Chapter Text
No matter how long he has been in the big city, he can never quite get used to the sprawling metropolis that is Seoul. Not to say that Daegu isn’t anything much to gawk at—it really is, in some ways, yet it’s a little more boring than the bright lights and rolling hills of Gangnam, a little less exciting than the rough, raw streets of Hongdae—but after all these years, Seoul still feels a tad off to him. Maybe he can chalk it up to the fact that he lives almost exclusively between Hongdae and Gangnam, commuting from home (where rent is about ten times cheaper) to work to home again. During those rare days where he actually leaves work before three in the morning, he can see with his own eyes just how different Seoul is—celebrities and commonfolk alike dressed to the nines, stumbling along paved streets after a bout of soju, hunting for the next best club to head to.
And in spite of the inconvenient location, hidden right in the middle of Seoul’s high-end clubbing district, Yoongi loves his job. He really, really does. He loves music, and despite the permanent grouchy expression on his face (he’s not grumpy, he’s just tired and he has small eyes to begin with and when he’s sleepy it gets about ten times worse) he really is happy with his position as a producer at Big Hit and he wouldn’t give it up for the world. He’s grateful every single day that when he came up from Daegu with barely a penny to his name, he still managed to make it work, somehow.
But it’s times like these that an inkling of regret surfaces. It’s a Thursday night when Yoongi is holed up in his studio, trying his best to perfect this new song for Big Hit’s sole moneymaker. BTS is gaining popularity, but not fast enough, and Bang PD wants a new comeback as soon as humanly possible; he’d sat Yoongi down, lined him up next to Slow Rabbit and PDogg and explained that they need to get sales up. They need to come up with an alluring concept for the boys’ next comeback, even if they were only the creative team when it comes to music , not boy group concepts made for pandering to screaming fangirls. Dark and Wild did alright for physicals, but digitally, it was a flop—the title track barely clung onto the Melon charts for long, if at all.
Hence his current situation: holed up in the studio, a small one that he’s practically made a home out of, racking his brain for exactly what kind of sound the boys would suit. He’s closer to them than the other producers by sheer virtue of being closer in age, but he’s a producer and they’re idols—he doesn’t know them that well. He doesn’t really talk to the boys much except to coach Namjoon and Hoseok with the raps and occasionally, one of the younger ones would pester him for a selca or a break during the endless hours of recording, i.e. ramen run. Hell, he is pretty sure that even Jeongguk’s still convinced he hides body parts in his closet.
Point is—he might work with them, he might be younger than even their eldest member, but he doesn’t know them well enough to know what concept would be good. It doesn’t just have to sell— they are the ones selling it, so the idea needs to fit them like second skin. It can’t be another half-assed hip hop concept. Neither can it be a schoolboy concept, not when a million groups are already doing it. (Cute concept, maybe? Namjoon would riot, though.)
And he’s trying hard, he really is. If there’s anything Min Yoongi is good at, it’s pouring everything he has (meaning: copious amounts of iced americanos, sleepless nights and creative swear words with a side of Cubase) into making things work. The fact that his paycheck hinges on the success of six boys barely his age makes him sweat even more.
“Yoongi-hyung!” Namjoon calls. His voice is deep and cuts through the air and even if Yoongi hadn’t already known him for four years, almost debuted with him before Bang PD realised that debuting Yoongi as an idol would be a horrible mistake, he’d know that voice anywhere. “They’re asking about you again .”
See, Yoongi tries really hard. But then you get times like these where it’s almost midnight and he’s trying to work and he can’t, because not only is Namjoon interrupting his Think Time, the other five are making a huge racket outside.
“Who?” Yoongi answers with a sigh, after exactly two seconds. Expectant pauses make the world go round.
“The fans.” Namjoon’s words are hurried. “On Twitter, I mean. They saw you in Jimin’s selca and they’re labelling you Mystery Oppa now.”
Yoongi groans. The fans know about his existence—there’s no mistaking the giant SUGA marking some of their title tracks and many of their albums’ B-sides, and it’s hard to miss the slightly sullen, small-sized boy-man that occasionally pops up in the Big Hit company shots, hugged to death by the rest of the boys.
But with Jimin alone, this is the third time it’s happened. The first was pre-debut, when Jimin had forced a cap onto Yoongi and made him hold a towel up against the boy’s unfairly defined abs. The second was only a few weeks ago, when Jimin had taken a lewd selfie—tongue poking out the corner, bedroom eyes and all—and looked not at the camera, but to the side, right at a busily working Yoongi. And this one, the one where Jimin had practically pouted and preened his way till Yoongi agreed to a proper selca.
“Some of these fans are crazy,” Yoongi grimaces, as he browses through the replies on Twitter. “I do not want to lick Jimin’s abs just because I’ve been in three photos with him.”
“You say that now,” Namjoon snickers. “Just get an Instagram or Twitter or something, people would go crazy over it.”
“Are you trying to get me killed?”
Seriously, kids these days. Namjoon’s only two years younger and as much as he is a good leader (from what Yoongi can see) and the occasional philosophical bullshit that spouts out from his mouth, Yoongi thinks that the boy is secretly a ten year old in disguise.
Namjoon leaves, muttering something about writing lyrics for his mix tape. Yoongi sinks back in his chair and lets out a sigh of relief—maybe he can finally get some work done—but just then, the studio door opens again and Jimin pokes his head in, small fingers clambering to grasp the side of the door frame.
“Yoongi-hyung?” Jimin asks. “Can I come in?”
“Yeah, sure,” Yoongi replies.
