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Yoongi opens his front door to Jimin, standing there in the hallway in a big black puffer winter coat, still shivering from the cold. His hair is tucked in a beanie, his eyes wide. He looks like a little scared animal, like a deer caught in the headlights, deciding between staying stock still and making a run for it, shivering in the cold.
Yoongi leans forward until his forehead rests against the doorframe and says, with his eyes closed: “Oh fuck. You know.”
“What? No, I don’t.” It doesn’t sound convincing to Yoongi’s ears. He can’t imagine it’s all that convincing to Jimin himself either.
Yoongi sighs, but he still lets Jimin in.
*
Jimin and Yoongi’s families were close when they were growing up.
Yoongi had grown up, for a while, with this bubbly little kid following him around like a baby duckling. They weren’t all that far apart in age, but Jimin was the only younger kid who followed Yoongi around like that. Yoongi had grown up as the perpetual younger brother, and generally the youngest kid in his childhood friend groups. Jimin, though -- Jimin followed Yoongi around like he was something incredible. Like Yoongi was wise, like he held all of the secrets of the world in his hands.
They’d be close, really, really close. Nearly inseparable. It had been hard when Yoongi’s family moved away, and they’d been too young to stay in touch properly.
When they grew up all the way, unsteady adults in this big bright scary world, it had been some stroke of incredible luck that brought them back together. Seoul is a big, big city. But still, they found their way back to each other. Yoongi lives in the cheapest apartment he could afford, works odd jobs to pay his rent, and produces music to middling notoriety with all the time he has left.
Jimin sparkles, as far as Yoongi can tell. He makes friends so easily, a skill Yoongi has never understood. He’s probably going to make it big with his dance career, with his dance crew he practices with incessantly and the kids' dance classes he teaches when he has time. He’s incredible, of course, but Yoongi could have seen Jimin growing up to be incredible a mile away. He is, in so many ways, the exact same kid Yoongi knew what feels like a thousand lifetimes ago, bubbly and sweet and overflowing with some sort of deep down goodness. But he’s changed too, is more sure and steady of himself, doesn’t try so damn hard to pretend to be someone he’s not. Yoongi is in awe of him, always has been, probably always will be.
It had been good for Yoongi when they reconnected. They spend time together whenever they can. It gets Yoongi out of his head, lets him play hyung for someone who saw him when he was young and not struggling so goddamn much. It’s been good to watch Jimin meet his college friends and get to meet Jimin’s friends too. It’s a goddamn miracle that their respective friends have gotten so close, a sweet little tight-knit group of seven that Yoongi is so grateful for. It’s been good for Yoongi to have someone around that he can have such light and fluttery feelings for, a crush that makes him feel like a fumbling teenager that blossomed and bloomed along with their rekindled friendship. More than that, it’s been good to know someone again who doesn’t know the whole story. Doesn’t know the way he shattered and fell apart when he was barely an adult, doesn’t have to see the jagged edges of himself reflected back in his friends' memories.
Yoongi should have known better than to think that peace would last.
*
Jimin won’t sit down on Yoongi’s couch, and it’s driving Yoongi absolutely off the wall insane.
“Why’d you come all the way here if you won’t even sit down, huh?” Yoongi asks, trying to keep the tone light after Jimin’s third refusal to take off his coat and make himself comfortable. Jimin looks impossibly young, standing there all wrapped up in his coat in Yoongi’s living room, like he’s five years old again asking Yoongi’s mom if he can stay for dinner.
Jimin's steadier than people give him credit for, is all. He's the person everyone in their friend group relies on, goes to for advice and comfort. He's silly, sure, but he’s not a kid anymore. All of that hard-earned maturity had bled into something softer and sweeter. It's unlike him, the adult version of Jimin that Yoongi has had the privilege to get to know, in a way that is putting Yoongi on edge, for him to be so fluttery and unmoored. Just standing there in Yoongi's home looking like he wants to take flight and run away. Even though he's the one who invited himself over to Yoongi's home at the late hour.
“Are you alright?” Yoongi asks, gentling the shape of his words now that he's realized that Jimin isn't going to take the easy way out, banter in place of whatever this conversation is.
