Chapter Text
Cicada all fly back to forest.
Sometimes think about human.
Can't stop laughing.
Tok, tok, tok.
—Cicada, Shaun Tan
/
Yoongi works in a tall building.
The sort of building that has too many floors, where he never bothered to find out how many.
The elevator buttons stretch for a kilometer, so high up that he doesn't think to check where they end. He's too busy keeping his head low. He walks into the grey elevator, and keeps his head low.
He used to think about what would happen if the elevator stopped.
He used to worry that he'd suffocate to death, trapped forever.
Sometimes, he hopes for it.
Yoongi works on the seventh floor. It's the only number he needs to know.
He reaches out, and presses number seven.
He brushes shoulders with the other grey people next to him, and it doesn't mean anything to any of them. No one stops to apologize. Or to make eye contact. They stare straight ahead, waiting for the elevator to go up.
The elevator doors open.
Yoongi steps outside.
/
The office is quiet.
The only noise is the gentle hum of the air conditioning, and even that is barely noise and more just a part of themselves at this point.
Yoongi walks straight to his desk, and takes a seat. His PC is sectioned off from the coworkers next to him, lest they have to see each other's faces and forget what they're here for.
It's very hard to forget what they're here for. The company's vision statement is carefully pasted, in black and white, behind each of their work stations.
Predicting consumer needs and maximizing long term value.
It's a shitty vision statement. It makes no sense. The only thing that it gets across is that they're doing nothing for the real world.
All the value is waiting for when they're gone and dead.
By reflex, Yoongi looks over to the break room, where he would see Jungkook starting his day. But there's an unfamiliar face there, one that might even be a face that Yoongi has seen before.
One that Yoongi has never bothered to get to know, because it wasn't dressed in red.
Yoongi boots up his PC, and for a second, the light flashes blue.
And then it disappears to his login screen, dead and grey, and Yoongi types in his password.
/
Yoongi has worked here for three and a half years.
Three and a half long, dead years.
It's been far too long.
Grey, grey, grey.
Black.
He thinks of the red and gold paint that had been on his back, wings that no one but he knew had been there.
Wings that had long since been washed away.
It's been two weeks since Jungkook left. Yoongi only has a photograph of what the wings had looked like to prove that they had ever been there.
He doesn't know the names of the people on either side of him. He doesn't think they know him either. It's too late to try to ask.
To be honest, Yoongi doesn't know if he even sits next to the same people every day.
He doesn't know if any of them are hiding dragon wings underneath their shirts. If any of them are secretly alive, and just unsure of how to say it.
Of how to say I've been trying to die for too long, but I'm still here.
To say, I wanted to fit in but I can't kill my heart enough.
He wonders how many people are the kumiho, before she swallows her own heart — holding on to the few things they have left, and wondering if it's worth losing it all to become human.
/
Yoongi drinks his coffee black.
He drinks it black, because the piece of paper hanging in the break room says that he likes it black.
Because Jungkook wasn't the sort of person to go about changing lists on pieces of paper — he was the sort of person to ignore the list and make whatever coffee he wanted.
And now Jungkook is gone, and Yoongi's coffee is black.
He can never finish it.
He always leaves a little, at the bottom of his glass. With the ugly dregs that look like the leftovers of someone's dead soul.
Maybe it's the soul he wishes was his.
Maybe it would be easier if he wasn't still alive inside.
Yoongi drinks the coffee, but he remembers what it tasted like with milk in it.
With sugar.
With cream.
He remembers it all, but he knows he isn't going to do anything about it. He isn't going to go up to the break room to ask them to change his preferences. He isn't going to stop drinking it, either.
At 11AM, while Yoongi is typing away at his desktop, lines and lines of code that will make money and nothing else, a cup of coffee lands on his table.
Yoongi doesn't look up. He doesn't say thank you. Any moment spent looking away from his screen is a moment lost.
The temporary worker steps past him, and there isn't a single hint of colour.
