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NOW
“Jung Hoseok, you are the greatest pilot in all the cosmos!” Seokjin cries as Hoseok hands over ancient artifact after ancient artifact, delighted grins on both their faces. Jungkook runs in and out of the storage cabin, picking out all the pieces Hoseok knew he would forget.
“My ability to transport valuables has nothing to do with my flying skill, hyung,” he counters, dusting off the last of the paperback books Seokjin insisted be wrapped in silk for the ride from old-New Earth (new-New Earth is a few star sectors over). “Besides, Kookie did most of the retrieval. He should get the credit.”
Seokjin huffs, ruffles Jungkook’s hair as he carries back yet another stack of Charles Dickens. “Considering the state of my pantry, I think I’ve given him that and more. And only you could fly porcelain so gently, my friend. It’s in immaculate condition.”
“Thank the icy landscape for preserving it.”
“No,” Seokjin declares. “I shan’t. Take credit for your bounty, Hoseok-ah, that’s an order.”
“Fine. You’re very welcome, humble benefactor.”
“You’re my least favourite crew.”
“Thought so.”
They’re parked on Seokjin’s rooftop, a hundred-and-twenty-fifth-floor penthouse with a grand view of Kosmos’ single ocean. The second sun is setting against a pink skyline, casting a pretty silver glow over the crystal-clear water. Beneath the surface, Hoseok can just make out a school of whaliens- bright yellow beasts with wing-like fins that sing when they come up for air, all in unique keys that harmonize like wind. He’s always loved the natural lifeforms on this planet, always appreciated the cool blue plant-life that covers it.
“Won’t you stay the night?” Seokjin passes the last of his artifacts to one of his many assistants and claps a hand on Hoseok’s shoulder.
“Ah, no. Yoongi has a client on Bultao in seven-thousand clicks.”
“Cutting it close, I see.”
“Well, you know Yoongi.”
“Yes,” Seokjin agrees, squeezing his fingers a little. “As well as I know you.”
He’s known as something of a spitfire, Hoseok, ever since the war. Hell, ever since he fled his home planet with a registered Companion at his side. Well, most people aren’t privy to that second part, but Seokjin’s been a close friend since the war, when they helped him rescue hundreds of innocents from a burning exo-planet. He’s been a generous benefactor ever since, turning to Hoseok whenever he gets a whiff of some long-forgotten token of history in a distant sector. He restores them. Keeps them in a public museum by the water.
“Will these go with the others?” Hoseok asks, as he always does.
The answer’s always the same: “What good are all these beautiful things if no one gets to see them. I’m sure you feel the same about your precious artifact.”
Hoseok guffaws- a sound that reminds him of his father. A sound he hates, but it’s appropriate for the moment. Jungkook mimics it while Hoseok grumbles, “Yoongi isn’t mine.”
“You might ask him that,” Seokjin suggests, and that’s nothing new either. He’s been absolutely relentless about their relationship for years.
Doesn’t it bother you? he asked once, drunk on rum, how so many get to enjoy him?
Hoseok laughed then, too. Because Yoongi loves his lifestyle, loves the job in itself. I get to bring comfort to those who need it, he always tells Hoseok. Those who can’t seek it elsewhere. Pull them out of their shell, let them be whoever they are without judgement.
Just like he did for Hoseok.
THEN
He was a prince, before the war. Choi Hoseok. His parents were desperate to marry him off before the battles started, ensure an alliance with the Alliance. They picked a girl he knew from school, one he remembered liking well-enough but had no interest in a life together. He had no interest in marriage, or in the continuation of his bloodline. He didn’t want to be involved at all in the production of an heir at all. He just wanted to fly.
He’d read western-style manhwa growing up, dreamed of stealing a spaceship of his own, learning to survive day to day like the cowboys of First Earth. Not accountable to anything or anyone, country or lover. Untethered.
But his parents insisted, thought they could convince him with a gift. “He’s a sought-after Companion,” Hoseok remembers his father insisting. “You’ll treat him with respect, show him a satisfying evening. Is that understood?”
“Certainly, Father.”
Companions are so sought after. At the time, all Hoseok knew was that they were highly-trained, well-educated, and outrageously expensive. While most had varied skills and chose only clients, they knew could appreciate them all-around, their most important efforts were what they did in bed. Or… so he thought, until Yoongi demanded a grand piano be dragged into his bedroom, sat Hoseok down and played the most beautiful sounds he’d ever heard.
“What the fuck was that?” he demanded, barely seeing past the tears in his eyes because he recognized those sounds, recognized a melody he hadn’t heard in almost a decade, when he was ten years old and less alone.
