Work Text:
THE BEGINNING
he didn't mean to look.
he had agreed to bring some papers into the staffroom for professor binns, since, well, he's dead and can't carry anything anymore. and yoongi never intended to look at what's inside the massive folder secured in his arms, because binns, with his ghostly thin voice, had made him swear not to look inside, and yoongi's one to stick to his words.
but when he motions to set the folder filled to the brim down onto the old, dusty table in the teacher's office, he somehow terribly miscalculates the distance from his hands to the edge of the table, and sends the entirety of it down to the floor. suddenly papers are flying around him, the dust forcing him into the coughing fit of the decade, and when yoongi finally regains full control of his body and teary eyes gain, he stares for a few seconds. shit.
he hurries to grab everything lying around and to put it back into the dark folder before anyone, especially not any teacher, witnesses him presumably snooping around in possibly sensitive and confidential information again.
after a few moments of panicked paper crumbling that makes him sweat more than learning for finals, yoongi recognizes the sheets as unrevised history of magic homeworks. essay after essay had been coming down onto the not so clean floor around binns' undead workspace, the parchments neatly or messily folded to make them more transportable for any unlucky fool who happens to carry them around (him).
he doesn't mind, just finds interesting how binns intends to correct them with the transparent ghost fingers of his.
a few moments later, he has every essay back in the folder, slaps it closed energetically, and puts the folder on the table with an exhausted sigh. that for sure was an experience.
he's a bit late for lunch now, his stomach growling loudly, and he certainly doesn't want to get caught here again.
yoongi's about to leave, checking again if every essay really is back inside the folder again, when he spots a scrap of paper right next to the door through which he came not even three minutes ago.
he picks it up hastily, snatching it away so quick it falls open in his hand, and he's promptly greeted by the ugliest handwriting he's ever seen, smeared across the page — he doesn't even know what to think.
the door opens.
he flinches, ducking away from where the handle almost hits him in the head, and rises to his feet as quick as possible, robes and his bag making it look a lot less graceful as he'd like to think, and straightens his back.
professor mcgonagall stares at him, her awfully intelligent eyes narrowed suspiciously.
"mr min, what are you doing here?" she demands in her best i-am-better-than-you–voice, and yoongi shoves the parchment he's still clutching deeper into his pocket.
he can't just go over to the table and put the paper into the folder as if nothing happened anymore, it looks too — guilty. as if he'd intended to steal a history of magic homework or sabotage another pupil and got caught and now tries to lie about delivering some papers (for a class he's not even taking anymore) and accidentally looking at a sealed paper to avoid any punishment. all of that while he had promised binns to not look at any containment. besides— mcgonagall doesn't like him, he knows it, and she distrusts the slytherins already as is. she'd never buy it, even though it's the truth. so he lies.
"good afternoon, professor," he greets to stall and give his brain enough time to think, "i was just waiting for professor sprout, because i wanted to talk about my last herbology essay with her?" it sounds like a question. why does it sound like a question? "anyway, i'll just go to lunch now and look for her when classes are over." he smiles, one of the kind where he looks like he's seven years old and couldn't ever do anything wrong in his life, and acts as if he couldn't see the way mcgonagall's lips disappear in a thin line. "have a nice day!"
and then he slings his bag over his shoulder and he's out the door, ignoring mcgonagall and her piercing look that makes it hard to pin down if she believes him or not.
❊
yoongi swears he didn't intend to look, he had no reason to. he doesn't care one bit about binns' class — a class he had dropped as soon as possible — and he certainly does not care about some random person in this class with the worst chicken scratch he's ever seen. yoongi doesn't care, no, not at all.
he doesn't care about some dumbass in this class who bullshitted themselves through a graded paper, someone whose desperation literally bleeds through the parchment.
he doesn't give one single damn.
not even a half.
"the fuck?" yoongi mumbles to himself, his eyebrows furrowing further with any passing second. "troll uprising in 1978? whomst—"
this essay is shit. it's inaccurate. it's ugly. it has no structure. it's not even completed. it's wrong, mostly.
he's sitting at the slytherin table, in front of piles of sandwiches and overboarding plates of variations of potatoes and bowls of savory soup, and only has eyes for this… abomination.
troll uprising in 1978.
oh, god.
the name at the top reads B. Iuny. or something. he can't really identify whether that is supposed to be a 'b' or an 'h' or something else. seems like the student writing this hoped it would get lost if their name was written extra ugly. they succeeded. kind of.
just when yoongi decides, no, this isn't his business, and even though he pities the person submitting this kind of essay for a graded homework, it's not his business, and he's about to put the rumpled paper back into his pocket, because it's not his business, someone with dark green painted nails grabs it and pulls it from his hands.
"jimin," yoongi groans but makes no move to get it back, since, well, it's jimin.
"what is this," jimin squints once he's given the parchment a quick once-over, and collapses onto the bench across from yoongi.
"a love letter?" taehyung squeaks excitedly upon his entrance, which includes, for whatever reason, one silly twirl with his wand (it produces a shimmering trail of glitter that forms a bouquet of flowers), jumping onto the bench next to jimin and some bouncing, which earns them some dirty glances from a group fifth year slytherins. he plops onto the bench, lets the starlight flowers settle on jimin's hair, and grabs the paper from his hands along with a spoonful of roastbeef.
"is our yoon-hyung finally getting the recognition he deserves? these cheekies of yours are to die for," he coos, and yoongi ignores the slightly offended look coming from jimin, reaches over to smack him upside the head and snatches the essay.
"seriously, what is this, i can't even read it." jimin begins to stuff his face with forkfulls of tomato salad, but leans over the table to try and read the letter.
yoongi groans again, regretting every decision he's ever made in his life, and finally starts eating as well. why did he wait for them?
"you are late. why is that, i wonder?" he asks, regarding their unusual lateness, and looks pointedly between their messy hair and flushed cheeks. taehyung's tie is loose.
taehyung slides closer to jimin and grabs the paper again.
"oh, the troll uprising 1978? i heard of that!" he shouts. a few people stare. "but whomst the fuck cites the troll uprising in a love letter?"
"i don't know, but isn't that like, super romantic? with all the rioting and torches and the ambiente..."
taehyung ooohs and kisses jimin.
yoongi wants to die.
❊
in the afternoon, after his herbology class (he had to improvise some questions about the last essay, because apparently mcgonagall had told professor sprout about his request, god damn), he finds himself buried under several potions books and the heavy bodies of two sixth year slytherins.
"get," he grunts, "off."
who would've thought jimin and taehyung, both built like green esparagus and with as much muscle as a cooked spaghetti, could get so heavy? yoongi's ribs produce a concerning cracking sound when he tries to shift their weight from one numb asscheek to the other and fails.
"no," taehyung mumbles from the middle of their pathetic slytherin stack.
jimin flails his arms a little bit, hitting taehyung in the process and smacking yoongi's chin. "maybe if you tell me everything about that paper you won't let us take a proper look at, i might."
yoongi groans. he realizes he does that way too often to be healthy, and slides down in his chair as far as possible.
"you're so much deadweight."
"tell us something new, grandpa," tae mutters. yoongi smacks his head, or at least what he thinks is taehyung's head. maybe it was jimin's, it's really hard to tell from his spot. but fine.
"found the paper in the staffroom after delivering something for binns. couldn't put it back because mcgonagall was there, so i had to keep it. maybe i'll return it. can't read the name though." he sighs. "now get up and let me breathe, the both of you stink."
"asshole," comes from taehyung.
jimin snores.
yoongi groans.
❊
"yah, yoomf," taehyung calls out, "hyung!"
yoongi proceeds to ignore him, because, well, his back hurts because of these two nosy fuckers, and he's lost two hours of assigned study time, which usually wouldn't be that bad — it's not like he's a nerd without any social life burying himself under piles of books voluntarily —, but it's his last year and he has a tricky potions homework due soon and he admittedly had let things slide lately. that's mostly jimin's and taehyung's fault, because they always have ideas that sound good at first but are not.
so now he'll have to stay in the library until it closes and then continue his essay in the slytherin homeroom, something he hates to do, because it's really impractical to write an essay under lake-green lights.
"hyung!" taehyung shouts again, and several people shush them from other aisles.
"what do you want," yoongi hisses. he knows that taehyung knows very well that he hates being disturbed at work, especially in the library where they're supposed to be quiet and inspired, as dumbledore had explained to the first years at the beginning of the semester. if the younger wants something, he'll have to get his ass over here and talk in his indoors-voice.
"hyung, show me that paper again!" taehyung demands as he skips over to where yoongi's seated, voice loud as ever. "that love letter thingy!"
someone behind the shelf mumbles something about noisy fourth graders not able to shut the fuck up, and tae silently sends a blue glowing spell through a gap between the books, smiling innocently at yoongi, and acts as if he can't hear the muffled, panicked rustling of paper upon the impact on the other side.
"where do you have it? the mysterious sex letter?"
he reaches yoongi's place and immediatley makes grabby hands for the bag leaning against his chair. yoongi hits the back of tae's hand with his wand, making him flinch away and whine about his grumpy hyung being so mean when he, his best friend in forever, never wants to do anything but help him.
"how do you manage to unnerve me all the time, kim," yoongi mutters and erases a whole paragraph of his own paper because its style was beyond the pale, "and how the fuck did you conclude it was a love letter from reading about — troll uprising?"
taehyung shrugs and makes himself comfortable on the table, on top of yoongi's potions book and three other tomes about runespoors and faux floo.
"i guess it's just skill! i can read upside down really well," he beams happily and obnoxiously places his hand close to yoongi's inkwell, who doesn't bother to tell him he can, in fact, not read upside down really well. yoongi rather grabs his inkpot and places it at the other side of the table, before the ink-on-homework-causes-fire-on-school-grounds–incident can repeat itself.
he tries to concentrate again, because he's barely halfway through his shit essay and he doesn't want to write anything about aggressive three-headed snakes and the use their teeth find in potion making, like, at all.
minutes pass.
peacefully humming, taehyung rummages through the books on the table, looks at pictures in some of the volumes, flips pages unnecessarily noisy. the heels of his shoes occasionally hit the underside of the table due to his violent leg swinging and tae's flexibility, producing weird hitches in yoongi's essay.
"what do you want, tae." yoongi wouldn't be surprised if his exasperation materialized itself and bit taehyung in the ass.
the younger looks awfully smug, just as if yoongi's reaction was the main goal of his doing.
"show me that mysterious paper again, and i'll leave you to your terrible work," he grins and flips the page of the tome he's holding to reveal an illustration of several completely round and goldbrown runespoor eggs.
"no," yoongi snaps. this paragraph needs some adjusting, and then he'll be able to link his next sentences to that one and the flow of the paper will be reestablished. he doesn't want taehyung to read that essay, mostly because it's really bad and he'll memorize facts completely wrong — that's totally a thing he'd do — which won't help him saving his measly NEWT score next year, and also because he doesn't want anyone to read someone else's essay.
he wasn't supposed to read it, and his conscience already weighs heavy in his belly because he did read it, and additionally fucking stole a graded paper out of binns' folder.
yoongi's a slytherin. he's not very high up the trust-ladder teachers and gryffindors had established over the course of a thousand years. he stole a paper belonging to another, unknown student with the worst knowledge of history of magic and the worst chicken scratch ever out of a confidential folder.
so no, he won't give taehyung the essay.
yoongi erases another sentence from his own.
when he glances up to where taehyung is seated, the younger slytherin grins.
uh oh.
"that's too bad, hyung," he snarls and shuts his book, a mischievous glint in his eyes, and it looks way too close to madness for yoongi to say anything, "i guess i'll have to tell jiminie all about how his broomstick broke last year."
"you wouldn't dare," yoongi growls and racks his brain for any blackmailing material, but nothing comes up, especially nothing jimin must never know.
"try me," tae smiles his boxy smile, and yoongi really, honestly wonders how he's best friends with the younger boy, because he's clearly crazy as fuck.
(taehyung is slytherin through and through, and yes, he really is mad, a little bit. it comes naturally, with growing up in a family of purebloods, with taking delight in blood rituals, and even though he sports a goofy, silly façade most of the time, yoongi knows he's wicked, and crossing him never ends good. taehyung is a slytherin, and he's mad, but yoongi also knows he's a good kid, someone who fears himself on bad days.)
he sighs and mentally apologizes profusely to the student whose paper he's stolen. then he takes it out of his robe pocket, hands it over, rolling his eyes at he situation.
he knows he could take on taehyung any day, but he won't, at least not now, because they are friends, and most of their conversations are bickering without any bite. if he really was adamant in keeping the parchment a secret, yoongi wouldn't hand it over at the lame threat of facing jimin's wrath for the destroyed broom, and tae wouldn't tease any further. but, he hopes, maybe taehyung knows something, recognizes the handwriting, or the essay, and yoongi can fix this mess.
he doesn't.
taehyung reads the essay, laughs a bit at the missing structure, and then he asks yoongi curiously how the troll leader recovered from his almost-beheading in early 1979. yoongi answers by almost crying and handing him Troll Behaviourism Throughout The 20th Century And Its Impacts On Wizardry And Muggledom, the most boring book in the godforsaken hogwarts library, to shut him up.
(it's not only that the book is boring, it's completely unnecessary. troll behaviour hasn't changed in more than four hundred years and it's not going to change anytime soon. yoongi could've explained to tae that there has never been a troll rioting because trolls can't collectively gather enough braincells to register farts are stinky, but he has to work, seriously.)
this plan works for about fifteen minutes, because then taehyung has looked at every picture in the six-hundred-page volume and is getting bored again.
"have you tried to find the author of this masterpiece?" he asks yoongi, who can't distinguish if the younger is being sarcastic or not.
"can't read the name."
taehyung grabs the parchment again, and although yoongi would like to know what he's doing with his pencil and leftover paper, he doesn't ask.
oh sweet, sweet silence.
the seconds tick by, the library getting even darker by the minute, and it's so wonderfully quiet. there are some younger students cheering and shouting in the distance, most likely at the far east end of the library, and he can hear madam pince scolding them before it's silent again. tae furiously scratches something onto the parchment, brows furrowed and tongue peeking out from between his lips, and yoongi manages to write three decent paragraphs. it's a bomb essay, yoongi has to praise himself, because although he can't think of any other homework of the last year that he hated more than the four-scroll-runespoor assignment, it's a good essay. if snape grades it with anything other than an O, he'll hex his cauldron.
taehyung asks something, probably how to spell a word. yoongi doesn't answer because he's about to finish this bitch, three hours earlier than he'd anticipated and a bit shorter than his essays usually are, but he had said what he wanted to say and it's Outstanding as is. if he wraps this up nicely, he'll have the evening for himself. he doesn't dare to think about it. what he could do with all that free time...
"yah!" taehyung shouts into his ear, way closer than he was just a few minutes ago, and yoongi almost knocks his inkpot over. there is a smear of dark glistening ink on his parchment.
"what the hell, what the fuck? what is wrong with you?" yoongi hisses, and yes, he's doing that way too often, too. his heart thumps as if he had exed three cups of coffee at once and is about to jump from a very high place.
"do you!" taehyung shouts. madam pince will kick them out, no doubt. "know!"
"shut up, shut up!"
"a H. Jung!"
"be quiet, what the f—" he interrupts himself when the sturdy, old figure of madam pince herself appears at the end of the aisle.
"good evening, madam pince," taehyung grins at her, as if he could never do anything to disturb the peaceful atmosphere in her library.
she sends yoongi her best disparaging look, something he had seen countless times in the last six years, and then — yoongi doesn't believe his eyes — she smiles at taehyung. madam pince smiles. at a noisy slytherin. a pupil. in broad candlelight, the world as witness.
she disappears as quiet as she came, without a word. taehyung turns back to yoongi.
"what just happened."
"the initials on the essay."
"what did you do to madam pince?"
"it's not B. Iuny but H. Jung, quite similar, but not the same. so do you know someone whose surname is jung?"
"i didn't know she could do that. with her face, i mean."
"of course, it could be B. Juny as well. or variations."
"i greet her every day! why is she so mean to me when i've never damaged a single book in my whole life?"
❊
yoongi plops onto his bed face-first. he's so exhausted.
thoughts are something he doesn't do anymore, he decides, and forces his eyes open against the cool pillow.
although technically, he had finished the potions homework earlier than anticipated, he stayed in the library to proofread and improve his essay until the library closed, and he's honestly glad he did because he had found more spelling mistakes than normal. dinner time was long past when he exited the library with all of his books, and yoongi is convinced he looked like a rat that had never seen the sun with the way he squinted into the too bright candlelight in the hallway.
a short trip into the kitchens (he had found during his fifth year that the painting with the big fruit basket on the ground floor leads to the kitchen, where house elves are always eager to help you with an empty stomach or a cold bed) provided him with cold cucumber soup and a shit-ton of biscuits filled with orange jelly, and now, well-fed and deadly tired, he's ready to pass out in his clothes any second.
and he is, the sound of absolutely nothing quickly lulling him into sleep, and he can't bring himself to care about how he's still wearing his shoes and robes, and how he still has the strap of his bag wrapped around his wrist hanging from the bed.
and then someone opens the door — yoongi wouldn't notice or care if the someone entering wasn't so loud in doing so.
the someone thankfully goes quiet again, leaving yoongi to his slow thoughts that feel like lead dripping into his thoughts and drowning any thought of homework and studying for NEWTS, until —
someone demonic-screeches into his ear and lets themselves drop onto his back.
yoongi screams, a high-pitched sound that cuts through his own ears, and kicks his legs furiously to get rid of whoever. his wand is stuck between the underside of his thigh and the mattress, which is not very convenient, since he's got at least seven different spells on the tip of his tongue to defend and counterattack.
sectumsempra, stupor, expelliarmus, maybe imperio, maybe something even more forbidden.
"hyung!"
he goes quiet. his back cracks as he whips his head around to face the voice.
"what the fu— get off!"
taehyung rolls over, snuggles into yoongi's bed as if he didn't just scare the living shit out of him, and grins.
yoongi's boiling.
"do that one more time and i'll slice you open like a rat," he hisses, and for a short moment, he means it. he doesn't appreciate being woken like that, or woken at all, basically. then he gets a grip on himself.
taehyung grins wider and, without warning, shoves a paper into his face. yoongi almost goes cross-eyed trying to read the small black letters before he leans back and grabs the scrap of parchment from taehyung's slender fingers to read it properly.
he almost chokes.
"you stole the student list of binns' seventh graders?"
"nyeah," tae wiggles, "i stole every list with names of binns' students. but look at the fifth name."
his eyes scan the names, A, D, G, I — Jung. Jung Hoseok. hufflepuff. 7th grader. terrible history of magic score.
"B. Iuny?"
"exactly," taehyung grins. "now pay me."
"no."
"sounds fair, have a terrible night."
and then he's gone.
❊
"um," yoongi stutters the next morning, running on approximately three hours of sleep, "i think this one's yours."
he's in the great hall, hufflepuff table, and stands in front of a really confused jung hoseok (at least he thinks it's him, because jimin had told him he's the one, and jimin isn't the most reliable source), and regrets every choice in his life that led him up to this point. because, it's just his luck, he had known jung hoseok without actually knowing him, and he's pretty.
rewind one year and four months. it's the day of yoongi's last OWL exam.
he's stressed, tired, hungry, too hot in his robes, and he's sure he failed his transformation test (spoiler alert: he hasn't, and mcgonagall will tell the class before they are dismissed for summer break that he's got the best grade, which will earn him sharp, angry looks until getting off the train at king's cross).
so he's not at his best, and when he finds someone had broken into his dorm room and blast every chest of the five people living there open, he's, of course, devastated. a few of his books and a rolled-up poster of the "Witch Way?"-tour of Spellbound are missing from his still slightly fuming chest, and he wonders a) how anybody could and would break into a dorm of fifth-graders and b) why that someone stole a few second-hand books and an old poster and not, for example, the small pouch of gold he had stored there for trips to the leaking cauldron.
he's not able to look his dormmates in the eyes, and he can't sleep in a room filled with the idea of stolen things and vanished safety, so he intends to sleep in the homeroom, but there are too many people celebrating the end of school and graduation, and when he sneaks out to nap in the library, which is more comfortable anyway, filch almost catches him.
he finds himself in the empty kitchens ten minutes later, because the house elves aren't on duty after ten pm, and pities himself a bit because, well, he's supposed to sleep. and he should be allowed to sleep peacefully after studying two weeks nonstop, alternating between two activities — studying and eating —, and being forced to participate in exams determining his whole future although he's only fifteen.
he tries, really tries so hard, to keep his shit together while nibbling on a piece of strawberry bread one remaining house elf had given him before disappearing, and it somehow works.
that means, until steps outside draw closer and the fruit basket painting swings open.
a brown haired boy enters, laughing at something a second person leaving in the other direction had said, and shoves his hands into his pockets.
he stops dead in his tracks as he spots yoongi crouching over the empty table eating strawberry bread in the dim lights of a candle like the pile of pure exhaustion he is.
the boy takes a few steps into the room, as if he's not sure what to do when another person is in the kitchen, until he gets a hang of himself and confidently walks over to the cabinets at the opposite wall and begins to prepare himself a sandwich.
yoongi isn't sure how to act. should he say something? "hi, someone broke into my dorm and i'm planning to be sleeping here, so could you kindly remove thyself?" or should he go, as to not disturb the other boy? but, he shakes his head once, the kitchens are free to enter for anyone who knows the secret. he has the same right to be here as that boy with the grey sweater. yoongi can't remember when he last saw someone in muggle clothes. it forms a big lump in his throat.
"you okay?" the boy asks hesitantly and cards yellow painted nails through his hair. he had turned around, leaning against the kitchen counter, the sandwich in his left hand and an unreadable expression on his face.
and it's as if that single question, posed by someone who looks like he'd rather be anywhere else and doing anything else than standing in a dark kitchen asking a half-dead looking, baby-faced guy in slytherin robes if he's okay, is all it takes to take yoongi down.
the small, innocent question transforms into a twenty-five ton tank in camouflage that slowly overruns his jittery heart, squeezing the tears out of him. he doesn't entirely know why or how, but he involuntarily lets out a strangled sob.
then he starts crying, full-on ugly-crying, with snot coming down his nose and red eyes and all.
he feels so small, just like when he was a first year and some older gryffindor students tried to dump his head into a toilet in the moaning myrtle's bathroom and the only spell he remembered was the imperio curse but his mom had told him that he was not allowed to use it because it's dangerous, so he didn't, even when his hair and then head touched the clear water. he just feels as small and lost and sad as he did back then. yoongi wants to curl into a ball and grip his own shins so tight his fingers leave blue bruises to remind himself he's made of flesh and blood, until the first house elves return for breakfast.
god, he's so dumb. could it have been any more dramatic? ok sure, someone had broken into their dorm, violated their privacy, stolen books and posters and the very basic feeling of safety inside the castle walls, but that's no reason to break down crying in front of a stranger.
then, suddenly, he doesn’t know how it happens, there are arms around him, soft, warm arms clad in a hand-knitted sweater smelling like the pages of old books and like it had been lying in a closet for thirty years, and the reddish haired boy with painted nails and a sweater made with love holds him close without a word, yoongi's face buried in his shoulder, simply lets him cry until he almost falls asleep from exhaustion, because being held like this is a blessing he didn't know he needed until that moment.
so that's how he knows him.
and now yoongi stands in front of the same boy almost one and a half years after his embarrassing breakdown he never talked to anyone about, and which he tried very hard to forget but couldn't.
jung hoseok has changed, definitely. he still has a pretty face, all soft, nothing out of the ordinary, if one's being honest, but he somehow grew into it, carries it with even more confidence. his hair is a really dark brown now, or maybe it's really just black, yoongi can't tell, and longer, halfway down to his shoulders. it looks nice how the dark contrasts with his honey skin, soft waves against smooth, clear cheeks.
cheeks that now rise up to his eyes in a confused smile, one that clearly says "the fuck?" but hoseok doesn't say it out loud.
and, oh god, yoongi remembers that this awful stuttering of his right now was the first thing he has ever said to hoseok, because even after letting it all out and sobbing a really big wet spot into his soft handmade sweater, he never uttered a single word at him or in his general direction. he had gotten up from his seat and walked out the portrait door just like that. it was more of an embarrassed sprint. he didn't stop running until he reached a classroom on fourth floor that never was locked.
"sorry," he hurries to say as hoseok looks like he's about to tell him to piss off, "i'm min yoongi, and i'm really sorry but i — not on purpose, it was an accident, i swear — i stole your history of magic homework, and. um. yes, that's it, basically. sorry again."
he slides the parchment towards hoseok, who looks so confused, and yoongi hates, with every cell in his body, how he can't form even one singular eloquent sentence. why the fuck didn't he lie about finding the parchment on the floor or something?
"i know who you are," hoseok says. yoongi looks up from the table, eyes wide. "your name, i mean. i already knew your name, you didn't have to introduce yourself."
oh, okay.
"oh, okay," yoongi says.