“Shouldn't I be asking you that?” Jimin shoots back, then makes a face like he really, really regrets letting that slip past his filter. Yoongi tries hard not to get defensive, and only mostly succeeds.
Yoongi fights back a sigh and sits down on his couch to look up at Jimin. It's just Jimin, whom he's known for the better part of his life, even though he's stressing Yoongi out with the way he won't just say what Yoongi is already certain he's here to say.
“Jiminie. C'mon. What's going on?”
“...I’ve listened to your music, you know?” Jimin says after a while. “I know the kind of stuff you write about. It's just -- I didn't know. I never talked to the others about it before.”
Hackles thoroughly raised, Yoongi squints at Jimin, hard. The same expression everyone they know makes fun of him for when he's trying to read something on his phone without his glasses on.
“Jimin. What?”
Jimin takes a deep breath, finally sits down on the damn couch, and speaks directly into his knees. “I was talking to Namjoon. He was over at my apartment, and I had music playing, and one of your songs came on shuffle. Y’know, one of your songs, one of the ones you put out, not one of the ones you sold. And Joon-hyung, he just, he got so quiet all of a sudden? And it was so weird, so I asked him what was wrong and he -- he told me. He told me what the song was about. And, hyung, I knew what it was about, obviously, I just. I hadn’t thought it was that serious. And I got kind of -- I don’t know, so Joon-hyung told me to talk to you. And now I’m here.”
Yoongi is going to kill Kim Namjoon.
“Jiminie. Take a breath. I still don’t really know what you’re talking about. Which song was it?”
“Uh. It was The Last, I think. The one where -- well. You know. The one where --”
Yoongi sighs. “The one where I said I tried to kill myself.”
Jimin looks a little bit like he’s going to throw up. “Right. That one. Yeah.”
“Jimin,” Yoongi says, feeling suddenly, insurmountably old. “I'm fine. I'm okay. It's in the past.”
Jimin doesn't look like he believes Yoongi at all. He looks like the world has shifted on its axis. He looks like he'll never believe Yoongi again. Like the version of Yoongi that he knew as a kid, that he knows now as an adult, is something else. Something weaker, maybe. Something lesser.
“Are you sure?” Jimin asks, not sounding very sure about anything at all.
“Yeah. Definitely.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Jimin won't look Yoongi in the eyes. Won’t look at his face. He's just looking at his fingers, at the way they're twisting around and around each other, playing with a silver ring Yoongi got him for his birthday last year.
“Listen. Are you going to be okay?” Yoongi asks. He really means, are we going to be okay? But he doesn't think Jimin hears it.
“Yeah, of course I am. As long as you're okay, I'm okay too.”
Yoongi sighs, tries to rearrange his posture into something less tense and on edge. Wishes Jimin would look at him.
“Do you want to watch a movie or something?” Yoongi asks, trying to shove them both back into a place of friendly normalcy.
Jimin nods his head meekly, so Yoongi stands up from his couch, on the hunt for the TV remote he knows is lying around his living room somewhere.
*
It's easy to pretend that Yoongi is fine, most of the time.
It's easy to pretend that his friends have never had to watch him slowly crumble into himself. To pretend that he's never had to tell a doctor yes, he is a danger to himself. To pretend he's never gone through grueling therapy sessions that made him feel like wet, chewed-up cardboard at the end of them. That he's never had to adjust and readjust psychiatric prescriptions. To pretend he can wake up and get out of bed every day, without fail, that he's always ready to face another day of being him. Of living in his life.
It's harder to pretend when Park Jimin, for all his glowing brightness, looks like the entire world's sadness is on his shoulders. Because of him. Because of Yoongi. And his pitfalls and weaknesses.
When Jimin leaves to go back home, after mindlessly watching some comedy Yoongi knows neither of them really paid attention to, Yoongi imagines a version of himself that never did any of that shit. That never thought about the world as better off without him in it.
He contemplates sending Namjoon an extremely strongly worded text message detailing when and how one should bring up a mutual friend's mental health struggles (when being never and how being just don’t, at least when it comes to Yoongi’s personal wants and whims). He contemplates sending Jimin all sorts of messages. Long explanations as to what he was feeling all those years ago and why he did it. How grateful he is to have failed, most days. He contemplates sending a long apology too, wonders how effective it would be to just beg Jimin for forgiveness.
