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Objectively speaking, the house Jimin’s grandmother has left him is a disaster.
The roof is leaking in three places; the tiles need to be replaced. The garden is overgrown with weeds, and the front gate hangs on a hinge. The hanji in the windows and doors is old and beginning to rip. And those are only the external problems. Heaven knows what else there is to fix.
Still, his grandmother’s home is stunning, and it’s a property that could be worth a lot of money if Jimin manages to fix it up. Not that he wants to sell it. The place has too many memories for that. And he doesn’t think his grandmother had left it to him for it to be sold. She’d never been subtle about her desire to get him out of the city and back to her tiny village, where she thought the country air would be good for him. You were so sweet when you were young , she’d told him more than once. It’s the city that turned you cold .
His mother, who was certainly more city-cold than him, had called him an idiot for moving to the old house. “You’ll be miserable there,” she had said during the last conversation before he left. “They don’t even have a nightclub out there, and you’re in the club every weekend.”
That just went to show how much she paid attention to him these days. Jimin hasn’t been to the club in over a year. He’s sworn off it, actually, which is why he thinks this move might be good for him. There won’t be any temptations out here. He can shut everything out and focus on music.
On the train ride over, he’d been full of ideas about how much he could get done on his first night there. He’d wanted to sweep, set up some lighting he’d brought with him, go through his grandmother’s things. But when he gets there, the scale of the task is so overwhelming that he ends up sitting on the floor, just inside the entrance, scrolling mindlessly down Instagram for most of the night. Then he unfolds his floor mattress and goes right to bed without even bothering with his usual nightly routine.
He doesn’t set an alarm and plans to sleep in. The last thing he expects is to be woken up by the sound of hammering. At first, he thinks he’s dreaming and drags his pillow over his head. When the sound grows incessant, he sits up blearily, rubbing his eyes. It takes him another five minutes to drag himself out of bed, but the noise is so consistent and annoying that he has no choice. Shoving his feet into a pair of shoes, he heads out the door into the courtyard.
A stranger is fixing the foundation in front of the main hall.
Jimin’s first reaction is alarm. He takes a step back, but he’s really too sleep-addled to be alert, so he doesn’t run or call 112 or do anything else that would be a normal reaction to finding a stranger in your home. Instead he stares, blinking slowly, trying to puzzle out why there’s a stranger fixing his house.
His second reaction is interest. The stranger is handsome in the sort of natural, unpolished way of someone who doesn’t think too much about it. His long, black hair falls into his eyes as he works, and he’s wearing a simple white t-shirt that pulls nicely across his broad shoulders. His jaw is sharp and angular, and his hands are strong and veiny like his forearms. From the side, he looks like he can’t be too much older than Jimin himself.
The stranger notices his arrival before Jimin can get himself together enough to even question him. He stops hammering for a brief moment to glance over and say, “Morning.”
Then he goes back to work.
The noise of the hammer is going to give Jimin a migraine. He steps forward, wrapping his arms around himself, his shirt too thin for the chill morning air. The stranger is alright - he’s probably heated up from working so hard.
“What are you doing in my house?” Jimin demands. “At the crack of dawn.”
The stranger doesn’t stop working but shoots him a glance that’s half-amused and half-confused. “It’s 8 am.”
Jimin winces. It’s honestly even earlier than he thought. “I was trying to sleep.”
The stranger doesn’t even bother giving him an answer.
“Excuse me,” Jimin says, growing more peevish by the second. “I don’t remember hiring you to come work on the house.”
“You didn’t,” the stranger says easily. This time he doesn’t stop hammering, and he doesn’t try particularly hard to make his low voice heard over the hammer. Jimin is forced to take a step closer.
He waits for an explanation but gets nothing. “Do I need to call the cops?”
The stranger shoots him an amused look. “Please. Officer Lee doesn’t answer the phone this early.”
So it’s too early for the police station to be open, but not so early that Jimin should be sleeping in. Jimin’s formulating an irritated reply when the stranger finally puts the hammer down and stands up, brushing his hands clean on his pants.
“Min Yoongi,” he offers at last.
Jimin doesn’t feel nearly as inclined to offer his own name. Somehow he thinks this Min Yoongi already knows who he is, so it isn’t much of a trade-off. He stares at him silently and waits.
“Your grandmother must not have mentioned me.” He finally has the sense to look a little embarrassed.
“Seems not,” Jimin responds coolly.
“I work in construction. Well, I’m a carpenter, actually. I live down the street from here. I would stop by to help your grandmother out when things needed fixing. She asked me to look after the place after she died, so I’ve been coming by, fixing it up bit by bit.”
“You must not come by often, given the state of the place.”
As soon as he says it, he realizes it’s an awfully mean thing to say. The guilt has him freezing up as a matching coldness spreads across Yoongi’s expression. It’s too late to take it back, and anyway, Jimin wouldn’t know how to. He lets his words hang in the air, buffered by nothing.
“Come around more than you,” Yoongi points out. His tone is even, but the words cut as deep as they’re meant to. He returns to crouching by the foundation and starts hammering again. Jimin’s first instinct is the rising heat of anger that makes him want to be even meaner, to fight back.
He tries to push it away. He’s supposed to work on that, and anyway, Yoongi’s right and Jimin started it. He clears his throat, but he can’t think of anything to say. Instead he turns around and walks back to his room, sliding the door shut between them.
The hammering goes on all morning. Jimin tries, in vain, to go back to sleep, but it’s impossible. He lies there mindlessly on his sleeping mat, scrolling through his phone and trying not to think too hard about Min Yoongi, the stranger who’s been helping his grandmother during the time Jimin was too busy and too important to visit.
His phone is full of texts from friends who aren’t friends and Instagram is full of pictures and videos of clubs and parties and brunches and desserts with towering swirls of whipped cream that he knows no one actually eats. The stark difference between the reality of everyone he knows and his own personal reality, lying in his grandmother’s old house with a stranger outside, feels a little surreal.
Around noon, he gets so hungry he starts to consider risking Min Yoongi again just to go outside and find something to eat. Then he realizes he doesn’t have groceries or anything to eat, and he’ll have to leave the actual house to find something, and he ends up groaning and burrowing back into his pillow instead.
The hammering stops around one in the afternoon. Jimin listens carefully for footsteps or any sign of life. When it’s been long enough that he can safely say Min Yoongi is gone, he finally emerges from his room and walks across the courtyard to the kitchen. The sun is almost painfully bright after his lengthy hiding stint.
Though he’s not expecting to find anything, he thinks he’ll go through his grandmother’s cabinets and fridge anyway. He and his mother had emptied out the perishables after her funeral, but they might have left a pack of ramen or two if he’s lucky.
He finds the stone countertop full of groceries. Someone has left him a box of ramen, rice, a few snacks, flour. He opens the fridge and finds fresh produce, milk and eggs that are all colors and sizes, likely laid by the neighbors’ chickens. He has to take a step back and think for a moment. It feels invasive, like someone’s embedded themselves into his life when he didn’t ask for it. But it feels nice, too, kind and warm, a welcome of sorts. Even his own mother never filled his fridge back home.
It could be one of the neighbors, or it could have been Min Yoongi. Jimin decides it’s best not to dwell on the latter. He pulls out a pot to cook ramen and gets briefly emotional. He remembers his grandmother cooking all her best homemade food for him in these pots, back when he was a child and they used to visit every summer.
The ramen is the best ramen he’s eaten in ages. It could be the fresh vegetables or the fresh eggs or his grandmother’s pots. Or maybe this is all he needed to make the crushing stagnancy of his life go away: being somewhere new. The meal is enough to motivate him to grab a broom and start sweeping.
He sweeps all the rooms except his grandmother’s, even the courtyard, and uses the broom to dust away the cobwebs. When he’s done, he goes through the kitchen to sort out what to keep and what to toss or give away, cleaning as he goes. It’s harder than he thought because it turns out he doesn’t really want to give away anything that belonged to his grandmother. Who knows how old the clay pots are? Who knows what history lies behind the pots and pans - were they her wedding gifts? Were they her mother’s? If only Jimin had thought to ask.
One of the cabinets is falling off its hinges. He knows the cabinets hadn’t been here when he was a kid, and she had them installed later on, doing much of the work herself. If she could put the doors on herself, he can probably fix them himself, too. He has the Internet, after all. One of the hinges is broken, though, which means he’ll have to go out and buy a new one.
He showers and dresses, thankful that one of the few renovations she’d done on the house was a proper bathroom, even if there’s a lone showerhead with no tub. Then he heads out in the vague direction that he remembers the village center to be, where all the shops are. He remembers there being a general store, a hardware store, a restaurant and a clothing store, too, though he can’t remember what else there is, if anything. But it’s been many years. Things may have changed.
It’s the afternoon, so there are people out and about, children playing. He runs into an old woman on the way who calls out, “City boy!” as soon as she sees him, as if she knows him. “You must be Iseul’s grandson.”
Jimin stops to greet her politely, feeling embarrassed. He can’t remember her at all, though they must have met. Only the young people tend to be transitory in places like this. “How did you know?”
She snorts. “Who else would dress like that?”
Jimin looks down at his outfit. He’d picked it specifically not to stand out, but it’s clear that he failed, though he isn’t quite sure why. He’s just wearing black pants and a beige pullover with a crossbody bag and leather sandals. He is wearing sunglasses though, and they’re designer, so that could be a giveaway. Although, if he thinks about it, everything he’s wearing is designer. It’s just a beige pullover, though. How would anyone know?
She laughs at his confusion and pats his arm comfortingly. “Nice watch,” she says, and Jimin winces. Okay, the watch is also a giveaway. “Anyway, I live outside the village, two miles that way.” She points vaguely in the distance. “If you need eggs, come to me, not anyone else, okay? Mine are the best.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jimin says.
She pats his arm again. “You’ll do just fine.”
He watches her walk away, feeling rather discomfited.
He has two more encounters around the village center, which is a quiet little street of stores with a few benches here and there and some tables outside the restaurant. There are a few more buildings, maybe offices, and the post office, too. Both are older men and women who guess whose grandson he is and tell him a story about how long they’ve known Iseul and how sad they are she’s gone. By the time he reaches the hardware store, his social battery is fully drained.
Another old man is standing at the counter when he walks in. He looks at him curiously then smiles. “Iseul’s grandson, I’m guessing.”
Jimin resists the urge to sigh. “Yes, sir, that’s me.”
