Chapter Text
Seoul, South Korea
The apartment.
Five years later
It’s been three months, seven days, and thirteen hours since Hoseok learned that Min Yoongi was dead.
He knows this by heart, because he’s felt every crawling second of time passing like it’s grating against his skin and peeling back every raw layer, leaving him something naked, and bleeding, and awful behind. He knows it, because he felt the news like it was a knife to his stomach, and since then he hasn’t felt a single thing.
He thought grief would be more. That it would be… something. Agony. Misery. Anger. All of the above, but it’s nothing. It’s an absence. It’s the gaping, black hole that Yoongi left behind that Hoseok will have to walk around carrying for as long as his heart keeps pumping, and his lungs keep breathing, and his brain still resolutely refuses to switch off, no matter how much he desperately wants it to.
“Hyung.”
Jimin’s voice is a brittle plea from behind Hoseok, which he neglects for the hundredth time to acknowledge. He can hear the sound of glass meeting glass as Jimin shuffles around last night’s offered meal for this morning’s version. The smell of food makes Hoseok’s stomach roll, though he knows it should entice him. He can’t remember the last time he ate something more than a mouthful at a time, and forget feeding. It’s been nothing but the short-term hormonal pills for months.
Not meant for continued use longer than four weeks . That’s what the label on the bottle says, Hoseok is at three times that amount now, and he’s feeling the effects as much as anything. He knows he looks like death, even just standing up makes his heart race and his head spin like he’s on the verge of passing out. That’s why he doesn’t do it much anymore.
If Hoseok is being honest, and he’s going to be, though the admittance wracks him with shame, he hasn’t even left his bed in a week. His hair is matted, he smells like sweat, and he’s sure his skin is ghostly, almost translucent from living in the dark for so long.
“Hyung, please, ” Jimin speaks again, a note of desperation creeping into his voice. “Eat something. Anything, please.”
He does this every day now, sounding increasingly worried each time. Hoseok wishes he’d give up, that’d he’d just let Hoseok go , but he knows he won’t. He won’t, the way Hoseok didn’t in those first months after everything ended, when they were confined to these same walls and Jimin’s grief was so deep that sometimes it seemed like he couldn’t even breathe through it.
Hoseok had refused to let him drown, but if he had known what he knows now, he would have let Jimin be. Death would be kinder than forcing himself to endure this. And to what end? There’s no horizon for him to look toward, no reward for his agony once it passes by him.
Imagining seven years away from Yoongi felt impossible, but Hoseok managed it knowing that there was a date in sight, a precious far away hope that waited for him. They would be together again, and he made it five years. Five.
He was so close. They were so fucking close .
Hoseok’s eyes burn with unwilling tears forced to bud once again, and he rolls against his tangle of blankets, drawing them over his face to hide himself. “Go away, Jimin.”
“Hyung–”
“ Go. Away. ”
To his credit, Jimin doesn’t argue. The telltale sound of glass on wood sounds, and Hoseok knows he’s left the food behind some place where Hoseok might reach it if he wanted to. When the door clicks shut behind Jimin, he leaves the air, somehow, even more sorrowful than how it was when he entered in the first place.
Hoseok shuts his eyes. If he lies still for long enough, he’ll fall asleep, and maybe there he’ll see Yoongi.
It is, after all, the only place he exists anymore.
At that thought, Hoseok begins to cry in earnest.
Seoul, South Korea
Kim Seokjin’s house.
Seokjin doesn’t announce his arrival, but the house is still, and silent enough that Namjoon can hear it happen. It’s well past midnight, no doubt Seokjin expects him to be in bed already, but Namjoon is wide awake, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, accompanied only by the coffee mug that is ensuring he doesn’t nod off.
He waits without making a sound, listening in to Seokjin shedding his coat and shoes in the front hall. It’s storming something hellish outside, and not the comforting kind with rolling thunder and rain, it’s the torrential kind, complete with howling wind that scrapes against the windowpanes and makes them groan in discomfort. Namjoon can’t possibly imagine what Seokjin would have to go out in this for, but he’s been insistent about these enigmatic jobs he has to run and tend to. Early mornings, or late nights, rain or shine for weeks.
And, listen, Namjoon gave him time, and space, lots of it. Especially in light of…well, Yoongi. He was a brother to Seokjin, although the two of them didn’t seem to like each other much, they cared deeply in the way that siblings tend to. Meaning, on the surface there was nothing but bickering, but when it comes down to it, they would have given a limb for one another. When they found out about Yoongi’s death, Namjoon braced himself for the worst, and more. After all, he knows the feeling. Losing Taehyung destroyed him in ways he can’t bring to words, even five years later. The early days following his death felt insurmountable, and when Yoongi died, Namjoon vowed that he would do anything he could to ease Seokjin’s pain during that time, the way he had wished for someone to ease his.
Namjoon knows everyone grieves differently, he’s not going to pretend he’s some grand master of mourning just because he had to go through it, and he’s not judging , but Seokjin has been…weird. He didn’t want to talk about it with Namjoon. He didn’t cry about it. He started disappearing sometimes, without much word. For fuck’s sake, Namjoon has visited Yoongi’s grave more times than Seokjin has. When Namjoon prompted him over it, Seokjin had merely shaken his head and said he didn’t see the point.
“ It’s just a bunch of bones, Joon-ah, ” he had muttered in exasperation. “ That’s not Yoongi.”
Namjoon was a little appalled by how unfeeling the statement had been. Yoongi’s burial hadn’t exactly been…traditional, but then, neither had his death. It was so fucking stupid, even now when Namjoon thinks of it, he can hardly accept that it’s real. A gas line. A gas line blowing in the maintenance room. Yoongi had been working down there with that boy Jeon Jeongguk and three other inmates, and for reasons unknown, the line had malfunctioned and blown up in their faces.
There wasn’t much left to look at after that.
It took the prison almost a month to identify which remains belonged to whom, and then gather them up to send back to Seokjin, who was listed as his next of kin. They buried him in the backyard next to Taehyung, because it felt symbolic in some way, or perhaps just comforting. The idea that they might be together again somehow, in some far away place. Hoseok and Jimin arrived for that, just long enough to shovel the dirt over the coffin, and then Hoseok excused himself to go vomit profusely in Seokjin’s rose bushes, and Jimin took him home after that. It’s the only time Namjoon has seen Hoseok since Yoongi died, and he was a sight for sore eyes.
But no, this isn’t about Hoseok, this is about Seokjin . All he does is work now, and he’s always maddeningly vague about where he is, or what he might be doing. Seokjin used to bring Namjoon to work with him, that’s how they got to be, you know, whatever it is they are today.
House mates , Seokjin calls them. Boyfriends , most people would say. Namjoon doesn’t care, he’s not really peeved about specific terminology, he’s peeved that Kim Seokjin keeps fucking vanishing into the night on him.
Down the hall, the sound of footsteps comes shuffling closer, and a moment later the kitchen light flicks on without warning.
Seokjin yelps. “ Fuck , Joon-ah, why are you awake?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Namjoon replies flatly, downing the last of his black coffee in one swig, and setting the mug on the counter. He swivels his chair around and turns to look at Seokjin. The rain, as it seems, has certainly gotten the best of him. It’s soaked into his shirt, even under the jacket that Namjoon assumes he was wearing, and plastered his dark hair to his forehead, but he still looks good. Infuriatingly good, Namjoon thinks. He’s come to accept the fact that there isn’t much - if anything - that Seokjin doesn’t look good in.
“Well, you scared the everfucking daylights out of me, way to put strain on an old man’s heart.”
Namjoon tips his head to the side, unimpressed. “For truly the last time, being in your thirties does not qualify you as a senior citizen. No matter how much you think it does.”
“Then tell me why my heart is beating at this rate?”
“Maybe you’re afraid of being caught red-handed,” Namjoon replies snappishly, more short-tempered than he had hoped to start the conversation, but he’s tired, and his words seem to slip out on their own accord.
Seokjin’s half-serious disgruntlement fades to something more serious, and he regards Namjoon with a puzzled frown. “Caught red-handed? Are you going to explain to me what that’s about, or just keeping sitting in the kitchen at–,” he pauses to glance down at his watch, “1:37 AM chugging straight coffee?”
Namjoon withers with something akin to shame, and he lowers his head, suddenly chickening out. “It’s nothing. It’s stupid.”
“Well,” Seokjin swings around and braces his elbows on the table, looking at Namjoon like he’s a riddle to be solved. “Do you wanna talk about it, or should hyung go to bed and leave you to wallow on your own?”
Namjoon falters. On one hand, he doesn’t want to be the one to start an argument, but on the other hand…Seokjin did ask. He sighs deeply, almost burdened, and plops his chin in his hands. “Why are you always gone? ”
Seokjin frowns, the typical crease of his eyebrows pairing with the downturned pout that he refuses to admit he does. “Working. You know that. You of all people know that.”
“I know,” Namjoon mumbles into his hand, “but what kind of work?”
“All kinds.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“It’s a weird career, Joon-ah,” Seokjin huffs, shaking his head. “It’s not like I have a timesheet here.”
“Do you take anyone with you?”
“Is this going where I think it’s going?”
“ No, ” Namjoon insists, though he catches the lack of believability in his own voice, and hates the fact of it. “I’m just asking.”
“Okay, well,” Seokjin turns to the sink and begins washing his hands as if he’s trying to scrub the cold and the rain from them, “if yourfollow-up is going to be something as ridiculous as are you cheating on me, you must already know the answer to that.”
Namjoon blinks. “Um, no ? I hope?”
Seokjin glances back at him, one eyebrow cocked. “The answer is that I never once dated anyone before you, what makes you think I’d date anyone after?”
Although his reply isn’t exactly an explanation for his long absences, it does make something tight in Namjoon’s chest unwind just a bit. He leans back over his coffee, somewhat mollified. “Romantic,” he murmurs.
Seokjin leans across the table and kisses his temple. “More of a reflection of me than you. Don’t go getting a big head about it.”
“Thanks,” Namjoon grumbles, but he stands when Seokjin tugs him to do so, and feels inclined to follow when he starts shuffling down the hall.
