Work Text:
It was just a little too dark when Yoongi finally stepped through the door.
He messes with the keys in the door, feeling from muscle memory the shape of the locks and latches, and the plastic handle of his bag around his wrist twists on the verge of slipping free.
There wasn’t a lamp within reach for him to fumble for, and it wouldn’t have done much good regardless – the light of the eternally-lit hallway peering through the crack of the door only just manages to give him enough to see where he toes off his shoes, hearing them collide with something he can’t see enough to care about.
It’s a little past as late as he wanted to be, and a little too dark for this time of night. The bag catches in the rivets it had sunk in his wrist, and Yoongi exhales soft and silent under his breath. The fumes of the road outside had clung to the bottom of his coat to dirty it black, and the weight of the day sat far deeper than the imprints of the bag on his wrist.
Still, Yoongi’s eyes didn’t adjust to the dark, and he didn’t quite shake free the exhaustion of working too long, too late. It was a long and unbearable shift, one that he would grit his teeth and glare at the ache in his shoulder if it were any other day. He reaches out, and lets his fingertips trail across the wall as he walks forward on memory, catching in the swirls and ribbons.
It’s quiet, except for the main road right outside. And the neighbours upstairs stomping in what must be boots, or the other neighbours to the right listening to shitty TV they turn up to drown out their yappy dog. The usual noise, yet underneath is quiet that’s too obvious not for Yoongi to notice.
A slight breeze ghosts across his face and unsettles the bag, and one of the broken points of his nails catches in the wall.
By the time he reaches the bedroom, Yoongi’s eyes have adjusted enough to fill in the shapes that memory outlines for him. The egg-yolk of a streetlamp spills through the open window, rigid in the slight curl of the wind that unsettles the curtains undrawn and indignant.
The light reaches the bed, and Yoongi quietly, ever so quietly, sets the bag on the floor.
“Baby.” Yoongi murmurs, just a brief caress of syllables that barely manage to be heard. His voice catches in the grit coating along the length of his throat, until it burns.
Jimin is still in his work uniform. A pillow had slipped out of reach onto the floor, and the blankets were only half-pulled over him. It was cold with the breeze, colder still with the coming night taking advantage of their shoddy heating, but the blankets hung limp over the side of the bed.
The light skitters in the creases of the blanket, concentrated in where his hands must once have been fists. It drifts over the bones of what little of his face Yoongi can see, and the yolk doesn’t quite drip into the hollows.
Jimin isn’t asleep, but he’s not awake, either. The white of his eye barely disappears when he blinks, each breath he takes heavy enough to dig in, almost as if it left little red rivets along his ribs just from the effort it took. For this, Yoongi doesn’t need his memory to fill in the gaps for him.
The joint of his shoulder grinds into bone, and into cartilage, twisting and grinding like a particularly poorly-oiled gear intent on destroying the entire machine, and Yoongi’s teeth grind into the tender inside of his cheek to force it to move.
The mattress doesn’t have springs, but it still manages to squeak as he crawls onto it. It dips with Yoongi’s weight unbalanced on one arm, and Jimin’s skin is cold when it brushes against his own.
A car screams by in the near-distance, reverberating in the upset curtains, and it’s easier to hear Jimin breathe now. The trucks are harder to ignore, but he tries. The blankets are tangled and knotted uncomfortably right in the grind of Yoongi’s shoulder, right where the pain aches in that way it always does, and he settles next to Jimin. Jimin doesn’t move.
“Jiminie,” Yoongi murmurs, and the day – the stressful, no-good day that he still carries the weight of, that he’ll feel tomorrow stuck like sand in his joints, the day that took too much and will probably give too little back – shrinks away into nothing.
Jimin’s hair is limp and soft between the calluses of his fingers, and Yoongi is too tired to care about how his soft heart aches. The bag lies where he dropped it, and neither of them notice it. Jimin is looking at him, or as much as he usually does in times like this.
“What are you thinking about?” Yoongi asks, still quiet underneath the traffic and the breeze curling gooseflesh along Jimin’s arms that he tries to rub away. His fingers bump on the bracelets on Jimin’s wrists, catching the gold of the streetlamp and on the jut of his bone.
He’s not expecting an answer. It’s quiet and it isn’t, and Yoongi doesn’t wait for an answer to interrupt it. He wraps his fingers easy around Jimin’s wrist, and tries to chase away the cold.
“Dying.” Jimin says, eventually and too quickly, and he closes his eyes. He shifts his wrist away from Yoongi’s reach, and sighs.
Yoongi hums, and the worry surfaces just where the splattered yolk of the light doesn’t quite reach. It’s used to lurking in unopened bills, and unopened cereal – it loves to wait for the night, and in the dark when he’s trying to sleep. Yoongi likes his worry best when Jimin isn’t looking. He might as well spread it on uneaten toast, right where Jimin can’t see.
Jimin exhales soft and silent under his breath. He shifts into the give of Yoongi’s palm as it runs through his hair. Maybe he can feel the worry looming over his turned back, or maybe he just knows Yoongi too well.
He whispers, almost too quiet to hear, if Yoongi wasn’t already listening, “I’m tired, Yoon.”
“I know,” Yoongi replies. He’s tired as well, in the way Jimin means and not in the way Jimin means. There are no springs in their mattress, but it digs into his shoulder when he rolls close into Jimin’s side.
Jimin lets Yoongi hold him, and doesn’t seem to realise how cold he is. He’d been cold too long to truly feel it, anymore.
“Have you eaten yet?” Yoongi asks, carefully, careful not to let his grip get too soft.
Jimin stiffens in his hold, just a little, and the sharp point of his elbow digs into Yoongi’s chest.
Another gust of a breeze, bringing with it the dust of the traffic, and the plastic bag on the floor rattles.
Yoongi traces along the shadow of his Jimin’s face, the dark condensed in the middle of his cheek, and his chest aches. The collar of Jimin’s uniform is all mussed up and ripped at the buttonhole, where he’d insisted to Yoongi a week earlier that he had sewed it shut properly. He’s cold and limp in Yoongi’s arms, and it’s too dark, too late, for what today is.
He lets it go. Just this once.
“Come on, baby,” Yoongi presses his lips to Jimin’s cheek, the corner of his mouth. The skin under his eye, his forehead. Not with any intent behind it, but just light enough to feel, “Come on, sweet thing. You want to get up? I promise I’ll make it worth it.”
Jimin lets out a small sound into the blanket, but he doesn’t try to pull away again. He turns his head at Yoongi’s feather-light kisses brushing across his cheek, finally dislodging from the same position Yoongi had found him in, and he’s not too far gone not to squirm.
“Come on, Jiminie,’ Yoongi croons, swallowing past the grit of the road to try and salvage what’s left of his voice, in the barely-there quiet, and doesn’t try to move Jimin further, “We can have some of that shitty tea I stole from work, as a treat. I can try and dance for you, and I promise I’ll try for real, baby. Or we can sit on the balcony and watch for the shooting stars you saw.”
“Those weren’t stars,” Jimin mumbles, turning away from the brush of Yoongi’s lips on his jaw, and the weight of the world settles sad in his eyes, in the glimpse in the egg-yolk yellow he moves into the dark from.
“You thought they were,” Yoongi says, and he sits up, ever so slightly. Jimin’s hands curl in the blanket when he rises.
The taste of blood lingers on the tip of his tongue, and his fingers twitch in the dark Jimin can’t see.