Yoongi’s still facing the monitor, but he hears the scrape of wooden legs against the ground, and by the time he turns around, Jimin has settled into the small stool in the corner, a contented smile on his lips as he looks around the room. Anyone else and Yoongi would probably have lashed out immediately, spat something along the lines of “Don’t look at Kumamon, you asshole!”, but for as long as he can remember (i.e. as long as he’s been in Big Hit), he’s always had a soft spot for Jimin. Everyone has a soft spot for Jimin. He’s too nice and sweet to deny—it’s like being attacked by a puppy. You can’t turn a puppy down, it just doesn’t happen.
“What are you working on?” Jimin asks, way too happy for someone who’s just been in the practice room for nine hours straight.
“Making money for you kids,” Yoongi replies. He narrows his eyes at the boy—it’s nearing winter and even though the office building is, like any other building, equipped with a half-decent heating system, Jimin’s only clad in a muscle tank. Sweat beads gather at his forehead and there’s a towel slung around his neck. “Go shower and get changed, you’re gonna catch a cold.”
“It’s okay,” Jimin dismisses. “I still gotta practice, and anyway, Jeongguk sweats much more than I do. You should see him right now. Sejin-hyung thought he went for a swim.” Then, a few seconds later: “What do you think of the photo?”
“On Twitter?” Yoongi asks. Jimin nods, and Yoongi really wants to lie. He kind of needs to. The fib is on the tip of his tongue, because he knows it’s late and everyone’s tired and if he says something a little too mean, it’s going to push everything off the ledge and someone is going to get their feelings hurt. But he can’t lie. “I thought you looked better than I did, but it’s pretty stupid to post it online.”
The happy smile on Jimin’s face fades so fast it would be funny, if not for the way he looks genuinely upset, full lips morphing into a pout and shoulders deflating.
“They keep asking about me, and you should’ve thought it through a bit more before posting,” Yoongi continues. He knows it hurts Jimin but he had to tell it like it is. “You know that I’m not a fan of being in the spotlight.”
“Even if you thought that way, you didn’t have to be so rude about it,” Jimin hisses. He throws one last glare, rendered half-hearted by the day’s exhaustion, before leaving.
Yoongi wants to tell Jimin to stay, that he’s sorry, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he dives back into his work and hopes that the boy isn’t the kind to bear grudges.
A few hours later, when he’s finally flagging a cab back to his apartment, he checks the boys’ Twitter account again. Yoongi shakes his head, partly amused and partly annoyed by the new post; whereas Yoongi is straightforward and critical and almost blunt (alright, not almost—he’s very blunt), Jimin plays the underhanded schemer whenever things don’t go his way.
And he’s come to expect that, he guesses. Maybe that’s why isn’t surprised when he checks Twitter and is met with another selca of him and Jimin, both crouched over a bowl of food and smiling into the camera, accompanied by the hashtags ‘#GrumpyGrandpa’ and ‘#SaltyNotSweet’.
The thing about curses is that not many people have them. They’re not exactly the rarest of things—Yoongi’s met maybe three or four people in his entire life who are carrying curses around—but for those who have to live with them, it’s not just a burden. It’s a huge fucking pain in the ass.
“You have an attitude problem,” the landlord says, on the very day he’s supposed to make his payment for the coming month. “Move out by tonight.”
Yoongi hisses. He would love to spit at the ahjussi’s feet, maybe select a few choice words, but whilst he can’t say anything but the truth, he does have a little something called self-control. It’s the sixth place he’s been kicked out of since coming up to Seoul and leaving the Big Hit dormitories, and as no-nonsense and blunt as he already is, he swears that he does not have an ‘attitude problem’. Hell, he was voted class president (albeit in middle school, but still).
He literally cannot lie. He can’t fib, he can’t wheedle his way out of tight situations with a glib tongue. Which brings him to his next problem—that he can’t tell anyone about it, either. Sure, if someone were to ask him, he’d have no choice but to say it; but to actually come out and tell someone, to say “Hey, I have this curse, and I can only say the truth” is to burn a permanent brand onto your skin. Seoul is small, and word spreads fast. People will know. They will know Yoongi as Someone With A Curse, and they will stare, and they will avoid him like the plague. Because even though curses aren’t contagious in the slightest, the attitudes towards those who have to live with said curses certainly are, and Yoongi doesn’t think he will ever be ready to be put in the spotlight like that.
He wants to talk back. He wants to fight back, to maybe finally have something work out smoothly, but he bites his tongue and nods stiffly and slams the door in Mr Kim’s face.
The apartment is messy, but Yoongi had known that sooner or later, the lack of being able to be socially appropriate more than half the time was going to bite him in the ass, as it usually does. This makes moving out a lot easier, he thinks, as he packs everything he owns into the cardboard boxes he’d kept from when he had first moved into this particular apartment a year ago.
There’s not much, and it’s only a little past two by the time the entire place is empty. (And dusty, a layer of grime settling above all the little nooks and crevices he’d never noticed. Whatever, he’s leaving. It’s someone else’s problem now.)
“Bang PD?” Yoongi calls into the phone.
It takes him less than five minutes to relay what has just happened, that he probably can’t come into work the next few days because he has literally just been kicked out of his place. The sigh that floats in from the other end is one that he’s heard too many times. But the words that come next—those are a surprise.
“Just move into the dorm with the boys,” Bang PD says. “They stay right here in Gangnam, and you’re close enough in age to make it not awkward. There’s even an extra mattress hidden under all that mess.”
It isn’t that Yoongi is a social recluse. It’s that he is very much a social recluse, and that it would be awkward—this whole time, the only relationship he has had with the boys is a working one, one where he told them what to do and they would follow and occasionally annoy him with continuous pleas for selcas and ramen. He has worked with the boys long enough for them to call him ‘hyung’, but little more. Save for Namjoon, he hasn’t stayed with any of them in an enclosed area for more than six hours before.
How is he supposed to do it for…for, well, forever? Or as long as they can handle his unintentional yet still biting remarks?
