Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You know I hate it when you bring your work home.”

“You think I enjoy it?” Jimin replied, voice heavy with exhaustion. He had just returned from the office, one that took up an entire floor of a towering building in downtown Seoul, filled with people wearing business casual suits and intellectual glasses, the kind of environment where everyone was competing for the next promotion, the next raise. It was stressful, and competitive, and exhausting, and Jimin might have lived through three years of law school and the past two years of being a rookie in a law firm, but he couldn’t help thinking it was a bit of a miracle every time. Every new case file added to his workload felt like it would be the proverbial straw to break this camel’s back. Jimin came home to relax, but he couldn’t do that when he took a heaving folder of papers back to review at the dinner table.

He also couldn’t do that when his boyfriend seemed incapable of restraining the barbs coming out of his mouth for just a moment.

“I’m just saying,” Jeongguk said, eyebrows furrowed as he watched Jimin open up the folder from across the dinner table, “have you heard of work-life separation?”

“Work and life,” Jimin said absently, “are not like church and state. Work and life have no separation.”

(He already knew Jeongguk wouldn’t understand; this was a conversation they’d had many, many times before. They still did it every time, like they were a pair of puppets on a stage performing the same show every day.)

“Isn’t lawyering supposed to be an office job?” Jeongguk asked through a mouthful of rice. Jimin’s own bowl went untouched before him, steam gently curling into the air. It was a fresh bowl, just filled from the rice cooker. Jeongguk had made it, as he did all their dinners, because if it was left for Jimin to do then they’d never have a home-cooked dinner to eat at all.

A pang of guilt shot through his stomach. Or maybe it was hunger. He hadn’t had anything since his afternoon doughnut, but that had been hours ago.

Jimin shovelled a spoonful of rice into his mouth and continued reading, only belatedly realizing Jeongguk’s question was still hanging in the air.

“Being a lawyer is an office job the same way being a finance guy is an office job. Anyway, doesn’t everyone bring work home?”

“When was the last time I brought work home?” Jeongguk replied, putting a piece of meat in Jimin’s bowl despite knowing that Jimin would likely leave it untouched.

Another shot of guilt.

“For all I know, you do extra work every night. You guys design all the bridges and buildings on computers anyway, and you’re always on your computer.”

A strained sort of smile feathered up Jeongguk’s face. “I play video games at home. Architects don’t bring their work home all the time the way you do.”

“That makes sense,” Jimin said, wondering if his voice was crumbling under the stress of trying to be lighthearted, “I was wondering why you were always making weird noises at your laptop screen.”

Jeongguk looked at Jimin strangely just long enough for him to realize that the joke hadn’t landed quite the right way. Jimin attempted a smile and then ducked his head so that he could let it drop and pretended to be totally absorbed in the engrossing details of this client’s libel case.

“Must be interesting stuff,” Jeongguk tried.

“Yeah, this pharmaceutical company is mad because somebody said something mean about them,” Jimin said, actually getting into the file now. “I don’t know how I’m going to make a case for this without laughing.”

“What, are you not allowed to laugh?”

“It’s unprofessional,” Jimin said, flipping a page. “Especially in front of your client. Or at them.”

“How can you live like this, hyung?” Jeongguk asked, and Jimin looked up to make eye contact, his attention caught. He was theoretically two years older than his boyfriend, but the way Jeongguk talked to him, you couldn’t tell. Honorifics rarely came into play for the two of them; Jimin didn’t often press it, Jeongguk didn’t care.

“Like what?”

Jeongguk gestured helplessly at the papers that took up Jimin’s half of the table. “All you do is work.”

“Do not,” Jimin replied, voice edging too close to what could be called sharp. “We went out for dinner last week.”

“Yeah, because I came home late and there was nobody to cook dinner.”

That truth sank like a stone in his stomach, taking up the space that food should have had, except his dinner was still mostly untouched. That piece of meat that Jeongguk had given was still there, the steam slowly rising further and further away, the heat from before out of reach.

Jimin could relate. It seemed like no matter what he did, the dynamic of heady excitement he and Jeongguk had had at the beginning of their relationship was getting further and further out of reach.

“Everyone works, Jeongguk,” Jimin said, frustrated.

“Not the way you do.”

“Look, you knew what you were getting into,” Jimin finally snapped. “We got together when I was in law school, Jeongguk.”

“Stop saying my name like that,” Jeongguk said, disturbed. Jimin could see the way it rankled the other man all over his face, in the way his eyebrows and the bridge of his nose were wrinkling, the tightness around his mouth.

Jimin found that despite the churning mess of guilt inside him, he still couldn’t stop himself.

“Like what? It’s just your name, Jeongguk.”

His boyfriend stood abruptly, his chair pushing back harshly against the floor. “I’m going to --” Jeongguk paused, “read or something. Enjoy your dinner.”

A beat as Jeongguk glanced down at the still untouched meat. “Or not.”

Jimin kept eye contact with his boyfriend as he finally picked up his chopsticks and ate the meat whole, chewing perfunctorily before swallowing. Jeongguk snorted a little, as if he didn’t quite want Jimin to notice but wouldn’t bother holding it in, and then left.

Jimin sat there at the dinner table, heart and body hollow for a few minutes. He felt entirely empty, and not just because he had barely eaten anything.

Sitting there alone at the dinner table he and Jeongguk had bought together when they had first moved into this apartment made him feel emptier than any morally dubious task he’d received at work. At least then he knew it wasn’t his fault – he was just following orders, because he was on the lowest rung of a long, long ladder.

Here, everything he did was his fault.

Jimin looked one more time at his case file, and then made a decision. He put the file back in his bag, stood, and padded over to the mostly closed door of their bedroom. He could hear Jeongguk’s breathing, slow and quiet, and Jimin silently nudged the door open, looking through the crack cautiously.

Jeongguk was curled up on the bed with his headphones and a novel he’d started a few days ago that was apparently a little boring, and so made it hard for Jeongguk to get through. Jeongguk had never been good at doing things he wasn’t interested in. It wasn’t a lack of determination, more like a lack of motivation. Jeongguk could love something fiercely and be no better than a steaming pile of garbage when it came to doing it, and still try every day.

It was very, very rare for Jeongguk to give up on something he loved. But otherwise, he gave up quite quickly. Jimin’s theory was that it was a function of being so good at almost everything he tried. His boyfriend could sing like a professional, dance like an idol, draw and design for a living, play almost any sport and be instantly good at it. Jeongguk understood his body in a natural way that Jimin had always envied. Sure, Jimin was also coordinated, could also dance. Jimin had even taken dance lessons as a child, been graceful and flexible. But Jimin had ended up with a life of the mind, and Jeongguk, well.

Jeongguk was an architect, not someone who spent all his time reading like Jimin. So as Jimin watched his boyfriend struggle through a boring book, eyebrows furrowed, he felt a little firework of pride burst in his stomach.

(Or maybe, he realized as he watched Jeongguk read, the other man had nothing else to do and the mere thought of going back out and coming face to face with Jimin was repellent enough to make Jeongguk sit his ass down and read a book he hated.)

Watching Jeongguk nestled in his spot on the bed like that, quiet and focused, he somehow looked both very, very young and very, very grown-up at the same time. It reminded Jimin of when they first met, when Jeongguk had still been doing his undergrad and Jimin had just started his first year of law school. It had been almost a whirlwind romance with the two of them, from acquaintances to making out in a span of weeks, from zero to sixty in three seconds. Like a fancy sports car.

Except a sports car was expensive and well-constructed, and Jimin was increasingly unsure that that was the correct analogy for this relationship. The foundation that it had been built on seemed more and more suspicious with each passing day.

Maybe that was just how it was; maybe growing up meant growing out of things, and that meant out of each other. But Jimin (and, he hoped, Jeongguk too) refused to believe that. People grew out of high school relationships, formed in the heat of puberty; people grew out of freshman year of university relationships, forged from the desperate need for intimacy that adolescents living by themselves for the first time had.

People didn’t grow out of relationships they had as mature adults, which Jimin would readily admit Jeongguk hadn’t quite been in university, but Jimin definitely had been. He liked to believe that there was no erosion happening here, but there were only so many lies one person could take.

“Guk,” he said softly, opting for pet name rather than the first name that had disturbed his boyfriend so much a few minutes before.

Jeongguk didn’t react for a few taut moments, but he sighed eventually, and set the book aside, spine up. “Hyung,” he acknowledged. Jimin took this as an invitation and stepped carefully into their shared room that now felt like enemy territory, and sat on the edge of the bed.

“You shouldn’t do that to the book,” Jimin said, casually glancing away from the topic at hand. He reached out and gently closed it, sandwiching a finger inside so that he could keep Jeongguk’s page for now until he found a better bookmark.

Jeongguk didn’t respond.

“I’m sorry,” Jimin finally sighed. “I should have taken you seriously instead of trying to make bad jokes and brushing you off to distract you so I could focus on a job that I’d been doing for hours already today.” Was that coherent? He was too tired to make his words string together as perfectly as they did when he was drafting a legal document.

“I know I’ve heard your,” he tried to find the right word without sounding condescending, “feelings about the amount of work I have before, but that just means I should’ve taken it more seriously instead of ignoring it.”

He cautiously reached out a hand to rest on Jeongguk’s thigh. “Please believe me, Guk. I hate it when we fight.”

A long moment of silence, long enough for Jimin’s guts to twist into knots he’d never be able to undo.

“For someone who’s paid to fight people for corporations, you seem to hate conflict,” Jeongguk finally said. It was like a sea change had come over them, erasing the tension that had been present mere moments ago. Jimin felt the tightness in his shoulders drain out as he realized that Jeongguk seemed appeased.

(Appeased. As if Jimin was under the watchful eye of a vengeful god, and he needed to make scheduled sacrifices so he wouldn’t be destroyed in some divine punishment.)

“The paradox of Park Jimin,” Jimin said lightly. “You just can’t figure me out.”

Jeongguk smiled weakly, but it was enough. Just like that, the world was fixed, and Jimin didn’t have to think about outgrowing relationships or unequal emotional effort, because those were problems other people had, in failing relationships. Not like them. Jimin and Jeongguk were the kind of couple, if they had been together in high school, to be named Couple of the Year in the yearbook. They were a unit unto themselves, their names linked. If one of their friends mentioned Jimin, the next name to pass their lips would inevitably be Jeongguk’s, and vice versa.

“Just can’t figure you out,” Jeongguk repeated, more to himself than anything.

“You in general, not you, singular,” Jimin corrected, reading the back cover of Jeongguk’s novel. “Hey, this actually looks pretty interesting.”

“You want it? I can’t make myself keep reading it.”

The novel was called Modern Lovers. It was translated from English. It was about two middle-aged couples and their marital troubles, and about their children’s love lives as well.

(It was about people growing out of relationships they’d started in university. It was about falling out of love.)

“On second thought,” Jimin said, putting the book on the nightstand and then swinging his legs up onto the bed so he could face Jeongguk properly, “there are more interesting things to do than read.”

“Like what?” Jeongguk asked, one perfect eyebrow arched. It could be mischievous, it could be knowing – or it could be disbelieving. It could be Jeongguk wanting to point out that Jimin’s job involved a lot of reading, trying to say that Jimin was being disingenuous. Or it could be Jeongguk playing into the innuendo.

Jimin made his own fate, and he decided it was the latter.