“They were cigarette butts from our neighbour upstairs,” Jimin doesn’t move to sit up, but he lets go of the blanket before his knuckles pop and snap through the skin.
A car slams on the horn outside, shrill and as droning as the neighbour they had last summer, hitting a tennis ball against the wall over, and over, and over – the same cycle, skipping on the record played too many times to remember the words to, and both of them are tired of it.
The plastic bag on the floor rattles, competing with the curtain’s distaste for the breeze. Yoongi carefully, the worry behind Jimin’s turned back, withdraws what was inside. He thinks of the back of his underwear drawer, the ring so cheap it might turn his finger green, and the cold of Jimin’s skin.
Jimin is watching him, now.
Sunflowers are Jimin’s favourite. Yoongi knows this. He also knows that Jimin likes their faces the most, and sometimes, in the times Jimin thinks he isn’t looking, he’ll gently smooth over their yellow petals and sing to them, if both of them are in the sun.
It’s a little too dark to see the yellow of their petals, and dirt gets under Yoongi’s nails when he adjusts the pot in his grip. There’s dirt on the plastic container of the cupcakes, and he doesn’t care where it spills.
“Happy anniversary, Jimin,” Yoongi sets the sunflowers on the bedside cabinet, so they’re turned towards Jimin. He settles back in the dip he’d left, and reaches for Jimin’s hand. He looks at the liquid of Jimin’s eyes, disappearing when he blinks in the dark, and his heart aches, “I love you. So much.”
Yoongi leans down to press a kiss to the top of Jimin’s head, but Jimin surges up, and meets him in the middle.
--
Yoongi has too many scars.
They’re not healed in the mirror’s reflection. Some of the smaller ones have started to lighten, fading into thin little lines that at first glance might just be a crease from the edge of a table, or a simple slip from cutting carrots. At second glance, if Yoongi dares to wear anything but long sleeves, the red and raw fibres of the scars vein their way along his arm and knot into rope at his shoulder, where they practically had to sew his arm back on.
There’s some on his face. The shower drips in their small bathroom, just off-beat enough that every drop that hits the drain makes him jump. The mirror is still smeared from the last time it had been covered, and the blur of Yoongi’s face staring back at him isn’t one he recognises.
There are bruises under his eyes, and his hair is overdue a cut from where it lies flat and full of exhaust. He pries his fingers from the porcelain of the sink, and pokes at the ridges of raised scar tissue on his cheek, under his eye. His nails sink in, and his shoulder grinds hard into bone, making his hand jolt deeper without him wanting it to.
The shower drips. Once, twice, and the first drop of blood from the inside of his cheek trickles between his teeth. His scars are weaved together with pain, and there is never, ever a time when a part of him doesn’t hurt.
The Yoongi in the mirror glares something grotesque at him between the smears, and his arm trembles against the side of the sink.
There isn’t a lock on their bathroom door, and in the crack he’d left open to stop the mould growing, the sound of Jimin’s light footsteps pass by. They linger outside, and if Yoongi could have looked away, he’d have seen the shadow creep over the crack in the door before it withdrew without a sound.
Yoongi has too many scars. There’s one near the corner of his mouth, where Jimin sometimes kisses before he can turn away, that pulls at his lips when he tries to smile. He glares at his reflection caught in the smudges, the horrible, disgusting image stuck in the flicker of their too-bright light.
He sighs, and he ducks his head away from the mirror. His knuckles pop against the porcelain, and the broken parts of his shoulder click as he tries to move. Without glancing at the mirror, Yoongi puts on his uniform, covering the worst of the scars on his legs and his shoulder, before he flicks off the light.
The two of them don’t have much time together before they both have to work. Jimin is already waiting for him at their rickety table, a mug clutched tight in his hands, and Yoongi holds his sleeves in his palm.
“Another letter from the internet people,” Jimin says, sliding over said letter when Yoongi finally manages to sit. There is more than one envelope stacked on the table, shoved to the side and typed with red underline.
The mornings are sometimes a little harder. Jimin’s mug is empty, and Yoongi’s joints don’t thank him for the extra shifts he can feel from the night before. He shoves the letter onto the pile of other unpaid bills, and resists the urge to rip it apart. It wouldn’t do any good.
“Yoon,” Jimin begins, and falters. He’s wearing one of Yoongi’s oversized jumpers, and he takes in a breath, steadying himself and prying his fingers from the sides of his mug, “I – “
“No,” Yoongi cuts him off.
Another truck speeds by, their tires screeching on a corner, and he tenses. It’s close to a festival, and there’s more deliveries than normal. The roads are that little bit more congested. He glances out at the grey of their window, and the inside of his cheek aches.
Jimin bristles, from the tips of his toes to the threads on the frayed sleeves of his stolen jumper. He glares, sharper than ever from the jut of his jaw, “Don’t do that. Don’t dismiss me like that, Yoongi.”
It’s a grey day today. Their sunflowers by the window are turned towards the glimpse of sky their upstairs neighbour’s balcony doesn’t steal, but their petals droop. The days are getting darker and colder, and the stack of unpaid bills aren’t budging.
“Yoongi.”
Yoongi turns away from the grey, and the clock near the stove ticks ignored and insistent in the background. The grey of the roads is waiting for him, and the fabric of the sleeves he pulls into his palm twinges at how hard he pulls them.
His shoulder gnaws into the bone, as does the ticking of the clock that one of them shouldn’t be ignoring, and when he tries to take in a breath, it catches and burns in the concrete grit in his throat.
Jimin curls his hands into fists, and he rises as tall as he can, “We need the money, Yoongi. I can take on more overtime. I’m ready to dance again, I’ve already talked to Hoseok about it.”
The worry, no longer preoccupied with taunting him over the bills they haven’t paid, the voicemails from their landlord demanding the rent they’re scrambling to make, shifts its attention.
Yoongi knows that he wasn’t supposed to notice that Jimin’s mug was empty, and there wasn’t the stain of tea or coffee that suggested he’d ever filled it. Jimin’s wearing one of Yoongi’s sweaters that only shows a sliver of his shoulder when he shifts, and nothing else. His eyes are empty with the grey of the sky, and he lets slip a little more than he wants to, perhaps.
Another car slams on their horn, and Yoongi hurts. He’s tired, his shoulder intent on grinding the gears of his side into warped, useless pieces of metal that barely turn, just stutter in their place, but he has to keep going. He has to.
If he doesn’t keep going, then it’ll slip away, it’ll slip like water through the cracks of his hands. Yoongi keeps going, because he has to, or he’ll lose it all again.
“Jimin,” Yoongi is careful, especially careful with tempting Jimin’s temper, nowadays. He swallows over a lump of stone in his throat, and the worry traces around Jimin’s bitten fingernails, bloody at the bottom, and the empty rim of his mug, “You’re still recovering. Your biggest priority right now is getting better, baby.”
“I’m trying,” Jimin snarls, and he deflates. He grabs a fistful of his hair, and tugs hard enough for it to hurt, a few of the thinner pieces snapping between his fingers.
His chair rattles as he stands, and he wraps his arms around himself, almost twice. It tugs the jumper closer to the lines of his body, and where his nails dig into bone. He says, quiet, steadying his feet under him, “I’m trying so hard, Yoongi. I am.”
“I know,” Yoongi says at once. His chest aches, looking at Jimin, his heart wanting him to go to him, but he isn’t lying. “You’re doing so well, Jiminie. I’m just saying that you don’t need to push yourself. I can handle the bills.”