“I’m so glad you took over her home instead of selling it. You know, I keep hearing about all these big companies coming in and turning historic homes into tourist stays. Can you imagine? Tourists in a place like this?”
“I can’t imagine,” Jimin says solemnly. He’d gone on a trip to one of those traditional homestays with his friends once. It had been familiar to him, of course, because of his grandmother’s home, but all his friends had treated everything like such a novelty. They’d even made kimchi in the courtyard and buried it. They thought it was the coolest thing in the world, like Jimin hadn’t spent all his childhood summers doing exactly that.
“Well, you’ll like it here. The air is definitely better than Seoul, I can guarantee you that.”
Jimin smiles. “I can already tell it’s making a difference.”
“Of course it is. Now what can I help you with?”
Jimin had been hoping to just look around the store himself, but he doesn’t want to be rude. “I was looking for a cabinet hinge. One of the kitchen cabinet doors is falling off its hinges, and one’s broken so it can’t be tightened.”
The old man nods. “You’ll have to forgive me, I have a hard time walking, so I’ll call my nephew in to help.” He turns over his shoulders and calls out, “Yoongi-yah!”
In hindsight, Jimin should have known the town carpenter worked in the town hardware store.
Yoongi emerges from the back room of the shop, looking a little more put together than the morning. The ends of his hair are damp, and he’s wearing flannel now instead of the morning’s t-shirt. When he sees Jimin, a cool mask settles over his pleasant expression.
“Yoongi-yah, get Iseul’s grandson some cabinet hinges.”
“Yes, Uncle.” His gaze passes over Jimin. “Right this way,” he says distantly, walking off to the wall of shelves toward the front of the store.
Jimin follows along behind him. It’s a small store, but they have an almost absurd amount of things crammed into the shelves. He feels like he could find anything he needed here. Yoongi stops at a shelf full of various cabinet hinges.
“What size overlay are you looking for?” Yoongi asks.
Jimin blinks. He doesn’t know what that is. “Um, not sure?”
Yoongi stares at him with a gaze clearly full of judgment. “Did you bring one of the hinges with you?”
He probably should have thought to do that. “No.”
“Do you even know how to install a cabinet hinge?”
“I can watch a video,” Jimin says defensively.
Yoongi sighs.
Jimin points out a hinge that looks fairly similar to the one in his grandmother’s kitchen. “It’s probably that one. Do you do exchanges?”
“I’ll just bring a couple other options when I come down next.” He sounds long-suffering about it.
Jimin blinks again. “You’re going to keep coming over?”
“Well, as you pointed out, there’s quite a lot left to do.”
He refuses to show any embarrassment even if he feels it acutely. “Well, I live there now. I can handle it from here on out.”
Yoongi finally looks at him head-on, eyebrows slightly raised. Jimin realizes they’re about the same height: eye-level. Yoongi’s eyes are curved and pretty, like two half-moons.
“You know how to refinish floors?”
“I can figure it out.”
“Fix damaged walls?”
“You can find anything on the Internet these days.”
“Repair foundation?”
Jimin turns away from him, exasperated. Then he turns back. “Look, I think we got off on the wrong foot.”
“ You got off on the wrong foot.”
Jimin purses his lips, trying to control the heated blush that threatens to rise to his cheeks. “I would like to fix it.”
Yoongi stares at him. His gaze is piercing, and Jimin resists the urge to squirm. “I promised your grandmother I would help. I intend to follow through. I didn’t charge her anything, and I won’t charge you either.”
Against himself, Jimin softens. “I can’t have you do all that work for nothing.”
“Trust me, your grandmother did a lot for me. It’s not for nothing.”
Jimin finds it difficult to answer. He’d neglected his grandmother in recent years - he knows that. It causes a uniquely acute stab of pain to know that someone else had taken his place. But he has no one to blame but himself.
“Right,” Jimin says quietly. “Alright.”
Yoongi holds his hand out. “Start over? Min Yoongi.”
Jimin takes his hand and shakes it. It’s rough, calloused, and nearly engulfs his. “Park Jimin. Nice to meet you.”
Yoongi nods and lets go. “Don’t worry about the hinges. I’ll bring them over in the morning.”
Jimin winces. “Not 8 AM, please.”
It could be a trick of the light, but he thinks he sees the ghost of a smile playing across Yoongi’s mouth. “Non-negotiable.”
Jimin groans. “Well. See you in the morning, then.”
He turns away, stopping to bow to his uncle at the front desk, before heading to the door. He has it half-open when he hears Yoongi call, “Park Jimin.”
Jimin glances over his shoulder, eyebrows raised.
“Nice bag.”
Jimin looks down. It’s just a crossbody, but he hadn’t thought about the gold letters emblazoned on the clasp. LV.
That’s probably a giveaway, too.
Yoongi shows up at nine.
Jimin is already up by then, determined to show Yoongi he isn’t some soft city boy who can’t wake up at a normal time. And he isn’t - his sleep schedule is just permanently fucked by schedules that run until 2 AM and have him up just two hours later. When he doesn’t have work, he can’t help but spend all his time catching up on sleep.
Jimin’s in the kitchen when he shows up, entering the courtyard through the front gate. For a moment, Jimin is annoyed, but then he remembers that he forgot to lock the gate, so it’s really his own fault. Jimin hadn’t slid the kitchen door panels shut, so Yoongi spots him right away and heads over. He’s carrying a hefty tool box with a belt around his waist, too.
“Morning,” he says. “Cabinet?”
Jimin nods, stepping back from the counter and pointing to the cabinet in question. The snarkiness is built into him at this point, so he says, “What happened to non-negotiable?”
“Didn’t want to disturb the sleeping beauty.”
He says it without an ounce of sarcasm, his tone perfectly level. Jimin’s nose twitches in irritation.
Yoongi takes off his shoes and steps inside, looking around with raised eyebrows. “Reorganizing?”
Jimin has decided the best way to tackle the problem of the kitchen is just to remove every item from every cabinet and shelf and place it on the counter. If he looks at them all at once, maybe then he can figure out what to do. If only his grandmother hadn’t been such a hoarder. He could have kept a few sets of pots and pans without a problem. But she’d jammed every cabinet to the brim.
“I’m trying to clean up, but I don’t want to get rid of something that was important to her by accident.”
“Mm.” Yoongi looks at the countertops critically. “She hated that set over there. Her mother-in-law gave it to her, and you know how she felt about her.”
Jimin doesn’t. He places the set in question into a box on the ground. “How did you know her so well?”
Yoongi crouches on the floor in front of the cabinet with the broken hinge and opens his toolbox. “We’re neighbors.”
It’s not a sufficient answer. There are other homes on this street. Neighbors don’t mean you know how much someone hated their mother-in-law. But maybe Jimin isn’t the best judge of what it means to have neighbors. He barely saw any of his back in Seoul. He’d lived in his building for three years before he realized another singer in the same company as him lived on the same floor.
Yoongi seems to interpret Jimin’s silence correctly. He stays focused on comparing the hinges he brought to the one on the door, but he says, “She helped out a lot when my father got sick. She sent us food for weeks. I made an effort to get to know her after that.”
Jimin smiles, though there’s a heavy tinge to it. That sounds like the grandmother he knew. She loved to cook for everyone. She was always making too much and sending Jimin to carry containers to the neighbors. “Is he alright now, your dad?”
“He had an accident while working. He’s paralyzed.”
Jimin’s insides lurch with sympathy. It’s hard to think of what to say to that. “I’m so sorry.”
Yoongi seems to find the right match and pulls out a drill to remove the screws. Jimin assumes that’s the end of the conversation and returns to sorting through his grandmother’s things. He tosses a pile of spices that are probably older than him into the trash.
It’s slightly awkward working in the same room as Yoongi, and he considers taking on a different part of the house, but it ends up being useful. Every now and then, he asks Yoongi if he recognizes a dish or a pan. Yoongi will look at it thoughtfully before coming up with an answer.
Her mother gave her that one.
That was a gift from your grandfather, I think.
She stole that one from your mom, actually, and said she wouldn’t give it back on pain of death. That makes Jimin laugh. He stores that particular dish right back in the cabinet.
It’s lunch time before he knows it. Yoongi has left the kitchen by then, working on something noisy in the courtyard. Jimin figures offering food is the polite thing to do. He pops his head outside and asks, “Do you want anything to eat?”
Yoongi stops drilling to answer. “No, thanks, I’ll eat with my dad later.” He pauses, considering. “But if you have coffee - ”
Jimin nods. “Can do.”
He makes himself a pot of ramen and brews two cups of coffee, setting up at the table. Yoongi joins him shortly. He looks a little hesitant about sitting down, but he ends up taking the chair across from him and thanks him for the coffee.
The silence is awkward, but Jimin can’t think of anything to say. He eats his ramen quietly.
“You’re quite popular,” Yoongi finally says, nodding to Jimin’s phone. It sits face-up between them. Jimin looks at it. He’s getting a call. He honestly hadn’t even noticed. “That’s got to be your fifth call and it’s been, what, ten minutes?”
“I’ve tuned it out at this point,” he says.
“Spam?”
“Company. Manager. Stalkers. Reporters.” He shrugs. “Emphasis on the company. They’re not happy I decided to move out here.”
“Probably hard to do events and shows when you’re not in the city.” His tone is neutral like he’s just observing.
“Nobody wants me for events or shows right now. I don’t have a single schedule booked.”
“Then there can’t be any harm in a break, can there?”
Jimin smiles wryly. “If only you were my manager.”
“Hire me.” There’s a teasing glint in his eye that Jimin finds suddenly endearing. “I’ll let you do whatever you want.”
“You say that, but I’m not an easy charge.”
“How bad can you be? I can go on midnight ice cream runs, easy.”
“You have no idea,” Jimin mutters, the humor leaving him as quickly as it had come. He looks down at his ramen and realizes he’s lost what’s left of his appetite. He shouldn’t ask, but he has to. It’ll hang over his head forever if he doesn’t. “Don’t you watch the news?”
“Not much,” Yoongi says lightly. Jimin can’t tell if he means it, or if he’s just helping Jimin save face. It’s not worth pushing, Jimin decides. If people in town know, he’ll find out soon enough.
“More coffee?” Jimin offers, standing up to refill his own cup.
Yoongi shakes his head, getting up to wash his mug instead. “Can I ask what you’re planning on doing with the house? I imagine your company would have a heart attack if you decided to live here permanently. Are you going to sell?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I didn’t think too hard when I came down here. Just taking things day by day.”
