Chapter Text
School is done for the day. The hallways are quiet, practically abandoned—save for Park Jimin, who is standing in front of a row of lockers, frowning and thinking this is stupid.
He’s clutching a bright blue slip of paper—just gently enough not to crinkle it—ruefully looking over the words he’d written on it the day before: “Whenever I see you, I feel like the world disappears because you’re shining so much brighter than the rest of them. I’ve been bumping into a lot of people lately, because of that, you know. But I don’t mind—I’d rather bump into people forever if it means you’ll always be around to light up my life. (: “
It really had seemed like a good idea the day before—but back then it wasn’t a bad day for him, back then he didn’t feel like there was some kind of strange pressure squeezing at him on the inside, making him feel like his organs are constricting and like he’s having difficulty breathing.
But now it’s a bad day for him, so he reads and re-reads his note over and over again and all it does is make him feel stupid, childish, like he’s found something he wrote back in middle school and he just realized how cringe-worthy it actually is. It makes him feel like all he would accomplish by slipping his note into Yoongi’s locker would be to make his friends (even Seokjin) have something to laugh about during lunch break, like he knows for a fact happened with the rest of the notes.
It doesn’t normally bother him—but Jimin’s having an off day, and that’s practically the worst kind of day to contemplate his embarrassing, clichéd and essentially shallow crush on Min Yoongi.
(Jimin was aware of Yoongi’s existence ever since he befriended Taehyung, and has seen him around at the Kim household before they went to the same school, but he’s only started paying attention to him earlier that year.
Some guys are yelling distasteful things at him—Jimin remembers what they were essentially saying, but not the exact arrangement of generic cruel words—and he’s about to walk off when he hears another voice butt in, telling his bullies to ‘Fuck off, effective starting now—unless any of you want to kick off the school year with a nice set of black eyes’ and scoffing after the group scuttles away.
“All bark and no bite—typical,” Min Yoongi, in all his (then) blond, pierced and leather-clad glory saunters over to Jimin with a scowl. “You alright, kid?”
Jimin, who knows he looks younger than his age yet resents being called a kid by someone only two years older than him, would normally protest. But he’s still trying to process what just happened, so he replies with a faint: “I’m fine.”
Yoongi raises an eyebrow. “Then why were you taking shit from those guys?”
“They’re just words,” he shrugs.
“Not words anyone should hear.”
Jimin stays quiet, because he doesn’t really have a retort for that. The elder squints at him for that brief moment of silence, tilting his head to the side, before a look of realisation crosses his face.
“Aren’t you Taehyung’s friend?”
“Yeah. Park Jimin.”
“Min Yoongi,” he offers in reply, like an afterthought.
“I know,” Jimin says before he can help himself, and watches Yoongi’s eyebrows rise in curiosity and barely concealed amusement. “Tae talks a lot about you,” he offers as means of explanation, feeling his cheeks heat up under the scrutiny.
“Ah,” Yoongi shakes his head, a hint of a smirk playing at his lips. “So I’m guessing that’s the reason why all the freshmen are scared shitless of me.”
Jimin giggles at the memory of Taehyung trying to convince Seungcheol that Yoongi was actually a real, (well, metaphorically) living vampire. “Probably.”
When Yoongi leaves, it’s not without looking back at Jimin and adding “You gotta start telling people to fuck off if they bother you unless you want to get pushed around your whole life. Got it?”
“Got it,” Jimin mumbles, unable to keep a smile off his face.)
Their first meeting—which left Jimin, for lack of a better word, a little starstruck—made him understand the admiration in Taehyung’s voice whenever he talked about him, like he’s some kind of super-hero.
Min Yoongi is not a super-hero—or a good role model, Seokjin would insist. He sleeps through his classes, he swings his fists before thinking about the repercussions, he cusses on every other fifth word that leaves his mouth, he constantly takes his anger out on people, he needs to be reminded to take care of himself sometimes, he has a hard time talking about himself and opening up to other people, and he closes off and becomes distant at the smallest provocation.
But he’s also heard Seokjin say on different occasions that he works the hardest he’s ever seen someone work for the things that truly matter to him, that he stands up for what he believes in without worrying about public opinion, that he sometimes beats himself up about things that aren’t his fault, that he only knows how to apologise to people in unconventional ways but he does it anyway. One time when he’s sitting on the bench with Hoseok, taking a break from practice to catch their breath, he tells Jimin he’s pretty sure that, no matter how cold Yoongi seems, he would probably kill and die for the people he cares about, if need be—and that worries him more than he lets on.
So of course, to Jimin, Min Yoongi became somewhat of a fascination.
