77. i miss you (i miss you)
Week 5 | Prompt 3
Word Count: 1244 Rating: G Submitted by: shinywords (tumblr)
Warnings: Implied mental illness Summary: Jimin has been back in Busan for a little over two months now.
Week 5 Prompt Set
Jimin digs his toes into the white sand as he listens to the waves softly crashing against the shore. It’s cold, he can barely feel his feet anymore, but he doesn’t care. He’s just glad he can go outside like this again, the air finally smelling like dew instead of snow, and the sun gently kissing his cheeks. He shivers. A gust of wind ruffles his hair and blows a loose layer of sand over his feet. Jimin pulls his jumper more tightly around himself before he decides to stand up, grabbing his shoes and pulling his feet out of the sand.
He walks along the coastline for a while, breathing the salty air and feeling the rays of the sun battle the cold wind on his skin, and tries hard to feel less lonely and more like himself. It isn’t really working.
He’s been back in Busan for a little over two months now, his family trying hard to make him feel loved and needed and not like the useless, stupid boy he has somehow turned himself into, and he appreciates it - but it doesn’t really help either. He just feels lost.
It was his doctor who’d first suggested he go home for a while. Suggested in a tone that had made it very clear that it was less of a suggestion and more of a prescription, and he hadn’t really had it in him to protest. Once he’d brought it up to his mother, the deal had pretty much been sealed.
He is supposed to stay in Busan for three months, to get away from everything for a while, to de-stress and rest and gain weight. A change of environment, his doctor had said, can often do wonders. A support network is also important, people who care for you and watch out for you - Jimin feels like he has constantly been on watch ever since he arrived back home. There is always someone hovering nearby, always inconspicuous and completely coincidental, and his mother always puts seconds on his plate without asking if he wants any. It’s not so bad, really. He’s glad they care about him, and he does maybe actually feel a little better by now. But sometimes the walls of his childhood home and his ever observant family become a little too much. Suffocating. Here, outside by himself, he can breathe. It’s still cold enough that he’s the only person who’d decide to go to the beach, and the open space makes him feel free in a way few things can, like the beat of a good song or the sound of Yoongi’s voice. But he’s not allowed to dance until his doctor says otherwise, and Yoongi is currently 325 kilometres away, so this is all he has.
Jimin startles when his toes hit something other than the soft, cold sand beneath his feet. He looks down and sees a bottle, small, transparently white, and made of glass. He bows down without bending his knees - even after not training for over two months, his flexibility is still that of a dancer - and cocks his head to look at it. It’s compelling somehow, this tiny little thing in the middle of nowhere, and Jimin wants to give it a purpose. He picks it up and straightens his back, turning the bottle over in his fingers. It’s obvious what he’s going to do.
Setting his shoes down in the sand, Jimin pulls a crinkled notebook out of his back pocket. This is another thing his doctor had suggested, a journal to write down his thoughts and feelings in. He doesn’t use it much - words aren’t exactly his forte, he prefers different ways of expressing himself - but he still carries it with him everywhere he goes. Pulling the pen out of the ring binding and ripping out a page from the journal, Jimin sinks down into a cross legged position. He uses the journal as a steady surface to write on and puts the pen down on the paper, then hesitates. He doesn’t know what to write. There’s a million things he wants to say and a million more he doesn’t know how to convey. He thinks of his friends, of the studio in Seoul, of his trainer and his manager and the way he used to be before he had driven himself into this situation. He thinks of Yoongi.
In the end, there’s only one thing he has to say to sum everything up in three simple words. Jimin rolls up the piece of paper with cold stiff fingers and pushes it into the bottle. A piece of wood that he finds a few feet away becomes the makeshift plug. He takes a deep breath, swings his arm back, and then hauls the bottle as far as he can into the ocean. It is swallowed up by the water at first, and Jimin watches until it bobs back up on the surface. He follows it with his eyes as the waves slowly carry it off into the open sea.
Yoongi is walking along Han River with his hands stuffed into his pockets and his breath forming white puffs of air in front of his face. He finally managed to pull himself out of the recording studio at about 1 am in the morning, but he couldn’t bring himself to go to sleep yet. Instead he is here, trying and failing to ignore the black hole that has been slowly but inexorably growing in his chest ever since it appeared there approximately two months ago. He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to think about it, so naturally it is the only thing he can think about. Fuck.
He misses Jimin. Painfully and undeniably so, and it gnaws at him with a persistence that he usually only feels when there’s something missing from a song he is working on and he can’t figure out what it is. But this is different. Because when he is working on a song, he can work through it. He can try a different bass line or talk to Namjoon about it, or sleep it over if nothing helps and try again the next day. He can’t do that with Jimin. He can’t work through it, he can’t talk to him, and he can’t sleep it over and try again the next day because Jimin isn’t here and he won’t be here the next day either. That’s the whole problem, really. Yoongi wouldn’t have to worry about working through or talking about anything if Jimin were here, because then the black hole in his chest wouldn’t exist and he wouldn’t have to think about what it means that he misses Jimin so much. But he does. He misses him.
Yoongi’s foot hits something on the ground in front of him and he watches a small bottle roll a few centimetres away until it comes to a halt. He squints at it; it looks like there’s something inside it. A piece of paper. A message in a bottle? Yoongi picks it up and pries off the makeshift wooden bottle cap. He turns it over and shakes it, catching the crinkled note as it slips out of the bottle, before unfolding and staring at it. Only three words are written on the battered paper, in a handwriting that feels faintly familiar. For some reason it makes Yoongi smile.
I miss you.