"thanks for... un-stealing my homework?" hoseok laughs, his mouth shaping an adorable heart, and yoongi is unbelievably relieved that hoseok somehow isn't mad at him. "i'll just sneak it back to binns, somehow."
hoseok moves to get up from the table, leaving his half-empty plate behind, and yoongi's panic rushed back all at once, he doesn't know what he's doing until he has done it.
"no, don't, i beg you," he whisper-shouts in a hurry to get all the words out fast enough, and the group of first- to fourth-graders hoseok had gathered around himself and who he had all sent away when yoongi came up to him with wobbly knees, look at yoongi suspiciously. maybe it's his slytherin robe, maybe it's the dark circles under his eyes, maybe they know the rumours about him.
hoseok sits down again, not shaking off the hand yoongi had subconsciously put on his wrist to hold him back.
he lowers his voice again, strangely empowered by how hoseok listened to him.
"i wouldn't send that piece of paper to binns, really," he murmurs and apologizes, "because, well, honestly, it's a bad essay. really, i — i could help you rewrite."
what. what the fuck did he just say. oh shit.
yoongi had intended to say something like "really, i would proofread it again if i were you, and do some more research before putting it back" but helping him rewrite? he simply has no fucking time for tutoring a hufflepuff that bad at history.
"um," hoseok says.
"um," yoongi says, letting the hand he had on hoseok's wrist drop to his side. "nevermind, i wasn't thinking, forget it. sorry."
he turns around, grabbing his bag so hard his knuckles turn white, and hoseok's fingers seem to twitch, but he doesn't hold him back when he hurries to the slytherin table to stare at his food in embarrassment until it's time to go to class, and yoongi is sure he imagined it.
❊
es war einmal ein schöner, reicher und begabter junger hexer, der beobachtete, dass seine freunde sich töricht verhielten, sobald sie sich verliebten, dass sie umherhüpften und sich herausputzten, dass sie ihren appetit und ihre würde verloren. der junge hexer beschloss, niemals einer solchen schwäche zum opfer zu fallen, und mit hilfe der dunklen künste sorgte er dafür, dass er dagegen gefeit war.
die familie des hex—
"what's a jobberknoll," jimin asks and chews on his pencil.
"your face," taehyung mumbles sleepily and snuggles up closer to jimin.
it's cold in the courtyard, because october is slowly coming to an end, and the few trees and hedges littered across the secluded court have long lost their leaves. jimin's sitting on his favorite stone bench, taehyung's head in his lap, and reads a book. it's a cheeky dime novel, something about a stubborn country witch falling in love with a business muggle and fighting for her unlucky love and yadda yadda, exactly jimin's taste, and he draws silly doodles in the margins.
jimin scoffs, bonking taehyung on the nose with the back of his book, and acts hurt before he turns to yoongi.
"hyung," he pouts, "what's a jobberknoll?"
yoongi sighs, abandoning The Tales of Beedle the Bard, and reaches into the bag on the bench next to taehyung's legs.
"i don't know, just look it up."
he passes jimin his copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, not saying anything about the homework he had to write about jobberknolls and their infamous cries the year before, effectively leading him to more knowledge about jobberknolls than he'll ever need or want, and turns to his own reading.
The Warlock's Hairy Heart haunts him, it really does. when he was a kid, his grandmother had read it to him, and he had had bad dreams about someone cutting his heart out of his chest for weeks. now he's almost an adult and doesn't know much about the tale anymore, only has vague ideas of what had happened, and he tries to read it whenever he has the chance to do so.
he remembers one summer break, maybe second or third grade, when his mother taught him the confringo spell and made him practice it in the garden behind the min mansion with a wand that was not his. she had taken him aside one hot afternoon, carding her soft hands that always smelled like earth and lilac through his hair, and told him that he has to understand the tales.
"you have to understand, baby, that we practice a kind of magic that is frowned upon. we are feared, because our ancestors were evil. but to really be a threat to mankind, one has to read the tales and dismiss them. as long as you listen to the stories, and think with that pretty head of yours, you'll be good and safe."
he hadn't known what it was supposed to mean back then, he still doesn't really get it, but yoongi wants to find out. so he rereads The Tales of Beedle the Bard and tries to understand what they mean in order to listen to them, and he's successful, kind of, but the warlock's hairy heart is somehow too complicated for his pretty head. he can't quite grasp the meaning of it although it feels like it's right within his reach, and he doesn't know if he's thinking too complicated or too simple.
and then yoongi's ripped out of his mom's lap, away from her soft voice and loving embrace, when taehyung buries his heel in yoongi's thigh and he drops his book. curses. rubs his thigh. leans down to pick it up again.
"i'll swear, one day, i'll feed you to the kraken in the lake. what the fuck was that for, kim? wanna throw hands? again? madam pomfrey will call dumbledore on us this time. i'll eat every single fucking chocolate frog from your secret stack, you ass."
he looks over his shoulder, still bent over, up to where taehyung lies, and he's so annoyed. he just wants to read in peace, spending the last few silent, slow months before the stressful NEWT exams season begins and his school life ends. he just wants to spend time with his two friends before he graduates without being inconvenienced and attacked for fun all the time.
besides — taehyung is no match for him; last time they dueled, yoongi broke an arm, but taehyung lost nonetheless (and almost lost three fingers and toes because he didn't catch the bombarda yoongi had thrown at his feet), and madam pomfrey didn't believe tae's super bad lie they "fell down the dorm stairs" for a single second. she was ready to call dumbledore and snape to take care of their fight, but they swore on their parents' lives that it had been solely a training fight, not one of hate and pure will to destroy. and that was true, mostly, because taehyung always wants to duel yoongi to try and defeat him, but it's always only a test of their abilities and to let steam off. jimin sometimes takes part, too, but he doesn't want to lose his wand, because he's grown attached to his larch wood and unicorn hair thing, so he only duels taehyung, because he lets him always win.
isn't it weird though, yoongi thinks, how all students at hogwarts are encouraged to take part in duels to better their combat skills, but as soon as two slytherins are involved, it's assumed they fought seriously? as if they practiced burning the castle down and revealing the secret of the wizarding world to all of muggledom? double standards.
taehyung looks at yoongi, nods, and then pointedly looks away. yoongi doesn't know why tae acts like this — hell, even jimin doesn't look at him, what's up with them — but follows his gaze up and to the left and
oh.
"hi," grins hoseok.
"shit," says yoongi.
jimin giggles.
yoongi flips him off.
jimin gets the hint.
taehyung groans when his boyfriend moves to get up, banishing him from the comfortable warm spot in his lap, but follows him nonetheless, dragging his own bag on the ground behind him and whining dramatically about this cold, cruel world slowly devouring his soul.
"hi," hoseok repeats as soon as they're alone and sits down next to yoongi, right where tae's legs were resting just one minute ago.
yoongi can feel his cheeks go hot. why though.
"hi. forget whatever you heard."
"already done," hoseok smiles, and what spell is he using to magnify his smile?, because yoongi has never seen someone with a smile as bright as hoseok's. it's almost unnatural. "although the kraken doesn't eat students."
"ok, cool, that's cool. super cool."
they fall silent. yoongi wants to hit himself and curse and jinx the memory out of his brain. "was there something you needed, or ...?"
"oh, yes, sorry. i wanted to ask if you could tutor me in history of magic."
yoongi doesn't say anything, because honestly, he doesn't know what to say, hoseok's face is so — distracting. how does he manage to look all soft with this jawline? how the fuck is his mouth in a heart shape like that when he doesn't even do anything? how are his eyes sparkly like that? isn't he growing tired of smiling all the fucking time? yoongi forces himself to look away.
"uh, no worries though! you said it's a bad essay, and i agree, i just need to pass binns' class," hoseok hurries.
yoongi is tempted to say yes, because hoseok's homework had been very much uncool, and although he hasn't had a history of magic class in one and a half years, he likes to think he's still good enough to maybe get a student as bad as hoseok to an Acceptable, at least. his mother's family deems it crucial to know every single little thing about wizard history, so he's been spending every year's summer break with at least three or four history tomes to work through. he likes doing it, reading about history and stuff, and it's one of his dearest hobbies, learning voluntarily and without pressure to score points with the topics.
but, and this is the biggest but, he has no time. okay, maybe he's free most of the time right now, but that's only because the school year had just started seven weeks ago. he'll be drowning in work by next week again, and he'll struggle enough with finishing all of his tasks before the holidays, when everyone will go home and he intends to relax. he'll have to look after jimin a little more, too, because november is the worst month for him, and he'll have to make sure taehyung won't go spiraling again when jimin's not doing well, all the while pleasing the teachers and making himself invisible, because around christmas, the gryffindors are usually the most aggressive, and try to pick fights more often. (of course he'd win, but it's better to keep everything low. easier. more convenient.)
so he won't be able to tutor hoseok. it almost pains him. that pains him almost more, because he doesn't know what it means.
"but it's totally fine if you don't want to tutor me, i mean it's probably a lot of work, i just wanted to check, you know."
hoseok smiles, a bit lopsided this time, and, well, yoongi's sure he can fit the hufflepuff into his schedule somehwere.
"okay," he mumbles. thinks. "are you free on thursday evening?"
hoseok's eyes go wide, and an ablsolutely brilliant smile breaks out. yes, yoongi has to squeeze him into his schedule, he just has to. it would be a crime against humanity not to do it (or maybe more like a war crime against himself, but he doesn't dare to think about that just yet).
"really?" he squeals. it sounds as if he's trying to suppress something louder and more joyed as to not scare yoongi away. it's cute, somehow, to see a boy the same age as him being so giddy and funny, but at the same time something about it strikes yoongi as wrong, as if something isn't quite right. it's concerning, and for some reason, intriguing. pulling him in.
"please don't make me regret it," yoongi says jokingly, pinching the bridge of his nose, and although hoseok seems to get he's joking, he goes back to smiling politely.
"i won't. thank you so much."
yoongi snorts.
"don't thank me before you get an A in history." and wiggling his fingers mysteriously, he adds with a big portion of self-irony: "you will suffer, mortal."
hoseok laughs again, clasping his hands once again and leaning a bit closer. then he goes more serious again, the glint of mischief still in his eyes.
"i'm free on thursday. library, four pm?"
yoongi nods.
"i'll probably be there the whole afternoon, you'll just have to find me."
"thanks! i owe you!" hoseok bows, his hands now hidden in his pockets, and gets up.
then he waves goodbye at yoongi and moves towards the other end of the courtyard, where an old wall had broken away two years ago (jimin had gotten into a really big fight with a ravenclaw girl one afternoon and her boyfriend tried to push him over the wall to knock him out and hex him, and maybe would've succeded if yoongi hadn't been there to blast a hole into the stone wall only inches away from the guy's head. they'd all gotten detention and nobody ever repaired the wall. the guy was honestly lucky yoongi held taehyung back, because he would've skinned him alive for hurting jimin and bruising his pretty face).
hoseok just steps over the stones and overgrown bricks lying around with his long, elegant legs, and then continues his way over the green yards down towards the lake.
he turns around once and waves yoongi a short see you tomorrow.
"don't be late!" yoongi shouts, and before he can move to call out again in case hoseok hasn't heard him, he gives him a distand thumbs up. then he's disappeared behind a soft wave of the mountains, and yoongi sighs heavily. disastrous.
"so," jimin flings his arm around his shoulder and places his chin on one propped up hand, grinning mischievoulsy, "you and hobi, huh?"
yoongi grows even redder.
❊
yoongi's mom calls that night.
it's sometime halfway to three am, the common room empty save for him sitting on the floor, and only red glowing embers remain in the fireplace — that is, until a silent fwoosh makes green flames flicker up to the top of the furnace. they burn on nothing but ashes, and after a few quiet moments in which yoongi scrambles to save a few books and scrolls that got swept too close to the furnace in the course of his learning session, the face of his mother materializes in the flames.
"hi, mom," he whispers.
her face looks young as ever, her smooth, black hair in a tight knot, dark eyes smiling but tired.
"yoonie, baby, i miss you," she greets, and his eyes immediately swell up. there's a lump in his throat, one that doesn't go away as he swallows, and his hands even shake a bit as he clutches his herbology book harder.
"miss you too, mom," he manages and snaps his mouth shut again in order not to break down crying.
"how are you?" she asks. "do you need me to send you another coat? your grandmother's weather channel said it's colder up in scotland than in the last years."
yoongi shakes his head.
"it's fine. i don't have time to go outside anyways." what he doesn't say is that he hasn't worn a coat at hogwarts in more than a year, because he's able to sustain a warmth charm for hours on end and could as well walk around the castle in his shortest shorts without being cold.
"i'm fine mom. i'm eating enough. don't worry, tae and jimin are taking care." he chuckles at that, because he doesn't know anyone who's more unfit to care for him than them, but his mom doesn't need to know. she's close with their moms.
"how are you keeping up, baby?" she asks and brushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
even in the flames and with the glowing embers shining through and obstructing her sharp, fine features, it's obvious how beautiful she is, even at almost forty. on her finger shines the blue sapphire ring yoongi's father had bought for their engagement. it's almost seventeen years old, and ji-hye had long since divorced him, but she's still wearing it. she had never told yoongi why, but he doubts it's out of nostalgia or because of a secret mourning for lost love — it's most likely his mom just likes the colour of the gem or the message wearing an incredibly expensive ring delivers to other pureblood families. ji-hye's never been one to be heartbroken over a man; she's never cared about them.
"i got an O on my last herbology homework," yoongi counts on his fingers, "and Os in transfiguration, defense against the dark arts and history of magic. i'm still waiting for snape to hand out the essays from last week, but i'm sure it'll be an O as well."
he hates lying to his mom, especially hates how he's really good at it. but she'd never be able to keep it a secret from his legilimentic grandmother — how he had secretly dropped all of the classes the family demanded he takes, how he had kept up the act for more than a year already, how he had chosen care of magical creatures, runes, charms, potions and alchemy as his NEWT classes, how he had never told anyone but taehyung and jimin, who swore to not tell their parents. how he's about to bring disgrace to a long chain of powerful, influential ministry witches and wizards. his grandmother would disown him, and while yoongi doesn't particularly care about that, she'd also most likely suffer a heart attack right after exiling him, forbidding everyone to ever speak to him again.
the only thing he can hope for is that his mom will still talk to him when he graduates and shows her his certificate, revealing how he studied hard but for all the wrong things, because he doesn't want to waste his life away at the ministry of magic like bis family wants him to. ji-hye has never been that strict, and she had told him more than once how she can't stand her family interfering with her parenting style, meddling in her affairs, pushing the family agenda on yoongi, so he hopes she can understand, somehow. that she won't stop talking to him like her sisters and mother most definitely will, and he hopes more than anything that she'll love him regardless, even when he strives to become a magizoologist, dishonoring the whole family.
he wishes he could tell her, right now, that he wants to study magical creatures and won't ever work at a desk in an office, instead of carefully spinning his web of lies about classes he hasn't visited since the end of fifth year and assignments he didn't write, but he's been lying to her for so long — he can't just drop the bomb via fire-call, not when he's been abusing her trust for so long.
he'll tell her when he's done with school. he'll tell her and her only, and he'll leave it up to her if she wants to tell his grandmother.
"i'm proud of you. now go to sleep, don't overwork yourself. you can study another time."
"okay, mom. good night."
"i love you, baby," she waves at him, the sapphire ring catching light on her side of the fire and blinding yoongi for a second, and when he blinks, she's gone.
❊
there is water at his feet, cold water pulling and pushing like the ocean does, or maybe doesn't, he can't tell anymore — what is ocean, anyway? the door of the fridge is standing open, a small lamp inside illuminating this corner of the kitchen weakly. the water flooding everything stems from there, he knows it. the snow belongs there, too. what snow? the snow, snow, snow, blood, snow.
he's home, in the kitchen at home, finally, after being locked away in a castle in the middle of nowhere for so long, between snow and ice and snow and blood. whose blood? he doesn't know whose snow. there lies a hand in the blood at his feet. the sapphire ring twinkles in the light emitting from the fridge, the cool ocean water magnifying the spark, the slender fingers twitching lifelessly, and the snow around them melts from the warmth of a dead body.
he stands there and looks down and up and around, the kitchen empty just for him. then there is more snow, it's coming from up, from where the chandelier is, covering the ocean in another innocent layer, untouched, and it's beautiful how the falling flakes glisten in the fridge light, the light of another world, maybe this is what being dead feels like? it's not bad.
and the water at his feet grows warm, thick and warm and his pulse is hammering in his ears, he's feeling sick.
hands cover his eyes. they are soft and cold, smelling like tears and his heart, blinding him in the best way, and he leans into them, trusting them with his weight, holding him by his eyes.
he doesn't want to see the snow, the disgusting snow covering the blood of strangers with sapphire rings and the face of his mother, and he doesn't want to see how the snow hides the bodies in the water.
what a foolish thing, to go into the woods for comfort, the hands over his eyes say, in the smiling voice of heart-shaped lips. moss-covered stones is what they will answer you.
and then his neck breaks.
yoongi wakes up.
he smiles.
❊
tutoring hoseok is ... weird. in a good way, yoongi thinks.
hoseok really holds his promise and isn't late, peeking around a shelf seven whole minutes before their agreed meeting time, finding an unprepared yoongi with disheveled hair and ink stained fingers buried under his runes homework and books for another potions homework snape had kindly bestowed upon his eight NEWT students.
"hi," hoseok grins and steps into the aisle between potions books with titles beginning with R and the ones with S, startling yoongi, who jumps in his seat, hits his elbow, and chokes out a quick greeting.
it sounds awfully close to "goodmornight", but neither of them say anything about it.
"i don't mind the mess," he chuckles as yoongi tries frantically to shove all of his papers aside to make place for hoseok, and sits down next to him.
their knees are touching, too warm and too close, but yoongi doesn't move away. it would be weird, especially since the younger doesn't seem to mind.
he clears his troat.
"did you bring your textbook?"
"wow, you really think i'd come to a history tutoring without tutoring material?"
yoongi shrugs and produces his own history textbook he had borrowed from a dormmate, opening it on page four hundred seventy one. "i'm preparing for the worst, honestly. what even was the topic of the essay?"
hoseok's smile is growing sheepish. he rubs his neck. "'How The Goblin Movement Of 1912 Influenced World War I & II.'"
yoongi stays quiet.
"wow," he snorts then, and a grin suddenly seems to bubble upwards in his chest, he can't help it.
they go to work.
to yoongi's big surprise — hoseok is not as bad as he had anticipated. he knows the basics, knows actually a lot about faerie and house elf history, and more about wizard and muggle history than yoongi (maybe). he finds out through a basic questionnaire he had put together the night before. hoseok freely admits he's a loser at everything else concerning history, and says that he'd never taken a NEWT course if he had known binns concentrates on goblin and gnome history in the last year.
the bad grades he had collected throughout his last assignments are dragging his score down.
"but you're not dumb," yoongi says while taking a break, munching on one of his dark chocolate bars and stretching his back.
hoseok acts lovestruck, "that's the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me!"
"seriously, why did you hand in an essay like that? didn't you have enough time?"
and hoseok, who had been serious and concentrated every second he's been here, sometimes throwing in a joke or two, but still smiling that weirdly fake, polite smile most of the time, doesn't smile anymore.
it's almost a relief for yoongi, because as sweet hoseok is, that smile creeped him out more and more throughout their session. it seems authentic most of the time, a heartfelt smile coming from an open, friendly boy who's unbelievably soft; but sometimes, when yoongi flips a page in the textbook
or scribbles a note onto the piece of parchment they use for collecting information for hoseok's essay,
or when the seconds stretch into minutes filled with silence and he pulls his robe tighter around himself, he catches in the corner of his eyes how hoseok's face looks when the smile fades away as if it had never been there. he spots crack in a façade he hadn't known was there, and yoongi is a bit ashamed it took him so long to discover.
"well," hoseok says, one hand in his hair, and smiles again. it looks a bit weak. "i would've finished it on time, but a third year girl needed my help with her transformation exercise, so i had to help her."
yoongi's knee at hoseok's twitches, but he doesn't seem to notice, and if he does, he's kind enough to not say anything.
"and when i tried to finish my own afterwards, a friend of mine just broke up with her girlfriend. i had to comfort her, and after that, the first graders needed an expanded introduction to show them all of the castle, and nobody wanted to do it so i had to, then they needed someone to practice their spells with and — ah, you see, it's just like that sometimes. and then i had no more time and i tried to bullshit my way through it."
"that's not healthy," yoongi mumbles into a passage about goblin clothes and their way of manufacturing them he's reading in the World History From a Goblin's Point of View — a Tale as Old as Time, not expecting hoseok to hear anything, but the younger nods bitterly.
"yeah, i know."
yoongi doesn't know what to say.
they work until the sun sets, take a short break for dinner, and return to their quiet secluded table in the library until it closes.
(hoseok sits with jimin, taehyung and yoongi at the slytherin table for dinner, endures the shocked, dumbfounded stares and the scandalous whispers from his fellow hufflepuffs with a kind smile, and stuffs his face with mushroom pasta and miniature cherry pies as if he'd been starving for weeks. and oh, oh — he goes along so well with jimin and taehyung, both of their dramatic asses, bickering and joking most of the time. there is a new smile on his face. it fills yoongi's heart with something gooey, something he doesn't have a name for, just like there's no name for the feeling one experiences when looking out the window at two in the morning, when it's quiet enough to hear the night whisper sweet nothings into your ear and the world seems to shy away from your desperate hands.
"how is the studying going," jimin wiggles his eyebrows and lets taehyung feed him a piece of pork. yoongi wonders what he means with that tone, and when they'll finally stop doing domestic shit right in front of his very tired eyes.
"really good," hoseok answers for him, "i'm almost done with the fu— essay, your hyung really helped me a lot with the material."
he smiles at yoongi, a brilliant smile that turns his eyes into the prettiest black calligraphy brush strokes, and pats his knee. it tingles.
taehyung seems disappointed.
"oh. you really were working?" he pouts.
"what else were we supposed to do." yoongi's voice rasps through his throat, a bit hoarse from not talking above whisper-level for hours.
"i thought the whole tutoring thing was an euphemism for fucking," jimin helpfully provides from his place in taehyung's lap, and yoongi suddenly inhales too sharp and deep. he chokes on a spoonful of red cabbage.
hoseok, quick-witted and confident, grows redder and redder but stays silent, only patting yoongi's back to keep him from dying at the dinner table, and once yoongi is able to lift his head, teary eyed and even more hoarse, he only manages: "didn't know you knew what an euphemism is," before another coughing fit shakes him.
hoseok is quiet while jimin hits yoongi's shin and complains to taehyung how mean yoongi always is, and they both hurry to go back to their table once they finished eating — more like shoveling — their plates empty. jimin and taehyung laugh at them, and their echo follows yoongi until he opens the books again and drowns them out of his mind for the sake of history.)
and then, when they leave, hoseok's finished essay in his pocket, walking down the stairs side by side, and yoongi thinks it'll get awkward, it's not.
"and then jeongguk said to us he likes the kraken more than us because she's not as loud and we were like, 'ok, fair'," hoseok tells him just as they reach the ground floor and stop at the feet of the stairs.
yoongi laughs, surprised at how natural it feels to openly laugh in the quiet hallways about a thing hoseok's friends he'd never actively met said.
it hits him in this moment, that he doesn't want them to part. they're both standing in front of the stairs, ready to disappear into opposite directions and go to bed, yoongi in his dark posh slytherin dorm with the most comfortable beds and hoseok in his whatever-looking hufflepuff dorm with surely equally comfortable beds.
"i don't think i've ever seen you laugh like that," hoseok mumbles absentmindedly, and yoongi doesn't know what he means with that or how to respond or if he's supposed to say anything to that, so he ignores it.
"if you need another session, let me know," he says, his books pressed to his chest, not daring to speak up in the vast, quiet halls. he feels as if he's supposed to say more, more of what he's thinking. "it's been fun, really."
hoseok beams.
"yeah, i think so too. thanks again, really, you saved my a—cademic grade! i'll make it up to you!"
"don't mention it."
and then, as yoongi's already about to turn around and go — because isn't that what people usually do? a swift and cool exit without much ado to spare everyone weird smalltalk? — hoseok pulls him into a hug. yoongi's brain fails to register it at first, but then the faint promise of warmth radiating from hoseok's body seeps through the several layers of clothing between them and he can feel hoseok's arms around him, his chin near his hair, his chest against his chest, his heartbeat incredibly fast. it's too close, too warm, too nice.
yoongi pats his back once and then he steps back, abandoning hoseok's warmth and softness, waving at him and mustering a small smile.
"good night, sleep tight!"
"oh," yoongi remembers and turns back. "you can give me the essay now and taehyung will place it on binns' desk in the morning, if that's okay with you."
"of course, but only if you tell me afterwards how he did it," hoseok grins, already rummaging through his bag, a dark blue backpack with several sunflower pins and batches on top of it, and pulls out the essay. it's gotten way shorter than anything yoongi would've ever turned in, but he guesses his essays aren't of usual standard length either, and it is the best they were able to produce in less than four hours.
