Work Text:
The trick is not to think about it.
Yoongi learned this in his second week on the job. His first week, he thought about it constantly. The stains, the smells, the way certain fluids behave on certain surfaces, the biology of it, the fact that a terrible thing happened here and now, he's on his knees with a bucket and a scrub brush making it disappear. He threw up twice that first week. Once in a client's bathroom, which he then had to clean. His boss docked his pay for the supplies.
By the second week, he figured out the trick. You don't think about what happened. You think about the grout. You think about the chemical reaction between the enzyme cleaner and the protein. You think about your technique: circular motions for soft surfaces, linear motions for hard surfaces. You become very interested in the specific way that hydrogen peroxide foams on contact with hemoglobin, because the foam tells you you're using the right concentration. It becomes mechanical. It becomes almost meditative, as anything does when you do it long enough and stop asking why.
Yoongi has been doing this for four years. He doesn't think about it at all anymore.
He cleans.
His apartment is a disaster.
It's neglected. Dishes from three days ago in the sink. Laundry in the machine that he washed on Tuesday and never moved, so now there's an old, sour smell crawling out of the drum, a damp thing that clings to the rest of the apartment and reminds him every time he passes by. He should run it again. He should take it out. He'll probably forget. Dust collects on surfaces he could clean in his sleep but can't bring himself to touch. Sometimes he swipes a finger through it and then leaves the mark as proof he noticed. The smell of mildew turns up even in rooms he's not entered, as if the neglect can travel, thread itself into curtains and pillowcases. Takeout containers pile on the counter, accumulating like geological layers of convenience store ramyeon and kimbap.
He spends all day on his knees cleaning up after other people's worst moments. When he comes home, he can't even look at a sponge.
He has a routine. He gets home around midnight, usually, sometimes later. He showers until the hot water runs out. He eats whatever's in the fridge, standing up, tasting nothing. He puts on the same playlist he's had since university. Thirty-seven tracks, same order, never updated. He doesn't listen to it. It's the sound his apartment makes when he's in it.
On Sundays, he calls his mother. She asks about his job, and he tells her he works for a cleaning company, which is true. She imagines office buildings, hotel lobbies. He doesn't correct her. She tells him about his brother's kids and the neighbor's dog and the persimmon tree in the yard and he says "mm" and "really" and "that's nice" at the right intervals and she never notices he's not really there. He loves her. He has nothing to report. He doesn’t hold back from her. There’s nothing to hold back, a nothing where other people seem like they have weather they can talk about.
His life is clean surfaces and dirty clothes, a playlist that never changes, and Sundays on the phone with a woman who thinks he mops floors in a nice building somewhere. It's fine. He stopped imagining things for himself a while ago. It's fine.
⬛⬛⬛
Mr. Kang's rule is no more than two people per job. They're supposed to rotate pairs. Yoongi, Hoseok, Jungkook.
In practice, Hoseok and Jungkook always find reasons to work together. Someone's car is in the shop, so they have to carpool. The job needs two people who know the same deodorizer system. They happen to text Mr. Kang first. The excuses are thin. Everyone knows. Mr. Kang doesn't care enough to enforce it.
So Yoongi cleans alone. Every job. Every dark room, every terrible scene, every 2 AM callout. He tells himself he prefers it. He's more efficient alone. No one to coordinate with, no one making jokes while he's trying to focus on the grout.
Because Hoseok and Jungkook joke. Constantly. They flirt during jobs, after jobs, in the group chat. They have the same dark humor that Yoongi cannot understand. Jungkook ranks the worst smells they've encountered in a tier list and sends it at midnight, unprompted. Hoseok does an impression of a landlord's face when he sees the invoice that makes Jungkook laugh so hard he has to leave the room, and they're in a room where a man died alone three weeks ago. They once debated the merits of different industrial solvents the way other people debate restaurants, and halfway through the argument, Jungkook said, "You're sexy when you're wrong," and Hoseok sprayed him with deodorizer. Yoongi stood there holding a mop and wondering how two people can be this playful in a place like this. A flash of irritation itched at his brain.
He doesn't get it. He does the work, he goes home, he doesn't make it into anything. They're the weird ones. He's the normal one. The grounded one.
