Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The city sulks.

It never sleeps—not really—but it broods, low and mean, like it’s holding a grudge. That was Yoongi’s conclusion after years of walking its streets at every hour: early morning, bone-cold dusk, midnight when the drunks stumble like prayerless saints. The buildings lean in like they are whispering something mean. The gutters burble secrets in the rain. If he looks long enough at the skyline, it feels like it’s looking back, unimpressed.

Yoongi keeps his head down and moves fast.

The streets hum with the noise of tired engines and tired bodies, and Yoongi moves through it like a ghost in work boots—present, persistent, unseen. The soles of his shoes had worn thin three seasons ago. His coat is patched on the inside with a scarf his brother had once knitted, unravelling quietly under the armpit. 

And still, he makes it work. He can make anything work if the alternative is failing someone he loves.

His day starts before dawn. Stocking shelves at the corner market for a manager who never learned his name. From there, he takes the bus to the industrial district, where he hauls scrap and machinery until his fingers bleed rust. At night, he rotates between two shifts—one at the twenty-four-hour laundromat, the other mopping floors at a prep school that would never let someone like his brother in.

By the time he gets home, the sky is black and the walls of their apartment are humming with the static buzz of tired lightbulbs. He smells like metal, grease, detergent, and defeat.

But Namjoon is there.

That’s what makes the difference. That’s what made it endurable—if not livable. His younger brother sits curled on the couch most nights, a book balanced on his knees, glasses sliding down his nose, smelling faintly of cheap vanilla lotion and the candle he lights when he studies. Always something poetic on his tongue. Always a thought too big for the room they were in.

He’s an omega, bright in a way Yoongi doesn’t trust the world to handle gently. Not soft—never soft—but kind. And stubborn. Too smart for the neighborhood they live in, and Yoongi is awfully aware of this from the first time Namjoon asks him about the stars. He had no money for telescopes or school trips, but he did have hands and arms and feet, so he worked an extra shift at the scrapyard and found him a secondhand astronomy book with yellowed pages and crinkled corners and celestial diagrams. And he still the remembers the way Namjoon’s eyes went wide like Yoongi had handed him the whole damn sky.

He wanted to get a degree in literature, of all things. Something useless, their uncle had scoffed once. Yoongi had nearly broken the man’s jaw for it.

Namjoon’s dreams aren’t up for debate.

So Yoongi works. And works. And works.

Four jobs, six days. The seventh is for sleep, cooking, and collapsing onto their ratty couch with a beer while Namjoon reads aloud from whatever book has him captivated that week. Some modern poet whose words feel like a knife being twisted through his ribcage, or a philosopher Yoongi doesn’t pretend to understand. He listens anyway, because he likes the sound of Namjoon’s voice; because it reminds him not everything needs fixing. Some things just are, and they’re beautiful for it.

He hasn’t written music in years. A keyboard he can’t bring himself to put for sale sits in the back of the closet, buried beneath a box of old jackets and broken promises. It’s not that he doesn’t miss it—he does, sometimes, in a dull, nostalgic ache, like remembering a summer you didn’t realize was your last. But music doesn’t put food on the table. Chords don’t pay tuition. He’d made his choice. He doesn’t regret it.

Most days.

The apartment is small. One bedroom they split with a curtain, a single bathroom with a leaky faucet, a kitchen that hisses like it hates being used. But they have their routines: Tuesday is laundry, Thursday is leftovers, and Sunday is when Namjoon calls their mother’s grave via a tiny altar in the corner, where he lights incense and whispers stories about his week. Yoongi never joins in. He doesn’t know how to talk to the dead, only how to make sure the living doesn’t go hungry.

It smells like dust and effort, but it’s warm in winter and dry in the rain, and it has a window that faces the east, so Yoongi can watch the sun rise while drinking instant coffee that tastes like cardboard.

He has scars on his hands from old machines. His back aches constantly. His body is strong, but in the way rope frays with use. There is no mate waiting for him, no future beyond the next shift, no rest, not really.

But Namjoon laughs when he reads poems aloud, and Yoongi makes the time to listen. That is enough. It has to be.

The world doesn’t owe him more than this.

It starts on a Monday.

He’s halfway through his shift at the laundromat, scrubbing rust-stained tiles with a brush that lost half its bristles in the fall. The whole place smells like heat and bleach and the sour ghost of old detergent. The vending machine’s humming in the corner like it’s trying to confess something, and Yoongi’s counting the minutes between loads, between drips, between breaths.

A man walks in wearing government grey.

Not a customer—he’s too clean for that. No laundry basket, no coin roll. Just a clipboard tucked under one arm and an envelope in the other, sealed and stamped and official-looking in the way that makes Yoongi instinctively brace for bad news. A fine, a summons, a draft notice, maybe, if the country’s in that kind of a mood again.

“Min Yoongi?” the man asks flatly.

Yoongi stands, straightens his back, wipes his hands on his jeans. “Yeah.”

The man hands him the envelope and nods once, like he’s ticking a box in his head. “You’ve been selected for complimentary participation in the National Bonding Program’s Fated Mate Analysis. Random draws, pilot program.” The man looks down at him with something akin to disgust lingering in the corners of his eyes, in the way his nose crinkles when he smells the air around him. “Fully funded.”

Yoongi stares at him. “What?”

The man gestures vaguely to the letter. “Instructions inside. Results processed within thirty days. Don’t lose the barcode. Good night.”

And just like that, he’s gone—vanishing out the door and into the foggy spill of city light, leaving nothing behind but the envelope and the faint scent of state-issued aftershave.

The paper is thick, unreasonably so. Embossed seal, typed name. The barcode glints faintly under the laundromat’s flickering fluorescent bulb. Inside, a finger-prick kit and a return slip stare back at him. He brushes the tips of his fingers over a slot for consent and a note about fate and science and something like love, though it’s all written clinically, as if a soulmate could be manufactured in a lab.

Yoongi laughs.

It’s not the sort that puts a smile on your face and makes you want to giggle along; it’s just a breath—short and bitter. A joke with no punchline. 

He doesn’t have time to dream. He certainly doesn’t have time to think about things like soulmates.

That was for the wealthy, the romantic, the desperate. The kind of people who could afford to get their blood tested on a whim and wait with bated breath for a name to arrive in an envelope wrapped in gold leaf. Yoongi had never even considered it. He doesn’t have the time, or the money, or the faith. He certainly doesn’t need another mouth to feed. In his world, love is a choice, not a chemical bond; a matter of showing up, not submitting to fate.

He sets the envelope on the top of the dryer beside the rag bucket, meaning to throw it out by the end of his shift. He forgets.

He ends up taking it home, tucked between coupons and crushed cigarette boxes at the bottom of his bag.

He gets home late.

The sky outside is a smudge of navy and orange, clouds dragging across the rooftops like smoke. The hallway stinks of boiled cabbage and wet socks. Their door sticks—has for years—but he knows the trick with the hip and the shoulder, and it creaks open into warmth.

The smell of vanilla, cheap candle wax and the faint metally tang of radiator heat welcomes him like a warm hug. Namjoon’s curled into the couch with a blanket around his shoulders and a book pressed against his thigh. His glasses are askew, his hair is a mess, and he’s humming to himself as he reads—one of those low, unconscious things he does when he’s really into it. It’s the kind of sound that feels like home.

“Hey,” Namjoon says without looking up. “You’re late.”

“Bus was full. Had to walk.” Yoongi drops his bad by the door and shrugs off his jacket. His shirt clings damply and uncomfortably to his back.

Namjoon shuts the book. “You look like a ghost someone washed on hot.”

“Thanks.”

He means to collapse on the couch, to listen half-awake while Namjoon recites another poem he half-understands, but Namjoon’s already rummaging through his bag, probably looking for the snack he sometimes brings home when they have a little extra—expired Pocky or those red bean buns on clearance— or perhaps simply to find the bottom scattered with tobacco and scold him about how he should really quit smoking. Instead, his brother pulls out the envelope.

“What’s this?” he asks, curious. He turns it over in his hands, frowns at the seal.

“Nothing,” Yoongi mutters, toeing off his boots. “Junk. Government shit.”

Namjoon’s reading the slip already. “It says you got picked for a fated mate test.” His voice lifts, it lights up. “Hyung, that’s so cool.”

Yoongi snorts. “It’s bullshit.”

Namjoon ignores him, still absorbed. “They’re doing a pilot program, right? You got selected at random. It says right here they will cover all the costs. That’s kind of amazing, don’t you think? Fate for free.”

“There’s no such thing as fate,” Yoongi says, tired. “Just bad timing.”

Namjoon grins, too used to this kind of answer to take it seriously. “You don’t believe in anything until it bleeds or breaks.”

“I believe in rent, and you. That’s about it.”

“Then do it for me,” Namjoon offers, quiet now. “Just… I don’t know. Humor the universe a little.”

Yoongi sinks into the couch, rubs his face with both hands. He can still feel the dirt under his nails from the scrapyard, the ache in his back is its own kind of steady penance.

“It’s not real,” he shrugs. “People like us don’t get fairy tales.”

Namjoon tosses him the envelope. “People like us deserve something good, even if it’s small. Even if it’s a lie.”

Yoongi catches it on instinct.

The paper is heavy in his hands, denser than it should be, like it’s weighted with expectations he didn’t ask for. The barcode gleams under the light like a smirk. Inside, there’s the finger-prick kit, the sterile swab, the consent form. It’s all still there, still printed cleanly and impersonally, as if his blood could mean something outside of labor and lineage.

“You really want me to waste time on this?”

