Chapter Text
The clock has never moved slower, and Seokjin wants to weep into the stack of documents that never seems to end. It’s the less-than-glamorous side of journalism no one ever talks about and Seokjin almost, almost regrets taking the internship. Almost, because he needs that paycheck and the experience but, fucking fuck, at what cost? Seokjin stares blankly at the paper in front of him, and concludes that he’s never read a single damn word in his life ever.
A coffee cup appears in his line of vision and he lifts his head, grateful to be looking at something that’s not black text on white background. Jaehwan smiles at him, toothy as ever. “Were you about to cry, Seokjinnie?” he asks, moving so he’s perched at the edge of the desk. He’s cradling his own cup of something hot because Jaehwan despises drinking coffee until strictly necessary.
Seokjin grabs his coffee, taking a long drink from it instead of answering Jaehwan. “Perhaps,” he replies after swallowing almost half of the cup’s contents. “A gentleman never tells his secrets.”
Jaehwan arches one unimpressed brow.
“Okay, piss off, I was about ten seconds from weeping into this story about the local park with the most exciting topic.” Seokjin cannot force more sarcasm into his words if he tried.
“Oh, tell me more,” drawls Jaehwan, hands clasped together in faux interest.
Seokjin lifts up the paper and reads, “A strange incident occurred last night where a bunch of kids saw a bright light from the sky and it descended behind the forest. When they went to investigate, there was nothing there except a mysterious flattened ring in the grass.” Seokjin looks up at Jaehwan, lips drawn into a wry grin. “They claim it’s a spaceship, and there are now extraterrestrial life running around the city.”
Jaehwan makes a face. “Is this really going to be published?”
“I mean, it’s just going into the local happenings column of the paper that no one ever reads always.” Seokjin shrugs as he shuffles the papers back in order and sets them on his desk. “Not exactly the glamorous reporting life I thought I’d be entering.”
“I mean, we are both still interns. At least you’re not going on coffee runs under the guise that ‘journalists are always running around for the scoop.’ I don’t know why my boss thinks I can’t pick up bullshit when that’s literally my job but okay.” Jaehwan picks up his drink and finishes it with a dismayed smack of his lips. “I probably should finish my coffee run.” He gestures to Seokjin’s coffee. “That was actually my boss’, but I put the wrong creamer and it felt like a waste to throw it out.”
“Aw, thanks Jaehwannie.”
“Any time, Jinnie.” As Jaehwan hops off the desk, mug in one hand, he suddenly snaps his fingers. “Ah, you know what you need?”
“More coffee?”
Jaehwan points at Seokjin. “You should come to the Valentine’s Day party the interns are throwing. There will be alcohol.”
“Sold,” says Seokjin immediately.
“Knew it. I’ll let you know what the theme will be, so dress appropriately!”
“There’s a what now?” Seokjin tries to ask but Jaehwan flounces away, hand waving airily over his shoulder in goodbye. With a sigh, Seokjin slumps down in his seat, moodily shoving around papers with his finger. Truly living in the dream of being a paper pusher - maybe there’s a reason why no one ever mentions this part of the job.
“Y’know,” Seokjin says to no one, cupping his face in his hands and sighing. “This wouldn’t be so bad if there were some interesting things happening in this city.”
There’s no answer, as expected, and Seokjin resigns himself with continuing to edit the stories on his desk, pen moving slowly across the page, as if he hopes that the ink would magically make the stories more exciting. It doesn't.
---
“Ooh. Ooh this is not good.”
“Hmmm, you think?”
“I didn’t think it would shatter apart like that. Earth’s atmosphere is so… Much different. Much heavier.”
“We should go and collect the pieces.”
“Surely it can't bring harm to humans. Don’t look so worried.”
“You’re very confident for someone who just shattered the orb.”
“I said I was sorry!”
“Actually, you didn’t.”
“...Fair enough. C’mon, let’s go find the pieces. That’ll be my apology.”
“And you’ll buy me ice cream - it’s what we came for.”
“And with what money?”
“Darling, where is the confidence for that like your confidence for finding the shards?”
“I can’t believe I’m spending all of eternity with you.”
“You wouldn't want it any other way.”
“You’re so smug.”
“And so right.”
---
Seokjin has, in common opinion, an easygoing personality. His bosses to his fellow interns to his keener students at the university all consider him to be both hardworking and approachable, and he makes it his business to be as genial as possible-
“No.”
“Come on, pleaaaaase?” Jaehwan pouts at him.
-but given the fact that he's known Jaehwan for the better part of his miserable 23 year old existence, and the fact that he’s had to spend an extra 4 hours of his life marking assignments because the professor gave them the wrong rubric the first time around, he's pretty sure he's entitled to at least some petulance now and then. Especially now, when Jaehwan is waving a heart adorned sweater at him, demanding he wear it before he be allowed to the drinks.
“No.”
“Come on! Where's the fun Jinnie I know?”
“Fun Jinnie died eight hours ago. You're talking to Post Editing, Mid Caffeine Crash Jin now and he just wants to drink far more shitty vodka than strictly sensible.”
In the end, Jaehwan concedes on the sweater, but pins a ridiculously large heart on the front of Seokjin's shirt and a pair of heart sunglasses on his face as recompense before allowing him to say a few quick hellos and making a beeline towards the almost alarmingly neon pink punch. He downs his first drink, relishing the burn of it down his throat as he pours himself another glass to nurse as he broodingly watches the party from the punch table, shooting a reassuring smile whenever anyone looks at him worriedly. He's being ridiculous, he knows this, but he can't seem to shake off the feeling that he'll be stuck at this stupid place in his life forever, thinly pretending that the self aggrandizing old professor giving his students an assignment every single fucking week so Seokjin has to mark 40 assignments is just fine, peachy keen, thanks, and that he drives joy from writing articles on yet another piece of toast that has a striking similarity to Jesus or Elvis or their grandma’s deceased cat because journalism is dead and his bosses at the newspaper won't let him even approach the idea of anything substantial, and that he's working himself into the ground, but he's just so goddamn bored. He scowls into the cup before taking another swig. If only something would happen.
He sighs, and works a smile back onto his face as he starts to approach a group of his dancing friends. Jaehwan notices him, and a smile lights up his face.
“Glad you finally decided to join the rest of us, Jinnie! Byullie and Hwannie were half ready to fight your professo-”
Time slows oddly down around Seokjin. One moment he's grinning back at Jaehwan, before his friend’s face morphs slowly into one of horror. He turns his head around to look back at what has Jaehwan scared, and is met with a blinding light, the sensation of being tossed like a ragdoll. He feels himself soar, hears several screams and the sound of his own bones cracking as he meets a very hard surface. Pain flares across his body, white-hot, and everything fades to black.
---
It’s not all that bad, Yoongi supposes. He’s one of the managers at the shop, he gets to boss around the other employees, drinks as much coffee as he so pleases on the store’s dime, and gets to play the music he wants.
It’s a shame there's the occasional customer with bad tastes and the need to lecture him about the songs playing in the store as they’re paying actual money for overhyped and underwhelming music. It truly wounds Yoongi’s soul, wears at his patience... like this guy in front of him.
“...I really would have expected better music from an establishment I’ve heard so many good things about,” the customer drawls, his credit card held aloft but not handing it over. On the counter is a CD of one of the “classic” artists that people try to play off as “overlooked” but who are in reality well-known. People just want to sound snobby. It’s absolute shit, and Yoongi feels like he doesn't get paid enough for this.
