учебники / forgive me father for i

hyung

what do you dream of when you sleep?

(as if to say that a dreamer only exists slotted between circadian rhythms)

( i dream of

the sea, a sea, that sea )

yoongi knows he’s drowning before he wakes up. his lungs expand, filling up with briny water. it’s an incongruous feeling— death by water. yoongi never dies, though. he just drowns. hyung , he hears it through the water, through the spaces in his mind, the voice that always comes to pull him out from under. hyung . his eyes flutter open, and he tastes the salt on his tongue as he inhales sharply. his bed is soaked, he is soaked, the floor is. yoongi sleeps and dreams but now all he brings back is water. he shivers, cold. water drips onto the wooden flooring and it stains the silence with punctual noises. a slit of jagged sunlight drifts in, white instead of yellow, because colours hardly survive winter. yoongi thinks it’s a miracle he’s surviving it, too. his socks drag over water as yoongi walks over to the tall, old wardrobe. the towels aren’t soft, the hems in tears. he wraps himself nonetheless, still trying to steady his breathing. his throat aches. “shit,” he hisses, catching sight of the phone amidst water on the floor. it looks dead, just a piece of flat technology gone to waste. there was a message on the screen the night before, and nights before that, and years before, even— a message he doesn’t want to read, from a number that doesn’t exist anymore, and the five letters follow him into his (grave) dreams.

hyung

a dull knock on the window startles him. the thing with wings hits the glass with violence, once, twice. it likes to hurt itself. yoongi sighs, dragging his feet towards it, letting it in. it’s a dream thing , a bird of sorts, small and fragile and hurt. he dreamt it out of desperation and want. when it sings, it’s only in one tune, that tune, the tune of the sea. yoongi hates it. “your bread is gone,” he says as the bird perks itself on the chair, wings flapping, one bloodied. “i don’t have the cash to buy more.” the song is offered as reply. yoongi presses his hands over his ears for a moment, inhaling. “ shoo , come on—,” he snaps, then, waving his arms about. the bird takes flight, falling onto the watery wood a moment later, splashing about. it won’t drown, either.

outside, everything’s frigid and lifeless. the workroom where he lives won’t dry any sooner, yoongi knows. his mattress, soaked, is pushed against the nearest wall. water already stains the wood that makes his piano. whenever he dreams, he brings about that sea. different shapes of it in different dreams, but always the same sea, always the same salt. don’t you ever try having a dream , he told jungkook that day, years ago, and jungkook was young, and yoongi was young, too. it’s tough having one . thinking of jungkook doesn’t help. he swallows, shoving wet linen into a bag,

counting coins to find out if he has enough of it to get them dry. there’s barely a bit over. the thing with wings flies about. the tune it sings is bothersome.

winter makes cities rather strange, almost dreamlike. it’s foggy that morning, and yoongi sniffs as he walks down the blocks. the neighbourhood is old and rundown and all the construction makes it look desolated. his feet are still wet, all his shoes caught up in the saline torrent. the music shop is closed. it’s been closed for a few years. yoongi still expects to see jungkook there, every time, through the cracks in the wood panels that cover the windows. “hyung,” someone calls, and yoongi halts at once. the word is haunted. he turns, confused, the familiarity of the voice alluring. hoseok stands a few feet away, eyes wide in surprise, bundled in jackets. yoongi blinks. “you’re still here.” for some reason, he hears it as you’re still alive . “i thought—”

“no,” yoongi has found other ways to hurt himself. dreaming, one of them. remembering, another. solitude, a third. “no.” he swallows. “it’s— good to see you.”

hoseok looks almost the same. it’s been a few years, how many? , yoongi can’t tell. he is still tall, but there’s less of him now, more bones than person, cheeks a bit hollow. once, yoongi had dreamt him happiness pills. they were colourful and tasted like mint chocolate. “are you still living at the workroom?” yoongi nods. hoseok has been there, jungkook too. none came looking for him. “it’s good to see you, too.”

the street looks too bland around them, even with the graffitti staining the walls. yoongi feels split in different timelines. hoseok belongs to the one he’s twenty-one and trying to burn everything around him— but he’s here, where yoongi’s twenty-five and drowns everytime he closes his eyes. he hasn’t seen fire in so long. his lungs are filled with seasalt instead. the hand still hidden in his pocket closes around the lighter he always carries around, anxiety tugging at his strings for a bitter concerto. yoongi turns completely. the air inside his lungs feel hot. “— have you kept in touch with the others?”

