Chapter Text
Jeongguk sat in his trigonometry classroom, foot tapping on the ground repeatedly with nothing on his mind other than a recurring thought of “I don’t know what the fuck is going on.” He has no clue how he actually was able to take one of the single hardest classes at the school and not understand one bit of it.
The teacher was talking about some kind of quadratic formula that he’d heard about in previous years, and how it’s applied to “finding angles in radians, not degrees,” which was so ridiculous to Jeongguk. How could this possibly help him when he graduated? Went to college? How could being able to find the exact measure of an angle using the same process (the memorization of 30-60-90 and 45-45-90 triangles was the most he’d gotten out of math, and that was the previous year in geometry). He was so lost. He didn’t understand how people were getting that this particular angle in this particular problem ended up being pi over two, considering it wasn’t even an angle.
It’s not that Jeongguk didn’t pay attention. He did, he tried to, so hard, but he never understood any of it. He had a mindset that told him anything past geometry standards was extremely fucking difficult and couldn’t be processed by his brain.
The kid who was sitting across from him was scribbling down notes like no tomorrow. When Jeongguk looked closer, he seemed to notice that this kid had a system to his notes. He’d use color pens for any problems that the teacher wrote down on the whiteboard, and pencil to write down anything he may have deemed important that the teacher had said. Jeongguk couldn’t help but feel that that was tedious and it’d be much more simple if he’d just do the problems.
But then he remembers seeing the A+ across the top of this kid’s test last week, and suddenly Jeongguk feels compelled to take notes in the same manner as him.
He doesn’t, of course, that’d be extremely awkward and, though the kid is thoroughly occupied by the mathematics written on the whiteboard, he’d probably notice. He’s bound to look around the class at some point; no one can be that consumed by math. It’s impossible.
Jeongguk glances back toward the teacher and realizes she’s stopped teaching, then looks to his notes, then the kid. He’s waiting on the teacher to pass out the night’s practice homework. Jeongguk studies the kid. He watches as his eyes are kept focused on their teacher, he watches as his hands reach out for the paper and his eyes and teeth form this beautiful mix of what could only be described as a beautiful gummy smile that could make anyone want to return it, and Jeongguk wonders how the fuck he’s not even as much as barely acknowledged this kid’s existence before today. His hair was colored an unnatural grey and it suited him.
He keeps watching slowly as a paper reaches his own desk and the kid gets to work. He was two problems down within a minute. Jeongguk wonders how the fuck someone can do that and probably get it right. He had to assume the kid was getting it right.
Jeongguk’s thinking to himself for a moment, contemplating whether or not he should ask him for help. They had almost 20 minutes left in the class period--even if he wouldn’t help Jeongguk, at least he’d have asked and didn’t have to feel entirely horrible.
People are chatting around them, so Jeongguk feels a little less tinge of awkwardness when he says, “Hey, what’s your name?”
The kid looks up at him, seeming to make himself appear smaller in a second. Jeongguk is surprised by this, but the kid replies quickly and quietly, “Yoongi.”
“Ah, Yoongi, you understand this stuff?”
Yoongi blinks at Jeongguk. “Yeah.”
“Mind helping me with it? Figured I’d ask. I’ve been failing this class.”
“I’ve seen, I kind of felt bad, but I figured you wouldn’t want much help unless you asked for it yourself.”
“I’m asking now, aren’t I?”
“You are. Sure, yeah. I’ll help you.” Yoongi starts, beginning to point at Jeongguk’s worksheet. “Try to do the first problem, it’s the easiest. Use your notes for reference, that’s what they’re for. And meet me in the library during lunch. We have the same period.”
This time, Jeongguk blinks, very much taken back by the spurt of vocabulary that exited Yoongi’s mouth. “Okay. I’ll see you there, then. Anyway.”
Jeongguk tries to pencil in an answer without looking to Yoongi. He tries his notes, and realizes how shit he is at taking them. He couldn’t decipher anything in his own handwriting that had to do with this problem of cosx(tanx)=0 and Jeongguk was genuinely considering sneaking a peak at Yoongi’s work.
Yoongi glances up at Jeongguk after a solid ten minutes, having already completed the entire first side and two problems on the back. Jeongguk was still doodling, staring at the first problem.
