Chapter Text
2019
Yoongi doesn’t get recognized much anymore.
Years have gone by—hair has become less teased and far less bleached, piercings have closed up, he buys clothes that actually fit him now—but on a rare occasion, he’ll hear a quietly cautious “Min Yoongi-ssi?” from the lips of someone who probably once hid their eyes behind a thick fringe and worshipped Crying Nut and No Brain and My Chemical Romance as deities, too, and it’s all he can do not to ask them, “please forget the Min Yoongi you used to know.”
He’s only trying to get a can of coffee from the vending machine outside of his bus terminal when he hears it this time, and it takes him aback for a long minute. It’s been a while since someone recognized him on the street; sometimes Yoongi forgets he used to be someone until he’s suddenly thrust into an old memory of a sticky-hot passenger van and bloody fingertips and too much alcohol.
“Excuse me,” says the voice. The girl—the woman, because anyone who remembers Min Yoongi as he was then is well past teenagedom by now—keeps her hands to herself, which is more than Yoongi can say for some people. She has her phone clutched against her chest, and she looks uneasy, like she’d been debating whether or not to actually approach. Even beneath the politeness, Yoongi finds himself wishing she hadn’t, but he’s not an asshole, so he passes his coffee to the other hand to tuck into the side pocket of his bag.
The woman smiles a careful smile. “Sorry, I just—you’re Min Yoongi.”
He nods, slight. “I am.”
“Sorry,” she says again. “I was a big fan back in the day.”
Back in the day—words that exist to haunt him. Words that remind him it’s been a decade since everything.
He wonders, if she’s here to ask for an autograph, if he even remembers how to sign one.
“Oh. Thank you.” Yoongi’s voice comes out small, much smaller than intended or anticipated. It doesn’t get easier. Ten years and it hasn’t gotten any easier.
The woman’s hands tense around her phone, and right when Yoongi starts to think great, you fucked up again, she sets her face in a determined look.
“I saw that where are they now article about you guys a few weeks ago. I think it was unfair to you. You’re allowed to want privacy”—she screws up her face, eyes closed tight, and shakes her head—“and I’m a huge hypocrite.”
Article… Yoongi’s heard nothing about any article. The last time he or any of the others were relevant enough to be reported on was years back, Namjoon and Hoseok’s names suddenly back in small time headlines because some bored journalist learned how to use Instagram in the big year of 2015 and found them loved up. Was probably mild hell for them. He wouldn’t know.
“I—” Yoongi stutters. “You’re fine, but… what article?”
The woman frowns. She lights up her phone, taps away at the screen for a few moments before showing her Naver search results. The publication is unfamiliar until it isn’t, an old alternative music magazine that the name of hasn’t crossed Yoongi’s mind since he was twenty-three and drowning in his own self-pity, among other things.
Funny, how things change sometimes.
He steps closer, squinting at the screen even through his glasses, sees The Biggest Band You’ve Never Heard of Hits a Major Milestone: Where Are They Now?, and feels his stomach churn uncomfortably.
He wants to say something. He wants to say something unpleasant—not to this woman, not to anyone in particular except maybe a journalist named Kim Hyunsu and whichever editor greenlit this.
But he can’t. He won’t. It’s been a decade; he shouldn’t be bothered by this.
“Oh,” Yoongi says again. “Thank you.”
The woman half-bows, pocketing her phone again. Backing away, she says, “Have a nice day, Yoongi-ssi.”
Yoongi watches her go with something lodged in his chest that aches a little more when she turns back around.
“Sorry,” she says again, preemptive. “Can you maybe satisfy a decade-old curiosity?”
He should say no, but Yoongi is stupid and dazed and caught off-guard. “Sure.”
The woman grips the strap of her purse like she’s anxious. Maybe she is—but is Yoongi someone to be anxious about anymore? Was he ever?
“The you. album… Was ‘you’ somebody?”
Memories flash through Yoongi’s mind again, more vivid now than in a long time. Messy hair and skin dotted with dark moles, wide eyes and crooked teeth and lips that tasted like strawberries and home. A thousand songs written about the way the sunlight draped across their bodies in the early mornings and the loneliness of time spent without each other. The euphoria of the first kiss. The misery of the last goodbye.
