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Jimin is so close to breaking something. So close.
“Late,” he hisses, slamming the door to his apartment shut behind him with a kick that has more force than necessary. He shakes his feet until his shoes fall off. He knocks them away. “Late again!”
He drops his bag and envelopes on the little leather couch in the centre of his living room, before turning on his heel and stomping back to the door. He locks it, violently yelling, “Late again!” He pads across his apartment and pulls back the sliding doors leading the balcony.
He goes to his room, shedding his cap and jacket as he walks. “Late again, Parang. Can you believe it?”
He lets out a choked scream and ruffles his hair. “This is the fifth time this month.This month!”
He kicks off his jeans and his shirt, dumping them into the hamper outside his bedroom. “He literally shut the doors in my face. I don’t understand. How can he be so rude?” he whines, roughly pulling on some sweatpants and a sweater.
He makes himself a cup of hot chocolate, angrily blowing upwards to move his bangs away from his eyes without his hands. “He was fucking smirking at me. The nerve of that guy— Aish!”
“He’s such a fucking ass. And he looks like a living skeleton, like damn. Does he even eat? It’s creepy to see at seven in the morning, if he doesn’t realise that!” With a pout, he gently settles himself on his couch and pulls his knees up to his chest. He scoots to the side to avoid squashing his envelopes with his butt. He takes a sip of his drink and sighs. “What did I do to deserve this, Parang-ah?”
His head lolls to his right and he gives his budgie a pitiful look. “What did I do, Parangie-yah?”
His budgie tilts its head in a similar fashion, blue feathers lightly ruffled having been left out for so long. It raises its right foot and wiggles. Jimin snorts, placing his cup on the coffee table and crawling off the couch, towards his pet. With a fond smile, Jimin loosens the string loop around Parang’s little bird ankle.
“Hello, Parang,” Jimin says, crawling a bit further to slide shut the glass doors. Parang hops out of its makeshift leash and waddles after him until it peers up at Jimin with milky eyes.
“Welcome home, darling,” Parang chirps innocently.
Jimin snorts again.
Jimin’s apartment building is found on the edge of one of the nicer places in Seoul, conveniently close to his university and the clinic he interns for.
The morning staff are nice enough, bow respectfully and everything when he walks out the door. Sometimes, very seldom, when he has time to spare, which hardly ever happens, he talks to one of the younger receptionists who he knows goes to the university a few blocks away from his.
He doesn’t know much about the night staff, because seeing as he is one of those students lucky enough to not have classes or schedules later than six in the evening, he spends his free nights locked in his bedroom pouring over his biology and physiology homework.
His little unit and almost everything in it is paid for by his parents, so he isn’t really all that bothered when all of his lights are left on or when Parang breaks something. His mother ships him his necessities (because she thinks that he can’t handle himself) and he buys Parang’s necessities (i.e. food, toys, more string).
His neighbours are quiet. No one plays disturbingly loud music in the middle of the night. When he sees them or is with them in the elevator, they are civil and polite. The little girl two doors down who lives with her older sister likes giving Jimin flowers when she plays in the park close to their building and he comes home just the same time she does.
His apartment life is close to spotless. The only stain on it is his only adjacent neighbour, Min Yoongi.
The strap of his tumbler is digging into his wrist. He can feel friction burns marking his skin as he tries to lock the door with one hand. His other hand is occupied by the five inch thick pile of envelopes he’s forced to bring with him everyday. He manages to lock the door, double-checking it twice within a second, and turns around to race for the lift.
He almost trips over a stack of newspapers. He growls under his breath, blowing his bangs from his eyes, because he should know better. He should know that, by now —after a good year and a half— his neighbour likes leaving his daily newspapers outside his door. Jimin doesn’t understand why he still bothers with them, they’re such a waste — he doesn’t even read them. If he does, he won’t leave them to rot there. (The stack’s almost two feet high already and—)
He muffles his curse as he makes his way down the dimly lit hallways to the lift. Just as he gets there, he can see someone stepping in between the open elevator doors. His breath catches in his throat because he knows that all-black get-up and that massive DLSR camera and he hopes against hope that it isn’t who he thinks it is.
Lord, he thinks desperately, picking up pace, not today. Chemistry is first subject. Please not today.
“Yoongi-ssi!” Jimin gasps a foot away from the closing doors. Yoongi looks up from his smartphone, only to smirk at Jimin from under his fedora’s brim. “Yoongi-ssi, wait!”
Jimin reaches the lift just as the doors close and he comes face to face with his distorted reflection on metal doors.