Namjoon’s expression softens. “I want you to remember that something else is possible. I want you to… be less lonely all the time.”

Yoongi lets the words sit in the silence between them. He doesn’t believe in fate, but he does believe in Namjoon, and perhaps that’s conviction enough.

So, he takes the kit into the bathroom, washes his hands with the last of the lemon-scented soap. Sitting on the edge of the tub, Yoongi pricks his finger with the tiny needle and watches the blood bloom like a flower against the white of the sample card.

He seals it, folds the envelope, slides it back into his bag between a broken umbrella that can just barley withstand a windy day, and a dented thermos.

In the kitchen, the kettle whistles low and weary. Back in the living room, Namjoon’s lighting a fresh candle.

“You send it tomorrow?” he asks.

Yoongi shrugs. “Yeah, I guess.”

Namjoon smiles like the sun’s already risen and Yoongi doesn’t have the guts to say it, but he feels it—the strange and distant pull of maybe. Nothing like hope, just a soft knock on the door of what could be.

He doesn’t answer.

Yet.

He’s late for the clinic.

It’s raining, of course. The kind that doesn’t fall so much as settle— into his collar, into the soles of his boots, into the soft bruising spot between shoulder blades where stress makes a home. It’s not dramatic, it seeps into his socks and settles into his bones, making everything heavier than it already is. It’s insistent, like everything else in life.

The clinic is ugly in the way old office blocks are always ugly: linoleum curling at the edges, ceiling panels stained from some leak no one ever fixed, paint the color of municipal apathy. The walls breathe out mildew and bleach. He tracks in industrial mud and yesterday’s exhaustion.

The omega behind the front desk doesn’t look up. He just slides a pen toward the sign-in sheet with a fingernail painted chipped lilac. Yoongi scribbles his name with hands that still smell faintly of rust and machine oil. There’s a dark streak under one fingernail that no amount of scrubbing could lift, and he hates that it makes him hesitate. As if he should apologize for the life he walked in wearing.

He sits, dripping, stomach turning on itself, hollow and slick from the instant coffee he downed at dawn and nothing since. The chairs are hard plastic and spaced too close. His fingers twitch on his knee. He looks back to the spot of rust clinging to his fingernail, and now he’s self-conscious about it, which is stupid, because this is far from the worst state he has walked outside in, but there is a voice at the back of his mind that whispers something about the doctor judging him for bringing a piece of the scrapyard with him.

When they call his name, it’s too loud and too sharp. He follows a nurse through a narrow hallway that smells like damp paper. The exam room is worse: bright, sterile, suffocating. The kind of bright that makes you feel like a mistake under a microscope.

Dr Han is new; a young alpha with a pressed shirt and no rings on his fingers. He’s efficient, polite, and just clinical enough to make Yoongi feel like a specimen instead of a person.

“Vitals are steady,” Dr. Han says, tapping at a screen riddled with words and graphs Yoongi doesn’t really understand but cannot mean anything too good; which he had expected. “But you’ve lost weight since your last checkup. Muscle density’s down. Iron’s low.”

Yoongi shrugs one shoulder. “I work.”

“More than before?”

“Always more.”

Dr. Han hums. “That might explain the fatigue and joint inflammation. But the hormone imbalance doesn’t come from long hours.”

Yoongi goes still.

The doctor scrolls. “You’ve been using off-label suppressants. Homemade blends, or worse, if the test markers are accurate.”

Yoongi doesn’t answer. He suddenly feels warm.

“That’s not safe,” Dr. Han says. Not unkind. Just tired, like someone who’s said this to too many ghosts already. “You know that.”

“I can’t afford the safe kind.”

“You can’t afford a ruptured gland either.”

The words hit sharp and cold, blunt in the way medical people get when they’re tired of seeing preventable problems pile up. Yoongi only crosses his arms and leans back on the exam table’s paper lining like it’s a bed of thorns he chose. He’s heard worse from people who cared less.

There’s a pause. And then, softly:

“Why haven’t you spent your ruts with anyone?”

Yoongi’s jaw tics. He focuses on a crack in the ceiling, a vein in the plaster that reminds him of the riverbed beneath the scrapyard bridge. He picks at the fraying hem of his sleeve.  “Not your business.”

“I’m your doctor,” Dr. Han replies, patient but firm. “It is, quite literally, my business.”

Yoongi exhales, slow. “I don’t have time for that. Or space. Or the kind of life where that’s even a possibility. I take something, I sleep it off. That’s it.”

“It’s not nothing, what you’re doing to your body. Chemical suppression without rest, without release— especially for an alpha—it builds up. You know this.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” the doctor replies, gently. “You’re surviving.”

The words hang there, heavy as wet cloth. The kind of thing Yoongi could argue with if he wasn’t so tired of hearing himself lie. If it didn’t feel like a mirror held up too close. If he didn’t know, already, in the quiet way he knows most things, that the doctor is right. Yoongi doesn’t know what to do with the silence, so he fills it the only way he knows how—by shutting down.

“Are we done?”

Dr. Han sighs and closes the chart. “I’m putting in a request for subsidized alpha care. It won’t cover everything, but it’ll help. You need regulated suppressants and at least one recovery cycle with a proper partner, or—”

“There is no partner,” Yoongi cuts in. He catches himself immediately after, and adds quieter, “There’s no one.”

Dr. Han hesitates. Shifts the pen between his fingers. “Have you considered a rut hotel?”

Yoongi actually laughs at that, sharp-edged. As if. “Right. Renting an omega? That’s disgusting.”

“I only meant—”

“I know what you meant.”

Dr. Han nods, as if filing something away. “Then… the mate program?” he asks, cautiously. “There’s been some recent expansions. Government’s been—”

“I know,” Yoongi cuts in again. His voice is thinner now, brittle around the edges. “I already submitted my sample. Some guy showed up with the kit like it was a gift basket. My brother thought it’d be—” he shakes his head. “Whatever. I did it.”

Dr. Han looks surprised, but not mocking. “Well. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

Yoongi doesn’t believe in luck, not anymore. But Namjoon had smiled when he sealed the envelope, and that had almost been enough. Something small and impossible in Yoongi still wants to be wrong about the world.

He stands and shrugs on his coat. The weight of damp fabric tugs at his shoulders.

“Yeah,” he says, quiet. “Maybe.”

When he leaves, the sky’s still pissing rain and the gutters still cough up secrets. The bus is late, his shoulders ache, his head buzzes dully from lack of food, and he should be on shift already, but his fingers drift to the inside pocket where the barcode stub from the mate kit is still folded—creased and soft around the edges, but not yet thrown away.

The factory air hits different after the clinic. Too hot, too dry, too full of old metal and the tang of electricity. It scrapes down his throat like sandpaper as he ducks under the restued frame of the back entrance and swipes in late. Nobody says anything, nobody ever does. The punch clock ticks like a distant heartbeat—indifferent and unbothered.

Yoongi wipes his boots on the mat out of habit, though the floor is already stained with decades of bootprints no mop could ever lift. The overhead lights flicker once, twice. They always do. He’s long since stopped expecting the foreman to change the bulbs.

His station is where he left it: cluttered with parts, cold tools, cables that wind like veins across the bench. A pile of half-disassembled sensor units sits waiting for his hands. He exhales and shrugs off his coat. The sleeve catches on the edge of the stool, and he lets it drag to the floor.

His hands move automatically—gloves on, power tools checked, parts sorted. There’s something almost merciful about the routine, about the way the world shrinks down to wires and screws, to things he can fix. Strip, solder, seal, test. One after the other. He doesn’t have to think. He doesn’t have to feel.

But his body betrays him anyway.

The doctor’s words linger. Surviving. Suppressing. Long-term complications. All those polite phrases wrapped in soft concern that still felt like knives.

He pulls a wire too hard and the solder gun slips. A hiss, a burn, a bite of heat at the edge of his palm. He curses, not loudly, but with the kind of quiet venom that curls in the teeth. The skin bubbles up, angry and red.

He sucks it in between his teeth and keeps working.

He’s always been like this; wear down instead of break, carry on instead of stop. No time for healing, no room for softness. He’s never spent a rut in anyone’s bed—never even considered the idea of being held through one. He gets through them the way he gets through everything else: clenched teeth, closed doors, curtains drawn against the world.

It’s easier that way; safer, cleaner. Love is a luxury. Wanting someone, needing them—it makes people stupid. It makes people slow, and he can’t afford to be either.

The machines hum in chorus. There’s a sort of comfort in it, a kind of mechanical lullaby, industrial and constant. Time blurs. His hands grow stiff, his back aches, and his neck feels like it’s been locked in the same angle for years. Someone offers him a smoke break and he shakes his head.

He reaches for the next unit in the pile and pauses.

His fingers hover over the barcode etched into the casing. It’s not the same, not even close, but for a flicker of a moment it reminds him of the stub in his pocket, the one from the mate program. The stupid little slip of paper that Namjoon had tucked into his coat like it meant something, like it was hope instead of just another line in a system that had never once looked his way with anything close to mercy.

Maybe you’ll get lucky, the doctor had said.

Yoongi snorts under his breath and jams the unit open with the edge of his screwdriver. 

Lucky isn’t a word that fits him. It feels too round, too smooth. He’s jagged at the edges, lucky would slide right off him.

He hasn’t even told Namjoon how bad it’s gotten. How the suppressants don’t always work anymore, how sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night clawing at his own skin, caught in a fever dream of heat and emptiness and the ghost of a scent that isn’t there.

The ache doesn’t leave; not when the rut fades, not when the fever passes, not even now, with his body limp from labor and his mind too tired to hold a thought straight.

