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Namjoon is logical. He's being very logical. He is, in fact, a very logical person. Please ignore the sheen to his eyes and the red patches on his cheeks; they don't match his aesthetic.
He was fucked up before Seokjin, he was fucked up during Seokjin, and he'll continue to be fucked up after Seokjin, because being fucked up has meshed into his aesthetic and he's resigned himself to it. It's fine. He's fine.
(Nothing is fine.
Nothing had ever really been fine.
It wasn’t fine when Seokjin had gotten off his shift at zero dark thirty and come home to an empty apartment and a letter on the kitchen table they’d bought together. It wasn’t fine when his phone started ringing on the roof of the apartment building, it wasn’t fine when he sat down and cried until Jin showed up with fear in his eyes and gentle fingers on his skin.
It wasn't fine when he tried and failed to open a vein in the shower and it wasn't fine when he took half a bottle of sleep aid and woke up in the hospital. Nothing was fine, except for Jin, but after three and a half years, even angels start to break.)
He was always fucked up, but this is a different brand; this is deep seated, aching in his bones instead of in his head, and it rings with Jin’s voice as he cried into Namjoon’s shoulder and said things like I can’t and Namjoonie and I need to go. Namjoon digs what's left of his fingernails into his wrists and tries not to be too disappointed with how unsatisfying it feels; he won't fail Jin, not now, not even after he’d fucked up Jin (just like he fucked up everything else).
He goes home to an empty apartment and a letter on the kitchen table they’d bought together.
---
Hoseok stops by every once in awhile with takeout bags clutched nervously in his hands. Yoongi spends more days on Namjoon's couch than off it. Taehyung sends him good morning texts and doesn't mind that he doesn't answer.
Jin comes by six months later, when Namjoon is in a darker place than he'd been in for a long time. He’s standing on the roof again - standing, just standing, and looking up at the stars with an unsettling calm in his head for what feels like the first time since Jin left. He's not in crisis. He's not particularly distraught. He's in a very logical place and thinking very logically and he'd decided, sometime last week, that he wasn't going to live to see Tuesday.
So here he is, Monday night, looking up at the stars.
Yoongi will be upset, that weird, angry fear he always gets when something goes wrong, and he'll cling to Jimin’s warmth once he can't stay awake anymore; Taehyung will still send him good morning texts until Jungkook harshly deletes the contact from his phone and Tae will sink into his arms and cry; Hoseok will fold in on himself and refuse to let anyone help - all this because if there's one thing Namjoon is good at, it's causing harm.
Jin escaped, he thinks. A smile thins his lips. At least Jin escaped the black hole of Namjoon's emotional disasters. At least Jin knew when he was being drained and got out of Namjoon's life as easily as he'd slipped in.
There's a bang, and then a voice murmurs his name. He ignores it, figuring quickly that it isn't real (it can't be real) and leaning over the waist-high cement barrier.
A hand on his wrist.
A hand on his wrist, even as he flips one leg over the barrier and straddles it like a horse.
A hand on his wrist, a voice in his ears, all an interruption he had not factored into his plan for the evening, because after six fucking months, he should have been able to assume that Jin wasn't coming back. But he has, he's back with a vengeance, he's back with the stars reflecting in his wide eyes and his mouth drifting open and his hair dyed brown and looking soft and clean and touchable. He's back with Namjoon's name on his lips and his shoulders curving inward just a bit, as if to protect himself.
“Let go,” Namjoon's mouth says. Namjoon is curled in a ball at the back of his head, only dimly aware of anything except the fact that Jin still uses the fig cologne Namjoon bought him in December, but his mouth is doing fine on its own.
“What's the square root of a hundred and forty four?” Jin answers.
“Twelve,” Namjoon's mouth says. He pries at Jin’s fingers, tight on his wrist. Jin’s grip tightens still.
“What's the capital of South Africa?”
“Cape Town,” Namjoon's mouth tries to answer, but Namjoon himself has resurfaced and immediately attempts to demand, “What the fuck, Jin?” so it all comes out in a tangle of consonants.
He's been pulled back onto the roof proper before he really understands what's going on and Jin wraps one arm around his ribs and uses the other to press Namjoon's head into his shoulder; it's strange, really, how right this feels. How easily their bodies fit together. How willing Namjoon is to stay wrapped in Jin’s arms and scent and essence for the rest of his miserable life.
“I brought you a cake, you idiot,” Jin says. His voice is rougher than usual. “Because I missed your birthday.”
Jin hadn't missed much; just Namjoon and Yoongi and Hoseok swaddled in blankets on the couch with enough kimchi fried rice to feed an army. Namjoon had spent most of the night fighting to keep the noise in his head from driving him insane.
“‘S okay,” he mumbles. There are no tears this time, nor anger at Jin’s interruption, nor disappointment of his failure to follow through. All he feels is a kind of distant numbness, like it isn't his body, so he doesn't care, but if it were, he wouldn't care then, either. Jin is simultaneously very far away and the only thing keeping him from floating off into space.
Jin comes back six months after he left with a pastry box and twenty-two pink candles. Namjoon explains dully over messy slices of cake - I'm tired, he says. I'm tired and everything is so loud and, Jinnie, I'm just so tired. Jin runs fingers through Namjoon’s bleach-abused hair and says, I still don't understand, but I'm sorry I left. They talk on the roof, under the stars, about Jin’s panicked trivia (“I didn't know how to distract you,” he says, covering his mouth as he laughs), about Namjoon’s sheet music (“I set it all on fire, I think. It wasn't good enough.”), about Jungkook’s new passion for lip balm and Taehyung's rather vehement interior design ideas. They sit and they talk and then Namjoon looks at his phone, which blinks Tuesday, 3:12 am above three voicemails from Yoongi.
Namjoon looks at Seokjin, who looks back uncertainly. “Namjoon?”
“It's Tuesday,” he says, dumbly. “We made it to Tuesday.” Jin nods vaguely, still unsure of Namjoon's sudden distraction. “I thought I wasn't going to. I'd decided I wasn't going to. But here I am.”
“Yes,” says Jin, and the word gains about twelve syllables between its beginning and the final lilt of Jin’s voice.
Namjoon lies flat on his back and picks out Jupiter from its place nestled in the constellations. “I don't make any promises, Jin.” He starts out slowly and carefully, but his words mush and twist together as it all goes on. “But I made it to Tuesday. Maybe I can make it to another, you know?
“Maybe I didn't make it to Tuesday. Maybe at midnight something in me changed and this is my second chance at life. Maybe it's all going to be okay.”
There is a pause, in which Namjoon focuses all his energy on hearing the steady, sweet in-and-out of Jin’s breathing.
“One Tuesday at a time,” he says, eventually. “I like that.”
---
It's still hard. Namjoon still has days he doesn't have the energy to do anything except exist, and sometimes days when that gets a little too much and he reaches for what he knows will stop it all.
But they're okay. They aren't back together, not really, but Jin drags him to a new coffee shop every Tuesday and makes him drink hot chocolate until he can't anymore, and Jin stocks his fridge and always backs up his music files in a place Namjoon can't delete them.
They work, Namjoon thinks. Jin tries and Namjoon tries and they keep each other out of the chaos. They're okay.