Work Text:
Jimin hates poetry.
When his teacher announces that their class would be focusing on the subject, Jimin groans. He doesn’t even try to suppress it. His peers laugh in response, some nodding their heads in agreement. His teacher, however, sends him a glare, one mixed with annoyance and surprise. Jimin is never one to speak up in class, let alone speak up against a teacher, but Jimin really hates poetry.
“Jimin, I’m sure if you actually try to enjoy poetry, you’d see that it isn’t so bad,” his teacher says, a passive aggressive tone in her voice, “it’s wonderful.”
He rolls his eyes. “Miss, I don’t mean to be rude but there is nothing beautiful about rhyming and stupid metaphors that don’t even make sense. The only thing poetry will be, and forever has been, is boring.”
The classroom erupts again into murmurs of agreement and nods. A small smirk creeps onto Jimin’s face as he sees his teacher sigh in defeat. It’s soon disappears when she starts handing out a poem anthology giving them all an assignment for the following class; ‘find a piece of poetry you like, take note of the poet and be ready to present to the class as to why you like it.’
Jimin lets out a whine, this time. He absolutely hates poetry.
-
“You don’t understand, Namjoon. They don’t know anything about it but they hate it anyway,” Yoongi mumbles, “It’s stupid.”
Namjoon chuckles, but Yoongi doesn’t understand what was funny. “It’s not their fault, Yoongi. You can’t force people to like things they don’t like.”
A frown furrows on Yoongi’s face as he clicks on several windows on his laptop. “That’s not true, and besides, they don’t even have a legitimate reason to hate it. They’re just ignorant.”
When Mrs. Oh had announced that they were moving onto a poetry unit, Yoongi had almost jumped in his seat. He had had to try to hide his excitement as the rest of his classmates groaned and complained. At that moment, he didn’t really care about the fact that he was the only student who was happy that they were doing poetry in class, but as he sits on his laptop trying to connect to the student shared printer (he may or may not have already found the poem that Mrs. Oh had assigned them to find), with Namjoon, it turns out that he does, in fact, care.
“Why don’t you just tell them all that poetry isn’t that bad then,’ Namjoon muses as he leans against the printer, “Have you printed it yet?” Yoongi clicks on his track pad, and the machine next to them starts to produce a series of whizzes and grunts.
“It should be, and no, Namjoon, I am not going to lecture the whole class about the ‘wonders of poetry’, do you want me to die?”
Namjoon smiles, grabbing the freshly printed paper and handing it to Yoongi. “I was kidding, dumbass. Any more?”
“Yep, hold on,” Yoongi mumbles, poking his tongue out as he opens up another document on his laptop, “I just have one more.”
“Don’t you have a printer at home,” Namjoon groans, “hurry up, lunch is over and you’re wasting my free period.”
Yoongi’s eyes dart to the time on his laptop, “Fuck, I’m late for history,” he slams his laptop shut, shoving it into his bag, “can you hold onto my papers for me and give them to me after school?”
Namjoon is barely able to give him an answer as Yoongi runs in lightning speed out of the school library.
-
Jimin likes being in the library. Not because of the books or the spacious desks that are meant for work, but because of the nice beanbags and armchairs that are littered around the area. He often sits there during his free period, the one he shares with his best friend, Taehyung. Unlike Jimin, Taehyung actually uses the hour and ten minutes to work– on what, Jimin doesn’t know, he just sits next to his friend dozing off into quiet space.
“Have you done your poetry assignment yet?” Taehyung asks, nudging Jimin with his shoulder.”
Jimin scoffs shaking his head. “No, have you?”
Taehyung nods as he turns to Jimin, eyes open wide, batting his long eyelashes. “Yes…. Can you go get it from the printer?”
“Of course,” Jimin rolls his eyes, puffing his cheeks, “You don’t really want to know, you just want something from me.” His voice is playful as he turns his lips into a frown, crossing his arms.
Taehyung winks as he props his elbow onto the desks, resting his head on his hand. “If you go get it, I’ll find a poem for you.”
Jimin darts to the printer.
He returns with two sheets of paper, both warm from just being printed, and he hands them to Taehyung. He plops back down on his armchair and watches as a frown creeps on Taehyung’s face. His friend hands one of the sheets back to Jimin. “This isn’t mine, I didn’t print this.”
