Jimin's Pet | Park Jimin (a hybrid story)

~~Twenty-six^.^

Jungkook~
Out the corner of my eye, I caught Jimin's reaction. Looking up from bandaging Poppy's hand, I watched him struggle with the name I had thrown out there. Taemin and Jimin had always been close ever since the early days. But the hurt look on Jimin's face right now suggested that friendship might be over.

"Jimin, it wasn't anything like what you're thinking," I tried to smooth things over. He had it all wrong.

He looked at Poppy and then at me, a forced coldness in his eyes that I wasn't used to seeing. "Like you said, why would I care?" he responded, his voice hollow, all emotion cut off.

He turned, I thought, to storm out of the room, but after taking only one step toward the door, he stopped. 

I went back to fixing up Poppy's wounds, discreetly keeping my eye on Jimin, who still stood as if he didn't know what to do now. Something about the way he forlornly looked at Poppy made me think he had lost his way somehow. 

I couldn't figure him out lately. Jimin used to be an open book; now he was about as closed off as he could be. He needed to talk to someone, but it had been weeks and he was still holding the problem close.

"You know I'm here for you, right?" I asked him, quietly. "You can tell me anything. Whatever's wrong, we can work it out together."

He wanted to tell me; I could see it in his face. He was working it out in his head how much to say and how to word it.

But before he could say anything, Poppy squirmed in her sleep and murmured something unintelligible under her breath. I reached over to scratch her favorite place behind her ear to settle her. She pulled her hand away from my other hand, tucking it under her chin, and muttered, "Mmm nobody's pet. Ah-I-mm don't need you."

The defeated look came back into Jimin's face and his shoulders sagged. He turned and walked out of the room, not looking back.

I was worried about him; something was wrong—big time wrong. I needed to talk to one of the members about this, but which one? In the meantime, I couldn't let him just walk away like this and not tell him what happened today.

After checking to make sure Poppy was fully back to sleep, I quietly left the room and went after Jimin.

~~~

Jimin~
It was almost midnight and I couldn't sleep. It was like that a lot now; many of my nights were spent staring at the ceiling. It was always in the back of my mind that I was being watched. I wasn't even positive my bedroom was the only room Mi-cha had placed cameras in. They could be all over the apartment.

Right now though, I stood at the edge of the roof, looking over the silvery glow of the city. At least up here, I was pretty sure there weren't any cameras invading my privacy.

I wished I could stay up here all the time, away from Mi-cha's prying eyes. I wished I could bring Poppy up here and live out the rest of our days in the seclusion of this summit, where I could keep the world at arm's length. But I knew that was a fantasy; my life would never be a private thing. Maybe things were better this way; at least this thing with Mi-cha had pulled me out of the fantasy I had been living in.

I climbed up on the half-wall, letting my toes hang over the edge, the way I'd seen Poppy do a hundred times. It was a strange sensation, knowing that one wrong move, one small misstep, would send me plummeting to the ground.

It would end everything—

I would be free from all this.

All I had to do was take one small step.