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All things considered, Yoongi has seen uglier nights.
Up on the twentieth floor, the nocturnal city reveals itself in a sea-change of roving lights— peering into him as much as he peers back. There’s a searing aloneness, Yoongi finds, in surveilling this private place of an outside world; currents of people and cars flowing in and out of Yongsan-gu and beyond. In being both seen and unseen.
Naturally, he’s at Hoseok and Taehyung’s engagement party. Or not so naturally. He doesn’t quite know why he’s still here, and he can’t but feel like he’s overstayed his welcome, even though he also knows nobody usually pays him enough attention to care.
It’s a two-storey loft that sublets most of the commotion; eddies of chatter and loud, sonorous voices keeling over a never-ending jazz chorus. He’d loitered around just long enough to seem polite, to have his name introduced and then tossed from mouth to mouth to mouth until it disappeared behind the expert swing of a shot glass.
But he really isn’t here to make friends. He isn’t even here to have a good time. It’s not Yoongi’s kind of scene, no thank you.
Instead, the open-air balcony succours him, alongside a handful of smokers and reject queers. Looking out into the vacuous landscape, he remembers he’s one of those things. And he’s already nearing the two year mark.
Two years, Yoongi thinks. Almost two years since the divorce.
In all fairness, not much has changed, save for the fact that it’s lemon-water he has in his whiskey glass (courtesy of Taehyung), and that he’s been somewhat co-opted by his older brother and his wife. Even so, he knows he’ll have to move out sooner or later; he knows they haven’t stopped trying for a baby. To them, he’s probably just taking up space. To everyone else…
Hoseok’s voice rings out from behind him just then.
“Hyung!” He rushes up to Yoongi, clapping him on the shoulder. “I’ve been looking for you! I thought you left.”
“Surely not without saying goodbye.”
“Ehhh it’s hard to keep track. So many people showed up tonight, you know,” Hoseok laughs; brilliant eyes on a brilliant face. He makes talking feel easy sometimes. “Anyway— you’re fine, right? If I can get you anything, another drink—”
“Ah no—” Yoongi shakes his head, “I’m good. I should really be heading back soon.”
Hoseok doesn’t care to plead, but he does take the glass from him with a small pout. “They’re exhausting, aren’t they? — parties, I mean.”
Yoongi eyes him briefly, then with some scepticism. The whole of him is practically aglow with life.
“Mmm… maybe it’s just a sign of my age.”
“Hey! What does that make me?” He laughs again. “Well before you leave, actually, I have a friend here you might like to meet — oh , and he’s single. It’s music you do, right?” Hoseok drills on, as if he’s already answered for him, “He’s not staying either, so don’t worry. It’ll only take a second — wait here a bit…”
Yoongi sighs.
He smoothes out his shirt, acutely aware of the way his body sags under like an overgrowth. He can’t help it. It isn’t as though he’s underdressed, he knows he isn’t — but these ego-dystonic murmurs of inadequacy, of being unpresentable, undesirable — shrinking into himself and his clothes in turn feels declarative of the parts he’s trying to obscure. It’s embarrassing, god , he doesn’t want to meet Hoseok’s friend; he doesn’t even think he can bring himself to.
Still, he watches as Hoseok emerges in his periphery a little later, heart agitated towards a window, a door; anywhere it can slip out of and disappear…
But it’s a figure to his left that makes him freeze — pulls his body right up into his chest, and with it the realisation that the night is only about to get a lot longer. Because he knows that face; those lemon-sweet eyes and that upturned nose. He’ll know that face in any setting.
There’s an awfulness that pours into him at once, that in doing so, admits the deficit within. What are the odds the world realigns him with Kim Namjoon?
“Yoongi-hyung?” Namjoon calls out. Hesitant, as if he’s speaking to a ghost — though Yoongi supposes that’s just what he is. They’d both been there, two years ago, to bury the life they personed together and spit on each other’s graves.
It’s Hoseok who reacts first, eyes flitting between the two of them in bewilderment. For a moment it looks like he might ask the obvious question, but then Namjoon turns to him, whispering something Yoongi can’t hear, something that makes his eyes widen— and he is merciful enough to head back into the apartment without so much as a backward glance.
And then there were two.
“Mind if I join you?” Namjoon asks.
“Not really,” Yoongi’s back answers.
Namjoon doesn’t mind the unfriendly back. Frankly, he thinks it looks more lonely than unfriendly.
“Didn’t know Hoseok was a mutual friend.”
“Cousin,” Yoongi corrects, “He’s my cousin.”
“Oh? I guess I was under the impression I’ve met all of your cousins.”
“You have. On my mum’s side,” Yoongi says simply, because Namjoon is already well-acquainted with his family drama. “I don’t know… he reached out to me a couple months ago and we reconnected.”
“Well it hasn’t been long since I met him either. Technically, I knew Taehyung first…” he trails off.
Yoongi hums along, feigning interest with a night sky and the clouds that’d gathered in it like congealed fat. Let that disguise the palpable shame of being islanded in Namjoon’s eyes, in all of his sagging bits — and he knows Namjoon’s been working out, and he knows it’s silly and pathetic and unproductive to compare and he knows it’s not supposed to feel like a competition — not one that Namjoon is winning, anyway — but it does.
As if reading his mind, Namjoon cuts through that thought.
“Can I ask how you’re doing— or is that a loaded question?”
That stuns Yoongi a little, but then the initial shock gives way to an uneasy smile. “I think it might be. I suppose I’m alive. I eat, breathe, sleep; live within these honest parameters.”
“And work?”
“It pays,” Yoongi answers, cautious of how much he’s letting on. “How’s Z-Factory treating you?”