“Oh, what is it anyway.” Jimin scans the words on the paper, reading it over multiple times. He lets out an amused hum through a small smile.
-
It’s morning, which means Yoongi is a little slower and a lot grumpier than usual. He’s rummaging through his locker tossing out loose pieces of paper, looking through every textbook and notebook, but he can’t find it. He goes through his bag at least ten times, the pockets in his jackets five times, but it’s not anywhere.
Namjoon walks up to him, biting back a chuckle. It was abnormal seeing his friend so active, in the morning especially. He leans against the lockers next to Yoongi, greeting him. “Lost something?”
Yoongi’s head whips straight up, like a deer in headlights. His hair is as messy as the crumbled pieces of paper that surround his feet and the bags under his eyes seem heavier than his schoolbag itself. “Do you have the piece of paper I printed yesterday? The one that I asked you to hold on to.”
“Oh…shit,” Namjoon cursed under his breath, “I got distracted I forgot to get it from the printer.”
Yoongi rolls his eyes and hisses. “Distracted? How the fuck did you get distracted? You just had to stand there and wait for a piece of paper to come out, it takes two seconds!”
Namjoon brings his hands up to his neck, rubbing it slowly as he shifts his weight uncomfortably. “Um…well, Seokjin kinda… li-… It doesn’t matter, why can’t you just print it again?”
Yoongi has lost count how many times he has internally and externally groaned this morning, but estimates that he’s in his hundreds now. “It doesn’t matter if I can print it again, it matters that someone might have read what was on it!”
“It can’t be that bad,” Namjoon scoffs, Yoongi had a habit of over exaggerating and so he wasn’t at all guilty about the fact that he had forgotten about the piece of paper, “What was on it anyway.”
His friend diverts the question by leaning over to pick up the loose pieces of paper on the floor. He piles them up on his hand and shoves them back into his mess of a locker.
“Nothing,” Yoongi slams the locker shut, making Namjoon jump, “The janitor probably tossed it anyway.”
Yoongi is upset, Namjoon could tell, anger was the only emotion his friend couldn’t hide well. And as he watched his friend walk away, Namjoon wonders as he glances at the rosy hue on Yoongi’s usually pale cheeks, if there was something else Yoongi was feeling, that his body couldn’t hide.
-
Yoongi sits in his usual seat, the back of Mrs Oh’s classroom, and for the first time in his life, he is bored of poetry. He’s had to sit through six students reciting the same Shakespeare monologue, muttering the same unrehearsed reasons as to why they liked it, through voices that didn’t seem to believe any bit of the words they said. Yoongi likes poetry, he really does, but he just can’t seem to stop glancing at the clock, counting the seconds to when class ends. That is until Park Jimin is called up to the front of the class.
Yoongi absolutely hates it when something that had gone unnoticed, becomes noticed; like how if you think about it, your tongue is sitting uncomfortable in your mouth, or how when you pay attention to your breathing, it increasingly gets harder to resume or how Park fucking Jimin is probably the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen and now that he’s noticed he can’t stop looking at him. Yoongi hates it. He hates how he notices Jimin’s clear, airy voice, how it gets higher when he’s excited and how it gets lower and raspier when he’s tired, how his eyes turn into crescent moons when he smiles and how the boy laughs with his entire body. How Jimin can’t go five minutes without reaching up to brush his hair back with those ridiculously cute, small hands. The thing he hates the most though, is how Yoongi notices his own heart beating a little bit faster when Jimin does all those things.
He hates how he can’t stop noticing Park Jimin, a boy who would never notice him back.
But here he his, trying to notice everything Park Jimin was doing, taking it all in so that Yoongi could hate himself a little more for not being worthy enough to be noticed by Park Jimin. His chest hurts as Park Jimin holds up a piece of paper, reciting a poem with his beautiful-
Wait.
Here he is, Park fucking Jimin, a known hater of poetry, reciting Yoongi’s poem to the rest of the class.
Yoongi doesn’t notice that he’s stopped breathing.
“Is it slow?
