Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The world is a giant system
Everyone everywhere is sick, whether sick from grief or sick from avarice
We let capitalism inject us with the morphine of hope
and take our dreams as collateral

The choices we’ve been given are all under control
No matter how much you have, everyone’s a slave to the system
In a sick world, only the person who is well is an outcast
Dreams are optional, and the glowing oracle has no answers

Namjoon crosses out the last line, pen scratching sharply against the page, eyes flicking furiously between Yoongi’s lyrics on top, a block of familiar chicken-scratch, and his own attempt laboriously taking shape below. He gets up from the floor, where he’s been lying on his back writing, and begins to pace around his living room, bumping gently into furniture and then navigating around it without looking, because his eyes are still trained on the page. 

His phone buzzes, once, twice, again, going off with an apparent deluge of messages.

Letting out a huge sigh, Namjoon casts the notebook aside and flops onto the couch, grabbing his phone to check his messages. He already knows who it is.

Jin-hyung:
namjoon-ah
we’re coming to pick you up
you’d better be ready
get up off the floor and put some clothes on
we’ll be outside in fifteen minutes
hyung gets carsick so you’ll have to sit in the back

Namjoon stares. We? 

He types back quickly.

I don’t care where I sit
and I already have clothes on
who’s we??

Jin-hyung:
friend of mine
my neighbor
ish
he lives five minutes away from me
you’ll like him

Namjoon shrugs and pockets his phone. It seems like Seokjin has roped another poor sucker into his scheme for the night.

The event was Seokjin’s idea, cashing in on the favor for dragging Namjoon up to his apartment that night from Bar Nap Star. It’s a new rival drag show, or at least Seokjin has decided that they’re his potential rivals, and he wants Namjoon to help him assess the competition by talking to random people in the crowd and reporting everything he hears to Seokjin after. It’s the sort of ridiculous semi-subterfuge out of a spy movie that he gets up to regularly. Namjoon doesn’t know if it’s inherent to being a performer, creating this sort of low-level, silly-stakes drama around yourself at all times, but he’s well acquainted with it by now, and he owes Seokjin a favor, so far be it from him to argue.

He checks his appearance in the mirror briefly, just to make sure his clothes aren’t a mess, but he doesn’t really care that much about looking nice for this. He’s wearing a simple black slim fit tee tucked into one of his favorite pairs of comfy olive green slacks, and a thin black belt with a silver buckle. Unlike Seokjin, he’s not a performer, and he’s not going there with the goal of being noticed. He runs a hand over his silver buzz cut. It’s grown out just a little, and with the shadow of dark roots beneath, he looks even more like a dandelion than before.

He has a few more minutes, so he decides to glance over the lyrics one more time, which leads to more agonized pacing around the house. When his phone buzzes again, he’s crouched on the floor in front of his couch, head in hands, like he can force the ideas out through sheer physical will. Clearly, it’s not going to happen tonight, so he might as well go to this drag show. 

He lets out another gusty sigh and goes to stand up in a huff, tossing aside his notebook again, but he immediately overbalances and crashes face first into his coffee table. 

“Oh… fuck.” 

It doesn’t actually hurt that much, but he somehow managed to break a drinking glass with his face, and he can feel something wet on his eyelid, which isn’t a good sign.

Sure enough, when he flicks on the light in the bathroom, there’s a fresh trickle of blood creeping down from just below his eyebrow. 

It could be worse. It looks pretty shallow. Namjoon suspects he’s the only person who could manage to hit his head and cut his face open while trying to write, but Namjoon knows himself, and it’s hard to be surprised by the amount of havoc he can wreak with his own clumsiness at this point in his life.

His phone buzzes again. 

Namjoon sighs, wetting a gauze pad with alcohol and wiping the cut as he pulls his phone out of his pocket.

Jin-hyung:
Joon-ah
put the notebook down
tick tock
don’t make me come in there

He texts back quickly, one-handed:

sorry hyung
hit my head (NOT a big deal) 
be right out just give me a minute

The little typing bubble appears right away.

Jin-hyung:
you 
what
ok that’s it I’m coming in 
open the door

Setting his phone down in frustration so he can peel the delicate film off a tiny bandage, he taps the text to speech. “I’m fine, I’ll be out in a minute. Seriously.” 

His own wide eyes stare back at him in the mirror. There’s very obviously a narrow bandage tucked above the outer corner of his eye, and possibly the shadow of a bruise forming beneath it, but at least it doesn’t appear to be bleeding anymore. That will have to be good enough. He already owes Seokjin for rescuing him that night at Bar Nap Star, he can’t skip out on this too or he’ll be two favors in debt, and then who knows what Seokjin will make him do.

He makes his way back through the house to the front door, being extra careful not to trip over anything, just in case. The thought makes him a little giddy, because there’s something funny about it, his house and all his furniture suddenly a minefield of potential injury, and he almost laughs. 

It must show on his face when he answers the door, because Seokjin is standing right there, eyebrows raised, and immediately asks, “What’s so funny? You don’t have a concussion, do you? Let me see.” 

Without asking, he takes Namjoon’s face in his hands and tilts it, taking advantage of the porch light for his examination. “Hyung, I told you I’m fine-“ Except he ruins the sentiment by laughing a little. He can’t help it, the situation is so ridiculous, and he’s well aware that just a few weeks ago, this would have been incredibly demoralizing for him; in fact, he probably would have taken it as another ominous sign in his significant string of failures, but his perpetual clumsiness is really all it is, something that’s never changed, and it feels nice to laugh at that rather than see it as a curse. He’s in a good mood.

This doesn’t seem to inspire confidence in Seokjin, however. “Namjoon-ah, should my neighbor take you to the hospital? Are you delirious in some way? Is your judgment impaired?” 

Seokjin’s face is creased in concern, and he’s wearing a beautiful blond wig in an artfully shaggy wolf cut, which somehow makes the situation even funnier.

“Hyung, is your face sparkly?” 

Seokjin straightens, his entire demeanor changing, and turns his face into a three-quarters profile, posing for an invisible camera. “Yes, it is. Thank you for noticing.” 

He’s also wearing a rosy pink hoodie, his favorite color. Namjoon knows how to read these signs by now: he wants to look his absolute show-stopping best without having appeared to put in any effort, hence the hoodie and the more subtle than usual makeup. With his face, and the tiny bits of silver scattered across that face winking like stars, he still, obviously, looks incredible.

“Well, your audience is waiting, hyung. Tick tock.” Namjoon thumps down the steps past Seokjin toward the car waiting at the curb before Seokjin can entertain any more thoughts of bringing Namjoon to the hospital. 

Namjoon opens the passenger door, not because he’s going to get in the front seat but because he thinks it will be a little funny if he holds the door for Seokjin like it’s his chariot, and so he’s completely unprepared when he makes immediate eye contact with a startled man in the driver’s seat swaddled in a giant black tracksuit and a cute fuzzy leopard-print bucket hat pulled low, a man who happens to be Min Yoongi. 

Namjoon is staring dumbfounded when Yoongi’s mouth curls into a little smirk, and of course, he starts laughing. 

“What’s so funny?” Seokjin stands next to the open door, hands on his hips like he thinks he needs to come to someone’s defense, which is what pushes Namjoon over the edge into laughter as well. 

Yoongi is forcing words out in spite of being half out of breath, which is just making them both laugh harder. “Sorry, sorry- I promise I didn’t know. Namjoon- what the hell happened to your face?”

“I fell on a table. And I don’t know if I believe you, why are you stalking me?”

“Ah. So you know each other.” Seokjin seems oddly pleased by this, as though he somehow arranged it all, and he slides imperiously past Namjoon into the passenger seat. “Well, chop chop. As you said, my audience is waiting.”

Namjoon hops into the back seat, face already aching from a too-big smile at this turn of events. “Wait, how do you two know each other?”

“I told you. We’re neighbors. We go way back.” Seokjin is already looking at something on his phone, voice casually detached. Apparently this whole revelation is meaningless to him.

“Funny how you failed to mention his name,” Yoongi says in his flattest, driest voice, to which Seokjin replies with a prim little humming sound, as though responding to this is beneath him. 

“Hyung, what exactly have you been plotting?” Namjoon leans forward between the front seats, trying to access Seokjin’s secrets by invading his space, which almost always works to some extent.

He answers without looking up from his phone, which is turned to the selfie cam, with a filter on that’s giving Seokjin huge sparkly eyes and bug antennae. “We’re not all thinking in five dimensions all the time, Namjoon-ah. Sometimes, a good time is just a good time.” He tucks his phone away decisively and turns sideways to stare at Namjoon at very close range, which is strangely intimidating, maybe especially because of the wig. “Let’s all relax and have a good time tonight, hmm? No more angst. No more bashing our heads into tables. Just good vibes. Can you promise me that?”

“I didn’t hit my head on purpose, hyung.” For some reason, Namjoon feels appropriately chastised by this, as though he’d burst into the car with his head split open, making a scene. “But fine, yes, I promise to try really hard not to injure myself for the rest of the night.” 

“Don’t try. Just do. Yoongi-chi, please keep an eye on him, I’m going to be extremely busy.” 

“But what about my very important reconnaissance?” Yoongi is still using his flattest, most affectless tone, which means he’s trolling Seokjin to the utmost extent possible. 

“New mission: Take care of Kim Namjoon for me. I will handle the reconnaissance.” 

Namjoon can feel his face getting hot. He sees what Seokjin is trying to do. “I don’t need anyone to take care of me-”

“Don’t you?” Seokjin cuts in archly. 

“Who’s going to take care of me?” Yoongi says loudly, over both of them, and then Namjoon is laughing again, embarrassment forgotten in the face of his favorite person’s contagious sense of humor.

So what if Seokjin kept his suspiciously coincidental friendship with Min Yoongi a secret? It feels good, almost, to have this additional point of connection, yet another thing in common. He can already foresee how much fun it will be to gang up on Seokjin together.  

There’s also the rare opportunity to see Yoongi being gently bullied by someone older than him, which Namjoon has never really been able to witness, with Yoongi always being the eldest in their friend circles. A fact he’s certain Seokjin intends to exploit, and is in fact exploiting already, but for now, Namjoon is just going to sit back, watch the city lights slide by through the car window, and attempt not to cause himself any more bodily injury. That’s enough for one night.

🦔

The drag show turns out to be more of a sprawling, multi-level party with a drag show in one corner, and that corner is so horrendously packed with people that neither Yoongi or Namjoon can bear to stand there for more than five minutes, which is why they find themselves standing together at the bar when Hoseok seemingly materializes on the dance floor in front of them, wearing an aggressively colorful assortment of mismatched streetwear, pointing and screaming inarticulately at Seokjin like he’s just witnessed the second coming. 

Seokjin’s head whips around like he’s expecting to be murdered, and then he starts screaming back, and before Namjoon can make sense of what’s happening they’ve met in the middle of the dance floor, clutching each other’s forearms while Hoseok speaks very loudly into Seokjin’s face about how Super Tuna is an icon, a legend, an inspiration even beyond the drag space, I can’t believe how lucky I am to run into you in person, all my friends are going to be so jealous, and a whole lot of general sentiment that Namjoon knows is exactly the reassurance that Seokjin needed tonight. He loves his fans, especially when they’re as genuine and energetic as Hoseok. 

“Did you know Hoseok was going to be here?” Namjoon sips his beer and asks Yoongi without taking his eyes off the magnetic tableau unfolding in front of them. Seokjin has one hand pressed over his chest, eyes lowered demurely, murmuring something while Hoseok literally bounces up and down on the balls of his feet, like he still can’t believe his good luck.

Yoongi shrugs, a little smirk tweaking the corner of his mouth. “I mean, I figured some of us would be? I didn’t know that you would be, or that you knew Seokjin, so I didn’t think to mention it.” 

“Does he make you drive him around often?”

At that, Yoongi’s smile widens. “Oh, not much. Only when it’s raining, or he needs a big grocery run to make dinner for both of us, or he needs company volunteering at the dog shelter.” 

Namjoon has to laugh at that, because he recognizes Seokjin’s primary hyung tactic: pretend to urgently need help with something, when the something in question is conveniently related to a particular self-care need for the person whose help he’s requesting. 

They’re interrupted by Namjoon’s and Yoongi’s phones going off at the same time, with a sudden slew of messages from the group text thread they’re both in with the other members of the collective, which Jimin insisted on adding Namjoon to, and which Namjoon has been totally normal about. It’s currently flooded with selfies of Seokjin and Hoseok, Seokjin glowing serenely, clearly in his element, while Hoseok is alternately pouting ridiculously or grinning with his mouth wide open. 

At first, Namjoon can’t tell what all the messages are about, and then he realizes from a zoomed-in crop of one of the photos that he and Yoongi are there in the background, leaning against the bar just as they are now. With his hair and his height above the crowd, Namjoon is obvious, but Yoongi’s hat hides his face and renders him unrecognizable in the photo, in Namjoon’s opinion — apparently, though, the hat is a very distinctive accessory to the rest of the collective, several of whom are demanding that Yoongi confirm the “date” he’s currently on with Namjoon. Date?

