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When Yoongi gets off the small plane landing in Alaska it feels a million miles away from anywhere he’s been before. The air is so cold it feels like it’s freezing the inside of his mouth when he breathes, and the airport is little more than a single runway and a squat concrete building on the side. It’s not anything like Korea or California, not anywhere Yoongi has ever called home.
“Here’s your bags,” the gruff pilot says, greying walrus moustache twisting into a grin, “little bit different isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Yoongi answers, “just a little bit.”
He hauls one of his bags onto his shoulder, his other more precious cargo is currently being tugged from the gut of the plane and onto the asphalt. He winces as the boxes are dragged along the ground, shouting out a warning to the small crew of airport workers. They nod and give him a thumbs up before continuing in the exact same way.
This place should amaze him, he thinks as he squints towards the thin line of grey he thinks is the sea, but instead all it does instead is fill his stomach with a thin lining of dread. He’s excited of course, he has the opportunity here to do something he’s never done before, study live whales. But the way the woman at the airport rolls her eyes when he stumbles over his English makes him feel like he’s a small boy in a foreign town again. And he supposes he is. Everything he’s done so far, it’s all gone. Here he’s not Dr Min, or Professor Yoongi or even just Min Yoongi. Here he’s just Yoon-ki Min, just a small Asian boy again.
There’s no one here at the institute to welcome him, it’s a little unusual but someone had told him about the last couple of guys getting into a fight with the locals, something about racism and homophobia and unwelcome. He huffs a little laugh when he remembers the person patting him on the back and saying, ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine Dr Min, they were only PhD students’, as if having an extra academic title made you less likely to punch someone in the face. Yoongi can tell from his own experience that it certainly does not.
The car stops in the centre of the town, it’s so small Yoongi hesitates to call it a town, maybe a village, a hamlet might even be pushing it. He’s always been a bit more of a city boy than anything else, but whales don’t go to big cities (and this time he almost laughs out loud at his own joke) unless they’re dead of course.
When the car door gets pulled open Yoongi wants to close it again, but instead he climbs out, eyes blinking at the bright light. It’s not even September yet and there’s already snow piled on the ground. He wishes all of a sudden that he studied tropical fish, bottlenose dolphins, coral fucking reefs, anything apart from goddamn whales.
“Hey,” Yoongi spins around to see who was talking to him, in Korean? “I’m Jung Hoseok. I run the whale watching boats around here – you must be Jimin, Tae and Jungkook’s – the last guys replacement?”
“Yeah, that’s me – I’m Yoongi, sorry you said you were–” he manages to stammer out, a little disorientated.
“Jung Hoseok, I know it must be a bit of a shock to see a fellow Korean here, right? That’s exactly the face Jimin made when he first met me.” The guy – Hoseok – has a bit of a weird accent, somewhere Yoongi can’t quite place mixed ever so slightly with an Alaskan tang.
“I wasn’t really expecting to be able to speak Korean here,” Yoongi admits and Hoseok laughs, it’s so big and bright that Yoongi almost expects the snow around them to start melting.
“Yeah, no one really does. Not many people of colour here, it’s just me and sometimes a few Native people come into town. You’ll get a few stares, half the town’s never left here before,” he shrugs and pulls a face before he switches his smile back on so fast Yoongi almost gets whiplash, “you want me to carry your bag? The van should be taking your other cargo up to the warehouse, but I thought we could walk if you’re not too tired. Good to see the town, I think. What year are you born? Could someone finally be my hyung? It was so tiring looking after Jungkook, Taehyung and Jimin, at least you won’t have to deal with all three of them.”
Yoongi barely has time to stammer out his answers, only just keeping pace with Jung Hoseok as he talks excitedly almost to himself. He’s not used to this, the slippery ground, the cutting wind, the accent he still can’t quite place. It’s all a little too much, Yoongi wants to slip back into his office in California with its big windows and books piled up to the walls. Or his now empty apartment with the potted plants he had to give away and the stray cat that he would always pet on his way to work, he hopes the neighbours will remember to feed her when he’s not there to.
“We’re here,” Hoseok says. His smiles are heart shaped, Yoongi notices and if all of the blood in his body hadn’t retreated away from any of his extremities he might’ve blushed.
The van with the rest of his cargo has simply dumped it all in the snow outside another ugly concrete building, except this one has a sign with most of the letters missing on it. It spells ‘MARI-- -I----Y IN------- -- A----- WHALE -ES-A--H ----HOUS-’.
“The Marine Biology Institute of Alaska Whale Research Warehouse,” Hoseok laughs to himself as Yoongi scuttles towards the crates, “locals call it the Whale Warehouse.”
“Can you help me get this inside?” Yoongi squeaks ignoring whatever Hoseok just said. He hopes no waters leaked inside, he’ll have to check all the bones tonight rather than tomorrow like he wanted to. He misses Hoseok’s soft laugh when he watches him struggling with the heavy boxes.
“You’re cute,” Hoseok mutters under his breath as he jogs over to help.
“Be fucking careful,” Yoongi hisses as they ease the final box to the ground, he groans a little as he straightens up again and he curses all the time he spent hunched over in a chair.
“D’you want me to show you the house and then I can leave you alone to–” Hoseok gestures towards the boxes, smiling cheerfully, apparently unbothered by Yoongi’s grumbling, “–all this?” he just nods gratefully.
