Work Text:
Dear Universtars,
It has been brought to our attention that a very small number of players have been making use of a backdoor exploit that not only allows them to access the game for free, but also allows them to glitch in endgame items, access infinite gold, and level up far beyond the current intended cap. While we can assure you that this exploit has not granted these people any access to your personal data, we understand that seeing these players seemingly get away with this behaviour has been stressful, and we thank you for raising the alarm. This is now being investigated in full, and we will not be commenting on the individuals any further at this particular time.
In game, there will be a few upcoming changes to reflect these developments – all guilds that have benefited from these players in any way will, unfortunately, be disbanded, but members of these guilds are more than welcome to reform with one another – this is not intended as a punishment, but rather as a means of wiping the game of any backdoor access for potential future exploit. All of the guildmasters of the top fifty guilds have also agreed to waive their joining fee for the next two weeks, so if you wish to join a new guild entirely, now’s the perfect time to do so!
All shops in the market will be running a sale for the next three days – need some more ore? Or maybe you’ve been putting off a visit to the blacksmith? (Note – the menagerie is not included in this sale – sorry, folks, but the fee to adopt a baby pet dragon is that high for a reason!)
Finally, this newsletter’s shoutout goes to the Bangtan Guild, whose average level hit 50 over the weekend! Way to go, Bangtan!
If you have any questions, feel free to hit up our Dev Team, who will be live on YouTube this Friday, 6pm KST.
We look forward to seeing you in the stars!
The Universtar Dev Team
[guild] koya: can’t believe we got a shoutout because jimin and taehyung stayed up grinding until 4am on sunday morning
[guild] chimmy: well, none of you congratulated us >:[
[guild] mang: i did!!!
[guild] tata: that’s true, actually, hoseokie-hyung did
[guild] chimmy: well fuck me in the ass i guess
[guild] koya: moving on from jimin’s ass
[guild] koya: yoongi-hyung, you there?
[guild] cooky: he’s grinding up on serendipity!! he should be on voice chat tho
Jimin puts on his headphones and opens up Discord – sure enough, Yoongi’s handle is there, seemingly waiting for them to come online.
“Ah, you’ve all seen the news then,” Yoongi says as they all log in. Jimin can hear the comfortingly familiar clacking of Yoongi’s keyboard through his headphones, and, when he logs in, the low-level, royalty-free music that Jeongguk’s almost always playing in the background. “About the guild fee.”
“We could’ve done with that money,” Namjoon points out.
“I didn’t really have much of a say,” Yoongi says. In game, Jimin fast-travels his character, an elf Swordmaster dressed in the most garish yellow robes he’d been able to find, up towards Serendipity. It’s his favourite planet, aesthetically – misty pink fog swirls around golden trees, and the background music is a pretty, solitary piano that blends beautifully with the atmospheric rustling of the leaves, the soft crunch of his character’s muted footsteps on the forest ground, the muted rush of the streams. It’s not, however, his personal choice of a grinding planet, namely because it’s full of trees. Trees, while pretty to look at, give very little experience points for his swords, but Yoongi plays an axe-wielding brownie, so it’s easy EXP for him. “The mods more or less said to us ‘look, we need you to drop your fees for two weeks’. They didn’t even tell us why.”
“It’s weird that they’re trying to incentivise these players to continue playing,” Jimin says, letting his character idle. There aren’t any enemies on Serendipity, so he’s not worried about getting snuck up on. “They would’ve noticed their guildmates getting ridiculously rich and powerful for a while, but they didn’t say anything? Ban them all, honestly.”
“Ah, but most guilds aren’t like ours,” Taehyung says, his voice echoing as it comes through both Jimin’s headphones and from where he’s sitting behind Jimin in the little corner of their living room they have set up as a dedicated gaming area. Jimin’s so used to the echoey delay now that he can’t imagine hearing Taehyung play video games without it.
“What, with the guildmembers living with one another?” Jimin says, watching Taehyung grin as his voice undoubtedly echoes, too.
“Taehyung’s got a point,” Hoseok says. “If you’re a casual player in one of those huge, revolving door guilds, you’re probably not going to notice if one player is suspiciously rich.”
Jimin hums but doesn’t answer, checking his inventory. He’s running low on healing items, so at least there’s the sale to look forward to.
“Are we looking for anyone in particular to join the guild?” Yoongi asks. Jimin stiffens, hands hovering over his keyboard like claws.
“Honestly, we could really do with another long-range attacker,” Namjoon admits, his giant Wizard hulking onto Jimin’s screen. “I know Hoseok has a few offensive spells alongside his healing spells, and that you were considering reclassing as a battle cleric, hyung, but I also know you’re really enjoying the Carpentry skill tree…”
“I could reclass,” Jimin offers. “If you need another long-range attacker, I’ve got the skill points to reclass to an archer or something.”
“You’d be starting from level 1 if you changed to a bow class,” Yoongi points out.
“Not to mention that you and I are our only melee fighters,” Jeongguk says to Jimin, his pout audible.
“What am I, chopped liver?” Yoongi replies with a laugh.
“You’re a brownie, you do half the damage I do.”
“Yes, but I’m cute.”
Jeongguk sighs, long and hard.
“We could do with another human, honestly,” Taehyung says; Jimin spins in his chair to shoot him a betrayed look. “What? Humans can go all over the universe, it’ll be somebody else to run errands to the places you can’t go to, because you picked elf.”
“I was sixteen when I made this account, I wasn’t considering the long-term strategy guides,” Jimin says.
“A lockpicker would be great,” Hoseok says. “I’m sick of carrying keys for the whole guild. Most of my inventory is keys.”
“Where does a centaur keep its inventory?” Jeongguk asks, spinning his character on the spot as he talks. “Your character doesn’t wear clothes, hyung.”
“Why are you, the moon rabbit, asking me questions about where I keep my inventory?” Hoseok shoots back. “You’re a rabbit!”
“A moon rabbit. Also, I’m wearing pants.”
“Jimin-ah,” Taehyung says, his voice coming in mono, not stereo – Jimin turns around to look at him, muting himself too. “You alright?”
“I just… I don’t want someone new to join the guild, you know?” Jimin replies. He’s aware that it sounds a little petulant, but he and Taehyung don’t keep secrets from one another, even the ones where admitting them makes them sound like sulky children. “We’ve got a good team, and we’ve all been friends for ages, if someone new joins it could be… Weird.”
“Or, it could be great,” Taehyung says gently. “Remember when Namjoon joined, and we finally had someone to unlock the magic gates on Epiphany? Or Hoseok joined, and we stopped needing to carry a full inventory of healing items to every raid? Remember how quickly they fit in?” Jimin bites his lip and nods slowly. “Besides, did you hear that wish list for a new member? We’re basically looking for a level fifty human rogue with a speciality in lockpicking, the odds of us finding one, let alone one who would even want to join us, are very small.”
Jimin had been sixteen when he’d signed up for the Universtar beta launch. It had been his first (and, too this day, only) MMORPG, but he hadn’t gone into it with the intention of making friends. Honestly, it had been the art style that had initially drawn him in – bright colours, impressionist-style backgrounds, and a simple, easy to use interface.
The thing about a beta release, though, is that the limited player pool means you tend to keep running into the same players, which was how he had met tata, cooky, and shooky.
Taehyung had been the first to reach out to him, inviting him to raid with Jeongguk and Yoongi and, when guilds had been patched into the game, it was a no-brainer for the four of them to form their own guild, with Yoongi as their guildmaster.
Namjoon had come to them next, looking for, in his words, a ‘low-key hobby for my downtime at university’. Jimin’s not sure whether a monthly subscription MMORPG counts as a ‘low-key’ hobby, but it apparently worked for Namjoon – out of all of them, he was the only one to continue playing right through university.
They all take breaks from the game, though, and it was during one of those biggest breaks – only Jimin and Namjoon were playing with any sort of regularity, and even then they would sometimes go weeks without logging in – that they had met Hoseok.
They’d found his avatar, his purple centaur with no armour, no weapons, no clothes of any kind, floating around the new players start zone, flitting through the asteroid belt and mashing the ‘cry’ emote above his head.
[worldchat]: [chimmy] waves at [mang]!
[worldchat] mang: HOW DO YOU KNOW MY NAME???
[worldchat] chimmy: it’s above your avatar’s head!
[worldchat] mang: oh
[worldchat] mang: can you help me?? i’m being chased!
[worldchat] chimmy: i can’t see any enemies… @koya, are there any invisible enemies in-game?
[worldchat] koya: you could check the wiki yourself you know
[worldchat] chimmy: why, when i know you’ve got it open already?
[worldchat] koya: well, it turns out there are! they’re called poltergeists, but they’re late-stage. we’re talking Prometheus world, that’s how late they turn up
[worldchat] chimmy: what do the enemies look like, mang?
