Work Text:
Interestingly enough, Yoongi's favorite part of being a best-selling novelist was not, in fact, writing those best-selling novels. It wasn't book tours or publisher meetings to sell them his manuscript. At some point, between the inkling of an idea and the publication of a book, he grew sick of his own writing. It was like when you read the same word over and over again until it looks foreign and peculiar, as if it isn't a word at all. He felt the same way about his books, no matter how successful they ended up becoming.
The deadlines, the never-ending edits, the constant revisions and reviews to proofread every plot point, every character's action, every comma, semi-colon, and period - it made his head spin.
Min Yoongi's favorite thing was the lull. The handful of weeks between his novels that he had entirely to himself. No obligations, no endless back-and-forth of emails with his editor, nothing. That first day of this vacation of sorts was something he truly cherished and savored. He'd spent it at a coffee shop a few blocks from his apartment - a hole in the wall sort of place, really. He could count the number of tables between two hands, and he liked that their coffee selection was no nonsense; no frivolous flavors or concoctions. They made coffee, damn good coffee at that, and an assortment of pastries that Yoongi liked to indulge in for brunch.
He didn't even do anything that first day; merely sat at his table of one and sipped at his coffee - it cost only a handful of won to refill his mug - and absently wrote down any sorts of thoughts that crossed his mind. He wrote about the way he traced the veins in the marble tabletop, about the way the woman at across the coffee shop chewed on her lip while she was trained on the book in her hand. A young man sat at a nearby table, and Yoongi wrote about the beautiful leather journal he'd laid onto the table and begun to scribble all over. When the man got up to get himself a cup of coffee, he shut the journal, and Yoongi admired the swooping designs of the leatherwork on the front cover from afar.
The young man sat back down, his ears tucked into a slouched beanie and his glasses resting precariously low on his nose. There was a birth mark just on the tip of that nose, and Yoongi smiled to himself before lowering his pen back down to his own notebook.
a beauty mark at the end of his nose as if he'd dug too deep into an ice cream co-
Yoongi's phone vibrated on the table with a rattle against the marble, and he glanced away from his journal mid-word to check it. It was a text message from his editor, some words of encouragement during this time of rest. Yoongi decides not to answer, instead looking back to his journal to finish the thought, absently scowling at the blot of ink he'd left in the half-second it had taken for him to look at the text and look back to the page.
He fills the journal pages with other absent thoughts and observations. There's something about the view from the coffee shop window, another blurb about a chill that creeps up his spine at some point in the day, some scribble or other about the detailing of someone's jacket when they brush against him walking towards the counter.
The day passes lazily, and Yoongi would have it no other way.
He returns to the coffee shop the next day. The same barista is there, and he squints at Yoongi and tries to recall his order from the day before. He almost gets it right, and Yoongi laughs lightly and says something about how he'll be here plenty in the coming weeks so the barista shouldn't worry about it. His coffee in hand, he settles at the same table as the day before. The young man is there again, at his same table from yesterday, hunched over that beautiful journal. His strokes are swooping and precise, but Yoongi can't tell what exactly he's drawing - he's covering the journal pages like a child keeping his classmates from cheating off of him.
Yoongi writes something in his own journal about the smudged granite on the young man's hand when he reaches for his coffee. Or at least, Yoongi thinks it's coffee; it's such a light shade of brown that he can't help but wonder if it's even coffee anymore and not simply flavored milk. He has a ghost of a smile on his lips as he picks up his pen again.
the coffee was barely even coffee anymore - he'd taken a big sip when he'd ordered it, not even trying to conceal the look of disgust as he'd swallowed the bitter taste as quickly as possible, and then refilled the cup back up with milk until the drink was a swirling cloud that melted into a light brown color among the ice cubes floating at the surface. he emptied a packet of pure cane sugar into the drink for good measure, stirring it for a moment before taking a more earnest sip this time. ah, perfect.
He stares at the words on the page, the end of his pen between his lips in thought. He mulls over the blurbs scattered over the past few pages of his journal and comes to a decision.
Yoongi pulls his laptop out from his bag on the floor, laying it on the marble and opening it. He glances up at the young man again, who isn't wearing a beanie today and whose honey-colored hair is strewn across his face, and he begins to type.
