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first.
he touches you and you light on fire. your wrist blazes where his fingers meet your skin. the burns don’t show, but it’s hard to breathe with ash in your lungs. it’s so hard to breathe. you’re suffocating daily.
You feel his hand on your shoulder, and instantly you feel the weight being lifted from it.
I got this, his touch seems to say, his smile bright and his eyes knowing as you glance at him from your seat in front of him. You don’t have to carry everything.
You smile uneasily, crippled by embarrassment and shame, because this is supposed to be your job. You’re supposed to carry the whole group through this interview—after all, you’re their leader.
His fingers squeeze your shoulder, and you feel a jolt like his touch has just lit a spark, searing through your suit, and the warmth that courses through you is not just from the fondness and humour of whatever joke he has just told your Western interviewer.
There’s a resounding laughter from the audience, though you’re not sure why; you’re only half-listening, and the ARMY will laugh at anything any of you say anyway. It’s ridiculously easy to make your fans happy, and you feel the weight of that responsibility crushing your chest all over again.
You’re supposed to make them happy, just as you’re supposed to make your members happy, and yet when they need you the most, you get tongue-tied, like this.
He leaps from his seat, startling both you and your interviewer as he breaks out into another one of his ridiculous dance moves, and the laugh that erupts from you is genuine. He takes charge of the entire room, and you can’t concentrate on anything else when he takes over, like this—a performer in more ways than one.
There’s no one else you can look at when he shines the brightest, like this.
The interview ends as the show cuts to a commercial break, and the cheers of the audience fade into static noise as you are all quickly ushered backstage to prepare for your performance.
You catch his wrist. He blinks down at your hand, then at you.
“Thank you,” you whisper, and you can’t quite hide the way your mouth trembles even as you force yourself to smile.
He tilts his head at you, quietly assessing, and the corners of his eyes soften.
“You and your sexy brain, Namjoon-ah,” he teases cheerfully, and you can’t help the way the corners of your mouth lift more easily. “I’m sorry none of us can speak English as well as you. It’s not your fault you’re the smartest person in the room all the time. Hell, you’re one of the smartest people in South Korea. Top one percent, right?” He shakes his head in awe. “I can’t even imagine the level of your brilliance.”
You flicker your gaze away from him to drop somewhere in the vicinity of your shoes, your cheeks flushing from embarrassment. “Ah, Hoseok-ah...”
“And I can’t imagine the pressure to prove yourself because of it.”
You inhale sharply as he twists out of your grip, only to thread his fingers through yours and hold on tightly.
“You shouldn’t have had to carry us all by yourself,” he says, and it’s the tenderness that finally breaks you.
Breathe, you tell yourself frantically even as your eyes fall close, and you grip his hand like it’s your lifeline. Breathe.
You sense him stepping closer, and you fold into him automatically, like a marionette cut off from the last strings of your sanity. He catches you effortlessly, his shorter stature a surprising source of both strength and comfort as he steadies you, pressing his forehead against yours as he rubs soothing circles on your wrist. You shudder at the sensation, limbs loosening as you feel the tension being leached from your skin to his.
He’s warm, so warm, and you want to open up his ribs and climb inside his chest and curl up next to the rhythmic bass of his heart and never, ever leave.
“Namjoon-ah,” he says softly. “You don’t have to take care of us all the time. It’s okay to let us take care of you, too.”
Your eyes flutter open as you gaze at the ever-constant smile on his face. You remember all the times he’d allow himself to break down only when he thought no one was looking, and you’d stand outside his locked door, leaning back against it as you’d listen to his muffled sobs, the hands in your pockets curling tightly into fists as you silently vow that he would never be alone if you could help it.
His hand migrates to cup your jaw as you lean towards the touch, and there—that’s his real smile now: not the one he pastes on for your millions of viewers and adoring fans, but the one he only reserves for the people he truly trusts.
What an honour that is, you think, even as your chest seizes with unchecked emotion, to be trusted with something so rare: hoarded, and preciously given.
“Only,” you whisper fiercely, “if you let me take care of you, first.”
second.
it hurts to watch him. he shines. he’s brighter than the sun. he’s too beautiful for your eyes. it’s hard to look at him. it’s even harder to look away from him. you’re going blind.
“So what do you think, Namjoon-hyung? Should I curl my hair, or straighten it?”
