Work Text:
Yoongi doesn’t intend for Hoseok to get this high the night before his enlistment ceremony.
“It’s the morning of, by now,” Hoseok croons, not sounding especially concerned about it. “Three AM! And I’ve gotta fucking- you know, and I’m gonna have to- tomorrow, like this with my brain all spacey and fuzzy and funny and I’m- hyung, look at me, don’t laugh-”
Yoongi has been looking. Hoseok’s eyes aren’t red– at least, aside from the crying, which had first occurred five minutes ago, when Hoseok was especially concerned about it– but also hours earlier. Yoongi has been doing a good job at pretending he didn’t know that’s what Hoseok had been up to before.
Before: before Yoongi had come over, knocked at Hoseok’s door with a bag of takeaway food, a couple bottles of makgeolli, and a sealed Ziploc baggie of locally-sourced, quality-vetted indica; before Yoongi had eaten the delivery food and cracked open a drink, taken a sip or ten (too sweet for his tastes, but he bought it for Hobi); before Yoongi had accidentally gotten Hoseok more stoned than he’s ever seen him.
And they’d gotten stoned a lot, maybe too much, in 2018. Started at it in late 2017 by way of sparse sessions where Yoongi would stare at the clouded ceiling of his studio, hazy even without the weed because he kept the lights low, kept the music the opposite, and Hoseok, never the best at inhaling and making it stick, would sit with him and intersperse his coughs into the beats. Louder than the kick snare he would wheeze, halfway to hacking up a lung, and he would smile through it, the body-high making him floppy like the blackmouth angler Seokjin had brought home from Cheongnyangni to chop up for their last dinner. Yoongi, even if he was trying to concentrate, would never ask Hoseok to leave on those days, only to help him remember that later on, when they closed up, they’d need to lock the door real good so that the cleaners couldn’t get in until they could empty half a bottle of air freshener inside first.
Bad influences they were; around that same time, Taehyung had made edibles once. Or rather, Taehyung had wanted to make edibles so badly that he took his half-melted patbingsu and stirred in already potent chocolate, infused by god-knows-who from god-knows-where and liquified courtesy of the QuikThaw setting on the microwave, and choked it down even though chocolate was never his favorite. Exactly sixteen minutes later did he begin to complain about a stomachache from his sideways, spread-eagle, frankly pathetic position atop the living room carpet. Exactly sixteen minutes after that, Taehyung was, as the kids say, tripping balls.
Hoseok is retelling that story now. Saying it in slow, carefully selected words like he doesn’t want to let his tongue stumble or trip around a single syllable, gotta get it right, no second chances: “–and remember when Jeonggukie came in and then got Namjoonie to come look at him ‘cause he was worried–”
Jeongguk (the kid) had taken one look at Taehyung’s pose of defeat and dialed up Namjoon’s phone just to tattle (“tripping balls, hyung, I don’t know what he did-”) with chin-wobbling, baby-doe-eyed cacospectamania.
“–‘N Namjoonie seemed more worried about Jeonggukie knowing that Taehyungie was high, like there was some way that baby Jeonggukie didn’t know at his age- twenty-two, right?- what drugs were. Jiminie, though, Jiminie was nervous, I think he was mad at Taehyungie, y’know, but he told me later that he wanted to try it, thought they were gonna do it together, the two of them-”
“I was there,” Yoongi opens his mouth to say, even if he wasn’t there for that very last part. He does, however, feel like he might as well be an honorary seven year roommate of Hoseok and Jimin’s, considering how much of their gossip has left their four walls and ended up on his conscience.
He shuts his mouth around his next sip of alcohol and keeps quiet. It doesn’t feel like a thing he needs to say: “I was there.” It’s a fact, more so. To Hoseok, Yoongi has always been there. To Yoongi, Hoseok has always been there.
“I don’t know how to say goodbye to you,” is what Yoongi does eventually say, depressing as all hell and unthinking even when he’s already been mulling with that thought for anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour. Time has been moving differently. It feels like both eight PM and eight AM. It is neither. Hoseok looks tragically trendy with his shaved head and his neon pink paint-splattered Kaws shirt and his bare feet.
“Hmm?” Hoseok says. Huh, Yoongi thinks, because Hoseok is not the type to be cruel, not the type to be selfish and pretend he didn’t know what Yoongi said just to hear him say it again. Wouldn’t be so selfless, either, as to make Yoongi repeat it just so that he could have an out, to see if he really meant it. So Yoongi must have been quiet, must have let the weed let him mumble.
“Never really done it before,” Yoongi says. He realizes he can feel his heart thrumming. It is low and subtle but still noticeable, still there. He is not sure why a part of him expected that it wouldn’t be.
“We haven’t. Have we?”
