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The star fell on his moon and Namjoon felt the impact deep in his bones.
The foreign sensation made him shudder. It never failed to make him feel incredibly strange, even though there had been so many times a star had fallen on his moon. The sensation would be completely gone in a few hours though, but so would the stars. They would quickly return to their adventures and their travelling and their fun. They never stayed in one place for long, and that’s how it’s always been, Namjoon knew that. Sometimes, though, he wished they’d stop to talk to him, tell him about their travels and all the adventures they’d had, where they were going and what they were doing. Sometimes he wished they stayed. Just for a little while, just long enough for him to stop feeling so lonely. Maybe then the gaping void in his chest would close just a little.
He stretched his limbs and felt the pressure and the unusual feeling of an impact ease as he did it. It would only feel worse if he stayed still, so he got up from his chair and went to take a walk in the garden. Kook woke up when he heard him move and followed him outside, hopping alongside him.
“Ah, Kookie, always taking care of me, aren’t you,” he chuckled.
The longer he walked, the more the sensation eased, and when he reached the garden, he felt almost as new. He checked his crops and the other rabbits, and when he was satisfied, he walked around to the back of the garden. There’d been another quake earlier that day and he knew he’d find another rift in the surface. The rifts were getting worse. This one almost reached his garden, and he knew the next one could very well split it in two. He sighed and wished, not for the first time, there was someone who could tell him what to do.
He sat down on the bench overlooking the garden, surrounded by moontrees, gnarly, contorted things that looked like ghosts on the dark backdrop of the moon sky. Kook jumped up next to him and laid his head down on Namjoon’s thigh. Namjoon pet his head and his long, long bunny ears, and the feeling of his soft fur under his fingers made him feel slightly more grounded. He closed his eyes and sighed.
He kept his eyes closed until he heard a whispered voice say, “Hello.”
Namjoon startled. He opened his eyes and looked at the star in front of him. The star had a slight frame, a pretty face with curious, searching eyes that made Namjoon feel like they were looking right through him, down to his bones. He had white, silvery hair that fell in his eyes and a beautiful, subtle glow around him. He had to be a very powerful star, then, Namjoon thought. He’d seen stars in human form before, but he’d never seen any who’d retained their star glow quite like this. Swirling patterns of light danced around his frame, making the star look like a lost prince of some far-off galaxy. He didn’t know they could be so pretty.
“Um…” Flustered, he cleared his throat. He hadn’t expected this, and he was most definitely not prepared. “Hello, hi, um, my name is Namjoon! This is my moon and this is my home, welcome. This is Kook, and he’s happy to meet you too.” Namjoon took Kook in his arms and made some space on the bench for the star to sit down next to him. “Here, sit down. What’s your name?”
The star cast his gaze away and said, in a deep, gravelly voice, “Yoongi. My name is Yoongi.”
How fitting, thought Namjoon. “Okay, Yoongi, do you want to come inside? You can stay for as long as you like.”
Yoongi nodded slowly and the swirling glow around him shone a little brighter and Namjoon hoped that meant he was happy to be invited. He didn’t seem to be in any rush to leave and recklessly, Namjoon let hope bloom inside his chest that maybe, maybe Yoongi would stay here for a little while.
***
Yoongi stayed.
He stayed for a day, two, three, and then the days turned into weeks, and Namjoon became dizzy with the euphoria of having someone else around that he could talk to and who could talk back to him. The first day had been awkward, neither of them knowing quite what to say or what to do around each other. Yoongi was quiet. Namjoon was excited to finally have someone to talk to, and words spilled out of him easily and readily, filling the silence and trying to make Yoongi feel more comfortable. His library contained thousands of books ranging from music and maths to magic and myth and stars and gods, and so he never ran out of stories to tell.