Yoongi sits with his black coffee, drinking it absently as he continues to work.
The memories of sugar don't leave his tongue.
/
The storm outside is terrible.
The wind blows harsh, angry, sending umbrellas inverting on themselves and pulling their owners away. Yoongi has his umbrella with him, unopened, but he can see it won't do any good.
Even here, under the shelter of the front entrance, he isn't safe from the rain. It hits him hard, leaving him with his eyes barely open as he holds his things closer to himself and tries to shield his eyes.
The rain pours, and pours.
The cold sinks into Yoongi's bones.
People brush past him, uneasy about stepping into the rain but unwilling to waste time for something unscheduled. They click open their umbrellas and step into the storm, fighting against it as they try to make their way to wherever they've told themselves they need to be.
Yoongi doesn't join them, staring into the storm.
At the lights reflected off the floor, the colour, the life.
For a second, the illusion cracks, and Yoongi can see reality.
He can see underneath the grey.
Yoongi — shouldn't get himself drenched. His clothes cost a lot.
A sizeable amount for the greyness, a sizeable amount for the dullness. A fair bit of money for the way it hides him underneath the layers and layers of cloth.
But he pulls off his blazer, tucking it into his backpack.
A moment, and then he pulls off his tie, too.
He rolls up the ends of his trousers, to keep them out of puddles, and then he holds his bag over his head, looking up into the storm.
Lightning flashes, and for a moment everything is white.
The world is reset.
And Yoongi runs, through the streets, through the storm, kicking up water as he splashes through.
His clothes are drenched, his shoes are drenched, and the storm tries its best to take him down.
But when all the grey in the world couldn't take Yoongi down — the rain doesn't stand a chance.
He slips, and slides, and he's shivering in the dark as he runs, but a part of him inside, a part that Yoongi had tried to bury — that part of him sings.
It laughs.
Lightning flashes, thunder rolls, but Min Yoongi is alive.
And that's something no one can ever take from him.
/
Sometimes he goes to Taehyung's bar.
Just for old time's sake.
He goes during Taehyung's shift, unwilling to see who has replaced Jungkook.
But as time ticks past, and the hours pass by, and Taehyung doesn't leave the bar — he's starting to think no one replaced Jungkook after all.
In a way, no one could.
Yoongi doesn't drink much. He asks for his drinks to be diluted, or asks for juice. Taehyung is half magic, and he mixes drinks that taste like heaven, that taste like life.
Yoongi doesn't need to be drunk to feel those things anymore.
If he thinks about it for too long he gets scared.
And then Taehyung makes him something else to drink, and he forgets to be scared again.
"Have you heard from Jungkook?" he manages to ask once.
Taehyung gives him a guarded look. "Yes," he says at last.
"What did he say?"
"That he made it home."
Yoongi nods.
Maybe that's all that matters.
He checks his own phone, to the single message he'd sent Jungkook since he left, three weeks ago.
Are you safe?
And Jungkook's reply —
more so than you'd think.
Yoongi hadn't sent anything after that.
It felt weird, texting Jungkook. Like trying to hold onto the sun after it had set.
He drinks whatever Taehyung puts in front of him, and wishes that some day he'll make it home too.
/
When the programs that Yoongi writes crash — he restores them to the last working version.
He pretends that none of the changes that he made exist, and starts looking at them again from what he knew to be okay.
Sometimes Yoongi wonders when he was last okay.
Maybe it was running through the streets with Jungkook at night, carving horrors into the walls of Seoul.
Maybe it was in high school, sitting in the library with Kim Seokjin, and feeling like he wouldn't be alone.
Maybe it was in his parent's house, hiding under the bed, scrawling stories in his notebook while his parents screamed at each other outside the door.
Or maybe it was earlier than that.
Far before he can remember.
Just a baby, staring at his mother in awe and adoration, as she fed him a spoonful of food.