He’s unprepared when Yoongi literally places his hand over Namjoon’s phone screen, fingers wrapped around the back of Namjoon’s hand where it grips his phone. 

“Sorry. Ignore them. They’re demons.” He says it flatly, like it’s a joke, but Namjoon knows him too well not to understand that he is actually a little annoyed, or upset, he can’t tell which. “I don’t get out much without a camera in hand, which Jimin loves to remind me, so this is a big moment for him.”

It sounds like a lightly self-deprecating joke, but something about it catches at Namjoon, especially having just heard that Seokjin finds reasons to drag Yoongi out of the house for friend hangouts masquerading as errands. 

Namjoon pockets his phone, already regretting breaking away from Yoongi’s touch. “Well, I don’t get out at all unless you count visiting my favorite trees, so no judgment here.” 

Yoongi finally smiles at that, and Namjoon feels unduly relieved. He hadn’t even realized he was watching Yoongi’s face out of the corner of his eye until he felt his own body relax at the sight of that smile. 

“Don’t fuck with me. You were on a bike ride just the other day.” 

“A bike ride to see my favorite trees. The point still stands.”

Yoongi grunts, and chews the straw in his glass of Coke, a non-response.

The thing is, Yoongi has always been good with people, better than Namjoon ever was. He also, Namjoon is well aware, has always been kind of a workaholic, and with the amount of creative work he’s taken on, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that the Yoongi the SDL Collective knows seems too busy to just go out and have fun.

But they happen to be in the middle of a party right now, with no possibility of working even if he were to try.

Maybe, for once, Namjoon has finally found himself in the right place at the right time, exactly where he needs to be.

He sets down his beer. “Well, we’re both here now. What do you want to do right now, in this moment, with absolutely no responsibilities?”

He’s been resisting the pull of the man next to him all night, but he can’t help turning to look at Yoongi now, giving in to the tug of that invisible thread.

Maybe that was just an excuse to delay the inevitable, because Yoongi is already looking at him, and he doesn’t look away when Namjoon turns to him. 

Underneath the fuzzy brim of his hat, his face is soft, his dark eyes a little sleepy-looking, the slight roundness of his cheeks emphasized by the zipped-up collar of his tracksuit.

Like a beam of light breaking through the ceiling, Namjoon is struck by the sudden, ridiculous revelation that he wants to kiss him. 

“No responsibilities? I’m supposed to be taking care of you.” 

Again, Yoongi says it like it’s meant to be a joke, but it doesn’t quite land that way. Not with the way they’re looking at each other, and not with the way, Namjoon realizes, that he’s leaning into Yoongi’s space, more than he usually would, possibly more than either of them should be comfortable with. 

It’s hard not to notice their height difference when they’re standing this close. Yoongi has to tip his head back a little just to keep eye contact with him right now. If he wasn’t wearing a hat, Namjoon’s lips would be right in front of his forehead. Not that that matters for any reason. Why would he even think about that? It feels like Namjoon’s brain is on fire with irrelevant facts. He doesn’t know how to focus, or what he’s supposed to be focusing on. 

Then Yoongi reaches up with one hand, straight up to Namjoon’s face, and it’s like everything is happening in slow motion, and Namjoon is hyper aware of every detail: the raised vein running over the back of his hand to his wrist, the particular breadth of his fingers, and the way Yoongi’s lips part ever so slightly as he turns his face up.

Time comes rushing back to him as, ever so delicately, Yoongi brushes the tip of a finger against the bandage over Namjoon’s eye. It’s barely enough of a touch to hurt, more like the premonition of pain, a feather against a bruise. 

Namjoon shivers involuntarily, and he realizes a little too late that his hand is gripping the back of Yoongi’s arm just above his elbow, fingers twisted into fabric— he’s touching Yoongi and he hadn’t even realized it. 

“Sorry. Does it hurt?” Yoongi’s voice is low in his throat, too quiet for a party, pitched for the little bubble of space between them. 

Namjoon realizes he hasn’t breathed in a while, and draws in a slow, stuttering breath. What did he think was about to happen?

“It- not really. Only a little.” He feels suddenly desperate for a topic of conversation, any topic. “I was on the floor trying to write and I broke a glass with my face.” 

One side of Yoongi’s mouth slides up in what Namjoon knows is his suppressing-a-laugh face. “How the hell…?” 

“Uh. Got up too fast.” They’re back in familiar territory now: Namjoon making himself the punchline, and Yoongi gently playing along. For some reason, when it’s him, it never feels mean.

“Lucky you didn’t need stitches.” 

Yoongi touches him again then, just puts his whole hand on the side of Namjoon’s face and slides his thumb lightly along Namjoon’s cheekbone, like that’s a thing they do, and they’re so far from anything he knows how to react to that he’s reeling. Maybe this is just how Yoongi is with his friends. Namjoon is one of them now. Again.

“Don’t stress that hard about the lyrics. Not to the point of injury, anyway. Next time just talk to me. We’re in it together, that’s the point.” 

“How do you know that’s- I mean. Yeah. Ok.” Namjoon’s brain has ceased to function. Yoongi’s hand feels so big and warm on his face, and so soft. He feels like his own skin is on fire, and is also turning into plasma, white hot and flowing like the heart of a star, at the place where they’re touching. He hopes he isn’t sweating. This is so embarrassing. 

Yoongi removes his hand casually, like it’s no big deal, but Namjoon can’t help but wonder if it’s because he looks like his face is about to burst into flames or something. Maybe he’s a little more drunk than he thought, because he has a sudden vision of his head as the head of a match, striking and burning. It’s kind of a funny image.

Yoongi’s gaze drops, finally freeing Namjoon from the intensity of looking into his eyes, landing somewhere around Namjoon’s neck. “What are you doing tomorrow? Let’s go write and look at trees. That always used to help. You go nuts when you get stuck inside.”

Namjoon takes him in: the shy curve of his mouth, slightly upturned at the corners, the way the angle of his face lets his eyes hide underneath the brim of his fuzzy hat. He’s so cute like this.

Of course Namjoon wants to spend the day writing with him. There’s literally nothing he wants more. Maybe even more than a finished work of art, he realizes, this is all he really wants. To always be in the process of making something with Min Yoongi. 

“Yeah. I would love that. I mean, if you’re not busy.”

Yoongi tips his face down a little further, not quite far enough to hide his little smirk. “It’s my time, isn’t it? I’m the one who decides what to do with it.”

Namjoon feels something twist low in his stomach. Why is that so- hot? 

He closes his eyes for a moment, trying to wipe his brain of unwelcome thoughts, when a voice interrupts at an impossible volume from very close range.

“KIM NAMJOON-SSI!! THE LEGEND!!”

Namjoon’s body does some kind of involuntary spasm, somehow knocking his beer off the bar top in the process. Thankfully it was mostly empty.

Yoongi relaxes away from Namjoon, like a plant unfurling in time lapse, the picture of unbothered comfort. He leans back against the bar, lifting his soda to take a sip. Namjoon wishes he had a fraction of Yoongi’s chill, sometimes.

Reluctantly, Namjoon turns toward the source of the noise, which, incredibly, turns out to be Beomgyu, the cute bartender from Bar Nap Star, next to a tall, sheepishly grinning guy around the same age with thick glasses. Standing a few paces behind them is Hoseok, now accompanied by Jungkook, who seems so excited about something that he’s literally jumping up and down, a little like a bunny. It’s cute. Next to them, Seokjin is gesturing expansively with a colorful cocktail in a giant novelty glass, while Yijeong listens to whatever he’s saying and nods politely, eyes on the drink sloshing around in the tall, impractical glass. Namjoon blinks. Is everyone they know here right now?

“You never came back to the bar, Namjoon-ssi. You said you were going to do a lecture series.” 

Namjoon’s heart sinks into his ass. He has absolutely no memory of this. Beomgyu is staring at him with what can only be described as a frenzied look, and he’s shaking his friend’s arm up and down a little like it’s a weapon he’s trying to brandish. “Soobin will make fliers for it. You’ll make fliers, right, hyung?”

“I- what? Make your own fliers.”

“HYUNG!!” 

Namjoon jolts again. The volume this kid is capable of achieving without any warning probably needs to be studied. 

“When’s the first lecture? I want to join.” Yoongi, of course, with his flattest voice, which means this time he’s trolling Namjoon. 

Feeling like an idiot, Namjoon immediately starts blustering. “Ah, no, I think I said that when I was blacked out, I don’t even remember-”

“AHH! AHA!! SEE!” 

Face transformed by triumph, Beomgyu points dramatically at Yoongi, ignoring Namjoon’s feeble protest, and Soobin reaches over to bodily restrain him, a move which Namjoon personally thinks is overdue.

“No offense, but you OWE me one, Kim Namjoon-ssi! You got to meet your hero! The greatest visual poet of the age, or whatever!”

Yoongi makes a choking sound and sets down his glass with a bang. Namjoon is wishing fervently that he never left the house tonight. 

So he does the only thing he can think of, which is to try to hasten the situation to be over with as soon as possible. 

“Well, that’s true. I do owe you for giving me Yoongi’s email.”

Yoongi’s head whips over to him, like he’s said something unexpected, but Namjoon can’t worry about that right now. Damage control is for later. “Don’t you have an open mic night? I’ll do a reading one week.” 

Beomgyu lets out a wavery, high-pitched scream, and turns to wrap his arms around Soobin and shake him back and forth, like his disbelief simply can’t be contained within the confines of his body. Soobin rolls his eyes and shakes him back, another shy little smile on his face, like he can’t believe his good luck. They’re going to be very cute together once they figure it out, Namjoon thinks.

“DEAL!! You have a deal!” Beomgyu seizes Namjoon’s hand and bows dramatically from the waist, like Namjoon is some kind of prince, which almost sends Namjoon into a fit of laughter that he barely manages to hold back. He happens to make eye contact with Yoongi in that moment, whose eyes are also shining, one hand hiding his mouth as his shoulders shake silently with suppressed mirth, and suddenly everything is ok again.

At that moment, Beomgyu spots more of his friends somewhere above them on the second floor balcony, and starts shouting to them from the floor he’s currently on, which leads Soobin to drag him toward the stairs so that he doesn’t have to yell right in Namjoon’s face anymore, which Namjoon appreciates. 

Hoseok and Jungkook have moved to the dance floor, where they’re having what looks like an incredibly exuberant full-body experience that Namjoon isn’t quite sure is meant for public eyes, so he stops looking. 

“You got my email from Beomgyu?” Yoongi says it like there’s a joke in it, which Namjoon doesn’t quite get, except maybe that it’s kind of embarrassing for Namjoon. 

“Well, yeah, I- you know I saw don’t forget to come find me there, right? And—” 

“And you were blackout drunk?” He’s not looking at Namjoon, sipping his soda again, but Namjoon can tell from the little quirk in his lips that he finds this funny for some reason.

“I thought maybe you could tell from the email.” Namjoon tries not to sound sulky. He’s not sulking. “I think maybe I was still a little drunk the next day when I wrote it, honestly.”

“Mmm.” His purr. Namjoon’s favorite sound. “I thought you were just being honest, actually. It sounded so much like you. And I hadn’t heard from you in so long, but it was just how I remembered you.” He stares down into his glass, not drinking, just looking at it like his words are for the soda and not for Namjoon. He finishes his thought in a quieter voice than before. “Like nothing had changed.”

Yoongi stares into his drink for another moment, not speaking, almost like he’s waiting for something, then he slowly takes a sip, still not looking anywhere in Namjoon’s direction.

It hits Namjoon then, that Yoongi wasn’t even laughing at him, he was laughing at himself, was turning his own sadness into a joke so that Namjoon wouldn’t have to feel bad about being the cause of it. 

He feels sick, turned inside out, like his guts are on the outside, all the ugliest parts of him he tries to keep hidden suddenly written all over his skin. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t think Yoongi wants to hear him say sorry again, but that’s his first instinct. It’s not even as though Yoongi’s blaming him for anything outright, but it feels somehow like a confession, like he was entrusting Namjoon with something and Namjoon failed to grasp it, failed to hold it safely and protect it from harm.

It’s at this moment that Jin returns in a flurry of pink, coming to stand between them at the bar as easily as though he belongs there, wrapping an arm around each of them and squeezing them both against his sides. 

“My beloved children. Are you being maudlin over here? This isn’t a night for quiet reflection. Do you need me to set the tone?”

Surprising Namjoon, Yoongi laughs a little, play-acting, leaning into Seokjin’s energy. “Hyung! I need you to cheer me up! Tell a joke. Quickly.”

“A tuna sandwich walks into a bar,” Seokjin reels off immediately.

“No! Not that one!” Yoongi flings a hand against his forehead dramatically, over the top, like he’s about to faint from Seokjin’s awful joke.

“Wait! Just wait! What did the tuna say to the crab-”

Namjoon groans, getting in on the bit because Yoongi is, and he’s following his lead. A small part of him feels guilty for it.

