Work Text:
The bell above the shop door dings, signaling the abrupt end of Yoongi’s tranquil morning.
“Welcome in,” he drones without looking up.
“Thanks,” says an eager voice. “Actually, this is my first time in the area — I had a couple of questions about the park?”
Yoongi sighs and tugs his headphones down around his neck. “I guess I could give you a map,” he says, glancing up to take stock of the intruder.
Oh.
He’s tall — that’s the first thing that Yoongi notices. Tall and handsome and grinning way too brightly for so early in the morning.
Right away, Yoongi decides to be a little bit more helpful than he had originally planned.
“That’d be amazing,” the man is saying, and he actually sounds grateful rather than just polite. “Could you help me orient myself a little bit? Sorry, I’m — not very good with maps.”
Yoongi catches himself staring just a second too long. Forcing himself to snap out of it, he tugs a paper map out of the plastic display and spreads it out on the counter for the man to see. “This is the northern part of Chiaksan National Park. You’re here, see the arrow? The visitor’s center is on the road north, and Chilseok Falls is just south of here.”
“Oh, wow,” the man says under his breath.
“Are you camping for the weekend?”
“Yeah, I’m booked for about five days at Guryong.”
“Great. You got here on the walking trail?”
“Yeah,” the man says, still a little hapless and scattered. “I thought this was the visitor’s center. Sorry.”
“No problem, it’s really not that far from here.” Yoongi gestures around. “This is just a rock shop.”
At that, the man seems to truly recognize his surroundings for the first time. “Oh,” he says, “oh, wow, look at that,” and before Yoongi can say anything else, he’s hurrying across the shop to inspect a large cross-sectioned geode resting on a display shelf. “Are these all found in the park?”
“I think so,” Yoongi says, unsure because he’s never bothered to ask and also because no one’s ever bothered to tell him. “People used to dig stuff up all the time out here. Big rocks and crystals and gold and stuff.”
“Wow,” the man says again. “You must love working here. This is amazing.”
“It’s just a summer job,” Yoongi says. “I live in Seoul during the academic year.”
The man glances over his shoulder. “Oh, me too,” he says. “What brought you all the way out here for work?”
“Well, I thought” — he grits his teeth — “that I’d get some peace and quiet if I worked at some random shop in the park, but there are tons of tourists in the summer, so.”
The man looks almost apologetic. “Sorry,” he says, as if there’s really something to apologize for. “I’ll just — take the map and get out of your way. Do I owe you anything for it?”
“No, no,” Yoongi says, marking the pathway back to the campsite, to the visitor’s center, and to the Falls with his thick green highlighter. “They’re included in your parking pass price. Have a good day.”
“See you around,” says the man. “I’m Namjoon, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you,” Yoongi says, tapping his name badge in response.
-
The next day, Namjoon comes back.
Yoongi slides his headphones down around his neck in preparation for the deluge of questions and comments about the park, but they never come. Instead, Namjoon just pokes around the shelves, scanning through rock identification manuals and bird guides and history-of-the-park leaflets. He hovers by the big purple geode again, kneeling; Yoongi watches his thighs flex with more attention than he would like to admit.
Eventually, he speaks up. “Can I help you find anything?”
“Oh, no, I’m just looking,” Namjoon says hurriedly. “Sorry, I don’t want to disturb you too much, I just thought — maybe your shop would have something on mushrooms. I saw an interesting one this morning and I didn't know how to identify it.”
“We do,” Yoongi says, “our books are on the back wall. There are a couple of field guides and some children’s books.”
“A field guide would be perfect,” Namjoon says.
After some perusing, he brings his selection up to the front. As Yoongi rings him up, Namjoon fiddles with the little velvet bags by the register.
“What are these for?” he asks.
Yoongi peeks over his monitor. “Oh, they’re for that kids’ thing outside,” he says. “You can buy a bag of rocks and sift for gold or whatever. Then you can put whatever you find in these bags. We usually do it when school trips come through the park.”
Namjoon looks far too interested for a man about Yoongi’s age. “Cool,” he says. He looks like he’s almost considering buying one until Yoongi rips the receipt off the machine and hands it to him.
“Do you want a bag?” Yoongi asks.
Namjoon shakes his head. “No, I think I’m good.”
“All right. Have a good day.”
-
Yoongi’s almost hoping that Namjoon doesn’t show up on the third day just so that he can work on his music in peace, but that’s before Namjoon walks through the door with a dog.
“Oh my God,” Yoongi says, tossing his headphones on the desk. “What’s your dog’s name?”
“This is Moni,” Namjoon says, smiling a little. “Is it all right to have dogs in here? If not, I can just leash him up to the bike rack or something.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Yoongi says, stooping to scritch the dog’s white fur. “Whoa, you got dusty on the path here, didn’t you?”
