. Yoongi casually stretches, gets to his feet. Catches his reflection in one of the mirrors—and winces. He’s one of them all right, face a few years too young for comfort.
Outside, the backstage area is organized chaos, performers and stage workers alike madly making last-minute preparations. Yoongi has no idea where he fits into all of this. At least he doesn’t until he looks through the crowd and spots a familiar head of dark hair. Port in a storm.
He shoulders his way through to the centre. “Hyung,” he says, trying not to sound as relieved as he feels.
“Ah, Yoongi,” Seokjin says, turning around. There’s a pencil tucked behind his ear—what a stupidly, perfectly innocuous thing to notice. “There you are. Are you ready? Of course you are, this is your third year in the showcase.”
“I,” Yoongi says. “Right. Um. Are you performing, too?”
Seokjin’s eyebrows shoot up. “No. Unfortunately I haven’t quite mastered my sword-eating routine just yet.” He snickers at the look on Yoongi’s face. “Since when do I perform in the showcase, silly? I’ve got enough on my plate keeping all you hapless performers from running around like headless chickens.”
“Uh, sure,” Yoongi says, and has an awful moment of uncertainty, that he can’t gauge how close he is with this Kim Seokjin, if they’re even friends. But Seokjin smiles back at him, a sharpness past the perfunctory niceties between acquaintances.
“The show’s about to start, you should get into position,” Seokjin says. “Don’t intimidate the first-years too much, will you?”
“Right,” Yoongi says again, and then, desperate, before Seokjin can turn away: “Thanks, hyung.”
Seokjin blinks at him. “Of course, Yoongi. Hey, I’d wish you good luck, but you don’t need it, do you?”
It’s a rhetorical question; rings of an inside joke. It’s true, after all—Yoongi doesn’t, even when he’s ushered into the wings with the lights dimming and the audience falling into hushed silence. It’s like those stress dreams Taehyung used to insist on telling him about, where he showed up to M!Countdown in his underwear. But at this point Yoongi’s used to being thrust a microphone and pushed onto a stage. When the bass kicks in over the speakers—he knows this one. He could rap it in his sleep. Maybe that’s exactly what he’s doing now. He does it anyway. Maybe this is the fixed point, his deepest-running anchor across all the universes: give Yoongi a spotlight and he’ll make it his own. Once it was a survival strategy, then simply what was expected of him. Here, at last, it’s something he can rely on, some part of him that he finds is still there when he reaches for it, sure as solid ground.
It’s when the last echoes are fading that he spots it, in the crowd. Flash of orange like fire. Tug in his chest; anchor striking stone. There you are.
Offstage, hands reach for him, slapping him on the back and pulling at his arms, but Yoongi pushes his way through the crowd, breaking away from the crush of bodies. He finds himself at the refreshments table in the back. Holding a plastic cup in his hand, thumbing the edge of its rim. Waiting.
“Never knew you could rap like that,” Jimin says, voice low and breath hot in his ear.
Yoongi toys with the cup in his hands. He doesn’t look, not yet. But Jimin’s presence radiates from behind him like its own star, a distant heat that shouldn’t hurt but does, hollow on a summer night. “Don’t you?”
He can sense Jimin pause, thrown off course; it’s not the answer he expected. Yoongi turns, offers him his cup of fruit punch. Jimin startles, but takes it, looking relieved to have something to occupy his hands. Yoongi doesn’t pour himself a new cup. Just slides his hands into his pockets and curls them into fists, nails digging into his palms.
Jimin takes a swig of punch. Darts a glance at him, then away. Then back at him. Funny. He looks like he’s waiting, too.
“Why’re you looking at me like that,” Jimin blurts. His lips stained red from the punch.
Yoongi stares at him. “Like what?”
Jimin’s gaze flicks away again. To the floor. To somebody else in the crowd. Back and forth.
“Like that,” he says finally. “Just—looking.”
He meets Yoongi’s eyes, then. A warm flush to his cheeks. Something a little defiant in the lift of his chin, the cock of his head. Maybe a little flirtatious. Playing a game.
Yoongi doesn’t look away. Keeps openly staring at him.
What else would I look at, he thinks.
