Archive of Our Own ^beta

Hoseok and Yoongi met when they were eight and nine respectively, and their friendship had burned so fast and furious to a kid it felt like a lifetime. They were next door neighbours, though Hoseok had come from Gwangju with his family, who had come to Daegu to open up a — well, a plant store, because it was a plant store and not a flower shop. They sold all kinds of things, every spice you could think off, things labelled in English and Japanese and Latin because translations are important, Yoongi-yah, words have power as Hoseok’s mother always used to tell him.

Yoongi had been a very shy, off-putting kind of child. He didn’t talk much, but with Hoseok — conversation came so well, they didn’t even have to talk to communicate.

His parents found the Jungs eccentric but kind. They made wonderful meals and babysat Yoongi for free — see how happy he makes our Hoseokie, he needs friends — and even when Hoseok had made the oven explode, on accident, both Yoongi and him swear, Yoongi’s mother hadn’t taken at all strangely to the fact that the child was capable of things that were always…slightly more. More than what, she wouldn’t outwardly say, scared of lending voice and meaning to the thought, so she pulled it taut inside her, and would look worriedly at Yoongi whenever the other boy got into trouble because of his errant strangeness.

Because animals would wait at doors for him. Flowers would grow in the cracks of his desks. A teacher had upset him and the teacher’s hair had turned bright pink. Yoongi had upset him and he had cat ears for the rest of the day.

The bottom line is, at the age of ten, Yoongi figures it out. Hoseok is magical, and he isn’t. He’s surprisingly fine with that.

=

“Hey, Seok-ah,” says Yoongi, as Hoseok troops into the store, dripping wet all over the wooden floors. He shakes his wet hair out of his eyes and grins at Yoongi, the tip of his mouth curling.

“Hyung,” says Hoseok cheerfully, and leans over the glass counter, pressing right up into Yoongi’s space. It makes Yoongi almost amused — this dance has been going on for nigh four years, since Hoseok had turned eighteen. His wet hair falls into his face and over his eyes, a deep red that was the product of a failed dye — oh my god hyung I’m supposed to be brunet — but it suited him anyway and he’d kept it. Hoseok has always been like that, finding the best out of every shitty situation. “How was your day?”

Yoongi gives him a small smile. “I managed the store. The siren came in again, as did the clumsy one.”

“You could learn their names, hyung,” says Hoseok with a bit of a bite to his tone, though it is mocking. He pushes off the counter and shakes his head, drying it out with a whispered spell. “It’s called customer service.”

“It’s called I’m thinking of banning the clumsy one from the store, because it’s the third time this week he’s nearly broken something. I’m not magical, Seok-ah. If it breaks, it breaks,” Yoongi huffs, leaning back against the wall of spices and herbs behind him. “Plus some of these are rare fuckers. Your parents have mad connections.”

Hoseok beams at him. “I’m still — I mean it’s been, like, twelve years since you figured it out, but I’m always still surprised you —“

“Got so invested? asks Yoongi with a raised eyebrow. “I’m fucking surprised too,” he snorts a little. “Though it’s fun. There’s so much history. Makes me wanna write a book.”

Hoseok grins at him. His smile is like the sunshine — his affinity, they’d learnt, when Hoseok nearly burned him with a gaze. “Go ahead, no one will believe you,” he laughs, and ducks as Yoongi throws a magazine at him. “Hey!”

Yoongi laughs, a hand on his chin. There’s always this blatant fondness that plays about Yoongi’s eyes and lips when he looks at Hoseok — don’t think having more than twelve years of friendship has in any way dulled his ability to know when someone’s interested in him. He is, however, a lot more interested in seeing who caves first, and he’s got twenty thousand won riding on it. “Did you bring me the texts, Seok-ah?”

“Did I?” muses Hoseok, but he brings out a thick book from his backpack and slides it across the table. “You still trying to translate that thing we found? We were thirteen, hyung. You can let it go,” but as he says it he knows he doesn’t sound serious. Yoongi’s been in love, perhaps more with the text than with Hoseok, with an ancient piece of paper he’d found in Hoseok’s closet a long, long time ago. The runes were so old even his great grandmother couldn’t read it — and his great grandmother was dead. Yoongi made him hold a seance, but he’s always been weak to Yoongi, even if seancing (was that a word?) gave him a headache.