“Like you,” Jimin replied coyly, sweet smile sliding onto his face.

Jeongguk laughed, and this time it was real.

(That was all he could ask for. A genuine laugh, a moment in bed. Fleeting happiness before he went back to his work and staying up until two, and Jeongguk drifting away again.)

Jimin didn’t process that he was the one being spoken to until his name had been repeated probably two or three times.

“Jimin-ssi,” he heard again, name imbued with not insignificant amounts of frustration. Jimin startled, the file he had been perusing slipping from his hands and onto the desk as he stood to bow perfunctorily to his managing partner and to the man standing next to her. The partner might be quite a few centimetres shorter than him, even with high heels on, but Kim Taeyeon was a legend in the office and in the legal profession of Seoul as a whole, and Jimin had to admit that he was more than a little scared of her.

Everyone in the office knew Kim Taeyeon’s story; how she’d been one of the latest to join the firm out of all the associates who’d become partners in her year and yet she was still considered one of the firm’s greatest assets. That she was one of those lawyers who functioned equally well in a team and on her own, that the CEO himself had called her one of the most versatile partners in the firm.

To even breathe the same air as her was an honour for most of the interns and associates, especially the rookies, and Jimin remembered clearly how, his first day of work, he’d met the eyes of Kim Taeyeon and all the blood had drained from his face. To be assigned to work under her was, as he’d heard an intern say one July morning, “a master class in success”. Kim Taeyeon never said an extra word, and her facial expressions when she was in court or on the floor were unreadable. She never needed to raise her voice because it seemed to carry anyway, and Jimin had a heart attack whenever she said his name, so it was almost impressive that he had managed to tune her deceptively quiet voice out for so long.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, mortified. “Was there something you needed?”

The unobtrusive man standing next to his superior he ignored in favour of trying to calm his cheeks down from the flaring red they were sporting.

“Min Yoongi-ssi just transferred from a branch office,” Kim Taeyeon said to him. “He’s being assigned to the empty desk next to you. However, it seems that there is no empty desk.”

Jimin’s eyes darted furtively to the long-unoccupied desk next to his own, one he’d slowly taken over with his bag and multiple stacks of old files that he was going to put in a filing cabinet at some point. Evidently, he never had, and now his cheeks flushed even darker red as he realized that he looked like a rude slob in front of one of his direct superiors.

“I’m so sorry,” he repeated again, immediately grabbing his bag and dropping it on top of his own filing cabinet, and then snatching a few of the file folders he’d meant to put away while he was at it.

“Uh,” he said, a verbal tic he thought he had eradicated from his vocabulary during his high school debate career but now apparently making a return at the worst time possible, “I’ll clear that for you right away Yoongi-ssi.”

“His superiors at his old office consider him a standout,” Kim Taeyeon said to Jimin. “Treat him as an example to learn from.”

Jimin bowed again as Kim Taeyeon walked away, and then bowed slightly shallower to his new colleague.

The two of them hadn’t made eye contact at all throughout the entire awkward affair, so when Jimin straightened up now and saw Min Yoongi properly, it was for the first time.

Dark, dark eyes, exacerbated by the stark contrast against his pale skin, hair that had some damage; it had probably been dyed before. Jimin had fallen in with an artsy group of people during university, knew how to recognize the signs of previously dyed hair very quickly. Jeongguk, too, had gone through a phase where he’d dyed his hair multiple natural colours, and although it wasn’t as bad as the cycle of bleach and dye and bleach and dye that he’d seen some people go through, that damage didn’t disappear.

So his new colleague had had a bit of a rebellious phase? Or had he been an idol fanboy who’d taken his emulation of his heroes all the way to his hair?

“I’m Park Jimin,” he said as he lifted a stack of folders back onto his own desk. “But you heard Kim Taeyeon-sunbaenim say that already.”

“Min Yoongi,” Min Yoongi said, casually dropping his bag onto the spot that Jimin’s own bag had occupied previously. “Here,” Yoongi said, passing him the final stack of folders.

“Thank you,” Jimin said reflexively, putting the stack in the last remaining open space on his filing cabinet. “That desk’s been open for as long as I’ve been here so I sort of got in the habit of putting papers I need to file on there and then forgetting about them.”

“Not a very good trait for a lawyer,” Yoongi commented wryly.

“I’m detail-oriented when it comes to what I’m working on right now,” Jimin replied, pulling his chair over to his cabinet to begin filing papers he should have put away months ago. “You could say I’m just very good at prioritizing.”

“You talk a lot more when your sunbaenim isn’t around,” his new colleague observed. “And a lot more casually too.”

Jimin’s eyes darted up from his work, trying to assess both the situation and Yoongi’s face. Had he miscalculated? Were they not just colleagues? Yoongi couldn’t be a partner, because he’d have a nicer workspace, and definitely an office of his own. So he hadn’t done wrong by dropping speech levels, had he?

Yoongi’s face was like his managing partner’s – similarly inscrutable. It just made Jimin’s brain work harder, trying to puzzle meaning out of nothing.

“Of course,” Jimin said cautiously, trying valiantly not to overstep while not sounding awkward, “we’re colleagues and she’s a superior, so obviously I talk more casually with you.”

“Are you scared of her?” Yoongi asked, a teasing smile appearing on his face.

“Not scared,” Jimin said, popping his head up from his filing cabinet, “just very aware of her presence. And skill. And power over my career.”

“Are you scared of the judge when you’re in court?” Yoongi asked, tone seeming to imply that the question was more rhetorical than genuine inquiry. Jimin replied anyway, knowing where his colleague was leading.

“No, not really. I’m aware of them.”

“So don’t be scared of Kim Taeyeon. I’m telling you from experience, most of your superiors aren’t as scary as you think they are.”

Jimin kept eye contact with Min Yoongi, and then slowly lowered his head back to his files. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, trying to be casual, but there was a line of fire burning over his skin that had been lit by something inside his new colleague’s gaze.

(He had a boyfriend. He had a boyfriend. He had a boyfriend. Fighting with him the night before did not make any of this okay. But then again, attraction was just attraction, and could it hurt to look?)

Min Yoongi smiled at him again before they each returned to organizing their own workspaces. Mere moments later, that iPhone maraca jingle rang through their section of the office, and Jimin’s hand instinctively went to his own phone. It wasn’t his (it never was; he realized belatedly that his phone ringer wasn’t even on), so he went back to his work while carefully peeking at Min Yoongi, who had picked up a call.

“What are you doing?” Jimin heard. The voice was almost totally different from the one he had been using mere moments before; the stress was placed on different syllables, the rhythm of the phrase entirely different. It sounded like dialect; it sounded like home, but with something very slightly off about it.

Jimin would bet money on Min Yoongi being from his province, and he’d also bet on Yoongi being from Daegu. That was as textbook as a Daegu accent could get.

It had been a while since he’d heard a Daegu accent anywhere but on a screen. It wasn’t familiar, not exactly, but it was definitely closer to home and warmth than any standard Seoul accent. Even now, years after moving to the big city, Jimin lapsed into his dialect when extremely panicked or extremely relaxed, and he’d noticed that Jeongguk seemed to fall into dialect and mutter to himself whenever he was trying to work something out. Funnily enough, the two of them slid between dialect and standard when at home. These days though, Jimin realized that they increasingly stayed in standard.

Maybe it was too much for them; the amount of effort it took to separate those two parts of themselves. Maybe both Jimin and Jeongguk had given up somewhere along the line and given in to the easier option. Jimin wasn’t sure when the last time he had heard dialect was, just as he wasn’t sure when he had last spoken to his family.

Jimin had long since negotiated his wary peace with the standard dialect he lived his life in. The way he compartmentalized it, standard was for public life whereas dialect was reserved for his home and his family. Dialect was house slippers and standard was dress shoes. He was not supposed to hear dialect when he was at work, because dialect wasn’t meant for that kind of thing. Even if Jimin was on the phone with his own mother during work, he’d use standard.

So when Yoongi suddenly began talking with a mouth full of dialect phrases, it was like he’d suddenly been presented with a bomb. It was that surprising, and similarly bewildering.

What to do with this information? A normal person would say nothing. Park Jimin waited until Yoongi hung up and then said, rather stupidly, “You’re from Gyeongsang too?”

Yoongi blinked twice, but seemed otherwise unfazed. “Yeah. Daegu. I actually transferred from the Daegu office. Where in Gyeongsang are you from?”

“Busan.”

A smile that could almost be called warm appeared on Yoongi’s face. “Almost home, huh?”

“Yeah. I just – I haven’t heard dialect in a long time.”

“You don’t have any friends who are also from back home?” Yoongi asked, one eyebrow raised. “That’s hard to believe.”

“I do. I actually,” here, Jimin cut himself off with a small laugh, “I actually live with another Busan kid. We just don’t use dialect at home anymore, is all.”

Jimin didn’t mention the important second part of that arrangement – that the Busan kid he lived with was actually his boyfriend. He had just met Min Yoongi, and it was always an uneasy game to play, trying to gauge if it was safe to just casually come out like that. If Yoongi turned out to be a homophobic dudebro (which seemed unlikely so far, but he could be surprised), then Jimin’s caution would have been well-chosen.

“And your parents?”

That could be construed as nosy, but then again, that was sort of a lawyer thing.

Jimin shrugged. “Things get busy. We don’t call each other that much anymore, just texts.”

“Seems like you miss dialect a lot.”

Jimin wrinkled his nose a little without meaning to. “Not dialect specifically,” he said slowly, thinking through it. “Just what it means. Dialect is home. I miss home.”

“Are you new to the city or something?” Yoongi asked. Jimin knew it was strange, what he had just said; he never used to have such a sudden longing for home and comfort and warmth. He didn’t even know until now that he considered Busan and dialect markers of home. For the past few years, he had thought he had made a home for himself right here, in Seoul, with Jeongguk and his case files.

And then Min Yoongi walked into his life, with that easy confidence and slight smirk and pitch-perfect Daegu accent, and Jimin realized all over again that he was missing something.

“No,” he replied. “I’ve been here for,” Jimin trailed off for a moment, tallying the years in his head, “five years now. I never used to miss home like this.”

Yoongi looked at him for a few more moments, blinked hard, and then turned back to his own work. Jimin finished filing and started going through the libel file once again, adding more detailed notes to the margins on this second reading. The first time was for the big picture, to get an idea of where the important parts of the case were, how to approach it; the second reading was for details, the small things that would win them a settlement. In the background, he heard the sounds of Yoongi’s desktop begin to boot up, soft murmurs from other lawyers at other desks, the clicking sound of heels against floor.

The heels stopped by his desk. This time, Jimin turned around before Kim Taeyeon could even say his name.

“I just wanted to talk to you,” she said, her eyes sweeping over his now-clean desk and ordered files, “about the Chiryoje case. I’ve decided to assign you to work with Min Yoongi on it. The workload would be a little much for one person.”

Jimin couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be shade or a sign that Kim Taeyeon cared about his well-being. Was Kim Taeyeon trying to say that she didn’t think he could handle hard work, or was she trying to say that she didn’t want him to?

A case like this was career-making and Jimin knew it. Associates like him needed a big case like this to sink his teeth in, to maybe pull in a new client and cement his standing. No doubt Kim Taeyeon knew it too; she had been through the same process. For all his deductive reasoning skills he was supposed to have developed, Jimin still couldn’t suss out if this was betrayal or benevolence.

