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Yoongi understands that his living space is, in kind words, cozy.
He’s spent enough late nights stalking the VanLife hashtag on Instagram to know that there are people out there with trailers bigger than his entire apartment had been back in Seoul. His truck bed camper may be a bit of a shoebox in comparison, but he hadn’t needed the space then, and he certainly doesn’t miss it now. There’s room for him and for Holly and for a guest to squeeze in every once and awhile, and usually he enjoys having company. He likes how they make the space feel warmer, more intimate.
Usually, though, the company in question are friends that he’s known for years and seen in hundreds of embarrassing, inebriated, and otherwise compromising situations. As far as hot storm-rescued strangers go, this is a first.
All of this goes to say that Jungkook’s knees are just barely poking into the back of Yoongi’s thighs as he sits obediently on the couch, staring at Holly while Yoongi waits on the percolator. Yoongi’s good towel (the huge fluffy gray one that’s soft like a blanket) is wrapped around Jungkook’s shoulders and his old towel (the huge formerly-white one that he’s had since college, probably) is draped across his own. Even so, as he turns to face Jungkook, Yoongi feels water dripping off his stringy hair and creeping down the back of his neck under his T-shirt. The floor is slick with the cold humidity in the air and the residue of two soaked hoodies and four damp socks with nowhere to hang dry. Outside, the rain continues, plinking away at the camper’s metal shell like chicken-pecked piano keys against the background hush of wet forest.
“Coffee should be about ready,” Yoongi breaks the settled silence. He leans back against the counter for lack of a place to sit that isn’t right next to Jungkook and his big thighs. Jungkook gives him an absent nod of acknowledgement but mostly stays focused on Holly, wide-eyed, like they’d be having a full telepathic conversation if only the poodle weren’t so preoccupied scratching at his own ear.
“Do you have a towel that you use for Min Holly, Yoongi-ssi?” Jungkook asks, glancing up at Yoongi as he reaches to pull Holly into his lap. He'd gotten a kick out of the dog being introduced with a family name and has since refused to refer to him as anything less. Maybe Holly appreciates the formality, because he never puts up with this much coddling when Taehyung is the culprit. “Or would you mind if I use this one to dry him off?”
“That’s fine,” Yoongi replies. “His fur isn’t that thick, he’s probably already halfway dry.” He turns back to fiddle with the percolator so he won’t get caught staring as Jungkook unwraps himself from the towel to bundle Holly up in it, making these babyish cooing noises that out of context would sound a bit creepy, to be honest, but given the scene are just unfairly cute. Yoongi grabs two mugs from his cups-and-spices shelf and cuts the gas on the burner as he pours the coffee.
“Ah, thank you, Yoongi-ssi,” Jungkook gives a little head bow and takes the steaming mug with both hands, arms still wrapped loosely around a swaddled, scruffy-looking Holly. He blows on it and takes a careful sip, big eyes round and focused like a little kid. With his huge black hoodie puddling on the floor, now Yoongi can see how his tattoos extend beyond his knuckles, curling all the way up his right forearm and under his T-shirt sleeve.
The knuckle tattoos are one of the main reasons Yoongi secretly blames this whole thing at least a little bit on Jungkook anyways. He’d been nothing short of a distraction this morning, long legs and all those hoopy earrings in his ears, asking to pet Holly, gracefully declining Yoongi’s offered tangerine, shyly suggesting that the two of them stick together for the rest of the trail. Jungkook had a stubbornly lengthy explanation why each and every item in his 70-liter backpack was crucially important for a 20-kilometer hike, and Yoongi had been too sincerely invested to notice that there wasn’t nearly enough sunshine for his face to feel as warm as it did, or that the wind fashionably whipping through Jungkook’s hair wasn’t just some special effect of his own mind’s doing. They made it to the summit just in time for the heavens to unleash.
