Work Text:
prologue
It begins, as all things in Seokjin's life, with a script.
His patented and insured face for the film screen has gotten no less pore-less as he tipped from thirty to forty to early-forties. Despite this, despite his drove of devoted house-wives and college aged girls and house-husbands and college aged boys, he stoops low enough to be cast in a drama full of unknowns.
Seokjin has always loved giving to those less fortunate.
"You're the strict father of a carefree son," Hobi tells him on the drive over to his first day of filming. He's holding out Seokjin's bubble tea for him to sip because his hands have only gotten more sensitive as he's gotten older and more famous. "In episode five you get to give a stern talking to the female lead."
"Hmmm," Seokjin sighs, morosely. Seoul is full of young people flaunting their belly buttons in the dying days of summer. "I was young once, wasn't I?"
"Maybe," Hobi says, turning back to his phone. "It's hard to say."
Upon arriving in the assigned studio closer to Incheon than his house, Seokjin meets the male lead. He's twenty-one and obscenely handsome, gigantic eyes and a big nose and muscles on muscles. He's practically frothing at the mouth to meet Seokjin.
"It's such an honour to meet you sunbaenim," the anthropomorphistic rabbit named Jungkook tells him after staring at him from afar for twelve minutes while Seokjin ate his weight at the catering table. "My appa and I used to watch Epiphany reruns every Wednesday night together growing up. You're the reason I wanted to go into acting."
Keeping his smile neutral despite the megatron punch of reruns out of this child's flapping mouth, Seokjin says, "It's always nice to meet a fan. I look forward to working together, Jungkook-ssi."
"You can call me whatever you want," Jungkook says. His eyes are the size of the dragon medallion on Seokjin's 2008 Best New Actor Blue Dragon Award. "I'll respond to anything."
Seokjin laughs, tells Jungkook to call him hyung. Jungkook drops a plate of baby carrots.
It begins, as all things in Seokjin's life, with the haze of hairspray and the poor air circulation of a television studio and the hustle and bustle of personal assistants. It's everything Seokjin knows and one of the only things he's ever wanted.
It begins the way his life has been beginning for a decade and a half now and then ends with a single phrase from the bright eyed and jacked rookie who's reciting the lines that Seokjin used to say.
"Come meet my appa," Jungkook calls over to him while he's packing up for the day, searching through the last of craft services.
Seokjin shakes out his hair, squares his gorgeous shoulders, prepares his smile, and turns.
From next to Jungkook's beaming smile, Min Yoongi blinks back at him.
act i
"So," Min Yoongi says, as if it's not been a decade and a half and two broken hearts. "You've done alright for yourself then."
Seokjin can't stop staring. He was raised in the school of Polite Korean Mothers and knows that he needs to stop. He cannot stop. Yoongi has grey hairs at his temples and along his hairline. There are small lines around his eyes, like he's spent the time since last seeing Seokjin laughing often. His eyes have not gotten any less warm.
"Sure," Seokjin says, hardly listening. He has barely touched his soup. This restaurant is the type where the ajumeoni who runs it absolutely will scold Seokjin if he doesn't finish everything on his plate.
Yoongi has a sip of his own soup and then glances back at Seokjin. Seokjin does not look away. His nose is still the perfect size for nibbling on.
"I liked Chuncheon Days."
"It was fine," Seokjin says, waving his hand around. "You have a Jungkook."
"Yes," Yoongi says, mouth going tight like he wants to smile. "I have a Jungkook."
It shouldn't be surprising; Yoongi always had an incredible ability to predict his own future. Still, Seokjin wants to ask seventeen follow up questions. Instead, Seokjin says, "How's being an architect?"
"I don't know. Switched to furniture making about ten years ago."
"Aigoo, Yoongi-ah, it's like I don't even know you. Do you still put pickles on your pizza?"
"I've not been lobotomized by aliens, hyung."
Seokjin laughs. Thinks about how one word could hit him so hard. Tries to look at something else but finds himself looking back at Yoongi. He used to be awful at eye contact – they both were. Even when he was literally and sexually inside of Yoongi, he would stare at his chin. Now, it's like being twenty-five again. Like flying.
"You look exactly the same as you did before."
Yoongi's nose wrinkles. "Tell that to my knees. You've stayed handsome."
"Of course."
"And humble." Yoongi laughs. He looks out the window of the restaurant and laughs again. "This maybe feels different for me. I saw you three weeks ago in a Hyundai commercial."
"I looked great in that commercial."
"I just mean – I've been able to keep up with you."
Seokjin hasn't seen Min Yoongi-yah in fourteen years since Kim Namjoon's housewarming party that Seokjin, drunk on the success of his first drama and the aforementioned Best New Actor Blue Dragon Award, attended purely out of spite. This backfired spectacularly when Yoongi showed up with a man the size of a two-bedroom cottage who kept a hand on Yoongi's ass for the duration of the party.
"Are you still seeing Goliath?"
Yoongi blinks. Slowly, "did you just have half a conversation in your head that you're only now letting me in on?"
"Yoongi-ah keep up."
"Who?" Seokjin describes him and Yoongi's pout becomes further defined. Seokjin can't believe he's finding someone's father this adorable. "That guy? I don't even remember his name. The size of a house?"
"Yes, a two-storey house in rural Jeolla-do."
"I think he was maybe 190cm."
"King Kong."
"Are you still seeing Park Hyorin?"
"What?" Now it's Seokjin's turn to blink. "Who? The – oh, with the ears? No, she and I haven't – wait a second, Yoongi-ah. Do you follow my news?"
Yoongi's cheeks go pink around the edges like a sunset. He says, softly, "Eomma does."
Seokjin's memory is terrible, but he remembers the trip down to Daegu before their hundred days. They were an odd couple, sharing a cup of Jin ramen together on the KTX, Yoongi's head on Seokjin's shoulder to watch as Seokjin defeated gym leaders on his DS. They were on route to Geoje for a five-day trip to a resort where Seokjin planned to fish and fuck, in that order.
He remembers being scared out of his mind. Yoongi shares his eomma's eyes, her mouth, and the way his face changes completely when he smiles. His appa was the same brand of upfront as Yoongi, frank in his inquiries to Seokjin about how exactly he planned to support a lifestyle in Seoul with a degree in performance arts.
It makes something in him both hot and cold, that Yoongi's eomma would be checking in on her son's ex-boyfriend more than a decade on.
Yoongi takes another gulp of his soup. Seokjin sees that there is less than half left of the soup. He has, for probably the first time in his life, a soup crisis. When Yoongi finishes his soup then the teenager in charge of clearing dishes will come collect the soup bowl and once the soup bowl is gone then Yoongi will soon be gone. Seokjin will have missed his chance again.
"So, Yoongi-ah," Seokjin says, watching Yoongi's tongue leave his perfect mouth to lick up a drop of soup off his lip. "You have a kid now and your knees give you trouble. Do you still like bungeoppang on your way home from a date?"
Yoongi blinks. He blinks again, looks down at his empty soup bowl, and then smiles.
"Yes," he says. Clears his throat. "Yes, I still like bungeoppang on my way home from a date."
The bungeoppang comes wrapped in brown parchment paper, piping hot. It's still warm, September crisping the edges of the night with a stifling sweat under Seokjin's button down. He watches as Yoongi huffs air over the carp.
There was a time when Seokjin would get hounded at night markets like this, girls with flip phones pressing their smiling cheek against his as their friend took a photo. Now, one of the street vendors asks him if he was in EXO. Yoongi snorts so hard he chokes.
"Hyung, you clearly missed your calling," Yoongi says as they wander away to quieter streets. He's bitten off the head of the carp so the red bean inside is visible.
"You're funny."
"You would have been my bias," Yoongi says, loyally, and then. "Well. I mean, after Baekhy-"
Seokjin tugs at Yoongi's shirt until they fall into step together and then he just – doesn't take his hand away. Yoongi is still slim, his waist a perfect nook for Seokjin's hand. The handle of his Yoongi teapot.
"This isn't a date," Yoongi says, a bit later, when they've walked along dark streets peppered with people on their way home, on their way to find some trouble.
"Don't break my heart."
"Isn't there a code about dating your son's co-worker? There has to be."
Seokjin's hand has made a damp patch on Yoongi's shirt. Yoongi stops to look at him and then turns pink, shuffling them towards the curb to make space on the sidewalk.
There's something about the spread of blush across Yoongi's summer flushed skin. It reminds Seokjin of the first time he fucked Yoongi and wasn't sure how he would ever be able to look at Yoongi without thinking about him in bed, under Seokjin, his mouth open and whining.
It's been years. Seokjin – "Even when that co-worker is extremely handsome?"
"Seokjin-ssi –"
"When did Jungkook happen?"
Huffing out air through his nose like he knows Seokjin's diversion tactics, the clever fox, he says, "Jungkook-ah was eleven. I had just started fostering. His mother was going through a difficult time and so he – stayed for a few years. She moved back to Busan and he had already made a life here so. So here he is." Yoongi clears his throat. "His mother is a good woman. We celebrate Chuseok and birthdays together."
They keep walking.
Seokjin knows several things to be true about his life. First, that he's gotten as far as he has because he's handsome and shameless. Second, that his life has been generally free from attachments or anchors. And third, that Min Yoongi was absolutely someone he should have locked down when he had the chance.
Yoongi finishes his carp and throws the parchment into a passing garbage can.
"I forgot how easy silence is with you," Yoongi says, adjusting the baseball cap on his head.
"Yoongi-ah, don't say that after telling me this isn't a date."
Yoongi and his Jungkook live in a squat apartment building in a quieter area near one of the universities. Not the one that Seokjin went to, where he first saw Yoongi. The area has a number of small parks and looks straight up at Ansan Mountain.
"Thank you for walking me home."
"I'd walk you home a thousand times, Yoongi-ah," Seokjin says, squinting his eyes to get his second-last-scene-in-a-drama stare out. "Take my shoes, my clothes, my hands-"
"Alright," Yoongi says, laughing.
The doors to Yoongi's apartment are grey. When Seokjin used to drop Yoongi off at his small studio on top of a jajangmyeon restaurant, the door was a dusty purple. Seokjin became very well familiarized with the purple door, the way Yoongi looked pressed up against it, the feeling of cold metal as he rested his hands to cage Yoongi in. It was his first real time being the star of a drama, those 3ams with Yoongi; the smell of jajangmyeon still gets Seokjin aroused.
He's never been particularly brave, never really needed to be with a blessed life.
"Yoongi-ah, I'd like to see you again," Seokjin says, looking at a spot above Yoongi's shoulder. "When would work best for you?"
The world's most perfect mouth opens, closes, opens once more: "Seokjin-ssi-"
"At least call me hyung as you break my heart, Yoongi-ah."
"Seokjin-hyung," Yoongi says, soft. He has a bead of sweat on his forehead from the September heat. Seokjin remembers him in the peak of July, cranky and pink with the heat, stealing Seokjin's portable fan and then swatting his hands away (Kim Seokjin I am so hot I'm about to explode don't you dare put your hand on my ass right now).
"My eomma asks about you too."
Yoongi blinks. "Oh."
"Constantly, actually," Seokjin continues, feeling his heart and throat twist together so he can barely breathe. "Says she's never had someone help her around the kitchen as well since you and I. Well. My appa, as well, he liked you. Liked talking about the war with you."
"Hyung."
"It was never a falling out, Yoongi-ah," Seokjin says. "Between you and I."
"I know that."
Seokjin clears his throat. He has the urge to look over both shoulders to make sure no one can hear this impassioned speech he's giving (for free!). "I'm not asking to get married, I just. Would like to see you again."
After starring in the nations' (best) films and televisions and made-for-tv-movies, Seokjin has lost track of what's from him and what's from his roles. He's given entire speeches to the people in between Yoongis, long rambling things, that he knows he stole from Lee Eunwoo, the protagonist of Epiphany that he now knows Yoongi watched with Jungkook.
I've been able to keep up with you Yoongi had said, and Seokjin is jealous.
"Let me – aish, this man," Yoongi says, like he's forty-two going on eighty. "Let me talk to Jungkook. Okay? Alright? Enough of those eyes."
"I can't stop having eyes, Yoongi-ah."
"Aish-"
Seokjin decides to walk back from Yoongi's apartment, to reminisce in the romance of it all and think about how Yoongi's smile looks the same.
Then his feet get tired and it's so hot out and a crowd of concert-goers are released from whatever cave they were hiding in, so Seokjin calls a car instead. He rests his head against the window to watch the streets pass by, feeling that this captures some of his wanted romance, before they're stuck in construction-based traffic 10 minutes from his house and the moment is lost.
He scrolls through his phone for a number he's not dialed in years.
"Hyung?" comes an unsure voice. As if Kim Seokjin could butt dial someone! Preposterous.
"Yah, Kim Namjoon! Why didn't you tell me Min Yoongi still lived in Seoul!"
"Yoongi-hyung?" Namjoon asks, as if Seokjin has all the time in the world. "Why are you asking about – oh, did you see him recently? Yes, he's still in Seoul. I didn't know that you didn't know, hyung."
The issue with young people these days, Seokjin decides, is that they have no sense of urgency.
"No, I did not know. Apologize, Kim Namjoon!"
Slowly, like Namjoon was not expecting to be scolded by an old college friend at 11pm on a Tuesday, he says, "I'm…sorry. Hyung."
"As you should be," Seokjin stretches out as best he can in the back of this big black Hyundai SUV. The radio is playing some pop song that sounds like a million other pop songs. "He looks exactly the same, Namjoon-ah. As do I, of course."
Seokjin has to clear his throat before Namjoon chimes in with his side of the conversation, "Of course you do. The same as when I met you in 2005."
"Namjoon-ah," Seokjin says, feeling vaguely like he's been cracked open like a coconut. Yoongi always did have that ability. "We were good together, right? Yoongi and I? You have a better memory than I do."
"Hyung I – I was literally just about to get into my shower when you called. To be honest, I don't really want to continue the rest of this conversation with my dick out."
"No one cares about your dick, Namjoon-ah." His driver's eyes widen. "Just answer my question."
"Yeah, you and hyung were – you worked. Sure. You made each other happy."
Seokjin hums. Closes his eyes and tries to remember waking up to his cranky Yoongi-ah.
