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The heart beats. It always does, when Namjoon presses a finger or two to his neck to find the pulse, or when he places a hand gingerly on his chest. It’s there, always thumping in his ribcage as a testament to his life, music to his ears in a way his old heartbeat had never been, but there’s a resounding drop in his stomach whenever he hears it and he’s long given up trying to make it stop.
And it’s sad, really, that it still does that, because it’s been ten years. Ten long years that it’s been his, beating for him and working to keep him alive, but still it’s there. It’s never gone away, the horrible spill of hollowness that’s tethered to his soul, like an anchor slowly sinking low in his gut, and it’s sad because it’s been ten long years and it still gets to him. He still cries, every morning, without fail, clutching a framed photograph close to his chest as if it’s the only lifeline he has left, and the loss is still so palpable in his throat even after all this time that he doesn’t know what to do.
“I’m sorry,” Namjoon finds himself whispering to the photograph every morning, in between shallow gulps of air that never seem to be enough. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
He doesn’t even know what he’s sorry for. It confuses him—everything confuses him—and all he can do is say sorry even though he doesn’t have a single inkling as to why. The heart beats, loud in his eardrums with a bitter aftertaste in his mouth, and the grief thrums low beneath his skin with a sharp burn that runs deeper than his bones, and he doesn’t know what to do because it was never meant to be mine, I’m supposed to be dead, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
“You need to take a break, what the fuck,” Yoongi decides one day. Alarm tinges his voice when he finds Namjoon shaking, trembling in the bedsheets, and there’s a dull stench of dried blood seeping into the room but Namjoon can’t even find it in himself to care. “I’m not taking no for an answer, Joon-ah. I won’t ask any questions you don’t want to hear, but just stop for a while, whatever it is you’re doing. It’s fucking killing you.”
“Can’t you kill me, then, hyung?” Namjoon murmurs quietly, voice hoarse from the screaming he’d done just before, because Yoongi is wrong. “Please, it’d be better that way. At least I can trust you.”
Yoongi only sighs. The room is dark, devoid of sunlight, and it fuels Namjoon’s hollow with an angry sort of eagerness that has wracking sobs conquering his chest. It’s too much, always too much, and he just wants it to end because he’s so confused about everything and the heart is beating there in his chest, keeping him alive like it always does, but he’s so sorry and the guilt is thriving under his skin. Namjoon shivers, sobs, and he’s pulling the covers closer to his chest because there’s not much else he can really do.
“Listen, Joon-ah,” the elder is saying, loud and shattering in Namjoon’s ears after a long moment of silence. “I know you’re not really stable right now, but I need you to listen to me, alright? You don’t need to look at me, just listen. That’s all I need you to do.”
“Okay,” Namjoon replies, gasping because he doesn’t know where all the air went. It was there, just before, but now it’s gone and he can’t find it anymore and he whimpers, feeling so lost and confused and pathetic with the heart pattering clear as crystal within the confines of his ribs.
Yoongi sighs, placing a hand on Namjoon’s shoulder. It’s cold against his bare skin.
“You need to get a hold of yourself,” he starts, and there’s his psychiatrist voice that Namjoon sometimes hears in the corridor when he’s walking past. It’s calming, soothing, but it’s not enough and the ache doesn’t go away. “Look, you know that I take some things really seriously. And you know that one of those things is… killing. You don’t really want me to kill you, do you?”
Namjoon looks up, blinks.
There’s something in those words, something sinister and dark that Namjoon’s used to hearing, but it takes a while for them to sink in. They swim, dance around his ears in the state that he’s in, but when Namjoon finally makes sense of them it makes him freeze. It makes him freeze, and it makes him remember that this is Min Yoongi, this is the man held accountable for almost half of Seoul’s mysterious killings, this is the monster that is his best friend that he’s grown up with for almost all his life, and Namjoon sobs. The heart is beating, loud and clear and discernible in his head and he remembers that he needs to be alive, and he feels so guilty that all the grief crashes into his chest like a plane crashing into the heart of the ocean.
“I don’t,” Namjoon whispers, because he doesn’t. He needs to live, he’s carrying two lives on his shoulders, he has a commitment to make and a promise to keep and he can’t just die like that, what would happen then? “I’m sorry, hyung, I… I’m just really confused right now, I’m not thinking properly, I just...”
“I know,” Yoongi sighs, and the air is back in Namjoon’s lungs as quick as it had gone away. The madness is hidden well away from prying eyes, masked behind worry and concern as Yoongi pats his back, and Namjoon can’t be more thankful. “You know what, you should sort yourself out. Fix the bed, and fix your breathing, it’s fucking horrible.”