“Okay,” he said, at a loss for any other words. “Is there anything else you need from me?”

“Can you give the intern something to do?” Kim Taeyeon’s face suddenly seemed to melt from goddess to human, as if she had gone from marble statue to just another person. “Whoever was supposed to be mentoring him is clearly not doing their job, because he’s not doing anything and it’s bothering me.”

“Of course,” Jimin said, feeling his own plaster smile crack into something more realistic. Kim Taeyeon’s smile followed suit, and the two of them shared a moment that could almost be considered conspiratorial.

It melted away in the next second as Kim Taeyeon turned towards Min Yoongi, raised a knowing eyebrow (as if to say, I expect you to be eavesdropping) and left.

Jimin let out a shaky breath.

“So,” he said to Min Yoongi, who had turned to him expectantly. “Do you want me to have the intern make you a copy of the case file?”

“Does he not have a name?”

Jimin shrugged. “He’s the intern until he actually does something worthy of the rest of us learning his name.” It was the kind of treatment they’d all been through; it was practically tradition. Besides, this intern had been with the office for maybe three days. Definitely not enough time to learn a name.

“I know that feeling,” Min Yoongi laughed, and Jimin laughed with him.

“Hey,” Min Yoongi said over his shoulder to Jimin as the clock ticked closer to six thirty, “do you know any good bars or restaurants around here? I’m kind of new to the city.”

Jimin looked up, startled, from his own work. “Uh,” he said, that damn verbal tic back again, “all the restaurants around here are ridiculously overpriced.”

Why did he say that? That was so inane. None of them cared that much; the restaurants here were overpriced because their wallets could handle it. They were all lawyers at a big, corporate firm. They were the last people in this area of downtown Seoul who needed to worry about counting pennies.

Min Yoongi laughed a little. “It’s my first day of work in the big bad city and already I need to be warned about the prices.” He carefully slid a sleek laptop into a nondescript, black bag. “Do people here jack up the prices if they can tell you’re not native?”

Jimin tilted his head and sucked in a breath as he considered this. “Maybe street vendors,” he finally conceded. “It’s the same as back home. If you don’t sound like you’re from around here they assume you’re a tourist. You know how it is.”’

Another laugh from Yoongi. “I think my standard is enough to pass,” he said as he swung his bag onto his back, and Jimin was momentarily distracted by the subtle emphasis on that final word. Pass.

Jimin passed every day; he wiped the taste of dialect off his tongue so that he could sanitize himself into someone who was of the city in every way, he was exceedingly careful in what he said so that not even the slightest detail could implicate his sexual orientation. Pass was a word he was extraordinarily familiar with, like a little piece of lint he didn’t want to have but somehow seemed to find its way back inside him every time he tried to leave it behind. Not that Jimin ever did, because he had made his peace with reality, which was that he was better off being careful.

What did Yoongi know about passing? Did he sleep with it on his tongue, the way Jimin did? Did pass sprawl itself across his desk, like it did for Jimin? Did the word always occupy the corner of his vision when he was at work, did it paint itself on billboards and alley walls, did it whisper in his ear when he started talking to strangers?

Maybe. But Jimin couldn’t know. He was thinking too much into it.

“That’s good,” Jimin replied mindlessly, glancing at the clock in the bottom corner of his computer screen. Six thirty; technically, this was a nine-to-five job. He should have been out an hour and a half ago, and yet here he was.

Now that he thought about it, he was kind of hungry. He needed to eat soon.

“Hey,” Yoongi said, as if it had just occurred to him, “why don’t you take me out instead?”

That phrase, ‘take me out’, hit Jimin like a bolt of lightning. His reaction was poorly concealed. “What?” he replied, and the exclamation mark after the question mark was nearly visible, like he was a manhwa character.

“Take me out,” Yoongi said again, a wicked smile adorning his face. “You know, to a good restaurant? Or a bar, if getting straight to the alcohol is more your style.”

Was this flirting? It had been so long, Jimin didn’t know if he knew what it was anymore.

(Even if it wasn’t, Jimin shouldn’t be doing this. His mind momentarily flashed to Jeongguk sitting at home, cooking something delicious, while he went out for dinner and drinks after work. He thought of all that food gone to waste, of last night’s dinner with the uneaten rice and the lonely piece of meat. Then he thought of Jeongguk’s face. How tired it was – how tired Jimin himself was walking on eggshells and waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the cracks in his relationship to grow too large once again, and then him being the only one trying to paste child’s glue over it and put it back together.)

“It’s been a while since I’ve had just alcohol for dinner and I don’t plan on starting again,” Jimin said. “I know this great barbecue place, I’ll take you there.” Jimin began to pack up his own stuff, now that he had committed to ditching his boyfriend back in their apartment. He wasn’t going to think about it like that. This was networking. This was helping out a new colleague, one that his direct superior had said was worth learning from. Jimin was just trying to get ahead.

(This was him being an asshole to his boyfriend and he knew it, and yet he couldn’t stop.)

“But you should know,” Jimin said, shutting down his computer, “my style doesn’t involve getting straight to anything.”

He felt unexpectedly bold, as if the alcohol he knew they were going to consume had made it into his veins already.

Yoongi side-eyed him. “So you’re one of those lawyers, huh.”

“A good one?” Jimin said, the boldness still there. He tilted his head with a smile. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

Something like respect lit in Yoongi’s eyes, and if Jimin had had long hair, he would have artfully tossed it over a shoulder, like a model in the movies.

“Wouldn’t have thought you had it in you,” Yoongi commented, pulling on his jacket. Jimin grabbed his own and shrugged it on as well, picking up his bag and then gesturing towards the doors.

“To do what?” Jimin asked, tilting his chin up slightly in challenge. He wasn’t tall at all, not by any stretch of the imagination, and especially not when he was standing next to his boyfriend, but it seemed that Min Yoongi was similarly vertically challenged, because Jimin didn’t need to look up at him.

“You just seem so quiet around Kim Taeyeon, so it’s still surprising when you talk like that.”

“Like I said, good lawyer,” Jimin said, stepping out into the aisle and heading for the elevators. “I know what to say, when to say it, and when to shut up.”

He could almost hear the gears in Min Yoongi’s head turn and click against one another as his assessment of Jimin shifted once again.

(Ruthless. Maybe that was the adjective that his new colleague was applying to him now. It wouldn’t be quite wrong. Jimin’s existence in this office, in this building, hell, in this industry, was not a fluke. He’d set his eyes on his goal and never stopped. Maybe that was why Jeongguk seemed to hate him. Because Jimin had, consciously or unconsciously, chosen what was essentially something selfish over the two of them. But, fuck it – if choosing his career was selfish, then Jimin was fucking selfish and proud of it.)

“Just because I have a healthy respect for my superiors doesn’t mean I’m quiet,” Jimin continued.

“Well, I know that now.”

Jimin turned to make eye contact with Min Yoongi, the recently pressed down button lit as they waited for the elevator to arrive. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Min Yoongi,” he pointed out. It wasn’t mean, just honest.

(Except, as he well knew in this line of work, sometimes honesty was the meanest thing you could choose.)

“I guess that means I’ve just gotta learn everything there is to know about you.”

Somehow, Jimin felt like he had ended up drinking more than he had eaten.

Oh sure, there was meat sizzling away on the grill, the last few pieces and some steaming mushrooms. But the empty bottles of soju overflowing on the rest of the table was either embarrassing or impressive, depending on the kind of person you were. Jimin thought it was a little bit of both.

As the sun outside slipped beneath the horizon and what stars could be seen winked their way into the night sky, Min Yoongi and Park Jimin stayed planted in their seats in the corner of the barbecue place that Jimin had gone to so many times before with other friends who worked in the area — Kim Taehyung was an old friend from law school who worked at a fashion magazine down the street as in-house counsel; Kang Seulgi who used to occupy the desk on the other side of him but who had been moved to a different floor after their first year together; Choi Seungcheol, a classmate who had ended up in contracts and was in the office building across the road.

And now, apparently, Min Yoongi.

As they imbibed more and more (it seemed Yoongi had a taste for soju; Jimin had offered to get beer instead and the slight wrinkle at the bridge of his colleague’s nose told him all he needed to know), their personalities came out. Jimin had built a professional life out of being unreadable and controlled, as most of his fellow lawyers had. He could see it in all of them; Kim Taeyeon had one of the best poker faces he’d seen, Kang Seulgi’s absolute control over her facial expressions was unparalleled in their cohort, and even Min Yoongi’s easy confidence pried from the jaws of past experience was part of a well-constructed facade, as all their work personalities inevitably were.

As he learned while drinking, apparently Min Yoongi was a talkative drunk. Unfortunately, so was Jimin.

Yoongi-hyung was more of the philosophical type when he got drunk, although Jimin was definitely the one deeper into his cups than the older man. From what little Jimin had seen, Yoongi-hyung was the kind of person to go on long, rambling one-sided discussions about existential questions like whether we really mattered, whether anything we did mattered, if we were doomed to mediocrity or destined to rise above it.

Jimin, on the other hand, knew from experience that he was a more run-of-the-mill kind of talkative when he drank too much. He just talked; his mouth became a never-ending spigot of personal information, observations, and gossip.

He hadn’t quite meant to drink so much, if he was being honest with himself. He knew the dangers of too much honesty straight away. Jimin was a cautious, measured man, and he didn’t want to accidentally reveal something he would regret later.

Then he’d seen a text from Jeongguk halfway through his third piece of pork belly, asking, are you coming back for dinner. Jimin had taken one look at it, felt his heartbeat accelerate, and flipped it over so he could finish his food. Moments later, after replying with a terse no, busy he turned it off entirely.

Yoongi-hyung had observed this moment carefully, and said nothing. Jimin didn’t know if he was grateful for the silence or for the multiple generous servings of soju Yoongi-hyung had encouraged him to drink.

Jimin got the feeling that Yoongi-hyung was one of those men, with an alcohol tolerance that stretched for days out of sheer necessity; it was how he lived. Jimin himself had never been one to turn to alcohol to cope, not after seeing the alcoholics in his neighbourhood as a child. But he could see the appeal.

All this led to him telling Yoongi-hyung in increasingly deeper dialect that he hadn’t learned to bike until he was 9, and that as a kid he didn’t seem to grasp the concept of using tissues to wipe evening nosebleeds and would wipe his nose on the pillowcase instead, and that he knew the entire dance to Mr Mr by Girls’ Generation and could sing and dance the whole thing by himself (high notes included), and that he’d be more than willing to get up and perform this unique talent right then and there. Luckily, Yoongi-hyung restrained himself from that particular embarrassment, but not from the one to come.

“My boyfriend, Jeongguk,” Jimin said suddenly, “he dances all the time. He’s really good at it. He could be an idol, he learns all the girl group dances. We can do a mean Genie duet.”

A glance at his phone was a sudden reminder of the side of Jeongguk that he had some problems of his own with Jeongguk, and Jimin continued by saying, “he’s an architect and he likes to complain that I,” here, he affected an extremely offended expression, exaggerated by drunkenness, “bring home my work too much, but it’s not like he doesn’t either!”

He paused and furrowed his eyebrows as he tried to remember if Jeongguk actually did bring work home.

“I think he does, anyway,” he thought out loud. “He’s always on his laptop but he says he’s playing video games.”

“Your boyfriend?” Yoongi-hyung questioned, cautious.