Yoongi accepts the non-answer. He dries off the mug and returns it to its correct spot. “Thanks for the coffee. I’m taking my dad to the doctor tomorrow, but I’ll be around the day after.”
“Alright. Thanks for your hard work.”
“There it goes again,” Yoongi says, amused, as he grabs his own phone from the table and eyes Jimin’s.
It’s not his manager this time. It’s Kwangsun.
His hand flexes, reaching for it on instinct. Then he lets it drop.
Yoongi’s looking at him curiously. “I’m leaving. You can get that.”
“Nope,” Jimin says, and he’s unable to keep the mix of anger and emotion from his voice. “Thanks again. I’ll see you in a few days.”
He sees Yoongi out. When he returns to the kitchen, he puts his phone in a cabinet and refuses to look at it for the rest of the day.
Jimin can’t sleep. It’s six in the morning when he gives up and decides to go on a run.
He avoids running toward the village, unwilling to be stopped left and right by well-meaning neighbors wanting to chat. He runs the other way instead. He passes Yoongi outside what must be his house, weeding the garden, which seems like a ridiculous thing to do at six in the morning. Jimin waves, and Yoongi waves back. Their houses really are close together - at least by village standards. It’s still a bit of a walk.
He runs well away from the village on the road that cuts through acres of farmland and loses track of how long it’s been. He didn’t bring his phone on purpose. He’s hoping he’ll run so much he’ll exhaust himself into finally sleeping. He’ll do anything to get away from doom scrolling his Instagram feed and visiting Kwangsun’s page once an hour as if there’ll be anything different at all. His most recent picture had been him and his latest boyfriend, some idol from a rookie group Jimin doesn’t care to know. They’re dressing it up as a hoobae-sunbae relationship. Kwangsun’s always giving him gifts and no one bats an eyelash.
It defeats the purpose, thinking about Kwangsun when he’s running to stop thinking. He tries to think about something else. He ends up thinking about how everyone’s calling him nonstop except his mother, who had only checked in to make sure he arrived and that’s it. It’s unhelpful. He tries to think about something else again. He thinks about his dog, who’s now with Kwangsun, who he hasn’t seen in over a year.
It can’t be helped. He’s spiralling.
He doesn’t know how much time has passed when he returns home to find a car parked outside the house. It’s his manager’s; he’d recognize it anywhere. Wiping his sweaty forehead on his sleeve, he steels himself for a difficult confrontation and enters.
Seokjin is waiting outside the door. He raises his eyebrow at the sight of him. “Well, hey there, hotshot who can’t answer his damn phone.”
“It’s six in the morning. You really drove four hours out here?”
“I’m getting paid overtime. Why the hell won’t you answer your phone?”
Jimin brushes past him to open the door. He doesn’t invite Seokjin in but leaves it open after himself, heading to the kitchen for a glass of water. Seokjin follows, of course, looking around himself curiously.
“I said I was taking a break.”
“Yeah, from the public, not from your job.”
Jimin gives him a withering look. “Do I have a job?”
“Are you gonna offer me coffee? Breakfast? Something?”
Jimin sighs. He puts on a pot of coffee and grabs bread and jam to place on the table. Seokjin starts making himself breakfast cheerfully.
“Look, I’m not here to lecture you. Sit down.”
Reluctantly, he slides into a chair across from Seokjin. “Please don’t tell me to come back. I thought we agreed I needed to stay out of the limelight for a while.”
“I’m not going to tell you to come back,” Seokjin says gently. “But you know the higher-ups want you back as soon as possible. They’re going to fight for it. They’ll let you hang out here for a bit, but eventually, when things die down, they’ll want you back.”
Jimin slathers a piece of toast with jam for himself, too, sighing heavily. “How long can we stave them off?”
“Not long at all if you keep acting like this.” Seokjin’s the one who gets up to get the coffee, pouring them both mug-fulls.
“Hyung, come on.”
“I know,” Seokin acquiesces. “You’re going through a lot, Jimin-ah, I know that. But if you want to stay here as long as possible, we’re gonna have to be smart about this.”
Seokjin’s always been the brains of the two. He’s the only one in the company that Jimin really trusts. Without him, he’d be lost. “Alright. What do I have to do?”
“Start preparing music, to begin with. The company needs to know you’re working. Don’t post on socials, yet, but get something ready in case they need you to. And answer your damn emails.”
“No one wants to hear music from me right now, hyung.”
“No, but they will. They’ve sent you a couple potential songs. Look at them and send a response.”
Seokjin gets up and starts going through Jimin’s cabinets, nosy as always.
“Nice place,” he says, and Jimin can tell he means it.
“There’s no alcohol, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
Seokjin shoots him a look, only slightly guilty at being caught. “Just checking. I still think we should get you into some therapy, maybe a group or something - ”
“I’m fine,” Jimin says stiffly. Seokjin sits back down. He doesn’t look convinced. From his pocket, Jimin fishes out the tiny notebook he keeps on him always and flips it open to a page full of tally marks. “Look. 96 days.”
Seokjin finally smiles, and his happiness is genuine. “That’s amazing, Jimin-ah. I’m proud of you.”
“That’s why I came out here,” Jimin mutters, putting the notebook away quickly. It feels too personal to have out for long. “No temptations. No distractions. If I drank too much, the old ladies in the neighborhood would stage an intervention.”
“I know,” Seokjin says. “I really do. I wish you could stay here as long as you need.”
“But reality is different,” Jimin finishes for him.
“It’s going to die down, Jimin-ah. All of it. I promise.”
Jimin finds it difficult to believe. He’s afraid he’s ruined his reputation forever. He already owes millions in damages for broken CF contracts. No one will want to hire him again. Half his image had depended on how sweet he was, how boy-next-door. No one will believe that ever again.
“Thanks for coming, hyung. I’m sorry I’ve been avoiding you. And sorry I ran away. I should have - should have dealt with all that more maturely.”
If he’s being honest, this is exactly why he’d been avoiding him. Because Seokjin is practical, realistic, and doesn’t let him get away with his usual shit. Because Seokjin cares about him more than anyone and forces him to be vulnerable. And right now, Jimin wants anything but vulnerability. He wants to burrow into himself like a turtle in its shell and hide until everyone’s forgotten his name.
“I don’t blame you,” Seokjin says. “I would have panicked, too. But next time remember that I’m on your side, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Jimin gives him a tentative smile, which Seokjin returns with blinding force. “You must be dead on your feet. Do you want to take a nap?”
“Please,” Seokjin groans. “I can barely see your face I’m so tired.”
Jimin laughs and leads him to the spare room.
All the music is terrible.
It’s a cacophony of noise, nothing that he would want to return to the scene with after his disastrous string of scandals. If anything, he should be coming back with something nice, quiet, and acoustic. This music is so loud it feels shameless.
It doesn’t help that Yoongi’s work is so loud in the courtyard today that Jimin can’t focus, anyway. He could slide the wooden doors of his bedroom shut, but the fresh air is much-needed, so he tries to focus on the music above the clamor.
He puts the least offensive file into GarageBand and messes around with it. He slows down the bridge and quiets down some of the background noise during the chorus. Absently, he hums a melody that could work, though lately his company’s always rejecting his ideas in favor of whatever new hotshot songwriter they’re working with.
“Lower the transients.”
Jimin nearly jumps out of his skin. He swears as he catches his laptop from slipping off his lap and looks up. Yoongi’s standing just outside the doorway in his work gloves, arms crossed over his chest. Jimin didn’t notice before, but now that his shirt’s a little see through he can see that he has some sort of tattoo on his chest.
“You scared me,” Jimin accuses.
The corner of Yoongi’s mouth lifts. “Lower the transients and compress that flute. It sticks out too much.”
Jimin blinks at him.
“You’re trying to make it less noisy, right?”
He nods slowly. “You know about mixing, Yoongi-ssi?”
“A bit.”
Jimin wants to be nosy, because the average person doesn’t talk about transients and compression. But he lets it go for now. “I tried compressing the flute and it just sounded hollow.”
“What’s the spatial placement?”
“Left and right.”
“Try front and back, but maybe only the back, and don’t compress.”
Jimin makes the adjustments. When he plays it back, it sounds better. Less jarring. Jimin looks up at Yoongi with new eyes. “Impressive.”
“You, too,” Yoongi returns. He pulls his gloves off but doesn’t step inside, still hovering outside the doorway. “It sounded pretty shit before you started fixing it, not gonna lie.”
“Tell me about it,” Jimin mutters.
“I didn’t realize famous pop idol Park Jimin produced his own music.”
Jimin gives him a wry look. “Well, you were judging, then.”
“Maybe,” Yoongi allows.
“I don’t, usually. Or at least, I try to, and the company rejects all my submissions. And then I get something produced by someone else.”
“The original song they sent, that was someone else’s submission?”
Jimin nods. “I thought I could fix it at least a bit. But they’ll probably reject it anyway.”
“Worth a fight, or you’ll be stuck with a trash song.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.” He turns his laptop so that Yoongi can see it, pointing at a particular part of the song. “I don’t know what to do here. It sounds like two songs put together, honestly.”
Yoongi leans in, squinting at the screen.
“You can come in, Yoongi-ssi,” Jimin tells him.
Yoongi looks at him for a moment. Then he takes off his shoes and leaves his gloves next to them. He enters carefully, sitting just inside the door with his legs crossed. He takes the laptop from him and messes around, playing the clip and fixing a few things. Then he hands it back. Jimin plays the adjusted track and beams.
“Now you have to tell me. When did you get into producing?”
“I went to school for music,” Yoongi admits.
Jimin blinks at him, surprised. “You left the village?”
He nods. “Dropped out when Dad had the accident so that I could come home.”
“Do you still make music?”
“I sell my songs when I can. It’s competitive, as I’m sure you know.”
“Can I hear something of yours?”
“Nope,” Yoongi says without a second’s hesitation.
Jimin frowns. “Come on, Yoongi-ssi. You just heard my song. Show me one at least.”
“Not a chance.”
“Please,” Jimin wheedles. “Where do you post them, Soundcloud? I’ll find you.”
“You won’t.” Yoongi sounds so sure about it that Jimin feels compelled to argue further.
“Come on, please. Yoongi-ssi, don’t be a spoilsport.”
“If you’re going to whine, you may as well call me hyung.”