Instead, he sets his phone far out of sight and out of reach, and goes to sleep.
*
Yoongi hasn't left his house in three days, or done much of anything at all, when he gets a text from Namjoon reading: Jimin's been asking everyone if we've talked to you lately. He's worried. Are you okay?
Yoongi sends back: Jimin's always worried. And then promptly shuts off his phone.
*
Most days, Yoongi is fine.
His life is better. His friends are good. His feelings about himself are positive more often than not.
Most days, Yoongi is fine.
Today he is not.
Today he is trapped in the past. In the golden-sheened, nostalgia-ridden memories of his childhood. Of the struggles of his young adulthood. Of the look on Park Jimin's face less than a week ago, when he stood in Yoongi's doorway looking like the world was ending.
Today Yoongi is not fine. Which means he is not particularly pleased when he hears an unexpected knock, opens the door, and oh look, there's Park Jimin again. Standing in Yoongi’s doorway. Looking tragic. Looking like the world is ending all over again.
“I'm getting a strong sense of deja vu, here,” is what comes out of Yoongi's mouth before he can stop the words.
“You said you were okay now,” Jimin says, sounding a little angry, actually. “You said it was in the past. But no one has heard from you for days. And you look terrible.”
“Gee, thanks,” Yoongi grumbles. But still, Yoongi steps back, lets Jimin push past him into the living room. Jimin fidgets nervously, refuses once again to just sit the hell down. He sounds angry, looks angry, but the rhythm of his movements is all fear and trepidation.
“I lied,” Yoongi answers. “Sort of. I mean -- I'm fine. It's not that bad. It's just. Not never bad. It’s sometimes bad, just not as bad as it was, I guess.”
Jimin looks like his face can’t decide if he’s angry or about to cry. Maybe both. “Why would you lie to me? Why would you do that?”
Yoongi is on edge already. It's not a great day. It hasn't been a great week. Defensiveness rises in his chest as easy as anything.
“I don't have to tell you everything, you know. You're not entitled to the tragic tale of Min Yoongi, world’s saddest man, just because we knew each other as kids.”
“Fuck you,” Jimin spits at Yoongi. All vitriol. It should feel better than Jimin's sadness. It doesn't. It doesn't at all.
Yoongi sits down on his couch heavily, looks up at the towering figure of a fuming Jimin. He's always been larger than life. Beautiful. Even when he's this angry.
“I'm sorry,” Yoongi says, words dripping out of him like a leaky faucet. “You're right. I'm sorry.”
“Why are we fighting?” Jimin asks and -- fuck. Fuck. He just looks scared. He looks so scared.
Yoongi feels like he could cry.
“This is why I didn’t tell you, Jiminie. I didn’t want you to look at me like — like that”
Jimin’s eyes are huge, full galaxies swirling in them. But the galaxies are sincere when he asks. “Like what?”
“Like you’re horrified. Like you’re scared of me. I just -- I never wanted you to be scared of me.”
“Hyung,” Jimin gasps, the exact tremble to his voice Yoongi heard a thousand times when they were younger, when he fell and skinned his knees or some nasty kid stole his toy on the playground. It’s the unmistakable tremor of Park Jimin trying not to cry. “I’m not scared of you. I’m scared for you. I’m scared for me. I’m thinking -- I’m thinking about how fucking awful it would have been if it had worked. If you were just gone.”
Yoongi doesn’t even realise he’s started to cry until he feels a tear drip down his face, trailing over his cheekbones and running under his jaw. He might consider it embarrassing, but he’s much more worried about the way his tears open Jimin’s flood gates, the painful inhale that sounds more like a gasp out of his mouth.
Yoongi reaches out without thinking, half raising from the couch, grabbing at Jimin's forearms while he tries to raise his hands to cover the sob escaping from his mouth. For all that Jimin is steady and solid, it barely takes any strength at all for Yoongi to pull him down with him, yanking until Jimin is almost sitting on Yoongi's lap.
“What do you even want, Park Jimin?” Yoongi asks, the words sounding awful and ugly in his mouth, dripping with tears, his arms full of his childhood friend, all grown up but still fitting in his lap as easy as anything.
