Archive of Our Own

I.

He’s been dancing for hours. Yoongi has been sitting at the bar, watching on, for hours. He almost regrets the way the waiters take away the glasses he finishes. He’s sure that he could have formed a train of them from one end of the bar to the other by now. But the little men do their job, and the little patrons like Yoongi sit at the bar and watch the little people with big potential like Park Jimin waste it away in some grimy back-alley club, because there’s nothing else for them to do.

It had only ever been with Yoongi that Jimin did this. Never Tae. Never Jungkook. Hell, not even Hoseok, the other serial self-destroyer. No, he only ever came to the club with Yoongi, only got wasted with Yoongi, and only ever let Yoongi take him home a crying mess when all was said and done.

He’s not hard to find in the sea of bodies. His hair is cotton candy pink, glowing in the neon lights. It bobs in and out of view, but Yoongi knows he’s there, on his feet, still dancing and singing along and probably kissing people, too. Kissing away the bad taste of his life, of his youth, of his failures. Swallowing the tongues of strangers to try and make himself believe he hadn’t just had his heart broken again.

Back when they were kids, Yoongi thought he understood. Hell, there are even times now that he thinks he understands. But he doesn’t. He isn’t the kind to love wildly, intensely, the type to invest his passion so freely and, inevitably, watch it get ripped away. Yoongi had always been slower to open up, but it’s the price of wearing one’s heart on their sleeve, these rituals. The life Jimin leads always ends up like this.

Yoongi had forgotten his name this time. The name of the most recent destroyer of Park Jimin’s heart. Someone older, taller and broader than the both of them. Someone who had pretty eyes and a sweet voice that Jimin had fallen head over heels for. Yoongi had reserved his judgements, let them be—it’s the same every time. He’s learned that’s just the way it’s going to be—and two weeks later Jimin had made his very sober phone call.

“Hyung, let’s go clubbing.”

Yoongi wonders what it’s like to bear your heart to a stranger. In the static suburbia they lived in, you either grew thick skin from the boring life or you lived naked. Too distant or too intense. Yoongi and Jimin found themselves at the opposite ends of the spectrum, but they seemed to stay relatively near, like habitual, seeking magnets.

The most recent beer is tangy. Too bitter. Too sweet. The bubbles feel all wrong and thick in his throat. The bartender is already gone, serving some other sweaty customer and Yoongi puts the beer down. He doesn't need it. It’s just a force of habit, to come to a bar at fuckass o’clock in the morning, get smashed and go home.

It’s nearly three o’clock in the morning when Jimin comes over, a crying mess supported by the frail arms of a stick-thin girl, teetering in her platform heels.

“He—he says he knows you, are you—?”

“Yeah, he’s with me,” Yoongi says quickly, jumping off his seat and hooking an arm around Jimin’s shoulders. God, he does this every time, and it whittles away at Yoongi’s heart. Jimin holds Yoongi tight, pressing his face into his shoulder and sobbing into it. He smells like sweat and destruction.

“Let’s get you home,” he says softly as they head out, away from the thumping music. “Come on, Jiminie. Let’s go home.”

II.

Yoongi, though not a touchy person by nature, has learned to begrudgingly accept the hangover cuddling and even grow to be comforted by it. It’s still the same morning, Yoongi’s still awake, and Jimin is still curled against him.

He likes it, the paleness of morning. The neighbourhood is painfully quiet and sleepy, no matter what day or time, and the hollowness Yoongi usually feels is replaced by calm. He knows he should sleep off his headache, tuck himself in against Jimin’s hair and drift away, but his mind is always going at one-thousand miles an hour in complete circles. Never reaching anywhere, but always in a hurry.

When Jimin’s asleep like this, Yoongi can still see the hint of baby fat in his cheeks. The years of dieting had stripped them, made him chiselled and oozing manliness off the edge of his boyhood charms, but Yoongi likes the softness. It makes him think of their youth, of a time when Jimin was bubbly and carefree, skipping around town with Hoseok in tow, not yet invested in high alcohol content and befriending bouncers.

There was a start to this. The self-implosion that swept them all up. Yoongi can’t even remember his name anymore, like every boyfriend that had ruined Jimin’s life, just how slimy his smile had been and how many times Yoongi had voiced his dislike. Jimin, kind, juvenile Jimin, had brushed him off. “He’s just awkward, hyung. Don’t worry.”

But Yoongi worried. He worried when Jimin started dieting. When he started commenting on how unattractive he was. When he started standing in front of the mirror until he cried. Yoongi worried.

And when he found out the cause he didn’t hesitate to get Namjoon and Seokjin and beat the fucker to a pulp. But in the end, he’d just been a nomad, passing through and wreaking havoc. It hadn’t mattered to him other than a busted lip and two swollen black eyes. He’d gone home and healed.

The damage was done.

“I failed my exam,” Jimin had said one day, sitting on the hood of a stranger’s car and looking out at the wide, empty street. “I’m . . . I’m so fucking stupid, hyung.”

The damage was so, so done.

No matter what Jimin said, what he told himself, he always fell. First it was the boy who had held open the door for him. Then it was the guy who’d given him his umbrella. Then the boy from chemistry. All the stories ended the same way, and somewhere along the line they’d discovered blacking out and nightclubs using them as a coping mechanism. One night to destroy himself, a week to recover, and then he’d go out there again and make the same mistake because love was engrained in his soul, right beside trust and good intentions.

Yoongi brushes his hand through Jimin’s hair, careful not to wake him but also desperate to try and clean the grime the club left on him. There was no cleaning, after a club night. Only sleeping and hangovers. Despite himself, Yoongi thinks of the times they used to party without the intention of getting over anyone. He remembers how the seven of them lay in a tangled mess of limbs and the way Yoongi used to wake up to Jimin brushing his hair back.

Yoongi misses the dull simplicity of their youths. Misses being out until the next morning, drinking as they sat on kerbs, throwing beer bottles into the river to hear the reverberating noise of the glass smacking the water at just the right angle. He misses the way they used to fool around, all bark and no bite.

He’s twenty-five but feeling a hundred. And when he looks at Jimin, his heart aches and struggles to beat like it’s been going for eighty years and ready to throw in the towel. Every time he sees the tell-tale, bashful smile on Jimin’s lips and the tentative ‘I met a guy’, it stutters and struggles to keep going, bowing under the weight of his ancient, cultivated despair.

And then there are moments like these, when he studies the peacefulness on Jimin’s face, smudged kohl along his eyelids and face blotchy from the amount he’s drunk. He’s only twenty-three, Yoongi struggles to remind himself, twenty-three and with more heartbreak than there are people in this goddamn town.

Jimin shifts against him, burrowing his cheek into Yoongi’s chest until his lips pout against Yoongi’s shirt, parted in a way Yoongi knows will drool but he doesn’t care enough to wake Jimin up. His brow furrows for a moment, like he’s trying to force himself to wake up, but he slips back into slumber.

