Work Text
Kobe makes Namjoon anxious.It's a large urban center just south of Osaka, teeming with crisp sake and the juiciest steaks in all of Japan. Skies wide and blue, it's so picturesque that he imagines it would be a gorgeous set for a chick-flick. The city is all at once quaint and metropolitan, the kind of romantic contradiction that Taehyung would rave about. Or he would rave about, if they hadn't all silently and unanimously agreed to never mention Kobe again.The promise doesn’t stop him from returning, though. He comes back every time their schedules allow it; it’s only a hour bullet train ride from Osaka. If Yoongi or Seokjin found out where he slipped away to every time they had a free afternoon in Japan, though, he was sure he wouldn’t be allowed out of their sight for weeks. It’s self-destructive, Seokjin would probably chide. I thought we’d been over this.Street vendors bark Japanese at him, of which he only understands a few words. Some are trying to sell him food, others handmade crafts or household items. Even if he wanted to buy souvenirs, he only has the one credit card the managers lent him for the trip, so he secures his mask over his face and walks a little faster.His footsteps fall in time with the thumping bass on the track blasting from his earbuds, and he’s so absorbed in just walking that he almost breezes past the station. He doesn’t, because he’s taken the same train for almost four years, but the fact that he’s getting used to these visits just makes him feel all the more guilty about slipping away. Dwelling on the familiarity of the path he trudges along makes him feel like he's doing something wrong, so he tells himself that he could easily lose his way. Could get lost in the backstreets and alleys of downtown Kobe for hours.He tries not to think about how angry he’d be with his members if they kept anything like this from him.He fails.Sliding the company credit card into an automated machine gets him a ticket to the island with no issues. The station seems to have updated its systems since his last visit, where he had to use his shaky Japanese to try to ask for a train ticket. He boards the train when it arrives exactly on time a few minutes later, picking a seat between two older looking people and tugging his hood over his eyes. Considering BTS's upward trajectory in popularity, each trip he chances is riskier than the last. He's vibrating with anxiety, knee bouncing up and down and fingers tapping a nonsense beat on the armrest. Hobeom-hyung had given him a stern warning to drop everything and run if he even thought he was recognized, right? He could run onto another car, or hide in the bathroom. He's going to be okay.“We can freeze debit cards. We can buy new phones, new clothes, figurines, whatever. Just remember, we can’t buy you another reputation. Or another you, for that matter.”When he received the lecture, he'd nodded along dutifully, but the thought of being recognized terrifies him. He's shaken up enough by the fans who grab fistfuls of his clothes at airports and concert halls, he doesn't know how he'd handle a sasaeng fan by himself without making a scene.Namjoon likes to err on the side of caution, of course, so he's limited his human contact on the trip to ordering a cup of now-lukewarm coffee. He sips it idly, trying to survey the people in his vicinity for any suspicious signs. He shuffles through a few tracks on his phone, skims a few interesting naver articles, and they’ve arrived before he can begin to feel bored.He hangs back to toss his bitter coffee, and an attendant with a broom bows at him as he approaches the trash bin. For a terrifying moment, he sees recognition flicker in her eyes, and he panics. His heart leaps into his throat, and his blood is rushing past his ears.She opens her mouth like she’s about to say something— her glossy lips form a surprised “O” and—he all but slams his coffee into the trash and sprints off the train car, nearly mowing over an older man with a briefcase in his frantic escape.He can barely turn to apologize before he runs into another person on the packed platform, this time a mother, who glares at him before turning back to her two children. Having a broad frame is both a blessing and a curse, but Namjoon is able to use it to his advantage and shoulder his way out of the loading area of the platform before paranoia sets in. As soon as he’s out, he slips into a stall in the nearest restroom. Thankfully, the area is mostly unoccupied, and he jams two of his knuckles into his mouth before he lets out a muffled groan.He gnaws on his hand for a while, eventually removing it from his gasping mouth and wiping it dry on the leg of his pants. That was way, way too close. At the sinks, he makes sure nobody else is around before stealthily sliding his mask off and splashing his face with cool water.He has it under control. Everything is fine.Just in case, he texts Hobeom-hyung about what happened. He makes it clear that he’s not hurt, and he’d been in a mask with a hoodie on. His manager responds quickly, asking him if he needs a ride back to Osaka, but Namjoon’s never been much of a quitter. He denies the offer and sets off to his destination.It’s been a while. He needs this.Hobeom-hyung doesn't pry.He knows better than to try the front entrance by now, so he slips through one of the side entrances. One of the ones they always left unlocked, a Korean-speaking janitor had informed him on his first visit.