The stack of unpaid bills seems to laugh at the conviction he tries to put into his voice, taunting him that it isn’t working. That it wasn’t enough. He can’t handle the bills, yet it isn’t something he’s told Jimin.
Jimin turns away. He closes his eyes, briefly, and he lets his arms sag by his sides. He murmurs, not quite angry but not quite calm, over the morning rush hour and the ticking of the clock, “You told me you were going to give up the delivery job, Yoongi. After what happened.”
Yoongi takes in a breath, and doesn’t let it out. The cold in the very core of him, forever gnawing at the stitches of his bones, yanking along the nerves that fray with every movement he tries to make, burns along each and every one of his scars.
The memories creep in with the cold, freezing him in the outlines he doesn’t really want to remember. The mirror, with the face he doesn’t recognise, and Jimin looking at his eyes – only his eyes, not his cheeks, or the lines clawing their way along the slivers of his skin barely visible under his layers.
His heart is loud, louder with the traffic that’s turned up in volume. Those memoires are hard to shove back, in the growl of his joints stuck in them. The worry pries him back, reminding him, as it loves to, of Jimin’s empty mug, and the unfilled prescriptions Jimin hasn’t chased up.
His voice shakes, as he forces the rest of him not to, “It’s different now. It’s only temporary, until I get a better job.”
“It’s not fair, Yoongi,” Jimin says, and his fingers are trembling, some of his thin, straw hair caught in the creases between them. A glimpse of what could have been tears, if he didn’t scrub his eyes hard with his broken, bloody nails.
“Jimin,” Yoongi begins, and he pushes himself to his feet. The joints of his knees rub away at the cartilage, sawing down into points that give out under his weight, and he steadies his hands on the table a little too hard, making the pile of bills slide from their stack. He tries, “I know you don’t like it. The money is good, Jimin. It’s only for a little longer.”
‘It’s not fair,” Jimin snaps, and he bares his teeth to grind them together. His eyes flick to the scar at the corner of Yoongi’s mouth, right where he kisses sometimes before Yoongi turns away, in case he starts to cry, and he’s angry.
Yoongi’s knees buckle the longer he tries to stand, and the ticking clock doesn’t relent, “Jimin – “
“It’s not fair,” Jimin repeats, and there’s some of his temper, there, that’s common on the grey days when he wants to lash out and hurt. He glares, and burns, “It’s not fair that you’re allowed to kill yourself, Yoongi, and I have no choice but to watch you do it. Why are you allowed to? Why do I try so hard, when you don’t care about yourself at all?”
Yoongi doesn’t have a reply to that. The argument, the retort, it dies before he can think of what it would be. He has to go to work soon, and his heart wants to stop at the thought of it. He can’t let the ticking of the clock that reminds them of their mealtimes go, even just this once.
“I know you’re doing it for me,” Jimin swipes at his eye again, too hard, again, and screws his face up. “I’m trying, Yoongi. Do you not think I’m doing it for you as well?”
“Do it for yourself, baby,” Yoongi says as a reflex, in the moment before he remembers exactly how that single phrase can tempt Jimin’s anger.
Before Jimin can do more than glare, at that, Yoongi flattens his palms against the table to give himself just that little bit more support. He adds, for Jimin’s benefit, “It’s different now, I promise. It’s not for much longer, Jimin.”
It’s not different. It’s worse, but that isn’t something he’s told Jimin just yet.
He sometimes wants to tell him, in the half-dark with the egg-yolk of the streetlamp dripping from their half-closed curtains, where the horrible, no-good day settles painful and stiff in his bones, and Jimin isn’t awake and isn’t asleep next to him.
The words and the fear crawl out of the dark, and demand to be said – Yoongi wants to tell him of the rattle of his motorcycle and the half-fixed brakes, and the lorry drivers he can’t breathe at the sight of. He wants to whisper to him that he hurts, all the time, and he’s scared. He’s so scared, and the memories don’t let him go.
That he doesn’t want to do this anymore.
But Yoongi never does say any of it.
Jimin wasn’t supposed to notice how his uniform trembles, and how his knees refuse to support him. But Jimin knows him, a little too well. He stares, and his shoulders slump into a sigh Yoongi doesn’t hear over the passing traffic.
“I wish you’d listen to what you say to me. I wish I could slash your tires and stop you,” Jimin almost smiles, but it doesn’t reach the grey in his eyes. He pulls his sleeves of his stolen jumper over his hands, and the weight of the world settles heavy in him. He says, not caring of the tears in his eyes, “I love you. So much, Yoongi.”
The worry is still there, the reminder that it loves to whisper, that he’d almost lost this, more than once – and with it, the reason Yoongi starts his bike and takes on more shifts than his body can handle. It will hurt, later, but Yoongi can’t find it in him to care as he forces himself to limp towards Jimin.
Jimin is always careful, careful not to squeeze him too tight, and to loop over where Yoongi’s shoulder usually refuses to bend. He tucks his face into the crook of Yoongi’s neck, wetting the skin, and lets out a shaky breath.
“Please give it up, Yoongi. Please.” Jimin whispers.
Yoongi doesn’t give him an answer. He can’t give it up, not yet, and he squeezes Jimin tight enough for his shoulder to burn.
--
“You should leave me.”
It’s not at all what Yoongi was expecting, and his toothbrush slips from his fingers, smearing suds on the inside of the sink. He spits before he chokes.
The bubbles of Jimin’s bath were from the dregs of their last bottle of shampoo, and they’re starting to pop. Yoongi doesn’t look under the surface of the water.
“What?” Yoongi wipes the corner of his mouth, and he rubs harder when it catches on the raised scar near his lips.
Their bathroom is small, the light far too bright and the mould too big of a problem, and there’s barely enough space to avoid stepping in the water dripping down Jimin’s arm. He dangles it above the tile to trace his fingertips, ever so lightly, over the grout. The washcloth Yoongi had placed under his head threatens to slide off the side of the bath, and he doesn’t move to fix it.
Every so often the shower above him drips, just off-beat enough to make him jerk when it runs into his cheek. Jimin’s hair is slick against his forehead and there’s bubbles caught under his chin, that he doesn’t seem to care to wipe away.
Jimin’s smile is smushed against the side of the tub, and his eyes are still puffy and red, “You’re too good for me. You’re so beautiful.”
Something twists inside of Yoongi’s chest, and he bites on the inside of his cheek.
He was given pamphlets in the hospital, when he was standing outside of that closed door and thinking, despite himself, of the rings. The pamphlets are in that same underwear drawer, folded neat in just the way that distorts the letters that don’t help, really.
Some days, Yoongi doesn’t know what to do, and it hurts, worse than whatever his shoulder can bring up. The days when he is helpless but to watch, and try not to hear his heart breaking. But he tries. For Jimin’s sake.
Yoongi can hear the undercurrent of what Jimin’s saying. He picks back up his toothbrush, hiding his wince in the half of the mirror that is covered by a scarf.
“I won’t be on a shirtless calendar anytime soon, baby,” Yoongi says, and in the corner of his eye, watches as Jimin’s smile slowly fades, the effort of keeping it too much. He tightens his grip on his toothbrush. “I also won’t be leaving you anytime soon. I won’t be leaving you ever, in fact.”
The water must be getting cold by now. By the time Yoongi finishes with his teeth, careful of the inside of his cheek, most of the bubbles are gone.
