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The woman herself is soft, but her perfume is thick and musty and carnal, and Seokjin trusts what a person smells like more than he trusts what they say, do, appear to be. He squeezes her hand until her wedding ring nips at his curved fingers, maintains a loose grip while her hand slips from his, and sits back down.
“Did you have fun looking around?” she asks, slicking back a single flyaway from her meticulously placed bun. Her pantsuit is stiff and seems to slow her down when she sits. Or maybe it’s the Spanx.
“Yes.” Seokjin lilts his voice to give it a singsong effect. “Thanks for asking.”
She smiles. Her lips are colored a soft, uncharacteristic gradient that impresses Seokjin, and he registers a feeling of pleasure. When she nods, her flyaway comes untucked. “We just want you to be comfortable here.”
The hairs on the back of Seokjin’s neck raise. She has a different smell to her now, an acrid brush of Dove deodorant that isn’t doing much to hide her staleness from a long day, an overly strong breathmint permeating from the trachea, and hairspray. Hairspray. So much hairspray. The smell of it detests him.
“So, Kim Seokjin.” She says it like she’s read his name straight off a paper. “Do you think you’re prepared to start school?”
Seokjin smooths his lips with his tongue. The nude lip stain he’s trying out is tasteless. His gaze shifts to the desk between them, bare of any personality, immaculate. “Yeah, I think so.”
She chews on the end of her pen. “It could be a hard transition. I hear you were homeschooled until now.”
He crosses his legs. “I’m not fussy.” He doesn’t have any right to be. What’s the point anymore? Even though most schools don’t ask about it in the initial application, they always ask later. They usually ask with an amiable smile that says they want to accept you, it’s just procedure to ask, it doesn’t change anything.
“I can see that.” She closes her eyes and rubs her temples. Her eyeshadow is smudged and muddy. He wonders if she primed her eyelids. “Homeschooled and an only child. You must be independent and have a strong sense of self. That’s a great quality for youth at our school.”
Seokjin nods. The chair gathers around him when he settles on it fully, no longer perched at the edge. It feels possessive and invasive. That’s the kind of chair it is. Overly soft.
The woman’s office is too much room and not enough her. It disturbs him somehow, the amount of space and cream wall and bare, immaculate hardwood, the stretch of nothing from the door to the overly long desk in the center of the room, an identical stretch to a massive window at the end of the room. The curtains are drawn closed.
“Do you like being homeschooled?” she asks.
Seokjin nods.
It’s hot and storming outside as though to ward off Autumn from encroaching. It fights stubbornly despite the color to the leaves and the message that sends. It fights against the laws of nature itself, much like Seokjin is now.
She follows his gaze the strange way people do when they’re admiring you admiring their space.
Seokjin stops at the bookcase on the wall directly behind him, studying the speck of something personal on one of the shelves, a picture of the woman pressed against a man. It looks years old, the smiles on their faces still fresh, the way they touch each other still soft, fingers digging in as though they can’t get enough of each other.
It puts a bad taste in his mouth.
Seokjin’s seen couples like that, seen how they start. They start out wanting to devour each other whole. It reminds him of every prospective high school before they learn of the single word on his birth certificate that implants the image of future mass murderer in their minds.
When a child is born, their sin tendency is tested and recorded just like their blood type, their weight, their height, their footprint. Much like blood type, it isn’t relevant until it is -- as ineloquent as that sounds. It isn’t relevant until you’re bleeding out and you need blood, you want to give blood, or maybe you stumble across a random personality chart on the internet. It’s something you can forget about. It’s something you don’t necessarily have to be educated on.
Except your blood type won’t make the expression fall from someone’s face and keep you from having a future.
six years later
When Namjoon singlehandedly derails the whole of the introduction session before it even starts, Seokjin thinks that of all the schools he’s tried to get into, of course it would be this one that actually accepts him. Though in this case, he did not really choose it.
Sinclair Academy (Sinclair, how clever) is a boarding school for boys up to the age of twenty-five whose tendency has developed into a dependency. Supposedly. There’s no definitive test for it.
It’s not exactly a boarding school. It just sounds better that way, since there are uniforms and activities and classes, though most don’t focus on academics. It’s better than calling it an institution or even a sanctuary. It’s a holding cell of sorts, keeping them away from the outside world until they’re less likely to harm it (or, more accurately, be harmed by it -- but that’s a decidedly unpopular opinion).
