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Taehyung's been gone six days when the first postcard arrives. The front of the card shows a blue outline of China. Jimin snags it out of their apartment's post box on his way to work and reads it on the metro, one hand grabbing the pole above his head, shoulders curled in to create sanctuary and read.
I miss you horrifically and it has only been hours. There is a stuffed giraffe at this airport store and it looks like Namjoon-hyung and I want to buy it for him. JK laughed and laughed. One day I will take you to Nepal without any of my equipment and you can see my gods from below. I love you. I will be safe. Call when I can - bye Min.
Jimin's glasses often fog up on his morning commute, mask pushed up against his nose. Now, they hide the edges of his eyes where water bunches up. Taehyung's handwriting is difficult, peculiar. Jimin teaches children to write but his own fiancé can barely keep his lines straight, merging into one another like traffic cones.
It makes him smile behind his mask and almost miss his stop.
There have been phone calls, every night a phone call, and Jimin reminds himself that this is the easiest part. That Taehyung trekking through Nepal with JK and a team is the part best to stomach. Last night, Taehyung called from Pokhara. On Google Maps it looks grey, streaked with lines of yellow. Jimin traced it with his finger while they talked –
"I refuse, baby. Sorry."
"I'll only be gone for a few weeks," Taehyung whines. "Maybe a month. Surely you can wait until I'm back to finish it."
"Hobi-hyung is coming over tomorrow to watch the finale," Jimin says. He wishes Taehyung were here, limbs all over the couch, eyes heavy lidded and looking bored at everything but Jimin. "Snooze you lose."
"Once we're married, I'm divorcing you about this."
His cell reception is shit and the line crackles. Jimin stays extra still like it will help, froze but for his finger still carefully smudging the screen of his laptop.
"We should get married here," Taehyung says, once he's done pouting about missing the finale of the Kim Da-Mi drama they started before he left Seoul. "There are boats by the water that curve up like they're trying to reach the sky. The mountains are everywhere. You would be very beautiful around all these mountains, Min."
"Are you implying that I will be less beautiful in a rental hall in Seoul?"
Reception delays Taehyung's laugh; it is the most familiar sound to Jimin, even before the waves hitting the beaches near his childhood home and his mother's humming.
He keeps the postcard tucked into the pocket of his jacket until morning recess. He eats two boxes of Pepero in his classroom while the kids are outside and thumbs over the blue pen marks of I will be safe. He feels something clutch his heart tight.
They met through Hobi, a poorly planned but well-meaning set up. Jimin was in his second year of university, double majoring in dance and education, and wasn't looking for anything. Taehyung had silver hair back then and the same wicked smile.
"You're Hobi-hyung's friend from dance," Taehyung said, nudging his face close to Jimin's to be heard over their mutual friends' karaoke. It was a packed night in September, summer heat collecting under Jimin's clothes and turning his neck wet with sweat. "Hi."
"And you're the maniac who likes to climb mountains," Jimin said. He stuck his hand out to shake. "It's nice to meet you."
Taehyung was lightening, striking and flashy, dimming everything in comparison. Jimin had heard stories about him before from Yoongi-hyung; a wiry kid he went to high school with who dropped out to climb the Matterhorn. Yoongi always described him as charming and insane and too good looking for his own good.
It took about forty-five minutes, and Taehyung's mouth on Jimin's throat, for him to agree with Yoongi-hyung's assessment wholeheartedly.
"When's he supposed to reach base camp?" Seokjin-hyung asks, now, over Szechuan pepper chicken at their favourite restaurant. Usually there are many of them, chopsticks crossing over the table to grab food, Taehyung's arm around the back of Jimin's chair. Tonight, it is just them.
"In two days. For now, he's dragging JK around town to get work for his next exhibit."
Jimin spends winters with his favourite person, but spring and summer are summiting season. His friends are good though, loyal to a fault, and they keep his evenings busy. Seokjin picked him up from the school today in his sedan with its cup holder full of receipts and glove compartment stocked with twelve pairs of sunglasses.
"Bless those idiots."
"I miss him." Jimin holds up a piece of pepper, brow furrowed. "I keep waiting to get used to it, but I can't. I should be an expert in life without Taehyung by now."
The first time they had only known each other eighteen days; eighteen days of Jimin feeling like his insides were going to go up in flames every time his phone vibrated in his back pocket. Taehyung was gorgeous and ridiculous, a terrible bed partner who woke up at 5am to run from Jimin's apartment up Ansan Mountain every morning.
"So," Taehyung told him one night when they were making out on Jimin's couch, his thighs split over Jimin's lap. "I don't know if I mentioned but I'm going to be in Tanzania on Sunday."
Eighteen days and already Jimin's stomach felt like knots – "Oh. For how long?"
"I'm hoping less than two weeks," Taehyung said. His hands were still folded up all polite on Jimin's stomach, thumbs tucked into his belly button. "Kilimanjaro isn't very technically difficult but I have to leave time to acclimatize. My sponsor only paid for the flight there and back, so hopefully I make my returning flight. I can send you the email confirmation."
Eighteen days and Jimin was already mostly used to the way Taehyung spoke, words out of place and somehow both direct and bewildering.
"Oh," Jimin said. He blinked. "Send me a postcard?"
"Baby, I'll send you a million postcards," Taehyung promised before kissing Jimin again, hands moving to heat things up again in the air between them.
"Wait – " Jimin said, head swimming. "I have so many questions. I need to ask you so many questions."
