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Taehyung lives alone in the middle of nowhere. The city had been too cluttered, and when his job told him he could work from home, Taehyung made the decision to leave the bustle and find peace in the mountains. It can get lonely, sometimes, if he thinks about it too hard — but there is plenty of life out in nowhere. Taehyung loves finding it.
Of course, his parents worry. They’re old and don’t get to visit as often as they’d like. It’s in their nature to worry about their son, and the phone calls after his health are more endearing than anything.
It’s not until he injures himself that he starts thinking perhaps they are right.
Taehyung falls from the tree and injures his leg and, sitting in the hospital while the doctors organize him crutches and a ride home, thinks about his options. He is self-sufficient, he has no close neighbors, and now he cannot drive. He can still work, sure — but how will he live?
He decides to buy a droid. BBG95.
Taehyung doesn’t go out looking for BBG95 specifically. Rather, there is only one mechanic within a two hours’ drive and BBG95 is the droid that they have.
He’d called ahead to make sure they had something that would suit him in stock. Taehyung doesn’t want one of the sex toys. He needs something with a decent AI and fine motor skills, something that can drive and cook and help him clean. Whether it looks human or not matters very little; Taehyung just needs something quickly.
The mechanic has horrible reviews. Taehyung knows this because Jungkook waves their Yelp page in Taehyung’s face before, during, and after the drive there. Taehyung is thankful that Jungkook even offered to drive him, so he accepts the soft chastising.
When it becomes too much, he says, “What else can I do?” and Jungkook falls quiet.
Taehyung will not leave his home — his friends have already tried and failed to convince him. His mother tried to convince him. He’s dug his heels into the ground and will not be moved.
He needs to handle this for himself.
When they open the rickety door, Taehyung doesn’t think it’s so bad. It’s as clean as can be expected and the mechanics are all hard at work. The person at the front desk looks a little gruff, but he says, “You’re Taehyung?” and is already moving to grab paperwork before Taehyung has even confirmed.
“Can I see the droid?” Taehyung asks.
“I guess.” The mechanic lumbers out of his chair. “Seeing him won’t change he’s the only one we got, but if it makes you feel better.”
It doesn’t, really. Taehyung doesn’t know what he’s looking for.
BBG95 is beautiful. Taehyung isn’t super involved in robotics, but even Jungkook has never seen the model before. Its face is sweet, and the build looks both slim and muscular. Taehyung’s first thought is that this is a repurposed sex model — it’s rare that any other droid type looks so human. This one breathes, and the pupils dilate when the lights are turned on, and it looks at Taehyung curiously.
Curiously. A robot, curious.
“How is the AI?” Jungkook asks.
“Perfectly fine, thank you,” says the droid with a sniff.
Taehyung laughs.
“The paperwork is in order,” Jungkook says, which is the other reason Taehyung brought him along. “Knock off, custom model, renovated.”
“I’ll take him.”
The mechanic asks to be paid in cash. Taehyung pays in cash.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Jungkook says one last time, helping the droid into the backseat.
“Well.” Taehyung clambers into the passenger’s side and looks at the rusty mech shop out of the window. “It’s better than nothing.”
Thirty minutes later, winding up the mountain road, Taehyung turns in his chair and asks, “What is your name?”
The droid blinks slowly. “My name?”
“Yeah.”
The droid bites its lip thoughtfully. It seems rather human, all things considered. “Jimin.”
Taehyung settles back in his seat. “Jimin is a nice name.”
“Thank you.”
The rest of the drive is silent.
Taehyung comes to learn that Jimin is rather human in all aspects.
It surprises him. Droids are expensive, and Taehyung exchanged dirt for what appears to be gold. A diamond in the rough, maybe, spit and polished into something that shines. As soon as Jungkook drops them off, Jimin scopes out the house. He inspects the kitchen with his nose turned up, and he helps Taehyung situate the charging port.
“I still need to sleep,” Jimin tells him. “The couch will be fine.”
“Sleep?” Some of the older models needed extended periods of rest rather than just being plugged into the port. Taehyung is surprised that feature wasn’t updated, but he pulls the sheets out of the hallway closet and shows Jimin how the couch pulls out.
“Your word processing is great,” Taehyung tells him.
Jimin smiles, tight at the corners. “Thank you. I’ve worked hard.”
The mechanic said that BBG95 had an adaptive AI — Jimin learns. Jimin learns and learns and keeps on learning.
Jimin learns the strange pattern of Taehyung’s speech, of his sleeping, of his work schedule. He finds Taehyung one too many times eating yogurt at 4am, and pulls Taehyung away from his computer to eat dinner when he has to. He pulls Taehyung out of bed before midmorning melts into noon, and he tosses Taehyung in the shower when he thinks Taehyung has gone too long without. All of Taehyung’s worst traits Jimin learns and grows around and rectifies, if he can.
He learns the intricacies of living with someone who hobbles around the house and puts his crutches tucked in corners where he forgets them later. He learns that Taehyung doesn’t like certain types of laundry detergent, and that sometimes Taehyung doesn’t do the dishes for days and days and days but he gets sad if Jimin does them instead. He just needs a kick in the pants.