Hoseok shows him the house, only a few steps away from the Whale Warehouse. He teaches him how to open the heating and hot water, where the landline is (phone signal is spotty at best), and internet (is debatably even worse). Yoongi nods in gratitude, all he wants now is a hot shower and a warm bed to sleep in, maybe a quick snack before that, but this is what he gets for asking to go into the field. Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s selfishness, but Yoongi volunteered to come out in a rush after the last guys left. The other two joining him haven’t even been chosen yet, they won’t be here until next year. He’s alone in a house made for seven for a whole six months and he won’t even be able to study the whales until they return in spring. At the very least it’ll be quiet.
“Wait, shit I made you a little welcome pack. The kimchi’s all homemade, they don’t sell this stuff round here.” Hoseok presents Yoongi a little fabric bag with ‘Jung’s Wale Tours’ emblazoned on the front. It has a little cartoon whale jumping out the water on the front and it makes Yoongi smile.
“Thank you, Hoseok-ssi. For all this.” Yoongi tries his best to look grateful but he looks so damn tired right now that all Hoseok does is laugh.
“It’s alright Yoongi-hyung. Can I call you hyung?” he beams so brightly when Yoongi nods that he feels like he needs to look away, “I’ve got a good feeling about seeing some orcas this weekend, just call me if you wanna come. Not many tourists this time of year.”
Yoongi waves goodbye and watches Hoseok march down the little path back towards the centre of town. The little fabric bag has a Tupperware box full of kimchi and another with some rice, he eats it without even heating it up. God, he didn’t even realise he was that hungry. Afterwards he studies the little map Hoseok printed out for him from Google maps, he’s circled the local pub, a nice restaurant, the bus station, the whale warehouse and even his own house, each with a little handwritten annotation.
A smile tumbles out, Jung Hoseok has barely known him for all of half an hour, but he’s somehow made this tiny little town feel a little bit less foreign. Yoongi chooses a bed (one on the second floor by the window) and lies on it for an hour before he falls asleep, staring at the ceiling in the steadily darkening light. Somehow, he feels slightly less lonely than he thought he would be all the way out here in the middle of nowhere.
To: UNKNOWN NUMBER
Hey this is Hoseok right?
It’s Yoongi
From: UNKNOWN NUMBER
yes!!!
u never texted me so I kinda thought u died or smthing lol
To: Jung Hoseok
Oh sorry I was rlly busy the whole warehouse is a bit of a mess. Idk who made the filing system but lets just say that they…. barely did
From: Jung Hoseok
oh lmao that was definitely tae
it was definitely a bit of a mess…..
To: Jung Hoseok
You said something last week abt seeing orcas? I’d love to get out for a little bit
From: Jung Hoseok
oh yeah!!
I don’t have any bookings this weekend so we can go out on Friday!!
might be a bit late in the year but hopefully we’ll catch em
or idk u tell me mr whale man
To: Jung Hoseok
……..
Mr whale man
From: Jung Hoseok
u heard me!!
anyways meet me outside the whale tours building @ 9 on Friday!!
I circled it on ur map dont be late!!
To: Mr Sunshine
Ok I won’t
Yoongi can’t help smiling to himself. Jung Hoseok is funny and sweet and Yoongi isn’t sure if his heart is thudding at the idea of being on the water or seeing Hoseok again.
He shakes his head at his stupid feelings and turns back to the shelves and shelves of dusty bones and jars that seem to get messier by the day. He’s used to electronic databases, but all he has here are fat old books where he methodically ticks off everything that is and isn’t here. It feels a little bit like he’s stepped back in time, but he’ll get used to it he supposes.
“Hey Yoongi,” he hears Hoseok before he sees him, shouting from outside a wooden building. He smiles and waves, he’s cute – friendly. Yoongi pushes whatever he was feeling back down, he’s being welcoming, nice because Yoongi is new, the other guys ran off, he’s the only other Asian guy in town – it’s whatever, doesn’t mean anything.
“You excited to go whale hunting?” Hoseok grins, tugging him along the outside of the building towards a pier where a few boats are docked, “the sound should be completely empty today, not much fishing allowed these days. We might have to outside, not too far though it’s a small boat, but it might get a bit rough. The whales won’t come in this late unless they’re following a shoal.”
The salt tang is so strong it burns at the back of Yoongi’s throat a little bit. He hasn’t been back to the sea for a long time, not since he was a teenager on a family trip to Jeju Island. This time the water looks murky black, sucking at the bottom of the boat and the legs of the pier like it’s hungry. Yoongi knows, it’s his fucking job to know the ocean is fully of life, here the water is nutrient filled, allows for life to thrive all the way to the equator, but still some deep human part of him is – apprehensive? Nervous? He won’t say scared, because he’s not – he’s not scared.
“Hey, are you okay? You look a little queasy,” Hoseok has a hand on his arm and it’s grounding, just a little bit. Fuck, it makes Yoongi want to laugh at himself. He might be a little bit scared.
“I’m just a little – a little nervous. I’m – I don’t really like, I mean I’m not scared I’m just. I don’t know. It’s really fucking stupid, I’m a fucking marine biologist I just – the ocean is – it’s really fucking big,” he laughs at himself, he sounds so goddamn stupid.