“Uh, yeah?” Jimin replied, drunk out of his mind and long past the caution his hyung seemed to have so much of. “Didn’t you hear me?” A crazy laugh left his mouth. “Wow hyung, you must be reeeeeeally drunk.”

(In retrospect, Jimin himself was the one who was reeeeeeally drunk.)

“I think you should go home,” Yoongi-hyung said suddenly, and something had changed in his eyes. Drunk Jimin was talkative, sure, and not nearly cautious enough, but he was not stupid, and some things didn’t leave you when you were drunk. He could see it.

“Is this because I’m gay, hyung?”

“Shh,” Yoongi-hyung said, standing up.

“Why? That’s what I am. I have a boyfriend and I live with him and we’ve been dating for years.” Jimin stopped to count on his fingers, slow and childish. “Five years.”

“You,” Yoongi-hyung said, turning his head sharply to make eye contact, “need to shut the fuck up if you know what’s good for you.”

“I’m not going to come onto you or anything,” Jimin continued rambling, “even though you have a really nice smile, don’t worry hyung, you’re safe from me --”

“Park Jimin,” Yoongi-hyung snapped, voice restrained and quiet even now, “people can hear you.”

And even in his drunkenness, that was what got to him.

“Oh,” he said, an understatement in two letters. He mimed zipping his mouth shut.

“Go home,” his hyung sighed as they stepped out of the restaurant. Somehow while he wasn’t paying attention, Yoongi-hyung had paid for them and their pile of soju and pulled him outside to wait for a taxi to come by. “Back to your boyfriend that you clearly have issues with.”

Jimin broke his silence depressingly fast. “But I don’t wanna,” he whined.

Yoongi-hyung sighed. “I think that’s why you have to.”

“I don’t wanna,” Jimin repeated, voice somehow whinier than before. Before Yoongi-hyung had a chance to respond, a taxi pulled up to their little patch of sidewalk, and Yoongi-hyung shoved him into it.

“Where do you live?” His hyung asked. “Tell the driver. I’ll wait for the next one.”

Jimin did have the presence of mind to remember his address, but when he finally tumbled out of the taxi at the end of the ride and went to pay, the driver shook his head. “Your hyung paid for you already,” the driver said. “Left a pretty generous tip, too.”

(Of course Min Yoongi was a ‘keep the change’ kind of guy.)

His night didn’t end there. After sobering up in the taxi, Jimin made it inside his apartment without messing up the password more than once, an accomplishment he was inordinately proud of.

He’d been hoping Jeongguk had gone to bed already. When he opened the door, his stomach dropped.

(He should have known better. Of course Jeongguk would be laid out on the couch with his laptop propped up on his thighs as the night got progressively darker, waiting and waiting for Jimin to come home. At least there was no dinner on the table.)

“Hey,” Jeongguk said, and there was something dangerous in that velveteen voice that set Jimin’s stomach churning, “you know what time it is?”

“It must be party time?” Jimin offered feebly, an attempt at referencing Girls’ Generation that was only made more painfully out of place by the look on his boyfriend’s face.

“It’s past midnight,” Jeongguk responded, unamused, as he shut his laptop. “Is the office even open that late?”

“It is if you don’t leave,” Jimin said, distracting himself from the steely look in Jeongguk’s eyes by crouching down to untie his shoes instead of just pulling them off the way he normally did. He knew Jeongguk knew what he was doing. He could feel that gaze burning into his back.

His fingers were fumbling like a five-year-old who still didn’t know how to tie laces, barely able to grab the things, let alone maneuver them.

“You’re drunk,” Jeongguk said, unimpressed.

“Not entirely,” Jimin retaliated. “I can touch my nose, see?” He proceeded to demonstrate his remarkable ability to touch his nose, although he just barely missed the tip and landed slightly on the right side.

“There’s no way you were drinking in the office,” Jeongguk sighed, setting his laptop to the side. “That means you went out to drink.” His boyfriend fixated a hard stare on Jimin. “Does that really count as being busy, hyung?”

The honorific was a little jarring, if only because Jeongguk had been addressing him solely with the pronoun ‘you’ the whole time. Jimin tried to shrug it off as he finally managed to wrestle his shoes off his feet. “You know how it is. When the office goes out for after-work drinks, you have to go with them.”

“So what, this is just the result of an innocuous little drinking session with colleagues?”

“Innocuous, vocabulary word of the day,” Jimin quipped, arranging his shoes as neatly as he could despite his lack of hand-eye coordination at the moment.

“I’m an architect, not an idiot,” Jeongguk replied, unwilling to let himself be distracted. “Anyway, who were you drinking with?”

“This guy,” Jimin replied. “Min Yoongi, he’s new to the office.”

“So when I said ‘colleagues’ I was being inaccurate,” Jeongguk said, and Jimin could practically see the fight brewing in the air between them, as palpable as the smell of impending thunderstorm wafting through the window Jeongguk had left slightly ajar. “It was ‘colleague’, singular.”

“Yeah,” Jimin said in return, both too tired and too tipsy to say anything more clever. “Yeah, it was.”

“God,” Jeongguk said, more to himself than to Jimin. “Where are your priorities?”

“What do you mean?”

(Jimin abruptly realized they’d been talking to each other in standard the whole time, save for whenever Jeongguk muttered to himself.)

“What happened to taking me seriously?” Jeongguk asked, finally standing. “You’re always like this. Why are you,” and it was here that Jimin began to see Jeongguk finally drop into dialect, “why are you such a fucking hypocrite?”

“You know what?” Jimin said in full-on Busan dialect, picking up a random shoe and slamming it against the ground for emphasis before standing to his full (unimpressive) height, “Fight me.”

For one fleeting, terrifying moment, Jeongguk really did look like he was about to fight Jimin, and he regretted putting the shoe down if only because he knew that he was no physical match for his gym rat boyfriend and he didn’t want to be totally beat up.

That he even had to consider that phrase, ‘totally beat up’, in relation to his boyfriend made him more than a little nauseous. Or maybe that was the soju catching up with him.

But it passed (both the nausea and the look in Jeongguk’s eyes), and Jeongguk sighed hard before saying, “You’re drunk.” The pitch-perfect standard sentences flowing out of his mouth was almost jarring after the dialect-inflected sentences from before.

“You should go to bed,” Jeongguk continued, a hasty “hyung,” tacked on at the end.

The honorific was most definitely supposed to be a peace offering. Jimin knew that much. But it didn’t feel like one. It felt like a slap to the face, and Jimin wondered how his boyfriend had learned to inject so much poison into a word that was meant to be anything but toxic.

Maybe it was a skill born from being the maknae of a family and a friend group, but Jimin suddenly found he didn’t care for it.

“If you tuck me in,” Jimin replied, a feeble attempt at normalcy.

Jeongguk forced a smile. “Okay.”

Two weeks later, long after the aprés-drinks hangover and accompanying throbbing headache had faded away, Jimin managed to wrangle a day off out of Kim Taeyeon.

The real difficulty hadn’t been in convincing her (Kim Taeyeon wasn’t mean, just intimidating), but in the mental preparation beforehand. It had taken Jimin a good fifteen minutes (incidentally, the same amount of time he used to get in high school debate to prep) of pacing around outside her office just to summon up the mental fortitude required to go outside.

Well, no, that was disingenuous. Truthfully, Jimin hadn’t been able to keep stalling outside the frosted glass of Kim Taeyeon’s office door because she had finally gotten fed up with the pacing noise and called out, “Are you going to keep walking around outside my door or come in and talk to me?”

She said all this in a laidback, banmal voice that made Jimin envision a scene that could belong in Mad Men, where the guy had his feet up on the desk while casually smoking a cigarette, if that guy from Mad Men was a Korean woman in her early thirties who didn’t smoke.

“Noona doesn’t bite, you know,” Taeyeon continued, and Jimin only realized as he opened the door, hand still on the handle, that maybe Kim Taeyeon had mistaken him for someone else.

“You’re not Minho,” she said in surprise.

“I am not Choi Minho,” Jimin agreed. Choi Minho was known to be close with Kim Taeyeon, since the two of them had made partner within a year of each other and he had memorably once let her paint his pinky bright pink.

This moment was the one, and probably the only, time that he’d see Kim Taeyeon shaken. To her credit, it lasted a split second, and the moment after her face was as impassive as ever. Her white pumps weren’t on the desk, but the casual manner in which her legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankle conveyed the tone he’d been imagining from her voice just seconds before.

Come to think of it, what was she working on lately? There had been a few Japanese cases that had been noteworthy in the office if only because they were Kim Taeyeon’s first venture into that market, and a big medical malpractice case back home that was new territory for her, but those were all from the past few months.

Must be nice to relax, Jimin thought to himself as he stepped cautiously inside and shut the door behind him. As a partner, she probably sat around in here and delegated cases until something big and interesting and shiny came across her desk, in which case she’d snap it up. That, and attend meetings.

“Did you need something?” Kim Taeyeon asked him, as if she had anything better to do. If she had been expecting a casual morning visit from Minho of the intimidatingly fast courtroom speech, then she clearly didn’t have anything better to do then listen to Jimin’s request for time off.

(Come to think of it, shouldn’t he have just emailed his request? Whatever, it was too late now.)

“I want to take a day off,” Jimin said, some heretofore unseen confidence appearing inside of him, “and I need you to approve it.”

“Alright,” Kim Taeyeon agreed surprisingly quickly, “What should I put it under? Personal time off?”

“Yeah,” Jimin said with a quick smile. “Thank you so much.”

“Not a problem,” she replied, clicking around on her double monitor setup that Jimin wasn’t quite sure she needed (they weren’t computer engineers; one was fine). “I hope you aren’t foisting all your work on Min Yoongi by doing this,” she said, and then looked up to make proper eye contact with the still-standing Jimin. “This libel case is pretty big. You could really make something out of it.”

“I’m aware,” Jimin said, trying hard not to make his tone turn the words into something else. “And I’m not the kind of person to push my work onto other people.”

An enigmatic, Mona Lisa-worthy smile from Kim Taeyeon. “Good. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy your day off. Lord knows most of the associates need to learn when to take a break.”

Jimin nodded, somehow feeling that he was significantly more uncomfortable in the current situation than his superior. “I’m one of them.”

“Apparently not, since you’re here asking me for time off,” she said, shuffling some folders on her desk. The printer in the hallway started up suddenly, a low whirring sound in the background.

“Intern,” Kim Taeyeon called out, the heels of her pumps pushing against the floor to propel her wheeled chair towards the door, “fetch that document for me, please.”

Jimin tried to suppress a smile as he heard the hurried movements of a new intern trying to comply with too many demands at once.

“Thank you,” Jimin said, bowing. “I’ll, uh, leave you to it.”

“Before you go,” Kim Taeyeon said, and Jimin turned around expectantly. “Can you tell Minho to come over here?”

“Of course,” Jimin said, and as soon as he closed the door behind him, he waved over the poor intern and said, “Taeyeon wants you to get Choi Minho for her.”

As he left, he could’ve sworn he heard a laugh.

“Where are you going?” Yoongi-hyung asked as Jimin collected his bag and his coffee thermos.

“Home,” he replied flippantly. “I took the day off.”

“So, I take it that I’ll be spending our daily lunchtime outing by myself?”

Jimin shrugged. “Sorry, hyung.”

