My Light, My Jimin

Epilogue: Evaluation

YOONGI

Our house was a crime scene that night. 

The police showed up twenty minutes after receiving a distress call about a home intruder, and they questioned both Jimin and I for a few hours before leaving as quickly as they came.  They didn't ask if we knew Young-sang, because we didn't tell them anything.  We simply told them the events that played out, leaving out some parts for their imaginations.

There isn't much that I regret, but I will spend every second for the rest of my life making up for the trauma Jimin had to go through all on my behalf.  It took me watching a gun being pointed at his head to realize my mistakes of trying to kill blindly.  That my anger made me incapable of thinking logically, and as a result, almost cost me the everything that mattered.

And while I know I don't deserve it, I thank the stars that my lover was just broken enough from his own issues to forgive me so easily.  Maybe that makes me sound like a selfish man, but I am just that: a man.  As it is, I like to think I've spent the last year making it up to him for the mistakes I've made, even if they do still haunt my dreams. 

After just a year of looking back, I've started to see the world through sharper lens. 

He's given me everything.  I have his beautiful smile I get to wake up to every morning, and I have the honor of making music that he hums to himself when he's in the library at work.  And when I'm with Jimin, I leave everything else behind.  He consumes me now just as he did the day he walked into my classroom.

He sighs, the winds lifting up his black hair under his beanie as he snuggles up in the lemon-yellow blanket, his favorite.  We sit together on a picnic blanket overlooking the Cliffs of Moher, a road trip idea both of us were desperate for after being cooped up at home.  I drove with the windows down, and the smile on his face as he took in the green hills was something worth living for. 

My eyes glance down at his fingers twirling over his new necklace: a silver ring with intertwined knots hooked to a chain; symbolizing never-ending love. 

"Yoongi, it's so beautiful," he says. 

I bury my nose into the crook of his neck, wrapping my arm around his waist and pulling him to me just as I did earlier today, making sure he can feel every inch of me.  I want him to know I'm here, always and forever.  Only for him.

When I lean in to give a kiss, he looks up at me and smiles, lifting a finger in the air.  "Hold on, I have something to show you."

He crawls out of my hold, heading back to the car where he rummages in the backpack he takes everywhere with him.  I stay there and watch him, smiling when he comes back with a slightly worn notebook in his hands.

"What's this?" I ask.  "Diary entries?"

He giggles and leans into me, flipping through the pages.  "It's something I worked on back in Daegu.  Here."

Curious, I take the notebook.  My stomach flips in response to seeing myself, or rather, a drawing of myself, staring back.  The details are nearly perfect, with the pencil outline being smudged from traveling.  Reaching to him, I pull him in an embrace.  "Did you draw this?"

He meets my gaze and nods, his cheeks flushing, and I forget how much I love the way he still turns so pink for me after all this time. 

"There's that, and quotes you said.  It was everything I liked about you."  He chuckles to himself, a distant memory clouding his eyes.  "After I realized how much I liked you, the most common sentences out of me were lies.  But I didn't care because I knew this was what I wanted— even if it ran against the entire world."