“Nothing is good or bad. It’s your thoughts that make them this way.”
Despite how short he keeps them in order to properly shape wagashi, Jimin’s nails dig crescents into his skin. It’s a testament to how hard he’s clenching his fists as Shion says it, skin stretched pink, then white over his knuckles. He’s only ever been this way in front of Eiji; no one else is allowed to see him like this. But Shion isn’t just somebody else. He’s family.
“You just...don’t understand. You weren’t there.” That’s right. Shion wasn’t there when Jimin was giving it his all to support the original Mukashi-Kara with his mother and his grandparents. He wasn’t there when Jimin had started branching out into different hobbies, new territories. He wasn’t there when Jimin’s sense responsibility began to slip, and he wasn’t there when Obaachan took sick and...
Shion wasn’t there when she died.
How could he know it was all Jimin’s fault.
“So you don’t know why I can’t slow down. You don’t know and you’ll never know because you weren’t there!”
If Jimin had known that a casual comment from Shion about taking a break was going to turn into an argument like this - an argument that had Jimin’s eyes stinging with unshed tears that wanted so badly to fall - he wouldn’t have said anything at all. He doesn’t care if he looks pale, he doesn’t care if breathing iss a little harder than usual, he doesn’t care that he has dark circles under his slightly sunken eyes, and he doesn’t care if he ends up getting a fever.
He can’t let everybody down again.