Chapter Text
It first started happening in seventh grade.
Before it ever did, Jimin had always thought it was a lie, even though his own mother couldn’t tell black from purple. He was a stubborn one, really.
Even if it was a well-known fact that soulmates were even a thing, that there was somebody out there in the world that was intended for you, just you. Jimin hated it, despised it, and rejected it with everything he had.
He almost made himself forget it completely when his best friend met some girl, and suddenly, he couldn’t play card games with Jimin anymore, since he couldn’t tell a blue UNO card from red. How pathetic. Jimin hoped that his own soulmate, if there ever was one, lived on the other side of the world and he would never meet them, ever.
However, this seemed more and more impossible when the kids in his class, one by one, started losing their colour vision. Over the course of the next three years, nearly two-thirds of his class had lost theirs because they’d met their soulmates. Pathetic.
If he could, he’d date. He’d date as many girls as he could to prove that he didn’t need a soulmate to be a regular person, and that he didn’t want to see the world in black and white, thank you very much. It wouldn’t be nice at all.
That, Jimin eventually realized, was also not a good plan. Dating girls meant he had to meet them, and what if one of them was his soulmate? Oh, the irony.
So he goes back to ignoring, and hoping for the best.
─
“You’re not getting paid for your precious labour?”
Jimin and his roommate, Jeongguk, were lying sprawled out in their respective beds in their dorm the night before Jimin was due to start volunteering at the local hospital. It was warm, warmer than usual for this time of the year. Seoul spring had just began to exchange its heavy rains for the eventual skin-blistering heat of summer, and nobody was particularly looking forward to it, but it was okay.
For now.
Jimin rolled over, holding his arms in the air, splaying his fingers out. “It’s volunteer work, I’m not supposed to get paid, anyway. It’s fine, though. It’ll be on my résumé, which is just as good.”
“Weren’t you just complaining about how you were broke?”
“Yeah, but don’t we all? I mean, regardless if we’re actually broke or not.”
The younger boy cackled. “That’s true.”
Jimin was in his second year of Psychology, and he loved it. He was intrigued by how the human mind worked, and poured himself into his studies. He was a good student, knew it, and was proud of it. That’s what had gotten him the scholarship that paid for his tuition, and that’s why he had room to do volunteer work. It made him sound so charitable.
─
The hospital was constantly hectic. Jimin learned that from the get-go, but it was difficult to adjust at first. There were fast days, slow days, but most of all, scary days.
Volunteering in the mental health wing, Jimin knew, would expose him to all kinds of things. Some of them were just a little more than he had expected. His job was to just float around, provide company to those who look like they needed it, run a few errands, and eat a few meals with patients.
Not too difficult, right?
It was tougher than he thought. Over the past two weeks, he’s had to deal with things from emotional breakdowns to seizures. He had tried to call upon his knowledge of mental illnesses and how to use them in context of the situation, but even that was difficult. Things just happened, and he had no idea the mental processes.
He liked it, though. It was sort of amazing.
“Hey, Jimin-ssi.” A nurse poked her head out from a doorway. “Could you get me some clean gauze and a compression bandage? I’m all out.”
The new addition to the wing came in a few hours ago, Jimin remembered. He didn’t really catch his arrival at all, and it wasn’t his job to worry, but he couldn’t help it.
When he returned with the gauze and bandage in hand, the nurse called for him to bring them in. He hesitated at the doorway, unsure. It wasn’t usually alright for him to go directly into rooms without being invited by the patient themselves.
“It’s alright. He’s asleep, and I trust you.”
The man lying in the cot was almost as pale as the sheets themselves, skin unnaturally white. Perhaps that explained why there was a sack of blood being fed into his arm through an IV.
Jimin’s gaze landed on his other arm, the one without the IV needle, and could not tear his gaze away from the grotesque sight before him.
It was, for lack of better words, ruined. Black stitches massacred the surface over the shiny pink of the newer scars, and beneath that, older ones. It was really bad. Jimin had seen a fair amount of self-harmers in the past week, but none of them were as bad as him.
What has he been through?
He handed the supplies to the nurse, who gently lifted the blanket up and began to wrap the compression bandage around the patient’s foot.
“Sprained his ankle when he fell from passing out,” she explained, answering Jimin’s unspoken question.
“Ah.”
Jimin made his way closer to the bed, close enough to read the name on the blue hospital band around the guy’s skinny white wrist.
“Min Yoongi,” he said aloud.