Jimin keeps sneaking glances at him. Foot tapping against the floor. He opens his mouth to say something, then closes again. Takes another drink. Long swallow. Yoongi keeps his eyes on his exposed throat. Jimin resurfaces with a lick of his lips and a smirk on his face, his cocksure confidence returned to him. Hand sweeping through his hair; Yoongi’s eyes trace the movement, the arch of his wrist.
“You weren’t bad, you know,” Jimin says. “But you should see me.” The challenge is clear. Body leant up against the table like it’s gonna be the best show Yoongi’s ever laid eyes on.
And Yoongi—has to resist the urge to laugh a little. To himself.
“I know,” he says.
Jimin stares at him. Tongue sweeping over his lips again, but this time the gesture is absentminded rather than deliberate. “What?”
Fondness rises up in Yoongi, warmth of a fire burning slow, even sweet. He shifts his stance; opening up, tilting towards him, fists uncurling and emerging empty-handed from his pockets. “I know,” he repeats, and then, taking pity on this boy—a little rougher in his intent than Yoongi’s used to— “I will.”
Jimin watches him, almost in suspicion. Eyes glittering through the haze of shadow and half-darkness. Something like a pout twisting his mouth, like Yoongi’d gone and flicked on the lights for a shadow act meant to be played on stage.
Yoongi leans forward; sees Jimin’s eyes widen slightly. What’d this Yoongi ever give him, he wonders, if not even a single grudging inch? “Go on,” he says, quiet. Nodding his head up at the stage. “Show me.” He takes the cup out of Jimin’s hands. “I’ll hold onto this for you.”
Jimin stares at him a moment longer, mouth slack. Then dragging up into a slanted grin, knife’s edge softened by the dimples of his cheeks. “That’s a promise, then,” he says, and, as though emboldened by Yoongi’s words, he reaches out and tugs at the lapel of Yoongi’s jacket. Flattening it against his chest. Fingers running along the fabric as he brushes past Yoongi and disappears back into the crowd.
Yoongi stays where he is for a little longer. Looks down into the cup; it’s almost empty. Throws his head back and drinks down the rest of it.
He watches Jimin for his entire performance. True to his word.
Then he’s gone.
Yoongi’s halfway down the street to nowhere when Jimin catches up to him.
“You made a promise,” Jimin says, voice cutting through the evening crowds, and Yoongi turns around.
It’s snowing, wet flakes sinking slow through the air, streets slick and melting underfoot. Before this, with Namjoon, it had been summer, Yoongi’s sure, a lazy hot haze. Springtime with Jien, cool breeze and quiet morning, sun glinting off the ring at his knuckle. And before that—? He’s scattered across the seasons, set adrift in time and space, the infinite landscapes of his life, or maybe it’s the other way around: his life stretching beyond its limits to meet him, reflections in a river, the overflow of memory and future and imagination happening all at once and everywhere.
Right now Jimin is standing with his shoulders hunched, snow in his firebright hair, waiting for an answer. Right now Jimin is turning away, hand reaching for the door handle of the hotel room, waiting for Yoongi to stop him, to say it back. Right now Jimin is humming along to a song Yoongi can’t hear, only feel, his cheek against Yoongi’s hair, thirty thousand feet in the air, waiting for Yoongi to come back. To come back to him.
“I kept it,” Yoongi says, “I plan to.”
Jimin’s glare is a flat, unmoving thing. He leans back, just a little, away. Closing of a door. “I just don’t get you,” he says. “I thought—”
He stops himself. Something changes in his stance, in his stare; the shift of an angle. Yoongi can’t know what he’s given away, but Jimin’s eyes narrow, seeming to sense that he’s been robbed of something. Seems to realize that Yoongi isn’t all there.
“You took something of mine,” Jimin says, startling Yoongi with the abrupt change of subject.
“What?”
Jimin nods pointedly at the cup, still clutched in Yoongi’s hands. Oh.
“Uh,” says Yoongi. “I drank it?”
Jimin raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t look surprised. “Well, then,” he says. “You owe me a drink, don’t you?”
Yoongi almost barks out a laugh. Fuck, he’s missed this, but it was never his, was it? Not in this way. A sudden greed rises up in him, to know all the ways it can happen: Jimin in front of him, demanding more. On a stage, on a bed, on a street where they’re half-strangers. How many places can they meet? How many times can they play it out again, the same old story? How many times can they get what they want?