"But there's a difference between being happy and being good for each other, hyung. You and Yoongi-hyung weren't ever serious about the same things."
Seokjin opens his eyes. "Yah, who asked you, Kim Namjoon? Go have a shower."
act ii
The first scene he films with Jungkook is a night shoot. Seokjin is in a three-piece suit and holding a briefcase, even in the warm September night.
It's supposed to be a chance encounter; Jungkook running out of a restaurant to catch the girl he loves before she leaves, but stumbling into his strict father before he can reach her. The father who has never accepted that he loves art, appa, and he doesn't want to run the family company!
Seokjin reminds himself, not for the first time, that he is getting paid for this.
There's an undeniable charm about Jungkook – something not quite all the way polished and all the more charming for it. He's unbearably polite to everyone on set, smiling and bowing religiously every time someone calls cut. Seokjin knows from Yoongi that this is Jungkook's first major acting role but that he's been training in acting, dance, and singing since he began living with Yoongi.
"He was never content with just one thing," Yoongi told him as they wandered the streets. "I'd pick him up from soccer practice and then drive him straight to vocal lessons. It was non-stop."
"You didn't tell him to pick just one?"
Yoongi looked at him then, nose crinkled and eyebrow raised. "You try denying Jungkook something sometime. Tell me how it goes."
Now, Seokjin watches as Jungkook listens patiently to one of the directors explaining the blocking of the scene. They've combed his hair back with gel so he looked like a middle schooler at his first dance, eyes wider than the moon probably.
"Seokjin-sunbaenim," Jungkook says when his part of the scene begins. "Or – hyung. Hi. Sorry."
"Good evening, Jungkook-ah," Seokjin says. "Long day?"
"Oh yeah."
He scans Jungkook's face for any indication that he may be looking at Seokjin the way one would be looking at their older, handsome co-worker who is currently trying to court their own father. Jungkook is giving no indication of this. He still mostly looks like the middle schooler from earlier, half asleep but still hero worshipping.
"Well, you'll have plenty of time to sleep when you're old like me," Seokjin says, laughing.
If he's expecting Jungkook to tell him that he's not old hyung, no at all, he'll be waiting all night. Instead, Jungkook says, "That's what my appa says. I do mostly fine, as long as I have all my vitamins every morning and go to the gym."
Seokjin, who got through his first drama with liberal use of ramen, naps on the metro on the way to shoots, and 4am blow jobs from Jungkook's abeoji, just nods. He can see that the directors are starting to band together to pick filming back up, so he says (in more of a rush that is befitting of someone like him), "So, your appa. Small world, huh."
"Yeah!" Jungkook says, laughing. "He mentioned that you had gone to school together at the same time before, but I thought he was lying. He lies a lot. It's funny. But then he was telling the truth about this. That's so funny that you know each other."
Jungkook is beaming. Seokjin narrows his eyes. "Yes. We…know each other."
Leave being brave to someone born in the year of the chicken. Really, Seokjin was asking for this outcome.
The directors get the scene rolling. Seokjin stands where he's supposed to and lets Jungkook fall into him a hundred times as they perfect the scene. Jungkook is all hard muscle like a Doberman. By the fourth take, Seokjin's middle is sore.
It's maybe inevitable, for Seokjin to try and find Yoongi in this boy.
Hard, too. The memories Seokjin has of Yoongi are blurred by time and college, the hazy nature of mixing energy drinks with alcohol before they would go to a shitty party across town. Seokjin remembers Yoongi for his filthy tongue, his long rants about capitalism and fascism, and the way he would hold doors open for everyone, unthinking, checking over one shoulder before he let any door slam shut.
But there are things.
Perhaps it's Yoongi, in the way that Jungkook can't help but laugh when Seokjin tells one of his better camera-based puns. Perhaps it's Yoongi, the way Jungkook sings between takes, old traditional songs that sound like they were passed on in kitchens, elbows deep in cabbage.
"You know what's expected of you," Seokjin-as-Jungkook's-Drama-Father says, his tone stern and cold. "There's a shareholder meeting next week that you are expected to attend. Have some decorum."
Jungkook-as-Seokjin's-Drama-Son hangs his head. "Yes, abeoji."
They wrap sometime around 1am. Jungkook looks like he's about to fall over. Everyone is shepherded into their trailers to disrobe and wipe the makeup off their faces. Seokjin does everything at three times his normal speed, throwing off his noona. She's been in show business for longer than Seokjin even, her hands rough and strong as she tries to blot his face with a makeup wipe.
"Seokjin-ah, what in the world," she says, as he turns from her to instead stick his entire face under the bathroom faucet. "Are you in that much of a hurry?"
She almost murders him when he, all ready to go, stands at the door of the trailer with his nose pressed up against the window. He's got a good viewpoint of Jungkook's trailer from here.
Jungkook exits his in a cloud of sweatpants, slouchy backpack, and tired boy energy. He's only taken two steps when Seokjin accidentally-very-much-on-purpose bumps into him. Jungkook yelps. Seokjin yelps back, as is in his nature.
"Oh, hyung. You scared me."
"Jungkook-ah, my favourite dongsaeng," Seokjin says, to watch Jungkook's blush spread across his face. Adorable. "I just wanted to check if you had a ride home. It's awfully late."
See: I just wanted to see if the snack-sized man you call a father is on the premises so that I can attempt to swindle a phone number out of him this time.
"Oh, sunbaenim, thank you! The company called a car for me, but I really appreciate your concern!"
See: My snack-sized father is already passed out in front of our television with a bowl of walnuts and a war documentary on the television.
Seokjin is reminded, suddenly, of the time he asked Yoongi to please tell one of his friends that the Mexican inspired dip that he made for every single get together was not "fire" or "delicious" but actually tasted like poison. It was a very not-fun conversation to be had.
Yoongi eventually did it. It took three months.
If this endeavour takes three months, Seokjin may die an old maid.
Two of Seokjin's scenes in the drama get cut. Hoseok tries to turn this into a positive thing.
"You've been mentioning all these things you've wanted time for, hyung, and now you have some!" he says, bright and cheerful at Seokjin's apartment door at 7am in the morning. "You're always talking about writing a book. Let's write that book together, hyung."
"I'm in ruins."
"Don't be ridiculous, I brought breakfast." Hobi bullies past him to drop a white pastry box off on Seokjin's kitchen island. He starts moving to collect plates and forks while Seokjin slithers over to his barstool, dejected. "I found a place in Garosu-gil that makes those giant square croissants! How fun, right? I bought us regular and tiramisu. I know how you feel about matcha."
"I woke up early to steam my face. I've been wearing these eye-bag patches for thirty minutes."
"And you look fantastic," Hobi says, grin blinding. He pushes a giant square croissant towards Seokjin. "Here you go. Yum, yum."
Seokjin used to live in a penthouse that overlooked the water. After his failed mini-series The Astronaut – which featured him fighting aliens in space and really should have been a smash hit – he downsized to his current place. It's fine. He misses the view sometimes.
"How about that book? Or we could get you on some variety shows again. They love you on those! Let me call Jimin, make it happen."
"Hob-ah, just leave me in my ruins."
Hobi tuts and turns to start pressing buttons on Seokjin's espresso machine. Seokjin spins on his little barstool and surveys his living room. It looks like it's recently been home to a nine-hour Maple Story gaming binge, because it has. His coffee table is still all wrong for the space, too wide and too white. Seokjin desperately needs to replace it but –
He stops. Hobi is still prattling about coffee beans.
"-and that's why I don't buy dark roast anymore. It's a funny thing, isn't it, how you watch one documentary and it can change your entire life-"
"Hob-ah, please pass me those reading glasses," Seokjin says, gesturing to the pair of cheap frames he stole from his appa last Chuseok, that he occasionally uses to read things close-up. "I've just realized something tremendous."
"It's rude to interrupt people," Hobi says which, yeah obviously. People are always telling Seokjin things he already knows. "What are you doing? Are you calling Jimin?"
"I'm getting myself a coffee table," Seokjin says, perching his reading glasses on his nose to open Naver. He has gotten used to typing on these damn things, although he does miss his old clunky Samsung with the keyboard that slid out. Carefully, he types out Furttniture Seoul Min Yoonfi
Naver asks if he means Furniture Seoul Min Yoongi. Naver, Seokjin thinks, can go fuck itself.
He rides out to one of the metro stops close to Namsan Mountain. Of course, Yoongi would be surrounded by trees in this new life of his, so different from the stretched thin life they used to live in between gaps in the concrete.
The storefront – an off white, minimalist front with AGUST D FURNITURE written in a charcoal – is right next to a small café. Seokjin is still full of the tufts of square, tiramisu croissant that Hoseok stuffed into his mouth as he got ready to leave.
Surely, even through fifteen years of separation, Yoongi still likes an iced americano.
"Hello?" he asks, as he steps into the storefront of Yoongi's furniture store, iced americano in one hand and a blueberry muffin (for his blueberry muffin) in the other. "Is anyone around to talk furniture?"
The store is skinny and has an almost dream like quality to it. The space is filled with light and green plants hanging from the metal loft above. It's very clearly a showcase room, with sleek wooden desks and end tables, shelves and chairs, and every couple of steps a different, beautiful, light fixture.
It is, notably, completely empty. Seokjin expects his feet to echo across the space but the sound is absorbed instead. Clever Yoongi. The most clever boy.
"Be with you in a second," comes a sing-song voice that does not sound at all like Seokjin's long lost lover. There's a bit of movement with a door to the left and then –
"Park Jimin?"
"Jin-hyung!" Park Jimin says, beaming from ear to ear. He is, of course, tiny and radiant like a warm summers' day. "Did Hobi-hyung tell you to meet me here? Is this about the book?"
"What? No."
"Is that for me?" Jimin asks, reaching for the blueberry muffin.
Seokjin, who is out of hands, snaps at Jimin's fingers with his teeth.
Jimin blinks at him.
Desperately trying to reign in some dignity once more, Seokjin tilts his chin up and says, "I'm in the market for a coffee table. Where is the owner of the store?"
"Yoongi-hyung? He had to take a call."
"Oh."
Jimin blinks at him again. "I can show you where the coffee tables are though, hyung. Yoongi-hyung even lets me ring up sales now."
"Why are you. Hm."
"Why am I?"
"Here. Why are you here, Jimin-ah?"
"Oh," Jimin says, as if he's never been asked that before. He starts to walk towards the back of the store and Seokjin, like a balloon on a string, follows, his hands full of courtship gifts for a fool who left his store to the whims of a madman. "Like in the store?"
"Yes, like in the store."
"I do marketing for Yoongi-hyung sometimes," Jimin says. "He does a lot of set design work for music videos! It's really cool. It's great that Hoseok-hyung introduced us when he did, or I would never have…"
Through a sharp ringing in Seokjin's ears, he manages to say: "Hoseok? Hob-ah introduced you?"
"Yep," Jimin says. Seokjin fears his hand has caused permanent damage to the muffin. "They've known each other for a long time – maybe seven or eight years? Hob-ah was volunteering at that dance studio when he met Yoongi's son – oh, you know Jungkook! God, what a small world. Ha ha ha, isn't that something, hyung."
All this time every single person in Seoul was hanging out with Min Yoongi except him.
"It's certainly something," Seokjin says. Mentally, he constructs a list of which friends he will be shoving down an elevator shaft first. Perhaps Namjoon's muscular body will help break Hoseok's fall.
"Are you bothering the clientele, Park Jimin?" comes Yoongi's voice from behind.
And oh. Seokjin's heart. Min Yoongi is wearing a leather and denim apron over a white shirt, his hair falling in little swooshy waves around his face. His face mask is shoved under his chin and he's looking at Seokjin like he's not surprised to see him.
"I've never bothered anyone, ever, in my whole life." Jimin scoffs, before he puts a hand on Seokjin's arm and says, "Have you met Jin-hyung?"
Yoongi nods. His eyes are warm like chestnuts. They drift downward to the half-destroyed muffin and the iced americano which has turned Seokjin's hand wet with condensation.
Jimin leaves. Seokjin gives him some half-hearted promise about drafting a chapter for this book Hobi wants him to write. The front door swings shut behind Jimin and then it's just the two of them and the muffin, between them a coffee table worth more than Seokjin's spent on anything for about five years.
"Is that –"
"Here's a muffin," Seokjin says, placing it into Yoongi's hand. Stray crumbs stay behind, and Seokjin rubs them off on his pant leg. "And a coffee. Americano. It's iced."
"I see that," Yoongi says. "Come to the back?"
Through the door that Jimin and, presumably, Yoongi came through is a workshop about the same size. Along the walls are planks of wood. Every surface area holds a different machine which Seokjin could not begin to guess it's usage. Yoongi leads him to a quiet corner away from the scary machinery, where a large computer shows CCTV footage of the store. He takes one of the chairs and gestures for Seokjin to sit in the other.
"Well, hi there."
"Hello."
Yoongi laughs. He turns to his muffin and rips off a piece of the top. "Thank you for the treat."
"That's a very strategic muffin, I'll have you know. A wooing muffin. A courtship muffin."
"I've never heard of a wooing muffin before."
"Good," Seokjin says, looking anywhere else but at Yoongi. "No one else should be giving you muffins. Wooing or otherwise." He waits for Yoongi to laugh again, a choked noise while his mouth is full, before he says, "This place is beautiful."
"Thank you. It used to just be this work room, and everything was made to order. The storefront was opened a couple years ago, when the tailor that used to be next door was selling."
"Well," Seokjin says, feeling something like pride in his chest. "You've done alright for yourself then."
Yoongi sips his drink. Seokjin regrets not getting something for himself to fidget with. Having to put all of his attention on Yoongi, after all this time, is making his fingers wig out.
"I haven't talked to Jungkook yet."
"I figured. He hasn't tried attacking me at work with a hair dryer, so."
"Jungkook-ie is learning boxing, he wouldn't bother with the hair dryer."
"Excellent to know."
Yoongi smiles at him, then looks away. Seokjin doesn't remember them being awkward like this. Their silences used to be these easy, enviable moments. They would spend hours in the same room not even speaking to one another.
"I'll talk to him."
"Mhmm."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing, sajangnim."
