Chapter Text
Yoongi turns twenty on a Tuesday, which feels appropriate in a way he can’t quite articulate. Not disappointing, exactly. Just… unceremonious. A day that doesn’t ask to be celebrated, that doesn’t demand a reckoning. The world continues as it always has: the neighbour’s dog barking at nothing in particular, the elevator in his building shuddering like it might give up one day but not today, the kettle taking just a little too long to boil.
There’s a superstition, he knows, about this birthday. Everyone knows it. You grow up hearing about it in the same tone adults use for weather warnings and mild curses—serious enough to note, casual enough not to panic over. At twenty, the soulmate bond activates. Not in the dramatic ways the movies insist on—no sudden visions, no lightning-strike recognition, no names carved into skin or red threads snapping into place. Just emotions. Big ones. Echoes that don’t belong to you, arriving unannounced and unapologetic.
Yoongi wakes up that morning braced for… something. A shift. A feeling. He lies still for a few seconds longer than usual, eyes on the faint crack in his ceiling that looks like a poorly drawn map, cataloguing himself the way he always does. Headache: mild. Back: stiff. Mood: neutral, edging toward sleepy. Nothing else intrudes. No tidal wave of foreign longing. No inexplicable sorrow. No overwhelming joy.
“Figures,” he mutters to the empty apartment.
If something is supposed to change, it does so quietly enough that he almost misses it.
The first time it happens, he’s halfway through making coffee. He’s just poured hot water over the grounds, watching the surface bloom dark and fragrant, when guilt hits him. So sharp and sudden, it lodges beneath his ribs like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples outward. His breath catches. His hand tightens on the kettle handle.
“What the hell?” he murmurs, glancing around as if the emotion might have a source he can point to. The kitchen is unchanged. The plant on his windowsill—an unassuming pothos he’s had since he was eighteen—is still very much alive, leaves glossy and content. He hasn’t forgotten a deadline. He hasn’t snapped at anyone. He hasn’t done anything wrong that he can think of.
The guilt fades as quickly as it came, leaving behind a strange hollowed-out sensation. Like he’s walked into a room mid-argument and arrived just in time for the silence afterward.
He stands there for a long moment, coffee forgotten, then exhales slowly.
“So that’s how it’s going to be,” he says, resigned.
Over the next few weeks, the pattern establishes itself. The emotions are never subtle, never small. They arrive fully formed, without context, and vanish just as mysteriously. Bursts of happiness that make his chest feel light and warm, even when he’s alone in his studio at two in the morning, hunched over a half-finished track. Flickers of panic that leave his hands cold and his thoughts skittering, his heart racing for no reason he can name. A deep, encompassing calm that settles over him like a blanket when he’s sitting by the window, notebook balanced on his knee, pen hovering uselessly above the page.
Yoongi learns quickly not to fight them.
He’s always been good at adaptation. It’s one of his quieter talents. You don’t survive the industry—don’t survive yourself—without learning how to adjust, how to fold strange things into the rhythm of your days until they stop feeling strange at all. So he acknowledges the emotions when they come. He lets them pass through him. Sometimes, when the guilt is particularly sharp, he pauses and takes care with small things: waters his plants, deletes an unfinished file instead of forcing it, sends a short text to someone he hasn’t checked in on in a while.
It makes him feel marginally less unmoored, as if kindness—any kindness—might balance out whatever unseen mess his soulmate has gotten themselves into this time.
He doesn’t tell anyone. Not at first. There’s nothing to tell, really. “Sometimes I feel bad for no reason” isn’t exactly headline material, and everyone his age is walking around half-feral with feelings anyway. The world is loud. Emotions bleed through everything. It’s easy to chalk it up to stress, to turning twenty, to the low-level existential dread that seems to come free with adulthood.
Except… it’s consistent. The emotional spikes have a shape to them, a flavour. The guilt is always the same—acute, self-directed, heavy with apology. The joy is bright and unguarded, the kind that bubbles up from somewhere deep and refuses to be contained. The calm feels earned, like someone sitting down at the end of a long day and finally breathing out.
Yoongi starts thinking of the person on the other end of the bond without quite meaning to.