[worldchat] mang: its face looks like x_o
[worldchat] koya: oh that’s van! the npc tutorial robot
It had been a steep learning curve, but Hoseok had soon settled in and, at the end of his free trial month, he had sent them all a screenshot of his confirmation email upon paying for his first year’s subscription in bulk.
For the last half a decade it’s been the six of them – through updates and patches, through relationships and break-ups, new jobs and new houses, even through the time when Namjoon got banned for a month after accidentally breaking the in-game economy.
They don’t need a seventh.
[worldchat] RJ: LV53 human Rogue, I’m looking for a new guild after mine got wiped for Crimes!
[guild] mang: okay good news or bad news
[guild] koya: bad?
[guild] mang: the hotel rooms are gonna be more expensive than we originally budgeted for
[guild] shooky: we figured that’d happen, hotels are always more expensive during cons
[guild] shooky: hang on just got a message brb
[guild] cooky: what’s the good news, hyung?
[guild] mang: i booked two rooms!
[guild] tata: no way you managed to book something??? hyung you’re amazing!!
[guild] mang: thanks! it’s one three bed and one four, that’s why it’s more expensive – booking three double rooms was gonna work out to be WAY more expensive
[guild] chimmy: great job, hyung!
[RJ has joined the guild!]
[guild] Auto_Mod: Welcome to [Bangtan]! Current members [7]. Guild leader [shooky].
[guild] shooky: wow our auto mod is fast
[guild] shooky: anyway this is seokjin everyone say hi
[guild] RJ: Hello everyone! I’m Seokjin, i was born in 1992 (you can call me hyung if you’re younger), and I’m a human Rogue.
[guild] koya: oh thank GOD
[guild] RJ: Nice to meet you too, koya!
[guild] koya: i’ve been carrying the guild’s long-range fighting for SO LONG
[guild] koya: anyway welcome to the guild, we’ve got a spreadsheet in the discord with everyone’s names and handles and pronouns and stuff
[guild] cooky: nice to meet you, seokjin-hyung! sorry, gotta run, but i’ll be back online tomorrow to chat properly!
[guild] tata: seokjin hyung, do you want to go raid? i found a dragon nest, but none of the rest of the guild are allowed into the territory
[guild] RJ: It’d be nice if they patched out allegiance territory boundaries, huh? But yeah, that sounds great, want to go now?
Jimin sighs, puts his status as ‘Do Not Disturb’, and pushes away from his desk, wheeling a little across the room. “I’m going out for a run, Taehyung-ah, can you let them know if they ask?” Taehyung gives Jimin a thumbs up without even turning away from his computer.
He’s not… Avoiding Seokjin, necessarily.
But he’s not… Not avoiding him.
The first time he’d dipped out, gone for a run when Seokjin had been added to the guild, he had genuinely intended to just run out his petulance, return to his computer, and greet Seokjin like a reasonable adult, but by the time he’d jogged back home everyone had already logged off for the day.
The second time had been genuine, too – he’d been chatting to everyone on Discord just before he had needed to go into a meeting, and the second Seokjin had logged in the meeting had started, meaning Jimin had needed to log off.
The third time… Well. Maybe the reason he’d rapidly signed offline the second Seokjin had changed his status to ‘online’ in Universtar hadn’t been quite as honest as the first two reasons. He had needed to go grocery shopping that day, but he hadn’t really needed to go the very second he had seen Seokjin’s greyed-out avatar pop into colour on his guild list.
And then the fourth time had rolled around, and the fifth, and the sixth… It’s getting to the point where Jimin is actively avoiding being online at the same time as Seokjin, if only to put off the inevitable conversation of ‘hey! I’ve noticed you go offline every time I log on, what’s up with that?’ He knows he’s blown this out of proportion, and that it’s entirely his fault for doing so – Taehyung keeps telling him how well Seokjin’s getting on with everyone, and how enthusiastic he is about both the game and eventually meeting Jimin – but it’s been weeks now, and he just can’t bring himself to make that leap and introduce himself to Seokjin.
He’s, a little bit childishly, grinding bow levels in the lava caves on Prometheus. Is he a little under levelled to be running Prometheus solo? Yes. However, each lava salamander he kills with his shitty beginner’s bow is more than double the EXP he’d get hunting slimes in the dark forests of Epiphany, and he needs to level up his bow fast enough that, if Seokjin should choose to leave the guild, they won’t need to look for anyone else to replace him.
Because Jimin’s not an idiot – he knows that they’ve needed an archer, and a second long-range fighter, for some time now. He can’t do much about the fact that his character is an elf and not a human, but Taehyung’s lasted long enough now on his own, he can last for longer without a second human on the team. Push comes to shove, Jimin will start a second account himself.
As he’s hopping between the unstable platforms in the middle of the lava ponds, another character pops into existence next to his – he’s so startled by their sudden appearance that he almost fucks up a jump which, just like real lava as opposed to Mario-lava, would be an instant kill, so he has to use his vaulting pole to rescue himself. Using it in lava immediately breaks it, obviously, so he whirls his character around on the spot to chew this other player out.
The character’s waving emote is very at odds with the angry emoticon Jimin’s spamming over his head, but that’s not what makes Jimin pause, finger hovering over the emoticon hotkey.
It’s RJ – Seokjin, rather – and he’s just sent Jimin a private message. Wincing guiltily, Jimin opens the window.
[Conversation with RJ]
[whisper] RJ: Sorry for startling you! I kind of followed you here in invisible mode… I wanted to say hi!
[whisper] chimmy: hi
[whisper] chimmy: sorry, i’m grinding… is there something you need?
[whisper] RJ: Not really! Just wanted to introduce myself properly, because we haven’t had a chance to speak yet! I’m really enjoying the Bangtan Guild, so I wanted to meet the secret sixth member that I kept missing, haha!
[whisper] chimmy: ah yeah sorry, just been busy irl you know
[whisper] RJ: Haha, yeah, I get that! We’ve met now, though •ᴗ•
“What the fuck,” Jimin whispers, staring at the cutest emoji he’s ever seen. How does Seokjin even do that with his keyboard? It’s not one of Universtar’s default options, those overly tiny, slow moving gif emoticons that look as though they were created nearly forty years ago.
One embarrassing internet search and a few bookmarks later, and Jimin’s armed with his own resource of cute emojis to use. He tabs back into the game to find that he has another message waiting for him.
[whisper] RJ: Sorry, was that too much? I kind of assumed we’d genuinely just been missing one another, but if you actually don’t want to talk to me, just let me know, okay?
[whisper] chimmy: no, sorry, i was afk!
[whisper] chimmy: i was actually looking up that cute emoji you used
[whisper] RJ: You mean this one? •ᴗ•
[whisper] RJ: It’s kind of my thing – my IRL friends used to say that that’s what my smile looks like, and it’s kind of stuck.
[whisper] chimmy: it’s cute!
[whisper] RJ: My smile? Thank you, I’m blushing.
“What are you smiling about?” Taehyung asks, making Jimin jump so violently he accidentally unplugs his headphones, causing the in-game music, the frantic drums and marimba of Prometheus, to blare out through their sitting room.
“Nothing!” Jimin says defensively, plugging his headphones back in.
[guild] chimmy: yellow robes – PURCHASED
[guild] chimmy: do you know how hard it was to find robes in this specific shade of yellow?
[guild] shooky: it’s an assault on my eyes whenever your character’s on screen, so i’d imagine it was pretty fucking hard, yeah
[guild] Auto_Mod: [shooky] has been temporarily banned for [profanity] for [12 hours]. Remember – Universtar is for all ages!
[guild] koya: LMFAO
[guild] Auto_Mod: [koya] has been temporarily banned for [profanity] for [12 hours]. Remember – Universtar is for all ages!
[guild] mang: no but i can’t believe yoongi and namjoon got thanos snapped together… rip in pieces i guess
[guild] RJ: So why have you bought yellow robes, Jimin-ah? Aren’t your robes already yellow?
[guild] chimmy: yeah, in game! these are ~real~ robes!
[guild] chimmy: for the con next month, you know?
[guild] RJ: The con?
[guild] chimmy: yeah we’re cosplaying as our characters!
[guild] RJ: Oh, the convention! Sorry, I thought you were confessing to being con artists or something.
[guild] chimmy: well, we could be that too ;)
[guild] RJ: If you are, please don’t tell me, I don’t want to have to find another guild to join,,,
[guild] cooky: look if you two are gonna talk constantly can you take it to messages? i’m trying to farm iron ore for yoongi-hyung and my notifications keep pinging
Jimin scoffs and opens up a private message to Seokjin, only to find that Seokjin’s already beaten him to it, a message coming through within seconds.
[whisper] RJ: So I just came into possession of some explosive potions, want to help me lay them at the mouth of the cave Jeongguk’s in and cause a little explosion?