“Yes,” he says, numb. “They were.”
He has a meeting with a new studio in half an hour. He can’t be this distracted. He can’t be thinking about this.
He pulls up the article in the lobby anyway.
The biggest band you’ve never heard of—
—first Korean act to be invited to join an American touring festival—
—2009—
—disbanded in 2010, citing internal conflict and the members’ struggles with their mental health—
The biggest mystery of all may be what exactly happened to keyboardist, producer, and lyricist Min Yoongi. Once one of Bulletproof6’s brightest stars, the now 32-year-old’s SNS accounts have been dormant since the disbandment. Netizen conspiracies range from an unreported death, to repeated stints in rehab, to simply settling down outside of the public’s eye, possibly with the titular ‘you’ that inspired the group’s final album. Min had been hush-hush about his relationship status in the final year of Bulletproof6’s career—
2009
“You’re gonna shit.”
Yoongi keens his head into the fingers buried in his hair, attention sufficiently pulled away from the phone pressed to his ear.
“I generally do at least once a day.”
One of the hands in his hair drops to jab him in the cheek. Yoongi barks a laugh as a sarcastic snort makes the phone in his hand crackle unpleasantly.
“Fucking gross, dude. You seriously haven’t checked your Cyworld messages today?”
“Do I ever?”
A breath, then a laugh. “Fair.”
The hands move from his hair. Yoongi almost protests, almost mourns them, until they wrap around his shoulders from behind instead and a nose buries itself in the curve of his jaw.
The sooner he ends this call, the sooner he can shift his attention back.
“Younghyun-ah,” Yoongi says, “tell me what will make me shit or whatever.”
“It’s more fun to make you guess,” Younghyun grumbles, but he sounds too excited to actually be irritated. “Yoongi, they asked us on Warped Tour.”
And for the first time in the span of this call, Yoongi is thinking about something other than going back to bed.
“Wait. Back the fuck up. What?”
“Told you you’d shit,” Younghyun sing-songs, that clear voice that would piss Yoongi off if it wasn’t their main draw. “Jae-hyung’s got some lucky fucking connections back in the U.S., apparently. It’s just for the first few stops for now, but whoever he talked to said we’ll see after that, like there was a possibility for more.”
It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be real. If it were earlier in April, Yoongi would assume it was a prank, but—
“They’re aware half of us don’t speak English, right?”
“They know. Don’t worry about that, Jae-hyung and Joon and I will handle that part.”
“And what, Sungjin-hyung, Hobi, and I will just be silent mannequins onstage?”
“Yoongi-yah, please shut the fuck up and celebrate with me.”
It starts to hit him in the midst of sarcastic cheers over the phone. They’re going on tour—they’re not just going to a tour but Warped Tour, the same one they’d watched in grainy, belated videos every year up until now.
Six months ago, they’d been contemplating disbanding if they couldn’t get the group off the ground before they all got old wasting their lives on a shitty little emo band with no real prospects outside of their small cult of fans. Now, they’re going to an entirely different hemisphere. Yoongi’s never even left Korea before.
It’s enough that Yoongi nearly forgets the arms around him until they squeeze tight as he hangs up the phone.
“Taehyung-ah,” Yoongi says into the air behind him. “Hyung won’t be sleeping on your floor anymore.”
“You never do anymore,” Taehyung mumbles into his neck, muzzy. “Except when you smell like beer.” He bites at his collarbone, leaves his teeth there, not enough pressure for Yoongi to feel, but he keeps them pressed down long enough to leave behind shallow indents.
Yoongi turns in Taehyung’s grip, leg clad in too-tight, too-ripped jeans slotting between Taehyung’s unseasonal thick flannel pajama pants. Taehyung’s grinning at him, lips chapped, smile boxy as ever.
“What, hyung?”
He’s got that kind of face that morphs around every emotion, an open book. Right now, Taehyung’s cheeks are pushing his eyes into half moons and his grin is big and boxy and just crooked enough to make his otherwise otherworldly face a little more human.
Yoongi has to look away sometimes. Like he can’t bear the purity, the weight of such a look aimed at him.