By the time he comes back to his senses, Namjoon’s smiling down at him.
“I just came by to grab a quick lunch,” he says. “Do you have a minute?”
“Yeah,” Yoongi finds himself saying. “Yeah, I — I could step outside for a while.”
Namjoon purchases a few things, some nonperishables from the rack beside Yoongi’s checkout counter, and a bottle of water for each of them. Yoongi brings his packed lunch out from under the desk and hangs the BE BACK SOON sign on the door of the shop, following as Moni leads them outside towards a picnic bench.
Stooping, Namjoon loops Moni’s leash around the bars of the bench. Once he’s upright, he pulls two peaches out of his coat pockets and offers one to Yoongi.
“I thought you might want a peach,” he says. “I found these at the camp store, and they seemed pretty fresh. They have a farm stand up there, but you probably know about that already.”
Yoongi smiles, just a little, and takes the peach. “Thanks,” he says, and holds it delicately in two hands. Namjoon smiles back, crescent eyes and full lips and — if Yoongi’s not mistaken — a flush on the apples of his cheeks.
Yoongi supposes he's never appreciated the farm stand much before this moment. But, when he bites into that peach, it tastes sweeter than anything.
-
Yoongi begins to look forward to Namjoon’s visits after that.
His long-sought-after peace and quiet is well and thoroughly disturbed, but it’s not all bad to have a handsome himbo taking up space in his eyeline for an hour or so every day.
If Yoongi was truly honest with himself, he’d say he had a crush.
“Do you like your job?” Namjoon asks, four days into this routine.
“It’s fine,” Yoongi says, shrugging. He clicks through the inventory spreadsheet displayed on his monitor. “It’s kind of boring, but that’s why I came out here in the first place.”
“It must be cool to be around all these rocks and geodes and stuff, though,” Namjoon says, wandering the shelves again, like he does every time. “It’s something I never really get to see in Seoul, you know?”
“I guess,” Yoongi says. “It’s kind of a tourist trap. It’s not really my—”
He’d meant to say that it wasn’t really his thing, all this nature stuff — a rock is just a rock, after all, and the moist mossy ground outside does nothing for him but make his pantlegs wet — but the way that Namjoon inspects the purple geode on the shelf at the front of the store makes him pause.
There’s something there, something familiar, in Namjoon’s eyes. It's something that Yoongi feels himself when he's working on music, some kind of much-adored routine, a peace of its own kind that has nothing at all to do with perfect silence and an empty shop.
“It’s not really my first love,” he ends up saying, “but it’s something I've started to appreciate more and more since you got here.”
When Yoongi jogs out to his car that afternoon, rain pours down through the treetops and the puddles on the path soak his shoes in no time at all.
For once, though, maybe for the first time, Yoongi doesn’t mind.
-
On the fifth day, Namjoon’s last day, Yoongi greets him with a steaming cup of coffee. They occupy themselves with just that for a while, sharing a kind of comfortable silence across the counter.
“You’re going home today,” Yoongi says eventually, and Namjoon nods.
“I had a good time,” he says. “It’s really beautiful out here.”
Yoongi smiles a little, grips his own mug with fidgety hands. “You know what,” he says, “it rained on me yesterday and I didn’t even mind.”
Namjoon laughs. “See, that’s the spirit.”
“And this morning, when I was coming in, I walked through the ginkgo leaves and the way the water shone off of all that yellow was the closest thing to sunlight I’d seen all summer. It was beautiful.”
Namjoon’s expression is warm, warm, warm.
“It was really nice to meet you, Yoongi,” he says, and turns to go.
“Wait,” Yoongi says, all in a rush. “I got you something.”
Namjoon’s surprise shows in his face. “You did?”
Shyly, Yoongi produces a new map, a map of the whole country this time. He hands it over, and Namjoon takes it gently. “So you can find your way back,” Yoongi says.
-
Namjoon waits until he’s back at his bicycle to unfold the map.
There are intricate, delicate paths traced in green highlighter, just like before, leading out of the park and to the nearest transit stop.
But there’s something else, too.
Below the snaking lines, below the blue ribbon of the river and the dotted park boundary lines, is Yoongi’s phone number.
-
As soon as he's back in his cramped apartment, Namjoon calls Yoongi right away.
When Yoongi returns to Seoul a month later, just before the start of the semester, they arrange to get coffee at the Gingko Cafe.
Yoongi’s picking him up, because it’s raining again and because Namjoon can’t quite wait until they get to the cafe to see him.
Namjoon's full of nerves, but he's breathing steadily: it's just Yoongi, he reminds himself. Just the guy from the rock shop. No surprises there.
Yoongi, however, has other plans.
When he knocks on Namjoon’s apartment door, he’s holding that purple geode from the rock shop.
“It’s yours,” he says quietly, “if you want it."
Namjoon does.