He doesn’t picture a face. That feels too intimate, too presumptuous. But he imagines habits. A tendency toward excess, maybe. Someone who feels things all the way through instead of skimming the surface. Someone who tries hard and fails often and feels terrible about it afterward. The guilt has that texture—earnest, remorseful, disproportionate.
“It’s fine,” Yoongi finds himself saying aloud one afternoon, alone in his studio as another wave of it rolls through him. He rubs his chest absently, grounding himself in the familiar ache of tension. “Whatever you did, it’s probably fine.”
He feels faintly ridiculous for it. Talking to a ghost. Talking to a feeling. Still, the guilt eases, and he takes that as a win.
By the time a year has passed, the bond has settled into something almost… companionable. A background presence. A strange, emotional weather system that drifts through his life without disrupting it too badly. Yoongi starts to anticipate it in small ways. When he feels an unexpected swell of happiness while stirring soup on the stove, he smiles without thinking, lips curving around the spoon.
“Good day, huh?” he murmurs.
When panic hits, he grounds himself instinctively—feet on the floor, breath slow and steady—like he’s done a hundred times before for his own sake. When calm washes over him, he leans into it, lets it colour whatever he’s working on. Some of his favourite melodies come from those moments, unhurried and warm, like sunlight through curtains.
He doesn’t go looking for his soulmate.
People do, sometimes. There are forums and meetups and half-serious algorithms designed to match emotional patterns, to cross-reference timelines of grief and joy in the hope of finding overlap. Yoongi has scrolled through them late at night, curiosity prickling, but he’s never signed up. The idea of reducing something this strange and private to data points makes his skin itch.
Besides, he’s not unhappy.
That surprises him, occasionally. He lives alone, works long hours, forgets to eat until his stomach makes its displeasure known. His life is quiet, bounded by routine and the small green constellation of plants he’s collected over the years—easy ones, mostly. Things that thrive on neglect. Snake plants. ZZ plants. Succulents he keeps out of reach of open windows and clumsy elbows.
Plants make sense to him. You give them what they need. You pay attention. You don’t overdo it. They respond in kind.
It’s why the guilt always makes him pause.
The first time he feels it connected to a plant, he’s standing in line at a café not far from his apartment. It’s mid-afternoon, that soft lull between lunch and the evening rush, and the place smells like coffee and sugar and damp soil. They sell plants by the window—small potted things arranged on wooden shelves, sunlight slanting across their leaves. Yoongi likes coming here to work when his studio feels too small, too echoing.
He’s waiting for his order when the guilt hits him like a physical blow. Harder than usual. So sharp he actually flinches, hand curling reflexively at his side. His heart stutters, then races, a spike of secondhand distress flooding his senses.
“Oh,” he breathes, startled.
It’s accompanied by something new—a rush of horror and self-recrimination so intense it almost borders on grief.
Yoongi turns, scanning the café without thinking.
A few feet away, someone is crouched by the plant display, hands hovering helplessly over a toppled pot. Dark soil has spilled across the floor, a succulent lying sideways amid the mess. The man looks stricken, eyes wide, mouth pulled into a miserable line as he scrambles to set it right, murmuring apologies under his breath.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—”
The guilt in Yoongi’s chest pulses in painful sync with the scene.
Their eyes meet, briefly.
It’s nothing. Just a moment. The man straightens, cheeks flushed, offers Yoongi a sheepish, embarrassed smile.
“Sorry,” he says, unnecessarily. “I didn’t—uh—mean to do that.”
Yoongi swallows. The guilt eases, just a fraction.
“It’s okay,” he hears himself reply. His voice sounds steady, even to his own ears. “Plants are tougher than they look.”
The man laughs, a soft, relieved sound, and warmth blooms in Yoongi’s chest in response, so sudden and bright it almost makes him dizzy.
Huh, he thinks, watching as a barista rushes over to help clean up the mess. That’s… new.
He takes his coffee to go that day, the encounter lingering in his thoughts longer than he expects. It’s easy to dismiss it as coincidence. Easy to tell himself he’s projecting, that cafés are full of clumsy people and spilled soil and unnecessary apologies.
Still, as he walks home, cup warm in his hands, he can’t quite shake the feeling that something has shifted. Not snapped into place. Not revealed itself fully.
Just… nudged closer.
