Archive of Our Own

The observable universe contains, roughly, one septillion stars.

Of course, it entirely depends on where you’re sitting as to what’s observable. Earth has been sitting in a Star Deficit Zone for almost its entire life.

Almost, because someone’s just taken our universe off the shelf to get to work on granting some wishes.

This is Hoseok’s final universe, the last one he needs to work through before he can retire and become a fully-fledged star, lighting up whichever universe he chooses to retire in.

He’s not found one he wants to retire in yet, but he’s got a good feeling about this one.

Each and every universe sits in a jam jar on a dusty grey shelf in the Library of Universes until it’s that universe’s turn to have its wishes granted. This universe, the one Hoseok’s taken, his final universe… It’s been on the shelf for a while. The lid of the jar has a distinct layer of dust on it, and while Hoseok’s never actually seen anyone else while he’s been putting in his shifts in wish-granting, the implication is clear – there’s something off about this universe. Not only is the jar dusty, but there is a perfectly dust-free circle underneath it when he picks it up. The glass of the jar is warm to the touch, and surprisingly weighty as he takes it over to one of the Universe Library’s many tables.

He notices what’s wrong as soon as he unscrews the lid of the universe’s jar; with most universes, there’s perhaps a handful of voices clamouring out with wishes – the most Hoseok’s ever heard coming from one universe was just over fifty, and most of those were coming from the same lonely spacecraft.

This universe, though, has so many voices calling out to him that he’s tempted to screw the lid back on it and put the jar back on the shelf, ‘good feeling’ be damned. It’s his last one, too, and if he starts wish-granting in this universe and doesn’t finish, he’ll just have to come back here, to this dusty old library of jam jars, and start all over again in a different universe.

He wants to retire.

Nevertheless, the cosmos didn’t raise a quitter, so he drags the Porcelain Jar out from underneath the table, tips the universe inside of it, and then jumps in.

He’s… Falling further than he usually does.

It’s fine, he thinks? He seems to be hurtling towards something, even if he can’t see what that something is yet. He’s passed a few modestly sized planets in quick succession, given how fast he’s moving – two methane-blue, one with a dense ring system that he almost crashes into, one with bands of heathered grey and chestnut brown storms, and one almost entirely red.

He spots the little blue planet just before he enters its atmosphere, and sighs a little – he hates crashing onto water worlds. He ends up marooned forever, bobbing along until he finds land.

Thankfully, his flight path and the planet’s rotation line up perfectly for once – he plunges towards a peninsula and lands in the middle of a city. It makes a nice change, crashing into a city rather than the middle of nowhere, but it does open him up to some potential difficulty. As he stands up from the little crater he’s left (only a small one – Hoseok has manners), brushes himself off, and has a look at his surroundings, he sees that he’s crash landed in front of someone sitting on a bench.

Hoseok looks down at himself, checks that the Porcelain Jar has given him the form of whoever (or whatever) he’ll be intermingling with for the next while. He’s got hands, which is nice, but no wings, which is distinctly unnice. He’d grown used to the wings in his last universe. He’s got clothes, thankfully, because he’s crashed into a couple of universes and the Porcelain Jar’s decided, for whatever reason, not to give him clothes. From what he can see, he seems to resemble the human staring at him, clothes and all. It’s been a while since he’s been in a human-inhabited universe – they tend to be few and far between.

“Holy shit,” the human whispers. “Did you jump from a tree or something?” Even as they say it, they seem aware that this isn’t likely – there’re no trees nearby, for starters, and Hoseok, for all his politeness, has left a crater in the ground.

“Or something,” Hoseok explains pleasantly. “I’m Hoseok, I’m a star, and I need somewhere to stay while I do my work. Got any ideas?”

“Should… Should I recognise you?” The human says, looking around. “I don’t, sorry. Hasn’t your company found you somewhere to stay? What about a hotel?”

“No money,” Hoseok says cheerfully, answering the easiest question of the bunch.

“Any… Any friends or family in the area?”

“Nope!” Hoseok says with a grin – he’s been in a few universes where he hadn’t been able to speak at all, so this is nice.

“Right. You can… You can come with me?” The human offers slowly. “Stay at mine?”

“That’d be great! Thank you…” He trails off significantly.

“Namjoon. Uh, Kim Namjoon. What did you say your name was?”

“Hoseok.”

Namjoon frowns. “Just ‘Hoseok’?” Hoseok shrugs helplessly. “Right.” Namjoon stands up off the bench. “Uh, come with me then, Hoseok.” Namjoon leads him back to a tall, grey building and leads him up so many flights of stairs that Hoseok briefly entertains the thought that he’s going to accidentally walk right out of the Porcelain Jar again.

He doesn’t, thankfully – Namjoon veers off the staircase and through a hallway of plain brown doors. They stop in front of one of these doors, labelled 6-13, and Namjoon, peeking nervously at Hoseok, opens the door.

“Hyung?” Namjoon calls into the still-dark apartment. Hoseok looks inside curiously; the curtains are still drawn, and, by both the looks and sounds of it, there’s no one inside.

Hoseok’s proved wrong, though, when a door inside the apartment tilts open slowly and another human pokes their head through it. Their hair is fluffy and standing up on end, and they’re wearing a big, black hoodie and black shorts. “…Joon-ah?” The person croaks, rubbing their face tiredly. “You good? You been out?”

Namjoon looks back at Hoseok, who responds with an encouraging thumbs up. Hoseok doesn’t know why he’s giving Namjoon encouragement, but it looks as though it’s needed. “Don’t… Don’t be mad, hyung.”

The sleepy looking person squints at Hoseok. “Namjoon, why would I be mad that you’ve brought a guy back? If that’s what you want, I’m all for it. I bring back guys all the time. Well, I used to, but just because I’ve stopped doesn’t mean-”

“N-no!” Namjoon says, cheeks pinking violently. “That’s not – hyung, Hoseok needs somewhere to stay.”

“And do we… Know Hoseok, Namjoon?”

“Uh, no. He says he’s an idol?”

“Not an idol,” Hoseok corrects, because it’s important to enter any living situation being as honest as possible. “A star.”

“Right,” Namjoon says awkwardly. “Hyung it was – Hoseok, do you mind if I talk to Yoongi for a moment? Alone?”

“Of course!” Hoseok says politely, bowing his head. “Is there somewhere I can wait?”

“Here’s good,” Namjoon says, waving vaguely at their apartment’s entryway before following Yoongi into the room behind the door. They tilt the door behind them, but they don’t close it all the way, so, even though he’s trying not to listen, Hoseok can still hear their voices, which they aren’t making any attempt to lower.

“Namjoon, you’ve invited a stranger back to our apartment?”

“Hyung, you didn’t see it, he literally fell out of the sky! I’m not being hyperbolic here, he fell, hit the ground like this-” There’s a loud smacking noise that makes Hoseok jump. “And then he just sprang up! There was a crater!”

“It sounds like a prank, Namjoon,” Yoongi says, in a tone that’s almost a perfect mixture of exasperation and endearment. “A guy falling out of the sky? Telling you he’s an idol? Asking to stay in our home?”

“To be fair, I offered that last part,” Namjoon mutters, making Yoongi scoff disbelievingly. “He – he said he needed somewhere to stay!”

“That is what hotels are for!”

“We can’t just send him away!”

“He’s not a stray cat, we’re not keeping him!” Yoongi appears back in the door frame suddenly, looking far more awake than earlier. “You – Hoseok, right?” Hoseok nods. “What’s your angle here? What scam are you running?”

“I’m not running a scam,” Hoseok says indignantly. “I told Namjoon why I was here – I’m a star, and I need somewhere to do my work! I opened with that statement!”

Yoongi’s eyebrows raise. “And what sort of work is that, Hoseok-ssi? Drugs? Trafficking? I don’t care if you’ve got weapons on you, I’m not having my apartment getting turned into some sort of crime hovel while I’m in the middle of my thesis.”

“Hyung,” Namjoon whispers, alarmed.

“I don’t do crime!” Hoseok rolls his eyes. “I grant wishes, I’m a star. You know, fall from the sky, grant a set amount of wishes, carry on my merry way, that sort of star.”

“Oh,” Yoongi says, nodding. “I see. Namjoon, you said he fell from the sky, right? Well, he’s obviously hit his head-”

“You’re currently wishing that I’ll leave so that you can go back to bed,” Hoseok interrupts, because it’s always a pain in the ass when well-meaning people send him to their universe’s equivalent of a medic.

“Is that… Supposed to prove something to me?” Yoongi says sarcastically. “It’s pretty obvious that I’ve just woken up, and obviously I want you to leave, you’re in my apartment.”

“You’re also wishing that the book you’ve ordered for your thesis will arrive today instead of tomorrow,” Hoseok says, a little desperately. “But you’re not wishing for that too hard, because you’re also welcoming the chance to have today off from working on it. I can go either way – your package is currently at the post office, so wish for it to come today and I can get it here by four-”

“Are you stalking our mail?” Yoongi shrieks, picking up a hefty textbook and holding it aloft.

“Wish for something!” Hoseok says. “Either of you, I don’t care, shit, I can see why no one else has touched this universe-” He stops, listening to what Yoongi’s just wished for. “Oh. Um. Okay? He might be a bit confused…” Hoseok waves his hands – the stardust is surprisingly slippery in this universe, manifesting as bands of white light that brighten Namjoon and Yoongi’s alarmed faces.

There’s a knock at the door. Followed by more, increasingly frantic, pounds.

“H-hyungs? Are you there?”

Yoongi stares at Hoseok, and then, socked feet slipping a little on the floor, runs over to the door, wrenching it open. “Jeongguk-ah?”

The person standing there is dressed extremely casually in loose grey sweatpants and a big black t-shirt, bare feet looking out of place on the hallway floor, and they’re staring at Yoongi with wide, dark eyes. “I don’t – I don’t know why I’m here, Yoongi-hyung, one minute I was in my kitchen and the next there was – it felt cold, and then I was in front of your door-” Yoongi pulls Jeongguk into the room, slams the door behind them, and whirls around to face Hoseok.

“Explain.”

“I told you – I’m a star.”

“Namjoon-ah, you told me he was an idol!” Yoongi snaps, although Hoseok’s been around enough beings in enough universes to know that it’s not coming from anger.

“That’s what I thought he meant!” Namjoon replies heatedly. “How was I meant to know he meant a wish-granting gas giant?”

“Whoa, hey, not a gas giant, I’m not retired!” Hoseok yells, feeling his patience start to fray, just a little. He takes a deep breath, reminding himself that it’s not their fault they’ve lived their entire lives in a Star Deficit Zone, even if it feels like they’re being deliberately obtuse.

“Can somebody please explain why I’ve suddenly appeared here?” Jeongguk shouts.

“Blame Yoongi!” Hoseok shouts back, waving his hand in Yoongi’s general direction. “I told them to make a wish so I could prove I was who I kept saying I was-”

“You wished to see me?” Jeongguk asks quietly, eyes wide.

“Yeah, I guess,” Yoongi replies, not meeting Jeongguk’s eyes.

“Okay, can we seriously start from the beginning?” Namjoon asks, voice a little strained.

“The stars you see in your sky are stars at the end of their lifecycle,” Hoseok explains. Everyone has introduced themselves to him properly, now, and he’s finally been allowed to sit down on Namjoon and Yoongi’s couch. Small steps. “Before that, we grant wishes. Once we’ve worked in enough universes, granted enough wishes, we’re allowed to retire in whatever universe we want to.”

“That sounds nice,” Jeongguk says, looking at Hoseok with shiny eyes.

“It is, most of the time,” Hoseok says with a grin. “Sometimes you end up getting brought back to an apartment only to get shouted at and threatened with textbooks, but, you know, it is what it is.”

“I said I was sorry,” Yoongi mutters. “The last time Namjoon-ah brought someone back to our apartment, they stole all of our instant noodles.”

“That was Jimin, and he’s our friend now,” Namjoon points out. “So you’re here to grant everyone’s wishes in the whole universe? Won’t that take a while?”

“I don’t have to grant every wish, that would be crazy,” Hoseok says. “What if two people had conflicting wishes?” He shakes his head. “No, nothing like that. I don’t do death wishes, or love wishes, or anything that’s got a lot of grey area. I usually don’t mess with free-will, although yeah, sorry, Jeongguk, I did transport you across space and time without your consent, but, again, I thought Yoongi was going to throw a book at me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jeongguk says, waving his hand. “Now that I know what was happening, it’s maybe the coolest shit that’s ever happened to me? Hey, do you think you can teleport me to the gym in the morning? It’d mean I could spend more time there.”

“You don’t need to spend more time there,” Yoongi mutters.

“And you’re not using Hoseok as a taxi service!” Namjoon says with a frown. “I’m sure he has much more important wishes to attend to, like… Like he could end climate change! Or bring about world peace.” Yoongi pulls a face. “What?”

“Well, it’s just, there’s a lot of grey area in the concept of ‘World Peace’, you know? For example, do you subscribe to the idea that the workers seizing the means of production will bring about world peace, as Karl Marx did? Does ‘World Peace’ involve a peaceful state of mind, because if not then technically mutually assured destruction results in no country ever making a net gain through war, leading to a technically peaceful world? Which completely contradicts the Buddhist belief that world peace can only come through peace within the mind – and that’s not even touching on the idea of Hoseok stopping climate change-”

“Again, I don’t do wishes that have a lot of grey area,” Hoseok points out cheerfully. “And who’s to say your wishes aren’t important? They’re important to you!”

Namjoon turns to look at him with an imperceptible expression, and then he smiles politely. “So, Hoseok, what is your plan?”

“Hmm… I never usually have one!” Hoseok says. “Although most of the universes I visit have worlds with much smaller wishing populations than this one – I’ve spent years travelling around in some universes, so at least here I could just stay in this city. There’s, what, ten thousand people here?”

Yoongi laughs. “And some.”

“Oh, wow, twenty thousand?”

“Try almost ten million,” Jeongguk says gently.

