Work Text:
Everything was wet by the time they got onto the roof. It had been raining non-stop for almost the entire day, the summer sky dark and claustrophobic, and now the humidity was high enough that pushing open the fire escape felt more like stepping out of the shower.
It was surprisingly bad; enough to make Yoongi immediately uncomfortable. He looked back over his shoulder, thinking wistfully of his cheap battery fan sitting where he’d left it in the studio and knowing that he’d never go back down the stairs to rescue it. If Yoongi went down there — where there was air conditioning and no city grit trying to stick to his skin — he’d never come back up, and the only reason he was out here was because Namjoon had come home from hagwon and asked in a strangely quiet voice if Yoongi wanted to get some air on the roof together.
So here they were. Honestly, Yoongi could find problems with every kind of weather. Cold froze his bones until they felt like they could shatter. Heat stuck to him until his skin was damp and he itched with the want to scrape it off. It was just how he was, and getting used to being uncomfortable was continually proving to be one of the most useful things about him.
Still. “Fuckin’ hate summer,” he whined, letting the heavy fire escape door slam closed behind them and stepping further out into the muggy air.
Namjoon made an agreeable noise that meant he hadn’t actually been listening, because he usually had great difficulty biting back his own opinions and he seemed to disagree with Yoongi as a general rule. When Yoongi looked over, Namjoon was clutching his cup of instant tteokbokki close to his chest, like he suspected Yoongi was going to try and fight it from him. He’d taken such a big mouthful that his cheeks were sticking out to the sides, and it was still so hot that he kept trying to suck air in through his teeth between chews.
“S’mine, hyung,” he said, without swallowing any.
Yoongi rolled his eyes. He didn’t get hungry in this kind of weather. He didn’t ever manage to get much of anything past miserable. Yesterday he had been so hot he couldn’t fall asleep before his shift at work, and he passed his time alone in the dorm repeating what the news reporters were saying, because Bang PD had suggested with a wink that maybe something like that would help Yoongi sound less like he should be digging for sweet potatoes. All day he’d felt sluggish and tired, and more aware of his accent than ever.
Thanks to the rain the ground was too wet to sit on like they usually would, so they ended up just standing in silence. Yoongi could feel his joints unlocking from the hours he’d spent in the studio earlier in the day, hunched over a track that he really wanted to impress the producers. He’d been working on it alone while Namjoon was away at his English lessons, and they were supposed to be finishing work on it now but, well. They were out here instead.
Yoongi didn’t really feel like pushing Namjoon to talk about whatever had made his voice sound so small when he invited him to the roof. They weren’t really … it was hard to describe what they were, no matter how many times Bang PD and the other staff spoke about their teamwork on tracks. Closer than they had been, but not close enough yet for Yoongi to feel like he owed Namjoon any kind of problem-solving, and he didn’t feel like Namjoon expected that of him either. He rolled his neck, grimacing at the crunch left over from his posture problems, and looked out over the city at the other tower blocks. Directly opposite the building Big Hit rented an office in was a block with a rooftop garden, and all Yoongi could think as he leant against the low wall at the edge was how nice it must smell over there with all the wet soil and plants getting what they needed to grow, while his own left foot was in a puddle with a choco pie wrapper floating in it.
He poked his tongue around his teeth and listened to the sounds of the city and Namjoon slurping at his food. There was a thin slice of skin peeling from the roof of Yoongi’s mouth from a coffee burn that he worked at without caring about the pain. The humidity was still taking most of his attention, and it was impossible to ignore how the collar of his t-shirt was sticking to the back of his neck with sweat or his long fringe was plastered against his forehead. It was easy for his thoughts to go places he usually tried to keep them from: like how this was his first summer in Seoul — wetter and more humid than home — and how still nothing seemed better than it had in November. It was worrying, if he thought about it like that. He kept messing with the burn in his mouth, forgetting what he was doing until Namjoon snorted out a laugh.
“What are you doing, hyung?” Namjoon asked. “You look ridiculous.”
