Step three, you'll never be like me, so la la la la la la la, oh no.

Perfect. Two syllables, broken up by a tongue at the roof of the mouth, the harsh rrr that cuts right into the marrow of your bones. Topped off with that sharp, onomatopoeic ring of the tuhthat rings a phantom in your ears long after it's gone—perfect like sugar that melts on your tongue—and then what?

Silence. Nothing. Nothing except the reverberations that thrum through the room in the word's wake, heavy with both expectation and implication.

Perfect. It's what his relationship with Yoongi should be. Where they tiptoe around the things better left alone, where the sight of the other makes their hearts clutch funny in their chests. Where the lust and the infatuation tide over all the broken pieces that don't quite fit. If that's all applicable, it should work. Right? It's explicable.

But what it doesn'texplain is why Jungkook is currently cloistered in his room, beating out a stormy rendition of Für Elise that would have made Beethoven turn in his grave, utterly indifferent to the cramping in his fingers. Or why he's all but memorized the pattern of the grooves—and counted every irregularity—in the stark monochrome of the wall in front of him, which he's been staring at for the better part of an hour. Or—and this is the biggest or—why the fuck he's got six messages from Yoongi festering in his inbox, all unopened.

His theories, in practicality, will never be able to fit this into their algorithms, but Jungkook can explain. He knows just what he's doing—and doesn't want to know. It's not a coincidence that this—this wretched room where he's been spending six hours a day doing nothing but injustice to every classical piece he can get his hands on—is the only sphere of his existence that hasn't been mottled over by pastel, painted over by Yoongi's tiny hands that bleed out color wherever they touch. And under any circumstances, I'm running away is not a pleasant admission to make. Neither is the fact that the ice that twists in his chest at any stray thought of Yoongi feels a lot less like perfect and a lot more like its hollow aftermath.

Jungkook fights the urge to just collapse, lean his head into his hands and give in to the blank inertia that makes the very beat of his heart seem sluggish—in part because he knows it'll bring little relief. It's an impossible combination, the contamination hanging heavy on his limbs, snaking its listless way into his synapses like a million little flagella claiming their own. And the restlessness pervading the other end of the the scale, skittering like a million little bugs under his skin.

He knows, also, exactly how to make it go away. Knows just what he has to do to set his frozen neurons drunk and firing again, to replace the crawling under his skin with something else there. Someoneelse. He knows that the second he taps a trembling finger onto the little message icon flashing a red alert on his home screen, the ghost of Yoongi's gravelly voice will interlace with whatever he's sent Jungkook that day. Maybe something quirky he saw at the pretentious hipster book-cum-coffee shops he likes to hate people at, or an unremarkable reminder of his submission dates—whatever it is, he knows it won't remain just a series of characters strung together for long. Jungkook's head will fit it into the niche of Yoongi's little mannerisms—a glower, a pout—a clear-eyed smile, even.

And the static in his head will shut itself up in the here and now—because Jungkook knows Yoongi doesn't text people. Perhaps it's in just that he doesn't strike Jungkook as the type, or that he's never seen him type out a message willingly—but more than that, Jungkook knows it in the way a ravenous sort of—loneliness—for the lack of a better term, stares right out of Yoongi's eyes at him sometimes. Like people's eyes and voices, and—and people scare him, for all he acts so tough.

And Jungkook, for his part, is scared of the warm rush that floods him every single time his phone makes that little ping noise. There're precious few people that text him, too, but it's not like he fearsthem, or anything. It's just that—it's Yoongi. For him, there's the rest of the world, and then there's Min Yoongi. First him, in all his aesthetic exquisiteness of bone structure and tilt and form, and then him,in all the rest of himself like an unraveling maze of crayon satin he's yet to reach the end of. Somehow, his profiles and algorithms and equations all run to irrational numbers when it's Yoongi in the variable, and maybe he's scared of that a little, too.

That Yoongi doesn't text people but texts Jungkook, that the—everything comes back avenged sevenfold after the washout of the words tinged azure and lavender has ebbed from his senses, that the knot in his chest becomes harder and harder to disregard, along with the—oh, godammit, the fear—that Yoongi wants things from him that he can neither comprehend nor give. The eternities where he's held Yoongi as his sobs made their bodies rock in cadence increasingly feel to him dangerous, adrenaline thrilling in his fingers even as their heartbeats slowed in unison. 

And with every nuance of Yoongi's life given to him, every red string that links them, he's more and more terrified to yank it towards himself, see if it'll hold. There's something there, between them—a stream, a chasm, a divide; call it what you will—and it's one of the things they don't talk about. If they ignore it, it'll go away. This can work.

Jungkook breathes out slow through his nose. The long and short of it is, Yoongi's a drug. And he can'tget addicted.

His gaze darts between his phone and the mahogany monstrosity of the bookshelf—the first thing he'd installed in the gaping fixtures of his room when he'd set up here—like that of a cornered animal. A few months ago, he wouldn't have hesitated. A few months ago, it wouldn't have come to this.

Jungkook grits his teeth. Before he knows it, he's taking the ten steps towards the latter. His hands—they won't stop their shaking even as he lifts the Eliot anthology off the top shelf, the corner of his mouth tilting up despite himself. Yoongi isn't the only one with a flair for the dramatic. There—wedged right into the binding where it opens at The Waste Land, the innocuous-looking strip of mint-green pills seems to stare him down, magnified. His heartbeat hitching, Jungkook lifts one hesitant finger up to run it along the edge and it snags, a bead of blood coming up to shimmer ruby-like at the tip of the digit.

The wince he makes has nothing to do with the sting, and everything to do with the white coats, the interminable, sterile series of rooms which never varied no matter how many institutions you changed, and the hours of one-sided assaults on your dulled senses, the culmination of all of which was prescription clonazepam. Almost ridiculous.

He hasn't taken one in a long time, and as he disengages it from the book, extracts a single pill from the casing, he shudders at the uncomfortable memory of its forced brand of calm—like it's trying to contain a screaming hurricane by sealing a lid onto it. The touch of a soft hand ghosts over his own, and he can all but hear his mother whisper as she presses the crinkling metal into his palm minutes before he gets on a flight to the hell out of here; his own hand closing over it almost automatically, convinced that he'd never need it. So adept at shutting people out. So invincible was he.

His fingers fumble for a bit before he closes his eyes. Steadies his breathing, counting out the inhales and exhales to the beat of his own heart. Okay.

Okay.

He considers for a moment, then—

"Oh, what the hell," he mutters, parts his lips, prepares his throat for the dry swallow—and his phone screen lights up.

Yoongi.