Jungkook early in the morning, lit by the tomato-orange sun as it filtered through the trees, had already seemed overwhelmingly handsome. But Jungkook in the rain, pushing his long, damp hair out of his eyes with those tattooed fingers—
—“if you have any? So sorry to be a bother,” Jeongguk’s saying, looking a little abashed. Holly chooses that moment to get antsy and wriggle off of his lap onto the floor, which makes his coffee slosh dangerously at the edges and gives Yoongi a couple precious seconds to try and piece together what he’s just been asked. No luck. Jungkook must interpret his absolutely blank stare as some sort of rejection, because his shoulders creep towards his ears and he adds hastily, “No worries! You were nice enough to let me into your, uh, home, Yoongi-ssi, and make me coffee, and pet Min Holly, and—”
“Sorry, I just didn’t hear what you said. Ask me again?” Yoongi cuts him off, because he’s good friends with Kim Namjoon and knows how to handle a nervous rambler. Jungkook’s posture relaxes so abruptly he sloshes his coffee again.
“Oh, sorry, um,” he says, less panicked but obviously still a little nervous. “Do you have any sugar? My hyung works at a cafe so I usually just order really convoluted things with, like, fifty different syrups in them. I think I’ve forgotten what actual coffee tastes like.” As it to prove himself he takes another absentminded sip and scrunches his nose, surprised by the bitterness.
For the most part, Yoongi just buys whichever coffee comes in the container he most needs for storage at the time. He chugs it black without tasting it because if he lets himself doctor it up he’ll revert to being a coffee snob and make himself sad thinking about how much he misses real espresso. Thank god for Namjoon’s insistent sweet tooth, at least, because Yoongi is pretty sure he has a tiny bag of sugar from a few weeks ago crumpled up somewhere in the pantry.
“Yeah, no problem. Let me see where I put it.” He tries to play it cool as he turns and rummages around, like he’s not having an existential crisis over serving this cute boy sludge coffee without asking him how he takes it or how he likes his eggs in the morning or how he feels about the winter season and the color green and the way pine trees stretch like spindly soundwaves between the earth and the stars. He finally finds a crinkled paper bag of sugar tucked into the tin where he usually stores protein bars. If he makes sure to grab the kind of unnecessarily fancy teaspoon Taehyung gifted him last June, it’s not like Jungkook is any the wiser. Jungkook bows and thanks him again as he takes the sugar and spoon out of Yoongi’s hands.
“I don’t know if I said this earlier, Yoongi-ssi, but I think your camper is seriously so, so cool.” He’s refreshingly earnest about it, a little stuttery, obviously not just bringing it up out of politeness. “I watched a bunch of Youtube videos about these types of things one time and it really made me want to run off into the woods for a bit.”
“I feel like I’m probably supposed to advise you against that, but that’s basically exactly what I did,” Yoongi replies as he watches Jungkook stir in what seems to be the entire rest of the bag, spoonful by spoonful, no shame about it whatsoever. He’s been wanting to know, and now feels like a good time to ask casually, “Is that why you were out there with no transportation at the trailhead and a backpack with enough supplies to camp for a week?”
“Ah, no,” Jungkook laughs a little, stirring in a final scoop. “I took the earliest bus from Busan this morning—I was seriously just planning on day hiking. The backpack was just in case, I guess, I dunno. I got it from my great-uncle.” He hands the sugar back to Yoongi like Yoongi will be able to get any use out of the four, maybe five, single crystals left at the bottom of the bag. “I’m not exactly the most experienced hiker,” Jungkook admits after a pause, swallowing another sip of his candy-coffee. “I’ve only really been one other time before today, and I brought a friend that time, so we were only out there for an hour or two.”
“It’s a nice hobby,” Yoongi says. “I hope the rain hasn’t completely changed your mind about it.”
“Well, next time, I definitely won’t forget to check the weather.” Jungkook’s lips are pouty and Yoongi has to laugh to keep from fully succumbing to the endearment welling up in his chest. The caffeine is finally sinking into his brain, and warmth is slowly starting to seep back into his fingers and the tips of his ears. It strikes him that if this whole thing were normal—if Jungkook was a friend who’d stayed the night or stopped by for the day, if they’d met through mutual friends or at the grocery store or in any other circumstance other than a loping trail at 6am and a torrential rainstorm at 8am—they’d probably be doing the exact same thing they are right now. Idle chat while the coffee kicks in, a little bit of friendly ribbing, easy silence as Holly’s tags jingle as he trots over to his water bowl while the rain patters on.