Yoongi and the young man fall into a sort of silent routine. Yoongi is at the coffee shop every day, bright and early. He sits at the same table with the same coffee order that the barista has memorized within only a handful of days. The days don't pass lazily like that first day, but rather they pass in a whirlwind. Yoongi feels driven, passionate, about this sort of side project he's taken on. He knows it'll never see the light of publication, never fall into his editor's hands, but he doesn't mind. It's a passion project of sorts, the kind of thing he liked to take on during these lulls. It's these little endeavors that Yoongi took on that always sparked his love for writing again, filling him with determination so that he could write his next best-seller.
The irony isn't lost on Yoongi, that his writing career always killed his love for the craft and that his vacations between book tours were when he fell in love with the art all over again.
He loves it. Loves the soft feeling of his pen against his journal pages, loves the way words flow from his fingertips, pouring across his keyboard like a bursting dam.
The young man is less punctual. He seems to work without a schedule despite the watch he always has on his wrist. But he arrives each day without fail, always with that same diluted iced coffee at that same table with that same beautiful journal. Yoongi does his best not to stare, but it's difficult when his writing relies so heavily on the man.
The man, Yoongi decides, is beautiful. It's really the only way to put it, which is saying quite a lot coming from one of Seoul's best-selling authors. He loves the challenge of trying to put this muse's beauty into words, twisting and rearranging sentences to try to paint a picture of the man.
a branch of ink wraps up his arm, around his bicep like an ebony serpent-
his earring is a trickle of silver from his earlobe, glinting when the light hits it just right-
beneath those lashes are an artist's eyes, an artist's gaze; chaotic, searching, desperate for that moment of inspiration- ah, there it is. his pen moves in quick, deliberate strokes across the paper, as if the image pouring from the ink isn't appearing quickly enough, as if the drawing will disappear if he doesn't move at the speed of light-
he needs to move faster than he can think; a moment slower and the image will flit from his mind's eye-
Sometimes the man gets frustrated, clenching his jaw and staring at the open journal for a moment before turning the page and starting anew. Every once in a while, the man tears out a page from the journal. He looks as though he might crumple it up or tear it into tiny bits, but he never does. He merely glares at the freed sheet and then tucks it into the back of the journal. Yoongi writes about this too, writes about the way the man's jaw clenches when he's unhappy with the way a work comes out, writes about the way the man's pen strokes get more aggressive leading up to the tearing-out of a page, writes about the way he sometimes misses the straw of his iced coffee when he's frustrated and refuses to look away from the page for even a moment to find the drink and successfully bring it to his mouth.
Yoongi looks at the corner of his screen and is unsurprised to find that he's already written twenty-four pages about this beautiful man across the coffee shop. He continues to type.
It's about two weeks into this project that Yoongi gets a name to tack onto this beautiful man.
"V" is what the barista calls out, and "V" is the name that the man perks up to. Even from his own table, Yoongi can see the letter written in Sharpie on the iced coffee cup, with two dots above it to form a pointed smiley face. Yoongi wonders if he would get a similar doodle if he ordered a to-go cup rather than his usual mug - maybe two dots above the "Y" or a smile beneath the two "O"s. Perhaps he'd give the barista his nickname of Suga and find the "U" turned into a smiley, or one hidden in the circle of the "G". But these letters don't particularly matter to him.
"V" does.
V is a sharp letter. The letter of Venus, of Valentine's, and of Versailles. It's a regal letter, the letter of vivaciousness, of vitality, and of victory. The V words drip from Yoongi's fingers, but none seem to do the beautiful man any justice. His typing continues to refer to the man as "the beautiful young man". He is sure that no earthly name he comes up with could be as fitting as the single letter on the side of the iced coffee.
there's a very certain way that the beautiful man looks, a visual indescribable even using vocabulary from every language and yet at the same time incredibly verbose. looking upon the young man's visage filled one with a sense of brimming vibrancy, as if a vacancy in the heart had been vanquished so viciously, so violently, that it made one's entire chest ache. one felt like a victim falling to their knees in a vivified vow to view this virtuous vestige with the value it deserves, with the vanishing vexation that perhaps this valorous creature is a villain of vanity-
Yoongi's head is spinning, and he closes his eyes for a moment to still the room. His fingertips are still humming, hovering over that one letter he'd never realized how little he'd used until now. He opens his eyes, half-expecting the printed letter to be worn off of the key given how many times he'd touched it in the flurry of words he'd just allowed to escape his head. He off-handedly wonders if the sudden use of the letter had given him whiplash of sorts, as if he couldn't process the words quickly enough, as if he'd sliced himself on the sharpness of the letter.
V is a sharp letter. He cannot bring himself to type it alone, cannot bring himself to leave it hanging on his computer without a jumble of letters following it to soften the blow. He fears that if he leaves it unattended it will cut him like a thorn, and even more so, he fears that he might not want to stop the bleeding.