“Shut up.”
Yoongi scowled across at Namjoon, who held up a hand and shrugged his shoulders as though he was saying Yoongi couldn’t be angry at him for taking such an easy hit. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his school shirt to his elbows and opened the top buttons, and there was sauce on the corner of his mouth. He looked young and guileless, and Yoongi had to thumb at his own lips twice before Namjoon understood what he was trying to say and ducked to clean his face with the shoulder of his shirt.
“Who’s going to wash that?” Yoongi scolded, looking at the orange stain Namjoon had left behind on the white material.
“Well, not you, hyung. Hoseok, probably.”
That was true. Yoongi didn’t even know who originally owned the underwear he was wearing, because it had been so long since he’d washed anything and by now he was resigned to just taking things from the dorm as he found them. They all had their jobs. Yoongi fixed whatever Namjoon broke, Namjoon made food, and Jihoon cleaned the dishes. Hoseok had roped Jeongguk into helping with the laundry almost as soon as the kid had set foot in the dorm, but it was a big task for even two people.
Then —
“I broke up with my girlfriend,” said Namjoon. Just out the blue like that.
Yoongi wondered if it was obvious how every muscle in his body locked into place when he froze. Maybe he’d been wrong and Namjoon did expect comfort, or maybe he wanted some sort of life advice that Yoongi wouldn’t be able to give. Shit. He turned Namjoon’s confession over and over in his head, knowing that every time another boy had mentioned something like this to Yoongi he had never been able to figure out the right things to say. Girlfriend trouble wasn’t something that Yoongi had experience in, or ever would have experience in, and sometimes he felt like he had something different inside of him than everyone else must have trapped behind their chests.
He didn’t want to make this worse for Namjoon. It just seemed like everyone felt differently about relationships than he did, and they thought he was strange when he talked about his ideal future in terms of work rather than family. But that was the truth for Yoongi. By the time he left primary school he knew he wanted to grow up to be an uncle rather than a husband, and he knew what that meant about him. He went through middle and high school knowing it, and learning to live with it, and still hadn’t had any sort of intimate experience until moving to Seoul — not even a kiss. But on his third time out in The Hill he was brave enough to do something, and that was that.
“Did ... she dump you?” he asked Namjoon, not able to be comforting right away but wanting to know, at least, what sort of hurt he was dealing with.
“No.”
Yoongi nodded to show that he was listening, and realised that he had expected Namjoon to have gotten dumped. There had been an almost religious devotion to the time Namjoon set aside after practice to text Jihye — too afraid to call in case Donghyuk stole the phone, or the rest of them mocked him for saying out loud whatever sort of things he wrote — and he had talked in quieter moments about how pretty she was, half-hinting about what they got up to together in a way that made Yoongi certain he was lying. He seemed into her. What could have happened to change that so quickly?
“How do you get over a breakup, hyung?” Namjoon was asking. “Like, I’m — I listened to angry songs and it didn’t work.”
“Well, you dumped her,” Yoongi said without thinking, still hung up on the why of it all. “Did she do something with another guy?”
Namjoon jerked his head back as though he’d been slapped. “What? No.”
“So why would angry songs help you? Why not sad songs?”
“I don’t want to be sad.” He didn’t look at Yoongi as he said it.
It sounded so childish that it startled something close to a laugh out of Yoongi. Sometimes he forgot how young Namjoon really was — maybe because he was so smart, or maybe because he never really treated Yoongi like Yoongi was his elder — but then things like this happened and threw Yoongi’s world sideways for a second. Namjoon was sitting huddled in on himself, scraping the bottom of the tteokbokki cup with the plastic fork. From this angle Yoongi could see the sweat on Namjoon’s neck and how his expression was all twisted up, and he felt sour guilt settle at the back of his throat.
“I didn’t mean to laugh,” he said. Then, in an attempt at an apology, offered, “I’ve never actually broken up with anyone before.”