[whisper] RJ: Only a little one, just enough that he has to spend an uncomfortable amount of time digging himself out.
[whisper] chimmy: naturally!!!
Jimin’s sitting in a video call with Taehyung, Jeongguk and Hoseok, his computer open on Discord while he attempts to follow a sewing tutorial on his phone. Behind him, and sitting at his own desk, Taehyung is moulding pauldrons out of EVA foam.
“Hyung,” Jeongguk says suddenly, prompting hums from everyone else. “Hoseok-hyung.” Hoseok hums again. “What’re you cosplaying as? Are you going as Mang?”
Hoseok laughs. “I’m not cosplaying as a naked centaur in the middle of winter, Jeongguk-ah, no.” Jimin looks over at his computer screen just in time to catch Hoseok showing them a giant, onion-shaped construction of cardboard strips and packing tape.
“…Is it a Shrek reference?” Jeongguk asks dubiously, peering down at his screen with his face so close to the camera that all Jimin can see of him is his eyes and nose.
“What? No, you know I don’t know anything about any anime,” Hoseok says, rolling his eyes. “It’s going to be Van’s head.”
“You’re cosplaying as Van’s head?” Taehyung says.
“Well, I was thinking about cosplaying as the rest of them, too, but yeah,”
Jeongguk’s head suddenly whips around to the side; off camera, Jimin can hear somebody with a low voice talking. “Ah, I’ve got to go, we’ll – I’ll talk to you all later bye!” He hangs up abruptly.
“Is Yoongi-hyung visiting him again?” Jimin asks, shoving liberal amounts of stuffing into the point of his Swordmaster’s hat. It seems to have been based off a cavalier’s hat, which is what he’s attempting to mimic from the video, except his hat is supposed to be pointier, and it currently isn’t. He’s pretty sure it won’t be a problem, but he hasn’t quite worked out how to fix it yet.
Hoseok snorts. “Probably. Namjoon-ah said we should wait until they tell us, that they probably don’t want us to feel left out that they’re meeting in person so regularly.”
“If they don’t want us to know, they need to stop being so obvious – they both sent me a photo of the same sunset from Jeongguk’s kitchen window yesterday evening,” Taehyung points out. “Within seconds of one another. My camera roll looks like a sunset timelapse.”
The three of them fall quiet, working on their cosplays in companionable silence. Jimin frowns down at his hat, and then holds it up in front of him. It still isn’t pointy, but now it looks even worse – in fact, it looks distinctly like…
“I’ve made a dick hat,” he says flatly, showing the very erect hat to the camera, before turning in his chair to show Taehyung.
“Is that a hat on your head or are you just pleased to see me?” Taehyung asks with a blank expression as, behind him, Hoseok’s laughter blasts through Jimin’s speakers.
“It’s fine, I can fix this,” Jimin says, searching frantically through YouTube for tutorials on how to make pointy hats. It seems to involve hand-sewing parts of the point to pinch it together into an arched shape, rather than what he’s done, which was to just jam stuffing up in there and try to mould it into shape. He works quickly, and then holds up his amended hat again.
“Oh, good, now you’re making a floppy dick hat,” Taehyung says, to renewed peals of laughter from Hoseok.
“Well, you do it, then,” Jimin says, tossing his inadvertent dick hat over to Taehyung, who catches it easily with one hand. He flips it over, takes a pencil off his desk, and slips it past the circle of material keeping the stuffing in place, through the stuffing itself, and with a little poke the point of Jimin’s hat pops back out, instantly transforming it into a perfectly pointy hat. “Oh, hey, thanks.”
“Ah, I’m excited to see you both again,” Hoseok says, still giggling intermittently. “It’s been so long.”
“Nearly three years since the last con,” Jimin agrees. “Over four since we all went to the same con at the same time.”
They fall silent again, and stay that way until everyone else starts cropping up online.
Dear Universtars,
One month out from Universtar-con! Tickets have, as I’m sure you know, been sold out for a while, however we are offering FIVE lucky players the chance to win tickets. All you have to do to enter is submit your own artwork of either your character or any NPC to [email protected] by January 31st for a chance to win! This can be any form of art – digital, traditional, even cosplay! For full terms and conditions, please visit universtar.kr.
We look forward to seeing you in the stars!
The Universtar Dev Team
[guild] tata: @chimmy send the dev team a pic of your dick hat
[guild] Auto_Mod: [tata] has been removed from [Bangtan] guild for [profanity] for [12 hours]. Remember – Universtar is for all ages!
Behind him, Taehyung cackles as he says “Worth it!”
[guild] shooky: jimin’s WHAT
[guild] mang: i’ll send you a pic hyung
[guild] shooky: uh, no? i don’t consent??
[guild] shooky: oh
[guild] shooky: yeah that’s very ithyphallic
[guild] chimmy: ithywhat
[guild] shooky: look i don’t want to get banned again it’s a bad look for a guildmaster to get banned for rude words
[guild] cooky: hoseok-hyung why are you sending yoongi-hyung pictures of jimin >:[
[guild] chimmy: that’s jimin-HYUNG to you
[guild] mang: i didn’t realise you were all online, i’ll send it to the discord one sec
Jimin’s Discord notification chimes, and then chimes several more times in rapid succession:
Hoseok Today at 10:23 AM
(image sent)
Jeongguk Today at 10:23 AM
DICK HAT
Taehyung Today at 10:23 AM
DICK HAT
Yoongi Today at 10:23 AM
DICK HAT
Namjoon Today at 10:24 AM
DICK HAT
Seokjin Today at 10:27 AM
…Good morning, everyone?
Seokjin Today at 10:27 AM
Oh, yeah, that’s pretty DICK HAT of you, Jimin-ah.
Jimin Today at 10:28 AM
i am DELETING it’s not MEANT to look like a DICK
(image sent)
Yoongi Today at 10:32 AM
that’s very good jimin-ah, you should be really proud of your hard work, but that doesn’t negate
DICK HAT
Jimin is mindlessly gathering herbs for a daily quest from the city’s apothecary, barely looking at his screen as he checks Twitter with his other hand, when he gets a private message in game.
[whisper] RJ: Hey
[whisper] chimmy: hi!
[whisper] RJ: So, there’s no easy way to say this, but I think I found your Grindr profile?
Jimin frowns, because he doesn’t use Grindr, but then Seokjin sends a screenshot over.
[whisper] chimmy: kekekekekeke yeah that’s me
[whisper] chimmy: but like
[whisper] chimmy: that photo’s almost a decade old
[whisper] RJ: Oh, thank GOD.
[whisper] chimmy:???
[whisper] RJ: I saw your picture and thought you were, you know, ‘Jimin 18’.
[whisper] RJ: I thought I’d accidentally befriended an 18 year old.
[whisper] RJ: Nothing wrong with that, of course! It’s just, you know, I’m over thirty, and that’s a huge life experience gap, and I was suddenly revaluating all of our conversations, just in case I’d said anything inappropriate.
[whisper] RJ: Even though, again, 18 is fine!
[whisper] RJ: It’s totally normal to be 18!
[whisper] chimmy: hyung? It’s okay. I’m 27!
[whisper] chimmy: finished my enlistment and everything. I even tie my own shoelaces! I am a fully grown adult man, if that’s something you’re interested in ᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ
Jimin regrets the emoticon as soon as he sends the message. Then, a few moments later, he regrets sending the message itself, and his regret only grows the longer he goes without a response from Seokjin. It’s not even been that long, especially in comparison to the grand scheme of things - two minutes without a response is nothing in comparison to how long humans have been alive, how long the planet has existed, how long it has been since the universe first exploded into existence.
But the universe is not the one he’s sent an embarrassing message to, and the universe is not the one who has left him on read for two minutes and thirty seconds.
Jimin takes a deep breath and opens up his chat window with Seokjin.
[whisper] RJ: I mean… I am on Grindr. So, yes, that’s something I’m interested in!
Jimin stares at the message. Wills the words to rearrange themselves into something, anything that reflected the amount of time they had taken to craft. Something flirty and fun.
He opens his chat with Yoongi, sends him a nonsensical, crunchy looking gif of Thanos saying “Fine, I’ll do it myself” in large, overly meme-y text because he knows it’ll infuriate Yoongi, and then he tabs back to his conversation with Seokjin.
[whisper] chimmy: so
[whisper] chimmy: grindr huh
Excellent start, Jimin, he thinks to himself, stretching his thumbs like he’s an athlete limbering up for the Olympics. He can do this, he’s just a little rusty.
[whisper] RJ: Yes, it’s a dating app!
[whisper] chimmy: hyung i know what grindr is
[whisper] chimmy: you found me on grindr, remember
[whisper] RJ: Right! Sorry, ahaha, I’m just a little nervous.
[whisper] RJ: I’m not technically ‘out’ irl.
[whisper] RJ: You’re the first person I’ve told, actually.
