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**
The first Namjoon remembers of Seokjin is a lanky tall kid who had long outgrown his trousers, laughing himself into a premature grave over cafeteria jokes. Two years apart, one tent between, stuck in the same platoon, they are made friends by situation. Though friendship makes them feel invincible, it doesn’t change the truth of war: eventually and inevitably, the enemy has them surrounded.
Still Seokjin remains unafraid, even as deafening explosions shake cement chunks off the ceiling. “You’re going to take care of my dog, right?”
Namjoon peers out the window, at the angry black sky, and back, “Take care of it yourself.”
“Don’t be silly. One of us has to be the decoy,” Seokjin says, knuckling him too hard on the shoulder. “Go on. My leg’s busted.”
“No,” Namjoon insists, dragging him up by the arm. “Don’t say that, you’ll die if you don't—”
“So will you,” Seokjin grunts, a flicker of determination as he pries Namjoon’s hand off and slumps back against the wall. The steady rustle of the enemy around them grows too loud, too soon.
Namjoon looks at Seokjin. He sees what he has seen their first night on the front. Seokjin with his uniform too big, dirt over his face, so brave, and so terrifyingly precious.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to end, Namjoon thinks. He had planned so far ahead. How to coolly say goodbye to Seokjin when they disembark for home. How to surprise him a week later because he’s looked up Kim Seokjin in the register. He has deluded himself into thinking maybe they could age into two titanic old men together. Two years apart and one bed between, they could live out their lives playing chess at some nondescript nursing home -- Seokjin always laughing as he cheats pawns off the board, Namjoon going along with it. And Seokjin had made it so easy for him to think this, coming back unharmed, again and again, like it was all a game.
Namjoon meets Seokjin’s gaze halfway. In hindsight maybe he was the one who'd never realized this was a war. “It hurts?”
“Not one bit,” Seokjin shakes his head furiously, a crooked grin on his face. “Make sure you don’t forget to take my dog for walks. And stop waiting to get married, Namjoon. You aren’t that great a catch to begin with.”
So Namjoon gets out. They don’t say goodbye. Just as he rounds the corner their safehouse blows up behind him. Dust to dust, metal to metal. His eyes are stinging with gunpowder and smoke.
They sting until forty years later, long after he marries, after his children marry. Namjoon visits Seokjin’s grave often, well into old age, bringing baskets of sweets and news of his children, the weather, the state of the economy. But he never tells Seokjin that he’s only waited so long to get married, because it has always been Seokjin who he was waiting for.
**
The second time, soon-to-be-rich Rap Monster lives in an abandoned warehouse, buried within a maze of other abandoned warehouses, because the reality of soon-to-be-rich is dirt poor. In Namjoon’s case, they are poor enough to survive on the blessings of cereal and tap water, though still rich enough to adopt the neighborhood strays.
“Stray animals,” Namjoon clarifies when, one unremarkable winter afternoon, a broad-shouldered Legolas invades his residence and begins rifling for biscuits. “As in kittens. And puppies.”
“Or a very helpful, very culinarily gifted, very handsome roommate?” Legolas suggests. He has a heart-shaped smile.
“This isn’t a homeless shelter, dude,” Namjoon mumbles, wondering if he should be giving in.
He does anyway. It doesn’t seem to be a poor choice. Seokjin, as Korean Legolas calls himself, is a runaway boy trying to make it big as an actor. He’s two years older but acts two years younger, with a heart that never aged a day past five, always testing the temperature of the milk before feeding the cats, consciously shrinking smaller when Namjoon has practice, rushing to wash the dishes after every meal, if only to save them from Namjoon’s Destruction GripTM.
For them, maybe due to convenience, sex comes naturally, like the beat in each sentence. They fall together easily, and they fit. But they’re not friends. There are things they don’t tell each other.
When Seokjin falls asleep over the coffee table, and Namjoon drapes a blanket over his shoulders, he has the gnawing suspicion that they’ve met before. He’s dreamt about the two of them in a war: sneaking the last biscuit into Seokjin’s sack, falling asleep and drooling on Seokjin's hand, Seokjin telling him about home, his dog, his favorite hang-outs. But he doesn’t tell Seokjin this. Likewise, Seokjin doesn’t say where he’s from.
It’s easy to get the gist of it, though, when a man in an expensive suit shows up knocking at the door and asking for, “Young Master Kim to please, come home by tonight for dinner with the President.”