Yoongi allows himself to keep looking at Hoseok. His under-eyes are swollen, his pupils glisten– not the remnants of tears, but just that glow he gets, that glisten-gorgeous light in them, loose-lidded and weed-squinted and cute. And that’s a whole thing, about him being cute, about him being gorgeous; Yoongi has no qualms about thinking it, about knowing it because it has always been true, a fact in his mind just like gravity or geographical coordinates or the best mustard leaf kimchi he’s ever had: his great-grandmother’s, when he was young, six years old and right before she’d died, she’d added more salt than harabeoji usually liked. Hoseok is always good to look at. Better to be around, to know the heart of, to know the way he snores at night and grumbles in the morning and takes his tea: black, except for a splash of sugar, and he always waits until it’s bordering on lukewarm to drink. (Gross, the kind Yoongi hates, and the kind Taehyung would take an accidental sip of and then spit right back into the cup before throwing the whole thing out, Hoseok’s afternoon pick-me-up be damned. Taehyung would always make him another one, at least.)
Hoseok is nice to look at for everyone, even just from afar. The kind of person that radiates something rare, makes hordes of passerby feel individually special with just a flicker of a glance, a nudge of conviviality. Yoongi has seen it: cashiers at grocery stores eager to give him a receipt just to give him something. Hoseok is, all capital characters, all letters underlined, bold and italicized, top billed, a good person. One Yoongi feels lucky to spend time with. Lucky to hang out and get stoned with to the point of absurdly fast snack consumption and looping the same song four times in a row because they didn’t appreciate it enough the other go-arounds. Lucky enough to get spacey and silly with, to be convinced that he can move his ears if he tries hard enough because Hoseok has found a YouTube video about someone who taught themself– lucky that Hoseok encourages him, that he ends up wiggling Yoongi’s earlobes with his own hands just to appease Yoongi when he fails.
They had done that maybe twenty minutes ago. Hobi’s hands had been warm from the cup ramyeon he’d kept mostly perched between his knees, a balancing game. Now, his hands touch Yoongi’s leg. Two hands layered on Yoongi’s kneecap. That good person, that lucky person touching him. Hoseok is still warm now, even with the soup abandoned on the table.
Then he lifts just one hand up, keeps the other on Yoongi’s thigh, and looks at Yoongi expectantly. He waves.
“Say goodbye.”
“Bye,” says Yoongi.
“Annyeong.”
“See you later.” In Korean– "daeume bwa” – and then in sloping and Southern-sappled English: “see ya later.”
That gets Hoseok to giggle. “Bye-bye.”
“Bye, Hobah.”
“Bye, Yoongi-hyung.”
Hoseok pauses. “Weird.”
“Yeah.” Yoongi pulls his legs out from under him. He had been folded up into the side of the couch. His calves ache from lack of blood flow. He notices both of Hoseok’s hands have retreated back to his own lap. Wonders when that happened. How he missed it.
“Well, what do we know how to do? Let’s do that.”
Yoongi chews at his lip, watches Hoseok have his thinking face on like he already knows Yoongi’s suggestion won’t be feasible.
“Make music.”
“Too late for that. No time.”
If Yoongi were dead sober, or maybe just a little less high (or a little more), something in his brain would ding at that. No time, and the ominousness of it, because he doesn’t want Hoseok to leave and he wants Seokjin to come back already and he wants none of this to have to happen and he wants to get rid of the feelings that he has about it because it has happened, and he’s here and he can’t change the past and the future is coming, fast and steady and undeniable and this is life, whether he wants it this way or not–
–And the Namjoon-nuanced, therapist-tinted, burned into his brain buoyancy would loop him back to another consideration: maybe no time is a good thing to have, maybe it means you have to make a choice. React, move on, resolve, keep on.
“We could eat,” Yoongi says instead, because he is stoned and the takeout boxes on the table are in his direct line of vision and fortunately that is the path his brain is choosing to go down instead of one of existential neurosis.
“Clearly.” Hoseok’s laugh lines flash, but his gaze does linger on the plate of deconstructed hoeori-gamja.
“Smoke more,” Yoongi suggests without really meaning it. He gestures at the mess of green on the table, at the click-n-flame lighter shoved between his thigh and the side of the sofa. It sticks upright, prodding into his elbow, and has been situated there for so long that Yoongi has an outline of it, vaguely phallic looking, on the underside of his forearm. Doesn’t know why he hasn’t moved it for so long. The prospect had felt daunting.
