Chapter Text
Year 2050
"Maybe you're all I have."
Taehyung breathes slowly in the nighttime even as the city revs to life around them. Lights so bright, Seokjin wonders if night and day truly trade places around them as they lay there. It would be just like the city to play tricks on the waking, to steal daylight from under sleeping bodies.
It's just an aura of a thing, after all. Taehyung sticks to the insides of Seokjin's eyelids like an afterimage seared in. The light from their window slashes across Taehyung's sleeping face in technicolor. Red, blue, green, circling through a flash pattern over and over as Seokjin looks on, the hand splayed across Taehyung's bare chest acting to count his breaths. Outside the window, someone shouts something unintelligible. Someone else shouts something garbled back, and throws something for good measure so that the hollow sound of metal coming apart against limestone carries up to them. Taehyung flinches in his sleep and turns further into the cover of Seokjin's arm beneath his head. Seokjin sighs and threads his fingers into Taehyung's hair. It's grown shaggy at the back, dark roots sprouting at his crown and the ends still a blonde so light it looks iridescent under the sliver of neon creeping in.
"Maybe you're all I have," Seokjin whispers again when he's sure Taehyung's still asleep. He's warm in Seokjin's arms, hot to the touch when Seokjin rests his palm on the naked skin of his waist and lets his thumb rub circles into his side. Maybe that's enough.
☽
Morning brings little change to the metropolis. The skyscrapers go dark. They take the harsh red glow of the night with them, but the gray expanse of the daytime sky brings little relief to the crisscross of alleys below. The street level shops keep their night colors on, blinking fluorescent in the dawn. Seokjin always wakes in time to catch the change over. In the mornings, he climbs the ten flights to the rooftop with slow and steady steps. He waits by the ledge, lays his arms out on the concrete and stares out at the metropolis in silence. There's a feeling like static in his limbs and lungs, like his body is kickstarting itself back awake. Too little sleep, Taehyung would say to him. Seokjin frowns, stubs out the cigarette he'd lit as soon as he got his foot through the steel trap of a door, even though he's hardly taken a drag since coming up. Below, the streets and back alleys glow pink and blue. Shops are opening up again - the ones that deigned to close at all - and the night haunts are turning over from their seedier operations. There, in the far corner of a back alley three streets down, is the bar Seokjin had spent most of last night in before Taehyung had half-dragged him back to his flat. The scarlet cast of the night is gone, turned green in the day as the morning crew rolls in to start peddling quick-baked breads. Something about the gesture sets laughter boiling in Seokjin's chest. The memory is like something out of another lifetime. Seokjin, pressed navy suit and high-shine loafers, briefcase in hand, stopping in at his favorite bakery for egg tarts on his way to work. He wonders who has the time for bread and butter, for gray mornings and briefcases. Above the city, the sky just barely lightens, turns to slate when Seokjin turns his gaze to it. Behind the smog cover, he sees the cold remnants of the dead sun. Fragmented silver and gold, suspended above them like a memory just vivid enough to seem real. Sometimes Seokjin thinks he can still feel its heat on his skin. Sometimes he turns his palms up to the sky just to try.
Below him, the city turns over in its bed. Taehyung is likely stirring awake, hands spreading over the empty space in his bed like they always do. Seokjin pulls out another cigarette and taps the filter on the raised ledge. He puts it back in the beat up metal holder he keeps in his back pocket. He sets his back to the city, to the shadows of the skyline sinking into the icy daylight.
☽
Taehyung is gone when he gets back to his flat, sheets still rumpled where he'd been twisted up in them. Seokjin scoffs at that before straightening them out. He folds up his blanket, the cotton thin in his hands, and lays it gently on top before gathering his own things for the day ahead.
It's not unusual for Taehyung to disappear the moment Seokjin's back is turned. Daylight brings new troubles to the city, and trouble brings new funds through their pipeline. At least, that's what Seokjin makes of it - Taehyung seems to genuinely think he can pick the city back up off its feet one cold case at a time. Seokjin thinks his optimism fell apart with the sun.
Seokjin watches gray light stream in through the blinds, dust dancing in the beams. If he closes his eyes, he can pretend the light feels warm on his palms, that the motes are dancing through a fresh slice of sunlight the way they once did in a childhood that feels lifetimes away. His hands move automatically, chasing after the motes like he can feel something of what they used to be through the skin of his hands. The light feels cold. It’s unsurprising and disconcerting all at once. Seokjin sighs and then, for posterity’s sake, slides his feet out of his house slippers and presses his bare feet to the floor. Centimeter by centimeter, pressing firm, and a quiet laugh escapes him when it's still warm, the building’s ancient heating system still whirring to life beneath them. All things considered, he supposes that this small warmth, at least, is a blessing.
Seokjin sticks his feet back into his slippers and starts shuffling through his usual morning routine. Goes through his motions, rakes his hands through dark locks of hair and splashes cool water onto his face. In the mirror, his reflection stares back, pale and watery as his fingertips prod at the sensitive skin under his eyes. In the kitchen, he can hear the soft whoosh of water boiling in the pot on his stove. He finishes up, walks over to his kitchen counter and pulls a mug and a jar of instant coffee from his cupboards. Steam rises up in slow clouds as he works the powdered grinds with his spoon.
