1.

“So I will be back again tomorrow morning to check up on you. You know to press the button if anything comes up right?” Yoongi says with a smile on his lips.

“Thank you dearie, but I won’t trouble you.” She laughs, reaching out an old, withered hand to pat his face. “You’ve been so kind to me while I was here, I shouldn’t waste your time any longer.”

His smile fades just the slightest bit. “Don’t say that. It’s never a waste of time to help a patient.” The words are practiced, the same words any nurse would say, but Yoongi finds that he means it. “Just- be sure to call us if anything happens.”

“Of course.” She laughs lightly, smiling to reassure him. “Now go on, I’m sure you’ve got other patients to deal with. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

He nods, not trusting himself to speak, and leaves the room, his heart heavy.

Somehow, he’s not surprised to find that the patient, the longest-lasting patient he’d had so far, had passed away peacefully in the night.

***

Yoongi attends the funerals for every single one of his patients. Sometimes he arrives late, sometimes he leaves early, but he attends every single one.

It makes him feel better, somehow, to see the faces of those that knew his patients in life. To see that they were loved, that they weren’t always weak and dying and smiling only to keep their caretakers happy.

He listens to their stories, closes his eyes, and paints a picture of what they must have looked like in their prime.

He wonders if they ever saw colour in their lives.

He wonders whose colour was taken away when they died.

His footsteps always drag a little when he walks away from the funeral, his eyes just a little wetter than before.

***

Namjoon tells him, sometimes, what colour is like.

He describes the delicate flowers (hyung you really should see it! The cherry blossoms- they used to just look white- like one shade- but in colour, there’s so many lovely shades of pink- Jin-hyung says he loves them all) or the fiery sunsets or the serene sky, but all Yoongi can think of is how long will your colour last?

Whose colour will be the first to go?

He never says it, never bursts Namjoon’s bubble, just laughs and nods as though he understands (he really doesn’t, especially when Namjoon talks about colours with reference to other colours) and morbidly wonders who would be more devastated, Namjoon or Jin?

He never has to find out the answer.

***

“Yoongi-ssi, there’s a new patient in room 340. You’ve been assigned to him.” Yoongi finds a clipboard shoved into his arms and he scowls at the turned back of the other nurse but glances down at the notes anyways.

He makes his way slowly to the room, heart heavier than ever. It’s the young patients that make his heart ache more, because they still have so much left to experience.

Pushing the door open, he makes sure his professional smile is in place as he enters. “Hi, Park Jimin? I’m Yoongi, and I’ll be-”

That’s all he manages to say before his worst fear comes to life.

2.

Jimin has lost track of how many hospitals he’s been to already.

First it had been for the viral infection that had gone out of hand, and he’d been shunted from place to place in search for a cure.

Then it was for the complications that had sprouted from the aftereffects of the virus, leaving him weak and often sick.

Then it was the heart failure that resulted from his valves being damaged by the virus.

Jimin sometimes wonders bitterly what the point of living is any more. All he’s doing is being a burden to everyone around him. And even if he does manage to find a donor- which is unlikely- he’s still not going to be able to dance.

He looks at the tv at the monochrome images of people leaping across the stage and envies them with all his heart- what remains of it anyways.

***

There are two reasons that Jimin allows himself to be checked into hospitals time and time again instead of just letting himself die peacefully at home.

Reason number one is his mother. She wants so desperately for Jimin to live that he can’t say no, even though he watches her become more and more haggard each day as the bills rack up.

Reason number two is because he’s selfish.

Jimin knows that he will die sooner rather than later. He’s come to accept that, thanks to the doctors that are forever peeking in with dark depressed faces and nurses that can’t look him in the eyes.

But Jimin is determined to see colour at least once before he dies. Just once. Even if he knows he’ll be taking someone else’s colour away when he dies.

So Jimin waits, and waits, because a part of him still wants to see the rainbow, still wants to be loved.

***

A part of him had longed for colour, but Jimin never expected it to actually happen. How was he supposed to meet his soulmate when he was trapped in a hospital bed all day?

His mother holds his hand tightly as they wait to be introduced to yet another nurse, the one who will supposedly be taking care of him during his stay, and Jimin isn’t looking forwards to seeing the guarded expression as they enter. Oh look, another dying kid, he thinks dryly, thinking that’s probably how they look at him.

He’s looking out the window when he hears the door open.  A low voice starts to speak, and Jimin blinks, surprised. He doesn’t think he’s had a male nurse yet.

When his eyes open from the blink, the sky is blue, and the nurse has stopped speaking.

3.