The bedroom is lit by the warm glow of the lotus floor lamp in the corner between the bed and the sliding glass doors that open onto a view of the backyard and the city sprawling beyond. The curtains, however, are closed, as Namjoon prefers them to be. Windows make his skin crawl, even just the idea that he could be watched inside his own house. Unfortunately for him, Seokjin was rich, and bored when it came to designing said house, so the windows are wide, and plentiful, but Seokjin was kind enough to invest in a nice sliding curtain situation when Namjoon moved in.
Namjoon, already dressed for bed, sinks onto the edge of the mattress and watches Seokjin stride unhurried across the room and into the en suite, tugging off his damp clothes as he goes. He doesn’t look away, or even blink as Seokjin bends over the sink to splash water on his face, and through his disarrayed hair, using his damp fingers to comb it back from his forehead. He looks like some sort of deity, all broad, and golden, carved from some sort of very expensive, luxury material.
It’s moments like these where Namjoon is struck by how profoundly different his life has become in the last five years. Winters spent homeless, wandering the streets trying to find a safe place to sleep for the night, have turned to watching his boyfriend stand in front of a double sink lazily applying his moisturizer that cost 150,000 won the last time Namjoon checked. Namjoon isn’t sure of when exactly this became his reality, and he isn’t sure if he’ll ever stop feeling like an imposer inside a life he was never meant to live.
What really digs into him at the end of the day, he thinks, is that this should have been Taehyung. Taehyung had carved out this pocket for himself in the world, he had Jimin, and they had their home, and it was beautiful. Namjoon was there, it was perfect for them. And now he’s here, and Taehyung is laying six feet under the soggy earth in the backyard, and Jimin is in a condo downtown with Hoseok, just getting through the days.
It’s hard to feel like Namjoon didn’t steal this from them, in a way. So hard, in fact, that Namjoon hasn’t stopped believing it yet.
“Namjoon-ah.”
Namjoon looks up sharply. Seokjin is toweling off his face, looking at him with one lifted brow.
“You’re brooding again.”
“I’m not brooding,” Namjoon lies. “I don’t brood.” He stands up and walks around the bed, flipping back the covers on his side and diving into them. “I’m just tired, I want you to come to bed so I can turn the lights out.”
“All you had to do was ask,” Seokjin replies with a roll of his eyes, but when he strides out of the bathroom he makes a pit stop at Namjoon’s side of the bed and extends a forefinger to tip his chin upward. “Are you forgetting something before you go to sleep?”
“ All you had to do was ask,” Namjoon replies mockingly, and yet, he leans upward to receive Seokjin’s kiss. His kiss. Even two years into their relationship, Namjoon marvels at the fact that he’s never been kissed by anyone the way Seokjin kisses him. Granted, it’s not like his dating pool was wide, a few girls in high school, and a few, ahem, situations, during his time in the military. Namjoon wasn’t even entirely sure he liked men until a few years ago. In fact, he’s still not convinced he likes men as a population, but rather that he likes Seokjin, and that’s all that matters at the end of the day. Seokjin, after all, will be the first one to say he doesn’t like anyone but Namjoon and that’s that.
Seokjin meanders around to his side, switching the lamp off before slipping under the covers, leaving a breath of space between himself and Namjoon. He doesn’t care to be touched when he sleeps, which is fine, because Namjoon doesn’t either.
“Are you doing anything tomorrow?” Seokjin asks in a conversational tone, rolling to face Namjoon.
Namjoon bunches his pillow under his arm and resists the urge to roll his eyes. “Busy as I always am.”
In other words: not busy in the slightest. Namjoon’s work goes as far as Seokjin’s, meaning that they both do their best to manage the so-called empire Yoongi left behind. Or at least, Namjoon used to do that, these days it feels like Seokjin does most everything in secret. Maybe he doesn’t need Namjoon’s help anymore.
No, stop that, Namjoon chides himself. You’re self sabotaging. You’re comfortable, and you don’t have a fucking clue what to do with yourself about it. Now you’re just looking for problems that don’t exist.
“Okay, well, you should stick around here,” Seokjin informs him lightly.
Namjoon frowns. He didn’t exactly have plans to leave, but Seokjin doesn’t usually ask that he stays.
“I’m bringing Hoseok and Jimin over.”
At that, Namjoon does a full double take. Jimin, maybe, but Hoseok? Hoseok who hasn’t called, or texted, or even left his apartment in months, as far as Namjoon knows? Yeah, good fucking luck.
Out loud, he just clears his throat. “And Hoseok—he agreed to come over?”
“Well, he will,” Seokjin shrugs, making the covers rustle around his broad shoulders.
“Have you seen him much? Since, you know…”
“A few times. I drop by every now and then, just to make sure the two of them are still alive.”
“And does he seem…?”
“Fine?” Seokjin interjects before Namjoon has to endure rooting around for an appropriate adjective to fit that particular question. “Fuck no. He’s a disaster. He’s miserable, he’s grieving.”
Now is the time, Namjoon has an in. He has to ask, he had to check in somehow.
“And, um, you?” he asks lightly. “Are you grieving, hyung?”
In the dark, Namjoon can’t see Seokjin’s frown so much as he feels it, an acute sensation traveling between them even when he can’t quite make it out. “I’m dealing with it, Namjoon-ah.”
“Right,” Namjoon replies, quieter. He’s not exactly satisfied with that answer, but it doesn’t feel right to push it. He doesn’t want to infringe on Seokjin’s grief, he just wants to know. Why he’s so okay amidst everything. It’s not right. And if he’s repressing all of his feelings now, they’re only going to come back ten times worse eventually. Namjoon would know, he’s been through every angle of grief as intimately as anything. First his parents, then Taehyung when he had assumed him to be dead for those years he spent looking for him to no avail, then Taehyung when Namjoon knew he was dead. Grief is that constant shadow trailing Namjoon, right behind him even when he isn’t looking at it. He wants to tell Seokjin that somehow, to let him know that, while he doesn’t claim to have all the answers, he knows grief. And he knows, most of all, that it’s better sat with than turned away.
Because it will always, always find its way back.
But it’s late, and Namjoon doesn’t want to push at a wound that’s still open, so he says nothing of it. Instead, he rolls away from Seokjin with a sigh.
“I’ll be here if you bring them over.”
“Good.”
“Goodnight, hyung.”
“Goodnight, Namjoon-ah.”
Namjoon shuts his eyes. The covers shift, and a moment later, Seokjin’s warm palm comes to rest on his waist.
The apartment.
Hoseok is killing himself. He’s actually killing himself. Jimin can’t pretend any longer that it’s anything other than exactly what it is: a slow, self-suffocating march toward death.
He almost never eats. He barely drinks. He hasn’t fed since—
And he still won’t talk about it. To anyone. When they buried Yoongi, on a day so cold that Namjoon had to fight to break ground with the steel tip of his shovel - probably the same shovel that buried Taehyung five years ago, was all Jimin could think - Hoseok said nothing. They lowered that little case of bones that the government had deigned to ship back to Seokjin and Hoseok had only swayed where he stood, remained standing long enough to watch Yoongi go under the earth, and then he’d turned and walked away looking like he was two seconds away from vomiting up a meal he’d refused to eat in the first place.
Jimin has tried. He has, he’s tried it all. He’s been the silent support, a ghost replacing Hoseok’s meals and letting him grieve in peace. He’s been talkative, urging Hoseok to share his feelings instead of containing them. He’s been supportive, offering to clean Hoseok’s room or wash his bedding or run to the store and grab him anything he wants. At the end of the day, Jimin might as well have tried the same things on a brick wall for all the reaction Hoseok gives him.
He won’t eat. Jimin can’t make him eat. He won’t feed. Jimin certainly can’t make him feed. He barely even takes those pills that are meant to be short term sustenance for succubi. Short term. It’s been three months now, three months and Hoseok must have dropped 20 pounds. People built like Hoseok don’t have 20 pounds to lose. He’s so gaunt he looks like he might be dead already, and it’s breaking Jimin’s heart. It’s breaking him. Maybe even more than losing Yoongi did. Yoongi has been gone for years, but Hoseok has been the only person Jimin could rely on. He was the only person who was really there after… Taehyung. After everything ended. And sure, they barely talked, Jimin didn’t have it in him to talk, but he still knew Hoseok was there, and Hoseok never once gave up on him.
But Jimin doesn’t remember it being this bad for him. He didn’t give up so entirely.
A few days ago Jimin asked himself why, why Hoseok’s grief would be worse than his own was, when Jimin was with Taehyung longer than Hoseok got to be with Yoongi. Then he remembered that Hoseok has been waiting every day for five years, waiting for Yoongi to come back to him, and Jimin was only able to be with Taehyung for four.
Four.
And it hit him that Taehyung has been dead for longer than Jimin got to love him. And somehow, that was the most unbearable thought he’d had in years. So he cried, for Taehyung, and for himself. For Hoseok, who is wasting away waiting for nothing, and for Yoongi who never got to be a free man again, although he deserved to.
Jimin cried until he felt as if his eyes would bleed from it.
“You don’t look so good.”
Jimin looks up. Seokjin is standing behind the couch in one of his nicely-cut suits, all trimmed and tailored to his broad shoulders and the way his waist moves inward in contrast. For as long as Jimin has known him, the man has dressed in business formal for every occasion, but since Namjoon has come into his life as, well, whatever it is that the two of them call one another, he dresses in expensive business formal. Like he upgraded from rental dry cleaner suits to custom-made silk and wool pieces just for the hell of it.
And look, Jimin isn’t saying that’s a bad thing, Seokjin deserves to be happy as much any of him, but him standing here looking so put together, so unbothered…it does feel like a little bit of a backhanded slap to the face, considering how poorly Jimin and Hoseok are doing these days. Is Seokjin not grieving too? Does none of this bother him? He hardly even blinked when they buried Yoongi, it doesn’t make sense to Jimin. Yoongi was like Seokjin’s little brother, and even if they weren’t exactly close and cuddly, surely he deserves… something . Some tears. A few weeks off work.
