Chapter Text
Affinity Occasion: have fate without destiny
Once upon a time, there was a doctor that was pouring his best effort into finding a cure for a world that was rapidly withering, but that he still loved fiercely.
He was the chief of his research team, despite being barely 23, a prodigy between his peers and probably the last hope for humanity, even though neither of them knew it at the time.
Once upon a time, there was also a young man, orphan of father and mother since he was ten, but luckily not orphan of love.
He had a person dear to his heart and everything he did was for him, because he had taken care of him when he was lonely, because he had welcomed the young man when nobody would and because he was, simply, the best person the young man had ever met.
Once upon a time, there was this young man and he was in love, but he didn't realize it because the world he wanted to save was fruitless and dry as the heart of its people.
In that world, there wasn't a place for fruitless love.
The world, after all, was withering due to the unfair and cruel actions of its inhabitants.
Once upon a time, there was a doctor and there was a man wrapped up in one human being. They both had tried their best and they had succeeded and failed at once. They had changed the world forever, each in their way.
In their actions, they both had been moved by love.
After all, they say that the craziest things are done in its name.
He had been stuck with his nose buried in the same data sheet for hours, which was now very crumpled and tortured. Maybe it had been days instead. His sense of surroundings was starting to get blurry and vague at best, so his estimation could have been wrong. He had seen the reflection of his face in the translucent screen of his laptop and the state of his hair looked tragic. So yes, a couple of days could have been a good hypothesis. Whatever. He didn't care.
He wasn't going to leave the lab until he had figured out what meaning he was clearly missing in the data that the sheets carried. Because he was missing something there, his gut knew it, his brain knew it. But he didn't.
There was a block in his synapsis that was preventing him to taste the sweet taste of Eureka and, had he been less tired, he would have started to scream. Or beat his head on the nearest surface in the hope it could work. Now, that was a very creepy thought.
He squeezed his eyes tight to chase that ridiculous thought away, but as soon as his world turned black, he knew he had made his biggest mistake. Closing his eyes felt too much like a relief and suddenly it seemed a very good idea to keep them shut.
He was aware that his head was leaning violently forward, but he couldn't help himself. After all, whether it had been hours or days, he hadn't slept since forever.
"Careful there. I swear next time you will crash face first on the desk and your nose will crack open like a nut. Then you will have a broken nose and I will have a desk to wipe your blood from."
He blinked his eyes open despite the tiredness as he felt his friend’s palm on his forehead, sustaining the weight of his head and probably the only reason he hadn't died of an embarrassing death.
"Jin, what are you doing here?" he asked as he straightened up in his seat, desperately trying to suppress a yawn. He failed miserably.
"What am I doing here? What are you doing here! The cleaning lady told me you haven’t moved from this position since her last shift, which was 48 hours ago. I came here to shoo you away before she starts thinking that you are a vampire or another kind of laboratory mutant. And to make you eat something. Possibly also make you take a shower. You stink."
"I'm still not done. I'm close, Jin. So close. I am sure the answer is here!" he replied, but his tone sounded whiny even to his own ears, so he couldn't blame Seokjin for giving him an unimpressed stare.
"Possibly. Probably. But you won't find it by staring at this non-stop for 48 hours straight. Did you forget what Einstein said?"
That basically killed every kind of counterback he could have thought of.
"That trying to obtain a different result by using the same variables is downright crazy," he enunciated with a tired voice.
"That's my genius boy. Now let's go. You need to eat. And sleep for the next ten hours," said Seokjin, snatching the paper from his hands and neatly putting it away in the documents box.
He stood up dead tired, but still reluctant.
Seokjin turned towards him, his usual stoic face replaced by a worried frown this time.
"Joon. You'll figure it out. Just not today.” he said, gently.
Namjoon stood there, frozen for some long moments, before nodding. Seokjin smiled, that smile that made Namjoon feel weird things ever since he was fifteen, that smile for which he would have done anything in his power to not erase it.
He let himself be dragged out of the lab by Seokjin then, his mentor and long-time friend, the closest thing to family he ever had since that night when his parents had died in the car accident.
Seokjin had been his neighbor back then and his tutor. Not like Namjoon needed a tutor to teach him anything, considering how he had skipped a couple of years of school due to his cleverness, but he needed one to not get bored.
His parents hadn't wanted for their son to grow up alienated from his peers, genius or not, and so they had allowed the school to move him only 2 years up. Namjoon had been grateful because at least he hadn’t felt too much like a weird phenomenon, but unfortunately his brain didn't agree with him. He got bored and easily suffered from migraines if he stayed intellectually inactive for too long.
