Chapter Text
Let’s get on the swings, says the boy, and you’ll push me as high as you can.
Taehyung you’re sixteen, says Yoongi.
Taehyung looks hurt. And Yoongi pretends like he doesn’t notice.
I want to stay like this forever, says the boy.
They’re lying on their backs on a grassy hill above a playground (it’s always playgrounds with him), a blanket underneath them, watching the night sky. They’re holding hands. They packed boxes with sandwiches and rice and they kissed a lot and everything was perfect. There are no clouds, only stars.
Nothing is forever, says Yoongi.
Taehyung’s hand goes slack in his own. And Yoongi pretends like he doesn’t notice.
I thought we had a chance, says the boy.
He’s never looked younger than right now. A child, broken, lip quivering because he doesn’t understand. Yoongi tells himself that it doesn’t faze him, but it does. But someone has to do it. Someone has to make him understand. This world isn’t as soft as the boy thinks. Nothing is as soft as he is.
We don’t, says Yoongi. We never had. Nobody stays with their first boyfriend, Tae. Nobody grows old with the guy they dated in high school. It was bound to happen. You’ll find someone else. And I’ll find someone else.
I don’t want anyone else, the boy whispers.
Yoongi is already turning away. He pretends like he didn’t hear.
A bump in the road makes the entire bus rattle precariously, and Yoongi snaps his eyes open. His flight was horrible, and he still feels drowsy and unhappy from falling asleep on a bus in the first place, his neck hurts and his ears are ringing, and the blurry dream about one of his ex boyfriends really didn’t help.
He doesn’t know why he’s dreaming about Taehyung anyway, he hasn’t seen him since high school. Not in the flesh, at least.
It doesn’t matter, though. Yoongi pulls his suitcase closer and stares out the window. He’s almost at his hotel, and he’ll have other things on his mind there, more important things.
Maybe, he will think later, part of him already knew.
“Yeah, he got super drunk last Thursday and told me about how he wants to fuck Saturn. Again.”
“Again?”
“Yeah, did I not tell you about it last time?” Taehyung shakes his head, even though Jimin can’t see that over the phone. “One second we were talking about space and then one drink later he tells me he wants to put his dick in Saturn’s rings. Anyway, so on Thursday I finally told him that Saturn’s rings are mostly, like, rocks. Some ice. And it’s probably all super sharp and jagged and he’d cut his dick into tiny little pieces trying to fuck Saturn.”
“Ruthless,” says Jimin. Taehyung actually does think he can at least imagine the way Jimin is shaking his head now. “But good thing you told him that. Somebody had to.”
“Right? I mean, I’m just being a good friend. Anyway, then he started crying.”
“Oh no.”
“He tried to blow his nose on a post-it note and then got a papercut from that. On his cheek. It was a mess. I love drinking with Namjoon.”
“Me too, I’m really looking forward to taking over babysitting duty now that you’re gone. He already announced we’ll be going out this weekend.”
“Ohh, good luck.” Maybe it’s not really fitting to call it babysitting duty when they take care of Namjoon, since he’s older than them. But he’s not much older, and he certainly isn’t behaving very maturely right now. And when Taehyung and Jimin of all people tell you that you’re not being mature enough, you know you have a serious problem. “At least he’s drinking on the weekends now, and not smack in the middle of the week. That’s progress, I guess.”
“Yeah, he’s getting there,” Jimin says. “Baby steps.”
Namjoon’s boyfriend broke up with him. He hasn’t been handling it very well.
“Honestly, don’t tell him that, but I’m still glad to catch a break,” Taehyung says as he slides off the soft hotel bed he threw himself on the second he entered his room for the first time about ten minutes ago. He settles down on the floor in front of his suitcase, eyeing it. Something seems off about it, but he’s probably just tired. What the hell would be off about his suitcase? That doesn’t make sense.
He loves Namjoon, loves his entire circle of friends and it’s weird to be away without them. Taehyung and Jimin have taken more weekend trips together than they can count at this point, Taehyung loves being with him, loves being with the others, going on mini vacations like they do, having fun together. He’s a people person, has always been one. His announcement about going on vacation all by himself raised quite a few eyebrows, but he’s looking forward to the next seven days. He can finally afford a fancy hotel on Jeju now and he’s going to make use of that, and it’s something he’s been wanting to do forever, so he’s going to enjoy it now. After those past two weeks of pampering Namjoon and telling him that everything is going to be alright and no, he can’t put his dick in there, and he can’t put it in there either, he needs this. He’s looking forward to spending some alone time.
“Hang on, I’ll put you on speaker while I unpack,” Taehyung says, doing just that and putting the phone down on the floor next to him afterwards so he can unzip the suitcase. “How’s my baby doing?”
Aside from babysitting Namjoon, Jimin is also sitting Taehyung’s cat for the following week. Honestly, he doesn’t know where he’d be today without Jimin. Not in Jeju, that’s for sure.
“She’s trying to lick bread crumbs off my plate because obviously I didn’t feed her, like, two hours ago.”