“But WHY DID THE TUNA BLUSH?” Seokjin shakes them both where he still has his arms around them, like he needs them to understand how important this terrible joke is.

“Because you wouldn’t stop talking about him, hyung.” Yoongi knocks back the rest of his soda like it’s a whiskey, laughing brightly as Seokjin berates him for ruining the punch line, and the sick twisted-up feeling inside of Namjoon eases a little, not enough to forget that it’s there, but enough to move past it for now. He’s still not sure if he misread the moment, or if he just made it awkward by being himself and overthinking it, the way he tends to.

Yijeong shows up then, along with an extremely sweaty Jungkook, who apparently has some kind of sibling-esque relationship with Seokjin, judging by the way they immediately start play-fighting in the middle of the party, dramatically posing and shooting imaginary blasts of energy at each other like Dragon Ball Z characters. 

Namjoon feels awkward again. He doesn’t have anything to do with his hands, because he knocked his beer over a while ago, but he doesn’t want to get a new one because he doesn’t think he wants to drink anymore tonight. He thinks about Yoongi, getting that ridiculous email from Namjoon that he wrote while he was still a little buzzed and bleary, so certain of himself but so foolish at the same time, foolish the way an innocent is, the way that someone who runs from their mistakes and never learns from them just blunders through life. He thinks about Yoongi, seeing the email address in his inbox and getting his hopes up, thinking that Namjoon had found him, that he was finally reaching out again after all these years—

Namjoon closes his eyes and leans against the bar, bracing himself against its solidity, trying not to spiral. This is all just something he made up in his head. Yoongi already told him he didn’t need to apologize, that he didn’t want that, but he also— he also sounded so sad just a few minutes ago, he seemed—

“Hey. You good?”

Namjoon looks up, startled. Yoongi and Yijeong have paused from their discussion of the music currently playing, which had turned into a lighthearted debate about the best track on the album it’s from, but now they’re both looking at Namjoon. Yijeong points at Namjoon’s eye and cocks his head, probably since Namjoon is still staring blankly at him.

“Oh. No, yeah, I’m fine. I just— parties. Overwhelm me sometimes, but I’m fine. This is nothing serious.” He attempts to brush his fingers over the bandage lightly, but presses a little too hard and winces, which probably doesn’t help his case.

“We should go,” Yoongi says immediately, turning away from them to look for Seokjin. He doesn’t even seem disappointed at the thought of having to leave so early. 

“Wait, no, I’m ok, really-”

Yijeong looks back and forth between them, tracking the exchange, and for some reason that’s annoying. Namjoon wishes suddenly that he weren’t here, standing right here between Namjoon and Yoongi, perceiving them both. 

“It’s fine, Namjoon-ah. I think hyung is done with his reconnaissance anyway.” Yoongi says it a little drily, like he’s hoping Namjoon will take him up on the joke, will agree not to make it a big deal, and Namjoon realizes he’s being stubborn for no reason. 

He lets his pride go. He knows how Yoongi gets when he’s trying to take care of someone. “Yeah. Ok. It’s up to hyung, but we can leave whenever.” 

Yoongi nods decisively, then turns to Yijeong and grips his arm in a kind of wordless see-you-later. His eyes brush over Namjoon, not settling on him, which is how he knows the next words are for him. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow after lunch, ok? Text me if you’re not feeling well.”

Before Namjoon can say that he’s sure he’ll be fine, it’s just a scratch, Yijeong interrupts in a careful tone, like he’s trying hard not to sound accusatory. “I thought you were busy tomorrow.”

He’s looking at Yoongi like Namjoon isn’t there, and Yoongi is staring back at him like they’re communicating telepathically or something. What the fuck.

“I am busy. We’re writing tomorrow. In the afternoon.” Yoongi says it flatly, almost menacingly, like he’s daring Yijeong to argue with him.

Namjoon doesn’t know what the fuck this is. Is he supposed to say something, to offer to cancel? He hates whatever this feeling is, and he hates that he can’t tell if it’s jealousy or social awkwardness or guilt or some weird mix of all three.

Yijeong shrugs lightly, like it’s no big deal to him after all, and turns to train that same telepathic communication look at Namjoon, who has no idea what the significance of it is, and doesn’t want to participate in this weird nonverbal duel.

“Thanks for offering to pick me up. And for driving tonight. You’re always taking care of me.” The words just come out, even though they’re very much an inside thought, and Namjoon feels a little mortified. Yijeong is still looking at him, a look that’s practically growing legs by now and preparing to swing.

“It’s fine. You pick me up next time, then.” Yoongi says it briskly, like it’s an easy trade. He doesn’t know that Namjoon doesn’t have a license. 

“I would, but it’ll have to be on my bike. I don’t drive.”

Yoongi smiles at that, like he’s caught off guard, and Namjoon realizes that he must be thinking of the last time they did that— a distant memory of another late summer in Seoul, Namjoon flying down the street on his bicycle, Yoongi standing on the back pegs, arms around Namjoon’s neck, voice whooping in his ear. 

Seokjin comes back from whatever he was doing with Jungkook, then, and Yijeong says, “Good luck tomorrow. Take care of yourself,” to Yoongi, and then he looks at Namjoon like he expects him to say something, but Namjoon still feels like he’s on the outside of their dynamic looking in and he doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything.

Seokjin starts ushering them through the crowd toward the exit, except he has to stop every few seconds to say goodbye to someone, and it takes longer than it should. They’re pushed close together by the crowd, and Namjoon places himself at Yoongi’s back automatically, protectively, close enough that Yoongi’s fuzzy hat occasionally tickles his nose, close enough that he can feel the warm line of his body in front of him, the perfect size for Namjoon to wrap himself around, but he doesn’t. 

He doesn’t know if it would mean something if he did, if it would be surprising to Yoongi, or if it would be nothing special. Namjoon wants to be able to do with him the things Yoongi does with all his friends, the easy affectionate touches, but at the same time, it feels like it would be incredibly hollow. Because skinship, any physical touch really, doesn’t come easily to Namjoon, and so it wouldn’t mean the same thing. For him it wouldn’t be easy.

That’s what bothered him about the way Yoongi touched him tonight, he realizes, the reason for the way his skin felt too small for his body, the touch too hot to sustain. Because the nervous energy, the intensity, was all on his side. Yoongi was confident, comfortable even, and Namjoon, as usual, was an awkward, pining wreck, full of pent up feelings never expressed, half-felt emotions he fled from a decade ago to avoid drowning in them. 

They finally make it outside, and Yoongi drives them home, and Namjoon joins the conversation in the car and laughs at the right moments but he doesn’t really hear what’s being said. When he gets home, he lies down on his bed with a package of frozen tteokbokki against his eye to numb the residual pain, and he eventually drifts off into the soft darkness and dreams of letters, words, sentiments lost to time, tangled up beneath tongues that always spill them out wrong, that never find the right person in the right moment, that always arrive too late to make a difference.

🦔

I’m just a pack of cigarettes
Imma burn down all the love and the hate, the right, the wrongs
Even the goddamn world I been livin’ in for my whole life
Smoking kills, I know
It’s my fucking business

Namjoon stares at the words and the words stare back. It feels good to write in English, pen scratching the page in shapes it hasn’t made in a long time, like a secret language, one layer further from the people who know him. It feels right, somehow, like everything about him is actually that one layer removed, requiring an effort at translation to even be imperfectly understood.

He feels calmer than he expected this morning. He’d had a scheduled video call with his therapist, and had ended up very gently parting ways with her— firing her, technically, though she’d genuinely helped him a lot the past year— because he’d suddenly realized she was being too kind to him now, and that he was leaning on that kindness like a crutch.

He’s not sure yet if he’ll find a new one right away. He feels a little sick of his own feelings at the moment. Here alone in his sunny, quiet house filled with plants, quiet unless he fills it with music or his own voice, he feels like he’s already immersed in his own feelings, practically swimming in them day in and day out. He needs a break.

Time to let go the past, the memories,
the stacks of the truth
Diaries without priorities

He drops the pen, letting the notebook fall shut around it.

After the appointment ended, he’d unearthed a box of his old journals from the top of a closet, flipping through them methodically, tirelessly, searching for something he couldn’t explain if asked but that he knows he’ll recognize when he finds it.

The journals he wrote when he was in America are crammed at the very bottom of the box, so tightly packed together that the covers stick when he separates them, and it feels a little like resurrecting something better left in the dark. They smell fragrant somehow, like damp soil and blooming white lilies, like they’ve been buried in a grave this whole time. Namjoon shakes his head a little, aggrieved by his own melodrama, and cracks open one of the middle journals, cleanly bound in black, pages full of furious overlapping scribbles in Korean and English. 

Honesty’s always a crime

But it’s my fuckin’ script

I don’t belong here

The words leap off the page and lance into him, piercing through the years in an instant straight to the heart of his current feelings. His impression of himself at that age is that he was always honest, painfully so, too ready to throw a gauntlet and risk alienating others rather than try to fit in. He remembers being so preoccupied with honesty at that time, and he wonders now if it was a kind of compensation for not ever being able to tell the truth to the one person that mattered.

The words slash across the page in front of him, reeking with the angst of ten years past, and Namjoon knows with a sick certainty where this vortex is leading him, where he’s being drawn to, hands moving to drop the journal almost without volition, his body acting against his will. 

He crosses the room to his laptop, navigating through muscle memory to log in to his old university email address, the one he used when he was still a student. 

He clicks past random bulletins and university news he hasn’t needed to look at in years, finding his way unerringly back to the last time he actively used it, and then further back, further, stubbornly scrolling, refusing to search for what it is he’s actually looking for, drawn to it like pulling the chain of wreckage sunk deep in the ocean, dredging his unshakable memories to the surface, still weighing him down in spite of all the intervening time he’s refused to look at them.

It’s still there, just another email in a seemingly endless list of accumulated history. There are 11 emails in the thread. That doesn’t really mean anything, they used to start new threads whenever they felt like it, arbitrarily. They always flowed from subject to subject, unable to keep each other fixed on any one topic, never really trying to. 

The last email Namjoon ever sent to Yoongi, before he reached out to him again as Gloss, isn’t so special. Namjoon races through it with blurry eyes, barely taking it in, feeling too mortified to read it too closely. It feels surprisingly light to him, almost flippant, for what he remembers feeling at the time. He thinks he was probably trying to be funny, trying to be clever and impressive for Yoongi even in the midst of all that darkness he’d felt so mired in. 

The last email Yoongi sent, before that one, he reads closely, carefully, almost lovingly, trying to picture him typing every word, what face he might have made, what he might have been doing in the moment. Yoongi always used to do that, Namjoon remembers— mention what he was doing, or interject something happening around him as he was writing. It used to make Namjoon feel almost antsy, electric, hungry to be beside Yoongi in that tableau, to feel what he was feeling, to see the look on his face. It made him feel so close, even as it emphasized how terribly far away they really were from each other. 

I took your words outside today because I wanted to see how they looked in the sunshine. Everything sounds gray there, though I don’t know if it’s only New York or if all big cities are like that. It’s gray here, too, but there’s a certain quality of light at dawn on a cloudy day when everything turns blue, like being inside of a big aquarium, the kind they put sharks in. And then even though it’s cold, it still feels full of light. So imagine me, in the ocean, carried by waves, washing up on a faraway shore with your letter in hand. 

I don’t know why the light feels cleaner at dawn. It’s like, even if I haven’t slept, something new is starting anyway, so maybe change is still possible even if the old day is still stretching on. We can’t hide from change forever, can we? Maybe change is the only thing we can be sure of.

Rereading this makes him feel incredibly fond of his friend, and that makes him sad, because he remembers how much he used to agonize over these emails, how uncertain he felt, how he’d poke holes and look for signs that Yoongi was losing interest, was about to leave him behind.

He doesn’t see anything like that now. All he sees is Yoongi trying gently to cheer him up, to feel around the edges of that darkness Namjoon couldn’t name, the thing he ran halfway across the world to escape but that found a home in him anyway. 

And of course, there’s the same passion they always had, the same back and forth, the same irrepressible intensity, the way they can’t help but respond to each other even without acknowledging it. Always the same dance, finishing each other’s thoughts and building on them, creating a shared world together without trying, always drawn into each other’s orbit, drawn down the same rabbit hole. 

That was the last email Yoongi sent to him, before Namjoon replied, riffing on the concept of change, agreeing that it was the only constant, that he sometimes didn’t even recognize himself these days— and got no answer, and decided to stop talking to his best friend, the only person who ever sort of understood him, the person he loved more than anything, including himself, for ten years.

He clicks out of the window, closes his laptop, and closes his eyes. Something like grief has overtaken him. He can’t find an explanation for it now, even though it felt so huge to him at the time, an epic rejection that shattered his confidence, that made him feel certain of something he had already convinced himself of: that he wasn’t good enough, that he never would be. 

