Work Text:
now we say goodnight from our own separate sides
like brothers on a hotel bed
(DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE)
you're the only story that I never told
you're my dirty little secret, wanna keep you so
(PJ HARVEY)
1.
They exist in the darkness. Darkness with them snatching at whatever pieces of light they can: through the slits in blinds, the tiny slivers of cracked open doors and whatever light they can pull out of each other.
Yoongi wishes it didn’t have to be like this. Of course he does. But then, he doesn’t have many other options, does he? No one’s written a rule book about this and so they’re trying to write it themselves. Only they don’t have pads of paper, just the pads of their fingers against the other’s smooth skin.
Yoongi refuses to be that tired old story of star-crossed lovers, forced apart by outward circumstances. They’re not Romeo and Juliet dropping cyanide into their mouths, they’re not a set of dumb teenagers who don’t know how to see past the obviousness of their own mistakes. Yoongi knows how to take responsibility for himself, he knows how to make his own decisions. He doesn’t need to blame anyone else. This was his choice, these are his decisions.
Here’s your bed, climb in.
Sleep tight.
(He’s a little reckless and maybe that’s part of why you like him so much. You won’t tell him that, you shouldn’t. Recklessness is not the kind of behaviour you want to encourage, not in your situation. Recklessness mixed with fun mixed with secrets worth keeping - that’s a dangerous cocktail. The kind of science experiment that explodes, the kind of drink that makes you want to vomit.
He’s reckless and you like him that way but you won’t tell him that. Then again --
Most of the things that make him restless make you a little reckless too, don’t they?)
2.
“You are the worst mistake I’ve ever made,” Kihyun says, mouth on the spot where Yoongi’s jaw curves into his throat. It’s true, and Kihyun means it, but not in a way that’s meant to hurt or bruise or cut. Just a fact, laid face down on the table like a trump card.
“Am I?” Yoongi smirks because Kihyun’s mouth is still on him and he’s still gripping Kihyun’s hips, for - how many times now? They’ve both lost count.
Kihyun nips at the delicate skin of Yoongi’s pale throat. “Maybe not,” Kihyun hums, “maybe you’re more like a bad habit.”
Like smoking, like biting your nails. Pulling out your hair or gnawing at your lip.
“Okay,” Yoongi replies, “but promise I’m the worst habit you have?”
(You just want to be something worth keeping. You just want to be something he won’t be able to replace.)
3.
They’re at KCON in Paris and isn’t that fucking romantic?
The city of love looks like any other city through the glass of a fifteenth story hotel room window, reflecting back flickering lights that look like stars. The sky itself is empty tonight, it’s too cloudy, and from here, the world could be upside down.
“If you could,” Kihyun says. He’s spread out on the bed like a cat who wants his tummy rubbed, button down half undone to expose his collarbones and riding up from where it was tucked into his pants to expose the line of his pelvis. “If you could take me out of here, where would we go?”
“I don’t know,” Yoongi is still watching the city blink it’s makeshift stars up at him. “Where do you want to go?”
When Yoongi looks at Kihyun his smile is mischievous and when Kihyun shrugs it’s drippingly faux-demure, “wherever you wanna go.”
“I’d take you to the Louvre,” Yoongi replies. Kihyun makes a face. He’s never understood Yoongi’s appreciation for art, for standing in the aura of someone's creation, proof of their creativity, in silence.
“You’re so boring,” Kihyun sighs exaggeratedly. “Take me somewhere fun.”
“You hungry?” Yoongi asks hypothetically. He slides onto the bed next to Kihyun, laying flat on his stomach and pillowing his chin on his crossed arms. Kihyun nods and so Yoongi continues. “I’ll take you to a cafe or something, buy you dessert.”
Kihyun hums, content. He lifts his hand to card his fingers through Yoongi’s bangs. “Keep going,” he asks.
“We can go for a walk after.” Yoongi knows Paris must be beautiful at night but in this scenario, this hypothetical walk through the streets, Yoongi wouldn’t be very good at keeping his eyes off of Kihyun. “We could walk anywhere, I guess. It’s the city of love, it’s not hard to find something romantic. We could hold hands. I could kiss you.”
The thought of kissing Kihyun makes Yoongi want to kiss for him real, so he does. Closes the distance between them, fits their mouths together easily. It’s familiar and practiced but every time Yoongi touches Kihyun’s mouth it might as well be the first time.
Kihyun goes limp and pliant, letting Yoongi lead the kiss wherever he would like. The hotel is warm, so are the sheets, so is Kihyun when Yoongi spreads four fingers across his jutted collarbone. Just to touch him, just because he can.
They break apart for breath and Kihyun, always a little bit of a brat, especially because Yoongi lets him get away with it, says, “what would we do after that?"
“I would take you back to our hotel room,” Yoongi says, fluidly repositioning himself so he’s hovering above Kihyun, “and I would fuck you.”
The corner of Kihyun’s mouth quirks up. “Sounds like fun.”