Taehyung laughs. “She’s testing your boundaries,” he says, leaning over a little to flip the suitcase open. “Don’t fall for it.”
And Jimin laughs too and answers something to that, but Taehyung is momentarily unavailable. He’s sitting on the floor, staring at the contents of that suitcase, dumbfounded.
Those aren’t his.
He packed tacky swimming trunks and flip-flops, not four copies of the same boring white button-down shirt. Carefully, like he’s afraid they might bite him, Taehyung reaches out with one hand and lifts the shirts to peek underneath them. Slacks, shiny shoes. A jacket. Yeah, even if Taehyung had packed a suit, he wouldn’t have folded it this neatly and put the jacket and the shirts into see-through plastic bags. He certainly wouldn’t have rolled up the black ties. He’d have thrown them in the suitcase carelessly, the way he threw his favorite socks and a Gameboy in there. Both of which are nowhere to be found.
“Tae? You still there? Hellooo?”
“Sorry!” Taehyung blinks, throwing his phone a quick glance before returning his gaze to the suitcase, lying in the middle of his hotel room like some sort of alien artefact, out of place and mysterious. “I, uh. I think I have a problem.”
“What? Why? What happened? You didn’t forget your shoes on the plane again, did you?”
“Uh, no.” Taehyung doesn’t know how he managed to walk out the airport and into the shuttle bus last year without realizing that he was barefoot. It happened, okay. He also doesn’t know how he managed to pick up someone else’s suitcase today. “I… Someone must have had the same suitcase as me. Because I swear, when it was closed, it looked exactly like mine, so I took it to the hotel with me, and… And it’s, um, not. It’s not my suitcase. I have someone else’s suitcase, and mine’s not here.”
Jimin started giggling way before Taehyung even finished, and now he’s full on laughing into the phone.
“Jimin!” Taehyung says, his voice easily an entire octave higher than normally. “Stop laughing at me! What do I do? This guy just packed a bunch of suits. I don’t think he’ll be happy with my weed shirt.”
“Go find him! Duh,” Jimin answers, still giggling. “I’m sure there’s some sort of label somewhere in the suitcase. Maybe he’s rich, if he only packed suits, rich people have, like, their names embroidered in their clothes and shit like that, right? Or they have business cards flying around. I’m sure you’ll find something.”
“I feel weird going through his stuff,” Taehyung says, already elbow-deep in clothes that belong to a stranger. “Are you sure? Do you think I should get my name embroidered on my clothes too, now that I make good money?”
“Please get your name embroidered on your weed shirt and those elephant socks, Taetae. Please.”
“My elephant socks,” Taehyung whines, shoving the pair of really expensive looking shoes out of the way. “He has my elephant socks…”
“If he actually does have your stuff,” Jimin says helpfully. “Who knows. You’re gonna have to find out! What an adventure, it’s like you’re living a romcom.”
“I’m not sure I signed up for this kind of vacation,” Taehyung mutters, now gingerly pushing a handful of grey briefs around. His hands touch paper, and he pulls a manila envelope from the very bottom of the suitcase. “Ooh! I think I got something.”
“Yeah? What is it, an embroidered napkin? A credit card? If he’s rich, Taetae, you gotta set him up with me. You’re already rich yourself, that wouldn’t be fair. Taetae?”
When Taehyung was seven years old, he visited a friend of his grandma with her, who had a swimming pool in her garden. It was winter, and the entire pool was frozen over, and his grandma and Taehyung were picking up shards of ice and throwing them over the pool surface, to watch them shatter into so many tiny pieces, glittering in the sunlight, like glass. Taehyung felt happy and fascinated and he wanted more, and he leaned in further to grab more ice, but then he lost ground and fell. He fell face forwards into the water that was still liquid underneath the icy surface, and it was the coldest he’d ever felt. His grandmother pulled him out only seconds after, but that time under water felt like an eternity to him. He was so cold, and he couldn’t breathe, and he was so sure he was going to die, he had no control over his limbs, his lungs, the water, anything, and he was so, so cold.
Taehyung is twenty-three years old now, and he’s sitting on the soft carpet of his hotel room holding a handful of papers, and he doesn’t know how to breathe, and everything is very cold again. His ears are ringing and his throat is burning, and there is a full-body shiver running through him when he finally snaps out of it to Jimin’s concerned voice.
“Taehyung?”
“It’s his ticket for the return flight,” Taehyung can hear himself say. His voice sounds husky and very far away. “And a visitor pass for something. It’s…” He swallows, and it hurts a little. Just a little. “It’s Yoongi.”
“What?” His phone is still next to him on the floor, but Taehyung still flinches like Jimin yelled right into his ear. “What the fuck? The Yoongi? Min Yoongi? Your asshole ex boyfriend?”
Taehyung doesn’t know why, but he huffs out a laugh. “Yeah.”
“Shit. This is a stupid romcom. Do you need me over there, Tae? I can come over, I could probably take the next flight.”
To Taehyung’s horror, he can actually hear Jimin type something on what sounds like a laptop keyboard. “Jiminnie, no. It’s fine. I can handle this. You don’t have to come here. I’ll… I’ll figure out what to do.”