Enough of a fascination that, during one of his better days, when he feels happy and confident and like he could take on the entire world, he waits until school lets out and slips a single note in Yoongi’s locker—I think you’re sweet like sugar. (;
Then another, and another, and another, until it’s been months and Jimin is standing in front of his locker, wondering if he should finally put this to rest. After all, he thinks, smoothing out the wrinkles of the paper in his hands, it’s likely that the only thing Yoongi does with his notes is laugh about them with his friends before throwing them out the first chance he gets. After all, Jimin’s never going to work up the guts to confess when there’s so much at risk and such a low chance of Yoongi liking him back.
After all, what is the point in continuing something that only he cares about?
“Hey kid, you’re blocking the way.”
Jimin turns without even thinking about it, with an apology on his lips that dies the moment he sees the figure of an irate-looking, messy haired Min Yoongi. But a second later, Yoongi’s stance relaxes and his features shift into something calmer, more akin the usual bored, sleepy look he favours.
“Oh, it’s just you,” he rolls his eyes, taking a step closer. “Still blocking the way, though. I forgot something in my locker and I need it, so it would be really damn helpful if you—“
Abruptly, he stops talking, eyes trailing downwards. Jimin follows his gaze all the way to the blue coloured paper he’s holding and for one horrible moment, he feels like his heart stops beating—before it picks back up, twice as fast.
He can’t say he’s never pictured Yoongi finding out about his crush on him, or that he hasn’t imagined worse case scenarios than this, but it’s still not the way he wanted it to happen. Getting caught in the act of it somehow makes it feel wrong, like it’s something he’s not supposed to do.
(Sometimes, Jimin can’t help but think that, maybe, it really is.)
What he knows for sure is that, in his current state, he is definitely not emotionally stable enough to deal with it—definitely not now, definitely not like this, definitely not at school, even if most of the students had gone home.
“Sorry, sorry. I was zoning out a little,” he says, forcing out a laugh that he hopes will come off as sheepish.
Adjusting the strap of his bag to its proper place on his shoulder with one hand and crumpling up his note in the other, he avoids looking directly at Yoongi. “Well, I’ll be heading home now, so—bye, hyung.”
He doesn’t stick around to hear Yoongi’s reply—if he had any—and on his way out, he tosses the balled up blue paper in one of the trash bins in the hallway, though he does so with a heavy heart and feeling like something is lodged in his throat.
That day, like on any other Bad Day, Jimin doesn’t go straight home. Instead, he joins Taehyung on the bus ride home and embraces the organised chaos that is the Kim household.
Taehyung announces their arrival in the loudest way possible, causing Seoyun to come out of the kitchen so she can greet them both (and give Jimin one of her bone-crushing hugs, that leaves him all warm and content inside) before hurriedly returning to a steaming pot of something that smells heavenly.
The rest of the family is in the living room: Sungho is waving his hands around and talking animatedly to Namjoon, who is resolutely shaking his head at something the man is saying, pointing at the TV for good measure, where a couple of penguins are innocently wobbling around. They’re both wearing glasses and bright-eyed looks that hint at the fact that they’ve probably been at this for a while before Jimin and Taehyung arrived home. Another thing that points at this is Seokjin, sitting next to them on the couch, looking bored out of his mind, occasionally tugging at his boyfriend’s shirt sleeve in a vain attempt to pull him away from the conversation and heavily pouting whenever he gets ignored (which is every time, though Namjoon occasionally tries to placate him with the apologetic ‘In a moment, babe’ eliciting an eye roll from Seokjin).
Once he takes notice of the two, Seokjin smiles at them and gives a small wave, which Jimin returns—tacking on a sympathetic look when the discussion seems to become more heated (“But the most recent study said—““I’m not saying they’re wrong, I’m just saying that there’s a lot of evidence that points to—“) and the elder lets out one last sigh before announcing no one in particular that he’s going to help with cooking.
In Taehyung’s room, Jimin makes himself comfortable on the bed, bundling himself up in the comforter, and closes his eyes, content to allow himself a break as his best friend zooms around in the room, placing and replacing things to his liking.
When he returns, Jimin cracks one eye open to be greeted with Taehyung looking at him gravely, eyebrows furrowed and jaw set.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, gingerly sitting down next to him on the bed.
Jimin knows why he’s asking—he always asks, but it never makes the topic seem any easier to talk about. He comes over so often that one time, Sungho admitted he forgets Jimin doesn’t actually live with them, but it’s not always because he wants to hang out with Taehyung, or talk to Seokjin, or talk period.