“Yes,” Yoongi says politely, because years in this shop has taught him that agreeing gets transactions done faster. It doesn't even fit the conversation flow, but the guy nods sagely before finally, finally handing over the cursed piece of plastic. Yoongi could not swipe faster if he tried. He prints the receipt and hands over a pen, tuning out the guy’s chatter. “Do you want your receipt?”
“I’m good, thanks man. Gotta save the trees and the environment, y’know? You guys should try going paperless.”
Yoongi hums in some vague agreeing tone as he pushes over the CD, skipping the bagging entirely since the guy is clearly all about the environment, which is ironic considering he’s let out so much hot air into the poor world with his banal chatter. The guy picks it up, says a cheerful goodbye, and strolls out the store as if he didn’t waste a good ten minutes of Yoongi’s dwindling lifespan. By the Indie CDs aisle, Wonshik has been organizing the same four albums for the whole transaction solely so he can eavesdrop, and lifts his brows at Yoongi in sympathy as he slumps down against the counter.
“Want me to take register?” he asks kindly, setting down the album in its correct spot.
“Yeah, could you? I'm going to drink directly out the coffee pot.”
“That's… No please don't.” But Wonshik’s feeble plea is batted aside as Yoongi silently dumps the vanilla creamer directly into the pot and lifts it to his mouth. The creamer doesn’t hide the fact that the coffee is already lukewarm, going on cold, but coffee is coffee and Yoongi deserves it. “At least brew a new pot.”
“I just went through retail war!”
“And I just offered to take register - you either get coffee or register duty, your pick.”
Yoongi wheezes but reluctantly takes the now empty coffee pot to the back room to wash out in their little sink. Filling it with water and grabbing their half empty bag of ground coffee, he walks back out to the machine as Wonshik greets a customer coming into the store. In a few minutes, the shop smells of rich coffee and Yoongi can finally feel some of the stress from the customer finally leak out of his system. The rest of the day goes by with little fanfare, with more people bustling in around late afternoon, when school is out for the day, and another burst in the evening as people finish with work and dinner. Wonshik’s shift ends and he swaps out with Solji while Yoongi slowly drifts around.
It’s the same thing almost every day - open shop, dust the place, restock shelves, unbox new orders, ring up customers, chat with the employees, chat with the nicer customers who make interesting small talk, make coffee, drink coffee, repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s not all that bad but it feels so cyclical, so empty. Yoongi wants something more, but 1) he doesn’t know what that something is and 2) he doesn’t even have the means to do so. It’s not like he’s going to change the world overnight. Not that he really had plans to change the world to begin with but… He can’t help but dream. He is, simply put, a chronic dreamer, and he feels as if his life is currently working its way through the interlude between dream and reality.
---
“Jinnie! JIN!” Seokjin groans as someone shouts his name in increasingly pitched tones.
“Fihmorminiss” He garbles incoherently, his bleary eyes slowly trying to make sense of blurry blobs.
“Oh thank god, you're alive!” That someone half sobs, and Jaehwan’s face comes into sharp focus above him. It takes Seokjin half a second to realize that a) he's not sleeping in bed and b) a lot of people are staring at him. His senses flood back to him immediately and he sits up, wincing as Jaehwan pulls him sharply into a bone-crushing hug. He takes a second or two to recalibrate himself and then looks up into the concerned faces of twenty or so people, most of whom he considers good friends. He groans.
“Guess I really crashed the party, huh?”
The dispelling effect is immediate. He hears several groans and “oh my god”s as Jaehwan chops at his neck and shrieks, “how could you think of puns at a time like this?!” All the same, the mood in the room lightens.
“What the actual fuck was that?” Heeyeon, who had given him a truly impressive eye roll for the joke despite her relieved smile, now points to the shattered window with a glare she reserved for things that dared to not make sense to her. This sets off a flurry of debate that half-heartedly concludes with the position that some punk must have set off a flare gun outside. Sure they're drunk, but they are a room full of journalism students fully cognizant of the fact that there's absolutely no damage, not even a stray burn mark, aside from Jin turning into an impromptu projectile and the sole window glass, which has been pulverized to the consistency of sand. But they go with the flare gun theory, because honestly, what the hell else could it even have been?
“I don't believe it for half a second,” Jaehwan says cheerily as he and Seokjin walk home later that night. After he had adamantly refused to go to a hospital, because he feels fine, better than fine honestly I feel like I've slept twelve whole hours, Jaehwan had been even more adamant in accompanying him to his apartment for a sleepover (“just like when we were kids!” “you slept over literally last week.”). Seokjin glances sidelong at him looking as blasé as if he was commenting on the weather, and mulls it over silently before noticing something.
“...how long have we been holding hands?”
“Two blocks now,” Jaehwan gives their intertwined hands a little swing for emphasis, “but seriously, that was so fucking weird, what d’you think it could have been?”
“Maybe it's the aliens those kids saw yesterday,” Seokjin jokes, and when Jaehwan hums thoughtfully, “Oh come on! Don't tell me you're seriously considering it.”
Jaehwan opens his mouth to reply, but there's a sudden groaning noise, steel against concrete that has them scrambling backwards in shock.
“Holy fuck!” They both screech almost simultaneously. A few meters ahead of them, an old building groans again, sending up clouds of dust as it starts to slowly fold in on itself like a concrete accordion. There's a group of people gathered at the base of the building that gasp in shock, and Seokjin’s eye is immediately drawn to a flurry of movement in the penthouse on the fifth floor.
“There's someone in there!” His feet are propelling him forward before he even has the time to think, and within an instant finds himself crashing through the window of the apartment. He lands unsteadily and finds himself blinking in surprise at an equally surprised looking woman with tears streaking down her face.
“Wha-”
“I can ex-”
Before either of them can finish the sentence, the building groans again and they're both thrust back in to the peril of the situation.
“Take my son!” she sobs, and Jin looks down to realize she's half-carrying a skinny preteen looking boy. The kid looks utterly unphased by the situation, staring intently as he wiggles his toes. He reaches an arm up to pat his mother gently on the face as she tries to lift him up again. “Please save him! Leave me here but just save him!”
Seokjin’s heart breaks at the selflessness of this mother, and channeling his own mom, he steps forward confidently and lifts the boy into his arms. The boy makes a noise of surprise as he’s lifted into the air, and pulls gently at Seokjin’s hair as he balances him on his back but remains otherwise compliant. Seokjin turns back to look at the woman with an assurance he does not possess. “Nobody's getting left anywhere. Please grab on to me.” He readjusts his grip on the two of them, the mom nearly squeezing the life out of him with how tightly she's holding on, and then with another jump the three of them are leaping out the window.
It ends up being way less heroic than it seems, considering he screams right along with the woman as they free fall to where Jaehwan, who has made his way to the front of the crowd, is standing below them.
“Oh my god, thank you so much, thank you, thank you,” the woman, talking a mile a minute, first hugs Seokjin, and then her son, who squirms at his mother's affection, “I thought we were really going to die out there- I've been telling the landlord to fix our fire escape for ages now, but nothing. Which is to be expected really, the elevator’s been out of action for a week and he hasn't done anything either- oh my god” she turns to look at Seokjin with wide, horrified eyes, “the elevator’s been out of action for a week.”
“Ma’am, I think realistically the elevator is the least of your concerns right now.” Jaehwan says placatingly, and he's handling this surprisingly well considering his best friend just launched himself five stories without adverse effect.
