Archive of Our Own

Jimin wakes up at two in the afternoon, and the first thing he does is check his phone.

Not for messages, there aren’t any, or none that matter; a few group notifications from a chat that has been mostly emojis and forwarded videos since the hiatus started, the kind of communication that says I’m still here without requiring anyone to actually be anywhere. Not for the news, not for the schedules, not for the seven unread emails from his manager about the photoshoot concept he’s been avoiding approving for three weeks.

He checks it the way he’s been checking it for the past however-many-days, which is with the specific, slightly nauseating hope that something will have changed since he last looked, and with the reliable disappointment of finding that it hasn’t.

Yoongi’s album is still at number one in fourteen countries.

Jimin puts the phone face down on the mattress and stares at the ceiling.

The ceiling is white. He has stared at it enough in recent weeks to have developed a detailed familiarity with its texture, its one small water stain in the northeast corner shaped vaguely like a country he can’t place, that Yoongi certainly could, the way the afternoon light travels across it from the east window to the west window over the course of a day like a slow, disinterested argument.

It’s not a particularly interesting ceiling. It's the ceiling of a man whose life is, at this precise moment in time, happening elsewhere; in rehearsal rooms, in studios he's not in, in fourteen countries where people are streaming a thirty-two minute album and feeling things Jimin has absolutely no right to feel as acutely as he does.

He feels them anyway.

He reaches for the phone again.

The album had come out three days ago, Jimin knows this the way he knows other useless precise things; the exact date, the exact hour, the fact he’d been in the middle of a very bland lunch with his choreographer when his phone had started producing the particular frequency of notification that meant something was actually happening.

He'd excused himself to the bathroom and sat on the closed lid of a toilet in a restaurant in Mapo and listened to the first thirty seconds of the first track through one earbud with his heart doing something embarrassing in his chest, and then he'd gone back to the table and eaten the rest of his food and talked about blocking and much-too-complicated footwork and said absolutely nothing about any of it.

He has since listened to the album, by a conservative estimate, an unreasonable number of times.

This is not unusual. He would do this for any of them, has done it, will do it, is capable of being a normal supportive person about his members' work without it meaning anything beyond that. 

He'd streamed Namjoon's last project on repeat for a week straight. He'd cried at two separate Jack in the Box tracks and wasn't ashamed of it. He's not someone who needs to make everything about himself.

Except.

He pulls his headphones from the nightstand drawer—the good ones, the ones he saves for when he actually wants to hear something—and puts them on without sitting up, ceiling still his only view, and opens the album from the beginning, lets it load, listens to the first few tracks with the measured, appreciative attention of someone being very mature about things, nodding internally at production choices, noting the ways the mixing has evolved since his last project, very calmly cataloguing the craft.

The fifth track hits in a way that is almost offensive.

Somebody does love, Yoongi's voice says, very quietly, with that particular quality of exhaustion that lives just underneath his rasp and makes everything he sings sound like a confession extracted under mild duress, but I'm thinking about you.

Jimin’s jaw tightens, he doesn’t move.

Somebody does love, it says again, the repetitio patient and ruinous, but I’m thinking about you.

Here is what Jimin knows, with the rational part of his brain that is still technically operative: songs are not confessions. 

Songs are craft. Songs are constructed things, assembled from scraps of emotion and experience and imagination and the entirely normal human tendency to reach for universally resonant language. 

Yoongi has been writing songs since he was a teenager and barely any of them are about specific people and even the ones that are have been processed and transformed and metabolized into something that belongs to the song more than it belongs to reality. Jimin knows this. He believes this. 

He is a professional who has spent over a decade making music and he understands, from the inside, the distance between the feeling that originates a song and the song itself.

Yet there is something happening in his chest that is not rational.

It's not even grief, really. It's closer to the feeling of touching a bruise you'd forgotten about; the sudden, almost indignant shock of the pain, the absurd sense that your own body has been keeping secrets from you. 

Somebody does love. As in: the love is not absent, the love exists in the world, the love is available and present and landing somewhere. Just not here. Just not on Jimin. And Jimin has no standing to object to this, he has no claim, he is not a person who gets to feel the particular twisting thing that is currently happening between his ribs as a response to a man doing his job beautifully three days ago in a studio somewhere and packaging his interior life into thirty-two minutes and putting it where anyone could reach it.

Jimin reaches for it anyway, over and over, like a person pressing a button that reliably administers a mild electric shock. He does this voluntarily. He does this with the headphones and everything.

By three o'clock he has migrated from the bed to the couch, which is progress in the way that moving from one room to another in the same building is technically travel. 

He's made coffee; instant, the good kind, the kind with the little sweetener packet already mixed in that he buys in bulk because it embarrasses him slightly to be seen purchasing it at a normal shop, which is genuinely one of the stupidest things he is embarrassed by given everything else currently available for selection. 

He's opened the blinds. He's done these things and now he's on the couch with the coffee and the headphones and the album on its third consecutive full rotation, watching the afternoon do its slow, directionless thing outside the window and trying to figure out when he became this person.

He's always been prone to feeling too much, that's not new. His mother used to say he was born with his heart on the outside of his chest, which she meant as a tenderness and which Jimin has spent the better part of his adult life treating as a structural flaw to be managed. 

You can't go through what he's gone through in his career with your heart on the outside of your chest; you learn to move it, to tuck it somewhere safer, to perform the feeling without being consumed by it. He'd learned that early and learned it thoroughly and has generally considered himself, in recent years, reasonably competent at the management of his own interior weather.

Then, track six.

They say there are no winners or losers in this game, Yoongi says, with a bitterness so dry it's almost comical, almost, but I'm always the loser

Jimin makes a short, involuntary sound that is not quite a laugh and not quite anything else, and puts his coffee down, and sits back, and lets the anger come, because it does come, that's the stupid part.

It's not even pure ache, it's an ache with an edge to it, an irritation he has no grounds for and cannot stop feeling. 

What does that mean. 

What is that supposed to mean. 

Yoongi, who deflects everything, who has elevated emotional evasion to something approaching high art, who will dismantle his own feelings in a song with surgical precision and then stand in a room with Jimin and say absolutely nothing—I'm always the loser—as if that's something he gets to just say. Into a microphone. For fourteen countries.

Jimin is being eaten alive and it’s over a figure of speech in a hip hop song and he’s fully aware of how that sounds.

He stays on the couch and gets eaten away.

The thing is—and this is the thing, the actual thing, the thing he circles the way water circles a drain without ever quite committing to the center—he doesn't know what Yoongi means by any of it. 

That's the problem with loving someone who writes songs, or one of the problems, one entry in the very long and well-maintained ledger of problems. He’s always parsing. He’s always in the uncomfortable position of a person trying to read a message that may not have been written for them, holding it up to the light and tilting it at different angles looking for his own name. 

He'd read an interview Yoongi had done about the album—had found it at one in the morning on a website he had to navigate to deliberately, which is another one of the small, devastatingly private shames he carries like loose change, another coin dropped into the bottomless pocket of the thing he doesn't call what it is—where he’d said I just hope that everyone gets loved from the moment they’re born until they die, and it somehow brings Jimin right back to a day many years ago where he’d lingered for too long at the Genius Lab, and listened to a messy demo that sounded less like music and more like an angsty confessional, and asked Yoongi if there was a specific person behind it.

