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Jung Hoseok was having a good day. At least, in comparison to last weekend when he’d drunkenly called Jimin and whined to him about how he was lonely and there were no hot people here at the club and I just want someone to love me, Jimin, then insert the (well deserved) death glare from the girl he'd been flirting with for the past half hour.
If you thought about that time a month ago when he got in after a long walk home in the rain to suffer his electricity cutting off right in the middle of microwaving some ramen, and ten minutes before the next episode of Hwarang was about to begin, Hoseok was having a good day.
Then there was this Thursday just gone where some wonderful (crazy) woman (actual witch of the west) had burst through the doors of the flower shop he worked in and started accusing it (yes, it, the shop) of swaying her son to “the wrong side of the pitch” and she definitely knew this because she saw him spending twenty whole minutes in here looking at the flowers. As if no straight man could stand to be around flowers, the height of femininity, for longer than a glance.
(The son eventually came through the door around three minutes later slightly out of breath and seemingly relieved to actually find his mother, though he explained, mortified, that he was buying flowers for his girlfriend, mom, and she’s really picky about colour schemes, you know this, and I wanted to make it special for her.
It wasn’t until the next day, when he came in again, that Hoseok found out he was buying flowers for his boyfriend too, and it was actually the boyfriend who cared about the colours. The two of them had a right chuckle about the wonders of polyamory and slightly homophobic parents.)
Jung Hoseok was having a good day, in comparison to some others he had under his belt, and as he pottered about in the back room of ‘Clover, White’, he sincerely hoped it would stay that way.
The thing Jung Hoseok should have learnt by now, though, is that in his life, it always seemed to happen that he spoke too god damn soon.
Jung Hoseok was having a good day, you see. Free of any drunken mishaps or crazy customers, until Jungkook, the nineteen-year-old brick built prodigy who for some reason chose to pick a career in floristry, came rushing into the back room of the flower shop looking severely panicked and flustered. He began tumbling over his words trying to explain that ("Help,") some crazy, small, blond, asian man (“He had blond hair hyung! Who has blond hair in Korea unless they’re an idol?”) had slammed a twenty thousand won note on the front desk and demanded Jungkook tell him “the best way to passive-aggressively say ‘fuck you’ in flower.”
Hoseok paused for a long moment, staring at Jungkook, a lack of emotion presenting itself in every crevice of his body, before he cleared his throat and asked the teen strewn over the doorway if he could “Please run that by me one more time, Jungkook?”
Hoseok watched as Jungkook collected himself, straightening his body out and taking a deep breath. He repeated what had just happened, considerably calmer this time, and waited to receive instruction from Hoseok, who he for some reason assumed would have the solution to this problem. As if he had the solution to every crazy customer they found themselves with. (He usually did, but that’s besides the point.)
Hoseok tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling, giving himself a few seconds to prepare for the worst. He counted to ten whilst breathing deeply, a classic calming method he’d been taught long ago. It was originally brought to Hoseok’s attention because they thought it could suppress his hyperactive tendencies. Now, he found himself using it only when he was about to deal with the insane customers they, for some reason, couldn’t keep out of the shop for more than a week. He sighed, slipping off the gloves he wore to handle the roses and making his way towards the front of the shop.
Jungkook heard him firmly mutter “Right then.” as he passed him in the doorway.
Min Yoongi was a calm person, he liked to think. He liked to imagine people saw him as a respectable adult who always knew how to handle difficulties appropriately and all cool-like. He liked to imagine he was that person inside and out. He liked to imagine he could hold his own in a fight (maybe not a physical one, he’d give those a pass), withstand teasing from his friends about insignificant portions of his life they wouldn’t let him forget, fix a lightbulb, or the microwave - and for the most part he could.
However, when a certain someone who was supposedly his god damn best friend had started to ignore him in favour of his fucking flower studies that weren’t anything to do with his psychology major. Namjoon you’re going to fail I swear to god, now can we please order the mother fucking pizza I haven’t eaten in eighteen hours, he couldn’t quite hold himself back.
This is what had lead him here, twenty thousand won of his well earned cash pressed hard to the desk of a random florists on the outskirts of Gangnam he didn’t even know the name of, and the employee of which he had seemingly terrified into hiding in the back of the shop. It was probably overboard, he was beginning to realise that, but he was pissed the fuck off and he couldn’t bring himself to back out now.