They still hang out, the three of them. After shifts, sometimes. Convenience store runs at 3 AM, splitting kimbap on the curb. Hoseok talks, Jungkook laughs, and Yoongi is the quiet third. He drives them home when Hoseok drinks too much. He's fond of them the way you're fond of a routine. He doesn't realize that he's the remainder, the one left over after two people chose each other, and that he has been cleaning alone in dark rooms for four years and that this might matter later. He doesn't think about it. He thinks about the grout.
⬛⬛⬛
Then his boss, Mr. Kang, offers him the other jobs.
It's a Tuesday. Yoongi remembers this because on Tuesdays, the convenience store near his apartment puts the expiring kimbap on sale, and he has four rolls in his fridge that he's looking forward to eating in the dark while standing over his sink, which is the closest thing he has to a hobby.
Mr. Kang calls him into the back office. This is unusual. Mr. Kang communicates primarily through text messages that contain only addresses and times. No punctuation, no greeting, no context. Being summoned to the office means either Yoongi's being fired or that he wishes he were.
"I have some additional work," Mr. Kang says. He's looking at his computer screen the way people do when they want to seem busy and unbothered. "Pays significantly more. Cash."
"How much more?"
Mr. Kang names a figure. Yoongi's face does a thing he can't control.
"The extra is for your discretion," Mr. Kang says. Still looking at the screen.
Yoongi doesn't ask what that means. He thinks it means rich people. He thinks it means someone with money had a bad day and wants it scrubbed away without questions, without reports, without some cleaning guy making conversation about what happened here. He understands discretion. He's been discreet his entire career. You don't ask about the stains. You don't ask about the dent in the wall, the broken glass, or why there's a lock on the outside of the bedroom door. You clean.
"Okay," Yoongi says. He swallows. His stomach curdles, quick and sour, then settles before he can name the cause.
Mr. Kang nods at his screen. "I'll send you the address."
The first job is an apartment in Gangnam. High floor. Nice building. The kind of place that has a concierge and a lobby with marble floors and the specific, expensive silence of money. Yoongi takes the service elevator, as instructed, and lets himself in with a code Mr. Kang texted him.
It's a lot of blood.
That's the first thing he registers. The quantity. More than his usual jobs, which trend toward the aftermath of accidents, unattended deaths, and the occasional domestic incident that the police have already processed and released. This is different in volume. This is different in pattern.
For two, maybe three seconds before the trick kicks in, he reads the room. The height of the spray on the wall. The drag pattern on the floor, toward the door, away from the door, and then nowhere. His mind fills in the motions of the bodies that made the mess. His stomach turns, like milk left too long.
The spray has a directionality he's learned to associate with force. With intent. Blood fanned out, droplets arcing high beside the light switch, a classic cast-off pattern, damning if even a trace survives. Spatter has seeped into the wood grain along the baseboard; one stray cell under luminol could compromise everything. As he kneels, his stomach goes tight and stays tight. This is the kind of scene that doesn't forgive mistakes. Every swipe might miss the evidence that will cause him trouble.
He stops thinking about it. He thinks about the grout.
He cleans for six hours. He does an excellent job. He always does an excellent job; that's never been the issue. The issue is that he goes home, sits on the kitchen floor, and his hands won't stop shaking. His knees ache from crouching, and there is a rising pressure in his chest, like the static before a migraine, dull and swelling. He presses the heel of his hand to his ribs but can't find a steady pulse, just the shiver under his skin. The kimbap is in the fridge, he's not hungry, his playlist is playing, and he doesn't hear it.
He goes to bed. He doesn't sleep. He runs the next day on coffee and muscle memory and the trick, the trick, the trick. Don't think about it. Think about the technique, think about the chemistry.
The second job is in a warehouse in Mapo-gu. Less blood. More of other things. He doesn't think about the other things.
The third job is a house in Yongsan. He finishes at 4 AM and drives home with the windows down because the smell is in his clothes, his hair, and the skin of his hands, despite the gloves; the cold air is the only thing keeping him from pulling over.
He does not ask Mr. Kang any questions.
⬛⬛⬛
He sees it on the news three weeks later.
He's eating ramyeon, standing up, tasting nothing. The TV is on because the silence has started bothering him in a new way, a watchful way, a silence with texture, like the apartment is waiting for him to think about the things he's not thinking about. So the TV is on. Background noise.
