YYEEESAAAAAHHHHHRRRRRRRR TUH YUH TUHHHHHH YUHHHHH

YYEEESAAAAAHHHHHRRRRRRRR TUH YUH TUHHHHHH YUHHHHH

red string 1

“our connection is determined by a tiny invisible string”

summary: you figured it was too late for your string to solidify, used to the idea of finding someone on your own, who also never got their string. However, your string began to tug when you least expected it, to the last person or people you would have ever thought. 

genre: soulmate au, red string of fate au, poly au, 

pairing: BTS (Yoongi centered) x Reader 

status: ongoing (random updates)

warnings: slight yandere themes, smut, insecure reader, alcohol, talks of jealousy, soul bonds, mentions of past abuse,

chapter warnings: soul pain, first meetings, running away, mc didn’t really want a bond, cinderella-esque plot line, small panic attack, mc is cynical, allusions to past abusive relationship, 

I am not going to have a taglist for this fic. I will only be using the permanent taglist as its intended for all of my fics.

permanent taglist: @m1sss1mp​ @yourleftsock​ @skyys-universe​ @cryingpages​ @strxwbloody​  @drissteele​ @dustyinkpages​ @iamkookiesforyou​ @crushedblackroses​ @fluffy-canada-pancakes​ @blaaiissee​  @iiitsmaria​  @carolinexkpop​  @azazel-nyx​ @strawberry-moonpies​ @g-h-o-s-t-b-a-b-i​ @knjkitten​ @foreverweareyoung7​ @lachimolala22019​ @namuficxs​ @94z-93​ @kimgmzmc​ @thenaverse​ @dahliasbouqet​ @black-rose-29​ @tinyoonsblog​ @take-u-2-an0ther-w0r1d​ @stellauniverse​ @stupendouscookiehumanmug​ @tinyoonsblog​ @veronawrites​ @tatyhend​ @singukieee​ @m0v3m3ntsblog​ @exfolitae​ @butterymin​ @queen-in-the-shadows​ 

masterlist // part 2

———————————————–

Being in your twenties was weird. You went from being in a structured routine for twelve plus years, having to ask to go to the bathroom, to being on your own and having to make mistake after mistake until you get the hang of being an adult (even if you never actually figure it out).

Being in your twenties also meant something else to most of the world’s population. The tiny string of fate that was always thought of as a fantasy would solidify, only visible to you and the person or people on the other end. The string was supposed to lead you to your soulmate/s, but sometimes only served to be a reminder of what you couldn’t have.  

Some people are lucky enough to already be with their soulmates and receive their string when they meet them, even before their twentieth birthday. You were not so lucky.

Keep reading

here’s a bouquet of flowers for you

🌷🌸🌷🌸 🌸🌷🌸🌷🌸 /ᐠ🌷🌸🌷🌸🌷 ( ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ🌷🌸🌷 \ つ \ / U U / 🎀 \

yoongi’s lullaby

pairing: yoongi x reader

wordcount: 13k

glimpse: there’s two things you can conclude from yoongi’s shapeshifting service: a) it’s great for his wallet, and b) it’s crushing for your heart.

alternatively, yoongi’s your best friend and soulmate, and you have to watch him fall in love over and over again.

[ 40% angst, soulmate au, yoongi is a capitalist (he shapeshifts and goes on fake dates then gets a load of money), fluff + wholesomeness, unrequited love (at first), f2l, self-deprecation, jealousy, YEARNING!!!, Redemption Arc I Promise ]

notes: this is part of the hlwwf universe :) and just like its predecessor, it’s also based on a song!! i haven’t felt this excited to write a fic in a while so i hope u love it as much as i do <3

as always, lmk what you think <3 send in feedback n love to my askbox anytime!!

Yoongi must be the universe’s reward to you for every good deed you’ve ever done.

When Yoongi lets himself to be roped into joining in your newest fixation, it must be your good karma because you sat front-row for each one of your younger siblings’ school events.

When he reminds you to drink your water and not skip your meals, even going so far as to deliver both to you as often as he could, it must be the universe’s payment to you for watering plants and going on that one (1) mandatory tree planting activity.

When he gives you all the credentials to log into his premium streaming platforms even without you asking, it must be fate’s way of thanking you for not making a fuss whenever a barista messes up your order or when a stranger cuts in line.

Yoongi is the good in your life and he has been ever since you were teens, reminding you of what you’ve worked hard for in life because when he wasn’t so busy going through the same hardships you did, he would be at the sidelines waiting for you to finish.

Or he could be someplace else without even sending a lousy text regarding his wellbeing nor his notice that he can’t be at your awarding ceremony tonight because he’s busy doing his job, serving as a reminder that Yoongi must also be the universe’s punishment to you for your missteps and lapses.

When he comes and goes into your apartment freely as treats himself to your newly-bought groceries, it must be retribution because you lost your temper on your college roommate once for eating the leftovers you’ve been craving since the night before.

When he salvages all the spare batteries you have lying around to power up his huge clock back at his apartment, therefore leaving you to eventually spend a rainy night without flashlights because of a power outage, it must be payback for lowering the temperature in your breakroom even with the sign that specifically tells you not to.

Whenever Yoongi mentions his shapeshifting “career” (he argues that it is) to you, a gift he had been born with and one he really maximizes to the fullest potential and profit, you’re reminded how much of it is a curse to you.

Yoongi must be the universe’s greatest reward and punishment for you at the same time because while he’s your soulmate and you spend almost every day with him — you have to see him fall in love with everyone else but you, over and over again.

“You should be splitting rent with me at this point. You’re always here,” you groan as soon as you spot him on your couch, barely escaping the grogginess you’re still in from having a long night. 

His presence isn’t surprising anymore given the time you’ve been with him and how this exact situation has already played out tons of times before (him breaking into your place because he doesn’t want to be alone, you blissfully clueless until you hear raccoon-like searching in your kitchen) — it’s more irking than it is surprising, especially when you wake up at the wrong side of the bed.

“Do you not want me around?” Yoongi laughs heartily, unwilling to wipe his grin off when you don’t react. “That’s what I thought.”

He’s already beaten you to the TV and while he hasn’t had breakfast yet because he thought that the least he could do is wait for you to wake up so you could make it and the two of you can eat together, he’s getting there anyway.

“What type of horrible soulmate kicks out their other half that hasn’t had breakfast yet at 8 in the morning?” he hums, a faux pout on his face that rubs you the wrong way. You’re still pissed at him for not showing up at your awarding ceremony last night for being the top developer in your tech company, his lengthy apologetic text before you went to sleep still not doing its full effects.

“You don’t wanna tread there,” you huff, crossing your arms. “I have a lot on my chest, Yoongi. A lot of hateful, vile, factual comebacks.”

“Exactly!” he exclaims, the smile on his face telling you that he’s taking this lightly; way more lightly than you’d like him to. “We’ve had this conversation a million times before, baby. Sometimes, people just aren’t meant to be,” Yoongi shrugs, his words embedded in you now from repetition alone. “Some soulmates are only platonic.”

“That’s what you want because you’re non-committal,” you hiss, the incoming headache you have for having this conversation too early in the morning making you sit yourself on the couch. Yoongi grins because he knows you won’t kick him out at this point, slinging an arm across your shoulders while you’re still glaring at him. “Your hustle or whatever you call it is falling in love with everyone but me.”

“Uhm, correction — it’s a career,” he tuts. “I have a gift, Y/N. What, I can shapeshift into other people and I’m not supposed to capitalize off of that?”

He had only started offering his services a little more than a year ago, a byproduct of his boredom and his producing internship at the music label falling through. It just came to him in a fever dream and a drunken suggestion from you, and one website domain purchase and a socialite with a lot of connections for a first client later, Yoongi quickly made bank.

SeeAndSaw’s a trial dating service led by Yoongi, one that would answer clients’ curiosities to whether or not they were compatible with a person, and that’s where his shapeshifting came in handy. His services continue to be used for a multitude of reasons, the most common one being to see if the client would match with their soulmates (or just a random person, he’s not particular like that) ahead of their meeting. He’s also become a handy instrument here and there, breaking up with people in his clients’ behalf because they were too guilty to do so, to becoming a stand-in for clients that needed to present someone to their families for occasions.

Yoongi acts far too casual to you and not only is its time’s fault, it’s also yours for keeping him around in any way you can have him, even if it’s just as a friend. 

“I keep professing my love for you every two weeks and I’m doing it now while you’re eating my leftovers. People would kill just to have a soulmate as dedicated as me,” you frown, slowly softening the more that you’re rendered awake. Yoongi’s right, you did have this conversation a million times before and it’s the realization of it all that perhaps, at rare times, makes it hurt less.

“We’ve had this talk before,” he sing-songs, digging into the carbonara you took home that he retrieved not even one minute later since you joined him on the couch.

“For someone who makes bank fake dating people, you sure do leech off of me a lot,” you grumble, effectively quietened when he shoves a forkful of pasta into your mouth.

“That reminds me,” Yoongi grins, building up to a dramatic gasp. “I love-…” 

He trails and trails and if only you didn’t know any better, you would know that Yoongi wouldn’t profess his love for you in your living room while you were still in your pajamas eating cold carbonara. Much less, Yoongi wouldn’t tell you at all that he loves you.

“I love doing that,” he agrees, disappointed for a second when you didn’t even react to him doing a cliffhanger about what or who he loves. “My treat for you this week is to get you a new mattress. You’ll be less grumpy in the mornings.”

“The mattress can stay for a little longer. Can you just get me a new alarm system please?” you say without missing a beat, having already thought long and hard about what make-up gift you wanted him to give you from missing out on your awarding ceremony. 

“Why? Are you okay? Did anybody attempt to break in?” Yoongi asks concerned, brows knotted in worry. He grunts under his breath, shaking his head. “I already told you to move into my apartment complex so many times. It’s much safer there.”

That’s also a conversation you’ve had a million times before, all circling back to your attachment to the first place that you bought with your own money. It’s not bad per se, it just looks like it when you show it side-by-side with Yoongi’s place.

“Oh. They already broke in,” you narrow your eyes, oblivious to the panic brewing in Yoongi.

“What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me?! Are you-…” he rants, stopping himself when he sees the irony. “Okay, I get it. You’re not funny.”

You and Yoongi eat cold carbonara in total silence, save for his grumbles of how you should never joke about your safety and yours for how he should start chipping in for your bills if he’s gonna keep showing up like this.

Yoongi swears he doesn’t find you funny. He swears it on his life when a few days later, a guy is sent to your house to update your security system. There’s a couple hundred packages of additional manual locks, along with Yoongi’s letter of how he still doesn’t find you funny, amongst other things.

Please guard your home. Don’t let anybody else in except me.

- Yoongi

( ♡ )

Yoongi despises change.

He’s with the elderly when it comes to online menus in an actual, physical restaurant, annoyed by them to the point that sometimes he just walks out. He can’t help it that he wants a nice, slightly greasy, and good menu because it just goes to show how great the food would be. 

He hates whoever invented and continues to advertise white cooking equipment that’s beyond impractical, knowing to himself that he would disown any friends or family he’ll catch using them. You spent a good two seconds more looking at a white ceramic pot that one time when you were online shopping, and Yoongi’s never been more determined to hurl your phone to the floor.

Yoongi also hates overly-modified cars and overly-decorated phone cases, because as much as it isn’t his business, he firmly believes that sometimes there are things meant to be left alone.

His voicemail is still the same one he had back in college and his standard ringtone for everyone remains untouched — everyone but you.

Yoongi knows that he’s in charge of his time given his very successful career and he worked around his whole schedule just to grant himself the luxury of sleeping in today. He wants to have himself buried in his cold sheets for longer but it’s your call that overrides his phone on Do Not Disturb, shaking him awake quicker.

“Yoongi?” you ask, too wrapped up in your internal to-do list to notice that he answered at the second ring. “Help me please.”

“Spider family in your cupboards again?” he yawns, rubbing the sleep off his eyes. God, he hopes it’s not that again. He isn’t the biggest fan of spiders either but at your insistence (and threatening last time that you’ll ignore him for a week), he forced himself to swallow down the unease.

“No, I woke up late,” you hum, once again oblivious that you’re intruding on Yoongi’s plans. He doesn’t mind though; not at all. “I just got a text about my package and I accidentally used your address again. The front desk received it.” 

Yoongi’s address has already become your secondary one at this point, from food deliveries from staying over to parcels you made him receive because you wouldn’t be home at the time. You’ve gotten used to utilizing his address, his home, so much that you forget which is which sometimes.

“Can you sign off on it as me?”

You know potential and convenience when you have it within reach, and the both of you know that your best friend slash soulmate gets a sense of pride whenever you need to utilize his shapeshifting abilities.

“Okay fine. I’ll even talk you up as a future tenant here because you’re taking my advice and moving to my building, right?” he caves in even if it took nothing for you to convince him, putting on a shirt before finding his slippers.

“What, what? Yoongi, oh! You’re breaking up,” you make a half-assed attempt in avoiding the offer once again. You could afford it with the salary you have now but aside your attachment to the place you have now, being closer to Yoongi in this context would precisely be the demise of you. “Thanks, Yoongs. Bring the package with you when you come over.”

Yoongi’s filial when it comes to you, that much you’ve noticed. He may not be in love with you but his loyalty to you is as clear as day, much of a soulmate’s but not exactly a lover’s.

It’s supposed to be like clockwork when he picks up his parcels (yours in this case) from the front desk but there’s just something he belatedly realizes now, his mouth in a grimace when he has to pry off your package from the receptionist who was unabashedly asking where you were.

He didn’t know that every time this would happen, or in any case wherein you came by yourself to his apartment and therefore passing by the front desk, the sleaze would flirt with you.

“Joohyuk from the front desk always comes off strong, huh?” Yoongi snickers the moment he enters your place, handing you your stuff instead of tossing it like he usually would.

“Tell me about it. He doesn’t give me a break,” you snort, unfazed that he doesn’t greet you with a hi anymore because your current visiting set-up has been executed many times.

Yoongi doesn’t know what to do with the unhinged anger in his brain that unfolds because from your response alone, you’re used to it. You’re used to feeling uneasy and he hadn’t caught on earlier than he should’ve, the guilt weighing down on his chest.

“Hey,” he calls out, his tone leaving you no room for objections. “I’ll receive your packages from now on.”

( ♡ )

You don’t know how you keep holding onto Yoongi despite him grasping you from afar.

It’s a melancholy enough as it is to swallow at the end of the day that Yoongi’s yours but not in the way you want him to be, along with the great possibility that it would always be that way. You don’t heed the reminder when you’re with him and that’s almost everyday of your life, the ache that you’re the only one pining after him remaining as a dull thrum. 

He seeks you in seasons but you look for him in all weathers, the great search of when you’d finally amount more to him still coming up unanswered.

You can handle seeing Yoongi often with the cue that you’re only friends despite the initials on both your ring fingers saying otherwise. You can manage with introducing him only as your close friend to colleagues and acquaintances because you don’t want to end up with a long-winded explanation how he wants you but really doesn’t.

Yoongi can deal with your moony stares at him every once in a while and your professions of love, whether sober or drunken. On the same vein, you can deal with the rejection he serves you every single time.

The both of you are adults who can handle each other, one more high-strung than the other, and it’s only in moments like these that you reach your limit. You’re awfully too aware of how easy it is for Yoongi to work, to be in love with people he only knows vaguely.

“I don’t like to see you when you’re at work.”

You’re momentarily caught with panic when you see a stranger in your living room, only being caught up to date when he’s sprawled across your couch in the same way that Yoongi does, the very same shit-eating grin he has on for giving you a fright.

You don’t know the guy at all and you don’t plan to. You try your best to separate yourself from Yoongi’s shapeshifting business, most especially his clients and the extensions of them that he has to portray. You don’t even want to hear the stories behind his appointments even if he begs for you to hear him out because he just wants someone to talk to. 

The moment you fully accept that Yoongi would belong to everyone but you is the day that you rue him.

And in a longingly heartbreaking fashion, you don’t hate Yoongi — yet.

He momentarily changes back to himself, sneaking a look at his watch to see how many minutes he has more of annoying you before going on a date just two blocks away from your place.

“Why?” he whines, and in retaliation, changes back to the stranger. “I’m Hong Dusik. I’m from the countryside, moved back to the city to do stocks, and my dimples are literally embedded in there. I’m my client’s soulmate and it’s their first date next week but she’s shy and she’s nervous, so she’s having a dry-run with me first.”

Tuning Yoongi out has become a skill you continue to hone and while it isn’t foolproof just yet, it’s helped tremendously when you want nothing more than to kick him (or any form he takes) out.

“Nice.”

“You’re icing me out, sweetie?” his voice lulls, the sweetness behind it cloying until you remember that you don’t know the guy it belongs to.

“My god, your dimples are deep,” you murmur, clutching your bag to your chest. “Switch back, Yoongi.”

“Why? Dusik’s a nice guy.”

You kiss your teeth with the annoyance of a hundred days built up, gritting out your answer that makes him falter momentarily. “I’ve heard already, but I don’t plan seeing Dusik or any other stranger in my home.”

“Aw, you’re so loyal to your soulmate, whoever he may be,” he coughs, shifting back to himself. At any other day, Yoongi’s playful nature would be met with one of your sarcastic remarks but he doesn’t get any this time, the ghost of a frown accompanying his lips.

He’s admittedly nervous when you don’t play along with him, but his urge to sneak one last word in overtakes his trepidation.

“My advice to get over me? Bone it out. Get it out of your system. Soon enough, my initials would fade.”

Come to think of it, Yoongi’s advice isn’t all that bad.

“If Dusik and his girl don’t work out, just send him to me,” you nod, retreating to your room.

“Good! I’ll-…” he grins, satisfied with ticking you off until your words sink into him, the double-take that he makes giving him an ache on his neck. “What?” Yoongi murmurs, “I didn’t mean it that seriously.”

( ♡ )

In a parallel universe or in a different life, Yoongi actually lives with you. In that reality, you’re still soulmates and the difference is that he loves you back. He doesn’t have the ability to shapeshift and you don’t have to profess your love repeatedly either.

In a parallel universe or a different life, Yoongi’s cooking you dinner. Dinner would be just takeout from a drive-thru that he transfers to plates because the two of you barely ate the bourgeoisie food at your awarding ceremony. You’re still the top developer in your tech company, but the difference is that he’s there and you get to introduce him as your soulmate and not just a friend who coincidentally bears the same initials on your finger.

In a parallel universe or a different life, Yoongi is your soulmate before he is your friend. He doesn’t condense your love for him as a mere obligation. He doesn’t bat an eye at your confessions because in that reality, he’s the one who loves you more than you love him.

You don’t have that life though — what you have at the moment is Yoongi, your soulmate, not being able to see what was wrong signing you up for a dating app. You wouldn’t have known if not for the couple hundred notifications you receive in your personal phone that you left at home.

You wouldn’t be this angry if Yoongi could just accept that he went out of line.

“How many times do I have to say it over and over again?” you yell, hands flailing around helplessly. The smug look on Yoongi’s face remains, strengthened only by his stubbornness. “I love you and it’s just always been you!”

This is not the life you pictured with your soulmate. In your head, you don’t even see a particular space the two of you would live in. The home you see in your dreams is ever-changing, the layout of it never staying the same. The only thing that stays in the life you picture is Yoongi. Your Yoongi.

“Why can’t you put me in your choices atleast? We’re soulmates and you’ve been my only choice but I’m– fuck!” you exclaim, sucking in a sharp breath when you feel a momentary stab at your chest. “You don’t even consider me to be a potential girlfriend even if my initials are on your finger!”

In another world, Yoongi doesn’t look at you with a clenched jaw when you speak your mind. The two of you have grown sick at this conversation but the difference in your world now is that you’re beyond angry at him, the frustration unmistakeable when you look at him.

“Why can’t it be me, Yoongi?” you seethe, fists clenched tightly that your knuckles turn white. “For fuck’s sake, when can it be me? When can it be my turn? When do you pick me?”

Yoongi didn’t mean for you to be heated with him. It was a practical joke, only following through with the half-hearted advice he gave you when he showed up at your apartment as Dusik. 

He just wanted to prove a point that you don’t want to give up on him as much as he doesn’t want you to stop trying for him. It’s selfish, he’s selfish. And if only Yoongi could focus on how conceited he is rather than the anguish he feels about you being angry and upset at him, he would wipe off the arrogance from his face.

“I hate your job so, so fucking much. It looks pathetic to me even if I know you must enjoy it a lot,” you burst, saying your truth that you’ve tried to minimize in order to make way for his self-esteem. “Your business is to be these random people’s dream guy but you’re mine. You’re my dreamboat, my ideal guy, my person! I’m your soulmate but I feel like shit. Just utter, hopeless shit that you visit almost everyday because you don’t want to be alone!”

He can’t put it into words but in the simplest way he could put it, being alone feels like a punishment more than it is a solace. Yoongi lives alone and he can handle it, but him tolerating it doesn’t mean that he loves it. 

It’s always been you and him, one way or another. In the trench of your love, waiting for Yoongi to come around is worth it. In the shore of your doubts however, the novelty of having Yoongi is starting to wear off.

You make up your mind then and there, the ascent from your trench to your shore increasingly coming fast by the day.

“Leave. You’re not staying the night here.”

Yoongi breaks by then, a dry sob leaving his throat while he tries to plead with the resoluteness in your tone.

“What kind of-“

“What kind of soulmate throws out their other half in the middle of the night?” you interrupt, knowing that Yoongi only mentions your status when he’s desperate. “The kind that doesn’t want to be soulmates anymore.”

You sound the most casual you’ve ever been and Yoongi’s annoyed at you for it, his eyes narrowed into slits. He’ll oblige for the night, on his way to the door when he looks at you.

“With all due respect, Y/N, screw you. You don’t mean that,” he mutters, chest heaving up and down. He’s convincing you as much as he’s convincing himself. “You’re just angry, you’re sad, and you don’t mean that.”

Your back’s turned to him when he leaves, or atleast attempts to do so because he doesn’t want to make his exit when you refuse to even look at him.

“I mean it right now, let’s focus on that,” you chuckle, already turning off the lights in the apartment without sparing a single glance at him. “Go away, Yoongi.”

( ♡ )

Unsurprisingly, you find Yoongi at your house the next day when you come home from work.

He probably has your key fob microchipped on him nowadays, your huge fight from last night not being enough to deter him from coming over. He’s a stubborn and mostly annoying stain you have in your life at the exact second, the two of you unwilling to apologize to each other.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” you mutter, rolling your eyes when you set your bag down on the counter. You’re on a time crunch, the window you have of preparing yourself to look divine already closing down steadily.

“The fuck are you doing home?” Yoongi retorts just for the sake of it and simply because he wants to keep the conversation (if it was even called that) going, trying to ignore the fact that he totally bombed his comeback and makes up for it by staring at your leftover dumplings on his plate.