The descent into the heart. Or is it long-drawn and
laced with pain. Do the days seem endless with dreams, or
does the sun seem to race faster through the sky
than you can
breathe. If the centre of gravity is
in the earth’s core, why
do I seem to fall
straight
to your lips?
Vessels explode as does
my chest. I look down,
head spinning. The ground
never looked so far
away.”
When Jimin stops speaking, Yoongi wishes that he’d stop living. His cheeks are burning, his whole body breaking into a cold sweat; he has to remind himself to take in air. His crush, out of all people, had been the one to find Yoongi’s poem. A poem that was never meant to be in the hands of anyone, especially in the hands of the person the poem was about. Yoongi wants to vomit. He also wants to die too. Maybe he’ll choke on his vomit and die, he sure hopes so.
“That was beautiful, Jimin,” Mrs Oh breaks the silence, “What’s the title of the poem and who wrote it?”
“The Anatomy of a Fall,” Yoongi silently answers with Jimin, “but I don’t know the poet. It’s signed with ‘M.Y’, I couldn’t find them when I searched online either.”
Mrs Oh nods, letting out an amused hum. “How did you come across it then?”
Jimin shrugs, nonchalantly, shoving his hands into the pocket of his hoodie. “I just came across it the other day. I need a poem for the assignment so I kept it.
” Yoongi in this moment wants to run to wherever Namjoon is to punch him in the face. He doesn’t understand what he did in his past life to deserve this kind of punishment. He isn’t sure what he is, mortified or delighted? What keeps him to his seat is Mrs Oh asking Jimin what he had liked about the poem. Yoongi gulps, thank God he was in the back of the classroom otherwise his classmates would’ve heard him practically heaving in air.
“I guess I like it because it seems raw, y’know? Like it just feels like we’re in the poet’s brain and what they’re feeling is clear, it’s not like over exaggerated with similes and metaphors, like we can understand it… Yeah, and like the whole thing about ‘falling straight to your lips’, I like that. It seems like the poet is really in love with this person and you kind of want to know more, but also are content with the simplicity of it.”
“Wow, Jimin,” Mrs Oh raises an eyebrow, and Yoongi swears she glances at him quickly, “It seems that you really enjoyed this poem.”
Jimin’s brows furrows, and a blush starts tinting his cheeks. “No, I-“
Their teacher cuts him off. “Maybe you should try finding out who this poet is, considering they’ve made you like poetry so much.”
Yoongi sinks into his seat as he watches Park Jimin return to his desk with an obvious blush on his soft cheeks. He’s starting to hate poetry.
-
“I’m quitting poetry club.” Yoongi grumbles as he plops down the seat next to his friend. “In fact, I’m quitting poetry in general.”
Namjoon raises an eyebrow, and scoffs. “You were in poetry club? Wow, when I thought you couldn’t get any lamer.”
“Fuck off, Mrs Oh made me do it,” Yoongi places his lunch on the table, but leaves it discarded as he rests his head on his arms, “and Park Jimin read my fucking poem to the whole class, not knowing it was by me because he doesn’t know I exist at all, and of course Mrs Oh knows it was by and now she must know that I’m absolutely whipped for him.”
“Park Jimin? The small guy that likes to dance with Hoseok?” Namjoon asks not looking up from his pasta. “I didn’t know you had a thing for him.”
Yoongi groans, it’s almost as instinctive as breathing now. “Yes I do, for a while now, and it was fine until he read my fucking poem in class saying all these things why he liked it and now my heart hurts and Mrs Oh knows and I don’t know if I should do something about it.”
“I’m pretty sure our high school English teacher doesn’t care much about your love life,” Namjoon chuckles, Yoongi wants to punch him in the face – which reminds him, he hasn’t done that yet, “but you’re right maybe you should do something about it.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno, why don’t you tell Jimin that was your poem or something?” Namjoon muses, saying it as if it was the easiest thing in the world.
Yoongi looks up. “And then what? ‘Oh hi you liked my poem, can you please date me?”
Namjoon ponders for a few seconds, eyes going to the side, tilting his head. “Actually… that isn’t such a bad idea. I mean, weren’t there rumors a few weeks back about him dating Seokjin?” Yoongi doesn’t miss how Namjoon’s voice cracks at the seniors name, “So he might swing that way, and if he really did like your poem, it doesn’t seem that much of a reach to say he wouldn’t consider it.”
