daybreak | yoonmin

april 5th.

6:51 a.m.

Today, he didn't wear a jacket.

For the first time in months, Yoongi walked up the stairs without a coat on his back. He felt oddly bare with just a jean jacket and hoodie over him, but it was something he'd have to grow accustomed to. In that way, it was much like Jimin's absence.

He thought about Jimin a lot more than he would have liked, which irritated him to the fullest because Jimin probably wasn't thinking about him nearly as much. His heart felt so heavy.

Yoongi was just a rebound. Nothing more than next in line. Second best. The first place loser. When Taehyung was around, Yoongi was bronze beside diamonds, and that's just the way it was. He forced himself not to forget that, even on nights when it made him overthink.

Fuck, he hated feeling so much all of a sudden. 'Cause why dwell? Why linger on his foolish fall for someone who was taken, someone who was an emotional mess, and in turn who made him an emotional mess himself? 

He didn't love that it ended on this note between them... but then again if they kept in touch his feelings would only get deeper. But then again did he give a fuck? If he got to see Jimin did it really matter? It all canceled out in the end, right?

It didn't. Have some fucking pride, Yoongi.

So Yoongi went on walking up the stairs with his stone face, headphones on at full blast. He didn't play Jhene Aiko because Jhene Aiko would fuck him up so he tried playing Kendrick Lamar instead. Then he thought about the things that fucked him up.

Lana Paranzetti. Winter weather. Movies with good concepts but bad directing. Sneakers with holes in them, or bad sneaker collections.

Jimin fucked him up, too.

Jimin fucked Yoongi's head up so bad that he found himself thinking about him.

Culinary school. It felt like ages ago, but in reality it couldn't have been any more than five years ago. Kim Mina was her name. She was his partner who became a close friend who became his girlfriend. She wasn't the brightest in the bunch, but she loved with everything in her. And he loved her. They had a lot of happy times together.

But he found himself even happier in her older brother's presence.

And he never said anything to Mina. He woke up one day and couldn't stomach breaking her heart, so he disappeared and never spoke to her again. Spared her the trouble. That was the difference between he and Jimin.

If it wasn't for him, Kim Minjun, the first boy that ever was, he wouldn't have realized that he could love another man. Maybe he would have carried on with life as "normal." Maybe he wouldn't have looked twice that day, wouldn't have felt so strongly for a bottle brunette boy named Park Jimin: wearer of loafers, eater of almonds, boy who loved books but could never find their glasses to read them. Perhaps they would have never crossed paths.

He imagined it fondly: both of them in nescient ecstasy, passing by every day as nameless bodies in the lives of one another and nothing more. Jimin would exist and he would exist in the discrete yet composite way that strangers do for what he wished would be eternity.

The tingling anger fizzled out until he was nothing. Nothing but the framework of a man on fire and a well of tears for later extinguishing.

This is grief.

6:53 a.m.

Jimin began to regret wearing his scarf because it was starting to get warmer.

His fingers tapped fervently against the screen of his phone to text Taehyung, and curse him for making the scarf so well. A smile quickly crept onto his face. It receded just as fast. His mind went to Yoongi, and how their conversation had fallen to the bottom of his messaging list.

That was all that came out of Taehyung's name now. He couldn't think of one without thinking of the other.

It was as if, so suddenly, Yoongi ceased to be. So seamless, it was almost like he never was. All their coincidental crossings of paths had stopped on that cold, warm spring day. Jimin missed him dearly, but their parting was for the best... right? The least he could do for Yoongi was leave him alone like he'd asked. He'd already destroyed enough people, not excluding himself.

He hit send, stepping through the open doors of the monorail that had just come to a halt before him. The song in his AirPods, one of Harry Style's ballads, permeated his soul and the air until all of it seemed to be covered in a blue lens. The sigh within him came from years ago.

This, too, is grief.

Then he saw the veiny, pale white hand extending itself back to him. It wrapped itself around the cold metal doors instinctively to hold the doors open and blushed with red. His heart felt like it had been jumpstarted with cables for a half of an inch of a second but when he looked up, the man did not look back.

"Thanks," Jimin whispered, looking at the back of the head in front of him. It was awkward and tense, and thank God for the other passersby rushing past, pushing and shoving, because he would have stood in that agonizing moment and lived in it forever.

Yoongi walked.

They got onto the train car and took the only remaining available seats, paired indirectly across from one another. Imperfect alignment. The song restarted in his ears. Yoongi skipped to something by 21 Savage and shut his eyes. Jimin cut his music off-- started reading from his bookmarked page. There were train noises, there was pain, there was longing.