TAEGI SMUTS [ᵃᵒ3]

This Skin Doesn't Feel Like Home

Ao3 by : endcredits

Summary :

If Taehyung was to ever hurt him in a real way, Yoongi thinks it would be devastating. He thinks of all the past lovers less distanced than himself that Taehyung has had to leave in order to find him here in this bed and doesn’t envy them one bit.

Or: There’s a power cut in the building. Taehyung helps Yoongi see the light.

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When the power cuts out, Yoongi’s in the middle of slurping up a bowl of instant ramen in his tiny kitchen, under the buzzy hum of a halogen strip light and a lone blue bottle. Sounding kinda similar, both unalive. He keeps his shit clean, but it’s June, and in cramped living blocks like this the heat attracts many a crawling thing.

Through his open balcony, Yoongi hears a cacophony of disgruntled human sound.

The horny couple that were fucking loudly on the floor above him stop with a cry of confusion. A group of teenagers one floor down are complaining that the movie was just getting to the good bit. And then, above all that, a silence that comes with the absence of white noise of everyday machines.

The blue bottle has landed somewhere, wings no longer carrying it around in unconscious circles around the room. There’s hardly any cars out on the roads at one in the morning, and the only light seeping through his gauzy curtains comes from the neon signs of the noraebang across the street.

In the waking slumber of the city, this backout seems a sigh of relief. The first real reprieve Yoongi’s seen it take.

And there he goes again, personifying. With a sideways jerk of his head, he thinks that maybe he should afford himself the same courtesy.

“Yeah, ‘cos you’re supposed to be the main character, right?” He mutters to himself, sipping more spicy broth down his burning throat. “Real euripidean guy.”

Sure, whatever god is taking a backseat must be getting a pretty good show of Yoongi’s own silent self-wreckage. Noodles in the A.M., that’s one thing, but there’s so many other ways in which he’s dazzlingly depriving himself of nutrition. Yet there’s still no blackout of his own yet, so he must be getting something right.

Right now, he should probably looking for his battery powered torch or something, but he’s just kind of standing there, hardly seeing a fucking thing and palm pressed to the cold of the kitchen counter. It’s dulling the taste, this darkness. He holds out his hand in front of his face, only barely able to make out the web of his fingers as he stretches it out, but that could just be his mind filling in the blanks of what it knows is already there.

That’s a thing he knows about. The tricks of the human eye, even when there’s no light to play with. Stare at this dot on the page, and watch this shape disappear. Stare at the dot on this video, and watch the world warp around you.

Illusions. And it’ll be your own damn brain that convinces itself it’s real.

Knock, knock.

Yoongi frowns, jumping to the conclusion that whoever’s at the door must want something. He’s got nothing all that useful to share, no back up power sources of any kind that would be of use, but just as he’s psyching himself up for a friendly neighbourly confrontation, he hears a familiar voice muffled through the door.

“Yoongi? It’s me.”

It’s him. It’s Taehyung. The pick up in Yoongi’s heartbeat is nothing but consequential.