Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Seoul, South Korea 

The apartment.

Five years later

It’s been three months, seven days, and thirteen hours since Hoseok learned that Min Yoongi was dead. 

He knows this by heart, because he’s felt every crawling second of time passing like it’s grating against his skin and peeling back every raw layer, leaving him something naked, and bleeding, and awful behind. He knows it, because he felt the news like it was a knife to his stomach, and since then he hasn’t felt a single thing. 

He thought grief would be more. That it would be… something. Agony. Misery. Anger. All of the above, but it’s nothing. It’s an absence. It’s the gaping, black hole that Yoongi left behind that Hoseok will have to walk around carrying for as long as his heart keeps pumping, and his lungs keep breathing, and his brain still resolutely refuses to switch off, no matter how much he desperately wants it to. 

“Hyung.”

Jimin’s voice is a brittle plea from behind Hoseok, which he neglects for the hundredth time to acknowledge. He can hear the sound of glass meeting glass as Jimin shuffles around last night’s offered meal for this morning’s version. The smell of food makes Hoseok’s stomach roll, though he knows it should entice him. He can’t remember the last time he ate something more than a mouthful at a time, and forget feeding. It’s been nothing but the short-term hormonal pills for months. 

Not meant for continued use longer than four weeks . That’s what the label on the bottle says, Hoseok is at three times that amount now, and he’s feeling the effects as much as anything. He knows he looks like death, even just standing up makes his heart race and his head spin like he’s on the verge of passing out. That’s why he doesn’t do it much anymore.

If Hoseok is being honest, and he’s going to be, though the admittance wracks him with shame, he hasn’t even left his bed in a week. His hair is matted, he smells like sweat, and he’s sure his skin is ghostly, almost translucent from living in the dark for so long.

“Hyung, please, ” Jimin speaks again, a note of desperation creeping into his voice. “Eat something. Anything, please.”

He does this every day now, sounding increasingly worried each time. Hoseok wishes he’d give up, that’d he’d just let Hoseok go , but he knows he won’t. He won’t, the way Hoseok didn’t in those first months after everything ended, when they were confined to these same walls and Jimin’s grief was so deep that sometimes it seemed like he couldn’t even breathe through it.

Hoseok had refused to let him drown, but if he had known what he knows now, he would have let Jimin be. Death would be kinder than forcing himself to endure this. And to what end? There’s no horizon for him to look toward, no reward for his agony once it passes by him.

Imagining seven years away from Yoongi felt impossible, but Hoseok managed it knowing that there was a date in sight, a precious far away hope that waited for him. They would be together again, and he made it five years. Five.

He was so close. They were so fucking close . 

Hoseok’s eyes burn with unwilling tears forced to bud once again, and he rolls against his tangle of blankets, drawing them over his face to hide himself. “Go away, Jimin.”

“Hyung–”

“ Go. Away. ”

To his credit, Jimin doesn’t argue. The telltale sound of glass on wood sounds, and Hoseok knows he’s left the food behind some place where Hoseok might reach it if he wanted to. When the door clicks shut behind Jimin, he leaves the air, somehow, even more sorrowful than how it was when he entered in the first place. 

Hoseok shuts his eyes. If he lies still for long enough, he’ll fall asleep, and maybe there he’ll see Yoongi. 

It is, after all, the only place he exists anymore. 

At that thought, Hoseok begins to cry in earnest.

Seoul, South Korea

Kim Seokjin’s house.

Seokjin doesn’t announce his arrival, but the house is still, and silent enough that Namjoon can hear it happen. It’s well past midnight, no doubt Seokjin expects him to be in bed already, but Namjoon is wide awake, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, accompanied only by the coffee mug that is ensuring he doesn’t nod off.

He waits without making a sound, listening in to Seokjin shedding his coat and shoes in the front hall. It’s storming something hellish outside, and not the comforting kind with rolling thunder and rain, it’s the torrential kind, complete with howling wind that scrapes against the windowpanes and makes them groan in discomfort. Namjoon can’t possibly imagine what Seokjin would have to go out in this for, but he’s been insistent about these enigmatic jobs he has to run and tend to. Early mornings, or late nights, rain or shine for weeks.

And, listen, Namjoon gave him time, and space, lots of it. Especially in light of…well, Yoongi. He was a brother to Seokjin, although the two of them didn’t seem to like each other much, they cared deeply in the way that siblings tend to. Meaning, on the surface there was nothing but bickering, but when it comes down to it, they would have given a limb for one another. When they found out about Yoongi’s death, Namjoon braced himself for the worst, and more. After all, he knows the feeling. Losing Taehyung destroyed him in ways he can’t bring to words, even five years later. The early days following his death felt insurmountable, and when Yoongi died, Namjoon vowed that he would do anything he could to ease Seokjin’s pain during that time, the way he had wished for someone to ease his.

Namjoon knows everyone grieves differently, he’s not going to pretend he’s some grand master of mourning just because he had to go through it, and he’s not judging , but Seokjin has been…weird. He didn’t want to talk about it with Namjoon. He didn’t cry about it. He started disappearing sometimes, without much word. For fuck’s sake, Namjoon has visited Yoongi’s grave more times than Seokjin has. When Namjoon prompted him over it, Seokjin had merely shaken his head and said he didn’t see the point. 

“ It’s just a bunch of bones, Joon-ah, ” he had muttered in exasperation. “ That’s not Yoongi.”

Namjoon was a little appalled by how unfeeling the statement had been. Yoongi’s burial hadn’t exactly been…traditional, but then, neither had his death. It was so fucking stupid, even now when Namjoon thinks of it, he can hardly accept that it’s real. A gas line. A gas line blowing in the maintenance room. Yoongi had been working down there with that boy Jeon Jeongguk and three other inmates, and for reasons unknown, the line had malfunctioned and blown up in their faces.

There wasn’t much left to look at after that.

It took the prison almost a month to identify which remains belonged to whom, and then gather them up to send back to Seokjin, who was listed as his next of kin. They buried him in the backyard next to Taehyung, because it felt symbolic in some way, or perhaps just comforting. The idea that they might be together again somehow, in some far away place. Hoseok and Jimin arrived for that, just long enough to shovel the dirt over the coffin, and then Hoseok excused himself to go vomit profusely in Seokjin’s rose bushes, and Jimin took him home after that. It’s the only time Namjoon has seen Hoseok since Yoongi died, and he was a sight for sore eyes.

But no, this isn’t about Hoseok, this is about Seokjin . All he does is work now, and he’s always maddeningly vague about where he is, or what he might be doing. Seokjin used to bring Namjoon to work with him, that’s how they got to be, you know, whatever it is they are today.

House mates , Seokjin calls them. Boyfriends , most people would say. Namjoon doesn’t care, he’s not really peeved about specific terminology, he’s peeved that Kim Seokjin keeps fucking vanishing into the night on him.

Down the hall, the sound of footsteps comes shuffling closer, and a moment later the kitchen light flicks on without warning. 

Seokjin yelps. “ Fuck , Joon-ah, why are you awake?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Namjoon replies flatly, downing the last of his black coffee in one swig, and setting the mug on the counter. He swivels his chair around and turns to look at Seokjin. The rain, as it seems, has certainly gotten the best of him. It’s soaked into his shirt, even under the jacket that Namjoon assumes he was wearing, and plastered his dark hair to his forehead, but he still looks good. Infuriatingly good, Namjoon thinks. He’s come to accept the fact that there isn’t much - if anything - that Seokjin doesn’t look good in.

“Well, you scared the everfucking daylights out of me, way to put strain on an old man’s heart.”

Namjoon tips his head to the side, unimpressed. “For truly the last time, being in your thirties does not qualify you as a senior citizen. No matter how much you think it does.”

“Then tell me why my heart is beating at this rate?”

“Maybe you’re afraid of being caught red-handed,” Namjoon replies snappishly, more short-tempered than he had hoped to start the conversation, but he’s tired, and his words seem to slip out on their own accord.

Seokjin’s half-serious disgruntlement fades to something more serious, and he regards Namjoon with a puzzled frown. “Caught red-handed? Are you going to explain to me what that’s about, or just keeping sitting in the kitchen at–,” he pauses to glance down at his watch, “1:37 AM chugging straight coffee?”

Namjoon withers with something akin to shame, and he lowers his head, suddenly chickening out. “It’s nothing. It’s stupid.”

“Well,” Seokjin swings around and braces his elbows on the table, looking at Namjoon like he’s a riddle to be solved. “Do you wanna talk about it, or should hyung go to bed and leave you to wallow on your own?”

Namjoon falters. On one hand, he doesn’t want to be the one to start an argument, but on the other hand…Seokjin did ask. He sighs deeply, almost burdened, and plops his chin in his hands. “Why are you always gone? ”

Seokjin frowns, the typical crease of his eyebrows pairing with the downturned pout that he refuses to admit he does. “Working. You know that. You of all people know that.”

“I know,” Namjoon mumbles into his hand, “but what kind of work?”

“All kinds.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“It’s a weird career, Joon-ah,” Seokjin huffs, shaking his head. “It’s not like I have a timesheet here.”

“Do you take anyone with you?”

“Is this going where I think it’s going?”

“ No, ” Namjoon insists, though he catches the lack of believability in his own voice, and hates the fact of it. “I’m just asking.”

“Okay, well,” Seokjin turns to the sink and begins washing his hands as if he’s trying to scrub the cold and the rain from them, “if yourfollow-up is going to be something as ridiculous as are you cheating on me, you must already know the answer to that.”

Namjoon blinks. “Um, no ? I hope?”

Seokjin glances back at him, one eyebrow cocked. “The answer is that I never once dated anyone before you, what makes you think I’d date anyone after?”

Although his reply isn’t exactly an explanation for his long absences, it does make something tight in Namjoon’s chest unwind just a bit. He leans back over his coffee, somewhat mollified. “Romantic,” he murmurs. 

Seokjin leans across the table and kisses his temple. “More of a reflection of me than you. Don’t go getting a big head about it.”

“Thanks,” Namjoon grumbles, but he stands when Seokjin tugs him to do so, and feels inclined to follow when he starts shuffling down the hall. 

The bedroom is lit by the warm glow of the lotus floor lamp in the corner between the bed and the sliding glass doors that open onto a view of the backyard and the city sprawling beyond. The curtains, however, are closed, as Namjoon prefers them to be. Windows make his skin crawl, even just the idea that he could be watched inside his own house. Unfortunately for him, Seokjin was rich, and bored when it came to designing said house, so the windows are wide, and plentiful, but Seokjin was kind enough to invest in a nice sliding curtain situation when Namjoon moved in.

Namjoon, already dressed for bed, sinks onto the edge of the mattress and watches Seokjin stride unhurried across the room and into the en suite, tugging off his damp clothes as he goes. He doesn’t look away, or even blink as Seokjin bends over the sink to splash water on his face, and through his disarrayed hair, using his damp fingers to comb it back from his forehead. He looks like some sort of deity, all broad, and golden, carved from some sort of very expensive, luxury material.

It’s moments like these where Namjoon is struck by how profoundly different his life has become in the last five years. Winters spent homeless, wandering the streets trying to find a safe place to sleep for the night, have turned to watching his boyfriend stand in front of a double sink lazily applying his moisturizer that cost 150,000 won the last time Namjoon checked. Namjoon isn’t sure of when exactly this became his reality, and he isn’t sure if he’ll ever stop feeling like an imposer inside a life he was never meant to live.

What really digs into him at the end of the day, he thinks, is that this should have been Taehyung. Taehyung had carved out this pocket for himself in the world, he had Jimin, and they had their home, and it was beautiful. Namjoon was there, it was perfect for them. And now he’s here, and Taehyung is laying six feet under the soggy earth in the backyard, and Jimin is in a condo downtown with Hoseok, just getting through the days.

It’s hard to feel like Namjoon didn’t steal this from them, in a way. So hard, in fact, that Namjoon hasn’t stopped believing it yet.

“Namjoon-ah.”

Namjoon looks up sharply. Seokjin is toweling off his face, looking at him with one lifted brow. 

“You’re brooding again.”

“I’m not brooding,” Namjoon lies. “I don’t brood.” He stands up and walks around the bed, flipping back the covers on his side and diving into them. “I’m just tired, I want you to come to bed so I can turn the lights out.”

“All you had to do was ask,” Seokjin replies with a roll of his eyes, but when he strides out of the bathroom he makes a pit stop at Namjoon’s side of the bed and extends a forefinger to tip his chin upward. “Are you forgetting something before you go to sleep?”

“ All you had to do was ask,” Namjoon replies mockingly, and yet, he leans upward to receive Seokjin’s kiss. His kiss. Even two years into their relationship, Namjoon marvels at the fact that he’s never been kissed by anyone the way Seokjin kisses him. Granted, it’s not like his dating pool was wide, a few girls in high school, and a few, ahem, situations, during his time in the military. Namjoon wasn’t even entirely sure he liked men until a few years ago. In fact, he’s still not convinced he likes men as a population, but rather that he likes Seokjin, and that’s all that matters at the end of the day. Seokjin, after all, will be the first one to say he doesn’t like anyone but Namjoon and that’s that. 

Seokjin meanders around to his side, switching the lamp off before slipping under the covers, leaving a breath of space between himself and Namjoon. He doesn’t care to be touched when he sleeps, which is fine, because Namjoon doesn’t either. 

“Are you doing anything tomorrow?” Seokjin asks in a conversational tone, rolling to face Namjoon. 

Namjoon bunches his pillow under his arm and resists the urge to roll his eyes. “Busy as I always am.”

In other words: not busy in the slightest. Namjoon’s work goes as far as Seokjin’s, meaning that they both do their best to manage the so-called empire Yoongi left behind. Or at least, Namjoon used to do that, these days it feels like Seokjin does most everything in secret. Maybe he doesn’t need Namjoon’s help anymore. 

No, stop that, Namjoon chides himself. You’re self sabotaging. You’re comfortable, and you don’t have a fucking clue what to do with yourself about it. Now you’re just looking for problems that don’t exist. 

“Okay, well, you should stick around here,” Seokjin informs him lightly. 

Namjoon frowns. He didn’t exactly have plans to leave, but Seokjin doesn’t usually ask that he stays. 

“I’m bringing Hoseok and Jimin over.”

At that, Namjoon does a full double take. Jimin, maybe, but Hoseok? Hoseok who hasn’t called, or texted, or even left his apartment in months, as far as Namjoon knows? Yeah, good fucking luck. 

Out loud, he just clears his throat. “And Hoseok—he agreed to come over?”

“Well, he will,” Seokjin shrugs, making the covers rustle around his broad shoulders. 

“Have you seen him much? Since, you know…”

“A few times. I drop by every now and then, just to make sure the two of them are still alive.”

“And does he seem…?”

“Fine?” Seokjin interjects before Namjoon has to endure rooting around for an appropriate adjective to fit that particular question. “Fuck no. He’s a disaster. He’s miserable, he’s grieving.”

Now is the time, Namjoon has an in. He has to ask, he had to check in somehow. 

“And, um, you?” he asks lightly. “Are you grieving, hyung?”

In the dark, Namjoon can’t see Seokjin’s frown so much as he feels it, an acute sensation traveling between them even when he can’t quite make it out. “I’m dealing with it, Namjoon-ah.”

“Right,” Namjoon replies, quieter. He’s not exactly satisfied with that answer, but it doesn’t feel right to push it. He doesn’t want to infringe on Seokjin’s grief, he just wants to know. Why he’s so okay amidst everything. It’s not right. And if he’s repressing all of his feelings now, they’re only going to come back ten times worse eventually. Namjoon would know, he’s been through every angle of grief as intimately as anything. First his parents, then Taehyung when he had assumed him to be dead for those years he spent looking for him to no avail, then Taehyung when Namjoon knew he was dead. Grief is that constant shadow trailing Namjoon, right behind him even when he isn’t looking at it. He wants to tell Seokjin that somehow, to let him know that, while he doesn’t claim to have all the answers, he knows grief. And he knows, most of all, that it’s better sat with than turned away. 

Because it will always, always find its way back. 

But it’s late, and Namjoon doesn’t want to push at a wound that’s still open, so he says nothing of it. Instead, he rolls away from Seokjin with a sigh. 

“I’ll be here if you bring them over.”

“Good.”

“Goodnight, hyung.”

“Goodnight, Namjoon-ah.”

Namjoon shuts his eyes. The covers shift, and a moment later, Seokjin’s warm palm comes to rest on his waist. 

The apartment. 

Hoseok is killing himself. He’s actually killing himself. Jimin can’t pretend any longer that it’s anything other than exactly what it is: a slow, self-suffocating march toward death. 

He almost never eats. He barely drinks. He hasn’t fed since—

And he still won’t talk about it. To anyone. When they buried Yoongi, on a day so cold that Namjoon had to fight to break ground with the steel tip of his shovel - probably the same shovel that buried Taehyung five years ago, was all Jimin could think - Hoseok said nothing. They lowered that little case of bones that the government had deigned to ship back to Seokjin and Hoseok had only swayed where he stood, remained standing long enough to watch Yoongi go under the earth, and then he’d turned and walked away looking like he was two seconds away from vomiting up a meal he’d refused to eat in the first place. 

Jimin has tried. He has, he’s tried it all. He’s been the silent support, a ghost replacing Hoseok’s meals and letting him grieve in peace. He’s been talkative, urging Hoseok to share his feelings instead of containing them. He’s been supportive, offering to clean Hoseok’s room or wash his bedding or run to the store and grab him anything he wants. At the end of the day, Jimin might as well have tried the same things on a brick wall for all the reaction Hoseok gives him. 

He won’t eat. Jimin can’t make him eat. He won’t feed. Jimin certainly can’t make him feed. He barely even takes those pills that are meant to be short term sustenance for succubi. Short term. It’s been three months now, three months and Hoseok must have dropped 20 pounds. People built like Hoseok don’t have 20 pounds to lose. He’s so gaunt he looks like he might be dead already, and it’s breaking Jimin’s heart. It’s breaking him. Maybe even more than losing Yoongi did. Yoongi has been gone for years, but Hoseok has been the only person Jimin could rely on. He was the only person who was really there after… Taehyung. After everything ended. And sure, they barely talked, Jimin didn’t have it in him to talk, but he still knew Hoseok was there, and Hoseok never once gave up on him. 

But Jimin doesn’t remember it being this bad for him. He didn’t give up so entirely. 

A few days ago Jimin asked himself why, why Hoseok’s grief would be worse than his own was, when Jimin was with Taehyung longer than Hoseok got to be with Yoongi. Then he remembered that Hoseok has been waiting every day for five years, waiting for Yoongi to come back to him, and Jimin was only able to be with Taehyung for four. 

Four. 

And it hit him that Taehyung has been dead for longer than Jimin got to love him. And somehow, that was the most unbearable thought he’d had in years. So he cried, for Taehyung, and for himself. For Hoseok, who is wasting away waiting for nothing, and for Yoongi who never got to be a free man again, although he deserved to. 

Jimin cried until he felt as if his eyes would bleed from it. 

“You don’t look so good.”

Jimin looks up. Seokjin is standing behind the couch in one of his nicely-cut suits, all trimmed and tailored to his broad shoulders and the way his waist moves inward in contrast. For as long as Jimin has known him, the man has dressed in business formal for every occasion, but since Namjoon has come into his life as, well, whatever it is that the two of them call one another, he dresses in expensive business formal. Like he upgraded from rental dry cleaner suits to custom-made silk and wool pieces just for the hell of it. 

And look, Jimin isn’t saying that’s a bad thing, Seokjin deserves to be happy as much any of him, but him standing here looking so put together, so unbothered…it does feel like a little bit of a backhanded slap to the face, considering how poorly Jimin and Hoseok are doing these days. Is Seokjin not grieving too? Does none of this bother him? He hardly even blinked when they buried Yoongi, it doesn’t make sense to Jimin. Yoongi was like Seokjin’s little brother, and even if they weren’t exactly close and cuddly, surely he deserves… something . Some tears. A few weeks off work. 

But no, it’s all business as usual for Kim Seokjin, who is looking down on Jimin as if he happened to find some poor, wounded animal on the side of the road, and he’s trying to decide if he should leave it to succumb to its fate, or if it’s worth trying to save.

“Hello, earth to Jimin,” he reaches out an unamused hand and waves it in front of Jimin’s face.

Jimin frowns, and curls back into his quilt, turning to face front where the TV is playing a cheap cable drama. “How did you even get inside?”

“I have a key,” Seokjin replies, sounding puzzled by the question. “My name is on the lease too, you know.”

Right. The apartment that Seokjin rents for them, because Jimin and Hoseok’s names were supposed to be kept off public record at all costs during Yoongi’s trial, every precaution was taken to shelter them from the media and the risk of retaliation, meanwhile Hoseok was terrified Yoongi would fall victim to that. 

In the end the only thing he fell victim to was the boiler room. 

It isn’t funny. Jimin shouldn’t laugh. He isn’t laughing, he’s just…in disbelief. Nothing makes sense right now.

“Did you hear me?” Seokjin prods Jimin’s shoulder, evidently feeling as though he isn’t receiving the appropriate amount of attention as the visitor he is. “I said , you don’t look so good.”

“Yeah, sorry, I forgot to shower this morning,” Jimin lies between his teeth. He had no intention of doing so, not then, and not now. “It’s been a long…” a long what? Week? Month? Five years? “...time,” he finishes weakly, not lifting his eyes from the TV.

“Since you showered?” Seokjin sniffs, “yeah, I can tell. Where’s Hoseok?”

“His room,” Jimin murmurs. “Same place he’s been for the past three months.”

“Well, that’s no good.”

“Hyung,” Jimin twists around, fixing Seokjin with what he hopes is an appropriately withering look. “It isn’t funny, you know. He’s hurting, he’s miserable, and there’s nothing you, or I can do about it.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Seokjin lifts a shoulder in a shrug that says I haven’t had my chance with him yet. “And I never said it was funny. It’s serious, it’s very fucking serious, that’s why I’m here. We’re getting him out of the house today.”

“Yeah,” Jimin mutters, just shaking his head. “Good luck with that.”

“Thank you,” Seokjin replies primly, not an inkling of sarcasm in his voice. “I assume I’ll need it.”

He turns without another word and strides down the hallway in the direction of Hoseok’s room. 

Jesus, he’s actually going to do it. Jimin drags himself off of the couch, leaving the warm shell of his blanket behind so he can oversee this himself. Seokjin trying to drag Hoseok up and out is like an unstoppable force meeting and immovable object; in other words, something is probably going to explode. 

Seokjin knocks once just as Jimin catches up to him, the quick, no-nonsense rap of his knuckles on the chipping white paint of the door. Unsurprisingly, Hoseok doesn’t reply. 

“We should just leave him,” Jimin suggests softly, and perhaps, a little fearfully. “I’m sure he doesn’t want—”

“Jung Hoseok, I’m coming into your room in ten seconds whether you answer this door or not.”

Silence. Jimin, throat tight, begins counting to ten in his heat. At seven, Seokjin turns the knob and shoves the door inward. 

The sight awaiting them inside is, well, more or less exactly what it has been for the last three months. Curtains drawn, keeping out any daylight. Laundry cluttering the floor, dust settled over most surfaces, and Hoseok, a lump under the blankets in his bed. There’s a vaguely musty smell lingering, the scent of neglect, decay, and despair. 

“Good morning, Hoseok,” Seokjin says, never one to be deterred by a little hurdle like this. Not waiting long enough to receive a response, he takes a few long paces across the room to the windows and throws the curtains open. The results are immediate and blinding , daylight flooding the room in a way it hasn’t in months, shedding light on the sorry state of it in a way that darkness didn’t seem to do justice to, thrusting the utter mess of it into sharp relief. 

Jimin opens his mouth, ready to tug Seokjin out of the room by force if need be, when Hoseok startles him by speaking. 

“Fucking shut those right now, Seokjin.”

No greeting. No honorifics. Hoseok well and truly must not care for anything, or anyone any longer. 

“I will not,” Seokjin replies flatly. “Jimin says you’re practically rotting in here.”

Wow. Way to make this look like Jimin’s idea. 

“That isn’t—I didn’t really say that,” Jimin stammers, shooting a dirty look at the back of Seokjin’s head as he does so. “But—but maybe it is time that you get up, hyung.”

“I don’t give a damn what Jimin said,” Hoseok almost growls. “Get out of my room.”

Seokjin draws his shoulders back. “No.”

“ Get out.”

“ No.”

“Get out right now, or I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” Seokjin interrupts him with unconcerned bluntness. “You’ll sulk in bed at me? You’ll think malicious thoughts while not having showered for a month? Get up , Hoseok. Enough is enough.”

“Hyung,” Jimin murmurs, a little more than appalled at his tone of voice. Where is the care? The consideration for Hoseok’s fragile state? Jimin isn’t sure what he expects Hoseok to do in response. Nothing, perhaps, as it seems that’s his choice reaction as of late. But instead, he draws himself upright, the blankets slipping down to his waist and revealing more of him than Jimin has seen in weeks. 

He looks awful. Sick. So thin and gaunt his collarbones jut out of the loose neck of his rumpled T-shirt, the locket he always wears resting between them, framed only by skin and bone. His cheeks are hollow, eyes lifeless, and his hair has grown out longer than Jimin has ever seen it. The ends brush his shoulders, not very unlike the style Yoongi himself used to wear, only Hoseok’s is a good deal less cared for. 

“What do you want me to do?” he spits, eyeing Seokjin with a look of venom. Jimin understands him. That anger, at the universe, at its every inhabitant. Why , why did this have to happen to him? Why does he have to go through this? Why must he suffer in a way no one else has suffered before?

Of course, it isn’t true. Everyone grieves for something or someone at some point in time, but when you’re in the thick of it, it feels earth-shattering. Like no one could have ever possibly gone through this and made it out alive. 

Seokjin, to his credit, looks entirely unphased by Hoseok’s hostile behavior. “I want you to get up, and shower, and I’ll take you and Jimin to mine and Namjoon’s place. I’ll cook, we can all have a meal together.” 

“I don’t want to eat,” Hoseok snaps, dragging his blanket around him like it’s defensive armor. “I don’t want to pretend to be some happy family, it’s not true. Go away. Jimin too.”

“So, what then?” Seokjin challenges, folding his arms over his broad chest and giving Hoseok an appraising look. “You’re just going to lie here forever? Disintegrate into a mattress and disappear?”

“What else do you want me to do?” Hoseok burrows his chin into his blankets, looking, in Jimin’s eyes, like a very distressed child on the point of tears. He wants to step in and hold him, but he knows that if he tries, Hoseok’s anger will return, and they’ll both be worse off for it. 

“Yoongi—,” Hoseok begins, stops as if he has to steel himself, and takes in a rattling breath. “Yoongi is dead.”

“And you’re alive!” Seokjin replies, gesturing widely around the room, as if to indicate all of its belongings and the surrounding world waiting outside. “You’re not the first person who has lost someone, Hoseok. I buried my father before I turned twenty, and Yoongi buried his when he was still a teenager. Hell, when Taehyung died, Jimin and Namjoon helped prevent an attempt at international pharmaceutical warfare far that same weekend—”

Jimin blinks, slightly affronted.

“-Life goes on . People die, and we don’t. And you’re deluding yourself if you think Yoongi would want you to live like this,” he adds, jerking his chin at Hoseok. 

Hoseok glares up at him. The look in his dull eyes says murder. “Fuck you,” he hisses. “I wish it was you instead of him.”

“I’m sure you do,” Seokjin replies without batting an eye. “And for that, I can’t blame you. Now get up and shower, or I swear to you, I will drag you into the bathroom myself, and it won’t be pretty.”

For a long moment, Jimin is sure, absolutely positive, that Hoseok is going to launch himself off of the bed and maul Seokjin within an inch of his life. He’s braced for it, expecting that he’ll have to come between them and drag Hoseok back. Then, very slowly, and to Jimin’s genuine shock, Hoseok stands. Albeit with some apparent difficulty, but he actually gets up. He turns, refusing to look at either of them, and walks out of the room without another word. 

A moment later, Jimin hears the bathroom door open, then clicks shut again just as quickly, and he breathes a sigh of relief that he didn’t know he was holding. 

“God,” he exhales shakily, bracing one hand on the door frame. “I didn’t think he would actually listen.”

“Well, I did,” Seokjin shrugs, lifting his wrists and adjusting the cuffs of his suit primly. “He was Yoongi’s boy, he probably missed having someone to boss him around.”

Jimin doesn’t reply, and the tiny smile slipping up the corners of Seokjin’s mouth drops. 

“Sorry. Too soon. But c’mon, we’ll all know Yoongi is kind of fucking bossy.”

Was . Yoongi was bossy. Jimin doesn’t say anything

He doesn’t have the heart to correct him. 

Hoseok doesn’t remember the last time he showered. He’s well aware that that’s disgusting, he just doesn’t particularly care . The other thing that he doesn’t remember is any of it being this difficult . Just the task of washing his hair feels like an arduous burden, one that makes his muscles burn in protest, and his vision swim like he’s on the verge of blinking out of consciousness. Natural consequences, he supposes, of not eating, not moving, and popping pills in place of having sex.

Hoseok knows he won’t last much longer than this. But again: he just doesn’t care enough to change that.

Maybe this is the end of the line for him. Maybe he should just go willingly, let Seokjin make him a last meal, savor what little semblance of togetherness he has left in his small, dark life, and when he gets back here, he’ll…what, kill himself? After everything? It seems a harsh call to make, but then, what have the last three months been if not Hoseok slowly and painstakingly taking his own life?

He at least owes it to himself to make it quick. To minimize any further suffering. There are pills in the cabinet, Jimin’s sleeping meds, and painkillers. Hoseok is sure if he mixed both of them and took it in copious amounts it would be enough to stop his heart, especially given the fact that he’s fifteen pounds underweight and sick as it is. A stiff breeze would probably be enough to stop his heart at this rate.

He should do. Rip the bandaid off. There’s nothing left here for him to–

“Hoseok,” Seokjin’s voice sounds through the wall, followed by a fist banging thrice on the door. “Hurry up, I told Namjoon we’d be there by 5:00.”

Oh, fucking Namjoon. Namjoon and Seokjin and their perfect, domestic little life. Hoseok heard they want a dog now. Maybe they also happen to have a white picket fence and a fucking baby on the way, fuck , it makes Hoseok sick to his stomach.

And deep down, he knows he should be happy for them, knows that his anger is vindictive and unnecessary, that the two of them are just as deserving as anyone of a hopeful beginning, but part of Hoseok (the one that’s still buried in denial) knows that seeing the two of them together hurts like hell because more than anything else, that was supposed to be him and Yoongi. One day .

And it never will be. How is he supposed to live knowing that? He can’t. He won’t.

Hoseok shuts the water off and towels himself down. At some point someone - Jimin, no doubt - cracked the door and placed a fresh change of clothes on the edge of the sink, and Hoseok pulls them on, a little disturbed at how the jeans, once form fitting, hang off of his waist, how the T-shirt gives the impression it’s draped over a skeleton more than an actual living, breathing person. And his hair–well, it looks better now that it’s clean, but it’s still wild and unkempt. He doesn’t know how to fix up hair this long, so he just dries it viciously and lets it fall lank and unstyled around his face.

When he swings the door open and shuffles out, he’s unsurprised to find Jimin waiting on the other side of the door like a little puppy, a little anxious around his eyes but obviously making an effort to appear neutral.

“You look good,” he attempts generously, lifting a hand like he’s going to touch Hoseok, then evidently deciding better of it and pulling back.

“I look like shit,” Hoseok replies in a grunt. “At least have the decency to be honest.”

“I think you look good,” Jimin says, softer this time, a little hurt, and dropping his gaze downcast. The sight of his shoulders drooping makes Hoseok very fleetingly feel a semblance of normal human emotion again. Sympathy for Jimin, his friend who has looked after him all these months, thankless, ugly work, and Hoseok no longer even has the decency to be kind to him. 

He might have opened his mouth and uttered something that could be called an apology, but Seokjin rounds the corner and gives him a quick once-over.

“Well, you look a little better,” he announces, lifting a shoulder. “How do you feel?”

“Like my boyfriend is dead, and I don’t want to go to your house and pretend like everything is great,” Hoseok replies, waspishly at best, and downright venomous at worst.

Seokjin claps his shoulder and heads for the door. “Great! I’m sure Jimin feels the same way. Get your shoes, I’ll drive.”

The drive to Seokjin and Namjoon’s place is charged, to say the least. Seokjin makes several attempts at conversation, which Jimin bravely tries to sustain, and Hoseok ignores entirely. He’s more intrigued by the way immovable Seokjin seems to grow almost nervous the closer they get. As they descend into the city center, the signs show in his body language like the tell of a lie: fingers drumming on the steering way, dodgy eye contact, the way he ends his sentences a note higher than he usually would. If it were anyone else, it would go unnoticed, but Seokjin doesn’t waver.

Something has him on edge, and for good reason. 

They slide smoothly into the double garage, pulling alongside the black Lexus tucked on one side. Seokjin cuts the engine and gets out quickly, grabbing the door for Hoseok as soon as he does so. Hoseok moves toward the side door leading up from the basement into the rest of the house, the same door he’s entered through every other time he’s been here, but Seokjin seizes his elbow and yanks him in the opposite direction.

“Not that one. There’s, uh, a mildew problem in the basement, don’t wanna be on those stairs. We’ll take the front entrance.”

Jimin looks mildly puzzled. Hoseok, quite frankly, doesn’t care enough about any of this to argue, so he allows himself to be led around to the front steps, where Seokjin punches in the door code and lets himself inside.

“Joon-ah,” he calls out as soon as the door swings open. “I’m home.”

After a brief pause, followed by the sound of bare feet on wood, Namjoon rounds the corner, a look of poorly-disguised surprise on his face. “Hoseok,” he blinks widely. “You came.”

“Against my will,” Hoseok mutters, brushing past them and showing himself into the living room where he sinks down into one of the amply cushioned couches and folds himself there, arms wound so tightly over his chest that they may never come unraveled.

Seokjin follows, his arm around Namjoon’s waist and a hand on Jimin’s shoulder like he’s shepherding them both into the room. There’s that look on his face. Doubt . Worry. Something is so clearly throwing him off, and if Hoseok were invested in being here at all, he might have asked, but he’s intent on getting this over with as soon as possible. Minimal conversation, minimal interaction. It’ll make it easier for when he goes home and–

“I want to talk to everyone,” Seokjin announces suddenly, blunt, and very to the point. Namjoon shoots him a confused, sidelong glance. 

“You–you do?”

Okay, so whatever bullshit Seokjin is on, Namjoon is clearly not in on it either. Apparently they’re not as deep in cahoots with one another as Hoseok originally thought.

“Yes, I do.”

“About…what, exactly?”

Jimin is staring at Seokjin quizzically, looking like he was about to ask the same question if Namjoon hadn’t beat him to it.

“Well, a lot of things,” Seokjin swallows, making his Adam’s apple bob. He directs Namjoon to the couch and propels Jimin in the same direction. “Important things.”

Namjoon sits warily, Jimin following suite but picking a cushion closer to Hoseok. Hoseok wishes he wouldn’t. Just being near other people makes his skin prickle with discomfort. With three sets of eyes staring at him expectantly, Seokjin seems to falter a bit where he’s standing at the head of the room, hands clasped like he’s about to present a school project.

After a moment of confounded silence, Namjoon clears his throat. “Hyung. You wanted to…talk?” he gestures vaguely at the gathered audience of three, including himself.

“I’m gathering my thoughts,” Seokjin replies snippily, nervously adjusting and readjusting his cuff links like some sort of unconscious tic. “Do I look like a fucking politician to you? I wasn’t born to stand around giving speeches.”

Hoseok thinks privately that, with his unshakeably handsome features and well-fitted suit, there’s no one in this room that makes a better poster boy for politics than Kim Seokjin, but that’s neither here nor there, so he keeps his mouth shut until Seokjin opens his.

“As I’m sure you’re all aware,” Seokjin begins, following a deep inhale, “three months ago Yoongi—”

“No,” Hoseok replies, the word punching out of him almost before he has time to even think of it. He stands up so quickly his head swims, and he can feel Jimin’s eyes dart to him nervously. “If you think you’re going to drag me here so we can all share our feelings about this, know that I will walk out of here right now. I’ll take your car, I don’t give a shit.”

“Sit back down,” Seokjin tells him, giving him the sort of look someone would give an unruly, dramatic child when they’re misbehaving. “If you could stop wallowing in self-pity long enough to listen to anyone else, you’d realize you’d kill to hear this.”

Maybe it’s the sheer finality in his voice, or the way he doesn’t coddle Hoseok in the slightest, but Hoseok feels slightly humbled by his sharp, unyielding tone of voice. Humbled enough, at least, that he retreats back to his seat, though fuming a little now. 

“ As I was saying , three months ago Yoongi was involved in an accident at the prison he was incarcerated at, which supposedly took his life–”

“ Supposedly ?” Namjoon interjects abruptly, the edge in his tone matching the way Hoseok’s heart skips a very necessary beat. “What do you mean supposedly? We buried him.”

“We buried a handful of bones stolen from a cemetery in Dobong-gu ,” Seokjin replies matter-of-factly. “Because it made it all believable.”

Jimin’s eyes are as wide as saucers at Hoseok’s side, and Hoseok is glad he speaks, because he isn’t sure he can for himself. “Made what believable?”

“His disappearance. He needed to go underground at all costs, and there was no better way to do that than to stage an elaborate, tragic death and make sure every single person around him thought it was true. Except for me of course. Someone had to help out with the details, this wasn’t exactly a one-man operation.”

Hoseok’s throat is so dry he isn’t sure the words will come out, but he manages to choke them up like a half-croak. “What are you saying?”

Seokjin tips his head and gives Hoseok a look that’s almost pitying. “I would explain more, but I really don’t think you’re going to believe me unless I show you so…” he turns slowly, facing the empty doorway behind him, and clears his throat. “Yoongi-ah?”

Yoongi’s heart feels like it’s jumping in his chest. Frantic, painful attempts at leaping straight out of his body and onto the floor, but its urgent beat is nothing compared to Hoseok’s. Yoongi can feel it as much as he can hear it, a racing pulse strumming along in his chest alongside his own. Namjoon’s, Seokjin’s and Jimin’s are there too, but they’re faint in comparison to Hoseok’s. They’re bonded, the two of them, Yoongi could feel Hoseok’s heartbeat from oceans away if he wanted to, but it’s been so long since they’ve been this close, months now, he forgot how strong it is, the incessant pull demanding that Yoongi go to his side and stay there.

