Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The first thing they did was find Yoongi’s brother, of course. Seokjin had gone from hearing exceedingly little about him to almost everything about him, some sort of kid wonder who excelled at everything in a way that he at first thought exaggeration, and only in the time that came much later, could marvel in how poorly it concealed the truth.

At the time, Seokjin thought it sweet how Min Yoongi, all of nineteen and a little too cool for everything, gushed about his little brother, his half brother at that. Seokjin’s older brother, only older by one year and full blood, saved all his sweet words for his girlfriend of the moment. They had not seen each other for a year.

Seokjin had seen photos, of course, mostly on Yoongi’s cracked phone screen, of a young boy with doe eyes and a bulbous haircut. Cute kid.

Lethal in person.

Jeon Jeongguk, for he had his dam’s name who never married and was never claimed by Yoongi’s alpha parent, was cuter in person, a bit of a string bean but with a starry smile for his brother, arms somehow longer than Yoongi’s already, threatening all of his full height to come.

“Jeonggukie, behave and meet my friend,” Yoongi said, and turned him by the shoulders to face Seokjin, still removing his shoes in the cramped doorway. It would become comical the way Jeongguk switched from shying away behind Yoongi only to puff out his chest with a bravado thus far only seen in sporting competitions, a constant back and forth juxtaposition from a sweet boy at a crux.

They never scolded him for his lack of deferential respect to his elders. What good would it have done? Yoongi doted on Jeongguk because as he put it, there was no one else to do it. While Seokjin complained about not getting his course schedule precisely right or the perils of navigating the dinner parties his parents expected of him while enrolled, Yoongi quietly worried about his brother, and whether or not he was lonely or eating well.

Standing in the largest part of their apartment told him the full story his friend did not; the front door emptied into their kitchen and living space, all smashed together so you could lie flat and touch both sides. There was an attached bathroom with a shower setup he hadn’t seen in years since traveling through the countryside, and a bedroom with a bunk bed, desk, and wardrobe all touching.

Seokjin understood then that he and Yoongi would not so easily part. For him to show him this was something special, and Seokjin sat on the bottom bunk bed which used to be Yoongi’s but now was Jeongguk’s, everything was Jeongguk’s, and laughed when the boy made faces and bunny ears behind his older brother’s hollow protests of how he lived.

They spent the day blowing through a chunk of cash Yoongi made from deliveries in the city at an arcade down closer to the beach, but they let Seokjin buy them dinner and then ice cream. He always found Yoongi easy to like despite some of the hushed whispers surrounding him in hallways. Where others found him prickly, Seokjin only saw careful consideration from someone who didn’t have the same consideration shown to him. It was even easier to like him then, like this, watching the way he laughed freely at Jeongguk’s petty gossip from school, or the way he curled his hands around his back to support him as they pressed through a throng of kids closer to his age.

Jeongguk would get a little quiet when next to Seokjin. They played hoops and shot up zombies together, and Seokjin felt the eyes on his profile, well used to them as he was at that point. “What’s it like?” he asked, and Seokjin knew what he meant.

“What’s what like?” he asked anyway.

“Being presented?”

Rather, he expected Jeongguk to ask what it was like to be an omega, or a male one at that. There had been something of a generational resurgence of men presenting as omega in the past decade, enough that it was almost popular for Seokjin to be one, but like a passing trend, may not be true for boys Jeongguk’s age.

“Good, in that it settles some things.” Seokjin smiled and ruffled Jeongguk’s hair. He didn’t need to worry about presentation at his age. “Hard in that it changes everything.”

“Oh, is that all?” Jeongguk rolled his eyes, shuffling in sneakers that looked far too large on his feet, but the flush on his cheeks persisted, and Yoongi, ever a doting brother, shamelessly poked fun at him for the course of Seokjin’s stay with them.

“Isn’t hyung the most handsome omega you’ve ever seen?”

The first few times, Seokjin struck a pose, framing his face, and then by the end of week one, was too tired for even a peace sign. “The prettiest,” Jeongguk agreed, the same starry look in his eyes as day one, but no longer as hesitant when it came to cuddling. After all, there was no room for separation in the brothers’ home. It was the three of them, Jeongguk’s dam never to be seen if not heard from, envelopes of cash left at inconsistent times over that summer, tucked away in the fridge between the eggs and bread.

It happened as early as that first night, when they’d just met, and Jeongguk, all of fifteen with limbs he couldn’t control, looked up at him from a bottom bunk and flipped up the covers next to him as Seokjin stepped into the room, a little unsure of where to fit.

