Chapter Text
The opening act has just gone onstage, there are forty-five minutes until the start of the main show, and Jimin is approximately another two from the world’s most tightly-contained nuclear meltdown, shuttered tight but still raging through all five-feet-eight-inches of him. He’s a professional, after all. He’s got no choice but to maintain his composure, even in a room full of people who really seem as calm as Jimin is pretending to be.
Twenty-five percent of their band is missing, and the remaining three members of dys/EASE can’t seem to be bothered about it. Jimin had managed to get them through hair and makeup with minimal difficulty, at least, and now they’re lounging around the greenroom in the contrasting mix of leather and lace that had looked more questionable on the racks this morning than it now did on the devastatingly-handsome men loitering in his peripheral. Their drummer, a tall, broad motherfucker whose massive arms and dark stare were undercut only by his bubblegum pink hair (“I lost a bet” had almost the first he told Jimin and Hoseok after his name, Namjoon), now sits on the couch scrolling through his Instagram and Twitter feeds without a single glance up. Yoongi, their keyboardist and second guitar sits on the opposite end, legs tucked up underneath himself and black kohl-lined eyes closed serenely as he zones out to the headphones tucked securely over his ears. Their difference in size is almost comical, and judging from the look Hoseok had shot him when the smaller one had situated himself on the loveseat after they’d finished his look, he had thought the same thing. The third in their current trio is responsible for most of the idle noise filling the space at the moment—for now, Jungkook has swapped his lead guitar for the acoustic across his lap, and he splits his time between strumming it half-attentively and ensnaring unwitting staff members in animated conversations that only he seems really engaged in.
Perhaps it’s because said staff members are the only ones around who, like Jimin, are genuinely concerned by the fact that there’s supposed to be four people in this band dressed, made up, and ready to go on stage in a laughably small amount of time. Even the manager in charge, a suit-clad man with a face probably better suited to beauty pageants than managing moody-sounding alternative rockstars, stands in the corner with relaxed shoulders topping his immaculate posture as he laughs into the phone at his ear.
“Says he got lost on his walk,” he informs the other three with an amused shake of his head once he hangs up a moment later. Jungkook’s balm-tinted lips spread into a wry smile that shows off straight rows of pearly teeth. The expression reminds Jimin vaguely of a bunny, completely at odds with the dark red shadow he’d politely asked Jimin to pack around his eyes and diffuse up to his pierced eyebrow. All three of them had seemed satisfied by his work on them—once Jimin and Hoseok declared his hair and makeup finished, Jungkook’s reaction had been effusive, Namjoon had been sincere with his praise on Jimin’s skill with the concealer and Hoseok’s precise finger-fluffing, and Yoongi, while not saying much at all, didn’t abjectly say he hated anything, which he still considers a victory considering the way he’s been mostly quiet since arriving.
But now he’s not so sure about this last one. Something bitter and annoyed is settling in his stomach alongside the anxiety—there’s nothing he hates more than feeling rushed, even though so much of professional makeup artistry often is, but he’s learned to manage it all over the years he’s been working. It’s hard to be stressed when all he’s got time to focus on is painting the face of the person in front of him, precise and heart-hammeringly right down to the wire. He collapses after it’s all done and exchanges disbelieving looks with Hoseok or other artists in his vicinity like he can’t believe they just did that, goes for a drink and vows to never get caught up in such awful disorganization again only to wake up the next day or week and do it all over. But it’s hurry-up-and-wait situations like these that he hates most of all. The taut inertia allows him to work himself up, which is a hundred times worse than being thrust into the thick of things and just focusing on what he’s able to do in a pinch rather than succumbing to his anxiety.
Their last fucking member is late, his mind has been rattling for the last tense twenty minutes he’s spent in forced idle. Their last member is late, I’m not gonna have time to do my fucking job, and they’re all gonna be stupid assholes about it and blame me for the shoddy work.
His nerves always make him decidedly less pleasant, and Hoseok seems finely-tuned to this as he skirts a look in Jimin’s direction from their mirrored corner of the room. He offers him a subtle nod and brushes his fingers along the wrist propping Jimin backwards against the counter. Jimin glances at his own reflection in the bright vanity lighting and promptly fixes how hard he’s scowling. Schools his face into something softer, his jaw loosening and a bit more pleasantness returning to the corners of his mouth.
Which is just as well because suddenly the main door to the greenroom is opening and the two emerging figures launch the room back into chaos.
The other three members dys/EASE perk up at the same time as Jimin, and Jungkook breaks into another smile. Not at the same time as Jimin.
“Sorry, Jin,” a voice cuts through the murmured greetings and teasing jibes of the band. It sounds devastatingly low—in any other circumstance, a timbre like that would be setting off alarm bells inside a part of Jimin’s head completely separate from panic. But Jimin’s already forgotten to be affected by it, his brain kicked on into overdrive as he turns back around to his station to start sanitizing his hands and his vanity worktop. If he has it his way, he’ll hit the ground running with the bastard responsible for ratcheting his stress up to eleven tonight and have his face beat to the gods before he can attempt inane small talk that Jimin would certainly bitch him out for.
Jimin hears reassurances of “It’s fine, Taehyung” from the cooler Seokjin and fights down the urge to snort by biting down savagely on the two mints he’d just popped into his mouth, snapping them into icy fragments. Hoseok has started moving, too, turning heat tools back up on his sliver of the counter unmarked by the towels and organized chaos of Jimin’s kit. There’s the barest hint of a smile tugging at his heart-shaped mouth, his eyes flickering back over his shoulder in a double-take as he presumably takes in what they’re dealing with. The smile is replaced with raised eyebrows that turn back to his tools after a moment.
“Oh,” Hoseok whispers into the privacy of their little station now that a commotion has been kicked up behind them. From the sounds of it, the last member is chattering to the others about the ambiance of the boutique coffee shop they’d spotted on the way to the venue. When Jimin looks up at his partner, the other’s eyes are shining at him. “He’s cute cute.”
Jimin narrows his eyes at the other and decides not to test that conjecture himself. He spritzes alcohol on the eyeshadow palette of burgundies he’d used for Jungkook, just in case this one feels more adventurous with color as well. His brain is already calculating which skin prep steps he can skimp on to conserve the precious minutes he still has left, while also wondering Why the fuck isn’t he over here yet—
“Can you move? I need to put my contacts in.”
The deep voice is right behind Jimin now, along with the awareness of a presence less than half a foot from his back. The thing that actually gets him, though, is the imperiousness in that voice. It immediately sets Jimin on-edge, the black storm clouds of his mood rolling back in and messing with his concentration, so much so that his mouth opens without him meaning to.
“Can you ask nicely?” is the thing that slips out, just as clipped as what he’d received. He feels Hoseok stiffen despite being a good three feet away, and that alone is enough to slam his own brain back into his head from its vacation.
What the FUCK did you just say, Jimin—
He hears a short scoff that devolves into half a laugh. It’s not a kind one, either, more disbelieving than anything else. “Can you please move? And maybe stop wasting time while you’re at it?”
At that, Jimin straightens up and has to swallow the last couple shards of mint in his mouth to keep anything else from coming out. He steps out from in front of the dressing mirror and turns around, just so he can properly make sure this guy’s head isn’t actually shoved up his own ass the way he’s acting like it is.
And amidst the hot tangle of his pissed off thoughts, there’s a special utterance of fuck.
Because Hoseok is right.
He’s cute cute.
Shame that head is shoved up his own ass when it would be better shoved—
Jimin needs a break from work. His inner monologue is beginning to sound too much like Hoseok.
