the devil skates on thin ice ∙ myg ✓

12 ↝ the insurmountable distance

Yoongi knows he is the one in the wrong. Yoongi knows he should have never let his alcohol-infused desire get the better of him. Yoongi knows he should have never swung his fist like some mallet of justice. And yet, despite this knowledge, he cannot find it in himself to apologise to her.

Every time he even thinks about doing so, a hand crushes his windpipe and smothers the words. To anyone else, he is sure that speaking an apology would be as easy as wading through water, but there is something inexplainable that stops him. An intangible barrier that prevents him from moving forward—from knocking on her front door and spilling his sympathies onto her feet like a tree shaking off its foliage, leaving it naked and exposed.

Maybe, it is his off-kilter sense of pride. Maybe, he is exhausted from begging for her forgiveness and always coming up empty-handed. Maybe, this is payback. Maybe.

In a way, it helps him to understand why she struggles to do the same. Struggles to strip him of the blame of their lamentable history with even the softest-spoken apology; light as a feather, fleeting as a spring breeze. And throughout the week and a half after the incident, as gradually as his split-open knuckles come to knit themselves back together, Yoongi learns this like an instrument—this stubbornness of hers; this self-righteousness.

He strokes its keys and listens to its melody, memorising it by heart. He swallows it down and lets it sit in his belly, unpleasantly warm. He notices how it recoils at any request to apologise, yet it hums with a tender, loving voice whenever he caresses it and murmurs sweet things in time with its tune.

Yoongi does not expect this process to make him realise that he has been going about everything so wrong, and yet, it does. It is like a light flicking on in an already lit room—one that you have been so used to living without, having never changed the blown bulb until now—and realising how dark the room actually was without it. The realisation hits him like that, as swift as the punches that he landed on Yugyeom's cheekbone. His forgiveness is not in the hands of begging. It does not belong to a spoken phrase of apology.

No, instead, it thrives in his actions.

He thinks about that night at the pojangmacha. How she was so supple and sugary beneath his palms when she was met with his comfortable conversation, ands his jacket on her shoulders. He recalls the afternoon at the semi-final game. How she appeared so baffled, so moved, by the courtesy of his words and the meaningful touch of her elbow by his fingertips. He has behaved like such a halfwit, scrabbling to his knees for her forgiveness when, in fact, it was so unbelievably simple all along.

She does not want his words. She does not want him to spell out I'm sorry with his tongue. She has only ever desired the blood of his honest heart, imbued in his gestures and painted in the loops of his g's and the curves of his b's. Yoongi nearly laughs at himself over this enlightenment. He wishes to have his past self be embodied in a physical form before him so he can shake his younger shoulders and call himself a fool.

Unfortunately, this realisation only serves to live in Yoongi's mind. Acting upon it—letting it be the driving force to try and make everything up to her—is an entirely different story after the fiasco involving his fist. After the war of words that they enacted upon his doorstep.

To put it simply, she becomes like a ghost after the fight. Yoongi does not even catch sight of her in the cafeteria, despite the fact that he will always notice Minah and Hoseok laughing over something unintelligible at an otherwise empty table. Yoongi chews on this like overcooked meat, mulling over whether she is purposefully avoiding him, or if she has become too busy with training for her competition, or if it is something else entirely. He doubts the latter, and he leans towards the first option like a magnet.