“Yeah,” Namjoon agrees, running a hand through his dishevelled hair in a daze before wiping the dampness off his cheeks. The hollowness is still there, present as always, festering quietly in the inner corners of his soul, but it’s bearable and the heartbeat starts to feel melodic in his ears. “Yeah, uh, thank you hyung.”
It’s early today, he’s thinking, and it’s not without a pleasant thump in his stomach. It’s gone, it’s early today. And he smiles, because it’s nice to be okay so soon for a change.
Yoongi grunts. “No problem, brat. I’ll go prepare some breakfast, so take your time.”
The elder turns to leave, steps lithe and eerily quiet in the scarlet light of sunrise. Namjoon is left alone, then, and he works to steady his breathing and shove the thoughts of ten years ago into where it needs to be.
In the autumn of 2009, Kim Namjoon is fifteen years old.
He sits on a hospital bed two blocks away from his father’s apartment, heart beating dull and low in his chest, and the world is his for the taking. The world is at his beck and call, wrapped around his little finger, and he can do anything he sets his mind to but instead he sits on that little hospital bed. Instead he listens to that deafening heart monitor, beeping away in between long intervals, and he’s so sick of it but he’s stuck there until he dies.
Three months, he thinks, and suddenly it feels so far away. Three months, Namjoon, and you’ll be free.
Or at least, that’s what the doctors had said.
Time bleeds out slow on the clock hands just like how Namjoon bleeds his life away slow on sterile bed sheets, and maybe it’d be nice do something with the days he’s got left. Something worthwhile. Something to remember, if heaven would even let him, to hold to his chest as he walks into the afterlife, to cherish and reminisce and think back on when he’s in the mood. It sounds like a good idea, when he thinks about it, and with three months left there’s really nothing to stop him so he takes out the wires holding him in place and buys a ferry ticket to Jeju, half a world away.
“You’re fucking insane,” Yoongi says, when Namjoon coaxes him into helping. It sounds a little funny, coming from a boy who’s kind of deranged himself.
And Namjoon laughs. He laughs, because it’s funny, and there’s this thrill that he’s feeling somewhere in his lungs as he stands precariously over the edge. The wind is blowing pleasantly on his face, the distance between him and the ground so tangible in his mouth, and his heart is in his lungs from the euphoria spreading wide through his throat and he laughs, Namjoon’s laughing, because the bus to Mokpo is not going to wait for late passengers but Yoongi is just ridiculous.
“I’m not insane, hyung,” he says, and he’s still giggling from amusement. “I’m dying.”
Affront bleeds into the corners of Yoongi’s face. He steps forward to where Namjoon is standing, about to tell him off, but before he can so much as open his mouth, Namjoon is gone.
Namjoon has seen much throughout his life. Before his fifteenth, before he was holed up within the sickening white walls of his hospital room, his life was a vibrant picture book, a series of colourful moments incomparable to those of today, and it was beautiful but not even that is a match for Heaven, not even close.
Heaven isn’t even a moment. It’s not a place, not a thing or a thought or an idea that’s bloomed in his head, no. Heaven is a person, and Namjoon meets him in the middle of the street on his first day in Jeju, on a beautiful autumn day that he’ll never ever forget.
Heaven is all broad shoulders and pink hair, the sun shining directly onto the crown of his head like a halo on an angel, and the sight has Namjoon reeling and blushing and stuttering as he asks him for directions. It’s a sight to behold, a moment worthy of being put on display, something that Namjoon’s never experienced before and he wants it to stay with him somehow.
“I stay at that hotel, too!” Heaven is grinning, his voice a symphony playing in time to the beat of Namjoon’s heart. He doesn’t even know the older boy’s name yet, but he’s beautiful and kind and his laugh is a melody that reverberates wonderfully through Namjoon’s core. What else is there to care about? “Come on, I’ll show you where it is.”
The hotel Heaven takes him to is a place of luxury, draped in finery so unlike anything Namjoon’s ever seen before, and Heaven breezes through it all like he’s meant to be there. Like he belongs, like he thrives, when he shows Namjoon the buffet and helps him find his room and asks him to join him for a cup of coffee by the beach later.
“I’m Seokjin,” Heaven says after all of it, and finally, finally he has a name. Seokjin. It’s nice, rolls easily enough on Namjoon’s tongue, and he thinks it’s fitting because of course Seokjin is the only possible name for someone so beautiful. “Meet me at the beach after you’ve unpacked your stuff, alright? I’ve got someone I want to introduce you to.”