You’re busy fending for yourself, your eyes too preoccupied in rolling to the back of your head that you fail to notice Yoongi’s puffy with all the crying he did last night. You ignore him and go straight to your bedroom, not having enough time to multitask showering and fighting with him.

You’ve already went through your entire routine and dressed yourself up, the frustration in you only skyrocketing up when Yoongi’s still there in your kitchen.

“Either get out or move out of my way,” you say as you retrieve yourself a snack from your cupboards to munch on while you multitask, intentionally bumping your shoulder with him in the process. “I’m going out on a date.”

Yoongi heavily sighs, his fork clattering on the plate loudly. He tries to keep his emotions at bay because this is all his fault, the fight in his body tensing his shoulders.

“You’re lashing out.”

“I’m not lashing out,” you argue, looking at the clock to see if you could still fit in fighting with Yoongi between spraying your perfume and meeting your date by the front door. “Lashing out would be me bringing my date home and fucking him loudly in my room.”

He stabs the dumplings a little too harshly and a little too unnecessarily, fitting two in his mouth while clenching his fists because he knows a nasty remark is just bubbling to be said.

Yoongi’s being childish and your patience has already run thin to deal with him especially when you’re mad, the huff that leaves you sounding extremely personal.

“What are you even doing here? Go back to your house.”

“My appointment’s just at the next block. Your place is closer.”

“You could’ve just driven there directly instead of camping out here.”

Yoongi sarcastically smiles, his eyes in crescents as he makes a show of tilting his head. “Can I notspend time anymore with my best friend? My soulmate, even?”

“Stop saying the s-word,” you grit. “Don’t say that when I bring Jimin home.”

The resounding tension that envelopes the two of you finally snaps, manifesting into a scoff from Yoongi so offended and loud that it resonated in your apartment like a clap of thunder. 

“Jimin from high school? You’re exes for a reason, remember?” he exclaims, eyes blinking in disbelief because he figures he must’ve heard you wrong. “He broke up with you when he went abroad for college because he can’t do long-distance. What makes you think he’ll give you the time of day this time?”

None of his words register in your head, blissfully letting them fly over. Jimin only invited you to catch up and you obliged; it’s not like you didn’t have years of love amongst yourselves to shroud yourself in anonymisity. Plus, it’s not like he asked you to try again with him — it’s dinner. Just dinner.

“He’s already outside. Also, it’s clearly a short distance this time.”

“Don’t be smart with me,” Yoongi scoffs, standing up abruptly with his arms across his chest. “I’m gonna barricade the door if you come home with him.”

“Good. I can come home with him to his place.”

“I’ll barricade his door,” he retorts without even thinking, his brows knotted in exasperation.

“Go fuck yourself,” you narrow your eyes at him, letting your glare at him linger until you get to the front door. “While I fuck Jimin.”

“You’re so-“

Yoongi points an accusing finger at you, unable to finish his sentence now that you’ve left. You’re stubborn.

If he’s being honest, the thought of you merely giving Jimin the time of day makes him uneasy. It puts a void on his stomach and an even larger cavity in his chest.

And if Yoongi’s being more honest, he doesn’t even have an appointment nearby. He just wanted to be with you whichever way he can.

( ♡ )

Yoongi used to hate crossfit.

He hated even the concept of it because the trainers for it at the gym have a superiority complex when talking about it as if it was revolutionary; as if launching yourself a feet into the air while doing push-ups from point to point was groundbreaking.

Even his friend, Jungkook, knowsjust how much he hates it. He didn’t particularly have a preference when it comes to working out, but Yoongi’s random and unprovoked hate for random things is starting to rub off on him. They both hate crossfit… right?

Jungkook doesn’t know how to react when he sees Yoongi doing pull-ups with one hand diagonally while a kettlebell’s on the other. He doesn’t know what to feel seeing him agitatedly do push-ups while wearing a weighted vest and with his feet up on a medicine ball. 

Jungkook, for a fact, does not know what his cue should be when he sees Yoongi running 24kph on a treadmill with his eyes fixated on the phone in his hand, although he’s about 99% sure that this is not exactly crossfit.

He’s known him for years now and there’s barely anything between them that they don’t know about each other. Jungkook, however, doesn’t know the threshold of Yoongi’s emotional constipation, slightly concerned when he sees his friend’s mind drift elsewhere.

“Yoongi, are we okay there buddy?”

“Huh?” he squints, looking up from his dessert which he’s just been staring at the past two minutes.

Jungkook clears his throat, vaguely mentioning to the poor utensil in his hand. “You’re bending the fork.”

“It was already bent when you handed it to me,” he weakly counters, setting the metal down without much concern.

“I uhm, I really don’t think so.”

Yoongi only supplies with him a scowl and normally, being the filial and nosey friend that he is, it was cue for him to inquire what was going on. Jungkook likes including himself and it’s one of the numerous things he has in common with Yoongi, but it was clear as day just how differently it manifests for each of them.

Yoongi’s only been staring at the mocha crepe cake because he knows he would be incessantly interrupted by Jungkook once he started eating it, but come to to think of it, the younger hasn’t asked him even once.

He narrows his eyes at him, crossing his arms with a sly look to his face.

“What are you waiting for? I know you’re dying to ask me.”

Jungkook scoffs, rolling his eyes so passionately that Yoongi saw you in him for a second. “No, you’re dying to be asked. It’s always like this! You want to get something out of your chest but you always need me to ask first and then you pretend like you don’t like it.”

His face is far too straight and he got to the point really quickly with his delivery, his posture standing straight at the unimpressed look Yoongi gives him.

“Sorry. Your emotional constipation’s rubbing off of on me,” he hums sickeningly, batting his eyes. “Yes, Yoongi? What seems to be on your mind?”

Not even a second goes by before Yoongi breaks, his shoulders falling in recollection. “It’s Y/N. You already know my deal with her.”

“Of course I do. Aren’t we basically the same?” Jungkook tilts his head in thought. “Longtime best friends with our soulmates but the only difference is that the two of you knew at the beginning?” he continues, mixing his drink with his straw just to cushion the impending blow this conversation might inflict on him. “And uhm, that you spend every waking moment refusing her but magically, your friendship isn’t ruined over it?”

“You go on and on like an audiobook.”

He’s not the least bit offended because he does have the voice for it, but it wasn’t so audiobook-ish of him when his hands flail and his voice pitches in remembrance. “Oh also, you’re a shapeshifter! Poor Y/N has to watch you date all these people except her.”

“Which side are you on?” Yoongi looks down on his feet, the sigh that leaves him slowly weighing as much as the conflict in his mind. “There’s one more difference, by the way. I think she’s making me jealous.”

Now, Jungkook doesn’t flatter Yoongi all too much because his ego outnumbers his and that’s coming from him! But this is the one time that Jungkook has to hand it to him, his friend’s delivery and impeccable timing giving him the best chuckle he’s had this week.

“She’s intentionally making you jealous? God, Yoongi. Are we skimming over the fact that maybe she’s just grown sick of you?”

“You don’t get it!” he whines. “She’s entertaining her ex from high school. This stupidly blonde, stupidly genius, stupidly always available guy named Jimin! What a stupid name too. Seriously, he’s so-…”

The café’s well-lit and the acoustics are good too but there’s just this one cloud that forms above Jungkook when Yoongi mentions Jimin’s name, his brows suddenly furrowing in annoyance.

“Jimin?” he clarifies. “Jimin who?”

“This isn’t a knock-knock joke.”

The urge to smack Yoongi would always be larger than Jungkook’s intent to be the bigger person, his curiosity bursting at the seams. “What’s his family name, you idiot?”

“Why does it matter? You don’t know him anyway. It’s Park Jimin,” Yoongi rolls his eyes as he soothes the side of his head, equally as annoyed now. 

The gasp coming from Jungkook alone shushes the entire café, his eyes as expressive as ever and his voice even louder, forcing Yoongi to sink further to his seat until the onlookers take their eyes away from the table.

“You’re joking me!” he booms, running his hands though his hair in a frenzy. “Guy from Busan, stayed until high school, then went to Harvard for college?”

“How do you know him?” Yoongi questions but at this point the how doesn’t matter as much as the why, his friend’s expression enough to keep him at the edge of his seat.

“Because he tried poaching my soulmate too!” Jungkook exclaims, pausing between words because he’s still speechless. “It’s this long story. We’re distant family friends, then I almost lost my bond, then-…”

Yoongi shushes him, putting up a hand for the both of them to stay on track. “Can we get back to me? Can we put a pause on the Jungkook and soulmate show?”

They’re a duo of insufferable people, one more self-absorbed and insufferable than the other. Jungkook sees much of his past self in Yoongi despite the latter being older, the irony of the situation rendering him breathless.

“What do I do about Jimin? Surely, he has a soulmate and it’s definitely not my Y/N,” Yoongi desperately asks for advice even if he thinks it’s beneath him, rubbing his face with his hands.

Jungkook thanks the universe and his soulmate for shaping him to be a better person because he could now hear what he used to sound like back then and by god was he emotionally constipated.

“My Y/N?” he mimics. “Let’s get you back to bed, uncle.”

He makes the internal reminder to get Yoongi away from crossfit because the punch that lands on his thigh is definitely powerful, making him wince loudly that once agains puts the both of them at the center of attention.

“Ow! What?! You can’t just refuse to be a thing with Y/N but then gatekeep her the moment she entertains another guy. That’s not how it works, believe me! I’ve literally been there before.”

Yoongi can hear Jungkook, but he doesn’t exactly understand.

He’s not oblivious to continue refusing the parallels between him and Jungkook but surely, the way it worked out for his friend means that it would for him too, right? 

He’s in denial but he’s not there at the stage yet where he actually acknowledges that he is, stuck in the realm of hope that you’re not sick of him yet.

“Okay what if– what if we try to find out who this Jimin’s soulmate is? Look for them, pluck just one strand of hair, and I shapeshift into them? Then I’ll tell him to back off from other people and only focus on his soulmate!”

Jungkook winces, scratching his head. “That’s wrong. And unethical. You have so many things to unpack, Yoongi.”

“It’s not my fault I can shapeshift!” he exasperatedly sighs, briefly mirroring Jungkook by shifting to him just to prove a point.

“It’s your fault that you’re this constipated to be willing to go to great lengths just to steer Y/N away from Jimin!”

“What do I do then?” Yoongi groans, plunking his head onto the table. He doesn’t even have to raise his head for Jungkook to know that he’s nearing a dead end, his hope about to run out sooner or later. “What did you do?”

“I woke up. Figured I was too self-absorbed back then to realize that it’s always been her for me.”

Jungkook shakes his friend, prompting him to start eating the crepe cake he treated him to but refuse to eat because he’s still wallowing in worry over where he stands with you.

“Wake up, Yoongi,” he sighs, looking down on the markings on his own ring finger that he thanks the heavens for every single day. “The universe works in mysterious ways.”

( ♡ )

Yoongi prides himself for having 20/20 vision.

He’s always boasted about his vision not deceiving him even once, the constant praise whenever he gets his yearly check-ups fully seeping into his head.

He’s neither suffering from a hangover nor vertigo. Yoongi’s mind is in a sound and safe place which is why he doesn’t get how it could be playing jokes on him now, the most crucial of times he’s been going through with you.

Your soulmate mark has completely disappeared.

It simply cannot be true to how his initials disappeared overnight and you just woke up one day to see that they’re gone. Yoongi’s hand is gripping yours tightly as if you’d suddenly disappear too, the glare he has at your ring finger vacant and unnerving at the same time.

“It’s blank. Oh my god, it’s completely blank,” your eyes can’t seem to believe it too, a silent gasp leaving you in shock.

You’ve already said your piece but it’s not what Yoongi’s looking for. You’re not as distraught nor panicked as he is and he knows right there that you’re only fucking with him, making him sigh in exhaustion.

“It’s obvious why you didn’t study liberal arts,” he mutters, rubbing your finger furiously. It makes absolutely no sense when not a single hint of his initials peek through, the worry over his lack of a mark on you growing by the second.

“Huh?” Yoongi says under his breath, his pursuit of trying to get your stint to budge leading him closer to you to the point that your foreheads almost bump when he looks to you. “Okay, what’s the secret? You used pot concealer instead of liquid? You color-corrected? Tons of setting spray?” he tries, licking his lips that turned dry in exasperation. He’s running out of ways you could’ve executed this, mind turning up empty. “You uh, you got it tattooed over with your exact shade match?”

The dread that fills Yoongi is liquid hurt. It builds up from droplets and takes form wherever it flows, turning murky in contained and neglected spaces. He can’t move on from the hurt that’s in his chest when he glances at your empty ring finger and then to his that still has yours; that still links you to him, yet unreciprocated.

“Why is it not budging?” 

“You’re rubbing all the way to my bone,” you chuckle, unable to read the anxiousness behind his tone. He looks disturbed even, lips parted with no explanation coming to mind.

“You’ve got me, Y/N,” he painfully chuckles, catching his bottom lip between his teeth. He bites too hard that he draws blood, eyes flickering ever so often. “Where did you hide the cameras this time?”

“Yoongi, I’m telling you! It’s really blank!” you chuckle but not as easily as the last time, sensing the atmosphere in the room that only favored you but not him. “Quick, walk into the wall. Let’s see if I feel it!”

He doesn’t know how you still have it in you to joke. He doesn’t know how you’re not panicking and as much as he’s figured that this is only one of the rare times where the universe favors you, he didn’t know it would result to this.

“First, I’m not walking into a wall. Second, you stop lying to me.”

“I’m not lying! I’m really serious!” your hands raise in defense, taking a step away from him. The starting notes of your laugh start to build but it never comes out fully because Yoongi interrupts you with a bitter laugh, throwing his head back in frustration.

You’re laughing. You’re unfazed and you’re laughing at Yoongi being at the end of his rope, his worry over losing his soulmate turning unrequited.

“Well then congrats on not having me as a soulmate anymore. I’m so happy for you!”

“What’s with the attitude?” you raise an eyebrow at him, scoffing in retaliation. It had only been lighthearted (for you, atleast) awhile ago and perhaps, maybe even humorous. You didn’t expect that he would receive the news like this at all. “No, congratulations to you, Yoongi, because you’ve been whining for years how you don’t want me and now you finally got it!”

The truth you say has been Yoongi’s for the longest time and the old him would’ve been thrilled because you finally got it. You finally got where he’s coming from and he didn’t need to deal with you pining after him but now that the realization comes here, one that you say to his face — it doesn’t feel good at all.

“Yeah, and I know and regret that now because I didn’t actually think the universe would listen!” his voice raises, pointing at his chest. “Fuck me for not thinking that the universe would stop to listen to my half-hearted wishes, am I right?”

“You’re right. Fuck you, actually!” you agree in spite, practically spitting your next words. “You’re so conceited. Why are you turning on me the moment you get what you thought you wanted?”

Yoongi doesn’t get it too.

He doesn’t get how he lets the flaw of his own insistence slip through his fingers so carelessly. He doesn’t even know what he wanted in the first place and it terrorizes him to know that he might just never know why, the answer for it only seen as a distant memory of you.

He doesn’t get how long he’s retained his insistence of preserving his safety zone by trying to deter you from loving him, when in reality, you’re the epitome of security itself. He didn’t think it through at all.

Yoongi didn’t think when he spent the past few years of his life rejecting your confessions and proposals in every opportunity that he could. Didn’t even leave you hanging from a thread of hope at all that he’d like you back; just a clean, straight refusal.

He didn’t stop to consider that the universe works in mysterious ways, because if he did earlier, he would’ve prayed to make you stay despite not being the type to get on his knees at all.

“Because I didn’t actually think we would stop being soulmates! I didn’t think that there’d be a reality where we aren’t together!” his voice cracks, his hands trembling at his sides. “It’s always been us, Y/N. I’ll always want you around.”

“Do you just want me around or do you want me?” you ask, the silence that follows after it being an accumulation of the ones you’ve had to spent alone when he rejected you. “I can’t be the background noise in your life, Yoongi. Not anymore. Y-yes, I know there are soulmates that are meant to be platonic but I don’t want that,” you stress, the tears springing to your eyes. “I can’t have that.”

It’s an ultimatum you didn’t know you would ever make at all.

“It’s either you have me as your soulmate or you don’t have me at all,” you say in strength, your thumb hovering about the ghost of his initials on your finger. “I can’t stand being your friend anymore.”

“You’d throw that away?” Yoongi croaks, taken aback. “You’d throw that– us away after all this time?”

“I would.”

“Your initials are still on my finger,” he reminds, sniffling as he pushes his hair back. This can’t be. You seriously can’t be posing this ultimatum to him, one that would determine both his present and future.

“Yours aren’t on mine,” you shot back. The lump on your throat is far too large to even swallow, each breath you take making it harder for you. “For the love of god, Yoongi, can you not deflect?” 

Yoongi’s the most panicked that he’s ever been in his life and in your surprising and rarely selfish nature, you don’t even pause.

“This is a big decision, Y/N! Can’t you please just give me some time to think?”

“No. You’ve had enough time to think when you’ve been stringing me around for years.”

The hurt that bubbles up in Yoongi comes like a riptide, unsuspecting yet just as devastating. There’s no pause between his words, much too smooth and articulate for someone who’s as panicked as he is now. They’ve stayed at the tip of his tongue before and lingered in the back of his mind even longer.

“I can’t think because I’m not sure about you, Y/N! I’m not sure if I’ve always kept you around because I want us to be more like soulmates than we are as friends,” he sobs. “I don’t know if I can love you how you love me.”

The liquid hurt in Yoongi’s bones solidifies but yours evaporates. It should hurt for you — you know that it should pain you the most now. You wait and you wait for the hiss before the sting but it doesn’t come. 

The weight lifts off from you instantly and you don’t even know why or how it happens. Whatever it was though, you let it carry your burdens for you. You only painfully nod, leaving Yoongi in your own house.

Yoongi can’t love you the way you love him — it’s the answer you’re looking for now, and it’s the same answer you swallowed down when you first professed your love for him years ago. 

.

.

.

Jimin didn’t expect you to report back to him this quickly and this late at night to say the very least, his sleepiness being pushed back when you stand at his door.

You slur the words but you’re not even drunk with alcohol. You’ve walked the long way to Jimin in order to take off your mind from your fight with Yoongi but there was just something n your system, one that made you even forget who you were fleeing.

There’s no Yoongi that comes into your mind during your walk, in fact, you were starting to think that the name didn’t even make sense to you because you couldn’t put a face to it. All you knew was where you’re going and who you were going to — only Jimin.

The more you walked and the more you came closer to Jimin, it was only him that filled your mind. In fact, you didn’t even know where you came from at this point, the details a blur in your head except for Jimin who’s standing in front of you.

“It worked. He bought it.”

It’s the last words that Jimin heard from you before you quite literally froze up, eyes closing solemnly despite standing upright until you open them again, the glaze behind it shining brighter the more you looked at him.

“Jimin, my love,” you drawl, squealing in delight as you launch yourself to him in a hug. “What a handsome soulmate I have.”

Jimin flushes at the realization, frozen in his position as he only puts his hand at the small of your back, patting you in comfort.

He needs some pen and paper, his notes, and the brainpower to calculate his next decision.

( ♡ )

Yoongi makes no move to drive himself home.

He doesn’t even have the willpower to leave from where you left him, his knees giving in to situate himself on the couch where he could sink further in his self-loathing. He has half the mind to recognize that you need the space, especially tonight, even if it means leaving the comfort of your own home because he (your demise) was there.

He doesn’t know anything, other than the fact that he’s repulsive and he wants nothing more than to go seek you but he doesn’t know where he should start; if you would even want to see him in the event that he finds you.

He considers calling your phone and at this point, he’d be contented even with the line ringing or you declining. Yoongi stays rooted in your house as a placeholder that he doesn’t even know you would be acclimated to having, stuck in the very space with no purpose at all.

He’s waiting for either you or a miracle and both revolve around him being able to see you for just one more time, then another, then again and again after so. He’s waiting for you and only you, and he didn’t even think you would come through the door in first place — much more with someone else.

The door beeps open and Yoongi launches himself from where he sat, his stance protective the moment his eyes land on you and Jimin.

The guy is just as shocked to see Yoongi of all people, lips parted open in surprise. Jimin’s just about to ask Yoongi what the hell he’s doing here in the first place but he’s cut off when you grumble against his neck, forgetting momentarily that you were clinging to him by the hip the whole time.

“What are you doing with Y/N?” Yoongi questions, taking large steps towards the both of you. There’s practically smoke coming off from the top of his head, his fists clenched at his sides,

“Taking her to her room, obviously,” Jimin scoffs, attempting to dodge past Yoongi with you in tow but to no avail, the latter’s arm outstretched.

“She’s drunk.”

“She’s not,” Jimin insists, punctuating his desperation.

He moves past Yoongi this time but he doesn’t get far at all, his arm being wrung tightly. His hand awaits on your back out of instinct, the whiplash putting the both of them on edge.

“Hey, buddy, Y/N’s drunk.”

Jimin groans, prying Yoongi’s hand off him just as easily as he clamped it. “She’s not drunk! Not in that way, atleast,” he mutters, putting you closer to his chest that sets off Yoongi further. “Just back off.”

“What do you mean not in that way?” Yoongi bursts, his vision darkening. He sets out a hand once again to get you away from Jimin, his hold on you much gentler. “Asshole. I said don’t-…”

“She’s drunk, but not actually drunk!” Jimin caves, pinching his nosebridge but not before swatting away Yoongi’s hand. The latter belatedly realizes that Jimin’s not even holding onto you to keep you steady, it was purely you clinging to him. Jimin can’t put it into proper, technical terms because he’s always known that Yoongi isn’t his equal ever since high school, dumbing it down the best as he could that it physically makes him shudder.

“She’s drunk… in love.”

“What?” Yoongi squints, his face contorted into confusion and disbelief at the same time. “Are you high?”

“I’m not high. I mean it!” he groans, throwing his head back. He looks at you while you slip in and out of consciousness, his thumb underneath your chin to get you to look up. “Y/N’s literally drunk in love.”

You being attached to Jimin doesn’t make sense. What Jimin’s saying now isn’t making sense. You immediately coming to your ex, Jimin, after your fight with him doesn’t make any sense. None of everything that’s happening is making sense and Yoongi’s head is bound to erupt any time, the migraine forming in his temples giving Jimin a smaller window to explain.

“My friends and I made this drug for our company’s upcoming breakthrough and Y/N volunteered to try it out.”

“You drugged her?!” Yoongi yells, eyes wide and furious.

“I think you have selective hearing,” Jimin grits, offended at the insinuation. “It’s this drug that’s supposed to temporarily desensitize you to your soulmate, okay? It worked because clearly your initials are gone from her.”