“Not so sure I’m good at that,” Hoseok says. He flails his wrists as if to point at himself, to say “look at me,” and giggles. Yoongi has been looking. How could Yoongi not be looking– and he wants to say that– suddenly– he wants to tell Hoseok because if he were Hoseok, personally, if he were that beautiful– that gorgeous– but also that so clearly, blatantly unaware of it, at least most of the time, Yoongi thinks he’d want to know. And Yoongi knows that Hoseok must not know, not really, because otherwise he wouldn't hear Hoseok’s curses in the dance rooms at dawn when everyone else is sleeping and Hoseok thinks Yoongi is, too. And Hoseok is a perfectionist and loves what he does and Yoongi knows, no matter what, that Hoseok will work hard and want to be better– but that’s what makes Hoseok beautiful, too. All of it. Yoongi thinks Hoseok should know. Yoongi wants Hoseok to know. Yoongi:
–Opens his mouth, and gets interrupted instead.
“This was so stupid, I could go to jail.”
Hobi’s voice quakes. Sticky-throated, sudden, there’s that concern Yoongi had been half-waiting for. Knew it would bubble up a little more, how could it not– only human, Hoseok is.
“Aish, ssibal, Yoongi-yah, wait, why– I’m gonna be fucked–” he stops to laugh again, as if a joke came and went through his mind in a matter of two and a half seconds, but then he blends right back into panic.
“I- What do I do? What do we– Yoongi-yah, what if I don’t sober up, what if I stay high and I say something or they drug test me, will they drug test me? I should have checked, I don’t know why I didn’t know, I don’t know if they’ll know, will they smell it on me-”
Yoongi’s method of calming Hoseok down is by way of touching all over his legs, apparently. Both of his palms are on his thighs, skimming his bare skin under his sleep shorts, and Yoongi is too busy speaking to even really notice it.
“You’ll be fine, I promise, Hobah, you’ll be fine. They won’t know, it’ll fade, you’ll be sober by morning. You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, I promise. Hobah. You’ll be fine. No one will know, they won’t test you, I already checked– you think I’d give you a joint the night before you get drug tested?”
Hoseok cracks a smile. Shakes his head. His fingertips cling onto Yoongi’s. Trust, or something deeper than that.
“You’ll be fine. It’ll be okay. It’ll be just fine. It’ll be fine, it’ll be okay,” Yoongi keeps saying, and he is talking about more than just the weed now. “What else are you good at?”
“We,” Hoseok says weakly, quietly. “We were talking about- we. Us.”
“Alright,” Yoongi answers. His mouth feels like it’s full of cotton balls, and not in the normal stoned way. “What else are we good at, Hobah? You and me.”
Hoseok is quiet for a long time. Yoongi thinks he may have forgotten the question. But then his eyes are glassy and he has started to ramble again, all different feelings this time but served with the same cadence from before, when he wasn’t frantic but fond instead, when he was retelling the story about the particularly unique shape of Seokjin’s frown when he’d walked into the dorm kitchen to find his leftover patbingsu empty and eaten and dribbling next to Taehyung’s carpet-smushed, pot-punched face. Different stories spill from Hoseok’s mouth and Yoongi is enraptured, even if the bits and pieces don’t have any order: when Namjoon drank too much coffee and accidentally stayed up for thirty two hours straight right before a world tour, when Seokjin had invited his girlfriend over and successfully convinced Jeongguk that the two of them had met in the exact same way the couple in their latest J-drama binge had, when Jimin had chipped one of his premolars on a burnt piece of rice right before a comeback and worried that people would be able to notice it and Taehyung had honest to god offered to find a way to chip one of his own teeth somehow so that they’d be matching.
Eventually Hoseok’s speech lulls.
“Remember when we used to…” he starts, and then succinctly quits: “ah, never mind.”
Yoongi knows.
“What?” he asks anyway.
“Never mind,” Hoseok says. Yoongi does not hear him say this so much as he had known, before Hoseok even opened his mouth, that it was what he would say. Knew, because sometimes he can read Hoseok like a book. Sometimes, he knows him more than he knows himself. Sometimes, it is to the point that Yoongi is scared by it.
“You thinkin’ about when we used to kiss?” says Yoongi. It feels simultaneously like an easy question and also like something that has taken a great amount of gallantry. Maybe it could be nice to lay down. The carpet here is nice. He could channel Taehyung, circa 2017, Mary Jane one, him zero.
Hoseok’s cheeks are turning red. So are his ears. Hoseok’s hair isn’t usually short enough– hasn’t been in a long time– for Yoongi to be able to see them. He’d forgotten.
The sight twists Yoongi’s gut. Hot blush on his lobes, creeping up high. Yoongi remembers Hoseok’s hands on his own ears from before, the pathetic wiggle challenge; Yoongi wishes he had reached out and tousled Hoseok’s ears, too, just to touch every part of him that he could when he had the chance– when Hoseok was there and the chance was there. When Hoseok was there– Yoongi reminds himself that Hoseok is here now.
