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I. Documentation of the process (skipping the process)
Namjoon is reading from a slim book of poetry and trimming his plum bonsai when he sees an unusual cloud formation on the horizon.
He usually prefers to keep his plum tree on the garden side of the library, because being so high up in the sky makes him a little dizzy, and he’s always harbored a half-silly, half-romantic thought that his plants might feel the same way, that they might want to stay rooted closer to the ground.
But sometimes, as is often the way when one leads a life of magic, he feels compelled to do something a little different than usual, outside his normal routine, and as he’s standing before the skyside window, watching the reflections from his glass wind chimes flash glimpses of reflected green from the garden that can be seen through the windows on the other side of the library, he has to adjust his glasses, unsure if he might actually have gotten so absorbed in his book of poetry that he’s hallucinating.
The sky outside the narrow tall window is blue and beautiful, soft fluffy clouds skipping by sedately. The cloud on the horizon is different from those.
The whole library is striped through with windows like these in between the floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, bright keyholes of light that break up the dark wood and hold the occasional seating nook. Because Namjoon is currently in front of a skyside window, that’s all he can see: sky, because this instance of his library floats in it; this is a magical library that not just anyone can wander into from a city street.
Namjoon is reminded for perhaps the hundredth time why he prefers to look out the gardenside windows into his own carefully cultivated world of shade and dappled sunlight and peaceful greenery, because he sees something on the horizon that gives him pause.
As he slides his small silver spectacles up his nose, the part of his brain that functions something like a vast reference system kicks calmly into gear, informing him that the thing on the horizon is most likely an iridescent pileus cloud, not something he’s ever observed from the windows of his library before, but certainly not anything necessarily sinister. Probably. If it weren’t moving towards him. Are they supposed to move?
Namjoon has a soft spot for whimsical things, which is fortunate since he manages a magical library, but even so, this is stretching the limit of his credulity.
He’s seen pictures of them before, of course, but in person it looks somehow fake. The colors too bright, almost boiling, like his eyes want to slide away from being forced to perceive it. It looks a little like some bright flower of paradise just peeking into bloom, hiding its beauty behind a dark storm cloud, as though if it revealed its own splendor, all that brightness would drown the entire earth in colors no human was ever meant to witness.
Thankfully, Namjoon isn’t exactly a regular human, and he’s never been afraid of encountering things meant to be forbidden.
He rests one hand against the smooth wood of the closest bookcase and brushes his magic along the library’s well-wrought defenses, checking for security against impact and weather, a given since one instance of the library spends all its time floating in the sky.
Everything’s fine, of course. It always is.
He looks at the little plum tree on the sill, observing the way the tree’s shadow is shortening as the strange cloud draws nearer in the sky. It seems to not only be moving closer, but also above them, based on the way the light is changing.
Unthinkingly, he moves to the middle of the atrium, standing between the desk and the bell-like curve at the front of the library, and looks up through the small skylight.
The light darkens and goes soft as the strange cloud moves overhead. Like the light underwater, rippling and gentle, in the heart of a storm cloud made liquid. Namjoon looks up at it, but he can’t see anything different from this angle. The same dark cloud, the same peek of otherworldly color over the top, like a magical portal just out of reach.
It’s distracting, and he looks at it a little too long.
When he looks around the library, he can tell something is different, and not just because Jungkook is hovering nervously between two shelves, big moon eyes shining at him in the strange light.
He clears his throat softly as Namjoon comes toward him, pulled unerringly by that feeling, a kind of constriction, like a yoke around his lungs.
“Umm, hyung? There’s a guy in your poetry books.”
“A guy?”
“A witch,” he amends quietly, his voice even softer than usual. Maybe he doesn’t want to be overheard, but Namjoon has a feeling there’s no point, if the connections he’s making are correct.
The poetry section is in the garden side, and the light here is mellow and butter-soft like early summer. But that strange sense of presence, that atmospheric pull, is still present, and as Namjoon comes around the magical classics shelf into one of his favorite parts of the library, he sees the source of it.
The hush in Jungkook’s voice suddenly seems funny, because the witch is very much dressed like someone Jungkook would admire. Tall shining black boots, sleek black trousers, a black tunic topped with a necklace made of winking silver stars, all swathed overtop by a huge, floor-sweeping black cloak that Namjoon wants to think is a bit much. He should think that, but the way the long, glossy dark waves of the witch’s hair flow into his collar and the way his pale face shines like a star in all that darkness also catch him off guard a bit.
Witches are so dramatic.
As Namjoon comes down the row of books, he observes the way the witch is grabbing volumes off the shelves haphazardly, seeming to flip them open and only read a few lines before dropping them back in random places, with no regard to where he pulled them from.
The witch’s hand flashes up to a slender volume of Lee Seongbok’s poetry as Namjoon comes up beside him, nearly smacking Namjoon in the face. “Welcome.” He places his hand lightly over the witch’s where it grips the spine of the book, ignoring the funny little jolt that goes through him with the direct contact. “Is there something I can help you find?”
“Oh. Hi.”
Somehow it’s not the response Namjoon expected. Up close, the witch is broad-shouldered but small, nearly a head shorter than Namjoon. He’s tilted his head to look at up at him, and his eyes are catlike and a little sleepy-looking.
“Can I look at this one?” The witch gives his hand a little wiggle, and Namjoon becomes aware that he’s still pinning the witch’s hand in place on the spine of the poetry book.
“Yes, of course.” As he releases his hand, Namjoon sees a hallucinatory flash of color at the witch’s wrist, where his sleeve has fallen up his arm a bit. The colors are sinuous, winding, perhaps a tattoo of flowers.
The witch resettles his cloak dramatically, flapping it forward over his shoulders to hide the glimpse of brightness, and he hunches over the book of poetry. Namjoon watches him flip rapidly to a page about halfway through and mutter a line softly to himself.
“The process itself is the goal, and the ending is simply the moment it stops.”
He makes a dissatisfied noise and pushes the book onto the shelf into a random spot lower down, in fact the place where the book currently in Namjoon’s shirt pocket is supposed to go.
Namjoon reaches to slide it out and reshelve it in the proper place. “I’m Kim Namjoon, the librarian here. Maybe if you tell me what you’re looking for, I can help you find it.”
At this, the witch stops scanning the shelves and fully turns to look at Namjoon.
It’s a gesture some witches might use to intimidate, or perhaps to make demands now that Namjoon has clearly identified himself, but there’s something hapless in the witch’s posture, something small, like a little black hole tugging at the soft summer light filtering through the tall windows.
“I’m Yoongi,” he says finally, uncertainly, like he expects a negative reaction. The sunlight whispers down between them. Outside in the garden, Namjoon hears the soft coo of a dove. It becomes clear the witch isn’t going to say anything else.
Namjoon nods. “I have a good selection here on the shelf, but I also specialize in sourcing rare magical texts, so if there’s anything particular you’re looking for, please don’t hesitate to ask. I have vast resources at my disposal to find anything you might need.”
