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Jungkook isn’t an idiot. He knows what it means when the boy comes stumbling in with only an old coat, loose around his shoulders and worn at the elbows and the collar. He knows what it means when he feeds him and finds him clothes to sleep in and tucks him into the old couch, tartan fading. He knows what it means when the silent, pale stranger leaves his coat folded over the back of the rickety kitchen chair. He’s not stupid.
But Jungkook has no interest in keeping anything, nor being kept, so he leaves the coat glistening in the oil light and goes to bed in his tiny saltchill bedroom at the end of the hall.
In the porcelain glaze of pre-dawn, the weight of a body climbing into his bed wakes him. He blinks his eyes open to the boy’s face. His hair is the color of a winter shore, saltsand streaked with sunslant grey. His cheeks are sleep-soft, eyes drowsy, skin unblemished.
“Hey,” he says, the first he’s spoken. His voice rumbles like a wavecrash, and he holds his battered, fraying coat in one hand, scowl creeping across his beautiful face. “What the fuck, dude.”
Jungkook makes coffee.
“Yeah,” grumbles the selkie, whose name is Yoongi, when Jungkook asks if he wants some. He sulks at the kitchen table while they wait for the water to boil on the stove, silence thick all around. His coat lies draped over the back of the couch, anticipatory, like it’s waiting for Jungkook to change his mind. Jungkook, far too stubborn for that, portions out grounds and water and a slop of milk for himself. Yoongi shakes his head at the offer so Jungkook pours his up black. He sets the sugar bowl in the center of the table. Neither of them touch it.
The kitchen table is small enough that their knees knock together when Jungkook sits. The floor is frigid under his bare toes.
“Look,” he says through the coiling steam of his drink. “I’m really flattered, but you’ve got the wrong guy.”
Yoongi stares at him.
“Like, you seem nice and all, but I’m not really, uh. I’m just not the type.”
Yoongi’s mouth turns down, just a little. “Everyone’s the type.”
“Not everyone,” says Jungkook. Obviously.
“What was last night, then?”
Jungkook wraps his hands more firmly around his mug. The heat stings his cold fingers. “I wasn’t just going to leave you out there. I’m not an asshole.”
Yoongi looks at him. He looks at Yoongi. In the slow filter of the morning, he looks just as pale as he had last night. His cheeks are round but the rest of him is winter-skinny, knobby knuckles and knobby elbows and knobby ankles poking out the rolled-up cuffs of Jungkook’s too-long sweatpants.
“But you’re not interested.”
Jungkook blinks at him, frowning and flushed in the steam of his drink, and looks away. “Sorry,” he mutters.
“Damn.” He sits back and ruffles his hair. A sigh gusts out of him, too big for his skinny frame. “You’re really serious.”
“I mean.” His jaw works. “Yeah.”
Yoongi looks away and curls his fingers around his mug. It’s got a chip in the lip where Jungkook dropped it six months ago moving into the one-bedroom seaside cottage, which is more of a shack. Yoongi bends low to breathe in the steam. His shirt slips over his hunched shoulders and Jungkook can see the cresting ridges of his spine too, all knobby and bare.
“But like,” he tacks on, and Yoongi glances up again. His mouth purses in a frown. He just looks so tired.
Jungkook gets tired. He swallows.
“Uh, you can stay. If you need to. That’s, like— That’s fine.”
“Okay,” says Yoongi, and Jungkook’s pretty sure he doesn’t imagine the relief. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
He doesn’t ask why a selkie would be mad enough to abandon the sea.
“Thanks.”
“Sure,” Jungkook says, feeling a little sea-mad himself, and he finishes his coffee.
Jimin calls at noon, like always.
“I can’t talk long,” says Jungkook, eyeing Yoongi where he flips through the handful of books that managed to make the trip with him. They’re mostly recommendations from friends, brought along out of obligation. He's pretty sure Namjoon slipped a couple in while he wasn't looking. Jungkook, never much of a reader, hasn’t cracked any of them open. Yoongi’s fingers pick through the pages, frowning. “I’ve got a guest.”
“Out there?” The surprise is warranted, but Jungkook wrinkles his nose all the same. “Who?”
“Just a, uh.” Across the room, Yoongi is staring at him. He hasn’t moved his coat from its place on the couch. Jungkook itches to put it away almost as much as he doesn’t want to touch it. “A local.”
“Anybody I know?”
“Don’t think so.”