Min Yoongi wasn’t strikingly handsome, but there was something about him that intrigued Jimin.
“I hope you get better soon, Min Yoongi.”
─
It wasn’t until he was well on his way home when things started changing
It happened slowly, gradually, and it wasn’t until the usual light green of his phone case turned grey did he notice something was off.
The elevator ride up the floors to his dorm was automatic.
Jeongguk was in his bed, watching anime. “Hey hyung, I finished the entire second season today.”
He threw himself into his own bed. “That is absolutely fantastic, dude.”
Jeongguk laughed. “I’d never thought I’d hear you say that. You’re always telling me to quit wasting so much time watching anime and now you’re congratulating me?”
Jimin didn’t reply. The small room was silent apart from the dramatic Japanese monologue issuing from Jeongguk’s phone speaker.
Minutes passed.
The episode ended.
“Jimin hyung?”
He was curled up on his bed, back to Jeongguk.
“Hey, hyung? Are you asleep? You should go wash up before you sleep, you know you hate waking up all gross…”
Jimin’s shoulders shook as pathetic hiccupping sobs rose from his throat, and he instinctively clenched himself tighter into a ball, wrapping his sleeves around his hands and covering his face.
Jeongguk rolled out of his bed. “Hyung? Are you crying?”
He sobbed harder.
“Do you want to talk about it? Now? Later?” Jeongguk was panicking.
“I-I wanna talk ab-about it n-now,” Jimin hiccupped, wiping his face quickly with his now-soaking sleeves, gathering his blanket around him and sitting up. “I n-need to talk about it.”
“What happened, then? Girlfriend broke up with you?”
Jeongguk received a watery but still effective glare.
“Sorry, hyung. I shouldn’t be joking around. Seriously, what happened?”
Jimin grasped his comforter tightly, small sobs still wracking his chest. “The worst thing in the world happened. I didn’t know, I don’t know, I just… I can’t freaking see, alright?”
“You’re blind?”
Jimin’s pillow went flying across the room, hitting the younger boy square in the face. “Can a blind person do that?”
“Okay, but what do you mean, you can’t see? If all that’s happened was you getting a vision test at the hospital and then getting told that you need glasses, then I can’t believe you’re crying like this. Man up, hyung!”
“That isn’t what freaking happened, shut up!” Jimin screeched. “I think I met my soulmate, alright?”
Jeongguk’s face paled considerably. He knew, heck, everyone knew, that Park Jimin hated having to have a soulmate. Jimin hated to conform. If there was such a thing as an anti-soulmates movement, Jimin would either have started it, or be leading it.
Jeongguk didn’t know how it felt. He’d practically seen in black and white his entire life, when he met his soulmate in daycare fifteen years ago.
But Jimin. Jimin, who dedicated every ounce of his being to not finding and being with his soulmate. Jimin, who hated to conform and thirsted for the freedom to choose who he loved. What could he do now?
Jeongguk had nothing to say.
“Look, Gukkie. This sucks, okay? This sucks beyond what I had imagined. I knew it was going to happen at some point, but not like this. If it was going to happen to me anyway, I’d wanted it to have gone normally, not this absolute chaos!”
“What do you mean, chaos?”
Jimin threw his comforter onto the floor in a flurry of limbs. “I don’t even know who she is!”
“What do you mean, you don’t know who she is? Didn’t you meet her, wouldn’t you have known?”
“I didn’t! It just gradually started when I was on my way back here. I didn’t even notice, it happened so slowly.”
Not only did he hate the fact that he’s completely blind to colour, but now he’s obliged to have some soulmate. Absolutely fantastic. Not.
“It doesn’t happen like that to people, though. It happens straight away-”
“That’s what I’m saying! I couldn’t possibly know who it was.”
Jeongguk’s mouth opened and closed a few times, and the two stared at each other for a while, an awkward silence spreading between them.
“What are you going to do about it?”
Jimin threw himself back onto his mattress, inhaling deeply through his nose. He closed his eyes.
“I fucking hate not being able to see right, Gukkie.”
See right? Jeongguk flinched slightly, but he brushed off Jimin’s comment. “What are you going to do about it?” He repeated.
The older boy sighed. “Nothing, I guess. If I don’t know who my soulmate is, there’s no way they can know who I am, either. I’m fine with that. There’s no way we can find each other now that the system’s been triggered.”
“You’re just gonna brush it off and go through life?” Jeongguk asked incredulously.
“Yeah. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay.”