“Good, good. We just got done with another songwriting camp, and I think I’m still recovering from the brain-fry — but apparently I’m on their Wikipedia page now…. so bragging rights? Of course, that’s different from having a page of your own…”
“It’s gonna happen one day I’m sure,” Yoongi smiles, “Just tell your editors to go easy on me in the personal life section, yeah?”
Namjoon looks at him, taken with the humour that colours his voice; it almost feels like he’s talking to a friend. Unable to repress this strange sense of happiness, Namjoon just grins.
“You know,” he says, “I always imagined the next time we’d meet it’d be some place proper. That some time down the road when we were ready and willing and had more to show for ourselves, we'd sit down and have a meal together, talk about our cushy little lives and what we’d learnt in our time apart, the places we’d been. But I guess that’s not the entire truth either. I don’t know, before we ended the way we did, I’d assumed we would just go back to some primordial state of who we were, worst of a worst-case scenario. I didn’t think there could be other ways to disappear.”
“The last time we fought… we never did talk after that. I mean you did block me.”
“I unblocked you the next week. You never tried again,” Namjoon says. “That’s not the point. The point is, and I feel like such an idiot for telling you this, but I think I’m happy. I think I’m happy to see you.”
Yoongi shrugs. The words feel like an apparition to him, purposeless without a body to convince. Less than a body— it’s just Yoongi. It’s just heart-slough.
“You’re crazy,” he whispers. “I have even less to show for myself than I did before.”
Namjoon seems particularly perturbed by this.
“What does that have t—that’s not even true,” he scrambles for something to say, and settles for the lowest-hanging fruit. “Well, you’re not drinking, for starters.”
“Oh wow.”
“No! I mean I heard all about— from Jin-hyung— and I’m not trying to patronise, by the way, I don’t know how else to say it. I’m really proud of you. I would’ve told you myself, first thing, if there was a way to get to you…”
He tunes him out. His mind starts on a tangent.
One thing about being sober, Yoongi thinks, the film slips right off your eyes, bringing the shape of life to a painful clear, and it’s like seeing every pore on your face at once.
It sometimes occurs to Yoongi that there is no purpose bigger than him. Yoongi fights for tomorrow, to get out of bed and undraw the curtains… to cook a meal and eat it. To keep out of god’s gaze, however low the shadow may hang... His existence is a simple thing, so simple it often feels as though he can grasp it with one hand— the blood-warm limits of his life.
He’s trying to get better, he knows, regardless of whether he feels the changes on some days or has to take two, three steps back on others. He has a regular psychologist and psychiatrist he sees now, and he’s at least done believing that the next drink will fix him— that the next fix will fix him.
If he is but an overripe fruit to be turned over and put down then he’ll just have to accept that there is still virtue in being too soft, even as he is unbecoming. It’s a privilege to feel human at all; Yoongi understands, therefore he is.
It’s a little bit later that his mouth forms a quiet “Thank you”, enough to traverse the narrowing gulf between them. He knows it’s something Namjoon understands as well.
“We don’t have to talk about it now. Maybe ever.”
Yoongi gives him an affirming nod.
“Something else… ” He trails off. And then a second thought eclipses him; his sharp new mind. “What about that other thing— you, and Jin-hyung?”
“What about me and Jin-hyung?”
Yoongi keeps his eyes fixed forward. He’d meant to ask Seokjin about this anyway.
“Oh my god,” Namjoon mutters incredulously, “We’re not dating. You know he just does a healthy amount of espionaging between us both; I know about you as much as you know about me, so on and so forth.”
“But you like him.”
“I like all my friends,” Namjoon protests. “I find some of my friends attractive and some of my friends find me attractive and we’re not all compelled to pursue anything more.”
“Well I know that. I also think I know my best friend and my ex-husband enough to know when they, you know…”
“Once.”
“Once?”
“Okay twice. Definitely twice. It was just a two time thing.” Shoulder to shoulder, Namjoon turns to look at a person who won’t look back at him. “Hyung, he was going to tell you at some point it’s just — I— we didn’t want you to worry about him taking sides or whatever — that’s really not the case.”
“I know that too,” Yoongi assures.
Because Yoongi isn’t jealous. He supposes they’ll both have to move along eventually.
But fuck is it miserable to have to reduce him to an ex-anything— he’s really grappling with a nullity here. Once upon a time, Namjoon had been his best friend, his first love and all the brightness in his life; and for him to be condemned to an open grave he weaves past, grateful that they’d survived each other? He doesn’t even fucking know if Namjoon likes him anymore.
He’s lonely. God , he’s lonely. He’s been lonely for a long time now; it’s a deep, self-conscious roiling in his stomach he can’t muscle out. It feels like the impulse has been let loose in his body now, skimmed from the eschar of unmuted longing.
For a brief moment, he imagines what it would feel like to kiss Namjoon again, though perhaps it is not so much that he wants for Namjoon to kiss him back, but for him to fasten his lips to the great big aching, to find him where he’s most ruined, to touch him there. That is, to have the mouth of his soul against the lip of his wound— for Yoongi to sigh and feel something more than relief.
And that’s just it. He wants to be held, touched, consoled. He wants to feel real again.
A shudder runs through Yoongi’s body at once.
It doesn’t go unnoticed by Namjoon, who, in the corner of his eye, is already peeling his jacket off. All too soon there’s a jacket draped over his shoulders, and a warmth that buries itself in Yoongi’s shape. Naturally, he can’t bring himself to move. He wants to let himself be cared for.
“Hyung,” Namjoon calls, as he walks back to his original spot. “Can you look at me?”
“It’s hard,” Yoongi replies, choked up a little with the small tenderness in that plea. “Harder to explain.”
“What do you mean?”
“There's something in me that gapes open when I see you.”