The cottage had been Jimin’s idea. He’d been the one to suggest, with all his stubborn kindness, that Jungkook take some time. He’d helped pick up the pieces of his life and driven down with him and tucked Jungkook’s jagged edges into the tiny house where the sea air might rub him smooth again. Jimin knows everybody.
“Okay,” he says, warm and patiently indulgent, like he knows Jungkook is lying and isn’t going to press. Jungkook wonders what he thinks, if it’s anything like what’s real. Probably not. Maybe. He’s from here, anyhow; he of all people might guess it right. “Ah, I’ll let you get back to them, then. I’m glad you’re making friends, Ggukie.”
“Thanks, hyung,” he says, feeling like a fool, and hangs up.
“You don’t have to do anything for me,” says Yoongi. Jungkook hums and disagrees. He’s out of practice with having guests—he’s out of practice with a lot of things, really—but he’s pretty sure that’s not how it works.
“I’m going down to the water,” he says. “Do you want to come?”
“No,” says Yoongi. Jungkook kind of expected that. He stuffs his feet in his boots and pulls his hat low over his ears and wonders if he’s a fool to leave a selkie alone in his house.
Most likely. He shrugs on his coat anyway.
“I'll figure out dinner when I get back,” he says. “Make yourself at home.”
Yoongi’s still standing next to the bare bookshelf when Jungkook slips out into the afternoon.
“You’ll really like it,” Jimin had said when he first brought up the idea. Jungkook hadn’t been particularly receptive, but Jungkook hadn’t been receptive to anything at that point, so that was hardly new. Also, Jimin was stubborn enough for three people put together, so receptiveness hadn’t exactly factored in on either side of the equation. “It’s really beautiful out there, and there’s practically no one around. Seriously, I think you’ll like it.”
Jungkook had felt bad about it later, how little he’d given Jimin to work with. Everyone else had given up on him by that point, more or less. Jimin was just a stubborn fucker.
“You don’t have to decide now,” he’d said to Jungkook’s cold shoulder. “You can stay with me and Joonie-hyung as long as you want. But if you want some space, it’s a good place for that. I can talk to some people, okay? So just think about it.”
And it had taken three dragging weeks to grow fed up with sleeping on his best friend’s couch, and admit that maybe, maybe he wouldn’t mind some space. Jimin, in a stroke of patient-hyung understanding, hadn’t even said I told you so.
He’d been right, though. Nowhere better to find some space than right at the edge of the ocean, where he could split himself open and spill the ugly, sour mess of his hurt and heartbreak out into the water and watch it wash away.
But you can't give like that forever. It’s not a surprise, really, that eventually something came back out.
Yoongi likes the bathtub. He discovers it the second night and takes to it with a hungry fascination. The hot water is sort of finicky, but Yoongi doesn’t seem to mind too much; he sits patiently in front of the tap and waits for it to stop spluttering and fill the basin. Jungkook leaves him to it, mostly, even though the steam seeps out from under the crack in the door and into the hallway, damp settling in with the rest of the years-old water damage.
“Hey, um,” says Jungkook the third time Yoongi clouds up the hallway. He’s been hiding away in the tub for over an hour, and everything has gone the sort of quiet that makes him worry. “You okay in there?”
Yoongi’s reply comes muffled through the door. “You can come in.”
Jungkook hesitates a moment. The knob turns under his hand, unlatched. He pokes his head into a muggythick haze of steam. It smells like his body wash, light and a little sweet.
“Hi,” he says, awkward. Yoongi blinks at him, mostly of his tender and bare parts hidden beneath the lip of the tub. Not all of him though—his ribs stick out too clearly, and his collarbones too, and his round face is soft like a fresh bun. It’s sort of hard to look at him straight on. Jungkook focuses on the blue tile backsplash instead. In the soft-sweet steam rising off the water, it doesn’t look quite as shabby as usual. “You, um, need anything? Towels? The radio, maybe?”
The radio is finicky too, and gets about three and a half stations on a good day, but it’s something.
“No,” says Yoongi. His hair is wet, droplets plinking into the water.
“Okay,” says Jungkook. He clears his throat. “Um. Dinner’s gonna be ready soon.”
“Okay.” Then, “Sorry. Do you need the bathroom?”
“No,” says Jungkook. “No, it’s fine, take your time. I was just—“ Worried, a little, maybe. His silence hangs in the humid air. He clears his throat. “If you need anything, let me know.”
He closes the door before Yoongi can answer. By the time he pads out of the bathroom, damp hair wetting the collar of Jungkook’s old sweatshirt, he’s got dinner almost finished, warm and steaming up the kitchen. Yoongi folds himself into the kitchen chair he’s claimed as his own, tucking his feet up under him.