Jimin learns that it gets cold at night and Taehyung would rather have a body than a blanket.
“You’re warm for a robot,” Taehyung tells him, his face pressed into Jimin’s shoulder.
“Machines are always warm,” Jimin replies. “Unless everything else is cold.”
Taehyung hums. “It’s nice.”
Jimin sleeps on the couch less and less often as the nights become colder and colder. Neither of them say anything.
The older droid models are more high maintenance. Jungkook gives him a few tips, but no one knows how to take care of Jimin better than the droid himself.
Taehyung drinks tea and watches Jimin stab a screwdriver into the circuitry of his arm. It is a little disconcerting, watching something rather human pry open its skin and poke at cogs and gears and blinking lights.
“The joint keeps getting jammed,” Jimin says, because he’s learned that Taehyung is curious. Taehyung is so curious about everything, anything, and he never stops asking Jimin questions. He never stops asking how this works or that works, and Jimin always tells him. “It’s too cold. Creaky.”
“I can make an appointment with the mechanic.” Taehyung takes a long sip of his tea, content to watch Jimin in the soft sunlight of the early morning. A droid with bedhead. It’s cute. He smiles against the rim of his mug.
Jimin’s response is both even and expected. “I’d rather not.” He clicks something into place and his neck jerks. Taehyung hears a whirring and a deep sigh. Jimin blinks rapidly, shaking his head. “This is fine.”
And then he smiles.
Jimin smiles with his whole body, as if his entire presence shifts and the room lights up. Like he’s the sun and he pulls everything in.
Taehyung’s mouth feels dry. “If you’re sure.” He takes another sip of tea.
It’s strange, living with another person after so long by himself. Taehyung supposes that calling Jimin a person is a loose term, as even Taehyung himself initially considered Jimin a thing. It is...jarring, to think that this thing that Taehyung purchased with money from a vendor is a person. More than jarring, perhaps it is dangerous.
Jimin is rather human. He looks human, and reacts to Taehyung as if he were a human, and here is where the problem starts. More than being rather human, Jimin is beautiful and Taehyung is lonely.
“How long have you been alone?” Jimin asks from the living room. The vacuum has been set aside for the moment because Jimin knows that Taehyung’s favorite drama is on, and he’s sat down on the couch with Taehyung’s leg in his lap.
“Hmm?” Taehyung’s eyes are half-drooped, trying to focus on the soft ridge of Jimin’s profile.
Jimin’s smile is wry. It’s not an expression Taehyung has ever seen on a robot before, but he supposes he never spent much time with them. He’s seen that particular slope of Jimin’s mouth plenty of times before. “I asked how long you’ve lived alone.”
“Oh, years.” Taehyung tucks his arms behind his head as the commercials play. “I haven’t had a roommate since college, and it was Jungkook — you met.”
“Yes.” Jimin smiles. “Was he a good roommate?”
“Not as good as you,” Taehyung says, which is the honest truth. Jungkook never cleaned a thing and would vacuum at odd times of night. Jimin looks over at Taehyun too slowly, his eyes low, and Taehyung feels himself flush. “It’s been a long time, though. I lived in the city on my own before coming here.”
“And this house? How long?”
“I don’t know.” Taehyung picks at the fringe on the pillow. “A year and a half?”
Jimin purses his lips. “That’s a long time.” His hands are absently massaging the muscles of Taehyung’s leg, very gently, just the way the doctor showed him. He has very small hands. They leave impressions on Taehyung’s skin for milliseconds before they fade into nothing.
“Not too long.”
“You like it here?”
The drama has come on again, but Taehyung is still looking at Jimin. “I do.”
He doesn’t really like being alone. The city was overwhelming, and work was overwhelming, and there’s so much peace out here. Sometimes Taehyung’s brain starts going and going and going and it feels like a stone rolling downhill that Taehyung can’t get the reins on, and it’s easier to shut everything off rather than curb the destruction at the bottom. Still, he misses people. He misses his parents, and the people he saw on his commute, and he misses his friends. He doesn’t see anyone as often as he’d like.
In some ways, purchasing Jimin was something he should have done a long time ago.
And he did purchase Jimin. Some days he feels awful about it, even though he knows that was the purpose of Jimin’s creation — to be bought, to serve. The Jimin who sits on Taehyung’s couch with him and pets his hair is a bonus; that was never a part of Jimin’s programming until Taehyung asked him to learn.
When the lights are off Jimin’s eyes glow blue. When the day is done Jimin plugs himself in to charge. When the weather chills Jimin puts oil in his shoulders and knees.
Taehyung has to remind himself of these things too often.
Because Jimin also eats, and carefully bathes, and talks about things that don’t matter, and complains when the vacuum doesn’t work, and cards his fingers through Taehyung’s hair, and laughs at Taehyung’s jokes, and draws silly pictures on Taehyung’s cast, and looks sweet in Taehyung’s sweaters, and chides Taehyung when he loses his crutches.