“some of them,” hoseok answers carefully. “he talks about you.”

mouth dry, heart pounding. “who?”

“you know who,” a huff follows.

“well,” and yoongi shrugs, starting to turn away already, probably to hide the panic in his eyes or the accentuated blush on his cheeks, or the gruesome parts of himself that feel so ashamed for being that way. “i haven’t gone anywhere.” knowing that jungkook still wonders is hindering, it’s being knifed between his ribs, over and over and over and over again. it reminds him how much he

failed both of them. “i need to go.”

“yeah— yeah, sure.”

they don’t say goodbye.

(

is the world tough for you, too?

yoongi looks at jungkook, his words almost lost under the drilling sounds. he stares, eyes searching for the reason of those words in jungkook’s pupils. they’re small, the sunlight harsh. jungkook’s pretty like that, with the brightness shading him, his hair golden brown in all autumn’s colours. do you want to give up on this world, too? , jungkook yells. yes , yoongi wants to tell him. there’s a strange sort of familiarity between them, suddenly, a connection of sorts, as if their crooked paths have somehow intersected— the stolen glances and brief touches and playful fingers following on keys suddenly meaningful. yes, the world is tough for me, too . “you’ll be fine,” yoongi tells him, instead, but it’s barely a mumble, a murmur of things he’s uncertain of. jungkook shakes his head, not able to discern them. “i’ll protect you—“ he doesn’t know why he’s shouting those things. maybe because jungkook can’t hear them and so they won’t be true when yoongi fails in doing so. he always fails. hoseok and taehyung start laughing at them. yoongi flushes, embarrassed, but jungkook smiles. the sea is glistening on that day, the heat scorching. jungkook is about seventeen.

i want a different world , jungkook shouts into the sea, but no one hears it, maybe, aside from yoongi. he stares at the back of jungkook’s head as he runs towards the water, shying away when it gets too close. when he turns, laughing, his eyes meet yoongi’s. i want to be able to give it to you , yoongi says under his breath, his new dream, to the water, to the remains of a rock that made dreams into things. yoongi’s foolish, he knows so, even as he spells the words out.

)

(that night, he dreams — dreams out of himself, and when he wakes up his bed is full of polaroids with jungkook’s smile against that endless sea.)

yoongi has been a dreamer since birth. it’s etched to his body, the making of dreams, the weaving, the bringing. but at some point, when fire came and burned everything to the ground, he stopped dreaming altogether. it’s tough having a dream . his mother was a dreamer, too— but she dreamt too much it consumed her. “i’m looking for kim namjoon,” he tells the middle aged man behind the counter of the gas station. it’s been a few days since hoseok crossed paths with him. it stirred things inside yoongi’s body. i’ll get him for you , the man says, walking away. namjoon isn’t a dreamer, but unlike yoongi, his extraordinary abilities go beyond the realms of unexplained magic. namjoon is able to save people.

he looks the same, much like hoseok did. a different hair colour, lighter now, that’s all. he follows yoongi outside without dialogue, and they stop by a gas pump. it’s awkward, for a little while, awkward as it is when souls that know each other meet in another life altogether. yoongi likes the smell of gasoline that permeates the air, though. it calms him down, the knowledge of possible combustions. “you ditched,” namjoon says, then. there’s no harshness in his voice, though. it’s said matter-of-factly, because it is.

“i needed to figure things out,” and yoongi sounds monotone. he wants to light a cigarette, to have something to do with his trembling hands.

“did you?”

( i figured out you can’t rinse first love, nor blood, with sea water )

“no.”

he dares to look sideways at namjoon, to find him looking back. he’s known namjoon the longest out of all of the boys— and so yoongi knows there’s hardly any judgement in his demeanor, right away, from the way his eyebrows are slightly raised, his eyes are gentle. if yoongi were a warmer person, he’d have missed namjoon. but he’s cold and all he does is dream. “why are you here, hyung?”