Yoongi beams at the text and flips through it experimentally. “Nice,” he nods, sounding a little determined. “I will not be coming to bed tonight, Seok-ah.”

Hoseok whacks his hand and rolls his eyes. “We have separate rooms, Yoongi-hyung.”

“I know we do,” says Yoongi, grinning slightly in that maddening way he always did recently, wide-eyed and twinkling. He’s always daring Hoseok, always daring him, but Hoseok’s never felt the pressure to really fall, because Yoongi is Yoongi and they’ve got all the time in the world.

Yoongi had taken over his parent’s business when they’d decided to retire early for a round the world discovery journey, Hoseokie, think of the plants we’ll find because out of the two of them, he was the only one who gave a shit about this whole — herb…thing.

See, Yoongi is their potions master, their herbologist, their resident encyclopaedia, lead translator, and he’d always loved it. The reading, the words — Hoseok is magic, and doesn’t need to speak to be able to do his thing. He just thinks and it happens — he gives rise to magic, he stands in its flow. But Yoongi has forced magic upon himself by lending power to the words he says, and it’s a trick so hard to do that when Yoongi had put out a fire Hoseok had accidentally started in his parents house by running up to it and bellowing “mul”, well, his parents had taken the prodigious Normal under their wings almost at once.

His magic — or, forcing magic to suddenly attune itself to him takes up so much of his energy that Yoongi hardly ever does it at all. In fact, Hoseok thinks the last time he did something spell-y that wasn’t brewing was when he’d saw a boy nearly drown in the city pool. It was a teleportation spell, and suddenly Yoongi had been in a pool fully clothed and the boy was dry heaving on land. Sometimes the incident still made Hoseok feel guilty — he was the magical one, he should be the one looking out for the boy, for the people. He supposes it’s another facet of their friendship, that Yoongi and him always motivate each other to be a little bit better every day.

But all through his life, ever since Hoseok met Yoongi, he’s never once complained of his lack of ability. Never once doubted Hoseok either. It makes him feel pleasant, always so pleasant to be around Yoongi.

In the present, Hoseok laughs again. He sends Yoongi a flying kiss, who dodges it and yells at him for spending too much time around the siren, to which Hoseok yells, “his name is Seokjin!”

Yoongi pauses. “Seokjin?” he asks, and tests the name out on his tongue. “Should I call him Seok-ah, too?”

“He’s older than you,” sniffs Hoseok, trying not to sound jealous though he sounds very far away as he’s climbing up the stairs and not at all like he’s being forceful.

“Seok-hyung,” he hears Yoongi muse. “Pfft. That sounds weird.”

=

True to his word, the light in Yoongi’s room doesn’t go off the entire night, so Hoseok wakes up a little earlier than normal and brews him coffee the way he likes it — with just a touch of magic to up the caffeine just a little and smooth out the bitterness without sugar. Even diabetes is something fairies find hard to control.

Knocking on Yoongi’s door, once, twice, he pushes it open to walk into Yoongi wearing his glasses — thin, round wire ones his parents bought him for his birthday, when it became evident Yoongi was being stupid about the whole reading glasses thing — and his hair is all mussed. He looks positively adorable in the warm orange lamplight.

“Suga-hyung,” says Hoseok, carefully. Yoongi always gets into trances when decoding. “Sugaaa~”

“You always call me that when you want something, Seokseok-ah,” mumbles Yoongi, looking up from the book. He sees his favourite mug in Hoseok’s hand and a delicate grin curves its way across his face. “Well, hello.”

“You only like me for my coffee,” whines Hoseok, but he sinks into Yoongi’s bed and rolls over, into the covers. Yoongi watches him, unimpressed. “Did you get stuff done?”

