hyyh for the soul

jungkook sits across from yoongi on the train. as he looks out the window, the trees and foliage and twilight flutter past him, not fast enough for him to miss, but not slow enough for him to linger in the spaces between them. he sees yoongi’s reflection in the window, the fluorescent train lights illuminating his hunched over figure scrolling away at his phone. the dark night bleeds into yoongi’s face. he’s transparent, but if jungkook concentrates, he becomes almost solid, the color of his arm so close to reality in the tinted glass. but if he shifts his focus to the scenery, yoongi is marred, the trees and buildings blending into the lines that outline his face, making him disappear. it invokes some strange, irrational fear in jungkook’s gut, something knotted in his intestines that burrows itself further in as he keeps staring. yoongi fades, then he is solid, then he is a mixture of blue and green and shapes that twist and change form at random. then he is solid again. for just a moment, when they pass a particularly red brick building, yoongi is gone completely. it makes jungkook want to look away. but he keeps his eyes trained on the reflection, watching yoongi wrinkle his nose, shift in his seat. absentmindedly scratch his arm. he wonders if yoongi knows he’s watching him. he wonders if yoongi will look up and into the window, and catch jungkook’s reflected eyes with his own. harness jungkook’s gaze and keep him trapped there as he bores into his heart. he wonders if he will see jungkook, make eye contact, with both their reflected states fading in-and-out of the trees, only half-existing, and if their temporary presences will find each other in the murk. if jungkook presses his nose to the glass, the reflections disappear. but he is selfish and wants to stare at yoongi and the slight flick of his thumb as he pads at his phone screen, he wants to trap this vision in his cornea forever. he wants to access it later when he’s alone, basking in the memory of yoongi’s closeness. the intimacy of it. jungkook wants him forever.

where’d you go / i don’t know where we are now / it smells horrible here / smells like summer / like a radiator / your bedroom is an ash tray / did i spend the night there / i can’t remember / did you kiss me / i love this city / we all used to live here / my mom died in that apartment building / i see her face everywhere / you’re blinding me / do you even remember what it’s like to get high / i hate that you’re sober now / why can’t things be like they used to be / do you remember / the beach / do you remember / drowning / you don’t live here anymore / you never belonged here in the first place / you were too good / for us / for me / i don’t remember why you took me in / do you / do you remember me / i have so many dreams / you’re always / floating / out of reach / you’re never / with me / do you want to be / is there anything you wanted / what did i take from you / i’m sorry i kissed you / i’m sorry / i’m sorry / i’m sorry / i meant to do it / i didn’t know i was hurting you

(so you are tired by sufjan stevens)

hoseok is a vision of sunlight and smile, a summer hallucination. he conducts false memories and plants them in his own head. he treats himself like a trick of the light. half the time he pretends to be here, he is somewhere else, trapped in vocalizations over the hills and in the ripples the wind makes in humid heat. he still blooms orange in their little group, sun at his core that makes him look like arms wide open to them, splayed and unabashed and glimmering.

jimin and hoseok dance around each other like ghosts. sometimes jimin has a hard time telling which one of them exists. sometimes they are both there, albeit rarely, when hoseok feels solid against the press of jimin’s fingers, or when he really smiles, with his heart on his lips. but most of the time they’re both half-gone, corporeality traded for the poltergeist cities they’ve built in their own brains, brick and mortar derived from old memories. they never make it past the county lines. it’s like orpheus and eurydice; a death for a death. they find each other on the doorstep of eternity, exchanging death like cards. taking turns. there are times jimin almost begs to stay, to be left in the darkness, if only to not have to face the walk up the stairs to life for the millionth time. orpheus and eurydice, one or the other, never together, when neither want to stay and neither have the strength to make the climb. so they remain as ghosts, as translucent as white sterile sheets when they are stroke by sunlight.

jimin walks the coast, feeling himself so fragile the wind would snap him if it tried. he’s never been able to hide his thoughts from his face, thoughts he wanted hoseok to know. it’s impossible. hoseok knows everything, knows every debt, knows every flaw. jimin wonders if he counts them like pills. if he takes them the same way, as a reminder of what he can’t admit, a reminder of what tethers jimin to him. if maybe, in some unfeasible way, he had loved jimin. once, before. although involuntarily, he had loved him. even if it had died long ago on a hospital bed, hooked up to a heart monitor. seized and flatlined.

hoseok can’t tell which one of them is the devil.

