Chapter Text
The good thing about having Kim Namjoon was your professor is that he didn't waste time taking attendance or setting up PowerPoints. He walked in, took off his outercoat and started talking at you about whatever the lecture topic of the week was. Oriental art. Renaissance. Visual Culture. You'll get your money's worth with Prof Kim.
The bad thing about having Kim Namjoon as your lecturer was that he very often would ask, "Any questions?", give the room an unfocused sweep with his eyes, before nodding satisfactorily and introducing the next piece of art or sculptor, ignoring three different hands in the air. This was sometimes the reason for the queue of students waiting to talk to him after class.
Why only sometimes, you ask? The main and real reason being Prof Kim was one of the youngest lecturers in the Department of Art History and a new hire at the university. Students smelled fresh blood, and his tanned skin, long legs and broad shoulders were not typically what Art History professors looked like.
Not only was he visually a treat to look at, but he was also charismatic and endearing. His eyes, an intimidatingly gorgeous colour of grey, were often glazed over because when he walked into the lecture hall, he meant business. He had a geeky sort of love for the course he taught (think Neville Longbottom with his Mimbulus mimbletonia) and was a commanding presence in lecture rooms, but when he saw the queue of students waiting to talk to him he always looked surprised, and endearingly shy.
In the first year of his employment, the university's confession page had never seen more use. The first fifty-ish confessions after his hire, the page was no longer a boring chasm of "stop hogging the seats in the fourth floor of the library" and "I got drunk and slept with my friend's ex", it was spammed with posts like, "has anyone else seen that hottie lecturer in AH or am I just sexually deprived" or "omg I saw this guy think he's a prof?? anyway he's hot af" or even "I'm in my ArtHistory clsas an sexiest mn on earth ckwekms" with a spam of blurry shots of Professor Kim. It wasn't surprising, therefore, that the confession page eventually became a Gossip Girl-esque anonymous forum of Professor Kim sightings.
It was a shock to the system when only after his fourth year of teaching at the university, and in Jungkook's third year of his degree, he quit his job. There were rumours he had gotten a better job offer in Seoul, or that he was going abroad to America for research. When grieving students asked, Prof Kim just coughed and smiled awkwardly, scratching his head.
Every now and again, over the months after he left, there were often comments on the anonymous confession page that mentioned him. "this page is boring without prof kim :((" "I swear I saw Professor Kim on the tram" and "say aye if you miss Professor Namjoon Kim", all with about a hundred comments.
It was a funny university-wide inside joke, but that was it. No one thought too deeply about Professor Kim - being as charismatic and clever as he was, he likely went off to bigger and better things. They were but a small university in Busan, and a lot of talented young lecturers got poached day in and day out.
You can imagine Jungkook's surprise, then, when he bumped into Professor Kim a year after his graduation, in an art gallery in Busan.