Chapter Text
To You,
Who is currently reading this
Remember:
To be soft,
To be patient,
And to be kind
To yourself,
And to others
nightfall.
❀
The thing with being excellent the first time, Yoongi finds himself pondering over as he fixes the silk tie nestled upon his sternum – unstable fingers undoing and redoing the loop anxiously, is that people expect you to always be excellent after.
It doesn’t matter if it had merely been beginner’s luck, the circumstances – time and space – simply falling in your favour. Once you put yourself on your best out there and people actually find you worthy of their attention, you now have their constant scrutiny (Congratulations!). You either continue your way up to the top as they grovel at your feet, or you die trying to be the person they expect you to be. The sad thing about this is, life becomes a continuous loop of neurotic am I doing it like how they want me to?’s and I’m not good enough for them’s. You become a puppet, a mere slave for their entertainment.
Yoongi chuckles mirthlessly under his breath, pushing these thoughts to the back of his mind as the room resounds with soft knocks. He continues to fiddle with the ugly knot of the tie, doesn't even bother turning to greet the figure slipping inside. It can only be one person anyway. He glances at the mirror and finds that his tie has knotted into the same shape as the one on his throat and he swears, tears it back off.
“Here, let me get that,” Seokjin says.
As always, Seokjin looks flawless. All creases and kinks ironed out, calm and poised, quite unlike the sea storm brewing inside Yoongi, who fidgets as Seokjin slips the tie perfectly around his neck, and finds himself wanting to be anywhere else.
Seokjin looks up at him. “You're going to be fine.”
“They're going to ask me about the new book.”
“Of course they are.” Seokjin steps back, brushes the imaginary lint from Yoongi's shoulders. He’s always known what to say. “And you're going to tell them all about it.”
Sometimes Yoongi finds it terrifying, the amount of blind faith Seokjin has in him. At the start he'd thought it was just Seokjin doing his job – an editor's got to protect his writers, no matter what, and Seokjin's the best editor Yoongi knows – but he’d begun to realise that Seokjin doesn't play that game. Sometimes Yoongi thinks, it’s that blind faith that’s going to get him someday.
But today, of all days, Yoongi clings onto that part of Seokjin the most.
“I don’t have a new book.” Yoongi sucks his lower lip in between his teeth, worries on it as Seokjin’s eyes flicker up to meet his.
“I know that,” Seokjin breathes a soft laugh Yoongi doesn’t find offensive at all, “I also know you’re going to come up with something great in a short span of seconds after they ask. You'll be alright.”
Seokjin leads him outside the small waiting room, up to a long table arranged on a platform in front of an army of camera-equipped journalists and a crowd of his fans awaiting for him.
“You’re not Min Yoongi for nothing, after all.”
Cameras flash.
The corners of Yoongi’s lips automatically tug into an award—winning smile.
(A puppet —
Is what everybody is.)
❀
“Min Yoongi-ssi, your debut novel, ‘The Sun Chasers’, had been a success the moment it had hit the bookstores,” The first reporter starts, a rather short bespectacled young man whom Yoongi had seen quite a lot during his interviews for ‘The Sun Chasers’, as well as during the earlier sets for his most recently published novel. Yoongi gives him a nod of acknowledgement as he continues, “so people had held high expectations for your recently published novel. As we can see now with it’s enduring spot as number one on The New York Times’ bestseller, it does not fail its predecessor. ‘My Little Sunflower’, however, has taken a different kind of take on life. Some may even go as far as saying that it is more suited as a children’s book at first glance, what with the title and the premise of the novel itself — despite the meaningful and profound messages it conveys underneath the innocence and somewhat naive front. So we’re all curious, what inspired you for this little gem?”
Yoongi’s features are graced with a pleasant smile as he brings the microphone before his lips, doesn’t forget to thank the reporter before answering. At the back, Seokjin is smiling at him, genuine and reassuring.
“Well, to be completely honest, I didn’t think ‘My Little Sunflower’ would charm my readers as much as ‘The Sun Chasers’ had. As you said, ‘My Little Sunflower’ does seem like something a child would grab from the shelf, rather than a, what, twenty—something year old,” The room echoes with soft laughter, “So I’m quite thankful that it has reached out to people the way I hoped it would.”