The anchor is talking about a building in Gangnam. A luxury apartment. There's been an investigation. The language is careful. "Alleged incident." "Unconfirmed reports." "Sources close to the investigation suggest." The anchor's face is doing that controlled, professional thing that Yoongi recognizes as fear, wearing a suit. They're afraid to say what they're saying. They're afraid to stop.
They show the building. Yoongi's chopsticks stop.
He knows that building. He knows the service elevator, the door code, the view from the fourteenth floor, and the specific way the grout meets the baseboard in the bathroom where he spent two hours on his knees with an enzyme cleaner.
The anchor mentions a name. Obliquely, the way you'd reference a storm system. "Alleged connections to organized crime." "A figure known to law enforcement." They won't say the name, but the implication sits heavy in the careful language, obvious, pressing against every euphemism.
Yoongi puts down his ramyeon. He Googles two words, and the results fill his screen, and his chest fills with cold, systemic dread, his body trying to shut down to protect him from what his brain is assembling.
Seoul's scariest mob boss.
Park Jimin.
The photos are few, blurry, and clearly taken from a distance by people who didn't want to be noticed while taking them. Young. Younger than Yoongi expected. Dressed well, dark clothes, face half-turned in every shot as if he's allergic to being fully seen. One photo catches a partial view of his hand. Rings, several, silver or white gold. That detail makes Yoongi's stomach turn in on itself in a way that blood and worse never managed.
He has been cleaning crime scenes for Park Jimin. Before the police. He has been making evidence disappear. He has been...
Yoongi calls Mr. Kang.
"I'm done," he says. His voice sounds like someone else's voice. "The extra jobs. I'm done. I quit."
Mr. Kang is quiet for a long time. Then he says, "I'll see if that’s okay."
"I don't need you to see if that’s okay. I'm telling you. I'm not doing it anymore."
"I'll see if that's okay," Mr. Kang says again, and his voice wavers on the last word. Yoongi's stomach drops. Mr. Kang is afraid. Not of Yoongi.
He hangs up.
⬛⬛⬛
The black car arrives at 11 PM.
Yoongi is sitting on the kitchen floor, where he seems to end up these days. His playlist is on. He's on track fourteen, which is an old Epik High song that used to make him feel alive and now makes the air move. He hears the car before he sees it. The way the street noise outside his window reorganizes itself around a presence that doesn't belong.
He looks out his window. Black sedan. Tinted everything. Two men get out, and they don't look up at his building, which means they already know which floor, which window, which unit. They know.
He could run. He thinks about this briefly and practically, the way he'd think about whether a stain needs a second treatment. He has no car. He has some cash. He has a mother in Daegu who he calls on Sundays, a brother whose kids' names he has to think about for a second before he remembers, and a coworker named Hoseok who once stood in his doorway looking sad about his laundry.
He has nowhere to run that wouldn't become a place they'd find him, and then it would be a place someone like him would have to clean. He already knows what the spray pattern would look like. He'd be another drag pattern on another floor, there, and then nowhere. His stomach twists so hard the acid burns the back of his throat.
There's a knock. He opens the door because every alternative is worse.
Two men. Suits. Faces like closed doors. One of them speaks.
"Mr. Min, you have two options. You can accept termination, in which case we are authorized to handle that now. Or you can accept permanent hire, in which case a car is waiting."
Yoongi thinks: termination. What a word. What a clean, corporate word for what it means.
"What does permanent hire look like?" he asks, and his voice is steady, which surprises him. Maybe it shouldn't. He's been steady in worse rooms than this.
"You continue your work. You are compensated accordingly. You don't quit again."
"And if I want to quit later?"
The man looks at him with an expression so empty it's almost restful.
"You don't quit again," he repeats.
Yoongi looks at his apartment. The dirty dishes. The mildewy laundry. The ramyeon he didn't finish. The playlist is playing track fifteen now, a song he can't name even though he's heard it four hundred times. Everything small and boring and dead-end and his, and he is going to miss it, he realizes, all of it, the way you miss a toothache once it's pulled. The familiarity of it. The way it proved you were still a person who could feel things.
"Okay," he says.
He gets in the car.