A sin dependency is a mutation of a dormant gene that’s awakened by extreme stress, especially in people who are still in their developmental stages. While some are genetically predisposed to developing a dependency, it is mostly the body’s way of adapting to prolonged trauma -- by starting to depend on the tendency they were born with.
Studies have shown that it can only get worse once awakened. The goal of Sinclair Academy is to help it to stagnate its progression and teach dependents coping mechanisms. They will always have fixated, obsessive, single-minded tendencies towards specific things or interests. The things they fixate on and the cycles they are trapped in are thought to feed their specific dependency.
The hardest part of the poor prefect’s job is convincing them to unlearn stereotypes. He did sign up for this actually. The headmaster had a bright idea that new students might be more receptive to other dependents who have been at the academy longer.
As for how that’s going, Namjoon’s talked so much in the past ten minutes that Seokjin’s own thoughts have taken on his voice. For his dependency being laziness, Seokjin’s still never encountered anyone who talks as much as Namjoon.
Taehyung returns from the bathroom. He smells of something confused but also completely intentional. Then he accidentally kicks the coffee table and almost trips into his seat and Seokjin questions the intentional part.
Taehyung filters through his hair (his brown, freshly highlighted hair) with long fingers that are freshly manicured. He loosens his tie to make up for almost tripping over a coffee table in plain sight. His tie is blue with stripes of gold, and the deep crimson of his suit looks even warmer against his brown skin. It’s not that he’s the only one wearing that -- they’re all wearing the same uniform -- but Taehyung seems to own it more than the rest of them.
Seokjin thinks that Taehyung is the way he smells. That he’s maybe like a fragrance with different undertones, layers, reactions to body heat. The first layer is a deep, pungent cologne, almost romantic, almost carnal, put together with aftershave.
Just underneath, there’s green apple shampoo and bubble bath -- the kind that’s marked for kids -- with an artificial scent of cotton candy and then soap that smells like rosebuds under all that. It’s a lot but it’s cohesive and strangely soothing compared to the first layer, which is a bit too much.
Taehyung tilts his head in Seokjin’s direction without looking at him and whispers, “Did you cry?”
Seokjin’s eyebrows lower. “Excuse me?”
“When you realized you were stuck here. Did you cry?”
“No.”
“I’m in the dorm next door,” he says pointedly.
Seokjin knows that. Yesterday Taehyung had introduced himself by offering a shaky hand to everyone he met. At some points he’d even put down heavy boxes to do so. He’d take a look at each person’s hand before clasping it in his own. He’d squeeze it without moving it a fraction. His gaze had darted along Seokjin’s palm and then back to his fingers, and he’d told him that his pinky was bent but never explained it. (Seokjin doesn’t know this, but Taehyung is actually quite interested in palmistry.)
“The walls are thin,” Taehyung says, “and I heard someone sobbing really hard last night.”
Seokjin considers Taehyung in silence, carving out the fuzzy lines of his personality (to which Taehyung offers him a mushy smile). But at least he doesn’t seem like the type to use information for external means rather than internal.
“It was Jeongguk,” Seokjin says.
Technically Hoseok had been crying too, but his breakdown was like internal bleeding while Jeongguk’s had burst from the seams and spilled all over the floor. Jeongguk broke down the moment his parents left. The general rule was that it was best for anyone transitioning into academy life not to contact their loved ones for two weeks, the amount of time that it usually took the kids to settle into a schedule (the amount of time it usually took them to stop crying).
Taehyung turns almost all the way around in his seat to look Jeongguk over. He’s nestled in the back of his class looking too big for his suit, black hair parted in the middle, jaw taut, playing with pencils. His seat is between Yoongi’s and Jimin’s.
Seokjin grimaces. “Why do you ask?”
“Dunno. Thought it might’ve been you.” Taehyung leans back in his chair and turns to Yoongi. “Hey man, let’s swap seats.” He talks to him like they’re best friends but they’ve known each other for barely twenty-four hours (and have had conversations that weren’t one-sided for less than thirty seconds in total).
To Seokjin’s surprise, Yoongi complies. Seokjin’s not sure why he’s surprised by that.