Just when Yoongi had almost given up on the kid ever returning and resolved to try out the next flower shop Naver Maps would take him to, movement came from somewhere behind the counter and a face he didn’t recognise emerged from the doorway.
The man, despite being bigger than Yoongi (really though, that wasn’t hard), wasn’t particularly large in stature. He was slim, with a long face and black hair parted in the middle, as if he’d pushed it back with his hands. Yoongi probably noticed his eyes first, and without a doubt he dubbed them the prettiest eyes he’d ever seen.
He didn’t realise he was staring, lips parted and jaw gone lax, until Pretty Eyes’ pretty eyes appeared mere inches away from his own, accompanied by the loud bang of his hands slamming on the counter, startling Yoongi’s eyebrows into his fringe and his mouth clamped shut.
“What’s your name?” He asked after a few moments of burning through Yoongi’s retinas and into his soul.
“M-Min Yoongi.” He managed, still suspended under Pretty Eyes’ glare.
“Well, Min Yoongi-ssi,” Yoongi braced himself for a chiding of some sort. Probably about terrorizing his employees by shoving money in their face and demanding flower interpretations of the crude messages he wanted to send to his friends. He wasn’t quite expecting what actually came out of the man scowling at him from across the counter.
“I’m Jung Hoseok, and you’re going to need some geraniums.”
Yoongi’s eyebrows, previously located halfway up his forehead almost instantaneously plummeted to a furrowed position. He watched, the furrow evening out just slightly, as this Hoseok guy made his way out of Yoongi’s face and around to the main area of the shop, stopping by a bucket of flowers in amongst the many lining the walls. This particular one labeled ‘Carnations - Yellow’.
“Carnations?” Yoongi heard a voice from beside him, and he turned to see the kid from earlier looking quizzically at Hoseok. “I thought you said geraniums?”
“Well, yes Jungkook, but the geraniums are over there,” Hoseok pointed to the other side of the shop, “so I’m picking up the carnations, and” he took a few steps towards the pyramid in the middle of the room and reached out to pluck a few orange flowers (fuck if Yoongi knew what they were) from one of the buckets near the top “lilies, on my way there.”
Hoseok picked a stalk of what looked to Yoongi like a collection of flowery agogo bells, and a handful of tiny white flowers Yoongi was sure he’d seen in the field behind his grandma’s house, before he finally ended up at the geraniums - little baby pink flowers neatly lined with magenta.
He then brought the assortment up to the desk and stood beside Yoongi as he placed them in front of him one by one.
“So,” he began, laying down the first set, “geraniums. Specifically, fish geraniums. You see how they have a broad zone of light pink inside the darker pink?” Yoongi knew what fucking magenta was, but yeah he saw, “That, and the fact it grows upright,” Hoseok made an upwards motion with his hand. Yoongi didn't enjoy being patronised. “Is what makes it a fish geranium, and fish geraniums symbolise a disappointed expectation. You give someone a fish geranium and it means ‘I trusted you, but you ended up a disappointment.’”
“Relatable.” Yoongi heard Jungkook mumble from his position in the doorway. (He reasoned Jungkook was probably a teenager (a very large, muscular teenager) and experiencing the reality of growing up and disappointing the people around you. He wanted to give comfort in the fact it got better as you got older, but it didn’t.)
If Hoseok heard Jungkook, he just ignored him, still facing Yoongi as he said “Right? You with me so far?”
Yoongi had watched Hoseok’s face as he spoke. Any sign of discontentment had been washed away as soon as he’d laid eye on that first carnation, and he was explaining with a fervour that reminded Yoongi of how he himself got when a dongsaeng asked about ‘that weird machine on his desk’. People talking about their passions had always been one of Yoongi’s favourite things to listen to. People got so inspired when they talked about the things they loved, and from inspiration bleeds inspiration in turn.
The love people were able to radiate when they were engrossed in the things they loved most; Yoongi felt that love weasel its way into his fingertips and make them scratch at each other, breathing write write write at each other’s throats until Yoongi could find a pen and paper.
Of course, he was curious about why Hoseok had chosen these specific flowers for him, but if he was honest, Yoongi just wanted to hear him talk.
Yoongi nodded and that was all Hoseok needed to continue. He placed down the agogo bells next.
