Chapter Text
Taehyung
Taehyung Kim grew up above a restaurant called Horangi, tiger in name and, according to his father, full of character. The sign outside was painted a deep, uneven red, with a hand-drawn tiger that looked more friendly than fierce, as if even the animal on the wall had given up trying to appear intimidating. His mother had always said it needed repainting. It never was.
Downstairs, the kitchen never really slept. Garlic hit hot oil in sharp bursts, broth simmered low and patient, and knives tapped against cutting boards in a steady rhythm that filled every corner of the building. It clung to everything—his clothes, his hair, the blankets on his bed, even his dreams. Taehyung had grown up breathing in steam and spice, raised in a place where every meal sounded like a minor disaster and somehow still came out perfect.
His father was a muggle, loud and affectionate and endlessly fascinated by anything he could not explain. His mother was a witch, quiet in the way some magic was quiet—effective, precise, and often unnoticed until the problem had already vanished. Taehyung, unfortunately for everyone involved, had inherited neither of those traits in any useful amount. He was noisy, impulsive, and the kind of curious that usually turned into trouble before it turned into wisdom.
He was five when the neighborhood cats started following him home.
Not one or two. All of them.
They appeared at the back door of Horangi as if they had been summoned, slipping inside between legs and chair cushions, settling themselves wherever they pleased, and waiting. For him. Taehyung took this as entirely normal. He spoke to them like they were old friends, full of questions and opinions and the kind of commentary most adults reserved for people who talked back.
“Don’t sit there,” he told one gray cat, gently nudging it off a stack of bowls. “Appa will drop everything.”
The cat blinked at him, then moved.
His father had watched the whole thing with the expression of a man who had already surrendered to life’s nonsense. After the third time something should have gone wrong and didn’t, he only shook his head and muttered, “Your son is strange.”
Taehyung’s mother, who was stirring something on the stove, didn’t even look up.
“He’s ours.”
The owls came later.
At first it was only one, perched at the window as though it had every right to be there. Taehyung stared at it for a long moment, and the owl stared back with unnerving patience.
“…hi,” he said finally.
The owl hooted softly, as though that was a perfectly reasonable response.
After that, more arrived. Some carried letters. Some carried nothing at all. Some only sat and watched, their heads tilted in eerie, thoughtful angles. Taehyung greeted every single one, as if he were conducting proper business with a very strange branch of the animal kingdom. He talked to them. Listened. Nodded at answers no one else could hear.
By then, his accent had already become its own peculiar thing, Liverpool edges wrapped around Korean vowels, soft in some places and sharp in others. People noticed. People laughed. Taehyung never cared enough to be embarrassed. He spoke the way he spoke. He was the way he was. He had not yet learned to apologize for either.
Jimin
Jimin Park learned very early that some things were not safe to remember.
He was five when it happened.
He did not remember it, not properly. Not in a way that belonged to him. What remained were fragments that refused to arrange themselves into a full picture: raised voices in a room just out of sight, a door slamming hard enough to rattle the walls, his name spoken too sharply, and then a stretch of blankness so complete it felt almost deliberate. Whatever had happened, his mind had been told not to keep it.
What he knew—the version that lived cleanly and obediently in his head—was simple.
His parents had died in an accident. Sudden. Tragic. Unavoidable. He had been too young to understand, too young to remember.
That was what his aunt told him.
That was what she made him believe.
What actually happened would not find him for a very long time.
His parents had been Slytherins, brilliant and ambitious and, somewhere along the way, disastrously convinced they were right. When the Dark Lord returned and they chose to join the Death Eaters, it had not been a mistake made in haste. It had been deliberate. Belief dressed up as loyalty. Power dressed up as purpose. The sort of decision that did not leave room for mercy afterward.
His aunt had discovered the truth too late, or perhaps just in time, depending on how generously one defined survival. She had not hesitated. She did not argue. She did not try to reason with them. She took Jimin—small, confused, three years old and asking questions she had no answers for—and left.
There was no dramatic farewell. No explanation. Just the abrupt, terrifying emptiness of a life being cut away before he could understand what it had been.
The memory modification came afterward. Gentle. Controlled. Exact. She sat him down, held his face in her hands, and rewrote the pieces that would have broken him too early.