And Yoongi listened. He listened intently to everything Namjoon had to say, and he didn’t seem to tire of it. Sometimes Namjoon would stop talking, embarrassed, saying “I should shut up, I’m probably boring you to death,” but Yoongi would smile and gesture for him to continue. Sometimes he’d ask questions that made Namjoon go on and talk about the subject at hand in even more depth. Sometimes he’d say something so insightful that Namjoon had to stop and reconsider everything he’d ever thought in his life. Yoongi would laugh and tease him and tell him it was okay to not know everything. He enjoyed Yoongi’s company, even when all they did was sit in silence in the same room, and he liked to think Yoongi enjoyed his company too.
Other times though, when his light got too faint and too pale, and the patterns would dissolve into nothingness, Yoongi’d apologize and retreat to the garden or to the library to read or play the piano on his own. Namjoon understood that. He needed his own time too. Yoongi always came back and he never showed any signs of wanting to leave at all, so the seed of hope that Namjoon had planted when he’d first met Yoongi bloomed and filled his chest to the brim.
Namjoon showed Yoongi his piano on the third day after he’d arrived on the moon. Yoongi pressed a key and gasped at the sound it made, then pressed another and another, until there was a cacophony of sounds filling Namjoon’s library. His patterns started glowing so strongly Namjoon had to squint to look at him.
“Do you like that?” he’d asked, and Yoongi had nodded excitedly, his lips trembling with the force of trying to keep them from curling up in a smile. “That’s a piano. I can teach you how to play it if you want.”
“Would you?”
Namjoon nodded and Yoongi’s answering smile was even more blinding than the dancing light around him.
They started talking more about music after that. Playing the piano together became a daily routine and seeing Yoongi open up so much in joy made Namjoon’s heart soar.
***
The first quake that shook the ground after Yoongi arrived on his moon, happened in the middle of Namjoon’s sleep cycle. He’d become so used to them that the quakes didn’t even wake him up anymore. He just ignored them because, well, there was nothing his magic could do anyway. He’d tried, so many times. Tomorrow there would be a new rift in the surface of his moon and there was nothing he could do to stop that from happening.
Yoongi shook Namjoon awake, worried expression on his face. “Namjoon, what’s happening?” His light was so dim Namjoon could barely see him in the darkness.
Namjoon was still mostly asleep and he blinked blearily up at Yoongi. “Wha-?”
“The ground was shaking,” Yoongi said. He sounded scared. “I think something might be wrong.”
“Ah…” Namjoon flopped back on his bed. “Well… There isn’t much that can be done. I tried. So, just ignore it if it happens again.”
Yoongi just stared at him like he’d suddenly grown a second pair of eyes. He was too perceptive and Namjoon knew he wasn’t going to escape his scrutiny that easily. He’d told Yoongi about his connection to the moon, about how he felt everything that happened to it, how he knew Yoongi’d fallen on his moon before he’d seen him. He hadn’t mentioned anything about it working the other way around, but Yoongi’s worried eyes told him that’s exactly where his mind was.
“I don’t think you should do that,” Yoongi said.
“Do what?”
“Ignore it.”
“Well, I haven’t. It’s just… I tried everything, alright.” Namjoon ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “My magic hasn’t worked, nothing has worked. So. Here we are. It’s fine. It’ll be fine.” Not even he could bring himself to believe his words.
Yoongi bit his lip worriedly, his dancing light starting to return to him and bathing Namjoon’s dark room in soft light. He looked like he wanted to argue, but instead he asked, “Is there some way I can help you?”
“I don’t know how you could.”
Yoongi looked away. “If you need me, I’m here, okay? Just. Let me know.”
“Alright. Alright, I will.”
“Good.”
***
“You used to be human, didn’t you?” Yoongi asked him a few days after they’d started the piano lessons. They were sitting together in the library, Namjoon reading in one of the couches, with Kook in his lap, and Yoongi sitting at the piano and trying to practice.
Namjoon looked up from his book, surprised. “How’d you know?”
“You don’t act like a god who’s always been a god. You’re too kind. Too eager.”