They’d had a bit of awkwardness at the beginning, standing back-to-back and trying not to throw elbows or whack each other with damp sleeves as they both stripped off soaked clothes. It took five minutes of Jungkook cutting himself off in the middle of flustered half-sentences for Yoongi to work out that the initial pair of sweatpants he’d lent him were too small to fit over his thighs. (It took at least twenty minutes after getting him another pair for Yoongi to be able to think about literally anything else.) Now though, settled and caffeinated and dry, sharing his morning with Jungkook feels like a muscle memory Yoongi never realized he’d had.
“Did you build all of this yourself?” Jungkook jars him from his thoughts. It’s a question Yoongi gets a lot. The camper isn’t much from the outside—he bought the shell off an old drinking pal of the guy who sold him the truck, and he bolted the two together himself, and it shows. But he and his friends designed and scrapped together every inch and board and nail of the place, and although it’s a bit of an ugly child Yoongi has never been a prouder parent. He falls asleep every night in his loft bed like a king surveying his kingdom: the kitchenette along one wall and the couch and table on the other, the little airplane aisle of space that runs between them, all of the storage crannies that you wouldn’t know to look for unless you’d installed them yourself like Yoongi had.
There’s something satisfying in the juxtaposition of this meticulously organized little life inside the camper, and the fact that at any given moment he can uproot it however it suits his fancy. He owns exactly three plates and one pot and five pairs of socks, and he owns them in the woodsy foothills he lived in four months ago, and on the vast expanse of rocky shore he lived in for two weeks last winter, and in the groves of mountain evergreens he’s living in now.
Usually, Yoongi is able to articulate these feelings pretty well—professional lyricist and all. In fact, he normally has a little elevator pitch about the camper that he could probably give in his sleep. It’s so practiced that a couple of months ago he was starting to give it to a curious guy in a bar and Taehyung interrupted to recite the entire thing, every syllable perfect down to the rhythm and the rasp. For the life of him Yoongi can’t remember a word of it now.
“Uh, yeah,” he answers lamely. “About three years ago now. Got tired of Seoul.” Jungkook nods seriously, like he’s conducting some kind of hard-hitting interview, but the image is broken as he furrows his eyebrows in confusion.
“Yoongi-ssi,” he asks conspiratorially, voice low, “how do you take a shower?”
Yoongi has to set his coffee down, his shoulders are shaking so much. “I’m serious!” Jungkook says indignantly, but he’s laughing too, biting his lip and trying to hold back a smile. “Your clothes smell way too nice for someone who hasn’t showered in three years.”
“My clothes smell nice?” Yoongi blurts. Jungkook’s eyes widen, guilty.
“I just never would’ve figured that some guy who, er, lives in a car in the woods would care about fabric softener, I guess,” he admits sheepishly, looking down at his mug. He narrows his eyes suddenly, eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Or that he would be such a big fan of TXT, for that matter.”
Now it’s Yoongi’s turn for all the blood in his body to rush to his face. His eyes flick to his usual mug (the black one with a little white Lord Nermal icon on the side, slightly chipped) and then to his cups-and-spices shelf, where his guest mug (the gray-blue Muji one that he stole from his parents’ house) is tucked behind a jar of chili flakes. Which means that the one currently in Jungkook’s hands is his cursed mug (the one with the big wraparound picture of Choi Yeonjun’s face that Hoseok found at a street fair and refuses to take home with him every time he visits).
“If I tell you it’s an inside joke would you believe me?” Yoongi asks, and he must sound pretty utterly defeated about it, because Jungkook gives him a shit-eating grin and just replies, “Sure, Yoongi-ssi,” and when Yoongi insists further—“I’m serious! It was a gift, I’m not rude enough to just refuse a gift from somebody, Jungkook-ah”—he just nods faux-sagely, “Whatever you say.”
“Uh, hyung is fine, by the way,” Yoongi adds belatedly, having realized that his brain was apparently comfortable enough to use “Jungkook-ah” without any prior conscious consent on Yoongi’s part. He refuses to make eye contact as he says it but sneaks a glance just in time to watch Jungkook drop his bratty smile in favor of something a little quieter, a little scrunchier.