“Hey no it’s not stupid. I used to be scared of the ocean and I grew up in this town, never went on a boat until I was fourteen, my sister would tease me so much. We can just go round the sound today. The landscape’s still absolutely stunning and you can stay in the cabin with me. You’ll still be able to see everything,” the hand on Yoongi’s arm turns into two hands and before he can react he’s being pulled into a tight hug, “it’s okay, Yoongi.”
“It’s kinda pathetic isn’t it? A marine biologist who’s scared of the sea?” Yoongi mutters as he grips Hoseok’s hand so tight his knuckles turn white when he helps him onto the boat.
“It’s not really at all, hyung. Not at all.”
“You know this is my first time in here, properly,” Hoseok admits with a wry smile when he visits Yoongi in the Whale Warehouse a few days later, “I think those three fucking hated this place. They spent as little time here as they could.”
“Yeah it showed,” Yoongi laughs, “I had to spend an assload of time organising everything. You know there was half an entire fucking blue whale skeleton on the wrong side of the warehouse? How the hell did they even do that?”
Hoseok laughs, but his eyes are wide with wonder. Yoongi remembers the tremble of fear he had when he first stepped into the actual Whale Warehouse in the Smithsonian. It felt big enough to get lost in for days, just isles and isles of bones and organs from the floor to the ceiling and even though this place is much smaller he understands the feeling.
“These skeletons are kinda spooky,” Hoseok says after a long pause, “I think I like whales better when they’re alive.”
Yoongi laughs breathlessly, laughs harder when Hoseok splutters to explain himself.
“If only I could get all my data from live whales,” he grins, giving Hoseok a pair of latex gloves and shows him the row of minke skulls that he’s studying at the moment. Traces the rim of their eyes and tells him how they feel vibrations through their jawbones, that’s how they can hear each other from so many hundreds of miles away. He likes the idea that their songs echo through their very bones even from across the ocean.
“D’you know who else is coming?” Hoseok asks Yoongi, looking at a fragment of his cheek through the jaw of the minke skull, “in the spring?”
“My friend Kim Namjoon, he’s an expert in whale migration, specialising in blues. He’s gonna overhaul the current tagging system with one he invented himself, it’s supposed to be 83% more accurate than the old ones,” Yoongi stands and cracks his back, wincing a little, “another guy as well, I’ve met him once or twice at conferences, Kim Seokjin. We’ve been planning a new research project on northern minke migration.”
“Are they your favourite? Minkes?” Hoseok asks, eyes wide and earnest. Yoongi laughs a little and shrugs out a yes, maybe, I guess if he had to choose, “why?”
“They’re just – they’re the second smallest species of baleen whale, they don’t breach, they dive deep for long periods of time. People thought they were dolphins for a while, or baby blues. They’re not as well studied as blues, humpbacks, seis, orcas. They’re not really endangered, they don’t make the news when they beach, people didn’t even kill them until every other whale ran out. They’re the whales that everyone forgets first,” Yoongi huffs out a laugh and shrugs again, “I always found them fascinating. They were just – just always side-lined a little bit, always forgotten.”
Hoseok nods, tucking the information away and then he looks at him carefully, studying him like Yoongi studies whales, “why’d you come to Alaska, hyung?”
“It’s one of the best places to see minkes in the wild in the world,” Yoongi starts and he knows that’s not what Hoseok means. He traces his fingers across the outside of the minke’s jaw and he continues, “I was just living in California, doing the same thing every single day. And I – this is going to sound so stupid but I broke up with my boyfriend and he said – said that I was always stuck doing the same thing, that I was gonna still be here fifty years later doing the same damn thing so I–” he laughs again, nervous, “–I dropped my project on pilot whales and moved to Alaska, jumped on Namjoon’s project to study minkes. I always liked them after all, but never studied them before”
“How long were you dating him for, your boyfriend?” Hoseok asks. He’s walked from one side of the table to the other so he’s half a skull away. Standing, waiting, expecting, “when did you break up?”
“Since I started my PhD so… around five years. We broke up in January, this year.”
“Did you love him?”
“I think I did. Well I tried to.”
Hoseok just hums and traces his gloved finger along the ridge of the whale’s jaw, “hyung is it spooky working with skeletons all day?” and there, the moment is broken. Shattered like a bone dropped onto the concrete floor.
“It’s not too bad when you get used to it,” he grins, and Hoseok grins back a little slower, a little sadder. Yoongi has the strongest urge to kiss him but he doesn’t, just looks away, traces a gloved hand across bone and sighs, wishes he could tell Hoseok that maybe he likes him without opening his mouth.
It’s been a month, a month of seeing Hoseok every few days crammed into the cabin of his little boat. Yoongi still shakes when they get onto open water, maybe it’s the warmth that presses even through the thick down of their coats, but as long as he can feel Hoseok’s hand tight on his arm he feels a little more okay.
He stares through the eye socket of a whale skull, wishing he could see the world through their eyes just for a little while. Common minke whale, killed 1953, one of the largest specimens ever found. He runs his hand down the bone and wonders how beautiful it would’ve been when it was still alive. A sliver of blue-black in the water.
There’s just something about whale skulls, if he was a writer or a poet he’d be able to describe it, or maybe he wouldn’t, maybe that’s the point. He stands up from where he was crouched, it’s been so long that his back cracks and he thinks a little uneasily to himself that he has an entire skeleton inside him too. He knows it, it’s an anatomical fact, doesn’t mean he likes it though, especially not when he spends all day around bones.
