Kiki | hiatus

His hands have stopped shaking.

He's finally managed to get the shakes from the adrenaline down, and it is only then that his eyes catch the room—which is, objectively, insane.

A full music room in someone's grandparents' house, because this is Greenwich Village and rich people furnish their spare rooms the way normal people furnish Pinterest boards: aspirationally and with zero fiscal accountability.

But his hands. They're steady now. Resting on his thighs where he's sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor with his back against a leather armchair.

Steady.

Three minutes ago they weren't.

Hobi's next to him, legs extended, ankles crossed, leaning back on his palms in that way he has where every position looks like a magazine spread.

Dance Studio Owner Relaxes After Preventing Friend From Committing Aggravated Assault At Costume Party. Shot on location.

The music room is small. Wood-paneled. A baby grand piano in the corner with a dust cloth draped over it like a ghost that gave up. Bookshelves full of vinyl—actual vinyl, organized by what looks like decade, which Jungkook is trying very hard not to get up and inspect because if he starts flipping through some dead rich guy's record collection right now he'll lose the next forty minutes trying to find a Mayer one and also the last remaining thread of whatever emotional processing he's supposed to be doing.

There's a cello propped in a stand by the window. A violin case on the shelf. Framed photos of someone shaking hands with Yo-Yo Ma.

And on the wall, between two sconces that look like they belong in a cathedral—

A fucking Fender Stratocaster.

Sunburst finish. Not new—played, lived-in, the kind of wear that comes from hands, not neglect. The frets show use. The pickguard has a faint scratch pattern near the bridge that tells him someone used to strum hard and slightly too low.

Whoever owned this loved it. Loved it the way you can only love an instrument that's been your primary method of saying the things your mouth won't.

He hasn't looked away from it since they walked in.

"So," Hobi says. Casual. "John Mayer or Hendrix?"

"What?"

"If you could only listen to one for the rest of your life."

"That's—" He tears his eyes from the Strat. "That's not even a fair question. Those are completely different—"

"It's absolutely a fair question. I ask every musician I meet. It's diagnostic."

"Diagnostic of what?"

"Of who you are as a person." Hobi counts on his fingers. "Hendrix people are chaos agents. They want to burn the building down and build something new in the ashes. Mayer people want to sit on the porch of the building and write a song about how the light hits it at 6pm."

"Those aren't the only two options."

"They're the only two that matter for this exercise."

"What if I say both?"

"Then you're a coward and I lose respect for you."

Jungkook snorts. Picks at a thread on the knee of his costume. The Ghostface robe pools around him like he's some kind of haunted monk who chose vibes over doctrine.

"Mayer."

"Knew it."

"You didn't know it."

"I absolutely knew it. You're a porch guy. You want the thing to be beautiful and precise and a little bit heartbreaking. Hendrix guys want the thing to be loud."

"Mayer can be loud."

"Mayer is loud the way a thunderstorm is loud. Hendrix is loud the way a car crash is loud. Different energy."

He's right. Annoyingly, thoroughly right, in the way Hobi is always right about things that shouldn't be in his area of expertise but somehow are because the man treats every domain of human knowledge like a dance floor—just walks onto it and starts moving and somehow it works.

Jungkook looks at the guitar again.

"The Trio stuff is what got me," he says. "Not the solo albums. The live Trio recordings. 'Where the Light Is.' The way he strips everything back and it's just—guitar and rhythm and this... conversation happening between his hands and the instrument. No production. No tricks. Just the thing itself."

"That's the porch," Hobi says.

"That's the porch," Jungkook agrees.

Silence. Good silence.

Then Hobi does the thing.

"Why'd you stop playing?"

Jungkook's fingers go still on the thread.

"You used to play all the time, man. At Tae's, remember? You had the acoustic with you. Played for like two hours straight on his fire escape. Couldn't get you to stop."

He remembers. Tae's old walkup. Before the whole shape of their friend group had solidified into what it is now.

Jungkook would show up with the guitar because he'd been playing at campus that afternoon between classes—couldn't play at home, obviously, because home was Mia's apartment and the guitar was noise at home—so he'd carry it around like an organ donor, playing wherever she wasn't.

Practice rooms at NYU. Taehyung's fire escape. The back corner of Blueline on slow afternoons.

Anywhere that wasn't the Upper East Side.

Anywhere she couldn't hear it and say 'do you have to do that right now?'

"And then one day it was just—gone." Hobi tilts his head. "Like someone unplugged you or something, man."

The thread is still between his fingers. He doesn't pull it. Doesn't move.

He could give the easy version.

Got busy, different priorities, you know how it goes.

Hobi would accept it. That's his whole thing—holds the door open and waits for you to walk through on your own time.

"Mia said it was noise."

Not the easy version, then.

Hobi purses his lips together.

"She—" He clears his throat.

Something shifts in his chest. Maybe the stone. The one he's been carrying so long it feels like an organ.

"She used to say it was a distraction. That I spent more time with the guitar than with her. Which—I mean, some days, yeah. Probably. Because playing was the only part of my day that still felt like—"

Like what?

Like himself. Like the version of himself that existed before the debt and the phone calls at 2AM and the birthday that wasn't a birthday and the night his mother cried because she believed something that never happened.

He doesn't say any of that.

He says: "She wanted me to sell my equipment. To prove I was serious about us."

The words lodge in his throat before he can release them.

"And I did. Most of it. Sold the amp first. Then the pedals. Kept the acoustic for a while because I thought—maybe if I just played quieter. If I did it when she wasn't around. If I made myself—"

His jaw works.

"She found out I was still playing. Said I was sneaking around. Like playing guitar in an empty apartment was the same as—"

Stops. Swallows.

"Anyway. Sold the acoustic too. After that."

The room is very quiet after that.

It sucks.

It sucks because there's a whole building full of people being twenty-something and careless and alive, and here he is on a music room floor telling Hoseok about the time he let someone convince him that the best part of himself was an inconvenience.

"She got what she wanted, I guess. I stopped playing. And then we broke up and I just—didn't start again. Couldn't pick one up without hearing her in my head telling me it was a waste of time."

He exhales.

"Which is—fun. Super fun."

"Real fun," Hobi says.

But there is no humor in it. Just some sort of echo. Holding the word so Jungkook doesn't have to carry it alone.

Quiet settles once more.

Hobi isn't looking at him—looking at the ceiling, at the Yo-Yo Ma photo, at his own hands—giving him room the way you give a patient space in a hospital floor.

"Is that why you switched?"

Jungkook blinks. "What?"

"Majors. You started in music production, right? Tae mentioned it once. And then you moved to film." Hobi says it evenly. No charge. Like he's confirming directions, not opening a wound. "Was that her too?"

The question sits there for a few beats before Jungkook finally nods.

Doesn't elaborate. Can feel the edge of something in his chest—the place where this conversation becomes a different conversation, a worse one, the one where he has to explain that it wasn't just the guitar.

It was the major and the friends and the way he dressed and the amount of time he spent on his art and the food he ate and the way he breathed, probably, if she'd figured out how to critique that too.

The conversation where he has to say 'she took everything apart, piece by piece, so slowly I didn't notice until there was nothing left' and then sit with the fact that he let it happen.

He allowed it to happen.

Even after he'd seen it happen before through his own eyes.

He doesn't want to go there.

His jaw tightens. Fingers press into his own knee. He can feel the rehearsed cheerfulness loading—some joke about film school, some deflection about Tarantino or aspect ratios—

Hobi stands up.

Doesn't push. Doesn't probe. Doesn't say 'you should talk about this' or any of the things that are probably true and absolutely not what he needs to hear right now.

Just walks to the wall. Reaches up. Lifts the Strat off its hooks with both hands—careful, respectful, the way you handle something that belongs to someone who isn't here to say yes—and carries it back.

Holds it out.

"Hobi."

"Just hold it."

"That's not ours."

"We're borrowing it. Tessa said the music room was open. That includes the instruments."

"That's a vintage Strat."

"And you're a guy who hasn't played enough. Seems like a match."

The guitar hangs there. Sunburst. Scratched pickguard. Someone's love, left on a wall.

His hand comes up before his brain clears it.

The neck slides into his palm and his fingers close around it and—

Oh.

The weight. The specific, exact, irreplaceable weight of a guitar in his hands.

Six strings and a body and a neck that fits against his forearm like it was measured for him, and his left hand moves to the frets on autopilot—memory from ten thousand hours that Mia couldn't erase no matter how many amps she made him sell—and his right hand finds the strings and he brushes them. Just once. Unamplified, barely audible, a whisper of harmonic vibration that travels through the wood into his chest.

His eyes close.

Fuck, he missed this.

Not like missing a hobby. Not like 'oh yeah, used to do that, should get back to it'.

Missing it like a limb. Like a language he used to dream in. Like the one thing that always made sense when nothing else did—not his family, not Mia, not the mess of his own head—just hands on strings and the sound that came out being exactly the thing he meant to say.

Opens his eyes. Looks at Hobi.

"There's an amp." Nods toward the corner. Small Fender combo, tucked beside the piano bench. "Can you plug me in?"

Hobi grins—the real one, not the redirect grin from the garden—and he's already moving, pulling the cable from its coil, flicking the power switch.

Jungkook plugs in the jack. Adjusts the volume. Tests a chord—open G, ringing, full—and the amp translates it into something that pushes against the walls and makes the wood paneling vibrate.

His chest expands. Actually physically expands, like his lungs figured out how to work again.

"I've been getting back into it, actually." He adjusts the tuning peg on the high E. Slightly flat. "At the apartment. Yoongi can vouch for it. He's been bitching through the wall for a month."

"Doesn't Yoongi bitch about pretty much everything except for hiking and music?"

"Yeah, but this bitching is specific. This is targeted complaints about my chord voicings at 11PM. Which means he's listening. Which means I'm playing good enough for him to notice."

"That is the most roundabout progress metric I've ever heard."

"The Yoongi Scale. If he's annoyed, you're on track."

Hobi laughs. Real, warm, settling back against the armchair while the amp sits between them patient and waiting.

Jungkook's left hand moves up the neck. Third fret. Index finger on the G string. Ring finger stretches to the B.

Doesn't think about what he's going to play. Just lets his hands go where they want.

The cleanest four-chord structure in the history of pop music, and his fingers know it the way they know the shape of a coffee mug, the way they know the frets on his own guitar back at the apartment, fog evaporating through rust and disuse and settling into something that doesn't feel rusty at all.

Feels like coming home to a house he forgot he still had a key to.

"Wait—" Hobi sits forward. "Is that Coldplay?"

"Yeah." Jungkook grins. Keeps playing. His right hand finds a picking pattern—the one from the acoustic version, not the album. "Their guitar work doesn't get enough credit, man. Everyone talks about the vocals and the production but the actual guitar lines—especially the early stuff—the chords are basic but the voicings are so specific. Like, the way Buckland uses the delay to create these layers—"

He shifts to the verse progression. Adds the delay-echo pattern, approximating it with his picking hand since there's no pedal.

"—see, that? That shimmer? That's not reverb, that's rhythmic delay. Dotted eighth notes. He's basically playing a duet with himself. The original note and the echo become two different melodic lines happening at once."

"You're nerding out."

"Appreciate me educating you, man."

"You are fully, completely nerding out right now and your face is doing the thing."

"I don't have a thing."

"The thing where your eyes get big and you start talking with your hands except you can't because you're holding a guitar so your eyebrows are doing all the work. That thing."

Jungkook's eyebrows, which are in fact doing an unreasonable amount of work, attempt to settle into something neutral.

They don't quite make it.

He doesn't care.

Because the Strat is singing under his hands and the amp is warm and the room is humming and his fingers remember every single shape and his chest feels wider than it has in months.

Maybe longer. Maybe since before.

He cycles back to the chorus. G, D, C.

Yellow.

He's always liked this song. Can't even remember when he first heard it—it's one of those songs that exists in the background of being alive, like it was already playing when you showed up and never really stopped. In grocery stores and Uber rides and the credits of some movie he can't name.

The kind of song you don't choose, it just—lives in you.

He played it for Mia once.

Early on. Before things got bad—or before he realized things were bad, which isn't the same thing but felt like it at the time. Sat on the edge of her bed with the acoustic and played the whole thing start to finish because he'd been practicing the fingerpicking pattern for weeks and he wanted to show her, wanted to share the one thing that made his chest feel bigger instead of smaller.

She listened. Or—sat there while sound happened near her. Which isn't the same thing either.

When he finished she said 'I don't get it'.

It wasn't really mean, nor cruel. It was simply... blank.

Almost as if he'd shown her a card trick and she couldn't figure out why he expected her to be impressed.

«The lyrics don't even make sense. What does 'your skin and bones turn into something beautiful' even mean? And why is everything yellow? It's a weird color to write a song about. If he wanted to be romantic he should've picked red or something.»

And Jungkook had sat there with the guitar still warm in his lap and thought—it's not about the color. It's not about any of the words, individually.

It's about how they sound together.

How the melody makes the language into something that means more than its parts.

How yellow isn't a color in the song, it's a feeling—warmth, and light, and the specific shade of being so full of something you can't name that the only word big enough to hold it is a color.

He didn't say any of that. Said 'yeah, you're probably right' and put the guitar away and never played it for her again.

Doesn't tell Hobi any of this.

Just plays.

And it feels good. Playing it. Right now, in this room, on this guitar. He doesn't know why. Doesn't interrogate it.

"The opening is the best part," he says, already shifting up the neck. "Everyone remembers the chorus but the but the way it comes back around—listen—"

He moves to the higher register. The melody climbs. Fingers stretching for the voicings—Em, D, C, and then back down—and the notes ring out clean and full and something about the sound in this wood-paneled room, the way it bounces off the shelves and the piano dust cloth and—

Sounds right.

Just. Sounds right.

His throat hums. The melody rises in his chest before it reaches his mouth—that feeling, the one where a song is sitting right behind your teeth and all you have to do is open up and let it out.

"Look at the stars."

Quiet. Almost nothing. More breath than voice.

"Look how they shine for you."

Louder now. Finding it. The shape of the words settling into the shape of the notes like something that was always supposed to be there.

"And everything you do."

He doesn't sound like Chris Martin. Doesn't try to. His voice is lower, rougher, slightly raw in a way that the studio version isn't—the sound of someone singing because the song asked him to, not because an audience is listening.

Hobi is still.

"Yeah, they were all yellow."

The chord rings out. Sustains. Fills the room and holds there—a single, shimmering, fading note that doesn't want to die.

He lets it.

Watches his own hands on the strings. Steady.

Not shaking. Not even a little.

"Shit," Hobi says softly. "Yeah. Okay."

"Okay what?"

"Just—okay. You're back." A breath. "That's all. You're back."

Jungkook looks at him. At the room. At the Strat in his lap.

Doesn't know why his eyes sting.

Allergies, probably. Old house. Dust on the piano cloth.

The door opens.

He stops. Hands flat on the strings. Killing the vibration.

A reflex so deeply wired it happens before he even sees who's there—the automatic silencing of sound when a door opens, because doors opening used to mean 'put the guitar down' and that's old code he's still debugging.

Taehyung is in the doorway. Pinstripe rumpled. Pocket square clinging on through sheer willpower. Drawn-on mustache smudged, giving him less Gomez Addams and more 'guy who fell asleep on a newspaper'.

And behind him—

You.

You with red eyes and makeup wrecked and eyeliner tracked down your cheeks in dark smudges that Jimin is absolutely going to grieve. Gold shimmer smeared across your cheekbones like a craft aisle casualty. The snake cuff is still there. The chain belt. The corset.

Same costume, different girl wearing it than an hour ago.

Something tightens behind his sternum.

Taehyung's face splits open before Jungkook can process the rest.

"Was that you?"

Sheepish isn't a setting Jungkook wears well. But he can feel it on his face: the half-grin, the slight duck, the hand rubbing the back of his neck.

"Yeah."

"Dude." Taehyung crosses the room in three strides, grinning so wide the smudged mustache lifts on both sides. "It's been so long since I've heard you play. Like—years. That sounded incredible."

"It hasn't been that long." He adjusts the Strat in his lap. "Yoongi's heard me plenty. Through the wall. Loudly and against his will."

"It's true."

Your voice. From the doorway.

You're leaning against the frame. Arms crossed. One foot in, one foot out.

Plausible deniability in both directions—your default stance in any room you haven't committed to yet.

"He plays at like eleven PM on a Tuesday and Yoongi bangs on the wall and then he plays louder and then Yoongi bangs harder and then Griffin starts yelling and it's a whole production."

Taehyung turns around. Looks at you. Back at Jungkook. Back at you.

"Wait—you've heard him play?"

Like you just told him you've witnessed a solar eclipse. Like Jungkook playing guitar in his own apartment with you on the other side of a shared wall is classified intel.

Your eyebrows lift. "...Yeah?"

Said like 'obviously'. Like you genuinely don't understand why this is a question.

Tae looks at him. He sees the processing frown, the one where information he had doesn't match information he just got.

Jungkook shrugs. "I've been getting back into it. Recently. She lives with me, so—"

Beat.

"I mean. In the apartment. Same apartment. That's—yeah."

Eloquence. Peak performance. A master class in language from a man holding a borrowed Stratocaster in a Ghostface robe.

"How recently?" Taehyung asks.

"Couple months?"

"Couple months?" Tae's voice pitches. "You've been playing again for a couple months and you didn't—"

"Tae, I just started picking it up at night. When I couldn't sleep. It wasn't an announcement situation."

"You could've told me."

"Tae."

"I'm just saying."

"And I'm just saying it was small. I wanted it small for a while."

Taehyung reads that. He's always been good at reading the things Jungkook doesn't say—since before Mia, since high school, since the era of guitar riffs and avoidant shrugs that Tae just learned the translation for.

"Okay." Softer. "Yeah. I get that."

A beat.

"It sounded really good, though."

"Thanks, man."

You've moved further into the room. Not all the way—migrated from the doorframe to the cello stand, close enough to be present, far enough to bolt.

Your fingers trace the edge of the cello's scroll with absent curiosity.

"So what was the song?" you ask.

"Coldplay."

"Coldplay." You make a face. Not a bad one—the face of someone forming an opinion in real time. "Like, Coldplay Coldplay? 'Fix You,' stadium tour, your-dad's-favorite-band Coldplay?"

"'Yellow,' actually."

"Huh." You tip your head. "That's their best one."

He blinks. "You think?"

"Yeah. The early stuff before they went all—"

You make a gesture that somehow communicates an entire artistic trajectory from Parachutes to Music of the Spheres. Both hands. A facial expression he's never seen before but immediately understands.

"It's the only one that still sounds like a band in a room. Everything after got so big. 'Yellow' is just a guy with a guitar who feels too much."

A guy with a guitar who feels too much.

Huh.

"Most people say 'Fix You,'" he says.

"Most people are wrong."

"Most people think 'The Scientist' is their peak."

"Most people also think Subway is a reasonable lunch option. Most people can't be trusted."

He grins. Can't help it. Doesn't try.

"What's your issue with Subway?"

"My issue with Subway is that it's bread-flavored depression served by someone who hates you, and I refuse to elaborate further."

"That's a strong stance on a sandwich chain."

"All my stances on sandwich chains are strong. That's what separates me from animals."

Hobi's head is moving between you two. Back and forth. Back and forth. He catches it in his peripheral—the look on Hobi's face isn't suspicion. It's closer to surprise. The pleasant kind. Like he expected you two to be oil and water and instead walked into... whatever this is.

The thing where you quote each other's rhythms and volley insults that land like inside jokes.

"Play something," you say.

"I was playing. You interrupted."

"We enhanced your audience. You went from one to three. That's a two hundred percent increase. You're welcome."

"That's not how percentages—it's three hundred—never mind." He adjusts the guitar. "Requests?"

"Surprise me."

"Dangerous thing to say to a man with a Stratocaster."

"I live with you and your 11PM concerts. Nothing you do with a guitar surprises me anymore."

He plays the opening riff to 'Wonderwall.'

Your face goes through six stages of disgust in approximately 1.4 seconds.

"Get out."

"Today is gonna be the day—"

"Get OUT."

"That they're gonna throw it back to you—"

"I'm going to break that guitar over your head. That is a vintage instrument and I'm willing to sacrifice it."

He's laughing too hard to keep playing. The riff collapses into a mess of muted strings and his own wheezing, and Hobi's gone—full-body, head-back, the silent dying kind—and Taehyung is watching with something that's softened slightly from vigilance into... huh.

Not quite warmth. Not yet. But the guard dog sat down.

Tae's phone buzzes. He pulls it out. Reads the screen.

"Shit—Irika." He holds the phone up like it's evidence. "She's looking for me. Apparently the Morticia wig is 'doing something' and she needs me."

He looks at Jungkook. Holds his gaze for a beat longer than the sentence requires.

"You good?"

It's not really about the guitar.

"Yeah, man. I'm good."

Taehyung nods. Glances at you—brief, assessing, not unfriendly but not warm either, and then he's gone. Pinstripes disappearing through the doorway, phone already at his ear, voice dropping into the specific low register he only uses for Irika.

And then it's three.

Him, Hobi, and you.

It feels—

Good. It feels good. Like the right number of people in the right size room with the right amount of noise, which is almost none.

He plays something, just chords now. Open shapes, ringing, cycling through a progression that doesn't belong to any song. Just sound. Just the Strat filling the room with warmth because it can and he's letting it.

"Okay," Hobi says, slapping his knees and standing. "I'm getting drinks. Actual drinks. Not whatever chemical weapon I made earlier—"

"Your drink was attempted murder," Jungkook says.

"It was festive. It had food coloring."

"The food coloring was the least of its crimes."

"I'm getting water. And maybe beer. You want beer?" He points at Jungkook. Then at you. "Beer? Water? Both?"

"Beer," Jungkook says.

"Whatever's open," you say, and your voice is still doing the raw thing but it's steadier now. More you.

"Two beers and a water. Back in five." Hobi's already at the door, already in motion. "Don't let him play 'Wonderwall' again. I know his tricks."

"Noted," you say.

The door clicks shut.

And then it's two.

He keeps playing. Soft. Nothing specific. Just his fingers and the strings and the sound filling the space between you that's smaller now, denser, without Hobi's brightness to dilute it.

You've sat down next to him, knees pulled up, skirt draped. Close enough to the amp that you'd feel it vibrate through the floor.

He lets the last chord ring out and fade. Sets the guitar down across his lap. Pulls out his phone—automatic, reflex, the thing his hands do when they stop doing something else. Screen on. Thumb swiping before his brain catches up with what his muscle memory just opened.

His feed loads—the grid, the blacks and greys, the shadow-heavy compositions—and before his brain can even register the difference—

"Huh?"

He looks up. You've tilted your head. Eyes on his phone—not leaning in, not craning, just the casual glance of someone who happened to look over at the exact wrong moment.

"That's not your feed, is it?"

Oh.

Oh, shit.

"Yeah, it is."

He switches accounts. Locks the phone. Pockets it. Three movements, clean, fast.

"Just looks different because I—reorganized. The grid. New layout."

"You reorganized your Instagram grid."

"Yeah."

"You."

"Me."

"Jeon Jungkook. Reorganized his Instagram grid. The same Jeon Jungkook whose apartment room looks like a frat house had a seizure."

"My room is curated—"

"Your room has a protein shake stain on the ceiling and you told me it was 'abstract art.'"

"It is abstract art. It's a Jackson Pollock."

"It's whey protein and negligence."

"Agree to disagree."

You squint at him. Not suspiciously—more like amused. Like you know there's something there but it's small and harmless and not worth the dig when you're sitting on a floor in a wrecked costume with mascara on your face and the night you've had.

Your eyes drift back to the cello.

Interest shelved.

Not deleted—he knows you, you don't delete, you file things for later retrieval at the most inconvenient possible moment—but shelved.

Good enough.

He looks at you.

Now that the phone's away and it's just you and the amp and the few inches of hardwood between his knee and yours.

Your eyes are swollen. Not a lot. Just enough that the liner smudges underneath look heavier, and the gold shimmer Irya swept across your cheekbones has been redistributed by tears into uneven streaks, and there's a mascara track on your left cheek that you clearly tried to wipe and only succeeded in smearing.