None of them should be making sense but it does. It scares Yoongi that this whole thing could be condensed down to an explanation because it only makes it much more real; much more vulnerable.

“So I’m still her soulmate?” he asks with a lump on his throat, his rage simmering down back into sadness.

“Yeah, unfortunately,” Jimin snorts, running a hand through his hair. “It’d last for a week but we have yet to know all of the possible side effects,” he kisses his teeth, going through his internal checklist. “So far, we found out that although it desensitizes a person towards their soulmate,” he trails, perhaps a little bit amused if he was saying the truth. “They cling to the first person they see.”

How awful, Yoongi thinks.

“Y/N’s drunk in me,” Jimin announces with a grin. “She thinks I’m her soulmate.”

You’re waking up little by little and Jimin figures that your unconsciousness is only temporary and a one-time thing, considering that you’re back to trying to entangle all of your limbs with him in an eager embrace.

“Snap out of it, Y/N,” Yoongi says outloud to you, completely disregarding that Jimin’s still in the room.

He even makes a move to try and pull you away from him but to no avail, his interruption only making you raise an eyebrow at him. You look at Yoongi from afar despite being near and it’s haunting, the tilt in your head giving your sentiments away.

“Who are you?” you question genuinely, brows furrowed slightly. You turn back to the person you know most in this room at the moment, who’s none other than Jimin. “Who’s he, Jimin?”

“You don’t know this guy?” he questions, his mind computing rapidly.

“Not at all,” you confirm, not sparing a single glance back at Yoongi.

There’s a tense silence because all that Yoongi could hear now is the fuzz in his brain and the pulsing of his heart, his chest deflating in anguish.

“You promise me? You don’t know this guy at all?” Jimin confirms to you once more, assessing you deeply.

“I promise. I’d never lie to you,” you say with a frown, both of the guys knowing that from your tone alone, all you’re saying is the truth.

Jimin takes it down quickly, his tone more somber and less hostile than before.

“That’s another side effect then. Not only can it desensitize, but it also makes you forget about your soulmate completely.”

The two of them are talking as if you’re not in the room with them but it doesn’t make a difference otherwise because you’re only focused on Jimin, your eyes all endeared just by the silhouette of him alone.

Yoongi can’t will his mind to focus on just one thing, his frustration coming off as a strangled yelp.

“You’re shitting me! Make an antidote or something!”

“We still have to wait out the whole week.”

“It’s like you’re just asking me to slap you!” he grits, hand outstretched already yet retreating when Jimin mocks him in return, pointing at you whose head is turned from Yoongi. Of course, you think Yoongi’s your soulmate — of course you’d shower him with affection.

“Can you guys be any louder? I wanna sleep. Please take me to bed,” your attention’s only turned to Jimin, the guy nodding earnestly.

He’s about to coax you into your room when a voice cuts into the air, an eager tap being placed on your shoulder.

“I’m Yoongi.”

You look back at the guy who introduced himself, a smile on his face that doesn’t quite reach his eyes but looks like he’s just begging to be given a sliver of attention.

You don’t mind him though.

“Hi, Yoongi,” you curtly respond, turning your back on him. “Take me to bed, Jimin.”

( ♡ )

Your vocabulary’s not affected by Jimin’s experiment at all, except for the fact that the word you utter most is his name and barely Yoongi’s.

He neither came home nor went to sleep, his mind not being granted even a single second of rest because all he can think about how this is only a mere, flawed glimpse of what you would be like if he wasn’t your soulmate anymore and it’s terrifying. It puts goosebumps onto his skin and instills the fear of fate on him, obvious by the way he’s only been functioning long enough for the past hours for the sake of reliving the same alternate reality again and again.

You come out of your room and there’s still that same dazed look on your face, eyes less crazed but more yearning. Yoongi awaits any reaction from you that would lead him to think everything that’s happened in the last 24 hours is only a figment of his imagination.

It’s early in the morning but the sorrow from the evening already hits you through a frown, your eyes darting everywhere.

“Where’s Jimin?” you ask, shaking your head. “Why am I still here?”

“You live here,” Yoongi answers, keeping his hands to himself. He begrudgingly makes the internal note to relay your momentary forgetting to Jimin later even if talking to him is the last thing he’ll ever want to do.

You gasp then, eagerly nodding your head because that one piece of information definitely traces back to you. “Oh, right,” you nod, your lip curling once again. “Why are you here?”

Yoongi’s not sure how he should answer that.

He’s unsure if he should answer that he’s here and stayed the night because he was worried sick about you after your fight, almost driven to passing out in overwhelm especially when Jimin brought you home.

He doesn’t know if he should say that in your home because it’s only rational since you’re soulmates, and that he dislikes being alone, and that being with you calms him down an infinite amount; if he could just skim over the fact that you barely have any recollection of him and will continue to do so for the next week.

Yoongi can’t determine to whether or not he should tell you that he wants to spend every second with you because should be the precursor for you to believe that you don’t want him anymore, he’s left with a memory of you, no matter how painful.

“Because I live here too,” he says a half-truth, trailing off in remembrance of you nagging him to go back to his house.

“We live together?” you question once again, your face contorted in confusion. “Why?”

You don’t even mean malice with it and Yoongi knows that exactly, the bit of realization even more painful because he knew that you would question him with snark and tears otherwise. In your foggy, Jimin-centric brain, it doesn’t make sense why you and Yoongi practically live together.

Because we’re soulmates, he wants to answer.

It’s the same question he asks himself because he doesn’t know how you let him either — when in reality, he already knows why and it’s because you love him. The even bigger question is if he was even deserving of you.

“Because we wanted to,” Yoongi leaves it at that, clearing his throat as he pushes a plate towards you that he put together on short notice. “Here’s breakfast. This is your favorite.”

You don’t even move to thank him curtly, head tilting in curiosity. You have all the questions yet he doesn’t know if he has all the answers, his heart hurting whichever way he addresses you.

“But why do we want to live with each other?” 

“Because we care for each other.” (Read: because we’re soulmates and because we’ve been friends and soulmates our whole lives and I don’t ever see us parting.)

You nod at Yoongi’s brief answer, stuck in staring off to space for a couple of seconds before you swallow down everything.

“Oh,” you hum somewhat satisfied. “You know where Jimin is?” you open a new line of questioning this time, tone picking up more. “Do we live with him or is it just the two of us?”

Jimin’s testing out his method of withdrawing himself this time, living out the remainder of the week by not making any contact with you and assigning Yoongi to report back to him. He’s not even meant to say everything to you in technical terms, knowing that he has to make up lies the whole week regarding Jimin’s whereabouts.

It’s only and should be a simple, trivial question regarding your living situation but Yoongi can’t help the hiccup that builds in his chest, heart heavy with nothing he can do about.

“Just the two of us,” Yoongi mutters, tracing your initials on his finger discreetly. It was one of the things you did when you felt like confessing to him silently, eyes not even meeting each other’s for you to tell him that you love him. He’s desperate to have you do it to him again — pathetically and helplessly pleading for you to come back to him again. “Always just the two of us.”

.

.

.

Yoongi finds it admirable that you grow warmer to him by the night, nevermind that you’re not doing it for familiarity but rather to get closer to Jimin through him.

Not once does he leave your side whenever you stroll back out to thr living room, plopping onto the couch to eat dinner made by him to which you aren’t weirded about. You no longer inquired him why he’s here, just accepting his presence because the back of your mind tells you that you’re used to him in the first place.

“I miss Jimin,” he hears you sigh for the umpteenth time, an automatic rigid smile painted on his face. He doesn’t want to hear about him at all actually, however he’d do anything just to get you to keep talking in the event that it’s the last he’ll hear from you.

“You don’t say,” he hums, tuning out his name as he tries to pretend that it’s his instead.

You can’t distinguish the far relaxed nature to Yoongi’s intonations because after all, you barely remember any of him and his quirks for you to compare his attitude to. For all you know, he’s just a calm and calculating person that you know in your life, one whose eyes just can’t stop straying to his hands.

Yoongi doesn’t want to feel like he’s mourning but the feeling in his chest is akin to it anyway, something resembling repentance rising out of it from nowhere when you let your curiosity get the best of you.

You’re unfathomably upset because Jimin’s nowhere to be found. One second you’re sighing and at the other you become molten aluminum at thrashing just to see him.

It’s painful to see you like this and he tries his best to gather you to his arms to calm you down, shushing you to the best of his abilities that annoy you even further.

“I don’t want you! I want Jimin!”

“I’m the only one you have,” he says just as urgently, releasing you from his hold but you melt to him anyway, in a fit of tears with your hands covering your face.

It hurts to see you yearn for another person who isn’t him (read: your soulmate) and it hurts more to even grasp that this could’ve been your vignette the whole time that he’s been working, perhaps even the whole time that you’ve been pining after him.

“But I don’t wanna have you,” you enunciate with a sob that wracks your body yet destroy Yoongi’s core, his intake of breath being shallower the more that you refuse him.

“Can you find him for me please? Did I do anything wrong? Maybe he’ll respond to your texts.”

“You’ve never done anything wrong,” he comes to his sense just to scold you, eyes narrowing of why you could’ve conjured up such a thing.

“But I must’ve done something,” you whine. “Jimin doesn’t love me.”

“It’s impossible not to love you,” Yoongi interjects faster than the impulsive thought had formed in your brain, his eyes stern and promising. “Your soulmate must be the luckiest bastard in the world.”

You hear him once again but you can’t understand him, the words meaning nothing to you because you aren’t even sure of the level of relation you had with him before your memory became hazy.

“But my soulmate doesn’t even love me back!” 

You have him there, ironic that you’re going through the same situation twice. You’ve went through it with Yoongi for years genuinely, while you’ve been going through it with Jimin for five days because of an experiment.

“He loves you,” he says it in confidence and assurance, his hands unknowingly making their way to grip your shoulders for you to look at him when he’s speaking the truth. “He’s a conceited asshole and he’s really flawed, but he’s trying his best to love you more than you deserve,” his voice cracks briefly, clearing his throat. “Must be hard to swallow down the fact that the universe is too generous to him because he has you for a soulmate. He must feel like he’s the scum of the earth because he has the greatest, most lovable person in the world loving him, and he used to take it for granted.”

It’s warm. Too warm, too personal, and too familiar — and in your head, Jimin is the only person in your head who fills all three boxes.

“Jimin feels like that?”

“Hmm,” Yoongi agrees, lying easily. “He also hopes that it’s not too late.”

In a moment’s notice, he furthers the distance between the two of you as if the oddly-spurred passionate conversation the two of you had never happened.

Your memory’s not acting up when you remember that you came out to join Yoongi to talk about Jimin, but now, you wouldn’t believe yourself that it’s actually the reason you came out.

This time it’s you who reaches out for Yoongi, clearing your throat.

“Who’s that?” you point to his ring finger, eyes peeking at the initials. It’s just like yours, the irony of it making you giggle. “That’s not me, isn’t it?” 

“And if it was?” Yoongi asks, eyes still gentle but his voice much too mellow to the point that you’d think he isn’t breathing.

“I wouldn’t believe you,” you answer, carelessly shrugging.

Yoongi purses his lips and he knows he should stop prodding now because the last time he did, it ended with him driving you right into Jimin’s arms to experiment him out of your life. He can’t hold his tongue now, even when he knows he’s bound to suffer from himself anyway.

“Why not?”

“Because if that’s me, then I should be in love with you right now and not Jimin,” you trail, your tone reeking obviousness. It’s clear enough for you, atleast, but Yoongi takes nothing but murkiness from it.

“Hmm,” he hums, pointing to your hand. “Why do you love Jimin if his initials aren’t on your finger then?”

“You got me there,” you snort, the words unwilling to roll off easily from your mouth. In fact, nothing forms in your mind anyway, just a mere vision that you can discern yet not verbalize. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I just love him.”

It’s a confession that sets you apart from the soulmate that Yoongi knows, all before you had been desperate enough to desensitize yourself to his very existence.

“You can’t explain love?” he asks gently, eyes lowering down in thought.

“Can anybody?” you counter resignedly, the concept of just settling for the fact that there’s things that are unexplainable being enough for you.

Yoongi feels the most alive that he’s felt since the past day, the smile on his face being so nostalgic and sentimental to you for some reason that it momentarily makes you dizzy.

“My soulmate can. She’d profess her love for me every chance she gets. Would do it in all the ways she could find.”

You can explain love. You’re talkative and you always have the right words to say. You have the stubbornness in you that when put to its fullest power, puts his ego to shame. You have the convincing power of a company in you, one that has nothing to its name and only its very being to prove with.

You can put love into words and it’s daunting how you can condense everything you’ve ever felt for Yoongi into the many confessions you give him. In your loud drunken spiels all the way to your silent telepathic stints — you’re the embodiment of love. You can explain love and it makes sense because you would know your own.

“She sounds like a handful,” you murmur, brows furrowed to how Yoongi describes someone who’s clearly not on the same wavelength as he is with lovesick dedication in his face.

“She’s my handful though.”

“Does she come by here often then?” your brows raise, your headache throbbing the more that Yoongi speaks to you.

“You already know her,” Yoongi smiles tightly, looking right through you. He looks at you like he’s a dog that looks for its owner, ready to be at your beck and call. “I just don’t know if you can’t recognize her.”

“Show me a picture! Maybe it’ll jog my memory,” you offer enthusiastically, already knowing that you’re missing bits here and there but maybe seeing Yoongi’s soulmate would push you to remember faster.

“Maybe another time.”

Yoongi’s turned solemn, breathing shallowly as if he doesn’t want you to have a clue that you’re even seeing him right now.

“It’s just a picture! You looked like you were gonna cry when you were talking about her,” you pout, giving in eventually. “Aw, come on! You’re not sharing her?” 

“No,” he answers almost immediately, masking his certainty with an uneasy chuckle. “I hope not.” 

( ♡ )

You feel fuzzy.

Fuzzy in the sense that you remember clearly the two days you’ve lived but operated with your mind from afar; every interaction and every word crystal clear.

Fuzzy in the sense that it’s overwhelming, the good kind this time, but still overwhelming to the point that you have to take a breather outside of your apartment that feels suffocating to be in.

You’re five days ahead of schedule, the effect of the pill that was supposed to desensitize you to Yoongi and have other as drastic side effects being cut early.

It’s only relief that fills you when you walk out and hear Yoongi’s light snores in your guest bedroom instead of the living room, alleviating your momentary guilt at leaving this time — but only to give yourself the space to think, of course.

It’s only solace that envelopes you when you screw your eyes shut and look to your ring finger while you hold your breath, the consolation of seeing Yoongi’s initials still on there satiating you.

You’re not in your room and not even in the apartment at all. You’re not at the hallway and not even anywhere in your entire apartment complex. You’re not at the convenience store nearby where you typically go on walks just to take your mind off things and buy yourself snacks. He’s already checked and checked — Yoongi can’t find you anywhere.

He fears the worst. The absolute, most heartbreaking worst. He can’t even fathom where he got the strength to dial your number on his phone because he thought he would be faced with nothing, the proof that you’ve cut all ties with him by disconnecting completely.

Yoongi doesn’t know what possesses him when you answer easily on the second ring, your voice lighthearted.

“You’re wrong,” you hum. “Your apartment’s easy to break into just like mine.”

“Where are you?” Yoongi asks first amongst the other hundred questions he’s been dying to do so, the relief that fills him unable to be topped. You’ve just said your location but he still asks, hesitant that this may just be some cruel joke.

You stay quiet at your side of the line, looking around his place with a fondness you can’t even begin to start tackling.

“I’m at home.”

There’s nothing that comes to your mind besides the fact that it actually looks like your home. It resembles your home when you only had a mattress on the floor and no bedframe when you moved in, when you started sticking up pictures with tape that you didn’t know would ruin the walls, and when you finally found your sense of the style and had the finances and time to do it — it resembles your home all at the same time.

There’s several pictures of you and Yoongi together that line up the walls and the shelves, notes written behind them in your handwriting that you didn’t think he would keep.

Your parcels that he received with your name on it are all gathered near the doorway, the flyers of your favorite restaurants hung up by the fridge. Yoongi’s house looks more like your home and it almost brings you to tears.

He never noticed it, in fact. Hasn’t noticed the way that his definition of his home has shifted to your taste and how his definition of love turned into you. It had been gradually building through the years that Yoongi hasn’t stopped to figure that your home has become his, all to the point that he’s been living in it the whole time.

“I’m waiting,” you mutter as soon as you open the door to Yoongi who had ran all the way here in a frenzy, chest heaving up and down. “I’m waiting for you to make it up to me.”

“I’ll do that and more,” Yoongi nods in earnest and immediately leaps in to kiss you, finally feeling that you’ve given him the opportunity to breathe. 

He kisses you so endearingly that you’re surprised you haven’t done it before with him because the way he does so feels like second nature. He breathes you in until he feels like he can exhale, catching his breath as he settles his head to the crook of your neck.

“I was waiting for that too,” you snort, speaking at the same time as him.

“What I said that night-…”

“I remember,” you interrupt. “You’re not the scum of the earth, Yoongi, and I’m not the greatest person in the world either.”

“Whatever makes you sleep at night,” he rolls his eyes even if he knows a fool would see that you aren’t anything short of great. “I’m sorry for making you wait,” he apologizes, eyes flickering to yours. “But you don’t have to wait around for me anymore, okay?”

It’s a great mound of consolation that he’d be willing to trek over and over again if it means making up for everything he’s done.

“I can’t love you the way that you love me because nobody can compare to you,” he whispers, crossing his heart in promise. “But believe me, please, I’ll make up for all of the lost time and I’ll love you the best that I could.”

It’s a progress, a working one at that, wherein you’d meet Yoongi in the middle of.

“I can’t confess my love for you every two weeks-…”

“Oh shut up,” you roll your eyes, playfully attempting to break off his hug to which he doesn’t let you.

“Because that’s too spread out. I’ll do it everyday,” Yoongi finishes, the grin on his face pleasantly annoying.

“You’re the worst,” you weakly offer, letting yourself into the moment of vulnerability by abandoning your defenses.

“You’re sounding like me,” he laughs, pressing just one more kiss to your forehead.

You’re the universe’s reward to Yoongi for everything he’s ever done, the resounding desire in his whole being to just be the best he could ever be for you reverberating throughout his home and yours.

“You don’t have to ask me to love you anymore,” he says gently, eyes holding up the entirety of a truth he can’t deny. “I’d give you the sun even if you didn’t ask me to.”

THIS SHIT IS SO GOOD ITS CRAQAAZYYYY READ ALLNOF THIS IN ONE DAY

Trip No Further | Chapter 20 (Finale)

Summary: When your valiant attempt to get your best friend laid not only backfires, but results in one mind-boggling discovery—that the world-famous idol Min Yoongi of BTS is your soulmate—you’re forced to confront your new reality. Soon, you will need each other’s touch to survive. Too bad Suga, despite his sweet name, is proving to be something of an acquired taste…

Pairing: idol!Yoongi x Reader Genre: soulmate!au, idol!au, slow burn, heavy humor, smut, idiots/nemeses/enemies to biases/lovers (iykyk) Word Count: ~16.7k Rating: 18+ Warnings: swearing, mentions of drinking/partying probably, multiple orgasms, dirty filthy talk, 69 😏 (nice), reader gets a booboo so a very brief mention of blood, jimin is a: menace, daehyun and hana are: correct, blow jobs, cunnilingus, MEMMMMORIES all alone in the mOOOONLIGHT, hurt/comfort, tooth-rotting fluff, delicious ambiguity, The End. Links: AO3, Masterlist 🖤 Please note: Trip No Further does not have a tag list 🖤

A/N: Thank you for sticking with me until the end, my most beloved Trip Heads 💜

Chapter Twenty (Finale): The Means To The End

June

Dribble the ball to the hoop Behind the back and loop dee loop Adelai, dance across the…

Jesus fuck. Why the fuck did that stupid song have to be so goddamn catchy?

Yoongi’s sitting in his hotel suite by the window, staring out at the lush green trees hemming this side of New York’s Central Park. The lights are off, a new sun is rising, and he cannot get the sound of your obnoxious, slurred voice—objectively speaking!—out of his head.

It’s the first time he’s been alone for more than an hour since it happened: the Incident. One second he’d been fleeing the basketball game before the big rush, and the next some drunken, ungainly, English-speaking girl was tripping into him in the middle of the goddamn aisle at Madison Square Park and—

He’s in shock. That’s what this is, right? Shock is what had kept him silent all the way out of the stadium and into Jae’s rental car. Shock is why he hadn’t mentioned what had happened—what he’d felt when you two brushed fingers—until he was safely back at the Ritz-Carlton, and Jae was gone, and Yoongi was alone with nothing but his tingling hand and his addled thoughts in the elevator.

He’d called Namjoon. That seemed like the thing to do—it was three hours earlier in Los Angeles, so he’d probably still be up, and Yoongi’s fingers still felt kind of warm and funny when he’d dialed his leader’s number. He’d just sort of stated it, deadpan, as though he were informing Namjoon of something banal and crude, like that he’d developed a blood blister on his pinky toe.

Hi, Joonah—yeah, the weather in New York is hot. Very hot. This hotel carves its soap into the shape of a flower. Also, I just met my soulmate.

And then he’d hung up. He’d done his part, right? Nothing left to do but wait. As expected, Namjoon had taken care of everything—he immediately informed Sejin, and also the members, and then someone called Kitae, and then everyone knew. All Yoongi had to do was open his room when the first frantic knock sounded at the door. He’d bowed curtly to Sejin, avoiding the older man’s eyes, and then sat in the armchair he’s in now, facing the window, while Kitae and Sejin talked on the phone, buzzing and panicking around him.

Not that he iced them out or anything! Not really. He joined in the conversation when necessary—because of him, it was determined that there was no need to go on the Soulmate Registry, since he remembered the girl’s weird chants! Actually, he’d been listening to her screeching for the better part of the fourth quarter. Not because he liked the sound of her voice, but because she was distracting. And weird. Really weird. Yoongi knew enough English to understand the majority of her lyrics, but then he’d decided on a whim to Naver the term loop dee loop, and then that had kind of put him in a sour mood with the mysterious and loud drunk girl. The nerve of her, to get him to look up a ridiculous term that didn’t even exist! Stupid.

But fate is a cruel mistress, because now Yoongi’s supposed to accept that the drunk, chanting girl is his soulmate? Just like that, huh? Jinjja. The more he thinks about it, the more outlandish the whole thing feels, like a bad set-up to an even more abysmal joke. So, two polar opposite humans walk into a bar, but the bar is actually an aisle, and the walking is tripping, and also now they need one another’s touch to survive—

No. It doesn’t make sense. If any of the members was going to have a soulmate, it was going to be Jungkook. Everyone knew that. The kid was grossly sentimental. He got misty-eyed during The Touch That Touches Back, for fuck’s sake—a campy horror film about a flying fire-breathing baby the size of a banjo! And if it wasn’t Jungkook, it would have been Taehyung, probably. That man loved to cuddle, which seemed like a proper soulmate-y trait to have. Cuddling! Imagine!