“Mm,” is Hoseok’s response.
“We used to be so stupid.” Yoongi doesn’t say it unkindly. Can’t be unkind to Hoseok, not ever. He is unsure if he ever has been. He hopes not. Hopes that if he has, Hoseok knows he didn’t mean it.
He leans against Hoseok’s shoulder. While Hoseok is here, his brain supplies. Before he isn’t. Before he isn’t here.
Hoseok sits back.
“I remember,” Hoseok says. After a pause that feels like it lasts the entire length of the song playing in the background (Epik High, “Fly,” how fitting– “it’s morning when you open your eyes, the compass takes you in circles, in this confident world around you-”) –and Yoongi thinks he’s lost his phone, can’t turn the volume up, doesn’t know when it got so quiet that all he can really hear is the tiny breath of exhale at the end of Hobi’s sentences– Hobi says: “Remember when we used to…ah, shit. Lemme just, real quick.”
He sits upright, jars Yoongi with the motion. He’s lighting up again, rolling fast and fumbling with the lighter that he takes from the crevice between Yoongi and the couch like he knew right where it was tucked away all this time. Keeping tabs on Yoongi’s legs or something insane like that.
Hoseok breathes in deep, stifles a cough. “Before I…” He starts, then sighs. Takes another toke.
“Hey.” Yoongi nudges him. “Easy-”
“Remember when we used to do this, too-”
“-Why’re you ashamed to say it, come on.”
Yoongi hates to ease the joint out of Hoseok’s fingers, but he does. Hoseok is pretty when he smokes. Part of the problem. He gets shrouded in smoke and appears from it like a vision, darker in his eyes like he gets a thrill out of doing what he knows he’s not supposed to. Law-breaking, dopamine-seeking. That poster-boy face with its jaw set tight, keeping the smoke in until it’s settled in deep.
“Hobah, it’s just me.”
“Yeah.”
That same jaw clenches.
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“Hobah.”
“That’s the problem.”
Hoseok’s hands are soft and warm, smooth against Yoongi’s knuckles, and then the rest of his body is, too, when it presses close and tight up against Yoongi’s chest. Soft and warm when he settles his hips onto the top of Yoongi’s thighs, where he hovers his mouth against Yoongi’s and then presses down and forward, lips parted like he doesn’t want to touch too much of Yoongi’s mouth with his own, like he’s almost not sold about the act of kissing him even as he’s doing it– but then Yoongi kisses back, gets Hoseok’s bottom lip between both of his and tugs like he means it, because he does, and Hoseok needs to know it.
“Gorgeous,” Yoongi says. Hoseok needed to know that, too. Yoongi has needed to say it. It’s an exhale of sorts, to get the word out.
“Yoongi-yah.” Formality gone, Yoongi’s stomach staggers; his mind reels. He’s not sure he expected this, to be sprawled backwards on the couch with a tongue that tastes of smoke licking against his teeth, a lap full of Hoseok, owner of said tongue. He’s not sure he didn’t expect it, either.
“Hyung,” Hoseok corrects.
“You got a hyung kink?” Yoongi doesn’t know why he says it. Doesn’t think it makes much sense. Doesn’t even really mean it. He is just trying to be sexy, really, and a little funny too. The room tips, just a bit, on its axis. Hoseok must have shotgunned him, just a little, like they used to, but this time they’re free of the shitty rolling papers, the ones that wanted to taste like berries but hit like chemicals on the way down.
“No hyung kink. Weed kink.” Hoseok chuckles, whisper-joking, and that perfect mouth comes closer to Yoongi’s and gets Yoongi to part his lips, tilt up to drink him in, mouth practically watering for him– until Hoseok suddenly stops. That perfect mouth– goddamn, fuck, Hoseok shifts around on his lap– pouts into a hard line.
“I mean,” that perfect mouth speaks, “it’s not because- trust me. I’m not- I- I didn’t mean that this was only because-”
He swallows hard. Yoongi wants to reach out and touch his throat, to soothe the motion.
“This is good. I feel good. Right now. About now.” A hand that had been buried in Yoongi’s hair tugs away, points its index finger at the both of them, gesturing. “About- this. This isn’t…this isn’t not me. Isn’t not real. For me. It’s…me. Doing this. Not the weed.”
“I know,” Yoongi says, very softly. He is looking at Hoseok, and he thinks, if the way that Hoseok is looking at him back is any indication, that he did not need to say anything at all. He feels laid bare.
Yoongi is the one to initiate the next kiss, and the one after that, and the one after that. Without words, he repeats it to Hoseok: I know.