Yoongi turns to his side, anyway, filling his eyes to the brim with Namjoon’s handsome face. He decides it’s not a physical sense of ugliness that’d really encumbered him before, but an ugliness of having failed them both.
“Forget about that,” Yoongi waves Namjoon off, as he is still fiddling with an answer, “Earlier on … what was it that you told Hoseok?”
“Oh… that we had unfinished business… is that not the truth?”
“Hmm,” Yoongi hums, eating his heart as he clears his throat. “Well I was just planning my escape when you came around, so let’s save me a little.”
He slips his arms into the jacket sleeves proper.
“Wanna get out of here?”
__
They end up at a convenience store a few streets down.
It’d almost beckoned them to come in, lighting up an otherwise dark end of a sideroad with some vehemence. Choose what you want and I’ll pay, Namjoon had said. It wasn’t particularly funny but it made Yoongi laugh; it sounded as if he was offering to foot the bill for some Michelin star meal.
Still prodding at his noodles, Yoongi watches as Namjoon dings out of the store with his hands full. The night seems to almost flow out from behind him with a dull glow.
“I forgot to ask if you wanted a hotbar too,” he says, setting the skewer down alongside another bowl of neoguri and a small carton of half-boiled eggs. “You like these right?”
“I was right next to you when you were heating it up inside.”
“Ah really? You caught me then,” Namjoon shakes his head. He seems stunned for a brief moment before he reaches into his clip wallet and produces a receipt. “Can you uh — chuck this in the front pocket real quick?”
Yoongi obliges without much thought. “I’ll live,” he huffs back, retracting into the jacket a little.
“It’s just that… actually… I really shouldn’t be eating after eight.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t tell?”
“Tell?”
“Nothing… I just started these new meds and I think they’re doing a number on me.”
Yoongi looks up, only half-expecting to be met with an absent reaction. He stops short at the bit of egg splatter on Namjoon’s side of the table, no doubt from where he’d broken into the shell with a little more force than necessary.
An old feeling blooms in him, perhaps akin to how he’d felt teaching Namjoon how to do up his laces in high school. Something like watching a fawn stand on its hind legs for the first time. He wonders if he’ll only be able to think of Namjoon in memories now.
“Ah—” Namjoon says, finally. “You’ve been seeing Dr Seo haven’t you? Or so I’ve heard from Jin-hyung — how d’you find him?”
“I like him … he’s uhh , open-minded to say the least.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” Namjoon raises an eyebrow. “Is your gaydar wonky, hyung?”
“That’s not a real thing.”
“Sure , and I’m not gay.”
“Right, right. You just happened to be married to a gay man. What was that like then, the worst five years of your life?”
“Well that isn’t—”
Yoongi waves him off. “I’m kidding.”
“The best three years and the worst two years, to be specific,” Namjoon says after a while, this time with some certainty. The rest of his egg falls into his soup with a wet, yellow plop .
“But that’s not even counting all the time before… and to answer your original question… you look good, actually. You look…”
“ Healthy? ” Yoongi taunts.
“... I was gonna go for cute.”
“Oh wow, thanks a lot.”
“I’m serious! You know I mean it in a good way.”
“I don’t know that!”
“Yeah you do.”
Namjoon looks at him as he leans forward and helps himself to the second egg. It’s oddly comforting, watching him eat. Maybe because it’s been ages since he’s seen Yoongi in one, living, breathing piece, maybe because it feels like he’s saving himself with every bite that fills him.
“This reminds you of old times, doesn’t it? I think I’ve spent half of my life in a convenience store.”
“I’ve spent half my life with you,” Yoongi replies, matter-of-factly, and giving them no time to think about how much time that was.
“I have the most vivid memory of us— the first summer I knew you— just standing outside the CU opposite our school. We were both eating melon bars, weren’t we? It was so hot that day you kept getting ice cream all over your hands and shoes… I don’t know. I guess you’re right… What was that thing you used to say? Nothing has changed and everything has changed.”
“Any time we were working late at the studio… the old company building—”
“—the mart near the entrance,” Yoongi finishes after him. “Yeah.They were the first and last label that ever signed us both, together, ha. You know how our first few months there were such difficult times when we were living through them…? It’s funny how differently I think of them now.”
“It’s only because we’ve had worse, hyung.”
“Can’t even argue with that.”
A knowing silence falls upon them.
When Yoongi had left for good he’d taken a few things away from Namjoon: a friend, a lover, a lifelong dream… it occurs to him that they’d never had the chance to talk about it proper. He’d just been so stubborn and angry through the split, so unwilling to come to shore about their differences, to put peace before pride.
Little of those original sentiments remain now, though Yoongi supposes they’d never really left either. When you grow around your anger for long enough it simply starts looking like a fuzzy, yielding centre of grief.
He almost feels the same way about himself, like a velvet nucleus of hurt so soft it could be thumbed right open, if only someone was willing to reach out and touch it…
“We moved too quickly,” Namjoon says, out of the blue. “Into marriage I mean.”
“You think things would’ve been different if we’d waited a few more years?”
“I don’t know if I’m saying that — all I mean is that it definitely complicated things.”
“Things would’ve been complicated anyway.” Yoongi says, his voice pressed flat. “We’ve always had issues reconciling work with our relationship outside of work… regardless of whether there was marriage in the equation.”
“I know that. I just feel like having a title like that bears down on you a bit more— hey, don’t get defensive.”
“I’m not trying to argue with you.”
“I didn’t say you were. I said you were getting defensive — why are you getting defensive?”
“I’m—” The accusation stabs at Yoongi a little, but the exasperation is short-lived. “It sounds like you regret it, okay? There’s a lot of things I regret and getting married just isn’t one of them. It was a miracle to me, and we were happy. Both of us. Really, fucking, over-the-moon when they passed that bill, if you still remember.”