"You okay?"

He says it to the guitar. To the frets. To his own fingers resting on the strings.

Not to your face, because your face is doing something that makes his chest tight and he doesn't have the bandwidth for that and eye contact simultaneously.

You look at him. He can feel it.

"Yeah. I'm fine."

"Okay."

A beat. Two.

"Your eyes are red."

"I'm high. We're all high. You literally watched me eat two brownies."

"That's not baked red." He lifts his gaze from the frets. Meets yours. "That's been-crying red. Different color. Different puffiness pattern. Baked red goes in the whites. Crying red goes around the edges."

"Did you just say puffiness pattern?"

"I'm a film major. I notice faces."

"You can't just use that excuse for everything."

"I'm just saying. You've been crying. And not in a subtle way. Like—it's pretty visible. From across the room. Possibly from space. NASA could probably—"

You swat his arm.

Open-palmed. Quick. The kind that's more exclamation point than assault.

He chuckles. Rocks slightly with the impact, more from dramatics than force.

"I'm just saying," he repeats, quieter now. "Anyone can tell."

"Great. Fantastic. Love that for me."

"Your mascara's doing a whole thing."

"I know it's doing a thing."

"It's migrated. Like a bird. It started on your eyes and now it's—" He gestures vaguely at the lower half of your face.

"I am going to actually break that guitar—"

"Okay, okay."

He sets the Strat down carefully—lowering it into the open case on the floor with the gentleness of someone putting a baby to bed, because it's a vintage instrument and he has respect even if he has no tact—and shifts so he's facing you

He pulls the sleeve of the Ghostface robe over his hand. Makes a fist inside the fabric so the cuff stretches over his knuckles—cheap polyester, Spirit Halloween's finest—and brings it to your face.

You look at the ground.

Not at him.

At the hardwood between your knees, at the dust in the grout line, at anything that isn't the guy who's currently dabbing at your mascara with a serial killer costume like it's a washcloth.

He's gentle about it. Doesn't think about being gentle—just is, the same way he's gentle with Griffin when the little idiot gets something stuck in his fur.

The sleeve drags soft across your cheekbone. The mascara smears more than it lifts, but it's something.

It's less.

Your eyes stay down.

He switches to the other side. Same slow drag. The dark crescent beneath your left eye fades to a smudge, and beneath it your skin is warm and slightly swollen and he's not—

He's cleaning mascara. That's it. A service. Public decency.

"There." He drops his hand. Sleeve still bunched. "Less disaster. More... controlled disaster."

You don't respond.

Which is—fine. That's fine.

He drops the sleeve back into place and shifts on his legs and tries to look anywhere that isn't the side of your face because the side of your face is doing something he doesn't have the emotional language for.

Your lashes. The smear of gold on your cheekbone that he didn't get all the way off. The shape of your mouth when it's not saying anything sarcastic.

Amp hum. Floorboards. The specific not-quite-silence of a music room at 1AM.

Then—

"It's a good song."

Quiet. Out of nowhere.

He glances at you. "What?"

"The one you were playing. Earlier."

"Oh." Beat. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

You don't look at him. You're looking at your own hands. Rolling one of the loose gold chains from your hair between your fingers like it owes you something.

"It's stupid."

He waits. Doesn't push. His right leg is falling asleep but he's not about to shift and risk turning this into A Thing.

A breath. You exhale it slow, through your nose, and it comes out more like a sigh than anything else.

"I used to listen to it when I was stressed. In high school. Like—if I had a big test coming up or whatever."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. My parents were really—"

You stop. Start again.

"I was a good kid. Like. Straight A-plus kid, the whole—" The gesture. The small one. The 'you know the type' gesture that compresses an entire childhood into a flick of the wrist. "Valedictorian track. My mom used to leave little notes on the fridge when report cards came out. 'We're so proud.' In this specific handwriting she saved for—I don't know. The handwriting was nice. It was always nice."

He nods. Doesn't say anything. Doesn't know what to say.

"And they were good parents, Rogue. Like. I want to be clear about that. They—" Another sigh. Smaller. "My dad got me this iPod when I was eleven. The pink mini one. The one that was really hard to get that year and I'd been asking for it for months and he just—showed up with it. And when the DS came out? I had it before anyone in my class had it. All my friends were obsessed. Like, the day it came out, he was in line. My dad stood in a line at a Best Buy for a Nintendo DS. For me."

A small laugh that isn't really a laugh.

"They were kind. I don't want to—this isn't that. I'm not trying to—"

You stop.

He watches your hand tighten on the gold chain.

"God, I sound so stupid."

"You don't."

"I do. I sound like a spoiled—I don't even know what I'm talking about. They were good. They were good parents. My mom packed my lunch until I was sixteen. She still sends me care packages. She sent me socks last month, Rogue, like—socks. Because she read online that students don't buy enough socks and she got worried."

Your voice is thinner.

"So I don't know why I'm—"

Don't know why you're what.

He wants to ask. Doesn't.

Because something about the way you're talking is familiar in a way he can't place.

The hedging. The qualifying. The 'they were good, though' said on loop like a defensive spell you keep casting in case someone accuses you of being ungrateful. He's—

He's done that. That's his thing. That's his move.

His jaw does something.

"Anyway. The song."

"The song."

"It just—it says 'look at the stars.' At the beginning. And when I was—when I would have a bad night, and there'd be a thunderstorm, and I'd be—" You wave a hand. "Spiraling, or whatever. I'd sit in the window seat in my room and play it on my CD player and there wouldn't even be stars. Obviously. It was storming. That's the whole—there were no stars."

A beat.

"But he kept saying it. 'Look how they shine for you.' Like they were still there."

You shrug. Small. Dismissive.

"I don't know. It made me feel less—" Stop. "Whatever. It's dumb. It's a Coldplay song, it's not—"

"It's not dumb."

"It's very dumb, Rogue."

"It's not."

Doesn't say it firm enough, maybe. Says it again.

"It's not."

You finally look at him.

And he wants to—he doesn't know.

He wants to fix something.

Wants to find the specific thing in what you just said that needs fixing and fix it.

He runs his tongue along the inside of his cheek.

Thinks about his dad.

The handwriting thing.

His dad didn't have handwriting, his dad had a voice and fists.

But also—his dad wasn't all bad. That's the thing nobody ever tells you about the stuff that fucks you up.

His dad taught him how to ride a bike. His dad cried at his graduation. His dad—

"Some parents suck."

You blink.

"Some don't." He's looking at the amp. At the little red power light. Not at you. "Some are—in the middle. Most, probably. Most are in the middle. Doing okay at some of it and fucking up other parts of it and the parts they fuck up can still—"

Stops.

Tries again.

"You can have good parents who also got something wrong. Both can be true. That's not—that's not an ungrateful thing to say. That's just math."

Quiet.

"The socks don't cancel out the other stuff. That's not how it works."

You don't say anything.

He finally looks back at you and your eyes are wet in a way they weren't thirty seconds ago—not crying, just that full-right-to-the-edge thing—and he looks away again because he's not equipped.

He's not equipped for this.

Nobody gave him the manual.

"And the song isn't dumb." Clears his throat. "Chris Martin wrote it about his mom, I'm pretty sure. Or—I don't know, actually. I read something once. Point is if you sat in a window during a thunderstorm listening to it that's not—that's just a kid looking for something to hold onto. That's not a personality flaw."

You make a sound.

Something between a laugh and an exhale.

It gets caught somewhere in your throat.

"You don't have to be nice to me."

"I'm not being nice."

"You're being—"

"I'm stating facts. I'm a film major. I deal in facts."

"You really have to stop using that—"

"Shh."

Another one of those half-laughs. Quieter. Your shoulder moves against his.

Your eyes go back to the hardwood.

And then—

Your arm lifts. A small movement, barely a gesture. Your hand making that little sideways motion, a 'come here', a 'closer', the kind of signal that doesn't have language attached to it because language would make it something you'd have to own.

And his chest—

His chest does something that has nothing to do with the amp or the room or the cobwebs or the Yo-Yo Ma photograph.

Because he's seen this before.

After Emma's birthday. After the fight that wasn't really a fight and the sex that wasn't really makeup sex and the part after where you'd been sitting on the edge of the table with your legs dangling and your defenses down at a level he'd never seen—zero, flatline, the version of you that exists when you've been turned inside out and don't have the energy to flip back.

You'd put your forehead on his shoulder that night too. Just—dropped it there.

And he'd stood between your legs not knowing what the fuck to do with his hands or his face or the thing in his chest that felt like a fist opening, and then you'd lifted your arms like 'carry me' and he'd said 'you're not serious' and you'd just looked at him and yeah. You were serious.

You're always serious about the things that are not supposed to be serious.

You look like that now, too. Just as soft, just as stripped-back as then.

This version of you that he only seems to get when you've cried enough or cum hard enough that the walls are down and there's just—you. Underneath all of it.

Tired and real and not pretending.

And maybe that's why his chest grips over itself. Folds in half.

Because his defenses are somewhere on the floor next to the Strat and he doesn't know when he put them down but they're not on him anymore.

He scoots closer. Across the hardwood. Until his knee is touching your knee and the distance between you has been reduced to the width of a breath.

Your forehead drops against his shoulder.

He doesn't flinch, doesn't stiffen. Just absorbs the weight of it—your forehead against him, your breath coming uneven against his collarbone. The gold chains in your hair press into the side of his neck. One of the little snake earrings grazes his jaw.

Quiet.

The amp hums.

"I'm sorry." Muffled into his shoulder.

So small he almost misses it under the electrical drone of the Fender combo.

"For what?"

Your breath catches.

Releases.

"You were right about Jason."

His chest caves in.

Not triumph. Not satisfaction. Not the 'I told you so' he'd normally chamber and fire with a grin because Jungkook has never met a victory he couldn't be insufferable about—but none of that loads.

None of it even approaches the chamber.

Because being right about Jason means Jason did something.

And being right about Jason means you're sitting on a floor in a wrecked costume with mascara on your chin telling him he was right in a voice that sounds like it went through a paper shredder.

He doesn't want to be right about that.

He sighs.

Tips his head back to look at the ceiling. Same motion as when he was staring upwards with Tae an hour ago, back when the biggest problem in his life was whether a pumpkin looked like Willy Wonka and whether Willy Wonka was categorically attractive.

A smile. Small. Not for you. For the ceiling. For whatever cosmic algorithm decided that this is where the night would end up—him and you on a floor in a dead man's music room, your forehead on his shoulder, a borrowed Stratocaster cooling in its case beside you.

Doesn't say anything.

Doesn't say 'I know.' Doesn't say 'what happened.' Doesn't say 'I nearly put my fist through his face an hour ago and it took three people and a vintage electric guitar to stop me.'

Just lifts his hand.

Puts it on the back of your neck.

His fingers find the nape—right where your hair starts, where the gold chains have come loose and the strands are damp and the skin is warm.

And he lets his thumb move. Slowly. A small arc over the top knob of your spine. Back and forth.

You breathe out.

Shaky. Uneven. Settling.

And for some reason—for some reason he's not going to poke at or name or hold up to the light because doing that would require vocabulary he doesn't have and isn't sure exists—

It's okay.

Not fixed. Not resolved. Not the kind of okay where credits roll and someone's learned a lesson.

Just okay.

Most of Jungkook's ideas are stupid.

He's well aware of that fact.

It's practically a brand at this point.

Jeon Jungkook: serial architect of decisions that seem perfectly reasonable in the three-second window between impulse and execution and then reveal themselves, with humiliating clarity, to be catastrophically ill-advised approximately four seconds later.

Perfect example of this is that time he tried to make cold brew in a sock because the coffee shop was closed and he was desperate and Yoongi looked at him with the kind of disappointment that leaves a mark.

So he knows. He's self-aware enough for that.

What he is not self-aware enough for—what no amount of Dr. Liao or Tuesday afternoon processing sessions has equipped him to handle—is the ability to identify a stupid idea before it crosses the threshold from thought to action.

Which is how he ends up here.

The party's winding down. That liminal hour where the music's been turned from weapon to wallpaper and the survivors are scattered across the living room in various states of horizontal.

Somebody's asleep on the smaller couch with a cape over their face. The fog machine finally died about forty minutes ago and the room's been slowly clearing, the last wisps of theatrical haze dissolving into regular air that smells like spilled beer and burned-out jack-o-lantern.

He finds Jimin in the kitchen, standing there with a glass of water, leaning against the island, looking at the aftermath as if he were surveying a natural disaster he didn't cause but will somehow be expected to clean up.

"It's gonna be a whole day tomorrow, huh," Jimin says, nodding at the living room.

Streamers sagging. Solo cups colonizing every flat surface. One of the plastic spiders from the bookshelf has migrated to the floor and is lying there on its back like it had one too many and simply surrendered.

"The decorations alone," Jungkook agrees.

"The cobwebs. Those fake cobwebs are a nightmare to get off. They get into everything. It's gonna take three people and a lint roller."

"I'll help take 'em down."

Jimin shakes his head. "You put them up. It's only fair that the rest of us suffer through the removal."

"It's not a big deal."

"It kind of is." Jimin is not being pushy about it—that's the thing. There's no edge, he's simply standing there with his water, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his voice has that particular pitch that makes disagreeing with him feel like kicking a puppy. "You did a lot. Take a break. You deserve it."

"I'm fine."

"I know you're fine. I'm saying you don't have to be." Jimin's smile is small. "Let us handle cleanup. You've earned a night off from being the guy who does everything."

Huh.

That's not—not what Jungkook's used to.

Most people just let it go when he brushes something off. Yoongi would've grunted and said 'do whatever you want'. Taehyung would've insulted him and told him to fuck off with that. Hobi would've shrugged and redirected with a dance move or a question about something else.

But Jimin doesn't let it go.

Which, paradoxically, makes Jungkook want to stay in this kitchen more, not less.

He leans against the opposite counter.

"Alright," Jungkook says, but then, because he can't fully surrender, he adds, "but if anybody fucks up the ceiling streamers I'm holding you personally responsible."

"That's fair." There's a little laugh folded into the words. "I accept full liability."

Silence settles, and it's the comfortable kind (or close enough).

Jungkook takes a sip of water from a cup that may or may not be his. Jimin's standing there doing the cardigan thing, thumb running back and forth over the cuff like a worry stone, and it occurs to Jungkook that he doesn't actually know this person. Not really. Knows the outline—comp lit, library, does your eyeliner, sat on the bathroom floor with you earlier, defended him to you once even though Jungkook hadn't earned it.

Knows Jimin is yours. In the way that matters. Part of your life in a way Jungkook is only adjacent to.

And that used to not register. Used to be just furniture—background characters in the movie of someone else's life, not his.

Except now it does register. Because you're—

Whatever. You're his friend now. Or something. The label keeps shifting depending on who's asking and whether his brain cooperates. And your friends are—

He should probably know your friends.

"So," Jungkook says.

Great start. Pulitzer-worthy.

"Yoongi," he says.

Jimin's thumb stops on the cuff.

"Hm?" Jimin turns to look at him, and there it is—the microshift. Lips pressing together, not quite pursed, but held. Color climbing his neck and landing on his cheeks in real time like someone turned a dial.

Jungkook reads it immediately.

Oh.

Oh.

Okay. So that's—yeah. That's a thing.

He clears his throat. Adjusts. Pivots.

"He's a cool guy," Jungkook says. Nods once, firm, like he's delivering testimony. "He's a really cool guy. Like. You know."

Smooth. So smooth. He should teach a masterclass.

Jimin blinks. The blush is fully operational now, staining both cheeks, and he does this thing where he sort of laughs and exhales at the same time, shoulders dropping half an inch.

"Oh. Yeah." He nods back. Too many times. "Yeah, he's—he's great."

"Yeah."

Silence.

The worst kind of silence now. The one that's sort of loud because both people are thinking things they're not saying and the gap between those things and the actual air in the room is deafening.

Jungkook watches Jimin's fingers migrate from the cuff to the hem of his cardigan, then to each other, lacing and unlacing, and something about the fidgeting softens the awkwardness into something else.

Something that makes Jungkook want to fix it.

Not because he has to.

Because this guy—this soft, careful guy who sat on a tile floor with you—looks like he's one wrong word from imploding, and Jungkook knows what that feels like.

"Matter of fact," he says, leaning back against the counter, finding casual the way a drowning man finds a pool noodle, "there was this thing last Christmas. With Yoongi."

Jimin's fidgeting slows.

"Well like, the four of us, actually. You know. Me, Yoongi, Hobi, Tae. Holiday week. Nobody had anywhere to be, nobody had shit to do, so Yoongi goes—" Jungkook pitches his voice lower, flatter, does his best Yoongi monotone: "'We should go hiking.'"

Jimin's mouth twitches.

"And we're like—hiking? It's December. It's freezing. Tae is wearing loafers." Jungkook gestures with the water cup. "But Yoongi's got this whole thing about Bear Mountain. Says the trails are empty in winter, says the views are better when it's cold, says some shit about how the Hudson looks different when there's frost on it. And he's not wrong, but he's also—you know how he is. He frames it like he doesn't care, but he'd already looked up the train schedule."

Jimin laughs. Quiet, but real. The fidgeting's stopped entirely now.

"So we go. Five AM, Penn Station, four idiots with no hiking gear. Hobi's wearing Jordans. Jordans. On a mountain. Taehyung's got a vintage Carhartt that he keeps stopping to photograph instead of wearing. I'm the only one who brought water—one bottle, like that's enough for four grown men—and Yoongi's just..."

He pauses. Not for dramatic effect. Because the memory is sitting right there, fully formed, and it's—

It's a good one.

"Yoongi's walking ahead. Not fast, not showing off, just—quiet. You know how he gets quiet in a different way outside? Not the apartment quiet, where he's working or ignoring you. A different kind. Like he's actually there. Present. Paying attention to something that isn't a screen."

Jimins leaning forward slightly, and his face has gone still in a way that isn't bracing. More like—receiving. Open and careful and waiting.

"We get to the top and it's—I mean, it's just a view. River, trees, sky. Nothing you can't see on Google. But Yoongi pulls out his phone and records the sound. Not a photo. Not the view. Just stands there with his phone up, recording the wind coming off the water for like two straight minutes. Doesn't say anything. Doesn't show anybody. Just—" Jungkook mimes holding a phone up, "—captures it. Pockets it. Done."

He takes a sip of the maybe-his water.

"And then on the way down, Hobi's Jordan tears on a rock, and Hobi's freaking out about it, and Yoongi—without saying a word—takes off his own shoes and gives them to Hobi. Just. Hands them over. Walks the rest of the trail in his socks."

"In socks?"

"In socks. December. Frozen ground." Jungkook shakes his head. "We're all yelling at him—put your shoes back on, dude, you're gonna get frostbite!—and he just goes 'they're Jordans' like that explains everything. Like the hierarchy of footwear is a moral issue and he's made his ruling."

Jimin's laughing now. Not the quiet kind. The real kind—head ducking, shoulders shaking, the sound of it bright and unguarded in the dead kitchen.

"He didn't mention the socks thing afterward. Not once. Hobi tried to buy him replacement shoes for Christmas and Yoongi wouldn't let him. Said the socks were fine. Said his feet don't get cold." Jungkook pauses. Looks at Jimin directly. "His feet absolutely get cold. He wears two pairs of socks around the apartment from November to March. He's full of shit."

Jimin's laughter subsides into something quieter.

"That's..." Jimin starts, then trails off. His thumb finds the cardigan cuff again, but it's slower now. Thoughtful instead of nervous. "That sounds like him."

"It is him." Jungkook says it simply. Doesn't dress it up. "He won't tell you the stuff that matters about himself. He'll just do it and hope you notice. And if you don't notice, he'll never bring it up. Which is—I mean, it's annoying. It's terrible communication. I tell him that all the time."

Jimin's smile turns softer.

"But it's also—" Jungkook waves a hand vaguely, the way Yoongi does when he's avoiding a point. Catches himself doing it. Stops. "He's the kind of person who'll walk down a mountain in his socks for you and then pretend his feet don't get cold. That's just. You know. What he does."

He doesn't add for people he cares about. Doesn't need to.

The sentence is sitting right there in the space between them, fully assembled, and Jimin's the kind of person who'll see it without being shown.

A beat.

Jimin nods. Slow. Looking at his water glass like it contains answers.

"Thanks for telling me that," he says, and his voice is different now.

"Yeah." Jungkook clears his throat. Tips the water cup toward Jimin in something between a toast and a dismissal. "Don't tell him I told you any of that. He'll kill me."

"Noted." Jimin smiles. "Secret's safe."

"Good."

He leans against the opposite counter. Pulls his wallet from the back pocket of the costume pants he's got on under the robe—because the robe doesn't have pockets, which is a design flaw that Spirit Halloween should answer for.

Opens it. Not for any reason. Habit. The way some people check their phone when they're standing still, Jungkook checks his wallet.

Inventory. Cards, cash, the little things that accumulate in the billfold because he never cleans it out—a bodega receipt from last week, his MetroCard, the loyalty card for the coffee shop two blocks from campus that he keeps forgetting to stamp.

And tucked behind the cards, folded small—

His thumb grazes the edge of it.

He closes the wallet. Looks around the kitchen.

The junk drawer by the fridge is half-open. Inside: rubber bands, takeout menus, a screwdriver, and a pad of post-its. Yellow. Small. The cheap kind—not the branded ones, just the generic squares that come in a pack of twelve from the dollar store and end up in every junk drawer in every house in America.

He pulls one off the pad.

Jimin watches him do this with politeness and confusion.

"What are you—"

"Pen?"

"What?"

"Do you have a pen?"

Jimin blinks. Pats his chest. Touches the quill behind his ear—decorative, useless, ink-free. Then reaches into his back pocket and produces a regular ballpoint like a normal human being.

Jungkook takes it. Uncaps it with his teeth. Presses the post-it flat against the counter with his palm.

Writes.

Fast. Then stops. Pen hovering above the yellow square, tip a millimeter from the surface, like the next word is sitting right behind his teeth and he's deciding whether to let it out.

His jaw works. Once.

He writes.

Caps the pen. Clicks it against the counter once—a period at the end of an action—and then folds the edge of the post-it. A small fold. Just the right side, barely a centimeter, pressing the crease flat with his thumbnail.

Holds it out to Jimin.

Jimin looks at the post-it. Then at Jungkook. Then at the post-it again.

"Can you give this to her?" Casual. Or trying to be. The trying is doing more work than the casual. "When you see her."

"To—"

"Yeah."

Jimin takes the post-it. Holds it between his index and middle finger like a card in a magic trick, studying it with the focus of someone who's been handed a piece of evidence and isn't sure what trial it belongs to.

He doesn't unfold it. Doesn't read it. Just nods—slow, careful, a nod that contains about twelve questions he's choosing not to ask.

Because that's what Jimin does. He's starting to get his vibe.

Jimin lets things exist without demanding they explain themselves.

He gets why you like him.

"Okay," Jimin says.

"Thanks."

"You could just... give it to her yourself."

"Yeah." Jungkook takes the pen apart—cap off, cap on, cap off—the idle fidget of a man who has burned through his daily allocation of emotional vulnerability and is now running on fumes. "I could."

He doesn't elaborate. Jimin doesn't push.

The post-it disappears into the chest pocket of Jimin's cardigan, yellow edge just visible against the wool, and Jimin pats it once—a small, careful gesture, like he's tucking something valuable into a safe place even though he doesn't know what it is yet.

A beat passes.

Jungkook looks at the living room. At the wreckage. At the passed-out beards and the empty fog machine and the smashed pumpkin that Taehyung is definitely going to blame on him even though he saw the centurion kick it on the way out. At the string lights still going, amber and warm, giving the whole disaster a filter it doesn't deserve.

He yawns—big and full and theatrical, jaw cracking, arms going up, entire spine releasing—and comes out of it and slaps both hands down on the counter hard enough to rattle two solo cups and startle Jimin into a step back.

"Alright." Too loud. On purpose. The volume of a man who has just, by executive decision, closed a chapter. "Why is everyone so sour?"

Jimin blinks. "It's 2AM."

