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There are three brands of tea stocked in the break room.
Yoongi doesn’t care for any of them.
He doesn’t even care for tea, but he likes coffee even less, and that’s the only other alternative that the break room has. So he cycles between the three brands, picking a different one every day, and makes himself a steaming mug of liquid that he barely likes but drinks at 11AM sharp because that’s what everyone else seems to do.
A lot of Yoongi’s life goes by like this—by trying to mirror what everyone else does.
It’s worked pretty well for him so far.
Yoongi drinks his tea at 11AM, leaning against the cupboards in the breakroom while his coworkers chat at a table. He’s back at his desk at 11:15, typing away at his computer. He keeps a monochrome pen stand by his screen because he’d seen the man who sits opposite to him keep one, he wears a dark grey tie because it’s what the interviewer had worn when Yoongi had applied for the job. He dresses neat and tidy, with as little colour as possible, because Yoongi is twenty five years old and still hasn’t understood how much colour you can get away with before you’re accused of being gay.
To be honest, Yoongi doesn’t know how much of anything you can get away with before you’re accused of being gay.
He doesn’t even know what gives it away.
So he solves this by trying to be nothing at all. By watching his cishet coworkers like a hawk, to see what he needs to do to pass as one of them—to see what he needs to do so that no one ever knows that he is himself.
It’s worked for him pretty well so far, even if he doesn’t particularly like tea.
Yoongi doesn’t particularly like much of anything in this building.
But the pay is good, so he keeps his head down, he keeps his insides dead, he keeps himself smothered so that no one ever figures out what he is.
It’s hard, but it’s worth it.
It’s better than being seen.
/
Yoongi will admit that when he first got this job—he was a little naive about it.
Fresh out of college, where he’d made his sexuality his entire personality—he’d been the secretary of the LGBTQ club, had thrown himself into activism, had been part of protests and fundraisers and drives and had more friends that were queer than friends who were not. Back then, he’d thought this was how he’d live his life. Not everyone could go out into the world and be who they truly were, but as a starry eyed college student, Yoongi had thought that he could be.
He thought that he had a duty to be.
Every time someone messaged him on his social media accounts, thanking him for being so loud about his work on campus because it gave them a little more courage, he felt like he had a duty to be this loud about himself for the rest of his life.
If he could, then he should have to.
Because the louder he was, the safer the world could eventually be.
He had hopes and dreams and a plan to live his life as truthfully as he could—but seven months into unemployment, it all started falling apart.
He’d been talking to a friend over dinner, despairing about how he might not be able to make rent, and that he didn’t understand why he couldn’t even get through screening when his resume was so good.
His friend had looked at him with pity.
“You know they do a social media check, right?”
“...oh.”
Only then did Yoongi realize that he was in deep shit.
Most of their campus activities had kept those involved anonymous, for security reasons. But Yoongi had always gone the extra mile. Things had seemed so safe, in their close knit community. And it had finally sunk in now that he might have fucked his life up because of it.
Nine months into unemployment, two months behind on rent—he’d wiped all his online accounts clean.
He got a ton of worried messages, from his classmates, from his juniors, from people he didn’t even know but had apparently looked up to him regardless—but Yoongi didn’t respond to any of them.
The guilt killed him. It made him feel like a sell out. Like someone going against everything he’d ever stood for, erasing himself just to put food on the table. He shouldn’t want to work for someone who wouldn’t hire him just because he was gay. That should be the last type of company he should apply for.
Was he really so willing to throw aside his morals for a job?
Was he really so willing to throw aside himself?
But when he finally started hearing back from companies, he realized that he was.
It didn’t matter to him if he couldn’t live as himself when the alternative was being out on the streets.
Yoongi had, officially, become the sort of person he’d hoped would never have to exist anymore.
He hated it, but for the money—he kept his head down and kept living it.
/
He’ll admit he wavered when he settled into his new job.
For one thing—they had a diversity, equity, and inclusion training course, mandatory for new employees like him.
Yoongi had never heard of such a thing at any of the companies his friends worked at.
He had never expected such a thing at all.
And the training was good. It wasn’t one of those shitty courses that were just taught to meet HR requirements, the material was good and sensitive, the instructor was kind, and while some of the employees were bored as hell, most of them were serious and involved in the instructor’s every word, taking notes, asking questions, politely offering hypothetical situations and asking what should I do if this happens.
After ten months of pure hell, Yoongi finally felt hope.
He felt like this couldn’t be so bad after all.