He hopes this Jimin gets what he wants.
“I guess I do,” Yoongi says. He can feel himself smiling, crooked and pleased.
“A real one,” Jimin says, crossing his arms.
“Sure.” Yoongi’s still smiling. He can’t stop. “But not now.”
Jimin runs his gaze over him, up and down. “Why not?”
“Tomorrow,” Yoongi says. “I’ll take you out tomorrow.”
“Uh-huh.” Snow is caught in Jimin’s hair, in his lashes. It won’t start melting until he goes back inside. Out of the cold. “And that’s a promise, too?”
“It is,” Yoongi says. “You can hold me to it.” He thinks, to the Yoongi of this universe: you’re welcome, asshole.
“If you insist,” Jimin says, straight-faced. His arms are still crossed. “So?”
“What?” What else?
Jimin wets his lips with his tongue. Snow dusting the shoulders of his jacket, the folds of his sleeves. He looks like he’s about to start tapping his foot out of impatience. “Did you like it?”
Yoongi looks at him. What ground there is left to cover. Acres of it, yawning on and on, always more to map out, this treacherous expanse under their feet, growing before them, beyond them. To a place where they can look at each other. See each other. Where he can reach out and place his palm on Jimin’s cheek, gentle, warm in the winter cold. Just to hold him there.
“I loved it,” Yoongi says.
Somewhere in the city, in the back of a moving bus with his cheek pressed against the window glass, staring out at the swirling snow, Yoongi falls asleep.
*
He wakes up with his head pillowed in his arms. Crick in his neck. Stale taste of coffee in the back of his mouth.
He lifts his head, sending the papers on his desk scattering to the floor.
“Aw, fuck,” he says. Slow dread of realization.
Squeak of wheels over carpet. Creak of the spine of a swivel chair. Over the cubicle wall, a face peers at him through thin-framed glasses.
“Bad dream?” says Kim Taehyung, glint of teeth to his grin.
Yoongi stares bleakly up at him. This is not his life. This cannot be his life.
Taehyung’s grin widens. “Or... sweet dreams? Of somebody in particular?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Yoongi wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. In the distance he can hear muffled voices, tapping keys. The mechanical whir of a printer. There’s something hanging around the collar of his button-up shirt—a black lanyard with an identification card in its plastic sleeve. He lifts it up to see his own dead-eyed stare.
“There’s no use playing coy with me, hyung, I know all your secrets.” Taehyung waggles his eyebrows at him. His face is rounder. Less polished-looking. His brow is serene, relaxed. Like there’s nothing in this world he wants to be doing more than taking the piss out of his next-door cubicle neighbour.
Interviewers always liked to ask them what they’d be doing if they weren’t in the band. As though it were a particularly original question, or their answers meant anything. Taehyung’s changed every time like the fan of pages through an encyclopedia: a farmer, a photographer, a saxophone player. Something to do with animals, with art, with music in his hands. With whatever recent obsession he’d been growing like a newly budding plant in the garden.
Yoongi’s only ever had one answer. And it isn’t this one.
“Then you should know you should go away because I’m only a few seconds away from throwing something at you,” Yoongi says, scanning the desk—his desk, fuck—for options. A pencil. A stapler. His desktop monitor, open to an email inbox and a blank background wallpaper. His gaze goes to the knuckle of his hand. No ring.
“Threats of violence at ten in the morning? Wow, earlier than scheduled. Must’ve been a really good dream.” Taehyung shoots him a wink like Yoongi’s an Inkigayo stage camera. Overexaggerated and sloppy without years of honed practice in dance studio mirrors. Yoongi isn’t even sure what he finds worse—that he’s here, or that Taehyung is, far from his spotlights and friend circles and fans, their adoration following him wherever he goes. But even they can’t reach him here.
“Sorry, are you talking to me?” His words come out harsher than he intends. What he feels, after all, is mostly just disappointment, sinking into the pit of him like a stone. “’Cause I have no idea what you’re going on about and I don’t particularly wanna find out.”
“Don’t worry.” Taehyung pretends to zip his lips and throw away the key. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
“If you locked your lips you shouldn’t be talking.”
