Chapter Text
Sometimes Jimin would feel insanely out of breath. He’d be thrusting his all into his dance moves one minute and then on the floor with shaky inhales the next. Whenever this happened, he’d be surrounded by Jungkook and Taehyung, rubbing his back and pressing bottles of water into his hands. This usually happened as a result of working too hard, but recently it had been happening much more often. Too often for everyone else’s liking.
This happened yet again after Jimin skipped yet another meal after yet another physically demanding day.Except, this time, he hadn’t been moving around loads or dancing. Yoongi had found him hiding in the bathroom after he noticed the door had been shut for too long. As well as that, when he pressed his ear to the door he could hear faint gasping.
“Jiminie, what’s wrong?” He knealt next to the younger who was leaning against the bathtub and looking as white as a ghost. Jimin tried so hard to catch his breath but only kept spluttering and clutching at his chest.
“Lungs.” The faintest of words left his blue lips. Yoongi rushed to the medicine cabinet, searching around the back for the spare emergency inhaler. Once grabbing ahold of the object, he crouched down again and held it to his lips, prompting Jimin to take it.
“I’m gonna help you breathe, okay? Just try your best, make sure I can hear you, stay focused. You’ll make it out okay.” The last statement was more for his own comfort than anything, really. The younger forced the air down his throat as best he could, the hollow sound clear in the otherwise silent bathroom. Yoongi hated seeing Jimin like this. He had figured out that his body barely contained the energy to be able to breathe. He was dying right in front of the rest of the band because he cared so much about his appearance.
It took an agonisingly slow amount of time, but Jimin was able to breathe on his own again. Yoongi still held on to the inhaler, though, as he lead the younger to his room.
Hoseok would be playing with the two younger members, so the two were able to spend time alone in Jimin’s room. Yoongi opened the closet doors and picked out a fluffy pyjama top.
“Let’s get you changed into something more comfortable.”
Jimin still felt physically weak, so he allowed the elder to pull his shirt over his head. However, before putting his pyjama top on, Yoongi couldn’t help but stare at the protruding ribs. His collarbones were so much more prominent than he remembered, his waistline was so tiny, and that was the moment he also noticed the massive gap between his thighs. Even with all that remained beneath the skin flattened against his bed as he sat, he felt like he was looking at his friend’s skeleton. With hot tears suddenly streaming down his face, Yoongi slid the warmer top over Jimin’s head and allowed him to pull it down all the way.
Yoongi let Jimin go and join the rest of the maknae line as they watched a movie in the lounge while he went to the bathroom to put the inhaler back where he found it. He also took that time to scrub the wetness from his eyes. The fact that the friction only made him look more red didn’t help his case, though. He made his way back to his and Seokjin’s shared room to find the elder reading a book. In that moment, he felt like being quiet would’ve been a crime.
He walked over to Seokjin’s bed and nestled himself between his hyung’s arms. Seokjin was confused at first, but quickly recognised this behaviour.
“Jimin is so thin.” And just like that, he started to cry again. “This has been happening for ages. We let this progress. Hyung, he’s dying.”
“I have to get him to eat at least 2000 calories tomorrow since he’s so worryingly thin.” Seokjin sighed sadly, holding onto the younger in understanding. “But you know how the number 300 can make him worried sick now.”
“He had another breathing problem in the bathroom. I helped him breathe and helped him change and his ribs were— oh my god, he’s gonna die.” Yoongi was losing his breath too. “His thigh gap and his bones, he has no weight left to lose- I’m—“
Seokjin set his book down on the bed and carded his hands through Yoongi’s coarse hair, willing himself not to cry alongside his friend, who quietly sobbed in a mild kind of anxiety attack.
“It’s gonna be okay, Yoongs. It’ll take some encouraging but before you know it we’ll have Jimin back on track towards a full recovery. And he’ll eat whatever he wants and love himself even if he gets a bit chubby. Even if he relapses we’ll build him back up again, okay?” He lifted Yoongi’s chin with his fingers to look him in the tear-stricken eyes. “Don’t worry too much, yeah?”
“Yeah.” The younger sniffed and buried his face into the crook of Seokjin’s neck. “I’m tired, I’m gonna sleep here.”
“Well, okay, but let me go check up on the others and I’ll be back soon.”
The movie had ended a while ago, so Jimin had come back to his room and collapsed onto his bed, ready for his thoughts of self-criticism and anxiety to drown out the silence. He ran his hand over his ribs beneath his shirt, feeling every one in painstaking detail, how they felt contrasted to the rest of his body, whether they continued all the way around, how they felt when he sucked his stomach in. Not perfect enough. Could be more visible. Could be thinner—
A knock on the door distracted him. He felt too weak to go and open the door, so instead he weakly called, “Come in”.
It was Seokjin, looking just a little concerned. Perhaps he was being overridden with anxiety also, like a parent worrying for their children, but he could conceal it better than Jimin.
“Tired?”
“Yeah.” Jimin blinked slowly as the elder perched on the edge of his bed.
“We have a lot of dance practice tomorrow.” Seokjin had decided to try to make Jimin comply tonight, for Yoongi’s sake. Then there was, of course, the fact that his ribs and hipbones really did jut out from under his clothes enough to make anyone want to give him a meal or three, right on the spot. “And, you know you need a lot of energy to do that. What I’m saying is, you should really eat breakfast with us tomorrow.”
At that, Jimin could feel his heart beating out of his chest.
“Hyung, I, ”He rapidly searched his brain for excuses. “I haven’t been feeling well lately. If I eat a meal I feel like it’ll just backfire.”
“You’ll be okay, Jiminie. Y’know, we might be idols but it’s not a crime to eat enough.” A ghost of a smile graced both of their faces.
“I do eat enough.”
“Okay then,” Seokjin brought his legs up to cross them on the bed. “When was the last time you ate?”
Now Jimin really had to wrack his brains. Another problem that his food intake presented with him was memory loss. Apparently he took too long to answer because then the elder sighed softly.
“Do you want some rice?” Jimin wanted to say no, he really did, but he was hit with a sudden pang of guilt accompanied with the pains weighing down on his abdomen throughout the day. The thought came back to him of Yoongi helping him change his shirt, how he caught the glimpse of tears shortly before being sent off to find the maknae line. Yoongi would always go to Seokjin or Namjoon with his problems, and now Seokjin was here. He suddenly realised what the elder might know.
“Please, hyung.” Rice was a safe food, anyway.