But no, it’s all business as usual for Kim Seokjin, who is looking down on Jimin as if he happened to find some poor, wounded animal on the side of the road, and he’s trying to decide if he should leave it to succumb to its fate, or if it’s worth trying to save.
“Hello, earth to Jimin,” he reaches out an unamused hand and waves it in front of Jimin’s face.
Jimin frowns, and curls back into his quilt, turning to face front where the TV is playing a cheap cable drama. “How did you even get inside?”
“I have a key,” Seokjin replies, sounding puzzled by the question. “My name is on the lease too, you know.”
Right. The apartment that Seokjin rents for them, because Jimin and Hoseok’s names were supposed to be kept off public record at all costs during Yoongi’s trial, every precaution was taken to shelter them from the media and the risk of retaliation, meanwhile Hoseok was terrified Yoongi would fall victim to that.
In the end the only thing he fell victim to was the boiler room.
It isn’t funny. Jimin shouldn’t laugh. He isn’t laughing, he’s just…in disbelief. Nothing makes sense right now.
“Did you hear me?” Seokjin prods Jimin’s shoulder, evidently feeling as though he isn’t receiving the appropriate amount of attention as the visitor he is. “I said , you don’t look so good.”
“Yeah, sorry, I forgot to shower this morning,” Jimin lies between his teeth. He had no intention of doing so, not then, and not now. “It’s been a long…” a long what? Week? Month? Five years? “...time,” he finishes weakly, not lifting his eyes from the TV.
“Since you showered?” Seokjin sniffs, “yeah, I can tell. Where’s Hoseok?”
“His room,” Jimin murmurs. “Same place he’s been for the past three months.”
“Well, that’s no good.”
“Hyung,” Jimin twists around, fixing Seokjin with what he hopes is an appropriately withering look. “It isn’t funny, you know. He’s hurting, he’s miserable, and there’s nothing you, or I can do about it.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Seokjin lifts a shoulder in a shrug that says I haven’t had my chance with him yet. “And I never said it was funny. It’s serious, it’s very fucking serious, that’s why I’m here. We’re getting him out of the house today.”
“Yeah,” Jimin mutters, just shaking his head. “Good luck with that.”
“Thank you,” Seokjin replies primly, not an inkling of sarcasm in his voice. “I assume I’ll need it.”
He turns without another word and strides down the hallway in the direction of Hoseok’s room.
Jesus, he’s actually going to do it. Jimin drags himself off of the couch, leaving the warm shell of his blanket behind so he can oversee this himself. Seokjin trying to drag Hoseok up and out is like an unstoppable force meeting and immovable object; in other words, something is probably going to explode.
Seokjin knocks once just as Jimin catches up to him, the quick, no-nonsense rap of his knuckles on the chipping white paint of the door. Unsurprisingly, Hoseok doesn’t reply.
“We should just leave him,” Jimin suggests softly, and perhaps, a little fearfully. “I’m sure he doesn’t want—”
“Jung Hoseok, I’m coming into your room in ten seconds whether you answer this door or not.”
Silence. Jimin, throat tight, begins counting to ten in his heat. At seven, Seokjin turns the knob and shoves the door inward.
The sight awaiting them inside is, well, more or less exactly what it has been for the last three months. Curtains drawn, keeping out any daylight. Laundry cluttering the floor, dust settled over most surfaces, and Hoseok, a lump under the blankets in his bed. There’s a vaguely musty smell lingering, the scent of neglect, decay, and despair.
“Good morning, Hoseok,” Seokjin says, never one to be deterred by a little hurdle like this. Not waiting long enough to receive a response, he takes a few long paces across the room to the windows and throws the curtains open. The results are immediate and blinding , daylight flooding the room in a way it hasn’t in months, shedding light on the sorry state of it in a way that darkness didn’t seem to do justice to, thrusting the utter mess of it into sharp relief.
Jimin opens his mouth, ready to tug Seokjin out of the room by force if need be, when Hoseok startles him by speaking.
“Fucking shut those right now, Seokjin.”
No greeting. No honorifics. Hoseok well and truly must not care for anything, or anyone any longer.
“I will not,” Seokjin replies flatly. “Jimin says you’re practically rotting in here.”
Wow. Way to make this look like Jimin’s idea.
“That isn’t—I didn’t really say that,” Jimin stammers, shooting a dirty look at the back of Seokjin’s head as he does so. “But—but maybe it is time that you get up, hyung.”
“I don’t give a damn what Jimin said,” Hoseok almost growls. “Get out of my room.”
Seokjin draws his shoulders back. “No.”
“ Get out.”
“ No.”
“Get out right now, or I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” Seokjin interrupts him with unconcerned bluntness. “You’ll sulk in bed at me? You’ll think malicious thoughts while not having showered for a month? Get up , Hoseok. Enough is enough.”
“Hyung,” Jimin murmurs, a little more than appalled at his tone of voice. Where is the care? The consideration for Hoseok’s fragile state? Jimin isn’t sure what he expects Hoseok to do in response. Nothing, perhaps, as it seems that’s his choice reaction as of late. But instead, he draws himself upright, the blankets slipping down to his waist and revealing more of him than Jimin has seen in weeks.
He looks awful. Sick. So thin and gaunt his collarbones jut out of the loose neck of his rumpled T-shirt, the locket he always wears resting between them, framed only by skin and bone. His cheeks are hollow, eyes lifeless, and his hair has grown out longer than Jimin has ever seen it. The ends brush his shoulders, not very unlike the style Yoongi himself used to wear, only Hoseok’s is a good deal less cared for.
“What do you want me to do?” he spits, eyeing Seokjin with a look of venom. Jimin understands him. That anger, at the universe, at its every inhabitant. Why , why did this have to happen to him? Why does he have to go through this? Why must he suffer in a way no one else has suffered before?
Of course, it isn’t true. Everyone grieves for something or someone at some point in time, but when you’re in the thick of it, it feels earth-shattering. Like no one could have ever possibly gone through this and made it out alive.
Seokjin, to his credit, looks entirely unphased by Hoseok’s hostile behavior. “I want you to get up, and shower, and I’ll take you and Jimin to mine and Namjoon’s place. I’ll cook, we can all have a meal together.”
“I don’t want to eat,” Hoseok snaps, dragging his blanket around him like it’s defensive armor. “I don’t want to pretend to be some happy family, it’s not true. Go away. Jimin too.”
“So, what then?” Seokjin challenges, folding his arms over his broad chest and giving Hoseok an appraising look. “You’re just going to lie here forever? Disintegrate into a mattress and disappear?”
“What else do you want me to do?” Hoseok burrows his chin into his blankets, looking, in Jimin’s eyes, like a very distressed child on the point of tears. He wants to step in and hold him, but he knows that if he tries, Hoseok’s anger will return, and they’ll both be worse off for it.
“Yoongi—,” Hoseok begins, stops as if he has to steel himself, and takes in a rattling breath. “Yoongi is dead.”
“And you’re alive!” Seokjin replies, gesturing widely around the room, as if to indicate all of its belongings and the surrounding world waiting outside. “You’re not the first person who has lost someone, Hoseok. I buried my father before I turned twenty, and Yoongi buried his when he was still a teenager. Hell, when Taehyung died, Jimin and Namjoon helped prevent an attempt at international pharmaceutical warfare far that same weekend—”
Jimin blinks, slightly affronted.
“-Life goes on . People die, and we don’t. And you’re deluding yourself if you think Yoongi would want you to live like this,” he adds, jerking his chin at Hoseok.
Hoseok glares up at him. The look in his dull eyes says murder. “Fuck you,” he hisses. “I wish it was you instead of him.”
“I’m sure you do,” Seokjin replies without batting an eye. “And for that, I can’t blame you. Now get up and shower, or I swear to you, I will drag you into the bathroom myself, and it won’t be pretty.”
For a long moment, Jimin is sure, absolutely positive, that Hoseok is going to launch himself off of the bed and maul Seokjin within an inch of his life. He’s braced for it, expecting that he’ll have to come between them and drag Hoseok back. Then, very slowly, and to Jimin’s genuine shock, Hoseok stands. Albeit with some apparent difficulty, but he actually gets up. He turns, refusing to look at either of them, and walks out of the room without another word.
A moment later, Jimin hears the bathroom door open, then clicks shut again just as quickly, and he breathes a sigh of relief that he didn’t know he was holding.
“God,” he exhales shakily, bracing one hand on the door frame. “I didn’t think he would actually listen.”
“Well, I did,” Seokjin shrugs, lifting his wrists and adjusting the cuffs of his suit primly. “He was Yoongi’s boy, he probably missed having someone to boss him around.”
Jimin doesn’t reply, and the tiny smile slipping up the corners of Seokjin’s mouth drops.
“Sorry. Too soon. But c’mon, we’ll all know Yoongi is kind of fucking bossy.”
Was . Yoongi was bossy. Jimin doesn’t say anything
He doesn’t have the heart to correct him.
Hoseok doesn’t remember the last time he showered. He’s well aware that that’s disgusting, he just doesn’t particularly care . The other thing that he doesn’t remember is any of it being this difficult . Just the task of washing his hair feels like an arduous burden, one that makes his muscles burn in protest, and his vision swim like he’s on the verge of blinking out of consciousness. Natural consequences, he supposes, of not eating, not moving, and popping pills in place of having sex.
Hoseok knows he won’t last much longer than this. But again: he just doesn’t care enough to change that.
Maybe this is the end of the line for him. Maybe he should just go willingly, let Seokjin make him a last meal, savor what little semblance of togetherness he has left in his small, dark life, and when he gets back here, he’ll…what, kill himself? After everything? It seems a harsh call to make, but then, what have the last three months been if not Hoseok slowly and painstakingly taking his own life?
He at least owes it to himself to make it quick. To minimize any further suffering. There are pills in the cabinet, Jimin’s sleeping meds, and painkillers. Hoseok is sure if he mixed both of them and took it in copious amounts it would be enough to stop his heart, especially given the fact that he’s fifteen pounds underweight and sick as it is. A stiff breeze would probably be enough to stop his heart at this rate.
