Chapter Text
It was the summer just before his fourteenth birthday, Jimin supposed, that he had started dying.
It had been one of those summers where everything seemed somehow heavier, thicker, the pressing, humid heat had hung over the streets day and night, the air was stale and stagnant and sticky in the throat. Even the memories of that summer all appeared blurred, like the rippling air over too hot asphalt, but what Jimin distinctly remembered were the colors, the perpetual, unsettling blue of the sky, the hot white sun reflected harshly on gleaming cars.
In that summer, he recalled, everything had seemed so unbearably stagnant, a restless stillness had thickened the air at all times, an impatient buzzing within the bones. There was no time, or perhaps there was too much of it, slow seconds stuck in the dense stickiness of the air. And yet, in hindsight, Jimin thought that he would give anything to go back, to linger just a few more moments in what would turn out to be his last moments of youthful innocence.
But he had been young, and so, at night, he had sat by his opened window and desperately wished for the cool retrieve that autumn would bring. His foster family's house was situated in one of the many suburbs in the outskirts of Seoul, and Jimin had his very own bedroom on the ground floor from where he could look at their tiny garden. It housed an old, gnarly peach tree with a creaky wooden swing dangling from its thick branches, and each spring, hundreds of pale pink blossoms would cover the patch of grass like a soft blanket, but by then they had already turned brown and mushy and had to be swept away.
Back then, even the moon had looked sickly, it hung heavily in the sky like a too ripe, swollen fruit, begging to die. For what was summer but a slow death? Everything was dying, even the flowers were dying beautifully in vibrant reds and lush greens, too sweet and just on the tip of decay; it was the promise of death that sat in every crevice, hid underneath supple leaves. It loomed over the summer like a cool shadow, like the thick swarms of flies with their green, shimmery bodies, waiting, waiting.
And then, that one summer night, death came as it always does; in the dark, quietly and swiftly, until it’s already too late.
There was a loud thump outside Jimin’s bedroom that had him jerk from his uneasy sleep at once, sitting up straight and rigid in between crumpled bed sheets. He was only wearing pajama bottoms because of the humid heat, and he now pulled the blanket self consciously higher, fiddling with the corner of his blanket and rolling it between his thumb and index finger.
A heavy weight then seemed to collide with the wooden door which creaked weakly under the impact, followed by a choked grunt, before the door was thrown open and the looming silhouette of Jimin’s foster father appeared in the frame. Jimin recalled that the man had seemed so large in the night, so colossal, like a giant statue made from lapis stone, and for a while, Jimin's foster father just stood there in complete silence while yellowish-white moonlight seeped into the room like souring milk into dark velvet. He was still clad in his work attire, a crumpled white shirt, with his tie dangling loosely off his neck and sweat darkly staining the patches of fabric under his armpits. The sheen of sweat covering his face gleamed in the moonlit room like a shiny, pale porcelain mask.
Eventually, the man stumbled clumsily closer until his calves hit the wooden edge of Jimin's bed, giving the mattress a violent rattle, and then, for the first time, he spoke. "Why did'ya c'mere, huh?" His speech was slurred, consonants fuzzy from what could only be heavy intoxication.
"W-what?" Jimin’s voice sounded weirdly thin and hollow and he cleared his throat. His mouth was dry. "I think you're in the wrong room,” he carried on shakily, “but I could help you back to your bed if you can't walk alone? Or to the couch."
For a while Jimin's foster father didn't offer a reply, just stared at him from black, beady eyes that glinted dully in the half-dark. He wrapped his large hand around the knobby, carved out part of the bedframe by Jimin's feet, body swaying unsteadily. "Y'make it so hard for me, y'know. You really do."
"I'm sorry, don't know what you-"
"You shouldn't have come here. It was all good until you came, y'know. I had it under control." He proceeded to tiredly rub his face with a heavy sigh and closed his eyes. "You really shouldn't have come here." All of a sudden, his face contorted then, and to Jimin's horror his foster father started to cry softly into his palm. "I'm sorry," he whispered, gasping for breaths in between tears, before he abruptly bent forwards and latched his wet, tear-stained hand around Jimin's jaw, and Jimin grimaced when the acrid stench of alcohol hit his face. It was almost sickeningly sweet, like rotting flowers. With his thumb the man brushed over Jimin’s cheek in a manner that was oddly gentle, and Jimin wished that it weren’t. "I'm so sorry."
Jimin mutely stared at him, wide-eyed and afraid. It was too hot, but there were goosebumps all over his skin.
"I can't help it, you know? It’s a sickness," the man continued to wail chokedly, "I'm sick . It's not my fault, I can't- I can't fucking stop it!"
A whimper escaped Jimin's lips, and he began frantically shaking his head. “N-no, you d-don’t have to- please-”
In response his foster father only smiled sadly, an ugly twist of his lips, and before Jimin knew what was happening the man was on top of him with all his weight, and then he was suddenly everywhere, warm, sweaty skin on Jimin's.