Yoongi didn’t like to cuddle. He didn’t even really like to be touched. And he certainly did not want to touch or cuddle up with the girl he’d found on Twitter, captured in distressing clarity on the Jumbotron photo.

God, what the fuck.

This was a disaster. A catastrophe. A bad dream. Why has no one come up with a solution to the entire soulmate conundrum? Yoongi is an important figure in an influential industry that values control.

Okay, fine. Sometimes, the acrobatics that go into making sure the band presents a manicured, idealized persona to the public do fatigue him—Yoongi can admit that. But right now? Now, he wants nothing more than for some merry team of mediators to course-correct his life, which has gone suddenly, horrifically awry. He needs someone to help him right the sail, wrangle the tides, and make this all better. How absurd that this should happen—that he should be bonded with someone who looks like she stuck her finger in an electrical socket in the Jumbotron photo. C’mon. Does she even speak Korean?

He hates this—this feeling of being so profoundly helpless. A part of him even wonders if she—YLN, YN, Sejin had informed him gently, before taking his leave—orchestrated this entire thing. It doesn’t matter if that theory doesn’t make any sense. When you’re an idol, strange things happen all the time. People use you. They plot against you. They don’t care.

For three more hours, Yoongi sits alone, and stares out the window. He greets the dawn with a tired, weary sigh.

In his lap, his hand flexes.

* 

About one thing, Yoongi is absolutely sure:

You’re insane.

What the fuck? He cannot believe you’re his soulmate. There has to have been some sort of cosmic mix-up; the wrong wires got crossed, and now there’s a flaw in the grand design, and some higher deity needs to answer for it. Because you and your weird friend left the Ritz-Carlton a few hours ago, and no matter how many different lenses through which Yoongi views the meeting, he always arrives at the same damning conclusions:

You’re unrefined. You’re loud. You chew with your mouth open! You got crumbs everywhere, for fuck’s sake, and you kept making all these noises when you ate the little pink cakes, like you’d been served heaven on a platter, which is ridiculous, because they were just sweets! Cavity-bombs! Sugar! But you got all breathy and pleased and moany when you bit into them, and the sound was insane, like a bolt of lightning traveling along a copper wire straight down to his—

The hell? He must be fucking out of it. It doesn’t matter what you sounded like when you ate the sweets—it’s not like either of you would be eating food for much longer, so he wouldn’t have to suffer through any repeat performances, thank god. He’s not above small mercies. It’s honestly a really good thing that he wouldn’t have to hear you moaning like that again. Good! Yeah. There’s that settled. He doesn’t have to think about it. He doesn’t have to remember the way you—

Jesus fuck, it’s hot in this hotel room. Isn’t it? He’s burning up. His cheeks are on fire. Because it’s summer, that’s why! Summer in New York. The worst. He clutches his head.

Yoongi wants to go home now.

But he can’t, and so he pours himself a glass of whiskey, and settles back down so he can fume some more. Everything about that meeting was annoying, just as he’d suspected. So what if you wrote? Well, he wrote stuff too. And you weren’t very slick—he could read your fucking face!

Also, he’s a bit ticked that he didn’t get to be the one to suggest that maybe you didn’t move into the dorms right away—because you had to go and bring it up first, and now he looks like the asshole! Like, come on. It’s not like he wanted you in there either! A girl in the dorm? Yeah. Right. Dream on.

And while he’s airing his grievances into his whiskey—why the fuck didn’t you thank him when he got Kitae to shut his trap about you? What, were you raised in a barn? Were you just obtuse? He shook his head irritably. You couldn’t be that stupid if you had gone through so much schooling—not that school was the determining factor between a genius and a bonehead or anything, you just seemed really engaged in your studies, is all. Plus, you’d read a bunch of the books Namjoonie read and liked, and Joonie was gifted, so you had to have at least some serviceable grey matter. Because you’d sounded pretty articulate when you’d lectured Kitae about trust and autonomy and respect, or whatever…

Yoongi frowns into his drink.

But what was an Ellewood? And why did you have such a hard-on for twigs made of lawn—wait, no, leaves made of soil? Leaves made of grass? Yoongi makes a mental note to ask Joonie about it once he gets back from picking up their ramyeon for dinner. Then he Navers the word “chesticles”, and gets mad all over again. What the fuck is up with you and your weird friends? Why couldn’t you guys just speak normal?

Yoongi flexes his hand. Realistically speaking, you probably weren’t actually raised in a barn. Because horses smelled like ammonia and pigs smelled like shit, and he can’t be sure, but he thinks you smelled kind of spicy and sweet, like vanilla or something. Which he only noticed because he had to walk right behind you when you exited the suite for the elevators. He only caught a whiff, it wasn’t anything weird, he just…

Whatever! 

** 

Sejin can be such a dick.

If Princess Hobi wants to send the artist called Kaws—who also lives in New York, by the way!—a fucking bottle of expensive makgeolli to thank him for helping him with some concept art for his next solo album’s cover, then Sejin’s all: “Oh, by all means! Let’s do priority shipping! And wrap it in a cute gift box! What Hoseok wants, Hoseok gets! Of course!”

But if Yoongi wants to send a care package to his soulmate (not because he cares about her like that, or anything! But because, in case everyone else fucking forgot, if she dies, he’s going down with her!) then suddenly the whole thing is “excessive” and “completely gratuitous” and “an unnecessary usage of company funds, Yoongi.”

Which makes no fucking sense, Yoongi thinks grumpily, carrying the package into the post office himself. He convinced an intern to swipe him a company card and signed it: For the plane — Hybe. Why? Oh, because he’s not an idiot. He doesn’t want you to get the wrong idea about, like. How much he’s thinking of you, or anything.

Because, look, the facts are the facts, and facts don’t need to be pretty. The truth is, Yoongi needs to look out for number one. He has a tour coming up—his members and fans are counting on him. Which means he needs to be healthy, which now means that you need to be healthy, too.

So he got you some things. Vitamins, for one—and clearly, based on all those fruity cakes you were shoveling into your mug at the hotel, you have a sweet tooth. You don’t seem adult enough to actually just swallow a pill, so yes, he played it safe and bought you gummy ones instead. Tropical punch flavor, because you seemed to like that pink passionfruit cake best, when you made all those sounds that he sure is glad he will never have to hear again, because what the fuck? Freak.

And obviously you’d need hand sanitizer. And a face-mask. Americans don’t wear them, but you’re half-Korean, so he hopes you won’t think it’s weird. But if you do, tough luck! You’ll just have to get over it! 

At the last minute, he throws in a disinfectant wipe for your phone. Incase you need to use your new Android to contact hi—uh, anyone. He doesn’t know! Emergencies happen! It’s whatever! This has nothing to do with caring about you, this is him caring about himself through you! What, was BTS supposed to go on tour with only six members if he died? He didn’t think so. Who the fuck would perform his verse in Cypher 3? Taehyung could never. It wasn’t fucking happening.

Well, he might as well bump you up to first class while he’s at it. What’s another few thousand bucks on top of the shipping costs for the package? Idly, Yoongi wonders if you’ve ever flown first class as he calls the airline. In his experience, they usually also serve little cakes at the end of the meal in the first class cabin—sometimes, they even throw in champagne. He can just imagine your face lighting up at the sight of the plane desserts—you’d probably even upload a selca to Instagram or something, and that seems like it could be kind of nice, to give something nice to you like that…

Uh, yeah. It would be nice because it wouldn’t do to have you acting like a wide-eyed idiot when it came time to tour! No, Yoongi needed to have you used to flying first class—otherwise, you might blow the cover by being all woo-woo and weird about it! Yeah, he isn’t upgrading your seat to be nice to you, personally. This is business! Very important business! He shoves his keys into his car and zooms away from the post office, in a terrible mood.

*** 

For the record, Yoongi didn’t stay up until two in the morning to make sure you boarded safely. He was just up. Jimin wasn’t the only night owl around these parts! Besides, he had shit to watch. Watch, not read, because sure, so he’d ordered that book Leaves of Grass you and Joon had been yanking your dicks about, but, like, come on. That’s just because he trusted Joonie’s taste. It’s not like Yoongi wanted to know everything you knew or like everything you liked or have something to talk to you about, or anything.

And he’s only watching Legally Blonde because he is actually interested in the law, thank you very much! There’s gonna be a lot of legislative, uh, stuff, that he needs to familiarize himself with, in the event you turn out to be nuts and he has to, like, sue his soulmate or something. He might! It’s good to be prepared. You could be a Ga-young in disguise, it’s not like he would fucking know, he’s an ISTP, not a goddamn oracle!

And it’s not like he’s scrolling through Instagram right before your flight takes off to check on you. He just likes to check in on his friends. Halsey sometimes posts pictures of their baby, and… and…

Oh, so you uploaded a story. Might as well see what that’s about, and…

Uh, ok. Well, it’s annoying that you pasted a Jack Harlow quote over your selca, because actually Jack Harlow was not the musician who put you in first class up in the sky. He, Min Yoongi, had been the one to do that!

But that’s not the point.

Ring…

Ring…

“Yoongi-nim?”

“Hey.” Yoongi’s tone is clipped when Kitae answers the phone. “Listen. I’m going to need you to contact YN immediately.”

Kitae clears his throat, sounding very sleepy—maybe because it’s two in the morning. “Is there—is there an emergency, sir?”

“Yes. She’s not…” Yoongi trails off, huffing, as Reese Witherspoon floats around on-screen on an inflatable donut in the pool. “Look, she boarded her plane to Korea but she’s not taking the proper precautions.”

The other line is silent.

“You mean… she’s not wearing her seatbelt?” Kitae asks.

Moron, Yoongi thinks.

“No, the flight attendants will take care of that.”

“Of course, sir.”

Silence again. Yoongi sighs, pointedly.

“Okay, I am going to send you a message to relay to her. Thank you, Kitae-nim. Good work today.”

“Sir—”

Yoongi hangs up.

Please remember to take your vitamins and wear your mask. Your health is important, and airplanes are breeding grounds for infections.

Satisfied once Kitae confirms he’ll pass the message along, Yoongi settles back in bed, refreshing his Instagram impatiently, tapping his thumb over and over on his screen like he’s doing a mic check.

Jackpot. He’s never clicked on a new story so fast—he opens your latest to see your masked-up face, lit by a weak beam of sunlight streaming through the plane’s window. And your hair looks normal, not at all like it did in the Jumbotron photo. He’s not saying you have good hair! But at least it’s not always so frizzy. His dark eyes roam over the pixels, taking it all in. Weird, how it’s daytime where you are. Soon, you’ll be together again, existing in the same time zone.

Yoongi flexes his hand, ignoring the strange flutter in his stomach.

He goes to sleep.

July

Yoongi’s having a bad fucking day.

It’s late. It’s late on the day that he was supposed to meet the soulmate that he doesn’t even want to have, so he shouldn’t be too upset about having to cancel on her, but he is. Because he doesn’t like flaking. Yoongi’s long believed that what separates Bangtan from the others—the wheat from the chaff—is their integrity. The members do not break their promises; their words are their bonds. They do their best to make their appointments, and to never renege on their commitments. That’s important.

But him and Joon can’t get the fucking dance routine down, so, he had to stay late. It is what it is.

By the time they’re both walking down the hall of the dorm, sweaty and hungry and tired and something else Yoongi doesn’t really want to examine—something that feels a tiny bit like regret—Yoongi wants nothing more than to just stuff his face with whatever leftovers are in the fridge, and then lock himself in his room to mope. He’s annoyed that he had to spend an extra few hours with Ga-young, who is back on her I’m-going-to-flirt-and-try-to-manipulate-you-into-making-Kihyun-jealous bullshit. He’s annoyed that he has to act nice because placating her is the lesser of two evils, and she’s a good dancer, and replacing her right now would be to the detriment of the team. He’s annoyed that now he has to wait another however-long to see you again, not because he wants to see you, but because waiting to see you is making him tense. You’re still an unknown factor, and Yoongi likes control.

He opens the door.

There you are.

He is distantly aware that he needs to do something—he can’t just stand in the entrance, staring at you, and yet, for just a moment, he feels he couldn’t move if his life depended on it. He didn’t expect you to be here. He’d texted you, let you know he had to cancel. But you’re here, laughing and dancing and looking like you did that first night he saw you—like you’re lit from within. Like a girl who’d swallowed the sun.

Before he knows it, he’s stepping forward, because he should greet you, because you’re in his dorm in the flesh and right here, and—

Oh. Okay. So this is gonna be, like, a thing now.

You barrel right into him.

“Yoongi?”

Fuck. He’s paralyzed. He can’t think, he can’t breathe, he can’t do anything but feel you right now. His fingers are digging into your forearms, and it’s like all the stressors of the day are getting scrubbed away—like the plaque caked onto the surface of his brain is getting scraped off and buffed down. He feels brand new, drowning in your warmth; your softness; your scent. Has he lived before this? Surely the purpose of life is to chase this feeling. Currents along his skin spark, all thrumming down to where the two of you are connected—it’s like a perfect transference, the electricity swirling within him pumping into you. You take it so well—you were made to take it; made to receive him, he thinks deliriously—and then give it back to him even better.

Someone’s talking to him—someone’s saying his name, and fuck, how long has he been standing here, staring at you? Seokjin-hyung! Seokjinnie’s speaking!

“You good?” Yoongi asks you, because he’s not going to ask what he really wants to know, which is if you feel what he’s feeling, which is sick to his stomach, actually! This is too much. This is terrifying.

Yoongi drops your arms.

It’s like stepping out of a warm bath and plunging headlong into a frozen lake. The moment the connection is severed, the reality of the situation returns to him. You’re in his dorm. You’re… you were laughing and playing with his members. Like you belonged here. Like this was your home.

What the fuck?

He lets himself fully assess the situation he’s walking into, now—sees the controller in Jungkook’s hand; the coffee table littered with chicken bones and empty beer cans; the way Jimin’s wiping mirth from his eyes. Alright. He’s just going to go wash his face—go take a quick second to gather his thoughts—and then he’ll come back out here and you two will talk and he’ll—

“Uh, dude? Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Yoongi freezes, turning back to face you. In the short time he’s known of your existence, he’s already grown accustomed to some of the faces you make—which is something you should get a handle on, by the way! Are you seriously just that okay with letting yourself be read like that? Are you really that brave?

Uh, okay. That wasn’t a thought he meant to think. He’s fucking tired. And he’s feeling a little threatened by the fact that the new face you’re making is a decidedly displeased one, and it’s directed at him. Back in the hotel, you’d looked… well, call a square a square. You’d looked sort of flustered by him. Intrigued, definitely. It had been kind of cute—or, at least, as endearing as a weird book nerd who moans when she eats dainty cakes can be. Which, not very. Right? He blinks. Flexes his fingers. Right.

But two seconds ago he’d walked in on you laughing and giving happy faces to Hoseok, and Jimin, and Jungkook. So why are you mad at him? What did he do? It doesn’t really seem fair, does it, that you and the other members are all chummy, when the only emotion you seem to have reserved for him is… disappointment. You’re looking at him like he’s a letdown.

It fucking sucks.

No, it’s fine. He can fix this. He just needs to take back control—to fall back on the tried-and-true teasing shit Army loves so much.

“What? Were you expecting a kiss?”

Your mouth drops open. Your eyes narrow.

Well, shit, Yoongi thinks.

It’s going to be a long night.

* 

Once you’re gone, Yoongi returns to the dorm and storms into Jimin’s room. Because he has questions.

“What fried chicken flavor did she like the most?” He rounds on the younger member, crossing his arms stonily.

“Uh, I don’t know, hyung…”

The fuck?

“You didn’t notice? Jiminah, how could you not notice?!” Yoongi could punch a wall. You moaned when you ate things you liked! Jimin must be pabo to not clock which flavor you’d enjoyed best, but fine. Whatever. Yoongi was thinking of apologizing for the miscommunication by sending over some chicken to you for lunch tomorrow (not that he should have to apologize! He’d texted you that he had to cancel, hadn’t he? How was he supposed to know the message didn’t go through?) but he guesses that option is out the window, now…

“I was paying more attention to the game, hyung, she was really invested…”

“In Overcooked, you mean?” Yoongi says. “So, what, she likes video games?”

“I don’t know…”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” For fuck’s sake, Jimin is useless. “You should pay attention!”

“Well—”

“Ah, Jiminah, she’s from New York!” Yoongi says accusatorially, as if this is some great, irrefutable offense. “She’s insane, all she does is make up ridiculous songs and read books and talk about poetry with Namjoonah.”

“Hyung…”

“She doesn’t even remember to wear a mask on the plane, Jiminah, she must be so irresponsible! I’m pretty sure she didn’t trip, either. I bet she did the bend and snap in order to meet me, which probably makes her a sasaeng, don’t you think?”

“The bend and huh?”

“You know, I bet she doesn’t even like basketball,” Yoongi hisses. “By the way, on my way to your room, I overheard Jungkookie say she ate the last piece of honey butter chicken, so clearly she’s a very selfish girl—”

“Yah! Can I speak?”

“Hey,” Yoongi says, stilling as a previous concern returns to him. “You said she fainted? Do you think she needs to go to the doctor?”

He listens with narrowed eyes as Jimin fills him in on how he’d found you collapsed at the door, and then scoffs.

“You picked her up? Jiminah, you can’t just pick my soulma—a strange girl up!” he lectures, biting back the absurd follow-up question that rises, unbidden, to the tip of his tongue: how does her skin feel to you? Warm? Perfect?

“She’s not a stranger! Me and YNie are friends, now.”

Yoongi’s mouth pops open.

“What do you mean you’re friends?” he presses, a strange sort of fury simmering in his gut. “How can you—how can you two be friends? What did she say to make you think she likes you now?”

One hour later, Yoongi stomps up to his room, still tired, still hungry, and no closer to understanding anything about you. And Jimin had the gall to fucking laugh as he shoved him out the door.

Fuck that guy!

** 

So, apparently you don’t care if Yoongi flirts with his backup dancers—even one as unappealing as Ga-young—and you want to be his just-friend. His soulmate-just-friend. Which is really great. Just what he was hoping for. Just friends with his weird, whacko soulmate, with the really soft, spicy vanilla-scented hands! Perfect! Yeah.

Jungkook had hinted earlier in the day that you weren’t feeling well, so he decided to call you and offer his… uh, services? It sounds creepy putting it like that. Like, hey, wanna drop by the lab and let me… touch your body? For your physical betterment?

At the last minute, he lied, and made it seem like he was the tired one. He’s glad you accepted it without question. If you’d pressed, he would have told you the truth.

He’s also sort of glad you ended up short on time, and had to stay with him for your interview. It was… interesting, listening to you speak in English. He couldn’t understand much—something about a Carmen Ma-blahblah, an author you liked that he’d have to look up—but you’d seemed… passionate. Eager. Like maybe you could be happy, here—like maybe the fact that you’d had to move countries and quit your job and be his soulmate and get stood up (even though you hadn’t been, really, but the optics weren’t on his side) and spend the day hungover could just be things that happened to you, and not your undoing.

It’s a relief, he thinks, that you refuse to be caged by him.

It’s a relief, he thinks, that the shackle Yoongi’s life has forced around your ankle appears to be no match for your wings.

*** 

Seriously, fuck Park Jimin.

Fuck him for making so many snide remarks this past week, just because Yoongi snapped at Taehyung during dinner when he’d interrupted some weird monologue you’d been giving about flamingo thighs. He didn’t do it because he was so desperate to hear what you had to say, necessarily—it’s just rude to interrupt people! Yoongi’s older, he has a responsibility to keep the younger members in line.

Fuck Park Jimin for snickering just because Yoongi had mentioned you’d dropped by Genius Lab the other night. Yes, it’s true that no one—not even the members—had been allowed in there for years, now. But what good did it accomplish to point it out?

Fuck Park Jimin for video calling you when you were out with your friends watching the Banpodaegyo Bridge Rainbow Fountain show, and for staring at Yoongi with his wide, blue eyes—why was he wearing colored contacts at the dorm, anyway? Who was he trying to impress?—when that moron Luke Ass leaned in to kiss you.

Fuck Park Jimin for dragging Yoongi into the office right now—directly after a grueling dance practice and minutes before you’re slated to arrive for dinner—to lecture Yoongi about his relationship with you.

Just, fuck this.

“Fuck this,” Yoongi says, crossing his arms and staring determinedly at the door. 

“Hyung.” Jimin shakes his head. “You’re being an idiot.”

“You shouldn’t give advice on things you don’t understand, Jiminah.”

“I understand this,” Jimin says—snootily, Yoongi thinks. “Trust me. You’re shooting yourself in the foot.”

“Big talk from a small man,” Yoongi says, which doesn’t even make any sense. Jimin is, like, a centimeter shorter than him at best. It doesn’t matter. He needs to shut this down.

“Just answer me this, hyung, and I’ll leave you alone, okay?” Jimin says, steepling his hands, perhaps anticipating that Yoongi’s about to make his great escape. “What kind of relationship do you want with YN?”

Uh, no. They aren’t doing this. They aren’t going there. Not now, and maybe not ever.

“Drop it, Jimin.”

“Don’t do that.” Jimin pouts. “It’s not a difficult question. Don’t be evasive.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“You like her,” Jimin presses, leaning forward slightly. “It’s obvious. Why don’t you just tell her?”

“Because it doesn’t matter,” Yoongi says without thinking, and at the triumphant gleam that sparks in Jimin’s eyes at the admission, he quickly backtracks. “I mean, it wouldn’t, if that was the case. YN talked to me, all right?”

“Oh?”

“She wants to be friends.”

“Friends.”

“Just friends.” Yoongi shoves his hands in his pockets; somewhere outside the office, he hears muffled voices, and then—yup, you’ve arrived. He can recognize that laugh anywhere, now.

“Uh, hyung.” Jimin has the nerve to giggle. “People don’t act the way YN does when she’s around you if they’re interested in being just friends. Didn’t you see how flustered she got over Rina suggesting she had a crush on you?”

Yoongi had noticed that, because he is not an idiot—Jimin’s the idiot for always reading into things that aren’t there. Maybe you reacted so strongly because you’d been embarrassed, and because you wanted to kiss the ugly guy from Daehyun’s work who’d compared your laugh to the honk of magpie geese.

“Hyung, we’re about to go on tour,” Jimin presses. “You and YN are going to be sharing a room. A bed.”

