Chapter Text
It wasn’t intentional. Yoongi would never purposefully hurt the neighbor boy, but, he’d gotten into a small altercation (Namjoon somehow managed to piss off a fucking gang and Yoongi was running for his goddamn life) and he and Namjoon were forced to duck through the backyards leading towards Yoongi’s house to avoid their pursuers. In the pitch-black dark of two a.m., neither of the boys noticed where they were stepping or what they were stepping on.
Apparently, the two of them trampled through a garden and, from the vantage point of his bedroom window, Yoongi can see that his neighbor was intensely distressed over that fact.He isn’t sure whether or not he should apologize, thinking selfishly that he could save himself a lot of trouble if he just pretended he had never seen the trampled yard or the sad boy. Then, Yoongi saw him pick up a handful of smashed pink petals in one hand and swipe the sleeve covering his other across his eyes and fuck, if he was crying, Yoongi had to do something. Jimin and Yoongi may not be friends, but Jimin’s a nice kid and Yoongi would never want to hurt him.
By the time he makes it to the fence that separates the yards, Jimin no longer seems to be crying, but he is pouting at the small, destroyed flowerbed. He’s so immersed in staring, he doesn’t hear Yoongi approach. Leaning against the fence, peering over the top at the scene, Yoongi sees the full extent of the damage he caused. It’s a small garden. A few plants seem to grow some kind of fruit that Yoongi can’t recognize because of how they’re smashed into the dirt. The rest of the area is filled – or was filled – with a rainbow variety of flowers that Yoongi can’t name. Three plants remain, drooping, near the fence. They lived just out of the area of Yoongi and Namjoon’s feet, their placement saving them from being completely smashed like their neighbors when the two boys launched themselves over the fence.
“Hey,” Yoongi calls after a few minutes of watching Jimin mourn his ravaged garden, feeling guiltier by the second. Still, he has a reputation to uphold, so he leans on the fence with one arm and watches Jimin through his peripherals, looking away so he doesn’t seem too interested. He greets Jimin in a bored tone, maintaining his front even when Jimin startles at the sound of his hello and looks up with glassy eyes.
“Ah, hi, hyung,” Jimin murmurs, turning his gaze back to the ground once he identifies the voice.
“Sorry about your,” Yoongi waves vaguely towards the wreckage, continuing to appear as uninterested as possible, “thing.”
“Oh,” he sounds so sad, Yoongi hates it, “It’s not your fault, I’m just upset after all the hard work I put into it, and it was looking really pretty. I wasn’t sure the flowers were going to bloom...” Jimin’s voice trails off towards the end, and if it was anyone else, Yoongi would think they were being this dramatic on purpose.
“Well,” Yoongi starts awkwardly, his facade slipping, “It is my fault.” Jimin’s expression shifts from defeated to shocked, jaw dropping while he stares at Yoongi with wide, disbelieving eyes.
“It wasn’t on purpose,” Yoongi tries to defend himself, laying his second arm over the one already resting across the fence to prop up his chin as he faces Jimin straight on, finally owning up to his mistake, “Me and a friend of mine were in a tight spot last night and we ran through. It was too dark to see.”
“This was you?” Jimin asks, voice so soft Yoongi almost misses it. The words escape his gaping mouth are dripping with betrayal, as if Jimin had somehow expected better of him. Yoongi doesn’t even expect better of himself. Jimin’s tone, though, destroys Yoongi as badly as Yoongi destroyed the flowers and his attempts to seem aloof fly out the window.
“It was an accident, honestly!” Yoongi says, a little frantic, and Jimin frowns at him, suspicious.
“You still did it,” he mutters.
Before Yoongi can consider his words, he rambles something about making it up to Jimin, and somehow ends with, “Why don’t we fix it together?”
Regret floods Yoongi’s stomach as soon as the offer is made, but the unknown feeling that results from Jimin’s responding smile, wide and bright, fights it off and leaves Yoongi feeling oddly pleasant, even as he’s drug from his backyard towards the nearest flower shop with Jimin chattering about seed types and watering methods in his ear the entire journey.
He hangs back as Jimin browses seeds and small containers with pre-planted flowers, grown and sold as little green stems that will eventually bloom with the care of their purchaser. Jimin asks Yoongi’s opinion each time he sees something he likes, but, even if he has one, Yoongi just shrugs and keeps it to himself.