“Okay, Yoongi-hyung. I’d like that,” he replies. They take simultaneous sips of their coffee like they’d planned it and then laugh about the coincidence. Easy silence. The rain is letting up a little bit.
Yoongi doesn’t consider himself a lonely person. He has Holly, for starters, and an explicitly non-work-related Skype call scheduled with Namjoon next Thursday, and in a month or so Taehyung and his boyfriend are hosting a belated housewarming party in Busan to celebrate finally moving in together. He hiked to Cheonhwangbong Peak six days ago, started when the sun was low and the fog hadn’t burned off yet, and he didn’t see another human soul on the trail even though by the time he made it back it was well past midday. Not once had he felt anything but perfect, intimate resonance, the buzzing in his soul and the steady pulse of granite.
It isn’t lost on him, though, just how long it’s been since he’s had an actual conversation with someone who hasn’t been a close friend for years and years. (He’s pretty sure sending emails that consist only of “Thanks [.MP3 attached] —MYG” and exchanging 30-second pleasantries with cashier ahjummas don’t count.) He’d been a little afraid of accidentally dragging Jungkook into testing whether the ability to make conversation with strangers can be shrugged on and off like a sweater. As far as Yoongi can tell, though, Jungkook is a little shy, but he doesn’t seem uncomfortable. If anything, it seems like he already fits in here, bundled up on the sofa as he drip-dries. Yoongi tries not to stare at how the humidity is making his bangs and the ends of his little ponytail all curly.
Eventually, Jungkook finishes his coffee and leans forward to set his mug on the counter next to Yoongi. The bottom is covered in a thick, syrupy layer of undissolved sugar. Sitting back, he pulls his knees up to his chest and plunks his chin down onto them, looks up at Yoongi with those big, dark eyes. His toes wiggle in Yoongi’s best pair of house socks (thick gray ones Yoongi made himself during Namjoon’s knitting phase). Yoongi’s other pair of house socks (one homemade yellow sock with wobbly smiley faces from Hoseok and one homemade yellow tube sewn together at one end, almost too formless to be considered a sock, from Namjoon) aren’t doing much to insulate his feet, but he’s used to it by now, and the rest of his body is so warm that he can’t quite be bothered to care.
“Yoongi-hyung, can I ask you another question?” Jungkook says, as if Yoongi would ever say no to him. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“Maybe I won’t once I hear it, but you’re always allowed to ask,” Yoongi replies honestly. He’s not really sure where this is heading, but the coffee has paradoxically made him a little sleepy, and the present company has him settled into his body in a way that usually only wandering double-digit-kilometers in the woods can achieve.
“Were you scared? When you made such a big change?” Jungkook’s voice is muffled where he’s resting his head on his knees. Ah, Yoongi thinks. So this is what it is.
“To be honest, at the time I don’t know if I had enough in me to be scared,” he admits. “Seoul was eating me up. I had a job that I loved, but eventually it was the only thing making me happy, and it started taking over my life.” He doesn’t say that for years, it was his life. For so long, it felt like the only thing he could ever get out of the world were the songs he wrenched into existence with his own hands. The camper is small compared to his apartment, but it had felt luxurious after living in his studio for weeks straight, only ever sleeping in his bed on the nights that he returned to to fork over the rent as the dust collected.
“So what do you do now?”
“I still make music. The company”—a fancy way of saying “Kim Namjoon PD”—“liked me enough that they still let me freelance sometimes. But now almost all of my music is mine, and I hike, and I cook a lot more, and I take care of Min Holly.” He knows that it’s not the “it was scary but it’s worth it” pep talk that Jungkook was maybe looking for, but Yoongi hopes that Jungkook can understand that he deserves Yoongi’s honesty. That Yoongi is more than happy to give it to him.
And he must, at least on some level, because he asks, “Could I, um. Would you mind showing me some of it?”