“No, you don't understand! Mrs. Park lives on the fourth floor. She's just had knee surgery, she can't walk!” Jaehwan looks to Seokjin, who doesn't hesitate before leaping off again. He crashes into an empty apartment this time and stumbles with the force of his jump before stabilizing himself and breaking off into a run. He looks through apartment after apartment, finding them all empty. The building makes yet another sinister noise and he realizes he doesn't have that much time left.
“Mrs. Park!” He knocks the last door on the floor off its hinges as he barrels into the apartment.
“What on earth are you making this kind of noise for?” He turns to face a tiny old woman who's sitting on her couch, drinking a cup of tea, looking absolutely unruffled despite the fact that her floor is currently tilted at a 30 degree angle. The situation is so absurd that he stops in his tracks.
“What?”
“I hardly think you're the one that should be asking that question, young man.” He opens his mouth and shuts it, deciding that arguing with an old lady is not what's important at this moment.
“We have to get out of here!”
“My dear, if you haven't noticed, this building is collapsing on itself, and I have a shit knee. You're either going to have to run for it or sit down with me for a final drink.”
“I can carry you!” he says exasperatedly. She looks at him with a discerning eyebrow before asking, “How handsome are you?”
He realizes that his scarf is covering a fair bit of his face. Oh good, his identity is preserved.
“I hardly think that's a pressing concern.”
“It's a very pressing concern. I've lived a fairly good life, you know. I've no qualms about dying.”
“Are you for- okay! Fine!” He pulls the scarf down. The old lady takes a long sip of tea before finally setting it down, and lifting her arms up to him, “You may carry me.”
---
Yoongi sneezes as he locks up the store for the night. The other employees have long gone, Yoongi shooing them off their shifts early since there were barely any customers and the shop basically was stocked and cleaned for tomorrow. He turns the key and pulls it out, the scrape loud in the quiet night. The streets are silent for once, something unusual since the city is almost always bustling at any hour, but he’ll revel in the tranquility. Putting in his headphones, he starts his trek down to the bus stop.
The music is loud in his ears, which is probably, no, well, it’s exactly why Yoongi doesn’t notice something falling from the sky and smacking him hard in the chest. He’s distracted by the lyrics, the beats, and the next thing he knows he’s flat on his ass in a puddle. “What the fuck.” Yoongi can still feel the… whatever the fuck hitting him and he paws at his chest, the weird tingly pain-warmth outweighing the fact he’s sat half in a puddle. He thinks he heard something important, like his bones, cracking beneath the force of what just hit him. Is it shock. Is he is in shock? Why can’t he feel anything. Unzipping his jacket and lifting up his shirt, Yoongi ultimately stares at absolutely nothing.
“...What the actual fuck?” Yoongi mutters, touching at the center of his chest. There’s nothing there, no mark, no bruise, no burn. It doesn’t even hurt when he presses at the skin but he can still feel the weird warmth emanating from his chest. He gets up, grimaces at the dampness on his jeans, and looks around for any sign of a fallen object. The street is absolutely devoid of anything except Yoongi and his confusion. “Right, nope, I’m probably just super fucking tired from taking everyone’s shift at the end there or whatever.” With a nod, because ignoring is easier than reasoning, Yoongi continues to the bus stop only to see the bus starting to close the door. He knows the next bus won’t be for almost an hour and to absolute hell is he standing there for the next bus. He takes a step, and then two, and then.
“Wait!” Yoongi doesn’t even know what happens but somehow he’s suddenly at the bus’ entrance, hands forcing the door open as he’s bracing himself against the tiniest sliver of the step. The bus driver looks shocked and he opens the door all the way. “Oh! Oh, thanks.” Yoongi enters, relieved that he didn’t miss the bus.
“Uh… No problem…” the driver is giving Yoongi a weird look but Yoongi is too busy swiping his card onto the reader and looking for a seat. He picks one towards the back, ignoring the way the driver cranes his head to look back at Yoongi before closing the doors again. What, has he never seen a half wet guy before? Yoongi plops down onto the seat as he feels the bus lurch back into motion. He pokes at his chest again, expecting a twinge of pain but gets nothing. Maybe a bird flew into him. The idea is as stupid as it sounds but what else could it be? Yoongi shakes his head and tunes back into his music, glances out the window to watch the cityscape.
After about half an hour, the bus suddenly slows down as they pass what looks like some kind of accident and traffic has turned into a crawl. Craning his neck, Yoongi can see a crowd of people gathered around a building whose structural integrity doesn’t look so great. Yoongi squints and he can make out someone ducking in and out of the building, but they don’t look like a firefighter. For a moment, it looks as if they flew out of the fourth floor back to the ground… Yoongi turns his head and unlocks his phone, attention now on the screen. Nah. Can’t be right. Maybe he needs actual sleep instead of trying to replace his blood with coffee. No one can fly. That’s… Impossible. His finger hovers over the Twitter app but he doesn’t tap on it. The rest of the trip is in contemplative silence, one hand tapping at his chest every so often, as if expecting his rib cage to suddenly turn into dust and he dies right there.
Back home, Yoongi goes to sleep that night and pretends that odd warmth in his chest is because he’s coming down with a cold.
---
“So…!”
“So…”
“We've gotten most of them!”
“Ooh, see, that’s the key word there - most. As in, still missing a few.”
“Don’t worry! They’ll show up before you know it. I bet they fell in some weird place we can’t detect right now but it’ll be fine.”
“It better be - you’ll be stuck with me and my wrath for...well, forever.”
“Mmmmm you make it sound like a bad thing.”
“Gross. C’mon, let’s take another sweep around. They can't have gotten too far.”
---
Seokjin is lying face first on his bed in the midst of what he can easily classify into the Top Five of his existential crises when there's a loud, fast and very very insistent knocking at his door. Oh right. Jaehwan. He shuffles in a daze, the unclicking of the lock sounding odd and echoey in his ears.
“I brought food!” Jaehwan nearly hits him in the face with the door as he barrels in cheerily and sets the package down on Seokjin’s dining table, “you have exactly 5 seconds to explain what the absolute goddamn fuck is going on before I start screaming about how I'm going insane!”
“I have no fucking clue.”
“About which, how a building with such poor structural integrity was allowed to continue to house people without getting fined to hell and back or how were you, a hitherto normal human man, able to jump in and out of the floors of a collapsing building with the ease of hopping a few stairs?” Jaehwan is still smiling as he plops himself down onto a chair, but with the jitteriness reserved for when he is well and truly losing his shit, “cause I'm just a tiny bit more curious about that latter happenstance!”
“Both! I'm freaking out about this as much as you are!”
“You haven't been secretly keeping superpowers from me for years?”
“No! Seriously, I have no idea what’s going on either!”
“Is this why you left me to fend with a curious crowd as you flew off into the horizon?”
“...Yes?”
Jaehwan exhales, “normally I'd be mad about that bit, but since we both seem to be having this breakdown simultaneously, I'm gonna give you a pass on this one.” He opens a box of noodles and begins to eat, nudging the other in Seokjin’s direction. He takes a gigantic slurp while looking reproachfully at Seokjin, his cheeks puffed out. “I fucking told you the alien thing was real.”