“The thing that we forget the most is we learn from children as much as children learn from us — or, the ‘adults’. I’m not quite sure if I’m an adult myself just yet,” Yoongi quips, tilts his head and makes a show of sheepishly scratching the back of his head that draws another set of laughter from his audience.
“We’ve all been a child once in our life, believe it or not, we were children. Children who, much like Kim Taehyung from ‘My Little Sunflower’, had a lot of imagination and love to go around.”
“What made me write this novel is that feeling of being a child again. Of finding love in the littlest of things — things that we as adults don’t deem as ‘treasures’ anymore. We forget that once, we too had found a friend in a lone ant in the middle of its scour; we forget that once we had sung to the birds back outside when they had sung to us. We forget that, there will always be someone to love the things we would consider pointless. A tattered rag doll missing an eye and a nose, a browning photo encased within a shattered glass frame, a broken pencil kept at the bottom of a bag. To us, they are useless simply because they are broken. What use is a broken thing if it can no longer do the thing you had bought it in the first place for?”
“Although one may disagree with my analogy, as a flower is not one of those things that I have just listed — and Kim Taehyung’s Sunflower had been very much alive in the book, a flower that we had not grown ourselves is just a flower in somebody else’s garden; an adornment, perhaps. We may stop in front of somebody’s yard and be in awe at the wonderful colours that decorate their lawns. But that’s it. We pass by, we stop to look, then we move on with our lives.”
“How many times have you looked at a thing, the most insignificant thing that you can think of, and have thought, ‘ah, this must be very special to somebody else’?” Yoongi pauses, his audience still and silent, the scratch of lead on paper the only sound breaking the silence. “But to children, every single thing out there in the world is… wonderful. It’s magical. A leaf dancing in the wind is Mr. Leaf, a rock shaped differently than the rest is Ms. Rock, a bubblegum stuck at the bottom of a table is Mrs. Bubblegum, and they create stories out of them. They never cease to discover and be amazed and treasure everything that they see, storing them in what I imagine to be tiny little memory boxes, each a special place of its own.”
“Perhaps, that’s the thing we forget. We forget to be amazed and to see anything as special, now that we are older and we think that we’ve seen all that the world has to offer, felt all the emotions we’ve been taught. I, for one, am guilty for losing that perspective on life. And that’s why I wanted to challenge myself, to become the child I once was, and to take on this journey.”
The reporter quietly says his thanks for Yoongi’s sincere answer as he takes his seat once more, and another stands. This one is a fan, Yoongi judges, by the way her smile is nervous at the edges and her voice wavering slightly before steadying into a stiff bravado, and Yoongi almost chuckles in amusement but opts to smile encouragingly instead.
“Min Yoongi-ssi, if I may, I have read ‘The Sun Chasers’ on the first day of its release and I must have read it about five — no, six times already,” some people coo and some laugh amusedly at the girl’s confession, and Yoongi finds it easier to smile more honestly at this, “so when ‘My Little Sunflower’ was released, I just had to get my copy asap. I’ve fallen in love with it just as quickly as I have with the former, maybe even more. Even though ‘My Little Sunflower’ takes on a seven-year-old’s perspective, I feel that I’ve connected with Taehyungie a lot. You see, I lost my mother as well. As with Taehyung, and although my mother had not left me a magical, talking Sunflower before she had passed,” The girl laughs softly, almost wistfully yet so bright all the same, eyes rounding as she finally manages to look at Yoongi in the eyes, “she had been the best mother a little young girl could ask for. I just — I’m sorry for ranting. I just wanted to know, because you’ve touched my heart deeply with your works. How do you write so… beautifully and so poignantly?”
“I’m sorry a lovely girl like you had to lose a wonderful mother like her, though I don’t doubt one bit that she’s proud of who you’ve become today,” Yoongi murmurs into the microphone, meets the girl’s eyes solemnly and hopes that it’s enough, “To answer your question, my novels are not always as beautiful as you make them sound like. You should see my drafts, they’re just train wrecks, one after the other. But my editor, the wonderful man standing at the back right there, does his magic and what you all read and see is a work of sleepless nights and a lot of nagging and editing.” Seokjin pulls a face that makes the crowd laugh.