“Set it on fire.”
“What?”
“The suitcase. Set it on fire. Who cares? You’re rich. If he sues you, you can just… You know what, if he sues you, set him on fire, too.”
“I’m not setting Yoongi on fire.”
“Fine, I’ll do it, then.”
“No!” Taehyung is actually genuinely laughing now, still quiet and a little desperate, but at least it’s honest. He loves Jimin. He only got to know him after he moved to Seoul for college, Jimin has never met Yoongi, he’s only heard the bad parts about him when Taehyung talked about them and their breakup. He should have figured Jimin would be ready to fight him if Yoongi ever showed up in his life again. He just never thought he’d ever show up in his life again. Taehyung is flipping through the rest of the papers in the envelope now, picking out what he needs. “There’s a phone number here, it even says which hotel he’s staying at. I think he just printed out all his travel info or something. I’ll find him and give his stuff back, and I hope he has my stuff so I can get that too, and that’ll be it.”
“No, punch him in the face, too.”
“No, Jimin.”
“Kick him?”
“Also no.”
“Not even a little?”
“I will not kick him a little.”
“Fine, but only because your manager would hate that, right?”
“Yeah, PR would have my ass,” Taehyung says softly. “That’s the only reason.”
“Okay. Good. Are you sure it’s him? Maybe it’s just someone with the same name. Do you have any idea how many Park Jimins I know?”
“You’re still my one and only,” Taehyung says automatically. While Jimin is still making disgusted noises, Taehyung runs a thumb over the visitor pass in his hand. “I’m sure. There’s a photo of him on the pass. He hasn’t changed much.”
“Still an asshole, then. You could at least flip him off. Nobody could ever prove that happened.”
“I’ll think about it,” says Taehyung. Jimin thanks him very loudly and Taehyung picks the phone back up to press it to his ear again with a little sigh. “Listen, I’ll get this over with right now, I need my clothes back anyway. I’ll call you afterwards, okay?”
“Okay,” Jimin says. His voice sounds very soft now, which sounds weird with what he says next. “And hey, if push comes to shove, I’ll help you hide the body.”
Taehyung laughs. They might be kidding, but Jimin might also be disturbingly serious somewhere in there, and it’s incredibly reassuring. He can do this. He’s a grown man now.
It’s a sobering thought, actually. Back when Yoongi broke (his fucking heart) up with him, it was because Yoongi was going to leave and do adult things, he was going to go be a grown man and Taehyung was still a child to him and that didn’t work. And now they’re both grown men, both in their mid-twenties, with jobs and separate lives, and here’s Yoongi with pretty suits in his bag and a crinkle-free envelope with everything he needs. And here’s Taehyung, with flip-flops in his bag, and dorky diving goggles, and video games. Nothing has changed, apparently.
He dials the number he found in the envelope, then zips the suitcase back up and slips his shoes on again. He wonders if Yoongi is even going to pick up with an unknown number calling him, and of course part of him hopes he just won’t, and an even bigger part of him hopes that he’s somehow still wrong and it’s not actually Yoongi. It’s a different Min Yoongi who happens to look a lot like the Min Yoongi he knows, which is a bit creepy but at least it’s not the guy who took his heart and stomped on it when he was just a teenager.
“Hello?”
Yeah, that’s his ex boyfriend.
Taehyung feels cold running down his back again, but it’s not as suffocating this time. He was expecting this. There’s an acidic kind of burn in his stomach and he feels like that one time he kept a sip of lighter fluid in his mouth for half a minute for a bet, but he can breathe. It’s alright. He’s not drowning.
“Yoongi?”
“Yes, this is Min Yoongi,” says Yoongi. He doesn’t really sound any different. A little irritated, maybe. No change there. “Who’s this?”
Maybe Taehyung does sound different. Maybe Yoongi just didn’t care and forgot his voice.
“This is Taehyung.” He busies himself with grabbing the suitcase and his wallet, and leaving his room. He’s getting this over with as quickly as possible. He wants to stop feeling like that first second when an elevator starts moving and your stomach lurches. “Uh, Kim Taehyung. I accidentally took your suitcase. I found your number in the envelope inside, I’m on my way to your hotel now to give it back to you, if that’s okay. Are you at your hotel right now?”
It’s quiet on the other end. Taehyung can hear him breathe. Fabric rustles, and he wonders if Yoongi is sitting down.
“Taehyung?”
Taehyung sighs. “Yeah, Kim Taehyung,” he repeats. “You know, from Daegu? Your -”
“No, I know,” Yoongi says quickly, thankfully saving Taehyung from having to remind them both. “I know. Jesus. I didn’t even… Wow, puberty really did a number on you, huh?”
Taehyung is walking through the foyer of his hotel now, blinking. “What?”
“What?” says Yoongi. “Nothing. Uh, yeah, I’m at the hotel right now.”
His voice, Taehyung thinks absently. His voice wasn’t this deep yet back when Yoongi broke up with him. He didn’t recognize his voice because it’s deeper now. “Great,” he says. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes tops, I’m guessing. Do you have my suitcase too, by any chance?”