He should do. Rip the bandaid off. There’s nothing left here for him to–
“Hoseok,” Seokjin’s voice sounds through the wall, followed by a fist banging thrice on the door. “Hurry up, I told Namjoon we’d be there by 5:00.”
Oh, fucking Namjoon. Namjoon and Seokjin and their perfect, domestic little life. Hoseok heard they want a dog now. Maybe they also happen to have a white picket fence and a fucking baby on the way, fuck , it makes Hoseok sick to his stomach.
And deep down, he knows he should be happy for them, knows that his anger is vindictive and unnecessary, that the two of them are just as deserving as anyone of a hopeful beginning, but part of Hoseok (the one that’s still buried in denial) knows that seeing the two of them together hurts like hell because more than anything else, that was supposed to be him and Yoongi. One day .
And it never will be. How is he supposed to live knowing that? He can’t. He won’t.
Hoseok shuts the water off and towels himself down. At some point someone - Jimin, no doubt - cracked the door and placed a fresh change of clothes on the edge of the sink, and Hoseok pulls them on, a little disturbed at how the jeans, once form fitting, hang off of his waist, how the T-shirt gives the impression it’s draped over a skeleton more than an actual living, breathing person. And his hair–well, it looks better now that it’s clean, but it’s still wild and unkempt. He doesn’t know how to fix up hair this long, so he just dries it viciously and lets it fall lank and unstyled around his face.
When he swings the door open and shuffles out, he’s unsurprised to find Jimin waiting on the other side of the door like a little puppy, a little anxious around his eyes but obviously making an effort to appear neutral.
“You look good,” he attempts generously, lifting a hand like he’s going to touch Hoseok, then evidently deciding better of it and pulling back.
“I look like shit,” Hoseok replies in a grunt. “At least have the decency to be honest.”
“I think you look good,” Jimin says, softer this time, a little hurt, and dropping his gaze downcast. The sight of his shoulders drooping makes Hoseok very fleetingly feel a semblance of normal human emotion again. Sympathy for Jimin, his friend who has looked after him all these months, thankless, ugly work, and Hoseok no longer even has the decency to be kind to him.
He might have opened his mouth and uttered something that could be called an apology, but Seokjin rounds the corner and gives him a quick once-over.
“Well, you look a little better,” he announces, lifting a shoulder. “How do you feel?”
“Like my boyfriend is dead, and I don’t want to go to your house and pretend like everything is great,” Hoseok replies, waspishly at best, and downright venomous at worst.
Seokjin claps his shoulder and heads for the door. “Great! I’m sure Jimin feels the same way. Get your shoes, I’ll drive.”
The drive to Seokjin and Namjoon’s place is charged, to say the least. Seokjin makes several attempts at conversation, which Jimin bravely tries to sustain, and Hoseok ignores entirely. He’s more intrigued by the way immovable Seokjin seems to grow almost nervous the closer they get. As they descend into the city center, the signs show in his body language like the tell of a lie: fingers drumming on the steering way, dodgy eye contact, the way he ends his sentences a note higher than he usually would. If it were anyone else, it would go unnoticed, but Seokjin doesn’t waver.
Something has him on edge, and for good reason.
They slide smoothly into the double garage, pulling alongside the black Lexus tucked on one side. Seokjin cuts the engine and gets out quickly, grabbing the door for Hoseok as soon as he does so. Hoseok moves toward the side door leading up from the basement into the rest of the house, the same door he’s entered through every other time he’s been here, but Seokjin seizes his elbow and yanks him in the opposite direction.
“Not that one. There’s, uh, a mildew problem in the basement, don’t wanna be on those stairs. We’ll take the front entrance.”
Jimin looks mildly puzzled. Hoseok, quite frankly, doesn’t care enough about any of this to argue, so he allows himself to be led around to the front steps, where Seokjin punches in the door code and lets himself inside.
“Joon-ah,” he calls out as soon as the door swings open. “I’m home.”
After a brief pause, followed by the sound of bare feet on wood, Namjoon rounds the corner, a look of poorly-disguised surprise on his face. “Hoseok,” he blinks widely. “You came.”
“Against my will,” Hoseok mutters, brushing past them and showing himself into the living room where he sinks down into one of the amply cushioned couches and folds himself there, arms wound so tightly over his chest that they may never come unraveled.
Seokjin follows, his arm around Namjoon’s waist and a hand on Jimin’s shoulder like he’s shepherding them both into the room. There’s that look on his face. Doubt . Worry. Something is so clearly throwing him off, and if Hoseok were invested in being here at all, he might have asked, but he’s intent on getting this over with as soon as possible. Minimal conversation, minimal interaction. It’ll make it easier for when he goes home and–
“I want to talk to everyone,” Seokjin announces suddenly, blunt, and very to the point. Namjoon shoots him a confused, sidelong glance.
“You–you do?”
Okay, so whatever bullshit Seokjin is on, Namjoon is clearly not in on it either. Apparently they’re not as deep in cahoots with one another as Hoseok originally thought.
“Yes, I do.”
“About…what, exactly?”
Jimin is staring at Seokjin quizzically, looking like he was about to ask the same question if Namjoon hadn’t beat him to it.
“Well, a lot of things,” Seokjin swallows, making his Adam’s apple bob. He directs Namjoon to the couch and propels Jimin in the same direction. “Important things.”
Namjoon sits warily, Jimin following suite but picking a cushion closer to Hoseok. Hoseok wishes he wouldn’t. Just being near other people makes his skin prickle with discomfort. With three sets of eyes staring at him expectantly, Seokjin seems to falter a bit where he’s standing at the head of the room, hands clasped like he’s about to present a school project.
After a moment of confounded silence, Namjoon clears his throat. “Hyung. You wanted to…talk?” he gestures vaguely at the gathered audience of three, including himself.
“I’m gathering my thoughts,” Seokjin replies snippily, nervously adjusting and readjusting his cuff links like some sort of unconscious tic. “Do I look like a fucking politician to you? I wasn’t born to stand around giving speeches.”
Hoseok thinks privately that, with his unshakeably handsome features and well-fitted suit, there’s no one in this room that makes a better poster boy for politics than Kim Seokjin, but that’s neither here nor there, so he keeps his mouth shut until Seokjin opens his.
“As I’m sure you’re all aware,” Seokjin begins, following a deep inhale, “three months ago Yoongi—”
“No,” Hoseok replies, the word punching out of him almost before he has time to even think of it. He stands up so quickly his head swims, and he can feel Jimin’s eyes dart to him nervously. “If you think you’re going to drag me here so we can all share our feelings about this, know that I will walk out of here right now. I’ll take your car, I don’t give a shit.”
“Sit back down,” Seokjin tells him, giving him the sort of look someone would give an unruly, dramatic child when they’re misbehaving. “If you could stop wallowing in self-pity long enough to listen to anyone else, you’d realize you’d kill to hear this.”
Maybe it’s the sheer finality in his voice, or the way he doesn’t coddle Hoseok in the slightest, but Hoseok feels slightly humbled by his sharp, unyielding tone of voice. Humbled enough, at least, that he retreats back to his seat, though fuming a little now.
“ As I was saying , three months ago Yoongi was involved in an accident at the prison he was incarcerated at, which supposedly took his life–”
“ Supposedly ?” Namjoon interjects abruptly, the edge in his tone matching the way Hoseok’s heart skips a very necessary beat. “What do you mean supposedly? We buried him.”
“We buried a handful of bones stolen from a cemetery in Dobong-gu ,” Seokjin replies matter-of-factly. “Because it made it all believable.”
Jimin’s eyes are as wide as saucers at Hoseok’s side, and Hoseok is glad he speaks, because he isn’t sure he can for himself. “Made what believable?”
“His disappearance. He needed to go underground at all costs, and there was no better way to do that than to stage an elaborate, tragic death and make sure every single person around him thought it was true. Except for me of course. Someone had to help out with the details, this wasn’t exactly a one-man operation.”
Hoseok’s throat is so dry he isn’t sure the words will come out, but he manages to choke them up like a half-croak. “What are you saying?”
Seokjin tips his head and gives Hoseok a look that’s almost pitying. “I would explain more, but I really don’t think you’re going to believe me unless I show you so…” he turns slowly, facing the empty doorway behind him, and clears his throat. “Yoongi-ah?”
Yoongi’s heart feels like it’s jumping in his chest. Frantic, painful attempts at leaping straight out of his body and onto the floor, but its urgent beat is nothing compared to Hoseok’s. Yoongi can feel it as much as he can hear it, a racing pulse strumming along in his chest alongside his own. Namjoon’s, Seokjin’s and Jimin’s are there too, but they’re faint in comparison to Hoseok’s. They’re bonded, the two of them, Yoongi could feel Hoseok’s heartbeat from oceans away if he wanted to, but it’s been so long since they’ve been this close, months now, he forgot how strong it is, the incessant pull demanding that Yoongi go to his side and stay there.
It’s been five years, five since Yoongi touched Hoseok. Sure, he sat across those steel visitor tables for fifteen minutes at a time, able to look but not feel, but that was a sorry substitute for being, truly being, with one another. He’s wanted it so badly for years now, sometimes wanted it so much that his teeth hurt from it, his skin burned, and his chest ached with some insatiable need that refused to truly go away, but now, on the precipice of seeing him again after so long, after staging his fucking death , Yoongi is sort of…terrified?
Maybe he didn’t do this right. Maybe he should have told Hoseok.
No, Yoongi shakes his head, physically forcing himself to remember why he did this. he had to keep it a secret, that was the whole point. That everyone, save for Seokjin, grieve and mourn, and react appropriately, so any stray eyes left watching them would believe that Min Yoongi well and truly perished in that freak explosion. It was a cruel, but necessary sacrifice, and one that Yoongi was willing to make because at the end, he would reunite with Hoseok again, and everything would make sense.
Only now he’s pressed flat against the hallway wall, having crept up from the basement where Seokjin relegated him, and Seokjin is calling for him to come out like some sort of surprise entertainer at an event, and Yoongi feels very bizarrely like he might actually throw up.