He looks away now, and then he doesn’t. After maddening minutes of not being able to, he slots their lips together, slow but hot and biting. In the breaths between kisses, he tells him, “We’re going on tour, Taehyung-ah.”
Taehyung pulls from the kiss and there’s that smile again, amplified now so Yoongi really can’t look.
“Hyung! Really?! That’s amazing!” and there’s absolutely no insincerity to his voice, just like there’s nothing insincere about him. “Can I go to one of the shows?”
Yoongi pauses, contemplating. He could, if the shows weren’t a world away. He could, if they weren’t scrounging for dinner money as it is.
“They’re in America,” Yoongi says, and the worst part is that Taehyung’s smile doesn’t even falter. He doesn’t even look sad—that grin eclipses everything. Like he doesn’t even have the selfishness in his bones to be sad that his… something. His roommate. His Yoongi is leaving for however long it will be.
Instead, he sits up straight. He claps his hands and giggles in his deep voice and holds either side of Yoongi’s face so it’s hard not to look into those honest eyes and he kisses Yoongi so hard he might bruise.
Yoongi’s happy. His dreams are coming true. The music he’s worked too hard on to throw away is getting an audience beyond the handful of people who stumble into their bar shows. He’s happy.
Fingers buried in Taehyung’s unruly hair as he slides to his knees in front of the sofa, popping the button of Yoongi’s jeans and peeling them slowly down his legs, Yoongi just wonders why it isn’t hitting him the way he thought it would.
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Yoongi’s never been on a plane. Lived all 22 years between Daegu and Seoul, never venturing anywhere a train couldn’t take him, and now his bag is packed for California.
The airport is crowded with travelers, with families and with people holding big cameras because some idol or other is flying out of Incheon today, too. Hoseok elbows Yoongi in the ribs to get his attention and walks tall in front of the cameras like they’re there for them when he gets it.
Yoongi grins, glad he’d kept his shades on so Hoseok can’t see how it doesn’t make it to his eyes. Not that it matters much when he catches up and Hoseok elbows him again, hooking an arm around his shoulders and chiding, “Lighten up, hyung.”
A girl too young to be following a celebrity to the airport peeks from behind her camera and asks, “Are you idols too?” and it’s almost funny. Like Jae’s tattoo sleeve and Sungjin’s shaved head and the guitar cases strapped to half of their backs and their general ugliness don’t out that they’re not. Hoseok politely tells her the truth, and Namjoon yanks him back by the collar before he can launch into a spiel about where to find their music.
Yoongi just gives her a nod, watching the entrance doors. Or trying to—there are too many entrances, too many people. They’ve got to get through security soon if they want enough time to actually make their flight.
But he watches. He ignores Younghyun rattling off a last-minute itinerary, mother henning as if he isn’t visibly hungover and doesn’t only outrank Hoseok and Namjoon in age. Yoongi grunts in acknowledgement when he hears his name, but in a second he’s gone. There’s a flash of messily straightened hair two entrance doors down and Yoongi hones in on it like he was programmed to.
And then he pauses. Stops. The ratty old Vans he only wore in hopes that being on a sponsored tour would mean free shoes squeal to a halt against the polished floor.
He shouldn’t. Not in public, and certainly not in front of a horde of bored, antsy fans obsessively watching for any sign from their favorite idol.
Yoongi slows his speed to a casual stride, acting cooler than the anxious bubble he feels inflating in his chest.
Taehyung grins at him; at his side, Jimin—who hates Yoongi on a good day when he’s not leaving his best friend alone in paying rent for an indeterminate amount of time —barely holds back a sneer. Yoongi would scoff what the fuck’s he doing here if he didn’t know that he’s Taehyung’s only friend with a reliable car.
“I wanted to say good luck,” Taehyung says, beaming, bouncing on his toes. He holds his hands at his side in fists like he’s trying not to reach out in public. Yoongi feels the same compulsion—only he also doesn’t want to reach out beneath Jimin’s harsh glare or his bandmates’ prying eyes. “Don’t forget us little people back in Korea when you’re a big Hollywood rockstar.”
