Chapter Text
~yoongi
now~
Yoongi gets home just past ten because the last meeting ran over and the taxi crawled along the river like it had nowhere else to be. He keys in the door code and thinks about the email he owes Tokyo by midnight and the lunch he skipped and whether the suit jacket can go one more week before the dry cleaners. He is still inside those thoughts when he looks up and sees the suitcase by the door and the shape of Jimin on the sofa, knees together, hands tucked into the sleeves of the sweatshirt he's been wearing for days.
“What’s this?” he asks, and the words leave his mouth out of habit, the way good evening does to a receptionist, the way thank you does to a waiter. He knows. He has known since he found Jimin’s coffee mug still full and cold on the counter three mornings in a row. Since the refrigerator started holding the same things week after week because no one felt like choosing. Since the silence in their bedroom settled in like a third body.
“I’m leaving,” Jimin says. He says it like someone giving a weather report. Ordinary voice, low and even. “I can’t do this anymore.”
Yoongi sets his briefcase against the wall. He loosens his tie, feels the slide of silk under his fingers, gives himself a second to believe he can treat this like any other night when Jimin gets overwhelmed. “It’s late. Where would you even go?”
“Busan.” Jimin stands. The sleeves fall back a little. His wrists are thinner than Yoongi remembers. “My brother.”
“That’s four hours away. Be reasonable.”
“I bought the ticket this morning.” Jimin moves like he has practiced moving, careful and steady. “Jihoon’s lunch is made. His uniform is laid out for school.”
It lands as a list of facts, all the small ways Jimin has been taking care of a day Yoongi was not in. Yoongi hears the words and looks over Jimin’s shoulder and sees where the uniform must be, somewhere in the clean square of their son’s room, where the bookshelf is too neat, every spine aligned, as if it belongs to a guest room instead of a child's.
“You’re not serious.” He says it like a meeting time. Like a calendar reminder that can be dragged to tomorrow. Because Jimin has no job. No savings of his own. No parents to return to. Just a brother they see twice a year who sends presents through the mail and writes short messages with too many exclamation points.
“That’s not your concern anymore.”
“Jimin, you’re being dramatic. You’re tired. Let’s talk about this tomorrow when you’ve slept.”
“I haven’t really slept in six months.” Jimin’s voice does not rise. It does not reach for Yoongi. It sits somewhere near the floor and asks to be heard there. “I lie next to you and stare at the ceiling and think about how I’m disappearing. How I’m here but not here.”
Yoongi looks at Jimin’s face and sees the proof of that. The way his mouth has forgotten how to soften. The small line between his eyebrows that used to appear only when he was reading bedtime stories or cutting sandwiches into shapes has settled in now, as if it no longer remembers how to leave. He has known Jimin’s gentleness since Jihoon came into their lives. Now even the air feels wrong, carrying something sharp and salt-leaning that lingers in the apartment itself.
“Jihoon stopped asking me to play with him,” Jimin says. “He knows I’ll just sit there. Empty.”
“You’re a good father,” Yoongi says, because this has been true for as long as Jihoon has been theirs. The way Jimin knows which songs calm him at night. The way he crouches on the floor to tie shoelaces with steady hands. The way he buys the same apple juice because it tastes less sour to small mouths.
“I make his meals. I wash his clothes. I take him to school.” Jimin swallows. “But when did he stop showing me his drawings? When did he stop telling me about his dreams? He knows. Four years old and he knows his appa is a ghost.”
Yoongi thinks about the last drawing he saw from Jihoon and comes up with a blank space. He hates that blank space. He hates the way it sits between them like something they are both pretending not to see.
“So you’re just going to abandon him?” The word is ugly as soon as it leaves his mouth.
“I’m going to get help. Become someone who deserves him.” Jimin picks up the suitcase handle. His knuckles go a little white. “Right now I look at our son and feel nothing but guilt. I go through every motion but I’m not there. I made the same lunch for three months before realizing he’d been throwing it away because he hates tuna now. Three months, Yoongi.”