From the living room, Seokjin coughs. “Hello, Yoongi, you’re making me look fucking crazy out here.”
Jesus, Yoongi exhales narrowly through his nose, steeling himself enough to fumble for his wooden can and propel himself forward. Get a grip, Yoongi. This is far from the most terrifying thing you’ve ever done.
Seokjin huffs, audibly losing his patience. “ Min Yoongi, walk into the fucking living room right now.”
With his heart lodged firmly in his throat, Yoongi doubles down on his cane for support (he doesn’t usually need it this much, he swears, it’s just that he feels a little unsteady on his feet just now. And can he be blamed for that under these extenuating circumstances?), and steps toward the waiting doorway.
Although there are four people gathered there, three of which he knows will be equally shocked at the sight of him, Yoongi only has eyes for one. He’s there, right in front of Yoongi, not even ten paces away.
Hoseok. His Hoseok. And there are a lot of things Yoongi could say or do or think, but the undeniable first that comes to mind is how devastatingly frail Hoseok looks, thin and hollow, and dark. Yoongi has a lot of thoughts on that, all of which, he’s sure, will come to him in due time, but right this very second, as Hoseok gets to his feet with his mouth open and a look in his eyes that’s frankly indescribable, Yoongi can only manage two words.
“Hi, Dove.”
There’s a second, or maybe ten, that seem to stretch on for a small eternity. Hoseok doesn’t move. Yoongi knows for a fact that he doesn’t breathe. Jimin has taken in his breath sharply, and Namjoon is snapping his head back and forth between Yoongi and Seokjin like he’s trying to gauge which one of them is lying, because someone must be, right?
Yoongi takes another step forward, intent on taking the shortest and most direct path to Hoseok’s, but Hoseok moves first.
Not to Yoongi. To Seokjin. He walks slowly, almost trancelike, right up to Seokjin, staring at him with that almost-stricken expression for so long that Yoongi is about to interrupt and ask if he’s missing something, when Hoseok lifts a hand, sudden and sharp, and slaps Seokjin hard across his cheek.
Namjoon lets out an indignant cry, jumping up as if he’s going to rush Hoseok, but Seokjin holds up a hand that halts him in his place.
“It’s alright,” he says calmly, maintaining a perfectly even tone in spite of the red mark blooming across his right cheekbone. “It’s fine.”
“You bastard,” Hoseok breathes. His chest is rising and falling rapidly, and through the thin material of his shirt, Yoongi could easily count each rib where they jut out of his skin. “You—for months. You knew. You—”
Yoongi has the feeling he should reach in and pull Hoseok away while he still can, while Seokjin is still stone-faced and unrattled, and Hoseok is still speaking instead of biting his head off. But the second Yoongi hesitates, is the second Hoseok takes to launch himself at Seokjin in a bodily tackle that sends them both hurtling toward the floor and landing with a crash in a tangle of arms and legs.
“You fucking knew, you let me be miserable for months, and he was alive the whole fucking time—” Hoseok is gritting out between clenched teeth. His hands have moved to Seokjin’s throat, circling there in what can only be a very well executed attempt at strangulation. If it were anyone else beneath him, Yoongi would praise Hoseok’s technique, but unfortunately his victim is Seokjin, and his murder by Hoseok’s hands would not go down very well.
The second the two of them hit the ground, the room erupts with noise. Jimin gasping “ hyung!”, Namjoon surging forward roaring “Hoseok, get off of him!”, and Seokjin trying with admirable calm to deescalate.
Namjoon seizes Hoseok by his collar, dragging him with a strength that’s disproportionate to Hoseok’s skeleton of a body, and it’s then that Yoongi realizes he really should have stepped in earlier.
“ Don’t, Namjoon, let him go,” Yoongi snaps, and Namjoon relinquishes him immediately with the look of a puppy who knows he’s misbehaved.
Seokjin is peeling himself off the floor, straightening his jacket and mussed hair. “It’s fine,” he repeats, sounding very self-assured about it. “I understand. I deserve it.”
“Yeah, you fucking do,” Hoseok snaps.
Seokjin shakes his head. “Are you even going to look at Yoongi, or just keep trying to cut my head off?”
It’s then that something in Hoseok seems to crumple. The fight is extinguished from his tense posture in one breath, and instead of drawing himself up,he sinks down. Down, down, down, into a crouch that he draws himself into, hugging his knees to his chest and dropping his face onto them as if he’s hiding from the rest of the room.
“I can’t,” he chokes, muffled by his clothing, but not enough to conceal the sound of tears in his voice.
Yoongi’s heart feels like it’s being forcibly shoved through a meat grinder and wrenched out the other side in tatters. He shoots Seokjin a look that says something like clear out and give us a moment if you know what’s good for you , and Seokjin makes a brief motion with his hand that summons Jimin and Namjoon to his side. Yoongi doesn’t watch them go, he only knows that they do by the sound of their footsteps retreating down the hall into the kitchen, and it’s then that Yoongi lowers himself too, crouching, because if he kneels his leg will cramp up, and he doubts he’ll be able to stand again.
“Hoseok,” he beckons, as soft as he can muster now, because Hoseok deserves only tenderness from him. “Hoseok, look at me please. Look at me, I’m right here.”
Hoseok shakes his head furiously, not lifting it for a second. His shoulders shake, wracked with crying that Yoongi knows he’s trying and failing to repress. “You’re dead, they told me you were dead. Everyone said it, they sent your body back, we-we buried you.”
“I know,” Yoongi whispers. “I know, all of it, I know. And I promise you, I have an explanation for everything, and I wanted more than anything to tell you. Every single day, Dove, I’ve missed you, and I’ve wanted to see you.”
He almost says you don’t know what it was like, being free, being so close to you but not able to see you , and it’s true, Hoseok doesn’t know what Yoongi has felt the past three months, but Yoongi doesn’t know what Hoseok felt either. He’s beginning to think he wasn’t the one who had it worse. It’s one thing to spend three months with no one but Kim Seokjin for company, knowing that at the end he’d have Hoseok back, and it's an entirely separate thing to go months on end thinking the person you love has died.
“I’m sorry,” he says instead, meaning it from the very bottom of his heart, from the pit of his stomach, and beyond. From the guilt running through him, the remorse for dragging Hoseok through this. For just one moment, the means to an end, the reasoning for why doesn’t matter, the only real thing is that Hoseok was hurting terribly, and it’s Yoongi’s fault. “I’m so sorry, Hoseok. I’m here now, I’m real, I promise you. Look at me, Dove, I’m right here.”
The following moment is filled only by Hoseok’s ragged breathing. He sounds like he’s trying to control himself, to steady his breath, but finding little success. Finally, after a pause in which Yoongi feels like his heart might be bleeding out wherever it’s sitting in his chest, Hoseok slowly, slowly lifts his chin and meets Yoongi’s gaze.
Up close, he looks smaller and sicker than Yoongi has ever seen him, like his skin has shrunk against his bones, and the life has been siphoned out of him, but under it all there’s an awe dawning on his everlastingly beautiful features that makes him look like himself, and Yoongi watches as it blooms until something seems to stretch and snap in Hoseok and his watery eyes overflow.
“ Yoongi ,” he sobs, and pitches forward to throw his arms around Yoongi in the kind of embrace that a drowning man gives a lifesaver at sea.
Yoongi falls into it, knee be damned. If he can’t stand after this, it’s worth it. He’ll live. Five years he’s waited for this, five fucking years, it’s everything he dreamt of, everything he lay awake at night twisting his bedsheets in hand over, riddled with the kind of desperation that drives a man to the edge of insanity.
This, all of this. Every part, every sensation. Each angle of Hoseok’s body pressed into his, the way his hair brushes against Yoongi’s face, soft and ticklish. His sweet scent unfurling slowly, like a flower bursting into bloom. Yoongi drinks it in like the last bit of water in the desert, savoring each note and then inhaling more. He missed this the way he would miss breathing if he were being held underwater.
“I love you,” he whispers against Hoseok’s throat, lips brushing soft skin that still rings familiar under his touch. Time has changed, but they haven’t, not really. Still the same bodies, the same birthmarks, and freckles, and curves, all of it so divine in its familiarity. “I love you so much, Dove. I love you.”
“I missed you,” Hoseok says, barely more than a whimper, and a disbelieving one at that, like he can’t quite comprehend that Yoongi is in his arms. “I missed you, every day I–every–three months.”
“I know, I know, I know,” Yoongi shushes him, threading his fingers through Hoseok’s hair. It’s soft, and clean, as if he recently washed it, but grown out longer than Yoongi has ever seen it. It’s beautiful on him, everything is beautiful on him. “I’m sorry, Dove, it’s not what I wanted, but I had to, I had to make sure everything happened exactly right.”
Hoseok pulls back shakily. He seems unwilling to release Yoongi, so even when he withdraws his hands move forward and up, cupping Yoongi’s face and holding him near, touching, feeling , as if he’s still trying to make sure that every single part of this sensory experience is real. “But– how?”
“Fire, and Seokjin, and a few bribes changing hands,” Yoongi tries for a smile, hoping he’ll elicit one from Hoseok too. “It’s not so hard to fake your own death, as it turns out. But staying underground was important, the whole point was making sure everyone believed I was dead, and that meant it had to be believable from every angle. And I couldn’t tell you, and I’m so, so sorry, Dove. I am. I wanted to let you, just you know, but Seokjin-hyung said I shouldn’t, and he was right. But it was awful. It hurt . I’m sorry.”
Hoseok stares at him for a long moment, his wide, watery eyes brimming with yet-to-fall tears, and for a terrible moment Yoongi wonders if forgiveness won’t be granted (and he knows, deep down, he couldn’t altogether blame Hoseok for it), and then Hoseok tips forward and winds himself around Yoongi again. His breathing, so shallow and rapid, each exhale a soft puff against Yoongi’s neck, and his heartbeat - oh - it feels perfect, the way it fits inside of Yoongi’s like a tiny echo when he tunes into it. Two reverberations bouncing in harmony with one another, like music that only Yoongi can hear. He wishes he could describe it to Hoseok, how beautiful they sound together, like they were always meant to be that way.