“Cute,” says a voice from behind him, and Yoongi freezes. “Sorry, am I interrupting something?”
“Only a well-established socialization ritual,” Taehyung says cheerfully. “We’re just getting done with anger and denial. Next’ll be the bargaining, when he bribes me with food to shut me up, and then the depression when I still don’t.”
“Uh, aren’t those the stages of grief?” says Jimin, dressed in a button-up and tie, peering at them from behind his glasses with a hint of a smile tugging at his lips. There isn’t a wrinkle in his shirt, a flicker on his face to show any discomfort in being here, standing in an office with a stack of papers in his arms and a lanyard around his neck to mark that this is the place where he belongs. Yoongi must be staring too hard, because the smile wipes itself from Jimin’s face, mouth straightening out into a blank line. He shifts the papers in his arms, as though nervous under the scrutiny.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing in my life,” Taehyung declares, hand to his heart.
“Of course,” Jimin says, mouth twitching, but he catches sight of Yoongi again and seems to remember why he’s here. “Anyway. Here are those copies for the upcoming report.” He places his stack of printouts on the corner of Yoongi’s desk, gingerly like he’s disturbing a well-maintained equilibrium.
Yoongi’s moving before he thinks about it. His hand shooting out, clamping down around Jimin’s wrist as he starts to pull away. Jimin freezes under his grasp. Still perched over the cubicle wall, Taehyung’s jaw snaps closed with an audible click, shock obvious on his face.
“Um,” Jimin says. “Min Yoongi-ssi. Did you need something?”
Yoongi stares at him, searching. Something in the eyes, a shifting shadow, darting out of sight. Then nothing, only a careful, wary politeness.
Yoongi lets go like he’s been burned. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.” He bites down on his tongue, and manages, “That was inappropriate of me.”
It’s not what he’s apologizing for. The stone in his stomach, cracking open in two. I’m sorry you’re here. I’m sorry it’s real.
“Min Yoongi-ssi,” Jimin says, and his tone is—not quite so neutral. Perhaps a little concerned. “Are you all right?”
Yoongi places his palms on his knees. Grips the fabric of his slacks. “I’m perfectly fine.”
A pause. “Okay, then,” Jimin says. He looks like he’s ready to leave, but before he does, he hesitates. “You should get more rest, Min Yoongi-ssi.”
Yoongi never wants to hear him call him that again.
“Holy shit, hyung,” says Taehyung with a low whistle, after Jimin’s out of earshot. “I can’t believe you just went for it like that. Are you finally making moves?”
Yoongi doesn’t deign him a response. Taehyung, for once, seems to give up easy, dropping out of view and back down into his chair.
A few minutes pass in silence.
“Hey,” comes Taehyung’s voice again, drifting over the cubicle wall. “You coming to noraebang tonight?”
Yoongi thunks his head back onto his desk. The universe has got to be fucking kidding him.
The universe is doing no such thing, because eight hours later he’s squeezed between Seokjin and Taehyung on a sweaty leather couch watching Hoseok bellow his lungs out to a trot song as the disco lights strobe over their faces. Flashes lighting up in the dark: the loosened buttons at Hoseok’s throat, the shot glass Taehyung raises in the air, the glitter of the ring on Jimin’s hand. Third finger. Not like the one Yoongi wore in another life; not a devotion but decoration.
Seokjin lets out a delighted laugh, clapping his hands together. Hoseok must have done something particularly scandalous. Yoongi missed it. His eyes are still on Jimin, the cup of his hand around his mouth as he whispers low into Namjoon’s ear, something private and lost in the din.
“Fuckin’ incredible, hyung,” Taehyung says. He’s pouring Yoongi another shot. When did he empty his cup? He considers telling Taehyung to stop, but he lets him fill up the glass. Alcohol sloshing over the rim. Might as well get blackout drunk on his way out of this world. Except—except there’s some part of him, buried so deep he’ll never admit, that’s selfishly glad they’re all in this hell. Every one of them together.
Except Jungkook. Maybe Jungkook made it on his own. Good for him, he thinks throwing back his glass, and then, poor kid.
“Okay, it’s Yoongi’s turn next,” Hoseok announces. What? He thrusts his microphone into Yoongi’s hands. What? “Go on, hotshot! Show us what you got!”