It’s been five years, five since Yoongi touched Hoseok. Sure, he sat across those steel visitor tables for fifteen minutes at a time, able to look but not feel, but that was a sorry substitute for being, truly being, with one another. He’s wanted it so badly for years now, sometimes wanted it so much that his teeth hurt from it, his skin burned, and his chest ached with some insatiable need that refused to truly go away, but now, on the precipice of seeing him again after so long, after staging his fucking death , Yoongi is sort of…terrified?

Maybe he didn’t do this right. Maybe he should have told Hoseok. 

No, Yoongi shakes his head, physically forcing himself to remember why he did this. he had to keep it a secret, that was the whole point. That everyone, save for Seokjin, grieve and mourn, and react appropriately, so any stray eyes left watching them would believe that Min Yoongi well and truly perished in that freak explosion. It was a cruel, but necessary sacrifice, and one that Yoongi was willing to make because at the end, he would reunite with Hoseok again, and everything would make sense.

Only now he’s pressed flat against the hallway wall, having crept up from the basement where Seokjin relegated him, and Seokjin is calling for him to come out like some sort of surprise entertainer at an event, and Yoongi feels very bizarrely like he might actually throw up.

From the living room, Seokjin coughs. “Hello, Yoongi, you’re making me look fucking crazy out here.”

Jesus, Yoongi exhales narrowly through his nose, steeling himself enough to fumble for his wooden can and propel himself forward. Get a grip, Yoongi. This is far from the most terrifying thing you’ve ever done.

Seokjin huffs, audibly losing his patience. “ Min Yoongi, walk into the fucking living room right now.” 

With his heart lodged firmly in his throat, Yoongi doubles down on his cane for support (he doesn’t usually need it this much, he swears, it’s just that he feels a little unsteady on his feet just now. And can he be blamed for that under these extenuating circumstances?), and steps toward the waiting doorway. 

Although there are four people gathered there, three of which he knows will be equally shocked at the sight of him, Yoongi only has eyes for one. He’s there, right in front of Yoongi, not even ten paces away. 

Hoseok. His Hoseok. And there are a lot of things Yoongi could say or do or think, but the undeniable first that comes to mind is how devastatingly frail Hoseok looks, thin and hollow, and dark. Yoongi has a lot of thoughts on that, all of which, he’s sure, will come to him in due time, but right this very second, as Hoseok gets to his feet with his mouth open and a look in his eyes that’s frankly indescribable, Yoongi can only manage two words. 

“Hi, Dove.”

There’s a second, or maybe ten, that seem to stretch on for a small eternity. Hoseok doesn’t move. Yoongi knows for a fact that he doesn’t breathe. Jimin has taken in his breath sharply, and Namjoon is snapping his head back and forth between Yoongi and Seokjin like he’s trying to gauge which one of them is lying, because someone must be, right? 

Yoongi takes another step forward, intent on taking the shortest and most direct path to Hoseok’s, but Hoseok moves first. 

Not to Yoongi. To Seokjin. He walks slowly, almost trancelike, right up to Seokjin, staring at him with that almost-stricken expression for so long that Yoongi is about to interrupt and ask if he’s missing something, when Hoseok lifts a hand, sudden and sharp, and slaps Seokjin hard across his cheek. 

Namjoon lets out an indignant cry, jumping up as if he’s going to rush Hoseok, but Seokjin holds up a hand that halts him in his place. 

“It’s alright,” he says calmly, maintaining a perfectly even tone in spite of the red mark blooming across his right cheekbone. “It’s fine.”

“You bastard,” Hoseok breathes. His chest is rising and falling rapidly, and through the thin material of his shirt, Yoongi could easily count each rib where they jut out of his skin. “You—for months. You knew. You—”

Yoongi has the feeling he should reach in and pull Hoseok away while he still can, while Seokjin is still stone-faced and unrattled, and Hoseok is still speaking instead of biting his head off. But the second Yoongi hesitates, is the second Hoseok takes to launch himself at Seokjin in a bodily tackle that sends them both hurtling toward the floor and landing with a crash in a tangle of arms and legs. 

“You fucking knew, you let me be miserable for months, and he was alive the whole fucking time—” Hoseok is gritting out between clenched teeth. His hands have moved to Seokjin’s throat, circling there in what can only be a very well executed attempt at strangulation. If it were anyone else beneath him, Yoongi would praise Hoseok’s technique, but unfortunately his victim is Seokjin, and his murder by Hoseok’s hands would not go down very well. 

The second the two of them hit the ground, the room erupts with noise. Jimin gasping “ hyung!”, Namjoon surging forward roaring “Hoseok, get off of him!”, and Seokjin trying with admirable calm to deescalate. 

Namjoon seizes Hoseok by his collar, dragging him with a strength that’s disproportionate to Hoseok’s skeleton of a body, and it’s then that Yoongi realizes he really should have stepped in earlier. 

“ Don’t, Namjoon, let him go,” Yoongi snaps, and Namjoon relinquishes him immediately with the look of a puppy who knows he’s misbehaved. 

Seokjin is peeling himself off the floor, straightening his jacket and mussed hair. “It’s fine,” he repeats, sounding very self-assured about it. “I understand. I deserve it.”

“Yeah, you fucking do,” Hoseok snaps. 

Seokjin shakes his head. “Are you even going to look at Yoongi, or just keep trying to cut my head off?”

It’s then that something in Hoseok seems to crumple. The fight is extinguished from his tense posture in one breath, and instead of drawing himself up,he sinks down. Down, down, down, into a crouch that he draws himself into, hugging his knees to his chest and dropping his face onto them as if he’s hiding from the rest of the room. 

“I can’t,” he chokes, muffled by his clothing, but not enough to conceal the sound of tears in his voice. 

Yoongi’s heart feels like it’s being forcibly shoved through a meat grinder and wrenched out the other side in tatters. He shoots Seokjin a look that says something like clear out and give us a moment if you know what’s good for you , and Seokjin makes a brief motion with his hand that summons Jimin and Namjoon to his side. Yoongi doesn’t watch them go, he only knows that they do by the sound of their footsteps retreating down the hall into the kitchen, and it’s then that Yoongi lowers himself too, crouching, because if he kneels his leg will cramp up, and he doubts he’ll be able to stand again.

“Hoseok,” he beckons, as soft as he can muster now, because Hoseok deserves only tenderness from him. “Hoseok, look at me please. Look at me, I’m right here.”

Hoseok shakes his head furiously, not lifting it for a second. His shoulders shake, wracked with crying that Yoongi knows he’s trying and failing to repress. “You’re dead, they told me you were dead. Everyone said it, they sent your body back, we-we buried you.”

“I know,” Yoongi whispers. “I know, all of it, I know. And I promise you, I have an explanation for everything, and I wanted more than anything to tell you. Every single day, Dove, I’ve missed you, and I’ve wanted to see you.”

He almost says you don’t know what it was like, being free, being so close to you but not able to see you , and it’s true, Hoseok doesn’t know what Yoongi has felt the past three months, but Yoongi doesn’t know what Hoseok felt either. He’s beginning to think he wasn’t the one who had it worse. It’s one thing to spend three months with no one but Kim Seokjin for company, knowing that at the end he’d have Hoseok back, and it's an entirely separate thing to go months on end thinking the person you love has died. 

“I’m sorry,” he says instead, meaning it from the very bottom of his heart, from the pit of his stomach, and beyond. From the guilt running through him, the remorse for dragging Hoseok through this. For just one moment, the means to an end, the reasoning for why doesn’t matter, the only real thing is that Hoseok was hurting terribly, and it’s Yoongi’s fault. “I’m so sorry, Hoseok. I’m here now, I’m real, I promise you. Look at me, Dove, I’m right here.”

The following moment is filled only by Hoseok’s ragged breathing. He sounds like he’s trying to control himself, to steady his breath, but finding little success. Finally, after a pause in which Yoongi feels like his heart might be bleeding out wherever it’s sitting in his chest, Hoseok slowly, slowly lifts his chin and meets Yoongi’s gaze.

Up close, he looks smaller and sicker than Yoongi has ever seen him, like his skin has shrunk against his bones, and the life has been siphoned out of him, but under it all there’s an awe dawning on his everlastingly beautiful features that makes him look like himself, and Yoongi watches as it blooms until something seems to stretch and snap in Hoseok and his watery eyes overflow.

“ Yoongi ,” he sobs, and pitches forward to throw his arms around Yoongi in the kind of embrace that a drowning man gives a lifesaver at sea. 

Yoongi falls into it, knee be damned. If he can’t stand after this, it’s worth it. He’ll live. Five years he’s waited for this, five fucking years, it’s everything he dreamt of, everything he lay awake at night twisting his bedsheets in hand over, riddled with the kind of desperation that drives a man to the edge of insanity. 

This, all of this. Every part, every sensation. Each angle of Hoseok’s body pressed into his, the way his hair brushes against Yoongi’s face, soft and ticklish. His sweet scent unfurling slowly, like a flower bursting into bloom. Yoongi drinks it in like the last bit of water in the desert, savoring each note and then inhaling more. He missed this the way he would miss breathing if he were being held underwater. 

“I love you,” he whispers against Hoseok’s throat, lips brushing soft skin that still rings familiar under his touch. Time has changed, but they haven’t, not really. Still the same bodies, the same birthmarks, and freckles, and curves, all of it so divine in its familiarity. “I love you so much, Dove. I love you.”

“I missed you,” Hoseok says, barely more than a whimper, and a disbelieving one at that, like he can’t quite comprehend that Yoongi is in his arms. “I missed you, every day I–every–three months.”

“I know, I know, I know,” Yoongi shushes him, threading his fingers through Hoseok’s hair. It’s soft, and clean, as if he recently washed it, but grown out longer than Yoongi has ever seen it. It’s beautiful on him, everything is beautiful on him. “I’m sorry, Dove, it’s not what I wanted, but I had to, I had to make sure everything happened exactly right.”

Hoseok pulls back shakily. He seems unwilling to release Yoongi, so even when he withdraws his hands move forward and up, cupping Yoongi’s face and holding him near, touching, feeling , as if he’s still trying to make sure that every single part of this sensory experience is real. “But– how?”

“Fire, and Seokjin, and a few bribes changing hands,” Yoongi tries for a smile, hoping he’ll elicit one from Hoseok too. “It’s not so hard to fake your own death, as it turns out. But staying underground was important, the whole point was making sure everyone believed I was dead, and that meant it had to be believable from every angle. And I couldn’t tell you, and I’m so, so sorry, Dove. I am. I wanted to let you, just you know, but Seokjin-hyung said I shouldn’t, and he was right. But it was awful. It hurt . I’m sorry.”

Hoseok stares at him for a long moment, his wide, watery eyes brimming with yet-to-fall tears, and for a terrible moment Yoongi wonders if forgiveness won’t be granted (and he knows, deep down, he couldn’t altogether blame Hoseok for it), and then Hoseok tips forward and winds himself around Yoongi again. His breathing, so shallow and rapid, each exhale a soft puff against Yoongi’s neck, and his heartbeat - oh - it feels perfect, the way it fits inside of Yoongi’s like a tiny echo when he tunes into it. Two reverberations bouncing in harmony with one another, like music that only Yoongi can hear. He wishes he could describe it to Hoseok, how beautiful they sound together, like they were always meant to be that way. 

“Yoongi,” Hoseok says again, his hand coming to run through the short back of Yoongi’s hair. He sounds like he’s saying Yoongi’s name just to say it, now. Just to feel it roll off of his tongue, each sweet vowel and consonant filling his mouth with sound. “Yoongi, Yoongi. I love you,” he breathes, his mouth brushing over Yoongi’s throat. “I love you. I miss you, I missed you. I love you so much, I want to talk to you, I want to tell you everything, I want to ask you–but I–”

“I know,” Yoongi brings his palm to the nape of Hoseok’s neck, pressing there to steady him. “We’ll have time for all of it, I promise. And there’s more I want to tell you, but I need to talk to everyone else too, alright? I’m going home with you today, that’s what matters. You won’t have to sleep alone tonight, Dove.

The five of them get caught up as best as they can under the duress of the circumstances at hand. Namjoon seems to be battling the opposing forces of grateful shock, and sourness in Hoseok’s direction for tackling Seokjin to the floor and trying to strangle the living daylights out of him. 

Yoongi still can’t believe Seokjin and Namjoon , of all people, ended up together. He honestly kind of thought Seokjin was one of those rare people who lived his entire life completely unmoved by feelings of love, romantic or otherwise, and honestly Yoongi had kind of envied him. This is the perfect career path for someone immune to the human condition, but as it turns out, Seokjin has his weaknesses too, in the form of one broody Kim Namjoon who is now watching Hoseok out of the corner of his eyes as if he might suddenly go rabid, leap up and start attacking people at random. 

For Hoseok’s part, he doesn’t look like he plans on moving any time soon. He seems a little dazed still, eyes glassy as if he hasn’t entirely comprehended the events of the last couple of hours yet. Where Yoongi goes, Hoseok follows with a hand wound into his sleeve, intent on not letting him stray far. 

Jimin seems relieved, more than anything, but notably quiet. He greets Yoongi almost as if he were going to hug them, but seems to remember a second before that the two of them don’t exactly do that. Either way, for the first time in his life, Yoongi is glad to see him. To see all of them. 

The loft apartment (if it can even be called that) that Seokjin has been storing Yoongi at for the duration of the last three months contained the bare essentials to keep a person alive, but Yoongi was bored out of his mind. It’s better than prison, sure, but somehow the tantalizing taste of having his freedom so close, yet just out of reach for mere weeks longer, was somehow almost as punishing as his years in prison. 

And Seokjin, Seokjin told Yoongi Hoseok was managing. “ Upset, but managing.”

Those were his exact words, Yoongi trusted that while Hoseok was no doubt struggling he was at least getting by, but looking at him now, Yoongi isn’t so convinced. He looks thin enough to be picked up and carried away by a stiff breeze, his face has hollowed out, and the flush of life he usually carries has been extinguished. Beneath the sweetened scent of his contentment at being next to Yoongi again, there’s something darker, like a deep char blackening the air. He smells hungry. He smells sick. Yoongi despises that, knowing that it’s his fault in no small way.

Seokjin cooks while they catch up. Namjoon’s tension lessens as they all get a meal in them, and he starts warming to Hoseok again, and they all talk, for once, of nothing important. Stupid, trivial things Yoongi missed while he was locked up. Celebrities who have had falls from social graces. Politicians with melodramatic sex scandals. The dog that Seokjin and Namjoon briefly owned. There’s no discussion of business, or crisis, or the unmentioned storm on the horizon that Seokjin knows of as well as Yoongi does, but chooses to keep his silence without even having to be asked. 

Yoongi is glad. They deserve one night like this. Normal, as if they were all just friends and couples gathered for an unremarkable evening the way that regular people do. It feels sacred, in a way. 

And it feels false. Yoongi knows it won’t last beyond the warm glow of this night, but he won’t be the first one to break the fantasy, so he says nothing and lets it stretch on a while longer.

It’s long since gotten dark by the time the evening winds to a natural end. Hoseok, fragile and exhausted, moved to the couch while Namjoon started the dishes. Yoongi peeks in on him every now and again, watching the way his eyes droop and his shoulders sags, body fighting against the inevitable until it gives out and his head lolls onto one of the pliable cushions and he dozes. Jimin is on the opposite end of the couch, keeping a not so distant eye on Hoseok almost as much as Yoongi is. He looks almost relieved when Hoseok sleeps, like a weight has been lifted off of his chest by it. 

“You can take my car back to the apartment if you want.”

Yoongi starts at Seokjin’s voice over his shoulder. It takes a good measure of self-control not to round on him, muscles reflexively coiled in defense. If Yoongi thought he was easily provoked before, years in prison have only made that fact exponentially worse. 

Seokjin, for his part, looks unphased by Yoongi’s reaction.  Though his face is bruised by the lingering shadow of Hoseok’s hand print, that’s the only small piece of him that seems disarrayed. “Jimin’s gonna stay here,” he shrugs. “Talked to him already. We both agreed it might be better for you and Hoseok to…have the place to yourselves tonight. You know.”

“Yes, hyung, I know, thank you,” Yoongi replies before Seokjin has to chance to go into any more detail about his speculations on Yoongi and Hoseok’s sex life. It doesn’t feel quite right to imagine the two of them falling into bed with one another when there’s still so much talking to do, any normal couple would surely get caught up on all the things they need to tell one another before rolling around tangled in sheets, but Yoongi and Hoseok are no normal pair.

Hoseok must need it terribly. Yoongi is almost surprised he hasn’t been tugged aside into a bathroom or closet just this afternoon to give Hoseok what he must be craving in a deep, awful way. Maybe it’s the shock that’s numbing his hunger, and sleep now that mutes it, but when he awakes Yoongi expects him to be ravenous, and Seokjin and Jimin are right. Yoongi will want privacy to care for Hoseok tonight.

“I’m going to take him home,” he adds after a brief pause, flicking a glance back at Seokjin, and receiving a nod in return. 

“Good. Take care of him.”

Yoongi narrows his eyes. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“No, I don’t mean–” Seokjin shoves Yoongi’s arm, making a tutting sound. “Get your mind out of the gutter, I wasn’t talking about sex. I meant take care of him . He’s exhausted. It’s…been a long few months.”

“I can tell,” Yoongi replies, unable to keep his voice from darkening slightly. He doesn’t want to criticize Seokjin, not after all he’s done these past years, keeping the skeletal remains of what was once Yoongi’s empire from dissolving completely, but there are some things Yoongi can’t let go of easily. “You didn’t tell me he was this sick,” Yoongi continues, throat tightening around the words. It’s physically painful to say, to address head on how bad of a condition Hoseok is in, that it’s because of him .

“Yeah,” Seokjin lifts a shoulder. “You died , what did you expect?”

“You told me he was doing alright when I asked.”

“Of course I did, I had to, Yoongi. I knew that if you knew what state he was actually in, you’d demand to see him, and the whole point of keeping you hidden would be ruined. I had to keep you both from each other to ensure we succeeded, you understand that, don’t you?” Seokjin’s eyes have a hollow, troubled quality to them when Yoongi looks at him. “Don’t think for one second that I took any pleasure in what I’ve done the last three months, but we made it out. Onto the next, right?”

“Yeah,” Yoongi sighs, turning back to gaze at Hoseok’s sleeping form. He wants, more than anything, to scoop him up and take him somewhere where they can be safe together, eternally, but Yoongi knows that place doesn’t exist for them, not yet. There’s more to be done before they can go there, but tonight none of that matters. Tonight, he’s alive, and there’s a love he hasn’t felt in years waiting for him. 

“Onto the next.”

Hoseok wakes up to movement, his own body being jostled slightly, his ear pressed against a heartbeat. It’s briefly disorienting. Is he dreaming still? Wishing? There’s been no one in his bed in years , why would there be now? Is this even a bed ? And why is he– ow .

“Shit, I’m sorry, so sorry, Dove.” A palm comes around to the side of his head, petting over the spot that just knocked into something unyielding. A doorjamb? A wall?

And oh, that voice. That voice .

Hoseok forces his eyes open so quickly that his body starts from it, jerking in place, and his foot hits something solid. 

“Shh, it’s me, Hoseok, it’s just me.” Yoongi’s hold on him tightens, preventing Hoseok from writhing out of his hold in a half-asleep panic. “You’re home, I brought you home. It’s just the two of us.”

The shock coursing through Hoseok feels strong enough to power a small city, he has to physically force himself to inhale, slow and deep, to remember that Yoongi is here .

He’s here, he’s here, he’s right here, he’s real, he’s touching me, he’s holding me.

He’s alive. 

He’s alive.

Yoongi adjusts him, wiggling a hand free, and the telltale creak of Hoseok’s bedroom door swinging open can be heard echoing through the hallway. “Gonna put you down,” he murmurs. “Just on the edge of your bed, okay?”

“It’s not clean,” Hoseok murmurs, a little delirious, both with exhaustion and relief, but all of that is fading fast in the face of shame rising hot and sharp in his chest. His room is disgusting, it’s a graveyard of broken hopes and endless misery. Dust, sweat, dirty clothing on every surface. Even with Jimin’s best attempts to keep the place livable, it still has the stale stench of bone-deep depression leeched into it. 

“It’s not clean,” he repeats, shakier this time. His skin feels hot, and his eyes are prickling, needlepoint tears emerging from nowhere and threatening to spill over. He gave up, he didn’t even to try to help himself. He all but rotted into his bedsheets, there were days on end where he wouldn’t even stand to go to the bathroom, he’d just lay there, miserable, holding it the way he held his agony. His grief was so ugly he almost can’t bear to have it perceived, it makes him feel small, contaminated and unwanted. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, bringing his hands to his face and hiding behind them, even as Yoongi is moving to sit beside him and pull them away. “I didn’t know what to do, after you d-died, I just couldn’t–I didn’t–I felt like everything ended, Yoongi. I thought I died too. It’s all dirty, and awful, I know, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t, Dove,” Yoongi’s voice is almost impossibly soft, and it twists the knife in Hoseok’s chest, making him want to cry even harder. He had forgotten that Yoongi could be this gentle, had almost forgotten the exact cadence of his tone without realizing it. The idea that something so beloved could slip from memory so easily makes him sick, the knowledge that even the most important things are only fleeting sensations. 

“Hoseok, please , please,” Yoongi holds his arms when Hoseok refuses to move them from his face, rocking him back and forth slightly. “Don’t do that, don’t apologize to me, there’s nothing you owe me. Listen to me, nothing . Nothing, do you understand that?”

Hoseok shudders, taking in a breath that doesn’t seem to make it all the way to the depths of his lungs. He isn’t sure that he does understand just yet, he’s not even sure if any of this is real, or if it’s his mind’s final push to give him something good before it gives out, but he nods regardless.

“I’ll clean it,” Yoongi whispers, pressing his lips to Hoseok’s temple and speaking against his skin. “I’ll do it right now, just say you want me to. Fuck, say nothing, Dove, I’ll do it anyway. I’ll make it better, alright? All I need is a couple of minutes.”

He pulls away from Hoseok slowly, petting over his hair. Briefly, Hoseok wants to call for him to come back, wants to tell him that even the briefest idea of Yoongi being separated from him makes his heart pound and his stomach churn, but Yoongi doesn’t go far. Just to the other side of the room, the low vanity desk where a pile of dishes that accumulated in spite of Jimin’s best attempts sits. He gathers them up into a pile, walking toward the doorway, then stops. 

He looks at Hoseok, gaze softening, sympathetic, as if he can read his thoughts. And in a way, Hoseok knows he can. Yoongi imprinted on him. He tied their lives together in some divine, primal way. They’re part of each other’s bodies, the two of them. Hoseok as Yoongi’s heartbeat, Yoongi as Hoseok’s sustenance. 

“I’ll be right back,” he says softly. “I’m only going to the kitchen. I promise.”

“Okay,” Hoseok whispers, no strength to muster anything more than that. He watches the back of Yoongi’s tousled head retreat, drawing pictures of him in his mind’s eye once he disappears from sight. 

The last time Hoseok saw him, Yoongi’s hair was buzzed short, almost military standard, in an effort to make it easier to care for in the little time he had for personal maintenance. He looked handsome, of course he did, but it was a painful reminder of how much had been stripped from him, and the fact that he was a prisoner, and Hoseok often found himself mourning Yoongi’s longer locks, grown out enough to be carded through or gathered up to the top of his head in a neat little knot when he didn’t want it in his face. 

It’s longer now, three months grown out, but he looks a little disheveled in the way that someone who has been hiding out alone for weeks on end would be. He’s a little thin. A little gaunt. And that limp…well, Hoseok thinks it hurts him more than it hurts Yoongi at this point. 

Yoongi reappears momentarily, exactly as promised, only this time there’s a laundry basket filled with bedding tucked under his arm, and a spray bottle of cleaner from god knows where in his other hand. Hoseok supposes Jimin probably got it. He supposes Jimin has done everything that needed to be done as far as household chores go for the last few months. 

Hoseok’s brow creases as he watches Yoongi move, suddenly troubled. “How did you do it?”

Yoongi glances over at him, questioning. “Do what?”

“Carry me here. I fell asleep in the car, how did you get me to the apartment? Your leg, it…” he trails off, gesturing to the obvious. 

Yoongi sets the basket down on the low, dusty bookshelf and walks to Hoseok, stepping lightly on his bad leg, and cupping Hoseok’s face in both hands when he reaches him. “I carried you out of a burning building while my skin literally peeled off of my body from the heat, and the structural supports collapsed around us, I think I can carry you from the car to the house.” 

He brings Hoseok’s face close and kisses his forehead. “I would carry you to the ends of the earth if you asked me to.”

“I wouldn’t ask,” Hoseok murmurs. “You should look after yourself.”

“I have,” Yoongi replies very firmly. “For months. Years. I want to take care of you.”

“But—“

“Hoseok. I want to take care of you. Let me. Please. ”

Those words are so welcome to Hoseok’s ears. Yoongi’s voice. His care. It’s not matched by anyone, or anything else. It’s irreplaceable. To be loved by him, to be looked after by him. 

It’s golden. 

Yoongi kisses him again, smudging the slow-drying tear-tracks on Hoseok’s face with his lips, before pulling away. 

He makes quick work on the room, shuffling around and re-shelving scattered piles, gathering dirty laundry into a corner, doing a quick wipe down of the most offensively dusty or forgotten surfaces. He coaxes Hoseok to stand just long enough for him to change the bedding, then gathers all of the old stuff and the clothing in the corner into the basket, giving it a swift shove into the hallway and closing the door behind him as if to say and stay out!

Hoseok’s shoulders droop, like tension being cut with a knife and relaxing once again. All at once, this room isn’t a prison, a despondent cell of his own misery, it’s just…a room. 

Perhaps, even a home. If Yoongi stays, that is. And Jimin will come back tomorrow, they can all live here together. Namjoon and Seokjin will be close and, no, it isn’t perfect, but it’s something. It’s a family, in its own unlikely way. They could be normal, sort of. They could have a future. All of them. 

“What are you thinking about?” Yoongi asks, shuffling toward Hoseok with that slightly uneven gait of his that Hoseok is still struggling to adjust to seeing on him. 

“I don’t know,” Hoseok murmurs, too tired, in all honestly, and too shocked to come up with anything better. He’s sure he’ll sleep and when he wakes, reality will have sunk deeper into his numb skin, but tonight everything around him feels blurry, like a fever dream built on desperation. “Everything, I guess. Maybe nothing.”

Yoongi sinks into the divot in the mattress beside Hoseok, face to face, knees pressing into one another, and takes him by the shoulder with thin, firm hands. Hands that Hoseok has dreamt of for years, hands thought he would never feel again. 

“I’m sorry, Hoseok,” Yoongi begins softly. His eyes are serious as they are earnest. “I know it’s been miserable. I never wanted to lie to you, I just wanted you to be safe. I wanted this to work.”

“I know,” Hoseok whispers. His throat feels tight and sore.  “I just—“ he tenses, teetering on the edge of trying to come up with something, anything to say and falling pathetically short in the light of everything. Instead of trying to fake it, he slumps forward into Yoongi and wilts into him. “No, sorry, I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

“That’s okay,” Yoongi whispers against the shell of his ear, smoothing his hands down Hoseok’s back in unhurried up and down motions. “That’s fine. You’re fine.”

His head turns, nose coming to press against Hoseok’s skin the way he used to so often, breathing deep and slow like he’s trying to memorize the smell of him. And then he whispers again. 

“Are you hungry?”

Hoseok shudders, the question wracking him with involuntary chills. The answer to it should be yes, a resounding, all consuming yes, but the feeling swelling in Hoseok’s chest is much more convoluted than that.

He hasn’t thought about it since Yoongi died - or, he thought he died. Since that day . Before then, Hoseok could stomach feeding when necessary, by gritting his teeth and knowing he was preserving his own life just until he could be with Yoongi again.

But after that, after losing that singular thread of hope, it felt both pointless, and like a monstrous disgrace to Yoongi’s memory to seek out anyone else.

So Hoseok didn’t. He took pills, and he laid in bed exerting as little energy as possible, and he wasted away waiting for time to come and claim him too, because maybe , maybe then he could see Yoongi one last time. Hoseok doesn’t believe in god, but he wanted to believe in an afterlife It was a respite of an idea that living no longer offered.

“Hoseok,” Yoongi’s voice is soft, coaxing, and he cups Hoseok’s face very, very gently. “It’s fine. Whatever you say, it’s fine. There’s nothing we have to do, I just want you to be okay.”

“I haven’t,” Hoseok whispers, his breath hitching somewhere between the words, “since I lost you. I couldn’t. I think I forgot to–I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what I feel. It’s like I’m not in my body anymore. It doesn’t belong to me.”

“It does,” Yoongi promises, his thumb brushing over Hoseok’s cheekbone. “It always has. It always will. And you don’t have anything to hide from. It’s just us here, and I love you. I love you, Dove.”

Hoseok’s eyes fall shut, Yoongi’s words washing over him. He is here. Hoseok can let go, for the first time in so long he can’t remember.

No, he does remember. The last time he and Yoongi had sex, and he committed it to memory because some part of him knew, or at least suspected even then that it might be the last time in a long time. Maybe ever . They had the fate of their world on their shoulders, but nothing mattered in that moment besides the two of them. He clung to every detail, pressing it into his skin and tasting it on his tongue.

But Yoongi is here. He’s right in front of Hoseok, and he’s warm, and present, and deeply alive in spite of everything, and all at once, Hoseok needs him more than he’s needed any one person in his entire life.

He leans in, pressing his mouth to Yoongi’s. He couldn’t do it in the living room at Seokjin’s place, he was too petrified that nothing and no one around him was real, Yoongi least of all. In the churning shock of that moment, Hoseok was sure that if he went to kiss Yoongi, he would disappear like the ghost of a lover that he had become and all Hoseok would be left with was empty air and broken hopes.

But his lips are on Hoseok’s now, and he hasn’t melted into the dark. If anything, he’s growing stronger, closer, pressing into Hoseok’s body as if he’s trying to absorb him. His hands are on the hem of Hoseok’s loose shirt, just beginning to push upwards, but he pauses before they do, and pulls back just enough to breathe a question into Hoseok’s skin.

“Can I?”

Hoseok nods, bringing his own trembling reach to Yoongi’s shirt. “You too,” he mumbles “I want to be close.”

It’s been so long, so long , Hoseok needs all of Yoongi exactly as he is in this moment.

Hoseok’s shirt rises, tugged over and off his head to be discarded into some unknown corner of the room. Yoongi leans away by a few inches, evidently planning to remove his own shirt before Hoseok can get to it. He falters, his hands bunched in the cotton, and flicks a look that could almost be called shy in Hoseok’s direction.

“I did something,” he says softy, gaze dropping downcast to his own lap, suddenly as bashful as a child hiding behind his bangs, “I got something for you.”

“For me?” Hoseok breathes. Before he can inquire further, Yoongi lifts his shirt, revealing the expanse of pale skin that Hoseok had grown so intimately familiar with years prior, each freckle and birthmark, his family emblem written in ink above his heart, all the places that Hoseok knows kisses will bruise the easiest, but in the middle of everything known, there’s something new to look at too. A collection of fine, black lines feathering out over his skin, decorating his rib cage on his right side, small and delicately done.

It’s a tattoo. A tattoo of a dove. 

“ Yoongi ,” Hoseok whispers. He presses his fingers to it, tracing over the piece with his heart in his throat. 

“I wanted you with me,” Yoongi replies simply, stacking his hand over Hoseok’s and guiding him. “The whole time we were apart, I needed you there.”

“I love it,” Hoseok breathes. His eyes are suddenly damp, hot with tears. “It’s beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful,” Yoongi tells him quietly, taking Hoseok’s chin and pulling him into their kiss. This time, it takes them downward, sinking side by side into the mattress, Yoongi tugging on the strings of Hoseok’s body like he’s waking up something that was once dead.

Come back to yourself , he said. Hoseok is. There’s an ember lit bright and hot again, heating Hoseok from his core, seeping into his skin and making it flush warm to the touch. Hunger . Hoseok had forgotten what sweet hunger felt like, the mouthwatering rush just before you sink your teeth into something you’ve been craving. 

Yoongi doesn’t hesitate. It’s as if a dam has broken between the two of them, setting loose five years worth of wanting, and it all comes to a head, here and now. He slips lower, but his mouth never leaves Hoseok. He’s marching lines of kisses, dozens of them, from Hoseok’s throat to his collarbones, across his chest, down his arms and back up again. Hoseok lets his eyes fall shut and imagines patches of his skin left glowing every time Yoongi takes his lips away.

Yoongi’s hands, wide and warm, span Hoseok’s waist, pressing him gently into the mattress as if he’s grounding him there. “You’re shaking,” he notes, pausing at Hoseok’s sternum and pressing a kiss over his ribcage. “Are you okay? Slower?”

“I’m fine,” Hoseok replies, but he can feel his teeth chattering as he says it. He doesn’t know why. He didn’t even notice he was trembling like a leaf in the wind until Yoongi said so, but now that he’s aware of it, he can’t seem to stop it. “I’m just–getting used to it.”

“To me?”

“To everything .” Hoseok doesn’t mean to whine, but the sound is almost ripped from him. Words pulled deep from his chest and wrapped in a half-choked sob. He needs Yoongi to understand how badly he wants this, and how he isn’t sure if his brain knows that yet. Or maybe it’s his brain that wants it, and his body that won’t comply.

“I’m sorry,” he says after a moment, shuddering through the tears that have bloomed fat and wet in the corners of his eyes and made hasty paths down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, I’m trying.”

“Sorry for what?” Yoongi inches back up to Hoseok in an instant, thumbing away his tears and replacing them with kisses to each side of his face. “This is not for me, you know that, right? Whatever you want, we’ll do it your way. I just want you to be– good , Hoseok. Safe. Seokjin told me you were okay, and I trusted him, but…” Yoongi trails off, leaving the rest of his statement an open-ended implication. 

“I know,” Hoseok shudders, shaking his head. “I’m not. I don’t look good.”

“Dove,” Yoongi’s hands travel down Hoseok’s arms, finding his wrists and squeezing him lightly. “It’s not about how you look, and you know that.”

Maybe not. Maybe not to him , but to Hoseok, it means something. Beauty was the one thing Hoseok always had with him, an ever-evolving tool to be used as needed. A weapon. A bribe. A lure. Without it, he feels naked, and worthless, and a little afraid that he’ll never really go back to the way he was. That these months of lying in isolation withering away have done something irreparable to not just his body, but his soul.

“I told you,” Yoongi pushes onward before Hoseok can gather himself to speak, “I think you’re beautiful.”

Hoseok sniffs, fixing his eyes on the dark ceiling overhead instead of meeting Yoongi’s intent gaze. “You have to say that.”

“Why would I?”

“Because you–” Hoseok begins, then halts again, unsure if the words because you love me were about to leave his mouth.

“Because I love you?” Yoongi asks, like Hoseok thoughts were written in bold right over his head, easy to pluck out of the air and read. 

Hoseok had forgotten this little titch of his. Sometimes he swore Yoongi could read his mind every now and again, when he really wanted to. He wonders if it has something to do with being imprinted on. He never got a chance to ask, back then.

“Of course that’s why I’m saying it,” Yoongi nuzzles his skin, lowering his head to rest over Hoseok’s heart so they’re no longer looking at one another, and somehow, that makes everything a little easier. “That doesn’t mean I mean it any less. I do think you’re beautiful, how could I love you this much and think any less? I’ve always thought that.” He pauses, then laughs a little wryly. “Too beautiful, sometimes, for my own good. But that’s behind us now, isn’t it, Dove?”

There are a lot of things behind us , Hoseok thinks, heaviest where his heart sits in his chest. There are a lot of things I wish I could leave behind too .

“It’s your call,” Yoongi says softly, sliding his arms up and down Hoseok’s sides before coming to a rest on his waist. He’s draped over Hoseok like a blanket, warm, and soft, and weighing him down. “I’ll be here all night. I’ll do anything you want. You just need to tell me.”

Hoseok shuts his eyes. There are so many things he wants, so many things to say, but more than anything he wants to feel free again. To let go of five years worth of hurt and meet Yoongi in the middle, exactly the way they swore they would. Because he’s begged for this. He’s prayed for it.

And because Hoseok knows all the times he’s felt the lightest were underneath Yoongi’s touch. 

He lifts a hand and winds into Yoongi’s hair, shorter than he remembers, but every bit as soft, and still so familiar. “I want you to fuck me,” he says, just above a whisper. “I want you to make me forget.”

Yoongi takes his sweet time with it. Maybe because Hoseok is on edge, muchtoo fragile and frayed to handle anything fast-moving and forceful, or maybe because it’s been five years since Yoongi touched him, and he wants to savor every second of it the way he did in five years worth of desperate dreams. 

Hoseok is tender, pliable, almost startlingly responsive, but it’s the sound that Yoongi has to

coax out of him. It’s like he’s forgotten he’s allowed the pleasure of noise, the freedom to feel and speak every sensation. He’s limiting himself, drawing back at first when he should be leaning in. 

Yoongi kisses his paths across Hoseok’s body, adorning his arms, chest, thighs, and the pink, drooling curve of his cock with shameless affection. 

When he sinks his fingers into Hoseok, he takes his time with that too, which normally Hoseok would be making his loud distaste for known - complaints that he can handle more, that he doesn’t need it slow and measured - but tonight he says none of that. Maybe it’s bordering on too much as it is, his long-denied body fighting the onslaught of pleasure, like a starving man devouring three meals and then throwing it all up again when he finds he’s no longer able to retain it. 

Hoseok has fallen out of touch with feeling good. The thought breaks Yoongi’s heart, and when he touches Hoseok, he tries not to think of all the pain he’s caused, and all the time they’ve lost. 

They have this moment, finally. A grief-stricken past, and an uncertain future, but these precious hours are safe in a bubble tucked away inside Yoongi’s heart, and no one, nothing can take that from him. 

It’s only once Yoongi slips inside Hoseok, pinning his arms above his head and kissing his throat, setting a steady rhythm that doesn’t take too much, or push too far too soon, that Hoseok cracks a little and seems to come back to himself. He tangles his hands into Yoongi’s hair, his little sounds beginning to escape him without limitation, and when Yoongi murmurs messy, senseless iterations of I love you into his ear, Hoseok says it all back. 

When he climaxes, his home-sweet vanilla scent swells in the air, the manifestation of his fever pitch pleasure. And when Yoongi breathes it in, it makes him want to cry. 