Yoongi snorts. Seokjin laughs with him. Yoongi scrunches his mouth, so it takes half the space on his face, like he's thinking. Seokjin lets himself look at the grey hairs along his temple. Seokjin himself has plucked or dyed every grey hair he's ever seen. It makes Yoongi look otherworldly. It makes Seokjin wish they had grown to this point together.
"You said something the other day," Yoongi starts. "About how it wasn't a falling out, between us."
"Yes."
"Wasn't it?"
Seokjin feels himself shift into flirting mode, easy, "Yah, Yoongi-ah, if you were really that upset about the time I swore I would wake you up on time for your shift but ended up sleeping through the alarm and we were both late, you should have said something."
Yoongi looks – unimpressed. It's a look Seokjin is familiar with. Please, said Seokjin's partner right after Yoongi, a gorgeous actor who he met on a set, Just be serious for once. I don't enjoy having these conversations either.
"You didn't want kids," Yoongi says, now.
Seokjin swallows. Nods. "And you didn't want an actor's schedule."
A nod. Yoongi takes another bite of his muffin.
"Do you want another kid?"
Yoongi looks thoughtful then. He purses his mouth around the straw of the americano and sips. Seokjin's heart goes stock-still in his chest. It's – he thinks he could love Yoongi again. Think it would be like falling into a warm bath, easy and simple. He thinks that outside of the grey in Yoongi's hair and the ache in Seokjin's lower back, they aren't that different than they were.
But Seokjin would rather not have a toddler with jam hands asking him for uppies.
"I don't think so," Yoongi says, looking up at Seokjin again. Whatever he sees there makes him laugh. "Try not to look so relieved."
"I'm not! I'm not, I'm just –" Relieved. He's relieved.
"And you?" Yoongi says, laughter still in his eyes. Honey boy. "Do you still want – god, what was it. To be a defining actor of our generation?"
Something aches in Seokjin's heart at that, though he knows it's not Yoongi's intention to mock. It's odd, to realize a dream has died while he's been so busy trying to stay afloat. That he could be at once too romantic for the mob boss roles that seem abundant for actors his age, and not soft enough for the romantic ones.
He reaches out to take some of the muffin himself, moving so that their knees touch in the process. "Nah," he says, "I'll leave that to Jungkook."
Yoongi laughs. Again and again for the rest of the morning.
The issue with Park Jimin knowing a single thing about Seokjin's life is that Park Jimin, for all his smiles and gentle hands and genuine thoughtfulness, is a demon crafted by the devil for the explicit purpose to make life on earth more difficult for everyone else.
"Sooooooo," Park Jimin says, two days after Seokjin folded a muffin wrapper in his pocket while trying desperately not to kiss Min Yoongi, "You like Yoongi-hyung, hmmm?"
"Go back to the fires of hell, demon."
Jimin giggles. It's like a baby duck falling into a bath full of bubbles. "Hyung, I saw the way you looked at him when he waddled out of the back room. It's like when we went to the petting zoo and you saw the alpacas. You wanted to take him home and feed him."
Seokjin cast his eyes desperately around the office-cum-waiting room where Hobi dropped him off ten minutes ago. The non-offensive corporate art blinked back at him. Behind the front desk, an intimidatingly hot man painted his fingernails while talking on the phone with one of those Bluetooth headphones that Seokjin still wasn't totally comfortable with.
"Do you need to be here for this meeting?"
"Oh relax," Jimin says, smoothing back his hair and squaring his adorable shoulders. "Taehyung-ie and I go way back. I just want to say hi."
"That doesn't fill me with the confidence you want it to."
Seokjin, as he will write on his tombstone one day, is right to be worried. When Taehyung's administrative assistant gestures them into the office, not looking over at them once to do so, things immediately get weird.
"Jimin-ah," Taehyung says, eyes wide. He's wearing a sand-coloured hat and a shirt that looks to have been made out of a beach umbrella. "I've been waiting for you."
"No silly," Jimin says, patting over Taehyung like he's a security guard at the airport who is about to be fired for inappropriate touching. "I was waiting for you. You said to meet at 3:00 and it's 3:17 now."
"Jimin-ah, I've been waiting for you my whole life."
"Taehyung-ie-"
"Hey," Seokjin says because he's seen this before and it's not nearly as charming as they both seem to think it is. "Your hyung is here, Taehyung-ah."
From there it's relatively smooth sailing. Taehyung trips over himself to get far too close to Seokjin's face to say hello which is par for the course and then Jimin leaves to go to a different meeting, which means Seokjin has to wait two-and-a-half-minutes for them to say goodbye to each other. It's exhausting, as are most interactions with this particular dynamic. Not everyone can be as calm and well-adjusted as Seokjin.
"So," Taehyung says, when he's taken a seat behind his big ridiculous desk. It's one of those with a standing option and Seokjin would bet his first edition holo Charizard card that Taehyung has never used the standing feature once. "What brings you to my hallowed halls, hyung?"
"You arranged this meeting."
"I did," Taehyung says, solemnly. His eyes twinkle like Santa Claus. "You remember what we talked about at Jung Hoseok's 38th birthday party?"
Seokjin the Walking Talking Goldfish blinks. "Was that the one on the boat?"
"Close! We had a potluck and then went to a pottery-painting place." At Seokjin's confused look, Taehyung clarifies: "Hobi-hyung was hungover for two weeks after that New Year's Party Jimin-ah threw. He couldn't even smell nail polish remover without heaving for months."
"I don't think I was there."
Taehyung turns around one of the many framed photos on his desk. Hoseok is in the middle of the photo, beaming with a polka-dot painted teapot. Next to him is Seokjin, who is holding a jewelry dish, grinning like it's the best day of his life.
"That could be photoshopped."
"You and I were at the same table," Taehyung explains. His tone of voice is not dissimilar to the way he's spoken to Yeontan on the phone before, patient while he demanded the dog sitter put him on speaker. "And you said 'Taehyung-ah my child, why are there no good drama roles for old men,' and I said 'Seokjin-hyung, you're not that old,' and you said 'Yah you brat, I'm not talking about me,' and I said 'Oh sorry, I just assumed,' and you said 'Well you know what they say about people who assume,' and I said-"
"Okay, sure," Seokjin says.
"So I wrote it."
Seokjin blinks again. "Wrote what?"
"A drama," Taehyung says, tilting his head. "It took a while because Seojoon-hyung's drama was green lit for a second season and then when I went to Paris I got that weird allergic reaction-"
"It was an STI, Taehyung."
"It could have been the cheese," Taehyung shrugs. "We'll never know. Anyways, I wrote it and I want you to read it before I send it to the powers that be."
Most actors hit their romance lead peak at around 35. Seokjin, who is so handsome that the midwife wept when she passed him to his mother, was able to stay in the game a bit longer. He's been thinking and dreaming about this for a long time, this gift that Kim Taehyung can talk about so nonchalantly. He imagines himself wooing again, getting into silly shenanigans with an absurd sound effect track in the background.
That spark, the one he was afraid was gone forever, kindles in his belly.
However, there is one thing to take care of first -
"Taehyung-ssi, and forgive me for this question, but before we move any further do you know a man named Min Yoongi?"
Taehyung frowned his bottom lip into a tremendous pout. "No," he said, "Should I? Is he hunting me for sport?"
"Not to my knowledge. Jimin-ah has never introduced you to this man? Hoseok? You've never met a Min Yoongi and forgot to tell your dear, sweet Seokjin-hyung all about it?"
Taehyung takes forty seconds to think about it, furrowed brow. "No. I haven't."
"Wonderful, Taehyung-ssi, you and I can be the best of friends then. Please continue your pitch."
It's a good pitch. A 10-episode series with multiple arches. Seokjin would play Moon Jihoon, a lonely composer who is funny and brazen until he is alone, when he is quiet and contemplative. One day, while scoring a new ballet, he bumps into the lead ballerina on her way to practice. Sparks instantly fly, despite the age gap.
"Oh! Scandal!"
"Just wait," Taehyung says, flapping his hands.
Moon Jihoon attempts to repair his heart, that which has been severely damaged by a past love, to be with this new ballerina, Haeun. But will it all crumble when his old love, Soojin, comes back into his life?
They conference call in Hoseok who gasps in all the right places when Taehyung re-explains the plot to him. They hammer out the important things, like what it means for Seokjin's career if, and Taehyung stresses the if, Seokjin were to nail the audition for Moon Jihoon of which he's a shoo-in, and Taehyung stresses the shoo-in, for, of course.
Seokjin thinks about Jungkook and his doe eyes and the way his hands span the waist of the lead actress's waist. He thinks about the coffee trucks people used to send him and the fan meetings Hoseok used to organize for him. The last time someone stopped him was at a fish market in Noryangjin-dong and that was an old man who recognized him from his traditional alcohol mini-series with Baek Jongwon.
The lights. The nicest chair behind the camera with his name written on it. That look Hobi gets sometimes, the pitying one, disappearing.
"Well, I think that was fruitful," Taehyung says, later, after Hobi has hung up to go lecture some up-and-coming idol group about PR answers. "I'll be in touch, I guess."
"Thank you, Taehyung-ah."
"Of course. I love you, hyung."
Seokjin gathers his things.
"Hyung? I love you."
Seokjin looks around the office with a hum. Now that Seokjin is Almost Dating a Furniture Maker Practically, he's become more aware of ottomans and desks. It's probably the romantic in him. He tells Taehyung, "That is a very charming armoury."
"Oh, thanks," Taehyung says, smoothing a hand over it. "I got it from this woodworker named Agust D. He's like if a gumdrop button was a man."
Seokjin feels his left eye twitch.
"It's a funny story, actually," Taehyung says, all bright eyed and bushy tailed and completely unaware that Seokjin would like to drown him in the Han. "I was working with this music producer for Singularity and we needed this bed that could tilt up and down for this one scene and he suggested his boyfriend – Agust D! Funny, huh! Small world!"
Seokjin feels his right eye twitch.
If Kim Seokjin were someone else, one could call his pace brisk. As it is, he is Kim Seokjin and Kim Seokjin need never walk at a brisk pace. The world could put itself on pause but Kim Seokjin, Korea's Sweetheart, would walk at a leisurely stroll at all times.
Now if the people walking on the sidewalk in front of him could quicken their own leisurely stroll or else move out of the damn way, that would be ideal.
Min Yoongi-ah is where he texted Seokjin that he would be.
Me
Are you in your store today? Hyung will stop by.
Kim Namjoon's Friend Min Yoongi
I'm delivering a piece today so I could meet you somewhere.
Me
Let's meet at the top of Lotte World Tower. I will bring champagne and my handosme face.
*Hadsome
*Handsome
Kim Namjoon's Friend Min Yoongi
I'll be here getting a milk tea at 4:30
[Location shared]
Yoongi is sitting on a bench outside the bubble tea store. He's hunkered in on himself like the kookaburra that followed Seokjin around on his last trip to Australia with that hot idiot he dated three years ago. If Seokjin didn't know better, Yoongi would just be someone reading off his phone, forgettable.
Seokjin, thankfully, knows better – "I waited for you at Lotte World Tower for forty-five minutes, Yoongi-ah."
"I got you a taro milk tea," Yoongi says, holding it out to him.
"50% sugar?"
"30%," Yoongi says, making space on the bench for Seokjin. "You shouldn't be eating too much sugar at your age."
Seokjin's heart swells into his throat, which he clears. It's easier to sit hip to hip as they are, both looking out at the busy street. Yoongi's thigh is slim, still, next to his. Baby V.O.X legs, Seokjin used to joke when they were in bed together.
"What did you need to talk about?"
As if through quicksand, Seokjin drags his mind away from the joys of intercrural sex, "Hmm? What? Yes."
Yoongi repeats himself. Seokjin blinks away the afternoon and tries to remember why he needed to see Yoongi so badly. He likes Yoongi very dearly. He would have married Yoongi, back then, after a couple more years of dating. They would have had to travel to Holland or Toronto to do that. They would have had to not break up. And oh that's –
"If you aren't single, Min Yoongi-ah, you have to tell me." Seokjin says and then pretty much immediately regrets it. He adds, "I'm a cop and that's the law."
"Cops suck."
"Well yes, I know that, but-"
"I'm not dating anyone," Yoongi says, turning his face slightly to make the briefest of eye contacts. "I would have told you earlier, if I was. Especially before you sent me that sext last night."
"I told you that when I asked the best way to cook a sausage, I really wanted to know what you think is the best way to-"
"The last time I was with someone was two years ago," Yoongi says. He sucks up a tapioca ball through his straw. Seokjin is jealous of the tapioca ball. "We broke up because they needed to move away for work and I didn't want to leave Seoul."
"How long were you together for?"
"Almost three years."
Over a thousand days. Seokjin imagines a thousand days with Yoongi.
"Do you have any more questions about Yijeong?"
Seokjin is a very good actor, which is why he's certain that he's nailing the "Who?" face that he's going for. Seconds after leaving Kim Taehyung's cursed office he was looking up the music production for Singularity and had narrowed down two possible ex-boyfriends for Yoongi. Seokjin was leaning towards Yijeong from the start once he saw he was a Virgo.
Fucking earth signs.
"Of course not, Yoongi-ah," Seokjin says, wafting his hand about. "Who brought this man up in the first place anyways? Yi-jeong? Very old fashioned, distasteful name if you ask me. Okay for some, but not made for everyone."
"Mhm."
Seokjin hums too. Yoongi is looking at him still so he adds, "And I am of course, married to my craft." Yoongi hums. "And no one else." Yoongi hums again. "I'm alone."
Yoongi snorts.
They wander around the block because Yoongi doesn't want to go too far from where his car is precariously parked in an underground parking lot. He claims the security for the building warned him that the doors to the parking get locked at 5:30.
"You used to be quite handy with a paper clip, Yoongi-ah."
"I'm a father now, hyung," Yoongi sighs. "Can't be caught up in the same life of crime. How was your day?"
The part of Seokjin's heart that is one of those child toys that makes bubbles on its own wants to tell Yoongi all about traitor Kim Taehyung and his admittedly good pilot idea. The other part, that larger part, the one that never seemed to be able to hold Yoongi's hand in public back when they were dating, wants to keep it close to his chest.
Hobi-ah sent him to a therapist once, who commented casually on Seokjin's comfort zone seemingly being one of unflappability and jokes and no bad times.