He tilts his head back and squeezes his eyes shut. Biting his tongue, he holds back his frustrated scream.
It’s too early for this, he tells himself. It’s only five in the morning. You have nineteen hours left of the day, Jimin. You can do this.
He manages to calm himself for a moment. He punches arrow down on the panel violently, and the button blinks yellow. Clenching his jaw, he releases a heavy breath through his nose.
He can’t get the image of Min Yoongi tipping his hat at him with a smirk and a wink through the slit between the golden doors out of his head.
When Jimin first moved into his current apartment complex, everything was as perfect as it could get. The unit on his left is vacant, and the unit on his right is, more often than not, peaceful.
The unit itself is spacious for a single person, but he doesn’t mind. The master bedroom is his, and the guest bedroom is left mostly bare, mostly unused. Both rooms are, for the most part, bare. The only differences are: Jimin’s room is painted a pale blue, little polaroid photos are stuck on his walls at random spots, and there’s a pc set on the desk pushed into a corner. Also, Jimin’s room looks slightly more lived-in.
The living room is softly lit, cream walls similar to the ones he has at home. A modest leather couch is set in the centre of the room, and a low, coffee table in front of it. A moderate flat-screen television is hung on the wall directly across it.
The kitchen, only separated from the living room by an open divider, is large enough for Jimin to be able to lay all of his mugs and cups on the counter the way his mother never wants him to, never lets him to. He even has his tiny, crystal pig in the centre of the set-up.
What really got him, even before he had moved in, was the fact that there was a small balcony just outside the living room. Draped over the glass sliding doors are clean, white curtains that flutter when the doors are left open. The balcony is glass, cornered by black paint-coated metal banisters. A little hook screwed into the plaster next to the doors serves as the anchor to the tiny ship that is his pet Budgie, Parang.
Parang can’t be contained inside for forever, and the low height of Jimin’s unit is only advantageous at this point. He keeps Parang leashed, so to speak, since Parang is a bird who does not fly much, being kept inside as a pet.
When Jimin’s out at uni or the clinic, he ties Parang’s foot to the hook by a string and shuts the doors for security purposes.
Parang likes the breeze on the balcony, and so does Jimin. He likes listening to music while lounging on his little chair and just playing with Parang. If he has time, he will take a nap.
Having an apartment in Seoul but not Central Seoul means living with eighty-percent clean air. He loves it. It reminds him of the breezes that pass by his house back in Busan. The balcony area of his unit is perfect.
Except, of course, when Yoongi smokes at the same time. His apartment is adjacent to Jimin’s, and so is his balcony. Jimin wouldn’t mind, really, if Yoongi just lounges around his own balcony peacefully. But he smokes there, usually around the time Jimin’s just come back from work. When he pushes open the sliding glass doors to let Parang in, Yoongi would be there with his crystal ashtray perched on the corner of the banister, and he’d be making rings in the air.
Sometimes, the ashes would get caught in the breeze, and blow into Jimin’s face. He hates the sensation of dust in his eyes and smoke caught in his throat.
Jimin has never really disliked smoking. After meeting Min Yoongi, however, smoking became one among many of Jimin’s newfound pet peeves.
Jimin comes home at four in the afternoon, because, for some reason, his professor in animal locomotive decided not to come for class. He doesn’t mind. It’s wonderful, actually.
Lately, his professors have been dumping mountains and mountains of assignments on them (and this may be an exaggeration, but he literally has molehills of papers scattered around his bedroom, he isn’t even kidding), and he hasn’t been this busy since his second week, freshman year. The two hour-early release is a welcome break.
He, as always, dumps his envelopes and bag onto the couch after he places his shoes next to the door. He leaves his now-empty tumbler on the coffee table before walking over to the glass sliding doors leading to his balcony.
A smile pulls at his lips when he catches sight of the darkening, albeit, still light, sky through the swaying curtains. Grinning to himself, he unlocks the sliding doors and pulls it back to let Parang in.
He is shocked to see Parang playing with Yoongi’s right hand. He raises his brows, quicker than he knows is polite, and Yoongi awkwardly withdraws his fingers. He puffs once on his cigarette (and, maybe Jimin’s a little blind, but are his cheeks pink?). Parang squawks in confusion and at the loss of its playmate.
This isn’t the first time, or among the first few times, that Jimin has caught Yoongi outside on his balcony the same time he comes out to bring Parang inside (and he severely doubts it’ll be the last), but it always manages to shock Jimin to see Yoongi being civil (with an animal, but still). He’s convinced that Parang’s had words added to its vocabulary because of the possible conversations it and Yoongi might have shared. He has, after all, heard Parang squawking about camera film and white balance and festivals — things that Jimin never talks about.