The witch — Yoongi — is staring at him in a strange way during this little speech, eyelids lowered, dark eyes hovering somewhere around Namjoon’s chest, which Namjoon supposes is fair since it’s close to his eye level, until—
Yoongi extends a hand and lays it lightly over the small book of poetry tucked into Namjoon’s front shirt pocket, where it rests over his heart.
“Anything?”
Namjoon looks down at the witch’s hand pressed over the book. His fingertips wrap over the top of it, small points of warmth through the fabric of his shirt. “Yes. Anything you want me to find, I can do it.”
He isn’t really sure what makes him say it like that, like he’s answering an unspoken challenge. Maybe he senses that Yoongi is about to ask for something unusual, the same strange sense of premonition that’s been haunting him all morning, or maybe it’s just in the way he cast so many of Namjoon’s beloved books aside with such obvious disinterest. He must be looking for a very singular volume, something perhaps only Namjoon has the power to give him.
“I’m looking for a verse.” His eyes move a little higher now, not quite all the way up to Namjoon’s face, but somewhere around his chin level. “A verse that can make a very specific spell.”
“What does the spell do?”
Yoongi’s eyes do flash up to Namjoon’s then, and Namjoon feels briefly scorched and so seen, impossibly illuminated, like he’s just stepped out of his library doors directly onto the surface of the sun.
“That’s still in progress,” Yoongi replies mildly, his eyes falling to somewhere around Namjoon’s left ear. “But this is the book I need.”
From somewhere within his cloak, Yoongi pulls out a little black spiral notepad. Something flickers in the air as he flips it open, like the ripples in the air around a bonfire, there and then gone.
Yoongi tears away a small sheet of lined paper and holds it out to Namjoon. His eyes are pointed even lower now, perhaps all the way down to Namjoon’s hands, like he’s watching for the moment Namjoon will reach for the paper. His long hair falls in front of his eyes in slow, glossy strands.
Namjoon takes the paper. Yoongi releases it delicately, gaze fixed to it, or perhaps to the shared space where their hands meet in midair.
Unable to still his curiosity, Namjoon looks at the title immediately.
There are other things scribbled on the sides of the paper, notes and bits of what looks like poetry or song lyrics, all in the same handwriting, some of it in Korean and some in English, but Namjoon’s eye catches on the title at once like steel drawn to a magnet.
Song of the Red Sprites (A Preyless Hunter’s Lament)
A thrill rushes down Namjoon’s spine. He looks up from the little piece of paper to find Yoongi staring directly at him, gaze intent, like he’s concentrating on Namjoon’s response before he’s even spoken.
This isn’t a joke. He really wants Namjoon to get this book for him.
Namjoon chooses his next words carefully.
“I’ve never had a reason to seek this book before, but I’ve always wanted to read it myself, and the opportunity to copy it for the library is invaluable. I’m happy to get it for you.”
“You know it?” Yoongi relaxes slightly, shoulders swathed in that ridiculous cloak sinking into an almost-slump.
“Of course.” Namjoon does his best to manage his scandalized tone. He can never quite understand it when witches find his knowledge of magical texts surprising. He’s only the head librarian of the most extensive magical library on earth. But witches can be like that sometimes: insular, vaguely patronizing, mostly unaware that interesting and capable people exist outside their narrow ranks. He’s disappointed but not surprised.
Except Yoongi does surprise him by suddenly dipping his head into an embarrassed little bow. “Yeah. I suppose you would. I guess I just thought— it’s a little off the beaten path. But if you’re willing to get it, great.” He says all of this while staring at Namjoon’s elbow, which is still bent, hand still holding the note paper between them.
Namjoon is taken aback again. He attempts to recalibrate. “It doesn’t pose a danger, if that’s what you mean. I’m in charge of acquisitions here, and I’ve been training for it my entire existence.” I’m a highly specialized magical practitioner, even though I’m not a witch, he doesn’t say. He realizes that he may have been projecting some of his own insecurities onto Yoongi’s response.
Yoongi looks directly into his eyes again, and it’s just as intense as the first time, like a searchlight beaming into Namjoon’s soul for a moment.
His eyes fall quickly to the note paper, which he gently slides out of Namjoon’s hand and puts back inside his cloak somewhere. “Good. As long as it’s no trouble for you.”
His eyes flick back up to Namjoon’s chest, and before Namjoon thinks to stop him, he reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out the little book of poetry tucked there, flipping it open to a random page.
He tilts his head, lips moving silently for a moment before he reads a scrap of a poem out loud. His voice is a little lower when he reads, soft and heavy, the sleepiness in it sharpened to a focus and intensity that Namjoon finds pleasing to the ear.
“…flowing as easy as milk and as certain as darkness. You can pick up a word and hold it, opaque, untranslated.”
Something in the air shifts, as though the fluidity the poem describes is expanding into something that encapsulates them both, is becoming the very sunlight that falls softly on them through the windows, that makes the dust dance and the old books on the shelves breathe in the quiet.
Yoongi snaps the book shut decisively. “Can I borrow this too? While I’m waiting.”
There it is again, the witch’s bravado Namjoon is used to. In Yoongi it seems to be dueling with a strange shyness, but it’s there nevertheless. Something about that combination is more appealing to Namjoon than it might otherwise be in another witch. He finds that he wants Yoongi to borrow the book, because he wants to know what he thinks of it.
“Yes, of course. I’ll see you in a week’s time, if that’s convenient? The book will be ready when you return.”
There’s a moment while Yoongi settles his cloak around himself, fiddling with the edges like he’s trying to vanish inside it, that Namjoon isn’t sure he’s going to reply, until finally— “I look forward to it.”
He turns and walks away before Namjoon can consider a response, and steps into a soft starry expanse like a patch of night winking open in midair at the end of the aisle, and that’s that.
It’s abrupt, but Namjoon doesn’t feel at all crestfallen. After all, he’ll get to invade the sky realms to steal a book from a dragon’s hoard this week, and make a copy of it for the library, and he has Yoongi to thank for it.
II. Dreams are not for being deleted but for being painted
The copying process takes longer than expected, because all the spiraling red lightning flashing through Namjoon’s brain as he reads gives him headaches, and he ends up pulling a couple all-nighters late in the week, limbs trembling and eyes flashing with a dragon’s voice like thunder, in order to have the book ready for Yoongi’s return.
Jungkook is beside himself to the point of calling in one of their hyungs, which Namjoon does appreciate a little, since Seokjin also brings food.
Thankfully, he shows up after Namjoon has already finished, otherwise Namjoon might have been annoyed to be interrupted, but it’s always hard anyway to be angry with Jungkook, who is so earnest and sweet even when he’s bringing Seokjin here to distract him.
“Jungkookie tells me you haven’t been sleeping again.” Seokjin taps his finger casually against Namjoon’s forehead, and his headache immediately drains away, the stormy weather there replaced by a soft lightness like fluffy clouds.
Namjoon sighs. “I appreciate it, hyung, but it’s not like that. Not exactly. It’s not insomnia, I just had some work to finish up for a deadline.” He looks to the completed book, sitting neatly at the edge of his desk in its fresh binding, title gleaming on the cover in red foil, letters branching and elegant like the lightning that birthed them. Some of his best work, in his own humble opinion.