“As for the emotions and the feelings my novels hold, I rely on what the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler called gemeinschaftsgefühl, or the community feeling. Often times, I find myself sitting alone, be it in a café or in a park, where I just watch people as they pass by. Old couples walking down the street whilst holding hands, a crowd of children laughing away in the heat of the afternoon, or a lonely woman with her scarf wrapped around her neck so tight with her eyes downcast during her whole stay. And then I put myself in them, put myself in their shoes. I think, ‘what is their story?’ or ‘if I wrote a book about them, what would it be about?’. So I imagine high school sweethearts meeting again after fifty years and finding true love again, I picture children of the sun and stars making the flowers bloom with their sweet, honey laughter, or maybe a misunderstood super villain who turned people into stone with a glance but had only wanted to love and be loved in return. And then I write.”
“We don’t always have to directly be in the situation to know what it feels like being there. Sometimes, connecting deeply with other people is enough — empathy. In contrast to sympathy, where we do acknowledge how other’s feel but fail to feel it ourselves, empathy is simply not just putting yourself in one’s shoes, but it is connecting with them, seeing through their eyes, and sharing the feeling that they feel.”
“So I guess what I’m saying is that, I feel with you. I feel with all of you. I am with you as you lose a mother, or a dog, or even a magical, talking Sunflower. I understand you as you go through the immense loss, as we both feel the gaping hole in our chests left in their wake. And I walk with you, hand in hand, down the road of being unbroken once again.”
“It is a curious little thing, empathy. But I guess this is the secret to my novels. You are all simply reading bits and pieces of yourselves through my words.”
❀
Most of the questions that followed had been easy enough that Yoongi breezed through them without a hitch. Fans had asked him about the characters of his story, to expound on scenes they didn’t quite get, and what his favourites were (He didn’t choose, instead, he threw the question right back at them and felt pride and happiness swell in his chest as starry—eyed fans recalled their most favourite parts with passion). Journalists had questioned him more about the differences between his two novels; to compare and contrast the two different yet related story lines.
(“Min Yoongi-ssi, after reading ‘My Little Sunflower’ multiple times since its release, I’ve been thinking… Especially with what you have said before, was Taehyung’s Sunflower really alive, or did he simply think that the Sunflower was, Taehyung displacing the memories he had of his mother to the Sunflower she had left behind?” had been one of his favourite questions yet.)
And Yoongi had thought that maybe, this time, they’d leave it up to Yoongi to surprise them (with something he hadn’t even started yet).
But alas, another thing about people that is so wonderful, so amusing and so self-destructive all the same, is that they will always want more, and the dreaded question comes.
“Min Yoongi-ssi, before the day ends, we would just like to know,” Yoongi holds his breath and glances at Seokjin, clutches his fingers around that blind faith in Seokjin's unwavering gaze, “what are your plans for your next book?”
There’s a second of silence that seems to stretch on to forever. Time slows down like the Earth has been swallowed by the ocean. All of the sudden, Yoongi’s submerged ten feet underwater. Faces blurring together, a woven quilt of expectant eyes and creased eyebrows. Voices muted, a lullaby sung to sleeping sirens at moonrise.
And suddenly, there it is. Right in front of him. Twinkling and soft at the edges, a little dream packed in a shell. Bright and precious. There is it.
“I don't want to spoil,” Yoongi clears his throat, rips himself from the crevice of his mind and back to reality. Hears the ripple of the surface of the water around him, heart beating wildly against his chest, “but it would be about love, still, yes, but a different kind of love. Of course. Of course, and then, two boys. Does that sound too much? We’ll see.”
The audience roars to life at his answer, right on cue. But he’s already stood up and given his thanks and one last bow, one last wave, to the crowd before exiting the way he’s entered, Seokjin by his side in half a second, and he’s glad. Doesn’t unclasps his fingers around blind faith, no. Not until they’re back in the small waiting room at the back and Seokjin’s brushing his palms down his shoulders.