It did the trick. Namjoon made an interested-sounding hum and looked up. His eyes were sad, but there was something else there too; something sharper than teenage heartbreak. “Has it always been you who’s gotten dumped, Yoongi-hyung?”
Yoongi sighed and pushed himself away from the wall to fish in his pocket for a cigarette and his lighter. His bare skin had been eaten by gravel, and he had to brush his hands along the underside of his arms to dislodge some of it.
“Nope,” he finally said, and let Namjoon work out what that meant without any more help.
It was late enough in the evening that the sky was starting to get dark behind the cloud of city light. Yoongi was tired, and he still had that song that he wanted to work on whispering in the back of his skull. He blew the smoke from his cigarette into the heavy air above him. He’d stop smoking soon. It was just a question of making himself believe he wanted to quit it more than he wanted the comfort of it. He’d slowly cut back and then stop altogether, and he’d lose his accent and he’d do whatever else was asked. Something about how he’d taken to the training against all odds made Yoongi think about horse racing: blinkered to a single focus point, trained and conditioned to have the best shot, and dead under his own weight if he fell.
He took another inhale of smoke and looked over at Namjoon, who was trying to flatten the waxed styrofoam cup so he could wedge it under one of the bricks that were lying by the wall. For someone so clumsy, he never seemed to be able to break things when he wanted to, which made it all the more pitiful. His hands and shoulders were shaking, and it was very obvious that he’d started to cry.
“Yah,” Yoongi said, smoke coming out around the word. He could hear how awkward he sounded. It made him wince. “Joon-ah. Don’t.”
Namjoon sniffed and coughed without trying to speak. This wasn’t the first time that Yoongi had seen him cry, and he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. They’d both cried together — furious and frightened tears that Yoongi pretended to forget about after — but this was the first time that Namjoon had cried over such simple teenage shit as breaking up with his highschool girlfriend, and it was hard to see.
They’d talked a lot about giving up now that the band was clearly becoming more and more of an idol project than what the company had originally spun. Big Hit couldn’t even deny it. Jeongguk had moved in earlier in the month and he was just a kid who didn’t even like hip-hop. Yoongi was angry with himself for slowly getting led along, and even angrier that he didn’t really have any other choice. It was embarrassing to think about how hard he fought back every time someone in school or at his job found out he was a trainee and made remarks about him becoming an idol. It was even more embarrassing that Yoongi knew he wasn’t even handsome enough to be a good one, even if he wanted to. And now all those guys had been right all along, because Yoongi and Namjoon were saying goodbye to their real dream so they could live out a lopsided compromise.
Maybe it had all gotten to Namjoon, too, and he just felt like it was easier not to be dating right now. Stress had been hanging low all around the Big Hit Entertainment building like smog, and the ever-growing number of hoops the group were expected to jump through before debut shone ahead of them like the rings of a solar eclipse. At least Bang PD had promised Yoongi he wouldn’t really have to dance.
“It’ll be ok,” he said weakly to Namjoon, not even really knowing which part of it he was talking about anymore.
Namjoon snorted. It was wet and ugly sounding. Hurt.
Yoongi fumbled for something better to say. “Hey, cheer up. Soon you’ll have so many girls after you that you won’t care about ex-girlfriends,” he tried. It seemed like something that might help, or at least remind Namjoon that the world didn’t stop at Apgujeong High School.
Another snort, but Namjoon seemed to choke on it. Yoongi pushed his sweat-slick hair from his forehead and dropped his cigarette into the puddle — wasting the rest of it when he usually kept them until they were little burnt-down stubs he’d have to hold between a finger and thumb very carefully so they wouldn’t burn him.
“Alright,” he said, turning to face Namjoon. “C’mon. Hyung’s listening.”
Namjoon’s voice was tight. He was holding his whole body angled away from Yoongi, still pushing the edges of the tteokbokki cup into itself. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Now, I don’t think that’s true,” Yoongi said as gently as he could, even as he could feel a corner of his mouth twist up into a smile. “You always want to talk.”