He’s seen pictures of all of them, has in fact spent probably too much time looking at them in the past couple of weeks as he’d prepared for this job. He knows this is Taehyung before he’d even entered the green room, even if he hadn’t listened to much of their music. He figured they were even better-looking in person, because objectively most models and musicians tend to be, but there’s something about this one specifically. He understands, maybe a little why Hoseok looked at him the way he did, though he’d never admit that to him out loud.
Taehyung is taller than him, almost as tall as Namjoon, with shoulders that aren’t as broad as his drummer bandmate or his manager, but with an indescribable quality that takes up space. The skin he can see from under his t-shirt is smooth and tan, with scant beauty marks on his upper arms, the side of his neck, inside of his wrist. His jawline is something lesser men would definitely kill for, and his hands—
Jimin hears what must be the distant roar of the audience through the concrete walls as the opening act must start.
Thirty minutes. Get it the fuck together, Jimin.
Once contacts are in—and they’re objectively a good choice, a striking shade of hazel that looks like molten honey—Taehyung settles into the chair and pulls off the beanie he’s wearing to reveal a head of thick, brown-black hair that Hoseok practically falls to like a magnet. He cards his fingers through it, professionally of course, and asks what he’s thinking. (Asked casually, as if they have the luxury of taking their time on this, but Jimin has seen enough small miracles to know that Hoseok can accomplish quite a lot with fifteen minutes and a round brush.) Jimin’s got micellar-wet cotton pads on standby while he’s plucking foundation shades to mix and test by eye from the assortment in his kit.
“Whatever you think is best,” the other responds with a sort of agreeable ease that Jimin hasn’t heard so far. “As long as it’s not all the way straight.” Hoseok brushes through a few more times, the expression on his face seeming horrified at the mere thought of taking an iron to such luscious permed curls, and pulls it back from Taehyung’s face. The move changes his face in an astonishing sort of way, rebalancing the symmetry of his features and drawing even more attention to his bone structure.
“I’d say up,” Hoseok says as he reaches for his spray bottle, and sounds genuinely regretful about it. “But I don’t think I have the kind of time to make it perfect enough to be satisfied. So we’ll work with it down but enhance the texture you have, and see where we go from there.” Jimin can tell the moment the other sees a finished look in his head, the almost scary way his eyes sharpen. It’s his professional-under-pressure face. Jimin wonders if he looks half as intimidating when he’s trying to work.
Taehyung nods along, scrutinizing for a moment like he’s trying to scry into the vision Hoseok has alongside him. The stylist sweeps Taehyung’s fringe back and to the right in a deep side part with one more lamenting little sigh, and angles the man’s head towards Jimin as if he wasn’t able to see it before. There’s a look in Hoseok’s eyes that Taehyung can’t see behind him. “Shame isn’t it, Jiminie?”
That amber gaze is fixed straight on him now, and despite the way it feels like a physical weight with its casual sort of intensity, Jimin sees a chance and grabs it. “Hold there for a minute,” he instructs, then leans down and begins to cleanse Taehyung’s face.
The other closes his eyes obediently, but there’s the slightest hint of a smile on his face that belies the kind of smugness that was in his voice from before. “Not gonna ask if I have any allergies or sensitivities?”
The pointed question is almost enough to make him pause as he moves in light, upward motions. So he knows how this works, apparently. (Jimin should hope so, actually, with how famous they seem. He wonders if this is some kind of habit Taehyung has—annoying makeup artists when he seems to know enough to know better.) Or, he must have picked up on the fact that he’s already under Jimin’s skin, and somehow wants to rankle him further.
“I ask that sort of thing on my contracts ahead of time,” Jimin says, just for the satisfaction of letting the man know he’d done his homework. Seokjin had returned them all with a clean slate, except for when he’d written that Namjoon was allergic to shellfish and Jimin had laughed and sent a screenshot of it to Hoseok. He only takes half a second to luxuriate, though, because he hasn’t got time. “What’s your skin type? Any preference on foundation coverage?”
“Combination,” Taehyung replies like it’s some kind of interview, eyes still closed. Jimin turns halfway around without skipping a beat to grab a tube of moisturizer that suits him. He taps it in with careful fingers, touch always light but effective—he’s proud of it, has had multiple mentors over the years that have praised him for it. The other looks like he’s about to say something else, but Jimin’s working fast so he falls quiet at the touch of a balm-slick cotton bud spread against his plush lips. His mind registers the beauty spot freckled on the left curve of the bottom one as Taehyung rolls them together and finishes with a pop. “Obviously matte is better because of how hot it gets on stage. One artist a few stops ago used a foundation that was three shades too light and I looked like a ghost, so maybe don’t do that.”
Jimin already has a few shades mixed on the back of his hand ready to go, so he swatches them first on Taehyung’s jaw and then a tiny dab on his neck. He keeps his mouth pressed into a neutral line as he finds one he likes, because he sees Taehyung watching him again. Despite the fact that it sounds like the previous artist made a genuine mistake, Jimin gets the feeling that the other might be a little too ready to talk shit. He already seems to know enough to have a discerning amount of opinions on how he should look, compared to his band members.
Maybe he’s the diva of the group. The thought has Jimin smiling to himself as he grabs a brush and begins his work in earnest.
Taehyung is undoubtedly the diva of the group.
It feels like not a scant three minutes goes by that Taehyung’s face changes in the mirror when he looks up from his phone, as if he’s waiting for Jimin to catch on and ask what’s the matter. He had opinions on the finish of the foundation, the shade of concealer under his eyes, the placement of the contour on his jaw and cheekbones. He even decided to pick a minor fight over the way Jimin was filling in his brows, when Hoseok had quite literally established that his fringe would be down and covering most of them.
That had been the one argument Jimin won, when Hoseok finished Taehyung’s hair five minutes ago and it did, in fact, curl artfully over most of the brows Jimin had fixed with tinted gel instead of true pencil. The victory turned bitter, however, when Hoseok fluffed the curls that wisped around his head like feathers and asked if he had any adjustments.
Taehyung had smiled at the other through the mirror while Jimin pencilled in the beauty mark on his cheek, and told him it all looked perfect, no changes needed.
Jimin’s been fumingly silent ever since.
He has ten minutes remaining, a fact that keeps itself apparent like a nuclear clock blaring at the back of his brain, and they haven’t even gotten to arguably the worst part—the eyes.
From his perusal of previous show photos, it seems that Taehyung and Jungkook seem to be the ones that are most fond of true eyeshadow looks. More often than not, their lead guitarist and singer sports warm colors smoked along his lids and into the sockets of his disarmingly sweet eyes. (Then asks them to be rimmed in eyeliner for good measure, ostensibly to tone down the bare-faced innocence he has in spades whenever he settles in the styling chair.) Taehyung is much of the same, the uniquely sleepy set of his almond-shaped eyes playing well with dimensional looks and shades of smoke fading in and out over the thin skin. A lot of the looks the two of them have worn look almost like a matched set, and if Jimin feels a little artistically critical, maybe a bit too one-note or safe (as safe as a rock group wearing definite eyeshadow can be, anyway) for the dynamics of their group.
He’s had a thought sketched out on a face chart since the night in by himself a week ago when he’d spilled cabernet on the sheet and liked the tone of it when it dried. It was just as well that Jungkook had asked for a striking red smokey eye that day, feeling something a little like providence that stoked the excitement and artistry in the back of his creative mind. (At least until it had all gone up in smoke to be replaced by his wilding anxiety and mounting irritation over the fact that this guy is turning out to be a right dick over just about everything.)
He finishes spritzing Taehyung’s base with setting spray and instructs him to hold the small electric fan up to his face to dry it quicker, something he follows with blessedly little comment. Jimin busies himself then with priming his eyes and putting down a base shadow to blank out the translucence of his lids, and still he stays quiet. He must be finally starting to realize the urgency that’s settled in, marked by the increasing pitch of the people puttering around in the rest of the green room. Jungkook’s been warming up his vocals for the past fifteen minutes.
