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“We have a problem,” announces Jimin, dropping himself into the seat before Seokjin and staring up at him with wide eyes.
Seokjin snorts. “No. You have a problem. I have an idiot that keeps getting into one.”
“Hyung, this is serious!” chastises Jimin, a comical mix of worry and disapproval starting to simmer on his brow. “This is very, very serious. I promise you, Yoongi hyung hasn’t slept in days.”
“Because of the problem?”
“Well, partly – but mostly because he’s causing half the problem.”
“Well, what’s the problem?”
“The problem is coffee,” says Jimin solemnly, as though he were the Oracle of Delphi pronouncing Percy Jackson’s very elaborate contributions to the world. “That’s the problem.”
Seokjin looks away from his laptop, squinting suspiciously at his dongsaeng. “I don’t understand, Jimin-ah,” he says, frowning a little in his wake. “You know I’m an Earl Gray man myself. I don’t see a problem…”
“You don’t get it, Hyung,” insists Jimin frantically, waving his tiny hands around as though to drive his point home. “It’s Yoongi hyung, that’s the problem! He just won’t! Stop! Drinking! Coffee!!!”
Seokjin stares at him from across the table, lips pursed in confusion. “Oookayyyy,” he says slowly, desperately trying to fit the pieces together. “Yoongi does like his coffee, that’s true. He drinks at least four iced Americanos between breakfast and lunch on good days – but why is that a problem?” He furrows his eyebrows at Jimin, evidently still as lost as he was at the beginning of their conversation. “And most importantly, how is that my problem?”
“Hyung, I still don’t think you get it,” says Jimin, and he sounds far more serious now, leaning over the table and looking Seokjin right in the eye. Seokjin blinks back at him, perplexed. “You know he’s been a little sick lately, right?” demands Jimin.
“Yes, Jimin-ah, I know he’s been a little sick lately,” Seokjin huffs in reply, annoyance now starting to creep up his veins. “He’s my roommate, of course I know he’s been sick! I was the one who dragged him to the doctor the other day, for God’s sake. But it’s okay, Jimin-ah – you don’t have to worry. Doc Choi recommended hot stuff like soup and coffee, to ease his throat, you know? My little Yoongichi’s got a bad cough, and the Doctor gave us a nice cough syrup and told him to drink as many warm liquids as possible. I assure you, it’s not a problem…”
“Listen to me very carefully, Hyung,” says Jimin, and he literally gets to his feet to glower at Seokjin, leaning over the table till they’re nearly nose-to-nose. “This is, and I will not repeat, a very serious problem. You’ve been worried about your thesis, so I know you haven’t had a lot of free time lately, but when I tell you that all Yoongi hyung has been putting into his system for the whole of last week is coffee and coffee alone, I swear to God I am not joking.”
Seokjin stares at him, speechless. “What?”
“Yeah, got you there, didn’t I?” says Jimin smugly, before his face resumes the at-the-wake sort of expression it had been harbouring all this while. He sits back down and sighs, hands folding themselves into the top of a tepee. “This is serious, Hyung, and we – all of us – are at our wits’ end. Yoongi hyung really has been living on coffee for a whole week now – and the rest of us have been trying our damnedest best to get him to eat more substantial stuff but he just refuses to listen! You know how he just drowns himself in his work all the time because he thinks we won’t worry about him that way? He’s been doing that again. We don’t know what to do…”
Jimin’s voice tapers out, the ends of his words subdued and forlorn. “We didn’t want to bother you because your deadlines are nearly here and you’ve been so busy lately and are always locked up here in the library and just go home to eat and sleep – but we’re worried about both of you, you know? And I know you’re still capable of taking care of yourself, but you know how he gets. You’re the only one who can hammer any sense into him, Hyung. For the love of us all, do something – Hoseokie hyung and Jungkookie are nearly about to cry, they’re so worried.”
Seokjin bites at his bottom lip, guilt starting to seep into his blood.