That was probably the first thing Yoongi had learned about Namjoon. He said whatever was running through his head aloud, and everyone found it annoying and endearing in equal measure. Namjoon claimed it was because sometimes his thoughts all got snared on one another and that hearing them was one of the best ways to get it all untangled, which Yoongi believed could mostly be true, but he also suspected that Namjoon just liked people to know what was going on in his head. That just seemed to be how Namjoon was, and Yoongi was as endeared as everyone else. A few months ago Yoongi’s anxiety had convinced him that Namjoon must have believed he was stupid, since he was so quiet, and he’d accused Namjoon of it while he was overtired and irritable. But they were on better terms now, and Yoongi wanted to hear what had happened between Namjoon and Jihye, so he could understand.
“Joon?” he asked.
Some sort of tension left Namjoon’s body. Yoongi could see it in how his shoulders sagged like someone had cut his strings. He stopped messing with the paper cup and knocked it to the ground, not even bothering to see where it fell to.
“I just feel like I’ve lost my future,” he said, in one big breath. He was clenching his back teeth so hard that Yoongi could see the muscles work in his jaw.
The explanation made Yoongi feel like all his blood had been replaced with ice water, the humidity around him forgotten. “Is it about the group?” he asked. Ikje had already left them. Donghyuk kept talking about it, and Yoongi knew he was serious. “Are you —” but then he couldn’t finish the question. Namjoon was only a kid. He was doing well in school, but he could have been doing better. He didn’t need this. Not really.
Namjoon looked at him. “What? No. Of course not. It’s just … something else.”
“Something else,” Yoongi repeated, his voice flat.
“Yes, something else,” Namjoon said, twisting his voice up into a mockery of Yoongi’s accent before he let it drop. His cheeks were wet with furious, heartsick tears and his words had to be hissed through clenched teeth. “I’m not going to leave. Fuck you for thinking that about me.”
Yoongi just kept making everything worse. They stared at one another for a long moment, the air so heavy it felt like it was drowning Yoongi.
“Look,” he finally said, reaching to rub at his chest, just under his collarbone. He kept looking at Namjoon; at the stricken anger on his face. “You aren’t telling me anything, Namjoon-ah.”
“I don’t know what else to say.”
Yoongi looked out at the rooftop garden again. “Whatever’s got you fucked up,” he started, trying to choose his next words carefully. “Whatever it is, it’s going to be ok.”
“Sure, Yoongi-hyung. Alright. Thanks. Nothing I’ve ever dreamed about in the future is ever going to happen, but it’s ok.”
It was hard to know if Namjoon wanted Yoongi to feel bad because of what Yoongi had said or because Namjoon was feeling bad and the two of them lashed out when they felt like that, taking it out on the other for feeling better. Sometimes it felt to Yoongi like their moods were caught up in some sort of magnetic pull, but an unnatural, man-made kind. Usually, Yoongi would give Namjoon space to just be pissy and get over it, but he didn’t want to leave him alone right now.
“Look,” he said. “That’s how the future works.”
Namjoon bared his teeth. He was hurt. He was hurting.
“It sucks but it’s true.” Yoongi thought about reaching out to Namjoon. He thought about going back downstairs after all, to the air conditioning and his song. He didn’t have energy for a fight. He could feel Namjoon watching him, but he refused to turn and face him.
Namjoon didn’t stop looking. “But I. Now I don’t know what I want,” he said.
It didn’t feel like there was anything Yoongi could say that would fix that. Feeling like that as a teenager was normal, he thought. It was normal that Namjoon was stressed right now. Yoongi had been stressed at his age. But Yoongi had also been afraid to leave his room, and he thought if he stopped doing certain things something bad would happen, and he’d wished that it felt like he could talk to someone and be taken seriously. He sighed. “You don’t have to know every detail of what things’ll be like when you’re older, Joon. Nobody else does.”
Another sad sound. “They seem to.”