Yoongi’s gaze is a little blanker than usual (not that Jimin really notices) and he has to furrow his brows a little harder in slight concern. Usually, by now, his neighbour will be taking a jab at him, or something similar. Yoongi takes a drag and blows over the edge of his banister, the wind carrying it over to Jimin.
He coughs, bringing up a hand to cover his nose. “Can you not smoke around here, please?” Jimin says with a frown.
He’s even more shocked when Yoongi presses the tip of cigar on the ash tray to snuff out the embers and retreats into his apartment with a soft sorry.
One of these days, Jimin thinks, he’s going to actually kill Yoongi.
Or, at least, punch him in the face. Maybe a little lower between the legs.
Yoongi sips on his coffee as he waits next to Jimin for the elevator to come down to their floor. He’s only got a small bag slung over his shoulder, unlike Jimin who’s got his hands full with the envelopes he always, always carries around and his large backpack.
Yoongi doesn’t even spare him so much as a glance when Jimin makes the effort to bow his head as a greeting to the elder. It’s like he’s pretending Jimin isn’t even there. He is offended to some extent.
This is hardly anything unusual, especially with Min Yoongi. The most Jimin gets from him on a good day is a morning, Jishit, and that in itself speaks volumes about Yoongi’s default disposition.
But just a few days ago, he apologised to Jimin for smoking on the balcony. And the next morning, he even greeted Jimin a good morning. Jimin had legitimately thought they were improving, actually getting somewhere, but now he doesn’t exist?
Jimin can’t give himself the benefit of the doubt, because he knows and acknowledges the fact that he isn’t exactly a quiet person, especially when lumbering down the hallways of their floor.
He tries again, however, and bows his head again, saying, “Good morning, Yoongi-ssi.”
Jimin is more than just offended when Yoongi steps into the lift and shuts its doors without even looking at or waiting for Jimin.
The flat expression on Jimin’s face immediately turns into a scowl when he sees who’s outside his room at nine in the evening. He knows it’s rude, he knows it’sreally rude, but he can’t help himself. He has literally just came home —he hasn’t even taken in Parang for god’s sake — and he can’t be bothered to deal with annoying neighbours who start to act nice one day then rude as fuck the next.
“Yes, Yoongi-ssi?” he grits through his teeth, crossing his arms over his chest.
Yoongi, dressed in his usual Grim Reaper attire, stares blankly at Jimin for a moment. Jimin growls, frustrated.
“I’m sorry,” he says, furrowing his brows, “but if you’re just going to stand there without speaking, you’ll have to leave, because you’re wasting—” He is cut off by a sudden flash in his face.
He blinks wildly to rid the dancing lights swimming in his vision. “Okay,” he says. “What the hell, Yoongi?”
Yoongi shrugs, looking down at his camera. “Assignment.”
“What.” He shrieks internally. “You can’t just randomly take photos of people like that! You can’t!”
Yoongi isn’t looking at him, but his raised eyebrow scream at Jimin, does it look like I give a shit? And Jimin’s frustrated, even more so than earlier, because he knows that Yoongi doesn’t. He clearly doesn’t care about the rotting, now almost three feet high stack of newspapers outside his apartment.
He sighs in an attempt to calm himself. “Do you need anything?”
Yoongi looks up at him, and Jimin is momentarily taken aback. The glow from the camera’s screen is soft against the sharp edges of Yoongi’s face and while he doesn’t look any less like the dead, he looks like an attractive dead.
It doesn’t make sense even in his head and he wants to slap himself for it.
“Actually,” Yoongi starts softly, slowly. Jimin is a little starstruck at how gentle Yoongi’s voice can be. He needs more sleep. “I was asked to write an article on pet owners and their taste in music based off the pets they owned.” He sucks in his right cheek. “This isn’t making any sense, it probably sounds meaningless, but the magazine’s editor is a friend who helped me become a photographer-photojournalist and I owe them and I thought that you could help me since I know that you’re taking veterinary…”
That is probably the longest thing Yoongi has ever said to him in their two years of neighbourship.
Is this worth it?
“Come in,” Jimin sighs, pushing off the door frame and holding the door open for Yoongi. “Do you want something to drink?”
Yoongi strolls in. He doesn’t remove his shoes and he stands awkwardly next to the door. He’s looking everywhere but at Jimin, and he finds it annoying. “No, thank you. But. Can I…can I take a photo of Parang? I need it as, erm, evidence, I guess.”