“And since when do you care about making witches wait? Aren’t you always going on about how we ought to understand the merits of patience and hard work, or something like that?”
Seokjin is filling a plate with a row of round, puffy pastries in unlikely colors, including one that appears to have a small, frothing ocean contained inside it, but which is almost certainly an illusion of some sort.
“Here, try it, you’ll like it. It’s savory.” Unerringly, Seokjin catches where Namjoon’s attention has fallen, and picks up the pastry, zooming it towards his mouth as though he’s going to feed Namjoon like a baby.
Namjoon rolls his eyes and accepts the bite, if only because he knows Seokjin won’t give up until he does.
He chews, and uses that as an excuse to mull over his answer. It really is delicious, warm and salty and nourishing, kind of like a curry bun but also light and buttery.
“This is different. It was — unusual. Challenging. I wanted to do it, I was excited. I haven’t felt like that in a long time.” As he says it, he realizes it’s true. He wanted to finish it because he felt compelled, even with the headaches and the intensity of all that weather magic, the words of an ancient dragon storming through his body, he felt exhilarated. He couldn’t stop, but at the same time he felt lit up by the task, like he almost didn’t want it to end.
As this realization dawns on him, he notices the light over the library darkening and becoming strange, like the artificial twilight that comes with an eclipse.
“He’s here,” Namjoon says, standing up at his desk.
Seokjin smirks at him.
“Shut up.”
Seokjin’s smirk intensifies into a patronizing little smile. “That’s rude. I haven’t said anything.”
“I knew you were about to say something, and I didn’t want to hear it. Give the rest of these to Jungkook, he needs them more than I do.”
“So incredibly rude. Here, take this one to your new best friend. I’ll just be here having a civilized and pleasant lunch with Jungkookie, the only one here who appreciates me.”
Namjoon accepts a twinkling, flower-covered pastry resembling a tiny enchanted garden from Seokjin, because as always, he knows it would be more difficult to disagree, and tucks the book carefully under his arm, heading into the shelves where he knows instinctively that Yoongi is waiting.
He’s sitting in one of the window alcoves this time, shoulder tucked against the wall with his back to the glass, the soft riot of color from Namjoon’s garden waving gently behind him through the window.
The sunlight cuts diagonally across his face, and he looks exhausted. His eyes are closed, and there’s a heaviness to his posture wasn’t there before. He’s not wearing his cloak this time, instead draped in a huge, soft-looking black sweater with small rips at the collar and hem. With his eyelashes casting dramatic shadows over his cheek, he looks almost too pretty to disturb.
Namjoon stops walking a little too abruptly, not wanting to startle him, and his sudden movement disturbs the wind chimes hanging overhead, sending them into a tiny tinkling frenzy.
Yoongi opens his eyes slowly and lifts his head as though he’s still a bit dazed. Namjoon wonders if he had actually managed to fall asleep in the few minutes since he got here.
“Sorry if I woke you.”
“It’s ok. I was just resting. Your garden is pretty.” His voice is low, words a little blurred and unfiltered. He seems too worn down to be as shy and self-aware as the last time Namjoon saw him.
He doesn’t know why the casual compliment towards his garden feels so personal, but it does. “Oh, thank you. It’s– I try to take good care of it. I enjoy the landscaping.”
“You made it yourself?” Yoongi’s eyes slide over to him. He’s leaning the side of his face against the window, like he wants to keep one eye on the garden while he talks about it. It’s cute.
“Yes. I planted the first trees almost twenty years ago now.” Namjoon feels oddly proud to be given the chance to share this fact. No one ever asks about the garden.
Yoongi closes his eyes again, and for a moment his face looks nearly translucent with exhaustion. It gives Namjoon the impression of the thin skin of a drum stretched tight over so much hollow space. He sees Yoongi’s hands flex suddenly in his lap, and his eyes open, returning the ferocity to his countenance. “I’d like to see it some time. Maybe next time?”
“Of course. I’d love that.” The words rush out before Namjoon’s brain can fully approve them. His face feels strangely hot. He isn’t sure if he should be embarrassed, but he always has trouble reining in his own enthusiasm for the things he’s really passionate about. For some reason, the idea of Yoongi in his garden fills him with an emotional intensity that he rarely feels for anything other than books and plants.
He looks down, and remembers the reason they’re talking in the first place. “I have the book you asked for. Song of the Red Sprites. And a pastry made by Seokjin-hyung. He runs a very popular bakeshop, if you’re hungry.”
He looks up again to see Yoongi staring at him blankly, like he can’t quite make sense of all the words coming out of Namjoon’s mouth.
“Sure. Yes. Thanks.” He holds out both of his hands, and Namjoon places the book and the pastry into each, feeling a bit foolish.
Namjoon notices proudly the way he’s drawn to the book immediately, eyes snapping to it and not leaving once Namjoon hands it to him. He sets the pastry down gently on the window seat beside him, a tiny garden silhouetted against a bigger one, and runs his hand lightly, reverently over the book’s cover, the foil letters winking in the light.
“This is beautiful work.” He curls his fingers around the cover’s edge and tilts it slightly, watching the light move over the letters. “Is this what it looked like when you saw it?”
Namjoon considers the question as Yoongi flips the book open, turning pages, perhaps looking for a particular verse. “Well, sort of. I couldn’t see it, exactly, it was more like– hearing. Inside my mind.”
Yoongi pauses with his finger over a line of text. “And you, what– you transcribe it all afterwards?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. I interpret and record what I’ve learned in a book so the information can be accessed by others.” Namjoon hesitates over a longer explanation. Anyone not in his specific line of work — anyone besides Jungkook, essentially — rarely asks about the process.
Yoongi bends over the book, hair slipping forward to half-cover his face. Namjoon can’t tell if he’s lost in thought or in the words on the page. Then his eyes flash up to Namjoon and back down again, so fast that if Namjoon wasn’t fixed on his reaction he might have missed it. “That’s extraordinary.”
Yoongi tucks himself deeper into the window seat. “I’ve always thought translation is an underappreciated art.”
Unable to help himself, Namjoon leans forward eagerly. “Yes, precisely. There are so many ephemeral nuances, so many ways to phrase a thought, so much that can be lost. Well, I often feel like something is always lost, despite my best efforts. I have an affinity for nature magic, but a language of lightning is one of the stranger source texts I’ve worked with.”
“And yet you created this in a week.”
Leaned forward as he is, Namjoon can see the page Yoongi has stopped on, can see the line where his finger rests. In the dark orbit, veins of light from the burning heart nourish the body of night. The red voice of the sky fills up the eyes, brilliance fills up the vessels of bodies born from stars—
“I like this. The idea of night as a vast animal. Is it a metaphor?”
Namjoon feels another thrill, a deeper, more decisive one that shakes his core. Yoongi is reading the book, the one he just finished translating, and asking him about metaphors.
“It’s difficult to say. A dragon of living lightning whose body is inseparable from its own magic may interact with the world differently than we do. What’s real to them may not be something we can fully experience.”