The second time Namjoon remembers Seokjin, he remembers Seokjin’s silhouette in the doorway, and the sad way Seokjin looked at him as he walked off, as if asking Namjoon to stop him. Namjoon almost wants to, but that would be insane, because who is Kim Seokjin to him?
**
The third time they come together Namjoon is a detective and to him, Kim Seokjin is a gangster with the loudest fucking laugh in the country who claims, from extensive experience riding backseat, that Officer Kim has the worst taste in music. Thus he is obligated, by the morals of the universe, to send ballad mixtapes to Namjoon’s office each time he breaks out of jail. Or so he says.
Odd as it may be, if Namjoon is honest to himself, the weeks spent harassing Kim Seokjin make up some of his fondest memories. There’s just something obscenely delightful about watching Seokjin run for his life.
Once in a while, Seokjin gives up running, rolls over spread-eagle on the pavement and mutters “God just take me already,” like he’ll die if he moves another inch.
These times Namjoon sits Seokjin down and lectures him on factors of a good life. (Education gets you places. No one sane crashes police cars for a hobby. Consider stopping with the shoulder workouts. Stop blowing kisses to strangers. Are you actually a stand up comedian. No really.) Usually, by the time he’s done, Seokjin’s evolved from playing dead to writhing in boredom. But since, in addition to being cruel and vengeful, Namjoon is also cool, he pats Seokjin perhaps a little too high up the thigh, and lets him off the hook.
“Wrong. It’s not letting off the hook if you’re hooking him for, what is this,” Inspector Min says, a week later, flipping through the thick book of offenses Namjoon has compiled. “Car stereo too loud? Walking in the middle of the sidewalk? Offensive dad jokes? Which files under intentional obstruction of public order? You’re dealing with the mastermind of the biggest drug cartel in history and you arrest him for obstructive shoulder width?”
Embarrassed, Namjoon occupies himself by stapling a stack of recycling paper and aggressively feigning ignorance.
The last time that Namjoon hunts Seokjin, he's cornered Seokjin into his hideout, where their mixtapes are blasting loud out of opened windows. A hand grabs him out of nowhere, knocks the gun out of his grip—which Namjoon only allows because he recognizes that laugh—and presses his head back against the wall.
“Hey there,” Seokjin says, face a cherub’s under the streetlight. One ray of light filters through his lashes and reflects into his eyes. Namjoon can feel Seokjin breathing heavy against his neck. Their legs are bumping. Seokjin is close. Far too close. The good kind of far. A spark of warmth stirs in his guts and, when their lips touch, ignites. Seokjin kisses fast and surprisingly demanding, like a punch to the mouth, hands framing Namjoon’s face, and Namjoon doesn’t wait for Seokjin to pull away before drawing him back into another.
Namjoon doesn’t stop searching for Seokjin until the day he dies, having remembered after the kiss that somehow, somewhere, he’s met Kim Seokjin before.
**
The next few times that Namjoon remembers living, they’re not lives with Seokjin. The gaps give Namjoon time to do his research. There’s fate between two of them, he concludes. That’s why he keeps dreaming of all these alternate universes with Seokjin. Universes which are real, universes where they’ve kissed or made love or hated one another down to the fibers of their beings.
People call it a red string, call it fate. Namjoon imagines their existences as clock gears spinning and colliding in sync, each life an uneven groove or tooth that doesn’t always fit together. But eventually, Namjoon believes, they will sand each other down into precise molds of one another, and they will hold hands from the end of one lifetime to the beginning of another.
**
Unfortunately, when they do meet again at Yoongi’s frat party, Namjoon discovers that Seokjin doesn’t remember him the same way. In fact, Seokjin doesn’t recognize him at all.
“Wow, brave child, are you hitting on me?” he laughs, taking down another shot of tequila with the ignorance of someone who doesn’t know the pains of a hangover.
“Well—” Namjoon begins, unsure. Seokjin helps him finish it with a kiss on the neck.
In college they date quickly, touch and go. Here, now, no questions. Usually Namjoon organizes notes as Seokjin wallows in his cereal and tries a dictionary’s worth of pleas for Namjoon’s help on his programming assignment. Sometimes they brush their teeth side to side before the bathroom mirror. After he rinses, Seokjin leans on the sink and looks Namjoon in the eye, unblinking, deep in thought. These moments, time slows into tangible increments. Namjoon can feel each second passing between his fingers, can hear the rise and fall of Seokjin’s chest, see something in Seokjin’s gaze. He moves forward, remembering their first kiss in the alleyway, Seokjin’s lips like electricity, and he’s ready to catch anything.
