He freezes, the pill slipping from between his fingers to the hardwood floor, dangerous in its proclivity, noiseless in its propensity. The pricking behind his eyes, the heat in his cheeks catch him by surprise. No, he tells himself, jerks his head to the side, clenches his eyes shut. It's all Yoongi's fault, really. This choice that wouldn't have normally figured even in the far reaches of his safe haven. This revolt of the tidal wave of difficult emotion that he's so successfully suppressed up until now. He can't—the tongues of restless flame lick at him from the inside out as he fights the scream building in his throat, fights the sense of entrapment that galvanizes him with fractious energy and gives impetus to the moisture quivering behind his eyelids.

With a sudden, vicious twist of his heel, he grinds the tablet to powder underfoot. And just like that, the flip of a switch, he needs to get out of here.

Only the shaking of his hands, more violent than ever as he deliberately replaces the medication inside the book, as he replaces the book on the shelf, are any giveaway that as soon as Four Quartets slides back into place, as soon as his hands fall back limply to his sides, he'll scan his memory for somewhere—anywhere—the scent and feel and shape of Yoongi doesn't permeate, and he'll run.

He doesn't even know why he bothers with the hiding ritual any more, he thinks in between heaving gasps of air as he forces his legs to power him through another round of the park where he eventually finds himself. The meds are prescription, and there's no one around to venture into his room and stand in judgement on his past—or present, or future. He's made sure of that. He doesn't know why, but he has to.

He just has to.

By the time his legs give out, the sun is well on the way of its mellow descent, a fiery orb slashed through with the stark outline of cityscape. Collapsing on a bench, Jungkook feels in his pockets for his phone. Maybe it's just him, maybe the cooling sweat, but the back of his neck prickles uncomfortably in what he imagines to be the questioning gazes of the late-evening parkgoers boring into him.

His hands come up empty—they haven't stopped shaking yet. Fuck. His phone, he realizes, is back in his room—and the tiny bit of irrational relief he feels in that is quickly eclipsed by the chill settling over him. It's not just that it's winter and he's sitting there in nothing but sweats and a tank top. It's also that he recognizes he's dreading facing Yoongi, even by technological proxy, let alone in person. It's that he's dreading returning to the apartment, too—both ends of the spectrum, both possibilities equally forbidding, leaving him at the mercy of some cruel experiment in negative reinforcement and with nowhere to run from the cruel baton of the conductor.

He shivers. He catches his breath. It's an unreasonable stalemate—and there's nothing he can do now but damage control for all the times he didn't. Where he let himself go and feel and lo—

Where he let want turn into need turn into hurt.

He pushes himself off the bench, and with some bastardized refrain of I told you so and perfect ringing in his head, trudges off in the direction of his apartment.

He's half frozen when he reaches, and it's a good feeling, somehow, the numbness and not knowing whether the shivers wracking his body are courtesy of the cold or his roiling thoughts. Nevertheless, he can barely get his key into the lock, it taking him three tries of jamming it haphazardly inside until it connects. He turns it, and the central heating of his apartment washes over him like a hot bath. He sighs despite himself.

"Jungkook?"

His head jolts up at the sound of the voice. Taehyung is sitting on the sofa in the living room, looking at him with an expression of horror that Jungkook can't place. It can't be past eight, Taehyung is doing nothing illegal, and he's pretty sure he isn't bleeding anywhere. In any case, he stands in his own entranceway like a deer in the headlights while Taehyung jumps off the couch and runs to him, dragging him inside.

"Where the fuck have you been? You're freezing!" Jungkook is too stunned, too numb, to remonstrate or resist, so he stumbles along as Taehyung leads him over to the couch he'd been sitting on, placing two hands on his shoulders to turn him so that their eyes lock and studying his face. "You know your lips are blue?"

Jungkook wants nothing more than to make a beeline for his room, move off the sofa he's sat in barely half a dozen times during his lease—always when Taehyung wasn't home—get out of this living room he's never lived in. He opens his mouth to say as much, make up an excuse and lock the door behind himself, sink back into his pristine bed and his sterile sheets, but Taehyung flings a throw rug onto him and all that comes out instead is a gasp. The discomfort churning in his gut notwithstanding, the warmth of the sudden cocoon around him is seductive and he relaxes into it just a little.

Taehyung says nothing, just watches, and even as his tremors slow, the silence lengthens until Jungkook wants to break something, as if the rending of metal and porcelain will bridge the gaps in his defunct system of interaction and he will, for once, know what the hell to say. He pictures it, throwing something, and Taehyung's widening eyes with the drop in his guard will probably give him the opening he needs to rush back into his room, his comfort zone. He knows it's a stupid game, but it gathers the tangled web of his thought process and gives it something to do,so he plays along.

As he scans the room for a viable option, his gaze catches on Taehyung's, who holds it for a long, awkward moment before clearing his throat.

"Look, I know we aren't best friends or anything," Jungkook snorts at this despite himself, and Taehyung just ducks his head, laughing almost sheepishly before continuing. "I know, right? Understatement of the century. I don't even know anything about you except your name and the fact that my parents thought I should shack up with you."

Jungkook's eyes widen at the near-exact reverberation of his own thoughts, but before he can—he doesn't know, say something, do something to somehow convey that to Taehyung, he speaks again. "But I really don't want your family sending mercenaries after me because you died on my watch." Another half-laugh follows this before he grins at Jungkook. "So the next time you want to go freeze your balls off, maybe just tell me? I don't bite, promise."

No, Jungkook wants to say, I know you don't. It's discomfiting, this whole exchange that's steadily punching holes into the disjointed plane he's built his existence on. It's a shock to him, almost, the rubble of it raining down after all this time of being shunted to and from the padded cells reading different and special case and fucked up. That people's thoughts can encroach on, overlap with those he's demarcated in his head as exclusively his own, is somehow inconceivable to him. It's scary—it's like someone is tugging at the veil of anomaly he's smothered his identity in, it's frightening even to consider that maybe everyone's perception isn't on a completely divergent track, not like—Yoongi.

But then again, Jungkook lets the corner of his mouth tilt up in a tiny answering smile, that's just plain stupid. He knows there isn't anyone in the world like Yoongi. All he has to do is hope for the abyss of their differences to somehow fill up.