“Do you remember, Hoseok-ah?” Yoongi asked.
Hoseok shook his head.
Yoongi didn’t falter. “We used to make up songs together, when Professor Xiao gave us time to rest. I thought we were rather good, don’t you?”
Of course. They were in classes together, back when Hoseok could attend a special school for royals and children of diplomats. In a central planet, Yoongi would have begun his training at twelve, left classes just a year after they met. Hoseok had a terrible memory, but he did recall a small, pale boy with unique eyes. Pointed, deep, and not quite symmetrical.
There, in his own bedroom, the night before his wedding… Hoseok got to see those eyes again.
“Min Yoongi-nim,” he barely whimpered before his old friend left the piano bench, crossed the room to Hoseok’s bed. Climbed on, confident. Smiling.
“I always wondered what became of the prince,” he flirted, but that gave Hoseok pause.
This is what Companions are for, he reminded himself as Yoongi dragged a hand across his face, turned their noses together. He puckered up for a kiss only to be met with a chuckle.
“Rules first,” Yoongi murmured. “Tonight is meant to bring you happiness, to see you off well into married life. It’s not meant as a last-ditch effort for some undue pleasure, some kink you don’t think you can explore with your future wife.” Hoseok coughed at that, and Yoongi smirked. “Otherwise, we can do whatever you want.”
“What if I don’t know what I want?”
“Then I suppose we find out. If there’s anything you don’t like, tell me right away, and we will stop. Understood?”
Hoseok nodded.
Yoongi undressed him slowly, like unwrapping a present you’ve waited to savour. He’s a good actor, Hoseok thought, Yoongi’s own cheeks blushing red at his nakedness, despite surely seeing so many men that way before. Then came the kissing. Yoongi started with his lips, of course, and that was nice. Kissed down the column of his throat and to his chest, still nice. Stomach, nice. Then he skipped down, biting the sides of his ankles, sucking up his thighs. Pressed an experimental kiss upon his hipbone, so close to where he lay flat the other side.
“I’m sorry!” Hoseok sputtered, well-aware that his lack of arousal was definitely not what Yoongi expected from their meeting. “I just- I- it!”
Yoongi looked unfazed. Pulled off his own robes in quick succession, laid down on his back. “Perhaps you’re more the dominant type,” he suggested, dragging Hoseok on top of him. “Touch me, Hoseok-ah. Touch me any way you’d like.”
So, Hoseok tried what Yoongi did before. It wasn’t unpleasant. Yoongi smelled of flowers his mother liked, smeraldos, and he tasted sweet and clean. He tried to nip at Yoongi’s icy skin, watch it turn pink for a second before fading back into soft white. It was nice, sure, but Hoseok expected more. Of what, he didn’t know. Just… more. Or… maybe less?
He’d tried all of it before. With past girlfriends, boyfriends, people he only dated to piss his parents off. Tried to pull them into bed, undo them, undo himself, but he could never quite cross his way to sex. Never felt the urge, never felt safe enough, never felt… anything… enough.
Telling Yoongi as much, he sighed. “My apologies, hyungnim. I’m not a worthwhile client, after all. You can leave, it’s fine.”
“Why should I leave?” Yoongi questioned. “Seok-ah, what did I say?”
“I know, I know. If I don’t like something, you’ll stop. It’s not that I don’t trust you-”
“No. I said that you can touch me in all the ways you’d like,” Yoongi eases, and there’s someone like a smirk on his pouty pink lips. “How would you like to touch me, Seok-ah?”
That changed everything. Hoseok returned to Yoongi’s lips, kissing him as thoroughly as he could without wasting too much time. He ran his hands over Yoongi’s sides, let Yoongi roll him onto his back, drape their skin together head to toe. It wasn’t sex, but it was skin. Sweet, glorious skin.
Yoongi asked questions between kisses, wanted to know everything about their years apart, to know all about the woman Hoseok was meant to marry. He lied, said it was a happy time, that his future wife was pretty and kind and all sorts of things he’d never actually confirmed. It was all a lie, because he had a plan:
He’d steal a ship at midnight, fly straight into the nearest wormhole, end up wherever the hell he ended up. Live with the consequences, because at least he wouldn’t be forced into his parents’ submission, into a reign he never wanted.
He didn’t expect Yoongi to see straight through the lies, to leave him at eleven onto to greet him by the ship at midnight, wish him luck on his journey.