In this lifetime Kim Seokjin tastes like Colgate peppermint.
When there are no exams Seokjin tries on Namjoon’s Raybans and takes pictures of himself winking to save in Namjoon’s phone. When there are exams, Seokjin slumps over the kitchen table and weeps passionately as Namjoon makes him ramyun.
“The hell,” Yoongi jumps, whenever he spots Seokjin snoring with a half chewed biscuit in his mouth, for all intents and purposes dead on the kitchen table, as if he hasn’t seen the exact scene yesterday. He turns to Namjoon with a scandalized whisper. “When did my apartment turn into an AA meeting for tall people?”
“He’s got a final tomorrow, just let him sleep,” Namjoon says. “Do you want some ramyun or?”
“Oh, so the dumb blonde gets special treatment,” Yoongi side-eyes him. “Why was I never allowed to sleep in the kitchen?”
“You can,” Namjoon shrugs, watching nonchalantly as Yoongi fishes out a permanent marker and decorates Seokjin’s forehead with something like a cock, complimentary with surprisingly cute balls. “Careful, he might take revenge.”
“I’m not worried,” Yoongi scowls, surveying his masterpiece. “What’s he going to do? Draw whiskers? Like he’s strong enough.”
Yoongi goes around with whiskers for the majority of the next day, not because Seokjin took revenge or because Seokjin's not strong, but because Namjoon is simply a vicious, heartless traitor.
For transient months they’re unhealthily competitive basketball matches, or naked toes poking out the other end of the blanket, Seokjin’s abnormally long and nimble and pale, Namjoon’s shorter and curled inwards. They’re in love. It’s tentative, but it’s there, when Seokjin reaches out for Namjoon’s hand, misses by a long shot, and almost gives up before Namjoon grabs his first. It’s there when Seokjin gifts Namjoon a pack of wet tissues for Christmas because he went shopping too late and nothing was open except the convenience store, and when Namjoon decides that he fucking loves tissues, so that Seokjin wouldn’t mope too long. It’s also what makes Namjoon want, so hard, for Seokjin to remember.
Honestly, Namjoon doesn’t think that he brings the subject of fate up often. Or maybe he does. But to Namjoon, having Seokjin remember, being able to hold Seokjin’s hand through the lifetimes, is worth a chat or two.
To Seokjin, it is only a burden. And whatever makes his heart skip whenever he sees Namjoon at the doorway, also makes the burden heavier.
“We didn’t meet until Yoongi’s party, damn it, why are you such a lunatic about this?” Seokjin says, quietly, one day. He takes his notebook out of Namjoon’s hands, leaves without another word, and he doesn’t come back.
Logically, they’ve been together for too long to crack at something like this. It’s shocking how smoothly things fall apart when you’re young and life is moving so fast, Namjoon thinks. Or maybe Seokjin’s been waiting for them to fall apart. Namjoon looks at Seokjin’s pictures in his phone and he is suddenly angry too. Maybe this was all just something convenient for Seokjin, who doesn’t remember him. Seokjin, who is everyone’s friend. If Namjoon wasn’t the one at the party, would he have kissed someone else like that?
One doubt buds out of another. At the end of a week Namjoon is reevaluating from the beginning. How can they be meant to be if Seokjin means whole lifetimes to him and he means a few months in return? They won't work if he’s the only one turning, getting sanded down.
“Maybe you’ve got the wrong idea,” Yoongi suggests.
Namjoon looks at Yoongi, sad, and Yoongi puts his hand over Namjoon’s shoulder in the best gesture of comfort he can muster. The fight lasts too long to be made up. When Seokjin graduates, Namjoon has no idea. They lose sight of each other, like two gears adjoined by force, but not moving in tandem. Namjoon thinks that they do love each other.
Just, in this lifetime, not enough.
**
Then there are a bunch of times when Namjoon remembers and gives up preemptively.
In the universe where they are runway models, he almost enjoys watching Seokjin sell himself out to consumer culture. The slow self-destruction. The brown paper-bags. The little white mounds on the coffee table, cut to military precision. Still he cleans him up, drags him out, and cooks him breakfast.
In another they are two preschool teachers, Namjoon who is constantly bullied because children can tell apart the easy ones, Seokjin who scares the shit out of anything in diapers because his jokes are scary. Out of charity, Seokjin protects Namjoon from the five year olds’ glitter bombs, blazing grin up at six million watts. Namjoon ignores him, even as Seokjin is dying on the hospital bed five years later. What good is there loving someone who will never love you back?