The skull stares at him from its rightful place on the shelf, hollow ring giving nothing away. At least it’s in a place that makes sense now. Yoongi was never the neat freak type, he prefers more an organised chaos but in order to do that he needs some sort of order.
It’s frustrating hauling bones around all day, slowly and carefully winching ribs and skulls across the warehouse that should really take two, three people. He spends one entire day carrying individual blue whale spine vertebrae to where the rest of the skeleton is, but somehow he’s glad he’s doing it. It brings him back to his PhD days where he spent days of his life writing and rewriting, overhauling and fixing broken cataloguing systems. Re-cataloguing bones after bones after bones.
It’s good, he’s tired, aching, a little resentful but it’s a good reminder that what he’s doing isn’t just analysing numbers on a screen, that science isn’t just numbers and trends and graphs, sometimes it’s a whale living a life beyond death. He stops being so clinical and thinks instead of how this whale lived its life staring out into the big blue until it was killed or died and washed up and now sits watching endless shelves of whale bones.
He sighs and tugs off his rubber gloves. They’re beyond annoying, they make his hands smell weird and his fingers get all wrinkly when he sweats, but he can’t go around rubbing his hands all over the specimens. They’re expensive and he needs to follow protocol so he only takes them off when he really wants to. He has a soft spot for minkes (especially a certain minke skull from 1953), a baby blue skeleton from the 1970’s, a few orca teeth that come to an absolutely wicked point and dig into his fingertips.
“Hyung,” someone shouts. Yoongi startles so bad he nearly flinches into a shelf. There’s a slamming against of the metal door.
“Yoongi-hyung it’s an emergency.” A bad feeling festers in his gut when he recognises Hoseok’s voice. Something makes him turn back to look for the minke skull when he's about to skid out of the isle and for a brief second he sees its blank eye socket looking back at him. He shakes his head and runs.
“Oh fuck,” Yoongi looks horrified when Hoseok drags him to the rocky beach. He knows the basics, a whale (common minke, just a baby) beached itself as the tide was going out. Some locals have started to gather around it, a small kid gets too close and screams when it thrashes. “Get them away, we don’t need people poking it with sticks,” he hisses, “fuck, we need to keep it wet. What if the water freezes? Fuck. We’ll think about that later. You know these people, we need to organise a bucket line. Shit, she’s so small. It’s too late in the year for minke’s around here. What’re you doing, huh?”
At some point Hoseok realises that Yoongi has stopped talking to him and started talking to the whale. His heart aches when he reaches a hand out to touch it, barely even flinching when it moves again, staring deep into its tired looking eyes. It’s barely even four or five metres long, “hey, relax big girl, we got you” he says before he turns around and starts shouting at everyone to do something useful.
They get into the rhythm of working, passing the heavy bucket along the line until the muscles in their shoulders ache. The bright plastic buckets dig into Yoongi’s fingers leaving red marks. At some point someone taps him on the shoulder and takes his burden away, leaving him to stumble across the stony beach, aimless. The whale has stopped moving so much, just breathing slow in and out of its blowhole, shifting its tail fins against the rocks.
“She’s tired,” Yoongi sighs when Hoseok wanders over, crouched on the pebbles and looking out to sea.
“The tides coming in, she’ll make it. It’s only been a few hours,” he says, hopeful smile on his face as he gives Yoongi a hand to haul him to his feet.
“I hope so,” he frowns back at the whale where people are swarming around her like ants picking apart a corpse, feeding brightly coloured buckets towards and away. It feels hopeless looking at it like this, “her pod’s still in the sound, you can see them sometimes. I’m scared the rest of them will follow her at high tide, especially her mother.”
Hoseok squints out into the water and he thinks he can see a splash of fin, a spray from a blowhole. They’re lingering, not too close to the beach, thank god.
“There’s been more navy sonar testing,” Yoongi frowns, “further south down by the mid-Atlantic. A colleague called and she thinks it might be why they’re still so high up, why she’s beached herself. It’s happened down the coast as well, near Florida, but worse – about two dozen common dolphins, but we can’t fucking prove anything without testing it on them and–” Yoongi shrugs, “–that’s never gonna goddamn happen is it? The Navy’s gonna carry on until every fucking whales beached themselves and then they’ll apologise or some shit, it’s fucked, but I guess they got bigger problems, I don’t know, fucking bombing innocent people or some shit.”
“Yoongi I’m – I dunno man, I’m so fucking sorry. It’s fucked up, it really is,” it’s all he can say. Yoongi feels so angry, so helpless, but it’s not Hoseok’s fault, standing there with his fists clenched by his sides, every bit as angry as Yoongi is. It’s nice to see someone who cares just as much as he does.
He kicks the rocks, staring out at the sea without saying anything. After a moment he wipes roughly at his face and glances quickly at Hoseok, muttering something about the sea spray.
“We should get back,” he says all of a sudden, breaking whatever quiet bubble had settled between them, “she’s gonna need all the help she can get.”
It’s already dark when the tide starts lapping against the whale. Yoongi can feel her shifting restlessly, splashing the water around with her tail. He likes to think that she can feel the call of the sea as the water swirls around her tail flukes, trying to pull her back to where she belongs. Half the town is still here, carrying high voltage torches that illuminate the dark swirling water before swinging away. Someone’s even brought one of the big searchlights off their fishing boat and hooked it over the sea wall so that the entire whale is cast in bright fluorescent light.