“I do remember. And I was happy—” Namjoon gestures, wagging a finger between them, “Look at me. I don’t regret it. It’s not that blasphemous to ask if we would've been just a little bit happier if we’d gone into it when we were in a more… stable part of our careers.”
“Yes. Alright.”
“I can’t even forget the day you broke the news to me — I can’t if I tried.”
“Really.”
“ God, yes, really— you know I was in the studio that day, writing a song for a group that I knew was never going to make it, when suddenly none of it mattered. None of it mattered because we were going to get married someday— because it was possible— because I loved you and that was more important than how miserable I was putting all my heart into shit that would never amount to anything, even if it was one or five or a hundred groups that would never make it.”
Too old for tears, Yoongi just smiles.
“Okay, I’m listening , Mr. Writer. What else?”
“ Mr. Writer ? Well let’s see, I think I flagged down the first taxi I saw outside the company— I couldn’t wait, god knows everything was rattling inside of me, and it was everything at once— heaven, hell, hunger, repletion… but I get back home, I’m up seven floors eventually—”
“The elevator wasn’t working that week—”
“Oh, that dingy old block…” Namjoon laughs, “And there you were, standing in our small excuse of a kitchen. I think I must have watched you for a good three minutes, just completely paralysed— you hadn’t noticed, of course. And there was a song playing... ‘Rain’ by Lim Kim… Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that you looked like a dream—”
“It was two in the afternoon and I was in PJs,” Yoongi deadpans.
“Yes you were. And it was a dream, no less. The next hour was kind of a blur for me though— I think we cried together for a while… naturally, it was historical and moving and all that… but the next thing you know we’re having the nastiest—”
“—okay, okay, shu —” Yoongi flings a disposable chopstick at him, just missing his face by a bit.
“—filthiest sex on a kitchen top that’s way too—”
“Small.”
“Yeah, way too small.”
The older rolls his eyes.
“I hate you, you know.”
“Do you?” Namjoon asks suddenly, catching him mid-sentence.
Their eyes meet in an instant.
Namjoon’s voice seems to carry all the sincerity in the world.
However misplaced, however offbeat… but then again, it isn’t beyond comprehension. They both remember how they’d acted during the negotiations, the hurtful messages exchanged after.
Right, Yoongi thinks, they’d never talked about those either.
It takes him a while longer to realise this specific word had hit a nerve in Namjoon, too.
And should he be surprised? Both he and Namjoon were — are sensitive people. He knows first hand what it’s like for an emotion to bypass the head, to register a word wholly in your gut.
“Not anymore, no,” Yoongi admits after some time — an answer with some truth. By now the initial playfulness between them had shrunk to the size of a small animal, like something to steal away in the shadows. He’d taken them right out of that kitchen dance and back into the numbed sadness of the present.
Namjoon keeps quiet. He seems almost to be drowning in a hundred defunct answers, unable to dedicate himself to one.
1) That’s good?
2) That’s always good to hear?
3) It would kill me to know otherwise?…
It’s all filler, anyway. There are some answers that cannot be held in a mouth.
Yoongi picks up after him.
“You know what I think? I think this is taking a toll on us: this, meeting each other of all people, at an engagement party of all things… Felt it up there on the twentieth floor and I feel it now— of course, I wish both of them the best—”
“I think I know what you mean. I guess I’m envious too.”
“More than envious… I think I’m resentful… I resent the end. I feel like I can see the whole road down and it makes it so hard to start again. And to watch other people start… ”
“What, are you scared Hoseok and Taehyung will end up like us?”
“I’m scared they won’t. I’m scared it’s just us. I’m scared it’s me.” Yoongi glances up at him. “Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know… maybe. But I never saw an end, personally. Nothing so absolute. All we did was let go when the time came, and we fought really hard not to.”
“That’s another thing,” Yoongi huffs, “We fought so much— why did it ever have to feel like a fight? We were supposed to be on the same team. I don’t think we ever sat down to talk about anything.”
“It’s hard to see through smoke, hyung. Harder to talk to you when you’re piss drunk — though that was a bit later on, to be quite fair.”
That catches Yoongi off-guard. Still, there is a distinct lack of expression on Namjoon’s face; a far cry from disdain. His eyes are everywhere else.
“You’re right, I know, my bad.”
“Well we should talk now. Since we’re already here.” Namjoon reaches out and taps him on the wrist.
“And if you don’t mind me drinking in front of you, I’m actually gonna need to be less than sober for the rest of this.”
Yoongi’s gaze lingers as Namjoon half-jogs back into the store.
It’s the little things he notices about him now. The frame of shadow over his shapely mouth— an old tan, hugging the swell of his arms— the wide expanse of his back. He’d spent many nights before sleeping with his head pressed against that back; it was as familiar as coming home.
And you can make a home of a person, know most intimately their windows and doors, the cool shade of their marrow, salt and spleen from the cut end of a rib, yet — Namjoon would always belong to Namjoon, more than he would the people who filled him. It seemed obvious enough in retrospect, but perhaps the notion had been lost on Yoongi along the way; a house simply does not take kindly to those who come to excavate.
Those were the ever-pervasive dangers of putting your whole life into someone else— to which Yoongi had lent his stubbornness. If Namjoon was changing in ways that hadn’t aligned with what Yoongi wanted from him, then Yoongi was resisting his every vicissitude. It was as though the more the walls warped around him, the more Yoongi moved to trouble the fabric, filling himself into rooms he wasn’t allowed.
Looking back now, it seemed so silly to think of change as an exhaustively antagonistic force. Why had they made enemies out of each other? They had been friends long before they were anything else.