"good night," he smiles at hoseok and takes the folded parchment, and then they part ways.
it's only later, after napping on the couch in the common room with jimin and taehyung, who can't keep their hands to themselves, and when yoongi lies in his own posh, pretentious, dark, soft bed waiting for sleep to catch up to him, that he realizes — hoseok smells like lemon drops and peppermint.
❊
taehyung returns hoseok's paper to binn's desk in the morning. binns hands them out friday afternoon, deeply sorry for the delay; he had thought he might've lost an essay, and hoseok is greeted by a big, fat Exceeds Expectations under his conclusion that the goblin movement did, in fact, influence both world wars, but not as greatly as one might think. (nobody thinks that.)
❊
"people-watching is just uncommitted stalking," jimin briskly states at breakfast saturday morning.
taehyung nods enthusiastically, mouth too full of croissant and strawberry jelly to say anything. he does it nonetheless.
"do it properly or don't do it at all."
(it sounds more like "doap'ope'y o' dondoiatall". yoongi scrunches his nose in disgust as a stray piece of croissant only misses him narrowly.)
four hours later and yoongi stalks people uncommittedly, because it's his favourite hobby. he had tried to tell jimin he's just unpopular-opinion-spitting, but had been unsuccessful in doing so, and now he's sitting in the darkest corner of the three broomsticks, two empty glasses butterbeer and a plate of chicken strips in front of him.
it's packed, probably because of the cold weather, and dozens of people are trying to get to the bar as quick as possible. he's been sitting here for at least one hour, drinking and eating, occasionally reading a few pages of the book he had brought with him, but mostly looking at the people passing his small three-person booth without sparing him a glance.
he can't help it, the watching. as soon as there are enough people to drown him in equally average faces and noise, as soon as there's almost no chance of recognizing him, he begins to look at people.
a chubby witch with long, red locks at the bar, her heels klicking on the footrest of her stool, talking excitedly to a thin woman with freckles darker than her chocolate skin. their hands brush more often than usual, and they share a plate of fries.
passing by, a completely average-looking guy: average height, brown hair, brown mustache, brown eyes, black suit, black suitcase.
behind the bar, there is a group of ravenclaws, maybe sixth year, playing a round of exploding snap and downing pure pumpkin juice shot after shot. a girl with a nose piercing and the longest hair yoongi has ever seen downs four shots as her cards explode without even flinching.
a ravenclaw boy nearby builds a house out of the cards, and when he succeeds and nothing explodes in the span of five seconds, he's suddenly sporting magnificent dimples, turning to a thin, tall boy with plush lips, impossibly aesthetic features and heavily pierced ears.
he likes to imagine stories to the people he watches.
the cubby witch and her girlfriend are in the process of battling the law to be able to adopt children, and they live somewhere in the mountains around the castle with a golden retriever puppy and geese in the backyard.
average guy is rushing to the mungos because his suitcase begins to nibble at the inside of his palm and won't let him let go of the handle. he doesn't know his ex girlfriend hexed it to eat his hand because he had fucked her best friend.
the girl with the nose piercing was once forced by her brother to swallow a frog and she had never tasted something more disgusting (although the frog didn't taste particularly bad), so drinking four shots of pure pumpkin juice isn't out of the ordinary.
dimple guy is in love with plush lips guy, who's too oblivious to realize his best friend loves him. they share everything with each other, except for their secret longing for each other, because they are too afraid to risk their friendship or some bullshit. the tension between them is only resolved through a dramatic misunderstanding and make up scene, just like in all the books yoongi had devoured in the thirteen years he's been reading.
hoseok announces his arrival with a cheery whoop, entering the three broomsticks with a doe eyed gryffindor who looks like he'd rather wrestle fifty murtlaps than be here. from what yoongi can see — a pair of really, really buff arms unsuccessfully hidden beneath the black hogwarts robes —, he might even be able to win.
the two ravenclaw boys, dimples and pierced ears, greet the newcomers with pats on the back, and they order a round of butterbeer. hoseok had gathered the longest strands of hair into a tiny ponytail with a blue ribbon, matching his dark blue coat over a grey hoodie.
instead of searching an unoccupied booth, the group stays around the high table. the doe eyed boy isn't as quiet as it might seem at first glance; he laughs loudly with his friends, flings himself into hoseok's side in the process, and gestures wildly with his hands, almost knocking over his glass.
after an especially funny joke, hoseok doubles over from laughter, collapsing onto the table, and if dimples hadn't caught the butterbeer pint being sent to the floor, they would've had to pay for its shards. the group stares at dimples in disbelief while he places the half full glass back on the table, unscathed. they erupt in another round of laughter, the kind of laughter where your lashes get a little wet and sticky from sweet tears in the process.
hoseok wipes his eyes and whacks doe eyes upside the head jokingly, and when he reaches up, there is a glimpse of skin where his sweater had ridden up.
no, he wasn't staring. no, yoongi would've never stared. he's people-watching, not staring, and there are so many people around, he's simply letting his eyes wander, and the group around hoseok is situated in the middle of the crowd, so it's only natural for him to pass them.
yoongi briskly turns away, shoving a piece of chicken into his mouth to stop himself from thinking, and opens his book.
he doesn't even remember on what page he had been (he had lost his latest bookmark to jimin, because he had bet on gryffindor to win the quidditch cuplast year and, well, the gryffindor team last year wasn’t very good, to say the least), nor what kind of genre it is, but reads the page he had turned to nonetheless.
he doesn't understand shit.
he reads it again. the only thing that sticks is a well and a group of witches doing — whatever. maybe if he reads it again, he'll understand more.
his gaze flickers to the high table, where hoseok's friends ordered a plate of fries.
"hello," murmurs a familiar voice, and for once, yoongi doesn't startle.
hoseok slides onto to seat on the other side of the booth, their knees touching under the small table, and smiles at him. he looks tired.
"oh, hi," yoongi answers, honestly surprised, because what is he doing here, in a dark booth with a sticky table that is way beneath his dignity, when his friends are waiting for him not even ten meters away, bickering and laughing?
"what are you doing?" hoseok asks, stealing one of yoongi's chicken strips, and looks at him with so much kindness in his eyes, yoongi wants to combust.
"i'm, uh —," he picks up the book for hoseok to read the title, "reading," he ends lamely.
"hey, i've read that book too, it's really good. do you like it? oh, do you want another beer?"
"yes," he answers simply, and hoseok waves a waitress over to their table, and asks for two butterbeer while yoongi tries to process that jung hoseok is currently sitting with him, voluntarily, their knees touching, and orders drinks for them, and how he was able to catch the attention of a waitress in about ten seconds sitting here and with doing nothing but a single silly waving motion with his hand.
they fall into chatter easily.
although — it's more hoseok rambling about anything, really, about the too small beds in his dorm, about the way his robes always rumple and he doesn't know why or how, and hoseok talks about his friends, too.
dimples is a seventh year ravenclaw, kim namjoon, and yoongi is surprised to finally have a face to the name, because a certain kim namjoon has been threatening to take his title of best hogwarts student for three years now.
piercings is namjoon's best friend, seventh year kim seokjin, ravenclaw as well, and they are inseparable, hoseok says. attached at the hip.
doe eyes is jeon jeongguk, the "shyest gryffindor ever. he's unnaturally strong, and he could probably break your spine like a twig, but he'd never hurt a fly." he's a sixth year, just like jimin and taehyung, in gryffindor.
so hoseok talks and jokes while yoongi remains quiet and admires his passionate tone and soothing voice, lets it pour over him like soft summer rain that soaks your shirt but you don't care because that's what being endless and small feels like.
and he tries to make himself remember the way candlelight looks on the half of hoseok's face it's able to reach, tries to remember the curl of his hair, the glint in his eyes, because he knows it'll be gone sooner or later.
they finish their drinks, order another one, yoongi still mostly listening, throwing in a nod or mmmh in between to signal hoseok he's still present.
yoongi asks if his friends don't wonder where he is, but hoseok laughs and makes a dismissive gesture into the direction namjoon, seokjin and jeongguk are standing, remarking that he had told them they could move on without him, because he meets a friend of his.
yoongi blushes at that and doesn't dare to ask if they really are friends or if hoseok just said it to justify his disappearance.
and then, somewhere between a story about how seokjin made a pact with a faerie last year and almost got into serious trouble because of something with the law, and complaining about only having a few weekends throughout the school year to leave the castle grounds, because what kind of logic is that, yoongi snaps. he's sick of not talking enough, sick of worrying, sick of not being enough, sick of how closed up he is. he wants it to change. he wants to be seen.
it comes out of the blue, sure, but when hoseok is finished with a story and they catched their breath after laughing too long and too hard to think anything at all, he nudges his knee and — he can't really describe it.
it's not like a waterfall, uncontrolled and messy. he talks and hoseok listens, about how glad he is to have hoseok here (he wills himself to speak it out loud although his ears burn. hoseok smiles warmly), about how his classes go, about jimi and tae, and about how fucked up it is that they are not allowed to leave the castle grounds, because why? hogsmeade is a wizard town, it's close, it's safe. they should be allowed way more weekends out.
no waterfall; more like a lake that yoongi tries to empty with a spoon.
and hoseok, sweet, funny hoseok, listens earnestly, and hands yoongi fried chicken then and now to allow him to think before talking without having to think about how he's taking too long.
yes, it's more of a pond of water daring to overflow, and yoongi tries to empty it with a teaspoon before it breaks loose and takes every single stone in the water with it.
hoseok dares to interrupt him a few times, adding details to his rambling or ask a question about something, and soon they are talking properly, interacting and laughing, and it's so weird and new, is this what being an adult feels like? it this how conversations work?
yoongi asks hoseok if they have a radio at home, one with buttons and speakers that transfers music and muggle news, and hoseok says yes, doesn't yoongi have one? he's incredulous to find yoongi's grandma had thrown out any piece of devilish muggle technology before yoongi had been born, and tells him he has to visit in the summer, when they'll have graduated, and he'll show yoongi every single bit of muggle technology available.
and then they agree to meet up after school ends.
it gets dark outside and yoongi doesn't even notice at first. only when less people frequent the bar and the overwhelming atmosphere settles down into something smaller, something calmer, he registers how long they've been sitting here. hoseok's friends are gone, their table occupied by a group of really old wizards with burgundy robes.
hoseok orders a round of pumpkin juice, watered down to edibility, and then they sit in silence for a few minutes, and yoongi finds it equally easy to remain quiet with him.
❊
when the church bell of hogsmeade rings half past five, yoongi leaves. he pays the bill (it's three times as high as usual, when he sits in the three broomsticks for people-watching and reading for two hours and leaves), waves hoseok goodbye, although he's a tad sad to leave him and the afternoon behind.
when he steps out of the door, it's cold, an icy wind blowing from the mountains, and the darkness seems to spur it on even more, biting his nose and cheeks not buried in his scarf.
he stops by honeydukes and spends a fortune on fizzing whizzbees, sugar quills and chocolate frogs, and then he's on his way back to the castle, through the forest and up the hill, to escape the freezing cold.
maybe he'll ask jimin and taehyung to stay in for dinner, feasting on candy and tea in his bed and practicing harmless magic, like charming the pillows to change colours and varying between different shades of temperature, or making the dust sitting on the windowsills and under the bed dance in the air and play scenes from their favourite books. they do it sometimes, just lay in bed and eat until their sugary food babies are unmistakable and their eyes get all droopy, and most of the time the two youngers stay over for the night. yoongi's dormmates are okay with it, they do sleepovers like that themselves often enough, and sometimes they merge together and have a bigger one, sometimes with alcohol, sometimes with so much sugar they don't need anything else.
he's on his way up the hill, his feet loud on the gravel, and the few rocks lying around in the grass are quiet, swallowing his steps, loud breathing and his thoughts. the massive walls encircling the castle grounds are looming in the darkness, somewhere up ahead and to the right. it's more of a hunch than actually knowing they're here.
and suddenly, it's over.
yoongi falls, trips on something in the massive black, has barely enough time to catch his fall, and rough pebbles send stinging pain through his hands. his vision goes white for a moment, trying to process what happened, on what his foot slipped, and when it comes back, he doesn't move for a moment to catch his breath.
someone laughs, a snarling cackle from a little away. yoongi's face becomes hot in embarrassment. of all times possible, of all the seconds in a day, he just has to make a fool of himself when someone's nearby.
he turns around, the side of his jeans scratching over the gravel, sits up and examines his hands — small pieces of stone are pressed into his hands, they're red but not bleeding — to assess the damage. the ground is really fucking cold, it comes crawling through the fabric of his pants, biting him in the ass.
"min," the same voice from before states. yoongi's arm hair rises into goosebumps. he can't locate the origin of the voice, the evening air too thick and dark to make out any kind of details of anything more than five meters away, and it freaks him out more than a little bit.
"who's there?" he demands.
he promptly feels dumb, shouting into the night like that. maybe he's about to get murked like a supporting character in the horror books he had read religiously for three or four months last year. with a loud cracking sound in his knees, he gets up. wipes his hands down the front of his jeans, hisses at the friction. sneaks a hand under his coat and secretly draws his wand.
"doesn't matter," the voice growls.
steps grow close, and then yoongi stands face to face with a hufflepuff fifth or sixth year, a guy he had seen several times in the hallways.
he reminds yoongi of a pigeon.
"i want you," the guy grins, "to stay away from jung hoseok."
wait, what?
at that, yoongi snorts, a surprised sound that bursts out of his throat as if he'd choked on a carbonated drink and had accidentally sucked something of it up into his nose, then starts to really laugh.
"ok, wow, slow down drama queen," he mocks once he had calmed down. his heart thumps in his throat like crazy; he wants to puke. "that's the reason you ambush me? in the dark, at night, from behind like a coward? just to tell me i'm supposed to stay away from a guy who's perfectly capable of taking care of himself? that's low." he forces out a chuckle again, a venomous sound dripping with snob that would pride any slytherin if someone was here to witness this scene.
something changes, maybe the way the guy grips his wand, a twist in the wrist, a fuming glare lingering a millisecond too long, something, and it saves him.
a bright orange lightning bolt erupts from pigeon boy's wand upon a whispered spell too quiet for yoongi to hear.
so he's in fifth grade, before knowing how to cast spells silently.
yoongi blocks it with a whip of his own wand, sending the bombarda back to his opponent, whose eyes go wide, and while he's busy dodging his own spell, yoongi has four counterspells, curses and jinxes on the tip of his tongue, waiting to be cast. he doesn't do it.
"you shouldn't ever attack someone older, more experienced and far more dangerous than yourself somewhere secluded," yoongi muses flatly as the guy stumbles backwards as his spell explodes at his feet, ripping a hole into the grass, sending dirt and small stones flying around. "and alone."
he's empty.
this is it, he thinks, this is what i'm born for. i could do so many things, and only few are powerful enough to try and stop me. i could do great things. i could repay them —
pigeon guy attacks again, sending expelliarmus, petrificus totalus, stupor and a few silly jinxes yoongi's way. it's clear how his opponent runs out of spells and ideas, becoming more desperate by the second.
he dodges them, and then it's enough, because the hufflepuff tries to throw him off-rhythm with a serpensortia. a motherfucking serpensortia spell. it should be illegal to conjure a living being just for the sake of duelling. that's why he doesn't use vipera evanesco to counter, letting the snake slither away in the dark grass surrounding them.
he still tries to keep it together.
tries to lock up the thing again, tries to lock up this thing, the monster living in his chest and belly and fingers and to throw the key away. because if he loses control, there'll be no holding back, no guiding hand and calming voice to lure the monster back into its cage, it'll roam free, and he doesn't know what it will do with him.
once, when he was in third grade, he let it slip free, just for one moment, because — he doesn't remember, it was something his brother did to scare him — he didn't pay attention, and geum-jae lost a toe and was at st. mungo's for a whole week.
yoongi had since learned to keep it small, to keep it hidden away, to ignore its whispers ringing in his ears some nights.
so he tries to soothe the burning fury in his chest and strikes back.
mimblewimble, to shut pigeon's sorry ass up.
crescendum, to make the short trimmed grass around his feet grow, developing a few thick ranks that wrap themselves around the other's ankles and lock him up, unable to move as soon as the ranks reach his knees. it's beautiful — to look at the way they grow and move with such ease, how they embrace a whole body and render him helpless without a sound, lifting one hundred thirty pounds into the air.
pigeon is completely at yoongi's mercy, and his patience really wears thin after seven years of hate and prejudice directly injected under his skin. the words and looks and spells and bruises thrown at him. he could repay what they did to him hundredfold, a thousandfold. could make this hufflepuff guy and everyone coming after him suffer for yoongi's misery. because they are all at fault.
and then, when pigeon's wand drops to the ground with dark red sparkles spraying from the tip as it hits the ground, only when he realizes how his vines are too tight, then there is nothing left to do anymore.
yoongi had won, of course, and it hadn't even taken more than a minute.
the ranks retract into the ground at once, letting pigeon guy drop to his death if yoongi hadn't been here, catching him with a quick arresto momentum.
then he casts a thin circle of magic fire around the guy and himself, just for dramatic purposes.
"bring more people next time. and maybe practice a few more tricks."
he can't help but crouch down next to the hufflepuff, the monster in his chest still too angry to not revel in the fear in pigeon's wide eyes and taste the sweet revenge on his tongue.
"maybe you'll be lucky then. understood?"
it costs him almost his last bit of resolve not to drag his wand across the hufflepuff's cheek, grab him by the chin roughly and force him to look into his eyes. his easy victory would be even more delicious if he could make him see the lingering thirst for his blood, make him see how worthless he is in his eyes. but he doesn't.
"and maybe you could let hoseok decide for himself who he surrounds himself with." the sarcastic "darling" stays tucked away under his tongue.
he gets up, quick and silent, dissolving the circle of the smallest white flames dancing in the grass around them, and watches how the boy gets up coughing and wheezing after the muffliato is lifted.
as he leaves — confidently, as if he didn't just have a duel almost on school grounds, he can't resist to send a verberatus over his shoulder.
the muffled groaning from the hufflepuff behind him as invisible fists beat the shit out if him makes yoongi almost have pity for him, but it dissolves into nothingness as he makes his way back to the castle and hears the other spit onto the gravel covering the way.
"you'll pay for this, asshole!" he shouts between long strings of cursing, and yoongi waves without looking.
there's a warm bed waiting for him, after all.
the thing, monster, whatever, sleeps in his belly again, locked away for another day.
❊
he can't sleep.
jimin is cuddled up to his side, meaning: if feels as if he's grilled alive and boiled in his own juices, because jimin has an average body temperature of approximately three thousand degrees. he seriously wonders how taehyung is able to sleep in one bed with jimin every single goddamn night of the year, but at the same time he doesn't, because taehyung's legs are spread out over his stomach and he's an icicle. it's a perfect match.
he's been lying awake for two hours now, trying to fall asleep, but something won't let him come down from his high. he can't differentiate if it stems from the adrenaline of the afternoon still lingering, from the sugar, or the open-mouthed snoring coming from the other two.
he didn't even have to ask the younger slytherins if they wanted to have a sleepover; as soon as he set a foot into the common room, they launched themselves at him, whining about how he's working too much and doesn't spend enough time with them, and they didn't let go of him until he agreed to hot dark choco and the delicious strawberry pies jimin's mom had sent her baby.
afterwards, yoongi was forced to read his latest book to them, but taehyung lost interest after only a few pages (he had told them it'd be boring for them, because the only things they read are comics and erotica romance dime novels. no one listened) and started to feed yoongi jelly slugs, ice mice, chocolate cauldrons and acid pops at the most inconvenient times, while eating most of yoongi's pile of sugar quills.
he told them about the incident on his way back from hogsmeade, and they giggled and made fun of the hufflepuff while simultaneously praising yoongi for being such a good wizard and so on. ("typical fifth year. hasn't even had an OWL exam yet, and thinks he can take on a seventh year. and for what?" jimin laughs and downs a whole piece of cauldron cake in two bites. yoongi wouldn't be surprised if he'd unhinge his jaw to devour his pillow next, with the way he's been eating all night.)
so now, long after taehyung had stated he'd pass the fuck out and really did, he's forced to lie awake, for whatever the reason, stare at the silvery canopy and listen to his unconscious friends' breathing and occasional sleep talking. jimin moves in his sleep. after two seconds of relieving coldness at yoongi's side where jimin had moved his body a few inches away, he slings an arm over yoongi's chest.
yoongi groans.
taehyung says: "five plus seven isn't twelve, you stupid cat", his leg twitching in his sleep.
he decides it's better to try and sleep in the common room, because although he enjoys the cuddling and company of his friends, he desperately needs his sleep, and if it goes on like this he'll be dead by tomorrow. maybe he'll grow tired in another setting. maybe he'll be able to sleep when there's not two windows throwing too-bright moonlight and reflections of the lake water onto the floor between their beds, reminding him of how short his remaining time here in the castle is.
wriggling out from under jimin and taehyung is tricky, since they practically trapped him in a messy pile of arms and legs (and taehyung's head is in there somewhere, too), but he manages without waking them up, sliding out of bed without as much as a rustle of his bedsheeds and a few mumbles from taehyung. (some cursing and something about prawns and cooking.)
as he sets his feet down, the wooden floor itches under his toes – he needs something cold, something biting his bare feet, like stone or glass. something crawls in his chest.
his legs start to tingle, the feeling is wandering upwards, to his shins, then his hips, then through his stomach, up to his chest. it grows. something feels wrong, something isn't right, something has to change.
yoongi is familiar to the feeling. he doesn't know why or how, but sometimes, when the night isn't dark enough and the air isn't cold enough, he feels sick, all wrong, as if he belongs somewhere else but was ripped from his home and placed into this world a few inches too far on the right.
he's too big for his own skin, his mother had told him when he came into her bedroom crying last winter, when the thing had told him to scratch open his wrists to release it into the suffocating air of his bedroom.
it grows and grows, simmering in his fingers, aching.
he blindly grabs his robe de chambre hanging from one pole of the canopy bed and slips into a pair of shoes, most likely jimin's, before he sneaks out the bedroom.
he feels like running, trying to get outside as fast as possible, and while his world seems to turn faster and faster, he's weirdly aware in one corner of his mind how calmly he walks down the stairs and out the common room.
in the dungeons, it's even warmer than inside. the heat radiating from the torches doesn't help at all, and now he's really running, down the hallway, to a painting of Gundel the Gruesome, who sleeps with her head against the frame and her hands peacefully folded in her lap, still cuffed together even three hundred years after her execution.
he doesn't have time to mind her horrified screeching as he mindlessly buries his fingertips in her frame and pries it open, revealing a small black door.
it's about four feet tall, and he has to place both his arms on the floor ledge once the door is opened, to get up to the first step of stairs behind it.
the painting and door clicks shut behind him as he makes his way up the narrow, low staircase.
at the end of it, there's another door. it swings open as he approaches, it always does for the few slytherins who know about it, and he finally steps out into the cold night air.
the lake spreads out in front of him, only a few steps away. the black water is glistening so beautifully calm and innocent. it makes him sick.
he wanders along the shore of the lake, only taking his eyes off of the black mirror to trace the silhouette of the mountains all around the castle.
the thing calms down a bit, stopping its violent, hot boiling.
he still wants to scream and destroy something. he can't tell if himself or something else.
an icy wind blows over him, making his hair fall into his eyes even more, tugging at his robes a bit more fiercely, begging him to go into the water a bit more urgently.
he can't stop walking, around the lake, further away from the castle, just walking.
yoongi stumbles once, twice, thrice, over something on the grassy ground shrouded in darkness, maybe as well over the shoes that are too big for him, but he doesn't care, not when there's something inside of him that tries to break free with so much force.
there is a rock at the shore, a big cold stone that reaches a few feet into the lake, and he has to climb it, he just has to.
the next time he blinks, he's up there, sitting at the edge of a cold, mossy stone on a lake in scotland's late, late october, freezing to death in his pajamas and a bathrobe and slippers that aren't his own. he doesn't really feel any of it, just his hair too heavy on his head and his fingers too lean and wanky at the hem of his shirt.
he wants to scream.
he wants to shout it out, this anger he doesn't know where it stems from, and the thing inside his chest that roams and roams and roams and won't let him sleep in peace.
but he can't, because the castle is right there, thousands of windows and doors facing him directly, staring at him across the lake in the darkness, and if he screamed and roared and bit like he wants to, it would come to life and devour him whole.
so he stays silent, eating his own words up, and they set into his stomach even heavier than before, weighing him down. if he fell into the water now, he couldn't save his life, the unspoken words and sentences too heavy for him, pulling him to his grave.
he stays silent, and the only thing that happens is his eyes dwelling up with tears.
tears streaming down his face, tickling at his nostrils and the corner of his mouth, but he can't even lift a single hand to wipe them away, so they stay and dig their way across his cheeks like the acid they are.
the quiet makes him sick. the way he can't even be letting loose when noone's here to witness it.
the thing flicks its tail. yoongi's wrists itch. he has to do something, anything, to let the monster free.
somebody coughs behind him.
he doesn't startle, as if he'd been expecting this, he can't bring himself to look. he's exhausted. he can't bring himself to care whether it's snape or mcgonagall or any other teacher finding him outside his dorm at one or two or three am; he'll take the detention and the lost points for slytherin and go back to bed, burying everything under twelve hours of unconsciousness.
the thing, however, perks its ears, curious, making yoongi turn around on his spot at the water nonetheless.
it's hoseok, wearing a grey pajama under a dark green jacket, and real shoes, black ones with green stripes.
