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“If your mother could see you now, she wouldn’t recognize you,” his father says over cold tea and stale biscuits. Yoongi doesn’t see him often; the med school program he was accepted into was on the other side of the country. Of course, he only applied to programs on the other side of the country.
“Good thing you’ve kept everything the same then, huh?” His father and the house he grew up in looks the exact same. More worn - the plates they all ate off miss little pieces here and there, and the wallpaper in the living room peels in the corner, but the shelves all hold the exact same dusty china in the same order, or the one sitting corner of the sofa offers the same stacked pile of magazines from thirteen years ago, corners of pages still dogeared.
“Do patients really want to see a doctor with all of - that?”
All of that is a platinum blonde dye job and some piercings in his ears. Yoongi hardly looks radical, especially given the vivid hair colors he had in high school, the facial piercings he experimented with and took out before med school. He doesn’t begrudge the comments about it anymore. What else would his father ask him about?
“They will if they’re dying,” Yoongi replies. “I’m working in the ER now.” He’s almost done with his clinical rotations. He’s planning to stay in the ER when he’s done. Everything else felt too - relaxed. Yoongi likes being one of the frontline. It requires him to think fast, to be on top of everything all the time in an exhausting way.
It’s his first trip home in over a year. There isn’t another trip planned. Never is, but Yoongi knows these visits will only get further and further apart. His father sends him home not with the homemade food a mother might, but with a store bought package of the cookies he keeps around always, the same ones he served with tea. On his way out the door, Yoongi sees a cop car turn around the corner down the street.
Six hours and a train ride later, Yoongi sees a similar patrol car parked on his street. He’s used to this one though. When he glances at his phone, sure enough there is a message from Seokjin: Your detective is here. Sent twenty-two minutes ago.
They live on the second floor of a three story; on the ground floor is an old tax office, a quiet sort of place, better than their previous apartment in the middle of bars and restaurants that were struggling to make ends meet so they allowed almost any sort of behavior. There is a slightly older couple that lives above them who they can hear every footstep of on the creaking floors, but they don’t play loud music or keep strange hours, so they don’t mind the basic noise.
Maybe he should have immediately realized something was different; Yoongi knew Officer Cho. He can pick out the man’s particular brand of cigarettes now just by smell. Their visits together are annual, much like Yoongi’s visits with his father, and they are held together by the same tenuous string: his mother. In some ways, Office Cho feels more like a father figure than his father. A gruff older man, maybe slightly older than his dad, but he cares enough to continue these little meetings even though he’s not getting much out of it anymore.
The man inside is not Officer Cho. It’s not his cop at all, and Seokjin knows that.
No, the man standing inside their cramped living space is not only entirely new to him, but entirely foreign in that he doesn’t belong there, or belong in a police uniform. His hair is too polished like his shoes, his delicate features partly hidden by longer black hair than Yoongi is unused to seeing on civil servants of any kind. He’s young - too young to be doing this sort of thing, and his frame is so slight that Yoongi immediately worries for his safety.
“Who are you?” he asks, piercing the silence of their home. Seokjin is nowhere in sight; did he let in a stranger then proceed to leave?
“My name is Officer Park Jimin.” He bows. In his hands, a familiar black notebook at least. His voice is higher pitched than Yoongi could have even imagined, like a chime. It suits his face. It does not suit the uniform.
“Shit, what’d you do to get put on this?”
Officer Park frowns. “I requested this case.”
Yoongi smiles; requesting to work cold cases was asking for a beating. Maybe not so different from asking to be placed permanently in the ER. He gestures into the kitchen, adjacent to the living room Park stands in, and pulls down two mugs. “Coffee or tea?”
“No, thank you.” Officer Park is nothing but polite. And professional.
“What are you going to do if you don’t want something to drink?” Yoongi fills the kettle. Outside of the hospital, he enjoys taking the time to savor tea, even if the idea of him drinking it is ludicrous to his coworkers. At work, his hand is glued to a cup of coffee if he’s not actively with a patient.
“Ask questions?” Office Park waves his notepad at him, one eyebrow raised. Yoongi suppresses a laugh.
“About what, exactly?” Yoongi doesn’t mean to sound unkind. “What questions do you have that haven’t been asked already?”
