The first time Yoongi saw Kim Taehyung, it was merely a puzzle piece of his profile through the

skeletal, empty eye socket of a big, brittle blue whale.

( “Oh!” Taehyung says, when he first sees Yoongi, ducking out from beneath the bone of it. He’s
tucked up into the skull like some incredibly archaic helmet, the lower jaw detached and wrapped up on
the table in layers of cloth, fluorescent lights washing everything in a bit of greenish glow. “Welcome to
the whale warehouse!”
Yoongi stares back at Taehyung; some halfway point between pajamas and an actual attempt at
fashion, a pair of outdated wire glasses. The way his brown hair falls around his face implies he’s been
running his hands through it for quite some time.
Taehyung steps closer, sticks his arm out for a handshake, and smiles.
“Hello,” Yoongi says, taking Taehyung’s hand into his own. The entire place smells slightly like
formaldehyde, nose-wrinkling and sharp. “What’s the year on that blue?”
Taehyung lets go of his hand, glancing back at the skull over his shoulder. The way he moves is
stunted; probably the result of a sore neck, bent backwards, looking up. He puts his hands down on his
hips, says; ​1963. ​Grins like his glasses are pinching at the bridge of his nose.
When Yoongi breathes in, the whole place feels acutely very opposite of where he worked in the
basement of the Smithsonian; all those white walls, printed labels, everything arranged into neat little
rows. Here, everything is half-dark, disorganized, juxtaposed against the bones of a thousand great blue
beasts, the bare light bulbs blinking.
It had occurred to Yoongi that to anyone else, Taehyung might look a little crazy.
But as he pulls Yoongi into the shadow of the skeleton, stretching his arms out wide, he decides
he doesn’t really care. Decides he’s been looking a little crazy for a long, long time now, too. Working
alone tends to turn you that way, in the end.
Taehyung’s arms don’t even reach halfway across the nineteen foot length of the skull, and he
laughs to himself like it’s new, groundbreaking information. Yoongi had reached up, tapped on the bone
with his knuckles, almost closed his eyes to the familiar, solid echo of it.
“The just don’t get this big, anymore,” Taehyung muses, the sound of his voice bouncing back
inside the cavern of the skull.
“No,” Yoongi says, agreeing, trailing his hand across the long line of the upper jaw. He imagines
all those not-quite-teeth. “No, they really don’t.” )

The plane ride to Barrow, Alaska, is as cold as it is turbulent, the metal of it rattling in a way that
should concern Taehyung more than it does.
Flurries of snow fall slowly, slowly, slowly, and when they step out onto the runway, everything
is washed half white through the weather and the permanent stain of road salts.
Like always, Yoongi is endeared by all the things Taehyung makes when he isn’t paying
attention; tiny songs that slide out from under his tongue, the ice crystals that form in the air when he
breathes. His footprints in the snow, each of them named after that thing air does when it parts around him
as he enters a room. Yoongi forgets the word for it, almost all of the time, and instead chooses to ponder
how the only tragic thing about Taehyung is that he had years where he was convinced that solid ground
was somewhere he belonged at all.
Their equipment is heavy, and the luggage is crammed with winter layers, things that withstand
both wind and snow, the bright orange parkas the institute provides them with every couple of years,
stuffed into suitcases.
Someone from the Alaskan division meets them on the asphalt with a van, rusty around the tires,
and makes small talk with Taehyung as they load the equipment into the trunk. It’s all sonar and satellites,
a few maps and a trunk of trackers they hope to implant sometime within the week.
They get dropped off at the Airport Inn, an outdated building framed mostly by power lines,
slicing their vision up into pieces like looking at the world through a pane of cracked glass. The man says
that the crew will load their equipment onto the boat that night, and he’ll be back in the morning to take
them to the docks.
The receptionist hands them a set of very old looking keys, and the room is fitted with two beds
instead of one. Yoongi changes into a pair of thick, flannel pajamas and climbs into a twin with
Taehyung, burying his face in the juncture of his shoulder.
The wind rattles in the window. Yoongi’s foot nudges it’s way beneath Taehyung’s calf,
searching for warmth. There might be a tiny mountain of snow on the windowsill, come morning, if the
weather continues this way.
In the dark, Taehyung remembers when he used to be afraid of the ocean.