The sharp, salt-leaning smell clicks into place. Tuna. It is in the air because Jimin kept making lunch and packing it, standing in this room breathing the scent of a food their child stopped liking while Yoongi didn’t notice, too busy rehearsing survival instead of living it.
“We can get you help here,” Yoongi says. “Therapy, medication.”
“With what time? When you’re never here.” Jimin does not add to watch him. He doesn’t have to. It hangs between them anyway. “The doctor said I need intensive therapy, three times a week. I’ve been on antidepressants for eight months. They stopped working. You didn’t know because we haven’t had a real conversation in a year.”
“You can’t just leave your son.”
“Our son.” Jimin looks at him then, steady and tired. “Except you wouldn’t know he’s scared of dinosaurs now, not in love with them. You wouldn’t know his teacher’s name or that he wet the bed last week because he dreamed you disappeared.”
Yoongi’s mouth closes. The floor feels like it tilts. “That’s not fair.”
“No,” Jimin says. “None of this is fair. But if I stay, I’m going to break completely. And then what happens to Jihoon? At least this way, he has one functional parent.”
“Jimin.”
“I left a list. Bedtime routine, school schedule, foods he’ll actually eat. His teacher’s number. The babysitter’s number for emergencies.” Jimin moves toward the door. The suitcase wheels do not rattle because he carries the weight instead of dragging it. “My brother’s number is on the fridge.”
“If you walk out that door,” Yoongi begins, and then he stops because the sentence will only turn into something he regrets, something that makes Jimin smaller when the entire point of this is that he feels like nothing. The threat dries in his mouth. He swallows it.
“Tell Jihoon I love him,” Jimin says. He puts one hand on the door. His fingers look thinner, the knuckles more visible. “Tell him appa had to go get better. That it’s not his fault.”
“Jimin, please.”
There is a second where Yoongi thinks Jimin will turn. There is the smallest shift of his shoulders, a breath that sounds like indecision. Then the door opens on the hallway light and someone’s television down the corridor and the faint noise of the elevator. Jimin steps out into it. The door closes behind him with the ordinary sound doors make when they click back into their frames.
Yoongi stays where he is because his body has not received instructions to do anything else. He stands in their living room with the lamp on and the suit jacket still on his shoulders and his phone lighting up with three missed calls from the office. The list Jimin mentioned is on the counter next to a lunch box with a sticker of a cat flying a rocket ship. The kitchen window shows a slice of other people’s lives across the way, a woman watering a plant that looks like it could survive neglect, a man lifting a child to see the city lights.
He does not chase Jimin. He does not even take a step toward the door. He thinks Jimin will come back because where else would he go. He thinks this is a statement, a way to make a point stick. He thinks about the bus schedule without meaning to.
In the bedroom, there are two pillows shaped by two heads but only one smells like shampoo today. In the bathroom, the toothbrush holder has a clean gap where blue plastic used to touch green. In the refrigerator, there are two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, made the way Jimin always made them, the crusts cut off cleanly because small teeth don’t like the chew. Pushed to the back is a half-full container of tuna salad and a neat row of unopened cans.
Yoongi peels back the lid of the container, winces at the sour smell, and tips it into the trash. He unwraps one of the sandwiches and takes a bite because people still have to eat when they are ruining their lives. It tastes like apologies that took too long. He swallows and throws the rest away and tells himself he will talk to Jimin in the morning when the light is different.
He sleeps on the side of the bed he always sleeps on and stares at the ceiling. He tells himself he has always been good at waiting things out until they resolve.
In the morning, Jihoon pads into the kitchen with hair going in every direction and his pajama top buttoned wrong and asks for cereal. He eats quietly, looking at the refrigerator like he expects a person to come out of it if he waits long enough. When the bowl is empty he puts his spoon inside it and says, “Where’s appa?”