On his worse days, Jimin just wants a quiet space for himself and, paradoxically, the house of his loud best friend and his even louder family becomes his safe haven. Maybe quiet isn’t the right way to describe it, because there’s always so much noise—but it’s good noise, peaceful in a strange way. Nobody’s screaming at each other for hours over whose turn it was to do the groceries or whose fault it is that they can’t afford to pay the electric bill. Nobody pulls Jimin into arguments he’s got nothing to do with. Nobody makes him feel guilty for things that aren’t his fault.
(He knows it’s terrible, but sometimes he thinks his parents love arguing with each other more than they love him.
They must love him—he’s not sure if that’s a fact or wishful thinking on his part—but they don’t show it very much. Jimin’s not sure if it used to be better when he was little, because he doesn’t remember much, but he knows that it’s been really bad for a while. Bad enough that, as nice as his parents are to him individually, being in the same room as the both of them means getting caught in one of their many, many impending fights.
Some days, he can handle it. Other days, he goes out of his way and avoids his house until he knows one of his parents has gone to work or someplace else.
And Jimin thinks it could be worse, because his parents never yell at him unless they’re already yelling at each other, would never lay a hand on him—but it’s stressful, and though he doesn’t feel unsafe at home, he doesn’t feel loved either.
He remembers reading an article once—something that said people who are deprived of affection either grow up to be distant and fearful of it, or latch onto anyone who could offer it to them. Back then, he thought it sounded stupid.
Now, it’s something he relies on to explain his own behaviour. Why he falls for people so easily, so quickly, though he doesn’t necessarily believe in love at first sight. Why he cried after his first relationship ended even though the guy wouldn’t even look at him in public and constantly left him second-guessing himself and holding onto empty promises. Why he practically glues himself to people—like Taehyung and Hoseok—from the very day he meets them just because they were nice to him. Why he was so quick to accept caring and fussy Seokjin as his pseudo-older brother after his actual brother went to college and dropped off the face of the Earth. Why he revels in every one of Seoyun’s hugs, in every instance when Sungho jokes about him being their third son.
He figures his crush on Yoongi came to existence on the same basis, but he hates thinking about it. He hates thinking that his feelings are feeble, that Yoongi is just a placeholder for any other person, that he only likes him because of some sort of pathological loneliness. He doesn’t like the idea that something that feels so big and important to him can be disconsidered because he ‘wasn’t hugged enough as a child’.
But he also hates agonising over it so much—especially now that Yoongi knows, and he probably doesn’t even care.
It’s times like these he wishes he were on the other end of the extreme—jaded, closed off and mindful of his personal space—so he could stop being dependent on every smile thrown his way, and hanging off of everyone like a leech
And most importantly, he wishes he would stop offering his heart to anyone who’s there to catch it, to the point where he can’t even tell if his feelings are valid or if he’s just incredibly desperate.)
“Jimin.”
Startled, he looks up at Taehyung, who’s frowning at him.
“Hey—you okay?” he asks, softly and with so much worry that it makes Jimin’s heart hurt.
“Yeah,” he lifts his head from where it’s pressed into the pillow when the answer comes out muffled. “Sorry, I was spacing out. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“M’kay.”
Taehyung nods, lifting the comforter so he can get under it; Jimin gratefully scoots closer to him and rests his head on his shoulder.
Then, they talk—or rather, Jimin stays quiet, curled up against Taehyung, while his friend tells him about the newest Captain America movie he went to see with Jungkook. He doesn’t care about the franchise or know anything about it, but he delights in Taehyung describing scenes from it complete with sound effects, and giggles at how offended he gets when he brings up the argument he had with Jungkook at the end of it, something about a Bucky (Jimin’s not sure if that’s a person or an object) that Jungkook apparently just doesn’t get.
It’s not uncommon for Taehyung to soothe Jimin with cuddles and spend hours on end talking about nonsense until his friend manages to crack a smile—it’s something even Jungkook has taken to doing on separate occasions, though it doesn’t come as naturally to him. Jimin feels pretty spoiled, nonetheless.
Eventually, it gets late enough that Jimin knows his dad’s shift has already started, which means a quiet house for him to return to.
“Text me when you get home,” says Taehyung, handing Jimin an umbrella once he finishes tying his shoes.
The younger tries to convince him to just spend the night after the downpour began, but Jimin declines. As much as he’d love to stay with the Kims –for the rest of his life, if possible—he’d feel bad about worrying his mother.
(Though, he muses, it’s not very fair that she doesn’t feel bad when she calls his dance lessons, among other things important to Jimin, a waste of money whenever she’s arguing with his dad.)