Namjoon will gather them once more, anyway, under a slow trickle of moonlight. A modest one bottle of chamisul for himself; one bottle of hot oolong cha for Yoongi, slid across the table for him to catch.
“So you see, I might have heard rumours that you’re working in-house again…” Namjoon will begin— and already, they’ll be diving into minor details about their little lives — busying themselves with the easy things first — with each other.
Yoongi blinks, and the night deepens.
—
“You know, I wish things had turned out,” Namjoon slurs, fixing his breath amidst the stillness of the air around them. His bottle is nearly empty now.
“I think I miss you — I miss you like it’s the most natural thing in the world — like breathing. But just like breathing, it’s something I don’t think too much about, right ; I have to breathe because I have to live, because I have to move on. Becoming conscious is how I choke up… I miss you like that. Does that make sense?”
Yoongi purses his lips. “I don’t really—”
“I mean to say — I want you to know that I still feel your absence, every day of my life. I’ve just embraced it… if it matters to you… or at all.”
Yoongi looks up at him. It seemed as though the words had cut his mouth as they left him, and he whimpered as he spoke.
If it matters? Of course it mattered. It mattered that Namjoon thought of him, that he was honest enough to be afflicted, that he cared enough to be honest.
“I miss… ” Yoongi manages, already despising the smallness of his voice “... before the bad years.”
Namjoon laughs.
“Well I miss those years as well, hyung,” He settles for a spot right under the bridge of Yoongi’s nose. “I have missed you. ”
“Your idea of me.”
“ No , despite it.”
Yoongi stiffens at once. It feels as if every fibre in his body has been pulled taut, if only to accommodate the stretch of the words as they sink into him.
There’s gravity in these words; the kind of extra weight that pulls your body right over an edge… but the landing, Yoongi finds, is soft… It’s familiar the way an old shirt knows the back of a couch. The way the first snow palpates a window. The way Yoongi still sleeps on the left side of the bed, like all of those other things, like he’s been waiting, all day and all year and Yoongi realises he knows. The landing is always soft when he’s made a home of that yearning.
He knows better.
Yoongi had spent a whole year hating Namjoon. And when he’d run out of reasons, he’d spent another year hating himself. He’s tired of that now, of making everyone else a mouthpiece for his own self-loathing. Tired of growing new teeth. He misses Namjoon, plain and simple. And he’s allowed to. And he deserves to.
Yoongi stares at the noodles in the bowl before him, now swollen with broth. He feels a similar bloatedness about himself, an accumulation of everything he’s ever been, the good-bad soup and all of life’s exhaustion. An empathetic bloat , he muses sadly. Or sympathetic. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
Here they are regardless, older and no wiser, scathed by the unfortunate ‘end’. He’d always assumed it was something that came with age, but perhaps there has never been any such thing as true wisdom, only a second currency of regret.
And Yoongi knows every centimetre of his remorse — it often visited him with questions, after all — like, What if they hadn’t moved into a business together? What if they hadn’t had that big fight, Chuseok of 2018? Or on Seokjin’s birthday the year before? What if Yoongi had drunk less and listened more? And Namjoon had remembered to talk?
What if, what if, what if…
He’d wished himself back on lonelier nights. It was so like Yoongi, to leave a burning house and still feel the compulsion for heat — but when that happens, Yoongi thinks, you just need to let yourself fucking have it. You need to pick at the thin, faded scar and let the rubor remind you of what you’re still healing from.
Yoongi’s eyes meet Namjoon’s, in the middle of that thought.
There is no going back, he tells himself, and hears it in the voice of every person who matters. Namjoon, Seokjin, his therapist, himself…
Namjoon had said something similar, on the last night they ever shared a bed: that they were way past over and they were going to be better people because of it. Strangely enough, Yoongi feels the finality of that statement now, but more than that — he understands why he does.
The wind whips around them in that moment, as if to usher in the realisation. It makes the hairs on Namjoon’s arms stand all at once.
“You should put the hood on, hyung,” Namjoon gestures instead, softly, kindly, washed in blue light. “You’re gonna get sick”
Yoongi doesn’t utter a word, not even as he registers the irony in the suggestion. It’s his body that moves bonelessly about him, like it’s never stopped being attuned to Namjoon, apathetic only to the world that’s managed to become bigger, and colder, in his absence.
To his right, the store bell chimes. A group of adults in their early twenties tumbles out, laughing and shrieking. Another — a couple — one swaying, enabled by a few units of alcohol, and the other with a bottle of water in hand.
They too are graced with blue, moving so languidly through the scene it almost feels like they’re in that bigger world. One that Yoongi is completely outside of — permitted only to be a bystander to its sights and sounds. He wonders if Namjoon feels the same. Should he?
“I’m sorry,” Yoongi says, swept under the noise from the passing crowd. It’s quite unlike him to speak like this, but the urge is too large to be contained. “I’m really sorry.”
Namjoon seems startled for a moment. His mouth stretches around an emotion. Closes. Slowly, he begins to understand.
There is both love and loneliness in a bottle of water, in a borrowed jacket— in falling out of someone’s orbit and yet, having faith in the hand that reaches across the divide.
To Namjoon, sorry is a word that barely covers the circumference of that hurt; those long, difficult years. But it’s a sorry that Yoongi wields like it’s the first and last word in their lexicon, like they’re early men who’ve discovered fire for themselves, determined to make anew the lives they’ve been given.
Yoongi is, at least.
“Fuck,” Yoongi starts, already mapping out the memories in his mind, “I’m sorry for all those places… the living room… that night in ‘17 we fought… embarrassed the hell out of us and our friends … for drinking when I promised I wouldn’t. And for throwing up in your planter box—”
His head hangs low, as if it’s been left to dry out over his shoulders, “for Hosugong-won … right around the time I met your parents... I shouldn't have said that — I don’t think I ever meant it. I don’t — I don’t pity you. You were always going to be the best writer I know — you are , still, the best person I know.”