A part of him wanted to come out to his coworkers right there. To leave a pride flag propped up with his pens at his desk, to keep the beaded rainbow keychainson the zipper of his bag. But he didn’t.
He can’t say why.
A part of him was still unsettled, still unwilling to think that this place was entirely safe.
Because to be honest—Yoongi doesn’t know if they would have hired him, if he hadn’t wiped his social media.
There’s no way of finding out.
/
Yoongi has realized this a long time ago—but he doesn’t act himself in front of people who don’t know that he’s queer.
And that’s pretty much everyone.
There’s alarmingly little that he has to talk about to straight people. He keeps his smile polite, and asks about the weather, and work, and whatever the government is doing to fuck their lives up at the moment. He doesn’t ask about their romantic lives, because too often it leads to them asking about him. He doesn’t ask about children, because that’s a topic he can’t afford to broach in public either.
All of the conversations that are supposed to be just how people talk to each other are terrifying, emotional minefields to him.
“It’s just lonely, you know,” his coworker Hoseok is saying. “All my friends from undergrad are getting married, and I’m just here, doing what—filling spreadsheets?”
“You fill spreadsheets with style,” Yoongi tells him solemnly.
Hoseok smacks him over the head. “I die,” he corrects. He sighs heavily, running a hand through his hair. “I’m just not sure if I’m on the right path, you know?”
“Where do you want to be, then?”
Hoseok doesn’t even have to think before he replies. “Where everyone wants to be. With a job that feels less tedious, a home to go back to at the end of the day. A family that’s waiting up for me. Kids to raise. Maybe neighbours that I sort of get along with. Just—an actual life, you get me?”
Yoongi doesn’t—but then, he never has.
Where everyone wants to be has never been for him, and that’s why his life is so fucked in the first place. It’s taken him too long to chip away at his world to try and make himself a life that he knows no one wants him to have—and now feels like he can’t even let himself have in the end.
“Yeah,” he says regardless. “I get you.”
Hoseok pats him on the shoulder. “You’ll be okay,” he says. “We’re still young. You’ll find a nice woman in no time.”
Yoongi forces a smile. “Let’s hope so.”
A few years ago, Yoongi would have answered with a ton of other things.
He would have said why does it have to be a woman?
Why do I have to find someone?
Why would you say any of this to me in the first place?
But he isn’t that Yoongi anymore, so instead he says let’s hope so, and fervently hopes that no one ever knows he doesn’t mean it.
/
Something funny that Yoongi has noticed about straight people is that the word gay sounds to them like an alarm.
Not in a homophobic way. Though there are those people, too. To some of them, the existence of the queer community still sounds like the most disgusting thing on earth.
But even to people who call themselves allies— gay still sounds like an alarm.
It sounds like a challenge.
Like a test.
Like someone’s sprung on them from behind and held them at gunpoint and tried to test their morals.
The word gay makes their faces freeze up. Suddenly they’re aware of every movement they make, every breath, every word—like there are cameras focussed on them trying to reveal if they’re a Good Person or not.
They try so hard to say the right thing that it makes the situation a little ridiculous.
Only cishet people could make someone else being gay somehow about them being not.
And it’s something that follows Yoongi into every conversation he has at work.
“My friend is going to the pride parade,” Minjun says, absently zooming into a photo during their break time. It could have been a simple statement, but there’s a self consciousness in how he says it. Like he’s waiting for a reaction. For someone to realize that he’s open minded, a good person, someone who has friends who go to pride parades.
There’s an instant awkwardness that spreads across the table.
“That’s nice,” Sooyoung says carefully.
“That’s brave,” Hana says, which makes Yoongi cringe inside.
“Are they gay?” Gilyoung asks, and Yoongi snorts into his tea.
He coughs, trying to breathe, and gets a ton of strange looks.
“Are you okay, Yoongi-ssi?”
“I’m fine,” Yoongi says through coughs.
“Do you want some water?”
“No, no, I’m good.”
There’s a worried pause as they wait for him to stop coughing, and then they all turn back to the more pressing conversation.
“You can’t ask if someone is gay,” Hoseok says scoldingly. “It’s rude to assume.”
“Is it?”
“Of course it is!” Hana pipes in. “How would you feel if people were making assumptions about who you were having sex with?”
Yoongi stares at his tea, feeling more dead inside by the second.
If he’s honest, listening to these conversations don’t even bother him anymore.
They give him a sort of morbid amusement, in a look how far I’ve wandered into the other side sort of way.