You look up just as he turns to you from his fussing in the mirror as he prepares for the photoshoot. His hair is dyed a soft lavender now, his bangs framing his subtly made-up eyes; the lightly shimmering eyeshadow makes them look more intense than usual, mesmerising and hypnotic, and the way he looks straight at you is like an arrow that renders you breathless from the heat in his gaze, even as the way he blinks at you is entirely innocent.
You wonder, not for the first time, if he ever causes heart attacks like this to the people behind the camera, especially whenever he’s filming his drama series, as the sharpness of his eyes can cut through any screen.
It’s already cutting through all your walls, all your defences.
It’s already cutting through your heart.
You shake your head to snap yourself out of your stupor, and he looks crestfallen as he misinterprets the gesture. “You don’t like it either way?” he mourns.
“No, you’re beautiful either way,” you answer roughly, the truth punching out of you before you can stop it, and he looks startled, taken aback by the candidness of your honesty. You shuffle forward, and he seems to hold his breath when you reach up to run your hand through his hair; for comparison, only one side is curled into soft waves, lavender strands sweetly clinging to your fingers as you thread through them, tender and proprietary.
“Curl it,” you rasp, and you don’t mean it as a command, yet you see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows in submission. “You look much fiercer, yet ethereal.”
“Big words from the leader,” he laughs softly, his eyes twinkling in mirth. “Okay then! What the leader wants, the leader gets.” He winks at you, and the abrupt shift from debonair leading man to charming young boy is like whiplash, making you blush at his cheekiness.
“Ah, that’s not how it works, Taehyung-ah.” Immediately you retract your hand, and you scratch your head bashfully, wondering if you had been too forward. This is why you try not to be too tactile with them. You have a certain power over them, unspoken and unacknowledged, but you all know it. You all feel it.
And damn if you will ever let yourself abuse that power. You’d rather cut off your own hands, your own tongue, than to ever say or do anything that will hurt them.
“Why not?” he asks, genuinely intrigued, and you blink when he steps closer to peer curiously at you. “When you speak, everyone listens. You can change the world, if you want to.”
“That’s—” You balk at the intensity of his stare, the seriousness of his declaration. “—clearly an exaggeration.”
He arches a perfectly plucked eyebrow at you. “You’re the one all the members listen to. You’re the one Manager Sejin and Bang PD-nim listens to. Heck, you’re the one the international ARMY listens to, ‘cause you’re the only one who can actually communicate with them.” His expression softens. “Do you even want this?”
There are a million things you want at the moment, tempted dangerously by his proximity, your mind spiralling with all the possibilities he offers. “What?” you whisper helplessly.
He makes a sweeping, all-encompassing gesture to the dressing room you’re both occupying while waiting your turn. “I mean, look at this concept,” he says airily. “Pastel suits? I’m pretty sure this isn’t what Runch Randa had in mind when he founded BTS.”
You huff a laugh at his gentle ribbing, your heart swelling in fondness when he looks pleased at the sound. “Yeah, I want this. It’s fitting,” you declare softly. “Rainbow hues. Seven different colours, coming together as one. Just like us.”
You cuff his cheek playfully, and there: his smile, pure and unrestrained, radiant like sunshine, lighting up the room brighter than the flash of any camera.
“Not quite the underground hip hop scene you envisioned eh, Rap Monster?” he can’t help but tease, and the smile you return is achingly genuine.
“No,” you gently agree. “It’s better.”
“Oh?” His voice tapers to nothing but a gust of breath as he steps even closer. “And what makes it better, hyung?”
You brush your thumb across his cheekbone, smudging highlighter on your skin and making his cheeks pinker than the barely-there blush he has powdered on. For all of the flippant mischievousness and hipster airiness he exudes, he’s actually the one amongst all of you who has retained that childlike wonder and innocent joy, despite the years you’ve all been forced to grow up much faster than you should.
You know that none of you will stay young forever—you’re not going to have this, them, forever, and the unwanted reminder spikes a pang through your heart—but you want to protect this, him, for as long as you can.
For as long as he will allow you to.
“Because,” you answer, painfully honest, “you’re happy.”
Feeling as if your heart is about to burst out of your ribs, you tilt his chin up, delighting in the widening of his eyes and the way his tinted lips part in a soft gasp.