It sounds like a confession where the fog lifts, perhaps in the way all apologies are. All earnest ones, anyway. The walls come down, sinew by sinew, flooding itself into veins and lymph and any part of his body that could spill out of him like through a sieve.
“The old studio … how we said we were gonna be making music together for a long time. The day I walked out was the day I went back on that promise and I’m sorry — ’m always sorry for that…” he whispers, “I could sit here all day, I know . There’s... a lot . A lot more…”
Yoongi looks at him. One long, hard look, like when you’re old enough for anything to feel like the first time again. Like it could be two years or maybe forever til he’d get the next chance, he can never be too certain…
So Yoongi surrenders, and lets the little left of his resentment roll away. There’s no fight to be had when there’s no stage, no executioner, no blade to make quick work of him.
He knows the way Namjoon will receive him, the same way his tired old heart has long known the contours of grace.
“Hyung,” Namjoon says, his gaze trailing over Yoongi’s features, his soft-sharp eyes and rounded nose. “Well you don’t have to—”
“I just wanted to say—”
“I know,” Namjoon interrupts; cutting through the chiaroscuro of shame. It didn’t seem fair for either of them to have to speak like this in the middle of a meal, tearful or otherwise.
“I know, I know. I know you. And I’m sorry as well. I think I might’ve been waiting to hear you say all of this, but now that you have… I guess I’ve never given much thought to what I would feel and say when the day came…
… then again, I think I found closure for myself quite some time ago. I’ve been selfish in that sense. Thank you? Thank you sounds weird doesn’t it?— but thank you, anyway. To be honest, if we’re talking right now, that’s already half a battle won...”
Wind rushes in again, sending all the umbrellas in the outdoor seating area aflutter. Namjoon thinks his voice might fail him if he goes on, so instead, he allows himself a second to breathe in the scene. Yoongi’s stupid, pretty fucking face— weathered by seasons gone missing, but pretty, nonetheless. He had always loved this face. It was the kind of face you’d dream of before you ever came to know it.
“Yoongi-hyung,” Namjoon recentres, “I’m actually happy to see you. I just am. And — and maybe you feel differently — but — now that we’ve said what we’ve had to say, isn’t it pointless to go back and forth for the rest of this? The night is so lovely…”
Namjoon trails off, gripped by an awareness that comes down on them both; by the measured intensity of his entire organism, and of Yoongi’s. It’s awkward. It’s quiet. It’s real, and a little unbearable.
It’s just the two of them — Yoongi and Namjoon, Namjoon and Yoongi, repeat, repeat, repeat.
A moment of forever passes before the corners of Yoongi’s lips quirk up, little by little, until Namjoon can just about make out the pink of his gums.
“You bastard,” Yoongi huffs, “When did you start sounding so mature?”
Namjoon retreats back into himself, comforted, finally. He offers a smile in turn. “You might not like my answer.”
His hand falls over Yoongi’s, if only to feel close. Closer. They’re an imperfect fit, he knows, wildly oriented puzzle pieces trying to make sense of themselves in a gathering darkness. But Yoongi doesn’t jerk away, and in that instance, it is love realigning; it is enough.
“Besides,” Namjoon continues, after thinking for a bit. “I know one more thing you can be sorry for.”
“Oh?”
“Breakfast.”
Namjoon shifts in his seat.
“It’s a random thought I’ve been having, but I’ve missed having breakfast with you— and it’s not to say that I can’t sit and have a meal with anyone else… it’s just at some point… when you live with someone… breakfast— I think it becomes something of a domestic affair.”
Yoongi hums, brows knitting together. Namjoon can tell the words have been lost on him in some way.
“I don’t know if I’ve thought about it like that.”
“ Ah , it’s probably different since you were the one who did all the cooking,” Namjoon adds sheepishly, scratching the back of his ear even though it hadn’t itched. “I guess I wouldn’t miss doing a chore, either.”
“Okay, it wasn’t a chore to me,” Yoongi corrects him. “ Habit, more like… ”
(It seemed imperative to make clear the distinction. Chores were habits practised without love.)
Namjoon is right, anyhow. In all their years together, he’d always been the one to prepare a first meal. Namjoon was never much of a cook, so he’d come into the role quite naturally.
It was a weird habit that stuck — even on mornings they were cruel to each other — it eased Yoongi’s heart just a little to set a table, to heat something on a stove, to portion food for two. Without noticing it, he’d been creating reasons for them to sit together, over and over again. It had soothed him to know there were things they could still share.
Slowly, the realisation begins to buoy up in him too.
“Well, habit or chore, this, ” the younger one gestures, pushing his food aside, “ This is nice.”
“What, breakfast at this late hour?”
“Something like that.”
“Yeah… yeah, it’s nice. I do sometimes forget about your roundabout way of getting a point across.”
A grin splits his lips. “You think I’m full of shit, don’t you?”
“Only when I don’t mean it.”
Namjoon balks. There’s an unreadable expression on his face where it is obscured by the blue light, but Yoongi gets the feeling that whatever Namjoon is about to say will transform them both.
“Okay.” Namjoon mutters, louder than a whisper. “Will you then at least be sorry for this, so that I may eat with you again?”
And—
Yoongi gets it. Yoongi truly gets it. He too pushes his bowl aside.
Sometimes you come to the end of the story and you just have to wipe the board clean and be hungry again. Here he is, putting his stomach in his heart and letting it gorge itself on a future of rewritten possibilities. Namjoon wants something they can share in the present, and luckily for him, Yoongi will come to the table.