"Prime time." Already moving, already crossing back toward the living room, the Ghostface robe picking up air behind him like he thinks he's something. "Everything before this was a dress rehearsal. Drinking game. Right now. Whoever's still standing."

"That's like six people."

"Perfect number for a drinking game. Hoseok—HOSEOK—"

"He's going to ignore you," Jimin calls after him, something lighter in his voice than it was twenty minutes ago.

"I'm his favorite."

"You are categorically—"

"Categorically everyone's favorite, Jimin. It's a burden. It's a cross I carry." He's already crouching over the sleeping beard on the small couch, shaking the man's shoulder with the cheerful mercilessness of someone who has decided that suffering should be communal. "C'mon. Up."

A groan rises from the living room. Several. The collective protest of six people who already died once tonight and resent being asked to do it again.

Jungkook grins.

Stupid ideas are, after all, his specialty.

The drinking game was his idea. The Uno was Hobi's. The combination of the two is, in hindsight, a human rights violation.

The thing about drinking Uno is that it sounds simple, right? You play a card, you follow the rules, you drink when the game tells you to drink.

Except there are no official rules for drinking Uno because Uno is a children's game that was never meant to be combined with tequila, which means every single person at this table has a different understanding of how it works, and every single one of you is willing to die on their specific hill.

Way too many people around the coffee table. Cards fanned in hands. Drinks sweating on coasters because even shitfaced, Jungkook respects Tessa's grandmother's furniture.

Yeji's cross-legged on the floor, extremely focused, cards held close to her chest, eyes flicking between her hand and the discard pile with a concentration that suggests she's running probability calculations in real time. Her combat boots are off—somewhere between the third round and the fifth, she kicked them under the couch and declared them 'a disadvantage'—and she's sitting in mismatched socks, frock coat unbuttoned, wine-stained lace at her throat, looking like an aristocratic vampire who takes recreational card games as a personal referendum on her worth as a human being.

Which, knowing Yeji from what little of her he knows, she does.

Irya is next to her, pressed against her side. Eyes at approximately sixty percent operational capacity, the brownies having apparently entered their final form about an hour ago, because Irya's been smiling at her cards like they're friends she's happy to see rather than a strategic hand in a competitive drinking game. She's holding her cards backwards. Nobody's told her.

Yoongi is in the armchair—the man located the most comfortable seat in the room within four seconds of arriving and has not moved since. Claire's skull earring still dangling. Cards held in one hand, phone in the other, scrolling through something while playing.

Hobi's on the floor by the fireplace, legs folded, managing his hand with the same energy he manages everything—bright, organized, vaguely menacing. He's been winning quietly and consistently for three rounds, which is suspicious behavior from a man who claims he 'doesn't really play card games', at least from Jungkook's perspective.

Taehyung is to his left. Pinstripe jacket off now, sleeves rolled, the drawn-on mustache surviving through what can only be described as chemical adhesion or the will of God. He's seven drinks deep and playing Uno like it's something extremely important right now.

Irika, for her part, is curled into the other armchair in her black silk, legs tucked, watching the table with the measured interested of someone who literally evaluates arguments for a living. Jimin's between her and Yoongi, plays smart instead of loud, never more than four cards in hand.

And you.

You're across from him. Knees pulled up, cards balanced against your thighs, the Medusa skirt fanned out around you on the floor. Eyes still a little swollen. Liner still smudged. Gold shimmer still caught in your hair where the chains have mostly come loose.

But you're smiling.

Not the full thing. Not the one that rewrites your whole face and makes your eyes do that specific shape that he's catalogued without meaning to. Just the edge of one. The ghost of it. Enough that he knows the music room worked. The floor worked. Whatever happened between the amp and the hallway—it worked.

Good.

That's good.

His hands are steady now. Some hours ago, they weren't.

He's not thinking about that. He's thinking about the fact that he's holding eleven freaking cards, which is a personal issue, frankly, a staffing crisis, and somebody in this deck owes him an explanation.

He puts down a red seven. Takes a sip of his beer—tenth? eleventh? hard to say, the bottles have been circulating with the same frequency as the cards and at some point the counting became aspirational rather than mathematical.

The thing about drinking with Hobi and Tae is that it's not really drinking. It's endurance athletics.

The three of them have been putting away liquor at a pace that would hospitalize a civilian, and the only visible evidence is that Taehyung's laugh has gotten approximately fifteen percent louder and Hobi's dance moves during the shuffle have gotten approximately thirty percent more elaborate.

Jungkook himself feels pleasantly bulletproof in the way that only happens around the two-bottle mark—warm, steady, everything slightly funnier than it should be but nothing blurry.

His tolerance was forged in freshman year dorm rooms and refined through keeping pace with Hobi at parties where the open bar was the only interesting thing happening.

It's a skill. A terrible skill. But a skill.

You put down a Draw Four.

He looks at it. Looks at you. You're already looking at him—that little anticipatory gleam, the one that says 'I know exactly what I just did and I'm enjoying it.'

He puts down another Draw Four. On top of yours. Blue.

Your mouth opens.

"You CANNOT do that—"

"Yes I can? It's literally the game."

"That is not the game. You can't stack Draw Fours, that's not a real rule—"

"It's the game for every single person who has ever played Uno in the history of the known universe—"

"I have played Uno—"

"It doesn't look like it."

Your eyes narrow. That specific narrow—the one that precedes either a devastating comeback or physical violence, and the odds on which are about fifty-fifty, and he'd be lying if he said he didn't enjoy the coin flick.

"The official rules—"

"Oh, she's bringing out official rules. Citation needed. Peer-reviewed? APA format?"

"The official Mattel rules state that Draw Four cards cannot be stacked—"

"Mattel also made Barbie. Do you want to talk about their track record with realism, or—"

"You two," Yeji says.

Neither of you stops. He physically can't. There's a version of him that could, probably, but that guy's not here tonight.

"—because Barbie's Dream House doesn't have a mortgage and yet somehow she has a convertible—"

"—are you seriously bringing Barbie into an Uno dispute—"

"Shut up," Yeji says. Louder. Both hands flat on the table. "SHUT UP. I have two cards left. I need to concentrate. My brain is still spinning from that brownie and I cannot—I physically cannot—process your childish quarrel about Mattel while I'm trying to win."

Jungkook opens his mouth. Closes it. Decides, wisely, that correcting Yeji on her word choice while she's in this state would likely be the last decision he ever made.

You appear to reach the same conclusion at exactly the same time, because you close your mouth too and stare very hard at your cards.

"Uno," Irya says.

Bright. Cheerful. Like she's announcing a fun fact about butterflies.

Everyone looks at her.

She's holding four cards. Four. Fanned out in front of her face like a tiny decorative screen, one of them backwards, one of them definitely from a different card game because it has a picture of a horse on it and Jungkook is almost certain Uno doesn't have horses.

"Baby." Yeji. Gentle. The voice of a woman that is deeply in love. "You still have four cards. That's not how Uno works."

"But I said it," Irya says, as if the word itself was the whole point and the card count was a secondary concern.

"She has to drink a sip," Yoongi says from the armchair, not looking up from his phone.

"Full glass." Jungkook sits up. Because if this table is going to be governed, someone has to govern it. "False Uno is a full glass."

"Jungkook, stop making rules UP."

That's you. Immediate. Reflexive. Like you have a dedicated neural pathway specifically for detecting his bullshit—which, fine, flattering, that's real prime state—but also wrong, because he's not making rules up, he's legislating.

"I'm NOT making rules up. She said Uno at the wrong time. That's a penalty. That's regulation."

"That's not—okay, first of all, there is no 'regulation' in drunk Uno. Second of all, the actual false Uno penalty is that you only drink if someone calls you out before you when you have one card and forget to say it. She said it with four cards. That's just—wrong. It's not a penalty. It's just incorrect."

"So there's no consequence for being wrong? What's next, we kiss serial killers?"

"The consequence is that we all saw it happen and now we know she doesn't understand the game."

"Babe, I understand the game," Irya says, sounding genuinely hurt.

"Of course you do," Yeji soothes, patting her knee.

"I have a horse," Irya adds, holding up the non-Uno card with pride.

"You're a tyrant," Jungkook tells you, because the Irya situation has clearly reached a dead end and the Draw Four dispute needs resolution. "An authoritarian. A despot. You should all be ashamed of yourselves for living under this regime."

"The regime where we follow the actual rules?"

"The regime where one person decides what the rules are and the rest of us suffer."

"That's called playing a game correctly—"

"Jungkook." Taehyung. Flat. Zero patience. "Shut the fuck up and eat the four cards."

"I'm not eating—"

Taehyung reaches across, picks up Jungkook's glass—three-quarters full, tequila and something, who even knows anymore—and drains it. One long pull. Sets it down empty.

"There." Tae wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, the drawn-on mustache surviving the gesture through what is now clearly some form of dark magic. "Problem solved. Take the cards."

"You just drank my drink."

"Consider it conflict resolution."

"That was my tequila—"

"It was everyone's tequila. Tequila is communal."

"Tequila is explicitly not communal—"

"I'm with Y/N on this one."

Irika. Who, in case anybody forgot, is a judge. A private judge, technically, but the distinction is irrelevant when she deploys that tone—level, final, the vocal equivalent of a gavel coming down.

Every head turns.

Irika shrugs one shoulder. Adjusts the black silk of her Morticia dress. "Stacking Draw Fours isn't in the official ruleset. It's a house rule at best. If no house rule was established at the start of play, default rules apply. He draws four."

Silence.

"Well." Hobi spreads his hands. "The judge has spoken. Overruled, Jungkook."

"She's not—she's not a judge right now! She's Morticia Addams! There's no judicial authority vested in a Halloween costume—"

"I'm always a judge," Irika says. Mild. Terrifying.

"That's—okay, that's actually a little scary—"

"Take the cards," Yoongi says from behind his phone, not looking up. "You're holding up the game."

"I'm holding up the game? I'm the one trying to maintain competitive integrity—"

"You're the one making up rules because you're losing," Yoongi says.

"I'm not losing. I have a strategy."

He does not have a strategy. He has ten cards and momentum.

"Your strategy is yelling."

"My strategy is passion—"

"Jungkook." Hobi sets his cards down. Folds his hands. Assumes the posture of a man about to deliver a verdict of his own. "You have ten cards. Yoongi has three. I have four. You are, by every measurable metric, losing."

"Metrics are a social construct."

"That's not what social construct means," Yoongi says.

"Yoongi, I swear to god—"

"Okay, you know what?" Taehyung leans forward. Points at Hobi, then Yoongi. "Leave him alone. He's playing his way. It's creative."

Jungkook turns to him. Chest swelling.

His guy. His day one.

"Thank you."

"It's stupid-creative. But it's creative."

"I'll take it."

"Oh, here we go." Hobi rolls his eyes—theatrical, full rotation. "Here we go. The dynamic duo. Tae, you always do this."

"Do what?"

"This!" Hobi gestures between Taehyung and Jungkook with both hands. "He makes that face—the pouty face, the big eyes, the whole kicked-puppy act—and you fold. Every single time. Like clockwork."

He's not making a face.

Probably.

He can't see his own face, but the odds of it being pouty are low.

...Medium.

Whatever.

"I do not fold—"

"You fold like a lawn chair," Yoongi says. Still scrolling. "It's honestly impressive. He looks at you and your spine just—"

He makes a collapsing gesture with one hand. Doesn't look up from his phone while doing it, which makes it worse.

"I am not—my spine is fine—"

"Your spine is compromised," Hobi says. "By his face."

"That's insane—"

"Tae." Yoongi. Flat. "He once convinced you to drive to New Jersey at 3AM for a cheesesteak because he said please with his lower lip out. You drove to New Jersey."

"It was a good cheesesteak!"

"It was a Wawa."

"Wawa has great cheesesteaks—"

"It was a GAS STATION, Taehyung—"

"With GREAT CHEESESTEAKS—"

Jungkook is beaming. Not even trying to hide it.

For the record: it was a great cheesesteak, the lower lip was simply a strategic maneuver and he regrets absolutely nothing.

And then, across the table, you've given up on containing it—the laugh comes out open, unguarded, the kind that uses your shoulders and tips your head back, and the sound does something to the room.

Warms it. Fills it. Makes everything lighter by exactly the amount that matters.

Good.

He takes the four cards. Doesn't even care anymore.

Three rounds later, Yoongi wins.

Obviously.

He lays down his last card—a green reverse—with the energy of someone submitting a tax return. No celebration. No gloating. Just sets it on the pile, picks up his drink, takes a sip, and says "that's the game" the way you'd say 'it's raining' like it's a fact.

"How," Yeji says. She's staring at the discard pile like it personally betrayed her. "HOW. You were on your phone the entire time."

"Multitasking," Yoongi says.

"That's not multitasking, that's—witchcraft—"

"It's pattern recognition. The discard pile is predictable once you track color cycling and hold distribution." He takes another sip. "Also, Taehyung has a tell."

"I do NOT—"

"You tap your cards when you're about to play a Wild. Every time. Without fail."

Taehyung looks at his hands. Then at his cards. Then at his hands again, as if they've been operating independently and without his consent.

Jungkook makes a mental note to watch for the tap next round and then a second mental note that Yoongi definitely has been reading everyone at this table all night, himself included, and elects not to pursue that thought any further.

Jimin lays down a red two. Looks at his remaining card. Looks at the table.

"Uno."

Said quiet. Almost casual. But his posture shifts—straighter, alert, the way someone sits when they know the whole table is about to target them.

You play a red reverse.

The direction flips. Back to Jimin.

Which means Jimin has to play. Right now. On a red.

And Jungkook, who spends most of his waking life watching people for a living (or at least for a degree)—catches the flicker. The expression of a man who does not, in fact, have a red card.

And Jungkook would love to say he watched what happened next with the full weight of his professional attention.

But he didn't.

Because you're still holding the reverse card play with that little surprised-gloat thing, chin up—the one where you refuse to smile outright but the corners give you away—and his eyes go there instead.

Of course they do.

You set the trap, the trap worked, and now you're being insufferable about it in a register that's only visible directly across the table.

He's directly across the table. So.

Two seconds. Maybe three.

When he looks back, Jimin is laying down a red eight.

"That's the game," Jimin says, with a smile that's a degree too innocent.

Huh?

"WAIT." Hobi slams both palms on the table. "Wait wait wait. Did he just—"

"He won." Yoongi says with zero inflection.

"He won? He WON?! He was stuck! I saw that face! He did the face—the trapped face, the 'I don't have a red' face—and then OUT OF NOWHERE, red eight?"

"He had a red eight."

"He absolutely did not have a red eight, Min Yoongi, don't you dare—your hands literally moved across the table!"

"I was picking up my drink."

The drink is right there. On the coaster. Half-finished. Sweating gently. An alibi with condensation.

"You put your phone down." Hobi points at it, face down on the armrest now. "You put your PHONE down. You haven't put that phone down since we sat down. That's premeditation."

"Are you accusing me of rigging a card game." Yoongi looks at Hobi over the rim of his glass. The skull earring sways. His expression is the dictionary definition of unbothered. "At a Halloween party. In someone's grandparents' house."

"YES. That is exactly what I'm accusing you of."

"Interesting theory."

"It's not a theory! I have eyes! Nobody goes from 'trapped face' to the exact card they need unless—" his finger sways between them, "—someone passed him—"

"Sounds like luck to me," Jimin says.

"It does sound like luck," Yoongi agrees.

"You two are—" Hobi sputters. Points at one, then the other. "You're in cahoots. You're in open, blatant, shameless cahoots and I am being gaslit at a coffee table—"

"Cahoots is a strong word," Jimin says.

"Do you have a weaker one?"

"Coincidence."

"COINCIDENCE—"

"I think we should move on," Yoongi says, waving his hand off.

"I think you should be IMPRISONED—"

"Drama," Yoongi mumbles. "The performer's curse."

Hobi's mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. He looks at Jungkook for backup. Jungkook raises both hands—palms out, staying clear, because getting between Hobi and Yoongi during an integrity dispute is how people disappear.

He catches your eye across the table.

You're smiling.

He looks at his cards.

Draws a green two. Puts it down.

Smiles.

His hands have stopped shaking.

He's finally managed to get the shakes from the adrenaline down, and it is only then that his eyes catch the room—which is, objectively, insane.

A full music room in someone's grandparents' house, because this is Greenwich Village and rich people furnish their spare rooms the way normal people furnish Pinterest boards: aspirationally and with zero fiscal accountability.

But his hands. They're steady now. Resting on his thighs where he's sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor with his back against a leather armchair.

Steady.

Three minutes ago they weren't.

Hobi's next to him, legs extended, ankles crossed, leaning back on his palms in that way he has where every position looks like a magazine spread.

Dance Studio Owner Relaxes After Preventing Friend From Committing Aggravated Assault At Costume Party. Shot on location.

The music room is small. Wood-paneled. A baby grand piano in the corner with a dust cloth draped over it like a ghost that gave up. Bookshelves full of vinyl—actual vinyl, organized by what looks like decade, which Jungkook is trying very hard not to get up and inspect because if he starts flipping through some dead rich guy's record collection right now he'll lose the next forty minutes trying to find a Mayer one and also the last remaining thread of whatever emotional processing he's supposed to be doing.

There's a cello propped in a stand by the window. A violin case on the shelf. Framed photos of someone shaking hands with Yo-Yo Ma.

And on the wall, between two sconces that look like they belong in a cathedral—

A fucking Fender Stratocaster.

Sunburst finish. Not new—played, lived-in, the kind of wear that comes from hands, not neglect. The frets show use. The pickguard has a faint scratch pattern near the bridge that tells him someone used to strum hard and slightly too low.

Whoever owned this loved it. Loved it the way you can only love an instrument that's been your primary method of saying the things your mouth won't.

He hasn't looked away from it since they walked in.

"So," Hobi says. Casual. "John Mayer or Hendrix?"

"What?"

"If you could only listen to one for the rest of your life."

"That's—" He tears his eyes from the Strat. "That's not even a fair question. Those are completely different—"

"It's absolutely a fair question. I ask every musician I meet. It's diagnostic."

"Diagnostic of what?"

"Of who you are as a person." Hobi counts on his fingers. "Hendrix people are chaos agents. They want to burn the building down and build something new in the ashes. Mayer people want to sit on the porch of the building and write a song about how the light hits it at 6pm."

"Those aren't the only two options."

"They're the only two that matter for this exercise."

"What if I say both?"

"Then you're a coward and I lose respect for you."

Jungkook snorts. Picks at a thread on the knee of his costume. The Ghostface robe pools around him like he's some kind of haunted monk who chose vibes over doctrine.

"Mayer."

"Knew it."

"You didn't know it."

"I absolutely knew it. You're a porch guy. You want the thing to be beautiful and precise and a little bit heartbreaking. Hendrix guys want the thing to be loud."

"Mayer can be loud."

"Mayer is loud the way a thunderstorm is loud. Hendrix is loud the way a car crash is loud. Different energy."

He's right. Annoyingly, thoroughly right, in the way Hobi is always right about things that shouldn't be in his area of expertise but somehow are because the man treats every domain of human knowledge like a dance floor—just walks onto it and starts moving and somehow it works.

Jungkook looks at the guitar again.

"The Trio stuff is what got me," he says. "Not the solo albums. The live Trio recordings. 'Where the Light Is.' The way he strips everything back and it's just—guitar and rhythm and this... conversation happening between his hands and the instrument. No production. No tricks. Just the thing itself."

"That's the porch," Hobi says.

"That's the porch," Jungkook agrees.

Silence. Good silence.

Then Hobi does the thing.

"Why'd you stop playing?"

Jungkook's fingers go still on the thread.

"You used to play all the time, man. At Tae's, remember? You had the acoustic with you. Played for like two hours straight on his fire escape. Couldn't get you to stop."

He remembers. Tae's old walkup. Before the whole shape of their friend group had solidified into what it is now.

Jungkook would show up with the guitar because he'd been playing at campus that afternoon between classes—couldn't play at home, obviously, because home was Mia's apartment and the guitar was noise at home—so he'd carry it around like an organ donor, playing wherever she wasn't.

Practice rooms at NYU. Taehyung's fire escape. The back corner of Blueline on slow afternoons.

Anywhere that wasn't the Upper East Side.

Anywhere she couldn't hear it and say 'do you have to do that right now?'

"And then one day it was just—gone." Hobi tilts his head. "Like someone unplugged you or something, man."

The thread is still between his fingers. He doesn't pull it. Doesn't move.

He could give the easy version.

Got busy, different priorities, you know how it goes.

Hobi would accept it. That's his whole thing—holds the door open and waits for you to walk through on your own time.

"Mia said it was noise."

Not the easy version, then.

Hobi purses his lips together.

"She—" He clears his throat.

Something shifts in his chest. Maybe the stone. The one he's been carrying so long it feels like an organ.

"She used to say it was a distraction. That I spent more time with the guitar than with her. Which—I mean, some days, yeah. Probably. Because playing was the only part of my day that still felt like—"

Like what?

Like himself. Like the version of himself that existed before the debt and the phone calls at 2AM and the birthday that wasn't a birthday and the night his mother cried because she believed something that never happened.

He doesn't say any of that.

He says: "She wanted me to sell my equipment. To prove I was serious about us."

The words lodge in his throat before he can release them.

"And I did. Most of it. Sold the amp first. Then the pedals. Kept the acoustic for a while because I thought—maybe if I just played quieter. If I did it when she wasn't around. If I made myself—"

His jaw works.

"She found out I was still playing. Said I was sneaking around. Like playing guitar in an empty apartment was the same as—"

Stops. Swallows.

"Anyway. Sold the acoustic too. After that."

The room is very quiet after that.

It sucks.

It sucks because there's a whole building full of people being twenty-something and careless and alive, and here he is on a music room floor telling Hoseok about the time he let someone convince him that the best part of himself was an inconvenience.

"She got what she wanted, I guess. I stopped playing. And then we broke up and I just—didn't start again. Couldn't pick one up without hearing her in my head telling me it was a waste of time."

He exhales.

"Which is—fun. Super fun."

"Real fun," Hobi says.

But there is no humor in it. Just some sort of echo. Holding the word so Jungkook doesn't have to carry it alone.

Quiet settles once more.

Hobi isn't looking at him—looking at the ceiling, at the Yo-Yo Ma photo, at his own hands—giving him room the way you give a patient space in a hospital floor.

"Is that why you switched?"

Jungkook blinks. "What?"

"Majors. You started in music production, right? Tae mentioned it once. And then you moved to film." Hobi says it evenly. No charge. Like he's confirming directions, not opening a wound. "Was that her too?"

The question sits there for a few beats before Jungkook finally nods.

Doesn't elaborate. Can feel the edge of something in his chest—the place where this conversation becomes a different conversation, a worse one, the one where he has to explain that it wasn't just the guitar.

It was the major and the friends and the way he dressed and the amount of time he spent on his art and the food he ate and the way he breathed, probably, if she'd figured out how to critique that too.

The conversation where he has to say 'she took everything apart, piece by piece, so slowly I didn't notice until there was nothing left' and then sit with the fact that he let it happen.

He allowed it to happen.

Even after he'd seen it happen before through his own eyes.

He doesn't want to go there.

His jaw tightens. Fingers press into his own knee. He can feel the rehearsed cheerfulness loading—some joke about film school, some deflection about Tarantino or aspect ratios—

Hobi stands up.

Doesn't push. Doesn't probe. Doesn't say 'you should talk about this' or any of the things that are probably true and absolutely not what he needs to hear right now.

Just walks to the wall. Reaches up. Lifts the Strat off its hooks with both hands—careful, respectful, the way you handle something that belongs to someone who isn't here to say yes—and carries it back.

Holds it out.

"Hobi."

"Just hold it."

"That's not ours."

"We're borrowing it. Tessa said the music room was open. That includes the instruments."

"That's a vintage Strat."

"And you're a guy who hasn't played enough. Seems like a match."

The guitar hangs there. Sunburst. Scratched pickguard. Someone's love, left on a wall.

His hand comes up before his brain clears it.

The neck slides into his palm and his fingers close around it and—

Oh.