“Yeah,” Yoongi knew what he meant. High school was the worst. Going to classes in Apgujeong was one of the most humiliating experiences of Yoongi’s life. It wasn’t just that everyone there had the same winter coats and the same accent, or came from richer families than him and didn’t need part time jobs; it was how they all saw Yoongi fall asleep in class every day. They didn’t have their whole future tied to a tiny company and a project that nobody cared about. It was impossible to ignore just how much more certain all of them seemed about life. And Namjoon cared more about grades than Yoongi had, or at the very least his parents did. “I’m sure that all the talk about entrance exams is starting to stress you-”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Namjoon sounded so upset that it hurt to hear. It sounded like he was dragging all of this up from his chest, like a dead thing he’d been trying hard to hide. “I’m talking about, about — I don’t know. Normal things. Just — being a dad. Normal fucking things.”
Sometimes, there was a way to hear what people meant when you’d already thought the same things. Normal fucking things. Yoongi thought about being an uncle and looked away; wondering. It’s not that Yoongi hid it, exactly. He felt like most people either knew or they didn’t when they met him. Hoseok had known. Yoongi had seen it in how Hoseok looked at him; how Hoseok had smiled at him. He’d heard it in how Hoseok spoke about his father. He knew, and Hoseok knew, and they both knew that the other knew.
And it was fine.
Namjoon could have been saying anything. He could have been talking about the dating ban for idols, and there would be no way for Yoongi to find out unless he asked. He realised, suddenly, that he trusted Namjoon to know this very personal thing about him; not just because it might help Namjoon to hear, but because it was important to Yoongi. It was an important part of him. He turned to face Namjoon so he could help a careful eye on his reactions and pulled the back of his shirt from his sticky skin. He was uncomfortable and nervous, but when wasn’t he? Baring his vulnerabilities was more than he usually asked of himself, but this was who Yoongi was going to debut with. This was Namjoon.
Yoongi sighed. Then, “I find men handsome,” he said.
Namjoon blinked. Something in Yoongi’s stomach pulled tight like a garrotte. He was always blunt when he spoke, and it seemed like that made people assume he didn’t care what they thought. Except that Yoongi was always actively anxious that whatever he had said didn’t come across how he wanted, and he watched every reaction to important things like this one closely. There was always the desire to qualify what he had said, but he didn’t want it to get too far away from what he’d wanted to say. But Namjoon was still quiet, still blinking.
“I’m,” he managed, but then he stopped. “I’ve,” he ducked his chin. His sweaty hair fell over his eyes. “You know.”
“With …” Namjoon’s voice dropped so low Yoongi almost didn’t hear, “guys?”
“With guys, yeah.”
It seemed to knock the air out of Namjoon’s lungs. “Yoongi-hyung,” he said, and then he got quiet again. There was that sharp something shining in his eyes again; some kind of fear. The tightness in Yoongi’s stomach didn’t get better, but it was a different sort of feeling now. Something shared between the two of them, a sort of understanding of words that didn't want to be said.
Yoongi knew, deep in his gut, what that silence meant.
“You want to say it?” he offered.
Namjoon shook his head. He seemed wide eyed and ready to run, like his body hadn’t quite caught up with the fact that this wasn’t going badly. Maybe it hanging between them in the air was scary enough for him, and he really did want to run. His eyes had filled with tears again. Yoongi ached to make it all easier for him.
“It is gonna be ok,” he said, and then after a second when the platitude felt too forced he reached out and pushed Namjoon lightly in the arm, holding onto his wrist and ignoring the discomfort of the heat. “Hey. Hyung was right after all.”
“Fuck you,” Namjoon coughed out a wet laugh in surprise. “You’re so obsessed with being right all the time, holy shit.”
“I’m not obsessed with it, it just happens a lot.”
Namjoon moved closer to Yoongi, stepping through the puddles. There were still tears in his eyes — on his cheeks and his chin, since he hadn’t moved to wipe any of them off — and Yoongi still had his hand wrapped around Namjoon’s wrist, his finger and thumb meeting one another. The heat from Namjoon’s body made the humidity even harder to stand, but Yoongi didn’t move away from him.