"Let me blow you first," Taehyung had responded and he did and then he answered them all, diligent, his voice raspy because in eighteen days Jimin had learnt what he liked best, how he liked it and how hard.
He was gone eleven days in total, that trip. Jimin felt weird picking him up from the airport and then felt bad about not going when Taehyung stopped by his apartment first, exhausted and red from the wind and grinning so wide.
"You can stay over with me and Joon, if you want," Seokjin is saying now, eyes patient. He can flip between joking and concerned quick, Jimin's favourite thing about him. "I'll make you breakfast in the morning even."
"The highest honour, hyung."
Jimin still has the postcards from Taehyung's Kilimanjaro summit; one from the airport in Nairobi, another from the airport in Arusha, and the last from a town called Machame. The first two Jimin keeps on the corkboard they have in the living room but the last he keeps in a box under the bed. He hopes to every deity on earth that no postal worker ever read the filth that Taehyung detailed on it before it landed in his mailbox.
"Tell me about your students," Seokjin says, while waving down their waiter for the dessert menu. Jimin shakes his head to dispel the phantom water in his ears, making the world cloudy around him. "I want to hear about those little munchkins."
Jimin smiles and thinks about his kids, his twenty-one six-year-olds who call him Mr. Jimin and spent the last two days watching their little bean plants grow sprouts. He thinks about them, about his school and his friends, twisting his engagement ring around and around his finger unthinking.
"We'll be at base camp tomorrow. JK's repacked his stuff six times."
Jimin hums. Tonight is dinner at Yoongi's and he's been tasked with dessert. Yoongi likes cupcakes that come from a box which is why Jimin doesn't mind bringing dessert to Yoongi's place.
"I miss your cheeks, Min. I should have brought more photos of you, the ones I have don't do them justice."
"You're such a fucking sap," Jimin says, smiling so wide he can hardly see the mixing bowl for a minute. Taehyung has taken approximately fourteen thousand photos of Jimin in their six years together and he spends a month picking which ones to develop and bring with him to his mountains. "Tell me about your team."
He knows most of the names, people Taehyung has climbed with on different expeditions. There's
Sungmin, an experienced climber who Taehyung has been training with for years. Last July, they summitted Broad Peak together and then Sungmin and his wife hosted them for a barbecue where Jimin got stung by a wasp and almost ended up in the emergency room.
There's also Haeun, a veterinarian from Daejoon who wants to do the Seven Summits by the time she's forty, and Eunwoo, who once spent an entire evening trying to convince Jimin that packaged ramen tasted better at 6,000 meters when it was cooked in melted snow.
And JK, but JK was more family than team.
JK and Taehyung were like extensions of the same person, like one person in two bodies. They climbed mountains like they were born to do it. During the off-season, Jungkook does freelance journalism for video games and lives in Seokjin and Namjoon's spare room. He has a terrible habit of picking up Jimin when he's drunk and taking him to a new location, giggling all the while.
Jimin loves him like a brother and a son and a best friend, all wrapped into one.
"Apparently a team of Americans will be climbing around the same time," Taehyung is saying, his voice low and rusty with travel. "I think Will Hutton is supposed to be with them. He was with us on K2."
"I like to think about your time on K2 as little as possible," Jimin says, grabbing the small tub of paper cups out of the pantry. He pops the lid and begins peeling cups away from the container one at a time to place them in his muffin tin. "Fuck that mountain."
Taehyung hums. He hums because they don't fight, not really, except about this.
It is not, as the Americans would say, Jimin's first fucking rodeo. He realized Taehyung was a mountaineer sooner than he realized what that meant. It wasn't until a few months after those first eighteen days, around the time Jimin first called Taehyung his boyfriend and introduced him to his mom, that he started using his university library card to learn more about the massive, rocky death traps the cute boy in his life was fond of climbing.
Jimin read about altitude sickness and pulmonary edemas and frost bite. He read about avalanches and the people who died in them, about lines breaking, about the apathy that takes over people above 8,000 meters. When Taehyung went to the States to climb Denali, Jimin read so many autobiographies about failed exhibitions that he left seventeen hysterical voicemails on the phone that Taehyung had shut off and carefully stowed in his pack during the climb.
On K2, Taehyung and JK got caught in a snowstorm 300 meters below the summit and had to turn back in near blindness. They had to pass under the hanging serac, known as the Bottleneck, in the middle of the storm lest they risk bivouacking overnight at 8,200 meters. Jimin knows they barely survived.
Taehyung writes him letters every night when he's climbing. He gives them to Jimin when he's back in Seoul and Jimin spends the days after his homecoming reading through them while Taehyung sleeps in his lap.
The letters from K2 –
My Min I am alive. I didn't expect to be. I didn't think we would survive. I thought I would die up there, Min, and never see you again. I never thought I wanted anything like I wanted the mountains. Min min min I want to get married to you. My fingers almost fell off. JK slipped but he survived. We survived. Let's get married Min.
- Jimin doesn't like thinking about them, is all. Even if it was the best proposal story he's ever heard.
Jimin doesn't like thinking about any of it because he knows that Taehyung was 300 meters out from the summit and –
One day I'll come back and reach the top, Min. JK will take a photo of me on the summit and you'll put it up in our living room. I promise, Min.
He burns the cupcakes. Yoongi tries to be nice about it but clearly only eats the frosting off three of them, leaving their burnt cake corpses behind. He slings an arm around Jimin's shoulders while they rewatch Kiki's Delivery Service.
"You alright?" Yoongi asks, staring straight at the screen. They went on four dates in Jimin's second year of university, just before he met Taehyung and fell so, so in love. At no point during those four dates, or the hand jobs in Yoongi's car after date three, did Yoongi make eye contact with him for longer than a few seconds.