It’s definitely not surprising when Namjoon starts talking again. ”The problem I have is the religious correlation of calling them sins.” Namjoon shakes his head and leans forward. “To say that there are seven deadly sins and they’re within all of us sounds like it’s going along the line of Christianity and I’m not a Christian, I’m an atheist.”
The prefect rolls back his shoulders and narrows his eyes. “Then should I say it slowly for you so that you can understand?”
The moment that Namjoon chokes on his words and cuts short is so audible that Seokjin can almost hear his mouth slamming shut, teeth on teeth paired with a juicy swallow to swallow the words down and quickly bathe them in acid.
“I call them sins,” the prefect says. “My parents call them sins. Don’t take it quite so literally. It has no correlation with religion. It might to some. It’s a label. Call it whatever you need to in order to make it more real for you, because it is.”
“Yeah. From my own personal research, I’ve found that this phenomenon has many correlations with a mental disorder—”
“Interpret it in whatever fashion which makes you take it more seriously. I’ve found that science and spirituality have much less of a combative relationship than people make them out to have.” Taehyung snickers from the back and the prefect’s gaze falls on him almost immediately. “Questions?”
“No sir,” Namjoon says. It’s always at this point that he realizes he fucked up (see: way too late for it to do any good). “Sorry.”
The prefect spares him a brief glance before continuing, “Do any of you have personal relationships or experiences involving a dependent?”
Hoseok raises a shaky hand. “My dad told me that my mom must be a lust because—”
“Because she cheated on him.” It’s a statement, not a question.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Anyone else?”
“I think my brother had a wrath dependency,” Taehyung says.
“Because he was angry all the time and got into fights?”
“Nah. Because even though everyone always comforted him he still got really mad when he fucked up so he killed himself,” Taehyung says evenly.
“I see.”
“I’ve only seen them on the news,” Jimin says. His voice is really quiet at first, and they have to strain to hear him.
“I watched a documentary on them once.” Namjoon’s much quieter than before, almost meek. He’s painfully aware of himself now. Every hair on his body and the way the air reacts to it. “The study on the ones in jail, where they try to pinpoint how they spun out of control. Became dependent, I mean.”
“I watched that one too,” Jimin says. “It was really scary. I’m not like that.” He looks at the prefect, then at his hands. “All of the wraths were in there for killing someone and they were so violent that they had to be kept in single cells. They were the scariest ones,” he adds, to which Seokjin inspects his cuticles. “And the lusts all had STDs or they were pregnant or they were rapists and child molesters.”
“They don’t have any control over their impulses,” Hoseok agrees.
“But they’re still people,” Namjoon says.
“Are they really?” Hoseok asks. Gluttony always tells him it’s good to agree with the majority, in order to receive more praise and love.
Jimin thinks about it for awhile. “I do agree that to give them the death penalty or life in prison or shoot them if they so much as get arrested is really going too far.”
“I think it’s reasonable,” Taehyung says. “If they hurt someone, they should just die. Or kill themselves.”
“I think that’s ignorant,” Namjoon says.
“They don’t deserve mercy though.” Taehyung makes it sound like he’s jealous of them -- and he is. Envy clouds his vision. “The people they hurt are the ones who deserve the special treatment.”
“I don’t think we’re like them though,” Jimin says. It’s obvious that he’s just remembered everyone’s tendency, that he’s just realized the things he said and feels the need to remedy it. “I get saying that we’re at risk, but to say that we’re basically just like those people is --”
“Dependents are the ones who are always saying they didn’t mean to,” the prefect says. “Always saying they can’t help it. Always out of control, doing the same thing over and over again, making the same mistakes. Obsessing. We’re the same. Some of us are just more privileged than others. So we can get the help that actually… helps. From each other and your conflicts. From learning with a group of other dependents, since those who don’t understand tend to be so deferential towards us.”
It takes them too long to realize that Jeongguk’s started crying. Not the loud sort of crying, but the pitiful sniffly kind where the person presses the backs of their hands to their eyes and tries to rub the tears away.
“That’s enough,” the prefect says, rubbing the back of his neck. “Who wants to help hand these info sheets out?” His gaze is sharp when he says it, that haze of something contemplative hidden under his eyelashes once again. He says it like he knows someone’ll do it.