"you good?" hoseok asks and uninvitedly climbs over to where yoongi's seated, taking up too much space on yoongi's secluded island, crushing his thoughts.
yoongi nods, turning back to the lake again, staring at the castle's empty, blind windows again.
hoseok doesn't address the evident trails of tears on his face, and the way he's rubbing his wrist, or the way he wears nothing fit for end of october. he doesn't say anything, just sits next to him on the cold, mossy stone hovering over the silent lake water. yoongi doesn't address anything either, he doesn't even think of how hoseok's here, why he's here, why he's not in his bed. he doesn't think anything much at all, if he's being honest.
"can i help?" hoseok whispers, and there is not a single droplet of smiling or easy acquaintance-friendliness in his voice, only honesty.
yoongi doesn't know what to say, because he had already resigned himself to staying quiet, has already swallowed his words and buried them deep, deep down, and he doesn't know — he doesn't know what's the problem, where to start explaining, if he should do it at all, what he wants, how hoseok could help if he was capable to do so. he doesn't know anything anymore, or maybe he didn't know anything from the start.
he just wants to be alone, sitting here and staring into nothing, until he's too cold to think about anything but a warm, overheated bed to slip into and sleep until lunch is long over. or — maybe that's not true anymore.
the thing curls in on itself, like he wants to, closing its eyes. lets him unclench his fists. lets him take a deep breath, sort his thoughts. look into hoseok's eyes as if he holds the answer for him, to search for the glint, the tired but honest glint of fire in hoseok's black eyes.
"say my name," he whispers. his hands stand still.
hoseok doesn't hesitate for a single second.
"yoongi."
the whole word seems to depend on one word.
"again."
"yoongi."
"again."
"min yoongi."
his name has never felt so good rolling from another person's tongue. his name has never been uttered like this, like it's the most fragile, most venomous, most precious and most lethal word. yoongi can't remember when it was the last time someone had spoken it out loud. not mr. min, not yoongles or yoon or yoomfs or hyung, not baby or asshole, just yoongi. he can't remember. he needs someone to say it like they mean it.
"yoongi," hoseok continues, and suddenly yoongi's glad he doesn't touch him. he'd crumble, just to take out the monster in his chest.
"yoongi, yoongi, yoongi," he whispers and whispers and whispers against the darkness covering their faces trying to drown them in loneliness, and then yoongi reaches out for him and hoseok somehow understands without a word and wraps his arms around yoongi like he wants to burn down this whole insane world only for yoongi to feel safe.
❊
he's in the forest. there is blood on his hands. it tastes like honey and almonds.
do their headlights look like god?
the voice is in his head, a soft whisper carrying the promise of love.
"what do you mean?" he asks aloud. the trees around him vibrate, turn to him, like they're made of soft clay, and they stretch towards his chest, as if they want to crawl inside.
for a deer, they might.
there is green around him, a neon colour cutting through the trees, wandering with invisible motion.
a heart-shaped mouth whispers into his mind, while the trees fall without a sound, leaving behind the ocean.
he has to swim, swim in the blood and the dark green moss, and the stars above twinkle an answer he can't decipher. he racks his brain for anything, anything, anything to help him swim and understand, but he finds nothing. the stars twinkle, they wink and laugh at him for not knowing, and he's growing angry, so incredibly angry, until soft, cool hands smelling like tears and his heart wrap around his ankles and pull him down, closer to their burning core, drowning him in adoration.
what is the forest telling you?
he doesn't know, he just wants to bathe in the voice and worship its origin. he doesn't know and he doesn't want to know.
is this enough stone?
he's in a forest again, the same forest as before, but this time, it's made of stone. the leaves are made of blood and ocean water, beautiful, white like sapphire.
he turns as the forest spreads, the branches intertwining, building a blanket against the stars above, until the forest became the great hall.
there is someone standing, waiting just for him, and the figure is illuminated by an endless sea of candles behind their head, painting them holy, holy, holy.
you found me, the figure says into his head, the same smile in their voice, was it worth it?
he nods, dripping wet from all the love, voice too hoarse to speak, his limbs shaking from the cold blood and icy moss.
the figure spreads their arms, and he slides inside, grateful for the golden warmth.
his neck breaks.
yoongi wakes up.
he smiles.
❊
he tutors hoseok a few more times.
they never talk about what happened at the lake that night. it feels so far away for yoongi, as if it didn't happen in this lifetime, as if it didn't happen at all and he just dreamt it up in a sugar-induced coma, sandwiched between burning jimin and icy taehyung. it's as if he'd witnessed it outside of his body, as if he'd watched some distant memories in the pensieve of his grandmother, but wasn't present at all.
yoongi refuses to think about the whole thing at all, because it's too much for him. he embarrassed himself in front of hoseok twice already, crying and dramatic as fuck, and he can't — can't spend any more time freaking out about it.
the next time they meet, at breakfast sunday morning, hoseok sits next to him and asks him for another session while picking apart a cinnamon roll, the bags under his eyes darker than before.
they have to talk, really, yoongi knows that, but he can't, not right now at least, so he agrees to three more tutorials in the afternoons.
he can literally feel the questions dripping into the space between them, the heavy air surrounding them, and it would probably be so easy to just — tell hoseok they'll talk sometime or just talk while jimin and taehyung aren't awake yet, because somehow things are so easy with hoseok.
but he doesn't. because he's afraid he'll say something too raw and true. because he's afraid to let too much of his heart slip over his tongue. and he can't scare hoseok away, he can't.
besides, he doesn't even know if he can answer the questions if they ever talked.
crazy enough, it's not weird between them.
hoseok's knee touches his own, they share each other's place, and they somehow talk about classes and the next hogsmeade weekend before christmas without uncomfortably avoiding the topic of last night. they quietly eat their breakfasts together, dropping sentences here and there, a calm atmosphere over their table, ignoring the stares and whispers.
that means, until taehyung and jimin enter the great hall in their pajamas and loudly argue about who kicked the other out of bed.
yoongi helps hoseok with six seven other assignments for history, once or twice every week. it becomes a routine. he looks forward to it every week, and he suspects hoseok secretly studies at night, because he's gotten way better at goblin history and some days he looks so tired when yoongi sees him in the hallways, he just wants to wrap him in a blanket and feed him mashed apples and biscuits until he falls asleep. he can't be sure though; maybe he's just so busy helping his housemates with their assignments.
somewhere in between those weeks (jimin had told him afterwards that it was hallow's eve), a troll demolished a pupils' bathroom. it was one exceptionally weird story, and yoongi only knew about it because he had sneaked around the corner in the exact moment professor quirrell almost fainted at the sight of the knocked-out troll.
yoongi had been too busy stopping taehyung from doing something he didn't fully understand but certainly knew was one of those ideas that sound bad from the beginning and are even worse in execution. he had duelled taehyung and won his wand, so that he couldn't set his plan in action, and thus had spent dinner time on fourth floor. on his way back to the slytherin dorm, because he wasn't hungry enough to put up with all the noise in the great hall, he witnessed quirrell's almost-fainting, a furious mcgonagall screaming at some gryffindors that looked awfully young (and that one boy, the one with the black hair; maybe that was the famous harry potter yoongi had heard so many stories about when he was younger?), and snape looking weirdly pale standing in the entrance of the girl's bathroom.
yoongi didn't actually pay it attention that much, because he could hear taehyung storming down the stairs in his chase after him, and he figured he'd rather bicker with taehyung again than be seen by mcgonagall in this state of hysteria when he's supposed to be at dinner, so he turned around and went back up. (jimin called it a "nope" moment.)
point is — october became november and november became december, and soon the first snow fell, freezing the mountains in peaceful white silence.
he might be wrong about it, but as soon as the first snow falls, it's getting more quiet in the castle, as if the snow not only quiets animals and nature outside but also the busy hustling inside the castle walls, as if there was snow and ice in the hallways, covering the marble floor tiles.
the students are huddled up in the great hall, standing in tighter groups to keep the cold out in the courtyard, wrapped in big sweaters and scarves and coats. some carry around their mugs from breakfast, charmed to keep any liquid inside hot all day, some enchant their hoodies and socks, some pupils even walk around the castle in heat bubbles, causing a few accidents in the hallways, because the problem with heat bubbles is that they tend to set things on fire when not handled properly.
yoongi doesn't notice much of it, anyway, because he has to submit not less than thirteen assignments before the holidays begin — he seriously wonders if the teachers try to kill him. he only has five NEWT subjects, but even his care of magical creatures professor, silvanus kettleburn, had given them three five-scroll homeworks, all due the week before christmas. he has to prepare a thirty-minute presentation for runes along with a 14-inch-parchment, brew an everlasting elixir to be tested on muggle plants for potions along with an explanatory essay to protocol its development, write an eight-scroll alchemy essay, keep an oculi oleum hedera alive and trimmed, a plant known for its excessive growing and preference for human eyes, write another essay for that, and write two charms papers followed by a practical charms test.
and it's not even NEWT exam season yet.
needless to say, yoongi has no time for anything, basically, and he has to cancel hoseok's weekly tutor lessons, because between doing an excessive amount of homework and sleeping, he's occupied with not getting eaten by a school project that just has to like eyeballs for breakfast and has the tendency to die if not babied for at least three hours a day. it's highly sensible, and jimin almost got his pretty dark eyes eaten by the violet and green ivy-looking creature when he called it an "ugly rat bastard plant fucker" the first time he saw it; yoongi had to calm it down for half an hour before he was able to finally leave the greenhouse for the day.
it's weird — he has known hoseok for a little more than eight weeks now (not that he's counting, no, not him), his weird break-down-and-cry-in-hoseok's-arms encounter in fifth grade left out, which is not much. but he misses the hufflepuff more than he'd ever admit to himself, because it's too embarrassing to even think about it.
he misses hoseok with his soft hands and even softer muggle hoodies, he misses hoseok's heart smile that lights up his eyes first and only after that the rest of his face, his honey tan because he's spending at least one hour outside every day. he misses the way hoseok brushes dark strands of hair out of his face to properly see the pages in his book, the way hoseok shares yoongi's silences, misses how their knees accidentally knock together under the table.
he misses him even when they sit together at the slytherin table most days and quietly shovel as much food as possible into their mouths with as little pause or unnecessary movements before parting ways to get their own workload done.
yoongi misses hoseok.
and then it's over, every essay handed in, every potion and plant reviewed, every charm exercise carried out, and he's finally able to sleep more than three hours every night again.
it's wednesday evening and he's actually glad he powered through his assignments and pulled three allnighters, because he turned everything in two days early, rescheduled his charms practical exam and all, just to be finished early. so now he has two spare days with nothing to do but spend time with taehyung and jimin, who don't seem to have any work this year (it's more likely they just don't do their assignments, because they are lazy fuckers and don't care about their academic grades at all).
yoongi's bored.
he had done what was expected from him, he worked so hard and long on finishing his schoolwork to be rewarded with a few days off before the annual christmas stress kicks in, and now he's bored. all the things he used to do after finishing his schoolwork in the last years aren't fulfilling anymore. that means — reading isn't fulfilling anymore. he's bored out of his mind when he opens his current book, he's bored and unconcentrated while reading the few pages he's managing to read, and he's feeling uneasy when he closes the book after a few minutes. sitting in an armchair and staring at pages over pages isn't the same anymore. yoongi fears that sitting in the library or the common room for weeks, surrounded by books and being forced to read tome after tome has ruined reading for him. permanently. and as sad as it sounds, he doesn't have another hobby. it's always been reading, too busy to have a pet or plants, neither at hogwarts nor at home, too impatient to sew or paint. he plays the piano when he's at home, but he's not really good because he obviously can't take a piano with him to scotland, and he's practically obsessed with Spellbound. he had seen them live a few times, last summer, but the ancient wizard radio his grandmother has at home only has one channel, and the terrible WizOldie-WizGoldie moderators would never, ever play Spellbound, not in a million years, and if they did, soon-hee would throw away this radio, too.
hoseok is the exact opposite: he paints, he sews his own clothes sometimes, he dances and plays flute, he has a puppy at home, a small brown shih tzu. he plays quidditch, something yoongi can’t really get behind. he's bright.
taehyung loudly chirps into his ear when yoongi groans again from his spot on the couch, startling him a bit, but he flops back onto his back soon enough.
"stop," jimin moans from the floor, his head at yoongi's hip and frantically flipping through his transformation notes.
his essay is due tomorrow.
he had started about forty minutes ago.
"you could help me when you're so bored."
"no," yoongi whines, throwing one arm across his face and peeking up at the ceiling, "i will never look at that shit again."
simultaneously, taehyung giggles, propping a jelly slug into his mouth and flipping through a magazine. "he's just mopey because he hasn't seen loverboy for weeks."
"'m not!" yoongi snaps through his sleeve.
"you are."
yoongi blindly reaches for jimin, whacking him up the head, who emits a choked shriek and shuffles away.
it's quiet for a few moments. jimin chews on his lower lip, scratching his quill over the parchment, and taehyung intently studies a double-paged image in his magazine. how long can a human person look at a close-up picture of a hand model without it being weird?
(yoongi only realizes later that the magazine in question doesn't exist; taehyung had enchanted a book he had stolen from borgin and burke's in the knockturn alley to conceal to curious passers-by the true nature of his evening reading. New and Improved Blood Rituals.)
there has to be anything he can do, preferably something that isn't totally forbidden.
being caught on his way down to hogsmeade again isn't very high up the list.
how did his life come up to this point, where he studies his ass off for a scrap of free time and is rewarded with boredom because he has approximately zero hobbies and exactly two friends? when did he decide he was okay with that?
for lack of possibilities, yoongi gets up from his warm, comfortable spot on the couch and sits down next to jimin.
jimin's notes are awful, but most importantly, a mess. neither of them would be able to find any source for an acceptable essay in this pile of garbage.
"you gotta sort that," he mumbles to jimin, taking a few scraps of paper out of the younger's hands. "skim over your notes once. take your time, it's more efficient to do it properly. and then sort the essential things into chronological order."
they work in silence for a few minutes, jimin putting all the unhelpful parchments aside while yoongi sorts the rest after dates scribbled in the margins and the lent books after usefulness. one might think jimin hasn't written a single essay his whole life, but he's just not prepared. jimin always does the bare minimum, worming his way through school years and exams, and yoongi honestly thinks it's admirable how jimin handles the annual, severe exam season anxiety and still doesn't study anything all year, every year. he begins his studying three days before the actual tests, and by the end of it he's saved himself a lot time but lost a lot of nerves.
"for fuck's sake, yoongs, just go look for loverboy." taehyung rolls his eyes, clicks his tongue.
"don't call him that," yoongi replies weakly, because he knows once tae started, he won't stop any time soon. "we're acquaintances."
taehyung and jimin snort completely in sync, but neither of them lose another word about it.
he's just about to reach for a highlighter in jimin's pencil case, when taehyung chimes in again.
"yah, yoongs, can you do me a favor?"
yoongi narrows his eyes, suspicious of what the younger wants.
"what favor," he asks hesitantly, because he had learned his lesson in third grade, when he had agreed to do tae a favor without asking and the whole story ended with him on top of the highest library shelf with orange hair and a fucking bowtruckle trying to eat his ear. their teeth are surprisingly sharp.
"can you deliver this," he flails around a folded piece of paper that looks awfully close to a ripped out textbook page, "to the library? table forty-two, i think. a friend of mine asked for it because i owe him but i forgot." he scratches his neck sheepishly, mumbling an excuse as to why he can't go there himself.
yoongi is about to decline, because who does tae think he is, a delivery boy? he's occupied with helping jimin pass his school year at the moment, which they both should be eternally grateful for since they wouldn't ever survive a whole year without the other. plus, he'll have to leave the warm and cozy common room on his free evening just to wander around the cold castle for a most likely stolen or copied homework. so no, thanks.
but jimin softly takes the highlighter out of yoongi's hand and ushers him to stand up.
"come on, hyung. it'll be good for you to get outside a bit. look around the castle, maybe you'll find a new cool passageway," he winks, uncapping the marker and mindlessly resting its tip on his newest paper, creating a neon pink stain.
yoongi tries to intervene, because he's not in the mood.
"you sure you don't need help with your—"
"yes, thank you, the essay will be alright. you helped me more than enough already, i'll be good. thanks," jimin interrupts, smiling cutely, and taehyung nods enthusiastically, neither of them noticing the growing pink stain on jimin's parchment or yoongi's sceptical look.
"i can help jimin."
it's yoongi's turn to snort.
but okay. maybe they are right.
"what's your delivery containing, anyways?" yoongi asks, side-eyeing the page. there's the dark form of a roughly sketched bubbling cauldron visible, together with some explanations.
taehyung grins, almost maniacally, and purrs: "i think it's better if you don't know."
oh, great.
"if anybody asks you, just say it's, i don't know, a love letter, or something." he rolls his eyes and starts shoving yoongi towards the door, away from the warmth at the chimney. they trip over a few wrinkles in the dark violet and green carpet where a few first graders had played tag a few minutes prior, but tae isn't bothered at all.
"but—"
"jesus, yoongi, hyung, whatever, please just go!" jimin throws his hands up in exasperation. "you'll be back in no time, if that makes you feel better. just do something!"
yoongi's shoulder bumps into the stoney door frame before it swings open and taehyung shoves him outside, pushing the parchment into his hands.
"i think it's better if you don't look at it," he grins, and before yoongi can say anything, he slams the wall shut.
yoongi just stares at the blank stone wall at the end of the hallway, paper in his hands and without his shoes, trying to process what just happened. what the fuck did just happen?
the stone walls part again.
"table forty-two," taehyung's voice shouts from inside, and a pair of slippers land in front of yoongi's feet.
the door shuts again.
❊
kicked out of his own home.
this is ridiculous.
yoongi stands in the library, right behind the closed doors through which he came not even three seconds ago. he's wearing his slytherin slipover sweater and a white shirt with a loose tie, like everyday, but his bottoms are his baby blue checkered pajama pants paired with fluffy, brightly red felt slippers (taehyung must’ve stolen them out of the gryffindor common room at the after-party of the first quidditch match in november). he changed as soon as he had come back from dinner, and he deeply regrets it, but once he was outside the common room, he thought it unnecessary to change anymore.
fourteen-year-old him would've killed him without hesitation.
anyways, he'll just drop off a ripped out page at table forty two, at the far east end of the library, somewhere between transfiguration books, and go back to the dungeons. he doesn't need to wear jeans and robes, it's not like he cares about what people think of him anymore, since it's rarely anything good.
madam pince shoots him a degrading look from her desk as he makes his way down the first aisle.
there are more students than usual sitting at the tables between shelves, mostly in groups, silently whispering questions, passing information, struggling with inkpots and grammar, and by the time yoongi passes desk forty, he has seen enough students looking at him with funny expressions and varying degrees of pity to make him uneasy.
he knows desk forty-two is just behind the next shelf, a small two-person table in one of the probably darkest spots of the library.
yoongi steps around the corner without thinking.
he freezes.
that's hoseok sitting there, his back to yoongi, but unmistakably hoseok with his long hair and unbelievably cute cheeks on full display even from his spot ten feet away. it's a hundred percent hoseok bent over a big book and a burned down candle at his side to illuminate the pages.
before hoseok can somehow sense his presence and turn around, yoongi stumbles backwards, back into the shadows between the shelves, and practically rips tae's parchment open.
the possibility of taehyung pranking and luring him into a sweet, embarrassing trap didn't cross his mind even for a single second. it should’ve. owing a fellow student some homeworks them is just not taehyung, because taehyung doesn’t owe anyone, but he didn't even question it. besides, how could he ever have known taehyung knew hoseok was here? it makes no sense.
and yet, here he is.
it's okay, he tries to calm himself, there's still the possibility of taehyung not knowing shit and all of this being a coincidence. that tae's friend left early and hoseok occupied the space for homework and some studying.
oh, who is he kidding.
there are only a few words smeared across the paper. it's a page ripped out of yoongi's alchemy book. he's going to kill taehyung — that book cost him forty galleons. and if he's at it, he might just do the same with jimin.
dear loverboy,
please cheer up yoongi, he's unnerving us with his constant moping and missing you shit.
best regards,
tae (and jimi, but he can't sign right now)
those little shits.
oh, they will pay for this, they'll just have to be glad that he didn't actually hand hoseok the paper without looking. he'll hide their bags and wands right before class, he'll hex the sleeves of their robes to always be a tad too tight, he'll jinx their books to never stay on the right page when they need it most.
he'll steal jimin's essay, write another one, and put it back into mcgonagall's essay folder, just to see jimin get a T, and then he'll laugh at them struggling with their wands and robes and grades, congratulating himself on —
"oh, hi, yoongi."
"fuck!"
yoongi jumps, he's surprised to say the least, and almost loses the fucking note, but he recovers fast enough to shove it down his pajama pockets. his heart jumps in his throat.
"sorry."
"nice pajamas," hoseok grins and gives him a short once-over, looking pointedly at his shoes and then at his face again.
heat crawls up his neck, but he tries his best to smile innocuous.
"thanks," he rolls his eyes, "taehyung kicked me out of the common room."
hoseok laughs, a bright rumble, and signs him to come sit with him as he returns to his table.
"what are you studying for?" yoongi snatches a book away from the flickering candle to save it from catching fire and studies the leather bound tome. it feels as if it has at least a thousand pages, maybe even more.
’You Can Lick It, It's Not Dangerous' — Six Thousand And A Half Zoologists' Last Words (Wizard and Muggle Edition).
"it's for transfiguration," hoseok groans. "mcgonagall wants us to write an essay about transformative magical creatures."
"should i —," yoongi bites his cheek, "should i help you? when's it due?" well, he's here now, and he really had missed hoseok, so spending a bit of time with him can't do any harm. if he's able to help, he could.
the younger looks up from his books, eyebrows raised.
"tomorrow. do you know anything about plants?"
yoongi grunts.
"well, i sure hope i do if i try to become a magizoologist," he mumbles and sits down. the cold of the chair creeps through the thin fabric of his pants.
"sorry, i forgot." he can see how hoseok tries to understand something, deep creases digging themselves into his forehead as he taps a rhythm onto a spot of the table where no parchment and book hides the black table. then his usual kind smile returns, and yoongi thinks maybe he imagined it.
"thanks," hoseok mumbles when yoongi pulls his chair over to his seat.
"don't mention it," yoongi says, and it feels blasphemous in the sacred silence.
the shelves filter the distant chattering of students into something more peaceful, more quiet, something soothing. he adores how it drips holy into his skull and filters out his too loud thoughts, helping him focus on hoseok.
they work until the library closes, and he once again curses the randomly set opening hours at hogwarts.
mcgonagall's insane homework of seven scrolls is almost finished, which is a pity, because hoseok is doing really good in transformation and doesn't really need yoongi's help, so he had thought they'd get it done until eight. but as madam pince, only smiling at hoseok, kicks them out, he still has one scroll to go.
he's about to say goodnight to the other boy at the foot of the stairs, across from the big entrance portal, when hoseok says: "do you want to come over and finish the last scroll?"
what?
"what?"
he doesn't mean to sound horrified, or aghast, or appalled, he's just genuinely surprised, but with the way hoseok's mouth twitches downwards, he knows it came off as exactly that.
"no, it's just—" he pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to focus. "i mean— ugh. sorry. it's— i'm a slytherin. do you really want me in your common room?"
yoongi hates how he sounds; lost, self-deprecating, desperate, it's pouring out of every word he forces off of his tongue, but he can't help it. he's never had a friend from another house. not even in his own year, really, because he's too quiet and was too lonely in his first year, when taehyung and jimin weren't at hogwarts yet. his first year was dark, because he had been lonely and had tried so hard to find friends, but his face just seemed to drive his classmates away, something about not smiling enough and being too angry all the time, which was a lie, and it seemed to just stick throughout the years. sure, his dormmates learned over time that he wasn't bad, but that, he had accepted a long time ago, doesn't equal friendship.
he's never had a friend from another house, because he's a slytherin and slytherins are grindelwald's minions, and anyway, they want to stay among themselves and do their own thing.
"of course i want you in the common room, you're my friend," hoseok says, incredibly soft and gentle. yoongi gulps around a big lump in his throat, trying to suppress whatever it is that rises through his chest and makes him want to scream and combust, but it doesn't go away. his nose burns.
"you okay?"
he sharply inhales through his nose to fake a sneeze, desperately trying to cover up his emotional slip-up.