“Romance, eh?” Seokjin’s saying, a knowing smile in place.
“Yeah,” Yoongi keeps his eyes on the dream, returns Seokjin’s smile blearily, and nods, “Yeah. This time.”
❀
The first thing Yoongi wrote was about a boy who couldn’t leave his house because of his evil stepmother and had to turn to the shadows in his room for friends.
That was when he’d been a tender age of eleven. When his mother wouldn’t allow him to join his friends for their sleepovers. His mother had pointed a ladle at him and said, “You have your own house and bed, why do you need to sleep in somebody else’s bed?” (a typical Asian mother’s response if he’d be honest with himself now, in hindsight), and it had filled a good twenty pages of his notebook, back to back, with his chicken scratch handwriting scribbled down in pencil hard enough that it ripped parts of the pages. He’d been angry and he’d written a short story about a boy with shadows for friends and a witch for a mother. (The next thing he’d written had been about a Mommy Fox and a Baby Fox living and making a home in the wild. He’d forgiven her by then. He’d also been eleven and a few days older than he were when he’d written his first story.)
The first time Yoongi’s ever kissed somebody though, he’d been fourteen. And the person he’d kissed had been a boy.
His mother hadn’t known, not then, and Yoongi had kept it that way. Had turned to his notebooks instead — journals wrapped in faux leather slipped in thick strips of garter to hold their pages together, dog—eared and pages blotted with ink — and wrote story after story of the moon’s adventure with a newborn star.
When Yoongi’d turned seventeen, he’d had a countless number of stars in his sky then. Been through six journals filled with stories of the moon and the star, and the star, and the star. Sometimes, his stars were soft, pliant and pink. Most of the times, they’d been red, angry on the outside and sad on the inside. Yoongi had loved them both just the same. Had covered himself with his blanket of stars every night as he slept, the curve of his palm tattooed with the telltale signs of the moon’s adventures.
He’d told his parents before they sent him off to college in Seoul, though. Years and years of keeping his stars little, white secrets embedded beneath his eyelids, only to spill from his mouth like starburst. (They had accepted him, had welcomed the way he’d built his sky around the moon and the stars.)
And then the fall had happened. He’d manage to lose his stars three weeks into college. No longer seeing them twinkle when he blinked, suddenly not knowing the universe at the back of his hand like he’d always known. They’d drizzled down to a place he couldn’t quite reach, a meteor shower of what he’d once loved — stars turning into simple rocks he couldn’t recognise. Had the stars simply lost their souls, the beauty and lustre, or had the moon shied away from the stars, had stopped looking for the night and had coveted for something different, something it couldn’t have? He had started writing ‘The Sun Chasers’ then. He’d been eighteen.
He hasn’t had seen stars since.
❀
Yoongi comes to a realisation that he hasn’t had anything to eat since Seokjin left after delivering lunch earlier this afternoon. Hunched over his computer, his stomach emits a soft growl, enough to startle him and still his fingers above the keys. His eyes flit down to check on his stomach, if it had miraculously grown a hole from the moment he’s started ignoring it in favour of typing away on his laptop. He sighs, leans back onto his recliner and feels a weight settling on his shoulders. Hears his joints pop and crack like hard candy.
Ever since the last interview, the idea has been begging to be written by him. His pearl—shaped dream, something he’d reached into the shell of his mind and plucked so delicately from. But now, after almost a week — (five days at most, maybe, he hasn’t had exactly checked the calendar or his phone to know. The only indication of day shifting into night into day was the sunlight washing into and trickling out of his room — a bad habit when he’s sucked into his work, Seokjin reminds him of every time he catches Yoongi in one of his still dreams) — after a week he’s only had a good thousand words of nothing. He almost considers trashing everything he’s written so far, smash his finger against the backspace key until he’s left with a white canvas, a clean slate to slave over again, but the corner of his eyes catches a pink sticky note. He twists in his seat and reaches for the piece of paper stuck inconspicuously on the corner of his laptop’s screen (how could I have missed this?) and it reads,
“You know how you get when you’re frustrated, mad, and stuck. Don’t do it, Yoongi. Go out. Get out of your seat and rest your eyes for a moment. You’ll get there soon. I know you will.”