Yoongi touches the list with one finger. There is a smudge near the word bedtime because the pen must have dragged through a wet place. “Appa went to visit family,” he says. The lie sits in his mouth like a stone.
“Okay,” Jihoon says. He accepts it because he is four and wants to believe the world makes sense.
Yoongi finds the uniform laid out, like Jimin said. The shirt is ironed flat, the little trousers folded along the same crease his mother used to make in his own when he was small enough to climb onto laps without asking. On the dresser, a flashlight waits next to a stack of picture books. Jimin must have left it there, knowing their son would rather push away the dark with his own hand than call for them.
In the entryway, the gap where the suitcase stood looks too clean, as if the floor has been scrubbed. Jimin’s shoes are gone. His keys are gone. His scarf with the tiny embroidered stars is still on the hook, as if a piece of him forgot to leave.
At work, the city moves like it always does. The elevator stops on every floor because people press buttons. The office smells faintly like old coffee and new toner. Yoongi writes an email to Tokyo and schedules it to send at noon. He sits in a meeting and hears nothing. He picks up his phone twice during lunch to call Jimin and puts it down both times because he does not know what to say that would not sound like an instruction.
Six weeks pass the way tired days pass. He keeps the list on the counter. The unopened cans of tuna sit untouched at the back of the shelf. The lunchbox with the rocket-cat sticker still goes to school every morning, filled with food Yoongi is only just learning how to make. The pillows hold different shapes now. Jihoon stops asking when appa is coming home. He starts asking for different stories at night. He dreams that dinosaurs are kind again and then he dreams that they are not. He wakes once and calls for appa, then remembers and closes his mouth and asks for water instead.
On a Tuesday that looks like every other Tuesday, Yoongi’s assistant knocks on his office door with a thick envelope and a face that tries not to hold an opinion. He signs for it. He opens it. The words are legal words arranged to remove a person from a life: divorce petition, custody petition, petitioner requests sole physical and legal custody. He reads the phrase three times before it makes sense, then holds the paper a little further away as if distance could turn it into something else.
The floor does not actually move. It feels like it does. Something in his chest does, quietly, as if a shelf has given way.
He takes his first personal day in two years without clearing it with anyone. It feels like stepping onto an unfamiliar street and hoping there is a sidewalk where you place your foot. He goes home before sunset and sits on the floor of his son’s room and counts the pairs of shoes. He finds three. None of them fit the feet that are growing in his house. He finds drawings with stick figures and labels, appa and me, daddy at work, the desk is a box with a line for a mouth.
He finds, in the medicine cabinet, three orange bottles, names he recognizes from television commercials, dates that line up with the months he was in planes and conference rooms. The most recent refill was two months ago, when Tokyo needed him for three weeks and Jihoon learned to fall asleep with the flashlight rather than a voice.
He picks up each bottle in turn, reading the dates, and thinks about how he has not known any of this because he told himself he was providing. He puts them back in a neat row. He goes to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, and sweeps the row of tuna cans into the trash. The sound is louder than he expects, like punctuation on something that won’t be undone. He takes the list and smooths it flat on the counter.
He is not good at many things that happen inside a house. He is very good at following a plan when it is in front of him.
He starts with bedtime, because the list begins there.
~yoongi
then~
The doors part with a sigh and a tinny chime, and the morning crowd pours into the car the way water fills a basin, each person finding the gaps made by someone else. Yoongi steps in with them, shoulder to shoulder, one hand sliding naturally to the cool metal of the nearest pole. The benches run the length of the car, white seats in an unbroken line under windows glazed with last night’s condensation. Straps sway overhead. An LED sign blinks the next station in blue.
He usually hates this part of the day. The perfume that always smells a little sweet and a little stale. The way people keep their eyes on nothing in particular. The pressure at his ribs when the train takes a curve and everyone leans the same way at once. He counts stops and thinks about email.
Except lately his eyes look for someone before the doors even close.