“Wish I could tag along,” he joked, but Hoseok was a stupid boy, and he invited his still-paid Companion aboard the firefly-class spaceship, offered him the private bedroom in the hull.
Yoongi boarded under one condition: no wormholes, but he knew a way that Hoseok could be safe. Could be anonymous, for once in his life. They met with Park Jimin, a programmer who deleted all instances of Hoseok’s life online. Photos, articles, identifications. He became as anonymous as he wanted, as long as he never used his full name, avoided planets still governed by his family.
“Why would you do this for me?” Hoseok asked Yoongi when it was over, dropping him off on his own home planet.
“Jimin’s a friend from the Academy,” Yoongi explained, “but he always excelled in secrecy. What makes you think he’s the only one?”
It seemed so wrong, leaving Yoongi when he was the reason Hoseok could be so free. So, they made another deal, and Hoseok became his driver, his lift from planet to planet as he met with clients. “Payback,” he told Yoongi, even if he saw straight through the new lie.
“And how will you make money, without your royal title?” Yoongi asked, a flirtatious lilt still affecting his tone despite the change in their dynamic.
Hoseok had a few ideas.
NOW
“Sorry I’m late,” Yoongi yawns as he pads into the cockpit, face wiped clean of make-up and hair still a little wet. He falls down in a velvet armchair he installed himself, bolted to the floor like all the rest of the furniture on board. It’s a small vessel, so the gravity gauges don’t always take well to turbulence, and they’ve both spent too much time resetting furniture to risk another bumpy ride.
Yoongi’s skin is marred with bright red welts, his neck a mess of hickeys. Hoseok raises a brow at him, and Yoongi simply shrugs. “You should see the other guy,” he jokes, and Hoseok rolls his eyes.
“Didn’t know Joonie had it in him.”
“Joonie had a rough week.”
“Good for him.”
“Mhm. Good for me, too,” Yoongi teases. He didn’t always make jokes about his work, didn’t know if Hoseok would be comfortable with that. But Hoseok never minded knowing how Yoongi spent their time apart. If anything, he liked knowing it brought him joy, amusement, whatever else it is people like about sex. And Yoongi likes Namjoon. Likes his taste in music, says that he’s as interesting as he is endowed. And he’s very well-endowed, Yoongi had revealed, blushing, after their third visit to Kosmos.
They’re not supposed to talk about his clients, but Yoongi’s always broken rules. He kidnapped a crown prince, after all! Yet somehow, no one ever suspected him, or reported him to the Agency. There’s so much study that goes into his position, and so much of it has to do with secrecy. He’s good at keeping secrets, but he’s better at knowing who he can trust to keep them too. Apparently, Hoseok can be trusted.
He smiles. He used to have to fake those, before Yoongi tore into his life and rescued him from the shiny prince act. Now he’s happy all the time.
“Where’s Kook?” Yoongi asks, pulling his feet up on the cushion so he can tuck his knees beneath his chin. He looks positively miniature like this, and Hoseok has to quell the urge to put him in his pocket.
“Sparring with Seokjin in the storage cabin,” he tells Yoongi instead, who simply hums, as that’s standard procedure for all their trips to Kosmos.
THEN
Jungkook came late in their time together, well after the war. They were on a dusty moon without a name when they came across the facility, an abandoned Alliance structure undoubtedly teaming with valuables. Yoongi used to wait on board the ship while Hoseok explored those types of places, as disinterested in gold as he was in boring conversation, but somehow this was different. The facility seemed more dangerous than usual, and Yoongi always had a sick curiosity for history, for places just a little lost in time.
Inside was a nightmare. Body bags filled with children lined the floors, killed in ways neither Hoseok nor Yoongi could piece together. “Reavers?” Yoongi suggested as they dragged the bodies to a pyre, giving the children what small funeral they could muster.
“Reavers don’t have technology like this,” Hoseok reminded his friend- they were friends, by then. Hell, they were friends as soon as Yoongi boarded the ship. Friends since they were children, though that barely seems to count. “This is more than torture. This is…” he hesitated to even say it, but they both thought the same thing. “This could be magic, hyung.”
It was in that moment that the pyre flames burned electric blue, and a boy dashed across the desert landscape. Yoongi, trained in unarmed combat, managed to pin him down, but the boy’s power wasn’t all in physical strength. They learned that day how fire could be controlled with nothing more than thoughts. In weeks to come, they learned what horrors must have been committed by the Alliance that they had to murder all their test-subjects. Or so Jungkook told them, silently drawing his story in the pages of Yoongi’s favourite books.
“We can’t leave him,” Yoongi had begged when Jungkook, thirteen at the most, tired himself into unconsciousness.