“Yoongi,” Hoseok says again, his hand coming to run through the short back of Yoongi’s hair. He sounds like he’s saying Yoongi’s name just to say it, now. Just to feel it roll off of his tongue, each sweet vowel and consonant filling his mouth with sound. “Yoongi, Yoongi. I love you,” he breathes, his mouth brushing over Yoongi’s throat. “I love you. I miss you, I missed you. I love you so much, I want to talk to you, I want to tell you everything, I want to ask you–but I–”
“I know,” Yoongi brings his palm to the nape of Hoseok’s neck, pressing there to steady him. “We’ll have time for all of it, I promise. And there’s more I want to tell you, but I need to talk to everyone else too, alright? I’m going home with you today, that’s what matters. You won’t have to sleep alone tonight, Dove.
The five of them get caught up as best as they can under the duress of the circumstances at hand. Namjoon seems to be battling the opposing forces of grateful shock, and sourness in Hoseok’s direction for tackling Seokjin to the floor and trying to strangle the living daylights out of him.
Yoongi still can’t believe Seokjin and Namjoon , of all people, ended up together. He honestly kind of thought Seokjin was one of those rare people who lived his entire life completely unmoved by feelings of love, romantic or otherwise, and honestly Yoongi had kind of envied him. This is the perfect career path for someone immune to the human condition, but as it turns out, Seokjin has his weaknesses too, in the form of one broody Kim Namjoon who is now watching Hoseok out of the corner of his eyes as if he might suddenly go rabid, leap up and start attacking people at random.
For Hoseok’s part, he doesn’t look like he plans on moving any time soon. He seems a little dazed still, eyes glassy as if he hasn’t entirely comprehended the events of the last couple of hours yet. Where Yoongi goes, Hoseok follows with a hand wound into his sleeve, intent on not letting him stray far.
Jimin seems relieved, more than anything, but notably quiet. He greets Yoongi almost as if he were going to hug them, but seems to remember a second before that the two of them don’t exactly do that. Either way, for the first time in his life, Yoongi is glad to see him. To see all of them.
The loft apartment (if it can even be called that) that Seokjin has been storing Yoongi at for the duration of the last three months contained the bare essentials to keep a person alive, but Yoongi was bored out of his mind. It’s better than prison, sure, but somehow the tantalizing taste of having his freedom so close, yet just out of reach for mere weeks longer, was somehow almost as punishing as his years in prison.
And Seokjin, Seokjin told Yoongi Hoseok was managing. “ Upset, but managing.”
Those were his exact words, Yoongi trusted that while Hoseok was no doubt struggling he was at least getting by, but looking at him now, Yoongi isn’t so convinced. He looks thin enough to be picked up and carried away by a stiff breeze, his face has hollowed out, and the flush of life he usually carries has been extinguished. Beneath the sweetened scent of his contentment at being next to Yoongi again, there’s something darker, like a deep char blackening the air. He smells hungry. He smells sick. Yoongi despises that, knowing that it’s his fault in no small way.
Seokjin cooks while they catch up. Namjoon’s tension lessens as they all get a meal in them, and he starts warming to Hoseok again, and they all talk, for once, of nothing important. Stupid, trivial things Yoongi missed while he was locked up. Celebrities who have had falls from social graces. Politicians with melodramatic sex scandals. The dog that Seokjin and Namjoon briefly owned. There’s no discussion of business, or crisis, or the unmentioned storm on the horizon that Seokjin knows of as well as Yoongi does, but chooses to keep his silence without even having to be asked.
Yoongi is glad. They deserve one night like this. Normal, as if they were all just friends and couples gathered for an unremarkable evening the way that regular people do. It feels sacred, in a way.
And it feels false. Yoongi knows it won’t last beyond the warm glow of this night, but he won’t be the first one to break the fantasy, so he says nothing and lets it stretch on a while longer.
It’s long since gotten dark by the time the evening winds to a natural end. Hoseok, fragile and exhausted, moved to the couch while Namjoon started the dishes. Yoongi peeks in on him every now and again, watching the way his eyes droop and his shoulders sags, body fighting against the inevitable until it gives out and his head lolls onto one of the pliable cushions and he dozes. Jimin is on the opposite end of the couch, keeping a not so distant eye on Hoseok almost as much as Yoongi is. He looks almost relieved when Hoseok sleeps, like a weight has been lifted off of his chest by it.
“You can take my car back to the apartment if you want.”
Yoongi starts at Seokjin’s voice over his shoulder. It takes a good measure of self-control not to round on him, muscles reflexively coiled in defense. If Yoongi thought he was easily provoked before, years in prison have only made that fact exponentially worse.
Seokjin, for his part, looks unphased by Yoongi’s reaction. Though his face is bruised by the lingering shadow of Hoseok’s hand print, that’s the only small piece of him that seems disarrayed. “Jimin’s gonna stay here,” he shrugs. “Talked to him already. We both agreed it might be better for you and Hoseok to…have the place to yourselves tonight. You know.”
“Yes, hyung, I know, thank you,” Yoongi replies before Seokjin has to chance to go into any more detail about his speculations on Yoongi and Hoseok’s sex life. It doesn’t feel quite right to imagine the two of them falling into bed with one another when there’s still so much talking to do, any normal couple would surely get caught up on all the things they need to tell one another before rolling around tangled in sheets, but Yoongi and Hoseok are no normal pair.
Hoseok must need it terribly. Yoongi is almost surprised he hasn’t been tugged aside into a bathroom or closet just this afternoon to give Hoseok what he must be craving in a deep, awful way. Maybe it’s the shock that’s numbing his hunger, and sleep now that mutes it, but when he awakes Yoongi expects him to be ravenous, and Seokjin and Jimin are right. Yoongi will want privacy to care for Hoseok tonight.
“I’m going to take him home,” he adds after a brief pause, flicking a glance back at Seokjin, and receiving a nod in return.
“Good. Take care of him.”
Yoongi narrows his eyes. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”
“No, I don’t mean–” Seokjin shoves Yoongi’s arm, making a tutting sound. “Get your mind out of the gutter, I wasn’t talking about sex. I meant take care of him . He’s exhausted. It’s…been a long few months.”
“I can tell,” Yoongi replies, unable to keep his voice from darkening slightly. He doesn’t want to criticize Seokjin, not after all he’s done these past years, keeping the skeletal remains of what was once Yoongi’s empire from dissolving completely, but there are some things Yoongi can’t let go of easily. “You didn’t tell me he was this sick,” Yoongi continues, throat tightening around the words. It’s physically painful to say, to address head on how bad of a condition Hoseok is in, that it’s because of him .
“Yeah,” Seokjin lifts a shoulder. “You died , what did you expect?”
“You told me he was doing alright when I asked.”
“Of course I did, I had to, Yoongi. I knew that if you knew what state he was actually in, you’d demand to see him, and the whole point of keeping you hidden would be ruined. I had to keep you both from each other to ensure we succeeded, you understand that, don’t you?” Seokjin’s eyes have a hollow, troubled quality to them when Yoongi looks at him. “Don’t think for one second that I took any pleasure in what I’ve done the last three months, but we made it out. Onto the next, right?”
“Yeah,” Yoongi sighs, turning back to gaze at Hoseok’s sleeping form. He wants, more than anything, to scoop him up and take him somewhere where they can be safe together, eternally, but Yoongi knows that place doesn’t exist for them, not yet. There’s more to be done before they can go there, but tonight none of that matters. Tonight, he’s alive, and there’s a love he hasn’t felt in years waiting for him.
“Onto the next.”
Hoseok wakes up to movement, his own body being jostled slightly, his ear pressed against a heartbeat. It’s briefly disorienting. Is he dreaming still? Wishing? There’s been no one in his bed in years , why would there be now? Is this even a bed ? And why is he– ow .
“Shit, I’m sorry, so sorry, Dove.” A palm comes around to the side of his head, petting over the spot that just knocked into something unyielding. A doorjamb? A wall?
And oh, that voice. That voice .
Hoseok forces his eyes open so quickly that his body starts from it, jerking in place, and his foot hits something solid.
“Shh, it’s me, Hoseok, it’s just me.” Yoongi’s hold on him tightens, preventing Hoseok from writhing out of his hold in a half-asleep panic. “You’re home, I brought you home. It’s just the two of us.”
The shock coursing through Hoseok feels strong enough to power a small city, he has to physically force himself to inhale, slow and deep, to remember that Yoongi is here .
He’s here, he’s here, he’s right here, he’s real, he’s touching me, he’s holding me.
He’s alive.
He’s alive.
Yoongi adjusts him, wiggling a hand free, and the telltale creak of Hoseok’s bedroom door swinging open can be heard echoing through the hallway. “Gonna put you down,” he murmurs. “Just on the edge of your bed, okay?”
“It’s not clean,” Hoseok murmurs, a little delirious, both with exhaustion and relief, but all of that is fading fast in the face of shame rising hot and sharp in his chest. His room is disgusting, it’s a graveyard of broken hopes and endless misery. Dust, sweat, dirty clothing on every surface. Even with Jimin’s best attempts to keep the place livable, it still has the stale stench of bone-deep depression leeched into it.
“It’s not clean,” he repeats, shakier this time. His skin feels hot, and his eyes are prickling, needlepoint tears emerging from nowhere and threatening to spill over. He gave up, he didn’t even to try to help himself. He all but rotted into his bedsheets, there were days on end where he wouldn’t even stand to go to the bathroom, he’d just lay there, miserable, holding it the way he held his agony. His grief was so ugly he almost can’t bear to have it perceived, it makes him feel small, contaminated and unwanted.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, bringing his hands to his face and hiding behind them, even as Yoongi is moving to sit beside him and pull them away. “I didn’t know what to do, after you d-died, I just couldn’t–I didn’t–I felt like everything ended, Yoongi. I thought I died too. It’s all dirty, and awful, I know, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t, Dove,” Yoongi’s voice is almost impossibly soft, and it twists the knife in Hoseok’s chest, making him want to cry even harder. He had forgotten that Yoongi could be this gentle, had almost forgotten the exact cadence of his tone without realizing it. The idea that something so beloved could slip from memory so easily makes him sick, the knowledge that even the most important things are only fleeting sensations.