“No way,” Yoongi says, but Hoseok’s already picking a song for him on the machine. Deep-thumping bass and rapid-fire beat. He narrows his eyes. Hoseok just looks smug.
“What?” Hoseok glows too bright for this cramped, darkened room, sheen of sweat on his skin, light in his eyes. “Will you or won’t you?”
Like Yoongi isn’t already getting to his feet, getting into the groove. “Fuck you,” he mumbles, and Hoseok only laughs.
“C’mon, hyung,” Namjoon pipes up. “Let loose a little.”
Jimin darts a glance at Yoongi, quick and sharp under the spinning lights.
“Let go,” Namjoon says, and Yoongi’s grip tightens around the microphone.
Sometime during his turn, the night slips away from him. He isn’t sure when. Shouting himself hoarse into the microphone to the hoots and cheers, maybe; knocking back the drinks offered to him and letting the alcohol wash over him in a dizzying haze. Heaving a breath in between verses and catching Jimin’s gaze, intent on him in the dark, a shadow of the real thing. All of them moving to the music, Yoongi’s entire body aching under the strain to bite his tongue, to not scream we should be the music. Let go, Namjoon is saying in Yoongi’s head, over and over. What does it matter? This is what they chose. And if it was good enough for him then, it’s good enough for him now. Letting loose in a cramped room where the volume turns up loud enough to let him pretend. Voice hoarse in his own throat.
At some point Yoongi comes to his senses slumped across the sticky couch, Taehyung draped over his shoulders and slurring something into his ear.
“S’okay, hyung,” Taehyung says. At the front of the room Seokjin is rapping Jay-Z while Namjoon stares like he’s watching a car crash, unable to tear his eyes away. “Don’t worry.”
Yoongi swats at Taehyung’s freakishly long limbs. “Wha—? What’re you talking about—”
“He’ll come around,” Taehyung says, breath hot on the side of Yoongi’s neck, and Yoongi lifts his gaze higher, to land on Jimin. Caught in the middle of laughing at something Hoseok said, open-mouthed and eyes crinkled up. Just another flicker in the dark.
Yoongi sucks in a breath and feels himself sober up like he’s been struck in the chest. Every reason remembered.
“Taehyung,” he says, real quiet in his ear.
“Yeah?”
“Get off me.”
Taehyung pouts. Detaches himself from Yoongi’s side and latches onto Namjoon instead. That’s Taehyung for you, Yoongi thinks numbly. He can put down his roots anywhere and still grow into something interesting, something loved. In full bloom under the close attention of the light.
Yoongi’s not like that. He had something. And then he lost it somewhere. Behind him, days or years or lifetimes, further away every time he looks.
“And that’s a wrap,” Namjoon announces as soon as Seokjin finally relinquishes the mic with a grand, sweeping bow. “Time to go, guys, I don’t think my ears can take any more of this.”
Around the room, everyone is caught in the clumsy fumble of agreement, scrambling to find their jackets and clear the table, but Yoongi doesn’t move.
“Hold on,” he says, and it comes out a little too loud in the sudden absence of music. “You’re not going to sing?”
Everyone freezes. Across the room, Jimin slowly meets his gaze, drunk flush to his cheeks and eyes wide. Staring like Yoongi’s never looked at him in all his life before.
“You’re not gonna sing,” Yoongi repeats, wave of nausea rolling through his gut. Fists clenching at his sides. “You—you—”
“He’s drunk,” Taehyung announces, slinging his arm around Yoongi and gently hauling him to his feet. “Nobody mind him! He’s not himself!”
Yoongi lets his head roll back. Laughter sick in his throat. He really isn’t himself at all. That’s what he keeps forgetting, and he needs to remember—this isn’t him, and the person staring back at him from across the room isn’t his. He needs to remember. He needs to find his way back—
“C’mon, hyung.” Hoseok’s at Yoongi’s other side, helping him move forward. “Let’s go.”
Outside the night air is crisp, cool against his skin. Huh. What do you know. It’s spring again.
Somewhere slumped in the backseat of a slow taxi, gliding smooth over every bump in the road, Yoongi falls asleep.
*
He wakes up with a start. An elbow pointedly nudging his side. He blinks, looks up to find himself seated at a long table in a banquet hall. White tablecloth and wineglasses and lush rose bouquets arranged between place settings like drops of blood.