“Of course, they don’t expect anyone to try to sneak in during offseason,” she’d explained once he introduced himself. “So we just leave the east entrance open, mostly so we don't have to fumble with those keys. Though I’ll let the others know you’re welcome anytime, too.” She’d smiled, but there was a glint in her eye, and Namjoon was sure he had never loved a person more.He circled around to the east entrance of Kobe’s World Memorial Hall, blessed the kind ahjumma as he entered without a hitch, and gone through the large double doors that led to the stage. He made his way down the stairs to the general seating area, fingertips skimming the tops of each seat as he passed by, until he stopped at the very front row of the venue.He sat down in a seat and took it all in.The venue was massive. Maybe it was tiny compared to CitiField or some other domes they’d performed in, but it was big enough to swallow him up, envelop him in emptiness.He’d never been to Greece, but he thought about Greek amphitheaters and the unique way they were constructed. In the amphitheater in the city of Epidaurus, architects of the time had been able to induce a phenomena eons ahead of their time. If you stood in a certain spot on stage, even the faintest sound you made would be heard by even those in the farthest seats from the stage. It was ingenious, a lovechild of mathematics and art, all created by men who were discovering things like elements and constellations and psychological theories for the first time.He'd found that certain spot, he supposed, in his own Epidaurus. On stage, marked by a duct-taped "x" so the stage crew knew where to aim the spotlight, where the fans could hear the roaring of the blood rushing in his ears and the anxiety scratching nails-on-a-chalkboard up the backs of his legs. He swore they could hear it all: every choked gasp, every nervous tic, every last aborted managing to escape his fried brain.The spot wasn't natural, of course, but manufactured. Forced upon him by the panicked looking stage tech who screamed at him in accented Japanese to "go, just keep them occupied until we figure this out!" It wasn't honorable or reverential or empowering at all— he felt like a mockery. Like a fake Aristotle, stammering as he tried to preach to the masses.He sighed. The sound echoed in the empty cavern of his failures, bouncing off the walls of the hall and ricocheting back at him.After the Chernobyl reactor meltdown, the Soviets constructed a large building to prevent the lethal nuclear waste from bleeding into the surrounding city. The containment structure loomed over the previously peaceful town, leaving a shadow of imminent death in its wake. It was aptly nicknamed the sarcophagus.The work ethic of BigHit’s first home-grown boy group was, in its early years, completely unsustainable. They were barely adults, after all, truly just overgrown kids, but none of them accepted anything less than perfection. They pushed themselves hard, often going days without sleep and weeks without decent meals. They certainly had no time to worry about their mental health.That scrappy determination propelled them far, now that Namjoon thought about it. A lot farther than he’d thought a small company group had any chance of going, in a world of EXOs and Big Bangs. But their good fortune had to run dry at some point.December 26, 2015.The day their dream had come crashing down around them.The Greek myths say Artemis hunts at night. She is cool, calculated, and can down even the most elusive prey with a single arrow. She vows off intimacy, trading lust for focus and concentration. Her twin brother Apollo, on the other hand, is hotheaded and foolish. God of the sun, he boasts of his countless lovers while spending long hours composing music with the Muses.Picture this: Apollo is sobbing, rocking back and forth on the tiles of a dressing room bathroom while Artemis rubs circles on his lower back. She is crying, too, though she has seen much worse things than her brother breaking down, especially during brutal wars with the Titans. Her worshipers laud her for her levelheaded nature, even as she weeps pitifully for her fallen brother.Artemis is shadowed by talented maidens, huntresses who have sworn their devotion to her, and they beckon her away from her brother. She has a duty to fulfill, after all. A duty not related to matters of compassion or love or family, but harsh corporate realities and sales charts and growth trends and trainee debts.Perhaps Apollo dies. Perhaps he takes his own life in the depths of his sorrow, maybe pleads for someone else to put him out of his misery. Either way, when Namjoon steps off the stage after the worst performance of his career, he sees Min Yoongi and Kim Taehyung, asleep in each others’ arms.He’s relieved, or as relieved as he can be until a manager pulls him aside and hands him an opened bottle of sleeping pills. “In case they wake up again,” the man says. He eyes the pair warily, like they’re manic zoo animals that need to be put down.He thinks the Soviets might have been on to something, with their whole idea of a sarcophagus. He’d love to build a wall around World Memorial Hall, never have to lay his eyes on the romantic blue skies and contradictions of Kobe ever again. The very spot of his failure is so close it’s overwhelming, and Namjoon struggles to breathe as the stage seems to triple in size before him.He