He’s starting to feel really proud of himself. Jimin would love this, Taehyung thinks. He’s keeping his voice steady, casual, like it’s not bothering him at all. Like it’s a boring necessity to see Yoongi again, a bit of a hassle, but no big deal. It’s even more satisfying now that Yoongi still takes long breaks before he manages to answer, and Taehyung can still hear him breathe into his phone, like he’s doing it through his mouth.
“Um, yeah,” Yoongi gets out. “I - I guess I do. I mean, I have a suitcase here that’s not mine. That’s probably yours, then.”
He sounds as dumbfounded as Taehyung felt when he opened that suitcase. Taehyung suppresses a giggle. “Fantastic,” he says dryly. “See you in twenty.”
“I,” says Yoongi, like he wants to say something, but then he doesn’t. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. I’m in room 276. See you then.”
Those acting lessons are really paying off now, Taehyung thinks.
Maybe part of him already knew.
Yoongi feels like he spent every second of the last fifteen minutes pacing up and down his hotel room like some sort of caged animal. Maybe part of him already knew when he had that horrible dream in the bus, about how he broke up with poor Taehyung, the soft, uncomprehending kid in his dream, the boy blurring around the edges. Maybe the suitcase had a smell or shit like that, maybe it managed to give some weird subtle sign to his brain that made him dream about that with Taehyung’s suitcase clutched in his arm.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Yoongi was an asshole, as a teenager. He likes to say he’s still an asshole, but now, at least he knows who to pick his fights with, and when it’s time to let someone live in peace. He’s an asshole to people who deserve it. Taehyung didn’t deserve it. Not for one second.
Someone knocks on his door.
Fuck.
Those weren’t twenty minutes. Yoongi runs his hands through his hair, then he wipes them on his pants because they feel sweaty, then he resists the urge to check his looks in the bathroom mirror. Which he regrets a second afterwards, when he opens that door.
Fuck, fuck, mother of fuck, mother of all fucks, what the almighty fuck, shit, fuck.
Taehyung was seventeen when Yoongi left him. He was fifteen when Yoongi fell for him. He was cute at fifteen, and at seventeen. Cute, small, soft, squishy even. Towards the end, he managed to grow taller than Yoongi, slowly, and not much. And he still had his babyface. His baby cheeks, and his hair was curly, his nose soft and his eyes dark and button, his shoulders were slim, his chest tiny, and Yoongi distinctly remembers calling his arms a pair of overcooked spaghetti. He was a stick figure. A cute stick figure, but a stick figure.
At this very moment, Yoongi feels incredibly small.
He’s staring at a pair of collarbones, poking out of a shirt collar that’s loose and wide, belonging to a shirt that’s also loose and wide but still somehow manages to fall smoothly against a broad chest, halfheartedly hiding the promise of toned pecs under there. Taehyung is definitely more than half an inch taller than him now, and with his flat, solid body right in front of Yoongi’s damn face, Yoongi feels like he’s also twice as broad. Yoongi wonders if he could break his face on that chest.
Hell, he’d probably deserve it.
Yoongi takes one step to the side to give Taehyung room to enter. He still hasn’t looked at his face, and once he’s closed the door behind him and glanced over at Taehyung, he wishes he would have kept it that way.
Taehyung is and has always been one of the most gorgeous people he’s ever seen. He used to think it’s the eyebrows, then he thought it’s the lashes, then he thought it’s the lips, the nose, then he blamed it on the tiny moles sprinkled over his face. Yoongi knows better now: it’s everything. Taehyung is a perfect composition, stunning, hard to look away from even when you feel like you’re burning your eyes if you stare for too long.
But the look Taehyung gives him is cold as ice, almost business-like, and Yoongi feels like something inside him breaks.
This is his own fault. He’s had it coming.
“There’s your, uh, suitcase,” he says, gesturing to the side towards Taehyung’s suitcase next to Yoongi’s bed, wondering why the fuck he was hesitating before saying a simple goddamn word like suitcase.
“Thanks. Here’s yours,” says Taehyung, patting the handle of Yoongi’s before letting go of it and walking over to grab his own. “Nice suits, in there. You here for business?”
Yoongi whips his gaze back to Taehyung after staring at his stupid suitcase that literally looks the exact same like Taehyung’s, what the fuck, and blinks at him for a second. He realizes, now, that he was hoping for small talk, but he wasn’t actually expecting any.
“Y-Yeah,” he says, clearing his throat after that first syllable didn’t quite come out right. “Yeah, I own a bunch of sound studios, and I’m meeting here for a deal with someone who wants me to distribute their equipment.”
“Oh, nice,” says Taehyung. He throws him a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. Yoongi feels cold. “You made it.”
“Yeah,” Yoongi says quietly. He made it. He’s doing what he wanted to do back when he left Taehyung in Daegu to go and be a businessman with no time for boyfriends or playground dates. Carefully, he smiles back at Taehyung. “You too. Saw your face up on a billboard in Myeongdong the other day.”
