The digital display on the air purifier in Genius Lab read 41 percent humidity. It was two percent lower than Jimin preferred, but Yoongi never touched the dials once he sat down, and Jimin was not about to walk across the room just to fuss with an appliance. He hated the dry bite of conditioned studio air. It tasted like ozone and cardboard, and it made the back of his throat itch within twenty minutes.
He sat on the arm of the leather sofa instead. He rolled the blue plastic cap of his water bottle between his thumb and middle finger until the ridged plastic dug into his skin.
"You didn't send the guide track to Pdogg," Jimin said.
Yoongi did not look up from the monitor. His left hand rested flat on the keyboard, index finger hovering over the spacebar, while his right hand nudged a fader on the console with microscopic precision. A pair of worn-out slippers hung loosely from his heels.
"I sent what was ready," Yoongi said. His voice was low, flat, and raspy from six straight hours without speaking.
"The bridge wasn't in the folder."
"The bridge isn't finished."
"I recorded three passes on Tuesday," Jimin said, keeping his tone light, though the skin around his knuckles tightened. "You told me the second pass was clean. You told the company engineer we were locking the stems by Friday."
"The arrangement changed."
"You didn't change the arrangement, hyung. The piano track is identical."
Yoongi hit the spacebar. A loop of four measures kicked in—warm Rhodes chords, a dry kick, and a muted snare that hit on the back of the second beat. It played once, twice, three times. Yoongi let it loop without offering an explanation. He had a way of using monitor volume like a physical door, shutting people out simply by letting the decibels fill the space between them.
Jimin stood up. He walked over to the desk, stepped around the cluster of black guitar cables pooled on the floor, and reached down. He tapped the spacebar with his index finger.
The music died instantly. The quiet that followed was heavy and cold.
Yoongi stared at the gray timeline on Pro Tools. He didn't turn his chair, but his shoulders rose a fraction of an inch, rigid under his black oversized crewneck. "Don't touch the board."
"Then answer me," Jimin said. He leaned his hip against the corner of the wooden desk, close enough to smell the stale Americano sitting in the paper cup beside Yoongi’s keyboard. "If you didn't like the vocal, tell me. Don't just bury the track in an unlinked folder and tell the A&R team we’re waiting on lyric revisions. Namjoon told me he cleared the draft three days ago."
"Namjoon cleared the rhyme scheme," Yoongi muttered, eyes still glued to the track list. "The tone doesn't match the record."
"The tone?"
"It’s too bright."
"It’s an F-sharp over an A-minor ninth," Jimin said, his voice sharpening before he could stop it. "It’s supposed to be vulnerable. That’s what you wrote in the scratch notes. You wrote *naked voice* right on the whiteboard."
"I changed my mind."
"You never change your mind after the arrangement is tracked."
Yoongi finally turned his chair. His face looked gray under the fluorescent desk lamp, dark circles bruising the delicate skin under his eyes. He looked tired—not just studio-tired, but hollowed out, the way he got when he spent four consecutive nights chasing three seconds of audio that refused to sit correctly in the stereo field.
"Are you running the session now, Jimin?"
The question was deliberate. It was designed to push Jimin back toward the door, back into the hallway, back into his lane. It was the sharp, clinical wall Yoongi always dropped in front of anyone who stepped too close to unfinished work.
Jimin did not move. Instead, he reached out and flicked the edge of a yellow legal pad sitting next to the audio interface. The paper was covered in Yoongi’s messy, cramped hangul, crossed out in black ink until the fiber of the paper was chewed raw.
"You do this every time," Jimin said quietly.
"I do my job every time."
"You lock people out."
"I don't lock people out. I filter out garbage before the company wastes money mixing it."
"My take wasn't garbage."
"I didn't say it was garbage."
"You acted like it was," Jimin snapped. The anger flared up fast, hot and sudden behind his ribs. He had spent two hours in the fourth-floor vocal room warming up on Tuesday, obsessing over breath support, making sure the lower register didn't sound pinched, just because he knew how merciless Yoongi’s ears were. He had wanted it to be undeniable. He had wanted Yoongi to look through the glass, nod once, and say nothing—because saying nothing was Yoongi’s highest form of praise.
Instead, Yoongi had cut the talkback mic mid-phrase, told him to go home, and never called him back for retakes.
"You're making this personal," Yoongi said. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, his rings clicking softly together. "It’s a mix decision. The vocal sits too far forward. It distracts from the counter-melody."