Jimin screamed and cried until his throat was raw, but, you see, he was big and Jimin was small, and soon Jimin found himself facing downwards, drowning and choking in the soft depths of his mattress. The metal clasp of a broad leather belt poked painfully through his thin pajama bottoms and cut into him, fat fingers crawling over his skin like bloated, pale white maggots, and then a meaty hand slipped through the loose waistband of his shorts, yanking them down, and that’s when it happened; Jimin swore that his heart simply stilled in his chest, just for a few seconds; like an old mechanical wind-up toy he felt the rusted clockwork's cogs and mechanisms come to a whirring halt with a sudden, jarring click.
Like a tiny, little death of a doll.
Jimin lay lifelessly pressed into the sheets, breath stuck in his throat like a knife as he waited for his defective doll heart to resume beating, though there was a small, dark part of him that begged for it to stay silent forever.
And when the treacherous thing eventually sprang to life again, creaking and groaning and so so tired, his foster father was already gone.
Jimin didn't move afterwards for a long time. Along with the pretty flowers something had died in his chest, it was wedged between his ribs, and he could still feel its hardened corpse rattling inside his ribcage, like a dead bird in a bony cage.
It didn't take long for the rot to set in after that. Slowly, painfully, decay settled heavily in Jimin’s bones, growing like black mold in between his sinews and flesh. Ugly, purple flowers bloomed on his milky skin like twisted blossoms of mold, mapping his body in a path of pain and shame, extending their sooten tendrils across his stomach, the soft insides of his thighs, his wrists, his waist. There was a dull, throbbing pain and a sticky wetness between his legs he didn't understand, and with trembling, rotten hands, Jimin reached behind him and grabbed his shorts and pulled them up. He heaved his upper body over the edge off the mattress, wooden bedframe digging harshly into his collar bones, and threw up next to the bed until all that was left was the acidic and bitter taste of decay in his throat, coating his tongue and lips.
Shaking and sweaty, Jimin lay awake and stared at the walls that were tinged grey in the darkness, the moon, as always, hung heavily in the sky, waxy and sick, its pale light casting flimsy shadows of the old tree’s gnarly branches into Jimin’s bedroom, and Jimin numbly watched them claw flatly at the wall, twigs like hands reaching for him as they swayed in the breezeless dark. All the while, noises from outside were seeping into the curdled silence of the house, a dog barking somewhere in the distance, the faint rustling of leaves from the pretty garden.
The tears came only later that night, like summer rain, all at once, and then he didn't stop crying until the early hours of the morning, until his cheeks were plastered with dried rivulets of crusty tears. His lashes felt heavy, his eyelids swollen and hot. Blinking slowly, Jimin stared at the slanted low ceiling above his bed, at the cluster glow-in-the-dark stars that he had attached there some time ago, and, for the first time in his life, wondered what it would be like to be dead.
Something then made him stand up on the bed, the mattress was squeaking underneath him and his legs were wobbly and there was a searing pain deep inside him, but as if in trance he balanced himself on his toes and extended his arm and plucked one of them off the ceiling. Cradled in his hand, it emanated a thin, greenish glow that seeped into the planes and lines of his palm. For some reason, Jimin had expected it to feel warm. But it was cold and hard and pointy, the flat edges digging into his skin.
And as he continued to stare at the plucked off star resting in the hollow of his palm, he found himself suddenly filled with an anger that licked down his throat and scorched his lungs, and before he knew it he had greedily extended his arm again and slotted his fingernails between the wall and the plastic stars and ripped them off the ceiling one by one, didn’t care that he tore tiny patches into the wall where the stars had been glued onto the plaster. They fell around him, scattered onto his bedsheets like fallen leaves until Jimin was left standing in a sea of dead stars, breathing hard, the tender skin just beneath his fingernails throbbing, sore from all the sharp edges.
And when the surge of anger eventually simmered down in him, died in him like everything else, Jimin sunk to his knees, and he began crying like only children can cry, snot running from his nose saltily into his mouth as he gasped wetly for breaths. He curled in on himself, his small hands finding their way into his hair, and he pulled at it until his scalp was sore and his head was hurting, and still it wasn’t enough, for there was another pain sitting in his chest, a pain that was too big for a child to feel. Too big for his small chest it expanded against his ribs from the inside, and Jimin felt something within himself burst, rip at the seams. For his heart unfortunately wasn't a mechanical toy that could just stop. Like a sloppily sewn ragdoll, the bloody threads tore through the doughy soft flesh of his heart. Jimin dug his fingertips in the soft spots in-between his ribs, yearning to reach inside his chest and hold the bloody thing, but the pain sat there, caged away.
He pressed his tearstained face into his stuffed lion resting by the pillow and wept against its soft body, and at one point he stuffed one of the fuzzy ears in his mouth to muffle the sobs and began to suck on it, and he kept sucking on it until it was all wet on his tongue. He couldn’t seem calm down at all, everytime his tears subsided the pain in his chest throbbed anew. It came in waves, painful along his heartbeat like a second pulse.
"W-why? Why why why-"
There was no one to listen to his wails but the sick moon in the sky, but he, too, didn’t offer a response, emitted silently his already paling yellow light, for it was yet another dead thing in a dying summer.
And ever so often, the memories of this summer would rise again, bobbing to the surface like bloated pale corpses in the still and dark waters of his consciousness, until they were lodged in his throat and crawling on his tongue. And so, when Jimin woke up in Yoongi's bed with an arm slung around his waist and a body pressed against him, warm puffs of breath fanning the back of his neck, he started screaming.