It happens now, ten years later, in an apartment in Seoul when Seokjin feels him before he ever so much as stirs the air in the bedroom. Jeongguk flips up the covers and crawls in next to him like he belongs there, and many would argue he does.

The best time of the year is when it’s cold enough to wear turtlenecks naturally.

In the summer, Seokjin avoids half of human obligation, entertainment, or sheer duty by the necessity pressed upon him.

When the gingko leaves begin to fall, Seokjin knows he may confidently step outside in whatever he wishes to wear without the threat of sweating through it. It is a fact he’s learned over the past decade, the same as how to manage his late night cravings or restlessness, the burn in his legs only rivaled by the later burn in his arms.

They’re so fatigued today he can hardly stand carrying his bag, barely full with much of anything. He picked the lightest laptop he could find for this reason, and his physician hardly looks impressed. He comes out to collect Seokjin himself, doesn't even use his office assistant.

“It looks worse than it is.” Seokjin winces upon removing his turtleneck.

“It looks worse, you are correct.” His doctor is another male omega, the reason why Seokjin chose him, but older by a couple of decades, so bore the brunt of prejudice. His hands massage the nodes in his neck and Seokjin glances at the manual clock in the corner of the room.

“How long since your last contact?”

“Three weeks. Maybe four.”

The doctor hums. “I wouldn’t suggest any more of the Avvenal.”

“But you’ll give it to me?”

“It hasn’t been working.”

It’s a game they play, every time. The doctor has a suggestion that takes time, and all Seokjin has is time, so they wait, but nothing ever works. The injections were just the newest invention, but not made for his sort of circumstance. The doctor denied him at first, but Seokjin had one final card to play.

“Maybe try injecting him too in the neck, yeah?”

The doctor laughs, then seems almost surprised he did. “You know what. Maybe that would work.”

Outside the clinic, Hoseok finds him with tea and a scarf, wrapping it around his neck although it’s already covered. “Do you feel up to seeing them still?” Seokjin nods, then they walk hand and hand until he gasps at the crushing sensation in his fingers.

Hoseok gently takes his arm at the elbow instead. “Do you know what they said at work?” Hoseok is something of a magician. He can dazzle, delight, and entertain. He can make Seokjin forget reality. “They said my rookie group won’t last the year.”

Seokjin scoffs, and Hoseok laughs. They forget themselves when Hoseok draws him in by the nape for a hug.

“Sorry, I’m sorry!” They have to sit right there, two short steps away, when Seokjin can’t stand upright.

The clawing in his stomach, his throat. Seokjin opens his mouth and no sound comes out. “I’ll call,” Hoseok says, but Seokjin waves him off.

There’s nothing to grasp onto when he stands. The smooth glass window pane of some coffee shop offers a reflection but nothing else, and he won’t take the hand offered again.

He sweats under the turtleneck after all.

They spent their days doing exceptionally little, but exceptionally little in the right company was infinite amounts of fun. In the morning, Seokjin took over coffee duty from Yoongi who slept in later anyway, and he and Jeongguk would take turns on Seokjin’s Game Boy or phone. In the afternoon, they either went to the beach to sit out close to the shore and listen to music as a group, or occasionally, Yoongi went on his own to pick up some work. In the evenings, they made dinner on their single burner, whatever they could mix together in one pot. They made it a competition, a culinary war to see who was the most inventive.

Every night, Seokjin slept in the bottom bed, Jeongguk beside him.

Sometimes, when his social battery fell too far, Seokjin would go to bed first, curled into the wall with the comforter pulled to his ears because they always kept the fan on. The apartment didn’t keep cool, but it kept windy. He’d fall asleep alone, wake up to an octopus attached to his back. Sometimes they went to bed together, side by side in silence, lying on their backs and staring up at the top bunk.

Jeongguk would play with his fingers.

“They’re so crooked.”

“My brother broke every single one of them,” Seokjin lied. “He’s not so sweet like you.”

In the dark, it was hard to see, but easy later to imagine, the looks. Jeongguk liked to tuck close to stick his nose in his neck as pups were want to do. “It changes,” he told him.

“Hmmm. It hasn’t settled.” Seokjin presented a little over a year before that, right in between high school and his first year of college. His sire was pleased with the timing.

“I wish you could smell like me.”

Seokjin laughed. “You mean you wish you could smell like me.” He was the presented one amongst them. The only one of them that had a scent. “I don’t need to smell like stinky pup!”

Jeongguk rolled over on top of him. “I could make you smell like me.” He held his wrists down by his head, and the intimate position became known, but when Yoongi walked into the room, he merely flicked Jeongguk in the side of his head and told him to go to bed.