Yoongi can’t look, again. He smiles at his feet, a broken thing, so he doesn’t have to fight the urge to tuck the stray piece of hair strewn across Taehyung’s forehead back into place. It doesn’t work as well as he’d like; he turns to the old standby of chewing the edge of his thumb nail to keep his hands from being too idle.
“I’m not a big anything,” he says. Jimin’s probably biting back his words. A big asshole. A big flake. A big waste of space.
Taehyung lifts one of his hands, then freezes in midair. His gaze lingers over Yoongi’s shoulder, then falters, and he drops his hand back to his thigh with a muffled smack.
Behind them, Jae looks down abruptly, caught in the act. Namjoon and Hoseok pretend they saw nothing. Sungjin and Younghyun weren’t looking anyway. The fear still ices Yoongi’s veins.
Taehyung’s voice is small when he says, “I’ll miss you.”
Yoongi could say we might just be there for a week if people don’t like us. He could say you could come with us for that week, fuck the rest of the world. He could say I lo—
He says, still to his holey sneakers, “You, too.”
They said their goodbyes last night, fucked quick and relentless into the mattress until Taehyung had to cover his own mouth with a palm so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. Worlds apart from this, too scared to touch each other under the eyes of strangers.
Younghyun calls to him from behind, where Yoongi’s left his suitcase.
“Yoongi-yah! C’mon, Jin-hyung’s already through security, we gotta go!”
Yoongi breathes out, long and slow. When he finally chances a look at Taehyung’s face, he sees it. That hidden sadness he hasn’t been letting himself show. Like he’s trying to force his broken smile to reach his eyes.
“I should go,” Yoongi says quickly, swallowing down a thick lump in his throat.
Jimin looks unimpressed. He doesn’t dignify Yoongi with his words, just a nod, arms crossed over his chest. Yeah, you should.
Taehyung sniffles so quietly Yoongi would think he was imagining it if they weren’t directly facing each other. “Yeah,” he says, then, “Yeah, yeah, no, don’t let me hold you back.”
With a deep inhale, Yoongi nods. He takes one step backwards, two, even though he feels frozen to the spot.
“Bye, Taehyung-ah,” he murmurs, turning on a heel back towards the others, because if he doesn’t do it all at once, it feels like he never will.
It could just be a week, he reasons with himself. A week of pretending they’re something bigger than they really are. He very well could be back at the arrivals gate next Thursday.
So why does this feel so insurmountable?
(Because it could just as easily be two months of having fun, of forgetting life back here, a drunken haze of daily, nightly performances like he’s always dreamed. Only without Taehyung.)
Yoongi catches up only to fall to the back of the group, dragging his suitcase slowly behind him.
If he looks back, dreams be damned, he might never leave. Two weeks ago, the breaking of the news, he felt on top of the world. Now, it’s like he’s walking away from the world.
Everything seems exciting until it actually happens.
At the security gate, Yoongi hangs at the back again, watching Younghyun and Sungjin and Hoseok clamor to the front with their passports. Yoongi runs his thumb along the edge of his, buried in his hoodie pocket, a thousand kilograms weighing him down.
He feels something on his shoulder, a hand, an arm. Glancing up, because he has to glance up to look at Namjoon properly, he sees something behind his eyes that knows more than it should but won’t say a thing. Instead, he puts a hand on Yoongi’s shoulder, careful and steady, and Yoongi swears it’s the only thing that keeps him from looking back.
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The descent into LAX is a smoggy view of city blocks, mountains further off covered by hazy morning clouds.
Maybe morning. Yoongi has no idea what time it is in Los Angeles. He couldn’t sleep most of the flight and as a result, nausea roils his stomach. He wants a drink to dull his mind, but airplane liquor costs more than he’s willing to pay. He’ll get a shitty American beer after touchdown.
Seokjin’s turned around in his seat, dictating some list of things they need to do, acting all managerial as if he’s not basically their age. They needed a manager to sign the paperwork for the tour, and Namjoon had a cousin that just got a public relations degree. It worked out, same as the scrawny kid staring moon-eyed next to him, probably too young to be here. But Jeongguk approached them after one of their shows early this year saying he’d just graduated high school, needed something to do until he enlisted in the fall, and didn’t care that the pay was shit, so they had a merch guy. Kid. Child.