“I think that can be arranged,” Yoongi says and immediately feels stupid for saying. The little bit of coffee he has left has gone lukewarm, and the ceramic isn’t warming his hands up anymore, so he deposits both used mugs in the tiny sink before reaching over Jungkook (and trying not to think too hard about it) to grab his laptop from the table next to the sofa. In his mind, he’s just going to suffice with holding it up with one arm and typing one-handed with the other, but as soon as the computer is in his hands Jungkook scoots to the other side of the couch, a clear invitation, and really, who is Yoongi to refuse?
“There’s wifi in here too?” Jungkook asks as Yoongi mulls over how, exactly, he wants to define himself musically to this beautiful boy. “You really thought of everything, huh,” he says, almost to himself.
“Everything but the shower,” Yoongi replies, deadpan, not taking his eyes off the screen where he’s flicking through folders containing such masterpieces as “ajhvoenwweoi(16)” and “FINISH_THIS_IDIOT(8)”. It takes a few seconds for the joke to sink in but he can’t help but smirk a little at Jungkook’s indignant, “It was just a question!”
Eventually, Yoongi just pulls up his SoundCloud page and hands the laptop over to Jungkook, who looks a little surprised by the action.
“This is all of my stuff. I rent studio space to record vocals, but all the production is done in here,” he gestures to the camper, thinking about all of his equipment carefully stored away in the padded drawers right under where they’re sitting. Jungkook scrolls through the page, wide-eyed, hesitant to click on anything in particular.
“AGUST D?” Yoongi nods.
“Just for my songs. I go by SUGA when I produce for other people. But yeah. They’re both me.” He nods at the keyboard, where Jungkook’s hands are unmoving. “You can click on something. I like it when people listen to my music.”
Jungkook does. Together, they listen to every song from Yoongi’s second mixtape, and a couple from his first, and then Jungkook badgers him into pulling up the music videos for the TXT songs Yoongi admits he helped produce, which turns into Yoongi badgering Jungkook into pulling up his gaming-and-fitness-and-video-editing-and-miscellaneous Youtube channel that, despite Jungkook saying is “nothing huge”, has a couple thousand followers even though he hasn’t posted anything new in months. Yoongi tries not to read too much into it when he shows people his music, but he can’t help but be secretly pleased with how enraptured Jungkook looks as they listen together, the way he says, “Wow, hyung,” at the end of every song but sounds like he means it every single time.
He’s no stranger to the perils of a Youtube rabbit hole, but even so, Yoongi doesn’t even realize it’s nearing noon until Holly interrupts an extremely interesting video of Jungkook visiting the cat cafe where his roommate works to remind him that he hasn’t been let outside since early this morning. Jungkook, who has been shy this whole time about watching himself in his videos, leaps at the chance to pause it and scoop Holly up into his arms.
“What is it, Min Holly-ssi? Is it time to run around?” he asks in a cutesy little voice, bouncing the dog in his arms like a baby as he turns back to Yoongi. “Does he need to be on a leash, or can I just let him out?”
“He’s well-behaved, just keep the door open so we can keep an eye on him,” Yoongi replies, setting aside the laptop and taking advantage of the increased couch space to stretch his legs a little. It’s approaching lunchtime and he suddenly remembers that all he’s eaten since 5am is two tangerines and half a protein bar. He wonders idly if there are any smaller towns between here and Busan—he needs to go grocery shopping soon. There’s stuff for sandwiches here, but the rain is making him hungry for something warm and just lethargic enough to want to order takeout.
“Oh, it’s stopped raining,” Jungkook interrupts his thought bubble as Holly leaps out the back of the truck to prance around the dirt parking lot at the trailhead. Yoongi glances over and sure enough, the birds are back out, replacing the shushing noise of raindrops. Even the sky has lightened to a milky, overcast gray, making the pine trees all around them look even more vibrantly, stalwartly green.
Jungkook’s posture jolts suddenly, and he turns sharply back to face Yoongi from where he’d been staring out the doorway. “Oh my god, I’ve taken up your whole morning, Yoongi-hyu—Yoongi-ssi. I am so, so sor—”
“Don’t even think about it,” Yoongi drawls from his position now fully splayed out on the couch. “For starters, you don’t get to go back on ‘hyung’ now, and even besides that, you’ve been nothing but a lovely houseguest, and an indulgent music listener, and you even helped me get rid of all that sugar I didn’t know what to do with.” He picks his head up to stare Jungkook right in the eyes as he says it, just to prove how serious he is. “If you pick out where we should get takeout from and you can stay as long as you want. You took the bus out here this morning, right?” Jungkook nods slowly and Yoongi flops back down again. “Good. Let your hyung treat you to lunch and then I’ll drop you off wherever you want.”