There's always a person, Yoongi had said, which told Jimin absolutely nothing and yet had lived in his head like a splinter ever since.

There’s always a person.

He goes to the kitchen because he needs to do something with his hands.

The tap runs cold, and he fills a glass and drinks half of it standing at the counter, looking out at the city doing its muted, indifferent thing below. 

Thirteen floors up, Seoul is just light and geometry. Cars like slow-moving sparks. A billboard cycling through its rotation, some skincare ad, some idol Jimin doesn't recognize, the kind of face that looks like ambition got to sit down and have a rest. 

He watches it change and doesn't think about Yoongi's world tour schedule, doesn't think about the ten cities, doesn't think about the particular loneliness of being the person left behind in a building where the apartment next door will be locked and dark for however long it takes.

He's not thinking about any of that.

The succulent on the windowsill looks terrible. Genuinely, medically bad. Jimin stares at it and feels a ridiculous kinship with the thing, both of them thirsty in ways they're apparently incapable of communicating clearly to the people responsible for their care.

He'd almost said it once. Three months ago, or four, not that he really cares, or that it really changes much, when Yoongi had come back from a month-long studio retreat in Los Angeles with a sunburn that had no right to suit him and the easy, settled energy of someone who'd gotten something out of his system. Jimin had taken one look at him in the airport arrivals hall, had picked him up without being asked, had manufactured a reason to be there, another coin, and felt the words climb all the way up from his chest to the back of his tongue before swallowing them whole. 

He'd driven him home, carried one of his bags, made tea because Yoongi always complained about jet lag and how his old-age stomach could no longer handle caffeine, but drank it anyway when it was put in front of him. Sat across from him at Yoongi's own kitchen table and said something about the new album, something about schedules, something absolutely worthless, and the words had dissolved somewhere between his throat and the open air and been replaced by more words about nothing.

Yoongi had looked at him once, in the middle of all the nothing, with that particular quality of attention that made Jimin feel observed from the inside out.

He hadn't said anything either.

That's the other half of it. 

That's the part Jimin chews on in the dark at two in the morning, that Yoongi isn't oblivious. He has never once thought Yoongi was oblivious; the man notices things for a living, pins them down in four bars and a bridge, and makes an entire room feel named by the end of a song. 

He notices the way Jimin angles himself, the way he volunteers his time, the way he shows up. He has to. And he says nothing, has never said anything, keeps showing up at Jimin's door with wine only Jimin likes and hands that know exactly where to go, and keeps waking up in Jimin's bed and never once opening his mouth and saying the real thing.

Which means either he doesn't feel it, or he does and has made a different calculation.

Jimin has been trying to figure out which one for years.

He's not sure which answer would hurt more.

He doesn't go back to the couch, or, his listening session, right away.

He sits on the kitchen counter instead, glass of water going warm in his hand, the city going about its business outside the window, and lets himself do the stupid thing, which is to feel it. All of it. 

The specific texture of today: sad coffee gone cold and abandoned on his table, the rasp of Yoongi’s rap in his ears, and the knowledge, quiet and inevitable as a season changing, that this time tomorrow the apartment next door will be dark. 

Weeks, months, the tour dates reel off in his head like a sentence he's memorized against his will, all those cities, all that distance, and in the meantime, Jimin will be here doing his own work, his own promotional rounds, sleeping in his own bed in his apartment that smells like someone who isn't there.

He's done it before. He can do it again.

That's the most tiresome thing, honestly: how survivable it is. 

How he keeps surviving it and then ending up right back here the next time, sitting on his kitchen counter with the ache settled into his chest like weather. His own private climate. 

It rains there. It has been raining for years, soft and continuous, each drop landing with the specific weight of something he doesn't say, the particular frequency of I love you kept below the threshold of sound. You'd think at some point the ground would be saturated. You'd think it would overflow. 

Instead, it just keeps raining, and he just keeps standing in it, and Yoongi keeps showing up by his door and sleeping in his bed hours before a departure, as Jimin knows he will, in a while, and it keeps being enough and not enough in exactly equal measure.

Jimin sets the glass down.

He thinks about knocking on that door, the one that separates the hallway from Yoongi's house in the fatal joke of their situation, as if proximity had ever been the thing they were missing, as if putting them next door to each other was a solution to anything except maybe logistics. 

He thinks about pressing his hand flat to the wood and feeling whatever there is to feel through it. The dull permanence of a structure that doesn't know or care what it's keeping apart.

He doesn't knock.

He takes the headphones off at some point; not out of discipline, just fatigue, the particular kind that comes from sustained emotional static, and sits in the actual silence of his apartment, which turns out to be only relatively silent. 

The building has its usual sounds: pipes, neighbors driving in and out of the community, the ambient thrum of the ventilation system, the specific acoustic signature of a tuesday afternoon in a residential block where most people are, presumably, doing something with their day. And underneath all of that, or maybe woven through it, the thin thread of a sound from next door.

Jimin goes very still.

It's nothing. It's movement; footsteps, maybe, or a chair, the ordinary sounds of a person existing in a space on the other side of a wall. 

Yoongi is home. 

Of course he's home; he's packing, presumably, or doing whatever it is he does before a departure, which Jimin has witnessed enough times to have a partial inventory: the methodical, almost aggressive efficiency of his packing, the way he checks things off a list he writes on actual paper, the last-minute studio session he always tries to sneak in even when there's no studio session scheduled, the two or three hours he spends doing nothing visible where Jimin suspects he's simply sitting somewhere quietly dreading the adrenaline of touring the way a person might dread something they also love so much it frightens them.

He’s right there.

A meter of wall, more or less, Jimin guesses; he knows jackshit about architecture.

A door, a hallway, another door.

Jimin puts the headphones back on.

It's actually my greed, Yoongi raps over a bass that comes in gentle and then doesn't stay that way, when I say that it's all for you.

And that’s…

That's the one that gets him. Every time, rotation after rotation, it's that one. The one about greed, the one that has the audacity to frame selfishness as devotion and then just leave it there, just let it sit in the air and mean whatever it means to whoever is listening. 

It's actually my greed. The acknowledgment that love, real sustained love, is never fully altruistic, that somewhere inside all the giving is a person who wants something back so badly they've built an entire architecture of generosity around the wanting to keep themselves from having to admit it.

Jimin knows that architecture. He’s been living in it for years.

He's angry about it in the impotent, private way he's angry about things he can't justify being angry about; the way you're angry at rain for being wet, at a scar for staying visible, at a person for making music that sounds like the inside of your own chest. 

It pisses him off with no good target and no good reason and the full knowledge that the anger is really just the ache in better posture, standing up straighter so it can occupy more space.

He pauses the album and sits in silence.

His apartment in the afternoon is the kind of quiet that has texture. 

He's been alone here long enough to have categorized its different shades; the sharp, productive quiet of early morning before he's fully awake, the flat quiet of midday when it just feels like absence, the particular quality of the current quiet, which is thick with something unprocessed. 

He thinks about getting up. He thinks about texting his choreographer back, about approving the photoshoot concept, about eating something that isn't instant coffee and the half a granola bar he'd found in the kitchen. 