“My face?” Taehyung repeats with amusement in that unsettlingly deep voice that makes something nervous flutter in Yoongi’s stomach. He doesn’t know if it’s attraction or fear. Taehyung pulls his brows into a playful frown. “That one big billboard in Myeongdong has my shot for the Calvin Klein ad. The one where I’m in nothing but boxers. That the one you saw?”
Well, yeah. Yoongi nods sheepishly. He did only recognize Taehyung’s face, he thought the rest seemed pretty photoshopped. That was before he saw him in person and realized that Taehyung really does look like an adult man now. Yoongi has long gotten used to seeing Taehyung’s face on billboards and magazine covers around town, but that damn Calvin Klein ad had him shirtless and sprawled out on a bed, gazing into the camera with bedroom eyes Yoongi had never seen on him before (they were teenagers; they were nervous looks and dorky squeaks and premature orgasms), and he didn’t think any of that was real.
Taehyung snorts softly while he drags his suitcase through the room towards the door. “That was really photoshopped,” he says.
“I know,” Yoongi says before he can stop himself.
At that, Taehyung stops in the small hallway in front of the door and turns his head a little to look at Yoongi, an amused what do you know-expression in the quirk of his brows. But Yoongi doesn’t waver, he keeps standing there and dares to grin at him, just a little bit, because there was a gigantic fucking bulge in those Calvin Klein boxers, and puberty might have been good to Taehyung, but puberty isn’t that good to anyone.
With a little scoff, Taehyung turns away again. “Well then,” he just says, and, to Yoongi’s horror, opens the door to the hallway. “Good luck with your business meeting. Bye, Yoongi.”
“Wh,” says Yoongi, and before he can think about it he’s rushing after him, clutching onto the door handle to keep it from falling shut, blinking rapidly. “Tae! Taehyung, wait!”
Taehyung stills in the hotel hallway, and turns a bit. He doesn’t say anything, just raises his brows at Yoongi, like he doesn’t know what he wants.
What does Yoongi want?
“Are you just gonna,” Yoongi starts, and then just waves his hand around instead of finishing the question. “I mean don’t you think-” He swallows, hard. That sounds stupid. Everything sounds stupid. But Taehyung just leaving like that sounds worse. “We, we must have been on the same flight. We have the same goddamn suitcases, this happened to us of all people, of everyone on that plane, we’re both here at the same time, the same fucking day, and you just… I mean, don’t you think this…”
“What, you think this is a sign?” Taehyung finishes for him. He’s mocking him. The sneer is dripping from his voice, cold, unimpressed. Yoongi wants to sit down.
“I don’t know,” he says, very quietly. He’s not sure if Taehyung can even still hear him. “I just thought…”
“I’m here on vacation, Yoongi,” Taehyung says. “I’m destressing.” Yoongi gets the message. Taehyung is here to relax. Meeting Yoongi means stress. He gets it. “You go and get your deal, big boy. Have a good life.”
His voice is hard, tough. Mature. Taehyung turns away again, and this time, Yoongi lets him. He’s never heard him talk like that before. Yoongi closes the door behind him and sits on the scratchy carpet in the hallway.
He told Taehyung to grow up.
This is what he gets.
“How’d it go? How’d it go?”
Taehyung can definitely hear the way Jimin is bouncing up and down in his seat right now. In the background, Taehyung’s cat meows loudly. Taehyung’s own heart is beating in his throat and his palms are sweaty, but it’s good, he thinks. He’s pretty sure this is good.
“Jimin,” he says solemnly, looking briefly before crossing the street, dragging his suitcase behind him on his way to the bus stop, “I fucking murdered him.”
“Good!” Jimin chimes. “Cut him in two and then put him in some plastic bags. Do you have a freezer in your hotel room? You can keep him there until I arrive, then we’ll burn the body together. I saw that on How To Get Away With Murder, that should get rid of all the evidence. I’m assuming nobody will miss him, he probably doesn’t have any friends.”
“I was being metaphorical,” Taehyung says between giggles. “You can be really scary, Jimin, you know that?”
“Aww, thanks,” says Jimin, and Taehyung frowns at his phone for a second. “So it went well? Did you flip him off?”
“Not directly. But I was super cool and I acted like I had, like, half an emotion at best. I literally told him to have a good life, Jimin. I was so cold. Where’s my Oscar, honestly? Anyway, he seemed heartbroken.” Taehyung swallows, trying to study the bus plan but failing to really grasp what he’s reading. “It was great.”
Yeah.
It was great.
Taehyung isn’t actually that into hurting people. Not even for sweet revenge. Jimin seems to have a lot more evil energy compressed in that small body of his, and Taehyung needs it to balance him out sometimes, he needed Jimin to kick his ass while he was still building up his modeling career, and he needed him to get over an ex or two. But getting over an ex and being mean to an ex are two different things. (Or killing an ex, for that matter.) Taehyung guesses he wasn’t even that horrible to Yoongi, he could have been worse and he didn’t insult him or anything, he just let him know that he’s over him and he doesn’t want anything to do with him, but Yoongi really did seem kind of hurt. More than that, he seemed sorry.