“Don’t,” Hoseok says, when Yoongi goes to dip his hand into Hoseok’s sweatpants. “Too much,” he says. Judging the wince on his face, he doesn’t mean for it to sound so much like an apology.
“Sorry,” Yoongi says. An apology of his own, one he does mean, even though Hoseok had been the one to take Yoongi’s hand, to remove its clutch on his sheared nape and put it right over his cock instead. Filling up in his shorts, he’d pressed down, helped Yoongi touch. But–
“I’ll cry,” Hoseok explains. He casts a look, half scornful and half despondent, down at his crotch. Looks back up at Yoongi like he’s trying to say something in a language he’s spent hours studying but never actually spoken aloud.
“I’m sorry,” Yoongi says again.
So Hoseok kisses him more. Hard and open, he lunges down and moves fast and Yoongi lets him. Yoongi moves too, as much as he can when Hoseok isn’t being whiplash-inducing on his mission of biting and licking down Yoongi’s neck, of stretching the collar of Yoongi’s shirt to mouth at his chest around the fabric. As much as he can reach, and then he does the same at the hem, at the expanse of Yoongi’s stomach, tenacious. Yoongi doesn’t know why Hoseok doesn’t just take his shirt off.
“How come I can’t but you can-”
“Shh,” Hoseok says, and Yoongi listens. Does as Hoseok asks and shuts up. And Hoseok–
Hoseok feels better than Yoongi knows what to do with. It’s been months since Yoongi’s had sex, longer since he’s had stoned sex, years since he’s had stoned sex with Hoseok– and just the ghost of Hoseok’s knuckles against his pubic bone makes him shiver. He realizes, delayed, that he forgot to trim there, fuck, but why would he have bothered to trim if he hasn’t had sex in months– and he wonders when Hoseok’s last had sex, if he gave a goodbye blowjob to anybody else recently– even without knowing it, maybe some hookup from months ago that didn’t know they were getting their last Jung Hoseok-flavored blowjob for a good long while– and Yoongi doesn’t know why he’s thinking about that, why it matters when Hoseok is here now, putting his nice hands and sweet mouth on Yoongi’s cock. A goodbye blowjob for Yoongi, and Yoongi isn’t even really enjoying it, not enough, just because he knows it’s his last and ignorance must be bliss, it must be better to not know that an ending’s an ending–
“Yoongi-yah. You ‘kay?”
The room is spinning a little faster now. Hoseok’s fingertips stroke underside of his knee. Tingly. His eyebrows are arched like stratus clouds, waiting.
“Yeah. Hobah.”
“Yeah?”
He churns out a breath. “Yeah. Yes.”
What Yoongi is saying, essentially, is that Hoseok is good. Confirming it, because Hoseok knows it. Uses this knowledge to his benefit to tease, to get Yoongi overwhelmed fast, gorgeous- good, that specific signature style of his. Fucking Yoongi’s mind up– and his body, too, every little thing–
And it’s not that Yoongi doesn’t remember how Hoseok used to give head– but it’s been a long time and he’s clearly had experience since– and Yoongi doesn’t want to go back there, not to that idea– but it’s different. Better now. Good weed. Good booze. Though, they had that all those other times, too.
No matter. It’s different. Different in the way Hoseok takes him down to the crux of his throat, lets the shape of Yoongi’s cock sit there, lets them both breathe like that. Different in the way he guides one of Yoongi’s hands to his hair, lets him touch and hold and it’s the shape of his skull Yoongi feels tonight, instead of his promo-damaged, bleach-fried hair; it’s different in the way he guides the other hand to his neck, lets Yoongi feel. The way he tells him, you can with everything but words, and so Yoongi does: lifts his hips up just enough to control the movement, to push himself further into the heat of Hoseok’s mouth, the firm suck of his throat.
Yoongi ends up parallel to the floor, sideways on the couch. This way, Hoseok’s knees can stay on the couch, not the floor, and Yoongi is happy about that. From here, Hoseok is comfortable, not bruising, and from here, Yoongi has a fixed view: mesmerized on the slope of Hoseok’s nose pressed up flush against the slope of his own crotch. He can’t see Hoseok’s throat too well, not from this angle and not in this lighting, dim-bleary and overcast. A good thing, maybe, because when Hoseok moves, Yoongi’s stomach lurches, this molasses slow but steady moving thing, and when Yoongi closes his eyes, he sees Hoseok’s own eyelashes, the half bell curve of them growing wet and fluttery in real time as he starts to move.
Yoongi keeps feeling. Keeps his fingertips to Hoseok’s throat, not holding but just touching, resisting the urge to curl his fist into a proper hold. His hand could fit around the width of Hoseok’s neck. He could touch him like that.