He turns the page slowly. “I should like to meet the animal of night. Maybe I could learn from it. Have they written a book as well?”
Helplessly, Namjoon feels a broad smile take over his face as he imagines the field work he might undertake to search for the animal of night and record its story.
When he refocuses on the real world in front of him, Yoongi is staring at him with a stunned expression, lips parted, eyes wide. Somehow with this face on, he reminds Namjoon even more of a cat than ever.
Yoongi blurts out, “Oh. Your smile.” His face starts to turn pink, and he covers it immediately, hands tucked into the oversized sleeves of his sweater like black paws. “Sorry. I’m so tired. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
His reaction makes Namjoon feel unaccountably embarrassed on his behalf. What about his smile? “Here, eat this. Knowing Seokjin-hyung, it probably has 1400 nutrients and your favorite flavors in it already. His food is like that.”
Namjoon picks up the pastry from the window sill and holds it out to Yoongi again, realizing too late that it seems like he’s offering to feed it to him.
“Ok.” Yoongi, now leaning with his back flat against the window, hands dropped to his lap, seems to have interpreted it that way too. He stares at the pastry Namjoon’s holding in front of him, a little cross-eyed (cute), cheeks still a little pink, and opens his mouth.
It’s fine. If Seokjin can do it for Namjoon, then Namjoon can do it for Yoongi. It’s just something people do for each other.
Namjoon calmly feeds him the pastry, watching those delicate pink lips close around the frosting so near to Namjoon’s fingers.
He tears his eyes from Yoongi’s mouth, only to find that Yoongi is staring him right in the face, and something in him malfunctions, because Yoongi is done eating but Namjoon’s hand is still there, frozen, unable to move.
“Thanks.” His breath hits Namjoon’s fingers, warm and close, startling Namjoon back into the moment.
“Uh. Yes. Yes, of course.” He grasps desperately for a topic, any topic. “You said you’re tired, and you look– you look tired. Is everything all right?” He manages to stop himself from putting his hand over his face in embarrassment, but only because he wants to keep looking at Yoongi. One corner of his mouth tweaks up in a tiny smirk, there and then gone. Namjoon gets the sense the expression is directed as much at Yoongi himself as at Namjoon.
“Sort of. I haven’t been sleeping well.”
His gaze drops back to the book still open in his lap, fingers skimming lightly over the page. “I have a difficult task ahead, that requires weaving a new spell, and I’m still figuring out how I’m going to do it. Gathering ideas. I think this will help.”
Namjoon feels something he rarely feels, then, like ripples spreading slowly in a still pond, or the rings of a tree expanding at infinitesimal speed. A feeling of completeness, his own efforts coming full circle. He rarely gets to feel this in his line of work.
“I hope it will. If you need anything else, you only have to ask.” Even if it’s to find the animal of night, or something else that may or may not exist, Namjoon thinks feverishly that he’ll do it, he’ll find a way.
He watches as Yoongi tucks his fingers inside the cuffs of his sweater, poking at little worn patches where his knuckles show through the fabric. It reminds Namjoon of the way cats like to dig their claws into soft things.
“Well. There is something. It might be very helpful, but it’s– it might also be hard to find. Even more so than this.”
He lays his hand over the edge of the book, wrapping his fingers around the cover and gently closing it, fingertips trailing along the spine. Namjoon likes the careful, possessive way he handles it, like it’s something he wants to covet.
“I can do it. Just try me.” The reckless words spill out easily. The truth is, even in his current state of exhaustion and humming nerves, Namjoon has never felt more alive. His entire body is singing with purpose. Yoongi has another task for him, an even greater and more challenging one. One that might help him with a difficult spell, one that he needs verses from multiple books to formulate.
Yoongi sets the book aside carefully, and his hands move into a familiar pattern, as though he’s about to start shaping a sculpture in midair. Namjoon focuses, recognizing the instinctual movements of a witch about to do magic. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.”
As Yoongi speaks, faint structures like the ghosts of buildings trace themselves in air. “At certain times, there is a place that never existed.”
Tiny lights like stars wink into the air, hovering between half-formed walls, staircases that spiral dizzyingly between small towers and platforms, a strange and vertiginous architecture that looks like something from a puzzle game. “It always exists, not here, but there.”
The structure grows in miniature, intensifying in complexity with a rhythm that seems to match the acceleration of Namjoon’s heartbeat. “To go there, you need a map, but the map only exists there. Not now, but then.”
Namjoon speaks the next line aloud, at the same time as Yoongi, their voices in sync. “Every known and unknown language is said to be written on its walls.”
“You’re looking for the Scriptures of the Labyrinth Lost in Time.” Namjoon’s heartbeat is pulsing in his ears, in his throat.
“I am.”
Yoongi looks at him, face faintly illuminated by the soft glow of his own magic, hair backlit by the familiar colors of Namjoon’s garden through the window. He looks young in the soft light, even though Namjoon suspects by now that he must be very old, perhaps older even than Namjoon.
“I’ve always wanted to go there.” Namjoon feels breathless. He would have had no conceivable reason to ever seek it out, as difficult as it’s said to be to find, if no one ever asked. But Yoongi is asking.
“Can you?” The summoned structures dissolve into the air in a soft spray of color as Yoongi rests his hands back in his lap. Without the light of his magic, he looks tired again.
“Of course. With very complicated math, I’m sure. I’ll need to plot a course through spacetime.” Somehow, Namjoon resists leaping to his feet then and there to get started. He can picture the exact maps he’ll need on which shelves, is already mentally tracing his route through the library to gather them all.
“If you’ve always wanted to go, why haven’t you?” Yoongi is fiddling with the cuffs of his sweater again, looking smaller and softer than when he was doing magic and reciting the words, the words all young witches learn of a legendary place that only half-exists and that most of them will never see.
“Such an intensive acquisition trip isn’t something I could ever justify without a request from a patron. My magic works differently from a witch’s. My role is in service of the library, and the knowledge that others seek through it.” Namjoon says it plainly, without any chagrin, despite how it probably sounds to a witch as seemingly powerful as Yoongi, who seeks legendary books for a spell that does something he won’t name.
Yoongi stares down at his hands in his lap for a moment too long. There’s a delicate flush in his cheeks, pink like the first blush of morning in a dawn sky.
Finally, he lifts his gaze to look at Namjoon.
“Are there no limits to what you could do, if someone asks for it?”
The hush that falls between them is so absolute that it feels quiet even to Namjoon, who lives in this library. Quiet enough for him to hear a soft snuffle from the next row over that sounds suspiciously like muffled laughter, and it occurs to him he hasn’t heard the clink of teacups and cutlery from Seokjin and Jungkook’s supposed lunch in some time.
Yoongi, unfortunately, seems to hear it too, if the way he jumps to his feet like a startled cat is any indication.
“Sorry, I’ve overstayed my welcome – I mean, not that you’ve made me feel unwelcome – I just really have to go put some more work in on this spell, I can’t afford any more delays—”
He wobbles a little, overbalancing, so Namjoon comes forward to catch him, and Yoongi sort of falls into his arms, so now they’re just standing there facing each other with Namjoon’s hands on his waist and Yoongi’s hands on his chest.