(You’ve realized he’s not one for smiles unless they’re sharp. He likes smirks, mouth curved like those ugly rusted knives, except this isn’t a horror movie and you’re not scared of it. You want to run your finger along it, maybe, to check and see if it’s dull. And maybe it slices your finger open and maybe you’ll need to get a shot for tetanus, but it will have been worth it.)
4.
They go out to dinner because friends can do that, right? As long as they aren’t acting like they’re doing something worth hiding. Yoongi takes a few pictures of their food and of Kihyun and of him and Kihyun and he posts them online.
“There,” Yoongi says when he locks his phone, “we’re fucking open books now.”
“You swear too much,” Kihyun replies, slurping up a mouthful of cold noodles. “I listened to your mixtape.”
The tablecloths in this restaurant are so long they almost brush the floor and it’s late and their kind of hidden, so Kihyun presses the length of his foot against the curve of Yoongi’s leg under the table. They both act like nothing's happening. They’ve gotten good at that.
“What did you think?” Yoongi asks.
Kihyun hums, “you swear too much,” is all he says. His eyes betray him, though, because there’s a fondness in them. It’s subtle, muted but Yoongi’s gotten good at reading Kihyun. It’s a side effect of acting like nothing’s going on.
Yoongi imagines someone taking pictures of them, those dark and grainy Dispatch-esque photos that they enhance and brighten, and imagines all the comments analyzing the way they might look at each other.
No one’s taking pictures, though. They’ve got nothing to hide. They’re fucking open books, remember?
(Once you read a poem and it was called THE FORGOTTEN DIALECT OF THE HEART.
That’s a little bit of apart why this works for you, no matter how much you won’t admit it. You’ve learnt how to say things that are hard to put into words without them.
You’re good with words. You know you are - okay, you’re mostly good with most words. So maybe you’re not good with these words. You don’t get to say them anyway. You’re not allowed to say them. The world’s got a padlock on the language of your heart.)
5.
A hotel home room in Hong Kong, or somewhere else. Places tend to blend together. People tend to blend together too. People and places might both be nouns but they have things in common besides that. Eyes like skylines and bodies like the tall buildings that break them. We’re seventy-five percent water and the earth is mostly oceans, we’ve got hearts like safes and sometimes we lose the combination.
Here’s the scene: a hotel room in a place that’s blended together, filled with people who have blended together.
Yoongi’s trying to learn how to not kiss Kihyun like he’s drowning but it’s not that easy. What is easy is to mistake Kihyun for that breath of air when you break the surface of the water after coming up from the bottom. Kihyun is sitting on top of Yoongi, their hips lined up, while Yoongi is balancing himself with his elbows on the soft mattress of the bed. Kihyun’s holding his face like he’s delicate, maybe, but also like he doesn’t want to let him go. Yoongi wants to tell Kihyun he doesn’t have to worry, that Yoongi won’t ever give him a chance to miss him. But then they’d have to stop kissing.
“Hey,” Kihyun breathes against Yoongi’s mouth. He’s catching the sweaty ends of Yoongi’s hair, a difference in textures of his skin against Kihyun’s palms and his his hair against the pads of his fingers. “I prepped myself before I left.”
Suddenly all Yoongi can think about is Kihyun trying to prep himself for Yoongi in a hotel room he’s no doubt sharing with another member of his group. Kihyun had knocked on Yoongi’s hotel room door tonight with wet hair, so Yoongi imagines Kihyun in the shower. One fist in his mouth to keep himself quiet under the spray of the shower, the other behind him - two fingers, working himself open. Kihyun’s hair dripping water across his face, his face and chest blotchy red. Yoongi can’t think about it anymore, he can’t, he needs to fill Kihyun’s mouth with his tongue so bad.
Kihyun laughs a little when Yoongi chooses actions over words. Kihyun tugs his jeans down as much as he can, but they get caught around his thighs. He leaves them. Kihyun fiddles with Yoongi’s button and fly, then, and manages to get Yoongi’s pants down past his knees, where he abandons them.
Sometimes they get the chance to be slow - but not often and not this time. It’s already 3AM and they both have things to do in the morning, they both have their respective responsibilities. Yoongi feels like he doesn’t even have time to breathe before Kihyun is sinking down onto his cock, mouth touching every part of Yoongi he can.
It’s not pretty, all their clothes still on and Kihyun rolling his hips so he can ride Yoongi somewhat successfully. There’s no rhythm and there’s no lead up, just a denouement. It’s just the pursuit of an end and that’s not romantic or ideal but it’s worth it. Most things are worth it between the two of them, no matter how empty or rushed they feel.
Yoongi comes with his face in Kihyun’s throat. He wants to bite Kihyun so hard he leaves one of those ugly-pretty purple and red bruises. He knows he can’t.
(You belong to each other in the hour between midnight and four in the morning, the most inky black parts of the night and the moments just before dawn. A less than ideal schedule but what are you gonna do about it?
By the time the sun rises you try to hand back all the pieces of himself he lets you have. But you’re selfish, you know this, and you’ll try and get away with keeping whatever remnants of him you can.
