"You're a fucking idiot, Jungkook."

One thing Jungkook's learned about Kim Taehyung is that he doesn't mince words. And seated across from him, the full impact of them hits him like a freight train even as he attepts to defend himself.

"I just don't understand him. Why. Why would he say things like that—and then leave? Why would he have sex with me in the first place?"

Taehyung heaves a heavy sigh. "You keep talking about how you don't understand him because you're so different. Have you ever considered that you might be too similar?"

Jungkook shakes his head. "That's just—not possible."

And it isn't. Yoongi and him—they're nothing like each other. They're so different, in fact, that they miss each other most of the time. That's the problem. Nothing else.

Taehyung steeples his fingers, looks at Jungkook with the same expression of caution he had on when Jungkook showed up at their apartment an inch away from hypothermia. "Look at the facts. You've both got issues. It's just that you deal with them in different ways. But whenever anything comes close to hurting you, you both run. That's what he's doing right now, Jungkook. And one of you has to end it."

Jungkook's head is spinning—Taehyung's arguments, in the most perverse sort of way, make sense—and it makes him sick to his stomach with rage at himself for not noticing sooner.

"So what do you suggest I do? Talk to him? He hasn't been in college for two weeks." Jungkook's barely keeping his voice level at this point, body thrumming with nervous energy as he fights the urge to pace around the room.

"Oh, Jungkook," Taehyung's voice is soft. "Did no one tell you? He resigned from the college the Tuesday after you guys went out."

"But," his grin is back, suddenly, blinding, as Jungkook fights to process the information. "I have a feeling you know where he lives."

Tuesday. That made it the day after—well, that.

He has to go find Yoongi. Now.

Taehyung just waves him off when Jungkook shoots him an apologetic look before bolting out of the apartment. He has no idea what he's going to say, but he thinks he's prepared for just about anything. Yoongi can rage at him, cry, turn away—and he won't be deterred. He has to see him.

He just has to.

And it's only when his knocks go unanswered and the caretaker tells him after an interminable period of waiting that Min Yoongi-ssi just moved out a week ago, no return address, that he realizes he's prepared for every possibility except the possibility of not seeing Yoongi, because, in all honesty, he never thought it could happen. It's only when he sinks to his knees in front of the shut-fast door that would only reveal bare walls and stripped-down furnishings even if he did force it open, with a hollow kind of gnawing eating away at his chest, that he realizes that he's somehow fooled himself into believing in happy endings somewhere along the way.

It's after a small eternity that he can bring himself to stand up, stand up and walk back—but he can't, on the way, stop himself from turning back to look at the balcony where Jungkook had first put his arm around Yoongi, and they'd stood an eon ago as they'd never again stand. He scrutinizes the empty space for where the flutter of Yoongi's pale-yellow curtain should've been—only it's gone now, like Yoongi's posters and his spilling-over lyrics and his stereo—and like Yoongi himself, there's

nothing.

Not even a chance.

Jungkook closes his eyes for a long moment, and when he opens them again, the world is no longer tinged mint-green and pale-pink at the edges, like it had seemed to be when Yoongi had walked into his life with a pastel palette and a careless hand to turn it inside out. It's normal, and his heart lifts in the slightest with the comfort of familiarity, because there's none of that now, no demands he can't fulfill, no expectations he can't field. There's no one to make him want or need or feel. He's free to go back. Go back to

nothing.