Officer Park frowns. “It’s routine to revisit the evidence, Yoongi-ssi. I’m sure Officer Choi went through the same procedure when he visited.”
Yoongi smiles. “You can call me hyung if you’d like, although it seems like you’ve been assigned babysitting duty for me.” He makes Officer Park some of the tea he’s decided on. If he doesn’t drink it, he’ll have the second cup later.
“How do you know you’re older?” Park asks. Yoongi gives him a pointed look and the other man scowls.
“You look like it’s your first year out of the academy.”
Officer Park doesn’t deny it, true or not. “I don’t mean that as an insult. You must have been a gifted student to be placed where you are, but running down old cases and people like me for it…” Yoongi shrugs his shoulders.
Park’s mouth is open; he snaps it shut with a frown. “Don’t you want to know?”
No. “Of course.” Yoongi shrugs some more. “But we all know the statistics.”
Jimin fidgets, shifting from foot-to-foot and fingers brushing down the sides of the paper in his notebook. “You seem very - nonchalant about it, I guess.”
Ah, Yoongi thinks. This is where Officer Park tells him that if it was his own family member, he would never stop looking. Everyone’s got their own sob story. “I’ve had a lot of time to deal with it. If I didn’t have these little annual visits to look forward to, I wouldn’t think about it much at all anymore.”
Lies.
“You wouldn’t think of your mother anymore?”
Yoongi sighs. The police love to put words in his mouth. “I wouldn’t think about how she’s not here, anyway.”
Park nods, frowning. He looks down at his list of questions in his little black notebook, then shuts it. “So, what did you and Officer Choi talk about when he did his visits then?”
Yoongi laughs. “Basketball, mostly. He retire, or something?”
“Or something,” Park nods. That’s okay. Yoongi is used to how they never give him any information, even if these yearly check-ins are supposed to be all about updating the family.
“You can ask the questions, if you need to.” Yoongi can probably still recite most of them that he’d ask, even if it’s been a few years since Choi bothered.
Officer Park shakes his head. “I’ll just ask one: when was the last time you saw your father?”
Yoongi stiffles his laugh. “This morning.”
“You saw your father this morning?”
“Yep. I can show you my train ticket and everything if you want, Officer.”
“That won’t be necessary. There’s a note on the file that says the two of you are estranged.”
“Not necessarily. We just don’t see each other often.” On purpose. “The glamorous life of a med student doesn’t include a generous schedule.”
“I see.” Park keeps frowning down at his notepad, like it actually has all the answers. And honestly, it should. “I guess I can get going if you don’t have anything new to report.”
Yoongi wants to laugh, but can’t.
“Do you - do you want us to keep the routine visits?”
“For the updates I get?” Yoongi asks. It’s not Park Jimin’s fault there is no news, but he has to know how ridiculous it all is. “Unless you want to watch NBA reruns with me when they air in our time.”
“Right. Well. I can make a note on the case for you if you’d like.” Park never touches the cup of tea Yoongi put out for him.
“Were you assigned to cold cases, or did you ask to be placed there?” Yoongi asks. He can’t help but wonder how old this kid is. He can’t help but think the department would only give someone that young the most hopeless cases.
“I asked for it,” he says softly, like he might regret it or it’s still his greatest wish. It’s hard to say. Yoongi doesn’t know him like he knew Officer Choi; Choi had all kinds of tells. From their first meeting, Yoongi could tell the man cared, but it wasn’t all about his mother - it was about him. It was about how he could help Yoongi along, more so than the case at that point which had been cold for years already.
Yoongi certainly doesn’t think a twenty-something detective right out of school is going to break new ground. Officer Park seems just as kind as Choi, if not a little naive still. Naivety is something they all have to grow out of at some point. For Yoongi as a physician, it was about three widows and several mourning parents ago.
Watching others mourn their loss is what keeps Yoongi going. At least the families of his patients have him, have the closure that he can offer when he gives him a time of death and a precise reason why. For him, the closest to closure he’ll get is a pseudo father figure who he saw only as often as his real father, but even he’s gone now.