It’s Hoseok who taps his foot on the ground and bites down hard on his lip and stands up like something’s come over him. “Me.”
“What’s your name?” the prefect asks.
“Ah.” Hoseok shifts. Takes on a knife sharp voice and a shaky smile, as though his facial muscles are taut from underuse. Or overuse. Sheds a skin and takes on another. “Jung Hoseok.”
“As I thought. It’s characteristic for the glutton to do this. They’re usually hungry for affection or praise.”
Hoseok laughs. It’s thick staccato beats, sticky in his throat, abrupt and too loud, and it’s the only reply he can muster.
When Seokjin gets his, he lifts the paper to his nose and inhales. Hoseok smells generic to Seokjin, that’s the best way to describe it, an edge of some kind of traditional cologne that he can’t quite place mixed with a flat tone of aftershave, the kind of smells someone uses to cover up the scent of someone else on their skin. He smells like a summer day, and not always the pleasant kind -- the sweaty choking kind that sports storm clouds but doesn’t know when it wants to storm.
He smells sort of sticky, if stickiness can be a smell.
“This feels a lot like like youth Bible study,” Seokjin says at dinner, sporting a heaping serving of steak which makes Yoongi’s bland choices look like they’re wasting away into the styrofoam plate.
Little does poor Min Yoongi know that the contained snicker from Taehyung is not directed at the contrast of their food choices, but rather the contrast of the both of them when they sit beside each other, and the perfect, startlingly accurate analogy Taehyung’s thought up concerning this.
If Yoongi hadn’t written Taehyung off quite so soon he would certainly wonder about the spark in his eyes and the knowing smile on his face. He would worry about the amount that these microexpressions happened.
The analogy that they’re just like their plates in regards to each other is perfectly uncanny and Taehyung is very smug about it. That’s not to say Yoongi is bland and unseasoned -- Taehyung has no information to back up this claim, no matter how it might appear; he tries to be the bigger person and not judge books by their cover -- but rather that he is dwarfed and sometimes outshined by Seokjin. He looks like he’s wasting into his chair by contrast when Seokjin sits beside him.
One thing that Yoongi is guilty of, besides his tendency to either write people off too soon or too late, is his assumption that Seokjin is a church boy the second he mentions youth Bible study. He sees a cleanly shaven preacher’s son in his mind who looks really good in button-downs, probably sings to the whole church, and lives for Sunday dinners.
“What about it feels like Bible study?” Namjoon asks around his fingers, not making eye contact. He’s sucking food off his knuckles but he’s also been told a few too many times that his lips look nice when he does things with his mouth, and thinks of this as one of his only redeeming qualities.
Seokjin swallows his bite of food before answering. “The way they sort of just throw you into a room, force you all into a group and an activity and hope you spontaneously have a heart to heart and get closer,” he says, dabbing his lips with a napkin. He glances at it, admiring the lack of transfer from the new lip product he’s trying out. “That’s what it feels like.”
“It does kinda,” Jimin says after Seokjin’s words are met with silence. He feels almost pressured to reply when Seokjin speaks.
“Especially how there’s always stragglers. Anyone who doesn’t fit that line of procedure in forming a nice bond remains on the edge of it all.”
“True,” Namjoon says. “But we don’t get graded for church.”
Hoseok purses his lips but doesn’t say anything. His mouth is the most expressive part of him. It twists and tightens. Sometimes it bleeds.
“I guess we should get to know each other?” Hoseok says. That’s what seems to fit the conversation, the mood he’s picked up, and he needed to say something, anything, to get a response. The tightness in his chest, claustrophobia from his own bones, dissipates when he does.
Taehyung finds interest in what Hoseok’s said unlike the rest of them. He sees an opening in it. Life, he realized a long time ago, is a collection of openings when you look hard enough and make yourself appear harmless in one way or another. “I have one. Why are you guys here?”
Jeongguk and Jimin give him a look. Not the same look, mind you. Jimin gives Taehyung a judgmental look. Jeongguk just looks confused. It’s nothing new.
“What? It’s good to think about your life critically,” he says. “Especially if we’re going to be learning from each other. I’m not asking for your whole life story or anything. Just what lead up to this.”