“But they’re the company’s idols,” Yoongi insists, slightly aghast. “And I don’t even know them that well.”
“That’s not what Twitter is saying.”
“Jimin is a menace,” Yoongi hisses.
“He’s like that with everyone,” Bang PD dismisses, and Yoongi extremely, extremely silently admits to himself that it’s kind of true. Jimin is hardworking and kind and above all, friendly to almost every living thing. Still, Yoongi is about to stage a one-man protest when Bang PD says, “You’d pay no rent.”
Fine, Yoongi will admit it. He’s a scrooge. He’s flat-ass broke after spending all that money on the new midi keyboard and a non-pirated copy of Cubase (and way too many Stussy shirts, but don’t tell anyone). The words ‘no rent’ are all it takes for him to pause for a couple of seconds, rethink his life decisions and then reluctantly agree to his boss’ proposal. When he hangs up, he collapses onto the floor, ignoring just how dirty it is despite not being lived in at all, and wonders whether he has just inadvertently ruined his life.
“Hyung, let me help you!” Taehyung greets, less than two seconds after Yoongi raps hesitantly on the door, a box smile on his face.
BTS’ dorm is somewhere in the outskirts of Gangnam, close enough to the office yet far enough from the busy streets such that they won’t get tailed back. Yoongi hasn’t actually ever spoken to Taehyung that much—all he knows is that Taehyung has a strange sense of humour, a deep voice that Big Hit does not quite know what to do with and, apparently, takes Yoongi living with them as a sign to cling onto said person from the moment they enter.
“Yoongi-hyung,” Namjoon says, watching as Taehyung drags a sleeping Jeongguk out to help Yoongi with his boxes, “where do you wanna sleep?”
“I’ll just take the couch. Or an extra mattress, if you’ve got one,” Yoongi replies. “I’ll probably spend more time in the studio than here anyway.”
“You sure?” Seokjin pops out from the kitchen. “We can probably squeeze you into one of the rooms; Hobi and Jiminie’s room has got a bit more space.”
“It’s okay.”
“Listen,” Seokjin says, holding out a hand as if he were about to grab Yoongi’s forearm, but dropping it at the last moment. Instead, he makes a ‘come here’ gesture and brings both Yoongi and Namjoon into the kitchen, leaving Hoseok and Taehyung to fool around with Yoongi’s boxes outside. “I don’t know you that well but Namjoonie does, and we’re both worried about this.” Seeing the expression on Yoongi’s face, he quickly adds, “It’s not that we don’t want you here, it’s just that you can be kind of mean sometimes.”
“Kind of?” Namjoon mutters.
“Quiet,” Seokjin snaps. He turns back to Yoongi and the only word to describe his expression would be conflicted, like he doesn’t quite know whether to address Yoongi informally, since Seokjin is older, or formally, since Yoongi produces all their songs. “It’s just that you don’t really sugarcoat your things at all, and the younger ones can get quite upset about that. They’re still quite…sensitive, and we’re all living together now, so hopefully you can tone it down a bit?”
The last sentence comes out as more of a question than a statement. Yoongi gets what Seokjin is hinting at—hell, he would probably have brought it up himself if Seokjin and Namjoon hadn’t, he’s not that much of a dick. But he knows it is going to be hard.
“If they don’t rile me up, sure,” Yoongi says, feigning an air of nonchalance. Because if he really does end up botching this, it could mean his career is over. “But I can’t promise anything.”
“You have a bit of an attitude problem, hyung,” Namjoon interrupts. Seokjin slaps the back of his head and Namjoon grimaces and mutters, “What? Everyone knows it.”
“I’m just honest,” Yoongi defends. Sure, some days he really hates this stupid curse, but on others he realises how much bullshit people like to slather themselves in and is secretly glad that he literally cannot take any of it.
“Honest is good, but you gotta be aware too,” Namjoon says. He stands up straight now, and he looks more like a leader than Yoongi ever remembers. “We’re not freshly debuted, we’ve got some experience now, but Jimin, Taehyung and Jeongguk are still young and they still take words to heart. Not just yours, but everyone else’s, especially their hyungs’. And we’re their hyungs, so we have to be careful.” He bites his lip. “I know this isn’t what you’re used to, but for the sake of keeping this dorm blood-free, just…try, alright?”
Yoongi nods, and he’s about to say something in return—he is not quite sure what, maybe just something to placate them that he will try his best not to stir shit up—when Hoseok dashes into the kitchen, panting.
“Guys,” he breathes, eyes glimmering with excitement and a smile tugging on his lips, “The Busan kids bought chicken.”
The concerned look on Seokjin’s face immediately transforms into one of anticipation. He keens toward Hoseok and grabs the younger’s shoulders with both hands, locking their gazes. Yoongi looks on with thinly veiled amusement—he’s sure that everyone else is already used to it by now, having lived with the elder for so long, but Yoongi is still caught off-guard whenever Seokjin’s demeanour completely changes at the mention of food.
“And the Daegu kids will go grab liquor, right?” Taehyung calls out sarcastically. He rolls his eyes as he bends over the single box of Yoongi’s things—wait, it looks like he’s peering into the box? what is he trying to do? Yoongi needs to go over there and stop him —like he’s heard it a million times before.
“We’ve got the soju too,” Jimin sings, as he holds up a CVS plastic bag with too much smugness. Trailing behind him is a Jeongguk, grumbling under his breath about how “how did Jimin-hyung not get carded, what the fuck”.
“Now,” Hoseok says a little too solemnly, voice dipping low and steady as he places his hands on Yoongi’s bony shoulders and spins him around, “I know we’re not the closest of friends. Hell, we’re not even the closest of co-workers. But you’re staying with us now,” he proclaims, more than a bit of pride beaming out of his ass, “and this is going to be our celebratory dinner whether you like it or not. You’re part of this household now.”