For the prick of a thorn implies he was close enough to gaze upon the beauty of a rose, close enough for it to curl up in defense, close enough for him to perhaps see what its lines are drawing- no, not that close.
The beautiful young man sometimes meets Yoongi's gaze. When Yoongi glances up from his laptop, he often finds his own eyes meeting the young man's. But the artist's eyes, warm and smoky like the coffee in Yoongi's mug, always dart away. The tips of the young man's ears turn pink within seconds, and he buries himself back into whatever sketch he's working on that day.
Yoongi is nearly a hundred pages deep in this document about the young man. At around page sixty-two, he'd begun to fear that he might run out of things to write about from merely sneaking glances across the this coffee shop, but as his cursor spills onto page ninety-six with little sign of stopping, Yoongi's unease evaporates. Every day there seems to be something new about the young man that he hadn't noticed the days before.
The way he types on his phone, the way he speaks into it when it rings - with some jingle or other rather than the default ringtone - and the way he smiles a wide, boxy grin at some joke by whoever is on the line. Yoongi likes that the young man takes his time choosing music after plugging his earbuds in, seemingly searching for the perfect soundtrack before diving headfirst into a new page in his journal. When he's plugged in, he doesn't look up for ages. There's a furrow in his brow, a wrinkling of his nose with that beauty mark at the tip, an absent bite at his own lower lip when a line doesn't come out as he'd like. It's these moments that Yoongi cherishes, the moments where he can glance up over his laptop screen at him and find the young man doing something new he's never seen before, some new habit or other that the young man certainly doesn't realize he does.
It's easy to write when the young man is so concentrated. They work in silence at their own tables, like two well-oiled machines. The young man is in his own world, and Yoongi in his as well, but every time he glances up to look at him, it's as if Yoongi is poking his head into the artist's realm for a heartbeat.
Yoongi finds himself expanding on the little details he notices about the artist. Little anecdotes on the individual tattoos scattered across the young man's arms and hands, a blurb about the friend he had been on the phone with, maybe an entire plot stemming from the bruise on his elbow that hadn't been there yesterday.
The hundred pages don't have a particular direction or even a particular flow. The words are merely thoughts, passing ships across his mind that he manages to catch before they drift away. It's this sort of freeform writing that always brings Yoongi home to his craft. But this is the first time an entire project is so centered around a single muse, and the experience is exhilarating.
He knows that in a month's time, he'll have to close this document with no knowing when it'll be opened back up so that he can begin work on the third and final book of his current book series. There is a very good chance that once Yoongi leaves this coffee shop at the end of this break, he would leave this project and the beautiful young man and never touch either again. And so he puts everything he has into the words on the screen, everything he has into the thoughts that fall from his fingertips, everything he has into immortalizing every tiny detail that makes this young man beautiful.
One day, he thinks, he might open this project back up when his hair is streaked with silver and there are crow's feet at the corners of his eyes, and maybe it's been decades since he last thought of the beautiful young man. Maybe it's been a day. Maybe he remembers every detail of the young man with startling clarity, or maybe he can't recall what he'd done the day before. Yoongi half-heartedly wishes for the latter so that he could fall in love with the beautiful young man all over again.
Yoongi notices the shift in his writing. He doesn't like to reread works until they were complete - he likes to print out a full, finished copy and go at it with a red pen in hand. Constantly rereading his works as they progressed merely desensitizes him to his errors, but just this one time, he feels the need to reread what he'd written about the beautiful young man.
It feels stiff in the beginning. It feels stiff for the first twenty-five pages. And then there is the volta - the turn. Somewhere between writing about the quiet, low voice of the beautiful young man and writing about the way he'd rested his chin in his hand and gazed out the window of the coffee shop, out upon the Seoul streets, Yoongi had softened. The metaphors became more eloquent, the descriptions less rough around the edges. It felt foreign.
Yoongi is an author, but not of romance. He doesn't write to outdo South Korea's best romance writers. He loves thrillers, loves suspense and mystery and history. He had met Han Kang on several occasions, had her contact in his phone, had even sat down to talk to her about Korean fiction as a genre and been one of the first people to congratulate her when she'd won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. Yoongi is not the type to write a novella over his break about a beautiful stranger.
But this project says otherwise. Somewhere around page thirty, Yoongi wonders if he is reading one of those romance novels that always stared at him in book stores when he did signings. Korea's romance novel collections are something of a marvel, and he'd never been interested in them - he found them dry and was a firm believer that if you'd read one romance novel, you'd read them all.