Yoongi places his toothbrush back into the holder, and stifles a whimper. The night-time shift waiting for him can’t quite reach him even though there isn’t a lock on the door. It’s getting closer around the corner he can’t see, with every drip that beads from Jimin’s arm.
He glances at the sliver of his face in the mirror, and that same something twists again in his chest.
But when Yoongi tries to step away, letting his hands steadying him in place drift away, a single, sharp pain in his knee tears up his leg. It rips and shreds everything it touches, and his leg is kicked out from under him.
He doesn’t realise he’d fallen until his head slams against the tile, and the pain is the first thing that comes back to him – a dull throb along his side, and the new, fresh torment that that comes with landing on his shoulder. Blood, he faintly realises, is spilling from between his lips, where he’d bitten hard into his tongue.
There’s a splash of water that he doesn’t hear. His head rattles with the impact of the tile, smearing his view of the bottom of the sink, the flecks of toothpaste he must have missed, and he lets out a cry he can’t seem to stop. His limbs aren’t his own, and they refuse to obey him.
Wet, cold hands gently, ever so gently, slide under him to pull him into a sitting position. Yoongi’s arm spasms, and he doesn’t realise there’s tears and blood on his face until they’re softly wiped away, and his vision starts to clear.
Jimin drips, off-beat and far too cold, and he doesn’t quite let go of Yoongi. He leans in close, close enough for Yoongi to see the droplets of water caught in his eyelashes, “Are you okay? Can you hear me, Yoon?”
His shoulder sets itself alight – it tears itself off the bone, the way it was, before, and Yoongi can feel it dangling from strings that start to fray under the strain. The pain demands all of him, taking and taking and giving him nothing back, and he can’t breathe through it.
“Hurts,” Yoongi can barely choke out, and the pain squeezes the tears from his eyes, stealing his body from him and wringing it into pieces. He reaches out with his good arm, and Jimin grabs his hand immediately. “It hurts.”
“I know,” Jimin says, and his grip squeezing Yoongi’s hand distracts him, if for a moment. Water continues to drip from the sharp points of him, and he’s starting to shake, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” Yoongi echoes, and the grit and the exhaust he can taste, even though he doesn’t want to, coats his throat with blood. He can see the worry in Jimin’s eyes, and the bad day behind it that Yoongi knows, somewhere, he’s only made worse.
There is still his night-time shift, in the shadow of the streetlamp barely visible through the crack in the door. The bills, the clock by the fridge and Jimin’s grey day – Yoongi tries to move, and his back hits the wall behind him hard enough to knock the breath from between his clenched teeth.
“What can I do, Yoongi?” Jimin’s trembling upsets the remaining droplets of water clinging to the gooseflesh on his arms, making the stain on Yoongi’s uniform grow. His fingers curl into the stain. “Please. What do you need?”
The pain brings out that horrible, no-good feeling that had been weighing him down all day, that made each step that little bit harder and his reflection more grotesque, and Yoongi can’t make himself move.
“You should be the one leaving,” Yoongi’s voice breaks, and he tries to let go of Jimin’s hand. He breaks his gaze, and bites back a sob that burns, all the way through his torn nerves. He says, through the blood clogging his throat, “I’m broken, Jimin. You shouldn’t have to look after me.”
Jimin blinks at him, his hand still suspended where Yoongi had pulled away. The last of the bubbles pop on his jaw, and in the too-bright light, his bones knock into each other when he shakes.
He snatches Yoongi’s hand, quick enough for his nails to lightly scratch the surface. He holds their joined hands close to his chest, and he doesn’t let Yoongi’s hand move.
“You’re not broken. You’re loved, no matter whether you think you deserve it or not, and you always will be,” Jimin insists, and he holds Yoongi’s hand over his heart. Pressing hard enough for Yoongi to feel the beat under the skin.
There’s still pink in his face from the tears of earlier, and his unopened tablets dangling off the side of the sink. But Jimin waits until Yoongi slowly raises his gaze to look at him, and he’s gentle when he wipes the tears and the blood from his face.
He raises himself as much as he can, nude and shivering and crouched on the floor, “I’m broken, Yoongi. You tell me that you’re there, with me, to help me help myself. I don’t believe I can ever stop being broken, but I believe in you.”
With all the energy he didn’t have, before, just on the cusp of sinking his head underwater when he thought Yoongi wasn’t looking, Jimin climbs to his feet. He doesn’t let go of Yoongi’s hand.
“Come on,” Jimin doesn’t pull at Yoongi’s arm, and he tries to smile. It doesn’t reach his eyes, and he curls in his shoulders, just ever so slightly. He tries, despite it all, to mimic Yoongi’s voice, in the way he always does when he wants Yoongi to laugh, “Come on, sweet thing. I promise I’ll make it worth it.”
Another few tears bead from Yoongi’s jaw, and they fall onto the tile. His legs are deadweight, locked stiff from the aftershocks that refuses to fade away, and they wobble as he finally manages to get them under him. Jimin’s grip holds him from falling again as he stands, and he only steps away briefly, to grab his robe, and tie it too tight.
Yoongi’s shoulder seethes, promising of another sleepless night, of another shift where the slam of his brakes will jolt the bone out of its socket. The inside of his mouth is raw, and the blood won’t budge from his throat.
“I should be looking after you,” Yoongi whispers, and his terrible, no-good heart aches. The edge of the sink digs into his spine when he rests against it, and there’s water soaking through his socks to wet the curl of his toes.
“We look after each other, Yoongi,” Jimin says, and he outstretches his hand again, wriggling his fingers. For Yoongi’s sake. “I think I’m ready to eat now, and you need food before you take any pain meds. Come here.”
There’s a shard of worry, the same worry that Yoongi can feel in Jimin’s gaze, caught in the glass of the mirror. It’s only visible for a half of a heartbeat, before it’s gone.
--
It’s three in the morning, and the helmet slips from Yoongi’s fingers. It bounces from the tip of his toes, and rolls into the dark to collide against a piece of wall he can’t see.
He doesn’t have the energy to sigh, to dislodge the layer upon layer of grit caught in his throat, his chest, and his back collides against the locks and latches of their front door.
In the dark, where the neighbour’s yappy dog has finally shut up and the traffic outside has slowed, somewhat, to the point where he could almost pretend he could ignore it, Yoongi grabs a fistful of his limp, too-long hair, and yanks hard enough for the dull throb of pain to take his attention away from his shoulder.
His boss hadn’t paid him.
There had been promises of an envelope full of money, twirling around a smirk, layered just enough for Yoongi not to notice right away that there was some missing. Enough money to chase away the stack of bills neat and slumped on the table, out of where the worry and Jimin could reach.
It would have made everything worth it. It would have let Yoongi convince Jimin to cut back on his hours and give those hours back to his appointments. It maybe, just maybe, would have let him cut back on his own hours to allow him to go back to physical therapy, like Jimin pleads with him to.
The overtime, the extra shifts far past what he could take – and it wasn’t enough.
A few strands of his hair stick in the cracks of his hands when he pries them free, and Yoongi presses the heel of his palms into his eyes, until he can see the smoke of stars. His legs can barely support his own weight, and the curl of his spine catches on the metal of the locks.
The exhaustion, in the way Jimin tries to describe, sometimes, on the grey days when he doesn’t sing to the sunflowers and the worry grins in the crack of the kitchen drawers, snags on the throb of his scars, the red rivets on his shoulder where his delivery bag twisted in to push the splinters of his bone deeper into his flesh.