“Okay,” Namjoon replies, and it sounds lovely before he realises what he’s here for. Don’t get too close, someone tells him from a vague part of his mind, and it all comes crashing down on him as his heart goes back to its lethargic state. He feels tears in his eyes, little speckles of dreams marring his vision when he raises a hand to wave Seokjin a short goodbye, and it’s sad that he’s already feeling like this. Like there’s nothing he can do, like it hurts to let Seokjin go.
You’re dying, Namjoon, the ugly voice in his head is reminding him. He’s only going to get hurt.
“I stand by what I said, Namjoon-ah,” Yoongi says, frowning into his cup of coffee. He hides his emotions well now, because there’s not a single trace of madness on his face, and it makes Namjoon feel somewhat proud. In a twisted, disturbing, incomprehensible way, he’s proud.
“Stand by what, hyung?” Namjoon asks, but he’s only skirting around the edges. He knows what Yoongi is talking about, and it brings an unpleasant lurch to his stomach because it’s not what he wants to do, he’s fine.
Yoongi looks at him with that critical gaze, those eyes that don’t really have the flash so much as they have the sinking feeling of someone looking into the deepest crevices of your soul, and sighs. “You and I both know exactly what I’m standing by, Joon-ah,” Yoongi bites out, distaste colouring his lips. “You’re taking a break. Seriously.”
“Hyung, please,” Namjoon rolls his eyes. It’s irritating, the way Yoongi thinks it’s because of what he does, because it’s not and Namjoon needs to be at the hospital every day. It’s his own, it’s a life he needs to keep beating for, and Yoongi doesn’t know that. “I’m not taking a break. Now now, not when the Medical Centre’s so busy.”
“I’m not asking you to, Namjoon,” Yoongi says, and there’s an edge to his voice that is dangerous, sharp like a knife that Namjoon isn’t stupid enough to ignore. “You’re taking a break, whether you like it or not. It’s the only way I know you’re doing alright, because I don’t even know what’s going on with you in the first place.”
“It’s nothing, hyung, please,” Namjoon tries, urges, pleads.
“No.” Yoongi is firm, stubborn like Namjoon knows he is, and he knows there’s no use trying now. “I’ve already booked your flight to Jeju. You’re coming back after the weekend, it’s only for five days.”
Namjoon winces.
“Jeju?” he whispers. The hollow curls around the discomfort in his gut, around the grief bleeding him out internally and Yoongi should know better. Leaving the hospital unattended for five days is neglecting the promise he keeps close to his chest and he won’t leave it, not for much else, and definitely not for Jeju.
Anything but Jeju.
“It’s time you faced your fears, brat,” Yoongi replies softly, ruffling Namjoon’s hair from across the counter. Namjoon wants to scream, to sob, to wrench the heart out of his chest because it’s starting to hurt again and he wants it to stop. “Look, I’m not going to pretend I know what happened to you there. But you’ve never been the same since you got back, Joon-ah. You’ve been different for the past ten years.”
“But why do you care so much, hyung?” Namjoon asks, his breath a whisper because he doesn’t think his voice will be able to make it. “You don’t see me trying to get you better.”
Yoongi frowns, and it’s an unpleasant curl of his lips that makes the hairs on Namjoon’s back stand on end. “You know it’s not the same, Joon-ah. You know that.”
And Namjoon does, but he’s never really let that stop him.
The person Seokjin wants to introduce Namjoon to turns out to be his younger brother, Kim Taehyung. His smiles are pure gold, boxy in the way his face contorts, and it’s nice because it leaves Namjoon with a dull kind of fondness that looms in the space beside his thin heartbeat.
“Nice to meet you!” Taehyung grins, bowing and holding out his hand after Seokjin introduces him. “And you are?”
“Kim Namjoon,” Namjoon smiles, and he takes Taehyung’s hand because that would be the most polite thing to do. “Nice to meet you, too.”
They’re at the beach, just like where they’d agreed to meet up at. The sun is high in the sky, brightening it into a vivid blue that sears itself onto Namjoon’s eyes even though all he can see is Seokjin. Seokjin’s everywhere; in the sun, in the ocean, in the sand, in the sky, just him, and it’s beautiful.
You’re dying, Namjoon. There’s that voice again, echoing in his ears, curling around the bitterness in his lungs. You’re dying, and you barely know him.
“No way,” Taehyung is blinking, and he’s got a drink held lazily in his hand that Namjoon can’t put a name to. “Kim Namjoon? As in, the youngest guy to rank in the nation’s one percent, Kim Namjoon?”