Yoongi-hyung nodded, looked back down at his file for a second, then, seemingly remembering something, looked up sharply. “How much of your work are you going to make me cover?”

“Relax, I’m not making you cover any work.” Why did everyone think that Jimin was that kind of person? He wasn’t. Everybody on the floor was an ambitious, young, hungry workaholic, and Jimin was no exception. They wouldn’t have been hired otherwise. He wouldn’t give other people his work if they begged him for it; hell, even if they paid him to. Unless it was double his salary. He’d consider it then.

(Ambitious, young workaholic, yes, but also broke, twenty-something millennial. Make money, live better.)

Looking around at the other associates who had much better things to do than listen to Jimin’s conversation, he leaned in closer to Yoongi-hyung and said, “I had a fight with my boyfriend last week and I want to do something nice to make up for it.”

“You need the whole day off to do that?” The other man responded, skeptical.

“To be honest, I’m probably going to work from home for most of the day, run some errands, and then do something cute and romantic in the evening,” Jimin said, sheepish. “I’m not brave enough to go full-on romantic drama and surprise him at work or anything.”

“I wouldn’t advise it either,” his hyung replied, a nose wrinkle that was almost cute appearing. It was one that Jimin had seen more and more often as they spent more time quietly working next to each other; when Jimin brought in the kind of coffee that was more sugar than caffeine (an abomination and a crime against nature, according to Yoongi-hyung), when someone came to work after spraying far too much fragrance on themselves, when he was looking for a particular section of a statute and couldn’t find it.

“Anyway, good to know you’re still going to be a responsible kid and do your work.”

Jimin spread his hands in question, an effect significantly mitigated by his drab coffee thermos that was very convenient but not the most stylish. “What kind of person do you take me for?”

Yoongi-hyung reached up to high-five Jimin’s free hand without even looking up from the file he was annotating.

“One who’s gonna try and fix a relationship littered with issues,” he replied casually. “Which is commendable, really. Good for you.”

“Don’t you think ‘littered with issues’ is a little harsh?”

The other man didn’t even pretend to think. “Nope,” he said as he circled some vitally important section. “This assessment comes from the mouth of Drunk Jimin himself.”

“I did not say that,” Jimin protested, shutting his filing cabinet a little louder than he needed to. He realized belatedly that he’d taken the wrong folder out and opened it once again.

“Maybe not in so many words.”

The taste of his excessively sweet coffee soured in his mouth. Jimin shut the filing cabinet again, making sure he had the right folder this time, and then offered a tight smile. “See you tomorrow, I guess.”

Yoongi-hyung’s eyes were too perceptive. “Are you seriously mad about this?” he asked, voice pitched low and soft. “Having problems isn’t a bad thing, it’s not acknowledging them that’s toxic. You told me yourself you’re trying to mend things with him. Can’t you just acknowledge that maybe there’s an underlying reason for the cycle you’re caught in?”

“Oh, what do you know?” Jimin replied, exasperated. “You’ve been here for two weeks. That’s not enough time to say anything about my relationship.”

Yoongi-hyung seemed to decide that this wasn’t an avenue worth pursuing and just shrugged, hands spread wide as if to admit defeat. “I think I’ve heard all I needed to say something about it,” he responded. “But you do you.”

For some reason, this was almost more annoying. “Yeah, I will,” Jimin said with an unnecessary amount of bite, and it wasn’t until he had entered the elevator that he realized there wasn’t a single part of his last sentence that had made sense.

As he was going down, his phone lit up:

yoongi-hyung: hey, email me about the case when you get home

yoongi-hyung: if you work on it at all anyway

He really wasn’t going to let that go, was he?

Jimin spent the rest of the day basically working from home. He fired off multiple emails to Yoongi-hyung about specific details of the case, trawled through the internet history of the person they were suing to see just how bad it was, and bought some groceries.

(They had run out of banana milk, which was less of an issue for Jimin but a problem of earth-shattering proportions to Jeongguk.)

At five on the dot, Jimin started cooking, since the commute was long and nobody actually got off work at exactly five. This way, dinner would be piping hot and ready for when Jeongguk came back. He had told Yoongi-hyung something ‘cute and romantic’, but to be honest, after a few years of the daily grind, ‘cute and romantic’ often meant warm, home-cooked meals, a fresh bowl of popcorn, and a decent movie to while away the night with.

Maybe the one thing cuter than that kind of comfort was grabbing someone in the middle of the day and pulling them out of their workplace, but Jimin, as a workaholic, was of the opinion that such gestures were both a, unnecessarily show-offy, and b, interrupting something that was literally vital for survival.

Also dangerous, for people like them. Jimin had never actually broached the topic of how public Jeongguk was with his sexuality, but he doubted that Jimin was ever referred to as more than a ‘person I’m dating’, if romance was mentioned at all. Unlike Jimin himself, Jeongguk was often reclusive, despite his circle of fellow rookies in his architectural firm. Even though he had some same-age friends that hung out with him, like Minghao and Yugyeom, he wasn’t sure just how much of that friendship was truly close.

Those boys often seemed like Jimin’s own group of classmates and deskmates; acquaintances, part of a network, maybe even casual friends, but not someone to pour out all your deepest darkest secrets to. And that was, unfortunately, something akin to what they were.

Deep, dark secrets.

The exception to this rule was probably Taehyung, who, like Jimin, made friends quickly. The two of them had basically been meant to be; from the day they first sat next to each other in their first-year Constitutional Law class, they hit it off. From there, it had been late-night study sessions and holding prime spots for each other in the library and, eventually, introducing boyfriends.

But Taehyung was just that; an exception. And the two of them didn’t even work together. So Jimin would never dream of appearing in the middle of the day to steal his boyfriend for a romantic afternoon getaway. It just wasn’t realistic, or how the world worked. Why damage someone’s career and reputation? Jimin knew for sure that if that kind of damage was done by Jeongguk, he’d end up resenting him, and vice versa. So really, he restrained himself to these kinds of gestures for the sake of them both.

Jimin turned on the Bluetooth speaker and left it on the table next to his thermos and his files, scattered in a little arc. As a consistent flow of bright, iconic girl group songs poured out of the speaker, he constructed a little castle in the sky for himself; Jeongguk coming home to find the tables turned for once, with Jimin waiting patiently like a little American 1950s housewife and a full dinner, a litany of Marvel movies all queued up and ready to go, a wonderfully buttery package of microwave popcorn tucked in a drawer until it was needed.

A night in got better and better the more he thought about it; there was a bottle of decent red wine just whiling away in the cabinet that they had received from Taehyung when they’d invited him over months back (a rare moment their schedules had aligned; if Jimin wasn’t getting ready to go to trial then Taehyung was caught up in defusing the latest legal complication created by creatives who didn’t or couldn’t know better) that would be perfect for movie night.

His work for the day was done and over with; unsurprisingly, it was easier to work when there was no Kim Taeyeon or fussy intern, no Min Yoongi making annoyingly perceptive comments and looking at him with those eyes. Here at home by himself cooking dinner, he could just...not, for a moment. Just stop thinking, a luxury he hadn’t had in a long, long time.

It used to be that he counted on Jeongguk to make him stop thinking, but these days Jeongguk just made him think more. What did he do wrong this time, what did he say wrong, what does that expression mean, does that eyebrow movement express frustration with Jimin or with Jeongguk’s video game, was that mouth twitch malicious or not; it was perhaps more tiring than all the mental manoeuvres he performed at work, which was impressive.

The clock hit six when Jimin shut off the stove. It hit six fifteen by the time he set the table and placed the last dish on the table. Jimin glanced at the clock again and scooped out two bowls of rice.

Are you coming back for dinner, Jimin typed out, fully aware of just how ironic this was.

Jimin listened to the incessant ticking of the clock as his screen stayed silent and dark. No reply.

(He couldn’t help the sudden swell of bitterness in his gut, some combination of stomach acid and hurt; at least he had bothered to write back last time, even if it was two words. Even tipsy Jimin spared a thought for his boyfriend, which was a lot more, it seemed, than could be said of Jeongguk.)

Jimin gave it another ten minutes before he sat down to dinner by himself. There was a unique kind of loneliness to dining on your own after years of being part of a couple; even though Jimin had spent dinners away from the apartment before, he had always eaten with a colleague or two or three. In fact, Jimin found it extremely hard to remember any nights he had spent like this, eating alone at his kitchen table.

Obviously, when he’d been a child dinner had always been a family affair. In university, he couldn’t escape people; in his room there was his roommate, in the dining hall it was literally everybody else who lived in the nearby buildings, in the communal kitchen there was always someone coming in or out. Then in law school, he’d started dating Jeongguk and befriended a multitude of people so he’d never be lonely.

Jimin found, mindlessly shoving food into his mouth in his kitchen, that he didn’t like eating by himself.

(At least the food was good. Small comfort.)

Was this supposed to be revenge, on Jeongguk’s part? Was this how his boyfriend felt every night, waiting for Jimin to come home?

Suddenly, it was as if the food in his mouth had been flavoured with an extra large serving of guilt. Jimin finished his rice, set the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, and brought his files to the couch so he could work there instead.

Another small comfort; the door opened at ten o’clock, signalling Jeongguk’s return. This time, it was Jimin who got the cold satisfaction of shutting his laptop with a meaningful look.

(Still, even now, Jeongguk was better than him; returning earlier, and with no hint of drunkenness. Or maybe that was worse, because it meant his boyfriend had knowingly and soberly decided to stay away from the apartment.)

“Hey hyung,” Jeongguk said casually, like there weren’t the shattered pieces of Jimin’s dreams on the floor right in front of him.

“Oh, how the tables have turned,” Jimin said to himself.

“Sorry?” his boyfriend said, toeing his shoes off without regard for where they went. It was like watching a teenage son come home, right down to the petty rebellion, except Jimin and this teenage son were romantically involved and had been for five years.

“I was talking to myself,” Jimin responded, tone a little curter than he’d intended. He didn’t know what it was about Jeongguk, but he destroyed the usual control Jimin had over his body language and his voice, the control he had painstakingly built up to get ahead in his line of work. Jeongguk came in and swept it all away at once.

“Where were you?”

Jeongguk paused, hand pressed against the wall, casually leaning as if this was a nice, casual chat. It was not. It was nowhere near nice, or casual.

(Casual? I don’t know her.)

“Does it matter?”

“If it does for me then it does for you,” Jimin said, and he could feel his voice pitching higher already.

“That’s different,” Jeongguk said, continuing on inside the apartment. He stopped again when he caught sight of the kitchen table, and Jimin caught sight of a momentary flash of guilt, the same kind that ate up Jimin from the inside out every day.

“You made dinner?”

“Surprising, I know,” and Jimin’s voice was practically covered in sarcasm, to the point where it was dripping onto the floor, “I took the day off so I could be around for once. Guess how well that turned out.”

“No,” Jeongguk said, turning around suddenly to meet Jimin’s eyes. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to try and guilt me for not being home in time for dinner this one time when you do this kind of thing all the fucking time.”

“Where were you, Jeongguk?” Jimin asked, standing. “I thought you said architects don’t work long hours the way lawyers do.”

“You don’t possess the only job in the world that requires a lot of time and effort, Jimin,” Jeongguk fired back. “If you had been listening to me talk for the past few months, you would know that blueprints are almost due for a new office building.”

“I have!” Jimin replied, defensive. “Those blueprints aren’t due for another three weeks, Jeongguk. It’s October, and those are due in November.”