is small, insignificant. He preaches self-love when he doesn't know what it means to love. He's never really loved anything a day in his life, has he? Not a boyfriend or girlfriend, not a pet or a friend or even his own family. Why does he think he can change the world? He's so pathetic, standing on a puny South Korean soapbox trying to preach to the entire world. He wonders what the American reporters would think if he told them he wasn't even powerful enough to help his own brother.When he can manage a breath in, the air he swallows is toxic. Radioactive. He’s going to die if he stays here any longer, like Indiana Jones trapped inside a mummy's tomb. He’s sure of it. But Artemis is nothing if not dedicated to her hunt.His phone vibrates from inside of his pocket, and the sensation startles him. It’s so loud in the still space, even though it’s muffled between the plush seat and the fabric of his pants. So loud. So insignificant, but it fills the entirety of the space, and his hands leave his temples to scratch and pull at his collar because he can’t breathe can’t fucking breathe can’tbreathehelphelp-
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Kobe is a coin. A dull coin, maybe, in comparison to the brilliantly shining Osaka to the northeast, but it has two sides. On one hand, it gleams with a natural beauty; a radiance granted by mother nature to only the most sacred of places. Mount Maya, dotted with peaceful shinto shrines, feels like a sanctuary compared to the bustling city that rests at her foothills. On the other hand, it's godawful. Stifling.Everywhere direction he turns in Kobe, he faces another tragedy. Another reminder why he shouldn't be here, why he shouldn't have sold out to become an idol, why he should have been content with the mediocrity and starvation of the underground scene.Kobe is the personification of what he never wanted to happen to him. He grew up thinking he'd have a sensible office job, and Kobe thrust him under a spotlight and made him come clean in front of the whole world. Not that he's a bastion of hope in the face of hardship, no. He is nothing.He can protest and argue all he wants, but the Kobe has been in the depths of his wallet for years, its previously silver surface tarnished blue-green. He could lose it somewhere, toss it into a fountain, maybe. But in his wallet it will remain, for eons and eons until the heavens crumble and there are no more gods to be disappointed in him.Kobe is a burden he will carry for the rest of his life.The concept of Yin and Yang is uniquely eastern, but it can be applied to almost anything. A lot of the world is split in two, anyway—it’s a natural way to look at nearly any idea. The company has told him, often in awed whispers when discussing comeback concepts, that he and Yoongi are like Yin and Yang. Nearly polar opposites in mannerisms and temperament, but scarily drawn to each other despite that. He supposes Artemis and Apollo are a bit like that, too. They are both children of Leto, after all.The maiden, juxtaposed against her promiscuous brother, looks doubly virginal. The patron of arts, compared to his staunchly conservative sister, appears especially unorthodox.The mountain, juxtaposed against the city, looks soft and welcoming. The city is shameless, flaunting its urban peace beneath a cloudless sapphire sky, when it should be shut away in a tomb.Dead. Never to be seen again.Yin. Yang.Mythology details that Apollo can be a sensitive soul as well, cunning when the situation demands it. Artemis is not immune to seduction, and is at her most powerful when she loses her composure.The coin flips-- the ground underneath his feet lurches. The hunt is over.The Artemis in him starts wailing, hands fisted in the silky material of her ethereal dress. On her knees, she weeps for her brother, for her huntresses, for her own untimely death. After all, she is doomed to fade away in the sarcophagus of her failures.She’s not prepared enough game to last the winter, perhaps, so her band of maidens starves to death. A slow and decidedly ungodly death. Or maybe she’s asleep when their camp is ambushed by monsters from the underworld. She wakes just in time to watch them destroy every sacred thing in sight.Or, the industry that she has worshiped since she was barely eleven years old has handed her a knife and told her to stab her brother in the chest, over and over and over and over again, until he locked himself in a bathroom stall and screamed that he’d rather die than go out on stage.There is no Apollo to comfort her. Her mother is long dead, father atop Mount Olympus and indifferent to her suffering. Her huntresses have vanished. She is completely, utterly alone.Yin. The buzz of a packed city street. Yang. The solitude of a mountain's peak, as still as pre-existence itself.Namjoon feels fingers card through his hair, and a soft creak as the seat next to him is occupied.“Joon-ah?” the delicate voice next to him says. It's soft, with the weathered wisdom of a great cliffside against the ocean.“Ahjumma,” he greets, the heels of his hands drop to his thighs. He was pressing his hands against his eyes so hard that it still hurts, that technicolor patterns whirl somewhere in the endless void of the building around him.“Are you alright, dear?” she asks, and he moves to look at her round, concerned face. Her hair, strikingly flecked with silver, is up in a tight bun, and she’s abandoned a cart of cleaning supplies near the stage to sit next to him.