He thinks about calling his mother, who would hear him in approximately twenty seconds and ask what's wrong with the precision of someone who's had twenty-eight years of practice, and he can't do that right now, can't perform fine without it being visible in every frequency of his voice.

He thinks about the door, he doesn’t knock.

Not because he doesn't want to. 

The wanting is not the issue, the wanting is frankly so well-established at this point it doesn't even bother announcing itself anymore, it's just the baseline condition of Jimin's interior life, the standing water in the low points of him. 

He doesn't knock because he knows exactly what knocking looks like from here, knows the shape of the evening that would follow, the wine or the beer, the couch and then not the couch, Yoongi's hands doing what his voice won't, and then the specific hallmark of aftermath: warm, close, devastatingly insufficient. His body made content and his chest still full of everything he didn't say. He'll survive it. He'll do it gladly.

He just knows, sitting here in the afternoon with the album paused and Yoongi's footsteps audible through however-many centimeters of wall, that it's not going to be enough. That it's never going to be enough. 

That he can spend every remaining evening before the departure pressed against Yoongi in every possible configuration and wake up tomorrow with the same swollen unsaid thing sitting exactly where it always sits.

He unpauses the album

It’s actually my greed when I say it’s all for you.

"I know," Jimin says, to the apartment, to the track, to no one, in the voice of a person having a very quiet collapse about nothing.

The afternoon continues. The light moves across the ceiling at its slow, argumentative pace. 

Through the wall, a sound, maybe a door, maybe a window, and then silence, and then the specific silence of someone present, three-something meters away, inscrutable.

Jimin closes his eyes and listens to a dead man's piano and blossoms alone in the dark of his own making, patient and furious and full to the absolute brim with something that has never once found its way out of him cleanly, and probably won't tonight either, and won't tomorrow when the flight leaves at eleven and the apartment next door goes quiet for however long it takes.

He presses play again.

Somebody does love.

Outside, the afternoon tilts toward evening without being asked.

And I’m thinking about you.

By nine o’clock, Yoongi has knocked.

Jimin had known he would. That's the other thing: the way he always knows, the way their rhythms have synchronized so thoroughly over years of proximity and want that he can feel the knock coming the way you feel a change in weather before the clouds arrive. Some shift in air pressure. Some particular shudder of his own anticipation that functions as its own kind of signal. 

He'd showered at eight, had put on the good sweatpants, had opened a bottle of wine and then reconsidered and put it back and then gotten it out again and left it on the counter in the studied, deniable way of someone who is absolutely not preparing for company.

He opens the door and Yoongi is standing in the hallway with a bottle of wine—different wine, his own wine, the type Jimin loves but never buys, because if he did he’d wind up drinking it alone at midday and he really cannot have that, held by the neck with the slightly sheepish energy of someone who has also been preparing for company and is also pretending not to have been—wearing a soft grey pullover and his hair pushed back and the general appearance of a person trying very hard to look like he ended up here accidentally.

“I bought this for the trip," Yoongi says. “Decided not to take it."

“Sure," Jimin says, he knows it’s not true. Yoongi barely enjoys wine over whiskey, but he always brings the wine.

He steps back and lets him in.

Yoongi finds the glasses without asking.

Jimin feels demented for the way it gets him. He doesn’t really care about the wine, or the teasing that’s coming, the way Jimin can already see it assembling itself in the slight tilt of Yoongi’s head as he clocks the open bottle on the counter, the prepared glasses Jimin had very deliberately not put out. 

What’s knocking the breath out of his chest and rewiring entirely too many neurons in his brain is the way Yoongi moves through his kitchen with the unhurried confidence of a person who knows exactly which cabinet to open, second from the left, the one with the mismatched steamware Jimin had accumulated from three different moves and two ex-situationships, neither of which were this one, all of which were lesser versions of this particular problem.

He doesn’t ask. Yoongi just knows.

Jimin stands in the entrance of his own kitchen and watches him do it and bites down, hard, on the inside of his cheek.

"You already had a bottle open," Yoongi says, not accusatory. Worse: amused, in the low-wattage way he does amusement, like it costs something to do it at full brightness and he's on a budget. 

He picks up Jimin's bottle and examines the label with the theatrical consideration of a man who has opinions about wine in the same way he has opinions about most things: actually informed but delivered with enough dryness that it reads as performance. "Were you expecting someone?"

“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” Jimin says, which is true in the strict technical sense of the word.

“Uh-huh.”

“I opened it for myself."

“At nine o’clock on a tuesday."

“People do that."

"People who are expecting someone do that," Yoongi says, and sets the bottle back down with the satisfaction of someone who has made a point and doesn't need to belabor it, which is one of the most infuriating things about him: he never overextends, never pushes past the place where the needle sits comfortably in skin, just finds the exact location and applies exactly the right pressure and then stops there and lets Jimin do the rest to himself.

He's been doing it since Jimin was seventeen years old. Since before Jimin could legally sit at a bar and order the thing they were already sharing anyway in dorm rooms and greenrooms and the backs of vans around Seoul, Yoongi's dry commentary arriving with the precision of something that had been calibrated specifically for him. 

He'd hated it at first, or performed hating it, which at seventeen had felt like basically the same thing. 

He'd told Hoseok once, in the irritated confessional way of a teenager who doesn't yet know he's describing the early symptoms of something much larger, that Yoongi knew exactly how to get under his skin. Hoseok had laughed with the knowing color of someone filing that away for later.

Jimin had spent several subsequent years learning that under his skin was an imprecise description of the situation.

"Sit down," he says, instead of any of that.

Yoongi pours both glasses from Jimin's bottle with the easy authority of a person making themselves at home in a space that has accommodated him enough times that the accommodation has calcified into something indistinguishable from belonging. 

He hands Jimin his glass with a look that still has the tail end of the teasing in it, something light living around the corners of his mouth, and Jimin takes it and looks away because the light thing around the corners of his mouth is genuinely one of the more unfair things about him.

They take the couch.

This is also something Jimin knows too well: the specific choreography of Yoongi on his couch, which has evolved over years into a kind of studied collapse. 

He doesn't sit so much as arrive, angles himself into the cushions with the whole length of him taking up slightly more space than is strictly necessary, socked feet on the edge of the coffee table, wine glass held at a thoughtless tilt that looks careless and isn't. 

He'd once spilled red wine on a couch in a hotel in Paris at four in the morning and had somehow made it look intentional. He is constitutionally incapable of being gauche in a way that Jimin finds—this is the word he uses, privately, as a euphemism for a longer word—irritating.

Jimin tucks himself into his own end of the couch. Pulls his knees up. 

There is a careful, perfectly calibrated distance between them that both of them maintain and neither of them has ever explicitly agreed to, the social contract of two people who know exactly what happens when the distance stops being maintained and have decided, repeatedly and without discussion, to continue maintaining it for a while longer before stopping.

The television goes on. Neither of them looks for the remote with any urgency; it becomes something Jimin finds wedged between his cushion and the armrest, because it is always wedged between his cushion and the armrest, because that is where he leaves it, and the fact that Yoongi knows this, has stopped looking for it anywhere else, registers as a small warm pressure in the left side of Jimin's chest that he categorizes briskly and moves on from.

