Chapter Text
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The 9:15 Metra is always empty, or nearly.
Jimin takes the commuter train seven stops from the yoga studio to his apartment every Tuesday night. There are closer studios he could frequent, cheaper ones that will offer the same services. But the yoga instructor in the suburban studio, Guided Serenity, settles the itch inside Jimin’s head better than any of the city instructors can.
Tonight, Jimin shares the train with a young woman. She sits four rows down on the seat Jimin avoids.
It squeaks.
Jimin flicks the spearmint gum in his mouth with the tip of his tongue. Left to right. Cheek to cheek. Squishes it between his molars every time the woman fidgets against the worn leather. He listens to the buzz of silence from his noise-canceling headphones and tells himself he should stop staring.
The woman brushes her lavender hair over her shoulder and their eyes lock across the aisle.
The seat squeaks.
She smiles. Her right incisor has a diamond embedded in it.
The faint smell of coconut and vanilla shampoo tickles Jimin’s nostrils. He grinds his molars and lifts one corner of his mouth. He can’t help that his grimaces look like smirks, the kind that make people’s stomachs swoop. Or even when he doesn’t. Regardless, it isn’t arrogance. If Jimin swipes his thumb down his phone to his headphone settings and turns off the noise cancellation feature, he’ll hear her heartbeat quicken. He won’t do it, but he could.
The woman gets off on the fifth stop. She holds onto the door handle for a moment with her lips parted like she means to say something. Jimin watches her tan cheeks grow ruddy with embarrassment before she ducks her head and steps off the train. Once she steps off the train, the woman stands on the platform for a second. Her shoulders rise. She catches her breath in the chilly October air. Even when she disappears into the night, Jimin can follow her path until the train moves again and the word outside the windows becomes a blur.
Alone, Jimin tucks his gum in the back of his cheek with his tongue and waits to see if someone will join him for the next two stops. He hopes not. His gum has already turned elastic and flavorless.
At the seventh train stop Jimin spits his gum in the trash can. Breathing in the chilly air makes Jimin’s diaphragm spasm. He coughs a few times, mouth tucked into the bend of his elbow. When he pulls away, the sleeve of his coat is dry. It usually is, but there was a day or two where his sleeves and tissue were speckled with a bit of blood.
It wasn’t the worst thing to have happened to him.
Jimin’s apartment is seven streets south of the Metra stop. It’s a long trek in the chilly fall, but he doesn’t mind. The cold doesn’t nestle in his bones the way it does with regular humans. He supposes there are a few advantages to being an anomaly. None outweigh the disadvantages, but he doesn’t expect them to. He’s too busy running away from them to pay much attention.
Rainwater laps at Jimin’s leather boots as he follows the alleyway along the train tracks home. There’s a sidewalk on the left, lining the backs of apartment complexes, but Jimin walks in the middle of the street. He avoids potholes without having to watch his feet, able to sense them by the vibrations in the ground every time he takes a step forward. He reminds himself of a shark, in a way, his own urban acoustico-lateralis system. Maybe the comparison is incorrect; he doesn’t know. Whatever makes certain humans become sentinels and guides isn’t anything he’s capable of understanding. This body didn’t come with an instruction manual. It certainly doesn’t have a warranty or return policy.
Jimin reaches the fifth street when he senses a car approaching. While the alleyways are normally free of traffic, there’s always the occasional car cutting through to pass up traffic on the main roads or someone whose garage opens into the alley. Jimin doesn’t turn around, just sidesteps onto the sidewalk to avoid being run over—not that it would easily kill him, though it certainly wouldn’t feel great.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Jimin repeatedly presses each finger against the outside of his thigh. Index. Tap. Middle. Tap. Ring. Tap. Pinky. Tap. Thumb. Tap.
The car should have passed by now.
With his other hand, Jimin fishes out a new strip of gum from the pack in his jacket pocket. His fingers twist it out of its packaging and fold it into a square before popping it into his mouth.
Seven chews later, flip-flopped between sets of molars, and the car is still trailing him, just a few feet back. A regular human wearing sound canceling headphones wouldn’t notice. Whoever is driving must not know Jimin.
Strange.
He would assume they do.
Jimin rolls his neck and weighs his options. It’s late by now, nearly 10 p.m. The chance of another car passing through the alley is slim, and most people on foot take the main road. With a sigh, he decides he should probably confront whoever is driving the car. He just hopes they don’t do anything that will make him have to kill them. Only a few days ago, he was close to spiking out. If even the slightest thing triggers him, he might lose it.
The car pulls up to the curb once Jimin stops walking. It’s an inconspicuous black sedan, nothing unlike most cars people drive in the city. The windows are heavily tinted, so he can only make out a shadowy figure behind the steering wheel. There’s an insignia carved into the handle of the back door on the driver’s side: two upright, mirrored trapezoids.
A shield, because sentinels are the protectors of their guide.
A door, because guides lead their sentinels to their mindscape, to safety.
Turning his head to the side, Jimin spits his gum into the street. There’s no use protecting himself from spiking or a zone out. He slips off his headphones and folds them into their case to tuck away in his backpack, and tries not to cringe at how loud the night is. Even the click of the car doors unlocking makes him flinch.
Then he opens the door and climbs inside.
The car's black leather seats stay firm under Jimin’s weight as he slides into the middle backseat, elbows braced on his knees. It's quiet inside the car, the buzz of the city snuffed out the moment the car door clicked shut. Warm air filters through the vents, chases away the autumn chill in Jimin's bones. He peers through the gap between the two front seats, gaze settling on the man behind the wheel.