“And that’s truly all I ever wanted.”
third.
your ears are tuned to his voice. you could pick him out in a sea of thousands. his voice makes pretty singers who sing pretty songs sound dull. his voice makes everything else sound ugly.
His voice is out of this world: like a miracle, a dream.
You close your eyes, desperately praying you’ll never wake up.
He crests in a falsetto, and you feel yourself being swept by it: the rise of a tidal wave. Then, just as suddenly, he lets his voice fall in a series of complex runs, and you shudder through it as it takes you under. Your chest tightens with the pressure as the current of his heart pulls you into its depths, and dimly you find yourself thinking that it’s a good way to die, letting his angelic voice carry you to a heaven you don’t deserve.
“… Namjoon-hyung?”
Your eyes snap open on a sharp intake of breath, and you choke through a gulp of air as you break through the surface of reality. Instantly you’re transported back to your surroundings, and you register the familiar texture of the buttons and dials of the soundboard beneath your fingers, the hard press of the ergonomic chair against your back where you’ve been sitting for far too long—and his beautifully expressive eyes staring at you worriedly from the recording booth.
“Was that alright?” he asks timidly. “I feel like I was a little flat on that last note.”
You blink, a nanosecond of confusion before your brain reboots, and your mind whirs into action, compelling your hand almost on autopilot over the amplifier as you replay the last few bars.
“Ah,” you murmur as the evocative lyrics blaze through the studio in brilliant sparks, zinging through your neurons and sizzling through your blood. It fires up your already overwrought mind, fuelling the restless agitation humming beneath your skin. “You weren’t flat—just a little out of breath. You were actually a little sharp during the high point of your falsetto, so if you dial it back by half a step, it should help with your breathing when you sustain that last line.”
The words slip past your lips unthinkingly, uttered merely in observation as you have a habit of voicing the notes you mentally take out loud, so by the time you look back up at him, you’re almost too late to catch in his averted gaze the swiftly suffused flare of what looks alarmingly close to hurt.
“Jungkook-ah.” You almost trip over your own tongue in your hurry to backtrack, lungs compressing with the desperate need to ease the thoughtless pain you caused, brain-to-mouth filter glitching at the worst possible time. “Your voice is—”
perfect, beautiful, heavenly, the last thing I want to hear before I die, the honour and privilege would be mine
“—fine. I’m just concerned about the level of difficulty for you. Especially when we perform this live.”
stupid, stupid, I shouldn’t have pushed you too hard, I didn’t mean to break you, I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry—
“Catch me then, hyung?”
Your brain stutters to a halt, and this time it refuses to restart. You stare at him blankly. “What?”
He removes the headphones and steps out of the booth to lean against the entryway, arms folded across his chest with confidence, not insecurity.
He’s grown so much before your eyes. Even when you haven’t been looking, he’s grown.
His smile is warm, his gaze tender. “When I fall from my falsetto,” he clarifies, and his eyes sparkle with amusement, tempered by fondness and something akin to reverence. “You should catch it with a line of your rap.”
You frown and look back down at the notes in your hands, listlessly shuffling through the pages. “I wrote the lyrics with you in mind, though.”
He shrugs, too casual for it to be meaningless, too offhand for it to be unimportant, and your throat tightens with it. “All the more reason for you to join me.”
Even after all these years, he still looks at you like you’re the full moon in a starless night, a guiding light when he loses his way, his devotion bare and unabashed, when he’s the one who’s golden, who can fire up the sky as the sun in your galaxy.
You don’t understand why it’s you he looks at this way, when you are just barren earth, and he is celestial.
“You really don’t know, do you?” he murmurs.
He kneels before you, ever the supplicant to your altar.
“You’re our conductor of light.” The proclamation is hushed yet impassioned, the dichotomy ever so achingly him. “We shine the brightest with you. Because of you.”
He takes both of your hands in his. Your notebook clatters to the floor. You’re shaking.
“Sing with me?”
And there, the ghost of a memory: the shy, barely out of middle school teenager you first met seemingly a lifetime ago, the one who was still so unsure of his worth, so clueless about his bursting potential, so unused to asking for what he wants, what he deserves.
And this, throughout all the offers, the dares, the demands for you to leave—this is why you stay.
Because there is nothing they can ask for—nothing he can ask for—that you won’t move heaven and earth to give.