“I think it’s — something to do with love,” mumbles Yoongi again, through he turns away from his papers, takes a sip of his coffee and places it on the table before sliding into the bed with Hoseok. They lie next to each other on the single bed, arms and legs brushing. “I love your coffee, Seok-ah, but now that you’ve snapped me out of it I should —“ he takes a deep yawn.

Hoseok snickers. “I’ll make it warm for you again, hyung,” he assures him, and Yoongi barely smiles at him before he drops off to close his eyes. They lie rigid like that for a minute, then Hoseok caves and drags Yoongi’s head to rest on his shoulder, tucks his face into his neck, and slides his arm underneath him.

Hoseok falls asleep again like that, which the smaller male pressed up against him and smiling into the curve of his neck, and would almost be late for his shift at the dance academy had Yoongi not smacked him awake with a huff and a — with all your magic, your kind does forget the simplest things. Like alarms, Hoseok. Alarms. You’re welcome.

And Hoseok smiles, because where would he be without him?

=

Hoseok knows, when he comes back from dance to see Yoongi’s blanched face through the glass door that the Clumsy One is here — or, to those who are his friends, Kim Namjoon. Pushing open the door, he finds Yoongi hovering about the man, reaching hands here and there to steady things that didn’t need to be steadied for the sake of calming himself. Yoongi is very protective, and very gruff — and also so very, very soft for people who just want to learn, and so has not yet kicked Namjoon out of the store yet.

“Hoseokie,” breathes Yoongi, when he sees the man step into the building. The tension zips out of his shoulders and he takes a stumbling step forward before he sinks into Hoseok’s shoulder. “My hope. Hobi-y ah, please tell Namjoon-ah to stay still if he wants me to teach him.”

Hoseok pats his hair and doesn’t do much else, because it’s quite a rare occasion that Yoongi goes to him with affection in front of other people and he’s too busy cheering.

“I’ve caught three vials today,” Yoongi continues. “One of it with magic, because I swear I child-proofed the liquids, only he got into the dragon tears. You can’t clean spills up, Joon-ah.”

Namjoon rubs the back of his head sheepishly and nearly upsets an entire jar of mushrooms. Hoseok thinks if he concentrates hard enough he can see Yoongi’s soul ascending as he contemplates running to the jar or staying pressed in Hoseok’s chest. “He can’t help if he’s a poltergeist, Yoong-hyung,” chides Hoseok, and Yoongi rolls his eyes and makes a shoo-ing gesture.

“I’m going,” Namjoon laughs, a small smile on his face. “Though you haven’t told me what the gold thing is for,” he says. Yoongi follows his eyes to the golden dust swirling on the topmost shelf.  His eyes soften — imperceptibly for dear Namjoon, though he seems to be becoming a fast friend, because he’s still here and people who are still here to Yoongi’s gruff exterior are the kind of friends who will always be still here. But Hoseok notices. It makes him feel warm.

“That gold thing is personal,” Yoongi says, dismissively. He looks over at Hoseok, who gives him a toothy grin and a wink. “Decorative unless you’ve got permission.”

When Namjoon continues to look at him like he’s demanding an answer, Yoongi huffs and says, “it’s fairy dust.”

A grin bursts its way across Namjoon’s face, and he writes it down in his book and grins at Yoongi. “Thanks, hyung,” he says, stuffing into his magical pocket. Namjoon is pretty damn smart, though, Hoseok can tell. He’d recently died — and by recently, Hoseok means he’d showed up a month ago banging on his door and asking for directions to the afterlife in a panicked, sort of high-pitched whine.

The man doesn’t even seem to be too bummed about the fact he’s dead or curious to how he died, he just seems so — eager to learn. Yoongi is eager to teach those eager to learn, and hence he’s become a common fixture at their shop. If he wasn’t a poltergeist, he could’ve become an assistant, though Hoseok knows better than to suggest it to Yoongi — doesn’t think the man’s heart could keep up. He’s very fond of his carefully labelled vials. Very fond of the ingredients. Very fond of the process.