“That’s alright, I understand. I’ll have the book for you when you return.” They’re nearly the same words he says to everyone, but somehow they feel different when he says them to Yoongi. Not just routine, but a promise he wants to keep.
From up close, with his eyes wide and staring at Namjoon, Yoongi looks much softer than the broody, unapproachable, melodramatically cloaked witch Namjoon met on his first visit. That air of awkwardness is still there, but it reminds him more of a cat peeking from behind a bookshelf than the powerful, standoffish panther of his first impression.
Yoongi steps back quickly, hugging Song of the Red Sprites to his chest with both arms. “Thank you. I’ll be back soon. Thank you for this, and for the food.”
His head hangs forward while he says it, hair half-hiding his face, and he turns and rushes around the shelves out of sight just as abruptly as last time.
Except this time, he comes slingshotting back around the corner less than a minute later, where Namjoon is still standing looking after him like a forlorn fool.
In that brief interim Yoongi seems somehow to have regained a good deal of his composure, because the corner of his mouth is tweaked up in a smirk, and he’s holding a different book in his hand, the book of poetry Namjoon lent him last time.
“I’ve just been reminded that I need to return this.” As he says it, the book in his hand gives a powerful little tremble, like it might leap out of his hand, a fish returning to water.
“Oh. Sorry, that’s– it gets triggered automatically when it’s past the time I’m expecting it back.” Namjoon is mortified. The binding spell for book returns is intended for people who are careless with his books, or even worse, try to make off with them. He can’t remember the last time he forgot to ask after a lent-out book when the borrower is right here in the library with him. He thinks it’s never happened before.
Yoongi, unlike the majority of witches who run afoul of Namjoon’s binding spell, seems to find it funny. “It was my fault for forgetting. I meant to return it.”
He hands the book over. Namjoon can’t help but notice a number of dogeared pages that weren’t folded before, and even – he lets the book flip open – handwritten marginalia. In a library book.
Incredibly, his first impulse is to sit down and reread it cover to cover, all of Yoongi’s notes included, and perhaps write some of his own notes back. In a library book! At the very least, Yoongi should be reprimanded, but somehow Namjoon can’t bring himself to want to.
He swallows. “Thank you. I hope it was helpful, or at least an enjoyable read.”
“It was both. It made me aware of a lacuna in my approach to spellwork, and I liked the cat poems.”
Namjoon has to suppress a smile at the idea of Yoongi, in his black cloak inside of his big traveling magical storm cloud, reading cat poems and scribbling margin notes.
“I thought you might.” He tucks the book tenderly into his own pocket to peruse later. “I can recommend more poetry for you, if you like. Next time.”
The air in the library thickens, the gravity shifting. The ends of Yoongi’s long hair start to lift upward, like he might come unmoored from the floor.
“A week from now? In the garden?” In the slow golden light, with his hair trailing upwards and the faintest hint of a pink flush in his cheeks, he looks like someone Namjoon will always want to meet a week from now, no matter the circumstance.
“I’ll see you then.” I’ll see you any time you show up. Come every day if you want, he doesn’t say.
A feeling comes like electricity snapping in the air, fizzing over the surface of his skin, and some of the lighter books start to tremble and lift a little from the shelves, the light from the windows peeking through beneath them.
“I have to go now.”
Before Namjoon can reply, can even process what’s happening, Yoongi reaches across the space between them and grabs his hand, squeezing it briefly. A small jolt of invisible electricity shoots up Namjoon’s arm, a tiny lightning strike just for the two of them.
Yoongi turns to go in a whirl of dark hair, his feet barely touching the floor, and he’s gone.
III. The dream is always present, the one who’s escaping is you
It takes Namjoon almost two weeks of wandering in the Labyrinth to find and record all the carvings he’s looking for, but thanks to the method he devised to journey there by bisecting spacetime, he arrives back only about three hours after he left, just long enough for Jungkook’s tantrum to have subsided.
“It wasn’t a tantrum, hyung.” He looks up at Namjoon with those big, sparkling, accusatory eyes. “I can’t believe you left me here for weeks instead of bringing me on the adventure of a lifetime. I’m supposed to be your apprentice.”
“It’s only been a few hours for you. And that’s exactly the point. You’re my apprentice. I can’t leave the library unattended, anyone could wander in. Case in point, what is he doing here?”
The fey and lovely demon draped over Namjoon’s desk with his nose in an upside-down book finally meets Namjoon’s eyes over the top of the book and snaps it shut, running a hand through his golden hair to show a brief flash of the little black horns hiding there, and smiles in a twinkling and vaguely mischievous way that Namjoon doesn’t like. He’s too cute for a demon. It makes him seem even more untrustworthy.
Jungkook covers his ears shyly and looks at the floor, suddenly unable to meet Namjoon’s eyes. “Jimin is just here to keep me company. It’s lonely being here all alone, you know.”
As Jimin comes around the desk to hang off of Jungkook’s arm and whisper something sweet and giggly in his ear, someone else with soft, curly dark hair stands up from behind Namjoon’s desk – was he on the floor? – elongating his body in an endless stretch and letting out a big, bellowing yawn. He peers sleepily over at Namjoon, who has had enough, and comes over to thump his pack down on his own desk, which has apparently been commandeered by all manner of interlopers under his apprentice’s supervision.
“Who the hell is this?”
The sleepy stranger looks at him with doe eyes almost as deadly as Jungkook’s. “Who, me?”
“Oh, that’s Tae, he’s mine.” Jimin says it breezily, like it’s a sensible thing to say about a person. It isn’t until he picks up a slim golden chain attached to a leather choker around the other man’s neck and gives it a little jingle that the meaning of his words belatedly slides into place in Namjoon’s weary brain. He takes in the way Tae folds himself small against Jimin’s side so that Jimin can scratch fondly behind the soft black cat ears Namjoon hadn’t noticed in his hair.
“Ok. Everyone out. You too.” He points at Jungkook, who gives him another tragically crestfallen look. “Take this somewhere else. No – cavorting, whatever this is – in the library.”
“You were flirting in the library just yesterday.” Jungkook says it in a sulky little voice, but he’s gathering up his things, which means he’s going to take everyone to his small, sun-drenched rooms below the library, and Namjoon won’t have to hear what they get up to down there.
The rest of the week is almost leisurely by comparison to last week. Namjoon has plenty of time to go about his book-making with the kind of meticulous care he likes most, and he gets to make illustrations, which he also loves. He even writes a small folio preserving the magic mathematical equations he used to locate and travel to and from the Labyrinth, which will be an exciting addition to the scholarship.
He leaves the other patrons to Jungkook, and he’s interrupted only by Seokjin, who insists on visiting again in the middle of the week.
“Hard at work for Yoongichi, I see?”
Namjoon looks up from the careful lines of his map and adjusts his glasses. “What did you call him? Hyung, have you been meddling?”