For joy. For loss. For how much he missed it, for how glad he is to inhale it now, because he knows it means Hoseok feels safe, and content, and for fuck’s sake that’s all Yoongi wants anymore. 

That’s all he can ask for in life. 

The come down is slow, because they have the time to let it be. Hoseok melts like wax before either of them can even catch their breath, and Yoongi is glad for that too. It’s succuban instinct to bask and rest in the afterglow, but Hoseok spent years curbing that particular impulse for his own safety. Yoongi worried that, like many other things, he might have fallen out of habit with that too, but on the contrary it’s the one thing he seems to have remembered to keep. 

Yoongi lets him be. He combs through Hoseok’s hair, strokes his spine until his breathing comes easy. When he moves to inch away, Hoseok’s body tightens instantaneously, his limbs restricting where they’re wound around Yoongi and his body going stiff. 

“ Don’t,” he murmurs his plea, muffled by the pillow pressed up against his cheek. His face is half-hidden, but the part of it that Yoongi can see is shadowed with concern. “Don’t go anywhere. Please.”

“Hoseok,” Yoongi exhales his name like a fond sigh, “I’m just going to get something to wipe you off. The bathroom and back, ten seconds.  That’s all.”

It’s a promise, even if he doesn’t say as much. He disappears into the other room, running a washcloth under hot water and ringing it back out again before he returns to Hoseok’s side. He sponges him down quickly, acutely aware of Hoseok’s distaste at both the unavoidable chill of water, and the fact that Yoongi isn’t right next to him. The whole ordeal is over in a minute and a half, but Hoseok’s disposition sours until Yoongi flips the light off and crawls back into his arms. 

Then, Hoseok latches onto him the way vines latch to a trellis. 

For a moment, it’s silent.  Hoseok is tucked behind Yoongi, his breathing a welcome, familiar pattern, and Yoongi finds himself drowsily counting the pulses of his heartbeat between inhales.  

“Stay,” Hoseok whispers after a long pause. His voice is thick with exhaustion. Yoongi wonders if the only reason he’s still awake is to ensure a promise that Yoongi will be here for the duration of the night. 

“I want you to be here when I wake up. You will, won’t you?”

“I will,” Yoongi tells him steadily. “And the whole time you sleep. I swear, I will.”

Yoongi’s word must mean something, because Hoseok doesn’t request anything further. A few minutes later, his breath deepens, and his heart rate begins to slow to a syrupy pace, and Yoongi knows he’s fallen asleep. 

Chapter Text

Hoseok wakes slowly. 

For months, it’s seemed, he’s been jolting up in a cold sweat, a broken-off sound stuck in his throat like a sob that he hasn’t been able to let out. But today, on this morning, with sunlight drizzling onto his skin for the first time in weeks , he wakes up slowly.

Comfortable. Quiet. Stirring against his blankets until he hits something warm and solid, and the feeling of it startles him because he hasn’t had someone else in his bed in– years . 

Hoseok rolls, blinking dazedly against the light spilling from the open curtains until his vision focuses enough to make out a familiar outline framed against the sun spill pouring from the window. When it does, his heart leaps into his throat with such a force that he gets dizzy from it even lying down.

Yoongi .

Reality is a slap in the face, a bucket of shockingly cold water being dumped over his head, but without any of the pain. His pulse is like a snare drum in his chest, his skin suddenly clammy, his thoughts racing while his sleep-addled brain tries to catch up with the events of yesterday and compute that somehow - miraculously - all of it was real .

Yoongi is here. With him. Returned. Alive. 

Alive.

Hoseok hears his breathing, muffled exhales hitting the cotton pillowcase while he slumbers on, It makes his chest burn, almost sick with affection that swells so large inside of him he might pop from the force of it expanding.

Back then, before everything , for the fleeting months that he and Yoongi actually got to live together, Yoongi almost always woke and left the bed first, which meant Hoseok rarely got to see him at his most peaceful, asleep and entirely unguarded. It makes him look younger, less troubled. The way he might look if he had actually gotten to live by his age and not been forced to endure many lifetime’s worth of pain before he even hit his 20s.

There are small things that look different too, unmasked by the daylight that they lacked when they were undressed last night. Hoseok takes him in now, each visible inch of his milky skin, now dotted with new scars from rough and tumble prison life, and that feathered tattoo that peeks out of the sheets on his rib cage.

Hoseok can’t believe he did that. He couldn’t believe it last night, and he can’t believe it now. The whole image of it threatens to make his lip tremble, even just thinking of it. Yoongi in a drab inmate common area, locked away from the world but having saved up enough favors and bribes to cover the cost of inking a reminder of Hoseok onto his flesh.

Hoseok lifts a hand, fingertips forward, and brushes them over the delicate lines of the piece the way he did last night. The movement causes Yoongi to twitch and stir under the blankets, and he rolls inward, colliding with Hoseok and tucking himself there like the space beside Hoseok’s body was carved out just for him. 

And in truth, it was. Always will be.

Hoseok lays still as long as he can, until his bladder makes its unavoidable demands known, and he has to force himself to stand and shuffle to the bathroom, quiet footsteps on the floor so as not to disturb Yoongi. 

After Hoseok has washed his hands, he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and falters where he stands, unable to look away as quickly as he’s grown accustomed to doing. 

He looks…different. Not well, but not inches away from death either. The bags under his eyes have lessened, and his skin looks less papery translucent. Shit, Hoseok knows he can’t undo months of neglect overnight, but it does seem like all of his problems just vanished into nothing, and he has no idea what he’s supposed to do with that all of a sudden. 

Sob for joy? Get his shit together and be normal, finally? What does normal look like between him and Yoongi anyway?

“Dove.”

Hoseok startles at the sound of a voice behind him, and he tears his eyes away from his own reflection, startled to see Yoongi’s face looming over his shoulder.  A moment later, his arms twine around Hoseok’s waist, and he settles his chin in the crook of his shoulder. 

“Morning,” Hoseok breathes, stacking his hands over Yoongi’s on his stomach and pressing him close.  “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It was necessary,” Yoongi grumbles, ever the early bird. Prison probably didn’t do much to change that. “I never sleep that late.”

“Maybe you needed it.”

“Maybe, but I don’t have time for it.”

Hoseok twists around, shifting so he’s facing Yoongi, and cups his cheek. “Time? Yoongi, you’re free , all you have is time.”

For one fleeting moment, Hoseok sees something dark, almost regretful flicker through Yoongi’s eyes. He opens his mouth, pausing as if he’s considering something, then shuts it again and leans in to press a chaste kiss to Hoseok’s jaw. 

“You’re right,” he says, trying for a smile that doesn’t come off as entirely authentic. “Come on, I’ll make you breakfast.”

Most people don’t know this about Yoongi - nor would they ever have a reason to find out - but he’s not a bad cook when he tries. He taught himself, somewhere around the age of seventeen or eighteen, when he had that whole big house all to himself and nothing to do. 

Well, that’s not true, he had plenty to do, he was running a fucking criminal enterprise. But when he got home, and the house was silent, and Yoongi felt entirely devoid of anyone or anything in life that actually mattered, he had to find a way to fill the space. 

So he taught himself to cook. Though he never had anyone to cook for. Not until now. 

Hoseok is sitting at the kitchen table, his hands wound together, watching Yoongi’s every move with rapt attention. It’s like he half expects for him to vanish in a puff of smoke, or melt into the floor and disappear every time he looks away. 

He looks better this morning than he did last night, his eyes brighter, his cheeks pinker, and his movements more precise unlike the sluggish, dazed behavior of before. 

Yoongi hates, hates the idea of bringing his newfound peace crashing down again, but the facts are that time is limited, as much as he wishes it weren’t. 

He spoons fluffy rice into a bowl, following with kimchi and eggs, then slides the whole steaming dish to set in front of Hoseok, gesturing for him to eat. 

“Thank you,” Hoseok murmurs faintly, picking up his chopsticks and poking into the food as Yoongi serves himself, then settles onto the stool across from Hoseok. It takes him a minute to settle into the meal. Yoongi watches it happen. He prods at it, sniffing, as if he’s forgotten how to eat, then finally sinks his teeth into a bite. 

His eyes flutter shut. He chews, slow and savoring, almost euphoric. A different type of hunger, satiated. Yoongi smiles, and takes a bite of his own. 

He lets the moment linger as long as he dares, allowing Hoseok to bask in his comfort a while more, until inevitable dread fills up Yoongi's chest, and he’s forced to launch into a speech that he’s had many hollow months to prepare. And yet, he feels wildly unsure about it, still .

“I wanted to talk to you about something.”

Hoseok looks up from his bowl, chopsticks poised halfway up to his mouth, his expression unreadable, always those keen eyes that Yoongi has never quite known how to read. He clears his throat, and lowers his utensils. “I want to talk to you about a lot of things. I haven’t seen you in three months, Yoongi.”

“No, I know that,” Yoongi nods. “I do too.” He fights the urge to squeeze his eyes shut. So, so many things, Hoseok. You don’t know the half of it . “But there’s one thing in particular. Right now. One…pressing topic.”

Hoseok’s expression wilts into one of disappointment as he sets the chopsticks neatly on his napkin and leans back in his chair. “We can have one day, can’t we?” he asks softly, shaking his head with what Yoongi knows is premature apprehension. “You just came back, it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours. Do we have to do this? Can we talk about anything else? Anything good ?”

“Hoseok,” Yoongi can only manage a whisper. He reaches across the table to take Hoseok’s hand in his own, rubbing circles in the supple skin of his palm.  “I don’t want to, but you know how things are.”

“No,” Hoseok shakes his head. His body language is souring, the soft lines of his body growing rigid again. “I know how things were , I know we risked our lives and lost others to change everything, I know you went to prison for five years, Yoongi, so that things didn’t have to be the way they were. And they don’t have to be. Walk away, whatever it is. It’s over. Just, pretend it isn’t there. Please, Yoongi. I need you. Please.:

God, Yoongi wishes it were that simple. If there were a world where he could let this go and rest, he’d embrace it in a heartbeat. But the facts are that he knows himself, and he knows that peace isn’t something he can obtain without burying this so deep he’ll never have to worry about it crawling back up again.

If even a trace of Yongsun Intak’s legacy is still out there wreaking havoc, Yoongi won’t sleep until he’s wrung its neck with his bare hands and dragged it six feet under. 

“But it’s not over,” he says quietly, waiting, watching for Hoseok to break. He expects it. The grief. Yoongi went through his own cycle of it, only he’s known all of this for months and had much longer to think it through. Still, the pain of finding out still lingers. He wanted so, so badly to be able to believe that they had locked down and left everything behind. 

“What we fought. The drug. It’s—there are still plans.”

“Plans,” Hoseok echoes hollowly. His expression is blank, unreadable. 

“Yes, plans. A sort of fail-safe, delayed by years to make sure everything died down before they started moving their pieces again, but always with the intention of being resurrected in case it wasn’t able to get off the ground here. There’s a branch in America, Hoseok. A second team, with new tools, and new plans, and they’re starting to come out of hibernation.”

“No.”

“It’s true, we’ve been monitoring, and we’re starting to see—“

“ No.” Hoseok jerks his hand out of Yoongi’s and slams it down on the table, making their plates jump. “Yongsun is dead. You told me he was dead, Yoongi. We blew everything up, we burned it to the ground. It’s gone. He’s dead.”

“He is. But everything he worked for isn’t,” Yoongi tells him in a low voice. He could raise it to match Hoseok’s, but that wouldn’t fix anything for them. Yelling won’t change the facts that are staring them down. “He was a genius, and a monster, dove. In all honesty, I never expected things to end with the trial. It was too good to be true.”

Hoseok pushes back from the table, getting to his feet, and for one moment Yoongi thinks he’s going to storm off and lock himself up somewhere where Yoongi can’t reach him with a harsh reality, but instead he begins to pace lines around the kitchen, pushing his already-unkempt hair back over and over. 

“So, what, you fly to America and start dismantling them from there?”

“Yes.”

It’s not ideal, but…yes. 

Hoseok stops in his tracks. The hollowness in his cheekbones and eyes makes the look of incredulity on his face even wilder and more pronounced. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am. Seokjin-hyung and I have spent the last months cementing as much of a plan as we can. Of course, there’s only so far we can plot without actually being there and finding out what we’re dealing with, but logistically, yes. It’s already arranged.”

Hoseok’s eyes widen even further and that stricken look returns, like a blow over Yoongi's heart. He mouths for a moment, struggling silently for words until he seems to land on the only ones he can manage. 

“It’s already planned?” he demands, twisting from devastated to distraught. “You weren’t even going to ask me?”

“Hoseok.” It’s Yoongi's turn to get to his feet now, and he cuts across the room, making the shortest line to Hoseok and folding him into his arms. He doesn't want Hoseok to feel this, the sense of betrayal. This has nothing to do with how much Yoongi wants to be here with him, unbothered by the world around him, and everything to do with what he needs to accomplish. 

“Look. Look at me.” He takes Hoseok’s chin, tipping it upward to meet those eyes which are brimming all glassy and shattered with tears. “I have to do this. I have to. If we don’t finish this, it makes everything we’ve sacrificed so far pointless, and I can’t live with that. I can’t just sit back and let them make their return. I know that, and you know that. I want - I need - to finish this so that I can let it go. And on that day, I will do anything you ask. Anything, anywhere, for the rest of our lives. I promise you that, Dove. I swear. But this has to come first.”

Hoseok lowers his face, dropping his head onto Yoongi's chest and burying himself there. His shoulders shake, and he makes a choked-off little sound in the back of his throat. “I just got you back.”

“And I won’t go far without you,” Yoongi assures him, sliding a consoling hand up and down his back, thumb catching on the worn, slippery material making up the T-shirt that hangs off of his shaky frame.. “I want you to come with us. If you’re willing.”

Yoongi went back and forth on this, in an excruciating way. The cons of bringing Hoseok were, well, once again exposing him to imminent perilous danger, which Yoongi tries to avoid as a general rule. But the pros are pretty much everything else. He’s so damn intelligent, a fearless fighter,and  he’s one of the only people who can and will talk back to Yoongi and put him in his place. Yoongi also couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him again so soon after being reunited - or worse, jetting off to America without telling Hoseok he was alive in the first place. Objectively speaking, that would have been the smartest and most emotionally detached option (certainly, the one Seokjin was gunning for) but realistically speaking, Yoongi has utterly no clue how long this will take, and the guilt of leaving Hoseok behind without an explanation would have eaten him alive. 

And after seeing the state he’s gotten himself into after three months, Yoongi has no doubt in his mind that him being gone under the guise of being dead any longer would have killed Hoseok. And that, he would never be able to forgive himself for. 

“We beat them before,” he nudges his forehead against Hoseok’s cheek, then softens his words with a kiss. “We can beat them again if we work together. Don’t you think?” 

“I don’t want to have to beat them again,” Hoseok whines, a soft sound from the depths of his throat. “I want to file taxes and pay a mortgage bill.”

“One day,” Yoongi breathes against Hoseok’s soft skin. “I swear on my life, I’ll give you that one day.”

The silence that follows holds a thousand words unsaid, but Yoongi is bracing himself to hear only one. 

“Fine,” Hoseok says finally, in a pitifully small voice. “I’ll go. But only because I’m never letting you out of my sight again.”

“Good,” Yoongi exhales his sigh of relief and draws back, retreating to the kitchen table. Hoseok doesn’t look particularly at ease. So much so that Yoongi debates saying anything more, but…it’s better to put everything out on the table now. To get it all in the open before the idea of a secret can begin to fester. 

Yoongi laces his fingers together on the tabletop and shoots another cautionary look in Hoseok’s direction. “Dove?”

“What?”

“There’s one other thing I need to tell you.”

“How long is the silent treatment going to last?”

“I’m not giving you the silent treatment,” Hoseok replies, trying (and likely failing) to keep the edge out of his voice. “I’m thinking.”

“Hoseok.” Yoongi’s tone is steeped in a lack of being convinced. 

“What?”

“Please.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Exactly, you’re not doing anything .” Yoongi sighs as they roll to stop at a red light, and he lifts his eyes off the road long enough to flick them to Hoseok for a second. “I’m home. I missed you. I want you to talk to me.”

“Sorry if I’m a little preoccupied,” Hoseok grumbles, slipping sideways where his elbow is resting on the window and leaning into it a little more. He hates the feeling of discontent brewing in Yoongi’s general direction, but every time he tries to let go of it, it clamps down harder, making it difficult to think, or even breathe. “It’s not like my entire world shifted on its axis overnight.”

“I know.” When Yoongi replies, his tone is softer, laced with apology. He reaches over the console and takes Hoseok’s hand, lacing their fingers together.  And although Hoseok feels distinctly bittered by the dread-turmoil brewing inside of him, he can’t deny his relief at the sensation of Yoongi touching him that way again. It’s one of those million little things that Hoseok had begun to forget in Yoongi’s long absence, how often he would pull Hoseok’s hand over to his side and hold it while he drove. Like even the width of the console between them was too much, too uncomfortable to bear for as long as a car ride took. 

Present Yoongi brings Hoseok’s knuckles to his mouth and kisses over them. “I know, Dove. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, you’re right, it’s not fair. Do whatever you need to do.”

I need to be with you. I need to feel safe. I need you to be safe. 

None of the things Yoongi has told Hoseok contribute to any of those wishes in the slightest . Especially not—

“Does Jimin know?”

Yoongi pushes the gas, and they roll forward again, picking up speed alongside the other cars. “Which part?”

Any of it. But namely—

“Jeongguk.” His name feels sharp in Hoseok’s mouth and carries a bitter, almost metallic taste. Like blood rising in the back of his throat. “Does Jimin know? That he’s—“

Alive. Jeon Jeongguk is alive. Of course he is. If the explosion supposedly killed them both and Yoongi is right here in front of him, the obvious conclusion is that Jeongguk probably never fell victim to it either. A hoax, every perfectly calibrated step of the way. But Hoseok had failed to ever consider that Yoongi and Jeongguk would be working together. 

That Yoongi would actually want him back. Free . Out, where he can hurt people the way he hurt the last time. The way he hurt Hoseok. 

“No,” Yoongi says shortly. He glances to Hoseok again, like he’s gauging his mood. “Not yet. I wanted to tell you first.”

Hoseok shakes his head. He and Jimin don’t talk about much of what happened across those months five years ago often. At least, not as often as Hoseok suspects they both think about it. It was kinder and far less painful to not have to constantly dissect the enormous trauma they had both endured, so in an unspoken sort of way they had a mutual agreement almost to pretend none of it had happened at all. 

Because the things they didn’t say out loud couldn’t sting them. 

But Hoseok knows, he knows, that if Jimin has reason to believe for even a second that he could inflict immediate suffering on anyone involved in Taehyung’s death, he would. There’s only one thing that has ever made Hoseok’s sweet, gentle friend go dark, and that’s the cruelness with which Kim Taehyung was ripped from them all. 

Yeah. Hoseok doesn’t imagine this meeting is going to be much of a homecoming. The second that Jimin catches wind of the fact that Jeongguk is alive and well, they’ll be hard-pressed to get Jimin to even stand in the same room as him, much less work together to solve the seemingly unsquashable cockroach of a dilemma that Yongsun Intak has made himself to be, even in death. 

“Don’t expect him to be happy about it,” Hoseok mutters, slipping down further in his seat. 

Yoongi rotates the wheel with his palm, an effortless, practiced motion that turns him into the lot of an apartment complex so small and unassuming that Hoseok barely noticed it tucked behind the boarded-up Mexican-Korean fusion restaurant taking up most of the space on the pavement. 

“Yeah, well, I can’t imagine Jimin has been happy about much of anything since—“ Yoongi breaks himself off before he can get very far into that sentence, perhaps deciding against the crassness of finishing it out loud. “Anyway,” he clears his throat as they slide to a stop between the faded lines of one of three mapped out parking spaces. He taps his fingers on the leather steering wheel, and Hoseok finds his eyes drawn to the thin, black T inked on the side of his index

He didn’t mention it last night when he showed Hoseok the dove. In fact, Hoseok didn’t notice it at all until the light of this morning, and because Yoongi didn’t bring it up, he hasn’t asked. 

He doesn’t need to.

Yoongi lifts his hand from the wheel after cutting the engine and brushes a lock of Hoseok’s hair off of his face. “Gonna run inside for a minute, okay?”

Hoseok makes a face as he glances out at the bleak complex in front of them. In passing, he would guess that it’s abandoned and waiting out a bulldozer to come and topple it, but upon closer inspection there are two or three lights on in various dingy windows that allude to inhabitants being present. But still, Hoseok can’t imagine why Yoongi would have business here, of all places. 

“In there? For what?”

Yoongi tips his head, confused, evidently, by Hoseok’s confusion. “Jeongguk. I told you we had to make a stop on the way.”

Oh. Oh, right, of fucking course. Why wouldn’t Hoseok assume that their gas stop would be to pick up Hoseok’s former client who tried to murder him on multiple occasions, who also happens to be Yoongi’s former adoptee, turned mortal enemy, turned begrudging prison-mate, turned ( supposedly ) ally?

If it weren’t all so egregiously awful, it would be almost comedic

Yoongi leans across the console before Hoseok can lose himself to his cyclone of thoughts, and bestows a soft, lingering kiss on his mouth. “I won’t take long. Seokjin-hyung is waiting for us.”

If Hoseok had wanted to protest, he doesn’t get a chance. Yoongi unclips his seatbelt and exits the car without further word, making a quick pace up the crumbling pavement steps to the dilapidated wooden door. He shakes a key out of his pocket, wiggles it into the lock, and disappears inside as soon as the door swings open into an unknown dark. 

Hoseok leans back in his seat and shuts his eyes. Prickling discomfort is biting at his skin like thorns, and he’s required to harness every instinct, every iota of intuition in his body telling him to get up and run to Yoongi, to get there before anyone can hurt him. 

Because Jeongguk would. Jeongguk has. Why the fuck would they trust him now? 

Yoongi says he knows things. 

He knows more than I do, Dove. There’s nothing left for him to return to here, all of his alliances were broken when he testified. I have manpower, and he has insider knowledge, and between us, I think we have a real chance at ending this. Permanently. 

Yoongi sounded so convinced, almost hopeful. It took a great amount of self-restraint then too not to crush his spirits by screaming he tried to kill me, Yoongi! He tried to kill you too!

Hoseok isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to look at Jeongguk without seeing the dark eyes of someone who swore to destroy him. He doesn’t really care about this whole five years in prison changed him bullshit. There’s no doubt in his mind that someone like Jeongguk will turn traitor on them the second a better offer pops up, the same way he turned on Hoseok in the casino five years ago. Broken, bloody, a burning building closing in, and Jeongguk dissolved their deal and walked away. 

If Yoongi hadn’t gone back for him, Hoseok never would have made it out of the building. Blood loss or burnt alive, whichever he succumbed to first. It wouldn’t matter. Either way, he’d be dead. 

Either way , it would be Jeon Jeongguk’s fault. 

The driver’s side door clicks unlatched without warning, and Hoseok’s eyes jump open again, startled enough to twitch in his seat, but it’s only Yoongi having made a hasty return. 

“Back,” he murmurs, and reaches over to squeeze Hoseok’s arm. 

Behind them, the door on Hoseok’s side swings open and the car rocks slightly when a third person slides unannounced into the backseat, and Hoseok swears the entire car drops five degrees colder. With every hair on the nape of his neck on end, Hoseok turns, glancing over his shoulder at the presence he knows has settled mere feet away. He isn’t sure what to expect. Jeongguk, obviously, and when he catches sight of him, it is Jeongguk in the flesh as expected. Only…Jeongguk as Hoseok has never seen him before, nor perhaps as he could ever imagine. 

Gone are the imperial, trailing locks that made him look like some sort of boy-king. Gone are the sleek, expensive clothes, the tailor-made suits cut to his waist and glossy loafers. Gone are the piercing cheekbones and frigid eyes of an underfed and over-angered teenager, replaced instead by a slightly softer visage. His hair isn’t as close-cropped as it was when Hoseok caught glimpses of him in prison, it’s grown out halfway to his shoulders, and it curls up a little on itself, the ends bouncing with even the smallest movement. His fine clothing - or an inmate jumpsuit, depending on the time- has been traded for jeans and an oversized hoodie that make him look his age for once, if not younger. A pair of plain, black glasses sit on the bridge of his nose, framing his eyes, and lending him the appearance of any young college student on any campus anywhere in the world. 

He doesn’t look like a villain. 

He doesn’t look like a killer. 

He hardly even looks like a man. 

He’s a boy. Just a kid. And not a particularly intimidating one, at that. 

Hoseok isn’t sure how long he stares. An uncomfortably long amount of time, more than likely. He feels himself flinch ever so slightly when Jeongguk lifts his eyes from his lap and matches Hoseok’s gaze. For one undefinable moment, they stare at each other across the canyon of silence, unable - or maybe, unwilling - to say anything at all. 

Then Jeongguk clears his throat. “Hi.”

Hi. Hi. Hi? That’s it? Five years? Numerous attempted murders? They used to sleep together, for fuck’s sake. Everything. Everything that happened, and Jeongguk expects to move forward with just hi?

Hoseok’s shocked silence must begin to feel tangible within the confines of the car, because Yoongi’s hand comes around the side of Hoseok’s face and nudges him lightly to face front again. 

“Buckle, please,” he murmurs. “Seokjin is expecting us.”

Right. Buckle . Yeah. Because the most dangerous thing about being in this car is the risk of a vehicular accident and not the convicted felon in the backseat. Well, the driver’s seat too, but Yoongi is his convicted felon.

The drive to Seokjin and Namjoon’s place is fifteen minutes of the stiffest silence that Hoseok has ever sat through. It’s not that he can’t think of anything to say - the opposite, in fact. The longer he sits here brooding, the more he knows exactly what he’d like to say to Jeongguk, it’s only that he’s pretty sure Yoongi wouldn’t appreciate a word of it leaving his mouth. Not when they’re meant to be allies for an indeterminate (and unbearable) period of time starting right about now. 

The only thing that gets spoken out loud for the entire ride is Jeongguk briefly murmuring a thank you to Yoongi as they pull out of the lot, and every word from that point onward exists only in their heads. 

When Yoongi maneuvers them onto the sloped driveway and cuts the engine, Hoseok gets out of the car without comment. He can feel Yoongi’s pointed, worried gaze on the back of his head as he heads toward the door, but Hoseok doesn’t return it with a glance of his own. Not when he knows Jeongguk is behind him following on his heels. 

He makes it all the way up to the door before his nerve fails him, and he stills just before knocking, waiting for Yoongi to fall into step with him before taking his arm. 

“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Hoseok mutters, voice low enough that he hopes Jeongguk can’t catch it from where he lingers a few feet behind. 

“About what?” Yoongi shoots him a quizzical look. “Jeongguk?”

“ Yes .”

“It’ll be fine. They know. Seokjin told Namjoon last night.”

“And Jimin?”

“Will be fine,” Yoongi replies shortly, forgoing knocking and punching in the door code instead. When the keypad lights up green he twists the knob and steps inside without further pretense. 

Hoseok trudges after him, chest tight. For all that Hoseok loves Yoongi, he’s also aware of the fact that Yoongi isn’t always…the most emotionally perceptive person in the room, and that on more than one occasion he’s been surprised by reactions that Hoseok could have seen coming from a mile away. So when he says Jimin will be fine, there’s an unspoken air of why wouldn’t he be? tacked onto the end of it. And Hoseok isn’t sure how to break it to him that for Jimin, seeing the man who fronted the movement that ended up killing the most beloved person in his life, his earthly soulmate, after spending the life several months thinking he was dead is going to be, well, distressing. 

Hoseok may not have been the greatest of friends to Jimin recently, but he still knows this for a fact. The same way that he knows the sky is blue, and he needs air to breathe, he knows that this won’t go down smooth for Jimin. The only question left is to ask just how poorly he’ll take it. 

Yoongi leads them through the unlit hallway into the living room where Seokjin is cross-legged on the couch as if he’s been waiting on them for some time now. Namjoon is perched on the edge of the coffee table, an air of seriousness hanging around him like an overcast sky. Jimin is nowhere to be seen. 

Hoseok notes the way Namjoon’s posture tightens almost imperceptibly when Jeongguk trails into the room after them. Seokjin, for his part, looks entirely unbothered. Hoseok assumes that he must have seen Jeongguk up close in the flesh since he’s been their outside man helping Yoongi and Jeongguk covertly settle back into civilian life. 

Hoseok still hasn’t fully comprehended the events of the last 24 hours. Every time he looks at Yoongi he feels shaky with doubt, as if there’s a high probability that if he even blinks the wrong way, the air will shiver and Yoongi will disappear into it. Rattled by the thought, Hoseok reaches out and closes his hand around Yoongi’s wrist, squeezing him lightly. 

In the middle of the room, Namjoon stands and lifts his chin ever so slightly at Jeongguk. “So you’re–”

“Jeongguk,” Hoseok’s least wanted companion answers with a nod that makes his glasses slip slightly down the bridge of his nose. He extends a hand in Namjoon’s direction. 

Namjoon doesn’t take it. Instead, he returns to his seat on the low table and continues watching Jeongguk with a critical eye. “Yoongi says you’re an asset.”

“I know a lot about the East,” Jeongguk says simply. “And my alliance to them is dead.”

Hoseok swears he hears Namjoon murmur sure under his breath, but it’s so quiet he can’t trust his own ears to have caught it. And the thought drops from his mind the second he hears the bathroom door click open down the hallway, and familiar footsteps trod their way toward the living room. 

Hoseok’s hand tightens around Yoongi’s wrist, instinct bracing him for Jimin’s appearance. Jeongguk is close to the doorway. Too close. When Jimin rounds the corner, listless in his limbs and vacant faced, he draws to a sharp halt. His eyes snap to Jeongguk, widening in shock. His soft mouth falls open, and Hoseok can practically see the blood draining from his cheeks, turning him a sudden, stark gray. 

Jeongguk’s shoulders tighten visibly, though again he extends his hand in greeting. “Hi. I—“

Whatever it is he was going to say gets cut short by the blur of Jimin’s arm swinging upward without warning. He strikes an open palm across Jeongguk’s face with such brutal force that Jeongguk’s glasses are knocked straight off, flying sideways and skittering across the wood floor. 

“ Jimin,” Yoongi barks, moving to grab him, but Hoseok takes him by the collar of his shirt and holds him before he can go far. 

“Don’t,” he whispers. If Yoongi thinks a slap is the worst punishment Jimin could have delivered, he’s deluding himself. Had it been Hoseok in the same position, he would have reached for a gun . 

“You,” Jimin breathes, chest heaving though he’s barely moved a muscle save for his one stroke. “are supposed to be dead. ”

“So is Yoongi-hyung,” Jeongguk grunts, straightening up with one hand clasped to the side of his face. Already, a bruise is blossoming under his cheekbone and there’s a fat dot of blood swelling on his lip where the force of Jimin’s blow split it. He turns to Yoongi, looking, to his very begrudging credit, somewhat aghast. “You didn’t tell him?”

For fuck’s sake, the situation is dire when Hoseok and Jeongguk are in agreement about something. 

Yoongi has the grace to look mildly humbled. “I didn’t—I’ve been busy, alright?” he says, a tone of defensiveness seeping into his voice. “I can’t babysit everyone, Seokjin-hyung could have done it just as easily.”

Seokjin fixes him with a flat, unimpressed look. “You literally told me not to.”

Hoseok smacks the back of Yoongi’s head. “Yoongi.”

“What? I was thinking we’d just debrief him real quick after he found out naturally.”

“I don’t want him here,” Jimin snaps. His eyes are a livid sort of dark that Hoseok only remembers seeing on him once before, and the sight terrifies him. Jimin is born for tenderness. He has the kind of soul that was meant to exist in peace and kindness, and even in the face of all the horror he’s been dealt, he’s managed to remain soft at his edges. 

But Hoseok is afraid his mental fortitude is dwindling. Pain is slowly suffocating him, extinguishing his determined light. He sees it every day, the way Jimin becomes shorter, sharper, angrier at the world around him and the people in it. And the worst part is that Hoseok can’t blame him, not for a second. 

Yoongi has missed a lot of time with Hoseok and Jimin both. He doesn’t understand that they’ve changed in ways that Hoseok isn’t sure can be touched. 

“I won’t—do anything if he’s here.” Jimin turns away, wiping the smudge of blood on his knuckles into the side of his jeans, leaving a red blur on the washed out denim. 

Yoongi’s jaw twitches. “He’s going to help us.”

“ I don’t want his fucking help!”

“Then sit this one out,” Yoongi replies coolly. Hoseok is aware how much he hates being challenged, but he’s also failing, miserably, to see Jimin’s pain. And in doing so, he’s only digging them all into a hole. 

“You sit this one out,” Jimin exhales in a rattling breath, rounding on Yoongi with malice rising in his face. 

“Excuse me?”

“I said you sit this one out. You and— him ,” Jimin points a damning finger to his side, clearly refusing to so much as cast a glance in Jeongguk’s direction. “Why would we need you? Five years , and you come back still thinking you run the motherfucking place.”

“I do run the place,” Yoongi shoots back, a dangerous edge creeping into his voice. Hoseok’s chest tightens. 

They never could stand each other, these two. Hoseok had hoped, maybe, that time would corrode the hard lines of their differences, and they could be put to rest, but clearly, time has only made both sharper and more volatile. 

“And in case it somehow missed you,” Yoongi draws himself up entirely and squares his shoulder, moving in on Jimin to jab a finger in the middle of his chest. “I was gone because I went to fucking prison. To take the fall for all of you. Do you think I liked that? Being locked up like a fucking animal and losing five years of my life? Do you think I was on fucking summer break , Jimin? That it was fun? I gave up everything , fucking everything . I’m still a Head, no matter how you feel about that. And you will still obey me, or you will leave.”

Jimin doesn’t wait. He doesn’t argue. He spins on his heel, and he stalks out of the room as if he never wanted to be there in the first place. Hoseok rounds on Yoongi, unaware of Namjoon doing the same where he sits until both of their voices ring out, identical in reproachfulness.

“ Yoongi .”

“What?” Yoongi demands, with the audacity to look surprised to see their discontentment. “All of it is true! And we have business to talk about, I don’t have time to coddle him through this, alright?”

Hoseok’s heart twinges. It’s through no fault of his own that Yoongi doesn’t always understand the enigmatic wavelength of emotion. Hoseok will dutifully walk him through it at a more convenient time, but it feels to him like there’s someone who needs him very much more than Yoongi does at this specific moment. 

“He was there for me the whole time you were gone,” Hoseok says quietly. “He’s done nothing but try to take care of me for months . Talk business if you have to, I’ll catch up on it later.”

“Hoseok,” Yoongi half groans under his breath, but Hoseok is already turning to follow in Jimin’s footsteps. As he leaves, he catches a muttered utterance of exasperation from Seokjin. 

“Two beatings in 24 hours, under my roof? It’s like a god damn soap opera with you people. Unbelievable.”

Jimin wishes Taehyung’s grave were more of a temple to him than it is. He’s not overly attached to his pixie heritage, but as a kid, he always found comfort in the typical beliefs of death and afterlife, the idea that nothing, and no one, is ever truly lost. It let him believe in his mother, in a lost family, and when Taehyung was torn from him so abruptly, Jimin had hoped that same belief would allow his presence to linger eternal.

He tried to do everything right. He said death rites over Taehyung to grant him passage into the venture between death and the Next. The seven-day journey where the dead walk onward to be reborn. It’s said that when your loved one returns to earth in their new body, beginning their new life, you can feel it. That distinct, beloved presence will enter the air once again, and when you kneel at their grave, their spirit will be stronger than ever. Strong enough, sometimes, that people would say they could practically see or hear them again.

Jimin never has. He waited like a pathetic child to feel the world around him shift so he could know Taehyung made it safely to new life, but that moment failed to arrive. Five years later, and it still hasn’t happened. 

He always knew those afterlife stories were a load of bullshit, but he wanted to hope for something more. He needed to hope in those agonizing months following Taehyung’s death. If he hadn’t had something to cling to, Jimin knows he would have joined him where he was buried. Sometimes, he still thinks about it. Drinking something that would make it quick, and lying down right here on the earth to sink into Taehyung one last time.

The only reason he didn’t was because he didn’t want Hoseok to be alone. 

That’s not a concern anymore, he thinks.

It’s funny how last week he would have given anything to see Hoseok upright and lively again, and today he is, but Jimin never prepared himself for the idea of how much it might hurt to see him happy again. 

To see everything Hoseok wanted come back to him.

How joyous. How beautiful.

It could just about make Jimin go insane. 

“Jimin-ah.”

Hoseok’s voice is a soft beckon from behind Jimin, and he’s less grateful for it than he wishes he was. 

The air around Jimin ripples and Hoseok’s presence sinks onto the dirt beside him and a hand is braced on his shoulder a moment letter, firm as it is warm. 

“I’m sorry.”

The words are so weak, so pointless in the face of everything even if they’re meant with kindness. What does Hoseok have to be sorry about? What can he do that would fix any of this?

“I don’t want him here either,” Hoseok continues, his voice taking on a sharp edge, and Jimin knows he truly means it. “I don’t trust him. I don’t want to work with him.”

“Then don’t,” Jimin says flatly, hands curling inward on themselves so his nails bite into palm. “We don’t have to.”

“I do,” Hoseok says, quiet, laced with regret. Jimin can’t look at him, but he knows Hoseok is watching him intently. “Yoongi is leaving. He’s going to America , Jimin. There’s something new. I don’t understand it all. There’s more he wants - needs - to do. Loose threads, I guess. The Last Waltz , it had this fail-safe, and something is going on in the states that will try to bring it back, and Yoongi just can’t rest until it’s over, so he’s going over to see what needs to be done. He thinks Jeongguk can help And Jimin, I can’t leave him. Don’t you understand?”

Jimin does understand. Or, he did once. He has no one to follow until the ends of the earth now, because men like Jeon Jeongguk killed him. As far as Jimin is concerned, Jeongguk should die for what he did. The man that pulled the trigger on Taehyung may be dead and gone, but he was just a pawn following orders, if he hadn’t done it, someone else would have. Because Jeongguk , fucking Yongsun and his precious little heir had to go on a power trip, had to bribe, and maim, and kill until they had everything they wanted.

And Jimin doesn’t give a damn if Jeongguk didn’t want it in the end, if he changed his mind, or if prison gave him some shining new purpose in life. Jimin doesn’t care . Taehyung’s blood is smothered all over Jeon Jeongguk’s hands, and Jimin wishes he would drown in it. 

