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One thousand, two hundred and eighty-nine days after the world ends—not that Taehyung has been counting; though he has, a little bit, been counting, sharpie streaks over paper, and then the walls when there was no more paper, and then paint when there were no more pens, and then the careful, precise strike of knifework, and isn’t it funny how three years ago he never would have known how to hold a knife so carefully as to mark off the days with it—
Ah, anyway. One thousand, two hundred and eighty-nine days after the world ends, the mail arrives.
This is a two-part curiosity. First, because there has not been any mail in three and a half years, not since the world ended. Namjoon thinks there will be mail again, thinks that the nature of humanity is to seek connection across space, but cities are dangerous and roads are dangerous and there is no way to know where to send mail, much less anyone to send it. Except, apparently, the mailman.
Second, the mailman is asking for him.
“Your description, anyway,” amends Jungkook, twisted halfway to upside down in the hammock when Taehyung arrives back with dinner. The brace of rabbits is good hunting for the time of year, fat with their autumn labor. Taehyung’s mouth has watered the whole way home.
“Why?” Taehyung asks, tipping Jungkook out of the hammock and onto his back in the crusty winter grass.
“I don’t know,” shrugs Jungkook, unperturbed. His nose is pink with the cold. “Do you have any enemies? Maybe he’s out for revenge. Jin-hyung took him down to the lower house.”
“I don’t think I have enemies.” He thinks he would know, at least, if he had enemies, and Taehyung’s life before the end of the world was a quiet, comfortable thing—though in the way of quiet comforts, he hadn’t realized how good things were until they weren’t. “I hope Jin-hyung isn’t being too nice, if he’s here to kill me.”
Jungkook shrugs again. Seokjin is the sort to welcome any stranger, on account of it being the right thing to do. It drives Yoongi halfway to the opposite of distraction, makes him all sharp and prickly and even more quiet than usual. Taehyung is distantly sorry for his hyung’s nerves.
“How do you know he’s a mailman anyway?”
“He has a hat. And some letters. Are those for dinner?”
“Yes,” Taehyung says, passing the rabbits to Jungook, who gets halfway down the road to the lower house before he pauses, turning back to look at Taehyung. There’s dry grass in his hair, which he’s growing out long and wild, and he waits with a quiet patience, undemanding. Taehyung is struck again, as he so often is, by the luck that saw him through the end of the world and was kind enough to alight him here, fed and alive and content more often than he is miserable, which he figures is a fair trade after the end of the world.
Then he claps the dirt from his hands and tugs his hat over his cold ears and traipses down after Jungkook.
The lower house sits at the base of the hill, not two minute’s walk from the upper house and the forest’s creeping edge. It’s a sturdy concrete thing, which Seokjin calls brutalist only to watch Yoongi’s mouth purse down around a lecture on modern architecture. This passes for entertainment on the slower, sadder days. The houses, lower and upper, are home to five of them—Yoongi and Seokjin, who arrived together, and Namjoon who arrived alone, and Jungkook and Taehyung, who found each other before they found a narrow slice of safe haven after the end of the world. The property was a tourist destination once, Namjoon says, but the forest has overtaken the roads and they’ve pulled down the signposts, and now the only people who come through are on their way elsewhere, which is how they like it best.
There are signs of a guest in the lower yard. An extra pair of shoes laid out on the deck, and grooves in the dirt of the lane where the gate has been opened and closed again. An unfamiliar bicycle sits propped against the folded wings of an old ping pong table, saddle bags worn and bulging in the back. Everything is cold and still in the winter afternoon.
They find Yoongi in the kitchen, parceling out ingredients for dinner. The purse of his mouth softens when he sees them, and he divests Jungkook of his rabbits with a quiet thanks, fingers lingering against the curve of Jungkook’s wrist and the fall of his hair as he tucks it behind one ear.
Taehyung busies himself with the dirt beneath his nails in the facsimile of privacy, and when he glances up again, Jungkook is gone and Yoongi is watching him.
“There’s a boy asking for you, Tae-yah,” he says.
“Trouble?” Taehyung asks, because Yoongi knows trouble best of all. He wears his badge in the scar over his eye and in his measured caution and in the days where he will not leave Seokjin’s side for anything.
Trouble doesn’t find them too often these days, but it has before and it will again, and they will be ready.
But Yoongi is in the kitchen, alone and unbothered save for his quiet contemplation of the state of their pantry, so Taehyung thinks today is not a trouble-day.
“He brought mail,” Yoongi says.
“For us?”
“Mmh. From the Crossroads.” Before the end of the world, the Crossroads was a convenience store and gas station. The family that runs it is their closet neighbor, half a day’s walk away. Things had been bad there, once, but there’s no more gas, so the Crossroads sees more trade than trouble these days. They go about once a month, two or three together, for news and new goods. One of the Crossroads boys turned nine this summer, and Taehyung and Jungkook pieced together all the scattered parts of one of the lego sets left abandoned in the upper house and brought it over as a gift. The tiny plastic storefront sits in the window of their storefront now, which makes Taehyung smile when he visits.
Taehyung picks at his nails again. His fingers sting at the warmth of the house after so long outdoors. “I don’t know any mailmen.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know any hunters.”
Nothing, Taehyung supposes, is what it was after the end of the world.
“Where is he?”
Yoongi hooks a finger behind him. “With hyung.”
A long, L-shaped room makes up most of the lower house. A fire blooms in the fireplace, and a man stands in front of it, speaking with Seokjin. Namjoon sits on the couch, frown crouched between his brows.
“—a while,” Seokjin is saying. “It will be dark soon.”
“I appreciate the hospitality, Seokjin-ssi,” the man says, and Taehyung stops. He can’t see the man’s face from here, but Taehyung doesn’t need to see his face. Taehyung is afraid, a little, to see his face. A hope long faded to embers sparks in his chest, stinging hot after so long in the cold.