“Hoseok, please , please,” Yoongi holds his arms when Hoseok refuses to move them from his face, rocking him back and forth slightly. “Don’t do that, don’t apologize to me, there’s nothing you owe me. Listen to me, nothing . Nothing, do you understand that?”
Hoseok shudders, taking in a breath that doesn’t seem to make it all the way to the depths of his lungs. He isn’t sure that he does understand just yet, he’s not even sure if any of this is real, or if it’s his mind’s final push to give him something good before it gives out, but he nods regardless.
“I’ll clean it,” Yoongi whispers, pressing his lips to Hoseok’s temple and speaking against his skin. “I’ll do it right now, just say you want me to. Fuck, say nothing, Dove, I’ll do it anyway. I’ll make it better, alright? All I need is a couple of minutes.”
He pulls away from Hoseok slowly, petting over his hair. Briefly, Hoseok wants to call for him to come back, wants to tell him that even the briefest idea of Yoongi being separated from him makes his heart pound and his stomach churn, but Yoongi doesn’t go far. Just to the other side of the room, the low vanity desk where a pile of dishes that accumulated in spite of Jimin’s best attempts sits. He gathers them up into a pile, walking toward the doorway, then stops.
He looks at Hoseok, gaze softening, sympathetic, as if he can read his thoughts. And in a way, Hoseok knows he can. Yoongi imprinted on him. He tied their lives together in some divine, primal way. They’re part of each other’s bodies, the two of them. Hoseok as Yoongi’s heartbeat, Yoongi as Hoseok’s sustenance.
“I’ll be right back,” he says softly. “I’m only going to the kitchen. I promise.”
“Okay,” Hoseok whispers, no strength to muster anything more than that. He watches the back of Yoongi’s tousled head retreat, drawing pictures of him in his mind’s eye once he disappears from sight.
The last time Hoseok saw him, Yoongi’s hair was buzzed short, almost military standard, in an effort to make it easier to care for in the little time he had for personal maintenance. He looked handsome, of course he did, but it was a painful reminder of how much had been stripped from him, and the fact that he was a prisoner, and Hoseok often found himself mourning Yoongi’s longer locks, grown out enough to be carded through or gathered up to the top of his head in a neat little knot when he didn’t want it in his face.
It’s longer now, three months grown out, but he looks a little disheveled in the way that someone who has been hiding out alone for weeks on end would be. He’s a little thin. A little gaunt. And that limp…well, Hoseok thinks it hurts him more than it hurts Yoongi at this point.
Yoongi reappears momentarily, exactly as promised, only this time there’s a laundry basket filled with bedding tucked under his arm, and a spray bottle of cleaner from god knows where in his other hand. Hoseok supposes Jimin probably got it. He supposes Jimin has done everything that needed to be done as far as household chores go for the last few months.
Hoseok’s brow creases as he watches Yoongi move, suddenly troubled. “How did you do it?”
Yoongi glances over at him, questioning. “Do what?”
“Carry me here. I fell asleep in the car, how did you get me to the apartment? Your leg, it…” he trails off, gesturing to the obvious.
Yoongi sets the basket down on the low, dusty bookshelf and walks to Hoseok, stepping lightly on his bad leg, and cupping Hoseok’s face in both hands when he reaches him. “I carried you out of a burning building while my skin literally peeled off of my body from the heat, and the structural supports collapsed around us, I think I can carry you from the car to the house.”
He brings Hoseok’s face close and kisses his forehead. “I would carry you to the ends of the earth if you asked me to.”
“I wouldn’t ask,” Hoseok murmurs. “You should look after yourself.”
“I have,” Yoongi replies very firmly. “For months. Years. I want to take care of you.”
“But—“
“Hoseok. I want to take care of you. Let me. Please. ”
Those words are so welcome to Hoseok’s ears. Yoongi’s voice. His care. It’s not matched by anyone, or anything else. It’s irreplaceable. To be loved by him, to be looked after by him.
It’s golden.
Yoongi kisses him again, smudging the slow-drying tear-tracks on Hoseok’s face with his lips, before pulling away.
He makes quick work on the room, shuffling around and re-shelving scattered piles, gathering dirty laundry into a corner, doing a quick wipe down of the most offensively dusty or forgotten surfaces. He coaxes Hoseok to stand just long enough for him to change the bedding, then gathers all of the old stuff and the clothing in the corner into the basket, giving it a swift shove into the hallway and closing the door behind him as if to say and stay out!
Hoseok’s shoulders droop, like tension being cut with a knife and relaxing once again. All at once, this room isn’t a prison, a despondent cell of his own misery, it’s just…a room.
Perhaps, even a home. If Yoongi stays, that is. And Jimin will come back tomorrow, they can all live here together. Namjoon and Seokjin will be close and, no, it isn’t perfect, but it’s something. It’s a family, in its own unlikely way. They could be normal, sort of. They could have a future. All of them.
“What are you thinking about?” Yoongi asks, shuffling toward Hoseok with that slightly uneven gait of his that Hoseok is still struggling to adjust to seeing on him.
“I don’t know,” Hoseok murmurs, too tired, in all honestly, and too shocked to come up with anything better. He’s sure he’ll sleep and when he wakes, reality will have sunk deeper into his numb skin, but tonight everything around him feels blurry, like a fever dream built on desperation. “Everything, I guess. Maybe nothing.”
Yoongi sinks into the divot in the mattress beside Hoseok, face to face, knees pressing into one another, and takes him by the shoulder with thin, firm hands. Hands that Hoseok has dreamt of for years, hands thought he would never feel again.
“I’m sorry, Hoseok,” Yoongi begins softly. His eyes are serious as they are earnest. “I know it’s been miserable. I never wanted to lie to you, I just wanted you to be safe. I wanted this to work.”
“I know,” Hoseok whispers. His throat feels tight and sore. “I just—“ he tenses, teetering on the edge of trying to come up with something, anything to say and falling pathetically short in the light of everything. Instead of trying to fake it, he slumps forward into Yoongi and wilts into him. “No, sorry, I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“That’s okay,” Yoongi whispers against the shell of his ear, smoothing his hands down Hoseok’s back in unhurried up and down motions. “That’s fine. You’re fine.”
His head turns, nose coming to press against Hoseok’s skin the way he used to so often, breathing deep and slow like he’s trying to memorize the smell of him. And then he whispers again.
“Are you hungry?”
Hoseok shudders, the question wracking him with involuntary chills. The answer to it should be yes, a resounding, all consuming yes, but the feeling swelling in Hoseok’s chest is much more convoluted than that.
He hasn’t thought about it since Yoongi died - or, he thought he died. Since that day . Before then, Hoseok could stomach feeding when necessary, by gritting his teeth and knowing he was preserving his own life just until he could be with Yoongi again.
But after that, after losing that singular thread of hope, it felt both pointless, and like a monstrous disgrace to Yoongi’s memory to seek out anyone else.
So Hoseok didn’t. He took pills, and he laid in bed exerting as little energy as possible, and he wasted away waiting for time to come and claim him too, because maybe , maybe then he could see Yoongi one last time. Hoseok doesn’t believe in god, but he wanted to believe in an afterlife It was a respite of an idea that living no longer offered.
“Hoseok,” Yoongi’s voice is soft, coaxing, and he cups Hoseok’s face very, very gently. “It’s fine. Whatever you say, it’s fine. There’s nothing we have to do, I just want you to be okay.”
“I haven’t,” Hoseok whispers, his breath hitching somewhere between the words, “since I lost you. I couldn’t. I think I forgot to–I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what I feel. It’s like I’m not in my body anymore. It doesn’t belong to me.”
“It does,” Yoongi promises, his thumb brushing over Hoseok’s cheekbone. “It always has. It always will. And you don’t have anything to hide from. It’s just us here, and I love you. I love you, Dove.”
Hoseok’s eyes fall shut, Yoongi’s words washing over him. He is here. Hoseok can let go, for the first time in so long he can’t remember.
No, he does remember. The last time he and Yoongi had sex, and he committed it to memory because some part of him knew, or at least suspected even then that it might be the last time in a long time. Maybe ever . They had the fate of their world on their shoulders, but nothing mattered in that moment besides the two of them. He clung to every detail, pressing it into his skin and tasting it on his tongue.
But Yoongi is here. He’s right in front of Hoseok, and he’s warm, and present, and deeply alive in spite of everything, and all at once, Hoseok needs him more than he’s needed any one person in his entire life.
He leans in, pressing his mouth to Yoongi’s. He couldn’t do it in the living room at Seokjin’s place, he was too petrified that nothing and no one around him was real, Yoongi least of all. In the churning shock of that moment, Hoseok was sure that if he went to kiss Yoongi, he would disappear like the ghost of a lover that he had become and all Hoseok would be left with was empty air and broken hopes.
But his lips are on Hoseok’s now, and he hasn’t melted into the dark. If anything, he’s growing stronger, closer, pressing into Hoseok’s body as if he’s trying to absorb him. His hands are on the hem of Hoseok’s loose shirt, just beginning to push upwards, but he pauses before they do, and pulls back just enough to breathe a question into Hoseok’s skin.
“Can I?”
Hoseok nods, bringing his own trembling reach to Yoongi’s shirt. “You too,” he mumbles “I want to be close.”
It’s been so long, so long , Hoseok needs all of Yoongi exactly as he is in this moment.
Hoseok’s shirt rises, tugged over and off his head to be discarded into some unknown corner of the room. Yoongi leans away by a few inches, evidently planning to remove his own shirt before Hoseok can get to it. He falters, his hands bunched in the cotton, and flicks a look that could almost be called shy in Hoseok’s direction.
“I did something,” he says softy, gaze dropping downcast to his own lap, suddenly as bashful as a child hiding behind his bangs, “I got something for you.”
