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When Hoseok met Namjoon, there was no mighty revelation, no angels singing. If Hoseok thinks hard enough, tries to remember long enough, he thinks he can make out the outline of what Namjoon looked like four years ago. It’s hard to remember the past when he’s not even sure how he ended up in the present.
It’s dark out, and the ground beneath his hands is damp where he’s crouched down low. He takes a deep breath, tries to ground himself, tries to get his bearings, tries to breathe, tries to remember where he is.
“—so it really depends on the type, but you can tell by the leaves!” Namjoon’s voice comes floating back into focus, and it pulls Hoseok out of his thoughts and puts Namjoon front and center. His eyes that get wider the more excited he gets, his bleached hair shoved back from his face like an afterthought, his dimples popping out of his cheeks as he looks at Hoseok expectantly, the mole beneath his bottom lip, his lips, his lips, his lips—
Hoseok blinks at him. “You’re really pretty.”
Hoseok might be disoriented, but not enough to not notice the blush that spreads across Namjoon’s features like wildfire. He did that.
Namjoon splutters a cough out. “What are you talking about?”
Hoseok hums. “Why are we outside?”
“You can’t just answer a question with a question—wait, what do you mean ‘why are we outside?’ How much did you drink in there?”
“Thought you couldn’t answer a question with a question,” Hoseok replies, wiggling his eyebrows as he does and is rewarded with the blush on Namjoon’s cheeks darkening. Cute. “Besides, I don’t think I drank that much.”
“That’s not saying a lot, considering you have the innate ability to get shit faced off a beer and a half.”
“Yah, what are you badgering me for? You probably drank too!” Hoseok punches Namjoon’s arm as he says it, no malice behind his words or his actions. If he lets his hand linger a little longer on Namjoon’s bicep, neither one of them says anything.
Namjoon scoffs. “Yeah I drank enough, but I’m not out here calling you cute out of nowhere.”
“Why not?” Hoseok whines, inching himself closer into Namjoon’s space. “Am I not cute?” He can visibly see the way Namjoon’s adam’s apple bobs when he swallows before shoving Hoseok away from him. He lands backwards in the dirt, the moisture dampening his shorts slightly.
Namjoon looks guilty, but not enough to look Hoseok in the eyes. “We should get back to the plants.”
Hoseok brightens immediately. “Oh duh, that’s why we’re out here!”
“Did you actually forget why we’re outside?” Namjoon gets out between giggles that are more breath than laughter, but it’s enough to get him to finally look at Hoseok.
“Only a little bit,” Hoseok beams up at him. “Remind me again.”
“Geez, man,” Namjoon sighs out. “So we’re at your house party—”
“Well yeah, I know that much,” Hoseok lies. He can still hear the music blaring and people yelling in the house—his house—behind them, starts recognizing more of his surroundings, realizes they’re crouched down in the bushes by his mailbox near the curb. He sees that Namjoon has his sleeves rolled up, and oh that’s distracting why are his arms out, before noticing Namjoon’s fingers are delicately holding one of the leaves on the forget-me-nots growing from the ground. “Oh!” he exclaims, can almost literally see the lightbulb click on. “I needed advice on how to transplant my forget-me-nots!”
Namjoon rolls his eyes. “Ding ding ding, congratulations, you’ve done it!”
“Shut up, you’re supposed to be helping me out here!”
“Well I was until you got all distracted by—” he looks away, awkward. “Until you got distracted.”
Hoseok laughs, a lilting noise. “Sorry, teacher! Please, do continue!”
Namjoon clears his throat. “Right, um, so as I was saying, it totally depends on what type of forget-me-nots they are, because one type you can transplant and the other you can just get the seeds from and they’ll do their own thing, but you can tell what type from the leaves! Here,” he says before grabbing Hoseok’s hand and placing two of his fingers on a leaf. “What does it feel like?”
All Hoseok’s brain can think is warm, warm, warm, all of his cells focusing in on the points of contact between his skin and Namjoon’s, how easy it would be to flip his palm over and lace their fingers together, how well they’d fit. Thankfully, all that comes out of his mouth is, “Huh?”
Namjoon rolls his eyes again, more playful this time, before pressing Hoseok’s fingers together around the leaf with more pressure. “Does it feel fuzzy or waxy?”
And oh, right, the leaf. “Uh, waxy I guess, like a gloss finish?”
“Yes!” Namjoon’s eyes get bigger somehow with his excitement, and Hoseok can feel his heart skip a beat. “Exactly! These have glossy leaves, which means they’re perennials, which means they can and actually should be transplanted! It helps with their growth, will make them bloom more!”
Hoseok feels like his heart is about to beat out of his chest. “There’s a metaphor there somewhere.”