The weight. The specific, exact, irreplaceable weight of a guitar in his hands.

Six strings and a body and a neck that fits against his forearm like it was measured for him, and his left hand moves to the frets on autopilot—memory from ten thousand hours that Mia couldn't erase no matter how many amps she made him sell—and his right hand finds the strings and he brushes them. Just once. Unamplified, barely audible, a whisper of harmonic vibration that travels through the wood into his chest.

His eyes close.

Fuck, he missed this.

Not like missing a hobby. Not like 'oh yeah, used to do that, should get back to it'.

Missing it like a limb. Like a language he used to dream in. Like the one thing that always made sense when nothing else did—not his family, not Mia, not the mess of his own head—just hands on strings and the sound that came out being exactly the thing he meant to say.

Opens his eyes. Looks at Hobi.

"There's an amp." Nods toward the corner. Small Fender combo, tucked beside the piano bench. "Can you plug me in?"

Hobi grins—the real one, not the redirect grin from the garden—and he's already moving, pulling the cable from its coil, flicking the power switch.

Jungkook plugs in the jack. Adjusts the volume. Tests a chord—open G, ringing, full—and the amp translates it into something that pushes against the walls and makes the wood paneling vibrate.

His chest expands. Actually physically expands, like his lungs figured out how to work again.

"I've been getting back into it, actually." He adjusts the tuning peg on the high E. Slightly flat. "At the apartment. Yoongi can vouch for it. He's been bitching through the wall for a month."

"Doesn't Yoongi bitch about pretty much everything except for hiking and music?"

"Yeah, but this bitching is specific. This is targeted complaints about my chord voicings at 11PM. Which means he's listening. Which means I'm playing good enough for him to notice."

"That is the most roundabout progress metric I've ever heard."

"The Yoongi Scale. If he's annoyed, you're on track."

Hobi laughs. Real, warm, settling back against the armchair while the amp sits between them patient and waiting.

Jungkook's left hand moves up the neck. Third fret. Index finger on the G string. Ring finger stretches to the B.

Doesn't think about what he's going to play. Just lets his hands go where they want.

The cleanest four-chord structure in the history of pop music, and his fingers know it the way they know the shape of a coffee mug, the way they know the frets on his own guitar back at the apartment, fog evaporating through rust and disuse and settling into something that doesn't feel rusty at all.

Feels like coming home to a house he forgot he still had a key to.

"Wait—" Hobi sits forward. "Is that Coldplay?"

"Yeah." Jungkook grins. Keeps playing. His right hand finds a picking pattern—the one from the acoustic version, not the album. "Their guitar work doesn't get enough credit, man. Everyone talks about the vocals and the production but the actual guitar lines—especially the early stuff—the chords are basic but the voicings are so specific. Like, the way Buckland uses the delay to create these layers—"

He shifts to the verse progression. Adds the delay-echo pattern, approximating it with his picking hand since there's no pedal.

"—see, that? That shimmer? That's not reverb, that's rhythmic delay. Dotted eighth notes. He's basically playing a duet with himself. The original note and the echo become two different melodic lines happening at once."

"You're nerding out."

"Appreciate me educating you, man."

"You are fully, completely nerding out right now and your face is doing the thing."

"I don't have a thing."

"The thing where your eyes get big and you start talking with your hands except you can't because you're holding a guitar so your eyebrows are doing all the work. That thing."

Jungkook's eyebrows, which are in fact doing an unreasonable amount of work, attempt to settle into something neutral.

They don't quite make it.

He doesn't care.

Because the Strat is singing under his hands and the amp is warm and the room is humming and his fingers remember every single shape and his chest feels wider than it has in months.

Maybe longer. Maybe since before.

He cycles back to the chorus. G, D, C.

Yellow.

He's always liked this song. Can't even remember when he first heard it—it's one of those songs that exists in the background of being alive, like it was already playing when you showed up and never really stopped. In grocery stores and Uber rides and the credits of some movie he can't name.

The kind of song you don't choose, it just—lives in you.

He played it for Mia once.

Early on. Before things got bad—or before he realized things were bad, which isn't the same thing but felt like it at the time. Sat on the edge of her bed with the acoustic and played the whole thing start to finish because he'd been practicing the fingerpicking pattern for weeks and he wanted to show her, wanted to share the one thing that made his chest feel bigger instead of smaller.

She listened. Or—sat there while sound happened near her. Which isn't the same thing either.

When he finished she said 'I don't get it'.

It wasn't really mean, nor cruel. It was simply... blank.

Almost as if he'd shown her a card trick and she couldn't figure out why he expected her to be impressed.

«The lyrics don't even make sense. What does 'your skin and bones turn into something beautiful' even mean? And why is everything yellow? It's a weird color to write a song about. If he wanted to be romantic he should've picked red or something.»

And Jungkook had sat there with the guitar still warm in his lap and thought—it's not about the color. It's not about any of the words, individually.

It's about how they sound together.

How the melody makes the language into something that means more than its parts.

How yellow isn't a color in the song, it's a feeling—warmth, and light, and the specific shade of being so full of something you can't name that the only word big enough to hold it is a color.

He didn't say any of that. Said 'yeah, you're probably right' and put the guitar away and never played it for her again.

Doesn't tell Hobi any of this.

Just plays.

And it feels good. Playing it. Right now, in this room, on this guitar. He doesn't know why. Doesn't interrogate it.

"The opening is the best part," he says, already shifting up the neck. "Everyone remembers the chorus but the but the way it comes back around—listen—"

He moves to the higher register. The melody climbs. Fingers stretching for the voicings—Em, D, C, and then back down—and the notes ring out clean and full and something about the sound in this wood-paneled room, the way it bounces off the shelves and the piano dust cloth and—

Sounds right.

Just. Sounds right.

His throat hums. The melody rises in his chest before it reaches his mouth—that feeling, the one where a song is sitting right behind your teeth and all you have to do is open up and let it out.

"Look at the stars."

Quiet. Almost nothing. More breath than voice.

"Look how they shine for you."

Louder now. Finding it. The shape of the words settling into the shape of the notes like something that was always supposed to be there.

"And everything you do."

He doesn't sound like Chris Martin. Doesn't try to. His voice is lower, rougher, slightly raw in a way that the studio version isn't—the sound of someone singing because the song asked him to, not because an audience is listening.

Hobi is still.

"Yeah, they were all yellow."

The chord rings out. Sustains. Fills the room and holds there—a single, shimmering, fading note that doesn't want to die.

He lets it.

Watches his own hands on the strings. Steady.

Not shaking. Not even a little.

"Shit," Hobi says softly. "Yeah. Okay."

"Okay what?"

"Just—okay. You're back." A breath. "That's all. You're back."

Jungkook looks at him. At the room. At the Strat in his lap.

Doesn't know why his eyes sting.

Allergies, probably. Old house. Dust on the piano cloth.

The door opens.

He stops. Hands flat on the strings. Killing the vibration.

A reflex so deeply wired it happens before he even sees who's there—the automatic silencing of sound when a door opens, because doors opening used to mean 'put the guitar down' and that's old code he's still debugging.

Taehyung is in the doorway. Pinstripe rumpled. Pocket square clinging on through sheer willpower. Drawn-on mustache smudged, giving him less Gomez Addams and more 'guy who fell asleep on a newspaper'.

And behind him—

You.

You with red eyes and makeup wrecked and eyeliner tracked down your cheeks in dark smudges that Jimin is absolutely going to grieve. Gold shimmer smeared across your cheekbones like a craft aisle casualty. The snake cuff is still there. The chain belt. The corset.

Same costume, different girl wearing it than an hour ago.

Something tightens behind his sternum.

Taehyung's face splits open before Jungkook can process the rest.

"Was that you?"

Sheepish isn't a setting Jungkook wears well. But he can feel it on his face: the half-grin, the slight duck, the hand rubbing the back of his neck.

"Yeah."

"Dude." Taehyung crosses the room in three strides, grinning so wide the smudged mustache lifts on both sides. "It's been so long since I've heard you play. Like—years. That sounded incredible."

"It hasn't been that long." He adjusts the Strat in his lap. "Yoongi's heard me plenty. Through the wall. Loudly and against his will."

"It's true."

Your voice. From the doorway.

You're leaning against the frame. Arms crossed. One foot in, one foot out.

Plausible deniability in both directions—your default stance in any room you haven't committed to yet.

"He plays at like eleven PM on a Tuesday and Yoongi bangs on the wall and then he plays louder and then Yoongi bangs harder and then Griffin starts yelling and it's a whole production."

Taehyung turns around. Looks at you. Back at Jungkook. Back at you.

"Wait—you've heard him play?"

Like you just told him you've witnessed a solar eclipse. Like Jungkook playing guitar in his own apartment with you on the other side of a shared wall is classified intel.

Your eyebrows lift. "...Yeah?"

Said like 'obviously'. Like you genuinely don't understand why this is a question.

Tae looks at him. He sees the processing frown, the one where information he had doesn't match information he just got.

Jungkook shrugs. "I've been getting back into it. Recently. She lives with me, so—"

Beat.

"I mean. In the apartment. Same apartment. That's—yeah."

Eloquence. Peak performance. A master class in language from a man holding a borrowed Stratocaster in a Ghostface robe.

"How recently?" Taehyung asks.

"Couple months?"

"Couple months?" Tae's voice pitches. "You've been playing again for a couple months and you didn't—"

"Tae, I just started picking it up at night. When I couldn't sleep. It wasn't an announcement situation."

"You could've told me."

"Tae."

"I'm just saying."

"And I'm just saying it was small. I wanted it small for a while."

Taehyung reads that. He's always been good at reading the things Jungkook doesn't say—since before Mia, since high school, since the era of guitar riffs and avoidant shrugs that Tae just learned the translation for.

"Okay." Softer. "Yeah. I get that."

A beat.

"It sounded really good, though."

"Thanks, man."

You've moved further into the room. Not all the way—migrated from the doorframe to the cello stand, close enough to be present, far enough to bolt.

Your fingers trace the edge of the cello's scroll with absent curiosity.

"So what was the song?" you ask.

"Coldplay."

"Coldplay." You make a face. Not a bad one—the face of someone forming an opinion in real time. "Like, Coldplay Coldplay? 'Fix You,' stadium tour, your-dad's-favorite-band Coldplay?"

"'Yellow,' actually."

"Huh." You tip your head. "That's their best one."

He blinks. "You think?"

"Yeah. The early stuff before they went all—"

You make a gesture that somehow communicates an entire artistic trajectory from Parachutes to Music of the Spheres. Both hands. A facial expression he's never seen before but immediately understands.

"It's the only one that still sounds like a band in a room. Everything after got so big. 'Yellow' is just a guy with a guitar who feels too much."

A guy with a guitar who feels too much.

Huh.

"Most people say 'Fix You,'" he says.

"Most people are wrong."

"Most people think 'The Scientist' is their peak."

"Most people also think Subway is a reasonable lunch option. Most people can't be trusted."

He grins. Can't help it. Doesn't try.

"What's your issue with Subway?"

"My issue with Subway is that it's bread-flavored depression served by someone who hates you, and I refuse to elaborate further."

"That's a strong stance on a sandwich chain."

"All my stances on sandwich chains are strong. That's what separates me from animals."

Hobi's head is moving between you two. Back and forth. Back and forth. He catches it in his peripheral—the look on Hobi's face isn't suspicion. It's closer to surprise. The pleasant kind. Like he expected you two to be oil and water and instead walked into... whatever this is.

The thing where you quote each other's rhythms and volley insults that land like inside jokes.

"Play something," you say.

"I was playing. You interrupted."

"We enhanced your audience. You went from one to three. That's a two hundred percent increase. You're welcome."

"That's not how percentages—it's three hundred—never mind." He adjusts the guitar. "Requests?"

"Surprise me."

"Dangerous thing to say to a man with a Stratocaster."

"I live with you and your 11PM concerts. Nothing you do with a guitar surprises me anymore."

He plays the opening riff to 'Wonderwall.'

Your face goes through six stages of disgust in approximately 1.4 seconds.

"Get out."

"Today is gonna be the day—"

"Get OUT."

"That they're gonna throw it back to you—"

"I'm going to break that guitar over your head. That is a vintage instrument and I'm willing to sacrifice it."

He's laughing too hard to keep playing. The riff collapses into a mess of muted strings and his own wheezing, and Hobi's gone—full-body, head-back, the silent dying kind—and Taehyung is watching with something that's softened slightly from vigilance into... huh.

Not quite warmth. Not yet. But the guard dog sat down.

Tae's phone buzzes. He pulls it out. Reads the screen.

"Shit—Irika." He holds the phone up like it's evidence. "She's looking for me. Apparently the Morticia wig is 'doing something' and she needs me."

He looks at Jungkook. Holds his gaze for a beat longer than the sentence requires.

"You good?"

It's not really about the guitar.

"Yeah, man. I'm good."

Taehyung nods. Glances at you—brief, assessing, not unfriendly but not warm either, and then he's gone. Pinstripes disappearing through the doorway, phone already at his ear, voice dropping into the specific low register he only uses for Irika.

And then it's three.

Him, Hobi, and you.

It feels—

Good. It feels good. Like the right number of people in the right size room with the right amount of noise, which is almost none.

He plays something, just chords now. Open shapes, ringing, cycling through a progression that doesn't belong to any song. Just sound. Just the Strat filling the room with warmth because it can and he's letting it.

"Okay," Hobi says, slapping his knees and standing. "I'm getting drinks. Actual drinks. Not whatever chemical weapon I made earlier—"

"Your drink was attempted murder," Jungkook says.

"It was festive. It had food coloring."

"The food coloring was the least of its crimes."

"I'm getting water. And maybe beer. You want beer?" He points at Jungkook. Then at you. "Beer? Water? Both?"

"Beer," Jungkook says.

"Whatever's open," you say, and your voice is still doing the raw thing but it's steadier now. More you.

"Two beers and a water. Back in five." Hobi's already at the door, already in motion. "Don't let him play 'Wonderwall' again. I know his tricks."

"Noted," you say.

The door clicks shut.

And then it's two.

He keeps playing. Soft. Nothing specific. Just his fingers and the strings and the sound filling the space between you that's smaller now, denser, without Hobi's brightness to dilute it.

You've sat down next to him, knees pulled up, skirt draped. Close enough to the amp that you'd feel it vibrate through the floor.

He lets the last chord ring out and fade. Sets the guitar down across his lap. Pulls out his phone—automatic, reflex, the thing his hands do when they stop doing something else. Screen on. Thumb swiping before his brain catches up with what his muscle memory just opened.

His feed loads—the grid, the blacks and greys, the shadow-heavy compositions—and before his brain can even register the difference—

"Huh?"

He looks up. You've tilted your head. Eyes on his phone—not leaning in, not craning, just the casual glance of someone who happened to look over at the exact wrong moment.

"That's not your feed, is it?"

Oh.

Oh, shit.

"Yeah, it is."

He switches accounts. Locks the phone. Pockets it. Three movements, clean, fast.

"Just looks different because I—reorganized. The grid. New layout."

"You reorganized your Instagram grid."

"Yeah."

"You."

"Me."

"Jeon Jungkook. Reorganized his Instagram grid. The same Jeon Jungkook whose apartment room looks like a frat house had a seizure."

"My room is curated—"

"Your room has a protein shake stain on the ceiling and you told me it was 'abstract art.'"

"It is abstract art. It's a Jackson Pollock."

"It's whey protein and negligence."

"Agree to disagree."

You squint at him. Not suspiciously—more like amused. Like you know there's something there but it's small and harmless and not worth the dig when you're sitting on a floor in a wrecked costume with mascara on your face and the night you've had.

Your eyes drift back to the cello.

Interest shelved.

Not deleted—he knows you, you don't delete, you file things for later retrieval at the most inconvenient possible moment—but shelved.

Good enough.

He looks at you.

Now that the phone's away and it's just you and the amp and the few inches of hardwood between his knee and yours.

Your eyes are swollen. Not a lot. Just enough that the liner smudges underneath look heavier, and the gold shimmer Irya swept across your cheekbones has been redistributed by tears into uneven streaks, and there's a mascara track on your left cheek that you clearly tried to wipe and only succeeded in smearing.

"You okay?"

He says it to the guitar. To the frets. To his own fingers resting on the strings.

Not to your face, because your face is doing something that makes his chest tight and he doesn't have the bandwidth for that and eye contact simultaneously.

You look at him. He can feel it.

"Yeah. I'm fine."

"Okay."

A beat. Two.

"Your eyes are red."

"I'm high. We're all high. You literally watched me eat two brownies."

"That's not baked red." He lifts his gaze from the frets. Meets yours. "That's been-crying red. Different color. Different puffiness pattern. Baked red goes in the whites. Crying red goes around the edges."

"Did you just say puffiness pattern?"

"I'm a film major. I notice faces."

"You can't just use that excuse for everything."

"I'm just saying. You've been crying. And not in a subtle way. Like—it's pretty visible. From across the room. Possibly from space. NASA could probably—"

You swat his arm.

Open-palmed. Quick. The kind that's more exclamation point than assault.

He chuckles. Rocks slightly with the impact, more from dramatics than force.

"I'm just saying," he repeats, quieter now. "Anyone can tell."

"Great. Fantastic. Love that for me."

"Your mascara's doing a whole thing."

"I know it's doing a thing."

"It's migrated. Like a bird. It started on your eyes and now it's—" He gestures vaguely at the lower half of your face.

"I am going to actually break that guitar—"

"Okay, okay."

He sets the Strat down carefully—lowering it into the open case on the floor with the gentleness of someone putting a baby to bed, because it's a vintage instrument and he has respect even if he has no tact—and shifts so he's facing you

He pulls the sleeve of the Ghostface robe over his hand. Makes a fist inside the fabric so the cuff stretches over his knuckles—cheap polyester, Spirit Halloween's finest—and brings it to your face.

You look at the ground.

Not at him.

At the hardwood between your knees, at the dust in the grout line, at anything that isn't the guy who's currently dabbing at your mascara with a serial killer costume like it's a washcloth.

He's gentle about it. Doesn't think about being gentle—just is, the same way he's gentle with Griffin when the little idiot gets something stuck in his fur.

The sleeve drags soft across your cheekbone. The mascara smears more than it lifts, but it's something.

It's less.

Your eyes stay down.

He switches to the other side. Same slow drag. The dark crescent beneath your left eye fades to a smudge, and beneath it your skin is warm and slightly swollen and he's not—

He's cleaning mascara. That's it. A service. Public decency.

"There." He drops his hand. Sleeve still bunched. "Less disaster. More... controlled disaster."

You don't respond.

Which is—fine. That's fine.

He drops the sleeve back into place and shifts on his legs and tries to look anywhere that isn't the side of your face because the side of your face is doing something he doesn't have the emotional language for.

Your lashes. The smear of gold on your cheekbone that he didn't get all the way off. The shape of your mouth when it's not saying anything sarcastic.

Amp hum. Floorboards. The specific not-quite-silence of a music room at 1AM.

Then—

"It's a good song."

Quiet. Out of nowhere.

He glances at you. "What?"

"The one you were playing. Earlier."

"Oh." Beat. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

You don't look at him. You're looking at your own hands. Rolling one of the loose gold chains from your hair between your fingers like it owes you something.

"It's stupid."

He waits. Doesn't push. His right leg is falling asleep but he's not about to shift and risk turning this into A Thing.

A breath. You exhale it slow, through your nose, and it comes out more like a sigh than anything else.

"I used to listen to it when I was stressed. In high school. Like—if I had a big test coming up or whatever."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. My parents were really—"

You stop. Start again.

"I was a good kid. Like. Straight A-plus kid, the whole—" The gesture. The small one. The 'you know the type' gesture that compresses an entire childhood into a flick of the wrist. "Valedictorian track. My mom used to leave little notes on the fridge when report cards came out. 'We're so proud.' In this specific handwriting she saved for—I don't know. The handwriting was nice. It was always nice."

He nods. Doesn't say anything. Doesn't know what to say.

"And they were good parents, Rogue. Like. I want to be clear about that. They—" Another sigh. Smaller. "My dad got me this iPod when I was eleven. The pink mini one. The one that was really hard to get that year and I'd been asking for it for months and he just—showed up with it. And when the DS came out? I had it before anyone in my class had it. All my friends were obsessed. Like, the day it came out, he was in line. My dad stood in a line at a Best Buy for a Nintendo DS. For me."

A small laugh that isn't really a laugh.

"They were kind. I don't want to—this isn't that. I'm not trying to—"

You stop.

He watches your hand tighten on the gold chain.

"God, I sound so stupid."

"You don't."

"I do. I sound like a spoiled—I don't even know what I'm talking about. They were good. They were good parents. My mom packed my lunch until I was sixteen. She still sends me care packages. She sent me socks last month, Rogue, like—socks. Because she read online that students don't buy enough socks and she got worried."

Your voice is thinner.

"So I don't know why I'm—"

Don't know why you're what.

He wants to ask. Doesn't.

Because something about the way you're talking is familiar in a way he can't place.

The hedging. The qualifying. The 'they were good, though' said on loop like a defensive spell you keep casting in case someone accuses you of being ungrateful. He's—

He's done that. That's his thing. That's his move.

His jaw does something.

"Anyway. The song."

"The song."

"It just—it says 'look at the stars.' At the beginning. And when I was—when I would have a bad night, and there'd be a thunderstorm, and I'd be—" You wave a hand. "Spiraling, or whatever. I'd sit in the window seat in my room and play it on my CD player and there wouldn't even be stars. Obviously. It was storming. That's the whole—there were no stars."

A beat.

"But he kept saying it. 'Look how they shine for you.' Like they were still there."

You shrug. Small. Dismissive.

"I don't know. It made me feel less—" Stop. "Whatever. It's dumb. It's a Coldplay song, it's not—"

"It's not dumb."

"It's very dumb, Rogue."

"It's not."

Doesn't say it firm enough, maybe. Says it again.

"It's not."

You finally look at him.

And he wants to—he doesn't know.

He wants to fix something.

Wants to find the specific thing in what you just said that needs fixing and fix it.

He runs his tongue along the inside of his cheek.

Thinks about his dad.

The handwriting thing.

His dad didn't have handwriting, his dad had a voice and fists.

But also—his dad wasn't all bad. That's the thing nobody ever tells you about the stuff that fucks you up.

His dad taught him how to ride a bike. His dad cried at his graduation. His dad—

"Some parents suck."

You blink.

"Some don't." He's looking at the amp. At the little red power light. Not at you. "Some are—in the middle. Most, probably. Most are in the middle. Doing okay at some of it and fucking up other parts of it and the parts they fuck up can still—"

Stops.

Tries again.

"You can have good parents who also got something wrong. Both can be true. That's not—that's not an ungrateful thing to say. That's just math."

Quiet.

"The socks don't cancel out the other stuff. That's not how it works."

You don't say anything.

He finally looks back at you and your eyes are wet in a way they weren't thirty seconds ago—not crying, just that full-right-to-the-edge thing—and he looks away again because he's not equipped.

He's not equipped for this.

Nobody gave him the manual.

"And the song isn't dumb." Clears his throat. "Chris Martin wrote it about his mom, I'm pretty sure. Or—I don't know, actually. I read something once. Point is if you sat in a window during a thunderstorm listening to it that's not—that's just a kid looking for something to hold onto. That's not a personality flaw."

You make a sound.

Something between a laugh and an exhale.

It gets caught somewhere in your throat.

"You don't have to be nice to me."

"I'm not being nice."

"You're being—"

"I'm stating facts. I'm a film major. I deal in facts."

"You really have to stop using that—"

"Shh."

Another one of those half-laughs. Quieter. Your shoulder moves against his.

Your eyes go back to the hardwood.

And then—

Your arm lifts. A small movement, barely a gesture. Your hand making that little sideways motion, a 'come here', a 'closer', the kind of signal that doesn't have language attached to it because language would make it something you'd have to own.

And his chest—

His chest does something that has nothing to do with the amp or the room or the cobwebs or the Yo-Yo Ma photograph.

Because he's seen this before.