But, in the end, just seeming sorry isn’t enough. Jimin has taught him that much. Yoongi didn’t actually say anything resembling an apology, so Taehyung doesn’t owe him shit. If Yoongi actually does feel sorry for what happened between them, he clearly doesn’t have the balls to tell him that, so Taehyung doesn’t want to talk to him, and he doesn’t care.
Of course, once he’s on the bus and Jimin has finally hung up after telling him again how proud he is of him, Taehyung has a long text from the number he never saved as Yoongi’s.
you dont wanna talk and thats alright. i get it. im not even expecting you to reply to this or anything, and you can laugh at me again but i really do think this was a sign, at least for me. that way at least i got your number so i can tell you this: im sorry. for how it went down back then, im sorry. i hurt you and i was selfish and you didnt deserve what you got from me. you dont have to forgive me or anything and we never have to see each other again, its fine, i just wanted you to know. im aware that i hurt you and i apologize for that.
im genuinely happy for you and your career. i hope youre happy, too.
Taehyung can practically hear Jimin’s voice in his head. Tell him to delete your number, block him, scrawl the number on a bathroom stall, hire a hitman. But instead of doing any of that, he clutches his phone in his hand, and twists in his seat, staring at the hotel growing smaller at the end of the road, as the bus takes him away.
He’s still on vacation, though. He’s not going to forget that. Taehyung is starting to regret coming here alone, but he wanted to do this for himself, he came here to have fun, and he’s going to. If there’s one thing Kim Taehyung knows how to do, it’s having fun.
And he does manage. Taehyung had plans for this trip and he’s not about to let them go to waste, so he actually ends up pretty good at taking his own mind off of Yoongi. He visits the beach, he goes for swims, he goes to a spa and gets an amazing full body massage, he flirts with his massage therapist until they’re both giggling, he lounges around on his hotel bed and finally catches up on all his dramas. He really, genuinely, does not think about Min Yoongi.
For roughly two days.
The last thing he expected was Jimin actively redirecting his thoughts towards Yoongi, but it happens just like that, the night after Taehyung’s second day on the island. He’s on his bed, a drama paused on his laptop making the actor’s face look hilarious, and he has his phone pressed to his ear once more, listening to Jimin fret over Namjoon. Taehyung had honestly thought be’d been doing better lately, but apparently, something came up.
“His stupid ex wants him back,” Jimin says, sounding way past annoyed and on the road to really fucking angry. “Can you believe that? The asshole has been sending him late night texts lately telling him he misses him. And you know how Joonie gets during the night. Like, next morning he’s always convinced he doesn’t need the guy and won’t take him back, but at night he’s actually considering it. What a mean fucking move. If I ever find this dude I’m shoving his dick so far up his own ass he’s gonna be throwing up piss for a w-”
“Jimin.” Taehyung puts his free hand across his chest. He tries to imagine Jimin’s angelic face saying that - and succeeds, really. He’s known Jimin long enough to not be surprised by outbursts like that, and to know that he might actually try to rip off sexual organs and put them where the sun don’t shine if nobody holds him back.
“What? He’d deserve it. He better hope he never meets me in person, did you know he’s never apologized? Not even once? I asked Namjoon. He broke his fucking heart, and now he’s all boo hoo I need you here, but he hasn’t said sorry for any of the shit he pulled. Which is good I guess, because it’s the one thing that’s keeping Namjoon from crawling back to him. I mean, shit, what’d he expect, anyway? You don’t take people back when they’re not even sorry for hurting you, they’ll just do it again. You didn’t take Yoongi back just because he looked like a kicked puppy. No apology, no chance.”
Taehyung chews on his lip silently. He watches the man on his laptop screen, face contorted like he’s just about to sneeze, and shifts a little against the mattress. “He did apologize, actually.”
He can hear Jimin exhale, like the anger is being temporarily pushed out of him. “Yoongi? When?”
“He texted me right after I left,” Taehyung says softly, his hand playing with the fabric of his shirt now. “Sounded really sincere, too. He even said I didn’t have to reply and he’d understand if we’ll still never see each other again, and everything. He just wanted me to know that he’s sorry for hurting me, and that he hopes I’m happy now.”
It’s silent save for Jimin’s breathing and someone running down the hall outside Taehyung’s hotel room. Taehyung can imagine how dumbfounded Jimin must feel, not only because he has built this image of Yoongi being the antichrist in his head, since he never got to know him like Taehyung knew him and only heard what he had to say after the breakup, but also because he was just ranting about Namjoon’s shitty ex and now Taehyung punched all that rage out of him. He didn’t want to. Actually, he thinks it’d be better if they continued talking about Namjoon, instead of Yoongi.
“I’m glad Namjoon has been turning him down,” Taehyung eventually says into the silence. He doesn’t want to talk about whether or not it would make sense to get back together with an old high school boyfriend just because he found the guts to apologize. It’s been years and he doesn’t have feelings for Yoongi anymore. This is stupid. “Do you think we should maybe set him up with someone? I mean, not to get him another boyfriend this quickly, but just to make sure he’ll have some fun? I think he could use that, and maybe then he’ll drink less, too.”
