Ironically, it's Yoongi who wakes up first.

Jungkook rouses with the sun streaming full force onto his face— putting his guess of the time at early noon.He rubs his eyes to clear his bleary vision, stretching like a cat for the split-second after sleep where nothing is real, where all his problems haven't solidified into a cast-iron gauntlet around his neck. That one, blissful moment—and then they hit him with the force of eight-floors-down concrete.

He's fucking naked.

He's in another bed—his professor's, specifically.

The one Jungkook had categorical instructions to stay away from.

And the other half of said bed is empty, which means he has no idea where Yoongi is right now.

Terrifyingly sober now, he can't quite find it in himself to get out of bed. He rolls over and buries his face into the pillow, as if now that he can't see the testament to his own stupidity, it will stall the unwelcome thoughts he feels flooding in with the force and propensity of a tidal wave. Any comfort he'd taken from the liquid courage last night has evaporated—holding Yoongi, being close to Yoongi—all of those little wants become eclipsed by the all-consuming panic, which is rendering the world a tint of blood, a hollow whooshing reverberating in his ears.

He's fucked up.

It's a litany of that in his mind—this was never, ever supposed to happen. He was never supposed to do more than just talk with him, surreptitiously draw him, marvel at his frustrating beauty in his head. Keep him a daydream's reach away. And now, now—Jungkook has the grim premonition— another one— that he's opened the floodgates for something impossible and needy and addictive and—and unstoppable. Because drunk as he had been—he knows. He's stumbled upon a secret of Yoongi's, something that he can't let go of—something which cloisters them together in the ever-present stigma of not normal.

And he knows he'll never, ever forget. Anything.

Knows that they've strayed down a path neither of them will ever fully recover from—whether it be in terms of memory or of just being able to go back to that— the level of contamination he can bear, that superficial affinity.

He needs to do something, something—even as an icy paralysis grips him he forces himself up the right way, fisting the sheets in the vain hope that the crumpling fabric will serve to release the despair that's knotting up his insides.

He needs to breathe—does his best to call up the million breathing exercises of a million wasted therapy sessions. In and out, relax your muscles, speak to yourself in positive coping statements.

Hope on your last breath it works, your earlier disregard for it notwithstanding.

Okay, he tells himself as he deliberately loosens his convulsive grip on the bedding, it's okay. He can leave all of this behind and return to the blank sterility of his apartment— quiet and familiar and safe. He just needs to do the next right thing— and the next, and the next. It's just a series of steps, if he looks at it that way. A few steps until he's back home and away. All he needs to do is start somewhere.

"...Clothes," he mutters under his breath. Yes, finding his clothes seems like a good place to start. Greenlighted, he looks around, recognizes the burgundy shape of his shirt next to the mattress, the black of his pants relatively close at hand. Now pick them up, his mind instructs him as it would a child, Jungkook nonetheless grateful for the solidity of it amidst the dizzying blur of the information overload.

It takes him a minute to comply, just pushing himself up and off the bed a herculean effort with his swimming head. His arm—and legs and everything else—feels boulder-like heavy as he makes a grab for his clothes. Now dress, the puerile instruction continues as Jungkook wills his hands to stop shaking, fumbling irritatingly long with the buttons on his shirt, the zip on his pants. Finally, though, he's decent—and he knows, without the tape-recorder instruction telling him, that the next step is to leave—get the fuck out and never look back.

But— there's always a but, that condemning three-letter word, the difference between sanity and safety and lack thereof, choice of reward or ruin suspended in its balance— now that his vision has cleared some, his heart slowed a little, he's looking around, things catching his eye. Even as the realization that this—this is the fork in the road, and he's consciously deviated from security to take the first step along the razor-edge of his undoing—hits him, he can't stop. Everything he takes in—the Casio keyboard wedged into the corner, the sheet music overflowing from its holder, the posters—BigBang mostly, but also ShinEE, Kanye West, Li'l Wayne, you-name-it hiphop artists—which leave scarcely an inch of the wall bare, the basketball on the floor he almost trips over—all of it intrigues Jungkook in a way he never thought possible. It's an epiphany, almost—how much he's missed about Yoongi in their snippets of conversation. How much Yoongi hides behind his long sleeves and perpetual scowl.

And how those ghosts of Yoongi charted out in black and white of charcoal against paper, the phantoms of something living—the voice, the face, the gestures—measured out in one hour thrice a week will never again be enough.

Jungkook is suddenly possessed with the need to touch—to commit to muscle memory all the million and one facets of Yoongi that lie scattered around his room like figments of light hitting crystal. Like he might very well never get to again, he runs his hand over the little foldable desk, the messy scrawl across pages and pages of paper occupying it—song lyrics, he realizes belatedly as he flips through them. Angry raps about desertion and fuck-the-world nihilism, rueful half-songs about loss— Jungkook is struck by the intensity of them, that powerful thread of unsaid, debilitating loneliness which connects them all. He suddenly, inexplicably, wants to steal a page of it, fold it up and keep it in his back pocket— and only partly because it's something precious of Yoongi's. It's something other than just that, the simple arranging and rearranging of those same letters in different patterns to form words— give themselves a meaning which resonates somewhere remote inside Jungkook. It's a window into how that same loneliness in a different brand has made Yoongi into who he is— his thoughts and feelings and most private musings—and Jungkook wants—

Want want wantwantwantwant

His rationale claws back with a vengeance, attacking the uncertain limbo that he'd successfully lulled himself into. That word—how he hates that word.

Wants turn into needs turn into hurt.

And it's annoying, almost, but this new chant inside his head reminds him of the need to distance himself from the situation, to analyze all factors and come up with an answer to this twisted, contradictory conundrum—something to reinforce his iron-steel-titanium armor, something that promises deliverance. Something, something, something—but he needs to get out of this apartment before he can't. So, with a last, wistful brush of his fingers over the knickknacks populating the painted over, wall-mounted shelves, he takes a deep breath—he's this close to clearing the breach between their worlds, transitioning over into what he knows—and opens the door to the hall.

He gets about half a step in before his faculties turn to ice—but he isn't the only one.

Because the minute he opens the door, Min Yoongi turns to stare at him from where he's apparently been pacing, looking like the literal embodiment of a deer in the headlights.