[whisper] chimmy: oh
[whisper] chimmy: wow
[whisper] chimmy: thank you for telling me!
[whisper] chimmy: when you feel comfortable doing so, the other guys will be super supportive!
[whisper] RJ: Thank you, Jimin-ah •ᴗ•
“What do you think it’d be like, dating someone in the closet?” Jimin asks Taehyung, apropos of nothing, almost two weeks later.
“I… Hadn’t really thought about it?” Taehyung says, looking up from his phone. They’re both sitting at their computers, waiting for Universtar to load. “Everyone I’ve ever dated, or been interested in dating, they’ve all been out of the closet.”
“Was that deliberate?” Jimin says. When Taehyung raises his eyebrows questioningly, Jimin elaborates further. “I mean, because they’re out of the closet, they’re more attractive to you?”
Taehyung hums. “No, I don’t think so. Most of the people I meet nowadays, outside of the hellish landscape that is the corporate office, I meet in a social setting where they’re likely to be gay - meetups at cons, gay bars, friends of friends. And, I mean, I don’t usually become attracted to someone until I know them pretty well, you know? Which usually means I know how they identify.” He taps his thumbs against his phone screen, the motion keeping his lock screen, a photo of the two of them with carbonated bubble masks on, permanently onscreen. “Why’d you ask?”
“Oh, no reason,” Jimin says airily, watching the little white loading bar on the Universtar home screen. “And, uh, hypothetically, what do you think it’d be like in a long-distance relationship?”
“…The Venn diagram of who this hypothetical man could be just got a lot smaller,” Taehyung replies dryly. “And if you want to know that, why not just ask Jeongguk, or Yoongi?”
“We’re still not supposed to know that they’re dating,” Jimin points out. “Not to mention that Yoongi blocked me because I got annoyed and started talking to him exclusively in Thanos memes.” Jimin’s camera roll is currently a very odd place, but he’s waiting for Yoongi to unblock him so that he can send him the image of Thanos he’d edited to have huge, pleading eyes with the text ‘fank yoo for unbwocking me XD’. It had taken him half an hour to make, and it would be a shame if all that work went to waste.
“Well, I’d imagine it’d be similar to a long-distance friendship,” Taehyung says thoughtfully. “Better in some ways than a face-to-face relationship, worse in others.”
“Uh huh, uh huh,” Jimin says as Universtar finally fully loads - he opens up the guild chat and shoots off a quick message to the others, letting them know that Taehyung was just waiting for his older computer to load. “And if these two scenarios were, hypothetically, happening at the same time?”
“I’m sorry, was I supposed to think they weren’t?” Taehyung jokes - he holds up his hands defensively when Jimin pouts at him. “Sorry, Jimin-ah, but you weren’t exactly being subtle.” Jimin huffs out a breath. “So, what brought this on? Really.”
“I was talking to Seokjin, and I flirted a little,” Jimin says.
“Okay?” Taehyung asks, clearly confused. “Everyone flirts with each other. Hoseokie-hyung and I are terrible for it.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jimin says. “But flirting with Seokjin wasn’t necessarily fun, it made me feel… Nervous.”
“Bad nervous?”
Jimin shakes his head. “Good nervous. Like, I wanted it to go well,” Jimin explains. “And I didn’t want to make him feel uncomfortable, and I wanted him to reciprocate.”
“And? Did he?”
“Not really.” Jimin shrugs. “Not that he shot me down, more like he didn’t really notice what I was doing.”
“Was this before or after he came out to us in the Guild chat?”
“Before,” Jimin says, snorting. Universtar’s relatively strict rules on discussable topics meant that Seokjin had chosen to navigate this by telling the Guild chat “I am part of the Alphabetti Spaghetti!” with no further context.
“…Maybe he really didn’t notice,” Taehyung says, pulling his headphones on just as he logs into Discord voice chat. “And if you want him to notice, you’ll just have to flirt harder.”
“Who’re we flirting with?” Hoseok says over Jimin’s headphones.
“Yoongi-hyung,” Jimin says immediately. “I think it’ll make him look like a bashful hedgehog.”
“Was banning you on mobile not enough?” Yoongi says flatly. “Must I ban you on every platform we’re both on?”
“Please, that wouldn’t be enough,” Jimin scoffs, finally getting past all of the opening menus of Universtar - they really need to sort out their internet, because Jimin’s character is lagging so badly that he’s stuck running at invisible zone walls until the game finishes loading - the point of Universtar is that it’s supposed to be open world. “I’d just turn up at your apartment.”
“I’m not there,” Yoongi says smugly, to which Jeongguk emits a little, aborted ‘eep’.
“Oh?” Taehyung says immediately, latching onto the comment like a dog onto a bone. “And just where are you, hyung?”
“I am… Away,” Yoongi says.
“Really? Whereabouts?” Jimin asks, turning in his chair to grin at Taehyung. “Depending on where you are, you could come visit one of us! Or two, if you choose me and Taehyungie.”
“Oh, would you look at that, the patch notes have just been released,” Namjoon says, in an extremely transparent attempt to change the subject. “Aw, they’ve fixed that bug where you could glitch through the side of Mount Singularity if you shimmied at it with the dancing emote,” Namjoon says, his pout clearly audible in his voice. “That’s so annoying, it cut down my travelling time by about half an hour.”
“Was your last ban not enough?” Yoongi says tiredly, the tone of a man desperately trying to keep a ship from sinking. “Please stop trying to break this game.”
“Whoa, wait, Namjoon-ah, you got banned?” Seokjin asks incredulously, making Jimin jump - he hadn’t noticed Seokjin log on.
“Have we never told you this story?” Hoseok says gleefully. “Yeah, Namjoon got banned - it was supposed to be permanent, but Yoongi interceded.”
“What did you get banned for?” Seokjin says in a low, wary voice.
“I figured out how the stock market works,” Namjoon huffs, his breath crackling his microphone. “Which, I’d like to point out, wasn’t against the game’s terms of service-”
“Which is why I was able to negotiate your ban down to one month, rather than for, you know, ever,” Yoongi points out.
“The… The stock market?” Seokjin asks.
“The in-game stock market,” Jimin explains. “Not the real one.”
“Why would you get banned for that?” Seokjin says. “Buy low, sell high, it’s just economics 101-”
“No, no, I figured out how it worked. As in, how the game determined the daily values of the stocks. Or how it used to, anyway, the dev team changed their methodology after they banned me,” Namjoon says. On screen, Seokjin sits his character down in front of Namjoon’s - everyone else follows suit, making Namjoon huff out a laugh. “Okay, so, the general consensus was that the value of stocks were randomly determined each day at 12AM KST, but I figured out that it was actually decided by how much of that stock’s equivalent physical item had sold in the shops the day before. So, for example, the stocks for the armoury would be determined by how much armour the armourer had sold the day before.”
“Makes sense so far,” Seokjin says.
“So… I’d buy stock when it was being sold at low prices, then I’d just go and… Buy as much as I could from the equivalent shop. The next day, I’d sell all of my stocks at ridiculously high prices, lather, rinse, repeat.”
“I’m… Namjoon, I’m surprised you weren’t banned forever,” Seokjin laughs loudly, making Jimin smile. His laugh is nice - his voice is nice, which is when Jimin realises this is the first time he’s actually heard Seokjin on voice chat before. Every other time they’ve talked, they’ve talked over messages - Seokjin is almost never on voice chat.
“Namjoon’s saving grace was that he was clearly only doing it because it interested him to see how the game mechanics worked,” Taehyung says, making Jimin jump again, distracted by thinking about Seokjin’s voice. “He was giving most of the money away anonymously, and the money he was keeping he was spending on weapons to hide in chests around the map.”
“You’re so cute,” Seokjin says, and if Jimin was a lesser man, he would have recorded that and made it his ringtone. As it is, he just has to put up with the sounds of it bouncing back and forth inside his head like the DVD logo.
“…And that’s how my hair ended up pink for a month,” Jimin finishes, smiling in satisfaction when Seokjin laughs.
“You’re lucky you didn’t lose your hair entirely,” Seokjin says, still giggling. “I bet it looked good, though.”
They’ve been talking a lot on voice chat – the combination of him coming out and that first voice chat seems to have opened the floodgates for Seokjin. He was fun to talk to over messages, but hearing the little inflections of his voice when he tells a joke, or recounts his day, or, in this case, laughs at one of Jimin’s stories, is a delight.
“It suited me,” Jimin admits. “Although Taehyung did call me Strawberry Shortcake for months afterwards. I still have pictures, if you want to see?”
“Oh! Um. I do,” Seokjin says, so Jimin opens his photos on his phone to scroll back through. “But not yet?”
“Not… Yet?” Jimin asks. He snorts. “Is this where you tell me that your webcam is broken, and it inevitably turns out that you were a catfish all along, and the person I’m speaking to right now is just a recording of a paid actor?”