Jimin thinks that might be worth a try, and says he’ll look around. They continue talking about Namjoon a bit, then about Taehyung’s cat, then Taehyung describes the paused face on his laptop screen in great detail until Jimin is wheezing with laughter, and he almost doesn’t think about Yoongi anymore.
But he dreams about playgrounds and lunch boxes. He dreams about the time when Yoongi would push him on the swings, the time when he’d even sit down on the swing next to him and join the fun. He dreams about Yoongi drawing goofy pictures on his sandwich with mayonnaise while they made them, Yoongi throwing himself in the grass and rolling down hills with Taehyung just because it was fun and they were just kids, just teenagers, and it was all about having fun. Taehyung dreams about the time before grownups came along and told Yoongi that he needs to stop messing around and put that genius brain of his to good use. The time before it was not about having fun anymore, the time before it was about money and college applications and giving up on dreams of fame and spotlight for something calmer, something safer, more mature.
They were happy together once, and it was beautiful while it lasted.
He gets up in the morning and doesn’t want to care. He wants Yoongi to stay off his mind, because he’s not seventeen anymore and he’s over it.
He was over it.
He really was; he hasn’t thought about Yoongi in years, he’s dated other people since then, he’s been enjoying himself. He still believes in love, he can trust people, it’s all fine. Yoongi hurt him because Taehyung was young and Yoongi was his everything back then, but he didn’t ruin him. He’s been okay. Hell, he’s been great. He doesn’t need this.
Taehyung guesses the problem is that he thought Yoongi would be the same. He’d always thought that if they ever met again, they’d both be grown up and over it and fine and able to hold regular conversations without hurt gazes and quivering voices. He’d always thought that Yoongi didn’t care about him anymore, and that made not caring about Yoongi a whole lot easier.
But Yoongi seemed broken. Taehyung didn’t think for a second that he was bullshitting that apology, because when Yoongi saw him, he looked like something inside him was shattered, like he felt a thousand times worse than that brief ice water moment Taehyung had in his hotel room. He seemed devastated, and Taehyung can’t get him off his mind.
He spends another day at the beach, trying hard to relax, but he ends up with his phone in his hands, squinting at his screen against the sun and googling Yoongi’s name. When he does it for the first time, he closes out of the browser before he can actually see anything, closes his eyes with a big frown and attempts to take a nap.
Around twenty minutes later, he’s on Yoongi’s studio’s homepage. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing there, what he’s expecting to find, and it turns out pretty sobering. It’s pretty, as far as he can tell from mobile, there’s a bunch of pictures and some links to their price list and production techniques, and of course nothing here screams our boss has been heartbroken for the past six years. It’s a sound studio, not Yoongi’s diary. It’s clean, cold, goes well with the suitcase filled with shiny shoes and pretty white shirts. Still a functional adult. Still able to live his life and be successful; good for him. Taehyung finds an about us with a brief résumé, born and raised in Daegu, graduated from one of Seoul’s best universities thanks to scholarships, a list of songs he helped write. He closes his browser again and drops his phone on his stomach. He came here to relax. He came here to please have at least one week of calm. Not for this.
Taehyung gets up from his spot in the sand and gathers his things once he notices a group of people standing a little too close and throwing him gazes a little too interested. He’s not yet very used to fame, and he doesn’t always get recognized on random streets or anything, but if he stays in one place out in the open too long, this usually happens now. It’s a bit weird, but it’s whatever. Normally he might have even stayed and given an autograph or two, but he’s on vacation, and he doesn’t want to talk to people.
He wants to sit in his cool hotel room and stare at Yoongi’s homepage on his laptop.
Carefully, Taehyung opens the about us again. He scans the list of songs again and again, vaguely registering the sinking feeling in his stomach telling him to stop doing this to himself. But he keeps reading through the titles, trying to convince himself that he’s seeing things, that there’s no pattern, that this is not the exact thing he was trying to find on this site in the first place.
Almost all of them are love songs.
Taehyung has heard a lot of them on the radio when they came out. They’re from various artists in various genres, mostly rap but not always, and mostly heartaches, but not always.
Still, though. Mostly.
It’s just a foolproof formula for success, Taehyung tells himself. Songs about being lovesick always sell. It’s easy to write lyrics about, probably, because everyone’s felt it before, everyone can relate. It has nothing to do with him. Yoongi just knows what the public wants to hear. Good for him.
Just as Taehyung tells himself to stop this avalanche of bad ideas, pick up his phone and call Jimin, his fingers open a new tab and start looking up lyrics. The first song he looks up is pretty much what he expected, generic, easy for everyone to relate, could have been written by anyone. The second one has a verse about teenage romance and Taehyung pulls a face at his laptop screen, but that’s still pretty generic, right? Nothing special there. Lots of people have teenage romances they still think about. No big deal.
The third song, as it turns out, isn’t actually a love song about a person, but about a piano. Okay. Sure. Whatever works.
It’s the fourth song that punches him in the gut.