Hoseok blows air out between his lips, then does it again for the fun of it. “Yeah, I definitely don’t need to leave this city.” He stands up, straightens up his clothes, and then bows. “Well, thank you for the hospitality.”

“Wait, you’re leaving?” Jeongguk says, turning big, shining eyes on Hoseok. “Already?”

“I need to find somewhere to stay,” Hoseok replies.

“Well, you could stay with me?” Jeongguk offers. “I’ve got-”

“Wait!” Namjoon says; at the same time, Yoongi says, “It’s alright!” They both turn to look at each other, and then both of them turn away sharply, Namjoon to look at his hands in his lap, and Yoongi to make almost unnecessarily adamant eye contact with Hoseok as he continues, “Namjoon had already offered – we’ve got a bit more room, Jeongguk-ah, and now that I know Hoseok isn’t going to host a crime ring in our apartment, he’s more than welcome to stay.”

“Oh.” Jeongguk looks uneasily at one of the doors, firmly closed. “Are you sure, hyungs? There’s enough room at my place…” He trails off, and tries to pull his eyes away from the door, but keeps glancing at it intermittently.

“Thank you, Jeongguk, but we’ve got more than enough space here,” Namjoon says, standing up and jerking his thumb at the door. “Hoseok-ssi, let me show you where you’ll be staying.”

The look Jeongguk and Yoongi share makes Hoseok a little nervous about what could be hiding behind the door Namjoon opens, but when he looks inside it looks ordinary enough – a neatly made bed, an empty wardrobe with the doors tilted open, a set of drawers underneath the window.

“It’s not much,” Namjoon says, firmly closing the wardrobe door before scanning the room with a critical eye.

“I’ve absolutely stayed in worse places,” Hoseok replies, going to sit on the bed and bouncing up and down on it a few times. “I once crashed in the courtyard of an underwater palace whose planet was rapidly losing water, that wasn’t fun at all.”

“Hoseok-ssi, do you have any other clothes? Belongings?” Jeongguk says, poking his head into the room, his feet very carefully not crossing over the threshold of the door.

“Nope!” Hoseok stands up again and gestures to himself. “Just me and the clothes the Porcelain Jar gives me.”

“The… The Porcelain Jar,” Yoongi says – he, too, doesn’t actually enter the room, peering into the room from the opposite side of the door to Jeongguk. Unlike Jeongguk, he seems to be specifically avoiding looking at anything in the room, his eyes slightly out of focus as he looks in Hoseok’s general direction.

“It’s like this jar that we pour universes into,” Hoseok explains, using his hands to vaguely imply a jar-like shape.

“…Okay. Sure,” Yoongi says eventually. “Can you make clothes with your wish magic?”

Hoseok shakes his head. “I need someone to actually wish for something-” He pauses; Jeongguk’s staring at him, eyes wide, as he shouts a wish in his head. “Oh. Thank you, that’s very kind!” He pulls at the stardust in the air, stretching it out like he’s unspooling thread, before whipping it into-

“You’ve… Remade the same outfit you’re wearing right now,” Namjoon says, staring at the neatly folded piles of clothes now resting on the bed.

“Jeongguk wished for me to have more clothes,” Hoseok replies with a slight frown, waving his hand at the piles. “More clothes.”

“Should I have been more specific?” Jeongguk says worriedly, turning to look at Yoongi with big eyes; Yoongi scowls outright at Hoseok.

“It’s not your fault, Jeongguk-ah,” Yoongi says. “Right, Hoseok-ah?”

“No, no!” Hoseok clarifies. “I’m grateful for the clothes! Happy, even!”

“But you look like you own the wardrobe of a cartoon character now,” Jeongguk says glumly. Suddenly, he looks over at Hoseok. “Wait, can I just wish again?”

“You can, but you don’t have-” Jeongguk widens his eyes at Hoseok again, so he goes through the rigmarole again. Once the clothes have laid themselves on the bed, he turns expectantly to look at everyone.

“These are…” Namjoon says, hand hovering over the soft blue fabric of a t-shirt identical to the one he’s wearing, the grey sweatpants Jeongguk’s wearing, the shorts Yoongi has on.

“Perfect!” Yoongi insists, pointing at Namjoon. “They are perfect, and we won’t keep asking Jeongguk to wish for more and more clothes.”

“I don’t mind!” Jeongguk says. “And Hoseok-ssi, didn’t you say you could go home once you’ve granted enough wishes? Why don’t I just keep wishing for more clothes until you’ve done enough wish granting?”

“I tried that once, granting the wishes of one person,” Hoseok admits. The memory’s a little hazy after all these years, but he remembers the great, hulking buildings of that universe, silhouetted black against the pink sky. Remembers the boy there, who he’d spent a lifetime with, granting wishes and living and loving, only for him to die and leave Hoseok stranded. “Didn’t work.”

“The rules of your powers seem a little vague,” Yoongi says.

“He fell out of the sky to grant wishes, and you’re questioning the logic?” Namjoon says incredulously.

“I’m just saying! What if he enters a universe with only one person? He’d be stuck!” Yoongi argues back.

“I mean, in my experience, if there’s one being in a universe capable of wishing for something, there’re usually more,” Hoseok says. “Not that any of that matters – this’ll be my last universe, so it’s not as though I’ll get stuck somewhere ever again. Well, unless there’s a mass-extinction event here, but that almost never happens.” This, apparently, is not as comforting for them to hear as he’d intended.

When he arrives in a new universe, the Porcelain Jar gives him three things: a form to help him live with the predominant wishing lifeform in that universe, a basic understanding of the rules and customs of the society he’ll be living in, and the ability to communicate.

He’s learnt things along the way, too – don’t go around advertising your wish-granting capabilities to everyone you meet; don’t assume you can run, swim, or fly; don’t go getting too attached to the mortal life you meet.

He struggles a little with that one.

The plan is to introduce him as ‘Yoongi’s childhood friend’ - apparently Yoongi doesn’t have much contact with his hometown, so the lie will be believable to any friends and acquaintances here that will ask why there’s suddenly a strange man living with Yoongi and Namjoon.

However, his very first conversation with anyone outside of Yoongi, Namjoon, and Jeongguk goes like this:

“I’m Hoseok,” he says, bowing politely to the man Jeongguk has just introduced as Kim Taehyung. Jeongguk had also been the one to text him to invite him over – the two other people he had texted had been too busy with work to immediately come over, but Taehyung had arrived within thirty minutes.

“Right, the wish-granting star!” Taehyung bows back. “Jeongguk said.”

“What the fuck, Jeongguk,” Namjoon says. “We were supposed to be keeping that quiet.”

“I was just excited!” Jeongguk says, eyes bright as he looks at Hoseok apologetically. “It’s not every day you meet a star! It’s literally never happened to anyone on Earth before, it’s exciting!”

“Namjoon-ah,” Taehyung says, walking over to Namjoon and clapping a hand down on his shoulder. “You weren’t going to tell me? Me?”

“We would’ve told you eventually!” Namjoon says. “He’s only been here for a few hours!”

“I’m telling Jimin,” Taehyung says immediately. “And Seokjin, obviously. Seriously, hyung, I can’t believe you didn’t want Jeongguk to tell us.”

“I just didn’t want to overwhelm him!” Namjoon says. “And why is this my fault? Yoongi, Jeongguk and I all came up with this idea! Tell them off, too!”

“Well, Jeongguk was the one that told me that about Hoseok, and I wouldn’t interrupt Yoongi while he was writing unless he was trying to work on his thesis in a literal burning building,” Taehyung points out. “And even then, I’d feel really bad about it. Like, super bad. I’d absolutely apologise for making him leave the building.” He frowns thoughtfully down at his shoes, then looks up at Namjoon again. “Right, yeah, so that’s why it’s your fault.” He turns to smile at Hoseok. “So, Jeongguk said you need to grant lots of wishes from lots of people so you can go home, right?” Hoseok nods. “Then can I wish for a coffee? Jeongguk didn’t give me time to grab one before I came over.”

“Oh my god,” Namjoon says as Hoseok carefully picks his way through Taehyung’s imagination, examining his wish, before pulling a cup out of the air. His wish had focused more on imagining the cup itself - the colour of its cup sleeve, the feeling of warmth under the hands - but he knows what coffee is, knows that Taehyung is not just wishing for a warm, weighty cup.

He hands it to Taehyung, who thanks him, takes a sip, and then gasps, eyes wide. “Hyung, this is the nicest coffee I’ve ever had!” Taehyung hands off the cup to Jeongguk. “Wait, can I call you hyung? Is there a special wish-granting star honorific?”

“Hyung’s good,” Hoseok says as Jeongguk hums delightedly around his mouthful of coffee.

“It does raise some interesting questions, though,” Namjoon muses, taking a sip of the coffee Jeongguk passes to him. “About honorifics, I mean. I’d imagine you’re significantly older than us, even if you do look our age, yet you have no experience of this world.”

“Of this universe,” Hoseok clarifies. “I’m given enough knowledge to survive in a universe, and it’s amazing how much you can pick up from being able to read minds-”

“You can read minds?” Namjoon says, suddenly looking incredibly uneasy.

“How… How did you think I knew how to grant Yoongi, Jeongguk, and Taehyung’s wishes?” Hoseok says slowly.

“I don’t know, magic?” Namjoon says. He rounds on Taehyung and Jeongguk. “He read your minds, why aren’t you reacting?” The two of them look at one another, then look at Namjoon and shrug in unison. “Seriously, you don’t care at all?”

“It didn’t feel like anything,” Taehyung says. “One second I was thinking about a cup of crappy coffee from the chain across the street, the next I was being handed a cup of coffee that has ruined me for all other beverages forever.”

“But it’s an invasion of privacy!”

“Well, we both asked him to do it,” Jeongguk says. “Not to mention he’s a wish granting star, hyung - he’s not likely to use my thoughts for evil.”

“If it helps,” Hoseok interjects. “Aside from wishes, it’s pretty difficult for me to read peoples thoughts, I have to really try. What I meant was that you can pick up a lot of context about a universe from the sorts of things people wish for.”

“Okay, well, don’t read my mind? Please?” Namjoon says, not meeting Hoseok’s eye.

“If that’s what you want, then of course I won’t,” Hoseok says.

“So, if we just preface any of our thoughts with ‘I wish’, you can read them?” Taehyung asks.

Hoseok shakes his head. “You need to actually wish for something for that to work. You can’t just say ‘I wish do we have any milk?’, because that’s not a wish, that’s just some nonsense.”

“Okay, okay, but if I thought ‘I wish I knew if we had any milk’, you could read my mind easily that way?” Jeongguk asks curiously.

“If… Yeah, if you sincerely wished to know that, sure?” Hoseok laughs. “And I’d probably tell you to go check your fridge if you wished to know that badly.”

Jeongguk giggles. “Fair.” Yoongi’s door opens and he shuffles out, hair sticking up on end. “Ah, hyung! Sorry, did we disturb you?”

Yoongi shakes his head, his bare feet slapping on the floor as he heads to the kitchen. “I needed a break anyway, I’ve spent most of the past half an hour considering whether to wish for my PhD thesis to be done.” He opens the fridge, takes out a half-finished takeaway cup of iced americano, gulps down a few mouthfuls, then puts it away again.

“You’re doing really well, though,” Jeongguk says with a slight pout. “You shouldn’t discount all of your hard work like that!”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” Yoongi says, shutting the fridge door with his hip, a small, pleased smile on his face. “Still, it was getting pretty tempting.”

“If you need a break, we should all go out!” Taehyung says. “Show Hoseok-hyung around, get Yoongi-hyung some fresh air, go and meet Jimin-ah and Seokjin-hyung from work…”

Because he’s already looking at Yoongi, Hoseok can see him glance over to watch Jeongguk nod in agreement before he says, “Yeah, sounds good. I could probably do with the stretch, anyway.”

“You all go on ahead,” Namjoon says; when Hoseok turns to look at him, he’s still not meeting Hoseok’s eye. He’s not looking at anyone, actually, looking instead at the room he and Yoongi have offered to Hoseok.

“Namjoon-ah…” Yoongi trails off.

Namjoon offers him a weak smile in Yoongi’s vague direction. “Ah, hyung, don’t worry about me, I’m fine. I’ll see you when you get back, yeah?” Hoseok feels the magnetic pull of a wish being formed in Namjoon’s mind; before he’s even consciously acknowledged the pull, he can feel Namjoon attempt to block him out so forcefully that Hoseok physically takes a step back from the wave of anger. If that wasn’t enough, then the quick, furious look he sends Hoseok’s way is enough to remind him that he’s not welcome in Namjoon’s head.

There’s not a lot he can do about it, as far as he can tell. He’s taken forms in some universes more intrinsically linked to stardust, but this human body has just five senses, none of which seem to be linked to stardust in any way. It’s not as though he can block his ears from hearing Namjoon’s wishes, or cover his eyes to prevent himself from seeing Namjoon’s thoughts.

As they walk, Hoseok asks everyone else for advice on how he can make Namjoon feel at ease around him; once he’s asked the question, Taehyung turns to Yoongi.

“You should talk to him, hyung,” he says as they walk down the street towards Jimin and Seokjin’s place of work. Considering the sky is bright blue, the height of the buildings around them drown the streets below in cool shadows; Hoseok is wearing the big hoodie he has wish-copied from Yoongi, and it’s still not warm enough to prevent him from shivering.

“You say that like it’s the easiest thing in the world,” Yoongi mutters, reaching out to press the button for the pedestrian crossing. They’re surrounded by people waiting to cross, and the woman standing next to Hoseok, her shoulders sloped and heavy, wishes suddenly for a sign that the day will be a good one. Hoseok, hands tucked into the deep pocket of his hoodie, tugs gently at the stardust, and tries not to smile obviously when a butterfly flits down, lands gently on her phone, then flutters off into the sky again.

“Oh,” she says quietly, watching the butterfly disappear into the sky. She looks around, spots Hoseok looking her way, and says, “Uh, you saw that? I didn’t imagine it?”

