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If Yoongi was the blogging type - which he’s not, empathetically not, prose in fancy font is Namjoon’s thing whenever he bothers to remember the internet exists - he would be going viral for posts like Ten Things They Don’t Tell You About Dating Vampires, or Home Hacks For When Your Idiot Boyfriend Runs Out Of Sunscreen At The Beach. (Smashed avocado. Saved Jung Hoseok’s life in summer 2015. Photographic evidence is stored on a password-locked harddrive in Min Yoongi’s studio drawer.)
Cold, Yoongi thinks when he is jerked hurtling into wakefulness at a disgusting hour by a snowman wiggling his way under his blanket.
“Fucking, fucking fuck,” Yoongi curses, when a frigid hand comes to rest on his belly under his t-shirt.
“Hyung,” Hoseok whines miserably, “the heating is broken.”
Yoongi takes a deep breath. “You’re dead. Seokesok-ah, you’re literally dead, you do not feel the cold.”
“Not true,” Hoseok mumbles, which shouldn’t be cute when Yoongi can feel warmth leaving his body celsius by celsius. “I hate the cold. ‘S unpleasant. You smell nice, too,” he adds, a slurred afterthought, then rests his - icy! - cheek against Yoongi’s neck, right over his pulse.
“Fucking fuck,” Yoongi mutters into the absolute silence.
Ten Things They Don’t Tell You About Dating Vampires, bullet point one: while vampires are technically dead and don’t generate their own body heat, most of them don’t like feeling cold. Hoseok owns an alarming amount of fuzzy socks. The first time Yoongi came home from the studio to find him and Namjoon curled up on top of Yoongi’s electric blanket in his dingy living room, he almost got a heart attack.
Bullet point two: vampires don’t need sleep, but love naps.
Bullet point two, supplemental: absolutely nothing will wake Hoseok up if he decides that he’d rather be asleep than awake, not even Yoongi wiggling out from under him to fetch the electric blanket from the living room sofa and kicking him in the nuts by accident as he goes.
Namjoon is up. He’s wearing sweatpants and an embroidered jeogori over a woolen sweater, and he’s reading something vaguely book shaped in the darkness.
Yoongi, toes freezing on the floor as he picks his way over to the sofa, rolls his eyes.
“Hoseok is playing icicle in my bed,” he says. “Care to join? Make me into an ice cream sandwich?”
Namjoon looks up and smiles, dimpled and gorgeous. He’s wearing Yoongi’s glasses even though he doesn’t need them to see.
Dick.
“Joon-ah. Words,” Yoongi adds when Namjoon stays quiet for too long. Would Yoongi see his own breath show in the air if the light was on? He shifts from foot to foot on the tile.
“Sorry,” Namjoon says. “It’s cold. Is the heating out?”
“Did Seok-ah not say?”
Namjoon shakes his head, then turns and blinks, owlishly, at the window.
“Oh,” he says, voice soft. “Yoongi, look. It’s snowing.”
Yoongi groans when he walks over and looks outside. The street is blurred with cottony white. There’s a couple of centimeters of it settled on the windowsill already, bumpy over the sad corpses of Yoongi’s summer geraniums.
“And the heating’s out, too. I’m gonna catch pneumonia and die,” Yoongi mutters crossly, tugging the blanket closer to him. “Fine. Nobody say we don’t like a classic trope in this house. Typical. You coming to bed or what? Huddle for warmth?”
Namjoon glances at him, at the blanket, then at the outlet by the armchair he currently occupies, and shakes his head.
“I want to admire the snow with you.”
He says admire like some kind of scholar displaced from history. Which he could be. Oh, old, Namjoon had said when Yoongi asked how old he was, once, in the kind of dismissive tone that could have meant anything: was he thirty? Three-hundred? Yoongi resigned himself never to know for sure. Namjoon is nevertheless the kind of guy who would sit in an IKEA armchair by the window in a third floor Seoul one-bedroom apartment and murmur something about plum blossoms and the lonely call of a goose, when the fancy strikes him.
(Vampires don’t bruise purple or red, not really. They’re more a greyish blue. The colour palette of hypothermia. It’s hard to pick out the difference in the darkness, but the elevator in Yoongi’s building is pretty brightly lit - it was the first time Namjoon quoted poetry at him, Yoongi later found out. Not like he could interpret the garbled Mandarin in any way on that January night eight years ago. Not with Hoseok delirious, and Namjoon looking deader than dead.)
“You’re thinking about it,” Namjoon says.
“You’re wearing my glasses,” Yoongi replies, quite nonsensically.
It was snowing, then, too. Yoongi - who is generally quite proud of his self-preservation instincts - had taken one look at fanged-out fledgling-Hoseok curling into a beaten up Namjoon, sighed, then said, I keep a few blood bags in my freezer for my cousin, if y’all want dinner.
Namjoon fell into the armchair by the window as soon as Yoongi invited them in. Hoseok tore through two microwave pouches of o-negative, curled up against Yoongi’s side, and fell asleep as the wind shook the window and whacked ice against glass like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum.
