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Yoongi watches long fingers carefully press lines into small pieces of origami paper, carefully matching corners and edges until a pink-and-yellow crane joins its other colored siblings on the small hospital fold-up table. Yoongi looks at the big bottle. It's a little less than three quarters full, Yoongi guesses, which makes sense because the bottle was supposed to hold 1000 cranes and Seokjin's about 700 cranes in.
There's a knock on the door and Yoongi looks up. "5 minutes until visiting hour's over, Mr. Min," the nurse tells him, and Yoongi nods. He turns his attention back to Seokjin, who's finished the next crane and has already started on his next. Yoongi carefully puts the rest of the papers away into the drawer next to the hospital bed, and Seokjin doesn't say anything.
Yoongi carefully puts the rest into the bottle. Seokjin's managed to fold about 30 today. He can't do much, not when he's constantly going in and out of surgery, but he's been at it for a while. "I'll be back tomorrow, okay?"
Seokjin doesn't respond, but Yoongi's used to that. He just unfolds the table for Seokjin and tucks the blankets around him, tugging him down lower so he's lying comfortably. Yoongi rubs Seokjin's cheek and carefully tucks strands that are getting too long out of his eyes. "You need to get a haircut soon. We'll go get one tomorrow, okay?"
"Mr. Min," the nurse is back at Seokjin's door. She's always here, right on time, because she knows Yoongi will stay until he's kicked out.
"I know, I know. I'm leaving." He squeezes Seokjin's hand, and Seokjin's gaze flickers to him. Yoongi tries his best smile. "I'll be back first thing tomorrow morning, okay?" Seokjin doesn't respond, and Yoongi just squeezes his hand again before the nurse calls him out again and he's hurrying out.
He sighs as he turns the ignition in his car, resting his forehead on the steering wheel. Seokjin's got some sort of rare disease that the doctors don't even have a name for, and he keeps throwing up blood and getting weaker and weaker by the day. His organs are deteriorating, but not the way of any known disease, and Seokjin's lost pretty much every memory.
Yoongi grips the steering wheel in his hands, fighting not to cry. He wishes he could turn back time, somehow go back in time and prepare his past-self for this, to make the most of what he could have because it was inevitable that Seokjin would just forget about him one day, memory by memory until he stopped speaking. His mental state had retrograded back down, roughly, the doctors said, to a 5 year old’s, but Yoongi doesn’t think that can be correct because he knew Seokjin when he was five and Seokjin wasn’t like this back then.
Yoongi doesn't know why Seokjin folds cranes, but he doesn’t argue against it at all. The TV had been on, as it always was to drown out the stifling silence. But they’d been watching and Seokjin had tugged on Yoongi’s sleeve when the craned had shown up on screen, and so Yoongi had bought all the origami paper they’d had in the store nearby and had brought them all to Seokjin.
Since then Seokjin has been folding cranes, every single day when he’s awake, except when Yoongi’s reading to him. He stops what he’s doing when Yoongi takes the book from out of the drawer. They’re into Moby Dick now. Yoongi purposely picks the longest books he knows to read. The doctors keep telling Yoongi that Seokjin’s not processing anything, and that he doesn’t have long to live, but Seokjin stops folding cranes when Yoongi starts reading. He’s listening, Yoongi just knows it, and Yoongi tells himself Seokjin will stay alive until the book ends, so he picks the longest books.
He’s told he’s wasting his life on someone who’s going to die soon. On a hopeless case. He doesn’t even recognize you. Just leave him alone with his paper and he’ll be fine.
But they don’t know. They don’t know that Seokjin looks for him when he’s not there. Yoongi had gotten stuck in traffic one day and had come late, and the nurses had brought him frantically to Seokjin’s room because Seokjin’s vitals had plummeted but he was refusing to cooperate. As soon as Yoongi came bursting into the room, Seokjin had grabbed onto Yoongi and passed out.
So Yoongi knows Seokjin looks for him. And even if Seokjin was completely unresponsive, he’d still be here, because they just don’t get Seokjin is Yoongi’s life.
He wakes up the next morning early because he’s run out of the gummy bears that Seokjin likes. When he gets to the hospital, Seokjin’s still asleep, heart monitor beeping steadily by his bedside. It’s not new for him to see Seokjin sleeping anymore, but for a while it was weird. Yoongi had always been the sleep addict in their relationship, and so he’d rarely seen Seokjin sleep. But now Seokjin was almost never awake. It scares him, the thought that one day Seokjin could just not wake up, but he pushes it to the back of his head.