After Emma's birthday. After the fight that wasn't really a fight and the sex that wasn't really makeup sex and the part after where you'd been sitting on the edge of the table with your legs dangling and your defenses down at a level he'd never seen—zero, flatline, the version of you that exists when you've been turned inside out and don't have the energy to flip back.

You'd put your forehead on his shoulder that night too. Just—dropped it there.

And he'd stood between your legs not knowing what the fuck to do with his hands or his face or the thing in his chest that felt like a fist opening, and then you'd lifted your arms like 'carry me' and he'd said 'you're not serious' and you'd just looked at him and yeah. You were serious.

You're always serious about the things that are not supposed to be serious.

You look like that now, too. Just as soft, just as stripped-back as then.

This version of you that he only seems to get when you've cried enough or cum hard enough that the walls are down and there's just—you. Underneath all of it.

Tired and real and not pretending.

And maybe that's why his chest grips over itself. Folds in half.

Because his defenses are somewhere on the floor next to the Strat and he doesn't know when he put them down but they're not on him anymore.

He scoots closer. Across the hardwood. Until his knee is touching your knee and the distance between you has been reduced to the width of a breath.

Your forehead drops against his shoulder.

He doesn't flinch, doesn't stiffen. Just absorbs the weight of it—your forehead against him, your breath coming uneven against his collarbone. The gold chains in your hair press into the side of his neck. One of the little snake earrings grazes his jaw.

Quiet.

The amp hums.

"I'm sorry." Muffled into his shoulder.

So small he almost misses it under the electrical drone of the Fender combo.

"For what?"

Your breath catches.

Releases.

"You were right about Jason."

His chest caves in.

Not triumph. Not satisfaction. Not the 'I told you so' he'd normally chamber and fire with a grin because Jungkook has never met a victory he couldn't be insufferable about—but none of that loads.

None of it even approaches the chamber.

Because being right about Jason means Jason did something.

And being right about Jason means you're sitting on a floor in a wrecked costume with mascara on your chin telling him he was right in a voice that sounds like it went through a paper shredder.

He doesn't want to be right about that.

He sighs.

Tips his head back to look at the ceiling. Same motion as when he was staring upwards with Tae an hour ago, back when the biggest problem in his life was whether a pumpkin looked like Willy Wonka and whether Willy Wonka was categorically attractive.

A smile. Small. Not for you. For the ceiling. For whatever cosmic algorithm decided that this is where the night would end up—him and you on a floor in a dead man's music room, your forehead on his shoulder, a borrowed Stratocaster cooling in its case beside you.

Doesn't say anything.

Doesn't say 'I know.' Doesn't say 'what happened.' Doesn't say 'I nearly put my fist through his face an hour ago and it took three people and a vintage electric guitar to stop me.'

Just lifts his hand.

Puts it on the back of your neck.

His fingers find the nape—right where your hair starts, where the gold chains have come loose and the strands are damp and the skin is warm.

And he lets his thumb move. Slowly. A small arc over the top knob of your spine. Back and forth.

You breathe out.

Shaky. Uneven. Settling.

And for some reason—for some reason he's not going to poke at or name or hold up to the light because doing that would require vocabulary he doesn't have and isn't sure exists—

It's okay.

Not fixed. Not resolved. Not the kind of okay where credits roll and someone's learned a lesson.

Just okay.

Most of Jungkook's ideas are stupid.

He's well aware of that fact.

It's practically a brand at this point.

Jeon Jungkook: serial architect of decisions that seem perfectly reasonable in the three-second window between impulse and execution and then reveal themselves, with humiliating clarity, to be catastrophically ill-advised approximately four seconds later.

Perfect example of this is that time he tried to make cold brew in a sock because the coffee shop was closed and he was desperate and Yoongi looked at him with the kind of disappointment that leaves a mark.

So he knows. He's self-aware enough for that.

What he is not self-aware enough for—what no amount of Dr. Liao or Tuesday afternoon processing sessions has equipped him to handle—is the ability to identify a stupid idea before it crosses the threshold from thought to action.

Which is how he ends up here.

The party's winding down. That liminal hour where the music's been turned from weapon to wallpaper and the survivors are scattered across the living room in various states of horizontal.

Somebody's asleep on the smaller couch with a cape over their face. The fog machine finally died about forty minutes ago and the room's been slowly clearing, the last wisps of theatrical haze dissolving into regular air that smells like spilled beer and burned-out jack-o-lantern.

He finds Jimin in the kitchen, standing there with a glass of water, leaning against the island, looking at the aftermath as if he were surveying a natural disaster he didn't cause but will somehow be expected to clean up.

"It's gonna be a whole day tomorrow, huh," Jimin says, nodding at the living room.

Streamers sagging. Solo cups colonizing every flat surface. One of the plastic spiders from the bookshelf has migrated to the floor and is lying there on its back like it had one too many and simply surrendered.

"The decorations alone," Jungkook agrees.

"The cobwebs. Those fake cobwebs are a nightmare to get off. They get into everything. It's gonna take three people and a lint roller."

"I'll help take 'em down."

Jimin shakes his head. "You put them up. It's only fair that the rest of us suffer through the removal."

"It's not a big deal."

"It kind of is." Jimin is not being pushy about it—that's the thing. There's no edge, he's simply standing there with his water, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his voice has that particular pitch that makes disagreeing with him feel like kicking a puppy. "You did a lot. Take a break. You deserve it."

"I'm fine."

"I know you're fine. I'm saying you don't have to be." Jimin's smile is small. "Let us handle cleanup. You've earned a night off from being the guy who does everything."

Huh.

That's not—not what Jungkook's used to.

Most people just let it go when he brushes something off. Yoongi would've grunted and said 'do whatever you want'. Taehyung would've insulted him and told him to fuck off with that. Hobi would've shrugged and redirected with a dance move or a question about something else.

But Jimin doesn't let it go.

Which, paradoxically, makes Jungkook want to stay in this kitchen more, not less.

He leans against the opposite counter.

"Alright," Jungkook says, but then, because he can't fully surrender, he adds, "but if anybody fucks up the ceiling streamers I'm holding you personally responsible."

"That's fair." There's a little laugh folded into the words. "I accept full liability."

Silence settles, and it's the comfortable kind (or close enough).

Jungkook takes a sip of water from a cup that may or may not be his. Jimin's standing there doing the cardigan thing, thumb running back and forth over the cuff like a worry stone, and it occurs to Jungkook that he doesn't actually know this person. Not really. Knows the outline—comp lit, library, does your eyeliner, sat on the bathroom floor with you earlier, defended him to you once even though Jungkook hadn't earned it.

Knows Jimin is yours. In the way that matters. Part of your life in a way Jungkook is only adjacent to.

And that used to not register. Used to be just furniture—background characters in the movie of someone else's life, not his.

Except now it does register. Because you're—

Whatever. You're his friend now. Or something. The label keeps shifting depending on who's asking and whether his brain cooperates. And your friends are—

He should probably know your friends.

"So," Jungkook says.

Great start. Pulitzer-worthy.

"Yoongi," he says.

Jimin's thumb stops on the cuff.

"Hm?" Jimin turns to look at him, and there it is—the microshift. Lips pressing together, not quite pursed, but held. Color climbing his neck and landing on his cheeks in real time like someone turned a dial.

Jungkook reads it immediately.

Oh.

Oh.

Okay. So that's—yeah. That's a thing.

He clears his throat. Adjusts. Pivots.

"He's a cool guy," Jungkook says. Nods once, firm, like he's delivering testimony. "He's a really cool guy. Like. You know."

Smooth. So smooth. He should teach a masterclass.

Jimin blinks. The blush is fully operational now, staining both cheeks, and he does this thing where he sort of laughs and exhales at the same time, shoulders dropping half an inch.

"Oh. Yeah." He nods back. Too many times. "Yeah, he's—he's great."

"Yeah."

Silence.

The worst kind of silence now. The one that's sort of loud because both people are thinking things they're not saying and the gap between those things and the actual air in the room is deafening.

Jungkook watches Jimin's fingers migrate from the cuff to the hem of his cardigan, then to each other, lacing and unlacing, and something about the fidgeting softens the awkwardness into something else.

Something that makes Jungkook want to fix it.

Not because he has to.

Because this guy—this soft, careful guy who sat on a tile floor with you—looks like he's one wrong word from imploding, and Jungkook knows what that feels like.

"Matter of fact," he says, leaning back against the counter, finding casual the way a drowning man finds a pool noodle, "there was this thing last Christmas. With Yoongi."

Jimin's fidgeting slows.

"Well like, the four of us, actually. You know. Me, Yoongi, Hobi, Tae. Holiday week. Nobody had anywhere to be, nobody had shit to do, so Yoongi goes—" Jungkook pitches his voice lower, flatter, does his best Yoongi monotone: "'We should go hiking.'"

Jimin's mouth twitches.

"And we're like—hiking? It's December. It's freezing. Tae is wearing loafers." Jungkook gestures with the water cup. "But Yoongi's got this whole thing about Bear Mountain. Says the trails are empty in winter, says the views are better when it's cold, says some shit about how the Hudson looks different when there's frost on it. And he's not wrong, but he's also—you know how he is. He frames it like he doesn't care, but he'd already looked up the train schedule."

Jimin laughs. Quiet, but real. The fidgeting's stopped entirely now.

"So we go. Five AM, Penn Station, four idiots with no hiking gear. Hobi's wearing Jordans. Jordans. On a mountain. Taehyung's got a vintage Carhartt that he keeps stopping to photograph instead of wearing. I'm the only one who brought water—one bottle, like that's enough for four grown men—and Yoongi's just..."

He pauses. Not for dramatic effect. Because the memory is sitting right there, fully formed, and it's—

It's a good one.

"Yoongi's walking ahead. Not fast, not showing off, just—quiet. You know how he gets quiet in a different way outside? Not the apartment quiet, where he's working or ignoring you. A different kind. Like he's actually there. Present. Paying attention to something that isn't a screen."

Jimins leaning forward slightly, and his face has gone still in a way that isn't bracing. More like—receiving. Open and careful and waiting.

"We get to the top and it's—I mean, it's just a view. River, trees, sky. Nothing you can't see on Google. But Yoongi pulls out his phone and records the sound. Not a photo. Not the view. Just stands there with his phone up, recording the wind coming off the water for like two straight minutes. Doesn't say anything. Doesn't show anybody. Just—" Jungkook mimes holding a phone up, "—captures it. Pockets it. Done."

He takes a sip of the maybe-his water.

"And then on the way down, Hobi's Jordan tears on a rock, and Hobi's freaking out about it, and Yoongi—without saying a word—takes off his own shoes and gives them to Hobi. Just. Hands them over. Walks the rest of the trail in his socks."

"In socks?"

"In socks. December. Frozen ground." Jungkook shakes his head. "We're all yelling at him—put your shoes back on, dude, you're gonna get frostbite!—and he just goes 'they're Jordans' like that explains everything. Like the hierarchy of footwear is a moral issue and he's made his ruling."

Jimin's laughing now. Not the quiet kind. The real kind—head ducking, shoulders shaking, the sound of it bright and unguarded in the dead kitchen.

"He didn't mention the socks thing afterward. Not once. Hobi tried to buy him replacement shoes for Christmas and Yoongi wouldn't let him. Said the socks were fine. Said his feet don't get cold." Jungkook pauses. Looks at Jimin directly. "His feet absolutely get cold. He wears two pairs of socks around the apartment from November to March. He's full of shit."

Jimin's laughter subsides into something quieter.

"That's..." Jimin starts, then trails off. His thumb finds the cardigan cuff again, but it's slower now. Thoughtful instead of nervous. "That sounds like him."

"It is him." Jungkook says it simply. Doesn't dress it up. "He won't tell you the stuff that matters about himself. He'll just do it and hope you notice. And if you don't notice, he'll never bring it up. Which is—I mean, it's annoying. It's terrible communication. I tell him that all the time."

Jimin's smile turns softer.

"But it's also—" Jungkook waves a hand vaguely, the way Yoongi does when he's avoiding a point. Catches himself doing it. Stops. "He's the kind of person who'll walk down a mountain in his socks for you and then pretend his feet don't get cold. That's just. You know. What he does."

He doesn't add for people he cares about. Doesn't need to.

The sentence is sitting right there in the space between them, fully assembled, and Jimin's the kind of person who'll see it without being shown.

A beat.

Jimin nods. Slow. Looking at his water glass like it contains answers.

"Thanks for telling me that," he says, and his voice is different now.

"Yeah." Jungkook clears his throat. Tips the water cup toward Jimin in something between a toast and a dismissal. "Don't tell him I told you any of that. He'll kill me."

"Noted." Jimin smiles. "Secret's safe."

"Good."

He leans against the opposite counter. Pulls his wallet from the back pocket of the costume pants he's got on under the robe—because the robe doesn't have pockets, which is a design flaw that Spirit Halloween should answer for.

Opens it. Not for any reason. Habit. The way some people check their phone when they're standing still, Jungkook checks his wallet.

Inventory. Cards, cash, the little things that accumulate in the billfold because he never cleans it out—a bodega receipt from last week, his MetroCard, the loyalty card for the coffee shop two blocks from campus that he keeps forgetting to stamp.

And tucked behind the cards, folded small—

His thumb grazes the edge of it.

He closes the wallet. Looks around the kitchen.

The junk drawer by the fridge is half-open. Inside: rubber bands, takeout menus, a screwdriver, and a pad of post-its. Yellow. Small. The cheap kind—not the branded ones, just the generic squares that come in a pack of twelve from the dollar store and end up in every junk drawer in every house in America.

He pulls one off the pad.

Jimin watches him do this with politeness and confusion.

"What are you—"

"Pen?"

"What?"

"Do you have a pen?"

Jimin blinks. Pats his chest. Touches the quill behind his ear—decorative, useless, ink-free. Then reaches into his back pocket and produces a regular ballpoint like a normal human being.

Jungkook takes it. Uncaps it with his teeth. Presses the post-it flat against the counter with his palm.

Writes.

Fast. Then stops. Pen hovering above the yellow square, tip a millimeter from the surface, like the next word is sitting right behind his teeth and he's deciding whether to let it out.

His jaw works. Once.

He writes.

Caps the pen. Clicks it against the counter once—a period at the end of an action—and then folds the edge of the post-it. A small fold. Just the right side, barely a centimeter, pressing the crease flat with his thumbnail.

Holds it out to Jimin.

Jimin looks at the post-it. Then at Jungkook. Then at the post-it again.

"Can you give this to her?" Casual. Or trying to be. The trying is doing more work than the casual. "When you see her."

"To—"

"Yeah."

Jimin takes the post-it. Holds it between his index and middle finger like a card in a magic trick, studying it with the focus of someone who's been handed a piece of evidence and isn't sure what trial it belongs to.

He doesn't unfold it. Doesn't read it. Just nods—slow, careful, a nod that contains about twelve questions he's choosing not to ask.

Because that's what Jimin does. He's starting to get his vibe.

Jimin lets things exist without demanding they explain themselves.

He gets why you like him.

"Okay," Jimin says.

"Thanks."

"You could just... give it to her yourself."

"Yeah." Jungkook takes the pen apart—cap off, cap on, cap off—the idle fidget of a man who has burned through his daily allocation of emotional vulnerability and is now running on fumes. "I could."

He doesn't elaborate. Jimin doesn't push.

The post-it disappears into the chest pocket of Jimin's cardigan, yellow edge just visible against the wool, and Jimin pats it once—a small, careful gesture, like he's tucking something valuable into a safe place even though he doesn't know what it is yet.

A beat passes.

Jungkook looks at the living room. At the wreckage. At the passed-out beards and the empty fog machine and the smashed pumpkin that Taehyung is definitely going to blame on him even though he saw the centurion kick it on the way out. At the string lights still going, amber and warm, giving the whole disaster a filter it doesn't deserve.

He yawns—big and full and theatrical, jaw cracking, arms going up, entire spine releasing—and comes out of it and slaps both hands down on the counter hard enough to rattle two solo cups and startle Jimin into a step back.

"Alright." Too loud. On purpose. The volume of a man who has just, by executive decision, closed a chapter. "Why is everyone so sour?"

Jimin blinks. "It's 2AM."

"Prime time." Already moving, already crossing back toward the living room, the Ghostface robe picking up air behind him like he thinks he's something. "Everything before this was a dress rehearsal. Drinking game. Right now. Whoever's still standing."

"That's like six people."

"Perfect number for a drinking game. Hoseok—HOSEOK—"

"He's going to ignore you," Jimin calls after him, something lighter in his voice than it was twenty minutes ago.

"I'm his favorite."

"You are categorically—"

"Categorically everyone's favorite, Jimin. It's a burden. It's a cross I carry." He's already crouching over the sleeping beard on the small couch, shaking the man's shoulder with the cheerful mercilessness of someone who has decided that suffering should be communal. "C'mon. Up."

A groan rises from the living room. Several. The collective protest of six people who already died once tonight and resent being asked to do it again.

Jungkook grins.

Stupid ideas are, after all, his specialty.

The drinking game was his idea. The Uno was Hobi's. The combination of the two is, in hindsight, a human rights violation.

The thing about drinking Uno is that it sounds simple, right? You play a card, you follow the rules, you drink when the game tells you to drink.

Except there are no official rules for drinking Uno because Uno is a children's game that was never meant to be combined with tequila, which means every single person at this table has a different understanding of how it works, and every single one of you is willing to die on their specific hill.

Way too many people around the coffee table. Cards fanned in hands. Drinks sweating on coasters because even shitfaced, Jungkook respects Tessa's grandmother's furniture.

Yeji's cross-legged on the floor, extremely focused, cards held close to her chest, eyes flicking between her hand and the discard pile with a concentration that suggests she's running probability calculations in real time. Her combat boots are off—somewhere between the third round and the fifth, she kicked them under the couch and declared them 'a disadvantage'—and she's sitting in mismatched socks, frock coat unbuttoned, wine-stained lace at her throat, looking like an aristocratic vampire who takes recreational card games as a personal referendum on her worth as a human being.

Which, knowing Yeji from what little of her he knows, she does.

Irya is next to her, pressed against her side. Eyes at approximately sixty percent operational capacity, the brownies having apparently entered their final form about an hour ago, because Irya's been smiling at her cards like they're friends she's happy to see rather than a strategic hand in a competitive drinking game. She's holding her cards backwards. Nobody's told her.

Yoongi is in the armchair—the man located the most comfortable seat in the room within four seconds of arriving and has not moved since. Claire's skull earring still dangling. Cards held in one hand, phone in the other, scrolling through something while playing.

Hobi's on the floor by the fireplace, legs folded, managing his hand with the same energy he manages everything—bright, organized, vaguely menacing. He's been winning quietly and consistently for three rounds, which is suspicious behavior from a man who claims he 'doesn't really play card games', at least from Jungkook's perspective.

Taehyung is to his left. Pinstripe jacket off now, sleeves rolled, the drawn-on mustache surviving through what can only be described as chemical adhesion or the will of God. He's seven drinks deep and playing Uno like it's something extremely important right now.

Irika, for her part, is curled into the other armchair in her black silk, legs tucked, watching the table with the measured interested of someone who literally evaluates arguments for a living. Jimin's between her and Yoongi, plays smart instead of loud, never more than four cards in hand.

And you.

You're across from him. Knees pulled up, cards balanced against your thighs, the Medusa skirt fanned out around you on the floor. Eyes still a little swollen. Liner still smudged. Gold shimmer still caught in your hair where the chains have mostly come loose.

But you're smiling.

Not the full thing. Not the one that rewrites your whole face and makes your eyes do that specific shape that he's catalogued without meaning to. Just the edge of one. The ghost of it. Enough that he knows the music room worked. The floor worked. Whatever happened between the amp and the hallway—it worked.

Good.

That's good.

His hands are steady now. Some hours ago, they weren't.

He's not thinking about that. He's thinking about the fact that he's holding eleven freaking cards, which is a personal issue, frankly, a staffing crisis, and somebody in this deck owes him an explanation.

He puts down a red seven. Takes a sip of his beer—tenth? eleventh? hard to say, the bottles have been circulating with the same frequency as the cards and at some point the counting became aspirational rather than mathematical.

The thing about drinking with Hobi and Tae is that it's not really drinking. It's endurance athletics.

The three of them have been putting away liquor at a pace that would hospitalize a civilian, and the only visible evidence is that Taehyung's laugh has gotten approximately fifteen percent louder and Hobi's dance moves during the shuffle have gotten approximately thirty percent more elaborate.

Jungkook himself feels pleasantly bulletproof in the way that only happens around the two-bottle mark—warm, steady, everything slightly funnier than it should be but nothing blurry.

His tolerance was forged in freshman year dorm rooms and refined through keeping pace with Hobi at parties where the open bar was the only interesting thing happening.

It's a skill. A terrible skill. But a skill.

You put down a Draw Four.

He looks at it. Looks at you. You're already looking at him—that little anticipatory gleam, the one that says 'I know exactly what I just did and I'm enjoying it.'

He puts down another Draw Four. On top of yours. Blue.

Your mouth opens.

"You CANNOT do that—"

"Yes I can? It's literally the game."

"That is not the game. You can't stack Draw Fours, that's not a real rule—"

"It's the game for every single person who has ever played Uno in the history of the known universe—"

"I have played Uno—"

"It doesn't look like it."

Your eyes narrow. That specific narrow—the one that precedes either a devastating comeback or physical violence, and the odds on which are about fifty-fifty, and he'd be lying if he said he didn't enjoy the coin flick.

"The official rules—"

"Oh, she's bringing out official rules. Citation needed. Peer-reviewed? APA format?"

"The official Mattel rules state that Draw Four cards cannot be stacked—"

"Mattel also made Barbie. Do you want to talk about their track record with realism, or—"

"You two," Yeji says.

Neither of you stops. He physically can't. There's a version of him that could, probably, but that guy's not here tonight.

"—because Barbie's Dream House doesn't have a mortgage and yet somehow she has a convertible—"

"—are you seriously bringing Barbie into an Uno dispute—"

"Shut up," Yeji says. Louder. Both hands flat on the table. "SHUT UP. I have two cards left. I need to concentrate. My brain is still spinning from that brownie and I cannot—I physically cannot—process your childish quarrel about Mattel while I'm trying to win."

Jungkook opens his mouth. Closes it. Decides, wisely, that correcting Yeji on her word choice while she's in this state would likely be the last decision he ever made.

You appear to reach the same conclusion at exactly the same time, because you close your mouth too and stare very hard at your cards.

"Uno," Irya says.

Bright. Cheerful. Like she's announcing a fun fact about butterflies.

Everyone looks at her.

She's holding four cards. Four. Fanned out in front of her face like a tiny decorative screen, one of them backwards, one of them definitely from a different card game because it has a picture of a horse on it and Jungkook is almost certain Uno doesn't have horses.

"Baby." Yeji. Gentle. The voice of a woman that is deeply in love. "You still have four cards. That's not how Uno works."

"But I said it," Irya says, as if the word itself was the whole point and the card count was a secondary concern.

"She has to drink a sip," Yoongi says from the armchair, not looking up from his phone.

"Full glass." Jungkook sits up. Because if this table is going to be governed, someone has to govern it. "False Uno is a full glass."

"Jungkook, stop making rules UP."

That's you. Immediate. Reflexive. Like you have a dedicated neural pathway specifically for detecting his bullshit—which, fine, flattering, that's real prime state—but also wrong, because he's not making rules up, he's legislating.

"I'm NOT making rules up. She said Uno at the wrong time. That's a penalty. That's regulation."

"That's not—okay, first of all, there is no 'regulation' in drunk Uno. Second of all, the actual false Uno penalty is that you only drink if someone calls you out before you when you have one card and forget to say it. She said it with four cards. That's just—wrong. It's not a penalty. It's just incorrect."

"So there's no consequence for being wrong? What's next, we kiss serial killers?"

"The consequence is that we all saw it happen and now we know she doesn't understand the game."

"Babe, I understand the game," Irya says, sounding genuinely hurt.

"Of course you do," Yeji soothes, patting her knee.

"I have a horse," Irya adds, holding up the non-Uno card with pride.

