Chapter Text
Yoongi is a grown man. He’s twenty-two years old. He can cook for seven people and do his own laundry, at the same time if necessary. He can install appliances and machinery and fix both if they break. He can write lyrics and produce songs, he can rap in Korean and English and Japanese, and he can dance incredibly difficult, fast paced, complicated choreography at least decently. He can look out for himself and take care of others.
He can’t for the life of him put in contact lenses.
Installing a bidet is no problem, but applying two clear hydrogel circles to his eyeballs is a big problem.
Who the fuck decided that contacts would be a good addition to their looks for this promotion anyway? And why? It’s not like the fans get close enough to see their eyes most of the time anyway.
The first time during the Run promotions that he tries himself, it takes him twenty minutes before he gives up and has to ask the staff for help. The stylists thankfully don’t mock him as they stand around him, one person holding his eyes open and the other pressing in the contacts. He pays attention to how they do it as much as he can so that maybe he can do it on his own next time, but it’s hard to pay attention when you have a finger in one eye and the other is fluttering shut automatically.
Naturally, he doesn’t see anything, and naturally, it doesn’t go any better the next time he’s handed a small case of colored contact lenses.
Today, he gives up before he even starts trying.
So far he’s had to ask for help every time and it’s taken upwards to half an hour to get the damn things in place. And to top it off, he’s the only one that still struggles like this, which does not improve his relationship with the lenses in any way.
He really can’t fathom how Seokjin and Namjoon and Jimin can do this on a daily basis.
He’s glaring at the case in his hands, grumbling to himself and getting ready to ask the stylist who handed the case to him if she can help him out when Seokjin’s voice comes from behind him, “Do you want help with those?”
Yoongi looks over his shoulder at Seokjin, and he only hesitates for a second. Seokjin puts in contact lenses every single day, with the exception of the rare days when he’s too lazy, and has been doing it since he was a teenager. Yoongi never doubts his unwavering trust in his hyung, and he’s not about to start now when it’s about something Seokjin has far more experience with than Yoongi does himself.
“Yeah, thanks,” he says.
Seokjin gets up from where he was sitting next to a sleeping Jimin and takes the case of lenses form Yoongi’s hand. On Yoongi’s other side, one of the staff members grabs the camera and points it at Seokjin as he studies the case.
“These don’t have left or right, do they?” he asks.
“No, they don’t,” Yoongi replies.
Seokjin puts the case down on the makeup table, opens it, and picks out one of the lenses, much more expertly than Yoongi does. He’s not as careful as Yoongi is with his movements as he gets the lens placed correctly on his finger, but he’s also not fumbling as much with it as Yoongi does.
“I’ll hold his eye open, if you want,” one of their makeup noonas says.
“Yes please, that’d be good,” Seokjin says.
And Yoongi’s been in this situation before, having two people help him put in his contact lenses, so he says, “Open my eye, then hyung should put the contact in.”
The noona holds his eye open with two fingers and Seokjin smoothly gets the first contact in place.
“I got it, I got it,” Yoongi mumbles, because Seokjin doesn’t immediately back away, instead he moves the contact around a little, adjusting it until it sits just right. “I got it.”
Seokjin gets the second lens ready quicker than he did the first.
Because he’s using his right hand to apply the lenses, he can’t move to Yoongi’s other side, which means that it would be too awkward for the noona to hold Yoongi’s other eye open for him, so Seokjin has to do that himself.
He brings the lens to Yoongi’s eye with one hand and uses the other to hold his eye open.
The eye that isn’t being forced open is fluttering, an instinctual reaction, and since Seokjin’s hand is so close to the eye that’s open, Yoongi can’t really see what’s happening. But he can tell that this is not going as smoothly as the first lens went, because Seokjin doesn’t get the lens to his eyeball before he pulls away again. He fiddles with it a little, moves his hand like he’s shaking something off.
Yoongi leans forward to see what he’s doing, but the lens is tiny and Seokjin’s hands are not, so he leans back again. He’s not expert on contact lenses, and he’s sure Seokjin would’ve said if there was something wrong.
That doesn’t stop him from getting a little worried though, because he’s pretty sure it’s not supposed to go like this.
He trusts his hyung, trusts almost completely that Seokjin knows what he’s doing, and Seokjin is the expert here out of the two of them, but even though he puts in contact lenses himself pretty much every day, it’s not like he goes around putting lenses on other people on a regular basis. Maybe it’s different enough that this isn’t as much Seokjin’s area of expertise as Yoongi had thought.