He hopes he was appropriately nonchalant about the whole thing, that he didn’t come off as too desperate to keep Jungkook in his life for just a little longer, but after a prolonged period of silence he looks back up to see Jungkook, still staring at him, eyes big.
“Jungkook-ah, I didn’t mean to make you stay here if you don’t want to, I can drop you off right now—” Yoongi starts to recant, sitting up, but Jungkook interrupts him, jolting back into life from whatever train of thought had just been meandering through his head.
“No, Yoongi-hyung, I would—I would love to get lunch. I live in Busan, though, so I can just get my hyung to pick me up… oh shit,” he says to himself, frantically patting at his sweatpants pockets and then throwing himself across the trailer to dig through his hulking backpack. He finally yanks out a cell phone and winces as soon as he sees the lock screen. “Give me a second, hyung, sorry,” he says, and he shoves his feet into his still-damp hiking boots before hopping out of the camper, phone already up to his ear.
Yoongi takes the chance to check his own phone, if only to not eavesdrop on the conversation—“...I know! But I’m fine, I promise! …You told Jin-hyung?”—currently happening outside. There are a couple emails from work, a notification from the astrology app Taehyung downloaded onto his phone, a text from Namjoon asking what that place is that sells those rugs, hyung, you know the one. He ignores all of it in favor of playing Piano Tiles until he hears Jungkook set Holly back up in the camper before following back in himself.
“So I may or may not have texted my roommate this morning that I’d been taken in by a stranger who, er, lives in his car,” Jungkook says a bit sheepishly. “And then I also may or may not have not answered any of his other messages since then.” Yoongi has a sudden, visceral flashback of the last time he’d gone clubbing, in which Taehyung had run up to him at the bar, whispered in his ear, “Hyung, it’s happening,” and then disappeared until the next morning, when their group chat had received four pictures of him eating a fast food breakfast sandwich.
“So yeah, he’s glad I’m alive, but he’s not exactly happy with me,” Jungkook finishes, toeing off his boots and shutting the door behind him but still standing awkwardly in front of it. “He’s already on the way to us—he got my other hyung involved, since he’s the one with the car—so, um. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to stay for lunch, sorry.” The contrast between this scorned little brother and the hot tattooed e-boy Yoongi had met on the trail this morning is almost laughable, but Jungkook truly looks so sad about the prospect of not getting to eat shitty takeout while crammed onto the camper’s tiny sofa that it makes something funny skip in Yoongi’s heart.
“That’s okay, Jungkook-ah, I’m sure he just wanted to make sure you were safe. We can get takeout another time,” Yoongi demurs, and then realizes what he’s said. “Er—”
“That sounds nice, Yoongi-hyung,” Jungkook smiles. He brushes his bangs off his forehead a little bashfully.
“Good,” Yoongi replies. “Thank you for letting Holly out, by the way.” He scoots over on the couch, reopening his laptop, and Jungkook takes the hint. The video of Jungkook at the cat cafe is still paused, but Yoongi is now kind of hoping that watching someone make something will inspire him to actually go to the grocery store after Jungkook leaves. “Do you like cooking videos?”
Jungkook doesn’t watch a lot of cooking videos, but he does watch a lot of ASMR, so they watch honeykki make dolsot bibimbap and green tea cream puffs. They’re 2 ways into “Korean fried chicken 4 ways” when Yoongi hears the telltale sound of another car crunching into the dirt nearby. Jungkook jumps up and starts gathering his backpack and all of his now-dry clothes from the ladder rungs that lead to Yoongi’s bed, all of his still-pretty-wet clothes that were thrown on the floor. Yoongi peers out the window and sees Jungkook’s roommate hyung (Jimin, who looked significantly less murderous in Jungkook’s Youtube videos) and his car-owning hyung (Jin, he assumes, who both looks handsome enough to star in a drama and, oddly, familiar enough to have maybe already starred in a drama). They park next to the camper and Yoongi loses sight of both of them as they get out and walk around to Yoongi’s door.