Jimin saw a brief flash of what could only be described as oh fuck in Jeongguk’s eyes.

Jeongguk ran a hand through his hair, as he was wont to do when stressed, and that was when Jimin noticed the water droplets. Damp hair.

“Was it raining outside?” Jimin asked suddenly.

“No,” Jeongguk replied, baffled as Jimin knew he would be. “Why?”

“Your hair’s wet. Where did you shower?”

(Maybe he was being too suspicious, too paranoid. Maybe subconsciously he thought that if he caught Jeongguk cheating, then it would be okay for him to make a move on Min Yoongi, even though he knew he never would.)

“Um.”

“Where,” he said, every word punctuated sharply, “were. You.”

“I was at a friend’s place,” Jeongguk replied, sounding like the words were being dragged out of him.

“A friend, singular?”

“Why does it matter?”

“If you get to do this to me,” Jimin said, voice carefully measured in a way that belied his anger, “then I get to do the same. And it matters, because when I was drunk out of my mind and I couldn’t even untie my laces properly, I texted back. You’re not drunk. You’re nowhere near drunk. And you couldn’t do the same?”

“I was distracted,” Jeongguk tried to say, but Jimin cut him off with a look that could slice a throat open.

“By a friend,” he said meaningfully. “You were so distracted by a friend that you couldn’t respond to your boyfriend’s text.”

“Yes!” Jeongguk said loudly. “It’s rude, yeah, and I shouldn’t have done it, maybe, but it’s not a crime, and it’s not worth fighting over.”

“You don’t get to decide what’s not worth fighting over,” Jimin responded, unwilling to let it go. “For all I know you were out there cheating on me --”

“Coming from you?!” Jeongguk practically exploded, and if Jimin had had anything better to throw than a cushion, he would have.

(At some point, they had devolved into from speaking in standard to yelling dialect at each other, and somewhere in the back of his mind, Jimin acknowledged that it was pretty damn sad that the only time they used this marker of home was when they fought, as if home was a never-ending battle.)

“Yeah, coming from me,” Jimin said. “So what? I can’t talk now?”

“I think you’ve talked enough.”

“Well, I don’t!” Jimin shot back, and if he had been more clear-headed he might have laughed. “It’s not like you don’t do this to me. That time I came back after dinner with Yoongi-hyung – you were all like, ‘colleague, singular’ and don’t think I don’t know what you meant by that. I’m a fucking lawyer, Jeongguk. My job is to find the subtext.”

“Yoongi-hyung, huh.”

“Is that really what you’re fixated on right now?”

“When did you two get so close? It’s been two weeks.”

“Baptism by fire,” Jimin said shortly, knowing that this was pulling them away from the meat of the argument. “Anyway, back to the point, which is that you go around calling me a hypocrite when you aren’t willing to take what you dish out. You’re so paranoid about one dinner with a new colleague whose name I gave you, and you won’t even tell me who you were with, or acknowledge my feelings as valid.”

“Maybe they’re not!”

“Then yours aren’t either!”

Jimin abruptly realized that he was standing toe to toe with his taller boyfriend, and they were yelling in each other’s faces. He also realized that this was an apartment, there were other residents in the building who maybe wanted to try and sleep like normal human beings, and they were being the rudest kind of neighbour that existed, the kind that Jimin himself hated.

Jeongguk seemed to come to this conclusion soon after Jimin himself, and they both deflated, the adrenaline of the fight leaving them just as quickly as it had arrived.

“I’m going to take a walk,” Jimin said before Jeongguk could, and took hollow satisfaction in the sound of the door shutting behind him.

It was only when Jimin stepped outside the apartment building that he realized he didn’t really want to be alone at that moment. Fighting with his boyfriend was like getting kissed by a Dementor; it was about as soul-sucking, that was for sure.

Jimin decided, as most millennials did, to resort to his phone for companionship instead.

For a brief moment, his thumb hovered between Taehyung’s icon and Yoongi-hyung’s, but he ended up pressing his hyung’s instead of Taehyung’s. He tried to justify it to himself by saying that his hyung was already in the know about what Jimin had tried to do tonight and how badly their relationship was going wrong. Taehyung, on the other hand, seemed to believe in love only because Jimin and Jeongguk were still together.

Jimin didn’t want to burden their number one fan like that. It wasn’t something Taehyung should have to bear. Not that he was disparaging Taehyung’s ability to handle Jimin’s relationship pressures; he had no doubt he could. But he shouldn’t need to.

To Yoongi-hyung’s credit, he picked up right away. “Hey,” and when Jimin heard the now-familiar voice grumble through his phone speakers, there was a pang of some kind of emotion in his chest.

“Sorry, did I interrupt something?” Jimin asked, and all of a sudden his voice seemed very small, swallowed up by the darkness of the Seoul night. He could project into the largest of courtrooms without effort, give a presentation to an entire floor of people and not worry too much about volume. But he was no match for this man-made metropolis.

Normally, Jimin didn’t mind, might even find the night comforting. Right now though, the thought of not being able to measure up wasn’t comforting at all.

“Just my Show Me the Money reruns.”

“Sounds important,” Jimin tried to joke, but even he could see the joke fall flat on its face.

“Oh, it is,” Yoongi-hyung assured him valiantly, and the effort touched his frozen heart. “But I’m sure you calling me at 11 means there’s something more important than a season I’ve seen twice already. Besides, all these contestants are kinda crap.”

“So really I’m saving you,” Jimin said.

“You can put it that way. Anyway, what’s up? Shouldn’t you and Jeongguk be having romantic, celebratory sex right now? Or did you miss me so much that you just had to call me after the first round?”

“Uh, about that,” Jimin said, awkward. “We might have, um, fought. Again.”

“Wait, what? What happened?”

If there was a phone cord, like his old phone back when he was in elementary school, he would have been nervously fidgeting with it right about now. “He came home late,” Jimin said, “and then it sort of snowballed from there.”

“How late?”

“Like we just finished yelling at each other late.”

“Well,” Yoongi-hyung said, deliberating, “I mean, that’s better than you did last week.”

“Hyung,” Jimin said, watching the faint puffs of his breath leave his mouth, “I think he’s cheating on me.”

Silence on the other end of the line, save for the older man’s breathing. A few moments passed as Jimin paced around, waiting.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, maybe I’m just being paranoid, but like, the hair was kind of suspicious, and he never comes home late, and he won’t tell me who he was with, and we’ve been drifting apart anyway so it would make sense --”

“Slow down,” Yoongi-hyung said. “His hair?”

“His hair was wet. He showered at someone else’s place. He said he was at a friend’s. He didn’t respond to my texts either. I don’t know, hyung.”

“Would this be a bad time to say that I was right about the ‘littered with issues’ thing?”

“A very bad time.”

“Can I just say it once?”

Jimin sighed. “Go ahead.”

“I told you so.”

Jimin let out a noise that was half laugh and half sob, then glanced around him to see if anybody had heard that leave his body. “Yeah,” he agreed, “yeah, you did.”

Jimin sighed. “Ah fuck, I really want a drink,” he muttered to himself as he looked appraisingly at the row of stores down the street, momentarily forgetting the man on the other end of his phone.

“Don’t think that’s a good idea right now, Jimin.”

Jimin made a noncommittal humming noise, but didn’t move towards the stores either. “Anyway, I just – I don’t know. I needed to talk to someone.”

“So talk to me.”

“I feel like maybe I’m being too unforgiving,” Jimin said, trying to count the leaves on a tree so he could have something to do instead of focus on the words coming out of his mouth. “I mean, is it really that suspicious? Maybe I’m just like this because I want him to be cheating on me so I have an excuse to do the same.”

“...is there someone you want?”

Yeah, you pushed at his mouth, but he didn’t say it. “Yeah,” was what Jimin settled for, and he kept the second word from entering the world.

“No name?”

Jimin let out an attempt at a self-deprecating laugh. “Would you really want to hear, hyung? Why would a straight guy want to know who this sad gay kid is crushing on?”

“Bold of you to assume I’m straight.”

At another time, this piece of information might have felt like a lightning bolt to his heart. Right now, though, Jimin was too wrung out to care or properly process what was going on. He hated fighting with Jeongguk, despite his contradicting enjoyment of the trial process. Litigation made him feel alive. Domestic fights made him feel dead inside.

“Do you really want to know who it is?”

“Of course.”

He hesitated. “I’m not drunk enough to tell you.”

“Pretend you are.”

“I talk to him a lot.”

“You talk to a lot of people.”

“I’m talking to him right now.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You heard me.”

Jimin could practically hear his hyung’s brain process that information, and then shrug. “Okay then,” he said, and that was the end of that line of questioning. Jimin didn’t ask about it because he didn’t want it to come back.

“But I’ve gotta say, coming home late after showering at an unnamed friend’s place is kind of suspicious. I don’t think you’re being super paranoid or anything.”

“Are you just saying that to make me feel better?”

“A little bit,” Yoongi-hyung admitted, and Jimin laughed.

“When did you and Jeongguk start dating?” Yoongi-hyung asked.

Jimin paused, a little startled, but replied, “My first year of law school. His third year of undergrad.”

“So you were kids.”

“I’m pretty sure I still am a kid --”

“You were kids.”

Jimin sighed. “Yeah, and?”

“Maybe it’s just time to move on. Maybe you wanting to get with someone else is a sign. I mean, five years is a long time but that doesn’t mean it’s going to last forever.”

In a small voice, Jimin replied, “I don’t know how.”

“I think instead of you wanting to use him cheating as an excuse to cheat, what you’re looking for is a way out.”

“I’m never going to do anything about it, though. I’m never going to try and end it.”

“Well, one of you has to. And ‘never’ can change pretty quickly depending on the situation.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Jimin said, and then glanced over his shoulder to the apartment building where his boyfriend was still, where he had built a life for himself. “Look, hyung, I’m going to go back inside and get some sleep. You have fun watching your reality show reruns.”

“Thanks, kid. Sleep well, cuz the meeting with the other lawyers is in a week and we really need to get on that.”

“Fuck,” Jimin muttered to himself, and Yoongi-hyung laughed. “Bye, hyung,” Jimin said, and hung up.

When he went back inside the apartment, the lights were off in the kitchen and living room, and the only illumination he had came from the hallway light, which Jeongguk had (probably) left on for him. Jimin hopped in the shower, flicked off the hallway light, and crawled carefully into bed. Jeongguk was pushed all the way to the edge of his side, and Jimin did the same.

Jeongguk was pretending to be asleep, and they both knew it, but Jimin didn’t exactly want to talk either.

He fell asleep like that, trying the hardest he could to keep as much space as possible between him and his boyfriend. It was a sad state of affairs, and he was going to do nothing about it.

There was no feeling in the world quite like facing off against another team of lawyers in a conference room. It was like the most high-stakes version possible of the high school debate tournaments Jimin had been so good at, except there were no judges to blame your failures on. If Jimin lost while trying to settle a lawsuit outside of the courts, he couldn’t say that the judge was biased. It was all on him.

And his partner, of course.

(Wouldn’t it be nice to apply that word to Yoongi-hyung in another context? Yes, yes it would, but it wasn’t going to happen.)

Jimin held the door open for the opposing counsel as they walked in. There was a moment of crackling eye contact, fuelled by the adrenaline of being on opposite sides, and then he and Yoongi-hyung walked in together, a united front.