“I’ll watch him, Jimin, I will,” Hoseok whispers. His thumb is pressing into Jimin’s nape as if he’s trying to ground him right where he kneels. “If he tries anything , I’ll be the first to retaliate, no matter what Yoongi says. I promise you I’m on your side. But I want you to come with us. You’ve been with me for so long, it wouldn’t feel right to go our separate ways now.”

Hoseok’s plea is the first small relief Jimin has felt in days, even if he doesn’t want it to be. At the very least, Yoongi isn’t everything to Hoseok. Jimin’s presence, his solidarity over the last years still counts for something. And it’s not that Jimin expected Hoseok to drop him as if he were nothing the second he returned, but Jimin’s not naive. He knows he’s no replacement for what Yoongi is to Hoseok.

It’s merciful to know he’s still wanted, at least partially.

Jimin lowers his hands into the dirt and presses his fingers into it, feeling soil push up under his fingernails. “Everything we bled to escape, and Yoongi wants us walking right back into it? This fight killed Taehyung. What makes you think we won’t be the next victims?”

“Nothing,” Hoseok says, and all at once he sounds weak with exhaustion. “But don’t we owe it to Taehyung to try?”

Jimin’s head falls to his chest. He hates that that was his first thought too. 

“I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“Oh, Namjoon , how many times are we going to walk through this?” Seokjin groans, throwing down the spoon he’s using to stir his tea and looking up as he clatters across the smooth countertop and falls, somewhat appropriately, into the sink. He has the audacity to look exasperated, as if it hasn’t been a mere twenty-four hours since this game changer of a revelation arrived without any warning. 

“Hyung.” Namjoon leans forward, bracing his elbows on the cool countertop making up the kitchen island, and buries his face in his hands. He doesn’t like getting upset with Seokjin, mostly because he doesn’t see a purpose to it. In their convoluted lives there are so many more pressing issues than run-of-the-mill relationships quarrels, that when they do have them they blow over quickly and seem too insignificant to even remember. 

But this feels…different. Like a new, tender bruise still smarting beneath the skin, unwilling to be ignored.

“You…lied.”

“Namjoon.”

“You lied.”

“For a good cause .” Seokjin spins around, tea in hand, and fixes Namjoon with a stern look. “They have a name for that, you know. White lie. The kind that deserves forgiveness.”

“A lie is a lie,” Namjoon mutters, not too keen on letting Seokjin wriggle off the hook quite so easily. “And it’s about more than just you covering up for Yoongi, and you know it.”

“I do,” Seokjin nods, and this time he sets down his mug on the island that stands between them, then comes around the sharp-edged counter to stand in front of Namjoon. “Do you want to talk about it?”

No. Namjoon really doesn’t want to talk about it, that’s the thing. He would have been alright never discussing it again, to be perfectly honest.  He’s handling his grief over Taehyung. Or, he was, until one of the figureheads of the operation that slaughtered his brother miraculously became undead. 

Having Yoongi back is fine. Great. Having Jeon Jeongguk is something else entirely. 

Seokjin sighs and reaches in to slide both hands up Namjoon’s neck to cup his face. He has these long, thin fingers, perpetually a little cooler than the average body temperature, and surprisingly soft, and when he caresses Namjoon with them, Namjoon always feels momentarily like a child again. Safe, and cared for in the hands of someone stronger than him. 

For as long as they’ve been together, they don’t touch as much as they could. Namjoon isn’t one for excessive physical affection - he never was, but it got worse after his parents died, and it felt for a very long time as if something froze inside of him. His years in the military only ever reinforced that, and he won’t even begin to dissect whatever it was that losing Taehyung did to him after it all. Seokjin, for his part, doesn’t mind the affection - in fact, Namjoon has a notion that he wants more of it than he asks for - but he’s so damn bad at giving it sometimes. He’s made improvements, but sometimes Namjoon will still look back and wonder how they ended up together in the first place when Seokjin started off with the sensibilities of a high society Victorian maiden. 

Oh look, our knees are touching. How very scandalous, and slightly erotic. 

“Namjoon-ah,” Seokjin says in a low tone. “You know I’d never do anything that I thought would harm you. And you know I wouldn’t do something that would upset you unless it was absolutely, crucially essential.”

Namjoon knows how this will go. Yoongi is essential. He’s family. He was here before Namjoon, and Namjoon has the sneaking suspicion he’ll be here after, too. If forced to do so, Seokjin might just pick Yoongi before Namjoon if worse ever came to worst. 

Namjoon’s never asked if he would. It doesn’t seem a fair question to propose. And besides, he doesn’t really want to know the answer. 

“I know that,” Namjoon replies, equally quiet. It’s a battle to convince himself to meet Seokjin’s dark, unwaveringly intense eyes. “It’s just…” Namjoon peels away and tips his head back to stare up at the ceiling. “I watched you. For months. I thought you were grieving, hyung, I tried every day to help you.”

Seokjin’s hands, no longer cupping Namjoon’s face, slide lower to toy aimlessly with the hem of his sweater. “I was fine, Namjoon.”

“I know. You were fine. And you didn’t tell me, you let me go on thinking you were miserable and didn’t know how to talk about it, and I felt like a fucking failure for not knowing what was going on in your head.”

“I’m sorry.” Seokjin’s voice is uncommonly serious, earnest to its very core, and Namjoon finds he has to settle at the sound of it. Even if discontentment is still churning in the pit of his stomach. “I am, Namjoon. Truly.”

They have so, so much more to worry about than this. And yet–

“Don’t keep any more secrets from me,” Namjoon orders softly. His eyes flutter shut, and he exhales a breath that’s been knotted in his chest for too long. “I want you to trust me, completely.”

“I do trust you. But I was protecting you.”

“ Don’t . I never asked for that. I can protect myself.”

Seokjin’s hand circles around Namjoon’s wrist. A second later, his lips brush Namjoon’s, bestowing a kiss that lingers like a sunset, warm as it is slow. When he breaks it, he only leans closer, mouth sliding across Namjoon’s cheekbone and coming to rest near his earlobe. 

“You would never have to ask, Namjoon.”

Hoseok’s bedroom feels worth missing, for the first time in all the years he’s been here. It’s strange, he never noticed before that the view from the window isn’t that bad, and the closet is a nice size, and the lamp he picked up from someone’s front yard with a free sign taped to it casts a nice glow that makes the white walls warm. 

In another world, he and Yoongi could have stayed here, at least for a while. It would be a squeeze with Jimin, but Hoseok wouldn’t mind it. It’s not like Yoongi would need or want his own room. Hoseok will squish aside the shirts in his closet and the socks in his drawer to make room for Yoongi’s. They would walk to the grocery store down the street. They could take turns cooking at night, and doing the laundry, and feeding Jiji and making sure that, even at her colossally old age, she gets enough playtime. 

Kind of like a family, Hoseok supposes. The ones they put in movies, not real, flesh and blood families, because real families don’t work like that. Not in Hoseok’s experience. 

The door creaks open, squeaky on its hinges, and Yoongi steps in. He’s damp from the shower he just took, his borrowed white T-shirt is thin enough that Hoseok can see the ghost of the tattoos that sit on his skin beneath it, one old and one new. There are so many new things about Yoongi, too many to try to count or even consider all at once. His face is leaner, but his body looks strong, built up more than Hoseok recalls from before. His arms most especially. Hoseok wonders if his leg prohibited him from doing certain things, so he doubled down and worked upper body instead to make up for it. 

“You’re staring,” Yoongi murmurs, shuffling inside and knocking the door shut behind him with his foot. He lobs his bundle of discarded clothing into the laundry basket in the corner and rounds on Hoseok. “Did you not want me in your room or something? Don’t tell me you started to enjoy your personal space while I was gone…”

“I didn’t,” Hoseok replies, an almost-panicked strain in his voice that takes even him by surprise. 

The corners of Yoongi’s mouth turn down. “Dove, it was just a joke, relax for me. There’s nothing in this room that should have your heart rate that high.”

You , Hoseok thinks feebly. How could I not be consumed by you right now?

In lieu of answering, he slides left along the headboard and reaches for the side table, scooping a cigarette from the open packet and flicking the end with his lighter. Yoongi’s lighter, technically, though on more than one occasion Hoseok has considered the fact that he may have been using it longer now than Yoongi ever did. 

When he looks up again, Yoongi’s brows are furrowed watching him, as if he’s puzzled by the sight he sees. “Since when do you smoke, my Dove?”

“Since you went away,” Hoseok replies after a drag that lasts a beat too long. He exhales in a cloud that he knows will make Jimin’s nose wrinkle once the smell seeps under the door and into the rest of the apartment. From a logical standpoint, Hoseok can’t blame him. He never did enjoy the idea, nor the aroma of a cigarette, but once Yoongi was out of reach, it was the only real way for Hoseok to keep the idea of him nearby when his absence became unbearable. 

“It reminded me of you,” he adds simply. Understatement . Sometimes he’d light one just to let it burn and remember his early days with Yoongi in a half-lucid haze of painfully intense recollection. Hoseok lifts the cigarette pinched between his fingers and gestures it toward Yoongi in vague offering. “Do you want to share?”

Something indescribable passes over Yoongi’s face. His eyes flicker. He inches closer to the bed, sinking down on the very edge of the mattress and opening, then closing his mouth twice before he actually manages to speak. “I…stopped. While I was locked up, I mean. I figured out pretty early on it was more lucrative if I sold and traded them off than if I smoked them myself.”

Oh. Oh. Of course. That makes…sense. It all feels obvious, in hindsight. It’s not like a nicotine addiction is something one can simply afford to have in prison. Yoongi is smart as he is cunning, naturally he would have found a better, more self-serving way. And yet, the idea that something Hoseok found so much comfort in, this unchanging fact of Yoongi in his mind suddenly being rendered null and void because once again, time stole from them.

“Hey.” The mattress dips, and Yoongi comes closer, crawling his way across a sea of pillows and disheveled blankets towards Hoseok. “It’s fine, I’m not the fucking Pope, Dove, I’ll start again. It’s just a cigarette, give it to me.”

He reaches over, and Hoseok lets him take it. He doesn’t watch as Yoongi inhales a breath full of smoke, but he feels it all a moment later when he realizes Yoongi is close enough to take him by the chin and nudge their lips together so he can exhale a soft stream of smoke over Hoseok’s mouth before sealing it off with a kiss. 

He gives a breathy laugh as he pulls away. “I always wanted to do that. You never smoked with me before, always gave me so much shit about it.”

“I didn’t give you shit,” Hoseok mumbles. He plucks the cigarette back from Yoongi’s hold, blinking a few times as he does so to clear his eyes from the wavering tears that had momentarily been threatening to blossom there like a watery pane of glass. 

“Yeah you did. You were so judgmental when you watched me do it,” Yoongi replies, his words a quarrelsome reminiscence, yet his tone carries nothing but nostalgia-steeped tenderness as he sinks down into the mattress and makes himself comfortable next to Hoseok.

Hoseok takes another puff before stubbing out the half-burnt cigarette on the tray next to the lamp. “You’re all the way over there,” he hums, and jostles Yoongi slightly. He’s not really far at all, in fact, as it stands, they’re touching one another. But he could be closer, and therefore he should be closer.

Yoongi’s mouth cracks the edge of a smile, and he rolls over Hoseok’s thigh and settles between his legs, gazing up at him all soft and unguarded the way he allows himself to be when they’re alone. Hoseok is hit by a colossal wave of fondness just looking at him, the kind of yearning that claws at his chest from the inside out and steals his breath away. No matter how he thinks about it, he can’t comprehend that just two days ago he was rotting alone in this same room, unable to continue swallowing his own despair, and today, this very moment, Yoongi is curled up safe in his embrace. 

Hoseok hasn’t decided yet if this is real. 

He stretches forward, arms reaching over Yoongi and flipping the hem of his shirt up to bare his stomach and push his fingertips against the soft, warm skin waiting beneath. Yoongi accepts it without word, leaning back between Hoseok’s legs as if they’re a lounge chair and exhaling a breath that sounds like he’s been holding it for awhile.

Five years, perhaps. 

When Hoseok draws himself back to sit upright, he makes a pit stop while he’s right above Yoongi so he can press a kiss to the pink tip of his nose. He smells like smoke again, and cotton, and cheap shampoo, and Hoseok would really like to bottle that up and wear it.

“Are you gonna tell me stories now?” he murmurs, sitting up and sagging against the headboard behind him. His hand comes to Yoongi’s damp hair and he begins to brush through it aimlessly. “All the ones you couldn’t tell me in the visitation area?”

“There’s nothing to say, really,” Yoongi replies, shrugging one shoulder with half-hearted effort. “Nothing happened. I was being too careful about everything to get caught up in petty drama. I wanted to behave, so they couldn’t come up with a single damn reason to keep me there longer than I had to be. I just wanted to get out. It was fucking boring every day, and I missed you. They kept the cells cold as hell, and every night I’d spend too long rolling over and over again, wishing you’d be there when I did. I never get cold next to you, Dove. And I–” Yoongi pauses himself mid-sentence, and his brow knits together unhappily. “I just missed you, that’s all.”

“You what?” Hoseok asks, thumbing over Yoongi’s brow to smooth out the crease. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. It’s not important.”

“I still want to know.”

“Hoseok.” Yoongi’s expression tightens into something of a wince, almost guilty. “It’s not fair of me to say.”

“Say it anyway,” Hoseok breathes. “Please?”

He doesn’t know why he needs to know. Maybe because deep down, he’s already sure of what Yoongi was going to say, and he needs to be able to tell him it’s not true. None of it.”

Yoongi sighs heavily and shuts his eyes. “I just…hated thinking about the fact that you were keeping someone else warm. Even though I told you to,” he opens his eyes again as quickly as they closed and meets Hoseok’s. “I need you to know I was never angry at you for any of it, it was just hard to think about, and it didn’t ever get easier.”

Relief unfurls in Hoseok’s chest like a flag signalling peace being won. He should have said this to Yoongi sooner, but he wasn’t able to talk, to even think about what he had to do with strangers while Yoongi was gone, not when he wasn’t even allowed to touch him. Hoseok told himself that when Yoongi’s years locked up came to an end, and they could be together once again, he’d explain everything then, when it was bearable to have on his mind.

“I never spent the night with anyone else, Yoongi,” he whispers, and slides his fingertips down to caress Yoongi’s smooth cheek, right down to the curve of his jaw. “Not even once.”

Yoongi’s eyes widen, and Hoseok can see in an instant the questions flooding to the tip of his tongue, but he moves his thumb over Yoongi’s lips in a soft, short motion to keep him from spilling them before he can finish. 

“I fed, obviously. I didn’t have a death wish, I wanted to see you again. But all of it was just…the bare minimum. What it had to be, and no more than that. I only went out when I had to, and I left the second it was over with, went home to sleep in my own bed. Alone, every time.”

“But…” Yoongi’s eyes are filled with a profound sort of sadness as he gazes up at Hoseok. “You told me the time after is the best part. The most fulfilling.”

Hoseok leans down to kiss him again, hoping his touch will brush off the regret on Yoongi’s face. As if he’s blaming himself for it. “It’s only good when it’s with someone I want. And there’s only one person I did, and he was worth waiting for.”

When Hoseok draws back, Yoongi looks calmer, a little more hopeful as he gazes upward still. 

“Well, it wasn’t half as much of a sacrifice as it was for you, but for what it’s worth I waited too.”

“Really?” Hoseok cracks a smile. He doesn’t need to be promised this. He’s known all along that Yoongi would. “You weren’t cruising for hookups in the mess hall? No sneaky prison bathroom handjobs?”

“No,” Yoongi shakes his head, looking more disgusted than amused. “Never. With those people?”

“Come on, at least a few of them had to be hot. Or, decent at the very least.”

“Maybe,” Yoongi shrugs again. “I wasn’t really looking. I don’t think about people like that.”

“Like what? Like they’re fuckable?” 

Funny. For so long, so much of Hoseok’s life consisted of viewing the people he encountered through the lens of how willing he was to take them to bed. And the answer more often than not was not really at all , but cash is cash, and rent was eternal, so he took them anyway. And he fucking hated it sometimes, but he lived. He needed it to live. 

Yoongi is quiet for a moment, his face serious and contemplative while he stares at the ceiling fan. It takes him a moment in silence, thinking of whatever it is he’s thinking of, before he looks back at Hoseok. “Do you want to know something?”

“Of course I do.”

“Before we met, I’d only had sex with a couple of people. I never really felt like it, but I did it sometimes to…keep up appearances, I guess. I didn’t want to feel like any more of an alien than I already did, so I’d just pretend sometimes that it was something I liked, but I really didn’t.”

Yoongi lifts his arms as he speaks, wrapping them back and around Hoseok’s waist and holding him. “But when I met you, I mean the first time I ever laid eyes on you in that nightclub, I wanted you more than anyone I’d ever seen before in my life. I’d never felt anything like that before, like I needed you.”

“You could have just asked me to fuck in my room,” Hoseok exhales a laugh under his breath. “You didn’t have to stage a whole elaborate kidnapping, I would have said yes to a wad of cash and ten minutes in the bathroom. I was watching you in the crowd wishing you would, because my backup client for that night was some old saggy CEO whose dick smelled like baby powder. You were so pretty that night, you were the only person I saw. But Yoongi, you probably only wanted me because I’m a succubus. We kind of have that effect on people at first glance.”

“Maybe.” Yoongi doesn’t sound entirely convinced. 

Hoseok pokes a finger into his cheek. “Do you have a different theory?”

“No. Not one I really believe, anyway.”

“Well, tell me whatever it is you dubiously believe then.”

Yoongi rolls his eyes. “I don’t even dubiously believe it. In fact, I’ve probably laughed at it before because it sounds like a whole fucking pile of wishful thinking, but sometimes it crosses my mind, and… I don’t know. It’s just one of those old wives’ tales, but some people say that when a vampire is destined to imprint on someone, he’ll know them on sight even before they’ve said a word to each other.”

Hoseok is quiet for a moment, wrangling back the facetious remark on the tip of his tongue, but his resolve fails him after a moment. “Are you saying I’m your soulmate?”

Yoongi shrugs. It’s not answer. It’s not… not an answer.”

“Yoongi.” Hoseok is fighting to swallow his laughter. 

“What?”

“It’s been five years. You never even asked me to be your boyfriend .”

“For fuck’s sake, Hoseok,” Yoongi lets go of a breath and rolls his eyes. “I have the nickname I gave you tattooed over my heart. Do you need a ring or something?”

He doesn’t want for Hoseok to reply. He pulls him down to meet him where he’s at, then nips softly at his lower lip before kissing him until Hoseok forgets anything and everything he was going to say. 

Chapter Text

The room is filled with a smoke so thick it could almost be called a curtain, and Hoseok has the urge to lift his hands and physically scoop it aside so he can make out what lies ahead. He should be running, and he knows this, but his movement has slowed to a halt all at once. What’s holding him back? A rope? A net? Maybe the ground is too steep to climb. He doesn’t know, he can’t see with the thick, black clouds in the air. It’s hot, unbearably so, and he can’t shake the feeling that he’s been here before. 

When he looks down to try and scope out what could possibly be preventing him from plowing forward, he realizes his legs are mangled and bloody, so torn up they could hardly be recognized as legs, much less expected to carry him anywhere.

It’s from the bomb , Hoseok thinks vaguely, a hazy recollection swimming in the back of his head. There’s never a question of whether or not it’s true, it’s a simple fact in his psyche. He doesn’t know how he didn’t remember it until now, the explosion that went off and brought down all the rubble around him. That must be why the building is on fire too. Hoseok really should be running. 

It’s too bad he doesn’t have legs anymore. 

Out of the smoke, a figure is stirring, gliding forward with an unnerving calm, and Hoseok realizes too late that it’s Jeongguk. It’s Jeongguk and Hoseok has nowhere, nothing, no possible way to leave here and escape.

“It’s going to keep getting darker,” Jeongguk states in a low, echoing voice that doesn’t seem to come from his mouth, or anywhere at all. The sound reverberates around as if it’s bouncing off the haze and flinging itself back at Hoseok. “You’re stuck here now.”

“Yoongi will come get me,” Hoseok chokes. His throat burns as if it’s been scraped raw. “He did last time.”

Didn’t he? Hoseok remembers that as if it’s a fact too. Where there’s fire, there’s Yoongi, and Hoseok will be alright.

“He isn’t always here,” Jeongguk shrugs. His pinstripe suit ripples. It looks as though his skin is coming to a boil beneath the fabric. The skin on his face stretches and warps, flesh melting and remolding itself. “He hasn’t been around for a while.”

Jeongguk lifts the knife in his hand. Hoseok didn’t see it before, how massive and unforgiving it is. Six inches of rigid steel sharpened to a lethal precision. For a second, Hoseok thinks he’s going to stab at him, and he looks up to beg for his mercy, but when he does he finds that it’s not Jeongguk standing above him any longer, it’s Yoongi in the T-shirt and boxers he wore to bed last night, and he turns the knife on himself instead.

Hoseok doesn’t get a chance to cry out and ask him not to. Yoongi plunges the knife into his chest, then draws it out again, moving an inch or two downward and stabbing himself a second time. The holes in his skin are wide open faucets, churning out more blood than Hoseok knew was possible for a single body to contain. It spills out onto Hoseok, covering his face and mouth in a hot, thick layer that tastes of iron and acid. It’s Hoseok’s blood, too, he gave his to Yoongi once. When Yoongi bleeds, it comes from Hoseok, and he realizes too late that every wound Yoongi inflicts on himself is appearing on Hoseok’s chest and stomach.

“Yoongi!” he tries to scream, but all that comes out is a gargle. “Stop, you’re hurting yourself, stop it! You’re hurting me!”

Yoongi hits the ground. His body is succumbing to its injuries. Hoseok doesn’t know why he’s still upright, he shouldn’t be. He should be on the floor with Yoongi, twitching, unable to recover. He drags his broken form over to Yoongi and buries his face into his shoulder, the sleeve of his shirt slick with blood that makes Hoseok’s stomach turn. 

“Yoongi.” It’s just a whimper now, a sob. “You didn’t have to die,” he cries, his hands scrabbling for purchase all over Yoongi’s bloody skin. “Why would you do that? Why did you have to do that?”

“Hoseok.”

The call is distant. Hoseok jerks in fear that Jeongguk has returned, but it doesn’t sound like his voice. 

“Hoseok.”

Firmer this time. A pair of hands grab him from behind, rolling him, and Hoseok screams at the idea that they might be trying to drag him away from Yoongi. 

“ Hoseok it’s me , you’re alright, it’s just me.”

Hoseok twists, and when he finds a new direction, the air is suddenly much colder and clearer than it was. A gasp shudders through him, filling his lungs with this new oxygen, and he realizes his eyes are squeezed shut tight. Slowly, fearfully, he opens them and blinks a few times, clearing the gummy, hazy feeling until the scene around him snaps into place.

Bedroom. His bedroom. His bed . Those hands are Yoongi’s, bracing Hoseok more than he’s holding him. But the moment the tension Hoseok didn’t realize was pinning his body rigid snaps, Yoongi melts and pulls him forward. 

“You’re okay, you’re fine, Dove. It was a dream.” 

His lips are pressed into Hoseok’s neck, and the familiar scent, soft cotton and lingering cigarette smoke, that clings to the collar of his T-shirt is the only thing that keeps Hoseok breathing for the first few seconds that he sinks back into his body. 

A dream, a dream, it was a dream, Yoongi is right in front of you, there’s no blood, there’s no one else here. It was a dream .

It felt so god damn real. It felt inescapable. He chokes out a whimper and winds his arms tighter around Yoongi, squeezing hard to make sure he doesn’t crumble and disappear under pressure. Mercifully, he doesn’t. In fact, the more Hoseok touches, the more solid Yoongi seems to become, and the more the room around them seems to sharpen in detail and presence. The wood floors, the pile of unfolded laundry sitting on the chair in the corner, the curtains with the gray light of an almost-dawn filtering through. It’s probably too early to be awake, but there isn’t a chance Hoseok is sinking back to sleep after this. He never ever wants to feel that again .

With a rattling breath, he turns and presses a kiss to Yoongi’s throat. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Yoongi’s voice is gentle, still hoarse from sleep, but soft, and Hoseok wants to lick up every delicious vowel of his and remember the sound of it forever, the taste of kissing his words right off his lips.

“Freaking out,” Hoseok mumbles. As reality begins to dawn on him, he feels increasingly foolish for what happened. His skin is cold from the sheen of sweat he must have broken out in, twisting within the confines of his blankets, and his hands are still rattling with false adrenaline, but nothing around him is moving. There’s nothing to fear here , in this room. It’s just his mind playing a cold, cruel trick, keeping him at the very edge of his strung-out nerves. “It just felt…I thought it was real. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Yoongi hushes Hoseok with a hand combing through his hair. “Everyone has them. You’ll always wake up. And I’ll be right here when you do.”

Yoongi turns Hoseok’s face, lifting it and kissing his cheek, then his temple, and the crown of his head where Hoseok is sure his hair is tangled from the friction of fighting his pillows. “I’m here, alright? Look at me. I’m here.”

You are now , Hoseok wants to whisper. But you weren’t once. And I don’t think I’ll ever stop being afraid that one day, again, you won’t be .

If Jeongguk is being honest, he didn’t entirely dislike his stint in prison. There’s something to be appreciated about a predictable schedule, routine meals, and the privilege of boredom. 

Being locked up wasn’t as bad for him as he imagined it would be for some people. He’s spent plenty of time adjusting to living by someone’s timeline, following orders he had no say in. The ordeal didn’t come as a shock, at the very least. After all, being an inmate of the country was no worse than being held hostage to Yongsun Intak.

Yongsun. Yongsun. Five years, and Jeongguk still has to train himself not to say Father , or Papa out of pure, fear-instilled reflex. They’re such stupid, childish titles. Jeongguk despises the fact that he lived deluded and obedient out of his mind in fear of it. 

Despises that sometimes, he still does. 

“Jeongguk.”

Jeongguk looks up, sharp and startled. He hadn’t heard Seokjin approaching, he seemed to have materialized at the side of the couch, all solemn in his black suit with his hands folded behind his back. He looks kind of like a butler from an old movie, some film noir cast in black and white on grainy film. Jeongguk’s been watching a lot of movies recently. There was nothing better to do alone in that hovel of an apartment.

“Here, drink something. You look like a malnourished college freshman,” Seokjin huffs, and presses a hot mug into Jeongguk’s palms without waiting to ask if he wants it. It smells sweet and herbal, a little like freshly mown grass colliding with a spice rack, but Jeongguk doesn’t dislike it. He’s cold here, anyway. He doesn’t know if it’s Seokjin or Namjoon’s doing, but one of them keeps the thermostat turned down to a chill.

Still, better than the apartment. After Yoongi brought him here last night, Seokjin told him he didn’t have to go back to the flat if he didn’t want to. 

We have plenty of space , he said, short and curt, but Jeongguk is beginning to understand the strange form his mercy takes. He and Yoongi were the only people Jeongguk saw for three months straight, Seokjin dropped by every few days with groceries and stayed only long enough to criticize the state of the place or shove food into the microwave for Jeongguk because he claimed he was seriously worried Jeongguk wouldn’t do it himself. 

Jeongguk would have, eventually. It’s just that he was kind of getting comfortable being horizontal for hours and hours at a time with no one cropping up and demanding anything else of him. He hates sleeping. He can barely do it, because when he does-

Well, he tries not to. But he found out recently that if he lies down and doesn’t move for long enough, he can recharge in his own way without ever having to drift under.

He got a phone too, one for himself that no one else touches. He had one before, but Yongsun could track it anywhere he went, and it was strictly for business. The phone Jeongguk has now is ridiculous and shiny and purple as a cluster of lilacs, and he can put anything he wants on it. Streaming apps, shopping, games. Mostly he likes the games. There are so many, more than he could ever play in a lifetime, but he got a damn good start after faking his death. 

Now, it’s back to work for him.

“Yoongi and the others are here,” Seokjin murmurs, nudging the handle of the mug like a small threat that if Jeongguk doesn’t drink it manually, he’ll certainly be drinking it through brute force in a second. “They’re in the kitchen, but we’re moving here in a moment. Try not to agitate Jimin into a fit again. He gets worked up easily.”

Jeongguk has a feeling the pixie will either be getting agitated or he won’t, nothing Jeongguk could do will affect that either way. His jaw is still smarting where he got smacked yesterday, and he expects the dull bruise sitting under his skin will take a few days to fade. 

“Sure,” Jeongguk mumbles and lifts the mug to his lips and takes a drink that signals he has nothing more to say. It tastes exactly the way it smells. Seokjin turns and disappears through the doorway that will take him back to the kitchen. 

It takes a long moment for Jeongguk to feel like leaving his nest of blankets on the couch and getting to his feet. In an odd way, he’s slightly grateful that Seokjin came in and warned him the others would be filing in soon instead of surprising Jeongguk where he lay. It stings enough as is to subject himself to sitting in a room of beings who despise the sight of him. It stings more to be ambushed by their presence before he can ready himself to face it. 

He knows he isn’t one of them. He isn’t going to ask to be included in their familiar patterns, but the looks of horror and disgust every time he makes his presence known burns to swallow. 

Mostly because he’s aware he deserves them.

It’s Yoongi who appears first, ushering Hoseok along at his side with a hand on his waist. They never stop touching, those two. Even when they move to sit on their couch, Yoongi’s arm stays wrapped around Hoseok’s, their knees knocking together, the edges of their feet almost stacked on the floor. Yoongi lifts his chin at Jeongguk in greeting, but it’s a quick, short thing. He’s more preoccupied with the low discussion he and Hoseok are having beneath their breaths, just quiet enough that Jeongguk can’t make out more than a few disjointed syllables. They keep their faces turned to one another, almost touching, almost a kiss even when they’re just speaking.

Jeongguk is an afterthought. A bystander. He had Yoongi’s near undivided attention behind bars while they were planning their great escape and subsequent plot, but he always knew that would die the moment they made it back to the others. Hoseok, most especially, will always come miles before Jeongguk. He’s priority number one, and Jeongguk is probably, shit, at least ten bullet points behind him.

It’s bearable. Expected at the very least. Jeongguk was and is aware this would be the price of his freedom. If it can be called that at this point. He might not be in a cage anymore, or under Yongsun’s heel, but it’s not as if Jeongguk can fuck off and do whatever he wants. Responsibility can be a prison as much as anything.

“May the members of the jury allow this session to commence,” Seokjin’s voice announces dryly, punctuated by a clap of his hands as he rounds the corner into the living room. Namjoon is on his heels, and Jimin follows at the very back, shrinking behind the other two, sullen as a rain cloud, so small and silent that Jeongguk doesn’t notice him until Namjoon moves to sit and unintentionally reveals Jimin behind him. Seokjin takes the seat on one of Namjoon’s sides, and Jimin takes the other, as far away from Jeongguk as the room will physically allow.

“Tomorrow morning we’re flying out of a private airfield. Pack light, we can get most of the shit you’ll need from any store anywhere around, and we need to be able to move quickly. Being bogged down by fifteen suitcases isn’t conducive to that, so keep that in mind. I have connections at the airfield and I know the pilot, but there’s still a thin security detail to get through before boarding. I don’t expect any complications, but everyone is getting fake passports just in case, only I don’t trust you with them for long, so I’ll be handing them out tomorrow morning. Sorry, but I don’t have time to remake them if someone fucks up.”

“That was one time,” Namjoon mutters, sounding sullen about it.

Seokjin continues as if he hadn’t spoken. “We’ll be stopping for a while in Vancouver, but we won’t be getting off the plane, so don’t expect a trip to the duty-free stores for souvenirs…”

Seokjin’s voice fades to a distant background drone the longer he talks. Jeongguk has heard this plan too many times over to need or care to listen to it again. He could repeat the whole thing from start to finish in his sleep, and frankly, getting to New York is the easy part. It’s what happens when they get there that’s going to be paved with roadblocks. So no, Jeongguk doesn’t tune in with any measure of attentiveness. Instead, he finds his gaze wandering to the pixie slumped behind the lines of Namjoon’s body, looking an awful lot like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

The few times Jeongguk saw him before , Jimin kept his hair a shade of platinum blond so light it was almost white, and Jeongguk could imagine it glowing in the dark. Now, it’s the natural black that the rest of them sport, and though his isn’t as overgrown as Hoseok’s, there’s a lank quality to it that suggests a prominent lack of self care.

He looks hopeless. Jeongguk doesn’t know how much he likes the idea of walking into battle with a dejected man. Their chances here are already rocky: two convicts, a hacker, an ex-soldier, a pixie who never learned his magic, and a malnourished succubus up against forces that run deeper and more corrupt than even their wildest nightmares could ever produce.

Jeongguk is pretty sure they’re going to die in New York.

Maybe he’ll at least get to sight see before it happens. 

Hoseok is asleep within ten minutes of returning home. He curls on the couch, a pillow tucked between his arms, and claims he just wants to lay down a moment. The next time Yoongi looks at him, he’s passed out cold.

It’s for the better. He has a lot of recovering to do. Time, Yoongi thinks, is the only thing that will heal him. Time and tenderness. 

While Hoseok sleeps, Yoongi cleans. It all feels a little pointless, given that they won’t be here after tomorrow. For weeks, months , even. Yoongi doesn’t want to think about anything longer than that. One day, when they’re able to, they’ll return, and on that day, it’ll be better if the place is clean.

Halfway through his methodical scrubbing of the fridge, Yoongi hears Jimin exit his room and shuffle into the bathroom, snapping the door shut behind him with a finality that suggests he’ll be staying in there awhile. And he does.

The door doesn’t budge the whole time Yoongi is in the kitchen. Even after he’s put together a plate of food and left it on the coffee table for Hoseok to wake up to. Even after he’s gathered up their bedding and dumped it into the washer, snagging clothes from the dryer and folding them while he’s there. Yoongi strains to listen in for any noise coming from Jimin, but after a long enough time hearing nothing, he gives up.

The best he can hope for is that Jimin didn’t crawl into the bathtub with his hairdryer in hand, though Yoongi knows that’s probably about the state he’s in right now. If he had something to say to Jimin, he would, but every time he tries, he comes up empty-handed. It’s not like they were ever close, the two of them. Taehyung was the only tie that truly bound them to one another, and in light of his death it would seem like the twin puncture wounds of grief they share would bring them closer, but it never has. It’s not as if Jimin was paying him regular visits in prison. In fact, he didn’t show his face even once. Hoseok suspects that was because he ran the risk of seeing Jeongguk inside those concrete walls. 

Yoongi suspects the pixie didn’t want to see either of them at all. 

“Baby.” 

Yoongi starts at the sound of Hoseok’s voice unprompted and side steps to the doorway so he can take a peek into the living room where he left Hoseok. It’s to his surprise that Hoseok is awake and upright - though admittedly barely so. His eyelids sag along with his shoulders, waist carved thinner than ever and curving forward as if it’s struggling to support his weight. He’s pecking weakly at one of the crackers from the plate Yoongi set out for him. 

Yoongi sets down the towel he was using to scrub the kitchen counters and takes the shortest route to Hoseok, a straight line to sink down onto the couch by his side. “How long have you been up?” 

“Just a couple minutes,” Hoseok murmurs. His voice is scratchy with sleep. “Still tired.”

“Go to bed,” Yoongi hums, leaning in and pressing his nose to Hoseok’s temple. It's compulsive, maybe slightly obsessive the way he feels he needs to monitor Hoseok’s status whenever he can. His scent, his heartbeat, his temperature. Right now, he’s nice and even. Maybe a little hungry, but not urgent. Lazy, lax pulse strumming underneath Yoongi’s own. “I just cleaned the room.”

Hoseok cracks a smile. “Didn’t you clean it the other day?”

“I cleaned it again. It’s really nice, ready for you to curl up.”

Hoseok tips forward, nestling his forehead in Yoongi’s shoulder. “I haven’t packed yet. What the fuck do you even pack for this kind of trip?”

“Anything you can’t get anywhere else. Besides that, I don’t think it really matters. I’ll buy you whatever else you need.”

“Hot,” Hoseok mumbles. He sounds a little delirious with sleep. Yoongi hooks an arm around his waist and stands, pulling Hoseok with him and scooping him up. It’s not as easy to lift him as it used to be, not with Yoongi’s damn leg, but he doesn’t let Hoseok know that. Besides, his leg has been doing better this week. Sometimes, Yoongi wonders how much of the pain is psychosomatic. 

He shuffles them both to the bedroom and lays Hoseok down in the center of the bed the way he imagines one would settle a baby down to sleep. The moment he begins to pull away, Hoseok stiffens and reaches for his arms. 

“Aren’t you going to sleep?”

“I have a few more things I need to do, Dove,” Yoongi murmurs, though the knowledge that he’s disappointing Hoseok by saying as much pains him. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

“You’re not leaving, are you?”

“The apartment? No. I’ll just be in the living room with my computer.”

That, at least, seems to relax Hoseok minimally. “Okay.” He reaches up and tugs the nearest pillow under his arms like a substitute for a body. “Don’t go far.”

“I won’t.”

Yoongi dips his head to kiss Hoseok again before flipping on the lamp and turning the overhead off as he exits, leaving Hoseok to lounge in a warm glow. 

He shuffles down the hall, intent on settling back in the living room, but as he passes the bathroom door the handle twists and Yoongi finds himself stopping to glance back. What he expected, he isn’t sure. Jimin, probably, and Jimin he gets. 

Only instead of a dark haired, sunken looking Jimin, or the waifish sort of blonde Yoongi got to know him as, his hair has been tinted a shade of crimson so deep and bright it looks like blood splattered across an empty backdrop. It highlights how pale he’s become, and his eyes are rimmed in a shade to match as if he had been crying, but his face is one of resolute - if not furious - determination. When he realizes Yoongi has stopped to look at him, he turns sharply. 

“What?”

Yoongi drops his gaze. “Nothing.”

It is nothing. He has nothing to say. They’ll leave tomorrow. They’ll fight a war. They’ll cry, and they’ll bleed, and it’s impossible to feel like they aren’t repeating the whole agonizing loop of five years ago. And Yoongi can’t help but ache and wonder if it will always be this way, or if there will come a day in his life where his world can be quiet. 

“You should go to bed,” he says finally, filling the tense pause rooting itself between them. “We leave early.”

“I know when we leave,” Jimin scowls. He doesn’t sound half as sweet as he used to. 