“So these, are foxgloves.” He said, matter of fact, “They’re often used as, like, the pillar of a bouquet. Whereas you’d usually use a couple of roses in a full bouquet, you probably wouldn’t see more than one stalk of foxgloves.” Yoongi didn't know when he would ever need to use that information, but he felt an intense need to burrow it away, tucked tight in his mind for potential future use. These were Foxgloves and Hoseok had told him about how they were used in a bouquet, so it must be important.
“I love these because of the little patterns inside them. Here. You see?” Hoseok gently lifted one of the flowers open with careful fingers. Yoongi noted how his hands were small, perhaps smaller than his own, dainty and thin. He thought they were probably made to handle delicate things.
Hoseok pointed to the inside of the white flower where a multitude of small dark patches, tinted purple, resided. They looked like the hole a lighter would burn if it was held underneath a piece of paper, copied and pasted a few, each morphed into slightly different shapes and sizes.
“I like it because the pattern is only on the bottom half. It’s like gravity pulled it down there, isn’t that cool?” Yoongi looked at him in wonderment and gave a small nod.
(But he thought Hoseok probably missed it as he looked up to scold his co-worker:
“It’s actually probably because the marks come from melanin or something, and the part of the flower mostly exposed to light is–”
“Shut up, Jungkook.”)
“Anyway,” Hoseok continued, focusing on the yellow flowers he put down now. “Carnations, like all flowers, come in hundreds of colours, and all the different colours have different meanings, right? But these,” he tapped the desk next to where the flowers lay, “are yellow carnations, and yellow carnations mean” He moulded his face into an urgent and pained expression, bending slightly at the hips. He held his hands out in front of him and shook them as he voiced the exclamation: “‘No!’”
There was a pause.
Yoongi was shocked, to say the least. He was a stranger, for god sakes, not to mention a customer. Did Hoseok just elope into slapstick comedy with any random person he found on the street? With any potentially ordinary customer that walked through his doors? Hoseok was shameless, completely and utterly shameless, and he wasn’t funny, not one bit. Yoongi had a sense of humour and it was crass and sarcastic and his jokes were always delivered with a straight face and a casual air enveloping them. Yoongi had a sense of humour, and this, whatever Jung Hoseok was doing, was not it.
Hoseok stayed in the position for a second once his tongue had formed the word and Yoongi tried - he did, honest - though it was in vain. He just couldn’t help but give in to the corners of his mouth and let out what totally was not an amused snort. Hoseok seemed satisfied with that reaction and he turned back to the desk to start on the next flower. Yoongi was glad for the opportunity to forget the crack in his resolve.
“I thought you could decorate with some of these.” He motioned to the small white flowers that Yoongi swore he recognised from a field somewhere. “They’re called meadowsweet and they mean ‘uselessness’. I assume whoever you’re wanting to send these to must be quite useless.” Yoongi thought about Namjoon and agreed.
“Finally,” Hoseok began, and– wait. No– this isn’t right.
Yoongi felt himself panic slightly. The last flower? There had been more than five, hadn’t there? Hoseok had more to explain to him, didn’t he? It couldn’t be over already, could it? But he had only just started listening, he had so much more to learn about, so much more to listen to. Hang on– What did the agogo bells mean? Foxgloves, Yoongi remembered. Hoseok told him they were the pillar of the bouquet, Yoongi remembered. What did they mean though? This conversation isn't over if he's unaware of the meaning of Foxgloves, the pillar of a bouquet.
He hadn't even smiled at Hoseok yet. He didn't even know if he should be calling him hyung! Was Hoseok older than he was? Where did he learn about all of this stuff? University? What made him get interested in flowers in the first place? Maybe he should talk to Namjoon about it. He was sure they would both like that.
But– no. Of course. Because Yoongi’s life had a habit of ending the nice things before they’d even really begun, Hoseok was almost finished. He was a few sentences shy of a job well done, and Yoongi was mere minutes away from walking out of this shop, away from the flowers, away from the explanations, and away from Hoseok’s voice muttering inspiration in his ear.
“Orange lilies.” He dropped the flowers down on the desk in a final motion and looked at Yoongi with empty hands and a tone of completion as he said “Hatred. Pure, unadulterated hatred.”
Jungkook snorted from across the counter causing both Yoongi and Hoseok to look over at him.
“Yeah, you must really hate this person if you were that intense when you walked in here.”
Hoseok gave a noise of amused agreement.