And yet, here Yoongi is, reading his own romance novel of sorts with the nagging feeling in the back of his head that maybe if he had read more of the romance genre, he would be able to better speak about the way the stranger's beauty made Yoongi's chest ache or about the way he sometimes finds himself stopped short in the middle of a sentence because the young man had done something particularly endearing.
He wonders if he would ever feel like this again.
By the final week of his break, Yoongi has written nearly two hundred pages about the beautiful young man. He knows, from experience, that one page in his word processor translates to a little under two pages in a paperback novel. He has officially written a three-hundred page book about some stranger.
He is sure he could write another three-hundred pages if he had the time.
His phone is always buzzing these days with emails and texts from his agent and editor with reminders about his work next week. Yoongi turns the phone off - he doesn't need distractions right now. These are the last few days he has with the stranger, the last few days he has to engrave every minute detail of his beauty into his writings, and he'd be damned if he missed out on that.
It's the third to last day of his break when it happens. He gets up for a refill of his coffee for that whopping couple won. He'd gotten a to-go cup today - he's scheduled to meet with his agent later today and he knows that he'll need a full cup of coffee to make it through without falling asleep - and he later thanks the universe for that decision.
Just as he passes the artist's table, the stranger collects his things and stands. He doesn't even see Yoongi coming; he's too buried in his earbuds.
They collide.
Yoongi's to-go cup falls to the floor with an empty clunk, and every torn-out page of the beautiful leather journal goes flying across the tiles.
An apology makes its way onto Yoongi's tongue, but it dissolves when he crouches down to help the beautiful man collect the loose papers. Every drawing, every beautiful sketch, is of him.
There's countless pages dedicated to his eyes, countless more focused on his lips. Sketches of him sitting at his table, looking more beautiful than Yoongi had ever seen himself as in the mirror. He didn't know he furrowed his brow when he was typing. He didn't know his fingers looked so slender when he wore his favorite heavy rings. He didn't know his glasses fell so low on his nose when he was consumed in a blurb. He didn't know he gripped a pen so tightly.
The beautiful young man scrambles to collect the pages, his ears bright red and sorry's falling from his lips at a hundred kilometers a minute. Yoongi tries to catch the artist's eye - he'd never been this close to him before - but the stranger refuses, haphazardly shoving the pages back into his journal and standing to leave.
Yoongi scrambles; he isn't ready to lose the stranger just yet - he's supposed to have two more entire days with his muse among these marble tabletops. He grabs at his hand, but those artist's hands escape a moment before Yoongi can grip them. Yoongi clutches at the empty air.
"Wait!" Yoongi finally says, right before the beautiful young man steps out the coffee shop door. "Please," he adds at the last second, and his voice sounds weak, vulnerable. The beautiful young man stops. He looks back over his shoulder after a moment, looks right at Yoongi without his glance darting away, and every tangible thought flies out of Yoongi's head.
"Can I, ah... buy you a coffee?" Yoongi says once he finds his words again - something he'd never experienced as an author before.
The stranger pauses. He looks on the fence. His eyes flicker between Yoongi and the other patrons in the coffee shop, who all seem to be waiting with bated breath for his answer.
Yoongi makes the decision for him. He glances back at the barista, the one who's been here every day and has Yoongi's coffee waiting for him when he walks in.
"He'll have an iced coffee, please. And leave room for milk. A decent amount of room."
The beautiful young man is still standing at the door. He waits.
Yoongi takes the iced coffee from the barista, who is grinning ear to ear, and grabs the milk. He fills the coffee up with milk until it finally swirls into the shade of warm, beautiful beige that the beautiful young man loves. And then he empties a packet of pure cane sugar over the ice cubes and stirs the drink for a moment.
He grabs a straw and looks back at the beautiful young man.
"It's barely even coffee anymore but-"
The beautiful young man strides over, taking the cup and straw before taking a sip.
"It's perfect."
Yoongi smiles. He thinks he might have another five hundred pages whirring away in his head now that he's barely a breath away from his muse. He gestures to his table, where his novel about the beautiful young man is sitting open on his laptop. The muse nods and allows Yoongi to pull a chair out for him. They settle at the table together, and Yoongi is unsure where to begin, how to tell this artist that while he'd spent the last several weeks drawing Yoongi, he himself had spent the last several weeks writing about his beauty.
He can just barely hear the barista mumble "It's about time" under his breath.