If you had to use one word, if someone really twisted your arm for it, to describe Park Jimin it would be...

Perfection.

He woke up three minutes before his alarm every day. He would sit up, immediately alert regardless of the amount of sleep he'd managed to finagle, rake a hand through his glossy, black hair and check the time. Instead of flopping back down into bed as the rest of us might, he would fold back the covers and shuffle his way to the built-in closet and collect the neatly folded clothes he had picked out the night before. Clothes in hand, he would move in near silence, his bare feet cushioned by the rough, practical carpet of his shared bedroom to the small tiled bathroom connected by a slightly ajar door. 

The only notification of his passing was a stealthy snick as he closed the door, handle turned so the metal latch was pulled politely back from the strike plate. It was only once he was safely ensconced within that he flipped on the bright overhead fluorescent, so as not to disturb his mercurial roommate, Yoongi, and use the facilities. Jimin never just went to the toilet, he was fair too pristine for such a base thing. No, he excused himself and visited the amenities. He would lower the lid when he was done but would wait until he had started the shower before flushing.

As steam built up in the small, tiled room, he would unbutton his pajamas; soft cotton flannel in the winter, lightweight organic bamboo in the summer and silk for the temperate spring and autumn months. Regardless of the season they were always blue, some might have called it navy, but they would be wrong. It was federal blue. A distinction anyone with a hint of class and breeding would know. It was also one of his signature colours according to his image stylist. He would then place them neatly in the basket provided by the school laundry service, put a cap on his head if it wasn't Sunday or Wednesday, and stretch his hand under the cascading water to check its temperature.

His showers never lasted more than five minutes. He would get out, sling a white, fluffy towel made with the finest Egyptian cotton around his narrow waist and stand in front of the fog resistant mirror above the tasteful white basin. Toothbrush jutting from his mouth, he would give himself a once over, running his smooth hands over his damp face, feeling for the slight sensitivity that heralded a breakout. He would look over his body, twisting this way and that, ignoring the healthy ripple of carefully cultivated muscle to focus instead on the way his folded abdomen would crease, and a resultant roll would form. He pinched the skin between his fingers critically before looking away from his reflection with a disappointed huff to spit into the sink.

He would then dry himself thoroughly with the towel and, since he had invariably used it the night before, place it in the separate laundry bin specifically for non-clothing items. Finally, he would dress. His sweats, which cost more than most people's weekly rent, would hang off his body loosely, hiding the hard-won physique from his dissatisfied gaze.

Grabbing his prepacked gym bag, he would slip from the shared room silently. The soft click of the door closing behind him would often cause the still slumbering Yoongi to stir a little before rolling to his side and nestling further into his covers.

A brisk eight-minute walk led him across campus to the on-site gym just as it should have been opening. Instead he found it dim and empty, the sensor above the door blinking red at his presence, denying him entry. He waited outside the closed glass doors for almost ten minutes, careful to mask his impatience with a friendly wave at the uniformed staff member he finally spotted hurrying into an almost-jog along the footpath toward him.

"Jimin, hey." One of the few females he spoke to on a regular basis at his exclusively male boarding school greeted him with a bright, toothpaste smile. She gripped the keys dangling from a dark blue lanyard, the words 'Saint Benedict's Academy' reiterated in white that most staff at the school sported, in one hand and an opaque paper cup in the other; a wide straw spearing it's flimsy plastic lid.

He smiled back automatically. "Morning Imogen. Long line at Boost?" He nodded at her cup and she gave a dramatic groan.

"Ugh! Yes. And they got my order wrong. Twice!" She complained.

He gave a sympathetic tsk and followed her through the door she held open for him.

"Right?" She didn't require much input to keep a conversation rolling. That perkiness was probably what had landed her the early morning shift most days. "Give me a second."

She set her juice on the curved reception desk and disappeared behind the staff only door and a moment later the fluorescent lights flickered to life above him. She reappeared not long after, her dark blue polo shirt now pierced with a name tag above the familiar school crest.

"Wanna give me a hand?" She threw over her shoulder, walking over to the line of treadmills.

He followed amiably, knowing it would be more expedient to just help her set up than to wait around for her to finish. Every minute she spent casually bringing every piece of equipment to life and checking over the safety measures ate into his rigid schedule.

As he mirrored her movements on the opposite end of the machinery line, he listened to the rather bland retelling of her 'disastrous' morning. He nodded along, agreeing quietly with her insistence that the universe was somehow conspiring to ruin her day. He laughed at her jokes and waved off her apologies and soon their work was done and he could finally get to the task at hand.

His workout ended up running a whole twenty minutes over the allotted time, forcing him to concede his usual banchan breakfast. Instead he found himself hastily gulping down vegetable juice he grabbed from the small bar fridge in his room.

Yoongi was now awake and shuffling, zombie-like to the bathroom. He flashed his roommate a smile, silently cursing the second set back of the day. Jimin had hoped to slip in a second shower before the other boy had awoken. Now he would have to wait the ten minutes or so it took Yoongi to get ready for the day.

When he finally emerged, fingers at the buttons of his white dress shirt, dark hair still damp, a small smear of toothpaste at the corner of his mouth, Jimin grabbed the hangers displaying his uniform and skirted past him, shutting the door firmly behind him.