He could, but he won’t. Not because he doesn’t think Hoseok would like it, because Hoseok had put Yoongi’s hand there once before, right before the pandemic had started and right after some server at a post-award show party had supplied them one drink each– and they had not spoken aloud about how three swallows of Hennessy and a single cube of ice were enough to justify Yoongi jerking Hoseok off with his tongue angled out the corner of his mouth like some panting, desperate dog, with his knuckles brushing Hoseok’s Adam’s apple the whole while.
They had spoken, however, about how Hoseok had come like that, before Yoongi had even been able to get him properly wet with that dangling tongue like he wanted. Hoseok had been embarrassed about it. Yoongi should be embarrassed now. He paints Hoseok’s lips powder-white. His come dribbles down his chin, and when his lips part in an exhale, Yoongi can see it on the strawberry-pink flat of his tongue, suck swollen.
“Hobah,” Yoongi says.
The noises that Hoseok has been making are- a lot. Yoongi’s stomach is clenched so tight. Hoseok licks at the side of Yoongi’s cock, at the vein that curves its root down near his balls. Hoseok licks him there, too, remembering more things. That afternoon in Yoongi’s studio, the time they’d mixed flower with tobacco and almost made a challenge of it, inhaling faster and faster until the kissing and groping they’d done had felt like a challenge too– until Hoseok had mouthed all the way to Yoongi’s asshole and right then and there the challenge was over– Hoseok had won, Yoongi’s conceding white flag waving in more ways than one, prolifically pleased and unbothered by his own defeat considering the way he’d gone and come all over his stomach. Embarrassment: Yoongi should’ve, could’ve– didn’t feel it then.
Doesn’t feel it now even as Hoseok keeps mouthing on him. The corner of his mouth lifts up, untrying, in that smirk he usually brings out when the cameras are on him and he wants to make himself look like a supervillain. He still sort of wants his shirt gone. Hoseok’s tongue is hot and humid.
Hoseok stops only when Yoongi’s knees start to shake, when Yoongi exhales a harsher breath, feeling something particularly deviant bubbling up inside of him, telling him something like that he can go again.
“Don’t think my throat can take a round two,” Hoseok says.
Yoongi nods. Clears his own throat like he’s the one that’s been utilizing it. He had moaned a bit, he thinks. Said Hoseok’s name and maybe called him jagiya.
“Right.”
Right, because Hoseok has to be careful of his throat, because he’ll have to speak in the morning. Will have to speak to government commanders like that’s something he wants to do, like it is a conversation he wants to have, and he will keep his hand poised in salute even when the morning air is chilly and windy. Hoseok has a tendency to shiver when he’s cold, he can’t help it, he tries to stay still and fails each time, ends up like a leaf quaking in the wind. Seokjin usually teases him for it, not long before he brings him a blanket or an extra coat or makes him dance so that he heats up and forgets about it. Seokjin had written something about Hoseok’s shivering in his last text to the group chat, something about the Gyeongsangbuk-do bunks being cold in the nighttime. Yoongi knows because Hoseok had laughed and laughed when he’d gotten the message and then he’d thrust his phone into Yoongi and Namjoon’s faces so they both could take their time reading it from his screen instead of their own, for whatever reason. They had taken their time really feeling the physicality of Seokjin’s truancy, to the point where Namjoon’s eyes had been wet afterwards and he’d gotten up to make a coffee to stay awake. Studio time in an hour, they’d been slacking off. Yoongi had followed him, had drunk a double shot.
Currently, Yoongi is trying to remember how to move his limbs so that he can attempt to sit up straight.
Hoseok says, “You wanna,” and then stops, suddenly and strikingly more awkward than Yoongi has ever seen him, he thinks– and that is saying something because he has seen Hoseok in so many predicaments over so many years. He grabs the joint off the table.
“Yah,” Yoongi says, “stop it”– then wishes he hadn’t because he’s never told Hoseok what to do and he’s sure as hell not going to start now. “Come here,” he says instead, immediately correcting himself by deciding to forfeit talking at all, actually. He guides Hoseok’s wet, humid mouth onto his. It is a hot slanted slot of tongues while Yoongi’s palm clutches around Hoseok’s jaw, and this is what he had meant to say in the first place. He is saying it all now. Knows that Hoseok is getting it.
Hoseok starts up that licking again, this time at the corner of Yoongi’s mouth. Show-off. Sexy and competitive and winning. Pretty all the time, cherub-charismatic, warm like the end of winter, when there’s snow on the ground but the sun is hot enough to make you forget, make you think it’s June. Good at everything. February baby, through and through. Love-shaped, those lips, pursed around smoke that sifts right down through into Yoongi’s lungs.
Yoongi buzzes. Feels his heart beating in his chest. Still beating, still going.