There are people shuffling in the rooms downstairs. Yoongi can hear the floorboards creak through the building, along with their muffled voices coming from the window. For not the first time, Yoongi wonders what kind of life they lead, the unremarkable average man. He wonders if people like him can grow into them. He wonders if people like Jimin can grow into them, safe and secure and looking to start a family and settle down, buy a house with a second bathroom, own a dog. He wonders what it would be, to find solace in normalcy in this concrete town with no soul.

Hours pass the same way, with Yoongi’s unbridled wonderings and Jimin sleeping. The morning turns to midday, and then to afternoon, and Yoongi hasn’t slept a wink. The familiar dread has seeped into his stomach, sinking through his fingertips carding through Jimin’s hair, through his toes and through his skin from the stale air around them. A week will pass. Jimin will scoop himself back together, and then next week he will meet another person, and Yoongi will have to hold him as he cries again.

Why couldn’t anyone love Jimin the way he loved them? Why did they break him down, time after time, and why did they up and leave when they didn’t like the fruits of their labour? Why was it so fucking hard to love Jimin the way he deserved, unbridled and in every aspect of life? Couldn’t they leave him be without filling Jimin’s head with their ugly words? Couldn’t they just tell Jimin, like he needed to hear, that he was beautiful and loved and his presence was so, so cherished?

So, so cherished in the way Yoongi wished he could tell him. The way they lingered behind his lips, heaving and stinging, ready to be said but dying on his tongue. His mouth was filled with good intentions never acted on, on sweet words that could have saved Jimin from the beginning if he’d ever said them. But he never did. He never did.

Traitorously, Yoongi let himself imagine dating Jimin. Holding him like this, all day and all night in bed, Yoongi’s favourite place, pressing kisses into his hair and face and lips and telling him, over and over, you are perfect.

He thought of Jimin’s smile, of his laugh, of his warm hands and the way his shape felt against Yoongi’s side. He thought of their high school years, still baby-faced and voices recently broken. He thought of the parts of Jimin he’d lost and the parts he’d found.

He thought of Jimin so very much.

The afternoon grows glaringly bright, so bright it wakes Jimin up with a grown. “Hyung,” he grumbles, burrowing into the crook of Yoongi’s shoulder, “get rid of that light, please.”

Yoongi chuckles despite himself, because Jimin’s whining is the exact kind of thing he needs to force the darkening thoughts away, to remind him that Jimin is still in one piece with them. He sits up, leans over Jimin and tugs down the blind, shading the light. Jimin sighs once the glare is out of his sensitive eyes.

“Good morning,” Yoongi says, carding through his hair. Jimin grumbles and burries further into the mattress, wincing at the ache that must go through his head.

“It’s a sucky morning,” Jimin grumbles back, burrowing into the pillow. “Fuck. I have such a bad headache.”

Yoongi laughs a little. Quiet, breathy, buried deep down because laughing too hard is too open and revealing for Yoongi anymore. “Good thing it’s afternoon, then.”

Jimin grumbles some more, groans into the pillow loudly. Yoongi cards his hands through Jimin’s pink hair, pressed flat with a bedhead. “You should shower,” Yoongi says. “I’ll order us some takeaway. Something stupid’s probably on TV.”

Yoongi wonders if this is what dating Jimin would feel like, but without the shadow of dread on his shoulders that the next disaster is coming. That Jimin would only ever be cared for. Like he deserved. Like he deserved.

“Yeah, okay,” Jimin says. “Thanks, hyung.”

III.

Yoongi hates himself for knowing Jimin’s patterns so well. Hates that he can see them like he can count his knobbly knuckles, like he knows how to play scales up and down the piano, practicing until his fingertips were numb because he’d ground it into himself so often. And he has ground Jimin’s patterns into himself the same way. His body is aching and numb with how often he has seen Jimin be torn apart and tear himself apart.

“So,” Jimin says, “I, uh, met someone.”

It’s been a few months. The days have gotten longer and the chilly bite is starting to fade from the air. And Yoongi knew, this would be when Jimin came back to him.

“Who?” Yoongi says.

“You act so cold,” Jimin laughs. “He catches the same bus as I do. He’s really nice, hyung.”

“You say that every time.”

“Yeah, but I mean it, this time.” Jimin sets his jaw determinedly. “Really. He told me about his dog and he’s really kind.”

“I tell you about my old dog. Am I really kind?”

“The kindest,” Jimin says, smiling so wide his eyes disappear. Yoongi feels his breath catch and his heart sink. Jimin has always been this beautiful. And he has always, always made Yoongi this sad.

“Okay,” Yoongi says, because the hardest lesson he’s learned is to stop himself from crying out, from grabbing Jimin’s shoulders and yelling this isn’t right, because he knows Jimin wouldn’t want that, knows that he’s flighty, and Yoongi knows that they wouldn’t be able to fix that crack between them.

So he keeps his mouth shut. Loads the words under his tongues like stones his mother used to say would let him speak to the birds but never did.

“I’m getting lunch with him tomorrow,” Jimin says. He’s beaming. He’s always been this radiant. Yoongi smiles, but it’s bitter. “That new place near campus.”

“Have fun,” Yoongi says. And he genuinely means it. He hopes this new guy is good. Hopes Jimin has fun. Hopes the boy from the bus is able to comfort Jimin the way Yoongi never can, because he’s a coward and a fool and Jimin always goes for the guys completely different to Yoongi. It’s not his place. He’s just Jimin’s hyung. That’s it.

“Thanks, hyung.”

IV.

“For a smart guy, you let yourself take a lot of shit.” Hoseok isn’t impressed with him when they go drinking at the bar that night. Jimin’s date went well. He’s sent Yoongi a text, a selfie, showing him and bus boy, smiling and cute and they look good together. The way Yoongi and Jimin never would. He went drinking with Hoseok because Hoseok is just rough enough with his words and too caring to have any real bite.

“Says you,” Yoongi replies, sipping at his beer. It reminds him of the life he leads. Beer tastes shit. It always has. But everyone drinks it It’s not overly toxic. And if he drinks enough it has the effect he wants. It’s all give and take. “How’s your life going?”

“Just admit you want it to be you,” Hoseok snaps. He’s on his second beer and he’s so willowy the beer goes straight to his head. His face is flushed already. “You want to be in the picture with Jimin.”

“I know,” Yoongi says. “But I’m not an asshole.”

“Fooled me,” Hoseok smirks. “And, for your information, I am doing great.”  Hoseok smiles. Something bitter around the edges. Yoongi knows the feeling.

“Besides, I don’t think we’d be compatible, like that,” Yoongi says.

“Jimin is pretty damn gay, if I do say so,” Hoseok says, leaning towards him. His hands are small and fine, unlike Yoongi’s. They dig in where they poke Yoongi’s arm. “As are you. You’re a little compatible, you know.”