it’s a dizzying realization, ripped out from the recesses of his stomach and forced out, hatred and guilt and a twisted kind of desire. the type of hunger that feels dirty. shameful. he grips it tight, breathing in, and welcomes it with open arms.”

it’s too late by lucy dacus and yoonkook and how they let it all fall apart and they blame no one but themselves (because what other option is there?) (what else can they do?)

from white line fever by mothface on ao3

“but i’m in so deep.”

fourteen year old jungkook getting attached to these older boys. seventeen, eighteen, sixteen, boys that run like whiskey does on ice. he’s mesmerized by their commitment to ruin and abandon, their willingness to die in flames of their own creation. they give him a wing, torn and missing feathers, or a something like a tin roof that doesn’t keep out rain. there’s a hearth made of gasoline and cigarettes. the walls are painted electric blue lightning that pierces its way straight through jungkook’s aorta, right into his bloodstream, rushing at his heart so quickly he doesn’t even notice it until it’s already inside. until he’s stained blue, blue, blue, like hoseok’s tongue and taehyung’s lips after he dives. blue, blue, blue covers him like a methanol fire like a flame he doesn’t see until he’s singed. until there are cigarette burns above his belt, yoongi’s fingerprints pressed into his skin. they’re filled with fire and ice and gauze taped to knuckles and lukewarm beer and a hundred different patterns so superimposed upon each other they clash and radiate. so explosive that they can’t get too close. so magnetic that he can’t stay away. he watches them with something akin to longing and love and lust for the rawness of their eyes. there’s something voltaic about their pain and it makes him swell. he needs to die or he needs to have them and having them will make him die, he’s sure of it, they’ll kill him with their supernova.

he thinks he’s addicted.

when they self-implode and when they disappear like they were foreseen by the fates to do, he can’t watch. he begs, i can’t watch you do this to yourself, i can’t watch you leave, and they tell him to look away. he’s not sure when he got into this role of savior, of victim, of beggar, of abandoned. he’s so mad, so furious with them, angry at the drug he can’t live without. there he’ll die, not from their creation but from their absence. because he’s the best of them, he’s too good and too bright and there are stars in his eyes instead of coal and he can’t follow them into oblivion because he is simply better than this path. better than cowardice. better than hatred.

but if they leave he has nothing. what they do not know is that his cells have regenerated as remnants of them, that if they tore open his limbs and exposed all the dirty innards they would find themselves lingering, and if they took out his spinal cord up to his brain, they would find his nerves warped and haywire, all his senses leading to them. a singular point, a focus, a purpose. a life force made up of people who are not alive. but what they don’t know won’t hurt them. and jungkook was only fourteen but now he is an addict and he always will be. if their fire makes him human then he was born to be consumed by the flames, and if they are the ghosts, fleeing towards the seas and away from home, then jungkook will follow them to the ends of the earth.

my two alter egos (my two tumblr accounts)

namjoon and taehyung are not crash-and-burn or decay-and-rot they are more like gone-with-the-wind or how-to-disappear. more like “you have bigger things ahead of you” more like “i hope i don’t interfere with this future i hope this blood doesn’t stain your floor no it’s not my blood it’s just everywhere i don’t know where it came from” more like “you leave traces of yourself everywhere you can’t clean this up i won’t let you” the type of moment you have for a second that feels like a year. but all in all it is just a second made up by people who care too much about things they don’t know much about. too dependent on tiny information too dependent on the temporary. taehyung is scattered; he covers everything he touches like magic, like fireworks, like smoke. the problem is with kids like that is that they fuck up spectacularly sooner or later and force themselves to disappear, leaving shards of glass in their place as if disappearing makes up for any of the things they’ve tainted. namjoon has steadiness that is only a preconceived notion. a remnant of what used to be there. he isn’t steady but he lingers; lingers in places people do not exist to make sense of what he will never have; lingers in ghost cities until he too decides to erase everything. he hides from his guilt and the black blood on his hands because if nothing else he shares it. he shares every burden until they are both nothing more than whispers.

they exist in this in-and-out collapsing portal where taehyung never stays in one place for too long and doesn’t tell anyone why and when he finally rips through space itself trying to flee, namjoon will take his things and leave the city with pockets full of glass.

HE TRIED SO HARD TO SAVE EVERYONE HE LOVED THEM SO MUCH he needed them so bad and they found no reasons for themselves to stay