They all used the same shower with the same products. The next time they went to the store, he asked Jeongguk to pick out some shower gel, and he chose the sweetest scented one. “We’ll both smell like a bakery now,” he teased.

When Jeongguk linked their pinkies together, he smiled. “The sweeter the scent, the happier the future,” he replied, a platitude spread in so many words in so many ways.

“Did you see the email?”

“Which one?” Seokjin need not drink much caffeine himself, but it’s nice to hold a mug of tea between his hands. Taehyung sighs dramatically.

“We’ll have to basically redo everything we’ve already done!”

“Yah, why not talk to that alpha of yours?” Seokjin likes Taehyung because no matter how bold he can be about almost anything, things most would take to their graves, his coworker becomes tongue tied and shy about one Kim Namjoon.

“He couldn’t get us out of this anyway.” He sighs again.

“Do you want to go loiter by his office in approximately fifteen minutes?” Even Seokjin knows Namjoon’s schedule now. Wordlessly, Taehyung nods, and Seokjin helps him fix his hair.

The three of them end up going out to dinner, Taehyung pulling him along by the arm when Namjoon insists they celebrate the end of their internal audit, a poor excuse if ever there was one, but Namjoon leans into Taehyung’s space over the steam rising from their stone bowls.

Seokjin will smell spicy the rest of the evening, and not like the ocean at all.

“It’s nice out, isn’t it?” Namjoon tilts his face back with a smile to the moon. He too wears a turtleneck, because as Taehyung daily comments to Seokjin and Seokjin only, Kim Namjoon looks like he should be starring in a drama.

“But it’s getting cold.” Seokjin shivers, arms crossed, and yet it’s Taehyung whom Namjoon wraps an arm around.

Poor Taehyung looks too stunned to speak, let alone walk. Help, his eyes plead, and delighted, Seokjin feigns a yawn.

“Have a good night, you two.”

Namjoon has no trouble navigating Taehyung’s shyness. It’s why it’s still so charming to see it from his friend.

At home, Seokjin wants a bath. It’s cold out, but his skin feels hot to the touch, feverish. The last time he felt stubborn about something like that, he may have briefly lost consciousness, but from a seated position, so hard to say.

Seokjin opens his hallway closet at the neatly stacked bins there until his phone rings. “Why haven’t you called hyung?” he asks before he greets.

Yoongi breathes heavily on the other end. “Tired.”

“No excuse.”

His friend steps over that to launch into the trials and tribulations of his current office job, a side gig to his main gig which others would consider the side gig. “When will you come see me again?” Seokjin asks, tucked up in his one blanket on the sofa.

The breathing on the other end is softer now. “Soon, but hyung - you could come here too, you know?”

He should. He really should.

“I miss you,” Yoongi breathes, and Seokjin agrees. “How are you? How are - things?”

“The same.” Seokjin’s bedroom escapes him just barely from where he sits. Door open. Bed gone.

“Really?”

“Really.”

It’s been a while since he’s had someone to talk to sleep. He tells himself it’s just as good. “Jeongguk’s back in town,” Yoongi says.

“I know.”

This time there’s static between them. “He’s about to have a rut.”

Seokjin presses fingertips into pink skin. He barely needs any pressure before it turns white. “I know. It smelled like the sea in Itaewon.”

Halfway through the summer, the phone rang. Seokjin, already an owner of a cell phone for several years, startled at the shrill tone of the ring, but Jeongguk didn’t have a cell phone, although he sometimes used Yoongi’s during the day.

“It’s for you.”

Seokjin’s mother called to ask if he would be coming home at all that summer, to which he hummed and acted as if it were a possibility left up to her, and delighted, she promised they would catch each other soon.

Jeongguk looked at the phone as if it offended him. “You gave her this number?” he asked, as if the sanctity of their summer could be pierced with one phone call. “But you have a cell phone.”

Seokjin shrugged, dressed in a pair of cheap shorts purchased from the only tourist spot on the beach. He didn’t really own shorts, nor was he even wearing his own shirt. Over the course of the summer, the limited wardrobe brought with became more and more of whatever was left lying around and smelled clean.

That day his shirt was black. Could have been Yoongi’s or Jeongguk’s, the younger of whom rocked up on his toes to hook his chin over his shoulder to look over at Seokjin’s book. His fingers skimmed Seokjin’s side, defense mechanism or survival instinct warning him that he was about to be tickled, but for some reason those instincts didn’t kick in quite in time. They never did around Jeongguk.