Namjoon gives him a wave as he leaves and a thanks for your time, hyung, which Hoseok finds that Yoongi smiles at, if very unnoticeably. Taking pity on the man, Hoseok bustles about the store, pushing through to the back to their small kitchen and putting the ingredients he bought away into the fridge Yoongi has reserved for what he calls normal food — literally, the magnets on the fridge spell out NORMAL in childish block letters, but Hoseok finds he constantly needs the reminder.

“I’m making jjajangmyeon tonight,” Hoseok calls over his shoulder.

“Isn’t it my turn to make dinner?” asks Yoongi, coming through the curtain to sink into the sofa after flipping the sign on the door to closed. He leans forward on his knees and smiles a little crookedly at Hoseok. “Hyung can do it, you know.”

“It is,” replies Hoseok flippantly. “Don’t worry. I’m feeling up for it.”

There’s no reply. Hoseok turns his head to look behind and finds Yoongi has curled up on the couch with his thick ancient translation text and his parchment. His glasses are back on his face, and he looks up at the feel of Hoseok’s gaze on him and his lips twitch upwards slightly. “Sorry,” he mouths, and points at the book.

Hoseok waves a hand, though he does forbid him from translating while eating. Hoseok thinks Yoongi only relented because he is afraid of getting the black bean sauce on his texts.

=

A week later, Yoongi yells something unintelligible and marches into Hoseok’s room without knocking, startling Hoseok out of the middle of planning the choreography he wants to put to his latest song.

“Yoongi?” Hoseok ventures, forgoing the honorific, but Yoongi doesn’t seem to mind. If anything, he grins a little and wipes off his sweat on his shirtsleeve. He takes the text Yoongi is brandishing about him like a weapon and sets it down on his bed with a slight bounce.

“It has a date of death,” says Yoongi, quite petulantly. He sits on Hoseok’s bed before jumping up and rummaging through Hoseok’s closet to pull out a white sweater — the white sweater, the one Hoseok bought for himself for his nineteenth birthday but never gets to wear because Yoongi always takes it when he’s stressed, which is so often it’s almost his default state. “Have I been fucking translating an obituary?”

The white sweater falls down past his hips and over his thumbs. Yoongi fiddles with the hem, chews on his palm and sighs. Taking his hands, Hoseok pushes the white sleeves out of the way to reveal a hand completely ridden with teeth-shaped bruises — when he was sixteen, when his anxiety and stress first started being overwhelming, he’d taken to this weird hand biting habit. It’s become so second nature to him that he just does it without knowing.

Hoseok doesn’t approve, but it’s a lot less self destructive than some of his other habits. Noting his disapproving eyes, Yoongi tugs his hands back and flushes red, the tips of his ears burning. They don’t comment on it, because Yoongi sags against Hoseok and leans on his shoulder. “Hobi,” whines Yoongi. “I’m so fucking done with this. If this turns out to be fucking rest in pieces memento, I’m going to hurl.”

Hoseok snickers a little and presses a kiss to the tip of his head, another thing they both don’t acknowledge, because they have time, so much time. Hoseok doesn’t plan to go anywhere; he knows Yoongi will never leave.

“You say that,” says Hoseok, a hand rubbing Yoongi’s back through his sweater. “But you’re not going to stop trying to figure out what it says, right?”

Yoongi snorts. “Course not,” he mutters, and kicks at the floor. “Just let me complain, you lump.”

“Lump,” parrots Hoseok mockingly. Yoongi kicks him in the shin and falls back on his bed, rubbing his eyes with his sleeves and sighing.

“Go to sleep, hyung,” says Hoseok, waving at his bed in an open invitation. “I’ll call you when you’re needed, you know how it goes.”

Yoongi grins at him a little crookedly. “Seok-ah,” he murmurs, reverently, but then whatever he is going to continue with dies in his throat. Instead he shuffles more onto the bed, puts his head on the pillow and closes his eyes.

Hoseok practices downstairs, but he comes up at six in the evening to wake his hyung up, because Yoongi gets grumpy if he sleeps in past six fifteen.

=

Yoongi’s almost done with the translations. They’re not proceeding in any particular order — certainly not top to bottom, because the words, the language, the runes they were written in, well, they didn’t really have concrete set of translations. “It’s complicated,” Yoongi liked to tell Hoseok, and now Namjoon, when he asked. “It’s…you don’t translate the way you do Korean to English. You’re translating sheer emotion.”