“No, nothing like that,” Seokjin says with another laugh. “But it’s… Don’t laugh,” he warns. “But I like having friends who don’t know what I look like. It means that they’re friends with me for just… Me, you know?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Hoseok says, phone under his chin as Jimin and Taehyung video call him on his commute home from work. He’s walking with a spring in his step - Jimin can tell, because the background is bouncing behind him like clothes in a washing machine. “He’s famous. Or a vampire.”
“Neither of those are obvious things, hyung,” Jimin says with a frown.
“Maybe he’s just shy?” Taehyung suggests, the same way he had suggested it when Jimin had first brought it up with him.
“Then why would he say ‘not yet’?” Jimin responds, the same way he had responded to Taehyung earlier. “He’s obviously planning to see our faces, and show us his - I mean, he’s seen my Grindr profile, and he saw that photo of me holding my hat for the con.”
“But your face was cut off in that photo,” Hoseok points out. It’s raining in Gwangju - a drop of rain lands on Hoseok’s camera, distorting the video feed like a fisheye lens. Hoseok swipes his phone against his leg, turning the screen dark for a moment before he appears on screen again. “And your Grindr profile is old, Jimin-ah. He’s basically never seen you at all. I’m telling you, famous? Or a vampire.”
No one provides him with likelier options - later, on video chat, Yoongi suggests he might be an undercover cop hoping to arrest Jimin for using terrible memes, while Namjoon suggests he might be one of the game developers.
“It makes sense!” Namjoon protests when Jimin sighs loudly enough into his microphone that he can hear the sound of it getting picked up from Taehyung’s microphone across the room. “Think about it - Universtar gets rocked by a huge scandal, it’s reasonable that the dev team would want to check out the highest performing guilds. Not to mention that we got a shoutout in the newsletter the week before he joined, remember?”
“Yeah, because Jimin-hyung and Taehyung-hyung grinded for eighteen hours straight,” Jeongguk says with a sniff. “I doubt the dev team wanted to spy on us just because Jimin and Taehyung take this game too seriously.”
“Says the guy with limited edition rhodium armour that you played for hours to get because ‘it’s the prettiest’, only to never use because your Moon Rabbit doesn’t use that particular armour,” Taehyung shoots back. “My human would, but-”
“If you wanted the armour so much, you should get good at the game,” Jeongguk interrupts, prompting a splutter of indignant rage from Taehyung.
“Guys!” Jimin says, thumping his fist against his desk. “You’re getting off topic! The topic being Seokjin’s face, or lack thereof.”
“Wait, you don’t think he has a face?” Hoseok says incredulously. “You shot down my vampire idea out of hand, but you think this man is faceless?”
“No, I know he has a face,” Jimin says shortly. “What I mean is, you know how in dramas when characters start dating online, and one of them refuses to show their face, so you’re yelling at the television for them to question them further? And you think ‘well, I’d never be so trusting’?”
“…This is a very specific example, Jimin-ah,” Yoongi says slowly. “Why are you worried about it? You didn’t see my face until we’d known each other for a year.”
Jimin frowns. “I… Don’t know?”
“I think… If you were going to meet him on your own, it’d be good to be cautious,” Yoongi continues. “But you’re not, right?” Jimin shakes his head. “Okay, so, I think you should think about why you want to see his face so much that you’d call us all for an emergency video call in the middle of dinner.”
“I’m sorry, did you have plans?” Jimin replies.
“Yes,” Yoongi says; at the same time, Jeongguk squeaks out a “No!”
For the next few days, Jimin engages in a level of introspection he doesn’t normally undertake. He thinks about why he would care so much about seeing Seokjin’s face, matching it up to his voice, being able to imagine what his mouth looked like when he laughed, how his eyes might scrunch up when he smiled, how his hair would move when he ran his fingers through it.
Eventually, he comes to the conclusion that none of that really matters. None of that has had any bearing on how he feels about Seokjin - namely, that he’d like to get closer to him, learn the things he loves, find out what he’s like throughout the year. Does he enjoy the holidays? Does he get melancholy in the autumn, or does he thrive under the changing seasons? Is he a night owl, or a morning person?
He’s curious about what Seokjin looks like, sure, but that’s because he wants to know as much about Seokjin as he can - if Seokjin’s not ready to show his face yet, well, then Jimin’ll just look forward to the day when he does get to see Seokjin.
Dear Universtars,
We’re pleased to announce the usernames of the winners of our recent competition to win tickets to Universtar-con! All of the entries we received were incredible, but our judging panel felt that these five in particular really went above and beyond in portraying that Universtar spirit! All of the winning entries will be available to look at on our website - please do take a look!
IAmPurple
RJ
XXgirlgamerXx
Th3odor3
Sus4nP3v3ns13
Thank you once again to all of our entrants - this community wouldn’t be the same without all of you.
We look forward to seeing you in the stars!
The Universtar Dev Team
[guild] chimmy: @RJ WHAT
[guild] RJ: Oh yeah, surprise!
[guild] RJ: I was going to tell you all after work, but the devs beat me to it.
[guild] mang: dude that’s awesome!!!
“Hey, we should let Seokjin know that we’ve got space for him to stay with us,” Taehyung says over his shoulder.
“That’s a good idea,” Jimin says. “Text the guys, although I’m pretty sure they’ll be okay with it?”
A few minutes and four positive replies later, Hoseok sends a message to the guild chat.
[guild] mang: so we’ve got two rooms booked… one’s a three bed and one’s a four, you should stay with us!!
[guild] RJ: That would be super helpful! Saves me having to look for a hotel room at such short notice… I live in Seoul, but because the con’s on the other side of the city, it would be handy to be closer.
[guild] koya: yeah, it’s the same for me and yoongi hyung - we’re both in the city too, but our apartment is too small to have everyone over… It’s nice to book a hotel so we can all hang out together
[guild] RJ: You two live together? I thought Yoongi lived with Jeongguk?
[guild] cooky: HAHA WHAT
[guild] cooky: WHAT GAVE YOU THAT IDEA
[guild] cooky: sorry capslock was on
[guild] RJ: You come through on each other’s microphones sometimes?
“I can’t believe we’re finally going to get confirmation that they’re dating, and it’s because Seokjin is incredibly perceptive to audio levels on everyone’s microphones,” Taehyung says gleefully, leaning back in his chair and clapping his hands as Yoongi and Jeongguk try to explain themselves.
“It’ll make sharing hotel rooms a little easier - they’ll want to share a room, so at least now they won’t be pretending not to date, while whoever ends up sharing with them pretends not to notice all of the yearning looks,” Jimin jokes, pumping his fist in the air as Yoongi and Jeongguk finally, finally, admit that they’ve been dating for the last few weeks.
Wait.
[guild] chimmy: WEEKS??!?!
[guild] shooky: uh yeah?
[guild] shooky: four weeks two days
[guild] koya: so… a month?
[guild] chimmy: i thought you’d been dating FOR months??
[guild] cooky: lmao no
[guild] cooky: he only just noticed that i’ve been pining after him for YEARS, AND i had to ask him out myself
[guild] cooky: the audacity…
[guild] shooky: >:[
[guild] cooky: sorry babe
[guild] shooky: :]
[guild] mang: okay! None of that in the gc please and thank you!!!
Jimin is supposed to be reworking a spreadsheet for his boss - whoever had written it before has, rather than creating new sheets for separate years, just been adding columns to create a behemoth of a spreadsheet, spanning both years and a whole spectrum of terrible cell colours. He’s working from home, and his boss needs it by Monday; while he has three days to get it done, it’d probably be wise to have it finished by the end of the day, so that he doesn’t have to work over the weekend.
If he decided not to finish the spreadsheet tonight, then he really needs to finish his cosplay. The convention is next weekend, and while he has his hat, sword, and shoes ready to go, he’s missing the most crucial element - namely, his robes. He’s got all of the pieces cut out, but his sewing machine packed up when he was finishing his hat, which means he needs to do his robes by hand. That, or attempt to fix his sewing machine.
Instead of any of these tasks, however, he’s clearing out his Universtar inventory. He’s got items in there that haven’t been useful in years - elixirs when he’s been using an alchemist-infused healing charm since level 30, rusty swords that, even if he got around to taking them to the blacksmith’s, he wouldn’t use anyway, five additional sets of commemorative shoes for the anniversaries of the game, and almost forty shields, despite the fact that he’s predominantly been using a two-handed sword for the last few years.
He’s been meaning to have a clear out for a while. Should he be doing it now, when he has other, more pressing tasks to be getting on with? Probably not.
“You don’t need to be justifying yourself to me,” Seokjin says over voice chat as Jimin outlines his excuses. “I’m literally at work right now, sitting in my office, talking to you on Discord while I nod pleasantly on my muted Zoom meeting.”