Namjoon looks down, and there’s a sinking feeling in the back of his throat as Taehyung says it. It’s not that it isn’t true that he’s achieved more than most of the nation has, that he’s offered jobs and internships straight out of high school, that he’s known and revered and respected despite his young age because he is, and that’s what hurts the most. All these options, these choices and decisions and futures that could’ve been his but they aren’t, and it hurts.
“Yeah,” Namjoon says softly, and he thinks that maybe Taehyung and Seokjin can sense the damper on his mood because they fidget quietly, sheepishly. “But uh, I don’t really go talking about it much.”
“That’s okay,” Seokjin is quick to say, because he’s Heaven and he’s nice and he’s everything that Namjoon can never have. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
They walk around the beach then, talking and laughing and playing around like all teenagers do, and for the first time Namjoon feels liberated. Like he can breathe, like he can fly, like there’s nothing that he can’t do and he forgets, for a moment, that his heart is slowly giving out. It’s a nice feeling, warms his chest and plasters false hope on the impossibility of his condition, but it’s fragile and fleeting and he only sees it when he looks at Seokjin’s face.
Beautiful, Namjoon thinks, whenever Seokjin turns to flash him another smile. The sky opens up, showers sunlight on Heaven’s slim figure and Namjoon barely even knows him. He knows more now, more than he had earlier when Seokjin had offered to help him on his way, when the most beautiful moment in his life had revealed itself to him in radiant heartbeats clamouring out of his throat but he doesn’t know everything, and he doesn’t have the time to know everything. He’s got three months left. It’s all he has.
“Three months,” Namjoon whispers to himself, too quiet for Seokjin or Taehyung to hear. “Get yourself together, Namjoon. You only have three months.”
Namjoon ends up on a flight to Jeju anyway. Yoongi’s face was too murderous, too dark and sinister for him to say no and he regrets that, because now he’s on his way to the place where his heart lies, to the place where it’s buried in a casket by the seaside with all his hopes and dreams and everything that’s ever made him laugh, and it hurts.
It hurts, because even now, ten years later, Jeju has been and always will be his darkness. It’s that one fleeting moment in his life that he completely erases, blurs away from existence, because as much as Namjoon loves finding Heaven there, it’s also where he hates losing it.
“Sir?” Namjoon blinks away the shadows in his head, drowning out the beating of the heart with plane noise as he looks up at the stewardess. “We’ll be landing soon. Your seatbelt, please?”
“Oh,” he says, a little sheepish, because an hour has come and passed just like that without him even realising. “Sure, uh, sorry.”
The stewardess only smiles, and it’s nice and warm like all the smiles stewardesses should wear but it’s not quite like Heaven’s. Nothing will ever be quite like Heaven’s. “There’s really no need to apologise! We’re just looking out for your safety.”
The plane starts its descent, and Namjoon’s stomach lurches but it’s not because of the sudden drop of altitude. He can feel the tears in his eyes, the tell-tale pinpricks of grief and loss so present in the corners of his vision, and he begs for it not to land. He begs for it to swoop up into the air again, to fly to some faraway place that isn’t the graveyard of his heart and his love and the most beautiful moment in his life but it does, even though he doesn’t want it to.
When he steps foot on Jeju soil for the first time in ten years, Namjoon takes in one breath of the balmy air and he’s overcome with the sudden urge to drop to his knees and cry.
“Do you love me?” Seokjin asks one day, when they’re shrouded by darkness under a sky void of stars. Namjoon doesn’t even know why they’re there. There are no stars to see, no lights lingering behind from the death of a millions Suns, because they’re all covered by a cloudy sky and it’s going to rain any time soon.
He blinks, eyebrows raised slightly at the sudden question.
“Yeah,” Namjoon says, and he doesn’t even try to lie. His voice slightly choked because his heart is there, beating to a slowly dying rhythm, and he wants it to end but he wants it to keep going at the same time. “Do you… I… Is that bad?”
“No!” the elder exclaims, and his voice is pretty even like this. “No, I… um… I asked because… because I might love you, too.”
Namjoon looks away.
It’s all too much. The question, Namjoon’s answer, Seokjin’s confession, everything is too much. It’s only been a month that Namjoon’s known him, that Namjoon’s unravelled all his parts and stopped calling him hyung and laughed away their days at the beach after Seokjin’s home-schooling is over, and he can’t handle it. Not yet. Maybe not ever, because his heart vies for his attention and he can’t just ignore the way that it’s slowly deteriorating every day.