There’s no one to tell, anyway. No one who’d understand.

He finishes the last unit in the pile just as the buzzer sounds shift change. He doesn’t stay for overtime, doesn’t stop in the break room. He simply peels off his gloves, flexes sore fingers, and slips back into his coat, even though the lining is still damp from this morning. It smells like cold rain and rust and the inside of the bus shelter near Building 8.

Outside, the sky’s gone grey with evening. Streetlamps buzz, flickering halos in the mist. Water pools in the cracks in the concrete. He steps aroun them, careful, even though it doesn’t matter. His boots are already soaked through.

The bus is late again. He leans against the stop sign and closes his eyes for a moment too long. Just a blink, just a breath, just—

“Hey.” A voice tugs him up. One of the other workers, a beta he doesn’t know well. “You good?”

Yoongi nods without opening his eyes. “Just tired.”

The beta hums. “Aren’t we all.”

They leave it at that.

The bus pulls in eventually. Eventually, he gets on, sits by the window, watches the city smear itself across the glass.

When he gets home, Namjoon is curled on the couch with a book in his lap and two mugs of tea going cold on the table. He looks up, smiles without saying anything, and Yoongi thinks, maybe that’s the only thing keeping him tethered these days.

He changes into dry clothes, eats half a sandwich and lies awake in bed for an hour listening to the rain tap against the metal siding of their building like it has something to say.

Eventually, sleep comes; thin and tattered, like the blanket he pulls over his body. But in the pocket of the coat draped across the chair, the stub of that barcode still waits. Still soft at the corners and not thrown away.

Morning comes slow.

Not like a sunrise, not golden or warm—just a gradual lightening of the grey outside the window, like the city is exhaling smoke after a long night of burning itself down. The rain has stopped but left everything wet; the kind of damp that seeps into the walls and lingers like a ghost. Yoongi wakes to it in pieces: the creak of the floorboards above them, the hiss of the radiator, the rustle of Namjoon in the kitchen trying to be quiet.

It doesn’t work. It never does.

He keeps his eyes closed anyway, holding onto the edge of sleep like it’s a ledge he might fall off of if he breathes too deeply. His body is sore in the old familiar way—shoulders like rusted hinges, knees aching like they’ve been borrowed from someone older, someone worn out. There’s a throb in his temple that promises to bloom into a headache if he moves too fast.

But he moves anyway.

The sheets stick to his skin when he peels himself out of bed. His shirt is tangled around his waist, sweat-damp from sleep that wasn’t restful. He feels heavy, not simply tired— weighted, as if the air itself has thickened overnight, as if the gravity in this part of the city clings harder to his bones.

He doesn’t say good morning when he shuffles into the kitchen. Namjoon doesn’t expect him to.

The boy just offers a soft smile over the rim of his mug and gestures toward the counter, where another cup waits, still steaming faintly. He’s always been like this—quiet, thoughtful, a little too kind for the place they live in. Yoongi sometimes worries he’ll break, that the world will find the softest part of him and carve it open just to see what’s inside,.

They eat in silence: toast and cheap jam, the kind that tastes like syrup and food coloring, not fruit. Namjoon hums along to the old radio on the windowsill, static-laced and fuzzy, a voice drifting in and out of tune. It’s a small thing, but it anchors them. It holds the morning in place.

Yoongi lights his first cigarette on the fire escape.

The air is sharp and wet and smells like rusted pipe and bus exhaust. Below, the alley is a sprawl of puddles and peeling posters. A cat darts past a trash can with something limp in its mouth. The city is already awake, clattering and groaning like a thing that resents being alive.

He inhales.

The smoke burns the way he likes it to: rough and familiar. It coils in his lungs and makes the ache in his chest feel just a little more bearable—like he’s chosen this hurt, at least. Like it’s his.

The sky overhead is an unbroken sheet of cloud, the kind of color he’d call silver if he were being romantic, but it’s really just dirty white, smudged like a bruise that never quite healed. He leans against the railing and watches the traffic inch past three stories below. Nobody looks up, they never do.

He thinks about the barcode again. About the sample kit. It’s still in his coat pocket, folded like a lottery ticket. He hasn’t thrown it out, and he doesn’t know why.

No, that’s a lie. He does know.

It’s Namjoon.

It’s the way his little brother had smiled that day, all bright eyes and hopeful nonsense, like maybe this broken little world still has something good left to give.

Like, maybe, Yoongi, who’s never asked for anything, who’s built his life out of scraped knuckles and silence, might actually be allowed something soft.

He takes another drag and exhales into the cold. Watches the smolke curl and vanish into the hush of morning.

The idea of a mate still feels absurd. Fated love, destiny, like the universe has the time to care about men like him. He doesn’t believe in soulmates, never has, but the doctor’s words cling to him more stubbornly than the rain.

You’re not fine. You’re surviving.

He flicks the ash over the edge of the railing and stares down at his feet, at the flaking paint and cigarette burns on the metal grating. He hasn’t had a real rut in almost four years, not one he didn’t choke down with pills and pride, shaking and fevered, pressing a towel between his teeth so Namjoon wouldn’t hear him making sounds he couldn’t control.

The memories are carved deep. Shameful. Animal.

He stubs the cigarette out on the railing and flicks the butt into a puddle below. Inside, the kettle whistles again—Namjoon, probably making another cup of tea before class. Yoongi doesn’t go back in right away; he stays where he is, hands in his pockets, breath fogging faintly in the air.

He wonders what it might be like, just once, to let someone help him through it; to have a hand in his hair instead of the edge of the sink. A voice, not his own, whispering that it’s okay, that he’s not broken, that this doesn’t make him weak. Whispering that he’s good, that his best is more than enough.

He wonders, but he doesn’t hope.

Hope is dangerous, and expensive, and he has bills to pay.

Eventually, he pulls his coat on and laces his boots. The sun won’t come out, not really, but there’s work to do. The world keeps turning, even when he doesn’t. He shoulders his bag, nods to Namjoon, and heads back into the city with another cigarette between his fingers and that barcode stub tucked quiet and creased inside his coat. 

Still there.

It happens on a Wednesday.

Which is funny, in a bleak sort of way—because Wednesdays are usually the quiet ones; the forgotten middle child of the week. The world doesn’t expect much from a Wednesday. It doesn’t carry the weight of a Monday or the cruel promise of a Friday. Yoongi’s always liked that about them: how they ask for nothing.

But this Wednesday, something asks. Something takes.

It starts the way most days do—ash between his fingers, gravel underfoot, and the clang of the scrapyard gate groaning open like it resents his presence. His shift foreman waves him over with a hand slicked in motor oil, and there’s already a new stack of parts to inventory, numbers to scratch onto clipboards with a pencil worn down to its eraser. He doesn’t mind the monotony. There’s something sacred in the repetition, in the rhythm of work done by hand, in knowing the world still needs people who can sort through the wreckage and find the things that might still be useful.

He’s halfway through cataloging a rust-bitten engine coil when it happens.

The gates don’t creak this time. They thunder.

Three men in matte black coats step onto the yard like the air is supposed to part for them. One of them carries a clipboard, one wears gloves that look expensive, and the last—tall, bald, with a badge gleaming at his throat—has a look that says this isn’t his first time hunting someone down. They do not belong here. The rust recoils from their shoes. Even the feral dogs that linger by the fence hesitate.

“Min Yoongi?”

His name, flat and full of teeth. He straightens slowly, wipes his palms on his trousers, and tries not to show the panic blooming behind his ribs. It’s not fear, exactly. It’s the sharp awareness that something is about to change, or perhaps that something already has.

“It’s him.”

The clipboard official steps forward. “You submitted a fated mate DNA profile through the Civic Pairing Initiative, correct?”

Yoongi nods once, cautious. “Yeah, days ago.”

The man flips a page. “You’ve been selected. Effective immediately.”

The world stops.

Not literally—there are still drills whining in the background, still a distant siren crying its usual song—but inside Yoongi’s mind, everything stills. The dust hangs midair, his breath doesn’t leave through his teeth. It’s like a dream that hasn’t showed itself as a nightmare yet.

“What?” he tries.

The official clears his throat. “Your compatibility rating returned as a 99.9% fated match with Crown Prince Park Jimin of the Omega Royal Line. The monarchy has issued an expedited bethrotal order. You are to be transported to the capital by  nightfall tomorrow.”

Yoongi blinks. “I—I think there’s been a mistake.”

“There are no mistakes,” the gloved one says, calm and impersonal. “The result was verified through all mandatory protocols.”

Yoongi stares at them, then down at his hands—grimy, oil-streaked, scarred. The skin beneath his nails is stained with iron from the yard. There’s a sliver of metal still bandaged to his thumb from last week’s accident. He smells like smoke and steel and stagnant rain.

A prince?

It doesn’t fit. It can’t.

He laughs, but it doesn’t sound like a laugh—more like a cough, or a man trying to spit out disbelief and finding it’s lodged too deep to shake loose.

“I—I filled out a paper form,” he says, because that’s the only truth he can find. “Some guy dropped it off like junk mail. I didn’t even read the fine print.”

“That doesn’t change the outcome.”

“It was a raffle,” Yoongi mutters, dazed. “It was a fucking raffle.”

And it feels like that, suddenly. Like someone somewhere spun a wheel and it landed on his name out of pure, cosmic boredom.

They don’t wait for him to believe it. They just hand him an envelope—thick, wax-sealed, gold trim on the edges like something out of a storybook—and tell him there’s a car waiting.

“Can my brother come?” he asks at last, as a last resort when nothing around him is clicking into place and he needs the reassuring presence of the one steady thing in his life.

