Chapter Text
“Coffee?” Hoseok says.
“Mm?” Seokjin says; glances up and finds Hoseok watching him, a carefully non-committal look on Hoseok’s face. Hoseok’s in his clinic clothes minus a jacket, shirt sleeves rolled up past his elbows, stethoscope jammed haphazardly in one dress trouser pocket. The look that gets him mistaken for a junior registrar all the time by patients in the corridors. “Oh, you mean across the road. Don’t you have clinic right now?”
“Cancellation. Got a one hour break before the next one comes.”
“You don’t have letters to catch up on?”
The cautious moment breaks and Hoseok grins at him, rolls his eyes. “Jesus, Seokjin, you’re worse than my typist. C’mon, I want a bagel.”
It’s a bright day. They sit at an outdoors table, the morning sun warming Seokjin’s back through his scrub top. They talk about nothing for a while - I wish they wouldn’t make the dictation system so damn efficient, feels like the moment I finish reviewing my letters there’s a whole bunch more waiting for me - falling back into the same old routine. Sipping coffee. Hoseok slathering enough butter on his blueberry bagel to make Seokjin wince. The sprawling hospital glinting in the hard sunlight, an unforgettable presence, the distant shriek of ambulances pulling into the ED bays around by East Wing. From their table Seokjin can see the line of thin windows on the fourth floor that spell out the operating rooms, pick out the bright halogen theatre lights.
“How’s Taehyung doing?” he asks finally, catching Hoseok mid-mouthful.
“Tae?” Hoseok sighs, chews slowly. “About as well as you can expect, I suppose. He’d been through four White Russians by the time I’d even gotten there last night. Thought he was going to get us kicked out before eight-thirty.”
“Jesus.”
“Tell me about it. Haven’t seen him hit this hard in a long time.”
“He at work today?”
“Technically not. I called him in sick. But he’s still hanging around clinic, I don’t think he trusts his registrar much.”
Seokjin nods. He gets it. They’ve all been there. The months of paranoia after a mis-step, the double and triple checking, the harried looks on their juniors’ faces; an unavoidable thing. He hadn’t thought Taehyung the type, but then again, the threat of a Board investigation tended to make even the most easygoing out of all of them think twice about a clinical decision.
“You look better though,” Hoseok says at last. “Did Yoongi come find you?”
“What?”
“He never showed up last night. I just assumed he went over to yours or something, maybe talked it out. You don’t have to tell me,” Hoseok adds hurriedly, putting the rest of his bagel down. “I understand if it isn’t - ”
“It’s fine,” Seokjin says.
He doesn’t know what else to say, though. Where are they, exactly? He’s not sure he could articulate it, even if he wanted to. He wonders, briefly, whether Yoongi is still on the plane, or whether he’s touched down already - realises he hadn’t asked last night which flight he’d be on. It bothers him, a slight guilty swoop in the pit of his stomach like missing a step on a flight of stairs. In the morning after the taxi had pulled away he’d eaten breakfast cross-legged on the carpet in the living room, watching the city wake up outside his windows, thinking not about Yoongi or about the two of them even but about how he’d felt the first time he’d played Rachmaninov. The stormy rush of the keys beneath his fingertips. The way the music had caught him at some point, the precise moment when he’d stopped worrying about which notes he played but let the sound of it lift him out of himself, the soar of it like the wind beneath new wings.
Thinking about his life back before he’d even known that a person called Min Yoongi existed.
Even now, he’s never met Yoongi’s family. Not for lack of trying on his part, and there had been close calls: a surprise flight on Christmas Eve that first year, Yoongi opening the door and nearly jumping out of his skin, ushering him out and away before he’d even finished getting the mud off the bottom of his shoes. He’d never quite understood it, and Yoongi had dodged any and all questions about it with the finesse he usually reserved for his operations. Not now, Jin. I’ll explain later. It’s complicated. It has nothing to do with you, trust me.
Trust me.
“I gave Tae my old therapist’s number,” Hoseok says, and Seokjin jumps.
“I didn’t know you had a therapist.”
Hoseok shrugs, casual. “I saw her for a few years, back when I first got on the program. She’s really good. I didn’t tell anyone, but she really made a difference for me. I slogged through by myself for the longest time, but it takes its toll, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“It’s good to get another perspective sometimes. I could give you her number too, if you wanted.”
Seokjin hesitates. Some strange part of him baulks. His tongue feels thick all of a sudden, glued to the roof of his mouth. He looks back down, turns his coffee cup around in its saucer before remembering that it’s empty.
“It’s alright,” Hoseok says. “It’s not everyone’s thing, I know. Just thought I’d offer. Have a think about it.”
“Okay,” Seokjin says. Looks on as Hoseok flags down a passing waiter. “I will.”
--
When he gets home that night, Park Jimin is on his driveway.
For a moment Seokjin thinks about it - putting his foot back on the accelerator and driving right on past, leaving him there for the next few hours. Driving somewhere. Anywhere. A long dinner maybe in a nice place in the city, a movie. The first he’ll have watched alone in a long while; the first in a long line of firsts.
Then he sighs, puts his indicators on and turns in to his building.
Park Jimin is waiting for him at the intercom buzzer the moment he steps into his apartment. He must’ve recognised Yoongi’s car, seen Seokjin in the driver’s seat. Something twists in Seokjin’s stomach; it hurts to think about it, Jimin in Yoongi’s car, the shadow of him in that close and private space. Jimin’s face looks warped in the intercom camera, his voice crackling over the poor reception.