“You can stop by whenever you need, Officer Park,” Yoongi bows his head in dismissal. The other man pockets his notebook and returns the bow, walking towards his shoes next to the door. “I don’t think he had anything to do with it.”
Park makes a questioning noise.
“My father,” Yoongi elaborates. “I know that will always be the predominant theory, but. I don’t think he had any more to do with it than the usual unhappy marriage.”
Park doesn’t respond; he stands there in the entrance way and looks at Yoongi, maybe looking him over for the first time. His expression is carefully blank - do they teach them that in cop school? - but he doesn’t look unkind when he says, “I’m not sure we’ll meet again then, Yoongi-ssi.”
“If we do, you can call me hyung.”
Park smiles; his eyes nearly gone with it. “If we do, you can call me Jimin.”
It feels no more strange to be flirting with a police officer at his doorstep for the complete unraveling of his childhood than it is to dress himself in scrubs and go to the hospital to stick his hands inside someone’s open chest. Yoongi is lucky in that he loves all of his attending doctors in the ER with him, and he’s always especially fond of Dr. Bauer, a transplant from Germany who’s accent in Korean is nothing short of heinous, but she’s the closest one to fun he’s ever had while still offering support when needed.
A good day in the emergency room can mean a lot of things; it’s a place of life or death, but just because no one dies doesn’t automatically make it a good day. Patients come through who go on to oncology for a bad diagnosis or they come in and never receive a diagnosis at all when there clearly is one that needs to be found. Yoongi enjoys being there because he gets to see it all; he gets to be a general surgeon, gets to be a psychiatrist, gets to bandage barely scrapes or give a flu shot and fluid bag, and he gets to do it under the guise of being a student still. If his name goes on a death certificate, it’s under the attending doctor.
His roommate works at the hospital with him, now an attending physician in the plastic surgery department where people take one look at his face and assume he’s there for nose jobs or liposuction, but Kim Seokjin has already made a name for himself in the community as a trans friendly provider for gender affirming operations. Yoongi couldn’t be prouder of him - couldn’t be prouder that they both made it.
“You know what my detective looked like,” Yoongi says to him over coffee on the rooftop. It’s overcast, so he dares to venture out. “Why’d you call that kid my cop?”
Seokjin snorts. “That boy was for you if ever I saw one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Seokjin shrugs and Yoongi frowns. He knows his friend likes to say shit just to say shit, but sometimes there’s real truth behind what Yoongi assumes is drivel. “Must be hard for him to be an out gay police officer.”
“Christ, Jin. You know better than make assumptions like that.”
His friend shrugs again, standing to brush off his pants. Yoongi knows others think of Seokjin as callous, and in moments like this he’s reminded of it. Without a doubt, he’s Yoongi’s best friend - but long have passed the days when Yoongi thought that meant knowing another person well. Yoongi doesn’t feel like he knows a thing about Jin, and it has nothing to do with him and everything to do with Seokjin’s favorite deflection tactics.
Yoongi wouldn’t change him though.
His good day in the ER ends after only fifty-two hours, most of them spent on call. A slow couple of days for their hospital. By the time Yoongi makes it home, Seokjin is gone back in for his more regularly scheduled hours. There are signs of one Jeon Jeongguk around the apartment though; Yoongi sticks his head into Seokjin’s bedroom to see if a lump of a body might reveal itself to him in the bed, but he seems to be alone.
In between a cup of spicy noodles and a gross ice cream bar he found in the back of their freezer, Yoongi realizes there is a business card stuck in the corner of their coffee table. It’s Officer Park’s - listed with two phone numbers, probably both for his precinct. It’s wedged deep enough in the table that he tears a corner of it trying to get it out. He wonders why Park left it there rather than in his hand or on the fridge.
Yoongi hates being in the apartment; he would rather stay on for the next shift at work if he thinks he can get away with it. Even if it’s just camping out in one of their overnight rooms, listening to an anonymous nurse snoring on the bunk above him, it’s better than being at home. Seokjin hates it as much as he does; when he’s off, and he tends to be off more than Yoongi, he’s usually out. It’s a fun game of phone tag between them if they want to see each other outside of the hospital, and it takes stars aligning for them to do this.