“Don’t be presumptuous,” Yoongi mutters, refusing to meet Jimin’s eye. He actually needs to have that talk with you today—Sejin’s going to be discussing the rooming situation with you soon, and he thinks you should have a head’s up about that conversation. It would be easier if you two shared a bed, sure, but he’s not going to force you…

Unbidden, his imagination conjures up an image of you in pajamas—flannel ones, nothing fancy or revealing—in his bed, and heat immediately crawls up his neck. What the fuck? Why would that make him—nah. The air conditioner must be broken again. That’s the only thing that makes how flustered he feels make sense.

Except that vision is just the first, the one that precedes the carousel of images that suddenly floods his mind: you, flushed and happy, with your hair fanned out over his pillow; your leg slung over his in sleep; you, stretching in the morning, the motion making your shirt crawl up, revealing a sliver of your stomach. He’d never touched your stomach before. He wonders if different parts of your body would feel different to him, and to you—if the soulmate connection got stronger or weaker depending on which parts of his skin pressed against yours. Not like he’d ever float that idea aloud, or anything—he’s not some opportunist creep!—though if you mentioned it to him, he’d be willing to explore that with you.

Let’s see. First, he’d drag his finger down your spine, real slow, and then trace circles over your stomach; he’d be gentle and attentive, eyes on your face so he could track your reactions. Maybe he could use his lips, too, or his tongue, to conquer every last inch of your body. If you’d let him, he’d dip down to finish right between your thighs. Would you like that? Fuck. You’d look sweet, all fucked-out like that. Yeah, he could make it feel real good for you…

“Okay,” Jimin’s voice shatters the spell. “You don’t want to be with YN like that. Fine.” Yoongi pretends not to hear the sarcasm dripping off Jimin’s words. “You’re probably right that she doesn’t want you either.” Yoongi’s eyes narrow reflexively at that. “At least apologize for being such an ass that first day. She didn’t deserve that, and if there’s tension between you, it’s going to affect tour.”

Jimin doesn’t give Yoongi a chance to respond before storming into the living room, which is annoying, because actually, Yoongi had been thinking about how to apologize to you for the better half of the week all on his own. He didn’t need prompting. Why was everyone always making him out to be some kind of asshole? Just because he acted like an asshole? Whatever. Fuck that guy.

He continues the night, steadfastly not thinking about how his stomach dropped when Jimin suggested you might not like him anyway.

And he definitely doesn’t think too closely about the sickness that ripples through him when you confirm that, yes, you do want to be his just-friend.

All of that’s great. It would only suck if he actually liked you.

If he thought you were pretty. And smart. And fearless and weird and funny and cool and oh wait. 

Oh hell.

He does.

**** 

It is as you’re declaring Yoongi as your sworn nemesis at the (soon-to-be-defunct) dinner table that an overwhelming realization snaps through him. The world shifts under his feet, spinning off its former axis, and in the work of a moment, he’s thrusted into a new and terrifying reality where he must confront the truth.

Yoongi wants you.

He—oh, fuck—he really, really wants you. He’s admitted his physical attraction to himself, and he knows by now that he’s intrigued by you—not just your spunk or your humor or the references that seem to erupt out of you, like steam from a kettle, but…

But there was something about the way your face lit up when you’d talked about books with that interviewer—it was like staring at a gentle sun. And he likes how you’re not afraid to dish back the sass the boys serve you, and finds himself wondering whether you were born with that spirit, or if it’s something you worked for; something you had to learn.

He’s seen the way you look at him sometimes, and he thinks he knows what it means. You’re attracted to him, too. But you never cow down to him and you never apologize, even when he can tell—based on weeks of careful observation—that you’re feeling insecure.

So where does that leave him?

He wants you—not just your free pockets of time at the dinner table, or your pencil’d in charging dates when you both get low on energy. Soon, he knows, he’ll have more of you to himself—he’ll have your late evenings, after he’s done with his concerts. He’ll have your midnights and your dawns. He’ll have your shoulders and your arms; you’ll have his chest and his back, if you want them. The parts of each other that make sense to press together at night while you sleep together and recharge.

But he wants more. Not all of you, not yet (he has a lifetime to work up to that, he supposes) but… he wants more than your idle in-betweens; he wants you to welcome his touch outside of medicinal necessity. He doesn’t only want to hold you and be held by you when you’re forced together in sleep.

That’s why he follows you out into the hall.

That’s why he traces the backs of his fingers down your cheek.

He needs to see if he’s too late.

He needs to see if it’s possible—if one day, if he plays his cards right—for you to want him, too. 

You shudder, and when Yoongi goes to sleep that night, the pretty little gasp you let out when his fingers touched your skin weaves its way into his dreams. There’s something about a concert, and he’s rapping to a sold-out show in the nude, and you’re on stage, too, trying to hand him Blind-Charmander so that he can hide his shame with the giant plushie. Yoongi doesn’t mind being naked; he’s fine to continue the show.

But even so, you reach for him.

He touches you, and you gasp.

***** 

Yoongi doesn’t feel any particular way about corn, or granny panties, or the word corn emblazoned on granny panties, but Jesus fuck, you have a great ass. He saw it. He didn’t mean to really see it, but now he can’t unsee it, all round and pert and begging to be slapped, and now he’s thinking of looping his thumbs in the band of those panties and slowly dragging them down…

Uh, no. Nuh uh. He’s a gentleman, and gentlemen don’t pop boners against their soulmate’s back while they’re waxing poetic about bodega cats and breakfast sandwiches and Big Life Changes he’d help set in motion. So as you shift in his arms, all drunk and content and newly employed—you’d gotten the job, just like he knew you would; something like pride had bloomed in his chest when you’d hugged him earlier that day, with a smile on your face and starlight in your eyes—Yoongi focuses on the one thing he has to do tomorrow: 

Yoongi is gonna make Jeon Jungkook throw those fucking perilla leaves into the trash.

August

Holy shit.

Yoongi stares down at the chicken left on his near-full plate in dubious wonder. He knew this was coming, of course—he’d had plenty of time to prepare himself for its inevitability, but it’s one thing to anticipate something in the abstract, and another thing to abruptly find yourself on the other side of it so concretely.

He can’t taste food anymore. That’s it. There’s no turning back.

Is it strange, that he’s not afraid? Objectively, he feels like he should still be working through feelings of bitterness, and mourning the follies of youth this entire thing has supposedly robbed him of, or whatever. Neither of you are even out of your twenties yet—you’re not supposed to have everything figured out and set in stone—he should be panicking, right? You’re a recent graduate, eager to make your mark, and he’s a guy in a popular band with money to blow and the world at his feet. You should both be out meeting people, and making mistakes, and sowing your wildin’-out oats, or whatever that phrase is he learned in one of Walt Whitman’s poems. He’s been reading Leaves of Grass each night before bed for you. 

But he doesn’t want to. He likes you. For him, it’s simple. The only thing scaring him—the thing that’s scared him for a while now, actually—is that the circumstances of his life will push you too far, and you’ll grow to resent him. Could he endure knowing that you’re miserable because of him? He doesn’t want you to think of him as a restriction. He wants to hold your hand, not clasp a cuff around your wrist.

He gives you his key that night and wonders, when you stare at it with that little furrow between your brows, if you can read the promise he’s trying to make—that you never have to feel alone again, if you don’t want to; that he’s here, if you want him—in its jagged silver teeth.

* 

Yoongi’s drunk.

Jimin is pouring himself another glass of champagne, and Hoseok is dancing, and Taehyung is dizzy, and Yoongi fucking misses you.

It doesn’t make sense. He literally saw you this morning. But also, it makes all the sense in the world, because when he boils it down, wanting you is just that: a want. And Yoongi has always been someone to run after what he wants.

He wants you.

Tonight is weird. They’ve only been home from the Melon Awards for half an hour, and Yoongi’s already fielded several calls from Sejin because of that stunt Ga-young pulled. The internet, as expected, is blowing the incident out of proportion, and he’s feeling kinda used, which makes him feel shitty, which wars with the part of him that feels awesome, because it is fucking awesome that they won. They won, and did you see him perform? Did you like it? He really liked your article. About Carmen. He’s getting her book, and already paid a translator to email him every time one of your articles comes out, so he can keep up with your work…

Fuck, it feels really fucking good to win, and now he’s drunk, and…

And he just wants to fucking be with you. It sucks that he isn’t right now. It’s fucking stupid. And Yoongi’s not stupid.

So.

Aha! He pulls out the key you gave him from his pocket like it’s Excalibur—like he, Min Yoongi, has finally pulled the magic sword from the stone, and now the good times can finally start rolling.

“Yoongiyah?” Seokjin says, windshield wiper laugh grating Yoongi’s ears. “What are you doing?”

Yoongi’s sat on the couch in the dorm, one hand still raised victoriously in the air. Namjoon has his eyebrow cocked. Jimin’s poorly concealing his giggles.

“Nothing,” Yoongi says flatly, unbothered as he rises from the couch.

“Leaving,” he corrects two seconds later, already dialing a car.

He no longer resents the whoops and cheers that sound behind him as he stumbles out the front door.

It feels good, he thinks, that other people can see it—it being the thing. The thing blossoming between the two of you. He used to be nettled when people teased him about Suran, but when it comes to you, it’s different. Maybe even nice. It’s almost like proof if other people have picked up on it, that they believe that you and he could maybe, someday, be—

Ugh, whatever. Now’s not the time for thinking.

It’s just nice.

** 

Two things:

One, if Yoongi never gets to see you in that black dress again, he is going to go sit down in front of a rockslide. It’s fine that you missed his concert, and fine that you chose one night of following your own dreams—(he’s glad that you can still do that; glad that you’ve found your path forward, despite being yoked to his side)—over one of his shows. Just… he would do terrible, depraved things to see you in that dress again.

Seriously.

What the fuck.

Two, he’s either going to learn how to make the best fucking songpyeon South Korea has ever seen by next Chuseok, or he’s going to die trying.

Die trying, or meet his end when your Eomma pummels him to death with her wet hot dogs for ruining the holiday.

Whichever comes first.

*** 

Welp, that’s a wrap. He had a good run, but now Yoongi’s done for.

The hell? He’s sitting on the hotel room floor, slumped over himself like an unwrung mop, feeling hampered, and tired, and alone.

So this is what crisis feels like—what it really means to push yourself to the very edge. Jungkook used to do this, sometimes. Jimin, too. Yoongi always worked hard—he prided himself on being a good worker; on accepting his mortal limits and knowing when to hit the breaks—but it’s been hours since he charged with you and he’s almost delirious with need, overcome with a primal, animal desire to survive this. To survive you.

When you enter the hotel room, it’s like his brain parkours out the window. You come in, a haze of color and sound—you’re babbling; you’re beautiful—and even though he’d thought he was dying, now he thinks he might actually die. It scares him. You are scary to him. He likes to be in control, and now he’s spiraling, now he’s almost wretched with needing you. He’ll beg if he has to. He will. He’s a sinner, but maybe you’ll show him mercy. You need to come down, you need to be on him—on his lap, on his tongue, in his arms, just there—and it needs to be okay if he doesn’t ever want to let you go.

Is that possible? he thinks as you stand above him, spewing some nonsense about how you’re going to donkey kick the tired off his… whatever, it doesn’t matter. He closes his eyes, and tries to imagine it: a world in which he doesn’t have to wonder. In which he opens his arms to you, and you come into them willingly. A world in which he doesn’t have to open them at all, because you’ve already placed yourself there, next to his heart.

Fuck it.

“C’mere,” Yoongi says, and then you’re there, you’re right where he needs you, and he’s drowning in you now, but it is a heavenly drowning. Suddenly his impossible dream doesn’t seem so far out of reach; not when you moan in his ear. Not when the tension holding you tight loosens as he handles your body, shoving your face into his neck. You have undone him. He wants to take you apart, and prove to you he knows how to put you back together.

He’s been paying attention. He could do it, he thinks. Better than anyone.

Do you trust him?

September

“I know you.”

Later, long after you’ve passed out and Yoongi’s crawled into bed beside you, he thinks of how you’d balked at those three small words, and he decides he doesn’t regret saying them.

You’d gotten drunk. Too drunk—not the kind that speaks to a one-off night of excess spent with friends, but something that looks closer to a binge. Ga-young had burrowed herself under your skin some time ago, like some terrible, aching splinter. He realizes that now. And tonight, you’d gone too far because you didn’t know how to tell Yoongi you didn’t want to be just friends anymore.

That’s not arrogance. He knows what you want, just like he knows you’re not ready for it yet. He’s being patient. It’s unbearable. It’s unbearable because he wants to just hurry up and cut to the section of your story where everything’s seamless—where you’ve both confessed to each other, and no more fears and unknowns stand in your way.

Yeah. It sucks that he had to delve into the whole sordid tale to ease your worries—that he had to explain exactly what happened with Suran and Ga-young, and how he’d acted back then. It’s not that he wanted to shield you from the truth, or anything. He’s accepted he’s lacking. But sometimes it seems preposterous that you don’t just know all of it already; sometimes he feels so close to you he actually forgets he’s only known you for a handful of months. Not even 100 days.

If he could, he would just export his brain onto a flash drive and place it in your hands, granting you unrestricted access to whatever files and memories you needed to peruse at any given time for reassurance. He trusts you. He has nothing to hide. But he also doesn’t want to hurry you. If he does that, you’ll crumble. You’ll panic.

He doesn’t want to lose you.

So he’ll wait patiently and he’ll keep trying to show you all the ways in which he knows you—because he does. He does. He knows you better than you’re willing to let yourself be known.

He’s patient because you’re letting him in. He’s breaking through. Slowly, slowly.

It will be worth it at the end.

It’s just a matter of time.

* 

Yoongi could live to be ten thousand years old, and he’ll still never forgive himself for making you bow to him.

Fuck. Everything’s in shambles. It was going great, and he thought he knew, but now he’s waiting in some stupid private suite in the stupid hospital and Jae is outside and Yoongi’s alone and…

He’s crying again.

Yoongi doesn’t cry often. It’s not that he looks down on the act, or thinks there’s anything wrong with it, or anything—lord knows he’s seen Taehyung and Jungkook and even Namjoon shed enough tears enough over the years, and they’re some of the people he respects most in the world.

But Yoongi cries as a last resort. He cries when it means he’s out of options—out of facts, figures, logic and patience and pathways through the hurt or the problem.

He cries when it goes dark.

Fuck. Fuck! It was awful. And it happened because he was wrong. He didn’t listen. He doubted you, and made you bow, and then you—

You went down like a rag doll. He could see when it was about to happen, like you were standing on borrowed time. Your body went limp, but you remained upright, like some sort of ornament on a wire. Then you crumpled. He couldn’t even hear the thump when your body hit the ground. It was too noisy backstage, there was too much going on.

Yoongi ran for you. Tried to, anyway. He can’t tell if it makes him feel better or worse that Sejin and Namjoon noticed, and that they intervened. He was assured you’d be all right. Seokjin-hyung got him on stage.

It’s not all right. He thought he knew you. He thought he was paying attention, that he knew how to listen.

But that’s not quite right. He was doing all those things.

Wasn’t he?

The moonlight pools at his feet and he stares out the hospital window, at the few pale stars shining out above Oakland’s city lights. They seem so dull now.

Maybe there’s something else to this whole thing—to being with someone—entirely. Something that spans beyond careful observation and accepting someone’s quirks and the small intimacies that come from shared time and familiarity.

Maybe he does know you. Maybe the problem is just that he’s still learning how to accept that people—you—can’t be compartmentalized. Yoongi likes compartmentalization. All the members do. There’s the Bangtan box (which is split into three subcategories: the interview box, the on-stage box, and the photo/video shoot box), and the Agust D box, and the off-duty-at-home-with-his-parents-in-Daegu box, and now there’s the you box. Yoongi made the mistake of believing that with enough attention and observation, the boxes would adhere to logic. They could be contained.

Yoongi didn’t believe that you felt bad, because he didn’t feel bad, and so consequently, you should have been fine. But you are a human, not a conditional statement. Your emotions, your actions, your truths—they are not the product of some solvable equation. They exist beyond patterns and logic. They sometimes defy reason.

He is not in control.

That’s it. That’s what scares him. Yoongi likes to be in control. The illusion that he has power—that if he just applies himself, he has the ability to wrangle his problems into submission—is what keeps him running; keeps him from collapsing under the pressure that sometimes feels like it’s caving in on him from all sides.

But you are not a problem to be handled.

You are large. You contain multitudes.

You’re you.

And Yoongi’s still Yoongi. The fundamental parts of him aren’t going to change. He knows that. But maybe loving someone means loosening the reins up a bit—or maybe, just maybe, it means accepting that he never had his hands on the reins at all. It’s a terrifying thought, but one that’s made a little more bearable when you’re brought into the room and placed on the hospital bed: still alive. Still breathing. Maybe his boxes are all scattered, and the files in his mind are all strewed across the floor.

At least he doesn’t have to face the uncertainty alone.

At least he has you.

Yoongi crawls into bed and slips his hand under your shirt, placing it softly over your incision.

He can’t promise that he won’t make mistakes, but he can damn sure vow he won’t make the same mistake twice.

October

He loves you.

He loves you.

He loves you.

He watched you bow, and now he drops to his knees for you.

* 

He loves you—yes, you—he loves you.

(What do you want?)

He hopes you know.

November 1st

Dawn bleeds into morning and then morning gives way to afternoon, silver moonlight erased by a golden sun. Through it all, Yoongi remains in his penthouse apartment. Alone. Right where you left him.

He showers, because that seems to his shell-shocked mind to be as good a first step as any. He brushes his teeth; puts his hair in a bun; casts a mournful glance at his now-obsolete espresso machine. And then…

Fuck.

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t fucking know.

What now? He wiles the brightest hours of the day away in his office, dipping in and out of memories that flash in his mind like shards of cut glass. He just can’t shake the feeling that he’s missing something. He has to be. None of this makes any fucking sense.

Did he make it up? Has he been misreading the signs? Being with you last night had felt, to him, like the culmination of something—like an unfinished puzzle that had finally found its last piece, and stitched itself together. It had felt good. No, not just good. It had felt right, being with you like that.

There’s a heavy weight in his throat, like he’s trying to swallow his own heart and failing. Yoongi hates this. He hates that you were here and now you’re gone. It is as nauseating as it is relieving, knowing that you’ll have to find your way back to him eventually. You’re still bonded. You’re still soulmates. You still need him to survive. He’s going to see you again.

But when? That’s the question. And what the fuck will you have to say?

He can’t bring himself to call you. If you wanted him to know what was up, he’d know by now—of that, he’s certain. If Yoongi were someone else—someone like Jimin, perhaps, or Taehyung—he’d reach out to a friend. He’d crowdsource, ask for some advice.

But he’s Yoongi. Still the same old Min fucking Yoongi. Usually, that’s fine—he wears his name proudly, like a crown—but right now, himself doesn’t feel like a very good person to be.

So he puts a record on; he pours himself a glass of whiskey; he wonders why the fuck he still hasn’t moved his toy basketball hoop somewhere actually conducive to playing—and for the first time in months, he settles in to endure the terror of the unknown alone.

His phone pings.

Yoongi looks down.

His heart sinks, and he chastises himself for even letting himself get his hopes up. It isn’t you, and it’s not his members, and it’s not even his management team.

It’s an email.

A fucking email? Nope. Ignore. He doesn’t want to be reminded that work and life will continue to trudge on around him. It feels preposterous. How can the world keep spinning? You were here, and now, impossibly, you are not. It’s wrong. It’s ridiculous. He entered this apartment through the door he’s staring at with you, and alone, you walked out of it. He remembers, already, how he’d made a vow to himself to remember you etched in the moonlight. He would have knelt before you a thousand more times.

Why did you leave?

Again, the pinging. How can work continue on when Yoongi’s universe feels cloven in two? He’s not gonna fucking answer. If he has to deal with his soulmate abandoning him, then the music industry can live without bothering him for ten fucking minutes.

By the third ping, Yoongi’s feeling testy. He’s raw and itching for a fight. With a look that could wither the bowels, Yoongi swipes his thumb to unlock his screen and glances down at his inbox.

It’s a notification for an article. Okay. Whatever. Over the past month, he’s adopted your habit of kickstarting his mornings by scrolling through mindless fluff pieces—“I’ve been a fashion designer for 9 days. Here are 5 trends that are in and 6 that will make you look like a virgin who can’t drive!” was a good one you’d shown him; he’d also liked “8 Things You Didn’t Know About The Great Emu War of 1932”—but he could give two shits about how emus are the only birds with calf muscles (alarming as that was to learn) today.

And when he sees that the article in his inbox is about BTS, his mood sours even further. He doesn’t care to read think-pieces about the band—most are foolish at best, and so offensive as to actually be amazing at worst. How this one slipped through his spam filters, he doesn’t—

Wait. He recognizes the sender. The email’s from the woman he’d hired to translate your articles when they came out so he could read them.

Yoongi opens the email.

Dear Yoongi-nim, I hope you’re doing well. Here’s YN’s latest! Sincerely, Binna

And then the next email.

Whoops, sorry—I forgot to attach the article! All my best, Binna

And the third.

GAH! Sorry! Please find attached YN’s essay, published today, this time in both the original English and your Korean translation. -B

Yoongi’s thumb glides toward the attachments like a glacier with an agenda—he knows he’s going to open the article. He wants to, even. But he’s scared, and he still doesn’t know quite how to exist in this state of fear. It’s confusing. He’s unused to this hesitancy. Yoongi’s a doer, but just like last night, he finds himself stalling for time. This could be it—the moment he learns, conclusively, that you don’t want him. Curiosity thrums through his body, but it’s tinged with dread. He can’t shake the feeling that something really heavy is about to land on him once his thumb connects with the screen.

Ah, well. Here goes nothing.

Yoongi opens the attachment.

The screen loads, and then an article appears. It went live at 3:09 PM.

Title: What I Want

Author: YLN YN

Subtitle: 7 Things My BTS-Bias Taught Me About Being Brave (You’ll Gasp At Number 3!)

Yoongi blinks, puffing out his first, small laugh of the day—he’s listened to you rage about the “redundant and creatively restrictive” formatting of so many online media articles and your disdain for “clickbait fodder” more times than he can count. You’ve whispered your frustrations to him while lying in bed in all those different hotel rooms; you’ve groused to him about it when you two were charging backstage; he’s even overheard you whining on your phone conversations with Daehyun and Hana. Yoongi’s willing to bet good money you didn’t come up with your subtitle on your own—he can imagine your resigned scoff when you typed it into the word processor.

Cute.

He begins to read.

Progressing through your piece feels a bit like standing on a stranded boat during the sunset; it feels like trying to trace the last strands of sunlight tangled in the waves, because he knows they’ll lead him somewhere good. Back to shore.