“The other guys Jimin’s seen are also a little compatible.”

“I know you don’t listen to me,” Hoseok admits, “but really, it wouldn’t be that bad to tell him you like him.”

“I don’t like him,” Yoongi says. I love him. So much. “I just . . . I want to look after him. Show him he’s worth more than the dicks that treated him like fucking shit.”

“Yeah, and why don’t you?”

“I try my best.”

“Hyung,” Hoseok says, eyes dark, lidded, glistening and flushed with the beer already, but his words never seem to stop. He’s that kind of guy. “You know he’d still love you, even if he didn’t want to be your boyfriend, right?”

“It’s not like that,” Yoongi says. “It’s not like that.”

V.

It lasts two weeks, Jimin and bus boy.

“Hyung,” Jimin’s voice is distant over the phone, tense, pulled taut, frayed. “Let’s go clubbing.”

Yoongi thinks they must be regulars at this point. Jimin does so many shots Yoongi wonders how he’s standing. He tries to go dance, but Yoongi catches him. Stops him.

“Jimin,” he says, and the dying thing, the words he’s always ached to say, bleed through his teeth. Dribble out of his teeth like blood from a pulled tooth. A split lip. “Jimin, this isn’t okay.”

Jimin laughs, he always laughs, tinkles like falling stars and shattering dreams and Yoongi aches. Laughter turns to sobs and the smile turns into a grimace, and he’s falling forward into Yoongi’s arms and sobbing against his shoulder.

It’s always him, picking up Jimin’s pieces. It’s always Yoongi. Always Yoongi.

Yoongi would never fucking treat Jimin like this.

Why can’t it be me? he wants to ask. Why can’t you want to date me, Jimin?

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t say those things because corpses of those words stay buried under his tongue. So far down they can’t be excavated for hundreds of years until the both of them are dead and gone and the only thing that remains is regret. Timeless and infinite. Regret. Regret. Regret.

Jimin’s face is skinny. There is a bruise on his rib. He’s not stable enough to shower on his own when they get home, so Yoongi helps him in the shower and gives Jimin some of his clothes and they collapse back in bed, routine, pattern, old, jagged pieces of their failures sliding back into a place that’s just stable enough to hold.

He helps Jimin up to vomit in the night. Brushes the bangs out of his face. Jimin’s too far gone to brush his teeth after, so Yoongi does it for him. Jimin’s become so skinny. He always does, when he’s seeing someone. Because that asshole from so long ago called him fat, called him ugly, told him the skinny ones are prettier and Jimin didn’t let it go, became obsessed. He can’t let it go anymore. Not without cutting off the hands that grasp it.

Yoongi never would have treated him like that. Like this. Never ever.

God, why couldn’t Jimin love Yoongi?

VI.

Yoongi doesn’t know how it happens. It’s the same sort of hesitance, same slow prying of the truth, like pulling a fingernail off. Painful and slow. Trapping.

“Hyung,” Jimin says. “Don’t you want to date anyone?”

He should say no. He should say no, he’s too busy with work and trying to make money in this godforsaken place, where the kids go to the trainyard for fun because there’s nowhere else. Because he wants to get out of here, with its toxic guys and he wants to take Jimin with him. Show him the better, wider world.

He should say this. But he can’t.

Can’t the same way he never used to flat-out say he was straight. It was too hard to lie. The hesitation lasted too long, it took too long to convince himself to say the words, and by then the deed was done and there was nothing he could do about it until the truth was pulled out of him, like peeling back his skin and pulling out his heart, drawing it taut like a bowstring to release and slam back into him.

“Hyung?” Jimin asks.

“Not really,” he says, because it’s too hard to say ‘no’. “Why, Jimin?”

“Are you sure?” Jimin can always read him like a book. Yoongi knows this. He knows Jimin can read him far better, because half the time Yoongi can’t even read himself. Can’t remember to eat. To sleep. To shower. Only ever with Jimin. Only does Jimin ever remind him.

“Yeah,” Yoongi says. “I guess.”

I want to date you, he thinks. I want to be the one you like. “Why'd you ask?” he says.

“No reason,” Jimin says.

VII.

Hoseok, like many of the people in their town, Yoongi met during a fistfight.

He came from the other side of town, gangly limbs and busted lips, and because they were teens and they had nothing better to do than clump together into friendship groups turned mafia gang wannabes and beat each other shitless.

It’s the same way he met Seokjin. The same way he met Namjoon. The same way Jimin met Taehyung.

But Namjoon is gone. Seokjin is gone. Taehyung is gone.

Now it’s just Hoseok and Yoongi, sitting in bars whatever day of the week because they don’t care, it’s just the booze, they only go for each other’s company and revelling in their own misery. Lick each other’s wounds.

Hoseok drives a forklift at the local warehouse. He would have gone to dance college if he hadn’t been working at that same place one day, on foot, and another forklift drove over his foot and ankle a week before his audition. The bones that shattered and the muscles that tore never really healed. He can barely walk on his left foot nowadays. So he drives.

“Just tell him,” Hoseok says like a broken record. “Tell Jimin.”

“It’s selfish,” Yoongi says, not hearing and not caring because he can barely see over the summit of everything that’s failed them, everything they’ve lost and shattered to pieces, shoved under the wet concrete for no one to see, until time has eroded it away and they will be wiped clean. No trace of them ever being there. “I don’t want to be selfish towards him.”

“It’s more selfish to drag it out,” Hoseok says, dull and tired. He’s picked up smoking. Or maybe he’s smoked for a while. Had he ever stopped? When they were teens they used to smoke for the hell of it. Yoongi learned how but when the smoke blew out, taking fried parts of throat and lung with it, he knew not even that would help him get out of here. So he stopped. Maybe Hoseok didn’t. Maybe he knows there’s no way out now so he’s driving into the grave at top speed. Maybe.

“He’d feel pressured,” Yoongi says. He realises he hasn’t looked at Hoseok the entire evening, just watched out of his periphery.

“Yeah, he would,” Hoseok agrees. The bar owner, across the room, who has known them since they were skin and bones teens pretending to be of age, glares at Hoseok’s lit cigarette. Hoseok stares back. Blows out a cloud of smoke in his direction. The moment passes. The owner gives up on them. “He would, but isn’t that the point?”

“No,” Yoongi says. “It isn’t.”

VIII.

Yoongi’s the manager at the fast food place he used to work part-time at during high school. And then when his grades fell through he stayed and stayed, and he was the eldest and the best so he got promoted. He makes enough to scrape together some rent. And people always know where to find him.