“I think I can be more than sorry,” Yoongi confesses. Somewhere in the bright red centre of his heart, he thinks he’s already pulling out a chair.
“I’d also like to be your friend.”
Again . Again and again and again.
—
It’s a quarter past eleven in Seoul and there’s a party downtown neither of them are going back to.
The solemnity of an ending— true or untrue— hangs where Yoongi is stuck wringing his hands out over a curbside, not knowing what else to do with them — how much, or how little to put down. Once, he knew a man better than he knew anything else in the world, and the man became his world.
Little trivialities remain now: how Namjoon takes his coffee, how he snores in his sleep, the fussing over how much afternoon sun should crowd a room, if it did, a strange accent he’d picked up one summer…
They are but callous reminders of what the nights have left behind, much including this one. No matter how cruel, the immensity of love is often measured in loss.
Yoongi sighs, feeling out the residual tap tap tap from where it had rained an hour ago. Perhaps it was incorrect of him to have ever assumed there could be a true ending, a final ending, or that loss and an end were approximately the same thing. But forget finality now; he just wants to be held, remembered, seen in a way that matters. He wants a light left on, a home that would not collapse the moment he stepped out of it.
In the corner of his eye, Namjoon kills the smoke. Grey trickles out from beneath his shoe and vanishes into the dark in flimsy curlicues. The wishlist ends.
There are wounds too wilful to heal
There are wounds too wilful
There are wounds. There are only wounds.
“Yoongi,” Namjoon calls. “Shall we head back?”
Yoongi turns to face him, steadying himself again. He doesn’t say anything about the dropped honorific, friend-to-friend, because, well , that’s what they are, right?
He thinks maybe a friend like Namjoon is like water; something to be sequestered and not grasped in a hand. Soon, they’ll be slipping away into different beds, into different mornings…
“Back as in—”
“Home,” Namjoon replies. His voice is calm and mellow, his composure practiced.
Home, Yoongi echoes, feeling his whole body well up at once. He knows not to think too deeply about it, but there’s a distant look in Namjoon’s eyes that makes him want to believe. And to have those eyes simultaneously against an economy of bright-ugly lights, the heat off a pojangmacha, a car going by and by…
Like an adult, he shakes the feeling off.
It simply isn’t the time.
“My car is parked near that building over there,” Yoongi shrugs. “You?”
“I’ll walk you, then.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a bike park nearby?”
“Ha. Ha.” Namjoon rolls his eyes. “I’ve got a license now, actually, just no car. Yet. ”
“Oh—? I’m impressed!”
“Well, yeah. It was tough living in the shadow of a big truck driver all those years, you know?”
The laugh that breaks absently from him warms his body. It’s an old inside joke.
“Yeah I’m sure it was difficult. And now you’re going places, Joon-ah.”
“Yes! On four wheels instead of two!”
“God , just —” Yoongi gives the younger one a light shove. He’s already pushing ahead, if only to chuckle to himself. “Just shut up and follow me.”
It isn’t until he notices the unerring rise and fall in his hyung’s shoulders that Namjoon does.
The walk back is silent.
It’s a good silence, where he isn’t thinking too much and the wolf isn’t knocking at his front door, big bad and groaning with memory. Two years is five days away, almost four. The night is still descending and he is walking with a friend. What else should matter?
So Yoongi moves along, embracing the rest of what is left. A full moon behind the clouds, the winking buildings beyond him, streetlamps expanding across the rain-drenched roads, lapping at them like tongues … It's the kind of magic that makes him want to gaze up at the sky, just in case something more divine might be fixing their eyes on him.
A bit of god in everything — Yoongi thinks — he is a funny little man who leaves himself tethered to places wherein people remember to find him; and it is not too difficult to imagine how the lonely watcher might kneel into the heart of a panopticon and belong.
The world is, of course, composed of these strange contradictions, all of the time: somebody is watching. Nobody is watching. He’s growing up. He’s becoming more neotenous. He has one life in which he dies approximately three times a week, and maybe it’s his ghost in the chassis cutting fruit and paying bills and putting a glove in every pocket.
It eases him then, to understand that he’d showed up to appease his good cousin and sip water from a whiskey glass as much as he’d come to be the funny little man. Perhaps Yoongi had gone to the party because a part of him wanted to be found. And Namjoon had found him because a part of him had been looking.
“Where will you be?” Yoongi asks, eventually.
He’s leaning back against the door of his driver’s seat now, suavely, and maybe too suavely. Maybe he’s compensating.
Weighed under Namjoon’s frame, he can’t but feel small, and almost permeable; as if his eagerness could be read through any part of his body that pulsed with it, a glasshouse of viscera for prying eyes.
Namjoon closes the distance. “Just… around.” He answers.
“Around.” Yoongi repeats, slowly. “I know Jin-hyung lives around here.”
It’s a joke of course. But his voice cracks anyway and he almost sounds a little miserable saying it.
Is he desperate now? Jealous? Neither feel right, but the need to correct himself doesn’t arise. He simply lets the ground hold him as his heart takes root.
“Hyung,” Namjoon scolds. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“... I know.”
“It’s not really like that between—”
“I know,” Yoongi cuts him off, sighs, then flashes him an apologetic smile. He decides it’s none of his business, anyway, what Namjoon and Seokjin do in their time together, and in their time apart. “It was a stupid joke and I’m sorry.”
“What, is that the word of the night? Sorry?”
“Mmm… if it makes you happy.”
“Well look, now— now I can’t just do that because… let’s see… I’m getting a bit of a passive-aggressive feeling from you?”
“It’s not aggression!” Yoongi rolls his eyes, though he knows Namjoon is just teasing. “I’m not angry, I’m not frustrated, and I don’t hate you, just to be very clear.”