The flat feels smaller without Taehyung in it. Quiet in the dull morning light, the walls cinching in around him as he sips on the bitter coffee in his cup, the ceramic returning warmth to his fingertips. The quiet has a way of falling heavy on his shoulders. In some ways, the solitude is cacophonous in its silence, like every bit of neon luminescence has picked up sound and fire. Seokjin knows that wherever Taehyung is in the city, he’s trying his best to go about his day without lingering on Seokjin’s plans - or lack thereof. Plausible deniability, Taehyung will joke later at night, but there’s no real humor in it beyond the little laugh he injects into his words. Kim Taehyung, always straight-laced and eager, sitting in the tiny shoebox of an office he’d managed to nab with the last of his savings when they’d first arrived in New Seoul. Kim Taehyung, who had stitched himself together enough to score a private investigator’s license, who would take any case in the city and would solve it, so long as the person seeking him out was willing to stay on record about it. This Taehyung doesn’t want to know what Seokjin does in the underbelly of the city, what cases or odd jobs he takes in hard cash that keep him rumbling through the street into the late hours of the night.
Seokjin shrugs on his jacket, the leather soft and smelling faintly of smoke and cold air, and makes his way out the door and down the stairs. It sits comfortably on his broad shoulders, clinging to him like the shadow of a friend. Taehyung has always loved this jacket a little more than Seokjin himself, if he’s honest, though he would hardly be one to say as much. But Taehyung has a way of showing without saying, of letting his fingers hook into Seokjin’s pockets even as he chastises him, of letting his palms rest on Seokjin’s waist a little too long even as he leans away.
Seokjin pauses on the last step. That’s enough of that, he thinks. His own hand comes down on his hip, squeezes into the flesh there. Enough. Seokjin sets rules for himself, some edge of true routine in the everyday guesswork. He spends his days working whatever jobs he can pick up at the market, works his fingers ‘til they’re aching in the icy light, leaves stretched and tumbled through the daily crowds. When the last fragments of the broken sun start to fade to a new darkness, he wanders the same alleys, shakes hands with familiar faces and stays careful of the streetlights. Swings by the same old shops to pick up necessities, swings by Suran’s hole-in-the-wall pub to pick up tips.
Beneath all that, he determinedly does not think of Taehyung. He does not linger on Taehyung sitting alone in his office working long days, slinking around in the dark working cases late into the night without backup. If he spares one thought, it’s this alone: that Taehyung does not want to think of him like this creature of the night. That, in the end, they exist to each other only in the slivers of neon falling across their bed at the end of the night. Seokjin’s bed, really, and Taehyung’s continued unfailing presence following him home.
So, Seokjin goes through the motions of the day. Today, he’s picked up spare shifts at a grocer’s, working stock in the back room and looking the other way when he spots some of the younger kids dropping packets of sugar or flour and mysteriously not picking them up again. He finishes his tasks in silence, bows quietly when the clerk at the counter hands him a sleeve of wrinkled notes as the shadows grow longer on the streets outside their windows. Seokjin inclines his head once more as he tucks the envelope into the pocket sewn into the lining of his jacket, and then strolls out into the night-darkened street. The lights have brightened during his time in the shop, red and green neons glaring down at him as he makes his way over to Suran’s around the bend. The shop windows on the street alternate between dimly-lit, bustling caverns of life and shuttered blankness. Seokjin’s feet move wholly of their own accord, the path to the pub well-worn over the past few years. He knows this pattern well - stumbling in and catching Suran leaning over the counter with a bright smile on her face and her light blue hair coming down long and wild around her as she turns to him, his easy laugh and the quick call of, “Suran noona! What have you got for me tonight?” On any other night, she would wave him over, slip him a card with someone’s name on it. Just a name, nothing more, and a nod to the back room where they would inevitably be waiting to explain what they need from him.
And all the while, Seokjin would not think of Taehyung.
Tonight, Seokjin turns the corner to Suran’s street, lets his hand rest on the door handle as he peeks in through her window, and freezes. Suran catches his gaze through the thick glass, her eyes going a little too wide and her smile a little too bright as she shakes her head almost imperceptibly. Seokjin watches her lean forward across the counter, just like any other night, except for who she has sitting in front of her. The man sitting in her favorite seat feels a little unreal in the moment. He’s shorter, but his legs are long as they press into the barstool, his full body bending with laughter at something Suran’s said. When he throws his head back, Seokjin catches the sharp line of his jaw and the glint of silver in his ears contrasting with the pink of his hair. His hand reaches out to pat at Suran’s hand, rings shimmering where they catch the bar lights.
Suddenly, all Seokjin can think about is Taehyung. Because sitting there, mouthing something to Suran around the rim of a glass filled to the brim with dark liquid and a surreally amused tilt of his lips, is Park Jimin.
Seokjin keeps staring for a moment longer, even when Suran pointedly looks away. Then, he turns back from her door and keeps walking, letting his feet take him down to the next street and the next bar.