"Yeah, hyung."
Yoongi is quiet for a second before he asks, "You sure?"
Jimin didn't pick Taehyung up from the airport the first time but has every time since, sometimes with their found family or Taehyung's parents, a little crowd with Jimin at the centre, stood on tiptoes to get the first glimpse of Taehyung's hair.
"He'll be home soon," Jimin says. "Right?"
Under Jimin's side of the bed there are three shoeboxes with six years of carefully wrapped letters inside each one. It's late and Jimin needs to sleep; instead, he gently opens the lid of the first box and pulls out a wad of thick paper tied together with a string.
Some are short –
Been climbing since 3am. Took half an hour to light the stove after I broke 3 matches with my frozen fingers. Finally JK found one in the bottom of his pack. He lit it without flinching. Melted snow for tea and set out. Going to sleep now, Min. We'll try to summit when we wake I love you.
Others were shorter still –
Fucking ice fucking rocks fucking mountains. I should have become a carpenter.
And some -
Dear Min,
The snow here is different from back home. There is snow snow everywhere and it fell hard last week before I got here. Every step is pushing snow with my body, wedging through it. I am thinking of you often and your love for the snow. You would make a great mountaineer, Jimin-ah. Shame about your fear of heights.
The north facing side is cankerous. JK thinks we have upset it by trying to conquer the summit from this side. We all get in bad moods. Humans are no different from mountains. This part of Canada is very beautiful and I think it would be a good place for a holiday. I'll bring you here. I'll carry you all the way to the top of Fairweather. We can lay under the stars and share my sleeping bag.
I told Hobi-hyung to take good care of you while I am gone. Is he singing you lullabies in your sleep?
I will be home for your graduation, Min. JK and I will be wind burnt and tired. JK is insisting that I tell you he has worn the sunscreen you bought him every day of the trip. I would like to amend that JK's definition of "every day" and yours are different.
You must be the most patient person in the world to wait for these letters. It's selfish but I'm glad you are so patient. I don't like to think of myself without you. I'll see you soon and in my dreams and in the snow always always.
Missing Taehyung is sort of like wishing the weather is different. Nothing can change the weather just like nothing can stop Taehyung from strapping crampons to his boots and climbing thousands of meters above sea level for fun.
It isn't missing then, or even wishing. There's no use wishing Taehyung was here every night because to wish that would be to wish away everything that made him, like wishing away the pinch of his fingers as he plucks strawberry hats from his mouth.
So Jimin doesn't miss or wish or yearn. He reads his letters. He goes out with his friends when they ask him to. He writes lesson plans at the kitchen table. He waits for phone calls from numbers he doesn't recognize, satellite phones that Taehyung rents along his road to the summit. He watches dramas with his mother over the phone, gasping seconds apart because his livestream is a moment behind hers.
Taehyung reaches Annapurna I base camp the next day. He calls as Jimin is packing up from work for the day, his phone ringing the top drawer of his desk.
"How is your day?" Taehyung says, gentle. It is like he is at the studio across town and is calling to ask what to pick up from the market. "Is it over? Am I calling at a bad time?" Taehyung is awful at time zones. He is lucky that Jimin loves him and does not usually make a fuss at being woken up.
"The day was okay. I guess. Eunae told me she hated me." Jimin's desk is a mess of papers and drawings, post-it notes from his co-workers and gifts from his kids. A line of rocks scavenged from the playground sits in front of the small frame of he and Taehyung on Hallasan for their three-year anniversary.
"That bitch."
Jimin laughs, covering his mouth with a hand. The door to his classroom is still open. "You can't call a five-year-old a bitch, Taehyung-ah."
When Taehyung is in Seoul, he volunteers for every field trip Jimin organizes. Last year, a boy skinned his knee on the way from the bus to the zoo. Taehyung carried him on his back the entire day. It did very little for Jimin's sanity and overall well-being.
"Are you headed home now?"
"No," Jimin says, sighing. He starts to pack away his things. "Namjoon-hyung wants to see a foreign film at the theatre you guys like to go to. He said he'll pay for my drinks, so."
"Ahh." He sounds wistful. For someone that routinely packs up and flies halfway across the world, Taehyung hates not being included in plans. "You get to have all the fun while I'm gone, Jimin-ah."
"I get to have all the fun because you're gone. Once you're home, you can watch your terrible movies with Namjoon-hyung while Jin-hyung and I wait at the barbecue place across the street."
Taehyung hums.
"You're at base camp?"
"Yeah."
"Let me look up photos," Jimin says. He puts Taehyung on speaker so he can get at the browser on his phone.
A rocky valley surrounded by white peaks, blues skies. There are banners strewn across the camp in bright, colourful fabric. He scrolls with one thumb to see yellow tents pitched in snow. Another photo shows a large sign that reads NAMASTE and informs Jimin that his fiancé is roughly 4,100 metres higher on the earth than he is presently and set to go even higher.
"It's pretty," Jimin says, zooming in on the peak of Annapurna in the background of the photo. He knows his peaks now, through osmosis by sleeping next to Taehyung all these years and his own research. "Prettier, probably, than the summit. Might as well come home now."
"Jimin-ah…"
Taehyung told Jimin about Annapurna late at night while they were dancing in the kitchen, before nudging Jimin up against their counter and having his way with him. It's not asking except that it is. Taehyung looks at Jimin with his pretty pretty eyes and says, in a tone not unlike Jimin's class of children, "Baby, please can I climb Annapurna with Kook in May?"