He remembers rereading that last email from Yoongi obsessively, deliriously, looking for clues, confirmation that he was unloved, that the reference to change was in fact a sign that Yoongi was leaving him behind and saying goodbye, letting him down gently because Namjoon loved him too much and it had finally become a burden he was unwilling to bear.

He can’t see any of that now. All he sees is his own insecurity reflected back at him, his oldest friend’s words turned into a dark mirror for his own depression, the thing that twisted everything and turned it all into a selfish, self-fulfilling prophecy, Namjoon’s certainty that he was unloved being the thing that drove him into an even deeper loneliness, cutting off everyone who ever cared about him, the one person who had always cared for him the most.

Miraculously, Yoongi is back in his life now, he found him again, in spite of all this stupidity, and yet Namjoon is still letting this in, still looking for answers in his old mistakes.

He’s sick of the past. He’s starting to think his preoccupation with apologizing is just a symptom of it. He needs to let it go. Not just for everyone else’s sake but for his own.

Maybe he’ll feel fragmented at different times, leave pieces of himself in different places that he can’t recover, but there’s still something in him that carries him on, something that still is him no matter what he loses. Even if he loses his way, he’ll find his way back to himself, to a certain value of himself that exists no matter what. 

He hadn’t felt that before, but looking back at his old writing, he feels it now. 

He stands up, there in the wreckage of the past, surrounded by his old notebooks strewn across the floor, and pulls out his phone to text Yoongi.

hyung I’ll come pick you up
let me know when you’re ready
my turn to return the favor

🦔

It feels good to be outside. The turn, turn, turn of the tires is his favorite rhythm, and it’s easy to be soothed by it. 

Namjoon doesn’t feel the giddiness he’s been surviving on the past few months, the absurd high of knowing he gets to see Yoongi, his favorite person, who he can finally admit he never wants to let go of now that he’s found him again. The happiness is still there, glinting, bright, seated somewhere warm and deep inside him, but it’s not an anxious flurry. It feels more patient. Settled.

The tires hush against the pavement as he pulls up in front of SDL Collective. Yoongi’s neighborhood is pretty, green in a different way from Namjoon’s but less quaint and more lively, noisier and full of city life.

Yoongi is standing on the sidewalk, looking cute, looking very himself: ripped dark jeans, a black Hawaiian shirt with a colorful summery pattern, a camera bag slung across his body. He’s laughing, and his hand is covering his smile, and his eyes are half-disappeared into it. 

It makes Namjoon want to laugh, too, but he wants to earn it a little more first.

“You thought I was kidding?” Beneath him, his bicycle glints in the summer sun, possibly the most inconvenient form of transportation for two people, especially for two grown men.

“I knew you weren’t.” Yoongi grins at him, dropping his hand so Namjoon can get the full force of it this time, his favorite smile on earth. 

Yoongi steps off the sidewalk and comes to sling himself up behind Namjoon, like second nature, just like he used to, warm hands steady on his shoulders. Namjoon is sweating a little underneath his white tee shirt, it’s kind of unavoidable on a bike, but for once he doesn’t feel self-conscious about it. They’ve done this before. 

“How much does that camera cost?”

“Just don’t crash and you won’t have to worry about it.” Yoongi’s voice is close behind him, breath tickling the back of his neck, sounding low and amused. Namjoon almost wishes he were even closer, that he could feel the rumble of the words in his chest.

As though he has to be told not to crash when he’s carrying the most precious cargo in the world.

🦔

So they roll and glide through the city together, wind beneath their feet, stopping where they feel like it, lying in the shade beneath the shadow of leaves, talking and writing for hours with their backs against the cool trunk of a tree, holding them up and thrumming with quiet life behind them.

Namjoon has always felt like miracles are more likely when he’s on his bike. He can’t explain why, but something about the way the scenery scrolls past feels a little like a movie, a little like an acceleration toward the kind of change he wants to welcome, the kind of life he wants to live. He says this to Yoongi, or something like this, because he wants to know if he feels it too, and he says something about the pace of editing being something like the gaze of the universe, the vast eye of a being who blinks in the span of a single human’s life, and how Tarkovsky said that filmmaking is sculpting with time, and Namjoon thinks that sounds like something Yoongi would like, sounds like something he’s already doing, an artist of life, of time itself, and somewhere in between they write down snatches of lyrics and ideas, and when they need a change of scenery Namjoon pedals them to the next place, a slow two-wheel express from green place to green place that will shelter them while they work on birthing something fragile and new together.

There is something sacred in this for Namjoon, a feeling he doesn’t get often, only really when faced with very great or very small wonders of nature, like the peak of a mountain, or a tiny crab scuttling on the beach.

Which is why he’s surprised when, in the twilight of the day, sitting on the hill behind the Collective and looking down at the light sparkling on the river, Yoongi turns to him and asks a question. “Do you still feel lonely when you’re with you?”

He feels the initial flare of embarrassment, faint, when any of those words are spoken back to him, from a book he always felt like he should have edited more or just been less transparent about, but when the instinct fades, he realizes the words don’t hit him the way they used to. He doesn’t need to feel ashamed of them anymore. They had a purpose, and he let them out, and now they belong to the world and not only to him.

“That’s fiction, you know.” It’s a non-answer, not because he doesn’t want to answer, but because he doesn’t know what kind of answer Yoongi is looking for. What he’s really asking.

“Yeah, I know that. But I also know you.”

Namjoon looks at the sunset, melted tangerine and gold, and lets the stirred feelings settle, letting himself sink past the surface-level answers he’s gotten so used to giving to those types of questions in interviews. I was going through a really hard time, and I’m just glad if someone, if anyone got something out of it, if it could help them on their own journey. It’s true, but in this context, it’s also kind of meaningless. He knows that’s not why Yoongi is asking.  

“Everyone gets lonely. I think the quality of my loneliness is different, now. Not as all-consuming. It doesn’t make me feel like- like there’s something fundamentally wrong with me, as often. Or I’ve gotten better at remembering to question those types of thoughts when they come up, instead of just taking the bad feelings as absolute truth.”

“You’re not being as mean to yourself. That’s good.” Yoongi has a small sideways smile on his face when Namjoon glances at him, but there’s something grim in his expression too, some acknowledgment of pain they’re not quite speaking about. Namjoon feels like there’s an understanding, that he’s letting Namjoon steer the conversation and determine how heavy it gets, which he appreciates. 

Yoongi’s not looking at Namjoon, but the gold-orange sunset brings a glow to his brown eyes that’s hard to look away from. 

Namjoon forces his gaze back to the river, soft light and stirring reflections. “Yeah. Trying to. My therapist— well, my former therapist— she helped me come up with a list of questions to interrogate certain thoughts when they come up. If I have a sudden conviction that things are going really wrong, or that someone is really angry or disappointed with me, that reminds me to set aside the swirl of impressions and look at what actually happened, and whether any of it supports my assumptions.”

Yoongi nods, and as usual, catches at the one thing Namjoon let slip, his too-strong penchant for honesty. “Former therapist?”

Namjoon can’t help but laugh at himself a little. “Well, I sort of stopped seeing her. Just today, actually. I don’t know. It feels extreme to say I fired her, because I wasn’t unhappy with her or anything, but I just decided to stop for the time being. I need a break from talking about myself all the time.” He leans forward, pressing his hands into the grass beneath them, the cool prickles strangely soothing, grounding him for this. “I think when I wasn’t really writing, or I wasn’t writing from myself— it was different. I feel more in touch with my thoughts and feelings than I have in a long time. I’m trying not to hide anymore, so I guess I feel like I need the outside perspective less. Or less than I used to.” 

Yoongi makes his low purring sound and sits up a little, like the conversation is pulling him in. Namjoon loves that about him, how physical his attention is, how easy it is to read his interest from his posture. 

“I think I get it. Writing isn’t a substitute for therapy, but it helps. It’s about facing the truth and not running from it.”

Namjoon smiles. “Yeah. That’s it exactly.”

It occurred to Namjoon as he was listening to Yoongi that he actually feels proud of himself, that maybe he brought it up not as a slip but because he wanted to— that it’s good he doesn’t feel like he needs his therapist as much anymore, that he’s actually learned how to apply the tools she gave him. That he feels ok with the occasional loneliness, even if he isn’t perfectly happy all the time. That he knows he can get through it.

“I’m proud of you. I know you’ve been through a lot lately, and it hasn’t been easy. I’m just glad- that we’re both here, now. I’m glad I could be here with you.”

Namjoon hears how careful he’s being, not to sound like he’s blaming Namjoon for anything, not to sound like he holds him responsible for all the time they’ve been apart. He feels bad for that, not because it makes him feel guilty but because he doesn’t want Yoongi to have to be that careful with him, doesn’t want Yoongi to feel responsible for the deep well of shame that sometimes overtakes Namjoon, that he sometimes mistakenly attributes to the blame of others but really has its root in himself. 

“I’m glad we’re here too. I’m glad I found you again, even if it was by accident.”

Yoongi cracks then, dropping his head forward and laughing that near-silent laugh of his. “I couldn’t believe it at first. I thought you were playing a joke on me, but your email was so genuine that I realized it had to be a coincidence.” He relaxes into a looser posture, forearms leaning on bent knees. His bare knees are coming through the rips in his jeans, and something about the shape of them leading into the long line of his leg is distracting Namjoon more than it should. Yoongi glances at him for a second, eyes flashing over Namjoon like heat. “I don’t believe in fate, but maybe the universe plays jokes on us, sometimes.”

“Yeah. I used to think— like, I subconsciously lay traps for myself sometimes, and I don’t know if that’s fate or if it’s just me figuring out what I actually need and finally getting out of my own way.” 

Yoongi’s gaze slants down diagonally, landing somewhere on the grass near Namjoon’s hand, and Namjoon recognizes it as a kind of misdirection, like he might not want to be perceived too closely for what he’s about to say next. 

“What do you actually need?”

“Well. In the context of the mess I made of my own life, I think it was to stop pretending I was ok when I wasn’t. I wasn’t just hurting myself but everyone in my life, really, and I had just stopped trying to do anything about it.” He takes a deep breath. He hasn’t really spoken about this out loud, not with anyone besides his therapist, and not since writing about it in those emails to Gloss, those emails that were actually to Yoongi. He doesn’t know why it’s so scary, but he feels like he needs to say it, like he’s clearing the air in a way, and he doesn’t want to second guess the instinct anymore. “With my ex— I think I stopped trying to make it work with her a while ago. I gave up on a deeper connection and settled for something shallow that felt easy to maintain. I think I was more depressed than I realized. At first, after it ended, I was so scared that I would become depressed, that I’d go into a spiral it would take me forever to come back from— and then I felt guilty, because I actually felt better when it was all over. Because I was already depressed in the first place, before everything visibly went to shit. I had trapped myself in my old life, and I didn’t even realize it.”

The thing he had been so worried about, Namjoon realizes, was the possibility of sounding cruel and indifferent while explaining this, as though Iseul were just a character in the drama of his life and not her own person whose life Namjoon kind of ruined. But they’re both free to make their own decisions now, and he thinks he owes it to them, to her and to what they had when it was still good, at least, to be honest. To try not to make the same mistake again.

“It’s ok to have depression, you know. You don’t need to pretend to be fine when you’re not.” Yoongi’s fingers crush into the grass close to where Namjoon’s hand rests, tangling into the strands. “Mental health has ups and downs. Even if you’re with someone, they should be understanding of that.” 

Namjoon suppresses a smile. Yoongi’s always so loyal. “It’s hard for someone else to be understanding if I don’t even understand myself, isn’t it?”

Yoongi scoffs at this, flinging out a hand that slaps against Namjoon’s bicep and upper chest. It sparks tingles in Namjoon’s skin, and not because it hurts. 

“So much for empathy. You’re not as hard to love as you think you are, you know.” 

Yoongi folds in on himself then, dropping his head to his knees, hands pressed to the sides of his face like an aghast cartoon character, and Namjoon can’t help but laugh. It seems like it takes a lot to embarrass him these days, but this isn’t something Namjoon thinks he should be ashamed of. He’s always loved his friends so fiercely, so protectively. It feels good to know that that, at least, is mutual. 

Without realizing it, Namjoon’s hand has come out and landed softly on Yoongi’s back, in the space between his shoulders. He can feel the ridge of his spine, the warm rise of muscles on either side of it, shifting as he uncurls his body from its instinctive reaction to hide. Namjoon feels a little dumbfounded. He didn’t necessarily mean to touch him, he almost never just touches people like this, but he doesn’t snatch his hand away, and Yoongi doesn’t act like anything strange has happened, so he leaves it there. 

Yoongi lifts his head, the golden glow of sunset hitting his face again, and Namjoon loses his breath for a second. “You know, I was at therapy this morning too. PT.”

He’s looking down at his hands, in what looks like an intentional show of unconcern, and Namjoon’s mind is drawing a blank.

