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Yoongi’s mother had always told him he was special.
He had always been a very clever child. Always ranked top of his class. One of those rare breeds that the far-too-precocious children in movies were modeled after. But he knew better than to take his mother’s words at face value. After all, he knew just how partial mothers could be about the achievements of their own children. Every child was the apple of their mother’s eye. Every parent’s child was the smartest , or the kindest , or any other superlative they could think of. Either way, Yoongi knew that he wasn’t all that unique.
But then he’d had his first vision.
It was the summer of 1998, just a few months after his fifth birthday. He remembered just how hot it was - he could still feel how sticky his melting firecracker popsicle was in his hand as he and his mother walked back through the borough on their way back home from the store. Just like it always was, the street was full of people walking by, some in a hurry to wherever it was they needed to go, others taking their time laughing and chatting away while their dogs sniffed at the red fire hydrants.
He remembered the couple who had stopped dead still in the middle of the sidewalk to argue loudly with each other. Yoongi couldn’t really recall any of the words that had been said. He only remembered the feeling of it. The tension in the air had been as shrill as a violin and as heavy as a stake being driven into the ground, and he recalled wincing, reaching up with his sticky fingers to grip tightly onto his mother’s hand.
The very moment, he’d touched her though, he felt it for the first time.
An electric thrum under his skin that was almost impossible to describe. Something deeply unsettling, like a chill you couldn’t shake, like standing on the edge of a dark void and hearing something - or someone - calling to him.
And what he saw when he stared back into its depths was something he could still vividly remember even years later. That horrifying sound, of glass shattering and bones breaking. Blood and tissue, splattering all over the sidewalk like one of Yoongi’s preschool art projects. And his mother, lying in pieces at his feet, eyes dull and body oddly still.
By the time he found himself back in his own mind and body again, he found himself staring up at the back of his mother’s intact head. Scared speechless by what he’d seen, he’d dug his heels into the sidewalk and refused to budge. He cried wordlessly and screamed when she tried to tug him along, not knowing why he was doing what he was doing but still trying his best to pull her back and pull her away, away, away from -
A scaffold came crashing down from the top floor of the nearby building, immediately killing the workers on it and crushing the couple who’d been arguing to death. Yoongi could only watch on in wide-eyed disbelief and horror, ears still buzzing with the chaos and the screams that ensued.
His mother had bent down as quickly as she could to shield him from the sight, but it didn’t really matter. After all, he had already seen it.
That had only been the start of many. Dozens of visions of gruesome deaths, always triggered by touch. For years, he’d spent so many sleepless nights terrified of his own dreams and nightmares, refusing to let anyone except his mother touch him or even get close to him.
It left him pale and withdrawn, a shell of his former self.
His mother took him to all the specialists, convinced that his night terrors had been a product of the shock he’d received from what he’d seen that day. Endless waves of psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, and neurologists. Doctor after doctor after doctor who poked and prodded him. They got second opinions when they had to - and third opinions when those second opinions weren’t optimistic enough. For a time, he had been on a laundry list of medications, ones that would make his head buzz and his sight blur. They never really helped, and eventually he stopped taking them without telling his mother.
He got better on his own, or so his mother thought when he ceased having fits. But the truth was he’d only learned how to get better at managing them. The visions still came, long into his adult years. It was no wonder, then, that his aversion to touch only grew exponentially over the years.
He never grew used to the morbid visions, but he learned to cope, although he would never get past how disgusting it made him feel when he could do nothing to stop it.
On one hand, he’d read enough comic books as a young boy to know how superhuman his power was. But it wasn’t one that afforded him the power to do anything about it. He was no Clark Kent and had never felt like a superhero in any sense. He couldn't fly, couldn’t sling webs out of his wrist, couldn’t even pick up a crowbar, let alone bend it. He didn’t fucking want to. He was nothing more than a boy with a strange gift, no stronger and no smarter than any other boy his age. He made suggestions when he could, tried to plant ideas that would help save the lives of those whose deaths he’d seen. But at the end of the day, his actions were strictly his own - human in all senses of the word.
And the only one who could ever make him feel guilty was himself. No one else would ever understand how he felt, because no one else would ever know about it.
-
“Hey Yoongi.”
“Hi.”
“Same as usual? Grande americano for here?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Sure.”
Yoongi shuffled to the side, trying his best not to meet anyone’s gaze as he carefully moved out of the way of the crowd of strangers waiting to pick up their drinks to-go. He skirted along the edge of the crowd like a game of Operation, stepping carefully over backpacks and out of the way of misplaced chairs until he reached the same corner table that he always sat at.
Muttering under his breath, Yoongi took his seat with a grumpy sigh, staring out at the usual crowd of early morning commuters and café regulars, all of them absorbed by whatever was on their phones or computer screens. Ah. Speaking of.
Yoongi dug into his coat pocket for his own phone, dropping it onto the table in front of him. A sudden prickle of static made him hiss, and he took off his itchy wool scarf from his neck and set it beside him. Trying and failing to unlock his phone, he tugged one of his gloves off his hand, stuffing his earbuds in his ear and cranking the volume up. He closed his eyes and leaned back into his seat.
Half dozing while drowning out the white noise of the café with his loud music, he missed his name being called the first few times and only looked up when he felt a tap on his shoulder.
Yoongi flinched away as he ripped out his earbud, muttering an apology when the barista - a former fellow highschool underclassman named Jungkook with tidy black hair and a winsome smile - took Yoongi’s Americano off his tray and moved to set it down on his table. The door slammed loudly shut and Jungkook winced at the noise, losing his footing for a second. The shift in balance had Jungkook’s hand wobbling, and without thinking, Yoongi reached out to grab the mug, grazing the barista’s fingers in the process.
Yoongi’s eyes glazed over momentarily, hand still outstretched for a moment as he stared unseeingly down at his mug.
The barista blinked rapidly, looking down at the mug with confusion written all over his face.
“Uh… you okay, Yoongi?”
As if coming out of a dream, Yoongi’s eyes slowly refocused and sharpened. He took in a deep breath before jerking his hand away, nearly spilling the hot coffee on himself as he set the mug quickly down on the table.
“...I, yeah. Yes. Sorry.”
Still eyeing him bemusedly, the barista flashed his stoic regular the same friendly smile he always wore. He bowed, and then turned away.
Before he could get far, Yoongi cleared his throat, calling back out to the barista.
“Hey, Jungkook…” the man said, “you usually take the train back home when your shift ends, right?”
Jungkook turned back with a frown, eyeing Yoongi as if trying to figure out what the man was trying to ask.
“Yeah,” the barista finally said after a moment, “...why?”
God, he probably thought Yoongi was trying to ask him out. They barely had much of a relationship outside of Yoongi being a regular at the café where Jungkook worked. Because Yoongi was several years older, the only reason Yoongi even knew of him was because his best friend at the time, Jin, had tutored him in math for a semester or two. The same kid that had barely looked a day older than 14 now looked like he belonged on the cover of some kind of high fashion magazine. Yoongi, on the other hand, still looked the same as he always had.
Jesus. This was mortifying. But Yoongi really didn’t have much of a choice.
Yoongi turned toward the window.
“Well, the sun is out and it’s a beautiful day. Don’t you think it’s a perfect day for a walk?” He asked, with an expression that didn’t match his cheery message.
The barista followed his gaze with a puzzled look, and the two of them watched the sun filtered in through the orange-red leaves of the tree outside.
“Oh. I guess,” Jungkook said with a neutral hum. This time, when the barista turned to walk back to the counter, Yoongi let him go without further comment.
Yoongi snatched his glove back up and tugged it back onto his hand. He stared down at the black leather for a moment, and when the image of a bloodied, mangled corpse popped up in his mind again, he clenched his hand tightly into a fist and focused instead on the squeak of the leather under his grip.
A short while later, when the moment had finally passed, Yoongi picked up his cooling cup of coffee and brought it up to his lips as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
And yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that something today felt... different.
Yoongi looked down at this cup, blowing waves onto the hot black surface of his coffee.
-
The door slammed shut behind him with a jangle. Yoongi pulled his jacket tighter around his body, folding his arms across his chest with a shiver as he briskly walked through the white clouds he’d made with his own breath.
It was a chilly fall day. It had been cold for weeks now, much longer than the short cold snap that the weatherman had predicted would only last ‘just a few days, folks’. More and more it seemed like that was becoming the new norm nowadays. Spring wasn’t really a season they’d been able to experience for years - not that Yoongi particularly missed it.
But, it was always a struggle to stay warm. He wasn’t exactly a big man, so the wind always seemed to cut right through his jacket, turning his nose red and making the tips of his ears numb.
The sudden and loud sound of the café door being thrown open made Yoongi jump, and he looked behind himself curiously. Stepping out from the coffee shop holding a coffee cup in one hand and something else in the other, was a man. Bright-eyed and breathless, the man had the type of soft face that seemed to instantly give away what kind of person he was.
He was cute.
No, beautiful.
Wait, definitely cute.
...both? Yeah. Both.
Yoongi hadn’t meant to stare, but apparently he’d done so long enough for the man to catch his gaze. Sucking in a sudden breath, Yoongi almost lost himself in the stranger’s dark eyes. There was something almost hypnotic about how deep and brown they were, yet at the same time they had a razor sharp focus and a deep intensity that made him shiver (this time, not from the cold). Yoongi quickly forced himself to face forward again, breaking the stare as his cheeks reddened in embarrassment.
Just what the hell was he doing, staring at random strangers like he was some mouth breather? Yoongi was supposed to be blending into the background, not attracting attention doing creepy shit like that.
Yoongi picked up his pace.
“Ex… excuse me?”
He heard a soft, timid voice call out. It matched so well with its owner that Yoongi didn’t even have to look back to know who it belonged to.
Startled, Yoongi’s shoulders cinched tightly together.
Was he talking to me?
But then he heard the voice call out again, making it unmistakeable who they were talking to. Still, Yoongi pretended not to notice and continued walking. Only to hear light footsteps behind him.
Yoongi glanced nervously over his shoulder again, only to see that the man was now marching determinedly after him, walking faster to catch Yoongi’s pace.
Shit.
A trickle of sweaty unease rolled down his back, a product of the fear that he’d lived with for such a long time. There was a reason Yoongi barely had any friends. He kept everyone at arm's length, both literally and figuratively. Could anyone blame him? Every single time someone touched him, Yoongi was forced to see things that he could never unsee. And that shit stuck with him. It really did.
Yoongi began to jog away, only breaking out into a full on run when he heard the man begin to run himself.
“I don’t know you! Leave me alone!” Yoongi shouted hoarsely over his shoulder, dropping any and all pretense of looking cool as he sprinted away as fast as he could. In two seconds flat he was already out of breath, and in the back of his mind, he cursed himself for not having put much effort in gym class. It was hard to compete with Mr. Olympic-Track-and-Field, who seemed to be gaining on him with little to no effort.
“Wait! - please - I just -”
Yoongi wheezed, clenching his jaw as a second wind gave him a sudden burst of speed.
“Why are you running?!” The man shouted, barely sounding out of breath.
“Why the hell... are you... chasing me?!” Yoongi shot back.
Yoongi couldn’t even feel the cold anymore, pumping his legs as fast as he could. He rounded a street corner and nearly slammed face first into the nearest light pole if not for throwing out his arms last minute and catching himself. He pushed off of it with his hands, and took off again.
“I just want to give you something!”
“WHATEVER YOU HAVE I DON’T WANT IT!”
“WHAT - YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT I HAVE!”
“JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!” Yoongi shouted over his shoulder.
“Oh-my-god-this-is- insane!” The man shouted back, still running after him like a maniac.
And then, just as it seemed as if Yoongi was finally pulling ahead, the man skidded to a stop and yelled at Yoongi’s back one last time.
“Oh will you just STOP!”
As if his body was compelled by karma to heed the other man’s command and provide comic relief, Yoongi tripped over a crack in the sidewalk, stumbling a few steps before faceplanting into the sidewalk with a loud “oomph”!
“Ow fucking shit fuck fuck …!” Yoongi groaned, rubbing his hand over his face as he slowly pulled himself back onto his knees.
Before Yoongi could gather himself enough to start running again, the stranger closed the distance between them. Balancing his cup in one hand, he pulled Yoongi helpfully onto his feet with a firm strength that Yoongi wasn’t anticipating.