( When Taehyung was twelve years old, his family took the ferry to Bainbridge island. On the
deck, where the wind blew his bangs sideways, he watched a pod of killer whales pursue a harbor seal,
that white water, blood red chase.
​ aehyung thought, somehow horrified but also unable to look away.
Oh, T
The ocean, for Taehyung, only ever made him hungrier, much like love, gravity, and other natural
forces. The sea and the sound are something he was taught to be afraid of over time, always pulled away
from shorelines and water edges without rails.
Dad, look!​ he had said, tugging on a sleeve, tiny finger pointing out at the show. His father had
made a fearful face at the fins flashing out of water, said; ​Taehyung, you don’t want to watch that.
Taehyung looked and kept on looking. He didn’t know it then, but this is what it was; the first
time he ever felt good about being so, so, incredibly insignificant. The feeling he was supposed to get
when staring up at stars, except better; made tangible, glowing blue beneath the small world of his hands.
He spent so much of childhood pushing lonely sailboats through the bathtub, though the sound of
waves crashing was still an enigma he couldn’t quite shake. )

The mattress, they find, is not very comfortable. Taehyung shuffles beneath the covers for a
hundredth time, and Yoongi turns, instead, starts pressing soft, slow kisses into the skin of his neck.
 Yoongi, above all things, is a private person, and most affection is reserved for closed doors and
darkness, so Taehyung just tips his head back, bares the vulnerable underside of his jaw, and lets him
have his way.
Yoongi hovers above him, hooking a knee over his hips, looking like grainy grayscale photograph
in the strange, hazy, un-black glow of a winter night. Taehyung’s vision dances like old film; spotting
with white noise as he tries to make out any shapes, though in the end, it all comes down to sensation.
Taehyung flips them over, because he is nothing if not always slightly over eager, slotting himself
between Yoongi’s thighs.
They’ve been together long enough that one another’s bodies no longer have an exciting, brand
new glow. What comes instead is a softness founded in familiarity; his hands on Yoongi’s body are as
habitual as breathing, Taehyung’s mouth against Yoongi’s own is as routine that repeats itself about as
often as Yoongi rushes off somewhere and washes his hands.

( Washington’s coast is near still as glass, the whole world blue where the sky reflects in the water.
Seokjin steers their boat through the mirror of it, always so adamant about keeping the engine low and
very, very quiet. ​Whales have sensitive hearing, you know.
It’s the last excursion before Seokjin transfers down to the Florida division, leaving Taehyung at
the warehouse alone. He was always more specialized in tropical types, after all.
A mile across the open water, a whale surfaces and pauses to breathe, a hiss of spray heard even
from here. Taehyung’s heart beats a more violent song the closer they come, his first expedition after
being relegated to recombine a skeleton back into its original shape.
Are you ready? ​Seokjin asks, speaking softly even when the water churns. Taehyung raises the
crossbow, and he sees that they’ve come across a lonely blue whale. It’s a mammoth of an animal, bigger
than the skeletons they keep stored in the warehouse, scarred white in some places with time. It wears
barnacles like a life long lived, and when Taehyung fires the satellite tracker into its back, it does not
flinch. It does not wallow.
Instead, the whale drifts forward, the sound of it’s breathing like heaven’s lonely sigh. He is three
times the length of a Seattle city bus, and it’s eye is so breathtakingly human; deep sea blue in the center,
the whites of it beginning to yellow with age. The other eye is missing, leaving the whale in a permanent
wink, and it’s face is so close that Taehyung can reach out and touch it with the tiny palms of his hands.
It’s skin is as marred and rough as tree bark where Taehyung touches it, and when he stares, Big
Blue stares back.
The whale blinks, so slow that it looks for a moment as if he’s falling asleep, though Taehyung
knows that whales don’t quite work that way, at all.
When Big Blue begins to sinks back down into the depths of the ocean, Taehyung keeps his hand
pressed to it’s skin for as long as he can. For a very short moment, Taehyung feels like the boy he once
was; face pressed to the railings of a ferry, eyes wide and glittering as he watches sea creatures swim by,
blood-hungry and beautiful.
Or maybe; he’s still that boy.
Maybe he’ll always be that boy. Maybe that's what it is, when the silhouette sinks and Taehyung
wishes his lungs were big enough to sing a whale song. Wishes he could tell it; ​these are the moments I
will always remember. You are the beast I can never unname; how I will permanently be beneath your
skin, and I was always yours to erase. )