“You’re the hyung, you shouldn’t be encouraging me,” Jimin says. “Is your cosplay ready for next weekend?”
“It’s been ready for a while,” Seokjin admits; in the background, Jimin can just about make out faint keystrokes, and the occasional murmur of someone else’s voice. “It’s how I won the competition, actually - I’ve been cosplaying as my avatar for a while, now, so the cosplay was more or less all ready to go.”
“You’ve cosplayed before? Have you been to Universtar-con?” Jimin asks curiously.
“Yeah, a few times, actually. I wasn’t originally going to go this year, which is why I didn’t get a ticket, but then I saw everyone else was going, so I entered that competition.”
“That’s so weird,” Jimin says, tabbing out of the game and into his photos folder. “We’ve gone every year, we could’ve seen you.”
“I mean… It’s possible?” Seokjin says. “I’ve done one or two panels before, so yeah.”
Jimin scrolls through his photos for a moment, but there’s nobody who looks like they’re wearing a cosplay of Seokjin’s Universtar character. The panels he can remember going to aren’t any help either, because all of the speakers had been in their everyday clothes. He has more or less gained net-zero information - yes, it’s possible he’s seen Seokjin before, but he still has no idea what he looks like.
“Is it weird that I’m both excited and nervous for the con?” Jimin says, trying to keep his voice light but failing.
“I feel the same, so it can’t be that weird,” Seokjin replies. “It’ll be nice to put faces to all of your names, though, I’m starting to feel silly for insisting we wait for so long.”
“Don’t!” Jimin blurts out. “Don’t feel silly, I mean. It’ll be so fun seeing each other for the first time in person, even if there was a time when we thought you were a celebrity. Or a cop.”
“I’m not sure whether I feel flattered or offended,” Seokjin says flatly. “Do I sound like a cop? Now you’re going to give me a complex, Jimin-ah.”
Jimin loves the way Seokjin says his name, which is a weird way to feel about your own name. He’s never really cared one way or the other about his name, never given it a whole lot of thought, but Seokjin says the word ‘Jimin’ affectionately, almost as a positive adjective rather than a neutral noun.
“No, you don’t, hyung,” Jimin says. Seokjin hums, pleased, in response. “Are you mostly excited, though?” Seokjin hums again, affirmatively this time. “Has someone just walked into your office, so you’re pretending to respond to one of your colleagues?” Seokjin hums a third time, except he overacts it, twisting through the notes like a slide whistle; Jimin laughs without interruption from Seokjin for so long that he thinks he’s accidentally managed to cut him off.
“Seokjin-hyung?” Jimin asks, a little breathless.
“I’m still here,” Seokjin replies gently. “Your laugh is really nice.”
“Oh,” Jimin says, his cheeks lifting up so high with his pleased smile that, if he glances down, he can see the tops of them. “Thank you.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Jimin says, pacing up and down the tiny hallway between his and Taehyung’s rooms. It’s hard going - their suitcases for tomorrow are littering the hallway, so he’s having to exaggeratedly step between them. Taehyung, sitting on his bed and watching Jimin pass back and forth, times his encouraging smile so that it aligns with Jimin passing by the door. “Right? I’ve never even seen him. Ridiculous.”
“You don’t need to see someone to feel romantically about them,” Taehyung points out gently, leaning back on his hands - his bed is so soft that he promptly sinks back onto his elbows.
“I mean, I know that, theoretically,” Jimin says, finally stopping his pacing in order to lean against Taehyung’s doorframe. “But it’s just… Taehyungie, what if, when I see him for the first time, I stop feeling this way? What would that say about me?”
Taehyung screws up his face, his mouth flattening into a straight, displeased line as his brow furrows. He sits up and pats the space next to him on the bed; when Jimin sits down, Taehyung presses their sides together, a warm, comforting presence.
“Absolutely nothing, Jiminie,” Taehyung says fiercely. “If, when we meet Seokjin face to face, you decide that you don’t want a romantic relationship with him, then all that says about you is that you don’t want a romantic relationship with him. No harm, no foul.”
“But isn’t that shallow?” Jimin insists, tangling his fingers in his lap.
“Not necessarily,” Taehyung says, shrugging. “I mean, if you meet this guy and continue to hit it off, and your only complaint is that he dyes his hair, I don’t know, blonde or something, then I’ll call you out for being shallow. Or if you realise you’re not physically attracted to him and you choose to tell him, then I’ll call you out for being a dick. Otherwise, I think you’re good.”
Jimin stands on his tiptoes, trying to see over everyone’s heads as they go about their commute at Seoul Station. He and Taehyung both have two huge suitcases each so they’re trying to stand politely out of the way, but there’re so many people that Jimin feels squished up against the wall they’re standing in front of.
Hoseok’s the only other person travelling into Seoul for the convention, but they’re meeting everyone here at the station anyway - it’s pretty close to the hotel they have booked, so they’re all going to check in, and then Yoongi, Namjoon and Seokjin have offered to show them around Seoul for the rest of the day.
“Imagine if Jeongguk hadn’t admitted he was dating Yoongi?” Taehyung says suddenly, checking the arrivals timetable again. “He would’ve needed to explain why he couldn’t get the train with us from Busan.”
Jimin snorts as he imagines it, and he’s still laughing when Jeongguk himself appears, carrying two suitcases. Namjoon and Yoongi are close behind - Namjoon holding his own suitcase, Yoongi suspiciously suitcase-free, although he is sporting a pretty intense blush.
“I don’t mind carrying my suitcase,” Yoongi says as Jeongguk sets the suitcases down in front of Jimin and Taehyung.
Jeongguk stretches his arms and shakes his head. “No, no need, carrying both of them keeps me balanced,” he says, holding out his arms for a hug. Hugging Jeongguk is great - he’s both broad and strong, so Jimin feels suitably cradled.
Hugging all of his friends is pretty great, Jimin quickly decides as he makes his rounds - Namjoon runs warm, even in the middle of winter, Yoongi is so bundled up against the cold that it’s rather like hugging a pile of soft blankets, and Hoseok, who sneaks up on him before launching into an enthusiastic hug from behind, laughs so joyously at Jimin’s squawk of surprise that it’s as though he’s being hugged by a sunbeam.
It would be wonderful if this was his life all the time - meeting up with his friends, hugging them and getting hugged, getting to see the little movements of their face in real time rather than in delayed pixels, hearing the tones of their voices as opposed to inferring them through text - but Jimin can’t yet justify packing up his life and moving to Seoul. He and Taehyung just can’t afford it yet, and while they probably could if they moved in with Hoseok or Jeongguk, Hoseok is understandably reluctant to move to Seoul without the same steady employment he has at the dance school in Gwangju he currently works at, and Jeongguk doesn’t want to move until he’s gone through his enlistment.
This is enough, for now, especially as things start to open up again and events happen more often - getting to share space with his friends, doing something he loves, means he appreciates spending time with them, looks forward to every time he sees them.
His phone vibrates in his pocket; the stereo of vibrations coming from everyone else’s phones gives him a pretty good indication of who might be texting him.
Seokjin Today at 09:39 AM
I’m running a little late with work - I’ll get a ride straight to the hotel, so I should be there about fifteen minutes after you get there!
“He must work pretty close to the hotel,” Yoongi says as they all type their responses. “Jimin-ah, what does hyung do for work?”
“Why’re you asking me?” Jimin replies, trying not to sound guilty and apparently failing, judging by Yoongi’s expression, a slow, disbelieving blink followed by him raising his eyebrows.
“You talk… All the time? Usually in the group chat?”
“If it bothers you that much, turn off notifications? I can show you how, I know the only reason your phone is on silent right now is because Jeongguk showed you how to do it-”
“Let’s take this conversation to the hotel, yeah?” Namjoon says, looking around. “You can argue to your heart’s content there.”
Their hotel rooms, next to each other in a hallway that has the slightly musty smell of an enclosed space that hasn’t seen the light of day in decades, are surprisingly decent. All of the beds are long enough that none of them will have to worry about their feet dangling off the edge, and both rooms have a pretty good view of the streets below. The windows will only open an inch, but it’s less alarming to look at than the hostel they’d once booked that had literal bars on the windows.
“Oh my god,” Hoseok says suddenly, pressing his forehead up against the window. “Come look at this car that’s just pulled up.”
Jimin hoists himself up off the bed he had been testing to join Hoseok at the window. They’re too high up for Jimin to be able to tell what model it is, but he’s pretty sure he’s looking at an incredibly expensive, shiny, black Mercedes. The driver gets out to get a suitcase out of the boot as a passenger emerges from the back of the car; the driver says something that makes the passenger shake their head, and they take their suitcase and head towards the hotel. "Didn’t really peg this hotel as the kind that gets clients who ride in those cars.” Before Hoseok can reply, Jimin’s phone rings - upon seeing who’s calling, he answers and immediately puts it on speakerphone. “Hi, hyung!”