Hoseok protested, said he was too dangerous (they both had burns from the fire, bruises from Jungkook’s fighting), but when Yoongi threatened to stay on that planet alone with the somehow surviving boy, he gave in. Thank stars he did.
A month later, when they finally coaxed Jungkook out of the storage cabin for a sit-down meal, he caught whiff of a Reaver vessel. Started drawing their ships in ketchup all over the table, and just as they would have crossed into Reaver space, Yoongi understood the strange, sticky art. To think that they were almost captured, if not for Jungkook’s instinct shooting them through a shaky wormhole, thankfully piloting them into a sector not too far from Kosmos.
And to think, too, how they would have gone about their lives without the boy they named that day. Jungkook, who’s quiet as a mouse and cleans the ship like he knows something they don’t. Who scrunches his nose up like a rabbit when he smiles.
Seokjin is endlessly annoyed by him. His brother Namjoon, a politician, is desperate to know what the Academy wanted from their experiments, how they can prevent it happening to more kids like Jungkook. But Hoseok thinks they’re taken with the teenager, just as he and Yoongi are. Fell for his protective heart despite him wanting to protect them first.
NOW
“Eat your rice, don’t levitate it,” Yoongi orders Jungkook, who’s been growing at an outrageous pace since puberty hit him hard. He’s probably around fifteen now, but Jimin can't find any clues to his identity. Can't find any information on the Alliance building at all, except to confirm a few manufacturing codes from the old equipment (that didn’t bode well for their morality).
Sometimes, Hoseok jokes that they adopted him, but Yoongi takes it seriously. He taught the kid to read, to cook, is even teaching him piano on a fancy keyboard his last client gave him as a gift. He’s our responsibility, Yoongi will say, even if he means that they’re his parents. And… that’s okay, Hoseok’s decided, despite his former will to die without a legacy. It’s okay as long as they’re raising him to live his own life, to live as himself. Raising him to set him free, see what wonders he can do with the power he’s been given.
Yeah. That doesn’t sound so bad.
“Who’s in Bultao?” Hoseok asks, just to make conversation. They’ve never been to that planet before, seldom been through the sector. It’s close to Hoseok’s old one.
“Kim Taehyung, a distant relative of Joonie’s,” Yoongi answers, still watching Jungkook’s plate like a hawk to make sure he doesn’t try something ridiculous like folding it in half with his mind. “He has a painting he’d like me to see.”
That’s the funny thing about Yoongi’s clients- they never seem to be in it for the sex. Even Namjoon, who met Yoongi through his brother, only started paying him because the council on his planet didn’t want the public to think he was friends with anti-Alliance Browncoats. Only started fucking him because Yoongi suggested it one night while they were locked up in his work accommodation, both too wound up from a debate about poetry to lay down and fall asleep.
Yoongi returned to the ship the next morning with flushed cheeks and a coy smile, and when he told Hoseok about it they both giggled like little kids. And Hoseok… wasn’t jealous. Has never been jealous, because Yoongi sees Namjoon as a friend. Hell, he sees Namjoon as a friend, one of the only people in the universe who gets his distrust of power, his hesitance to lead. The sex is just that, just sex. Just one way they show affection to each other, when debate and music aren’t enough.
Companions are incredible that way, Hoseok thinks, or maybe that’s just Yoongi.
THEN
They almost died again, after Jungkook saved them from the Reavers.
Hoseok took a mission from another war buddy, a bounty hunter he still owed from when they were smuggled children away from the war. It was a dangerous retrieval of a prisoner from an inner circle planet, a man his benefactor swore was innocent. And Hoseok was bold after the Reavers, too proud to ask for Yoongi’s second opinion. Yoongi, who could spot liars as though they wore neon signs.
He should have. Hoseok freed the prisoner without much effort, disguising himself as an Alliance guard and entering the prison center with a code he got from Jimin. That part was easy. Getting back to the ship was easy.
But the prisoner wasn’t a good man. He tied Hoseok up as soon as they entered the cockpit, revealed that he knew his true identity, that his parents would be thrilled to have him back. Thankfully, he had no idea there was a Companion on board the ship, and Yoongi fought him easily. Backed him into a corner with the silver pistol he kept under his mattress. Used the matching blade to free Hoseok from his tethers.
Unfortunately, Jungkook already imprinted on his new hyungs, and didn’t understand their plan to turn him back in. His magic- psychic power, space voodoo, whatever it is- wilded, and his anger tossed the ship into a violent orbit, spinning through space and plummeting toward a gas giant. Somehow, Hoseok managed to climb his way back into driver’s seat, maneuvered them out of the planet’s gravitational pull and back into the gentle drift of space.