“Of course not. I happen to have met him in his previous life. He’s very famous, you know. But I guess you wouldn’t know, all holed up here.”
That gives Namjoon pause. For Seokjin to have known Yoongi in his previous life, he must have been a witch then too, which means Namjoon’s suspicion that he’s older than he seems is correct. “Is he as old as you are?”
Seokjin raises his eyebrows in a show of offense. “Excuse you, I’m not old.” He makes a gesture in the air that reminds Namjoon of a princess throwing a long fall of hair over one shoulder, except Seokjin’s hair isn’t quite long enough for that. It still has the intended effect.
“He’s younger than me, only a little. Yes, to me, you’re all sweet little babies.”
Namjoon manages not to roll his eyes, only because he knows it will annoy Seokjin further, and make it harder to get the information he wants.
“And what is he famous for?”
“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t deign to answer that, since gossiping is beneath me.” He smiles slightly, and Namjoon somehow resists the sarcastic remark lurking behind his teeth. “However, I think it’s reasonably something anyone would be expected to know, unless they live completely under a rock in the sky as you do, so I’ll make an exception.”
Namjoon makes a show of neatly setting his printing tools aside. He recognizes Seokjin’s penchant for melodrama when he has a truly attentive audience, and Namjoon knows how to participate when that’s what’s required of him.
“He is a weather witch of the highest and most prodigious power. So much so that his skills are sometimes required on an exoatmospheric scale.”
Namjoon stares. “What do you mean, like– in space?”
“That’s one way to put it.” Seokjin is enjoying himself far too much.
For a moment, Namjoon pictures Yoongi drifting in the darkness of space among distant stars and planets, but the thought is so infinitely lonely that he immediately banishes it. He thinks of the photos he’s seen taken from space of lightning blazing through the upper atmosphere. It’s no wonder he wanted to read Song of the Red Sprites.
Apart from this, Namjoon is having trouble imagining the practical use of spellwork up there in a vacuum. “What would a weather witch even do in space?”
“That’s his business, not mine.” Seokjin leans against the desk, holding up one arm to peer at the sparkling golden watch on his wrist, which displays an assortment of colorful astrological symbols instead of numbers. “Ah. My beloved approaches.”
Despite his momentary annoyance with Seokjin, Namjoon perks up. Seokjin’s longtime paramour, Hoseok, is someone Namjoon gets along with pretty well, despite how different they are.
He bursts through the front doors of the library dramatically, the golden glow that always surrounds him dimming a bit to save their eyes, and Namjoon is already smiling before the shrieks of greeting even start. Soon, Jungkook emerges from somewhere with both Jimin and Taehyung in tow, and the front atrium of the library fills up with sound and laughter.
For a few suspended, golden moments, everything is easy. Namjoon rarely gets this feeling, and it’s nice to be able to let everything go and just enjoy the convivial company of friends, and people who he doesn’t know as well yet but maybe could be friends.
He wonders, a little foolishly, if Yoongi has this, or something like this. Namjoon can’t shake the feeling that those bursts of shyness, along with the revelation from Seokjin that he’s famous (Namjoon can’t help but remember the awkward way he introduced himself when they first met, like he expected Namjoon’s demeanor toward him to change) – that the air of loneliness around him isn’t just a reflection of Namjoon, but something almost tangible, something possibly accumulated over years that surrounds him like a soft force field of untouchability.
But Yoongi had touched him, the last time he was here.
Namjoon is used to being almost invisible himself. Helpful, certainly, but not necessarily valued simply for who he is as a person. He’s realizing that over time, he’s slowly come to think of himself more and more as a kind of tool, perhaps a very useful and purposeful one, but still — not someone that lives to touch and be touched, that enjoys moments of laughter with friends, that has an answer to loneliness, that wants to love and be loved.
Now, as he watches the easy, fond way Seokjin and Hoseok leave little touches on each other while they talk, and the way Jungkook keeps stealing shy, sweet glances at Jimin while he’s laughing with Tae, and the way Tae puts his arm around Jungkook and pulls him effortlessly into their conversation, it all seems – easy. Like maybe it could be possible, not just for all of them, but also for Namjoon.
He carries this strange, fragile, sweet feeling inside himself for the rest of the week, as he carefully finishes the book’s illustrations and binding, and deliberates over a new book of poetry to recommend. The problem is that he has too many options, and he’s having trouble narrowing it down.
He’s drinking tea and rereading Yoongi’s scrawled margin notes for the fifth time, while moving poetry books between three different piles on his desk in an ever-changing sorting system that he couldn’t explain to Jungkook even when asked, when the light changes.
It isn’t as noticeable this time, because today it’s raining skyside, the library already suffused in soft grey underwater light, crepuscular and crystalline through rain-soaked windows.
Namjoon gathers up the books and the tea tray and moves quietly through the rows of shelves to the garden side, the soft hush of rain fading as he emerges into mellow sunlight. It will be an especially beautiful day in the garden.
Silhouetted against the wooden screen that divides one corner of the library from the small covered porch leading to Namjoon’s garden is a figure draped in white like a marble statue. Namjoon blinks, and it resolves into Yoongi in an oversized off-white sweater over a long, pleated black skirt that sweeps the floor. It’s a reasonably casual look, but the figure it cuts is dramatic enough for Namjoon to recognize the continuity between this Yoongi and the one he met that first day, impatiently pulling books off the shelves in his big black cloak.
He doesn’t turn right away when Namjoon comes up beside him, but he does take a sideways step closer, putting the side of his arm right up against Namjoon’s. It reminds him so much of a cat nudging against a person’s leg with hesitant affection that his heart seizes in his chest.
“I wasn’t sure if I chose a bad day for the weather, but it looks like we’re in luck.”
“Yes. When I became the head librarian, I chose this location for its mild weather year-round. I wanted there to always be something living in the garden.”
Yoongi doesn’t speak for a moment, but he does turn his face toward Namjoon ever so slightly, just enough for his little pink mouth and the soft rounded edge of his nose to be visible past the dark fall of his hair. Namjoon watches, mesmerized, unable to look away from the hesitant parting of his lips.
“I like that, the thought behind it. It’s a good reason.” He seems to clear the boundary of his own reticence, because he turns toward Namjoon more decisively, though his gaze appears to be drifting somewhere around Namjoon’s collarbone. “It used to be stupidly high up in the mountains, you know. It was practically a pilgrimage to get here.”
Namjoon is well aware. His mentor was an even more reclusive man than Namjoon. “I know. That’s an unfortunate tendency of hermits, they love hiding in the mountains.”
There’s a pause, a moment where Namjoon lets his little joke sit before he’ll suggest they go into the garden and have tea, but to his surprise, Yoongi speaks.
“You’re not trying to hide, are you?” As he says it, Namjoon feels the unmistakable tug of one of Yoongi’s fingers – his pinky? – sliding briefly against the edge of Namjoon’s palm, almost like he’s trying to hold his hand, before his touch shies away again.
Namjoon is too taken aback to reply with anything other than honesty. “I don’t think so. Not anymore, at least.”