"yes, of course, i'm fine, it's nothing."
hoseok seems sceptical, tilting his head a little, but he doesn't say anything.
"you can totally say no, i just — i missed you, and it's way more fun to work on homework when you're there."
yoongi's mind crumbles at hoseok's words, but then, because apparently it's Min Yoongi Is A Dumb Stupid Student Who Doesn't Know Anything day, he says: "i missed you too." and blushes like the idiot he is.
so that's how he ends up in the hufflepuff common room with hoseok next to him on the sofa.
it's a beautiful house room, bright wood and furniture, the fireplace a little bigger than the slytherin one, and it's so incredibly comfortable with the brightly orange and yellow and green carpets on the floor, and with the big, big windows facing a pitch black nightly landscape around the castle, it's wonderful. there are almost the same armchairs and sofas as in the slytherin common room, but somehow they aren't, because where slytherin is dark and elegant, with filigrane and intricate patterns everywhere, hufflepuff is sturdier, more straightforward, more cottage-like, brighter and more inviting.
there are so many students, it's packed with so many hufflepuffs, but gryffindors and ravenclaws too, people loudly playing exploding snap and chess, sitting in circles with their friends.
yoongi can't help the loud pang of anger in his heart, he really can't.
here, it's soft and peaceful, and one homogenous mass of pupils, of friends, and it's warm with nice chatter and people helping and loving and adoring, and he's the only slytherin here. he'd never been invited here before, he had been excluded, avoided, and while it's not at all bad in slytherin, he knows things aren't as sincere as they are here, not even close. the slytherin common room is big too, but it's dark inside because it's situated under the lakeshore, and someone had thought green light was a good idea for a learning and living environment for children. it's also mostly empty, because most of the pupils spend their free time somewhere else, yoongi doesn't know where exactly, or in their dorms.
he thinks he might spill over with anger and the goddamn hurt — because, what kind of shit is this?
how did he deserve this?
how did eleven year old him, a scared, small, pale boy who loved to sort pencils after colour and length, deserve to be treated like he was the most evil person on the planet?
how did fourteen year old him, who bickered with his closest, oldest friends, deserve to get his wand broken and be beaten up behind the leaking cauldron?
how did seventeen year old him, who only wants to work with magical creatures after school, deserve to be attacked in the dark because — what?
what did he ever do to deserve this hate and mistrust?
because he got sorted into a house known for developing more dark wizards and witches, but nobody asks themselves: why is that? did he deserve this treatment through being born a halfblood into a loving pureblood family, or through being taught dark magic by his mom to defend himself from other students and their attacks?
and now, at the end of his seven years, when he's finally ready to leave all the bad things behind and remember the good moments inside the castle walls in pure nostalgia bliss, only then he's allowed to see what he was denied all these years? how things could've been all along?
he might explode here, in this room filled with friends and not a single droplet of hostility directed at him, where he's feeling like there is a neon sign floating over his head, pointing at him and reading "the odd one out, if anyone didn't notice yet, it's so obvious, come on".
he might explode here and unfurl his rage on every student in the room, to give them finally, after seven goddamn years, a real reason to fear and hate him.
and hoseok, sweet, sweet hoseok, gently touches his elbow and looks him in the eyes.
"it's too packed here," and his voice pours into yoongi's heart, directly to the core, and soothes its ache like a cool cloth on a fever shaken face, "let's go upstairs."
he just nods and follows hoseok up the stairs, leaving the stares and furtive looks, until they are sitting again, and yoongi realizes only now that "upstairs" means hoseok's dorm, his bedroom, and they are currently sitting on hoseok's bed.
he can't say anything for a while, just tries to keep his shit together, because they are in hoseok's bedroom as if it wasn't the biggest deal right now, and stares at various things in the room without actually seeing them properly. bright wooden floor, slightly darker beds, grey bedsheets, boxes and posters and books everywhere. it's messy, in a good way. there is an easel in the corner, some white canvas, a bookshelf he doesn't know where it possibly came from. it's filled with life.
hoseok doesn't seem to mind yoongi's silence. he had leaned against the headboard, a book as pad for his parchment, and scratches the last few sentences onto his essay, the inkpot balancing dangerously on his knees. yoongi sits at the other side, his back leaned against the cool, wooden foot part of the bed, doesn't know what to do with his feet and arms, so he awkwardly shuffles around until he decides, it's ok, he'll just stretch his legs and put his hands into his pockets. he's still wearing his pajama pants.
cool.
"sorry for the mess, i haven't cleaned in a few weeks. homework and all." a grin.
yes, yoongi thinks at that, shoolwork wears everyone down, hoseok looks so tired, way more tired than he feels himself, and he wonders why. he thinks he knows the answer, but he doesn't say anything but "it's okay, i don't mind", because he really doesn't.
"and," hoseok speaks up after about fifteen minutes in which yoongi tried to think about nothing, not about the mass of students downstairs having fun, not about the way hoseok had gotten ink onto his temple, and definitely not about the way yoongi is tempted to slide between hoseok's propped up legs, making himself comfortable on his belly, chest and kiss the ink away. "finished."
yoongi smiles.
"good job, mcgonagall's gonna be blown away," he chirps happily "if she doesn't give you an E, she can prepare for trouble."
(hoseok adds "and make it double", but won't explain to yoongi what that is supposed to mean.)
"do you want to look it over?" hoseok asks.
he does, and it takes him longer than he initially had thought. hoseok's handwriting didn't get better over the course of two months, it barely manages to stay in one straight line, and the seven pages take him almost half an hour to read. it might be around seven or eight thousand words long — like he thought: insane.
hoseok had given him a pencil in case he wants to correct something, and he does, because neat grammar isn't very high up hoseok's priority list when he tries to finish a homework last minute.
all the while yoongi is busy proofreading the essay, hoseok shuffles around. he rummages through the chest in front of the bed, sorts his clothes, sorts his books, packs his colours away, folds the easel and pushes it under his bed. he disappears for a few minutes, and yoongi has to admit he doesn't realize until he's back, in the grey pajama pants he had worn the night he had found yoongi crying at the lake, and carrying a tray with two mugs and a lot of biscuits.
"here. it's almond," he hands yoongi one of the mugs; it's warm milk.
"thanks." yoongi can't help but smile as he tastes a faint note of honey in his cup, just like his mom used to make for him when he was small and couldn't sleep or had a tummy ache.
"i made it like my mom always does," hoseok plops down onto his pillow, groans, and cracks his neck after sitting in the library for too long.
"didn't know we had the same mom," yoongi chuckles and places a missing comma in the last sentence. "maybe it's universal."
"like how we were never allowed to turn on the light in the car?" hoseok blows onto his cup although it's not hot anymore.
yoongi ignores the way hoseok tilts his head a little, the way he's sitting cross legged on his bed and how long said legs are, how bad he wants to — he ignores it, he's good at ignoring, he doesn't pay attention to it at all, he's just sitting on a friend's bed, correcting his almost perfect homework, drinking warm almond milk with honey. it's nothing weird.
yoongi finishes his milk, scanning over the seven pages again to maybe find some minor mistakes, and stifles a yawn. he hiccups.
for some reasons, hoseok decided he has to apologize for something. "sorry," he answers sheepishly, tilting his head again — yoongi thinks he might combust — and takes the empty cup out of yoongi's hands.
"for what?" he asks, underlining a passage that feels like an unused forest shortcut with so many hitches in it, wagons would break if they ever decided to follow it into the unknown.
"for making you tired so early."
yoongi snorts.
"okay, i have no idea what's so bad about that, but thanks, i guess. i love almond milk with honey."
once again, they fall into chatter easily, and before yoongi can think of anything, basically, he's sitting next to hoseok, with no recollection of how he got there.
hoseok shows him a letter his mom had sent him last week, a small moving picture attached, and yoongi almost dies at the sight of the tiny puppy jumping inside the frame, trying to lick the camera lens and violently wagging his tail. he tells yoongi how they adopted the puppy and how he always tends to go cross-eyed when he's super happy. yoongi tells the story of how his grandma's specially-trained delivery raven can't distinguish him from his mom, although they — apart from their identical noses — look nothing alike.
hoseok casts a muffliato around his bed once the first of his roommates opens the door to sleep, and yoongi — he stays, although he knows it's a dumb idea, because he's already in too deep and it's just going to end badly for him, but the company is so good. the younger doesn't make any move to kick him out of his room, doesn't show any sign of discontentment towards yoongi's lack of motivation to leave, and although he can't be sure if hoseok really doesn't mind, because he knows he's a really good actor, he decides in a wave of confidence that he'll take what he can get and stay as long as hoseok wants him to.
they talk and laugh, and it feels so fucking good to know yoongi is the reason hoseok smiles, the smile that lights up his eyes, not the forced polite one he sports so damn often.
sometime between ten and eleven pm, hoseok dozes off against yoongi's shoulder.
he takes it as his cue to leave, carefully propping hoseok's head up against his mountain of pillows to keep him comfortably asleep and slipping out of bed with as little sound as possible.
his slippers slid under the bed somehow, maybe when hoseok brought the snacks, and yoongi's knees crack loudly when he squats down to look for them.
warm fingers sneak their way on top of his hand resting on the mattress.
he looks up, surprised by the sudden contact. hoseok mumbles something unrecognisable.
yoongi gets up. hoseok holds his fingers tightly.
"good night," yoongi whispers as to not disturb the younger.
hoseok's eyes are still closed, too tired to open them, he frowns.
"nuh," he slurs, "stay."
the gears in his head spring into overdrive. he must've misheard, because it's so unrealistic for someone like hoseok, who laughs like he rivals the sun and every star in the entire universe with his brightness, would want someone to sleep over in their bed. it's just not plausible. why would he ever want that? there is no answer to that, so yoongi decides he's imagining it, hallucinating, and he's free to ignore it without consequences.
but there are consequences, he should've known.
he steps back, pulling hoseok's finger from his wrist one by one and putting them down onto the mattress, and said fingers immediately motion to touch him once more.
"please," hoseok mumbles, the frown on his face deepening, and oh, oh god, there is a pout on his lips. it's too sweet, too lovely to see hoseok, who's always collected and calm and put-together, with messy bed hair and soft soft soft features. how can he look like that and still run free?
yoongi's resolve crumbles. if hoseok wants him there, he doesn't want to disobey, he couldn't. he's here to spend time with hoseok, maybe also to do whatever he orders, and if hoseok wants him over, he'll get himself over.
he still takes his time to think about it thoroughly.
then he decides.
"okay," he whispers as he climbs back into bed again, trying to not freak out.
hoseok lifts the blanket a little, his movements incredibly careful and a little uncoordinated, to let yoongi slip inside.
it's warm, and hoseok is right there, and the night is sacred as long as they are together.
yoongi tries to ban his thoughts, clear his mind, drift off to sleep, with unbrushed teeth and in a white dress shirt.
he's never been more comfortable.
❊
he's never been more uncomfortable.
his shirt is wrinkled, his hair a fucking mess, his breath stinks. he's cold.
the password for the slytherin dorm had changed overnight, and the new code can only be found at the notice board in the common room.
it's a little before six am; yoongi's currently freezing to death, because he doesn't know the new password and thus can't enter to shower and brush his teeth and sleep a little bit more.
he woke up half an hour ago, heart beating too fast, empty stomach a little too nervous, jittery all over, and had found hoseok sleeping next to him, really fucking close. he almost had a heart attack.
they didn't touch, which he is grateful for, because he is sure he couldn't bear more physical contact than a quick hug or a few touching-knees occasions under the table. he's too fragile for this, he couldn't live with the knowledge that hoseok was comfortable enough with yoongi in his bed to subconsciously pull a starfish or cuddle. like this, he can pretend they were both too nervous next to the other to sleep like they usually would have, or that hoseok offered him a sleepover out of sheer politeness, nothing more.
yoongi can't process or understand anything hoseok-related relationship-wise right now. he can't comprehend anything, period.
so when he woke up to a peacefully snoring hoseok (it's not a snore, more like an incredibly adorable open-mouthed breathing) and knew he couldn't fall asleep again to save his life, he decided to leave. it was more of a half-cooked panic reflex or whatever, because hoseok had mumbled something in his sleep and made some movements that looked like he was about to roll closer to yoongi, and he wasn't prepared for it.
he left a really ugly note smeared onto a small piece of parchment he had ripped from the roll hoseok had stored under his nightstand, saying he had to go and thanks for the sleepover, he had fun! and left, hurrying through the dorm, passing sleeping hufflepuffs, and then through the empty common room.
he was only able to breathe more calmly once he left the corridor leading to the set of barrels masking the house entrance and the air grew colder around him.
and now he has to wait until another unlucky slytherin gets up and lets him inside. the dungeons are so fucking cold, why does anyone think it's a good idea to shelter children in a dungeon, crazy enough, without a heater.
yoongi tries to ban every thought of hoseok out of his mind to focus on the more pressing matters at hand: he's miserable and deserves to wallow a little bit in self-pity.
he doesn't even know why, exactly, but he just feels restless, af if he's running out of time — but for what? sure, it's christmas soon and he hasn't had the time to get everyone a present yet, but that's something he's able to change in the next few days. and ok, fine, his school life will be over in a few months and he didn't see even half of the things he had intended to explore in his seven years at the castle, but that's honestly more than ok, because it just shows how occupied he was with studying and, more importantly, his friends and their weird shit.
so why, why, why does he feel like there's not much time left — he doesn't know for what.
he's just uneasy, all of a sudden, and he really wants go back to hoseok and sleep in his bed with him, having a hand to caress his face, having a heart to pour his love into. someone to have late night snacks with, and someone to walk around the lake and someone to take a walk in the forbidden forest, on his favourite route. someone who's not afraid of his heritage and the dark magic he's got in his family and that he adores despite never having used a single dark spell in all his life.
he doesn't know if that someone exists, but by merlin, he wants to find them so bad, so that he's not so alone on the loudest nights and the wrongest days, and in his last months here, because he doesn't know what will happen after graduation.
yoongi doesn't know what he'll do afterwards, because he hadn't dared to imagine things when everything's still in the scornful stars, he doesn't know where he'll go, he doesn't even know if he'll see taehyung and jimin again after they've graduated, because they themselves don't know what they will do afterwards, only that they want to be together, and he doesn't know what fate has got in store for anyone, obviously.
after a few minutes that were way too big for him, he tries knocking against the wall — maybe someone is down in the common room and hears the faint sound of his knuckles against the stone, and although he has no hope, the wall parts after a few moments.
and alas, there's jimin.
"why are you awake," yoongi frowns and hurries inside to maybe shove his feet into the furnace or something.
"didn't sleep."
yoongi sits down on the warm metal grid in front of the fireplace, shuffling as close as possible to the fire, and sighs as the heat hits his face with full force.
"that sucks, buddy." oh, with his limbs getting hot in super-speed, he's feeling a lot better all of a sudden.
jimin sits down next to him.
"why are you so happy," jimin asks, his eyes narrowed.
"it's just a beautiful day," yoongi shrugs, trying to set up his usual unbothered expression to avoid more questions from jimin.
"you hate winter." jimin remembers something. "where were you all night, anyway?"
the younger turns to yoongi, taking in his whole appearance, and he realizes a tad too late how he looks: all rumpled, disheveled, and clearly exhausted. jimin's eyes grow wide, his mouth forming a perfect O.
"oh my god — you finally got that dicking down?" he shouts before yoongi can open his mouth to say something between the lines of "it's not how it looks."
"damn, tae's gotten way better at scheming. i should've known he never owes anyone."
yoongi rolls his eyes, remembering the circumstances that led him to staying at hoseok's in the first place.
"i'll kill him," he deadpans. "i helped hoseok with this insane transfiguration homework and it got late, correcting and all," he then explains to an overexcited jimin who looks like he might just combust any moment, purposefully leaving out the part where they talked for more than two hours.
his shoulders slump down. he stares at yoongi — one second, three, ten. maybe he has a stroke? then he opens his mouth as if he wants to bite yoongi's head off.
"boo! "
"come on, shut up," yoongi yawns, turning toward the fireplace again, but jimin grows redder and redder by the second.
"i can't believe it!
"you meet hoseok, loverboy, your crush or whatever, on a wednesday evening. in your least un-sexy pajamas, hella bored, you spend the night in his dorm, probably in his bed, and you don't — you didn't bonk ?"
"not everyone thinks of fucking all the time, you… horny rabbit," yoongi mumbles without bite.
jimin laughs, shrugs, pinches yoongi's cheeks. the disrespect.
"i'll go to bed," he yawns.
"i'll proofread your essay," yoongi yawns.
jimin smiles sweetly, patting yoongi's back in gratitude and mumbling a small "thanks".
then he disappears in the staircase leading to his dorm to cuddle with taehyung until they have to get up at eight to make it to their classes, and yoongi grabs the younger slytherin's homework from the coffee table, banning the idea of sleeping until noon out of his mind.
❊
his face almost drops into a bowl of tomato soup when it's time for lunch, the proofreading taking up a whole lot more time and nerves than anticipated, because at some point during the night, jimin had fallen asleep on the parchment, and the few sentences and paragraphs right before that were … interesting. so he rewrote a few passages in the best impression of jimin's handwriting he could manage; after that, he had to go to his last class before the holidays begin tomorow, a double lesson herbology, and professor sprout had him demonstrate how he had trimmed the vines of his oculi oleum hedera without suffering of oily hands for days.
he had been forced to wrestle a fucking plant so early in the morning, without preparation, and his mood is, in all honesty, dwindling down rapidly with every passing second he's here. he might be in love with most plants and magical creatures, but that love ends as soon as he's forced to shove his entire arm down a plant's maw that tries to eat his eyes out of sheer joy.
he'll never breed one of that fuckers, that's for sure.
but at least it's only two days until he can go home for christmas.
he's got his schedule cleared for friday, and the hogwarts express leaves at eleven am on saturday with just enough time for jimin, taehyung and him to stuff themselves to the fullest at the morning feast (the break-feast ), pack their things, and leave for the train station.
presents will be exchanged on the five or six hour-ride to london to prevent:
a) taehyung from forgetting his present in the castle because he had packed everything else already and didn't think he'd forget the entire gigantic box of carefully handcrafted sweets he had to throw away after the holidays, b) jimin from losing it at the platform because it didn't fit into his small suitcase anymore and c) yoongi from accidentally keeping jimin's present because he had thought they'd have time for it once they were at king's cross (a miscalculation). (the first two happened in yoongi’s fourth year, the last one in yoongi’s second.)
he's exhausted, and his day isn't over yet, because he had promised jimin and taehyung to sneak off to hogsmeade once the both of them handed in their homework, because they all need presents for their family as well.
"are you okay?" hoseok asks just when yoongi is about to pass out over his soup, and he almost wishes he wouldn't have said anything, because he would've drowned in tomato soup and that would've been so epic.
by the way, he realizes, it's impossible to pin-point one particular moment throughout the last months, where hoseok had started to sit with yoongi in the great hall, because he just does, once a day. he doesn't seem to mind the annoyed, suspicious, angry stares he gets for sitting with the slytherins. he continued to sit next to yoongi as if he belonged. for yoongi, he did.
"yes, just tired." yoongi smiles and takes another spoon of soup. burns his tongue.
hoseok pats his back as he chokes on the hot soup in his throat.
"sorry i've kept you up so long."
"oh, don't worry."
he could say so much, like reassure hoseok of how much fun he had, how comfortable he was in his bed, how it pained him all morning to have left, how he would like to do it again, how bad he wants to be with him all the time. how he's just drained from a rough morning, how he had corrected jimin's homework and how he had to trim a violent plant's vines before lunch. but he doesn't, because it's not important as soon as hoseok smiles, his cheeks turning into soft pillows he wants to rest his hands and head on.
hoseok wants to say something, he opens his mouth to say something, but then—
a hufflepuff girl interrupts him, tapping on hoseok's shoulder.
"hoseok, hi, please, sorry to interrupt, but i need your help," she asks, clutching a few books between her short child fingers. she's sporting brown space buns and so many freckles they sometimes blur together on her nose. she's cute in a childish way, maybe first or second grade. she doesn't look at yoongi once.
hoseok smiles up at her, his lips a thin line pulled toward his ears trying to manage an unbothered expression. yoongi doesn't think she's going to fall for that, it's so obviously fake it almost physically hurts him, but she doesn't seem to be bothered at all.
"hey, dal," hoseok glances down at her books, a pitying frown on his face, still this uneasy grimace on his features, "what subject?" his voice is higher too, if yoongi is not mistaken, a little softer than usual, a little more — sweetness. a little more strained.
her small shoulders slump down a little bit, "defense against the dark arts."
a forced laugh drops heavy into yoongi's stomach. he shouldn't care this much about hoseok hiding his brightness, for whatever reason. it's not his business, but seeing hoseok obviously forcing himself to be friendly towards all the people, makes him feel sick.
"oh, bummer. library at four? i might be able to help you."
dal grins, cute crooked teeth poking out between her lips.
"you're the best!" she laughs and skids away, out the door as if she's at home. maybe that's true for her.
yoongi realizes she didn't ever say thank you or anything.
hoseok clears his throat to announce his return to him, a little awkward.
"so… sorry for the interruption. back to topic — what are you doing today?" hoseok asks and puts a fork with egg and bread into his mouth. his voice is normal again, the natural sound, a honey-covered spoon gently scraping over a brick.
yoongi averts his gaze quickly, because he simply cannot stare at hoseok like that, and he certainly can't think about how hoseok has a tiny piece of bread stuck to his bottom lip.
how the smallest movement of his dry, pink, pretty lips feels obscene in what they do to him, how he wants to be bad in every single possible way and put shame on his family's name, revelling in hoseok's light, for the whole world to see his sins so terrible and clear. how he wants to devour him whole, and be devoured by him, picked apart by his soft fingers and those tender eyes, ripping out his liver and lungs to look at him under a microscope to find his cause of death, unknowing it was him.
he wants so bad, so, so bad, he wants to be ripped apart by those honest eyes and warm skin until nothing is left of him but the sun casting shadows onto his grave. but he can't — he can't, and he's disgusting for thinking these kinds of things about a friend. never.
hoseok nudges him with his elbow: "hey," he smiles so kindly, and yoongi snaps out of it — whatever it was — and lifts his gaze to hoseok's face again, admittedly trying to look right through him to distract himself from the breadcrumbs on his lips.
"why do you smile so much?" he blurts out, completely caught off guard as hoseok licks his lips.
hoseok freezes.
yoongi drops his spoon into the soup bowl, small dots of red tomato splashing everywhere, and he can't think, he can't think anymore, because why? why did he open his mouth just for this gigantic question to slip out, completely unprompted. he had never intended to let it out at all; it was supposed to stay tucked away under his lungs to never see the bright of day, and now he's offended hoseok and ruined their friendship with his dumb, stupid, fucking impossible question.
"i mean — fuck," he stutters, not even bothering with his soup-stained tie and slip-on, too busy being the biggest fucking douchebag on castle grounds. maybe people were right to avoid him, he's so rude. mean. "shit."
"i meant — i don't know what i meant, i'm sorry."
hoseok doesn't say anything, he just stares at the table, the fork between his fingers and the plate in front of him completely forgotten. there's not a single trace of any smile left.
yoongi breathes in deeply, trying to sort his thoughts quickly enough to stop the younger hufflepuff from getting up and leaving him here. or fucking deck him, like he deserves.
"please forget what i said, it's just — i see you smiling so often, and it's cute, but, i don't — i don't know, it just sometimes feels — not right. no, it's kind of, maybe, fake. please, you have every right to be mad at me, i might as well be completely wrong about it, it just occurred to me that you're smiling so often but it's not as sincere. when we are together, you smile so honest, is all. maybe i'm just totally wrong, and of course i know you don't owe me any explanation, i don't know why i asked you that, it's none of my business. sorry. ignore me, please."
yoongi wants to cry. he made it worse, he's so stupid, so incompetent, so incredibly dense, why the fuck can't he just keep his dumb fucking mouth shut at all times? he just goes on and assumes things about hoseok, basically saying he's fake for smiling a lot, when he himself would certainly do a lot better by smiling more often, or at least just doing it once a day outside of common room, library or great hall.
"i couldn't ever," he whispers then. yoongi really doesn't know what that's supposed to mean, but before he's able to ask, hoseok continues, ears red and with fidgeting fingers. "listen, can we talk about this later? i don't think this is the right place. or time."
he doesn't know what to say to that, hell, he doesn't even know what to think, because is hoseok not mad at him? or is he and tries to mask it? he can't read hoseok, doesn't know or even guess what's going on inside his head, and while he usually finds it endearing, it's making him anxious now. maybe the younger wants to talk later to tell yoongi to get fucked, and never talk to him again, or to punch him in the face, telling him he's a fucking moron meddling in other people's business who doesn't deserve his attention or time or even a single glance ever again.
he doesn't know anything, so he nods.