Seokjin and Yoongi both appear to have a similar reaction on the exterior but they couldn’t be more different. Seokjin doesn’t look up but raises his eyebrows at his plate and sips his soda and doesn’t say shit nor give a shit.
Yoongi, on the other hand, stays deadpan but barely refrains himself from saying: My mom shit me out of her vagina, duh. He gives quite a few shits, just not out loud.
It’s the gluttony in Hoseok’s bones that tell him not to acknowledge Taehyung and to change the subject before the discomfort settles in. He musters a nervous laugh. “What about favorite music genre?”
“Hey, do you think you can be more careful about what you say?”
“What?” Hoseok sputters around his toothbrush.
It’s at these times that Seokjin forgets the way he appears to other people. He forgets that when he leans his upper body into the bathroom in their dorm and repeats himself, all Hoseok sees is a threat because he knows what Seokjin is instead of who he is. It’s at these times, when he’s just woken up and still thinks of himself as a normal person, that he forgets to alter his body language and tone of voice into something that would make any other person seem terribly meek but just makes him seem like a declawed lion.
Hoseok is -- was -- rather innocently brushing his teeth. He’s brushed his teeth after every meal so far and now before breakfast. He is actually the only person that Seokjin has ever seen actually brush after every meal. There’s something disturbing about it.
“What’re you talking about?”
“More careful about what you say,” Seokjin repeats again, keeping his voice low and even while he gestures to Jeongguk, who’d fallen asleep after dinner last night without showering. “I’m talking about when he started crying yesterday. I really couldn’t care less about what your personal opinions are. But he seems sensitive and it might make him comfortable if he feels like this room is a safe space.”
And then Hoseok, who’s never been more intimidated in his whole life, gags on his toothbrush and starts choking.
Seokjin reaches for Hoseok and then thinks better of it and steps back instead. Kind of like he’s done something wrong. He feels like he’s done something wrong. He probably has. He hates how he’s always thinking about what it would look like to someone else -- if he’d be in danger if someone who didn’t know what was happening saw him so much as touching Hoseok on the shoulder.
But in the end it doesn’t really matter anyway. Because the walls are thin, god they are so thin, and through the ones to their left, Taehyung’s asking if Hoseok’s okay. They don’t even need to see it to jump to conclusions.
Wrath, his sin, isn’t something he thought about often before it got harder to keep off his mind. It suggests that he can be rash and violent, of which he’s neither. It alters the way he stands and the wording he chooses and takes away some of his control in terms of being interpreted the way he wants to be. When he looks behind himself and sees that Jeongguk is awake and looks terrified, he thinks that’s probably his least favorite part. Having to pick up the pieces all the time.
“Everything’s fine,” he says, loud enough for both Jeongguk’s ears and their neighbors.
“Oh my god,” Jimin whispers to Taehyung (like he thinks he can’t be heard). “Is he yelling? Are they fighting?”
It’s too early for this.
At breakfast, Namjoon gives Seokjin (his gorgeous profile, more specifically) the most apprehensive look possible from behind him in line.
“Good morning,” Seokjin says, more loudly than necessary, and Namjoon looks to the left of him as though he’s intently studying the long rows of polished wooden tables and scattering of students behind them, and ducks his head.
“Morning.” Namjoon’s voice is a foggy rasp compared to Seokjin’s singsong tone. He returns his attention to the food, which is set out in buffet fashion, while Seokjin gets napkins and then an extra piece of ham as an afterthought.
Seokjin hates the feeling of silently taken sides, but he doesn’t say anything.
They all sit at the same table out of habit. (Not really. It doesn’t make sense to call it habit because it isn’t. Habits aren’t formed in two days unless it’s because of anime or Pokemon Go. Seokjin can vouch for this.)
They all sit at the same table because it makes sense, just like the fact that even though Yoongi and Jeongguk are missing, no one tries to take their seats. They’re stuck together, frankly, sincef the academy functions in groups of seven (which Seokjin thinks is obnoxiously clever -- groups of seven for seven sins).
“Good morning everyone,” Seokjin says.
“Hi there,” Taehyung says -- drawls, in fact -- not to Seokjin but instead to his overflowing plate.