Then he lulls Jimin into a false sense of security using one of his many bargaining tools (see: sex) and asks again while Jimin is mostly asleep (due in part to the aforementioned sex). By the time Jimin has caught onto what Taehyung is planning on doing with the month of May it is, of course, far too late to yell at him.
This has never stopped Jimin, however.
"The deadliest mountain in the world," Jimin shouted, six months ago now, holding his laptop in both hands while standing atop their couch. "Taehyung-ah, are you out of your mind?"
"Used to be, baby!" Taehyung knew to stay on the other side of the living room. "Not anymore! See, if you read a bit further you'll see that –"
"For decades, Annapurna I Main held the highest fatality-to-summit rate of all principal eight-thousander summits." Jimin dutifully read from the Wikipedia article. He could feel himself shaking in rage and fear. "What part am I missing? Huh? Taehyung?"
"It's only 20% fatality rate now, baby," Taehyung said, smiling with even teeth. "That's an improvement. Aren't you always saying that life is about improvement?"
Jimin threw a pillow at him.
Now, Jimin hums while Taehyung chews his tongue in the Himalayas. He takes Taehyung off speaker and presses his phone back to his ear. Somehow, ridiculously, it feels more like he is closer when his voice is just for Jimin's ears.
"Please be careful," Jimin says. Maybe he is whispering.
"Do you know what they call the trek to get here, Min?" Taehyung asks. Maybe he is whispering back. "They call it a sanctuary. The mountains surround us like a cradle. We're in heaven here, Min. Couldn't possibly be safer."
"So, I'm coming to you for advice, Jimin-ie," Seokjin says two days later. They are in his living room, tucked into the grocery store cake that Namjoon-hyung bought on the way home and then promptly dropped, still in its container, in the kitchen. "A man on his knees, knowing you are the only prophet to whom I can turn."
Jimin swallows the cake in his mouth. "Everything okay?"
"Yes," Namjoon says. "He's being dramatic."
"Kim Namjoon!" Seokjin says, loud and shrill like a crow. "No one asked you. Get out of my house."
Jimin watches Namjoon-hyung close his mouth against a reply and take a sip of his beer.
"Anyways. Now. What would your advice be for me if, say, a boy – a man. A man kissed me. And it – that happened. But before we could talk about it or anything important, he got on a flight to go climb a mountain and possibly die in an avalanche."
Blinking hard, twice, Jimin says, "Jungkook-ie kissed you?"
"I never said it was him," Seokjin shrieks, ears red like the centre of the earth. "It could be anyone."
"It could be Jungkook-ie or Taehyung-ie," Jimin says, flat. "And if it's Taehyung-ie then I think I have to punch you."
"No respect." His fingers fiddle with a fork, the end of his plate, the collar of Namjoon's jacket. "I feed you, I clothe you, I bring you green tea when your stomach is queasy, and this is the thanks I get?"
"Mm. So. Are you asking for my advice because you know Kook talks to me about the boys he likes?"
Seokjin splutters, indignant says, "Of course not. He does? No, not at all. I'm asking you because you're the only person I know who routinely lets the man you're – kissing – go to the Himalayas for fun."
Jimin eats another forkful of the busted cake. Thinks about saying that he doesn't let Taehyung do anything. Thinks about saying that to let is to give permission, to give Taehyung a slip of paper that allows him to be himself. Instead, says, "So you don't want me to tell you if JK has ever talked about you?"
Nonchalant, Seokjin shimmies closer to Jimin on the couch. "Have I ever told you how positively radiant you look, Park Jimin?"
Jimin giggles while Namjoon shakes his head, grinning.
"A vision. Isn't he a vision, Kim Namjoon?"
Truth is, Jimin hasn't had many heart-to-hearts under the blankets with Jungkookie because they're not twelve. However, he lives with Taehyung and Taehyung is a big gossip who tells Jimin everything.
"Kook-ah is difficult," Taehyung told him, a few months ago. They were having breakfast near Jimin's school painfully early on a Thursday, early enough to watch the sunrise over the top of squares of glass and metal. Splitting a crisp, golden pajeon between them, Taehyung chewed with his mouth open and said, "He gets crushes easily but falls out of them easily. So, he's playing cautious with Seokjin-hyung."
Jimin drank some of his americano. "Did he ever have a crush on me?"
"He liked you for two and a half months after you made him a drink at a party back in college," Taehyung said. "He told me when we were stuck in a snowstorm on the east face of Logan. I think he told me because he feels guilty."
"Why? I'm really hot."
"That's what I said!"
Not by choice but by the little parts around Jimin's heart that went cruel, he sometimes hates Jungkook. Only ever for a few seconds before its washed away by shame, by all the love in the world, by the knowledge that Jungkook is that which Jimin is not and that's okay. It's okay that Jungkook tells Taehyung all his carefully kept secrets when they're moments from death and that Taehyung, presumably, does the same.
It's okay that Jimin hears them months later in patches of time before he's off to teach the alphabet and Taehyung is sent to the green tea fields in the south with his Canon and the lunch Jimin packed for him.
"You should talk to him," Jimin says, sage. "The best relationships are built on communication, hyung."
"Didn't you and Taehyung fuck three hours after you met?" Namjoonie asks.
Jimin glares at him. "No one asked you, Kim Namjoon. Get out of Seokjin-hyung's house."
