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Seokjin doesn’t like to say he believes in fate, in destiny. Because he doesn’t, not really. He believes that he can make his own destiny. If you work hard enough for something, you can make it. And if you don’t make it, maybe it just means that you didn’t try hard enough.
What he does believe in, though, is intuition. He doesn’t question his gut feelings, even though sometimes they lead him astray, like that one time he had gotten the spontaneous urge to get a burger at midnight in Japan and had gotten hopelessly lost until he had Google-translated enough words to string together a barely-comprehensible question asking for directions back to his hotel.
Most of the time, though, his instincts are helpful. Like the time he was at the grocery store and decided to buy a bunch of twelve-packs of sodas because they were on sale. When he came back the next day, they had gone back to their original prices.
Or like the time he was out drinking with his friends and lost Namjoon, and he just knew Namjoon would have made his way to the park across the street. Indeed, Seokjin found a smashed Namjoon singing to himself—rather loudly—on the swing set.
So when Seokjin runs into Y/N as he is late to class on the first day the semester started—in hindsight, she must have been too, if he had managed to run into her—he doesn’t question his gut screaming at him to apologize, smile at her, and ask her name.
She looks at him strangely, but answers curtly, “Y/N. Now look, I would love to stay and chat but my class was supposed to start—” She looks at her watch. “—five minutes ago.”
Y/N runs off, but Seokjin can’t stop himself as he shouts after her, “I’m Seokjin! Hope to see you around!”
The only indication that she heard is the fact that she turns to look at him before throwing open the door to the science building, and Seokjin mentally notes that she takes a science class at—he looks at his watch—eight in the morning.
He snaps out of his reverie as he realizes that he, too, has a class at eight in the morning. Seokjin runs into the math building, right next to the science building. He sits impatiently through his Calculus II class; he was never really a math person. He tries to concentrate and diligently take notes, but his mind keeps going back to the fact that he quite literally ran into Y/N and then had made a fool of himself.
But when Seokjin sees Y/N sitting near the back of the lecture hall in his eleven a.m. music theory class, he can’t say that he’s completely surprised. Without hesitation he takes the open seat to her right. “It’s you,” he comments, sitting down.
“It’s you,” she repeats soullessly as she watches him.
Seokjin can’t help but question if this is one of the times he’s just acting rashly, stupidly, under the disguise of a “gut feeling” he had somehow made up. “Yeah, um…sorry about this morning,” he says, scratching the hairs at the base of his neck.
“It’s fine. We were both in a rush.” She looks down at her hands, which, Seokjin notes, are quite pretty. They’re clasped together, interlocked fingers, and Seokjin wants to replace one of her hands with his own. He doesn’t.
“I didn’t know you had to take this music class,” Seokjin says, and at her raised eyebrows he rushes to explain, “I mean…I’m a music minor, and this isn’t exactly a beginner’s music class, and…I haven’t seen you around in any of my other music classes.”
“Yeah,” Y/N replies, finally cracking a smile. It’s not huge, but it’s something, and Seokjin will take it. “I need to take a music class, but since I’ve been playing piano for a while now I didn’t really see the point in taking a beginner’s class.”
“Ah, I see.” Seokjin racks his brain, trying to find another point of conversation, but comes up short. Her brief responses are proving a challenge.
Thankfully, though, Y/N seems to be warming up to him. “You said you’re a music minor?” Seokjin nods. “What’s your major?”
“I’m a business major,” he responds.
“Oh, I see it,” she says, and her smile is wider and more genuine. “You have a look about you that screams business.”
“Is that a thing? What do business majors look like?”
“Oh, you know.” Y/N waves a hand. “Talkative, not shy, kind of laid-back and easygoing.”
“Huh.” Seokjin takes a minute to absorb this. He hadn’t really thought about it before, but now, comparing his business friends to her descriptions, he realizes that she’s correct.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. What about you? What’s your major?”
“Biology,” she answers, and Seokjin almost laughs. It’s too good.
“I’m not surprised,” he says. “You have a look about you that screams bio.”