---
Yoongi wakes up, as usual, eats his breakfast, as usual, gets ready to open shop, as usual, says hello to Wonshik and Taekwoon (who looks like he’s still about 85 percent asleep), as usual, starts to brew the pot of coffee, as usual, and the coffee pot slips from the counter it was precariously balanced on, not as usual.
It was originally further in on the counter but Taekwoon had unthinkingly just hefted a box onto it and, when pushing the box inwards, scooted the coffee pot towards the edge and nearly sending it crashing to the floor if Yoongi didn’t catch it in time.
Except, consider the fact that Yoongi was about halfway across the shop when he saw the pot of very full, very freshly brewed and very hot coffee tumbling to the ground. He has no absolute fucking clue how he managed to leap across the store and catch the pot by the handle and only sloshed a little of the liquid onto the ground. Wonshik looks like he has no fucking idea either.
“Oh shit,” Taekwoon says blandly, staring at Yoongi and the rescued coffee pot. Considering the almost supernatural feat that Yoongi just pulled out of fuck nowhere, he doesn’t seem very perturbed. Yoongi chalks it up to the fact that the older male is still mostly asleep. “Sorry, Yoongi. You good?”
Yoongi slots the pot back in its place and wipes his hand on his jeans, ignoring the way that Wonshik is still staring at him in abject bewilderment. “Yeah, I’m alright” Yoongi says. “No harm done.” Taekwoon nods and putters off in search of their biggest coffee mug so he can finally be semi-functional and Yoongi meanders over to register to check the till. Wonshik follows him, eyes wide.
“What was that?” Wonshik hisses, damn near crowding Yoongi against the counter.
“What was what?” Yoongi asks innocently, unfazed by the fact that someone who is over 180 centimeters is looming over him.
“You- You like?? Jumped?? Flew? Moved inhumanly?” Wonshik leans closer. “Yoongi, do you have superpowers you’re not telling me about?”
Yoongi punches Wonshik on the chest before swearing under his breath because the fucker works out and has sturdy pecs, but the male moves back with a little wince. That's a first. “That’s ridiculous,” Yoongi says, unlocking the till and checking on the bills before pushing it shut. “I just… Dived for it.”
Wonshik looks wholly unconvinced. “Dived for it and caught it by sheer dumb luck?”
“...Yep.”
A customer walks in and diverts Wonshik’s attention, giving Yoongi a chance to sneak past. He must have been too quiet because he accidentally scares the living hell of out poor Taekwoon, causing him to knock into a display of CDs next to him. Yoongi blinks and realizes he’s caught all the CDs before they could hit the floor. “Careful,” Yoongi says, setting the CDs back in place. Finally, Taekwoon seems to blink in genuine puzzlement, looking between Yoongi and the display and the floor before shrugging.
“You should move it so no one runs into it on accident,” Taekwoon says eventually, confusion a soft lilt in his voice but he doesn’t press it and continues on his mini mission for coffee. Yoongi exhales only to turn around and see Wonshik staring at him from register, body language saying “what the fuck.” Yoongi lifts his hands in innocence before turning back and moving the display as Taekwoon suggested.
The rest of the day is filled with… unusual incidents, mostly by Wonshik knocking things over or putting things in strange, hard to reach places that Yoongi easily reaches by… Scaling on the shelves and tables around said place. By the end of the night, Wonshik is sitting on the counter with a dumbfounded look on his face as he’s tosses an empty mug back and forth between his hands.
“...Okay, maybe something weird happened last night,” Yoongi admits, hands shoved into the pocket of his jeans.
“Oh?” Wonshik pauses in his tossing to give Yoongi a faux-shocked look. Actually, it might actually be shock. Yoongi isn't sure. “Do tell!”
“Something weird hit me in the chest last night and… I don't know, but I almost missed my bus, and you know those shits take forever to come around again at night, so… I jumped and landed on the doors just as it was closing.”
“Like…A squirrel or something?”
“Are you calling me a squirrel?”
“If the shoe fits.” Wonshik abruptly tosses the mug at Yoongi, who catches it easily with one hand. Also a first, since he usual fumbles them. “So, like, are you about to become a superhero or something?”
Yoongi blinks in confusion. “Why?”
“Because you have, like, superpowers now! It’s like the next step in the story!” Wonshik leans in. “Or are you about to become the super villain?
“Or maybe I just want to live a regular human life,” Yoongi retorts, chucking the cup back at Wonshik. The other male barely snags in it time and winces at the force. He sets it down next to him before hopping down from the table.
“The most boring and ordinary answer possible, Yoongi,” Wonshik says with a huff of laughter. He stretches his arms upwards, not noticing the conflict on flashing momentarily across Yoongi’s face. “Anyways, I’ll see you next week.” Wonshik gathers up his bag and jacket and waves to Yoongi as he exits shop for the night. Yoongi waves back, contemplative.
Boring. Ordinary.
Yoongi looks at his hands, flexing his fingers, curling, uncurling.
With a sigh, Yoongi checks the cash drawer and locks up for the night, mind still racing around the words laced with playful intent. So why is he feeling like this? Maybe this is the opportunity he dreamed about - he does have superpowers. He could potentially change the world.
Except he has zero idea where to even start.
On the bus ride home, there’s a lull in his music and Yoongi catches a snippet of a nearby conversation. He discreetly presses pause on his phone and feigns going on Twitter as he eavesdrops on the conversation between two businessmen.
“Yeah, Park is going on another trip to who the fuck knows where while I’m stuck with all the paperwork and merging and all that bullshit. Must be nice to be rich without having to do any work all because his daddy is the CEO.” The businessman slumps in his seat, his friend patting him consolingly on the shoulder. “God, like, I wish something could knock that kid down a peg or some shit. Something to just make him realize that his money has value and work behind it all. His dad doesn’t even know he’s jetsetting off to Los Angeles again.”
His friend tsks. “How would that even come about?”
“I dunno… He gets robbed or some shit? Or get exposed on his ridiculous spending?” The man sighs and straightens as the bus slows down. “He’s out there on some private jet and I have to take the bus so I can have enough money to buy my daughter dinner from her favorite food chain.”
“Soyee’ll be happy.”
“As long as she’s happy.” The bus rolls to a groaning stop and Yoongi watches the two men disembark and head down to a small strip of restaurants. Sinking down in his seat, he moves to turn his music back on when he notices something laying on the seat where they were sitting. In an instant, he snatches the scrap of paper and returns to his seat, eyes on what turns out to be a business card.
A name, but more importantly: a company name.
One quick search on Naver later, Yoongi has that chaebol brat’s name, address (because of course he’s the kind of guy who throws elaborate house galas), and the bus to get on to get to his address. Yoongi considers going that night but he doesn’t exactly have a good disguise at the moment.
Back at his apartment, Yoongi throws open his closet to search for any old black hoodie he could wear, hands rifling through folded laundry shoved into the back since he doesn’t wear them as often and keeps forgetting to donate them. As he’s lifting out old shirts and jackets, he’s surprisingly unsuccessful in his search considering his wardrobe knows little else than black and neutral colors. With a sigh, he throws aside a shirt when he noticed one last tan colored thing at the bottom. With a confused frown, he lifts it up and promptly bursts into laughter.
A kigurumi. A sugar glider one, to be exact, bought several years ago for some shitty Halloween party with the theme of “wild animals having a wild night.” It was the only animal theme costume he could find last minute and worn exactly for that night and only that night. Shaking it out, it’s practically brand new sans the somewhat musty smell of being in his closet for so long. He gives it a contemplative look and thinks back to Wonshik’s words earlier that night.