He turns to stare back at the words that seem to blur together on his screen. He hasn’t always written like how he does, like how most people do — chronologically. He doesn’t know how he got to writing the middle first, and then the end, before the beginning. Almost arbitrary. But it makes sense to him like that.
What greets him is a simple paragraph, no longer than a couple hundreds of words, five hundred maybe if he’s to be a little specific, and it’s nothing but sentences that describe his character. Not the protagonist, but nearly so.
A boy, Yoongi imagines, who is twenty—two years old, with scarlet hair neatly parted in the middle. He has a pair of thick, plush rosy lips underneath a cute, button nose, and a pair of almond shaped brown eyes that turns into soft crescents when the corners of his lips tug upward into a smile. And when he smiles, it reveals a chip in his tooth — the one he’s gotten when he’d been nine, chasing after a yellow butterfly in the garden, tripping over a rock in the process (he hadn’t manage to catch the butterfly).
He wears glasses most of the time, and he’s fond of wearing sweaters two sizes too big during Autumn. He works as a part-time florist, and when he comes home he smells of freshly cut grass and sweet lemon. He knows how to sing and dance, but he doesn’t really do any of that in public, partly because he’s shy, but mostly because he doesn’t believe that he can. He’s an open book, a true romantic at heart, crumbles easily under a fingertip’s pressure, and he’s lovely. Beautiful and golden under the heat of sunlight. He loves the early mornings and the latest nights. He loves listening to the birds sing, and he loves watching ships sail into the sea when he’d been back in his hometown, Busan. He loves a lot of things, he thinks it’s hard not to, but there’s just this one thing. He doesn’t love himself.
Yoongi doesn’t know where he gets the name, but he decides to call him Park Jimin. Something unisex, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a common name — maybe it’s good that it is. And so far, he’s all that Yoongi has pat-down.
He rolls his head to rest on his shoulder, flicks the sharp corner of the paper with a finger, and glances at the clock from his peripheral. He finds it in himself to be slightly alarmed that it’s now close to midnight and he still hasn’t eaten. Another growl sounds from his stomach and it’s enough to force him out of his seat and down to the kitchen.
Upon opening the fridge, Yoongi is met with absolutely nothing, except for all three half-empty bottles of red wine and half a mouldy banana. Stuffed into the garbage disposal are the remnants of lunch, boxes of greasy takeouts (fried Chicken and bibimbap) Seokjin had brought in earlier.
(“Really, Yoongi, what would you do without me? Have you eaten anything at all — in, what, four days — before I even got here?”
“I’d die. Simple. Now hand the chopsticks over and stop nagging, I need to eat.”
“Should’ve thought about that before starving yourself for nearly four days, idiot.”)
He remembers holing himself in his house the past few days, only sustaining himself with the leftover cereal on his shelf and whatever junk food he could get his hands on from his cupboard and gallons of water, and mutters a curse under his breath. Slamming the fridge door shut sourly, he turns to the hallway and to the door entrance, scoops his wallet and keys from the kitchen counter on his way out, slips into his shoes, and spills out onto the streets.
❀
There’s a 24/7 minimart Yoongi frequents a few blocks from his home that he treks to, a short twenty-minute walk. Enough for him to make a short list of what he needs in his head (ramen, milk, cereal, and maybe some toilet paper before he runs out of that, too).
The soft tinkle of the bell signals his arrival, though it doesn’t draw more than a soft grunt from the attending employee. He grabs a blue basket from the entrance and makes a beeline for the aisle he’s long memorised, ready to fill his basket to the brim with packets and cups of ramen like he’s initially intended to when an oddly surprised voice sounds from behind the aisle.
“Hyung?” A redhead appears from the bend, startles Yoongi enough that he drops the cup ramen from within his grasp, the crisp thump of the cup against the tiles ringing loud and clear in the space between them.
“Huh?” Yoongi, in all his ratty hoodie and baggy sweatpants’ glory, unintelligibly mutters.
Red hair neatly parted in the middle. Thick glasses perched on his nose. Sleeves that hide his short fingers. Roses for lips. Chocolates for eyes.
Jimin.