⬛⬛⬛
The first time Jimin shows up, Yoongi doesn't know it's him.
He's working a site in Itaewon. A restaurant basement, after hours, the kind of job where the fluorescent lights turn everything green-gray and the mop water turns colors he's trained himself to ignore. He's been at it for about an hour, alone as always, when the air in the room changes. A shift. Like barometric pressure dropping before a storm.
Yoongi looks up.
There's a man sitting in a chair by the door. Yoongi doesn't know when the chair got there or when the man sat down. He's small. Smaller than Yoongi expected from anything, though he's not sure what he expected or why he'd have expectations of a stranger sitting in a folding chair in a restaurant basement at 2 AM. He's wearing dark clothes, well-fitted, and his legs are crossed and his hands are resting on his knee and there are rings on his fingers. Silver. Multiple.
Yoongi's stomach drops.
"Continue," the man says. His voice is quiet. Low volume by choice, the voice of someone who has never had to raise it because people lean in when he speaks.
He watches Yoongi the way you'd watch a television playing on mute. Scanning for signal. His jaw shifts by a millimeter when Yoongi doesn't react to the room, just kneels and starts working. A cat watching a mouse that doesn't know it's a mouse. Irritation that the fear isn't there. Curiosity about what it would take to put it there.
Yoongi doesn't know it yet. Later, he'll understand. Indifference, to a man like this, is an insult that requires investigation. And Jimin has never left an insult uninvestigated.
Yoongi continues. He goes back to the floor. His hands are shaking. He tightens his grip on the scrub brush to hide it. The trick. Don't think about it. Think about the technique.
His technique is terrible. He's aware of the man the way a rabbit is aware of a hawk. Every brush stroke feels clumsy, obvious, wrong. He keeps losing his place in the grid pattern. He can feel the man's eyes on him and his skin crawls and he scrubs harder to compensate and scrubbing harder is the wrong approach for this surface and he knows that but his hands won't cooperate because there is a man in a chair watching him and Yoongi is alone in a basement with no weapon and no phone and no one who knows he's here.
"You missed the edge by the drain," the man says. His voice is flat, but there's a needle in it, fine, almost invisible. The correction of a man testing whether there is a place in Yoongi where the needle can go.
Yoongi hasn't missed the edge by the drain. He was getting to it. He works in a grid pattern, left to right, and the drain is in his next pass. But he doesn't say this. He adjusts. He moves to the drain edge. He cleans it.
"Mm," the man says. It means nothing. It means everything.
Later, when Yoongi is packing his supplies and his back aches and his knees are bruised and the restaurant basement is so clean it looks like nothing ever happened, one of the men by the door says, casually, to another, "Jimin-ssi seemed fine with it," and Yoongi's hands pause inside his supply bag for one half-second before he continues packing.
That was Jimin.
He is so fucked.
⬛⬛⬛
Jimin comes to the next job. And the next. And the next.
He always sits. There's always a chair, materialized from somewhere, positioned where he can see Yoongi work. He always crosses his legs the same way. He always has his rings. He watches the way someone might watch television, with a kind of detached, half-interested attention that could sharpen into focus at any moment or drift away entirely. Yoongi can never tell which. This is the worst part. A man who is always angry is predictable. A man who is sometimes interested is a minefield.
The comments are constant.
"You're slow tonight."
"Did you use the wrong solution? It’s streaking."
"I can still see it. Can't you see it? It's right there."
The comments sound like criticism. But each one functions as a small demand: react. Show me you're in this room. Show me this matters to you. Yoongi doesn't understand this yet. He hears the words at face value and adjusts his work and misses the provocation underneath, and the provocation continues because it keeps failing.
His voice never changes pitch. Never rises, never sharpens. The cruelty is in the evenness of it, the way he delivers criticism and observation in the same flat tone, as if Yoongi's failures are weather. Unremarkable. Expected. Mildly inconvenient. He never yells. Yelling would be a concession, an admission that Yoongi has provoked a reaction worth raising his voice for. Jimin gives him nothing that generous.