Well. A sugar glider is kind of squirrel-like. It’ll have to do until he finds something better.
Is he really about to do this?
Yoongi thinks back to the weary resignation of the father, thinks about his own past and how he worked several jobs to make ends meet before eventually securing a somewhat stable job as manager, how his shoulder is never quite the same from an accident at one of his earliest jobs, but there’s some rich brat gallivanting off somewhere without a care in the world.
Man, fuck capitalism.
And that is exactly how Yoongi finds himself scaling the side of that chaebol’s penthouse suite, several dozen stories above the city but oddly at ease despite the wind whipping around him. For a rich kid, there is almost nil security though it could be in part that he doesn’t have to worry about anyone robbing him. Yoongi feels a slight thrill at getting to instigate fear in the heart of that brat.
Yoongi sidles up to a window and peers inside. Despite the fact that the only light is from the moon above him, he can actually see pretty well. It looks like a living room of sorts and he contemplates the window for a moment before he sticks his gloved fingers at the bottom and hefts up. It slides easy and Yoongi cannot believe his luck as he slips into the darkened penthouse.
Luxury oozes from floor to ceiling, with a huge entertainment center taking up one side, a large cushy couch directly across, weird artsy paintings on the wall that Yoongi knows costs more than a month of his paychecks. Yoongi wonders absentmindedly what he should do as he wanders deeper into the penthouse. It’d be too hard to try and actually steal anything electronic of value (he casts a longing glance at the neat set up of multiple game consoles), but maybe there’s something of value in his bedroom? Jewelry to pawn?
Yoongi finds a little study and starts pulling open drawers, grins when he realizes what he’s staring at in the second drawer he opens.
A stack of checkbooks and credit cards. How can one fucker just leave his spare cards just chilling in a drawer?
Well, this changes everything. Yoongi takes one of them and pockets it in the ridiculous little pouch that the kigurumi comes with. He contemplates whether or not he should fuck up the place a little.
Yoongi unplugs the fridge, pours soap and whatever shit he could find underneath the bathroom sink all over the carpets, couches and bed, and takes the laptop on the desk. He needs a new, lighter one anyways and the dude doesn’t even have a passcode on it. He wonders if he should wreak more havoc but he knows that no matter how much shit he breaks or bleaches, the chaebol could easily replace it, but this will do for now.
Chaos is fun, Yoongi thinks, as he spikes the empty bottle of toilet cleaner against the wall and watches it clatter to the ground. It’s not really villainous because, let’s be real, the real bad guy here is this fucker with all this money who gets to fly first class while office workers are left picking up his work and get nothing extra. Checking to make sure that everything is secured in his pockets, Yoongi hops out the window back onto the ledge and crouches there for a moment as he eyeballs his escape his route. Now, he can see the perfect little holds to climb on to make his way to a nearby rooftop, which is level with multiple other rooftops.
With an unusual burst of confidence in his veins, Yoongi hops down and easily snags his fingers on the first short ledge.
Everything goes smoothly, and that is one hell of a first in Yoongi’s life. If luck holds out, then he’ll try again.
---
“You're so mean!” Seokjin hisses, grabbing helplessly for the phone. Jaehwan just cackles harder and maneuvers out of Jin's reach.
“Heartman!” He wheezes with laughter and Jin represses the urge to smack him. “They called y-him Heartman!”
“There's no one here, dumbass! And it's your fault! You pinned that stupid heart on me in the first place!”
“Love is in the air? Mysterious “HEARTMAN” seen flying to the rescue!” Jaehwan reads the headline with exaggerated drama and dissolves yet again into peals of laughter. Jin glares at the blurry picture of himself with the stupid paper heart on his chest and sits back huffily, pushing his glasses back up his nose and waits for Jaehwan to stop cackling.
“Hey, you still need these, huh?” Jaehwan pokes at his glasses, ignoring Seokjin’s pout, “I mean I definitely thought you were just wearing them to keep up appearances but the lenses are genuinely still in there.”
“Yup,” Seokjin sighs, “I get superpowers and yet here I remain: unable to tell my own mother from a houseplant at a distance of half a meter.”
“You can literally fly now, Seokjinnie,” Jaehwan levels him with a stare.
“Guess you can't help my myopic worldview.” Seokjin waits for it to hit Jaehwan and then cackles as he gets smacked in retribution for the pun.
“You're a little shit, you know that?” Jaehwan glowers at him without any real heat behind it. He perches on the edge of Seokjin's desk contemplatively, silent for a second, “so what are you gonna do then, with the powers, I mean?”
“Help people,” Seokjin says, before hesitating, “It’d be a waste not to. It's just- I have no idea what the cap is on this thing.”
Jaehwan nods, “you did rip your bedroom door off its hinges this morning.”
“Exactly! I don't want to end up doing more harm than good. What if I try to lift someone up and accidentally toss them a hundred feet? What if-” Oh good, he's freaking out again.
“We'll figure it out.” Jaehwan interrupts him firmly, and then chances a glance at the clock, “maybe after you get back from class though.”
“Oh fuck,” Seokjin looks at the time and then hurriedly scrambles up, haphazardly throwing his things together and running out the door with a quick goodbye.
Tragic, his life is utterly, utterly tragic. He's going to be supremely late to his tutorial and then the students will have to come to office hours to complain about their assignments, and that means Seokjin will have to come to office hours to tell them they need to read the instructions because he actively tries to help them out, he really does, but he can't do shit about their beautifully composed thought piece on the inherent bias of the judicial system when the assignment asked them to interview a local politician- wait, is he on campus already? He stops abruptly, feeling the wind whoosh by him as if a freight train had just passed through and walks a very deliberately slow last few steps into his building.
“Guess I can add super speed to the list.” He mutters to himself while he smooths down his unkempt appearance. His distracted state when entering the tutorial room means he nearly has a heart attack when he sees a figure clad in all black sitting in the front row seat.
“Fucking hell!” At his exclamation, the figure, now proven to be a doe eyed freshman with headphones in, looks up in surprise from his sketchbook and shoots up ramrod straight.
“Oh, sorry Mr. Kim! I was just trying to be early!”
“I'm not that old, Jungkook, you can just call me Seokjin.” Jin says pleasantly, wholly ignoring the fact that he'd just screamed bloody murder not three seconds ago and that Jungkook was a whole half an hour early as usual. “Uh, you don't have to stand.”
“That's okay Mr. Seokjin, I'm sorry for startling you.” Jungkook is still standing at attention, and that makes Seokjin feel weird about sitting down, so they both stand awkwardly while Seokjin takes his laptop out onto the desk.
“That's okay, it's my fault, I was distracted,” Seokjin chances a glance back at the kid while he runs through the setup, and yup, still standing. He's continuing to doodle nonchalantly from the position he's in but his ears are steadily turning red. He feels the desperate need to dispel the awkwardness and asks the first thing that pops into his head, “What are you drawing?”
“Oh, um,” Jungkook just turns the sketchbook towards him, and Seokjin sees a pretty good drawing of a masked guy. With a gigantic heart on his chest. Mother fucker.
“You saw the Heartman thing on the news too?”
“No, I, uh, I was actually there.” Seokjin's blood runs cold, but Jungkook continues on, suddenly excited, “I was on my way back from class. He was so cool, I mean like, he literally flew! I know it sounds crazy but I saw him fly from, like, the top floor and he saved everyone in the building!”