Park Jimin.
It’s Jimin.
The Jimin he’s just written about not an hour ago.
“Yoongi—hyung! I told you I’d get us grocery,” Jimin chirps, holds up a basket to make his point, and gives Yoongi a funny look. “What happened to your writing streak?”
“Who — what, huh?”
“Are you really that tired that you forget you sent your own boyfriend for a quick grocery run?” Jimin jokes, easily hooking an arm around Yoongi’s slack limb, and guides him to the counter. He’s leaning his head upon Yoongi’s shoulder as he giggles softly, breath fanning warmly against Yoongi’s cheek. He’s real. (Mind racing a thousand miles per hour, heart beating so incredibly hard against his ribs. Shell-shocked.)
“That’s it. Once we get home, I’m tucking you into bed, no matter how much you insist on writing some more, okay?” Jimin’s voice is stern, but Yoongi hears a hint of playfulness underneath it. Like he knows how Yoongi gets when he’s writing. Like he’s been there through it all.
Which is impossible.
Because he’s not real.
But there he is, right in front of Yoongi’s eyes, scanning lettuce so normally, not a hair out of place, frowning at the price that flashes on the screen, bagging the grocery. Their grocery. Apparently.
“I’m sorry,” Yoongi intercepts, and alarm bells ring inside his head as Jimin lifts his head to look at him, a carton of eggs in his hand paused mid-air, hair hanging over his eyes, brows lifted and lips pursed into a small pout. “I’m sorry, I think you got the wrong… Yoongi, I’m not… I don’t think I have a boyfriend.”
“Hyung,” Jimin says, slips the plastic bags around his wrists, and takes a look at Yoongi, “are we really doing this?”
“I just. I’m sorry, I really don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yes.” The plastic rustles as Jimin lifts them off the counter, and walks away from Yoongi without saying anything else.
Yoongi should feel relieved. He had been able to get Jimin to leave like he’d initially wanted — a Jimin who claimed to be his boyfriend (never mind that this Jimin is his Jimin, the Jimin in his drafts. Red-haired, sun-kissed, droopy eyed, chipped tooth, Park Jimin). It’s absurd. Because Yoongi hasn’t had a boyfriend since he graduated college seven years ago. The entire situation is ridiculous as it is — how this Jimin looks too eerily the same as the one he’s written about, coincidence or not.
By the time Yoongi’s gotten ahold of himself, the redhead is nowhere to be found, disappearing after the familiar tinkling of the bell. No longer feeling the same appetite as he had earlier, he decides to forego shopping for the night and lifts a hand to rub the heel of his palm against his eye.
I’m hallucinating from the lack of sleep and food, Yoongi rationalises, searches for a clock and reads that it’s now one in the morning.
This is not real. He takes a step away from the counter, and makes for the door he’d gone through just a few minutes ago. I’m going to walk home, I’m going to sleep, and when I wake up tomorrow, I’m going to call Seokjin to bring me food instead.
He breathes in the frigid, city air as soon as he steps out, inhaling a lungful to wake himself up. It clears his fogged-up mind for a few seconds, blood roaring in his ears like soft waves crashing against the shore in the comforting silence of the night. Digging his hands into his pockets, he sighs. Feels the heaviness of his flesh settle in his bones like the cold. And then sees Jimin when he looks up.
(A halo around his head, the moon glittering in his eyes.)
He seems to have waited for Yoongi, even after leaving without saying anything. He doesn’t say anything else when Yoongi emerges from the shop. Instead, he simply turns and walks ahead, the sound of plastic rustling following him.
Something in Yoongi tells him that the boy’s worried about him, if he’s correctly seeing the way a small frown settles itself between his brows, teeth gnawing on his lip before he’s seen Yoongi himself.
And, despite feeling like an utter fool — a hallucinating idiot who’s brought his character to life on a night he’s had enough of seeing starless skies and feeling cold fingertips, he lets warmth settle in the pit of his stomach (especially when Jimin stops walking when he purposely lags a little behind, pretends to fix the laces of his shoe or dig something from his pocket only to continue when Yoongi finally catches up). And pretend it isn’t ridiculous at all until it lasts.