“No,” Yoongi breathes out, taking a step back as if it would save him. “No, no, no no-” but he can see now the ugly dun of the walls and the way they contrast with the bright white of the hospital sheets and the way the sun shines in the bright blue sky it really is as beautiful as Namjoon said and this can’t be happening.

His eyes flick to the mother, briefly, praying, hoping that she’s the one that triggered the change, but she looks at him with confusion and asks “Is something wrong?” and he knows she’s not the one.

Instead, he glances at the boy, still looking out the window, but there’s something in his eyes that’s different now. Jimin stares outside like he’s looking at a whole different world- and he is- and Yoongi wants to scream.

Clenching his teeth, he says abruptly, “I apologize, but I must go.”

He doesn’t explain himself further before leaving, slamming the door unnecessarily behind him.

***

“I can’t work with Park Jimin.”

The head nurse looks up from her paperwork, surprise evident in her gaze. Yoongi is one of the few nurses that never refuses a patient, regardless of how difficult they might be. “What’s wrong with him?” she asks slowly, unwilling to agree without finding out more.

“You don’t understand. I legally cannot work with Park Jimin.” He forces the words out.

She still doesn’t get it. But when he starts describing the colours around them, she brings a trembling hand up to .

“No,” she whispers, but the look in Yoongi’s eyes tells her everything.

***

“I don’t understand.” Yoongi says flatly, looking at his new schedule.

The head nurse gives him a sad smile. “It’s so you have more time withhim before, well.”

Yoongi grits his teeth. “Maybe I don’t want to get to know him,” he snaps angrily. What’s the point of getting to know someone that’s going to die anyways?

“You never felt that way with any of the other patients.” She counters easily.

It’s different, Yoongi wants to protest, but she doesn’t give him a chance.

“Just… try it? Enjoy the time you have together, right? Just because it ends doesn’t mean the time wasn’t worth it. Isn’t there a quote like that somewhere?”

Yoongi just swallows and stares at the paper in his hands, at the amount of free time he apparently now has. “…I’ll give it a shot.” He says at last, though he doesn’t mean it. He has no wish to connect to his soulmate only to have him torn away.

As he leaves, he pauses at the door. “I think the quote is ‘Just because something ends doesn’t mean it never should’ve been.’ Or something like that.”

He smiles, though it doesn’t reach his eyes. “There’s a lot of quotes around that idea.”

He doesn’t agree with a single one.

***

(Quote by Robert Tew apparently.)

4.

The day after Jimin starts seeing colour, he sees his first rainbow.

Not an actual one. He doesn’t know why this nurse happens to have rainbow scrubs but she does, and Jimin wonders briefly if she knows what she’s wearing. If she can see colour the way he can.

“Morning!” the nurse chirps and Jimin nearly cringes. The fake cheer in her voice is the thing he hates most about hospitals. The way the nurses pretend to be happy when they know they’re dealing with dying patients.

He thinks briefly back to his nurse yesterday- the one with the deep, smooth voice, the one that had brought colour into his life. The way he had entered hesitantly, respectfully, with full knowledge that he was facing death, and not pretending otherwise.

Jimin only half pays attention to the nurse as she flits around checking his vitals, but he learns that they share a name (“I’ve never met another Park Jimin- you know, like I know a lot of Jimins but not any Parks”) and that she’s new to the hospital, and that Yoongi was reassigned to a different patient for “unknown reasons.”

Jimin knows why. It’s because soulmates aren’t allowed to have each other as patients or clients or anything, and this is no different.

The nurse finishes efficiently, and Jimin can tell that her training is good, but her inexperience is obvious. The way her smile fades once in a while, the way she can’t quite look Jimin in the eyes, the way she seems to skirt around his bed as though death is infectious.

It’s a relief more than anything when she leaves and Jimin sighs, staring out the window once again.

 He finds peace in the bright blue sky, but he wonders a little uneasily how Yoongi must be feeling.

***

Jimin half expects to never see Yoongi again. He figures the other won’t want to get acquainted with a dying patient if he doesn’t have to, even if that dying person is his soulmate.

They probably never would have met again but Jimin manages to run into Yoongi in the washroom. Then in the cafeteria. Then in the hallways andwhy does it feel like this hospital is so small?

Yoongi glares at him the 10^th time it happens and mutters, “Are you following me around now?”

“No,” Jimin mumbles, feeling a little intimidated. But his mouth betrays him and he asks back, “Are you?”

Yoongi blinks, and Jimin wonders if he’s just pissed Yoongi off. To his surprise, Yoongi’s lips slowly curve into a smirk.

“Is that any way to talk to your hyung?” Yoongi asks, cuffing the back of Jimin’s head lightly.