"Well why would anyone want to have bad times, huh? It's always important to have a joke in your heart. And a song. A song and a joke in your heart. In fact, I always make sure I have at least three songs and two jokes in my heart at all times and you know – sometimes it's two songs and three jokes or even four jokes and maybe if you had a similar disposition, you wouldn't be so judgy about those that do –"
Seokjin did not return to therapy. Which is fine.
"My day was a fine day. A barista cried when they saw me because my face is so handsome."
"You're the only person I know who that seems to happen to daily."
"I better be," Seokjin says, pinching Yoongi's arm lightly. "Why are you speaking to other handsome men, huh? Leave them alone."
If Seokjin ever gets around to writing that memoir that Park Jimin seems set on strangling out of him next time they bump into each other, Seokjin will make sure that this moment is showcased. He will describe in painstaking detail, to his ghost writer, the way golden hour suits Min Yoongi well. The way Yoongi is familiar like seaweed soup and altogether something new. The dry way Yoongi speaks and his commitment to every one of Seokjin's bits.
They take the elevator down to the underground parking garage down together, shoulder to shoulder. Seokjin, abruptly, wants to see Yoongi in other seasons. He remembers waiting with Yoongi for buses in the winter, Yoongi's red nose the only visible from his mess of scarf and hat. He remembers spring, Yoongi scolding him for holding the umbrella poorly as they braved the trip to a convenient store in a downpour.
"Forgot how much you stare at me."
"I'm not even looking at you!"
"You can't fool me, hyung," Yoongi says, breezily, as he exits the elevator. Seokjin follows behind him like a row of preschool children on those toddler leashes. "I know all of your tells."
Yoongi's delivery truck is actually a produce delivery truck, squashed and small in the front and emblazed with a tomato on either door. Sheepishly, Yoongi says, "I refuse to have a car when the planet is lacking the ability to sustain life and no one is holding oil companies accountable-"
"Uh huh."
"So the grocery store down the street lets me borrow their van in the afternoon." Yoongi shakes off embarrassment as he's always been able to do, so different from Seokjin who has to yell awhile until everyone agrees with him and even then his ears keep betraying him. "Anyways. Thanks for walking me."
"Don't thank me," Seokjin says, shrugging one of his lovely, broad, award-winning shoulders. "I'll accept payment only."
"I bought you boba."
"Not that kind of payment, jagi."
Despite his words, Seokjin lets Yoongi make the first move. A hand goes to Seokjin's chest, right over his heart, as Yoongi steadies himself. He tastes like the jasmine milk tea he's been sipping on, chewing on the straw while they wandered. Seokjin means to put a hand on Yoongi, his waist or the soft of his cheek, but it goes rogue and slides over Yoongi's hand, their fingers locked over the steady beat of Seokjin's heart.
Yoongi's tongue slips into his mouth. He feels twenty-three again.
"Is the debt paid?" Yoongi murmurs, speaking the words into Seokjin's mouth.
"Gotta make sure it's not counterfeit," Seokjin says, nonsensical. He throws his arms around Yoongi's waist, tugging him in. Yoongi squirms like a cat in a bath. "You hear all kinds of horror stories these days. Better check again."
Yoongi laughs into their jasmine taro kiss. Seokjin squeezes tighter.
act iii
Seokjin met Kim Namjoon in a botany class in his last year of university. He, Seokjin, was required to take a science before he graduated. He, Namjoon, was double majoring in botany and music production, with a minor in philosophy.
Namjoon hosted poetry nights throughout university. Seokjin generally hated poetry but, after a few well-placed comments from his mother at Chuseok about making the most out of his short-lived college days, he occasionally mustered up the energy to commute down to a student bar on a Tuesday night and listen to lesbian after lesbian pour their heart and soul out on stage.
It wasn't a particularly memorable Tuesday, the first time Seokjin saw Yoongi perform. It wasn't a particularly memorable poem either, something angry and vaguely longing. But Yoongi, with his soft looking boy hair and two earrings in each ear, long sleeves pushed down so just pink knuckles showed gripping his pretentious moleskine notebook – Seokjin was hooked.
"Hi Kim Namjoon," he said, as soon as the lights came on in the student bar. "What a lovely time."
"Seokjin!" Namjoon said, all fond, "So glad you could make it. I didn't know if poetry was your thing and it's always nice-"
"I couldn't agree more," Seokjin said, patting Namjoon's back. "Who was that angry man that came before the eclectic ukulele number?"
Namjoon blinked. "Yoongi-hyung?"
Cute name cute face cute boy. Seokjin hummed. "Delightful. Is he always here? If I come back next week, will he be here?"
"Depends - Yoongi-hyung works most nights," Namjoon says, slow. He starts to smile. "Why?"
Seokjin went to the next seven poetry nights. Seokjin heard so many sonnets and haikus and haibuns that he started to be able to tell the difference. He even became friends with some of the lesbians!
Yoongi didn't show once.
"In fact," Seokjin would often remind Kim Namjoon during the 540 days that Seokjin called Yoongi his boyfriend, "It took me another year and a half before I finally saw Yoongi again. Useless."
"You're still friends with Dahyun and Momo to this day!"
The year and a half culminated in Seokjin attending Namjoon's twenty-second birthday in the backroom of a pizza restaurant that belonged to the uncle of someone Namjoon used to sleep with. The music was loud and Seokjin was fully intending to do his usual fifteen-to-twenty-five-minutes of time with the host before unceremoniously going home to play The Sims alone when – pink knuckles and silver earrings.
Yoongi's hair was blonde and tucked neatly under a backwards black baseball cap when Seokjin sidled up to him.
"A thousand won that Namjoon knocks over his own birthday cake."
Not his finest work. He's pretty sure, on reflection, that if his face weren't as good as it is, Yoongi might have walked away. But, as it is, Yoongi stayed. He turned his body half towards Seokjin and let him blab on about the first time he ever met Namjoon, at their aforementioned botany class, and Namjoon managed to lock them both inside a greenhouse for an hour.
Seokjin stopped, eventually. He watched Yoongi tug at one of the silver hoops through his ear and say, "You're Seokjin."
"Oh, to some," Seokjin said. He liked the way Yoongi's mouth was shaped like a siot and the way he held the bottle in his hand. "You can call me whatever you like."
Seokjin had spent the better part of the last year and half going to auditions that never seemed to pan out. In that time, he learned in that time that dreams were fickle creatures. Whilst blowing out his birthday candles as a child, Seokjin should have specified which side of the lights camera action he wished to be on.
Wishing for Namjoon's hyung Yoongi, with his quiet confidence and slim waist, would come with far more specifics, for that Seokjin was certain of.
"I kind of hate this song," Seokjin said, over the loud bass, leaning into Yoongi's ear enough that he could see the holes along Yoongi's cartilage.
Yoongi caught his eye. "This is my favourite band."
"I love this song."
Quick, a row of white teeth and pink gums, before Yoongi was looking away to hide his smile.
"Are you a poet then?" Seokjin said, because he's heard that people can be poets full time. Not most people and apparently only people with long hair and who had a perchance for wearing linen. Seokjin couldn't imagine Yoongi in linen.
A glance his way. "What?"
Seokjin was, then, forcibly reminded that Namjoon's delicious bite sized snack of a hyung was not necessarily aware of his own relentless devotion via poetry slams. A weaker man would have hit the ground and army crawled out of the pizza restaurant, never to be seen again.
"Just a vibe you give off."
"A vibe."
"Yeah."
"I'm a part time architecture student," Yoongi said, his mouth close enough to a bottle of beer to make Seokjin feel some kind of way (horny). "Part time delivery person and tutor and waiter for a catering business. It's a glamorous life."
"What do you want to architect?"
Yoongi hummed around the head of the beer bottle. Seokjin thought some more non-God-honouring thoughts. "Concert halls." After a second, "For now, I just design whatever assignment the professor assigns. But I want to design places where art is heard. Or seen. Make it more equitable."
Like a flower to the sun, Seokjin was charmed.
"What about you?"
"Hmm? Oh, I'm a personal assistant for a casting agent right now," Seokjin said. He usually reserved a different version of the truth for hot strangers, of whom it was important to portray himself as sexy and unattainable and successful. Despite that, something in Seokjin's gut told him that lying to Yoongi would be a bad idea. "I mostly get coffee and hold clipboards. I want to be an actor."
Yoongi made eye contact for the first time all evening. "You've got the face for that."
"Oh yeah?"
Yoongi nodded. He tilted his head back so that his chin jutted forward, flirty and defiant. Seokjin felt his mouth go dry.
"So," he said, laying on the charm, doing that thing that his new lesbian friends Dahyun and Momo told him where he ducks in close to get at someone's ear while holding a hand at their side, voice low and sexy. "What do you say about going back to my place and I'll show you my house on The Sims ?"
After their first few dates - when the dust settled and Seokjin was allowed to call Yoongi Yoongi-ah and Yoongi had called him hyungie with a pout on his face in the early hours of the morning – Yoongi told him:
"I thought you were lying."
Seokjin, who at that time was completely horizontal but for his head, which was at a 45-degree angle to be able to see the screen of his DS, paused his descent into Cerulean City. He looked over at Yoongi, who was sitting pretzeled all neatly with his textbooks open around him.
"Come again?"
"With your Sims house," Yoongi said. "I thought it was just a weird question to get me to sleep with you."
"Jagi-"
"And then you really did find me a pair of slippers and boot up your computer."
Seokjin could fry an egg on his face. "Wait. That would have worked? If I had lied about the Sims and instead tried to fuck you the minute we walked in the door?"
Yoongi slowly looked over to Seokjin and then, deliberately, shrugged. "Probably."
They fly to 100 days without an argument. Seokjin had never met anyone as different to himself as Yoongi. It worked.
Yoongi stewed on everything, anxious and overthinking. Seokjin followed his gut and wiped the hard drive of his brain every 30 minutes like an old computer. Yoongi took naturally to meeting new people, a smile on his face and a beer in one hand. Seokjin needed an arsenal of friends around him at parties like the American Suit Men who surround the American President. Yoongi knew all sorts of things about the world. Seokjin knew all sorts of jokes about fish.
Seokjin's parents adored Yoongi like a son, something that made Seokjin's ears burn at Choseok.
Eomma took him aside to tell him, "Seokjinnie, he peeled that onion with care. Marry a man who peels an onion with such care Seokjinnie." Appa told him, while Yoongi was most definitely within earshot, "You can trust a short man, Seokjin-ah. Tall men carry secrets."
It was 100 and then 156 when Seokjin blurted out I love you while making out with Yoongi on Kim Namjoon's couch at 7am. 175 and Yoongi said "Yeobo, pass the salt," and Seokjin said, "Keep that up and we'll spend our lives together, jagi-ah."
It was 224 when someone hit on Seokjin at a bar and Yoongi didn't even flinch because, as he said later when they were waiting for the bus in the cold, Seokjin had never given him a reason not to trust him. 268 and they were absolutely crushing all of Yoongi's college friends in karaoke, despite Yoongi only knowing two karaoke songs.
289 and Seokjin was packing and re-packing camping equipment into the back of Kim Namgil's sedan for his and Yoongi's 5-day camping trip to Yongmunsan to celebrate 300 days. 301 and Yoongi was a tiny ball of overheated fury at 2am because Seokjin was romantic and purchased a double sleeping bag. 304 and they were packing up and Yoongi didn't look at him to say, "I always have fun with you."
389 and Seokjin was removing his hand from the back pocket of Yoongi's jeans to sign an autograph for someone who liked him as the third male in a drama starring Kim Jungeun. 397 and Seokjin was calling the hotel in Kyoto to cancel their reservation because he was set to start filming in two days after the second male lead dropped out.
417 and Seokjin hadn't seen Yoongi in days and then 419 and Seokjin was making it up to Yoongi through the kind of shower sex that leaves them both sitting on the floor of the bathroom after, exhausted.
481 and Yoongi was driving Seokjin to the airport in Kim Namgil's car and they were arguing because it was the fourth time Yoongi had driven Seokjin to the airport in months. They were arguing because Seokjin was supposed to be back in time to see Yoongi graduate but now it was looking like that wasn't going to happen. Seokjin said a bunch of right things in a row – this is an opportunity for a lot more things, a bigger apartment and more security and I'm sorry but if I mess this up I won't be asked back – one eye on the digital clock. Yoongi grew into himself until he was still, like a stone with moss growing along it, and nodded when Seokjin finished speaking.
"Sorry," Yoongi said and Seokjin's heart would have broken, if he'd had the time. "Have a safe flight."
502 and Yoongi goes pink when Seokjin brandishes the bouquet he chartered all the way from Macau – not a single petal bent, jagi-ah! All for you! 503 and the petals cast shadows from their small kitchen table when Seokjin opens the fridge, hungry after fucking Yoongi twice in a row.
511 and they're taking the trip planned for 500, Seokjin's carry-on full of scripts that Yoongi helps him read. 514 and Seokjin had a car pick him up from Incheon to go straight into an audition, Yoongi's smile worrying when he promised Seokjin that taking the train alone was fine. "I'm sick of you from the trip," Yoongi said and he did look tired.
517 and Seokjin got drunker than he had in months to celebrate his first lead (Awake) and Yoongi gets on his knees in the bathroom of the upscale club that Seokjin's agency booked for him. 520 and Seokjin was on billboards with Samsung's new sliding cell phone, his face barely recognizable. 521 and everything feels like flying, like his Seokjin is surrounded by clouds and can't possibly see the ground.
529 and Yoongi made the trip out to the studios so they could have lunch, 35 minutes in Seokjin's trailer. Yoongi showed him photos of his hyung's new baby girl they were supposed to go see on Sunday, a tiny pink baby wrapped tight in a blanket like rice to seaweed. Seokjin said, "I like kids for an afternoon, you know? One shift at a summer camp would be my perfect amount of kids. And they all have to laugh at my jokes. And then they all go home to their parents. And that happens maybe four times a year." He laughed, dug out another bite of mulhoe, noticed he was laughing alone and said, "Right, Yoongi-ah?"
Yoongi looked down and shrugged.
Seokjin tried again because they had never been on the wrong page, really, not them. "Having children is like signing your life away. No more trips and sex and drinking, just diapers and soccer games and crying in the supermarket."
Yoongi hadn't lifted his eyes. Quietly he said, "Could be fun."