“You may bring blood family.”

He doesn’t go with them right away.

He stumbles home.

The door slams behind him with a finality that sounds like gravel. Not dramatic, not cinematic, just the dull thud of cheap wood catching on warped hinges. Yoongi stands in the entryway with his boots still on, the envelope still clutched in one hand like it might dissolve if he lets go of it. His jacket is damp, his fingers cold. He doesn’t remember walking home, but he must have, because here he is—smeared in scrapyard dust and bureaucratic ink, standing in the ruins of what used to be his ordinary life.

Namjoon is where he always is: the sofa, curled like a question mark over a tattered civics textbook, surrounded by a gravity field of empty tea mugs, Yoongi’s old clothes that no longer fit, and notes written in a language only he understands. The TV is on low, playing some retro anime dubbed in the wrong accent. He looks up when Yoongi doesn’t call out.

Then he really looks.

“Hyung?” he says, eyebrows lifting. “You okay?”

Yoongi can’t speak. He just walks in like a ghost might: slow, hollow-boned, dragging something invisible behind him. He holds out the envelope like it’s an omen, or a puzzle, or a live wire.

Namjoon takes it gingerly, tilts his head to read the seal. When he does, his brow furrows, and then his mouth opens.

“Oh, shit.”

Yoongi sinks into the armchair like he’s been shot. His limbs don’t bend right, his spine’s made of string. “Yeah, shit.”

Namjoon stares at the wax. Then at him, then back at the wax.

“You got matched.”

“Yeah.”

“To a royal.”

Yoongi closes his eyes. “Apparently.”

Namjoon lets out a breath and leans back, blinking hard. “Like—a real royal? Like castles and crests and cloaks and constitutional immunity?”

Yoongi gestures vaguely with a hand. “Something like that.”

Namjoon’s voice goes soft with awe. “Hyung, you’re gonna be a consort. A palace-kept alpha. You’re gonna have to learn how to curtsey.”

Yoongi groans into his palms. “Alphas don’t curtsey.”

Namjoon shrugs, eyes wide and gleaming with the hysteria of someone two seconds from falling into manic laughter, “Maybe this one does. Maybe you’ll be the first.”

He starts giggling in earnest now, high and wild. “Do you think you’ll get a title? Sir Min of the Scrapheap? Lord of the Rust and Rot?”

“Shut up.”

“Oh my god.” Namjoon wheezes. “This is insane. I mean—you filled that form out on the kitchen table, didn’t even read the privacy clause, and now you’re someone’s fated royal knot consort.”

Yoongi flinches. “Don’t say that out loud ever again.”

“Knot consort,” Namjoon repeats solemnly, as if savoring a fine wine. “Royal. Knot. Consort.”

“Joon-ah.”

“No, hyung, think about it. You’re gonna be in the tabloids. The alpha who clawed his way out of the slums and into a silk bed.”

Yoongi huffs a humorless laugh, bitter as day-old ash. “No one claws into royalty. They get dragged.”

Namjoon sobers at that. His mouth presses into a line and he tosses the envelopeonto the table like it’s too heavy to hold any more.

“But seriously,” he says, softer now. “Are you okay?”

Yoongi stares at the ceiling. The same water stain they’ve never fixed blinks back at him. The cracked paint curls like the edge of a burnt page.

“I don’t know.”

There’s silence between them, thick and uncertain.

“I thought they’d take weeks,” Yoongi murmurs. “Months, maybe. I thought I’d get a rejection notice. Or no match. Or some lonely bureaucrat with four kids and a trauma bond. I didn’t think I’d get—him.”

Namjoon blinks. “Him? You know who it is?”

“Crown Prince Park Jimin.”

Namjoon lets out a low whistle. “As in Park Jimin. The one with the eyes and the ass and the diplomatic immunity?”

Yoongi looks at him, striken. “Joon.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Namjoon says quickly, hands up in surrender. “Just—he’s the omega. The Omega of Omegas. You know how many people have been tested hoping it’d be him? Do you know how many wars have almost been started over that match? Over his scent gland?”

Yoongi’s throat is dry. “So why me?”

Namjoon’s voice is gentle now. Still amused, but shaded with something else—wonder, maybe. Or quiet fear. “Maybe fate’s a freak.”

Yoongi shakes his head, fingers raking through his hair. “I fix broken carburetors with coat hangers. I shower in a bathroom with mold on the ceiling. I can’t even afford my own rut meds.”

Namjoon snorts, loud and incredulous, but his laugh is more startled than mocking. “Well, you can now,” he says, then pauses, eyes flicking with mischief, warming to his own absurdity. “Actually—scratch that. They probably won’t let you take suppressants anymore anyway. Wouldn’t want to poison the royal seed or whatever.” He gestures vaguely, mock-serious. “They’ll swaddle you in silks and lay you on a state-approved bed of enchanted flowers. Feed you hormone-rich broth by spoon and monitor your temperature hourly until you’ve put an heir in the prince.”

Yoongi stares. “I’m going to kill you.”

Namjoon only grins, eyes crinkling with the kind of delighted horrors that come from watching your life swerve into high fantasy without a warning. “No, really. You’ll be the nation’s most pampered alpha. The newspapers are probably drafting headlines already. Royal Knot Sought. Scarred Alpha to Seed the Future.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Namjoon’s laugh is sudden in a bright way, too loud in the little apartment where nothing feels real anymore. It bounces off the concrete walls and comes back softer. “God, this is isane.”

“I haven’t even met him,” Yoongi whispers, almost to himself. The words feel foreign in his mouth—unbelievable, like bad fiction. “He doesn’t know me, I don’t know him. I’m just… I’m no one.”

Namjoon sobers at that, though the edges of his mouth still twitch. “You think a crown cares about that? You sent your sample. They ran your profile. This isn’t a raffle, hyung. The algorithm doesn’t care about bank accounts. It matched you because of who you are, not what you’ve got.”

Yoongi picks at the label on a jar of instant coffee, flaking it off in strips. “And who is that?”

Namjoon doesn’t answer, not directly. Instead, he looks at Yoongi for a long moment, eyes steady, then says, “Apparently? A man worth locking in a palace to bed the Crown Prince.”

Yoongi groans, head thunking back against the cabinet behind him.

“I hate you.”

“No you don’t. You’re just scared.”

“I’m not scared.” Yoongi lies.

Namjoon raises a brow.

“... I’m overwhelmed.”

“Same thing.”

They lapse into silence again, the kind that settles into their bones. Outside, the city moves on—sirens and footsteps and the low hum of trains threading through rusted arteries. Inside, Yoongi holds the letter like it’s radioactive, as if it might burn through his hands and leave nothing behind but smoke.

“You think they’ll really make me do it?” he asks finally, voice low. “Make me… give him a child?”

Namjoon hesitates, then shrugs. “They’ll probably just expect it quietly. Like all things royal. But they’ll never ask. That’s how they get away with it.”

Yoongi presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I’m a mechanic.”

“You’re a lot more than that.” Namjoon’s voice softens, Yoongi can feel the weight of his hand settling over his shoulder and pressing gentle circles over sore skin. “You’re my brother, for one.”

Yoongi doesn’t answer, he doesn’t know how. He simply breathes in the stale apartment air and wonders if the palace will smell like bleach and jasmine and ghosts.

He wonders if the prince is kind.

He wonders what the hell kind of world would put him in a bed of flowers and call it fate.

The bags are packed before dawn, though neither of them really sleeps. Sleep is for people who dream without dread, who don’t wake up with the memory of a stranger in a golden sash standing in their cramped kitchen and saying things like bethroted and state contract and please come quietly.

The apartment is hollow with the sound of departure. Every cupboard has been left half open, every drawer just slightly ajar—as if the place itself is holding its breah, unwilling to accept the quiet truth that its tenants are leaving. Yoongi sits on the edge of the bed and lights a cigarette with shaking fingers, not quite looking at Namjoon, who is checking—again—the latch on the window that never quite closed right.

“I should leave the key,” Yoongi says, more to the smoke than the room.

Namjoon snorts softly. “And the mold spores. And the guilt.”

Yoongi flicks ash into a cracked cup that once held soy sauce and not much else. “And the cigarette stench.”

“They’ll air it out anyway,” Namjoon says, knowing full well smoke that clings to walls is the sort that never really leaves. He’s not smiling, but his mouth tilts like he’s trying to be brave for both of them; brave, positive despite despite despite. “They’ll probably torch the furniture. Can’t have royalty exposed to secondhand hardship.”

Yoongi makes a noise that could be a laugh if it weren’t so tired. “Don’t talk like that.”

Namjoon shrugs, shoulders too narrow for the jacket he’s borrowing—Yoongi’s best one, which isn’t saying much. “You’re the one getting carted off to some silk-draped palace to breed a prince.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Well?” Namjoon grins then, wide and dimpled and real. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

Yoongi smokes in silence, because Namjoon has been wrong about very few things in his life. The world feels blurry at the edges, like he’s walking through someone else’s dream. He wants to protest— this isn’t what I wanted, I didn’t ask for this— but his throat is full of splinters, and his heart feels like a sore thing shoved too suddenly into sunlight. All he can say, after a long moment, is, “You don’t have to come.”

Namjoon looks at him like he’s grown a second head. “You think I’m staying behind? What the hell would I even do without you? Scrub reactor tanks for fun?”

“You were just getting your footing.”

“And I’ll get it somewhere else,” Namjoon replies, simply. “They’ve got books in the palace, right? Probably even ones without pages missing. Who knows, maybe I’ll become a scholar. Write a memoir on what it’s like to be the brother of the Royal Knot Consort.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Oh, you’re getting embroidered towels. Maybe even a monogrammed jockstrap. His Majesty’s Knot.”