“How did you know for sure, hyung?” Namjoon asked. He was looking at Yoongi’s face in a way he usually didn’t, really searching it for something.
Yoongi wouldn’t meet Namjoon’s eyes. He could feel the sweat on Namjoon’s wrist under his own hand, and he knew it must be even more uncomfortable for Namjoon. But still. The feeling of his skin against Namjoon’s was giving Yoongi a bad idea, or maybe it was the feeling of Namjoon’s dark eyes darting around his face searching for whatever it was he needed to find.
“Just felt like I wanted different things than everyone else,” Yoongi replied. “Just figured it out.”
They were both so still. Beneath them the city was loud, and Yoongi glanced over to the fire escape to make sure that nobody had snuck up here without either of them noticing. Namjoon was looking at his wrist now, hidden under Yoongi’s pale hand.
“I didn’t really try anything until I got here,” Yoongi offered, just saying anything that came to mind in the hopes of cutting the tension between them, or spurring Namjoon into action or —
Namjoon closed what little distance was left between them. His cheeks were flushed. “Can I?” he asked.
Yoongi nodded, because he was curious too.
Namjoon leant down a little too far, obviously used to kissing people shorter than Yoongi, and Yoongi cuffed him on the shoulder. “Dickhead,” he said, and then the inevitable happened.
It wasn’t a good kiss. Yoongi was too hot, hyper-aware of how his clothes and his hair were sticking to him, and Namjoon was close against him. Yoongi could taste sweat and the spicy tteokbokki, and he knew that his own mouth must have tasted like smoke and old coffee. Namjoon had his eyes closed, but he didn’t try and fight his wrist out of Yoongi’s grip. They just sort of stood there for a second, kissing, and then moved away.
Namjoon couldn’t look at Yoongi. His neck was flushed now too, and the top of his chest, right under the open buttons of his school shirt.
The first time they cried together was after Bang PD spoke to them about the workshop and what had been decided about their futures. They listened and nodded in the meeting room with him, like they were expected to, and then they went back to the dorm and cried beside one another in their bedroom. After that, they didn’t speak for almost three days. Neither of them knew how to move past it or talk about what was so embarrassing about what had happened. Yoongi still doesn’t know what Namjoon was thinking, but for those three days all that was stuck in his head was how Namjoon looked exactly as betrayed as Yoongi had been feeling, and the realisation that his own future — signed away at the detriment of his relationship with his own parents — was entirely out of his control.
This felt like that. Yoongi wanted to leave. He was sure Namjoon wanted him to leave. But he had told Namjoon secrets, and he had kissed him, and he could stay.
“You don’t have to have everything figured out,” he said again. Something in his throat caught and he stopped to clear it. “Not even this. I promise.”
Namjoon heaved a heavy breath like it hurt to hear that, too. Yoongi thought about Jihye, and how much Namjoon obviously still felt for her. It must have been scary for him. It must have been so fucking scary.
“C’mere,” Yoongi said, and pulled Namjoon closer to him again, into a hug this time. Namjoon let Yoongi move his body easily, falling against him. They didn’t really touch. During practice, Yoongi sometimes helped Namjoon stretch, but neither of them cared enough about the warmup routines to get close for any significant length of time. More often they just ended up lying on the floor beside one another trying not to fall asleep.
Yoongi could feel the press of Namjoon’s body against his own, and the shake of it as he cried. He held on, as strong as he could, never minding how much worse the heat was now they were closer again.
“I’m sorry,” Namjoon said. It was strange to hear him apologise, when that was something they didn’t really say to one another as a rule. Before now everything had felt like an exercise in giving ground to Namjoon, but something had changed. Not because of the kiss, but to allow the kiss at all.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” Yoongi told Namjoon, firmly.
They stepped apart. The air was still so dead and heavy around them. The song still had to be finished downstairs. Namjoon probably had homework to do.
And now they had this between them, and whatever else was coming.