“Hyung,” Jimin tries. It doesn’t feel as weird to call him hyung as he thought it would be. He must be getting more comfortable around him, though he hadn’t realized it. “Hyung, one song, please. If it’s good, I might hire you. It’s networking.”
Yoongi laughs out loud at that. He stands up, brushing off his pants. “Nice try. Like I’d ever get the chance to produce for The Park Jimin.”
“I’m literally giving you the chance right now.”
Yoongi scoffs at him. “Yeah, yeah. That’s my cue to leave. Good luck with that song.”
“Hyung, this is your chance to pitch!” Jimin calls after him as he walks across the courtyard. Yoongi waves two fingers without turning around, and Jimin returns huffily back to the song.
There’s an issue with the plumbing, and Yoongi’s a carpenter, so Jimin’s forced to find someone to actually work on the house for once. He asks around until he finds the man in town who deals with that sort of thing. He fixes the problem fairly easily and doesn’t charge much, either, but he does spend about two hours talking Jimin’s ear off about how new plumbing works in old houses and then expects Jimin to treat him to a cup of tea and a snack, too. That’s the problem with the village. Everyone’s friends and everyone wants to chat. In Seoul, if he’d called a plumber, he would have been in and out before he knew it.
But he supposes it’s kind of nice, having other people to look out for you. One of his neighbors cooks a big meal every weekend and has started sending him extra dishes when she does. She’s an amazing cook. He’s a little sniffly from allergies one day, and a woman he passes in the village gives him a sachet for some herbal tea that clears his congestion up overnight. Even his own mother had never been this helpful when he lived in Seoul.
He spends his days caught between working on the house and his music, focusing on both tasks almost obsessively. One weekend afternoon, when the weather is particularly nice, he decides to visit his grandparents’ graves. His grandfather had died when he was too young to remember him, but he had visited his grave every time they’d come to stay with his grandmother. She’s buried right next to him.
He stops at the store to pick up fruit and wine, and Mr. Yang, who likes to chat with him whenever he shops, smiles in immediate understanding.
“Visiting the graves?” he asks, and Jimin nods.
“Good. Are you bringing a broom? There are always leaves scattered around there.”
“I forgot one,” Jimin says regretfully, holding out his empty hands.
Mr. Yang grabs the broom behind the counter and hands it to him, shaking it insistently when Jimin starts to protest. “Just drop it off on your way back.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Jimin takes his shopping, the broom, and the lollipop Mr. Yang hands him and heads to the graveyard. It’s a ways walk from the village, but he doesn’t mind, enjoying the pleasant breeze in his hair. As he nears the graveyard, he sees that he wasn’t the only one with the idea. Families are there with their children, running through the hills with soccer balls and shouts of laughter.
Jimin greets everyone he passes politely before he makes it to his grandparents’ plots, where he’s startled to find fresh fruit already placed neatly there and the grass wet with wine.
“Park Jimin,” says a familiar voice that sounds oddly pleased. “Fancy seeing you here.”
Jimin turns around and finds Yoongi. He’s holding a broom. The sleeves of his plain black shirt are pushed to his elbows, and it hugs his chest nicely. The veins in his forearms are particularly stark today. Jimin blinks, surprised at himself for noticing, and forces his gaze up to Yoongi’s face.
He wants to ask him what he’s doing there, but it seems like a stupid question. Instead, he gestures lamely to the fruit and says, “Thanks.”
“I come by every weekend,” Yoongi says. “Mine are over there.” He gestures a short distance away.
It’s a little annoying, this additional proof that Yoongi’s a much better grandson than him. Every weekend. He’s like the poster boy for a perfect village son.
“I have a blanket set up if you want to sit.”
Jimin nods. “Sure. I’ll be right over.”
Yoongi heads back over to his picnic blanket, set up between the graves, and Jimin pays his respects. He places the fruit, pours the wine, and bows three times. Then he sits for a moment, thinking about his grandmother and the warmth of her smile, and the way she used to call him every time he released a new song. He would send her downloads of his music videos because she hadn’t figured out Naver yet. Then she’d call him to tell him she’d gotten a neighbor to help her put it on the TV so she could watch him in full screen. And then she’d ask when he was visiting, and he’d put her off like he always did. I’m sorry, I have so many schedules . He wonders now if the neighbor had been Yoongi.
With a sigh, he gets to his feet and heads over to join Yoongi, who has brought snacks. He hands him a bag of crackers and Jimin takes it, folding his legs underneath him.
“How’s your dad?” Jimin asks, like he’s taken to checking every time they meet.
“I got him a new pair of headphones so he doesn’t have to blast his phone calls on speaker and he hates them,” Yoongi says matter-of-factly. “He spent ten minutes this morning telling me how ugly they are.”
Jimin’s startled into a laugh. “He’s a man of style, I see.”
“He sure is,” Yoongi says bitterly. “He’s worse than your grandmother.”
Jimin grins, because that he does know that about her. She’d loved critiquing his outfits in his music videos, too. Although it was annoying, he has to admit she was usually right. “I’ve been meaning to ask. I don’t remember seeing you around when we were kids, and I always played with the kids in the neighborhood when I visited.”
“I wasn’t around,” Yoongi says easily. My parents got divorced when I was a baby. My mom raised me in Seoul.”
Jimin’s eyebrows rise into his hairline. “No way. You’re a city boy?”
“Born and bred.”
“I never would have guessed. When did you come to live with your dad?”
“High school. My mom basically kicked me out, she was so sick of me. You wouldn’t remember me from then - I never left my room.”
Jimin leans forward in interest. Yoongi doesn’t usually talk about himself much. “You were bad?”
“Terrible,” he says darkly. “So she sent me to live with my dad and my grandfather. They straightened me out pretty quickly.”
“And you never went back?”
“For university, but then my dad had the accident, so I came back. Been here ever since.”
“You like it,” he discerns.
“I like it,” he confirms. “Seoul wasn’t good for me.”
“And your mom?”
“I visit sometimes. She’s fine on her own. She likes it.” Yoongi leans back on his hands, stretching his legs out, and tilts his head, his eyes glittering curiously. “Your turn.”
Jimin sniffs and looks away. “You probably know everything there is to know already.”
“I don’t follow celebrities.”
Jimin wants to say that he’s big enough that everyone knows about him anyway, but that sounds like an asshole thing to say, so he resists the urge.
“I want to hear it from you,” Yoongi says, and Jimin twists his lips then gives in.
“There’s not much to tell. Was doing pretty well until I had a drinking scandal last year. Just kept escalating. Figured it was time to lay low for a while.”
“Your mom’s still in Seoul?”
“Yeah. We don’t see each other a lot though. She’s busy.” He scoffs a little. “You think I’m bad, but she didn’t even call my grandmother.”
“I don’t think you’re bad.”
Jimin shoots him a look of frank disbelief.
“I don’t,” Yoongi repeats, and it’s firm enough that Jimin almost believes him. “She missed you though, your grandmother. Talked about you all the time. Her pride and joy, Park Jimin the idol. Even though she hated all the hair colors.”
Jimin laughs. “She was so mad when I dyed it pink. She didn’t talk to me for weeks.”
“Pink?” Yoongi repeats, impressed. “That must have been something.”
“She thought so too.” He sobers, thinking about her smile again. “I never thanked you properly. For working on the house. For helping her. For being there for her. I’m sure she loved you very much.”
Yoongi clears his throat and looks away. He rubs his nose, and the tips of his ears are a little pink. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It is,” Jimin says. “So thank you, Yoongi hyung.”
After a moment, Yoongi looks back at him and nods. “You’re welcome, Jimin-ah.”
Jimin’s pretty sure he’s being followed.
He feels like he’s being watched on his walk back home from the village picking up groceries. No one in the village would watch without stopping to chat. He looks around surreptitiously a few times but doesn’t catch anyone. Then he swears he hears a footstep.
When he bumps into Yoongi headed the same way, he almost jumps out of his skin.
“Yoongi hyung,” he says, surprise fading to relief.
Yoongi falls into step next to him. He holds his hand out, and Jimin hands him one of the grocery bags. “Jimin-ah. Shopping?”
Jimin nods. He glances behind himself once then whispers, “I think someone’s following me.”
Yoongi’s clever enough not to turn around immediately. He puts his free hand in his pocket and looks perfectly nonchalant when he glances around himself a few minutes later. “Can’t see,” he returns. “But I think you’re right.”
It’s either a sasaeng or paparazzi. Jimin feels an itch of anxiety begin under his skin. He had hoped no one would follow him here, but he should have known it was inevitable.
“Here,” Yoongi says suddenly, grabbing his arm and yanking him into the narrow space between the gates of two houses. Jimin stumbles to keep up as he turns the corner, takes him behind one of the houses and into the space between the same house and another one on the other side.
“Shh,” Yoongi whispers, putting a finger to his lips before he turns his attention to the road.
Jimin gets the idea. If someone’s following, they’ll have to pass by eventually. He settles in to wait. There’s not a lot of space in the alley, and he and Yoongi are nearly chest-to-chest. Jimin has to avoid looking at him because when he does, he realizes they’re far too close to each other.
After a little while, a man walks by with a camera. Not one of Jimin’s stalkers. Paparazzi, then. Somehow, that makes him feel better.
“The culprit?” Yoongi asks.
Jimin nods. He finally looks at him, and Yoongi’s mouth quirks up in satisfaction. He smells good, he realizes. Like some sort of woodsy cologne.
“Come on,” Yoongi says. Then he takes his hand and yanks him out of the alley.
They run right back onto the road and in the opposite direction of the photographer. They make a racket, stumbling into the road, grocery bags rustling. The man turns around and sees them with a shout of surprise.
“This way.” Yoongi turns them down another road and the photographer bumbles along a moment later, going to the wrong way.
They keep running, and Jimin can’t stop laughing now that they’ve lost him. Yoongi leads them down some convoluted back route to their street, and when they see Jimin’s house up ahead, they finally stop running.
Jimin bends over, hands on his knees as he catches his breath. It’s hard when he’s still laughing. “Yoongi hyung, I wish I’d had you in Seoul.”
Yoongi grins at him, similarly breathless, his hair plastered to his forehead. “I told you. Hire me as your manager.”
Jimin giggles. “Maybe I’ll have to.”
“Who was that, Dispatch?”
“Probably.”
“You really ought to start going around in a disguise.” Yoongi reaches out, suddenly, and flicks one of Jimin’s dangling earrings. He’s lucky he’s already flushed from running, or his reaction would have been obvious. “You don’t blend in at all.”
