Jungkook doesn't want to leave.

It's an instinct as innocuous as a tripwire, that renders the demarcations in his head defunct with its easy, easy treachery. Somehow—in the way of a misgiving, his universe has shifted and rearranged itself in terms of Yoongi, all serrated edges and stubborn pastels in the midst of Jungkook's breathing galaxy of blood tones and lies. And it's the novelty of it, maybe, how the uneven corners seem to round out in the shape of Yoongi in his arms, but he's managed to convince himself that this place is safetyand that nothing else matters.

It's an illusion—even as he thinks it he knows that, but a part of him—more than a part—is content to dwell in it. Knows that getting up and leaving, head long past the point of it being the smart thing to do, will splinter everything right down to the core. Like cracks spiderwebbing across frozen glass, the strength of every excruciating moment away will consolidate—one lethal strike across that flimsy screen he's built up between himself and everything he doesn't want to think about. Everything he hates himself for doing—and not doing.

So he stays. Until the sun sinks into a crimson glow staring moodily at them through tones of watercolor purple, with the stenciled-out shapes of buildings making stark, contrasting outlines against it, he follows Yoongi around the house. Helping him out here and there—yah brat get away from my kitchen—until he gets swatted away, but mostly just looking. Just silently touching the fragments of Yoongi he's carelessly left behind, clinging to the well-thumbed Hemingways on the coffee table, scrawled across the mountain of papers stacked for correction on the divan, secreted away in the disk slots of the beat-up sound system. Trying to match his fingers to the imprints of Yoongi's he imagines on each piece of furniture, and realizes—that realization of time and again—that everything he's picked up from throwaway interactions with Yoongi is just—like he'd been trying to use dichromes to paint him in and then wondering why it lacked luster.

"Oi, Jungkook!"

He startles out of his reverie at the sound of Yoongi's voice—forgets he actually has to respond until Yoongi emerges from the kitchen, frown firmly in place as he stands in the doorway. Hands on his hips—Jungkook snickers at how much he looks like a vengeful mother.

"See, we do this thing, y'know," the sarcasm in Yoongi's voice is layered on thick enough to bite into. "When people call you, you're expected to perform this unprecedented feat called responding."

Jungkook doesn't know how to field that wordless expectation, really, doesn't think that Yoongi would appreciate his efforts to retrace his absent touch.

"Sorry," he says instead. "I got caught up."

Yoongi raises an eyebrow at what Jungkook knows to be a vague, abrupt answer, but mercifully doesn't press for details, just walks over to stand beside him in the balcony. It's silent for a moment, and Jungkook wonders, for maybe the first time, what Yoongi is thinking. Finds his thoughts reeling back to the yanked-up sleeve and what both of them have been careful not to mention. Quick, soft as cured leather, a presentiment brushes up his spine—and is gone before he can grasp at its tail-end.

It's quiet for a little, then—so much so that Jungkook can feel Yoongi in the barely-there whisper of his breathing, the callous dissipation of his body heat to the winter chill. Belatedly, it occurs to him that this is what literature decrees and purple prose paints a moment. And cynicism notwithstanding, the glance of gentle breeze across his face feels to him a lingering caress, the hints of amber and bergamot in it impossibly heady. He chances a glance, then, at Yoongi, pinpricks shooting across the back of his neck—and finds him staring right back.

A flickering reel of images—a laugh, a parting of the lips, the sharp angles of a shadowy figure—flash impossibly fast across the million and one possibilities he sees in Yoongi's gaze. All different, and yet like in that they rivet Jungkook in flashbulb memory. He can't forget, and he can't look away from that—somethingwhich demands encroach into every nook and crevice of him he's ever cloistered away, relegated to shadows and oblivion.

It invokes in Jungkook a deep unease, a discomfort like the pit of his stomach and everything buried therein is rising in his throat, leaving him with no air—and no choice but to divulge.

Like it's slowly unraveling the tense cluster lodged somewhere between his stuttering heartbeat and the sharp stab under his bottom ribs. One by one, dangerously close to siphoning out in velvet, sinuous like the slide of ribbon against cautious fingertips, the entirety of every black anger and clinging want and jagged-edged pain that constitutes it.

It's one fell swoop when the gravity of this hits him, one soundless moment where he feels fine-grained sand cascade through the breach of his fingers. It's fuel to the fire of that menacing, bruised purple-carmine that holds within its pitch core a promise to raze Jungkook's world right down to barren ground if unleashed.

He flinches.

It says something much about him; them—maybe. And maybe that same, seductive premonition from earlier glances across the back of his neck, flickers behind his lids the moment eye contact is broken. That unease, though, Jungkook gladly shoulders—quid pro quo—assimilating it into that same, malevolent knot that holds his reality together with the figments of scaled-over insanity and blisters at every touch—the one he'd probably hold dearer than anything else if it came down to it.