“How so?” Namjoon asks, tilting his head as if he’s humored.
Hoseok blows his lips together, raspberries. “Ask me in a few minutes, gotta piece it together.”
“Alright, you’ll figure it out I’m sure.” Namjoon laughs a little, the noise bringing Hoseok into the moment more. “So, on to actually transplanting them!”
Hoseok nods vigorously, the movement combined with the alcohol still coursing through him enough to make him lose his balance slightly. “Right, how do I take my forget-me-nots with me if I ever want them to move?”
Namjoon’s eyebrows furrow at that. “Wait, move? Why would you move?”
“Not me, the flowers,” Hoseok replies, flicking Namjoon’s forehead for good measure.
“R-right, yeah, my bad.” Hoseok wants to interrupt him, wants to say “I would never go where you can’t follow,” but he doesn’t, doesn’t even get a chance to before Namjoon continues. “So when you do decide to move them, it’s actually super easy to do. Wait until early spring, so like, March? Yeah, March totally counts—”
“So like right now?”
Namjoon blinks at him. “Uh, yeah, like right now. Or like, next week? Were you uh, well, were you moving them right now?”
Hoseok hums. “Thinking about it. You could still show me, y’know, as practice.”
“Yeah, of course, if that’s what you want.”
“It is,” Hoseok breathes out. He notices how close they are now, how easy it would be to touch and be touched, how easy it would be to feel. Don’t fuck this up, he reminds himself.
“So, um, you actually don’t need any tools, you can do it all by hand! You just have to dig in the dirt and separate them into sections, it’s actually super easy.”
“Right, but can you show me?” Hoseok asks, purposefully dropping his voice a couple octaves before grabbing Namjoon’s hands, hoping he’ll get the hint.
Luckily, he does, though he won’t make eye contact still. “Sure, Hobi,” he says, voice near a whisper, before wrapping his hands firmly around Hoseok’s and plummeting them both into the wet earth. Hoseok can feel the tendrils of roots, can feel the gentle way Namjoon uses his own hands to make Hoseok break them apart, can feel the pressure on his skin as the two of them gently lift them up, up, up, until the plant is free from the dirt. “Just like that,” Namjoon says low, enough to make Hoseok shiver. “And you just do that for all of them, just be gentle, but you get it. Separate into chunks, replant in groups. They’re actually pretty hard to kill, I’m sure you’ll get it.”
Hoseok hums. “I hope so. These bad boys have a job to do, after all.”
Namjoon just regards him curiously, eyebrows furrowing and grin peeking through. “Whatever you say, Hobi.”
“Hey Joon,” Hoseok says, eyes still focused on the freshly unearthed plant resting in his hands. “Can I crash at yours?”
“But you’re already at home…?”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to stop hanging out, and it’s too loud here. Plus I know Yoongi will make sure the house doesn’t take too much damage from the kids,” he says, motioning his head back—oh that was a bad idea, too much movement—towards the porch where an exasperated man is trying to half-heartedly break up what has turned into a rowdy game of beer pong.
Namjoon doesn’t seem to have even noticed them, focused intently on Hoseok’s face, as if unsure whether he’s serious or not. “If you want, yeah, that’s um, that’s totally fine! The place is a little messy, but—”
“Joon,” Hoseok interrupts with a dirt covered finger pressed against Namjoon’s lips, his lips, his lips, his lips—“If it’s your mess I don’t care.”
For the first time in maybe his entire life, Namjoon actually seems at a loss for words, a whispered “okay,” barely making its way out of his mouth. He clears his throat. “I’m going to get us an Uber and let Yoongi know what’s up. You just sit here, okay?”
“Aye aye, captain!” Hoseok replies, offering a two finger salute with the hand not still clutching the plant.
Namjoon laughs a little as he walks away, and Hoseok can almost physically feel his heart go with him. He doesn’t know when or how he fell in love with Namjoon, just knows that it feels as natural as breathing at this point. The sky is blue, Hoseok loves Namjoon. He tries to remember what life was like Before Namjoon, doesn’t think he actually can. That’s the funny thing about love sometimes, he thinks, is that it’s kind of like—Oh, he thinks. It’s like that. “Namjoon!” he calls out, wobbles slightly as he stands up too fast.
“Whoa there,” Namjoon says, materializing at his side. “You still a little drunk?”
“Only a little, but Namjoon, I told you I’d do it, and I did it!”
“Hold that thought, our Uber is here, c’mon.” Before Hoseok can protest he’s being manhandled into the back of an unfamiliar midsize sedan. Much to his disdain Namjoon does not join him in the back seat, but instead seats himself up front.