Yoongi jerked himself out of the man’s grip as soon as he was standing steady, silently thanking god that the man had only touched him through his shirt.
“Oh no, are you okay?” The man asked with concern in his voice, stepping back into Yoongi’s bubble as he lifted a hand towards Yoongi’s face. Yoongi reeled his head back and bared his teeth in a grimace.
“Don’t fucking touch me!”
If there was one thing that one could say about Yoongi, it was that despite his relatively small stature, Yoongi could make someone two times his size shit their pants just with his face alone.
Strangely enough, the man didn’t seem the least bit bothered or put off by Yoongi’s death glare. In fact, he seemed more concerned with the scratches on Yoongi’s cheeks than anything else, making one last attempt at touching Yoongi’s face before his fingers were brushed away again. With reddened cheeks, the stranger finally stopped what he was doing and stood back, lifting his hands above his shoulders as if to demonstrate to Yoongi that he wouldn’t touch him again.
“What the fuck do you want?”
“I just… well, I, uh...” the man mumbled with a - was that a pout? He looked down bashfully, and then back up, wordlessly shoving his clenched fist towards Yoongi. “You… you forgot your scarf. At the café.”
Belatedly, Yoongi finally noticed what was balled up in the man’s hand. It was, indeed, his scarf. He blinked slowly.
“........oh.”
Face flaming for having run like a freaking psychopath for no reason, Yoongi reached out to snatch the scarf away. It snagged on the stranger’s fingers though, and as the man instinctively reached out to help unsnag it, he wound up dumping his entire cup of coffee he had been holding onto it, splashing brown liquid all of Yoongi’s grey wool scarf.
“Oh god, I’m so sorry!”
The stranger stepped even closer to tug the now stained scarf out of Yoongi’s hands. Yoongi sucked in a quick breath, one that drew the man’s attention. He looked up at Yoongi and Yoongi found himself staring right back, completely forgetting about his scarf. He really was frustratingly beautiful. Compared to Yoongi who was dressed as he usually was in greys and blacks, the man looked like a peacock on a perch - feathers all puffed up and pleasing to the eye in a way that naturally demanded one’s attention. And Yoongi noticed, now that he was close enough to see the man’s face, that he had one of those faces that mothers always warned their young daughters away from - don’t let him break your heart, now! But honestly it’d be impossible to ignore him, not when he looked and smiled at you as if you were the only person in the world that mattered in that moment.
Strangely enough, there was something vaguely familiar about it too. As if he’d seen that handsome face before. In a magazine, maybe? It wouldn’t surprise Yoongi if the man was some kind of model of some sort. Either way, deja vu.
“Do... I know you?” He found himself asking, only to become acutely aware of the stranger’s now sharpened gaze and the small smile that twitched onto his lips. As if Yoongi had said something particularly humorous.
Actually, maybe Yoongi had. He had no idea why he’d even said that to begin with.
Heart skipping a beat, Yoongi looked away and jerked his hands back towards himself, shifting awkwardly away.
“Ugh, jesus. I’m sorry. I’m having a weird morning.”
The man leaned in just a fraction closer, the smile on his face growing.
“My name’s Jimin. What’s yours?” He whispered, with a voice like silk.
For whatever reason, despite how strange the circumstances were, Yoongi felt compelled to answer honestly, stammering out his name shyly before looking away.
“Well, Yoongi. Has anyone told you you’re beautiful?” Jimin said softly. Yoongi could feel Jimin’s cool breath against his hot cheeks, making them become even more red.
Yoongi had never felt such a visceral reaction towards another person before. He hated people with a passion, and had ever since his power had developed. No matter how much his mother wheedled him about it, he’d had absolutely no interest in finding a girlfriend (or a boyfriend) before. He was therefore, by circumstance, a virgin, but that hadn’t ever bothered him too terribly. After all, it was understandably hard to stomach any kind of intimate touch when all you could see was how horribly your partner would die.
Weirdly enough though, none of those thoughts popped up in Yoongi’s head as he considered the man in front of him. Instead, what thoughts he did have weren’t entirely pure. (Like how plush and kissable those lips looked. God, what the hell was going on with him today?!)
The man - Jimin - took his silence for what it was, and leaned back with a blush.
“I’m sorry, I must be coming off a little strong, aren’t I? You probably just think I’m a creep, chasing you down like that,” Jimin said with a bashful laugh, smoothing back his hair in a way that was far too distracting. “I swear I’m not some kind of psycho murderer or anything - although I guess me saying that isn’t very reassuring, is it?”
“Um, right...” Yoongi started hoarsely before clearing his throat and wetting his dry lips with his tongue (was it just him or was Jimin glancing down at his lips when he did that?). “I-I should probably go.”
Before he could make even more of a fool of himself, Yoongi yanked the scarf out of Jimin’s hands and turned around to leave. But fingers encircled his (thankfully covered) wrist and tugged him gently back.
“Wait, let me take it,” Jimin said, tugging the scarf away from Yoongi. “It’s my fault that it got dirty, so let me have it properly cleaned as an apology and I’ll return it to you in person.”
“...return it?”
“Yeah. And then maybe we can go out for a drink or something. Would that be alright with you? Actually, let me just give you my contact info. You have a phone on you, right? Give it to me.”
Without thinking, Yoongi pulled his phone out of his coat pocket, only to have it stolen away by Jimin who began to enter his own contact info into it.
“How’s Thursday work for you?” He asked. “You don’t have anything going on, do you?”
Yoongi blinked, and Jimin looked over.
“I… I’m not reading things wrong, am I?” Jimin asked, with the puppiest of all puppy dog eyes that Yoongi couldn’t look away from.
Oh, Yoongi thought to himself dumbfoundedly, I think he’s trying to ask me on a date.
“Uh, well, no, but…”
“Great!” Jimin exclaimed, bulldozing through any of Yoongi’s potential protests with a loud enthusiasm. “Let’s plan on meeting tomorrow then. Do you know the big fountain in old town? The one in the park right across the street from the movie theater?”
Jimin flashed him a 1000 watt smile, and Yoongi (whose brain was now mush) could do nothing but nod dumbly.
“It’s a date then,” Jimin said to him, confirming all too clearly what Yoongi had thought. “I can’t wait to see you then!”
And just like that, Yoongi found himself agreeing to a date with a man he’d only just met.
-
The next few days seemed to crawl and fly by at the same time.
Yoongi spent the vast majority of it worrying.
He spent hours staring at the wall, drumming his fingers against his desk. Staring at his dirty clothes spinning in a hypnotic circle, biting at his nails and jiggling his leg to the drone of the late night laundromat. Stirring coffee that wasn’t even warm anymore, banging his warm forehead against the cool refrigerator door.
On one hand, Jimin was by far the most attractive guy that had ever paid that kind of attention to Yoongi, even if that list itself was one that was very short. Yoongi had virtually no experience with dating, and the idea of either fucking something up and making a complete ass of himself was just as anxiety inducing as the idea that he’d only feel disappointed and let down by a date he’d built up so much in his mind.
On the other hand, he knew he really should have been more put off by the fact that he’d agreed to a date with some dude who had chased him down the street. It almost felt like a scene ripped out of some 80s slasher movie, and he could already hear his mother yelling at him, boxing his ear for even entertaining a conversation with a stranger in that kind of circumstance.
But there was something so different about Jimin. Yoongi couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but the fact still remained that he just… was.
Yoongi wiped his sweaty palms on his pants, staring intensely down at his phone in a sorry attempt to distract himself as he sat perched on the edge of the fountain.
Swiping blindly at his screen and resisting the urge to bite his nails, Yoongi found himself nearly scrolling right past a news article that caught his eye. Yoongi’s leg stopped jiggling, and he scrolled up slowly until the title reappeared back on his screen.
COMMUTER TRAIN DERAILED TUESDAY AFTERNOON BY JUMPER, 15 DEAD, 10 CRITICAL CONDITION!!! -- the sensationalist title read.
It was a couple of days old, but that was besides the point. Yoongi tapped into it, glossing over the details in his search for any identifying names or images of the victims. Of course, there wasn’t much more said about them other than their status, so Yoongi wasn’t entirely sure if Jungkook was involved. He could only hope that Jungkook had taken his advice.
Fuck.
Yoongi shivered as the image of the barista’s broken, mangled body popped up again in his head. He closed his eyes, grimacing and willing the image out of sight and out of mind.
Just then, something touched his shoulder.
Yoongi opened his eyes and jumped to his feet, looking to see Jimin leaning over where Yoongi had been sitting with a hand outstretched.
The other man blinked, straightening up with a pleasant smile.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t spook you, did I?” He asked, in that honeyed voice of his. “I just was so happy to see you here.”
Yoongi’s dark thoughts faded quietly away into the back of his mind at the sound of the other man’s soothing voice. Staring into the other man’s earnest eyes and feeling the genuine concern and care that seemed to seep out of his every pore, Yoongi couldn’t help but to feel his lips twitch into a small, crooked smile.
“Nah,” he said with what he hoped came off as an indifferent shrug, “it’s nothing.”
“...oh, okay.”
For a second or two, the two of them shifted awkwardly around each other, not knowing what else to say to move forward with the conversation. Jimin broke the silence first. Scratching the back of his head, lips pressed together into a thin line, he looked so deep in thought for a moment that it spooked Yoongi when he suddenly stuck his hand out. The paper bag Yoongi hadn’t even noticed that Jimin had been holding crinkled when it collided against Yoongi’s chest. Yoongi took it carefully out of Jimin’s hands, opening it up with his gloved hands and peering down into it. There it was. Just his scarf, looking clean and smelling fresh, folded with great care and tucked neatly into the very bottom of the bag.
“...thanks,” Yoongi said with another small smile. He pulled the scarf out of the bag, starting to loop it around his bare neck before small fingers tugged the fabric out of his hands.
“Here, let me.”
Yoongi still didn’t know why he let the other man get so close. He barely knew the man. He was a stranger, by all accounts.
But he let Jimin do it all the same. Let him step so close that he could feel Jimin’s breath against his cheeks. Let him drape the soft fabric around his neck, let him wind it around Yoongi’s thin neck with such care that it made Yoongi’s cheeks redden.
Jimin’s fingers seemed to linger as if not wanting to let go, holding onto the fringes of the scarf for what felt like ages before finally pulling away.
Only then, the breath Yoongi hadn’t known he’d been holding finally expelled itself slowly from his mouth. He blinked the spots out of his eyes, burying the lower half of his face into the warmth of his scarf and breathing in. It still smelled like soap or detergent. And then there was a hint of cologne on it too - one that probably cost much more than Yoongi could ever justify affording for himself.
“Um,” Jimin said with an awkward laugh, drawing Yoongi out of his thoughts, “is now still a good time? I know I was being a little pushy last time.”
That was a good question. Was it a good time? Did it really make sense for him to be there right now when the only thing that tied him and this stranger together thus far was a scarf?
Jimin shook his head, looking down at his feet during Yoongi’s silent reflection.
“I’m sorry,” Jimin mumbled, “I just - when I saw you for the first time, it was hard to concentrate on anything else. I’m super chatty, and my nerves just got the best of me. I swear I’m usually less awkward. It’s just, I got so nervous. Do you know what I mean?”
Yes. Yes he did. Not that Yoongi would ever tell him that.
“Agh, sorry, I’m doing it again! Anyway, uh, we can meet at another time or, you know, I can just … leave, if you’d like.”
“...do you want to?”
“...no.”
Yoongi wondered if the man knew the effect he had on people and used it to his advantage, or if the man really was as irritatingly endearing as he appeared to be. Either way, the outcome was the same.
Yoongi snorted, swiping his nose coolly and looking away as if he wasn’t affected. Still, what came out of his mouth was:
“Fine. Why don’t we grab a drink?”
Jimin peeked over at him.
“...just one?”
“If you can keep my attention, I might stick around for two.”
“...I can work with that!”
Jimin brightened up visibly, and with another amused snort Yoongi thought to himself - if this boy had a tail, it’d be wagging.
He was so easy to read, this one. Easily pleased, and eager to please, looking absolutely delighted every time Yoongi even looked his way.
But every closet had its skeletons, and Yoongi intended to find Jimin’s, if only to prove to himself that love wasn’t meant for someone like himself.
Or at least - that had been the plan.