It's thought for thought in his head, then, the floodgates splintering under the onslaught with the ghost of I told you so trailing behind in the whisper of a silent scepter. Jungkook jerks his head to face the street the balcony overhangs, blind to the evening traffic, to the shops and the people and the stars that sparkle like shards of brilliant frost shot through the velveteen embrace of slow, darkening prussian. The temptation to give in, to snap the red string in half and let his body go limp, to shut down and numb himself to the sinking dread, is overwhelming.

He closes his eyes.

It's always quieter like this, the all-encompassing darkness like the warmth of affection, the impenetrability of it like the safety of an old favorite sweater. It's somewhere ahead of blind panic, where the shrillness of the voice, the propensity of the ache, abate; retreat into the promise of retribution. In the dark, there's neither evidence nor existence—and the milling of thought is not something he can't shunt out.

For now.

It's a conscious effort—the contamination burnt into his skin crawls in resistance even as he wills himself into the flow of tranquility—in and out, slow and sure. A blot of light—he fights to picture the spatter of it, like luminescent paint onto the charcoal inside of his head. Another. They blink out in quick succession then, like a white-hot smattering of fresh, restless light swinging off a wide, careless sweep of a paintbrush, bending to Jungkook's touch in soundless motion. He finds himself fashioning them into pretend constellations, the link of serene silver string tugging them into those flickering outlines off the pages of a book.

He's breathing easier, heart slowing from the frantic race of aggravated adrenaline. And all in all, the thump of Yoongi's head coming to rest on his shoulder shouldn't be too much of a shock, is what the miniscule remnant of his rationale is trying to scream at him through the sudden painful, quivering tension of the glass-piece map in his head. But the constellations are suddenly crystal, the darkness cellophane, as everything trembles on the precipice of shattering ruin.

And yet the moment drags on, unbearable almost, until something—something warmbegins a slow spread through him, touching over his frozen cogs, casting a lull over the pregnant silence in his head. Out and out it spreads, restoring action to his catatonic limbs, rhythm to his still heart. And when the permeation washes over that—that crystalline image in his head he's barely keeping together, shards of it driving home into the flesh of his hands and tinting everything rust and salt—well. Jungkook's never seen the northern lights, but he can't draw a more fitting parallel for their sudden flicker of color—wide swathes of pale green and purple-pink, stars dancing in their shadowy brackets against the juxtaposition.

The buoyancy of it is like a crescendo, up, up, up until Jungkook chances to open his eyes. It's almost completely dark now, but the soft glow from Yoongi's living room radiates to the balcony. Like a careless sweep of hand it blurs outlines, softens the sharp contrasts and the jutting edges until they become, to Jungkook, an oil pastel piece of long-forgotten art. And Yoongi—he's so beautiful in chalk and charcoal that Jungkook forgets to be terrified of the dubious warmth.

Avarice—it's a strange feeling to Jungkook, to say the least. He'd always figured that it—like everything else—could be kept at bay through sheer restraint. And yet— this itch under his skin whenever Yoongi's hair brushes the side of his neck in the fluctuant breaths of winter air, the shallow want of something he balks from spelling out in four-letter words—this, thishe understands as language more felt than thought, is how utterly prevailing the seven deadly sins really are. Because nothing of less than dangerous potency can, like this, jerk his head up straight to take into painful consideration that love has four letters and so does more, that hatred is miles away from indifference, but so is infatuation.

And that charcoal has shadows, as does pastel—no more, and no less.

So maybe it's something of that, like a drop of clear, cool epiphany in the roiling typhoon tearing him two different ways, or maybe it's just physical—the scream of opposition his body makes at the thought of withdrawing his arm, but there's a chasm right down the middle of his head. It's affected his higher faculties, he's sure, because the grip that he's supposed to be deliberately loosening from around Yoongi's shoulder retaliates by overwhelming his senses in sudden propinquity as it presses them up together in a mind of its own. And it's something inhuman, it has to be, the way the panic rearing up in his chest quiets down to nothing at the sound—caress, shape, feel—of Yoongi's subsequent inhale. The words running riot in his head, messy letters to shapeless feelings so entangled and garbled that they're strangers to him, even, find sudden fluency to the tune of the rustle of fabric and the lines of Yoongi's body pressing piano keys into his side. It doesn't matter, then, to them that this is a dangerous hazard, that every moment he spends like this with elementary touch to stifle the blank screaming in his blank head, drives him further from the point of safety, the point he can still return to—as they're out before he knows them.

"See you tomorrow, hyung."

He knows, without a shadow of doubt even as his fingers dig in for a last, lingering second before releasing Yoongi, that he'll be cursing himself right through the descent of the shadowy stairwell, phrasing and rephrasing a million ways to take those words back, make him—them—understand that this is just not a good idea. He'll go his room and let himself sink down under the weight of inertia, under the covers until they blanket in monochrome the swirling misgivings and the ache of the contamination.

And that he'll be up with his alarm on the Monday, gather up the pieces, and make his way to Yoongi's class.