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He introduces himself as Jin to the little girl who screeched to a halt in front of him on her bike. He fumbles a bit with his words and with how to make sounds in general—human bodies are weird like that and it’ll take him a while to break it in. Thankfully, it gets through.
“Jinnie!” The girl chirps, abandoning her bike to circle around him with a skip to her steps. Jin has to bend his neck to see her, which isn’t all that comfortable, so he lowers his body to the ground. That’s a thing humans do, right?
That’s how the guy finds him later, sitting on the curb with his arms around his knees and the girl’s squishy little paws all over his face. Jin makes eye contact with him. “Help,” he says.
The guy stares before snickering. “Hey,” he says to the girl, “I think I heard your dad say he was gonna make cookies. Wanna go help him?”
“Yes! Cookie dough!” She screams, getting to her feet and sets off running to the house behind them.
“Thank you,” Jin says to the guy, who just shrugs with an amused smile. He holds out a hand to Jin.
Jin’s not entirely familiar with the expected response in this kind of situation. He reaches out and touches the guy’s outstretched hand after a beat, and ends up getting pulled up.
“I’m Namjoon,” the guy says, still holding Jin’s hand in his and making a jiggling motion with it. Jin just lets him, clueless and transfixed on the small dent just left to the corner of Namjoon’s mouth, like a soft little crater on his face. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around here.”
“Jin,” Jin says. “I’m new here. My spaceship just crashed nearby a little while ago.”
Namjoon nods, then does a double take. “Your what?”
“Spaceship. I’m…” Jin searches for the word in the vocabulary of the language they’re using. Wait, is it not the same one he was using with the little girl? Weird. The word he eventually lands on feels slightly off somehow, but he guesses it will get the message across. “I’m an alien.”
Namjoon’s first words, after gawking at Jin for a whole minute, are: “But why would an alien be Korean?”
“...What’s ‘Korean’?”
***
It takes a long time for Namjoon to believe Jin doesn’t know what ‘Korean’ is, and a longer time to believe that Jin really isn’t from Earth—not until Jin takes him to the wreckage of his spaceship. And then an even longer time to convince Namjoon that no, Jin isn’t in danger, and neither is the Earth. He really was just passing by and put in the wrong coordinates, and will be leaving as soon as someone from his home planet sends a rescue team over.
“Okay,” Namjoon says, slurping on the last bit of his drink, “so what are you gonna do until then?”
Jin chews on a fry. They are grabbing food at a dingy burger place, and he finds out eating might be his favorite experience as a human. “I don’t know. What do you usually do?”
Turns out Namjoon is in ‘the States’ for ‘summer school. He’s staying at his aunt’s house, and goes out to explore different ‘malls’ and ‘beaches’ when he and his friends aren’t ‘in class’. Jin doesn’t understand entirely but he thinks he gets the gist of it.
“You should hang out with us,” Namjoon offers, “and you can probably crash at my aunt’s place if you’re okay with the couch.”
“Oh,” Jin says, blinks. “Thank you. Do you want anything in return? I can answer some questions. Not ones about our civilization’s weapons since that’s top secret and I could be executed. But everything else is fair game.”
It’s Namjoon’s turn to blink. “Uh… wow. I mean, there’s a lot I want to ask about, but I guess the first one that comes to mind is… how old are you?”
“I’m two hundred and thirty six. That’s around…” He does some quick math in his mind, “... twenty-three in human age?”
“Oh.” Namjoon blinks again. “So you’re like two years older than me. It should have been Jin-hyung all this time, huh?”
“What’s a ‘hyung’?”
“Ah, well, it’s like… a way to show respect to someone who’s older than you. You add something after their name.”
“But what if I want to show respect to someone younger than me?” Jin frowns. “I respect you, too.”
Then he remembers something. Jinnie, the little girl had said. Well, she’s younger than him, but she also spoke a different language. Either way, she added something after his name—that seems to be a shot as good as any. “Namjoonie?” He ventures.
Namjoon pauses, before he smiles big and wide. Ah, there’s the craters again.
***
It’s surprisingly fun to hang out with Namjoon’s friends. All of them have taken to Jin without fanfare, despite the alien thing. The younger ones—Jimin, Taehyung and Jungkook—hover around him constantly, curiosity quickly giving way to playfulness, declaring him the hyung they’ve always wanted, to the others’ good-natured protests. Hoseok is an affectionate ball of energy who’s always showing Jin Earthly things he thinks Jin might be into, and Yoongi the opposite—often so quiet that it seems he isn’t interested in the whole alien-on-Earth discourse, and then abruptly throwing out an offhanded speculation about Jin’s home planet that’s scarily accurate.