“What do you think I want?” Jimin asks back. “I want you to be happy. I want you to text me back when I'm worried about you. I want to take you out for coffee and for dinner and watch you work on your songs. I want to see you every day or as often as you can put up with me, at least. I want you to let me in. Please let me in.”
The potential for everything to go wrong is growing and growing in Yoongi’s head. He’s not all that pleasant or interesting in large doses, as far as he’s concerned, when it comes to himself. He doesn’t know how much of him Jimin can take before it would turn ugly or resentful. But Jimin is in his lap, and crying, so Yoongi tries to be as truthful as he can.
“I don't know what I can give you, Jimin, I really don't.”
“Just--” Jimin gasps, words thick in his mouth. “Just let me in. Talk to me. Don't push me away. Please.”
“Okay,” Yoongi says, running his fingers through Jimin's hair like he's soothing a child. “Okay, okay. I'll -- I'll try.”
*
Jimin refuses to leave - once they unwind from each other and dry their eyes - which Yoongi should have seen coming, really.
He keeps looking at Yoongi like Yoongi is going to disappear into a puff of smoke, dissipate into the air, if he takes his eyes off of him for even one second. He keeps looking at Yoongi like he’s scared. And Yoongi could never turn a scared Jimin away, couldn’t do it when they were kids and certainly can’t do it now.
It’s late, so Jimin stays over, spends the night. Yoongi spends a useless minute trying to convince Jimin to take his bed while he takes the couch. They end up curled up in Yoongi’s bed together, lying like two parentheses, facing each other. It’s almost like they’re little kids again, whispering into the late-night darkness during a sleepover, trying not to get caught by their parents and scolded for staying up so late.
“Hyung,” Jimin whispers. He has a fist balled up by his head. It makes him look a little bit like a baby. Yoongi’s heart aches. “It’s like we’re little kids again.”
“Yeah,” Yoongi whispers back. He wants so, so badly to reach out and hold his younger friends. But it’s been a long day, a hard day, and Yoongi thinks that might be pushing it a little bit. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
*
Yoongi’s not sure what exactly woke him up, but he’s awake, suddenly, and he turned over to look at his bedmate and was struck by the overwhelming thought of Wow. Park Jimin has always been beautiful.
It had shocked Yoongi to slack-jawed silence the first time he saw Jimin all grown up and in the flesh, his hair long and bleached blond, his steps confident, his body all lean muscle. It had taken a minute, many minutes really, for Yoongi to get over just how beautiful Jimin had grown up to be.
He’s beautiful even now, maybe especially now. The early morning light that is seeping in through Yoongi’s sheer curtains is lighting up Jimin’s face in the delicate glow of sunrise. Jimin’s mouth is smushed half open into Yoongi’s pillow, his breaths even and deep in sleep, his fists still loosely curled up by his head. He looks rumpled, like a kitten. He’s beautiful. So beautiful.
Jimin grumbles himself awake under Yoongi’s watchful eye, his face scrunching inwards and legs and arms stretching out.
“Yoongi-hyung?” Jimin asks, blinking slowly.
“Yeah Jiminie. I’m right here.”
“Oh. Good.” Jimin mumbles, closing his eyes again as his breath evens out and his face slackens back into sleep.
*
The next time Jimin wakes up, Yoongi isn’t there to see it. Instead, he’s in his kitchen, brewing coffee Jimin probably won’t drink and making breakfast Jimin will hopefully eat.
Yoongi’s nervous. It’s a foreign feeling, to be nervous to see Jimin. Even when Yoongi had realised that what he thought was and would stay childhood adoration was actually an overwhelming adulthood crush. Even when Jimin appeared on his doorstep, twice, looking like the very conception of devastation personified. Yoongi has never been this nervous about Jimin, has never been so unsure as to where they go from here.
Jimin stumbles out into the kitchen in clothes that he absolutely pilfered from Yoongi’s own closet, old basketball shorts that hang loose around Jimin’s hips and a shirt several sizes too big that Yoongi likes to wear to sleep.
“Yoongi-hyung,” Jimin says, a touch of wonder in his voice, like he’s surprised to see him in his own damn kitchen.