"You're a tyrant," Jungkook tells you, because the Irya situation has clearly reached a dead end and the Draw Four dispute needs resolution. "An authoritarian. A despot. You should all be ashamed of yourselves for living under this regime."

"The regime where we follow the actual rules?"

"The regime where one person decides what the rules are and the rest of us suffer."

"That's called playing a game correctly—"

"Jungkook." Taehyung. Flat. Zero patience. "Shut the fuck up and eat the four cards."

"I'm not eating—"

Taehyung reaches across, picks up Jungkook's glass—three-quarters full, tequila and something, who even knows anymore—and drains it. One long pull. Sets it down empty.

"There." Tae wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, the drawn-on mustache surviving the gesture through what is now clearly some form of dark magic. "Problem solved. Take the cards."

"You just drank my drink."

"Consider it conflict resolution."

"That was my tequila—"

"It was everyone's tequila. Tequila is communal."

"Tequila is explicitly not communal—"

"I'm with Y/N on this one."

Irika. Who, in case anybody forgot, is a judge. A private judge, technically, but the distinction is irrelevant when she deploys that tone—level, final, the vocal equivalent of a gavel coming down.

Every head turns.

Irika shrugs one shoulder. Adjusts the black silk of her Morticia dress. "Stacking Draw Fours isn't in the official ruleset. It's a house rule at best. If no house rule was established at the start of play, default rules apply. He draws four."

Silence.

"Well." Hobi spreads his hands. "The judge has spoken. Overruled, Jungkook."

"She's not—she's not a judge right now! She's Morticia Addams! There's no judicial authority vested in a Halloween costume—"

"I'm always a judge," Irika says. Mild. Terrifying.

"That's—okay, that's actually a little scary—"

"Take the cards," Yoongi says from behind his phone, not looking up. "You're holding up the game."

"I'm holding up the game? I'm the one trying to maintain competitive integrity—"

"You're the one making up rules because you're losing," Yoongi says.

"I'm not losing. I have a strategy."

He does not have a strategy. He has ten cards and momentum.

"Your strategy is yelling."

"My strategy is passion—"

"Jungkook." Hobi sets his cards down. Folds his hands. Assumes the posture of a man about to deliver a verdict of his own. "You have ten cards. Yoongi has three. I have four. You are, by every measurable metric, losing."

"Metrics are a social construct."

"That's not what social construct means," Yoongi says.

"Yoongi, I swear to god—"

"Okay, you know what?" Taehyung leans forward. Points at Hobi, then Yoongi. "Leave him alone. He's playing his way. It's creative."

Jungkook turns to him. Chest swelling.

His guy. His day one.

"Thank you."

"It's stupid-creative. But it's creative."

"I'll take it."

"Oh, here we go." Hobi rolls his eyes—theatrical, full rotation. "Here we go. The dynamic duo. Tae, you always do this."

"Do what?"

"This!" Hobi gestures between Taehyung and Jungkook with both hands. "He makes that face—the pouty face, the big eyes, the whole kicked-puppy act—and you fold. Every single time. Like clockwork."

He's not making a face.

Probably.

He can't see his own face, but the odds of it being pouty are low.

...Medium.

Whatever.

"I do not fold—"

"You fold like a lawn chair," Yoongi says. Still scrolling. "It's honestly impressive. He looks at you and your spine just—"

He makes a collapsing gesture with one hand. Doesn't look up from his phone while doing it, which makes it worse.

"I am not—my spine is fine—"

"Your spine is compromised," Hobi says. "By his face."

"That's insane—"

"Tae." Yoongi. Flat. "He once convinced you to drive to New Jersey at 3AM for a cheesesteak because he said please with his lower lip out. You drove to New Jersey."

"It was a good cheesesteak!"

"It was a Wawa."

"Wawa has great cheesesteaks—"

"It was a GAS STATION, Taehyung—"

"With GREAT CHEESESTEAKS—"

Jungkook is beaming. Not even trying to hide it.

For the record: it was a great cheesesteak, the lower lip was simply a strategic maneuver and he regrets absolutely nothing.

And then, across the table, you've given up on containing it—the laugh comes out open, unguarded, the kind that uses your shoulders and tips your head back, and the sound does something to the room.

Warms it. Fills it. Makes everything lighter by exactly the amount that matters.

Good.

He takes the four cards. Doesn't even care anymore.

Three rounds later, Yoongi wins.

Obviously.

He lays down his last card—a green reverse—with the energy of someone submitting a tax return. No celebration. No gloating. Just sets it on the pile, picks up his drink, takes a sip, and says "that's the game" the way you'd say 'it's raining' like it's a fact.

"How," Yeji says. She's staring at the discard pile like it personally betrayed her. "HOW. You were on your phone the entire time."

"Multitasking," Yoongi says.

"That's not multitasking, that's—witchcraft—"

"It's pattern recognition. The discard pile is predictable once you track color cycling and hold distribution." He takes another sip. "Also, Taehyung has a tell."

"I do NOT—"

"You tap your cards when you're about to play a Wild. Every time. Without fail."

Taehyung looks at his hands. Then at his cards. Then at his hands again, as if they've been operating independently and without his consent.

Jungkook makes a mental note to watch for the tap next round and then a second mental note that Yoongi definitely has been reading everyone at this table all night, himself included, and elects not to pursue that thought any further.

Jimin lays down a red two. Looks at his remaining card. Looks at the table.

"Uno."

Said quiet. Almost casual. But his posture shifts—straighter, alert, the way someone sits when they know the whole table is about to target them.

You play a red reverse.

The direction flips. Back to Jimin.

Which means Jimin has to play. Right now. On a red.

And Jungkook, who spends most of his waking life watching people for a living (or at least for a degree)—catches the flicker. The expression of a man who does not, in fact, have a red card.

And Jungkook would love to say he watched what happened next with the full weight of his professional attention.

But he didn't.

Because you're still holding the reverse card play with that little surprised-gloat thing, chin up—the one where you refuse to smile outright but the corners give you away—and his eyes go there instead.

Of course they do.

You set the trap, the trap worked, and now you're being insufferable about it in a register that's only visible directly across the table.

He's directly across the table. So.

Two seconds. Maybe three.

When he looks back, Jimin is laying down a red eight.

"That's the game," Jimin says, with a smile that's a degree too innocent.

Huh?

"WAIT." Hobi slams both palms on the table. "Wait wait wait. Did he just—"

"He won." Yoongi says with zero inflection.

"He won? He WON?! He was stuck! I saw that face! He did the face—the trapped face, the 'I don't have a red' face—and then OUT OF NOWHERE, red eight?"

"He had a red eight."

"He absolutely did not have a red eight, Min Yoongi, don't you dare—your hands literally moved across the table!"

"I was picking up my drink."

The drink is right there. On the coaster. Half-finished. Sweating gently. An alibi with condensation.

"You put your phone down." Hobi points at it, face down on the armrest now. "You put your PHONE down. You haven't put that phone down since we sat down. That's premeditation."

"Are you accusing me of rigging a card game." Yoongi looks at Hobi over the rim of his glass. The skull earring sways. His expression is the dictionary definition of unbothered. "At a Halloween party. In someone's grandparents' house."

"YES. That is exactly what I'm accusing you of."

"Interesting theory."

"It's not a theory! I have eyes! Nobody goes from 'trapped face' to the exact card they need unless—" his finger sways between them, "—someone passed him—"

"Sounds like luck to me," Jimin says.

"It does sound like luck," Yoongi agrees.

"You two are—" Hobi sputters. Points at one, then the other. "You're in cahoots. You're in open, blatant, shameless cahoots and I am being gaslit at a coffee table—"

"Cahoots is a strong word," Jimin says.

"Do you have a weaker one?"

"Coincidence."

"COINCIDENCE—"

"I think we should move on," Yoongi says, waving his hand off.

"I think you should be IMPRISONED—"

"Drama," Yoongi mumbles. "The performer's curse."

Hobi's mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. He looks at Jungkook for backup. Jungkook raises both hands—palms out, staying clear, because getting between Hobi and Yoongi during an integrity dispute is how people disappear.

He catches your eye across the table.

You're smiling.

He looks at his cards.

Draws a green two. Puts it down.

Smiles.

His hands have stopped shaking.

He's finally managed to get the shakes from the adrenaline down, and it is only then that his eyes catch the room—which is, objectively, insane.

A full music room in someone's grandparents' house, because this is Greenwich Village and rich people furnish their spare rooms the way normal people furnish Pinterest boards: aspirationally and with zero fiscal accountability.

But his hands. They're steady now. Resting on his thighs where he's sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor with his back against a leather armchair.

Steady.

Three minutes ago they weren't.

Hobi's next to him, legs extended, ankles crossed, leaning back on his palms in that way he has where every position looks like a magazine spread.

Dance Studio Owner Relaxes After Preventing Friend From Committing Aggravated Assault At Costume Party. Shot on location.

The music room is small. Wood-paneled. A baby grand piano in the corner with a dust cloth draped over it like a ghost that gave up. Bookshelves full of vinyl—actual vinyl, organized by what looks like decade, which Jungkook is trying very hard not to get up and inspect because if he starts flipping through some dead rich guy's record collection right now he'll lose the next forty minutes trying to find a Mayer one and also the last remaining thread of whatever emotional processing he's supposed to be doing.

There's a cello propped in a stand by the window. A violin case on the shelf. Framed photos of someone shaking hands with Yo-Yo Ma.

And on the wall, between two sconces that look like they belong in a cathedral—

A fucking Fender Stratocaster.

Sunburst finish. Not new—played, lived-in, the kind of wear that comes from hands, not neglect. The frets show use. The pickguard has a faint scratch pattern near the bridge that tells him someone used to strum hard and slightly too low.

Whoever owned this loved it. Loved it the way you can only love an instrument that's been your primary method of saying the things your mouth won't.

He hasn't looked away from it since they walked in.

"So," Hobi says. Casual. "John Mayer or Hendrix?"

"What?"

"If you could only listen to one for the rest of your life."

"That's—" He tears his eyes from the Strat. "That's not even a fair question. Those are completely different—"

"It's absolutely a fair question. I ask every musician I meet. It's diagnostic."

"Diagnostic of what?"

"Of who you are as a person." Hobi counts on his fingers. "Hendrix people are chaos agents. They want to burn the building down and build something new in the ashes. Mayer people want to sit on the porch of the building and write a song about how the light hits it at 6pm."

"Those aren't the only two options."

"They're the only two that matter for this exercise."

"What if I say both?"

"Then you're a coward and I lose respect for you."

Jungkook snorts. Picks at a thread on the knee of his costume. The Ghostface robe pools around him like he's some kind of haunted monk who chose vibes over doctrine.

"Mayer."

"Knew it."

"You didn't know it."

"I absolutely knew it. You're a porch guy. You want the thing to be beautiful and precise and a little bit heartbreaking. Hendrix guys want the thing to be loud."

"Mayer can be loud."

"Mayer is loud the way a thunderstorm is loud. Hendrix is loud the way a car crash is loud. Different energy."

He's right. Annoyingly, thoroughly right, in the way Hobi is always right about things that shouldn't be in his area of expertise but somehow are because the man treats every domain of human knowledge like a dance floor—just walks onto it and starts moving and somehow it works.

Jungkook looks at the guitar again.

"The Trio stuff is what got me," he says. "Not the solo albums. The live Trio recordings. 'Where the Light Is.' The way he strips everything back and it's just—guitar and rhythm and this... conversation happening between his hands and the instrument. No production. No tricks. Just the thing itself."

"That's the porch," Hobi says.

"That's the porch," Jungkook agrees.

Silence. Good silence.

Then Hobi does the thing.

"Why'd you stop playing?"

Jungkook's fingers go still on the thread.

"You used to play all the time, man. At Tae's, remember? You had the acoustic with you. Played for like two hours straight on his fire escape. Couldn't get you to stop."

He remembers. Tae's old walkup. Before the whole shape of their friend group had solidified into what it is now.

Jungkook would show up with the guitar because he'd been playing at campus that afternoon between classes—couldn't play at home, obviously, because home was Mia's apartment and the guitar was noise at home—so he'd carry it around like an organ donor, playing wherever she wasn't.

Practice rooms at NYU. Taehyung's fire escape. The back corner of Blueline on slow afternoons.

Anywhere that wasn't the Upper East Side.

Anywhere she couldn't hear it and say 'do you have to do that right now?'

"And then one day it was just—gone." Hobi tilts his head. "Like someone unplugged you or something, man."

The thread is still between his fingers. He doesn't pull it. Doesn't move.

He could give the easy version.

Got busy, different priorities, you know how it goes.

Hobi would accept it. That's his whole thing—holds the door open and waits for you to walk through on your own time.

"Mia said it was noise."

Not the easy version, then.

Hobi purses his lips together.

"She—" He clears his throat.

Something shifts in his chest. Maybe the stone. The one he's been carrying so long it feels like an organ.

"She used to say it was a distraction. That I spent more time with the guitar than with her. Which—I mean, some days, yeah. Probably. Because playing was the only part of my day that still felt like—"

Like what?

Like himself. Like the version of himself that existed before the debt and the phone calls at 2AM and the birthday that wasn't a birthday and the night his mother cried because she believed something that never happened.

He doesn't say any of that.

He says: "She wanted me to sell my equipment. To prove I was serious about us."

The words lodge in his throat before he can release them.

"And I did. Most of it. Sold the amp first. Then the pedals. Kept the acoustic for a while because I thought—maybe if I just played quieter. If I did it when she wasn't around. If I made myself—"

His jaw works.

"She found out I was still playing. Said I was sneaking around. Like playing guitar in an empty apartment was the same as—"

Stops. Swallows.

"Anyway. Sold the acoustic too. After that."

The room is very quiet after that.

It sucks.

It sucks because there's a whole building full of people being twenty-something and careless and alive, and here he is on a music room floor telling Hoseok about the time he let someone convince him that the best part of himself was an inconvenience.

"She got what she wanted, I guess. I stopped playing. And then we broke up and I just—didn't start again. Couldn't pick one up without hearing her in my head telling me it was a waste of time."

He exhales.

"Which is—fun. Super fun."

"Real fun," Hobi says.

But there is no humor in it. Just some sort of echo. Holding the word so Jungkook doesn't have to carry it alone.

Quiet settles once more.

Hobi isn't looking at him—looking at the ceiling, at the Yo-Yo Ma photo, at his own hands—giving him room the way you give a patient space in a hospital floor.

"Is that why you switched?"

Jungkook blinks. "What?"

"Majors. You started in music production, right? Tae mentioned it once. And then you moved to film." Hobi says it evenly. No charge. Like he's confirming directions, not opening a wound. "Was that her too?"

The question sits there for a few beats before Jungkook finally nods.

Doesn't elaborate. Can feel the edge of something in his chest—the place where this conversation becomes a different conversation, a worse one, the one where he has to explain that it wasn't just the guitar.

It was the major and the friends and the way he dressed and the amount of time he spent on his art and the food he ate and the way he breathed, probably, if she'd figured out how to critique that too.

The conversation where he has to say 'she took everything apart, piece by piece, so slowly I didn't notice until there was nothing left' and then sit with the fact that he let it happen.

He allowed it to happen.

Even after he'd seen it happen before through his own eyes.

He doesn't want to go there.

His jaw tightens. Fingers press into his own knee. He can feel the rehearsed cheerfulness loading—some joke about film school, some deflection about Tarantino or aspect ratios—

Hobi stands up.

Doesn't push. Doesn't probe. Doesn't say 'you should talk about this' or any of the things that are probably true and absolutely not what he needs to hear right now.

Just walks to the wall. Reaches up. Lifts the Strat off its hooks with both hands—careful, respectful, the way you handle something that belongs to someone who isn't here to say yes—and carries it back.

Holds it out.

"Hobi."

"Just hold it."

"That's not ours."

"We're borrowing it. Tessa said the music room was open. That includes the instruments."

"That's a vintage Strat."

"And you're a guy who hasn't played enough. Seems like a match."

The guitar hangs there. Sunburst. Scratched pickguard. Someone's love, left on a wall.

His hand comes up before his brain clears it.

The neck slides into his palm and his fingers close around it and—

Oh.

The weight. The specific, exact, irreplaceable weight of a guitar in his hands.

Six strings and a body and a neck that fits against his forearm like it was measured for him, and his left hand moves to the frets on autopilot—memory from ten thousand hours that Mia couldn't erase no matter how many amps she made him sell—and his right hand finds the strings and he brushes them. Just once. Unamplified, barely audible, a whisper of harmonic vibration that travels through the wood into his chest.

His eyes close.

Fuck, he missed this.

Not like missing a hobby. Not like 'oh yeah, used to do that, should get back to it'.

Missing it like a limb. Like a language he used to dream in. Like the one thing that always made sense when nothing else did—not his family, not Mia, not the mess of his own head—just hands on strings and the sound that came out being exactly the thing he meant to say.

Opens his eyes. Looks at Hobi.

"There's an amp." Nods toward the corner. Small Fender combo, tucked beside the piano bench. "Can you plug me in?"

Hobi grins—the real one, not the redirect grin from the garden—and he's already moving, pulling the cable from its coil, flicking the power switch.

Jungkook plugs in the jack. Adjusts the volume. Tests a chord—open G, ringing, full—and the amp translates it into something that pushes against the walls and makes the wood paneling vibrate.

His chest expands. Actually physically expands, like his lungs figured out how to work again.

"I've been getting back into it, actually." He adjusts the tuning peg on the high E. Slightly flat. "At the apartment. Yoongi can vouch for it. He's been bitching through the wall for a month."

"Doesn't Yoongi bitch about pretty much everything except for hiking and music?"

"Yeah, but this bitching is specific. This is targeted complaints about my chord voicings at 11PM. Which means he's listening. Which means I'm playing good enough for him to notice."

"That is the most roundabout progress metric I've ever heard."

"The Yoongi Scale. If he's annoyed, you're on track."

Hobi laughs. Real, warm, settling back against the armchair while the amp sits between them patient and waiting.

Jungkook's left hand moves up the neck. Third fret. Index finger on the G string. Ring finger stretches to the B.

Doesn't think about what he's going to play. Just lets his hands go where they want.

The cleanest four-chord structure in the history of pop music, and his fingers know it the way they know the shape of a coffee mug, the way they know the frets on his own guitar back at the apartment, fog evaporating through rust and disuse and settling into something that doesn't feel rusty at all.

Feels like coming home to a house he forgot he still had a key to.

"Wait—" Hobi sits forward. "Is that Coldplay?"

"Yeah." Jungkook grins. Keeps playing. His right hand finds a picking pattern—the one from the acoustic version, not the album. "Their guitar work doesn't get enough credit, man. Everyone talks about the vocals and the production but the actual guitar lines—especially the early stuff—the chords are basic but the voicings are so specific. Like, the way Buckland uses the delay to create these layers—"

He shifts to the verse progression. Adds the delay-echo pattern, approximating it with his picking hand since there's no pedal.

"—see, that? That shimmer? That's not reverb, that's rhythmic delay. Dotted eighth notes. He's basically playing a duet with himself. The original note and the echo become two different melodic lines happening at once."

"You're nerding out."

"Appreciate me educating you, man."

"You are fully, completely nerding out right now and your face is doing the thing."

"I don't have a thing."

"The thing where your eyes get big and you start talking with your hands except you can't because you're holding a guitar so your eyebrows are doing all the work. That thing."

Jungkook's eyebrows, which are in fact doing an unreasonable amount of work, attempt to settle into something neutral.

They don't quite make it.

He doesn't care.

Because the Strat is singing under his hands and the amp is warm and the room is humming and his fingers remember every single shape and his chest feels wider than it has in months.

Maybe longer. Maybe since before.

He cycles back to the chorus. G, D, C.

Yellow.

He's always liked this song. Can't even remember when he first heard it—it's one of those songs that exists in the background of being alive, like it was already playing when you showed up and never really stopped. In grocery stores and Uber rides and the credits of some movie he can't name.

The kind of song you don't choose, it just—lives in you.

He played it for Mia once.

Early on. Before things got bad—or before he realized things were bad, which isn't the same thing but felt like it at the time. Sat on the edge of her bed with the acoustic and played the whole thing start to finish because he'd been practicing the fingerpicking pattern for weeks and he wanted to show her, wanted to share the one thing that made his chest feel bigger instead of smaller.

She listened. Or—sat there while sound happened near her. Which isn't the same thing either.

When he finished she said 'I don't get it'.

It wasn't really mean, nor cruel. It was simply... blank.

Almost as if he'd shown her a card trick and she couldn't figure out why he expected her to be impressed.

«The lyrics don't even make sense. What does 'your skin and bones turn into something beautiful' even mean? And why is everything yellow? It's a weird color to write a song about. If he wanted to be romantic he should've picked red or something.»

And Jungkook had sat there with the guitar still warm in his lap and thought—it's not about the color. It's not about any of the words, individually.

It's about how they sound together.

How the melody makes the language into something that means more than its parts.

How yellow isn't a color in the song, it's a feeling—warmth, and light, and the specific shade of being so full of something you can't name that the only word big enough to hold it is a color.

He didn't say any of that. Said 'yeah, you're probably right' and put the guitar away and never played it for her again.

Doesn't tell Hobi any of this.

Just plays.

And it feels good. Playing it. Right now, in this room, on this guitar. He doesn't know why. Doesn't interrogate it.

"The opening is the best part," he says, already shifting up the neck. "Everyone remembers the chorus but the but the way it comes back around—listen—"

He moves to the higher register. The melody climbs. Fingers stretching for the voicings—Em, D, C, and then back down—and the notes ring out clean and full and something about the sound in this wood-paneled room, the way it bounces off the shelves and the piano dust cloth and—

Sounds right.

Just. Sounds right.

His throat hums. The melody rises in his chest before it reaches his mouth—that feeling, the one where a song is sitting right behind your teeth and all you have to do is open up and let it out.

"Look at the stars."

Quiet. Almost nothing. More breath than voice.

"Look how they shine for you."

Louder now. Finding it. The shape of the words settling into the shape of the notes like something that was always supposed to be there.

"And everything you do."

He doesn't sound like Chris Martin. Doesn't try to. His voice is lower, rougher, slightly raw in a way that the studio version isn't—the sound of someone singing because the song asked him to, not because an audience is listening.

Hobi is still.

"Yeah, they were all yellow."

The chord rings out. Sustains. Fills the room and holds there—a single, shimmering, fading note that doesn't want to die.

He lets it.

Watches his own hands on the strings. Steady.

Not shaking. Not even a little.

"Shit," Hobi says softly. "Yeah. Okay."

"Okay what?"

"Just—okay. You're back." A breath. "That's all. You're back."

Jungkook looks at him. At the room. At the Strat in his lap.

Doesn't know why his eyes sting.

Allergies, probably. Old house. Dust on the piano cloth.

The door opens.

He stops. Hands flat on the strings. Killing the vibration.

A reflex so deeply wired it happens before he even sees who's there—the automatic silencing of sound when a door opens, because doors opening used to mean 'put the guitar down' and that's old code he's still debugging.

Taehyung is in the doorway. Pinstripe rumpled. Pocket square clinging on through sheer willpower. Drawn-on mustache smudged, giving him less Gomez Addams and more 'guy who fell asleep on a newspaper'.

And behind him—

You.

You with red eyes and makeup wrecked and eyeliner tracked down your cheeks in dark smudges that Jimin is absolutely going to grieve. Gold shimmer smeared across your cheekbones like a craft aisle casualty. The snake cuff is still there. The chain belt. The corset.

Same costume, different girl wearing it than an hour ago.

Something tightens behind his sternum.

Taehyung's face splits open before Jungkook can process the rest.

"Was that you?"

Sheepish isn't a setting Jungkook wears well. But he can feel it on his face: the half-grin, the slight duck, the hand rubbing the back of his neck.

"Yeah."

"Dude." Taehyung crosses the room in three strides, grinning so wide the smudged mustache lifts on both sides. "It's been so long since I've heard you play. Like—years. That sounded incredible."

"It hasn't been that long." He adjusts the Strat in his lap. "Yoongi's heard me plenty. Through the wall. Loudly and against his will."