The ship, the next morning, is a monstrous red icebreaker, curved to a point like the lost teeth of a
cachalot whale.
They’re not the only experts aboard it--it’s a marine biology expedition, after all. Yoongi seems
to recognize someone from the ichthyology department at the Smithsonian, and there’s a few ecologists
among the other scientists, as well as the ship’s regular boarding crew.
It’s a week long journey across the arctic coast of northern Alaska, and Yoongi shakes in a small
way as he first steps onto the deck.
Taehyung scratches at the warm back of Yoongi’s neck with the blunt edge of his fingernail,
slipping his hand beneath the hem of Yoongi’s knit hat in a subtle attempt to momentarily soothe him;
knowing best what it is that makes Yoongi fearful, though the water is still and the arctic ice is thin.

( Growing up, Yoongi, had a habit of falling asleep in front of the television, cheek squished
against the scratchy, old carpet, a quilt pulled over him like tarp.
It was a humid, mid summer night when he was suddenly awakened; the television leaving the
room hazy blue as a rerun of a natgeo documentary flickered by on the screen. It was a team of biologists,
searching for a spade-toothed whale; something so rare it has never been seen, alive. In the ocean, the
waves would roll; they carved through leaping shoals of fish, cut across miles and miles of multicolored
portuguese jellyfish, saw schools of eagle rays and bioluminescence.
In the end, they never managed to find it, though they did pass through several small orchestras of
dolphins and whales. There were a few sounds that made Yoongi wonder, though perhaps he was just not
familiar with the fishy sounds of the sea.
As the credits rolled by, Yoongi, nine in his pajamas, decided that he wanted to be both the whale
and the water, or maybe what he already was; the one who gets to see. )