“Only three people.” Seokjin says weakly, and wonders if he can just crawl into the Earth to die. Just like him to have narrowly missed having his secret identity exposed before he'd fully realized the need to have one.
“Still!” Jungkook is animated now, meaning he can actually speak to Seokjin and look him in the eye at the same time, “who knew superheroes were a thing! I wonder who that guy is.”
“Yeah. I wonder.”
Jungkook smiles at him with all the determination of someone who will not rest until he finds out. Fuck. He might be awkward in front of Seokjin, but he's one of the top students in the class, always going above and beyond the requirements of an assignment. He's got a great intuition, an eye for detail combined with a relentlessness that makes Seokjin absolutely certain that he'll be a fearsome investigative journalist in the future. In short, Seokjin is fucked.
He shakes himself internally. It'll be fine, he just has to avoid the kid and get a better mask. It's all fine.
---
Turns out Seokjin isn't the only one to get superpowers. Not even close. After the Jungkook incident, the first thing he does is update to a blackout motorcycle helmet to better conceal his identity, and Jaehwan gleefully supplies him with a large red heart decal for his visor that looks opaque from the outside but lets him see through from the inside (fine, he needs a brand, even if it is fucking Heartman). He also decides on a full sleeve black workout shirt and comfortable black cargo pants and boots. But the helmet, he thinks in a slight daze as he lies in the metal ruins of a former ‘97 Corolla, the helmet is key. sure it makes him look kind of like a Power Ranger but it also probably prevents him from getting concussions when somebody throws him 40 feet across the street into a fucking car when he tries to stop their superpowered rampage with a few choice words. He really hopes the owner has insurance.
He slowly picks himself up from the rubble, pleased to discover his body still works and shakes the glass off himself. He looks towards the guy currently using another car like a baseball bat to crash through store windows to the screams of people both inside and out.
“Have it your way, asshole.”
All in all, things go about as well as they can. Nobody dies and the casualties are restricted to the few store windows and the two cars. Still, sitting pensively on the roof of the baseball bat car, Seokjin wonders if he's being too optimistic. Under the car, the guy swears loudly as he futilely tries to push it off himself. The metal screeches under his grip but doesn't give. It's almost fascinating, the guy can pick up vehicles almost effortlessly, but he's rendered helpless by Seokjin's added weight on it. Even more strangely though, the car isn't buckling under him so it's not like he's gained much mass. He's going to have to ask about this to someone whose knowledge about physics extends beyond a vague understanding that it sure does exist.
“That would be us.” Two voices, one light and musical and the other reverbratingly deep echo around him. Inside him? Seokjin blinks in surprise and suddenly the street is completely empty. He remains sitting on the car, but the guy under it is gone too.
“What the fuck-?” Seokjin yelps and the world falls away. Suddenly it's just him and the car.
“I wouldn't move if I were you.” The higher pitched voice says to him (around him?).
“Sound advice,” he replies, looking around every which way, “who the fuck are you?”
He turns his head back to the front and there's two vaguely people shaped things in front of him. They're simultaneously standing very close to and very far away from him in a way that makes his head hurt.
“Hello, earthling,” the deep voiced one says, “I'm V.” He (?) brings a hand up to his eye in a quick peace sign and winks at Seokjin. He's much taller than he appears to be and unearthly beautiful, with gold hair and gold eyes that seem to flow like molten metal. Or like a burning star. He’s also dressed like a Gucci store threw up all its statement pieces on him.
“Uh, hi.” Seokjin waves back, wondering if he's going insane. Maybe the superpowers were a delusion caused by a brain tumour.
“Ignore the dramatics,” the one with the musical voice says, giving an impressively disdainful roll of silver eyes, “I'm Chim.” Swathed in diaphanous layers of silver clothing that flow gently like his silver hair and eyes despite the persistent lack of wind, he's the same sort of unearthly beautiful as V, if a little colder. The two continue to stare at him until he feels the need to speak.
“Hi. I'm Seokjin.”
“We know.” They reply and lapse into silence again. Seokjin realizes he can see them even when he closes his eyes.
“So, uh, what brings you guys here?”
“That's none of your business.” Chim says, at the same moment V says, “the orb.”
“Ok and what does the orb that's not any of my business have to do with what's currently happening here?”
V and Chim are silent for either a ridiculously long or insignificantly short amount of time. Seokjin gets the odd impression that they're arguing with each other.
“Essentially, everything.” V says eventually, and he looks a little guilty for a strange celestial being that may or may not be a figment of Seokjin’s potentially delirious imagination.
“It's an object more ancient than your human brain can comprehend-” Chim interjects.
“And it's powerful beyond measure-” V continues. Seokjin hears the medley of their voices even as only one of them speaks.
“So powerful, in fact, that it can take us from one end of the universe to another in an infinitesimal amount of time-”
“Among other things.”
“Yes, so we took it, because otherwise it would probably take us an eon to get here-”
“And then your planet might have been dead. And we wouldn't have been able to get any ice cream.”
“Okay, wait.” Seokjin puts his hands up and tries to gather himself because this is getting more ridiculous by the second, and focuses on the one aspect of this conversation he can kind of understand, “you came here for ice cream? Where did y- how did yo-is there some kind of intergalactic travel book listing ice cream as one of those “can't miss it” things if you happen to pass by Earth?”
“Oh, he's very perceptive.” V looks impressed. “Yes there is! There isn't much else though. Wait, Chim, we did see a few of the paintings, we could probably add those in there.”
“I also did quite like all those... cat creatures, so them too.”
“Okay! So I get why you guys are here on Earth,” Seokjin interjects quickly, because if interviewing people who have something to hide has taught him anything, it's to detect when a conversation is digressing, “but it still doesn't explain why I'm here. Wherever this.. is.”
V suddenly looks very guilty again.
“Well. The orb may have sort of...shattered.”
“We picked up most of the pieces.”
“But a few escaped us. And may have been absorbed.”
“By people. Unwittingly.”
“Which may or may not have given them some enhanced abilities-”
“-though for humans that's technically not saying much.”
“And it might also be that by defeating other enhanced people, you could absorb their share of the orb.”
“And accumulate more power.”
“And again, it's not like it's much. But if someone bad were to piece that together-”
“-it might just cause a tiny bit of a headache for us.”
“RM would be very disappointed, for one-”
“And we’d be unable to get back without making an effort, for another. So. We're hoping that you could collect all the pieces and then give them back to us-”
“And then we can all be on our merry way, putting this whole celestial mess behind us.”
“Right, let me get this straight.” Jin says, rather bravely considering he’s floating on a car in the middle of a void while staring down two otherworldly beings, “You want me to engage in a battle royale for superpowers with god knows how many other people, while you guys do what, exactly?”
“Nothing. Cosmic rules say we cannot intervene.”
“What if I don’t want to?” Seokjin, with the express purpose of pissing them off, raises an eyebrow. His self preservation instincts have never been touted as particularly good. “I’m a busy guy, you know. I can’t just run around cleaning up your mess.”
He hears harmoniously raucous laughter in his head. V and Chim are looking at him in amusement, like they can see right through his front.
“Sit around while someone else goes around hurting others? I don’t think that’s a choice for you, Kim Seokjin.” Chim says, showing rows of pearlescent white teeth.
Seokjin will not fall for this. He refuses to fall for this. So what if he doesn’t try to save people, surely there’ll be someone else out there who also got superpowers who’s also willing to stop any potential nefarious activity. Surely someone else has a stupid hero complex. He sighs.