“Like dance,” Hoseok said once, his eyes glazing over as he looks at the words. “Don’t you think so hyung?”

That had been Yoongi’s first breakthrough, because yes, yes, the runes were dancing on the page. They didn’t follow a left-right or an up-down style of writing, the runes were jumbled and all over the page because they followed their own choreography. Hoseok sometimes helps him by tracing the steps the runes make, dancing for him in their small kitchen with the bare white light, spinning around and leaping to the side, sinking into a low bow. That is the most common pattern Yoongi’s identified — the spin, the sink, the bow. He thinks it’s a name with the amount of times it’s repeated, and even the handwriting seems to be softer when they play out the dance.

When he thinks he’s gotten the final translation down, he starts to write them out in the way he knows, pieces the chronological events together. Writes them down as he thinks they ought to have happened — and his final product, something he feels building as he writes, anticipating the next word, the next character, makes him drop his pen onto the table.

He scans over the parchment. He looks back at the thick book helplessly, then says, very firmly, “fuck.”

What happens after is a blur of frantic emotion — Yoongi falls off his chair as his body convulses — he can’t breathe, oh dear god, he can’t — Hoseok bursts into the room, grabbing onto Yoongi’s shoulder when he sees him clutching at his throat, then lets go of him almost at once. Waving his hand intricately, his blanket floats from his cupboard and lands on his shoulders, wrapping them tightly around him.

“Yoongi,” Hoseok leans forward and takes his face into his hands. Yoongi clutches onto his tanned wrists, heaving, committing every detail to memory so fast he cannot process it — Hoseok’s eyes are tinged with worry, they’re the darkest brown. His hair is getting longer, into his eyes. His eyelashes are so dark. There’s a pimple near his nose.

Hoseok frowns at him and starts to sing, slowly, softly, a calming spell, a soft one that speaks of falling snow and train tracks to nowhere and tall, tall trees in the middle of a dense forest, and Yoongi loses himself in the song only to come back and find himself slumped onto Hoseok’s shoulder, clutching onto his shirt with a vice-like grip.

“Hobi,” mumbles Yoongi watching the tension bleed out of Hoseok’s shoulder. “Seok-ah.”

“Hyung,” says Hoseok, pulling back to search his face. “You haven’t had a panic attack since the eleventh grade.”

Yoongi hyperfocuses on the callouses on his Hoseok’s fingers that scratch at his face when they brush over his jaw. He knows what he has to do. “Hoseok,” he says, bringing his hands up to loop tenderly over his neck. The use of his full name has Hoseok going rigid in his hands. “I’m going to make you a protection charm,” he continues. “You’re going to wear it. All the time. You’re never going to take it off.”

Hoseok draws back and stares at him — then at the text on the table. His eyes search back and forth for answers, and when none come, he bites down hard on his bottom lip. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll wear it always.”

=

Yoongi used to think he had so much time. So much time to do all the things he wanted to do with Hoseok, all the time in the world to think about his feelings and how best he wanted to tell Hoseok he loved him, more than friends of twelve years should. He had various scenarios, too. He’d tell him at night, when they’re sitting in the overly silver light of the moon on their little roof. Yoongi will be leaning into Hoseok’s bulk, pressing his head against his shoulder. There would be no rush. Yoongi would say, “I love you, you know?” And Hoseok would know that this wasn’t your typical, platonic I love you. That it meant something. Hoseok would kiss his temple and laugh and Yoongi would be happy.

Or he’d tell him during the day, when the sun was bright on his eyes. He’d be drinking ice lemon tea across from Hoseok in the café down the road and over the drinks he’d tell Hoseok he’d pay because it’s a date. On the way back they’d kiss before they stepped into the apartment they’d share. There is no time frame set for this — Yoongi didn’t have a deadline.

Death, however, is a surprisingly good motivator.