“Yeah, so we expect you to do the dishes too!” Jeongguk calls out from the dining area, as he’s getting all the boxes of chicken out of the bag. It’s quickly followed by a loud thump to his head, courtesy of Taehyung, and an ensuing scuffle.
“Welcome to the family, hyung,” Jimin grins, eyes curling into little crescents. His smile looks like it could save all the kittens. Yoongi tries not to acknowledge the way his chest warms and his heart stutters.
Yoongi learns. He’d always had a steep learning curve—it took him months to even master the basic shortcuts on a pirated copy of FL Studio, and even then he couldn’t do much unless he had the tutorial page opened up next to the programme.
But the boys are more open than he expected; they’re fun, to say the least. Namjoon asks him for advice on lyrics, Hoseok asks him for production tips. Jeongguk treats him to lamb skewers their first night out as a group, Seokjin cooks him seaweed soup when he mentions offhandedly that he misses his mother’s cooking. Taehyung shows him blurry, shaky videos of Soonshimmie and Jimin crashes his studio during those long nights when he’s agonising over what to do, practically skips in with two cups of ramen and a few sausages in his hands.
So, it’s easy to learn. It’s like having a group of dongsaengs (even Seokjin, who’s older than him, seems more like a maknae than Jeongguk half the time) that he never quite had. It’s like having a group of friends he never quite had, because he simply never had the time. It’s not easy to build relationships when you move to a completely new city on your own at the age of eighteen, not when you’re trying to build a career. Not when you’re trying to build a name for yourself so that you don’t have to worry about your parents crying every night, crying that you’d left home for a bunch of castles on clouds.
For Yoongi, work never really stops. He’s always working on something. But for the rest, it’s their lull period now. (Bang PD wants a comeback in spring and with a concept that fits the season, but the creative team hasn’t come up with anything decent.) And, for all their growing popularity, BTS doesn’t have as many solo schedules as expected; their days are spent mostly in the practice studio or the family restaurant down the street.
So, it’s one of those nights again. A surprisingly early day, only three days after Yoongi’s first moved in, and everyone has decided to take it easy for today. To take it slow, because a snowstorm had suddenly hit and then let up for all of a half hour, which they used to rush back to the dorms before they got trapped in the office for the next two weeks.
And what better way is there to spend a winter’s day in than with a bunch of kinda-maybe-friends? and hearty stews packed from the family restaurant.
“Kimchi jigae!” Taehyung exclaims, the moment Yoongi takes everything out from the takeaway bag. He’d bought a bunch of items—kimchi jigae, budae jigae, samgyetang—but everything was hot and hearty and the sort of food that would fill up your stomach and warm your heart. “Thanks!”
“You bought all this?” Namjoon asks, surprised. A pleasant kind of surprise, like he’s secretly smiling inside despite the comically wide eyes and open jaw. “You didn’t have to, hyung.”
“Nah, you guys are letting me stay here,” Yoongi dismisses. “So it’s my treat. Just don’t expect it to be a regular thing.”
“Who’d have thought Yoongi-hyung was such a sweetheart?” Jeongguk jokes. He immediately reaching for the budaejigae and Hoseok’s hand darts out to slap Jeongguk’s greedy fingers away.
“No one,” Yoongi answers.
It’s almost automatic. Almost as if he couldn’t stop himself, and that’s how he knows it’s the curse again. Fucking curse, seriously. If he was alone right now he’d have slammed his head on the table—but then again, if he was alone he wouldn’t be in such a predicament anyway, because no one would ask him any questions that he has to answer with only the truth.
He looks around and, thankfully, no one seems to think his answer was suspicious. It’s sarcastic and to-the-point and curt, just like Min Yoongi always is, with or without the whole honesty problem. It’s only Jimin that stares back at him with curious eyes and knitted brows instead of digging into the food like everyone else—
—and it’s unnerving, trying to hold the younger’s gaze. So Yoongi looks down instead and reaches for a bowl of rice and snatches the tteokbokki from the stew before Taehyung can get his hands on it.
When they’re all fed and full, everyone retreats to their bedrooms for all of five minutes before Namjoon troops out and asks, “Anyone up for soju?” and that is when all the shit begins, Yoongi is sure. He can pinpoint the exact moment with his eyes blindfolded.
Because there are way too many bottles of soju leftover from the night Yoongi had moved in, the fresh and grapefruit and pomegranate stacked up in their tiny fridge like a very dangerous and slightly boring game of tetris. They had been too full from the fried chicken (which had been really good, actually, ten out of ten would recommend, especially when Yoongi’s been living off ramen and kimbap for the past few years since he didn’t really have anyone to share fried chicken with and he sure as hell wasn’t gonna fork out thirty bucks for a box of fried poultry he can’t finish) to drink anything, and slept early that night.
Jeongguk hops out of the room right after Namjoon with a glint in his eyes, heads straight for the kitchen with a purpose. The rest file out next, all looking more or less enthusiastic about the prospect of alcohol.
“Alright,” Seokjin says. They’re seated in a circle on the floor since the couch is too small, and right in the middle there are seven bottles of soju. Three fresh, four grapefruit and it’s not quite the same of downing fourteen shots before having a Chemistry midterm the next day—Yoongi went through a rebellious and vaguely illegal stage, so sue him—but it’s still more than enough to get everyone on the same page of ‘slightly drunk’. “So, the maknae’s not having more than half a bottle.”
“ Whyyyyyyyy ?” said maknae whines. His eyes are so large and his pout so…pouty, that Yoongi is ninety-percent sure Seokjin is going to give in. “I’m almost legal.”
“There’s still a year to go,” Taehyung hisses, nudging Jeongguk in the ribs. “Go through life like the rest of us, you brat.”
