come home ; ym | tk | nj

1.

Quiet. Just stay quiet.

Min Yoongi squeezes his eyes shut. His arms wrapped around his knees, he squats on the floor, behind the teacher's desk.

"Forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven –"

Yoongi tries not to focus on the faint voice and instead on his breath; it's loud, but is it too loud? Should he hold it? Not yet, not yet.
"Fifty!"
Yoongi squints with his left eye. The voice has stopped counting, and it's completely silent around him.
Somewhere, far away, he can hear laughter and chattering. It's so distant, it doesn't feel like it belongs to Yoongi's world, though.
After a few seconds, there are steps coming down the hallway. Then, the door slides open.
Yoongi fully opens both eyes, his heart is beating against his rib cage and suddenly, he is awfully aware of his blood flowing through his veins.

He concentrates on the steps coming closer and tries to make out from which direction they're coming.
The steps stop. Yoongi holds his breath.
Then, in a very brave moment, he holds onto one of the walls of the desks and leans forward until he can peak around the corner.
No one's there.
Yoongi's heart skips a beat.

"Got you!" someone yells, and before Yoongi even has the time to turn around, he's already jumped up and hit his head against the desk with full force.
He gasps, his hand flying to his head where an aching pain starts to evolve.
Tears shoot into Yoongi's eyes and for a second, everything is a bit too blurry, but he is already running towards the door.

All that counts are that he gets downstairs and to the column standing in the middle of the hallway. Because then, he has won, and although he has always been bad at hide and seek, he can't risk losing.

Behind him, his friend Hoseok is running, and Hoseok is fast and Hoseok is not injured (Yoongi could have a concussion, after all), but Yoongi is nimble-footed (is that blood running down his temple?), and he takes advantage of that.
He turns around a corner and then, quickly, slips through a door into another classroom.
He slides the door shut behind him.
Hoseok's frantic steps disappear somewhere.

Yoongi breathes through.
"Hey there," someone says.
Yoongi gasps and spins around. His heart, which has just decided it can calm down after the sprint for life, now doesn't know whether it should pick up in speed again or just stop beating altogether.

(Luckily, it doesn't give up on him yet. Yoongi is grateful.)

There's a boy sitting on one of the tables, his legs crossed and a book resting on them.
His black, shiny hair sits perfectly and his fringe forms a nice wave; his school uniform looks a lot tidier than Yoongi's, since he most likely hasn't just sprinted through the whole school to escape his friend.
His plump lips are pulled into a smile, and his eyes are nothing more than two crescents.
Yoongi knows him, it's Park Jimin.
Cute kid, good at everything and a teacher's pet, but a nice one.
He is two years younger than Yoongi, and for a moment, Yoongi wonders why exactly he knows him, but then again, who doesn't? It's Park Jimin, after all.

Yoongi must be looking a lot more scared than he feels like because Jimin giggles while covering his mouth with his hand.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," Jimin remarks. Yoongi blinks.
"Do I?" he says, "Oh."
"You're out of breath."
"Uh-huh." Yoongi scratches the back of his head. "I was – running."
"Inside the school?"
"Uh-huh."
And suddenly, Yoongi feels utterly stupid and immature for playing hide and seek with Hoseok. He's just one year away from graduating, after all, one year separating him from adulthood.
But Jimin just smiles at him and then looks down at his fingers playing with the corner of his book, as if Yoongi just told him the most natural thing like "The weather is nice today," or "I'm good, thanks".