Yoongi had been loud, and queer, and proud, and now here he is surrounded by strangers that he calls coworkers who say the most heterosexual of things.
“Dude, I think Kim Namjoon is going too! He’s posted a picture on his instagram.”
There’s instant excitement.
“Really?”
“That’s so cool!”
“I’m so proud of him, damn…”
“That’s a huge risk to take for his career.”
“Sometimes I think he might be gay,” Taehyung says, in a hushed whisper.
Jimin frowns instantly. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“I literally just told you why you can’t,” Hana says, frowning angrily.
Angry on behalf of who, Yoongi will never find out.
“It could hurt his reputation,” Jimin explains.
Taehyung looks incredulous. “Dude, he’s a celebrity, I doubt that me saying he might be gay to one person is going to hurt his reputation.”
Jimin shakes his head. “It’s not safe,” he insists. “And like Hana said, you can’t just assume that about people. It’s not nice to them.”
Yoongi hears this all the time.
The fact that the assumption of someone being gay is some kind of cruelty.
As if the assumption that they aren’t hasn’t been the cruelty all along.
Yoongi opens Kim Namjoon’s account on his own phone. The photo is unmistakable—it’s of his fingers held in a peace sign in front of a pride flag. The man has always been open about supporting queer rights, this isn’t out of character for him—but it still fills Yoongi’s heart with warmth to see.
And at the same time—with guilt.
This is the type of person he wanted to be.
The sort that could have an entire music label balanced on his shoulders and still go outside and stand up for what he believed in.
Not someone like Yoongi, erasing his own existence to get a job just to make ends meet.
But then, perhaps—that’s the only reason Kim Namjoon is able to do this. Because he has an entire industry balanced on his shoulders. The worst that could happen to him is that certain artists refuse to work with him, he makes far too much money for the simple fact that he’s an ally to bring his career to the ground.
The worst that could happen to Yoongi is that he goes bankrupt and dies alone.
And that someone will say, in hushed voices— I always thought he was gay.
And someone else will say, purposefully loud, so that everyone knows that they’re a Good Person— you can’t just assume something like that about people.
/
“Yoongi-ah,” Hoseok says, “I want to ask you about something.”
Yoongi looks up. He’d been packing his things away for the night, to go home and get something to eat and waste away in front of his laptop until he passed out. Hoseok looks a little worried, a little awkward, and Yoongi instantly jumps to the worst case scenario.
His secret is out.
He left some photo undeleted, something he was tagged in, maybe—there’s too much shit about him and his friends online, there was never a way to hide it all—
“Someone left me a note,” Hoseok says. “And, uh. I need help responding.”
“A note?”
“Yeah.” Hoseok looks even more awkward. “They, uh, asked me out. But—” he hesitates, like he’s about to confess to something terrible. “It’s a guy.”
For a moment, Yoongi doesn’t know how to take it.
He blinks.
“Oh,” he says. “You want to say yes—?”
“No,” Hoseok says immediately, too loudly. Then he laughs, sheepish. “No, no. I just don’t know how to tell him that I’m not—you know.”
You can say the word, Yoongi wants to tell him.
Instead he bites his tongue and nods.
“You can just say that,” he says.
“Isn’t it rude?”
“To say you aren’t interested in men?”
“Yeah, like—won’t it sound like I’m judging him for being interested in men?”
Straight people are truly a mystery to Yoongi. He never knows how they get from point A to point B.
“How is you not liking men some kind of judgement on him liking men?”
“Isn’t it? Like don’t people usually—give them a chance, or something? Just to let them down easy?”
Yoongi stares at him, horrified. “You mean go on a date?”
“Yeah, like one meeting for courtesy where you tell them at the end that you gave it a chance but you aren’t into men.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” Yoongi says. “Don’t do that.”
Hoseok frowns. “Are you sure?”
“If you know you don’t like men, don’t play with him. Just tell him.”
Hoseok looks stricken. “It’s not—it’s not playing. I thought it would just be more polite.”
“The polite thing to do is to let him know that he doesn’t have a chance,” Yoongi says.
Maybe he’s getting too angry—but he’s seen people do this for too long and he hates it.
He hates it.
In the case of some bastards he’s run into, who dated his own friends while knowing they were straight—the dates weren’t even for this feigned politeness. It had just given them a sort of ego rush to know that someone of the same gender was attracted to them, and they’d wanted to bask in that attention for as long as they could.
It’s kind of flattering, you know? a guy had told him obliviously once, at a bar. Apparently gay guys have great taste in style. If they’re attracted to you, it means you’re doing something right.