“Namjoon—”

“You’ll be famous.”

“I’ll be eaten alive.”

Namjoon’s grin fades, his mouth softens, and his eyes—always too old, too knowing—go gentle at the corners. “Not if I have any say in it.”

They look at each other then, across the shadow of the room that has been both prison and shelter, home and hardship. Yoongi sees the boy he raised in Namjoon’s too-tall frame, the kid with scrapped knees and big questions who used to cry when Yoongi skipped dinner so he wouldn’t have to. And Namjoon sees the brother who never took a break, who stitched his own dreams into smaller pieces so he could feed them both with scraps and stubbornness.

“I’m scared,” Yoongi finally admits. It slips out soft, too unguarded for his mouth.

Namjoon doesn’t hesitate. “So am I.”

They leave at dawn, backpacks slung over shoulders that have carried more than they should have had to. The sky is colorless, the street slick and quiet. A black car idles at the curb like something out of a movie they were never supposed to star in.

Namjoon bumps his shoulder against Yoongi’s on the way down the steps.

“We’ll be alright,” he says.

Yoongi doesn’t answer, but he lets himself believe it—just for a moment—as the door closes behind them.

The apartment doesn’t say goodbye. It never does.

The car is obscene.

It waits at the curb like it belongs to another planet, all sleek angles and gleaming chrome, the kind of thing Yoongi would expect to see in a propaganda reel, not outside a half-sunken building with rust in the gutters and last year’s trash still frozen to the sidewalk. Its windows are blacked out and so clean they reflect the whole grey morning back like a lie: two silhouettes standing in the doorway with a single back each, trying not to look like they’re about to be swallowed whole.

“Holy shit,” Namjoon whispers, elated. “Is that real leather?”

Yoongi doesn’t answer. His mouth is dry, his fingers are twitching slightly at his sides like they’re missing a tool, a wrench, something to hold onto. His boots stick to the concrete like they’re trying to anchor him to the life he knows. For a second he just stands there, staring at the vehicle with its quiet hum and invisible driver, and thinks: this isn’t my life.

The sky is the color of old steel, and Yoongi can smell rain coming again—he can feel it in his joints, behind his eyes. The wind kicks up and stirs the thin layer of street-dirt on his jeans, on Namjoon’s too-long sleeves. They are made of all the wrong textures and all the wrong shapes. The car doesn’t belong here, and neither do they.

A suited attendant—who must’ve been standing there the whole time—steps forward from some shadow beside the vehicle and opens the back door without a word.

Namjoon nudges Yoongi with his elbow, barely containing his awe. “Come on, royalty. You first.”

Yoongi shoots him a glare, but it’s too half-hearted to matter. His limbs move on autopilot, sliding into a leather seat that probably cost more than their entire year’s rent. The interior smells like cedar and ozone an something faintly floral—like the memory of luxury, or at least that’s what he imagines it would smell like—and the seats swallow his body in a way that makes him feel like he’s disappearing, like he’s being eaten by the vehicle itself.

Namjoon slides in after him and lets out a low whistle. “Okay. Okay, this is the softest thing I’ve ever sat on. I think my spine just resigned from its job.”

Yoongi exhales through his nose, presses his back against the seat, and closes his eyes for a second too long. It’s warm in here; too warm. He feels like he should apologize to the cushions for being filthy, for bringing in the scent of a building with bad insulation and even worse plumbing. He doesn’t belong in this softness, in this silence cushioned with money.

The car starts moving without so much as a rev of the engine, silent as a secret, and Yoongi opens his eyes again just to make sure the city’s still there. It is, blurring past the tinted windows—grey concrete and sagging signage, old women with bent spines dragging carts of wilted greens, a child in too-big shoes kicking a plastic bottle down the street. Life as it was, as it is, as it will go on without him.

He pulls his phone from his jacket pocket and unlocks it with a swipe. There’s a string of messages from Yijeong--- his junior partner at the refinery, the one with long fingers and longer dreams, one of the few people Yoongi had ever talked to beyond the usual grunts and nods. The one who used to hum under his breath while they cleaned out the gunk traps, and who once confessed in a tired, slurred voice over a table full of cheap soju and discount fried chicken that he used to write music too. That he had a keyboard, once. That he used to sing. 

Yijeong had always gravitated towards Yoongi in the quiet hours of night shifts, like something in him recognized the matching loss. Not the kind that comes with death, but the quieter kind; the theft of a thing you never really got to hold. They’d talk sometimes, in snippets, about chords and scales, about beats that came to them in dreams but never had time to record. They’d pass a broken headphone back and forth in the locker room and listen to scraps of melody like they were sacred. It was the only time Yoongi ever let himself miss it; the only time he remembered what his hands were built for.

> where tf r u
> you sick or something??
> your name’s off the rota bro
> did you get fired lmfao
> hyung????
> u good?

Yoongi stares at the blinking cursor for a long moment. His thumb hovers.

He types: Something came up. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Take care of yourself, alright?

Then deletes it. Starts again.

I’m not dead. Just…. Somewhere else now.

He deletes that too.

In the end, he just sends: Thanks for the coffee last week.

It feels stupid and incomplete, but it’s more than he usually gives, and perhaps it’s enough. Perhaps, Yijeong will understand the gaps between the words the way only someone who’s lived inside silence can.

He slides the phone back into his pocket and glances at Namjoon, who’s now fiddling with the embedded touch screen in the door, trying to see if the cupholders are heated or if there’s a mini fridge. He looks impossibly young suddenly—excited and glowing and curious in a way Yoongi hasn’t seen since the world pressed its teeth into both of them.

“You okay?” Namjoon asks, glancing over, the joy dimming just slightly when he sees Yoongi’s face.

Yoongi nods. It’s a lie, because he is not really okay, but he is upright and moving forward and the weight beside him in the car is his brother. That will have to be enough.

For now, he watches the city peel away behind them, and wonders how long it will take to forget how it smelled.

The car glides through the final security gate with barely a whisper, like even the tires know to hush in the presence of royalty. Yoongi watches the iron bars peel open, slow and deliberate, revealing a world that doesn’t look real—something from a myth or an old hollow-screen drama. Trees too symmetrical, lawns trimmed with scissors, statues carved from soft white stone, gleaming even beneath the gray stretch of morning sky. There’s a fountain ahead spaced like a pair of wings, water fanning into the air with such elegance it seems wasteful.

He glances sideways at Namjoon, who has gone perfectly still. His eyes are wide, mouth parted just slightly, one hand still catching the seatbelt across his chest like it might keep him from floating away.

“Looks fake,” Yoongi mutters, because he has to say something, because the silence inside the car feels too heavy, like velvet lined with lead.

Namjoon only exhales a stunned, breathless laugh. “It’s beautiful.”

Yoongi looks away.

The palace itself unfurls like a dream—like a spell. Wings of cream-colored stone rise form the ground in wide, eyegant arches, latticed with narrow windows and glass corridors that glint with the dull light of the overcast morning. Balconies bloom from every level like petals—curved and delicate and utterly unreachable. Ivy scales the lower walls, artfully contained, as if even the wild things here know their place.

There are guards in black standing at attention near the arched entrance. Their faces are expressionless. Their uniforms gleam at the seams. Yoongi is sure that if he peeled one open, there’d be gears inside instead of blood and bones.

He swallows around the sour taste in his mouth. It’s nothing to fear, but something akin—something colder and brittle that makes him feel like he’s made of cracked porcelain and everyone here knows it.

The car eases to a stop at the base of a wide staircase carved from pale marble. A man in gold-trimmed livery steps forward to open the door, bowing low. Namjoon nearly trips over himself climbing out. Yoongi follows slower, feeling every centimeter of oil and soot and refinery grime still stuck to his skin, even though he scrubbed himself raw the night before.

He does not belong here.

The thought is a thunderclap, echoing loud in the caverns of his chest.

They’re led inside.

The ceiling is too high, that’s the first thing he notices, as if the architects believed air itself needed space to think. The foyer is vast and humming with light, marble floors inlaid with gold filigree that patterns out like sunbursts beneath their feet. There are no overhead lights—just crystal fixtures blooming from the walls like slow-moving stars, their glow warm and unnatural.

Namjoon keeps craning his neck to look at everything: paintings, scrollwork, a chandelier shaped like a blooming magnolia. “Do you think they’ll let me take pictures?” he whispers.

“Of what?” Yoongi mutters. “Your nervous breakdown?”

Namjoon grins anyway, half-dazed. “Man. You’re gonna be a royal. An actual royal. You realize that?”

Yoongi doesn’t answer; he doesn’t know how to.

He’s walking through this temple of polished stone and whispered wealth like someone wearing another man’s skin. His boots still squeak faintly with refinery mud, his collar itches, his hands are in his pockets with fingers curled around the edge of the envelope the palace staff had given him in the car—a schedule, a summary of the consort orientation, an official seal pressed in red wax a the bottom like a bloody period.

A royal consort.

An alpha chosen by the state and science, paired with the most powerful omega in the country. Betrothed. Claimed.

Yoongi wants a cigarette so badly he can feel it ghosting against his lips.

They’re shown to their quarters by a steward whose shoes don’t make any sound when he walks. The guest wing is quieter, cooler, the hallways narrowed and lined with pale silk panels instead of gold. Their rooms are enormous— too enormous. A full sitting area with plum-colored chairs and a harp in the corner no one has touched in years. Windows as tall as trees, a bed big enough to drown in.