You begin by describing how, based on your “observations”, all seven of the members seem like considerate, perceptive people: the kind of men who would not hesitate to pick you up if you were injured (which Jimin had done, Yoongi muses), or inconvenience themselves to make someone else comfortable (like how the maknaes had come out to the couches the first night you spent in the dorm; Yoongi’s throat constricts at the memory).

And then you name your bias, and… and it’s not Jung Hoseok.

Yoongi can literally feel his heart stir in his chest, as though it’s waking up from a seasons-long slumber.

He closes his eyes.

He remembers you glowing with moonlight.

It’s him.

It’s him.

He reads on.

You say Yoongi’s taught you that it’s okay to want to believe in people; that it’s okay to want to put your trust in the people who have shown, time and again, that they won’t betray it. That it’s not cowardly to submit, but instead courageous to approach life as a team sport; as a shared effort. Because letting someone love you the way they’d like to—accepting that you’re deserving of someone’s focus and attention—is brave, but it’s also the bare minimum of what you deserve. You don’t have to accomplish some great feat to earn love or respect.

You say that Yoongi showed you it’s okay to be vulnerable; that if you surround yourself with people who care—(even though it’s hard, you commiserate, to trust)—they won’t weaponize your softness against you. Yoongi reminds you that there’s no wrong way to express yourself; no wrong or weak way to be.

You say that Yoongi’s convinced you that success is relative, and yours to define—you get to set the metric. You get to choose.

But you do have to choose, you emphasize. You do have to choose.

You end the piece with a question that has Yoongi holding his breath.

What do I want? you write.

I want to tell him: thank you. I trust you. I am made braver by you.

Let’s walk together, side by side, for the rest of our lives.

Yoongi blinks. Reads it again.

For the rest of our lives.

Yoongi stares at those words for a long, long time. He is still staring at them when they dissolve in front of his eyes as a phone call comes through.

“Hello?”

“Good afternoon, Yoongi-nim,” a male voice says pleasantly. “This is your building’s front desk calling. I’m afraid there’s a young woman here who is… er, quite insistent she be let up to come see you.”

“A young woman.”

“Sir,” the man replies. He lowers his voice. “It’s hard to describe. She said you two are nemeses but really you’re her bias and that she knows you have an alert for her writing on your phone and that you’ll understand. Then she said good-bye, front deskman, I’ve got to go, got to leave it all behind and face the truth—”

“Yeah,” Yoongi says.

“And now she’s singing off-pitch and waving around just this insanely big bouquet of yellow flowers—”

Yoongi nods. “Course she is.”

“Scaramouch!” Yoongi swallows, hard, as your whatever-the-opposite-of-dulcet-is tones crackle through the receiver. “Will you do me the honor of this fandango?”

“So, shall I call the authorities?” the man asks genially.

“Nah.” Yoongi heads over to unlock his front door. His feet don’t even touch the ground. He floats back to hover next to the couch, as though lofted there by wings. “Send her up.”

“Right you are, sir,” the man says in the same agreeable tone, even though he surely believes he’s about to help facilitate Yoongi’s funeral.

Suddenly, you stop singing in the background.

The line goes dead.

Yoongi turns and he stares at the door and he waits for you to come home to him.

The moment you’re out of the lift you blast right through Yoongi’s front door, hot and reckless like fire through stubble. There’s the leather armchair. There’s the record player; it’s on. It’s playing a song. And there’s Yoongi by the couch, looking at you like you’re some sort of goofy revenant—like if Casper put on a wig and also had really great boobies. He steps backward, eyes wide, toward that stupid basketball hoop on the outside of the office door that makes no fucking sense still.

“You’re back,” Yoongi says.

“Uh, doy!” you say with a gormless grin, immediately regretting your wording. Mayday! Code blue! Regroup! Regroup! You’re running on two hours of sleep, a fuck-ton of soul charge, and a lifetime of unrealistic expectations of romance formed by watching too many (is there such a thing?!) rom-coms.

Will it be enough?

“Here,” you say, thrusting your hand forward. “I brought flowers.”

“YN.” Yoongi doesn’t move. “You’re bleeding.”

“I—huh?” You raise your hands to your face, and are shocked to discover several beads of blood oozing down your fingers.

Thorns, you realize, dropping the bouquet unceremoniously to the floor—your floral gauntlet, thrown.

Yoongi continues to stare at you and not move.

“I wore your underwear when I left this morning,” you say, looking back up at him. Your tone is casual, as if you’re discussing the weather. “But then I went back to the dorm to change. Just in case you were wondering where your purple briefs with the coconut pattern went when you got dressed. They are so silky.”

Yoongi stays silent.

“Now I’m wearing my corn-ties,” you clarify.

Your soulmate remains, as always, as loquacious as a slab of fossilized rock.

“So.”

“I know,” he finally replies. 

Your eyes bug out. “What? How?”

“Not about the corn-ties.” He waves his hand. “Just that you went back to the dorm. Because you’re not wearing your Katara costume anymore. Look, YN, I didn’t expect you to—”

“I know,” you say, and you’re back in Yoongi’s bed and the lights are dim, the moon is bright, and he’s telling you to look at him—telling you to take a breath—and you’re listening. Last night happened. It was real. It matters. You’re trying to show him.

Just take what you fucking want.

“Before you say anything,” you rush on, “I know you read my essay.”

Yoongi hasn’t moved. Doesn’t seem to plan on it anytime soon.

You soldier on.

“I’m not crazy,” you say, crazily. “Although I think your front doorman might call the police on me, so it’s probably better that I get this all out pronto. He wasn’t listening to me when I asked to come up, so I thought, ok, I’ll give him the ol’ razzle-dazzle—”

Here, you pantomime something truly unspeakable with your fingers.

“—but he was stubbornly unmoved by my singing. Thank god you picked up his call, my phone is dead. Anyway…”

Your fingers are still wiggling mid-air, you realize, so you drop them to your side, anticipating a rejoinder that continues to not come. You stomp your foot.

“Yoongi, can you stop?”

“Stop what?”

You gesture at him vaguely. “Doing that thing where you stand around, and continue to be… all the way that you are and everything! With your man bun and your silence and white tee and earrings and… stuff!” 

Yoongi’s lip twitches. You see it. You do.

“YN…”

“NO!” You erupt. “No talky! No namey! Be quiet!”

“But—”

Jesus. What the fuck isn’t this man getting?

“I’m trying to make a grand gesture here, Meeyooee!” you whine.

Yoongi bites his lip.

“Oh?” he drawls.

You want to crawl into the belly of a killer whale. “Yeah!”

“Huh.” He crosses his arms, looking just as he did that first time you really saw him at the Ritz-Carlton. Lazy. Taunting. Incredible. Seriously, how dare he put his hair in a bun? “Get to it then, Princess.”

That bastard. Pet names? At a time like this? Where does he get the nerve?!

Now that Meeyooee’s given you the floor, you don’t know where to begin—don’t know how to begin explaining the barrage of emotions that had swept through you when Yoongi had finally asked you his question, point-blank:

Do you want this?

You’d thought you’d have the night to arrange your feelings into some magical sequence of words for him; you’d thought the two of you would sit down, like adults, at the dining table—an old relic from a past life where food actually mattered—and go over everything, points A to Z, weighing the pros and cons of staying bonded before deciding that no matter what, the two of you would still be together.

You believed that. It was the only option. A foregone conclusion.

It had to be.

But he’d gotten up, and he’d gone to the bathroom, and you’d realized then that logic and facts and figures had not been what Yoongi was asking for. Meeyooee—the man who’d watched your movies, and read your books, and secured your gowns, and listened to your stories, and brought you to Norman, to the stadium, to the greatest safety you’d ever known in his arms; the man who’d showed you, through his own grand gestures and smaller acts of service how much he wanted you—was scared.

And so you decided to Grand-Gesture his toight ass right back.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time—to surprise him with your own sweeping declaration of devotion via… an essay.

(“Right,” Hana had said sarcastically when you’d Google Duo’d her to share your plan.

“An essay,” Daehyun had joined in. “Famously the most romantic of all short-form types of writing!”

Those hoes.)

If staff at Starfield Library had noticed anything off about the intense, frenetic energy you’d brought with you as you’d sat down and poured your heart out into what was essentially a love confession dressed up as an op-ed, they wisely stayed silent. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. You were like a woman possessed.

When you finished, your supervisor shot down your request to rush-publish the piece—until, that is, you surprised her with a quote for the article straight from Park Jimin himself, and his guarantee to promote the essay on Twitter.

That settled, the piece went live, and you went to the dorm to shower and explain to a rather-hungover Jimin about what had propelled you to write the essay in the first place.

It was only once he’d gazed at you in fond exasperation that you realized you probably shouldn’t have run out of Yoongi’s apartment directly after he’d asked you if you wanted him.

So, uh…

Oops?

The yellow flowers, your Hail Mary play, hadn’t exactly gone to plan, either. You and Meeyooee just weren’t really the bouquet type, you have no idea why Jimin, with a fiendish glint in his eye, had insisted you pick these particular ones up.

You guess it doesn’t matter.

You were trying. You are trying.

“I’m trying,” you say.

“I know.”

“I didn’t mean to keep you hanging, Yoongi. I wanted to surprise you. And give you something to keep.”

Yoongi’s gaze shifts from the flowers wilting on his floor to your face, and when your eyes finally lock, his gaze staples right through your skin to the connective tissue holding you together underneath. You have never felt so disarmed; so exposed. He always knows how to cut right through you. He looks at you like he knows who you used to be, who you are now, and who it is you’re trying to become once all is said and done, which is his.

“I know, baby.”

Oh, fuck. Oh, god. It’s now or never. Sink or swim. Do or die.

Showtime.

“Yoongi, when you asked me that question about what I wanted…” You pause. Swallow. Start over. “I—fuck, sorry. I’m nervous. I need you to know that I’m always going to overthink things, and it’s hard for me to just ‘say what I want’ without taking you into consideration, too. Because that’s just not the way my brain works. I can’t turn off the side that cares about you. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“Okay, but I am. And I don’t want to pretend like the points I brought up before aren’t real, because they are real, and ignoring the reality of our circumstances… that’s not romantic to me. It’s fake. And you… we…” You take a deep breath. “This is real,” you whisper. “It is true that being bonded is a hindrance to our autonomy. Maybe the world will be better off now that the procedure is available. I don’t know.”

Yoongi hums. “What do you know, Princess?”

“What I know is that sometimes I miss the taste of grilled corn,” you say, not missing a beat. “I know that one day I’ll probably piss you off and you’ll wish you could run away to your Appa for a week without needing me to follow you there like some unshakeable shadow.”

He nods, encouraging. “But?”

“But!” You thrust up a finger, thankful for the segue, not even noticing how he’s feeding you the words you need to get out the sentiment he needs to hear. “But none of that matters—or, it all matters, but it’s all just relative, right? Like, if we remain soulmates, we will sacrifice some freedoms; we will spend our lives making compromises, and concessions, and some things will just always have to remain more difficult.”

You don’t register Yoongi stepping closer until he’s already closed the space between the two of you. You don’t look up until he’s inches away, the pocket of air separating you charged and electric and thrumming. Your soulmate looks down his nose at you, and his clever, catlike eyes burn like molten jewels. He looks a little soft; a little wild.

He looks like yours.

“But?” he murmurs again.

“But I don’t care,” you whisper back, lips millimeters from his now. “Because all that matters is that I want you.”

His hands find your hips, his touch as light as the whispers of a dream. You were cold, and now you are warmer. Brighter. Does he see? Yoongi is a saxophone, and you, a single-note flute. Both instruments make sound—one lonely, sad chord at a time.

Together, you are music.

“Even if it’s not right or fair or convenient I really, really want to be with you, Yoongi,” you finish. “In the selfish, greedy kind of way.”

He nods because he knows.

He tugs you toward him because you are his to bring closer. Under his touch, you are made solid and real. It dawns on you, with his hands on your hips and forever in his eyes, that there’s no script for you two to follow—no guidebook on how to proceed. It’s up to you now, and you want to try.

You really want to try this with him.

“What do you want?” you whisper.

“You,” he rasps back with no hesitation. “I want to walk together, side by side, for the rest of our lives.”

“Oh my god. Nerd.”

“Me? You’re the one who wrote it!”

“Fine—narcissist. Who memorizes essays about themselves?”

Yoongi shrugs, grinning. “It was a good article. You called me your bias.”

“Yeah,” you say, “cuz you are.”

“Not your nemesis?”

“That, too.”

“Forever?” He leans in. “You mean it?”

You smile against his lips. He smells like orange blossoms and boy and home.

“Every word.”

Yoongi’s lips are chapped and warm and soft when he kisses you, and you wrap your arms around his neck, needing him nearer—so near you don’t know where you begin and he ends. He responds willingly, deepening the kiss as he smooths his hands down your body, muttering his own private mantra into your mouth: mine, mine, mine.

“Yours,” you agree, and he chuckles, hot tongue pressing wet kisses to your throat as he grips your waist, molding you against his body. He kisses your jaw; your cheek; your temple; then dips down to suck a bruise in that one sensitive spot below your ear he discovered. When your knees buckle, his hand shoots up to hold your jaw, keeping you steady as he continues his demanding claiming. He’s intent, you think, to make sure you never, ever forget.

Mine, mine, mine.

“Bedroom, Princess.” His voice, when he speaks again, is gravel. Your insides curl at the look on his face, more predator than man—like he’s calculating how, exactly, he wants to ruin you. Like he knows you’ll let him. His eyes gleam out at you, volcanic and piercing; his knowing, gummy smile is effortlessly smug. He knows how he’s destroying you. He knows you’re going to give him what he wants.

Fuck. You just had him yesterday—your body’s still bright and fizzy from the charge—but already you’re desperate for him again. He’s barely even touched you, yet somehow you’re trembling, hot, wet. A low whimper leaks through you, floating up to the rafters.

Instantly, his eyes darken.

“C’mere,” he says huskily, and you’re not sure who moves first, but suddenly, he’s back on you, his roaming hands more insistent as he tugs impatiently at the hem of your shirt.

“Take this off,” he breathes.

Instantly, you obey, flushed but enthralled by the way Yoongi’s eyes trail over your skin, lingering shamelessly wherever they want to, for as long as they want. He groans, an almost pained expression painting his face, and his approval makes you feel brave; wanted; adored. You cock an eyebrow, tongue darting out to wet your bottom lip.

“You too.”

His shirt hits the ground a half-second later, and then he’s licking messily back into your mouth, all spit and teeth and need. You’re so swept up in the taste of him you don’t even realize your bra is unclasped until his thumbs come up to rub over your nipples, already hard; you swallow his groan down as he plunges his tongue into you, the motion ruthless and desperate.

“Goddamn, YN.” He pulls back and sucks in a ragged breath at the sight of you, standing in the last flare of late-afternoon sunshine: you’re all glazed eyes and kiss-bitten lips, your nipples taut and your body warm and dripping with lust. “You’re so fucking beautiful.”

He reaches forward to roughly tweak a nipple and your back arches immediately, your brain emptying of everything but the feeling of his large, rough hands kneading and squeezing the swell of your breasts. He releases a dark puff of amusement as you fumble clumsily with his belt buckle, finally ripping the offending strip of leather free and brandishing it like you’re some kind of matador. He makes much quicker work of your trousers, his fingers sending fire skittering over your sensitized flesh, until you’re both left standing in your underwear, staring at one another in dazed wonder.

“You’re mine,” you say, and Yoongi looks up at you, almost dumbstruck, and nods.

“Course I am,” he murmurs.

“No one else’s.”

“Baby,” he moans, reaching for your hand. “Just yours.”

He tugs you toward the bedroom, but first you stumble over the abandoned bouquet, cursing as you nearly face-plant into the floor. After steadying you, Yoongi shoots the trodden flowers a battle-weary expression, like a soldier coming face-to-face with an old foe.

“What’s that look?”

“Nothing.” He won’t meet your eyes, but you hear him mumbling something about Bitchtits, which makes no sense, and then, in a disparaging tone: yellow flowers.

“The color doesn’t seem very you,” you concede.

“Then why did you get—” Yoongi trails off as his eyes narrow, something slotting into place. “I’ll fucking kill him,” Yoongi mutters, swatting your ass as you pass through the threshold to the bedroom. He’s still muttering about revenge and does he think this is funny? as he goes to sit on the bed, back against the headboard. You swallow when he turns to you, patting his lap invitingly. “I’ll fucking destroy that guy.”

“Me first, though,” you say, and his responding huff of mirth turns into a groan when he grips your hips and pulls you down, hard, to straddle his lap.

And then the bastard hooks his hands behind his head, strong forearms flexing as he smiles beatifically up at you.

“Go ahead, sweetheart,” he taunts, feral promises blazing in his eyes. You gulp, already lightheaded from arousal and trepidation about what he has planned. “Let’s see what you got.”

Oh, fuck. If he wants you to put on a show, he’ll fucking get one. You see his smug, crooked grin and raise him a smirk of your own as you lean forward, threading your hand into the hair not tied in a bun. You tug slightly, dipping down to trap his mouth in a kiss. When he groans, you absorb the sound, slowly rocking your hips into him, over and over, feeling him harden beneath you. When you sense one of his arms snaking down—likely heading to cup your ass—you stop moving, reaching out to secure his wrist in your own grasp.

“You touch me, I stop,” you warn, pushing his arm roughly back against the headboard.

Yoongi hisses, hips bucking up involuntarily while you grin darkly down at him, arching your back as you resume grinding into his rock-hard length. You take your time, swiveling your hips languidly before settling into a rhythm. At this point, your panties are already sticky with your desire; a quick look down shows the evidence of your arousal smearing all over the navy fabric of his underwear. 

“Yeah?” he grunts, looking up at you with hooded eyes; the heat behind his gaze causes a throb to pulse straight in your core, and you nod, feeling his dick twitch beneath you.

“Go on then, sweetheart,” he goads you, before tipping his head back. “Do your worst.”

His words stoke to life a flame of self-confidence—lifting yourself off him, you use one hand to slowly shuck your underwear; at the same time, you pop two fingers from your other hand into your mouth, swirling your tongue sloppily around the digits. When you lower yourself back down, jolting as your bare cunt brushes against the bulge straining against his underwear, you use your spit-slick fingers to slowly spread open your folds without an ounce of shame. A curse flies out of Yoongi’s mouth as he stares, mesmerized, at your glistening, unobstructed sex, his eyes following the trajectory of your fingers as they come up to roll over your clit.

“What the fuck?” Yoongi’s eyes flutter closed, and then there’s a sudden smack as he curls his hand into a fist, banging it against the headboard. His head tips back, and when he opens his eyes again with a gasp, his pupils are blown, his eyes pitch-dark and ravenous. “You trying to kill me?”

You hum lowly, but the longing bare on his face only encourages you to keep teasing. It’s not enough for him to be delirious with desire. If he’s yours, you want to make sure he remembers who he belongs to; want to make sure he remembers no one else could ever compare. Before you can talk yourself out of it, you spin around. Arching your back, you hook your thumbs into the waistband of his boxers.

“Shit,” you hear Yoongi groan behind you. “This ass.”

“No touching,” you remind him, throwing your namesake—your goddamn Triple B—back as you make the mistake of glancing over your shoulder. Yoongi’s brows are furrowed, his eyes all blown-out pupil, and the expression on his face is nothing short of kinetic. Your breath hitches, your heartbeat picking up in your chest.

“It’s like that, huh, baby?” He’s flexing his hands, the veins on his forearms bulging from the effort of his restraint to keep from reaching for you. When you lock eyes, he cocks a strong brow at you, his grin possessive and intense, and you shiver, faltering in your movements for a moment as you forget who’s supposed to be charge. He is so beautiful. He is all yours.

At his low laugh, you snap back to yourself.

“Uh, sweetheart.” He smiles, not hiding his amusement at all, but there’s nothing cruel in it; shaking your head, you laugh with him.

“Fuck you, Meeyooee,” you quip, and then, before he can respond, you turn back around to finally, finally, hook your thumbs into his boxers and tug them down to reveal his length, standing at stiff attention.

You have to bite back a sigh. His cock is as pretty as you remember: long, thick, and veiny, the tip glistening already from his arousal. Wasting no more time, you lean forward to grab at his base, warm and weighty in your hand, and then spit on the tip. Mesmerized, you watch it drip down his flushed length in slow, glistening trails. 

The amused tut from behind you snaps you out of your reverie. Fuck, this man’s hold over you is ridiculous.

“Don’t be shy, baby,” he murmurs. “Say hi.”

Rolling your eyes, you lean forward and take as much of his length as you can in one go. That should shut him up. The slight burn of his tip breaching your throat coaxes tears to your eyes, but you soldier past the discomfort for him. It’s a welcome ache. One you missed.

“Fuck!” Yoongi hits the headboard again, and, satisfied, you brace your hands on his knees, a warning to keep his hips still for you as you swirl your tongue over his velvety ridges. Remembering to breathe through your nose, you begin to bob in earnest over his length.

“Fuck, YN,” he stutters reverentially behind you. “Just—just like that.”

He sounds fucked out already, but you can do better. This whole time, you’ve been seated on him, but you allow your hand to take over your ministrations as you rock forward, shifting until your knees bracket his body. With your ass on full display, you take his puffy tip in your mouth, hollowing out your cheeks as you suck, hard. Yoongi grunts, your only warning before he begins muttering a jumbled string of profanities.

“God.” His voice is low, strangled. “You’re fucking dripping, YN.”

You ignore the heat blooming in your core at his words, taking as much of his length as you can.

“Wanna taste.”

Fuck. This. Him. Min Yoongi will be your undoing.

Your resolve crumbling, you brace yourself and swallow around his shaft.

“Shit, yes.” Yoongi’s hips jerk up, and you gag, trickles of drools leaking from your mouth. One hand returns to his thigh, and the other reaches back to spread your cheeks teasingly at him.

“YN.” Your cunt throbs at the growl of his voice; it’s almost menacing. You can’t hold out anymore.

“Okay,” you command, chest heaving as you try to prepare yourself for what’s to come.

“What’s that?” Yoongi says behind you.

“Go ahead,” you breathe, reaching forward to fondle his balls the way you learned he likes. One of his hands whips down to clutch at the sheets, but he holds strong.

“Sweetheart,” Yoongi drawls. “You want something, you gotta ask for it.”

God, he’s such an asshole. You’re almost glad he can’t see your grin—can’t see how much you love it—as you hover back over his cock.

“Touch me,” you command, simply. “Eat me out, Yoongi.”

A low, dangerous chuckle is your only warning before two strong forearms suddenly wrap around your thighs and yank you backward to straddle his face. Your mouth pops open, your eyes going wide as he uses one hand to nudge your back down. The positioning doesn’t leave much room for the imagination, but judging by his appreciative moan, you think Yoongi likes what he sees.

“Gimme this wet pussy,” he growls, and then his flattened tongue is grinding against your clit, his hands digging into your thighs in a vice-grip to keep you from squirming away from him.