Some of them are in big fisherman’s overalls, the kind that’ll keep out any water to around waist height. A few people have even got dry suits on, but there’s not enough to go around, not many people diving in these parts, in this weather. The rest of them will just get cold and wet and hope that they can get dry before the hypothermia sets in.
Yoongi feels swamped in his big overalls, more like a kid wearing a Halloween costume than anything else. He has more experience than anyone else, he’s got a goddamn PhD in whales, wrote it on why whales beach themselves, he should know exactly what to do, but somehow he’s still just a kid that’s scared of the water. It’s so dark and cold, sucking at the toes of his boots like it wants to pull–
“Hey Yoongi, you okay?” Hoseok reaches out through the haze of panic and tugs at Yoongi’s wrist until he looks towards him.
“It’s going good, she’s showing more energy than she was before. All we need to do is make sure she doesn't try swim back for the shore again,” he rattles off automatically, giving Hoseok a strained smile, one that he supposes is meant to look reassuring, but probably looks more like a grimace than anything else.
“I meant you. The water, I know you might be a little – a little nervous. I just wanna let you know that I’ll be right next to you the whole time. I won’t let anything happen,” Hoseok squeezes his wrist slightly before he lets go, taking a step back.
“Thanks,” Yoongi’s voice cracks a little and he coughs to try and hide it, “that’s – that would really be – I’d be really grateful for that.”
All Hoseok does is smile, Yoongi’s smile in reply is a little smaller, a little more nervous. It’s a flashlight pointing towards the ocean, small, insignificant but still there, still bright. He reaches out, unsure and pulls Hoseok’s hand back towards his. Behind them the whale lets out a low tired noise and shifts against the pebbles.
“We need to go,” Yoongi spins them around and tugs them back towards the whale, Hoseok smiling down at their interlinked hands. He pretends not to notice, but their hands don’t separate until they reach her, water swirling around their knees.
Slowly they push homemade slings under where the waves lift the whale for a brief second. They labour around her in swirling black water as the whale struggles and moves against them. Slowly they turn her until her head is facing out towards the mouth of the sound where they can hear the sounds of the rest of her pod, restless in the night.
“Come on,” Yoongi hisses as they all splash backwards, water up to their chests and spilling into the fisherman’s overalls, frozen cold. The whale falters, tail kicking up sand as it struggles forwards, “come on, just go a little bit more. They’re all waiting for you.”
Hoseok reaches towards Yoongi again, finding his hand in the icy water, “she can do it,” he promises, half to himself.
“She’s going,” someone shouts in the night.
“She’s swimming out.”
The whale raises her tail fluke and slams it down, powering out away from them towards the open ocean and dousing them in water. Yoongi squeezes Hoseok’s hand so tight and maybe it’s the cold water but he can’t really feel his fingers or his chest, but he doesn’t care. There’s one final spray as the whale breaches one last time before it swims out, it feels like a goodbye. Yoongi stands there frozen even after everyone else has started wading back to shore, eyes frozen onto the small splashes in the darkness.
“Yoongi, come on, you’ll catch your death,” Hoseok half drags him back the shore, “she’s gone, she’s safe.”
“She is,” he whips around and grins so big and bright that Hoseok stops breathing for a moment. Yoongi laughs and as soon as they get into shallow water he leaps onto Hoseok, squeezing tight enough to bruise, “we did it Hoseok,” he shouts.
It triggers a chain, suddenly half the town is in each other’s arms, laughing and cheering together. Yoongi’s breath is fireworks in front of him. His heart should be pounding in the cold, but it’s beating a slow, steady rhythm in pace with the whales travelling towards the mouth of the sound.
They make the unspoken decision to go to Hoseok’s house. It’s closer, just beyond the stony beach, Yoongi rationalises, plus Hoseok still hasn’t let go of his hand as they push their way through the swelling crowd. When Hoseok shuts the door it clicks into quiet. Yoongi strips his clothes in a small trail, like shedding a second skin. Shivering. Towels, Hoseok grabs as many as he can carry and smothers him with them. They’re old and soft and Yoongi rubs his wet hair in them.
“Take off your clothes Hoseok,” he says, laughing a little when Hoseok flushes red before realising what he means, “we should shower.”
Yoongi lets Hoseok push him into the shower first with a soft ‘you’ve worked hard today hyung, we couldn’t’ve done it without you’. He stands as the spluttering warm water rinses the cold out of his bones and the water flows down the drain and slowly, slowly back towards the sea. He uses Hoseok’s citrus shampoo. He always wondered what that soft tangy scent was when they were pushed together in the cabin of Hoseok’s boat.
After he’s done, he finds Hoseok dozing off in the corridor, slumped against the wall outside the bathroom, still wrapped in towels.
“Hey, I didn’t take that long did I?” he asks as he touches Hoseok’s shoulder to wake him up.
“Mmn no – just tired. I found you some clean clothes,” he says, yawning so big and wide Yoongi could count his teeth as he sticks out a hand for Yoongi to help him up.
He tugs him to his feet, gulping a little when the towel around his shoulders falls to the ground revealing skin that Yoongi has the greatest urge to sink his teeth into. Hoseok is all skinny muscle and he’s only wearing boxers and suddenly he’s standing all too close and Yoongi has no idea where to look. Fuck, how’s his skin so golden? Yoongi’s just skinny and pale and he used to live in goddamn California. It makes him want to hide away, but Hoseok’s still holding his hands and gently pressing him towards the wall.