He looks at Yoongi then to find him looking right back at him. His dark eyes are a little lighter with the sunlight from the garden turning them lucid, brown and clear like well-polished stones resting at the bottom of a stream. Namjoon is momentarily transfixed, and almost forgets he’s holding a tray full of tea things and a book that he cheated time and space to transcribe.
“Whoa.” Yoongi’s hands come up to steady the tray, resting over Namjoon’s one-handed balancing act, which was probably a foolhardy idea in the first place, with how clumsy Namjoon can sometimes be. Most of the time he’s fine, but sometimes he gets– flustered.
This is the second time Yoongi has touched him in less than a minute. Namjoon lets himself observe this and file it away for future scrutiny, because right now he isn’t prepared to decode it.
“Come with me.”
He manages to lead them into the garden without further incident, and finds a good spot for them beneath the trailing branches of a willow, next to the lotus pond, which is only just beginning to bloom with the warmer weather.
The sun creates a glow through the leaves, surrounding them in a soft halo of light, like they’re in an outdoor room made of yellows and greens.
Namjoon loves it here. This is one of his favorite places to sit and read, or simply to let his mind wander and absorb the beauty of this place, the sweet simplicity of the birdsong and the movement of wind on water.
Jungkook usually gets antsy in a few minutes, and ends up splashing around in the pond or climbing a tree, singing something under his breath all the while so it’s impossible to forget his presence. Not that Namjoon wants to, or begrudges Jungkook’s way of relating with nature, but sometimes he just wants to soak in the quiet, to focus on the little sounds of the garden as it moves undisturbed around him, as it shows him what it’s like when no one’s around. Like he’s becoming a part of it himself, one with the trees and earth.
Yoongi sits in the quiet with him, leaning back against the trunk of the tree, melting into it with his head tilted back as though he’s taking in the tree as it hangs above them. He looks surprisingly content, and Namjoon is briefly lit up with an inner rush of warmth, a glow that expands to fill him until he’s almost giddy. He hadn’t imagined he could feel like this for anything other than his books and his plants, the quiet passions he usually shares with no one else. He wants Yoongi to like this place as much as he does, to feel at home here, to want to come back and spend time here. Namjoon wants him here all the time, he realizes.
He copes with this feeling by presenting Yoongi with the book. It’s hard to contain his own excitement, but he tamps it down in favor of watching Yoongi’s reaction.
Yoongi sets his teacup aside and takes hold of it reverently, holding it in both hands above his lap before opening it to one of the map plates, a rendering of the heart of the labyrinth, where the walls swirl and twist in on each other like the whorl of a shell.
Yoongi smiles then, and he suddenly looks so young, eyes crinkling, his whole face lit up, all his gums showing with the kind of delight that Namjoon doesn’t think he’s ever seen directed at himself. It splits something open in his chest.
“There really isn’t anything you can’t do.”
He doesn’t even say it like a question. It makes Namjoon feel stupidly happy. He knows it isn’t true, not really, but then at the same time, he doesn’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t at least attempt if Yoongi asked. He can’t see himself failing if it were for him.
They spend the afternoon like that, timeless in the golden-green bubble of the garden, exclaiming over different details of the maps Namjoon reproduced so carefully, asking and answering each other’s questions, conjecturing together as they extrapolate new meanings in lost languages.
Yoongi is studying one of the maps in the appendix, leaning on his side with his hair brushing the grass, when it finally occurs to Namjoon to wonder again— “What kind of spell is this, that makes use of all this disparate research?”
Though Yoongi seems more relaxed than Namjoon has ever seen him, he expects the question might put him a little bit on guard, but he’s surprised when Yoongi drops his head into his hands and laughs.
There’s something a little unhinged about it, like someone who laughs instead of crying, yet it also seems like an emotion unreachable to comfort. Namjoon waits.
The brief storm of emotion clears from his face, and he seems somehow looser than before. He folds himself into a sitting position, arms resting on his knees, looking out at the sunlight on the pond. In late summer, it barely feels like time is passing here.
“Well, the council of weather witches chose me for a task, but it’s not that the research is going into the spell, exactly. It’s more like– I’m going into the spell with everything I have, and I’m worried that I don’t have enough.”
Namjoon blinks. He’s aware that this is still a non-answer of a kind. Before he can ask, Yoongi does something completely unexpected, and reaches across the space between them to take hold of one of Namjoon’s hands, and starts to sort of play with it, batting it between his hands like a cat with a soft toy.
“Sorry. I’m not used to talking about– well. Talking to anyone about anything, really. But I wanted to tell you the truth, just in case– um.” He pauses, and suddenly looks lost, small and far away, like he’s shrinking internally. Namjoon is struck by a vivid mental image of Yoongi, underwater, drifting further and further from the surface. Without really deciding to, he tightens his hand reflexively around Yoongi’s fingers where they’re dancing idly over the surface of his palm.
Namjoon’s eyes are fixed on Yoongi’s face, unable to look away, but Yoongi is looking over Namjoon’s shoulder, perhaps to the light dancing on the water, or the leaves swaying from the hanging branches.
“I’m going to start from the beginning.” His mouth flattens into a line, an expression that makes Namjoon think he’s laughing at himself. “Well, no, not exactly. I’ll summarize. My last life didn’t go as well as this one.”
His gaze drops back down to their hands, where one of his fingertips is tracing over Namjoon’s knuckles.
“This time I’m trying to do things differently. But I maybe– I don’t know, overcorrected a little. I just wanted to be useful. To do something good that would have a big effect, that would be felt by a lot of people. That I could point to and say, look, everyone benefited from this. It was worth it to keep me around.”
Namjoon makes a noise that isn’t a word, and lifts his other hand to cup Yoongi’s face. His hand feels awkward, like a big bear paw, but he somehow finds a natural position, the corner of Yoongi’s jaw fitting perfectly in the center of his palm, his thumb tracing gently along the edge of Yoongi’s soft cheek.
He looks at Namjoon, eyes big like he’s startled, but then his eyes drop, eyelashes low over his cheek, a hint of that sweet shyness that keeps appearing. Namjoon doesn’t like the possibility that it might be because he wonders if it’s worth it for other people to have him around.
The gesture seems to be enough. Yoongi keeps going.
“Anyway. I came up with a lot of new spells, and I got used to doing things on my own that would usually take two or three witches working together. And now everyone sees me as this prodigy who doesn’t need any help. And that makes it harder to ask for help when I don’t really know what the fuck I’m doing.”
“Ask me.” Namjoon feels that familiar fire flare up in him again, but it doesn’t feel reckless this time. He knows immediately, without even knowing what the task is, that this is something he can do. That it’s supposed to be him, and not any of the so-called council of weather witches who apparently heap near-impossible tasks upon Yoongi without thinking to offer anything in return.
“Wait, that’s not—” Yoongi jerks upright, animated by sudden panic, but Namjoon has never felt so calm or so sure of anything. He tightens his grip on Yoongi’s hand in his lap.
“I know you weren’t meaning to ask. But I want you to. Whatever it is, I can find a way to help.”