“Honey,” says Jien from beside him, under her breath. A note of dry amusement in her tone. “You really need to work on your timing.”
Yoongi stares down at the glint of silver at his knuckle. Clenches his hand into a fist.
Most of the other guests gathered around the table are strangers, though he recognizes some faces—managers, staff, Jungkook stuffing an entire shrimp into his mouth and then glancing around furtively to check if anybody saw. Namjoon and Seokjin in conversation, Taehyung in a bow tie, and—Jimin, hair dark and eyes soft, leaning in close to the woman beside him and pressing a kiss to her cheek.
Yoongi can’t look away. Pinned by a needle and threaded with longing.
A spoon clinks against glass. “Family and friends,” announces Hoseok at the front of the table, unable to keep the grin out of his voice. There are rose petals scattered in his hair. “It is my greatest happiness to be able to welcome you all to my engagement party tonight.”
Love in the air.
On the rooftop the skies are clearer than anything Yoongi’s seen in a long time.
“You can see the stars,” Yoongi says, and then wishes he’d said nothing at all.
“Hmm?” Jimin’s toying with the label on his beer bottle. Nail scraping at the glass. He looks distracted; has been since Yoongi cornered him here. Like he’s waiting for someone else. Something about it pushes Yoongi to keep talking. An itch to get Jimin to look up, straight at him.
“Like how we used to. Remember that?” Yoongi takes a swig from his own bottle. Jien’s in the bathroom. Jimin’s got a flower pinned to his lapel. Pale gardenia.
The ring around his finger matches Yoongi’s own, under the right light.
“What, watching stars? With you, hyung?” Jimin tilts his head slightly, away. Maybe he forgot. Maybe in this timeline they never hid away on the rooftop as trainees. Maybe in this timeline Jimin doesn’t love him back and that’s why he’s gripping his beer bottle tight like he wants to run.
Yoongi kind of wants him to run. Then he’d know where to chase.
But maybe that’s just the alcohol talking.
“Don’t you ever think,” Yoongi says. “Don’t you ever wonder how it would have worked out?”
That gets Jimin’s attention, a hitch in his breath. A spooked look in his eyes. “What are you talking about, hyung? How what would have worked out?”
They shouldn’t have let him in here, at this reception with fine glassware and delicate hanging lights and the buzz of polite conversation. He feels a bitter recklessness rise up in him, a dare. He’s waited long enough.
“Us,” Yoongi says, and half-expects to hear the crash of breaking glass.
Jimin’s face is flushed red. Spinning lights in the dark; snow falling into his hair. Collar drawn up tight. Yoongi thinks of thumbing the button at his neck, through its hole, popping open and undone. Palm laid across collarbone, fingers sweeping across the throat, skin bared. Tracing the slow swallow of the Adam’s apple.
“Hyung,” Jimin says. His voice is brittle. Hard. He doesn’t say anything else. A warning, then.
“I’m just saying.” Yoongi keeps his hands at his sides, but Jimin glances at them sharply, as though sensing the twitch of his fingers, the intent between them a line drawn long and red. Yoongi sways an inch closer. “Haven’t you ever—didn’t you—” He wants to understand: why didn’t you fight for what you wanted? Why didn’t I? “Jimin—do you believe in parallel universes?”
Blurted out in a desperate rush. Last-ditch effort. Yoongi reels backward from his own admission, blinking. He didn’t mean to give that away. He lowers his beer bottle, rubs at his mouth. Turns towards him to backtrack, or to blame it on the alcohol, and comes to a dead stop.
There is the most terrible expression on Jimin’s face, running cracked through his open mouth and empty eyes, body recoiled like he’s been hit. His hands are shaking. He swallows, throat working.
It isn’t anger, isn’t hurt. Might be something worse. Something like hope.
Faced with it, for a moment Yoongi feels brave. As though he has stepped into a story, or else it’s entered him, inhabiting his body and transcending what he used to be, transformed into a character. A hero. Armed with the knowledge of the universes, forbidden cards in his hands, all the possibilities held fast in his grip. He’s going to tell him the truth, everything: I’m not myself, I’m not from here, I know what you don’t, Jimin, and it’s that we’re meant to be—
“Jimin,” Yoongi says, reaching for him, but Jimin flinches away, and his hand freezes in the air, half-raised.