“Help me breathe, hyung,” he entreats softly, and there is only one answer you can give, lungs heaving as you promise:
“Always.”
fourth.
the colour of his eyes is blue enough to drown in. he is turning you into a clichéd love-wrecked being. you’re drowning, always sinking. down, down, down.
You slip through the doors to the dance studio, unnoticed. He hasn’t seen or heard you just yet, focused as he is on practicing, and that’s perfectly fine with you.
Art is meant to be watched closely, quietly, like this.
He’s something of an anomaly, a living contradiction that lures and traps you in a spell of fascination. He isn’t as hard-hitting as your choreography leader with his powerful b-boy stylistics, isn’t the technical perfectionist your golden boy is with his athletic prowess; he is beauty and grace wrapped in ferocious control, gliding fluidly across the floor and leaping high across the air as if daring gravity and the laws of physics itself to defy him. The innocence of his features is sweet and succulent, like peaches and cream, yet the sensuality of his motions is tempestuous and overpowering, like dark chocolate liquor.
He is something of a god, angelic in his intention yet devilish in his execution, and you are left to fall into worship the only way you know how.
The lyrics begin to take shape in your mind, and you drum your fingers subconsciously against your thigh as you match the rhythm in your head to the beat of his movements. You can’t sculpt him out of stone or paint him on a canvass, so you seek to immortalise him through the only medium of art you are a master of.
“Keep looking at me like that, Namjoon-hyung.”
The turntable of your mind scratches to a stop, breaking you out of your trance. You blink, certain you haven’t heard that correctly. “Pardon?”
He’s staring at you openly now, chest heaving from exertion, sweat dripping from his temples to trickle at his jaw and pool along his collarbones, like rivulets of paint colouring a statue. There’s a hint of a smirk playing on that lush mouth, and his eyes are half-lidded, lashes fanning across his cheekbones like a brand new paintbrush on a blank page.
“When something catches your eye, you watch it with your whole being,” he breathes, panting between parted lips as he moves, slow and sensuous, towards you. “It does something to us, being the focus of your razor-sharp concentration. Makes us want to be absolutely worth your attention.”
Up close, you realise that he’s wearing contact lenses: a smoky, stormy blue-grey that leaves you unmoored, lost at sea. “Jimin-ah,” you say helplessly, needing an anchor to keep yourself from drowning in those depths, in him. “What are you talking about?”
He chuckles lowly, like the distant rumbling of a brewing thunderstorm on the horizon, filling the air with electric humidity. “I don’t perform like this for just anyone,” he murmurs. “None of us do, hyung. Surely you must know that.”
“… I know what, exactly?” Confusion is making you stupidly redundant, and inwardly you curse the way you sound out of breath, when he’s the one who’s been dancing like a Renaissance painting: a masterpiece of movement, mystical and transcendental.
He stops, looks at you as if you’re the puzzle, a cipher he can’t quite figure out. “Don’t you know,” he says quietly, “that whenever you step out on stage, you command it?”
There’s a flash of lightning in the storm of his eyes, a warning of impending danger, and if you have been any saner you would’ve heeded it.
You’ve never once been sane in your entire life.
“You’re our Pied Piper,” he declares softly. “We’d follow you anywhere.”
And there: the vulnerability behind the bravado, the sweetness beneath the ferocity, the purity behind the passion. He’s a walking anomaly, a living contradiction, godlike in his talent yet all too human in his weaknesses, a powerful force of nature needing containment and control, a jaded innocence needing guidance and protection.
Leadership.
The undeniable truth of it slams against your lungs, roaring in your ears like the crash of waves on jagged rock. You’re standing on a cliff, and he’s right there with you, ready to leap over the edge on your command.
It’s only fitting that you be the first to jump.
“You should follow me now, then,” you tell him quietly.
Because you’re not going to let them fall. You’re not going to let them drown.
“Where?” he whispers.
You’re going to make them fly.
“If you want to keep dancing for me like that,” you murmur as you amble closer to him, sunlight breaking through the clouds in his eyes as they widen at you. “You have to follow me… to the kitchen.”
He blinks. “… What?”
You laugh out loud at the completely confounded look on his face. “Don’t think I don’t know you haven’t eaten yet. You need to build up your energy for later, especially if you’re gonna have to teach this—”
You make a vague gesture at your own uncoordinated bundle of gangly limbs.