“Physical therapy? For what? Did you—”

Of course, it’s at this moment that someone crashes into Namjoon’s back, crushing him into a hug that sort of feels like a headlock, yelling, “HYUNG! Namjoon-hyung!” with their face smushed into the back of Namjoon’s head, so that he both has trouble hearing it and it’s also way too loud. 

When he recovers from the initial heart attack, Namjoon gives the tattooed hand clasped around his neck a resigned pat. “Hey, Jungkook.” 

Namjoon turns to the side to find Jimin sliding between them, wrapping his arms around Yoongi, who is already complaining. On his other side, Taehyung flops into the grass, using Yoongi’s folded leg as a pillow for his head, holding a film camera up with one hand like he’s going to start snapping selfies with it. 

Namjoon lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, and slowly realizes that Jungkook is still latched onto him, one of his hands idly squeezing at Namjoon’s chest. “Hyung, do you work out? I’ve been meaning to ask. Wanna go to the gym with me?”

“Um,” is all Namjoon has time to say before Jimin leans over from accosting Yoongi and starts, for a lack of a better word, feeling up Namjoon’s chest and shoulder area with sudden interest.

“No. He’s mine. Get your own emotional support hyung.” Jungkook slides around Namjoon’s side as he says it, apparently trying to come between Namjoon and Jimin and landing half in Namjoon’s lap.

“Monsters. Wild animals. Who let you out of the house?” Yoongi groans in a low, flat voice that Namjoon thinks is probably a joke, but also has a trace of real suffering in it.

He understands. It’s a lot, but they’re sweet. Namjoon has never had such uncomplicated friendships before, but he finds he wants to be good to them, to set a good example in some way, so that their path through their twenties might be a little easier than his was. And he knows that Yoongi feels the same.

Yoongi. Sitting next to him, letting Jimin tangle their fingers together to hold hands while he combs Taehyung’s hair back where his head rests in his lap, and patiently lets him take photos of them all. 

Namjoon feels certain Yoongi was about to tell him something, maybe something important, but he’s just as certain that the moment is lost now, though it itches at the back of his brain the rest of the day, and while he bikes slowly home in the long summer dusk. He thinks about texting him, something artificially casual, you mentioned you’re in physical therapy? how’s that going? and wonders if that would be awkward, if it’s something he can even ask about outside of that fragile sunset moment they shared, when Namjoon let himself be more vulnerable than he thinks he’s ever been with anyone. He doesn’t want it to seem like he’s demanding the same of Yoongi. He’s still feeling out the shape of their shared intimacy, looking to the other members of the Collective for cues on how close he can be, how much of himself he can share. He thinks he’s learning, slowly, but even more uncertain than how much to share is how much he can push. He’s always let Yoongi come to him, like a proud, independent alley cat, as fierce as he still needs attention and care. He knows from experience that Yoongi doesn’t respond well to being pushed. 

And so the days whirl by in a storm of activity, writing lyrics and recording songs and filming music videos with everyone in the Collective. It’s the busiest Namjoon has been in a long time, and his life is more full than he ever imagined it being, in those first half-empty days after Iseul left the house with her belongings and their dog, when he thought the sandcastle of his life had been leveled clean down to smooth sand, and that it would be years before he could start to rebuild again. 

Every day he gets to write and make music and make art with his favorite person, and every day he falls a little more in love with him, but now that he has him back the last thing he wants is to do anything that will push him further away, so he keeps it to himself, and lets his love shine through in little ways— bringing him iced americanos in the morning, carrying his equipment to shoots, leaving pillows and a blanket in his editing suite without being asked, because it’s not as comfortable as it could be and he knows Yoongi sleeps in there sometimes when he’s in the throes of inspiration— all things that could easily be taken for the care that comes with a regular creative partnership, a regular friendship. 

The shared creation takes shape between them, not just between Namjoon and Yoongi but all of them, their input and hard work and creativity creating something from the ineffable drift of ideas in their heads, emerging into something with a voice and light and color, something that expands beyond the space they fill in the world, something that Namjoon believes will have the power to fill other people’s hearts too, once they let it go. 

Sometimes Namjoon feels terribly awkward on camera, grinning and cringing, sinking into his shoulders, trying to make himself small on screen. Yoongi is good at making him laugh when he needs it, and also good at making everything else disappear, like it’s just the two of them there, no camera, no greater goal than what they can come up with together, face to face, mind to mind, the connection that has never broken between them even after the intervening distance of ten years.

Their thoughts and ideas flow together, and it feels even more intense than it used to, even more so than Namjoon remembers, like they’re sharing a brain, but two different halves of it, and the ideas coming from the other half are so wild and all-consuming, so everything he’s ever wanted to say but been too afraid or lacked the skill to fully bring to life, and it keeps him thrilled, every day, reaching for something bigger and stranger and greater than anything he’s ever done before, and none of it would be possible without Yoongi.

Namjoon is a little shy to put all this into words, because maybe this is just another project for Yoongi, every day just another work day at his dream job, as wonderful as it is, and Namjoon is the one who came to this so late, who was too afraid for nearly his entire life so far to go after what he really wanted. 

So he throws himself into the work, day after day, and he has dreams of Yoongi with his hands on Namjoon’s chest, his own heart pulsing and glowing beneath those hands, burning through his skin, turning all of him to light; and he keeps showing up every day, and summer burns out into autumn, the heat slowly and interminably fading in place of trees that burn with color and a chill clear sky— he keeps showing up, and he doesn’t say anything about it.

🦔

Namjoon wakes up groggy and gently confused at 14:37, light already streaming through his windows in an afternoon slant, after a night shoot that had them all heading home through quiet streets while dawn broke soft and grey over the city. 

He lets himself lie there for a few seconds, staring up at the pattern of light and leaves on the ceiling, then rolls himself out of bed to face what’s left of the day— or the night again, rather, because he’ll be pulling a different kind of all-nighter tonight. 

They’d scheduled the night shoot strategically, knowing it would throw off all their circadian rhythms, because tonight is the first so-called Insomnia Art Festival, somewhere in the forest between the airport and the beach, and one of Yoongi’s new films is screening there, and Namjoon wouldn’t miss it for the entire world. 

He starts his day pretty much the way he always does, except he’s guiltily enjoying the slightly loopy feeling of having slept through more than half the day. Bright yellow branches of gingko wave at him against crisp blue sky out the window. He sits in his quiet kitchen with a steaming cup of coffee, laughing over the updates in the group chat, doing a quick cursory check of social media and reposting everything from SDL’s account about the film screening tonight. For a first-time festival, Insomnia Arts has done a good job with the promo so far— lots of cool photographers and writers are going to be there to cover the event, and there will even be some live performances, out there in the middle of the night among the pines and beneath the stars. He likes the idea of an art festival lighting up the cold autumn night, making a sort of dreamland for a few hours before disappearing back into the hearts and memories of the people who participated. He wonders how surreal, how magical, it will feel to be there.

He doesn’t understand how Yoongi found time to edit an entirely new short film in the midst of all the work he’s already been doing on the visual album, but Namjoon suspects he hasn’t been sleeping much more than he did in college, lately. Though he’s sure that type of relentless work without enough rest must hit differently at 31 than it did at 21. Not that Yoongi is any less desirable, attractive, passionate, and magnetic now than he was at 21. 

Namjoon shakes his head to forcibly rid it of these thoughts, and leaving his empty coffee cup behind, goes to flip through his closet.

He dresses more carefully than usual, and has several outfit crises that require him to text Seokjin, and eventually, Jimin, who is so delighted to be consulted that he demands Namjoon video call him right away and show him all the outfits he’s considering, which is unexpected but kind of fun, in the end. 

He ends up wearing something a little more bold than what he might have chosen for himself without Jimin’s input, but something about his vociferous insistence through the video call gave Namjoon the push he needed to wear it without feeling too ridiculous or extra. 

He stands in front of the mirror, looking at himself.

The silver in his hair has grown out, so while he’s kept it buzzed short, it’s back to its usual black. He’s wearing a soft, oversized, slightly silky, slightly fuzzy brown sweater with a mock neck, that makes him feel cozy and also makes him look “a little like a teddy bear, but in a classy way,” according to Jimin. He paired it with thick-treaded black boots and simple, tailored black slacks, and he feels comfortable, monotone yet warm, like he’ll be at one with the trees, which is one of his favorite feelings.

He putters around the house, collecting a few things, his soft black overcoat, his keys, a battery pack in case someone needs it. 

He almost falls asleep on the bus on the way there, despite the coffee, and wonders if he needs to caffeinate again. He knows there will be plenty of opportunity to do so at the festival. 

He feels strange, sneaky, like he’s doing something illicit, heading out to an all-night event while commuters are heading home from work or going out to the bar for the evening. The city is loud around him as the sun goes down, but he barely notices, drifting along in his own world, the kind of electric, softly magical feeling that surrounds him when he knows he’s about to experience something unforgettable.

Yoongi’s films are always unforgettable. Even getting closer to the process, getting all the way inside it, hasn’t changed that for him. There’s still a magic there, undemystifiable, unquantifiable in words, which is ironic since Namjoon lives his entire life by words. He could try to explain what he loves about Yoongi’s films for the rest of his life, he suspects, and never have enough words to get it right, to truly get the feeling across.

All he knows about this new film, the one that’s screening tonight, is the name. Somebody Does Love. Apparently, this is what the SDL in the collective’s name stands for, which makes Namjoon think the film must be some kind of mission statement, or a celebration of what they are together. He suspects that might be why Yoongi is being so cagey about it, as soft-hearted as he is, because he feels shy to speak about the sentiments in the film directly. He’s good at letting his work speak for him in that way, especially when it comes to how he portrays the other members of SDL in his films, the people he’s closest to. 

As he travels through the city, Namjoon’s thoughts spin out into the night air, and he pulls his notebook from the inner pocket of his coat, scratching down a few stray lines of poetry, watching the cold slice of moon, the sky darkening above the city lights out the bus window. 

All of the lyrics are written for the album by now, and most of the music recorded, with the musical and vocal talents of everyone in SDL to thank— it’s mostly filming and editing left at this point, which Namjoon is aware falls heaviest on Yoongi, so he’s trying to help out as much as he can. He’s been working a lot on the promotional materials, what they’ll say about the work to press and film festivals and anyone who wants to know what it is, and has made himself available around the clock to give Yoongi feedback on how the videos are all coming together, to come in and record vocal interstitials whenever Yoongi decides they need them. He wasn’t expecting his own voice to be in it so much, in spite of how many of his words there are, but Yoongi keeps insisting that it’s necessary, so he does his best.

So the poetry he’s writing down idly now on the bus is just for him. Or just because. It doesn’t have a purpose yet, and that feels good in its own way. 

He transfers from one bus to the next, and it gets more crowded close to the airport, and then empties out again, and Namjoon floats through it all like a dream, and finds himself smiling at a random baby in their mother’s arms, who giggles back at him, and then he’s in the right place, which is to say nearly the middle of nowhere, because no one really comes here after summer, unless they’re up to something, which in this case is an indie art festival in the woods by the beach. 

The feeling of thrilled anticipation is growing inside him, inflating like a hot air balloon, all warm in his chest. He’s meeting the rest of SDL here, somewhere, because they’re all coming from different places today. He knows Jimin and Taehyung are arriving together, that they drove and are planning to nap in their car if they’re too sleepy to drive back in the morning. He knows that Yoongi was working in the afternoon, probably editing right up until the moment he had to leave, and that he had to arrive a little earlier than the others to show up for an interview before the festival started. Namjoon would have offered to come early with him in a heartbeat, but Yijeong beat him to it in the group chat, and Namjoon felt awkward about potentially third-wheeling after that, so he didn’t say anything. But even that hasn’t managed to put a damper on his excitement. 

When he gets off at the last stop, it feels like he’s sharing a secret with the few people left on the bus with him. There’s a pair of friends in their early twenties wearing black lipstick and cool velvet pants, one of whom grins at Namjoon while stomping off the bus in big black boots. There’s also a man with little round glasses who has a small notebook flipped open, and seems to be taking notes frantically even as he steps off the bus, which Namjoon can relate to. He trails behind the others towards the light and music coming from the pine trees up ahead. The lighting isn’t as harsh as he’d thought it might be for the late hour of the event, little lanterns glowing along the path here and there, enough to see where they’re going but not too bright to shatter the illusion of something secret and magical taking place. Namjoon’s heartbeat picks up. 

His hands tremble in his pockets as he progresses down the path into a big open clearing, looking out for landmarks so he can find the others. Everyone he makes eye contact with seems unusually friendly, that feeling he had on the bus expanded to include all these strangers in on the secret together, here in the middle of the night because they love something too much— whether it’s art or music or movies or their own friends who made something that they couldn’t help but want to be part of. 

The smell of the pine trees is all around him, soothing, a little at odds with the people milling among the trees and talking excitedly, like fairy rings forming in the atmospheric lighting. The contrast is kind of delightful. When he passes between one group of people and another, in the lull of voices he can hear the distant rush of the sea, waves breaking on the beach somewhere through the trees. 