The man died in the upheaval. They all should have died.
“How are we going to fix this?” Yoongi grieved when they left the cockpit, saw the disaster their ship had become. But Jungkook, sweet Jungkook who never meant to hurt anyone that badly, closed his eyes and willed the broken plates back together. Willed the pillows back on the beds. Willed their ship into a safe haven once again (even though it was sort of his fault it all got wrecked in the first place).
Hoseok tucked him into bed, shot the body of their almost captor into space, and knocked on the door to Yoongi’s private room.
“Come in,” he heard, and Yoongi was in bed himself, pretending to read a book.
“It’s upside-down,” Hoseok informed him, and his forever passenger merely chuckled, set the book down on his nightstand.
“No more odd jobs,” he said, and they both knew what it meant. No more bounties, no more running from the law. Good, honest work from there on out.
“Okay,” Hoseok agreed, and began to strip his clothes in the same order Yoongi had done years before. Yoongi watched. Silent, but not too shy to rake his eyes up and down Hoseok’s body. A dancer’s body, he’d said on their first night together. Hoseok never forgot that.
He crawled onto Yoongi’s (frankly stupidly) high bed, straddled his legs atop the covers.
“What are you doing?”
Hoseok grabbed his hand, pressed it against his chest. “I can’t lose you,” he admitted, and Yoongi made a broken sound that seemed to come from nowhere, his face the usual picture of elegance. “I can’t die unless you know what you mean to me, what you’ve always meant to me.”
His first love. The first person who made him feel like a person.
“I know,” Yoongi promised, and leaned in. Kissed Hoseok for the first time since they met again. He kissed back, hard, pressed his tongue against Yoongi’s lips in a way he hadn’t before. “Shhh,” Yoongi cooed, pulling back. “What is this?”
“Let me make love to you,” Hoseok begged, and his eyes welled up while the recycled ship air pressed goosebumps on his bare skin. He felt… small. Not in a good way, the way he felt when Yoongi sometimes ran fingers through his hair while he was flying. Small like when he was a child, when his tutors said to pay attention, when his parents told him to stop daydreaming about the stars.
Yoongi pulled him back. “You don’t want this.”
“I want you.”
“You have me.”
“Please. You’ve given me so much, you’ve given me this family. Let me give you something in return.” It felt humiliating, to be on his knees in front of the person he respected most, begging for something that he didn’t want at all.
“I don’t want anything.”
“Sure you do.”
Yoongi admitted it once, during the war. Said that he was almost disappointed that he’d never get to see his Seokie all riled up the way he gets to see so many others.
He frowned. “I was joking.” Maybe he was. They were desperate for levity. It was a terrible war.
Still, it changed nothing. “You’re saying you don’t want sex?”
“I have sex all the time.” Yoongi hesitated, cheeks pink. “I- no one gives me what you give me, Seok-ah.”
“Comfort?” he guessed, and Yoongi’s eyes welled up before kissing him again, more gentle than ever.
“Companionship,” he whispered between their lips, like it was a secret. Their little secret.
NOW
That was a year ago, and tonight, Hoseok climbs into Yoongi’s (still way too high) bed (and doesn’t even joke about it, because they’re long past jabs at Yoongi’s height) without a doubt of what they mean to one another.
“Kook’s driving,” he tells his partner (in work, in crime, in every good thing he’s ever done). But Jungkook isn’t really behind the wheel, just propelling their ship forward on a brainwave, steering them safely through the stars.
Yoongi nods behind an old Mandarin book he refused to let Seokjin keep in a museum, by an author none of them had ever heard of. Some mysteries you never solve, he told Seokjin before they left Kosmos, and the older man relented, too amused to fight.
Yoongi has a way of disarming people without a fight.
Hoseok smirks. “You know, Jin-hyung says I should be jealous of your clients.”
“Ha.”
“Is that all you have to say? Should I be jealous?”
Yoongi shakes his head. “No.”
Something lingers in Hoseok’s head, a thought he has sometimes, alone on board the ship. “Do you want me to be?”
That makes Yoongi stir, put down his book, rest a cheek against his palm while he really, really considers it. He makes a face when he does that, debate things that deserve a proper answer. Parted lips and lazy eyelids and a calm gaze that seems to face within. So, he looks wonderful when he answers, “I want you to be as happy as can be.”
“I am,” Hoseok promises, and the ship lulls them off to sleep.