Chapter Text
It started getting bad the way that it usually did— slowly, quietly enough that at first, even he didn’t notice it. The old habits started setting in. He started eating less of his lunch and refilling his coffee more. He started missing the bus on purpose and walking home to get the extra workout. His fingers started unconsciously traveling up to his collarbone to trace the ridges again. It wasn’t until one day he felt the tell-tale ache in his left shoulder, the vagus nerve redirecting ignored hunger cues, that Yoongi realized he had hardly had a real meal in days. Despite himself, he couldn’t help the smile from spreading across his face, and that was the moment he knew he was relapsing. He made half-hearted attempts to fight it for a few days after that, spending those mornings rushing out the door with a granola bar thrown into his backpack only for it to crumble in the graveyard of receipts and sheet music and coffee cup sleeves. He put together a great deal of effort into making treatment plan snacks that were shrinking smaller and smaller, and he’d still only eat half of it. Yoongi even made sure to put his old fear foods on his plate, all the things he’d successfully incorporated back into his diet, but they ended up pushed to the wayside of the plate each night, scraped into the trash and covered up with a wad of paper towels or some kind of packaging from the mail. After a week or two of this, he felt at-home again in his body in all the worst ways. He still looked fine, was maybe even better, this time, at hiding it, but behaviorally, Yoongi was right back where he’d started with this whole mess a year ago when his boyfriend begged him into treatment— hardly eating or sleeping, puffing on his vape any moment he was alone to try and stave off cravings, and living off of coffee and tangerines and a chicken breast now and again.
Yoongi was plenty smart enough to explain it all away, both to himself and to anyone else who asked. This made the whole situation even worse. He had to skip breakfasts because he needed to leave home at the crack of dawn to get to campus early enough to snag a rehearsal room; his snacks were small because he was eating plenty at the receptions for his classmates each day; his nerves had changed his tastes, and he’d be fine after his recital— any excuse he could think of to get people off his back. He’d take a long sip on whatever drink he had, almost only ever water or an Americano these days, and smile wide at any question asked of him. “I’m okay, really. Your concern is appreciated.” He was charming and disarming, and so most people would just smile back and leave him be— he was a good kid with a good head on his shoulders. After all, he’d been a model patient during treatment, the clinic staffers had said. He was recovered, now, and he was committed to being recovered. Whatever he said was good enough for anyone else.
He knew where his trouble spots would be-- the people who’d worry too much and ask too many questions. His mother would call him a few times a week from down in Daegu and ask him how school was going, if he was eating well, if he wanted her to mail him anything from home. He felt bad lying to his mom, but knew the truth would just worry her more. Inpatient treatment had been painfully expensive, especially for a poor family like his— he wasn’t going to let her think that it was a waste. Before, during, and after treatment, Yoongi had loved to watch cooking shows. These days he’d watch them while doing homework and tell his mom all about the recipes on the shows he watched, and make white lies like he’d try this or that tomorrow, or he’d had something last night that didn’t turn out well, either. All the talk of food would make his mother happy, and she’d end the conversation every time offering to write down some family recipes when he came home next. Yoongi’s circle of friends were proving difficult too, always wanting to come over to his apartment and have dinner, or go out to eat and then hit the clubs, but he had ways of dealing with them, too. If he was feeling particularly social, or if he’d felt like he’d saved enough calories that week, Yoongi would reluctantly agree to go out with them and push his food around his plate and get teased when he couldn’t hold his liquor the way he used to. Bringing his best friends together to eat and get drunk usually brought enough of its own chaos that they didn’t notice too much of what Yoongi was or wasn’t doing, and if he was too wrapped up in the numbers to drink that week, they appreciated having a sober shepard to get them all home when the sun started to rise.
The problem in all of this was his boyfriend. Yoongi had met his boyfriend, Namjoon, at Hongik’s first year orientation the summer before they started classes and couldn’t stand him at first. Namjoon had bragged the whole time that he had skipped a grade, that his entrance examination scores were top-rank, that he was a genius, completely fluent in English and that he’d be the best student the College of Business at Hongik had ever seen. In a cruel move by the hand of fate, Yoongi got stuck sitting next to him in their first year public speaking class-- where they bonded over a mutual hatred of their instructor and love of rap lyrics, and Yoongi realized that Namjoon was actually a really sweet and goofy guy, and had just been bragging at orientation because he was nervous about being so young. They became friends, and then roommates, before Namjoon asked him out at the end of their second year, sitting at the tables in the Starbucks just off campus. They had their first kiss a few weeks later in a garden cafe by campus that Namjoon adored, and a few weeks after that they had their first fight.