“I saw it,” Hoseok confirms. She smiles, small and private, as she straightens her posture.

When he looks away, his three new friends are watching him; Jeongguk is practically vibrating with excitement, but they all wait until they’ve crossed the road and the woman has walked away in the opposite direction before they say anything.

“That was you, right?” Taehyung says, jerking his head in the general direction the woman had walked off in. “Did she wish to see a butterfly?”

“She wished for a sign that the day would be good,” Hoseok says. “There’s a little bit too much wiggle room in that wish than I’d normally like, but she seemed so sad, I wanted to try to do at least something.”

“Could you see why she was sad?” Yoongi asks. Hoseok looks at him - he seems to be asking something more, something else, but his face is almost completely impassive.

“…No,” Hoseok says eventually. “If I had more time, and there weren’t as many people around, I might’ve been able to see more, but I wanted to focus on making her day a little bit better while I still had time to try.”

It’s the right answer to whatever question Yoongi had actually been asking. He smiles, nods firmly, and then looks away from Hoseok. “I’ll talk to Namjoon.”

It’s very much a non sequitur, but Hoseok’s starting to get the impression that Yoongi’s mind runs at a mile a minute, flitting from one question or topic to the next without giving his mouth time to play catch-up. Jeongguk and Taehyung don’t seem to mind, at any rate - that, or perhaps they had known what Yoongi had been implying with his question.

“I think I get it,” Jeongguk says a few minutes later. He turns to Hoseok before he continues. “What you said earlier about being able to pick up a lot of context from peoples wishes. If someone’s wishing for a sign that the day will be a good one, they’re probably not very happy, right?”

“Usually,” Hoseok says, rubbing the space behind his ear. He’s forgotten a lot of the places he’s been, but he’s pretty sure he’s never been anywhere so densely populated - the constant noise of the city combined with the underlying drone of thoughts he can’t really pick out is starting to give him a headache. “They’re not necessarily sad - sometimes they’re anxious, or they’re particularly superstitious, you know?”

“This is so cool,” Taehyung says, looking around at the people surrounding them. “I keep seeing other people and thinking ‘wow, I wonder what you’re wishing right now?’” Suddenly, he stands on his tiptoes and starts waving, huge, sweeping strokes of his arms over his head. Two people are approaching them; the shorter of the two looks sharp, from their slicked-back hair to the lines of their suit. The other is dressed much more comfortably, in an outfit similar to the one Hoseok has co-opted from his new roommates. “You look so handsome!” Taehyung says, clearly looking at, and talking to, the person in the suit as he puts his hands on their shoulders and looks them up and down.

“Thank you, Taehyung-ah,” the other person says, straightening their hoodie; unlike Hoseok’s Yoongi-copied black hoodie, theirs is a vibrant pink, and Hoseok makes a mental note to try and get a version of it for himself. “I wore my best coding outfit because I knew I’d be seeing you.”

“Hyung, you know you’re handsome,” Taehyung says, readjusting the hem of his hoodie as the suited person gently reaches out to tuck the man’s hair behind a rapidly pinking ear.

“Yes, well,” he says, swatting away their hands.

“Taehyungie, who’s this?” The other person asks curiously, looking Hoseok up and down.

“Can we go up to your office to talk?” Taehyung replies, glancing around. “It’s not safe out here.”

“He’s not a drug dealer,” Yoongi says flatly when the two of them share a look of alarm. “Or any sort of criminal. I wouldn’t have let him stay in our apartment if he was.” They share another look of even greater alarm; Yoongi sighs. “Please just let us in your office.”

The office in question belongs to Jimin, the man in the suit, and is part of a game developing studio owned by Seokjin, the man in the pink hoodie.

“You just swipe across the screen,” Seokjin explains, leaning over Hoseok’s shoulder to point his finger at the phone Hoseok’s looking at. “Whatever pattern you draw is how your character will use his chain whip – different monsters are weak to different patterns.” It’s not necessarily helping his growing headache, but Hoseok’s having too much fun with the game Seokjin’s showing him to put it down.

“I don’t understand,” Jimin says, sitting on his own desk in order to sit in front of Taehyung, who’s sitting in the large office chair.

“You saw Hoseok-hyung grant your wish,” Taehyung says, glancing over at the office window that Hoseok had expanded – it’s now high enough to actually provide a view of the sky, as opposed to just neatly framing the opposite building. Yoongi and Jeongguk are standing next to it, originally marvelling at how nice the view was, but now talking so quietly that Hoseok can’t hear them even when he strains to do so.

“And I don’t understand it,” Jimin says firmly, punctuating his statement by hitting his fists against his knees. He turns to face Hoseok, sitting on the office’s tiny couch next to Seokjin; Jimin has to lift his legs almost uncomfortably high in order to avoid kicking over his computer, but he manages the manoeuvre with seeming ease. “All the places you could’ve come to, why come here? Why come to us?”

“Total luck,” Hoseok says with a shrug, briefly glancing up at Jimin; his lack of attention makes something happen on the game and the phone vibrates, startling Hoseok so badly that he almost throws the phone. Once he’s got it steady in his hands again, he looks directly at Jimin. “I almost ended up in the ocean.”

Jimin shakes his head. “No, no, you must’ve ended up with us for a reason.”

Taehyung gasps; Hoseok thinks it’s only mostly theatrical. “You think it’s fate?”

“Taehyung-ah, I absolutely think it’s fate,” Jimin says seriously, leaning forward. “I think he must be here to help Namjoon-”

“Okay, absolutely not,” Yoongi says firmly, pushing away from the window to glare at Jimin. “You know Namjoon would be mortified if you finished that sentence.”

“Ah, hyung,” Jimin replies, looking a little guilty. “I just meant-”

“I know what you meant,” Yoongi says, his voice gentler. “But Hoseok said it was total luck, so we’ll take him at his word.”

Jimin makes a show of grumbling, but he still looks contrite as he strikes up a conversation with Taehyung.

Jeongguk, meanwhile, comes to stand in front of Hoseok. “Hoseok-hyung, are you alright? You look pretty pale.”

Hoseok tilts his head up to look at Jeongguk, the movement making his head swim. “Ah, I’m okay, I’ve just got a headache coming, that’s all.”

“You should’ve said!” Jeongguk says worriedly, gently laying his hand on Hoseok’s forehead. The backs of his fingers feel lovely and cool against the skin of his forehead, and he finds himself chasing the feeling when Jeongguk pulls his hand away. “Yoongi-hyung, he’s really hot.”

“I’ll give you all a lift back to Yoongi’s, my car’s downstairs,” Seokjin says, standing up. “Taehyung, are you staying here?” Taehyung nods, and so the three of them follow Seokjin down the building’s narrow flight of stairs.

The car ride back, although short, doesn’t help Hoseok’s head at all, adding to the vertigo he’s already feeling; by the time they get to Yoongi and Namjoon’s building, Jeongguk and Yoongi have each got an arm wrapped around him in order to help him up the stairs. When Yoongi opens his door, Namjoon, who’s sitting on the couch with a notepad on his lap, barely glances up.

“Ah, you’re back. Did you have fun?” He asks; the slight glance turns into a double take, and then he stares at Hoseok. “Are you alright?”

“Just a headache,” Hoseok mumbles, his mouth feeling woolly as he tries to form the words.

Namjoon springs up, his notepad falling to the floor as he heads into the kitchen. “I’ll get you some painkillers,” he says as Yoongi and Jeongguk help him into the room he’d been offered earlier. There’s something different about it, something he can’t quite put a finger on, but he’s out like a light almost as soon as his head hits the pillow on the bed, well before he can figure out what’s changed.

“…rearranged the furniture, Namjoon-ah, obviously you’re not okay with it-”

“I moved the furniture so I could be okay with it – now it looks less familiar, so it’s fine.”

“You keep saying fine, but this isn’t one of those ‘fake it till you make it’ things-”

The voices are quiet, practically whispers, but they’re also the only noise Hoseok can hear. He doesn’t think he’s supposed to be listening into this conversation though, so he rolls onto his back with a groan, which makes the voices stop suddenly.

“Hoseok-ah, you awake?” Yoongi says quietly. Hoseok hums as he feels the gentle touch of fingers on his forehead again. They feel warmer than Jeongguk’s had – or, perhaps, his own forehead is comparatively cooler. “Your fever’s gone down, at any rate.”

Opening his eyes blearily, Hoseok hoists himself up into a sitting position. “How long was I asleep?”

“Almost a full twenty-four hours,” Namjoon says. “You kind of woke up a few times, but you were really out of it – I don’t know what language you were speaking, but it wasn’t one either of us recognised.”

“That’s super weird,” Hoseok says, rubbing his face.

“Could it have been your, uh, star language?” Yoongi asks.

“Wouldn’t have thought so,” Hoseok replies with a shrug, continuing to rub his face – his skin feels dry and taut, and he doesn’t think rubbing it is actually helping, but he can’t help it, the action helping to relieve a little of the itchy tightness. “I’ve never seen another star face-to-face, so I don’t think I can actually speak ‘star language’. Honestly, it was probably a half-remembered language from some other universe.”

“You’ve… You’ve never seen another star?” Namjoon says. Hoseok shakes his head. “Not ever?”

“That must’ve been lonely,” Yoongi murmurs, handing Hoseok a glass of water; he tries to gulp it down, but Yoongi restricts him to small sips.

“I spend a lot of time alone,” Hoseok says with a slight shrug.

Namjoon looks increasingly put-out, but it’s Yoongi who speaks up. “Has this happened in any of the other universes you’ve been to, where you’ve gotten really sick?” Hoseok shakes his head. “What if you’re allergic?”

“To… To your universe?” Hoseok asks slowly; Yoongi nods. “I mean… Do humans often get allergic to the universe here?”

“Uh,” Yoongi says, looking at Namjoon, who pulls a face. “Not that I… Know of?”

“Not that you know of?” Namjoon says incredulously.

“Not that I know of!” Yoongi reiterates firmly. “Because yesterday morning I thought I knew that stars didn’t grant wishes, and look how wrong I was there! I’ve accepted that I know nothing!”

“I think I was just overworked,” Hoseok cuts in, because Namjoon looks set to argue back. “Being in a crowd of people like that, granting too many wishes in short succession, you know? I think this is the most populated place I’ve ever crash landed into.”

Despite his logical explanation for his illness, Yoongi insists that he take it easy, only allowing him as far as the sitting room couch because Hoseok has to physically plead for it. Namjoon joins him, sitting quietly with his notepad face down in his lap. From the kitchen, Yoongi shoots Namjoon a look and then, very pointedly, slides a pair of headphones over his ears – Hoseok can hear the music he’s playing from his place on the couch.

“I want to apologise,” Namjoon says, folding his fingers over the top edge of his notepad and gripping it so tightly that the pages bend. “I freaked out at the thought of you reading my mind, and I treated you unfairly.”

“Thank you for apologising,” Hoseok says, tucking his legs underneath himself. “If it’s any consolation, I’m not mad or upset or anything – you’ve offered me a place to stay, if you want to establish boundaries in order to make me being here as comfortable as possible, then you totally can.”

Namjoon doesn’t look entirely satisfied with that answer, but he nods regardless.

Considering how crowded and hectic the streets below are at seemingly every hour of the day, life inside Yoongi and Namjoon’s apartment is slow, almost sleepy. The pair of them keep random hours, and coexist with the ease of roommates who have lived together for years; after the excitement of Hoseok’s first few days in their universe, they seem to subsume him into the calm of their days with barely a ripple.

Hoseok’s days in the following weeks typically go like this - he wakes up at dawn, says hello to whoever may or may not be awake, gets ready, and heads out for a run. He grants a wish or two along the way if he can, but most days he returns to the apartment without granting any wishes. Once he’s washed up, he tries to be helpful by cleaning - Namjoon and Yoongi had very firmly refused any offers to pay rent, although he does manage to cajole Yoongi into wishing for things he needs around the apartment in order to pay at least a little of their generosity back.

Namjoon still hasn’t wished for a single thing, but he’s slowly warming up to having Hoseok around - he’s loaned Hoseok his laptop to go with the old phone Yoongi had given him, because they’ve found that Hoseok can use the internet to grant wishes, searching through social media sites for people using the phrase ‘I wish’, so the two of them usually spend their afternoons sitting next to one another on the couch, Hoseok searching for wishes, and Namjoon working with his notepad. Yoongi joins them very rarely, preferring to keep his workspace firmly located in his room.

“It means that when I’m out here, hanging out with people, I can more or less forget about my thesis.” Yoongi shoots the notepad on Namjoon’s lap a very pointed look.

“I’m on a deadline, hyung,” Namjoon says, scribbling something out tetchily, his pen clenched in his fist. The three of them are supposed to be watching a show on the television, but Namjoon keeps looking away to write something down before almost immediately crossing it out again. Yoongi, in turn, keeps pausing the episode to wait for Namjoon to look up again.

“Then we should turn this off,” Yoongi says, waving the television remote. “You know you won’t understand it if you don’t pay attention.”

Hoseok begs to differ. He’s been paying the episode his full, undivided attention, and he can barely understand what’s going on. The characters - indeed, the narrative - everything seems to have been written with the understanding that the viewer will have at least some knowledge of what’s going on. One character seems to have multiple names - the Duke, Mountbatten, Louis, Dickie - with no explanation on how he’s acquired them; the show seems to be gearing up for some sort of grand coronation event at one point, only to barely show anything, as though the show creators expect the viewer to have already seen it somewhere else. It’s all very confusing.

“I’m almost done,” Namjoon says; Hoseok begs to differ on that, too. He can see the page Namjoon’s working on from his seat next to him on the couch - just one line has survived being crossed out.

He does, eventually, set the notepad down on the side table before waving vaguely at the television; Yoongi presses play on the episode.