He doesn’t wait for them to knock before swinging the door open, Jungkook shouting, “See! I told you I was fine!” from over his shoulder as he attempts to fold his sopping hoodie.
“Uh, hi,” Yoongi says. “He’ll just be a minute.”
“We can wait,” Jimin says pointedly, craning his neck to look at Jungkook inside the camper. “Not like we’ve been worried sick all morning or anything.”
“I really am sorry, hyung,” Jungkook seems to have abandoned trying to fold the hoodie as he comes up behind Yoongi, backpack bulky and arms full of clothes. Yoongi steps out of the way to let him hop down, only to be immediately pulled into a huge hug that nearly forces him to drop all of it.
“Jimin-ah was worried, Kookie,” Jin says. “You got lucky that Yoongi-yah was here to take care of you.”
Yoongi-yah? “Sorry, do I know you?” Yoongi asks, squinting at him. He realizes too late that it was undoubtedly a rude thing to say, but Jin doesn’t seem to take offense.
“I should hope so,” he replies haughtily, puffing his chest out a bit. Jungkook is still firmly in Jimin’s embrace, but both of their eyes are following the two oldest like a tennis match. Yoongi stares blankly and Jin deflates. His ears are starting to turn pink. “Y’know… Taehyung…” he makes a crude gesture with his tongue and his cheek.
“Oh my god, you’re that Jin-hyung,” Yoongi says blankly at the same time that Jimin extricates himself from Jungkook and says, “Wait, you knew this guy all along?”
“Well how was I supposed to know that Jungkookie’s ‘hot mountain guy who lives in his car’ was the same guy that Taehyung is friends with?” Jin whirls on Jimin. “There could be lots of hot mountain guys out here living in cars for all we know.” Jungkook makes a mortified noise and moves to cover his face with his hands before realizing they’re covered in clothes.
“Hot mountain guy,” Yoongi says to himself, but he must say it louder than he thought because Jin and Jimin immediately turn to look at him, and then at Jungkook, and then at each other.
“Kookie-yah, we’ll take your stuff back to the car for you, just meet us when you’re done,” Jimin says, grabbing all the clothes under one arm and tugging on Jin’s sleeve with another.
“I’ll see you at the housewarming party!” Jin calls over his shoulder. Yoongi gives an absentminded little wave before turning his attention back to Jungkook, who is currently staring at the ground with his hands clenched around his backpack straps like a schoolboy. Who deserves Yoongi’s honesty, and a little bit of his vulnerability.
“I would ask you for your number under the guise of getting my sweatpants back, but it seems like we’ll be seeing each other at this housewarming in a few weeks, so I’ll, uh, abandon the pretense. Do you want to go out sometime?” He clambers down out of his truck in his second-best house socks, tries not to blush too much at how Jungkook is looking at him like he’s magic. Jungkook nods so vigorously it makes his ponytail loose.
“I’d really like that, Yoongi-hyung.” He yanks his phone out of his pocket and enters Yoongi’s number, sending him a little series of indecipherable emojis so that Yoongi can have Jungkook’s as well.
Not that Yoongi will ever admit to it, but they must spend some decent amount of time just kind of… staring dopily at their phones and at each other, because Jin lays on the horn behind them and Jungkook spooks like a horse.
“Text me, okay hyung? So I can give your socks back to you soon.” That big scrunchy smile is back, and Yoongi’s face feels tight from how much he’s grinning in return.
“See you soon, Jungkook-ah,” he says. “Safe drive home.”
(As it turns out, Jungkook isn’t picky about his coffee as long as it’s unbearably sweet, and his favorite way to cook an egg is to soft-boil it for ramen. He likes summer more than winter, and he doesn’t wear green that much but he doesn’t have a reason why, and one time when he was a little kid he climbed too high in an oak tree in the park by his house and got stuck up there for two hours.
Also as it turns out, there are lots of beautiful places within driving distance of Busan to park a camper.)