There he is, halfway down the car on the bench by the center doors. Same overstuffed canvas bag wedged between his knees. Same dark coat pulled close at the collar, the kind of thing you wear most days once the season turns. A thick One Piece volume open in both hands, thumb hooked into the gutter like it belongs there. He isn’t reading the way most people read on the subway, using the pages like a wall. He reads with his whole face. A crease comes and goes between his eyebrows, then his mouth lifts without apology, and a breath of laughter escapes him that he tries and fails to swallow. An older man two seats down glances over, more curious than annoyed. The reader dips his head, still smiling at the page.
Yoongi tells himself he’s only watching because routine craves anchors. But it has been three, maybe four weeks of this, and he knows things he shouldn’t know about a stranger: the stop where he gets on must be farther out, because he usually finds a seat; his hair never fully settles no matter how the morning goes; he turns the pages faster when the paneling tightens, slower when the story lets him breathe. None of it should matter, and yet it has become the only part of the commute that feels like it moves toward something instead of away from it.
The train bursts from darkness into a shallow wash of daylight as it runs above ground for a minute, and light cuts through the car, catching on the reader’s cheekbone. The sudden curve shakes the car hard enough that a student in a blazer stumbles into Yoongi, palm slapping the pole. Yoongi shifts his grip, steadying the kid with a small nod, and when he looks back down the aisle, the reader is looking back at him. Not a quick accident of eyes meeting. There is a spark of recognition there, the kind that says, you again, I know your face from mornings.
He lifts his bag from the bench to his lap in a small, practical gesture that makes space. There’s a gap beside him now, hardly enough for a full-grown person unless they don’t mind bodies fitted close. People rarely offer you those inches unless they’ve already decided you’re not a problem.
Yoongi moves through the aisle in two sideways steps and slides onto the edge of the bench. From this angle the manga cover is a riot of color, the spine worn white where fingers have dragged a hundred times. He hears himself speak, not loudly, not warmly, just the way you ask a stranger for the time when you already know it.
“Good part?”
The man looks up. His eyes are dark and bright at once, the way coffee is dark and electric. “Always,” he says, and he tips the book so Yoongi can see the double-page spread of a ship that looks both stupid and brave. “Don’t tell me you’ve never read it.”
“Never,” Yoongi answers. He expects judgment and gets delight instead. The man sits back a little, hand pressed to his chest in mock horror.
“You’ve made it this far in life without One Piece? That feels illegal.”
“I have a job,” Yoongi says, which is defensive and stupid, and the minute it’s out he wants to pull it back. But the man just laughs, the kind of sound that makes other heads turn and then soften, because joy is a contagious thing even at eight in the morning on Line 2 running toward the city center.
“That’s exactly why you need it,” he says, eyes crinkling. “You can’t email your way through every day. Sometimes you have to let pirates fix your mood.”
“Pirates fix your mood?”
“They fix everything,” he says, grave for a second and then not. “Or at least they make the bad parts louder and the good parts louder and it reminds you your heart still works.”
The train dips back underground and the windows turn into mirrors. Yoongi can see both their faces reflected faintly over the smear of tunnel. He hears the next station announced in a friendly recorded voice he’s stopped listening to years ago.
“You stand there most mornings,” the man adds, nodding toward the place on the floor where Yoongi usually stands by the pole. “You get on two stops after me. Left hand on the rail, right hand on your phone. You scowl at the doors like they’ve wronged you personally.”
“I don’t scowl,” Yoongi says, and scowls. The man laughs again, not unkindly.
“I’m Jimin,” he offers, like it’s the only natural next step. He closes the book around his thumb and holds out his hand in a space where no one does that. His palm is warm, smaller than Yoongi expected, the fingers fine-boned but steady in their grip, as if carefulness came naturally to him.
“Yoongi.” The name leaves his mouth slower than it should, as if it has weight. Jimin repeats it, trying the shape of it on his tongue, pleased with how it fits.