They stop outside the gate to Jimin’s home, and Yoongi hands him his grocery bags back. “Alright, alright,” Jimin says, slightly peeved because he’d thought he was getting better at that. He’s just wearing shorts and a t-shirt today - no watch, no sunglasses, no bag. “I get it. You don’t have to remind me every week.”
“I’ll have to keep reminding you until you listen. I’m your hyung, after all.”
“I look that bad, huh?”
Yoongi shakes his head quickly. “Not bad. I didn’t say bad.”
Jimin reaches up and slips out his earrings. “There. Better?”
Yoongi stares at him for a long minute that doesn’t do much to ease the blush on Jimin’s cheeks. “Ah, well,” he says suddenly. “Can’t be helped. It’s the face.”
He starts walking on ahead in the direction of his own house. Jimin watches him go indignantly.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” he shouts after him.
Yoongi glances over his shoulder, lips quirked. “Too pretty,” he calls back, and leaves Jimin half-fuming and half-blushing.
Jimin still hasn’t hunted down Yoongi’s secret Soundcloud, and Yoongi still won’t share, but one morning Jimin wakes up to an email from a [email protected] with a file. It’s the skeleton of a song, and it’s good. It sparks a level of excitement for music that Jimin hasn’t felt in ages. He doesn’t even bother with breakfast or coffee, pulling out his laptop while still in his pajamas so he can get to work.
He comes up with the melody himself. He has a few lines of lyrics that he sings over and over until they sound right, adding them over the music. When he’s unsure of how to move on, he sends the file back to Yoongi.
Yoongi’s response comes late at night, when even Jimin has almost decided it’s too late to be up. I knew your voice would be perfect for this .
Jimin’s had his voice praised countless times. But somehow Yoongi’s one sentence makes him giddy.
The house is really coming together, and Jimin feels like he’s finally beginning to settle into his new lifestyle. So naturally, it’s inevitable that everything goes to shit.
It’s another video. He’d sworn that at this point all of them had come out, but it seems like someone else had another angle. This one’s worse. They’d all been bad, but this one in particular makes Jimin feel especially humiliated. After his drunken fight on the sidewalk outside the bar, the video catches him stumbling into an alley and puking. Then he lies down in it, unconscious, and someone in the background starts shouting about calling an ambulance.
All the other videos had just been of the fight. There’d be a picture of him on the stretcher, later, but most of the news sites had been at least good enough not to post that one, so it disappeared pretty quickly. The worst part is that Jimin can’t even remember throwing up or passing out. He just remembers waking up in the ambulance.
The video, of course, starts the discourse all over again, when it had finally begun to die down. He’s all over the news once more. Netizens are talking about him on every medium possible. They’re resharing the old videos and pictures, digging up scandals from years ago. Worst of all, floating amid the mess is a picture of him and Kwangsun at a bar together, and Kwangsun’s kissing his cheek.
It’s not the first time that picture had come up. Every time it does, it gets buried quickly. Most Korean netizens still don’t like to talk about queerness, so they just pretend it doesn’t exist. They were friends , they insist, it’s normal.
Seokjin calls him as soon as the video starts circulating. Jimin has a panic attack after seeing it for the first time, and after that he’s in no capacity to talk to anyone. He mutes his phone and ignores it, even as it rings and rings and rings.
It’s too hard to sit with himself when things like this happen. To hard to wallow in the self-hatred. To hard to think, to be Park Jimin, to be a person at all.
The one good thing about living in such a small village is that it’s highly unlikely that any of the older inhabitants have seen the video in question yet. So Jimin goes to the village to get a drink and knows that no one will ask him about it or look at him askance. In Seoul, he had to hole up in his apartment until he felt like he was suffocating. He couldn’t even walk out to get coffee.
It’s a mistake - a dreadful, terrible mistake that he regrets the second he takes his first shot of soju, but by then it’s too late anyway. 117 days are already down the drain, and the regret grows until it’s choking him, so there’s nothing he can really do but keep on drinking.
“You better slow down,” the auntie who owns the restaurant warns him when she brings him his third bottle. “Eat something with it, or you’ll throw up all over my floor. I’m bringing you food.”
He doesn’t eat much, drinking more instead. He ends up scrolling down his phone, which is a mistake, too. Some of his friends have messaged him to check in. Seokjin keeps begging him to call back. There’s even a text from Kwangsun, which Jimin refuses to open. He should have closed his Instagram comments the second he saw the video, but he hadn’t, and now his photos are flooded with vitriol.
Jimin puts his head down on the table and wonders why the hell he had ever wanted to become a singer in the first place.
When the restaurant door opens, Jimin’s too out of it to even lift his head and look. It’s only when he feels a hand on his shoulder that he’s forced to pick his head up, even though it feels like it weighs a ton.
Yoongi’s figure swims in front of his gaze, blurry.
“Alright, Jimin-ah, you’ve had quite enough to drink. Let’s get you home.”
He starts picking up the bottles on the table and carrying them to the bin. He stops to chat with the restaurant auntie, who thanks him for coming and asks after his father. When he returns, Jimin’s rubbing his face to wake himself up.
“Hyung, what are you doing here?”
“Imo called me to come pick you up. Said you were drinking her entire stock.”
Jimin frowns blearily. “Not true. And I’m not ready to leave.”
“Oh, yes you are.” Yoongi grabs his arm and yanks him up. Jimin stumbles into him and nearly falls right to the ground, but Yoongi catches him, winding an arm around his waist to hold him steady.
“Hyung,” Jimin slurs, clutching a fistful of his shirt to keep himself upright. “You could stay and have a drink with me.”
“Not a chance. You’re going straight to bed.”
“Spoilsport.”
Yoongi grabs Jimin’s phone off the table. It’s ringing again. Kwangsun, this time. He hands it to Jimin, and Jimin raises his hand as if to chuck it at the wall.
“Woah,” Yoongi says, snatching it back quickly. “Not sure why we hate Kwangsun, but don’t take it out on your phone.”
“Fuck Kwangsun.”
“Fuck Kwangsun,” Yoongi agrees easily, leading him to the door. He puts Jimin’s phone in his pocket. Just before they leave, he props Jimin against the doorway and pulls off his jacket. “Here. Wear this.”
Jimin can’t figure out how to get his arms through the holes, so Yoongi helps, tucking him in and zipping it up. It’s oversized in a comfortable way. Maybe it’s just because he’s drunk, but the proximity has a sudden flush rising to Jimin’s cheeks, mixing in with the heat of the alcohol. Yoongi’s fingers accidentally brush the sliver of skin where his t-shirt’s ridden up, and Jimin’s breath hitches. Then he pulls the hood up, too, tight over Jimin’s face.
“It’s not cold,” Jimin says, to distract himself.
Yoongi winds an arm around him again and opens the door, half-carrying him out. “I’m guessing you don’t want to be photographed drunk after being in a scandal for being drunk.”
Jimin winces. “You saw it.”
“I have the Internet, Jimin-ah,” Yoongi says dryly.
Jimin pulls away from him. It’s mostly instinct, humiliation swirling in his belly even through the haze of drunkenness. He only stumbles a step away before Yoongi grabs him again, holding him firmly but gently.
“Hey,” Yoongi says quietly. Jimin can’t look at him. “Jimin-ah, look at me.”
He doesn’t. Yoongi reaches under the hood to cup his face in his hand and turn it toward him. His expression is serious but calm.
“I don’t care,” he says. Then, for good measure, he repeats it firmer. “I don’t care.”
He sounds so genuine that Jimin’s forced to believe him. He nods hesitantly, and Yoongi lets him go. They keep walking. Jimin can’t muster up words anymore, but he clings to Yoongi a little harder, leaning into him for support.
Jimin’s phone buzzes in Yoongi’s pocket, and Yoongi slips it out to check. Kwangsun again. He puts it away quickly, but Jimin’s already seen it. He scoffs bitterly.
“Who is he?” Yoongi asks. “You’re always rejecting his calls. You’ve done it before.”
“I don’t wanna talk about him. Don’t be nosy.” It doesn’t come off nearly as firmly as he wants it to. Instead, he sounds like he’s whining.
“Alright, alright. I’m dragging your drunk ass home and you’re calling me nosy?”
The phone’s ringing again. This time, Yoongi doesn’t look.
“Should I tell him to fuck off?” he asks.
“You’d do that?” Jimin blinks at him, stumbling a little. Yoongi catches him easily and keeps him walking, steady in his grip.
“Sure. What have I got to lose?”
Jimin stops walking abruptly. Yoongi stops beside him, confused, until he looks down and realizes Jimin’s crying. He groans in disbelief. “Jimin-ah. Why the hell are you crying?”
But then he reaches past Jimin’s hood to wipe his tears with the sleeve of his jacket. That, of course, makes Jimin cry even harder.
“He’s an ex, isn’t he? I knew it.”
That startles Jimin into stopping the tears. He looks at him, eyes wide, and Yoongi looks back in amusement.
“You’re not - I’m not - you don’t - ”
Fortunately, Yoongi understands his lack of speech and laughs. He leans in, chucking Jimin on the head, and says a little wickedly, “Takes one to know one.”
Jimin’s saved from answering by the sudden sight of a flash. They both catch it, freezing, and Jimin’s heart clenches tightly in his chest. Yoongi slowly pulls his hands away from Jimin. Jimin stares at him, and his stomach turns, and suddenly he thinks he might throw up. He turns around and runs for the nearest bush, collapsing on his knees in the wet dirt and throwing up twice.
When he looks back, wiping his mouth, Yoongi’s no longer in the same spot he left him. He’s over in an alleyway between the general store and the pharmacy, and he has his hand fisted in a man’s collar. Jimin stands up on shaking legs and watches the man hand Yoongi his camera. He pulls out the memory card, drops it to the ground, and crushes it beneath his foot. Then he lets the man go and returns to Jimin, who’s watching him with wide eyes.
“Did you just - ”
“Let’s go.” Yoongi turns him around and marches him down the street quickly. “He might have another one.”
“Hyung,” Jimin says, and he’s crying again, wiping viciously at his eyes. “Why are you so nice to me?”
Yoongi snorts quietly. “I’m not, really. I think you just hang around a bunch of assholes.”