Ten Things They Don’t Tell You About Dating Vampires, supplemental note: letting a feared Creature of the Night and his freshly turned fledgling crash on your sofa until they sort out whatever ‘property dispute’ landed them in a dodgy alley beaten within an inch of their lives and starving, might have unforeseen consequences. They might never leave, for instance.
You might not want them to.
“You’re thinking very loudly,” Namjoon says.
His eyes on Yoongi are soft. Snowfall then, snowfall now. Namjoon had always believed in fate.
“Shut up,” Yoongi grumbles. “I’m freezing. Come to bed.”
Namjoon hums, then shakes his head.
“Come here, hyung, just a bit? Hm?”
Hyung. Yoongi rolls his eyes, but he allows Namjoon to pull him closer and take the electric blanket. Namjoon narrowly avoids braining himself on the corner of the table when he bends down to plug it in.
His birthday on his ID card is 12th September 1994. He only calls Yoongi hyung when he feels especially sentimental.
“Come on,” he says now, holding the blanket out.
When Yoongi shuffles between his legs, Namjoon drapes it around his shoulders and wraps Yoongi up like a burrito, then picks him up and folds him into his arms.
“I hate it when you do that,” Yoongi mumbles, winded.
“Do what?”
“Pick me up. I’m like… heavy.”
Namjoon smiles. Yoongi can tell from the way the air shifts around his exhale, a little amused sigh.
“Are you?”
Namjoon nuzzles closer. His nose - cold, cold - bumps against the shell of Yoongi’s ear.
Yoongi rolls his eyes.
“Whatever. Show-off.”
Snow falls. The light is almost blue with it, an icy soft filter over the world. Yoongi’s feet tucked inside the blanket begin to thaw slowly.
Ten Things They Don’t Tell You About Dating Vampires, bullet point three: most vampires are cuddlers, but in a tsundere way. They’re a bit like cats. You have to earn their trust first.
After that, they can and will lay across your keyboard until you give up working to pet their hair. After that, there is no escape.
“Happy anniversary,” Namjoon murmurs into Yoongi’s hair.
“Happy anniversary,” says Yoongi. “Hobi’s gonna be upset if we leave him alone for too long.”
“You can make it up to him with anniversary dinner.”
Yoongi scoffs. “Microwave o-negative?”
“You saved his life, you know,” Namjoon says softly.
Bullet point four: vampires are sentimental fuckers.
“Like I was gonna watch the university dance captain go on a murderous rampage on campus, because his vampire daddy couldn’t provide for him properly.”
“I hate it when you call me that,” grumbles Namjoon.
“You’re not denying the allegations of child neglect.”
Namjoon pulls Yoongi closer. The accusation had lost its sting long ago - You caught me at a historical low point, Namjoon had said when Yoongi yelled at him about irresponsibly turning somebody and failing to provide adequate care afterwards, blue and grey bruises a mottled topographical map of cursed magic from his brows to his t-shirt collar.
A group of mudang were involved, apparently, and Namjoon’s old brood. There was some kind of necromantic ritual. Namjoon talks about the house he lost like he’s still mourning a person.
It was harder to care, at the time. Hoseok’s missing posters were going ragged with melting snow. Hoseok himself, red-eyed and a little out of it, was sitting in Yoongi’s one-bedroom apartment with his reluctant sire pressing a bag of frozen peas against his bruised cheek, sipping on Jungkook’s supply of microwave dinners with an ethically sourced reusable straw.
That Yoongi happened to have both a massive crush on the university dance captain and a vampire cousin, and was therefore perfectly positioned to offer them his couch and the contents of his freezer, well. Namjoon just shrugged and said, Fate. Hoseok, once he regained coherency, cried all over both their shoulders about saving his sorry life.
Hoseok switched to night classes after that. The university dance team had lost its captain, and the neighbourhood fledgling hip-hop group had gained one.
“Yeah, well,” Namjoon says. “I’m not exactly a model parent, am I?”
“Considering you regularly make out with your vampire child, no. Not strictly speaking.”
Namjoon huffs a laugh. His hand, where it sneaks into Yoongi’s hair to pet him, is warm now, with the blanket’s radiating heat.
“The snow’s beautiful,” he says after a long, comfortable pause.
Yoongi’s half asleep. Namjoon doesn’t breathe, but his body moves a little anyway. Habit.
“Bed,” Yoongi grumbles into his neck. “Seok-ah will have a fit.”
A kiss on his forehead, fingers on the collar of his t-shirt. The air smells, impossibly, like apple flowers for a second.
Namjoon is smiling.
“Okay,” he says, unplugs the blanket, then picks Yoongi up as he is, wrapped up and cosy, and blinks to the bedroom.
“Show-off,” Yoongi says, muffled with a yawn.
Namjoon deposits him in the bed behind Hoseok, pulls the blanket up, and crawls in after him. His arm wrapping around Yoongi’s burritoed waist is solid. Heavy.
“You plug the blanket in?”
“Mm.”
Yoongi sighs and nestles against Hoseok.
“G’night, Joon,” he says.
He hears Namjoon laugh again and feels, with a shiver and a pleased little tug in his chest, cool lips brush against the nape of his neck.
“Good night, hyung,” Namjoon sighs, then goes still and silent with sleep.
Outside, the world slowly turns from blue and grey to white, white, white.