Though Namjoon might think this, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t secretly fold paper cranes until Seokjin’s very last breath.
Honestly he just wants Seokjin to remember.
The universe where they have it the worst is the one where Namjoon ends up a crippled military doctor and flatmates with Consulting Detective Hoseok. Seokjin is their neighbor, always laughing behind thick glasses.
It’s love at first sight for Seokjin, who trips over everything as soon as he notices Namjoon. He throws pebbles at Namjoon’s window at night, and pretends it wasn’t him as soon as Namjoon opens up.
“I’m just, uh,” Seokjin gesticulates wildly. “Plucking weeds.”
“On my side of the yard.”
“Well, damned things grow everywhere, huh.”
“Weird, because I thought the tulips Hoseok planted grow where they should,” Namjoon notes, flat but not entirely unamused.
Seokjin looks down in his hand, gaping like Namjoon just shot his dog. Namjoon laughs. For him, it’s been a longing of lifetimes. They make love in the tub, with the windows open, sunlight drifting over their skin.
As it happens, Seokjin is the serial bomber in this version and Hoseok, out of necessity, kills him. The thing is, Namjoon knew it would happen. He lets Seokjin die anyway, bewildered and afraid and remorseful, choking down his own blood, because maybe Namjoon’s still angry that Seokjin doesn’t understand. That, all these lifetimes, and nothing has changed other than the twines of red strings multiplying, knotting, tangling through his head.
**
Once, Seokjin meets homeless Namjoon as a puppy. And having resigned to educating a puppy on the meaning of fate, because no matter what he says Seokjin will always be Seokjin, straining for his attention, looking towards him for affirmation, Namjoon learns to be happy. This, too, is how he forgives Seokjin, and how he promises to wait for Seokjin to remember, maybe, one time or another.
Whenever Namjoon collects enough change, he buys Seokjin a biscuit.
“When we were in the army, I used to save these for you,” Namjoon says, carding his fingers through Seokjin’s fur.
Sometimes Seokjin looks like he understands. Most of the time, he doesn’t, just responds with slobbers over Namjoon’s face. Regardless, they stay together, until the day Namjoon doesn’t wake up in the cold and Seokjin guards his body, braving the world, barking at anyone who tries to take Namjoon away, still waiting for that biscuit and for Namjoon to rub his belly again.
**
After this, Seokjin ends up as a guy, Namjoon as a girl, and they meet again as roommates in some liberal arts school. The only problem is, Seokjin is gay.
But even being gay, and dating some stupidly talkative stupid comp-sci major named Kim stupid Taehyung, Seokjin still has that part that Namjoon falls in love with. That quiet, brooding part, the brave part, the part that always reaches around Namjoon and checks if she’s doing well, eating well. When Namjoon gets sick, Seokjin makes the best soup, feeds her spoon by spoon, and then falls asleep at the bedside. Namjoon wakes up to Seokjin snoring by her side, sweeps the bangs across his face, and murmurs, “Maybe next life we’ll get it right.”
When Taehyung and Seokjin get married in November, Namjoon ends up forced into a bridesmaid dress even though she’s far too man for dresses. But that’s how much she’s willing to tolerate Seokjin.
“I'm too man for dresses,” Yoongi, Taehyung’s maid of honor claims, snatching the wine glass from Namjoon’s hand. She empties it in one go.
“Do I know you?” Namjoon snaps, off guard.
Yoongi only scoffs, as if Namjoon should know better. It’s the day when they get crowned as godmothers to Taehyung’s annoyingly talkative children that Namjoon realizes, “I’ve seen you before. In all my other lives.”
“Yes, I’m your faerie godmother.”
“What?” Namjoon begins, except Taehyung’s annoyingly talkative children toss a chunk of cake in her hair and the world subsequently ends with many domestic disasters. And screaming, terrified children. Namjoon’s never liked the little spawns of Satan after that preschool-teacher façade.
**
“No I’m not, I was just joking last time,” Yoongi laughs when Namjoon hunts him down again. This time they’re in Australia. Yoongi a critic, Namjoon a publicist, Seokjin a novelist, who really shouldn’t be, though after two dozen reincarnations Namjoon realized fate needs to entertain itself too.
“Are you at least human?”
“The question is, are you?” Yoongi retorts. “All these lives and you haven’t noticed that you’re the only one who remembers this stuff?”
“So am I a spiritualist?”
“Gross. Please, you are a demon.”
Namjoon takes a moment, but somehow, he’s not entirely surprised. “And you are too?”