“You smell like me, hyung,” he says softly, still sleepy, smiling slow and precious. It’s slow-burning and warm, like a candle that’s been alight all night. Yoongi wants to kiss him, he’s so close, skin still smelling like saltwater, but Hoseok slips away from him before he can move. He disappears into the bathroom with a shy backwards glance and the closed door leaves Yoongi beached in the dark corridor alone.
It’s the first time Yoongi’s been in Hoseok’s house properly, not lurking at the doorway like when Hoseok had forgotten his phone last week. He feels a little like a stalker or a thief, walking around the darkened house in one of Hoseok’s old t-shirts and boxers. They’re a little too big and he fiddles with the fraying hem as he looks at all the Jung family photos on the walls. Hoseok’s always had that big heart shaped smile, his ears always stuck out like that from underneath hats. He looks like his sister, who looks like a pretty mix of both their parents.
“You found my baby pictures?” he jumps a little when Hoseok’s voice comes from behind him.
“Shit you were really quiet,” he hisses, “and it’s not like they’re hard to find. They’re uh – kinda everywhere.”
Hoseok laughs, the whole wall in the living room is covered with family photos. In the corner there’s a cluster that are taped straight onto the wall without frames. They’re more recent and worse quality, mostly just blurry selfies and Yoongi smiles a little. It’s Hoseok and three guys he assumes are Jimin, Jungkook and Taehyung. It’s cute, like Hoseok made his own new little family.
“I grew up in this house,” Hoseok shrugs, idly rubbing a towel over his wet hair, “I know all the creaky spots.”
“Is it just you living here?” Yoongi asks, tentative and curious. He’s never seen anyone else here, but it seems awfully big for just one person. The more he thinks about it, he doesn’t think he’s ever seen Hoseok with anyone else at all, apart from the familiar small talk he has with shop owners and the occasional local who walks along the seafront when they’re there, but he doesn’t really mention any friends, always seems to be free whenever Yoongi calls.
“Yeah, my parents moved back to Korea – missed their family, friends. My sister went to New York for college and settled there, I think she prefers the weather,” he smiles wryly and Yoongi snorts, it’s practically tropical compared to here, “it’s been just me since – well, since I was eighteen.”
“You didn’t go to college?” Yoongi can’t really imagine his life outside of university, but he flushes, doesn’t want to come off like he’s looking down on him, “I mean not that there’s anything wrong with that, lots of choices these days.”
Hoseok huffs out a quiet laugh, shrugging his concerns off, “I wanted to – I was going to. I had a place to study geography in California but my parents – well they were getting old, couldn’t run this place anymore and my sister was already gone so I uh – I stayed to look after the family business. I don’t mind too much, it gets busier during the summer when it’s easier to fly in and the roads are open.”
“So you’ve run this place alone? Since you were eighteen?”
“I’ve basically been in charge since I was seventeen. It feels like forever, huh?”
“Weren’t you lonely?”
Hoseok licks his lips, they’re still standing in front of the sofa, some weird pretence that they’re still looking at baby photos, talking about family.
“Yeah hyung, I really was. I had Taehyung, Jungkook and Jimin for a while but it still wasn’t family. It’s hard in small towns, when you’re the Korean, the Asian. It got fucking lonely sometimes.”
“And now?” Hoseok is standing so close to him, he reaches and touches the soft fabric covering his shoulder and feels his muscles buzz underneath his fingertips.
“Now? There’s someone who’s always there to keep me company,” he smiles again, big and beaming and so bright Yoongi has to blink to clear his head.
He’s the one who pulls away this time, lets a little air between them and he’s pretty sure he’s blushing again “it’s getting late we should probably–”
“Sleep, yeah,” Hoseok looks disappointed, a little sad, like he wished Yoongi had kissed him, like he wished he had kissed Yoongi, but he doesn’t say anything else, “you can take my sister’s room, it’s on the second floor, here I’ll show you.”
“Yeah, yeah thanks,” Yoongi says as he turns to look at him, Hoseok looks back. Some soft tender part of Yoongi wants to trace the line of his jaw, tell him whales find each other over millions of miles of ocean, that they hear with their very bones, that even by themselves they’re never truly alone.
Yoongi wakes up to almost complete darkness and soft worn duvet around him. For a minute he thinks he’s back in California in his flat with its blackout curtains and fancy mattress that he bought for more than he could really afford. But something is off, he can hear the sound of the radio and singing from outside his room, cooking as well.
“Hoseok? Are you making breakfast?” he asks, voice low and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Hoseok is dancing as he walks across the kitchen, passing Yoongi a mug of coffee on his way to the fridge. Yoongi can’t help but giggle when Hoseok sings in a straining falsetto along to some kpop girl group song.
“I made an omelette and fried rice. Got some kimchi as well. D’you want some juice as well?” Hoseok grins, twisting his hips in time to the music. It’s cute, shouldn’t make Yoongi blush, not at all. He nods quickly, sharply, just to do something at all.
They sit around an old wooden table, feet nudging underneath as they eat. The silence feels intimate, way too intimate for two friends that didn’t even sleep in the same room.
“Did you sleep well?” Hoseok asks, eyes trying not to catch the line of Yoongi’s neck as he tips his head back to drain the last of his coffee (but failing, failing so fucking bad).