“That’s, um… wow,” he breathes anyway, and there are too many emotions for him to keep track of all at once and it’s making a mess of his head. “I just, I would never expect—”
“Oh please,” Seokjin laughs then, cuts through whatever Namjoon was going to say and the words fall right out of his lips, tumble away from view and he can’t find them anymore. “Really, Joon-ah, it’s not that surprising.”
“Not that—Jin,” Namjoon gapes, because he’s looking at himself and then at Seokjin and all he can see is Life and Death lying next to each other under a starless sky. “We’re like, the complete opposite of each other. You’re all sunshine and sparkle and rainbows and I’m just… me. And you say it’s not that surprising?”
“Look, I don’t care if it’s surprising to you or not,” Seokjin says, facing Namjoon gently. “Ever since I saw you that day, I knew there was going to be something. I just didn’t know it would be this.”
Namjoon stares into Seokjin’s eyes, gorgeously lustrous in the way they shine even without stars hanging overhead.
I don’t need any stars, he realises with a pang to his heart even as it fights itself to keep on beating. Not when I have you.
He really should tell Seokjin one other thing, should confess something that isn’t his love because it’s only right that he does, but Namjoon can’t even bring himself to form the words. Not when Seokjin’s eyes are so bright, so vivid with their lustre and the hope a future that goes for longer than the remaining two months Namjoon has to spend his life with him.
“Kiss me, Joon-ah,” Seokjin whispers, and Namjoon barely even hears it.
He leans in. There’s a horrid kind of screaming lying sharp in the back of his head but he pays it no mind, ignores it for the feel of Seokjin’s chin above his fingers. Their lips are close, so close that Namjoon is breathing him in, and he thinks he’s reeling because he never thought they’d ever get to this point.
When they finally connect, mould into one as they’re shrouded by darkness under a sky void of stars, Namjoon thinks he can see fireworks searing themselves onto the backs of his eyelids.
Namjoon checks into the same hotel from ten years ago, and this is how he knows he’s completely done for. That he’s completely gone, finished, ended, because there’s no way he can stay in the same place for five days without breaking down somehow.
There are new people at the front desk, but some of the chefs and cleaning staff recognize him even after all this time. They don’t talk to him, but they nod and offer him watery smiles because they remember him as the boy with a failing heart from ten years ago, the boy who fell in love with their employer’s son, the boy who lived to die for the first fifteen years of his life before having another heart wrapped up and offered to him in the form of Kim Seokjin, and Namjoon can’t even look them in the eye. It hurts too much to do it.
He spends the first three days sitting at a table overlooking the beach, sipping a cup of coffee with a book in hand. The hollowness is there, like always, tethered to his soul like an anchor sinking low in his gut, but the photo of Kim Seokjin is secured tightly in his breast pocket and Namjoon thinks he might be okay. For the first few days, he thinks he might be okay.
He’s wrong.
Wrong comes in the form of Kim Taehyung, now twenty-four years old and every bit of the fourteen year-old self that he was ten years ago. It’s slightly disconcerting, because Namjoon knows how much he himself has changed, how much of his innocence is layered off with the crudeness and cruelty that comes with real life, but despite that here Taehyung is, acting as nonchalant as the day he’d met him, as if nothing had ever gone wrong.
“I heard from someone that you’d be here,” Taehyung grins, holds out a hand for Namjoon to take just like he did ten years ago. “I haven’t seen you in a decade, hyung. Wow.”
They take a walk around the beach, for old times’ sake, and they skirt around the elephant in the room until noon turns into dusk. It’s inevitable then, the tangle in Namjoon’s lungs as Taehyung looks at him properly for the first time today, and it’s startling because he sees tears in the younger’s eyes and he doesn’t know what to do about it being there.
“Thank you for coming back, hyung,” Taehyung murmurs as the sun paints the sky layers of gold and vermillion. “You—I… I’m not sure w-why, or how, and I’m not going to ask you any questions, but I just wanted to thank you because we missed you here, you know? Sure, people came and left, but there’re all those people who stayed behind and waited for you to show up and now you’re here. So thank you.”
There’s a knot in Namjoon’s throat, tying itself further and further until it’s finally choking him, forcing the words out of his mouth like a menace would. “Can I visit him?” he asks, and his voice trembles. “S-Seok—the grave, I mean. I… Can I go?”
“Of course you can,” Taehyung smiles, and it’s not a happy smile because it’s close-lipped, edges curled rather than boxy. “I’m sure he’d like that.”
Namjoon tells Seokjin on a particularly chilly day, when it’s too cold to go walk on the beach.
“I’m not here because I’m taking a break from my education, Jin-ah,” he starts, and his voice breaks into a thousand tiny fragments as he tries to wrap his lips around the next words. “I… I’m here to die.”