Yoongi always told Taehyung this work would corrupt Jimin sooner or later. That it wasn’t right for him, and he was better off somewhere else, and it was only a matter of time before he succumbed to it and became as cold and terrible as the rest of them had. As a general thing, Yoongi enjoys being right. 

So this time, when he realizes he is, he’s surprised at the pang in his chest at the fact of being so. 

Perhaps, he should have been kinder to Jimin while he still could. 

Getting onto the airplane is the easiest part of what their lives are going to become over the next several weeks, and Yoongi knows this, but it doesn’t stop the stirring of apprehension in his chest as they make their way on board. Security is lax, it’s a private craft at a private airport, and he’s fully aware they have inside men on scene ensuring things will run smoothly. Even so, as they present their faux passports listing their fake name and ages, Yoongi is braced for denial.

You’re supposed to be dead! someone will shout and point a damning finger at him before shoving him onto the pavement, pinning him to an unyielding ground and holding his arms behind his back. Yoongi wishes the lingering risk of returning to life behind bars didn’t rattle him as much as it did, but the truth is that he finds it almost paralyzing. Even the recollection of his arrest is enough to induce a compressed panic in his lungs. He felt so distraught, so afraid on that day. His only relief was the fact that he had sent Hoseok running with enough time for him to escape, but Yoongi wanted to be back in his arms desperately. When the flood of cops swung onto the scene, burning building and smoking rubble, they hadn’t given Yoongi an ounce of grace. They didn’t even allow him to surrender, they dragged him and Jeongguk apart and forced Yoongi onto the hot, coarse earth, pressing his face into the dirt so hard he couldn’t breathe. His leg ached, he could feel his own hot blood sloshing around in the confines of his jeans, and he tried to reason with them between gasping for air.

“Let me up, I won’t run. Please let me up, I’m injured.”

It was worse, watching them do the same to Jeongguk. He wasn’t even conscious, but they jerked him around like a rag doll and tossed him and Yoongi both into the backs of patrol cars instead of racing them out to get the medical attention they needed. It was at least twelve hours before Yoongi saw a doctor, and by that time, if a total repair on his leg had ever been possible, it wasn’t anymore.

“Baby.” Hoseok’s whisper is a soft call to attention, and when his lithe fingers wind around Yoongi’s arm, Yoongi remembers he isn’t in a cage anymore, nor is he at the mercy of law enforcement. He’s on the narrow steps leading into a plane, and he’s with someone who loves him, and he no longer has to live and die by the rules of others.

“Are you okay?” Hoseok asks, tucking his chin onto Yoongi’s shoulder as they shuffle towards their seats.

“I’m fine,” Yoongi murmurs, and slips a hand down to Hoseok’s waist, keeping him close. “Do you want the window, or the aisle?

“Window. Do you mind?”

“Not in the slightest,” Yoongi replies, and ushers Hoseok toward his chosen spot. If anything, he prefers it. Looking outside has been known to make him motion sick. Yoongi never really appreciated flying; the best he can do is sit in the aisle and try to pretend he’s in a car. Hoseok, on the other hand, has never had the opportunity to try, and Yoongi is more than content with letting him have the scenic seat if he thinks he’ll enjoy it. 

The jet isn’t meant for commercial travel: it only has eight seats, four sets of two facing one another. Behind that, a bar, and beyond it a set of bathrooms before the cockpit where their pilot and copilot reside. Seokjin vetted them carefully, he says they can be trusted to get them to their destination in one piece.

Yoongi can only hope that’s true. 

Seokjin and Namjoon take the two seats directly across from Yoongi and Hoseok. Jeongguk sinks into one of the spots across the wide aisle. Jimin, trailing onboard last, sees him and bypasses the seating area completely to go sit on the floor by the bar. Yoongi doesn’t waste breath trying to convince him not to. And besides, Hoseok is nodding off on his shoulder almost before they’ve lifted off the ground, and Yoongi would rather sit still forever than risk disturbing him. 

“You look like you’re one misplaced hand away from fucking right in front of us,” Seokjin notes, stating his observation wholly unimpressed while giving Yoongi and Hoseok a visual once-over laced with heavy judgment. 

Yoongi looks down. With the armrest tucked away, there’s virtually no divide between his seat and Hoseok’s. The moment Hoseok fell into slumber, he basically melted the both of them into one pile: his leg is slung over Yoongi’s, thighs stacked, arm wound around Yoongi’s own, their fingers laced tight. His other hand is a wandering vine, outstretched and resting on Yoongi’s hip, thumb scooping under the hem of his shirt and brushing up on the bare skin beneath as if touching just isn’t enough; he needs to absorb him. 

The Yoongi of another time, a younger, angrier, more shame-sick and hot-edged version of him, would have recoiled at the idea of such a blatant display of affection, how weak it made him look, how pathetic it was to need or want that. But today, Yoongi is wiser for knowing how precious tenderness can be. That something worth missing terribly should not be taken for granted. After years, nearly decades, of shuddering his way through touch, the mere idea of it sometimes being enough to make his flesh crawl, he finally found a person whose embrace he craves. Arms that he longs for when they’re apart, kisses that lull him to sleep, a safe spot to rest his head. 

Yoongi refuses to deny himself the pleasure of it any longer. He spent too long already with a hole in his heart, the least he can do now is take comfort in the fact that it’s been filled. He raises a condescending brow at Seokjin. 

“You’re just jealous that we have sex.”

It takes a lot to rattle Seokjin the majority of the time, but Yoongi learned pretty early on that a dig at his nonexistent sex life was an easy way to do it if he ever needed to. Or at least, it was nonexistent up until the last couple of years when Namjoon entered the picture. Yoongi still has questions about how that all came to be. He wouldn’t exactly have placed them on a mostly likely to get together list. 

“Namjoon and I have sex,” Seokjin replies mildly, but the red glow of his ears is a dead giveaway. 

Yoongi gives them a once over of his own. Namjoon, like Hoseok, fell asleep almost the second they lifted off the ground. Unlike Hoseok, however, there are several polite inches of space between them, bridged only by Namjoon’s hand resting just slightly to the side, a single pinky extended to hook through Seokjin’s own. 

“Well, you’re sitting like you’re not sure if it’s legal,” Yoongi informs him, holding back a snicker. He reaches for the newspapers rolled into the rack beside his seat and picks one at random. 

“Like what’s legal?”

“Faggotry,” Yoongi replies, deadpan. Seokjin’s brow creases. 

“You’re my least favorite person to talk to, do you know that?”

“Is your favorite person your boyfriend who you’ve never had sex with?” 

Seokjin plucks a mint from the bowl inlaid in the shelf by the window and flicks it at Yoongi, obviously disgruntled. “We do have sex.”

“Okay, Sister Seokjin. Whatever you say.”

“You think you’re so special just because you bagged a succubus, but I’ll remind you that you had to kidnap him in order to get him to go home with you,” Seokjin replies sanctimoniously. 

Yoongi snorts. “He was gonna fuck me before he knew I was going to kidnap him, just so we’re clear.”

“Because he thought you were paying him . Do you know how many times I’ve had to pay Namjoon to have sex with me?”

Yoongi swallows his shit-eating grin and forces his face to remain neutral. “Well, hyung, I would say zero because I don’t think you guys have ever seen each other naked.”

Seokjin lifts a hand and flips him off. 

For a good portion of the first leg of the journey, Hoseok sleeps. He sleeps like a baby ; as soon as they lift off the ground, the urge to shut his eyes swallows him. Hoseok doesn’t think he’s ever been tired like this, for so long and so often, in his entire life thus far. Yoongi is patient about it. He doesn’t ask Hoseok for anything. He encourages him to sleep, more often than not. Tells him he’s been through a lot. That he needs to recover. 

Hoseok agrees, on some level, but the rest of him is steeped in some degree of shame. It’s his fault that he let himself get like this, so brittle he could snap. He could have been stronger. He could have at least tried to fight his grief. Instead, his grief fought him. 

Still does. Even when Hoseok sleeps, there are fifty-fifty odds he’ll get sucked sideways into a nightmare and wake up in a cold sweat, shaking and retching until his hands find Yoongi beside him.

Today that doesn’t happen. Today, Hoseok wakes slowly, his stomach grumbling. Yoongi finds a bagged snack mix behind the bar and feeds it to Hoseok piece by piece, shaking it out into his hand and holding it, as if even asking him to grip the bag himself would be too much. Hoseok leans back in his plush seat and allows himself the luxury of nothingness. 

They land somewhere at sundown and switch planes. Hoseok is too dazed by sleep and travel to keep up with the hour or their location, and Yoongi is distracted speaking to the pilot on the tarmac in a low voice, him, Seokjin, and Jeongguk all with their heads together, so Hoseok doesn’t ask. He just waits for Yoongi to return and scoop him by his waist, ushering him off to their next stop.

The second plane is larger, the seats spread farther, and this time he and Yoongi are able to get a section of their own instead of sitting across from Seokjin and Namjoon, and more importantly, well away from Jeongguk . Though, not as much as Jimin, whose brand new scarlet hair can be seen bobbing through the rows for a moment until he settles into a spot as far away from Jeon Jeongguk as physically possible while still remaining on the same aircraft. 

With the sun gone, the lights in the cabin dim. Hoseok discovers the footrests on the seat fold out a good amount, turning the whole thing into a sort-of bed. Reclined enough, at least, that he can tuck his chin on Yoongi’s shoulder and relax.

“Are you cold?” Yoongi looks up from his phone after five or so minutes of Hoseok leaning on him as if he were a pillow. “Do you need a blanket? They probably have some sitting around.”

“I’m fine,” Hoseok murmurs, fingers clamping down on Yoongi’s sleeve before he gets any ideas about standing. He’ll be fine, as long as Yoongi stays right where he is. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Well, I can’t go far, Dove. We’re on a plane.”

“Don’t go anywhere ,” Hoseok reiterates, firm even as his voice grows a little smudged by fatigue. Beneath them, city lights are tiny dew drops scattered in clusters across a pitch black earth. They’re not high enough yet that the ground has been overtaken by a blanket of clouds, so Hoseok watches them shrink into nothing and imagines them growing again as the plane descends upon New York City. 

“Have you ever been?” he murmurs, grazing his fingertips up and down Yoongi’s arm. He gets a little touch drunk over him, he’ll be the first to admit it. Feeling Yoongi, just being close to him, clothing and all, is a sort of elation Hoseok never expected to feel again. Every second is worth drinking in and savoring. 

“New York, I mean. Have you been there?”

Hoseok attunes himself to every minute detail of Yoongi’s body, noting the way he tenses gently, a physical response to a visceral memory. 

“Twice,” he says after a missed beat. “With…Yongsun. Once for a business trip, and once for three months because he wanted me to work on my English.”

Hoseok feels his brow curl upward, and he tips his chin to look at Yoongi, half-amused and half-puzzled. “I didn’t know you spoke English.”

It shouldn’t be funny, really, the fact that so many things about Yoongi still surprise him. It’s only constant evidence of how much togetherness was stolen from them. 

“Had to,” Yoongi replies, and his voice takes on a darker edge. “The work we were going to be doing was international. Fucking clearly.”

A pause. Yoongi softens, then takes Hoseok’s hand in his own. “Sorry.” He brushes a kiss over his knuckles. “It’s fine. We’re fine. I’ll teach you English.”

Funnily enough, that’s far from Hoseok’s main concern. But he doesn’t want to push Yoongi while he’s already agitated, so instead he settles and holds his hand tighter. 

“I’ll be a good student, Yoongi.”

“I know you will, Dove.”

For the last portion of the flight, Yoongi stands up to walk. Not because his legs are stiff, or his mind is restless - though both of those things are technically true - but because he has to. It’s compulsion more than mere wanting. He feels like something in his head or chest will explode if he doesn’t get to his feet and make pointless trails up and down the aisle, even if it means leaving Hoseok to do so. 

He’s alright, Yoongi reminds himself as he repeats his straight path, then doubles back to do it yet again. He’s asleep. You can see him. 

Still, Yoongi feels guilty. He said he wouldn’t leave his side, but the Yoongi of several hours ago didn’t account for the visceral feeling of discontentment that was going to wash over him like a rogue wave. 

The fifth time he passes Seokjin, whose nose is buried in his laptop, he stops. 

“Where’s Namjoon?”

“Bathroom,” Seokjin murmurs. Every crease in his navy suit is still pristine. Yoongi has no clue how he still looks so put together after an entire day cooped inside an airplane. The rest of them are all fairly rumpled. 

Yoongi flicks a glance over his shoulder. “This whole time?”

“I assume he’s motion sick. We’re landing soon.” Seokjin looks up, blinking away the screen fatigue no doubt clouding his eyes. “Why are you up and away from your lover, angelfish?”

“ Angelfish?” Yoongi repeats, almost aghast at the unwarranted nickname. “What the fuck does that mean?”

Seokjin raises a brow, then shoots a look over the rows of seats to where Hoseok is sleeping. “They mate for life.”

“Yeah, so do fucking wolves, but you chose angelfish?”

“Please, wolves are so conventional, Yoongi,” Seokjin shakes his head and goes back to his laptop. “God forbid I branch out.”

“Yeah,” Yoongi mutters under his breath. “ God forbid.”

Yoongi resumes walking, making a loop or two before stopping again, this time by the aft bathroom when he catches scent out of nowhere. For a second he thinks it’s gasoline, then when he inhales it properly and realizes it’s far from the muddy, sour aroma of gas, he wonders if maybe it’s Hoseok. Hoseok is sweet, but not this sort of sickly, fruity -

The door swings open and emits Jeongguk, along with a noxious cloud of smoke that he, upon seeing Yoongi standing a foot from him, hurriedly tries to fan away with his hand. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles, pulling the hood of his gray sweater up over his head. “Didn’t know you were waiting.”

Yoongi catches his shoulder before he can hope to turn and slip back to his seat. “Are you vaping in the bathroom?”

“No.” Jeongguk’s fist slips into his pocket, but not before Yoongi catches a flash of the blue and pink pod in his hand. 

Yoongi fixes him with a look that he’s previously reserved for victims of interrogation by torture. 

Jeongguk emits a low huff of a sound from the back of his throat. “It’s not like it bothers anyone.”

“Why can’t you just smoke a cigarette like a normal kid?”

“‘Cause they taste gross,” Jeongguk grumbles, shaking Yoongi off of him and peeling away. 

“Oh, and radioactive blueberry tastes good?” 

“Yeah, it does. That’s not a crime. And if it was, would you actually give a fuck?”

Yoongi represses the urge to emit an aggravated sigh. He’s reasonably aware that Jeongguk isn’t a teenager any longer, but there’s a prickliness to him that harks the likeness of one. Yoongi is trying to have patience for the fact that on the rocky road of rehabilitation, it would appear that Jeongguk has taken roughly fifteen enormous steps backward in some aspects of maturity. 

“Just wait until we land,” Yoongi exhales sharply, making a quick grab for Jeongguk’s vape and swiping it out of his grasp before he can do anything to stop it. “You can suck on this all you want once we get to the apartment. But do it on a balcony or something, this stuff reeks.”

Evidently deciding that fighting isn’t worth his time nor energy, Jeongguk peels away from the bathroom door and slips past Yoongi without another word. 

“It’s not much, but it’s honest work.”

Seokjin’s bag gets tossed on the bed with a soft flump! of a sound, and Namjoon looks over at him, fully expecting the half-pleased look on his face in reaction to his own joke. Seokjin’s humor is nothing if not badly timed 100% of the times he employs it.

Namjoon pulls a face. “It’s a two-story penthouse in New York, I would go out on a limb and say that is much.”

“It’s an abandoned two-story penthouse,” Seokjin corrects, and when he yanks the curtains closed over the looming windows on the far side of the bed, a cloud of dust chokes out as if to reiterate his statement. “But we’ll buy Clorox wipes and clean it up. It’s fine.”

“It is fine,” Namjoon agrees mildly, and sinks down on the edge of the unmade mattress. It’s a little dull, and sort of saggy, but not dirty. He’s slept on far worse. He was, in fact, sleeping in between dumpsters in Gangnam four years ago when Seokjin all but made him move into the house. 

Namjoon had an apartment for a while following, well, everything , but after standing as a whistleblower against Yongsun Intak and his country’s military, Namjoon had become horrendously paranoid. It was grief and loneliness more than anything, but he felt as if he was dragging through every single day, inching toward the brink of total insanity. With his name on a lease, he was constantly looking over his shoulder, jumping at every noise and expecting something awful to be waiting around every corner. It was easier to leave, safer to slip off the face of the earth and vanish into the churning city.

When Seokjin found out how he was living, he practically dragged Namjoon by the collar of his soggy, unwashed jacket to go take up residency at his house.

“ Seriously,” Namjoon had tried to reason with him over it, to shake off his insistence, “ I don’t need your sympathy, I’ll manage.”

“Sympathy?” Seokjin had given him the world’s most melodramatic eye roll as he hauled Namjoon into his car. “ You think this is sympathy? I’m running Seoul, Kim Namjoon. No one is around anymore, I need your help.”

And so, what Taehyung had once been to Yoongi, Namjoon became to Seokjin as he headed up the mess left in the fallout of the arrest, the trial, and the sentencing. For a good long time, Seokjin played off his emphasis on keeping Namjoon around as nothing more than needing an extra set of hands to juggle the things he couldn’t, but it became clear after a while that he, too, was suffering from acute loneliness and craved company the way Namjoon began to realize he himself was. As it turned out, physical touch and conversation were in fact necessary human experiences, and Namjoon began to enjoy both from Seokjin often. As a result, some of the worst parts of Namjoon’s brain grew quieter with time. He trusted more. He feared less. He wasn’t invincible, but he was steadier , and after so much time alone and afraid of his own mind, steady was as much as he could ask for.

“Namjoon-ah, did you hear me?”

Seokjin’s hand passes in front of Namjoon’s face, tearing him from his thoughts. Namjoon blinks. He hadn’t noticed Seokjin came around the bed to stand in front of him, nor that he was speaking in the first place.

“Yes. No . Sorry, could you say it again?”

“I asked if you wanted to shower. Though, now that I think about it, there probably aren’t any towels hanging around here. Are you alright? You look a little…” Seokjin trails off, and moves his hand to cup Namjoon’s chin, considering him with pinched concern, “pale.”

“I’m okay,” Namjoon replies, though his voice doesn’t come out nearly as assured as he would have hoped for. He thinks, more than likely, he’s just jet-lagged, and coming off the tail end of motion sickness. Flying rarely agrees with him. The first flight was alright, but he swears the second one was a ramped descent into illness, the kind of sickly disorientation that makes his stomach turn and his skin tingle from head to toe. Even now on even ground, he hasn’t been able to shake it.  

He sighs and leans forward, wrapping his arms around Seokjin and tugging him close so that he can rest his head on his stomach. Namjoon is a little taller than him, but when he’s feeling particularly affectionate, he has a habit of wanting to be held like he’s smaller, in a way that Seokjin indulges.

“Maybe I do just need a shower, hyung,” he murmurs, lips brushing the thick, smooth linen of Seokjin’s suit jacket. His cheek comes to rest on the softer material of his button-down.

“I’ll run out and grab some towels,” Seokjin replies in a hum. His hand comes to the back of Namjoon’s head, holding him there without pressure. He’s warm all over, and for just a moment it makes the buzzing in Namjoon’s head fade away. “Or Yoongi might be on the job already. Hoseok said he was cold so, you know, Yoongi is probably getting ready to light the place on fire, and then go hang the moon for him as an extra touch.”

Namjoon huffs out a laugh. “You told me Yoongi had to pull Hoseok out of a burning building once. Wouldn’t lighting the place up drag back bad memories?”

“With them, Namjoon? I honestly have no clue. It could be unspeakable, or it could be their foreplay.” Seokjin pulls away, but not before bowing to kiss the top of Namjoon’s head. “Not everyone is as nice and normal as you and I are.”

“Kim Seokjin,” Namjoon shakes his head as Seokjin ambles off to go inspect the bathroom situation, “you are not normal.”

Hoseok isn’t entirely sure that Yoongi has taken a single breath as long as they’ve been in New York. Which, granted, has only been about four hours, but still.

That’s a long time to go without breathing. 

“You should sit down,” Hoseok suggests with a touch of apprehension as he eyes the path Yoongi has made around the room - their room, for the foreseeable future - a dozen odd times now. Probably more, but who’s counting?

“I’m not tired yet,” Yoongi mutters, but he looks it. He didn’t sleep on the plane, at least not that Hoseok saw. He could have while Hoseok was out, but it’s his personal observation that Yoongi rarely sleeps without being told to.

Hoseok reclines slightly, his back hitting the flat pillow sandwiched between his spine and the headboard behind him. The bedding isn’t much, but at least it’s brand new and functional. Seokjin made a store run for essentials a couple of hours ago, came back with simple bedding for everyone, towels, and a handful of snacks so they could eat a meager excuse for dinner and shuffle off for the night. It’s not exceedingly late, but they’re all too jet-lagged and disoriented from a day’s travel to be expected to do anything more than slump to their unfurnished bedrooms, shake out the dust, and lay awhile.

Or so, Hoseok thought.

“You’d probably feel better if you slept though, don’t you think?”

Yoongi doesn’t reply. He’s fixated on his phone, hastily typing things that Hoseok is too far away to see. He’s been rough around the edges since the second they landed, and it doesn’t take a stroke of genius deduction to figure out why. All of this, every fucked up, precarious day is going to continue setting him off over and over for as long as they’re here. Hoseok doesn’t mean to say Yoongi isn’t as strong or as brave as he appears, but he does mean that there’s a hell of a lot that Yoongi has neglected to work through for several decades, one of those being how scared he is of Yongsun Intak and everything he touched, dead or alive.

For good reason, Hoseok knows. But fear is fear, and now is not the time for Yoongi to let his past get the best of him.

He slides his feet off the bed, planting them bare on the cool, cement floor. The apartment they’re in is one of those expansive, brutalist style designs. Yoongi had said something about the building having been intended to supply multi-million dollar condos, then well into restoration it was declared that the lot was in an industrial zone rather than residential, and the project fell into limbo. Apparently some East Coast contacts of Yoongi’s districts snagged it for a low price and they use it as a temporary dwelling when needed. Seokjin brought the tech to install security and surveillance systems, but for tonight the otherwise empty building and deadbolts on doors will have to do.

Hoseok shuffles toward Yoongi tentatively, the way one would approach a skittish animal. It’s an odd thing, the way Yoongi hardly seems to notice him coming, or care for that matter. He’s sucked into his head, slipping almost beyond reach.

“I think you’ll get tired if you lay down,” he tries again, falling into step beside Yoongi and joining his aimless pacing. 

“If you want to go to bed, go to bed,” Yoongi exhales his words in a breath, terse, distracted. “I’m still working.”

“You can finish tomorrow, can’t you?”

“Nothing good comes from procrastination, Hoseok.”

“Nothing good comes from running on empty either,” Hoseok points out, and this time he lays a hand on Yoongi’s shoulder. He flinches .

“Just let me do what I need to, I’ll stop when I’m done.”

“You have all of tomorrow,” Hoseok tries to offer him, softly because in a strange way he feels as if Yoongi needs talking down from some sort of edge hiding just out of sight.

“I have now , Hoseok, I have right now,” Yoongi replies waspishly. “Do you think another day is ever guaranteed?”

Hoseok’s skin prickles. Be patient with him. Be understanding. He’s dealing with a lot . And then comes a smaller voice, one that sounds like a childish, petulant version of Hoseok’s own: I’m dealing with a lot, too. Can’t he see that? Can’t he understand me too?

Out loud, Hoseok clears his throat. “I think you should go to bed. You’re starting to–”

“ Stop telling me what to do!”

Yoongi snatches Hoseok’s hand off of him with a claw-like grip and throws it, shoving him with enough force that Hoseok has to stumble and step back to avoid falling. It happens in a second: beginning one moment, and over the next. It doesn’t hurt, really , it doesn’t, but Hoseok’s eyes begin to water immediately, body smarting like he was smashed into the ground and beaten there. Before he can do anything more than open his mouth and choke out the smallest of sounds,  Yoongi’s entire demeanor shifts, eyes widening as if he’s looking at Hoseok and seeing him for the first time all night. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and he rushes forward to take Hoseok by his arms and straighten him up, dragging him close to be held. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what–I didn’t mean to do that.”

“It’s fine,” Hoseok stammers, but he can barely breathe when he drops his head and presses his nose into the collar of Yoongi’s shirt. He wants to be right next to him, and he wants to be a mile away behind a locked door where Yoongi can’t see him. He wants to dissolve. He wants to cry .

“Hoseok, I really didn’t mean to,” Yoongi repeats, and he sounds horribly shaken himself. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Did I hurt you? Are you okay?”

Physically, unscathed. Mentally–

“ I’m fine,” Hoseok repeats, but he doesn’t lift his head off of Yoongi’s shoulder. He needs to be held a moment longer, to pretend nothing happened between them. Pretend to go back to a single minute ago when he believed Yoongi’s fire would never burn him again. It’s not like he’s a stranger to those fatally sharp edges Yoongi has, god knows he’s been cut open on them before, but that was then . That kind of hurt was supposed to have crumbled between them and long since been replaced by tenderness. The Yoongi he knows now doesn’t bite.

“I’m fine,” Hoseok repeats for the umpteenth time, and takes a shuddering breath as he extracts himself. Yoongi watches his every move with a stricken expression. Hoseok steps backward, hand fumbling for the doorknob. “I’m going to go get some water.”

“Dove,” Yoongi whispers, and when he reaches for Hoseok’s hand, he looks near tears. “Please. I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Hoseok nods. His throat burns. “It’s just water, Yoongi. I’ll be right back.”

The hallways are shadowed black and unfamiliar. If there are light switches, Hoseok doesn’t know where to find them, so he relies on the cast off glow from the moon to lead him down and around a corner to the unlit staircase that takes him back to the first floor. The whole of the place feels like a maze, and suddenly Hoseok is struck by the awareness that he’s further from home than he’s ever been, thrown into a city whose language he doesn’t speak, faced with an almost insurmountable task before him and practically everyone on the earth he cares about. 

He doesn’t even have his stupid cat around anymore. Jimin decided to give Jiji to the neighbor kids across the block, having obtained their solemn promises that she’d be looked after in their absence. It’s a better life for her by far than whatever she would have had here, but Hoseok misses her all the same. She was always quiet. Always good for a long nap, or a lazy afternoon. She served as a handkerchief to catch their tears one too many times, but never yowled about it or snuck away.

She could have filled up some of the emptiness here.

Hoseok takes a left at the bottom of the staircase. He isn’t thirsty, he only wanted air outside of that bedroom for a minute, but he shuffles toward the kitchen anyway for no particular reason. Because it’s close by, maybe. Because it’s a central space. Because it’s the only room he can tell still has its light on at this hour. Hoseok rounds the corner into the doorway and startles, stopping almost before he can take a step over the threshold. 

Jeongguk . 

He’s leaning on the countertop, a bag of chips propped open in front of him. He didn’t eat when the rest of them did. Wasn’t even in the general vicinity for it. He’s probably too fucking ashamed to even be seen by them.

Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of his own actions . 

When Hoseok enters, Jeongguk looks over, almost startled, and straightens up. There’s no need to. It isn’t like Hoseok is going to stay and make small talk. He turns faster than he entered, ready to disappear into the darkness exactly the way he came, when Jeongguk makes a sound.

“Wait. Hoseok.”

Hoseok freezes, body going rigid. Even the sound of his voice. Fuck . It’s different now. Smoother, softer, like he spent five years in a cell sanding down the edges, but he’s still the same in some ways. It still transports Hoseok back to places he never wanted to visit again. 

He doesn’t want Jeongguk to think for a second that he’s afraid of him, however, so Hoseok turns and faces him like the sight of his face alone doesn’t make his heart pound. 

“What?” His own tone sounds foreign to him, cold and blunt. Hostile . 

Jeongguk’s head is bent slightly, angled toward the floor more than it is to Hoseok. With the shadows hung over his face, all Hoseok can make out is his eyes, wide, and dark, and gripping in their seriousness. “I thought we should talk. After everything. I know that…there’s no chance you wanted to see me again. But I want–”

“I don’t give a fuck what you want,” Hoseok cuts him off without a thought in his head. It’s pure instinct speaking for him, he doesn’t want or need to pause and consider for a second. “Are you thinking you’ll say sorry, is that what it is? Sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, sorry I left you to die. Sorry I lied. Sorry I kidnapped Yoongi,  sorry I force-fed him a drug that almost killed him, sorry I tried relentlessly to make your life a living hell, to gut everyone you care about, to blow up the goddamn world. Sorry I’m a shit excuse for a human being with no soul. Is that what you were going to say? Do you think I give a fuck about your ‘sorry’ ?”

Jeongguk is very still, and very quiet for a long moment. Too long . It makes Hoseok’s chest burn with rage not yet spoken. There’s so much more he could say, so much he could unleash on Jeongguk right here and right now, words that could make him writhe , and he’d deserve it. 

“It wasn’t my idea, you know.” When Jeongguk finally speaks, his voice is underwhelming. Flat, like he disengaged from the conversation before it even began. “It wasn’t like I had a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Hoseok snaps. “You made the wrong one every fucking time. And I have no forgiveness, and nothing to say to you except this: if you lay a hand on anyone in this house and think for a second you’ll get away with it, you’re out of your goddamn mind. If you try to double-cross us, I will kill you, and no amount of begging, or pleading, or I’m sorry will change my mind. You’ll be dead before you hit the fucking pavement. Do I make myself clear?”

Jeongguk’s eyes are trained relentlessly on the floor. “Yes.”

“And if you so much as think a single word against Yoongi, I know where you sleep, and I have a gun. You’re not safe here. You’re outnumbered. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t. Try. Anything .”

“I won’t.” Jeongguk’s voice is microscopic. “I’m not going to.”

“Good,” Hoseok breathes. “Watch your fucking back.”

He turns away, skin flushed hot, throat burning, and finishes the unsaid accompaniment to that sentence in his head: and I’ll watch mine . 

Chapter Text

The first week in New York City is sickeningly anticlimactic. Every day, empty. Every night spent waiting. Jimin crawls into bed time and time again, heart pounding in his chest, strung out and haunted by the silence. He’s only holding his breath until something happens, he knows it’s waiting right around a dark corner, just outside of their reach.

Seokjin does surveillance. That’s what he calls it, all the time he spends slumped in front of his screens, clicking around several monitors and copying and pasting things into countless files. He’s set up a whole station for it in the living room, and complains about the lack of privacy day in and day out. “ I like to work in my own time,” he’ll grumble every time Yoongi goes over to pester him about something. “ In the dark. Alone.”

And yet, he doesn’t seem to mind when Namjoon pulls up a chair and leans on him, or watches him work in contemplative silence. He’s silent most of the time. Not that he’s ever been much of a talker, but Jimin watches people, and he can tell when they change. There’s something about being here that isn’t sitting right with Kim Namjoon. He hears him whisper about it to Seokjin sometimes when they think no one is listening, because no one is. No one but Jimin, anyhow. And Jimin has always held the sneaking suspicion that he doesn’t count. 

“It’s just my head,” Namjoon will mumble, rolling his fingertips over his temple. “It still hurts.”

“Are you drinking enough water? Do you need to eat? You’re probably tired, Namjoon-ah…let hyung do this, go back to bed.”

Seokjin’s suggested ailments don’t help. Jimin can see that clear as day.

As for Hoseok, on the other hand, he looks…better. To say he’s well might be overly generous, but he’s eating, and he’s sleeping, and Jimin is beginning to feel like he’s slowly going to put the necessary weight back on those perfect bird bones of his, and at long last Jimin will have something worth smiling about. None of them should be happy here, but at least Hoseok isn’t dead miserable , for the first time in months. As his friend, Jimin will appreciate that for what it is. A silver lining in hell. But Hoseok isn’t content. He isn’t . He doesn’t like this city either, and he doesn’t like what it’s doing to Yoongi. 

Jimin doesn’t know why exactly, he only knows what he observes, and what’s said to him. Three nights ago, in the hallway that runs from the stairwell to the living room, Hoseok caught Jimin by the sleeve of his shirt without warning and tugged him back.

“ Can I ask you something?” He had whispered, eyes flashing as if he was on the lookout for eavesdroppers hanging within earshot.

Jimin had murmured a yes. Why shouldn’t Hoseok ask him anything?

“ Does he seem off to you? Yoongi? Is he acting strange?”

Jimin had debated for a moment, mouth popping open and shut, open and shut as he wondered what he could possibly say in response to that that would hold any measure of pacification. “Aren’t we all ?” he replied finally. Maybe helplessly. “ In this place?”

Hoseok let him go without further comment. But after that, Jimin watched closer, and he thinks maybe Hoseok is right. Yoongi is sharper. More volatile. Like a loaded gun with a loose trigger. He never actually does anything, not anything damning at least, but Jimin gets the sense that they only have so much time before he fires off and takes something out with him. 

And then there’s Jeongguk.

Jimin tries really hard not to think about Jeongguk.

For the most part, they don’t interact. They don’t have to. There’s no plan in place yet, no action they’re commanded to take that will force them into each other’s presences. They drift around each other like ghosts, both pretending the other doesn’t exist on the off chance that they happen to step into each other’s presences. Jimin knows if he opened his mouth and gave himself the chance to say a word to Jeongguk, the only thing that would spew out is pure venom. For the sake of keeping the precarious peace, he seals his lips tight.

Pixies believe in divine fate. Jimin isn’t sure how much of that he can say he subscribes to, but he likes to think karma will come for Jeongguk. In time, it will burn him the way he burned others.

Still, karma seems to be taking a long damn time to show up. Jimin can’t help but toy with the idea of ushering it in a little faster. He doesn’t like hurting people, he never has. It’s not something he longs for, violence. But Taehyung , oh Taehyung. For Jimin’s sweet Taehyung, for his life , brutality seems justified. Vengeance seems necessary . And too often this week, Jimin has lain still in bed and thought of the kitchen knife in the wooden block downstairs, or of one of the plastic cables used to secure the box Seokjin shipped his computers here in. How easy it would be to go collect one of those, to creep unseen down one of the many hallways here and find Jeongguk isolated in his room, sleeping, undressed, defenseless, and bring death down upon him. No burial, no mourning. No spoken rites, and no seven day walk into the next life. When Jeon Jeongguk dies it should be final. When hell swallows him, it better keep its goddamn mouth shut. 

But Jimin won’t do it. Not out of mercy, but out of love. For Taehyung, and only Taehyung, who had always made time to whisper his admiration for how soft Jimin was. Because Jimin never belonged here - or at least, that’s how he felt then. 

“ I’m too weak, Tae” he would whisper, tearful and shaken every time he was faced with a task that felt insurmountable, or with one that made his heart twist with guilt and horror. “ I’ll never be brave like you.”

“I don’t want you to be like me.” 

When Jimin thinks of these moments, he can still feel Taehyung’s touch lingering, his wide hands and warm skin on Jimin’s like an embrace that exists still, beyond the lines of space and time.

“ You’re so sweet, Jimin. You’re so tender. I need that, I need you. I think you make me a person. I think for you, I can be a better man.”

Taehyung wouldn’t want Jimin to devolve into this. A killer. Poisoned by his own anger.

I’m trying , Jimin whispers into the empty nights sometimes, praying on a chance inside a chance that Taehyung hears him somehow, somewhere. I’m trying to be good for you. I love you, Kim Taehyung. I love you forever.

There’s something else about Jeongguk too, something that makes him even less bearable to be around, a secret truth that makes Jimin’s heart jump in his chest each time he’s forcibly reminded of it. It’s not often, only in the right lighting, only in a shadow cast along a wall just the wrong way, but sometimes Jimin sees Taehyung in the lines of Jeongguk’s face. The shape of his nose. The curve of his jaw. There for one second, then gone as soon as Jimin blinks, but the feeling lingers. A deep unrest, an aching longing in Jimin’s second when his heart of hearts thinks for one fleeting second that his Taehyung is close enough to touch. 

And then he’s gone again in an instant. He was never there. It’s Jeongguk. It’s only ever Jeongguk.

If Hoseok knew their time here would be so slow-moving, he would have packed a book. They don’t even have a TV in this place. The windows become Hoseok’s entertainment, though Namjoon doesn’t seem to appreciate it when he pulls the curtains open to sit and look out. It’s not very busy, the neighborhood they’re in. For the most part it seems to be comprised of warehouses and factories that churn out clouds hanging thick in the air, but sometimes he’ll see people. Uniformed employees, wives dropping off their husbands, handing them lunch boxes and pressing chaste kisses to their cheeks. The weather isn’t very kind, but occasionally the sun will come out and on those days Hoseok wants to venture outside while it’s nice enough to and catch fresh air - or, as fresh as it gets around here. 

The only time he asked, Yoongi said no. 

“It’s way too dangerous for you to go out on your own.”

“I’ll take Jimin with me.”

“That’s not any better. I don’t want you out of my sight.”

“Then come with me.”

“I can’t. Seokjin-hyung and I are working.”

“But–”

“No.”

“Yoongi–”

“Hoseok. No.”

Hoseok didn’t ask again after that. Yoongi’s patience is a thin, brittle thing here, and Hoseok doesn’t want to crack it a second time, so he bites his tongue and swallows any argument. Sometimes it makes him unspeakably angry, hot and trembling, fists fighting to ball at his side, and he’ll see Yoongi the way he did years ago when he was first dragged in, a hostage, a prisoner in his own life. 

Look at me, I’m miserable. I’m fucking miserable, I hate this, I hate all of this. What are we even doing here? Do you know anything? Or are we only chasing rabbits and waiting to get shot?

His upset always dies out within seconds, and it’s replaced by pure regret. For Yoongi, how exhausted and hopeless he is. For their lives, a constant state of unrest. For what they could have, if they could just be home, and normal, and boring. 

It’s the end of their second weekend in New York now. Hoseok only has the vaguest grasp on the days of the week now, and he expects that will only continue to slip now that he has no reason to live by a calendar. But today, he knows it’s Sunday, and nothing has happened. Just like Saturday. Just like Friday. Just like the entire week before that. 

He’s lying in bed, counting in measures of one hundred as the sun sinks behind the hazy skyline. It’s not late enough to sleep, but he has nothing better to do. He talks to Jimin sometimes. Most days. It’s just that there’s nothing to say between the two of them when they haven’t spent a day apart in five years and nothing has happened . 

When the door clicks open behind him, Hoseok doesn’t roll over. He knows it’s Yoongi. He isn’t exactly sure how he knows, just that he’s sure he does. Maybe it’s the pattern of his footsteps, or the barely audible sound of his breathing, or maybe, maybe a sixth sense. The imprinted knowing his imprintee. There’s something between them that exists far beyond the realm of the physical, and Hoseok knows this, he just isn’t feeling particularly grateful for it at this very moment. 