“Hey,” Jimin says. Jimin, Yoongi looks at. Studies his face. His hair. His eyes. His mouth. Studies his crooked tooth. His uneven eyelids. Remembers how much he has watched Jimin change. Remembers how much Jimin had begged to get braces as a kid for his tooth. Remembers the way Jeon Jungkook had placed the punch, at eight years old, right into Jimin’s eye and sent him to the doctor’s to get stitches.

“Hey,” Yoongi replies. There’s no one in. Just Yoongi. And just Jimin. Separated by the counter, too close and too far. Nothing’s ever going to change.

“Do you remember Minjoon?” Jimin asks, soft like he’s afraid the words will catch fire on his tongue if he speaks too loud. “Lee Minjoon?”

Yoongi knows the name. Knows the guy.

It’s him. The first one. The one that ruined Jimin. The one that made him fail high school when he shouldn’t have, who stripped back his skin and stole his confidence and pride. The one who started all this.

“Yeah,” Yoongi says. “What about him?”

“He’s, well, he’s back in town,” Jimin says. “And I thought, y’know, why not go meet up?”

“You want to meet up?” Yoongi cries, and he can’t help it, because he remembers bashing in the fucker’s face and watching him disappear from town. Remembers the years of pain he caused. The years that haven’t ended. He remembers, with clarity, with hatred, how he ruined Jimin’s life. “With him?”

“I knew you’d be like this,” Jimin sighs. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Jimin, he hurt you,” Yoongi says, reaching over the unfathomable distance of the counter and grasping Jimin’s shoulders, hard. “He ruined your life, Jimin.”

“Stop,” Jimin says, and there should be fight in his voice but there isn’t. His eyes stare down, down at the bright red counter and the napkins and the plastic knives and forks. “Just stop.”

“Don’t tell me you forgive him,” Yoongi says, and he can’t remember the last time he felt this hysterical, can’t remember the last time he felt like the life he’d built from twigs and shards was coming apart in his hands, falling between his fingertips. “Jimin, please.”

It’s funny. When Yoongi was younger, when Jimin was younger, they used to have to beat each other until they couldn’t walk until one of them would win or lose. Until one would cry. But now he’s barely holding Jimin’s shoulders and they aren’t even yelling, not really, because Yoongi can feel the screams swallowed in his throat, but Jimin’s eyes water and they’re both losing. They’re both the losers. So little hurts so much, the older it gets.

“Please don’t,” Yoongi says, and he thinks the last time he sounded so distraught was when he went to see Hoseok in the hospital, where the nurses told him the price of the operation to fix his foot and they realised they couldn’t afford it. “Please don’t see him.”

Maybe all pain is the same. It comes from the things lacking: money, love, potential.

Each other.

“What if he didn’t do it to me?” Jimin whispers. “What if I was always like this?”

He doesn’t say like what, because even though Yoongi can’t hear the words Jimin keeps under his tongue, like all of them, he knows what they are. What if Jimin was always a failure? What if he never had any potential? What if he was always not good enough and what if he was always going to end up like this?

They’re questions Yoongi can’t answer, because Jimin will never believe him, and he never learned how to say the right things.

“Go out with me instead,” Yoongi says. “Let’s get dinner. Somewhere nice. Just, please—please, don’t go see him.”

There are tears running down Jimin’s cheeks, and Yoongi cradles his face in his hands, wiping them away with his thumbs. It’s an old gesture. One he barely remembers because he can’t remember the last time they’d been this close yet so far, completely sober and Jimin had let him be so tender.

“Okay,” Jimin says. “Let’s get dinner.”

IX.

Hoseok always leans to the side a little. It’s a dynamic pose, Yoongi supposes, but it’s because he doesn’t like to bear weight on his bad leg. He’s always leaning on things. Today there’s black motor grease up to his elbows, his overalls rolled up, but using his old phone to call Yoongi.

“Minjoon’s back around here,” he says to Yoongi when he arrives. “You know that, yeah?”

“I know,” Yoongi says. The night air has lost its bite as it grows warmer. “Jimin told me.”

“Shit,” Hoseok says. Yoongi remembers, absently, that the last time Minjoon had been here, Hoseok had come with Yoongi and the others, weight equal on both feet, and beaten the guy up. Truth be told, Yoongi couldn’t imagine why he was here. Not after what they did to him.

“What’s he gonna do? Go see him?”

“I asked him not to,” Yoongi says, but it feels like a hollow victory. “But I don’t know.”

“It should have been you,” Hoseok grumbles, pulling out a cigarette. “He should have dated you.”

Yeah, Yoongi wants to say, but he doesn’t. He thinks it too, though. There’s only himself to blame.

X.

The thing about their town is that nobody comes back. Yoongi hasn’t heard from the others since they escaped this shitty place. Not since Jungkook got his scholarship, since Jin got offered a place at a university, since Namjoon found the music production job of his dreams. The dreams Yoongi used to share. Still does, a little, just because he still has a dumb piano in his room that he salvaged from his childhood home, and he can’t help but want to cling onto the dream.

But the thing is, people leave. They’re born, raised, beaten into shape or learn to live with their heart on their sleeve, and when they find a way out they take it. That’s just the way it is. Sometimes Yoongi thinks he’s living in a prison, a fancy prison like The Truman show, where everyone is an actor and he can’t go anywhere, and Namjoon, Jungkook and Jin are just the guys that wanted to quit.

He knows it isn’t, but he can’t help it. In elementary school they drove them an hour out, into the hills, and Yoongi swore he could see the outline of another town further down, beyond theirs, that the railway led to. It didn’t matter he wasn’t friends with anyone in his year level. He’d been sure. So sure.

There is never any texts. Never any letters. Maybe if Yoongi had a computer and social media accounts he could find them again, find their coded presence online and convince himself that he still knew them. He knows he doesn’t. But he likes to think about it sometimes.

It’s the same way he likes to think about jumping on one of those freight trains, buckling down, heading somewhere he doesn’t know but doesn’t care. Hurrying into the dark with Jimin. Trying to bring Hoseok even though the town has shackled him down, broken the bones and muscles in his feet and ankle and he can never run on it again, never dance, just sit in a forklift and use only his right leg for work in the place that robbed him of everything.

Yoongi forgets to sleep often, actually. But at some time in the night Jimin calls or texts, telling him he should be asleep because Jimin always knows, somehow, and Yoongi is reminded that he is tired and hungry and empty inside, and people keep stealing the heart Jimin offers in his hands to them and crushing it because they can.

There are always people that amount to nothing, Yoongi knows. There are dead ends in society. There just are. And he has to accept that maybe he is one. Maybe he was one from the start. He hates this town, hates that he can’t do anything and hates what it takes from him, but he gave up on trying to leave so long ago, he can’t remember when.

But Jimin and Hoseok should never have stayed. Jimin was smart. Got straight As until his final year when that fucker Minjoon destroyed him from the inside out, and suddenly Jimin lost everything and especially his grades, and Hoseok should have made it into that dance academy but the town struck him down. Hoseok, who used to smile and laugh. Hoseok who used to be the life of the town, full of ambition and brightness. Hoseok who was crippled for life. Hoseok who was stuck.