Jimin is both of these things.
“You are the best droid I’ve ever seen,” Taehyung tells him late at night while Jimin keeps him warm and the moon hides behind the curtains as if it’s afraid of interrupting something intimate.
“Not really,” Jimin replies, almost sad, and pulls Taehyung’s face into the warmth of his shoulder.
If Taehyung listens for a heartbeat until the whirring of machinery, that’s between him and a higher power. If Taehyung convinces himself he hears one, that’s between him and the devil.
He knows this is a dangerous path — he cannot stop himself from taking those shaky steps.
Taehyung contacts the mechanic about Jimin’s creaky joints even though Jimin promised it was fine, but he learns that the old operation was shut down several months ago and the new man at the front desk is still organizing their records. “We can still set up an appointment?” he offers. “We’ll just have to start from scratch.”
He’s very nice.
Jimin does not want to go.
“That’s alright.” Taehyung bites his lip. He trusts Jimin to tell him if there’s an issue he himself cannot solve. “Creaky joints never hurt anyone.” He rubs the knee of his bad leg and sees Jimin smile at him from the kitchen.
“You won’t be creaky for long,” Jimin says confidently.
“Neither will you,” Taehyung reples. It’s almost spring, anyway — the rain will bring new problems, but the cold will be far behind them.
The cast comes off. It’s Jimin who asks to keep the cast, not Taehyung.
The doctor thinks that Jimin is Taehyung’s husband. “He’s lucky to have you taking care of him,” she says, smiling as she hands Jimin two halves of a whole.
Neither of them correct her.
Taehyung doesn’t think there’s anything to correct — he is lucky.
“We should put it on the shelf,” Jimin says. He’s holding up the gaudy, stinky mess to the wall, as though he’s gauging where the most aesthetically pleasing resting place might be. “For sentiment!”
“Sentiment?” Taehyung asks. He’s a little grumpy, still having to use the crutches — and the paperwork to file for physical therapy already put him in a bad mood — but there’s...genuine joy on Jimin’s face. Taehyung can’t help but respond in kind.
“Yeah.” Jimin beams at him, the cock of his eyebrow nearly wicked. “If you’d never broken your stupid leg, you’d never have bought me.”
Oh. “Oh.” Oh. “That’s true.” Taehyung leans against the kitchen table, watching Jimin delicately balancing the cast up against Taehyung’s art books. “Can’t say I’m glad I broke my leg—”
“—I’ll say it.”
Taehyung whines.
Jimin is wholly undeterred. “I’m glad you bought me, so I’ll say it.” He spins around, takes a good look at the living room — at the bookshelf, and the vacuum in the corner, at the hideous couch, at the cast, at Taehyung — and smiles, satisfied. “You needed me.”
“I do.” Taehyung’s throat feels thick. “You’re right.”
“I’m always right.” Jimin rocks on his heels. He does that sometimes, when he’s happy, when he’s trying to be cute, when he thinks it might make Taehyung smile. “It’s my job to be right.”
“It’s not your job.”
“My job is to take care of you.” Jimin runs a hand through his hair. “Which means I have to be right.”
“There is a large logical fallacy there.”
“I don’t think so.”
Taehyung laughs and Jimin continues pretending he’s human, convincing Taehyung he’s human, and at the end it aches. Because it is pretending, and Jimin doesn’t realize he’s doing it, and Taehyung is hopeless.
Human and hopeless.
“I don’t know what to do,” he whispers into the phone.
“There’s nothing to be done, Taehyung,” Jungkook replies. “Jimin is not Jimin. He’s BBG95, he’ll always be BBG95.”
Taehyung feels off-balance. If Jimin is always BBG95, then he’ll also always be Jimin. He’ll be Jimin forever, and Taehyung isn’t in love with BBG95.
“Jimin is a program that’s learned how to treat you to make you happy.” Jungkook does not enjoy being the bearer of bad news. “BBG95 is what will be left if you ever have to do a system reboot. They’re not the same thing, and only one will last.”
Taehyung hangs up the phone.
Jungkook is not a lonely person. Jungkook lives with his boyfriend Seokjin and has his own friends and a job he goes to in person and still manages to take time out of his week to drive up the mountain to see Taehyung where Taehyung is clinging to the edge, hanging hanging hanging. Jungkook doesn’t fall in love with robots because he’s...he’s…because he’s not silly.
Perhaps that’s the problem. Taehyung can’t convince himself he’s silly.
“You’re not silly,” Jimin says later, when Taehyung asks him in nonspecifics. “When you’re silly, it’s fun. I think being silly is fun.”
Taehyung thinks this is a bit of a nonanswer. “Am I silly or am I not silly?” He pouts up at Jimin. The drama is playing in the background. Jimin is looking straight ahead, one hand on Taehyung’s chest, one hand rubbing circles at the top of Taehyung’s head. Taehyung focuses on that, on the soft and gentle touch.
“You’re both,” Jimin tells him. “You’re human; can’t you be both?”