“—how to dance, again,” you finish with a wry, self-deprecating smile.
I can’t have you collapsing again, are the words you don’t say, fierce determination settling over your chest at the silent vow. Never again. Not on my watch.
He opens his mouth as if to protest, but you’ve already turned on your heel as you head out, and you know, even without looking over your shoulder, that he’s already stumbling over his feet to catch up to you.
“Come with me,” you command: and without fail, he follows.
fifth.
you know him. you love him. through a thousand lifetimes, across millions of stars, you’d find him. you’d never leave him. you love him. till death do you part.
An open bottle of water magically appears in front of you. Blearily, you blink at it several times in quick succession, already half-convinced it’s a figment of your sleep-deprived imagination.
“Your blood must be made of caffeine and energy drinks by now,” you hear a low murmur from behind you. “You should wash it down with that.”
Ah. Not a hallucination then. Your subconscious isn’t this kind.
Water spills from the full bottle onto your quivering hand as you grasp it a little too tightly. Pale, nimble fingers close over yours, angling the bottle to your mouth as a steady hand supports your nape, tilting your head back as you drink like a man in a desert who’s dying of thirst.
Maybe it’s the exhaustion finally catching up, maybe it’s the intimacy of the gesture, but the gentleness startles unwitting tears pricking at the corners of your eyes.
The need for air makes itself known; you gasp as he moves away and takes the precious bottle with him, and you’re momentarily seized by irrational panic until you realise he’s taking his seat next to you.
Carefully and deliberately, he keeps his gaze turned away, giving you the illusion of privacy to scrub discreetly at the wetness in your mouth and in your eyes. Your vision blurs once more, and you furiously blink the tears back, a watery chuckle escaping you when he slides a napkin towards you while still looking straight ahead, still not looking at you.
This is how he knows you. He knows you best, knows you the longest. Knows the darkest parts of yourself no one else sees.
Shakily, you take the napkin and bury your face in it. It terrifies you, the way you can never hide from him, like this.
His voice is hushed amidst the tense silence that has settled over the recording studio after you erased the entire track you were producing in a fit of frustrated rage. “Why are you killing yourself like this?”
The napkin crumples in your hands as a noxious cocktail of emotions surges through your bloodstream: white-hot anger, bone-deep despair, crushing disappointment, crippling fear.
And yourself—the targeted bullseye of this poison.
You want to cry. You want to scream. You want to close your eyes and never have to open them ever again.
This is dangerous territory, and he knows it.
He knows you.
“You know that you’re our pillar, right?” he adds quietly; and maybe it’s the twelve cups of coffee and eight bottles of Red Bull and the four hours of sleep over three days and exactly two meals of instant noodles in between that’s making you imagine the tone of accusation in his voice, because the last vestiges of your sanity splinters into a cackle, bitter and hollow.
“I know, Min Yoongi.” The words come out in a growl, and immediately you feel sick to your stomach for snapping at him; your gaze whips up to him with gut-wrenching horror, yet he is only regarding you coolly, the immovable object to your unstoppable force.
“So you should understand.” His tone is eerily calm, like the depths of the most treacherous part of the ocean, like the eye of a typhoon. “That when a pillar collapses, everything goes down with it.”
There’s no heat behind the words, the point simply delivered with cold hard fact, yet it burns you from the inside out, like a molten brand of failure.
I know. Despair rattles in your ribs and claws at your throat. I know it in every moment of every damn day. You see it in every shortcoming, every flaw, every little mistake you make that reminds you that you’re not enough—that you can never be good enough for him, for them.
All at once, your ability to produce music seems so small, so insignificant, so unworthy to capture the essence of who they are—everything good, and kind, and right in this world—and everyday you are doing your damn best to try, but somehow you always fall short and it’s never, ever enough.
“Kim Namjoon,” he exhales shakily. “You big stupid idiot.”
Your eyes snap open. Somehow, somewhere in the midst of your anxiety-laced haze, partially muffled by your arms on the table where your face has fallen—you said all of it out loud.
Fuck.
Your breath catches in your throat when you feel his hand land on your head, startling you. “You really are so appallingly stupid for a genius,” he murmurs, tenderness and affection softening the barb of the words, touch light as if you’re something precious and fragile, and it’s devastating, the way he makes you fall apart, like this.