Jimin was right.
It was true he hadn’t been the most attentive of roommates lately: thesis deadlines loomed over his head like Big Brother watching, and he had been slaving away at his research with the devotion of a priest offering flowers to a shrine of the deities. But this new development was enough to make him drop his pen and start packing his bags for home at once.
He decides that he does, in fact, have a problem.
His best friend, roommate and secret, oblivious crush for not even God knew how many years needed him, now, and he would be damned if he let coffee, of all things, get in the way.
.
.
.
“Yoongi?”
No answer.
“Yoongi-yah, I’m home! Let’s have dinner together –”
The door to Yoongi’s bedroom opens, and a tousled head pokes its way out, hair sticking up in a million odd angles and making its bearer look like a bird had built its nest in the strands.
Seokjin’s heart constricts.
“Hyung?"
“Yoongichi, would you look at the time! It’s nearly nine, why are you not in your pyjamas yet? You need to sleep early, remember? Doctor’s orders!”
“You’re home early,” says Yoongi simply, and Seokjin can hear the hoarseness of his voice, can see the reds of his eyes, the light bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows, the bright pink little tongue that pokes out between his lips. “Why are you home early?’
“What do you mean, why am I home early? Is a man not allowed to return to his own home at a time he feels like it? I didn’t expect such betrayal from you, Yoongi-yah. Are you hiding something from me, perhaps?”
“No, no, Hyung, of course not. I only meant you usually don’t come back home this early…”
“I wanted to make my baby food,” pouts Seokjin, dropping his bag onto the floor as he sashays his way to the kitchen. “What do you think we should eat tonight, Yoongi-yah?”
“What baby?”
“Huh?”
“You said you wanted to make food for your baby. What baby?”
Seokjin pauses in his culinary conquest, a strange mix of irritation and concern starting to sing unholy chaos in his blood. It’s you, you idiot, he wants to say, exasperated – you and your cute little face and fierce determination and insane amounts of coffee consumption and comments oblivious enough to drive me up the walls. It’s you. You’re the baby. You’re my baby. The whole world. Everything.
He figures going this hard would be a bad idea right now, however. So resorting to aegyo it is.
“Silly boy, it’s you,” he trills in turn, back turned to Yoongi as he finally lights the stove. “Now, I’m going to make us dinner, and you’re going to eat right up, okay, Yoongi-yah? And then you’re going to go straight to sleep.”
“I don’t want any dinner, Hyung.”
“Oh, Yoongichiiiii… how can you refuse your only hyung’s food like this? Do my wonderful cooking skills mean nothing to you?!”
“I only meant that I’m full, Hyung, thanks. I drank a lot of coffee...”
“Too much of a good thing is bad for you, you know,” scolds Seokjin lightly, pottering over to the kitchen cupboard and pulling on his apron. “Jimin told me what you’ve been up to,” he sighs, Yoongi waddling his way into the room, his unsocked feet soft on the cold marble floor. “Honestly, Yoongi-yah, you ought to know better. You need to take better care of yourself, young man. What will you do when I’m not around to look after you, hmm? Will you just… not eat?”
There’s no answer. Seokjin whips them up a lovely dinner of japchae, and by the end of the meal, Yoongi’s eyes are drooping with sleep, hair falling in clumps all over his forehead.
“Let’s get you to bed, tiger,” says Seokjin softly, grabbing him by the arm and lifting him up, hand automatically going to smack Yoongi’s away when it reaches for his coffee thermos. “No, no more coffee for you! You’ve had enough to fill the seven seas! You touch coffee one more time and I will personally decimate you, you hear?”
“But –”
“No, no buts. You’re just going to take the cough syrup Doc Choi recommended, and then get your ass straight to bed.”
.
.
.
Seokjin wakes up the middle of the night, feeling a heavy sort of weight shift into position next to him under the covers.