Sometimes, Yoongi thinks about thinks like this.

Sometimes they make him sad, or angry.

But tonight all he can think is that he has nothing, nothing at all but a shitty job and even shittier apartment, the ghosts of his friends and his tired, aching love for Park Jimin, whom he watches destroy himself because there is nothing else left for them.

XI.

They go out for dinner, of course. Hoseok comes along because he has nowhere else to be except smoking and drinking and limping home after dark.

“Jiminie,” Hoseok cooes, reaching out, and Jimin falls into his familiar embrace. “It’s been so long.”

“I’ve missed you, hyung,” Jimin says. He’s bubbly tonight. Bubbly and a little restless. The pink is fading from his hair, looking a little orange. He smiles and lets Hoseok ruffle his hair, and they look fond and old like the fading facades of old, empty houses.

They sit and talk and order food, and Yoongi can’t help but notice how much more animated Hoseok is around Jimin, how the cigarettes stay in his pocket, how he doesn’t order any beer. There’s no grumblings or snide comments, none of the cynicism Yoongi has come to associate with him. He laughs, an echo from the last that fills up the room, and Yoongi realises it’s because of Jimin.

Jimin, so often hurt. Jimin, too open and loving to know any better. Jimin, who smiles up to his eyes but there’s sadness behind them, because the three of them are the exact sort of people made to be loved, made to be nurtured, and made to be left.

They’re lonely, Yoongi decides. That must be the word. Lonely.

Sitting at a table that could sit seven, Yoongi decides he’s lonely, too.

XII.

It’s like the people from the outer world are a different colour, too bright, too radiant, their clothes are too vibrant where everything else is grey and dulled. Yoongi knows because he sees Minjoon from three blocks down, in a green parka and blue jeans but he doesn’t come from their world.

Yoongi thinks of the way he’d found Jimin crying in a bathtub. Thinks of the way Jimin stopped eating. Thinks of the way Jimin watched his grades fall impassively, because that fucker had put the idea into Jimin’s head that this was what he was worth.

Yoongi thinks of the way he’d hit Minjoon so hard he’d stumbled back into the wall behind him, the way he’d grabbed his coat and slammed him back again and again and again but no matter how much blood he spilled Jimin was still crying, Jimin was still hurt and he still didn’t know how to help.

Yoongi isn’t thinking, though, when his feet carry him forward, towards Minjoon, and his familiar disgusting face and empty smile and slimy voice. Minjoon looked pleased to see him, too. Yoongi hadn’t hit anyone in a long time, but it felt like he’d never stopped.

“I was just thinking of you,” Minjoon says. Light and airy, like Yoongi hadn’t wanted to beat him to death the last time he saw him. “I work for a modelling agency now. I’ve come to find Jimin. I showed them an old picture of him—he’s perfect. The agency wants him.”

XIII.

“I don’t like this,” Hoseok says, lowly, one leg propped up on a spare chair. Yoongi sits on the floor, hands tucked under his thighs. Jimin’s on his bed, kicking his feet out in thought.

“It all checks out,” Yoongi says. “It’s a real deal. The only downside is that it’s Minjoon.”

It’s a golden ticket straight out of this place. Yoongi catches Hoseok’s eye and knows they’re thinking the same thing. It’s what Jimin deserves. A chance to get to the big smoke, get a job, get money, pursue what he wants. But there’s Minjoon in the equation, and Yoongi doesn’t know what to do. He knows Jimin would forgive the bastard if he said sorry, because Jimin just does.

“If one agency wants you, you can find another,” Hoseok says, patting Jimin’s knee. “It doesn’t have to be this one.”

“No one else will want me,” Jimin says. His voice shakes, and Yoongi knows he’s going to cry. “I probably only made it because of Minjoon. There’s no other way.”

“Minjoon is just trying—”

“He is why, hyung,” Jimin snaps, and when he looks up his eyes are shining. “He must have . . . I don’t know. He must have put in a good word and he’s really good, now, so they must have listened to him. That’s the only way. This is my only chance.”

“Then take it,” Yoongi says, and it feels like he’s letting go of something. Like something is unravelling inside of him and Yoongi can’t do anything except watch it spill, crash, burn and die. “Take the offer, Jimin.”

“You know that isn’t a good idea,” Hoseok warns. “There has to be another option. He’s Park Jimin, for fuck’s sake. If you send in the right material, every modelling agency in Korea will want you.”

But Yoongi, like Hoseok, knows those words will never work. Knows the fracture and damage goes below what their words can reach. Goes beyond what anyone can reach. Jimin cannot be swayed like this.

“I’ll think about it,” Jimin says. He stares at his hands, shoulders drawn. Yoongi remembers his voice on the phone. “Hyung, hyung, hyung, help me, I don’t know what to do. Help me, Yoongi-hyung.”

There are people made to be left, and people made to leave.

Yoongi hopes he is the only one of them made to be left.

XIV.

“I’ll take care of him,” Minjoon says. “He can stay with me.”

“Bullshit he can stay with you,” Yoongi snaps. “He has friends in the city. He’ll stay with them.”

“Oh? What friends?”

“Fuck off, Minjoon. If it weren’t for Jimin, I’d beat you to a pulp.” Yoongi can feel his blood boiling, curling up and down his neck and it’s like everything that’s ever been wrong in Yoongi’s life is begging to be released, to let Minjoon suffer the shards of his shattered ambition and buckle under the weight of knowing how useless he is. But he can’t. For Jimin. He can’t.

“How will you come and stop him, Yoongi?”

“You fucker,” Yoongi snarls. “You broke him, you know that? You ripped him apart and he doesn’t know where to start fixing himself. There’s no one who knows. You did this. You ruined his life.”

Minjoon doesn’t seem to care. Maybe he could be one of those people gifted and cursed with a strong poker face, who can break down behind it and never let anyone see, or maybe he genuinely doesn’t care. Yoongi thinks it’s the latter.

“You don’t deserve to be around him,” Yoongi continues, because if he can’t punch he’ll talk, he’ll talk and he’ll talk until he’s hoarse because words don’t mean anything, no matter how many he strings together to try and have an effect. “You never deserved him.”

“Models do not need to be happy,” Minjoon says. “I submitted Jimin’s picture because he had the exact kind of frame and face the agency wanted. If it wasn’t for me, he’d be stuck here with you no-hopers.”

“So what? He should be grateful?” Yoongi thinks of Jimin walking up and down a runway, eyes red from crying but the light is too intense for anyone to ever see, and in pictures they’ll edit out all the sad parts of his face, the beautiful parts of his face, and Yoongi will lose him. Lose him to the city. Lose him to Minjoon. “You could die for him and it wouldn’t be enough to make it up to him.”