“I don’t know what’s going on in that big brain of yours that you just can’t turn off.” His hand is carding through your hair now, stroking gently and scratching lightly, and the rumble in your chest might have been a purr if you were a cat, except right now it feels like a volcano about to erupt with the lava of your self-loathing. “But get this through your thick skull, alright?”
You turn to him then—and your lungs deflate all the air you have left at the raw, ragged vulnerability in his gaze.
“It will destroy us to lose you,” he whispers tremulously. “Whatever it is you’re slowly killing yourself for like this, it’s not worth it. Especially if the reason is us.”
Swiftly you shake your head, ignoring the way it makes the room spin, desperate to clear the misunderstanding. “That’s not—hyung, I’m not trying to—” fuck, why do words fail you when you need them the most? “It’s because I’m selfish, okay?”
He falls back to his seat. He looks gutted, like you just landed a punch to his stomach. “Namjoon-ah,” he says slowly, narrowing his eyes. “What the fuck are you saying?”
It feels like you’re being flayed open, the tender, bruised flesh of your bloodied heart laid bare. The confession is wrangled out of you, and you tremble with the force of it.
“I don’t trust anyone else to take care of all of you the way I know I can. The way I know I will.”
sixth.
Laughter peals in the dressing room backstage, reverberating in harmonised pitches of six very distinct voices—as familiar and as necessary to you as breathing—like a choir made up of pure, unadulterated joy.
You stop in the middle of your patrol, knowing it can only come from one source.
You hover at the entrance, just beyond their line of sight. Your eyes crinkle with mirth when you see him doing his hilarious impersonation of a praying mantis—or at least what he believes passes for one. The others have collapsed into various heaps on the couch and on the floor, shaking and gasping and crying in hysterics, and sending exactly three teams of your staff—wardrobe, hair, and make-up—into a panicked frenzy to make all of them look presentable again.
You’re all going to be performing onstage in thirty minutes, and here they are horsing around like a bunch of schoolchildren.
You shake your head, even as a warm, aching glow fills your chest and spreads outward to suffuse your entire body. You shove your hands into your pockets and lean against the door jamb, a smile tugging at your mouth and in your heart, intent on letting them have this for a while longer.
You don’t know how much longer you’ll all have this, together.
The thought is a dark cloud amidst the ray of sunshine before you, and your smile dims. Something in the air changes with it—or perhaps he’s much more keenly insightful than he lets on—because he chooses that exact moment to look up at you.
It startles you when he locks his gaze unerringly with yours, making you want to crawl out of your skin, caught in the act of voyeurism, no matter how innocent. Embarrassed without really knowing why, you step away abashedly, not wanting to ruin this moment for them.
“Hey, Rap Mon-ssi!”
You stop in your tracks, hesitating, before your shoulders hunch over with a deflated sigh. You paste a smile on your face, hoping it doesn’t look as forced as you feel, and turn around to face him as he jogs to catch up with you in the hallway.
“Hey, Seokjin-ssi,” you acknowledge brightly.
He snorts. “How dare you be so formal with me, Joonie-ah.” Something in his expression both warms and softens when he looks closer at you. “Have you eaten yet? We have time before the show starts, right?” He doesn’t even wait for you to answer, even as you open your mouth in amusement to try. “TaeTae demolished all the hamburgers and JK eats like a cow, I swear that boy has four stomachs or something—” and here he grins at your resounding laughter, “—but I saved the kal-guksu for you. And—”
He steps closer to point a finger menacingly at your face, making you a little cross-eyed when you stare at it.
“I made it myself, so it’s special and homemade,” he declares proudly. “So don’t you dare refuse my cooking, Joonie-ah, or I will be very insulted.”
He pouts cutely at you, living up to his self-proclaimed title of ‘worldwide handsome’, and really, you mourn, that face should be illegal. Countries can go to war for that face, you think fondly, and it makes you not just a little overwhelmed to have in your group the modern Korean male version of Helen of Troy. He might not have launched a thousand ships, you muse wryly, but you’re pretty sure his face has already broken a hundred thousand hearts. Maybe even more.
With a face like that, it makes you wonder if he’s really content to settle for just… this.
“Hey,” he says softly, suddenly serious—and there it is again, the perceptiveness that makes him look at you as if he can see straight into your soul: all the jagged, broken parts of it. “Is everything okay?”