A little boy, listening to his father tell him bed time stories, before Yoongi knew that the man was only doing it to prove that he was taking a part in raising Yoongi.
A little boy, going to sleep at night with lullabies playing on the cassette player.
A familiar tune, a melody of home.
What did it mean, to be okay? To be happy?
All Yoongi really knows, is that it's not this.
It's not what he is.
When the codes that Yoongi writes crash — he restores them to the last working version. But right now he doesn't remember what the last working version was.
He doesn't remember a Min Yoongi who wasn't on his path towards whatever this is.
But when he's tried his best, and the code still won't work — Yoongi calls it quits and throws it in the trash.
He starts over again.
Erases the board, forgets everything he'd ever known.
There's no reason to prove that Yoongi can survive things that he's learned that he can't.
So Yoongi chooses defeat.
He chooses to give up.
He packs up his bag at 6PM, when his work day ends, and takes the subway home, standing alongside the grey faces.
This time he knows he won't come back.
/
There isn't a lot that Yoongi needs to take with him when he leaves. Most of what he owns, he can bring himself to part with.
There aren't any memories burned into the things he keeps with him — everything in Yoongi's house is there because he thought he needed it. There's very little that he'd ever looked at and thought — I want that.
But there are books, of course.
Stashed in the back of his shelf, hidden behind his framed degree certificate and high school diploma. A stupid attempt to make it look like those were things that mattered to him more.
Yoongi takes the frames and leaves them face down on the table.
There are books all the way from when he was just three years old, children's stories that meant nothing to his parents but had once meant the world to Yoongi.
There are the books he read through school, of dragons and riders and fantasy creatures. The books he read when he was older, about coming of age and coming to terms with who you were.
In the end, he packs them all.
A heaping suitcase full of them.
And then he stuffs his backpack with changes of clothes, an extra pair of shoes, a tooth brush and documents and all the money he can find, and Yoongi is ready to leave.
/
He says goodbye to Taehyung.
He doesn't really know why.
Taehyung seems surprised to see him at the bar, so early at noon, and when Yoongi tells him that he's leaving he seems to have seen it coming.
He doesn't give Yoongi anything to drink, but he gives him a glass jar of a powder that Yoongi can't identify. It smells like spice.
"Mix a spoon of it into milk," Taehyung says. "It'll taste like — well. It'll taste like things are okay."
"It feels like you're sending me on a quest," Yoongi says.
Taehyung grins. He's so beautiful that Yoongi isn't sure that he's human.
Maybe it's a good thing if he isn't human.
"Isn't this a quest?" Taehyung asks.
Half a year ago, Yoongi would have said no.
He'd have said that that's stupid, that real life doesn't have something stupid like quests, or something stupid like endings.
Real life doesn't have dragons to slay, or dragons to become. Real life is just the grey, monotonous edge of nothing ever changing or going anywhere.
But this isn't the Yoongi from half a year ago.
This Yoongi chooses to believe that Taehyung is right.
Reality is whatever he chooses to make of it, and Yoongi decides to make it survivable.
So this is a quest.
Yoongi is in search of a home.
Maybe if he tries hard enough, there'll even be an ending.
/
Yoongi leaves at the crack of dawn.
He loads his suitcase into a cab, and settles inside. The wind is cold, and his coat collar is pulled up, but inside the cab is almost warm.
"Where to?" the driver asks.
The man's accent is familiar — the Daegu dialect unmistakeable, despite the attempt to hide it.
It's been a long time, since Yoongi met someone else from his hometown. Everyone he knows in Seoul has perfected the art of sounding like they've lived here their entire lives.
"The station," Yoongi says, in his own dialect.
The man looks up into the rear—view mirror, eyebrows raising in recognition. "Going home?" he asks, more easily now, the Seoul accent entirely gone.
Yoongi shakes his head.
"Busan," he says.
"Oh. A vacation?"
Yoongi shakes his head again.
"There's someone I need to meet."
/