And he regrets it almost immediately, because the look on Seokjin’s face is everything he’d expected to find and more.
“Take it,” Seokjin says one day, when they’re shrouded by darkness under a sky void of stars. He’s accepted it, swallowed it with a gulp like poison in his throat and now they spend the rest of Namjoon’s days doing everything they can, loving and holding and drinking each other in so that neither of them would ever forget.
“Take what?” Namjoon blinks at him.
Seokjin reaches over to take Namjoon’s hand, and he places it on his chest with a gentle sort of action that Namjoon can’t help but adore. There’s a heart there, beating away to keep Seokjin alive, loud and powerful in the way that Namjoon’s is so weak, and it’s an ethereal rhythm that has Namjoon entranced.
“My heart, Joon-ah,” Seokjin says, and there’s a tiredness to his voice that only restless nights spent crying into his bed would ever bring. “I love you, you know? You have me. You have all of me, and that includes my heart, too. So take it. It’s yours.”
Namjoon trudges up to the grave with dull, shaky steps, hands clammy in the way they hold the bouquet of roses he’s going to offer, even for just a small apology. It’s the last day he’s there, just mere hours away from his plane back to Seoul, and the hollowness is still curling around the grief in his throat but it’s slightly better and he can’t be any gladder.
He arrives at the top of the hill and sees it then, Heaven’s final resting place. The stone is there, carved with love and affection for the person lying beneath it, six feet under without a single way to identify him except for the fact that Namjoon’s heart is encased in what used to be his ribs. There are blown-out candles, dried flowers and even small take-away containers with left-over food, and Namjoon’s eyes tear up because he’s here, he’s always been here, and I’m sorry it took so long for me to visit but I love you and I’ve never let you go.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, placing the roses gently next to the grave in front of him. “I don’t know why I didn’t come here for so long. But I’m here now, if you’ll still have me. If you’ll still let me.”
The wind blows pleasantly on Namjoon’s face, easing the hollow just a little before it festers again in the drapes of his mind.
“You never really left, you know?” he says, louder this time even though his voice almost cracks. “You were right. You were here all along, I bring you with me everywhere I go. So thank you, and I’m sorry I realised so late.”
There are tears in his eyes now, little crystals glittering in the sunlight and Namjoon’s breath falters, the heart clambering in his ears just like how the hollowness creeps into the tiny fractures of his bones. It’s a cold feeling, a sick feeling, one that he’s felt for ten whole years but it’s dulling at the edges even as he continues on.
“I love you, Jin-ah,” Namjoon says, and there are sobs wracking through his lungs and it hurts, it hurts, because it’s the first time he’s ever said it out loud in the years since Heaven left. “I love you, s-so, so much and I… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, that I… That… Oh god.”
He runs a hand through his hair, windswept and aged in the way that Heaven stays forever seventeen in the walled-up corners of his mind. There’s an ache making its way into his temples, snaking around his head, and it’s doing everything it can to makes itself known.
“I told you I didn’t want it, didn’t I?” Namjoon says, so quiet that it’s blown away with the breeze. His legs are going to give out any time now, just a gentle nudge to his back and it’ll send him toppling over Seokjin’s grave with his arms around the tombstone because that’s it, that’s where his heart lies, and he’ll have it back if it means having Heaven alive again.
“So why is it with me, Jin-ah?” he asks, and this time, he almost screams it out. “Your heart… why is it here?”
Namjoon wakes up a new man, with a new heart in his chest, but he’s never felt emptier in any of the other moments he’s ever had in his life.
“Where am I?” he whispers, his voice croaky from misuse and the fatigue that hovers around him like an irritating fly. The room swirls around him, all bright colours and flashing lights and he wonders for a moment if this is how Yoongi sees the world every day, spinning and curling and warping into nonsense before the doctor clears his throat to get Namjoon’s attention back.
“You’re in the hospital, Namjoon-ssi,” the doctor says with a practiced calm, and it’s meant to put him at ease but instead Namjoon can feel bile rising from the pits of his stomach to the tops of his throat. “You underwent a heart transplant just a couple days ago, with only a 30% chance at survival. Congratulations.”
“Whose heart is it?” Namjoon demands, not even a moment after the doctor closes his mouth. It can’t be, he thinks, because there’s just no way and Seokjin can’t do that to him, he won’t do that to him because Heaven isn’t the type to take away people’s happiness, to take away their hopes and their dreams and everything that’s ever made them laugh, he just isn’t.