“How’s the packing," Jimin says.

"Done."

"Already?”

“I pack efficiently."

“You pack like someone who’s trying to leave before they change their mind."

Yoongi glances at him. The light thing around his mouth does the thing where it almost becomes something else and then doesn't. "Some of us don't need to bring four bags to Tokyo."

“I had four bags for Tokyo because I was in Tokyo for three weeks."

"You brought four bags for Busan last year."

"That was different."

"You were there for a weekend."

"It was a very full weekend," Jimin says, and drinks his wine, and watches the television do something he's not following, some variety program with the sound low, bright colors and the miniature drama of people competing over something inconsequential. 

The laugh track comes in at intervals like punctuation for a joke he keeps missing. He's aware of Yoongi's shoulder, warm and present four inches from his own, in the specific way he is always aware of it when they are in close proximity, which is to say in the way that makes the rest of the room slightly out of focus by comparison.

He thinks for a moment, about track five.

He drinks his wine instead.

It’s more bitter than usual on his tongue.

"I listened to the album," he says eventually, because he was going to eventually. 

He'd known that too, the same way he'd known about the knock, the inevitability of it, the way it would come out of him at some point in the evening regardless of whether he'd decided to say it, because there are things he can manage the timing of and things that simply happen.

Yoongi doesn’t react, exactly. There’s a slight pause, the weight of it barely registering, the kind of pause that on anyone else might mean nothing and on Yoongi means he heard it and is deciding what to do with it.

"Yeah?” he says.

"Obviously," Jimin replies. "Don’t make it weird."

"I’m not making it weird. You brought it up."

"I’m making conversatopn."

"About my album."

"About your album that came out three days ago and has been number one in however many countries, yes, I thought that was a normal thing to bring up, I’m so sorry—”

“Jimin."

“—I’ll keep my opinions about your music to myself in the future, clearly it’s a—”

“Jimin.” The way he says it this time is different, quieter, the single syllable landing with a gentleness that cuts straight through the momentum of Jimin’s desperate deflection. He has always been able to do that: interrupt Jimin’s spiralling not with volume but with a kind of precise softness, a hand placed flat on moving water. "I’m glad you listened to it."

Jimin looks at the television.

"It’s good," he says, in the measured tone of someone trying to be extremely normal about it. "Really good.”

“Thanks."

“Track five is…” he stops, bites his lip.

"Track five is what?” Yoongi prods, pushes him a little.

"It’s good," Jimin finishes. "They’re all good. It’s a good album."

Yoongi makes a small sound that lives somewhere between acknowledgment and something else, something Jimin doesn't examine, and drinks his wine, and they both watch the television in a silence that has a shape to it, specific artistic intention. 

It is not a comfortable silence really, but it isn't uncomfortable either. It is the silence that shamelessly belongs to two people who have learned the dimensions of each other's quiet the way you learn the layout of a room you've spent too much time in; by feel, in the dark, without needing the lights on.

Jimin is pathetically, devastatingly at home in it.

The teasing starts again somewhere around the second glass. 

It always does; there's a temperature that gets reached somewhere between the first drink and the point where the evening loses its social formality, where Yoongi's commentary sharpens back up and Jimin's irritation reaches the kind of pitch that is, if he's honest, one of his more reliable indicators that he's enjoying himself. 

It's about the succulent first, Yoongi notices it on the windowsill from across the room with the unerring accuracy of a person who notices things for a living, and says nothing for a full thirty seconds, just looks at it, before turning back with an expression of mild theatrical concern.

"Jimin-ah."

“Don’t," Jimin shoots back, because he also notices things for a living, somewhat.

"I’m just looking."

"You’re doing the face."

"I’m not doing any face." He says as he does the face, which is the face of a man beholding a slow-motion disaster he has specifcally warned someone about. "I told you it needs indirect light. I told you that six months ago."

"It’s fine."

"It looks like it’s ready to pass on a will."

"It’s going through something," Jimin says with more defensiveness than the botanical situation strictly warrants. "It’ll be fine."

"I’ll water it when you’re—” Yoongi stops, and the cut-off doesn’t even feel as dramatic, nor does it possess the inherent performance of stopping, and Jimin can hear the clean silence where the end of that sentence would have been all the same. When you’re in the military. When you’re away. When the apartment is empty and someone with a key and a code lets themselves in to do the small maintenance of keeping things alive in your absence.

Jimin feels the words land in the gap between them and doesn’t move to fill it.

"You don’t have to," he ends up saying.

"I know," Yoongi replies, because when does he not know.

Another pause, the laugh track goes off on the television, misplaced and vaguely absurd.

"I’ll water it anyway," Yoongi concludes.

Jimin looks at him. Yoongi is already looking back at the television with the deliberate attention of having just said something and, contemporarily having decided the best course of action is to pretend he didn't. 

The light in the room catches the edge of his jaw, the slight downward set of his mouth. He looks, in this specific light at this specific angle, exactly like the person who has been living next door to Jimin for two years with the key to his apartment and a working knowledge of his kitchen cabinets and a habit of knowing exactly what to say and then stopping one word before the part that would change anything.

Jimin bites his tongue.

Literally, briefly, with the practiced application of a person who has been having this particular conversation with himself for long enough to have developed a physical technique. It works well enough.

He turns back to the television and drinks his wine and does not say: track five, specifically, I need you to explain track five to me, I need you to sit here and tell me who that’s about with your outside voice.

Does not say: you’re leaving tomorrow and I’ve been sitting in this apartment all day listening to your voice in my headphones and the only thing I can think about is whether any of it is about me and I am so, so tired, Yoongi, I am so tired of not knowing.

He doesn’t say any of it.

He says: “If it dies while I’m gone, it’s your fault."

And Yoongi says, without looking at him: “It was already dying before I got involved."

And Jimin laughs, despite himself, the short involuntary kind that comes out before he can decide whether to let it, and Yoongi makes the sound he makes when something lands the way he’d intended, the low exhale that functions as his laugh, and for a moment the shape of the room shifts, becomes something lighter, warmer, smaller, and Jimin hates him a little for being able to do that.

For knowing exactly where the funny thing lives, even inside the sad thing. For being the only person who has ever been able to make him laugh at the moments where he is most genuinely trying not to.

He’s been doing it since Jimin was seventeen.

He’ll probably do it forever.

The thought sits in Jimin’s chest with the weight of something he’s never going to say out loud, warm and sharp in equal measure, and the wine is almost gone, and the city does its patient thing outside the window, and the distance between them on the couch does what it always does at a certain point in the evening, which is to simply stop being the distance it was, quietly and without announcement, until Jimin looks down and finds that Yoongi’s soulder is against his and has been for a while now without either of them having moved toward it deliberately, or at least without either of them saying that they did.

The television murmurs. The city murmurs. Yoongi is warm against him.

Jimin closes his eyes for a moment and listens to the rain fall softly inside his chest, each drop patient and precise, and does not knock on a single door.

The evening continues.

It does what evenings do when you are in exactly the right place to be ruined by them: it softens, and stretches, and refuses to end at the reasonable hour, and gets later and later and better and worse in exact proportion, and by the time the second bottle of wine i s finished the distance on the couch is a memory from a previous version of the night, and Jimin is not thinking about the flight at eleven, is actively, consciously, deliberately not thinking about it, which means he is thinking about nothing else at all.