When Namjoon comes over the next day, Yoongi shows him how to summon spirits for protection and put up invisible barriers and heal people — ghosts exist in the flow of magic, you have more affinity than any of us Joon-ah — and the only thing he’d ask was that Namjoon follow Hoseok to dance practice and back every day.

He’s not supposed to meddle, he knows, but he has to. He has to meddle. So he makes healing potions and stacks them up and takes down Hoseok’s bottle of fairy dust, the swirling glowing thing something beautiful, and poured half of it into a smaller vial he kept around his neck. But yet, while all of this is going on, while Yoongi agonises over Hoseok’s safety, he never once follows the most important message of the dancing letters. The way they had moved around one another.

Tell him you exist to be with him.

=

Hoseok doesn’t understand what’s gotten into Yoongi recently, but he’s worried. His first instinct on coming home is no longer to hug him or touch him or pull him close, instead he pushes apart Hoseok’s collar to make sure that nestled against the hollow of his throat, there is the charm Yoongi gave him two weeks ago.

Hoseok’s also noticed the glowing golden light beneath Yoongi’s shirt, noticed Namjoon follows him to practice and watches him with his arms folded. He notices Jimin doesn’t let him go out of the studio unless he has to, that Jungkook keeps him back later than normal for “practice”, that Taehyung makes up dumb rules like holding hands when they cross the road for what he calls safety. None of them are strangers to the magical world — Jimin is a the son of a nereid, Jeongguk has wings and Taehyung is a witch, even if he’s kind of bad at it. Sometimes when he dances, he performs the hand movements for a spell, and the next thing Hoseok knows his desk is on fire.

But this time, there is no desk on fire. Just worry in Taehyung’s voice when they part ways, and a spell Taehyung thinks Hoseok never sees him cast floating about on the wind.

He remembers the text on Yoongi’s table and the petrified way he’d looked at it. Hoseok knows, and he corners Yoongi one night when Yoongi had given him yet another protection potion and held onto him like he’s going to fade away.

“Yoongi-hyung,” Hoseok says, like he’s approaching a wild animal. “Hyung,” he says, and falls to his knees, in front of the sofa, reaching up to hold Yoongi’s face in his hands when all he does is give him a terrified look. “Please, please tell me what’s going on. Please, Yoongi.”

Yoongi, impossibly, starts to cry. His beautiful face crumples up, and he holds onto Hoseok’s wrists and turns his head into his palm and kisses the inside of his skin. Tears drip out of the corners of his sharp eyes and spill over onto Hoseok’s fingers. He cries, “god, what if I can’t protect you?”

Hoseok’s heart breaks — shatters to be precise. It spills out over the floor and this time there’s no Yoongi to pick it up for him, so he steps on his pieces to help find Yoongi’s amongst the broken shards. “You don’t have to protect me,” he starts, and Yoongi weakly slams a fist onto the middle of his chest.

“I have to,” says the man adamantly. He wipes the tears off his face and his face changes, turns almost furious. “I have to.”

Hoseok pulls him into a tight hug. “Am I going to die soon, hyung?’ he asks, his voice cracking.

Yoongi’s grip tightens on his shirt. When he pulls back, gone is the waver that was in his voice that filled Hoseok with anxiety. “Not if I can help it,” he says, and his voice is full of steely determination.

=

Hoseok learns it must be car related, his death. He doesn’t know how Yoongi knows but he guesses it has something to do with the parchment in his room, the parchment Yoongi has brought into Hoseok’s room and pinned against the wall (with magnets, lord knows Yoongi is still attached), because Yoongi no longer sleeps in his own bed.

He’s lying on his side, tracing shapes and runes onto Hoseok’s back, runes Hoseok dimly recognises as being one life, of safety, of vitality, when he asks, “Seok-ah, the letters on the parchment,” Hoseok rolls over as soon as he mentions it. Now they’re uncomfortably close, and to look at Yoongi properly he goes kind of cross-eyed. “They’re dancing, you know? Their position changes every day. Rotates. Will you dance it for me?”