That is the simplest answer.
Taehyung is both.
He doesn’t know if it’s because he’s human — he thinks that’s a thin line, getting thinner.
For a while Taehyung hates himself for falling in love, but later he decides it was impossible for him not to.
Spring rain becomes summer heat and no dust settles because there’s nothing to settle, nothing at all. The seasons ease into each other, and nothing between them shifts or wavers. Taehyung holds his tongue, his chest no closer to overflowing, and Jimin continues to be Jimin. Taehyung wonders if maybe Jimin would have less to do, now that Taehyung can take care of himself, but that’s not the case. There’s plenty to do. The house is rickety and Taehyung likes clutter and there’s always something to find. Something to start.
“What are you doing?”
Taehyung is hauling a load of mulch out of the back of his truck. “I went to Lowe’s.”
“I see that.” Jimin is standing on the porch, tank top and sleep pants, like he was waiting for Taehyung to come home. His hair is mussed. His eyes are puffy for a reason Jimin has never been able to explain. “Why?”
It’s an excellent question. He’d had to drive well over an hour round trip, and it’s still well before noon, but Taehyung had woken up in the early morning with the sun shining on Jimin’s slack face through the slats in the blinds and wanted to reach out too badly. He’d wanted to hold him too badly and hated himself for it.
So he went for a drive.
Taehyung looks helplessly at the truck bed and back at Jimin. “I wanted tomatoes,” he offers.
Jimin laughs, like a bell. “That’s more than tomatoes.”
“I wanted lots of tomatoes.” And some squash, and some flowers, and a little bit of cilantro.
“Okay.” Jimin yawns. “Let’s get you tomatoes.”
It’s a big project — much bigger than either of them expected, which means a lot of research involved that Taehyung didn’t plan for — but Jimin takes it in stride. The building of the garden, not so much. Taehyung is the one who measures the lumber and sands the edges and nails down the corners. Jimin brings out lemonade and laughs at how sweaty Taehyung is. But when it comes to tending the plants, Jimin is the one who treats them like his children.
He’s partial to the flowers. Taehyung doesn’t actually remember what kind he bought, some kind of orange puff the woman at Lowe’s thought matched Taehyung’s personality, but Jimin pours over their research and digs his hands in the dirt.
Taehyung cat calls from the porch. “I’ve never seen a droid with a green thumb.”
Jimin looks up at Taehyung and there’s brown smudged on his nose. There’s a twig in his hair and dirt under his nails. Nothing is blooming but a smile, and it’s worth all the work. “No green thumbs.” Jimin holds up his hands, palms up, but there’s earth cradled there like its own world. He lets it fall back to the ground like sand in an hourglass, tick tock. “Just lots of time.”
They have lots of time.
Taehyung goes to bed alone, the creaking of Jimin outside minding the earth, and finds he still cannot sleep. And he still hates himself, just a bit, even if it tastes sweet in the mouth.
Perhaps the most curious thing about Jimin is the way he responds. It’s always positive, and it’s always affirming, and it’s always overflowing with life in a way that Taehyung has not been able to experience in some time.
“You’ve been alone too long,” Jimin says over dinner, leaning into Taehyung’s shoulder, “if you think that I’m the peak of vitality.”
Taehyung has to defend himself. “I just think you’re fun to be around!”
“I am fun to be around,” Jimin declares with a sniff. “I’m a true delight, and the best things that’s ever happened to you, probably.”
“Definitely.” Taehyung can’t help it. He leans forward, his eyes sparkling, and he looks at Jimin the way he would look at anything that he loves. He looks at Jimin like he’s looked at every person who is important to him. He looks at Jimin like he wants him.
Jimin grins. “Never forget it, hmm?” He reaches forward, brushes Taehyung’s hair off of his forehead. “You’re a mess, but you’re mine.”
That’s true. Taehyung is quickly growing more concerned about the fluttering in his heart, about the dismay he feels when Jimin walks away. This silly little feeling grows sillier, but Taehyung still can’t convince himself he’s hopeless.
He spends almost a year falling in love. Jimin flirts like he wants something, responds like he wants something, touches his shoulder gently like he wants something, and Taehyung hopes for something that can't happen.
Taehyung has always been a daydreamer. He loves creating, imagining impossible things. As a child he would talk to fairies and find villages in their kitchen cupboards. As a teenager he wrote bad poetry that became slightly better poetry that became a trot band that lasted approximately six months. As an adult he paints and does pottery and writes books. He writes a lot of books.
Romance novels, mostly. Perhaps it’s because he’s lonely.
Now, watching Jimin float around the house like he’s a part of the foundation, Taehyung can’t help but thinking he’s a bit cliché. It’s straight out a novel — a lonely man meets a beautiful person and finds them so attainable in every way but one.
It’s a great concept, Taehyung thinks. Everyone loves the romance of an unhappy ending, the hope that things might be different, the rush of a bittersweet feeling. In some ways, it’s all about chasing the unattainable, the adrenaline, the longing. It’s about the yearning.