“Business is business,” Minjoon says. “And Jimin is his own person. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like his decisions. He chose me, Yoongi.”

“It should have been me,” Yoongi says, but it’s too quiet, too subdued, and Minjoon is leaving, the winner, and even though there’s no fighting and no blood, Yoongi can feel his energy draining away. “It should have been me!”

But there’s no one to hear. No one left to care. He’s been silent for too long, and the stones under his tongue never did let him speak to birds anyway. Useless. Useless from the start, and only more useless over time.

“It should have been me,” Yoongi whispers, and his will disappears with the admission.

There was no violence, but Yoongi can’t stand. Yoongi’s crying. He slumps against the grey, concrete wall and slides down, his legs giving in, and he’s crying into his hands. Yoongi’s lost. Lost everything.

Lost Jimin.

XV.

Yoongi hasn’t had a drop of alcohol but Jimin’s leaving tomorrow, booked his ticket out on the train and it’s one-way. He hasn’t drunk anything and there’s no celebration, no reason for this recklessness.

The people who leave do not come back. Jimin will not come back.

And it doesn’t matter how sober he is, he’s calling Jimin’s number and he’s sobbing into the speaker, saying, “I’m sorry, it should have been me, it should have been me.”

And then it turns into I love you, I love you, I’m so sorry, I’ve loved you from the start and I still let you do that. I’m so sorry.

I’m so sorry.

Yoongi thinks of the faces he’s lost. Hugging Seokjin on the platform, pretending that they’ll see each other again. Shaking Namjoon’s hand, already knowing that this is the end for them. Ruffling Taehyung’s hair, the younger kid crying because even he knows that there isn’t any way he’s coming back.

And he can imagine doing the same to Jimin, letting go of him, letting him get on that train and leave. Can imagine the crying. The pain. Can imagine how hard he’s going to cry the night after, until he can’t cry anymore and his teeth rattle in their gums, and there won’t be anyone to tell him to eat and sleep and go to work and he’ll just wither away and die. And then there’ll just be Hoseok. Just Hoseok. Alone.

“Hyung,” Jimin says, throwing open the door. The call is still going on his phone. Tears stream down his cheeks and he rushes forward, holds onto Yoongi like he’s scared someone will pry them apart, and they sob into each other and the empty, lonely space between them. Because it’s too late. It’s far too late.

“It should have been you,” Jimin sobs into his chest. “It should have been you.”

XVI.

It should have been Yoongi. This Jimin tells him over and over again as he holds Yoongi close, and Yoongi inhales his scent, remembers the feel of his hair, and even if he was never able date Jimin, never able to love Jimin like that, this would do. It couldn’t hurt anymore.

Jimin’s the same height as him, just about, but his frame has always been smaller despite the greater amount of muscle mass. His shoulders tuck in against Yoongi’s. Yoongi’s arms are longer. They fit together awkwardly, but they’ve been together for so long it feels perfect.

This is it, Yoongi realises. He presses his lips to the top of Jimin’s head, unable to speak. This will be his last memory of Park Jimin.

Jimin’s tried to stay. But Yoongi won’t have it. Tickets out of here don’t come easy. They come once. And Jimin finally got the chance that, ironically, Minjoon took away from him the first time.

“I’ll call,” Jimin says. Yoongi knows he won’t. That’s okay. “Every day. Tell you how things are.”

Yoongi nods, unable to speak. Hoseok is dead silent, but he reaches out for a hug.

Yoongi is just someone to be left. Like the town. Someone to raise. Someone to love. Someone to let go. He’s the one standing on the train platform, waving at Jimin in the window, watching half of his soul go with him. That’s just how it is. Because Hoseok was one of the people meant to leave, too, but he’s stuck.

So Yoongi will stay with him until he leaves.

XVII.

Jimin doesn’t call.

Not for months. Spring turns to summer and Yoongi sees Jimin as a model online, for some sports brand he can’t name. He’s leaning against a wall, graffiti and grungy against the sharp black and white lines of what he wears. His head is tipped back against the wall, exposing the column of his throat and they’ve added filters and cut his hair and he’s blonde now, and the makeup and photoshop hides the bags under his eyes, but he looks sad.

Maybe that’s what they want in models nowadays. Soul-crushing sadness you can only see through their eyes. Aesthetic, he guesses. The exact sort of depressing, artful display people seem to like.

Yoongi buys the magazine. Tries to believe he has some of Jimin in his home again. But his home is empty and soulless. Jimin isn’t there to make the mornings bright, and Yoongi’s bed is too large, and every time he walks down the street he sees the kinds of guys Jimin would like. The kinds that were never good enough.

Summer bleaches the town. The nights are too hot to sit inside, where the bars don’t have air con, so he sits with Hoseok on the kerb. Smokes his cigarettes. Clinks their glasses together but their eyes are both empty.

“How’s work?” Yoongi asks, trying to shift the humid air. Hoseok hums in response, inhales and exhales a cigarette.

“It’s work,” he says. “The usual. You?”

Yoongi thinks about the empty shop he spends all night in. Jimin isn’t there to drop by anymore. He isn’t there for Yoongi to lean over the counter for. Isn’t there for him to give a free meal.

“It’s work,” he says.

XVIII.

Yoongi’s too busy having a smoke break to recognise what happens. He sits himself on the kerb, early morning, the town empty because it’s summer holidays and the students are sleeping and the parents are baking in their old houses, and no one wants fast food. Yoongi wonders what he must look like, but he hears the sound of a shutter beside him before he needs to.

“Sorry,” says the photographer, standing quickly. “Is that all right? You just sort of— oh.”

Mornings are always quiet, but it’s like the sound has disappeared.

Kim Taehyung stands silhouetted against the morning sun, taller and fuller than Yoongi remembers, a heavy camera around his neck and a satchel over his arm. The absolute image of a college photography student. He has glasses now. Small square ones. Yoongi does remember Taehyung’s habitual squint.

“Oh,” Yoongi says, because what else is there to say. “Tae.”

“Hyung.”

They stare at each other for a while longer, as if waiting for something or someone to arrive and startle them out of their moment, but nothing does. Eventually, Yoongi sighs, stubbing out his cigarette in the gutter and standing.

He’s never seen anyone come back. Never thought he would. Taehyung is like a ghost. He glows like an outsider. Good, Yoongi thinks. Good.

“Hyung,” Taehyung starts again, looking at him as if he’s trying to find the right lens, the right filter for his gaze to fully comprehend Yoongi before him. “Um. Hey. I didn’t recognise you for a second.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Yoongi says, and he smiles despite himself. There’s a small part of him that gnaws at his chest, gripping it tight enough to bruise, because he wants to rush out and hug Taehyung, little Taehyungie who made it out when Jimin didn’t, but he can’t. Yoongi can’t. “I look the exact same. You, on the other hand . . .”