Less than two minutes later, Namjoon’s hand reaches out, almost imperceptibly slow, towards the notepad again. He keeps shooting Yoongi guilty looks as his hand inches closer. And, as soon as his fingertips brush the paper, Yoongi’s hand shoots out to the remote to pause the show again. “Hyung, it’s fine-”

“Trying to do two things at once that require your concentration mean that none of them will get done properly,” Yoongi says firmly, jabbing his thumb on the remote button. “Tell hyung what the problem is, maybe I can help.”

“You know what it’s like,” Namjoon says, tossing the notepad in Yoongi’s direction. It’s a bad throw from Namjoon, and an equally bad catch from Yoongi, who accidentally bats away the notepad as it comes in his vague direction, sending it slapping onto the floor in front of Yoongi’s chair. Namjoon waits for Yoongi to pick the notepad up, straighten out the page, and lay it on his lap before continuing. “The label says I’ve written enough break-up songs for five years worth of edgy, sad comebacks, and now they want me to write something ‘fun’ and ‘cheerful’ that the ‘kids’ can dance to on ‘TikTok’.” He encompasses each of these words with slow, pointed air quotes.

Yoongi looks down at the page thoughtfully. “You’ve rhymed ‘seclusion’ with ‘blood transfusion’.”

“It’s a metaphor,” Namjoon explains. “Or, it will be. About how this pop song is going to transfuse the sadness out of you. Or something.”

Yoongi nods. “Can’t imagine the kids whipping or nae-ing to metaphors on TikTok, Namjoon-ah.”

“Can’t imagine the kids whipping or nae-ing to anything on TikTok, considering that dance is ancient by modern pop standards,” Namjoon shoots back. “Most of the people dancing on TikTok would’ve been learning to read when that song came out.”

Yoongi tosses the notepad back, but his throw is just as bad as Namjoon’s had been; the notepad lands in Hoseok’s lap, who averts his eyes from the page as he hands it back to Namjoon.

“You can look, I don’t mind,” Namjoon says.

It’s surprising, given that Namjoon has been very adamant about wanting to keep his thoughts private, but Hoseok pulls the notepad back slowly and has a look at the page it’s open to.

Most of the words have been crossed out to the point of obfuscation, but the words he can see are clearly being chosen with great care; one line alone, about the feeling of grass underfoot, has gone through so many iterations that Namjoon’s started drawing little arrows around the page to lead to the next point of his train of thought.

However, there are so many of these asides scattered across the page that Hoseok has to use his finger to trace along the lines of some of the arrows, with one attempt to create a pair of lines around the rhyme of ‘clean’ and ‘green’ creating a matted web of lines so gnarled that Hoseok genuinely cannot find where they lead to.

“Wait,” Hoseok says, running his eyes over the words again. “This isn’t in Korean.”

“No,” Namjoon says slowly, raising an eyebrow. “It’s for an English language comeback.” He blinks. “You can read it?”

Hoseok nods. “I’ll lose that ability the longer I spend here, but yeah, for now, I can understand every language when I see it.” He hands Namjoon back the notebook. “Why don’t you just write about what you want to write?”

Namjoon snorts and shakes his head as he takes the notebook back off of Hoseok. “Doesn’t work like that. If I refuse to write the songs the company wants, then they’ll just find another lyricist to work with.” He pinches the corner of the page between his thumb and forefinger, and lifts it up and down idly. “As it is, they’ve been pretty patient with me writing miserable songs for the last few weeks.” Suddenly, he tears the page off the notepad, balls it up, and tosses it towards the wastepaper basket in the corner. “It’s time to move on.”

They watch several more episodes of the show that isn’t getting any easier for Hoseok to follow and, when the television prompts them to confirm that they’re actually still watching, Yoongi stretches, arms over his head and face scrunched up. “I’m gonna start dinner before I fall asleep in this chair.” He stands up, stretches again, then heads into the kitchen. Namjoon stands and follows, veering off into his bedroom and closing the door behind him.

Hoseok glances at the crumpled up sheet of paper on the floor, fallen inches short of the wastepaper basket. He wants to do something, but what is there to do? He could put the sheet in the bin, like Namjoon had intended, but he doesn’t want to be the one to physically throw away Namjoon’s work. He could retrieve it, but then what would he do with it? Namjoon didn’t want the piece of paper, that’s why he’d thrown it away, after all.

He goes to stand next to the piece of paper, staring down at where it lays, crumpled, on the floor. He crouches down next to it, fingertips brushing over the sharply folded edges of the paper ball.

“If you’re going to steal it,” Yoongi says wryly behind him, making Hoseok jump up and away from the paper guiltily. “You’d better do it quick.” Yoongi’s leaning on the open doorframe leading into the kitchen, spatula in hand. “Namjoon won’t be in his room forever.”

“I don’t know if I want to steal it,” Hoseok says, hands clasped behind his back. “I don’t know what I want.” He frowns. “Well, I want to understand what Namjoon would want. Why work so hard on this, only to throw it away?”

Yoongi’s mouth flattens into a line as he considers Hoseok, head tilted slightly to the side. Eventually, he nods, pushes away from the door frame, and walks towards his own room. “Come with me.”

Hoseok’s not been in Yoongi or Namjoon’s rooms before, and he hasn’t stopped to imagine what they might look like. If he had, he would’ve imagined something like this for Yoongi - sturdy, practical furniture absolutely covered in a maelstrom of stationery, textbooks laying face down with their spines cracked, even a huge, blown-up photograph of engravings that look like…

“Khitan?” Hoseok says curiously, the word for the script flashing into his brain before he can even think to look for it.

Yoongi looks stricken. “You can read it.” He glances at the page. Bites his lip. “Don’t tell me what it says, I’m not cheating on my thesis.”

“Uh, okay?” It was a pretty boring passage, in all honesty, talking about taxes and commerce, but Yoongi seems adamant.

“I can’t believe the universe’s best polyglot - omniglot - has literally moved into my apartment,” Yoongi mutters as he uses the textbooks to cover up the zoomed in image of the script. Once he’s done, he takes a step back to survey his work, then turns to Hoseok. “Why were we in here?” Hoseok shrugs. “Right, I remember.” He opens a drawer in his desk, pulls out a pair of earphones, and hands them to Hoseok. “You want to understand Namjoon, yeah?”

“I do,” Hoseok says.

“Why?”

Hoseok winds the wire of the earphones lightly around his hands, staring down at his hands’ slow movements as he thinks. “What do you mean?”

“Do you just want to ‘understand’ him because he doesn’t want you to read his mind?” Yoongi asks bluntly.

“What? No!” Hoseok replies indignantly, stopping his winding in order to look at Yoongi. “That hadn’t even crossed my mind!”

Yoongi smiles a little. “Alright, I believe you.” He jerks his head towards his earphones. “You want to understand Namjoon? Look up the songs he’s written online, that’s as good a place as any to start.”

Hoseok waits until they’ve all gone to bed - relatively early, by Namjoon and Yoongi’s usual standards - before booting up the borrowed laptop. On the list of technologies he’s used over the countless millennia, the internet ranks pretty high so far, all things considered. He likes the deliberateness of it, of specifically choosing and typing out what he wants to search for, much better than similar knowledge databases that could react to every minute, subconscious flicker of thought he ever had.

He types in Namjoon’s name in the internet’s search bar, and is almost immediately confronted with a collage of news articles about Namjoon’s personal life; he catches a few words - ‘messy’, ‘exposé’, ‘romance’ - before hastily tabbing back to the main search page.

Clarifying his search of ‘Kim Namjoon’ with ‘song writing credits’, he finds something closer to what he’d been looking for - a list of songs Namjoon had either written himself or helped to write. On further inspection, someone has even made a playlist of each song, helpfully organised chronologically.

The playlist is almost eleven hours long.

Namjoon’s been prolifically writing songs for over a decade, although fewer have been released over the last few weeks than seems to be normal for him. It’s still a significant amount of songs, but there are far fewer than in other comparable periods of time in the playlist - and, glaringly obviously, all of the songs released in the last few weeks have thoughtful, melancholy, or just plain miserable song titles.

That’s not to say he should judge a song by its title. One of Namjoon’s songs from early on has a delicate, poetic title that gives way into a bombastic, synth-heavy chorus that has Hoseok subconsciously dancing where he’s sat before he realises what’s going on. However, after he’s listened to each of the recent songs, he has no choice to confirm that they’re just… Sad. Lost, in a way that Namjoon’s earlier material isn’t. Gone are the intricate rhyme schemes densely packed into his earlier lyrics, the metaphors turned on their heads to approach a problem from a different angle, the evocations of feelings and emotions Hoseok’s never experienced for himself in this universe, but he can imagine with ease.

He’s not sure he understands Namjoon any better after listening to his lyrics, but he does understand what he wants to do with the crumpled-up sheet of half-formed lyrics currently tossed aside on the sitting room floor, so Hoseok sneaks out of the room, padding past Namjoon’s closed door, over towards the wastepaper basket-

“Hoseok? What’re you doing?” Namjoon mumbles the second his fingertips brush the paper; Hoseok whips his head to look around. Namjoon’s laid out on the couch, one foot propped up on top of the back of the couch, and his head tilted up just slightly to look down at Hoseok, crouched over the tossed away sheet of paper like a gargoyle.

“I’m, you know.” He picks up the sheet of paper, a small part of him surprised that it’s just that - a sheet of paper, with little worth beyond what he’s attributed to it. He waves the paper at Namjoon.

“I don’t,” Namjoon says, looking tired but amused as he shifts into an upright position. “What made you come out here in the dark at three in the morning to pick up some rubbish?”

“It’s not rubbish,” Hoseok says. “They’re your lyrics.”

“They’re pretty bad,” Namjoon says with a quiet laugh, resting his forearms on his knees as he tilts his head from side to side, his neck cricking with the movement. “Did Yoongi speak to you about them?”

Hoseok shakes his head, then frowns. “Uh, kind of? He caught me doing, well, this earlier, and when I couldn’t give him a reason why I didn’t want you to throw your lyrics away, he told me to listen to your music.”

Namjoon snorts, a rough puff of breath through his nose. “I figured he’d said something to you, he couldn’t even look at me during dinner. In a different way to how we normally avoid eye contact, you know.” Hoseok doesn’t, but he doesn’t really think Namjoon expects him to, the nuances of Namjoon and Yoongi’s friendship seemingly a mystery to everyone except themselves. “If you want to keep them, I don’t mind,” Namjoon continues, nodding to the sheet of paper Hoseok’s still clutching tightly. “I mean, I was literally throwing them away, so.”

Hoseok doesn’t want to keep them, he realises, not necessarily. What he wants is for Namjoon to want to keep his handwritten words, to know the intrinsic value of being able to hold onto things like that. What he wants is to take Namjoon by the shoulders and shake him, tell him how lucky he is to have friends who love him, a home to welcome him, a place in a world where he can make art and live and love, even if that does lead to him getting hurt sometimes.

He opens the sheet of scrawled lyrics and looks down at them unseeingly to gather his thoughts, to hide just how suddenly furious he is. It surprises him, the vehemence of it - in all the uncountable years he’s been granting wishes, he can’t remember ever being so deeply affected by something like this before.

“Yeah, I think I would like to keep them,” Hoseok says, nodding.

As the weeks pass, Hoseok starts seeing less and less of Yoongi around the apartment.

“He’s got a meeting with his thesis advisor coming up,” Namjoon explains when Hoseok asks, looking up from the carrot he’s very carefully cutting. “He always gets like this around a deadline.”

Thankfully, Namjoon’s warming up to him now that he’s seemingly proved that he won’t just go poking around Namjoon’s thoughts without permission, so whereas he’s seeing less of Yoongi, he’s seeing more of Namjoon; this also means he’s seeing a lot more of Namjoon in the kitchen. Up until this point, dinners have been cooked almost exclusively by Yoongi, but with Yoongi’s increasing absence Namjoon seems to be taking on more of the daily cooking.

Because of how open their apartment is, Hoseok’s grown pretty familiar with both of their cooking styles (both Namjoon and Yoongi continue to refuse his increasingly insistent offers to help out with the cooking, treating him more like a guest than someone living with them indefinitely). Yoongi cooks like it’s second nature, knife flying as he chops vegetables, no timers set, no recipes, just multiple pots simmering away simultaneously as he occasionally pauses his music to yell voice notes to his phone about potential things to look into for his thesis.

Namjoon, on the other hand, puts his full focus on cooking. He’ll neatly weigh out ingredients and chop things well before they’re needed in the recipes he always uses, pause music in order to read the instructions - Hoseok’s even seen him rewriting recipes so that they’re easier for him to follow. Namjoon doesn’t talk much while cooking, but Hoseok hovers around the kitchen anyway; Namjoon uses a lot of dishware and cutlery as he cooks, so Hoseok keeps on top of the dishes for him.

Hoseok likes washing dishes; the bubbles of the dish soap are soft and fizzy under his hands, and the water’s warm enough to turn his skin pink. The kitchen’s only window, a small, smeary rectangle, is right above the sink, just slightly higher than Hoseok’s eyelevel. Standing at the sink gives him a view of the sky, the evening swirling it lavender and buttermilk yellow.

“Thanks for your help,” Namjoon says, carefully ladling soup into three bowls, one spoonful at a time to keep the portion sizes equal. He glances over his shoulder at Hoseok. “You didn’t need to.”

“I’m happy to,” Hoseok says, drying his hands. He leans against the sink as Namjoon takes one of the bowls to Yoongi’s door; he knocks quietly and waits for Yoongi’s answering hum before stepping inside. Yoongi’s response is too quiet for Hoseok to hear from the kitchen, but Namjoon emerges without the bowl of soup, instead carrying an empty mug and a tangerine peel.

Now that he and Namjoon talk, it’s only slightly awkward without Yoongi sitting between them at dinner. Namjoon helps him come up with conversation topics, at any rate, even if Hoseok is still the primary instigator of most of their conversations.