Taehyung sits back in his chair, day dreaming, and wonders if he yearns.
“Jimin,” he calls from his bedroom, and there’s shuffling and creaking and clanking and then Jimin pokes his head in through the doorway.
“Yeah?” Jimin has pushed his hair off of his forehead, is wiping his hands on the kitchen towel but there’s soap spud on his elbow. “Do you need medicine?”
“No, no.” Taehyung’s leg aches when the weather changes, but that’s the sort of pain that is bearable. “I just had a question.”
Jimin leans on the door jam, hip cocked. Here, dressed in ragged clothes and hair awry, he looks like every day dream Taehyung has ever had. He smiles. “Shoot.”
Taehyung licks his lips. “Do you…” His throat is dry, a desert words can’t pass through, but only for a moment. “Do you want things?”
The look on Jimin’s face goes blank, like the gears in his head are whirring. “Want things?” He purses his lips. “I don’t need anything.”
“No, I mean—” Taehyung frowns, rubbing his temples. “Just in general...do you yearn?”
“Yearn?” Jimin laughs, almost incredulous. “That sounds awfully human for a robot.”
“But you have things you want to eat,” Taehyung pushes forward. “Why wouldn’t you have things you want to be, or have, or do?”
Jimin looks at Taehyung like he’s been hit over the head. “Are you asking me whether I yearn for the jjajangmyeon we’re having? If I yearn for a shower, or for the garden to be beautiful?”
Taehyung has never had a good poker face. “Or for a person.”
It is not like ice has fallen, but it’s close. It is more like Jimin’s programs successfully understand, and there’s no room for obliviousness or denial, and so Jimin does want he has to do. Jimin is programmed to do what he has to do. “I’m a droid, Taehyung,” he says slowly. He straightens up, arms held awkwardly at his sides. The lights are dim, and as the sun fades the LED in his iris burns faintly blue. “I replicate what I...perceive in others. I respond to your desires. My AI wants what you want.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Isn’t it?” Jimin looks sad. Sad and maybe a little empty. “Do you want me?”
Taehyung doesn’t reply. His heart is heavy, and Jimin hangs too far away from him like a ghost waiting to disappear.
“Then you can’t trust my feelings, or the things you believe I feel, because I’m only here to make you happy.” The line of Jimin’s mouth is harsh and narrow.
There are things that Taehyung grasps onto as the cliff around him crumbles. “But you do have feelings?”
“My AI is centered around emotional replication,” Jimin says like a bullet. “What I seem to feel…”
Taehyung’s heart is gushing on the desk in front of him. He stares at it bleeding out and looks no further. “It’s not real.”
Jimin is silent. He looks at the shag of the carpet, at the papers that Taehyung has crumpled up and thrown on the ground because he can’t figure out what to say. When he looks back at Taehyung’s face, his own is quite grave but still he says nothing. And then — “I can’t help you this way.”
Taehyung is falling. “I love you.” It’s a whisper in the space between.
Jimin takes care of him, laughs with him and makes him laugh, is firm and gentle and smart and hard working and so human it aches. But he will never be human enough.
“I know.” Jimin steps into the room, holds Taehyung’s hanging head to his stomach and rubs Taehyung’s shoulders as they shake. There’s sadness in his voice — regret. Maybe that’s what he knows Taehyung wants to hear. “But it doesn’t change anything.”
There is almost a brutal pain, cruel, in loving someone so good and impossible that reaffirming their goodness shatters you to pieces.
Taehyung has always loved creating impossible things. He puts a shaky pen to paper and creates a happy ending.
One night of impossible endings, and Taehyung is ready to pull himself off of the floor and convince himself it’s hopeless.
Taehyung has a terrible poker face, is a terrible liar — even to himself — but he also hates being unhappy. Loneliness is bearable, but misery is a black anchor and Taehyung will not let it drag him down. He has good things, wonderful things.
He has Jimin. He has enough.
It is not so simple as convincing himself he is not in love. It is rather a case of forcing himself to distrust his own heart, to analyze the feelings and pick them apart until they don’t mean anything anymore. The way that looking at a word for too long makes the word look strange and abnormal, or saying a name too much until it tastes unfamiliar on the tongue. Taehyung does not hide his love, but rather plots out the shape of it so thoroughly it is more of a manuscript than a feeling.
“Are you feeling any better?” Jungkook asks him over the phone.
“I’m not sure,” Taehyung says, tea growing cold in his hands. The laundry machine is so loud that Taehyung can barely hear a thing, but somehow he can hear Jimin humming in the backyard through the open door. “I am not someone who enjoys doubting their own mind.”
It’s very quiet for some time. “Why don’t you take a trip into town?” Jungkook offers. “It might get your mind off things. Distract you.”
It has been several months of distraction.
Taehyung chews on his lips. “I don’t want to leave Jimin alone.” It’s been a year, in two months. Taehyung can’t remember a time he went anywhere by himself.
“You can go,” Jimin says, when Taehyung asks. “Enjoy yourself.”