It builds, on top of the exhaustion from where he’d lied awake for too many nights, listening to Jimin breathe, until Yoongi’s useless, no-good knees buckle and he collapses onto the floor.
It wasn’t enough. Yoongi has nothing left to give, and it still isn’t enough.
The hospital bills are becoming less and less polite, as the days to the deadline dwindle closer, and the threat of taking away their prescriptions becomes less of a nightmare and more of a reality.
He nudges against the shape of his helmet, and he has a sudden urge to throw it as hard as he can, until the cheap plastic shatters into nothing but shrapnel and lost revenue.
It’s dark, with his back covering the slit of light that escapes through the gap under the door. Yoongi feels, in a far-away, distant way, detached from where the unpaid bills and Jimin’s unfilled prescriptions gnaw at where his body tears itself apart, something drip down his cheeks. He’s been crying more, lately, and Jimin is starting to notice.
His boss hadn’t paid him, and maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t at all unless Yoongi agreed to do more hours.
Yoongi tries to wipe his face, but his shoulder jerks loose in its socket, and his cracked lips split under his teeth. His body refuses to be his, anymore, and the inside of his cheek is nothing but scar tissue. Like the rest of him.
The person at the job interview he’d had earlier, in snatched moments he’d paid for, in one way or another, had taken one look at him – their eyes behind their glasses moving from the scars on his face, stretching the polite smile past what they could ignore, to the worn colour of his minimum-wage uniform and the way he begged, polite yet through gritted teeth, for enough to support his sick partner – and slid his application back over the table at him even before the timer had reached halfway.
He didn’t have the face for customer service, anymore.
It was past three in the morning, and Yoongi doesn’t have the energy to force himself to move. His scalp burns where he’d yanked it a little too hard, and the pain gleefully takes over him while he can’t move to fight it.
He closes his eyes, squeezing a few more tears free. It wasn’t enough. It still wasn’t enough.
Some nights, he doesn’t want to keep going, or force himself to get up.
Yoongi forgets, in times when he’s crying in the dark against the front door, why he didn’t just let himself die in the hospital.
A gust of a breeze barely manages to reach him, the ghost of a cold hand twirling around his ankle, teasing at the hem of his trousers, and Yoongi freezes.
He snaps his eyes open into the dark, and at once, the cold creeps into where the worry has already taken hold in his heart.
Another slight breeze laughs through the hallway, teasing, now, across where the tears have dried on his face, and Yoongi’s next breath hitches. The horrible, awful, no-good day that has overrun into the next he shoves somewhere inside with the rest, to overwhelm him later.
His soft, worry-rotted heart skips, and stops. Yoongi’s legs wobble, as strong as wet twigs, and he leans heavy against the wood of the door to force himself to stand. His knees scream at him for the impudence, hissing promises of a new agony, but there isn’t enough air in his chest for him to care.
The broken edges of his nails gouge into the wall he uses to steady himself, limping into the dark that stretches out in front of him. The cold creeping in through the open balcony doors settles in the slumbering shapes of the kitchen, the sleeping faces of the sunflowers, and it shivers in the deadweight of Yoongi’s joints.
Yoongi’s not thinking – he’s not, and it is a little too late to push away the memories of last time.
Back when the bathroom had a lock, and the carpet outside was wet under Yoongi’s socks. When Yoongi had come back a little earlier than he said he would, and found the kitchen drawers yanked out of their places, their contents scattered across the tile and the breakfast he’d left for Jimin still left uneaten.
The breeze, what little of it manages to reach them from the small patch of sky they have, billows the curtains by the side of the open balcony door, spilling the egg-yolk light of the streetlamp outside across the cracks of the floor. The fear flickers in the edges, in the edges where the curtains twirl their ends into the shadow, and in the space the light can’t reach.
His ankle twists on the threshold of the balcony, and Yoongi near collapses to hold himself unsteadily in the doorframe.
“Oh!” Jimin makes a small noise of surprise, and his chair squeaks as he startles. His ball of yarn slips from his lap, and rolls to a stop at Yoongi’s feet.
Outside, the breeze brings with it the growl of the overnight trucks, and the grit sticks in the wet still drying on Yoongi’s cheeks. His socks curl in the threads of Jimin’s yarn.
Jimin’s pyjamas peek underneath a blanket folded where he sits, allowing the light to weave in the stitch dangling between his hook, letting it outline the jut of his bones stretching when he smiles. The steam from his half-empty mug fades away, into nothing against the cold.
“Yoongi,” Jimin beams, far too soft, in the way that he always is when it’s just the two of them, and he says, in almost a laugh, “You scared me. I thought we might be getting robbed again.”
Yoongi’s chest squeezes, and it aches. The memories are stuck in the blood on his tongue, drawing in the worry behind Jimin’s back that dangles from between the bars on their balcony edge, and he tries – tracing along the smile in Jimin’s eyes, the packet of strawberries Yoongi had brought from work, because he knew Jimin used to love them, before – to let it go. Just this once.
Jimin’s face falls, and the blanket slides from around him. He crosses the slim distance between them, and he gently, ever so gently, raises his hand to brush along Yoongi’s cheek. It’s enough to make him flinch.
“You’re crying, my love,” Jimin murmurs, and he swipes his thumb into the path of Yoongi’s tears. He doesn’t seem to notice the ridge of one of the scars against his skin, and he steps closer, “Just breathe, Yoon, it’s okay. You’re home now.”
Yoongi hesitates, before he leans into the soft give of Jimin’s palm, and the memories break into pain. He pries his fingers free of the doorframe, one by one, until he comes back enough for his legs to threaten to collapse. The bones creak under his skin, and Jimin’s bump against them.
“You’re crocheting again,” Yoongi rasps, and it shakes with the rest of him. He can’t seem to stop himself from crying, and the terrible, no-good day that gave nothing back, nothing at all, weighs him down further than he can stand.
Jimin catches him in the loop of his arms, and Yoongi falls into him. His shoulder throbs along the torn nerves it disjoints from, and Yoongi doesn’t have enough in him to ignore it.
“You’re late,” Jimin replies, pulling back to keep him close. He rocks back on his heels, slightly, to hold them both up. Lets out a small sigh Yoongi wasn’t supposed to hear, quiet as he whispers, “You’re exhausted, baby. You can’t keep pushing yourself like this.”
‘I’m fine,” Yoongi tries, and his voice breaks. His legs shake under what little of his own weight Jimin can’t support, and he catches on the strings of Jimin’s pyjamas, right when his arm spasms without giving him much of a choice about it.
The worry is deadweight in his soft, cracked heart, and the memories in the blood on his tongue. Jimin’s knees wobble under the strain of holding both of them, without the strength he used to have.
“Don’t cry, Yoon. I’m here,” Jimin moves back into where the not-night of the seemingly endless city digs its claws into him, right in the worn smiles of his pyjamas and the liquid yolk of the light catching where he hasn’t slept, for too long. He tries to smile, but it’s a little too late to be as sad as it is.
The raw bone of Yoongi’s shoulder creaks out of place as he lets Jimin lean into him for a moment. Just a moment, in that threat of both of them falling. The worry behind Jimin’s back retreats into the dark between the railings.
“Was it grey today, sweet thing? Is that why you’re out here?” Yoongi barely manages to say it, through the tears. There’s a drop or two of water wetting his socks, and he squeezes Jimin hard enough to hurt, hard enough to feel the hum of his heart against his own.
It wasn’t enough.