“Things were very different that last time you texted me.”
“I know. I’m sorry, yeah, shit, word of the night, there you go. I’m sorry. I think I’ve forgotten how to talk to you.”
“Me too,” Namjoon sighs, his hands coming up to his hips. “Honest to god we should start over.”
“What like… pretend we’ve never met?”
“Not so far back… maybe— how about this…”
Namjoon leans in again, this time pressing his palm flat against a spot next to Yoongi’s head. The scene is slightly comical to him, all in all; Namjoon with his less-than-romantic manoeuvrings, the gestures of a novice actor with the script written all over him.
If this were a different time, Yoongi thinks to himself, if he were ten years younger and unpossessed by cynicism, he might even feel flattered. But this is the Namjoon he knows, and it’s in his sudden nearness that Yoongi finds solace, even if it’s only a reflection of a Namjoon that’s years away; the light catches and catches.
So Yoongi watches him; the imperceptible twitch of Namjoon’s lips as his mouth settles on a new emotion—
“… have I ever told you that I love you?”
— and stuns him.
Yoongi’s mind goes blank, all at once.
He searches for a clue and finds only an atrociously beautiful face staring back at him; it is not even a mirror but a hole. A hole through which love slips in and out and induces its path into purpose, a void remembering it’s a void every time it is filled.
He can’t tell if he’s meant to be sarcastic or serious. It sounds like both.
“Not quite, I don’t think.”
“Well I love you.”
Namjoon’s voice is unwavering, as if it's taken shape in the night.
“And I also still like you.”
Yoongi doesn’t say anything. For a while, he doesn’t even believe him. He thinks he’s blushing. He thinks he might just die. He thinks he might be crying with his eyes dry and no, it's something inside him that’s burst open and become inconsolable. It can be quite a harrowing affair to know you are liked beyond love, that you are wanted beyond obligation, and he … and Namjoon…
Memories go by — their first meeting, first date, first times, first apartment together— he pays them no mind. Has it been ten years? Two years? His head sinks to a place lower than his head as he watches Namjoon lean in one last time, nudging his shadow into his…
And then he’s kissing him.
He’s kissing him and it might just be the world. It blooms from the corner of his mouth where Namjoon leaves his mark.
A shudder rips through Yoongi’s body, maybe because he hasn’t been touched in months, maybe because someone loves him and likes him and wants him and none of those things feel remotely real or possible.
The veil had come loose as he kissed him, but as Namjoon’s eyes flutter open ( fuck , had they been closed?) … Yoongi feels like he’s falling apart, like he’s being flipped inside-out, light pouring from every interstice to reveal his great big oafish heart.
Can a heart become conscious of itself? Is that why it skips a beat?
Is it just like breathing, Namjoon-ah?
“I should g—” Yoongi blurts out eventually, “ We should—go. Umm . It’s late.”
He paws at Namjoon’s shirt for a bit before his hands drop to his sides.
“I’ll see you around then?”
“Wherever around is.”
“You know where to find me, hyung.”
“I do?”
“You do. I promise.”
Just like that, he’s watching him leave again. Namjoon walks into the night where it lapses, then dribbles after him, like something hungry.
—
He’s in the car, kicking his seat back when he realises he still has Namjoon’s jacket on. It’d kept him so warm the whole night he’d forgotten all about it.
He’ll need it tonight, he knows, regardless of whether Namjoon had meant for it to be some kind of farewell gift. It isn’t him withdrawing into the past either — he doesn’t dream to — no matter how much harder it is to move along, to thread a storm through the eye of a needle… the plain and simple truth is that he needs it like he needs other people. He cannot walk every night alone.
A strange calm comes over Yoongi in the moment; his body, inhabited by two, sharply contrasting lives, tips over the edge of a new season.
In the meantime, he’ll be twenty nine pushing forty.
He’ll be somebody’s brother, ex-husband, a lover, a friend— peering out of a window, taking in the first breath of another day. There’s a Wednesday ahead of him where he wakes up, masturbates, puts the kettle on… an old corner store where he collects himself… the inevitable tear that sees only the padded inside of his car, or the chipped walls of an apartment with the curtains drawn.
What are adults, anyway, without their private anxieties? Their private afflictions? If only for the moments where someone stops to talk, and someone stops to listen… where there is room open and a body holding, instaurated with something that endures…
Yoongi sighs, shoving his hands into the jacket pockets and subsequently brushing against a crumpled wad of paper in one of them. Recalling the receipt from earlier, he fishes it out.
That was a weird point. Namjoon had never really been the type to keep a receipt, much less for something that couldn’t’ve cost more than ten thousand won.
Blame it on intuition, he thinks.
Warmth fills his car at once. He slips the jacket off his small frame and into his lap with ease.
For a while, Yoongi doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t quite know what to feel, actually, looking down at the string of numbers on the flipside of the receipt, the unmistakable scribblings of one Kim Namjoon. His new phone number.
He breaks out into a little laugh, eventually. He’s won, hasn’t he? What else is there to do but laugh? — at Namjoon's awkward suaveness, his cool yet clumsy proffering of a friendship. Truce, Yoongi nods, truce . He’ll see him around. He’ll make the call when he’s ready.
A few more minutes of contemplation beat pass.
Yoongi leans back in his seat, brings the jacket up to his face and breathes, deeply. It’s a shameful thing to miss someone like this, but he lets his lungs nag on anyway, if only in search of symptoms of a previous occupation— of Namjoon. If only to be flesh wishing itself back on a bone.
At last, it’s only himself he smells.
The moon wanes overhead. In this moment, Yoongi feels both young and older than he’ll ever be— but perhaps it’s only natural.