They take Jin to midnight boba runs and drag him out of bed at 4am to watch the sunrise. When they are in class, Jin hangs out with the little girl from next door instead—her obsession with his cheeks has finally tailed off, and now Jin is mostly in charge of pushing her on her bike so she can speed down the road. It seems a very important task, judging by how giddy she gets.
On the days Namjoon gets back home early, he would drop his backpack on the lawn and join Jin, the two of them taking turns with her bike.
“It’s so strange,” Jin says, as they sit on the curb side by side, watching her getting distracted by a squirrel down the road and giggle-squealing at it.
“What is?”
“I’ve always thought Earth really small—I mean, I still do. I can travel across its entire surface in less than seven seconds in my real form. But there’s…” Jin thinks about the biting wind nipping at his face in the dusk, before the sun peeks out. The chewy roundness of a boba. The chirp of a squirrel, and the chirp of a little girl. “So much, in so little.”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Namjoon says softly.
“Beautiful,” Jin repeats in a murmur. It’s another one of those words that he never quite grasped the meaning of—not of concrete matter but fleeting sensations. Instead of asking, though, he breathes in, and tries to feel it out. The dappled sunlight dancing on his skin. The gentle afternoon breeze. The quietness, the chittering of insects and birds, the happy noises of a child. The warm, solid presence of Namjoon next to him.
“Yeah,” he breathes out, “it is.”
***
He knows it right away when it happens. When the rescue ship arrives. Retrieving your ship at 12:00am Earth Pacific Time tonight , he hears on a frequency that should have been imperceptible to human ears.
It’s now early in the afternoon. The others have gone off to school, and Jin is sitting on the curb again, watching the familiar pink bike waddle down the road—she had said she wanted to go off ‘training wheels’, which involves a lot of waddling and falling over.
He feels… something. He has mostly gotten used to the way the human body is always churning out emotions, but it’s still difficult to put words to them.
“Jinnie!” The girl sprints over, stopping in front of him with a pout. “You’re zooming out.”
“Sorry,” he says, looking down at his hands. Tugs at the hem of the sleeve of his cardigan that Namjoon’s aunt had lent him. “I think… I’ll need to go home soon.”
Her brows furrow. “Where is home?”
“Another planet. In another galaxy.”
“So it’s far away?”
Jin didn't use to think it was. It takes about a year in human time to make the one-way trip, which is just a blip in his hundreds of years of life. But humans’ time is so much more limited. “I guess so, yeah.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know,” he answers honestly. No one really visits Earth—an unremarkable little planet that’s kind of out of the way. There isn't documentation of exact coordinates or established navigation guides anyway, with the lack of general interest.
She falls quiet for a while before raising her head with a somewhat determined look. Jin blinks as he feels something bulky and padded land on top of his head with a soft thud.
“You should wear my helmet!” She says, small arms stretched out to press her own helmet down onto his head. “It’s for safe travels. Traveling in space is more dangerous than traveling on a bike so you should have it!”
Jin raises a hand to touch the smooth plastic shell of it. It's a tight fit, but he meets her eyes in gratitude. “Thank you.”
She’s in his arms the next second, petite body curled into his snugly. “Everyone’s gonna miss you,” she says, voice small and muffled.
Jin wraps his arms around her, tightly, to ground himself against the feeling rising in him that he doesn’t recognize. It feels a little tingly and a little sore, like a tender sting.
***
For some inexplicable reason, it’s hard to bring himself to open his mouth and announce the news of his departure to the others—perhaps because he’s still unsettled from the stinging sensation from before. So Jin just waits until everyone parts ways, and tells Namjoon as they sit on the house’s porch, watching a few stars twinkle distantly in the night sky.
“Oh,” Namjoon says. There’s a second where he stays completely still, and then, “that’s great! You get to go home, right?”
“Right.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Tonight at midnight. I’ll need to wait by my ship and they will pick me up.”
“Oh,” Namjoon says again before falling quiet. Jin braces himself for the question—when are you coming back? But Namjoon doesn’t ask it. He just takes a long look at Jin’s face, his chest rising and falling with slow, deep breaths.
“I’ll miss you,” Namjoon says, with a tone and an expression Jin wishes he is better at deciphering. He suddenly wishes for a lot of things—none of them he has time left to fulfill anymore. It’s a little overwhelming how strong the feeling is, and it triggers the sting and the soreness again. They swell inside him like hot air.
He tentatively presses a figurative hand down on the swell—and the soreness gets worse, grows until it reaches all the way to his throat and sinuses. “What’s happening?” He says, hoarse and wet.
“You’re crying,” Namjoon says. His face scrunches up like the soreness is getting to him too. Jin reaches up and touches his own face, feeling the dampness. He quickly wipes it away with the back of his hand—he gets the impression that humans don’t appreciate seeing one another discharge bodily fluids in front of them.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Namjoon says, gentle despite sounding a little nasal as well, “crying is good. It means…”
He trails off, as if temporarily at a loss on how to explain something profoundly intricate. Jin sniffles. He can’t begin to guess what Namjoon wants to say, but the feeling that had led to the crying—it wasn’t downright awful, but wasn’t great either. He made Namjoon feel like that, and is likely gonna make the others feel like that too if he tells them he’s leaving and not coming back.