Seokjin is hungry for sure. There’s no way to deny that. But there’s also no way to deny that he’s just as aware that this works in his favor within an environment that shines a light on one of the only things that’s ever stopped him -- or it would if that information hadn’t already been openly disclosed. He loves food but it’s a bit of a habit now to profit off the stereotypes people associate with gluttony.
Seokjin can tell which ones aren’t bothered much by their tendency. He recognizes the open curiosity with which they watch and analyze, trying to harmlessly deduce what’s hidden in people’s DNA. They treat it like a scavenger hunt. They’re inquisitive. They’ve never had someone else’s curiosity be a danger to them.
Laziness, greed, envy, pride -- these tendencies are acceptable to society so long as they’re not exacerbated by dependency.
Laziness, more accurately referred to as sloth, isn’t exactly lazy at all -- it tends to get caught up in possibilities and research to the point that its keeper has trouble living and learning actively.
Greed desires knowledge. Its keeper -- Jeongguk, in this case -- is inquisitive, a jack of all trades, ambitious, painfully perfectionistic, and often a prodigy.
Envy is perhaps seen as the most natural as it’s a sentiment that any human can relate to. Taehyung, for example, can appear harmlessly possessive and enjoys being doted on, but his envy does cause him a great deal of pain and obsession as it worsens.
Pride goes almost unnoticed and so do the people who exhibit it. Rather than being arrogant or vain, oftentimes its keepers, like Yoongi, don’t ask for help even in severe cases and turn to Google more than they turn to their friends.
By contrast, lust and wrath and gluttony are misunderstood and often kept under lock and key, the only sign of it being when they show forms of identification (though some go as far as to avoid getting any kinds of ID for this exact reason).
Telling someone that gluttony is what you were born with will bring on an onslaught of misconceptions, comments, pressures about body image, and perceived entitlement to information about their body and how much they’re eating -- especially if its keeper is not thin. Lust does not always have a sexual correlation, but can instead be traced to strong emotions, passion, dedication, obsession, fantasies, and quickly formed bonds. It is a mysterious tendency and can be so internalized that some of its keepers, such as Jimin, appear completely normal. Ironically enough, those with a lust tendency can exhibit more problems with anger management than those with wrath.
The stereotypes for lust and wrath are self-explanatory, though it should be noted that lust’s stereotypes are more harmful for women, and wrath’s stereotypes are more harmful the darker your skintone is.
It’s the stark difference in experiences that Seokjin uses to his favor. When people get a little curious -- preferably before people get a little curious -- he tries to make his tendency seem perfectly obvious and unquestionable. For that he uses his love of food to his advantage. He’d take the incessant comments about how he must work out to be so thin for a glutton over being feared any day.
It’s a habit. A rather useless one at this point.
But Taehyung’s eyes are a little too wide for his comfortThey’re watchful and unblinking and the length of his eyelashes and the way they rest on his cheeks when he blinks makes him look harmless and simply put, Seokjin feels the need to hide behind something.
“Everything okay?” Jimin asks Hoseok. The way he says it, sort of blurts it, is like he’s been working himself up to asking for a long time now.
“Yeah.” Hoseok flinches a little like he’s been shoved out of a trance. “I’m doing great.” These sort of questions bother him, throw him off, because he can’t figure out what the correct answer is. Every day of his life is a test that he’s trying to get the highest possible marks on.
“We thought you guys were fighting earlier,” Taehyung says.
“I know.” Seokjin dabs his lips with a napkin. “I heard you.”
Taehyung licks his lips and tilts his head and leans back in his chair and gestures to Seokjin with a particularly floppy bacon strip. “So where’s Jeongguk?”
Seokjin shrugs and helps himself to another egg tart. “I think he slept in.” He hears the faint accusation in Taehyung’s voice -- the curiosity that’s so damn dangerous because it’s so damn contagious to everyone else at the table -- but chooses not to acknowledge it. “Don’t worry, we weren’t fighting.”
Taehyung props his head on his hand and stares. “That’s good. Cuz you definitely look strong enough to choke someone out.”
Seokjin just laughs.
This is a common pattern in Seokjin’s own life, to be perfectly honest. He notices most everything. But it’s very rarely necessary to open his mouth. He prefers to sit there and act just as pretty as he is when it benefits him. He doesn’t have to let someone know that he’s aware of what they’re up to just to feel smart.