“Feeling better?” asks Jungkook. Yoongi looks up at him with something sort of like surprise, maybe.
“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” says Jungkook. He takes his time portioning out dinner. The bowls don’t match because Jungkook hadn’t been the one to keep the dinnerware, but there’s something sort of charming about that. Everything else in the house is hodgepodge, anyway. The outsides match the insides, or whatever. He sets Yoongi’s bowl down in front of him.
“Is it a… y’know. A seal thing?”
“Not a seal,” says Yoongi, wrinkling his nose in distaste as he picks up his spoon. It’s kind of cute. “And no. I just like it.”
“Oh,” says Jungkook. “Cool.”
Yoongi shrugs and tucks into his meal. Their knees knock together under the tiny table as they eat, but it’s sort of nice.
Yoongi finishes two portions, and that’s sort of nice too.
Jungkook tries it once, soaking until even the steam dissipates. It takes him a while to settle into it, to let himself fully unfurl into the hot water, but once he’s there, he kind of gets it. He drifts, mind going the nice sort of hazy. All of him feels lighter in the water, and warmer, and his mind isn’t nearly so loud.
When he emerges, wrinkly and damp and feeling like all his muddled insides have seeped out with the steam, Yoongi is tucked up on the couch with one of his books. He catches Jungkook’s eye across the room and smiles. Just a teeny, tiny bit.
That feels lighter too.
“Your books are boring,” says Yoongi when he’s been around long enough to stop surprising Jungkook every time he steps into the living room and there’s another body there, but not long enough that he starts to wonder how long it will go on. They’ve fallen into a strange, straightforward sort of cohabitation. Jungkook refuses to think too hard about it.
“I didn’t pick them,” returns Jungkook, stomping wet sand from his boots and ruffling his hair flat from where the wind has tossed it all on its side. He hangs his coat on a peg, right next to Yoongi’s. They still haven’t talked about it. “We can go to the library, if you want.”
Yoongi gives him a look, but he also shoves his feet into the shoes Jungkook has left out for him, so. Library.
He stops for food on the way home. The grocery is also the bait shop and the closest place to get a loan without driving to the bank in the city, and it’s as busy as it ever is when they arrive, which is to say not at all. There’s one car parked in the lot, and it belongs to the clerk on duty. The bell rings as they enter, a bright and tinkling thing at odds with the sullen grey of the winter sky.
Yoongi’s head snaps up immediately.
“Oh shit,” he mumbles.
Jungkook turns to look at him. It’s sort of difficult, since Yoongi is doing his level best to make himself small and unseen behind his back.
“You okay?” he asks. A booming voice interrupts him before he can get an answer.
“Min Yoongi, in the flesh! Or do my eyes deceive me?”
Yoongi makes a face, all squinting and irritable, and grudgingly pokes his head out from behind Jungkook’s shoulder to frown at the clerk.
“Hello, Taehyung,” he says.
Taehyung leans over the counter, chin braced in the palm of one hand, smile wide and a little predatory. Behind him, Yoongi looks vaguely ill. He clutches his library books tighter and won’t meet Jungkook’s gaze when he glances between the pair. Taehyung just looks pleased, and contemplative beneath that, which is a dangerous combination. Jungkook makes the executive decision to remove himself from the situation entirely and goes to pick up tinned tuna and crackers and milk, and body wash because Yoongi has used up most of his. Voices rise and fall behind him, but Jungkook doesn’t listen. Not his business.
Taehyung is alone when he gets to the till. Across the store, Yoongi pokes through bait and tackle, bored and incurious and not nearly so troubled. He ignores Jungkook’s glances. Taehyung rings him up as though this is a normal occurrence, which is something of a relief. Jungkook tosses a candy bar onto the belt.
“House okay?” Taehyung asks as he scans a bag of tired-looking onions. He asks this every time.
“Fine,” says Jungkook. He says this every time too. He’s pretty sure the man is keeping tabs for Jimin, but it’s a harmless sort of minding, and he doesn’t push. He’s sweet enough, Taehyung. A little odd, maybe, but Jungkook’s pretty sure he doesn’t have a leg to stand on there, so he leaves it be. Plus Taehyung’s about the only person his age in town, and Jungkook’s not ready for Nana Lee to be his only point of human interaction in a fifty mile radius.
“Need anything else?”
“Nope.”