“Hello, Jimin-ah,” Seokjin says, huffing a little. “I’m here!”
“Are you down in reception, hyung?” Hoseok says. “Did you just see that super fancy car pull up?”
“Uh… The Mercedes?”
“That’s the one!”
“I mean… I was in it? So I suppose you could say that I saw it?”
“Holy shit,” Taehyung mutters, looking up from where he’s kneeling on the ground, digging through one of his suitcases. “I can’t believe you’re getting a sugar daddy.” Jimin kicks him in the shoulder, sending him toppling to the ground.
“Is it your car?” Jeongguk calls from across the room. “Do you have a driver?”
“No, no, nothing like that - it’s the company car,” Seokjin insists; Jimin can hear the low-level rumbling of suitcase wheels against hard carpeted floors.
“Still,” Namjoon says. “That’s pretty impressive, hyung, having access to someone who can drive you around like that.”
“Kim Namjoon, I have driven you around for the last ten years,” Yoongi says indignantly.
“Yeah, in a Kia Pride older than you-”
Somebody knocks at the door; almost as one, everyone falls silent and whips their heads around to look at it.
“Uh… This is the room you guys are in, right?” Seokjin says eventually; Jimin can hear him in stereo, both through the phone and through the thin wood of the hotel room’s door. “Otherwise I’ve just knocked on a stranger’s door.”
“Yeah, it’s us!” Taehyung calls.
“Great! The receptionist says you have my key card, so could one of you let me in?”
Five faces turn to look expectantly at Jimin, who makes a big show of sighing, put-upon, as he stands up, in the hope of masking just how nervous he is. He exhales again once his hand is on the door handle, slow and through lips so pursed it’s almost a whistle, and he opens the door.
Kim Seokjin has a smile like a Polaroid photograph, developing slowly across his face until the resulting grin makes something in Jimin’s chest ache like nostalgia. Jimin has to clutch a little tighter at the door handle when, mortifyingly, he feels his knees go a little weak as Seokjin smiles impossibly wider at him.
“Jimin-ah! It’s nice to finally see you in person,” Seokjin says, and Jimin chooses to blame hearing his voice in person for the first time for the fact that he initially forgets that the reason Seokjin knows what he looks like is because he accidentally found is Grindr profile, and not due to some innate soul bond, like in those romantic movies Jeongguk loves to watch.
“You too, hyung,” Jimin says softly, looking over every feature of Seokjin’s face, trying to commit it to memory as fast as he can. It might just be his imagination, but Jimin would swear that Seokjin’s smile gets even brighter after Jimin speaks to him.
“Your hair’s not pink,” Seokjin says, his eyes flitting up to Jimin’s head briefly before he, almost immediately, makes eye contact with Jimin again.
“The upkeep, you know,” Jimin says, holding his hand out. He means to offer to take Seokjin’s suitcase from him, but Seokjin misunderstands and takes Jimin’s hand in his own, shaking it like they’re at a business meeting. Jimin will never admit that this hadn’t been his intention, though, because now he knows that Seokjin’s hand positively dwarfs his own, a little cool to the touch from the chill outside.
Somebody coughs behind him; Jimin jumps and, judging by the sudden jerk of his hand, so does Seokjin.
“Ah, my other friends!” He cheers loudly as Jimin steps aside to let him into the room. “Sorry, I know each of your secrets and favourite childhood stories, but I don’t know which one of you is which.”
“I’m Jimin,” Jeongguk says immediately, face serious as he stands up and goes to shake Seokjin’s hand.
“I,” Taehyung chimes in, also going to shake Seokjin’s hand. “Am also Jimin.” Hoseok gets halfway through introducing himself as Jimin too before he laughs loudly, falling back against the bed.
“The real Jimin was the friends we made along the way,” Yoongi says as he carefully unpacks his suitcase.
“Our friendship group is a matryoshka doll of Jimins,” Namjoon finishes. “It’s nothing but Jimins all the way down.”
“Amazingly,” Seokjin says flatly as Jeongguk and Taehyung continue shaking his hand. “Even if I’d never heard your voices, I’d know which one of you was which from those comments alone.”
Jimin loves all of his friends. They are some of the most important people in the world to him, and he cherishes them all dearly.
“I am going to push all of you in the way of the first person with a clipboard that we see,” Jimin hisses, bumping his hip into Hoseok, who just laughs and bumps him right back. “They’re going to take up so much of your time, and I’m just going to watch from the side-lines as you struggle to politely disengage from the conversation.”
“All I said was ‘Seokjin is very good looking, isn’t he?’” Yoongi says, turning his nose up and away with an imperious sniff. “You projecting there, Jimin-ah?”
“You have a boyfriend,” Jimin huffs, eyeing Seokjin to check that he’s not listening. He doesn’t seem to be - he’s walking ahead of them with Taehyung, talking to him about a play that’s being advertised outside of the theatre they’ve just walked past.
“A boyfriend who also agrees that Seokjin-hyung is hot,” Jeongguk himself pipes up, walking close enough to Yoongi that their hands bump together as they walk; Jimin has to remind himself that he is currently acting cross with them to prevent himself from loudly cooing at the sight. Then he realises that doing that could embarrass them, so he does it anyway.
Jeongguk blushes a satisfying pink, but Yoongi, unfazed, takes up Jeongguk’s hand and then, menace that he is, loudly says “Can someone come hold Jimin’s hand? I think he’s lonely.”
Taehyung and Seokjin stop up ahead and pull back; Taehyung snatches up Jimin’s hand and swings it. “I’ll always hold your hand, you don’t need Yoongi to ask for you.”
Seokjin smiles politely. “You’re both very cute - how long have you been together?”
“Me and Taehyung?” Jimin asks, surprised. “We’re not dating.”
“Yeah, he’s my soulmate, but we’re not together,” Taehyung corroborates with a shake of his head.
“Oh, sorry, I misunderstood,” Seokjin says, although he doesn’t look sorry - his expression is closer to relief, more pleased than apologetic.
“Don’t be! Jiminie’s very dateable, I think,” Taehyung says seriously. “Kind? Check. Hot? Check. Funny? Check. Talented? Check. It’d be an honour to date him, honestly.”
Seokjin opens his mouth to say something, but seems to think better of it at the last second; he shuts his mouth again with a little pop, and smiles.
“You’re as bad as Yoongi-hyung,” Jimin hisses into Taehyung’s ear once Seokjin has moved on to talk with Hoseok.
“He wants to ask you out,” Taehyung says assuredly.
“Do you… Know that?”
“Not… Officially. Not in so many words? But, I mean, how much do we know, really?” Taehyung says. “We don’t know that all of the oxygen on the planet won’t fly away tomorrow, but we can readily assume that it won’t.”
“…I don’t know enough about oxygen to tell you that that’s wrong, but it sounds wrong,” Jimin says. “I’m pretty sure we do know that oxygen won’t do that.”
“You get what I’m saying though, right?” Taehyung says. Jimin sighs, but he nods, because he does - sometimes you don’t need to be told something to know that it’s probably true.
Because Jimin’s not blind. He’s caught Seokjin looking at him a lot, watching for his reactions to things he points out around Seoul, standing close enough that Jimin can appreciate how well they’d fit together, if one of them moved just a little bit closer. All the signs point to Seokjin being at least interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with Jimin.
But the verbal confirmation from Seokjin himself, that he is interested - well, Jimin wouldn’t say no to having that guarantee.
“So,” Jimin says as Seokjin returns to them, pink around the ears. “You’re something of a big deal in the Universtar fandom. A fandom bamf, as it were.”
“God, please don’t say that ever again,” Seokjin says, trying to skirt behind Namjoon. “No one has said that in at least ten years.”
They’d all decided that, for the first day of the convention, they’d go in cosplay, and then go in regular clothes on the second to check out panels and the artist alley. And Jimin had noticed, almost immediately, that their little group was attracting some attention.
They usually did anyway, and Hoseok’s Van headpiece is pretty eye-catching, but this seemed excessive, and focused almost entirely on Seokjin. Who, it turns out, has something of a cult following at conventions.
He keeps getting asked to take photos with other cosplayers, and Jimin can’t really blame them - Seokjin’s cosplay is incredibly well made, and he just looks nice and approachable. He’d let a small girl pose with his prop sword and shield for her parents to take photographs, which had resulted in Jimin suddenly entertaining fantasies of Seokjin as a father, fantasies so soft and earnest that even the sight of someone carrying the weirdest looking body pillow he’d ever seen wasn’t enough to bring him down from his high.
“I used to play Maple Universe,” Seokjin explains quietly as they shuffle across the convention hall, trying to hide Seokjin from view so that they can go get something to eat before everything sells out. “It was by the same developers as Universtar, and when they stopped supporting Maple Universe, uh, six months ago, now? They offered to let us port our characters and levels over to Universtar, or as equivalent as it could get, anyway. So, I signed up for Universtar, joined a guild, almost immediately after most of the guild got wiped for cheating, and that’s how I ended up in our guild.”