“Stay," he whispers, and it comes out quieter than he means it to, less casual than he’d rehearsed in the half-second between the thought and the word.

Yoongi is quiet for a beat, two.

"Okay," he says, like it was never a question.

As if there was nowhere else he was going to end up tonight, which is either the most comforting thing Jimin has thought all day or the most devastating, and he genuinely cannot tell the difference anymore, has stopped being able to tell the difference a long time ago, somewhere between the first time and the forty-seventh time and now, here, with the empty bottles on the coffee table and eleven hours until the flight and Yoongi already reaching to turn off the television with the familiarity that comes with knowing which button is which on a remote that is not his.

Jimin watches him do it.

The room goes quiet, the city keeps its lights on, indifferent and permanent, and the rain in Jimin’s chest falls and falls and falls.

Yoongi sets his glass down on the coffee table with the particular deliberateness of a man who is about to say something he's already pleased with before he says it. The sound of glass on wood, small and final in the quiet room. 

He settles back into the couch with the whole relaxed length of him and looks at Jimin with an expression that can only be described as smug in the way that a cat is smug: not reaching for it, wearing it with the easy ownership of someone who knows exactly what he's sitting on.

“So," he says. "What do you want to do?”

Jimin feels heat climb up the back of his neck.

It’s the wine, he decides, immediately and without conviction.

It’s the wine and the hour and the fact that it’s been a long day of sitting in his own feelings like a bath that’s gone cold, and not at all the fact that Yoongi is sitting there with that expresson asking him what he wants to do in a tone that knows exactly what Jimin meant when he said stay and is choosing, deliberately, to make him say the rest of it.

That’s not what’s making his jaw tighten. That’s not what’s making him feel, suddenly, like the room has gotten several degrees warmer and considerably smaller.

He looks at Yoongi.

Yoongi looks back, waiting, pleasant as the smell of a freshly cut up rose.

And the thing is, the thing that tips it from warm irritation into something sharper, something that comes up through his chest and out his mouth before the more sensible part of him can interpret it, is that he can see it. 

He’s known this person for eleven years, he can read the landscape of him the way you read somewhere you grew up, every landmark catalogued, every shortcut memorized, and what he can see right now, underneath the smugness and the pleasant waiting, is that Yoongi knows. 

He knows what Jimin meant, knows why he opened the wine at a quarter before nine on a Tuesday, knows why the shower happened at eight and the good sweatpants and the studied, deniable preparation of a person who was absolutely not preparing for company.

He knows, more to the point, exactly why he knocked at nine o’clock, which has nothing to do with the wine he’d bought for the trip and decided not to take, and everything to do with fourteen hours and a flight and the particular appetite of a person who is about to be somewhere else for a long time.

Jimin knows this. Yoongi knows that Jimin knows this. This is the specific absurdity of their situation, distilled into a tuesday night on a couch.

"You know why you came here," Jimin says, flat and precise, with the tone he strictly uses when he’s done circling. "You’ve got eleven hours before your flight and you want to get your dick wet before a world tour. That’s fine. That’s— fine. But don't sit there and ask me what I want to do like you don’t already know what you came here for."

He expects the grin, the concession, dry and minimal, the yeah, you got me that Yoongi gives when he’s been correctly read and sees no point in arguing the obvious.

Instead, Yoongi looks at him softly.

That’s the only word for it and Jimin resents needing it.

Soft; the smugness gone, or not gone but underneath something else now, quieter, and he’s got his head tilted slightly the way he does when he finds something genuinely worth his attention, looking at Jimin with an expression that has no planned execution in it, no deflection, nothing Jimin can grab onto and push back against. It’s just attention, colored by the full, unhurried tint of it.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Yoongi says, perfectly even. "I came to share a drink with my favorite dongsaeng."

The word lands the way it always lands.

Jimin has heard it ten thousand times and then some more, has heard it from Yoongi specifically more times than he can count, in greenrooms and vans and hotel corridors, said with varying degrees of affection and sarcasm and the causal ownership of someone who established the hierarchy early and found it useful.

It has never, in ten thousand repetitions, stopped doing the thing it does: the small, stupid, totally disproportionate sting of it the way it slots him neatly into a category that is fond and permanent and entirely beside the point.

Dongsaeng. Junior. Kid. the word that means I know you, I claim you, you are mine in the specific way that has a name, and the name is not this, and the name is not that, the name is this word. This word exactly, comfortable and bounded and safe.

Jimin knows it’s stupid. He has always known it’s stupid. He’s a grown man, an almost-thirty-year-old professional person, and the word dongsaeng should not be capable of leaving a mark on him, and yet here he is, almost thirty years old, feeling it settle into the bruise it has spent years carving out, small and precise as a stone dropped from a known height.

He schools his face.

"Maybe," Yoongi continues, with the soft amused quality still fully intact, watching Jimin the way he watches things he wants to understand better, “that’s what you want. A drink with your hyung."

"I already had a drink with you."

"Then maybe another one."

"The bottle’s empty."

"I can get another one."

"Yoongi—”

“Or," Yoongi says, and the word is quiet, sits differently in the air than the ones before it, the amusement still present but underneath it now something that is not quiet serious and not quite not, "we could stop doing this and you could tell me what you actually want, mh?”

The room is very quiet.

Jimin looks at him.

He looks at the soft, open expression he is so rarely given full access to; the one without the armor of wit, without the buffer of irony. Just Yoongi, on his couch, at almost midnight, watching him with the kind of attention that makes him feel both completely seen and completely furious about it, because what good is being seen by someone who is going to be in another country in mere hours, who will pack his one efficient bag and get on a flight and be in ten cities before Jimin has figured out what he was trying to say tonight.

What good is all that attention when it doesn’t stay anywhere.

When it has never, in all their years of this, gone anywhere but here.

He could say it. The thought moves through him like cold water. He could, right now, in this quiet room, say the actual thing. 

Not I know why you came here and not stay with its careful deniability, but the thing before all of that, the one that has been sitting in his chest since long before tonight, since before the album and the headphones and somebody does love but I'm thinking about you, since before the hiatus and the apartment next door and the key that Yoongi still has for reasons neither of them have examined. 

He could say: I want you to look at me like this when you're not leaving. I want you to come over with wine you're not taking with you and stay until morning and not have an eleven o'clock flight. I want to know if track five is about me. I want to ask you once, clearly, with the lights on, if any of this has ever meant to you what it means to me.

He could.

He looks at Yoongi’s face, soft and waiting in the low light, and the words sit right where they always sit, swollen and patient.

“You’re so annoying,” Jimin says instead.

Swollen and patient, and trapped.

The corner of Yoongi's mouth moves. The soft thing doesn't go anywhere, it gets, impossibly, a degree warmer, that fractional shift that Jimin has catalogued and re-catalogued and never quite found the right label for, the expression that looks like fondness and feels, to the person on the receiving end of it, like something considerably more dangerous.

“Yeah,” Yoongi agrees, like a concession, a gift, the punchline to a joke that only the two of them know. “I know.”