"Didn't know you were in Chicago, Yoongi hyung."
Yoongi doesn’t answer right away. That comes as no surprise.
Jimin leans back against the leather seats as Yoongi shifts the car into drive and pulls out of the alley. Yoongi's hands are steady on the wheel, but Jimin notices how tight his grip is by the tension in his knuckles.
"I don't plan on staying for long," Yoongi finally says, his voice deceptively calm.
Their eyes meet through the rearview mirror, illuminated by streaks of light from lamps and neon signs. The red lights look especially striking on Yoongi when they catch on the scar sliced down one side of his face. All the soldiers in their former faction have scars like Yoongi's. Some decorate torsos, like Jimin's; others are invisible patterns carved into hearts, like Taehyung's.
Jimin hums, letting his gaze slide from Yoongi's unreadable side profile to the blur of late-night traffic outside his window. "Is that why you didn't tell me you were here?"
"You used to love surprises."
With a snort, Jimin scoots across the seat to sit at the back window on the passenger's side of the car. "Maybe seven years ago," he mutters as his street passes by.
They're driving further south, toward downtown. Jimin doesn't bother asking where they're going. This isn't the first time Yoongi has kidnapped him.
While they wait at the next red light, Yoongi taps his thumbs against the steering wheel—a habit they share.
"Changmin's dead,” he says.
Jimin stills. He has chewed a new piece of gum into a paste in his mouth and has to fight the urge to spit it out. “I know."
Word gets around, and it has only been two years since Jimin was discharged from the military. As much as he has tried to distance himself, news of how his former comrades are doing still winds up in his periphery.
Especially news like Changmin's.
Sentinels weren’t made to survive without their guides—without the one person who can anchor them when the world becomes too much. That's just a fact, something they all know to be undeniably true. Sentinels and guides are engineered to be like this. It's all very convenient, really. The superhuman powers they're born with are altered by the government to shape them into the perfect weapons of mass destruction. People like Jimin and Yoongi are ticking time bombs that are only capable of being diffused by the touch of their bonded guide.
Alone, sentinels with severed bonds spike. Zone out. Break down. Without anyone to balance their senses, their bodies turn on themselves. And once the deterioration starts, there’s no stopping it.
Jimin knows. He’s been living on the edge of it ever since Taehyung left. He rolls his shoulders back, ignoring the painful itch just under his skin—a feeling that never goes away. “I can handle myself.”
“Can you?” Yoongi doesn’t bother hiding his skepticism.
"Haven't I?"
Answering a question with another question was something Taehyung always did when he wanted to get on Jimin's nerves. From the lurch in Yoongi's pulse, Jimin can tell that he's pushing Yoongi's buttons in the same way. He'd get satisfaction out of it, if it weren't for how terribly his head throbs with Yoongi's heartbeat. The sound floods Jimin's eardrums, pulsing and reverberating through his skull.
"I don't know." Yoongi raises his eyebrows but doesn't look into the rearview mirror again. "I'd say the way you're fucking chomping on that gum is making me wonder how stupid you think I am."
Outside, the streets evolve from the homey but shabby apartment complexes of Jimin's neighborhood to something artsy, with community theaters on every corner, and photography galleries and plant shops nestled between mom-and-pop diners. Jimin could read the street signs through the splatter of rain that's now steadily drumming against the windows to figure out where he is, but he lets the weather blur his vision.
"Not to mention how pale you are"—Yoongi continues as he parallel parks the car, not needing to look at where he's going to perfectly align with the curb—"and skinny, shit, Jimin. You look sunken."
They don't talk once they get out of the car; there's no time. For a normal human, the chilly rain might be a bit jarring, but manageable in the short time it takes to jog from the street to the apartment. For Jimin, each raindrop feels like an ice shard piercing his skin. He knows the wet sensation left behind is only rain. Still, his brain pictures blood while he huddles against the front door to hide.
Yoongi jabs his thumb against the intercom, each press harder than the last. "Come on, come on," he mutters, until the door lets out a low, mechanical buzzing sound.
"Do I get to know whose apartment I'm walking into or am I supposed to use my instincts?" Jimin asks as he follows Yoongi through the front door and up the steep stairs to the second floor. "Want me to sniff them out like a bloodhound?"
It isn't a funny joke. Even if it had been, Yoongi wouldn't have laughed. He looks at Jimin over his shoulder with an expression so blank it makes Jimin's stomach dip with nerves.
Jimin squeezes the straps of his backpack and jostles it around, adjusting, with his eyes on the carpeted stairs. "Nevermind…"
Yoongi doesn't need to know that Jimin's sense of smell mostly stopped working a few weeks ago anyway.
It's Jimin's shit luck that it stopped, too, because it would have been pretty damn useful now—when Yoongi reaches apartment unit 207 right as the person on the other side of the door flings it open.
Wide, brown eyes stare past Yoongi to fall on Jimin, who shivers like a wet cat, rain-soaked clothes hanging off his thin frame. Jimin watches those eyes blink to the beat of his own heart, can count every perfectly curled eyelash.
Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
Taehyung twists the doorknob back and forth, making the lock click to the rhythm of Jimin's fingers tapping against his outer thigh. It's an absentminded guide thing, him clicking the doorknob. Jimin knows Taehyung isn't doing it on purpose. His body is doing it, because it knows. Muscle memory is stronger than anything else.
"Hi, Jimin."