Your parents loved you. There was an accident. You are safe now.
She had not met her husband yet. Back then, it had only been her and Jimin, small and contained and trying to become a life that could survive what it did not know.
They moved not far from London, but far enough to make a difference. A quieter place. Fewer eyes. Fewer questions. Her husband arrived later, kind and curious and just chaotic enough to make her stillness less lonely rather than more. He worked in magical innovation, which, according to him, meant “fixing what magic does badly.”
Jimin did not do magic yet. Not in any meaningful way. But he watched.
He watched everything.
One afternoon, he sat on the floor beside a cluttered workbench while his uncle bent over a mess of wires, enchanted fragments, and tools that did not seem like they should have belonged in the same room together.
“Magic alone is inefficient,” his uncle said without looking up.
“It’s elegant,” Jimin replied, chin resting on his knees.
“It’s lazy,” his uncle said. He lifted a small object—a watch that gave off a faint, strange glow. “Why rely on a spell that fades when you can build something that lasts?”
He turned it in his hand, then set it down and tapped the side. “Combine it,” he added. “That’s where it gets interesting.”
Jimin leaned closer, eyes sharp and intent. He did not interrupt. He did not reach for it. He simply took in every detail, every mechanism, every small and deliberate choice. He learned by watching, by listening, by noticing the parts other people overlooked. He grew up careful in all the ways Taehyung did not.
By the time his Hogwarts letter arrived, Jimin already understood something most children did not.
People could be dangerous. Magic could be worse. And sometimes the safest thing a person could do was take control before anyone else had the chance.
Taehyung believed in curiosity, impulse, and leaning in too close to see what would happen.
They were sorted into different houses, of course they were.
Taehyung had barely sat on the stool before the Sorting Hat shouted, “Hufflepuff!”
He looked delighted, as if this were a reward and not a decision delivered in front of the entire school.
Jimin’s sorting took longer. Not because the Hat was confused, but because it seemed determined to be absolutely certain before it said the obvious.
“Slytherin.”
He did not argue.
They might have stayed strangers. Two boys moving through the same castle on entirely different tracks, one drawn toward people and messes and accidents, the other toward silence and control and the comforting lie of certainty.
If not for a frog.
The Potions classroom smelled like something had gone wrong and everyone had agreed not to discuss it. Taehyung leaned over his cauldron with his usual level of reckless concentration, ignoring the instructions written very clearly on the board.
“Two drops,” the professor had said.
Taehyung added five.
“Just to see.”
The potion hissed in immediate protest. A frog sitting on his desk twitched violently, and Taehyung gasped as if he had personally offended it.
“Oh—wait—are you—”
“Stop.”
A hand caught his wrist mid-motion, firm and unhesitating. Taehyung froze. He blinked, then slowly turned his head.
The boy beside him was sharp-eyed, composed, and looked deeply unimpressed by the fact that Taehyung had apparently decided caution was optional. Jimin was already reaching for the ladle, scooping out the excess before it could do any real damage.
“You’re going to kill it,” he said.
Taehyung looked at the frog. It was still alive. Barely.
“…I was experimenting,” he said, as if that explained everything.
“You were guessing.”
“That’s a type of experimenting.”
“It’s not a good one.”
The frog croaked weakly. Taehyung winced and gently nudged it aside as though he had not nearly turned it into a tragic classroom incident.
“…sorry,” he murmured.
Jimin released his wrist and stepped back, assessing the entire situation with the grave concentration of someone who had never once in his life enjoyed chaos and was now forced to witness it in direct proximity.
“You should follow instructions,” he said.
Taehyung considered him for a moment. Then, with all the earnestness in the world, he asked, “What’s your name?”
There was a pause, brief and suspicious.
“…Jimin.”
Taehyung’s face brightened immediately, like this was excellent news and not merely a social introduction.
“I’m Taehyung.”
Jimin glanced at him, at the accent, the bright expression, the complete lack of self-preservation, and then at the frog, which was still alive only by luck and a small miracle.
“…I can tell,” he said.
Taehyung grinned.
And for reasons Jimin could not have explained then, and would probably deny later, he did not walk away.