They exchanged a few pleasantries (in this world, all the lawyers knew that it wasn’t personal, and who knew what connections you might need down the line), and then sat down and got right to business. Watching Yoongi-hyung in action (finally) was a revelation; when the phrase ‘zealous advocate’ was coined, it was in reference to him. The only thing Jimin could think as he watched his partner present the first half of their case was that he was definitely a savage in court. Spitting out legal terms and confident ultimatums was clearly what he was made for. The way his eyes had lit right up as soon as he started talking, the confident tilt to his smile, it all had the mark of a lawyer who was doing what he was born to do.

Their two styles were the ultimate complement; Jimin was succinct and cautious in court, every word measured and carefully chosen, his face frozen into a mask of cold neutrality all while presenting the most persuasive case possible. Yoongi-hyung practically exploded into action, savage and strong, opening statements like raps flowing out of his mouth. Somehow, it worked, like a good cop bad cop skit from his childhood.

Jimin had never felt more alive than those moments, him and Yoongi-hyung working together, trading in and out statements and files and evidence, laying out the most ironclad case possible for their client.

“Your client,” Yoongi-hyung said, voice almost eruptive in its intensity, “knowingly libelled ours. As a working journalist of almost ten years, your client should know better. This was a verifiably false statement, one that was written by a veteran journalist, checked by an editor, and then, supposedly, verified by a fact-checker. That this statement made it into print from a respectable publication is an absolute failure of the responsibility that comes with freedom of the press.”

Jimin slid a printout of the news article in question across the table to the opposing counsel, even though he knew for sure that they had a copy themselves. It was theatrics; it was here to make a point.

“The damage done to our client’s reputation is lasting,” he said, measured where Yoongi-hyung was loud, voice even where his hyung’s was varied. “False and libellous statements like these hurt the finances and market value of a company, especially a pharmaceutical company, where they rely on public belief in their medicines.”

Yoongi-hyung cut in again, this time offering a sheet that showed the drop in stock market value for their client after the story was published. “Your client’s statements promoted pseudoscience and created lasting material damage to our client’s finances. We both know that if we took this to court, we’d win.”

“However,” Jimin said smoothly, “in the interests of both our clients, wasting time in court on a pretty clearcut case isn’t the goal. We’d like to offer a settlement.”

“No admission of guilt,” opposing counsel finally said. “One million.”

That was...surprisingly easy. Either he and Yoongi-hyung were just that good of a partnership or the publication really was running out of money. He and Yoongi-hyung had discussed that angle a few days ago, playing to the lack of money in their coffers as an incentive to settle quickly rather than protracting an inevitable loss. Hyung hadn’t thought they would need it, and he had been right.

“Have you seen this sheet?” Yoongi-hyung replied, appalled. “Ten.”

The other lawyer raised an eyebrow. “Three.”

“Junghoon-ssi,” Jimin said, channelling his inner chaebol, “we understand that your publication might be,” he took a pregnant pause, “limited. Although the damage done is worth at least ten million, we’ll settle for five and no less.”

“Five,” Yoon Junghoon agreed.

“Great,” Jimin smiled, and it was the kind of tight smile where you knew it was meant to be empty. “I’ll have our team send you the paperwork. Nice doing business with you,” and he stood to shake the other man’s hand.

“The intern can show you the way out,” Yoongi-hyung commented, his parting shot. There was pain in Yoon Junghoon’s eyes.

When the door shut behind the other man, Jimin turned to actually look at his partner properly, unable to stop a large smile from spreading across his face. “That was easy,” he whispered, surprised. He felt like the rookie of rookies all over again, as if he was on his very first project.

There was a matching smile on his hyung’s face, one that Jimin found he enjoyed looking at the more he saw it.

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah it was.” The realization seemed to hit Yoongi-hyung at that moment. “Oh my God,” he said, voice low to match Jimin’s, “we just did that in an hour.”

“Not to brag or anything,” Jimin said, clearly bragging, “but we are good.”

The look in Yoongi-hyung’s eyes shifted infinitesimally, and the change was too fast for Jimin to parse before he felt another mouth on his own. It was a foreign feeling, in that he hadn’t kissed anyone besides Jeongguk in five or so years, but at the same time, it was the most familiar thing in the world, because he had still been kissing for those five years and that kind of stuff didn’t leave you.

Hyung kissed like he talked when in lawyer mode; hard and driving and intense. Jimin allowed himself to be caught off-guard for a count of eight and enjoy the kiss for a brief moment before pulling away.

“Hyung,” he said, a million objections on his tongue. He ended up picking one. “I have a boyfriend.”

“From what I heard,” Yoongi-hyung replied, thumb rubbing little circles at the point near his waistband where his hip bone was easily found, if you looked hard enough, “he’s probably cheating on you too.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

“And,” Yoongi-hyung continued, one questing finger carefully playing on the edge of something bigger as it dipped underneath Jimin’s waistband, “you two are going to fall apart. Anybody can see that. I’m just making the story end faster.”

“The story?”

“Yeah, the story of your sad, sordid love affair with Jeongguk that eventually falls apart.”

“I think sordid describes this better than that,” Jimin said, backing up to sit on the conference room table. There was just enough space between his legs for Yoongi-hyung to stand there comfortably, hand never leaving Jimin’s hip.

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a fuck yeah.”

A smile that looked more like a predatory baring of teeth from Yoongi-hyung. “Then you’ll have to keep quiet.”

“Bold of you to assume you could make me be loud --”

Yoongi-hyung did a thing with his tongue, and Jimin barely stopped himself from making an embarrassing noise by putting a hand over his mouth. Catching sight of Yoongi-hyung’s laughing eyes, he said, “Oh, stop laughing, you can use your mouth for better things.”

“And use it I will.”

Despite the euphoria and the payoff of winning a case so easily, Jimin couldn’t look anybody in the eyes. He felt naked, like his chest was hanging open and people could see straight to his beating heart, read what was written there; cheater. As he left the office, he couldn’t look at Yoongi-hyung for longer than a second. When he stopped in at the convenience store, he didn’t make eye contact with the cashier.

When the clock in the apartment hit nine and Jeongguk wasn’t home yet, Jimin breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t know how he would face his boyfriend when he still felt so raw and open, when the wrong words might leave his mouth and incriminate both him and his hyung.

The guilt was the heaviest burden Jimin had ever carried. It filled up his entire body, weighed him down so he couldn’t move. He felt full of it, as if the only thing there was space for inside of him was guilt, the reminder of what he had done, the rightful punishment.

He didn’t eat dinner.

At the same time, Jimin felt dead inside, the same kind of hollow that he had been a week ago after fighting with Jeongguk; it seemed almost funny now that he’d been accusing Jeongguk of cheating. Infidelity had been like a giant guillotine hanging over their heads, one that he and Jeongguk both feared was going to drop soon.

And look at him now. He’d brought about his own demise, and for what? So he could sit alone in an apartment he didn’t co-own with his boyfriend and watch the raindrops trickle down the window as the storm outside raged on? So he could curl up by himself on the couch in a blanket as the lightning flashed? So he could nearly spill his beer when the thunder came a few beats later and have nobody to laugh at him or help him clean up?

Jimin wasn’t sure he knew how to be alone, but he was probably going to have to start learning. Although there was a quiet flame of hope that maybe he and Yoongi-hyung could be a thing, not even Jimin was delusional enough to believe it could happen now. They had known each other for what, a month? And Jimin had thrown it all away for him.

(Although, to be fair, that wasn’t far off from the beginning of Jimin and Jeongguk’s ‘sordid love affair’. Jimin was starting to see a pattern.)

Jeongguk was going to break up with him, after all. That was, if Jimin didn’t break up with him first, something akin to an employee screaming “I quit!” just after they got fired.

Jimin continued nursing his beer as the thunderstorm outside seemed to alternately pick up and slow down, the peak of unpredictability. Although, smarter humans than he had eventually learned to predict thunderstorms, to some degree. It was just Jimin who couldn’t figure anything out.

Almost unconsciously, he dialed Yoongi-hyung’s number.

“Hey kid,” Yoongi-hyung’s voice grumbled in dialect, low and warm.

“Hi hyung,” Jimin said, closing one eye and peering into the dark recesses of his nearly empty beer bottle. “I...we need to talk.”

“Where are you?”

“My apartment,” Jimin responded, tilting his head to get a better look at his beer. Were there still dregs left?

“Is the boyfriend not with you?”

“Nope. No clue where he is.”

“Well, that’s not a good sign.”

Jimin snorted a little, and decided fuck it he would just tilt the bottle as far back as he could and hope something fell out. “No, it isn’t. But um, hyung, I wanted to talk to you about us.”

“What is there to talk about?” Yoongi-hyung asked. Something cold trickled into Jimin’s stomach, a mixture of alcohol and anticipation.

“I – what happened at work today. Did that mean anything to you?”

A long pause, one where Jimin wished fervently he could see Yoongi-hyung’s face, try to gauge a reaction. Finally, his hyung spoke again. “Did it for you?”

Classic lawyer tricks, flipping a question around. Despite himself, Jimin felt a little smile tickle his mouth at that. “Of course it did, hyung, I mean, I cheated on my boyfriend. At work! Not even in a bed!”

“No, we can do that next time.”

“Next time?”

“It was a joke, Jimin.”

“You were right, hyung,” Jimin admitted, standing to throw away his now-empty beer bottle. “Jeongguk and I are going to fall apart. I’m going to break up with him.” It wasn’t a decision he had been quite aware of making, but as he said it, he felt more and more certain.

Another pause, like Yoongi-hyung didn’t quite know what to say. “That’s...I mean, good for you, Jimin.”

“But I don’t know what’s going to come after that. And, I don’t know, do you think we...”

“No,” Yoongi-hyung replied immediately, and Jimin felt like he was about to shut down.

“What?” Jimin asked, numb. “But none of this would have happened without you. You – you made me see just how bad things were, you showed me that there was something else --”

“No,” Yoongi-hyung repeated. “I don’t think you understand, Jimin. I have nothing to do with this. You’re just – you’re just lonely and confused and looking for a rebound. I’m conveniently here, is all. I’m a replaceable part of this story.”

“You’re not!” Jimin protested.

“I am. It wouldn’t have mattered who the vaguely attractive transfer was, you would have fucked them.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Sure it is.”

Jimin let out a long breath. “Why do you think you’re replaceable?” he asked, confusion plain in his voice. “You’re just as much a part of this as I am.”

A low, cynical laugh from Yoongi-hyung. “This isn’t a love story, Jimin. It’s the story of a relationship breaking down.”

When Jimin didn’t respond, his hyung’s voice softened a little. “Look, kid, it was fun. I like working with you and drinking with you and talking with you. But this isn’t what you think it is.”

A sudden flood of white-hot anger appeared inside Jimin. “You know what? This is your fault. You wrecked my home, my life, my relationship--”

“I didn’t destroy your relationship, you did. I was just here. If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else. I’m a replaceable part of this story. There could have been a billion other actors for this part in your life, I just ended up being the one.”

And just like that, the anger left as quickly as it had arrived. Jimin wanted to lash out, wanted to throw the blame around like he was playing a game of hot potato he was determined not to lose; but that wasn’t fair.

Jimin took a moment, and then he said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that to you.”