Yoongi shrugs, half-assed, playing with his phone, “What you should be focused on: Seokjin is food.”
Seokjin’s blood-curdling scream of, “Namjoon, I may have just shredded what looked like an important? Document? With a stamp?” from the next room promptly cuts off their conversation.
Yoongi takes one look at the horror on Namjoon’s face and offers a single piece in consolation, “As far as I know, stupidity can’t be absorbed.”
“So how does this work?” Namjoon asks, two hours later, tie significantly loosened and Seokjin banned to the study for time-out.
“Demons harvest souls to replenish their energy. You lost his soul while harvesting it. When a soul is lost, it bounces through incarnations on earth,” Yoongi says.
Namjoon nods, “And I with him?”
“Since you are bound to it, per laws of our realm you co-exist in its every incarnation until you complete your harvest,” and Yoongi doesn’t finish his explanation by the time Seokjin barges back in.
“Oh, are we talking about monsters?” Seokjin starts. Fact of the matter is that once Seokjin starts, he doesn’t stop. So after two minutes of Seokjin’s musings on the existence of the zombies and zombie-related puns, Namjoon tells him that if he doesn’t shut up they’re going to abandon him. Seokjin doesn’t shut up, and indeed they leave him in his big, lonely penthouse.
The next morning Namjoon wakes up finding half his precious vintage One Piece manga shredded into pieces, and Seokjin trying to camouflage himself in the room with a flowerpot over his head. When the camouflage fails, he makes a pitiful whimper of, “See, you left me…”
Namjoon groans. Clearly Seokjin never lost his habits from his puppy days.
Eventually Namjoon forgives Seokjin, except then Yoongi shreds Namjoon’s collection as well, because he’s bored and, more importantly, hasn’t forgotten the whiskers from seven lifetimes ago. This, Namjoon does not forgive.
A question remains as they age. Without knowing the boundaries, how much he is allowed to cross, how much he is allowed to smudge, Namjoon lets Seokjin go. They become the kind of best friends who are close but too far. Namjoon considers. He’s a demon. This is a human. Between the two of them, where is the line?
“Trust me, you crossed that line a long time ago,” Yoongi speculates. “There’s no happily ever after that ends in a dinner plate, if you catch my drift.”
“What if I murder Taehyung instead,” Namjoon suggests, returning an eye-smile from said man across the room, who again has again landed the spot as Seokjin’s boyfriend, and who doesn’t evoke his supremely murderous envy. Not at all.
“Food,” Yoongi prods him in the stomach.
Namjoon weeps like a baby behind a poker face.
**
Then at some point Jungkook, who Yoongi claims is the asshat in charge of reincarnations, really gets bored of playing around with Namjoon. And, against all odds, Namjoon ends up a sugar glider. A fucking sugar glider.
How does this shit even happen.
“Do you mind?” Namjoon snaps up at the sky, indignant.
A gust of wind, which sends him rolling several meters, contorts the clouds into a rather clear formation of ‘LOL’.
“I will end you.”
‘I’m a demi-god. Go ahead and try, baby squirrel,’ replies the cloud. Namjoon is so angry that he actually bounces.
“Get over it,” The cat named Yoongi conveniently smacks him in the face with a paw, sending Namjoon diving down from midair in a trajectory not entirely dissimilar from that of a furry volleyball. Back in his cage, Namjoon sulks a bit, plotting and waiting for the day he ends up as a gay dolphin.
As if to shit further on their parade, Jungkook decides to reincarnate Seokjin as their young master.
And in all honesty, Seokjin is loving and Seokjin is careful but Seokjin sucks. If it weren’t for Yoongi’s repeated guidance Namjoon would’ve lost himself in some ditch ages ago, sense of direction sadly bound by the size of his brain. Eleven-year old Seokjin has no idea that sugar gliders are not taken out for walks and left to explore nature, or that they are not rabbits and do not gnaw on carrots. In six months Namjoon gets lost twelve and a half times, but each time when Seokjin finds him again—whether it’s fishing him out of a puddle of mud or rescuing him from the windowsill—there is unfailingly that relieved glint in Seokjin’s tears.
And because of this, because he knows that Seokjin does love him, Namjoon can’t even hold a grudge.
Seokjin loves him so much, so dearly. And as much as he sucks, Namjoon always likes it when Seokjin pets him to sleep in his lap.