Taehyung is just another stranger now. Just passing through.

It’s bittersweet, really.

Taehyung was never one for awkward silences, but Yoongi can’t decide whether he knows him well enough anymore. There’s vitality in his face, his clear skin, and he looks a little drained, maybe from travelling over, Yoongi doesn’t know. Doesn’t really want to ask.

“Want some food?” he says instead, pulling open the door for Taehyung. “There’s literally anything.”

XIX.

Taehyung is a photography student who works with Namjoon. Just hearing their names in the same sentence pulls a tight chord in Yoongi, tearing a little at his insides. Namjoon’s a producer now. Taehyung always had a good voice. He does backup stuff.

“Jungkookie is doing art,” Taehyung says. “And a bit of music too. He’s really good, hyung. I might have some of his art, hang on.” Yoongi leans on the counter, and Taehyung’s already sitting on it, clicking through his camera roll at the speed of light.

“Here,” he says, handing it to Yoongi. “This is Jungkook at his latest exhibition. He won people’s choice.”

There’s a taller, older Jungkook standing next to three canvases. They’re all studies of human anatomy blending into natural patterns. He can discern Tae’s eyes, the lashes turning into petals that rise from his eyebrows, soft and purple. They might be tiny strips of tissue paper painstakingly applied individually as petals.

The other are a pair of hands and wrists, the veins turning into branches and disappearing into the black background. Skin, brown, green, black. Yoongi doesn’t recognise them, but they might be Namjoon’s.

The last is someone’s silhouette. Carved from behind, looking over a warm sunset. The set of his shoulders is too familiar. Gold, orange and red.

“Taehyung,” Yoongi starts, “who’s the last picture?”

“Jimin,” he says. “He lives in Seokjin’s spare room now.”

They’re all living. All moving on.

It hurts more than it should.

Taehyung shows him more pictures, pulls out his phone to let Yoongi go through their selfies. Namjoon has silver hair now. Seokjin is blonde. They look older. In some pictures they have stubble. There’s dark circles under their eyes that scream adulthood, and they’re a little greyed by the big smoke of the city. They look a little bit like old friends, old ghosts, and strangers.

Then there are pictures of Jimin. Taehyung does photography, so it’s no wonder there’s a whole folder dedicated to a real-life model such as Jimin. Taehyung likes black and white. Likes to capture the line of Jimin’s profile, his neck, likes to show his shoulders and jaw. There’s one or two candid pictures in-between shots, where Jimin’s falling forward, teeth glowing in a smile, and it reaches his eyes and Yoongi lets out a sigh he’s been holding for months.

Jimin’s okay now. Jimin’s okay.

“The contact he had with Minjoon’s company expired,” Tae says, without waiting for Yoongi to ask. “He works with the company I’m trying to get into now. They do more street fashion. I think it’ll suit him.”

Does he ask about me? Yoongi wants to ask. Do any of you think of us, trapped back here?

“Where’s, uh . . .” Taehyung holds his camera close. His most prized possession. “Where’s Hobi-hyung?”

“He’s working,” Yoongi says. “He has the day shift. He gets off at six.”

“Oh,” Taehyung says. “My train is in an hour.”

“Oh.”

XX.

It doesn’t mean anything to walk up to Hoseok’s work and drop by, because they’re lazing around like dogs in the summer heat, belly-up and slacking off. Hoseok has his feet kicked up on the forklift’s dashboard, head tipped back onto the headrest.

“Hoseok!” Yoongi hollers. It makes the other man look up from where he is, metres away. Yoongi can just see him rub his eyes and look between him and Tae, expression changing, and then he’s crawling out of the machine, limping over as fast as he can.

“Taehyungie!” he calls, and Tae rushes out to meet him. “Agh, you’re so grown! Where did my little dongsaeng go?”

Taehyung laughs, and when he’d left his voice was still deep enough to be surprising, but now he’s grown into it, become a man without them seeing, and Yoongi can’t help but feel a little bitter. Taehyung doesn't belong here, not anymore. Not with them.

“Hyung,” Taehyung said once, one time, so long ago Yoongi can barely remember when, but Tae’s hair had still been black and bowl-cut so he must have been younger. “Hyung, I think I have a crush on Hobi-hyung.”

Yoongi remembers laughing about it. Ruffling Taehyung’s hair and saying ‘go and get him’ or whatever it was that people say, but he never had. And then all he remembers is Hoseok being tired from endless practice, stepping back and running a hand through his hair at work, and the forklift driver wasn’t looking where he was going and Hoseok had never been able to afford those steel-capped boots required.

Hoseok was still on crutches when Tae left, those years ago. He wouldn’t lose them until the year after, and Yoongi knows he still has them in his home, for when he has to walk farther than to work and around town for a while. Yoongi can remember how distraught Taehyung was. How devastated he’d been.

Maybe they’re all bitter, Yoongi decides, because he can see Tae’s still a little broken inside about it, still holds Hoseok like he’s afraid to let go, even though he’s taller and broader than both of them now, and Hoseok looks like he can’t believe he ever said goodbye.

XXI.

“What is that?” Taehyung says, too loud for the town. Yoongi shrugs, pulling out his phone.

“My ringtone,” he says. “I made it when I got bored, one time.”

It’s just a bunch of random things Yoongi threaded together to make a beat. It had taken him weeks, because no one had the right technology. Every thing had to be recorded from his shitty phone and then strung together on the library computer. A hand slapping a piano, the thud of people living their lives above and below, punctuated by the sighs of cars driving past his window. Yoongi wished it had more strength, more boldness, but Jimin had liked it, and he hadn’t changed it since.

“That’s so cool,” Taehyung says. It’s Hoseok calling him, so Taehyung picks up for him. “Hey hyung,” he greets.

There’s a brief exchange of words, probably Hoseok telling Taehyung to make Yoongi eat, because the weather is too hot to let him forget now, and he forgot to mention it when they came by. Taehyung looks Yoongi up and down, and there’s a glint in his eye like he recognises what Hoseok’s saying. He probably does.

Maybe, Yoongi thinks, it’s because Jimin told them.

“I will, hyung,” Taehyung says. “I’ll get him a sandwich or something from the store.”

XXII.

They’re at the station the next time the shutter goes off. Yoongi swears, batting Taehyung away, but he’s laughing because it hurts, but it hurts okay. Tae smiles, impish and still as cute as he was as a child, and mutters something about how it’ll be ‘good for his series’.

Yoongi glances over, strains his eyes to catch what’s on the camera roll as Taehyung flicks through it, and he sees a lot of himself, a picture or two of Hoseok’s ankles, some smiles that have been captured just at the moment they turn sad. None have filters yet, but Yoongi can tell it’s the exact sort of thing Tae would put a black-and-white over, enhance the exposure, sharpen the right lines.