Yoongi is terrified. His stomach churns through every job now, a constant sourness. Every comment lands and his gut twists and his mouth waters like he might make a mess of his own. Every silence between comments feels like the last silence before the last thing he'll ever hear. He does his job with his jaw clenched and his hands tight on his tools and his mind running a constant, low-frequency calculation: is this okay, am I doing this right, will I leave this room alive. He counts the men by the door. He notes the exits. He keeps his head down and his movements efficient and he does not make eye contact, ever, because making eye contact with a man like this feels like reaching into a cage.
Things Jimin makes him do:
Re-clean surfaces that are already spotless. Yoongi knows they're spotless because he cleaned them, and he's good at this, he's always been good at this. But Jimin says "again" and Yoongi does it again. On his knees, with Jimin's men standing around the edges of the room like statues. His jaw aches from clenching.
Clean around a body that hasn't been moved yet. Yoongi understands this is unusual. The body is supposed to be gone before he starts. But Jimin is watching and Jimin hasn't said to stop, and so Yoongi works around it, carefully, methodically, like it's a piece of furniture he has to clean behind, and his hands are steady because they have to be, because if they're not steady he's useless and useless people don't leave rooms like this.
Use inadequate tools. A toothbrush when the proper equipment is sitting right there, three feet away, in his own supply bag. A rag when he needs industrial solvent. Jimin never says use this instead of that. He has someone remove the right tool before Yoongi reaches for it, and Yoongi adapts, and Jimin watches him adapt, and says nothing.
The toothbrush takes forty minutes on a section that would take him five with the proper brush. His arm burns. His wrist locks up twice and he has to flex it back and the lost seconds feel like failures, every bristle dragging where it should glide, and the gap between what he could do and what he's being allowed to do sits in his stomach.
"Your shirt," Jimin says once. It's a warehouse in Yeongdeungpo. Yoongi's been working for three hours. "It's dirty. You're going to contaminate the scene."
Yoongi looks at his shirt. There's a small mark on the hem.
"Take it off," Jimin says. Scrolling his phone.
Yoongi takes off his shirt. He finishes the job shirtless, on his knees, in a cold warehouse and Jimin doesn't look up from his phone once but he also doesn't leave, and the men by the door are very carefully looking at nothing.
The cold finds every part of him. His stomach is tight, his arms are tight, everything is tight except the skin of his back, which warms under Jimin's non-attention. Being looked at would be one thing. Being not-looked-at while shirtless and kneeling is worse. His skin knows where Jimin's eyes are even when Jimin isn't looking.
But Yoongi does it. He always does it. Whatever it is, he does it. He doesn't sigh, doesn't hesitate, doesn't look at Jimin with anything in his eyes that could be read as protest. He adapts. He gets back on his knees and he cleans. Because what is the alternative? The alternative is the black car and the word termination and a room someone like him would have to clean.
⬛⬛⬛
Jimin is on the phone when Yoongi arrives. This has never happened before. Jimin has always been seated, composed, the room already arranged around him like a set. Tonight he's standing by the window, talking, his voice low and unhurried, and he doesn't acknowledge Yoongi at all. He doesn't even look.
Yoongi sets up. Starts working. He's halfway through the first section when Jimin says, still on the phone, still facing the window, "Hold on."
Then, to whoever is on the other end: "The cleaner's here. He's efficient. Fast hands." A pause. "No. He doesn't talk."
He says it the way you'd describe a piece of equipment. A dishwasher with a good rinse cycle. No inflection, no humor, no cruelty even. Cruelty would mean Jimin was thinking about Yoongi as a person worth being cruel to. This is inventory. A man telling another man about a tool that works.
"He gets on his knees and he goes until it's done. Doesn't complain. You don't even have to watch him, really, though I..." A beat. Jimin's hand, the one not holding the phone, settles on the arm of the chair. The fingers tap once. Stop. The ring catches the light on the downstroke. Jimin's jaw shifts during the pause, a recalibration. "Though it's good to check the work."
He goes back to his conversation. Yoongi goes back to the floor. His hands are steady. His face is steady. There's a low, needy tension between his hips that he shifts his weight to clear. It doesn't clear.
Later, packing up, he replays "fast hands" and his stomach twists and the tension between his hips flickers back, brief and unwelcome. He zips his bag and doesn't think about either. The recognition that you have been accurately described and the description didn't require your name.
⬛⬛⬛
"You always start from the left," Jimin says one night. It's a house in Hannam-dong. Yoongi is on his knees by the living room wall. "Why?"