Hoseok looks at him seriously, then sits up to take down the parchment and look over it. Yoongi points out the pattern, shows him the way the triangular shaped rune and the circular one move against each other and come out the other way. He follows as best as he could, eyes trained on the moving runes, spinning, sinking, then leaping. He finishes by sinking into a low bow, almost as though he’s been punched in the gut, and as the triangular rune vanishes off the paper, he drops to the floor.

Hoseok stares at the carpeted floor, stunned, then turns to Yoongi with wide, alarmed eyes. Yoongi’s eyes are closed, though, and when he opens them there’s something akin to resolution in them. “Hyung will change that ending,” he promises. “Nothing will ever hurt you.”

There’s something unspoken there. A taste of an emotion Yoongi has not lent voice to yet. Hoseok doesn’t push him. They don’t have time, not anymore, but if it is death that’s approaching, he’s glad Yoongi will be the one to see him off.

=

The day it comes, Yoongi is prepared. He knows the date, knows it’s Hoseok’s birthday. He keeps him at home, invites over the dance troupe with the premise of a party, even the siren with the too pretty face — fine, Hoseokie, it’s Jin-hyung — and Namjoon. They mill about and eat cake and Yoongi laughs at everything Hoseok says, which is probably what clued him in on something being wrong. Too wrong.

Yoongi kisses his cheek as he leans over to get drinks and smiles at the red flush that works its way up his face. He plays with his hair and stares at his side profile, trying to commit the memory, the sight, of the man’s jawline to memory. Hoseok is beautiful. He’d started off an annoying, pudgy, pasty kid with a too big nose and a big mouth, both literally and figuratively, but then he’d become — this.

Yoongi still remembers when he’d realised it. It was the morning after Yoongi had brewed some tea —

(“Magic tea,” whispers Hoseok conspiratorially.

“It’s not magic tea you loaf,” grumbles Yoongi. “It’s just chamomile.”) —

and Hoseok had been so beautiful that morning. His hair was messy and he hadn’t brushed his teeth. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and had come out in his sweatpants, dropped at the table and mumbled something about projects and deadlines and I’m a fairy, hyung, I don’t need to learn. The morning sun had filtered onto his skin and burnt it a bright colour, his dark hair was illuminated by gold and his eyes were covered with his fairy dust from where he must’ve had a bad dream in the night and reacted to it.

Hoseok glowed in the morning light of his college kitchen. Yoongi realised he fell in love with the sun when he was the age of nine and Hoseok had come bursting into his garden, screaming something crazy about Daegu pixies.

When Hoseok says he’s going outside — just to grab the mail, hyung, I promise, my parents said they sent something — Yoongi lets him go, then realises how bad an idea that was and bursts out of the door with his entourage following behind him. That’s when he sees the car that’s coming trundling at the store off the road, going what must be seventy miles an hour and knows, no matter how hard he screams at Hoseok to move, the car will hit him anyway.

The world stops.

Yoongi opens his eyes to find he’s floating in water.

This always happens. Whenever Yoongi tries to use magic, time in the real world seems to stop for him, and he finds himself in the spirit realm, where, you know — no one living is supposed to be, but Yoongi’s always been too stubborn for those sort of rules.

“You’re back,” says one of them. There’s always a panel — three of them. Yoongi knows not what they represent, but here’s the catch. If he wants to force magic into him, even for a brief transportation spell, he knows he’s going to have to get all three of them to agree. And they almost always never agree.

“What do you want this time?” asks the one in the middle. Her long hair floats high and above her head, but Yoongi never remembers her features once he’s out of the trance.

“My friend is going to get hit by a car,” replies Yoongi, strangely calm. As though all his life he’d studied for this moment. “I need to move him out of the way. Any way. Just — please.”

“Why?” asks the third one.

Yoongi blinks at him, dumbfounded. It takes a while, but then he says, “I love him.”

“Love is no good reason to mess with Fate, Min Yoongi,” says the first one. HIs eyes are solemn and serious, his mouth pressed into a thin line. “The forces of life and death operate on a scale above your own.”