“If, IF, I were to do this, completely hypothetically, what would I have to do to return the pieces to the orb?”
“Fairly sure that you can absorb it by touching him now,” V gestures to underneath the car, and oh good, the guy is back down there. He screams in horror upon laying eyes upon the two beings, and Seokjin shrugs at him in a casual “what can you do?” manner despite being fully cognizant that the other is having a much more reasonable reaction than he is.
“Probably should get this car off you before I try any funny business.” Seokjin has no idea what possesses him to hop off the roof of the vehicle other than a vague feeling that the fact he’ll land safely. His feet hit solid ground, and suddenly all of them are back in the street. Good job, gut. He peels the car off the guy, who seems to be frozen in shock, his eyes almost comically wide. Police sirens blare in the distance, closing in on them.
“I really don’t have time for this,” He mutters, and lifts the guy up by the arm. He’s not really sure what is supposed to happen when they touch, maybe a huge shock, or a gigantic beam of light to illuminate the sky, so he’s almost disappointed when nothing does. He frowns, “This can’t be right.”
“Ow, ow, ow ow oww!” The guy yells suddenly, “you’re crushing my arm, man!”
“Shit! Sorry!” Jin loosens his grip. He almost misses the small piece of what can most, but not completely, accurately be described as glass that comes away on his hand. It’s small, about the size of a quarter of a marble, and glimmers strangely at him before shooting upwards into the sky. He really hopes that means it’s gone back to wherever it came from. He gives the guy a last sidelong look as a police car rounds the corner, and then he’s flying away too. What can he say, after what’s happened to him today, the last thing he wants to deal with are cops.
—-
He does his heists once a week, at most. He figures anything more would up the chances of him getting caught.
Yoongi spends a couple days beforehand researching up on the millionaires and chaebols of the city, planning his heist, and executing it. He’s traded his kigurumi for an all-black ensemble but with elastic cloth material attached along his arms, sides and legs to mimic the “wings” of a sugar glider. To his dismay, Yoongi learns that he can’t fly but he doesn’t immediately become a blood splatter when he lands on the pavement after jumping from several stories up.
He does learn that his sense of balance has gone up incredibly so as well as his sense of sight and hearing. His reflexes are definitely better. His strength has also improved, able to knock out a guard cold with one swing but Yoongi is about 85% sure he could have done that without superpowers. He’s got a mean right hook.
Yoongi’s robberies are not for naught: he donates the money to local charities and food banks (using their laptops or tablets so they can’t track him) where he knows the money will go to help people in need. Sometimes he loots clothes and food, and donates that to the scattered homeless population with his masked pulled up high and hoodie pulled down low. He makes sure not to take the expensive designer clothes because it’ll definitely create suspicions, but popular affordable brands are all game. Sometimes he raids the fridge for meats that he feeds some neighborhood strays with.
It’s exhilarating. It finally feels like Yoongi is doing something with himself, albeit in the most illegal way possible. It doesn’t seem like the city has caught wind, since nothing has been published but he’s guessing the rich people are paying the police and press to stay hush-hush. Which is frankly great for Yoongi because it means that no one is going to figure out who he is for a long, long time.
He watches the mayhem of his latest heist atop a nearby rooftop, his bag weighed down with mainly food this time, though he did manage to swipe a wallet left carelessly atop the counter. Unsurprisingly, security has gone up in these areas - he figures they’re talking among themselves - but there’s a small window of time after he trips the alarm that lets him swipe as many things as possible before the police arrive. Unfortunately for him this time, the window was a lot smaller so he couldn’t poke around for more valuables. Red and blue lights flash below him as he opens the wallet. There’s several large bills inside, with even more hidden in a secret pocket. Yoongi fishes out the money, sticks it in his bag before he chucks the wallet in the direction of the officers. He laughs when the wallet arcs through the air and perfectly nails one of them on the head and ducks away as they draw their guns out in a panic.
Hefting his bag back onto his shoulder, he hops down from the ledge and makes his way to the other side of the rooftop, away from the hubbub, and easily clears the gap between the roofs. He easily scales his way across the skyline, fingers gripping tight onto ledges and feet sturdy on even the tiniest brick juts. As he passes a bank, he ducks behind a pillar when he realizes there are a bunch of police cars surrounding it. A robbery? He peeks around the corner, but it doesn’t look like they’ve arrested anyone. As far as he can tell, nothing seems out of place but he can make out the officers saying something about how nothing was broken, but yet money was stolen?
Probably an inside job, Yoongi thinks, before turning away and taking a different route to the local shelter so no one spots him. He thinks Mrs. Choi can probably afford to fix the heating of the building now with the money. Next heist, he’ll get even more so they can rent out the nearby buildings to make more space to accommodate the people.
For now, this small step is plenty.
---
Jaehwan sprints in, bundles of papers in his arms. Seokjin really hopes those are not for him.
“They’re not for you,” Jaehwan says, reading whatever horrified expression may be on Seokjin’s face. “They’re all the articles we’ve run about this Sugar Glider guy, I’m collecting them all from everyone who’s made a report about him. I know you have a couple, right?”
Seokjin, who had already started working his way through the five stages of grief, sighs in relief and starts rifling through a stack of papers by his elbow. “What do you need it for? Are we finally publishing them?” Seokjin thinks about how they were told to stay quiet until the people robbed and the police were ready to release the information to the public so they don’t cause panic. When the first reports of this masked winged vigilante came through, Seokjin almost burst out laughing at the description. “They looked like… like a sugar glider!” a woman had told Seokjin vehemently and he had to bite his tongue because… they are the least intimidating flying mammal. There’s a reason why ‘Batman’ sounds intimidating. Bats are intimidating - at least more than a sugar glider.
Seokjin did try to piece together the reports himself to see if he could try and nab the guy in action but other than the fact that they targeted the rich districts, he had no idea where Sugar Glider could even strike.
(And frankly, they weren’t causing too much havoc and there were more pressing matters at hand. The police could deal with this weird furry robber.)
“Apparently some detectives are coming in to gather more information so they can catch this guy,” Jaehwan explains, and jolting Seokjin from his brief reverie. He shifts the stack to one arm, and it wobbles precariously. Seokjin wonders if it would completely topple if he adds his papers. Jaehwan cuts him a hopeful look. “By any chance, would our resident superhero like to carry these instead? I am a mere civilian in need of rescue~”
Seokjin stands up and rounds his desk, papers in hand. “Nope.” He sets it atop of Jaehwan’s tower. It doesn’t collapse, to Seokjin’s mild dismay. Jaehwan scowls at Seokjin’s expression.
“Some hero you are,” Jaehwan hisses, moving his free hand to grip the pile. Seokjin grins and points to the door.
“I’ll open the door for you,” he says sweetly, a contrast from Jaehwan’s unimpressed scoff.
“Thanks, asshole.”
“I’m your favorite asshole.”
“Debatable!”
Seokjin cackles, loud and squeaky, as he swings open the door to reveal someone standing right outside the door, hand lifted and posed to knock.
“Oh shit,” Jaehwan says as Seokjin stares at a familiar face. “I mean, oh shoot. Hi. Sorry I just had to grab the last reports from Seokjin.” Jaehwan steps back and scrutinizes the detective for a moment. “Oh hey! Hoseok! Good to see you again.”