“I’m going to do it in stages,” Hoseok had said about his hair. He had brought it up over lunch the other day while Yoongi had burnt his tongue on too-hot jjigae and his eyes on too-bright sunlight. Too-bright Hobi, too, across from him in the reserved Hybe luncheon room with a sesame seed stuck to the corner of his mouth and glasses propped slightly tilted on the bridge of his nose. New glasses– Hobi had squinted through them when he first found Yoongi in the parking garage, next to a company van and under awning number five. Five. Yoongi had noticed. Signs and premonitions and fate and all that. And Hobi’s glasses, brand new, prescription and all, just in time.
“Just in time,” Yoongi repeated by way of an answer, whatever that meant.
Yoongi wakes up after Hoseok. Hoseok is in those glasses, sitting on that bright yellow wingback chair he keeps poised at the end of the kitchen island. He is reading something on his phone and looking like he’s pissed. When Yoongi walks into the room, the expression vanishes. Easy, like nothing. He smiles, bright, and Yoongi believes him. Believes himself less when he smiles back, but does it anyway. Keeps doing it, even when it feels like a lie.
“Jeonggukie’s already sent me eighteen TikToks. I don’t think he’s slept.” He is showing Yoongi his screen, swiping past videos too fast for Yoongi to register any of it, before he settles on one: there’s a dancer, lots of bright colors, text in what looks like German but could be Dutch. There must be a joke hidden in the video somewhere because Hoseok is laughing at it until it flickers away. A flash of Hoseok’s lockscreen– looks like a photo of Mickey. Then: phone off, screen blank, settled face down on the counter. Hoseok always gives his full attention.
“Namjoonie’s been awake since four.”
“Did anybody sleep?” Yoongi asks. It is rhetorical, but Hoseok answers “I did a little” like he knows Yoongi was worrying about him. Worrying already, before he’s even left his own house, while he’s still right in front of Yoongi with his fuzzy slippers on.
“Good.”
“You?”
“Yeah.”
There is a coffee on the table that looks like it has been sitting there for a while. Yoongi takes a sip. Grimaces at the taste, stale and cold. Outside, the weather looks about the same. He drinks some more.
“Hyung,” Hoseok says. He is going to start the conversation about it. Going to bring it up, the elephant in the room, because Hoseok is not the type to ignore it, not when he is on the border of being thirty with countless accolades and awards on his shoulders and a good, level, clear head held high above them. Hoseok is a mature adult and talks about things when he needs to. It is admirable. He is admirable.
Yoongi does not have to do more than look at him. There is an obvious smudge on the right lens of Hoseok’s glasses. The left one, too, though far less obvious.
“So when I come back, are we gonna do this again?” Hoseok asks.
“Eat so many Choco Pies our stomachs hurt?” Yoongi says, because he is less admirable than Hoseok.
Hoseok laughs anyway.
“Yeah,” Yoongi says, answering his own question, answering Hoseok’s too because he had been deflecting and Hoseok knows it. Knows his deflection was an answer in itself. Rhetorical Choco Pies. Last night they’d only had Pocky. His stomach does hurt, though.
“Okay,” Hoseok agrees. “Okay. We don’t have to- you don’t have to wait. For me. If someone else comes along, or if you meet someone-”
Yoongi wants to shake his head, say that he won’t. He cannot promise that. He did not even know it was something he wanted to promise until now. He is not sure if he even does want it, or if he just does not know what to do when Hoseok is about to leave him for a year and a half. He stays still.
“-If I come back and things look different for you, in your life and in your circles, if it’s different for me, too. For me and you. I don’t have any expectations. If things aren’t the same, that’ll be okay and I don’t want you to think it wouldn’t be. If we don’t want the same things. If we don’t even know what we want. Because I don’t know what that life will look for me yet until I get this done-”
He gestures wildly. His long fingers stretch, and Yoongi thinks of nine months ago, when he had his nails painted.
“And I’m sure your life will be different then too. So we can just- be us. You know, you live your life. I’ll live mine. We’ll reconvene. We’ll figure it out. ”
“We’ll figure it out,” Yoongi answers. He can agree to that.
Hoseok smiles. The lenses of the glasses are just a tad too big for his face. They make his face look more angular. Or maybe he’s lost weight. The delivery box they arrived in sits on top of his recycling bin. Who is going to take it out when the time comes? His trash day is Saturday. Today is Tuesday.
“Don’t worry about me,” Hoseok tells him.
Yoongi makes a list of things he is going to do: Yoongi is going to follow Hoseok out the front door. He is going to watch him lock up. He is going to stay right behind him the whole time even as he takes his own car, and then he will see him off in the parking lot and watch him inside the training camp as he is levied. He is going to miss him before he is even gone. He is going to recycle the cardboard container of Hoseok’s glasses come Friday because he had shoved it in his bag when Hoseok hadn’t been looking.