Namjoon whistles for what feels like the hundredth time that day. “You sure they didn’t send us to a hotel for gods?”

Yoongi doesn’t laugh. He stares at the window for a long moment; he stares at the manicured gardens outside, the winding stone paths, the soft nodding heads of the peonies heavy with dew.

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

It’s Yijeon again. The screen lights up with three new messages, all short.

> seriously, hyung
> where the hell are you?
> boss says you’re fired unless you send a death certificate

Yoongi exhales through his nose. Guilt stabs through his chest—not because he misses the refinery, but because he hadn’t meant to vanish like that. Yijeong had been the only one who ever persevered in the impossible task of talking to him during their breaks, who used to pass him headphone wires during night shifts and say, you still think about music, hyung? And they’d talk, quietly, about the beats they used to make before the city made it impossible; about their dream setups, about the rhythms they never had time to write down.

Sometimes, they went out for bottom-shelf soju and fried dumplings from a cart near the canal and got drunk enough to pretend they were still freshly twenty. Yijeong had called him a secret genius once, grinning through the steam rising from his cup, and Yoongi had scoffed and called him an idiot. But the warmth had stayed with him anyway.

He should reply, but he doesn’t know what to say.

He sets the phone down on the side table and walks to the far window. He presses his palm to the glass and watches the clouds roll heavy in the sky.

He doesn’t know what will happen next, but the palace stands still and golden around him, like a mouth holding its breath.

Somewhere beyond these halls, behind a wall of silk and protocol, there is an omega prince with a heartbeat meant to match his.

And Yoongi has no idea what to do with that.

He’s just finished folding the last of Namjoon’s shirts into one of the gilded drawers—handling them with more care than necessary, just to keep his hands busy—when there’s a knock at the door; not sharp nor hesitant. Measured. The kind of knock that suggests timing has already been taken into account.

Yoongi startles. He’s still holding a balled-up pair of socks. Namjoon, sprawled belly-down on the settee reading a pamphlet titled What To Expect When Your Brother Marries Royalty, mumbles something into the cushions that sounds suspiciously like you go.

Yoongi sighs, sets the socks down, and opens the door.

The man waiting on the other side is young, short, and composed to the point of theatricality. Every piece of him looks arranged with intention: honey-brown hair swept back into a glossy knot, robes in a soft ash-blue trimmed with gold piping, and a belt that gleams like it’s been buffed with prayer. His omega scent is barely perceptible, softened beneath layers of lavender and something older, medicinal—like balm left too long in a drawer.

He inclines his head in a manner that’s too graceful to be casual but not stiff enough to be formal. “Consort Min?” he asks. His voice is lilting, precide, like it’s been fine-tuned over the course of years. “I’m Haneul. His Highness’s domestic attache. I’ve come to escort you to your preliminary intake interview.”

Yoongi stares at him. “My what?”

“Interview,” Haneul repeats gently, as though the word might mean something different if he says it softer. “With Lord Jung. you’ve been scheduled for intake, vetting, and preliminary medical. It’s standard.”

Yoongi resists the urge to glance back into the room like he might find a version of himself more capable of handling this.

Haneul smiles, noticing. “It won’t take long. If you’d prefer to wear something else, I can wait.”

Yoongi is still in his work-washed jeans and a loose black shirt that smells faintly of train oil. He hasn’t even unpacked his own clothes, let alone found the closet. But he nods anyway, because the word intake makes his heart squeeze sideways, and he figures if he delays it, he might throw up from anticipation.

“Alright,” he mutters, tugging at the hem of his shirt. “Lead the way.”

The palace, once overwhelming, now feels vaguely conspiratorial; too many doors, too many turns. Velvet-lined corridors and flickering sconces, and a constant hush in the air that isn’t quiet so much as waiting. Haneul walks ahead, short legs surprisingly fast, the hem of his robe whispering against the marble. He’s efficient, polite—but never turns to make conversation, which Yoongi is both grateful for and unnerved by.

They stop in front of a pair of carved oak doors. On them, inlaid in mother-of-pearl, is the sigil of the royal household: a crescent moon flanked by thee ink-dark feathers.

Haneul raps twice, then steps back. “Good luck,” he says, voice suddenly warmer. “Try not to lie. Lord Jung hates lies.”

And then he’s gone, leaving Yoongi with a sudden, irrational desire to run.

But the door opens.

And inside, everything changes.

The room is all sunstone and shadow—books lining the walls, golden daylight falling in long, clean slabs across a burnished desk, lacquered but not gaudy, with stacks of papers bound neatly in ribbon, and a pitcher of water with sliced citrus glinting inside, and behind that desk sits a man Yoongi has never seen before but somehow recognizes immediately. 

Jung Hoseok.

He’s smaller than Yoongi expected, maybe even a few inches shorter than Namjoon, but the room bends around him anyway. He spins a fountain pen around his fingers as if it were a dance—or, not really, not quite. But there’s something in the movement of him—fluid, effortless, like water pouring itself just right into a carved glass decanter. His frame is light,  long lines wrapped in muted silk and shades of cream and rose-gold, his collar open at the throat where a chain of delicate opals gleams like starlight on dew. His hair is a cascade of honey-brown, drawn half-back from his face with pins shaped like feathers., and when he smiles, it’s like the room tilts toward him without meaning to.

He looks every inch the dignitary—the kind who could take his soul apart with a smile. And smile he does, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes; not unfriendly, but not warm either. Like he’s studying something under glass.

Yoongi, quite stupidly, forgets to breathe.

“Min Yoongi,” he says, standing. “You’re early. That’s good.”

Yoongi opens his mouth to correct him—that he was summoned—but the words don’t come. He nods stiffly instead. Hoseok—omega, Yoongi registers belatedly, scent coiled with soft chamomile and firewood—waits until he steps fully inside and takes a seat before offering his name.

“Come, sit.” Hoseok gestures toward a chair set a careful distance from his desk. “I’m Jung Hoseok. Royal Omega Advisor and steward to His Highness. You’ll be answering to me more than anyone else in the coming weeks. Possibly the rest of your life.”

There’s no threat in the statement, no bite, but Yoongi feels it all the same.

The chair is soft—too soft. He sinks into it like it was made to trap him. Yoongi keeps his hands in his lap, tucked into one another.

“I’ve read your file,” Hoseok starts, sifting through a small stack of parchment. Yoongi marvels at how perfect his posture is without being rigid, but something’s… off. Just slightly. His fingers tremble once before he stills them. His eyes flick too quickly across Yoongi’s face. There’s a flush high on his cheekbones that could be sunlight, or stress. “Min Yoongi. Age twenty-eight. Industrial mechanic, guardian to your younger brother Namjoon, who arrived with you. You were contacted one day ago by the Department of Pairing and Genetic Matchmaking after your sample—“ and here, Hoseok glances down briefly, “returned with a high compatibility score.”

“Apparently,” Yoongi mutters.

He’s trying not to look around too much, or at Hoseok too directly. The room feels too soft. The man across from him feels like a trick of the light.

“Yes,” Hoseok says, and now there’s something peculiar in his tone. “Apparently.” 

There’s a pause. Hoseok’s fingers tap once against the wood, then stop. He exhales through his nose, then flips the file open. Yoongi catches a glimpse of his own ID photo and winces. He looks like someone who hasn’t slept in five years. Which is not entirely inaccurate.

“Have you had previous partners?”

“Not seriously.”

“Any rut partners?”

Yoongi tenses. “Not in years.”

Hoseok nods, scribbling something down. “And no long-term bond history?”

“No.”

“Are you opposed to royal life?”

Yoongi gives him a look. “I’m a mechanic from District Ten. I don’t know what the hell royal life is, much less whether I’m opposed to it.”

That earns a laugh—brief, musical, a small release of tension that leaves Hoseok’s shoulders a little less tight.

“Fair.” he says, light. “I have already reviewed your medical record, your work history, and the note from your community physician.” He pauses, one brow arching. “You’ve been using unregulated rut suppressants?”

Yoongi swallows. “Couldn’t afford prescriptions.”

“You won’t need to worry about that now,” Hoseok replies. “In fact, you’re to cease all suppressant use immediately. The palace physicians will monitor your cycle. We need to monitor compatibility.”

The word lands like a slap.

Yoongi sits a little straighter. “Compatibility with whom?”

Hoseok looks up from the pages, eyes pinning him in place in a way that makes Yoongi feel as small as he did back in school when the teachers would look down on him for asking a dumb question. “With the Crown Prince, of course.”

Silence folds over the room like wet fabric.

Yoongi opens his mouth, shuts it again. His heart is a fist pounding inside his chest.

“I—” he tries, voice cracking. “I thought this was just… a selection process. I didn’t think—”

“You’ve been selected,” Hoseok says, and it’s not cruel, but it’s not gentle either. “That was the process.”

A breathless laugh escapes Yoongi. He rakes a hand through his hair. “This is insane.”

“Is it?”

“You don’t even know me.”

Hoseok leans back, fingers steepled. “The Crown Prince’s instincts are not easily swayed. Nor is the fated match program.” A pause. Then, softly, “Believe me, I questioned it too. But the data is unequivocal.”

Yoongi stares at the floor. It’s inlaid with tile—white and cream and flecks of gold. It looks like bone.

“Why me?” he murmurs.

Hoseok tilts his head. “You’d be surprised how rare it is to find someone who has absolutely no ambition to climb.”

Yoongi snorts despite himself. “That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it?”

Eventually, Hoseok stands. “You’ll undergo your formal physical next. I’ve arranged for a discreet appointment with the royal medics. Afterward, we’ll begin behavioral protocol orientation.”