Yoongi’s barely listening, staring out the window as the runway gets closer and closer. Seokjin says something about rental vans, sleeping in close quarters for a few nights, say goodbye to comfort for a week because I swear if one of you whines about sleeping next to other guys I will take your spot in the band and send your ass back to Seoul.
Yoongi snorts. He likes Seokjin.
At his side, elbow smashed against his in their economy seats, Namjoon looks at him again with that expression on his face that Yoongi hates, like he sees too deeply into him.
The airport is chaotic in a way that’s different than Incheon was, less idol fans stalking around with cameras but more people pushing their way through crowds, rolling suitcases nearly tripping people in their wake. Louder, or maybe the same volume, but Yoongi can’t understand what these people are saying, so it seems that way.
A man meets them outside of baggage claim, band name written on a sheet of paper in messy Hangul in his hands. Says in English that his name is Daniel and when Yoongi mutters something half to Hoseok about not understanding anything he says past that, switches to Korean.
“Sorry,” he says. “Force of habit being here.”
Daniel leads them to a pair of passenger vans parked on the curb, him driving one and a friend of his behind the wheel of the other. Yoongi piles into one with Namjoon and Hoseok, and Jeongguk follows eagerly behind, which means so does Seokjin, to babysit the actual baby that’s tagged along with them.
The four of them practically buzz with excitement through the exhaustion. Even Seokjin, whose job for at least the next week is to keep them in one piece, watches the LA skyline pass by outside the windows with wide eyes. For the first time today, Yoongi starts to feel the anticipation of the tour outweigh the dread of change, of travel, of playing their few shows in California and being sent back home because no one liked them.
(Of missing Taehyung.)
Daniel’s friend drives them to a dingy motel an hour from the airport, a brief luxury before they’re stuck dozing in the van for the next few days. Almost immediately after dropping his bag in the room, Yoongi heads for the gas station convenience store next door. The beer selection is shitty, as expected, but at least it’s cold, and the overhang of the building gives him some shade from the sun that’s starting to burn through the cloud cover.
“I’m just saying it looks a little like a motel from a horror movie,” Namjoon says with one hand up in defense, the other turning the energy drink between his fingers so he can inspect the label.
“Well, don’t say that because if this is the only good night of sleep we’re getting before we go back to Seoul, I want to be able to actually sleep,” Hoseok grumbles back at him over the lip of his soda bottle before taking a swig.
A sudden noise, the door of the store opening a little too fast, and Hoseok jumps, clinging to Namjoon’s arm. Namjoon goes spectacularly red, and Yoongi doesn’t say anything.
There’s a payphone next to the building, metal corroded and covered in graffiti, something about international calls written beneath an indecipherable fluorescent yellow tag. Yoongi’s battered cellphone burns a hole in his pocket.
But he’s already budgeted his waning minutes in his head. He’ll call Taehyung for ten, fifteen after their first show. He’ll call his brother for long enough to let him know he’s not dead in a Los Angeles County reservoir at some point. Another call to either tell Taehyung he’s coming home or that the tour wants them to stay on. After that point… maybe he should pay his phone bill.
Instead, he trudges back to the motel with his beer bottle in hand, the rest of the pack haphazardly clinking together in a flimsy plastic bag with every step, leaving Namjoon and Hoseok bickering outside of the gas station. Sungjin’s standing on the balcony of their second-floor rooms, phone to his ear and cigarette between the fingers of his free hand. He nods at Yoongi in passing, flashing a V sign with his smoke.
“Jae went somewhere with Daniel-hyung and the other guy, fuck if I know. Younghyun fell asleep. You’re bunking with Joon and Hobi.”
Yoongi gives him a nod, hands too occupied for a thumbs up. He slides the convenience store bag over his wrist so he can dig for the room key in the pocket of his jeans and shoulders the door open. It’s not remotely nice, but it’s better than a cramped economy seat, and it’ll be nicer than a muggy passenger van. Only two beds and a small couch, but they’ll fight over that later. For now, Yoongi strides to his carry-on and fishes out his laptop, charger, and headphones and drops them on the desk in the corner.