“Who said you’re my hyung? We’re the same height,” Jimin retorts easily, scrunching his face up, though he’s smiling himself.

“I saw your records, remember? I’m older by two years, brat. And for your information, I’m officially taller than you by a centimeter.”

“Just a centimeter! That’s like nothing-” Jimin yelps when Yoongi cuffs him again, though it’s not painful at all. Yoongi’s surprisingly gentle, even if he is rather physical. “Hyung…” he whines, pouting.

It’s the first time Jimin hears Yoongi laugh and he thinks that he’d like to hear it more often.

5.

It takes a while before Yoongi gets the courage to look at his photos.

He has a room full of them. Photos of landscapes, of places he’d been and wanted to remember. People he wanted to see.

He takes every photo in both black and white and colour. He’s always known that the settings on the camera have to be different, that he can’t possibly know what the settings should be for the colour photos, but he tries anyways in the hopes that one day he’ll be able to see the colours.

His black and white photos are beautiful, he realizes, but impossibly sad. The black and white imparts a sense of… loneliness. Longing. The people, the places are there, so close you could reach out and touch them, but at the same time you’re detached. You know the things in the photo see a different world than you do. You see nothing but monochrome.

Yoongi’s photos reflect the black and white of a person who has yet to experience colour, but he imagines that many people who see his pictures are reminded more of the shadows that come after the colour is gone.

Nobody wants to be reminded of darkness in their past, or the darkness yet to come.

Tearing his eyes away from the black and white, Yoongi looks at the coloured photos and he fights the urge to cry.

His efforts have been wasted. Not entirely- the colours aren’t, say, reversed, or negatives, or anything like that. They’re just… warped. Just slightly off. Too dark. Too bright. Too much contrast. Too many shadows.

In comparison with the black and white beside them, the colour photos are so flawed that Yoongi can barely tell they’re the same scene.

He glances at the photos he’d taken of his mother and a low cry tears from his throat.

He’d never seen her in colour, he realizes. And this- this mockery of colour that he’s created- doesn’t reflect her appearance at all.

He’ll never see his mother in colour.

His cheeks are wet as he reaches out and roughly tears the photos from the wall. They’re useless to him now. Picture after picture lands on the floor, discarded like the trash they are, like the broken dreams he’d had.

Crumpled pictures of warped memories lie around him as he lets himself sink to the ground and cry.

***

The next time he sees Jimin, Yoongi makes sure he has his camera ready.

His plan of completely avoiding his soulmate hasn’t worked. He didn’t suppose it would, really. The hospital was only so big, and while Yoongi still worked there it would be nearly impossible to not run into Jimin at some point.

He has to admit, the kid’s pretty nice. And funny, sometimes. And he has a smile that can light up a room.

There are times when the smile slides from Jimin’s face, when he thinks nobody is looking. Moments when he looks so, so old, so exhausted. So sad.

Yoongi snaps a black and white photo of it one day. Jimin blinks and turns at the sound of the shutter, then pouts. “Hey I wasn’t ready for that one! Delete it!”

Yoongi laughs a little. “I’m using film, you can’t really delete those.”

“Who even uses film nowadays?” Jimin grumbles, scowling.

Yoongi reaches over and slaps the back of Jimin’s head again. “Shut it, brat. Now smile.”

It seems fitting to Yoongi that the colour photo he’ll have of Jimin is of him smiling.

***

Later, he develops the photos. He’s still getting used to taking photos in colour, but this is a good photo of Jimin.

He wonders how it will look in black and white, and he eyes it critically.

Too many shadows, he thinks, and his heart wrenches, and Yoongi looks away.

6.

Yoongi brings his camera everywhere.

Jimin swears it’s attached to Yoongi’s hip, because once he starts bringing it around, it’s literally always by his side. He wonders where it had been in the first few weeks, when they were just bumping into each other randomly, but figures Yoongi has a reason now to take photos.

It’s not like he really hides the fact that almost all his photos are of Jimin, after all.

“You should develop some of these and let me have a copy,” Jimin says one day. “I’d love a photo of the two of us somewhere.”

“What for?” Yoongi murmurs absently. “It’s not like you’ll really need a photo as a memento.”

Jimin can feel his smile turning brittle. He forces his tone to be happy. “Yeah, but maybe my mom would like to be reminded that her son was happy before he died.”

Yoongi looks up from his camera, realizing belatedly that his words were overly insensitive, but Jimin has already walked away.

***

Jimin’s not surprised when Yoongi finds him on the roof. He just sighs, continuing to stare up into the sky, not reacting even when Yoongi leans over to obscure his view.