"It's true."

Your voice. From the doorway.

You're leaning against the frame. Arms crossed. One foot in, one foot out.

Plausible deniability in both directions—your default stance in any room you haven't committed to yet.

"He plays at like eleven PM on a Tuesday and Yoongi bangs on the wall and then he plays louder and then Yoongi bangs harder and then Griffin starts yelling and it's a whole production."

Taehyung turns around. Looks at you. Back at Jungkook. Back at you.

"Wait—you've heard him play?"

Like you just told him you've witnessed a solar eclipse. Like Jungkook playing guitar in his own apartment with you on the other side of a shared wall is classified intel.

Your eyebrows lift. "...Yeah?"

Said like 'obviously'. Like you genuinely don't understand why this is a question.

Tae looks at him. He sees the processing frown, the one where information he had doesn't match information he just got.

Jungkook shrugs. "I've been getting back into it. Recently. She lives with me, so—"

Beat.

"I mean. In the apartment. Same apartment. That's—yeah."

Eloquence. Peak performance. A master class in language from a man holding a borrowed Stratocaster in a Ghostface robe.

"How recently?" Taehyung asks.

"Couple months?"

"Couple months?" Tae's voice pitches. "You've been playing again for a couple months and you didn't—"

"Tae, I just started picking it up at night. When I couldn't sleep. It wasn't an announcement situation."

"You could've told me."

"Tae."

"I'm just saying."

"And I'm just saying it was small. I wanted it small for a while."

Taehyung reads that. He's always been good at reading the things Jungkook doesn't say—since before Mia, since high school, since the era of guitar riffs and avoidant shrugs that Tae just learned the translation for.

"Okay." Softer. "Yeah. I get that."

A beat.

"It sounded really good, though."

"Thanks, man."

You've moved further into the room. Not all the way—migrated from the doorframe to the cello stand, close enough to be present, far enough to bolt.

Your fingers trace the edge of the cello's scroll with absent curiosity.

"So what was the song?" you ask.

"Coldplay."

"Coldplay." You make a face. Not a bad one—the face of someone forming an opinion in real time. "Like, Coldplay Coldplay? 'Fix You,' stadium tour, your-dad's-favorite-band Coldplay?"

"'Yellow,' actually."

"Huh." You tip your head. "That's their best one."

He blinks. "You think?"

"Yeah. The early stuff before they went all—"

You make a gesture that somehow communicates an entire artistic trajectory from Parachutes to Music of the Spheres. Both hands. A facial expression he's never seen before but immediately understands.

"It's the only one that still sounds like a band in a room. Everything after got so big. 'Yellow' is just a guy with a guitar who feels too much."

A guy with a guitar who feels too much.

Huh.

"Most people say 'Fix You,'" he says.

"Most people are wrong."

"Most people think 'The Scientist' is their peak."

"Most people also think Subway is a reasonable lunch option. Most people can't be trusted."

He grins. Can't help it. Doesn't try.

"What's your issue with Subway?"

"My issue with Subway is that it's bread-flavored depression served by someone who hates you, and I refuse to elaborate further."

"That's a strong stance on a sandwich chain."

"All my stances on sandwich chains are strong. That's what separates me from animals."

Hobi's head is moving between you two. Back and forth. Back and forth. He catches it in his peripheral—the look on Hobi's face isn't suspicion. It's closer to surprise. The pleasant kind. Like he expected you two to be oil and water and instead walked into... whatever this is.

The thing where you quote each other's rhythms and volley insults that land like inside jokes.

"Play something," you say.

"I was playing. You interrupted."

"We enhanced your audience. You went from one to three. That's a two hundred percent increase. You're welcome."

"That's not how percentages—it's three hundred—never mind." He adjusts the guitar. "Requests?"

"Surprise me."

"Dangerous thing to say to a man with a Stratocaster."

"I live with you and your 11PM concerts. Nothing you do with a guitar surprises me anymore."

He plays the opening riff to 'Wonderwall.'

Your face goes through six stages of disgust in approximately 1.4 seconds.

"Get out."

"Today is gonna be the day—"

"Get OUT."

"That they're gonna throw it back to you—"

"I'm going to break that guitar over your head. That is a vintage instrument and I'm willing to sacrifice it."

He's laughing too hard to keep playing. The riff collapses into a mess of muted strings and his own wheezing, and Hobi's gone—full-body, head-back, the silent dying kind—and Taehyung is watching with something that's softened slightly from vigilance into... huh.

Not quite warmth. Not yet. But the guard dog sat down.

Tae's phone buzzes. He pulls it out. Reads the screen.

"Shit—Irika." He holds the phone up like it's evidence. "She's looking for me. Apparently the Morticia wig is 'doing something' and she needs me."

He looks at Jungkook. Holds his gaze for a beat longer than the sentence requires.

"You good?"

It's not really about the guitar.

"Yeah, man. I'm good."

Taehyung nods. Glances at you—brief, assessing, not unfriendly but not warm either, and then he's gone. Pinstripes disappearing through the doorway, phone already at his ear, voice dropping into the specific low register he only uses for Irika.

And then it's three.

Him, Hobi, and you.

It feels—

Good. It feels good. Like the right number of people in the right size room with the right amount of noise, which is almost none.

He plays something, just chords now. Open shapes, ringing, cycling through a progression that doesn't belong to any song. Just sound. Just the Strat filling the room with warmth because it can and he's letting it.

"Okay," Hobi says, slapping his knees and standing. "I'm getting drinks. Actual drinks. Not whatever chemical weapon I made earlier—"

"Your drink was attempted murder," Jungkook says.

"It was festive. It had food coloring."

"The food coloring was the least of its crimes."

"I'm getting water. And maybe beer. You want beer?" He points at Jungkook. Then at you. "Beer? Water? Both?"

"Beer," Jungkook says.

"Whatever's open," you say, and your voice is still doing the raw thing but it's steadier now. More you.

"Two beers and a water. Back in five." Hobi's already at the door, already in motion. "Don't let him play 'Wonderwall' again. I know his tricks."

"Noted," you say.

The door clicks shut.

And then it's two.

He keeps playing. Soft. Nothing specific. Just his fingers and the strings and the sound filling the space between you that's smaller now, denser, without Hobi's brightness to dilute it.

You've sat down next to him, knees pulled up, skirt draped. Close enough to the amp that you'd feel it vibrate through the floor.

He lets the last chord ring out and fade. Sets the guitar down across his lap. Pulls out his phone—automatic, reflex, the thing his hands do when they stop doing something else. Screen on. Thumb swiping before his brain catches up with what his muscle memory just opened.

His feed loads—the grid, the blacks and greys, the shadow-heavy compositions—and before his brain can even register the difference—

"Huh?"

He looks up. You've tilted your head. Eyes on his phone—not leaning in, not craning, just the casual glance of someone who happened to look over at the exact wrong moment.

"That's not your feed, is it?"

Oh.

Oh, shit.

"Yeah, it is."

He switches accounts. Locks the phone. Pockets it. Three movements, clean, fast.

"Just looks different because I—reorganized. The grid. New layout."

"You reorganized your Instagram grid."

"Yeah."

"You."

"Me."

"Jeon Jungkook. Reorganized his Instagram grid. The same Jeon Jungkook whose apartment room looks like a frat house had a seizure."

"My room is curated—"

"Your room has a protein shake stain on the ceiling and you told me it was 'abstract art.'"

"It is abstract art. It's a Jackson Pollock."

"It's whey protein and negligence."

"Agree to disagree."

You squint at him. Not suspiciously—more like amused. Like you know there's something there but it's small and harmless and not worth the dig when you're sitting on a floor in a wrecked costume with mascara on your face and the night you've had.

Your eyes drift back to the cello.

Interest shelved.

Not deleted—he knows you, you don't delete, you file things for later retrieval at the most inconvenient possible moment—but shelved.

Good enough.

He looks at you.

Now that the phone's away and it's just you and the amp and the few inches of hardwood between his knee and yours.

Your eyes are swollen. Not a lot. Just enough that the liner smudges underneath look heavier, and the gold shimmer Irya swept across your cheekbones has been redistributed by tears into uneven streaks, and there's a mascara track on your left cheek that you clearly tried to wipe and only succeeded in smearing.

"You okay?"

He says it to the guitar. To the frets. To his own fingers resting on the strings.

Not to your face, because your face is doing something that makes his chest tight and he doesn't have the bandwidth for that and eye contact simultaneously.

You look at him. He can feel it.

"Yeah. I'm fine."

"Okay."

A beat. Two.

"Your eyes are red."

"I'm high. We're all high. You literally watched me eat two brownies."

"That's not baked red." He lifts his gaze from the frets. Meets yours. "That's been-crying red. Different color. Different puffiness pattern. Baked red goes in the whites. Crying red goes around the edges."

"Did you just say puffiness pattern?"

"I'm a film major. I notice faces."

"You can't just use that excuse for everything."

"I'm just saying. You've been crying. And not in a subtle way. Like—it's pretty visible. From across the room. Possibly from space. NASA could probably—"

You swat his arm.

Open-palmed. Quick. The kind that's more exclamation point than assault.

He chuckles. Rocks slightly with the impact, more from dramatics than force.

"I'm just saying," he repeats, quieter now. "Anyone can tell."

"Great. Fantastic. Love that for me."

"Your mascara's doing a whole thing."

"I know it's doing a thing."

"It's migrated. Like a bird. It started on your eyes and now it's—" He gestures vaguely at the lower half of your face.

"I am going to actually break that guitar—"

"Okay, okay."

He sets the Strat down carefully—lowering it into the open case on the floor with the gentleness of someone putting a baby to bed, because it's a vintage instrument and he has respect even if he has no tact—and shifts so he's facing you

He pulls the sleeve of the Ghostface robe over his hand. Makes a fist inside the fabric so the cuff stretches over his knuckles—cheap polyester, Spirit Halloween's finest—and brings it to your face.

You look at the ground.

Not at him.

At the hardwood between your knees, at the dust in the grout line, at anything that isn't the guy who's currently dabbing at your mascara with a serial killer costume like it's a washcloth.

He's gentle about it. Doesn't think about being gentle—just is, the same way he's gentle with Griffin when the little idiot gets something stuck in his fur.

The sleeve drags soft across your cheekbone. The mascara smears more than it lifts, but it's something.

It's less.

Your eyes stay down.

He switches to the other side. Same slow drag. The dark crescent beneath your left eye fades to a smudge, and beneath it your skin is warm and slightly swollen and he's not—

He's cleaning mascara. That's it. A service. Public decency.

"There." He drops his hand. Sleeve still bunched. "Less disaster. More... controlled disaster."

You don't respond.

Which is—fine. That's fine.

He drops the sleeve back into place and shifts on his legs and tries to look anywhere that isn't the side of your face because the side of your face is doing something he doesn't have the emotional language for.

Your lashes. The smear of gold on your cheekbone that he didn't get all the way off. The shape of your mouth when it's not saying anything sarcastic.

Amp hum. Floorboards. The specific not-quite-silence of a music room at 1AM.

Then—

"It's a good song."

Quiet. Out of nowhere.

He glances at you. "What?"

"The one you were playing. Earlier."

"Oh." Beat. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

You don't look at him. You're looking at your own hands. Rolling one of the loose gold chains from your hair between your fingers like it owes you something.

"It's stupid."

He waits. Doesn't push. His right leg is falling asleep but he's not about to shift and risk turning this into A Thing.

A breath. You exhale it slow, through your nose, and it comes out more like a sigh than anything else.

"I used to listen to it when I was stressed. In high school. Like—if I had a big test coming up or whatever."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. My parents were really—"

You stop. Start again.

"I was a good kid. Like. Straight A-plus kid, the whole—" The gesture. The small one. The 'you know the type' gesture that compresses an entire childhood into a flick of the wrist. "Valedictorian track. My mom used to leave little notes on the fridge when report cards came out. 'We're so proud.' In this specific handwriting she saved for—I don't know. The handwriting was nice. It was always nice."

He nods. Doesn't say anything. Doesn't know what to say.

"And they were good parents, Rogue. Like. I want to be clear about that. They—" Another sigh. Smaller. "My dad got me this iPod when I was eleven. The pink mini one. The one that was really hard to get that year and I'd been asking for it for months and he just—showed up with it. And when the DS came out? I had it before anyone in my class had it. All my friends were obsessed. Like, the day it came out, he was in line. My dad stood in a line at a Best Buy for a Nintendo DS. For me."

A small laugh that isn't really a laugh.

"They were kind. I don't want to—this isn't that. I'm not trying to—"

You stop.

He watches your hand tighten on the gold chain.

"God, I sound so stupid."

"You don't."

"I do. I sound like a spoiled—I don't even know what I'm talking about. They were good. They were good parents. My mom packed my lunch until I was sixteen. She still sends me care packages. She sent me socks last month, Rogue, like—socks. Because she read online that students don't buy enough socks and she got worried."

Your voice is thinner.

"So I don't know why I'm—"

Don't know why you're what.

He wants to ask. Doesn't.

Because something about the way you're talking is familiar in a way he can't place.

The hedging. The qualifying. The 'they were good, though' said on loop like a defensive spell you keep casting in case someone accuses you of being ungrateful. He's—

He's done that. That's his thing. That's his move.

His jaw does something.

"Anyway. The song."

"The song."

"It just—it says 'look at the stars.' At the beginning. And when I was—when I would have a bad night, and there'd be a thunderstorm, and I'd be—" You wave a hand. "Spiraling, or whatever. I'd sit in the window seat in my room and play it on my CD player and there wouldn't even be stars. Obviously. It was storming. That's the whole—there were no stars."

A beat.

"But he kept saying it. 'Look how they shine for you.' Like they were still there."

You shrug. Small. Dismissive.

"I don't know. It made me feel less—" Stop. "Whatever. It's dumb. It's a Coldplay song, it's not—"

"It's not dumb."

"It's very dumb, Rogue."

"It's not."

Doesn't say it firm enough, maybe. Says it again.

"It's not."

You finally look at him.

And he wants to—he doesn't know.

He wants to fix something.

Wants to find the specific thing in what you just said that needs fixing and fix it.

He runs his tongue along the inside of his cheek.

Thinks about his dad.

The handwriting thing.

His dad didn't have handwriting, his dad had a voice and fists.

But also—his dad wasn't all bad. That's the thing nobody ever tells you about the stuff that fucks you up.

His dad taught him how to ride a bike. His dad cried at his graduation. His dad—

"Some parents suck."

You blink.

"Some don't." He's looking at the amp. At the little red power light. Not at you. "Some are—in the middle. Most, probably. Most are in the middle. Doing okay at some of it and fucking up other parts of it and the parts they fuck up can still—"

Stops.

Tries again.

"You can have good parents who also got something wrong. Both can be true. That's not—that's not an ungrateful thing to say. That's just math."

Quiet.

"The socks don't cancel out the other stuff. That's not how it works."

You don't say anything.

He finally looks back at you and your eyes are wet in a way they weren't thirty seconds ago—not crying, just that full-right-to-the-edge thing—and he looks away again because he's not equipped.

He's not equipped for this.

Nobody gave him the manual.

"And the song isn't dumb." Clears his throat. "Chris Martin wrote it about his mom, I'm pretty sure. Or—I don't know, actually. I read something once. Point is if you sat in a window during a thunderstorm listening to it that's not—that's just a kid looking for something to hold onto. That's not a personality flaw."

You make a sound.

Something between a laugh and an exhale.

It gets caught somewhere in your throat.

"You don't have to be nice to me."

"I'm not being nice."

"You're being—"

"I'm stating facts. I'm a film major. I deal in facts."

"You really have to stop using that—"

"Shh."

Another one of those half-laughs. Quieter. Your shoulder moves against his.

Your eyes go back to the hardwood.

And then—

Your arm lifts. A small movement, barely a gesture. Your hand making that little sideways motion, a 'come here', a 'closer', the kind of signal that doesn't have language attached to it because language would make it something you'd have to own.

And his chest—

His chest does something that has nothing to do with the amp or the room or the cobwebs or the Yo-Yo Ma photograph.

Because he's seen this before.

After Emma's birthday. After the fight that wasn't really a fight and the sex that wasn't really makeup sex and the part after where you'd been sitting on the edge of the table with your legs dangling and your defenses down at a level he'd never seen—zero, flatline, the version of you that exists when you've been turned inside out and don't have the energy to flip back.

You'd put your forehead on his shoulder that night too. Just—dropped it there.

And he'd stood between your legs not knowing what the fuck to do with his hands or his face or the thing in his chest that felt like a fist opening, and then you'd lifted your arms like 'carry me' and he'd said 'you're not serious' and you'd just looked at him and yeah. You were serious.

You're always serious about the things that are not supposed to be serious.

You look like that now, too. Just as soft, just as stripped-back as then.

This version of you that he only seems to get when you've cried enough or cum hard enough that the walls are down and there's just—you. Underneath all of it.

Tired and real and not pretending.

And maybe that's why his chest grips over itself. Folds in half.

Because his defenses are somewhere on the floor next to the Strat and he doesn't know when he put them down but they're not on him anymore.

He scoots closer. Across the hardwood. Until his knee is touching your knee and the distance between you has been reduced to the width of a breath.

Your forehead drops against his shoulder.

He doesn't flinch, doesn't stiffen. Just absorbs the weight of it—your forehead against him, your breath coming uneven against his collarbone. The gold chains in your hair press into the side of his neck. One of the little snake earrings grazes his jaw.

Quiet.

The amp hums.

"I'm sorry." Muffled into his shoulder.

So small he almost misses it under the electrical drone of the Fender combo.

"For what?"

Your breath catches.

Releases.

"You were right about Jason."

His chest caves in.

Not triumph. Not satisfaction. Not the 'I told you so' he'd normally chamber and fire with a grin because Jungkook has never met a victory he couldn't be insufferable about—but none of that loads.

None of it even approaches the chamber.

Because being right about Jason means Jason did something.

And being right about Jason means you're sitting on a floor in a wrecked costume with mascara on your chin telling him he was right in a voice that sounds like it went through a paper shredder.

He doesn't want to be right about that.

He sighs.

Tips his head back to look at the ceiling. Same motion as when he was staring upwards with Tae an hour ago, back when the biggest problem in his life was whether a pumpkin looked like Willy Wonka and whether Willy Wonka was categorically attractive.

A smile. Small. Not for you. For the ceiling. For whatever cosmic algorithm decided that this is where the night would end up—him and you on a floor in a dead man's music room, your forehead on his shoulder, a borrowed Stratocaster cooling in its case beside you.

Doesn't say anything.

Doesn't say 'I know.' Doesn't say 'what happened.' Doesn't say 'I nearly put my fist through his face an hour ago and it took three people and a vintage electric guitar to stop me.'

Just lifts his hand.

Puts it on the back of your neck.

His fingers find the nape—right where your hair starts, where the gold chains have come loose and the strands are damp and the skin is warm.

And he lets his thumb move. Slowly. A small arc over the top knob of your spine. Back and forth.

You breathe out.

Shaky. Uneven. Settling.

And for some reason—for some reason he's not going to poke at or name or hold up to the light because doing that would require vocabulary he doesn't have and isn't sure exists—

It's okay.

Not fixed. Not resolved. Not the kind of okay where credits roll and someone's learned a lesson.

Just okay.

Most of Jungkook's ideas are stupid.

He's well aware of that fact.

It's practically a brand at this point.

Jeon Jungkook: serial architect of decisions that seem perfectly reasonable in the three-second window between impulse and execution and then reveal themselves, with humiliating clarity, to be catastrophically ill-advised approximately four seconds later.

Perfect example of this is that time he tried to make cold brew in a sock because the coffee shop was closed and he was desperate and Yoongi looked at him with the kind of disappointment that leaves a mark.

So he knows. He's self-aware enough for that.

What he is not self-aware enough for—what no amount of Dr. Liao or Tuesday afternoon processing sessions has equipped him to handle—is the ability to identify a stupid idea before it crosses the threshold from thought to action.

Which is how he ends up here.

The party's winding down. That liminal hour where the music's been turned from weapon to wallpaper and the survivors are scattered across the living room in various states of horizontal.

Somebody's asleep on the smaller couch with a cape over their face. The fog machine finally died about forty minutes ago and the room's been slowly clearing, the last wisps of theatrical haze dissolving into regular air that smells like spilled beer and burned-out jack-o-lantern.

He finds Jimin in the kitchen, standing there with a glass of water, leaning against the island, looking at the aftermath as if he were surveying a natural disaster he didn't cause but will somehow be expected to clean up.

"It's gonna be a whole day tomorrow, huh," Jimin says, nodding at the living room.

Streamers sagging. Solo cups colonizing every flat surface. One of the plastic spiders from the bookshelf has migrated to the floor and is lying there on its back like it had one too many and simply surrendered.

"The decorations alone," Jungkook agrees.

"The cobwebs. Those fake cobwebs are a nightmare to get off. They get into everything. It's gonna take three people and a lint roller."

"I'll help take 'em down."

Jimin shakes his head. "You put them up. It's only fair that the rest of us suffer through the removal."

"It's not a big deal."

"It kind of is." Jimin is not being pushy about it—that's the thing. There's no edge, he's simply standing there with his water, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his voice has that particular pitch that makes disagreeing with him feel like kicking a puppy. "You did a lot. Take a break. You deserve it."

"I'm fine."

"I know you're fine. I'm saying you don't have to be." Jimin's smile is small. "Let us handle cleanup. You've earned a night off from being the guy who does everything."

Huh.

That's not—not what Jungkook's used to.

Most people just let it go when he brushes something off. Yoongi would've grunted and said 'do whatever you want'. Taehyung would've insulted him and told him to fuck off with that. Hobi would've shrugged and redirected with a dance move or a question about something else.

But Jimin doesn't let it go.

Which, paradoxically, makes Jungkook want to stay in this kitchen more, not less.

He leans against the opposite counter.

"Alright," Jungkook says, but then, because he can't fully surrender, he adds, "but if anybody fucks up the ceiling streamers I'm holding you personally responsible."

"That's fair." There's a little laugh folded into the words. "I accept full liability."

Silence settles, and it's the comfortable kind (or close enough).

Jungkook takes a sip of water from a cup that may or may not be his. Jimin's standing there doing the cardigan thing, thumb running back and forth over the cuff like a worry stone, and it occurs to Jungkook that he doesn't actually know this person. Not really. Knows the outline—comp lit, library, does your eyeliner, sat on the bathroom floor with you earlier, defended him to you once even though Jungkook hadn't earned it.

Knows Jimin is yours. In the way that matters. Part of your life in a way Jungkook is only adjacent to.

And that used to not register. Used to be just furniture—background characters in the movie of someone else's life, not his.

Except now it does register. Because you're—

Whatever. You're his friend now. Or something. The label keeps shifting depending on who's asking and whether his brain cooperates. And your friends are—

He should probably know your friends.

"So," Jungkook says.

Great start. Pulitzer-worthy.

"Yoongi," he says.

Jimin's thumb stops on the cuff.

"Hm?" Jimin turns to look at him, and there it is—the microshift. Lips pressing together, not quite pursed, but held. Color climbing his neck and landing on his cheeks in real time like someone turned a dial.

Jungkook reads it immediately.

Oh.

Oh.

Okay. So that's—yeah. That's a thing.

He clears his throat. Adjusts. Pivots.

"He's a cool guy," Jungkook says. Nods once, firm, like he's delivering testimony. "He's a really cool guy. Like. You know."

Smooth. So smooth. He should teach a masterclass.

Jimin blinks. The blush is fully operational now, staining both cheeks, and he does this thing where he sort of laughs and exhales at the same time, shoulders dropping half an inch.

"Oh. Yeah." He nods back. Too many times. "Yeah, he's—he's great."

"Yeah."

Silence.

The worst kind of silence now. The one that's sort of loud because both people are thinking things they're not saying and the gap between those things and the actual air in the room is deafening.

Jungkook watches Jimin's fingers migrate from the cuff to the hem of his cardigan, then to each other, lacing and unlacing, and something about the fidgeting softens the awkwardness into something else.

Something that makes Jungkook want to fix it.

Not because he has to.