535 and Seokjin came back to an empty apartment after four days on location in Chuncheon. He called Yoongi from the kitchen island, stilled when Yoongi picked up and said, "I'm at Namjoon's. I just – was tired of being alone, I guess."
538 and anyone else would have seen it coming but Seokjin. Seokjin thought about Yoongi's pink knuckles that first night and how something in Seokjin's brain just clicked. That one. That's the one he wanted and the one he got and the one he was losing.
540 and Yoongi's stuff was all packed up in the suitcases he bought for Kyoto. He looked small in the new apartment, the one they only lasted a few months in together. Seokjin was late to get home and missed Yoongi sorting their clothes because of it.
"If I find anything of yours, I'll give it to Namjoon to give back to you," Yoongi said.
Seokjin had told himself in the taxi that he would be collected and cool and unbothered as Yoongi broke his heart and left. He wouldn't cry and beg or anything of the sort.
"Yoongi-ah," he said, trying not to look at the clock over the stove behind Yoongi's shoulder. Only four hours before he had to leave again. "Hyung's sorry. For everything."
And Yoongi, tired and pale, cleared his throat. Over 500 days of words between them that ended with, "Don't be. Not for everything, hyung."
act iv
Four days after Seokjin feels up Min Yoongi in an underground parking lot, Yoongi's half handfuls of ass a welcome return for Seokjin's greedy little paws, it's time to shoot his second last scene of the drama. Hobi comes with him to work, probably because Seokjin has oscillated this week between great sighs of joy and non-blinking smiles of panic when he thinks of his illicit paramour and his one real chance of stardom again, respectively.
"And you're sure you're okay?" Hobi asks, turning himself to see every angle of the impressive outfit he has on. More than once Hoseok has been stopped by people assuming he is a celebrity while Seokjin pretends he isn't seething behind a face mask. "You've been. Off."
"Me? I'm great." Seokjin sort of wants to burrow into the dirt like one of those groundhogs Americans can't get enough about. "Perfectly fine."
"Taehyung-ah will call soon," Hobi says, looking away from the mirror to give big, sympathetic eyes. "It's what audiences have been looking for. A forty-four-year-old man finds love again."
"Yah! I'm only forty-three."
"Well, with filming and production." Hobi flops his hand around. He takes a seat, sighing, pulling out his phone. "Between now and the premiere, you will have had at least one bowl of seaweed soup, hyung."
"The disrespect."
Seokjin peers at his phone. He has no messages or missed calls from Taehyung. He has no messages or missed calls from Min Yoongi-ah. There is a message from an hour ago from his eomma that just says Saw a picture of you in the tabloids at the grocery store. Do you need me to send you some eye cream? You would be charged extra to put those bags on a flight Seokjinnie.
He's never been respected, not once.
"I'm going for a walk."
"Hyung-"
"I love you as well, Hob-ah," Seokjin says, waving his hand around his head. He takes the steps from his trailer down gingerly and presses the call button. As it rings, he starts walking about.
"Hyung?" Yoongi asks, quiet on the other side of the line. "Everything okay?"
"Of course, jagi-ah. Everything is fine all the time in my world. How was your morning? Where are you? Regale me with tales of my forgotten youth."
"I went to a Pilates session with Namjoon," Yoongi says. Seokjin mentally adds Namjoon to his long list of people to punish. "My ass hurts."
"Oh Yoongi-ah, come on over then. I've been taking massage lessons you know."
A snort. "Uh huh."
"I'll have that ass feeling like new or your money back."
"I'm on my way to the shop," Yoongi says, changing the subject as he's known to do when Seokjin starts talking about his ass. "Why did you call, hyung? Surely it wasn't just to talk about my ass. But actually, now that I'm saying it out loud, that absolutely could have been the sole reason for your call."
"Yoongi-ah, how do you feel about Osaka in January?"
"Sounds cold," Yoongi says. His voice is muffled like he's got a paper mask over his face on the train. "I've heard October is the best time to visit Honshu."
"Ahh, our 500 days," Seokjin says. "Such a romantic trip, Yoongi-ah, I remember it well."
"Hyung, you walked around wearing an I <3 Tokyo Disney shirt asking people if they knew Kim Seokjin. I almost suffocated you in our hotel room every night."
Seokjin laughs. "How easy one forgets the past after forty. If you recall, you nearly did suffocate me nightly when I had you sit on my face, Yoongi-yah, which-" Seokjin bumps into a torso, looking up to see Jeon Jungkook's giant deer eyes wider than he's ever seen them. He blinks back.
"Yah, it wasn't every night. Pretty sure it was once and then you complained about your jaw hurting so we –"
"Yes, eomma, I will make sure I send you the slippers you left at my house," Seokjin says. Jungkook gives him a Look like perhaps the improv class Seokjin took in college has run its course. "Bye bye, eomma."
"What? Hyung –"
Seokjin is not a stranger to an uncomfortable situation. He once accidentally walked into the wrong room at a walk-in clinic on campus wherein the physician was explaining to a man that despite his supposedly monogamous relationship of 3+ years he did indeed have chlamydia and should probably ask aforementioned supposedly monogamous boyfriend about that.
This may take the cake.
"So. You heard at least some of what I just-"
"You know other Yoongis," Jungkook says, a statement. A man looking for assurance only and desperately so. "That was one of the many, many Yoongis you know, right? And not. My. Um."
Seokjin could lie. However - "Honestly, it feels wrong to me that anyone else on the planet could be named Yoongi."
"I need to throw up," Jungkook says and before Seokjin can blink, he's jogging in the opposite direction.
For roughly 540 days of Seokjin's life in the mid-2000s, there was a new pathway of decision making added to his conscious: What Would Yoongi Do? The chair he's sitting on is off kilter on one leg: What would Yoongi do? Fix it immediately with the closest thing he could find. The woman next to him at the bar is saying some biphobic shit: What would Yoongi do? Casually destroy her entire sense of ego and id with a few carefully crafted words.
For fifteen years or so since those blessed 540 days, he's been able to put away that part of himself. At times this has been a goddamn blessing because What Seokjin Would Do is often very different. Seokjin would swap chairs. Seokjin would move to a different part of the bar and talk shit about that lady all night instead.
Seokjin would let Jungkook go angst in a corner somewhere, as fifteen-year-old children are known to do, and get a snack from craft services for himself. Yoongi, Seokjin assumes, likely has a different approach.
This will also have to go in the memoir. The things he does for love.
"Yah, Jungkook-ah," he says as he storms into Jungkook's trailer. It is the exact same as Seokjin's except there are dumbbells on the little coffee table and a pull up bar in the hallway bit to the bathroom. The bathroom light is on. "Jungkook-ah, where are you?"
Someone dry heaves. Seokjin Would have said a quick "I'll come back later!" and fled the scene. Yoongi Would go rub circles on Jungkook's back and say soothing words. Seokjin braces himself and walks toward the bathroom.
Jungkook is hugging the toilet.
"Hi there," Seokjin says, stepping into the small bathroom. It smells amazing, like lavender. "It's me, Kim Seokjin."
"Please just leave me to die."
"No can do." Seokjin gingerly wrings his hands. "Could you move your legs? I need to pat your back in a supportive manner."
Jungkook obliges. Seokjin folds himself into the tiny space between the wall, the toilet roll holder, the cupboard bit under the sink where cleaning supplies go, and Jungkook's gigantic muscles. What was Yoongi feeding this child?
He puts a hand on Jungkook's back. Moves it up a bit, counts to two, and then down. Does that three times.
"So," he starts. "Your abeoji and I used to have sex."
"Noooo," Jungkook moans, dry heaving again. If actual vomit leaves his mouth, Seokjin will have to abandon this whole What Would Yoongi Do mission. He has a very gentle and beautiful stomach, not unlike a maple souffle.
"There is a 99% chance we will have sex in the future," Seokjin says. He thinks back to his therapy day. "Um. What is your initial reaction to this information?"
"Bad."
Seokjin takes his hand off of Jungkook's back. "Oh, grow up!"
Jungkook takes his face away from the toilet. His eyes are ginormous and glittering with sparkly little tears. His nose is red. Seokjin wants to put him back into whatever fairy tale he came out of.
Like a baby, he says: "I'm upset!"
"Yah! Older people are allowed to have sex!"
"Not when it's my appa," Jungkook says, pouting now. Seokjin narrows his eyes. "Go date someone else's appa. I don't want to think about you and him – eughhhhhhhhh."
"It was before you were even born," Seokjin says, but he's never been great at math so he adds a, "Probably! Besides, isn't your appa allowed to have all the happiness in the world? Hasn't he deserved that?"
Jungkook pouts harder. "Yes!"
"So?"
"You aren't all the happiness in the world," Jungkook says and then, as if remembering he's speaking to Kim Seokjin, he says, "Sunbaenim. You don't even like garlic!"
"I'm allergic!"
"My appa loves garlic."
This is why Seokjin never wanted children. You clothe them and raise them and then they have a hormonal moment and tell you that all their problems are your fault. Seokjin, luckily, is too smart to say all that to Jungkook.
Instead, he puts his hand back on Jungkook's back and starts stroking it again.
"What are you doing?"
"Giving you comfort!" Seokjin says, angry like a storm cloud.
Jungkook makes a humph sort of noise. He looks into the toilet bowl like it contains the answers to all of life's questions. Quietly, like a child in an allegory who has just been turned into a small rodent because he didn't complete his chores, he asks, "Why didn't he tell me?"
"Maybe because this is how you handled the news?" Seokjin says, petulant right back.
Jungkook reaches out and flicks him on the ear. His eyes widen.
"Sunbaenim," says Jungkook who has apparently ditched Seokjin's hyung for the time being, understandably. "I'm sorry-"
Seokjin flicks him on the ear right back.
"Yah!"
Jungkook flicks him back.
Seokjin flicks him back too.
The door to Jungkook's trailer opens and a tired sounding PA asks, "Jungkook-ssi? Are you in there? We're about to film scene eighteen and you needed to be in hair and makeup ten minutes ago."
Jungkook looks at the toilet bowl, at his own hands, and then up towards the door. Seokjin takes advantage of his doe blinking to flick him again on the ear.
"Ow!"
"I win!" Seokjin says before hastening out of the bathroom.
The joy he gets from his dramatic exit is summarily squashed when they're wrapping up around midnight and he sees Yoongi at the craft services table, car keys in one hand. He looks unimpressed.
"Yoongi-yah, my most gentle and delicate sunflower –"
"'I win?'" Yoongi says, narrowing his eyes. "Really? You said I win??"
Seokjin looks at his shoes. He has to give the shiny leather shoes he wears as Jungkook's father back at the end of every shoot, so he's in the pink running shoes his cousin regifted to him after dubbing them "too old" for her. They have done wonders in ankle support.
"I once had a guy try and bribe Jungkook into liking him so that I would date him," Yoongi says. "Physically fighting my child is a new one."
"He started it," Seokjin mutters.
"What's that?"
"I said, Yoongi-ah my dearest chestnut." Seokjin takes a couple steps forward and, when he is not immediately castrated, chances a hand to Yoongi's waist. "How can I repay this egregious error?"
Yoongi still looks mightily unimpressed. Seokjin wiggles his eyebrows.
"Tell hyung. Hyung will make it right."
"Are you still good at making jeyuk bokkeum?"
Seokjin hasn't made jeyuk bokkeum in six years. "Oh Yoongi-yah, I whipped up some just this past weekend. It's serendipity – fated! Why don't you and I head back to my apartment, and we can have a glass of wine and reminisce about the old days and –"
Seokjin looks out the window of Yoongi's grocer neighbour's truck and contemplates life. In Moon - one of Seokjin's best works but given a terrible time slot on KBS and overrun with comparison to Epiphany - he played a devoted lover in a one-sided love story. One of the big monologues he recited (which should have won him a Baeksang for Best Actor) went something like:
I didn't even have a name until I met you. You gave me your love and now have become my reason.
Devotion, Seokjin thinks as his entire body is pressed up against the truck door, is bullshit.
"Appaaa," Jungkook whines, smushed as he is between Seokjin and Yoongi. He keeps rattling his knees like a fidget spinner. "Do we have ojingeochae-muchim at home?"
Yoongi, Seokjin has learned so far in the twenty-three minutes they've snaked through late night Seoul traffic, is an indulgent father. He turns the radio dial to a pop station that Jungkook seems to know every lyric to. He has a pocketful of cheese snacks and tangerines for Jungkook to eat on their way home. He lets Jungkook poke and prod at him without flinching once.
"I can pick some up for you," Yoongi says.
Jungkook cheers. He turns his face to meet Seokjin's eye and sticks his tongue out. He mouths I win at Seokjin and Seokjin feels both his eyes twitch, one after the other.
"Did you both have a nice day filming?"
"Yes appa - "
"Yes, jagi-ah - "
Yoongi humphs. He checks over his shoulder three times for pedestrians before making a very measured right turn. Seokjin wants to keep him in a jar on a shelf inside a room that only Seokjin knows the 12-sequence passcode to. He'll feed Yoongi-in-a-jar little slices of carrots and kimchi.
"Appa," Jungkook begins as particularly gridlocked bit of Seoul erupts in front of them. The song playing on the radio is beating through Seokjin's skull in a 4/4 rhythm. "I thought we didn't lie to each other."
"You don't lie to me. I lie to you when it's for your own good."
Jungkook's pout could be seen from space. "That's impossible. Lying is never for my own good!"
"When Walnut Cake died and I told you that she had snuck away to become a cat spy for the NIS," Yoongi says, matter of fact. Jungkook's pout deepens. "That was a lie for your own good. You never would have been able to handle the truth."
"This is different than Walnut Cake."
"I told you I knew Kim Seokjin," Yoongi says. He takes another one of his overly safe turns. Seokjin nearly pops a boner. "That we had spent some time together. You didn't believe me. You said, 'Uh huh, sure Appa, and I'm the princess of England.'"
"I didn't think you meant that you know Kim Seokjin biblically."
"Well, you didn't ask."
"Appaaaaaa-"
"When I first met Yoongi, he was an acrobat with Cirque du Soleil. I was the lion tamer. We fell in love over train rides across this great nation."
Yoongi's mouth turns up. Jungkook's turns down.