He cracks a small smile as he leans over the desk and points at Jeongguk’s notes. “You see this here?” He says, directing his fingertip to a title called Identities . Jeongguk doesn’t write much of his notes, but if something sounds important or is written on the board he tries to write it down. Tries to.
“Yeah, what’s the problem have to do with this?”
“You have tangent still in the equation,” Yoongi says, his gummy smile breaking out. Jeongguk is trying to pay attention to what he’s saying but is so taken back by that damn smile. “You need to find a way to get the equations to only sines and cosines. That way it’s easier to simplify.”
Jeongguk is confused about the vocabulary he’s using only slightly. He’s grateful that trigonometry is similar to geometry in some senses, but the fact that it had algebra in it basically ruined it for Jeongguk. He looks at his notes, and looks at his paper, and slowly scribbles out the tangent in the equation and inserts a sins/cosx in its place. Yoongi nods happily and lets out a gummy smile for Jeongguk. “Do you see anything you can do now?”
The problem now looked like cosx(sinx/cosx)=0 and Jeongguk knows that when something is by itself, which in this case would be cosine, and you have another fraction, the something is over one. He had heard of cross-eliminating when they had the same common factor and crosses out the cosines. Yoongi smiles again. Jeongguk felt as if he didn’t deserve to see that smile.
Yoongi tells Jeongguk that his equation is now sinx=0 and he can graph it from here. He asks him if he remembers any of the pictures the teacher had taught, or if he’d at least written them down somewhere. Jeongguk is confused, but as Yoongi starts flipping back through his notes and finds them he’s quickly reminded.
If sinx=0, that means that the graph will be along the x-axis. He doesn’t exactly remember what the measures are in radians, but he knows that they’re 180 and 360 degrees. He’s proud of himself that he knows that.
But as he begins to write down the degrees, Yoongi nearly snatches his pencil. “Radians, Jeongguk,” he says quickly. Jeongguk blinks.
He squeezes his eyes again after a moment before saying, “What would it be in radians? I barely even understand that. ”
Yoongi pulls out his own notes. He’s realized that Jeongguk’s not very organized, so he figures that he could help him out a bit. When the page is laid out in front of Jeongguk, he feels almost like life is not as much a mess as he’d always made it out to be. And suddenly, math is not as much of a mess as he’d always made it out to be. He’s looking at Yoongi’s notes and feels almost at peace. Everything is so easy to find, and he looks at Yoongi as if he were alien. “How?”
“How what, Jeongguk?” Yoongi replies, slightly shocked at the contextless question. Jeongguk puts down his pencil.
“How the fuck are you so organized?”
Yoongi looks at Jeongguk in total confusion and a little bit of uneasiness, considering the proximity to the teacher. He shakes it off and starts, “I’ve done my notes like this for as long as I can remember having to take notes, if that’s what you’re talking about. I think it started in around 6th grade? And I’m a senior now--”
“Wait, shit, you’re a senior?” Jeongguk inquires with total curiosity. The last thing he expected Yoongi to be was a senior, because his almost nervous voice and appearance made him out to be smaller than he actually ended up being. “I’m a freshman. God. What the fuck.”
“Yeah, I’m a senior, is it that surprising?” Yoongi replies, and Jeongguk quickly shakes his head.
“No, no, I thought you were a sophomore. Wow. Okay.” Jeongguk whispers under his breath, picking his pencil back up and doodling at the corner of the worksheet. He makes the mental note to start calling Yoongi hyung. He mentally sighs.
“Almost.” Yoongi mumbles, a laugh stuck to his monotone voice. He points to #2 on the worksheet, “See, Jeongguk-ah, the next question--”
“I’m sorry, I did get the first one right though?” Jeongguk asks, “I forgot.”
“Yeah, yeah, the answers are pi and two pi. You got it. The next one looks a little tougher, do you remember identities other than how tangent turns into sine over cosine?”
The problem looked bothersome. Jeongguk shook his head out of boredom and confusion and utter hopelessness because every time he spoke to this boy he felt like he was being jabbed in the abdomen.
“Do you remember that sin2x-cos2x equals one?”