He just watches Seokjin sleep, carefully memorizing the slight part of his lips, the shift of his bangs as he stirs, and the way he’s turned just so slightly to the left. He’s stopped taking pictures because he only wants pictures of Seokjin when he was healthy and smiling, but he engraves these moments into his brain, over and over again so he won’t forget.
It’s a while until Seokjin wakes, well into the afternoon, but Yoongi hasn’t been bored the entire time. “Hey,” Yoongi smiles, when Seokjin opens his eyes. He reaches for the bag of gummy bears. “You want some?”
Seokjin doesn’t respond, but Yoongi props the bed up a little and opens a small bag. Seokjin doesn’t make cranes and eat at the same time, so Yoongi opens up the book and reads, and for a while the only noises are Yoongi’s reading and the crinkling of the wrapper as Seokjin picks up gummy bears, slowly, one by one.
Yoongi stops at the end of the chapter, and Seokjin, as always, has left the last bear for him, so Yoongi eats that and takes out the origami papers for Seokjin to start folding again. Seokjin has to go in for checkups during the day, and the nurses flock in and out to change his IV and check the life support. They bring in meals three times a day but Seokjin barely touches that, and Yoongi knows better than to even try coaxing him to eat when he doesn’t want to because he’ll just throw it back up with blood.
And that is Yoongi’s day until he’s kicked out by the nurses again, and then is Yoongi’s day over and over again. People tell him he’s wasting his time but Yoongi neither thinks so nor cares.
Yoongi finishes the epilogue of Moby Dick and wonders which book to go next. “Maybe Ulysses?” He tells Seokjin, not that Seokjin’s really listening with the paper squares out. Yoongi brushes a hand through Seokjin’s hair, remembering that he was supposed to go get Seokjin a haircut. “You wanna listen to James Joyce? It’s a little long but we’ve got time, right?”
Seokjin finishes his purple-and-pink crane and Yoongi carefully puts it aside and watches him start on a blue-and-green one. Yoongi smiles and rubs his thumb on Seokjin’s cheek. “Seokjin, wherever you go after this, just remember I loved you more than anything else, all right?” Seokjin finishes the crane and starts a new one, and Yoongi sighs.
He wakes up the early next day to go to the library and return Moby Dick and borrow Ulysses. Seokjin’s sleeping as always when Yoongi gets to the hospital room. The heart monitor beeps steadily and Yoongi puts Ulysses on the side so he can just watch Seokjin sleep.
It’s exactly 12:11 PM when the heart monitor goes flat, exactly 12:12 when the doctors and nurses burst in to wheel Seokjin into surgery, and exactly 1:38 when Seokjin is pronounced dead.
--
After the wake and the funeral, Yoongi comes back to the hospital room to clean it out. He takes the clothes he’d brought Seokjin to the hospital in that had been hanging in the closet collecting dust for so long. He carefully cleans out the drawer filled with unopened gummy bear packages and unopened origami crane packs, and is about to throw out the opened one because he’s thought it was empty.
He looks, just out of impulse, and there’s one sheet left in the 1000 pack. His eyes fly over to the bottle, sitting innocently where Yoongi had left it. The bottle is full, and Yoongi counts the cranes, over and over again because he can’t believe the number at first, but every time it comes out to be the same.
999 cranes.
Yoongi laughs and cries as he carefully folds the last piece of paper into a crane. It's crude - he's not good at it, and it looks kind of out of place on top of Seokjin's perfectly folded cranes, but Yoongi tops it off anyway and carefully seals the glass bottle.
He cries, resting his forehead on the cap, until he has none left to cry and the sun’s well set. He brings everything home, carefully hoisting the bottle up. He puts his palm on the bottom to support it just in case it falls, and his hand brushes on a piece of paper stuck to the bottom.
He pulls it off thinking it’s the price tag, but a piece of post it comes along. The writing is messy and not like Seokjin’s usual, round, neat characters, but Yoongi recognizes it right away and the bottle slips out of his hands. The glass clatters but doesn’t break, and it falls on its side and rolls away.
I wish I could remember him.