Two years later Seokjin goes abroad to university and Namjoon waits for his return proudly and faithfully at home, counting the days, sleeping on Seokjin's pillow, or romping around in Seokjin’s room, snickering at the mistakes on his old quizzes. Except human days are always so long, and there is so little to do, and Yoongi keeps frolicking away with another cat named Jimin, and sometimes Namjoon starts to worry.
At first Seokjin comes back for winter breaks. Namjoon is so excited that he, even in his old age, prances on Seokjin, and is nearly sent to the vet. But then the visits become shorter, and soon Seokjin doesn’t come back in years.
Time slips away insanely fast these days, and Namjoon begins losing things. First his sight, then his hearing. When the day comes that Namjoon knows he’s going to die, he crawls back into his cage and curls up in a comfortable position, so that Seokjin won’t know he’s spent the last year clinging to the front door and waiting for his master, who has grown so tall, so handsome, so smart, who has made him so viciously proud.
He just doesn’t want Seokjin to be sad.
**
The next time Namjoon is born an emperor, and he knows it’s Jungkook trying to make amends for the sugar glider debacle. Yoongi ends up an old court counselor, so for every annoying thing he’s done against Namjoon in all their previous lifetimes, Namjoon makes a tally on the wall and counts it towards Yoongi’s Eunuch promotion.
“If you make an eunuch out of me, I’m going to destroy you.”
“Mature,” Namjoon counters, “For a sixty-year old.”
“Incidentally, I’m ten thousand and two years old,” Yoongi corrects.
It’s after Yoongi’s ten thousand and sixteenth birthday when Seokjin finally shows up—unfortunately, as an assassin.
“Are you going to kill me?” Namjoon asks, when Seokjin sneaks up on him. Time hasn’t changed the slightest about Seokjin, and of course it hasn’t; he’s way too lanky and noisy to be an assassin—the sneaking was louder than Yoongi playing cricket—and he’s got the same unnerved laugh when Namjoon looks him in the eye.
“For the em-empire,” Seokjin stammers, charging recklessly into Namjoon. Even from afar, Namjoon can tell from Seokjin’s scrunched nose and the sway in his steps that he lacks conviction. Probably, Seokjin knows that Namjoon will kill him, and if Namjoon doesn’t, one of the palace guards will execute him. This is the acknowledged fate of every assassin, though Namjoon isn’t surprised that Seokjin became one anyway. He’s always had this sort of blind courage.
“Shh, you’ll get caught,” Namjoon says, and when Seokjin closes their distance, he guides Seokjin’s blade. First the metal cuts into his hand, and it’s slicked with his own blood as it slices through him. Seokjin makes a terrified whimper when he looks down and sees the sword buried in Namjoon’s body, all the way to the stilt.
They’re both rooted to the ground. One in pain, one in shock. Seokjin whispers, in tears, as he would be, “Does it hurt?”
Namjoon wants so much to laugh but it actually does hurt, so fucking much, so he tries to twist his mouth into a smile. He takes his last breath with his eyes in Seokjin’s and his palm, warm, dripping, on Seokjin’s cheek.
“No, it doesn’t,” He says, “There’s a back door by the west side. Run, Seokjin.”
“How’d you know my name?” is the last thing Namjoon registers before he dies.
**
“How’d you know my name?” is the first thing Namjoon hears from Jin when they meet again, waiting outside Bang PD’s office for their performance review. This time they’re celebrity trainees, little teenagers preparing to be packaged and sold to the anonymous masses.
Namjoon pauses, suddenly unsure. This is a name he’s known for dozens of lifetimes, for centuries and centuries, a name he’s committed deep into the seeds of existence. This is a truth he’s always known.
“He’s the leader. Obviously someone told him,” Yoongi intercepts, squeezing in between, and Namjoon wipes a mark off Yoongi’s ongoing eunuch tally.
Later that day Yoongi catches Namjoon on the train home, “It’s because you’re losing your powers.”
“What?”
“Your energy’s depleting. The spell’s wearing off, because you’re starving. That’s why he’s growing more aware of you. If you keep fucking around, you won’t have enough energy to keep reincarnating.”
Namjoon says nothing.
“If you don’t kill him you’re going to die, Namjoon,” Yoongi says, urgent, and when he looks up and sees Namjoon staring blindly out the train window, he sighs. “You’re not listening.”
“I don’t know,” Namjoon admits, “if I can.”