“I…” He doesn’t wait for Namjoon to finish his thought. “I need to leave soon. I’ll go get ready.” He gets up and brushes past Namjoon, mumbling a “sorry” as he hurries into the house.
He holes himself up in Namjoon’s room, where all his stuff has been piling up. He didn’t have belongings—didn’t need any—but he’s accumulated all kinds of quirky little trinkets and souvenirs the others insisted on gifting him, from pretty shells from the beach to a sparkling, boba-tea-shaped keychain to a squiggly crayon drawing of him from the girl. He borrows—takes, his mind whispers—a beaten-up backpack from Namjoon’s storage closet and stuffs all those things in it.
Luckily, Namjoon doesn’t come up and find him—reasonable, since he probably doesn’t want to talk to Jin after all that. So Jin just lies down on the floor, and takes in his surroundings one last time. Potted plants, stacks of books, a bike leaning against the wall in a corner like it’s quietly dreaming. Namjoon had promised to teach him how to ride a bike sometime.
He lies there for a long time and wonders if it would really be such a bad thing to miss his ride.
He’s just pushing himself up to his feet when there’s a honk outside the window. Then another, and three more until Jin sticks his head out to see what’s going on.
A pickup truck is parked right by the street. A few people are huddled together on the cargo bed—Namjoon, Hoseok, Jimin and Taehyung. Jungkook pokes his head out the driver side window and shouts: “You weren’t even gonna tell us to our faces? Not cool, hyung!”
“What?” Jin says, voice coming out wheezy.
“Just get down here, you idiot,” Yoongi yells from the passenger seat, “we’re gonna miss it if we don’t get going!”
Jin goes downstairs in a daze, lets them pull him onto the cargo bed too. Jungkook tells them to hold on tight before pulling out onto the road, speeding toward the direction of the deserted hill where Jin’s ship had crashed.
It’s almost midnight, and they don’t pass any cars as the truck turns onto the dirt road. Jungkook hits the gas, and Jimin and Taehyung open their arms and scream, giggly and unrestrained. Namjoon and Hoseok soon join in, laughing as wind gets in their faces and messes up their hair.
“Try it,” Namjoon tells Jin, “stand up and shout.”
So Jin does. He holds onto the exterior of the cab with one hand—Namjoon holding onto the other, to support him—and stands up on unsteady knees. It’s bumpy and windy and a little terrifying, but he takes a deep breath, and shouts at the top of his lungs, hearing it echo through the night.
It feels… good.
When he sits down, breathless and elated, Namjoon looks at him with so much mirth and fondness in his eyes that Jin feels overtaken by some big invisible thing again. He flicks through all the things he’s seen humans do in his head, trying to find one to match something this intense.
“What’s wrong?” Namjoon asks, then makes a surprised “oof” sound as Jin wraps him in a hug.
Human vocabulary fails him again, so Jin just buries his face in Namjoon’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he murmurs, “I’ll miss you too.”
Namjoon hugs him back, squeezing tightly.
“Hey, not fair! I want a hug too!” Jimin protests, and Jin finds himself getting pulled into five more pairs of arms—including Jungkook's and Yoongi's, when they have arrived at the hill and all gotten off, all of them huddled around him by the end.
They are broken up by a dim glow not far away. Jin turns to see the remains of his ship enveloped by a sweeping white light—his cue.
He turns back around to face the rest of them, chest suddenly bursting with things he wants to say. Feeling he hasn’t gotten to translate into words and actions yet.
“I’ll—I’ll come back,” he says in a rush, “I’ll find you. I’ll crash land on every planet in this solar system if I have to. It might take a few years, but—”
“That’s great! Come back in three years, hyung, you’ll make Kookie’s graduation!” Jimin says. “And we’ll be back in Korea then—oh, you’re gonna love it there.”
“Or we can go find you! We’ll crowdfund a space trip. It’ll be awesome,” Taehyung says, smiling his boxy smile. Yoongi smiles his gummy one, Hoseok his heart-shaped one, and Namjoon with his dimples. Now that Jin is made aware of the proper name to them, he knows he will think of the word—and Namjoon—every time he sees a crater now.
The white light gets brighter. Jin takes one last look at everyone and says goodbye before turning around, making his way to the ship—he’s able to do it because he knows it’s not goodbye for real. They will meet again.
He holds onto the straps to his backpack tightly, it a reassuring weight on his shoulders as everything inside clinks and jingles. He closes his eyes, and—he’s home.