“You know what you’re doing, right?” he asks quietly, laughing a little.
“Yeah,” Seokjin mumbles.
Yoongi leans back, still laughing a little from nerves and just the ridiculousness of the situation. He feels a little silly, needing this help to put in his contact lenses, but it makes it better, it makes it a little funny, that Seokjin also has a little trouble with it. At least that means that not all of Yoongi’s struggles are just because he’s bad at this. But if Seokjin says that he knows what he’s doing, then he knows what he’s doing, Yoongi’s sure of it.
Seokjin reaches for a Q-tip from the makeup table. “An eyelash was attached to it,” he says quietly.
“An eyelash?”
Seokijn puts the Q-tip back down and turns back to Yoongi. Yoongi widens his eyes as much as he can, and Seokjin pulls his eye gently open again, lens poised on his finger. He tries again to get the lens onto Yoongi’s eyeball, but again, something isn’t quite right.
“This eyelash is weird. Wait a moment,” he mumbles, pulling away again. Seokjin doesn’t mumble very often, but the more he concentrates on something delicate, the quieter his voice gets.
Right now, he’s barely audible.
“Huh, it’s not easy, is it?” Yoongi chuckles softly. He feels a little vindicated. They’ve teased him before about how he needs help to get the lenses in, and now Seokjin is struggling too. He feels like it proves that his inability to do it himself isn’t that ridiculous. Putting in contact lenses is not easy. Even a guy who does it every day is struggling.
Or at least, it’s not easy for Yoongi because apparently his eyelashes don’t quite cooperate.
“I can do it at once,” Hoseok says. “At once.”
“This isn’t an easy job,” Yoongi maintains, shaking his head a little for emphasis.
“Didn’t you spend ten minutes in the bathroom with Jimin guiding you on how to get your contact lenses in when we did that photoshoot for Now3?” Seokjin asks.
Yoongi wants to say Ha! but he feels like that’s maybe a little too childish, so he just laughs instead.
Hoseok rolls his eyes and grumbles good-naturedly.
“That was then,” he says. “I can do it now. And I could do it then too, it just took a little time!”
“Mmhm,” Seokjin hums, a little distractedly as he goes back to focusing entirely on Yoongi’s lens.
His fingers aren’t as crooked as they used to be, Yoongi notes absently, especially his index fingers. They’re still not straightened out entirely, though. Seokjin says it’s called swan neck deformity, and he’s worn splints from time to time to straighten his fingers out a little, but he also says it’ll take many years to straighten out all his fingers, because he can’t wear the splints on more than a couple of fingers at a time and never for more than a day, and that they’ll never straighten out entirely.
Seokjin turns back around to Yoongi once again and holds Yoongi’s eye open.
This time, the lens makes contact with his eyeball. Yoongi’s other eye flutters shut almost entirely. He can feel Seokjin pushing the lens a little, and he can kind of see it too, see it moving on his eye, as Seokjin tries to get it placed correctly.
He lets go of Yoongi’s eye and Yoongi blinks a few times.
“Is it good?” he asks. Yoongi holds his eyes closed a little longer, then opens them and nods.
“Okay,” he says, leaning forward to see how they look in the mirror.
“Good.” Seokjin straightens up. He keeps standing next to Yoongi’s chair for a beat, then says. “What do you say?”
Hoseok laughs.
“Thank you, hyung,” Yoongi says.
Seokjin makes an appraising noise and goes to sit down on the couch again.
“How did you learn to do it, hyung?” Yoongi asks.
“Put in contact lenses? I learnt at the optician’s,” Seokjin replies. “When I got my first pair of lenses, a lady taught me how to put them in and take them out.”
That night when they get home, Yoongi goes to his and Seokjin’s room and stands in front of the mirror, ready to get down to the struggle of getting the contact lenses out again, when he gets an idea.
“Jin hyung!” he calls out.
“Yeah?” Seokjin calls back.
“Do you have any tricks to getting the lenses out again?” Yoongi asks. It’s not like he can’t do it himself, but he’s still not very comfortable doing it, still not entirely sure what the right way is, and if Seokjin can give him some kind of technique that he learnt from the optician, that would be great.
Seokjin’s laughter is joined by Namjoon’s and Jimin’s, because of course the three of them all know.
“You know, sometimes you are very helpless,” Seokjin chuckles, but he follows it up with, “I’ll be right there.” And really, that’s all Yoongi needs.
Who cares if he needs to ask his hyung for help sometimes. That’s what hyungs are for.