Yoongi glances down at his wrist, bare and unmarked, and exhales softly.
“Careful,” he murmurs to no one at all. “You’re going to give me a complex.”
Somewhere, far away, guilt flares—and then fades.
🪴
Yoongi doesn’t see him again for three days.
Which, logically, should mean nothing. Cafés are transient spaces by design—people drift in and out of them like weather, leaving behind only the faintest impressions. A face glimpsed once doesn’t obligate itself to reappear. Still, on the third day, when Yoongi pushes open the café door with his shoulder and scans the room out of habit, there’s a small, unhelpful flicker of disappointment when he doesn’t spot dark hair bent guiltily over a plant display.
He tells himself to get a grip.
He orders his usual, claims his preferred table by the window, and opens his notebook. The page stays blank longer than he’d like. Outside, the afternoon is overcast, light diffused and grey-soft, the kind of weather that presses inward rather than opening out. Yoongi taps his pen against the margin, waiting for a melody to surface.
Instead, calm rolls through him.
Not the shallow kind—this is deep and full-bodied, like exhaling after holding tension for hours. It settles in his chest, loosens his shoulders, quiets the low-level static in his head. Yoongi blinks, startled, pen pausing mid-tap.
“Oh,” he murmurs.
He doesn’t look up right away. He doesn’t need to. The calm is familiar now, recognisable as theirs—contented, tinged with a faint pride that doesn’t quite belong to him. He lets it wash over him, lets it soften the edges of his thoughts.
When he does glance toward the door, it’s more out of curiosity than expectation.
The bell above it rings softly, and there he is.
The man from before stands just inside the café, scanning the room with a hopeful, uncertain expression. He’s dressed casually—oversized sweater slipping off one shoulder, worn sneakers scuffed at the toes—and he looks exactly like someone who would knock over a plant and apologise to it. His hair is slightly damp, as if he’s come in from the mist outside, and there’s a smear of something dark on his sleeve.
Yoongi watches him without realising he’s doing it.
The calm deepens, warming, as the man exhales and visibly relaxes upon spotting an empty table. He orders, smiling brightly at the barista, and Yoongi feels the echo of that smile like a brush of warmth along his ribs.
This is ridiculous, he thinks faintly.
Still, when the man turns, balancing a cup of something foamy and sweet-smelling, and catches Yoongi looking, there’s no jolt of guilt this time. Just a flash of recognition—and then something else. Curiosity. Interest.
“Hey,” the man says, stopping short at Yoongi’s table. “You’re—uh—you were here the other day. With the plant.”
Yoongi blinks, momentarily wrong-footed.
“Yeah,” he replies. “You knocked it over.”
The man winces. “God. I really did, didn’t I?”
“You apologised to it,” Yoongi adds, deadpan.
That earns him a laugh—bright and unfiltered—and the calm, this time Yoongi’s own, swells in response, blooming outward like a chord resolving.
“I felt terrible,” the man says earnestly. “I still feel terrible. I think about it at night.”
Yoongi snorts before he can stop himself. He gestures to the empty chair across from him, surprising them both.
“Sit,” he says. “Before you feel guilty about hovering.”
The man’s eyes crinkle at the corners as he smiles again. He doesn’t hesitate, sliding into the chair with a grateful hum.
“I’m Jimin,” he says, extending a hand.
“Yoongi.”
Their hands brush when they shake—warm skin, brief contact—and something shifts. Like a string drawn a fraction too taut.
Jimin doesn’t seem to notice. Or if he does, he doesn’t comment. He glances down at Yoongi’s notebook instead, interest sparking.
“You write?” he asks.
“Music,” Yoongi replies. “Sometimes.”
“That’s cool,” Jimin says, genuinely impressed. “I dance. Badly, some days. Dramatically, always.”
Yoongi huffs. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Jimin grins, unabashed. “Exactly.”
They fall into an easy rhythm after that, conversation looping lazily from one topic to the next. Jimin talks with his hands, animated and expressive, his emotions close to the surface in a way Yoongi finds himself tracking instinctively. Each laugh sends a ripple of warmth through him; each self-deprecating comment is followed by a faint echo of guilt that Yoongi recognises.