Within minutes of parking Yoongi's grocer neighbour's truck in front of the grocery store, it becomes clear that Yoongi is the type to know every halmoni and halaboji on his street. The older man at the security desk of their building immediately says, "Ahh, Yoongi-ssi. Were you out so late looking for your lost youth?"
"Mmm," Yoongi says. He makes them wait for a minute as he opens his little mailbox. "I found it too."
Seokjin looks smugly at the security guard. He isn't looking back, instead staring at his phone but holding it out eight metres away from his eyes. Seokjin turns his smug gaze to Jungkook instead. Jungkook is angrily munching on a cheese stick from Yoongi's pocket.
Min Yoongi-ah's apartment is small and warm. Yoongi used to be very into European architecture and his home reflects Scandinavia – all wood and minimalism, with plants everywhere. Burnt orange cushions surround a chabudai, snug in the corner next to a keyboard. One wall is covered in framed photos of Jungkook, of Jungkook and Yoongi, and of Jungkook, Yoongi, and some of Seokjin's former friends.
Seokjin examines a photo of The Artist Formerly Known as Jung Hoseok slung arm-in-arm with Yoongi and Jungkook, The Monster Formerly Known as Park Jimin beaming next to them. He says, casually, "Love what you've done with the place, jagi-ah."
"Gross gross gross," Jungkook says. He is up on the counter in the kitchen, banging his heels against the cupboard doors. Yoongi doesn't seem to even register the rhymical thud thud thud from where his head is stuck in the fridge. "I hate this."
"Do you want carrots in your jeyuk bokkeum? We have some that are going bad."
"Yes please, Appa."
There's a photo of Kim Namjoon, who has been dead to him for decades. He has his arm around a middle-school-aged Jungkook who looks to be the colour of a persimmon and whose smile reminds Seokjin of being awkward from ages 9 to approximately the day after he met Yoongi.
There's another one of Namjoon further over, he and Yoongi asleep on lounging chairs near a beach. Seokjin asks, "Kim Namjoon grew up alright, didn't he?"
Jungkook's face snaps to Seokjin so quick he swears he hears a crack. "What? Huh? You know Namjoon-hyung?"
It takes a second for Seokjin's old man bones to cooperate, but he shimmies right up next to Jungkook on the counter. Watching Yoongi huff and puff in front of the fridge, Seokjin says, "Kim Namjoon is a con artist. If he hadn't stolen those diamonds, I would never have been embroiled in his life of crime."
"Don't listen to him," Yoongi says because Jungkook's eyes are as wide as dinner plates. "Namjoon introduced Seokjin-hyung and I."
"Back in the war years?"
"Yah!" Jungkook laughs. Yoongi turns away with his bushel of ingredients and starts prepping his workstation, just across from them both. Seokjin will offer to help in a few minutes or so.
"You met Namjoon-hyung in university too?"
"Hm?" Seokjin was looking at Yoongi's ass. He blinks away. "Yes. He used to stare at plants all day and then write poetry about it."
"Namjoon-ah wrote songs with Jungkook when he was younger," Yoongi says. Seokjin watches as Jungkook's face reddens. "He'd perform little raps and Jungkook used to call him Rap Monster."
"Appaaaaaaaaa-"
"What? It was cute!"
"I'm going to die," Jungkook says. His hands are up to cover his face. "At the hands of my own father."
"So dramatic," Yoongi says, turning back to his pork.
"Kim Namjoon still owes me 10,000 won from when I bought him cold medicine in 2006," Seokjin tells the room. "He thinks I've forgotten, but I haven't. I'm fully prepared to bring it up to his next of kin, should he pass before he wires me the debt."
It doesn't get Jungkook to lower his hands, but Seokjin hears him giggle a bit. When he looks over, Yoongi is looking at him with something like fondness. He says, half sighing, "You're both dramatic."
Yoongi lets him stay the night.
"It's almost two in the morning," he said, as they finished up the jeyuk bokkeum they made together (Seokjin stirred it while Yoongi was in the bathroom which is helping). "You're both exhausted."
"I'm not tired," Jungkook said from where he was snoozing, folded over the table and resting his head on his forearms.
"Me neither," Seokjin said, around a yawn that pulled at the corners of his mouth. He let out two honks of yawn, blinked, and then met Yoongi's eyes. They were unimpressed. "Really, I'm good."
Yoongi lets him stay in his bed but only – in Yoongi's words – if there was absolutely no funny business.
"My son is in the next room," Yoongi said as they brushed their teeth side by side. "We will be doing absolutely no canoodling. Your hand will go nowhere near my ass."
"Ahh, of course, Yoongi-ah," Seokjin said as he put his hand on Yoongi's ass. It was so warm and soft and small and nice. The perfect ass. "Consider yourself heard."
Seokjin putters over to bed but keeps the door open a smidge. Yoongi stopped into Jungkook's before bed, ostensibly to say goodnight but almost certainly more to check in. Seokjin leans his head into the hallway to try and catch a bit of their conversation, because he's never claimed to be anything but nosey.
"…didn't want to hide it from you," Yoongi is saying. His voice is softer than Seokjin's ever heard it, something reserved for thunderstorms. "I was worried about how you would take it."
"Okay."
"You're still allowed to be upset with Appa. Appa shouldn't have lied."
"Okay, I'll still be upset with Appa."
"Brat," Yoongi says and Jungkook laughs.
"So are you um. Dating?"
Seokjin sticks more of himself out the door and into the hallway. He keeps one foot latched into Yoongi's bedroom, for posterity, and strains his aging ears as hard as he can.
"I don't think so," Yoongi says. Seokjin feels like one of those blow-up parade decorations but all the air's been let out of him. "I don't know. We'll see."
"You don't have to know yet."
"No." There's some shuffling. Seokjin leans all the more forward. "Goodnight, Kook-ah. I love you."
"Good night, Appa."
Like one of the boomerangs Seokjin threw in the aforementioned trip to Australia, Seokjin rights himself back into Yoongi's bedroom. He flies onto the bed, grabs at his phone on the bedside table, and strikes a very convincingly casual pose so Yoongi can know that he was not, would never even dream of, dropping any eaves.
"Everything okay?"
"Hm?" Seokjin says, so casual. "I'm just reading the news. And stocks."
"You're out of breath."
"Because you take my breath away."
Yoongi lets out a hysterical little laugh at that and then, as if horrified by himself, turns red before looking away. He clears his throat and, while Seokjin watches on delighted, asks "Do you need pajamas?"
Seokjin only sleeps well if he is in full length Ebenezer Scrooge pajamas with funny little characters on them. However, in the interest of bending Yoongi's No Funny Business Rule, he says, "I sleep in a t-shirt and underwear now. I'm very modern."
Yoongi mutters something that sounds like how convenient but waves off Seokjin when he asks for clarification.
And then they're lying together, rolled over to their sides so they can blink at one another like two cows in a field. It feels like they're back at the parking garage with this solitude. Solitude like they used to take for granted, Seokjin's hands up the back of Yoongi's shirt and the kind of kissing that Yoongi had to pull away from, lips rubbed raw, to go find his chapstick in the pocket of his coat.
"I missed making dinner with you," Yoongi says, now.
"Yoongi-ah, let's marry," Seokjin says. "We can honeymoon in Jeju."
"Don't make fun."
"I'm not kidding."
Seokjin can't see Yoongi's dumpling cheeks go pink with the light off. "Isn't that a bit soon?"
"You know, I was thinking Yoongi-ah," Seokjin says. He can hardly feel his body, like it's been dropped into a cold body of water. "The life expectancy in Korea is 83. If you and I got married tomorrow, we could be married forty years."
Yoongi rolls, gracefully, onto his stomach. He hides his face in the pillow.
"Yoongi-ah?"
"Mpghhhh."
"Ahh, jagi." Seokjin's ears feel as if they're on fire. This room feels safe, somehow, though it is new to Seokjin. "Hiding? That's fine."
"Mpghh."
Seokjin sneaks his hand under the covers to put his hand on Yoongi's ass. Like two takoyaki. Seokjin squeezes and hums. Just like takoyaki, Seokjin would like to crawl himself under the covers and nibble on Yoongi's ass.
"I said no funny business," Yoongi says, turning the most perfect mouth in human history enough to the side to speak. "That includes feeling my ass up like a watermelon."
"I'm so funny, Yoongi-ah. How can I not partake in some funny business?"
Yoongi pushes himself up with two hands to sit on his knees, sheets bunched around his rump. His hair is fluffy like a puppy under a duvet. Seokjin can't help his hands, which grab at the air.
"Just a minute, Yoongi-ah, let me squeeze you for a minute."
"Okay, we're doing this now," Yoongi says, bracing himself as if for battle. Seokjin slows his grabby hands. "You and I fell apart because of real reasons."
"Oh god."
"Seokjin-"
"Kill me dead," Seokjin says, trying to pull away from the bed. "I don't want this. I can't handle this."
"You want to get married for forty years," Yoongi hisses. "But you can't have a conversation with me?"
"No, I can't."
Seokjin frees himself from the blankets and, in a move that is truly shocking for a man of Yoongi's age, is thrown back against the bed as Yoongi's knees come to either side of his hips. Yoongi takes in a sharp breath, bracing himself.
"Shibal, now I'm light-headed."
"This is an excellent way to get me to stay here, Yoongi-ah," Seokjin says, putting his hands on the straight bone of Yoongi's hips. "Right back to the funny business."
Yoongi's hands, like little claws, grasp around Seokjin's wrists.
"Oh goodness, Yoongi-ah-"
"I didn't just want a kid, yeobo," Yoongi says. He isn't looking at Seokjin, his eyes slightly to the side. "I wanted one with you."
Something crumbles in Seokjin, something he didn't know was inside him. He can still remember the way heartbreak felt with Yoongi, sitting alone in a beautiful new apartment in the late hours of the evening.
"Oh."
"I wanted to drive to soccer games with you and make dinner for an ungrateful toddler together. I wanted to take turns taking care of our child together. That's what I wanted."
Seokjin swallows. He can feel his skin goosebumping over.
"It's okay that you didn't want that," Yoongi says, closing his eyes like he's reciting from a script. "You can't make yourself change or want things that aren't right for you. I've moved on from resenting you for that, that's not your fault. But hyung-"
"Yoongi."
"Yeobo. You and I have different ideas of the future."
"We talked about this already, Yoongi-ah," Seokjin says, desperate. "You don't want any more sticky little dependents in your home and I'm not about to get the calls that Choi Wooshik does. We weren't right for each other's lives then, but we could be now. Please let me play your ass like bongos."
And Yoongi – deflates.
Fuck. "I'm sorry."
Gently, he climbs off Seokjin. Seokjin's heart is racing as he scrambles to get up, pulling himself on his side to be closer to Yoongi.
"I'm sorry. Fuck, you know I don't mean to do it. I'm sorry."
"I think this could be good," Yoongi says, quiet. "But we have to be serious about the same shit."
It's not noisy in this neighbourhood, the mountain and trees absorbing the sound. Seokjin used to wake up constantly when he first moved to Seoul but he's grown used to it. Now, it's too quiet. Just his heartbeat, Yoongi's, their breaths in the air, and the hum of the central air system.
"What's your plan for the future?"
"We don't have to-"
"Min Yoongi-ah," Seokjin says, pulling his hyung voice. "What does our future hold?"
"This is – we shouldn't be doing this."
Seokjin hitches Yoongi's thigh up slightly higher. "Could you just hold that there, darling?"
"I'm going to be so fucking sore tomorrow," Yoongi grumbles but does as he's told.
When Seokjin imagined sex with Yoongi after their decade and a half hiatus, there was passion – buttons flying off and moans. He fantasized for eighteen minutes the other day about all of the angles they would try again, the positions, the heated skin. On Seokjin's 26th birthday Yoongi dressed up in a schoolgirl outfit and called him oppa.
This is the level of fantasy Seokjin was expecting.
Instead it's – hushed. Seokjin's mouth laying wet kisses along Yoongi's cock, hands holding his slim hips down to the bed. Yoongi's knee cracks when he curls it over Seokjin's shoulder, the loudest thing in the room as they keep their voices down.
"I want to leave Seoul," Yoongi had said, caged in Seokjin's arms against the bed. "Get a home in the countryside with a garage to make my furniture in. Maybe have some chickens in a coop in the yard. Make my own kimchi on Sundays."
Not typically enough to get Seokjin rock hard in the boxers he wore to make Yoongi interested. And yet - he leaned down to ask, a whisper, "Two year plan? Five years? Ten?"
"Whenever Jungkook is settled," Yoongi said. "And I have someone to take care of the chickens with."
"Ahh, I see Yoongi-ah. You need my labour."
Yoongi shrugged. "I could probably call up that guy I took to Kim Namjoon's housewarming party instead. Seems like he'd be able to hold a lot of chickens at once."
So there's really no wonder Seokjin found himself sucking on Yoongi's balls halfway to dawn. It's the principle of the thing. And Kim Seokjin is, if nothing else, a man of principles.
"Still so pretty, jagi," Seokjin says, slowly thumbing over the head of Yoongi's cock. "How did you stay so pretty, hn? Did you know I was coming back for you?"
Yoongi's toes are curled around Seokjin's shoulder blade, his long fingers gripping at Seokjin's hair softly. His stomach is so pale and soft where it's peeking out from underneath his sleep shirt, pushed up to his nipples by Seokjin's wandering hands.
"Jagi," Seokjin says again, softly, and Yoongi's cock dribbles white over Seokjin's fist.
"Fuck my thighs," Yoongi breathes, eyes half closed. His hair is spread out over the pillow like waves in the ocean. "Please, yeobo-"
"You don't have to ask me twice, god-"
Yoongi grumbles about being folded in half but Seokjin ignores him, pressing Yoongi's girl group thighs together tight, grip around his knobbly ass knees. They used to go at it in Yoongi's twin bed, in the futon that Seokjin borrowed from his older brother after college, in Kim Namjoon's bathroom during a memorable Halloween Party. This is the nicest bed they've ever fucked in – save for maybe the hotel bed in Macau – but Yoongi still looks the same. A fucking knockout who doesn't realize. Head back and mouth open, gasping.
Seokjin comes all over his stomach. His come pools white in Yoongi's belly button and then spills down Yoongi's side, dampening his sheets.