“Why are you hiding up in here all by yourself?” Yoongi’s voice is a little softer than it has been all week. “Are you ready for bed already?”

“I’m bored,” Hoseok replies, flat and non-elaborative. He still doesn’t turn and face Yoongi. He’s not quite ready to relinquish the all-consuming annoyance that the past few days have sunk him deep into. There’s something just a little vindictively satisfying about sulking awhile longer and waiting to see if Yoongi takes the bait and chases him.

“Sorry it’s not a Hawaiian cruise, my love, but at least it’s all expenses paid for.”

Hoseok doesn’t reply. The door clicks shut, and he can hear the short rustling sound that comes with Yoongi removing his shoes. 

“That was a joke, Dove. You can laugh.”

I would, if it was funny .

A second later, Yoongi comes around the bed and into Hoseok’s line of sight, crouching in front of him and tipping his head. It’s an unfair play, standing where Hoseok can see him, because he looks so damn good all of the time it’s an instant ace. At the very least, it sends all of Hoseok’s self-preserving instincts to feed into overdrive, and he can feel his skin begin to heat before Yoongi can so much as touch him. 

“Hey. Talk to me,” Yoongi murmurs, blinking slowly a few times before reaching for Hoseok’s hand and drawing it close. He lifts it to his mouth, kissing Hoseok’s palm, then his knuckles, one by one like a row of soldiers. He flips Hoseok’s wrist and kisses there too, that soft, vulnerable spot where his skin is almost translucent, blue veins visible just beneath the surface, and Yoongi’s lips linger there a moment as if he’s making love to the very pulse that keeps Hoseok alive. 

“I’m just tired,” Hoseok lies, the words escaping him with a huff of a noise. “Am I not allowed to be tired?”

“‘Course you are, as long as you’re all taken care of.” Yoongi leans in further. “Seokjin-hyung and I are done for the day, I’m all yours if you want me. I thought maybe you’d be hungry.”

The heat in Hoseok’s stomach flares up and licks his insides, a familiar thirst kicking in and settling. He’s always hungry when it comes to Yoongi. Five years of intermittent fasting, and Hoseok is still relearning what it feels like to be satiated. His repressed frustration unwinds in his chest like a knot unraveled.

Don’t waste your time being mad, he chides himself.  There was a time when you would have given anything for a chance to be pissed off at him as long as it meant having him around.

Hoseok draws in a deep breath and rolls onto his side, facing Yoongi in earnest. He’s such a beautiful thing up close. Each freckle, each mole, the time-worn thread of the scar over his eye. Hoseok reaches out and pushes the longest piece of his hair from where it's hanging in his face like a curtain. “I could be convinced.”

“Dove,” Yoongi’s lips part, and his voice becomes deliciously low, “that’s not nearly as enthusiastic as I need you to be if I’m taking your clothes off.”

Hoseok leans back again, sinking into his pillows and letting Yoongi’s eyes roam as he does so. “I don’t want them off yet, you haven’t even told me what you’re going to do to me.”

Yoongi moves still closer, near enough that every time he exhales his breath fans warm over Hoseok’s mouth. One of his hands shifts, settling low on Hoseok’s stomach and sliding down, down, dipping beneath the waistband of his jeans and stopping just before it can reach anything more. “I would do anything you asked.”

“Anything?”

“Whatever you want. All you have to do is tell me.”

Hoseok wraps his arms around Yoongi and tugs him forward, pulls him onto the bed and on top of his body, letting Yoongi fold around him and cage him there. Hoseok likes his weight above him, pressing him into the mattress and pinning him there all slow and heavy and soft. They find each other in a kiss and fall into a rhythm like that, bodies winding together, legs stacked, one of Yoongi’s hands bracing himself up, and the other settling on Hoseok’s throat, thumbing over his collarbones. 

“You taste good,” Yoongi breathes against his lips, grinding down against Hoseok’s hips. His belt bites into Hoseok’s pelvis. “You smell good,” Yoongi drags his kisses sideways, smudging them down Hoseok’s jaw and to his neck. “You’re perfect. I want you.”

“I love you,” Hoseok exhales. It’s instinct now, delicious instinct. I love you I love you I love you . How could he ever get tired of saying it? How could he ever say it enough ? He holds Yoongi close, kissing and tasting and touching, sucking at his teeth and savoring the flavor. He tastes like stale water, and black coffee, the 24-packs of frosted sugar cookies that Seokjin keeps throwing on the counter. They’re not even good, but on Yoongi they’re sweet.

Yoongi shifts again, and again the edge of his belt digs sharp into Hoseok’s skin, making him wince.

“You should take your jeans off,” Hoseok mumbles, shifting sideways and moving his weight onto his shoulder. It’s not the most comfortable position they’ve ever been in, but it’s manageable. Yoongi’s hand is pressing onto his throat just slightly too hard, so distracted by lust he’s forgetting his own strength. “Your belt is - ah-” Hoseok breaks off sharply when Yoongi shoves his hips down, pushing on him as if they were already naked, but with the stiff layers of clothing and the unyielding belt buckles, it feels more bruising than pleasurable. 

“Hey, slow down,” Hoseok tries to wiggle his arm free, to reach out and cup Yoongi’s face, but Yoongi catches it and drags it back up, finding his other wrist and wrangling them into one hand that holds him to the headboard. Which could be fine, would be fine, it’s not like it’s the first time Yoongi has decided he couldn’t use his hands, but it’s usually gentler , and further into the heat of the moment. Yoongi is moving with the hunger and desperation usually reserved for when he’s naked, already inside of Hoseok and chasing a release. 

“Yoongi,” Hoseok tries again, chest jumping when he tries to inhale and is met with the solid resistance that is Yoongi’s body. “It’s not a race. Can I have my hands back?”

“Take them,” Yoongi rasps against his throat. He’s breathless, heaving out, fucked out before they’ve even begun. 

“What?” Hoseok tugs, testing half his strength to see if Yoongi’s grip will give when he feels it. It doesn’t. It tightens . Crushed in Yoongi’s fingers so hard he can feel the frantic hammer of his own pulse, the one that was kissed only moments ago. 

“ Take them ,” Yoongi repeats, words smudged by the way he’s still kissing Hoseok’s throat. Kissing? Pulling. Clawing at . It feels sharp , all of him, the edges of his teeth grazing over the thinnest panes of skin. “You can’t, can you?”

“Yoongi, wait, go slow,” Hoseok pants. He feels trapped all of the sudden, swallowed by the realization that he actually can’t pull his hands free, too helpless and too vulnerable to the marks being dug into his skin, unable to take a full breath with Yoongi’s entire body and the weight of his palm on Hoseok’s neck smothering him. If this is a game, he doesn’t want to play it, and Yoongi would know that. He should know that.

“ Wait , I need a second, Yoongi, please.”

Something sharp sinks into Hoseok’s skin, hot, wet, and unforgiving, and he cries out in pain. Yoongi’s hand is shaking where it’s shoved against the column of Hoseok’s throat, and he can’t–he can’t breathe . 

“ Yoongi ,” Hoseok chokes out, twisting his legs to try and kick. “Stop, get off me. Stop it. Please, you’re hurting me , stop!” 

Hoseok isn’t sure if Yoongi relinquished him, or if sheer panic gave him the sudden strength to rip himself out of Yoongi’s hold, he just knows that one second his hands aren’t his, and then they are again. He uses them without thinking, shoving Yoongi as hard as he can, prying himself out from beneath him, and in the same breath Yoongi seems to jerk himself sideways, rolling off the side of the bed and sinking to his knees there, gasping.

At first, Hoseok does nothing. He can’t. He has to force himself to breathe in spite of the smarting, compressed feeling on his throat, and the sticky sensation cloying against his skin. He presses his fingertips there, brushing over the point where it stings the most, and when he draws them away to look at them they’re tacky and kissed red with a film of blood. 

“You bit me,” he whispers, voice all brittle, almost raspy. The words seem to scrape along the raw lining of his throat. “Why did you bite me?”

Yoongi says nothing. It takes Hoseok a moment to realize it sounds like he’s gasping for air, and another moment before he can push himself upright. His eyes fall on the curled outline of Yoongi’s shoulders, folded inward and heaving. One hand creeps up the edge of the bed, rigid before curling into the sheets and pulling them sharply. Instinct startles Hoseok backward, half expecting Yoongi to rise and lunge at him, but then all Yoongi does is tip his head up. He looks bloodless, stricken. Cheeks hollow, jaw slack, dark eyes flickering as if they’re hunting for something to settle on, some explanation for everything around him.

“Something’s wrong with me,” he breathes, drawing in a shuddering inhale and rising to his feet as if he were being dragged that way by invisible strings. He shakes his head, gaze dropping to the floor, panicked. “Something is-something’s wrong .”

“W-what do you mean?”

Even as Hoseok says it, it feels redundant. Clearly, fucking clearly something is wrong. Yoongi has never, never done that. Before he knew Hoseok, before they cared for one another, he was deliberately, pointedly gentle, in ways Hoseok knew he didn’t have to be. He chose it, because he was, and always has been good and kind deep down, even if he struggled to see it and show it sometimes. The only other time he sank his teeth into Hoseok like that was when he was drugged , and Hoseok still has the scar to remind him of it. 

Whatever this is, whatever that was, it’s not Yoongi. 

“I don’t know.” Yoongi turns away, both hands fisting into his hair and dragging through it with enough force that Hoseok half expects him to rip out the weaker strands. “I don’t know , I don’t know, I don’t fucking know.”

When he twists to face Hoseok again, still looking wildly disoriented by his own body, Hoseok sees the smudge of red on his mouth, the white flash of his fangs pushing against his bottom lip in response to the tantalizing scent and taste of fresh blood. 

“You know it,” he looks up sharply, and Hoseok jumps again. “You know it, I know you know it. Ever since we got here, I pushed you, you’ve been tip toeing around me ever since. You can feel it too, can’t you?”

Hoseok’s mouth is trembling. “Yoongi–”

“Hoseok please, just fucking tell me, please. Be honest. You know it, don’t you?”

“I-I don’t know,” Hoseok whispers. How can he articulate what he can hardly even string together in his own head? He doesn’t want to scare Yoongi. He doesn’t want to scare himself . 

Yoongi drops his head into his hands and shuffles back to the bed, stopping when his knees hit the mattress and staying there a moment, too consumed by himself to speak. He looks helpless. Hopeless . Whatever brute force possessed him moments ago has vanished, leaving behind only a shell who looks in desperate need of comfort. 

Hoseok pushes up onto his knees and crawls to Yoongi’s side. He’s only himself, he’s still Yoongi, still Hoseok’s Yoongi. He needs him, they need each other. 

“You’re alright,” Hoseok says softly and leans in to wrap his arms around Yoongi before he can think twice. There’s a bone-deep part of him that’s refusing point-blank to be afraid of Yoongi, refuses to cling onto this and let it grow like a blister between them. “You’re fine, right? You’re just stressed, we’re all just worked up, being here.”

Yoongi sucks in a breath that sounds like it aches and drops his face into Hoseok’s neck. This time, he’s nothing but gentle. His lips move tenderly over broken skin, a feather-light touch as if he’s mending the wound there. “I hurt you.”

“It’s just a scratch,” Hoseok promises him, and as he says it he can almost convince himself it’s as small as he wants it to be. “I’ve had worse.”

“Dove,” Yoongi’s arms wind around his waist, squeezing him tight, but Hoseok knows this strength from him. It isn’t forceful, it’s just plain need , the need to be absorbed by the love they have just for a moment, like maybe if he holds onto Hoseok’s body enough he’ll stop feeling his own. “I would never hurt you. I would never do that.”

“I know you wouldn’t.” Hoseok cards his hands through Yoongi’s hair, pushing it beneath his ears and scraping softly against his scalp. “You didn’t.”

He did. You know he did. You couldn’t breathe. 

“I love you.” Yoongi’s chest jumps when he speaks. Hoseok wonders if he’s crying, but he can’t bear to look. “More than– anything . I would do anything, everything to keep you safe, Dove, I’d do anything you asked. I love you. I need you. I want you to trust me, to be here, I want–”

“Yoongi,” Hoseok cuts him off in a low voice, holding the back of Yoongi’s head with fragile affection and bringing his lips to his temple to hold there in a kiss. “You don’t have to beg for me. I’m not leaving you here. I’m yours.”

He brings his hand back, stacking it over Yoongi’s on his waist and squeezing hard, dragging him in. “I’m yours and you’re mine. Nothing changes that. Nothing changes us .”

Yoongi says nothing, and holds him tighter. 

“Namjoon, are you sure you’re okay?”

It takes a long moment for Seokjin’s voice to appear to reach Namjoon, and he finally tears his gaze away from the wall he’s been staring at for too long. For a moment, his eyes are vacant, almost disoriented as if he isn’t quite sure what he’s seeing, and then he blinks, and he’s back within himself again. 

“I’m fine,” he replies, short and blunt. It’s become his standard response this week, and Seokjin isn’t sure where to begin with dragging more out of him.

It’s just me , he wants to reason with Namjoon. You can say anything between the two of us. It doesn’t even have to leave this room. Hyung will keep your secrets and find a way to help . 

“If the headaches are still bad, I can find you a doctor you know. I have people here, hidden all over waiting to be called out of the woodwork.”

The honest truth is that Namjoon gets so in his head about things so heavily from time to time, and brushes it off as just not feeling well, that Seokjin isn’t always able to feel out when he’s caught up on something mentally, or when he actually needs to see a damn professional. There have been times before that Namjoon will claim for a week or so that he feels sick, and then after a few days Seokjin will catch him lingering on and off at Taehyung’s grave and piece together that he didn’t feel sick in his body, he felt sick in his mind . He felt…sad. Grieving. Only, he doesn’t always seem able to say as much, in so many words, and so Seokjin is left to analyze and guess.

“I don’t need a doctor,” Namjoon mutters and peels away from the window, looking distinctly unhappy.

Seokjin sighs, shifting his legs off the edge of the bed and raising his arms. “Come here.”

“I need to wash up.”

“And the shower will be there in two minutes,” Seokjin assures him, arms still extended. “Come here.”

“Seokjin–”

“Namjoon-ah, come and let hyung hold you, it’s going to make you feel better.”

Namjoon falters on his path to the bathroom. He turns. He doesn’t look entirely convinced of Seokjin’s words, but he shuffles around and approaches him anyway. Maybe he’s desperate enough to need to believe that Seokjin is right. That wrapped in his arms, nothing can be wrong. 

Seokjin folds Namjoon into him the second he’s close enough, and holds him there, drawing in deep breaths that he hopes Namjoon will match on instinct. Seokjin likes being hugged, really, he does. He spent a long time convincing himself he didn’t need it - and lived to tell the tale, so he supposes he was correct; he didn’t need it - but the simple truth is that he wants it. Someone warm, someone he cares about right next to him. He likes it more than sex, which he does have with Namjoon, contrary to whatever Yoongi wants to believe, but it’s always felt like more of a frivolous thing. Done for entertainment, an enjoyable but unnecessary pastime. It doesn’t give Seokjin the same thing he gets from being held, or kissed, or caressed.

And Namjoon, Namjoon doesn’t want as much of it as Seokjin sometimes thinks he does. Which is alright, Seokjin can curb his impulses and be patient, but sometimes , when Namjoon gets too swallowed up in his head like this, Seokjin feels he has a responsibility to force him back into his body by holding him until he returns to himself.

After a moment, Namjoon folds over him and rests his chin on top of Seokjin’s head. The breath he inhales is shaky. Seokjin hugs him even tighter. 

“Are you sure you’re okay, Namjoon? Really sure?”

“I don’t know, hyung,” Namjoon whispers, and he sounds a little crestfallen about it. “I don’t know. I swear, it’s all felt different since we got here. I can’t get comfortable. Everything… hurts.”

‘When you say everything ,” Seokjin presses his fingertips into the base of Namjoon’s spine, gentle, firm pressure, and draws back just far enough to look up at him, “do you mean in your body, or somewhere else. Your mind? Your mood?”

“I don’t know ,” Namjoon repeats, shaking his head. His eyes fall shut, and Seokjin thinks he does look sick. Or sickened. “I’m trying to focus. I know we’re here for a reason.”

“It’s slow-going, Namjoon-ah. Yoongi and I are just profiling people we know or assume are involved. We don’t even have a plan of action yet, you know that. When I need you for something, I’ll tell you.”

“What if I can’t do it?” Namjoon opens his eyes and looks down at him, darkened with doubt and fear running unchecked. “When you need me to, whatever it is. What if I can’t?”

Seokjin unwinds his arms from Namjoon’s waist and raises his hands, cupping his face and holding him with the sort of serenity and trust that could only exist between two people who have faced as much as they have together. Blood, death, and horror. Unimaginable pain and insurmountable grief, and through it all they never turned on the other. Seokjin is sure it isn’t even a thought that’s capable of crossing through their minds. 

“You can, Namjoon. You will. You’re much stronger than I am, don’t you know that?” Seokjin lifts his thumbs and uses them to smooth Namjoon’s hair off his temples. “And if you can’t, if you break, and you fail for whatever reason, hyung will still love you.”

Namjoon squeezes his eyes shut again and turns away. “I can’t afford to fail.”

Seokjin stands up and brings Namjoon close, kissing the soft slope of his cheek, and then his downturned mouth. “I didn’t say you could afford to fail, Namjoon. I said I’d love you anyway.”

Hoseok can’t be sure what woke him, but it happens with the sort of abruptness that makes him wonder if he were startled that way. A crash. A movement. A whisper . His heart is pounding. His palms are slippery against the sheets. 

Hoseok rolls inward, waiting to hit what has once again become the familiar lines of his body, but he’s met with empty space. Chest fluttering, he opens his eyes and sits up.

Empty bed. Alone . 

“Yoongi?” Hoseok’s voice comes out as a sleep-soaked rasp, a barely audible scrape against his throat. It feels like a bruise. It took so long for him to find sleep last night, skin still smarting long after he got Yoongi to calm down enough to lay beside him. 

“ Yoongi?” Hoseok repeats, firmer this time. Again, he receives no answer. He kicks the covers back and lurches toward the edge of the bed, feet hitting the unbearably cold concrete which sends shivers shooting up and down his spine. The bathroom light is off, but Yoongi could be in there anyway. Back at the house - the old house, Yoongi’s house, before he went to prison - he would wake in the middle of the night sometimes, restless, and go onto the balcony to smoke. There’s no balcony attached to the bedroom here, and Yoongi hasn’t smoked since the one they shared in Hoseok’s bedroom back in Seoul, but maybe - maybe he’s sitting in the bathroom anyway. 

Hoseok pushes the door. “Yoongi? Are you in here?”

He’s met with silence. Total stillness. The only commotion is that of his voice bouncing off the tile walls and hitting him. 

“ Yoongi .” This time, when Hoseok says it, his voice sounds cracked with desperation, and the sound of it scares him. “Where are you?”

He wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t just leave . He knows Hoseok has been having trouble sleeping, even by his side. Only a couple of days ago Yoongi nudged him awake just to tell him he was going downstairs, because he knew Hoseok would hate to wake alone and confused by it. But maybe something happened quickly, and he had to run downstairs. Maybe Hoseok should go check. 

His heart is pounding, rattling the walls of his ribcage as he stumbles toward the door. Before he can reach it, something clatters down the hall, followed by a slamming noise and thundering footsteps. Then, before Hoseok can move, or even question it, the knob turns and his door is flung open with a force usually proportional to the detonation of a bomb, and Seokjin all but falls inside. 

He looks wild . Disarrayed like Hoseok has never seen him before. His hair is tangled, T-shirt askew. There’s a shiny bruise unfurling on his cheekbone that can be seen clearly even in the dark, and a rivulet of blood dripping from his nose onto his cracked lip. His eyes are wide, and looking right over Hoseok’s head, scanning the room frantically. 

“Where is he?”

Hoseok trips back toward the bed, recoiling on instinct. “W-who?”

“ Yoongi, where the fuck is Yoongi?”

No. No. No .

“I don’t know.” Hoseok’s voice is suddenly airless. “I woke up, and I was alone, I thought he went downstairs, or to find you–”

“ Fuck,” Seokjin swears at the top of his voice, turning and slamming his hand against the wall.

“Hyung.” Dread is creeping up Hoseok’s throat like bile, threatening to make him gag. “What’s going on? What happened to you?”

Seokjin swings back around. He brings his knuckles to his face, swiping over his mouth and dragging a smear of blood across his cheek as he does so. His eyes are so dark they look like two holes bored into his face. “Namjoon is gone,” he says, and this time his voice is so quiet it’s barely audible, even in the silence of the night. “And I think Yoongi is with him.”

Somewhere in New York City

Underground

147 is done with his work, but he wishes he wasn’t. That’s a strange thing. To want more work than one is assigned. But 147 learned quickly that he much prefers doing something to doing nothing . Something can be anything. Really, he isn’t picky. He could sterilize rooms, or organize subject charts. He could update the pharmacy inventory, because it changes by the hour during the day, what with the Doctors and the Aids signing things out, using them up, running them dry. They get new shipments routinely, and much of it is temperature sensitive, reliant on careful handling and storage. 147 is among the Aids who have the security clearance to take care of that. Security is important here. That’s one of the first things they’re taught. 

If it weren’t late, 147 would scan into the custodial wing and pull out mops to take to the floors, even head into the overheated and overstuffed laundry room to start sorting and washing scrubs. He doesn’t mind it, those jobs everyone else turns a blind eye to and hopes get taken care of by hands other than theirs. There are worse things than dirty work, he knows this. There’s silence , and stillness , and solitude. 

147 doesn’t like it when he’s left alone in the dark. When everything goes quiet, it gets loud in his head. He’s never asked if the other Aids feel that too. If they hear what he hears. He’s never asked the other Aids much of anything at all. 

They’re not friends. They’re barely even colleagues. They’re well-oiled pieces in a very functional machine, and their only permitted duty is to fulfill their job and ensure nothing is amiss, overseen, or unaccounted for. Machines don’t make mistakes.

147 pulls his badge from the breast pocket of his uniform and runs it over the checkpoint locking the slot of a door that leads to his bunk room. It turns green, and permits him inside. Home , one might say. 147 doesn’t know where he got that word from. He’s not entirely positive he understands what it means, but he has the vaguest of notions that it doesn’t apply here.

The room is barren of any personalization. It has to be. 147 doesn’t own anything that isn’t standard issue to every other Aid. He has his bed fixed to the corner, white sheets and thick blue blanket tucked crisp at the edges. A rack containing a single change of his uniform, and a softer shirt and pants for sleeping. Opposite to that, a mirror cemented to the wall and covered in a thick pane of plastic that warps his reflection in certain spots. Behind a sliding door there’s an alcove large enough to house a toilet and nothing more.

The walls are white. The floor is white. There are no windows. If there were, he doesn’t know what he would expect them to lead to.

If you asked 147 how long he’s been here, he wouldn’t be able to tell you.

If you asked him what he did before he got here, he wouldn’t be able to tell you that either. 

In all truthfulness, he wouldn’t even be able to describe what here is. A hospital. A facility. An experiment. 

He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, all he knows is what he does know. Anatomy. Biology. Pharmaceutics. That’s why he’s here, he thinks. That’s all they have him do. They live in measures of twenty-four hours. It’s functional. Simple. Yesterday doesn’t matter as much as today, and today is only preparation for tomorrow. They rise at 6:00 on the clock. Midday meal is at 12:00. Dinner is six hours later. Curfew is 21:00. After that, they’re not meant to be wandering the halls. Everyone heads to their rooms. 

147 heads for the quiet.

It isn’t that he thinks awful things. It’s just that he has the lingering idea that he’s not meant to be thinking. That it’s somehow contraband, illicit, even dangerous . It tells him things he’s sure he’s not meant to receive. He isn’t convinced that what he hears is real, he isn’t sure it matters if it’s real or not. What matters is that he’s perfectly aware that a healthy human brain should not be hearing voices. 

Sometimes, 147 wonders if he’s human at all.

That’s why he hates the quiet. He starts spinning ideas. He has a few so far, which he categorizes in his head the way he categorizes pills in the pharmacy ward. He doesn’t have a paper, or a book to jot down his ideas on, and even if he did, he wouldn’t dare place them anywhere where someone else might read over it one day. 

As 147 changes into his night clothes and lays down in bed, he begins to run through his list:

• The outside world ended, and he belongs to the last known colony smuggled away for safekeeping. (A few problems with this one, such as: what is the outside world? How would it end? If he thinks about it for too long, he gets a headache)
• This is some sort of a test. Maybe one day it will come to an end.
• He’s dead, and this is what comes after
• He’s being watched all the time. He is an experiment. 

147 doesn’t believe any of these things. They are, in their barest form, nothing more than a futile hope that any of this means more than it does. That there’s some sort of greater purpose and explanation for everything. Reality, he knows, is much more likely to be mundane. Life, and death, and everything that comes in between will be boring and pre-planned for him every step of the way.

Maybe, just maybe , he should be grateful for the noise in his head when it comes to find him. After all, it’s his singular limited window into variety. It’s proof, perhaps, that 147 is human. Machines don’t make mistakes. Humans however are distinctly irregular and usually flawed.

Strangely comforted by that thought, 147 rolls onto his side and draws his blankets over his head, drowning himself in darkness. Here is how the voices get loudest. He can induce them, if he tries. Tonight he wants to. 

147 says voices . The truth is that it’s only ever just the one. Soft. Lilting. Musical. Much like home , those words mean nothing to him either, but much like home, he’s always known them.

His voice comes to him quickly, as if it was on the edges of his consciousness waiting to be called forward. Tonight, like many nights, it only wants to say one thing. Over, and over, and over, and over . 147 lets them reverberate through his skull like a strumming pulse.

Kim Taehyung. Kim Taehyung. Kim Taehyung. 

He screws up his eyes. His stomach clenches. He feels sick.

Chapter Text

“What do you mean gone ?” Hoseok’s voice is a whisper, cutting across the silence and splitting the heavy air. 

That would seem to be the crucial question. Seokjin wishes he knew the answer. Truly . But all he knows is tonight he woke up with a pair of hands around his throat, unable to draw a breath. 

It’s not the first time someone has tried to kill him. 

But it’s the first time Namjoon has. 

Seokjin isn’t sure he’ll be able to shake it, that inconceivable feeling when he opened his eyes and the man he fell asleep holding was trying to strangle him to pieces. 

Seokjin hadn’t known what to do. Of course he hadn’t known what to do. He wasn’t about to lay there and die. After everything he’s lived through, that felt like a cop-out. So he fought. Or, he tried to. The thing about Seokjin is that brawling has never been his strong suit, and the odds were wildly skewed against him. Namjoon trained for years in the military, and Seokjin? He’s just the guy who sits at the computers.

And, it was Namjoon . Namjoon! Seokjin didn’t want to hurt him. He certainly didn’t want to kill him. But Namjoon, oh , Namjoon had wanted to kill him . Something backwards and awful was happening in his head, he was ruthless. Inhuman. It was all a blur. One moment Seokjin was asleep, the next he was on the floor trying to keep Namjoon’s hands from his throat, and the whole time the only thing running through his head was what the actual fuck is happening? 

He held Namjoon off for as long as he could. The last thing he can recall from the smudge of memory left behind was Namjoon seizing a handful of his hair and using it like a handle to jerk his head back and smash it onto the floor. Which, Seokjin regretfully remembered, was concrete a second before his face smashed into it, and after that, everything went dark. 

When he came to, Namjoon was gone without a trace, which was bad enough. Worse is the fact that it would appear Yoongi too has also vanished into thin air, leaving no explanation, and no clues as to his whereabouts.

Seokjin strides into the room anyway, smacking the light switch on the wall and illuminating the place as if that might reveal Yoongi hiding away in the shadows. He casts a look around. The bed is disarrayed, but beds usually are in the middle of the night. There’s no sign of a struggle, no crumpled rug or spilled bookshelf, and Hoseok looks normal. Well, mostly normal. There’s something on his neck half hidden beneath the collar of his shirt. A blister? A bruise? No, it’s–a bite mark .

Seokjin walks over to him briskly, pulling Hoseok’s neckline aside by an inch or two and examines the mark further. There’s no mistaking the indentations of teeth, crowned by twin puncture wounds on either side. Fangs . It’s fresh, still pink and not yet scabbed over. 

“When did this happen?”

Hoseok stumbles back, jerking his shirt back up and shooting Seokjin a look that reads briefly of terror. “I-I don’t know.”

“You don’t know ? Yoongi bit you and you didn’t know it? What is he feeding on you in your sleep or something? When did it happen , Hoseok?”

“Why does it matter?” Hoseok matches the frantic volume in Seokjin’s voice, though he seems more scared than angered. “You’re asking about me, meanwhile you look like you got jumped in a fucking alley–”

“I did get jumped!” Seokjin snaps, giving Hoseok a little shove as he turns away. “I woke up and Namjoon was trying to murder me , he beats the living daylights out of me, knocks me out, then I wake up again and he’s disappeared off the face of the planet.”

Hoseok’s jaw all but hits the floor. “ Namjoon?”

“Yes, he–”

“What’s going on?” A third voice breaks in, and Seokjin spins around. Jeongguk is standing in the doorway looking freshly risen and disoriented by it. His bangs are hanging in his face and his glasses are askew as if they were shoved on with haste. “Where’s Yoongi-hyung?”

“Question of the day,” Seokjin mutters darkly. “And where’s Namjoon, while we’re at it?”

Jeongguk’s face wrinkles with confusion. “Why isn’t he with you?”

“Listen kid, you’re gonna have to catch up on the way, okay?” Seokjin rounds back on Hoseok. “I need you to tell me exactly when Yoongi bit you and why, and I need you to do it now.”

Hoseok opens his mouth, shuts it again, then repeats the motion a few times, eyes flashing toward the doorway. Finally, he lifts his hand and makes a jerky, stilted motion in Jeongguk’s direction. “I–I don’t want to talk about it in front of him .”

“Oh, for god’s sake, you used to fuck him. Grow up, Hoseok, this isn’t grade school. Tell me about the bite.”

Behind Jeongguk, someone coughs and a head of scarlet hair appears from the darkness. 

“Why is everyone awake? Where’re Namjoon-hyung, and Y–”

“ Nobody knows, stop asking. Hoseok - the bite!”

“It was last night,” Hoseok murmurs, and he looks clammy and ill all of the sudden, balking under the attention, or maybe , at the memory. “He was–he didn’t mean to. It happened so quickly, we were in bed, and everything was fine, and then it just– wasn’t . It was like he went insane for a second.”

“Insane?” Seokjin repeats, shaking his head. There’s a pit of doubt churning in his stomach, and with every second passing he has a sick notion of where this might be going, he just can’t understand why . Why now . “Insane like Namjoon trying to choke me to death insane?”

In the doorway, Jimin takes in his breath sharply. “Namjoon-hyung what ?”

“Hyung.” Hoseok’s voice has become very wobbly again, as thin and as fragile as glass. “ Where is Yoongi?”

“I don’t know,” Seokjin mutters. “But I have an idea of why he left.”

Yoongi wakes as if he were shocked that way. Every vein, buzzing. Every nerve lit up on fire. His pulse is racing at such a speed and force he can feel it pounding away inside his skull like a prisoner to his body. His eyes are the last to catch up - they feel puffy, sore like the rest of him, and slow to clear. Too slow . 

Drugged , Yoongi thinks almost before his brain is back online. His head is swimming too much, and everything is too achingly bright to comprehend. He blinks several times, urging all systems to come back to themselves, but it’s slow work. 

Where the fuck am I? 

Yoongi glances down. Linoleum floor. Hospital ? Chair. Exam chair. And–fuck. Handcuffs. Whoever put him here wants him staying. But how did he get here? And when can he leave? 

Think, Yoongi, think. You can’t afford panic. What’s the last thing you remember? 

He was in bed, with Hoseok. He couldn’t sleep, he was wide awake in the dark unable to get over what he’d done. Hoseok was tender about it, told Yoongi it was fine, just stress, just high-strung nerves. He’s sweet, and he’s dead wrong. Yoongi knows when something is twisted, and this week something in his head had been rotten. He can’t control it, the anger that comes out of nowhere. Kill him, just kill him, kill them all, they’re holding you back . 

Yoongi represses a gag when his stomach turns, esophagus seizing. He didn’t hurt Hoseok, did he? He would have known if he did, he would remember . Suddenly spurred by doubled panic, Yoongi begins to twist in the confines of his chair, taking in his surroundings, but there isn’t much of it to be had. 

White floors. White walls. A single chair restraining him. Bright white fluorescent panels of lighting on the ceiling. Far out of arm’s reach is a wall of white cabinets, totally nondescript without so much as a visible handle. And one look at Yoongi’s spot tells him it’s fixed to the ground, no chance of inching over there. But there’s something else too - his clothing. When he went to sleep, he was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, but in their place now are the plain, white, ill-fitted pieces of an inmate, or a patient. Patient, more likely. They don’t look durable enough for prison. 

Yoongi tips his head back and stares up at the low ceiling. Where. The fuck. Am I?

Without warning, something unhinges, and Yoongi startles upright. A sealed door in the far corner has popped open with a hiss, alluding to the shadow of a long hallway outside, then a narrow figure steps into frame and enters the room, closing the door once again as quickly as it opened. A woman, lithe and tall, dressed in the straight, black lines of a suit so crisp and dark it barely looks real. Her skin is almost as white as the walls behind her, her blonde hair not much darker, and drawn back in a severe ponytail. She’s attractive, in a disarming way. Ageless. Incomprehensible. 

She rounds on Yoongi and smiles. 

“Hello, Yoongi. I’ve been waiting to meet you.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Yoongi spits, tugging against the binds on his wrist even though he knows his struggle is futile. As dizzy and disoriented as he still is, he doesn’t stand a chance of breaking through them, not with eyes on him.

“My name is Doctor Bishop,” the woman announces, calm and crystal clear in tone. Each word is so sharp and crisp it sounds almost automatic, like the artificial tone of a computer or a robot. “You speak English, Mr. Min?”

“Why am I here? What do you want?”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Bishop replies with a smile that does nothing to warm her lightless eyes. She folds her hands behind her back and turns, walking the length of the room, then doubling back again, all the while her eyes never leave Yoongi. “I’m surprised you’re here,” she says, and then - seemingly noticing the undeniable confusion that must show on Yoongi’s face, she corrects herself. “Ah, I’m not surprised you’re here , in this building, but I didn’t expect you to come all the way to New York. After all, the official report is that you’re deceased. Prison accident, wasn’t it?”

Yoongi doesn’t answer. Clearly, this woman already knows too much, and god knows how she found out. The last thing Yoongi’s interested in doing is giving her more .

Bishop rounds on him and halts her walking. “So you faked your death, then you lie low for a while and hightail it to New York. Why?”

Yoongi stares at her, furious and without emotion. “Why,” he repeats, barely controlled anger shaking his voice, “am I here?”

“I’m trying to get to that, Mr. Min,” Bishop waves a hand, as if Yoongi’s hostility is a fly buzzing around her head and killing her mood. “Why are you here? You’ve been on my radar, too far out of reach to make use of, but I never expected you to walk right into my arms.”

“Walk?” Yoongi spits before he can think better of it. “You took me.”

The look on Bishop’s face reads of genuine surprise, even hurt, and she raises a hand to her breast pocket and presses it there, right over her heart. “Took you? Oh no, Yoongi. Oh, no no no. You came to me. I called you.”

She walks to him, slow and measured, then bends and lowers herself to his eye level before reaching out a hand and moving it to the top of Yoongi’s head. “It’s all in here,” she says quietly, and a slow smile unfurls on her lips. “Your very special orders. My…say, ability to send them to you. Much too far out of reach all the way in South Korea, but here? You’re right in range. You’re just where you should be.”

Yoongi leans back, but is met only with the unyielding resistance of his chair. Her skin on his is making his flesh crawl, slippery and stinging with a cold sweat. He feels nauseated. The room is beginning to spin. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Yongsun Intak,” Dr. Bishop detours in her jacked up monologue, straightening back up in a businesslike manner, fixing her crooked sleeve and resuming her focused walk up and down the room. “I’m sure you’re very, very familiar with him. 

Yongsun ? The only people who know Yongsun Intak were his victims and his colleagues, and this woman doesn’t strike Yoongi as Yongsun’s ideal type. Not male or juvenile enough. So she worked with him. For him . Which can only mean–

“ The Last Waltz ,” Yoongi growls. “The failsafe.”

Obviously. What they came here to find, finding him first. Just his luck . 

“Me? The failsafe?” Bishop’s eyes widen, and she laughs, shameless and unbridled. It makes her mane of platinum hair sway like a hypnotizing pendulum. When she quiets again, she’s shaking her head like Yoongi has said something pitifully entertaining. “Mr. Min, he was the failsafe. Your country was the failsafe. A botched trial run. I can assure you what we’re doing here is much more advanced. We’re broadening scientific horizons that have never even been touched before. Mr. Intak was a valuable investor, and his involvement allowed us to get a lot of necessary testing out of the way. It was…a first draft, if you will. Essential, but messy, and intended to be scrapped and revised. I liked to let him believe he was our king, though. Men with egos are easier to work with when you feed them like that.”

Bishop pauses, eyebrows so blonde they’re near invisible pinching as she flicks Yoongi a furtive glance. “He was vile, Mr. Min. I want you to know that I know this. He was a sick man who wanted perverse things. It’s…important to me that you understand you are not here to suffer the way he made you suffer. You’re useful to us, Yoongi. You belong here.”

Yoongi’s heart kicks up in his chest, veins shooting with a mixture of sickness and rage that hits him so hard and heavy he feels blinded by it. How fucking dare she speak about this like she has even an inkling of understanding? Like she could even begin to imagine the agony Yongsun inflicted on him? The only other person who can comprehend what living with their throat under Yongsun’s heel felt like, what his greed and lust and violence felt like on their own skin, is Jeongguk, and between the two of them, he and Yoongi never speak of it. 

They couldn’t. It can’t be recounted. This woman’s imitation of sympathy is a slap across the fucking face, mocking his anguish. 

Yoongi gathers the saliva he can muster from his parched mouth and spits it at the toes of Bishop's polished shoes. “Go fuck yourself.”

“I know about Jeongguk too,” Bishop informs him serenely, an odd light passing over her face. “Where is he now?”

