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✂ ✂ ✂
When they met five years ago, Seokjin’s hair was the color of cherry blossoms.
They were young, then; Seokjin was nineteen, Hoseok just a year younger. They were in college, experiencing life as young guys normally do: going to class, going to parties, blowing their money on stupid things.
They became friends easily, and fell in love even easier; by their third year of dating, their friends constantly joked that they were already married.
So, their actual marriage was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At their wedding, Seokjin’s hair was a brilliant blond ━ they’d stripped the pink and left it bare, and he’d never looked more beautiful.
(Well, okay. That isn’t entirely true ━ Hoseok thinks that Seokjin looks more beautiful with every single day that passes. But, that’s beside the point.)
When Seokjin had decided to pursue his Master’s degree after graduation, Hoseok was supportive every second of the way, even though he himself decided to end his scholarly career with undergraduate; he’d never been too enthralled with academia anyway, merely fulfilling his parent’s wishes of seeing their son through a degree.
But finishing with school didn’t bother Hoseok, because he had plenty of other passions to pursue ━ like dancing, and charity, and, as of late, cosmetology.
Really, it’s Jimin’s fault.
Though fault is a strong word (Seokjin’s, not Hoseok’s); Jimin has been Hoseok’s best friend since before either of them had even met Seokjin, and Hoseok had been right beside Jimin through all of their many schemes since they were young. So, when Jimin went off to cosmetology school, it was only a matter of time that Hoseok followed.
He just hadn’t expected to nearly flunk out.
Nearly, being the key word ━ they did give him a license, after all; Min Yoongi, the stylish owner of the salon, had only hired Hoseok under the promise that he would stick to simple haircuts for the time being, or for at least as long as it took for them to figure out the mystery behind why all of Hoseok’s dye-jobs seemed to go haywire.
It’s not his fault, really. It's just that sometimes when he’s aiming for burgundy, he gets blue.
It mystifies Yoongi more than any of them ━ the man had made it a point, once, to stand over Hoseok’s shoulder while the latter mixed the dye, ensuring that he was using the right shades, the right developers; he had even stood watch while Hoseok applied the dye to Jimin’s hair (Jimin had so graciously offered to be a guinea pig for Hoseok’s learning process. The guy’s hair was indestructible, somehow; no amount of bleach or dye seemed to fry his hair the way it would any other normal person’s. But the mystery of Park Jimin’s scalp is another story entirely.) But despite Hoseok obediently going through all the right steps, making sure the mixture was exactly right, applying the paste the way he’d learned to ━ it still came out wrong.
And even though Jimin looked great with orange hair, the goal was silver, so.
Hoseok isn’t sure whose mind was more blown, that day: his own, or Yoongi’s.
Any normal person might have given up right then, but Hoseok had adopted the failure as a challenge of sorts. He wanted to get better, truly. But, Yoongi wouldn’t let him “practice” on any of their innocent customers, so, Hoseok had to get creative.
Seokjin’s hair is a plain light brown, these days. A canvas, just waiting to be painted on.
“On a scale of one to ten,” Hoseok asks one night over dinner. “What is the likelihood of you letting me dye your hair?”
Seokjin immediately begins to cough, choking on his pasta. Hoseok reaches out to pat his back helpfully, but persists with the question.
“Zero,” Seokjin eventually wheezes. “Absolutely not.”
Hoseok pouts.
“But baby,” he whines, prodding at his food noncommittally. “I have to practice somehow!”
“Yes,” Seokjin snorts, fixing him with a look. “On one of those weird decapitated heads with wigs, not on your innocent, adoring husband.”
Hoseok pouts harder.
“Oh, don’t give me that look━the last time you tried this, Taehyung ended up with red hair.”
“It was a nice shade of red.”
“He looked like a walking traffic light, Hoseok.”
“...A nice walking traffic light.”
“Dear?” Seokjin says pointedly. “It’s not happening.”
Hoseok sighs dejectedly, slumping down in his chair while Seokjin watches him do so with an amused but unimpressed stare.