Namjoon blushed. Sometimes he felt a little bit like a lost puppy around Yoongi, always so excited to follow him around and talk to him, and the thought that Yoongi had noticed it and that maybe it bothered him made Namjoon want to shrivel into a ball and throw himself away.
“Is that a bad thing?” he asked.
“Not at all. But it does give you away.” Yoongi smiled. Namjoon’s heart stuttered in his chest. “How did you get here?”
Namjoon wasn’t fond of talking about his past much, because it hurt to do so, even after so many years, but he found himself wanting to tell Yoongi. He felt that the information would be safe in his hands.
“I just… followed the moonlight trail to the sky. And then I kept going.”
“You didn’t like it on Earth?”
“It’s not… It’s not that I didn’t like it, I was just- I didn’t really feel like I fit there, you know?”
Yoongi nodded with a faraway look in his eyes. “Yeah, I know.”
The silence stretched between them, and Namjoon went back to his book, but Yoongi didn’t start playing again.
“Me too,” he whispered after what felt like forever, so quiet that Namjoon almost missed it. “I didn’t fit in either. So… yeah, I get it, wanting to leave.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Namjoon asked carefully.
“Not really,” Yoongi said, throwing a deprecating smile in Namjoon’s direction. “I mean. I want to tell you, but I don’t want to have to explain. Does that make sense?”
“It does.” Namjoon understood. He felt the same way.
A pause.
“Will you tell me about your story?” Yoongi asked.
“Alright,” Namjoon said. He closed the book and placed it gingerly on the armrest. “There’s not much to tell. I… My family and I, we were very close. I was especially close with my brother, Jungkook, though.” Yoongi looked to where Kook was sleeping in Namjoon’s lap. “Yes, I named Kook after him. I missed him a lot. Still do.” Yoongi smiled fondly at him, and now fully turned towards Namjoon on the piano bench, gestured for him to continue. “I could not imagine my life without them. And then my life suddenly stopped having them in it, and I couldn’t find my place in the world anymore. I tried, I spent so many years trying. And then I got tired of trying. So I came here, and I stayed. It felt like I’d found my place for a while, but then at some point it stopped feeling that way, and I thought I’d made a grave mistake.” But then I met you and you stayed and everything was alright again, he didn’t say.
“Do you feel that way still?”
“No, no I don’t.”
“I’m glad.”
The silence stretched between them again, and Namjoon could feel Yoongi battling with himself about what he wanted to say next. Namjoon let him. He could wait for Yoongi to find his words.
“For me, it wasn’t great,” Yoongi said finally, the patterns of light disappearing into nothing. He spoke quietly, like it was hard to get the words out. “Stars, they don’t like to stay in one place.” Namjoon nodded. He knew that all too well. “So they all left and came back and left again and every time they’d come back, they’d ask when I’ll go with them or when will I leave on my own adventure or-” Yoongi paused a little, then took a deep breath and continued. “Eventually, I had enough. I left because I wanted some place where it would be okay for me to stay.” He looked at Namjoon with wide, hopeful eyes. “You haven’t told me to leave yet.”
“And I won’t. You can stay as long as you like.” Your presence sews the hole in my chest closed little by little every day, how could I ever ask you to leave, he didn’t say.
Yoongi let out a relieved breath. “Thank you, Namjoon. I’m so lucky to have found you,” he said. Light began to swirl around him once again.
No, I’m so lucky I met you, Namjoon didn’t say.
Yoongi got up from the piano bench and wandered over to the couch Namjoon was sitting on. He sat down next to him, and leaning his head on Namjoon’s shoulder, he said “I think there’s something to be said about two lonely misfits finding each other on a lonely moon and making it their own, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
***
Slowly, slowly, the quakes became less frequent and then, eventually, stopped altogether.
***
Namjoon couldn’t pinpoint a moment when he realized he was in love between all the time they spent together talking and playing the piano and taking care of the rabbits and the garden together. All he knew was that, at some point, his mind had gone ‘oh. I love him’. It was so nice to have someone there to help him, to keep him company. He felt the hole in his chest close a little more with each day that passed, with each smile that Yoongi threw his way, until he could barely feel it anymore.