“Dead,” Yoongi snaps point-blank. If this freak of a woman thinks she can get information out of him that easily, she’s about to learn the hard way how sturdy life has made him. “Died in prison.”

“Ah, see, but if that basement explosion didn’t kill you , I doubt it killed him.”

“It did. I saw it. I have no fucking clue what happened with what was left of him.”

Bishop’s gaze darkens as she eyes Yoongi as if he’s a stubborn child acting out of order. “There can be so much to gain from being cooperative, Yoongi. Why don’t you tell me what you know?”

“Did I stutter when I said go fuck yourself?”

Bishop squares her shoulders and draws in a heavy breath. “I understand this is jarring–”

“You don’t understand shit.”

“Your past doesn’t matter to me, Yoongi. Here, you’ll receive a fresh start. No special treatment, good or bad. You’ll be another in our ranks, you belong here. We can make the pain and the hurt go away, it isn’t something you’re required to live with any longer.”

“Eat shit,” Yoongi hisses. There’s nothing here for him, only that which he promised to destroy. She’s standing right in front of him, and he’s handcuffed, powerless, useless . Hoseok is probably scared out of his mind wondering where Yoongi is right now. The others are no doubt being driven up the wall searching for him. Yoongi can’t even recount his path here, much less begin to plot his escape.

Bishop looks at him for a long moment. Whatever hopeful glimmer bloomed in her eyes for a measure of time is now extinguished, and she shakes her head. She crosses the room, sliding open one of the smooth, silent drawers and pulling out something small, shiny, all metallic and glass. “Regardless, Mr. Min, opting out is not a choice you were given. You’re here now, and you stay here.”

She turns around. The syringe in her hand flashes. Yoongi tenses, straining against the binds keeping him tethered to his seat. It’s futile. 

The last thing he knows is a needle biting hot and wet into one of the veins on his neck, and he has the clarity only to wonder if there’s anything he could have done to save himself, then his anguish fades to black.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? The thread of connection? Struck by some insatiable bout of madness, succumbing to violence. Where have they seen this before? What do Namjoon and Yoongi have in common that none of the rest of them do?”

Seokjin is pacing up and down the length of the living room, carding a frantic hand through his hair. He’s uncharacteristically disheveled, from his socks to the rumpled sleeves of his shirt, and worse for the wear from the beating he took. 

Namjoon. Namjoon . Jimin can’t even imagine him that way, violent beyond reason, hurting Seokjin of all people. Those two are closer than close, they never seem to go anywhere without each other. Their affection is subtle, but Jimin has watched them long enough to know the quiet trust they have in each other speaks volumes. And now? Namjoon and Yoongi both gone in the night, leaving Seokjin bruised up and Hoseok shaking with a blood-fresh bite on his throat. 

The four of them moved down to the main floor when Seokjin ran to check the security system on the doors for signs of forced entry, but all was intact. If someone came for Yoongi and Namjoon, they were allowed in, and the two of them subsequently left willingly. Or if they ran out on their own - why ? Hoseok had asked that exact question while Seokjin muttered feverishly to himself about how he should have installed those damn security cameras when he had the chance.

“ It doesn’t matter now ,” Hoseok had groaned, tugging his hands through his own hair and leaving it tangled and stood on end. “You said you had an idea, tell us what it is.”

And that brought them here. Now. Seokjin, spilling the edge of his theory and Jimin, sickened by the immediate parallel he sees in what Seokjin is saying.  

“ The Last Waltz,” Hoseok breathes, his breath hitching on the exhale. “Oh my god. Oh my god .” He twists, hunching forward and dropping both of his hands on the couch, gripping the dusty leather with all his strength as if it’s the only force keeping him upright. 

“Focus,” Seokjin interjects, a warning in its plainest form. 

Focus, because we can’t afford not to . 

“But that was—they— years ago,” Hoseok chokes out. He straightens up and turns around, though with the appearance of someone who is only just barely managing to do so. He looks empty and breakable again, like the boy who wasted away in his room for months wallowing in grief, and Jimin is struck by the sudden want to envelope Hoseok in his arms and promise him that they’ll fix this. Somehow. 

“How could they still—?” Hoseok breaks off, the unspoken remainder of his sentence dangling like a blade in the air between them all. 

The drug, Jimin still doesn’t fully understand. It’s the kind of thing that Taehyung would have been best at explaining to him in that patient, knowledgeable manner he had. And he would have, Jimin knows, if he weren’t six feet under the frozen earth in Seoul right now. There’s no one here who Jimin wants to ask, least of all while Jeongguk is watching. 

Jeongguk, who is leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest, following every movement. 

Jeongguk, who has said nothing. 

“Fuck if I know,” Seokjin mutters, returning to his futile pacing and looking only more frustrated about it this time. He throws a sharp glance at Jeongguk, who startles like a rabbit caught unawares in the forest. “Feel free to take center stage here and offer your insight, you were the one running Yongun’s errands and shining his shoes. What did we miss? What aren’t we seeing?”

“I don’t know,” Jeongguk says quietly. “He didn’t tell me…as much as he could have.”

“I don’t give a damn what he did, just give me what you think . What you’ve ever had reason to suspect. What you’ve overheard discussed across lunch once eight years ago. Please. Their lives are on the line. You know Yoongi would try everything if it were you who needed help.”

Seokjin’s words, though both genuine and imploring, make Jimin’s flesh crawl. Imagine Yoongi, sacrificing any measure of anything for Jeongguk’s sake. Jimin wouldn’t give up a piece of rice to save Jeon Jeongguk. 

“The end result was for the Waltz to be more than just an injectable,” Jeongguk murmurs, casting a sidelong glance at the group of them like he isn’t sure if he’s going to be lashed for speaking. “F- Yongsun had large-scale ideas for how he wanted to improve and unroll it, but I don’t know how far he got while he was living.”

“What kind of ideas?” Hoseok asks, a steel edge to his tone. 

“Pills,” Jeongguk replies, lifting one shoulder and keeping his gaze fixed pointedly on the concrete floor. “Topical patches. Other things like that.”

Inexplicably, the temperature in the room seems to drop by several degrees following his statement. Seokjin has frozen in his paces. Hoseok’s soft features have hardened to stone. 

“What kinds of other things?” Hoseok asks, rounding on Jeongguk with an alarming intensity.  

Good. Jimin hopes Jeongguk crumples beneath it. Hoseok doesn’t know how frightening he can be in anger, but Jimin does. 

“I don’t know,” Jeongguk repeats, retreating into himself again. He looks like a sullen teen with his hood pulled up like that, even in the middle of the night, or a junkie fending off the chills of withdrawal. 

“I think you do,” Hoseok breathes. “I think you know a lot that you’re not telling us.”

“Hoseok,” Seokjin fixes him with a cautionary look. “Don’t start something that won’t end well.”

“Look at him,” Hoseok throws out a hand, damning in accusation and jabs it in Jeongguk’s direction. “Do you trust him? Do you honestly fucking trust him? He’s a liar , he’s been a liar for as long as any of us have known him.”

“Yoongi wanted him here,” Seokjin says, placid and firm, but Jimin can see the flicker of hesitation in his stern eyes. 

“And now Yoongi has disappeared,” Hoseok snaps, lividity lighting him up like a flare. “Can you look at me right now and swear he has nothing to do with it?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Jeongguk murmurs. “Yoongi-hyung is the only person who–”

“Don’t say his name,” Hoseok hisses. “Until you tell us every single thing you know, you don’t get to say his name. There were pills, and patches, and what else ?”

Jeongguk’s gaze flits up to Seokjin, almost imploring. Seokjin makes an aborted gesture with his hand, as if to say say it, whatever it is. Say it now.

Jeongguk lifts his chin, tremulous. What an insult, Jimin thinks, for him to stand in their midst, role-playing a victim, as if this, all of this, wasn’t brought on by his own actions. As if he has something to cry about. 

“There was…an implant,” he says, just above a whisper. If Jimin hadn’t watched his lips move he doubts he would have heard him speak at all. “Ideas for one at least, it was being discussed. Yongsun felt that the injections were archaic, that it would be much more sustainable if they were given self-regulating implants that could be…” Jeongguk trails off, lifting a hand to his forehead and pressing his fingertips there as if something about being forced to recall is causing him physical discomfort. 

Jimin is alarmed by how little he pities Jeongguk’s pain. 

“I don’t know,” Jeongguk continues, breath hitching on the odd word as he carries on, “Yongsun was working with a–a different person. Part of the American side of things, she was the most interested in–the implant. I think. She knew more about it, I wasn’t allowed in those meetings, I never even s- saw her. I didn’t know it was real - finished. But when you,” he pauses, gesturing vaguely as Hoseok, “and hyung were taken hostage by Yongsun–”

By you, Jimin thinks furiously. He’s heard this story. He knows the truth. 

“-I was the one who took hyung to get injected, but they had me take a detour and drop him off in another room first after I sedated him. I didn’t go inside, they told me they were preparing him for his dose, I didn’t–I wasn’t allowed to ask any more than that.”

“Do you know what you were allowed to do, though?” Hoseok asks, his tone murderously quiet. Jimin tenses. He knows the silence that comes before Hoseok explodes, like a coil tightening before it springs. 

“ Fucking tell us,” Hoseok launches forward as if he were shot that way and shoves Jeongguk

 back against the drywall, pinning him there, elbow to his throat. “Did he know?”

“I—“

“ Did Yoongi know any of this?”

“No,” Jeongguk rasps, voice hoarse under the pressure of Hoseok all but choking him. He makes no move to shove him away. “I didn’t think he would run . I thought, maybe, if there was even a chance it was real, it would affect his mood and I could explain my suspicions then. Or worst case, he’d have bursts of being under the influence of Waltz, and we could-“ Jeongguk breaks off as Hoseok presses harder, and the end of his sentence is forced out airlessly “- handle it. ”

“You fucking bastard,” Hoseok hisses. His eyes are dark - pitch black in their entirety. Not the irises, or even his pupils, but all of it, an inky torrent that light gets sucked into and eaten. It’s the part of him that Jimin is sure now that Hoseok can’t control. The primal, animalistic piece invoked by the deepest of emotions and taking over as if to preserve the softer, human parts of him. 

Jeongguk’s hand has crept up, curling around Hoseok’s wrist and pushing back against him, if only hard enough to keep his throat from being crushed under Hoseok’s trembling rage. Mere paces away, Seokjin does nothing. He’s watching the scene unfold, expression unreadable beneath the bruises discoloring his face. 

“I was afraid,” Jeongguk starts again in a rasp, “that if I told him, and he thought it was true, he might not want to risk coming to America with me. And I didn’t want to do this alone.”

“You’re selfish,” Hoseok whispers. 

“Stop touching me,” Jeongguk chokes. His fingers are rigid where they hold Hoseok’s wrist. “Please.”

“Yoongi trusted you, and you fucked him over.”

“I know,” Jeongguk shudders. His lips are turning purple. “I’m sorry.”

And if Jimin didn’t know he was a sickening liar, he would almost feel compelled to believe it. 

“That’s enough.”

Seokjin’s voice rings across the room, heavy with the authority Jimin has only ever seen him and Yoongi command. He strides over to Hoseok, taking him by the shoulder and pulling him back hard enough that Hoseok has no choice but to release Jeongguk, who turns away immediately, holding his throat. 

“You won’t get anywhere by strangling him.”

“I’ll feel better,” Hoseok hisses. The whites of his eyes have returned to normal, but he looks as volatile as ever. 

“It won’t help Namjoon or Yoongi. Go somewhere else and cool down until you’re ready to be logical about this. Jeongguk, go sit at my desk. There’s more I want to know. And Jimin—“

He falters when he turns to Jimin, and Jimin can see it in his eyes that he has nothing more to say. No directive to give him. Jimin is just another person here. An afterthought. He really only came out of loyalty to Hoseok, and out of habit. These people, the places they built, they are his only home. But he doesn’t really belong. Taehyung brought him here, then left him here, and Jimin knows deep down he’s never recovered from that. Never truly found his own purpose. 

Fade into the background, Jimin. We’ll call you if we’ll need you, but I can’t imagine why we ever would. 

“Just—stay or go. But don’t get in the way,” Seokjin sighs, and to his credit he looks somewhat apologetic about not having a better job for him. He just doesn’t have the time to come up with anything good, Jimin thinks. Because Seokjin has someone he loves, someone who might still be able to be saved. 

Jimin has no one. 

When Hoseok leaves the room, Jimin follows on his heels without a word. 

Hoseok is barely in his room for thirty seconds before he stops breathing. 

He doesn’t know why it happens. One moment, anger has him by the neck. The next, he can’t take a breath. It feels how he imagines being plowed into by a car would, like tons of steel just tore open his chest and revved off again with his lungs in tow. He’s sick with dizziness. His ears begin to ring, a high-pitched chime that makes his eyeballs rattle inside his skull, the corners of his vision blurring. 

I must be dying, he barely has the clarity to think as his knees give out, and he lands palms-first on the unforgiving concrete floor. I think I’m dying, and Yoongi isn’t here to save me because he might be dying too. It’s real this time. There are no more tricks left. If he’s gone, then he’s gone. 

Gone. Gone. Gone forever. Dust and memories. 

“Hyung?”

Soft hands press onto either side of Hoseok’s body. They’re not Yoongi’s. He knows that beyond any trace of count without even looking. 

“Don’t,” he moans. Wheezes , more like. What he really means to say is you won’t help, because you’re not Yoongi, but he can’t find the words, nor the strength to say them. 

“Hyung, you’re okay.”

Jimin. Tender and ever present. He turns Hoseok, rolling him onto his back, and then his visage is floating above Hoseok, all warped in his shaky vision with that shock of hair like a bloodstain on the horizon. 

“Yoongi,” Hoseok chokes out. The corners of his eyes burn, and he’s dimly aware of something hot and wet squeezing out and running down his cheeks into his tangled hair. “My Yoongi.”

“We’ll find him,” Jimin exhales. He sounds sure of himself, but not sure enough. It’s a forced confidence, a display for Hoseok’s benefit, because Hoseok is drowning now and they both know it. 

“I barely had him,” Hoseok shudders. Is it worse, he wonders, losing Yoongi a second time? Would it hurt less if he had never gotten to kiss him and touch him and breathe him again? If Yoongi was only a slow-fading memory?

“I know.”

“He told me he’d stay.”

“I know, hyung. I’m sure he wanted to.” Jimin is caressing Hoseok’s hair, curling over him like he’s making his body a shield to hide Hoseok under until the world around them gets a little gentler and a little easier to bear. “We will find him. Namjoon-hyung too.”

“What if they’re gone?”

“They’re not gone.”

Hoseok writhes where he lies. There’s an insurmountable amount of pain wracking his body, and he has no idea where it’s coming from or how to make it stop. “What if they are?”

“They’re not, hyung.” Jimin’s voice sounds like it’s a single breath away from splitting. “They’re coming back.”

Hoseok tips onto his side and begins to sob. 

It’s a long time before Jimin feels like he can leave Hoseok’s side. A long time before Hoseok’s breathing comes and goes easily, before his skin cools down, and his body uncurls from where it was locked stiff with panic on the cold stone floor. 

By the time Jimin returns to the first floor, his head is buzzing, mouth parched, stomach gnawing on itself. He lost track of the time. The sun has risen, stealing away the dark and replacing it with a flood of light that seems almost insensitive to the abysmal mood settled over the apartment. 

Whatever Seokjin and Jeongguk are up to, Jimin doesn’t know. He supposes he’ll be looped in when he needs to be. As usual. And as for Hoseok…well, it’s probably better that he just rest for now. He’s not in any condition to launch into a strange new city and start a wild hunt for two people who could be anywhere . 

They might not even be in the country any longer. 

Jimin tries not to think about that. For everyone’s sake, he desperately wants to believe that what he said to Hoseok earlier is true. They’re not gone. They will return. Min Yoongi always returns. 

He’s proven that time and time again. 

The fridge is all but barren when Jimin swings it open, his stomach giving a hearted grumble. A Chinese takeout container. An unmarked styrofoam box that smells like old cheese. A single banana, and a can of some hyper-colored energy drink boasting 12 hour total energy. 

Jimin sighs a sound that no one hears. Maybe they should all chug one at intervals until they’ve fixed this nightmare. 

Uninspired, Jimin reaches for the banana then turns to the cabinet above the stove. It’s not much better in there, but there’s a packet of cheddar popcorn and a tangled net of a bag containing three oranges. Jimin takes one, and the popcorn, and settles in at the cluttered kitchen island. 

Fruit salad and popcorn. The breakfast of champions, defender of countries, smiter of all evil. 

Jimin hates this. He hates this. He misses Korea. He misses all the things that were familiar. He misses Jiji, and their cramped apartment. But before that, more than that, he misses his first home. His real home. The pretty penthouse he shared with Taehyung. 

And he misses Taehyung. Forever, he misses Taehyung. It’s a wound that never heals, and Jimin has grown tired of wrapping and rewrapping it. 

“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

Jimin starts so hard at the sound of a voice from over his shoulder that he almost slips off the barstool. He turns quick enough that he feels it sharp in his lower back and finds Jeongguk rooted behind him. 

In the unlit kitchen, his face does that thing where it warps in the shadows and for one moment, he’s Taehyung. The next, he’s himself again, much to Jimin’s disappointment. A killer. A liability. A hopeless looking one, with shaggy hair and a penchant for oversized hoodies and the vape that lives in his palm. 

That’s the one thing Jimin won’t fault him for. 

He’s had worse vices himself. 

“I didn’t,” Jeongguk repeats. His dark eyes are serious, stoic and…when the low light from above the sink hits them just right, almost pleading. “I didn’t betray Yoongi-hyung. I didn’t betray any of you.”

Jimin turns and faces the front again. He’s not a willing audience to Jeongguk begging for grace. A secret. A betrayal. What’s the difference, in the grand scheme of things, if the cost was two of their own?

“Do you believe me?”

Jimin’s body goes rigid. Jeon Jeongguk must be out of his mind, asking Jimin of all people if he believes him. If Jeongguk said the sky was blue, Jimin would open a window and check it himself.

With his hand curled into a fist so tight he can feel the curve of his fingernails biting into the skin they’re pressed up against, Jimin rotates, and this time he faces Jeongguk head on. No shame. No avoidant gaze. He does have the urge to slap him again, but Jeongguk’s glasses are a little bent from where they got smacked off his face the last time and that fact suddenly makes him look too pathetic to lift a hand at again. 

“You killed my best friend,” Jimin says, short and flat. He has to keep it that way. If he elaborates at all, if he recalls Taehyung’s memory to the forefront of his mind, he won’t be able to keep his voice from shaking. “Did you know that? Do you even know his name?”

“Of course I know his name,” Jeongguk says, equally still. His expression is unreadable, and he doesn’t look away. “Kim Taehyung. Yoongi-hyung’s right hand. It was my job to have eyes on all of you. But you’re wrong, I didn’t kill him.”

Jimin drops his gaze to his lap, the threadbare knees of his jeans. Don’t cry, Jimin. Don’t give him the satisfaction of making you break.

“Yongsun killed him.”

“You worked with–”

“I worked for Yongsun,” Jeongguk cuts in over him. It’s the strongest Jimin has heard his voice since they’ve been here. Usually he speaks under his breath, the morose mumbling of a teenager, but in this moment it’s steady, and sharp, and sounds much more like the version of him Jimin saw five years ago. An angry, violent boy with vendettas piled a mile high and all the power in the world to carry out his symphony of revenge.

“On that day, Yongsun and Seong Miyoung had made arrangements to march into her den and capture Yoongi-hyung, but when they arrived he had already fled the scene. Yongsun issued orders for the forces he sent out to take in Yoongi-hyung or Hoseok alive, and kill anyone else on sight, with a cash reward for the body. No one consulted me for my help, or my opinion. I didn’t even know it was happening until hours later. Do you want to know why?”

Jeongguk’s voice fades quiet again, but that only makes each word more dangerous than the last. There’s an implication, unspoken, that they’re only for Jimin to hear, and the idea of that makes him shudder. He doesn’t want to carry a secret with Jeon Jeongguk. He doesn’t want to know him at all.

“I was in a hotel on the other side of Seoul,” Jeongguk carries onward, filling up the space Jimin left vacant with his lack of response. His tone grows cold as he speaks, dissonant and without emotion, and Jimin despises the fact that he recognizes the specific cadence of hollowness too deeply and too well.

“I was handcuffed to a bed, because Yongsun had loaned me to four European billionaires, as a personalized thank you for the sizable investment they had made into one of his projects. Nothing makes greedy men worse in bed than the presence of other greedy men. They start to compete with one another. And then they start to get drunk on complimentary wine. And then they really lose themselves. I think they forget you’re a human being, too. But you know this, Jimin, don’t you?”

Jeongguk’s tone isn’t a threat. It’s a whispered question, and Jimin nods before he can harness the impulse and think better of it. 

He does know. 

And he hates that he and Jeongguk share that.

“I promise you,” Jeongguk breathes. He’s so close that his breath ruffles Jimin’s hair. Jimin continues to stare resolutely at the floor, unable to look up. “I didn’t kill your boyfriend, because I couldn’t even stand by the time they were done with me. I thought my ribs were broken. I was coughing blood . You think Yongsun and I were a team, but between us there were no equals. I was his plaything. I was a dog . I knew what he wanted me to know, and I did what he told me to do, and then I killed him.”

Jimin flinches. His chest performs an odd spasm, like an aborted hiccup. The back of his throat tastes like sour bile. 

“With a butter knife. On my bedroom carpet.”

Jimin could vomit. He could, right now on this ugly concrete floor, because in a single second, on some level that feels both microscopic and fundamental, he understands Jeon Jeongguk. And no matter how much he hates that, he can’t change it. No amount of time nor malice will undo the fact that they share a piece of pain that never goes away.

“I know murdering him didn’t fix anything.” There’s a note of bitterness in Jeongguk’s voice that bites. “But you could at least give me some credit.”

Jimin says nothing. He keeps on staring, trembling, at the fixed point on the ground that his eyes have locked onto and refused to move from. He doesn’t hear Jeongguk leaving, but when Jimin finally lifts his head sometime later, he finds that he’s alone again.

Yoongi wakes to an alarm. It’s a digital pulse that reverberates in the back of his head, stirring him from a heavy-lidded sleep. 

One breath. Two. 

No .

Yoongi isn’t supposed to be here.

He sits up, scrambling against the padded surface he’s on, fighting the cloak of material tangling his arms and legs against his body. Handcuffs, or–blankets. He pauses, heaving, and looks around. The last thing he knew was the blank lab room, Dr. Bishop and her thinly-veiled threats, then the syringe she shoved into his neck that sucked him into a deep, pitch black nothingness.

Now, a new space has materialized around him, more white walls and liminal spaces, but this one is smaller, as claustrophobic as a closet and no more decorated. Yoongi is in a bed, steel frame fixed to the wall. Beside him, a plastic table that looks like it’s attached to the floor, a single change of clothing folded on top. The door at the end of the bed is only just visible, a crack in the wall with no handle. So it opens from the outside, and until it does, Yoongi is a prisoner to this box. The alarm sounds as if it’s coming from the fluorescent light embedded in the ceiling above, leaving no switch or button for him to punch it off.

He kicks the covers back and staggers to his feet, bracing himself to beat the door into oblivion and force his way out if he must, but before he can reach it, something mechanical hisses, slides, and the door unseals itself and springs open by an inch or two, revealing a well lit corridor beyond. 

The alarm stops. A pleasant chime rings out, and the artificial tone of a woman rings out in crisp English. 

All subjects: proceed to dining. All subjects: proceed to dining. 

Outside, the hallway has sprung to life. Yoongi hears the shuffling of listless footsteps, rubber squeaking on linoleum, bodies bumbling around at a leisurely pace. Through the crack in the door he begins to see them trail past, vacant faces and slumped shoulders all headed past his door to the left, all dressed in the same loose, nondescript white clothing that he’s been given, like the unprotesting members of a cult. None of them look alarmed, scared, or even confused. They look dead . Awake, but devoid of any life, husks of human beings. 

Yoongi’s heart quickens, skipping a necessary beat in his chest and making him sway lightheaded. What the fuck is this place? Who are you people? Why? Why, why, why?

Dr. Bishop’s voice is recalled to mind, her tone echoing around on blank, white-washed walls. You came to me. I called you. Your very special orders . 

Goosebumps creep up on Yoongi’s skin, pulsing him with disgust. Nothing about his body feels like his own.

He pushes his feet into the flimsy white shoes tucked by the foot of his bed, and swings the door open, braced for the worst, and joins the channel of people flooding their way elsewhere. If the others - subjects, according to the voice on the intercom - notice or care that he’s joined them, they don’t show it. They barely even register him. A man with a thick mustache shoots him a hazy eyed look, lingering for one second before turning to face the front again, unintrigued by a newcomer in their midst. 

Their sluggish journey ends a minute and a half later when they round a corner, and the corridor becomes wider. A pair of wide double doors are propped open at the end, flanked by two women in lab coats who seem to be holding traffic up at a standstill. They queue the lifeless people in white, shuffling them into two distinct lines, then have them step into the room beyond one at a time. It isn’t until Yoongi gets closer and hears a tiny beep, beep, beep of a sound that he realizes they’re scanning them in one by one by the wrist. He glances down at his own arm and finds a blue tag there, his name typed out in English, which looks sharp and foreign to him, followed by his date of birth and a bar code of harsh lines. When he reaches the head of the line, they take his wrist, lifting it for him and scanning like he’s some sort of doll, unable to think and speak for himself. The others don’t protest, so he doesn’t either, and lets himself get propelled onward into the dining hall. 

Like everywhere else, it’s all clinical and white, long tables lined with trays and faces that hold no conversation. They break into their food in silence, thousand yard stares into open space, taking in everything and understanding none of it.

What the hell happened to you people? Why am I awake, and you’re not?

Yoongi hits a cafeteria style queue in front of a bar manned by silent women dressed in white shifts and aprons. They don’t even give the patients the grace of eye contact as they ladle proportioned scoops of something or other onto slate gray trays and shove it into waiting hands. Yoongi mimics the person ahead of him, taking his tray and breaking off from the herd to find an open seat. There doesn’t appear to be any order to it, people float until they land somewhere with enough room to plant themselves, and then they begin to eat with their blocky plastic utensils. 

Yoongi looks down. The food on his plate is indistinguishable, save for the dull, olive-colored peas boiled and plopped in the corner. The main course is some sort of tomato pasta dish, all one texture and mushed together like a congealed soup. At the corner of his tray, a cup of pale yellow pudding that jiggles with every step he takes. 

He lifts his chin again and scans the room, eyes lost for a tether in a sea of unfamiliar faces and the smack smack smack of lazy, open-mouthed chewing. 

A corner would be ideal, Yoongi thinks. Somewhere away from the staff at the door, or the meal counter, where he can try to wring answers out of his seatmate. Surely they know something, surely they can speak if pressed to do so. There’s a section against the back wall containing only three people at one of the long tables, and Yoongi decides it’s his best bet. As he goes to make a beeline for it, something catches the corner of his vision and he swings his head. A flash of light, a particularly loud clatter of fork against plastic, or perhaps just the innate human need to find someone who looks like him in a crowd. But when he turns to look twice, his eyes land upon something - someone - all too familiar in a sea of unknown. 

Namjoon. Kim Namjoon is sitting alone, staring at his meal, dead silent. 

Yoongi almost drops his food. In his haste to stride to Namjoon’s table he elbows a young woman, knocking her against a broad, blond man, but neither of them react to the incident. They straighten up and keep walking, and Yoongi isn’t about to stop and check on them. When he lands at Namjoon’s table, he sets his tray down with shaking hands, fighting to maintain a pretense of normalcy. He doesn’t want eyes on them, doesn’t want the attention drawn to them. Do these people know that they know each other? Are they allowed to speak here, or is silence demanded?

Yoongi’s fingers pinch the edges of his tray so hard they turn white, and he lowers his face, joining Namjoon in staring resolutely at the table instead of each other before speaking. 

“Namjoon,” he breathes, barely audible against the rumble of noise created by their lifeless companions. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Hm?” 

The sound Namjoon makes is small, and blurred at the edges like a frosted window. It sounds distant, like he’s speaking from some far away plane without really listening. 

“Where are we?” Yoongi hisses, still fighting to keep his voice down. “Did you speak to the doctor? Bishop?”

“Bishop?” Namjoon’s hand shuffles in Yoongi’s limited frame of vision, fork poking into his tomato sauce and smudging it around with little intention. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? The doctor, Namjoon. Blonde? Tall? She knew who Yongsun was, I think she—“ Yoongi drops his voice even lower, dipping deeper into caution. “ I think this has to do with Waltz . Why else would we be here? Why us?”

“Us,” Namjoon repeats, a nondescript echo of Yoongi. “Why us?”

A chill trickles into Yoongi’s blood. This isn’t right. Namjoon isn’t - right. He’s like them, the listless dead faces. Yoongi dares to lift his chin and look Namjoon in the eyes. There’s a bruise on his jaw, but that’s the most defining thing about his appearance. Everything else is…scrubbed. Clean slate. No life, no color, no personality. When he blinks, it’s slow and sluggish, like all of his bodily functions are weighed down with lead. Even his skin is paler, distorted by the light and clothing to the same washed out gray of his meal tray. 

“Namjoon,” Yoongi whispers, and this time there’s a hint of fear in his voice that he despises the sound of. “Talk to me.”

“It’s us,” Namjoon repeats. He’s looking at Yoongi, but seeing right through him, no recognition in his dark eyes. “It’s us.”

Yoongi’s hand has curled around his fork with such a force that his entire arm is trembling inside the loose, white sleeve of his shirt. “Don’t do this. Don’t be like them. You can’t leave me alone in this shithole.”

Namjoon says nothing. He lowers his chin and goes back to his plate, grazing through his food like an animal in a cage. 

“We have to figure out how we got here, and how to leave .” Yoongi wants his words to come out a command, but it rings more of a plea to him, the tremble in his voice falling just short of desperate. No one around them seems to be listening, the whole of the cafeteria continues to clatter on numbly as Namjoon does. “They’ll be looking for us. Hoseok, Jeongguk - Seokjin - hyung . He’s probably terrified, Namjoon. Seokjin-hyung wants to know where you are.”

For one fleeting second, Namjoon’s posture tightens, waking up and exhibiting a brief sign of life. His hand falters halfway to his mouth, fork going still mid-air. “Seokjin?” he mouths, the first word inaudible, but Yoongi can read it on his lips. “He’s…looking for me?”

“ Yes , he’s looking,” Yoongi leans in, hope spiking for a single second at the faintest sense of Namjoon, the real Namjoon returning. If logic doesn’t call him back to his senses, maybe discomfort will. 

Bishop said he was called here. Receiving special orders . If that’s true, if Yoongi blacked out under some stronger command, he’d have no memory of it. He could have hurt Hoseok without even knowing it, the same way he hurt him in bed, teeth sinking into the soft, breakable surface of his skin. For days, Yoongi has suspected he wasn’t himself, not entirely. There’s something else living under his skin, something hungry pulling at him, wearing his body like a disguise.

Fear shoots up in Yoongi’s chest, pulsing its way to his skull and sitting behind his eyes like a blinding migraine. His vision spots, dread threatening to overtake him. He could have done something awful to Hoseok, much worse than a bite mark that will scab over and leave him unharmed. He could have–

No . Yoongi himself. Even in his deepest disillusionment, he would find a way to preserve Hoseok. He did it in the hospital after they pumped him full of Waltz , and it lit him up from the inside out, knocking him to ride shotgun in his own mind. Primal instinct saved him then, Imprinting on Hoseok rather than tearing him apart. Yoongi has to trust that he would know to do that again, that no substance, no directive, no distant order would be enough to turn him against his deepest foundations. 

But he doesn’t know. Neither of them knows. 

“You could have hurt him,” he says to Namjoon, quietly, reminding himself that they’re still at risk of being overheard even if these living zombies don’t seem to have the ability to retain information. 

Namjoon tips his head. “Seokjin?”

“Yes, Seokjin. I think you hurt him before you left. You want to go back to him, Namjoon. You need to make sure he’s alright.”

Silence. Yoongi presses his nails into the slippery plastic-coated table so hard he can feel his pulse strumming in his fingertips. Please, listen. Please hear this.

Namjoon’s fork unfreezes, and he takes a bite of his food. His brow smoothes out and the angle of his head rights itself. “Who?”

Despite having eaten nothing, Yoongi fights the way his muscles are clenching and clenching, threatening to send bile shooting up his throat. There is no Kim Namjoon here. The man sitting in front of him is a ghost, he wouldn’t know it, and he wouldn’t care if Yoongi died in front of him right this moment. 

Dr. Bishop said something when she spoke to Yoongi, something that rings in his ears now, a threat more than it was an explanation: “ We can make the pain and the hurt go away, it isn’t something you’re required to live with any longer.”

It wasn’t hyperbole. All these people are gone . Something essential and human has been scrubbed out of them, leaving them shells of themselves. There’s nothing easier to manipulate than a person who no longer has a will, or even a sense of self. Do they even know their names? Does Namjoon respond to his, or was that taken too?

And why, if they have all ceased to be, is Yoongi still himself?

Why does he remain?

How long until they steal him too?

“Table eighteen, stand.”

Yoongi starts so hard he drops his fork into the muddled mess on his plate. A warden with a clipboard and lab coat identical to the ones who took attendance at the cafeteria entry is standing at the head of their table, an empty expression passing over the heads of the eight or nine of them staggered across the seats in no real pattern.

Yoongi doesn’t dare move first, doesn’t want to run the risk of acting out of line and flagging the fact that he has more life in him than he should. If they haven’t noticed yet that he’s awake , more awake than these numbed up ghosts, they might make it their mission to change that. And Yoongi needs to be awake, he needs to be himself so that he find out how to get away from this place.

Namjoon stands first, pushing his tray back with a languid lack of haste. The others follow, and Yoongi mimics, leaving his meal untouched. He doesn’t want it anyway, whatever it is. Who knows what the hell they might be putting in that slop? Yoongi won’t eat it, not until hunger strikes so hard his stomach burns from it.

What he wants is blood, life-sustaining blood, but he didn’t see that option at the counter next to the cold peas and wet noodles. 

Hopefully, he’ll be long gone from here before that becomes a problem to reckon with. 

The group from table eighteen falls into line behind the male orderly, led around the tables on the edge and through a pair of swinging doors on the left, which brings them to a new hallway. This one is smaller than the one outside the cell Yoongi woke up in, but it too is lined with rooms, only these look more akin to hospital bays than bunks. Plastic-shrouded exam tables with sanitary sheets stretched, a sink, a rolling monitor, a steel cabinet lined with sleek drawers. 

They march onward, taking turns seemingly at random and walking along a never-ending hallway of the same, each one a mirror image of the last. Yoongi tries to keep track of their moves, left, left, right, straight for awhile, but after three or four corners they begin to muddle together in his head. Was the last turn left, or was that the one before? He can’t recall, and it makes him dizzy. All these bright white lights, the lack of food, he doesn’t have the clarity he needs. He’s good at this; when he has nothing else, Yoongi knows his mind is sharp, but it seems to have been sanded down to something soft and useless. 

“Stop.”

The line halts so suddenly Yoongi nearly walks right into the person ahead of him. The orderly at the front has paused in his tracks, looking down at his clipboard and making note of something. He looks over his shoulder. 

“Collect!”

A door swings open and eight identical orderlies step out, marching down the line and stopping one by one, assigning themselves to each person in the line. Yoongi’s is a small woman with red hair and glasses that take up half her face. Yoongi wonders, with a thread of guilt, how hard it would be to overpower her if he needed to. 

“All tagged, please prepare for examination. Aids to follow shortly.”

The orderlies nod. Yoongi’s take his by the elbow like he were a child, pulling him down the hall by several paces and removing a badge from her pocket to tap on the digital scanner at the door. It beeps, lighting up green and slides open to admit them. Without a single word, she propels Yoongi toward the table and sits him down on it, using no force but no patience. She maneuvers him the way one would a doll, or an animal being prepped for slaughter. 

The orderly turns, pulls a pair of latex gloves out of the dispenser on the wall and snaps them onto her hands, then slides back to Yoongi and presses him down on the table. He tries not to react to her cold, plastic-coated touch as she rolls his sleeves up, clearing the space around his hands and clipping something - a pulse monitor - onto his index finger. Then she pushes the hem of his shirt up, snaking her hands beneath it. She has a fist of cords, capped off by sticky tabs, and she presses them onto his skin one by one, two on his chest, one on either side of his stomach. Yoongi stares at the six-bulbed light inlaid into the ceiling, determined not to look at anyone or anything, but when she brushes over his skin a chill shoots up his spine, and he gives a bodily shiver. He glances down, only for a second, but when he does, he meets her green eyes and sees in them for a fleeting moment a look that could almost be called pity. 

“You’ll get your medicine soon,” she says, then looks away and goes silent once more. 

She finishes her work in silence, flipping on the monitor by the table and watching for a moment as it powers up, projecting all of Yoongi’s vital information onto the screen, the rise and fall of his heart, the speed at which it pulses, and the amount of oxygen in his blood. She must be satisfied by whatever it is she observes, because she grabs for the clipboard hanging at the end of the table and jots something down on it. Then, she walks to the door and scans it open, exiting without another word to him. There’s a half-second before the door closes in which Yoongi almost, almost hurls himself off the table and makes a bid for it before the lock can slide shut again, but in the moment that he hesitates, he hears the bolt click back into place, and he knows he’s alone and trapped once again. 

Beep. Beep. Beep. 

Yoongi’s pulse is a metronome, ticking away the minutes. Could he find Hoseok’s from here, wherever here is, he wonders? A piece of Yoongi is desperate to try, and the other terrified. What if he waits to tune into the sound of it and finds nothing? Only empty, static space where Hoseok used to be?

Yoongi exhales long and slow. His eyes fall shut. He needs to know. He has to try . He waits a moment for his own heartbeat to calm down enough that he can go to that quiet place where Hoseok lives in him and listen . He’s always there, always always there when Yoongi goes searching. Five years in a prison cell and it’s the only thing that kept him sane. 

Please , Yoongi prays, silent, but he can feel his lips moving. Please, let me hear you . 

Ten seconds pass. Twenty. The pads of Yoongi’s fingers are cold and clammy with sweat. Then he feels it - a flutter in his chest. A new pulse matching his, running faster, but just as strong. 

Hoseok . 

Yoongi’s entire body floods with much-needed warmth. He hears the speed of his pulse increase on the monitor like the crescendo of a song, and he breathes deep. Wherever Hoseok is, he’s alive. Yoongi knows it beyond any shred of doubt, his dove lives on in spite of all of this. 