“Not more than half a bottle,” Seokjin repeats, voice firm. “I’m not having anyone die on my watch. God knows the shit that you’d do to all of us if you get drunk. I don’t think any of us want to be on the receiving end of those pushups you keep doing.”
“Yeah, and you do your pushups to Abracadabra too,” Jimin snickers.
They’re a little more than an hour into their drinking session when Yoongi just knows that he’s drunk. That’s the thing about soju: it’s only twenty percent for fresh and fourteen percent for grapefruit, and you don’t feel drunk or tipsy or even buzzed straight away, it just tastes vaguely like you’ve poured rubbing alcohol down your throat. And then, twenty, thirty, forty minutes later, it hits you. Just like that.
“Let me try standing up,” Yoongi mutters.
His vision is already slightly shaky (wobbly? like jelly?) whenever he turns his head and he needs to know if he’s actually drunk, or if he’s just dreaming. So he stands, and sure enough, he’s shaky and wobbly and he falls over.
“Hyung,” Jimin giggles from his foetal position on the floor. “You look stupid. Stuuuuuupid .”
“Yah, shut up!” Yoongi snaps. He sits back up and ignores the way his butt hurts from the fall. Not that he has much of a butt. It’s more tailbone than butt. It’s not like Jimin’s bubble butt, the one that stays no matter how much he diets. Yoongi bets that that butt would cushion any fall.
“Hey, h-hyung,” Hoseok hiccups. He’s splayed across most of the living room floor like a starfish, staring up into the ceiling. “Why are you such an asshole? I mean,” at this, Hoseok pauses, and laughs at his own pun, “you’re a lot nicer now that we’ve gotten to know you, but before you moved in you were so scary . Like, you’re younger than Seokjin-hyung but you behave like you’re fifty years older or something.”
“It’s not my fault,” Yoongi pouts. Before he can stop himself (like he could even do so sober, anyway), everything comes out. “I’ve got that stupid curse thing.”
“Wait, curse?” Taehyung asks. He quickly scrambles to sit up straight, untangling himself from Jeongguk, who looks slightly miffed at the loss of a Taehyung cuddle bear. “Like those people who can’t swim, or can’t do heights. I thought they were super, duper rare.”
“Yeah, those,” Yoongi sighs dramatically, staring into the distance, i.e. that one suspicious stain on the wall that really needs to be looked at. “I can’t lie. Like, ever. Never ever ever ever .”
“You’re cursed to not be able to lie,” Jimin repeats slowly, carefully. He turns the syllables over his tongue and each word rolls over with more than a little bit of fascination and understanding. Then he kneels forward on his knees and all of a sudden he’s so close that Yoongi can count each eyelash. (Not that he does, of course. That’d be weird, even for a drunk Yoongi. It’s Jimin the Menace we’re talking about.) “Who did it?”
“What do you mean, who did it?” Yoongi asks, puzzled. It’s a testament to how drunk he is that the only reaction he has to Jimin being this near is his heart speeding up and his stomach turning over on itself. Practically nothing, if you think about it. “It’s a random thing. People are just… born with it.”
“I heard it only happens to those who aren’t in a good place and don’t want to get to a good place,” Jeongguk pipes up unhelpfully. Barely even a quarter of a bottle and he’s already spouting out nonsense.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Namjoon contemplates. “Where’s the evidence?”
“I dunno,” Jeongguk shrugs. “But that’s what my grandfather and my grandmother said, and they’re both really smart. The smartest old people I know.”
“It makes sense though,” Jimin says, finally moving backward and away from Yoongi. “I heard of people whose curses just lifted out of nowhere. And they were happier before those curses got lifted, so it must mean something.”
“Not like you’ve got studies, or something,” Namjoon points out. “Purely anecdotal.”
“Why are all of you such coherent drunks?” Seokjin groans. He’s lying on the floor with his stomach pressed into the floorboards, heels of his feet digging into the leg of the couch. “I signed up for drunken messes, not a Philosophy lesson.”
“Wait, so what happens if you try to lie?” Hoseok asks, eyes sparkling. “Come on, try it.”
“I dunno, I never felt the need to,” Yoongi replies. That’s the truth. “Even if I could lie, I probably wouldn’t. I don’t care enough to lie.”
“Hyung, come on, just try it,” Jimin urges. “Here’s one: tell me I’m not cute.”
Yoongi scoffs, even as he feels a furious blush rising up from his neck to his cheeks. He’s pale, so he knows it will show. Maybe he can pass it off as an inevitable reaction to the alcohol. He tries to say the words anyway, though, but it simply comes out as,
“Jimin, you’re not c—”
and he literally chokes on his own tongue, almost dies when his tongue magically manages to dance around his mouth like someone had grabbed hold of the muscle and taken it for a joyride, words coming out garbled and incoherent, i.e. what drunk people should sound like, according to Kim Seokjin.
“Holy shit.” Jeongguk finally gets up from his position on the floor and latches himself onto Taehyung again. “It’s actually true. I always thought it was one of those bullshit stories my grandparents made up.”
“I thought you said they were the smartest people you knew,” Yoongi points out.
“Yeah, but half of what the smartest people in the world say is bullshit, so,” Jeongguk shrugs. Yoongi decides not to argue.
“I was supposed to debut with you guys, you know,” Yoongi blurts. It’s like once the faucet has been open it can’t be closed. It’s probably the liquid courage rushing through his system, but he’s never felt more ready to share—or maybe because he’s never had anyone to share it with, until now. “But you can’t exactly debut an idol who doesn’t have a filter.”
“That would have been crazy,” Namjoon agrees. After all, he was the one member who had been around since the very start, since Yoongi got casted for getting second place at that audition and then slowly watched everyone—Ikje, Donghyuk, Hunchul and so many more—go and never keep in touch. “Crazy fun, I mean,” he adds, when he sees Yoongi’s narrowed eyes.