Yoongi blinks. “Behavioral what?”

Another smile, sharp and sugary. “We’ll teach you how to survive the court without tipping over your own dignity.”

He opens the door with a graceful sweep of his hand. “Someone will come for you in a quarter hour. Rest if you can.”

Yoongi rises on autopilot. He’s already halfway out the door when Hoseok adds, almost as an afterthought, “You’ll meet him soon, you know. The prince.” 

Yoongi stops.

Hoseok’s smile turns enigmatic. “He asked to meet you the moment your name was confirmed.”

And then the door clicks shut behind him.

The medical wing of the palace is quiet in the way deep snow is quiet—muffled, reverent, still. The walls are stone but softened by the quality of the light, filtered through arching stained-glass windows the side of cathedral doors, spilling blue and rose onto marble floors so clean Yoongi can see the scuff of his own boots reflected back at him.

He does not belong here.

The hallway smells like crushed mint and sterile linen, polished steel and something soft underneath—like wet chamomile leaves ground between fingers, muddled into tea. He follows a steward in silence, trailing slightly behind, half-present in his body and half still back in the chambers where Hoseok had left him. His heartbeat is a little off-beat, like a song he hasn’t played in years.

They call him Royal Consort.

They’d said it as if it were a foregone conclusion. As if it weren’t still echoing around inside his chest like an accidental chord struck in an empty room.

He shouldn’t feel anything about it.

He does anyway.

The doors to the evaluation suite open with a hush. Inside is light and steel and a vaguely citrusy tang of antiseptic so expensive it doesn’t even sting to the nose—just settles like mist. There are two nurses in pale stale uniforms, standing with clipboards and neutral expressions, and one man in a darker coat who is already reviewing something on a floating screen.

“Consort Min,” one of the nurses greets him without looking up. “Right on time.”

Yoongi doesn’t correct the title. He doesn’t say anything. He just steps inside and takes the seat offered—slightly too low, slightly too soft, the cushion rubbing against his pants as he shifts.

The doctor turns.

He’s tall—of course. All palace alphas seem tall to Yoongi, as if elevation were a requirement for service. His hair is longish and swept back with an air of practiced ease, like he woke up handsome and only barely had to try. His scent is understated but noticeable in the sterile room—clean firewood and warm sugar and something familiar underneath, the barest suggestion of chamomile, as if it had clung to him in a passing breeze.

“Doctor Kim Seokjin,” he says, offering a hand that Yoongi doesn’t take fast enough. The doctor’s smile doesn’t falter; he simply retracts the hand and continues. “I’ll be conducting your preliminary evaluation today, along with a few standard tests required for consort registry.”

That word again. 

Like it fits.

Like it belongs to him,

Yoongi nods once. “Alright.”

“Vitals first," one of the nurses says. "Please roll up your sleeve."

He does. The cuff inflates around his arm. There is a soft beep. Numbers blink to life on the screen. Doctor Kim hums and begins dictating softly into the floating screen.

"Resting heart rate elevated. Blood pressure slightly low. Temperature suboptimal—likely stress-induced. Malnourishment markers noted. BMI well below consort baseline."

Yoongi closes his eyes for a second.

There’s something uniquely humiliating about being discussed like furniture in the room. Like he’s a fine chair—antique, but worn. Still elegant, but needing restoration. He supposes that’s the point. The palace probably likes to know the condition of their goods.

He rolls his sleeve back down after the nurse draws a thin line of blood. Another beep. More silence. 

"He’s in poor condition," the doctor murmurs. Not mean, just… detached. "Muscle degradation along the shoulders. Overexertion noted in joint readings. Work-related, most likely."

Yoongi says nothing. He looks out the window instead, at the white blossoms trembling on the branches of a tree just outside. He doesn’t know its name. Maybe he should learn it. Maybe that’s what royal consorts do—learn the names of things they’ve never seen before.

"Rut records indicate frequency suppression," one of the nurses says, flipping to a file. "Non-regulated blockers, used irregularly. No partner cycle on record. No recovery periods logged."

"That," Dr. Kim says, gaze sharp, "is concerning."

"I didn’t have a choice," Yoongi says before he can stop himself.

Three heads turn toward him like they’d forgotten he was sentient.

"I couldn’t afford it," he adds, quieter. "And I couldn’t afford to miss work."

Dr. Kim’s expression softens, just slightly. “I understand. Still, there’s long-term endocrine damage to consider. And as the—" he hesitates, just a beat, before continuing, "as the Crown Prince’s consort, your cycles will be monitored and managed closely."

Yoongi stiffens. The implication tastes like iron in his mouth.

One of the nurses is already preparing a scan. The light flickers over his chest, cataloguing every scar, every old injury, every place where the body has borne too much and broken just a little. Yoongi wonders if the machine can detect disappointment. Or exhaustion, or a slowly breaking heart.

"Recommendations," Dr. Kim says as the scan completes. "Begin tailored nutritional therapy immediately. Schedule regulated rut cycles to reverse hormone suppression impact. Monitor organ stress over the next quarter. Provide omega contact for scent stabilization and psychological acclimatization."

"Whose scent?" Yoongi asks, before he can help it.

Dr. Kim glances up from the screen. "The prince’s. Of course."

Yoongi’s hands curl on the examination table.

Of course.

There’s a pause as data loads. The nurse inputs something quickly. Dr Kim sighs softly, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"I’ll mark this all down for review," he says. "But in your current state, you’re not ready for first cycle integration."

First cycle integration. As if it’s a job to clock into. As if it’s a requirement of the role.

Yoongi wants to ask if he gets vacation days. Instead, he nods, and bites the inside of his cheek.

The doctor closes the screen with a flick of his wrist. "That’s all for now, Consort Min. please return to your quarters. There will be a briefing shortly."

Yoongi stands. The nurses don’t look at him. The doctor offers a final polite smile that feels too bright and not warm at all.

As he walks back down the hallway, past the tree with its trembling white blossoms, he wonders if they brought that tree from the mountains, or if it grew here on its own.

He wonders if he’ll be expected to bloom, too. Or if it’s already too late.

The chamber is still when Yoongi returns—still in that way that feels deliberate, like someone is holding their breath within it. His boots scuff soft against the rug, too loud for the hush that has settled. He stops just inside the doorway, heart knocking unreasonably at his ribs, something restless beneath his skin, something that has not calmed since they led him away from the medical wing and called him royal consort like it was a thing he’d earned.

He is already there when Yoongi cracks the door open.

Not a servant. Not a summons. Not even the soft rustle of warning that usually precedes the entrance of someone royal.

Just—there. Standing quietly by the window, hands clasped behind his back, gaze cast over the early evening gardens like he was born to be caught in this particular light. It is a vision so delicate Yoongi thinks he must’ve conjured him from exhaustion, or hope, or the half-starved place that lives in his ribs. The sheer, dizzying audacity of existing like that; like a painting in a frame made of sunlight. And not just beautiful in the mere sense of the word— arresting. Pale robes the color of rice paper catch the golden spill of day’s end and flutter faintly around his ankles, delicate embroidery gleaming like moonthread caught on silk. His hair is dirty blonde, brushed back from his forehead, plump lips parted just slightly in thought—like he might speak a poem into the air and not even realize it.

And his scent. Oh—his scent. It hits Yoongi like a melody he forgot he knew, some haunting chord of sweetness and summer and soft citrus rinds, warm rain on warm skin, something that shouldn’t be allowed to exist in a world as gray as the one Yoongi’s lived in. It’s not overpowering—no, it glows, subtle, magnetic, calling to something inside Yoongi he thought long starved quiet and broken. His mouth waters. His throat goes tight. The air feels too thin in the room.

And the Crown Prince—Jimin is so still, so impossibly composed, but Yoongi can see the flicker of breath in his chest, the careful tension in his shoulders. Regal, yes, but something lonely about it too, like he’s used to silence and strangers and has never quite believed that something good might stay. There is something achingly lonely in the lines of his body, something careful in the way he holds himself—as though he has learned to be lovely only in silence. 

He turns slowly, eyes finding Yoongi like gravity itself willed it, and Yoongi is—undone. Just completely, instantly undone. 

He has never believed in fate. He believes in it now. 

Or something worse—something tender and cruel. Something that makes his knees feel weak, his heart feel bruised, like he’s been waiting for this exact second his whole life and never once prepared for it.

Yoongi forgets how to stand.

Because Jimin is gorgeous. Not just in the shallow, polished way of nobility, though he is—his skin luminous, his mouth a pale bow, his lashes absurd. But in a way that hurts. 

And then the Crown Prince smiles. Quiet, unreadable, like he’s already seen something in Yoongi no one else ever bothered to look for, without even having to glance at him first. Like he knows. He looks at Yoongi with recognition. Like he’s been waiting and some stubborn, quiet part of him is… relieved.

And Yoongi—Yoongi, who has made himself steel to survive, who has outlasted want and tenderness and the weight of dreams too large to name—suddenly feels like something fragile held in two hands.

He cannot breathe.

He cannot look away.

Yoongi, for all his restraint, for all his cynicism, for all the grit and caution baked into his marrow, feels himself unspool like thread in the wind. If he breathes, the scent reaches him like want bottled and left to ripen. It catches his lungs like laughter or a sob. Like home, he thinks faintly. His hands go numb.

For a moment—one brief, golden, infinite moment—Yoongi believes in all of it. In fate. In whatever force pulled them together. He feels high off scent and light and heat and possibility. His mouth opens and his tongue curls around some tentative greeting, something stupid like hello, like thank you, like I don’t mind this life if it’s with you.

But then, Jimin speaks.