"I don't want to talk to Jungkookie," Seokjin says, deflating like a balloon over the table. Jimin spots a single grey hair along his hairline. "I want Jungkookie to leave the Himalayas and come home. I want him to propose six times so I can turn him down every time. I want him to leave behind his life of adventure and become my emotional support golden retriever. Is that so much to ask?"
Jimin has another bite of the grocery store cake.
Taehyung's last letter, stored between a recipe in the cookbook that Jimin's mother wrapped in brown paper for him the day he moved to Seoul, read – Mountains are lonely. I told JK this and he told me he thinks I think I'm a mountain. I'm not sure about that but if I was a mountain, you would be the summit and the valley and the safe spaces between rocks. You would be the moss that grows higher than you could ever believe it would. You would be all the things that keep this mountain home.
"We're leaving early tomorrow morning," Taehyung says through the crackle of Annapurna and Kathmandu and water and rock and trees to Seoul. "Ueli Steck went from base to summit and back in 28 hours. I don't think JK and I will be quite as impressive." Taehyung is an encyclopedia of climber names and facts; Jimin stopped looking them up after reading about too many deaths.
Tonight, he is at Yoongi's again, with Hobi-hyung this time. Jimin is in Yoongi's bedroom to take Taehyung's call, which is Yoongi's recording studio because Yoongi is a giant mess of contradictions when it comes to his own well-being.
"Okay," Jimin says. He thinks if he says more, he will break.
"Are you getting my letters?"
"The mile high club should really be reserved for mountaineers," Jimin recites. "On a separate note, do you want to join me on a mountaintop soon?"
Taehyung laughs. He laughs most at his own jokes and second most at Jimin's jokes and third most making Yoongi embarrassed by flirting with him. "Are you happy, Jimin-ah? Are you keeping well? Are you keeping warm?"
Jimin stares very very hard at a blinking light on Yoongi's monitor. He tells himself, not for the first or second or twentieth time, that this could be his very last phone call with Taehyung for the rest of his life. That a snowstorm or avalanche or an incorrectly tied rope or tripping over a rock, could mean no more phone calls or letters or airport arrivals.
When Taehyung's flight landed from Islamabad and K2 and all the awfulness that is held there, Jimin ran halfway across Arrivals to hold him. Taehyung was shaking in his arms, grasping at Jimin's back like a man starved, like a man who spent three nights in a tent at Camp IV.
Jimin does not say – "how can I be happy? How can I be warm when you aren't? How can I be well when you are so far away? How can I know that missing you is futile but also miss you every time I walk past the bench in the park where you tied my shoes that one time?"
Instead –
"Hobi-hyung brought a dancing video game with him. I haven't seen Yoongi-hyung this uncomfortable since Seokjin-hyung got drunk and told him he loved him."
After eighteen I love yous and thirty-five be safes and one quick chat with Jungkookie, Jimin leaves Yoongi's bedroom. His hyungs are at the kitchen island arranging fried chicken in a bowl. Neither of them ask about Jimin's dewy eyes or his red nose.
"Jimin-ah you should bring the kids to the studio," Hobi says, later, as he's peeling off the plastic gloves covered in Buldak sauce. "A field trip for them and a day of joy for me. I'll teach them how to do a two-step while you have a nap in my office."
Jimin laughs and if he cries, just a little, just a bit of moisture between the lines around his eyes where Taehyung says all love is kept, then no one says anything. Hobi lays out the field trip and Jimin writes notes on a napkin to type into an email for his principal and Yoongi zones out watching a basketball game, more hoodie than man as the night progresses.
Hobi goes home early and Yoongi-hyung brings out the whiskey and that's when things fall apart, really, because somewhere between four dates and handjobs in the back of a Subaru, Yoongi became someone who could crack open Jimin like a walnut. They sit on opposite sides of the couch while some sports announcers dissect the game on the television, low but with subtitles.
"Secret for a secret?"
Jimin looks over. Yoongi is almost horizontal, spinning his phone around in his hands over his chest. He's been awfully cagey with it all night.
"I already know you're seeing someone," Jimin says. "You're obvious."
Yoongi blinks over to meet his gaze. "Take it or not, Jimin-ah."
They all have ways to distract him from the loneliness, from his ever bearing, heavy, mountain-weight loneliness. For Hobi it is field trips and dancing and for Jin-hyung it is complaining and food and for Namjoon-hyung it is boring films and careful questions and with Yoongi it is this: whiskey and a way out of talking if he wants.
"Take it."
"I'm moving," Yoongi says and then, to Jimin's aborted choke, "just to Yongsan. I found a two bedroom with you know. Fucking big windows and a kitchen where I could make Chuseok dinner. My parents' dream."
Anyone else would congratulate Yoongi on his news and ask what he might need for a housewarming present. Park Jimin knows him too fucking well, however: "Oh my god, you finally realized you're never going to get laid if you have a record studio in your house instead of a bed."
"So anyways," Yoongi says, ears no doubt red under his hoodie. "Secret for a secret. How are you dealing with Taehyung gone?"
"What's their name? The person that's encouraged you to level up for the first time in years. Are you going to buy a coffee table next, too? A cat??"
"It's someone I wrote a song for and I'll – I'll get a cat if I fucking want a cat, Park Jimin, now answer the question."
Lonely, lonely mountain with moss all along the top – "I'm doing terribly."
"Obviously."
"I have the number for someone I met through Taehyung; he's this doctor in Suwon who's married to a woman that Taehyung-ah climbs with and I keep meaning to call him and ask what he does with all his love, when she's gone. Because I can barely sleep, Yoongi, and I don't know why this time is different. I don't know why I could handle so many other mountains but not this one."