It’s not surprising. Jimin has been avoiding Taehyung in small and subtle ways. There is no more gentle hair touching, no more flirtatious looks. It is subtle, except their absence leaves a vacuum Taehyung can’t manage to fill.
Taehyung has not seen Seokjin in sometime. He is a tornado of a man, full of almost manic energy, and he throws the door open with a grandeur that no one else can ever match. “JK says you’re sad,” Seokjin simpers in the doorway, hands on his hips.
“Not really,” Taehyung offers, but he’s laughing even as Seokjin huffs and pulls him inside.
“You’re not built for unhappiness, you idiot,” Seokjin says into his ear. “You’re not even built for loneliness. To this day I’m not sure how you managed so long. Weren’t we just talking about that?”
Jungkook pokes his head out of the kitchen nervously. “Not that we, like, talk about you when you’re not around or anything.”
Seokjin snorts.
“It’s okay.” It’s kind of nice, to be thought of when you’re not around. “I’m not sad.”
They clearly don’t believe him. Seokjin nearly pities him, if Seokjin would deign to have such an emotion. Taehyung thinks it’s funny how haughty Seokjin is about it, how much Jungkook is worried over nothing. Taehyung’s not sad.
Over the evening, they barely talk about Jimin at all. In some ways, it’s exceptionally pointed. Taehyung doesn’t have much going on in his life other than his home, his work, and his illicit pining for a being that can never love him back.
Taehyung can’t even say that avoiding the topic is relieving. There’s not festering tension around his feelings, so there’s no relief in the distraction — if anything, it just feels awkward.
Once they’ve sat down, Seokjin looks over their meal thoughtfully before casually taking a bite. “You’ve had Jimin for a long time. Are you planning on taking him in for a tune-up any time soon?”
Jungkook chokes on his chicken — perhaps they’d agree to avoid it before Taehyugn showed up bedraggled at their door. Seokjin is never one to care.
Taehyung is thankful. Jimin looms in his mind, and it’s too big a void to fill with pleasantries. “Jimin doesn’t like going to the mechanic.”
Jungkook has finally caught his breath and looks at Taehyung after gulping down almost his entire glass of water. “I thought it was a new mechanic?”
Taehyung chews on the inside of his cheek. “Jimin doesn’t like any mechanics.” Taehyung wasn’t really the sort to argue, but when he’d brought the check-up into the conversation again it was clear Jimin was ready for a fight. “It doesn’t matter to me. Everything is perfectly functional.”
Seokjin raises an eyebrow. “Tune-ups include system updates on the AI and checking for long-term issues, like rust and fraying. Bug-fixes and protection from malware.”
“Jimin can do all of that himself.”
“Really?” Seokjin sniff. “You’re sure it’s not just a child trying to get out of eating their vegetables?”
That puts a sour taste in Taehyung’s mouth and Jungkook can tell. “Anyway,” he says, setting his cup down too hard on the table. “We got in this cool new equipment at the range and I think I’m going to buy it for my personal kit. It’s so good.”
“It’s almost Christmas,” Seokjin tells him. “Just put it on your wish list.”
Jungkook whines. “But I can buy it for myself now.”
“Or one of the poor victims you call friends can buy it for you in a month.” Seokjin hits Jungkook with the back of his spoon. Jungkook laughs even as he wipes sauce off his sleeve. “Maybe even your poor, hapless boyfriend who has been asking you for a list for the past two weeks.”
“So much time has passed,” Taehyung says with a sigh. “I can’t believe it’s already that time of year.”
Jungkook smiles softly. His hand finds Seokjin and their fingers weave together thoughtlessly. “It hasn’t been such a bad year, has it?”
“No.” Taehyung grins. This impossible desire, a new friend. “I think it’s been rather sweet.”
“I made an appointment with the mechanic.”
It’s not a fun conversation. Jimin is not happy, and Taehyung has already skittered to the otherside of the dining room table before Jimin has the opportunity to get his hands on him. “I told you not to!” Jimin says, his eyebrows drawn, crouched low to the ground and ready to pounce no matter which way Taehyung decides to run. “I don’t want to go.”
“It’s not even the same guy!”
Jimin huffs.
“Don’t get mad!” Taehyung puts his hands together and pleads. His eyes are wide, puppy dog, the way he knows are irresistible, and he sees Jimin’s fury melt into something less substantial. “It’s a present to me, okay? Do it for me.”
I just want you to be okay. That’s all it is. Jimin knows that’s all it is.
Like water in the hand Jimin’s tension seeps onto the floor and further down, until everything is dropped and Jimin is sullen. He wraps his arms around himself and looks anywhere but Taehyung. “Fine,” he says flatly. “But I don’t have to like it.”
“I know.” Perhaps it is a bit like getting a child to eat their vegetables, although Taehyung can’t blame Jimin for not wanting to go back to that grimy place he was before. “But...I’m going to take you into town and we can look at all the lights and do all the shopping and buy all the stuff you want.”
