Chapter Text
Please, I would say. I can be useful. I can make stew and tea. You would like me, if you tried me.
You are killing me.
--
The world ends for Seokjin on a Friday night.
They are in a club and it’s very dark, very loud. A thick smog of cigarette smoke everywhere. It’s not the kind of place Seokjin would ever have stepped foot in a year ago but Yoongi seems to prefer places like this, slumming it he says sometimes, a little sheepishly, looking at Seokjin out the corner of his eye like he’s worried Seokjin will laugh at him. Like he thinks Seokjin will run away.
To be honest though, Seokjin doesn’t mind. The smoke and the flashing lights make him nauseous sometimes but it’s a small price to pay.
So here they are.
On this particular Friday the place is even busier than usual. Yoongi’s off like always, fetching them something to drink; Seokjin is hovering across the floor, trying not to get shoved over or stepped on.
It takes Seokjin maybe five minutes to remember that he’s carrying both their wallets, another five minutes to shove his way through the dance floor, only a split second to catch sight of Yoongi near the bar pressed up against the wall with somebody that isn’t him.
And that’s how the end begins.
--
“I have a list this weekend,” Yoongi tells him at breakfast, mumbling through a mouthful of croissant.
Seokjin stops what he’s doing. Yoongi brushes past him to get to the fridge, bare feet padding silent on the tiles, hair sticking all up over his head like he’s touched a live wire.
“Oh,” Seokjin says.
“Tried to get out of it. But we’re overbooked enough as it is.”
“Yeah,” Seokjin says.
“We got any more juice left?”
“No, sorry. I forgot. I’ll get some on the way home tonight.”
Yoongi hooks his hand around the neck of the milk bottle. “Nah, Wednesday’s a long day for you. I’ll do it.”
Seokjin swallows, nods. Drags raspberry jam over his toast. In the slow chill light of the early dawn Yoongi looks like a thing you’d find in a poetry book. Not at all the creature Seokjin fell in love with - the first time he’d caught sight of Yoongi had been in the hospital corridor, Yoongi still in scrubs and moving like a storm oncoming, sharp hard focus, flint edges passing by him in a blur.
Yoongi closes the fridge again and Seokjin says, “When’s the last weekend we had together?”
“What?”
“You’ve been so busy lately. It’s been ages.”
There’s a short pause. Then Yoongi drapes himself over Seokjin’s back; has to raise up onto his toes to do it, mouth pressing into the soft spot behind Seokjin’s ear. “Ah, Jin. I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright. Next time.”
“I’ll cancel the list. Can always do it later in the month.”
“No, don’t,” Seokjin says. Yoongi’s breath tickles his throat and he has the sudden urge to cry, to set his knife down and bury his face in his hands. It isn’t a thing he can afford. “We can talk about it later. You’re running late, you’ve got clinic in half an hour.”
“Jungkook can wait.”
“No, he can’t. Go on. I’ll tidy up.”
Yoongi hesitates, gives in. “Alright.”
Seokjin keeps his head down as Yoongi goes. He’s still sitting at the kitchen table when Yoongi comes back out in his suit jacket, hair wrestled into a respectable shape, navy tie a thin stripe down the front of his chest.
“What are you doing?” Yoongi says, patting his jacket down for his keys. “Don’t you have to get ready too?”
“Yeah,” Seokjin says. “Yeah, in a minute.”
--
The boy’s name is Park Jimin, and he’s everything that Kim Seokjin is not.
Seokjin sees him once, dawdling not all that subtly out by the curb of their driveway. A slender little thing. Younger than he’d expected. Difficult to miss in this part of the neighbourhood: tight jeans and a monster of a fur coat, black fingerless gloves, that blood-orange hair.
Seokjin watches him for around half an hour then clicks the blinds shut.
He remembers Jimin. He’d seen the crash on the news. The camera had fixed shakily on the mangled form of the bike, two ambulances parked nearby with their screaming lights, policemen everywhere with traffic control signs and whistles. Yoongi had gotten the page ten minutes earlier and had already left. Seokjin had peered distractedly at the news program as he wrapped foil over the cooling remnants of Yoongi’s dinner, set the plate near the stove.
Yoongi had come home sometime in the early hours, nails dyed yellow from the iodine and smelling like exhaustion. Seokjin was still up. Had shuffled over, given Yoongi a warm divot of the mattress to crawl into.
“The kid okay?” Seokjin had said, voice rusty from sleep.
“Should be. If he makes it through ICU tonight.”
“Don’t go in tomorrow.”