Jimin trying to pull away makes the jut of his hip hit the side of the railing, and Yoongi stops short of digging his nails in. Jimin doesn’t try to move away again, warm from the blanket he’d wrapped around himself, and he rubs his hands over the gooseflesh of Yoongi’s arms to try and warm him of the cold.
The worry in his eye is one Yoongi glimpses in the crack of the open bathroom door, the slivers of time when the light soaks through their curtains, and Jimin is neither awake nor asleep but looking at him. The worry Yoongi isn’t supposed to see reflected back at him.
“No. It was a good day.” Jimin says, and there’s a glimpse of tears, if he hadn’t wiped them away with the tremble of his hand. He looks at Yoongi, and doesn’t wipe them away again, squeezing harder than he’d normally allow himself, “I paid the rent and the water bill, Yoon. Hoseok’s agreed to let me help with the classes, again.”
An overnight truck slams on their horn, echoing somewhere in the near distance, and Yoongi flinches. His grip on Jimin slides, and Jimin grabs his hands to keep them from falling.
“No more, Yoongi,” Jimin says, just quiet enough for it to nearly fade away. “Please.”
Before Yoongi can turn away, Jimin presses a small kiss to the scar on the corner of his mouth, where the tears couldn’t fall.
Yoongi moves his head to the side, and thinks of the back of his underwear drawer, the bills. And he aches, right down to the bone.
“Come on,” Jimin murmurs, and presses another soft kiss to the corner of Yoongi’s mouth, his heart against Yoongi’s and his crying quiet, “Come on, my love.”
--
Yoongi doesn’t remember what it felt like to die.
He only remembers, when he doesn’t want to, when he’s trying to sleep and when he’s not, what it felt like to be trapped in the fine line between being alive and being dead.
There are only snippets that he can grasp, and even they burn, tear apart the fibres of his head and trap him back along that single patch of road to where he was straddling the line. He doesn’t want to remember, but it doesn’t want to let go of him, sometimes.
The corner he turned, running late and running towards his last shift, having finally gathered enough to buy the ring he hid away to overwhelm him later. The motorbike falling apart under him, just waiting to break apart into sharp pieces of shrapnel and molten metal. The sickly groan of the engine never quite reaching the ears of his boss.
There are some moments he remembers, and some he doesn’t.
The truck meeting him around the corner, and not stopping.
Death tasted like blood, and exhaust. The blood from the pieces of metal embedded in his face, the cracked shell of his helmet dripping its yolk into his skull. Exhaust lingering in the stones of the road he scraped along, leaving layers of his skin behind. Yoongi hadn’t been dead, but he hadn’t been alive, either, and neither side wanted him.
That fine line between being dead and being alive was Yoongi not quite breathing against the concrete, his body ripping itself apart and never, ever being the same again.
It would always be stuck in that moment when the truck rounded the corner, the gap in-between his memory of clawing his way back from the edge and wishing, feeling the world sink away in the steady puddle of his blood growing from what remained of his shoulder, his body, that he’d lose his footing on the tightrope.
Those memories of lying in the wreckage of his bones and bike are what Yoongi remembers. His wheel spinning around and around, over and over on its side.
And always, always the pain – his body begging itself to die, twisted and distorted far past what he could take, and his mind replaying over and over that image of the truck rounding the corner and not being able to fill in the black in-between.
He doesn’t remember getting to the hospital, or being alive after the rumble of the truck’s engine swallowed the sound of his heart slowing. Yoongi remembers waking up on the other side of that fine line, and the pain waiting for him.
Those memories don’t let him escape that moment of death reaching towards him, and being able to do nothing but wait to die. It is the past, but one that won’t leave him.
Now, Yoongi wakes slowly, to the feeling of the springs of the mattress digging into the ridges of his spine. He tries to move in an attempt to dislodge them, but his body refuses to obey him.
The pain was waiting for him, and the springs squeal in the juncture of his shoulder, teasing along the jagged scar tissue seaming it together as if threatening to let them tear open. It’s a dull, throbbing ache along the worn muscle and bone, settling along the entirety of him before he has a chance to fall back asleep.
His eyelashes are stuck together, and when he blinks them open, trying in vain to breathe through the ache that snatches what rest he got from him, he’s met by too much light, and a white ceiling.
A white ceiling, and springs. Yoongi grinds his teeth, and forces himself to sit up. The worry, of not remembering, and waking up in a hospital drags him back along to that single patch of road. Of course, it does. The flimsy blanket falls from him, and the cold of the hospital creeps along the wire of his IV, the burn of his joints straining to keep his arms from trembling.
His vision blurs, smearing the edges of his hospital bed, and he doesn’t remember what led up to this moment, waking up in hospital like there was nothing in-between now and the first time he came back to white ceilings and pain. The memories of before are foggy, meaningless, nothing but shapes identical to every other day that his memory can’t quite fill in the outlines of.
Somewhere in the near distance, he can’t hear the traffic, or make out the words of the chatter from behind the door.
Yoongi is starting to panic, and he feels it, right down to the bone.
There’s a weight on his legs that doesn’t shift when he tries to move them, covering them with concrete that refuses to break. The blanket slips over the side of the bed, and his heart, spinning around and around in the line of his throat, lurches as his hands twitch and fail to catch it.
The wire of his IV manages to pull itself free of the juncture of his arm, and it’s the sight of the blood, gleaming under the light, that pushes him back over that line. He can’t remember why he’s here.
The pain delicately unpicks each and every stitch of his shoulder, letting him feel it unravel, one by one, and Yoongi curls the length of his spine to brace for the impact, a soft whimper escaping through the squeeze of his lungs.
There’s a squeak of hinges that he doesn’t hear, and from where he’s nearly folded himself in half, he doesn’t see them trip over their shoes in their rush.
“Yoongi! Oh, my love.”
Somewhere, in the part of him that wasn’t panicking, remembering what it felt like to be neither dead or alive, Yoongi’s fragile, broken heart aches at Jimin hovering in his peripheral, and tries to calm knowing he is near. The springs under him bite at the shake of his legs.
“Just breathe, Yoon. It’s okay, I promise. You’re safe.” A brush of warmth along the gooseflesh of Yoongi’s side, and it pulls away just on the cusp of touching. Jimin’s voice is quiet, underneath Yoongi’s ragged breathing, “You’re just having a panic attack, love. I’m going to touch you, okay?”
Yoongi flinches, and it’s too sudden for his body to handle, anymore. The pain seizes everything in him, whiting out the worry lurking in his peripheral with outstretched hands, and he chokes on it bubbling from his throat, dripping from the juncture of his arm, until it takes the rest of him.
His hand is gently, ever so gently, pried from where he’d knotted it hard in his hair. It bumps against the bones of Jimin’s hand, and almost manages to jerk free.
“I’m here, Yoongi. I always will be,” Jimin presses Yoongi’s hand to his chest, where Yoongi’s nails sink in the space between his ribs, right where he can feel the beat of Jimin’s heart against his palm. “Try to follow my breathing, okay? You’re safe, and you’re okay.”
Jimin takes some over-exaggerated breaths that Yoongi can hear, under the roar of the truck’s engine in his ears, and the sting of his shoulder gnawing itself loose. He tries, still tensed for the impact, to mimic Jimin’s breathing, and fails.
The memories don’t want to let go of him, but Jimin murmurs something soft when Yoongi tries again, clutching Yoongi’s hand harder than he normally would allow himself.