Yoongi hasn’t been out on a weekend night in a long time; prefers the action in the ER on the weekends by far, but when Jeongguk texts to tell him which club they’re in, Yoongi gives up his attempt at stress baking eclairs. If they come home together later, Jeongguk will at least eat them no matter what.
“You came.” Seokjin’s voice sounds the same no matter what; he’s never heard his friend sound upset or excited. Their mutual friend Hoseok joked about how Seokjin might sound in bed - just as flat - and if it had been Yoongi, he might have not talked to Hoseok for the rest of the night, but Seokjin just shrugged, unbothered as ever.
When he’d told his friend about this mother, back when Jin was more his roommate than friend, Seokjin quietly watched him with unblinking eyes and asked, “Do you miss her?” As if there are people out there who wouldn’t miss their mother, but Yoongi guesses there must be, and maybe it’s not so impolite for Seokjin to ask such a question.
A surgeon needs to be cold blooded, after all, but Seokjin went away to plastics and spends most of his consult time double-timing as a therapist.
“He’s here again,” Seokjin says, and only someone as composed as him could be heard over the house music without yelling.
“Who?” Yoongi looks around, assuming he’s talking about Jeongguk, who Yoongi is well aware is there. He’s the one who texted him.
Seokjin nods his head out in the center of the floor, used for dancing on the weekends and for anything from self defense to pop-up prayer services during the week. When Yoongi follows his eyesight, it’s not Jeongguk he sees, but Park Jimin, standing in the middle of the dance floor, already looking at him as if he’d been waiting.
He’s not dancing. He’s not moving at all. Park Jimin looks up at him from under pink and blue lights, dressed in black pants that look like liquid and a silky shirt unbuttoned past his collarbone. The long earrings around his face swing back and forth, the only part of him moving, but Yoongi is hypnotized.
“Hyung - ” When Yoongi turns, Seokjin is gone. No sign of his retreating back or Jeongguk’s familiar tattoo sleeve in the crowds. Yoongi shifts back, and standing directly in front of him now is Jimin.
“On duty, Officer?” Yoongi drawls.
“We agreed it would be Jimin if we met again,” the other smiles. It’s just from one side of his mouth.
Yoongi stands up straighter, away from the bar. They’re roughly the same height, but Jimin wears heeled boots that give him a hike up. “You look different out of uniform,” Yoongi says.
“So do you,” Jimin replies, standing close enough Yoongi can feel the warmth of his body wafting off his skin.
“You came to the hospital?”
Jimin nods. “It’s my job to be thorough.”
“Is tonight part of your job, too?” Yoongi asks, raising an eyebrow as Jimin snags Yoongi’s hand with his drink in it.
“What is this?”
“Old fashioned.”
Jimin takes a sip and takes a face; it’s far too cute on someone who radiates that much sex appeal. Yoongi has to grin. “Not a bourbon fan?”
“Don’t drink much,” Jimin admits, still frowning slightly from the aftertaste. He sticks out his tongue for a minute as if that might help anything. It certainly doesn’t help Yoongi’s concentration.
“Not everyone would take kindly to you helping yourself to their drink.”
“It was the fastest way to prove my suspicions.”
“Oh?” Yoongi grins, finishing the last of his drink in one go. He’s about to need his hands free. “And what’s that?”
“That you’re into me.” Jimin’s smile isn’t polite or professional any more. “Come on. Dance with me.”
All night long Yoongi never shakes the feeling of being under water, pulled under by no one other than Park Jimin. He can’t look away from the man’s face, thinking about how differently he does and doesn’t look from two weeks ago when they met in the shitty lighting of Yoongi’s apartment. It’s the same kind of open intensity in the looks that Jimin gives him, like he simultaneously is going to imprint himself to Yoongi’s skin all while deducing his next move. It’s scrutiny that leaves Yoongi open-mouthed, unsure of what to do except for what Jimin tells him to do.
When he tells him to come home with him at the end of the night, Yoongi does. “This doesn’t feel very professional,” Yoongi says, sitting on top of Jimin’s kitchen counter top with a shared go-to container of tteokbokki between them. He’s dressed in a pair of short shorts and baggy tee lent to him from Jimin’s dresser drawers.