That’s probably true. They walk the rest of the way home in silence, jarred by the paparazzi. Jimin cries silently for half the way before his tears dry up and he starts to feel a familiar hollowness settle within him. He expects Yoongi to leave him at the gate, having done his duty of seeing him safely home, but he takes Jimin’s keys from his fumbling fingers and helps him inside, all the way to his room. He even holds onto him when Jimin almost falls trying to kick his shoes off.
“Pajamas in here?” Yoongi asks, gesturing to a set of drawers near his bedroll as Jimin heads for the bathroom. When Jimin nods, he says, “I’ll put them outside the door.”
He washes his face and brushes his teeth, staring numbly at himself in the mirror, red cheeks and red eyes. 117 days.
He changes into the pajamas Yoongi sets out for him, and when he emerges the room is empty. He assumes he’s left, but he can hear noises across the courtyard, and when he peeks out, the kitchen light is on. He crosses the courtyard and finds Yoongi making ramen. He’s already set two bowls on the table.
“You can go home, hyung,” Jimin says quietly.
“What, you think you don’t owe me ramen after this?”
Jimin sits down at the table, feeling embarrassed and tired and touched all at once. “Thanks.”
When he brings the pot to the table, it’s steaming hot and topped with eggs, and Jimin feels a rumble of hunger at the sight of it. He’s still a little drunk, although it’s much easier to control it now.
“He was an ex,” Jimin confesses after a moment of quiet eating. “We broke up two years ago.”
“Two years?” He raises his eyebrow. “That’s a long time for you to still be crying over him.”
“We were together for a while. He took the dog.”
“Why’s he still calling you?”
Jimin shrugs. “He does that sometimes.”
“A lot, it seems. He single?”
“Doesn’t seem like it.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“A year. More than a year, maybe.”
“Do you ever pick up?”
“Sometimes,” he admits. “I try not to. Stresses me out.”
“Hmm.”
He doesn’t say anything after that. Jimin wonders if he’s being judged, but Yoongi looks peaceful, scooping more ramen from the pot and into his bowl.
“I was sober for 117 days,” Jimin says, and he must be drunker than he thought he still was, or he wouldn’t be confessing so many secrets today. “Until today.”
This time Yoongi looks at him across the table, his gaze impossibly soft. “That’s really impressive, Jimin-ah.”
“Not anymore.”
“It’s still impressive. Tomorrow’s day one, then. I’ll make you a mocktail.”
Against himself, Jimin smiles.
After a moment, Yoongi pulls Jimin’s phone out of his pocket and puts it on the table. It’s ringing again.
“He the reason you used to drink so much?”
“It was a hard breakup,” Jimin says defensively. “But I got better. I’ve been better. Stopped going out so much a year ago.”
Yoongi nods amenably. “So can I tell him to fuck off?”
Jimin doesn’t think. “Why the hell not?” he decides.
He answers the phone. Jimin’s heart stutters with sudden nervousness. With his eyes locked on Jimin’s, he says, “Jimin-ah’s too nice to say this, so I’m saying it on his behalf. If you keep calling him, I’ll make your life fucking miserable.”
Then he hangs up and tosses the phone between them.
It doesn’t ring again.
When they’re done eating, Yoongi takes their dishes to the sink and washes them despite Jimin’s protests. The sight of him standing there, broad-shouldered back at Jimin’s sink, makes him oddly emotional.
“It’s a control thing,” Yoongi says, his tone as mild as ever. “That’s why they do it. So they get to move on and you don’t. You’re stuck, and they get to feel like you’re still theirs.”
Jimin’s quiet. He hadn’t thought of it that way before, but now that Yoongi’s said it, it feels obvious. It fits Kwangsun perfectly.
“So move on. Don’t let him control you.”
Yoongi turns around, and Jimin finds himself nodding.
“Now go to bed. You should rest.” He stops by Jimin’s side and ruffles his hair until Jimin scrunches his nose. “Tomorrow everything will matter less. I promise.”
Jimin wakes up to incessant knocking on the gate. The sound makes him aware of how much his head hurts, his mouth dry and his stomach rolling with nausea. With difficulty, he pulls himself out of bed and goes to answer the door.
It’s Mrs. Choi, one of his neighbors, holding a thermos and with a smile far too bright for how terrible Jimin’s feeling.
“Heard you had a night,” she says, bustling by him straight to the kitchen without waiting to be invited in. He follows her, rubbing his eyes, and finds her rifling through his cabinets for a bowl. She pours the contents of the thermos into one and sets it on the table for him. “Hangover soup. You look like you need it.”
Jimin’s touched. He bows blearily and takes a sip. It’s delicious, and it settles his nausea after only a few spoonfuls.
“You’re young, but you shouldn’t drink so much, you know.” She pats his shoulder. “Good thing Yoongi was there to bring you home, or what would you have done all alone? That’s why you need a wife. Living in this big house all by yourself.”
Jimin mumbles an amenable response, which seems to be good enough for her, because her smile doesn’t fade.
“Did you see hyung leave for the store already? I have to thank him.”
“Oh, no, he’s not at the store today.” She sobers suddenly. “He took his father to the hospital this morning. He’ll still be there, I think.”
Jimin startles, staring at her. “Is he okay?”
“I couldn’t say. He was in a rush, so I didn’t get the chance to ask.”
“Which way’s the hospital?”
She points. “But it’s too far to walk. You’ll have to drive.”
He doesn’t have a car, of course. He’d wanted to leave Seoul as quietly as possible, and his cars are all too recognizable, so he’d gotten a private car on the train instead. He nods anyway and thanks her, and she leaves him with the rest of the thermos. As soon as she’s gone, Jimin runs to his room to change. His stomach feels tight with sudden stress. But then he considers that he can’t exactly show up empty-handed, so he’s off googling recipes that seem easy enough to manage with what’s already in his fridge.
Jimin’s never been much of a cook. All he does in Seoul is order delivery or make something instant, but he does his best and whips up some sort of a mix between kimchi and tofu stews. Then he puts it in one of his grandmother’s thermoses, puts that in a backpack, and goes to find his grandmother’s bike.
She hasn’t used it in years, as far as he knows, if she ever used it all. It was one of those things she always said she was going to do, bike around the neighborhood in the fresh summer air, but when it came down to it, she always went on walks instead.
It’s covered in dust but seems to be in working condition, so he puts on a mask, pulls up his hood, and heads out. He knows the hospital is over in a bigger nearby town, but it can’t take that long, and the weather’s nice. He can always stop for a break.
Despite his attempts at disguising himself, he’s riding on the road out when a truck driving by slows down and doubles back to hover slowly next to him. It’s Mr. Lee, who lives a few houses down.
“Jimin-ah, where do you think you’re going on that bike?”
Jimin comes to a stop, balancing a leg on the ground. “To the hospital, Mr. Lee. Taking Yoongi hyung some soup.”
“The hospital? On a bike?” Mr. Lee scoffs. “Get in.”
“It’ll be too out of your way - ”
“Get in,” he insists. “Don’t be silly.”
So Jimin puts his bike in the bed of the trunk and slips into the passenger seat. It’s a slow ride - Mr. Lee’s truck is ancient - but it’s definitely faster than the bike. Mr. Lee talks his ear off the whole ride, but it’s kind of nice. Leaves him less room to think and worry.
He drops him off in the front of the hospital with a wave and a greeting for Yoongi. Jimin asks at the front desk and they direct him over to the second floor, where Mr. Min had been admitted that morning.
Jimin finds Yoongi dozing off in a waiting chair, looking bent and uncomfortable. When Jimin sits down next to him, he startles awake and blinks at him a few times, like he can’t believe his own eyes.
“Jimin,” he finally says.
“Shh.” Jimin puts a finger to his mask. The hospital is much busier than their little village. He probably won’t go unnoticed as easily.
“What are you doing here?”
“Is your dad okay?”
He rubs his face tiredly. “He’s fine. It was just a bit of a scare. It happens sometimes, but he’s alright.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You just can’t be sure, so I always bring him, just in case.”
Jimin nods. “That makes sense.”
“What brings you out here, then?”
“Mrs. Choi brought me hangover soup and told me you’d brought your dad to the hospital. I got worried.” He pulls the thermos of stew out of his backpack. “I made you kimchi stew. Or tofu stew? Who’s to say.”
Yoongi gives him a disparaging look. “Well, that sounds promising.” He takes the thermos and unscrews the top, peeking inside.
“Here.” Jimin hands a spoon. “Before you try it, I have to warn you, I can’t cook. So if it’s really bad, we’re not giving it to your dad, and I’ll buy him flowers downstairs instead.”
Yoongi laughs. “You don’t have to get him anything.” He takes a spoonful, and his nose wrinkles.
“Bad?”
“Pretty shit, honestly.”
Jimin smacks his arm, and he almost drops the spoon. “I cook for you and come all the way here and this is how you treat me?”
“You said yourself it was probably bad.”
“You’re supposed to pretend it’s fine!”
“I’m not a liar, Jimin-ah.”
“Liar.”
He laughs again, then his face softens. “Thanks. For coming. For cooking. You didn’t have to. How the hell did you get here, anyway?”
“I was biking, but Mr. Lee saw me and gave me a ride.”
“You tried to bike here?” he says in disbelief. “Jimin-ah.”
Jimin shrugs. “I didn’t think it was that far.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
Jimin might be imagining it, but there’s a note of fondness in his voice.
Yoongi checks his watch. “I think I can go in now. You want to meet my dad?”
Jimin nods a little shyly. “If that’s alright. I remember him a little, I think.”
“He definitely remembers you.” Yoongi stands, and Jimin follows him down the hallway to the hospital rooms. He stops a nurse to double check that he’s alright to go in and see his dad, and when she gives him the okay, they step into the room where they’re keeping him.
They’ve propped him up in bed, and he’s eating a bowl of rice from the tray on the bed. It looks like it’s more than just his legs - his left arm sits immobile by his side, and Jimin assumes that’s paralyzed too. At the sight of them, he raises his eyebrows in interest.
“Well, well,” he says. “Is that who I think it is? Am I going to get an autograph?”
Jimin laughs shyly. “Hi, Mr. Min. I didn’t know if you’d remember me.”
“Remember you?” he scoffs. “You look exactly the same as you did as a kid. Same cheeks and everything.”
“How are you feeling?” Jimin asks, pulling up a chair to sit by his side.
“Oh, I’m fine. This kid just gets worried.”
“I brought you stew, but hyung said it was bad, so now I don’t want to give it to you.”
“Yah,” Mr. Min scolds Yoongi. “Who are you to tell him his stew is bad when he went to all that trouble?”