He’s just pulling his phone out of his pocket to text the others that he’s here wandering around when he sees it. Sees him.

Yoongi, standing just below one of those little glowing orbs that’s perched in a pine tree above him, sending soft diffuse light down over his face so that it looks like he’s in a spotlight, the king of a magical realm holding court, because he’s at the center of a group of people listening to him raptly while he tells them something, gesturing, and he has that little quirk of his mouth when he’s really in his element and he can’t wait to see who will respond to him, waiting for a worthy conversation partner who will throw the idea back to him with a new spin. Namjoon longs to be there, wishes he were there already, and he picks up the pace, walking even faster to get to him sooner.

Because he can’t take his eyes off him, he gets to see the moment Yoongi sees him coming, and the way his face transforms. The way he smiles, so open and excited, eyes crinkling, gums showing, hits Namjoon right in the heart. He feels too hot suddenly, even though it’s chilly in the night air, but he doesn’t stop walking, and before he knows it, Yoongi is pulling him into the circle of people, pulling Namjoon over to him with his arm around Namjoon’s waist, tucking him into his side like this is a completely natural thing for him to be doing, like Namjoon belongs there pressed up next to him, at the center of this adoring group.

Namjoon’s heart is now beating uncomfortably fast. Why is it so hot, the way Yoongi just grabbed him? Why is it doing things to Namjoon to have Yoongi casually manhandle him like that when he’s practically half Namjoon’s size? He needs to calm down. There’s no hidden meaning behind it. Yoongi is just confident, and does what he wants, and that’s just naturally hot. Namjoon is perfectly calm.

Except he still feels like he’s going haywire, because he can’t control his bodily reaction, the way he feels all overheated, his heart thumping too fast and too loud, and the sudden spike in awareness of all the people who were looking at Yoongi now looking at him too. 

“Namjoon-ah. You made it. Yeah, this is who I was telling you about.” Namjoon blinks. This last part is directed at an excitable looking man standing across from them, which means Yoongi was talking about him? Was talking about Namjoon? With that glowing look on his face when Namjoon was walking up. That’s. Namjoon doesn’t know how to process this, so he puts a pin in it for now for his conscious mind to come back to later, when it’s fully online and functioning, which is not right now. 

He can still feel Yoongi’s grip, firm at his waist, the warm circle of his arm underneath his coat. Yoongi’s arm is between his sweater and his overcoat. That’s fine.

He’s introducing Namjoon to everyone in the circle now, listing names and professions, glancing at Namjoon with a half-smile as he occasionally adds his own commentary, to the apparent delight of the people he’s introducing. Namjoon can tell he’s trying to make this easy for him, and it makes him want to try harder, to act like he belongs here with these people who all seem united by a shared admiration of Yoongi, which is certainly something Namjoon can relate to. 

He doesn’t try to smile, because he still feels a little off and he’s not sure he can right now without it looking strange, so he nods politely, and pays attention to everyone’s names, and jumps into the conversation when it feels appropriate, and ends up drawn into a debate between Yoongi and a tiny woman with a buzz cut and lots of sparkly makeup who has strong feelings about the use of voiceover in non-linear films, and at first he thinks Yoongi must be messing with him about finding it overbearing and unsubtle, until he qualifies that Namjoon’s voice is one of the few exceptions, and the sparkly woman laughs at them both while Namjoon is left feeling like his head is on fire again. 

At some point, Yoongi’s hand moves from Namjoon’s waist to lightly hold his hand, completely casual, as though there’s nothing at all loaded about two men holding hands in public. Maybe not for Yoongi, Namjoon thinks, but he’s hyper aware of that touch, Yoongi’s warm fingers in the cold air, not gripping too tightly, like he would let Namjoon pull away if he wanted, but he just doesn’t want to let go.

It puts more space between their bodies, makes Namjoon feel less tethered, less certain of his place. As though someone would point him out as an impostor, shout him out of this circle of people who all know more about filmmaking than he does, and have strong opinions on things he’s never even thought about before. He recognizes this irrational fear as a product of anxiety, knows he should be questioning it to bring himself down from the spiral, but he can’t find a quiet moment to even think about it right now, as focused as he is on keeping up with the conversations and seeming normal, seeming like someone who is ok. 

At some point, Yoongi leads them out of the circle, and Namjoon’s brain is fried, so he just follows, not asking where they’re going, letting Yoongi lead him by the hand. 

The smell of pine comes rushing back in, the cold night air, and he immediately starts to feel better. He focuses on his feet hitting the ground, boots making contact with the packed earth of the walkway, close after Yoongi, whose black bomber jacket is shining faintly ahead of him in the soft lights along the path. He’s wearing dangly earrings, small and silver, and they wink and spin through the waves of his hair, glinting like little stars in the dark.

Eventually, they come into another open area, this one a little smaller, where a lot of people are sitting down on the ground. Some are in camp chairs, some on blankets or beach towels spread out on the grass. Yoongi finds the other members of SDL without any help from Namjoon, and they all greet each other loudly and cheerily. Namjoon still feels excited, but there’s a weird displacement to it now, like it’s coming through a filter, a faint distortion casting over him and rendering him unrecognizable even to himself. 

No one else seems to notice this, or if they do they’re kind enough not to act any differently towards him, and Namjoon sits down with his back up against a tree trunk, even though the spot where he’s sitting is a little damp, because he instinctively felt like the tree would make him feel better, and he’s mildly surprised when Yoongi sits close to him, shoulder tucking in front of Namjoon’s arm, dark waves of his hair close to Namjoon’s face. He smells good. Namjoon hadn’t noticed it before, with everything else going on. 

The movie is starting. 

Things go off the rails for Namjoon fairly quickly.

The imagery is a little more elliptical and disjointed than Yoongi’s usual style, not quite what Namjoon expected. The shots of people are truncated, strangely framed, only lips or hands in the corners of the frame, as though he’s looking at the empty space between them instead of the people themselves. Namjoon feels slightly frantic, like he isn’t able to pay close enough attention, like he wants to take notes but also can’t look away from the screen long enough or he’ll miss something important. 

Interspersed with the space-in-between shots are ones of tree branches against sky, and close-ups of fallen leaves on the sidewalk. These, conversely, are framed perfectly, right in the center, beautiful and jewel-like in autumn colors, like the person filming them is looking at them reverently. 

Words in a familiar handwriting etch on screen.

Is it really me that you miss?
Or just the rose-tinted memories?

Something nervous twinges in Namjoon’s gut, but he keeps watching. 

He sees sunlight on the river at sunset, a familiar landscape from the hill behind the collective, but the camera is roving, restless, gliding too fast over people sitting on the grass, their backs turned to the camera.

Were we who we wanted to be?
Were we always us from the beginning?

Autumn leaves drift on the surface of water, this time in close-up, framed as carefully and lovingly as before. 

Maybe the gap between us
was always doomed to grow

Namjoon feels like something hot is pulsing behind his eyes. He’s having trouble taking in the imagery, but he does recognize a shot of the fireworks from the day they first met at SDL, quick and sparkling in the dusk like fireflies— the day Namjoon found out that Yoongi and Gloss were one and the same, and followed him to the hill behind the collective to peer over his shoulder into the camera and learn to see the people he loved through his own eyes. 

We who spoke of forever, we’ve faded like a dream
Still here, divided by something invisible
I see you through a mirror or an open door
What is it that I miss— is it really you?

A figure backlit by bright afternoon light, tall, face invisible, no more than a shadowed silhouette against all that blazing light, yet it gives Namjoon a jolt— that’s him. That’s Namjoon. 

In a split second, the shot gives way to quick match cuts of autumn leaves, balanced in the palm of a hand that he immediately recognizes as Yoongi’s, flashing brilliantly across the screen like a flip book. There’s something charming about it, the level of detail and care in matching the leaves almost cute in contrast with the emotions stirred by the words on screen. 

Or is it only time turning everything to regret
Recalling feelings that refuse to fade
No matter how we try to explain them away?

The camera is staring at wet pavement now, tilted sideways, like a person lying there with the side of their face pressed into the ground. A little like the perspective of a tree’s roots, Namjoon can’t help but think. 

Only you can tell me
if we’re meant to come closer or grow apart

He blinks. The blurriness getting in the way of him seeing, he realizes, is that his eyes are full of tears.

Something warm and rose-golden fills the screen, large droplets of water faintly visible on the surface of it, light coming through and illuminating a delicate tracery of vessels. It’s an extreme close-up of a leaf, he realizes, seen so close that it looks like some strange membrane, like the glowing sunset skin of an alien.

Somebody
does love
But I’m thinking
about you

The words trace along the veins of the leaf playfully, almost shyly, like they’re trying to camouflage themselves. 

The short film ends, and people are clapping enthusiastically, and some other film starts playing, the next film in the program, but Namjoon can’t take it in. He feels unsettled, a little sick. He tries to stand, and tries to be unobtrusive about it, but he overbalances a little and has to catch himself on the ground.

“You good?” Yoongi’s hand lightly touches his elbow, and it occurs to Namjoon that he’s only checking because he can tell it’s more than just Namjoon’s usual clumsiness, can somehow read in the details of his body language or his vibe  that something more than that is wrong, because he knows Namjoon better than anyone, just the way that Namjoon knows him, and suddenly he hates it, he wants to evaporate into the core of the earth, let the heat of that attention dissolve him into nothingness so he can finally be free of wanting endlessly, with no outlet and no hope of that greedy, selfish, possessive wanting ever being returned. 

“Just need to get some air.” It’s a dumb thing to say, they’re already outside after all, but the words come rumbling out of Namjoon’s chest without his permission, in his deepest register, the one that comes out when he completely forgets to modulate his voice. 

Namjoon stumbles away, not really looking where he’s going, almost crashing into a tree at one point, following the soft rushing rhythm that he doesn’t process as the sound of waves until the trees thin around him to an open beach, empty, blue in the night. It’s not lit the way the paths for the festival are, not part of the main area. Empty, cold, deserted, bathed only in moonlight.

It should make him feel relief, but he finds that all he wants right now is to lie down on the cold sand, and maybe let the freezing ocean wash him away with the tide. He wants to disappear. 

Before he can get very far, someone grabs his forearm, and he knows by the ferocity of the grip exactly who it is.

Instead of turning around like a normal person, Namjoon immediately stops in his tracks, so suddenly that he feels Yoongi thump into him from behind.

“Oof. Joon. What’s going on? Talk to me.”

Then he does the absolute worst thing he could do in that moment, which is to touch Namjoon with kindness. It seems instinctive, the hand that was on his arm coming up to land on his front lightly, quellingly, like he just wants to keep Namjoon from running away, but Namjoon can’t stop the reflex that rips through him, and he finds himself gripping the back of Yoongi’s hand too tightly, like he’s trying to fix him in place, to slow the stimulus before it gets to be too much, but also like Yoongi’s hand is a lifeline. 

He can hear Yoongi take a little breath in, then feels a gentle pressure against the back of his shoulder, maybe Yoongi’s forehead resting against him while he waits to understand what Namjoon will do next. 

It occurs to him suddenly, uncomfortably clearly, like having a light flashed in his face, that he’s objectively being an asshole, that he might be ruining this night for Yoongi. He wishes, hating himself for it even as he thinks it, that Yoongi hadn’t followed him, that he had just let him go. 

“Sorry.” He forces himself to release Yoongi’s hand, and to step away from him toward the ocean, putting some space between them. It’s so dark out there, monochrome, black sea with white-tipped waves, white moonlight shivering across the surface. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to worry.”

Yoongi makes a sound, halfway between surprise and something that might be offense. He comes to stand next to him, respecting the small amount of distance Namjoon put between them, facing the sea and kicking at the damp sand with the toe of his boot. “I’m not worried. Or I wasn’t. Should I be?”

Namjoon feels trapped. He doesn’t know how to get them out of this situation without saying something bad, something hurtful, and he has the ugly realization then that maybe he wants that. To just let it spill out like oil, something toxic that needs to leave his body before it festers.

“Why did you. No.” He tries to focus, to remember how he’s supposed to start conversations like this. “I felt sort of— ambushed. By the film. I wasn’t ready to see it, I think. I feel ashamed.”

There it is. He doesn’t know if it’s enough, but he feels like his lungs are burning, not just from the cold, but like he spoke something made of fire that scorched him on the way out. 

“Ashamed? Of what?” Yoongi’s voice is low, tight and flat, and Namjoon realizes uncomfortably that he’s angry, really angry, when he wasn’t before, and Namjoon doesn’t fully understand why. He expected discomfort, or pity, but not— whatever this is. That stiff set of Yoongi’s shoulders, like he’s expecting a blow, like he’s already bracing himself to return it.

Namjoon starts to speak, but Yoongi beats him to it, talking over him, spitting the words out like an angry cat. “I’m not asking you for anything. There’s no need to be fucking ashamed. I thought you were done running away.” 

In spite of the cold, Namjoon feels a rush of heat traveling down his face and neck. What the fuck?

“I’m just trying to say what I felt. You don’t have to throw it back in my face.” 