“i saw hoseok the other day,” he reminded me of you. plural . yoongi sniffs. “it’s just been a while.” namjoon nods, then looks away. a car parks at the nearest pump. he goes to it, working seamlessly the same way he did it back then . yoongi thinks they’re all stuck in a loop, maybe. the

neverending, solitaire string of a poor, damaged youth. now they’re just loose threads in the shape of adults. namjoon pockets the money given to him, waving the customer off. “— are you doing alright?”

“i can feed myself,” namjoon shrugs, kicking dirt with the toe of his sneakers. he approaches yoongi again, slowly, hands in pockets. “what about you?” a pause. “you don’t look that well.”

“i’ve been dreaming,” he replies, and hopes namjoon understands. he does. “that’s all i do.” yoongi doesn’t have a job. he has a workroom in an empty building set for collapse full of dream trinkets, a thing with wings, a piano, a nightly soaked mattress. sometimes he’ll busker, filling up a casket of cash, living off of it for a week. it feels like a worn out way of living. it is, anyway. namjoon breathes out. yoongi doesn’t know what he wants to say— i want to come back to this, i want to have you again, you, plural, i’m scared to drown like this— “are you still at the containers?”

“free rent,” namjoon snorts, nodding.

“i— need a place to sleep, just tonight,” yoongi licks the corner of his lips, nervous. “the workroom is flooded.”

namjoon watches him for a moment. “broken pipe?”

yoongi meets his eyes again, shaking his head. “something like that.”

but things— things change. namjoon looks abashed. “there’s someone there already,” he says, but he doesn’t sound apologetic. he just— sounds , if that’s possible. yoongi feels his throat dry, feels ashamed again. he ditched. they didn’t have to wait for him. “you’ll freeze if you sleep on the floor.” then, quietly: “i’m sorry.”

the man behind the counter calls namjoon up from inside. they don’t say goodbye. i’ll be right back , namjoon says, as if yoongi will wait there, under the strange glowly neons of closer buildings. it’s cold. yoongi walks away once he hears the door close. the city feels like a dream around that time, with all its colours bare like that, and yoongi swiftly disappears into them, blending in with the lingering shadows on foul smelling alleyways. he quickly falls into step with the timeline of years back, the loop grabbing into his sides like claws, digging into flesh, making him bleed. with the remains of his money, he buys a few bottles of soju, and drags them into a cheap motel room. someone is moaning down the corridor, low and heavy and desperate. the room smells of cigars. yoongi opens the bottle of soju, drinking it down in one take. it drips down his chin, and the remains of it wet the sheets when yoongi falls backwards onto the mattress. he’s used to wet sheets already. the alcohol taste is pungent on his tongue, tingling down in a pleasant,

numbing way. if he closes his eyes, he’ll dream of that sea. his hands search for the lighter in his pocket, instead. the flame flickers, yellow and blue and red rims. he traces the letters with his finger. jungkook has written on it, a long time ago, before their befores. yoongi feels nauseated. the flame is still burning when he brings it to alcohol stained mattress. it wouldn’t take long. it never stops burning anyway.

(

“—i still have this.”

the sentence is timid. yoongi’s drunk, or slightly, and jungkook is where he should not be— in his poor lit workroom, in oversized clothing that hide his hands. yoongi wants to look at him, but looking at jungkook is like staring straight into the sun, and it blinds yoongi, searing through his eyesight. he sniffs, eyes firmly on the cracked ceiling, then. “so what,” the empty words are pushed through the dryness of his throat, thorny. jungkook drags in a breath.

this is between their before and their after, albeit yoongi doesn’t know what the after implies yet. the moment snug between teenage memories and the bitter, ocre taste of a love that shouldn’t be. those blend inside yoongi’s guts like vomit. pushing jungkook the farthest away is the only decision there is— but jungkook, with his face all wrong from getting beat up, with his fingers that need holding, with his eighteens and nineteens, he can’t stand too far away from burning fire. in that sense, they’re exactly the same. a dreamer, and the boy who wants to dream so badly. they fit like jagged edges of a broken mirror, and cut just the same (and bleed all the same, too). “you told me it kept the dark out,” jungkook goes on, and yoongi feels when he approaches the bed, and yoongi stills, body so tense it strains.