“Better than I have since I got here,” Yoongi grins, the dark circles under his eyes have lightened slightly, “the curtains are really shit in the accommodation. It’s fine now because the sun rises so late but it’s nice to have some blackout curtains once in a while.”
Hoseok laughs and Yoongi wants to lean over and kiss him, or poke his dimples, or both. “You can come over any time you know, hyung. When you’re not working, or if you just want somewhere different to work, or just chill, I don’t mind. I leave my spare key behind the little whale plaque by the door.”
He likes that idea, just coming into Hoseok’s house and being welcome here, coming into a home with another person inside. He could bring his laptop, finish finalising some theories he has. He won’t be able to prove anything until he has more data and he can’t get more data until someone can help him tag some actual whales. Simply: he has time to kill.
“I’d love that Hoseok, I really would.”
Yoongi starts to pop into the house when Hoseok is out, to work, to sleep, to linger somewhere that feels a little more human than a warehouse filled with long dead whales. Hoseok discovers things about him that feel like contradictions. Yoongi is meticulously typed research and handwritten post-it notes on the fridge, he’s a city boy yearning for takeaway and the warm taste of home cooking. He dozes on the sofa not quite asleep and when Hoseok wakes him he always leans in for a not quite kiss before he blinks himself awake and looks away, curling back in on himself. His perfume smells like sea salt and rosewood and he’s scared of the ocean, but not when Hoseok is holding his hand.
Sometimes Hoseok comes back and he’s already gone, leaving behind little ghosts of his presence in the freshly washed dishes by the sink or the cushions smell like him, sweet and fresh. Other times he catches Yoongi in the flesh and wonders: ‘is this what it’s like to love him? Is this what it’s like to fall in love?’
Yoongi explains what he’s researching, when Hoseok protests that he’s wasting his time telling some nobody like him, he just laughs and brushes him off, pointing to another diagram or photograph. “It helps me think things through,” he says afterwards, “talking to you, and you can point things out that I miss. You work with whales more than I do really, live ones anyways.”
Other days when Yoongi doesn’t appear Hoseok goes to the whale warehouse, bag full of food in hand. Those days when Yoongi looks at him with small tired eyes, like he hasn’t seen another human being in days Hoseok laughs and drags him back from the warehouse for at least an hour, talks enough to fill the silence for two. It’s comfortable, it’s ritual and he knows he’s being selfish, but Hoseok wants something more.
Yoongi’s phone starts ringing all of a sudden, he startles so hard from where he’d dozed off on the sofa that he slams his head into the wall behind him. The ringtone is old, reminds him of his stuffy office in California and the bad taste of his boyfriend ringing him up to ask where he is. The answer was always working, still there, still doing the same thing. He picks up and squints out at the blurry white outside, seems a little different now. He should change it sometime.
“Hoseok?” he asks, sleep confusing the syllables in his mouth, “what’s wrong?”
The phone signal is garbled, a rush of static every other word so it sounds like Hoseok is fighting against ocean waves instead of bad signal, “Y–gi, ther– gonna – ba–ba – zzard. Coming – foo –”
“Hoseok the signal is so patchy, hello?” he scowls at his phone, walking around the kitchen to try and get better signal. The only effect it has is making Yoongi scowl even deeper and glare outside the window, as if the swirling snow will tell him what Hoseok’s saying.
There’s a thump and a ‘hyung!’ and he nearly jumps into a wall again, whipping around only to see Hoseok pressed against the window and pulling a face.
“Hoseok what the fuck are you doing?” he practically drags him in from the screaming wind outside, howling as it presses against the walls out the house and begging to be let inside. Hoseok tumbles in laughing, grinning when he sees Yoongi’s pinched, confused expression at the bags of food he has with him, even more than usual.
“It’s the first blizzard of the season,” he grins, dusting the melting snow and ice off as he slowly unpacks himself from his jacket, “we’ll probably get snowed in and I thought you might want some company. The phone signal will be terrible and last year when they forecasted it was this bad some of the water pipes froze up. Didn’t want your first blizzard to be a bad one, you know?”
Something big and warm rises in Yoongi’s chest like an eruption from deep beneath the sea, he tries to think about anything other than the weird tingling in his gut and the dopey smile on Hoseok’s face. Climate change, melting icecaps, deforestation, that scary looking fish from a deep-sea trench that Namjoon sent him a photo of an insisted was cute, anything that wouldn’t make him grin like a big sappy idiot.
“What were you doing when I called you? You look sleepy,” Hoseok presses his thumb into Yoongi’s puffy cheeks and he blinks for a moment before he turns his head to bite his hand and Hoseok squeals, wrenching it out of range.
“I was napping,” he says after a while, stretching out the final cricks in his back, “it’s fine though I needed to wake up or I wouldn’t sleep at night,” he adds before Hoseok can open his mouth to apologise. Instead all Hoseok does is shake his head with laughter. His hand rests warm against Yoongi’s back when they walk into the kitchen and it doesn’t disappear even when Yoongi starts to rush around to make dinner. Hoseok just follows him like gull, peering over his shoulder until Yoongi spins around brandishing a spatula and telling him to go sit down to wait.
When Hoseok grins it’s all bright white teeth, in one giddy moment Yoongi thinks back to the first day in Alaska when he had opened the car door in a rush of white. Outside the wind has started to howl and whip at the walls, but here Hoseok’s hands are warm between his and the bowl of stew curls steam up between them. Yoongi thinks that maybe watching at Hoseok accidentally spill stew on his lap makes him feel more at home than anything else in his life.