Every time he tries to breathe, it tastes of the blood on his tongue, and the exhaust engrained inside of him, but Yoongi keeps going. It’s starting to come back to him, now, in the spill of the light chasing away the dark of the roads, bit by bit.
“There,” Jimin says, soft and worried, still breathing for Yoongi’s sake, “That’s it.”
There’s no clock ticking nearby, and eventually, Yoongi pries himself free from that patch of road, and the panic he shoves deep in his chest, to tear him apart later. He raises his head, rattling with stones, and grits his teeth to hold back a cry.
Jimin doesn’t let go, and he pulls a little too hard as he collapses into the chair lodged in the side of Yoongi’s bed. The unyielding light of the hospital lets him hide nothing, and he doesn’t try to wipe away the splotches on his cheeks, or the sad, tired grey in his eyes that trace over the scars of Yoongi’s face. He doesn’t seem to feel the blood trickling down Yoongi’s arm staining his sleeves.
The worry has nowhere to hide, and Yoongi sees it, looking right at him. He swallows over the grit, and the memories still shake in the core of him, enough for the cold of it to freeze his every attempt to force himself to shove them away. Yoongi’s free hand curls into the sheet, and curls it almost until it breaks.
There was a lot of things he never did tell Jimin. About the bike falling apart, again, and the extra shifts he never was paid for. The slow, creeping feeling that those too have nowhere to hide makes him hesitate, if for a moment.
Yoongi rasps, and holds himself up, “What happened?”
The bills – the hospital bills from before that they never did fully pay off, is a reminder that hits him full force. He remembers, distantly, leaving Jimin not asleep to go to work, and the envelopes shoved into their box, and nothing else.
Jimin sighs, and he’s angry, in the tense of his shoulders and the curl of his lips, in the way that only Yoongi could spot. The plastic of his chair squeaks when he straightens, and he slowly grabs the blanket from the floor to cover Yoongi’s legs.
“You collapsed, Yoongi.” Jimin says, letting no emotion leak through, and his glare burns. He doesn’t let go of Yoongi’s hand, even when he twitches, “Exhaustion, and dehydration. You pushed it too far.”
Yoongi doesn’t respond. The pain has not vanished as much as it has subsided, and it croons to him of the shifts he’s missing, the bills for this hospital visit they can’t afford, but it shrinks away for later. There’s nothing he can say that doesn’t feel like a lie.
Jimin deflates, bit by bit. He rubs at the corner of one of his eyes hard, and curls in the points of his shoulders, popping the ripped buttonhole of his uniform that doesn’t fit him quite right, anymore. The wind had caught his hair in the shape it settled, and where he’d yanked it almost hard enough to break it.
It’s quiet, without the traffic and the noise of the neighbours. Yoongi slides his fingers free of Jimin’s, and something inside of him wants to break. It hadn’t been enough to get both of them away from where they started – under the light, against the springs and in the horrible, no-good days neither of them could escape.
The guilt tastes like the blood coating his throat, and he holds his hands against his knees to stop them from reaching back.
“I’m sorry.”
Jimin doesn’t get angry. Instead, he straightens as tall as he can, and his chair squeaks in the quiet. The broken edges of his nails sticks in the loose threads of his pockets, yanking them even looser as he searches. Searching for something, not quite looking at Yoongi but not quite looking away, either, as the blanket slips from him and he doesn’t move to catch it.
It’s then that Yoongi notices the flowers, hiding in plain sight. The sunflowers on the cabinet next to the bed, the plastic of the bouquet half-dangling from the edge and the faces of the flowers beaming at him. That same something in his chest twists, and Yoongi aches.
The legs of Jimin’s chair screeches when he suddenly stands, pushing it away hard enough to tangle his foot in the leg, and upset the springs of the bed. There’s pink in his cheeks, and an energy that he didn’t have, before. He withdraws a small box from his pocket, and Yoongi’s next breath stalls.
“You are a complete pain in my ass, Yoongi. You don’t listen to me, you don’t take care of yourself, and everything you do you do for me, even though you say you don’t,” Jimin doesn’t open the box on the first try, and he says, through the stalled engine of Yoongi’s heart, “I found this when you got it. You forget you almost never remember to put your laundry away.”
The rings, in the back of Yoongi’s underwear drawer. They’re not real enough to gleam, but Jimin holds them carefully, ever so carefully, in his palm, and hesitates before sitting in the space next to Yoongi. He’s warm against the cold of Yoongi’s skin, and the cold of the rings he holds between them.
“I love you, Yoongi. So much.” Jimin murmurs, and his eyes are liquid. He tries to smile, and it pushes against the grey, the weight of the world that never leaves him. “I know you wanted to do it. You’re more patient than I am.”
Yoongi’s too tired, in the way that Jimin is, reflected back at him, to let go the way his soft, fragile heart threatens to break. He can’t, just this once. The rings, and Jimin tracing along the light spilling into Yoongi’s cheeks, dripping into the raw flesh of the scars all over his face.
That face in the mirror, brought into the light the hospital won’t let him hide from, laughing in the back of his mind to the rumble of the truck’s engine, tearing the bone from his shoulder and stretching the rubber of his muscles until they buckle.
Yoongi blinks, and the warmth of Jimin’s fingertips wiping under his eye causes him to flinch. He doesn’t let the whimper slip, but Jimin knows him too well.
He bites hard enough on the inside of his cheek to the flesh to split, and the pain twists the laughter of his reflection into something grotesque. Yoongi moves away before Jimin can wipe any more of his tears.
“You should leave me,” Yoongi whispers, and it breaks, despite his best effort. He pulls his arms tighter around his legs, and ignores how his shoulder burns past what he can take.
The springs shiver with how he’s trembling, right down to the bone. The cold of the hospital sinks through his skin, and Jimin doesn’t move.
“Look at me, Jimin,” Yoongi’s cheek aches, and he feels it split him apart, along the seams that hold him together.
He doesn’t quite meet Jimin’s eyes when he unfolds, and there’s no dark to hide each and every one of his scars and burns. He murmurs, and trembles, “You’re so beautiful. I’m selfish. I’m so selfish. You deserve more than me, baby. There’s nothing left of me to love.”
Those beats in-between are the loudest they’ve ever been. That same sort of quiet that the worry thrives in, without the traffic lurking in the dark and the sound of cigarette butts bouncing off the streetlamp. The truck in Yoongi’s memories growls, somewhere.
Jimin exhales, a sad little thing, and bows his head. The rings in his palm clink together, almost as quiet as the faintest glimpse of a tear dripping from the bone of his jaw. In his minimum wage uniform that doesn’t fit him, remembering to bring sunflowers because they were Yoongi’s favourite - only because they reminded him of Jimin, on his good days - but not remembering to change.
It"s a different type of pain than he one he knows, sometimes, for Yoongi to watch Jimin sing under his breath to the sunflowers, and croon at cats sitting on fences, and wait for the day that Jimin finally pulls away. He would see it in the mirror’s reflection, creeping closer with every tick of their ignored clock in the kitchen. That day was coming around the corner he couldn’t see, and he waits, now, for Jimin to slide out of reach.
The springs creak, and Yoongi tenses. Warmth slides along his side, trying to warm him of the cold, and the staggered, rough rhythm of Jimin’s breathing grows louder. Jimin is careful, always, and moves Yoongi to give himself room to stay near.
“Look at me, Yoongi.”
Jimin has rolled up his sleeves, and his arms tremble. The scars along the length of his arms redden under the eternally-bright hospital lights, and cut jaggedly across the skin.