Because this guy—this soft, careful guy who sat on a tile floor with you—looks like he's one wrong word from imploding, and Jungkook knows what that feels like.

"Matter of fact," he says, leaning back against the counter, finding casual the way a drowning man finds a pool noodle, "there was this thing last Christmas. With Yoongi."

Jimin's fidgeting slows.

"Well like, the four of us, actually. You know. Me, Yoongi, Hobi, Tae. Holiday week. Nobody had anywhere to be, nobody had shit to do, so Yoongi goes—" Jungkook pitches his voice lower, flatter, does his best Yoongi monotone: "'We should go hiking.'"

Jimin's mouth twitches.

"And we're like—hiking? It's December. It's freezing. Tae is wearing loafers." Jungkook gestures with the water cup. "But Yoongi's got this whole thing about Bear Mountain. Says the trails are empty in winter, says the views are better when it's cold, says some shit about how the Hudson looks different when there's frost on it. And he's not wrong, but he's also—you know how he is. He frames it like he doesn't care, but he'd already looked up the train schedule."

Jimin laughs. Quiet, but real. The fidgeting's stopped entirely now.

"So we go. Five AM, Penn Station, four idiots with no hiking gear. Hobi's wearing Jordans. Jordans. On a mountain. Taehyung's got a vintage Carhartt that he keeps stopping to photograph instead of wearing. I'm the only one who brought water—one bottle, like that's enough for four grown men—and Yoongi's just..."

He pauses. Not for dramatic effect. Because the memory is sitting right there, fully formed, and it's—

It's a good one.

"Yoongi's walking ahead. Not fast, not showing off, just—quiet. You know how he gets quiet in a different way outside? Not the apartment quiet, where he's working or ignoring you. A different kind. Like he's actually there. Present. Paying attention to something that isn't a screen."

Jimins leaning forward slightly, and his face has gone still in a way that isn't bracing. More like—receiving. Open and careful and waiting.

"We get to the top and it's—I mean, it's just a view. River, trees, sky. Nothing you can't see on Google. But Yoongi pulls out his phone and records the sound. Not a photo. Not the view. Just stands there with his phone up, recording the wind coming off the water for like two straight minutes. Doesn't say anything. Doesn't show anybody. Just—" Jungkook mimes holding a phone up, "—captures it. Pockets it. Done."

He takes a sip of the maybe-his water.

"And then on the way down, Hobi's Jordan tears on a rock, and Hobi's freaking out about it, and Yoongi—without saying a word—takes off his own shoes and gives them to Hobi. Just. Hands them over. Walks the rest of the trail in his socks."

"In socks?"

"In socks. December. Frozen ground." Jungkook shakes his head. "We're all yelling at him—put your shoes back on, dude, you're gonna get frostbite!—and he just goes 'they're Jordans' like that explains everything. Like the hierarchy of footwear is a moral issue and he's made his ruling."

Jimin's laughing now. Not the quiet kind. The real kind—head ducking, shoulders shaking, the sound of it bright and unguarded in the dead kitchen.

"He didn't mention the socks thing afterward. Not once. Hobi tried to buy him replacement shoes for Christmas and Yoongi wouldn't let him. Said the socks were fine. Said his feet don't get cold." Jungkook pauses. Looks at Jimin directly. "His feet absolutely get cold. He wears two pairs of socks around the apartment from November to March. He's full of shit."

Jimin's laughter subsides into something quieter.

"That's..." Jimin starts, then trails off. His thumb finds the cardigan cuff again, but it's slower now. Thoughtful instead of nervous. "That sounds like him."

"It is him." Jungkook says it simply. Doesn't dress it up. "He won't tell you the stuff that matters about himself. He'll just do it and hope you notice. And if you don't notice, he'll never bring it up. Which is—I mean, it's annoying. It's terrible communication. I tell him that all the time."

Jimin's smile turns softer.

"But it's also—" Jungkook waves a hand vaguely, the way Yoongi does when he's avoiding a point. Catches himself doing it. Stops. "He's the kind of person who'll walk down a mountain in his socks for you and then pretend his feet don't get cold. That's just. You know. What he does."

He doesn't add for people he cares about. Doesn't need to.

The sentence is sitting right there in the space between them, fully assembled, and Jimin's the kind of person who'll see it without being shown.

A beat.

Jimin nods. Slow. Looking at his water glass like it contains answers.

"Thanks for telling me that," he says, and his voice is different now.

"Yeah." Jungkook clears his throat. Tips the water cup toward Jimin in something between a toast and a dismissal. "Don't tell him I told you any of that. He'll kill me."

"Noted." Jimin smiles. "Secret's safe."

"Good."

He leans against the opposite counter. Pulls his wallet from the back pocket of the costume pants he's got on under the robe—because the robe doesn't have pockets, which is a design flaw that Spirit Halloween should answer for.

Opens it. Not for any reason. Habit. The way some people check their phone when they're standing still, Jungkook checks his wallet.

Inventory. Cards, cash, the little things that accumulate in the billfold because he never cleans it out—a bodega receipt from last week, his MetroCard, the loyalty card for the coffee shop two blocks from campus that he keeps forgetting to stamp.

And tucked behind the cards, folded small—

His thumb grazes the edge of it.

He closes the wallet. Looks around the kitchen.

The junk drawer by the fridge is half-open. Inside: rubber bands, takeout menus, a screwdriver, and a pad of post-its. Yellow. Small. The cheap kind—not the branded ones, just the generic squares that come in a pack of twelve from the dollar store and end up in every junk drawer in every house in America.

He pulls one off the pad.

Jimin watches him do this with politeness and confusion.

"What are you—"

"Pen?"

"What?"

"Do you have a pen?"

Jimin blinks. Pats his chest. Touches the quill behind his ear—decorative, useless, ink-free. Then reaches into his back pocket and produces a regular ballpoint like a normal human being.

Jungkook takes it. Uncaps it with his teeth. Presses the post-it flat against the counter with his palm.

Writes.

Fast. Then stops. Pen hovering above the yellow square, tip a millimeter from the surface, like the next word is sitting right behind his teeth and he's deciding whether to let it out.

His jaw works. Once.

He writes.

Caps the pen. Clicks it against the counter once—a period at the end of an action—and then folds the edge of the post-it. A small fold. Just the right side, barely a centimeter, pressing the crease flat with his thumbnail.

Holds it out to Jimin.

Jimin looks at the post-it. Then at Jungkook. Then at the post-it again.

"Can you give this to her?" Casual. Or trying to be. The trying is doing more work than the casual. "When you see her."

"To—"

"Yeah."

Jimin takes the post-it. Holds it between his index and middle finger like a card in a magic trick, studying it with the focus of someone who's been handed a piece of evidence and isn't sure what trial it belongs to.

He doesn't unfold it. Doesn't read it. Just nods—slow, careful, a nod that contains about twelve questions he's choosing not to ask.

Because that's what Jimin does. He's starting to get his vibe.

Jimin lets things exist without demanding they explain themselves.

He gets why you like him.

"Okay," Jimin says.

"Thanks."

"You could just... give it to her yourself."

"Yeah." Jungkook takes the pen apart—cap off, cap on, cap off—the idle fidget of a man who has burned through his daily allocation of emotional vulnerability and is now running on fumes. "I could."

He doesn't elaborate. Jimin doesn't push.

The post-it disappears into the chest pocket of Jimin's cardigan, yellow edge just visible against the wool, and Jimin pats it once—a small, careful gesture, like he's tucking something valuable into a safe place even though he doesn't know what it is yet.

A beat passes.

Jungkook looks at the living room. At the wreckage. At the passed-out beards and the empty fog machine and the smashed pumpkin that Taehyung is definitely going to blame on him even though he saw the centurion kick it on the way out. At the string lights still going, amber and warm, giving the whole disaster a filter it doesn't deserve.

He yawns—big and full and theatrical, jaw cracking, arms going up, entire spine releasing—and comes out of it and slaps both hands down on the counter hard enough to rattle two solo cups and startle Jimin into a step back.

"Alright." Too loud. On purpose. The volume of a man who has just, by executive decision, closed a chapter. "Why is everyone so sour?"

Jimin blinks. "It's 2AM."

"Prime time." Already moving, already crossing back toward the living room, the Ghostface robe picking up air behind him like he thinks he's something. "Everything before this was a dress rehearsal. Drinking game. Right now. Whoever's still standing."

"That's like six people."

"Perfect number for a drinking game. Hoseok—HOSEOK—"

"He's going to ignore you," Jimin calls after him, something lighter in his voice than it was twenty minutes ago.

"I'm his favorite."

"You are categorically—"

"Categorically everyone's favorite, Jimin. It's a burden. It's a cross I carry." He's already crouching over the sleeping beard on the small couch, shaking the man's shoulder with the cheerful mercilessness of someone who has decided that suffering should be communal. "C'mon. Up."

A groan rises from the living room. Several. The collective protest of six people who already died once tonight and resent being asked to do it again.

Jungkook grins.

Stupid ideas are, after all, his specialty.

The drinking game was his idea. The Uno was Hobi's. The combination of the two is, in hindsight, a human rights violation.

The thing about drinking Uno is that it sounds simple, right? You play a card, you follow the rules, you drink when the game tells you to drink.

Except there are no official rules for drinking Uno because Uno is a children's game that was never meant to be combined with tequila, which means every single person at this table has a different understanding of how it works, and every single one of you is willing to die on their specific hill.

Way too many people around the coffee table. Cards fanned in hands. Drinks sweating on coasters because even shitfaced, Jungkook respects Tessa's grandmother's furniture.

Yeji's cross-legged on the floor, extremely focused, cards held close to her chest, eyes flicking between her hand and the discard pile with a concentration that suggests she's running probability calculations in real time. Her combat boots are off—somewhere between the third round and the fifth, she kicked them under the couch and declared them 'a disadvantage'—and she's sitting in mismatched socks, frock coat unbuttoned, wine-stained lace at her throat, looking like an aristocratic vampire who takes recreational card games as a personal referendum on her worth as a human being.

Which, knowing Yeji from what little of her he knows, she does.

Irya is next to her, pressed against her side. Eyes at approximately sixty percent operational capacity, the brownies having apparently entered their final form about an hour ago, because Irya's been smiling at her cards like they're friends she's happy to see rather than a strategic hand in a competitive drinking game. She's holding her cards backwards. Nobody's told her.

Yoongi is in the armchair—the man located the most comfortable seat in the room within four seconds of arriving and has not moved since. Claire's skull earring still dangling. Cards held in one hand, phone in the other, scrolling through something while playing.

Hobi's on the floor by the fireplace, legs folded, managing his hand with the same energy he manages everything—bright, organized, vaguely menacing. He's been winning quietly and consistently for three rounds, which is suspicious behavior from a man who claims he 'doesn't really play card games', at least from Jungkook's perspective.

Taehyung is to his left. Pinstripe jacket off now, sleeves rolled, the drawn-on mustache surviving through what can only be described as chemical adhesion or the will of God. He's seven drinks deep and playing Uno like it's something extremely important right now.

Irika, for her part, is curled into the other armchair in her black silk, legs tucked, watching the table with the measured interested of someone who literally evaluates arguments for a living. Jimin's between her and Yoongi, plays smart instead of loud, never more than four cards in hand.

And you.

You're across from him. Knees pulled up, cards balanced against your thighs, the Medusa skirt fanned out around you on the floor. Eyes still a little swollen. Liner still smudged. Gold shimmer still caught in your hair where the chains have mostly come loose.

But you're smiling.

Not the full thing. Not the one that rewrites your whole face and makes your eyes do that specific shape that he's catalogued without meaning to. Just the edge of one. The ghost of it. Enough that he knows the music room worked. The floor worked. Whatever happened between the amp and the hallway—it worked.

Good.

That's good.

His hands are steady now. Some hours ago, they weren't.

He's not thinking about that. He's thinking about the fact that he's holding eleven freaking cards, which is a personal issue, frankly, a staffing crisis, and somebody in this deck owes him an explanation.

He puts down a red seven. Takes a sip of his beer—tenth? eleventh? hard to say, the bottles have been circulating with the same frequency as the cards and at some point the counting became aspirational rather than mathematical.

The thing about drinking with Hobi and Tae is that it's not really drinking. It's endurance athletics.

The three of them have been putting away liquor at a pace that would hospitalize a civilian, and the only visible evidence is that Taehyung's laugh has gotten approximately fifteen percent louder and Hobi's dance moves during the shuffle have gotten approximately thirty percent more elaborate.

Jungkook himself feels pleasantly bulletproof in the way that only happens around the two-bottle mark—warm, steady, everything slightly funnier than it should be but nothing blurry.

His tolerance was forged in freshman year dorm rooms and refined through keeping pace with Hobi at parties where the open bar was the only interesting thing happening.

It's a skill. A terrible skill. But a skill.

You put down a Draw Four.

He looks at it. Looks at you. You're already looking at him—that little anticipatory gleam, the one that says 'I know exactly what I just did and I'm enjoying it.'

He puts down another Draw Four. On top of yours. Blue.

Your mouth opens.

"You CANNOT do that—"

"Yes I can? It's literally the game."

"That is not the game. You can't stack Draw Fours, that's not a real rule—"

"It's the game for every single person who has ever played Uno in the history of the known universe—"

"I have played Uno—"

"It doesn't look like it."

Your eyes narrow. That specific narrow—the one that precedes either a devastating comeback or physical violence, and the odds on which are about fifty-fifty, and he'd be lying if he said he didn't enjoy the coin flick.

"The official rules—"

"Oh, she's bringing out official rules. Citation needed. Peer-reviewed? APA format?"

"The official Mattel rules state that Draw Four cards cannot be stacked—"

"Mattel also made Barbie. Do you want to talk about their track record with realism, or—"

"You two," Yeji says.

Neither of you stops. He physically can't. There's a version of him that could, probably, but that guy's not here tonight.

"—because Barbie's Dream House doesn't have a mortgage and yet somehow she has a convertible—"

"—are you seriously bringing Barbie into an Uno dispute—"

"Shut up," Yeji says. Louder. Both hands flat on the table. "SHUT UP. I have two cards left. I need to concentrate. My brain is still spinning from that brownie and I cannot—I physically cannot—process your childish quarrel about Mattel while I'm trying to win."

Jungkook opens his mouth. Closes it. Decides, wisely, that correcting Yeji on her word choice while she's in this state would likely be the last decision he ever made.

You appear to reach the same conclusion at exactly the same time, because you close your mouth too and stare very hard at your cards.

"Uno," Irya says.

Bright. Cheerful. Like she's announcing a fun fact about butterflies.

Everyone looks at her.

She's holding four cards. Four. Fanned out in front of her face like a tiny decorative screen, one of them backwards, one of them definitely from a different card game because it has a picture of a horse on it and Jungkook is almost certain Uno doesn't have horses.

"Baby." Yeji. Gentle. The voice of a woman that is deeply in love. "You still have four cards. That's not how Uno works."

"But I said it," Irya says, as if the word itself was the whole point and the card count was a secondary concern.

"She has to drink a sip," Yoongi says from the armchair, not looking up from his phone.

"Full glass." Jungkook sits up. Because if this table is going to be governed, someone has to govern it. "False Uno is a full glass."

"Jungkook, stop making rules UP."

That's you. Immediate. Reflexive. Like you have a dedicated neural pathway specifically for detecting his bullshit—which, fine, flattering, that's real prime state—but also wrong, because he's not making rules up, he's legislating.

"I'm NOT making rules up. She said Uno at the wrong time. That's a penalty. That's regulation."

"That's not—okay, first of all, there is no 'regulation' in drunk Uno. Second of all, the actual false Uno penalty is that you only drink if someone calls you out before you when you have one card and forget to say it. She said it with four cards. That's just—wrong. It's not a penalty. It's just incorrect."

"So there's no consequence for being wrong? What's next, we kiss serial killers?"

"The consequence is that we all saw it happen and now we know she doesn't understand the game."

"Babe, I understand the game," Irya says, sounding genuinely hurt.

"Of course you do," Yeji soothes, patting her knee.

"I have a horse," Irya adds, holding up the non-Uno card with pride.

"You're a tyrant," Jungkook tells you, because the Irya situation has clearly reached a dead end and the Draw Four dispute needs resolution. "An authoritarian. A despot. You should all be ashamed of yourselves for living under this regime."

"The regime where we follow the actual rules?"

"The regime where one person decides what the rules are and the rest of us suffer."

"That's called playing a game correctly—"

"Jungkook." Taehyung. Flat. Zero patience. "Shut the fuck up and eat the four cards."

"I'm not eating—"

Taehyung reaches across, picks up Jungkook's glass—three-quarters full, tequila and something, who even knows anymore—and drains it. One long pull. Sets it down empty.

"There." Tae wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, the drawn-on mustache surviving the gesture through what is now clearly some form of dark magic. "Problem solved. Take the cards."

"You just drank my drink."

"Consider it conflict resolution."

"That was my tequila—"

"It was everyone's tequila. Tequila is communal."

"Tequila is explicitly not communal—"

"I'm with Y/N on this one."

Irika. Who, in case anybody forgot, is a judge. A private judge, technically, but the distinction is irrelevant when she deploys that tone—level, final, the vocal equivalent of a gavel coming down.

Every head turns.

Irika shrugs one shoulder. Adjusts the black silk of her Morticia dress. "Stacking Draw Fours isn't in the official ruleset. It's a house rule at best. If no house rule was established at the start of play, default rules apply. He draws four."

Silence.

"Well." Hobi spreads his hands. "The judge has spoken. Overruled, Jungkook."

"She's not—she's not a judge right now! She's Morticia Addams! There's no judicial authority vested in a Halloween costume—"

"I'm always a judge," Irika says. Mild. Terrifying.

"That's—okay, that's actually a little scary—"

"Take the cards," Yoongi says from behind his phone, not looking up. "You're holding up the game."

"I'm holding up the game? I'm the one trying to maintain competitive integrity—"

"You're the one making up rules because you're losing," Yoongi says.

"I'm not losing. I have a strategy."

He does not have a strategy. He has ten cards and momentum.

"Your strategy is yelling."

"My strategy is passion—"

"Jungkook." Hobi sets his cards down. Folds his hands. Assumes the posture of a man about to deliver a verdict of his own. "You have ten cards. Yoongi has three. I have four. You are, by every measurable metric, losing."

"Metrics are a social construct."

"That's not what social construct means," Yoongi says.

"Yoongi, I swear to god—"

"Okay, you know what?" Taehyung leans forward. Points at Hobi, then Yoongi. "Leave him alone. He's playing his way. It's creative."

Jungkook turns to him. Chest swelling.

His guy. His day one.

"Thank you."

"It's stupid-creative. But it's creative."

"I'll take it."

"Oh, here we go." Hobi rolls his eyes—theatrical, full rotation. "Here we go. The dynamic duo. Tae, you always do this."

"Do what?"

"This!" Hobi gestures between Taehyung and Jungkook with both hands. "He makes that face—the pouty face, the big eyes, the whole kicked-puppy act—and you fold. Every single time. Like clockwork."

He's not making a face.

Probably.

He can't see his own face, but the odds of it being pouty are low.

...Medium.

Whatever.

"I do not fold—"

"You fold like a lawn chair," Yoongi says. Still scrolling. "It's honestly impressive. He looks at you and your spine just—"

He makes a collapsing gesture with one hand. Doesn't look up from his phone while doing it, which makes it worse.

"I am not—my spine is fine—"

"Your spine is compromised," Hobi says. "By his face."

"That's insane—"

"Tae." Yoongi. Flat. "He once convinced you to drive to New Jersey at 3AM for a cheesesteak because he said please with his lower lip out. You drove to New Jersey."

"It was a good cheesesteak!"

"It was a Wawa."

"Wawa has great cheesesteaks—"

"It was a GAS STATION, Taehyung—"

"With GREAT CHEESESTEAKS—"

Jungkook is beaming. Not even trying to hide it.

For the record: it was a great cheesesteak, the lower lip was simply a strategic maneuver and he regrets absolutely nothing.

And then, across the table, you've given up on containing it—the laugh comes out open, unguarded, the kind that uses your shoulders and tips your head back, and the sound does something to the room.

Warms it. Fills it. Makes everything lighter by exactly the amount that matters.

Good.

He takes the four cards. Doesn't even care anymore.

Three rounds later, Yoongi wins.

Obviously.

He lays down his last card—a green reverse—with the energy of someone submitting a tax return. No celebration. No gloating. Just sets it on the pile, picks up his drink, takes a sip, and says "that's the game" the way you'd say 'it's raining' like it's a fact.

"How," Yeji says. She's staring at the discard pile like it personally betrayed her. "HOW. You were on your phone the entire time."

"Multitasking," Yoongi says.

"That's not multitasking, that's—witchcraft—"

"It's pattern recognition. The discard pile is predictable once you track color cycling and hold distribution." He takes another sip. "Also, Taehyung has a tell."

"I do NOT—"

"You tap your cards when you're about to play a Wild. Every time. Without fail."

Taehyung looks at his hands. Then at his cards. Then at his hands again, as if they've been operating independently and without his consent.

Jungkook makes a mental note to watch for the tap next round and then a second mental note that Yoongi definitely has been reading everyone at this table all night, himself included, and elects not to pursue that thought any further.

Jimin lays down a red two. Looks at his remaining card. Looks at the table.

"Uno."

Said quiet. Almost casual. But his posture shifts—straighter, alert, the way someone sits when they know the whole table is about to target them.

You play a red reverse.

The direction flips. Back to Jimin.

Which means Jimin has to play. Right now. On a red.

And Jungkook, who spends most of his waking life watching people for a living (or at least for a degree)—catches the flicker. The expression of a man who does not, in fact, have a red card.

And Jungkook would love to say he watched what happened next with the full weight of his professional attention.

But he didn't.

Because you're still holding the reverse card play with that little surprised-gloat thing, chin up—the one where you refuse to smile outright but the corners give you away—and his eyes go there instead.

Of course they do.

You set the trap, the trap worked, and now you're being insufferable about it in a register that's only visible directly across the table.

He's directly across the table. So.

Two seconds. Maybe three.

When he looks back, Jimin is laying down a red eight.

"That's the game," Jimin says, with a smile that's a degree too innocent.

Huh?

"WAIT." Hobi slams both palms on the table. "Wait wait wait. Did he just—"

"He won." Yoongi says with zero inflection.

"He won? He WON?! He was stuck! I saw that face! He did the face—the trapped face, the 'I don't have a red' face—and then OUT OF NOWHERE, red eight?"

"He had a red eight."

"He absolutely did not have a red eight, Min Yoongi, don't you dare—your hands literally moved across the table!"

"I was picking up my drink."

The drink is right there. On the coaster. Half-finished. Sweating gently. An alibi with condensation.

"You put your phone down." Hobi points at it, face down on the armrest now. "You put your PHONE down. You haven't put that phone down since we sat down. That's premeditation."

"Are you accusing me of rigging a card game." Yoongi looks at Hobi over the rim of his glass. The skull earring sways. His expression is the dictionary definition of unbothered. "At a Halloween party. In someone's grandparents' house."

"YES. That is exactly what I'm accusing you of."

"Interesting theory."

"It's not a theory! I have eyes! Nobody goes from 'trapped face' to the exact card they need unless—" his finger sways between them, "—someone passed him—"

"Sounds like luck to me," Jimin says.

"It does sound like luck," Yoongi agrees.

"You two are—" Hobi sputters. Points at one, then the other. "You're in cahoots. You're in open, blatant, shameless cahoots and I am being gaslit at a coffee table—"

"Cahoots is a strong word," Jimin says.

"Do you have a weaker one?"

"Coincidence."

"COINCIDENCE—"

"I think we should move on," Yoongi says, waving his hand off.

"I think you should be IMPRISONED—"

"Drama," Yoongi mumbles. "The performer's curse."

Hobi's mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. He looks at Jungkook for backup. Jungkook raises both hands—palms out, staying clear, because getting between Hobi and Yoongi during an integrity dispute is how people disappear.

He catches your eye across the table.

You're smiling.

He looks at his cards.

Draws a green two. Puts it down.

Smiles.