Yoongi raises his hands in defeat. “If you want to try his bad stew, be my guest. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“See?” Jimin says. “This is what I’ve been dealing with.”
“Come, now. You can’t be that bad of a cook when your grandmother was so excellent. That sort of thing runs in the blood.”
Jimin smiles. “You’re going too far. I could never match up to her.”
Mr. Min’s expression softens abruptly, and he sets his chopsticks down. “You have to forgive me for not coming by to give you my condolences. But we all loved your grandmother very much. She would visit me every week, you know. She’d bring me breakfast and watch a morning show with me every Saturday without fail. Now I wake up every Saturday morning and think about her. I don’t have the heart to eat without her.”
Jimin’s alarmed at the suddenness with which his own eyes fill with tears. He tries to answer, but he can’t speak past the lump in his throat. That sounds just like her. She’d always been a light for everyone. He’d been such a fool for so long. Such an absolute fool for not coming home. For not visiting her and basking a little bit in that wonderful glow.
“Ah, Jimin-ah,” Mr. Min says. He reaches over with his good arm and pats Jimin’s hand. “She loved you infinitely. You were the light of her life.”
The tears won’t stop coming, a silent stream down his cheeks. He’s embarrassed. That’s two days in a row he’s cried in front of Yoongi, but somehow, he can’t help it. Yoongi feels safe.
He hasn’t cried since his grandmother died. He hadn’t cried at the funeral, either. But now he can’t stop thinking about her. His heart hurts so much he wants to pull it out of his chest. He looks down and watches the tears drip onto his pants, and Mr. Min holds his hand quietly throughout it, until he can finally lift his head back up and wipe his face.
Yoongi fetches him a tissue, and Mr. Min distracts him with a new line of conversation. They chat for a while, and Mr. Min even tries some of the stew and valiantly praises it, too. Jimin can easily see where Yoongi gets most of his personality from. They’re almost carbon copies of each other, although his dad laughs easier and smiles more. Eventually, when he grows tired, Jimin takes his leave, not wanting to exhaust him too much.
“I’ll drive you,” Yoongi says. “Dad, I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Ah, you don’t have to, my bike’s outside - ”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Come on.”
Yoongi’s pickup truck is about as beat up as Mr. Lee’s, though the engine’s much stronger. Yoongi puts on some ancient hip-hop cassette and rolls the windows down, and they spend most of the ride in silence, pleasant breeze crossing through the windows.
Finally, he says, “Thanks again. It was nice of you, coming out here.”
“It was nice seeing your dad,” Jimin says. “Anyway, I should be thanking you, after last night.”
“How’s that, by the way? How much trouble are you in?”
He realizes, abruptly, that he’s gone most of the day without so much as glancing at his phone. With all the hecticness of the morning, the video and its aftermath had been driven entirely out of his mind. They’re probably going crazy over at the company. He’ll have to deal with it eventually, but at the moment, with the wind in his hair, he can’t bring himself to care. Unexpectedly, the crying had felt good. He thinks he feels lighter now.
“Not sure,” he finally says. “I haven’t checked.”
Yoongi glances at him discerningly. Then he smiles. “Good. Don’t forget to mark day one off today. We’ll have to do a rain check on the mocktail, but I haven’t forgotten.”
Jimin smiles back. “Sure thing, hyung.”
That night, before he goes to bed, he pulls out the little notebook that’s always on him and flips to a new page. Then he makes one neat tally.
Jimin’s out running through the farmland the next morning when he passes Seokjin’s car on the road. He recognizes it instantly and stops, shielding his eyes from the sun as Seokjin reverses down the empty road until he’s right next to him. Seokjin doesn’t bother rolling down the window; as soon as the car stops, Jimin gets in the passenger seat without complaint.
“Sorry,” Jimin says almost immediately. Seokjin blasts the A/C a little higher for him. “You had to drive all the way down here again. I was going to answer the company’s emails today, I swear. I would have yesterday, but my neighbor’s dad was in the hospital, and I went to visit. It just slipped my mind.”
Seokjin smiles at him gently. “I’m not mad at you. I would have buried my head in the sand after a video like that, too.”
Jimin winces.
“How are you coping?”
He hesitates, unsure of how to respond. He can’t say he coped well because he broke his sobriety streak and got so drunk the restaurant owner had to call someone to pick him up. But at the same time, since then he’s been doing quite well. He hasn’t checked social media once.
“I don’t know,” he finally says. “I think I’ll be okay.”
“Good. You didn’t do anything wrong, you know that, right? Not the way they’re acting like you did. Having a problem doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“Thanks, hyung.”
“I brought breakfast, by the way, since I figured you only had toast and ramen to offer.” Seokjin gestures to the to-go coffee cups in the drink holders of his car. “One’s yours.”
Jimin takes it gratefully. “I actually do have food, thank you very much.”
“Oh? And do you cook it?”
Jimin sniffs and doesn’t deign that with an answer. The truth is, he only has food because either Yoongi or one of his neighbors will insist on bringing him things like fresh produce and eggs. Speaking of Yoongi, they pass by his house on the way, and he’s in the garden as usual. His truck’s in the driveway, so Jimin assumes that means his father’s back home from the hospital. He pulls down the window to wave good morning, and Yoongi waves back, looking at them curiously.
“New friend?” Seokjin asks.
“I think so,” Jimin admits.
Seokjin gives him a mildly suspicious look as they pull into Jimin’s driveway. Jimin helps him carry the bags of breakfast inside to the kitchen, where they set everything up on the table and begin to eat. The food’s cold after his long drive, but Jimin doesn’t mind. He’d missed takeout.
“So?” Jimin asks, once they’ve eaten a bit and caffeinated themselves. “How bad is it? You’re only here because it’s bad.”
Seokjin sits back in his chair. He’s usually so jovial, joking even during the most serious of times. But today he looks somber. Jimin’s belly tightens with sudden tension. It’s the way he’s looking down, like he can’t quite look Jimin in the eye.
“They’re dropping me,” Jimin discerns.
“I think it’s likely.”
Jimin nods. He looks at the table. Then he asks, “Would it have made a difference if I’d answered the phone yesterday?”
“No, Jimin-ah.” When he looks up at him, Seokjin’s looking back at him tenderly. “I don’t think it would have.”
He nods again. That’s better, at least. There’s nothing he could have done. “It’s the CFs?”
“Mostly. A few more dropped you yesterday. And your contract - it’s only half over, so it’s too long to have you wait it out silently, and not recent enough for them to find a way to overcome this.”
He hadn’t wanted to resign. He almost hadn’t. But in the end, he’d been to scared to go anywhere else. He’s been with his current company since he was a preteen. The thought of joining a new place with a new boss and a new manager and a new team - it was too much. Too scary. There were so many, many ways in which it could be worse.
“I should call my lawyer,” Jimin muses, and Seokjin nods.
“I gave him a heads-up, but yes, you should. They’ll probably want to meet with you by the end of the week.”
“How bad is it in terms of the public?”
“It’s bad,” he acknowledges. “It could be worse, though. For what it’s worth, I think they’re wrong for giving up on you. I think this is all going to blow over a lot faster than anyone thinks.”
Jimin gives him a small smile to show he appreciates it.
“Look, Jimin-ah. If it’s too early to have this conversation, tell me to can it, and I will.” Seokjin sits up, clasping his hands together on the table. “But you know Namjoon’s still interested.”
Jimin looks at him guardedly at first and then thoughtfully. Seokjin’s best friend Namjoon started an indie label some years ago. When Jimin’s contract had been close to ending with his company, Namjoon had reached out with an offer to sign him. At the time, his company had been relatively new, and Jimin had been too afraid to consider it. So he’d said no.
But it’s been some years since then, and he knows Namjoon has found a fair bit of success signing a few artists who’ve done quite well since then.
“I can put out feelers if you’d like me to, but I know he’s still interested. He’s always bringing you up.”
Jimin’s a little surprised. “He is?”
“He thinks you have so much potential. He thinks they’re holding you back.”
It hurts a little to hear that, but at the same time, Jimin knows it’s true. He complains about the same thing all the time. He has for years. His company wants him to fit a mold, but he’s too old for that now. He has been in the industry too long to go on without any autonomy.
“I know it won’t be the same as now. He doesn’t have the kind of networking, the contacts, the money that you do right now. But I think you’re quite capable of bringing most of that with you. People love working with you - they always have, and they’re going to keep on wanting to.”
Hesitantly, Jimin asks, “Does that include you?”
Seokjin grins, some of his usual amiability shining through. “Come on, Jimin-ah, you know there’s no damn way I’m staying in this shitstain of a company without you. If you sign a new contract anywhere you better put me in the fine print.”
Jimin laughs, but it’s as if a weight has been lifted off his shoulders. He’s always so afraid of being alone. He couldn’t bear to lose Seokjin.
“But hyung, I think - ” he pauses, considering his words and the weight of them. He knows once he says them out loud, he won’t be able to take them back. He won’t be able to lie to himself. “I think I want to stay here. At least for a little while. I’m - ”
He hesitates again, but Seokjin doesn’t look surprised at all, and it gives him the courage to go on.
“I think it’s been good for me. I can’t drink too much because the restaurant auntie cuts me off, and then the whole village finds out, and Mrs. Choi next door brings me hangover soup the next day. There’s nowhere to go that makes me feel bad. No one to see who makes me feel bad, either. Everyone knows my name, but only because they watched me grow up, not because they care about my career. I’ve been - I’ve been working on the house a lot, and there’s so much left to do, and finishing things makes me happy. Out here, I even enjoy working on music again.”
“Jimin-ah, you have no idea how happy that makes me. There’s nothing more I want for you than to be in a place that makes you feel healthy.” He grins again. “You definitely look better. You finally look like you’re eating.”
Jimin waves him off. “I don’t know if I can sign with a new company if I choose to stay here.”
“I don’t see why it’s a problem,” Seokin says easily. “It’s only a problem if you want the career you have now. But if you want something different, if you want something like what Namjoon is offering, there’s no reason you can’t live here and just come to the city when you need to. You can send him your music from here, come into the studio when you need to record. I bet we could even work on building you an in-home studio out here, and the producers can come your way instead.”
“Schedules? Music videos? Performances?”
“It sounds to me like what you want is to slow down. And when you slow down, you don’t have to go to schedules every day. You can do interviews when you want to. You can do performances when you want to, too. You have a place in Seoul already. It’s only a four hour drive. You can come and back forth as much as you want.”