It’s the most normal he’s felt all day, has felt in days between packing and getting his affairs in order and trying to get two weeks off his part-time food delivery job and getting canned instead.
Yoongi scrubs a hand across his face, pulls on his headphones, and disappears into GarageBand. He tries to pour everything out that’s in his head, shaky feelings with no words to them yet, just a beat that brings to mind thick eyelashes and straightened hair curling at the ends with sweat and a mouth on his neck, his shoulders, his chest.
When he next resurfaces, Namjoon is asleep beneath the covers of one bed, Hoseok curled up at the foot of it, the second empty and the couch piled with bags and clothes. Yoongi hadn’t heard them come in. They could’ve been robbed and he’d be none the wiser. But he has the bones of a song, so he leans back in satisfaction, popping the lid of one more bottle before he showers and passes out in the empty bed.
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The first day of tour passes in a blur. It’s hot and dry and crowded, and their merch tent location is in the middle of a labyrinth of similar-looking tents that has Jeongguk begging for spray paints to differentiate it.
Yoongi sits beneath the tent until their set, soaking up the shade. Predictably, they hardly get any foot traffic, not for lack of trying. Jeongguk blasts their latest EP over a speaker, Seokjin wanders the aisles and crowds with their name, stage, and set time written in permanent marker on the torn-off side of one of the cardboard boxes holding their merch shirts before getting irritated and shoving it into the hands of the first English-speaking member he can find. He yanks Jae out of a conversation with their tent neighbor and sends him on his way.
Half an hour before, they gather behind the stage, tuning guitars, adjusting microphones, Yoongi fixing the height of his keyboard stand because everyone always overestimates how tall he is.
Five minutes before, Sungjin pulls them into a huddle of anxious, fidgeting limbs.
One minute before, Yoongi presses an overwarm cheek to the side stage scaffolding and lets himself feel the nervous joy that’s been evading him.
And then it happens. And they do well.
The crowd is small, but it grows—no doubt because Sungjin and Younghyun’s vocals draw them in, some people probably curious about the unfamiliar language they’re singing in. Some, probably, because Namjoon’s changed into a T-shirt with the sleeves cut all the way down beneath his ribs and he worked out way too hard before they left Korea. Maybe some because the main stage act playing at the same time is too mainstream now and listening to the random Korean kids who showed up lends some indie cred.
But people seem to like them. The merch tent gets a modest line afterwards that Namjoon and Younghyun help field when Jeongguk’s big eyes and memorized English phrases stop being enough on their own. Daniel finds them with a huge smile on his face and says the organizers are impressed.
“If you can keep that up,” he says, “they’d seriously consider letting you stay on.”
Their shoulders all rise to their ears for the rest of the night—even Yoongi’s, though his fingers still feel that wild buzz beneath the skin that even a set played with them wildly flying across the keys can’t shake.
There’s an after party thrown between no less than three buses, bigger bands that don’t know their names and don’t speak their language but press red plastic cups of dubious colored booze in their hands and shout drunkenly through the windows.
An hour or so in—and enough drinks that Yoongi doesn’t recall how many cups he’s been handed—he remembers he hasn’t called Taehyung.
Yoongi ambles down the stairs into the night air that’s not much cooler than the inside of the bus. The fairplex serving as the venue is halfway up a hill, so the light pollution isn’t as bad as down at the motel, and not nearly as bad as it is back in Seoul.
It’s midday back home. Taehyung should pick up. He’ll understand Yoongi getting to him later than planned. He always does.
The line rings once, twice. Yoongi’s almost ready to hear the song Taehyung recorded through his computer speakers for an answering machine message, but before the last ring, it stops.
“Hyung?”
“Taehyung-ah,” Yoongi drawls, back against the outside of the bus, chin tipped to the sky. “Taehyung-ah.”
“You’re drunk,” Taehyung says, neutral. Less enthusiastically than he’d answered with, more than the words imply.
“Taehyung-ah,” Yoongi says again, just because. “After party.”
Taehyung hums quietly in the back of his throat. “So did you guys do well? Did they like you? Did you enjoy yourselves?”