Yoongi nods. He sips his whiskey. Asks quietly, "is it different this time? Were you really okay, the other times?"
"Yes," Jimin says, but that doesn't feel right. He says, "Maurice Herzog lost all his toes on the way up Annapurna. Most of his fingers too. I love Taehyung-ie's toes and fingers."
"Have you thought about talking to someone about this?" Yoongi says and he doesn't mean himself or Namjoon or Taehyung's climbing friend's husband. Jimin shakes his head then, pauses, squirms his shoulders. "Not the doctor who's married to someone that climbs but –" Yoongi purses his mouth "-someone who you pay to tell things to, to get advice from."
"I can't ask him to quit, Yoongi-hyung, he loves it. He was made for it. He's – nothing makes him happier than climbing. It's been in his life longer than I have. He'll always love it and it'll always call to him. I can't take it away from him. It would be like taking away his heart and lungs."
"He doesn't love it more than he loves you," Yoongi says, quiet, and then: "More whiskey?"
And maybe he lied to Yoongi because maybe Jimin does know why it's different this time. Maybe he knows it's because two days before Taehyung left for Annapurna, Jimin's mom called him and told him all about the florist she met at a neighbour's house for dinner and how that florist specialized in wedding flowers and would Jimin like the number to the florist from the neighbour's dinner party?
Maybe it's different because Jimin's had a ring on his finger for years now and a boy in his heart for longer, but he's never planned a wedding and wouldn't know when or where to start.
"Jimin-ah, you can't wait forever," Jimin's mother told him over the phone the morning after her neighbour's dinner party. "I want grandchildren-"
"-Eomma-"
"-and to make all the ladies at the salon jealous when I talk about my son's husband. I want you to be happy, Jimin-ah."
"I am happy," Jimin said, finding it hard to look away from the gear Taehyung had laid out in living room. Everything was brightly coloured, orange, so that a helicopter could find Taehyung in the snow if the worst should happen.
"You shouldn't have to wait anymore," Jimin's mother said. He heard the snip of scissors on her end, flowers or kimchi. "So tired of seeing you wait. You've waited half your life for that boy."
Jimin swallowed. He thought about the word husband then, flinching, widow.
"How is work?" he asked, pointed, and barely breathed as she answered.
It feels like holding his hands open while grain after grain of rice is dropped into them. It's light and easy until it isn't, until he realizes his hands are full and more rice grains keep dropping, threatening to spill over.
Jimin thinks on the metro. He thinks on the walk back to his and Taehyung's apartment, the one too nice for his teacher's salary but fine with the money Taehyung makes selling his life and adventures on Instagram. He thinks as he stands in the threshold to their home and his eyes catch on their framed engagement photos JK took for them on the beach near Jimin's mom's house. His hair was pink then, weeks out from the beginning of the school year. Taehyung looks so stupidly handsome.
I don't like to think of myself without you Taehyung said once. In this space, in this empty house and his heavy mountain body, he can only think of himself without Taehyung.
Without removing his coat, he sits at the kitchen table. Checks the time on the microwave and does backwards, time zone math. Imagines Taehyung with a light on his head and crampons on his feet, walking up a wall of ice and rock in pitch black. Jimin exhales.
The drive home from the airport after K2 was loud, loud with people and reassurances. Taehyung's parents stayed in their bedroom, made with fresh sheets by Jimin though he couldn't remember doing it, couldn't remember anything after getting a call from someone Taehyung met at basecamp. He and Taehyung are in the living room on folded blankets, knees knocked together, one of Taehyung's hands in both of Jimin's.
Jimin had just finished reading his stack of letters from the mountain. We survived. Let's get married Min.
"Min?" Taehyung asked, soft, once Jimin turned his phone light off.
Jimin held his hand tighter. They had been together four and a half years. He said, quiet too, "Do you mean it?"
"Yes."
Taehyung doesn't speak about mountains with fear, only reverence, but Jimin saw his eyes when he pulled back from the hug at Incheon. He needs to know: "Did you write it scared?"
Slowly, like he's pulling each word out through water and laying them at Jimin's feet, "No. No, I wrote it relieved. Grateful that I – grateful that I was given the opportunity to ask you."
It's heavy. Taehyung is the strongest, between them, but only in muscle. In everything else -
"Where's my ring?" Jimin asked, voice going whiny like his children. He felt Taehyung begin to grin against his skin. "Taehyungieeeee where's my engagement ring?"
"I bought it months ago," Taehyung said. "Hobi-hyung's keeping it safe because I know you snoop around the apartment too much to hide it here."
"Yah, Kim Taehyung, you think I'll marry you when you say such things - "
A letter comes out of order two days after Taehyung has left basecamp to summit. It's from the airport at Kathmandu; Jimin might keep the largest collection of postcards from the airport at Kathmandu.
Min my mini min. I've been thinking about what you asked me and I think both min. I think we do the service in your mother's backyard and then honeymoon in Vancouver to do it properly. It rains a lot in Vancouver which is lucky for me as no one looks as good in the rain as my mini min. I'm thinking about kissing your bellybutton min. Should we get matching bellybutton piercings? I will adore you when you're eighty-four and have a butterfly piercing through your navel. -T
Jimin leads the kids through exercise and then math equations. Eun-ae calls Yoon-soo a mean word but it's only to get Jimin's attention. He has her be his helper during reading time, holding up the book with her small hands, and she does it perfectly. Jimin speaks to other teachers during lunch hour and only checks his phone eight times for a call from an unknown number; none come.