But three drinks in and several surprisingly long, deep conversations afterward, and Yoongi found himself uncharacteristically invested in a man he’d only just met the day before. It was a very strange happenstance, the circumstances in which they’d met, but Yoongi couldn’t seem to think of why he’d been anxious about it before.
Not when Jimin made it so easy to just… relax. Even have a little fun.
And it was genuine too - never forced. Yoongi appreciated that more than anything.
Maybe mother was right, that there was real joy to be had in connecting with someone on that kind of level. He’d never believed it in the past because he had always been irritable by nature and too stubbornly unforgiving of other people’s flaws to appreciate real human connection. But conversation flowed so naturally between the two of them that there was never a dull moment. Even if just for a moment, Yoongi forgot about the weight on his shoulders. Talking with Jimin - it felt right and made him feel as normal as someone like him could ever be.
Sitting at the bar, the hours flew by, and at the end of it, it felt as if they’d known each other for years. The physical distance between them gradually closed with every minute. At first, under the pretense of not being able to hear each other over the noise of the crowd. But when night turned into morning and the crowd thinned out, it never struck Yoongi that he should move away.
It only caught Yoongi off guard when he took a drink of his mojito, laughing into the glass at one of Jimin’s stupid jokes and sending liquid splashing back onto his face. He set the glass down, looking around for something to wipe his face.
But his companion was already reaching toward him with a napkin.
Yoongi froze in shock, pupils dilating as his alcohol addled brain attempted to kickstart his body back into motion. But his body refused to move - at least not in time to avoid the bare fingers that were about to brush up against his face.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck!
All the optimism that had settled around him fell away, and within an instant, the fear came crawling back. Yoongi scrunched his eyes shut and braced for the very worst.
...except that nothing came.
Everything was silent.
And there was nothing… at all. Nothing.
Breath quivering and lips trembling, Yoongi’s eyes fluttered slowly open, only to find that once again, Jimin was the only one he could see. Jimin’s hand was still on his face, stroking his cheek with gentle fingers, the touch so feather light that Yoongi couldn’t help but to fixate on it.
“Can I kiss you, Yoongi?” Jimin whispered softly to him, already leaning in.
Oh, and for the life of him, Yoongi couldn’t say a single thing to stop him.
Because when he felt only the press of soft, warm lips against his own for the very first time, Yoongi stopped thinking about anything at all.
His eyes fluttered back shut.
-
Yoongi took Jimin home that night. And the night after. And the night after that. And so on and so on, until eventually he never left.
Initially, he’d been nervous about the whole thing. Again, Yoongi had never been in a relationship before. Nor had he lived with anyone for that matter - other than his mother, of course. And even with her, he’d kept his physical distance as much as he could, not wanting to be reminded of the frightening shit he’d seen as a kid.
But he never had to worry about that with Jimin.
Good thing, that. Jimin was the most physically affectionate person he’d ever met. He never seemed to be able to get very far away from Yoongi, always plastered against his side or wrapped around his back, nuzzling into his neck while watching movies on the couch, or hugging Yoongi tightly in his sleep like a goddamn koala bear.
He didn’t know why it was that Jimin didn’t trigger his… power (god, he hated calling it that, sounded so fucking lame), but he didn’t want to question it. For a while, Yoongi foolishly thought he’d just grown out of it, and that Jimin had just been the first person he’d touched since.
So, a few days after their first date, he’d experimented by finally allowing himself to buy hotdogs from the stand he’d always eyed. The only reason he’d never bought from there before was because the owner was the energetic, noisy type, who always asked too many questions and always leaned in too close. He ordered a hotdog with all the toppings, and sure enough, when he held out his cash for payment, the man practically grabbed his entire hand.
He nearly threw up afterwards, losing his appetite completely and chucking the hotdog completely untouched into the nearest dumpster. He couldn’t touch ground meat at all for at least a week, and all of it was because he couldn’t not think about the bloody pulp that had been left of the hot dog stand man.
So, it really was just Jimin.
Yoongi tossed around wild theories in his head. Maybe Jimin would live a life longer than even his power could foresee. But he’d seen plenty of natural deaths before, and based off of how old some of the folks he’d seen in his visions had been, he didn’t think that could be it. Maybe he had the same powers as Yoongi? But that couldn’t be it. He never flinched when he touched anyone (unless he’d trained himself not to, but Yoongi seriously doubted it). Hell. Maybe he was a vampire. God, he’d been watching too many horror movies lately. But on the other hand, it wasn’t as if vampires couldn’t exist in a world where people had the power to fucking foretell the future, right?
Either way, Jimin never gave him the impression that he was any different from any other person, except that he was in all the best ways.
Dating Jimin was just so damn easy. Yoongi didn’t have to try and change himself, which he thought he’d have to do if he ever did eventually get himself a romantic partner. Jimin was his complete opposite, cheery when Yoongi was sullen, always optimistic and hopeful about the world in stark contrast to Yoongi’s natural pessimism and apathy. He was loving, and caring, and he always put a smile on Yoongi’s face, which wasn’t always the easiest thing to do. Whenever a particularly gruesome vision of death struck Yoongi, Jimin never asked him any questions about why he would become so moody and withdrawn. But he’d still sit with Yoongi on the couch and hold him until he felt better, something which Yoongi hadn’t known that he’d needed until it had happened.
Time and time again, Jimin proved himself to be as beautiful on the inside as he was on the outside, and there wasn’t a single damn day that Yoongi didn’t count his blessings.
He wasn’t anything special, certainly not as beautiful as Jimin always told him he was.
But being with Jimin made him feel like he was. Being with Jimin made him feel like he could be vulnerable without having to worry about the consequences. Because he was Yoongi first and foremost. Everything else - his looks, his circumstances, his powers - didn’t matter at all in the long term.
Because Jimin loved him all the same.
So Yoongi gradually stopped wearing his long sleeved shirts and gloves. He stopped covering up his face with face masks and baseball caps, and he started to believe Jimin’s words - that there was nothing he should be afraid of. At least, not when Jimin was around.
Sometimes they would spend hours in bed, just holding hands and staring at each other without saying a word. Other times, they would sit on the couch and talk quietly for an hour, Yoongi thumbing the worn pages of a book he’d read many times, Jimin scrolling through his Instagram feed with one hand, idly stroking Yoongi’s leg with the other.
And it was in those soft moments that Yoongi thought to himself - damn, I think I’m in love.
Without question, he knew Jimin loved him back. God, the man told him that every single minute of every single day.
But he couldn’t say it himself.
The words always caught themselves on his tongue and his teeth. Maybe it was because of his inexperience or maybe it was because of his insecurities, but he still hadn’t.
He would, but, not quite yet.
It wasn’t always great.
For someone who looked like a ball of marshmallow fluff, Jimin could be real possessive, and his jealousy streak, when invoked, was just a little disconcerting. It was never directed at him, but he could see the murderous looks Jimin shot at anyone who even spoke to Yoongi, whether it was a stranger just asking for directions or every damn waiter that wound up taking Yoongi’s order. In those moments, when Jimin’s hands would ball up into fists and his jaw tightened in a dark grimace, Yoongi thought Jimin a lot more like him than his usual self. Made Yoongi wonder if this was how most people saw him.
Yoongi put up with it. It didn’t really frighten him (he didn’t think Jimin ever would), and he didn’t like socializing with strangers anyway, preferring Jimin’s company over anyone else’s on any given day. It was also true that because he hadn’t had very many friends, he hadn’t ever really been told by anyone else before what a ‘normal’ relationship was supposed to be like. So this was his normal.
For what it was worth, he liked it. Specifically, he liked that Jimin made him feel things. And it was new, and exciting, and fulfilling - to be able to hold someone’s hand for once, to let someone touch you on the shoulder, feel the weight of their hand on the small of his back, the warmth of their lips against your skin.
Maybe if he’d had relationships before, he’d have felt differently. But he hadn’t.
He was content. Because he was sure that there was no one out there that he’d love more than he loved Jimin. And there was no one out there either, he thought, who could love him as completely as Jimin obviously did.
-
Yoongi had never wanted to tell him, but Jimin eventually caught on.
It all started off as an accident.
Yoongi had been waiting his turn at the meat counter of their local grocery store - Jimin had wandered off a few minutes ago in search of some boxed Mac ‘n Cheese, leaving Yoongi to get the pound of the meat that Jimin needed to make some of his famous homemade burgers. Distracted for a moment by the disgusting ground meat that always conjured up bad images of hot-dog-man, he’d carelessly allowed his fingers to brush against the butcher’s when the man handed the carefully wrapped package of meat over. Foolishly, Yoongi hadn’t been wearing his gloves. He hadn’t for a few months, so comfortable with Jimin that he hadn’t felt the need to.
So he was almost knocked off his feet by the strength of the vision that slammed into his head, the first he’d had in a very long time. By the time it was over, Yoongi had to take a step back to keep his balance, blinking away the spots out of his eyes as he readjusted back to the sterile white of the fluorescent lights.
“You alright there, bud?”
With a look of horror, Yoongi stared at the man in front of him for a moment. Then, all of a sudden, he surged forward, grabbing the man by his lapels and dragging him half over the counter. The man swore, wearing a face of surprise and shock.
“Don’t drink that bottle of whiskey before you leave today. Do you hear me?! Don’t do it!”
“What the hell- are you insane?!”
“You’ve got one under the counter, right? Next to the gloves? Whatever you do, don’t drink it!”
“How the fuck did you…? Hey, get your fucking hands off of me!”
“If you drink that and drive home, you’re going to kill that little girl and her mom -”
“... Yoongi?”
Reality sank back in like an anchor. Suddenly feeling the burn of shame and humiliation, Yoongi let go of the butcher abruptly, letting the man rock backward on his heel. The man was still swearing up a storm at Yoongi, cussing him out and threatening him, but Yoongi was too busy being transfixed by the shock and the concern on Jimin’s face to even notice.
“Yoongi, what’s going on?” Jimin asked.
Sweat was rolling down his forehead. Yoongi’s throat closed off completely, the room slowly beginning to spin as the colors began to blend together.
Oh god. Oh god oh god no no no no.
“I’ll tell you what’s going on, your fucking boyfriend tweaked out on whatever drugs he’s on and started acting like a complete lunatic, ranting and raving and saying all this crazy shit -”
Yoongi wasn’t in the right state of mind to take in his surroundings, but whatever expression was on Jimin’s face was one that silenced the butcher immediately. Yoongi found himself pushed protectively behind his boyfriend.
“Don’t you dare call him that,” Jimin snarled.
“That’s it, I’m calling my fucking supervisor. I don’t get paid enough to deal with some junkie and his boyfriend.”
Oh god.
“Hey!! Watch your fucking mouth, you don’t even know the first thing about him, you -”
“- I don’t need to! He has a fucking problem, I mean just look at him, he looks like he’s going to have an epileptic fit -”
“Point at my boyfriend one last time and I will beat the smile off your face -”
Oh god, I feel like I’m going to puke.
“So you’re threatening me, now?”
“I said leave him the fuck alone!!”
The room started swirling, and his vision was spinning, spinning, spinning.
“Fine. I’m calling the cops then. I’m doing it!! I’m ---”
“--- not sure what happened, officer. He hasn’t been sleeping well lately so I think the insomnia might have been affecting him a little bit. Anyway, he didn’t mean anything by it, I swear.”
“Insomniac or not, that doesn’t mean that either you or your boyfriend can go around grabbing random folks and threatening them with physical violence.
I get that you wanted to protect your boyfriend, and since this is your first run in with the law, I’ll let you off with a warning this time. Your boyfriend, though… well, this isn’t the first time.”
“...what do you mean by that?”
“This isn’t the first time someone’s called the police on him. He’s been involved in multiple cases of public disturbances, and this time I’m afraid I’m going to have to take him into -”
“Wait wait wait, officer, please, could you reconsider? His mental state hasn’t been the best lately because… because someone in his family died recently. And he’s been under a lot of stress.
We’ve been taking him to see a counselor, but these types of emotional wounds take some time to heal, so… maybe you could cut him a little slack?”
“Is that right...? Well... my condolences to him and his family, then. Alright, he can go home tonight with you. Just make sure he gets some sleep tonight and stays out of trouble next time, alright?”
“Yes, definitely. Thank you officer, thank you so much.”
The sound of footsteps grew closer and closer to Yoongi until he could see a familiar pair of shoes enter his vision. He didn’t even bother looking up to see who it was.