The first night on the icebreaker--which Taehyung later learns is named ​True North​--a grad
student doing her thesis on the behavior of ribbon seals asks Yoongi about the skulls of fin whales while
they eat dinner in the cafeteria. He lights up like a ferris wheel, always eager to talk about his last
published journal, the enigma that had evaded him for quite some time.
It throws Taehyung back to Yoongi’s first five months in Seattle; where he was sent, originally,
to finish research he had begun on the way whales hear in such alarmingly low frequencies, across such
impossible distances.
Min Yoongi, who the Smithsonian sent off with two rare sei skulls, a personally programmed
whale tracking system he would later use to overhaul Taehyung’s own, and a heap of handwritten
research with ring stains sunk into it from multiple mugs of coffee. They sent him to the whale warehouse
for the inventory and equipment that outranked his own, and perhaps also because the marine director in
Seattle thought Taehyung could use a slightly more clinical approach, stir crazy and alone, so much of his
time spent floating out there somewhere in the sound.
He remembers helping Yoongi create 3D imaging of baleen whale skulls, Taehyung spinning
each specimen in a circle; several slow increments as Yoongi took a photo from every angle, compiling it
into a single set of data they could rotate and turn and take apart inside the computer screen. When that
hadn’t worked out quite right, Yoongi took a CT scan of a fin whale that was freshly dead, sent to them
from where it washed up on the beach in Washington, eventually archived into jars in pieces. New power
sources had to be installed in the labs to merely process the imagery, let alone the physics of the thing.
It was several months of whale songs, wavelengths, the two of them bickering and spending too
much time at a tacky fifties diner on the outskirts of Seattle. Taehyung teased Yoongi about the time
consuming lengths he took; washing his hands every time he touched the whale skull, hundreds of latex
gloves, his penchant for quiet and silence where Taehyung usually plays jazz songs or whale calls,
tapping his pen against the iron of the shelves.
He remembers the day that Yoongi had finally discovered it; walking into the fluorescent lit
corner of the warehouse one morning, finding Yoongi standing there with his glasses slightly askew, one
hand on bone, the other clicking away at the supercomputer, simulated wavelengths the size of a bus
passing through the cartilage and back again.
Bone conduction, Y ​ oongi had said to him, looking tired and slightly crazed. ​It all vibrates at
different frequencies, Taehyung, that’s why I couldn’t--
Yoongi abandoned the keyboard, put on another latex glove. Taehyung had laughed; always
happy to see Yoongi being the chatterbox Taehyung knows he truly is, coffee jitters and purple beneath
the eyes.
Yoongi had run his hand across the jaw of a fin whale, up to the sides of its eye sockets and
looked back to Taehyung, now that he had come closer to see. ​It’s--it’s ten times more sensitive--imagine
hearing with your skull. Ten to one hundred and thirty hertz--that’s so...it’s--
“It’s like they talk to each other here,” Yoongi says to the grad student, poking at his own temples
and the hinge of his jaw, with his fish hook smile splicing across his face like a scar.
“Here?” she asks, poking her own hands at the same points of her skull.
“Exactly,” Yoongi replies, and Taehyung brings his hand down on the smooth plane of skin at the
nape of Yoongi’s neck, feeling his vocal chords shiver there, as he continues on talking.

( Yoongi runs the simulation again and again and again, as if he’s not sure whether or not it
happened in a dream. Taehyung makes him sit down, leaves then returns with muffins and pastries for
breakfast.
Yoongi doesn’t even eat the whole thing--takes a single bite and sets it down before changing into
a new pair of gloves. He stares at the white skull for a long, long time.
They talk to each other here, h​ e says, so, so quiet, poking his hands at the white expanse of it. ​It’s
like being inside someone else’s head, even if it’s only for a few seconds. They talk to each other right
here, and here, and here.
In their chairs, Taehyung scoots closer.
 You talk to me here, T​ aehyung says, grinning, fingers dancing along Yoongi’s jaw, gentling up to
the warm space behind his ears.
Yoongi knows that Taehyung’s mostly just joking around, but still, still, still, the feeling--the
fondness is not lost on him.
Taehyung’s smile is a blinding thing; malleable, sweet, always like a knee to the chest, in the way
that it knocks the air right out from his lungs. They look like a pair of mad scientists, puffy beneath the
eyes, the same crusty mugs of coffee littering the lab space. Yoongi’s coordinate system blinks
somewhere as a minke whale travels north towards the arctic ice.
You talk to me here.
And you; here, Y ​ oongi murmurs, hands making the same slow line across the underside of
Taehyung’s jaw, dragging their mouths together with the same ease of fire cutting through ice.
Kissing Kim Taehyung, Yoongi finds, is like feeling the ground move beneath his feet; a
reminder that the world is still turning. A reminder that he can listen to the wind if he wants to hear
something greater calling his name.
Taehyung half laughs against him, low, saccharine, rumbling; Yoongi can feel the vibration of it
against his fingertips, and for a moment, science doesn’t feel quite so clinical.
When Yoongi opens his mouth, Taehyung mirrors the motion of it, all together languid slow,
breathing quietly out his nose as if he doesn't want to make any sounds. Yoongi curls his hands into
Taehyung’s hair, thumb sliding across the very base of his skull.
When he kisses him, it’s careful.
Taehyung kisses like he hasn’t done it in a while, which means; clumsy. Which means; slow.
Means; bleeding red, his heart hiding somewhere just beyond the ivory backs of his teeth, a smile
crushing at the curve of his eyes when Yoongi moves to press his mouth to Taehyung’s temple, to his jaw,
the patch of his skin just beneath his ear; the place where noise always rings the loudest, those nautical
bells that echo, all through the night. )