"how about today after dinner? here?"
he nods, thinking about how nice it was to have a friend like hoseok while it lasted.
and then he's gone, leaving behind nothing but an empty plate and yoongi's feeling of failure as a decent human being, until taehyung and jimin almost squeeze him to death in a heavy pile of slytherin and screech about the wonderful essay he had proofread (and enhanced) earlier and that it will earn jimin an E, at least.
❊
yoongi is broke. (and miserable, by the way, but he doesn't want to think of it.)
he had spent a literal fortune at honeyduke's, and then he agreed to lend taehyung a chunk of money for zonko's, and on the way he had lost his last five galleons on eight bottles of butterbeer, since an old friend of taehyung's had agreed to smuggle a few pints out to them — not without charging more than the usual two sickles for each plus a secrecy fee — and yoongi was forced to pay because he had lost another bet to jimin (it seemed impossible, but tae really can fit three whole snowballs into his mouth at once).
so now he has exactly one sickle and two knuts left in his sweets-stuffed pocket, jimin yawns all the time, and they decide to leave their secret hangout spot in madam puddifoot's currently closed winter garden to sneak back to the castle.
(madam puddifoot is a friend of yoongi's grandma and he had found her glass conservatorium is closed september to march, and it's super easy to sneak in, since she only has a single lock at the back door, and it isn't even locked half of the time, not that it would keep them out. yoongi is also fairly sure the old lady knows there are several slytherins using the secluded place for forbidden afternoons outside the castle, but she never caught them, conveniently never looking out into her garden on said days.)
from her house, it's a five minute walk around the busy parts of hogsmeade towards the shrieking shack, and the icy december air bites into yoongi's cheeks.
jimin's constantly complaining about how scratchy yoongi's scarf is, and they have to stop in front of the shack's lopsided doors because yoongi just has to shove a fistful of snow down jimin's back, placing it right under the scarf, and then they have a short, violent snowball fight resulting in taehyung getting buried under a pile of snow with only his arms and head sticking out, jimin having to empty his shoes and coat, and yoongi faceplanting into tae's snowpile.
the shack is empty — it would've been a shock to see anyone else here, since most of the students are too afraid of the ghosts haunting it.
yoongi himself had only dared to set a foot inside once he had learned an old, almost forgotten spell compelling all evil from his mom on christmas break in fourth grade. tae and jimin had spent a whole night in the shrieking shack as a dare in their third year, and only when they had come back alive, the trio searched the whole building, found a passage leading up to the whomping willow, and declared it their inofficial hideout for their days off. yoongi hasn't ever seen a ghost in there, and he thinks maybe they just don't like sharing the house a few afternoons a month and hide, but tolerate it anyways.
jimin scrunches his nose as they enter the tunnel leading up to the whomping willow, warm, moist air making all of them sneeze. their bickering grows louder once they're under earth, knowing nobody's here to hear or judge them for screeching loudly, tripping over each other's feet, and yoongi wants to live inside this moment, all soft and weirdly claustrophobic with the low ceiling and the two other boys walking close to him, to not forget anything they did together.
and then, everything goes terribly wrong.
yoongi knows he's been anxious all afternoon, the meeting with hoseok weighing down on his conscience, and although his friends were able to banish every thought of yoongi's fuckup, he's been even more tense than usual, but it's been ok most of the time. trying to stop taehyung from stealing and jimin from hexing random things on the streets for their evil masterplan helps.
but now, as they step out from between the roots of the whomping willow in a huddle of robes and coats and poke a hidden spot of knotty wood with jimin's precious wand to stop the willow's whomping, yoongi feels stiff all of a sudden, as if something dark lures in the evening.
it's as if something breathes into his neck, making his ankles all jittery in anticipation of something he doesn't know yet, and it's an ugly feeling pounding onto his temples.
"careful," he whispers to the youngers who had taken to arguing over whose bed they'll sleep in tonight again, and then the first curse comes crashing towards them, ripping the calm, silent evening night apart.
yoongi doesn't think. he only casts a shimmering shield around them, unable to see where the brightly red flash of light comes from.
the full force of the spell smashing against the orange protego makes his teeth clash together, and the shield dissolves as quick as it came.
he can feel jimin and taehyung straightening themselves behind him, jimin gripping yoongi's robe to assure him they're still here, taehyung siently whipping out his wand and knife.
it's quiet. there's not a single sound for a whole five or ten seconds, and the hair on his arms rises. he knows they're coming, he knows they'll attack again, whoever it is, and he's ready, he just has to wait a little bit longer.
someone casts a lumos. the snow blinds them.
it's pigeon.
jimin giggles at the sight of the hufflepuff and whispers something directed at taehyung, who snorts in amusement, but yoongi can see out of the corner of his eyes how he grips the knife handle so hard his knuckles go white.
"you've had your warning, min," pigeon declares dramatically, spreading his arms, and other people step into the dim lights surrounding his figure.
there are hufflepuffs and gryffindors and he can even spot two ravenclaws at the far right of the crowd.
it's a colorful group of maybe fifteen students, maybe even twenty, fifth years and up. it would be a wonderful demonstration of diversity and comradeship at hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry, if yoongi didn't know they are gathered here united in their obvious need to beat him up.
it wouldn't faze him in the slightest, because he had known this already, since the very first day of first grade when all his mom's warnings came true and gryffindors picked on him in front of the potions classroom.
now, it's not even the first time gryffindors and hufflepuffs teamed up to beat the shit out of him, since they did that in hogsmeade often enough to make him go there only secretly until last year, but seeing ravenclaws between them hurts nonetheless; hadn't he thought ravenclaws were more neutral in the endless fight between the houses? it hurts especially when he recognizes one of the ravenclaws as seo hyelin, a cute short-haired girl he had chatted with a few times in his OWL herbology classes, and who he thought liked him.
seems like he was wrong.
yoongi gulps.
he knows he'd be able to take them all, maybe even all at once, without hurting himself too badly in the process, but this — they are on school grounds, not like last time when pigeon attacked. this time, they are more likely to be detected from countless windows, this time, yoongi's not alone. he has to protect jimin and tae, because although they are good wizards, they are younger and far less experienced in serious battle, because that's what this is.
or will be.
he couldn't bear one of them getting hurt because of an over-confident, meddling student.
besides, whom would the teachers believe more: a few infamous slytherins known for their mischievous pranks and troubleshooting, or a group of innocent hufflepuffs, gryffindors and ravenclaws?
taehyung is about to roll up his sleeve, and yoongi takes a small step back to grab his wrist and shake his head in warning.
they mustn't use dark magic. neither blood rituals nor forbidden spells, nothing out of the ordinary, because when they're caught and someone finds out, they'll get expelled, or worse, and they will be caught, pigeon made sure of that. a petition to set the age to be able to get sent to azkaban up to seventeen didn't pass last year, meaning: if they use dark magic and someone sees or feels or knows about it, they'll all go to prison. especially as slytherins, because it's widely known that pureblood families and slytherins are followers of grindelwald and voldemort.
"will you listen this time?" pigeon asks triumphantly, "will you get into your dense skull that hoseok doesn't want to be your friend? he'd never like someone like you, he's too good for you, and you should just stay away from him."
he wants to counter, wants to scream into pigeon's face it's none of his fucking business what hoseok or himself do or don't do in their free time, that he has no right to talk to him at all, that he's a moron to even propose such things. but there are no words left, nothing sufficient to convey yoongi's disgust and his rage, nothing to help him tame the thing in his chest rising from an ashen forest, roaring into his ears.
before he could even open his mouth to undoubtedly say something stupid, jimin interrupts, a sly smile on his face, his pretty white wand twirling anticipatory between his fingers.
"how about you take that stupid shit and shove it up your gigantic nose. maybe then something's up where your brain's s'posed to be, fucking moron."
taehyung giggles, leaning towards jimin, and as much as yoongi's worried about them being here and being part of all that, he's also glad, glad to know someone is on his side.
"how about you let min speak for himself?" pigeon snarls.
"how about," yoongi bites, the burning in his stomach bubbling over, "you let hoseok speak for himself and stop attacking people in the dark for it?"
"oh my," pigeon says after a short, minimal pause in which yoongi can see anger flash behind pigeon's eyes despite standing a good thirty foot away, "i'm just doing what you advised me." his voice is so disgustingly smooth, fucking self-absorbed, so sure of everything. "'bring more people next time,' is what you said to me after your unfair tricks."
"didn't think you'd have even less backbone than the last time," yoongi scoffs. "look, pigeon—" it slips out, really, he's too concentrated on marking down the number of wands pointed at him in the darkness, and on sorting every spell he ever learned into useful and unuseful for this fight while not freaking out. jimin and taehyung giggle brightly. "look, we don't want a fight. most of you don't want one either, you know who we are. we just want to go to dinner and forget the whole ordeal," he tries to soothe the waging waves threatening to wash the three of them away and coaxing the volcano inside his belly back to inactivity.
"you're scum, every single one of you," pigeon snaps, losing his temper for a second before he's back to his usual unbearable complacent act.
"you just have to promise to not talk to hoseok again, and we'll go. nobody has to get hurt. everybody'll be content. it's up to you."
"the only thing up to yoongi is whether he shoves his fist down your throat or your wand up your ass," taehyung murmurs behind him, assuring yoongi to say whatever he's up to.
"no," he simply says, and he means it. he won't let someone like pigeon tell him what to do; not to be dramatic, but he'd rather die than listen to a group of students playing hero completely unprompted.
it's not even one second later that curses and spells are thrown at them with a single nod of pigeon.
it's a bit ridiculous, the whole situation, and he'd surely laugh if he wasn't a tad occupied at the moment.
yoongi blocks, throws the lightning bolts back to where they came from, he suffocates the harmless spells with his boot, the snow fizzling with heat and light before small wisps of dark smoke rise up and the spell's dead.
jimin and taehyung next to him do the same — it's not like they could do anything else — and nothing more.
it's ugly, to block spells coming out of nothing and do nothing more, like they're some goody two-shoes not wanting to hurt anyone, but they have no other choice. they just have to stand their ground until maybe someone comes along.
and by merlin, yoongi wants to hurt.
the thing grates through his chest once again, whispering, coaxing, too hot and too sleek to touch it and tell it to be quiet, and he wants to hurt, destroy, he wants to unleash it and bathe in their fear and tears. he wants revenge.
it goes on for minutes and minutes on end, the silence of the dark, cold hills interrupted only by shouting and thunder, and they're good so far.
yoongi can see how the others become tired, how some of them just want to go home and eat dinner, how their arms grow tired with the weight of their spells and the obvious lack of effect.
pigeon grows desperate. it's obvious in how he shuffles around in the snow, throwing more dangerous curses at them, blue, pink, yellow, dark violet, bright orange, red.
it's okay, a completely ridiculous scene, yoongi almost chuckles when he thinks of how they have to look from the outside, if anyone looks out their window and sees the two groups, but then the chuckle dies in his throat, because —
the whomping willow's paralysis ends.
one second, they manage to save themselves from pigeon's group and their spells, the next the whomping willow comes to life again.
there are twigs and branches whipping around, reaching for them in its rage, leaves cutting through the dark, delivering small paper cuts to their faces and wrists. the willow croaks and groans, its bark knacking and creaking, like the old floorboards in yoongi's room at home, fighting to keep them away from its secret passageway, and the trio has to escape, somehow, because the tree would kill them. and if not the tree, maybe the teachers coming to help them, maybe.
then, just about when he thought he might have a spare moment void of attacks to cast an immobilis onto the furious tree, it happens all too fast.
a thick branch finds its target in his back. he's knocked over, falls face-first into the innocent snow.
"yoongi!" someone shouts, someone to his right, maybe taehyung, maybe jimin, but he can't hear them over the sound of his heart beating and his lungs cracking, letting in the icy december air.
it hurts. he never thought a branch could hurt so goddamn bad.
it's like burning stripes of cold fire, dancing blue and red on his skin. it's like a blazing hot bone piercing his back. it's merciless, picking him apart just to reassemble the pieces all wrong, the glowing cut surfaces pressing back together in all the wrong places.
he has to remind himself to breathe. it burns even more.
yoongi lifts his head, searches for jimin and taehyung, who had frozen the willow again, saving them all from the furious tree. his wand is gone, slipped from his fingers the second he was struck, lost somewhere in the snow. he reaches around blindly, trying to focus on breathing, breathing, breathing.
he doesn't see the spell coming.
jimin does, and he catches the violet bolt with a flick of his wrist, fast and easy. it dissolves upon colliding with the bright protego.
he flashes a short grin at yoongi, his brilliant smile almost blinding in all this dark, dirty snow mess, until white light drowns the world.
the smile vanishes like it's never been there, his face blank and surprised and shocked, eyes comically wide, mouth in an almost adorable O, and jimin drops to the ground like a puppet whose strings were cut.
the world goes quiet. yoongi's fingers find his wand.
nothing moves for a few seconds. it's all coming to a halt.
the hufflepuffs and ravenclaws and gryffindors lower their wands, standing there frozen, none of them knows what to do. they don't know who sent the curse on its way.
yoongi doesn't see any of it, he just looks to where jimin was standing two or three seconds ago, and where he is not anymore.
taehyung drops to his knees.
yoongi scrambles to his feet, a flipped mirror to the younger, and then, finally, he's next to jimin again.
there's blood, so much blood, so much red and wet, and it's coming from everywhere, everywhere, every goddamn where, soaking his robe, his sweater, yoongi's scarf, his pants.
"jimin," taehyung whispers. his hands tremble as he brings them up to jimin's face, the wounds there, the blood and his eyes that try to focus on him, the lips that try to form words but can't.
and yoongi doesn't know what to do, he doesn't know how anyone could do this over a house fight, how anyone could hurt jimin, funny, silly, lazy jimin who does nothing all day except loving taehyung and dreaming of their future together, who is so bright and elegant in everything he does, who loves rowanberry tea and golden earrings.
yoongi doesn't know anything anymore, he only knows fear and the knowledge he'll lose jimin, his best friend, the other half to tae's crazy self, the calm counterpart. he only knows that jimin will bleed to death this evening, the last day of school before christmas, beneath the crazy tree in dirty snow, between wooden roots and pieces of dirt and grass and ice.
he just knows jimin will die if nothing happens.
get a grip, yoongi, get a grip, nothing will happen, everything's gonna be alright, you got this. bullshit.
jimin tries to say something, but his pretty lips are colorless and numb from the cold and the blood loss, and he just stares, stares, stares up to their faces, or maybe just the star-littered sky.
is he dead?
he breathes, blood spluttering, bubbling from his lips. it runs down the corners of his mouth, across his cheeks, to his ears.
yoongi grips jimin's hand to remind himself how to breathe, and to keep jimin present. their hands make a wet sound together, slippery from all the blood.
what should he do, what curse did they use? what spell is white, what curse causes this? what curse, what counterspell, what can he do except holding jimin's soft, small hand and helplessly pressing down onto his chest to stop the bleeding, one wound of too many to do anything?
taehyung whips out his silver knife again. gets up, shaking from fury and hate. he casts a silent spell to keep the whomping willow frozen longer, and steps out from under her shadow, into the moonlight.
"don't," yoongi warns; he wants to get up, but he can't, not when jimin's bleeding so bad in the snow. not when he doesn't know what to do.
taehyung looks like he's in trance — his face is all calm. he rolls up his sleeve, exposing his bare arm with the scars and the dark drawings, his wand between his teeth.
he's about to do something dangerous, something so dark and forbidden that no lawyer on earth could help him anymore if he just as much as began with the ritual.
"taehyung!" yoongi begs, realizing with half a mind how the students back off step for step. pure terror is written onto their faces, even in the darkness it's obvious. taehyung positions the knife, the glistening blade reflecting the moonlight, on his wrist.
"stop!" yoongi bellows with all his authority, all his pride and hope and volume and desperation. his voice cracks. "stop! tae! he's dying! GET HELP! " he chokes on his own words, struggling to keep the bile inside. "please. get help!"
taehyung raises his dazed gaze from his bare wrists and meets yoongi's wide-eyed stare.
there's so much pain, so much madness in his eyes, yoongi thinks he might break. taehyung looks at him, one second, three, seven, twelve. time ticks by in a whirl of blood crawling through the coldness and moonlight illuminating the scene like on a sick theatre stage. he holds his breath as hard as he grips jimin's weakly twitching hand, not knowing what to say, because words aren't enough anymore.
taehyung's stare flickers, wandering down to jimin's pink hair almost invisible between the bloody snow, the red spreading. something snaps, ripping the world away from them and leaving the three of them able to peek behind the thin veil wrapping this world's reality.
taehyung drops the knife, and then he runs. he runs up the hill, pushing through the pupils without stopping once, punching one of them squarely in the face when he doesn't move, and he runs, until he disappears in the darkness of a december evening.
jimin's eyes slip shut, lips blue, his hand so small, and yoongi knows he did the right thing to send taehyung away. taehyung wouldn't survive jimin, his love, dying here, he couldn't hold back anymore and he'd destroy recklessly, blinded by anger and grief, unstoppable. taehyung would explode like the bomb he is, and he'd take his time with the killing. yoongi can't promise he won't do the same. he can't promise he would hold him back.
the tears spill over, desperate to burn hot trails into his icy cheeks. he tries so hard to not explode as he looks up, gripping jimin's hand painfully hard, trying to push his blood back into his chest.
they want to battle him, halfblood born into a pureblood slytherin family, raised to do great things, raised by a family who really did sympathize with grindelwald before he was born, a family big in ministry affairs, a family of dark witches and wizards, they want him as an enemy? they want to try him, when he has everything to lose, when he has so much to lose and is not afraid to fight for it? they want to try him when he would set the world on fire to fight for what is his, without hesitation?
they want battle?
"i'll give you a bloodbath."
his voice breaks again, hoarse and too choked up to be steady, but they hear him, a promise over tears and a dark heart — a promise made to be held.
and suddenly yoongi knows, he knows what he has to do. he knows what spell did this, what he can do to maybe save jimin.
"vulnera sanentur," he whispers, can't remember how to cast spells quietly, just knows how to form the words on his tongue and spit them out to help, to do anything.
"vulnera sanentur."
he repeats and repeats and repeats, not daring to hope for jimin and himself and taehyung, not looking up from his pretty, innocent face.
by the time steps grow closer, yoongi doesn't know how long he's been sitting in the snow, how often he had repeated the spell in hopes of doing the right thing, remembering the right formula, doing anything good.
someone grabs his shoulders firmly and pulls him away, wrenching his hand out of jimin's, his wand out of his other hand, makes him stand up.
mcgonagall kneels beside jimin, panic engraved into her face, snape next to her, brows furrowed, murmuring more spells.
taehyung stands next to him, eyes trained on jimin's silent body, and he's shaking so badly, yoongi wants to scream. taehyung's eyes are dry, but so impossibly dark and empty, it scares him a little. yoongi knows that he won't forget this, they all won't. he knows there is a light in taehyung, a light he tries to keep alive every day, and he knows the light has been put out the moment someone cursed jimin, it went extinct the moment someone cast sectumsempra to prove a point.
"he'll be okay," madam sprout pants next to yoongi, her hand resting reassuringly on his shoulder. "you did a great job, yoongi."
yoongi nods quietly, mechanically.
there is no trace of the students, they all fled sometime between yoongi promising them a taste of his rage and the arrival of the teachers, fled like the cowards they are, trying to escape the consequences of their doing. there are footprints in the snow, the peaceful white blanket meant to suffocate sorrows and noise all messed up and trampled down, evidence of their presence. it'll be almost impossible for any teacher willing to listen to their story and help find them, given someone listening at all.
but yoongi knows who's been there.
he has a promise to keep, after all.
❊
they have to wait in the staff room, taehyung and yoongi huddled together on a velvet sofa, one jimin would have scrunched his nose upon, and they both are shaking. yoongi's knees can't stop bouncing, and taehyung clenches and relaxes his fists every other second, as if conducting an orchestra of nervous tics and violent thoughts.
yoongi can't pretend he's not doing the same. it's easier to do it in his head than take it out on everything around him. which he will. once jimin is doing better. once they're all okay again.
mcgonagall is furious, snape just tired. but they both don't listen to the professor's fuming tirade of "dangerous tree, so much more could've happened, what were they doing there, willow dangerous, scandalous!". only when snape reminds her with a dry, unnerved tone why they're here, she focuses on the matter at hand.
and, oh boy.
taehyung snaps when she asks who of them had cast the dark spell wounding jimin, side-eyeing yoongi. as if he cut jimin open, sent taehyung to get help, and healed the younger slytherin for show. he thinks he might throw up on her shoes.
"are you serious?" taehyung growls, rising to his feet, jaw working. yoongi has to bite his tongue to not roar curse after curse, obscenities along with magic hexes, because what on earth does she think she's doing, accusing them of — of trying to kill their friend? taehyung's boyfriend? yoongi's oldest friend, whom he grew up with, closer than his own brother?
"do you really think we would — what? attack our best friend and only companion in this godforsaken school? try to kill one of us over what, exactly? what? do you think we would hurt jiminie? that we would go on and slaughter him like a pig? is this what you think of slytherins, professor?" he spits the honorific at her feet, staring her down with the coldest expression yoongi has ever seen on him, and she actually backs away.
one step, one tiny step, which is more he would've thought a fierce woman like minerva would ever allow, and it honestly feels a little like a victory, a small one.
taehyung is intimidating.
he carries himself confidently and has a way of demanding respect, although yoongi doesn't think he could hold up the act for any longer with the way his hands try to make reality stay sewn around them tightly, and the hint of red in his eyes.
yoongi almost rips his sweater in gripping its hem so hard.
he'd love to — to sink his fist in mcgonagall's face, for their way of treating them, not letting them see jimin, who got carried to the hospital wing, for accusing them. he'd love to wipe the disparaging smile from her face and break her wand in two. yoongi knows it's wrong, would get him expelled immediately, but he doesn't care enough right now. a short moment of sweet satisfaction.
he doesn't do it.
turns to snape instead.
"check our wands. we didn't do anything."
he knows snape knows exactly what kind of curse was used to hurt jimin, because snape was the one who wrote it into a potions textbook when he was in sixth year, and who showed it to yoongi's mom, his neighbor in london, where she had worked at the time, in his summer break. yoongi knows that snape knows what had wounded jimin, because ji-hye had been a close friend and mentor of severus, their age gap and her job in the ministry of magic benefiting him greatly with studies, information, gossip, and connections, and she had taught her sons the spell, because it is useful for self-defense. how one of pigeon's friends had known the curse, yoongi doesn't know. he doesn't allow his thoughts to stray this far.
snape nods.
yoongi hands over their wands.
they say they'll replay the most recent spells conducted with their wands, not minding the great privacy violations they'll commit in the process, and then they ask questions.
taehyung is on edge, his eyes flicker to the door, he shuffles around in his seat he was made to sit in. he wants to see jimin, badly. that's why it's mostly yoongi answering.
the teachers ask the wrong questions.
it's as if they don't believe their story. it's as if they don't actually want to find whoever did this to jimin. it's as if they'll check their wands to prove they are innocent, but nothing more. the bare minimum.
as if the christmas haze dulls their will to be just in their actions, and makes them lazy enough to swat away the uneasy feeling people tend to feel sitting under their skin in the presence of injustice. it's as if three students aren't important enough to justify a bigger, more thorough investigation.
there is something new in the pit of his stomach, and it's not as helpless anymore.
❊
yoongi sneaks out of the hospital wing sometime nearing midnight.
taehyung is pale and shaky but refuses to leave jimin's side, and yoongi figures he's hungry, additional to the shock of the evening, so he makes it his mission to get the boy some food and clean clothes.
the icky feeling sitting under his skin won't disappear, not even as he walks down the stairs and lets his palms grate over the rough stone walls.
he wants to go home, crawl into his bed, feel the fresh sheets smoothe out his skin, and sleep with wet hair. he wants to wake up refreshed, a warm pillow imprint on his cheek, limbs all heavy and groggy, and he wants his mom to pet his hair when he stumbles down for a late breakfast. he wants to go home and never come back.
usually, he would go to the dorms first, change into something more comfortable, something less dirty and ripped, but there's nothing normal about tonight, and he admittedly forgot about his clothes altogether, so he takes the hallway down to the kitchens without thinking.
the pear giggles as he tickles it, not minding his frozen expression and the rough scratch of his finger, because it's a painted pear who doesn't feel anything at all. yoongi wishes it was him.
as the painting swings open and he steps inside, a warm wave of bread-scent comes crashing into yoongi's face. he's so starved he almost whimpers, the smell of freshly-baked bread like balm to his anxious mind.
the kitchen is empty, all quiet and dark, abandoned tables and stoves and counters, except for — well, he isn't even surprised anymore. or maybe he's just too exhausted to be surprised.
there, at one of the heavy work tables, with only a small candle illuminating the scene, is sitting hoseok.
his long hair is really shiny, yoongi thinks. he doesn't waste a thought on why he's here, or what he's doing.
hoseok turns around upon yoongi's entrance, sporting a polite but unnerved smile — as if he'll be asking the intruder to piss off and close the door behind them. but he doesn't, because the smile slips from his lips similar to jimin's in the evening, and he jumps up.