Taehyung glances over his shoulder at Yoongi, who has moved on to poking through bins of different bait. His mouth tightens, and he catches Jungkook’s eye again. His voice drops.
“You know he’s a—“
“I know,” says Jungkook with a sour look. Taehyung isn’t fazed.
“Okay. Well, as long as you know.”
“Not gonna warn me?”
“Nah.” He finishes bagging the groceries, brown paper crinkling. Jungkook eyes him.
“You know him.”
Taehyung makes a wiggly gesture with one hand, fishing the receipt out of the printer with the other. He’s forgotten to charge Jungkook for the candy bar.
“Just a bit. Not too well. He shows up sometimes. Honestly I thought he’d left. Most of the local colony took off a few years back—haven’t seen them since.”
“Oh,” says Jungkook. Taehyung shrugs.
“Yeah. Been a while. Just— Take care, yeah?”
“Sure,” says Jungkook, collecting his groceries with a grunt. He’s not entirely sure what he’s supposed to be taking care of, but Taehyung means well above all else, so he figures the least he can do is make an effort.
“See you,” says Taehyung. “Bye, Yoongi-ssi!”
Yoongi ignores him.
“Friend of yours?” he asks as they trudge back to the cottage. Yoongi tugs his coat tight around him, books under one arm. The wind tosses his bangs into his eyes and he doesn’t make any move to fix them. The wind scrubs his cheeks pink.
“No,” he says, and Jungkook lets it sit. They keep their silence all the way home, but it’s a kinder silence than the one Jungkook is used to. They hang their coats next to each other on the pegs by the door, and Yoongi reads one of his library books aloud while Jungkook cooks dinner. His voice rises and dips like the steady tuck of the waves, filling the space and the silence until Jungkook almost forgets what they sound like. Even the hungry wind isn’t quite so harsh with Yoongi’s voice to round it out.
It pisses down rain for a week. They don’t get snow this close to the water, but winter sets in with a vengeance anyway, and they’re left to hole up in the house with their three-point-five station radio and Yoongi’s haul of library books. Jungkook gets used to the sound of him, his sighs and shuffling and the steady rumble of the stories he parcels out in chapter-long chunks while the rain rattles the roof. He thinks maybe he likes the noise.
Jungkook goes down to the water every morning in spite of the weather, because there’s fuckall to do in the house besides watch and listen and think too much, and because he’s never been good at shedding routine. It had been one of the problems to start with, but he’s not really planning on changing it any time soon.
The seaside, he discovers, is not quite as satisfying when it’s just him in the sheet-grey rain. That doesn’t stop him, but it does leave him cold and dripping and miserable, staring out at the sullenslate sea.
Getting home is nicer. There’s steaming hot coffee and dry clothes and Yoongi to make faces at him that suggest he might be an idiot. Jungkook doesn’t disagree, but Yoongi’s got a way of making it fond instead of furious, and some mornings he looks forward to leaving just for the pleasure of coming home.
He heads into town too, because a guy’s gotta eat and Yoongi puts away enough for three people, but he feels bad about that. Mostly because Yoongi insists on trudging along, making the muddy, sludgy trip while Jungkook fights with an umbrella that’s not quite big enough to cover the both of them. Taehyung seems happy, at least, to see him again—and Jungkook thinks Yoongi might be happy to see him too, in some weird private way of his. It’s a little amusing, or it would be if not for the cold and the wet and the wind.
Plus Taehyung refuses to lend them an extra raincoat, the bastard.
So it’s a narrow squeeze under Jungkook’s umbrella with the water hissing down all around them and splattering their pants, but they get back to the house with their milk and fish and wet-wilting greens and dry out in front of the spitting, creaky heater as best they can.
“You don’t have to come,” he tries telling Yoongi, but Yoongi scoffs at him—Jungkook’s started to think this is something he does out of fondness—so he lets it go.
Besides, Yoongi wears his sleek speckleskin coat when they go out, so— Well, Jungkook’s not quite sure what it means, but it doesn’t hang so limp on his frame, isn’t fraying so badly at the cuffs and the hem, so he figures that must be a good thing.
There’s a boathouse down at the bottom of the cliffs. It’s an ugly, run-down little thing, ceding bit by bit to the elements. The only boat left is a narrow fishing dinghy, barely more than a canoe. Jungkook doesn’t take it out often. Not too much work this time of year.
Yoongi sits on the beach, watching him skip over the water. He’s left his coat up top, and he’s got Jungkook’s oilskin instead, hem pooling around his ankles. He looks tiny back on the shore, one with the windswept rocks speckling in the salt spray. Cold too, but he insisted on coming, even if he won’t touch the water.