Taehyung pulls on the strings of Yoongi’s hideously orange parka, steadies his shoulders with the
warm palms of his hands. The wind whips at them, and the inflatable research boat is so much smaller
than he thought it would be, the size of it thrown into his face as they were lowered from the icebreaker,
miniscule against the red of ​True North​.
Taehyung, his parka a similar though slightly more faded color, keeps his eyes out on the horizon.
The satellite map makes a hollow sound across the hull, but they’ve both lived in Seattle long enough to
know that all you need to spot a whale is a pair of working eyes, and occasionally; binoculars.
On the other side of a mass of sea ice, spray spouts upwards towards the sky, sends a ripple
outwards in every imaginable direction, and that’s how they know; ​whales​.
Yoongi looks out at the water and wonders if you can fall in love with something when you’re a
little bit afraid of it, too.
The side effects read the same, after all; weak in the knees, wracked with chills, an expansion in
the chest. That ​bang bang banging i​ n his heart that won’t stop no matter the circumstance.
It’s the grand, mammoth feeling of loving something without knowing why; the same sweep
Taehyung felt all those years ago on a ferry in the sound, watching the fins of orcas slice through the
surface of the water. It’s the same pull Yoongi felt, laying on the worn carpet of his living room, nothing
but a child in his pajamas, blinking against the white light of beluga whales, blue beneath the ice as they
swam sideways through the television screen.
They pilot the boat closer, turning off the engine. Taehyung readies the crossbow, and when the
creature breaks water, they see that it’s a bowhead whale; gray and white, splattered with barnacles,
always looking a little as if it is upside down.
The crossbow firing the satellite tracker is a slick, sharp sound. Taehyung has landed it just right,
a foot or so down the length of its spine, and the carbon shaft of it breaks off and falls into the water,
drowned out by the ocean churning as the whale dives back into the blue.
It’s tail flags out of the water, slipping in without a single splash, and all the air rushes out of
Yoongi’s lungs. His face is barely visible between the fur of the parka’s hood and the mask pulled low
over his mouth, but Taehyung can see that he is smiling, even in his eyes.
Taehyung hands him the crossbow. He watches Yoongi no longer stumble, even when the water
rolls with a turbulence like taking off.
“C’mon,” Taehyung says, pulling Yoongi to the edge of their tiny, insignificant boat. He wants
very badly to kiss him, but there’s whales to tag, and his hands are so cold inside the gloves that he’s not
sure he has the dexterity to hold Yoongi right.
Yoongi leans over the rubber edge of their boat, and Taehyung can’t tell if he imagines the breath
Yoongi takes when he looks down into the water. He holds the crossbow loosely as though he’s forgotten
why he is here.
So; ​c’mon, ​Taehyung says. There’s the telltale hiss of a whale breathing, big and blue and so so
beautiful, a few meters over to the left. Bowheads sometimes travel in pods, small as they are, and the
music they make is somehow not-so-lonely.
Up this close, inside a distance so rarely destroyed, the two of them can hear it.
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, T ​ aehyung grins, even when Yoongi is already pressed right up next to
him, unrecognizable in the regulation coat except for the chime of his laugh.
I think they want to sing you a song.