“So, Yoongi-who-doesn’t-read-manga,” Jimin says, settling back with the easy confidence of someone who has learned the shape of other people quickly and kindly, “what do you do on here if you’re not reading? Stare at your reflection and contemplate life? Check spreadsheets? Sleep standing up?”
“Emails,” Yoongi says. “Mostly deleting.”
“That’s tragic,” Jimin says. “You need a better morning ritual.”
“Like crying over a ship?”
Jimin lights up, delighted to be teased. “Exactly like crying over a ship. Or laughing at a rubber boy who thinks friendship can solve government. Or watching a cook kick fire because his hands are for food and his feet are for fights.” He gestures with the book without meaning to, as if every word asks for more space than the seat can give. “I teach kids all day. If I didn’t have this before nine a.m., I’d have no soul left for them.”
“Kids?” The word comes out softer than Yoongi intends. He tries to picture it and can, easily: a studio with scuffed floors, small socks in a heap by the door, Jimin crouched to tie a shoe, the kind of patience that feels like light rather than duty.
“Tiny tyrants,” Jimin says affectionately. “They don’t know how to apologize but they know exactly how to forgive. They fall and then they laugh at falling. They make me remember my body is not just for getting somewhere.” He looks back at Yoongi, curious, not prying. “What about you? Aside from your inbox.”
“Corporate,” Yoongi says. It’s the truth and not the whole of it. “First rung of a ladder that never ends.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is,” Yoongi says, and finds that he doesn’t feel the need to defend it to this stranger who reads with his whole face.
They ride through two more stations like that, not quite facing each other, not quite facing away, conversation easing into the kind of silences that feel like air rather than walls. A child on the opposite bench drops a toy car and Jimin’s hand moves before the mother’s, catching it with a small, reflexive grace and passing it back with a smile that has no performance in it. The mother thanks him. The child thanks him louder. Jimin grins at both and then at the page he’s marked with his thumb.
“So you've noticed me,” Yoongi says eventually, because the thought sits warm in his chest and demands a home outside it.
“Sure,” Jimin says, as if it’s obvious. “You have this look like the doors owe you money. Also you always step aside so the student with too many books can get the seat first.” He tips his head, approving. “I notice things.”
“What else do you notice?” Yoongi hears himself ask, and wishes the question sounded less like a hope.
Jimin’s eyes flick down, then up. A small smile, softer than the big ones. “That today you don’t look like you want to fight the doors.”
The chime sounds again. The LED blinks his station name in blue. Jimin slides the manga into his bag, zips it halfway, and then seems to decide something in the space of a breath. He digs in the front pocket for a dog-eared memo pad, peels off a square, and scribbles with the kind of handwriting that will never quite fit the lines.
He presses the paper into Yoongi’s hand rather than handing it to him in the air, like he’s making sure it lands. “I don’t usually do this,” he says, “but I'm bringing you volume one tomorrow whether you want it or not. Text me when you realize I was right.”
“You’re very sure of yourself,” Yoongi says, but his thumb is already smoothing the edge of the paper like it’s something fragile.
“Only about the important things.” Jimin is smiling again, that quick flash that makes the car feel less fluorescent. “Pirates. Coffee. And the fact that you’ll like it.”
The doors open. A new wave of people presses in, another wave presses out. Jimin stands with the movement of the train, keeps his balance without thinking, and is halfway onto the platform before he looks back over his shoulder.
“See you, Yoongi-ssi.”
The doors close on the tail of his grin. The car slides forward. Yoongi looks down at the square in his palm, Jimin’s name and number written there in quick strokes. He folds it carefully, as if folding is a promise not to lose it. He tucks it into the inside pocket of his jacket where important things go.
Two stations later, he watches his own reflection in the dark glass and doesn’t recognize the expression there at first. It takes him a few seconds to accept that it’s a smile he hasn’t had to force, the kind that starts in the chest and arrives on the mouth last. He steps onto the platform with the day already rearranged around the idea of tomorrow’s train.