Before turning on the water, he reached into the drawer that had been designated to him at the beginning of the year and pulled out dental floss, swiftly removing any pulp that dared to get caught in the gaps of his perfectly engineered smile. He brushed his teeth again before plucking up the washcloth Yoongi had left in a damp pile on the cabinet to roughly clean the mirror.

His second shower of the day was as brief and utilitarian as the first. He emerged, skin glowing pink from both the heat of the water and the vigour of his scrubbing and slung a fresh towel around his hips and stood before the mirror once again, neatly placing the various tubes and bottles he used in his skin routine beside the basin and splashing his face with water.

He cleaned, first with oil, then with foam. Toned with something lightweight alternating between PH balancing, AHAs and BHAs. The rest of his skincare routine varied at the discretion of his dermatologist, although it always included sunscreen. The sun was the enemy of his fragile dermis, and direct exposure to it was to be avoided at all costs.

He never shaved, what little hair grew on his face was patchy and sporadic and the shadow it made below his translucent skin ruined the aesthetic of his bone structure. Not to mention how dehydrating the whole process was for his flawless skin. So, he routinely used the weekend leave passes he was granted to visit the local beautician and wax away his barely-there beard and excess body hair, leaving only his eyebrows and scalp intact. And those he sculpted or styled into fashionable submission.

He then applied a tasteful layer of cosmetics and styled his hair, doing his utmost to disguise the fact that any part of him was capable of succumbing to something as pedestrian as human frailty.

Practice had whittled the time he needed to construct this seamless mask of perfection down to twenty-seven minutes. Unless, of course, he'd washed his hair that morning or was experiencing a rare breakout. As luck would have it, neither of those things was a problem that particular morning. He left the bathroom at precisely seven fifty-one, shirt crisp but not starchy; the silver and blue striped tie knotted at his throat; three pins cascading down the centre, visible above the V of his grey sweater vest; the school crest, senior badge and prefect badge. He pulled the navy-blue blazer from its hanger in his closet and shrugged it on, adjusting the cuffs with a twist of his wrist before snatching up his bag and leaving his room for the day.

He arrived at his homeroom a good twenty minutes before the first bell, using the key he'd been entrusted with to enter. He set up the classroom quickly and quietly.

"Good morning, Jimin." The voice was pleasant but he could hear the fatigue in it. He flashed another falsely bright smile at his teacher in the doorway.

"Good morning, Mister Martin." He greeted, tucking the phone he'd just been passing the time on into his trouser pocket. He picked up the thermal cup beside him, a modern equivalent to the token apple, exchanging it for the laptop bag in his teacher's hand.

The older man lifted the cup to his lips, sighing with deep satisfaction while Jimin busied himself with setting up the laptop on the podium at the front of the class, skillfully connecting it to both the classroom system and the academy network as a whole.

Then he lent against the side of his desk in the front row, fished his phone back out of his pocket and waited for his classmates to filter into the room. 

Not a minute later, Martin made a small, curious sound, drawing Jimin's focus back to him. "New student." His teacher enlightened him.

"Oh. Cool." He knew it will fall on him to show him around. He didn't mind. He liked that the teachers look to him, trust him.

"Kim Tay-young. Do you know him?"

Jimin frowned, seriously considering the question as he did all questions posed to him by those in positions of authority. While the name held a familiar ring, he was fairly certain he didn't know the student who bore it. "I don't think so, why?"

"He's Korean. Like you." This was something Jimin had already gathered. Kim was moderately generic Asian surname but Taehyung was a uniquely Korean.

"Oh. Well Kim is a fairly popular name, like Smith over here. Same with Taehyung." Unlike Martin, he pronounced the 'h'.

"Says he's from Dee- No, Day..." He stumbled over the foreign word.

"Daegu?" Jimin offered helpfully.

"Yeah. Daegu. Where are you from again?" He didn't look up to see the tightness around Jimin's eyes, the way his smile turned strained and false.

"Melbourne." There was a flatness to his tone his teacher either didn't notice, or chose to ignore.

"Yeah, but like, originally." He knew he shouldn't still get annoyed at this question. He especially shouldn't get annoyed with his teacher. Mr Martin was a good guy. He was the one who put in Jimin's nomination for Prefect.

"I was born in The Royal Melbourne. Grew up in Glen Waverly." He tried not to grit his teeth as he explained, yet again, that he was 'originally' from Melbourne. He could see his teacher's discomfort. In an effort to set him at ease, he hurried on, "My parents are from Busan though."

Don't worry, the message between the lines read, I'm Asian enough to assuage your guilt. You're not wrong for your assumption, not racist. He'd learned long ago that this was part of his job, to reassure the well meaning adults in his life that they weren't wrong, weren't bad. He soothed the educator's spike of white guilt with a reassuring smile while he pushed down the familiar, suffocating anger. Mr Martin didn't mean it like that. He assured himself. Mr Martin was a good man, a kind man, a patient man. 

"Ah." He nods although Jimin knows he has no idea where that is. "Well, I trust you'll get to known each other as you're showing him around. I'm sure it will be nice for him to see a familiar face in a foreign land."

"Of course, sir. I'm sure we'll get along like a house on fire." So he smiled and spoke in his soft voice and barely felt the sliver of discomfort at his placation. Even so, it was a splinter in his mind, one he wouldn't recognise as pitiful self-loathing. Perfect Prefect Jimin, teacher's pet, goody-two-shoes, doormat.