“‘Morning,” Yoongi answers, an odd sort of blush overtaking his face. He knows without looking that his cheeks are pink, and has to fight the urge to put both of his hands over them, to cover the flush as though Jimin can’t already see.
“What are your plans for the day?” Yoongi asks, digging around in his cabinets to find bowls and chopsticks.
“Oh, I thought maybe I’d hang out here. If you’re not already sick of me.”
Yoongi turns back around and faces him with his bowls in hand, chopsticks balanced delicately across the tops. “I could never be sick of you, Park Jimin.”
Jimin fixes him with an unimpressed look. “You ignored my texts for days. I had to show up at your house to get you to talk to me. Which you obviously did not want to happen”
“That was different.”
Jimin’s unimpressed look deepens, his eyebrows doing a lot of work to communicate sentiments like how? And I don’t believe you for a second, Min Yoongi.
“It’s different when the guy you’re kind of in love with wants to chat about that time you tried to kill yourself,” Yoongi grumbles, focused on placing their bowls down on the table gently, trying not to spill anything or send a chopstick rolling away.
He hears Jimin choke on air. When Yoongi looks up and takes in the shocked look on Jimin’s face, it takes several seconds for Yoongi’s brain to catch up to what came out of his mouth. His heart rate kick-starts in his chest, a whole-body wash of oh god.
“I mean,” Yoongi tries, voice wavering as his heart pounds away. “I mean -- haha. Funny joke, right? The thing I just said? Funny.”
“Was it a joke?” Jimin asks, his voice sounding a hell of a lot less shaky than Yoongi’s. He’s got that determined look in his eye again, the same one that told Yoongi last night there was no way he was going home and leaving Yoongi all alone. “Because if it was a joke, then that was mean. But I don’t think you’re mean, Yoongi-hyung. So if it wasn’t a joke, I’ve got good news.”
“Yeah?” Yoongi asks. He feels vaguely like he might faint, which would be too embarrassing to bear, probably.
“Yeah,” Jimin repeats. “I’m kind of in love with you too.”
“Oh,” Yoongi must be dreaming. He must be. He must still be in bed with Jimin, a foot away from him, all curled up in his bed. There’s no way that his childhood friend who very recently yelled at him and made him talk about his twisty dark sad feelings is confessing a crush. There’s just no way. “Really?”
“Mmhmm,” Jimin confirms, walking further into the kitchen, close enough to Yoongi that they’re all but plastered together. Jimin puts his hands on Yoongi’s hips, draws them in further so their knees almost bump against each other. The weight of his hands on Yoongi is warm, far better and more solid and real than anything his dreaming mind could possibly conjure up. Standing right there in front of Yoongi is the confident Jimin that he’s been missing. He doesn’t look like the entire world is crumbling down around him. He looks -- he looks happy, instead.
“I lied,” Yoongi starts, their faces so close together that all he has to do is whisper. “Earlier.”
“About what?” Jimin whispers back. “That it was a joke?”
“No. I mean. Yes. It wasn’t a joke. It’s just that I said kind of that I was kind of in love with you. I was lying, I’m pretty sure. I love you way more than kind of.”
“You know what I think we should do?” Jimin asks. “I think you should take me out on a date, and you should tell me all about your feelings, and I’ll tell you all about my feelings, and we can talk about that kind of.”
Yoongi groans, drawn out and dramatic, but he’s smiling so wide he’s sure his gums are showing. “That sounds terrible. I would love to.”
*
(Later, when Jimin insists on another sleepover - not that Yoongi is actually complaining - they’ll curl up together in Yoongi’s bed again, and Jimin will insist on being the big spoon. In the dark, Yoongi will whisper, “You know that loving back doesn’t fix me, right? You know that I’ll still -- I’ll still have bad days and be sad and stuff and I might not text you back and not want to talk about it and —yeah.”
Jimin will curl his warm, compact body around Yoongi, splay a hand across Yoongi’s stomach and whisper back, “Hyung. I don’t want to fix you. I just want to be there for you. I want to be with you. I want to love you. That’s all.”
“Oh,” Yoongi will say. “Oh, okay. Thank you. I want that too.”
And Jimin will giggle, and everything will be all hopeful and wonderful, and Yoongi will fall asleep content.)