This will probably be a good life, even though this time they are just children rushing fast into fame, and like a handful of falling stars, their life is one where they’re meant to shine fast and disappear faster. Still Namjoon believes firmly that they’ll be okay. There might be no security, no home, no tutelage, but between all of the nothings Namjoon will provide Seokjin a handle. While the industry carves it into their bones to economize, to shave off all the unnecessary part of their human beings, to learn that this is work, not play or dreams or ambitions, Namjoon will keep an eye out for Seokjin, so that Seokjin doesn’t shave too much away.
Sometime near debut, Kim Seokjin sits down with a clean sheet of paper and lists on each side the traits that profit and the traits that don’t. Namjoon sits beside him, watching out the corner of his eye. Seokjin circles the ones that he will keep and crosses out the ones he will throw, and an hour later, he’s got this person on paper named Jin.
“Who is he?” Seokjin asks absentmindedly, passing his forefinger through the print.
“No one,” Namjoon explains, taking the paper back from underneath Seokjin’s hand and rewriting all of the ones he’s crossed out in a separate column. “But this here, this is my Seokjin hyung. This is the guy I like.”
“Joon,” Seokjin chuckles, sad, “Sometimes I feel like you know me better than I do.”
“Jin hyung, I probably do,” Namjoon says, holding his hand. Even when Seokjin is countries away, he’s holding to that hand, putting all of him into protecting Seokjin, because Seokjin’s the soul most deserving of happiness.
And Jungkook, who has accidentally inserted himself into this reincarnation, is most certainly not.
“Welcome to hell,” Namjoon says, flexing his fingers, the first time they’re left alone.
Jungkook grins like all of his Korean has failed him.
No problem, because BTS leader Kim Namjoon speaks a billion languages, in all of which he can very clearly enunciate, “Yoongi, avenge us and whip this traitor.”
**
Defeated, Jungkook is very obedient to them for the next few lives. Yoongi gets to be rich, then filthy rich, then when he gets bored of buying houses and islands, he buys increments of Jimin’s interest.
Namjoon lives the next few lives like he’s got eternity at his hands. In the two lives that he runs into Seokjin, he lets things unfold as they will. In the three that he doesn’t, he compiles a list of the things that Seokjin is: the kind who is responsible for all of the internet’s bad jokes; the quiet kind who builds himself in obscurity, if only to protect his friends; the genuine kind, who will hurt and be overjoyed with Namjoon regardless of his own emotions; the kind that is entirely too human, real; the kind who is always looking to Namjoon, but always ready to grab his hand.
And in the Venn diagram of the things that Namjoon likes, and the things that will unquestioningly like him back, Kim Seokjin is the intersection.
**
In one of their last lives, Namjoon is a senior partner at a law firm and Yoongi a junior litigator who takes every other moment to repeat, “You probably won’t even make it for another incarnation. Hurry up and end this.”
Namjoon shrugs, waiting for the espresso machine, “I just need to be with him.”
“Okay no,” Yoongi gags. “Stop it. Stop emoting. Stop with the general moping. Just. Stop. I’ve been stuck with you for a thousand years now. Have some mercy, asshole.”
Namjoon snorts, looking down at his coffee. In the reflection there is one half him, and one half Yoongi. As their gazes collide over the surface, Namjoon realizes that all along Yoongi has been, like now, there. Propping him along. Sure, maybe Yoongi doesn’t love him the way he loves Seokjin. But Yoongi loves him deeply, enough to have been there for a thousand odd years. Yoongi was a brother when Namjoon was born into a life without parents, a cat when Namjoon was a sugar glider, a friend, unfailingly, always there.
And now, Yoongi loves him enough to let him go after all of this.
“I’m sorry,” Namjoon says, for not picking up on it until now.
“You will die. You will literally cease to exist, you loser.”
"I'm sorry, Yoongi.”
Yoongi’s jaw snaps open like he’s protesting, and then it catches there like he’s confused, like he doesn't think Namjoon understands--and Namjoon probably doesn't--and then it closes back together.
And Yoongi smiles, like he’s always understood, “You dumb, giant, thing. Buy me dinner if you want my forgiveness.”
After dinner and a thorough critique on the importance of melted butter in confections, Yoongi punches Namjoon’s shoulder and walks off. Namjoon sits stone-still at their table. For some reason he keeps waiting for Yoongi to turn around and come running back, perhaps because there is a tacit understanding that this is their last night together, perhaps because they’ve been together for so long. Hundreds of lifetimes. Thousands of years.
But Yoongi doesn’t turn.
Instead, it rains for the whole night. By morning, Yoongi has disappeared like he’s never existed. The sky clears.
Two weeks later, Namjoon finds Seokjin, a free-spirited rentboy with a head full of life philosophies.