(and here, a dream within a dream— i don’t smoke , jungkook had told him, chuckling, their fingers touching as he grabs the lighter offered to him. that’s a lantern, not a lighter. just recently jungkook had learned about yoongi’s strange abilities. he had sat there, looking hurt and at awe all at once. a lantern? jungkook presses onto yoongi’s knuckles. they’re red and cut from picked fights. we can find each other with it , yoongi had wanted to say. to keep the dark out , he says instead. jungkook’s mouth curls into a small smile. he looks up, finding yoongi’s eyes. i never met anyone like you, hyung .)

(and here, another dream within a dream— in layers yoongi has pressed himself to forget —) (jungkook’s lips were dry, and his eyes were big, and the small, breathy hyung he let out was out of

what’s a dreamer without someone to dream for?

yoongi watches the flames lick at the foot of the motel’s bed. he closes his eyes, then, and he slips into water, and it soaks his body, and it drips on the carpet floor. the fire has left a black shapeless mark on the furniture by the time he’s awake again. the sun feels harsh, the windows open. his mouth tastes like salt. he leaves the motel behind quickly, wrapping himself in a jacket that is wet, shivering in the cold street. yoongi doesn’t know how long he walks, but he walks until he’s stumbling against colourful containers, counting, one, two, three, four— the fourth at the end of the railway. he knocks.

namjoon looks sleepy when he opens the door. he stops, staring for a moment, and then he pushes the door further open, quietly. yoongi stumbles in. it’s still the same as it was years before. still crammed with books and newspaper cuts, still messy despite the lack of things. it’s cold inside, almost as cold as outside. yoongi knows there’s someone else on the bed, some sleeping chest rising and falling still. he looks away. “i told you there was someone here already,” namjoon sighs, but he touches yoongi’s arm, and he feels how cold he is, how wet. “i’ll lend you clothes and we can go and get coffee.”

“— alright.”

his clothes are large, but they warm against his body, and yoongi feels less like he’s still drowning in cold sea water. namjoon walks them to a nearby convenience store, no words exchanged, yoongi tagging along always a step behind, staring at their battered shoes. “here,” and namjoon offers him the coffee once they’re there, from a machine that looks unclean. it tastes bitter and burnt. it’s familiar. “what happened?”

“i drank too much, that’s all.”

“that’s all, really?”

they stand together, inside the warm store, the cashier not paying attention to them. yoongi drinks

some more, too much, this time, coughing as it burns. namjoon waits. “i don’t know what’s going on,” yoongi finally says, shrugging. “i don’t know why i’m here.” he’s never known why, to be fair. why was he welcomed to the group of odd ones out, why was he accepted as part of it, despite lacking so much. back then, though, back then yoongi was grateful for it.

“why did you ditch like that?”

(

what are we to each other?

we are all alone in the end.

it won’t ever be the same. not after those words are spit out in grief and anger. his eyes unfocused from taehyung’s distorted face to jungkook’s— heartbroken one. his eyes are wide in panic, his hands cupping his ears, as if he could stop listening. yoongi stares and stares, helpless, hopeless, breathless, and when hoseok suggests they should go, yoongi only follows, hoping jungkook will come along, too. he does, tailing behind him, and yoongi can tell when jungkook’s fingers curl around the hem of his jacket, and yoongi’s throat feels achy and dry and he wants to start running for no good reason, running away, tugging the boy with him, to a dream space where he can’t be hurt. jungkook lets go after a moment. he leaves, disappearing between containers, yoongi can tell that, too, from the way his steps get lighter against the gravel. he follows, then.

it takes him some time to find jungkook in amidst the graveyard of colourful containers, all rusted and old now, all stained by weather, much like yoongi’s soul. “— are you okay?” he asks, because he has to, because he’s the hyung. jungkook isn’t okay. he has never been okay. yoongi knows how that feels on a personal level. it’s no surprise when jungkook sniffs, shaking his head, hiding his face away. “don’t cry.”

“i’m not crying,” his voice seems stuck inside his throat, as if he’s somewhat choking on them. yoongi doesn’t get closer. tears are made of salt like sea water. he stands opposite, against another metal casket. jungkook has his ears coloured red. the rest of him is pale, or purple, or bruiseyellow. “why did you follow me here?”

“because you followed me first.”

it’s always been this way. since the start, the very first day. i’ll follow you, hyung , jungkook used to say, sitting next to him on the bench in front of a damaged piano. they’d exchange glances in the