Jungkook checks the motor, floating. The sea past the mouth of the cove is a choppy, winter-sullen smear, but things are pretty quiet here. Makes it easy to check the traps, or as easy as it ever is. He’s used to it by now, at least, the way the world moves under his feet, the adjustments he has to make as he works. There’s a rhythm to it he likes, mostly. Not much is biting anyways—he’s only frozen most of the way through by the time he’s got the boat back in the shed and the crates loaded in the back of the rusty old truck borrowed from Mr. Choi down the road. Yoongi slides into the passenger seat without a word, fiddling with the heater.
“Doesn’t run,” says Jungkook. Yoongi snorts and tucks himself deeper in the coat. He stays in the car when they reach the market, leaving Jungkook alone to hoist half-empty lobster traps out onto the cold concrete. He accepts his payment in cash, and old Nana Lee forces a damp plastic bag into his hands before he can make his escape.
“For your friend,” she says with something like amusement, and Jungkook flushes to the tips of his ears and mumbles his thanks.
When he gets back into the truck, the heater is buzzing away, warmth unlocking the ache in his knees and his fingers. Jungkook passes the bag to Yoongi, tucked so deep into the coat that only his eyes poke out, blinking blearily at Jungkook.
“What’s this?”
“Dinner,” he says, inching out of the narrow market lanes and back towards the windwashed cabin up on its hill. Yoongi idles at the table with his library book while Jungkook boils up the lobsters the way his own Nana used to, and Yoongi polishes off every last bite.
A rustling wakes him in the middle of the night, which is dark and loud around him. A sea storm howls over the cliffs, and it takes him a moment to realize it’s the figure half kneeling in the bed that has woken him, not the weather outside. He squints blearily up at the shadow.
“Whatsit?” he manages. Yoongi pauses.
“I was just,” he says. He sounds wide awake. Jungkook pushes himself up a little more. The heater creaks and groans. “Can I sleep in here?”
“Sure,” mumbles Jungkook, nudging over a little. Yoongi slides under the covers without a ripple. Like a seal into water, his sleep-thick brain says. His sleep-thick brain is stupid. Cold toes tuck up against his shins.
“Jesus Christ,” says Jungkook, reaching for him. All of him is cold, winter water and winter wind. He’s shivering. “Jesus fucking Christ, hyung, why didn’t you say something.”
“Sorry,” Yoongi says, whisper-soft, almost too quiet to hear even with his mouth pressed up against Jungkook’s shoulder. Even his lips are cold.
“Next time just ask,” he says. “Just—”
He’s too tired to figure out the words, the shape of them or the right meaning. He grumbles, pulling him tighter. Stupid fucking selkies. Stupid fucking boys with their eyes and cheeks and knobby fucking knees digging into his gut, close and not close enough. Jungkook’s eyes slide shut.
“Okay,” whispers Yoongi, like he gets it anyway. Jungkook wraps him up as best he can in the dark, bundled small and warm under his heaping of blankets, safe from the wailing wind. Sleep tugs at him, insistent, dragging to his every word and motion. It welcomes him back, warm and heavy. If Yoongi whispers anything else to him that secret, windstruck midnight, Jungkook doesn’t hear a word.
In the morning, he’s still there.
“You called me hyung,” he says when Jungkook cracks an eyelid open in the hazy grey pre-dawn. He looks like he’s been awake for a while, eyes dark and watchful. Jungkook squints at him.
“Was that okay?” He’s too tired to care too much. It’s early. Yoongi now is just as much a vision as he was that first morning when he climbed in bed to curse at Jungkook and demand why Jungkook refused to bind him here. His face is a little softer, maybe. His elbows and ankles and knees aren’t quite so hard where they knock against him, and he’s nice to hug. It isn’t the worst way Jungkook has woken up. It’s better than many months of lonely wakings. He smells like Jungkook’s body wash, and the sea. Jungkook tucks his nose back into the warm hollow of his throat and closes his eyes again.
“Yeah,” says Yoongi above him. There’s a hand in his hair, and it’s nice. “I liked it.”
“Okay, hyung. That’s good. I’m going back to sleep.”
“Okay, Jungkook-ah,” he says. Jungkook smiles against his skin, pleased, and slips back into sleep.
