Chapter Text
Hoseok sits up in bed, furious. He had just woken up on his day off, ready for a lazy Monday afternoon of cleaning his kitchen and then a peaceful evening of staying in the studio until 3am. A perfect plan. He had stretched contentedly, rolled over, checked his katalk, checked instagram, and then made the mistake of checking the members’ twitter account. And now, he’s furious.
Jin and Yoongi have gone fishing, again.
He needs to text Jimin.
Hoseok locks his phone and throws it on the bed with a huff. Jimin is right, although he hates to admit it; he hasn’t given Yoongi and Jin any indication that he might want to come on a fishing trip, and he is, famously, not great with boats. But he’s always complimenting them on their cute boat outfits and their catches and he thinks he’s been pretty obvious in his admiration of their sexy fisherman efforts. Hoseok sighs, and heads to his bathroom to shower. Maybe the water will clear his head.
It doesn’t, and two hours later Hoseok is on his hands and knees, halfway through scrubbing the floor of the bathroom, singing along to Lizzo, when he remembers that it was actually his kitchen he planned to clean today.
He sits back on his heels, pouting at his sponge. Maybe he should message them? Just in the Bangtan chat? Show them all how cool and fine he is about fishing trips, Yoonjin-based or otherwise?
He wipes his hand and reaches over for his phone, looking at the picture again. They both look so rugged and adorable at the same time, which is very confusing and somehow alluring, and Hoseok is sure that there is absolutely no way that they got on that boat without kissing first. Why else would Yoongi’s nose be red? Hoseok pictures Jin and Yoongi sharing a shy peck with the sea wind in their hair, and grins ruefully at a soap bubble. Should he message them?
‘Smile on my lips, and I don't know why / I think I'm in love, I think I'm in love,’ Lizzo’s voice echoes round the bathroom.
That’s got to be a sign, surely, Hoseok thinks, and opens katalk.
(The next lyric is ‘with myself’, but Hoseok is too busy typing to realise.)
Perfect, Hoseok thinks. Absolutely nailed it. Super chill and super cool. They’ll absolutely have to invite him next time. He thinks the 😎 emoji to himself, and finishes cleaning the bathroom.
He does end up going round to Jin’s for mulhoe later, and it is delicious, and the fact that he’s sharing a table and a bottle of soju with his two pretty hyungs probably makes it taste even better. Jin’s house is surprisingly chic for a guy who primarily fishes, naps, and games, and it’s tidy today, too. The PR at some company or other had sent him flowers, so it smells nice, and Yoongi had said something about midsummer traditions in Norway and lit some candles, and the doors onto the balcony are open, and it’s warm and breezy and peaceful and unfortunately for Hoseok, Jimin also decided to come along. Hoseok is really trying to enjoy himself; really trying to focus on whether Yoongi’s knee resting on his is intentional, and really trying to listen to Jin talking about ‘—the Korean skate I caught, Hoba, it was so huge, honestly, this big, and did you know they’re endangered? So I had to throw it back but don’t worry, I took a picture, I just didn’t post it because Yoongi-chi didn’t want to worry Army with thoughts of critically threatened local species—’, but every five minutes, Hoseok shoots a glance at Jimin, and every single time Jimin is looking back at him with an unpleasantly knowing smile. Hoseok wants to punch him. Well, he doesn’t, because Yoongi doesn’t like violence, but he could definitely threaten to withdraw gossip privileges, and that would probably have much the same effect on Jimin.
He just wants to have a nice time. And he knows Jimin wants him to say Something, wants Hoseok to blurt out something embarrassing or obvious, so that Jimin can have a front row seat to the implosion and later smugly claim that he was the catalyst for their successful relationship. But Hoseok won’t give him the satisfaction. He will just enjoy the mulhoe, tease Jin, nudge Yoongi, enjoy the summer evening air and the flickering candlelight, and figure it all out a bit better tomorrow. Yeah. He’ll do that. Good plan.
‘More soju, hyung?’ He asks.
~
As it happens, ‘tomorrow’ brings an earlier and busier start than Hoseok expected, and with studio work and recording revisions and album decision-making all happening very fast over the next week, Hoseok doesn’t have much time to think about fish. Or anything adjacent to fish, whatever that might be. Working a little more independently suits him, he decides, wandering around his flat late on Sunday night. Nearly all his interactions with his members over the last week have been one-on-one, and so he’s managed to limit any fish-related feelings to the bare minimum, keeping his conversation with Yoongi strictly within the studio and focused purely on whether the second synth in his new song is an octave too high or not, and managing to avoid Jin in person entirely. Hoseok dries his clean dishes and stacks them away, humming along to his Slow Bops For Sundays playlist. He adjusts his robe, draws his curtains, lights a scented candle, decides to do a foot mask. This is the life. Fishing and also boyfriends are both overrated, anyway.
His phone buzzes.
Hoseok sighs, pulling his weird slippery moisturising socks on and leaning back on his sofa, notes app open. As far as he can see, his options are as follows:
Option one is absolute insanity, in Hoseok’s opinion. Both Jin and Yoongi are famously not huge fans of having emotions in public, and while Hoseok is pretty sure he isn’t wrong about the secret relationship, he doesn’t want to embarrass himself to that extent quite yet. Option 2 seems viable, but not for the long-term, if he actually does want to be invited; as Jimin rightly pointed out, they are both oblivious idiots, and Hoseok has been patient for too long. Option 3 is out, because Hoseok does not have amazing fishing skills and he does not wish to acquire them. And so that leaves option 4, which seems both achievable and realistic, and Hoseok is ready to begin. Once he’s finished moisturising his feet, of course.