A soft sigh.
“Come on Yoongi, let’s go home.”
The car ride back was almost completely silent, peppered only with the quiet toc-toc-tocing of the car’s turn signal and the quiet robotic voice of Jimin’s GPS.
Yoongi sat feeling paralyzed in the passenger seat. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would have made what he’d done seem any less crazy, and he knew just how bad it had looked. Frankly, he didn’t even want to look Jimin in the eye, too humiliated by his own nervous breakdown and still shaken from what he’d seen.
Still, it was hard to deny how oppressive the mood felt in the car.
When they were a few minutes away from the apartment, Jimin leaned back, slowly braking at the red light in front of him before propping his head up against the side of the door with his arm. His other hand remained on the steering wheel, tapping a steady rhythm against it with his fingers.
“Are you going to tell me what happened in there?” Jimin finally asked, as they continued to wait for the light to turn green.
“It’s… hard to explain. I - … yeah. I don’t know.”
Jimin looked over.
“You know,” he said in a tone that made it seem like he was talking about something completely normal like the weather, “the cop told me that this wasn’t the first time they’ve seen you around.”
Yoongi stayed silent, and Jimin eventually sighed.
“Are you sure there isn’t something you want to tell me?”
Yoongi sank slowly into his seat, digging his fingers into his hair as if he could tear out from it whatever it was inside of him that made him feel this way.
“Fuck - Jimin. Please, don’t make me.”
“Why can’t you, Yoongi? You can tell me anything. You know I’ll always be on your side.”
Yoongi shook his head.
“- it’s not about picking sides! It’s just that you’d…” Yoongi trailed off.
...it’s just that you’d think I was crazy. You wouldn’t love me anymore, if I told you. You would leave me, and then I’d be all alone again.
“You… just wouldn’t understand.”
“Yoongi, you -”
“Please, Jimin.”
The gate to the parking garage of Jimin’s apartment complex squealed slowly open, and as they waited, Jimin turned in his seat to stare at him. Yoongi stubbornly refused to meet his gaze. Jimin’s eyes dulled, and he turned back to face the wheel with a soft exhale.
“...fine.”
As soon as he’d parked the car in his usual spot, Jimin turned off the ignition, unbuckling his seatbelt and stepping quickly out of the car without another word to his companion. Coming out of anyone else, and Yoongi wouldn’t have cared. But the thing about Jimin was that he never seemed to get angry - at least, not in the way most people did.
He wasn’t the type to slam doors, or shout, or get violent. But that just made it sting even more, when Jimin wouldn’t even acknowledge him. It was as if someone had turned off the heater in the dead of winter, plunging him into the freezing cold without any warning.
Groaning, Yoongi roughly wiped the sweat from his face, stumbling out of the car a second later and slamming the door shut in his rush to catch up with his lover.
Jimin still refused to look at him, even when Yoongi was beside him, and it just made Yoongi so angry , to know that he’d done this to himself.
Yoongi hadn’t wanted this. He hadn’t ever wanted Jimin to even know. But he’d lost himself in that moment, just like he had on so many countless occasions in the past, and it crushed Yoongi - absolutely obliterated him - that this stupid fucking power of his was taking away the one good thing in his goddamn life.
He hated to admit it, but he craved Jimin’s acceptance and love. He could have saved a hundred and one people from their deaths, and none of it would have made a difference if Jimin wouldn’t look at him. All he wanted was the man to turn around and face him - to do what he always did and hug him and to tell him that it was going to be alright. And he knew he’d believe it, because Jimin always had a way of making him feel better no matter what.
Staring at Jimin’s stiffened back, Yoongi realized at that very moment that he was losing Jimin.
The elevator in the parking garage announced its arrival with a startling loud ping. The metal doors slid open with a squeal, flooding the garage with a piss yellow blinking light that buzzed away in the ceiling.
Jimin stepped forward, but Yoongi caught him before he could get onto the elevator, wrapping his arms around Jimin’s thin waist and burying his head into Jimin’s back.
“I’m sorry,” Yoongi muttered, wincing when his voice cracked but still forcing the words from his lips. “I’m sorry, don’t be angry at me.”
Finally, after what felt like ages, Jimin turned around in his embrace with a sigh. Yoongi found himself being held closely against Jimin’s chest. A soft kiss was pressed against his cheek.
“Oh, baby. I’m never angry at you. Never you. I’m just… frustrated I can’t help you. That’s all,” Jimin said.
Oh thank god. Yoongi found himself breaking down again, this time in relief as he dug deeper into Jimin’s embrace. He pressed his face against Jimin’s warm collarbone, letting the tears seep through the thin fabric of Jimin’s shirt.
“I’m sorry anyway,” he muttered, wanting so badly for Jimin to understand just how truly sorry he was. Not just for what had happened that night, but for dragging Jimin into his life. It hadn’t been a very happy life, before they’d met. It’d made Yoongi hurt, made him see things he would never be able to unsee, made him feel hopeless and scared and alone.
Deep down, he’d wanted to tell Jimin from the very first day. He wanted to get this weight off his chest and to share with Jimin as much as Jimin had shared with him. But the idea of Jimin leaving him had always frightened him away in the past. But the question now was if it was better to continue keeping it a secret, and to have this rift driven permanently between them - or if it really was worth the risk to try.
In the end, Jimin made the decision for him, speaking into Yoongi’s ear in that sweet voice that Yoongi had grown to cherish.
“Tell me, please?”
-
He did. Not immediately, but later, when he’d had a moment to compose himself. Later that day, the two of them sat on the opposite sides of the bed. Hugging his knees to his chest, Yoongi began to tell him. It wasn’t really organized. In his head he’d planned it all out in a way that he’d hoped was believable, but when the words began to tumble out of his lips, they seemed to spill out uncontrollably, jumping bewilderingly between moments in time and events - visions - that had occurred.
What he’d planned to be a short discussion turned out to be hours , and by the end of it, the sky was dark and his head was pounding.
He couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t hear anything other than his own labored breaths, sounding so loud in his own head that he could barely think.
And he braced. He braced for the worst. For Jimin to laugh at him, to call him crazy, to tell him that he needed help.
But Jimin was always proving him wrong.
Instead of laughing, Jimin slowly made his way across the bed, the soft sound of the man’s clothing brushing up against the sheets making Yoongi shiver. Jimin pulled Yoongi’s head from his hands, gently brushing away Yoongi’s half-hearted resistance before gathering the man inside his arms. He held Yoongi to him, as closely as he could, and told him quietly - I believe you.
It was soft. Sincere.
The very first time Yoongi had ever heard those words out of anyone before.
It was hard to describe how Yoongi felt in that moment. All he knew was that in the next moment, he was sobbing against Jimin’s shoulder, the tension finally leaking out of his body. Finally, someone knew. Someone knew, and someone understood. Everything inside of him ached - a happy kind of ache - and the relief he felt had him falling to pieces. But Jimin was there to pick him up, to put him back together, to tell him that it’d be alright - and when he said it would be, it was impossible to believe anything else.
God, he loved this man. Loved him so much.
Later, when they had progressed to having sex on top of the sheets, Yoongi found himself looking up and admiring the only person in the world he’d ever loved in that capacity before. Hair slicked back and dripping wet with sweat, it was hard not for Yoongi to find him gorgeous. He was lucky, so lucky, and although he often wondered just why it was Jimin had chosen to love him out of all the other people in the world, he didn’t doubt for a single second just how strongly Jimin loved him back.
Besides the way he held Yoongi, the way he treated Yoongi as if he were something precious, there was also that almost terrifying intensity in Jimin’s eyes when he looked at Yoongi, one filled to bursting with the type of adoration that made Yoongi groan and go a little cross-eyed.
It also didn’t help that Jimin was an absolute beast in bed. He always had Yoongi’s toes curling in the sheets and his fingers scratching bloody trails down Jimin’s back.
He was so blinded by all of it that when Jimin whispered the words into his ear, he thought nothing of it. It felt soft, romantic. So characteristically Jimin of a gesture. But for some reason, a deeper part of Yoongi’s subconscious found itself feeling unsettled. And that part of him, twisted and broken, wouldn’t understand why until it was far too late.
“You’re mine.”
-
They still occasionally went to the same cafe where they’d first ‘met’. Not as frequently now that Yoongi had practically moved into Jimin’s apartment and was able to take full advantage of Jimin’s fancy espresso machine - but they still went out of their way to get a coffee every now and then, even if it was mainly for nostalgia.
“I’ll get our coffees. Why don’t you grab us a seat?”
“Are you sure? I can come with you.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, I’ll be fine for the two seconds we’re not together, Jimin. Now go get us a damn table.”
“...fine, but only if you let me pay. Take my card. Here. Here. Here. Take it. Yoongi, take it.”
“Jesus christ you insufferable brat, fine, I’m taking it, fuckin’ leave me alone already!”
“Love you too. Hurry back to me, okay?”
Yoongi’s ears were still steaming red by the time he stepped up to the counter, and he rubbed at the back of his head to distract himself. God, Jimin was always so affectionate in public. Not that Yoongi didn’t secretly like that, but still…
“A grande americano and a large iced mocha frappuccino, please.”
“Sure. Can I get a name?”
That wasn’t a voice he recognized.
Yoongi blinked. He finally glanced up, only to find that there was a girl he’d never seen before standing behind the counter. He furrowed his eyebrows.
“You’re not the usual cashier…?”
“Oh, I’m new! I started last month. Are you a regular?” The girl asked with a bright smile.
“Uh, yeah, I guess,” He muttered, leaning to the side to look past her for a moment. “Where’s Jungkook? Did he quit or something?”
Almost immediately, the woman froze, staring at him for a moment. Her smile, wide and beaming, looked stiff and wooden for a few seconds before it fell away completely. She opened her mouth several times as if to talk, only to click it back shut again as she began to turn a pale white.
Had he said something wrong?
He didn’t know what he’d done to offend her, but he didn’t know what to do about it either, stuck between wanting to ask if she was okay and demanding her just to spit out whatever it was that she seemed unwilling to say.
She glanced behind her at her coworkers. The two others - also both girls - had been quietly preparing orders in the background, but when they had noticed what was happening, they both stopped and looked over, exchanging a meaningful look with each other.
“What’s wrong?” Yoongi finally asked hoarsely, wetting his suddenly dry lips with his tongue. “Did I say something?”
“You didn’t hear…?” One of the baristas finally piped up. Yoongi stared blankly at her, vaguely recalling her as the one that usually worked on to-go orders. He also recognized her companion, small and mousey with a short bob. He’d seen them both around before, even if he didn’t know them quite as well as he’d known Jungkook.
“Jungkook died a month ago. He had a heart attack while restocking,” the barista said before inclining her head towards the cashier. “Yerin was the one who found him in the back room.”
Yerin ducked her head down, eyes looking big and watery all of a sudden.
“Oh come on, Yerin. There was nothing you could do,” the other barista said comfortingly.
Still, her lips trembled and she let out a soft sob, stuttering her way through an apology before turning tail and running toward the employee bathroom. The barista with the short hair followed after her, calling out her name, leaving the remaining girl to step up to the cash register.
She rang him up quietly, announcing his total before reaching her hand out to take his card - only to find that he wouldn’t let it go. She looked up to see him standing there frozen, a look of shock clear on his face.
“Hey... you okay?” She asked him kindly.
No. No, that… that couldn’t be.
“A heart attack? ...at his age?” Yoongi muttered, feeling a bead of sweat slide down his forehead as the room began to spin around him. He closed his eyes for a minute, reaching forward to stabilize himself against the counter.
“Yeah, it’s shocking isn’t it? Eunha thought that maybe it was something that ran in the family. His mother actually came by last week to pick up some of his things. It was awful. We all cried.”
No, he had… he had stopped it from happening, hadn’t he? Then… then why…
“I asked the owner if we could do anything for her because I know he was an only child and his father wasn’t around, but…”
The sound of the transaction being completed fell on deaf ears.
Frankly, he was locked in a state of shock until Jimin’s credit card was pressed back into his hands, and without really thinking he took it between his numb fingers, stepping backward away from the counter. He was aware that she was still talking to him, but he couldn’t hear a single thing over the roar in his head. The only thing he could think of was what he’d seen, that one day when Jungkook and he had touched. He’d seen Jungkook’s mangled, cold body. The blaring of the subway train horn. The tracks streaked red with blood. And Jungkook’s handsome face, pale and still with those unseeing eyes that had haunted him for long, long nights - it - it couldn’t be -
“Hey, your receipt…?”