And then he reaches over and takes Jimin's empty glass from his hand, sets it next to his own on the coffee table with the same deliberate quiet as before, and when he settles back the distance on the couch is different again, and Jimin lets it be different, and the city holds its lights steady outside the window, and the rain in his chest keeps its pace, falling and falling, each drop a small patient I love you aimed precisely nowhere.

The night does what it does.

Jimin stops fighting it.

The first kiss is Yoongi's, which is how it usually goes.

Not because Jimin doesn't want to—that has never been the variable in this equation—but because there's something in him that has always needed it to be an offering before it can be an answer. 

Some deeply ingrained, deeply inconvenient part of him that requires the first move to come from outside himself so he can pretend, for the length of a breath, that he isn't hurtling toward this with the full velocity of everything he's been feeling all day. That he's responding rather than arriving. That this is something that's happening to him and not something he's been building toward since eight o'clock and the shower and the good sweatpants.

Yoongi kisses the way he does most things: without preamble, without beating around the bush. 

His hand comes up to the side of Jimin's jaw and he just… closes the remaining distance, simple as a what’s-for-dinner decision when you have all the money in the world and a delivery app subscription, and Jimin's eyes shut and his brain does the thing it always does, which is to go briefly, blessedly quiet.

For approximately four seconds.

Then, it starts again.

The thing about wanting someone this much for this long is that it doesn't simplify the act of having them. 

Jimin had assumed, at some early point in this arrangement—nineteen, twenty, the age when you still believe proximity to the thing you want will eventually satisfy the wanting—that it would. 

That the body's appetite, thoroughly enough fed, would quiet the rest of him. That this would function as a release valve. A pressure system with a working mechanism.

It doesn't work like that. He knows this now. Has known it for years with the weary certainty of someone who has run the same experiment under controlled conditions many times and keeps getting the same result.

It's like… he searches for the shape of it, even now, even here with Yoongi's mouth on his throat and his own hands finding the hem of that soft grey pullover by memory, it's like being given a glass of water and being told to use it to understand the ocean. 

The glass is real. The water is real. He's genuinely, acutely grateful for the glass. And it doesn't touch the thing underneath, not really, not the part that isn't thirst.

He tips his head back anyway.

They move to the bedroom with the unhurried economy of people who know the route, no negotiation required, just the quiet momentum of two bodies that have mapped each other thoroughly enough to navigate without instructions. 

Yoongi's hands on him are certain in the way they always are: not rushed or faking patience, just entirely, effortlessly present, here, moving across him with the attentiveness of someone who has paid close attention and retained the information. 

Jimin's shirt goes, then the good sweatpants, which had done their job and can retire with dignity.

There’s a moment, Yoongi pulling back just enough to look at him, the low city light coming in, that particular flavor of attention fully deployed, where Jimin feels so thoroughly seen that his chest seizes.

He pulls him back in before it can turn into anything he’d have to explain.

The thing he hates most, he decides, is how good it is.

Not in the reductive, uncomplicated sense, though it is that too, has always been that, Yoongi has never in eleven years of Jimin's acquaintance done anything at half-measure when he decided it was worth doing, which is one of his most attractive qualities and also one of the reasons Jimin is currently in this situation on this particular tuesday. 

He means something more specific: the way it layers, the way the physical fact of it keeps intersecting with the other thing, the larger thing, so that every point of contact carries more information than it should. 

Every place Yoongi's hands settle in feels like a sentence in a language Jimin has been studying for years without ever quite reaching fluency.

It's… good. It is so good it makes him want to scream, a little, into the middle distance, into the ceiling he knows too well. Not from pleasure alone but from the specific torment of pleasure that is also deprivation, having the thing and being hungry, being full and starving in exact simultaneity.

It’s actually my greed, Yoongi had sung, when I say that it’s all for you.

Jimin thinks about that, which is insane. He's aware it's insane. He's in the middle of… this, Yoongi's weight above him, the warm specific pressure of him, the familiar weight of him pushing into his core, and he's parsing album lyrics like a person who has completely lost the plot, which he has, he has lost the plot, he's not sure he was ever reliably on the plot, the plot may have been lost as early as 2014 in a van between cities when Yoongi had handed him a set of earphones without looking at him and said listen to this and Jimin had listened and felt something rearrange inside his chest that had never quite moved back. He carries proof of that, on his own chest, scribbled forever in black ink.

He brings himself back.

Yoongi's face, close. The way he's looking at him, that same combination from the couch, soft, present, the full attention without the armor. It undoes him every time. It will undo him every time for the rest of his life, probably, which is a grim projection that he arrives at and departs from in the space of a breath because there's no use living there.

"Hey," Yoongi says, quiet. Not a question, just checking. A small calibration. Years of fucking someone means you notice when they're not fully in the room.

"I’m here," Jimin says.

Yoongi looks at him, then:

"Yeah," he says, and something in the word is careful, is gentle in the specific way Yoongi is gentle when he's doing it on purpose, the gentleness he deploys like a precision instrument, and Jimin's throat does something complicated. "I know."

He doesn't push it, because Min Yoongi never pushes it. He just dips his head and presses his mouth to the hinge of Jimin's jaw, the soft place below his ear, and Jimin closes his eyes and grips his shoulders and breathes through it, through the warmth and the sting, both at once, both always at once, like weather that can't decide what it's doing.

It's so stupid, he thinks, much later, when the room is dark and quiet and Yoongi is a warm weight beside him settling toward sleep. 

It's such a waste of a feeling. 

He's got the world's most elaborate unrequited love, except not unrequited, technically, not in the physical sense, not in the I came to your door at nine o'clock with a bottle of wine I'd bought for the trip sense, which should count for something, which does count for something, but which keeps failing to add up to the total he needs it to add up to.

He should write a song about it. The thought arrives with a black humor he can't quite suppress, a short exhale through his nose in the dark that almost becomes a laugh before it decides not to. 

He should write a song about this precise feeling: the having and the not-having, the body satisfied and the chest still full, the specific absurdity of lying next to the person you love and feeling the distance from them like something measured in instruments he doesn't have. He wonders what key it would be in. 

He wonders if it would be any good.

He wonders if Yoongi would listen to it and think: oh.

The thought sits with him, patient and slightly ruinous.

Yoongi's breathing has gone slow and even against his shoulder. His presence takes up space the way it always does: physically, thermally, in the particular way that the room feels differently arranged with him in it, all the furniture making more sense, the ceiling less blankly hostile. 

Jimin stares at it anyway. His old friend the ceiling, with the water stain in the northeast corner shaped like a country he still can't place, and that Yoongi could, if he wasn’t always only either sleeping or fucking in this room. He's spent so many nights accounting for himself to it.

What would he write. He turns it over idly, the way you turn a stone in your hand not to examine it but just to feel its weight. 

I have kissed you many times and done it wrong every time. No, that's not quite right, too wordy, but that’s the problem:

The problem—or one of them, there's a whole taxonomy of problems here, a very organized disaster—is that Jimin has kissed him before. 

Many times. Too many times to pretend every single one of them was an accident, and not quite enough for it to become something they've agreed to call normal. 