“I think I might spend the day granting wishes in person tomorrow,” Hoseok offers as they finish up eating. Namjoon accidentally loosens his grip on his spoon, sending it clattering against the bowl and spilling a little of the soup onto the table. As he returns with a cloth, he hums in acknowledgement of Hoseok’s statement. A few weeks ago, Hoseok might’ve let it slide, careful to let Namjoon keep whatever secrets he wanted to himself. Now, however, he asks, “Something on your mind?”

“No,” Namjoon says immediately. He pauses in his wiping. “Well.” Hoseok waits patiently. “It’s just… You were so ill after that first day. And I know you’ve been going out running every morning and granting wishes then, and you’ve been using the internet to grant wishes, but…” He starts wiping again, much more furiously. “I just don’t want you to overdo it.”

“I’ll be careful,” Hoseok promises. “But I think I need to do this. Granting wishes over the internet is…” He smacks his lips thoughtfully before shrugging. “Difficult.”

“How so?”

“People talk hyperbolically on the internet,” Hoseok says. The way Namjoon snorts in agreement lets Hoseok know that he’s on the right lines with that argument. “So, the text might say someone is ‘wishing’ for something, but they’re not. Not really.”

“It’s an interesting concept,” Namjoon says. “But I suppose you’re not really interested in the nuances of wish-granting in an online space - you probably want to go home, huh?” Hoseok hums, noncommittal, as he gathers up the bowls. “Can I go with you tomorrow?”

“Really?” Hoseok asks as he gets to work cleaning the bowls. “Why?”

“Because at least then if you overwork yourself, I can carry you back,” Namjoon replies. “Also, I’m interested to see you do your thing.”

Hoseok lets Namjoon pick the route that they walk around the city - partly to assuage his fears of Hoseok accidentally wandering into a crowded area and overwhelming himself, and partly because Hoseok still doesn’t really know his way around anywhere except the route to and from the park he’d originally landed in.

Namjoon takes him to a tiny island set in the middle of the river, seemingly set aside for the sole purpose of walking through and taking in. The fields are strewn with green plants dotted with yellow flowers that, due to human eyes, seem to recede into denser, brighter yellow as the fields stretch on, creating a gradient beautifully suited to the soft blue sky and blisteringly white skyscrapers in the distance.

Unfortunately, the peaceful, beautiful surroundings are not exactly conducive to wish granting. Most of the people they walk past are content, or at least content enough to not be actively wishing for something as Hoseok walks near them. He manages to catch one person wishing, desperately, for somebody to commission her for a piece of art, but that’s an easy enough fix - just hook his magic into the internet’s algorithm to gently promote her work to the right people, and her phone is buzzing with notifications before she’s out of earshot.

“Was that you?” Namjoon asks, turning to look at her as she lets out a sudden, loud whoop of delight. Hoseok nods, already eyeing up the next group of walkers approaching them; he can’t sense any wishes from them, yet, but it’s possible one of them has a quiet wish buried deep down somewhere. “What’d she want?”

“For somebody to commission her art,” Hoseok says, trying not to sigh glumly as the group walk past without a wish between them.

“That’s it?”

Hoseok frowns sidelong at Namjoon, having to look up to do so. “What do you mean, ‘that’s it’?”

“Well, it’s just…” He laughs awkwardly. “I’ve just realised that saying this out loud is going to sound awful.” Hoseok blinks, lets the silence fester to prompt Namjoon into filling it. “It’s not going to mean much, in the grand scheme of things.”

“It means the world to her,” Hoseok says simply.

“Yes, I know that,” Namjoon replies. “But in terms of, I don’t know, the universe-”

“Well,” Hoseok laughs, claps Namjoon on the shoulder, and says, “Nothing I do in your entire universe matters in the grand scheme of things, by that logic. This is just one universe in an infinite slew of them.”

“Oh.” Namjoon stops. Frowns down at his hands as they cast shadows on the dirt path through the fields. “I hadn’t really thought about it that way.” His fingers start shaking, just a little, but he doesn’t make any move to hide it as he continues to stare down at the shadows.

“However,” Hoseok says, reaching out, so slowly, towards Namjoon’s hands. “Each person in each universe is incredibly unique, you know? So many chances and choices led to each and every one of you, which makes the things you choose to wish for remarkable.” Namjoon’s eyes track Hoseok’s slow movement, but he doesn’t move to take his hands away as they edge closer. “No one else in all of existence has ever wished for anything in quite the same way as you.” He takes Namjoon’s fingers in his hands and squeezes. “So, whatever you wish for, it matters. To me, at least.”

When he takes his hands away, he’s pleased to see that Namjoon’s fingers aren’t shaking anymore, but he stuffs his hands in his hoodie pocket before Hoseok can marvel at it for too long.

Just as suddenly as Yoongi had disappeared from the apartment, he reappears - the bags under his eyes a little deeper, but otherwise exactly the same as before.

“My thesis advisor was happy with the work I’ve been doing,” Yoongi says, frying up eggs on a sunny, late spring morning. “Which means I can afford to take a little bit of downtime.”

Yoongi’s return to day-to-day life in the apartment means that Jeongguk starts coming over more often again; he’s sitting across from Hoseok at the kitchen table, swinging his legs cheerfully as he watches Yoongi cook. The only one missing is Namjoon, and Hoseok knows he’s not likely to appear any time soon - he’d heard Namjoon getting ready for bed as he’d been leaving for his run.

“We should do something!” Jeongguk says. “We can celebrate hyung’s freedom.”

“I was researching, Jeongguk-ah, I wasn’t in jail,” Yoongi teases, serving up the biggest egg on Jeongguk’s plate.

“Would’ve been able to visit you in prison,” Jeongguk grumbles, bowing his head in thanks when Yoongi slides the plate in front of him. When he looks up, his face brightens, smile wide and eyes scrunched; even in the dim light of the kitchen, Hoseok can see his eyes sparkling. “Didn’t Namjoon-hyung say he wanted to go to the botanical gardens soon? We should go today!”

“Are we going to wait for Namjoon to wake up?” Yoongi asks, glancing at Namjoon’s closed bedroom door before serving Hoseok his egg. “Or was the plan to just stick him in a wheelbarrow?”

“Do you even have a wheelbarrow?” Jeongguk says, glancing around the apartment before making eye contact with Hoseok. “Wait, I can wish for-”

“Absolutely not,” Yoongi says firmly as Hoseok laughs. “No wishing for Namjoon-manoeuvring wheelbarrows.”

“What about - hyung, you know that bit in-”

“And no wishing for magic capes like that bit in Infinity War,” Yoongi interrupts.

Jeongguk pouts, looking to the side. “You don’t know that that was what I was going to say.”

“Oh?” Yoongi pauses to serve up his own egg, and then looks over at Jeongguk with a glint in his eye. “What were you going to reference?”

“Okay, fine, I was going to reference Marvel,” Jeongguk says. He gasps delightedly, looks at Hoseok, opens his mouth-

“No, no, don’t - Hoseok-ah, I wish that you do not grant Jeongguk any wishes that will grant him Marvel superhero powers,” Yoongi says, his words almost blending together with how fast he’s speaking.

“Weird conversation to walk in on,” Namjoon says, scratching the back of his head as he appears in his doorframe.

“Ah, hyung! Sorry, did we wake you?” Jeongguk asks.

Namjoon shakes his head. “I was already awake, don’t worry.”

“You can’t have slept for very long,” Hoseok says with a frown, looking out of the kitchen window at the sky.

When he turns back, Yoongi is looking at Namjoon with a sharp look in his eye. “Did you sleep?”

“I dozed off, I think,” Namjoon says, taking a seat across from Hoseok at the table. “Yeah, I must’ve, I don’t remember hearing Hoseok come back from his run.”

Yoongi hums and stands back up. “Let hyung cook you breakfast. Want to head to the botanical gardens today?” Namjoon looks set to argue about breakfast, but the stern look Yoongi shoots him makes him close his mouth; he nods. “Good. It’ll do us both good to get out of the apartment.”

“Speak for yourself,” Namjoon jokes weakly. “Hoseok and I went out, uh… Last week?”

“It was almost two weeks ago,” Hoseok points out gently.

“Huh.” Namjoon frowns. “You sure?”

“Positive,” Hoseok says, waving his hand vaguely at the sky.

“You can tell the date from the sky?” Namjoon asks, turning to look at the window.

“You can’t?”

“Uh, no?”

“You could probably learn,” Yoongi says, cracking the egg with one hand over the pan. “It’d just be a case of tracking the movement of the stars, I reckon.”

“I’ll get right on that, then,” Namjoon says, grinning at Hoseok. He looks just as tired as Yoongi - more so, even, his eyes a little bloodshot and his hair flattened against his head – but Hoseok can’t help but grin back.

By the time they make it to the botanical gardens they both look a bit more awake; when Jeongguk pulls Yoongi away to look at a giant dandelion sculptural installation, Hoseok turns to Namjoon. “Why did you want to come here?”

“The gift shop sells a pretty good selection of books about plant care,” Namjoon explains, reading the little information plaque about the artist. “I’m hoping they have some on terrariums, I’m looking to improve mine.”

“Terrariums?” Hoseok asks curiously.

Namjoon shoots him a surprised look, and then grimaces apologetically. “I suppose you’ve never seen them, yeah. Hang on, I think I’ve got a recent picture…” He scrolls through his phone and shows Hoseok a photo of several glass jars filled with plants. “I keep them in my room.”

Hoseok takes a closer look at the photograph. He’s still never been in Namjoon’s room, never even seen inside of it - however, unless his furniture is identical to what’s currently in Hoseok’s room, this photo looks like it was taken in Hoseok’s room. The chest of drawers the plants are sitting on looks the same, the view out of the window looks identical, even the uneven coating of paint right under the windowsill looks the same. Rather than pointing any of this out, however, Hoseok smiles and says, “It’s like the Library.”

“The Library?” Namjoon asks.

“Where I live?” Hoseok says, before he frowns. “Well, kind of. I spend more time in universes than in the Library. It’s more like a base. Or a hub?” He skews his mouth to the side, thinking. “I also don’t really live when I’m there, I’m just there to find a new universe.” He shrugs. “Anyway, we keep the universes in little jars, and they kind of look like yours.”

“You’re revealing secrets about the universe to me in an incredibly blasé manner,” Namjoon says, a little faintly. “We’re just here looking at a Ficus, and you’re telling me all of this-” he waves his hand around vaguely “-is in a jar?” He looks up at the glass ceiling above them. “Shit. Here I was worrying about paying rent.”

Hoseok laughs. “I wouldn’t think about it too much. I don’t actually think there’s a way for you to leave your universe anyway.”

“Oh.” Namjoon pouts a little, looking back down at Hoseok. “It would’ve been nice to come and visit you once you’ve finished working here.”

“You know, I’m not actually sure what would happen if you did come to the Library,” Hoseok muses, letting Namjoon lead him around the plants. The variety on display is incredible - while he knows that organisms with the capability to wish usually live in places with biodiversity, it’s nice to take the time to look at plants for their own sake. He doesn’t often have company like this in universes - in most he keeps to himself, either because there isn’t anyone around for him to talk to, or it’s generally easier not to tell people who he is. Having friends to hang out with is a nice change of pace. “I don’t know what I look like in the Library, but it’s not this.” He wiggles his hands to gesture to himself.

“Huh.” Namjoon looks him up and down. “I kind of just assume this is ‘you’, it’s weird to think that it’s not.”

“Well, it is,” Hoseok argues, putting his hands on his hips. “I’m still me.”

Namjoon hums, then shakes his head. “I’d argue that’s not strictly true. You told me that you forget things like languages the longer you spend in a place, right? And isn’t your personality derived from your memories of your experiences?” Hoseok opens his mouth to reply, but Namjoon’s on a roll. “Not to mention one of the things you enjoy doing here is running, which you wouldn’t be able to do if you’d turned up here as, I don’t know, a fish or something. A fungus.”

“They do a lot of wishing, fungi?” Hoseok teases, turning his hips so that his elbow gently knocks Namjoon’s arm.

Namjoon snorts and knocks his elbow right back. “Ah, you know what I mean.” He shrugs. “Guess you’ll just have to come visit us, then.” Hoseok stops walking and stares at Namjoon’s broad back as he walks a few steps ahead. Once he notices that Hoseok’s not at his side, Namjoon turns to look back, raises his eyebrow, and says, “Hoseok?”

Hoseok shakes his head jerkily. “Right, sorry, coming.”

Hoseok’s never been invited back to a universe before.

On the occasions where he’s made friends, found family, fallen in love, he has, without question, outlived every relationship he has formed.

He’s pretty sure he can’t go back to universes once he’s left them, except when he retires – but he doesn’t think that’s what Namjoon means, somehow.

As they move on to a humid room filled with huge, damp leaves and pearly ponds, Hoseok gives his retirement some thought. This universe would, almost certainly, be the nicest one to retire in out of all the universes he’s visited. He’d like to be close to this planet, with its wide variety of people and places to watch over, including-

He watches Namjoon as he leans over a smooth wooden railing to peer down into one of the ponds. The thought of watching his friends from afar doesn’t feel good, necessarily, but he thinks it’s probably inevitable – there are so many wishers in this universe, densely concentrated on this one planet, that he’s surely going to be able to retire sooner rather than later.

Thinking about it isn’t making him feel great, though, so he pushes the thought aside and goes to join Namjoon at the railing.

“And that…” Hoseok stretches his hands out in front of him and then above his head, like he’s seen Namjoon do after he’s finished writing a verse that’s been troubling him for a while. “…Was my one hundredth wish.”

“Already?” Namjoon asks, looking up from his notepad. The two of them are visiting a cafe - Hoseok had more or less insisted after he’d done the math and realised that the last time Namjoon had left the apartment outside of work had been when they’d gone to the botanical gardens, and that was nearly a month ago. This is out of character for Namjoon, according to Yoongi.