“Hey Jaehwan,” Hoseok greets, patented heart-shaped smile flashing brilliantly. “Hi Seokjin.”
“What's up?” squeaks Seokjin, attempting nonchalance as if he wasn't totally blinded by the charming police detective. They've met a couple of times, mostly under circumstances akin to these where the police need help with a case.
Hoseok points to the stack in Jaehwan’s arms. “I’m here to collect the articles?”
“Right here!” Jaehwan immediately drops the pile into Hoseok’s unsuspecting arms, a few pages fluttering to the ground from the force. Hoseok grunts and stumbles a little, and Seokjin rushes forward to help steady the wobbling tower. He pointedly ignores Jaehwan’s not so subtle scoff as he picks up the fallen papers and sets them carefully atop the rest.
“Oh thanks Seokjin,” Hoseok says gratefully. “You’re a real hero.”
Seokjin really ignores Jaehwan’s cackle now, even as Hoseok gives them a quizzical look. “Need anything else?” Seokjin flashes a smile of his own, trying to wrap everything up before Jaehwan accidentally chokes on one of his snorts. Hoseok shakes his head.
“Hopefully there’s something in here that we can use,” he replies. “Thanks Jaehwan, Seokjin.” Hoseok gives Seokjin another dazzling smile and Seokjin wants a hole to swallow him up. Or maybe instead Jaehwan and his seal noises from behind him. Either one, he's not picky.
“No problem. Bye now!” Jaehwan waves cutely as Hoseok turns back around.
“Don't say anything.” Seokjin says, as soon as the detective is out of earshot.
“I'm just say-” Jaehwan starts, shit eating grin developing on his face only for Seokjin to interrupt, voice cheerfully level despite the ice cold glare he shoots Jaehwan’s way as he counts off on his fingers, “-the new baby faced hulk of an editor, that shark tooth photographer AND his dancer boyfriend.”
“That's just mean, Jinnie!” Jaehwan stomps his foot, ears red and Seokjin gets to cackle this time.
“Two way street, pal.”
---
Wonshik is shaking out an honest to god newspaper when Yoongi walks into work. He’s leaning up against the checkout counter with Hyojin perched next to him atop the counter and peering in interest at the paper.
“Oh hey Yoongi,” Hyojin greets, waving him over with one perfectly manicured hand. “Come check this out, Hongbinnie brought it over earlier.”
“Hongbin?” Yoongi asks in surprise, walking over to join the other two.
“Yeah, you remember him right? He works for the city’s paper as a photographer?” Wonshik explains, and Yoongi can vaguely picture a guy with sharp teeth and dimples. He nods and Wonshik continues, “Well, he brought us a copy of today’s paper because apparently it’s the first time they’re running a story they’ve kept under wraps for, like, the last couple months.” Yoongi finally gets a good look at the headline and his blood runs cold.
Robin Hood or Robbin’ ‘Hoods? Police On The Lookout For A Thief Targeting Affluent Citizens
“What an awful title,” Yoongi comments, happy his voice isn’t slightly shaking. Hyojin crosses her legs and hums.
“It’s funny,” she counters, poking at Yoongi. “And that’s rich coming from you, considering you love awful puns.”
“Guess I’m just not feeling this one.” Yoongi’s eyes linger on the title before asking, “So, what’s so special about this?”
Wonshik shakes the paper shut as he says, “Well, according to Hongbin, all the people who got robbed were all these super rich people. They didn’t want news getting out about them getting robbed in case it, like, I don’t know, encouraged other people to rob them? Anyways, these people have basically been influencing the press to keep it quiet but I guess they couldn’t keep it under wraps anymore.”
Hyojin tsks. “Maybe it’s to scare off the robber?” she suggests. “Like I bet they were ballsy about it before because no one was saying anything about it but now the entire city knows and everyone’s like hypervigilant now?”
“Maybe,” says Yoongi, knowing full well that Hyojin just nailed his worries dead-on. It wasn’t luck that no one reported anything about it, it was because the people he robbed were just paying off other people. Maybe he should have stolen more money. Or, no, less money? Yoongi has no idea what he’s going to do now because she’s right: everyone’s going to be hypervigilant now for a robber. He heads over to the coffee machine to pour himself a nice hot mug of coffee. He needs it to process everything and caffeine is his friend to make his brain work.
“They even gave them a pseud,” Wonshik adds. “It’s kind of…” He makes a face. “Underwhelming.”
“It’s too cute considering that they’re a notorious robber,” Hyojin laughs. “Sugar Glider!”
Yoongi, with a mouthful of coffee in his mouth, promptly chokes. Hyojin looks over in concern but he waves her off. “Sugar Glider?” he splutters finally, his throat feeling raw from the hot coffee.
“Anti-climatic, isn’t it? It’s only just a little better than that other name popping up lately… What was his name?” Hyojin directs this question to Wonshik.
The other male pulls his phone out. “I was just texting Hongbin about this,” he says, scrolling quickly. “I think he even sent a picture? Ah hah!” Wonshik pauses and holds the phone out to Hyojin and Yoongi. It’s a little blurry - because all photos of any mystery person are going to be blurry, that's just how these things work - but the round helmet and heart shaped decal is front and center. “They’ve dubbed him ‘Heartman.’”
“Heartman?” Hyojin repeats with a laugh, pushing the phone back at Wonshik. “I see the city’s journalists are alive and creative.”
“I think Hongbinnie said it was a kid who called him Heartman.” Wonshik tucks his phone back into his pocket. “I think he’s like a vigilante or something? About to put the police out of business? And he flies?” Wonshik shoots a very pointed look at Yoongi here, who ignores him.
“He flies? So like a superhero or something? In our little city?” She faux grabs her chest and Wonshik laughs.
“That’s what people have been saying. Hongbin’s a skeptic and Hakyeon’s a believer, so you can imagine how this conversation goes with them.” Wonshik rolls his eyes. “Anyways, that’s the buzz around the newspaper building these last couple days. I wonder if we’d ever catch this Sugar Glider guy or, like, figure out who Heartman is.”
Hyojin shrugs. “Well, there’s not like a lot we can do.” She hops off the counter and brushes down her jeans. “Did we get any new shipments yesterday?”
“Oh, shit, yeah we did. I don’t think Solji unboxed anything yet so we have to do that.” Wonshik sets the paper on the counter, a finality to their brief conversation that Yoongi is still most definitely still wrapped up in. As the two walk off to the back room, Yoongi moves around the counter to check the register again. Checking their profits from the last couple days, he’s at a loss with what to do next. Does he lay low? Does he continue? He stacks the receipts and glances out the front windows.
He watches as people bustle by, some glancing into the shop before continuing on their way. A couple passes by, one with blonde hair and one with gray. Under the sunlight, it almost looks gold and silver, and Yoongi wonders why he feels unsettled - people have weird hair colors all the time now; hell, he’s even gone for mint green once. Before they clear the windows, the one with gray hair suddenly turns around and stares right at Yoongi. Not, like, around him or in his general direction but direct eye contact, making him jerk back. Before he can even find the proper emotion, the stranger turns around and disappears from view. One hand comes up to his chest and touches there uncertainly.
No… they wouldn’t know, would they? That’s impossible.
Yoongi exhales a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, opens up the register to tuck away some receipts and shuts it with the decision that he’ll go out again. The city needs him. He’ll just be more careful.
He does not know what to make of the feeling that prickles on the back of his neck for the rest of the day.