Yoongi was lost. He didn’t hate Namjoon. Sure, he was pissed at him. Sure, he wanted to kick his head in sometimes. Sure, sometimes he said he hated him, but Yoongi was a tsundere and that was how he worked. He didn’t have ‘pure unadulterated hatred’ for the guy. God that sounded so venomous. No, he just wanted to get his point across to Namjoon and he was angry and made a stupid split second decision that was supposed to be funny at the true heart of it.
Yoongi tightened his grip around the twenty thousand won in his hand and realised that twenty thousand won could well pay for his dinner for a whole week if he was careful about it. He didn’t want to throw that money down the drain for some stupid message he could just talk to someone about.
Yoongi didn’t hate Namjoon, he didn’t want to skimp on food for a week, and he didn’t want Hoseok and his pretty eyes to stop telling him about flowers and their meanings and that he liked the way they looked because it was almost like gravity itself had worked it’s way into their patterns and given it that effect. What do the agogo bells even mean?
Yoongi swallowed and kept eye contact with Hoseok as he let his subconscious take free reign, and foolishly allowed it to blab something he was sure would be embarrassing in half a seconds' time.
“Do you like coffee?”
Hoseok blinked. Lips slightly parted as he looked between Yoongi’s eyes, waiting for him to continue, or give more of an explanation to the meaning of his question, but it didn’t look like he was going to do either of those things.
Do I like coffee? Hoseok thought to himself. You’re supposed to be confirming a purchase.
But-
Well, Hoseok doesn’t like coffee, not really, but he also would never turn down a caramel coffee frappuccino if he was offered one, and if he hadn’t slept in fourteen hours then he’d dabble in a coffee or two to keep him on his feet, and that was kind of something he liked about coffee. He answered before he allowed himself to.
“U–um. Yeah? I– I guess I like coffee.”
“How do you take it?”
Hoseok now furrowed his brows as he answered, suspicion dominating his tone. The hell did this guy want with his coffee order?
“I only really like it in caramel frappuccinos.”
“Okay.” Yoongi said simply, decidedly, like he’d got all he wanted from this conversation, and made to leave. Where is he–? What the fuck?!
“Y–Yoongi-ssi, what about your bouquet?” Hoseok called, exasperated, slightly offended, as Yoongi walked past him toward the door.
“Oh, I changed my mind. I don’t hate him, not that much.” He shrugged, and Hoseok almost blanched. He changed his mind? After all that? “And I need the money.” He tacked on, sheepishly. “I’ll see you around Hoseok, okay?”
Hoseok, expression displaying pure confusion, nodded at the debatably crazy, small, blond, asian man halfway out the door of the shop before he even had a chance to think about it.
Yoongi left the premises and walked in the direction of the train station. Yoongi left the premises empty handed, after Hoseok had spent twenty minutes having a crisis in the back room, picking out an entire bouquet and explaining each flower choice to him in detail, and then decided he had ‘changed his mind.’
Hoseok looked over to Jungkook, still unmoving from the door to the back room. The boy wore a look of confusion that complimented Hoseok’s own, but he also had a hint of something more there, something Hoseok couldn’t quite place. (Something that read: ‘My hyung just got asked out by a crazy customer and I don’t think he realises it yet.’)
After Jungkook, Hoseok’s gaze drifted to the counter where all the flowers he so carefully picked out lay unused and rejected and (according to business regulations) en route to the dustbin. Honestly, he would have considered making Min Yoongi’s requested bouquet and sending it to the man himself out of spite, the ‘fuck you in flower’ he’d been so adamant about when he first entered the shop making its way into his life anyhow, despite the fact he'd changed his fucking mind about it.
He would have, that was, if he didn’t have an odd feeling that he would ‘see Yoongi around’. That he would indeed 'see Yoongi around' very soon.
Yoongi turned up at the flower shop unannounced just the next afternoon (after tactically walking past the windowed front wall to check if Hoseok was indeed working today. He’d forgotten to ask yesterday. But it was okay, he was there.) with a small black americano, two sugars, and a medium caramel coffee frappuccino. He handed Hoseok’s coffee over with a smile, receiving a look of pure bewilderment in return which was only amplified by Yoongi bringing out his little black notebook and pen.
Yoongi asked Hoseok to tell him more about the flowers whilst he scribbled in his book, and Hoseok’s smile was worth a thousand cherry blossoms.