“Usually it’s getting him to stay in on his days off that’s the challenge,” he’d said wryly, glancing at his closed bedroom door. Namjoon seems to be sleeping better, at any rate - he’s getting at least seven hours of sleep, even if it’s at seemingly random times of day. “My tutorial group has an exam next week, so my office hours for this week are basically every waking hour, but I’ll ask him if he wants to do something this weekend.”

“I can ask him today?” Hoseok had offered - leading to the two of them here, in this chain cafe just down the street. Namjoon has brought his song writing notepad with him, and Hoseok’s been granting a wish here and there, but for the most part they’ve been relaxing. He can actually see the tension leaving Namjoon’s shoulders, the more time they’re spending out of the apartment.

“You’ve been keeping track?” Namjoon prompts; Hoseok shakes his head to clear it, but Namjoon misunderstands. “Do you get a, uh, notification or something?”

“I’m not a computer,” Hoseok says with a grin. “It’s not like I get an email from my bosses, like, ‘Attention, you’ve just granted wish number one hundred!’”

“Well, I don’t know!” Namjoon laughs. “For all I know, you’ve got some cosmic abacus floating beside you at all times!” He takes a sip of his drink. “How do you know, then?”

“I dunno, I just remember?” Hoseok says, tilting his head to the side and looking up thoughtfully. He shrugs. “Yeah, there’s no special trick or anything.”

“That’s still pretty impressive,” Namjoon says, resting his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands. “Remembering every wish you’ve ever granted.”

“Well, not every wish,” Hoseok clarifies. “Just the ones I’ve granted here, and a few of the more memorable ones from before - the big ones, or the ones for people I cared about.”

“I’d imagine it’s a coping mechanism,” Namjoon says; Hoseok blinks confusedly. “Sorry, I was thinking ahead - you forgetting things over time, I’m guessing it’s your mind’s way of not overloading you with information. You’re in a human body, right? The human mind isn’t equipped to hold onto millennia of memories indefinitely.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess so,” Hoseok says, nodding. “I remember returning back to the Library a few times and needing a while to decompress with the information overload.”

Namjoon thinks about this for a moment, writes something down on his notepad in English (and Hoseok can tell he’s spent a while here - he remembers being able to read Namjoon’s English lyrics with ease a few months ago, but now he’s struggling with some of the longer, more complicated words. Some of that could be the fact that he’s looking at the notepad upside down, though), then says, “If you stayed here, how long would it take you to forget you weren’t just a guy from Korea?”

“A while,” Hoseok says.

“Years?”

“I don’t think the planet will still exist,” Hoseok says gently.

“Huh.” Namjoon looks out of sorts for a moment. “Do you…” He seems to really be struggling with his words; eventually, he just blurts out, “Why do it, then?” Hoseok takes a loud slurp of his own drink as he waits for Namjoon to elaborate. “You have the power to… To bend time, shift space, mould the universe in any way you wanted, go anywhere, do anything. Why bother being that selfless, using all of that knowledge, that power, to grant wishes for people who’ll be gone long before you will?”

“It’s not selfless,” Hoseok says.

“You’re so selfless, you don’t even call it ‘selfless’.”

“No, trust me, it’s not selflessness,” Hoseok laughs, waving his hands as he shakes his head. He sets one of his hands on the table and draws it up, showing Namjoon the slippery ribbons of stardust cupped underneath his palm to shield them from view. “If I don’t grant wishes in the universes I’m in, I end up stuck there. Which, I’ve floated around in one or two empty expanses after the heat death of a universe, and let me tell you, it’s boring as shit waiting for middle management to realise I’m stuck. It’s quicker to just grant wishes.”

“Well, why not just stay home?” Namjoon asks.

“Because my home is nowhere near as nice as yours,” Hoseok says with a shrug. “The Library of Universes is just that, a library of universes.”

“It sounds amazing,” Namjoon says; he’s trying to reach his straw into his mouth, but he’s not really paying attention, missing it each time he leans in for another attempt.

“Eh, you see one universe from the outside, you’ve seen them all,” Hoseok says dismissively. “They’re just like jars of blue soup, I never miss it. Honestly, universes are much more interesting from the inside. Why else do you think stars choose to retire to universes, rather than spend the rest of eternity floating around the Library of Universes? We grant wishes until we’ve done enough, then we get to spend the rest of our lives in a universe of our choice.”

“So, you spend all that time granting wishes just to spend a small portion of your life relaxing?” Namjoon says. “Sounds like a shit deal to me.”

“Namjoon, I’ve spent enough time here experiencing capitalism to know that a significant number of people on this planet are doing the exact same thing,” Hoseok points out; Namjoon laughs loud enough that several customers turn their way.

“All right, fair,” Namjoon says, seemingly unaware that people are still looking at him. His smile stays bright as he looks at Hoseok, eyes creasing at the corners. “What was your wish, then?”

“Eh?”

“Your hundredth wish,” Namjoon clarifies. “That you just granted?”

“Oh, right!” Hoseok surreptitiously points to the barista, who keeps eyeing the door with repetitive flickering glances. “She’s trying to study for an exam, so she wished for a quiet afternoon with not many customers.”

“So, how do you grant that?” Namjoon asks. “Without messing with anyone’s free will, I mean.”

Hoseok nods at Namjoon’s coffee cup. “Are you finished? I can show you, but we’ll need to leave for it to work.”

Namjoon nods and starts tidying his things away; Hoseok takes their tray to the counter and thanks the barista, who smiles, casts one last look at the door, and pulls a hefty hardback textbook out from underneath the counter.

“So, if anyone makes the decision to come here, it won’t work,” Hoseok tries to explain as he follows Namjoon out of the coffee shop. “However…” Once they step out of the door, Hoseok gestures to the street. The stardust has done its job - to their left, a cracked paving slab is being fixed on their side of the road, and the crossing set up to redirect pedestrians takes them straight past the coffee shop - to enter, people would have to double back on themselves to cross back over the road. To their right, a string quartet has set up shop - they’re good enough to draw attention, but their instruments are taking up too much of the path to really warrant squeezing past them.

Across the street - and Hoseok’s especially pleased with this - a rival coffee shop has suddenly had the idea to start offering samples of iced coffee, and the shop is being lit up by a pretty little sunbeam.

“Smart,” Namjoon says, looking around approvingly. “The sunlight is a nice touch.”

“Thank you!” Hoseok feels like he wants to laugh, or cup Namjoon’s cheeks, or jump, or punch the air - he feels warm and happy and noticed in a way he can’t remember experiencing in a long while. He rocks back and forth on his toes in order to deal with some of that surplus energy.

At wish number 136, for a small boy wishing for ice cream (a simple traffic diversion sends an ice cream van trundling down the street towards the boy and his parents), Hoseok frowns down at his hands.

“What’s wrong?” Namjoon asks immediately. The seven of them are all together again for the first time in a long while - since a beer and chicken night Seokjin had organised before one of Yoongi’s crucial deadlines - and Namjoon’s been paying close attention to him since everyone had first met up outside of the apartment building. They’re going camping at a campsite-

“It’s not a campsite, per se,” Taehyung had explained as Yoongi had tossed the tent into the back of Jeongguk’s old car - it’s the only vehicle any of them had that would seat all seven of them, but at a very tight squeeze. “But if you’re in the know, then you know it’s a really good place to camp.”

“I really don’t want to go to jail for camping wrong,” Seokjin had said. He had what, to Hoseok, looked to be the most uncomfortable seat in the whole car; right smack in the middle, squashed in between Jimin on one side and Taehyung on the other.

“We won’t go to jail! Probably.” Taehyung looked thoughtful, then shook his head. “No, no, I’m sure we won’t go to jail. We might get told off if we’re caught, but how’re you supposed to live your life if you’re afraid of being told off?”

“I’m afraid of being told off if that telling off involves jail time,” Seokjin had insisted.

“Ah, live a little, hyung!” Jeongguk said, reaching up to close the trunk of his car; the whole vehicle bounced with the force of it, but the back - where Hoseok and Namjoon were sitting - rocked particularly vigorously.

So. They’re going camping at a potentially illegal site, and they’ve stopped at a tiny roadside shop for supplies, and Hoseok’s just granted his 136th wish.

“I just granted my 136th wish,” Hoseok says aloud, because he’s a little hung up on this.

“Is that… A significant number?” Namjoon asks carefully. They’re both sitting in the trunk of the car, legs swinging in the air, watching the car while the others run to grab food and use the restroom. The early summer sun is warm on Hoseok’s face - he tilts his head up, closes his eyes, and basks in the light for a moment.

“The number isn’t,” Hoseok says eventually, opening his eyes. “But it’s the most wishes I’ve ever granted in one universe.”

“Really?” Namjoon asks.

Hoseok turns to look at him, feeling lazy in the warmth of the sun. “You sound surprised.”

“Well, you’ve been doing this for a while, right?” Namjoon explains, wiping his forehead with his forearm. “I don’t know, I kind of figured 136 wishes wasn’t that many, it’s not like you’ve been here that long.”

This is true - there’ve been universes where he’s been lucky to have granted even one wish in the amount of time he’s spent here. There’ve been universes where he hasn’t even seen anybody else by this point.

“There’re a lot of people here, though,” Hoseok says.

“You’re telling me there aren’t cities in space?” Namjoon laughs.

“You’d be surprised how rare this sort of thing is,” Hoseok replies with his own laugh. “Lots of people living in such close proximity to one another like this, it’s… It’s special, you know?”

Namjoon is prevented from answering by everyone barrelling out of the cafe; Seokjin with his arms wrapped around Taehyung’s shoulders, Taehyung holding Jimin’s hand while Jimin talks to Jeongguk and Yoongi, gesticulating wildly with both hands, pulling Taehyung’s along with him in the process.

“…I’m just saying,” Hoseok can hear Jimin saying as they come closer. “I think I could take twenty tiny Yoongi-hyung’s in a fight. I don’t think I could take one giant one.”

“The question isn’t ‘which one could you fight’, the question is ‘which would you prefer’,” Jeongguk says, with the air of a man who’s said something repeatedly.

“Also there’s no world where you could take me in a fight,” Yoongi says, a little smugly as he draws close enough to hand Namjoon a tray of three cups of iced coffee - he takes one and turns back to Jimin. “We could even ask Hoseok to confirm it.”

“I mean, yeah!” Hoseok says with a shrug as he takes one of the cups from Namjoon. “This is the only universe you’re in, and if you can’t take him in a fight here…”

“I’m not sure where this slander is coming from,” Jimin says. “But I do kendo, while you sit at a desk writing about old languages. We are not the same.”

“Again, that’s not what I’m asking,” Jeongguk says with a half laugh.

The half-argument continues as they all climb back into Jeongguk’s car and for a significant stretch of the rest of the journey; it’s only as they’re slowing to a halt, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, with the sun setting low over the lake they’ve parked up alongside, that Namjoon says quietly, “So, you could go at any time?”

Hoseok can’t immediately follow the train of thought; Namjoon’s been quiet for most of the latter half of the car ride. “Huh?”

“You’ve granted the most wishes you’ve ever granted in one place,” Namjoon says. “Which means you’ve got no way of knowing which wish will be your last.”

“Well, I didn’t know that anyway,” Hoseok reminds him.

“No, but you would probably have guessed it would’ve been less than 136, right?” Namjoon presses; Hoseok gives a half-nod. “So now you’re just… Flying blind.”

“I guess?” Hoseok frowns at Namjoon. The two of them are still sitting in the back of the car; Yoongi had made a half-move to open the trunk door to pull out the tent nestled behind their seats, but Hoseok had seen him take one look at Namjoon’s face through the window and promptly chivvy everyone else towards the water. “Namjoon, what’s wrong?”

“Just… I don’t want you to leave without having a chance to say goodbye,” Namjoon says quietly. “I’ll miss you, you know? When you have to go.” Hoseok opens his mouth to reply, but Namjoon cuts in hastily. “Don’t promise something you can’t keep. Don’t do that.”

“Alright.” Hoseok takes in a deep breath. “How’s this - I really only grant wishes in your presence anyway, so when it is time for me to go, you’ll be one of the first to know.”

“Do you know in advance?” Namjoon asks. “When it’s time, do you get a five minute warning or something?”

Hoseok goes to answer, then stops. Thinks. He stares down at his hands. “I… Don’t remember.” He wracks his brain for the memory, any memory, of his final moments in any of the countless universes he’s been in. He knows it’s happened, and he remembers being able to remember those memories, but right now? Nothing.

“Hey,” Namjoon says; his hand flexes jerkily. “It’s okay.”

“This is normal,” Hoseok says, still looking at his hands. “If I spend long enough somewhere I start to forget things.”

“Yeah, I remember you saying,” Namjoon replies.

“It’s just frustrating, because it would be useful to be able to give you an answer,” Hoseok tries to joke, but he thinks it sounds a little flat. He sighs, then shakes his head. “Well, it doesn’t matter right now - we’re here to enjoy ourselves, right?” He pats his cheeks a few times, then offers Namjoon a smile. “Let’s get out of here.”

It’s easy to distract himself from the looming inevitability of his departure when he’s spending time with his friends. Although he sees much more of Namjoon, Yoongi, and Jeongguk than Jimin, Taehyung, and Seokjin, they’re all so enjoyable to talk to and get along with that he feels he’s known them all for years.

As their first night gets underway, the seven of them sit around the camping stove Seokjin had brought with him - with good beer, great food, and excellent company, the hours fly by so easily that it feels like minutes have passed before Hoseok looks up at the sky and sees how late it’s gotten.

Namjoon sees him looking up at the sky and checks his phone. “Ah, it’s pretty late, huh?” He looks up at the sky again. “I didn’t realise how clear it was out here.” He stands up and stretches before jerking his thumb behind his shoulder. “I’m gonna go have a better look at the sky, anyone want to come?”

“Yeah, I will,” Hoseok says.

“I’m going to sleep, I think,” Jimin says around a yawn; it almost immediately sets Taehyung off, who tries to mask it by keeping his mouth closed and widening his eyes. Jimin pulls him upright, and then the two of them pull Seokjin to his feet, who offers them a tired, wordless wave as they enter the tent.