His friend made it sound easy, but in fact, it wasn’t. Yoongi isn’t quite sure what had led him up to this certain moment (it was definitely Namjoon threatening him that if Yoongi hadn’t told Jimin by the end of the day, Namjoon would do it for him) but here he was, standing in the middle of the hallway staring Park Jimin, who was standing so princely in front of his locker with perfectly styled brown hair and soft cheeks.
Yoongi takes a deep breath and starts to move forward. ‘Fuck it’.
-
Jimin is relieved when he hears from Hoseok that dance club was cancelled. That meant that he could return home and take a nap before he started all his schoolwork. Thursdays were the hardest considering the club that usually ran in the afternoon left him no time to rest as he had mountains of work that was due the following day. Jimin entertains the thought of him doing work on time and instead of doing it in the last minute and chuckles. He’d rather die.
He reaches in his locker and pulls out textbooks that he needed; History, Math – he rolls his eyes, his poetry anthology. Jimin takes out the piece of paper that he had slotted in the cover of his book. It was the poem that he had read out in class this afternoon. He’s not sure why it causes him to blush when he reads over the printed text.
“Um, excuse me?”
Jimin looks up, folding the poem immediately, almost crumbling it in the process. He hates himself, as he’s almost relieved that the paper is still neat. In front of him is… he actually doesn’t know. Jimin has seen him before; he swears that the boy is in one of his classes, History maybe?
The boy has unruly, bleached blonde hair that manages to be lighter than his pale skin; it falls just above his eyes, showing just a bit of his eyebrows. His eyes are sharp, yet they look at him softly, and his pink lips that curl up into a soft smile. Jimin doesn’t notice how they tremble when the boy speaks.
“Hi?” Jimin closes his locker; needing something to do with his hands, fuck why is he so nervous? “Sorry, do I know you?”
The boy bites his lip. “I’m Min Yoongi, I’m in your English class…” Jimin curses under his breath and apologizes, “It’s okay, I sit in the back; I wouldn’t notice me either.”
Jimin’s not sure why that comment tugs at his chest but it does. He’s also not sure why he feels guilty. “No it’s just I’m bad with names but yeah, I've seen you around.”
They stand in awkward silence, and Jimin waits for Yoongi to say anything. He watches as the boy’s eyes dart to the piece of paper in Jimin’s hand. Jimin swear he hears Yoongi’s breath hitch as he points to it. “T-that poem… where did you get that?”
“Oh,” Jimin unfolds it, showing Yoongi but not giving it to him, “I found it in the student printer. Were you the one that printed it?”
“Um…” Jimin watches as Yoongi shifts his weight uncomfortably, eyes darting to look down on the floor. Jimin doesn't notice his heart jumping at the site of him. “It’s my poem…. I wrote it.”
Oh.
“You’re M.Y?” Jimin shouts, he’s not really sure why as when he thinks it through in his head, it was obvious that the acronyms matched with the boy’s name; but he was in unexplainable joy that he had found the poet, and that it was non other than Min Yoongi, a boy he had just met two seconds ago with soft features and a mind as beautiful than his face.
Yoongi looks up at Jimin. “Yeah… um, I just didn’t have enough ink in my printer at home to print it so I printed it here, but my friend Namjoon forgot to take it for me and so I thought I had lost it but then you read it out in class and now I’m really embarrassed because it wasn’t really meant to be read by peo-“
Jimin interrupts the boy’s rambling. “Do you have anymore? Poems, I mean.”
“Huh?” Jimin smiles as he sees a rosy blush creeping on Yoongi’s cheek, “I mean, yeah, I do. I sometimes write… Well not sometimes, like all the time, but it’s kinda lame so I don’t like telling people about it.”
Jimin frowns. He looks down at the poem in his hand, eyes skimming words that he has read about a hundred times now. “I don’t think its lame,” he finds himself saying, not really sure himself if it were the truth.
“You do?” “Yeah.” Jimin nods, giving Yoongi a smile, “I think it’s really beautiful.”
Yoongi frowns, chewing at his lip. Something about this boy makes Jimin’s heart flutter and he wishes that he could be enough for Yoongi to write lovely poems about him. “Don’t you hate poetry?”