"You dick," Yoongi says, grimacing.
"Shhh," Seokjin shushes, breathing as hard as when he had to take the stairs a week ago. "I'm having an orgasm over here."
"Gross."
And then they're lying next to each other in bed. Yoongi is cycling his legs in the air to work out the kinks. Seokjin's mouth still tastes like jizz when he says, "You're so fucking hot that I need oven mitts on around you."
Yoongi breathes a laugh. "Was it the chickens that did it for you?"
"Yes," Seokjin wiggles closer to Yoongi's side. "All those breasts, mmmm."
They tangle together. Yoongi sleeps like a mummy in a particularly cramped sarcophagus, tucked in and still. Seokjin rolls him around and moves his arms until he's in the perfect spot to be snuggled up on. He tucks himself around Yoongi, who is already pouting his way into a dream, eyes screwed close.
"Yoongi-ah?"
With a noise like a dying whale, Seokjin's precious little Yoongi-button asks, "What?"
"How long has Jungkook-ah had a crush on Kim Namjoon?"
A snort. "Forever. I hate it."
Post-sex-with-Yoongi Seokjin is a Seokjin that Seokjin missed. His back aches. His dick aches. He sort of feels like he should be lounging in a clawfoot tub all day with a champagne fountain next to him.
"I still don't know why you had to put pants on to make breakfast."
"You've mentioned that," Yoongi says, poking at the egg in the frying pan.
His lovely self has gotten dressed for the day, albeit in sweatpants and a shirt that proclaims Hope's Lil Stars Dance Crew. Seokjin is still in his sexy not-pajamas look, though with a robe of Yoongi's to cover up "your Maple Story boxers and the semen stain on your t-shirt." Despite these challenges, Seokjin is still making it work.
"I like everyone fully clothed," Jungkook says, nose wrinkled distastefully. They're sitting next to each other at this little kitchen island to watch Yoongi work. Jungkook started punching Seokjin's leg three minutes ago, so now they're trading punches.
"Spoilsport."
Jungkook sticks his tongue out.
Years ago, Seokjin went to a fortune teller with his ex-girlfriend. The ex-girlfriend was named Eunae and she was way too good for Seokjin; she liked to go running on Sunday mornings and talked a lot about setting boundaries in their relationship. They didn't last.
The fortune teller, on the other hand, was named Jiyoung and she used saju to tell Seokjin that he was one of the least spiritual people she had ever interacted with. She sounded near impressed when she said it and Seokjin, never one to turn down a superlative, said thank you.
Jiyoung may have had a point because when Seokjin's ringtone – Girls' Generation's Mr. Taxi - interrupts them, he is none the wiser.
"Seokjin-hyung! It's me, Kim Taehyung. We know each other from film and television. How are you doing?"
"Yes," Seokjin says. He can see Yoongi's ass through his funky little sweatpants. He idly wonders what the odds are that Jungkook will go take an hour and a half long shower and he can convince Yoongi to get back into bed. "What do you want?"
"Aw, I'm glad to hear." Taehyung sounds like he's spinning around in a desk chair, playing with his hair. "Anyways, I'll cut to the chase. The casting director loved your audition tape. Truly. Apparently, she almost burst into tears."
Yoongi pushes a plate of eggs, rice, and banchans down in front of him. Seokjin blinks at it.
"So, we'll be sending over the pilot script and the contract," Taehyung says. He laughs. "Well, someone else will be doing that. I barely know how to open emails on my computer. Someone with a lot more knowledge and capabilities than me will be sending you all of that information. Let me know if you have any questions! Wow! It's happening!"
"It's happening," Seokjin says. He feels like a parrot. He should be vibrating out of his skin right now in excitement.
"I love you, hyung."
"Great, thanks Taehyung."
"Hyung, I love you. Aren't you going to say it back?"
Seokjin hangs up. He brings a piece of fermented radish to his mouth and takes a bite. His own show. His own chance to show that people in their forties have whole entire lives, that people don't age out of joy or love or sex or drama.
He feels himself smiling.
"Good call?" Yoongi asks. He's bent over the island to eat his own plate of breakfast, eyes gentle in the light of the day.
"Yes," Seokjin says. He shakes himself. "Yes, it was a good call. It came from Kim Taehyung, a writer I know through Hobi-ah."
"Oh yeah," Yoongi says, smiling. "I know Taehyung. He bought a couple of pieces from me. He would always ask for me to smile with my teeth before he left my store. Weird guy."
"With your-" Kim Seokjin was going to murder Kim Taehyung the next time he saw him. After he finished all the scripts for the drama, and everything, he was going to kill him. He could live down the bottom of the cliff along with all of Seokjin's other former friends. "You're showing people your teeth for free now, Yoongi-ah?"
"I hate this," Jungkook says.
"What did Kim Taehyung want?" Yoongi asks and oh.
Hm.
Back in the parking lot where Seokjin and Min Yoongi-ah began their courtship with a smoking hot smooch, Seokjin did not want to tell Yoongi about his possible, soon-to-be award winning television program. Seokjin believes in many things – pinky promises and playground handshakes – but none more than the unmovable, unmatchable power of a jinx.
Now, he grins. He lets himself laugh like God and all her angels are smiling down at him. A new beau, a new show, and stomach that was soon to be full of eggs. "I was just cast as the lead in Kim Taehyung's new drama."
Like the sun over the mountains on a cool morning, slow, Yoongi's face shifts. He says, "Wow, that's incredible. Congratulations."
"Congratulations, Seokjin-sunbaenim," Jungkook mutters around a generous slice of tamagoyaki.
"Yes, thank you, congratulations to me," Seokjin agrees. He shovels some egg rice into his mouth and continues, "Filming starts in two weeks. Taehyung says I get my own trailer and rider. And we're doing a few weeks on location in Jeju-do. The height of luxury."
Yoongi's smile is flat like a coin. "Bring sunscreen."
"Maybe I will write that memoir after all," Seokjin says, munching on his egg thoughtfully. Yoongi always had a wonderful hand when sprinkling salt and pepper on Seokjin's eggs. "I'll be sure to include this scene. I can turn Jungkook into a friendly poodle."
"Hey!"
"Sounds fun," Yoongi says and then, "Aish, well. Sorry to ruin the party but I have to get ready for work. There's a shipment I have to sign for."
"A shipment?" Seokjin remembers Yoongi telling them both last night that he was taking today off.
"Mhm," Yoongi says around his mouthful of coffee mug, leaving the kitchen. "Getting forgetful in my old age."
Seokjin frowns. He makes to follow him when Girls' Generation's The Boys plays out.
"Ahh Hob-ah," he says down the line. He can hear Hoseok weeping on the other end. "Did you hear the good news?" Yoongi waddles back to his room. "I'm a star. Certified."
"Did I – yes of course! Yes of course I did, aish, this hyung! Wow! Wow, Seokjin-hyung, wow! I'm taking you out for dinner. And lunch. I'm taking you out the whole day." Seokjin lets Hoseok prattle, digging into his eggs.
"I want beef. Expensive cuts."
"Of course! Wow! I'm headed to your place with celebratory smoothies!"
"The – "
"No, not the fitness ones that Jimin got you that one time that made you quote throw up internally and destroy your genetically perfect bowels unquote," Hobi says, all out of breath and charming. "The ones that pretend to be healthy but are full of peanut butter and red bean and banana."
"You're a saint, Hob-ah." He shook his shoulders. What did he know about furniture making? It probably happens all the time that Yoongi needs to go sign for big pieces of wood and other furniture making stuff and had to leave his beautiful paramour at home with his pet poodle. Nothing to worry about.
"I'll be there in 10, okay? I'm going to give you a really really long hug, hyung, warning you now."
"Sounds wonderful, Hoseok-ah, but I will not be there. I stayed the night with a gentleman caller and will be returning to my home within the hour."
"What? What? Seokjin-hyung, wow wow! What a bombastic 24 hours for you, huh? I knew that if you just put yourself out there, good things would come. Wow! Wow! A gentleman caller. Huh. Anyone I know, hyung?"
Seokjin's eyes catch the framed photo of Hoseok, Yoongi, and Jungkook beaming in front of a CGI background that proclaims I rode the Moonboat ride at Lotte World Adventure™
"Probably not."
"Well, I'll have to meet him then. Wow! A gentleman caller!"
The sound of feet scuffling has Seokjin turning toward the front door. Min Yoongi-yah appears to be attempting to leave without even so much as 4-7 goodbye smooches. Unacceptable.
"Yes, I love you too Hob-ah, goodbye."
Yoongi blinks up at him when Seokjin skitters across the polished wood floor toward him. He's wearing a green shirt. It looks horrifically nice on him. Seokjin wants to pack him into a suitcase, fly him out to Hawaii, and watch him sit disgruntled under a beach umbrella for a week.
"You're off."
"Yes."
"To sign for a shipment delivery."
Yoongi nods. "Yes. Very important delivery. Lots of – furniture stuff."
"Hm." Seokjin, though known for his arguing, could not exactly argue with that. Perhaps he would have to read up on furniture stuff so he could surprise Yoongi with his knowledge later, preferably during sex. He makes a mental note to ask Hobi to get him some books. "Well. I guess –"
Yoongi puts a hand on Seokjin's shoulder while he bends down to put his shoes on. In his hand, Seokjin's phone rings out – Girl's Generation's Genie.
"Phone's ringing," Yoongi says, helpfully, grabbing a ring of keys from a disfigured bit of pottery on a little shelf.
"Yes. Yoongi-yah - "
"I'll see you later," Yoongi says and then – kiss-less! – he's out the door.
Seokjin humphs but picks up the phone, as he remembers who set himself as Genie: "Park Jimin, what do you possibly need now?"
"Sooooooo I hear you have a gentleman caller?" Jimin says, coy. "Hobi-hyung just told me. Who is it? Did you finally make a move on Yoongi-hyung? Did you take a senior's shuttle to a lake and go fishing together for the afternoon? Did you break a hip trying to fuck-"
Seokjin hangs up the phone.
In the light of day, the apartment is just as cheerful, colourful and cozy. Seokjin wonders how much of Yoongi's things will be brought to their eventual home in the countryside. He would like to see the charming credenza in their country estate. The grouchy half-poodle half-man slouched over the kitchen island could go.
"Well, I best be off," Seokjin says, still in last night's pajamas. Perhaps he could use Yoongi's toothbrush before he leaves. "Many people to see, contracts to sign. Are you okay to be left on your own, Jungkook-ah? Can you let yourself out to pee?"
His paramour's spoiled son and his own sometimes son, son-for-tv-son, is glaring at him like he just stabbed a porcupine.
"No? Yes? How old are you again, fifteen?"
"I told you that if you break my appa's heart I have to break your body," Jungkook says. His face suggests he's trying for a mean look but it mostly looks like a rabbit trying really hard to remember something. "So get ready to be – um. Body brokened."
Before he can continue down this road, Seokjin clarifies, "You never told me that."
"Huh?"
"You never said that if I broke your appa's heart you would break me," Seokjin says. "Wait, what do you mean breaking Yoongi-ah's heart?"
"I meant to," Jungkook says, stiffly. He squares his shoulders. "I was going to do a whole speech last night but then - I fell asleep. It doesn't matter, the content of the speech remains the same."
"What do you mean I broke sweet Yoongi-ah's heart?" Seokjin asks, again. "I would never do that –" Jungkook does not need to know about a decade and a half ago and the mistakes that have since past. Bygones and all that. "- and insinuating as such is slander and defamation. I will see you in court, young man."
"He was humming Epik High's Lullaby for a Cat under his breath while he was getting ready to leave," Jungkook says, exasperated. "He only does that when he's upset."
Once, a million years ago when they first got together, Yoongi and Namjoon collaborated on a USB key of music that was "necessary" for "Seokjin to gain some cultural merit." He lied about listening to it every night before bed – who hasn't told a few white lies in their days – and mainly remembered the tracks that also lived on the mixed CDs Yoongi would play during sex.
Seokjin does not recall having his ass eaten to any cat lullabies. But memories are fickle things.
"Yoongi-ah has no reason to be mad at me," Seokjin says after a brief yet fond mental foray of sexy times. "I respected almost all of his rules. We had a lovely night. I have been nothing but kind to you. What are you talking about, break his heart?"
"I don't know!" Jungkook says. "I just know that he's upset and it's not with me because I didn't say anything or do anything."
"Neither did I!"
Jungkook begins pacing back and forth in the kitchen like a detective in a procedural drama. Seokjin has always dreamed of playing a detective – he's got the face for a deerstalker hat and a pipe – so he paces as well, the two of them passing each other.
"He was fine when he woke up."
"Gross."
"I didn't give details."
"Still gross." Jungkook's pout could be seen from space. He has a deep furrow in his brow, not dissimilar to when he was stuffing his face with pork last night. "He started to be less happy when you brought up that teeth guy."
"Taehyung is an acquired taste," Seokjin says with finality. "Open and shut case. Thank you, Jungkook-ah, we cracked it."
"But Appa also said he liked the teeth guy," Jungkook continues, not high fiving the hand that Seokjin put out especially to be high fived. "Maybe he doesn't like Jeju-do? We went on holiday there once when I was 13 and a seagull stole my French fries. Could that be it?"
"Of course not," Seokjin says, blithely. "Don't be ridiculous. Yoongi-ah doesn't carry some decades long trauma about seagulls –"
Seokjin blinks. Oh.
"I'm still kind of scared of them, to be honest," Jungkook says. "Even though I'm from Busan. They don't really seem to be afraid of anything. They sort of remind me of Jimin-hyung-"
Seokjin sits on the floor.
"- and. Oh. Um."
Seokjin lays back down until his back is flat against the hardwood.
"Are you having a medical emergency?"
"I'm going to lose him again," Seokjin says.
The conversation from last night buzzes around Seokjin's ears. Chickens and a house in the country. A spare room made up for Jungkook whenever he needed. A large table in a large kitchen, where Yoongi could grumble through making dinner for everyone he's acquired over the years. Wine on the back porch overlooking green.
Through this haze, Seokjin senses the weight of Jungkook laying down next to him. "Lose…a seagull?"
Last time it was slow, rice slipping through his finger in each rinse. This time will be swift.