Yoongi hardly remembers the performance, a hundred different reasons why. Nerves, heat, playing the songs a hundred times before, dubious blue alcohol.
“Yeah,” he says. It’s at least partially true. “Yeah. Hey, where are you?”
Taehyung makes a small noise, a puff of air through his nose. Yoongi can see his face in his mind, eyes downcast and lips pretending they’re not about to smile.
“I’m home. You know this.”
“I dunno that,” Yoongi says lamely. His tongue suddenly feels too big for his mouth, words slurred and unsure. “Could be doing anything.”
“Well, anything right now is classwork at the coffee table,” Taehyung replies.
Yoongi’s too gone to hear the tired edge, at least to notice it. He’s too busy thinking of their last night, just a couple of days ago but the image still burned into his brain of Taehyung’s swollen lips, teeth clamped down so hard on the lower that it’s a miracle he hadn’t drawn blood, but he’d still left a lasting mark. He wonders if the marks are still there, a reminder.
He doesn’t say it aloud. In the silence between them, he breathes the stuffy night air and kicks his tattered sneakers against the pavement. They never did give him free shoes.
“Hyung—” Taehyung starts, right as someone else stumbles out of the bus, drunk and probably something else, giggling even though they nearly eat it on the blacktop before waddling unsteadily across the parking lot.
Taehyung’s timed it perfectly so Yoongi doesn’t hear him. All that fills his senses are the mixed sounds of the party, of van engines, of a flock of neon-dyed heads and ripped jeans spilling out of the door cackling and squealing into the night. Someone fist bumps him without looking, nearly missing and hitting metal instead.
The phone’s gone quiet, not comfortably. Yoongi tries to prompt Taehyung to repeat himself, but all it comes out as is a questioning murmur. A pathetic little hm?
Taehyung doesn’t repeat himself. “How’s everyone?” he asks instead. “How’s Jeonggukie? He’s just a kid, it’s got to be nerve-wracking for him there, right?”
Jeongguk, when Yoongi left their van, was busy with the spray paints that Daniel’s friend finally brought him after enough wheedling, painting by the moonlight while Seokjin kept him company. A Yoongi with his head on straight might have checked the party to make sure their teenaged merch guy wasn’t being corrupted, but this Yoongi is trashed and overstimulated and fading fast.
There’s a commotion from inside—raised voices, and not in the celebratory way that they have been all night. Sharper and biting, a man and a woman by the sounds of it. The bus door opens and shuts in such quick succession that it’s almost like the woman who exited just appears there, right next to Yoongi.
“Sorry,” she says, accidentally bumping his arm as she lights up a cigarette. An easy enough word to bridge a language gap. Yoongi may not speak English, but he knows enough to murmur s’okay back.
The woman gives him an absent smile that mirrors his own. Her hair is the same color as the alcohol he’s been drinking all night.
“Hyung? You still there?”
Taehyung’s voice gets muffled behind too many thoughts. Yoongi switches back from his momentary lapse in Korean. “M’here. What’d you say?”
“I asked how Jeonggukie was holding up, but—but it’s fine. You’re probably tired, huh? Big day and all.”
A Yoongi with his head on straight might have also caught the edge to Taehyung’s voice that betrays the exhaustion he’s masking with that ever-present cheer. He doesn’t, though. Yoongi’s watching the plumes of smoke that come from his blue-haired neighbor’s cigarette when Taehyung says, “I should let you go. Get some rest, rockstar-hyung.”
Breathing in secondhand smoke, Yoongi absentmindedly manages, “Taehyung-ah.”
“It’s okay, hyung,” Taehyung already mediates the unsaid plea. “I have a deadline tonight, anyway. I’ll talk to you soon, mhm?”
He hangs up with that. Yoongi stares into the distance blankly, processing what he can while incapacitated. There’s less light pollution, sure, but now the stars are blotted out by smoke.
A flash at his side, and the girl with the blue hair is holding out a cigarette and a lighter, lavender with a design hand-painted on. “Want a smoke?” she asks in English, words Yoongi can understand.