He looks steadily into Yoongi’s eyes, even though he himself feels overwhelmed, because he also feels stronger then before, like knowing Yoongi needs to depend on him is somehow making him stronger. “It doesn’t matter what it is. I’ll find a way. You know I will.”
He doesn’t really know if Yoongi knows any such thing, but he wants to believe it of himself, has never wanted it to be true more than in this moment.
Yoongi is still looking at him, but the panic has cooled into something fierce, whatever is left when you don’t have the luxury of fear any longer.
“Namjoon. I need to work a spell with enough power to beguile a meteor into spinning off its course so it doesn’t rip a hole through the sky and blow us all to bits, and I need to not choke while I’m doing it, so it doesn’t blow me to bits either. Can you help me? Do you have any books for that?”
Namjoon feels a strange, giddy trembling in himself that might almost be humor, and he suddenly understands Yoongi’s wild laughter of a bit ago, because— “No. I don’t have a book for that, but it could certainly be researched. Since you’re asking.”
A wild look comes over Yoongi’s face then, and before Namjoon can take him in, Yoongi dives forwards and buries his face in Namjoon’s chest, knocking into him with a force that Namjoon happily absorbs, wrapping his arms firmly around his shoulders.
Yoongi speaks into the front of Namjoon’s shirt, voice muffled but feverish with determination. “You can’t get hurt. That’s the rule. I won’t allow it.”
“That’s the rule for both of us. I’m the librarian here, I make the rules.”
Yoongi actually growls then, like an angry little animal, and seizes the front of Namjoon’s shirt. For a second, Namjoon isn’t sure if he’s going to kiss him or attack him, but then he really does start laughing, soundlessly, his shoulders shaking with it, and it’s infectious, the whole situation so absurd that Namjoon finds himself laughing too.
When they both stop, they’re lying in the grass by the pond, Yoongi half on top of Namjoon with his head resting on his chest, and Namjoon’s sleeve is a little wet from getting in the water, but he doesn’t really care.
He lifts his hand and runs his fingers lightly through the hair that’s fallen over Yoongi’s face, tucking it back so he can see something of his expression. His cheek is squished against Namjoon’s chest in a cute way. He looks relaxed, almost peaceful. When he speaks, Namjoon can feel the minute movements of his jaw against Namjoon’s chest.
“I can hear your heart.”
“What does it sound like?”
He closes his eyes. “The music of the universe.”
Namjoon thinks about his many shelves of carefully ordered books, the shadow of his plum bonsai on the windowsill, of Jungkook and Seokjin chasing each other through the library laughing, of his spacetime equations that he only just figured out, and of his vision of Yoongi underwater, sinking, alone.
“When is the deadline for the spell?”
Yoongi shifts to look up at him, the sun hitting his face in a stripe of light. “Three days.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t leave it to the last minute.”
They start laughing again, but it fades quickly, because they’re still exhausted from the first time.
“I have a spell already. Well, most of it. I just– I’m worried about the power it takes. If I have enough.”
Namjoon hums, the picture of what needs to happen, the variables in the equation, already taking shape in his mind. “Then I’ll get you a source of additional power equivalent to the task.”
Yoongi goes up on his hands, braced above Namjoon’s shoulders, and leans over him, looking him in the face. Tendrils of his hair fall between them, tickling Namjoon’s nose.
“Where the hell would you get it in three days?”
“Where else? From the target itself.” The equations are already scrolling across the surface of his mind, along with newer ones taking shape, ones to calculate velocity and trajectory.
Yoongi’s lips twist into a delighted, disbelieving sideways smirk. “It’s that easy for you, huh? I should have known.”
Namjoon reaches up to tuck a piece of Yoongi’s hair behind his ear. “It’s not easy, but that won’t stop me.”
Yoongi’s smile shifts then, into something sweet, and he brings one hand to Namjoon’s mouth, trailing a fingertip softly against his bottom lip. For one wild moment, Namjoon thinks he really is going to kiss him this time, but— “Okay. Deal. I’ll follow your rules.”
“You will?” Namjoon feels strangely ecstatic, almost electrified, at the thought of the task Yoongi has entrusted him with. It has nothing to do with the library, not really, except that if the world ended the library would too. But it doesn’t matter. He’ll do it because he wants to, for Yoongi.
“Yeah. Nobody gets hurt. And I’ll bring your poetry back before it’s due. Same time next week?”
His finger slips off of Namjoon’s lip over to his cheek, and presses gently into the indentation where Namjoon knows his dimple is when he smiles. He’s smiling now.
“I’ll see you then.”
IV. You’re the earth, why do you want to become an island?
Over the next week, Namjoon learns a lot of new things.
For one, there’s a rhythm at the heart of a burning star hurtling through space, some audible combination of spin and orbital motion that’s almost like a song. An icy, jittering voice of strange pulses and discordant, metallic music from the other side of the galaxy, but a kind of song nonetheless. Like everything in existence, it has its own kind of poetry. At least, that’s how Namjoon chooses to see it. It gives him a reason to write it all down in a volume that will gather dust on the library shelves for generations, but that wasn’t the real reason he went anyway.
Later on, he also learns something new from Yoongi, sitting in the garden with his back against a tree and Yoongi’s back against Namjoon’s chest, Namjoon’s face nuzzled into his hair, while he tells him a story about his favorite animal.
“…the only way to ensure a cat will grow to like humans is to socialize it with human contact in the first six weeks of life. Timing is everything. In my first life, I had a cat who I loved so much. She was so sweet. I’ve always wondered who gave her love at the start of her life, who shaped her and made her so tender.”
“Aren’t there any cats who come to like humans later on?” It seems cruel, somehow, that the window would be so short, but Namjoon has never had a cat. He wonders if the library would be a good place for one.
“There are, but it’s a toss-up. Odds are, they won’t seek out human companionship, and they won’t ever know what it’s like to be loved by someone. Even though they’re technically domesticated, they just live their own lives. Feral.”
“Is that why they have nine lives? To get more chances at love.”
Yoongi’s laugh comes, shaking his body gently where it’s nestled against Namjoon’s chest. “Yeah. It must be.”
He turns around in Namjoon’s lap, knees on either side of his hips, kneeling above him so that Namjoon only has to look up a little to see him. He likes this, having Yoongi in his arms and a little above him, with the golden green light of late summer all around. It feels like Yoongi is his entire world.
His cheeks are a little pink from the heat of the afternoon, and his hair is mussed on top where Namjoon was nuzzling it. “You know, I used to think I wanted to be reincarnated as a rock in my next life.”
“Whatever for?” Namjoon slides a hand into the soft, silky waves of his hair, and Yoongi turns his head sideways a little, eyes closing, leaning into the touch.
“Rocks don’t feel lonely.”
“Rocks don’t feel anything. They can’t feel this.”
Namjoon leans up just a little to leave a tiny kiss on the tip of his nose.
Yoongi opens his eyes and smiles at him in that lopsided, hungry way that Namjoon knows means he’s about to attack. “Good thing I met you in this life, then.”
Yoongi leans down and kisses him back, and Namjoon forgets about the rest of the world only for a little while, because an entire world is held within his arms.