“Really? And what is this bio look?”
“Serious, angry, unfriendly,” Seokjin answers without missing a beat.
Y/N shoots him a joking offended look—or at least, he hopes it’s just exaggerated.
Just as the professor walks in, he whispers, “You know what else fits the bio mold?”
“What?” she mutters back.
“Beautiful.”
Her cheeks turn a faint shade of pink, and she clears her throat, determinedly looking at the professor—or anywhere but him, really—throughout the rest of class.
Seokjin thinks it’s adorable.
The minute the professor dismisses class, Y/N stuffs her things into her bag and dashes off like it’s the end of the world, but Seokjin easily catches up to her, taking full advantage of his long legs. “Where are you going?” he asks once he’s caught up to her.
Y/N flinches; obviously she hadn’t noticed him. “Home.”
“Home? Already?”
“Yeah, I’m done with all my classes for today,” she answers, staring at the ground.
“Do you want to grab some lunch?” Seokjin hears himself asking, and even he is surprised. He’s never normally this forward. Plus—
“Okay, I’m really sorry, but I have never seen you before this morning. What is it you want?”
He almost fires back with a “you” before he stops himself and realizes that he will really, really regret that decision. So instead Seokjin shrugs—is that casual enough? He thinks it’s casual enough—and says, “A new friend?”
Y/N is still standing there looking like she wants to say no, so Seokjin adds, “I’m just hungry, and you seem fun to be around, so let’s go eat. Like, literally, eat. We can even go to one of the places on campus if it makes you feel better.” He makes a face. “I don’t recommend it, though. Food here is overpriced and doesn’t actually taste that great.”
She caves. “Alright, fine. Where were you thinking?”
He starts walking, and she follows him. “There’s a really good Thai place a few blocks down. That is, if you’re okay with Thai food.”
“Yeah, I’m okay with it. I love Thai food.”
“Great!” Seokjin looks about for anything and everything that he can use to make conversation. He realizes he’s rambling, but she’s as engrossed as ever as he tells the story about how Taehyung—“he’s one of my friends”—had stopped into a Bath & Body Works—“yeah, that one”—during a group outing and hadn’t told anyone. “We all thought he was kidnapped or something, and we were so freaked out because we didn’t even realize he was gone until we reached the restaurant. So Yoongi—he’s another friend of mine—and I doubled back to try to find him, and all of a sudden as we stop to look in through the window of this ice cream store we smell something rotting, right? Well not exactly rotting—just a mix of scents that should not, under any circumstances, go together. So we turn around, and there’s Taehyung with a bag of body spray and lotion in his hand and looking downright miserable. You know what the first thing he said was?”
“What?” she asks as she steps through the restaurant door that Seokjin has held open for her.
“He was like, ‘I have made a mistake and I smell like an old lady.’ At that point Yoongi and I just lost it.”
Y/N is laughing too, now, and Seokjin decides that he really likes the sound of her laugh. And he’s proud that he’s the one who caused it.
Seokjin is glad he decided to talk to her, after all. He is glad to discover that when at ease, she is fun and talkative, attentive and warm-hearted.
He may not believe in fate, but when he asks her to help him practice for a contest he was planning to participate in—“because you said you play piano,” he added—and she says yes and he’s even happier than the time his friends threw him a surprise birthday party with the cake in the shape of a Mario mushroom, he can’t help but think that maybe there was more to this than just his intuition.
Two months later, in a practice room alone at seven p.m., Seokjin hears knocking on the door as he is in the middle of singing. It’s Y/N, her long hair blowing slightly from the wind created as she closed the door. She has a plastic bag in one hand, and a Starbucks cup in the other, and she quietly takes a seat in a corner of the room as Seokjin smiles at her.
He can’t help but look at her straight in the eye as he sings.
Because after all, even though she doesn’t know it, she is the reason why he chose this song in the first place.
"So honey, now
Take me into your loving arms
Kiss me under the light of a thousand stars
Place your hand on my beating heart
I’m thinking out loud”
And he begins walking towards her, still singing.