What this means is that the next day, Jin posts a picture on his public instagram of himself on a boat, holding a fish aloft, and Hoseok does not tap the like button. Later that afternoon, Jin posts a picture of him and Yoongi standing side-by-side on the harbour. He has captioned it ‘fishing soulmates 🎣’, and Hoseok once again resolutely avoids the like button, and closes the app, feeling very pleased with himself.
A few hours later, though, he is puzzled. Jimin hasn’t said anything yet. Maybe he’s busy? Hoseok decides to take matters into his own hands, and opens katalk.
Hoseok thinks. He thinks hard, all the way through his afternoon, taking some selfies, writing some music, rearranging his bracelet drawer. He thinks through dinner, trying not to focus on the fact that Jin made him an extra portion of Namjoon’s milmyeon, ‘just in case you didn’t want sashimi after all, Hoba.’ He thinks really hard about the way Jin and Yoongi tell a story about Yoongi’s hat nearly flying away in the wind in the middle of the ocean, and the way they both look at each other afterwards, when everyone’s laughing. He thinks really hard about Yoongi getting up wordlessly and bringing Hoseok a cold bottle of water when he complains his face is getting too hot. He thinks, possibly too much, about the way that he can’t bring himself to leave until very very late, and when he’s eventually hovering by the door with Yoongi, ready to share a cab back, Jin uncharacteristically hugs them both goodbye.
He lies in bed that night, awake until it’s light outside, and he really, really, thinks.
And then, ignoring everything sensible and smart and the anxiety bubbling in his stomach, he picks up his phone.
Once he’s sent it he feels a bit like throwing up, but also incredibly sleepy, so he throws his phone across the room and tries to settle down for a nap.
His phone buzzes a moment later, and he shoots upright and leaps across the room to check. It is, disappointingly, an email about a rescheduled meeting, and Hoseok feels just a little bit silly for overreacting. But then, in quick succession, comes several messages:
Well. Now he just has to figure out how to say, ‘hey, I am extremely jealous of your secret boyfriend fishing trips, and I think you’re both super neat, if a little grandfatherly, and I would be very interested in joining your clandestine oceanic fucktrips,’ but in a more calm and rational way. A way that hopefully won’t scare them off. It’s gonna be tough, but he’s Jung Hoseok. He can do it.
Unfortunately, three hours later, he’s dozed off twice and then woken up in a panic. His notes app contains six unfinished speeches, one pros & cons list, and two apologies (one formal, one informal). He feels slightly insane.
‘Get it together, Hoseok-ah,’ he says aloud to himself, staring unseeingly at his feet. ‘Get it together, ’ and then he heads to the shower to calm his brain down. It helps, a little bit, and after he’s driven to the studio and he’s sitting under the aircon, sipping his second iced coffee, he feels much more clearheaded. Almost too clearheaded, and he realises that in four hours Yoongi and Jin will both be sitting on that sofa, waiting for him to say something, and he nearly shrieks.
He could text Jimin. Or even Jiwoo. But the prospect of being turned down and then having to explain that afterwards seems very daunting, and he’d rather just get this over and done with. Quick and easy, so they can reject him gently and then they can all move on. Definitely the best course of action, he thinks, and prepares himself for the inevitable let-down.
The thing is, Yoongi and Jin have been fishing together for a long time; they just really ramped up the frequency in the last couple of years, and every time they return they seem so content and relaxed, so happy around each other. It was only natural for Hoseok to come to the conclusion that they had spent one of their trips talking more than usual and realising their feelings for each other, and then used their special boat time to be a couple, away from prying eyes. And it hurt a bit, for lots of reasons. Partly that they clearly didn’t want to tell anyone at all, which Hoseok didn’t understand but respected anyway, because maybe they had good reason, or maybe they just didn’t want all the questions that would no doubt come. Partly it hurt because Namjoon had made them all sit down and discuss the possibility of dating within the group, very early on in their career, just after Taehyung and Yoongi and Hoseok had come out, one after another like gay little dominoes - and the consensus then, as Hoseok had assumed it still was, was that it was allowed and okay, as long as everyone was on board and communicated about it. And Yoongi and Jin were breaking that with their marine trysts, and that made Hoseok worry, just a little bit, about what other rules were getting broken in secret.
But partly, mostly, it hurt Hoseok because he had loved them both, for a long, lonely time. And he knew it was his fault and his fault alone, he knew that it was only his fear of rejection and his fear of upsetting the status quo that had prevented him from saying anything. He had also never been able to choose between them, pick one of them to approach about his feelings, and confessing to them both seemed futile when they didn’t initially appear to be into each other. But then the fishing trips started happening so often, and Yoongi and Jin started joking about being soulmates, and Hoseok had started picking up on certain things, like the way Jin would look at Yoongi right after he made a joke, or the way Yoongi would always be the first to ask Jin about a new game release. He had started wondering how much of it was just the love they all had for each other, and how much of it was something deeper.
One night, Jimin had texted Hoseok at 4am, in need of gossip, in need of company, and in the dark it had all come out - how he thought Yoongi and Jin were dating in secret, and how he wanted very badly to be a part of it, but he didn’t think it would ever be feasible. Yoongi and Jin never seemed interested in him romantically, and neither of them had ever expressed an interest in polyamory anyway. Jimin, of course, had told him kindly and plainly that that was absolute nonsense - that Hoseok deserved a chance at happiness, at least, and he should just sit them down and talk. And now, many months later, Hoseok supposes Jimin will be pleased he finally took his advice, so that’s something comforting to focus on right now, even if it does feel like there’s a small tsunami in his stomach.
Hoseok takes a deep breath. It’s almost three, and he still isn’t sure what he’s going to say. Maybe he should just wing it? Improvise? Read the vibes?
Good one, he thinks. He’s Jung Hoseok. Obviously, he’s gonna do a plan.
And so, when his little studio doorbell rings, and he buzzes them both in, he’s ready.