Murderers! Thieves! Robbers! Adulterers! screams his brain, before a familiar sort of warmth reaches out and rests on his arm, the shape of the fingers known and beloved, and all too reminiscent of home.
“Yoongi? What on earth are you doing here?”
“Wanna sleep with Hyungie,” comes a whine, and terror seizes at Seokjin’s throat, cutting into his veins like blocks of ice.
Sleep with Hyungie? What the hell???
Why the hell was Yoongi in his room in the middle of the night anyway?????
“Why the fuck do you sound drunk?” he manages to sputter after a pause, brain still half-asleep, and partly consumed by irrational fear. This was too much. First all the worry with the love of his life turning into a coffee maniac, then rushing back home to convince him to eat, and now a very obviously far-gone said love of his life hanging onto him like a cat and purring in his ear? Seokjin is a weak man – and an incredibly stressed man, at this point.
“Finished all the cough syrup since you didn’t let me drink coffee,” mumbles Yoongi, nestling closer, and Seokjin can literally feel the beat of his heart, pressed close against his own, good God, their breaths mingling and warning sirens ringing like crazy in his mind. “It was sweet. Not like the coffee. I liked it.”
“You – you did what?”
“Hyung, am I floating? I feel like I’m floating,” says Yoongi, finger coming up to trace Seokjin’s collarbone, and Seokjin feels his stomach plummet into the depths of the Bermuda Triangle, panic really starting to boil beneath his blood. “Will Hyung hold on to me so that I don’t float away?”
“Yoongs, you crazy little fool,” hisses Seokjin, rationality finally getting the better of him even as his heart protests in agony. “Get up. Come on, let’s get you back to bed –”
“Wanna stay with Hyungie,” Yoongi whines again, throwing his arms around Seokjin’s neck and holding on tight, and Seokjin can't do this, he can’t, he genuinely can’t do this, he’s going to die. He’s going to die by how wonderful and absolutely stupid this all feels, how this is exactly what he’s been craving for, for what seems like all his life now, and yet mocked at by the very timing and circumstance of the situation itself. He can’t, he physically cannot do this, he’s going to die.
“Like Hyungie so much,” Yoongi is sighing, blissfully oblivious to his predicament. “Liked Hyungie always. Forever. Why does Hyungie never see it?”
Like – what?
Wait…
“Yoongs, you’re high,” sighs Seokjin, and God, his heart is crying, thumping a mile a minute in his chest. “Let’s not do this right now, okay? We have to get you back to bed…”
“Don’t wanna go back to bed,” wails Yoongi softly, and Seokjin can see his pretty pretty eyes starting to sparkle with unshed tears – a little manic, no doubt, a little drunk, but genuine all the same. “Wanna stay with Hyungie. Tonight and tomorrow and all the days after… miss Hyungie so much.”
“Yoongi, please,” mumbles Seokjin, chagrined, and Yoongi blinks up at him drowsily, a small, delightful smile playing at the corners of his lips. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow, when you’re not as high, okay, baby? Come on, you have to help Hyung…”
“Yes, I’m baby. My name is baby,” decides Yoongi, nodding his head enthusiastically up and down. “I’m the best baby. The best baby for the best Hyung.”
Jesus, fuck, what the hell was in that cough syrup??? thinks Seokjin to himself as he finally manages to haul Yoongi bridal-style back to his own bedroom. After a brief tussle, Yoongi falls back into an easy sleep, and Seokjin picks up the empty bottle of cough syrup on his way out, making a mental note to keep Yoongi away from it at all times in the future.
Future Seokjin would find a way to keep all forms of coffee and cough syrup away from Future Yoongi – but for now, he thinks, that doesn’t matter.
For now, that wasn’t a problem.
Because as he settles back into bed, pillow fluffy under his harrowed head, he thinks that after tonight, and if what Yoongi had said were true, then they were both going to enjoy their future very, very much.
Together – and if he could help it, determinedly problem-free. :)