“Truly, I do,” he continues with a voice that Taehyung has dreamed of so often he’s worn the memory thin and patchy. It’s a dizzying relief to know he hasn’t forgotten it, that he still can still recognize it anywhere and anywhen, even after the end of the world. “But I need to get back on the road. My friend—”
“Jimin-ah.”
It takes Taehyung a heartbeat to realize he’s the one who has spoken. The room falls silent save for the quiet crackle of the fireplace. Jimin turns around.
“Tae,” he says, airless, and Taehyung sucks a deep breath in. Jimin’s hair is black now, and long and shaggy around his ears, and his jaw is sharp, and he is standing in the long L-shape of their living room clutching a mailman’s cap, and he is whole and here and alive.
“Hi,” says Taehyung, stupid with shock. Jimin makes a noise like a laugh and a sob squeezed into one, and then he's in Taehyung’s arms. Taehyung stumbles at the sudden weight of him, but his body remembers this even if he is slow and dumb and all afire with joy. He knows how to hold Jimin.
“I found you,” Jimin says in his arms, voice muffled against Taehyung’s shoulder. His nose is cold and his breath is warm. “I found you, I told you, I told you I’d find you.”
Taehyung’s hands clench in the back of Jimin’s coat. He’s slighter than he was the last time Taehyung held him, squeezed tight at Incheon before a fourteen hour flight to Paris. He smells smoky with cold, and under that like dirt and dust and the road, and under that like Jimin.
“Jimin-ah,” he says again, helpless, and Jimin removes himself from the juncture of his neck, and Taehyung drinks him in. His freckles stand out more than they used to. He has a small scar carved through one eyebrow, and it makes him look rakish and dangerous, except that his face is damp and blotchy with tears. He smiles bright enough to rival the sun, and he’s alive.
He’s alive.
“Hi,” he says, beaming. “Hi, Taehyung-ah.”
“Hello,” Taehyung says. He laughs, short and sharp and bleeding disbelief. And then, one thousand, two hundred and eighty-nine days after the world ends, Taehyung kisses his boyfriend.
They’re both smiling too wide for anything more than the brief press of lips against lips, but they stay tucked together as their kiss falls apart between them, noses brushing. Seokjin and Namjoon have left, so it’s only them before the fire, wrapped up in each other. Taehyung’s heart struggles to beat its way out of his chest.
“How?” he asks. It’s a small part of a dozen other questions he means to ask—how is he here, how is he alive, how did he find them hidden away in their forest—but he can’t untangle the words.
“You said you were going on a day trip,” Jimin says wetly. “I thought, if you were out of the city when it struck, you would still be— I’ve been searching all over.”
Taehyung’s eyes land on his hat, abandoned on the floor, letters stitched neatly over the brim. “And bringing the mail.”
“It’s a good way to find people,” Jimin protests. “Everybody likes a mailman.”
“That’s clever.” Taehyung knocks their foreheads together, nearly feels the warmth of Jimin’s blush.
“It was Hobi-hyung’s idea. Oh, wait, shit—”
“Your friend?” Taehyung untangles from Jimin enough to see his face as the grimace passes across it.
“He’s been with me since Paris,” Jimin replies, driving a hand through his hair in a gesture so familiar that Taehyung’s chest seizes. He itches to know more, to piece together how Jimin is here when he was half a world away when the world ended. “I left him back at the Crossroads. He’ll worry.”
Taehyung considers the angle of the sun, the clearness of the sky. Daylight disappears early these days, but they have at least an hour of good traveling light left. If someone went now, they could get to the Crossroads and back before dinner.
“Okay,” he says. “We can ask the hyungs.”
This is an invitation to retreat to the kitchen, to talk logistics and introductions and help or hinder Yoongi with dinner, depending on the mood. Jimin reaches down to lace their fingers together, halting him before he can move more than a step away. Their knuckles slot just as they always have, Taehyung’s slim fingers a perfect fit between Jimin’s. Like this, he catches Taehyung, and Taehyung is happy to be caught.
“Tae,” he says, quiet. His eyes trace Taehyung’s face, that familiar intensity, and the relief comes again, dizzying. Taehyung puts a hand against Jimin’s cheek. It isn’t as full as it used to be, but none of them are what they were before the world ended.
“You found me,” Taehyung says, and Jimin sags forward into him. Taehyung catches him. Taehyung will always catch him.
“I said I would.”
“I know.”
Taehyung had stared and stared at that message, stared long enough that the imprint of it sits on his dead phone screen, a promise etched in light and data. Jungkook drew it for him on his first birthday after the end of the world, and he has the notecard tucked under his pillow, a poor man’s screenshot done in blue ink and negative space. I’ll find you.
Taehyung should know better than to underestimate Park Jimin.
He would stand here forever, soaking in the rise and fall of his chest and the press of his fingers and his breath puffing warm against Taehyung’s neck when he rests his cheek against Taehyung’s shoulder. But the daylight won’t last that long, and there is work left to do, and everyone is waiting for them, and that means Taehyung will get to introduce them to Jimin and Jimin to them, and the glee of that meeting shocks him to the tips of his fingers.
“Come on,” Taehyung says into the quiet, easy stretch of their silence. “Come meet the hyungs.”
“I already met them,” Jimin says. Some things, it turns out, have not changed even after the end of the world, and that includes Jimin’s insistence on having the last word.
But then he says, “They seem very kind. I’m glad you have them.” So maybe some things have changed.
“You can have them too,” Taehyung says. There is nothing he would love more than to give them to Jimin. “And they’ll help get your friend. Come on. Come say hello.”
“Okay,” says Jimin, and he takes Taehyung’s hand, and Taehyung brings him home.