Despite his disinterest in the store, he works harder than does at most things when it comes to rebuilding the garden. He follows all of Jimin’s instructions carefully, taking his time to dig holes to Jimin’s exact specification, transferring the small, recently planted flowers into the ground with gentle hands, much to Jimin’s surprise.
“You’re good at this,” he comments, while Yoongi is patting the soil down around the plant in its newly filled hole, plucking a few stray weeds and crushed petals out of the nearby dirt and dropping them into the pile of ruined flora they’d cleared out before beginning to replant, “maybe you should be a florist instead of fighting like a hooligan.”
“Hooligan?” Yoongi snorts, glances sideways at Jimin to see the serious look on his face before muttering, “how old are you?” Jimin huffs softly.
“I’m just saying, I think you could do something better,” Jimin edits, gently. Yoongi thinks he’d be offended, hearing it from anyone else, but Jimin is a sweet kid and Yoongi finds he doesn’t mind it.
“I don’t really get into fights,” Yoongi explains. He doesn’t. Neither do his friends. Namjoon just doesn’t think before he speaks and runs his mouth a little too much and Jin will get a little cocky sometimes and always jumps to protect his younger friends, but, like Yoongi, would rather run than fight. Male pride is nothing to him. Fighting never seems worth the energy. “We’re not really bad kids, either, I don’t think,” Yoongi continues, picking at the dirt under his fingernails for an excuse to look away from Jimin’s intense gaze. He’s mildly uncomfortable with his own honesty, but something about Jimin drags it out of him, “We just don’t know what to do. With our time, or our lives. We’re just looking for something, and we haven’t found it yet, so, they all think we’re lazy and, worthless, or whatever.”
“Maybe you just need better friends,” Jimin suggests.
‘They aren’t bad friends,’ Yoongi means to defend, but, instead he asks, “Like you?”
“Like me,” Jimin confirms.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Jimin nods, slowly, and Yoongi finally looks at him and the faint blush streaked across his cheeks. Yoongi watches, confused, as Jimin plucks one of the flowers that had narrowly avoided sudden death when Yoongi ran through the night before. It’s a dull purple, one of the petals missing, the stem torn open where Jimin ripped it from the ground. Yoongi has the offhand thought that it reminds him a little of himself.
“Friends?” Jimin asks, holding it out like a peace offering. Yoongi doesn’t know why Jimin would want to be friends with him. Yoongi knows that Jimin has plenty of friends, sees them coming and going and loitering around the driveway or backyard with Jimin when Yoongi comes home and sees them leaving late at night when he’s sneaking in after curfew and he hears them shouting from the backyard when he’s sleeping through the afternoon and catches Jimin talking with everyone and anyone on the days when he shows up for school even though he finds the whole idea of standardized education a little pointless. Yoongi knows that Jimin has plenty of friends and that he’s never missed a day of school and that he has a smile prettier than the flowers he’s somehow got Yoongi planting and that he’s told Yoongi to have a good day or night, depending on the time, every single time they’d crossed paths despite Yoongi’s rare replies and Yoongi knows that Jimin could do so, so, so much better than him, but, he’s sitting in the dirt next to a boy grinning hopefully at him and asking for his friendship, for god knows what reason, and it’s impossible to refuse.
“Friends,” Yoongi agrees, letting Jimin place the tattered plant in his rough palm and sliding it ever so carefully into his hoodie pocket.
Maybe, after he’s finished making amends for his accidental instruction, which, did not end with his aid repairing the damage he caused, but after a three hour dinner (the dinner only took twenty minutes, but Jimin had a lot of questions for his new found friend) that Jimin talked him into paying for (there wasn’t a lot of talking involved. Jimin slid the check across the table with a sly smile and a ‘please, hyung’, and Yoongi sighed but didn’t try to argue), Yoongi slides the gifted flower into his desk drawer for safe keeping.
And, maybe, Jimin smiles knowingly when he starts to slide the drawer open two weeks later, looking for something to write with, and he catches sight of a crumpled, browning petal before Yoongi shouts and slams it shut, stammering something about not owning a single pen or pencil or marker or even a crayon.