“What’s it about?” Despite the kid wonder reputation he had, Seokjin never saw Jeongguk crack open a book to study, nor practice for any of the sports he competed in, as evidenced by the rows of medals hung across the opposite side of the bunk red. Mostly, Jeongguk followed him or Yoongi around.

“Oh. The same thing most stories are about, I guess.” Seokjin wasn’t sure himself what it was about. It was the kind of thing one of his newer friends suggested he read. Yoongi liked to suggest music and Hyojin liked to suggest books.

It was the next day, another day, when Seokjin walked out into the steel death trap of a balcony they have, something not really fit for two people to recline on, that Seokjin found Jeongguk’s fingers purple and his arms splattered red. For whatever reason, the sight of a pomegranate in a young teenage boy’s hands was shocking. He offered up the available seeds in a little plastic container wordlessly, but under the heavy fringe of a desperately needed haircut.

Seokjin ruffled it away from his face. “Where’d you get it?” He expected no answer and got none, Jeongguk shrugging. “I’m not sure I’ve really had pomegranate seeds before.” He’d only ever tried the juice, something his dam kept in their fridge sometimes.

“It’s supposed to be good for you,” Jeongguk said, head bent back down where he couldn’t see his eyes. “Omegas require more fresh fruit in general, but I read that pomegranates are one of the best for you.”

It was stifling hot out and all Seokjin could smell was this fruit he was ill acquainted with. The red didn’t fade from the folds of Jeongguk’s hands for a full two days after. “Fresh fruit is expensive, Jeongguk-ah.”

He stopped his ministrations in their entirety to look up at him. Others might say he looked too serious for a kid his age, but they didn’t know Jeon Jeongguk then.

Between his thumb and index finger, he held up a seed between them.

It took far too long given the context for Seokjin to realize what was happening.

Hoseok delivers packaged meals, medication, and vitamins on the first go-round, and on the second, bottled water, tea, and electrolytes, as if they were preparing for a storm and not weathering what could be a cold. “I’ll survive, really.”

“You’ve missed two days of work, hyung.”

Seokjin holds up the manuscript. “I’m working.”

Hoseok frowns, picking up a crumpled tissue, the washing machine churning in the background. “Do you want me to spend the night?”

He doesn’t, but leaves by giving stern instructions for Seokjin to at least sleep in his bed, but the lock he put on that room at least keeps his friend out.

The fever breaks sometime between three and four am if he had to guess. He falls asleep and wakes up to a kitchen cabinet shutting. The scent of ggwari gochu heralds his arrival.

“I like the place,” Jeongguk says once Seokjin sits up, blanket drawn up over his shoulders. He removed his sweat stained shirt sometime after midnight. “Nice neighborhood.”

He, too, is shirtless, but in the kitchen. Cooking. The differences between this Jeongguk and the last Jeongguk that he saw in person are obvious - at least one more tattoo, and his shoulders stand out more.

The cutting board is the same, and the knife set too. Jeongguk would be well familiar with where to find his pots. “I want you to eat better.” Seokjin stands from the couch. Jeongguk takes one look at his body and returns to slicing. He need not look to know all of the prepackaged and store bought affair from the day before is gone, entirely wiped not out of the fridge but out of existence.

“Your mission to fatten me up is as transparent as they come.”

“What, caring about you?” He shakes his head. “Loving you?”

Seokjin crosses his arms, even if the alpha isn’t looking at that precise moment. The knife skills are the same too, a steady tempo across the wooden board. When they stop, they stop with military precision born less from service and more so from all the years of training on the field.

“Come, hyung.” Jeongguk reaches for him. He waits for Seokjin to step close enough to draw him in. It is a long wait. “Taste.”

According to Yoongi, there were no proper beaches in Busan, so they took the train out for forty minutes to a proper one, one with rocks and coves and what he promised was better food. It was the hottest part of summer then, and all three of them were burnt somewhere on their body, Jeongguk the worst as he had resumed some of the sports practices previously on break. Yoongi accused Seokjin of looking like one of the old stoop aunts while sitting out on the balcony to wait for Jeongguk to jog by.

The boy’s neck was much darker than the rest of his body, and overall, much darker than Yoongi. “I thought you’d been working during the day, hyung,” Jeongguk teased. “What kind of work have you been doing?”

They wrestled each other by the waves which would have been better suited to the sandy beaches closer to their home, and when they got too hot, Seokjin bought them all ice cream, Yoongi not even protesting when Jeongguk got two. His doting on Jeongguk surpassed Yoongi’s at that moment.

The way Jeongguk draped himself over Seokjin’s body did raise Yoongi’s eyebrows, and Seokjin felt the commentary far sooner than it came. Jeongguk rubbed his chin on his shoulder, gripped the back of his neck.