“Shit!” you gasp, immediately overwhelmed at the sensation. Far from trying to escape, you rock back into him as he licks a hot stripe up your folds.

“There you go,” Yoongi encourages you, nose buried deep in your cunt. “Nasty girl, rutting against my mouth like that.”

You moan, returning your own mouth to him, but the movements are sloppy, now; unrefined. If Yoongi notices, he doesn’t seem to mind; he keeps lapping hungrily at your clit, praising you for how good you taste, how hot and wet and perfect you are. All shame flies out the window as you squeeze your eyes shut, giving yourself over to the sensation. When he pushes a digit inside you, finger curling expertly against your walls, you moan his name around his cock, your thighs beginning to tremble.

Abruptly, before you can make sense of what’s happening, your world tilts as Yoongi rips you off of him, somehow managing to flip your body until you’re laying on your side, his body, hot and slightly sweaty, pressed against the length of your back, mouth nipping at your ear.

“Sorry, Princess,” he says, looping an arm under your thigh to drag it up before his fingers return to your clit. “When I cum, I want it to be in that tight little pussy of yours.”

The smell of your essence on his mouth, combined with the flurry of sensations he’s unleashing upon your body—his stiff cock pressed against your ass; his fingers swirling expert figure-eights on your clit; the melting heat in your core tightening into something taut and ready to snap—is too much. Everything ramps up, your pelvic muscles clenching furiously around nothing.

“Yoongi, I—” You tilt your head to him, your voice high and unrecognizable to your ears. “Yoongi, I’m gonna—”

His lips, heady with the taste of you, claim your own—sweet and musky and addictive, cutting off your frantic stuttering.

He grins.

“I love you,” he says, thrusting the words into your mouth with his tongue. For a second, your heart—maybe even time itself—shutters. You step outside of yourself and shoot up, up, up into the stars, looking down from impossibly high to see your and Yoongi’s story, laid out like some kind of celestial picture book.

You see the first time you tripped into Yoongi; the first time he held your hand; the first time you hugged.

Your first sleepover.

Your first kiss.

Everything, leading up to this moment. To him. To this. To you.

To love.

“Come,” he says, and you crash back into yourself, your body left with no choice but to obey his command. Endless waves of pleasure pulse through you, unrelenting. You let out a moan so guttural it’s nearly a scream, your body spasming as your vision sparks with dizzying, overbright colors. Yoongi plunges his fingers into your tight heat, fucking you through it, refusing to let you come down from your high. 

When the world resolves, the first thing you hear is Yoongi’s slow laugh in your ear.

“Let’s see,” he snickers, the sound almost verging on patronizing, and then you feel his hands on your body, rolling you gently onto your back. Through blurred vision, you see him grinning down at you like a wolf. “Doing okay, YN?”

All you can do is hum in sated contentment, your capacity for speech absolutely void—until he settles himself on top of you, rolling his hips into your still-sensitive core, earning a low, drawn-out fuck.

“Think you can do that again on my cock, Princess?” he whispers, his voice goading but his touch tender, protective, as he presses you softly into the sheets, his thumbs massaging soothing circles into your sweaty hips. You hope you never get used to this—how incredible it still feels to be the sole object of Min Yoongi’s focus. You gaze up at him—his bun still somehow intact, though some errant, sweaty strands now hang in front of his face; his flushed skin, which looks to you in this moment as if spun from moonlight. Fresh arousal stirs deep within you as you nod deliriously at him.

“Please.” Your soft murmur becomes a moan as Yoongi drags his cock through your slick folds; still sensitive, your legs jerk closed on impulse, but Yoongi gives you a hard, dark look.

“No, baby,” he chides, his cock still sliding torturously over you. “Be a good girl and open a little wider for me.”

Wasting no time, desperation for him licking gentle flames through your body, you part your legs as you wrap your arms around his neck.

“I can take it so good, Yoongi,” you say, your words slurred and feverish with need. “I can do it, I promise. Please.”

Yoongi gives you that bright, lopsided grin again, brushing his lips against your forehead as his leaking cockhead nestles at your tight, warm entrance.

“I know you can,” he whispers. “I’m gonna give you what you want, Princess.”

And then in a single motion, he makes good on his promise, plunging into your heat with a low groan as your walls flutter around his thick length.

“You’re so perfect, YN,” he praises you, cock throbbing gently as he bottoms out, earning a low whine. You can already feel a new orgasm building, just from how full you feel; how perfectly he stretches you out. “So fucking tight…” He begins to thrust into you, slow and shallow. “And wet…” His thrusts pick up a little. “This pussy was made for me to fuck.”

“Please, Yoongi,” you beg, your eyes rolling back into your head as you wrap your legs around his hips, coaxing him closer. Deeper. You want to feel him all the way in your skull. “Fuck me as hard as you want, baby. Don’t hold back.”

The way Yoongi looks at you then would chill you to the bone if you didn’t know, deeper than in your marrow, that you’re never safer than you are with him.

“You asked for it,” he says, and your reply is lost in your throat when he slams ruthlessly into you, long, bony fingers grabbing bruising handfuls of your hips as he fucks into you, again and again, with no mercy.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” you chant, and though his eyes flicker up briefly at the sound, you can tell that he’s truly elsewhere right now—completely enveloped in the overwhelming sensation of your sex. His headboard thumps punishingly against the wall, and his jaw clenches, his brow furrowing as he redirects his attention to where he spears your cunt open, again and again, moving your body under his just how he likes it. This is about him now—the way he drives into your heat is brutal, animal, raw, and unforgiving. It’s all you can do to lay back, your body thrashing as you’re forced to just take what he’s giving you. You wrap your hands around his neck, desperate for something to hold onto as you receive each primal, bruising thrust like a gift, a familiar coil tightening in your belly.

Suddenly, one of his hands comes up to clamp your jaw.

“Eyes on me,” he growls, and the wild, proud look on his face catapults you over the edge for a second time, white noise ringing in your ears as you’re launched into the stars. You snap your head back, vision erasing to a brilliant, sparkling white as your pussy clenches down, milking his cock, over and over as he looses control, fucking into you sloppily. Seconds later, with your name on his lips, Yoongi spills into you—and when you return to yourself, he’s collapsed at your side, kissing lazy marks into your slick, heated skin, resting his sweaty head on your shoulder, and telling you in every silent way he knows how: you’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine. 

After you two clean up, you lay together in tangled sheets, watching the red sun kiss the horizon in silence. Tomorrow, you will talk some more. You will wake up to greet the first day of your chosen forever.

But for now:

“I love you,” you say. Yoongi’s head rests on your chest, right above the steady, sure thrum of your heart beat. When he smiles his gummy smile, you feel tired lips curling against your skin.

“You are my soulmate,” he says. Simple. Devastating. Honest.

When you fall asleep, you are not wrapped in a cage of Yoongi’s arms—you are holding his hand.

When you wake up, you are free to go. The choice is yours.

(What do you want?)

You stay.

Fifteen Months Later

You walk into the restaurant ten minutes late, keeping your head bent low out of habit as the hostess leads you to a private dining area in the back. There’s no reason to hide today—for all public intents and purposes, you’re attending this dinner as BTS's translator. For the second time this year, Chris Martin and his girlfriend are in town, and though the boys have all vastly improved in their English since you first met them, Seokjin still wants you nearby—“Yah! What if he misunderstands one of my famous knock-knock jokes, YNie? I need you, girl!”—as a back-up.

You’re the last to arrive, having spent the majority of your Saturday helping Soomin and Daehyun move into their new apartment and then getting held up on the train. Yoongi, you know, has been in his Genius Lab most of the day. It’s where he’s been spending the majority of his waking hours (and many of the twilight ones, too), putting finishing touches on what is slated to become his next solo album. (You’ve heard it all. It is, you assure him, supremely dope ass. Yoongi, ever the tortured-artist, remains unconvinced.)

When you enter the room, Meeyooee’s eyes find yours first; the boys have left the seat between him and Seokjin open, with Chris and his girlfriend sitting directly across the table. You murmur your hellos, bowing to Chris before settling in and accepting Seokjin’s offer to pour you a glass of wine.

“I hear the samgyeopsal here is great,” Chris says, passing you a food menu.

“Oh?” you say, catching Jimin’s eye across the table. He winks at you before returning to his own menu with a secret, knowing grin. “I’m not big on pork belly these days, actually. Haven't had it in over a year.”

“Don’t worry,” Yoongi says with a smirk, slipping his hand onto your knee under the table. “We’re ordering family style; there’s bound to be something you like.”

“I hear there’s good chicken!” Jungkook pipes up.

“Original, honey butter, or sweet and spicy?” you ask.

“Yes,” the members all chant.

You snort agreeably, trapping Yoongi’s fingers in your own as conversation swells comfortably around you.

His skin, as always, is warm.

As always, is soothing.

As always: your choice.

A/N: Holy. Shit.

I can't believe it's over. I wrote an incredibly long, sappy post about how much writing and sharing this incredibly cracky, cheekily sluttay fic with you has meant to me, and ended up trashing it because it just didn't feel right. So, what I want to say is that I wouldn’t have written past TNF:4 if it wasn’t for the encouraging comments and just, in the words of YN, dope fucking ass energy from those of you who have been kind and generous enough to share your enthusiasm for this story with me. Even the smallest reminder that any of you found something worthy of commenting on has had a profoundly positive influence on my life and creativity that I don’t think I will ever be able to fully express—please believe that.

TNF will remain in my memory as the project that led me back to my passion for writing, and I can’t thank you enough for lifting me up; for being my torch in the darkness, as Meeyooee is for YN, and for giving me back what I worried I had lost.

All my love, Matchy 💜

P.S. Before anyone asks or wonders if they missed something while reading—while I have my own opinion about what YN and Yoongi chose re: the soulmate separation procedure, I've purposefully left that part of the ending ambiguous for you to decide on your own.

If you like what I’m doing here and want to support me, just a head’s up that I have made a Ko-fi account, if you feel like checking it out!

Otherwise, if you enjoyed this chapter (or TNF in general), please consider leaving me a comment, re-blogging with feedback, or sliding into my asks (anonymously or not!) to let me know what you thought.

Goodnight (Love)

Jimin x Reader – Spy!Au

Hurt/Comfort, Angst/Fluff, Enemies(?)/Lovers(?), Non-Idol Au, One-Shot

Summary: You and Jimin hold an unwavering grudge against each other, but for what reason? Or, when you and Jimin get partnered for a case together, emotions arise, and so do the stakes. Pride and vulnerability are an explosive pair; will you both set each other off into flames?

Warnings (Buckle up folks because there's a lot): THIS STORY CONTAINS THEMES OF HARASSMENT AND IMPLICATIONS OF S/A!!! DO NOT READ IF THOSE TOPICS ARE TOO HARSH FOR YOU!!! Angst, panic attacks, anxiety, descriptions of violence (like a single fight), sexual assault (no non-con sex happens i swear), misogyny if you squint, Jimin is an asshole at times, trauma, trauma flashbacks, horrible communication tbh, implied abuse, implied s/a

Disclaimers: I am in no way, shape, or form trying to romanticize these sensitive topics, I simply want to show that comfort can be found after said situations. Please do not leave any comments about glamorizing any of the topic.

A/N: Hello hi author here! I haven't thoroughly proof read this oopsies but we'll get there when we get there. There's a lot of time-skips in this btw, and I also just made shit up because I don't really have any clue as to what spies or agents do or whatever (lol)

Taglist: @screamertannie

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

"This mission is risky, as it's heavily reliant on precision and strategy, so we'll have to be very careful with who we send."

"I have the perfect pair in mind."

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

"You're fucking kidding me."

Jimin stares in disbelief at his bosses, Seokjin and Namjoon, not knowing why they thought it would be a good idea to partner you together.

"I don't care whatever personal vendetta y'all have against each other, you both are the most reliable option we have. So put your willy-nillies aside and get your head in the game."

Namjoon shoots Jin a disapproving glare at his choice of words.

"Please never say willy-nilly again."

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

You never thought it was possible for so much tension to fit inside a singular car, yet you and Jimin seemed to be breaking that record currently:

"Listen, I want to get this done as soon as possible, so please just listen to me and do what I tell you and I can finally stay away from your annoying ass."

"As long as you listen to me as well, it'll be a smooth sail."

"And why do I have to listen to you?"

"We listen to each other, it's called teamwork; hence the fact that we're a team, and we work tog-"

"I know what teamwork is – I'm not stupid. But I specialize in retrieving information, so I think we both know who has sufficient knowledge to lead this case."

"One of the requirements to be recruited is being able to safely retrieve information, so technically even though I'm not centered in the encryption department, we still have the same level of expertise in the field of-"

"Do you ever shut the fuck up?"

"I do."

"Great well do that now."

"If it means you stop running your mouth as well then I will."

It isn't that Jimin hates you specifically, he just hates how stoic you are all of the time. No matter what case you had to take on, what was going on around you, your cold demeanor never faltered — and that pissed Jimin off.

I mean, who were you to be so stand-offish to all of your colleagues? Did you think you were better than everyone else? Is that why you never spoke up unless you were giving your 2 cents on the approach the organization should take on the case given. And it pissed him off even more how you were always right, how Namjoon and Jin always agreed with whatever you had to say.

Jimin didn't hate you specifically, but he hated your face and how nice it was to look at and your annoyingly smart brain and your voice that was so soothing to listen to.

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

"Jimin, I'm telling you, having me go undercover isn't safe or efficient. The man who has the information we need is kno-"

"Are you admitting that you don't have the guts to complete this mission? What happened to commitment?"

Strategizing with Jimin felt like being a court trial where anything and everything you said would be used against you.

"I am committed. That's why I'm telling you that this isn't a good strategy."

"And why not? We've used it countless times before and it's worked, what's different now? All those men are the same, just play them to your will. Is that really so hard for you to do?"

"It's not good because it's not safe. Chances are that not only will I walk out of there severely injured, but you will too. And what happens then?"

"All I'm hearing is that you're too scared to do it. If that's the case, then why don't you just go home? I can even go ahead and call Jin hyung and tell him that you chickened out-"

"I am not chickening out."

"Then just trust my plan, princess. It's never failed me, and it's not going to start now."

"....... Fine. But don't call me that."

"No can do, princess."

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

As you walk into the large fancy venue where the event was being held, the urge to run and hide became much more prominent.

You doubt that he remembers you, you were small when it happened, and now you'd grown.

That should bring some form of comfort, but it doesn't.

Because even if he doesn't recognize you, you would never be able to forget those months.

What he did changed you as a person forever, and for the worse as well.

You walk tentatively, saying hello to people you come across, until you find who you're looking for.

Upon seeing his face, it felt like a kick had just impacted your gut, like if you were dumped into a freezing lake with nothing on. Your mouth dried and the room began to spin, and you almost ran away, almost cowered back to safety, but you were stopped by-

"Dumbass, he's right there all by himself. Approach him, quick."

Hesitantly you started your way towards him.

"Jimin, turn my earpiece's mic sensitivity up."

"Why?"

"Please, I need you to be able to catch anything."

"Fine."

Seeing he was grabbing a glass of wine by himself, you took the opportunity to slide in next to him.

"Excuse me, sir? Do you happen to know what kind of wine this might be?"

"Cherry wine, madam. Would you like to try one?"

"Yes, please. Thank you."

"It's no problem. If you don't mind me asking, is someone accompanying you tonight?"

"Oh, no. I'm here by myself. I got invited by mutual friends."

"Ah, I see. So then, you wouldn't mind joining me tonight? I have a table right over there if you'd like to sit."

"I'd love to join you. Please, lead the way."

After some brief moments of small talk, Jimin gives you the okay to start trying to pull information out of him.

"This venue is so lovely, I wish I could see all of it in full." You started prying. "Well, actually, one of my closest partners runs the venue, if you'd like I could ask him if it's okay for me to give you a tour?"

"Would you really?"

"Of course, anything for such a delightful woman as yourself."

"Oh, you're too kind."

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

The tour was going well as good as your given position allowed. You managed to ask about almost each room, giving Jimin any helpful information through your earpiece.

That was until you got to the third floor.

You were trying as hard as you could to push through being in his presence, when you'd been going up the stairs you stumbled for a second, and his hand reached out to "stabilize" you. You managed to regain your balance, still his wrinkled hand remained on the small of your back, a little lower than appropriate, and that was all it took to push you to the edge.

"Um, excuse me, do you mind if we pause for a short while so I can use the restroom?"

"That's totally okay. Do you want me to lead you to the one on this floor?"

"Oh, no. Thank you, I'll use the one from the previous floor. You can wait for me here. I won't be long."

Running down the stairs quickly, your head began to spin with fear.

All of the haunting memories you'd managed to drown out in the deepest parts of your brain resurfaced within a flash, and suddenly its like if you were back where you were less than two years ago.

Rough hands around your waist, liquor scented breath hitting your face, the cold air biting your exposed skin – you remembered it so vividly that you could almost feel it happening to you.

You could feel the harsh tone of voice, taunting you, painting you with shame.

'You should be thankful for all that I do for you. I'm the only person that can stand you after all.'

"Why the hell are you going to the bathroom? Don't stall, you idiot. We need to get this done."

"Right. Yeah. Right."

You stood up and walked towards the door, but you couldn't bring yourself to twist the doorknob. The thought of having to continue with him had your breathing quickening, and your vision shaking, it was all too much at once.

All Jimin could hear was your shallow breathing, and strangely, he found himself growing worried.

"Y/N? What's going on?"

"I can't- I can't do it-"

"What do you mean?"

"I- I need to get out of here."

"Y/N, what's wrong?"

"I can't be here, please Jimin."

Jimin burrowed his eyebrows in confusion, not understanding what caused you to get so worked up. He was even more confused when he felt himself progressively getting more concerned for your well-being.

"Where are you right now?"

“Um, a bathroom in floor 2."

"And you told the guy to stay in the third floor, right?"

"Yeah." You hear Jimin sigh, and you know he's upset with you, but your brain can't fully process that right now.

"I can't believe you're actually pussying out of this right now."

"Jimin, please."

The crack in your voice left an uncomfortable buzz in his chest, and Jimin found himself caving in.

"Okay, fine. I'll find a distraction for him so you can leave while he's busy. Only because we stil have tomorrow to do this and we've made progress."

"Thank you-"

"Don't, we still have to get this shit done tomorrow."

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

You thought you'd be relieved as you finally got the chance to run out of the building, but guilt was heavy on your chest. The sound of Jimin's frustrated voice made you uneasy; you've never really been on his good side, but hearing him sound so disappointed in you drilled a hole into your pride.

He watches you as you open the car door and clumsily jump in, and Jimin can't stop his frown from deepening further when he sees your usually sparkly eyes tainted a light color of red, one that matches your nose and cheeks. You take his expression as one of disapproval, and you shrink in your seat, hoping that it'll swallow you whole. You were triggered as it is, an angry Jimin would not help you whatsoever.

Obviously, the only thing he could come up with was to scold you, because what else was he supposed to do? Wipe away your tears gently and destroy anything that would cause those tears to resurface? Yeah, of course not. Not that he wouldn't be willing to if you asked him, but he'll try to convince himself it's only because he's a good person. No ulterior motive.

"This better be a one time thing, eh? No one wants to work with someone unreliable, and leaving was one hell of a liability."

"I know."

"Then why did you do it?"

The words got stuck in your throat; you couldn't tell him that this guy had abused you for years on end of your adolesence. You refused to let anyone see that side of you.

"It wasn't safe, and it wasn't worth risking it."

"I didn't see any threats in the security cameras, and everything in your earpiece sounded fine. What was unsafe?"A tentative moment of silence passes before:

"Him."

You spoke so softly that you thought Jimin hadn't heard you, until you heard a sigh from him.

"We work with dangerous people all the time, there's no difference here, princess."

The name had clear condecendicy laced within it, and it made the sting in your eyes return quickly; it reminded you of him, and now the memories were fresh. You turned your face out the window, hoping that Jimin didn't catch sight of them.

But he did, and great. What else is he supposed do? to destroy himself then? Being harsh is supposed to be what keeps you from getting hurt by him, so why is that no matter what he does, the outcome is always rough?

The rest of the car ride was silent, the emptyness of nightfall very clear amongst the dark.

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

"Will you stop moving so goddamn much? Some of us are trying to sleep here."

"Why are you referring to yourself with plurality? The only ones here are you and I, and your comment is directed at me so-"

"It's too late for your smartass."

"Well, it's currently 1 in the morning, so technically-"

"Less talking more sleeping."

"Okay."

You'd stopped moving, and Jimin was about to completely pass out, when the shuffling started again.

"Y/N I swear to god-" he groaned, annoyed that you interrupted his sleep again.

But when he looked over, you were sitting up on your bed, a pained expression covering your face.

Jimin sighed and sat up as well, mumbling under his breath about how 'it's always something with you'. Still he asked:

"What happened now?"

You hesitated to answer before responding.

"Did you do it on purpose?"

"Do what?"

"Send me in there, knowing who he is?”

"I genuinely don't have a clue of what you're talking about."

"I knew you hated me but I really didn't think you would go to such lengths."

"Stop speaking in riddles and just say whatever it is you want to say."

"Do you really not know about him?"

"Stop acting like you know better than I do just because you know about some rando that I've never heard of."

"I'm not trying to act like I know better, because I do know better. I know who we're up against, and I know that Seokjin and Namjoon would agree that sending me in there by myself is a shit decision."

"Why would they give us the case then if it's so dangerous, huh? Maybe you're just too much of a scaredy-cat to handle this case. Why don't you go and whine to our bosses that the task is 'too hard' if you're so set on them agreeing with you?"

Jimin's words felt like a stab straight through your heart, and all you could do was bleed out in silence.

"If I were them, I'd be real disappointed if someone I handpicked for a job as prestigious as this one called me and told me they didn't wanna do it because it's too hard."

The mention of disappointing your bosses made your stomach twist with anxiety. Just when you'd begun to learn to protect yourself, you're suddenly getting berated for it?

"Do you want me to complete this task or not?"

"Of course I fucking do. That's why I'm telling you that you need to suck it up."

"Degradation isn't going to motivate me, so you can stop trying to make me feel like shit. Are you happy? Because it sure is working."

"See? This is what I mean. For someone who acts so stoic all the time you sure are goddamn sensitive."

"Jimin, please. Drop it. I get it. You win."

"Stop whin- wait, what?"

You blinked at Jimin, before sighing and laying back down, shuffling around and throwing a blanket over your head.

For some reason, this made his heart twist in an uncomfortable way.

Jimin took a deep breath and told himself that it definitely wasn't because he felt like crying at seeing your defeated expression, he was just shocked that you didn't continue arguing with him.

Yeah. That's what it is. Totally what it is.