“No way I remember it off the top of my head, but yeah,” Jeongguk affirms, “I remember hearing it and writing it down maybe. Or a different version of that.”
“Well, that’s already solved you the denominator,” Yoongi says, “the denominator is one.”
“Wait, if it’s over one, isn’t the top already the answer?”
“I don’t know, is it? Is there anything else you can do to try and solve it, Jeongguk-ah?”
“C’mon hyung, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Yoongi’s eyes quickly flash with surprise over the fact that Jeongguk called him hyung, but he continues without word with, “What did I say about notes? They’re there for a reason, remember that. You won’t regret it.”
“My notes are a mess.” Jeongguk deadpans. Yoongi frowns.
“I’ll photocopy my notes from this unit and email them to you tonight. Or you could come over to my house and take them yourself.”
What? Over to Yoongi’s house? They’d literally just spoken to each other the first time this period and he’s already inviting Jeongguk over?
“I can come over, I don’t need to be home until later anyways.”
Yoongi blinks and says, “Yeah, yeah, alright,” and starts scribbling down the work to another couple problems.
The bell rings within the next two minutes, and Jeongguk is ( very, very slightly, because why should he genuinely be?) worried because it’s suddenly the last period of the day and Yoongi hasn’t given him his address or any details for meeting up after school is over and--
That was when Jeongguk felt the tap on his shoulder. The senior is shorter than him, and offers a bright smile as he says, “Meet me in the foyer right after classes. I’m typically sitting on one of the couches for about twenty minutes while people file out after school. Gives me some comfort, I guess. And some time.”
Jeongguk only blinks and proceeds to nod in affirmation. “Alright.”
He goes down to his last period and sits through another hellish 45 minutes, this time of History, which he seems to despise more than mathematics. He can’t seem to figure out what the point is that they learn all of this useless information. At what point in his time will he genuinely need the knowledge that Lee Seungman was South Korea’s First Republic president and that his reigning was extremely conservative, while the Second Republic’s president was a liberal? What point was there to knowing this information? It really didn’t make sense to Jeongguk. He’d rather be in a foods class. Making fried rice and chicken and lamb skewers. Damn. Lamb skewers sounds really fucking good right now to Jeongguk.
The class finishes quicker than he thought it would, the bell interrupting his daydreams of eating lamb skewers with Yoongi and him being taught such simple mathematics and maybe, maybe holding Yoongi’s hand a little. He didn’t understand how he’d gotten there with his daydream but he shook it off regardless, and made himself grab his bookbag and make his way to the foyer.
As expected, Yoongi was already in there, pulling his green trigonometry folder out of his own backpack and grabbing a pencil from the side pocket where a water bottle would usually be kept. He seemed very organized, Jeongguk thought, and he made his way over to Yoongi. He flopped his bag down on the ground next to the couch, sitting on one that’s facing Yoongi.
Yoongi looks up and lets a smile tug at his lips toward Jeongguk. Jeongguk lets a small smile release in return, and Yoongi returns to working on the worksheet that they were assigned as practice from the earlier class.
Jeongguk pulls out his phone and starts messing around on it, occasionally (okay, not occasionally, very often-ly) looking at Yoongi and studying him and staring and hoping to God he didn’t notice he was staring at him every time he moved his head the slightest and Jeongguk would return to staring at his phone screen very, very quickly.
Sure enough, twenty or so minutes had passed, and Yoongi packs up his bag and says, “Alright kid, let’s go.”
Jeongguk shakes his head for a moment out of distraction, tapping away at Piano Tiles and not wanting to mess up this round of Rush for the life of him and totally, totally hating that he’d just tapped a white tile and closing his phone. He shakes his head again. He gets up and grabs his bookbag and proceeds to follow Yoongi, who was already about twenty feet ahead of him and heading out the front door to the student lots. Of course he’d have a car, Jeongguk had to remind himself, Yoongi’s a senior, he’d most definitely have his own car, why wouldn’t he?
They near a shitty old ‘97 Toyota Camry that looks like it was from a junkyard when Yoongi says, “Get in!”
Jeongguk blinks, and does it anyway, pretending to not even be fazed by the fact that this car was fifteen years past its breaking point and Yoongi didn’t seem to care in the slightest.
