Present day

It’s late on Saturday night - actually, it’s Sunday morning - when the guys drag themselves, still sweaty and limp, into their clubhouse of sorts. There’s a brief tussle between Jungkook and Jimin for the mattress before they both give up and flop into a boneless pile atop it. Yoongi takes up his usual position against a pillar while Jin gets the fire going. Namjoon follows a couple of moments behind, thumping and cursing as he drags out the cooler from where Jin had stashed it earlier in the evening.

Namjoon passes out beers before flopping to the ground with a huffed sigh. They drink in companionable silence for a few minutes. Or at least, Yoongi thinks sardonically, he’s silent. No telling what the other four have got going on.

The years since “that night,” as they used to call it, back in those first couple of weeks when they still talked about it, have passed quickly and uneventfully. Just as Yoongi has always suspected, the connections present between his friends and their soulmates have remained strong and consistent. With three such solid pairings in one little social group, it makes sense that his is the failure. He’s never heard another peep since that panicked night.

As far as his friends know, he rarely thinks about it now. But with their own healthy connections, it’s not possible for them to know how he’s never not thinking of it. Not consciously, of course -- he doesn’t obsess. And it doesn’t come up in his day to day interactions at his delivery job, or with his friends. In fact, after those initial few weeks, some never-spoken agreement has the group carefully crafting their own interactions so that Yoongi never needs to be confronted with the notion of soulmates at all if he doesn’t want to, and it seems as if he doesn’t.

They don’t know the reality, though. They’re so used to the constant presence in their own minds, the ability to unconsciously extend their thoughts to their matches, that they probably don’t even remember a time before that existed for them. And even if they could, it wouldn’t be the same as what Yoongi experiences, every day, every minute. He, too, can extend his thoughts outward. He knows how to do that just as well as they do, the technique almost immediately becoming second nature in the few moments he was able to utilize it. But instead of running into an answering call back, he instead hits a wall.

It’s as if his own mind is partitioned. When the connection was initially made, it felt like space exploding inside of his head, the space at once more vast and free than he ever could have conceptualized on his own. But just a minute or two later, that expanded space was halved. He’s never tried to explain it and doesn’t think he could - how do you put into words the fact that you can sense an inaccessible space in your own mind, that you can almost physically feel the wall dividing it? The other side is there - he can sense it and feel it and knows it just as clearly as he knows that his feet are at the end of his legs. But he can’t access it, can’t open the door.

That doesn’t stop him, though, from running the tendrils of his mind along the seam, like a tongue feeling along the edges of a jagged broken tooth, hundreds of times per day. It never stops, it never gets less unsettling. Over time, the feeling became familiar, but never comfortable. He’s used to it, but never okay with it. He’s aware of it even when he’s not, even when his mind is fully occupied on other things, one small part keeps touching that wall, feeling for a crack, looking for a way through. He feels weirdly hollow almost always, in a way he never imagined he could before that night.

The contrary thing is, though - and Yoongi knows he’s being contrary but at this point in his life he’s not interested in making the effort required to become a less contrary person - he never tries all that hard. He doesn’t know what’s on the other side, and he’s not sure he wants to. On a normal day, he tells himself he doesn’t care - why would he want to connect with someone who would shut him out like that, without even giving him a chance? What kind of person does that? Everyone knows how the soulmate system works in this world. Why would you slam the door before you even gave each other a chance? Not someone Yoongi wants to know, surely.

Other days, though, rare ones, he knows that he doesn’t try too hard because as long as he doesn’t try, he doesn’t ever have to know what’s over there. If there’s anything over there. While he’s spent his whole life being fairly low key about the whole soulmate connection issue, that was before he had one. Now he knows he doesn’t anymore. Who knows what happened that night? The whole thing was such an intense rush of panic and over so quickly, it’s impossible to know. His soulmate could very well have died. He could really be alone in his own head forever. The feelings of fear, panic, and desperation that flooded him that night were too unbearably intense to have lead to anything else. The continued silence only confirms this fact for him.

If he doesn’t push, he’s not alone. He’s just waiting. Again.

Yoongi’s not oblivious to how his friends have been playing this for the last six years. After the initial shock, everyone had been quick to assure him his soulmate would be back right away. A couple of days later, when it hadn’t happened yet, they hesitated to bring it up unless he did. As the weeks went by, their conversations about that night dropped down to a questioning glance sent Yoongi’s way whenever he’d arrive each Saturday, making sure to mask their disappointment at each silent shake of his head. When it was clear the silence had no end in sight, they not only stopped mentioning it, but stopped mentioning anything about soulmates and matches all together.

Jungkook and Jimin had taken to going to CNX on Saturday afternoons to chat with their soulmates before heading to hang out under the bridge. The coffee chain, designed for soulmates separated by distance or circumstances to have a way to “meet,” makes a pastry Yoongi was especially fond of, so he’s not about to discourage their behavior, not when it comes with a weekly delivery of coffee cake. Namjoon and Jin were similarly considerate with their own silent contact. All carefully worked to craft a world around Yoongi, for Yoongi, where he wouldn’t have to deal with the absence.

He appreciates the effort, of course. It’s amusing to him that they don’t know how obvious they are. It’s also amusing to him, in a darker way, that while their efforts to shield him from external reminders of his missing other half, they can do nothing to protect him from or even understand the reminder that is constantly tugging at his mind from inside.

Namjoon passes out beers, carefully propping two against the heap of bodies on the mattress. They don’t move. He hands one to Yoongi, then twists the caps off two more and approaches Jin near the fire.

When Namjoon approaches Jin with the beer, he’s ignored. Jin turns his back to toss another log on the fire. He pokes it a few times and, finally satisfied, stalks over to the cooler and snatches a beer. He slams it on the edge of the cooler to remove the cap, then sits down against a pillar on the opposite side of the fire from their usual seats.

Namjoon looks at Jin, then at the two beers in his hands. Shrugging, he takes a long pull off each before sitting down halfway between Yoongi and Jin.

“Good crowd tonight,” he states, finally breaking the silence. His voice is low and heavy with fatigue, tinged hoarse at the edges.

“Mmhm,” Yoongi agrees wordlessly, eyes darting back and forth between Namjoon and Jin.

“Your second verse really got them going.” Namjoon tosses his bottle caps into the fire one at a time.

Jin huffs and adjusts his position dramatically. Yoongi’s eyebrows shoot up, but Namjoon continues staring blankly into the flames.

“Yeah…,” Yoongi replies slowly. “I think the changes you made to the chorus played better than I thought they would. You were right there.”

Namjoon grins at him and tips his beer toward Yoongi in response. Jin slams his own bottle to the ground with another huff.

Namjoon looks at Jin, then at Yoongi in confusion. Yoongi raises his eyebrows and gestures meaningfully tow