“Thought you said you were good without any more police involvement,” Jimin says in between bites. Under his own shitty apartment light, Jimin looks more human again and less like a miraculous hallucination from loneliness. It also helps that he removed his dangly earrings and leather pants.
“Guess there are other things I can ask of you,” Yoongi says with more confidence than he has. Fake it until you make it. Another thing med school taught him.
Jimin is easy to talk to when the topic of conversation doesn’t revolve around Yoongi’s greatest trauma. Of course, Yoongi doesn’t have a lot of friends to compare to, but he thinks Jimin is easy to get along with in general. He becomes his most frequently texted number in his phone, his name always at the top of his messages. Jimin works long and often strange hours like Yoongi, so in person hang-outs are limited often to grabbing a rushed dinner at three in the morning at an all night pizza joint or sometimes Jimin comes to lay out on the hospital roof and stargaze with him (and Seokjin if he’s around).
It’s always weird to see Jimin in uniform; Yoongi isn’t sure why. He met Jimin in uniform and most of the times when they can meet up he is still in uniform. It should be his default image of him, and yet he can’t forget the image of Jimin on the dance floor, standing there silently and unmoving, waiting just for Yoongi.
At some point, Yoongi wakes up from a dream and recalls why this feels like a memory. It’s not a memory, it’s a fucking fantasy. Yoongi used to dream about seeing his mother again in all sorts of places - a deserted 24-hour laundromat or the middle of a busy up and coming restaurant - but in all of these dreams she’d always be standing there just waiting for him. Quietly and alone. She’d look neither happy or sad to see him. She’d just look at him, and he at her.
Much the same way he found Jimin. Or, Jimin found him. Standing there under all those lights in the middle of all those people and he stood out the most of all.
Yoongi isn’t ever going to be able to untangle thoughts of his mother from Jimin. It’s a pity, because he really likes Jimin.
“Hyung, if you’re still off Tuesday night, maybe you can meet my friends?” Jimin asks, curled up in a lumpy blanket on his bed. He sleeps with no less than three comforters on his bed, Yoongi finds out. He wears glasses off duty, and he used to have a lip piercing before he went into law enforcement. His greatest wish is to be just six centimeters taller, and when he wants to dance, he’s alarmingly good at it.
Yoongi could be smitten, if he lets himself.
Because Jimin is - Jimin is a lot of things. For someone who looks so serious when he’s working, who can make himself look bigger and threatening when he needs, the man is also decidedly soft and relishes in being so. He loves everything and is happy to spend time painting his nails even though he has to remove the color within just hours before work or he’ll learn a new language just so he can teach his niece a couple of words the next time he sees her. He reads about anything and everything and can put Yoongi to shame with his knowledge on most things. Jimin seems like one of those people who could literally do anything he wanted, who can be anyone he wanted. He’s humble about it, sometimes even borderline shy although he’s not afraid to be proud of himself either.
Seeing him with his best friend Taehyung completes the picture; Jimin and Taehyung orbit each other in a way that makes it hard not to be jealous. They don’t seem like they’d fit together, one in law enforcement and the other working as a stylist for a fashion publication, but they have matching giggles and grins for each other. Taehyung shows Yoongi pictures of Jimin from high school when he had pink hair and then a continuous photo stream of Jimin with kittens crawling all over him at Taehyung’s family’s farm.
It feels like someone sucked all the air out of Yoongi’s lungs as he’s looking at the photos. He looks up at Jimin now, present tense, sitting not far from him with a smile that’s meant for his best friend, a smile meant for him.
He could be smitten.
“He’s too good for you,” Seokjin says casually, legs crossed while they’re eating breakfast on the roof a few mornings later.
“Yah!” Yoongi protests verbally, even if he agrees.
Seokjin at least has the decency to smile, as if he’s joking, but like most of his smiles, it falls a little flat. One of the attending doctors they’d shared once called Seokjin an ‘old school doctor,’ and when Yoongi asked his friend what the fuck that was supposed to mean, Seokjin shrugged and said: “I think he means I’d score high on the psychopathy scale.”
Yoongi knows Seokjin feels things a little differently from him - doesn’t everyone feel things a little differently? - but he also knows Seokjin cares. He cares about him. He definitely cares about Jeongguk.