“How am I supposed to get better?” whines Hoseok. “I can’t really keep my chair in Yoongi’s salon if all I do is haircuts. Have you seen Jimin’s dye jobs? Last week he dyed some guy’s hair rainbow ━”
“Babe━”
“ Rainbow, Seokjin!” Hoseok cries. “And all of the colors were right!”
Seokjin tries to hide his laugh behind his hand, but it doesn’t work very well. Hoseok sits up in his chair, making a face of betrayal at his husband.
“It’s fine,” Hoseok sighs, dramatically forlorn. He rests his face in his palm, elbow propped on the table, dinner forgotten. “I’ll just… give up my chair... retire my cutting shears…” he trails off, pouting at the table. “Fade into obscurity…”
“Fine!” Seokjin blurts, unable to contain his laughter now. “Fine.”
Hoseok perks up immediately, his eyes alight. Seokjin holds up a disarming hand, but he can’t mask the delighted look in his eyes at his husband’s shenanigans.
“Just…” Seokjin sighs. “Okay, what color are you thinking?”
“Will you really let me?” Hoseok grins, bouncing excitedly in the dining room chair.
“I said thinking, don’t get ahead of yourself━”
Hoseok claps his hands together, already scrambling to stand from the table.
“Okay, just, a subtle color, right? Like, maybe ━ you’ve never done black, have you?” Seokjin scrunches his nose up at that, so Hoseok dismisses it. He gasps. “Oh! You should go blond again babe, God you looked so━”
“You are not coming anywhere near me with bleach, you creature.”
Hoseok dissolves into laughter, and soon enough Seokjin joins him again. The topic is dropped for the night when Seokjin wrangles Hoseok to make his husband help with washing the dishes, but it’s enough of an agreement that Hoseok holds onto it.
✂ ✂ ✂
He brings it up again about a week later.
They’d both gotten busy ━ Seokjin with his course load, and Hoseok with helping Yoongi and Jimin upkeep the salon.
But Hoseok had not forgotten.
“So, what about purple?”
Seokjin looks up from the textbook he has splayed across his lap just as Hoseok drapes across him from behind the couch, smushing their faces together as he wraps his arms around Seokjin’s neck. There’s a laptop with the screen dimmed sitting on the cushion beside them, a paper with too many words for Hoseok to bother reading lying open in a word document there.
“What about it?”
Hoseok laughs, turning his head to drop a kiss on his husband’s cheek.
“For your hair, silly,” he laughs, wiggling his eyebrows.
Seokjin puckers his lips in thought, one of his more adorable habits (and, believe Hoseok, there are a lot of those). Hoseok reaches up and begins to gently run his fingers through his husband’s hair, tugging at the soft strands every now and again while he waits for Seokjin’s response.
“What kind of purple are we talking?” Seokjin ponders, squinting at him sidelong.
Hoseok giggles. “How many kinds of purple are there?”
Seokjin rolls his eyes, but there’s not an ounce of annoyance behind the action ━ just fondness, something that never fails to turn Hoseok’s insides to mush.
“Like, if it were a crayon,” Seokjin says. “Would it be named Vivid Violet , or like… Eggplant Express? ”
Hoseok snorts. “ Eggplant Express? ”
Seokjin swats at him, grinning back.
“Just answer the question, sir!”
Hoseok hums. He takes his fingers out of Seokjin’s hair and wraps both of his arms back around his husband’s neck, letting them hang there loosely. He stares up at the ceiling as he thinks about it for a moment, another one of Seokjin’s habits that Hoseok had picked up himself a long time ago.
In the meantime, Seokjin’s hands find their way to Hoseok’s forearms, warm as he hugs him a bit closer despite the strange position.
“I would say…” Hoseok muses, smiling warmly. “ Pulchritudinous Plum. ”
There are several beats of silence that follow.
Hoseok lifts his chin from Seokjin’s shoulder to peek at him curiously, and finds his husband already staring at him with a very bewildered look on his face.
“Hoseok.”
“What?”
Seokjin blinks at him in utter disbelief, beginning to scowl in a very playful way, which only makes Hoseok laugh more. He tugs on Hoseok’s forearms, mouth agape.
“Where on earth did you learn that monstrosity of a word?”
Hoseok cackles.
“ Pulchri━ I can’t even,” Seokjin blabbers. “I don’t even know how to say it, and I’m about to have my Doctorate!”