“And I can’t say what I felt? We’re not kids anymore. If you’re so fucking ashamed to be associated with me, then why are you even here?”

“Ashamed to- what?” Namjoon feels slow, like he’s completely missing the point. Yoongi thinks Namjoon meant that he’s ashamed of him? He sucks in a breath, too aware of the harsh sound it makes. “It’s not like that. I just, I don’t belong here. I’m ashamed of myself. I feel guilty. And I don’t want to put that on you. But I didn’t handle it well. There’s nothing wrong, I’m just that type of person.”

“That’s your choice, you know. If you wanted to be part of this you could. I want you here.” In Namjoon’s peripheral vision, he can see him turn his face away, his hair moving in the wind to hide it, though it doesn’t take away his words. “I was going to ask you to join SDL tonight, you know.”

He laughs bitterly into the wind, and Namjoon hates this, more than he has ever hated anything. He tries to swallow but the lump in his throat is too big. He better not be about to cry, that would just be fucking great. “You can’t— you can’t always make things right for me. I appreciate it, but you can’t make everything ok. You shouldn’t have to.”

Yoongi answers so fast that Namjoon doesn’t even know how he could have been listening, but his words cut true, the way they always do. “Everything doesn’t have to be ok. It’s fine to feel bad sometimes. You don’t need to punish yourself for it. It doesn’t mean you don’t belong. If anything it makes you even more relatable.” He takes a slow, frustrated breath, and Namjoon risks looking sideways at him. Even in the dark Namjoon can see the fierce set of his brows, the way his eyes are fixed out on the sea, refusing to return Namjoon’s gaze. He looks livid. 

Namjoon can’t believe how badly he’s fucked this up. He’d thought he was the hurt one, the one done wrong, his true heart cruelly exposed by the honesty of Yoongi’s film, the feelings he hadn’t been ready to face, not ten years ago, and still not now. 

But Yoongi is so much more angry, and seems even more hurt than Namjoon felt a minute ago. He feels like he’s fumbling in the dark, looking for a hidden switch he can’t see, something that will finally illuminate this and let him see the thing looming between them for what it is.

“You were really going to invite me to join?” He sounds shy, and he feels stupid, but it’s— it’s his dream. The only thing he’s ever really wanted with his whole heart, aside from the man standing next to him, and he’s somehow already ruined it.

“Yes. Of course. You idiot.” Yoongi breaks finally, dropping his gaze down to the sand, hands hidden in his jacket pockets, and he laughs a little, but it sounds sad. “Maybe I’m the idiot. You’re here because you feel guilty. I thought we were in this together, but I was pressuring you. I’m sorry.”

“No. What? You’re not— you never did. Out of everyone, you’re always more patient with me than I deserve.”

“Why do you always think you don’t deserve it?” He turns to look at Namjoon finally, vehement, and the last of the anger seems to drain out of him before Namjoon’s eyes. It reduces him somehow, leaves him looking small in a way Namjoon doesn’t like. “But that’s not even what I meant. I was pressuring you with my own deadline to finish the album, and wanting you to join SDL, and everything. I didn’t wait for you to be ready. I rushed you into it.” He says it calmly, colorlessly, like he’s admitting something to himself. 

Except it’s all wrong. Namjoon knows it is. Yoongi has been as steady and patient with him as ever. Namjoon is the one who pushes, who’s greedy, who takes everything he can get from Yoongi, more than Yoongi could ever want to reasonably give. Namjoon has dreamed of being part of SDL, has longed to join since the first night he ever heard of it, before he even knew it was Yoongi’s. All he’s wanted is to be part of something real and passionate and true, to be welcomed in, and now here he is, fucking it up as usual.

Yoongi’s voice cuts into his impending spiral, low and calm, soothing in its steadiness. “Listen. I should have just told you this. It’s stupid, but I was rushing to finish as much as I could before—”

He stops talking then, like he’s simply run out of steam, but Namjoon can tell he isn’t finished. So he waits.

“I’m having surgery next month. In three weeks. And the recovery will take a while, so.” 

That’s all he says. He seems oddly relaxed now, hands still in his pockets, eyes turned down to the sand at their feet, his graceful profile half-visible through his hair.

“Surgery for what?” Namjoon isn’t sure if what he’s feeling is panic yet, or if it’s just on hold until he hears the answer to the question.

Yoongi lifts his shoulders in a shrug, looks up at the sky, and releases a big sigh. “For an old injury. My shoulder. I hurt it, the year that you left, and I never got it fixed. But I can’t put it off anymore.” He looks over toward Namjoon, finally, eyes clear and dark through the soft veil of his hair. “I’ll have to take it easy for a while. It’s just— hard to think about not being able to work much, not being able to shoot, for all that time. I’m not handling it well. I’m sorry.” 

“The year that I left?” Namjoon barely even registers that Yoongi’s somehow, incredibly, still trying to apologize for whatever it is he thinks he did wrong. Alarm bells are going off in his head, big frantic ones, screaming like new ghosts.

Yoongi looks away again, back out at the ocean, trying to act unconcerned. To convince Namjoon he shouldn’t be concerned. But Namjoon still knows all his tells. 

“I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. It was so long ago now, but— I was in an accident. I got hit by a car, and it complicated some things for me. That’s part of why I dropped out. But it’s ok now. It really is.”

“You got hit? By a car?” Namjoon is well aware that all he’s doing is repeating Yoongi in a panicked, incredulous voice, but he feels like his brain is moving in slow motion, like his heart is splitting apart in his chest.

“That’s why I never wrote back to you. I’m sorry.” 

Yoongi still isn’t looking at him, but it’s fine, because Namjoon doesn’t think he could bear to be witnessed in this moment. He finds himself sinking, involuntarily losing all control of his body, slowly going down until his ass hits the sand. He can’t really feel the impact.

Yoongi sits down next to him, and half-turns toward him, eyes still pointed somewhere over Namjoon’s shoulder toward the ocean. “It was hard to talk about. But I think we both— we were both having a hard time, then. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.” 

He says that like he really believes it, like Namjoon couldn’t have reached out like a normal person and asked Hey, is everything ok? Haven’t heard from you in a while. Anything. He could have said anything. Instead, he got so caught up in his own invented melodrama that he couldn’t even be there for his best friend when he needed him most. 

“Hey.” Yoongi’s hand emerges into his vision, gripping the top of his leg just above his knee, digging into his thigh. It’s so cold here on the beach that he barely feels any warmth in the touch. “Don’t blame yourself for this. It wasn’t just you. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want anyone to know.” 

“What?” Namjoon feels his throat trying to close, the single word struggling to escape. 

Yoongi’s arms fold together over his front, and Namjoon is seized by an awful urge to hold him, just to feel him, real and alive in his arms, not lost to time or the vague horror of an accident he never knew about, an accident that actually could have taken him away forever, and Namjoon never even knew it. 

He hates the rare occasions Yoongi seems to get smaller, like now, so he somehow unsticks his throat. “I’m sorry. I should have been there. I wish—”

“No.” Yoongi cuts him off decisively, lip curling a little in something like a silent snarl. “I didn’t tell you for that. I don’t need pity. You couldn’t have fucking saved me, Namjoon.” 

As quick as it came, the anger seems to recede, and he sinks back into himself, forearms resting on his knees, head bowed. “I’m kind of glad you weren’t there, honestly. It probably would have made dropping out a lot harder. Who knows, maybe I would have stayed.” He laughs, like that isn’t a knife twisting in Namjoon’s heart, catching at all the most tender parts of him and ripping them into an open wound.

“But you wanted to quit. You don’t regret it.” Even to himself, Namjoon thinks the words sound pathetic, wishful thinking, compared to the conviction Yoongi brings to everything he says. 

“I don’t.” A silky tendril of hair falls over his face. He stays looking down at the sand. “I’m telling you because you deserve to know what’s going on with me, and why I pressured you to be part of this.”

“You didn’t. That’s ridiculous. Yoongi, you know, you have to know, this is what I’ve always wanted, this, you—” Namjoon stops himself, presses a hand against his own throat like he can forcibly keep the words in, stop a damning confession from spilling out. 

Yoongi looks straight at him then, face so perfectly still, like he’s composed his features into a mask of careful indifference, the way he used to do sometimes when Namjoon first met him; meanwhile Namjoon burns on the verge of melting, face hot with unreleased emotion, hands clutched around the back of his own neck, tears itching the corners of his eyes.

“I get that you want it. I do. But I don’t know if this is just a vacation for you.” Yoongi’s so careful to say it without heat, the skin around his eyes smooth and stiff, so viciously blank. Withholding anything that might let Namjoon really see him. “I thought I might have the surgery, and you’d disappear again. Fuck off back to your old life.” 

Without warning, he brushes his hands sharply against his jeans, like he’s shaking the sand off in preparation to get up, and Namjoon slides over the edge into full-blown panic, leaning forward to stop him.

“Wait—” In his haste Namjoon sort of falls on him, catching himself awkwardly with his hand on the cold ground next to Yoongi’s hip, and the breath leaves Yoongi in a sharp rush, his composure cracking a little as Namjoon practically bowls him over into the sand. Namjoon is closer to Yoongi’s face than he thinks he’s ever been before. 

“Shit. Sorry.” He can see the hair that frames Yoongi’s face stirring a little from the displaced air of Namjoon’s hasty apology. He struggles to sort himself out and move back out of Yoongi’s space before the closeness drives him to do anything even more embarrassing. 

Yoongi surprises him, then, by seizing the lapel of Namjoon’s jacket with one hand, gripping onto it like he doesn’t want him to move. It knocks Namjoon off balance again, and his hand lands on Yoongi’s knee. He can feel the bony shape of it through his jeans. Namjoon swallows.

He watches Yoongi’s lips move when he talks to avoid looking into his eyes. “I don’t like thinking that way about you. I know you don’t trust yourself sometimes. I want to trust you.”

Namjoon’s heartbeat feels funny, too big and loud, echoing through his whole body. The moment feels too intense, Namjoon has escalated the situation by sort of falling on Yoongi, and now he doesn’t know how to redirect things to a safer place that doesn’t involve gripping at each other’s clothes at close range on a moonlit beach. 

So he stares at Yoongi, his small angry pout, his hair falling over his brow, his cute nose, and he just says what he thinks. “First of all, I’m not pitying you. For fuck’s sake. How could I? You’re the coolest person I know. I admire you more than anyone.” Thankfully, it’s so cold out that Namjoon can’t really feel his own face anymore, which somehow helps with the embarrassment. “So when I say that I wish I had been there, it’s just that. I wish I had been there for you. That’s all. Can’t I wish that?”

He doesn’t know how else to say it, how to convince Yoongi that this is it for him, that he’d never consider leaving Yoongi again as long as Yoongi will have him around, how to say any of it short of a love confession, which he’s positive would be the worst thing he could do right now, even if it feels the most true.

He has to find other ways to be true. To excavate the right words from inside himself, to give Yoongi as much of that honesty, as much of that love as he can without it being too much.

“I want to be there during your surgery, and I want to be there during your recovery, and I want to be there when you’re ready to make art again, whatever that looks like. I want to be there for all of it.” He’s aware suddenly that he’s too breathless, that the words have been rushing out of him without pause. 

Yoongi just stares at him, eyebrows drawn down in the middle, an intense little furrow between them, but he doesn’t look angry anymore at least. Namjoon feels his fingers tighten slightly where they’re still clenched into the front of Namjoon’s jacket. 

Then, finally, his mouth pulls into a smirk. “My knight in shining armor.” It’s such a Yoongi sentiment, equal parts snarky and sweet, and Namjoon is just happy as long as Yoongi is feeling good enough to give him shit; there isn’t anyone else he wants making fun of him while he spills his guts with the most mortifying secrets he possesses, and he can’t help it when his face splits into a smile and he starts to laugh.

Yoongi laughs too, eyes folding into crescents, the starry lines around his eyes deepening the smile, Namjoon’s favorite expression to see on this earth. He’d traverse oceans, he’d go to the moon if he had to, he’d come back over and over again. He’d endure anything for that smile. 

Yoongi settles back into the sand, facing Namjoon with his legs crossed. His hand falls lightly, naturally to Namjoon’s thigh, where it rests, playing with the fabric of his slacks. Sure. Fine.

Namjoon looks away from it immediately, the sight of that broad, strong hand kneading the fabric over his leg, feeling like his face must be so hot as to be glowing, even in the frigid sea air.

“Ok then. Honesty time?” Yoongi presses the tips of his fingers into the sand, stirring it gently, and gives Namjoon’s leg a slight squeeze with his other hand. 

Namjoon nods without looking up at his face, because he needs to work himself back up to it, and even though he knows Yoongi can see him, it somehow feels a little less revealing than looking into his eyes right away. So he watches Yoongi’s hands, and he listens.