It’s not exactly the place to do it, but he tries his luck.
He grabs a red gel from the line of small pots laid out in his kit, and a tiny detail brush that feels more like an extension of him at this point.
If there’s one thing he’s excelled at more than his fine touch, it’s liner. Whether through extensive practice, some divine providential favor with the makeup gods, or a mix of the two, Jimin has more finesse in the wrist and fingers of his right hand than he often feels in the rest of his entire body. More times than he’s cared to count in his seven years as a working artist, he’s been called over by people both more and less skilled than him to troubleshoot a model’s rimmed eyes in a we need to be ready in two minutes pinch. (He’s got a near-hundred percent success rate with situations like those, not that he’s really counting or anything.)
It’s a trait that feels a bit silly to brag about anywhere outside the realm of makeup, but he’s proud of it and trusts his skill. And despite everything that’s gone on in the last twenty minutes, give or take, he still feels confident enough in that. It could be impactful, it could be sexy and in line with part of a distinct creative direction for tonight—
“What are you doing with that?”
It could be the one last fucking thing Kim Taehyung decides to fight him on.
“I was thinking of doing a graphic liner,” Jimin explains as he scoops a bit of the product onto the back of his hand to get it warm like they have any time to be discussing this. “Red to match Jungkook’s vibe, and make it the focal point of the look without messing around too much with eyeshadow.”
Taehyung looks up at him and arches a brow, slow and deliberate. It says everything it needs to without him opening his mouth, and it’s just one more thing on top of the other shit he’s done; all of it broadcasting that he doesn’t believe one bit Jimin has done enough to match whatever conceited image Taehyung might have of himself in his head. Jimin’s had asshole clients before, plenty of them, and though he’s made peace with the fact that he’s not going to please everyone, it’s hard in a moment already live-wired with anxiety to not take it personally.
Then he says, perfectly neutrally like he hasn’t just insulted Jimin’s skill without needing any words, “Eyeshadow seems easier, though. Less… ambitious.” And then, because he apparently really wants to hammer it home, “We’re already pressed for time, don’t you think?”
If he had one, Jimin would really take a moment for the last bit to sink in. As it stands, with no one else around—Hoseok’s gone off from their corner of the green room for last-minute touch-ups on the other band members—there’s a second of silence that feels wound entirely too tight with tension.
And then it shatters.
All of the franticness that’s been building in Jimin galvanizes into hot anger. It's sharp and spills out of him like a pressure release that’s opened because it will all explode catastrophically if he keeps it inside any longer. “Can you just have half a fucking teaspoon of trust in me that I’m capable of the job I got paid to come here and do?” he snaps, and it’s a wonder it doesn’t come out as a shout that reaches the other side of the room. Small mercies, part of his brain thinks deliriously as it’s tagging along for the collision course the rest of it is set down. “If you hate it, that’s fine. I don’t really give a shit. It’s one goddamn show, wash it off as soon as you get back in here if you can’t bear to be seen like this for more than two hours. We’ve got seven fucking minutes until your ass needs to be dressing on the way to the stage wings unless some poor unpaid interns are figuring out how to stall, and I know I can slap this on you perfectly in five. No matter how much you truss up an asshole it’s still an asshole, but at least I can give your fans and the tour photographers half a fighting chance at finding some part of you that’s nice, even if it’s just how you fucking look.”
Taehyung is staring at him with such bold-faced shock that he looks like a goddamn cartoon character. That sculpted jaw is hanging slack and his eyes are so wide that when he finally blinks, his lid knocks out one contact. The motion seems to knock both of them back in there bodies, and Jimin comes-to with a feeling like he was just possessed.
His first coherent thought is that he needs to stop watching horror movies with Hoseok.
His second is What the ever-loving FUCK have you just done, PARK JIMIN??????????????????????
The third comes when he watches Taehyung’s head dip down to his chest as he works his lens back in, and it goes something along the lines of You can’t even begin to imagine the kinds of fired you’re about to be, your career is absolutely o—
“Okay,” Taehyung says, with a sniff and a dab at his left eye that’s watered a bit. Thankfully none of his base has moved—one thing Jimin had done well already coming to roost, it seems. “Sure. Do the liner.”
Jimin can’t be entirely sure, considering that his brain has shut down all but the most necessary functions to do his job right now as a survival tactic, but he thinks he sees the barest hint of a smile tugging at the corner of Taehyung’s lips, and a twinkle of amusement in his eyes before they shutter closed.
Taehyung sits in the chair as still and relaxed as ever, looking perfect-faced and serene, but drawing nearer to him now feels like purposefully running towards an electric fence. Jimin simply tries to will himself to become a robot in that moment, because he’s afraid if he doesn’t then he will keel over on the spot out of pure embarrassment.
And they simply don’t have time for that, do they? The interns would nudge his body out of the way and Taehyung would have to go on stage with absolutely nothing on his eyes.
So he does the next best thing. He dabs his brush almost woodenly into the gel on back of his hand, and gets to work.
Even when his voice and brain and every other part of his body feels like they’ve failed him, his hands don’t. He murmurs for Taehyung to open his eyes after three minutes, and his lashes flutter for half a heartbeat that does something weird to Jimin’s own, then the other looks up at him with two perfectly-symmetrical wings that hardly need any touching up.
(It might be some of his best work. Maybe he should work like it’s literally his last job as a makeup artist ever more often.)
Because the terrified adrenaline rush hasn’t let him crash quite yet, Jimin snags another brush and the red palette from behind him and dusts a shadow that toes the line between red and pink across the rest of his lid, a wash that ties the color in better. His vision and hearing is still tunneled when he hears himself telling Taehyung to look straight ahead, and he traces the upper corner of each socket with the red liner to frame the eyes more and balance out the sharp wings in the opposite diagonal. For some reason, his eye catches on the delicate mole just under his right eye, and in a last moment of inspiration, he dots the remaining pigment on the brush at the outer corner of his left eye, below the wing.
Kissed by an angel on both sides.
It feels almost like a competition, because the second he finishes combing through Taehyung’s dark lashes (he doesn’t even need mascara, isn’t that just great) and checks over his base for any smearing, Seokjin strides over and asks rather politely how much more time they need.
It’s a curious sort of approach, one that almost endears Jimin to the other man for his consideration, if not for the fact that the entire room behind and around them is a hive of jittering activity because We are running so fucking late—
And if not for the fact Jimin is now back in his body and painfully, acutely aware of the fact that this kind man will be using his Renaissance-sculpted face to rip him a new one for cussing out his talent come thirty seconds from now when Taehyung opens his mouth.
“We’re done,” Jimin draws up from somewhere reservoir of bravery deep inside him that he hardly knew existed. And then, because apparently he’s already dead on this hill, he might as well add, “Sorry for the delay.”
There’s what almost sounds like a snicker beside him as Taehyung rises out of his seat and stretches his shoulders lightly. Seokjin’s eyes trail over to him and widen in what looks like impressed surprise as he takes in the look. Jimin hides his quivering hands behind his back and twists the ferrule of his liner brush round and around in his fingers.
And then—
Taehyung clips out a “Thanks, Jiminie” over his shoulder before he’s pulled into the undertow of activity to finish prepping for stage. Seokjin echoes the sentiment and claps Jimin on the tricep with a curve of his plush lips, and leaves him to wilt on his own in the corner.
Hoseok is still caught in the maelstrom of prep, because he’s got the generosity of a saint and likes to dive in head-first and help where he’s needed. Jimin, instead, leans quite uselessly against his station and sips at the water bottle he’d been offered by a PA at the start of all this, unsure he’d be good for anything else until he’s had a minute to recover.