“It means beautiful ,” Hoseok drawls playfully, reaching down to swipe up the heavy textbook from Seokjin’s lap. He dumps it on the cushion beside them, and then climbs over the back of the couch, awkwardly wiggling over Seokjin’s shoulders as he finds his way to his lap. “Like you, my love.”
Seokjin scrunches up his nose cutely, feigning disgust. Hoseok loves it, loves him.
“I still cannot believe you just said that word,” Seokjin mutters.
Hoseok laughs, and then kisses him silly.
They don’t do much talking for the rest of the night.
✂ ✂ ✂
Another week passes without any talk of Seokjin’s hair.
One day, they’re walking through the grocery store hand-in-hand, and Hoseok squints suspiciously at his husband.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” he says, dramatically accusatory. Seokjin stares at him, wide-eyed and confused.
Hoseok squints harder.
“What?” Seokjin chuckles, tugging him along down a new aisle. Hoseok lets him.
“You’re avoiding me!”
Seokjin picks up a box of crackers, bonks Hoseok on the head with them lightly, and sets them back down.
“I am literally holding your hand right now.”
“So?” Hoseok says smartly.
Seokjin rolls his eyes, his cheeks full with a smile.
“So,” he drawls sarcastically, reaching for a bag of chips. “How can I be avoiding you if I’m holding your hand?”
“Okay, so not avoiding,” Hoseok admits. “But you’re definitely stalling!”
Seokjin shakes his head, plucking the bag of chips from Hoseok’s grasp before setting that back on the shelf, too. They continue along down the aisle.
“You’re the one who has to dye my hair,” Seokjin observes mildly. “Doesn’t that make you the one who’s stalling?”
Hoseok bites his lip.
“Okay,” he says slowly. “Okay, maybe you have a point.”
Seokjin snorts.
“But, you never actually told me which shade you want,” Hoseok reasons, nudging his husband’s shoulder.
“Yes,” Seokjin admits. “That’s because the last time we talked about shades, you went all Thesaurus on me. And don’t━” he holds up a finger the second Hoseok opens his mouth again, recognizing right away that mischievous glint in his husband’s eye. “━don’t say it again.”
Hoseok grins.
They shop in comfortable silence for a little while longer, but eventually Seokjin speaks up.
“Look, babe,” he says. “You can choose whatever shade you want, but honestly it'll probably all come out dark anyway since my hair is brown.”
Hoseok mulls it over, nodding slowly. “I guess I could ask Jimin what he thinks.”
Seokjin frowns. “Why not just ask Yoongi?”
Hoseok shakes his head immediately, squeezing his husband’s hand.
“No way,” he says. “If he knew I was doing this he’d put my picture in every beauty supply store and make them blacklist me, or something.”
Seokjin slows to a stop in the middle of the aisle, turning to stare at Hoseok with a blank expression.
“That’s… incredibly reassuring,” he says sarcastically.
Hoseok grins sheepishly, shrugging his shoulders.
Seokjin merely shakes his head and tugs him forward again, heaving a sigh.
“I love you, dear,” he hums. “But please don’t make me regret this.”
✂ ✂ ✂
“And you’re sure this is the right brand?” Hoseok asks into the receiver of his cell phone.
“ You’ve asked me this like three times now,” answers Jimin on the other end. “ You even sent me a picture to confirm. Yes, Hoseok, it’s the right brand. ”
Hoseok sighs, plucking two boxes of the same dye from the shelf in front of him. They’re just for temporary color, in case anything goes wrong like everyone is assuming it inevitably will.
“ And make sure you have extra gloves at home, you don’t want that stuff staining your skin! ”
Hoseok laughs, imagining himself with purple fingers.
“Will do.” He says. He coos into the phone at his friend, “Thanks, Jiminie.”
“ Ugh, shut up, ” comes Jimin’s fond response. “ Send me pictures! ”
“Promise,” says Hoseok, swiping a box of disposable gloves on his way to check out. “Bye!”
He sets all three boxes on the counter just as he hangs up his phone, smiling politely at the cashier. The gloves come in a blue box, the hair dye in shiny purple boxes with a smiling woman on the front, her own hair a luscious purple. Hoseok feels giddy just imagining Seokjin with the same shade ━ subtle, but stunning.