If you were good at math you’d try to figure out how much more of him you would need to keep until he was mostly yours. All yours.)
6.
At a fansign a tiny girl with pretty eyes slides a piece of paper over to Yoongi. He reads it carefully, the clear handwriting and the little space left for his reply. It says, idol outside of BTS I am most compatible with?
Yoongi smiles at her. He’s wearing bunny ears. He writes, Yoo Kihyun.
It’s not much and it won’t ever be enough but at least it’s something.
(You could tell the truth if you were braver. Or perhaps this isn’t about bravery, perhaps this is about the difference between staring down the barrel of a the proverbial gun and being the one with your finger on the trigger.
It’s going to be messy either way but in one version you’re in control and the other. Well.)
“When we run away together -” Kihyun says.
Yoongi cuts him off, “don’t start.”
7.
They’re at an awards show. Yoongi does his best to smile through it even though he feels exhausted. He’s been exhausted for years. He should probably talk to his doctor about that.
Jungkook drinks too much champagne because he still doesn’t have that firm grasp on his limits that comes with age. Taehyung eggs him on, trying to get him to embarrass himself, daring him to make faces at the cameras or go chat up one of the Red Velvet girls. Namjoon does his best to combat Jungkook’s lament of turning down a challenge with a constant, warning hand on his shoulder. Jungkook vibrates in his seat, a little bit, but manages to keep his image intact.
It’s an okay year. Kihyun doesn’t win anything but Yoongi does. When they stand up to collect their award statue the tables around them stand too, to congratulates them, Kihyun and his members among them. Kihyun hugs Yoongi with a hand on the small of his back and smiles at him with so much bubbling below the surface.
It should be one of the happiest moments of Yoongi’s life, but all he feels is sad.
(Later, in the bathroom, he’ll kiss you. You’ll catch your reflection in the mirror, in the low light, and you’ll wish you could freeze this moment in time.
Something outside will make a noise, though, and you’ll break apart before you manage to figure out how to do that.)
8.
Yoongi and Kihyun have been all over the world and they’ve kind of done it together, only they haven’t. So they both end up in Paris, so they both end up in Hong Kong, so they both live about thirty minutes away from each other. So they’ve travelled all the same distances but not quite the same way. What does that mean, how does that work? How do you define something you can barely grasp.
“Fuck me against the window,” Kihyun says. A hotel room in California, a hotel bed and hotel art hung on the wall. The eyes of every person who’s ever slept in these same sheets watching them, a bunch of presences still felt.
“Okay,” Yoongi replies. He locks his fingers into Kihyun’s hips like an anchor and they crash together like a shipwreck. They splinter like old wood and they sink into each other.
Yoongi feels gluttonous, pulling off every piece of Kihyun’s clothing slow and meticulous. He’s pushing his fingers against every mark on Kihyun’s skin and pulling his eyes over every edge of his body and feeling bone and muscle beneath skin with his own body. Kihyun’s mouth slips off of Yoongi’s when he pushes him against the bourgeois floor to ceiling window in this hotel room and he ends up breathing out against Yoongi’s chin.
They smudge up the window so good. It’s so fucking annoying that Yoongi looks at it and thinks it might be modern art, they could it name it something like Two Lovers, Fading in The Dark. Or something better. Yoongi can’t think right. Kihyun turns to face the window with both hands propped against it and grinds his ass against Yoongi’s crotch.
It’s only one in the morning, so Yoongi takes precious seconds and minutes and what feels like hours to open Kihyun up. He drops to his knees and licks into him, kisses up his spine, take his times with one, two, three fingers, entertains the idea of a fourth. Kihyun is whining so much, though, pushing back against Yoongi, so he relents and slides into Kihyun the same slow and meticulous way he undressed him.
Pressed up against the window like this, despite the darkness and the height of the floor they’re on and the time, it feels like the whole world can see them. It feels like the collective weight of a gaze of over a billion people. Yoongi groans, presses his hand against Kihyun’s stomach to pull Kihyun harder against him, and hopes everyone fucking likes what they see.
Kihyun fogs up the glass with his sweat and his laboured breaths and Yoongi wipes it all way when he puts a hand against the glass himself to steady. He grips onto one of Kihyun’s wrists, thrusts particularly hard, says Kihyun’s name into the knob of Kihyun’s spine.
“God,” Kihyun is mumbling, “God, don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. Stay, stay, please,"
Kihyun says it like a prayer and doesn’t mean just right now, he isn't bracketing that statement in just these moments, and they both know it.
After they come they can’t do much besides collapse onto the floor. Yoongi pushes Kihyun’s hair out of his face and kisses his forehead, his closed eyelid, the high point of his cheekbone, the corner of his mouth. “I won’t,” he mumbles back, no explanation needed. Kihyun grips Yoongi’s shoulders and kisses him hard.
(You refuse to be the cliche of star-crossed lovers kept apart by outward circumstances. That’s a tired old narrative that no one gives a shit about anymore.
But sometimes --
sometimes you look at him and you feel like the two of you can’t help it.)