“For me?” Hoseok breathes. Before he can inquire further, Yoongi lifts his shirt, revealing the expanse of pale skin that Hoseok had grown so intimately familiar with years prior, each freckle and birthmark, his family emblem written in ink above his heart, all the places that Hoseok knows kisses will bruise the easiest, but in the middle of everything known, there’s something new to look at too. A collection of fine, black lines feathering out over his skin, decorating his rib cage on his right side, small and delicately done.
It’s a tattoo. A tattoo of a dove.
“ Yoongi ,” Hoseok whispers. He presses his fingers to it, tracing over the piece with his heart in his throat.
“I wanted you with me,” Yoongi replies simply, stacking his hand over Hoseok’s and guiding him. “The whole time we were apart, I needed you there.”
“I love it,” Hoseok breathes. His eyes are suddenly damp, hot with tears. “It’s beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful,” Yoongi tells him quietly, taking Hoseok’s chin and pulling him into their kiss. This time, it takes them downward, sinking side by side into the mattress, Yoongi tugging on the strings of Hoseok’s body like he’s waking up something that was once dead.
Come back to yourself , he said. Hoseok is. There’s an ember lit bright and hot again, heating Hoseok from his core, seeping into his skin and making it flush warm to the touch. Hunger . Hoseok had forgotten what sweet hunger felt like, the mouthwatering rush just before you sink your teeth into something you’ve been craving.
Yoongi doesn’t hesitate. It’s as if a dam has broken between the two of them, setting loose five years worth of wanting, and it all comes to a head, here and now. He slips lower, but his mouth never leaves Hoseok. He’s marching lines of kisses, dozens of them, from Hoseok’s throat to his collarbones, across his chest, down his arms and back up again. Hoseok lets his eyes fall shut and imagines patches of his skin left glowing every time Yoongi takes his lips away.
Yoongi’s hands, wide and warm, span Hoseok’s waist, pressing him gently into the mattress as if he’s grounding him there. “You’re shaking,” he notes, pausing at Hoseok’s sternum and pressing a kiss over his ribcage. “Are you okay? Slower?”
“I’m fine,” Hoseok replies, but he can feel his teeth chattering as he says it. He doesn’t know why. He didn’t even notice he was trembling like a leaf in the wind until Yoongi said so, but now that he’s aware of it, he can’t seem to stop it. “I’m just–getting used to it.”
“To me?”
“To everything .” Hoseok doesn’t mean to whine, but the sound is almost ripped from him. Words pulled deep from his chest and wrapped in a half-choked sob. He needs Yoongi to understand how badly he wants this, and how he isn’t sure if his brain knows that yet. Or maybe it’s his brain that wants it, and his body that won’t comply.
“I’m sorry,” he says after a moment, shuddering through the tears that have bloomed fat and wet in the corners of his eyes and made hasty paths down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, I’m trying.”
“Sorry for what?” Yoongi inches back up to Hoseok in an instant, thumbing away his tears and replacing them with kisses to each side of his face. “This is not for me, you know that, right? Whatever you want, we’ll do it your way. I just want you to be– good , Hoseok. Safe. Seokjin told me you were okay, and I trusted him, but…” Yoongi trails off, leaving the rest of his statement an open-ended implication.
“I know,” Hoseok shudders, shaking his head. “I’m not. I don’t look good.”
“Dove,” Yoongi’s hands travel down Hoseok’s arms, finding his wrists and squeezing him lightly. “It’s not about how you look, and you know that.”
Maybe not. Maybe not to him , but to Hoseok, it means something. Beauty was the one thing Hoseok always had with him, an ever-evolving tool to be used as needed. A weapon. A bribe. A lure. Without it, he feels naked, and worthless, and a little afraid that he’ll never really go back to the way he was. That these months of lying in isolation withering away have done something irreparable to not just his body, but his soul.
“I told you,” Yoongi pushes onward before Hoseok can gather himself to speak, “I think you’re beautiful.”
Hoseok sniffs, fixing his eyes on the dark ceiling overhead instead of meeting Yoongi’s intent gaze. “You have to say that.”
“Why would I?”
“Because you–” Hoseok begins, then halts again, unsure if the words because you love me were about to leave his mouth.
“Because I love you?” Yoongi asks, like Hoseok thoughts were written in bold right over his head, easy to pluck out of the air and read.
Hoseok had forgotten this little titch of his. Sometimes he swore Yoongi could read his mind every now and again, when he really wanted to. He wonders if it has something to do with being imprinted on. He never got a chance to ask, back then.
“Of course that’s why I’m saying it,” Yoongi nuzzles his skin, lowering his head to rest over Hoseok’s heart so they’re no longer looking at one another, and somehow, that makes everything a little easier. “That doesn’t mean I mean it any less. I do think you’re beautiful, how could I love you this much and think any less? I’ve always thought that.” He pauses, then laughs a little wryly. “Too beautiful, sometimes, for my own good. But that’s behind us now, isn’t it, Dove?”
There are a lot of things behind us , Hoseok thinks, heaviest where his heart sits in his chest. There are a lot of things I wish I could leave behind too .
“It’s your call,” Yoongi says softly, sliding his arms up and down Hoseok’s sides before coming to a rest on his waist. He’s draped over Hoseok like a blanket, warm, and soft, and weighing him down. “I’ll be here all night. I’ll do anything you want. You just need to tell me.”
Hoseok shuts his eyes. There are so many things he wants, so many things to say, but more than anything he wants to feel free again. To let go of five years worth of hurt and meet Yoongi in the middle, exactly the way they swore they would. Because he’s begged for this. He’s prayed for it.
And because Hoseok knows all the times he’s felt the lightest were underneath Yoongi’s touch.
He lifts a hand and winds into Yoongi’s hair, shorter than he remembers, but every bit as soft, and still so familiar. “I want you to fuck me,” he says, just above a whisper. “I want you to make me forget.”
Yoongi takes his sweet time with it. Maybe because Hoseok is on edge, muchtoo fragile and frayed to handle anything fast-moving and forceful, or maybe because it’s been five years since Yoongi touched him, and he wants to savor every second of it the way he did in five years worth of desperate dreams.
Hoseok is tender, pliable, almost startlingly responsive, but it’s the sound that Yoongi has to
coax out of him. It’s like he’s forgotten he’s allowed the pleasure of noise, the freedom to feel and speak every sensation. He’s limiting himself, drawing back at first when he should be leaning in.
Yoongi kisses his paths across Hoseok’s body, adorning his arms, chest, thighs, and the pink, drooling curve of his cock with shameless affection.
When he sinks his fingers into Hoseok, he takes his time with that too, which normally Hoseok would be making his loud distaste for known - complaints that he can handle more, that he doesn’t need it slow and measured - but tonight he says none of that. Maybe it’s bordering on too much as it is, his long-denied body fighting the onslaught of pleasure, like a starving man devouring three meals and then throwing it all up again when he finds he’s no longer able to retain it.
Hoseok has fallen out of touch with feeling good. The thought breaks Yoongi’s heart, and when he touches Hoseok, he tries not to think of all the pain he’s caused, and all the time they’ve lost.
They have this moment, finally. A grief-stricken past, and an uncertain future, but these precious hours are safe in a bubble tucked away inside Yoongi’s heart, and no one, nothing can take that from him.
It’s only once Yoongi slips inside Hoseok, pinning his arms above his head and kissing his throat, setting a steady rhythm that doesn’t take too much, or push too far too soon, that Hoseok cracks a little and seems to come back to himself. He tangles his hands into Yoongi’s hair, his little sounds beginning to escape him without limitation, and when Yoongi murmurs messy, senseless iterations of I love you into his ear, Hoseok says it all back.
When he climaxes, his home-sweet vanilla scent swells in the air, the manifestation of his fever pitch pleasure. And when Yoongi breathes it in, it makes him want to cry.
For joy. For loss. For how much he missed it, for how glad he is to inhale it now, because he knows it means Hoseok feels safe, and content, and for fuck’s sake that’s all Yoongi wants anymore.
That’s all he can ask for in life.
The come down is slow, because they have the time to let it be. Hoseok melts like wax before either of them can even catch their breath, and Yoongi is glad for that too. It’s succuban instinct to bask and rest in the afterglow, but Hoseok spent years curbing that particular impulse for his own safety. Yoongi worried that, like many other things, he might have fallen out of habit with that too, but on the contrary it’s the one thing he seems to have remembered to keep.
Yoongi lets him be. He combs through Hoseok’s hair, strokes his spine until his breathing comes easy. When he moves to inch away, Hoseok’s body tightens instantaneously, his limbs restricting where they’re wound around Yoongi and his body going stiff.
“ Don’t,” he murmurs his plea, muffled by the pillow pressed up against his cheek. His face is half-hidden, but the part of it that Yoongi can see is shadowed with concern. “Don’t go anywhere. Please.”
“Hoseok,” Yoongi exhales his name like a fond sigh, “I’m just going to get something to wipe you off. The bathroom and back, ten seconds. That’s all.”
It’s a promise, even if he doesn’t say as much. He disappears into the other room, running a washcloth under hot water and ringing it back out again before he returns to Hoseok’s side. He sponges him down quickly, acutely aware of Hoseok’s distaste at both the unavoidable chill of water, and the fact that Yoongi isn’t right next to him. The whole ordeal is over in a minute and a half, but Hoseok’s disposition sours until Yoongi flips the light off and crawls back into his arms.
Then, Hoseok latches onto him the way vines latch to a trellis.
For a moment, it’s silent. Hoseok is tucked behind Yoongi, his breathing a welcome, familiar pattern, and Yoongi finds himself drowsily counting the pulses of his heartbeat between inhales.
“Stay,” Hoseok whispers after a long pause. His voice is thick with exhaustion. Yoongi wonders if the only reason he’s still awake is to ensure a promise that Yoongi will be here for the duration of the night.
“I want you to be here when I wake up. You will, won’t you?”
“I will,” Yoongi tells him steadily. “And the whole time you sleep. I swear, I will.”
Yoongi’s word must mean something, because Hoseok doesn’t request anything further. A few minutes later, his breath deepens, and his heart rate begins to slow to a syrupy pace, and Yoongi knows he’s fallen asleep.