Namjoon didn’t know how to tell him, though. What would he say? What would Yoongi say? Would he leave? Would he look at him in disgust? Would he say no? Would he pity him? Would he… say yes? He wanted Yoongi to love him back, but did he? There were clues, but he could never be too sure. He built this moment up in his head so much, as if the world would end if it didn’t come out right, and he overthought himself into a corner where he couldn’t move forward anymore.
One day, they were in the library, looking for an answer to one of Yoongi’s questions that Namjoon hadn’t known how to answer. Yoongi had fashioned swirling lamps out of his star glow and made them float around them to light their way around the library.
“Joon, can I tell you a secret?” Yoongi asked casually, while looking around at the rows and rows of books. His fingers were trembling slightly where he was dragging them over the books’ spines.
“I’m all ears.”
Yoongi stopped walking and took a deep breath. He closed his eyes and said, “I think… I might be in love with you.”
Namjoon felt as if all the air had been sucked out of his lungs. Yoongi kept talking.
“And it’s fine if you don’t feel the same, it really is… but I wanted to tell you. I think I’ve been in love with you for a while now, but-” He stopped himself. “Yeah.”
Namjoon kept staring at Yoongi. He wasn’t sure if what he’d heard was real or if it was a hallucination.
“Please say something, even if it is to tell me to leave.”
“No,” Namjoon said. “I mean, no, I don’t want you to leave.” He took a deep breath. “Stay,” he said, putting his arms around Yoongi and hiding his face in the fabric of Yoongi’s shirt. They stayed like that for a little while in silence, before Namjoon gathered his resolve and said, “I’m in love with you too,” but it came out mumbled and half muffled into Yoongi’s shoulder.
“What was that, Joon?”
Namjoon raised his head from Yoongi’s shoulder and said it again, more clearly this time.
“Oh,” Yoongi said and then his light did something Namjoon’s never seen it do before. It went out, completely, and reformed as a huge ball of pulsing light outside the room.
“Yoongi, what-?”
“It would have blinded you if I’d just let it hang around right now.” Yoongi’s words were shaking and fast, spoken through his fingers, but Namjoon could hear the smile in his voice.
Seeing Yoongi without even the dimmest glow was… strange. He’d gotten so used to the ethereal light always hanging around him, and without it he looked so… so delicate. He loved him even more.
“I can’t keep it away for long, but… Do you mean it, Joonie? What you said?”
“Yeah, I do. I really do.”
Yoongi giggled and smiled his blinding smile that lit up his face, no starlight necessary. He took Namjoon’s hand in his and said, “Is it okay if I kiss you now?”
“Yeah, please.”
The kiss was better than he’d thought it would be. It was just a simple kiss, but Yoongi’s lips were soft and just slightly cooler than his own and Namjoon felt electric down to his fingertips. When they split apart, Namjoon smiled and enveloped Yoongi in a hug, lifting him up off the ground and Yoongi laughed so loud and happy Namjoon thought he’d never heard a more beautiful sound.
Later that night, laying together in bed, Namjoon couldn’t help himself but ask, “Yoongi, are you going to have to leave?” He looked away and continued. “It’s fine if you are, I just want to know.”
Yoongi froze. He looked at Namjoon carefully and asked, “Do you want me to?”
“No, no, not at all, it’s not that, it’s not, it’s just…” Namjoon rubbed his face with his hands. “I really don’t want you to leave.”
Yoongi’s shoulders sagged in relief. “So then why are you asking?”
“I’m just worried. I don’t want you to leave but I don’t want to keep you here if you can’t stay. So I just wanted to know. If you’d have to leave at some point. Do you need to return to the sky? Can you stay like this, here, forever? Whatever forever means for you.”