“Don’t,” Jimin says. Very quietly. That’s all. “Please—don’t.”
In the distance—music, laughter. Breeze in the air.
The lifetimes between them can’t bridge this gap.
Yoongi lowers his hand, and doesn’t miss the relief that crosses Jimin’s face as he turns and leaves, bottle in hand. He doesn’t run. A brisk pace, heading for the stairs, his posture stiff as he walks further and further away.
Go on and chase, Yoongi thinks numbly to himself.
He drinks.
Somewhere, in a bathroom stall with his back against the wall, Yoongi falls asleep.
*
He opens his eyes to a pot on the stove. Steam warm in the air. Broth rich with vegetables, with meat.
Yoongi stares at it for a long time, unsure of what it’s for. His fingers are bare. The apartment is one he recognizes. Outside, the skies are cobalt blue.
As though on autopilot, he reaches out and turns off the stove. Turns to find an open door in the hall.
There’s a lump on the bed, swaddled in blankets.
Ah.
He gently shakes the bundle of blankets on the bed. “Jimin,” he whispers. “Jimin-ah, wake up. I made soup.”
A groan; a quiet snuffle. Yoongi waits him out, until Jimin pokes his head out and blinks blearily at him.
“Soup?” he repeats.
While Jimin eats—or more specifically, while Yoongi feeds him—Yoongi tries to just focus on holding the spoon steady, on scraping up spoonful after spoonful with precise portions. He bites his tongue every time he wants to speak. The domesticity of the scene is fragile enough to break, he’s sure, with a clumsy word, a careless touch. He wants it to last. He wants—
“Hyung,” Jimin says, voice barely a rasp, “can you carry me back to bed?”
He looks as tired as Yoongi feels, scraped raw on the inside, worn through. The minutes have passed in silence, yet still Jimin offers his arms, waiting to be held. Yoongi slowly puts down the spoon, gets to his feet. Squats to let Jimin climb onto his back.
Jimin presses his cheek against the nape of Yoongi’s neck. “Hyung,” he exhales. “Hyung, I...”
Yoongi goes rigid underneath him, arms locked. What? he thinks. What is it? What’s it gonna take for you to tell me you love me? I heard you say it, you said it then. I know your secret, Park Jimin, ’cause it’s the same as mine.
But Jimin’s breath is warm against the back of Yoongi’s neck, his lashes fluttering soft against skin. Yoongi tightens his grip. Wants to say—I know.
Instead he enters the room and dumps Jimin onto the bed.
“Hyung,” Jimin whines, burrowed deep into the blankets.
“We’re not meant to be,” Yoongi says, the words spilling out of him rushed and urgent. “We’ve only got what we’ve got, and either we grab onto it while we can or we let it go. And I don’t know how any of it ends, nobody does, maybe we end up together and maybe we don’t but everything matters, Jimin, all that we do matters...”
He trails off. From the blankets there comes a rumbling snore.
“Jimin?” Yoongi says.
He’s asleep.
Yoongi sinks down onto the bed next to him. Stares at his slumbering form.
Slowly, he starts to laugh.
He leans forward, draws himself closer. Presses a kiss to Jimin’s forehead.
“I’m coming back,” Yoongi tells him, or an echo of him, “I’m coming back for us, Jimin, and I know what to do—”
*
It’s mad loud, even from within the compounds, even with the metal doors sealed shut. Twenty seconds! comes the shout, and Yoongi’s eyes open to muffled cheers and crowded staff and the kaleidoscopic rush of the moments before the platform rises onto the stage, glittery jackets and shadowed faces and all of them in formation, ready to be swept up and away,
Three, two—
and Yoongi knows exactly what to do.
*
“So when are you going to ask her out?” Jimin plops down next to Yoongi on the couch. He adjusts his headset mic, only for Yoongi to knock it off and send it clattering when he lunges forward and braces his hands on Jimin’s shoulders.