“He can’t scent you, but he’ll take your scent.” Yoongi said later, when they were alone for whatever brief time they were alone.

“Don’t be weird, Yoongichi.” The sun had gotten to them all.

“He likes you, hyung, or did him handfeeding you and taking your scent not trigger any kind of omega’s intuition?”

“He’s a kid.” Seokjin was used to dongsaengs following him around like ducklings. It wasn’t strange, although he did not voice this aloud, because even he could not ignore how hollow it would ring.

“He could present tomorrow while sharing a bed with you.”

Seokjin scoffed. Yoongi was a bit of a late bloomer, so he reminded his friend, “You haven’t even presented yet.” They hooked their arms together and waddled out of the store back towards the train. Jeongguk caught up to them, waving around his abrupt conquest - one of those touristy necklaces with sand from the beach that couldn’t be from the same beach they were on, and a tiny message in the glass bottle ornament.

They’d walked past a man selling them on the street corner, a variety in both necklace and bracelet length. You could write the message before he’d stuff it in there.

Yoongi didn’t say anything when Jeongguk looped it around Seokjin’s neck.

Jeongguk was not idol level of celebrity, but with the endorsements he had, he was the sort of celebrity that people recognized without realizing they recognized him. This was most evident in the way people stopped and stared at them when they were together; sometimes it was just for the alpha, whose face they vaguely recognized, or sometimes it was because they thought that they as a couple modeled for something.

“You’re just too pretty, yeobo,” Jeongguk says, arm around his shoulder as he gently pulls them away from an older woman and what would appear to be her teenage granddaughter. He likes to put his arm around his shoulder, because then he can do this: press the inside of his wrist to his neck.

It certainly feels superfluous at this point.

When they dine out, the chef sends out something Jeongguk didn’t order but he insists is the perfect fuel for athletes. Jeongguk bows his head with a great smile, and Seokjin does not hide his smirk. “This is what you get for all the times you tried to tell me what to eat,” he remarks, tiramisu on his spoon.

“Food is love.”

Everything is black and white with Jeongguk. When he sits back in his chair, a jacket zipped up to his chin with a matching set of shorts on, Seokjin huffs. Not only is it too cold out for shorts, but the only items Jeongguk keeps in his wardrobe are athletic pieces. “You still haven’t learned to dress yourself.”

“Would you rather I take this off?”

Hand on the zipper, he begins to slowly unzip the jacket under his chin until Seokjin stops him. Jeongguk stares until Seokjin puts his hand away.

“Did Yoongi hyung tell you?” They walk the city street, busy enough their bodies stay warm in each other. “Now that Jimin finished his service?”

It wasn’t just Jimin’s service that slowed down their courtship, but Seokjin can’t be sure what Yoongi told his brother. Already, he can’t reply on the topic.

“I found the prenatal stuff all over his place last time I was there. He’s serious about it, and he should have a heat before new year.”

“Jeongguk-ah.” He allows Seokjin to pull him to stop. “I never got to celebrate your birthday with you.”

And then the alpha smiles, enough his eyes close. “I could think of something.”

They get second dessert on the way home because it’s Seokjin’s preferred and frequently only consistent meal, and Jeongguk will run it all off within the next ten hours anyway. Jeongguk feeds Seokjin by hand. He licks his fingers between every bite.

It happens between one step and the next. The crowd parts just so, and Hoseok stares back at them. “Hobi hyung.” Jeongguk’s smile is genuine. Hoseok’s could be.

The thing about Hoseok is that Jeongguk knew him first. He introduced them. “Hyung.” Hoseok greets Seokjin first. “Jeonggukie.”

“You’ll have to forgive us, we’re on our way home,” the alpha says, arm loose around Seokjin’s shoulders, his scent - not.

Seokjin would rather not look at Hoseok’s face. “We? Are you moving back to Seoul?”

“Seoul’s always been home.” The moment passes, and a new one comes. It does not bring with it anything useful to Seokjin. Hoseok moves his attention away from Jeongguk onto him. He feels it happen.

“You look better, hyung. I’m glad.”

In his apartment, Jeongguk unlocks the bedroom, and from where Seokjin stands, watches the alpha look inside the room for a long time.

Then he finds and opens the hallway closet and moves bin by bin everything into the room. The lights never come on, but for an even longer time, there is rustling. Eventually, Jeongguk carries him in too, when it’s time. From the couch to the bedroom, Jeongguk lays him down in a nest.

Summer wound down, not in weather, but in time.