Yoongi will get back to him. He always does. 

The lock on the door slides undone with a metallic clank. Yoongi’s eyes fly open. Someone steps into the room, just out of view, and Yoongi fights every self-preserving instinct in his body not to launch himself upright and assess the threat. 

Blend in and do nothing , he directs himself. You can fight when you know what you’re swinging at . 

The stranger in the room is moving around, though not with any audible sense of haste. A drawer opens. Something is shuffled around. It slides shut again. A clinking sound - glass on metal? Or metal on glass? It doesn’t make a difference - either way it’s something unknown and undoubtedly dangerous.

A beep pierces the room, followed by shuffling static and a muffled voice emitting from what sounds like an old flip phone, or a tinny speaker. “147, lab has updated requests - collect two samples. Please confirm. Over.”

Radio device.

The unseen guest shuffles, and another beep sounds. “Two samples to be collected. Over.”

The moment he speaks, Yoongi’s body goes rigid from head to toe, each muscle pulling taut as if they’ve erupted into civil war against one another. All of the sudden, he can’t breathe. The lights overhead are swimming. He’s vaguely aware of the rapid pinging as his heart rate climbs, projected on the monitor beside him and broadcasted to the silent room. 

That voice. 

He knows that voice. 

He would recognize it in a sea of people, in the dark, in a void, in old age, in illness, or insanity. There’s nothing that could scrub the memory of that voice from his mind. It’s smudged there like the stain of blood he left the world with. 

“ Taehyung ,” Yoongi whispers. 

The cords attached to his skin pull him as he sits up, but they fail to hold him back. All thoughts of stillness and submission have flooded away, replaced by a confusion so desperate and so visceral Yoongi feels like it’s made a fracture right down the middle of his skull, half-blinding him in disorientation. 

There’s a man standing in front of him. A man with mismatched lids on his dark eyes, a dot of a mole on the tip of his nose, and a mouth that curves into a box-shaped smile on the rare occasions that he’d be amused enough to let it do so. His hair is shaved short, buzzed almost down to his scalp and he’s thinner, paler than Yoongi has ever known him.

There’s a man standing in front of him, and it’s Kim Taehyung, and he’s looking at Yoongi with the expression of someone trying to conceal their alarm.

“Taehyung,” Yoongi repeats. The name feels so strange in his mouth, equal parts familiar and foreign. Once spoken countless times, day in and day out, and now said not at all, for fear of hurting himself with the weight of memory. 

Memory, of which Taehyung’s eyes hold none. A gaze once so piercing it could shut Yoongi up with one glance, and now, vacant. Not a trace of recognition, no shock, no joy, no pain, just blank dismay at the sight of Yoongi upright. His hands are fiddling on a steel tray lined with the threads of several plastic tubes and two sealed vials, 

“Lay down,” he says, hands going still. “You need to be laying down.”

Yoongi doesn’t reply. He can’t . He’s burning up from the inside out trying to make sense out of the senseless. Taehyung is dead . There are precious few occasions on which Yoongi has been able to admit that to himself, much less out loud, but even in denial he knows it’s the truth. He’s a collection of bones and decaying flesh buried six feet under Seokjin’s back lawn in a city thousands of miles away and Yoongi knows this.

He dug the hole himself, until he had blisters that split open and rained blood on the earth that would be shuffled over Taehyung’s body. It felt like a small sacrifice then. Too insignificant to ever repay all he owed to Taehyung. For his time. For his nerve. For his loyalty. 

“Taehyung.” When Yoongi says his name this time, he’s choking. Taehyung can’t look at him like that, with the same nothingness Namjoon gave him in the cafeteria. He of all people should know Yoongi, he isn’t allowed to be empty. He can’t. He can’t be here without really being here at all. 

“ Taehyung ,” Yoongi steps off the bed, pulling all the cords tying him to the monitor until they snap and break away from his body, leaving him untethered. 

Taehyung steps back, his hand flinching to his side, cupping something unseen clipped to his pocket. “Lay down,” he instructs again. His tone is steady, but he’s afraid of Yoongi, Yoongi can see it in his eyes. He’s afraid of the stranger walking toward him. 

“Look at me, look at me,” Yoongi lifts his hands, reaching for Taehyung’s shoulders. He has to touch him, or he’ll never believe his own mind. “ Look at me. Taehyung. Taehyung, it’s me. It’s me.”

“Do not touch me,” Taehyung warns, his voice taking an edge. His eyes are wide, and Yoongi can hear his pulse pounding louder than Yoongi’s own, a deafening blood rush making him dizzy. He’s terrified. He’s trying not to show it.

Yoongi grabs him, thumbs sinking into the soft space between each of his shoulders. He has to make sure he’s real, and made of skin and bone, and it won’t peel away into decay the second Yoongi feels him. 

“Look at me,” he shakes Taehyung, a demand of his own. “You see me. Do you see me?”

“Let go,” Taehyung replies, unflinching, but his pulse betrays him, “I’ll use force.”

“ No!” The cry is ripped from him, and he shoves Taehyung back, pushing him right up against the expanse of white wall and pinning him there, pressing hard against all of his edges, determined to make him feel . “Look at me. Look at me! ”

Can’t he see Yoongi? Wouldn’t he know him anywhere? Is he real?

Is he real?

Is Yoongi?

“You have to look at me!” Yoongi’s voice leaves him like a sob, which is wrong, because he doesn’t cry. He doesn’t cry, and men don’t come back from the dead, but both are happening even as he denies it, and it’s filling Yoongi with a suffocating madness. “It’s me, you know me, you have to know me .”

He shoves Taehyung hard again, blind to his own force until he hears Taehyung’s skull knock against the paneling he’s pressed to, but this time Taehyung says nothing. He pulls that unseen object from his side and swings it against Yoongi’s throat and the next thing Yoongi knows is agony . His muscles seize, forcing him to relinquish Taehyung, and he stumbles back as his legs give out, hitting the floor on his knees and sinking still. It disappears as soon as it starts, but leaves a strumming feeling under Yoongi’s skin and a metallic tang glued to the roof of his mouth.

Tased. Taehyung tased him? 

“Commotion room 116,” Taehyung’s voice follows the telltale beep of his radio. “Subject in distress. Backup.”

“Taehyung,” when Yoongi speaks it comes out like a moan. His limbs burn, but they’re soft and useless when he tests them, refusing to let him stand. “Please, we can’t be here. Don’t hurt me, I’m your friend. I’m your friend .”

When Yoongi can lift his head again, Taehyung has already turned away, straightening himself and refusing point-blank to give Yoongi his attention. He’s distraught still. His heart is racing almost as fast as Yoongi’s electrocuted one. Because he knows, he must know, whoever or whatever he is, he’s still a shell of himself. 

He could be saved. If Yoongi could stand, he would save him. 

The door slides open again and two orderlies appear, this time dressed in sturdier uniforms. They stride right past Taehyung and grab Yoongi by his shoulders, dragging him upward in spite of his protesting muscles. 

“Taehyung,” Yoongi manages to rasp. Even his larynx seems to be giving out on him, hoarse and taut when he tries to use it. “Don’t let them take me.”

Taehyung remains stock still, shoulders rounded as he stares into the corner. There’s nothing there for him. He just doesn’t want to look at Yoongi. 

“ Don’t,” Yoongi struggles against the guards, but they’re much stronger than he is like this. One of them grips him by his hair, jerking his head sideways and exposing the column of his neck. “Don’t, Taehyung, don’t ,” his voice rises with his heartbeat, pounding away the frantic pulse of his own life. Will they kill him? Scrub him of himself? Will he wake up after this, or will he become a memory to everyone who knew him, the same way Taehyung did. 

“Taehyung,” Yoongi chokes on his desperate plea, and he realizes the heat pouring onto his cheeks is the product of his own tears. His body keeps convulsing with the aftershocks of the taser, and orderly holding his hair pulls tighter, forcing him to be still. A silver flash catches the light, and Yoongi braces himself for it to pierce his skin. “Tell them to stop,” he shudders against the grip pinning him in place. “Please. Tell them to stop. Look at me. Make them stop.”

The needle bites into Yoongi’s throat, spreading something cold through his veins. It’s a lure into the dark that he doesn’t want to chase, but it’s dragging him. He continues to speak, aimless, desperate pleas directed at a man who never turns to look at him. The last thing he knows before he’s taken under is the sound of his own voice reverberating in his skull, hurting his head with every repetition. 

Taehyung. Taehyung. Stop it, Taehyung. Stop them. Taehyung, please. Don’t let them hurt me. 

Taehyung. 

Taehyung. 

Taehyung. 

Chapter Text

147 can hear that man’s voice reverberating in his skull long after he returns to his room for curfew. 

Taehyung . Taehyung. How does he know Taehyung? How did he find the voice in 147’s head and use that name?

He was so…desperate. So alive. The people 147 sees here don’t speak or act like that, they’re easy to handle and herd like cattle, they don’t have thoughts and desires. Neither does 147. At least, he’s sure he isn’t supposed to. No one else here seems to. They do their work, take their meals, and pass one another in the hallways in silence, none sharing dreams, nor thoughts, nor familiarity with one another. As far as he’s aware, 147 is the only one who hears the voices. 

As far as he’s aware, he’s the only one who that subject from earlier, Min Yoongi , reacted to. 

Min Yoongi. Min Yoongi. 

“Min Yoongi ,” 147 samples the way the name feels on his tongue, heavy and smooth, and somehow reflexive. He’s heard it before. He doesn’t know why, and he doesn’t know when, and trying to recall either of those things is giving him a splitting headache, but none of that changes the fact that he knows beyond any reasonable shred of doubt that he’s seen it, or heard it, or thought it before. 

It sounds different, doesn’t it? All of the letters, the way they fit together. There’s something about them that sets them apart from the other names 147 sees on a regular basis. 

Jessica. Thomas. Manuel. Steven. Allison. 

They’re not like Min Yoongi . Min Yoongi sounds like Kim Taehyung. Like they would sit on the same branch of a tree, or get filed into the same cabinet. And it reminds 147 strangely of the first memories he can recall inside of here - these endless white halls and bright lights that have become home, for lack of a second option. Back then he thought in…different words. He could understand theirs - the ones everyone else were speaking, that is - but he had to transpose them in his mind before he could reply, to turn them into the words everyone around him knew. It was as if he had multiples, backups on backups for each one they used, and he wasn’t quite able to distinguish why he knew so many of their words, and they knew none of his. 

After a long time, 147 decided it must all be something he made up before he came to consciousness. They would never understand it, because it wasn’t real to anyone but him, and so he stopped using them, and he stopped thinking about them, and after a while, they stopped being the first thing that would pop into his head. Even his thoughts started to come to him in the right words, no more of his pretend ones. 

But Min Yoongi…that Min Yoongi looked at 147 today, shook him, screamed at him, and he did it in those words. The made up words. The ones that only 147 had ever uttered.

How could he know to do that? How could he know anything? He’s not supposed to. He’s not supposed to . He looked at 147 with more familiarity than 147 has for himself when he looks in the mirror. 

As if stung, 147 rolls out of his cot and stands up, striding across the room and flipping the light on. Its white cast rains down on him, illuminating 147 from all the wrong angles and making him gaunt when he catches sight of his reflection in the mirror fixed to the wall. 

This is him. This is all he is. Skin and bone, dark, hollowed eyes, the mottled, fragile patch of scar tissue beneath his shirt on his left side, just above his naval. 147 doesn’t know how that happened. It’s always been there, as long as he’s been here, as long as he’s been himself . He looks at it sometimes, when he’s changing or showering and morbid curiosity gets the best of him, but he doesn’t touch it. Not ever. When he does, something awful happens to him, and for days, he can’t escape it. 

It’s pain . Pure, unbroken pain. Not on his flesh, in his mind . He feels as if he’s splitting. Everything at the edges of his vision will go dark, his body pulsing like all the blood is being churned out, dredged from him and spilling onto the pavement. Parts of him will be warm, pushed up against something soft and alive, and for one fleeting moment he’ll see a pair of terrified eyes, wet with tears of anguish. 

“I’m here,” it will say to him, and 147 will feel something very tender brush through his hair. “ I’ll stay here .”

And then the emptiness will arrive, and 147 will lose himself to it. When he wakes, his stomach will ache, and his skin will burn, and he can’t shake the feeling that he went somewhere long forbidden.

Like Min Yoongi. 

Min Yoongi . 

147 drags himself back to bed and collapses into it without turning the light off. On this night, he doesn’t want to be alone in the darkness. 

He doesn’t want what’s inside his mind to sink into him and carry him away.

“The only good option is to show up shooting. We have guns. We have cars. Why are we still sitting around here?”

Seokjin emits the sound of a man pushed to the edge of his very last nerve and slumps over his desk, running his hands through his disheveled hair. Jeongguk isn’t used to seeing him look so screwed up, from his wrinkled clothing to his haggard face. In the brief months that Jeongguk has known him, it’s been pressed suits and gold cufflinks all the way for Kim Seokjin, but right now he looks as if he aged ten years overnight, lank and listless and exhausted. 

Finally, someone’s in competition with Jeongguk for looking like shit. 

Not that Hoseok is much better. The shadows around his eyes are so deep they’re nearly black, giving him an almost skeletal appearance, but he seems to be working overtime to make up for his wisp of a physical presence with an attitude of pure fire. 

“What?” he snaps, gesturing with the Beretta in his hand. He’s a little too comfortable swinging that around for Jeongguk’s liking. It’s a strange thing to compare him to the Hoseok Jeongguk first encountered, that delicate thing who cowered in The Lilith and pleaded for Jeongguk’s help, some release from the sadistic Min Yoongi who had a heel on his throat. Now, using the gun as a dictation piece, he looks at ease with the weight of it in his palm, brandishing it to punctuate his words. “You’d rather sit here and do nothing? We’re wasting time .”

On the couch, Jimin is watching it move like a hawk, his eyes never leaving the dark steel. When Hoseok moves too quickly, he flinches. 

“We’d be wasting time by showing up guns-blazing to random locales and hoping we strike gold on pure chance,” Seokjin groans. He presses his fingertips to his temples, as if massaging away the headache that’s beginning to build there. “And it’s frankly stupid to think they wouldn’t overpower us before we got to Namjoon and Yoongi, even if we did find them. We need to know exactly where they are, then make a plan.”

“And how the fuck do we make a plan if we don’t go find out where they are?” Hoseok fires back, pure scathing dripping from his tone. In his desperation to recover Yoongi, he seems to have forgotten the four of them are operating on the same team. Three of them, maybe, depending on whether or not Hoseok has mentally chopped out Jeongguk from their forces.

It would be understandable. Jeongguk knows how this looks. But he didn’t set Yoongi up, he didn’t . What does he have to gain from that? Yoongi is the only person who Jeongguk believes truly does trust him, in spite of everything. The only person who looks at Jeongguk and sees something…redeemable. Seokjin is tolerant, sometimes even polite, but even then Jeongguk can feel the dismissiveness in his expression when it passes over him. If given the choice, he wouldn’t have selected Jeongguk to be amongst their ranks. 

Only Yoongi chose Jeongguk. 

Only Yoongi wants him here.

And now he’s gone, and Jeongguk has the creeping suspicion that the longer he remains absent, the shakier Jeongguk’s footing amongst these people becomes, until eventually the ground will open up beneath him and he’ll fall. Shunned. Pushed out of the boat into the waters.

Jeongguk doesn’t want to be in this god awful city alone. He won’t make it, this much he knows. He’s barely even managed to claw his way through his time here , surrounded by the security blanket of other people. He doesn’t eat. He fights sleep. He’s weaker every day, he can feel it. He’s afraid of his own body. Afraid of what rises to the surface when he closes his eyes.

He doesn’t belong here, but he needs them.

“ Jeongguk.”

Jeongguk looks up. Seokjin is staring at him expectantly, brow pinched. “What?”

“I asked if you had any other places you wanted to pin on the map.”

“No, there’s nothing.” He swallows, throat dry. “I can’t think of anything else.”

He might be able to if he tried, but he’s in enough pain already from sitting through Seokjin’s forced recollection exercises, making him dredge up the murky memory of his childhood from the places he tucked it far away. The only way to keep himself safe was to lock all that shit up, and it helped for a while, it really did. Jeongguk saw his family in prison, the people that gave birth to him and loved him for the few years they knew him. But eventually he saw their recognition fading, their slow, heavy disappointment drawing in like an inevitable tide as they realized he wasn’t their little boy anymore. He wasn’t the cherubic child they wanted back in their arms. He was a man, and a strange, warped one at that. He didn’t like being touched, didn’t recall any of the stories they tried to tell him, or the photos they brought to jog his memory. They were kind, Jeongguk owes it to them to acknowledge that. They never gave up on him; every week like clockwork they’d still visit, but he could see the hurt in their eyes, the resentment building itself into a brick wall between them. They wanted their baby back, the sweet thing they remembered. Jeongguk couldn’t blame them, not then and not now. He wouldn’t want himself either. Eventually, he could see he had become nothing more than an obligation to them, despite their obvious attempts at rekindling some sort of relationship. And after a while, being subject to their disappointment again and again and again became more painful than anything else.

It’s better that they think he’s dead now. Closure, finally, on the chapter they couldn’t write a happy ending for. No more weekends spent in a prison in Seoul, they can move on. Jeongguk hopes they’re happier now. Free . Maybe they can leave the city and go somewhere, just the two of them. Travel, since they couldn’t while they waited around, praying for a day that he’d come home. Jeongguk hopes, he really does hope, that they find their peace. He just knows he wasn’t meant to be a part of it.

“That’s not good enough,” Hoseok spits. “I’m getting in the car, I’m leaving. You can come, or stay here, I don’t give a shit. I’ll do this alone if I have to.”

“You’ll be screwing them both if you do that,” Seokjin warns, eyes flashing as he follows Hoseok’s fraught pacing up and down the length of the room.

“Oh yeah?” Hoseok whips toward him, fire in his gaze. “And sitting around doing nothing isn’t?”

“We’re not doing nothing, we’re making a plan . Give me, give us time, and we’ll narrow down a list of viable locations, we can tackle them one by one instead of kicking down doors and open firing at god knows what–”

“Yoongi would get up and follow the second any of us were in danger–”

“Yoongi would make a plan!” Seokjin shouts. His voice echoes across the vaulted stone ceilings, so humbling in its volume that Jeongguk feels his spine go rigid. 

Loud men. He can’t fucking stand loud men. 

Seokjin’s hands have tensed where they rest on his desk, stiffening right down to his wrists where they disappear into the sleeves of his wrinkled button-down, and he’s staring Hoseok down with the most pointed anger that Jeongguk has seen on his face. “Do you want to know something about Yoongi, Hoseok? I watched him grow up . I was in the god damn home he was born in, I used to pick him up and carry him around like a fat little doll. I knew him before he knew himself. And when he disappeared, I spent a decade looking for him. Why do you think I know how to do all this bullshit on a computer? I wasn’t a fighter, not like my dad. I couldn’t save him like that, so I found another way. I searched the digital ether for him endlessly for ten years, I tried every lane I could think of, there wasn’t a file I could access that didn’t get turned over and checked. You’re standing there, all self-righteous and wounded like you’re the only one with stakes in this. Yoongi is my brother, and he’s gone, Namjoon is my best friend, and he’s gone, too, so I don’t give a damn if I’m not working fast enough for you. I’m doing everything I can, everything , don’t you dare act like it isn’t enough. Don’t you fucking dare.”

The silence that follows is more deafening than Seokjin’s voice ever was. It rings in Jeongguk’s ears, making his chest flush with shame despite the fact that the outburst wasn’t directed at him. He chances a glance at Hoseok, whose gun-hand has fallen limply to his side, staring open-mouthed at Seokjin as if he isn’t sure a word of what he just heard was real. He clamps his jaw shut, arm coiling, then he jams the Beretta into his waistband, stalks over to the couch, and sits down with violent force, still silent. 

Seokjin folds over his desk for a moment. His shoulders are heaving as if he just ran a marathon, and he stays that way for the measure of a few breaths before straightening up and pushing his hair out of his face. He pulls his keyboard closer to him and trains his gaze on Jeongguk.

“Tell me more about the clinical group, the NovoBio people. Anything you can remember.”

Jeongguk’s head pounds, but he peels himself off the wall and trudges toward Seokjin anyway.

It’s the least he can do for Min Yoongi. 

Yoongi wakes up on the floor. It takes him too long to realize he’s there, and once he does, he can’t bring himself to stand right away. 

He aches, from the heels of his feet, to his fingertips, to the top of his head. Even his hair hurts where it sprouts from his scalp, all of him pulsing like a fresh bruise being pressed inward. His mouth is dry; his mind, blank.

Taehyung . 

He needs to get up.

Taehyung . 

Something is wrong in this place.

Taehyung.

They shot him up again. Tried to make him numb. He can still feel, Yoongi can feel . He knows what he’s missing, he knows Hoseok and the others, waiting and wandering wherever they are. He knows Namjoon, stranded in here with him, but drugged blind. He knows Taehyung . Blank slate Taehyung who couldn’t even look at him. 

It’s wrong. It’s all wrong. Even now when Yoongi tries to recall the details, they seem to be swimming just out of reach in the corners of his thoughts, barely there, then not at all when he tries to focus on them.

He’s slipping . He’s slipping like Taehyung and Namjoon and everyone else in this godforsaken place.

Bishop. When Yoongi finds Bishop, he’s going to hold her down and make her explain. All of this . Everyone here. For what? 

If he still knows himself then. If he still knows. 

After a moment, Yoongi realizes the same alarm from earlier - this morning? Yesterday? - is going off, the bright white bulbs on the ceiling pulsing along with the noise. The door to his cubicle of a room has popped open automatically, displaying a strip of the movement outside, the same sea of people shuffling in rivulets towards their promised meal. Yoongi’s stomach turns at the thought of food, though he knows he should be starving. All he wants is blood, that thick, metallic flavor coating his tongue. Maybe it would unstick his mind, clear away the lead weight in his limbs. 

Food . Yoongi doesn’t have time to eat. His presence of mind is running out. What happens if he doesn’t make it out of here before the numbness sets in for good? He’ll stay and rot like the others, an empty body at the mercy of these freak scientists and their sadistic mission, whatever that may be. Manufacturing soldiers. Brainwashing. Stealing people’s minds. Yoongi won’t roll over and take it.

He’s spent enough time in captivity. 

Yoongi rolls onto his side, scraping himself onto all fours. Without thinking long enough to allow himself hesitation, he lifts a hand and jams his fingers into his mouth, stuffing them as far and fast as he can, scraping the back of his throat. He knows from experience that it won’t take much to induce vomit. Even now, after everything, his gag reflex is as sharp as it was when he was a child - sharper , maybe. A defense guard against intrusion, a mechanism from a body that never stopped trying to defend him, even when resistance was futile. Most of the time, Yoongi hates it. 

Now, it’s an advantage. Although his stomach has to be nearly empty, bile shoots up and spills onto the floor. He chokes on the acrid flavor coating his tongue, spitting and coughing, which only produces more. Enough, he thinks, to make a convincing act. 

He staggers to his feet and makes his way to the small red button near the bed labelled AID , and jams his finger into it before sinking down, hunching over and feigning chills that swarm his entire body. 

He’s sick. He’s horribly, suddenly ill, and he needs to be taken to the medical bay for treatment. 

Within a minute, his door swings open completely and one of the white-clad orderlies strides in, looking him up and down, then turning to the puddle of vomit on the floor, and back to him again.  

“I don’t feel well,” Yoongi rasps before they can speak. “I think something’s wrong.”

The orderly says nothing. He walks over to Yoongi, grabs him none too gently by his elbow, and swings him onto his feet. There’s a radio clipped to his belt and he reaches for it. “Cleanup, room 223. Subject to be transported for further examination.”

With no further comment, he heads for the door, pulling Yoongi along like a dog on a leash. They take off in the opposite direction from the people headed to the cafeteria. Earlier, he swore the exam rooms were through the cafeteria. Now, he doesn’t know. This whole godforsaken place looks the same, every doorway, every lightbulb, every hall. 

Yoongi keeps his head bowed, but out of the corners of his eyes he tries to spot Namjoon in the crowd. He wouldn’t notice Yoongi. He wouldn’t follow . He’s too dulled for that, to catch onto a plan through a single expression, a fleeting moment of eye contact held. Besides, Yoongi doesn’t see him. He’s probably already eating, staring at a wall with no clue who he is, or what he has to live for outside of these white walls. As if he wasn’t a living, breathing, feeling man with a purpose, and grief, and hope, just a day or two ago. As if he doesn’t matter to anyone, anywhere. 

They take a sharp left through a doorway that requires the orderly to scan his badge. Here, it’s quiet. Vacant. They walk for a while, down a corridor that looks like any other, then the orderly selects a door seemingly at random and leads Yoongi into it. Just like earlier - yesterday, whenever it was - Yoongi is propelled to the table to sit. Again, he’s manhandled like a doll. The orderly takes his temperature, then his pulse. He pulls out a tablet from one of the large pockets on his white coat and uses it to scan the band on Yoongi’s wrist, then peruses it slowly, unconcerned. Clearly, he’s not concerned by the fact that Yoongi just threw up. Maybe he has bigger tasks on his mind, or maybe, he just doesn’t care at all.

Yoongi, for his part, tries to continue to feign illness. It’s not difficult; he does feel nauseous, dehydrated and strung out. When’s the last time he had water? He’s so cold, chilled right down to his bones, but his skin feels hot and tender too, his throat sore from having his own fingers scraped down its soft interior.

He has to focus. He has to. He won’t be able to pull off this act more than once before they begin to grow suspicious. Yoongi wishes he had the luxury of waiting around a while, to gather Namjoon and track down Taehyung - Taehyung. To form a plan from the inside and break them out. 

But his mind is slipping.

His body is, too.

If he doesn’t leave now, he isn’t sure he will at all, and that helps none of them. He has to take his chances, cut himself loose, and come back for them. He will come back for them. He’s not abandoning them; he’s just finding a better way. 

The only way . 

The orderly sets the tablet down on the rolling cart at the side of Yoongi’s chair and turns away, rifling through one of the many drawers in the cabinet built into the wall. For what, Yoongi doesn’t know, and he isn’t planning on holding still long enough to find out. A cursory glance at the corners of the room has informed him that if there are cameras around, they aren’t installed in plain sight. He knows from Taehyung that the orderlies carry tasers, so when Yoongi jumps this one, he just needs to get it before the opponent does. He looks down at the cart by his side, scanning it for potential weapons, and realizes the tablet is still powered on, displaying a chart on the screen. He sees his name, right at the top in bold, followed by a plethora of identifying information, medical or otherwise, and he scans it as quickly as he can. 

STATUS: CHIPPED / ACTIVE

STATE: QUIETED

SPECIES: HUMAN

Human? Yoongi does a hasty double take, blinking to make sure his eyes don’t deceive him, and that he isn’t mistaking one word for the other in a language that he, admittedly, doesn’t find himself reading often.

Human.

They have it wrong. Of course . Vampires and chemical resistance, a studied phenomenon that only broke through sometime in the 80s when medical professionals actually began to incorporate vampires into their research pool, and came to the conclusion that across the large majority of the pharmaceutics tested, vampires required up to triple the amount used in a prescribed human dose to achieve the same effects.

That explains it, why Yoongi’s mind is still sharper than the others. Something was lost, across countries, between translations. They think he’s human, and they’re giving him a corresponding dose of whatever bullshit they’re pumping everyone else with, and it isn’t overtaking him the same way it is them.

But for how long ?

What happens when he succumbs anyway? Or when they realize their mistake and up his dose?

He has to get out. He has to. Today. Now. 

Yoongi looks down. A sturdy rubber cord is plugged into the wall at one end, and the monitor by his side at the other. He reaches over, slow, silent, and pulls it free from both sides without making a sound. It’s not too long, three feet or so, but it’s long enough to wrap around someone’s throat. And when the orderly turns, Yoongi is ready. He waits until the man has sidled back up to him, blissfully unsuspecting, then lunges. 

It’s been a long time since Yoongi hurt someone. He was good in prison: faultlessly well-behaved, even when provoked. He didn’t want to risk getting time added on, he had someone too good out there in the real world waiting for him, so he kept his head down for five years and played the part.

But when he tightens the cords around the orderly’s throat and pulls them taut, Yoongi has to admit, it’s all still too easy. He can remove himself from it, the feeling, any lingering empathy he may have for the person beneath his hands. It’s for good reason, all of it. Yoongi measures his strength, trying to find enough pressure to subdue the man without killing him. Yoongi keeps a hand clamped over his mouth, serving the dual purpose of cutting off his air supply and keeping him as silent as possible while he writhes. The writhing becomes sluggish. The sluggishness becomes twitching, then nothing at all. Still. Gone, for now. 

Yoongi releases him onto the ground. His arms burn. It takes a lot of force, strangling a man. Yoongi’s out of practice. Running out of energy. Between his hunger and the chemicals pumped into his veins, he thinks he has hours here at best before things start to fall to irreparable pieces in his mind. If he can’t get out before then–

No. He will . He has a plan now. Or at least, he has a body with an ID access badge.

Yoongi crosses the room and flips the light off. He’s going to need a moment to pull this off.

When Yoongi leaves the room six minutes later, his name is Silas Halter, and he’s an employee of CIPHER, a subsidiary of NovoBio. Whatever the fuck any of those things are. Min Yoongi - or at least, the badge with the name and identifying tag belonging to Min Yoongi - is attached to the wrist of the real Silas Halter, who is bound with medical tape and gagged with a handful of the disposable sheets used to drape over the exam table. He’s going to wake up sooner or later, and by that time, Yoongi will be gone. 

The main problem Yoongi foresees is that Silas Halter looks nothing like him. Besides his dark hair and clean shaven face, the picture on his ID bears no resemblance to Yoongi whatsoever. He can only hope he won’t be confronted by an instance where he needs to be checked against it. Or, god forbid, biosecurity measures. Surely a lowly orderly wouldn’t be tapped into the system, with fingerprints and facial recognition, would they?

For good measure, Yoongi grabbed a face mask from the dispenser on the wall before he left the room and slipped it on, concealing as much as he could and pulling his bangs down, lank and long over his eyes to try and cover the rest.

It takes all of his willpower to walk instead of running. With no one around, the idea of breaking into a sprint and finding the nearest exit is tantalizing agony, but he tells himself over and over again that patience will be his aid here. There are bound to be cameras somewhere, eyeing everyone, watching for anomalies. He has to blend in. He has to. 

So he takes the halls at a measured pace, keeping his head bent over the clipboard he grabbed from the exam room to give himself some pretense to hide behind, but it’s a difficult thing. With each turn he takes down a series of identical hallways, it feels more and more like his brain is disintegrating inside his skull. A labyrinth of white, and little to no signage posted anywhere, he has no real idea if he’s leading himself further into the building or out of it. It’s hypnotizing in the worst of ways, as if the layout itself is designed to make his memory slip further into a haze. 

Hoseok, Hoseok, Hoseok . 

He chants it over and over again, a mantra, a reminder, a ward against evil. If he can make it out of this building remembering only one thing, he wants it to be Hoseok’s name. A guide that tethers him to all else in his life that matters. 

When Yoongi reaches the first access-restricted door, he reaches for the badge clipped to his pocket and scans it with his heart in his throat. There’s a taser tucked away, too, his hand ready to twitch towards it at a moment’s notice, but the only thing that happens is the card reader lights up green and the doors slide open with a mechanical hiss of a sound, and Yoongi continues onward. 

On this side, the hall is populated, and Yoongi’s body goes rigid beneath his shapeless white clothing and body lab coat. He expects them to round on him, eyes wide, teeth bared, dogpiling the imposter in their midst. But…they do nothing. They seem just as quiet as their so-called subjects, but not quite as lifeless. Still, they walk, heads bent, distracted by their own tasks instead of mingling between one another like colleagues. Rolling carts of medical supplies, inputting notes on the tablets pressed into their palms. No one looks twice at Yoongi, angled over his clipboard pretending to study the contents laid out on it. He reminds himself once again to walk - no one is in any rush here. Why would they have to be? Their patients are numbed stupid, not only unable to break free, but unwilling. 

That’s going to be their downfall, Yoongi thinks. Whoever runs this place - Bishop, and her cohort - are so confident in the system they’ve laid in place, so convinced they’ve landed upon a foolproof system, they have no idea one of their subjects is wide awake and planning his escape. 

Don’t get cocky, Yoongi chides himself as he reaches for his badge and scans his way through the next set of doors. You’ll be as bad as they are. 

When the doors open, Yoongi’s heart lifts in his chest at the sight of an elevator bay. The hall is empty, and he allows himself the satisfaction of speeding up his walk, locked in on the wide set of steel doors that will lift him out of this clinical hell. He scans his badge. 

Beep. 

The doors don’t open. The scanner beeps red, alerting him of his access denial. 

Shit. Fuck. Yoongi swings left, then right. There’s a door behind him marked with a large red sign. FIRE EXIT - ALARM WILL SOUND. 

Well, that’s one way up and out, but then Yoongi is really fucking himself over. He doesn’t want to put a timer on his head like that, not when he barely has his head with him at all. Even now he’s sluggish and slow, when he knows any other time he’d already be on plans B, C, and D. 

Think, Yoongi, think. You don’t have forever. 

At the end of the hall, the doors he just came through click, and he sees the shadow of another person outside. Could they be headed the same way he is? Is there any chance he could—

Making a split second decision between running and hiding or letting himself get caught and praying it works, Yoongi back steps as if he had just entered the door himself, kneels, and rips the laces of his shoe open so he can begin to retie them just as the doors slide open. 

“Excuse me,” a male voice mutters as he almost collides with Yoongi’s hunched form. He steps around him, paying no mind, and heads for the elevators. 

Now, Yoongi thinks and jerks the knot on his shoe right, standing up and straightening out his coat and clipboard. He sees the man lift his badge. 

Beep. 

The scanner lights up green. 

Yoongi keeps his pace at that same measured rhythm he’s forced himself into, and follows after the man with his heart thudding in his throat. He steps into the elevator. The man looks up. He’s holding a white box in his gloved hands labeled biohazard - human sample , and his eyes behind the thick lenses of his glasses are comically large. He blinks once at Yoongi. 

“Where are you headed?” 

Yoongi’s eyes dart to the board of buttons beside the door, fifteen or so lined up one after another, all without a descriptor beyond the singular number denoting the floor, save for one - ground. 

Yoongi draws in a breath that he hopes doesn’t rattle behind his mask, and forces himself to recall everything he knows about English in order to produce a decent approximation of an American accent. 

“Ground floor,” he replies, his voice coming out sounding like a stranger to him. Foreign and higher than usual. “Please.”

The man pushes level 6, then hits Ground for Yoongi without another word. 

Yoongi steps back and leans against the polished wood paneling, willing his heart to stop beating as if it’s seconds from detonating inside his chest. 

The elevator moves as if it’s suspended in gelatin. Yoongi swears full minutes pass before the button lights up with a pleasant chime of a sound and the doors slide open, revealing yet another series of white hallways. The man beside him straightens up and steps out, not even a glance back or a word of parting directed at Yoongi. When the doors rumble shut again, Yoongi exhales a gasping breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, overcome with relief mixed with lingering fear that makes him feel boneless. He doubles at the waist, keeping one hand pressed firm against the wall as he fights for air. His skin is flushed beneath his mask, warm and pulsating like an infection. Yoongi brings fingertips to his face, and when he withdraws them he’s surprised to see they’re slick with sweat. His joints are beginning to tremble.

Withdrawal , he thinks, numbed by the realization. Of course. They were drugging him, even if it didn’t work the way it was supposed to, his nervous system must still be itching for the next hit.

Too fast. It’s happening too fast . He needs more time . 

The elevator chimes again, announcing his arrival at the ground floor, and this time when the doors slide open it isn’t a clinical white corridor waiting for him on the other side it’s a giant, concrete loading zone, like a warehouse tucked away at the end of a long, gray tunnel. At the end, Yoongi sees light, and the sunlit outlines of organic material. Trees. Brush. Greenery. 

He takes a tentative step out, willing his legs to stay strong beneath him as he swings left and right to check his surroundings. Yards down, a forklift hefting a stack of black crates is being directed by a man in a safety vest and hard hat, waving it in to back up toward something. They don’t seem to notice Yoongi stepping out. Why would they? It’s key card access in and out, anyone emerging must surely be authorized. 

He begins to walk slowly. His muscles feel battered up and bruised, swollen beneath his skin. The mouth of the tunnel feels achingly far away still, and he has no idea what lies beyond it. If there was a car in here, Yoongi would try to steal it, but all there is is a series of forklifts lined at the end of the bay that appear to be a half mile away. He won’t be getting anywhere fast in that. Besides, it isn’t exactly subtle.

As Yoongi nears the end of the tunnel, his heart starts to sink as reality dawns on him the closer he draws. He isn’t in the city center any longer. The only thing visible from here is forest . Miles of it, spread wide and endless. The mouth of the tunnel is paved leading in and out, and Yoongi steps out to scope the setting, searching for any respite. The road leads a ways down to a gated checkpoint, seemingly vacant, though there’s a security box that Yoongi can’t see into from here. He shrinks into the shadows around the side of the tunnel out of an abundance of caution and looks behind him. The building is massive, story upon story of nondescript white material, supported by the concrete loading zone base. Clearly, it goes as far up as it does down . If every floor before this was a basement, Yoongi can’t imagine what might be housed on the upper levels.

“ Fucking purgatory ,” he mutters under his breath, but he’s only disturbed to hear how shaky his voice comes out. 

He takes a determined step forward into the road. Not that it has much traffic. Not a single vehicle inside, before or beyond the gates down the winding slope. Clearly, this is a restricted route the same way everything else is. On the opposite side, the ground slopes off at an angle, not quite a straight drop, but not a gentle descent either. It opens onto a thick, wooded expanse, dense with bushes and brambles, the earth covered with a thick mat of decaying leaves and rotting branches.

How far out is this? 

Before Yoongi can come to a conclusion, he hears a clank and turns just in time to see the security box at the gate swing open and spit out two men. Startled, he swings around the wide, rugged base of the tree at the side of the road and presses himself flat behind it like a shield. 

“Hey, did you see that?” a voice calls, barely audible, but audible enough that a chill runs down the sweat-slicked thread of Yoongi’s spine. 

“See what?” a second voice asks, this one almost annoyed. 

“Like a–a white flash or something, right around the treeline.”