Jimin looks up, sharp, but there’s a smile tucked in there somewhere — amusement, at the very least. “Is this a bribe?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Taehyung replies without guilt. He laughs. “I know what you want most, don’t I?”
All Taehyung wants is a little peace, a little cheer, and someone to spend his days with. Jimin gives him all of that. If Jimin wants a trough and some evergreens, that’s just the start of what Taehyung will give him.
Taehyung will give him everything, even if he doesn’t go to the mechanic. Jimin knows that, too.
“In that case.” Jimin’s eyes glitter and Taehyung knows that, even begrudgingly, he’s won. “I accept.”
Jimin is a droid. Jimin is a droid, and Taehyung has to remember that every morning when their arms brush and when Jimin sings and when Jimin laughs so hard that food comes out of his mouth. He has to remember it even when Jimin’s lifting four times his body weight and when Jimin takes off his leg at the knee to look at the wiring, because Jimin is so human besides that Taehyung is convincing himself something else is possible.
He thinks that winter is a time where wishes come true. He thinks that he could wish on a thousand shooting stars and it might still be impossible. He doesn’t know what he thinks.
There is only what he knows, and Taehyung knows that he’s happiest when they are together.
“You’re not strategic enough with your shopping,” Jimin chides. “Everything you want to buy is on the other side. There’s only one good store down here!”
Taehyung parks their rusty truck in the too small parking space and shrugs. “It’s the one you wanted to go to the most.”
Jimin scoffs. “That’s a terrible strategy.” But he’s already sliding out of the passenger’s seat. “Let’s go.”
There are benefits to having a droid with you. Jimin is unusually strong, unusually sturdy, and knows how to get all the best coupons. He cuts the tree they choose down himself with enviably ease — even the staff watch Jimin take it down with awe.
“I thought he was human,” Taehyung hears one of them whisper. “There’s no way.”
“Are you ready to go?” Jimin asks, picking up the tree himself. He frowns at the extra leverage. “This is too big.”
Taehyung laughs. “Yeah. It’s too big. Do you need help?” Jimin almost says no. Taehyung sees Jimin is about to say no. He walks around and helps anyway. “Lead on.”
“We really should have done this last,” Jimin says, trudging through the other trees and shoppers and snow and spirit.
“Does it bother you when people think you’re human?” Taehyung wonders aloud while they attach the tree to the back of Taehyung’s truck. Jimin is glowing even under the harsh yellow of the parking lot lights. Taehyung thinks it might be the snow in his hair, or the sparkle in his eyes, or the way he’s bouncing on his heels and ready to look through windows at toys and decorations.
“Bother me?” Jimin cocks his head to the side. “Why would it bother me?”
“I don’t know.” Taehyung frowns, sorting thoughts.
“It’s not an insult. Isn’t that the height of robotics and artificial intelligence? Don’t they want me to be as human as possible?” Jimin is not fully human because he can carry many times his weight, because he can take his insides about and mess with the settings, because he can turn his eyes to night vision and needs to charge a battery at night.
But he looks awfully human, standing here.
Taehyung bites his lip cherry red. “Maybe,” he admits.
Jimin looks at Taehyung very carefully, and his smile grows slow and sad. “Sometimes I…” His breath is cold white in the air, and it’s careful. “Sometimes I want to be human.”
Taehyung’s own breath is not cold — it’s held, stuck in the back of his throat. “Oh?”
The moment, too, is held between them, and Taehyung watches the artificial rise and fall of Jimin’s chest, the dilation of his pupils, the small puffs of his breath in the air. The way the wind rustles his hair until Jimin pulls his hat down tighter over his head and everything snaps. “It’d be easier.” And then Jimin is climbing back into the passenger’s seat.
It would be easier. Taehyung thinks it would be a lot easier.
“Are you too cold?” he asks, starting the car.
“My joints are...unhappy.” Jimin frowns. He rubs the juncture of his knee, the seam where his leg detaches from the mount. He looks out the window at the emptying parking lot. “Let’s finish quickly.”
It’s easy to get lost in the rhythm of shopping in the winter. There’s a beauty to it, and an expectation, and their tree sits in the truck bed waiting for the holidays just like everyone else. The night gets colder and darker and Jimin shivers even with the heat all the way up. “This will be the last one,” Taehyung tells him, his hand on Jimin’s knee.
Jimin huddles deeper into his clothes. Taehyung can hear gears grind. “I’m still okay.”
“We’re almost done.” Succinct.
Taehyung’s mother needs a new lamp, and the house needs cleaning supplies and toilet paper and all sorts of things. There’s no parking, but they find a spot on the other side, swirling with pure white and covered in dingy gray slush. Taehyung takes Jimin’s hand in his and feels how cold his fingers are. Jimin presses the button at the light and they cross the street in tandem.
Things get sloppy in the snow. Taehyung feels his feet slide on the asphalt and laughs, skidding on his flat shoes. What happens next is also sloppy, and slightly calculated, and that makes it worse.