“That doesn’t explain why you have fans, hyung,” Jimin points out.
Surprisingly, Yoongi is the one to answer. “Because Maple Universe was huge back in the day. Anyone attached to it - the developers, the artists, even some of the more popular fans, they all had huge, cult-like sub-fandoms. No offense, hyung, I’m sure your fans are great.”
“They’re not my fans,” Seokjin says with a cringe so great it makes his whole body shudder.
“Why do you know so much about Maple Universe?” Hoseok asks Yoongi curiously, who shrugs.
“Oh my god,” Seokjin says suddenly, straightening up. “I’ve just realised who you must be.” Yoongi turns to look at Seokjin, rather like a deer in headlights. “You’re glosswrites.”
“Gloss writes what?” Jeongguk asks curiously as Yoongi pulls his hat over his face.
“No, no, that was his handle, way back in the day,” Seokjin explains. “He was in the Maple Universe fandom, he was one of the first guild leaders to make the switch over to Universtar. He also…” He blinks. “Do they know?”
“No, but you can tell them,” Yoongi mutters. “It’s a miracle they haven’t found out already.”
“If you don’t want us to know, you don’t have to tell us,” Namjoon says with a frown, as everyone else nods.
Yoongi peeks out from underneath his hat, and makes a show of sighing exasperatedly. “No, it’s fine. I used to write fanfiction. Glosswrites was my handle.”
“That’s not embarrassing,” Jeongguk says firmly. “That’s amazing.” Jimin’s not sure ‘amazing’ is necessarily the word he would choose, but he’s also not been in love with Yoongi for years. It is pretty cool, though, if a little unexpected.
“‘Fanfiction’, please, these were novels,” Seokjin says. “Most of the fandom considered them basically canon. And then one day he finished his latest work in progress, and in the author’s notes at the end basically just said ‘I’m jumping ship to Universtar now bye’ and no one ever heard from him again.”
Yoongi snorts. “I literally told you where I was going.”
“Gone, from the face of the earth, never to be seen-” Seokjin cuts himself off suddenly as a young man approaches them.
“RJ-hyung?” He looks nervous, his toes pointing inward as he looks up at Seokjin with doe-eyes that could give Jeongguk a run for their money. He looks younger than them - Jimin would put him at twenty, maybe a year or two older.
“Hello,” Seokjin says, not looking nonplussed in the slightest over being addressed by his username in public, even though Jimin thinks that if anyone were to call him ‘chimmy’ in real life his soul would actually leave his body. “Are you enjoying the con?”
“Oh, yes! Um, I was wondering… my friends and I were going to check out artist alley, did you want to come along?”
“That’s very kind of you to ask, but I’m hanging out with my friends,” Seokjin says gently, throwing his arm around Jimin’s shoulders. He probably means it demonstratively, but Jimin feels himself relax down from a tension he hadn’t even noticed creeping up through his spine. “Enjoy the rest of the con!”
“You too!” The man says, looking a little disappointed over being shot down so efficiently, but Jimin can’t feel too sorry for him - who asks someone out without even exchanging names first?
“Hyung, this fic is almost five-hundred-thousand words long,” Namjoon says, seemingly unaware of what’s just transpired as his thumb flicks wildly over his phone.
“As I said, novels,” Seokjin agrees. His arm is still around Jimin’s shoulders, so Jimin stays still, like he would if a bird landed on his outstretched palm. Seokjin seems to misconstrue his stillness, though, and goes to move his arm, so Jimin, in a moment of bravery, lurches his hand up to hold onto Seokjin’s hand, keeping it in place.
After a few minutes of listening to their friends talk about Yoongi’s series of three novel-length fanfics, Jimin chances a glance up at Seokjin. He’s already looking at Jimin, his eyebrows raised in surprise as his lips curl up in delight.
“We should talk,” Jimin says, sitting down next to Seokjin on the hotel bed. It is, technically, an ambush - they’re sharing the three-person room with Taehyung, who had made himself mysteriously absent after Jimin had given him a significant look when they had returned to the hotel. They’re still in their full cosplay, Jimin in his buttery yellow robes and hat, Seokjin in plate armour made of craft foam, because Jimin had been too eager to have this talk to allow them time to change.
“We should,” Seokjin agrees. “Although, I admit, I didn’t think I’d be having this conversation with you while carrying a scabbard.”
“How did you think this would go?” Jimin asks curiously.
“I was going to ask you if you would be interested in dating me when we all went to dinner tonight,” Seokjin says, very clearly trying not to laugh. “When I was wearing normal people clothes. Perhaps some slacks, if I was feeling fancy.”
Jimin hums. “I can see the vision. Unfortunately, I’m very impatient, so you’ll just have to ask me out while we’re cosplaying.”
“I thought this conversation was going to be you asking me out,” Seokjin says, finally giving into his laughter, which spills out of him in little peals. “Why am I suddenly asking?”
“You clearly had a plan already,” Jimin says, scooting around on the bed until he’s sitting, cross-legged, facing Seokjin. “I am just… Expediting the process.”
“Well, it does make it a little easier,” Seokjin says, mirroring Jimin’s position. “Jimin-ah, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you over the past few months. We live halfway across the country from one another, but talking to you in any way is usually the highlight of my day, so I think we’ve got a good shot at making this work. Also, you’re very hot.”
“I’m very hot?” Jimin says. “I went weak-kneed when I first saw you, hyung.”
“When you opened that door, I couldn’t stop smiling at you,” Seokjin says, before laughing again. “Let’s just agree that we’re both hot, and it’d be in everyone’s interest for us to date.”
“Well, if it’s for the good of everyone,” Jimin jokes, before he lets his grin soften into something warmer, more reflective of how bright and champagne-fizzy his heart feels. “I’d like that.”
“I’d really like to kiss you,” Seokjin says, his gaze flicking down to Jimin’s mouth.
“Well, come here then,” Jimin says with a grin.
Seokjin pushes himself up onto his knees on the bed and crawls to sit in Jimin’s lap, resting comfortably between Jimin’s crossed legs as he props his heels behind Jimin’s back and drapes his arms over his shoulders. Jimin, in turn, moves his hands so that the delicate skin of his wrists rests on Seokjin’s hips, his hands naturally falling to support his back.
Once they’re settled, Seokjin moves one of his hands to thread his fingers through the back of Jimin’s hair. He’s not tugging, but the gentle pull of it feels nice, like the relief of brushing product out of his hair at the end of the day.
They lean in to kiss one another at the same time; a small part of Jimin wishes there was someone to take a photo of them kissing in their full cosplay, but the majority of him marvels at how well they fit together, how warm and soft Seokjin’s mouth feels on his. Seokjin pulls back a little; when Jimin involuntarily squeezes his hips in response, Seokjin huffs out a breath.
“We should stop,” he says, his eyes drifting down to Jimin’s lips again. “Not because I want to, but because I don’t want to do this while I’m wearing full plate armour, even if it is made of craft foam.”
“You look sexy in armour, though,” Jimin says, nevertheless loosening his grip so that Seokjin can crawl out of his lap.
“Yes, well,” Seokjin says, his ears pinking. “Find some armour appropriate for kissing in, and maybe I’ll consider wearing it for you in the future.”
It’s an offhand comment, played as a joke, but Jimin catches it - the flicker of cautious hope in Seokjin’s smile as he talks about their potential future together, so he takes Seokjin’s hands in his. “I’m not naïve. I know this,” he says, moving their hands around to represent the general concept of their future relationship. “Won’t be easy. But I don’t think ‘ease’ is a good reason to date someone anyway, and what we could have is worth working for. What we currently have is really good, imagine how powerful we’ll be as boyfriends?”
“Basically unstoppable,” Seokjin agrees. “I’m in.”
Jimin huffs in faux-indignation. “I give you a romantic speech about how our relationship is worth the effort, and what do I get in response? Dialogue from some random hacker guy in a shitty movie? I’ve changed my mind, actually-”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Seokjin laughs, wrapping his arms around Jimin’s waist and pulling him back down when Jimin makes to get off the bed. They both land, giggling, on their backs, Seokjin’s arms still wrapped around Jimin. “You know, this isn’t helping me get all this armour off. I want to get in my comfy pyjamas, Jimin-ah.”
“We’re supposed to be going out with everyone,” Jimin points out, making no move to get up. He’s excited to move into the future with Seokjin, to progress in their relationship, but if he could bottle this moment, photograph it, encapsulate it in some way so that he could revisit how he feels right now - the optimistic anticipation for the future, the way the city lights bleed cinematically through the windows, the fond warmth he feels looking at Seokjin’s smile - then he would.
Seokjin hums. “We’ve got time.”