They are from back when their bathroom had a lock and the water overflowing the edge of the bathtub soaked Yoongi’s socks black. His bones stick out of his wrist, but not as bad as they did, before. Before Yoongi pulled him out of that bathtub away from that fine line he knew too well, away from where Jimin wasn’t dead but wasn’t really alive, either.
“Do you think I care that you have scars, when I have them too?” Jimin rolls down his sleeves, and grabs Yoongi’s hand before he can move it away. He leans forward, and he means it, “Loving you is not hard work. Not if it’s you. You are enough, Yoongi. You will always be enough, always.”
A sob escapes him, at last, and Yoongi squeezes Jimin’s hand hard enough for it to hurt. He can still taste the blood, of his cheek and of his memories, and his IV drips somewhere neither of them care to look.
“It’ll get better,” Jimin promises, for Yoongi. Even though his voice breaks when he says it. “It will.”
They’re Yoongi’s words, reflected back at him. Jimin hadn’t believed him when he’d said it the first time, but Yoongi lets Jimin squeeze his hand back, just soft enough not to hurt.
The worry, out of the dark behind Jimin’s back, shoves away another sob. Jimin doesn’t fight him when he pushes up his sleeve, just a little. There were a few fresh marks he gets a glimpse of, before Jimin shakes his head, and begs him, in the quiet, to let it go. Just for now.
“Jimin,” Yoongi says, far too sad for what he wanted to let slip, and hesitates.
“Let me take care of you, for once. Please. You can put on the plasters later,” Jimin moves closer, and Yoongi lets him hold him. He’s warm where Yoongi’s cold.
The rings have left little red rivets in the middle of Jimin’s palm from holding them tight enough to pinch. They don’t quite gleam, but when they clink together, Yoongi’s next breath hitches.
“I love you,” Yoongi says, and his throat burns. He holds Jimin harder than he would normally allow himself, letting their bones grind together. The bed isn’t big enough for both of them, yet Jimin is small in his arms. “I’m not letting it go.”
“I know,” Jimin’s ring fits him, in the way Yoongi didn’t expect it to. He smiles, pulling open the cracks in his lips and making the bones of his face push against his skin, and it reaches his eyes.
The soft kiss against the scar next to Yoongi’s mouth almost makes him sob, a little. The exhaustion is waiting for him, as the pain brings it to him. The guilt – his own voice in the reflection he doesn’t recognise, whispering to him that he doesn’t deserve it, that he wasn’t enough, and nothing he did would ever be enough – sticks in the blood in his throat.
He shoves it away, if only to grind the joint of his shoulder caught in the springs. The cheap, no-good ring that had survived unscathed in the back of his pocket, Jimin slides onto his finger as if it were the most precious diamond in the world.
Jimin laughs, a small, sad thing, at the sound that escapes Yoongi at the cold of the metal, and the warmth of Jimin’s arms.
Yoongi aches, down to his soft, fragile heart, and he smiles wide enough for it to hurt.
--
They weren’t shooting stars.
The light of the city soaked into where any stars would hide, and no stars would ever be able to peer through the exhaust and the filth hiding away the sky. It wouldn’t make a difference, because the streetlamp drenched everything it stretched to reach in yellow.
The water dripping from Jimin didn’t fall to a rhythm, but fell often enough for Yoongi to know that he was shaking. It was late enough for the dark behind them to break the yolk of the light into pieces that caught in the droplets covering the gooseflesh on his skin.
The bandages he squeezes against his chest spreads the stain on his shirt.
It’s late, as it usually is. The traffic has quieted enough to hear the music of their neighbours upstairs. The chatter of overlapping conversations competing over shitty party music, and laughter dancing around the rims of glasses cut-off by each other.
Yoongi can’t move. Most of him is broken, screaming in a new type of agony he doesn’t quite know how to deal with, yet. The bed had been cold and the pain waiting for him, when he’d climbed into the wheelchair the hospital gave him and trapped his worry in the space between the wheel and the chair, almost ripping off his nail.
It squeaks from his attempts to inch, with the tips of his toes, closer. The puddle forming around Jimin’s feet ripples, and Yoongi’s socks soak up the water.
“Jiminie,” Yoongi’s voice is barely more than a whisper. The word is mangled almost past the point of recognition through the layers of bandages and stitches that hold together his face. He rasps, and reaches for the space Jimin moves into.
“Look,” Jimin steps closer to the very edge of their balcony, and points at a glimpse of light disappearing into the sky. Yoongi’s attempts to tug him back don’t work. He says, “Isn’t that a shooting star?”
They weren’t shooting stars. They were cigarettes the party a few floors up were tossing over their balcony, carelessly throwing them over the edge and letting them fade into nothing. If Yoongi strained to listen, he could hear the conversations mulling on the balcony, competing with the slow, quiet drip of water falling from his Jimin.
Jimin turns, and lets Yoongi grab his hand. He’s shaking, the sharp points of him threatening to break through the skin, and he breaks Yoongi’s heart, sometimes.
The water trickles down along Yoongi’s wrist, bringing the cold with it. Jimin smiles, as much as he does nowadays, “You have to make a wish, Yoon.”
Yoongi tightens his grip on Jimin’s hand, and tries to will his broken, useless body to tug him back from the edge and the drop below. The exhaust still trapped in his chest rattles in his lungs, and the worry in the space between his ribs.
“Do you know what I wished for?” Jimin quiets, and the false, empty smile fades from him. The dark gathers in the water spreading the stain on his shirt, and the grooves of his cheeks. His fingers are limp against Yoongi’s, tilting his head up towards the sky and murmuring, “I wished for things to be better.”
Yoongi stops tugging, and his shoulder screams. The party upstairs continues, and another cigarette winks out of existence behind Jimin’s back. His arm refuse to obey him when he wants to move closer, and reach for Jimin.
“Will it ever get better, Yoongi?” Jimin asks, and his voice breaks. The dark doesn’t distinguish between the water yet to dry or the tears trying to compete for space. The water falling from him quickens at the tremble of his shoulders, and he asks, desperate, “Will it ever stop? I want it to get better. Will it?”
Something in Yoongi wants to cry, at that.
Yoongi thinks of the shoddy wheel of his wheelchair, and the shifty-eyed promises of the doctors skirting around the topic of chronic pain. Or his boss reminding him that trying to sue won’t work, in the end. He thinks of the bills they can’t pay, and the desperate, sad wish to die he had on that patch of road that haunts him.
Yoongi thinks of Jimin singing, the other day, for the first time in months. Or the cheap, no-good rings shoved in the back of his underwear drawer alongside the pamphlets he’s overwhelmed about. The cheap rings that he’ll probably never give to Jimin, which survived the accident he almost didn’t.
It’s late, and Yoongi aches, right down to his soft, no-good heart. He can’t move anymore, but he can hold Jimin’s hand, and stay next to him, as broken as he is.
“It will,” Yoongi says, through the blood in his throat, and he means it. Every word is agony shoved through his stitches, and he can’t smile, yet. He whispers, and tries to anyways, for Jimin’s sake, “It will, my love.”
Jimin doesn’t reply. He tugs on Yoongi’s fingers, so softly that if Yoongi didn’t know him, it would have been nothing.
“Come on,” Yoongi murmurs, and aches, trying to pull Jimin back from the edge, “Come on, sweet thing. I promise it will.”
The two of them go back inside, neither of them letting go of the other.
The balcony door shuts behind them.