Without bothering to respond, Yoongi staggered away, blindly searching through the crowd for the only thing that could ground him right then in that moment - that one familiar face. When he finally found Jimin, tucked away in the same corner that Yoongi always used to sit in, Yoongi stumbled up to his side, saying absolutely nothing as he pressed his body as physically close as he could to Jimin’s side.
Jimin looked up at him, that ecstatic smile on his face that he always had when he saw Yoongi quickly fading as he read the expression on Yoongi’s face.
“Yoongi?” Jimin asked hoarsely. “What’s wrong, baby?”
An ugly, raw emotion flickered onto Yoongi’s face for just a second. He wasn’t sure what it was - couldn’t even make sense of what he was even feeling in the moment - but it was apparently alarming enough for Jimin to jump onto his feet as fast as he could, making the wooden legs of his chair squeal violently against the ground. Yoongi flinched at the sound, anxiety skyrocketing as he struggled to breathe past the tightness in his chest.
Jimin put his hands on Yoongi’s shoulder, speaking to him in a hushed tone.
“What happened - did someone touch you? Did you see something again?”
As if just realizing where he was, Yoongi blinked a few times before shaking his head dazedly. His eyes darted around the room, seeing the blurry shapes of people as they turned to stare at the two of them with those fucking dead eyes.
“Are you feeling overstimulated again?”
Yoongi bit his lip tightly, nodding just once before forcing his mouth to open.
“Can we… can we leave, Jimin? I… don’t feel too good.”
And Jimin, who seemed to care more about Yoongi than Yoongi cared about himself, readily agreed. He didn’t say anything about their coffees or the waste of money, didn’t question Yoongi about his sudden panic attack or the circumstances which had brought it on. Instead, he grabbed their things and threw his other arm around Yoongi’s shoulder, letting Yoongi lean against his side. They walked slowly out of the cafe as if nothing was wrong, and although Yoongi’s mind was still slipping in and out of anxiety, he breathed a sigh of relief when he realized that everyone else was turning back to their own conversations.
Jimin was so good to him. A caring, honest, decent man.
One Yoongi didn’t think he’d ever deserved - especially not in his darkest of moments. Especially not that night, when he lay on his side in the bed for hours, still and unresponsive.
But Jimin never left him, and the warmth of Jimin’s body pressed up against his back and the steady breath against his neck was enough to ground him. To bring him slowly back from the brink.
He knew Jimin felt his pain, even if Jimin didn’t understand it. And the Yoongi who had been crying out for help was willing to share it, if only to give himself over to the sleep that he knew he needed.
He counted Jimin’s deep breaths against the back of his neck, allowing his eyes to flutter closed with a finality that made him almost want to weep.
-
Jimin told him it was going to be alright. Jimin held him close and kissed him. Let him shake and shiver in his arms. But although Yoongi could appreciate his lover for everything he did, deep down he couldn’t shake that feeling that something wasn’t right. That something wasn’t okay.
It was nothing more than a hunch at the beginning, but that seed of insecurity, once planted, grew steadily and steadily until it overshadowed the comfort of Jimin’s words.
He had to know for himself.
So he called the only person who might have the answer.
“God, I haven’t seen or heard from you in years. It felt like you just... disappeared. Where the hell have you been?”
Yoongi looked down at his lap, picking nervously at his nails and worrying his lip between his teeth.
The man sitting across from Yoongi had a soft voice and a handsome face that reminded Yoongi of Jimin. But unlike the level of intimacy he shared with Jimin, he barely knew the man in front of him. Not anymore, at least.
There had been a time when Jin and he had been close. Highschool felt like another lifetime at this point, but he still remembered the long afternoons spent in the classroom together with Jin, piling over the same workbook to copy each other’s answers, eating instant ramen out of a cup and laughing quietly to themselves.
He’d been more naive then. Less jaded and more careless.
So careless, in fact, that he’d made the mistake of touching Jin’s arm once, one day, after basketball practice.
He didn’t entirely remember what happened afterward - only that it ended with Jin’s broken nose and him puking into the nearest trash can.
He visited Jin in the hospital later that week, and he did what he had determined was the right thing to do at the time. He crushed up some of the pills he’d been described by his own doctors, and mixed them into Jin’s hospital food tray when the other boy wasn’t looking. Yoongi wasn’t stupid - he made sure to read up on each and every drug, and picked a low dose that wouldn’t do anything other than to make Jin extremely drowsy, but it still concerned the staff enough that they kept Jin in the hospital just a day longer.
Later that night, he watched Jin’s house burn from atop the hill next to his house. He’d felt the heat of the flames even from far away, and did nothing, not even when he heard the pained yowl of Jin’s pet cat.
It wasn’t the same afterwards. Their entire class held a bake sale to raise money for Jin's family, and when Jin finally came back to school two months later, it was to a fanfare of gifts, pats on the back, and sympathy from everyone - except Yoongi. Yoongi couldn’t even look him in the eye. He knew Jin noticed how Yoongi avoided him after that, but Yoongi figured that the other boy would only assume it was because Yoongi had broken his nose. Jin probably didn’t blame him for it. He wasn’t the type, which made him much like Jimin in that way. But all the same their friendship never recovered, and after they graduated highschool, they’d never seen or talked to each other again.
But Jin’s number had never changed, and here they were, more than a decade later, sitting across from each other at the same table once again.
“I’ve been around,” Yoongi said, finally responding to Jin’s earlier question. “Did a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Nothing exciting.”
Jin stared at him from across the table.
Yoongi shifted nervously, and thanked god when their waiter stepped up to their table to take their order. But in the silence that followed, Yoongi found himself tying knots in the napkin on his lap, still not knowing where exactly to start or what exactly to say.
“Well,” Jin replied, “maybe you can tell me all about it at another time. You’ve got something on your mind that you want to talk about though, haven’t you? I can tell.”
Jin was a great conversationalist, and had always been able to read Yoongi well. He’d always carried their conversations naturally when they were in school, and there were times that Yoongi would admit that he missed his old friend’s encouraging voice.
But he could tell that even Jin was bothered by Yoongi’s sudden reappearance in his life. And it wasn’t as if Yoongi couldn’t deny that there was an ulterior motive for wanting to call Jin out to meet him on a random weekday. That feeling of something being wrong had never faded. He wasn’t quite sure what it is, but he’d hoped that someone who’d shared his life for a while would be able to recall details that he couldn’t.
“Do you remember Jungkook?” Yoongi asked, out of the blue.
Jin - who was in the middle of calling the waiter over for another glass of wine - looked over at Yoongi distractedly.
“What, Jungkook? The kid I tutored for a while in Math?”
“Yeah. Him.”
Jin froze, and then turned back in his seat. His eyebrows were furrowed and his expression was stern.
“So you called me out here after years of not talking, all to talk about some kid I tutored in highschool?”
Of course it didn’t make sense. Yoongi knew that. Or maybe he did, in the logic processing part of his brain. But these days his thoughts were a jumble, a run-on sentence with no beginning and end, and trying to pull the pieces together into one coherent narrative was at times more difficult than just asking for what he wanted and explaining it all later.
“Jin, please.”
Jin stared at him for a moment longer before huffing and leaning back in his seat. He picked up his wine glass and absently began to swirl it. Yoongi watched the red liquid slosh violently against its sides.
“Well, vaguely,” Jin said. “I haven’t talked to him since we graduated highschool, and that was years ago. I heard he’s still around, though. Probably about to graduate college, come to think of it. Anyway, why the sudden interest in some random kid?”
“It’s… probably nothing really, but...” Yoongi trailed off, digging his nails into the palm of his hand and fighting off the urge to bite at them. “You don’t recall if he had a heart problem, do you?”
Jin blinked.
“What, like, arrthymia or something?”
“Yeah. Or something more serious. Maybe something hereditary.”
Jin narrowed his eyes, studying him for a second as if trying to figure out the reason why Yoongi was asking. But eventually, he answered.
“He might have, but I doubt it. If he’d had problems, he wouldn’t have been playing on as many sports teams as he did, right? I think he became the captain of the basketball team the year after we graduated, didn’t he? And he ran track and field, too. His dad used to be the coach, remember?”
Fuck. Yoongi did remember. And that scared him beyond relief for reasons he didn’t understand.
Yoongi’s hands shook as he picked up his own glass, nearly spilling water everywhere as he pressed the glass against his numb lips.
“Yoongi, you alright?”
At first, Yoongi didn’t answer, too busy lost in his own mind. But when a second voice called out his name from somewhere behind him, he lifted his head.
“Yoongi...?”
Yoongi turned in his seat and saw with shock that Jimin was standing on the sidewalk beside the restaurant patio, his cellphone pressed against the side of his head, looking nearly out of his mind with worry.
Yoongi’s fingers twitched, wanting to pull out the cellphone he’d stuffed into his pocket. He’d silenced his phone before he’d arrived, not wanting to be distracted during the conversation. But he knew without a doubt that if he had looked at it then, he’d see more than a few missed calls. It wasn’t a question as to who it was who left those missed calls.
“Jimin, what are you -” Yoongi paused, and then shook his head, “- no, wait, how are you…?”
“I used Find My Phone. You had me worried sick when I came home and you weren’t there. You weren’t answering when I called you either. Where have you been? Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” Jimin said, jumping quickly over the low fence and walking over to Yoongi’s side. Knowing full well that he was in front of a childhood friend who’d only known him before he’d come out as gay, Yoongi turned a bright shade of red when Jimin attempted to kiss him, ducking out of Jimin’s grasp with a murmured apology. Jimin followed him with his eyes, looking as though he couldn’t understand why Yoongi had reacted that way.
But then Jin cleared his throat, drawing Jimin’s attention away from Yoongi for the first time.
“Hi, you must be Yoongi’s… er... ‘friend’?” Jin asked, looking between the two of them with a small smile. Jin had always been good at reading between the lines, so it didn’t surprise Yoongi that Jin had figured out their relationship anyway.
Yoongi frowned, when he realized Jimin hadn’t yet responded. He looked to his side, only to find that Jimin was staring.
For a moment, it almost worried Yoongi, seeing his lover freeze up like that. It was as if someone had hit pause on a VHS tape, leaving only a flash of a strange, hollow look in Jimin’s eyes.
But then Jimin straightened up again, returning to his normal self to flash Jin a bright smile - as if nothing had happened.
“Yes, nice to meet you! I’m Jimin. And you are?”
“I’m Jin.”
A short pause lingered awkwardly between the three of them. Yoongi cleared his throat, reaching up to place his hand on Jimin’s arm.
“Jin’s my old highschool classmate - we go way back. Anyway, we were just catching up. Right, Jin?”
Jin narrowed his eyes.
“Uh, right. Listen, Yoongi, is this maybe a bad time? We can always talk more later if you want.”
“No, I -” “- yes, if that would be alright. We should probably get home soon, Yoongi - I went shopping and left frozen food out on the counter in my rush to get out the door, and I really don’t want it to spoil.”
“But I thought we went shopping on Monday,” Yoongi muttered under his breath.
Still, he murmured an earnest (if sheepish) apology to his old classmate as he stood up from his chair. Jimin left towards the front of the restaurant, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet and saying something about paying for the meal. Yoongi knew better than to protest - Jimin made it all too clear at the start of their relationship that he liked to take care of Yoongi. Especially given that Yoongi was the type who tended to forget about things like eating food and drinking water.
Yoongi leaned down, pulling his jacket off the back of his chair and throwing it on quickly.
He avoided eye contact with his friend, embarrassed by Jimin’s strange behavior and the selfish nature of his own request. Besides, there wasn’t really much else to say, at least nothing they could cover in such a short time. He’d gotten what he needed from Jin, but a part of him still felt bad. He knew, just as well as Jin, that Yoongi wasn’t likely to contact him again.
God, he was terrible. This was a man he’d once considered a friend. And yet here he was, using the man as if he were an encyclopedia.
At the same time, he didn’t really have the desire to change the circumstances, either. He’d never been particularly outgoing to begin with, and now that he finally met someone who truly understood him and accepted him for who he was, it was hard for him to feel motivated to form relationships with anyone else. He had his person already.
Yoongi muttered one final apology, dipping into a short bow before beginning to walk away. Before he could walk past, though, Jin reached out, gripping Yoongi by his sleeve.