“It must have been hard, coming up from Daegu alone,” Jimin says. Somehow, his head has found its way onto Yoongi’s lap, and he stares up at Yoongi as he speaks. Yoongi tries not to move but it’s kinda really fucking hard when your heart is palpitating at a million miles a minute.
“Kinda,” Yoongi shrugs. Stay cool, Min Yoongi. You can do this. “I didn’t really have friends up here, and it’s hard to make friends when you’re in the studio all day and all you can do is be an asshole to people.”
“True,” Hoseok laughs. Looks like the hiccups are gone. He tilts his head upward to look at Yoongi and from this angle, there’s a double chin which would have been hilarious had they been sober, but right now, it just looks perfectly in place. His eyes sparkle more than usual when he says,
“But you have us now, don’t you?”
It’s easy to get into the groove of things. Yoongi knows that the boys are hardworking and humble and as nice as idols can get, and yet, it still blows him how easily he fits in into their little gang, as if there had been a Yoongi-shaped hole just waiting to be filled all along. It helps, he guesses, that he stays at the office as late as the rest do—it’s gone to the point where Bang PD has entrusted him with the key to the office, knows that he works nights in the studio till the dawn breaks and that the boys do the same.
And so, when the day finally comes to a start, he’s not the only one that catches the first train down one station from Sinsa to Gangnam. It could be Namjoon, who stayed up late crafting lyrics on the couch of Yoongi’s studio. Or maybe Jeongguk, who records cover after cover until his voice turns hoarse. But more often than not, it’s Jimin (the Practice Bug, as the others have dubbed him—this is just one of the many new things Yoongi has learnt since literally spending all his waking hours with the boys) who dances and sings and dances again, and it’s a wonder how his bones don’t break with the way they move like water to music and through air. Yoongi now has company, and that’s a first.
On this particular day, it’s just the two of them. Yoongi and Jimin, weaving their way through the apartments and buildings of Gangnam, having taken the first train and almost missed their stop due to sheer sleepiness.
Jimin usually supplies the conversation, even though he’d been pissed off at Yoongi not even a week ago, but tonight (today?) he’d already danced for eight hours straight and even Yoongi can tell that the boy is exhausted. There’s still a good fifteen-minute walk up a particularly torturous hill. Yoongi can already feel it in his knees, and it’s cold. Fall ended a long time ago and winter is in full swing and the Seoul wind is biting.
He turns to his right, and Jimin is right there, as always. But today he’s a little more tired, a little more subdued. His beanie is pulled over his bangs and there’s a hunch in his back, and none of those things make Yoongi feel good.
“Hey,” Yoongi whispers. There’s a bunch of chairs outside the GS25 that’s a few meters ahead, and more than anything, he knows that Jimin needs to rest. Anyone would need to rest after working so hard. “Do you wanna take a break? Sit down for a bit?”
“It’s fine,” Jimin smiles. It’s strained, though. Tight at the corners and failing to reach his eyes.
“Don’t be stubborn,” Yoongi sighs. He grabs Jimin’s forearm and leads him to the chairs, sitting him down before rushing in to grab a can of latte for each of them. It takes all of two minutes before he’s right next to Jimin, passing him the hot coffee with cold hands. “Drink up.”
“Thanks,” Jimin says. He smiles again, and this time there’s a bit more life in it. And, all of a sudden, “Hey, hyung. What did you feel when you moved up here?”
“Alone,” Yoongi jokes. Except, it’s not really a joke.
“No, seriously,” Jimin insists. “What was it like? I had Tae to help me out, but you didn’t really have anyone, did you?”
“No, not really. For a while there were all the other trainees, but after a couple of months I was moved to production so I was really, seriously alone. But I was pretty young, so it was not too bad.”
Jimin looks aghast. “Isn’t it worse if you’re young?”
“The younger you start being alone, the longer you have to learn how to get used to it, and the easier it is to live with it.”
“That’s so…depressing,” Jimin says. His mouth is downturned and when he looks at Yoongi, his eyes are soft. “What about school? Did you at least have friends there? Joined clubs? Tae and I didn’t really do anything, but we always spent our breaks in the football field.”
“I played a bit of basketball back home, but no, not really.” Yoongi shakes his head. “I was always asleep in school since I was so tired from producing all night.”
“So you basically lost your entire youth.” Laid out like this before him, and by Jimin, no less, it’s like having a poison arrow pierce his heart a thousand times over. “You lost your entire childhood .”
“That’s a bit much,” Yoongi frowns.
“What’s your most memorable moment? The most important, defining moment?”
“When I came out of my mum?” Yoongi pipes, and it’s only half a joke, because he can’t think of anything and he’s also getting slightly annoyed by Jimin’s incessant prodding. But, he has friends now, he lives with actual people instead of ghosts in his mind, and he needs to be sensitive. “I don’t know. I don’t think I have any.”
“You know that phrase, hwa yang yeon hwa ?” Jimin asks, and Yoongi nods. “Yeah, that. So you can’t think of what is your hwa yang yeon hwa ?”
“I—” Yoongi stutters. His heart comes to a stop and his mind comes to a halt. All he hears is Jimin’s words ringing in his mind and all he sees is the quiet morning streets of Gangnam, office workers suited up for another routine day of mundane work and cars starting up as another day begins. “—I can’t say that I do.”
The comeback is a go. Bang PD sits everyone in the team down and explains that, after months of brainstorming and weeks of finalisation, they’ve decided on a concept: youth. (See, the thing about the industry is that no one outside of it ever understands the full scale of how much work goes into each comeback. There’s literally no rest period. It’s always work, work and more work.) It’s a little cliche, Yoongi thinks, but he was the one who suggested it in the first place, who piped up during a meeting and said that a boyish image wasn’t enough—there were enough groups with a boyish image already, it was either that or the hardcore hip hop concepts, heavy rap and all. And, besides, BTS is at the perfect age for such a concept, teetering the line between adolescence and adulthood, bodies young but minds worn old with responsibility.