And the floor drops out from under him.

"You weren’t supposed to exist," Jimin says softly.

It lands not like a bullet—quick and clean and merciful—but like a slow unzipping of the chest, a quiet unraveling from the inside. As if every bone in Yoongi’s body is suddenly made of paper and someone has set a match to his spine.

The room is warm. The sun hasn’t yet faded from the windows. The scent still lingers—honeyed and golden, like ripe fruit and childhood dreams and something precious Yoongi hasn’t let himself imagine for years. It clings to his clothes, floods his lungs, knots itself around the stunned, clenching core of him.

And Yoongi—who had let himself hope for one glimmering moment, who had felt the terrifying shimmer of maybe this is good, who had, for one breathless instant, thought this might not be a sentence after all—just blinks. His heart lurches. The room shifts. The scent clings to him like silk, but now it’s unbearable.

He wasn’t supposed to exist.

He blinks once. Then again, slower.

"I—what?”

It’s not a real question. It’s air and ache dressed in consonants. His voice cracks at the edge. The words feel like foreign objects in his mouth: too sharp to swallow, too real to spit out.

Jimin stands with his hands loosely clasped in front of him, the picture of princely poise, but his knuckles are white and his jaw is tight, and Yoongi notices now—how his lashes flutter too long between blinks, how his weight shifts like he wants to take a step back but won’t allow himself. How he can’t quite really meet Yoongi’s eyes, not in full.

"I didn’t submit my sample," he says, gaze steady, voice too gentle for the words. As if it matters if he whispers the confession. As if lighter words would somehow make the crack of Yoongi’s ribs more bearable. "I didn’t want to be a part of the program. I gave them someone else’s. I never wanted a mate. I— you— weren’t supposed to happen.”

And there it is. The knife under the ribcage, twisted.

Yoongi laughs, but there’s no humor in it, just disbelief. Just the kind of brittle, hollow sound he makes when his soul has been sat on a ledge all day and someone finally nudges it off.

"So," he says, "What am I then? A glitch? A bureaucratic error?”

Jimin flinches. Not visibly—he’s too well-trained for that—but Yoongi can feel it, like a current in the space between them.

"No," Jimin says. "You’re real. I just didn’t think you would be."

Yoongi bites the inside of his cheek until copper coats his tongue. He wants to scream, or run, or crawl under the rug and vanish. But instead, he stands there in his clothes that don’t belong to the palace with his hands clenched and his throat dry and his heart breaking open in slow, deliberate slices.

"You smelled me," he says, accusing, desperate, the words scraping raw down his throat like they were never meant to be spoken aloud.

His voice trembles with something he hasn’t named yet—too tender, too sharp, too real. It’s more than a plea and less than a scream. It’s a wound, blooming quietly in the space between them.

"You felt it." he says, softer now, as if the sound of his own certainty might be enough to make it true.

But Jimin shakes his head.

Not harshly, not with anger or even resistance. Just a slow, aching turn of his neck that says no with the weight of a funeral bell tolling in a cathedral no one prays in anymore.

"I didn’t," he says, and the lie floats like a feather caught in the wake of a storm. Too light, too late. "I didn’t feel anything."

Yoongi flinches, barely. A flicker at the corner of his eye, a twitch at his jaw. But inside, something folds in on itself. It collapses like a paper animal in the rain. His lungs feel full of smoke again, but not from tar; from something even more insidious. From hope dying.

"You’re lying," he says quietly, almost wonderingly, like he can’t believe it. Like he doesn’t want to believe this is happening. "Why would you lie?”

Jimin doesn’t answer.

He looks out the window insead, eyes glassy in the gold-pink light of the dying day, and Yoongi realizes, all at once, how young he really is. How fragile. How carefully he’s been carved—by duty, by history, by the sheer pressure of being wanted by a kingdom and allowed by no one to want anything in return.

Yoongi swallows. His heart claws at his ribs.

"Whose sample was it?"

The question hangs like a blade suspended by a single thread, taut and shining. And Jimin, foolish or brave or just tired of being afraid, reaches up and cuts it.

"A friend," he says. "Someone I trusted. He’s already mated."

There’s no sound in the room for a long moment but the soft rustle of the curtains breeding in the breeze.

And then—Yoongi breaks. Not loudly, not even visibly. But he can distinctly feel something in him shatter. Cleanly. Irreversibly.

The sort of break that doesn’t bleed, but instead stays inside the skin, spreading like hairline fractures through bone.

He breathes in, and the scent of Jimin—sunlit fruit and first spring rains—turns bitter in his nose; not because it’s changed, but because he knows now he was never meant to taste it. He was never the chosen one, just the one fate chose as its own personal laughing stock when no one was looking.

"So that’s it?” Yoongi murmurs, voice low and hollow. "I got a whiff of someone who was never mine. I thought—" Yoongi’s breath catches. He looks away, furious with himself. "God. I thought this meant something. I felt like—I felt like I found something I didn’t even know I was looking for.”

His throat works around the next words like they’re made of splinters.

"I didn’t know how lonely I was until I smelled you.”

He lets that truth sit in the open. Bleeding and brave.

Jimin’s hands tremble, barely. His lips press together as if to keep some traitorous thing from slipping out.

And still, he says nothing.

Yoongi nods once. Just a jerk of his chin, as if to signal he’s heard enough and he’s trying not to drown.

He steps back, away from the window, away from Jimin, away from the golden hush of a room that already feels like memory. The air feels thick with a sweetness that had made his mouth water and is now just cloying, like the aftertaste of a dream turned bitter on the tongue. It clings to him like humidity, like something he cannot scrub off.

The absence—the almost— presses against his ribs like a vice. It’s not pain. It’s something slower, quieter, deeper—a thread pulled from the seam of his certainty.

He is halfway to the door when Jimin’s voice catches him. Soft, clear, unmovable.

"You can’t leave."

Yoongi turns, slowly, like his limbs are suspended in syrup, like even gravity has changed its mind. His eyes find Jimin still by the window, haloes in light like something so sacred to touch—or too dangerous. The dying sun reaches for him, paints his cheeks in the same watercolor warmth as the sky, and his profile could be etched onto coins or carved into marble—but Yoongi knows now that even angels lie.

His jaw tightens. "Why not?"

Jimin doesn’t flinch, but his fingers curl slightly at his sides, as if they long to grip something solid; as if they’re used to holding things that slip through them.

"Because the results were entered into the registry," he says, voice low and deliberate. "Which means the match was sanctioned. You’ve been announced."

Yoongi blinks. "What?"

"Internally. To the court, the council and everyone that matters."

He steps forward, only once, only enough to be closer, not enough to be near. His scent brushes the air again—clementines and something greener beneath, like crushed leaves in sunlight—and it hits Yoongi like a sucker punch. He straightens, involuntarily. The bones, even half-starved, sing too close to the bone.

"If you leave," Jimin continues, "it will be a scandal. A political one. Questions will be asked. Investigations opened. The registry will be audited. My—my friend will be implicated. My family, yours. The state. The whole match system could come into question. It’s too… big.”

Yoongi’s breath leaves him in a staggered exhale.

"So I’m just supposed to stay here?” he asks, low, hoarse. “Lie to the world? Pretend I belong here with—” his hand flutters between them, useless. “With you?”

"You don’t have to pretend anything," Jimin says, and this time, there’s something else in his voice—not anger, not pity, something like resignation dressed in silk. "All you have to do is play your part."

Yoongi stares. The room sways faintly. He thinks of smoke breaks and rust-stained hands, of night shifts and oily ruts alone in the dark. He thinks of holding Namjoon’s coat closed against the wind. Of calling Yijeong back with some half-lie. He thinks of the mate he had reached for like a drowning man to a lantern—and how it had flickered out in his hands in a matter of seconds.

"And what is my part?” he says, nearly choking on it,

Jimin’s mouth softens, but his eyes don’t. "You are the royal consort now. You’ll have duties and appearances. You’ll be trained, dressed, photographed, examined, and protected."

The word lands heavily. Protected. Like a possession. Like public goods.

He continues, gently, "but you won’t be asked to… be with me. Not like that. We can share a roof without sharing a bed."

Yoongi can’t breathe, he can’t think past the ringing in his ears. The words feel like dust in his mouth.

"Why me?” he whispers, finally. “Why even risk it?”

Jimin looks at him then—fully. Not as a prince, or a liar, but simply as someone caught in the same storm.

"I didn’t think it would work," he replies, and it’s the final answer to the question Yoongi has been asking for the past few days. "I didn’t think they’d find anyone. My friend is mated, the sample wasn’t supposed to be viable. I didn’t think you would—"

His voice falters, like the truth is a narrow bridge he’s not ready to cross.

"You’re not supposed to exist," he repeats, quieter now. "But you do. And that means I can’t undo this.”

Yoongi says nothing. He watches the light move across Jimin’s cheekbones, the delicate press of his lashes against his skin. He looks like something out of a dream spun too finely to survive the morning. Everything about it is wrong, and Yoongi wants him anyway.

Which makes it worse.

He presses a palm over his chest, like he could calm the gallop of something frenetic and frenzied in there. Like he could reach into his ribcage and silence it.

And then, barely audible:

"I don’t know how to be this."

Jimin nods, solemn. "Neither do I."

They look at each other then, and are met with a sort of reflection: two people trapped in the wreckage of someone else’s design, bound by a choice that neither of them made.

Outside, the bells of the palace ring the hour. The sound rolls through the windows like an echo of something inevitable.

And inside, Yoongi—still standing on the threshold of a life not meant for him—takes a slow breath and doesn’t step away.