He hears Yoongi lying down beside him and still says nothing, waiting for Yoongi to make the first move.

“…I’m sorry,” Yoongi says quietly. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“I know,” Jimin says. He does know that Yoongi didn’t mean anything bad by it. But it still hurts.

Sighing again, Jimin murmurs softly, “I’m sorry too.”

Yoongi doesn’t respond. He doesn’t ask for clarification, doesn’t try to reassure Jimin with empty words. Even though they’ve known each other for such a short amount of time, it feels like they’ve known each other forever, and Yoongi knows that Jimin is apologizing for everything. For being his soulmate. For bringing him colour, only to take it away. For being sickly and weak and not being able to give Yoongi the happy ending he deserves.

Yoongi says nothing, just reaches over and grabs Jimin’s hand. It feels perfect, Jimin thinks, and tries to focus on the sky, the outline of the clouds, the glint of sunlight.

But the clouds are blurring, and Jimin realizes he is crying when he feels Yoongi’s hand brushing away the tears.

Jimin decides not to comment on the fact that he can feel Yoongi’s tears splashing down onto his shirt, and just stares into the blue blue sky, pretending that neither of them are crying.

***

The next day, he finds two photos on his table when he wakes up. One in black and white, of Jimin staring out the window with a bittersweet smile on his lips. The other in colour, an attempt at a selca, but Jimin had turned at the last second to press a kiss to Yoongi’s cheek.

It had been unplanned, the first time Jimin had made any indication that he did like Yoongi, but it had been captured in film forever.

7.

Yoongi forgets sometimes that Jimin’s time is limited.  He forgets that his own time with Jimin is limited.

In another world, perhaps, they would truly have been soulmates. There are flashes of it, how perfectly they work sometimes. How he sometimes knows exactly what to do to get Jimin’s mind off something. How Jimin knows when Yoongi’s had a hard day, and knows how to cheer him up. How Yoongi can tell when Jimin is about to cry.

Maybe in a different time, a different universe, they could truly have loved each other.

Yoongi refuses to consider that he already does, because he sometimes forgets, but not all the time, and he knows that their time will soon be up.

***

He also forgets sometimes that they haven’t been together forever. That he doesn’t know everything about Jimin, and that Jimin doesn’t know everything about him.

He walks into the hospital room and Jimin’s watching a music program and his face is unreadable. “Hey Jiminnie, I didn’t know you were into Kpop,” he says, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s… not so much the music,” Jimin murmurs, eyes glued to the screen.

Yoongi raises an eyebrow. “What, the looks then?” He glances at the screen, half-expecting the skinny model-esque females prominent in Kpop, but he finds Jimin staring intently at a boy group with a dark concept.

Jimin doesn’t answer right away, instead reaching for the remote and turning the TV off. He looks up at Yoongi and his lips curve into a bitter smile. “…a long time ago, I used to be a dancer,” Jimin says at last, and Yoongi swallows.

Oh. That explains the look on Jimin’s face. Yoongi knows better than most that Jimin’s heart won’t let him dance, and even if they do manage to find him a donor, any kind of prolonged exercise will be dangerous.

 “I’m sorry,” Yoongi says quietly, feeling like he says those words a lot these days. He feels so useless, thinking about all the things that Jimin wants to do has yet to do will never get a chance to do.

“Don’t be.” Jimin’s voice is harsh, a little harsher than he means, probably, and Yoongi falls silent, finding himself unsure.

A moment later, he hears, “Hyung?” Jimin’s voice is trembling, just a little. Yoongi looks at him, looks at his eyes, sees the pain swirling in them, sees the moment of weakness under the strong smiling front that Jimin usually puts up.

Yoongi might not know what to say, but he doesn’t need words to just hug Jimin close and let him cry against his shoulder.

***

A little later, Jimin’s fallen asleep against Yoongi’s shoulder, and Yoongi gently puts Jimin back into bed, tucks him in and everything. He’s technically not supposed to be working with Jimin as a nurse, but Yoongi finds himself checking vitals anyways, fussing with machinery, making sure everything is in place to make sure Jimin will be ok until morning.

The nice thing about being a nurse is that he can bypass the visiting hours limitations. It’s late, well into the night shift hours already, and Yoongi smiles a little watching Jimin sleep. He looks peaceful like this. Not burdened by thoughts of a future that might never come, not bitter with the thought of what might have been. Just… serene.

Yoongi leans down and presses a kiss to Jimin’s forehead before he leaves. Sweet dreams, Jiminnie.

It’s the first and last kiss he’ll give Jimin.

8.

He wakes up to a monochrome world, and can’t stop the scream that tears from his throat.