He still can’t quite believe what happened. His body refuses to calm down, frozen in a never-ending fight-or-flight tense for the exact moment the hand suspended above him is going to come crashing down and give him the punishment he deserves for his appalling lack of professionalism. All the anger has bled out of him now, replaced with nothing but embarrassment and a desire to go home immediately after dys/EASE clears intermission and drown himself in a bottle of shiraz and his own mortification.
But it seems life has more for him in store today. (What’s another one for the books of Park Jimin’s Trials and Tribulations, after all? He’s always been a glutton for punishment, right?)
After a few more seconds where he’s allowed to drift, watching the unfurling chaos in front of his eyes but not really seeing it, he hears his name.
“Jiminie?”
Jimin’s not really sure if it’s better or worse that it’s Hoseok.
He musters enough energy to call out in response, “What’s up?”
“Can you come over to the dressing room, please? And bring paper towels and the baby powder from your kit?”
Hoseok’s always teased him for being armed to the cosmetic teeth for every sort of eventuality—carrying things that are practically once-in-a-career necessities, but they’ve worked enough jobs together that Jimin’s overpreparedness has proved helpful on more than one occasion.
And he feels a bit of smugness at the fact that maybe this is another one of those instances, his mood lifted a little as he cuts through the flutter of activity towards the open door Hoseok’s voice was coming from, into the small room laden with clothes racks that functions as their dressing room.
For some reason, Jungkook is lingering at the door, too busy losing his goddamn mind with peals of laughter that Jimin has to edge around his not-insignificant width to properly enter the room and see what’s going on.
And he promptly wishes he hadn’t.
Hoseok is on his knees just behind Taehyung, who is standing in front of one of the dressing room mirrors with a pair of leather pants pulled only halfway up his legs.
Maybe he’d be in hysterics like Jungkook, albeit a different kind, if he could actually believe what was happening in front of him.
The thing is, situations like this actually aren’t that out of the ordinary for Jimin—he’s worked on enough haute couture jobs to know his way around squeezing models into skintight leather and latex—but the fact that it has to happen now, here, in the wake of what just happened, here, is just a little too wild for even his artistic imagination.
“Jimin,” Hoseok repeats, a level of serious urgency in his voice like he isn’t ass-level with a half-naked rockstar attempting to help him into leather pants where the rest of the group is sporting ripped denim (or, in Yoongi’s case, a surprisingly flattering pair of black lace tights and short-shorts that drew Jungkook’s attention a little too much while sitting in the makeup chair). Except that’s exactly what he’s doing, and he expects Jimin to help because Hoseok knows objectively they have done this enough times to do it fast and well. As if on cue, he gives the final nail in the coffin: “Can you give me a hand here?”
“Stop fucking laughing, Kook,” Taehyung bites out as Jimin keeps his gaze fixed on the floor the entire way over to the pair of them. His deep voice is dark with irritation, closer to a growl. “This has literally happened to you before. I’ll kick your ass.”
Jungkook stifles his amusement long enough to retort, “Not in those pants you won’t. Maybe we’ll need to cut you out of them.”
“I’ll kill you, I really will,” Taehyung deadpans with an obstinate stare into the wall as Jimin arrives within arm’s reach. “Joon will be our lead singer instead and we’ll go on without you and put clues in our songs about where we buried you.”
This, apparently, is enough to school Jungkook into a more scandalized mood. “None of you are clever enough for that except Yoongi and he wouldn’t let my memory be commercialized like that. ‘S not in the spirit of alternative music.”
Jimin clears his throat to get the renewed attention of Hoseok, who has spent the last moment fussing over the hem of the black mesh turtleneck clinging to Taehyung’s torso, dotted with lace appliqués that flash with dark rhinestones as Taehyung continues harassing his bandmate. He hedges around the taller musician, holding the bottle of powder in front of his partner’s face to get his attention.
“Thank you, Jiminie,” he says with what seems like genuine relief as he refocuses his attention and tugs the pants back down Taehyung’s legs to where his ankles are already dressed in vicious-looking pointed-toe boots with a heel. The other doesn’t stop in his arguing, but his fingers slacken away easily without Hoseok having to tell him, and the stylist makes short work of tucking squares of paper towel over the waistband of the pants to protect the outsides from errant powder.
But then, because Hoseok must hold some kind of years-long grudge against Jimin for something he must have forgotten about over the course of their friendship, he asks, “Can you move over to Taehyung’s front and powder his legs?”
Things like privacy and shame are lost relics in the world of tours and shows, Jimin knows this quite well. Nakedness doesn’t faze him at all anymore, and it’s perhaps a small mercy that it doesn’t seem to bother Taehyung that much, either. (Though Jimin has a burgeoning suspicion that has more to do with Taehyung being a particularly shameless person in general than it does with a desensitization to it.)
But there isn’t exactly a roadmap to situations like the one Jimin seems to find himself in tonight. He’s not sure how pissed, exactly, Taehyung is at what transpired at the makeup station, isn’t really sure yet to what degree his name is going to be dragged through the mud of the professional community because dys/EASE isn’t exactly a small band—the fully-sold out months-long tour they’ve almost completed is more than enough proof of that. So he’s really not sure how okay he is with having Jimin in his space. And at least he seems distracted enough by Jungkook that he hasn’t paid much mind to him, or is at least pretending he’s invisible. (It’s a bit chafing on his pride, but he’ll swallow it because he knows he needs to.)
And so he’s really not sure how he’s supposed to react when he gets down on his knees in front of Taehyung’s naked legs and is quite literally faced with his fucking crotch.
At least the singular thought in his head right now is, No one could pay me enough money in the world to turn and look.
He’s doing quite well with his be-still-stay-quiet tactic until a particularly large cloud of baby powder Hoseok is kicking up from behind gets right in his face and he has to cough until his eyes water. The force of it pitches him forward from where he’s balanced on his knees and his arms instinctually seek to counterbalance out in front of him. And apparently the best place to do that is the long, lean line of Taehyung’s thighs. His head pitches forward too, and winds up pressed into the dip of one hip.
And of course, that’s more than enough to get Taehyung’s attention, if the dropped thread of his conversation and the weight of his stare on Jimin is anything to go by.
For all his thoughts about being prepared for this, Jimin can only imagine how flushed his ears must be with how they’re burning.
“Sorry,” he says immediately, because asshole or not, Jimin is tightrope-walking on a very dangerous line of conduct here. “Didn’t mean to lose my balance.”
Taehyung presses his lips together for a moment, gaze raking over Jimin’s features, and Jimin distracts himself for a moment thinking about the fact that This bastard really doesn’t have a bad angle, does he?
“Don’t worry about it,” he answers at length, and then turns back to Jungkook. From his periphery, Jimin can see his expression immediately crumple into a glare, and so just out of curiosity, when Hoseok declares he’s done with the back and passes Jimin the powder bottle around Taehyung’s body, he takes the opportunity to glance over at Jungkook.
And he nearly drops the bottle when he sees the vocalist looking right back at him. The expression on his face is thoughtful in a way Jimin immediately decides he dislikes, and then summarily revokes his previous thought of putting the word innocent anywhere near him. Jungkook seems just as prone to scheming as Hoseok—they’d be a true match made in Hell.
The only way Jimin can handle the rest of his minutes in this godforsaken room is by scrubbing his powder-covered hands over Taehyung’s legs with a sort of clinical detachment, and pointedly not noticing how they might feel under his hands. The threat of time has returned to loom over his head again, and this is bolstered by the fact that Namjoon and Yoongi both have come to linger in the doorway by the time Jimin and Hoseok and Taehyung have all slid the fucking pants far enough up his body for him to finish with the zipper and fly himself.