When he gets home, Seokjin sets aside whatever he was working on to greet Hoseok with a kiss, spotting the bag full of goodies immediately.
“Can I interest you in taking off your shirt?” Hoseok jokes, wiggling his eyebrows.
“Are you interested in taking it off for me?” Seokjin retorts, kissing him again as he pushes Hoseok toward their bedroom.
They forget the dye for a while, but eventually they come back to it. It’s late out, and has been dark for hours by the time they finally make it to the bathroom, Seokjin now clad in a ratty old t-shirt they’d found at the bottom of a drawer.
Hoseok takes his time mixing the dye together, both because he’s trying really hard to follow the box’s directions, and because Seokjin is distractingly adorable as always, so he can’t resist pausing to pepper his husband with kisses every now and again.
“Are you sure this is the right dye?” Seokjin asks skeptically. He plucks the mixing bowl from Hoseok’s hands, peering suspiciously down at the colorless mixture. “How come it’s white?”
“Chemicals, babe,” Hoseok responds, taking the bowl back and giving it a few more good mixes with his applicator brush. “It’ll react with your hair after it’s put in━just trust me, okay!”
Seokjin guffaws.
“Okay,” Hoseok takes a deep breath, staring back and forth between the bowl full of ominous white dye mix, and his husband's head. “Okay.”
“Okay?” Seokjin laughs good-naturedly, gazing at him in the reflection of the mirror.
“Don’t look at me!” Hoseok squawks, forcing his husband to sit down on the closed toilet lid, facing him away from the mirror. Seokjin just lets himself be manhandled, laughing all the while.
“Sure, baby,” he coos. “Whatever you want.”
“Good,” Hoseok breaths, lips puckered in an absentminded pout. “Now, I just have to…”
“...Apply it?” Seokjin concludes helpfully.
Hoseok nods.
“Okay,” grins Seokjin. “Then do it.”
Hoseok nods again.
They stare at each other with equally expectant looks on their faces, Hoseok just holding the applicator brush in one gloved hand, blinking down at his husband with doe eyes. Eventually, Seokjin swats him.
“Do it!” he laughs.
Hoseok makes a series of unidentifiable, panicked sounds, but he dips his brush into the mixing bowl at last, giving Seokjin one last tentative look.
“Okay,” he says warily. “Okay, here we go.”
✂ ✂ ✂
“ IT’S GREEN, ” shouts Seokjin.
“I know!” cries Hoseok, fretting nervously behind his husband where the former stands, blanched as he stares in shock at the mirror. “I know! I don’t know how━I don’t know what happened, but━”
“Hoseok,” Seokjin gapes, an incredulous laugh passing his lips in a breath of air. “My hair is green! ”
Hoseok stands like a deer caught in headlights, his plastic gloves still covered in the white mixture━the white mixture that had somehow, beyond all measures, turned green atop his beloved husband’s head.
“Oh gosh,” Hoseok sighs. “I know.”
“Just, how,” stammers Seokjin, reaching to tug at his newly-dyed locks, the strands still wet from the shower head. “How the hell━”
Hoseok has no idea.
He applied the dye just as the instructions directed, followed every single step to a T, and yet still━he had been applying the last of the mixture to Seokjin’s well-saturated scalp when he’d caught a glimpse of the area he’d first applied the dye to, and well━
He’d kept quiet about it, thinking… the purple just took some time to take, and maybe once they rinsed it out in the shower, the dye would be the right color…
Only━
“Hoseok!” Seokjin shouts again, despite the fact that neither of them have left the bathroom, nor has Hoseok said anything else out of fear for his own life.
“Okay, I just━here, look at the box!” Hoseok scrambles to dig it out of the small trash can placed beside the toilet. “I swear, I don’t know how this happened.”
Seokjin takes the box, dragging his eyes away from his reflection to read its cover.
The silence is stifling, only because it drags on for so long that Hoseok just knows that something isn’t right. And, his suspicions are only confirmed when Seokjin’s head turns toward him slowly, without even lowering the box clutched in his hand.