“You’re a safe driver, right, hyung?” Jeongguk questions, a tinge of a nervous attitude attached to his voice. The car was injured a lot, scratches panned across the sides and the bumper very occasionally. The paint was chipping. It had a couple dents at the back and one, barely, barely noticeable unless you studied it, stuck to the passenger door.
Yoongi nods. “Yeah, yeah. The scratches and stuff were all from when my older brother had the car. He used to get a whole bunch of tickets and stuff so I practically vowed to not be as horrible of a driver as he was to my mother. Thankfully I’m actually not the worst driver in the family.”
“Ah. Alright.” Jeongguk says. He senses a bit of an awkward feeling set in and glances at the radio player. “Does it play CD’s?”
“That thing? Yeah, you got any? I don’t, I can’t afford CD’s. I’m usually listening to bad pop radio.”
“Dang, are you serious? Yeah, I have a couple in my bag for emergency, but honestly they’re only ever used in classes where the teacher is like, ‘alright guys, music requests?’ and no one says anything. So. First real emergency, I guess,” Jeongguk grins. He unzips his bag and digs around to find his mix CD of a guy who called himself Rap Monster, and slides it into the player.
The song starts out slow with a piano, and Yoongi’s attention is immediately caught.
The song is a mix of Korean and English, and it’s very enticing and exciting and Yoongi is quickly into it and Jeongguk loves seeing this. Yoongi’s grinning, the car is started up and driving down the lane to exit school grounds, and Jeongguk reaches to turn up the volume and blast what he considers very, very beautiful music that deserves to be shared with the world.
The drive to Yoongi’s house filled another two songs off of Rap Monster’s mixtape, which Yoongi very much enjoyed, and Jeongguk decided that he’d ‘forget’ the CD in Yoongi’s car and just tell him to keep it if he tries to return it. He can always buy another one. Or rip it to a blank CD, considering he’d already bought it online anyway.
Despite that, they get out of Yoongi’s car and make their way to the front door of an apartment building. He hops up three stories of stairs without a care in the world, and Jeongguk feels like he’s watching some kind of actual rabbit. He’s not actually, actually jumping up the stairs, but his feet give a little bit of a bounce every time he hits another step and Jeongguk can’t help but smile a bit.
Once they reach the fourth floor of the apartment building, they’re immediately met with a door on the left side that Yoongi is already shoving a key into and opening up and welcoming Jeongguk into.
“My mom isn’t home yet. We can just hang around for a while.”
Jeongguk nods awkwardly. Yoongi slips his shoes off and Jeongguk follows. Yoongi places his bookbag on one end of the couch and Jeongguk follows. The younger sits around awkwardly, waiting for Yoongi, who is currently looking at his own lap, to initiate some kind of conversation, until he just couldn’t take the silence anymore and said, “So. Math.”
Yoongi looks up, a bit surprised at the breaking silence. “Oh, yeah… Yeah. Math. I’m sorry, I blanked. Got a bit distracted,” the older says, reaching across the arm of the couch to grab his bookbag. He grabs his folder and then Jeongguk asks if Yoongi can hand him his, and he does so very quickly. “The worksheet… I finished it. What do you need help with?”
“Oh, well, anything you can help me with,” Jeongguk says as Yoongi places his folder on the cushion next to him and scoots closer to the younger. Jeongguk blinks for a second, realizing the close proximity between himself and the year 12, and his heart starts pounding against his ribcage and blood starts pumping in his ears and he wonders, wonders so much in that single moment if it’s loud enough for Yoongi to pick up.
The older started pointing at the paper, and explaining the concepts about how to solve the problem at hand, but Jeongguk wasn’t focused on the worksheet, he was entirely, 100% focused on the seventeen year old sat next to him, so engulfed in talking about equations with a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips. Jeongguk admired how invested Yoongi was, that he was enjoying something like this with such a passion. His eyes were lit up and he knew exactly what he was talking about. Jeongguk had to physically stop himself from sighing from the absolute beauty that Yoongi resonated.
Yoongi looked to the younger very quickly, the brightness in his eyes dimming just a bit and said, “Are you listening to me?”
And fuck, Jeongguk knew in that moment that he wanted to be the only person that can make Yoongi’s eyes light up like when he’s doing math.