“I’m going to have to cut myself out of these at the end of the fucking night, aren’t I?” Taehyung laments as Jimin uses the discarded paper towels to mop up any lingering spots of powder on the tile floor. He’s the one lingering closest to the table where Taehyung is busy fussing with last-minute details in the mirror, but he’s not really sure who the comment is supposed to be for.
When no one else really responds, because Hoseok seems to be busy retelling the story to a mildly-shocked looking Namjoon and a Yoongi who keeps sending tired glances up to Jungkook who can’t restrain his giggles, Jimin finds himself laughing a little in spite of himself.
“Ask one of the stage assistants to get you some solid Crisco while you’re onstage,” Jimin answers glibly as he tosses the crumpled paper towels into the small trash can under the vanity counter.
Taehyung’s eyes, lit up gold by the bright softball-sized lights lined up vertically on either side of the mirror, catch Jimin’s behind him in the reflection. Those tapered fingers are busy slotting a red jeweled earring into place on his earlobe, so his head is cocked a little to the right. His expression is wide and genuinely questioning, as if he’d forgotten somehow, who he was talking to, and for one helpless moment, Jimin forgets too and thinks, Looks like a fucking puppy.
“Seriously?” he asks.
But then, the absurdity of his joke comes back to him and his lips pull into a smile that’s almost regretful because of how sincere Taehyung sounds. “Of course not, that’s what the powder was for.” And then, because there’s some trick of this overly-bright light that makes his work on Taehyung’s face so striking that he feels a little breathless, Jimin offers out the truce of: “Just peel them down like a banana. Don’t try and slide them off, ass chafe is no joke.”
There’s a brief second where that look of surprise is back on Taehyung’s face again, familiar from the entirely different situation in his chair. Except this time, instead of freezing back into a mask of indifference, it melts completely in the bright light, and he tosses his head back and laughs.
“But I’ll leave this here for you, just in case,” Jimin says, cracking a smile of his own because there’s still some kind of fizzing under his skin at the sheer surprise of having such a reaction from the other. He sets the bottle of powder down on the counter quickly and ducks away when the feeling starts to subside a few moments later, turning towards the door back out into the larger green room.
He comes face to face with four people jammed in the doorway, looking quite plainly right at him like a gaggle of alley cats honed in on a mouse. Jimin thinks it’s probably a miracle he doesn’t somehow have a hole in his head from the piercing stares.
Hoseok is shining at him again, but of course that’s nothing new—the way the other’s eyes curve up at the corner and have this certain sparkle that wants to see him a little too well is familiar enough at this point that Jimin’s knee-jerk reaction is to roll his own eyes back. But he’s stopped from doing that now, because there’s something actually quite different about it this time.
And it’s because Jimin realizes that the three remaining members of dys/EASE are staring at him in exactly the same way.
True to his word, Jimin finished the rest of his night working with dys/EASE the exact way he’d planned. The weird circle at the dressing room door had been broken up by one Seokjin that actually looked ruffled for once, entreating the four band members to “Please get your leather-clad asses in gear, we are ten minutes past final call time and I’m seriously about to blow a fucking fuse if there’s any more delays” in speech so rapid Jimin could have sworn it was tongues. It wasn’t stipulated in his or Hoseok’s contracts to stay through the entire concert, and after clearing their departure with the head of backstage operations, they packed up their supplies and left. The shock of the night had settled back in by the point they’d piled into Hoseok’s car to head home, and Jimin invited Hoseok over with little other than a particularly miserable look that Hoseok always referred to as his helpless kitten expression.
They split not just one, but two and a half bottles of red wine between them—the last half was probably to make up for the glass Hoseok choked and sputtered through as Jimin told him what, exactly, had gone down with Taehyung.
“Holy fucking shitballs,” had been the sagely wisdom he imparted at the end of it. While the statement was both a condemnation and a praise for the way Jimin had handled someone being a royal pain in the ass, he did point out it came at obvious risk. They decided the best course of action about a full bottle in was to begin drafting an apology e-mail to Seokjin in a last-ditch attempt to beg for mercy that may not have been entirely deserved, but at least they could say they tried. They spent the second bottle in a continuous toast to what remained of Jimin’s career.
He wakes up the next day curled up on the couch at half-past noon with a dull ache in his head and neck and and a dead phone wedged between the cushions. There’s a glass of water and painkillers on the coffee table, along with a trash can tucked underneath. A flower-shaped post-it note from Jimin’s basket in the kitchen is stuck beside it.
Minjimmie,
Had to be up early today to run some errands. Penny’s been fed and breakfast tacos from down the street are in the microwave. I tried to find your phone to charge but you were laying on it and I didn’t want to wake you.
Definitely read that e-mail back before you send it, yeah? ;)
Text me if you need anything else!!! Love you loads!
H x
Jimin finds himself smiling just a little and manages to haul himself up from the couch after downing the medicine and full glass of water. He catches his calico sunning herself on the kitchen window seat and scratches along her flank until she stretches a bit and trills in acknowledgment. As he runs the microwave to reheat his breakfast, he thinks about how weird the morning feels.
He settles down at the table with his tacos and a cup of coffee, and thinks on it a little more without his phone, without his laptop. Things are weirdly fine in this moment, like he’s trapped in a soap bubble high above the ground. It’s calm and contained and the world looks iridescent from the inside looking out, but there’s a distant-yet-looming awareness that everything will pop eventually. Things won’t be the same once the world stretches, wakes up, and catches up to him, and it feels strange to luxuriate in the head start.
But maybe that’s all he can do right now. Best option is to at least try to nip it in the bud.
Once he finishes eating, he perches on his couch again and opens the e-mail waiting in his Drafts folder. The beginning starts out surprisingly cogent, but doesn’t stay that way for long. The drunk stream of consciousness actually has him outright giggling at some parts—why haven’t he and Hoseok considered starting a podcast? (Because only straight assholes start podcasts, would probably be Hoseok’s decisive response, and a shortly-contrived dream would die on the same couch where it was birthed.)
But as it stands, it needs a lot of workshopping. He makes himself half a second cup of coffee and really feels his brain switch on, and spends another hour editing it until it’s as professionally groveling as something he might have sent to his professors in college for a late-submitted paper if he’d stayed longer than two semesters.
He pastes it in a reply to their initial thread where Seokjin had reached out a month ago inquiring about a short-notice booking and they’d negotiated Jimin’s contract.
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Re: RE: Inquiry for Short-Notice Musical Tour Booking
Sunday, October 17, 01:46 PM
Mr. Kim,
I hope that this e-mail finds you well and that you and the rest of the band enjoyed a successful show last night. Thank you again for the opportunity to work with you all, it was an experience that I found creatively challenging and am incredibly grateful for your consideration.
I’m writing because I feel the need to apologize immensely for my behavior, though. Although parts of the backstage process were admittedly stressful due to time constraints, my attitude and the way I conducted myself was out of line and unprofessional. Unanticipated working conditions are no excuse for poor conduct and I am deeply sorry for any stress or upset that resulted from my words or actions. I consider my clients to be putting their trust in me to handle myself with professionalism and respect through the entire process, and I have absolutely failed in upholding that in this case.
Please do let me know if there is anything I might do to rectify the situation. I would be happy to refund any or all of my fees if it would in any way make up for the damages I incurred with your talent, staff, or venue personnel due to my conduct.
Sincerely,
Park Jimin
His fingers burn hot with a torrid mix of anxiety and guilt as they hover over the Send button. He feels like a middle schooler again, with the way he shoves his laptop to the other end of the couch as soon as the whoosh comes through the speaker as confirmation. It’s hardly been an hour and a half since he’d woken up, and already he feels like he needs to go back to sleep.