Yoongi had contemplated following the man out just to slash his tires, but Seokjin had held him back and bought him another drink.
“Just be up front,” Yoongi repeats. “It’s the nicest rejection that you can give him.”
“Okay,” Hoseok says, but he looks a little put out. “I’ll think about what to do.”
Yoongi nods, going back to packing his things. He’s a little curious about why Hoseok asked him this, of all people, but he isn’t sure if he wants to know the answer.
“I’m a little surprised, though,” Hoseok muses, staring around them.
“Hm?”
“I can’t believe this person was gay and I didn’t know it. Not like I ever talked to him much—he works in sales. But still. I thought I’d have picked up on it.”
Yoongi’s heart stops.
“I mean,” Yoongi says, trying to keep his voice steady. “There are probably a ton of queer people who work here. You can’t really tell just by looking at someone.”
Hoseok considers it for a moment, glancing around them. At all the strangers that try so hard to be friends with. Who know nothing about each other, really, except for the faces they’ve put up as pretense just so they can keep earning enough to stay alive in a world that doesn’t want anyone to be themselves.
“Nah,” Hoseok says. “Can’t be anyone here. We’d be able to tell for sure. It’s not really something you can hide, you know?”
He gives Yoongi a smile, as if they’re just two heterosexual people and could never be seen as otherwise, and then gets back to packing his things away.
Yoongi stands, frozen, as if his heart hasn’t audibly broken in his chest.
/
Sometimes Yoongi wonders what he’s trying to be.
If he’s tried so hard to suppress a secret that it’s withered away into nothingness.
Is he really queer, if he can hide it with such ease? Is he really queer if he can erase everything about himself and still pass as a perfectly functional person?
And the worst thought of all, that haunts him when he’s trying to sleep—does it really matter if he’s gay, if he’s never going to act on it?
Does it matter , if it’s so easy to sweep it under the rug, to laugh at jokes he finds offensive, to agree to bad takes that he used to fight tooth and nail against—if it’s so easy to pass as the average heterosexual loser, then does it even matter that he can’t be loud about being queer?
It’s not like it affects him, if he just keeps lying.
It’s not like anyone can find out.
It’s just a quiet secret, in his chest, that day after day, hour after hour of smiling and talking and forcing courtesies, of pretending to want things that he doesn’t, of pretending to work towards places he’s never dreamed of being—he’s starting to realize he doesn’t ever want that secret to be out.
He doesn’t want to be himself, in front of people who wouldn’t see it for what it is.
He doesn’t want to be The Queer Guy who people use to up their own Good Person points.
Yoongi just wants to be Yoongi, but he can’t do that without calling himself gay—and if he calls himself gay then he will suddenly become, in the eyes of everyone around him, not Yoongi at all.
It’s like he has to choose between being a person or an abstraction, except that being a person isn’t quite being a person—but simply being seen as one.
And the truth is—Yoongi doesn’t know what the right answer is anymore.
He doesn’t know if he has a duty to be loud, to be brave—or if it’s okay to let himself waste away in this building, pretending to be dead inside.
He doesn’t know if he has what it takes to make this world a better place, when he’s no longer in the comfort of his college dorm, surrounded by people just like him.
Yoongi has seen people grow up and become less of themselves. He used to joke and call them corporate slaves, and vowed to never become one of them. They were easy enough words to throw around back then, when he never realized his life was at stake, but now—
If acceptance means Jung Hoseok looking him in the eye and saying I never would have guessed that you were gay, then Yoongi isn’t sure that he wants it.
If acceptance means that someone will say my friend went to a pride parade and then shift their gaze to meet Yoongi’s, waiting for approval, then Yoongi doesn’t want it.
If acceptance means that every conversation about wanting a family, and kids, and grandkids, will be paused to say um. It’s okay if you don’t want that of course, I’m just saying that I do, then Yoongi would rather throw himself into a river.
Yoongi doesn’t know what he wants.
He doesn’t know how he wants to be treated.
He just wants to stop being the other.
The different.
The of course, there are exceptions—
He just wants to be himself. Whatever that is. Whatever that could possibly mean.
Yoongi is afraid he’s lived in this world for so long, that he can no longer visualize a better alternative. When he says I want equality, he no longer knows what that would look like. So he keeps his head low, he keeps his secrets quiet, he keeps himself dead—and he keeps going.
And he hopes that someday, someone better than him, someone who knows what to do—can fix this for him.
/