“It’s hard to explain. I never really talk about this. Back then, it just felt so inhuman. I was working all the time so I could pay for school, and I was in pain all the time.” Namjoon swallows, and watches Yoongi’s hand pushing the sand around, and suppresses the urge to pull Yoongi into his arms. “It’s like I was killing myself to make all this money and turn around and dump it all down the drain, into these pointless classes I barely had the energy to attend anymore. So I quit school and kept the job, and started apprenticing with an architect — I told you about that — so I wouldn’t have to feel like I was killing myself for nothing. I was just trying to survive, and I thought I didn’t need it. A diploma, a stamp of official approval that said I knew shit. Whatever.

“The first films I made were about buildings. I liked looking at the places people lived, as a way of looking at people. Before I learned how to look at people. You can see a lot in the details of how a person arranges their space, how they share space with others. So I worked, and I met people, and I observed the details. I learned more about designing buildings, and I learned more about how to build them. And I made a place I’d always wanted to make. It’s mostly the studio, now, a place to hang out and make stuff together, but at first it was also a place to live. A place for people to gather if they didn’t have any other place.”

“Everyone always says they want to live in a big house with all their friends, but you actually did it.” Namjoon feels a little silly saying it, but he wants to find some way to capture it in words, the size of Yoongi’s love, the way he takes care of people even in the midst of the hardest moments of his life. 

Yoongi laughs a little, and pushes a pile of sand towards himself. The tide is getting higher, waves hissing toward them farther up the beach than before. “Yeah. Well. I didn’t know if I would make it, back then, and if I didn’t, I wanted to be doing something that felt like it mattered, not dragging myself to a boring theory class every day. That wasn’t worth dying for.”

Namjoon gets it. It hurts to hear, but he thinks he gets it. “Sometimes you have to have to rend your life apart to end an even greater pain. You blow up the present for a future you can’t see, but at least it isn’t wherever you’re trapped at the moment.” Namjoon thinks, but doesn’t say: Even if you become a stranger walking in your own skin, that’s it. You just keep walking.  

As Namjoon stares at Yoongi’s hand moving in the damp sand, he realizes that he’s making a sand castle. Sort of. It looks like a tiny house fit for a crab, with a little moat around it. 

He reaches out, digging his hand into the smooth expanse of cold damp sand, bringing a handful over to make a smaller second floor for the tiny castle. Yoongi makes a characteristic little huffing laugh that Namjoon knows means he just cracked a smile. 

“Yeah. You get it. Except I was bad at confiding in people back then. So I didn’t tell anyone anything. I just kept dragging myself forward until it got better. I’m trying to take better care of myself, now.” 

Namjoon hears what he doesn’t say. The physical therapy, and the upcoming surgery. “Good. I’m proud of you.” 

He would have felt embarrassed to say that before, but he means it, and so he wants Yoongi to know. Even if it doesn’t mean much coming from someone whose life is a mess. But Yoongi makes his humming purr sound, and it reassures him enough for what has to come next.

Namjoon is carefully shaping little bits of sand atop the second floor of the castle, adding crenellations, when he finally feels ready to start explaining himself. He’s tired of lying to his best friend, his favorite person. It’s too tied up in the reason he ran away, the reason he keeps running away, and he doesn’t want to do that anymore. 

“I didn’t just leave because it was a good opportunity. To go overseas, meet people in the literary world. It was, but that’s not really why I went. But I think you know that.” He breathes, and focuses on breathing, and starts to pile up more sand to build a new wing of the castle, disrupting the moat. He can worry about the moat later. “You were right. I was running away. I was running away because I fell in love with you, and it scared me. I wasn’t ready to deal with it, and I was afraid I would do something stupid and ruin our friendship. But that’s exactly what I ended up doing anyway, because I ran away without explaining anything.” He feels lightheaded, so he takes another breath, carefully shaping the castle with his hands, carefully not looking at Yoongi. “And then when you didn’t answer my email, just one time, I convinced myself that you somehow knew, and you didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. I was lonely, and depressed, and spiraling, and I was still trying to run away from everything, including my own mental health. I knew something was wrong but I thought it made me wrong, that no one should have to deal with me. That no one wanted to. But it was just me that didn’t want to deal with me.”

He has to take a longer pause here, because he actually feels out of breath now, and his eyes are a little wet. He’s not actually going to cry though. He feels better than he thought he would after letting it all out. 

From the corner of his eye, Yoongi’s hands reach over, gently shaping and pushing wet sand into the shape of a little bridge over the moat. He doesn’t say anything, but the patient movement of his hands says everything that Namjoon needs to know, so he keeps going. 

“And I ran away tonight for the same reason. Because I fell in love with you. Again. Maybe I never stopped. I think I’ve been in love with you my whole life. It’s the only thing I know how to do. And I thought you knew, and you were trying to— let me down gently, or something. I don’t know. It was stupid. I don’t need anything else from you. I’m ok like this. I’m just sorry I did that. Ran away again.” That’s not how he wants to end it, but he feels like he talked himself into a corner. It’s the biggest thing he’s ever said, and he said it without any obfuscation or metaphor, and he’s so terrified that he feels numb, because he doesn’t know if he’s about to lose the most important person in his life. 

“The night I saw your film for the first time, there was this poem on the wall. In the bathroom of the bar. I want something real, but ‘forever’ is a sandcastle. I thought it was a sign from the universe, or something. Like it led me to you, even though I didn’t know it was you yet. It opened me up when I’d been closed for so long. And when I saw don’t forget to come find me, it made me remember everything I used to love. It made me remember you.”

He stops talking, and he stops building the sandcastle, letting his gritty hands rest on the cold sand. He thinks that’s it. That’s what he wanted to say.

He’s not prepared when he hears the nearly soundless, gasping laugh from beside him, because he thinks there’s only one reason Yoongi could be laughing right now, and Yoongi is kind of a little shit but he’s never been mean, not like that, until Namjoon turns to look and sees his face.

He’s shaking, and laughing, and he’s smiling so big that Namjoon almost misses the tears rolling down his face. He’s laughing and crying at the same time. 

Namjoon doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he finds himself reaching for Yoongi anyway, not sure how to fix whatever’s happening right now. Did he break his best friend?

As he finally does what he’s been wanting to do for a while, and wraps an arm around Yoongi’s shoulders, Yoongi wipes his face, still laughing a little. “Sorry— shit, sorry, it’s just— I wrote that. I had a really bad hookup and I wrote that stupid poem on the wall in there. The castles we built together, while dreaming of forever.” 

“We’re the ones who let them wash away.” Namjoon finishes the stanza without thinking, a tingly feeling stirring at the back of his neck that starts humming through his entire body, like full-body ASMR, like his entire body is fizzing and turning to bubbles. “You wrote that? Really?”

“Yeah. Of course you found it. You read everything around you, all the time.” He says it with such fondness in his voice that Namjoon actually wants to look at him, to see what his face is doing when he says it, but he can’t from this angle with his arm around him, with Yoongi leaning into him and his hair tickling Namjoon’s chin. “I called it don’t forget to come find me for you, you know. I wanted you to find me. I always wanted that. You idiot.” 

Namjoon blinks. This doesn’t even make sense. “What? You called it that for me? But we hadn’t even spoken in—”

Except Yoongi doesn’t let him finish. “Namjoon. Shut up. I always thought it was obvious that I had a crush on you back then. I thought it was why you left in the first place.”

“You what?” Namjoon’s head is spinning. He’s already sitting down, but now he feels like he needs to lie down, or something.

“When I read your books years later, and saw your interviews talking about being queer, I thought— I mean, you weren’t out back then, you know? I didn’t know. I assumed you always knew how pathetically in love with you I was, and you just put up with it because we were friends and it was too awkward to talk about. That you put distance between us because that was what you wanted, even if you didn’t say it.”

This is so unacceptable to Namjoon that he can’t let Yoongi go on about it anymore without saying or doing something, so he shifts them again, separating from Yoongi’s side and kneeling in front of him. Without thinking about it, he finds his hands framing Yoongi’s face, holding him as gently as he’s always wanted to, so that Yoongi can easily push him away if he wants, but right now Namjoon wants so badly just to look at him.

“Yoongi. What the fuck. What the fuck are you saying? I love you. I’ve always loved you. You ruined me for anyone else. Even when I left I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you.”

Yoongi is staring at him so intently, like he’s studying Namjoon’s face, like he can’t stop looking at him. “I always thought you’d leave again, when you got sick of me. I didn’t think I’d get to have this. I was going to let it end if it had to. Everything has to end, right?”

It’s the way he asks the question, like he’s desperate, like he knows he’s right but he wants to be told the opposite. And Namjoon will tell him, because nothing about it is right. Maybe as a general sentiment it is, that everything ends, but not this. This, between them, is different. As far as Namjoon is concerned, they are a law of the universe. Namjoon will always love Yoongi, and he knows now that he will never, ever leave him again.

“Not this. Not us. We’re not going to end. If you want me to leave again you’ll have to make me.”

“I won’t make you. I’m not even going to let you. You’re mine now.” The words shock through Namjoon, clenching inside him victoriously, the feeling of being claimed so directly by the person he’s always wanted most. Yoongi’s face is tear-streaked. He looks fierce, triumphant almost, as he climbs on top of Namjoon, all the way on top, into his lap, so that his face is right above Namjoon’s, so that he’s looking down directly into his eyes. “I’m going to kiss you now.” 

And he puts his hand alongside Namjoon’s face, tilting it up a little more, his thumb pressing gently into the spot where Namjoon’s dimple is, and he can feel it there because he can’t stop smiling, and then Yoongi does it, he leans down and kisses him.

Time stops, and then it disappears entirely, because there is only this. Yoongi, on top of him, Namjoon’s hands in his hair, Yoongi, touching him, kissing him breathless, and then kissing him more, like he’s impatient, like he can’t get enough, and Namjoon doesn’t know if he wants to laugh or cry, or just never let go. 

He wraps both of his arms around Yoongi’s back, holding onto him, holding him close, and rises to standing, so careful with the man he loves in his arms. 

“Show-off,” Yoongi mutters, and the words are hot against Namjoon’s lips because Yoongi hasn’t bothered to stop kissing him, because they can’t seem to separate for more than a few seconds.

Namjoon feels himself smile again. “Your nose is cold.” It’s a simple statement, but for some reason, it makes them both laugh, and then they have to stop kissing. Yoongi leans his forehead down against Namjoon’s, and Namjoon pushes his up against Yoongi’s, and he still can’t stop smiling. He spins in a slow circle beneath the stars, once, twice, with the man he loves in his arms, just because he can, and then sets him down gently, his entire world reset to the size of him, Min Yoongi, Gloss, who he lost and found again, who left Namjoon a trail of poetry and light to help Namjoon find his way back to him.

For the first time in Namjoon’s life, he feels like the universe is on his side.

They walk away from the ocean, huddling together with Yoongi’s arm around his waist and Namjoon’s arm around his shoulders, heading back toward the trees and the noise and the light because it’s fucking freezing, and behind them the tide rises and slowly washes away the sandcastle they built together, but it doesn’t matter, because Namjoon doesn’t need the metaphor anymore. He already has what he wants.

“Namjoon. It was really so obvious. The first day you showed up Jimin called you my celebrity crush.”

“Oh. I mean, I thought he was joking? I also didn’t expect to see you, so I couldn’t really process it. I kind of thought I fell into an alternate dimension or something.” 

“The look on your face—” Yoongi is laughing at him again, at the memory of Namjoon seeing him again for the first time in ten years, and Namjoon is filling up with warmth, so full he might overflow with it, and he leans sideways and kisses Yoongi’s forehead just because he can.

Yoongi seizes the front of his coat again and pulls him lower, into another quick, forceful kiss, and speaks the next words directly against his mouth, sending a happy quiver through Namjoon’s body. He hopes this will keep happening. He wants to get used to this. 

“I should have figured. You see everything in five dimensions. You only see the secret sinews of the universe, not the things that are obvious to everyone else.”

Namjoon pulls back, already halfway to laughing himself. “Oh, you want to talk about obvious? Have you not noticed the way I drop everything to follow you around everywhere? The way I rearranged my entire life to be available whenever you text me? What about the time you fell asleep at your desk and I came to tuck you in—”

“We work together, Namjoon. It’s not that suspicious.” He’s denying it, but he’s also grinning wildly, exultantly, like he can’t believe Namjoon is real, like he can’t believe he got so lucky.

But Namjoon is the one who’s lucky. He tightens his arm around him, pressing Yoongi into his side, nuzzling his face into Yoongi’s hair with a smug smile. “You’ll never be able to get rid of me now.” 

Yoongi turns his face sideways and presses it into Namjoon’s neck, nudging upward, biting lightly at the delicate skin behind the hinge of his jaw and sending a delighted shiver down Namjoon’s spine. “I don’t want to. I told you, you’re mine now.”

They walk back into the trees, holding each other close, bickering and laughing, talking until sunrise, because they can, because they spent too long apart and even after thirteen years, Namjoon doesn’t think he’ll ever run out of things to say, and he knows that even if the world were ending he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else — because he’s finally here, in the right place, with the right person.