a ticket to the sun ∙ myg ✓

23 ↝ long gone

Yoongi had not once thought about what it might feel like to die until that day, curled around her body in the middle of the road like a cracked shell, a frail cocoon. A vulnerable means of protection; flesh and meat that can be shredded to bits in an instant. But it was the sensation of her emotions pouring into the small space between them that felt the most like death. The way her shoulders heaved like the sea during a storm. The sound of her empty sobbing. It was like being torn apart and stitched haphazardly back together, only to be torn apart again, and again, and again.

He is sure that a bullet to the heart is going to be infinitely less painful than the way she came to pieces like an imploding star in his arms. And he knows that this is his doing, that his dishonesty made the fallout so cataclysmic, but a tiny part of him is glad that he did so because he wouldn't have been able to take the way that she now stares at him as if he is already dead. He had his selfish period of normalcy, of each kiss and touch not being laced with the worst kind of desperation, and now he must bear the consequences of his cowardice.

Three days post the end of the world, ten days until Yoongi's heart stops, and she says it.

"We could run away."

They are laying side by side on her bed, fingers interlaced, elbows touching. While she cannot help but look at him with mourning in her eyes, her hand has hardly left his since the afternoon that the light was sucked out of his soul. The night sky is clear, allowing the moonlight to spill into the bedroom in a waterfall of pale silver. Nothing but the quiet has existed between them for the last hour; Yoongi was certain she had fallen asleep.

Now he closes his eyes and breathes in, the scent of jasmine rich on his senses.

"We wouldn't get far," he says, hating the memory of such a similar conversation when they were younger, untouchable by the ballot. When it was merely a joke, not something that was going to predict their future. The present. "Besides, they'd take you down for being complicit, too."

"I don't care."

"I care."

She sits up in a rush, turning on him with something molten like anger, frustration, bleeding through her gaze. It flickers in and out of focus, knowing that being upset at him is pointless now. Wasteful.

"Then what else can we do? We have to do something," she snaps, only barely exasperated, like they are discussing standing up to a schoolyard bully rather than how to make the bullet miss.

Yoongi squeezes her hand, stares at her, and hates that when he parts his lips to answer, nothing can seem to come out. The words are stuck somewhere deep in his lungs, beneath all of the I love you's and come here's and don't leave me's that he spent too many years storing for her. And all for what? A glimpse of what could have been had the world been different?

She notices, falters, and then crumples...

• A lot of crying and emotional confessions throughout this chapter. Yoongi is full of guilt and she holds his hand, always.

• This chapter was intended to be set 10 days prior to Yoongi's death day, but I wish I had made it the night before because holy moly, trying to think of what they would do other than mope and be in each others' miserable presence was difficult. Because of this, the summary for the next chapter reads very similar to the situation above in regards to them being in bed, etc.