( “Can I tell you a secret?” Taehyung whispers conspiratorily, leaning forwards in his worn rolling
workspace chair.
Yoongi, at the examination table, is hunched over the spine of a pacific right whale, going
through the painstakingly slow work of cleaning each individual vertebrae. Taehyung slides up next to
him, hooks his chin onto Yoongi’s shoulder, and waits.
“Hm?” Yoongi says, distracted. He’s never been very good at multitasking. Yoongi turns his
head, nearly goes cross eyes trying to look at Taehyung. “Say that again?”
“I said; can I tell you a secret?”
“Sure,” Yoongi replies, dropping the brush and the cotton swabs down on the table. He cracks all
his knuckles and then his neck in the process, and Taehyung thinks, not for the first time, that Yoongi has
a pair of piano hands; knobby but also somehow strong. He’s always thought they’d look a bit beautiful,
dancing over the black and white keys of a baby grand, though watching them ghost along the xylophone
of a harbor porpoise’s rib cage is kind of the same, in the end.
 “I used to be afraid of the ocean, too,” is what Taehyung says, after a while, watching Yoongi pop
pieces of his skeleton back into their place. He’s still got his chin on Yoongi’s shoulder, though he’s been
jostled around by the motion of him.
“I’m not--”
“I know,” Taehyung interrupts. “But you keep checking the weather radar like it’s going to
change, suddenly, and I know you’d rather be overhauling all my old tagged whales into the new system
than doing ​this.” ​Yoongi makes a face, nose scrunched, squinting, because he dislikes being known well
as much as he desires it deeply, and the whiplash of it still makes him recoil, even after all this time. “You
always do stuff with your hands when you’re all...antsy, or whatever.”
And it’s not that Yoongi’s afraid of the ocean, really. It’s just the deep, dark blue violence of the
sea that psychology is designed to warn him about taking root somewhere at the base of his skull, tugging
like a leash. It’s the idea of finding what science cannot locate or name; the darkness that is more
emptiness than absence of light, the limits of the human body, amplified when faced with the maw of a
killer whale, faced with a whole acre of jellyfish or a fifty foot wave.
The freedom that comes with finding it is something that cannot be given, but learned.
Taehyung discovered it for himself when he first tagged Big Blue, the dark shape of him passing
beneath the boat, blinking back at his one, lonely eye; the echoes of a song that shiver upwards from the
water hanging in the air like slow drying laundry.
“I’m not--​scared--i​ t’s just, all,” he makes a vague gesture with his hand, “you know?”
Taehyung knows. He leans to kiss Yoongi on the cheek, which still makes him blush terribly,
though these days he doesn’t make any move to hide it. “You packed, right?” Taehyung asks, opening the
drawers for latex and more cotton swabs. “Did the institute give you your arctic gear?”
Yoongi nods. Taehyung pulls on a pair of gloves, starts cleaning the grime three vertebrae ahead
of Yoongi’s busy hands.
The whale tracking system blinks, somewhere in the dark behind them.
Miles away, a pod of orcas are just now entering the sound. )

The last day on ​True North, T ​ aehyung shakes Yoongi awake, lights spinning in his eyes as he
pulls Yoongi up and out of the metal bed bolted to the wall, drags him down the hallway to the equipment
hub they’ve been relegated for the week.
You have to see this, T​ aehyung keeps saying, leading him fast past iron doorways, his grip
shifting from the vice he’s made around Yoongi’s wrist to hold his hand, instead.
“What?” Yoongi says, having no idea what could possibly have Taehyung so riled up as he
throws open the door of the hub.
​ oongi thinks, as Taehyung types a familiar tracking number into the satellite
And then; ​oh, Y
catalog, dots blinking on the grid of the world.
It’s never been hard to remember tracking codes, seeing as they began by counting upwards from
zero. Seokjin, Taehyung’s old coworker, had started it all. Taehyung was tagging into three-hundreds by
the time Yoongi made it into Seattle, anyway.
The number Taehyung types; ​fifty-two.
What it feels like, to him; ​one.
 “Big Blue,” Taehyung start, stops, always very aware of the way words go tumbling out of his
mouth like moths to a flame, “Big Blue--he’s...he’s just under two miles away. Yoongi ​he’s here.”​