"Then pull the fader down two decibels."
"It’s not just the volume, Jimin."
"Then what is it?"
Yoongi didn't answer. He dropped his hands into his lap. His fingers curled into loose fists, resting on the worn denim of his knees. The defensive posture was so familiar that Jimin felt a bitter wave of exhaustion wash over him.
"Tell me," Jimin insisted. "Because right now, it looks like you're throwing away three weeks of my work because you’re annoyed with me."
Yoongi let out a dry, harsh laugh. "Annoyed with you? Why would I be annoyed with you?"
"I don't know, hyung. Why don't you tell me? You haven't looked at me in rehearsal since Sunday. You skipped dinner with Hoseok and me on Wednesday. And now you’re gutting the only sub-unit song we have on this release."
"I'm not gutting it."
"Then play the solo vocal."
Yoongi’s jaw tightened. "No."
"Play it."
"It's muted in the master bus."
"Then unmute it." Jimin reached toward the console again.
Yoongi’s hand shot out. His fingers clamped around Jimin’s wrist with surprising speed, his grip firm and dry. He didn't squeeze hard enough to hurt, but the contact was electric, sudden, and entirely out of character. Yoongi rarely initiated physical contact in the studio; he treated the control room like an operating theater where unnecessary touch was a contamination.
Jimin froze. He looked down at Yoongi’s pale hand wrapped around his wrist, then up into Yoongi’s face.
Yoongi was staring up at him, breathing through his nose. His pupils were wide in the dim amber light of the desk. There was no anger in his expression now. The hard, dismissive edge had vanished, replaced by an expression so raw and unsettled that Jimin felt the breath catch in his throat.
"Don't," Yoongi whispered.
"Hyung..."
"Just leave it alone."
"Why?" Jimin’s voice had lost its sharpness. He didn't pull his wrist away, and Yoongi didn't let go. "Why can't I hear it?"
"Because you know how you sound," Yoongi said. His voice was barely audible over the hum of the cooling fan beneath the desk.
"I sound like me."
"No," Yoongi said. He looked away, his gaze dropping to the edge of the mixing board, though his fingers remained locked around Jimin’s arm. "You sound like you're standing right in front of the microphone with no monitors, singing directly into my ear."
Jimin blinked. The explanation did not make sense. "That's... that's how a dry vocal is supposed to sound before reverb."
"I don't mean technically."
The silence returned, thick and suffocating. Yoongi slowly loosened his grip, his fingers sliding off Jimin’s skin, leaving behind a cold spot where the warmth of his hand had been. He looked down at the track sheet on the screen, his chest rising and falling unevenly.
"The lyric in the second half," Yoongi said, staring straight ahead. "Who did you think you were singing it to?"
Jimin frowned. "It’s a love song, hyung. The lyrics Namjoon wrote about the winter walk by the river."
"Namjoon didn't write the bridge," Yoongi said quietly.
Jimin stopped. He looked at the legal pad on the desk. The crossed-out lines, the scrawled handwriting, the ink pressed so hard it had nearly torn the yellow paper.
"You wrote it," Jimin said.
"Yeah."
"You told Pdogg it was a rejected draft from the 2021 batch."
"I lied."
Jimin stared at the back of Yoongi’s head. The small room suddenly felt much smaller. The hum of the computer fans sounded louder, a low drone that vibrated through the floorboards. He remembered Tuesday afternoon vividly: standing inside the sound booth, the heavy isolation door sealed shut, looking through the double-paned glass into the darkened control room. Yoongi had been sitting alone at the desk, head bent over the notebook, his face hidden beneath the brim of a black bucket hat. When Jimin had sung the second line of the bridge—*I won't ask you to stay, but don't walk faster than me*—Yoongi hadn't hit the talkback button. He had just turned his back completely to the glass.
"Why didn't you want to hear it?" Jimin asked, the words coming out slower now, cautious, every protective instinct suddenly on alert.
Yoongi reached out and grabbed his paper cup of cold coffee, taking a sip he clearly didn't want just to have something in his hands. "Because I have to sit in this chair for twelve hours a day," he said, staring at the muted audio waveform on track seven. "And I can't listen to you sing words I wrote about you, pretending you don't know who they're about."
The plastic cap in Jimin’s hand dropped. It hit the carpet with a dull, barely perceptible thud.
The studio monitors were silent, but the air in the room felt entirely different now, sharp and thin, leaving no room to breathe.