“D’you think we locked him up or something for knowing too much?” There’s laughter in Hoseok’s voice too, but it’s practiced and calculated. When he smiles, when he beams like that, it brings all the attention to him. If there’s anything he’s good at, it’s bringing the spotlight off someone else. “I choked on my toothbrush, not on a dick.”
It’s so ridiculous that it even gets a laugh out of them. That’s something else Hoseok is good at.
“What a relief.” Taehyung’s voice is casual but he makes direct eye contact with Seokjin when he says, “This might sound weird, but you really remind me of my brother.”
Seokjin’s eyes narrow. “That’s cool.”
Isolation comes in the little things. It’s Seokjin trying to wake up before everyone else so that he can start his morning in peace and so can everyone else.
This works seamlessly for the first week of classes but on Tuesday he’s not alone. Because on Monday, there was a seminar on the wrath tendency and dependency, and the next morning he’s not alone. That’s not something he expected.
“You’re up early,” Seokjin says to them before sitting beside Yoongi, voice casual. Jimin’s there too, but he doesn’t say anything.
Yoongi stiffens up a little when Seokjin comes, starts eating a little more neatly for the image of a prim pastor’s son with faint stubble and messy dark hair and flushed skin and a crimson suit that it looks like he’s was born in.
It’s not just Seokjin. Yoongi doesn’t like eating near people anyway. He’s always been a little self-conscious about the way his teeth sit in his mouth and how it makes him chew like a cat.
Yoongi swallows. Nods. “So are you.” His hair smells like citrus and sandalwood.
Seokjin watches them closely. “I can leave if I’m making you uncomfortable.”
“You’re not making me uncomfortable,” Yoongi says.
Jimin nods his agreement.
“Are you sure?” Seokjin asks. There’s a mystery in his eyes and a faint smile tugging at his lips. “I thought you might not wanna. You know. Sit with a wrath while there aren’t many people around.”
“It’s cool,” Yoongi says.
Seokjin finds that hard to believe, so he changes the subject. “I’ll tell you why I’m up if you’ll tell me why you guys are up.”
Half of Yoongi says that, frankly, he would not care either way. But that’s pride speaking, hissing in the back of his mind.
The other half of him cares in the way he always cares: too much. His ex datefriend always said that he was a stereotypical Pisces. Yoongi still doesn’t know shit about astrology but he still hates being associated with anything stereotypical.
Yoongi still doesn’t know shit about astrology but he still misses getting tagged in astrology posts on Tumblr by them and he still misses that time where he had to make a personal account to reblog them all because his photography account was off limits.
“Insomnia,” Yoongi says. It’s not an interesting answer but it’s true.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Jimin says. “You?”
“Skipped my makeup routine to get to breakfast early.” He actually did skip out on his makeup routine today so it’s partially true. “I get hungry really fast. I was homeschooled when I was younger so I’m still used to being able to take snack breaks whenever I want to.” And he still lives at home with his parents because no one wants a wrath, dependent or not, traipsing around their college or even their apartments.
Yoongi does a double-take. “You wear makeup?”
“Yep.”
“What kind of makeup do you wear?”
“Natural makeup mostly,” Seokjin says. “But some days I like to look like I’m a drag queen. It’s pretty fun.”
“Hey cool,” Yoongi says with a nod, and that actually makes Seokjin laugh. For the first time in a long time, Seokjin registers that he feels good. He’s never gotten a reaction like this before and he actually feels good about it. The feeling fades eventually.
“Don’t feel sorry for me.”
They sit in silence until Jimin says, “I don’t feel sorry for you.”
Seokjin smiles. “Yes, you do.”
“No I don’t,” Jimin insists. His eyes say otherwise. “But it made me want to apologize for believing the rumors. I want to apologize for Taehyung too. He’s hurting. I think he’s really jealous of you because of how well you’re doing compared to his brother. I think everyone will come around in time. It’s just. A lot to process.”
“We all have our shit to deal with I guess,” Seokjin says with a shrug.
“That’s it?” Jimin says. “You’re not mad?”
“Of course I’m mad. I’m mad and tired of my life being like this.” Seokjin puts a sausage link in his mouth. “I just can’t show it.”