“Hyung? Jeongguk?” Namjoon asks.

Jeongguk turns to look at Yoongi expectantly; he shakes his head, cheeks a little pink. “I’m, ah, going to stay here, I think. Watch the fire.”

“I’ll keep hyung company, then!” Jeongguk offers immediately. “You two go have fun.”

They meander off a little ways away - close enough that they can still see Yoongi and Jeongguk in the glow of the camping stove, but far enough away that they can’t hear them - and they sit on the side of a hill. The grass is long enough that it feels cool and damp when Hoseok digs his fingers in; he’s supposed to be looking at the stars, but instead he finds himself looking out at the lake; the rippled reflection of the slither of moon up above, the surprisingly bright blue water under the dark night sky, the dark silhouette of the trees on the opposite shoreline.

He looks back over at Yoongi and Jeongguk just in time to catch them both lean forward suddenly and start kissing.

Namjoon huffs out a quiet laugh. “Finally, took them long enough.”

“Wait.” Hoseok turns back to Namjoon. “That’s their first kiss?”

“Uh, yeah?” He snorts with another laugh. “Did you think they were already dating?”

“Yes?” Hoseok says incredulously, shuffling around on the grass to stare at Namjoon directly. “Are you serious, they’re genuinely not dating?”

“No - well, they might be now, but they haven’t been.” Hoseok flops back onto the grass; he feels, rather than sees, Namjoon lay down next to him. “Hyung wanted to wait until he’d finished his PhD, even though I told him that was stupid.”

“He probably didn’t want to split his attention between his work and Jeongguk,” Hoseok says fairly, moving his hands to cradle the back of his head, his knuckles digging into the dirt below.

“True, but… You don’t know how long you have, you know? You should just go for it, in most cases,” Namjoon says. Hoseok glances at him out of the corner of his eye; he’s staring up at the sky. He hums in agreement as he turns to look at the stars himself. “Is it weird, seeing them like this?” Namjoon blurts out.

Hoseok turns to look at him again, rolling onto his side to do so. “You mean the stars?” When Namjoon nods, he rolls back over to look up at the sky. “Not really. I’ve seen retired stars before. They’re a little further away than I’m used to - well, except for the sun, of course.”

“I wish I could see it,” Namjoon says. Hoseok rolls over, yet again, to look at him.

“You can,” Hoseok says with a slight frown, waving his hand up at the dark sky above them. They’re not quite far enough from Seoul for the sky to be completely black, but if he stares into the sky for long enough, he can just about make out the little pinpoints of light of the stars overhead. However, he’s not actually spending long enough looking up there, because he keeps turning to look at Namjoon.

“No, I mean, the things you’ve seen,” Namjoon says. “The Library, all the universes…” He trails off with a wistful sigh.

“Well, you can,” Hoseok repeats, rolling back onto his back. “You said you ‘wished’, right?”

He can hear Namjoon roll in the grass next to him. “Yeah, but…” He bites his lip. “What if it’s your final wish? I don’t want your last wish to be something wasteful like that.

“Granting a wish for you isn’t a waste,” Hoseok says seriously. “And if I did grant my last wish tonight… Well, it’d be at the end of one of the best days, so, I’d be happy.”

“I… Alright then, yeah. Show me,” Namjoon says softly.

As Hoseok thinks it over, he’s surprised by just how few memories of other universes he has left. They’re still there, but he can tell they’re getting hazier – how he looked in one universe, or the way a planet smelled in another - but he can remember one that he thinks Namjoon will like.

He waves his hand.

His memory unfurls above them like an ink splotch in water; although he can still feel the grass at his back, his memory makes it look as though the two of them are floating in an abyss of darkness. Namjoon sits up, and Hoseok can see his memory rippling underneath his palms like the membrane of a bubble as his magic battles against the reality of the grass between Namjoon’s fingers.

“It’s so dark,” Namjoon whispers, clenching his hands. Hoseok reaches out and puts his hand on top of Namjoon’s; he jerks, startled.

“Sorry, I forgot you wouldn’t be able to see yet,” Hoseok whispers back. He goes to pull his hand away, but Namjoon grabs at it, scrabbling to link their fingers.

“You can see?”

Hoseok nods, then turns up his own glow a little so that Namjoon can see him nodding. “There’s not a lot to see yet,” Hoseok explains, turning back to watch the sky. “But keep an eye on…” He pauses, glancing around the memory, before pointing. “That little patch of sky up there.” He turns to look at Namjoon, who’s staring at him, mouth slightly agape. “Namjoon, you’re not looking!”

“Right, sorry,” Namjoon says, rapid fire – and the words don’t stop coming. “Sorry, just, didn’t know you could do that. It’s pretty, you know? Makes you… It, uh… Anyway, what’s happening? Why’s it so dark and quiet here?”

“There was no life in this part of this universe,” Hoseok explains, choosing not to acknowledge the other things he said, or to acknowledge the way he feels about them. He may not remember much from previous universes, but he’s been down this road before – falling in love with the people he meets never ends well, so if he chooses not to address it, then he’ll be okay. “But then…” Something explodes silently in the corner of the sky he’d pointed Namjoon towards. It glows white, brighter and wider. “That galaxy’s star has just exploded, sending the outer planets in its orbit ricocheting across the universe. We’re going to hitch a ride on a passing asteroid carrying some organic matter.”

“We’re going to what-”

Hoseok stands up and pulls Namjoon along with him. The subtle nuances of floating weightlessly through space are a little lost when he can feel grass underneath his feet, but he’s not sure Namjoon is ready for that memory just yet - he already looks nauseous just from standing in the dark and listening to Hoseok’s words. He graciously skips over his memory of timing his landing on the asteroid, and just waves his hand to the two of them sitting on the asteroid’s surface.

“This is much more fraught than I imagined,” Namjoon says. The asteroid, carrying organic matter, Hoseok, and Namjoon, is hurtling through the galaxy Hoseok had spent a while floating around uselessly in, and they’re getting close enough to this galaxy’s star that he can turn down his own glow. “Although, I met you after you’d made a literal crater in the ground, so maybe I should’ve expected this.”

“It was a small crater,” Hoseok says, frowning. “Also, I’m not in any danger when I do things like this.” He taps his heels against the asteroid. “I suppose it looks different if you’re mortal. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No, no, I’m not scared! I know this is a memory,” Namjoon says hastily, squeezing Hoseok’s fingers. “I was just worried for you. Although…” He bites his lip. “You don’t have to do this again, right? You retire after our universe.” Hoseok nods, and Namjoon sighs roughly. “I wish you had some way of knowing when you’re going to be leaving - figure of speech,” Namjoon clarifies. “I don’t want you accidentally, I don’t know, opening up a magical wormhole because you’ve used my wish to access hidden knowledge of the universe.”

“I wish I knew too,” Hoseok says. “Feels weird.”

“What does, not knowing?”

Hoseok shakes his head. “Having a wish. Feels different to just wanting something.”

Because Hoseok’s not stupid.

He knows that some days, he catches himself looking at Namjoon for a little too long, laughing a little too loudly at his jokes. He knows that it would be scarily easy to build a life here with Namjoon, given time. It’s not love, not yet, but it’s something.

And he’s pretty sure Namjoon feels similarly, catches him looking at Hoseok just as often as Hoseok’s looking at him.

But at this stage, Hoseok doesn’t think it would be fair to either of them to start something, given Hoseok’s imminent departure from the universe. He’d much rather enjoy the time they have left together, as themselves, without needing to put a label on it.

For now, at least.

“I’ve got something for you,” Namjoon says, appearing suddenly in the sitting room from his bedroom.

Hoseok looks around, sees that Yoongi’s nowhere to be found, then looks over the back of the couch at Namjoon. “It’s not my birthday?”

“You… You have a birthday?” Namjoon looks mortified. “I never even thought to ask, oh god, please don’t tell me we missed it-”

“No, no, I don’t have a birthday,” Hoseok says quickly. “What is it?”

“It’s in my room,” Namjoon says, face clearing up. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

“Your room?” Hoseok asks; Namjoon blinks. “You sure?”

He seems genuinely bewildered by this question, looking from the door to Hoseok a few times before asking, “Why… Wouldn’t I be sure?”

“Well, I’ve never seen your room before! I figured you were hiding something in there!” Hoseok says defensively. Namjoon, to his surprise, starts laughing. “What? It’s been over half a year and there’s a whole room of this apartment I’ve never seen, what was I supposed to think?”

“Sorry, it’s really not that deep, I’d just never really thought about it,” Namjoon says with a grin, opening his bedroom door. “Come see the top secret room.”

Hoseok goes to peer inside. It looks… Like an ordinary bedroom, in all honesty. On the small side, but most of that isn’t helped by the giant shelves of Namjoon’s plants and books.

“Why’s this your room, and not the one I’m in?” Hoseok asks curiously, stepping inside.

“That used to be my room,” Namjoon explains lightly, running his finger over one of the shelves. “When I broke up with my last boyfriend, I started sleeping in here.” He smiles at Hoseok, a little strained. “You turned up about four weeks after we broke up, and I kind of jumped at the excuse to not have to move back into that room.”

Hoseok doesn’t know what to say - ‘sorry’ seems inadequate - so he settles on, “Want to swap back?”

Namjoon shakes his head. “I’m used to this room now. There was a while where I was struggling to sleep in here, but I’m alright now.” He takes his hand off the shelf, moves over to the window and, bizarrely, closes the blinds. “Alright, close your eyes.”

“Ominous,” Hoseok jokes, dutifully doing so.

“Yes, this has all been a ruse to get you alone in this specific scenario,” Namjoon says flatly. “Oh no, you’ve foiled my plan.”

“I knew it,” Hoseok says, feeling his cheeks rise with the force of his grin.

“Okay, hold your hands out,” Namjoon says; Hoseok does so, palms face down. “No, not like that, like-” Hoseok feels Namjoon’s hands around his, gently manoeuvring them into a cupped position. A moment later, he puts something cool, rounded, and heavy in his palms, fiddles with it, then says, “Now, open.”

The thing in his palms is a glass jar, similar to the ones on the shelves - except, where those are filled with tiny plant ecosystems, this one is filled with a string of soft blue lights.

“You mentioned once that the universes are kept in jars,” Namjoon explains, his voice a little shaky. “And this is what I imagined.”

“It’s honestly pretty close,” Hoseok says, thinking of those uncountable jars of swirling blue. “Thanks, Namjoon.” His own voice sounds noticeably strained, and there’s a lump in his throat he’s having difficulty swallowing around.

“I know you probably can’t take things with you when you leave,” Namjoon continues. “But I wanted to make you something you could hopefully remember, you know?”

“Shit, Joon.” Hoseok hiccups around a breath. “Way to kick a guy when he’s down, huh?”

“Oh, I didn’t - don’t be upset!” Namjoon says hastily.

Hoseok shakes his head violently. “Not upset. I’m happy.” His reasoning for not going any further with their relationship is starting to look more and more tenuous, but he clings to it stubbornly, especially with his new knowledge of Namjoon’s fairly recent breakup - it wouldn’t be fair to Namjoon to pursue something with such a definite end date.

Namjoon, over the following weeks, tells him more about his ex-boyfriend.

How he’d been the one to suggest Namjoon get into song writing after he’d shown him some of his poetry, only to become increasingly resentful as his song writing started to become more popular. How their relationship had gradually withered before exploding catastrophically, with said ex-boyfriend not only leaking Namjoon’s poetry about him to a news site, but seriously implying that Namjoon had been seeing one of the idols behind his back.

“Not true, of course, but the media didn’t care about that when they ran the story,” Namjoon explains tiredly. “Thankfully, the guy he chose was one of the few that has a pretty public girlfriend - which just goes to show how little he actually knew about my colleagues - so he was able to weather the media shitstorm pretty easily, but there were a few weeks where I just couldn’t face leaving the house.” He smiles suddenly. “Actually, that day I met you was the first time I’d been out on my own since everything blew up in my face.”

“Serendipitous,” Hoseok says; Namjoon gets that look on his face that Hoseok sees more often these days, the look of sudden lyric inspiration, and he hurries off to his room.

Hoseok also learns that Namjoon’s relationship had been on the rocks before their messy break-up, but he learns this from Yoongi.

“Colossal dick,” is what Yoongi says specifically when Namjoon mentions that he’s told Hoseok about him.

“Yes, well, you never really liked him,” Namjoon says; Yoongi pulls a face. “Shut up, you did not know.”

“No, you’re right, if I’d have known he was that bad, I would’ve changed the locks after you gave him a key,” Yoongi mutters.

“It wasn’t just the jealousy,” Yoongi says later to Hoseok when Namjoon’s out at the gym with Jeongguk. “It was this constant, probing belittlement from him, all the time.” He huffs angrily. “Like, Namjoon barely shows me his poetry, and this guy takes one look at it and goes, oh, you should write idol songs.' And Namjoon’s writing great stuff for idols, don’t get me wrong, but that’s not how this guy meant it.” He’s practically vibrating with rage at this point, leg bouncing up and down as he talks. “Every day, these shitty jokes, wow, the museum again? Why are your hobbies so boring? Or, why don’t you do something beneficial with your writing, rather than wasting all that time making art no one will ever see? And every time I’d say something, Namjoon would say he was just teasing, that was just how he showed affection.” He laughs humourlessly. “Even Jeongguk didn’t like this guy, he wouldn’t come over if he knew he was round.”

“And Namjoon didn’t see it?” Hoseok asks.

“He did, I think,” Yoongi says carefully. “But he was happy to be in a relationship, so I think he was willing to put up with more than he should’ve.” He sighs explosively, then flops back against his armchair, eyes closed. “Sorry to offload, that’s been building up for a while, I think.” He opens an eye to look at Hoseok. “I’m happy he’s talking about it with you.”

“Yeah?”

He nods, closing his eye again. “Before you arrived, I was worried he’d struggle to open up to people again. Neither of us really have much of an opportunity to go out and make new friends at the moment, so it’s good that you literally fell out of the sky in front of him.”