That’s what people do when they have hangovers, right?
That’s what people do when they have hangovers for nicer reasons, he thinks a bit forlornly, flopping back lengthwise onto the cushions and pouting his lips up at the ceiling. He’s kicked up enough of an idle fuss that at least Penny seems to want something to do with him—she’s awake and nuzzling at the hand hanging off the side of the sofa with a few entreating trills. He turns his hand over to seek out her chin by feel, and wonders what else he might be able to do today to put off the world a little bit longer.
As he shifts, the bump under the couch cushions digs between his shoulder blades. Jimin grunts as he twists his arm under himself to reach it, and plugs it into the charger he has running on an extension cord from the outlet behind the sofa. He hoists Penny up onto his chest while he waits for the device to power back on, and she settles down easy before the screen lights up.
And the buzzing starts.
Once, twice, three times—all the way up to a dozen-plus, and Jimin actually sits up a bit in alarm because he usually doesn’t get so many texts all at once. At least not through his personal phone, unless Hoseok’s on a particular bender.
As soon as it stops and settles, he slides the messages app open.
🐿Hobi🐿 [10:17]:
hey
wake up
check Twitter
🐿Hobi🐿 [10:23]:
oh my GOD jimin are u STILL ASLEEP
WAKE UP AND CHARGE UR GODDAM PHONE
THIS IS NOT A TIME TO BE IRRESPONSIBLE AND WALLOW
🐿Hobi🐿 [10:30]:
minji i swear to christ i am on a CAFE PATIO with my niece rn but i will drive back across town to pour that entire glass of water on ur head
remember that time we used to live together and YOU were the one up at 6:30 every morning to run and drink a gross green smoothie???
manifesting that energy to come back to u right NOW so u can WAKE TF UP
🐿Hobi🐿 [10:36]:
god ur so annoying
Choi Hyerin 🌺 [10:38]:
Jiminie
Hobi won’t stop scowling at his phone so I’m assuming he’s mad at u
ngl it’s kind of harshing the vibes so I’m just gonna tell u, but maybe still act surprised for him
[screenshot attached]
Ur trending
Jimin’s heart drops out from his body and must hit his stomach on its way out, because it churns hot as he takes in the screenshot from Hoseok’s niece with a bit of disbelief.
It could be literally anything, he tells himself as he shuffles to his own Twitter feed and checks the explore page.
It’s still there—two spots higher on the ranking than the screenshot Hyerin had sent.
The words are so short, could relate to anything.
But when he clicks on the link, sporting tens of thousands of tweets and counting, the feed pulls up images of a face he’s familiar with from spending time on it last night.
The most reposted image that dominates the stretch of the feed is one that must have gone up late last night, a teaser from the LCD camera screen of one of the tour photographers.
It’s Taehyung, gleaming with sweat that sluices down the side of his neck in almost complete profile. Those exquisite hands are wrapped around a bass guitar whose neck takes up the lower half of the pictures. The upper third is dedicated to his head, of course, captured in an amount of detail that should probably be illegal. The stage lights set the curls of his hair on fire with washes of gold like a halo, where it’s been tousled off his forehead and has now started to stick back, exposing the dark slashes of his brows in contrast to his glowing skin. (He’s even more glad now that they didn’t fill them in deeper, because any added pencil would have looked too severe and artificial).
Those eyes burn gold-amber-honey under the stage lights, as he gazes out to the crowd but the angle of the camera emphasizes the dark fall of his lashes and makes him look like a sleepy sort of predator. The sharpness of his eyes is only exacerbated by the strikes of red across his lids that look downright sinful to some highest exponent. Like Communion spilled over white altar cloth.
He wasn’t bullshitting himself last night. It was some of his best work. Taehyung is some of his best work.
(It’s something that feels a bit silly to brag about anywhere outside the realm of makeup, but apparently thousands of people disagree.)
Jimin scrolls through some of the top tweets in the feed, a handful catching in his brain as he skims.
besties i bombed my physics test this morning but at least i can say i saw red V in person 😔✋
yall. V with that RED eyELINER??????? SUGA IN TIGHTS??? IS THIS OKAY AM I OKAY
we are gathered here today to witness and thank the gods for their gift of red V
their makeup MATCHES???? ITS RED ??!?!?!?? fhdjgjgkld stylist knew wtf was up VK REAL THIS IS NOT A DRILL
Technically, Hyerin and Hoseok are wrong. It’s Taehyung that’s trending, RED V being the key words cropping up in thousands of tweets aggregated from all parts of the world. It’s a little terrifying honestly, how much things can move on the internet in the blink of an eye, how fast it can all connect. Twitter moves a bit too rapidly for him, and it’s never felt like the best medium to represent his professional work. He only keeps a private account on Twitter for his friends, mostly so Hoseok can use DMs to send him memes and stupid videos on the platform itself instead of clogging their actual message thread with it. He uses Instagram more often than not—it feels a lot more stable, maybe just a bit lower-stakes. His follower count is nothing to sniff at after all these years, though it’s definitely not as large as other people in the same profession sharing the platform. Jimin finds he doesn’t mind all that much, actually, because there’s a bit of a disconnect between the networking-driven world of beauty that he prefers to work in that may be less well-known to the public. He’s not found himself bothered by it much over the years—his contract work is stable and more than enough for him to live comfortably.
Even so, by the looks of it word hasn’t traveled nearly as fast on Instagram. Though he doesn’t have a ton of personal experience, from other artists he’s spoken to in the industry, band or musician make-up artists don’t tend to be well-known by association until they’ve established a more long-term working relationship or if they're already famous in their own right. No one really knows who he is, judging by the way his follower count hasn’t fluctuated at all, which at this point in time Jimin considers something of a relief. It would almost be embarrassing if he’d ridden on the coattails of this success somehow and then was summarily dropped from it just as fast, except it’s out in public for everyone to see.
Jimin flicks through dys/EASE’s official accounts out of half-formed curiosity, but gives up after finding nothing new and lets his phone fall back down to his side. His whole entire body feels pent-up with potential energy now, like he’s buzzing with an anxiety that’s frustratingly vague on what it wants to… be. He’s still nervous about retaliation from Seokjin or Taehyung, of course, but he tries to tell himself the damage is done now. There’s nothing more he can do to rectify that situation except to wait and see how it turns out. And maybe send a fruit basket, but those logistics on tour are difficult. But he also feels fizzy and disbelieving about the most unlikely unfurling of events, maybe just the tiniest bit smug at the fact his work had such an impact.
Jimin takes another couple of minutes to stare at the ceiling stretching over his head, cat snoozing pleasantly now that the scrolling fidget has stopped disturbing her. He decides that even if it would never be revealed to the world, if Taehyung knew about this particular turn of events, he’d be satisfied. As long as it affects the two most-involved parties, he’s content with such a level of petty, quiet revenge.
It’s enough to momentarily quell the residual irritation at the whole ordeal, even when things seemed almost ruined. It’s more than worth it, when he thinks about the Taehyung in his makeup chair being subject to seeing just how right Jimin was. (He feels less like this when he considers the briefest moments of Taehyung in the dressing room proper, but finds he can’t think about it for too long or risk being confused by the way it all ended.) Either way, a little teaspoon of I told you feels good enough, even if he’s the only one that gets to revel in it.
He finally texts Hoseok back then, and in less than a minute the other is calling him, effusive energy bubbling off him even through the phone. “I know we both know he’s a dick, but he looked so sexy,” he says with a wistful little sigh.
Jimin turns his head to the side and catches his slightly-scandalized expression in the reflection of his dark TV. “Are you still with your niece? Are you allowed to be saying that in front of her?”