“Hoseok,” he says again, dangerously calm.
Hoseok gulps. “What?”
“Tell me the name of the color you picked up.”
“...What?”
“The name,” Seokjin says. “Of the shade of dye?”
Hoseok stares, shaking his head in confusion.
“I━what do you mean? The box… her… her hair is purple.”
“ Kim Hoseok! ” Seokjin bellows, his face turning the color of a cherry, even as his eyes are on fire with hysterical amusement. “What do you mean her hair is purple!”
“The woman on the box,” Hoseok rushes out, beginning to dissolve into laughter, despite the clear and imminent danger. “Her━her hair is purple! The box is purple, I thought━”
“Oh my god,” Seokjin chokes, reaching to clutch Hoseok’s shirt lightly. He begins to gasp with laughter himself. “Oh my god you didn’t even read the box, did you babe?”
“Um…” Hoseok trails sheepishly. “No.”
Seokjin cackles, tossing the empty box of dye back into the trash can. He doubles over the sink with laughter for several moments, his green hair beginning to dry the longer they stand around in the bathroom; he wipes tears from his eyes as he straightens to stand, bursting into hysterics again the second he meets his own eyes in the mirror.
Amidst his chaotic laughter, Hoseok stands guiltily in the doorway, looking pitiful.
“I can fix it,” he offers haphazardly.
Seokjin’s laughter spikes again, and it takes him several seconds to calm himself down before he answers with a firm shake of his head, his smile still brilliant all the while.
“I am calling a professional,” Seokjin insists.
Hoseok blinks at him.
“...I am a professional.”
Seokjin sends him a look through the mirror’s reflection.
“A more professional professional,” he retorts, cheeks still red from his fit.
Hoseok’s shoulders sag defeatedly as he looks at his poor husband, and Seokjin immediately coos at him in the reflection, turning to draw Hoseok closer to him. He plants a solid kiss on Hoseok’s forehead, and then kisses away the pout that’s forming on his lips.
“Don’t worry, buttercup,” he hums. “Jimin will fix this for us in the morning, and then we can go straight to the store so I can show you how to read labels , for heaven’s sake.”
“Her hair was purple!”
Seokjin laughs, and kisses him again.
✂ ✂ ✂
In the morning, Hoseok wakes up first; the sun shines in through their windows so nicely that even he has come to love waking up early, despite not being the most “morning person” around.
It’s nice for other reasons too, though. Most of the time when he beats Seokjin to waking up, he’ll just lie there and stare at his husband, wondering how on earth he got so lucky.
This morning, he wakes up first, and rolls over to do just that.
Only, he forgot about the hair dye debacle from the night before, so when his eyes fill with a flash of bright green, he gasps so loud that he accidentally wakes Seokjin up.
“What?” his husband slurs, squinting. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, sorry,” Hoseok stammers, eyes wide. “I just… forgot about your hair.”
Seokjin pries one eye open to glare at him, but it’s short-lived. Not a second later, he rolls over and buries his face into the front of Hoseok’s shirt, giving the latter a real close-up view of his handiwork.
Hugging Seokjin closer, Hoseok kisses the top of his head despite the lingering smell of chemicals from the dye. Seokjin hums pleasantly against Hoseok’s collarbones, and Hoseok thinks he could probably lay there forever. Except━
“Baby?” he murmurs.
Seokjin grumbles something unintelligible in response.
“We should probably get up now,” Hoseok tries again, a smile creeping up on his face.
“Why?” wonders Seokjin, voice adorably groggy. “We’re not supposed to meet Jimin until noon.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s just…”
Seokjin pulls back slightly to look up at Hoseok, and Hoseok’s heart melts right there in his chest. He almost forgets what he meant to say, until Seokjin nudges him, a pout taking over his sleepy features. Hoseok laughs, nodding his head slightly in the direction of Seokjin’s side of the bed.
“Your pillow is green.”
Seokjin spends the rest of the morning a grumpy green mess, stomping around their home, shoving their bed sheets into the washing machine with muttered curses along the lines of, if this doesn’t come out I’m taking you to the pound.
And Hoseok spends the rest of the morning smiling, because he wouldn’t have it any other way.
✂ ✂ ✂