It’s getting harder and harder by the day to remind himself that he should not be thinking about pursuing a romantic relationship with Namjoon, no matter how he’s feeling.

It’s not helped by the fact that, with the nicer weather, the two of them have started going out together - not like they have in the past, for almost the sole purpose of finding people for Hoseok to grant wishes for, this is entirely so they can enjoy one another’s company while taking in the sun.

And seeing Namjoon glowing in the sun is not helping.

“Our apartment is… That way,” Namjoon says, pointing towards the city below. They’re hiking up one of Seoul’s many mountains, and they’ve stopped to take photos – Hoseok’s enjoying filling up the memory of the spare phone Yoongi’s lent him of photos of Namjoon looking at things, Namjoon walking, Namjoon talking.

Namjoon’s doing the same thing to him; when he turns to look in the direction Namjoon’s pointing in, he hears the distinctive shutter sound coming from Namjoon’s phone.

“Hey, thanks for coming with me,” Namjoon says. “I know walking’s not that interesting.”

“What’re you talking about?” Hoseok says, leaning his elbows on the granite wall lining the mountain trail, the stone warm on his forearms. “I’m having fun, this is interesting!”

Namjoon snorts. “How could anything be interesting to you on this planet?” Namjoon says, holding up his phone to take another photo of Hoseok.

“That’s not a very nice thing to say,” Hoseok says, pushing away from the wall so they can continue walking. “Also I think you’re overestimating how much cooler the rest of the universes are in comparison to yours. Most universes are about as interesting as living inside of soup, honestly.”

“Okay, but you’ve literally taken me on an asteroid ride through space.” Namjoon waves his hand at the, in Hoseok’s opinion, spectacular view of the city below. “I’m taking you on a walk through a mountain park.”

“The asteroid ride was interesting to you because you’ve never done it, right?” Hoseok says pointedly.

Namjoon huffs. “But an asteroid ride is objectively cooler than-”

“Yes, to you,” Hoseok interrupts. “I’ve been to so many universes that I’ve lost count, lost more memories than I can remember making, but I can promise you that I’ve never been to a universe where you take me on a walk through a mountain park. That’s interesting to me.” Hoseok can see that he’s not getting through to Namjoon, even without looking into his thoughts, so he stops walking, puts his hands on Namjoon’s shoulders, and gets as close to him as he can get without physically plastering his body to Namjoon’s. “Listen to me - you are interesting, and fuck anyone who made you feel otherwise.”

Namjoon’s eyes go very wide, and then his cheeks flush. “You’re just saying that because you haven’t met many people on this planet-”

“Namjoon!” Hoseok shakes his shoulders a little. “I don’t need to meet other people to know that you’re interesting! You took in a stranger who literally crash landed at your feet! You take care of tiny plants! You write poems that you only let a few people see, and you write music that you let lots of people see, and you cook for Yoongi when he gets too focused on his work even though you hate cooking, and you reach out to people time and time again even though this world has told you that behaviour only gets you hurt! You try, very hard!” He shakes Namjoon’s shoulders again, which, disastrously, seems to be the catalyst for him to burst into tears. “Wait, no-”

“I’m not sad,” Namjoon says, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand as he hitches a stuttering breath. “Well, I am, sometimes, but you haven’t made me sad right now.” He pauses, so Hoseok carefully wipes away his tears with his thumbs. “I’m… Relieved, I think. The only relationships I have left are ones I made years ago, where I was cooler and more fun and more interesting, and… I guess I was worried that I’d just slowly lose all of my relationships and not be able to make any new ones.”

“Do the others know that you worry about that?” Hoseok asks. “Losing them, I mean.”

Namjoon nods. “My therapist recommended I tell them.”

“And what did they say?”

“They were very kind.” Namjoon smiles faintly. “And I have a lot of factual evidence that they wouldn’t willingly leave, or stop being my friends. But I’m not factually sad, you know?” He taps his head with a self-deprecating smile. “It’s not rational, and while some days it’s helpful to have a list of facts stating how your friends won’t up and leave randomly, sometimes it’s just as nice to have a new friend shake you down on top of a mountain and tell you how interesting you are.”

“Yes, well, you deserve people in your life who will tell you how interesting you are every day for the rest of your life,” Hoseok says firmly.

As the height of summer rolls in, with the air bearing down oppressively thick and storms seemingly every other day, Yoongi gets sick.

“This happens every year,” he says, his voice sounding like it’s being ripped out of his throat. “The academic year winds down, and my immune system just gives up for a few weeks. I’ll live.”

He sounds awful, though, coughing all night, laying listlessly on the couch during the day when his headache gets too bad. After almost an entire week, Namjoon says, “I’m going to pick up more medicine for hyung - can you watch him for a bit? I won’t be long.”

“Yeah, of course,” Hoseok says; from where he’s laying on the couch, Yoongi rolls his eyes.

“I’m not a child,” he says hoarsely. “It’s just a cold, I don’t need a chaperone.”

“Okay,” Namjoon says with his own eye roll. “Hoseok, can you sit in the same room as hyung purely by coincidence?”

“I can do that too,” Hoseok says, pressing his lips together to bite back a laugh when Yoongi sighs loudly.

“Perfect.” Namjoon grabs his phone, then looks between them both. “Fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll be fine, Namjoon, just go,” Yoongi says, waving his hand at the front door. Namjoon still looks reluctant to go, but he does, walking a little faster than normal out of the apartment.

Hoseok flicks through the photos on the phone he’s basically adopted from Yoongi at this point while Yoongi lays on his back, staring up at the ceiling; there are so many photos in there that he takes a few minutes to organise them a little, putting them into little folders organised by date, and then by person. There are tons from the camping trip alone, then all the little outings to parks and museums, late night parties and quiet morning cups of coffee. And everywhere, Namjoon – Namjoon talking, Namjoon smiling, Namjoon laughing.

Suddenly, a flicker of pain pulses behind his right eye - he rubs at it with the heel of his hand, then glances over at Yoongi, who’s curled up on his side with an irate expression on his face. “You good, hyung?”

“Feels like my head’s in a vice,” Yoongi says wryly, pressing his thumb against his sinus. “You could feel it?”

Hoseok nods. “Were you wishing for something? That’s usually the only time I can read minds like that.”

“Not consciously,” Yoongi says thoughtfully. “If I was, I was probably wishing for my headache to go away, honestly.”

Hoseok raises a hand absentmindedly to grant Yoongi’s wish, then pauses. He has no way of knowing if this will be the last wish he grants, and he knows that Namjoon wants the chance to say goodbye before he leaves. Namjoon should be back any moment.

However, Yoongi’s turning a very funny colour from his headache, and although he’s not putting his wish into words, Hoseok can feel it - his deep desire for the pain to subside, even for a little while.

As he grants the wish, he can feel Yoongi’s pain abating alongside Hoseok’s own sudden wish that this won’t be the last wish he grants.

And he can immediately feel that something’s different about this wish.

“Shit,” he says, standing up frantically.

Yoongi sits up just as quickly. “Was that you?” He asks sharply, brushing his hair out of his eyes. “My headache’s - your hands!” He says, staring down at Hoseok’s hands.

Or, rather, staring down at where Hoseok’s hands aren’t. Like the shimmering wave of hot air, Hoseok can see the space where his hands should be, but he’s fading out of existence fast.

Yoongi pulls his phone out so fast that he fumbles it, almost dropping it on the floor, before he calls someone. “No, I’m fine, it’s Hoseok, he’s - where are you?” He hears Namjoon’s voice on the other end of the line. “I don’t know, one second he was fine, the next - you’re outside?” Hoseok goes to the window, feeling like he’s walking through a dream. He can see somebody running up the road towards the building, but they’re too far away for him to be certain that it’s Namjoon. “No, I don’t know, I - yeah, he’s still here, hurry.”

Strangely, as Yoongi seems to get more and more frantic, and more and more of Hoseok disappears, Hoseok’s reminded of a conversation he’d had with Namjoon a few months before, about how much of Hoseok was made up of the form he was inhabiting. He still feels like himself, almost, but there’s an additional tiredness there that he hadn’t felt earlier. Yoongi’s voice is starting to sound further away and, seemingly overlaid on top of the apartment, he can see the endless shelves of the Library starting to materialise.

Just before the apartment fades from view, he sees the door burst open, Namjoon barrel in, Namjoon run towards him, hand outstretched, then -

Then the shelves, same as they always were.

Nothing happens.

Honestly, he’s not sure what he was expecting, but he was at least expecting something. Some sort of acknowledgement of his work, maybe, or at least instructions on what he needs to do next.

But there’s nothing.

The only real difference is that he keeps thinking of himself in human terms - thinks of himself as walking around the Library to find out where to go next, even though he’s now noncorporeal; considering what he wants to eat, even though he doesn’t need to eat anymore.

One moment, finally, he snaps. If no one’s going to tell him what to do next, then he’s going to make the decision for himself.

As soon as he’s had the thought, he finds the universe he’s come to think of as his on the shelf next to him. He doesn’t even give it a second thought as he takes it to the Porcelain Jar, pours it in, and tosses himself inside.

He’s falling.

This, at least, is familiar, if unexpected - he’d kind of figured that retiring would leave him floating in the universe somewhere, one star among billions.

He is a little worried when he realises he’s rapidly approaching the solar system where his friends live. There’s already a star in their solar system, after all, and he doesn’t want to inadvertently cause a cataclysmic event with his retirement.

As he hurtles towards Earth, he looks down at himself, and he’s processed the fact that he still looks human just as he’s crash landing.

It’s much colder than the hot summer day he’d left, and he’s dislodged a fair bit of snow with his crater. Hoseok’s stricken when he realises that he has no idea how much time has passed. What if it’s been centuries? He’d still prefer to be here than stuck alone in the Library, but most of the reason he’d wanted to retire to this universe was to be close to his friends-

“I want to say something witty, but I think I might be hallucinating,” Namjoon says faintly. Hoseok rolls over onto his back to stare up at Namjoon, wrapped up in a big coat and even bigger scarf. “Are you actually here? Are you my Hoseok?” The small strip of his cheeks that Hoseok can see flushes red. “I mean, the Hoseok we know.”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Hoseok says, pushing himself up onto his elbows. Namjoon offers a gloved hand to him, and pulls him up off the ground and into a hug.

“You must be freezing,” he mumbles into his hair; if he is, Hoseok can’t tell, wrapped as he is in Namjoon’s arms. He could stay here indefinitely, but Namjoon pulls back, keeping Hoseok’s hand in his. “Come on, let’s go home.”

Yoongi walks into a door frame when Hoseok walks into the room.

“I thought you were gone!” He says, rubbing the pink spot on his forehead as Hoseok pulls him into a hug. Both of their hair has gotten a little longer, but they don’t look all that different; Hoseok’s suspicions that not that much time has passed are confirmed when Namjoon says,

“He’s been feeling guilty for months.” Namjoon’s still holding Hoseok’s hand, as though he’s trying to tether him to the ground. His hand’s getting a little sweaty now that they’re in the heated apartment, and Namjoon’s still wearing his glove on that hand, but Hoseok doesn’t want to let go.

“Well, yeah!” Yoongi eyes him up and down. “I thought I’d banished you by accidentally wishing for the magical equivalent of a painkiller. Why’re you back? Not that we’re not thrilled to see you, but we literally watched you vanish - we’ve been stargazing every other weekend to see if we could spot you.”

Hoseok tells them, although he’s surprised by how quickly he’s forgetting things - he can’t tell them what led to his decision to take the initiative to come back, or anything of his fall from the Library to their solar system. Even the details of falling through the solar system are getting fuzzier by the moment.

“So… Are you here to stay? Human?” Namjoon asks.

“I wouldn’t say he’s a hundred percent human,” Yoongi points out. “You did find him in another crater, after all.”

“I think I’m here to stay,” Hoseok says, waving his hand - a thin stream of stardust appears. “And I can still do magic at least, but it feels… Different. Harder?” He shrugs. “So I’m not entirely human, but I feel more like a human version of myself than I did in the Library.” It’s difficult to explain, and he can only imagine it’ll get more difficult as time goes on, but it seems to be answer enough for Namjoon and Yoongi.

Yoongi pulls out his phone. “I’ll get everyone over, they’ll be thrilled.”

Everyone arrives simultaneously, worried expressions at being called over out-of-the-blue melting into delight when they see Hoseok sitting next to Namjoon on the sofa. Namjoon’s barely left his side since he’d found him in the snow, and Hoseok’s not exactly inclined to put any distance between them himself. He’s got a future with these people now, he realises - can choose to develop relationships however he chooses, without worrying that he’s going to be pulled away at any moment.

His moment comes towards the end of the night - everyone leaves, with Yoongi going back to Jeongguk’s with a very significant look in Namjoon’s direction and, in the quiet of the apartment, Hoseok and Namjoon just look at one another for a moment.

“I want to tell you something,” Hoseok says eventually.

Namjoon smiles. “Me too. Can I go first?” Hoseok nods, trying to hold back a bubble of excited laughter. “I really like you, Hoseok, but before today I thought you were gone for good. My feelings haven’t changed, and seeing you again has only confirmed that, but… I think, if we pursue this, I’d like to take it slow.” He nods decisively. “That’s what I wanted to say. What about you?”

Hoseok can’t help it - the laughter bubbles out, a delighted giggle. “The same, actually. This is new territory for me, so I want to savour it.” He grins at Namjoon, drinking in his face. He’s lived for countless millennia, but in this moment, his possibilities feel truly infinite. “I would like to kiss you, though.”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Namjoon says, fast and eager, so Hoseok steps closer, puts a hand on Namjoon’s shoulder, and leans up onto his tiptoes to kiss him. His lips are soft, warm, and taste a little bit like the alcohol they’d been drinking earlier in the night - but the best bit, for Hoseok, is that he can feel Namjoon’s lips curling up into a smile underneath his.