( In the beginning, they found romance in strange places; knocking ankles beneath the grimy
tabletops of Mel’s Diner, locking eyes across a table full of whale parts in oily jars.
The mercurial little dance of it went on for a while; fleeting touches, a chemistry that worked the
same way it kind of didn’t work at all.
One late night in the storage space, they had argued about why Yoongi wouldn’t come out on the
water over the weekend, where Taehyung wanted to observe a local pod of sleek, grey minke whales.
What kind of marine biologist are you? ​Taehyung had said, more anger in his voice than he liked
to remember.
Yoongi had looked back at him through the frame of the iron shelves, pulling back as if burned.
The same kind as you, ​Yoongi bit, and that’s when all of Taehyung’s fight went out of him.

​ aehyung had murmured, some time later, everything reshelved and reorganized,
I’m sorry, T
holding Yoongi’s hands in the gravel parking lot, standing between their cars.
Yoongi had said nothing. Just squeezed him, a little bit, a very gentle curve to his lips as he let go
and opened his own door.
It was a concession. A promise. It was the first time they began speaking the same, soundless
language.
Several weeks would pass, before they would kiss, but that night was when Taehyung knew.

He loved Yoongi, the way one loves any quiet, curious thing; rather softly, and with an
outstretched, open hand. )

The research vessel gets lowered into the sea, sun beginning to sink into the line of the horizon,
the white light doubly as bright where it reflects off of the snow and sky and clean Alaskan ice.
Yoongi steers the small boat while Taehyung clutches the portable satellite tracker like a child
clinging to a balloon, crouched at the bow of the boat, jumpy with something akin to nerves.
The orange regulation coat swallows him whole, the fur of the hood flattening in the wind, and
Yoongi pulls his mask higher up his face to conceal his nose and the crests of his cheekbones from the
crisp bite of the cold.
They wait, killing the engine, for the next point to appear on the grid; a new one flashing alive
every five minutes. The sky turns pink as a pyrosome, with the slow setting sun. Taehyung glances back
at Yoongi over his shoulder, ice forming on his eyelashes, his smile apparent in the warm tilt of his head.
 The satellite beeps at the same time something breaks from the water. Taehyung stands so quickly
he almost falls over, and Yoongi says nothing as he idles the boat closer, quietly as he can.
Big Blue’s flukes rise up from the water, lingering there before the ocean sucks them back in
again, and Taehyung leans so far over the side of the boat Yoongi’s certain, for a second, that he’s about
to fall right in. The echo of a whale song peals up from beneath them.
The whale comes up on the other side of the vessel, a few minutes later; no splashing, no breach,
just the incredibly gentle sound of water rippling and dripping out of the way, Big Blue’s first breath an
enormous spray of mist into the air.
Taehyung reaches down as the boat rocks, having ripped his gloves off quite some time ago, and
places the palm of his hand down on the whale’s snout where it sticks up from the waves.
Hello, ​Taehyung says to it, the way one might call an old friend.
Big Blue is the same, one eyed creature he remembers, always calling Taehyung home; if not
with a song, the sky. If not with a voice in a dark room, then Taehyung’s stumbling feet that never seem
to get him anywhere in time.
In that moment, the air tastes of sea salt and sunlight, golden hour washing the whole world
warm.
Big Blue turns, a parallel line with the rubber of the boat, his good eye turned skyward, white
scarring slashed across his skin.
“Yoongi,” Taehyung says, still staring into Big Blue’s cherry pit eye, thumb moving slowly
across the sandpaper skin. “Yoongi, come here.”
Yoongi listens.
When he reaches for the whale, he locks his other hand in Taehyung’s. Their fingers puzzle piece
together with practiced ease, and Big Blue is cold where Yoongi touches him.
My lonely whale, T​ aehyung murmurs, as Big Blue closes his eye, peeling it open again when
Taehyung smiles at Yoongi through a sidelong glance.
The sun bleeds red across the sky, and the wind screams like a banshee in the silence.