“But people expect a certain role from me. If I stop, if I switch it up, will I even have any fans left?”
Seokjin shrugs. “No one can predict that. Maybe you’ll lose some. Maybe you’ll gain some. You won’t know until you try.”
“He wants me to write my own music?”
“He encourages it. And I’ve mentioned how eager you are to write, only our shitstain of a company keeps rejecting your submissions.”
“Yeah, because they might be bad,” Jimin says bitterly.
Seokjin snorts. “Not worse than that song they made you do last year, that’s for sure.”
Jimin finds himself grinning. “Fair point.”
“Look, just think about it. I’m not pressuring you into anything. But if you want to talk to him and get a sense for things, I can set it up. I think it’s worth talking about at the very least.”
Jimin sits up and finds himself nodding. There’s a strange sensation in his stomach, a knot of anxiety but not exactly a bad one. It’s the way he’d felt when he first returned to his grandmother’s home after he learned she’d left it to him. A hint of fear mixed with anticipation, like a new door was opening up in front of him.
“Alright,” Jimin says. “Set up a talk, then. Just a chat, okay, nothing formal. I’ve still got a lawyer to meet with.”
Seokjin beams. “On it. Can I take I nap here again?”
“Obviously.” He gets up to toss out their trash and put away the dishes. With his back to Seokjin, because vulnerability is still hard, even now, he asks, “Will you stay for a day or two?”
He doesn’t have to look to know Seokjin is giving him that gentle smile again. “Sure thing, Jimin-ah.” Then, after a moment, “So when are you inviting your sexy new friend over?”
Jimin turns around and flings water at him. Seokjin raises his hands in defense, laughing.
“What? Don’t hold out on me. That t-shirt was real tight around his chest - ”
“Go take your damn nap.”
Later that night, as Jimin lies awake in the restless throes of his own anxiety, he pulls out his phone and decides it’s time to write a letter. His company’s going to drop him. They’re going to want to do it on their terms, restricting his autonomy up until the very end. He doesn’t want that. He wants to leave in a way that feels right to him. Honorable.
He knows he has spent a long time not being the best grandson, or the best friend, or the best boyfriend, or the best idol. But he would like to be, now. He would like to try again.
To ARMY,
Have you been eating? It’s been raining often, and I hope you’re staying warm and dry.
First, before I say anything else, I would like to say sorry for taking so long to write this letter. I’ve caused you all a lot of pain and stress, and more than anything, I’m sorry for failing to meet the standards of a person that you deserve to love. I hope this letter will shed some clarity, although I don’t expect that it will make anything better.
Due to private struggles in my life, I’ve suffered from a drinking problem. When I didn’t have schedules, I went out and partied and drank because I didn’t like to sit with my own thoughts. But a year ago, I realized I had a problem, and the people who love me encouraged me to make a change. I’ve been trying since then. It’s been a journey with various setbacks, one that goes up and down and all around, and I haven’t been perfect. But I’ve been trying, and I’m not the same person I was a year ago. I’m not the same person from those videos.
But the truth is that I was that person once, and I’m very sorry that you all had to see it. I hope that from now on I can quietly live my life until I can return to you all as a healthier person, even if it may not be the same way as before. And in the mean time, I hope that you can support the people around you who are struggling to live with themselves. I hope you can give them grace and care and compassion.
I can’t change my actions from the past. But what I can do is promise to change so my future will be brighter, healthier, and kinder, for myself and for you all, too. Thank you for loving me, and I promise to become a Park Jimin who will no longer disappoint you.
- Jimin
And after he posts the letter, he sends [email protected] an email asking if he would consider writing him a song.
“Hyung, if you fall, I’m going to have a heart attack.”
Yoongi stops hammering to give Jimin an irritated look. “This is literally my job, Jimin-ah. I was on top of the pharmacy roof literally yesterday.”
Jimin makes a face at the thought of it, thankful that he’s nowhere near being on top of the roof right now. He doesn’t think his heart could handle it. He’s got a ladder set up and is on the top step to fix the edge of the some of the courtyard roofing, and even that is too much for Jimin. He’s been hovering around the base of the ladder since he started.
“Quit acting like a mother hen.”
“Stop wobbling around so much, then.”
“If you weren’t distracting me - ”
The telltale crash of thunder cuts off their ensuing argument. Yoongi mutters a curse under his breath and starts working faster, hammering in the rest of the tiling as quick as he can. Jimin looks at the sky nervously.
“Hyung, you shouldn’t be so high up in a storm.”
He doesn’t have to push him any further because then it starts raining, instantly at torrential downpour levels, and Jimin instinctually hunches into himself as the cold water hits the back of his neck.
He’s about to snap at Yoongi to get down, but he’s already doing it, climbing down carefully. Jimin reaches out to grab his arm, nervous that he might slip as the ladder steps grow wetter and wetter in the rain. By the time he makes it down, they’re both drenched.
“Who said it was going to rain today?” Yoongi complains. “I did all that work for nothing. The water will fuck up the binding.”
“That’s what you get for trying to work on a Saturday. Who the fuck works on a Saturday?”
“I’m doing this shit for free, the least you can do is be nice to me.”
“Come on,” Jimin says mid-laughter, grabbing his sleeve and yanking him out of the courtyard.
As soon as they’re out of the downpour, it becomes apparently exactly how wet they are. Yoongi’s hair is fully sticking to his face, rivulets dripping down his cheeks, his shirt clinging obscenely to his chest. Jimin’s sure he doesn’t look much better.
He hadn’t expected Yoongi to show up today, but he’d knocked on his door before lunch without any real explanation for being there. Then he’d seen the courtyard roofing and gotten distracted, and Jimin had forgot to ask why he’d come over in the first place.
He realizes, abruptly, that he’s been starting at Yoongi for a moment longer than necessary. But before he can clear his throat and turn away, Yoongi says, “I read your letter.”
Jimin blinks at him. He’s staring back with an oddly serious expression, his gazed fixed on Jimin’s. “Wow, you must be pretty deep in my algorithm to see that,” he responds teasingly.
Yoongi rolls his eyes. “Do you know how famous you are? It was on the news.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t realized that. To save face, he snarks, “I thought you didn’t watch the news.”
“It was nice,” Yoongi says, insistent, back to being serious. “Is it true? That you’re leaving your company?”
“They’re ending my contract on Monday.”
“And then?”
“There might be another company. Friend of a friend. More freedom. I’m not sure yet.”
Yoongi tilts his head, and the intensity of his gaze makes Jimin briefly discomfited. They’re closer than he’d realized they were, or maybe they’d drifted closer together during the conversation. Jimin’s still acutely aware of how wet they both are. “Are you going to stay?”
Jimin blinks, breath catching in his throat. “Yes,” he says, without hesitation.
Abruptly, Yoongi pulls out his phone, holding it between them, almost like a barrier. “The song,” he says.
Jimin blinks again, startled back into reality. He takes a step back and looks down at Yoongi’s phone. “You didn’t answer my email.”
“But I finished the song.” He sits down on the ground, cross-legged, and puts his phone in front of him. Jimin sits down, too, across from him, and waits.
When he plays it, Jimin likes it almost immediately. It’s an updated version of the song he had sent him before using the melodies Jimin had created, but he’s done something different. It’s slower now, mellow but not a ballad. A slow song with a beat. Yoongi’s voice filters through, and Jimin realizes he can’t breathe again.
“You can change the lyrics, of course,” Yoongi says. “I just wrote something temporary.”
But he likes them. They’re realistic but not negative - hopeful but not overbearing. He hadn’t sang on the last song he had sent him. He has a nice voice, low and smooth. Jimin could listen to it all night.
The song ends, and Jimin looks up. Yoongi’s staring at him.
“Hyung. It’s perfect.”
Yoongi nods, smiling only the slightest bit, as if he’d known Jimin would love it.
“Will you help me record it?”
“I have a sort-of studio at my dad’s. If that’s good enough for the famous Park Jimin.”
“Stop that,” Jimin says, but he can’t stop smiling. “I’m a free agent starting Tuesday. Can I post it?”
“Residuals from a Park Jimin song? I can take an early retirement.”
“Stop,” Jimin laughs again. “I was thinking Soundcloud to start. But we could - in the future. If you’d write me more.”
Yoongi looks at him with a gaze that makes him squirm. “Did you mean it? Staying?”
“I meant it,” Jimin says quietly, and then Yoongi’s reaching for him, cupping his face in his hand, and Jimin’s scooting closer, breathless.
Yoongi’s thumb strokes his jaw, and he won’t stop looking at him, even though it makes Jimin feel so dizzy. “Did you block the ex?”
“Yes,” Jimin murmurs, his gaze locked on Yoongi’s mouth, pink and bow-shaped.
“Good.” There’s a hint of arrogance in his tone. “I want to be the only one you think about.”
Then he kisses him.
If Jimin thought he was breathless before, he’s drowning now, sinking into an endless pool of bliss. They’re hesitant at first but then the kiss deepens, Yoongi’s free hand snaking around Jimin’s waist, drawing him in, Jimin’s hands fisting in his shirt. Yoongi’s a good kisser, but even if he wasn’t, Jimin thinks it would feel perfect anyway.
He pulls away first, catching his breath, his heart thudding hard in his chest. Yoongi doesn’t let him go entirely, leaving kisses along his jaw, his cheeks.
“You’ve been the only one I’ve thought about for a while,” Jimin admits quietly, his stomach clenching with the effort it takes to be honest, to be vulnerable.
He can feel Yoongi smile against his skin. Jimin thinks he’s going to say something snarky in return, something arrogant, but instead he says, “I’ve thought of nothing else since I saw you.”
Midnight on Tuesday, when Jimin is officially free, he posts the song.
Then he sets his phone to do not disturb - he’s trying this thing where he doesn’t worry so much about the outcome, and focuses more on the accomplishment of having done the thing. It’s nice. He thinks he could get used to it.
The next morning, he visits his grandmother’s grave, and he plays her their song. He thinks she’d like it. He imagines her bragging about it. Isn’t Yoongi-yah so talented? She’d go around telling everyone. And finally Jimin’s seen some sense .
He’s lost a lot of time. But he’d like to become someone his grandmother would be proud of, even if it’s too late for her to see him do it. There’s no use in looking back anymore. The road ahead of him is now littered with open doors, and for the first time in his life, Jimin thinks only of moving forward.