When he climbs out of bed later, it’s well into morning and the kitchen smells of coffee and his boots are set out by the door so he can troop down to the water just as he does every day. Yoongi sits in his chair, flipping through a new book. The heater whirs away silently, and the water is hot in the bathroom, and the wind doesn’t howl so horribly against the siding, the storm's fury blown out overnight. The sun cuts fractal patterns through the window, given body by the steam rising from the mugs on the table. Yoongi’s hair turns all to seafoam in the light.
Jungkook leaves his boots by the door and his coat on the hook and sits down at the too-small table with a cup of fresh coffee to press his calves against Yoongi’s. The heater warms up the floor, and not even his toes are cold.
On the third day after Jungkook moved into the cottage at the top of the cliff—which was the third week since he moved out of his apartment and the fourth week since the breakup and the fifth since his life imploded beautifully upon itself, shattering outwards in all directions and careless of the casualties—he woke up with the sun and went down to the water.
The ocean out here was a lonely, resentful thing, even in the height of summer. This was good, though, because Jungkook was also a lonely, resentful thing, with a broken heart clattering around in his chest and sour air in his lungs, settled and gone to rot, all mold and mothballs. They matched like that.
Down at the water there was nobody else around. The tourists were all south in the city, or north where the beaches were sandy and spacious. Here there was only rock and salt and whistling winds that wept in the night and kept him tossing and turning in his tiny saltbox bedroom. Jimin had left the day before. He was alone with the wind and the water, and the seal.
Jungkook wasn’t stupid. Jimin had told him, before he left. He hadn’t been home long enough to know the details, but he knew about the colony, who had been here longer than anyone, who would probably be here longer still.
Maybe you’ll see one, he had said, before kissing Jungkook’s forehead and promising to make a nuisance of himself once a day and leaving him to the winds and the weeping.
He hadn’t believed it much, because Jimin was given to fancy and hope and Jungkook was soursullen, even under the warm summer sun. But then he’d come down to the water and there was the seal with its specklespot coat and black eyes and twitching whiskers, careless of the wind or the water or Jungkook when he threw himself down on the sand and let the sea scour him clean.
“You get left behind too?” he asked, and the seal didn’t say anything, but it was there the next day, and the next day, and the next. Long enough that Jungkook got used to it. Long enough that Jungkook didn’t mind.
And then one night there was a boy, lonely and small in a coat too large for him, and Jungkook wasn’t an idiot, and he wasn’t cruel, and he knew what it was like to be small and lonely and tired and cold.
So he opened his door, and said, “Do you want to come in?”
When he closed the door behind, he shut out the night and the wind and the cold with it. The loneliness too, but he didn't realize that until later.
In the evening, he goes down to the beach. Old habits and all that; he likes his routines too much to abandon them entirely. It’s different in the evening. The sun sets in front of him, reflecting off the water, and the world goes bright and blazing even in the midst of winter. He digs his boots into the damp sand and sits with the surf licking his toes. The wind tosses his hair in a dozen different directions and mostly in his eyes. He doesn’t say anything to the water today. He hasn’t got anything left to tell.
Up the beach, footsteps crunch through the sand, and Yoongi sits next to him. He keeps his feet drawn up tight, out of the water, but he sits. Even in the blister of the sea wind, he’s warm. Jungkook leans into him.
“Why me?” he asks. Yoongi leans back into him in turn.
“I liked how you talked to me,” he says.
Jungkook hadn’t considered it like that. “It was just talking.”
“I know.”
“I wasn’t trying to— I mean.” He huffs, irritated. Talking is all well and good, but words have never been his strong suit. “I don’t want to keep anyone.”
They sit in silence a little longer. The sunset is clear and endless, a runny-paint riot of color cast over the water. Jungkook shivers.
“Guess I don’t really want to be kept either,” says Yoongi eventually. “But I’d like to stay.”
“Yeah,” says Jungkook. He’s sort of figured that one. “You don’t have to give me anything for that, though. You can just stay.”
It’s what he’d meant to say this morning, and last night, and weeks ago, and maybe months ago too. It’s taken him a while to figure it out. He doesn’t think Yoongi minds.
Yoongi hums. Jungkook stares at the water and shivers. Yoongi sighs at him, irritated and fond, and drapes his coat over Jungkook’s narrow, shaking shoulders. It’s warm, and clean, and not the slightest bit frayed at all. Jungkook’s surprised to find it fits him perfectly.
“Come on,” says Yoongi, taking his hand and drawing him up. He keeps their fingers laced together even when they’re both upright, turned to each other instead of the endless sweep of the ocean. His hands are warm, and his grip is sure, and Jungkook holds him just as tight. “Let’s go home.”