“I’ll do anything,” Yoongi pleads. His chest is heaving, his eyes are wet. In his mind all he can see are the dancing letters coming to an abrupt stop and vanishing. It shouldn’t have taken this long to translate, but he hadn’t been looking at it from the right angle — he looked at it his way, when he should’ve looked at it Hoseok’s way. “I’ll write anything. Make any potion. Translate any text.”

The one in the middle suddenly narrows her eyes. “Wait,” she says. Her voice is commanding. The water itself shivers. “How do you know your friend will die?”

The story pours out of Yoongi’s mouth even if he doesn’t want to say it. How he found the parchment one night in the attic with Hoseok. How the runes claimed him when he first saw it. How he’s spent nearly ten years of his life trying to decode it. About how the letters dance on the page, the story they tell, the ambiguity of their situation.

The one in the middle listens to it all, then stops him as he gets to explaining how Hoseok had danced it for him and understood. She says, “I’m in for helping him.”

“Why?” asks the third one. “What made you change?”

The first one moves closer to him. His dark eyes look over Yoongi solemnly. The second one says, though her voice sounds very far away, “because he deciphered the language of death for love,” and she smiles a little. “That’s a Grim Reaper’s text, you know. You’re not supposed to be able to read it.”

“I can’t read it,” Yoongi tries to explain. “I can feel it. In here.”

The first and the third one exchange looks, then turn back to Yoongi with the same expression. “We will move him,” they concede. “On one condition.”

Yoongi will do anything.

“Burn the paper,” commands the third one. “And rewrite the end.”

“I don’t know how,” he breathes.

“You’re the one who summons us with only your words,” continues the first one. “You figure it out.”

The water falls away as quickly as it appears. Yoongi falls to the ground, heaving, and Hoseok shouts from where he’s ended up on the roof, clutching a white envelope to his chest in fright.

=

Yoong doesn’t know how to make the letters dance across the page. He knows which runes he wants to use, but he’s not a Grim Reaper or whatever, he can’t make the letters move. He’s agonising over it, staying up late — and away from Hoseok, in case they decide if he stops working on it that the spirits would just stick Hoseok in the middle of the highway.

He’s banging his head on his desk when it comes to him so quickly he’s wondering if he should bang his head on the table more, and so bursts into Hoseok’s room, brandishing an ancient camera and yelling, “dance for me.”

Teaching Hoseok the steps is painful, but eventually he gets them down, and Yoongi tells not a story about life and death, but life and love. Hoseok ends with his hands outstretched to the sky, and Yoongi would deny he ever cried that night, but Hoseok is alive and giggling into his shoulder.

Hoseok is alive and laughing into his ear. Hoseok is alive and falling asleep next to him. Hoseok is — Hoseok is here. His hope.

=

They don’t have a deadline anymore, but Hoseok’s riled up from well, almost dying, from Yoongi using magic to save him when they were surrounded by magic users, god — but it seemed only Yoongi could move him, because he hadn’t had to move the body he’d had to move the soul. Yoongi had move his soul. Hoseok isn’t sure how he can live on borrowed time, but he’s making the time his own.

He comes home from dance practice to see Yoongi leaning over the counter, staring at the glimmering bottle of fairy dust. Hoseok’s fairy dust — the one that he summons in the palm of his hands and gives to those whom he trusts with his soul, because that’s what it is.

Yoongi looks up and smiles at him when he enters.

“Hobie,” he says, pleased. “You’re back.”

Hoseok stares at him as though seeing him for the first time. “Min Yoongi,” he replies. The lack of honorific causes Yoongi to raise an eyebrow. “Have I told you that I love you?”

Yoongi startles, but then he smiles. “I love you too, Hoseokie,” he replies, and Hoseok grins at him. He doesn’t try to commit the laugh Yoongi makes, the breathless sound of realisation and happiness as Hoseok leans in to kiss him, because he knows, just knows — he’d make sure he hears that every day. Instead he lets Yoongi lean in to kiss him again, then smack him on the shoulder with a ginger root.

“I had a plan,” Yoongi wrinkles his nose. “And a dinner reservation. Was going to kiss you over overpriced panna cotta.”

Hoseok shrugs his shoulders. “We can do that anyway,” he says, and Yoongi grins at him.