“Not yours,” Jimin says almost immediately. It’s now his turn blush because fuck, did he really say that? “I mean, I like this one a lot.”
Yoongi flashes him a gummy smile and Jimin thinks he might die right then. The only thing that keeps Jimin standing is the locker that he was leaning against. “Thank you, I’m glad you like it.”
“Who’s it by? If you don’t mind me asking.” Jimin notices how Yoongi’s lip starts to tremble again with his question as well as the silence that fills them. He hates how he can’t stop noticing how pretty Yoongi is, how their heights are similar and how Yoongi’s voice and so low and slurred that it makes Jimin want to fall asleep. Jimin hates how he can’t stop noticing how Yoongi’s features remind him of a kitten or how the light hits his blond hair, making it look like the Golden Fleece itself. Jimin hates it, how he can’t un-notice all these things.
Because here he his, suddenly noticing everything about Min Yoongi, taking it all in so Park Jimin could hate himself a little more for not looking hard enough to notice a boy as beautiful as Min Yoongi.
Jimin's chest starts to hurt as Min Yoongi's eyes dart to Jimin's lift, parting his soft plump lips, and saying with his calming voice –
“It’s about you.”
-
For their final assignment for their poetry unit, they were assigned to write a poem – who would have guessed. Jimin walks into the classroom holding a freshly printed piece of paper in one hand, and Min Yoongi’s hand in the other; both are warm in Jimin’s grasp. They both go up to their teacher’s desk, handing in their poems, smiling awkwardly as their teacher glances on their entwined fingers.
Jimin follows Yoongi as the older boy walks to the back of the classroom to his desk, and sits in the vacant desk next to Yoongi. They both steal glances at one another as the class starts, none of them paying attention to a word of what was happening around them, both in a hazy trance.
“How come you never let me read your poem,” Yoongi murmurs, his head nuzzled in Jimin’s neck, his warm breath sending tickles down Jimin’s spine.
They’re cuddling comfortably on Yoongi’s bed, bodies in between lying down and sitting up. Jimin breathes in the smell of old books, coffee and mints, one that he has gotten too addicted to these past couple of weeks. Yoongi’s room is small, but big enough that whole worlds live in them. Jimin once tried to count the number of books that Yoongi has shoved in cramped bookshelves and under his bed, but the number had gotten too high for Jimin to remember. Jimin wonders if he could too, have a mind as beautiful as Yoongi if he read the amount of books that were in his room, but he shoots this idea down. Attaining a mind as beautiful as Min Yoongi’s was a pipe dream.
Jimin chuckles, turning his head so that their lips were only whispers apart. “Because it was one of those ‘roses are red, violets are blue’ poems.”
“Aish, you do know that that assignment counts toward half our semester grade right?”
Jimin’s eyes glance at Yoongi’s lips and watch as they speak. With how close their bodies were, Jimin moves with Yoongi’s chuckles, his body rising up and down with Yoongi’s chest. He rolls his eyes. “I hate poetry, Yoongi, I couldn’t write something nice if I tried, and trust me, I tried.” Yoongi frowns, looking so cute when he was confused.
“I thought you started to like poetry?” Yoongi’s lips turn into a pout and Jimin heart skips a beat. He can’t help but close the gap between their lips.
Jimin wonders what poetry is. And if each verse is about how Yoongi and Jimin’s lip move against each other and if each comma is how they sneak in a needy breathes between kisses, then maybe, they were poetry. If a simile is how their lips fit so perfectly as though they were puzzle pieces, then they were poetry. If each emotion expressed in a line is how Jimin pours his love into Yoongi and if a meaning is as ambiguous as how Jimin isn’t sure where his lips end and Yoongi’s start, then they were poetry. If the rhythm is how fast their hearts raced, yet still in time with each other and if rhyme is how they complement each other, how their lips move in sync as if stuck on similar schemes, then they were poetry. If poetry was the intense feeling that they both had when they were kissing each other, touching each other, breathing each other, then they were poetry.
Jimin, like a caesura in a poem, breaks the kiss. “I love you.”
And if poetry was a blond haired boy with dilated eyes and red, swollen lips that whispered ‘I love you too,’ back, Jimin may not hate poetry after all.