“Can I come up?”
“What do you want? Yoongi isn’t here.”
“I - I know that.”
Seokjin waits, but nothing else happens. Jimin doesn’t say anything else and he doesn’t leave, either.
“It’s not a good time,” Seokjin says finally. “And honestly, I have nothing I want to say to you, or hear you say to me. You should go home.”
“Please,” Jimin says.
A sudden exhaustion washes over him. He leans his forehead against the wall.
A part of Seokjin knows he needs to deal with this. He’s known for a long time that whatever happens between himself and Yoongi, whether they move forward together or not, he’ll still have to get himself through the aftermath of it on his own. He had just really hoped that it wouldn’t have to be today.
But still. He understands now the feeling he’d had at Kyunghee’s concert: the sense of escape, of finally being allowed to be a part of something that was not the contained implosion happening inside of his chest. The relief he’d felt, knowing that Yoongi would be gone, even for just a week or two. A postponement. Denial. More time, for him to lick his wounds and run in place. Sooner or later, he knows, it would’ve still come to this.
Finally, Seokjin presses the intercom button. “Alright.”
--
Park Jimin looks different.
Seokjin doesn’t ask him to sit and he doesn’t. Hovering in the hallway, the grey sweatshirt and dark-washed jeans makes Jimin look like a college student. Nervous. Ordinary.
There’s a long, stagnant pause.
“Is he okay?”
Seokjin doesn’t answer. It’s been a while since Jimin has been to the hairdresser’s; his roots are emerging in a dark chunk, a jarring contrast against the neon red. No makeup this time. No eyeliner. He looks small, one shoulder resting tersely on the plasterboard like he’s preparing to run at the first sign of anything. His shoes are scuffed but Seokjin had watched him wipe them meticulously on the doormat - like that would’ve somehow made things better between them, easier.
“He won’t answer my calls,” Jimin says eventually. “Which - I mean, I guess that’s fair.”
Seokjin waits.
“I’m not - trying to do anything. I’m not here to get him back or whatever, that isn’t - I mean, I know he’s gone. Back to you. I know he’s trying to make things work.”
“What are you doing here, Jimin?”
“I - I don’t know.” Jimin looks at him, shifts a little. Looks away again. “I’m not sure. I didn’t even mean to be here, I just ended up here all of a sudden. I just thought - maybe, if I talked to you, I don’t know - ”
“If you’re asking for my forgiveness,” Seokjin says then, quietly, “I can’t give it to you.”
Jimin says nothing for the longest time.
Seokjin moves towards the door. “I think you should - ”
“He wanted to leave. He tried to - break it off with me, so many times. But I didn’t want to let him go. For the first time in my life, I had felt what it was like to be - to be with someone good. Someone who wasn’t about just trying to hurt me, or to use me. Somebody who didn’t even think like that. Who couldn’t. And it made me angry, that he wasn’t mine, that even when he was with me, I could tell, he was thinking about you, about what to do. I always knew there wasn’t any way that he’d leave you for me - that given a choice, he’d always choose you. I knew that. And I should’ve just - but all I could think was, maybe, if I kept him long enough, just a little bit longer, maybe he’d hurt you so much that you’d let him go, and then I could - then maybe, he’d - come back to me.” Jimin stops, voice wavering, a hand coming up to drag his hair back out of his eyes. “I know it doesn’t mean much to you, me saying all this - stuff - but I just - ”
“None of this has anything to do with me,” Seokjin cuts in. “What you felt, or what you wanted - even what you want now - it doesn’t mean anything to me, Jimin. I don’t know you.”
“But - ”
“If he’d really wanted to end things with you, if he’d wanted to leave, he would’ve left. But he didn’t. That’s what matters. Whether he would or wouldn’t have chosen me when it came down to it has no bearing on anything.”
“I know,” Jimin says. “But I just - I made it hard for him, is all.”
Seokjin leans the back of his head against the wall and closes his eyes.
A moment passes.
Seokjin realises suddenly that he isn’t angry. This isn’t, at the end of the day, about Park Jimin at all; Min Yoongi had made the decisions that had led them here, to this rapidly darkening apartment and the two of them, almost ridiculously, hovering on either side of his kitchen like a pair of wary boxers squaring off. Min Yoongi had made this happen. It was useless to pretend that Park Jimin had done all of this, because whether he’d made it difficult or not, Min Yoongi was no stranger to difficult decisions; and just because a decision was hard - whether to operate, when to switch off a ventilator - didn’t mean that the responsibility for it didn’t still lie with the person who’d made the call.
He thinks about Yoongi, standing at the balcony railing the night before; the decision that Yoongi has placed into his hands.
I don’t want you to just bear it, Seokjin.
“You still care about him, don’t you?”
A hot, dark flush goes up Jimin’s neck. “It isn’t - ”
“It’s alright,” Seokjin says. “I care about him too. I suppose I can’t really blame someone for falling in love with him, since I did it first myself. I just - ” He blinks, hard, against the sudden blurring in his vision. “I just - don’t know what to do with all of it. Any of it. Everything you’ve said, it doesn’t - help me in any way, and I - ”
“I never had him,” Jimin says softly, then.
“What?”
“That’s what I came to tell you, I never - I never had him.” Jimin’s face turns away in the lamplight like it’s finally taken all his energy to say it. “He was never mine, even when he was with me. He was always yours.”