On the dark boat ride back to the red iron hull of ​True North, T ​ aehyung kisses Yoongi as they
break free from the arctic ice.
Did you see? ​Taehyung says against his mouth. Means; ​did you feel it, too? Am I as alone in the
world as I once thought I was?
If he listens, Yoongi can still hear the song of Big Blue. Can still imagine his eye, the other
missing and healed over as if in a wink, can still feel the tide of time beneath his skin.
Taehyung pulls back, shivering in the cold, holding Yoongi there, unsteady. On the horizon, stars
sweep up behind the silhouette of ​True North.
Yoongi looks into Taehyung’s eyes, the long eyelash frames of them, and his own breath fogs up
between them where Taehyung has tugged down his mask.
He kisses Taehyung. Means; ​I saw, I saw, I saw.
Thinks; ​I might always love you.
Thinks; ​There might always be a piece at the bottom of my heart that the water never stops
weighing down, a piece that I can’t cut out of me. A fragment that I can’t feed back to the ocean, no
matter how much poetic sense it probably makes.
 /

( On a cloudy spring day, Taehyung convinces Yoongi all the way into a kayak, paddling next to
him a mile into Seattle’s sound.
Several dark fins slide out from the surface of the water, tall and looming and dark, the surefire
sign of killer whales.
“What do we do?” Yoongi says, a tremor in his voice, watching the pod approach them.
Taehyung smiles to himself--Yoongi, of all people, should know that they have nothing to be
afraid of, but instead he says; ​we watch.
Yoongi clutches his paddle tight against him, when an whale’s head bobs out of the water before
him. Taehyung floats his kayak over, takes Yoongi’s hand into his as a tail slaps the surface and an orca
passes black and fast beneath them.
Yoongi feels--just for a second--like the boy he once was; half asleep in his pajamas, the constant
buzz of the old tv in the gloom, wishing for water wings. Maybe he’s still that boy, blinking awake in the
dark. Maybe he’ll always be that boy. The one who wants to swallow the big fish, if he can. Who pretends
to be surprised when a bigger fish swims by to swallow him back. )

Big Blue returns to the coast of Washington, and Taehyung watches his satellite point swim down
the western side of Alaska for weeks.

When they spot him, it’s the same whale call as always, but for the first time; two parts of the
same song.
Yoongi squints through a pair of binoculars from the research vessel, and very briefly, he thinks
that he’s lost his mind.
Taehyung, ​Yoongi says, ​look at this. There’s two.
In the distance, two whales breathe in tandem, the white mist of their lungs expanding spraying
upwards towards the sky.
My lonely whale, T ​ aehyung murmurs, smiling, putting the binoculars down.
He wants to tag the other whale, but they haven’t brought any trackers along, and Taehyung
thinks that maybe, it’s time he lets his Big Blue Beautiful ​go​.
Yoongi watches the way Taehyung’s thumb runs over the blinking screen of the satellite rig, and
in the air hangs a whale song somehow both high and low, a sound that only promises to one day become
more bewitching, in time.
In that moment, Yoongi is again like a jaded astronomer, plotting points into the grid lines of the
water; ​this is where big blue calls home, look north and there are whole acres of jellyfish. Kim Taehyung,
this is where I loved you most, and here is how I’ll never lose you.

/
( The first time Taehyung saw Min Yoongi, he thought he had a world of sea foam inside him.
Thought that he understood the lost language of waves; with his dark, storm black hair and the
undercurrent of blue beneath his skin.
Back then, Taehyung thought what he had within himself was only his skeleton, though these
days, it seems as if its the other way around. )