“As long as you get my point, kid,” Yoongi-hyung said, and there was still that warm fondness in his voice that Jimin wanted to steal and keep tucked away somewhere in his sock drawer, so he could take it out and look at it and hold it tight when he needed to. “You only want me because you can’t have me. It’s human nature.”

Jimin couldn’t stop the broken sound from leaving his chest. “I’m just so scared, hyung,” he admitted. “What comes next?”

“The breakup,” his hyung said casually. “Just be honest with him. It’s not your fault, Jimin. And it’s not his either. Two people can fall out of love as quickly as they fell in it.”

Jimin took in a shaky breath, and nodded. “Thanks, hyung. I’ll, uh, stop bothering you with my problems for now.”

“Any time, kid.”

It took another hour after the phone call for Jeongguk to come back. This time, Jimin didn’t say a single word that could be the start of a fight. He didn’t say a single word at all, in fact, and he had a feeling that that was what made Jeongguk look him in the eyes and then say, quietly, “Oh.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re different.”

Something about the way Jeongguk said it (you’re different, with a mix of pain and acceptance, like Jeongguk had both simultaneously seen it coming and been surprised by it) made a knife twist into Jimin’s heart. But it was too late to back out now.

“I think you should sit down,” Jimin said through dry lips, and so when Jeongguk sat down Jimin bounced up to get a drink of water. To his credit, Jeongguk watched this strange show without laughing, or saying anything at all.

(Jimin realized he was still speaking in a strange sort of sterilized standard speech, very careful and measured and, of course, polite, despite the low speech level.)

When Jimin sat back down, Jeongguk said in the deadest voice Jimin had ever heard, “We’re breaking up.”

Jimin just stared for a few moments, and then, “Was that a question or a statement?”

“Statement.”

Jimin didn’t know what to say to that, so he nodded inanely and wished for that cup of water to be back in his hands so he’d have something to do.

“Are you saying that because you want to break up?” he asked, cautious.

“Don’t you?”

(Not really an answer, but he’d take it.)

“Well, I’ll admit that’s what I was planning on doing, but you sort of beat me to it.”

It was this sentence that finally lured a mouth movement that could be construed as a smile if you looked at it the right way out of Jimin’s soon to be ex-boyfriend. It wasn’t a lot, but Jimin would settle for any hint of emotion at this point.

(He had always been good at reading people; faces, bodies. He saw distress in the movement of another person’s fingers, confidence or fear in the way they crossed their legs. These past few months, the access he’d once had to Jeongguk’s inner thoughts and feelings had been increasingly closed off. Now, he felt illiterate, like a child staring at a book they couldn’t possibly read.)

Neither of them said anything for a long while, and then Jimin turned to look Jeongguk in the eyes and said with a sudden burst of courage, “I cheated on you.”

Irrationally, Jeongguk started to laugh. Jimin stared and stared and stared some more, trying to suss out whether this was insanity borne from the sudden emotional stress or some kind of joke he wasn’t privy to.

“That’s what I was gonna say,” Jeongguk replied, and Jimin stared some more.

“When?” was all he could force past his mouth.

“That night we fought after I came back late. I didn’t expect you to catch the wet hair,” Jeongguk admitted. “But you have good instincts.”

Bitter victory, that.

“I feel,” Jimin said, “like I should feel a lot better now that you did it too, and before I did, but I just feel worse. Like, what have we done to ourselves?”

“When did you...” Jeongguk didn’t need to finish his sentence for Jimin to catch onto what he was trying to say, and that was the worst part of it, wasn’t it? Realizing that he still knew so much about his boyfriend, that these tiny things he’d memorized were stuck in his brain and would reappear from his subconscious at the most inopportune times. Even after all this was over, Jimin would look at someone taking rhinitis medication and think of Jeongguk. He’d see architectural blueprints (the same kind Jeongguk pulled up on his computer or printed out and left scattered on the table) and choke down memories of an ex-boyfriend he no longer talked to.

Jimin would never be able to escape Jeongguk, even if he tried.

“Today,” Jimin admitted, and he wanted to laugh too, for some reason. The whole situation was so ridiculous; two people pouring out the sordid details of just how exactly they’d betrayed each other’s confidence and trust. “It was literally right after Yoongi-hyung and I won our libel case.”

“Sounds like the best combination,” Jeongguk quipped, “A shitload of money and an orgasm.”

They laughed, and Jimin was reminded of just what the start of the two of them had felt like; easy and fun and happy, like this but without the history and the problems weighing them down, without a breakup hanging over their heads.

“You’re a better person than me,” Jeongguk said, eyes flickering to the case of beer in the corner. Jimin could see that Jeongguk clearly wanted to stand up and grab a beer or three, but Jimin could also tell that Jeongguk knew this wasn’t that kind of talk.

“Go ahead,” Jimin finally said, and of course Jeongguk knew what he was talking about.

When Jeongguk came back to the couch with two beers, Jimin shook his head. “I already drank one. Now, go on telling me about how I’m better than you.”

Jeongguk laughed, and then said, “You probably felt so guilty you decided you had to tell me and break up right away. I’ve been sitting on this for almost a week.”

“Hey, that’s already better than a lot of people,” Jimin said, and, unwilling to resist the urge to drink a little, casually snatched the bottle out of Jeongguk’s hand to tip some beer into his own mouth. His boyfriend followed the motion with his eyes, but made no move to stop him.

“Do I want to know who it was?” Jimin asked suddenly, handing the bottle back to Jeongguk.

Jeongguk’s mouth twisted into something that Jimin couldn’t interpret. It wasn’t an expression Jimin had ever seen before. “You don’t know them.”

“Sounds kind of like a lie,” Jimin commented, “but okay. Are you two dating, or is it just a fuckbuddy sort of thing?”

A helpless shrug out of Jeongguk. “I don’t know.”

Jimin laughed. “I can relate to that.”

The two of them sat in some silence for a while. Jeongguk drank his beer. Jimin watched Jeongguk drink his beer, all the way to the last drop. Somehow he both had too many things to say and not enough.

“So,” Jeongguk said, “it’s over, huh.”

“I’m sorry it ended up like this,” Jimin said quietly.

Jeongguk put a hand over Jimin’s; something that wasn’t supposed to be happening now that they weren’t together anymore, but Jimin would let it slide. He would always have a soft spot for this boy-turned-man, for his hair and his smile and the endearing little scar on his cheek. Jimin had been there for those pivotal years when Jeongguk had grown up, had been the one to pick Jeongguk up off the floor after exams and parties, to help him prepare for job interviews, to choose ties and dress shirts for his first day on the job.

(Where had that kid gone, the one who asked Jimin to help him tie his tie?)

“For what it’s worth,” Jeongguk said, “I am too.”

Jimin let out a long sigh, and let himself lean into Jeongguk’s side for the last time.

“Morning, hyung,” Jimin said, setting his bag down next to his chair. It was his new routine now, and he was getting better and better at it; in fact, it wasn’t much different from how his life had been before, just minus the other person in his bed. Wake up, make coffee, pack lunch, shove a slice of bread into his mouth, fill the thermos, and go. There wasn’t time for anything else.

Kim Taeyeon seemed to have gotten it into her head that Jimin and Yoongi-hyung were a winning team, one that could take on any task, after the quick resolution to their previous case together. Of course, it led to her assigning more and more cases to them. Surprisingly, and a little frustratingly, it wasn’t awkward at all. They still worked together just as well as they had before. Yoongi-hyung’s laugh was still as freely given to Jimin, his advice and off-hand remarks ever-flowing.

Jimin hadn’t felt that kind of ease with someone for a long time. It was ironic that, in breaking up with Jeongguk, the two of them had brought back that early dynamic for the last time.

“Hey kid,” Yoongi-hyung said, holding up a box of powdered doughnuts. “Want one?”

“Please,” Jimin said, helping himself to one without any more preamble. “Why’d you get these?”

A casual shrug. “Felt like it. You can take more, you probably didn’t eat breakfast.”

“How did you know?”

“I know you,” Yoongi-hyung replied, flipping through a folder. “And you, my friend, are not that great at taking care of yourself.”

Jimin laughed a little (it wasn’t a joke, but he didn’t know what else to do) and sat down. “Well, I broke up with Jeongguk, and that was taking care of myself.”

“And who told you to do that?” he replied archly.

“Of course, of course,” Jimin replied, sarcastic, “you’re always right, hyung.”

“As long as you know it,” his hyung replied, and offered a folder to Jimin as well. “Taeyeon dropped this off for you. We have another client.”

Jimin sighed, already knowing that he’d be losing sleep over this. The folder was bulging, full of files that Jimin would have to read. Not that there was anybody to complain about that anymore. Maybe next time he dated he should just shack up with someone like Taehyung; someone else from his world, someone who understood what all his lawyer jargon meant, someone who felt the same career pressures and workload that Jimin did. There wouldn’t be anyone to make cute home-cooked dinners, but that was okay. Jimin could be into a takeout kind of romance too.

(It was almost definitely too early to be thinking about dating again, but how could he not think about it when he worked next to Min Yoongi every day?)

“I guess it’s time to bid the outside world goodbye,” Jimin said mournfully, riffling through the folder. “Are there more files online, too?”

“Of course.”

Jimin sighed dramatically, but resolved to stop complaining after this. He loved his job. He really did. It might have been a big part of why his last relationship had shrivelled up and died after five years, but other than that, it was a dream. The money was good, his coworkers were smart and helpful, and he didn’t have a terrible boss. Not to mention that it was actually in the field he’d studied (harder and harder to come by these days) and intellectually challenging.

He’d do himself some good to count his blessings.

“Jimin,” Yoongi-hyung said suddenly, eyes trained on Jimin’s face. He looked up from the files to meet a strangely serious expression.

“Yeah, hyung?”

“Why don’t we go out for dinner tonight somewhere? My treat.”

Jimin looked down at his work. “What, to discuss the case? We just started, hyung, don’t you think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself?”

“Not work dinner,” his hyung said, “just dinner.”

There was something deeper underneath those words that Jimin was almost scared to look at, as if he was a child again and there was a monster under his bed.

“I thought that wasn’t what this is,” Jimin said.

“Don’t overthink it,” Yoongi-hyung replied. “It’s just dinner. You look like you need a chance to relax, anyway.”

Jimin shrugged, something like a smile struggling to get onto his face. “Sure, hyung, if you’re okay with me eating you into debt.”

His voice dropped into something more honest. “I feel kind of hollow these days,” he admitted. “Empty and dried up.”

Yoongi-hyung turned to make eye contact with Jimin. “It gets better,” he said seriously. “It’s behind you now. Just...keep your chin up and look at what’s ahead of you instead of behind you.”

“Careful,” Jimin teased, “you’re going to ruin your image. You’re supposed to be cool, not a therapist.”

“Hey, I’d ruin my image for you,” Yoongi-hyung said casually, “just this once.”

(That was more touching than he’d like to admit.)

“Thanks, hyung.”

“Anytime, kid.”

And when Jimin walked out of the building for lunch that day and felt the drizzling rain land on his shoulders, it was like the sky was finally on his side. The rain droplets hitting his shoulders were like the friendly touch of a friend, as if they were asking about his day. It was like someone up there was finally listening to him, had heard him say he felt dried up and said, I’ll make it rain so hard you can’t be dried up even if you tried.

How did that song go? Rain on me, who has dried up?

Rain on Jimin, who has dried up.

Jimin tilted his head up to the sky and laughed.