“Your inner Jin-hyung is showing,” Jimin teases, as means of response. Immediately, Taehyung’s face scrunches up.
“Don’t even joke about that, Park Jimin, or I’m taking back the umbrella and throwing you out in the rain.”
He’s still laughing while he walks down the steps of their front porch.
Things are looking up the next day—the food Jimin’s mother leaves out for breakfast is still warm by the time he gets out of bed, the weather is pleasant for a change, and his English teacher doesn’t show up for class, giving them a free period that Jimin spends talking to Jeonghan and Jisoo, the shy kid sitting next to him who transferred from America.
It’s a good day—good enough to take Jimin’s mind off of things he doesn’t want to think about.
Until he wanders through the hallways in the search for Taehyung and his box-shaped grin, and instead bumps into a very happy Hoseok and Yoongi, trailing after him and looking lethargic. His eyes move around lazily until he rests his gaze on Jimin, and the younger feels like his mouth go dry.
“Jiminie,” Hoseok all but coos, with his signature megawatt smile. “Long time no see.”
“Yeah—long time no see, hyung. It’s been like, a full day or something,” he lets out a laugh, before greeting Yoongi with a cheerful “Hi, Yoongi-hyung” like he’s not wondering whether Yoongi knows or not.
When the elder replies with a muttered, impersonal “Hi”, Jimin kind of starts suspecting the answer—and when he turns to Hoseok and tells him to “go ahead, I have something to discuss with Jimin” it shatters any hope he had about Yoongi staying blissfully ignorant to what happened the other day.
Even so, Jimin wishes he could stay blissfully ignorant—so after he waves goodbye to a departing Hoseok, he turns to Yoongi with a smile and a feigned innocent “So, what do you want to talk about, hyung?”
If anything, it only makes Yoongi’s eyes narrow in a way that spells out ‘You know what I want to talk about’ in bold, capital letters. It’s then when it dawns on Jimin that he looks tenser than usual, wearier, like he’s mulling over something difficult—how to turn down a pesky freshman, for instance.
Jimin feels bile rise in his throat at the thought of public rejection, but he braces himself for it anyway.
(He wonders if he could handle to stand still, grin and bear it, or if he should make a run for it before he bursts into tears and makes a fool of himself in front of the entire school.
He wonders if Yoongi would feel bad if he made him cry, but knows he doesn’t want to find out.)
Instead, Yoongi sighs, runs a hand through his pink locks of hair, and says: “Not here. You know the park next to the middle school? About fifteen minutes from here.”
“Yeah,” leaves Jimin’s lips, barely above a whisper. He clears his throat. “Yeah, I know the one.”
“Meet me there after school and—we’ll talk.”
He leaves as soon as Jimin gives him a small nod, without much preamble. The younger lets out a slow, shaky breath as he stares at his retreating back, feeling grateful for the fact that the scream that’s been building up inside of him during the conversation didn’t escape with it.
He has so many things to think about—all starting and finishing with Yoongi—but he doesn’t get to do anything because in the next moment, Taehyung just slams into him. Literally.
“Jesus, Tae,” he breathes out, rubbing at a sore spot on his hip.
“You looked like you were thinking too hard,” he starts pulling him away, in the direction of their next class. “Speaking of—did you do your science homework?”
“What does that have to do with thinking?”
“Hopefully a whole lot since I was planning of copying mine off of you,” cue the wide, cheeky grin.
“Really? It’s the same homework from last time. You’ve had almost a week to do it,” Jimin sighs, regarding Taehyung with his best imitation of Seokjin’s unimpressed look—which is not very good.
Taehyung winces, regardless. “Yeah, I know. And I wanted to, but I completely forgot. And if I get another warning from the teacher, they’ll get on my case again.”
“Your parents?”
“No, Seokjin-hyung and Namjoon-hyung.”
“So, essentially your parents,” he concludes, laughing when Taehyung grumbles something inaudible.
“Okay, here’s the deal—I buy you lunch for a week.”
He hums. “Two weeks.”
“You give them a finger and they take your entire hand,” his best friend gasps, theatrically. “Okay, two weeks. You greedy jerk.”
He jokingly elbows Jimin in the ribs—Jimin pushes him in return, snorting with laughter and they make their way to their next class trying to shove each other into walls while simultaneously ignoring weird looks from most of the student body.
And Jimin actually manages to keep himself from thinking about the fact that he will most likely be rejected by his crush later that day—for all of five minutes, and then spends the remainder of his Science class wondering if he should ask his teacher if there’s such a thing as a quick DIY on how to turn into an unicellular organism.