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

Day 2 of the event begins, and your fear is drowned out enough to tolerate it by your desperation to get this over with.

"Okay, he's in there. Go. No chickening out this time, okay?"

"Yes. Whatever."

"Good."

You find him standing by the small bar they have across the venue, and you muster up any remaining strength inside yourself as you begin to approach the man who haunts your every move.

"What kind of wine are you honoring tonight?" You use the same conversation starter as last time, and the guy jumps; you caught him off-guard.

"Oh, my dear, it's you. I am so glad we meet again." His smirk grew, and if you didn't know any better, you would think that it's one of excitement rather than perversion.

"So am I."

"I was afraid you'd pulled a classic Cinderella on me after that first night, I thought I wouldn't see you again."

"Oh, I apologize for leaving so abruptly. Something I ate gave me a stomach bug, and I decided it'd be best to go rest before it could get worse. I'm just thankful it cleared up before the event ended."

"I am deeply grateful as well, I don't think I could've bared to not see you again. Say, why don't we actually complete our tour around the venue tonight."

"That would be lovely."

You had always hated how snobby rich people spoke, as if everything was fancy and business. The formalities and outdated vocabulary made you irrationally angry, and you weren't sure how much longer you were going to withstand this entire thing.

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

Thankfully, you lasted a pretty good while. Everything seemed to be going as planned; you asked questions, he blabbered on and on about whatever you asked, he got more comfortable and started spilling more and more, and Jimin got more information.

“This floor is my favorite.” He says once you finish taking the flight of stairs you were just on.

“Oh, really? May I ask why?”

“My personal room is up here, it's supposed to be a guest room but since I spend my days here frequently, it's practically become my bedroom.”

“That sounds very comfortable. The people who own this place seem to show genuine hospitality.”

“They indeed do. And I was thinking, maybe I could follow in their steps, and extend that hospitality to you?”

“What does this said hospitality consist of?” You were skeptical, the glint in his eyes was evidently one that was ready to strike knives into your chest.

“Reconnection. Mending broken bonds. Making up for all our time lost.”

Your heart began beating rapid and panicked, afraid of what implications come with his statement. He seems to notice your expression fall, as he starts to laugh and even doubles over. Once he composes himself, he immediately makes his way towards you, the change in demeanor too quick to even respond.

"You really thought I wouldn't recognize you doll? Hmm?" He circles around you slowly.

It feels like you've fallen through a sink hole into the midst of hell hearing his words, it's suffocating, so much so that you're sure you won't make it out in one piece this time around.

"To be fair, you have changed a lot. You look much more mature, womanhood has treated you well." It takes everything in you to not break as he grabs your chin between his fingers, Jimin's voice playing on repeat in your head - 'no chickening out this time'.

You swallow and take a second to compose yourself, before speaking again.

"May we please continue our tour?"

"No need to hide from me, little one. I'd always told you, you'd come running back to me one day; and here you are. No need to be embarrassed about it, I'm more than happy to have you again."

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

Jimin's blood runs cold when he hears what the man is saying; did you know him before? What history could you possibly have with this man?

"I'm n- not hiding. I just simply wish to continue looking around."

"Oh, trust me, dear. We'll have plenty of time to look around. But first, don't you wanna go somewhere private? So we can, reconnect?"

A shiver runs down your spine out of pure fear, and you're not sure if you can back down this time.

"Um, I don't know. I don't want to be gone for too long."

"No one will notice dear." He leans in closer to your face. "I know you want this just as much as I do."

His suggestive tone has you feeling sick to your stomach, and you pray to whoever sits above that Jimin realizes what's happening and comes to help you. You aren't sure what you had ever done to turn the universe against you, but you knew your prayers weren't heard when Jimin responds through your earpiece.

"Go. If you're worried about anything getting out of hand, I have this planned out. Just go."

You didn't know what plan Jimin had up his sleeve, but his annoyed expression on your face were imprinted in your mind, his words from the previous night still heavy: ‘If I were them, I'd be real disappointed if someone I handpicked for a job as prestigious as this one called me and told me they didn't wanna do it because it's too hard.’

"Okay, take me with you."

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

He leads you to up another set of stairs, and into different hallways, before stopping in front of two big doors. You watch as he takes a key out of the inside pocket in his coat, and he opens the door, letting you step inside first and following after you. The room was spacious and slightly dark, the only light entering through the window from the lights outside.

"Ask him what part of the building you guys are in."

"This room is beautiful, what part of the building are we in?"

“It is quite luxurious, huh? This is the fifth floor. Main hallway, 3rd door. If you ever want to pay a visit, you're more than welcome to stop by.”

Jimin quickly jots down the room, and you hope he's satisfied, because you're shaken with fear at this man’s words. He locks the door from the inside, and proceeds to move toward you.

"He has a key, right?"

"Ah, yes." Pause. "I'll keep that in mind."

He smiles at you and grabs your wrist, walking towards the large bed in the middle of the room.

"Okay, get his key. Do whatever it takes, just get your hands on it."

He sits on the bed and grabs you by the hips, pulling you down with him.

"I can't believe I have you all for myself again. Even if its just tonight." You feel his fingers in your hair; the thought of shaving your head crosses your mind. If it means getting rid of any trace of him, you'd do it.

"Your features may be a little more grown, but you're still that innocent little sweetheart that I've always known."

His face seems so close; your body falls cold with fear.

"Tell me, how much have you missed me, sweetheart?"

He gets scoots even closer and cups your cheeks, running a thumb over your lips. He gets even closer, and all you can do is swallow and curse Jimin, because why isn't he doing anything to help you?

"I thought you would've learned to use your words by now." He chuckles, you wait for a hand across your cheek.

"Stupid little girl. Aren't you glad I'm so forgiving?"

He leans closer again, your foreheads touching at this point.

"I'll let you show me with your actions. Come on, show me."

Your breath hitches in dread, but he takes this a good sign. He kisses you and you do your best to "kiss" him back without actually doing any kissing. You tug on his coat, hoping he gets the message to take it off, and thankfully – you're not sure this is the right word – he does. As he shrugs it off, he keeps kissing you, and you take the chance to grab it from the inside, and flip it around so the key falls into your lap. You quickly put the key in your dress pockets and you toss the coat across the room in attempt to mask it as a move of interest.

He notices that his coat is gone, and it prompts him to begin trying to remove your corset. You realize that this is your chance to communicate with Jimin, though you're not sure if he can hear you if the silence from his side is anything to go by, while also prompting the man to get off of you.

"I've got it."

"You got the key?" So Jimin can hear you. You don't know if what fills your gut is relief or anger.

"Let me do it." He grips your hands and puts them aside, continuing to undo it himself.

"Yeah." You respond to Jimin. Pause. "I've got it, its fine. It'll be faster this way."

"Okay, we'll get him distracted now." Once again, you're torn between relief and anger.

"Don't you wanna take it slow? Enjoy our sweet time together?" His lips on your neck, and his hands getting lower and lower. You start to cry. Thankfully, he doesn't notice, because the intercom system im the building blares: "The auction is about to begin, 5 to auction." Hearing this, you take your chance to push him away, trying to get yourself back together.

"We should go, we wouldn't want to miss this." You move to get up, but he locks you within his arms.

"It's okay, you're the one thing I want."

"People will notice that we're missing."

"They won't. And if they do, let them. I'm more than glad to show you off."

He keeps on untying your corset, and panic starts to flow more prominently through your body as you realize that he isn't going to let this go easily.

"I really think we should go back. What if we miss something important?"

"Shhhh. Let this happen."

Another announcement blares through the intercom, but he doesn't even flinch this time.

"Auction is now beginning."

"Let's stop. I don't want to miss it."

He doesn't stop.

Doesn't even do a double take.

"If you want something from the auction, I'll get it for you. I'll even pay double the price. But I'm not letting anything take this away from me. I've been waiting to feel you for years. I'm not letting you go now."

You're on the border of cracking as he gets lower on the strings of your corset, not sure if you're gonna be able to get out of this unharmed. He moves to suck on your neck, and that's when you break.

"I don't, I don't want to."

"You're just nervous. I know you want this."

You shake your head, your whole body is visibly trembling now.

"I don't want to."

"Be good and stop talking."

He finally gets to the last string when his phone rings behind him.

He ignores it.

You pry him on.

"Are you not gonna take that?"

"Nothing is going to interrupt this."

"What if it's important?"

"What did I say? Be quiet. Why is it that now you're all chatter, but when I asked you earlier, not even a peep? It's like you want me to punish you."

A sob escapes you; where the fuck is Jimin?

He takes your corset off, leaving you almost bare.

"Such a pretty little thing."

All you can think is that 'This is it. This is it. What did I do to have to go through this again? Why is it tha-"

"I'm on my way up. I'll be there in a moment. I'm sorry I didn't come earlier. I'm coming."

You let out another sob at this.

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

Jimin feels like his heart flew out from his chest because of how hard it was pounding.

He's desperate to get you out of there, and Jimin didn't know what to do.

His original plan to get the man distracted by random interruptions wasn't working, and he knew going up there on his own was risky, but listening to your situation made him sick.

He knew one of the guys on his usual team, Yeonjun, was monitoring the assignment, as they always have someone on standby in chances of emergency.

With his mind made up, he lets him know that he's gonna go in, but he isn't too fond of the idea.

"No, Yeonjun. You don't get it. I have to go up. He's- he's hurting her."

"You'll get caught. Especially if you and Y/N leave together."

"I have to go."

"Jimin-"

"Sorry, I have to get to her."

The line disconnects.

He was coming now.

Getting to you was the only thing that mattered in that moment.

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

You can't bare to watch as the man takes his own shirt off, and you feel like you could throw up at any moment.

"I'm on the fifth floor. Toss the key under the door if you can."

At this, your only string of thought consisted of 'Jimin's here' 'Toss the key' 'Jimin's here' 'Toss the key'

You quickly reach into your pockets and let the key drop by your feet, and you kick it so it's by the door. An eternity of seconds pass by, your brain simply chanting 'Jimin, Jimin, Jimin'

Everything happens so quickly that you don't even have time to process what's happening before Jimin tackles the old man. He punches and pounds, and all you can do is watch in horror as both men begin to swing at each other. You have no clue what to do, but thankfully, Jimin manages to catch him off-guard and injects him with a tranquilizer.

It's strong enough to paralyze him on the ground, but simultaneously doesn't knock him unconscious.

You run to put your shirt on and rush to look for the flash drive that's meant to have all the information you're looking for. Despite your frantic state, you miraculously find it in a drawer, relieved and ready to show Jimin.

But when you turn around, he's still on top of the man, beating him like a crazed man.

"You. Fucking. Bastard. How. Dare. You. Touch. Her. I will fucking kill you." He says in between punches.

He kicks, stomps, punches, even pulls out his blade, and he doesn't stop until he feels you tug from behind him, hearing your attempts to hold back sobs from escaping you.

Even as you're trembling, you hold up the small flash drive in your hand.

Jimin stares in shock for a few seconds, confused as to how you still went to look for the files even with the state you're in.

He looks back at the man on the floor, bloodied and now unconscious.

You wouldn't be surprised if Jimin beat him to death.

A pause of silence engulfs both of you, before he interrupts it.

"Let's go. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Let's go. We'll talk later. Come on."

You moved to step towards the door, but you were filled with such panic that your legs were giving out on you.

He stepped towards you, but you recoiled.

He knew that this reaction was to be expected, but it still felt like a flame was burning his chest seeing you jump away from him, looking absolutely terrified.

You stumbled and wobbled, but you were insistent on walking on your own.

Jimin respected your boundaries, but when you almost tumbled down the stairs, he couldn't take it anymore.

“Do you want me to carry you back to the car? It'll get us out of here quicker, you're gonna hurt yourself .”

He saw your facial expressions change multiple times in that short moment before you stepped toward him and let him lift you off the ground. You were tense, any touch making your head spin but feeling how securely Jimin is holding you, you can't help but loosen up a tiny bit.

Feeling you shake in his grasp, it hit Jimin like a bag of bricks; you had been one of his victims. That's why you told him that it wasn't safe for you.

How could he have missed this?

You'd been brought back to hell after finally escaping it, and it was Jimin himself that dropped you right back into the gates of it. Maybe if he had listened to you when you said it wasn't a good idea, maybe you wouldn't be shutting down right in front of his own eyes, wouldn't be shaking uncontrollably, wouldn't be face to face with a monster you were to never see again.

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

In the car, you can't stop clawing at yourself in the passenger seat, unsure of how to get rid of all the anger and anxiety in you.

Jimin kept peeking from your eyes and back to the road, and for some reason, this made you angry; not in a scream and throw things way, but in a sob angry tears with harsh breaths until you pass out way.

“What did it cost you to listen to me? Your pride? Is your pride worth the touch of that monstrosity?"

"I'm sorry."

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

You get to the hotel and rip the dress off of you, wiping your lips and scrubbing your hands furiously, you pull your hair in desperation.

Everything feels so wrong and overbearing, it feels like its the end of the world.

Jimin feels like his world is crumbling at the same time that you are.

He goes to make you some tea, anything that will make you feel even the tiniest bit better. Seeing you in so much distress left only 2 things swirling around his head.

The first one being: He would, in fact, do anything to take back everything he's said, and to protect you from any harm that may come your way.

The second: He is so emotionally constipated.

Instead of letting himself understand and acknowledge what he feels for you, he put up a big fucking barrier, and now he’s responsible for your breaking point. Maybe if he could've been honest with himself, maybe if he had been gentler with you–

Well, there's no point in dwelling over it now, so instead he approaches you and removes your hands from your head to stop you from pulling your hair.

"Y/N? You're gonna hurt yourself."

"I don't care." You try to pull your hands away, but Jimin clasps them against his own.

"I made you some tea, it's in the nightstand by your bed. Go drink it while I put on a bath for you. And grab clothes once you're done."

You weren't sure what it was, anger? Gratefulness? Appreciation? Resentment? But something was coursing through your veins, and it all was clearly directed at Jimin. Feeling frustrated and confused, you broke down into sobs once more.

"We don't have to do anything, but I think getting washed up will help you feel better. Whatever you wanna do. Just, please don't cry, I don't like it when you cry.”

You look up and find Jimin crouching in front of you; his stare so soft that you think he might actually care. You can't help it – you launch yourself towards Jimin, neither of you are sure if it's an attempt at a hug or at knocking him down.

He wraps his arms around you and you begin to hit at his chest, your frustration and hurt showing themselves.

"Why didn't you listen to me?! I didn't want to tell you! You should've just listened to me! Then I wouldn't be hurt! It hurts, Jimin. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts."

You repeat that phrase over and over again until your breakdown begins to falter into hiccups, energy gone, and you melt into Jimin's embrace. The room is suddenly still, the only existing thing being you and Jimin on the floor, crying out hurt and apologies.

When he clutches so hard onto your shirt that his knuckles turn white, you know that he didn't mean to do it on purpose, that he's genuinely sorry for how things went down. And when you hug him back and shuffle closer to him, he knows you're willing to forgive him, you don't blame him for the decisions he made.

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

Things feel fuzzy after that. Not necessarily in a bad way, there's just too much delicacy in the air for you to process things properly.

The cup of tea is warm in your hands as you wait for Jimin to finish filling up the bathtub.

After some quiet moments, he walks out of the bathroom and throws an apologetic smile your way.

"You're all set. I'll be out here, shout if you need anything."

"Okay."

You do think initially that a bath will help you relax, maybe get rid of some of the squeezing tension in your muscles, but it becomes clear that your mind won't be able to handle something as simple as undressing and getting into the tub.

Marks brokenly painted across your skin catching your stare, you needed to be forced out of it.

Even as you slowly climbed into the tub and sat down, the only thing running through your head was the image of your scarred form.

You cry out Jimin's name.

"Is everything okay?"

You beg the words to leave your tongue.

"Stay. Please."

Your voice is small and tired, and his heart jumps in a mix of adoration and pain, because you are ever so lovely, but you're hurt, and you're hurt because of him and his pride.

"Okay. I'll stay."

He takes a seat on the closed toilet, and you stare at him for a few seconds, trying to figure out how to ask for the support you need.

"I- can y- my hair."

Finally, it comes out strangled, but it comes.

"What about your hair?"

Jimin moves closer when you fuss a little at his question, splashing the water while doing so.

You rake your hands through your hair aggressively, and he thinks he understands what you're trying to say.

"Do you want me to help you wash it?"

Your face visibly softens – similarly to Jimin's heart – and you let out a little sound of confirmation.

"Okay, are you sure you're comfortable with that?"

"Mhm."

"Okay, pass me the bottle."

The warm water is soothing on your scalp and you feel yourself relaxing as soon as the shampoo touches your head.

“Sorry if I pull your hair.”

When you feel Jimin’s fingers raking across your hair, you start to cry again.

The way he gently rubs your hair makes you overwhelmed with a warm feeling that fills your chest at being handled so tenderly for the first time in so long.

"Love, why are you crying?"

If Jimin was already panicked at your tears, he’s utterly mortified now that the term of affection slipped out accidentally.

Thankfully, it seems like you're too caught up in enjoying the feeling to notice what he just called you.

“Thank you.”

His hand movements stopped for a second to think about his next words before resuming with a sigh.

"Don't thank me. I fucked up so bad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I should've just listened to you. I'm so sorry."

Jimin's voice cracked, and it looked like he was going to start crying too.

Once he was done, he went to grab a towel, and you stopped him by putting a hand on top of his.

"It's okay. I know you didn't mean it."

"I'm still really sorry. You shouldn't have gone through any of that."

You simply hummed as a response, and you both knew that it meant forgiveness.

The moment felt so soft, soft in the way you were looking at each other, soft like the butterflies in your stomach, it was all just really, really soft.

∘⁺✧◞₊⋅✱

That didn't last too long though, because sleep has never come easy to you, and the events of this day only worsened it.

Every time you closed your eyes, his sickening face would appear in front of you. You could almost feel the way he gripped onto your skin, bruising it.

You could feel yourself falling into a panic spiral again, and your brain's first instinct for whatever reason was 'where's Jimin?’

You sat up and saw him fast asleep on his bed, and you grew hesitant.

What if he gets mad that you woke him up? What if he laughs at you? He's gonna tell you to toughen up.

But then you think back to how he's acted ever since he went to get you.

That wasn't just temporary, right? Was it just pity? Was he only nice to relieve himself of any guilt?

Your overthinking mixed with your already panicked state, and you once again felt like things were crumbling all around you.

You showed Jimin your weakest parts, he can surely use that against you. He probably thinks you're even more pathetic now. He's gonna tell everyon-

"Y/N? What's going on?"

You were so deep in your thoughts that you didn't realize how loud your sobs had gotten, nor that they'd woken Jimin up.

You looked up in horror as you realized that he was sitting on your bed, watching you cry.

The concerned look in his eyes only made you cry harder. You wanted to fall into his comfort, wanted to believe that he genuinely cared about you, but at the same time you were convinced that he was just pretending.

"Don't act like you care."

“Huh?”

"I know you're only being nice to me out of pity, you can drop the act now."

Your words came out broken and between sobs. After you finished your sentence your breathing quickened again.

Jimin felt his heart being shredded into pieces as he saw your state. Did you really think that he hated you?

He could deal with that later, right now his main priority was getting your breathing regulated.

"Come here, we're gonna breathe together, okay? Can you do that for me?"

You were hesitant to approach him, but the offer of closeness was too inviting for you to turn down.

Jimin waited until you were seated directly in front of him before continuing.

"Hands on your belly. Now breathe in, and out."

It took a while before you were breathing again, but now Jimin could tackle the second issue at hand.

“What can I do to help you?”

Jimin sees the distrust on your face at his words and his chest squeezes sadly.

"I'm not doing this to get rid of guilt or anything like that, if that's what's running through your head."

“How do I- know that you're not just saying that to say it?"

Oh what Jimin wouldn't do to hand you the world.

"If I genuinely didn't care I wouldn't be here right now. You'd know if I was lying."

You think to yourself before giving into his offer with a small nod. Jimin smiles at your response.

“Do you need a distraction? Comfort? Water?”

“I think– I think comfort.”

"Okay. Do you want cuddles?"

Your brain short circuited, and Jimin took your silence as discomfort, so he rambled on.

"When I was younger, if I was ever scared of something, my mom would cuddle me and it always made me feel better. If you're not comfortable that's fine, I just think it would help."

You took a second to digest what Jimin had just asked you, never in a million years imagining you'd hear him asking you that, before nodding your head.

"Okay then, come here." Jimin laid down facing you and opened his arms expectantly, so you scooted closer to him and let him embrace you.

There's an inexplicable safety you felt surrounding him that had you melting into his hold. For the second time that day, his fingers gently played with your hair and you felt your walls come down a little further, warmth encasing both of you.

"You're so warm."

"Fuck do you think I am, a reptile? Of course l'm warm."

You scoffed at Jimin’s words, but stayed snuggled into him nonetheless.

"Are you uncomfortable?" You asked him.

"No. I'll let you in on a little secret of mine. I love cuddles. But only from specific people. But don't tell anyone.”

A soft giggle leaves your lips at his words, and Jimin decides that it's now his new favorite sound.

You pull back so you and Jimin are eye to eye; you want to speak but words are hard to convey.

“What's on your mind?” He's attentive, eyes searching yours for any hurt or worry.

“Do you cuddle with all your mission partners?” You try to lighten the mood and he laughs, so you assume it worked.

“No, only with the ones I like.”

His voice is soft when he says this, and it makes you melt a bit more.

“I really did think you hated me at one point.”

“I never did, I'm just very emotionally constipated. In all honesty I really do admire you, but I forced myself to see you as competition to avoid any of the weird emotional shit. Looks like it didn't work.” He finishes his sentence with a bitter chuckle; shame evident in his voice.

“I mean, I wasn't really all that nice to you either.” You try to easy his guilt.

“I wish we would've gotten off on the right foot.”

“Me too. But what's done is done.”

“I'm really sorry for not listening to you. I thought you were saying all of those things just to mess with me, but now I realize how stupid my logic sounds. Hearing what was happening over your microphone had me sick to my stomach. I can't even imagine how it must've felt for you.”

“It felt like my world was ending, honestly.” Your voice is quiet, but not enough to conceal how it cracks while tears pool in your eyes again.

“I never thought I would see him again. I'm still so scared, Jimin.” You begin to hiccup sobs, and he wastes no time in pulling you closer.

“It's okay. He's never coming near you again. I promise. You're safe, okay?” Jimin's voice was soft, feeling the way his chest vibrates against your head that's now tucked under it only helped calm you further.

You both remain like this until you've completely stopped crying and relaxed in his arms. Everything around you felt warm and tender, lulling you into deep sleep.

The last thing your brain manages to process is a soft kiss on your forehead, and words that sound a lot like:

“Goodnight, love.”