He does not plan to kiss him again. He does not plan for Hoseok to kiss him again. Does not manage to factor in, amidst the strife of everything else, that Hoseok would want to.
But Yoongi finds himself already leaning halfway in, anyways, when it happens.
“For good luck,” Hoseok said, and Yoongi had been kissing him back before he could even get the last syllable out.
His palms lay flat on Hoseok’s waist, creeping up under his shirt, under his jacket, just to touch at him as much as he can. He skims Hoseok’s waistband. Touches him with intent they do not have time for and they both know it.
“Good luck,” Hoseok says again, like Yoongi hadn’t heard him the first time.
“For what?” Yoongi asks, though sometimes he needs luck just to be able to get him out of bed in the morning and not spend a day with the shades drawn. He will need luck to live eighteen months without Hobi. He will need luck to live eighteen months without this life he’s made for himself, when he has to do the same amount of time himself– has to do more. Twenty one months of civil service feel daunting and looming and eternally damning.
Yoongi goes on: “For you?”
“For your tour,” Hoseok says. Yoongi’s chin jerks in acknowledgement. He hadn’t been thinking about it. They hadn’t talked about it. Yoongi had thought to bring it up, once when Hoseok was flicking his wrist to get the TV remote to work and it reminded Yoongi of a certain move from “Black Swan,” muscle memory ingrained deep and innate. It felt wrong for him to say anything about what he was getting when Hoseok wasn’t getting it, too. Cheering crowds and crystal-clear cameras and creativity and a slice of a little more freedom, just for a while. Hoseok craved it. Deserved it.
“I should be saying good luck to you.”
“So say it.”
Yoongi’s jaw clicks. “Good luck. No, now it feels ingenuine.”
“Kiss me, too,” Hoseok says. His fingers trip along Yoongi’s cheeks. “Kiss me, then say it.”
Yoongi is already interrupting him again to do so. He kisses Hoseok for too long. Dead sober, heart hammering in his chest, his ankles feeling numb like he’s standing weird when he isn’t, using some muscles he isn’t used to using– and everything feels weird right now– maybe he is using new muscles, those Hobi-specific ones he’s kept out of shape and nearly dormant because he’s never thought he’d need them, or no, he knew he would, but never thought he’d get sharpened up enough to actually use and feel good about–
Always waiting for the right time. Losing time, all the while.
“Good luck,” Yoongi says again. One more brush of lips, faint this time, as if petering out.
This is the last time for a long time, Yoongi realizes, when they are in the elevator and then the lobby and then in different cars, for some reason. They’re not notorious like Jimin and Taehyung, repeat offenders of car tomfoolery– both the innocent and mischievous kind and the ‘Taehyung likes to put his hand down Jimin’s pants at any and every convenience, even if the partition is down” kind. They should be in the same car and Yoongi thinks it is unfair that they are not. He now has all the time in the world to ponder about how they are separated, how they will be reunited after the seventy minute drive, and then they will be separated once more. They will be back under the sun with the apricity warming the brim of Yoongi’s hat and the skin of Hoseok’s scalp, and then they will be cold again.
“Yoongi-yah,” Hoseok says when he sees him. He says it in a voice that Yoongi knows, in that teasing brand of drawl he reserves just for late night studio sessions or early morning breakfast with whipped cream and chocolate chips and oftentimes a half-asleep Jeongguk or Jimin in tow. The intonation he uses when Yoongi’s beats him at gawi bawi bo , or gets the choreography right on the third try instead of keeping Hoseok holed up in the studio with him doing run-throughs until their sneakers chafe wear out. It is not the way he talks to Yoongi when he is kissing him, or when he is sucking on his cockhead with pursed, pucker-pretty lips. It is not like those lesser, rarer moments. It is okay. Hoseok is many things at once. He is something Yoongi knows, true and easy and faithful even when he is blooming into something different. Something different both together or apart– both are okay, Yoongi is learning.
And Jeongguk is trying not to cry and Namjoon is looking like he has already been crying and Taehyung and Jimin are side by side, pressed close, trying to laugh. Yoongi reminds himself that it is nice to see Hoseok’s forehead. Bare and unshrouded by even the slightest bits of hair, even on his forehead. How nice that is, but how awful the reason for it. His hair–
“How did you end up doing it?” Yoongi asks– he means about his hair, about the stages of cutting it to nothing– but he also means, “tell me more about you. Anything.”
It is cloudy out, overcast and gloomy and halfway to raining. Hoseok is smiling under his black face mask. Yoongi can tell by the way the vein under his temple jumps.
The sun is so bright, and it is still dry. The staff keep their umbrellas out for them.