“I dropped her off an hour ago,” he hums easily in reply. “Besides, she’s fifteen now. Hears worse at school all the time, I’m sure.”
“Of course. Well, what are you doing now?”
“Working through laundry now, you know how Sundays are,” Hoseok says, but then there’s a slight scuffle on the other end as he presumably sets his phone down and turns on speaker. “You wanna know what I’m wearing, too?”
“Obviously a pair of my sweatpants from five years ago, if you’re doing laundry,” Jimin retorts, but knows the other hears the smile in his voice. He’s rewarded with a bright laugh that arcs in its sound as Hoseok presumably tips himself back against the couch cushions.
Jimin must be right if he’s laughing so hard.
“Brat,” he manages once he’s cooled off a little. “But how about we go back to the brat of the hour? Taehyung is your type.”
And there it is.
“I don’t have a type,” Jimin huffs out, knowing that Hoseok’s been wanting to bait him with this since the last musician had set foot in the green room yesterday. “I’ve dated models and dancers and even did my community service in my ill-advised college stint by dating a business major and an engineer. It’s all over the board.”
“Of course you don’t,” Hoseok croons sympathetically. “But let’s just take four of the ones you just conveniently brought up as a sample size.” He makes some thoughtful little sounds then, drumming on the closest hard surface in what’s probably supposed to mimic a keyboard in a scientific calculation. “Survey says—taller than you, dark-haired, a little broody-looking with—and I’m quoting you on this, tipsy after that AllSaints shoot a year and a half ago—with ‘Faces I’d love to work on.’ What about any of that does our most recent tortured little rockstar not have in spades?”
“I’d like to talk about Jungkook now,” Jimin announces abruptly, because deflecting and diverting conversations with Hoseok has been how he’s survived almost a decade of friendship with him. “More specifically, the way Jungkook turned so red it was hard to color-match his foundation when you so much as breathed half a compliment in his direction.”
They do this sometimes—despite the fact that it’s work, that there are very clear professional and personal boundaries with the clients they work with, there still isn’t any real harm in looking and teasing each other about it in the privacy of their own world. They’re paid to make pretty people even prettier—sue them if objective attraction comes into play, it’s practically par for the whole damn course.
“Pass,” Hoseok says, but Jimin is a little surprised at the hint that there’s actual disappointment in his voice. “Looked that one up when I got bored after you passed out last night. He’s dating Yoongi.”
Huh. At first, Jimin’s not sure he would have ever guessed that, but then he recalls the slightest unfurling of the older when the younger drew near, the more obvious way Jungkook snuck glances across the room like he physically couldn’t go too long without seeing the other, even if they weren’t speaking.
But because Jimin still feels like the scales aren’t quite equal with the way Hoseok had laid into him, he says, “So? Date him, too. They’re rockstars, I’m sure they’ve done crazier shit than a threesome.”
The peal of bright, unrestrained laughter he gets on the other line is enough to bring a smile to his face, too. Hoseok’s ebullient like that, the sunlight he generates all on his own infectious in the worst way. “Maybe so,” is all he says with a little hum. “They’re probably out on a bus or flight to some new place right now, anyways. Four more stops and then it’s over, I think, from what Namjoon said.”
Jimin wonders what that’s like, traveling so quick and so often that it probably feels like a chaotic free-fall, only to have the ground come up abruptly to meet you in a full-stop. He remembers one of his exes, a ballet dancer, had been on a month of the most intense rehearsals of their life. And then they’d tripped on a curb in a grocery store parking lot, sprained it just a little too badly, and it all—stopped. A puppet dancing madly whose strings have suddenly been cut loose.
Maybe it feels like that, or maybe Jimin’s just being dramatic. He can’t really claim to know what goes on inside tortured artists’ heads. He’s tortured enough by his own work stress as it is.
“At least maybe then Namjoon can get the sleep he needs for those dark circles he kept apologizing for,” he hums, but his tone of his joke is actually sympathetic. Hoseok agrees with another huff of amusement, and Jimin finally draws himself up off the couch to start on his own house chores with his phone still tucked into his shoulder.
A twenty-minute call with Hoseok turns into three hours, the two of them moving and chattering in their own spaces like it should be cut into a movie that pretends they’re in the same place. Jimin still misses Hoseok sometimes, a lot of the time, it’s hard not to when they’ve been best friends for nine years and spent four of those living together. But the lease on their half of a kitted-out duplex had ended a year and a half ago, and at the time Hoseok had been serious enough with a girl that they’d made the decision to move in together. The adjustment was a little hard, of course, twice the amount of chores he’d always pawned off on Hoseok coming back to bite him in the ass, but he eventually adjusted back to a life of easy independence—working a job that so often demanded hours and hours around people and swarms of chaos placed a precious premium on somewhere he could just spend time alone if he needed it.
And that’s exactly what Jimin did, after getting off the phone. He’d managed to spend his time chatting with Hoseok in a rather productive mood—he’d done two loads of laundry and washed dishes that were a couple days overdue, cleaned Penny’s litter box and water dispenser and even figured out what to have for dinner. Now, he’s finished cooking said dinner as the sun has begun to tuck itself behind the taller buildings in his windows’ views, filling his apartment with streaks of burnished orange. He’d sort of avoided the rest of his phone’s functions on purpose the rest of the day, still not quite believing what had happened and also purposefully turning a blind eye to whatever his e-mail inbox decided to have in store for him.
Except until he grabs it off the counter from where it’s been casting Kali Uchis to the speakers of his TV in the open-plan living room, and sees a notification that makes his body run all sorts of cold and hot.
[pjm_13] dys.v.official wants to send you a message.
Maybe the end is coming sooner than he realizes, Jimin thinks a bit dazedly as he walks to the kitchen table. He sets his phone down face-up at the center of it like it’s some kind of alien artifact that could jump up and bite at any second. The little banner still stares innocuously up at him over a photo of Penny sunning herself on his lock screen. A nice, poignant little moment, maybe, to the paragraph ripping him a new one that’s probably waiting inside.
He gets two bites of fried rice into his mouth before giving up entirely. His first inclination had been to text a picture to Hoseok, but he figures it would be best to figure out what the hell it is before kicking up a fuss about it.
It could be nothing. It could be a very big something. It could also be a spoof account that just decided to make his day weird.
But when he follows the link into the app, the account and its absurd follower count and blue checkmark display at the top of the potential message thread. Jimin recognizes the profile picture, he’d seen it just a few weeks ago sifting through their accounts to vet the offer he’d received.
He scrolls down just a little ways, he’s stalled long enough.
[link attached]
The preview of the link displays what looks like a brief puff entertainment piece from a corner of Internet journalism designed to keep up with the smallest pulses of online activity. He taps it out of curiosity, because the title’s a bit cut off.
dys/EASE’s V Rocked A Daring Look Last Night And Fans Are Still Processing It
He wonders whose job it was to sift through these kinds of metrics, even moreso the mounds of tweets in the trending topic for a handful deemed good enough to post along with the images he’d already seen peppered over social media. (He feels a bit bad, but the Physics test one definitely got an actual giggle out of him.)
Jimin closes the news article and returns to the DM request. He sees another, actual message tucked underneath.
Looks like ambitious pays off sometimes
Holy shit.
He’d said to himself earlier in the day that his own acknowledgment at the entire situation was enough for him. But he’d be lying if he didn’t feel a sort of weird, warm pride washing over him at the fact that Taehyung acknowledged it, too. And to his face.
He sort of figures this maybe stands in as his apology, maybe—who’s to say, really. Jimin’s not exactly sure where they stand right now, because there’s this great big foul-mouthed elephant sitting fat between them, and he’s not sure what this sort of acknowledgment includes and excludes right now.