“Is everything alright?” Jin asked him, with an expression so grave that it gave Yoongi pause.
He looked toward the front of the restaurant, catching Jimin’s watchful eye from where the man stood at the cash register. Then he looked back down at his classmate.
“Yeah, everything’s fine. I promise.”
Although he didn’t look as if he was satisfied with Yoongi’s answer, Jin still dropped his hand, turning away with a stiff nod.
A strange feeling came over Yoongi as he walked away, turning back to stare at the back of Jin’s head one last time. He’d felt it before, he was sure, but he didn’t know how to describe it. It wasn’t until weeks later though, standing by Jin’s coffin at his classmate’s funeral, that he recognized it for what it was.
-
Unease. Dread. Fear.
It was tight like the grip of Jimin’s arm, holding him up and pressing him into Jimin’s side. Sharp, and biting, like the cold rain that bit into his skin. And just like Jin, lying deceptively still in his coffin, he felt as though he were wandering into a trap. Like an insect wandering into a spider’s web.
“Who is he? One of Jin’s old friends? A coworker?”
“I’ve never seen him before, but just look at him. He must have known Jin well.”
“Poor thing. Good thing he has a friend with him. Look at how sweet his friend is, holding him up like that.”
Without Jimin’s arm around his waist, Yoongi would have probably collapsed. He would have joined Jin’s mother on the floor, sobbing her heart out onto her son’s coffin.
Yoongi stared at the scene in front of him, replaying in his mind the phone call he’d had the other day. How he’d called to ask to talk to Jin, only to be told that Jin had passed away.
A robbery gone wrong, Jin’s brother told him. Stabbed in the gut twenty seven times while he was taking out the garbage. So badly mutilated that the family had no choice but to have a closed casket funeral.
They hadn’t caught the perpetrator.
Yoongi knew better. As soon as they got home, he was hugging the toilet again, shouting incoherently in between violent retches into the toilet bowl. Jimin wound his arms around Yoongi, holding his hands to the side to prevent Yoongi from lashing out. All the while, he whispered fervently into Yoongi’s ear, over and over like a prayer - it’s going to be okay, Yoongi, baby, don’t cry, it hurts me when you cry, baby please, please, please.
It rained all week.
-
The internet was a terrifying thing wasn’t it? All these names, addresses, phone numbers - obituaries - all accessible at his fingertips.
Spurred on by a morbid, relentless curiosity, he’d looked up a few names of people he used to know. Old classmates. Friends. Acquaintances.
People who he thought he’d helped save through the years.
They were dead.
They were - all - dead.
Jessica, the girl he’d had a crush on in highschool. He’d saved her from a car accident, only for her to die from a boating accident four years later.
Mark, one of his classmates who had worked with him once on a group project. He may not have drowned in the university pool, but he had apparently met his death years later, falling from the top of a roof he’d been trying to repair.
Then there was Jungkook, who he’d saved from that trainwreck, only to die alone from a heart attack in the backroom of the cafe he worked at.
And finally there was Jin, who he’d saved years and years ago from that house fire. Only to die just now from a random burglary gone wrong.
There might have been a logical explanation for all of this. Some kind of strange coincidence maybe, a sick example of how fragile life really was. But it couldn’t have been as random as it seemed, not with the pattern that slowly presented itself before him with each successive click of his mouse.
And much like how he felt the very first time he’d ever had a vision, he now felt that strange self-realization click into place.
All this time, he’d thought he was some kind of superhero. Sometimes, more of an antihero than a true superhero, but all the same, he’d done what he’d done because he thought it was the right thing to do.
He’d thought he’d been saving lives. Jesus fucking christ, that couldn’t have been any less true. God, what did that mean? That he - that he was…?
“Fuck!! ”
Yoongi slammed his laptop shut and threw it violently aside, too busy trying not to scream to notice how it shattered to pieces against the wall. Somewhere further away in the apartment, Jimin called out his name with worry, and the sound of running footsteps drew closer and closer.
Jimin burst into their bedroom, still wearing an apron and an oven glove from where he’d obviously been in the middle of cooking.
“Yoongi?” Jimin asked, taking in the scene with a white face. “What the hell happened?”
Jimin gave him a look - one that made Yoongi feel as if he was the only thing that mattered in the world. Something precious. Something to be protected. He had always loved that about Jimin, but now it only made the pit in his stomach grow wider, like the endless maw of an old god, chewing up his innards until there was nothing left but the rot.
“Baby, what’s wrong?” Jimin asked him.
There was so much Yoongi wanted to say. So many things he could admit to, both the truth and all the lies.
But the words twisted in the corners of Yoongi's trembling mouth and the only thing that came out of his mouth was a wet whimper.
Jimin crossed the room immediately, taking off the oven glove and reaching out to Yoongi as if to hold him - but Yoongi brushed past him quickly without so much as a word.
By the time a stunned Jimin had followed him back into the hallway, Yoongi had already thrown open the door to the hallway closet, taking out his thick winter coat and pulling it on.
Jimin tried to stop him by grabbing his hands as Yoongi tried to button his coat up with shaking fingers, but Yoongi brushed him harshly away. When Jimin tried to get close to him again, Yoongi had no other choice but to shove him.
“Fuck off!" Yoongi shouted, only to immediately regret the words that came out of his mouth when he watched Jimin’s face crumble with hurt.
Jimin hadn’t done anything wrong. He didn’t deserve to be treated like shit, to have to always deal with Yoongi’s cruel behavior, the fucking panic attacks and the onslaught of bad shit that always happened to Yoongi and anyone close to him.
And no matter how much he needed and wanted to be held by Jimin, no matter how much peace the other man gave him and how much better he felt when Jimin said he loved him unconditionally, Yoongi knew he did not deserve any of it. He wasn’t worthy of that kind of unconditional love. Not when he was a fucking murderer.
So he swallowed the apology that was on the tip of his tongue, steeling his nerves and hoping that the wet look in his eyes didn’t betray what he was feeling. He turned away quickly, shoving his feet into his boots and opening the front door to a blast of cold winter air.
Just as he crossed over that threshold, two warm arms wrapped themselves around his waist like iron bands, dragging him backwards into the embrace of a man who pressed himself desperately against Yoongi’s back.
“Where are you going?” Jimin asked him, hot words against the back of his neck. “Why are you leaving? Don’t leave. Please, Yoongi, don’t leave me.”
“Don’t touch me!” Yoongi screamed out the words he didn’t mean, pulling himself free for just a moment only to be trapped by Jimin’s arms again. And in that very moment, he felt weak, as if a wave had rolled over him and dragged him under. He wanted so badly to fold under its pressure, to turn around and fall sobbing into Jimin’s arms.
“Stay away from me!” Yoongi shouted, finally ripping himself out of Jimin’s embrace. “Just leave me alone!”
As if hoping he’d come back, Jimin’s hands remained outstretched towards Yoongi even as Yoongi stumbled quickly away. He kept calling out Yoongi’s name even as the distance between them only grew, over and over until finally it stopped.
Yoongi glanced back once, and then again.
A part of Yoongi had foolishly (selfishly) hoped that Jimin would follow. But when he looked back for the second time, Yoongi realized that the door was closed, leaving Yoongi alone to be swallowed up in the darkness as he stumbled onward.
-
Stumbling blindly through the dark, he eventually wound up at the edge of the park closest to their apartment. Feeling tired, cold, and overwhelmed, Yoongi leaned up against a street lamp, propping himself up against it as he smothered another wet sob into his arms.
He finally understood, after all this time. What good had he really brought into this world? Had he ever done anything right? Or had he just killed everyone around him?
He was a monster. One whose self-loathing came to a head when he realized that he was more upset about the thought of losing Jimin than he was about anyone else.
A thought he hadn’t had since he’d met Jimin surfaced itself up again, one so hopeless that it always made him spiral into a dark, dark place. Just what the fuck had he ever done to deserve this? What terrible crime he committed in a previous life, to have to live through this? He was alone, always alone, and now more than ever he felt that loneliness creep back into him like a dagger in his side.
After another minute or two of fighting himself, he dug into his coat pocket with trembling fingers and pulled out his phone. He blindly punched in the numbers, pressing the phone up to his face as soon as he’d dialed.
“Hello?”
The instant relief he felt at hearing his mother’s voice gave way to a sadness that made hot tears roll down his cheeks. He clenched his eyes shut in an attempt to calm himself down, only to sob brokenly when it didn’t work.
“Mama…! ”
There was a crackle of static, as if his mother had suddenly shifted.
“Yoongi? Honey, what’s the matter?” She asked him, the urgency and worry in her voice growing as he continued to sob.
“Mama, ” Yoongi said wetly, “everything’s all wrong and I don’t... I don’t feel so good…! ”
Yoongi turned away from the phone to retch into the bushes, heaving dryly on an empty stomach only for nothing to come up. By the time he’d wiped the spit from his mouth and pressed the phone back up to his ear, he could hear his mother moving quickly through the house, a door slamming shut as the sound of a car starting up rumbled through the speaker of the phone.
“Where are you, Yoongi?!”
Maybe that’s why he’d always loved the sound of Jimin’s voice. The soft voice and the genuine love that was in every word reminded him of his mother. It made his chest ache and made him miss the time in his life where he didn’t have to fear her embrace. Yoongi took another gasping breath, screwing his eyes tightly shut.
“Yoongi, honey, tell me where you are.”
No.
Don’t do this, Yoongi.
Don’t you fucking dare.
On the edge of hyperventilating, Yoongi closed his eyes for a moment, clenching his fist and swearing silently under his breath. When his thoughts continued to scramble, he hit his head with his hand, over and over and over until he could think again. He tried. He tried so very hard not to give in, not to let himself do it, not to -
“On the corner of 24th and Lamar, near the park entrance,” he said. Only to immediately crumple into himself in agony.
On the other side of the line, he heard the engine of the car rumble making a flash of guilty relief spike through him.
“I’m coming to get you. Go wait by the intersection and stay right there, do you hear me? Don’t move. I’ll be right there.”
The call ended with a beep.
Numbly, Yoongi did as he was told. He dropped his hands to his sides, teeth chattering as he stumbled his way toward the busy intersection. He stumbled his way over to the nearest bus stop, stepping under its little metal roof in order to sink into the hard plastic bench. A homeless man who had been taking refuge under the same bus stop glanced over. He took one wary look at Yoongi’s shaking, shivering form before picking up his things and leaving Yoongi completely alone.
...good. Good. It was safer wasn’t it? To stay away from him. They all had to stay away.
Time seemed to pass him by. As if he wasn’t even part of the stream anymore, just a passive observer watching as faceless people passed by, muttering words that he didn’t understand and mingling their laughter with the sound of their loud, barking dogs. Traffic roared past him at an almost violent speed, leaving trails of bright lights in his eyes that he could still see when he closed them. And then there was his phone. His phone buzzed several times from inside his coat pocket, but he never pulled it back out to see who it was who was calling him. He just couldn’t bring himself to care.
It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later when someone touched him on the shoulder that he finally pulled himself out of his near catatonic state. He opened his eyes, only to find himself staring at the face of his mother. She looked just the same as she always did, still warm and comforting, still staring at him with love and worry. His eyes stung again with fresh tears, his usually stern expression crumbling at the sight of his mother as he leaned forward and threw himself into her embrace.
“Shhh, shhh,” she whispered to him, rubbing his back as he cried out all of his frustration and anger and fear into her shoulder. “Everything is going to be alright, don’t you worry.”
“No, everything’s all wrong, I fucked up, and I - I just -”
“There’s nothing you can’t fix in this world, Yoongi. Can you tell me what’s wrong??”
“I can’t, mom, I-I-I just can’t …”
His mother shushed him, drawing him tighter into the circle of her arms.
“Don’t cry. It’ll be alright,” she continued to say to him, just like Jimin always said. And just like with Jimin, he knew it was a lie, but he still took comfort from hearing the words anyway. He probably should have been more ashamed of himself. Here he was, a grown adult, bawling in his mother’s arms in the middle of a street. It was embarrassing, to be sure, but even that was an easier pill to swallow than the truth that loomed over his head like a death sentence.
He tried hard not to think about it, and with his mom’s help the tension gradually eased out of his shoulders with every tear that dripped down his face, until there was nothing left to cry about anymore and his heartbeat returned to its regular, steady rhythm.