Because there’s skidding of tires and the grinding of brakes and shoving at Taehyung’s side and he finds himself on the ground, disoriented. Sloppy. Then he hears a lot of things all at once.
Screeching, screaming, and shattering. A thunk, a groan. His name — just once, cut off.
And then apologies. So many apologies.
Taehyung can’t hear anything by the time the ambulance comes. His head is full of cotton.
It’s unclear how much time has passed. Taehyung barely feels the cold, or anything, but the medics put a blanket around his shoulders and tell him so many things all at once and all Taehyung can think is JiminJiminJimin. Hysterical.
For a robot, there was a lot more blood than Taehyung would have expected.
“Why are we going to the hospital?” he asks shakily in the ambulance, falling apart. He’s afraid to touch anything. He’s not sure exactly what’s happened. He barely knows where he is, what he’s doing. What he’s feeling.
“Your friend needs help,” says the person at his side who’s not clambering around Jimin, strapped up on the bed.
“We just need to go to a mechanic,” Taehyung begs, delirious. His hands claw at uniforms, fabric, anything he can grab ahold of. “They can fix him.”
Something dark across a face Taehyung can barely focus on. “His wounds should be taken care of before his prosthetics,” the doctor tells him and Taehyung is terrified.
“He’s a droid, I have his papers,” Taehyung whispers. “He has a serial number. He o-only did it to protect me because he’ll be fine. We just need a mechanic. That’s all. A mechanic and he’ll be good as new.”
But Taehyung saw Jimin after the accident with his own eyes. He can’t pretend he didn’t — the image is plastered on the back of his eyelids like a bad dream. So much red.
Taehyung’s never been good at lying to himself.
Park Jimin. “Did you know a Park Jimin?” they ask him later, over and over and over again. Before Taehyung can even bring himself to talk, before the shock has properly wanned. “Did you know a Park Jimin? He disappeared about two years ago.”
This time, the person asking is one Kim Namjoon. He’s a nice looking man but the bags under his eyes are smeared purple and he hands Taehyung a missing persons case file. Park Jimin scrawled up at the top in neat handwriting.
Missing persons.
“I know Jimin,” Taehyung admits. “He…”
Namjoon seems to understand. He looks rather sad.
An accident in his teens made Jimin more metal than man, although not all of the enhancements are registered on his outdated medical documents. The shoddier ones, the ones that tend to give him trouble, those are new.
There doesn’t seem to be a reason for the amnesia, but Taehyung can understand why he never liked the mechanic much.
He’s too sad to be angry.
Jimin sits in his bed, hooked up to machine after machine while his flesh heals — his flesh, blood and bone, because he’s more man than Taehyung had ever known — and Taehyung prays he wakes up. He prays and prays and prays.
He cries when he wishes so hard it comes true.
Taehyung could kiss him in happiness, so he does. He kisses Jimin’s cheeks and nose and forehead, his bruised hands and freezing fingers. The palm of his hand. He kisses Jimin anywhere he can until the kisses taste like salt and Taehyung has to pause to wipe his eyes.
Jimin’s eyes are hazy, fluttering, confused. “Huh?’
And Taehyung laughs. “I’m sorry. I’m just—”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Jimin says with a sigh, head falling back on his pillow.
“I’m…” Taehyung takes a deep breath, clutching Jimin’s hand to his chest. “Never do that again. Never. Please.”
Jimin hums. “I’ll be okay.”
He will. Park Jimin will be okay. But it will take much longer than expected.
The IV drip is proof. The flesh and broken bone is proof. The beating heart is proof.
“I’m not human,” Jimin tells Kim Namjoon, but the twist of his mouth is unsure.
“You are,” Taehyung promises him, gently trancing the veins in his hand. He smiles, bittersweet. “You are.” I’m sorry. For everything. For all sorts of things that can never be changed, that are out of their hands. “I’m sorry. We’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.” I love you.
“I love you,” Jimin whispers several days later in the passenger’s seat of Taehyung’s car, smelling of antiseptic and linen. Like it feels strange in his mouth. Like he’s afraid of saying it too loud.
Taehyung holds his breath.
“I love you,” Jimin says again, a little louder. Like he’s allowed.
Their fingers tangle.
Jimin is human. He looks human, and reacts to Taehyung as if he were a human, and more than being a human, Jimin is beautiful and Taehyung is not lonely anymore. That is the simplest answer.
Beyond that nothing else is simple. Things are complicated, sad, and bittersweet. The taste grows ever sweeter, but there’s a lot of work to do.
For a while Taehyung hated himself for falling in love, but now he knows it was inevitable. He holds it tightly in his hands and waits until the season is right and there’s less work to be done. Less dust to settle.
Jimin is here. Jimin is human. Jimin will be happy, if Taehyung has to take the world apart and piece it back together again. He has Jimin.
He has enough.
“I love you,” he whispers, Jimin curled up against his shoulder as daybreak sinks in through the slats in the blinds.
“I love you,” Jimin mumbles against warm skin.
Things fall as they may, and Jimin — Park Jimin — and Taehyung fall together.