“Truth is, Namjoon, I don’t know.” He chewed on his lip before continuing. “Not many stars have chosen the path I have. Living out their lives on a planet, moon... I heard stories, but they’re vague and undetailed, it’s just. I don’t know. But please understand that if I ever do have to leave, it’s not going to be because I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“Will you let me know if that ever happens?”
“If I can, I will. We’ll figure it out together, okay?”
“Okay.”
***
When the weeks turned into months, and Namjoon noticed the quakes had gone away along with the empty void in his chest, he looked at himself and he looked at his moon, and he made a connection. Of course there would be a rift in his moon to match the hole in his chest. Of course. He would be lying if he said he didn’t think this to be true before, but now it was plainly obvious. After making the connection, he made a decision. He felt around the edges of what had once been a hole in his chest and found it closed and thought that if Yoongi’s presence helped it disappear, maybe it would help in other ways too. The quakes had stopped but the rifts in the surface didn’t heal on their own, so one day, a few months in, he took Yoongi by the hand and asked him to come on a walk with him.
“Where are we going?” Yoongi asked.
“Remember how you said to tell you if you could help me with the quakes that happen every now and then?”
“Have you figured out a way?”
“I’m not sure. I just know that whatever I do now would not have worked before you.”
Yoongi smiled and threw his arms around Namjoon’s neck. “I’m glad you’re trying again.” The ‘to heal yourself’ was unspoken, but Namjoon heard it anyway.
Yoongi let him go and took his hand in his own instead. “Let’s go.”
Namjoon squeezed his hand and smiled. “Let’s go,” he echoed.
So they walked hand in hand to the rift that went around the garden. He figured he’d start as close to home as possible and work his way outward. When they reached the garden, he let go of Yoongi’s hand and kneeled on the ground, careful not to step on his robes.
Yoongi kneeled next to him and asked, in a whisper as if he didn’t want to disturb the moment, “What should I do?”
“Just…” Namjoon gestured vaguely around him, unable to form the words needed to ask Yoongi to touch him. But Yoongi, perceptive as he was, didn’t need anything more than that. He understood what Namjoon wanted and draped his arms gingerly around his shoulders. Namjoon felt warmth bloom in his chest, as he took a deep breath and tried to calm his nerves. What if this wasn’t going to work? What would he do then?
Find another way, said the part of his brain that now sounded like Yoongi.
Namjoon steeled himself and placed both hands on either side of the rift. He gathered his strength and willed his magic to flow through his fingers and heal the rift closed and… nothing happened.
“Oh,” he said.
“Try again,” said Yoongi and tightened his arms around Namjoon. “Remember I’m here, okay? You’re not alone.”
Namjoon took a deep breath. “I’m not alone.”
He tried again, he gathered all the strength he had, all the willpower and all his magic, and this time something did happen. The rift groaned and moved and closed halfway through.
Namjoon let all the tension flow out of his body as he sagged in Yoongi’s arms. “Well, this is much harder than I thought it would be,” he said, trying not to completely collapse under his own weight.
“That’s okay. We know that it works now, we know what to expect. You don’t have to fix everything today. We’ll take it one step at a time.”
Yoongi let go of him to get back up on his feet and then helped Namjoon back up as well. Namjoon felt weaker than he though he’d be, but he also felt giddy that he could use his magic again to fix what he hadn’t been able to for the longest time, and he couldn’t keep the corners of his lips from going up with joy and relief. Yoongi was smiling too, happy. Something was definitely better than nothing.
Yoongi helped Namjoon walk back towards the dome house that now belonged to both of them, half carrying, half dragging him there. He helped Namjoon into his bed as well and told him to rest, and that he deserved it for working hard today. Before Yoongi could leave the room and close the door behind him, Namjoon called his name.
“Stay with me,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright.”
Yoongi got gingerly into the bed and put his arms around Namjoon. Yoongi’s dancing swirls surrounded Namjoon as well now, leaving a warm and tingly feeling on his skin.
They fell asleep together, limbs tangled around each other, safe.
Tomorrow would be a better day.