“Okay.” Jimin goes over to the balcony doors, unlocks them, and slides them open. Almost instantaneously, Paramg flutters in with its feathers ruffled more so than usual. Jimin quickly unties it and locks the doors. Parang chirps, “Welcome home, darling” twice. It confuses Jimin for a moment, because Parang never greets him twice consecutively, not since Parang was smaller, and Parang never greets anyone else other than Jimin, and it definitely cannot be greeting Yoongi of all people.
“Hello, Parang,” Yoongi murmurs, camera at the ready. Parang shakes in its place and blinks up at Yoongi.
Jimin sighs. “Parang, this is Yoongi, you probably know him.”
Parang shifts its beady gaze onto Jimin, and Jimin’s heart suddenly stops. He can tell that Parang is thinking, is registering the name Yoongi by the way his head twitches every second for five seconds. Fuck.
“Yoongi is such an ass,” Parang squawks, “he looks like a skeleton.”
“Oh my god,” Jimin says, slapping his hand over his eyes.
He can’t even look at Yoongi in his embarrassment, but he can hear the choked cough he lets out.
“Doesn’t he know he looks creepy. Really creepy. Really really creepy.”
“Parang, please shut up.”
“He never shuts up. He doesn’t talk a lot, but when he does, he never shuts up.”
“Oh my god.”
“He calls me Jishit. He’s a shit.”
"Oh. My god.”
"He does that a lot,” he says, letting out something that sounds like a strangled laugh. “He likes shit-talking me on the balcony. Yeah.”
Jimin’s temples pulse. This is fucking awkward.
“Well,” Yoongi chuckles, still sounding like someone’s got their hands tight around his neck. Jimin spares a glare at him to see him fingering the top-most button of his shirt. “I guess I should be going now.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to. I’ve heard everything.” And Yoongi’s a little too bitter, and now Jimin’s hurt, and he snaps.
“Why do you treat me like this?” Jimin finally screams, throwing down his cap in a fit of rage. “What the fuck do you have against me?!”
Yoongi’s eyes widen noticeably and he tugs at the collar of his black button-up. His lips are pulled thin and his feet shuffle nervously. “I don’t have anything against you…”
“What?” Jimin clenches his jaw. “What?”
"I don’t,” he says. His eyes don’t meet Jimin’s. “I…actually I…”
“I really like Jishit,” Parang caws, wings fluttering meekly. “He’s really cute, don’t you think?”
In an instant, Yoongi’s face is a stark red all the way down his neck and up his hairline. He coughs into his curled fist awkwardly. “Er.” He shrugs lamely. “Surprise?”
Jimin can only gape as Yoongi rushes out of his apartment, not even letting Jimin work through his confusion.
Jimin wonders if this is what déjà vu really is.
He, as always, has his hands and arms full with the stack of his usual envelopes and his usual heavy backpack. He’s waiting for the lift to reach their floor at five in the morning. And, as always, Yoongi stands next to him with a cup of coffee in his left hand and his phone in the other, with his usual body bag hung on one shoulder.
Jimin doesn’t really know what to do, or what to say. He hasn’t seen Yoongi since a week ago when Parang confessed for him and he bolted out of Jimin’s apartment like hell was set loose on his tail.
But his cheeks are burning and his palms are starting to sweat, and he doesn’t really know what’s happening anymore.
The number of their floor lights up on the screen above the golden doors, which slide open. Jimin doesn’t make a move to enter, slightly afraid of what he might do if he does attempt to enter.
Yoongi slips in the elevator, however, and Jimin’s brow furrows the slightest. He stares at the ground hard, and waits for the usual ding of the elevator sliding shut in his face.
But Yoongi holds on the open button and raises a brow at Jimin. “I’m waiting,” he says, a tad miffed. Jimin gets miffed in return and he raises his nose just the slightest, but he is struck by a sudden realisation. Yoongi is waiting for Jimin.
Yoongi is waiting for Jimin.
Jimin feels as if his brain has fried for a moment. With a blush high on his cheeks, he scrambles into the lift and steps next to Yoongi.
He doesn’t know what to do when the envelope on the top of his stack slips, and Yoongi picks it up along with three-quarters of the rest of Jimin’s envelopes. He can only blink at his neighbour, confused.
The top of Yoongi’s cheeks are pink and and unsettled frown is set on his lips. “Can we start over?” he asks, softly.
Jimin stares for a little bit more, then, with a darker blush, shrugs slowly, carefully. “Sure. Why not.”