Jeongguk’s break, shorter than their own, ended already, and he left in the mornings with either breakfast prepared for him or preparing breakfast for Seokjin and his brother. Sometimes there would be a flower left by the plates or a candy. Yoongi would comment that they both knew whose plate was whose and the one time Seokjin protested, his friend yanked at the back of his necklace.

They finished their summer reading and Seokjin devoured online information about his new classes. He was excited for them, ready to go back to the city where he could walk down familiar paths with new music and new weather.

There was the obvious problem.

Jeongguk no longer waited for Seokjin to wake before plastering himself to his back, chin hooked over his shoulder and one leg over his hip. A supreme cuddle for what was chinning through to his scent.

“Smells like a rose garden in here,” Yoongi said more than once. “Pretty sure there’s never been a rose in this entire joint.”

He said this in public, that is, he said it when Jeongguk was around, and when he wasn’t, Yoongi also said: “Your scent is stronger here.” Seokjin wasn’t sure if he meant in Busan, or in their apartment, a keeper of its own secrets.

With the threat of new textbooks looming, Yoongi picked up as much work as he could in those final days, and alone, Seokjin spent that time either gaming in bed or walking the shoreline to feed the birds. Mostly, he stayed in bed with the excuse of hard work around the corner.

At night, Jeongguk met him there.

Their departure on the horizon, Seokjin allowed him to stay as close as he wanted. After all, Jeongguk’s brother was about to leave too, and then he would be on his own. In all that time, the whispers of Jeongguk’s dam were there in everything but physical presence, and Seokjin found a new worry for the coming term in thinking about how lonely he must be.

Knees folded together, they ate the same way they played games or listened to music together, which was facing each other in a cramped space with room not even for breath, and that was okay, because Seokjin found even the scent of Jeongguk’s breath comforting.

“I won’t ever wash my bed again,” Jeongguk declared, and Seokjin frowned, sitting up. It was more than the bed, it was most of Jeongguk’s clothing woven around them. What once resided across the floor or the back of the computer chair now all lived under his head as an extra pillow, and it was hard to recognize until that moment because it was all black. Jeongguk and Yoongi both wore black exclusively, and Seokjin belatedly realized it had less to do with cool factor and more to do with masking any stains to go longer between washes.

“Shit, hyung, you made a nest in his bed!” Yoongi cried out, the two of them alone but Seokjin barely able to push through the fog of waking consciousness. “What are you going to do? We have to pack up and leave soon!”

It was strange to see his things there, stranger yet to see them on Jeongguk who wore his pink shorts around the house. “Jeongguk-ah.” Seokjin’s hands kneaded his hoodie under the covers as he said it. He wanted to wrap it all up and take it with him.

“Hyung could stay here with me.” The boy said it with a smile like a joke, but Seokjin knew it was anything but. Above their heads, Yoongi’s mattress was nearly bare.

Everything must come to an end.

One day, Seokjin stripped away his possessions from the bunk bed with a physical ache, and when Jeongguk came home, he took one look of betrayal, then silently sat on the balcony for the rest of the night. “He’ll be okay,” Yoongi said, hand on Seokjin’s shoulder. “Kid’s been through a lot. It was good for him to have you here.”

That night was the last, but the first in a long stretch that Seokjin fell asleep alone. The bed didn’t feel right. A body - Jeongguk - jostled his getting in. At first he opened up for him, for Jeongguk to lie on top of him like he sometimes did, but when Jeongguk turned to pull him on top, Seokjin sighed.

“I’m sorry, hyung.”

“Hush. You’ll see me again.”

“I know I will.”

There was little said after that. The sensation of something wet on his neck was so unexpected that Seokjin could not and did not understand what happened, long after it happened. He doesn't think he made a noise, but how else did Yoongi know?

It was Yoongi who turned on the lights and screamed. It was Seokjin who was bloody, and Jeongguk who remained in that bed, long after Yoongi dragged Seokjin away.

The unfortunate truth is that Seokjin never sleeps better than when they’re together.

To this day, he does not understand how Jeongguk’s body can do what it does when they’re apart, which is operate on a level to compete with world class athletes. He used to keep the photo of Yoongi and Jeongguk standing next to each other at Yoongi’s graduation on the fridge, used to look back at precisely the age Jeongguk shot up over them both with his long legs.

Despite the times they go without, nothing feels more natural than the arm around his waist.

Everything around them smells like the sea, like brine and something more sinister underneath. It was one of the strange side effects that no one thought of until it became obvious. Jeongguk lights rose scented candles around the place, but Seokjin knows how happy Jeongguk is that he is the only alpha who ever really knew Seokjin’s true scent. He wouldn’t need to tell him that for Seokjin to understand it.