“Your heart was slowing down at a very fast rate,” the doctor says carefully, and grief settles into the tips of Namjoon’s tongue because he knows what he’s going to say next. It’s there, in his face, a second-hand condolence he only wears to be polite. “We had no other donors except for Kim Seokjin.”
Kim Seokjin.
Kim Seokjin.
It shatters then, the fragile bones in Namjoon’s ribcage. The heart in his chest is foreign, has never been his, but it beats for him and it’ll never break so Namjoon’s ribcage breaks instead, and it hurts because he’s gone, Seokjin’s gone, Heaven’s gone, what am I going to do?
“No,” Namjoon whispers, and he sobs into his hand because this wasn’t meant to happen, he wasn’t meant to live, he was going to die. “No, I… Take it out. Take it out, he can’t just die like that, this isn’t mine, it’s his, I can’t have it!”
“Namjoon-ssi,” the doctor murmurs, places a hand on Namjoon’s shoulder as a feeble attempt to calm him down. “I’m sorry. I won’t presume much about your relationship, but what I do know is that it was very special. He cared about you a lot, to be able to do something like that, and you must care a lot about him too. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that there was nothing else I could do.”
The world is cruel. Too cruel, and Namjoon is the target that it’s never let slip from its fingers.
“It’s… I,” Namjoon tries, but he’s only just understanding the loss and his world isn’t the same anymore, it’s back to the grey and the monotone and the dullness that was there before Seokjin came, and the realisation burns its way through his cheeks because he’s gone, Seokjin is gone.
“Did he l-leave anything?” Namjoon finally manages to say, and his voice is broken and bruised. There’s a foreign hollow encasing his lungs that he doesn’t know how to handle, a hollow that tethers itself to his very soul like an anchor sitting low in his gut, palpable in the way it holds itself high over all the other emotions coursing through his veins. It reigns, thrives off the ache in his chest and burrows under his skin like a vice, and the world is so cruel. What has he ever done wrong?
“He did,” the doctor is nodding his head, and he’s fishing out a letter from his coat pocket as if he’d been waiting for the opportunity to hand it over, to rid himself of the little piece of tragedy etched out onto crumpled white sheets. “He wanted you to read this.”
As soon as the letter is given away, the doctor bows his head and leaves Namjoon to open it by himself, and it’s cruel because he needs someone to hold him as he reads it and tell him that it’ll be okay, even if it really isn’t. He needs someone to stroke his hair, to smile at him the way that Heaven once did, but Heaven is gone and nothing will ever be quite like his smile. Nothing. Never again.
Namjoon takes a shaky breath, opening the papers with trembling hands. He casts one long look at Seokjin’s elegant handwriting and lets out a broken cry.
Dear Joon-ah,
By the time you read this, I’ll be dead.
It’s not a ‘probably’ or a ‘maybe’, because it’s a fact and it’s one that I like thinking about, as morbid as it might sound to you. Because by the time you read this, I’ll be dead, but then you’ll be alive to read what I have to say.
I know that it’d be wrong to be so confident about your surgery being successful, because it’s not like I don’t know the survival rate. The doctors told me so many times that I have it engraved into my memory. 30%. Nothing more, nothing less, and it should be an intimidating number but I’m confident that you’ll pull through even though I really shouldn’t be. You’re a fighter, Joon-ah, and you’re brilliant in so many ways that others aren’t, so I have no doubts that you’ve managed to get through it. I mean, you’re reading this right now, aren’t you?
I know it’s hard for you. I’ll admit that it’ll be painful, that you’ll cry and mourn and blame yourself but you really shouldn’t. I knew it was going to happen one way or another. If you didn’t take it yourself, I’d give it to you, because you own all of me and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
And it might take years for you to understand it, or to accept it and learn to love it the way I have, but I want you to try, okay? I want you to think of it as me giving my heart, not just metaphorically, but physically too, and I want you to think of it as me giving all my emotions, my love and my happiness and my sadness and my pain, to you, because in a way, it is me doing that. It is, and I want you to cherish that and hold it close to your chest whenever you feel sad or lonely, because I’m never really leaving. I’m there, and you’ll take me with you wherever you go.
I want you to do something else for me, too. A favour, because I know you’ll go on to be great at so many different things, but I want to be selfish just for a while.
I want you to build me a hospital.
You know I’ve been wanting to do that myself for a while now, but now, in this moment, I want to do it more than ever. The things I went through when I found out about your time limit, the grief and longing and screaming I wanted to do from the unfairness of it all… it was horrible, Joon-ah. And I know you felt something like that too, even though it’s probably not in the same why I did, so I know you’ll understand me when I say I don’t really want anyone else having to go through the same things we went through up until now.