"I need to call Kim Taehyung back," Seokjin says. His voice is muffled slightly as it's pressed out into a pout by the hardwood beneath his head. "I have to tell him that my acting days are behind me."
"What?!"
"I'll write that book. That should free up some cash for my early retirement. I'll tell the story of the time Lee Sungmin called me Seokhwa and I had an existential crisis on set. That will endear me to my fledgeling audience."
"Kim Seokjin-ssi," Jungkook says. Seokjin turns his head so they can meet each other's eyes, flat on their respective backs. "Why are you giving up your lead? Aren't you excited for it?"
"The chickens, Jungkook-ah! Keep up!"
"The chickens?"
"Your jam jar of an appa deserves better than me coming home at 2am and spending three weeks at a studio on Jeju Island," Seokjin says. "It's fine. I'll have a new lifelong dream. Maybe I'll become really good at making songpyeon and win a local contest. That could be fulfilling."
Jungkook rolls his head away from Seokjin's to look up at the ceiling. He's doing that furrowed brow thing again.
"I'm confused."
"You shouldn't be," Seokjin laments. "I've explained myself perfectly."
"My appa told you that he doesn't want you acting anymore? That's so strange. Appa loves when people follow their dreams."
"Well yes, obviously," Seokjin says. He used to find scraps of paper with Yoongi's writing on them, half notes about sense of self and following your dreams and forgiveness. "You're simply not listening. He has no problem with the act of acting – the stage. But he needs someone dependable! Someone who is home by 7 every night!"
Jungkook mulls that over. Seokjin wonders who will replace him. Hopefully someone way less hot and also humourless.
"Okay so why don't you just –" Jungkook cuts himself off and then continues: "ask to be home by 7?"
Seokjin blinks. "Don't be ridiculous."
"It's not ridiculous."
"Of course it is. When's the last time you came home at a reasonable hour since we started filming Begin? Hmm?"
"But Seokjin-ssi I'm a nobody," Jungkook says, eyes the size of Seokjin's soon to be contest-winning songpyeon. "You're Kim Seokjin. If you want to go home for dinner then – well, why don't you just ask to go home for dinner?"
"It's – that's –"
"Just bring Appa to Jeju-do with you," Jungkook says, like it's the easiest thing in the world. "He's always talking about going back to the lava tubes. He really likes things like that. He likes to keep the printed guides and bring them home and put them into a scrapbook for us to look back on when he's old and I'm older but still not as old as him."
A memory bubbles up at Jungkook's words – Yoongi frowning into a folded over visitor's guide as they trudged through the temple at Yongmunsan. Seokjin had a laissez-faire attitude toward sightseeing at that time – preferring to eat a bunch and force strangers to take photos of him and Yoongi standing next to each other like divorcees – but it was sort of nice to be on the receiving end of Yoongi. Of all his guidebook regurgitation and wandering thoughts.
"Lava tubes," Seokjin summarizes. Hm. "Chickens and lava tubes. Dinner time?"
Jungkook opens his mouth then closes it. "Sure."
"I need to call Kim Taehyung," Seokjin says. "Wait – Hobi first. Oh god, I bet he's at my home already with my smoothie. I need to call Hobi and then Taehyung and then Hyunok from casting. Maybe they'll allow me to bring Yoongi-ah on set if I tell them he's my emotional support dog? Cat? Do people bring emotional support cats with them to work?"
"I don't know."
"I'll ask Hobi."
"Wait, hold on –" Seokjin stands up, shakes himself off. He has places to be, once again! People to speak to! Demands to be met! "Aren't you forgetting something?"
Seokjin turns to his son-for-pay. He looks absurd, standing with his chunky hoodie and these humungous black jeans and toe socks that have smiley faces on each toe. Seokjin says, "My apologies. Thank you Jungkook-ah, for your wisdom. I will include you in the book. I won't even make you be a poodle."
"That's not what I was talking about – "
"Okay, okay," Seokjin takes a deep breath. He lifts a hand, drops it onto Jungkook's shoulder. "Fine. You're right. This has been a long time coming. I suppose –" Like those old British people in their fancy castles, he gently bonks Jungkook's head in coronation. "- you can call me hyung again, kid. You've earned it."
He turns away to go steal Yoongi's toothbrush.
A hand tugging on his shirt stops him.
"Aren't you going to go tell Appa?"
act v.
It starts, as all good things should, with a furniture store.
When Seokjin arrives there is, of course, no delivery truck outside. Yoongi always has been a rascal with the truth, happily bending it during board games and when he forgot to pick up a new tub of samjang on his way home even though he swore he was going to over the phone.
There are people inside. What the fuck were they doing inside a furniture store at 10:45am on a Wednesday? Some people needed to go get real jobs.
Yoongi is chatting with a stylish older woman next to a set of dining chairs. He's in his little leather apron and he looks good enough to eat.
"Can I help you?"
The noise comes from below. Seokjin darts his eyes around until they see a smaller Yoongi next to him. He's like if Yoongi got shrunk by a shrink ray. He's like if Yoongi was a wool sweater and he got thrown in the dryer accidentally.
"Gah!"
"Sorry," Small Yoongi says, startled. "I'm Jihoon. I work here sometimes. Can I help you find something?"
"You should wear a bell," Seokjin says. He puts a hand over his heart. "I need to speak to Yoongi."
"He's with a customer," Jihoon says, smiling brightly. "But I can help! What furniture needs do you need serviced today?"
Seokjin shakes the metaphorical water out of his ears. "No. No, I don't. I need to go to the backroom."
Jihoon frowns. "That's employees only, sir. If you're looking for custom work, I can show you our order form and begin the process of –"
"I am very familiar with Yoongi's backroom," Seokjin says because in for a penny in for a pound and this child is asking for it. "Intimately familiar."
Jihoon frowns more. "What?"
"Woozi!" Seokjin turns to see Yoongi waddling through the array of ottomans and end tables and armouries and spindly little chairs. "Could you ring up Misook-ssi for her order? I'll step in here."
The Shrunk Yoongi Sweater gives Seokjin one more odd look before pottering off to the lady in the back. Yoongi claps him on the shoulder as he goes before turning to Seokjin. He looks beautiful and pale and tired. He won't quite make Seokjin's eye.
"Yoongi-ah-"
"Backroom?"
Yoongi does not lead him to the chairs along the sides next to the old computer. Instead, he goes over to a pile of wooden planks, his hands passing over them immediately. He grabs a piece of sandpaper and says, "What did you need? We can chat later."
"Are you – " Seokjin cuts himself off before he can say sanding??? because he may be no furniture aficionado but he knows what sanding is. And it's clearly what Yoongi's doing, his hands working fast while the wood makes a swoosh swoosh noise. "Do you want to set that down?"
"Nope."
"Okay."
"Is that Jungkook's shirt?"
Seokjin looks down at the shirt in question. It's a gingham pink button down that Jungkook pulled out of the very back of his closet. He claimed, profusely, that it was very high fashion and that all the kids were wearing it.
"Yes. He leant it to me; I didn't steal it."
"You can probably take it," Yoongi says. There's a little pile of sawdust on his workstation from the sanding. "Jimin gave him that shirt for a birthday five years ago. I've never seen Jungkook wear it."
"That’s – well, that's immaterial," Seokjin says. He wants to make a pun about immaterial material very badly but he suppresses it. "Yoongi-ah. Are you going to break up with me?"
Yoongi's eyes widen as he blinks. "Are we dating?"
"Of course, we are! You think I canoodle with just anyone?"
"I think you're confusing," Yoongi says. He grabs a different piece of wood. "You tell me you missed me and that you want to – get married. But then you don't take anything seriously."
Seokjin's insides are tying themselves into tight knots. "I'm working on it."
"I don't really want to keep being the bad guy. I hate being the one that has to walk out or call it quits but I – I think we have different visions of our futures and yours is stardom and that's fine, but I don't-"
"I love you."
Oh.
"Fuck."
Yoongi's looking at him now.
"So, I was talking to your son. Child. Jungkook. And he gave me some perspective and also told me all about how he thinks you self-sabotage yourself, always assuming that the worst is going to happen-"
"I don't –" Yoongi frowns his little face.
"You do, but it's okay. You do it in an extremely sexy way."
"Hyung."
"I'm going to call Jung Hoseok," Seokjin says. He brandishes his phone around and then catches his screen:
The Kid / Yoongi's Offspring
Did u do it ?
Big Hit Manager Jung Hobi
Jin-hyung I've been here for 20 minutes are you ?? coming ?? your smoothie is melting should I eat it ??
Big Hit Publicist Park Jimin
I know all your secrets!!!!!!!!! You can't hide from me hyung!!!!!!
"He's my manager. Did you know that?"
"What?" Yoongi shakes his head gently. He's still holding onto the sandpaper and wood chunk. "He goes on family trips with us. Do you know all of my friends?"
"Evidently," Seokjin says. "Anyways. I'm going to call him and he's going to negotiate with the people at the production company for Abyss and it's going to be different. It's going to be different Yoongi-ah, because I want this, but I want you. And I can have both."
Yoongi furrows his brow just like Jungkook does. He says through half a pout, "It's not that I don't want to believe you –"
"So do it. Believe me."
"I want to but I just –"
"I'll make sure I'm home when you make dinner. 8pm or 7:30pm but honestly, probably not earlier because the traffic in this city is terrible –"
"8pm is fine."
"And I'll be there for the moments that matter," Seokjin says moving to hold onto Yoongi's hands now. Yoongi drops the piece of wood he was clinging to and it clunks onto the workstation. "You seem like the kind of person who has a schedule for months in advance, Yoongi-yah."
Blinking like he thought about being offended, Yoongi says, "Yes. I am."
"A decade and a half ago you told me you couldn't do this anymore and all I said was sorry," Seokjin says. He clears his throat. "I'm not going to do that again."
Seokjin watches as Yoongi swallows.
It's quiet after all his words. As with all silences, even ones that he creates all on his own, Seokjin starts squirming. He looks at Yoongi's cream dollop of a nose that's all blushed pink. He looks at Yoongi's rice cake cheeks. He squirms a bit more.
"If you don't say something back, I'll cry."
"Hyung."
"Yoongi-ah."
Yoongi smiles, just a bit. "Yeobo," he starts again, and Seokjin fills his lungs back up with air. "I love you too."
Seokjin's only directed once in his career, for an episode of his widely successful children's animated show Super Tuna. Super Tuna never had any declarations of love, so he never got to direct the moments around such a precious thing. He likes to think he's not preoccupied with stereotype but maybe he is, because at Yoongi's words all he hears is strings, swelling and clear. All he sees are fireworks, even in Yoongi's dusty workroom.
"We're doing this."
"Mm. We're doing this."
"All in, jagi?" Seokjin asks.
Yoongi closes his eyes for a second and then nods. He says, "All in."
And this - Seokjin's arm going around Yoongi's waist, his hand coming to Yoongi's chin, Yoongi's hands on either of his shoulders, the warmth of a Wednesday morning between them and enough love to fill a cavern, to fill a decade and a half and lots of unfulfilled dreams – this is cinema.
Until Kim Namjoon, as he's known to do, fucking ruins it.
The employees-only door opens and Seokjin hears the unmistakable Ilsan drawl of his least favourite poet say, "Alright, I'm ready for day-drinking to avoid our problems, Yoongi-hyung. I even left my bike at home, so I don't lose it again – oh. Oh."
Seokjin removes his face from where it had been very gently and beautifully snuggled into Yoongi's neck. Namjoon looks like a salmon out of water, mouth open and hair pink. He's wearing layers and layers of brown linen.
Quietly, to Yoongi, Seokjin says, "Day drinking?"
Yoongi clears his throat. "I was upset."
"Sure."
"I'll come back?" Namjoon asks. He takes a half step backwards. "I'll come back. Okay." He trips over the floor. "Fuck. Nice to see you again Seokjin-hyung. We'll talk – after. We can talk after. Okay. Bye."
He leaves.
"Off to a good start," Yoongi sighs.
epilogue
Six months to the day that Kim Namjoon ruined the single most romantic moment of Seokjin's life, he and Yoongi get married at city hall.
Seokjin wears a three-piece suit. Yoongi wears a crisp button down and the green knit sweater that Jungkook got him for his birthday. In a few weeks, Yoongi will likely have to go rent a suit to wear to the Begin premiere, but he staunchly refused to wear one to his own wedding.
"It's my birthday week still," he told Seokjin before they left. The calendar behind his head said March 17. "I can do what I want."
It's raining in Seoul and city hall is all beige concrete. Seokjin had suggested that they ship themselves off to Macau for the weekend to get married. "Yah, jagi," he said after a passionate round of almost silent love-making due to the freeloader still living in Yoongi's apartment. "Elopement. Sexy vacation elopement. What do you say?"
"Are you paying for Jungkook's ticket too?" Yoongi asked, blithely, and Seokjin grimaced.
Jungkook is here, of course, in a black-on-black-on-black suit and a puffy face from crying. When they first planned out this little soiree, they agreed that it would be just the three of them. Yoongi said that he didn't want it to be too busy. Seokjin said that he didn't want anyone else to swoop in and steal the spotlight.
When they arrived at city hall, they were greeted by four people, one of whom – the artist formerly known as Kim Taehyung – was wearing a baby blue blazer and holding a hundred red roses.
Yoongi patted Seokjin's hand. Seokjin thought patient thoughts.
The ceremony itself is short. Seokjin promises all his worldly possessions to be split in half with his favourite Yoongi-biscuit. Yoongi's cheeks are pink. They kiss and Jimin heckles them and Hobi cries too loud and Namjoon's whoop whoop echoes down the hallway and Taehyung begins waving his arms from side to side like they're at a concert. Jungkook signs as witness and then hugs Yoongi for forty-five seconds.
Seokjin has said a lot of great lines in his career. Now, with their horrible friends around them and the rain falling outside, he tells Yoongi, "Rest of our lives, jagi-ah."
"I guess," Yoongi says. His smile is so wide and pink.
"Now we just have to kick out the kid," Seokjin says, gesturing with his chin toward where Jungkook was still back-hugging Yoongi. "Get that place out in the countryside and start making our own kimchi on Sundays."
"Psssh," Jungkook says. "Who is going to help Appa to get stuff down from the top shelf? You? You could fall and break your geriatric bones."
Seokjin closes his eyes. Yoongi laughs.