But then he suddenly recalls the moment in the dressing room. The one that still made his skin flush a bit at the thought, his stomach to curl around itself in a way that felt dangerously close to melting. That laugh, bright and clear and unbidden, still resonates clearly in his ears. The looks the others fixed him with in the seconds after spark along his skin, too. The way his joking wit had come so easily then, thoughtlessly clever, prickles at the back of his head now.
There are two ways he can approach this, depending on how far he wants to push his luck.
A flash of bright-honey-red streaks across his thoughts, like the moment before his fingers itch to work on something really out of the box, and he goes for broke.
Spend a lot of time googling yourself, do you?
He abandons his phone just out of reach the moment he hits send. Fucking stupid, is the immediate admonishment from his brain. You’re so stupid.
Jimin wonders what Hoseok would say. He almost wants to screenshot it before he gets blocked by the bassist. Maybe it would be a good story for bar chat down the road when his pride has recovered enough, anyway.
Maybe he could seriously look into starting a YouTube channel the way Hoseok has always harangued him to do. It might be his only source of income if him and his stupid mouth survive all this.
A few more bites of fried rice.
His phone screen lights up again. Another notification appears, then a third.
[pjm_13]: dys.v.official liked a message you sent.
[pjm_13] dys.v.official: Lol
[pjm_13] dys.v.official: JK was the one that told me
Jimin stares at the messages in the tiny thread like they’re a foreign language. Is this some kind of attempt at a conversation? Where the hell is this going?
He feels totally lost, somehow, a bit untethered. He hasn’t thought this hard over Instagram DM’s since he’d gone private on his non-professional account over a year ago. He’s fourteen years old again, where every text to someone is a fresh minefield to navigate each time.
[pjm_13]: me: Hobi texted me like twelve times this morning about it. But it’s pretty cool, congrats
[pjm_13]: me: You still didn’t answer my question tho
He’s shoveled almost all of his remaining rice into his mouth and dropped the bowl off in the sink when his phone chirps again. He pulls it out of his pocket with a hand that might be on the side of too wet when there’s a dish towel in clear arm’s reach.
[pjm_13]: dys.v.official liked a message you sent.
And that’s it. It’s basically radio silence the rest of the night.
Jimin opens up a new playlist for the speakers and plants his phone face-down on the kitchen counter. He retrieves the massive black and clear carriers that constitute his professional kit, and sorts through all of his used brushes. He spends the rest of the evening with his kit sprawled across his counters, sorting through every item and tool and cleaning and sanitizing. It’s something that’s easy to get lost in, especially backed with smooth, rolling beats of instrumental R&B that let him slip into a quiet rhythm. It’s almost a ritual, the way he cleans and inventories everything before packing it all back up, a precious pocket of calm tucked between the rush of his actual jobs. It’s almost as relaxing as the days he has a couple of hours to himself in a creative mood and decides to shut himself in his bathroom and just see what happens. (Jimin makes a mental note to himself to do that sometime soon, it’s been a while since he’s worked extensively on his own face.)
The whole process takes a leisurely two hours and he finishes around half-past nine. He thinks that it’s maybe an acceptable enough time to go to bed, hedging just past ten if he chooses a particularly elaborate skin routine tonight.
When he’s halfway through rinsing a chemical peel off, his phone chimes against the counter.
He flips it over with his elbow, tries to convince himself that it’s just Hoseok sending memes or a cat video to his personal account.
Jimin slides the notification open almost at the exact same time Hoseok’s texts start shuffling in.
His screen fills with the un-watermarked, high-definition version of the photo that had been pasted all over Twitter.
Jimin’s first thought in a sea of everything else buzzing around is Holy shit. It’s more detail than he ever considered needing. The colors have been rebalanced to compensate for the lighting, and it makes the red makeup even more sharp and shocking streaked over Taehyung’s smoldering eyes.
But there’s a second photo tucked behind the first, as if that one needs any help.
It’s a mirror selfie. Taken in the dressing room. (Jimin’s sure that the place is going to haunt his nightmares sometime.)
The long angle of his body is dressed back down in loungewear, so far removed and loose compared to the clothing Jimin literally helped him squeeze into. The oversized blue sweater and the barest glimpse of wide-leg trousers looks almost… soft, hanging off exposed collarbones that need their own post code for the dip between them. But that’s where any of the softness stops.
Because his eyes are at a sultry half-mast, head tilted up and to the left at the exact angle to capture the right side of his face. His hair has been tousled to hell and back, no doubt soaked through with sweat from the stage lights that even Hoseok’s specific brand of black magic isn’t completely immune from. It’s whisked off his face the way the hairstylist sort of dreamed, clipped back on the sides of his head now that they’re presumably post show, but it makes it all the more dangerous. It makes it all the most clear that his eye makeup is as pristine as ever, still a brilliant red against the caramel of his skin and eyes and the inky darkness of his hair and eyebrows. A palette of contrasts that’s almost indescribable in how satisfying it is.
He lets out a breath he didn’t even know he was holding. He scrolls a little to see the source of the notification, just to check and see if it’s really there, if it’s not a glitch.
The caption is still there, right below.
[pjm_13] dys.v.official mentioned you in a comment: “@pjm_13 Couldn’t wash it off after. It was waterproof”
Jimin’s fingers tremble slightly against the screen as he types, and hits Send before his brain catches up with the rest of him.
[pjm_13]: @dys.v.official Looks like you might have needed solid Crisco after all
He turns his phone back on silent, turns off all of his notifications because he’s going to need a fucking minute or several hours, if the way his body is live-wired right now is anything to go off of, and promptly face-plants into his pillow. He plugs his phone into the charger on the nightstand and catches a final banner that lingers along the top of his screen.
[pjm_13] dys.v.official liked your comment.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: RE: Re: RE: Inquiry for Short-Notice Musical Tour Booking
Tuesday, October 26, 04:49 PM
Hi Jimin,
Thank you very much for your e-mail and my sincerest apologies for the delayed response on my end. I don’t normally take a week to respond to e-mails, but the days just seems to blur together faster the closer you get to the end of a tour. I hope you’ve also been well.
If you can forgive me in being frank for a moment, I’m not sure I quite understand what you’re apologizing for. I had to read your e-mail a couple of times, and even then thought for a little while that it was maybe meant for someone else. You were nothing but professional, efficient, and courteous the entire way through Saturday’s show. Which, I might add, was no small feat, considering the schedule changes and semi-last-minuteness of the entire arrangement. You and Hoseok work together in a way that’s almost scary-good, I feel like we really lucked out booking the two of you and I can’t thank you enough for your flexibility.
The members also had nothing but good things to say about the looks you came up with and I have to agree. You came in with less than a month’s notice, killed it, and really seemed to understand the creative direction we were taking for this tour. It’s easy to see from your portfolio that you have talent and creativity, but seeing it in person along with the reactions of fans in real-time is a whole other level. Taehyung in particular seemed especially impressed with you, which is honestly no small feat. Between you and me, he’s had a tendency over the last month to frustrate a lot of our substitute stylists with how picky he is, but he was particularly complimentary of your work after the show had finished. He even asked that I keep your name on file and pass it along to our higher-ups at the label for potential future projects.
I sincerely hope that some day soon I or another one of my colleagues will be reaching out to you with another opportunity to work together. Until then, please take care and feel free to let me know if there is anything I might be able to do for you.
Best Regards,
Kim Seokjin
me [17:48]:
[screenshot attached]
[screenshot attached]
🆘
🐿Hobi🐿 [17:55]:
to quote the immortal words of a very wise and sexy man last week
holy fucking shitballs