“Mmm,” Yoongi had said. But he’d still rolled out of bed four hours later.
Seokjin gets it. Park Jimin moves like a train wreck in slow motion. Narrow-hipped, pert little rosebud mouth. Those kohl-smudged eyes always open to suggestion. It’s not an even playing field by any means.
But still, Seokjin had thought, but still. Six years.
He’d thought that they were safe.
--
“Is everything alright?” Hoseok asks.
Seokjin looks up. Hoseok is already sitting down, thin squeal of plastic against linoleum as he nudges the chair back with one foot.
“I don’t drink the coffee here,” Seokjin says, and Hoseok fixes him with a look.
“I know. This is from the machine upstairs. I sent my reg up especially to get it for you.”
“Oh.”
Seokjin cups his hands around the chipped mug Hoseok’s slid across the table. The chatter of the tea room washes over them. It’s been a quiet list so far, no unexpected happenings, Hoseok humming his way through two valve replacements with a minimum of fuss. On and off bypass smooth as butter.
“You going to tell me what the matter is or not?” Hoseok says. Steam curls up and over the rim of his mug.
“What?”
“Don’t give me that. You’ve been quiet all morning.”
“Oh,” Seokjin says. He looks down and takes a tentative sip of his coffee. “It’s nothing, really. Just tired.”
Hoseok watches him. Jung Hoseok’s no push-over, knows when he’s being spun a line. But in all honesty Seokjin couldn’t even begin to explain it if he’d wanted to. There have been girls in Hoseok’s life but Seokjin can see that he’s the happiest when he’s cracking a chest: the wrists so supple, the stitches darting in so quick and tight and symmetrical, the needle flashing and leaping amidst all that red like the silvery flank of a fish.
“If Yoongi’s giving you trouble, hyung,” Hoseok says, voice gentler now, “you should tell me.”
“He’s not giving me trouble,” Seokjin says.
“I can have a word with him.”
“Don’t.”
“I’ll send him that crazy Marfan’s patient I had in clinic the other day. The one who thinks turmeric will fix his aneurysm.” Hoseok pauses, waits for a smile that isn’t coming. “Seokjin. He loves you.”
“I know,” Seokjin says.
And he does. That’s the very root of the problem. It wouldn’t hurt so much, otherwise.
--
Yoongi meets him in the carpark, slanted against the door of the car.
Yoongi’s frowning down at the screen of his phone. It’s nearing evening and Yoongi’s suit jacket flaps about in the wind. Yoongi is always testier on clinic days - hates the song and dance of it, the shuffling of bulky charts, the endless dictation - but he looks up when Seokjin approaches and gives him a tight, wan smile.
“Hey. You’re done early.”
“So are you,” Seokjin says. He stands in the cold for a moment, trying to find his keys. “Jungkook borrowing your car again?”
“Yeah. Again.”
Seokjin wants to touch him. Instead he pops the boot. “I don’t feel like cooking today.”
“We’ll pick something up on the way home,” Yoongi says.
By the time they get Thai and make it through the rush hour traffic they are both flagging. Yoongi droops against the breakfast bar, yawning as Seokjin cracks open the takeout containers and fishes about the cutlery drawer for forks.
“Been a while since we ate like medical students,” Yoongi mumbles at him, half-asleep. “To be honest I’ve kind-of missed it.”
Seokjin doesn’t say anything.
Every now and then Yoongi forgets. Yoongi came up through the system tooth and nail: late night cramming in dusty coffeeshops, second-hand textbooks. Sneaking into third-year anatomy courses for the chance at dissection. Practising his knot-work first with shoelaces, then with dental floss, then with expired sutures filched from hospital supply rooms, practised first with his right hand and then his left, practised first with the lights on and then with them off, practised on oranges and on spare meat scraps from the butcher’s across the road. Practised until it was a thing he could manage in his sleep.
Everything Min Yoongi has he’s built for himself from the ground up.
It’s not a feeling Kim Seokjin knows much about. Kim Seokjin went to med school in England, never paid a cent of tuition; lived in a nicely furnished London flat with a housekeeper who tidied up after him, cooked him three solid meals a day, drove him to and from his pharmacokinetics lectures in a tinted Bentley. By the time he’d graduated his mother had a residency back home lined up for him, a path in glowing lights paved all the way to fellowship.
“Hey,” Yoongi says. Seokjin blinks; Yoongi’s next to him suddenly, leaning into his body, hooking a finger into the belt loop of his dress pants. “What’s the matter?”
You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Seokjin wants to say. The best and the only.
Instead he says, “Tell me about Park Jimin.”