Chapter Text
Someone started it as a joke, and like most of Jin’s jokes it refuses to die.
“No, no, listen—” Jin holds his phone up for quiet, which in a room with all seven of them is a doomed request. “This one says I have ‘the shoulders of a man carrying the weight of the world and the face of a man who has never once thought about anything.’”
Hoseok goes down sideways into the cushions. Namjoon nods slowly, like he’s reached a real conclusion. “That’s well observed, actually.”
“It’s a compliment,” Jin says. “I think. I’ve decided it is.”
This was the game now, apparently. Jimin had found some thread where readers and writers described them and was scrolling it with the focus he usually reserved for choreography he didn't like yet. Every so often he'd make a small wounded noise and read one aloud, and the room would decide, by acclaim, whether it was flattering or a crime.
“Okay, Joon.” Jimin angles the screen away protectively. “Yours says you’re ‘devastatingly intelligent and completely unable to walk through a doorway.’”
“That’s two different people’s observations.”
“It’s one sentence.”
“It’s two observations.” But he’s laughing, reaching for Jimin’s phone to see for himself, and in doing it he knocks a water bottle off the table, which the room receives as proof of thesis.
Jungkook’s on the floor with his back against the bed, knees up, scrolling his own phone the way he always does, which was half in the room, half somewhere else. He laughs occasionally, even feeds Jimin a search term once, easy, “try sorting by kudos,” and nobody thinks anything of it, because everyone reads this stuff sometimes. It’s funny, even a little flattering at times. The kind of thing you look at on a long flight and don’t mention.
Taehyung watches him for a second longer than he needs to. Jungkook’s gone quiet again, that thing where he was there and not there at the same time. Most people didn’t catch it. Taehyung always did, though.
Yoongi, from the armchair, announces his, unprompted. “Mine says…” He pauses and frowns. “‘Italian mafia gang leader who’s just a softie inside.’”
Someone chokes.
“What does that even mean?” Yoongi grimaces and waves it off. “Horrifying. Delete it.”
“You chose to read that one,” Hoseok notes.
“I'm aware of what I did.”
“Tae!” Jimin found something. “Okay, yours— yours says you're ‘the kind of person who remembers what everyone else forgot they said.’”
The room makes a warm noise, a resonating oooh.
“Means he remembers all of your embarrassing stuff,” Yoongi gestures to the others. “I'd be nicer to him.”
“Yoongi-yah, you’ve always had a soft spot for Taehyungie…” Jin grins, “Though what could possibly measure up to these shoulders which carry the weight of the world, huh?”
Jimin holds up his hand, “There's one more. It's a whole paragraph.”
“Whose?” Namjoon asks, retrieving the water bottle he'd murdered.
“All of us. It's like— a list.” Jimin presses a hand to his heart. “‘The thing about them is none of them would survive without the other six.'"
“And then it just names what each person can't live without."
“What’s mine, Jimin-ah?” Hoseok questioned.
“Yah! You're not allowed to ask that,” Jin says, wagging his finger. “That's how they get you. You ask what you can't live without and suddenly it's three in the morning and you're feeling things about the other members.”
“I already feel things about my bandmates,” Hoseok says, wounded. “I've accepted—”
“Aiya~” A cushion catches him in the head, and it all dissolves into noise, three conversations at once.
It thins out late the way it always does, phones going dark one by one, people peeling toward their own rooms with the reluctance of a group that spends every hour together and somehow still doesn’t want the night to end.
Taehyung’s one of the last to go. He usually is. He likes the tail end of these nights, when it gets quiet and a little stupid, when everyone is too comfortable to move.
“Hyung, don’t forget your water.” He tosses Namjoon the bottle on his way past, and Namjoon, half out the door, makes a sound of gratitude.
“Night, Jin-hyung. Rest well.” Taehyung smiles back at Jin who finger-guns him in response, and ambles out.
***
Taehyung’s room is dark and a little cold. He doesn’t bother with the big light, just the lamp by the bed, and sits on top of the covers with his laptop on his knees.
He’s not going to write tonight. He decided that on the walk back from Jin’s room, he’s tired, there’s an early call, and for once in his life it would be smart to just sleep like a normal person.
He opens the document anyway. At this point it’s a reflex, especially when he’s alone with his thoughts. It just happens, the same way it’s been happening for two years.
That line keeps circling back. The kind of person who remembers what everyone else forgot they said. Which is stupid. It’s a nice thing a stranger typed about a version of him that isn’t real, and it doesn’t mean anything, and he should let it go.
Except it does stick with him. He remembers… remembers Jungkook laughing too hard at something dumb in the car a few days ago and then going quiet, staring out the window for a long time after, somewhere Taehyung couldn’t follow. He’d wanted to ask. He always wants to ask. He didn’t, because you don’t, not with five other people in the car and a schedule in the morning and a whole life built around not asking Jungkook the things he actually wants to ask him.
So he writes it instead.
He keeps the names. That’s the part that should scare him more than it does…he never changes them. It’s Taehyung and Jungkook on the page, same as in real life. He just changes everything else. He moves the car to a train, shifts it to a different time of day, bends all the little details until he can almost convince himself it’s not a real memory, just a story that happens to look like one. And then he lets the Jungkook on the page get asked the question, and lets the Taehyung on the page be brave enough to ask it.
That was the whole trick of it. As long as it was fiction, as long as there was a little orange (red, sometimes, if he was feeling indulgent and guilty about it) tag on it and a hundred thousand other people writing the same two names…it wasn’t really him. It was a character. It’s the most popular pairing on the site. He’s one writer in an ocean of them, and no one would ever look at Taehyung and Jungkook, 4k words, fluff and angst and think it was anything but what everyone else was doing.
It’s not really me, he tells himself. He’s gotten good at almost believing it.