“Not really,” he admits, and he despises that he feels safer talking to this woman than the men he’s grown up alongside.She manages to pull him into her lap, making him feel even smaller than before. It’s comforting, somehow, even though he’s sure he must be hurting her fragile build. He makes to get off, but she holds him to her chest with an iron grip.“Cry,” she commands. “Let it all out.” And he does as if on command, a disgusting sob ripping from somewhere deep inside of him. He lets himself shake in her embrace for what feels like eons and eons and eons, and even after he’s out of tears to cry, he heaves dry sobs into her shoulder.Eventually she releases him, gesturing to the watch on her wrist. “Your friends must be getting worried,” she says, and she’s right. Namjoon checks his silenced phone to thirty messages from the members and managers, and twelve missed calls. He groans, swiping at the dried tears on his face.“I guess I have to go back,” he says. He knows he sounds like a kid, but the ahjumma just nods sympathetically. To her, he must be a real child. No matter how wise and jaded he thinks he is, he knows the woman has seen decades more beauty and suffering than he can even fathom.He is about to leave when the woman beckons him over quickly. “In case this is the last time I see you,” she says, snatching his phone out of his hands. He was in the middle of replying to one of the managers, but she gives her own number a call from his phone. “Now you’ll always have someone,” she says, eyes crinkling up in a warm smile. “Whenever you need any advice, give me a call. Okay?”She holds up her wrinkled pinky finger, and Namjoon intertwines it with his longer one. He feels comically oversized, like he has a pair of baseball mitts for hands, but the woman strokes his exposed palm with her thumb with all the adoration of a mother.“Ahjumma,” he begins. “Thank you for all you’ve done for me the past few years.”She scoffs. “Would you thank your mother for comforting you?” she asks, and the Artemis in him jolts as he recognizes the Leto in her. “You’re like a son to me. Thank you for making this damned job a little bit more interesting.”He holds her for longer than he should, considering he’d told the managers that he’d be taking the very next train to Osaka. It feels oddly like a goodbye, and he remembers the woman's earlier words."In case this is the last time I see you," he muses to himself. He forces himself to leave eventually, saving her contact in his phone and rushing back to the station to make the last train back to the mainland.Gods are immortal. Apollo will always rise to the east and set to the west. Artemis will follow, spending her time in the heavens as her brother roams the mortal world at night, and Leto will watch over them from the afterlife, forever proud.“Sister,” Apollo greets, staring up at the yellow moon suspended in the void of the sky above Mount Maya. She's been there, stuck in limbo, enshrouding the entire city in darkness since her brother's death.“Don’t cry.” His hand is steady as he raises it to stroke her backlit face. “I’m back.”Artemis cries anyway, because despite what the myths say, Namjoon knows she is quite prideful. “I let them kill you,” she laments. She feels useless, as if all her godly powers are for naught. Her tears are pale moonlight, thin and weak, and they glitter like diamonds as they land on Apollo’s cheek.“But I’m alive!” he says, swiping them away. He grins a gummy smile from below her, in his hospital bed. He flashes the rings adorning his fingers, prods at the machines the nurses have hooked him up to. “We got through it together, Joon.”She cannot stop crying, but her brother keeps smiling.Artemis sets, Apollo rises. Mount Maya is eventually bathed in sunlight once again, and when Artemis wanders the city during the daytime, her brother beams at her from every single backstreet and alley. He is the weeds that grow in the abandoned lots, the insects that scurry underfoot as Artemis clambers through the concrete jungle.He is the source of all his happiness, Namjoon realises, just as the sun is the source of all life on earth. Yoongi is the source of everything he holds dear to him.The cycle continues, and relapses are inevitable. Gods are immortal, though.Namjoon has long since rejected the rigid standards of the music industry. He knows from personal experience that there are better ways to get results than relentless overworking. They’ve all learned the value of taking breaks and being kind to themselves.There’s no knife in his hands anymore. Instead, he's reclaimed his dignified bow and arrow, hunts only when his band of huntresses is in danger of starvation. Even then, he ensures that each stag he downs receives a noble and painless death. He’s atoned for his mistakes.He’s not complacent anymore; he’s takes charge. Using their position as money makers as leverage, he knows how to take command of a conference room and force the company to meet their demands.And Yoongi-hyung? Namjoon opens up the kakaotalk chatroom and types.
i was in Kobe.
He gets a response a few seconds later.
would have been nice to know before you left oml
we were all so worried what the hell
what were you doing in Kobe idiot??
i’ve been visiting that concert hall for the past few years
i’m not going to go back
ever again
i’m done
i needed closure there
i think i finally got it