They leave in silence.  They sit inside the van in silence.  The sky beyond the window is black; the night is dying out slowly into the hours between day and night.  It’s the sort of time when people get lost in the in between, uncertain which time they truly belong to.  Are they night or day, evening or morning, or is it possible for them to be everything and nothing all at once.

The silence stretches with the miles they travel; the music playing through the speakers so low that is may as well not even be playing at all.  Namjoon shifts in his seat, body restless and exhausted all at the same time.  Yoongi watches the younger boy’s fingers curl into his jacket before loosening slowly; it’s a process that he’s been repeating for the last 15 minutes while Yoongi pretends it isn’t happening. There aren’t any words to say, yet the silence is like an itch against skin they can’t scratch away.  It burrows beneath their skin, picking and poking at the most tender places leaving them caught somewhere between aching and numb.

Namjoon fumbles for his phone; Yoongi blinks against the harsh light turning his head towards the window.  He can hear the tap of finger against phone, it irritates him in a way he can’t explain.  But he isn’t surprised that his muscles shake with annoyance, fingers shifting across his legs.  He shoves his hands into his pockets and slides down further into the seat.

He spaces out enough that Namjoon has to shake him when they make it to the dorms, he startles a little more than usual head caught in a state of mind he can’t escape from, thoughts circling around one another in an endless loop of words he’ll never quite be able to shake away. Yoongi shifts out the door, not even phased when Namjoon doesn’t move an inch.  He stares at the boy for a minute, notices the tense shoulders and the troubled eyes, but mostly he sees the shaking hands that are itching to release every single ounce of turmoil raging through his body. 

Namjoon likes to squeeze the emotions from his body, piece by piece and lay them out to look at, to analyze.  Sometimes he shares them with the world, sometimes just with the boys, sometimes he keeps them locked away merely for himself as a reflection on his life. Namjoon has the ability to always learn some type of lesson from every emotion he allows himself to feel, he tears it all apart until he finds something worth holding on to and then latches himself to that thought and doesn’t let go.

Yoongi isn’t like Namjoon though.  He wants to hold onto the anger, the humiliation, the blind rage that is seething just below the surface churning in his stomach. The disrespect that’s lingering on his skin, invisible marks slapped against cheek. All the emotions make him ache but he doesn’t want to let go of them yet, he can’t let go of them yet.  He wants them to sit there, festering in the pit of his stomach for a while longer.  Every single word lends to him another motivating factor, something to push him even further, something to leave him reaching for higher peaks.

“They already know,” is the first and last phrase spoken between them before Yoongi shuts the door with a click. He stares at the dorm building long after the van has disappeared into the night.  He tilts his head from side to side, bounces on the balls of his feet and rolls his shoulders.  He feels like he’s ready for war, all the emotions too close to the surface and battling against chains to be set free.

Sometimes he wishes that he had the same type of initial coping mechanisms as Namjoon.  The pulse of a beat, the freedom of a lyric – letting it all out with pen and paper, smears of black against white that create something from nothing, masterpiece from a blank slate.  But Yoongi doesn’t write well when he has rage coursing through his veins.  The anger becomes catastrophic, the words turning into illegible snippets of thoughts not fully processed.  Nothing fits together and nothing makes sense, the anger in him only feeds from the words he tries to create.

So instead to holds onto every single one of the emotions.  Makes sure he feels them instead, opens up his mind and forces himself to truly experience them.  Taking them into his body deeper, letting them cause the damage they were meant to inflict.  Letting word and thought and memory rip open his chest and lay them there spread across organ and blending into the very essence of his being.

Rage stirs with the pounding of his heart, anger settling into the flow of the blood through his veins, humiliation churning with the acid in his stomach.  Disrespect carving a niche into his skin and settling there like a tattoo. Emotions brand invisible across his skin, but he still feels them all burrowing there for him to pull at later, picking at them like a scab until they bleed and eventually run clean.

Yoongi makes attempts at pulling back the reigns as he climbs the stairs, half-heartedly preparing himself for the unknown as he finally enters the dorm.  He shuffles out