Taehyung gets through the first verse with nothing but a slight ache in his chest, ignores the way it talks about growing up and being sorry and leaving people behind who didn’t deserve it, chalks it up to coincidence. He gets through the chorus, redundant lines about missing people, and then the bridge comes to hit him like a freight train.
You ruin every song
It’s there, mocking him, black against the soft purple of the lyrics site. You ruin every song. If he holds his breath, he can hear Yoongi’s voice saying it in his head. You ruin every song.
Oh, the boy giggles. She sings ‘please dry my eyes’? I kept thinking it’s ‘destroy my ass.’ That song sounds a lot less wild now.
Jesus, Tae, says Yoongi, but he’s laughing. You ruin every song.
But eventually, months later, when the boy quietly announces that a certain rapper makes the word ‘perfect’ sound like ‘ballsack’, Yoongi isn’t laughing anymore. He just bites his tongue, to make sure he can throw Taehyung a glare, and shakes his head.
You ruin every song.
Taehyung feels sick. The bad, gagging, about-to-throw-up kind of sick. He gingerly moves his fingers on the touchpad, closes his browser, shuts down his laptop. He doesn’t want to look up the other lyrics. He’s done enough damage to his stupid damn self.
Yoongi has been thinking about him. It might not be as obvious to other people, but it is now to Taehyung. He knows him, has always known him, will always know him. He wouldn’t just throw around phrases from their past like that if it didn’t mean anything. Yoongi might have succumbed to the cold harsh world of grownups in the music industry, but he has always put his heart into his lyrics and Taehyung doubts that it could have changed that drastically.
He ruins every song. Taehyung knows what that means, to them both, today. He can’t sing the wrong lyrics anymore, but their breakup ruined enough songs for Taehyung to understand. Suddenly, everything on the radio was about Yoongi, but Yoongi makes it sound worse, because it’s about his own songs, Taehyung ruins those, like everything in his head is about Taehyung. Still. All the time.
When Jimin calls, Taehyung doesn’t know how to tell him that he’s been checking Yoongi’s homepage and made himself sad like a teenager. Jimin can tell something’s up, but he can also tell when Taehyung doesn’t want to talk about something, so they distract him instead by continuing to plot the setup for Namjoon. At least one of them needs to properly get over his ex, Taehyung thinks.
When he gets up the next morning, he has decided. He needs to at least talk to Yoongi one more time. It’s not like he has any real feelings towards him right now, other than confusion really, but he needs to see him. He needs to tell him that it’s okay, that he forgives him and he has moved on, he’s doing fine and he wants Yoongi to be doing fine too. And if they maybe stay in contact after that, that would be fine. That might even be nice. But Taehyung doesn’t want to plan that far - right now, he just wants to talk to him again.
So he puts on his most normal looking clothes, definitely also doesn’t care about the state of his hair or anything, just checks himself in the mirror out of sheer habit, nothing special, and takes the bus back to Yoongi’s hotel. When he gets out he’s pretty sure he has at least a handful of sentences planned that should make sense to say to Yoongi, he thinks he’s good, and he’s just about to cross the street when he sees him.
Yoongi is walking out of the hotel, his suitcase in one hand, his other arm slung around the middle of a man, who has his own arm around Yoongi’s shoulders. He’s tall, looks good, handsome, broad shoulders, and they talk and Yoongi smiles, and Taehyung is still standing and staring at the other side of the road when they get into a taxi together.
Of course.
How stupid of him, how naive, to assume that this was going to work out. To assume that Yoongi doesn’t have anyone else right now - maybe he still thinks about Taehyung sometimes, maybe he just uses the distant memory for his lyrics. Maybe he does that now, maybe he’s changed. Maybe he’s just trying to finally move on with a new boyfriend and a new chapter in his life, and Taehyung should let him. And why would he stay here for as long as Taehyung does? Taehyung is here for a week of vacation, Yoongi was just here for business. Of course he’s leaving. Of course Taehyung is too late, of course he’s missed his chance.
Later, Jimin tells him to let it go. “Let it go,” he says on the phone, to the constant chanting of Taehyung’s cat because it’s almost dinner time. “Leave him be, Tae, it’s okay. It was nice of you to try and let him know that you forgive him, but I guess it just wasn’t meant to be. You two go your separate ways again, I mean, you’ve been happy all this time. You can be happy again. Just stay there and enjoy the rest of your time off. There’s a huge shoot waiting for you when you get back here, remember? You got more important stuff to worry about than some ex thing that happened, like, almost a decade ago. And I’m sure so does he. You’ll both be fine. Just let it go.”
He’s right, Taehyung knows. And he really does try. He really does try to let go and enjoy his vacation, focus on everything good in his life, which is, frankly, a lot. He tries, but it’s hard. Life doesn’t make it easy on him.
Because Yoongi is on the radio, everywhere, all the time, whenever Taehyung walks into a store there’s a song playing that he wrote, that he produced, and even when he tunes in during the night and they play songs that Yoongi has never had a hand in, Taehyung still thinks about him. Like every single song, the entirety of music, is tainted.
He ruins every song.