He knows the geography of him by now, knows exactly how Yoongi's breath changes when something shifts from casual to not-casual, knows the exact quality of the silence afterward, how it's never quite the same kind of silence as before. He knows all of this with the intimate certainty of someone who has paid close attention for a very long time.

And still.

He has never once gotten it right.

That's the thing he keeps circling, the thought that lives in the back of his throat on nights like this when the city is quiet and Yoongi is right there and leaving in far too few hours. He's had the opportunity. He's been close, God, so many times he's been so close, and every time, something in him misfires; goes for the wrong thing. 

Reaches for the body when he meant to reach for the heart. Kisses him with hunger instead of honesty and then lies there afterward with the honest exhale still sitting swollen and unsaid in his chest, convinced that if he could just do it again, do it properly this time, he'd find a way to make Yoongi understand.

He never does.

He'll do it again tonight, probably. Already has, really. It was fine. It was more than fine; Yoongi's hands, God, his hands, knowing and unhurried, and afterward Jimin felt, for exactly the length of time it took Yoongi to fall asleep, like maybe this was enough. Like maybe this was the version of things that worked, the one he could survive.

And then Yoongi fell asleep and Jimin thought about the flight at eleven and survival had started feeling like a more complicated word.

I could write you into a song, he thinks, looking at the ceiling. I could make you a track five. I could put everything I've never said to you into four minutes and release it into the world and watch you listen to it and wonder, the way I wonder, whether any of it was meant for you.

Would that count.

Would that be doing it right.

Yoongi shifts, arm moving in sleep, finding Jimin's waist with the unconscious precision of a body that knows where it's going, pulling him closer in the automatic, artless way that bypasses every defense Jimin has ever constructed. No irony in it. A sleeping person reaching for the warm thing and holding on.

Jimin looks at the top of his head, the dark hair, the soft picture of him at rest.

He thinks: I am so full of you, you’re everywhere in me. You’re in my kitchen cabinets and my dying succulent and three days of album on loop and the shape of every feeling I’ve had today, and tomorrow you’re going to be across the ocean while I’m here in this apartment that smells like you, and neither of us will say a word about any of it.

He thinks: maybe that’s the song.

He thinks: somebody does love.

He closes his eyes, the rain falls, the city holds its lights.

Yoongi breathes against his shoulder, slow and warm and present and leaving, and Jimin stays perfectly still in the complicated grace of it; the sting and the sweetness wound so tight around each other he's stopped trying to tell them apart, just carries them both, the whole impossible weight of this thing he's been blossoming alone inside for longer than he can honestly remember.

He doesn’t sleep for a long time.

When he does, finally, he dreams of nothing. Or nothing he’ll remember.

The apartment smells like Yoongi. It has, if he’s honest, smelled like him for two years.

Jimin surfaces into consciousness at four-seventeen in the morning.

He knows because he looks, because he always looks, the first reflexive reach for the phone before his eyes have fully agreed to be open, the screen's brightness a small assault that he squints through and then lets fall face-down onto the mattress with the quiet resignation of a man confronting evidence about himself he'd rather not confront. 

Four-seventeen. He'd fallen asleep somewhere around two. He’d been telling himself he was fixing his schedule, had been making genuine, effortful attempts to be horizontal by midnight and unconscious by one, which is the kind of optimism that looks reasonable from the outside and collapses completely the moment the city gets dark and his brain decides that darkness is simply the correct lighting for thinking too much.

He’s not fixing his schedule.

He is, in fact, profoundly, architecturally nocturnal in the way of a person who has spent over a decade treating the hours between two and five as the realest part of the day; the part where the managed version of himself clocks out and leaves behind whoever is actually living inside his body, blinking at ceilings and feeling things at full volume with no one watching. 

His mother has opinions about this. His manager has opinions about this. His nutritionist had sent him an article about cortisol once, which Jimin had read in its entirety at three in the morning and found deeply ironic.

He lies still for a moment, taking inventory.

His own ceiling. His own bedroom, the familiar smell of it, which is to say the smell of Yoongi, woven into the sheets and the pillow and the ambient air of the room with the thoroughness of something that has had time to settle. Citrus and something warmer underneath. The ghost of the wine. 

He'd noticed it the first time Yoongi had stayed, years ago in a different apartment, the way a person's smell persists in a space long past their leaving. He had found it, privately, humiliating how much he'd noticed, how precisely he'd catalogued it, how long he'd lain in sheets that smelled like someone who wasn't there with the full awareness that he was doing something he would not be admitting to anyone.

He hasn’t stopped noticing. He has simply gotten better at treating it as background information.

Yoongi is still here.

That registers second, which probably says something unflattering about the state of Jimin's sleep-addled, still pretty fucked-out brain; the phone first, the smell second, the actual living person in his bed a distant third.

Yoongi is asleep, or doing a convincing impression of it, which, with him, has always been the same thing. 

He's on his stomach the way he'd fallen asleep, face half-buried in the pillow Jimin thinks of as Yoongi’s pillow and has never once said out loud, one arm folded under his chest, the other stretched wide across the sheet where Jimin had been lying before sleep ruined their perfect interlock, his hair spilling dark and loose across the pillow and over the back of his neck, nearly to his shoulders now, longer than Jimin has ever seen it, really. 

He'd been growing it out since the hiatus started, had mentioned it once in passing in the way Yoongi mentions most things about himself: factually, briefly, with no apparent investment in whether anyone had feelings about it, and Jimin had nodded and said something neutral and had been thinking about it at odd moments ever since.

He thinks about it now.

Jimin could stare at his back all day.

The thought arrives without preamble, without apology, settling into the available space with the calm ownership of something that has been true for a long time and knows it. 

The city light comes in at its low four-in-the-morning angle through the curtains, different from the two-in-the-morning light, thinner, the city having exhausted most of its brightness and operating now on something closer to habit, and it moves across the landscape of Yoongi's back in the slow, indifferent way of light that doesn't know what it's illuminating. 

The line of his spine. The shallow valley between his shoulder blades. The dark fall of his hair against his nape, the way a few strands have caught on the curve of his shoulder and stayed there. The ink of his new tattoo.

Jimin could stare at his back all day.

He has before. He will again. It is another small, devastatingly private shame he carries, another coin in his pocket; how easily he can lose whole hours to the shape of Yoongi at rest. There's something about it that short-circuits his better judgment; the way he looks smaller like this, stripped of all that dry wit and careful deflection, just a person breathing in the dark. Just a person Jimin has known for eleven years and still can't figure out how to stop wanting.

Jimin doesn’t move.

He's done this before, been awake in the dark, watching. It's not something he'd ever say to anyone, not something he's particularly proud of in the rational light of day, this particular habit of surveillance, the way his eyes find Yoongi in a room and stay there with the helpless consistency of a compass finding north regardless of which way you turn it. 

But there's something about him at rest that dismantles all of Jimin's better arguments. Asleep, he looks like what he is underneath all the careful construction; just a person, slight and warm and real. 

A person who makes music that sounds like the inside of Jimin's chest and drinks wine he says he bought for the trip, but he really only bought for Jimin, and knows which cabinet has the glasses without being told and says dongsaeng in a soft voice like it costs him nothing.

Just a person who is going to be somewhere else in—Jimin does the math without wanting to—six hours and forty minutes.

He should sleep.