At this, Taehyung lets out a loud whoop and Seokjin almost falls off his chair in excitement. Yoongi wants to laugh—it’s funny, how they know just how hard it’s going to be, and yet they’re still so eager to put their bodies through the grinder. Choreography is all set, the songs are pretty much done (this time, they’ve even got self-composed tracks by Jeongguk and Taehyung, the ones they slaved over for weeks) and all that’s left to do is for everyone to actually learn everything. Maybe now Yoongi can finally take a breather.
“We should celebrate,” Hoseok says, once they head to the recording studio and Yoongi loads up the song from his laptop, ready to show them the demo.
“No more soju for the rest of my life,” Jeongguk says sternly.
“You had two shots,” Yoongi deadpans, and Jeongguk pulls a face.
Yoongi sinks into the chair—one of those tall, made-for-your-spine ones, with a back that rises up past the crown of his head—like it’s his second home and waits. He feels someone’s chin dig into his shoulder as he preps his laptop, and it’s almost as if his body knows that it’s Jimin—the small breaths puffing into his ear, the melodic hum of his laugh when Namjoon trips over his own shoelaces trying to squeeze into the studio. And it’s almost as if Yoongi’s body knows that it’s Jimin and doesn’t care. Doesn’t mind . Tries to create a Jimin-shaped hole in the crook of his collarbone so that Jimin can stay there forever.
Okay. Wait, no. Those thoughts are bad. Yoongi shakes his head lightly and his bangs brush Jimin’s cheek and the younger pulls away with a small pout. Get yourself together, Yoongi.
When everyone is settled and ready, he presses play and shows them the particular song that he’d written for this album—Fun Boys, a track that had started out inspired by the permanent sunshine shining out of Hoseok’s ass, and gradually, as he continued composing, he realised it was more representative of BTS as a group than anything else. It’s upbeat and fun and has lots of room for the boys to play around with. Everyone nods along to the beat, Taehyung even getting up to shimmy about a little.
“That sounds great,” Hoseok grins. “The choreo’s gonna be so fun.”
“Thanks,” Yoongi says, a small smile on his lips. It’s nice to get approval from someone other than the man who’s paying you. “These are your parts.”
And so the rest of the evening goes on like this, and he guides them along. This is where Jeongguk comes in, this is where Namjoon’s rap will start. Making sure that the rappers know the beat like the back of their hand so that they can come up with good lyrics.
It’s dinnertime when he realises there’s still one more song, the title track, the one that is almost done but not quite.
“And this is gonna be your title track,” Yoongi says. “PDogg-hyung and Brother Su-hyung and I all worked really hard on this. We’ve got to touch it up a bit more but this is what it’s like for now. Pretty sure Bang PD has got a huge music video planned, too.”
“Lumpens again?” Seokjin asks.
“I think so, yeah,” Yoongi agrees, before playing the track.
It isn’t quite like their previous title tracks. Not as in-your-face hard-hitting, more electronic than anything else. But it’s layered and complex and the melody line had taken hours to do, the post-chorus no-lyric breakdown had been a risk that they’d taken, and Yoongi is pretty damn proud of the result.
After the song ends, there’s silence for all of two minutes before someone starts clapping.
“Holy shit,” Jimin breathes, awed. He stares at Yoongi as he lets out, “That was so good.”
“Guys, I think we can actually get first place this time.” Taehyung’s eyes are bright and his face lights up with excitement.“Seriously, I think we really can.”
“Well, that’s gonna be up to you guys,” Yoongi says with a final flourish, closing his laptop and letting the replay of the track abruptly end. It’s getting late and the boys still have to learn their choreography from Teacher Son, and Yoongi himself has to work on his mixtape (though, knowing him, he’ll probably just rehash lyrics again and again and never settle on something). “Everyone took note of their parts, yeah?”
“Yep, everything’s good,” Namjoon affirms. It’s times like these that Yoongi can really see how the skinny, lanky boy he first met years ago can actually be a good leader. “The theme is an angsty relationship, right? Just to confirm?”
“Mm,” Yoongi hums in agreement. “We’ll take care of vocal line’s lyrics but you and Hobi gotta pass your stuff through us first before we do the final recording.”
When everyone else leaves, Yoongi curls into his chair in the studio, glad that he’d impulsively dropped two hundred thousand won on a spinny but comfortable chair a month ago. He’s glad that the boys are enthusiastic and optimistic and that they’re all fired up to give it a go, but he’s afraid that he can’t live up to their expectations. The track is not done yet and without the final okay from Bang PD, there’s little that he can do.
The sigh that he lets out echoes throughout the whole studio. He guesses it’s time to go work on his mixtape.
Home has always been a funny thing for Yoongi.
When he was young, home was Daegu—not his small bedroom, not the one piled up with worksheets and textbooks, but the his hyungs’ studio, cooped up inside till as late as he could, fiddling with gear until the older boys would nag at him to go back before his parents started worrying about where on earth their kid was. After moving to Seoul, home was the studio—his own studio, not someone else’s, the gear was his own and he didn’t have to share and all he needed was privacy and time and his own thoughts.
Now, he’s not quite sure. Home is still his studio at the Big Hit office, don’t get him wrong, it’s become as much a part of him as the inability to lie and the sleepy eyes, but he realises that that’s because he never had anyone to go home to since the very start. Not in Daegu, where his parents would be working to put food on the table. Not in the studio, where it was just him and Cubase.