The anxiety and the fear was still there, but having his mother beside him had taken the desperate edge off of his emotions. He eventually relaxed enough to wrap his arms loosely around her waist. Distantly, he could hear people talking as they walked by, but he frankly didn’t care anymore what they were saying.
“Feel a little better?”
“Yeah, a little,” Yoongi admitted hoarsely. The tear tracks on his face were dry and itchy now, and he lifted his head from his mother’s shoulder to scrub at them with his sleeve.
His mother’s gloved fingers carded through his hair, combing back the stray, unruly hairs from his face. It was something that Jimin would often do for Yoongi too, when Yoongi wasn’t feeling well. Thinking about his lover - even just briefly - made him recall the look on Jimin’s face, when Yoongi had pushed him away.
The guilt he felt hurt.
Yoongi took another shuddering breath to ground himself.
“So, are you going to tell me what happened or am I going to have to pry it out of you?” His mother asked, thankfully drawing him out of his thoughts. Yoongi frowned, considering her words.
... could he, even?
How would she even react, if she found out her son was a murderer?
No, he already knew she wouldn’t believe him. She loved him unconditionally, but she lived in a world that was based off of reality, not fiction. Chances were she’d probably take him to see another doctor.
Yoongi eventually shook his head and looked away.
She hummed in acceptance.
“Okay - I know that look of ‘mom, please stop talking’ when I see it.“
Finally, Yoongi wheezed out a dry, chuckling laugh, feeling the normalcy settle back in at the same time as the embarrassment he felt over crying in public like a child. She seemed to catch onto it, looking at him fondly and rubbing the back of his head with her hand.
“Alright, I’ll let it go. But when you’re ready, please talk to me, okay? I’ll always be here to listen, Yoongi. No matter what,” She said, leaning over to press a wet kiss to his cheek.
He dodged it in the nick of time with a groan.
“I know, I know. Yeah, I know.”
“I’m glad. Hey, now let’s go get back into the car. It’s freezing cold out here and you barely have anything on! You’re going to catch a cold, Min Yoongi.”
“...where are we even going?”
“Well, I could drive you back to your apartment, if that’s what you want.”
Yoongi couldn’t go back there. Not tonight, anyway. Not after all of the mean shit he’d said to Jimin when he’d freaked out. It would only just spiral out of control again, and Yoongi was only barely keeping his emotions under wraps as it was.
“Can…” Yoongi started hesitantly, pausing briefly to carefully consider his words. “Can I go back home with you? Just for tonight?”
“Of course you can, sweetheart,” she said, with a soft, beaming smile.
Yoongi nodded, absently rubbing the back of his hand against his dripping nose as the two of them stood.
“Okay, so where’d you even park?”
“Oh, just down the street.”
“Ah. Wait, at a meter?”
“Yes, but it’s past 5. Now, where did I put my keys?”
She pulled away from him to start walking, digging into her purse in search for her keys.
The moment she did, he felt something indescribable. Like the feeling of something heavy weighing him down, like a wave of electricity that traveled down from his head to his feet. His mother walked even further away and he hurriedly tried to follow, but his feet - his feet weren’t moving. As if they were glued to the floor. With a puzzled frown, he looked down at them.
The rush of air and the smell of burning rubber. A sick crunch, a wet scream, and the splatter of some kind of liquid across his face. It dripped wet and thick like the grey smoke that began to pour back down onto the concrete and the gravel. When Yoongi finally looked up to see what had happened, what he saw in front of him made him slowly turn white.
The sound that came out of Yoongi’s mouth next wasn’t even human.
-
Jimin reunited with him at the police station. And after he’d finished giving the policemen the details that Yoongi’s mute mouth refused to give, he returned to Yoongi’s side and folded the man into his arms.
“I had no idea it was your mother,” Jimin had said to him that night, over and over again, “I am so, so, so sorry, Yoongi.”
But even if Jimin’s soft, sincere words were meant to comfort him, Yoongi had given up on feeling anything at all. So he said nothing at all in response, and wouldn’t for a very long time.
-
“Baby, please, you have to eat something.”
“Please, for me?”
Yoongi had no appetite. He hadn’t, for what felt like months.
He slept most of every day away if he could, and barely paid attention to his own body’s needs unless Jimin forced him to.
Thanks only to Jimin’s constant attention and pestering, he hadn’t completely wasted away. He’d only lost six to eight pounds or so, give or take.
Either way, Yoongi didn’t really care. He just didn’t want to think about anything anymore.
He only opened his mouth when Jimin pushed the spoon up to his lips, swallowing the soup without tasting a single thing. He let himself be fed that way until there was nothing but an empty bowl and a paper napkin pressed up against his lips, dabbing away the excess liquid. When the napkin was pulled away, Jimin replaced it with his lips.
Yoongi barely noticed.
The thoughts that had briefly left him crawled back into his head again like a diseased rat, gnawing at his conscience and eating him alive from the inside out.
His apathy slowly melted away into despair. As soon as his lips began to tremble again and the tips of his lashes became wet, Jimin reached out, folding Yoongi into his arms.
“There, there,” Jimin told him, rocking him back and forth. “Let it all out.”
But how could he do that? When his entire body was a gaping wound, and there was nothing left inside of him to give. Everything he’d tried to keep bottled up inside of him - all the hopelessness and the rage - had been ripped open and bared cruelly, as if to show the world just how much of a monster he really was.
Jimin held him tighter when he felt Yoongi tense up in his arms.
“You’re going to be alright,” Jimin said. “You’ll see. It’s all going to be okay.”
She had said the same thing.
As his decision became clear, Yoongi sank his face deep into Jimin’s thin shoulder, and pulled the other man close.
-
Jimin left to go to work. Yoongi wasn’t quite sure when - frankly his sense of time had been warped by the time he’d spent locked away in the dark safety of Jimin’s room.
Because he knew Jimin’s apartment like the back of his hand, it was far too easy to find the spare keys Jimin had left inside of one of his kitchen drawers. Yoongi reached in and grabbed them, staring blankly down at the cold metal in the palm of his hand.
He closed his fist, leaving the drawer hanging open as he padded barefoot down the hallway toward the door. He was barely wearing anything other than an oversized t-shirt and his boxers, but he opened the front door and stepped out anyway, leaving it slightly ajar as he turned to the locked iron gate that guarded the stairwell leading up.
Slowly and methodically, he tried every key on the ring until he finally found the one that fit, turning it in the lock until he heard the bolt sliding away. The iron door squealed loudly.
The stairwell was dark. Yoongi could barely see a foot in front of him. Carefully feeling his way through the dark with his hands, he made his way slowly up the winding stairs until he found himself at another door.
This time, when he opened it, he stepped onto the snowy rooftop of the apartment complex.
The wind blew back his hair. Every puffed breath was a cloud of white and grey. The snow, crunching under his bare feet, was freezing wet.
But he hardly felt the cold, not when he finally saw what had been calling to him for weeks now.
The answer to the riddle he’d tried his whole life to solve, one he hadn’t known he had the power to fix until that very moment.
Yes, there it was. Finally. For the first time in a long time, the racing thoughts in his head calmed, until nothing was left but a strange, quiet sort of acceptance.
With a grim resolve, Yoongi lifted his leg over the guardrails, and stepped onto the ledge of the roof.
-
When Jimin came home to an open door and an empty apartment, the warm smile he had on his face - the same one he always had whenever he realized who he was coming home to - slowly faded away.
He called out his lover’s name. Once, twice, and then again for a third time - only to hear nothing in response. He checked every room, slowly at first, and then with more and more frantic energy, tearing through his apartment in his search.
The color slowly drained from his face when he realized he was completely alone.
He desperately dialed Yoongi’s number, holding the phone up to his ear with a shaking hand as he raked his other hand through his hair. A faint buzzing in another room only confirmed his sinking suspicions. With a violent curse, Jimin threw his phone to the ground, losing interest in it as he looked around him for something - anything - that could tell him of Yoongi’s whereabouts.
Eventually, he found the open drawer in his kitchen.
He burst through the front door, panting as he desperately looked for any sign of Yoongi. A metallic squeal drew his attention, and he whipped his head in its direction only to find that the gate leading to the roof was unlocked. Swinging open in the cold wind.
Jimin stared for a second, and then another. And then he swore.
-
“Jesus, FUCK!! What are you - Yoongi, get away from there!! ”
Yoongi laughed, well aware how crazy he looked dangling his bare legs over the side of the building. But the snow was so pretty, falling around him and down, down, down onto the ground below.
What a coward he’d been, waiting for Jimin to get home. Selfish. Greedy. Sadistic. More and more, Yoongi realized just how irredeemable he really was. Strangely enough, it only gave him a foolish confidence that what he would do was the right thing.
Crunching footsteps through the snow. Jimin was trying to get to him.
Yoongi quickly got up, hooking one hand through the railing for grip and tipping himself slightly over the ledge.
“Don’t.”
The footsteps stopped.
Yoongi could hear Jimin’s panicked breaths, shaky and wheezing and hard.
“...Yoongi? ”
His voice still did things to Yoongi. Even in his darkest moments, when he had felt the most hopeless, just one single word from those lips never failed to make his heart flutter. But it only hurt him now.
Yoongi slowly straightened back up, pressing his back against the cold iron railing. There wasn’t much room to move - barely any to even stand - but Yoongi turned as much as he could, craning his neck to look back at Jimin.
Jimin looked as if someone had stabbed him in the gut. Like he was the one standing on that ledge, instead of Yoongi. Yoongi wanted to hold him, but he knew he couldn’t let go. So instead, he said - “Hey, Jimin.” - with a small smile that stung his already wet cheeks. Yoongi watched Jimin’s face crumple even more, and he could only imagine that the same emotions were reflected on his own face.
“...what are you doing, Yoongi...? ” Jimin whispered, as if afraid that if he raised his voice, Yoongi would fall.
Yoongi looked away. He spent a moment pondering Jimin’s question, wondering just how it was he would ever be able to make Jimin understand. He only had one shot, there would be no trying again after this. So he had to make it count.
“You know, I always loved reading books as a kid. I didn’t have very many friends to talk to, so, I’d spend most of my recess in the library. I found out how much about the world you could learn - you know? - just from the pages of a single book,” Yoongi said hoarsely. “I mean, did you know that the singular even that killed the most people in 1945 wasn’t any battle of any war?”
Jimin looked confused. Yoongi took it as a sign to continue.
“It was an atomic bomb - actually, two - that killed more than one hundred thousand people. You know, I read somewhere that the mushroom cloud reached a height of twenty thousand meters in the first ten minutes.”
“Twenty thousand meters…” Yoongi repeated blankly, staring up at the grey sky. “That’s almost twice the height of Mt. Everest. Can you even imagine?”
“...Yoongi, I don’t under-”
“- but the actual explosion wasn’t what actually killed all those people, you know. It was the dust that settled from the cloud. Radioactive waste, nuclear fallout, some shit like that. ...that! That was what killed all those fucking people. ...isn’t the idea of that terrifying? That you and everyone you cared about could be alive one minute, only to die slow, painful deaths - just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The look on Jimin’s face made it clear that he wasn’t sure where Yoongi was going. It almost made Yoongi want to laugh.
“You know, I used to think I had a gift,” Yoongi whispered hoarsely. “I used to think that I could do something good, if I wanted to. But - what I’ve come to find - is that I never did a single good thing in my life at all.”
Yoongi’s head suddenly dropped down to his chest, his lips pulling into a grimace as hot tears began to splatter onto the street below him.
“Because it’s me, isn’t it?!” Yoongi choked out. “I-I-I’m that stupid fucking radioactive dust. I’m the one that kills e-everyone around me. It’s me. It’s ME! It’s always been... me…!!”
Yoongi tried to suck in a deep breath, but it came out as a sob that sounded hysterical even to his ears.
“S-so, it’s all m-my fault, right?!” Yoongi cried out. “It’s all my fucking f-fault, so… s-s-so I…! I…!”
The words stopped coming.
Instead, all that came out were his own gut wrenching sobs, drowning him with a sorrow that wracked his thin body so hard that he began to feel lightheaded and dizzy.
Yoongi lost his balance for a moment, sliding just a little further over the edge before catching himself again.
And Jimin, who had been quiet the entire time while Yoongi had been talking, suddenly moved forward, holding out a hand toward Yoongi.