He doesn’t normally, not when he’s around Taehyung, who won’t kiss him when his breath smells like ashtray. But Taehyung is in Seoul and Yoongi is in a town somewhere outside of Los Angeles that he doesn’t remember the name of and will be in San Francisco tomorrow and who knows where the hell he’ll be after that, so he nods and accepts the light.
“Ashley,” the woman introduces herself. She’s got red lips and small teeth and scattered tattoos down both of her arms. She looks about as happy as Yoongi does—which is to say only marginally—but more lucid. Probably fewer plastic cups of booze in her.
Yoongi tells her his name, which she repeats, and pulls enough English together to ask if she’s okay. Whoever she’d been arguing with has fucked off to another bus, but she looks where he’d gone anyway when she answers, “Yeah,” like she’s trying to convince herself, too.
They smoke in silence, side by side. When she does occasionally say something, Ashley speaks in clear, easy sentences, doesn’t pitch her voice up and over-enunciate like Daniel’s shithead friend, who definitely knew Jeongguk was asking for spray paint before he made him repeat it a hundred times. She asks about the band; from what he can gather, she’s a soloist playing tiny sets on small stages. Doesn’t mention the man that had disappeared into the night, but it doesn’t matter, because Yoongi doesn’t mention Taehyung, either.
The party winds down when someone’s bus driver barks that it’s already nearly two in the morning and they’ve got a six hour drive to San Francisco ahead of them. Yoongi only finds the van when Younghyun takes hold of his arm, guiding him through a maze of exhaust fumes. Ashley got whisked away in a group of unfamiliar faces before Yoongi could properly say goodnight.
“You’re gonna be a nightmare in the morning,” Younghyun says, good-natured rasp at odds with the words coming out of his mouth. He calls ahead of them, bodies crowded around the van, “Found him. We got any hangover drinks in the van? Dude’s trashed.”
Yoongi would object to the statement, but he’s too busy trying to yank himself out of Younghyun’s vice grip. Any words he could say would come out as weak, slurred protests anyway. Proving a point, rather than denouncing it.
Sungjin looks up from the GPS screen in Daniel’s friend’s (Yoongi never bothered to learn his dumb fucking name) hands. “We bought some Gatorades from the vending machine at the motel? Probably warm as shit now though.”
“S’fine, I’m just not dealing with this fucker hungover in the morning.”
Yoongi’s handed a bottle that’s piss yellow and tastes like salted, sugared cold medicine. Even the Gatorade in America tastes like shit. He chokes it down to appease Younghyun and Seokjin, and to a deliriously giggling Jeongguk’s delight. The entire van smells like his spray painted tent shoved against the back doors, and Yoongi’s stomach churns as he’s shoved into the backseat, stuck sharing with Namjoon because they’re the biggest and the smallest and it balances out, or something. In reality, Namjoon’s got too much leg for the back of the van and he has to sprawl, so his bare, knobby knees keep knocking against Yoongi’s and Yoongi wants to tell him to sit by Hoseok because he’d rather be shoved up against him anyway, but his lips fail him.
Predawn California flies by outside of the window in a nauseating blur of fast food restaurants and strip malls punctuated with miles of nothingness, winding hillsides, and a rest stop among them that Yoongi throws up in the bathroom of twice before there’s another salty-sweet Gatorade rolled between Hoseok’s somehow still immaculate sneakers and beneath the bathroom stall door.
Cheek pressed to the toilet seat, overwarm, Yoongi thumbs at his phone keys. More sober now than hours ago, his battered nail hovers over the enter key, screen lit up to the same number that had called him mid-drink. Debating the extra money to text back home while he’s overseas. Debating if he’d get a message back.
It’s 9pm in Seoul. If his phone will tell him nothing else about Taehyung, it will at least let him know what time it is where he’s at.
But Yoongi doesn’t text. Doesn’t call. He finishes his second lukewarm bottle and spits one last mouthful of bile into the toilet before shakily getting to his feet, brushing his teeth in the public bathroom with his pointer finger and a tube of too-minty toothpaste that Hoseok wordlessly hands him when he staggers out of the stall.
Broken blood vessels stare back at him in the dirty mirror. Yoongi ducks his head to hide them from the rest of the world, three hours left until the next stop.