“You in love with him already?” Seokjin asks, expression safely hidden behind his sunglasses.
Yoongi shrugs. “We’ve never even kissed.”
If Hoseok were with them, he might express shock at this. Seokjin doesn’t react. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
Jimin isn’t shy about leaning in like he might want Yoongi to kiss him; it’s just an occasional thing when they see each other in person. Mostly, they just text. It’s nice to have someone just to himself; he has Seokjin, but Seokjin has Jeongguk. Jimin feels like his in a similar way, even if they aren’t kissing.
They go a few weeks without seeing each other in real life, so Yoongi takes the trip out to Jimin’s precinct to take him coffee and a snack, maybe sit in his office with him for a little bit if he allows it, but when he enters the room with mountains of folders stacked up on Jimin’s desk, Yoongi feels ill. It’s strange to see so much information on paper still - even the hospital hardly keeps anything on hard file anymore.
There’s nothing good in those files, Yoongi knows. Every one of them has a different sob story, every one of them a life ending in some way. One of those files could very well be Yoongi’s mother, he realizes. His fingers itch to look, to just read through the stack of names. Jimin has her case, has her file somewhere, but what might it say that Yoongi doesn’t already know?
“Hyung!” Jimin is happy to see him, and when he finds him in his office, Yoongi sits on his hands. He’s not looking anywhere near his desk.
It’s fine. The way they interact in his office is different; a little more stilted and they keep more distance between them, but Jimin happily introduces Yoongi to his work friend, a friendly looking man named Namjoon who looks like he’s been sleeping there for days on end, hair and clothing rumpled but no less welcoming to Yoongi for it.
The other people in the office Jimin doesn’t introduce. Which is fine. Yoongi came from the hospital in his scrubs and there might be a little bit of blood and other bodily fluids around the hem. Not enough to bother him, and surely not enough to bother this entire floor of detectives. Jimin’s uniform isn’t as hard pressed as usual either.
“How long you been here?” Yoongi asks as they sip their coffee, office door shut behind them.
Jimin shrugs. “Just over twenty-four hours. It’s not bad.” He chews the words a little. Yoongi can tell at this point when Jimin wants to say more than he does. Jimin is someone who works with confidential information all day long, and much like Yoongi, it’s sometimes dealing with life or death.
“I should have gone into the financial crimes unit,” Jimin sighs.
“Oh yeah? Chasing down offshore accounts more your speed now?”
“Better than explaining to parents that their missing daughter probably isn’t coming home.” Jimin winces. “Sorry. Forget I said that. For legal purposes. And - ”
“Yeah. It’s okay, Chim.” Yoongi’s lost some kids. A little boy from a car wreck just a week ago, and before that a little girl from what would have been an easy appendectomy if she was brought in just a couple hours earlier.
“Yeah. I know you get it,” Jimin says so softly, looking at him over the stack of folders taller than his head while seated.
“I gotta go.” Yoongi stands, a little too abruptly for it to seem natural. “I’ll message you later.”
“Hyung, wait.”
Yoongi does not wait; he goes to hang out with Hoseok.
Hoseok, despite all of his warm smiles, is a bitter pill to swallow. At least, for Yoongi, who is used to Seokjin. Both of his friends are the sort of people who don’t hold back or mince words, but with his oldest friend it’s at least said with little to no emotion. With Hoseok, he can cut someone down with the truth or build them up with the loveliest lines, but everything feels so emotionally charged all the time. There is no inbetween with Hoseok.
The one thing he gets more freely from Hoseok though is physical affection; Hoseok will throw himself into people’s laps when he laughs or jump on a back for a demanded piggyback ride when he’s tired. He doesn’t think it’s strange for Yoongi to show up unannounced and crawl into bed with him, a thing Yoongi would never do with Seokjin.
“You smoking again?” Hoseok asks from under the cover Yoongi pulled up over both of their heads. He’s a thirty year old man hiding under the covers.
“Never.”
Hoseok scoffs at him, or at least Yoongi thinks so. His eyes are still adjusting to the low light. “That shit will kill you.”
“Thanks, Dr. Jung.”