So that’s it, build me a hospital. Open it up to everyone, make it the best in the nation, so that survival rates that are normally 30% will go up to 100%, so that people can be at ease knowing their loved ones are in good hands. I know it sounds hard, and I’ll understand if you don’t end up doing it but I’ll help you, in any way I can. My parents will fund for your education, they’ll get you all the credentials and connections you need, and they’ll do it even if you don’t end up building the hospital for me.
And in case you wonder why and think that you don’t deserve things even just up to this extent, you have to understand how much I love you, and you have to understand how much they love you, too. In the three months that you’ve been with us, you’ve become our family, one of the people we cherish and no matter how long it’ll take for you to open up to them again, they’ll always love you. Just like how I’ll always love you, how I’ll always be close to you wherever you go.
But above all, I wanted to thank you, Joon-ah. I never really got to say it before, but thank you. I really don’t think you know how just much you’ve affected my life ever since you arrived in it, and you probably won’t because only I really know what it feels like and even I don’t know how to explain it in words. But just know that I am so grateful, and that I love you so much more than you really think. Because I do. I love you so much. Never forget that, Joon-ah, whatever you do.
So I guess this is where I should say my goodbyes. But goodbyes are fickle, sentimental things and it’s not really where I want to go with this.
I’m there, with you. Always. I’ll say that instead.
Yours Truly,
Kim Seokjin.
The moment Namjoon finishes reading Seokjin’s letter, tears staining his eyes a dull red hue, he presses a button to call in a doctor because it’s something he knows he has to do. It’s something that he’s never even thought about not doing, ever since the thought came into his head, and for a moment he realises that this must’ve been how Heaven had felt, just before he gave away his heart.
“Do you still have it?” he asks, the moment the doctor walks into his room. “D-Do you still have my heart?
“Yes, I believe we do.”
“And has Kim Seokjin been… buried?”
The doctor smiles at this, and all the worries Namjoon has melts off right away, although the hollowness is still there. He has a feeling that it’ll always be there, but he’ll worry about that later. “No. His family told me that they didn’t want to hold a funeral until after you were well enough to attend, and to contact them as soon as you were awake.”
“Oh.” Namjoon’s throat clogs up at this, because they really didn’t have to do that, and he twiddles his thumbs idly before continuing. “I was wondering… if you could do me a favour? If it’s not too much trouble?”
“A favour?” the doctor blinks, pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose gently. “And what would that favour be?”
“Jin-ah’s chest must be empty, now,” Namjoon whispers. The thought sends fresh tears lingering in the backs of his eyelids, because the missing piece to Seokjin’s being is here, hammering away in his ribcage, and it makes him wince. “Could you… Could you give him my heart? P-Place it in his chest so that he’ll have mine before he… he’s buried?”
The doctor’s eyes soften, and the sigh he gives is a melancholy that Namjoon hears loud and clear. “Of course I can, Namjoon-ssi. That’s no problem at all.”
When Seokjin is buried, on a hill by the seaside with all of Namjoon’s hopes and dreams, he’s comforted by the fact that at least his heart had died with him, that at least Seokjin will carry it to wherever he goes next just like how Namjoon will do the same down here on earth.
The casket is lowered, and it’s the last he’ll ever see of Heaven in all the years of his life.
“So did you have fun?” Yoongi asks, when Namjoon shows up for work with his cheeks full of life, his smile a little more real than it had been before.
“You could say that,” Namjoon murmurs, and the heart beats like it usually does in his chest but it’s not so deafening, it’s just okay.
Yoongi smiles, and there’s madness curling around the edges but it’s genuine, and the urge is nowhere in sight. “Well then, I should go back in. I’m expected my next patient soon,” he raises a hand, pale like they always are, but before he can duck back inside his office Namjoon holds him by the arm and feels ice on his fingertips.
“Wait, uh,” Namjoon mumbles. “About what happened in Jeju, hyung. You can ask me now.”
Yoongi blinks, and his expression is unreadable but his eyes study Namjoon in that same critical gaze, those eyes that don’t really have the flash so much as they have the sinking feeling of someone looking into the deepest crevices of your soul, and it never fails to make Namjoon shiver. “Really? You sure?”
“Yeah,” Namjoon replies. The hollowness is still there, emptiness looping around his insides like a snake would, slipping in through the cracks and holes of Namjoon’s soul, but it’s not so heavy now. Not as much as before. It’s like the weight is lighter, easier to carry.
“I think I’m ready,” he continues. And he smiles, although it isn’t necessarily happy as much as it’s filled with the nostalgia of loss. “It’s been ten years, after all.”