After they’ve been on the road for at least two minutes, but no more than four judging by the one and a half top 40 hits played through the radio, Namjoon finally looks back at him. “What were you saying before?”
Hoseok blinks a few times, remembering exactly, but also remembering the unexpected extra listener in the driver’s seat. “I’ll tell you when we get to your place,” he says on the tail end of a gulp.
“I’ll hold you to that,” Namjoon replies light-heartedly.
“Good,” Hoseok says with all the weight in the world behind it.
The rest of the short drive is silent, save for the tinny sound of some pop singer whose voice Hoseok can recognize but name he can never remember coming through the stereo. He can feel himself sobering up more and more with every turn their driver makes on the way to Namjoon’s house, over-thinking about how what he’s going to do and say could either be the greatest, or stupidest thing he’s ever done. That fear is only amplified by the vice grip he has on the roots of the raw plant in his hands, careful not to get any stray dirt on the carpet of the car. By the time they pull up to the house, motion activated porch lights flickering on, he feels as if he hadn’t drank a drop all night.
“You need help getting out?” Namjoon’s voice goes, pulling him out of his thoughts.
“Nah, I got it,” Hoseok replies, making sure not to make a mess as he opens the door on the passenger side. He walks ahead of Namjoon, too busy making sure Hoseok didn’t leave anything in the backseat and thanking their driver, and beelines it straight to the second window to the left of the front door before dropping to his knees and plunging his hands into the dirt.
“Hoseok, what—what the hell are you doing? I thought you were sobering up—”
“Remember what I said earlier?” Hoseok interrupts.
“Which part?”
“About how there was a metaphor there somewhere, about the forget-me-nots, how they need to be uprooted sometimes and planted somewhere else to help them grow?”
Hoseok swears he can almost hear the spit go down Namjoon’s throat when he swallows. “Yeah,” Namjoon replies.
Hoseok waits a moment to respond, occupying his hands with settling the plants into the dirt there. He stills for a moment, wanting to make sure he’s doing this right. “This is under your bedroom window, right?”
“Yeah, yeah it is,” Namjoon says.
Good. “Well, I figured out the metaphor.” He pauses, steels himself with a deep breath, before continuing on. “Forget-me-nots are Love; you don’t really know where they came from or how long they’ve been growing there, but one day you notice, and you think, ‘hey, this would look really good in front of Namjoon’s house,’ and so you take your heart in your hands and you bury it under his window and hope that it blooms big enough for him to notice and that maybe, he’ll lo—well, that you’ll love me back.” Hoseok looks up for the first time, meets Namjoon’s eyes, and is caught so off guard by the look on his face.
Namjoon simultaneously looks like he wants to cry and wants to punch Hoseok in the face. He breathes in deep. “Hoseok, this better not be a joke.”
Hoseok shakes his head, fast now that the alcohol doesn’t feel like it’s bogging down his movements. “Not a joke.”
Namjoon nods, pursing his lips as he breathes out so that it makes a raspberry sound in the still night air, then back in through his nose. “Alright alright alright, cool cool cool, so I’m going to say something, and Hobi, Hoseok, I swear to god if this whole thing was a prank—” he stops himself again, closes his eyes, exhales again. “I’m going to kiss you now.”
“I’d love nothing more,” Hoseok says, and hopes to whatever being may be listening that Namjoon knows he means it.
Namjoon searches his face for a moment, and Hoseok guesses he finds what he was looking for, because then, finally, Namjoon is kissing him. It’s tentative at first—like most things with Namjoon are, wanting to know he’s welcome and wanted before he dives into anything—but when he does, god does he dive in. All Hoseok’s brain can register is how nice it is to finally have Namjoon’s lips, his lips, his lips, his lips, against his own.
Namjoon kisses like the ocean: ebbing and flowing, softly and gently, like the soft caress of the moonlight on your cheeks, before crashing in like a tidal wave. Namjoon kisses like the turn of a radio dial: fuzzy on the edges, missing a little sometimes, probably on purpose, trying out different frequencies, until he finds the exact station and then he doesn’t move one bit. Namjoon kisses like sunlight: warm, natural, all encompassing, eternal.
They pause for a moment to catch their breath, coming back into their bodies and figuring out whose hands have ended up where. Namjoon rests his forehead against Hoseok's. "What're you thinking about?"
“Honestly?” Hoseok replies. Namjoon just hums. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Can you do it not on the lovely flowers you just successfully transplanted?”
“Was already planning on doing it in your neighbor’s bushes.”
Namjoon sighs, a dreamy noise before letting Hoseok go. “Yeah, I love you,” he says, barely audible over the mad dash Hoseok has made to get to the azaleas that border the two yards in time. “I definitely love you.”