“Maybe” step “we” step “found” step “love”
And now he’s right in front of her, and he kneels down as he sings the last part of the line. “Right where we are.”
Y/N is only staring at him, not saying anything as she looks into his eyes, and God, they are so beautiful and mesmerizing and he’s not sure how he could have missed the fact that they seem to have a sparkle to them, but there’s one thing he’s sure of, and that is that he has never wanted so much to kiss her as he does now.
“I,” she says, visibly swallowing, “brought you some donuts.”
Seokjin breaks eye contact first as he takes the bag from her. “Thanks. Sugary goodness, that’s exactly what I needed.” He reaches in the bag to find a box filled with three glazed donuts. He takes one and offers the box to Y/N. She takes one and he closes the box, saving the last one for later.
“I’ve been holed up in here for, like, two hours. You want to go to the lake and just sit and get some air for a while?”
“Sounds good,” she says, standing up.
Seokjin gathers his things into his backpack and leads the way out. Neither one of them say much as they walk to the lake, but the silence doesn’t feel awkward. They’re greeted by an empty lakefront, and Seokjin settles into the sand. Y/N silently sits down next to him, her warmth a comfort.
“Sorry, I know it can get kind of chilly this late in the evening, especially by the water, but I like being here at night when no one else is here. The air is nice, and I don’t know, it helps me clear my head.” Seokjin puts his hands behind him and leans back to look up at the quickly darkening sky.
“No, it’s fine. It’s refreshing,” she says as she mirrors his pose.
Kiss me under the light of a thousand stars. The words suddenly appear in his mind and he can’t get rid of them, no matter how hard he tries to clear his head and focus on the here, the now. So he says, “Don’t you kind of wish we could see the stars?”
“Yeah, we’re so industrialized that the sky is basically just a black surface and then there’s the moon. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in the countryside and look up every night to see the sky covered in stars.”
“Me too. It’s sad.” He pauses, still looking up. “Sometimes I come out here and just look up. And wonder where all the stars are. But if you think about it, stars are special because they’re a speck of light among darkness. So on the rare occasion that you see a star out here…I don’t know, it feels special somehow.”
Y/N looks over at him. “What are you, a philosopher?” she asks, but she’s smiling, and he knows she’s only joking. “You’re right, though. Stars only shine because they’re surrounded by darkness. It’s like the light-dark, good-evil, happy-sad paradox, right? We like the light, the good, the happy, but they wouldn’t exist without the dark, the evil, the sadness.”
“Exactly,” he agrees, glad that she understands his point instead of teasing him or questioning him. “Sometimes when I’m down I come out here and see the empty sky and I think, the good can’t exist without the bad. We don’t live in a vacuum, and good things would be meaningless if there was nothing we could compare them to.” He looks away from the sky, then, and stares at Y/N, studying her profile. “And I think to myself, if are no stars, I’ll make my own stars.”
There’s a sudden tension as both of them realize Seokjin isn’t just talking about the stars anymore.
Kiss me under the light of a thousand stars.
“You can’t just make stars,” she whispers. Is it just him, or does she sound a little breathless?
“I can if I try hard enough,” Seokjin mumbles, leaning closer to her. “Turn around and look at all those city lights and tell me those aren’t stars in the night sky.”
Y/N turns around to look at the skyline, filled with glimmering lights along the dark horizon. “Those aren’t stars,” she says, turning back to face him, grinning, teasing.
“They are now,” Seokjin all but growls as he closes the distance between him and finally, finally, his lips are on hers and they’re just as soft as he has imagined and he’s breathing in the smell of her, the feel of her. His hand explores her hair as he holds the back of her neck to steady them both even as he feels her arms wrap around his waist: very soft.
Take me into your loving arms
Kiss me under the light of a thousand stars
Who cares if there aren’t any stars out? Give Seokjin a can of fireflies, a bright skyline, some flying airplanes, whatever can be specks of light in the dark and God damn it all, he will make his own stars.