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“Yoongi,” his mother says. “Come away from the fire.”
“Okay,” he replies, uncrossing his legs. They ache, protesting as he moves them from the position they had been in for the past hour or so. He climbs into his mother’s lap with clumsy limbs, eyes scratchy from being so close to smoke and heat for so long. His mother is warm and comforting, but the orange flames that dance in the hearth are much more interesting. Yoongi isn’t sure why. He is, after all, just five. He has a lot to learn.
“I love you,” his mother coos, Daegu’s grip iron-tight around her vowels and consonants. “My little firecracker.”
“I love you more,” Yoongi mumbles. Shades of scarlet, red, orange, and blue burn behind his closed eyelids, and there’s a moment where he can’t quite tell who he’s speaking to: his mother or the fire.
——
He is seventeen and impressionable, gasoline sinking into his skin. It calls to him like a drug, cloyingly sweet and tangy as it fills his nose and mouth. The scent makes his throat itch, but he likes it, in a strange way. It calms his hurricane thoughts, suffocating them until they subside into white noise.
Yoongi is seventeen when he burns down something for the first time. It’s a tiny sapling with baby-soft leaves and smooth, pale bark that chars and smokes wonderfully. The water stored inside wood-meat hisses and pops as the flames fight their way up every twig and stem. He watches, fascinated, as the tree curls in on itself, too young and weak to stay upright for long.
“Preddy li’l tree,” the boy beside him drawls, the sound of home thick where his tongue slides across his teeth. Yoongi’s heart pangs like it does every time he hears Taehyung speak.
“Isn’t it?” Yoongi preens. He’s proud.
“A’course,” Taehyung mumbles, leaning into his side, comfortable. He pulls away as quick as he came, eyes glittering in the strange light as he shoots forward. “Hey, watch this.”
Yoongi lurches to grab him on instinct before halting, staring transfixed as Taehyung circles the burning tree hummingbird-quick. He darts into the heat and back out in the span of a second, a leaf trembling between his fingertips, suspended on a thin thread of twig as it shrivels. Taehyung is triumphant, unflinching even as small flames lick hungry down his fingers, wanting to grow bigger. The burnt leaf crumbles to powder, scattering to the wind. Yoongi lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding as Taehyung laughs, loud and clear and sharp. Yoongi thinks it sounds like wolves, the ones that wander in his backyard at night.
“You hurt yourself,” Yoongi says, dumbly.
A shrug. “Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“‘M fine. Look.”
Taehyung holds up his hand and lays it flat for Yoongi to inspect, morbidly fascinated. His thumb and pointer finger are already blistering, red and swollen. Yoongi pokes at it again and again, the skin bouncing back every time.
“C’mon,” Taehyung mutters eventually, snapping him out of his trance. His teeth are chattering despite his jacket. “Let’s go back. I’m cold.”
“Me too,” Yoongi replies, glancing back at the smoldering tree. “Let’s go.”
Back at Yoongi’s, Taehyung swaddles himself up in Yoongi’s favorite navy blanket and instantly falls asleep on his chest, mouth pulled into a frown. He’s warm and smells like cedar-ozone-dead leaves-firewood when Yoongi presses his nose to the crown of his hair. He lets his fingers trace the lines where Taehyung’s knuckles bend, lets his nails press into the newly acquired burns.
“Ss’ it. Hur’s.” Taehyung huffs, annoyed. His breath is a hot slice against Yoongi’s throat, uncomfortable.
“Sorry.”