“So,” Yoongi says at one point, nodding toward the plant display by the window. “You come here often to terrorise the greenery?”
Jimin groans, dropping his head into his hands. “It’s not on purpose! I swear. Plants just… die around me. I try so hard.”
“Mm,” Yoongi hums, unimpressed. “That’s what they all say.”
“Wow. You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
“I own plants,” Yoongi says. “Plural. Alive ones.”
Jimin peers at him skeptically. “That sounds fake.”
“Jealousy doesn’t suit you,” Yoongi replies dryly.
Jimin laughs again, bright and unguarded—and for a split second, something twists in Yoongi’s chest.
Affection.
It startles him enough that he has to look away, eyes dropping to his coffee. He stirs it absently, watching the surface ripple.
Get a grip, he tells himself. You just met him.
Still, when Jimin sighs contentedly and leans back in his chair, basking in the quiet hum of the café, the calm that settles over Yoongi feels deeper.
“Hey,” Jimin says suddenly, leaning forward again. “Can I ask you something weird?”
Yoongi raises an eyebrow. “You already have.”
Jimin grins sheepishly. “Fair. Are you always this judgmental, or am I a special case?”
Yoongi snorts, stirring his coffee. “You knocked over a plant and apologised to it like it was a funeral.”
“It died,” Jimin insists.
“It tipped,” Yoongi corrects.
Jimin squints at him. “Wow. You’re one of those people.”
“Competent?”
“Cruel,” Jimin says solemnly.
Something warm flares in Yoongi’s chest. He scowls at his cup like it’s betrayed him.
“So,” Jimin continues, leaning back in his chair, rocking it slightly until Yoongi gives him a Look, “do you come here often to silently judge strangers, or is today special?”
“You’re not a stranger anymore,” Yoongi says before thinking.
Jimin stills. Blinks.
Yoongi clears his throat. “You ordered. And I’ve seen you twice. That makes you a regular.”
“Ah,” Jimin says, lips twitching. “And here I thought it was because I traumatised you with my plant murder.”
“Attempted murder,” Yoongi corrects automatically.
Jimin laughs, and something in Yoongi’s chest settles, easing into this calm sort of feeling that Yoongi has no words to describe. But he hates that he recognises it now.
“You okay?” Jimin asks suddenly, head tilting. Not concerned—just observant.
Yoongi stiffens. “What?”
“You went quiet,” Jimin says. “Like you do when you’re thinking very hard about something you’re not going to say.”
Yoongi stares at him. “…You do that a lot?”
Jimin shrugs, sheepish again. “I like to people-watch. Occupational hazard.”
“What occupation?”
“Professional disaster,” Jimin says cheerfully.
Yoongi exhales through his nose. “That tracks.”
Jimin grins, unoffended, and leans forward again, elbows on the table. “You know,” he says, casual as anything, “you look like the kind of person who talks to his plants.”
Yoongi’s eyebrow twitches. “I do not.”
“Liar.”
“They don’t listen.”
“Still counts.”
Yoongi takes a slow sip of his coffee, eyes never leaving Jimin’s face. There’s something disarming about him—about the way he delivers every accusation like a joke and every joke like a fact. It’s irritating. It’s… oddly pleasant.
“If you kill another one in this café,” he says evenly, “I’m charging you for emotional damages.”
Jimin gasps, scandalised. “You can’t prove anything.”
Yoongi hums. “Give it time.”
Jimin laughs, the sound easy and unguarded, and leans back in his chair like he’s got nowhere else to be. The café hums around them—cups clinking, quiet conversations overlapping—but Yoongi finds himself oddly aware of the space this man occupies across from him, of how naturally the silence folds around them when neither speaks.
When Jimin finally stands to leave, shrugging his bag back onto his shoulder, he hesitates. Just a fraction of a second.
“I’ll… probably see you around,” he says, like it’s an afterthought.
Yoongi nods, equally casual. “You probably might.”
Jimin grins at that, wide and bright, then turns toward the door. As the bell rings softly behind him, a familiar calm settles over Yoongi’s chest—deeper than it has any right to be, lingering long after Jimin disappears into the grey afternoon.
Yoongi exhales, closing his notebook without having written a single word.
“That’s annoying,” he mutters, not entirely sure why.