Chapter Text
When the call from Kim Namjoon’s assistant came, Kim Seokjin was still cocooned in blankets, watching a documentary about the moon and idly mulling over whether to give himself a day off. It was already almost four in the afternoon, and the curtains on the bay window weren’t tightly drawn, so the warm yellow light of the sun spilled into the room along the edges of the curtains, falling on the marble sill of the bay window and forming a perfect square.
Seokjin liked nighttime more than dusk, liked the sight of a silver moon hanging in the night sky. Whether it was a full moon or a waning moon, he liked them all.
On many a sleepless night, he would sit on Namjoon’s living room sofa and watch the amber moonlight fall outside the window. He would quietly watch the moonlight spill over the windowsill, waiting for the warm red light of the dawn sun to slowly rise, waiting for Namjoon’s assistant to call—in other words, waiting for Namjoon to return.
He didn’t actually live in Namjoon’s villa, but Namjoon had taken the initiative to ask his assistant to add Seokjin’s fingerprint to the automatic lock.
“No matter what, it will be much more convenient to have your fingerprint logged in the system,” Namjoon had said to him casually that day. “You could even move in, if you’d like.”
Seokjin’s soft-spoken refusal was almost without conscious thought. “No need. It’s not far for me to come over. If I take a taxi it’s just over ten minutes.”
When he said it, Namjoon was standing in the center of the living room, his posture ramrod straight. He seemed to have just finished with a meeting. He was fully dressed in a finely-made suit—he hadn’t even loosened his tie yet. The cold light cast by the chandelier cascaded down and spilled across his brow.
Seokjin could see that he was a little exhausted.
They looked at each other for a couple seconds, and then Namjoon let out a sigh and quickly answered him. “Okay.”
Kim Seokjin and Kim Namjoon had known each other for three years and would soon enter their fourth year of knowing each other. How well can two people know each other after three years? Seokjin had been thinking about this question quite often recently as he drifted off to sleep.
The fluffy down comforter was so warm, and he soon lost the ability to think in his drowsiness. He knew Namjoon quite well—for instance, which scents he preferred, which colors were his favorite, which foods he liked best. Seokjin knew all these things. And even details like how at nine in the morning each day Namjoon drank half a cup of coffee without cream or sugar—these were all clear in his mind.
It was as if these trivial matters had been carved into his body. Seokjin was like a clay doll. Every time he and Namjoon interacted was like the touch of a moment, and each left its fingerprint on him.
Some were deep, some were shallow, sometimes pressed heavily, sometimes lightly.
“Seokjin, we just got off the plane, where are you?”
Kim Seokjin reached his hand out from the down comforter to find the remote. As soon as he pressed the pause button, he heard Namjoon’s assistant from the other side of the receiver, a slight urgency apparent in the question.
Namjoon’s assistant was a woman around Seokjin’s age, a beta who was extremely capable at her job and did everything with a sense of propriety. Seokjin had probably spent more time communicating with her than with Namjoon.
“…I’m at home.” Seokjin looked at the paused image of the giant moon projected on the screen, a little confused. “What happened?"
“The new treatment the doctor prescribed wasn’t quite right, and the president’s rut has arrived early. I just gave him an injection, but I don’t think it will hold up for long. I’m driving directly to your place right now. Don’t go back over to the villa.”
The assistant on the phone calmly added, “Be there in about half an hour."
Tick tock, tick tock. As the clock on the living room wall sounded out the time, Seokjin raised his head to look. It was just now exactly four o’clock.
For the past three years, Namjoon had always needed Seokjin for his rut, and he had only needed Seokjin.
Among the secondary genders, S-level Alphas tended to be more capable than others, but they also had more intense ruts. And Namjoon’s situation was even more unusual, in that he couldn’t smell any Omega’s pheromones other than Seokjin’s.
And so they made a deal.
It was fair enough—Namjoon helped him pay off his debt, and so Seokjin helped him get through his ruts.
Love wasn’t tangled up in it.
This was what Namjoon said himself.
But Seokjin had no way to make good on this promise. In these three years with Namjoon, he always felt that he was a small boat, bobbing up and down on the tides. The surface of the sea was sometimes calm, sometimes tumultuous, but all he could do was to try his hardest to preserve his balance upon the tide—he had neither strength with which to escape from this ocean, nor the opportunity to capsize and be submerged by the waves.
He had no way to control his own feelings, just as the tides have no way to control their own rise and fall. The moon hung in the vault of the sky, the day as dawn, the night as dusk, and the fondness that Seokjin hid in his breast was always rising and falling, surging and stopping. But it had never once fallen away.
Once he had thought, naively, that if Namjoon could smell only his pheromones and no one else’s, it must prove that there was some kind of fate between the two of them.
Or rather, wasn’t Seokjin somehow different, even if only to Namjoon?
Seokjin has always been a gentle and obliging person. He never wanted for him and Namjoon to fall in love, so he always purposefully ignored this bit of fondness. But it had truly been quite difficult.
That nameless feeling burned in his chest like a single tongue of flame, and every time Namjoon reached his hand under the hem of Seokjin’s clothes to stroke the skin of his waist, that lick of flame burned him until his ears turn red.
And so Seokjin carefully tucked the sentiment away, not knowing whether he should reveal it, or how to reveal it. He still hadn’t had time to think deeply on it when on the night before one of Namjoon’s ruts, Seokjin accidentally caught sight of an examination report on the desk in Namjoon’s office.
How could a top-class Alpha who had created a commercial empire simply bow his head to an unknown symptom?
Seokjin grabbed the report in his fingers. His body stood firm, but his fingers used too much force. His thumb pressed down in a death grip and left a half circle depression at the corner of the paper. Ah, so it was like this in the end, Seokjin quietly thought. All along, Namjoon had been receiving treatment, had been trying hard this whole time—trying to smell the scents of other Omegas.
Trying to expand his power to choose. Trying to end his deal with Seokjin.
And it seemed that after Namjoon’s final treatment finished, every one of these goals would be fulfilled.
The white paper covered in black type announced that their relationship really was exactly as Namjoon had said—fair and equitable, with no love tangled up in it.
In that instant, Seokjin only felt that that those sentiments in his chest, which he had never divulged, spread out like tidewater. The moon disappeared in a bank of clouds, the sea water lost its gravitational force. After the sea tide, which had once surged ceaselessly, beat upon the shore for the final time, it wouldn’t be willing to move forward again. The small silver boat, swaying and being tossed on the ocean waves, finally ran aground on the shore.
Seokjin hugged his legs to his chest and watched the moon for the whole night.