He knows he should sleep. He has things tomorrow, not many things, the sparse scattered obligations of a man between projects, but things. A call with his label at eleven, which had felt manageable when he'd agreed to it two weeks ago and now feels like a minor act of cruelty on the part of his past self. He should close his eyes and put the six hours to use and stop lying here in the dark cataloguing the details of someone who is leaving at dawn.

He doesn’t sleep.

He watches the light move across Yoongi's shoulder instead, the slow travel of it, and thinks about the shape of a feeling he still hasn't found adequate language for. 

He's been trying for years. He writes, a little, more than he used to, less than he should, the lyrics coming in fragments that he keeps in the notes app on his phone in a folder he's named something deliberately boring so it doesn't look like what it is. 

He's good at the physical stuff, the kinetic, the feeling of movement and want. He's less good at the underneath. 

Every time he tries to write toward the specific oddity of this, the having and the not-having, the warmth and the ache, the rain that falls in one direction forever without flooding anything, it comes out either too much or not enough. Too explicit or too coy. Too angry or too soft.

Yoongi had done it in thirty-two minutes.

Somebody does love, he’d said, but I’m thinking about you.

Eight words carrying the whole unbearable shape of a feeling, simple enough to sing, devastating enough to replay three days running in a pair of headphones on a couch in an apartment that smells like the person who made it. 

Jimin had spent years honing his craft, had worked himself to the edge of what a body can do in service of expression, and Yoongi had opened his mouth in a recording booth and said the precise thing in the precise way and Jimin had heard it through one earbud sitting on a toilet in a restaurant in Mapo and felt named.

That's the thing about being loved, or known, or whatever the accurate word is for what Yoongi does and doesn't do, by someone whose primary instrument is language. 

He’s never quite sure where the song ends and the person begins. He’s never sure whether being seen means being wanted, or whether being wanted means anything beyond the glass, the water, the inadequate vessel for the ocean underneath.

He exhales quietly. Yoongi doesn’t stir.

His hair moves slightly with his breathing, just the ends of it, the longest strands, lifting and settling in the almost-imperceptible way of something very light responding to something very small. 

Jimin watches it happen. 

He watches it happen several times.

This is what he's doing at four-seventeen in the morning: watching the ends of someone's hair move with their breathing, which is either the most tender thing he's ever done or the most pathetic, and he genuinely cannot locate the line between those two things anymore, cannot find the place where devotion tips over into something that should be brought to a professional.

He could reach out and touch it. 

The hair, he’s touched it before, in the context of other things, the incidental contact of proximity, but not like this, as in, deliberately, just to fele it between his fingers in the dark because it’s there and it’s his only for six more hours and he wants to, simply and completely, the way he wants most things involving Yoongi, which is to say with an appetite that has proven entirely immune to satisfaction.

He doesn’t reach out.

He tucks his hand under the pillow instead, the small physical argument of a man exercising the only restraint available to him at four in the morning, and keeps watching, and the city does its thin pre-dawn thing outside the window, and the light keeps moving across the line of Yoongi's spine, his shoulder, the dark fall of his hair.

I could stare at your back all day.

He could. He has. He will, in mere hours, watch him walk out the door with his one efficient bag and the punctual company car and the key to his apartment that neither of them has addressed, and it will be Yoongi’s back that’s the last thing he sees, the familiar landscape of him moving away down the hallway, and Jimin will stand in the doorway of an apartment that smells like someone who is no longer in it and stare until the elevator closes.

He already knows this. He’s already grieving it at four-seventeen, which is efficient in the way of a disaster that announces its own timing.

He should write a song about this too, he thinks, darkly, with the specific humor of a person laughing at himself to stay ahead of the alternative. 

The whole album, maybe. The complete taxonomy of loving someone in the wrong tense; present tense when you need future, future tense when you only ever get present. 

He could call it something ironic. He could perform it somewhere small with bad lighting and everyone would think it was a concept, a persona, a beautifully constructed emotional performance.

Only Yoongi would know.

Jimin stills at the thought; he likes that.

He likes that only Yoongi would listen, in whatever city, and recognize the specific frequency of it, would hear his own apartment in the chords, his own hair in the image, his own key still hanging on Jimin's hook by the door in the bridge, and would know, with the precision of someone who notices things for a living, that it was him. All of it. Had always been him.

And would say nothing, probably.

Would text him after, something brief and oblique and Yoongi-shaped. 

Listened to the new stuff. You sound good. Something that carries the message without being the message, the way he always carries things, packed efficiently, nothing unnecessary, maximum content in minimum space.

Or maybe, the thought is rarer, more dangerous, the kind he usually keeps behind a door he doesn't open at reasonable hours, maybe not. 

Maybe that's the version where something different happens. Where the song does what his mouth hasn't managed, where the music carries the real thing all the way to the receiving end for once, where Yoongi listens to track five and thinks oh with the full weight of an oh that changes the shape of a room.

Jimin closes his eyes.

He can still see the back of him in the dark behind his eyelids. The hair, the shoulder, the slow breathing.

The city is making its first tentative adjustments toward dawn, the black thinning at its edges, the street noise shifting register from the sounds of night completing itself to the sounds of morning not yet ready to begin. 

That particular hour. The city in transition, not one thing or the other, held in the hinge between.

He knows the feeling.

He opens his eyes and watches Yoongi breathe and does not touch him and does not sleep and does not say the thing, and the rain falls in its patient, perpetual way, and the light moves, and the clock somewhere in the apartment marks time toward six hours and thirty-eight minutes and then thirty-seven and then thirty-six, patient and indifferent and completely unmoved by any of it.

Jimin stays very still.

He looks at Yoongi.

The city light still does its slow work across his back, across the shoulder blade, across the soft knob of his spine. His breathing is even. He looks, in the absolute charity of sleep, like someone with no unfinished business in the world.

Jimin slides back into his embrace carefully, trying not to wake him.

Yoongi shifts anyway, the way he always does, some hinge of awareness that never fully switches off, and without opening his eyes, without saying anything, he moves. He makes room in the unconscious, practiced way of someone who knows where Jimin belongs relative to him. An arm, a shoulder, the arrangement of two people who have been doing this long enough that their bodies have worked it out independently of their brains.

Jimin lets himself be arranged.

He lies there with his face close to Yoongi's shoulder and the rain doing its quiet falling inside his chest and the clock somewhere in the apartment marking time toward eleven, and thinks: this is the one I'll remember. 

Not the good wine, not the skillful hands, not the long specific knowledge of each other they've built up over years of almost, but this specific weight of now, the dark apartment and the city murmuring outside, and Yoongi's warmth against him and the six hours shrinking down to five and then to four and the words sitting right where they always sit, in the soft place between his lungs, patient, waiting for a door he keeps not opening.

He thinks: I would like to try again.

He doesn't say it.

He closes his eyes and listens to Yoongi breathe, and the rain keeps falling in the way it always does, warm and persistent, each drop a small, muted I love you aimed at the walls of his own chest, the only place it's ever landed.

Outside, the city proceeds with its slow lean toward morning.

Jimin stays very still, full to the absolute brim, watches the last hours drain out quietly through a hole he doesn’t know how to close, and blossoms alone, and doesn't sleep.