“A Chinese proverb says, you might have a big house, but you don’t have a home,” Seokjin decides thoughtfully the first time Namjoon takes him home. “You might be rich, but you’re not wealthy. But I’m different. I have a home, and I might be penniless now, but I’ll be wealthy! Later!”
Namjoon is not sure what Seokjin means by wealthy. When he wakes up the next morning and Seokjin has vanished with Namjoon’s car and wallet and all the cash in the house, he does get a vague idea.
As expected, Seokjin fails his get-rich-quick master plan. A year later Namjoon finds him homeless, slumped against the back of a building, with that cement look in his eyes, and bruised all over. Namjoon doesn’t ask a question as he helps Seokjin into his car, pays his debt to the loan sharks, and cleans him up.
For months Seokjin is quiet, detached, but he opens up overnight and when he does, he attempts making dinner—even with a chef in the house.
“I’m showing appreciation,” Seokjin explains.
“You’re just embarrassed because all those life philosophies didn’t work out,” Namjoon teases, smug.
“I could burn down the whole kitchen,” Seokjin mumbles, pink to the neck. Namjoon smiles against his ear. They eat over the couch, sitting with shoulders and elbows bumping, awkwardly intimate.
A year passes before Namjoon goes for his first business trip. When he returns, somehow he’s not surprised to find that his key no longer fits in the lock and that the house apparently belongs to someone else. Honestly he’s seen this coming, including the message left on his office phone that says, “Wait, I can make this up with a really funny joke. So, what does the duck say--”
Though logically, Namjoon should be angry, somehow it doesn’t feel like he’s lost much.
Six months later, Kim Seokjin returns, weepy and broke. And again, Namjoon lets Seokjin crash on his couch. Then two months later Namjoon comes home and the house is sold. This happens again, and again.
Oddly enough, the day Namjoon goes bankrupt is the day he feels most secure, because even if Seokjin took his houses and his riches, Seokjin is home, Seokjin is wealth, and Seokjin always returns.
“It’s like—I feel like we’ve known each other for really long,” Seokjin explains as he picks Namjoon off the streets. “Like I had a dream that in some past life I had a crush on you but I? was? a? dog? And you were homeless, like now.”
“Is that a confession?” Namjoon laughs.
Seokjin turns red at the ears, “You know what, get in the damned car. What do you want to eat.”
**
In their very last life they get married. The wedding is a simple two man show in the neighborhood church, Kim Namjoon and Kim Seokjin. Seokjin makes sure Namjoon doesn’t open his eyes until he’s somehow fumbled his way up the aisle, “Because it’s bad luck if you see me.”
“Pretty sure it’ll be worse luck if I fall on my face,” Namjoon snorts, trying to grope his way towards Seokjin’s voice. Then suddenly Seokjin’s by his side, grasp tightening around his wrist, steering him forward. And as they walk with the same steps, two lines not intersecting but meeting, merging, Namjoon thinks that this is what the world feels like when it’s stopped on its axis.
“I, Kim Seokjin, take you, Kim Namjoon, to be my husband, to have and to hold…” Seokjin starts, loud and confident. The exact tone of one who had stayed up too many nights rehearsing with a hanger. Then Seokjin pauses, a wince that Namjoon’s seen before beginning to cloud over his face.
“To have and to hold,” Namjoon prompts, reminding him, “from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.” He recites this as confidently as Seokjin, because after Seokjin had fallen asleep every night, Namjoon crawled out and poured over the same texts, highlighting all the segments that Seokjin had missed and filling in the notes that Seokjin had overlooked. Because, though he never said it, Namjoon has wanted this just as much. Namjoon has wanted this infinitely more, for infinitely longer.
To grow old together, to be fathers together, to experience a whole life, long, every bit as treacherous, but endlessly beautiful all summed up.
“In sorrow or in joy, to love and to cherish,” Seokjin says. Their syllables align, perfectly in sync, one voice steadying when the other falters, one falling back when the other strengthens, like two gears, perfectly in tandem, molding into one another.
“From this day forward until death do us part,” Namjoon says. Seokjin nods hard, approving, proud, smiling ear to ear, that damningly handsome man. When Namjoon sweeps Seokjin’s bangs away, his eyes are wide and brilliant and, suddenly, Namjoon understands. After three dozen incarnations, he stops waiting.
Namjoon pulls Seokjin close and kisses him, not because this is their last life together, but because, perhaps, this one moment will be worth all of those future lifetimes. This one instant will be worth eternities.
**