“How long are you staying?” he asks, between breakfast and lunch, two meals he rarely eats, but Jeongguk is carb loading and the pasta smells divine.

He always has Seokjin taste first. If it’s to his liking, it’s done. “As long as I want.” That is often his reply, but Seokjin rolls his eyes. Jeongguk has practices and traveling, always. His main coach is still in Busan, even though the entire team spends just as much time in Seoul, and Jeongguk has never slouched in anything.

Including him.

He accompanies Seokjin to work, because Jeongguk knows Kim Namjoon likes him and Taehyung entertains him while Seokjin attempts to finish his assigned projects. The two of them giggle together over anything, and he catches Namjoon watching with fond eyes.

“Do you think I’ve wasted my potential working here?” he asks his boss, a man younger than him but whose opinion the entire industry sets their stocks by. Namjoon double takes.

“Aren’t you happy?”

Seokjin hums, trusting Namjoon to decide if it’s affirmative.

“Others decide our potential for us,” he eventually answers, still frowning, still uneasy, or maybe that’s because Jeongguk and Taehyung have disappeared and he doesn’t know where. Seokjin knows where. It’s half past two in the afternoon. He knows exactly where Jeongguk is.

“But only I know the truth?” Seokjin suggests. Namjoon barely smiles.

Taehyung comes back, the scent of salt on his skin, in his hair, on his eyelashes. He smells as if he could be related to Seokjin well and truly, the way a few of their colleagues joke about after observing them together. He looks a little troubled, the same as Namjoon, but for different reasons. “Hyung, the way your scents-”

“It’s nothing, Tae-yah.” Taehyung had met Jeongguk before, but maybe not spent enough time one-on-one for his dongsaeng to fully note Jeongguk’s scent.

“But hyung - they’re the exact same.” He has the face of someone who’s seen something they shouldn’t. “Not even identical twins have the exact same scent.”

Fingers curl around his shoulder. “Hyung has a transient scent. He used to smell different.” Jeongguk hooks his chin over the shoulder, arms circling his waist. Seokjin notes that Jeongguk doesn’t share what his scent used to be. That’s only for him to know now.

The four of them go to dinner in what should feel like a proper double date, but Taehyung looks uncomfortable and Namjoon exhausted, perhaps more haunted than anyone else, although Seokjin would not assume it has the same sources. At home, Seokjin settles on the couch, his own fatigue bleeding in.

Jeongguk carries him to the nest with a kiss and a promise to be back shortly.

A terrible thing, to be left alone in a nest. The scent of Jeongguk, the same as himself, all around him, but without the alpha there, it might as well just be him. Seokjin knows the truth though, knows precisely the outline of where Jeongguk slept only the night before, and nose buried to the hilt, he throbs with need.

Two fingers tucked inside himself, Seokjin smells the air, the sea, the sun. He can smell that old shoebox of an apartment and its particular musk, dehumidifier never quite enough to save it. Scent is tied to memories, and his memory of that summer may never fade.

Sometimes it’s hard to hear or scent him coming, but Jeongguk presses him down into the nest. His hips shift first, enough to place his hardness between Seokjin’s legs, then removes Seokjin’s hand from inside his underwear to suck on the wet fingers. “Tell me why I had to quit the gym early tonight, hm?”

Seokjin returned to the dorms under the cover of night, thankful that the next time he’d likely see any family wouldn’t be for a few months. Enough time for a wound to heal. If it were any other time of year, it might be easy to conceal it, but as is, wearing a jacket with the collar popped and zipped all the way up looked suspicious at the end of the hottest weather of the year.

Yoongi walked into their room, two days late after their joint planned arrival, and yanked down the zipper.

They said nothing about it at first, but Yoongi cried, the first tears he’d ever seen from his friend. “Yoongi-yah.”

“Don’t. Don’t say anything.” It was their second term living together. Yoongi brought more back with him than ever before, but one duffel bag remained stuffed in the corner of their meager closet while everything else came unpacked.

“He hasn’t presented yet. It doesn’t mean anything,” he’d say, over and over again. “It’s gonna heal and vanish.”

Both morning and night, Yoongi helped him clean and bandage the bite.

“Besides, we don’t even know if he’ll turn out alpha.” Their entire dormitory had a betting pool for anyone who hadn’t presented yet; heavy odds were on Yoongi to present as an alpha. Why he thought his brother was unlikely to turn out alpha was unknown other than fanciful thinking at that moment.