“Park Jimin,” says Yoongi, low and clear, “you’re the one I want,” and what a wonder it is every time to have the words in his mouth, to hear what they sound like in his own voice, to watch the slow lovely flush of shock creep up and over Jimin’s face. He’ll say it over and over again, as many times as it takes, until it becomes its own song, echo following him every time and place he goes. Jimin’s still staring at him wide-eyed, so Yoongi does exactly that, opens his mouth and says it again—
*
“There’s seriously nobody you’d like to work with?” Namjoon presses. His bags are packed. Half the apartment boxed away. He’s left the plant on the windowsill, its own quiet cluster of green. Growing roots.
“The one I want,” Yoongi says—
*
“Is it the song?” Jimin says, his voice sounding small from the other side of the bed. “If you really wanted Jungkookie to feature instead of your own rap, we could do that, you know—”
“It’s you,” Yoongi says, and fumbles for him in the dark—
*
“Did you like it?” Jimin says, snow on his shoulders, in his hair.
“I love you,” Yoongi says, and grabs his face in his hands—
*
“Um,” Jimin says. “Min Yoongi-ssi. Did you need something?”
“Only you,” Yoongi says, and drags him forward by the wrist—
*
Jimin scratches his head with a yawn, the light of the hotel room framing him through the open doorway. His hair still wet from the shower, face bare. Toothpaste on his chin.
“Sure, you can crash here for the night,” Jimin’s saying, and Yoongi steps forward, grabs him by the shoulders and drags him into a kiss, straight on the mouth and heavy with the momentum of all the lifetimes chasing at his heels.
He tastes like mint.
After a moment, Jimin kisses back, a little slow but sure. His hands hover at Yoongi’s waist before finally settling. His eyes close—flutter of lashes—and open again.
“Oh,” Jimin says when they pull apart. It sounds muffled, as though from under the surface of a river. Everything echoing. Jimin blinks a little at him, looking wide awake all of a sudden.
Static electricity lifts strands of his hair slightly, shone through in the halogen lamplight. Yoongi can feel it through the thin fabric of his shirt, the warmth of his skin. Faint fuzzy charge building between them, burning.
Yoongi runs his palm down Jimin’s chest, smoothing out the rumple of his shirt. The curl of his fingers over his collar an endearment.
He doesn’t say anything, in the muted silence. Just looks at Jimin.
Jimin looks back.
Slowly, he smiles.
In Yoongi’s chest: the rattle and thud of landing. A stone’s throw.
He smiles back, and sinks.
*
He wakes up to a flurry of commotion. Passengers taking down their luggage from the overhead compartments. Plane rolling to a stop on the tarmac. Thank you for flying with us, the flight attendants are saying, making their rounds. We hope you enjoy your stay.
A nudge at his shoulder. “You up, sleepyhead? We’re here.”
Yoongi lifts his head. Stares at Jimin next to him, whose look of fond amusement shifts into confusion under his scrutiny. “I got something on my face?”
And all that matters—
“What, did you have a dream or something?” Jimin raises an eyebrow, leans back in his seat. “What was it about?”
Yoongi finally manages to open his mouth. He can’t take his eyes off him. “I’ll tell you all about it someday.”
“Really? Like a story? Must be some dream.”
Yoongi shakes his head. “Not a story,” he says. “A promise.”
The other members are getting ready to disembark, Hoseok jamming his bucket hat on over his head, Jungkook putting away his headphones. Outside, it’s night. No way of knowing the season; no way of knowing the end.
“Come on,” Yoongi says. There are so many things he wants to tell him. For now, he settles for taking hold of Jimin's hand. Jimin’s face goes firetruck red, but he grips back just as tight. “Let’s go.”
Forward into the futures they’ll make.
*
And then one day, after a long, successful run, they disband. Namjoon makes a speech during their two-hour press conference, running through the long list of people to thank, every turn that ended them up here. He says something funny; everyone laughs. Jimin laughs, too. Turns his head and sees that Yoongi is looking at him, straight at him, with a light that is terrifying, up here in front of all the world.
There are a thousand things he could say, in the immediate moment—what’s up with you or you can’t look at me like that in front of the cameras or can you believe it’s really over?—but none of them seem to fit. Instead he leans in close and whispers into his ear, low enough that no one else can pick it up.
“I didn’t catch that,” Yoongi says finally. “Can you say it again? One more time?”
Like the whole world hinges on Jimin’s answer.
So Jimin does. One more time.
Leans in and repeats—