Yoongi doesn't answer because he doesn't know if he's supposed to.
"I asked you a question."
"It's systematic," Yoongi says. "Grid pattern. Left to right."
"Systematic," Jimin repeats, like he's tasting the word and finding it bland. "Is that what you call it."
Yoongi goes back to the wall. His jaw is tight. He doesn't respond.
"You hold your breath," Jimin says, a few minutes later. Quieter now, almost observational, like he's noting a thing to himself. "When you get close to it. You hold your breath."
Yoongi didn't know he did that. He has been doing this for four years and he didn't know he held his breath and Jimin knew it from watching him.
His stomach twists. Jimin has been watching closely enough to see things Yoongi can't see from inside his own body, and the intimacy of that, the violation of it, the fact that a man he's terrified of knows something true about him that he didn't know himself.
This is worse than the insults. The insults are generic cruelty, the kind of thing a man with too much power does because he can. This is specific. This requires attention. This means Jimin has been studying him, and the difference between being mocked and being studied is the difference between a man who might kill you on a whim and a man who is deciding whether to keep you.
He doesn't hold his breath for the rest of the night. His lungs burn with the effort of breathing normally.
⬛⬛⬛
The first time Jimin touches him, Yoongi almost quits for real.
It's a penthouse in Cheongdam-dong. The job is bad, one of the worst. Yoongi has been at it for five hours and he's tired and his knees are raw and he's missed a spot, apparently, because Jimin stands up from his chair and walks over and Yoongi hears the shoes on the tile getting closer and his body goes rigid, every muscle locking because this is it, this is the moment, Jimin is walking toward him and Jimin's men are by the door and no one knows Yoongi is here.
Jimin's hand closes on the back of his neck.
The grip is firm. Fingers digging in, finding the tendons, the vertebrae. And Jimin pushes. Yoongi's face goes down toward the floor, toward a spot near the baseboard, and his cheek is inches from the tile and Jimin holds him there. Like a dog. Like shoving a dog's nose toward their own mess on the carpet.
"There," Jimin says. Quiet. "Use your eyes."
He holds for one more beat. Yoongi's pulse beats against Jimin's palm and he knows Jimin can feel it. Then Jimin lets go. Walks away. Sits back down. Picks up his phone. His hand, the one that was on Yoongi's neck, rests on his knee, and the fingers don't relax all the way. They stay half-curled. Holding the shape.
Yoongi stays down. His hands are shaking and his vision is blurred with a shame so total it's indistinguishable from rage. He has been pushed down like an animal, corrected by a hand on his neck, and Jimin's men are in the room, they saw, they all saw, and underneath the shame there is fear, real fear, because that hand could have done anything and Yoongi couldn't have stopped it.
He finishes the job. He does not do a good job. His hands are shaking too badly and he can feel the ghost of each individual finger on his neck, five points of pressure that will not fade.
He drives home. Sits on his kitchen floor. His playlist is on. He doesn't hear it. He showers and the hot water hits the back of his neck and his whole body locks because the heat is a hand and his body doesn't know the difference. For one second his knees soften, dropping him toward the floor the way they drop in Jimin's rooms. The water runs over the place where Jimin's fingers were and Yoongi stands very still and does not think about the fact that his body almost knelt in his own shower.
He wants to quit. He fantasizes about it, the word, the act, the door closing behind him. He lies in bed and replays the moment, the grip, the push, the floor rushing toward his face, and his body floods with hot shame every time, and he thinks: I will not go back. I will not. I am a person and I will not.
He goes back.
⬛⬛⬛
Jimin eats while Yoongi works.
This becomes a pattern. Jimin has food brought in, the kind of food that comes in containers that look like the food inside would cost Yoongi his whole paycheck. He eats slowly. He never offers. Yoongi is on the floor, and the smell of the food mixes with the smell of chemicals and the smell of what the chemicals are covering, and Yoongi's stomach growls once, audibly, and heat rushes to his face.
Jimin picks up a piece of meat between his fingers. Holds it out. Yoongi's hands are gloved. Covered in chemicals. The implication is clear.
"I don't..." Yoongi starts.
Jimin's eyebrows lift a fraction of a millimeter.