“Yoongi…” Jimin cried, his own shattered eyes filling with tears as he tried desperately to get through to his lover. “Baby, get back from the ledge, it’s dangerous -”
“I’M FUCKING DANGEROUS, JIMIN!” Yoongi roared, his body shaking with the strength of his anger. But it faded quickly and left him aching. He sobbed wetly again.
“Don’t you get it? I’m the one you should be afraid of, Jimin,” Yoongi said. His voice was quieter now - tired and broken, just like he was.
Behind him, Yoongi heard Jimin take another step forward. And then he heard something heavy fall into the snow. Against his better judgment, he looked back again, only to find that Jimin had dropped onto his knees. The man had his hands clapped together, as if he were begging to some God for help.
“Yoongi, don’t do this. I’m begging you…! - please - I - ever since I met you, I-I knew that you were the only one for me. Can’t you see it, Yoongi? I only ever loved you, I only ever wanted you, so - please, Yoongi, don’t do this…!”
He even spoke with such reverence in his voice that it almost felt like a prayer. Like he truly believed Yoongi was something worth fighting for. It was a sentiment that made Yoongi’s fractured heart swell with love, even as it bled through the cracks. He couldn’t believe any of what Jimin said, couldn’t believe that anyone could have loved someone as broken as he was, but he believed that Jimin believed it. And that was almost enough.
A small smile twitched onto Yoongi’s pale, cracked lips, and he finally admitted what he’d felt all that time.
“I love you too, Jimin. So very, very much.”
A glimmer of desperate hope, in those beautiful eyes.
“... but that was never enough , was it?”
“Yoongi, no -”
“- I’ve killed so many people, Jimin. So many fucking people. Do you know what that does to me? What that makes me feel?”
“- none of those people mattered, Yoongi, only you -”
“- THEY FUCKING MATTERED TO ME , JIMIN...! I killed my friends, I killed my classmates, jesus christ Jimin I killed my own - fucking - m o t h e r !! ”
There was only silence in response.
“...so tell me, how the fuck am I supposed to live with myself?! How - how am I supposed to sleep at night?! I fucking can’t!”
“So that’s it? You’re just going to give up?”
Just like that, those words gave him what he needed. Clarity, and a strange, surreal sense of calm.
Yoongi turned carefully to face his lover.
“I love you, Jimin,” Yoongi said, turning to face his lover, “but I can’t watch you die.”
Jimin looked beautiful, even when he cried. And if that was the last thing that he’d ever have to see, Yoongi was fine with that.
“No… no, no, no YOONGI, DON’T - PLEASE!!”
Yoongi let go, and let himself slip off the ledge.
-
A throb of pain erupted from his arm. A shout and a scream. The loud grind of a joint popping out of place.
And as he swung in the cold air by his dislocated arm, slamming into the side of the building with full force and scraping his face on the brick, all Yoongi could really process was - this wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
Jimin was straining, cheeks red and jaw clenched tight as he struggled to pull Yoongi’s dead weight up. Yoongi watched him try without helping, feeling oddly detached. As if he were watching the entire thing happen to someone else rather than himself.
“... just let me go, Jimin.”
“Shut up… shut up, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!! ” Jimin muttered, quietly at first, only to grow louder and louder until he was practically screaming out every word. “You don’t get to decide who gets to die and who gets to live!! That’s not fair!”
“It wouldn’t be fair if you died because of me.”
“If I die, I die. If I live, I live. I don’t fucking care what happens!!” Jimin shouted, still trying his hardest to pull Yoongi back up over the railing, only to fail when Yoongi stubbornly dug his feet into the side of the building. “I love you, isn’t that enough?! You love me, isn’t that enough?! Don’t - you - have - what - you - wanted?!”
Yoongi shook his head quietly.
“I want to die, Jimin.”
All of a sudden, the tears stopped falling onto Yoongi’s head. Jimin stared at him - blankly - in silence.
“No. You don’t.”
And then he felt it again. That strange electricity. That sinking feeling of something indescribable.
Staring up at his lover, Yoongi became acutely aware of the fact that something was very wrong. The look in Jimin’s eyes had changed, becoming harder, sharper, the colors shifting and swirling and filling with something that was as profoundly breathtaking as it was horrifying to behold. Whoever it was that was standing above him now - gripping onto his hand with what felt like sharpened claws - it wasn’t Jimin.
Despite how much he might have looked like him, this wasn’t the man that he loved.
And for the first time, Yoongi felt as though he might be afraid.
“I said NO, you don’t," the monster wearing his lover’s skin repeated, louder this time. His voice was like gravel. Like a parasite, digging deep into his very guts. Yoongi couldn’t hear anything other than the vicious horror of every word that came out of the beast’s maw, like a deafening roar in Yoongi’s ears. “You do not. You will not. YOU. CAN. NOT!!”
And suddenly, Yoongi didn’t.
As if all of his previous conviction had been sucked right out of his body, Yoongi stopped resisting, collapsing like a puppet with its strings cut.
...what? What’s going on?
“Give me your hand, Yoongi!”
Without hesitation, Yoongi reached up with his other hand, allowing Jimin to take hold of it and pull him back over the ledge.
No, I… that’s - that’s not…!
The two of them collapsed onto the rooftop. Yoongi's dislocated shoulder still ached, but he barely paid attention to it - too frightened by that feeling of terror to even feel the pain. Two hands grabbed him by his face, pulling him up and forcing Yoongi to stare straight into the monster’s face.
“You’ll stop all of this foolishness, won’t you, Yoongi?” Not-Jimin asked him in a dark, guttural mutter, one that sank into Yoongi like a thick, suffocating blanket.
“What…? What’s happening?” Yoongi said in a trembling voice. His limbs felt like lead, and try as he might, he couldn’t even lift a single finger. “Why can’t I move?”
“I’ve watched over you for too many years to let you die now,” the monster said, ignoring his questions. “I love you, don’t you get it? I’ve always loved you.”
And then it paused, staring at Yoongi as if trying to determine something for itself.
“... you said you loved me too, didn’t you?” It asked.
“Yes,” Yoongi said, without hesitation. He hadn’t wanted to say anything at all.
Those dark eyes scanned over him darkly again before its hands finally released him from their grip. Before he could slump back into the ground, though, his arm was neatly snapped back into place, causing Yoongi to scream out. Tears began to roll down his cheeks again from the pain and it wrapped its arms around him, pulling him close in a facsimile of a lover’s embrace. As Yoongi shuddered, it shushed him quietly in a tone that pretended to be gentle.
Even when Yoongi finally stopped shaking and shuddering though, it continued to hold him as tightly as it could, barring him from making any movement away from the circle of its arms.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” it growled deep into his ear, minutes later.
Yoongi found himself nodding against his own will.
This wasn’t right no no no it was all wrong all so very very wrong -
“Promise me. Promise that you won’t.”
“...I promise,” Yoongi said, every word rolling off his tongue like poison.
And though it finally released him from its grip, having heard what it wanted to hear, the sinking, deadening feeling never left. Not even when a warm smile tugged back onto its face. A smile that he couldn’t help but to return, even as the alarm bells in his mind began to ring bloody and shrill.
-
“Come.” Growled the voice in his ear, giving him no choice but to obey.
Yoongi began to shriek and scream, throwing his head back as he was forced into his fifth orgasm of the night. After the third, he’d stopped ejaculating and had been coming painfully dry, throwing him into a full body shiver that had his back arching from the bed and his eyes rolling up his head.
When he was finally able to think again, he panted for breath, pleading desperately with the man on top of him to let him rest.
“One more Yoongi, one more.”
“No, no, wait, please, I -” “Come.”
Yoongi threw his head back again, voice breaking for the sixth time that night.
-
All this time, he’d thought he was the only monster in this world of theirs.
Don’t be frightened, Yoongi.
We were made for each other, don’t you see?
Nothing is going to happen to you. I’ll make sure of that.
I told you I’d always take care of you, right? And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
All I'm asking is for you to stay. Please, just stay here with me, Yoongi. Stay.
-
By the time it was over, by the time Jimin had collapsed between Yoongi’s legs, panting wetly into Yoongi’s sweat-soaked hair, Yoongi found himself thinking - that he’d known nothing at all.
Legs and arms were wrapped tightly around Yoongi’s numb and aching body.
He still twitched and trembled every few seconds, the hot fluid that leaked out from between his legs joining the liquid that was already pooling in the sheets.
“... who … are you ..?” Yoongi barely was able to say, in a broken voice that was barely above a whisper.
He received an answer a minute later, when the man had finished pressing kisses against Yoongi’s pale throat.
“...I’m the one that loves you the most.”
The answer was pressed into his neck with hot lips, words that Yoongi could not perceive as anything other than the truth. But did he feel that way, or was that the part of Jimin that had slithered its way inside of him? Filling in all of the holes until there was nothing left except - except him.
“You complete me. You always have. But you knew that, didn’t you, Yoongi?” Jimin whispered his declaration of love, taking Yoongi’s hand and pressing a tender kiss against his knuckles. “Because I’m yours. And you - you will always, always, be mine.”
Staring down at him with those warm, gentle eyes of his, Jimin bent down, swallowing Yoongi’s silent scream with his own smiling mouth.
-
When it was all said and done, Yoongi couldn’t for the life of him remember what he’d even been upset about. It wasn’t that important, anyway. Curled up on the couch watching his favorite movie, tucked away in the warm comfort of his boyfriend’s arms, Yoongi realized - he’d never been happier.
A stupid joke was made on the screen. Yoongi snorted out a laugh, reaching out for another handful of popcorn with his free hand before leaning back against his boyfriend. His other hand was already intertwined with his boyfriend’s. A thumb stroked the back of his hand, so lightly that Yoongi forced back a shiver.
“I’m sorry,” his companion said.
Yoongi barely looked away from the pull of the television.
“...what for?” Yoongi asked, after a second.
“For hurting you.”
“Hurt...? When was I hurt?” Yoongi muttered absently, choking back another low chuckle at the movie they were watching.
At his side, Jimin was unusually quiet. It took Yoongi a little while to notice, but when he finally looked over, he saw that Jimin was staring intently at him with a strangely solemn expression.
Something didn’t feel right. Yoongi frowned, and sat up.
“What’s the matter, Jimin?”
A thin, watery smile tugged onto Jimin’s lips.
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” Jimin lied, tugging Yoongi closer to him. Jimin wrapped his arms tightly around Yoongi, as if wanting to fold Yoongi into him as much as he could. It was suffocating, almost, Jimin’s grip on him. It was maddening, like that feeling in the back of his mind, that there was something important that he was forgetting. But it slipped through Yoongi’s mind like grains of sand, and Yoongi found himself letting go of it as quickly as it came.
Even if he did remember it all later, he knew, deep down, that he’d only forget again. Because nothing else really mattered except for the warmth of the man beside him. None of it mattered, not when he had Jimin. And wasn’t that what he’d always wanted?
It was.
It was.
It was.
...right?
-
“I love you, Yoongi.”
“...I love you too.”
-
No one had ever loved Jimin. Not his parents, who only ever bickered when they were still alive. Not his foster mother and siblings, who only ever saw him as a meal ticket. Not the priest at his church, who only ever saw him as a damned soul not even worth saving.
Not a single person cared enough to want to do right by him. At least, not by their own free will.
So he learned not to care. He learned how to use what he had, that strange gift of his, and built his life around taking what he wanted from the people who would have used him just the same.
But then - but then he’d met a boy who had an extraordinary power just like his, and in that very moment, he finally realized just how lonely he had been.
What he’d found that day was a kindred spirit. And the profound idea that there could be someone out there that could understand him without needing to try, was one that brought him to tears.
He was in love.
No, no he wasn’t.
It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even devotion. It was something even stronger than words could ever describe, that Spark that forged the bond between them that day.That feeling of suffocation finally lifted off of his shoulders and he knew, right then and there, that what he’d been missing all that time was the other half of his soul.
He didn’t even get to make a decision. It was already set in his mind. He wanted to be with Him - he wanted to hold His hand, he wanted to only hear his own name out of those lips, he wanted those eyes only to look at him because all he could see when they were together was Him.
And just like he’d done all his life, Jimin would do whatever it took to bring them together - after all, they belonged together, you see. The ends would always justify the means.
So he smiled gently from above the rim of his cooling mug of coffee, and willed the man he had always loved to take off his scarf.