They get settled down in the same room together, bumping hips over the sink when they brush their teeth. One of them could’ve waited for the other, but Yoongi likes this, half of Hoseok’s face reflected in the mirror next to his own, two toothbrushes by the sink, a different pile of skincare products that Hoseok oh so carefully applies. He waits for him, half laughing as Hoseok pats the cream into his skin with his fingertips.
When they get changed Yoongi turns away from him, glancing at him over his shoulder to see him watching, careful and light from across the room, like he’s dipping a toe into the water, testing. Yoongi is less cautious, he likes the way Hoseok’s muscles strain and relax when he takes off his t-shirt, the way he blushes when he realises Yoongi is watching but doesn’t turn away.
“I’ve never done this before, not with a guy,” Hoseok mumbles into his pillow, just a bed away when they’re both ready to sleep, but still with an edge of restlessness. Yoongi doesn’t ask what this is, doesn’t need to really. For a small cold second, he remembers that he can’t stay here, that in a few months, years, he has a one-way plane trip back to California with a published paper.
“We can – we can take our time, Hoseokie,” he thinks of Hoseok back here alone, without him. The words sit a little wrong in his mouth, he thinks maybe they’d feel better if Hoseok’s mouth was on his. He opens his eyes, sees Hoseok’s face is a pale moon in the dark room, barely peeking out of the duvet and something warm blooms within him, so at odds with the wind howling outside. Even if it can’t last forever, maybe it will still be worth it. Nothing is really forever anyways, minkes only live for about fifty years, but when they die their bodies feed scavenging birds and sharks and eventually rot and falls all the way to the bottom of the ocean where the worms scrape at their bones. It has an impact even if it’s not forever.
Somehow, even with that thought he sleeps better with Hoseok just a few metres away, listening to his breaths slow down feels like someone is counting him down to sleep. The bed is warm, his sheets are newly washed, Hoseok sleeps with a tiny crease between his eyebrows that Yoongi can barely make out in the darkness. Sleep finds him easier than it has in years.
In the morning the world outside is completely white, the snow is piled up so high that when he opens the window on the second floor he can reach down and touch the top. It’s soft and powdery and sticks to his fingertips. When they’re drinking tea in the kitchen, the small amount of light that manages to filter in throws the world into a weird hazy grey, but neither of them wants to turn on the lights. Hoseok laughs at him when he opens the door and there’s nothing but a wall of snow outside and he just gasps in amazement, pressing his hand in. It’s cold and wet and numbing and he doesn’t take his hand back out until the tips of his fingers feel like they’ve frozen solid.
He can’t help thinking about Hoseok, about his words, about how eventually Yoongi’s going to have to leave him alone, but now even when they’re curled on opposite ends of the sofa it feels like they’re too far apart. Yoongi looks at him, at his frown, at the curl of hair just at the nape of his neck. It’s getting longer, he realises, falls just over Hoseok’s eyes now where it had been cut above his eyebrows when Yoongi first arrived.
“What’re you thinking about?” Hoseok asks, curling a hand around Yoongi’s ankle and tugging slightly.
“Your hair, it’s grown so long since I got here,” Yoongi says, moving forwards so he’s leaning over Hoseok, an arm propped up on the sofa arm behind him. His hair is soft, far softer than Yoongi’s after years of bleaching and dyeing, still smells like his wonderful citrus shampoo. It makes his heart ache, Jung Hoseok with his soft black hair and his unplaceable accent and the soft smell of oranges lingering around him, Jung Hoseok who comes to spend the night so Yoongi won’t be scared by the blizzard, who welcomed him like a friend even when they were strangers.
“What’re you thinking about now?” he asks and it’s more breath than words, but he traces his hand down the edge of Yoongi’s jaw where there’s a small scattering of stubble, barely noticeable until Hoseok’s fingers brush across them.
“Kissing you,” it makes Yoongi flush red as he says it, Hoseok can feel a hint of heat where his hand is resting just under Yoongi’s jawline, “I know we said – yesterday – that we’d take this slowly, but I just want you to know that I – I want to kiss you almost every time I see you.”
It’s Hoseok’s turn to blush now, he tries his best not to turn his head away, hide away from Yoongi’s smile, his gentle warmth, but old habits die hard. He curls in on himself like a sea snail retreating into its shell and Yoongi takes that as a signal to stop, move away, save energy for another day. It takes all of Hoseok’s strength to pull him back in, stare him in the eye, say “I’d like that,” and like a small afterthought he adds, “please.”
“Are you sure?” Yoongi is kind, concerned like he always is but Hoseok is sure now. Really, he’s been sure ever since he saw Yoongi climb out of his car, wobbly kneed like a new-born. He’d noticed his eyes first, soft, but there was something like fire in there too, a determination to make something work, just what he hadn’t known back then. He knows now and he curls a hand around Yoongi’s neck.
“Please kiss me.”
Yoongi finally, finally obliges him. He doesn’t know where this will go, whether this will even last, but he can’t stop. It feels like from the depths of the ocean another whale call echoes out towards him, one that he never thought he would hear. They break apart after a moment and he smiles softly, uncertain and Hoseok smiles back. At least for this moment they’re together, two people in an ocean so big it makes the world look blue. Somewhere deep under the water, far beyond the sound, a minke whale sings to their pod and Yoongi leans in to kiss Hoseok again.