"hi," yoongi greets weakly, doing a silly wave with his hand, and shortly wonders why hoseok looks so shaken, until he remembers. "sorry. i didn't mean to ditch you."
he had remembered a little earlier, around nine o'clock, that he was supposed to meet hoseok after dinner, but he didn't have the time to go and see him — snape and mcgonagall had them stay in the staff room to answer their questions for an eternity, resulting in nothing but a half-assed promise to look into it, and to deduct a hundred points from slytherin for going near the whomping willow. yoongi didn't say anything about his back. he also didn't say anything about taehyung's dagger tucked away in his robe and slowly ripping a hole into the pocket fabric, or why they had been there in the first place, or how close he had been to using an inexcusable curse.
he didn't say anything anymore.
they'll get their wands back in the morning.
by the time they were allowed to see jimin, it's been way past nine, every chance to meet hoseok before the holidays destroyed.
"what happened?" hoseok chokes out, taking a step toward him, insecure.
yoongi is too exhausted to think — about anything, really. he can't think about how bad he looks; his hair dirty, his pants ripped from falling too hard and kneeling on sharp stones hidden under snow for too long, jimin's blood spread everywhere, on his hands, his face, in his hair, on his pullover and shirt. he didn't have time to wash up, didn't even think of it, because jimin — jimin woke up when taehyung and him were allowed to see him again, and he's so weak. yoongi can't think about any of it, not of how he looks, not of how close jimin had been to bleeding to death on school grounds, not of how hoseok and him still need to talk, and especially not about how he had slept in hoseok's bed the night before. it feels like it's been ages.
yoongi steps down into the kitchen and slumps down on the next bench.
it's as if he realizes only now what had happened in all its colorful, hostile splendor.
what would he have done if jimin died? what would he have done if the light in his eyes went out before the teachers were there? what would have happened if jimin died on school grounds, after being pulled into an affair that had nothing to do with him at all? what would he have had to tell his parents, his family, their friends at home? they sent their child to school, to learn and grow, and they were so close to losing him. the last time his parents had seen jimin was at king's cross in september, where his dad had patted his shoulder with a smirk that was so jimin, and his mom had been super emotional, sending her baby away for another year, but jimin was all excited to go back to the castle, where he's able to share a bed with tae every day instead of only three times a week.
what would have happened to his parents, and the school? would it get almost shut down like when myrtle warren had died in 1943, or would everything go on as usual, minus jimin, because he's a slytherin?
hoseok is at his side in a second, gripping his dirty hand hard as if to make sure he doesn't slip from the bench and crack his skull open.
"are you okay?"
yoongi nods, shakes his head, laughs. tears prickle in his eyes.
"i want to go home."
"of course." hoseok's eyes twinkle.
"can you do me a favor?"
"anything."
yoongi looks up from their hands, his all white and red, sickly pale and dark from blood, hoseok's tan and clean, his fingernails manicured and neat where yoongi's are disgusting and chipped, to hoseok's eyes. they sparkle in the light of the candle. a strand of dark hair falls into them, and he already raises his free hand to brush it aside when he realizes what he's doing — fingers dirty and shaking, tainting hoseok's clean complexion — and retreats.
"don't say that. please. don't say that."
don't devote yourself. don't give yourself away. don't gift your happiness and sanity to anyone. not when you don't know.
hoseok stares, only for so long that yoongi wonders if he really did stare or he just imagined it, and hums.
"okay. i won't. tell me, then."
"can you —" yoongi gulps. looks down to hoseok's chest. he can't look into these honest eyes anymore, adoring, endearing, soft eyes that hold so much power over him.
he swallows his words down. he won't say them, won't say what he had wanted to say for so long. he will say what he's supposed to say. he will say what's safer for his friends.
"can you —"
oh god, he can't do it. he can't push hoseok away, selfish as he is. jimin's at the hospital wing, wounded and unconscious after being forced to drink a pain killer potion, taehyung at his side, hungry and shaking, and he's here, holding hands with a cute boy. it was his fault to get the both of them involved in this mess in the first place.
and still.
he deserves friends, doesn't he? he deserves to talk with hoseok, be his friend, if he still wants him, because — what happened tonight wasn't his fault. he's not responsible for the acts of other students. he's allowed to have a friend, and he knows jimin would think the same. yoongi isn't at fault for what happened.
"can you — can i see you again?"
selfish, selfish, selfish, not telling hoseok what's going on. just selfishly taking and taking and never giving him what he deserves. greedily asking for more even after what happened.
"of course, yoongi."
a small sob escapes before he can hold it back.
"can you hold me?"
only for a short while, only a few minutes until he has to get back to the hospital wing. only until his eyes aren't watery anymore. only until he can forget a little bit.
hoseok wordlessly lets go of his hand and opens his arms. he doesn't ask questions. he just accepts, and welcomes yoongi in his arms.
"gotcha," he murmurs as yoongi shuffles closer, wrapping his arms around his shoulders, drowning him in a big sweater and a tight embrace, making him snort quietly.
"will you tell me?" hoseok whispers into his hair, a low rumble in his chest. "what happened?"
yoongi doesn't want to, because it's no use to do so. it's over, and he doesn't know if hoseok could believe a few students would do something like that, and it's a burden. it's not like he could do anything if he knew. yoongi doesn't want pity. but it's even more selfish not to tell him, coming to hoseok for comfort and never actually explaining anything.
"jimin is in the hospital wing." yoongi's voice is muffled by the sweater he had buried his face in, and he regrets his choice of words immediately.
hoseok flinches, leaning away, shocked.
"what?"
"he's — a few students teamed up against us and i messed up and he got struck by a —" he can't say it, probably won't ever again — "sectumsempra."
hoseok's breath hitches.
"fuck."
"yeah. he'll be okay."
"good. who did it?"
"i don't—"
"don't tell me you don't know. i've seen you people-watching as a hobby, you know who. tell me. please."
yoongi straightens himself, leaning away. hoseok's arms fall from his shoulders, catching his hands again, holding tight. he stares at their entwined fingers.
"hufflepuff fifth year. i don't know his name. he looks —" yoongi almost snorts at the memory although there is nothing funny about it anymore, "like a fucking pigeon."
hoseok doesn't laugh. he holds yoongi's hand, drawing slow circles onto his knuckles. all at once, yoongi realizes how close they are — he's almost sitting in hoseok's lap, their thighs pressed together, holding hands, yoongi's head at the other's shoulder. he can't bring himself to care enough.
it's too good, breathing like this.
"will you be okay?"
yoongi nods.
hoseok wraps his right arm around his back, accidentally pressing into the bruise the whomping willow had left. he flinches, clenching his jaw shut, squeezing hoseok's fingers.
"sorry," he breathes once the worst pain has vanished.
"what did they do to you?"
"it wasn't them, it's — i didn't pay attention and the willow got me, don't worry."
"how can you be so cruel to yourself?" hoseok asks, almost outraged, and he needs a few seconds to understand. "yoongi, why are you like this? you care so much about everyone around you, but you don't —" hoseok breathes heavy, "you don't take care of yourself. something happens to jimin or taehyung, and you want to fight for them so bad, and protect them, but as soon as it's yourself, it doesn't matter. why?"
he doesn't have an answer. he didn't even know it was something he does. apparently, he does.
"jimin's parents will get him tomorrow, and my mom wants me to come home as well," he says instead, acting as if he didn't hear hoseok's question at all, knowing it's hopeless to pretend.
"oh," hoseok says.
"yes."
"will you come back?"
how does he manage to always ask the right question? how does he manage to know what's going on in his heart? how does he manage to know him this good?
"i don't know, honestly."
"can i write you?"
"if you want to, of course. i'd be happy."
and then he leaves hoseok's warm side hug and soft hands and comfy shoulder to get something to eat for taehyung and a few spare clothes.
hoseok waves goodbye, doesn't make advances to come along, and yoongi is glad about it, because he couldn't stomach hoseok seeing him scrub the blood from his skin, looking in the bathroom mirror, the red stripes burning a pattern into his back, and forcing taehyung to go take a bath, them eating soft bread and cheese in the hospital wing, silent, fast, desperate, devouring it as if they haven't had something to eat in weeks, as if they are on the run, them napping in their chairs at jimin's bed, their heads uncomfortably resting on the mattress.
it's night, the darkest night of december, maybe, and for the two of them, it surely is.
yoongi doesn't want hoseok to see this.
❊
the next morning comes cold and dark as well, an icy wind howling around the mountains, redistributing the snow like a weird winter-robin hood, and the whole castle is trapped inside.
the black board in the common room read that herbology and care of magical creatures classes are cancelled, just like astrology has been for a week now, because the greenhouses are snowed in and the stairs leading up to the astrology tower are frozen over, and nobody seems to care enough to hex snow and ice away. christmas magic, or so yoongi thinks.
he climbs the stairs to the sixth year's dorm at seven in the morning and packs taehyung's things. his belongings are littered across the space, it's a mess in taehyung's chest, jimin's chest, on both their beds. he still manages to make sure to pack the emerald suitcase with (mostly) tae's clothes and the few books he owns, the charmed magazines, his diary, and the fuzzy bear socks he wears ninety percent of the time, even in his sneakers. jimin's bag is ready, because he is too lazy to unpack between september and december — "it's only, what, like half a month? not worth it." — and only picks singular pieces of what he needs out of the violet bag. yoongi checks nonetheless, tossing a few toiletries and dime novels and his soft-as-fuck slippers into the expensive, boston purple gucci luggage taehyung had gifted him for his birthday.
he takes the bags to his own dorm, breathing heavily after only twelve steps, and by the time he reaches his door, he has to take a break on his bed. by merlin, who would've thought he'd be this out of shape? ok, he didn't do any sport in more than one and a half years, except for running to class when he skipped breakfast to sleep a bit more, but who would've thought the unsporty-ness expands to everywhere in his body? not him, for sure.
yoongi's roommates are gone already, having a peaceful, unbothered breakfast before making their way to their classes. he doubts any of them know what happened yesterday. yoongi's absence could be explained with many reasons — sleepover, homework, learning, napping in the common room, sneaking into the library for more books, wandering the school grounds. nobody would think he'd be missing if he spent a singular night out of their dorm. it's almost tragic, yoongi thinks, that they'll all be going on with their days, and by the time they notice he's not here anymore, he's long gone. no goodbye, no thanks for tolerating me and thus tae and jimin too.
he has his own bag packed in a few minutes, messily throwing in everything he had brought with him. he won't leave anything behind if he doesn't know if he'll come back.
shortly, he considers leaving a note for his roommates, something like "see you sometime, merry christmas, happy '92", but he brushes the thought aside; it sounds too petty, or maybe just desperate. it's not worth it.
and then he leaves without really looking at the room one last time, as if he'd be back after breakfast, or lunch, or dinner.
carrying the bags up the stairs to the entrance hall is exhausting, since mcgonagall still has his wand for inspection, and he has to take a few breaks on his way, but he manages.
up in the hall, panting embarrassingly heavy, yoongi sits on the cool marble steps leading up to the classrooms, the three suitcases in a row at his feet, and tries to take it all in.
because, like it looks right now, he won't come back.
he's done with this school. the last string snapped last night.
yoongi remembers, a little bitter now, how starstruck he was when he first came to hogwarts. understandable. he was eleven years old at the time, and he had always been a protected child, protected from the big, weird world, rowdy and loud in his own backyard and jimin's garden only, learning how to read and write and so much more at home. it was new and cool and exciting, living more than ten months per year away from his secluded home, with children his age, learning even more in a big castle filled with headless ghosts, forbidden books and ancient secrets.
it's not worth it anymore.
the looks, the hostiliy, the prejudices, the restrictions, all because he got sorted into slytherin, because a fucking thousand year old, mind-reading, talking hat had thought it was a good idea. the danger that comes with it.
it's just not worth it anymore.
yoongi can study at home, buy or lend the books for his NEWT exams. hell, for all he knows, he might pass NEWTS with bravura if he were to take them right now.
he doesn't want to return — what would he miss, anyway?
the big library (with a librarian who hates him and no access to forbidden books, the only interesting thing there). the view from his bedroom window. the view from any of the thousands windows, basically. lazy afternoons in the common room. that's it.
no, he won't return to hogwarts after the holidays.
(maybe he'll change his mind, when he remembers details about the castle and misses more than a bunch of dusty books and a dark living room.
but right now, he doesn't think he'll come back.)
yoongi shuffles around, pulling his coat tighter around himself. he's been cold all night, ever since he left hoseok in the kitchens, and he tried to reach for his wand to charm his clothes more often than he'd like to admit, always finding his fingers empty. so he had pulled out his coat from the bottom of his closet, and he doesn't know if he ought to be glad about the old thing still fitting or annoyed about his lack of growth over the course of two years.
the portal opens with a haunting creak, sending snowy gusts over the threshold. a few innocent snowflakes melt on the marble as the door closes again.
it's jimin's mom standing in the entrance, and he almost leaps when he recognizes her.
"yoongi!" she calls out, spreading her arms for him, and he has to run towards her, collapsing into her embrace. he's so glad to see her.
"hi, auntie."
"are you okay?" she grabs him by the shoulders, rubbing up and down his arms to warm him up and search for any sign of injury, and yoongi wants to cry — for the dark circles under her eyes, her tense muscles, the sorrow in her gaze.
he nods, glad she didn't touch his back.
"jimin is awake. hospital wing."
he's so glad to see mi-jeong, because it means everything's going to be okay, it has to be.
"i'll go then," she sighs, deep creases on her forehead. "talk with this incompetent teacher corps and dumbledore, that senile old man. don't worry, everything's going to be good. okay?"
yoongi nods again. "i'll just wait here until everything's settled. we need our wands back, too."
mi-jeong rises her brows.
"they took your wands? for what? not heard of privacy?"
"they accused tae and me of cursing jimin." shrug. "so i said they should check them to prove our innocence."
mi-jeong scoffs, but yoongi can hear the dangerous undertones laced within.
"unacceptable. i'll handle it, don't worry. give me thirty minutes, then we'll get you out of here."
she smiles, her lips the same gorgeous shape as jimin's, hers colored a dark red. he does, too. only one more hour and he'll be home. that's sooner than he had anticipated.
mi-jeong isn't a tall lady, but as she pats yoongi's shoulders in passing, it's as if he's ten years old again and vomited onto her clean, perfect lawn after he fell from jimin's tree house eleven feet up. worried of course, but also a little bit mad, like every mother would be when children don't listen to countless shouted warnings and someone gets hurt, and a tad amused about yoongi, because as much as she likes him, he was a rowdy kid with dirty knees and missing buttons on his jacket, and he's still a halfblood, and while that isn't an issue at home, her family are proud purebloods.
(he only realized that last part a few years later. she never made him feel uncomfortable or unwelcome though.)
and yoongi knows the exact reason she could be mad at him. jimin. after all — he is still the reason why her child got hurt in the first place.
mi-jeong climbs the stairs, incredibly elegant in her high-end business costume and burgundy high heels under a matching robe, and then he's alone.
for lack of alternatives, he sits down again. and then he waits.
the cool marble creeps through his four layers of clothes, making him shiver, and once again, he wishes he'd already be home, in his room that will feel awfully empty although all of his things will be there. at home, it's silent, and warm, and smelling better, and he doesn't have to be alert. he could fall asleep in his entrance hall with the doors wide open, spread out on the floor, and wouldn't have to fear someone cursing him in passing by. a quality every school ought to have, but hogwarts doesn't. at least not for him.
"mr min." mcgonagall's voice echoes through the silent foyer. from here, not even the doubtlessly loud chatter in the great hall is audible.
yoongi turns around and gets up, hands shoved into his coat pockets.
"my apologies," she reaches into her robe and draws three wands — his dark spruce wood, taehyung's cherry wood with the intricate vines wrapped around the shaft, and jimin's raw, untreated larch wood that was once yoongi's.
he reaches for them, desperate to have his wand back, but mcgonagall whips them out of the way.
"a thorough examination has proven your innocence."
"quod erat demonstrandum," he scoffs. the words are bitter on his tongue, just like the feeling of nothing in his hands. "thank you for the news, professor."
mcgonagall raises her eyebrow at this, her mouth in an unappeased curl.
"—though i'd advise you, mr min, and mr kim, to not duel each other at every chance. we've found a lot of corresponding spells in your wands' memories, and all of them were used on school grounds. you could take your violent training elsewhere, to prevent further injuries."
ah, yes. the violent training that has put so many innocent, uninvolved people into the hospital wing badly wounded.
he takes the wands out of her hands, quickly storing them away in his pocket, as if he's afraid of the professor ripping them out of his grasp again. he is, honestly. being without his wand scares him a little. a lot.
a few students leave the great hall, bags slung over their shoulders, some still chewing on bagels and cereal, or whatever it was they had for breakfast. they disappear in the dark hallway leading down to the dungeons, happy to only have one school day left before they can finally go home, and talking about their plans, their homework, their friends.
mcgonagall sends yoongi a pointed look over the rim of her glasses.
"i hope you know where your place is, mr min. you might be able to pass your NEWT exams with self-taught topics, but the real spirit of wizardry can only be found here, in these halls. it'd be a shame to lose a brilliant student like you."
really?
"what about jimin? would it be a shame to lose a brilliant student like him?"
she stays silent.
"there you have your answer."
she can't look yoongi in the eyes. but she says nothing further, her stare trained on a spot right over his head.
she still doesn't say anything when taehyung, in his school uniform, comes walking down the stairs slowly, supporting jimin, who tries his best to walk on his own, but his legs are too weak to manage his own weight. he wears sweatpants and a hoodie that is not his, because he'd never wear something so hideous, yellow and lilac with a green hood, ever.
jimin smiles, but it's painfully forced. there is sweat on his neck, and it's obvious how heavy he relies on tae's steady arm to make it to the ground safely.
mi-jeong is right behind them, a wheelchair floating in front of her, and her face is awfully pale. yoongi wouldn't even be surprised if she started sobbing right then and there; he knows how her family always took pride in her beautiful, ethereal sons, looking just like her, and while jimin will continue to be effortlessly beautiful, there will always be an edge to his face, something dangerous — with the brightly red, almost bleeding wound spreading from his right ear straight across his cheek, almost down to the tip of his nose.
madam pomfrey had told them, when she had woken them at six in the morning to change his bandages, that there's a great chance it'll leave a scar behind.
something ugly eats its way through his stomach at the sight.
taehyung carefully lowers jimin into the wheelchair, caressing his unharmed cheek in the process, and with a whip of yoongi's wand, that feels so good and wrong in his hand, their bags rise into the air and follow them out the door.
mcgonagall still doesn't say anything. she looks after them, yoongi can feel her stare in his neck, but she doesn't say anything. no goodbye. no well-wishes, not even an apology to jimin for failing him on school grounds. nothing. absolutely nothing.
it's silent as they leave the school. mi-jeong leads them down the way to the gate, from where they'll be able to disapparate, taehyung pushes jimin in his wheelchair, yoongi walking next to them, their suitcases floating behind him. they don't talk; jimin looks back to the castle with an expression yoongi can't quite decipher — is it sadness? or pain? or something entirely different, like joy to go home? taehyung stares at the ground, making sure there are no pebbles obstructing the way, chewing on his lower lip. mi-jeong talks to herself, angry, and gestures around wildly. yoongi can only make out singular words, but it's got something to do with the school and teachers.
he almost expects someone to jump out of the bushes at the iron gate marking the limits of school grounds and break his wand, because he's leaving the school, hopefully for good, and has to give it back or something. they pass the gates, and continue down the path to reach a spot not visible from the castle, because mi-jeong always wants her privacy with these kinds of things.
"hey," he nudges taehyung, who turns to look at him with dark eyes. "you good?"
dumb question, yoongi thinks immediately, but tae sports his usual boxy grin and nods. his lashes cast long shadows onto his cheeks.
"of course, it's christmas now!"
yoongi doesn't believe him one second, but he's the last person to push him.
"here," he hands the younger his wand and knife, who nods gratefully, and puts both away.
jimin makes grabby hands for his own wand, still silent. he hasn't said a single word since the curse.
when yoongi moves to give it to him, jimin grabs his hand and doesn't let go.
yoongi leaves hogwarts and only wishes he'd said a proper goodbye to hoseok.
❊
once yoongi's mom babied him enough, stuffing him with homemade biscuits and napping with him on the sofa in one of the salons, and once yoongi unpacked his suitcase, effectively making his room his again, days go by by in an endless, hazy blur, too slow in their passing.
he's at home, at last, and he almost forgot it's christmas, but now, with the decorations on the dining table, on the dark banisters, hanging in the windows and over the furnace, he feels even more out of place.
it's almost a sacrilege — he just doesn't know against what exactly. the world being so twisted that the peaceful december feels violated, made unholy. the silence about it is gone, and it screams into his ears. or maybe it's just him who's being weird, and the rest of the world is completely fine. he doesn't know.
his stay at home is the same as every single other one, he just came home one day early this year, but he's feeling itchy all the time, as if small bugs were crawling under his skin, building small tunnels for a whole bug city in his fingertips, shuffling around on busy days, meticulously picking apart his belly day for day.
he's antsy, restless, upset, and he doesn't exactly know why.
or, he does. it's obvious.
yoongi visits jimin every day. every day after lunch, he leaves through the back door, wrapped in coats and scarves and a pile of books stacked in his arms, crosses his own garden covered in white silence and the dark forest separating their family's lands, until he steps out of the thick forest and onto the street in front of jimin's giant mansion gate.
the younger is doing better, slowly.
and it's weighing yoongi down to see him struggling to walk again. taehyung is with him, too, reading to jimin so he can fall asleep, peppering his face with sweet kisses, fetching him meals and drinks and pillows, helping him change clothes and bandages.
the process of healing his friend doesn't take as long as he had anticipated, but still too long for anyone's taste.
by friday evening, he sits upright in his bed and reads a book, his arms strong enough to hold it himself. on saturday, around the time the hogwarts express is arriving at london, jimin can eat more than porridge and mashed potatoes again. by sunday evening, he sits on the carpet on his floor, holding a black sharpie, even writing silly things onto tae's bare arms and back.
and by the time yoongi enters the gigantic mansion on monday, shaking snow out of his hair, jimin is sitting downstairs at the dinner table again, laughing with tae about something the younger had said. they're paging through a slick together, a magazine with gucci models inside, probably tae's. maybe they're looking for wedding suits. (or a dress for tae, who looks deadly hot in a long summer dress with flower print.)
jimin still doesn't talk, has not uttered a single word since he almost …. but as much as it concerns yoongi, he also acknowledges that it's probably the shock. it's good to see him smile, eyes all lit up, twin crescents flashing across his still pale face, wrinkles all around.
"what are you guys doing?"
yoongi shrugs off his shoes in the hallway; his socks are wet at the toes, but why?
jimin leans back in his chair, still smiling softly, puzzlingly, and taehyung plops a grape into his mouth, right after feeding one to jimin.
"looking for wedding tailcoats," tae chews on his grape longer than necessary. did he seriously eat the seed?
"aren't you too young to marry?"
jimin swats taehyung's feet resting on the table away, smiling so sweetly at tae, he feels as if his teeth are rotting directly in his mouth.
"oh, yoongi, sweetie, not for us," taehyung purrs with a mischievous glint in his dark eyes.
"for you."
yoongi coughs, setting down the pile of books he had brought with him onto the dark, polished table too heavy and fast. ths table vibrates.
"me?" he chokes out, almost laughing, because what? "what — for me?"
taehyung holds another grape to jimin's lips, who now has his feet in his favourite soft, velvet house slippers resting on top of tae's legs, and yoongi can't help but think they look like the perfect rich, ominous couple.
what the hell are they talking about?
"biscuits?" kilky asks upon her silent entrance.
kilky is an especially tiny house elf with big, watery, violet eyes and only one arm. she lost her left one when she was a toddler and played on the kitchen's floor in a particularly bad moment, and she's the best elf the park family owns. jimin's mom made her his personal maid, so she's able to look out for him when he's home. nowadays, she has a lot of free time because taehyung reads jimin's every wish straight from his eyes and does everything himself.
"thank you, kilky," taehyung smiles, taking the tray full of biscuits and sandwiches out of her arm to spare her the whole ordeal of putting it onto the table.
"will you visit tomorrow?" taehyung asks when kilky exits again. yoongi plops down onto a chair next to jimin.
"i don't know," he admits, groaning as his back cracks. the pain got less over the last few days, his grandmother's cooling lotion working wonders, but he's still a little bit sore. "i wanted to ask if you wanted to come over for a christmas dinner, but i forgot."
it's true, he had wanted to ask the both of them to spend their christmas eve with him, since it's his last year at school and both of their families will host a cocktail party neither jimin nor tae have expressed any desire to attend. so, he had thought, they could have a relaxed dinner at yoongi's, sit in his living room and drink eggnog (and whiskey, maybe), and look through old photo albums, or just don't do anything. but he had forgotten, with jimin not talking and christmas being so far away for him, and now it's just one day until the twenty-fourth, and he had accepted spending christmas eve with his mom and grandmother again — not that he would mind. it's just the same every year, except for the holidays three years ago when yoongi's dad invited him to tenerife, but he can't really count that, because yoongi flew home after only four days. he doesn't want to talk about it.