You take a deep breath, fully intent on thanking him, maybe even teasing him back, but your brain-to-mouth filter glitches all over again, and instead what you end up blurting out is: “It should have been you.”
He gapes at you, his expression that of utter befuddlement. “What?”
You swallow against a suddenly dry throat as a gnawing pain makes itself known inside your chest, fluttering weakly against your ribs. It’s something that’s been eating away at your heart for a long time now, building up to this moment when you’re forced to face the truth you’ve been trying so desperately to outrun.
You can’t escape it anymore, not when the very reason is literally standing right in front of you.
Bravely, you draw yourself up to your full height, holding your arms stiffly against your sides, preparing to face the firing squad as you finally confess your crime.
“You should have been the leader, Seokjin-ssi. Not me.”
You swear you can hear a pin drop in the silence that follows. It feels like you’re about to shatter, flying apart into a billion shards like a damn supernova.
“What?” he exclaims again, and you cringe at the barely controlled note of hysteria in his tone; the maknae in you can’t help but cower instinctively at your hyung’s outrage. “And you’re telling me this now because—what? Because I’m the oldest?”
“Yes. Well, no,” you stammer helplessly. “Actually, yes. I mean—”
“Kim Namjoon—”
“You take care of us!” you eventually explode, matching the intensity of his outburst with your own; he steps back in shock, and you can’t keep your voice from cracking with emotion—you’re vibrating with it. “Better than I ever could! You cook for us, you look after us when we’re sick, you make us fucking laugh and you—”
You break off with a choked garble. Your face falls into your hands, because what the fuck you can’t be having a breakdown right before your concert.
“You make us happy, hyung,” you whisper through shaking fingers. “And that’s why I shouldn’t be the leader—because I fail spectacularly at it. And you don’t.”
The admission is wrenched violently from you, making you lightheaded and boneless; it feels like breaking through the surface after being submerged for so long, liquid guilt weighing you down as it clings to you, but with the freedom of finally being able to breathe.
“Oh my god.” The note of bemused wonder in his voice is unmistakable. “Yoongi-ah was right. You are an idiot.”
That is—certainly not how you expected him to react.
“… What?”
Your breath gets knocked out of you as he slams something solid against your chest. You wrap your fingers around it automatically as you look down, and you blink as you realise: it’s your notebook.
The one where you’ve been composing all your songs—for them.
“We’ve been trying to write our own lyrics there too,” he says casually, as if this honestly alarming breach of privacy is not mind-blowing or inconsequential, as if it’s not an earth-shattering revelation to you that they have somehow managed to access this locked away part of yourself.
In retrospect, you think numbly, perhaps you shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, no matter how stubbornly you’ve tried to close yourself off, no matter how far you've pushed them away—no matter how much, much too often you’ve let them down—they’ve all managed to carve a permanent, irreplaceable, untouchable place in your heart anyway.
You let the tips of your fingers trail reverently over the cover, wrinkled and worn and so, so beloved. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because we all know why you’re our leader. And all this time, we thought you already knew, too.”
You look up at him with wide eyes. He smiles at you knowingly, and nods towards the notebook in your hands.
“Why don’t you see for yourself?”
The roar of the ARMY is deafening, like a battle cry in a war you’ve already emerged victorious from. Thousands upon thousands of ARMY bombs light up the night, outshining every constellation in the sky, filling the arena with explosions of love. The familiar chant echoes throughout the dome as the battle-worn heroes are memorialised through the commendation of voices from all over the world, singing as one.
“KIM SEOKJIN!”
All this time, we thought you already knew.
“MIN YOONGI!”
It will destroy us to lose you.
“JUNG HOSEOK!”
It’s okay to let us take care of you, too.
“PARK JIMIN!”
We’d follow you anywhere.
“KIM TAEHYUNG!”
You can change the world, if you want to.
“JEON JUNGKOOK!”
We shine the brightest with you.
“BTS!”
Because of you.
The chant repeats itself, and you smile.
That’s your cue.
“KIM NAMJOON!”
You step onto the stage, front and centre—and behind you, the six people you love most in the universe, soaring higher and shining brighter than ever.
It feels like you can conquer the world. And you will. You already have.
Here, with them: You are bulletproof.
sixth.
he loves you, too.