Namjoon picks him up from school and they enter the metro together, headed to get pad see ew and roam a night market in Itaewon.
"You sleep okay, Jimin-ah?"
"Neighbour's fire alarm went off at 3am," Jimin lies, easily. "Took ages to fall back asleep."
Namjoon is a steady presence. He laughs like a kid on a playground and is so kind, always bending slightly to hear Jimin's words clearly. He's the only one to go along with all of Taehyung's bits, pretending to fall, slain, when Taehyung gets it in his head that they're samurai.
"How's the climb?" Namjoon asks, gently, as they wander through the market, bellies full. Namjoon reads all the same books as Jimin does, asks Taehyung and Jungkook the right questions about weather and climbing conditions. "Is Taehyung enjoying it?"
Jimin means to say: "Good! They started out two days ago and are headed to the summit. They're very well prepared and trust the rest of the group. In Kathmandu, Taehyung met up with that documentary maker and apparently she's gotten some great footage already of them climbing. I miss him, of course, but am so proud, I'm so proud, I'm so fucking proud that this man chose me and we will build a life together someday, eventually, when his bones have settled and the mountains stop calling for him."
Instead, somehow, a sentence built on late night whiskey and lonely metro trips: "I took my engagement ring off."
If it weren't the worst thing Jimin's ever said, Namjoon's expression would be funny. As it is-
There are bars everywhere and this bar is no different than any others, the one that Namjoon shuffles him to quickly. It is no different than the bar where Taehyung's big eyes first met Jimin's, you're Hobi-hyung's friend from dance.
Jimin might be crying or laughing but either way he's so tired. He's tired of waiting, of turning down numbers for a florist in Busan, of waking in the middle of the night and telling himself not to browser search 'Annapurna death' 'Annapurna avalanche' 'accidents Annapurna' 'Kim Taehyung climber,' telling himself don'tlookitsfinedon'tlookitsfine until he looks, phone screen blue white and blinding.
"What if we never get married?" Jimin asks, half into a pint of beer, his heart heavy. He can see Namjoon trying to text discreetly under the table, no doubt for reinforcements. "What if we do, Namjoon-hyung?"
"He loves you. You love him."
"Of course," Jimin says like breathing. "I would give him my hands. I would give him my eyes."
Namjoon's never been in love or maybe, maybe that's not fair. Maybe it's fairer to say that Namjoon loves the world so precisely and so delightfully that no person has ever shone more than any other, that none ever would. That his version of life is alone but never lonely, that he knows exactly how Jimin feels but also not at all how he feels.
"He'll come home," Namjoon says. His hand rubs a circle between Jimin's shoulder blades.
Jimin thinks of a million things to say and doesn't say any of them. He stares at his hands where they're wrapped around a glass. Last summer there was a ring of pale skin on his fourth finger when he would slide his ring off before showering or playing soccer. It's too early in the year for that now, Jimin's skin still yet to honey from the sun.
"Jimin-ah, did you hear me? He'll come home. You can tell him all this when he's home. That you're scared and can't send him off again."
Mountains are made from rock and water and life and snow but mostly from shifts in tectonic plates, fracturing up and up and up. Jimin is small. He laughs with his whole body. He teaches young children how to say please and thank you.
Namjoon has his phone pressed against his ear. No doubt there will be a Min Yoongi next to Jimin soon, his words indifferent but his eyes worried.
"I am no match for a mountain," Jimin says and closes his eyes.
There is a girl in Yoongi's kitchen when Jimin wakes up, hungover, the sun heavy in the sky and he heavy on Yoongi's couch.
She looks familiar in the JK-has-a-poster-of-you-in-his-room sort of way, in that your-face-was-on-a-magazine-at-the-grocery-store sort of way.
"Hi," she says when she notices Jimin blinking at her from the couch. He feels like a mole in a hole. "You're Jimin, right? I'm Jieun."
Yoongi comes out of the bathroom at that point and sits on top of the blankets he dumped on Jimin last night until Jimin starts flailing like a fish out of water. Then they all go sit criss-cross-applesauce around the table as Yoongi's girl pours coffee from a carafe.
It feels like a parallel universe, one where Yoongi isn't bleary eyed over breakfast but clear and smiling, pink elbows leaned on the table to listen to Jieun. Jimin holds pieces of fruit in his sore little mouth.
Yoongi-on-his-best-behaviour is usually reserved for when the halmeoni at their local seafood restaurant drops by their table or when Namjoon's parents are in town to see "their boys."
Yoongi did not display best behaviour characteristics when he was dating a firefighter last spring. At one point Jieun coughs and Yoongi stands so quick to get her a glass of water, Jimin gets mild vertigo.
"So, Jimin," Jieun says, brushing her hair back behind her ears. She's so pretty and shiny like a shell at the beach. "You knew Yoongi-ah in college. You have to tell me all his stories."
"He's a liar!" Yoongi yells from the kitchen. There's an awful lot of commotion for a glass of water. "Don't believe a word he says."
Jieun is lovely and sharp, whining when Yoongi teases her over their food. Jimin feels like a corn husk watching them, hungover and sad and missing his person like an arm. He wants Taehyung here, suddenly, dehydrated and exhausted next to him. He wants him half asleep in Jimin's lap and barely listening to the conversation. He wants to walk home with Taehyung's arm around his shoulders, hips jostling together on the train.
Jieun has to leave and do popstar stuff and Jimin buries himself in dishes while her and Yoongi do their awkward farewell two-step at the front door. Yoongi wanders in a bit later to lean against the counter near Jimin and give him one of his looks.
"You okay, kid?"