Yoongi spoons up against Hoseok’s back. He’s warm from being in bed all morning. He smells like sweat and fried food, a scent so comforting to Yoongi because it feels centralized in his own ideas of living, of being here. Far better than smelling like a hospital.
“Did you tell that boy you like him yet?”
Hoseok is familiar only in theory with Jimin; they haven’t met, despite the fact that Hoseok hovers closely on the periphery of Yoongi’s life, but Yoongi didn’t have a choice in sharing Jimin with Seokjin, so he’s not eager to give that up so quickly for anyone else.
Yoongi shrugs so Hoseok will feel it against his back. “Dunno if I can.”
“If you survived your round in pediatrics, you can do this.”
Yoongi wants to smile. It’s usually easier to smile around Hoseok. “Somewhere in his office, at his work, he has a photo of her, and I know exactly which photo it is, and I know the date it was taken. I don’t know if I can - reconcile that he’s someone I like while he’s someone who looks at that for his job.”
“But you would have never met him if not for her. That’s something, right?”
It’s something. Yoongi isn’t sure it’s a good something.
Jimin becomes only increasingly involved and familiar in Yoongi’s life. The nurses at the entrance and the ER station recognize him now, understand he’s not a cop they need to get their hackles up about when he comes poking about. Jimin has Yoongi’s favorite oversized hoodie at his home, and Yoongi keeps one of Jimin’s rings on his right hand when he’s not scrubbed in. They spend the night in each other’s bed because sometimes that’s the only time they can see each other.
“I’ll be gone for a few days,” Jimin says in the absence of daylight. It feels more familiar in the dark though. Most of their meetings are late at night.
Yoongi doesn’t need to ask, but does: “Case taking you away?”
Jimin bites his lips, carefully looking over Yoongi’s face. “Yeah. Got to run down some leads. Don’t know exactly how long it will take, but at least a few days.”
The thing about investigating people who are already gone is that it doesn’t often put Jimin at risk; he’s not in the direct line of duty like some other cops are, doesn’t even have to deal with drunk and disorderly people who can get handsy. Yoongi sees Jimin off that morning and doesn’t need to worry about his physical wellbeing, but it makes it no less difficult to grasp what he’s doing when he’s away.
Is he knocking on doors, talking to people about the last time they saw their loved ones? Is he meeting a different version of Yoongi on the other side of the country, a man who’s still a boy, arrested in development after his mom was gone?
Yoongi doesn’t have a lot of pictures of his mom. His mom was gone when he was young, too young to be taking his own photos of her, and his dad was never one to care to document anything. He doesn’t have a lot of baby photos even, not when his parents were young when they had him and more concerned with paying for nutritious meals than things of sentimental value. He has the same photo that the police have though - it’s one of the things he shares with them. He’s not even sure if he has the original, or if they do. Even this might be a copy of a copy.
It’s not a great picture, but Yoongi keeps it hanging in the mirror on top of his bedroom desk. It’s a stiff, formal photo, taken by people who wouldn’t have even known her. It’s a version of his mom he didn’t know, and the version he did know is distorted now.
How could someone do that? They all ask. They is everyone except the cops, because cops know, or pretend to know. The general pontification of how or why is left up to the general public. How could someone do that to a family? They wonder, as if there are any easy answers, and maybe there are for families who grow old together.
Jimin doesn’t contact him at all for five days. Whatever he’s doing, Yoongi hopes it’s for answers. Answers for someone. Yoongi can always hope for answers for someone, even if it’s not him.
When he returns, Jimin lets himself into Yoongi’s apartment with the code that he finally gave to the other. Yoongi comes home from the hospital smelling like death, and it’s Jimin who wrinkles his nose and tells him it’s time to bathe. “Do you want to join me?” Yoongi asks.
Nudity outside the light of sexual intimacy can be a lot of things, but since it’s the first time Yoongi sees all of Jimin’s body, it feels bittersweet. His skin is paler in some parts and he’s both surprised and not surprised to find the younger man has more tattoos, kept hidden away. Yoongi had seen the larger one on his side before - it’s hard to keep hidden when they’re relaxed in bed together, but there are several more. Yoongi traces each one with a single finger as they sit facing each other, limbs all jumbled up in the water.