Now, he has a dormitory with six other boys in the middle of Gangnam. It’s not just that he has someone to go home to—it’s that he is someone that others come home to, too.
Groggy but sincere voices greet him when he opens the door at three in the morning, not a stagnant silence. He can tell who’s who by the sound of their footfalls (Namjoon walks with long, hard steps, Taehyung with loud, clunky ones, almost tripping over himself, Jimin practically glides across the floorboards) and the rhythm of their breathing (Seokjin’s are slow and drawn-out, Jeongguk’s are even and steady, Hoseok’s are easy and almost seem as if they’re bouncing to a permanent beat). Someone prepares breakfast in the morning (probably Seokjin, since Namjoon can’t tell a frying pan from a plate) and replaces the toothpaste whenever it runs out and there is always, always food in the fridge.
Even though he doesn’t share a room, doesn’t have to deal with their clothes flying all over his bed (he doesn’t even have one, anyway), it’s starting to become comfortable. Almost too comfortable. And he should be worried, he knows he should—he shouldn’t get attached, not when he breaks ties so easily, not when he runs his mouth without even knowing—but he’s not.
So, to finally have a home that is, in the conventional sense, an actual home , is weird. It’s weird and it makes Yoongi’s chest go all tingly whenever he jabs the key into the lock and it should worry him but it doesn’t.
“Hyung,” Jimin calls out. He sits down onto Yoongi’s mattress hesitantly, relaxing when Yoongi doesn’t seem to bristle in the slightest. “Do you wanna go out?”
It’s a free day and everyone else has headed out—Taehyung and Jeongguk covered from head to toe in black and trooping off to Everland, Seokjin meeting Sandeul and Jaehwan at a restaurant, Namjoon and Hoseok taking the train all the way down to Seoul Forest just to catch some frogs—and only Yoongi and Jimin are left in the house ( home , a voice whispers).
Logically speaking, Yoongi should go out. He should get some fucking sunlight for once in his life and stop scaring people with the over-used joke that he’s actually a vampire. But the indoors, as Spongebob-seonbaenim once wisely espoused, are glorious.
“Come on, you haven’t left the studio for the past two weeks and now that we have a free day, do you really just wanna stay in and not move?”
Yoongi lets out a groan and flops back onto the mattress, glaring at the ceiling. Trust Jimin to try and talk some sense into him.
He feels a loud thump next to him, the sound of another body hitting the thin mat, and he’s not surprised when he sees Jimin splayed out next to him. They’re almost the same size, the two of them, the butt of Jeongguk’s jokes (Yoongi really needs to give the boy a good knock to his head, though to his credit, Jeongguk barely dares to offend a single hair on Yoongi’s head) and lying like this—they’re shoulder to shoulder, ankle to ankle. Thigh to thigh, waist to waist, ribcage to ribcage.
Lying like this, Jimin is closer than he has been in the past years that Yoongi has known him. (Yoongi tries to ignore the fact that for the better part of those years, he has barely even tried.) Jimin smells like the green tea shampoo Seokjin always stocks the bathroom with and his hair is like strands of feather tiptoeing across Yoongi’s forearm, the one stretched across the mattress, the one that Jimin is using as a makeshift pillow.
“No, I don’t wanna go out,” Yoongi says, because he really means it. “And yes, I really just want to not move. At all. For the rest of my life.”
Jimin giggles, and Yoongi swears it sounds like a thousand wind chimes billowing in the winter breeze. A light tinkling that pierces through the air and the day is instantly a thousand times brighter.
So, instead of allowing Jimin to pry further, instead of allowing him to dig and burrow deeper into Yoongi and extract everything he will ever need, Yoongi does what he does best—he changes the topic.
“Are you excited for the comeback?” Yoongi asks. He tries to sound as nonchalant as possible but it’s not quite working, because as much as he can’t lie to others, he can’t lie to himself either, and he knows that he is genuinely curious. He is genuinely rooting for the boys’ confidence and success.
“Kinda,” Jimin replies. He almost sings as he speaks, the vibration running through Yoongi’s forearm and to his neck and spreading to every corner of his body. “Teacher Son just taught us the choreo to I Need U and we’re cleaning everything up now.”
“How do you do it?” Yoongi asks, abruptly. He figures, it’s just the two of them now. There’s nothing else to lose. “How do you live with others for so long and not… worry?”
“Not worry?” Jimin shifts Yoongi’s arm away, small fingers pushing into soft flesh, and props his chin in his own palm, leaning up on his elbows. Tilts his head to the left and raises his eyebrows. “Not worry about what?”
“About them leaving,” Yoongi breathes. He doesn’t dare look into Jimin’s eyes. “About everyone leaving.”
“Why would that happen?”
“Because I left.” Yoongi doesn’t know where this sudden bout of honesty has come from, even though honesty is literally all he has. “Because I always leave before everyone else does.”
It’s silent. He can’t bear to lift his head up and see what must be a pissed off expression on Jimin’s face. He can’t bear to look to Jimin and see the disgust in the younger boy’s eyes. Disgust that Yoongi would push people away before they even came in, because Yoongi knows —he knows that being honest is a burden, and as much as he downplays his curse, it’s a weight that he carries and it’s always there. It’s always fucking there, and there’s nothing he can do about it, and how he wishes he could for once walk without any shackles.
It’s quiet. He expects Jimin to up and leave, maybe send a condescending scoff Yoongi’s way while he’s at it. But the next thing he knows, there’s a small but distinctly muscled body splayed across his chest and Jimin is burying his face in the crook of Yoongi’s neck and his arms are around Yoongi’s waist, and Yoongi should push Jimin away—but he doesn’t, because it’s comforting and it’s warm and it calms his beating heart and it’s Jimin .
(He realises later that it’s always like this. He should, and yet he doesn’t, and it always boils down to the same reason. It always boils down to the same person.)