“I’m heading further out, to the country,” Taehyung says, knowing it’s only an hour’s ride by train until the houses disappear to fields, long and empty, full of rice and wheat and whatever else there is. “New project and all.”

“Good luck with it,” Yoongi says, patting Taehyung’s knee. “Go and show them.”

Taehyung smiles, but it’s like the town makes everything sad. Maybe it does.

“I will,” he says. “I’ll show them.”

XXIII.

Yoongi sees Hoseok and him in a magazine, some months later, when summer has faded. Hoseok’s ankles, one of them still bony and elegant, like Hoseok used to joke about, the other one perpetually swollen and no longer straight. His socks are pulled over them. Taehyung made it black and white, like he’d expected.

Bitter, Taehyung had titled it.

The other one is different. It’s him, looking out at the station, eyes following the train tracks into the city. It’s dulled, but not greyscale. On the other side is Jimin mimicking the same pose, staring out at the city station looking at the train tracks Yoongi assumes lead back to this shitty place.

Lost from the start, his was called.

Special thanks to BigHit’s model, Park Jimin.

XXIV.

“We have an email for you,” one of the librarians says one day, when Yoongi walks in for the hell of it. She’s older than the town, wrikles so deep on his skin they’re like craters, like maps. “The volunteer showed us. The town hall forwarded it. From some guy.”

Yoongi lets her sign in and show him.

From ‘some guy’.

It’s from a company. A production company. Telling him they heard his ringtone beat from the one Jimin had saved on his phone, and they’d like to use it in a song. They want to use his music.

It’s signed Kim Namjoon.

There’s a post-script too. Yoongi reads it slowly, because its hit him so hard he can’t feel anything at all.

You have to come to the city to hand-sign the agreement, it reads. And we need a witness. You and Hoseok should come.

He does feel something. He feels pain. And maybe, for the first time ever, he feels himself breathe.

XXV.

Yoongi knows it isn’t permanent, but they both booked one-way tickets and compressed their lives into single bags. Yoongi didn’t tell his neighbours. Didn’t show the librarian what he’d replied with. No one knows they're going. No one knows if they're coming back.

Yoongi’s decided he hates change. Hates it with a passion. He’s lived his whole life here, hating every second and now that he has to go it’s like peeling that thick skin he’s lived in all these years straight off. Letting himself bleed freely on the concrete, as they wait for a train.

Hoseok has his crutches. He sits in them heavily, shoulders riding up under his hoodie like a rag doll as he swings his bad leg aimlessly, whistling a tune to himself.

Their ticket came and Yoongi still can’t believe it. Doesn’t believe it. He wonders if they’ll get there and it’s all a hoax, but neither of them have enough pride or money to buy tickets back.

Hoseok looks at him, and Yoongi realises there’s no cigarettes in his pockets, and they haven’t had a drink together in a long time. There’s tired stubble on his chin, too lazy to shave it off and he looks gaunt with fear. Yoongi imagines he looks the same. He can’t even remember the last time he looked in the mirror.

In his bag are those two magazines; the one with Jimin in a sports ad, the one that Tae made of them.

XXVI.

It’s raining in Seoul when they arrive, hours after getting on.

Yoongi wonders, now, if they have an accent. If Seoul dialect is that different from their own. He hasn’t had to speak to people with formality since he quit school. Since he failed.

Oh, that’s right. He didn’t even tell his boss he was quitting either.

Oh, well. It doesn't matter anymore.

Hoseok’s jittery beside him, watching the buildings get taller and shinier and suddenly there’s no more grey, but there’s concrete and a heavy sky but there is colour everywhere, on posters and on billboards, and they’ve entered a different world.

Hoseok looks at him, like a ghost, empty and grey, and Yoongi knows he looks the same too.

XXVII.

Yoongi helps Hoseok off the train. The platform is slippery, but they have weird patterns that give grip, and Hoseok leans heavily on his crutches as they meander out, cash in their tickets, step out into the city.

Yoongi doesn’t know if he’s ever seen so many people in his life. Doesn’t know if the world has ever been so noisy. He barely hears his phone ring, but when he reaches, no one is calling him.

Jimin stands, not far away, his hair blonde now, bundled up in a scarf and holding his ringing phone. The same ringtone Yoongi gave to him. He’s put it on a new phone now, a sleeker, newer model, but it doesn’t matter, because Yoongi’s stepping forward and he feels like he’s seeing a ghost, but Jimin’s rushing forward, running into the damp air.

And then they’re together. Just like that. Yoongi doesn’t know how it happens, but Jimin still fits against him terribly and perfectly, and he’s taller because he has new, modern shoes now with higher soles, and he smells different, but it’s Jimin, and he’s crying onto Yoongi’s shoulder.

“It’s you,” Yoongi says, over and over. “It’s you.”

And then Yoongi looks up, and there are four other people coming towards them, the ones Yoongi had always thought were ghosts but now that he’s here he realises that he’s the ghost, greyed-out and faded, and Hoseok’s by his side and they’re crying, there’s so much crying, because now Jungkook is the same height as Taehyung and Yoongi doesn’t recognise them but he knows them.

“It’s always you,” Jimin says, and he holds Yoongi’s face in his hands and kisses him, teary and wet and it feels like coming home. Like the broken parts that balanced together fusing back into one. Like a new beginning. Like spring. “It’ll always be you.”

XVIII.

Yoongi thinks of the magazines that he brought in the bottom of his suitcase.

Thinks of Hoseok’s new job, working with Namjoon.

He thinks of lazy mornings with unfamiliar smells but familiar feelings. Thinks of pearly mornings and Jimin curling back against him, but there’s no smell of beer and no one smokes anymore.

Yoongi thinks of the nights, distant and not at all like the ones he knows, where the city lights are too strong to let them see stars.

He thinks of the way Namjoon had shown him the computers, the way he made six beats in one day and the manager liked all of them.

He thinks of home, his empty, small apartment, his unmade bed, his neighbours who probably haven’t realised he’s gone, and his brown piano, lying neglected in the corner.

Yoongi knows he isn’t going back for it. But he likes to think about it, sometimes.

And Yoongi knows he’ll never see the town again, except when he looks it up in Google Maps and sees how frighteningly small and grey it is, so far away. He cries about it sometimes. But Jimin tells him it’s okay. He did the same thing when he first came.

Yoongi thinks about the people who left him and he thinks about the town that kept him, thinks about how he knew he was the one made to be left but suddenly he was leaving, but he was leaving no one behind. Just the ghost of Min Yoongi, who kept that brown piano in his room and worked an unhappy job and said goodbye to his friends.

People are made to be left, and people are made to leave.

Jimin brushes the hair out of his eyes, one lazy morning, and Yoongi smiles.

There are also people he didn’t know about.

People who are made to find, and people who are made to be found.

This, Jimin tells him with a smile, over and over again.