“My dad told me she wouldn’t recognize me if she saw me now,” Yoongi tells him. The faucet leaks, so there’s a slow but steady drip soundtrack.
“I think a mother would recognize their child always,” Jimin replies, trying to peer up into Yoongi’s face. He doesn’t say anything else, so Jimin says, “Don’t you think she’d be proud of you if she could see you? A successful doctor?”
“She always wanted me to be a doctor.” A statement most of their peers could probably make, Yoongi thinks. She wasn’t even unique in that, and he wasn’t unique in that he went along with it and just did what his parents wanted.
Jimin washes his hair and dries him off. They’re both pink from more than the heated water, but Jimin only shyly wraps his pinky around Yoongi’s when he leads him to bed. He pushes Yoongi’s shoulders down until they’re both lying side by side, their faces on the same pillow.
“You know you’re never going to find her, right?” Yoongi asks.
“Hyung.”
“It’s been thirteen years,” Yoongi says. “She walked out the front door of her own volition. You know it, and I know it. She wanted to leave. No one made her do it.”
“Yoongi.”
“And it wasn’t bad, either. I know everyone thinks it must have been bad at home, bad enough she would want to leave, but it was fine. My dad was fine. I was fine. My mom just didn’t want to be there anymore, and one day she walked out of the house without her purse or coat or anything else.”
Jimin stays quiet. He was supposed to talk to Yoongi about what happened, and they never did. So now, he listens.
“She left the front door open. It was wide open when I got home from school.”
Jimin covers his mouth like it’s a shocking detail, but Yoongi knows every detail, including this, was recorded in those files. Jimin knows this already.
“I have to be okay with that, and if we’re going to do this,” Yoongi pauses, licking his lips. Jimin’s eyes swell. “You have to be okay with that too.”
“Hyung.” Jimin wraps up both of Yoongi’s hands in his own, decides it’s not enough, and pulls Yoongi to his chest. The hand that works through his hair is patient and kind - almost motherly in this touch.
“You have to let the case go. Give it to someone else. I don’t care. But I can’t - ” Yoongi’s voice breaks. It’s been awhile since he’s cried over it. “I can’t do this with you if you’re still looking for her.”
Jimin might delude himself into thinking that Yoongi is upset over the thought of false hope, that maybe if Jimin works hard enough and long enough, he might find out what happened to her, but Yoongi has no hope. His mother is gone. He won’t ever fully know why or how, but he knows the general why and how, and the simplest answers are usually the most devastating.
She just left, and at some point, she must have died. Anonymously. The way she probably wanted. It doesn’t matter if it happened right away or years after the fact. She’s gone. They would have found her by now if she were alive. She didn’t gift Yoongi any last wishes, but he can honor the fact that she wanted this.
Yoongi doesn’t need more answer than that, and he can’t be with someone who doesn’t honor that too.
He must decide he’s okay with that; Jimin continues to see him. For a while he tries to avoid dropping by in his uniform, but their free time is too precious to worry about that so he drops it. He keeps working missing people cases, but he doesn’t talk about it with Yoongi, and Yoongi doesn’t bring up the people he saves or doesn’t save in the ER. It’s mostly broken bones and fevers and coughs anyway.
Jimin helps find a teenage boy who’d been abducted seven months prior into a sex traficking operation. When they watch the news footage of the blurred out boy hugging his parents after their reunion together later that week, Yoongi can feel Jimin staring at his side profile.
“I have something for you,” Jimin tells him later. He’s standing in front of Yoongi in uniform, his shoes polished and his hair carefully styled. About to go into work. He’s got a large manila envelope in his hands, and he stands in the middle of the living room like he did so many months ago now when they first met.
When he gives it to him, Yoongi waits until Jimin leaves to open it.
It’s his mom’s death certificate.
“You okay?” Seokjin asks. Yoongi lies flat on his back on the floor of their living room watching the sun move across the opposite wall, the piece of paper in his hand still. He lets his friend yank it out of his grip to look at it.
“Yeah. Gonna kiss a boy I like later.”
Seokjin hums, looking it over. “I think you two will be very happy.”
Yoongi smiles.