That was when Seokjin first came into view. He was the brilliant son of their neighbors, first in his course at medical school. They had an age gap of ten years, yet he had always considered him his best friend.
When Namjoon’s parents died he had ended up living with his grandma, but Seokjin hadn't stopped visiting him even then. When fiver years later his grandma had died too, the older didn't hesitate to take Namjoon with him even though he had just started his specialization in microbiology. He had never made him feel like a burden, but had given him only care and love.
Seokjin had been determinant in every aspect of his life, and Namjoon had admired Seokjin the older brother as he had the man.
It was only natural then for him to try and follow on his steps and put his brain at the service of medicine and science too.
He became a geneticist because he had always known that he was better with data than with people, making his mentor’s mission his own.
He knew Seokjin had been studying the case of the spreading phenomenon of infertility for years but without any success, so when they made him head of a research team with the clear goal of finding a cure and funds to investigate the same mystery Seokjin had been battling out for so long, Namjoon had accepted and had also demanded for Seokjin to be in his team.
Seokjin wasn't a clinical genius, but he was still the best microbiologist in the whole country and Namjoon needed him.
So now Seokjin and Namjoon weren’t just colleagues, they also lived together, making their lives even more securely intertwined.
They had lived separately briefly for Namjoon's years of college, but that was because Seokjin had insisted that Namjoon needed to experience youth and not hang out with an old man all the time.
Namjoon couldn't have cared less, but he hadn't wanted to ruin Seokjin's good attempt and so he had complied.
Those were good years, the ones of his college. He made friends and he met new people, but then college ended and everyone took their path. He was given a team and suddenly he was an adult with responsibilities, but with no clue how to function in life without guidelines. Going back to Jin just felt natural. It made sense.
And the rest of the world could go fuck itself, Namjoon didn't care.
They lived in a weird time in which the world population hasn’t been growing for a while. The natality index had fallen so dramatically that the governments were wasting as much money as possible in medical research and experimentations.
So the new trend of the last century was to frown upon relationships that clearly couldn't contribute to raise natality incidence. Same-sex couples weren't discriminated yet, but weren't looked at nicely either, and the history books said that was how bad things usually started for minorities.
Granted Seokjin and him didn't have that kind of relationship, but even if they had, Namjoon thought it was nobody's business and certainly nobody's right to judge them.
Even though he had to confess that when it came to sex & love Namjoon felt confused and ignorant. He didn't have enough time and neither the inclination to investigate that aspect of his life at school, his mind always busy and focused on learning notions rather than biblically knowing people, so Namjoon wasn't sure of his gender preference, if he had one at all. But he hated being imposed outsiders’ point of views, and even more when people tried to hurt the only person that mattered to him.
Namjoon hadn't felt bad when he made a guy of his team get fired after he had heard him bad-mouthing his relationship with Seokjin.
It had cost him shorter deadlines, but he regretted nothing.
"C'mon, go shower and try not to fall asleep and drown while I prepare us dinner. I go away for just a couple of days and I find you back as a zombie. Unbelievable.” Seokjin said once they stepped inside their shared apartment.
Namjoon found himself nodding obediently.
Sometimes he found their dynamics kind of unique and hard to explain to the rest of the people, because Seokjin wasn't a relative and wasn't a lover either, yet they functioned in symbiosis. For Namjoon, it was more than enough.
He knew that they would find a cure together, patch up this world and make it a less angry and sad reality. Namjoon wished that by giving people hope, they would also free them from their animosity towards one another.
There had been wars and pollution and contamination that had caused, among many things, for women to conceive less. They were going to fix it. The answer was close. It was in that damn paper he hadn't been able to decipher yet.
Namjoon got out of the shower exhausted, but he still ate with gusto whatever Seokjin had managed to arrange from their leftovers. Then, without much resistance, he was convinced to go straight to bed.
He managed to sleep for ten solid hours before frenziedly waking up like a man who was seeing light for the first time.
He ran all the way towards the bus stop, barely bothering to put on a pair of jeans and shoes and totally not bothering to change the upper part of his pajamas or brush his hair, such was his urgency to just arrive at the damn lab.
"Namjoon? What happened?" Seokjin had stood up from his desk as soon as Namjoon had dashed inside, the remnants of the muffin he had been munching during the bus ride smeared on his left cheek.
"I finally got it Jin! I got it" he shouted excitedly, grabbing the paper.
Finally, the results made sense. They were negative data, but underneath of it all there was the key to start building a new theory.
"I've found it!"