Yoongi leans forward and takes it from Jimin's fingers. With his mouth. His face is on fire. One of the men by the door shifts his weight and Yoongi wants to dissolve into the floor. He has been hand-fed by a mob boss in front of an audience and the mob boss didn't even think it was notable.
He goes back to cleaning. His face is still hot. His eyes sting with held back tears. But below the shame, the animal relief of food in his mouth when his mouth was empty sits low in him, warm, and the warmth doesn't care about the audience or the shame. The warmth just knows it was fed.
It keeps happening. Jimin holds out food. Yoongi takes it. The shame dulls but doesn't disappear. It just stops being the loudest thing in the room.
Then, one night, Jimin has food and Yoongi is on the floor and the smell reaches him the way it always does, sharp through the chemical overlay. He's been working for three hours. His stomach is a clenched thing he's stopped negotiating with.
Jimin picks up a piece of meat. Holds it out. The gesture Yoongi knows now, the extended hand, the waiting.
Yoongi leans forward. His mouth opens. He's already there, already moving toward it, his body trained now to close the distance when Jimin's hand extends.
Jimin pulls his hand back. Eats the piece himself. Chews slowly. Doesn't look at Yoongi.
Yoongi stays where he is for one beat. Mouth still open. The air between his lips and Jimin's retreated hand is the longest distance in the world. Then he closes his mouth. Goes back to work. His jaw is so tight his teeth ache.
Twenty minutes later. Jimin holds out another piece.
Yoongi doesn't move. He looks at Jimin's hand and stays where he is. He's not going to lean forward and be pulled back again. He stays.
Jimin waits. The food is in his hand. He waits with perfect patience, the patience of a man who has nowhere to be and nothing to prove and an entire night in which a man on a floor might eventually get hungry enough.
"It's going to get cold," Jimin says. Mild. Observational. Commenting on weather.
Yoongi goes back to work.
He lasts eleven minutes. He counts them. On the twelfth minute his hands stop moving and he turns and Jimin's hand is still out, still holding the food, still waiting, because Jimin knew. Jimin knew he'd come back. The question was never if but when, and Jimin knew the answer before Yoongi did.
He leans forward. Opens his mouth. Jimin places the food on his tongue and doesn't withdraw. His fingers rest on the ridges of Yoongi's lower teeth. Yoongi can feel Jimin's eyes on him the way you feel a dare. His mouth is open and full and Jimin's fingers are in it and neither of them is moving.
Yoongi's tongue pulls the food from between Jimin's fingers. Slow because he has to work it free, the sides of his tongue dragging against the pads of Jimin's fingertips. His jaw opens wider to give Jimin's fingers room to leave. His head tilts back, throat lengthening, and for one second he is open, chin up, neck long, Jimin's fingers dragging across his lower lip on the way out, and the sound Yoongi makes is not voluntary.
Something flickers below his stomach. Lower. A single point of heat, brief, like a match struck in a dark room. Gone before he can look at it.
"Good," Jimin says. His voice is the same as always. His hand, the one that was in Yoongi's mouth, rests on his knee. The fingers are wet. He doesn't wipe them. He doesn't look at them. He picks up his phone with his other hand and the wet fingers stay on his knee, drying in the air, and Yoongi goes back to the floor and his mouth is full and his empty stomach twists.
⬛⬛⬛
Hoseok asks him if he's okay.
They're at a regular job, a legitimate one, an old woman's apartment where her cat died under the radiator in July and no one found it until October. It's bad but it's normal-bad, the kind of bad Yoongi can do in his sleep. It's one of the rare times they're paired together; Jungkook called in sick.
"You look different," Hoseok says.
"I'm tired."
"You've been tired for four years. This is different."
Yoongi sprays the baseboard. Wipes. Sprays again. "I'm fine."
Hoseok is quiet for a while. Then, carefully: "Jungkook thinks you're avoiding us."
"I'm not avoiding anyone. I'm busy."
Hoseok doesn't push it. He knows when to stop. He looks at Yoongi for a second with an expression too gentle for this room, for this job, for the smell that's in both of their clothes and will stay there until tomorrow, and then he goes back to the deodorizer.
On the way out, Hoseok says, "You know you can call me. If you need anything."
"I know," Yoongi says.
He will not call Hoseok.