Seokjin started new classes and met new friends. Someone remarked that his scent reminded her of her grandmother’s soap, and it meant nothing to him because lots of older women enjoyed the scent of rose, but Yoongi looked at him for so long that Seokjin got sick in the bathroom.

It wasn’t long after that he walked into his dorm room to be bowled over by bright citrus, an eruption of sweet and tangy that coated the walls for weeks. “You always said we’re just alike,” Seokjin remarked when he delivered soup and light meals a few days later.

The one omega girl on their floor that bet against odds made a small fortune, enough she bought them both a care package of her preferred omegan sanitary items and drinks from either guilt or gratitude.

Presentation was a tough time for most, even tougher when it occurred later. Yoongi had never mentioned a dream of being one thing or another; he wanted to compose music. Anything else was superfluous to him.

It was only at the end of his first heat that Yoongi plugged in his dead phone to abruptly curse. “I can’t believe this. I can’t fucking believe this!”

Jeongguk presented just two days after his older brother. Seokjin would have thought his own subsequently early heat a symptom of stress, the same likely instigator for Yoongi or Jeongguk, but holed up in a hotel on his own, he sweated out a tide and knew better.

Seokjin and Yoongi sat reunited in their dorm room after their heats, the itch between them different than before. His roommate, and at that time, probably closest confidant in the world, sighed deeply. “How many showers was it?”

Just then? “Three.”

Seokjin still smelled only like the ocean.

Yoongi nodded, then with a slowness felt more than see, retrieved the bag he dropped in the corner of the closet when he arrived. “You should at least nest.”

It was everything from Jeongguk’s bed.

Seokjin’s heats weren’t the same any longer, and because so many years had gone by claimed without a successful cycle in terms of a pup, they weren’t always so obvious. It would be impossible to tell if all the fucking that transpired was a heat or a reunion, but he spent a couple of days on his back with a soreness between his legs that lasted longer.

“I fucking love you,” Jeongguk whispers in his ear. Sometimes he shouts it. “The only one for me.”

He’s always made it simple, Seokjin will give him that. Never once did he have to wonder where they stood, and as the fall twilights into shorter days, the nest grows larger and larger, a black hole where social obligation once stood. This, too, feels rather obvious. The teas that appear. Seokjin wonders if Jeongguk accepted them from Jimin.

It shouldn’t happen the way it does, but then again, none of it should have happened the way it did.

Jeongguk isn’t even at the gym or out for a run; he’s safely tucked into the ensuite bathroom adjoining their nest. Hoseok knocks but lets himself in. He’s had the code for some time.

“Oh.” He doesn’t make it through the door before he stops. “I see.”

Post heat, post reunion, post whatever it was, Seokjin dressed himself in a pajama set with little to it. Shorts, short sleeved collared top, but the kind that was wide enough to show half his chest. When he flushes, Seokjin knows the mating bite glows.

“I’m sorry. I should have told you.” Hoseok’s flirting had been so mild Seokjin spared no thoughts for it until Yoongi pointed it out. That was in spring, and since then, it had not changed in tempo or temperament. It was easy to accept in that Seokjin didn’t notice it at all.

“Hyung, when did it - when it happen? I’ve been here for-”

“A long time ago.” Seokjin sighs with a smile.

“Who?” Hoseok asks at the same time as he arrives, Jeongguk slipping quietly into the room so that when he echoes the question, it startles Hoseok.

“Who?” Jeongguk laughs.

“You-? He bit you?” Hoseok points, and Seokjin can’t be sure of the cause of the indignation in his voice. He’s known Jeongguk longer. Perhaps he didn’t think a young athlete like Jeongguk would risk or even be interested in mating.

Jeongguk pulls Seokjin back to his chest. “When I was fifteen, I claimed him, and that was waiting as long as I could.”

“Fift-fifteen?” Hoseok reels back.

“Yes, and you know what happened?” It’s funny that he was wearing anything at all. He usually isn’t. Jeongguk pulls the towel wrapped around his shoulders away. Seokjin hears it hit the floor.

“He claimed me right back. Right then.”

Seokjin’s scar is older, but by a mere hour. The hour it took for Yoongi to calm down, enough to leave to buy proper bandages and antiseptic, was all there was between them.

It happened at the very first moment they were left alone, that Jeongguk went to him on the balcony, teary eyed but with a look in them that Seokjin will never forget. He ducked through the window, overgrown hair in his face, looking for all the world as if he was about to ask for forgiveness.

Seokjin drew him to his knees in between his.

There hadn’t been a single thought in his head.

“I bit back,” Seokjin confesses.