"You have lipstick on your chin."
Yoongi waddles off to the bathroom pink cheeked. When he comes back, Jimin is sitting on the floor next to the sink. Yoongi sits down next to him.
"Hyung," Jimin says, staring at his socked feet. "I don't think I can do this anymore."
Carefully, like he's talking to a woodland creature or Jungkook while he's crying, Yoongi asks his knees, "What is 'this' exactly?"
At a street fair when he was little, Jimin tried to catch a small fish between his hands to be able to take it home. The fish was so quick, silver and shining, that every time Jimin's hands came to cup around it the fish would swim free. Now, Jimin's thoughts dart between his fingers, grasp coming up empty.
"I can barely sleep. I feel stretched thin." He's been pinching the space where his ring used to be.
"Have you spoken to Taehyung?"
"He's climbing," Jimin says. When Taehyung is in Seoul and the world is okay, he comes with Taehyung to the bouldering gyms that have spread across the city like wildfire. Jimin will join him, for a bit, feet sticking into the grooves on the wall and gripping to the side of the wall by his fingertips. Then he sits on the soft floor, resting back on his hands, to watch Taehyung.
"I didn't mean this morning."
"They have to leave really early, like 3am," Jimin says. The cold from the kitchen floor is spreading into his chest. "So that they can reach the peak by the afternoon and have sunlight to come back down with."
"I think you need to tell him to stop," Yoongi says, after a moment.
"I can't do that."
"I think you have to say that you can't be with him anymore, unless he stops risking his life climbing mountains."
"This is his whole life. This is all his happiness, he – he hasn't done Everest yet, hasn't made it to Antarctica, he hasn't beaten K2. I'm no match for a mountain."
"You said that last night too. Who's asking you to be a mountain?"
"What don't you understand, hyung? It's his happiness. I can't ask him to stop being happy."
"His happiness is not more important than yours."
Yoongi's words are coupled with a look less careful than before. It makes something in Jimin want to snap back like he would have four years ago, to say something blunt and rude that he doesn't mean. Instead, he breathes furiously through his nose and says, eventually, "Jieun is nice."
"Your deflection bullshit doesn't work on me."
"So, hyung, Jieun is nice."
Yoongi chews on his tongue, looks away from Jimin and catches his eyes on the cupboard doors in front of them. Jimin looks at them too. Yoongi replaced the hinges on the cupboard doors one night halfway through a movie marathon because he was sick of them being off kilter. Hobi-hyung proposed marriage when he came back into the living room with his drill in one hand and Yoongi's cheeks stayed pink for an hour.
"She makes everything brighter."
Yoongi wants to work on something at the studio because he likes to tote mental health and worker's rights until they're his own, so Jimin follows him into the subway until they have to part ways. After a night out last winter with all of them, Yoongi rode on Jungkook's back up and down a subway car telling anyone who would listen that he gave birth to Jungkook under a bridge one night and raised him to be a warrior. Jungkook laughed so hard he got the hiccups.
Now, Yoongi sways back on forth on the car like a metronome that has a battery to replace. Jimin waits until they're just at his stop to say: "Ultimatums are bad. They're unhealthy."
Blinking, Yoongi says: "And this isn't?"
A call comes in near midnight.
Jimin lets it ring four times. Heart in his throat, he picks up at five.
Crackles of sound as Seoul connects to Nepal and mountain air. Then, gentle, soft like there was never anything to worry about, "Min-ah, baby? Did I wake you, Min?"
Relief like a wave knocks Jimin's feet from under him. He staggers out of bed to fold himself in half on the ground, arms around his knees, breath hitting his skin. He takes a breath and croaks out, "Yah, Kim Taehyung, what time do you call this?"
Laughter from the base camp of a mountain thousands of miles away. Laughter from safety, back in the cradle of sanctuary, where Taehyung is no doubt huddled over a satellite phone while Jungkook heats snow for tea.
"Did I have you worried, Min?" His voice sounds crackled and beautiful, like butterscotch.
Jimin feels ashamed, then, for the empty space around his fourth finger. He bites at the space, holds it close to his mouth and listens to the static. Tries to imagine Taehyung's thick eyebrows and wide smile, his cheeks wind burnt.
"Jimin-ah? Are you there, my love?"
"Taehyungie," he says, slow, watching the shapes in the darkness. "Do you think they let people get married at airports these days?"
Jimin has climbed a few mountains before, ones with stairs and handrails and neatly written plaques about the local flora and fauna to read on the way up. He knows the sound of Taehyung's laugh against rock and snow and ice and wild grass. It echoes here, too, throughout their empty Seoul apartment and the chambers of Jimin's heart.
"Your mother will never forgive us."
"I don't want to wait any longer. I don't –" Jimin swallows. He says, "We'll get married and then get some hotteok, Taehyung-ah, and then we're going to talk. I'm going to talk to my husband about how much I missed him. About how much I've been missing him for the last six years. And then you can tell me about the summit, Taehyung-ah, and about Jungkook stringing along our hyungs. Okay? Is that okay, Taehyung-ah?"
Jimin's ass is sore against the hard ground. He has to be awake soon to catch the train to his school and teach children how to sit still for hours every day. He needs Taehyung to fuck him silly and then map out their next six years, this time with conditions and new lines drawn in the sand, safety nets and fences to keep Jimin's heart intact.
Taehyung sounds like he's smiling when he says, "Got letters for you, Jimin-ah. Can you make some time for those, between getting married and the gossip?"
Like the sun, slow and brilliant, Jimin breathes out and smiles.