"so," he draws out the vocal, "do you want to come over tomorrow?"
"i'll tell my parents to convince your mom to go to their cocktail party."
"nice," yoongi grins, "i'll ask flimmy to make us pudding and get us a few new sweets to try."
❊
the afternoon sky is white, just plain, blinding white. he wouldn't have thought that the sky could turn this burning white in mid-december. shouldn't it be all dark and grey and broody, with even darker clouds making it impossible to stare into the reverse abyss? because there isn't anything dark or cloudy obstructing the sky, and it feels wrong, in a good way. as if something big is about to happen, which is never really good, but yoongi thinks he has earned something good to happen finally, and he hopes.
but right now, he's just staring. the snow melts away where his back and arms and legs touch the ground. cold water seeps through his pajama legs, his coat soaked, his beanie dripping wet. he doesn't get up. the sky is too quiet.
it's calming, to lie here, in the almost untouched fresh snow that fell overnight, with his pajama pants and coat and a beanie, his bare hands resting opened on top of the cold snow, knowing that if he was laying here long enough, he'll be one with the hills around. it's so quiet when there are no birds to chirp and no breeze to shake the branches of their apple trees, when no breaking sticks from wandering animals in the forest disturb the winter. it's as if the world died around him and he just exists for a moment, no thinking, no feeling, just being and staring up into this endless white until his eyes burn from the brightness. until the white takes over and creates a white noise in his ears that makes him shiver.
it's cold, and calm, and yoongi thinks he might go back to hogwarts, because as long as jimin and taehyung are safe, he'll manage. after all, he has to find the ones who cast the spell, and he honestly doesn't care that much if he'll be expelled for it, because a wand is nothing he couldn't replace. his mother has a whole wand collection in her rooms, and it's only a matter of time until he could duel someone to win a good one. besides — it's not even unlikely he'd go crazy here, in two months of not being able to use his own wand, until he's turning seventeen.
so maybe, he thinks as he stares up into the flimmering void above his head and all around him, he'll go back. maybe just until his birthday. maybe to finish school. he doesn't know yet.
yoongi closes his eyes, the view too empty and full at the same time.
the terrace door opens and closes, steps come closer.
"mom, please, 'm not hungry," yoongi whines in a hushed voice as his mom stops by his unmoving figure, making a snow angel wallowing in a weird kind of life-contemplating. he doesn't look at her, just stares at the inside of his lids, waiting for a snowflake to meet his lashes or a breeze to lift this heavy weightless blanket on his chest, the mansion, the whole county.
"well, you sure look like you could use a decent meal," someone with hoseok's voice says.
okay, that's new.
and yes, really, there, he's standing right there, next to yoongi's knees, in a light grey coat and a red beanie covering his dark hair, the long strands curling in on themselves where they peek out of the fabric.
yoongi thinks of how often he had met hoseok in the castle, starting the time he found his history homework. how often they had met in the kitchens alone, or the library, in the hallways and great hall, even at the lake. how hoseok seemed to be everywhere, even outside the castle halls, in hogsmeade, once they had met properly.
it’s as if hoseok strayed just out of his reach all those years, even when slytherins and hufflepuff had been paired for care of magical creatures or charms anytime in the first five years at hogwarts, and existed, hidden away from yoongi for so long. and then, all at once, he got shoved into yoongi's life by a stack of papers tumbling to the floor and an horrible essay.
and now hoseok, jung hoseok, is here, at home, in yoongi's garden. on christmas eve. in yoongi's garden. at his home.
he's not even surprised. not really. kind of.
if he's being honest, he had wished for hoseok to be here, or maybe not here here, just — near. like, living down the street, in the next village, or across the forest, not five hours away in london's suburbs with his extended muggle family.
it’s as if hoseok stepped out of yoongi’s imagination, out of the cluttered, messy space that is yoongi’s mind, right into his garden.
"are you following me?" he says, sitting up, acting unbothered while his stomach tries a backflip. fails.
"merry christmas," hoseok smiles and ignores yoongi's outstretched hand as a quiet question to pull him up. he plops down next to him, straight into the snow.
"merry christmas," yoongi repeats automatically, thinking he sounds like a parrot. "what are you doing here, hoseok?"
hoseok smiles at him before lying down. yoongi just looks at him, still not fully sure if he's real. his eyes twinkle so beautifully dark. his lips do too, probably from chapstick to battle the dry winter air. he might as well be a sugar-induced hallucination, or maybe yoongi's just dreaming, still fast asleep in his soft, warm bed upstairs, and imagining hoseok was here for christmas eve just like they always did in jimin's kitschy novels (okay, he had read them too, sue him). maybe yoongi fell asleep on the sofa in the downstairs living room right after getting up, and he's just mushing together memories of hoseok and outfits he had seen in tae's magazines, or somewhere in london, because it's basically impossible jung hoseok is here, on the twenty-fourth of december, a five-hour drive away from his own home and his own family, who he knows are big on celebrating christmas.
but although yoongi tries to tell himself he's wrong or sleeping or just too tired, blinded by the sky, he can't bring himself to not hope he's real.
"well," hoseok's cheeks turn rosy from the cold, "i missed you. and taehyung gave me your address."
"oh."
yoongi doesn't know what to say. he lies down again too, mostly because he has to process hoseok's blunt statement, but also because the cold floor looks to him like the best possible place right now.
"taehyung said you're celebrating christmas and i should visit."
taehyung, that scheming asshole. he knew exactly what yoongi had planned.
"he basically threatened me to come," hoseok grins, his right cheek pressed into the snow as he looks at yoongi with a wink. he wants to slip his hand under the tan cheek to protect it from the cold.
"sorry."
"for what?"
"for tae. i didn't know — he didn't tell me anything. sorry you had to come all the way up here because he can't chill for seven seconds." that asshole. threatening hoseok? yeah, no, yoongi doesn't think so.
"if i didn't want to come, i wouldn't have done it, don't worry," hoseok chuckles lighthearted. "i'm not afraid of him."
you should be, yoongi thinks, but he doesn't say it out loud. tae might be a terrible enemy to deal with, blood rituals and mental instability and all, but hoseok has nothing to fear. taehyung would never, ever dare to hurt him, that's sure.
"sorry for intruding. i didn't think it wasn't okay with you."
his eyes are so — fuck, he's so — beautiful, honest. genuine. hoseok is worried he might intrude, the stupid boy, not knowing he couldn't ever, although yoongi had thought it was clear.
"i'm glad," yoongi murmurs, turning back to the sky. it seems even brighter than before.
maybe, he thinks, the sun will burn holes into his body if he only stays here long enough. or maybe he'll get transparent, making place for beams of sunlight grazing the grass hidden beneath snow.
❊
hoseok is in yoongi's kitchen.
he's sitting on a barstool, and the sun falls onto his face as if to tell yoongi something, probably something between the lines of "he's here, talk to him, he's here, he's here, this is the universe's way of saying sorry, go talk to him, everything will be alright". or maybe something like "you dumb, stupid, fucking dense motherfucker, he's right there, stop being a fucking chicken, say something, asshole, i swear, if you fuck this up —". either way, he's not listening.
yoongi has to admit, he's not very familiar with the kitchen in his own house. the house elves usually prepare everything, meaning literally everything, and he's usually only here for breakfast, when his grandmother doesn't deem it super important to dine in the salon.
so while hoseok is sitting on the barstool like a come-to-life full-size fantasy, showered in clean, golden sunlight, because the sun had decided to break through the solid white sky and shine for hoseok and for him only, yoongi is glad he finds the cabinet with glasses first try.
he couldn't bear if he made a fool of himself in his own home. even worse if he offers something to drink to the other boy and doesn't even know where the necessary tableware is stored.
but he did find a glass, and tries to calm his fluttery nerves while the faucet rumbles a bit to get water into the glass as fast as possible.
"old house, huh?"
"yeah, my great-great-grandfather won it in a game of poker. i guess the owner was glad to get rid of it, because she thanked him for taking it," yoongi shrugs, looking out the window into the blinding white garden just to see two or three stray ravens playing in a nearby bush.
"is it haunted or something?" hoseok chuckles.
"oh, i don't know. my grandma swears there are ghosts hiding in the walls, but i've never met one. the heater in my room doesn't work sometimes, though, so maybe they just can't stand me."
hoseok laughs, oh god.
and yoongi turns around to hand him the glass of water just in the exact moment hoseok's face is getting all scrunched up by the surprised laugh. he might be smiling dumbly as well, like he thinks he's always doing in hoseok's presence.
"do you want something to eat?" yoongi asks once he's calmed down. hoseok nods gratefully, and yoongi is so glad he actually knows where the snacks are stored.
"did you walk all the way from the train station?" yoongi asks while getting various snacks out of the cabinets and drawers and holding them up for hoseok to decide. the next train station is about three miles away, and it sucks to take the road leading up here, because it's only gravel and puddles all the time.
the younger makes a short, surprised sound, swallowing quickly. "oh, no, no. i drove."
no way.
"no way! you have a license?"
hoseok nods, surprised.
"you have your own car?" hoseok has a car, a license, he can go wherever he wants, no rules attached! he could drive to france just like that, getting onto a ferry if he feels like it, he could drive all the way through france to monaco and visit taehyung's extended family just like that. hoseok could just drive to france and then further, through germany and austria and italy, or through spain and portugal, crossing the strait of gibraltar. or, he could as well do small trips, like to the mcdonald's restaurants yoongi always had wanted to go since they opened one only forty miles away a few years ago. hoseok can just go.
"my uncle lent it to me," hoseok shrugs as if it's not a big deal, "he doesn't need it during the holidays."
yoongi sets a plate stacked with flimmy's best chocolate biscuits down in front of hoseok, the counter pleasantly cool against his belly where yoongi's hoodie had ridden up.
"that's so cool," he whispers, watching hoseok eat a few crunchy biscuits before taking one himself. "is your family cool with you not being home for christmas? you told me they go full-out for celebrating."
hoseok tries an unbothered expression, fails. yoongi wonders why.
"oh, yes, sure. they'll be too busy with my sister to care too much."
he had told him about his sister. jiwoo works at the ministry, department of magical accidents and catastrophes, and is currently laddering herself up the promotion ladder. he had also told yoongi how good jiwoo is at anything, basically.
"i don't think so. you're free to stay as long as you wish, though," yoongi offers, his hands suddenly sweaty.
hoseok grins, his teeth brown from all he chocolate, and yoongi makes a face.
"ew, shut your mouth, or i'll kick you out."
hoseok laughs.
❊
the thing with hoseok is that whenever he's in a room, yoongi has to pay attention to him. it's as if his eyes are literally glued to him, as if he will die if he looks away for too long.
hoseok has an aura begging to just look at him, and it's not even weird, because there's so much to see. the soft light dots on his dark hair, the tiny curls his hair makes at the nape of his neck, the soft slope of his nose with a shiny dot at the tip. the pair of soft, black calligraphy strokes resembling his eyes, the dark, shimmering pupils making yoongi feel as if he's looking into — into a chocolate fountain, or something. the list could go on and on and on, travelling further down, to his smoothed out throat and collarbones, his fingers. yoongi has to look at him.
"hyung," taehyung whispers and nudges yoongi with his elbow, "hyung, you're staring."
"i'm not," he whispers back. he totally was. "you don't have any proof."
yoongi peels his gaze away from hoseok sitting across the table, who doesn't seem to mind jimin's silence while he narrates his six-hour-journey up the country, and looks at taehyung just to see him rolling his eyes.
"don't roll your eyes at me. ass."
"i will if you stop being so fucking stupid."
the audacity, in his house, at his table. yoongi doesn't say anything.
hoseok continues his story. he had stopped right outside of london to refuel the almost-empty petrol tank before driving the whole five hours in one go, although the traffic was terrible the first fifty miles.
"you're doing it again," tae snickers, and yoongi seriously considers kicking him under the table or smacking him up the head or — doing something, but nothing comes to mind as hoseok reaches for his glass and his bicep flexes. hoseok is slender, not buff or evidently muscular, but he has a bicep — stat’s stupid; everyone with arms tend to have. but hoseok has a bicep, it’s surely the revelation of the century, and it fits so wonderfully.
why on earth is he wearing a shirt, it's december, for fuck's sake. and why on earth does said shirt have to be short-sleeved and black and thin, and why did hoseok have to wear a silver necklace with it? and the ring — why did he have to pair the whole outfit with a ring, a singular, silver, thin ring adorning his right index finger perfectly? it's driving him insane.
"get a grip."
with another sip of water, yoongi tries to quiet tae and his own thoughts. it doesn't work. he should've started drinking whiskey when flimmy had been here the last time.
"don't tell me what to do," yoongi hisses while jimin giggles. "you're the one who planned all this. despite, you can't stop staring at jimin."
taehyung winks at his boyfriend and turns to yoongi again, a sly smirk on his lips. "but jimin and i are together. what excuse do you have?"
god damn.
yoongi resolves to sublime silence.
when flimmy comes back to clear the table, yoongi asks her for a whiskey on the rocks.
hoseok raises his eyebrows, but says he would like to try one too, and taehyung orders almond milk on the rocks. there is definitely something wrong with him. even jimin scrunches his nose.
they spend the evening circulating around the house — in the dining room, in the warm, comfortable living room, back in the kitchen to get themselves some snacks, sitting on the stairs just because, back to the living room, and so on. yoongi can't remember a day where he had felt at peace like this.
flimmy, who had prepared more biscuits for them, a little bit of eggnog and punch, a little bit of everything, went to bed once yoongi explained to her that they could take care of themselves, practically ordering her to go get some rest.
it's weird; the house is usually quiet, with his grandma being a cliché old lady doing old lady activities, his mom away for work, and yoongi reading in silence when he's home. he wouldn't go as far and say it's gloomy, but the house is old and most rooms have dark wood paneling on the walls. yoongi loves his home, it's a beautiful, comfortable house — more of a mansion, if he's being honest — but it tends to have a bit of an eerie vibe, especially in winter, when the sun isn't strong enough to pierce through the windows with enough force to light up the rooms completely.
but tonight, with taehyung, jimin and hoseok strewn around his room, it's loud and full, making yoongi's heart thump in his throat. it's easy to be okay when things are like this.
it's easy when jimin tries his best with the piano, struggling to keep his left and right hand in tune, when taehyung embarrasses yoongi by telling hoseok stories from his childhood, when hoseok laughs and can't stop, when they drink and eat and bicker. it's so god damn easy to be with the people he loves.
jimin messes up an accord and interrupts his version of "bohemian rhapsody", a song taehyung can't stop humming everywhere he goes since he had found it last year. (yoongi never actually heard it, just tae's pieces of melody and text.)
"— and then he tried to clean it up, but he was so furious, you can't even imagine, it was so funny, and he accidentally set the whole thing on fire and my mom almost had a heart attack. by merlin, it was so hilarious."
hoseok turns to yoongi, shiny tears of laughter in his eyes.
"is that true?" he gasps, managing to stifle his laughter only for a few seconds before bursting out as yoongi nods.
the room erupts in a deafening mess of shouting as taehyung tries to silence yoongi, who begins to tell the story of how taehyung had managed to shove a whole egg into his nose when they had known each other for about five minutes. hoseok can't stop laughing. it's so loud, yoongi thinks he might actually go deaf, an overwhelming swoosh ringing in his ears.
the laughter dies in his throat once he realizes there's four voices.
"he cried so hard when the egg wouldn't come back out again, do you remember?" his voice is sweet, all wine and sugar.
they're taken by surprise — taehyung loses balance, slips from his place on the back of the sofa, and yoongi accidentally slams his cup of punch onto the table instead of putting it down gently. it spills over his hand.
"jimin," taehyung chokes once he collected himself again, getting up from behind the sofa. "you're — you're talking?"
jimin nods, a smile on his face that screams confusion. he probably didn't think the first thing he'd speak about again after being silent for more than five days would be taehyung shoving an egg up his nose when he was ten years old.
"seems like it," he says, successfully shrugging the tension off of his shoulders. it settles at yoongi's feet, a puddle of guilt and relief.
taehyung tears up, hurrying over to where jimin's seated at the piano and peppering kisses onto his face. they giggle, hitting the keys in their haste.
"yoongi, are you crying?" hoseok whispers, as to not disturb the lovey-dovey couple.
"what? no, i'm just —"
seeing them like this — he almost lost jimin. he almost would've had to bury his oldest friend. taehyung almost lost his love. his family almost lost their son, brother, cousin, nephew, grandson. hogwarts almost lost a brilliant wizard, a lazy, awfully intelligent, skilled, funny, loving wizard boy.
and, maybe most importantly, jimin almost lost his life. jimin almost became nothing more than forgotten dreams, ambitions, he almost became lost feelings.
he almost became memories; a few dust-collecting keepsakes people would store away in their hearts for years and years until they fade and leave nothing of him behind, not even ashes and a smile.
now, he's here — in a norwegian sweater, dress pants and fuzzy socks that somehow make for a terrific combination, and with tae clinging to his side, overjoyed that he talks again. he's here, and he breathes and laughs and talks, kissing taehyung because he can, dreaming and making new memories.
maybe yoongi's eyes are wet.
"yoonie hyung, don't cry," jimin coos when he's not occupied with tae anymore, blinking a few times too often to look as unbothered as he acts. "i'm right here, it's all good!"
yoongi melts.
❊
when yoongi wakes, he's sweaty.
the night rests on his skin like a damp cloth, it's too moist and too warm to be bearable, especially not in december.
sometime right before one in the morning, when taehyung and jimin disappeared into one of the guest rooms across the hallway, and he apparently fell asleep, the fire died down to soft glowing ambers. it's still too hot for his taste, despite the walls and windows in his room not insulating properly.
only when he tries to get up and his back cracks loudly, he realizes he'd been fallen asleep in his armchair, in the most uncomfortable position he had slept in since he tried to pull an all-nighter at the kitchen tables at hogwarts.
yoongi forces himself to sit up, shuffling around awkwardly and kicking the blanket on his legs away.
his head swims a bit, from the heat and something grating through his chest. he feels dizzy all of a sudden, as if he has to vomit, and something grates, scratches across his ribs.
his skin doesn't fit again, it's too tight. too warm, too full. as if he's a doll about to get its strings cut, or a spring milliseconds before being let free. it doesn't matter how hard he tries to forget it, the guilt gnaws at him, although jimin and taehyung had told him countless times it's not his fault. they mostly say it out of politeness, he can see in their hands and ears and mouths that they mean it, but they still hold a grudge — for dragging them into his own pile of shit. understandable.
jimin had forgiven him, sweet as always, he had said it's no big deal. but it is.
the anger still feeds on his liver, still so furious about everything that has happened, still ready to destroy. and the guilt, well, it sits in his stomach, refusing to leave even after jimin hugged him so incredibly tight when he had the strength to do so, holding him close, or when he whispered into his ear that it was alright when he cried earlier. it doesn't go away. because it doesn't matter what he tells himself or what his friends and his mom say — after all, it's still his fault. he could've just stopped talking to hoseok, they didn't know each other very well when pigeon showed up the first time, so it wouldn't have been so bad. but he didn't, because he didn't want to, that's all. jimin got hurt as a consequence of his own egoism, wanting someone who's too far away from him.
the guilt doesn't leave, burying itself even deeper between his organs.
of course, yoongi had thought of how to make it up to him, but nothing came to mind.
nothing could even start to be enough. nothing could make it better for jimin.
somehow, he thinks, it makes sense. he'd had an incredible day, time spent with his friends, a whole wonderful, precious day crowned by jimin talking again, and it's just natural for him to feel bad now. it's inevitable. a good day has to end in ugly feelings, otherwise it would be too good for him. it's just natural — it's happened before.
he thinks of the wonderful day he had in hogsmeade in fourth grade that ended with his wand and nose getting broken, and the christmas holidays he went to visit his father, the nice day he had with his family just for his dad to turn out to be a manipulative prick, or the day he began with sleeping next to hoseok in the same bed and ended with jimin lying in the bloody snow fighting for his life. it's the default, yoongi thinks, that the better he feels, the bigger the misfortune has to be in the end.
if it wasn't, then there wouldn't be any balance in the world, would it?
it's too hot here, right in front of the dark marble furnace, with burning guilt ravaging through his chest growing stronger and stronger.
and just like always, he knows he has to leave. the armchair, his room, the house, to catch a bit of cold night air. maybe he can calm it down to fit his skin again, to stop his heart from aching so much.
as he gets up, his dress shirt and pants all wrinkled and sweaty, and spots hoseok sleeping across from him on the sofa, he feels bad.
for leaving, wandering around in the dead of the night on christmas eve, for not offering him to sleep in his bed, for being so stupid in everything. for yearning.
hoseok is so peacefully asleep, his legs too long for the couch, and his left hand touches the carpet where it slipped from his chest. it's too dark to actually make out any details, but the glowing ambers in the fireplace paints shiny dots onto the long, loose strands of hair obstructing his profile.
yoongi knows exactly which floor boards creak and which don't. he also somehow manages to not fall over the pile of jackets they had put on the floor instead of the entrance hall, or the bottles of eggnog and punch they put aside after they sent flimmy to bed.
when yoongi draws back the curtains, he can breathe a little better.
the view is wonderful — the landscape is inked in the darkest shades of blue and black, the snow even brighter now that the world is dipped into night. the footprints he had left in the afternoon are slowly getting covered under a fresh layer of snow, innocent and so cold.
the window opens without a sound, and there's finally, finally fresh air on his skin. his body stops cracking open from every movement.
he sits down on the windowsill, the raw, worn down wood warm under his thighs, evidence of the heat ruling in his bedroom. he can't stop staring onto his lawn. the woods beginning behind the vast, beautiful lawn echoes with three short hoots of an owl.
yoongi thinks there isn't anything just like it — nothing could ever compare to the sacred silence of fresh night air. as if the earth breathes out everything beautiful at night, as if the earth breathes in at sunrise, preparing for a day filled with ugly words, ugly acts, ugly things being created and destroyed all the same, and when the sun sets, it breathes out the beautiful things hidden away at day. scents and sounds and air that feel so clean.
this time, he hears hoseok coming; small, careful steps onto old, creaking wooden floorboards.
"sorry," he whispers as hoseok pads toward him, his hair all messed up, still wearing his dark shirt and blue jeans. "i didn't want to wake you. i'll close the window again."
hoseok yawns, but grins. the moonlight makes his teeth shine whiter than white.
"it's fine," he whispers back and leans against the windowsill next to yoongi, their thighs touching, looking out for any sign of life together.
"are you okay?"
hoseok nods, and yoongi thinks that he's maybe a worse actor than he had thought.
"don't lie to me. please. what is it?"
he won't pressure him into opening up to him, but yoongi also knows they haven't talked about the thing between them, the one that has been there since last thursday at lunch, when yoongi slipped up. and although he knows now that hoseok won't break off their friendship, he can't help but grow nervous at the memory.
hoseok cards through his hair. yoongi holds out his hand, heart thumping in his fingertips and ears at the gesture, but he doesn't draw back, just offers it up on his thigh despite being all clammy.
"i'm sick of being a hufflepuff," he whispers, quiet enough for yoongi to wonder if he's heard correctly for a short moment, until hoseok takes his hand. "i'm sick of people taking me for granted, and stepping all over me. because i'm a hufflepuff, ‘hard working and loyal’, fuck, i don't like even half of the people at hogwarts. i'm so sick of it." he snorts, a bitter, sad sound, his eyes trained onto a spot yoongi can't see.
"they don't even know me and never bothered to get to know me. they just want tutoring lessons and help with homework and someone acting like an older brother — without being as close and without the fighting. they just want to live in their own little fantasy world. i hate it so much."
yoongi hadn't known, he never would have thought it's wearing hoseok down. sure, he knew hoseok sometimes struggles to smile honestly, fighting to stay friendly and nice, but he always thought it was just that — being tired of false niceties. exhausted from being polite all the time, from learning for himself and teaching others, basically. he had thought hoseok loves hogwarts. maybe he does, still, but how he says it makes yoongi wonder if he had misjudged hoseok all this time.
it sounds as if he loathes the castle. as if he wants to quit and leave it all behind. burn it all down.
yoongi gets it.
hoseok looks at him, turning away from the window. he's close all of a sudden, or maybe he had always been this close, ever since he woke up and came over and yoongi only didn't realize.
there is something living inside his eyes, something dangerous, something so raw it scares him a little bit, draws him in a little too much, maybe.
it makes him grip his hand harder, and yoongi can't help but wonder what it's like to be loved by hoseok, with skin and bones and all the small parts.
he nods.
"i just want a little tragedy sometimes."
it's one of the transparent moments, one where the whole world feels wrong. see-through, almost nonexistent. a little too lost. it's one of the moments when he looks out the window and can't see anything at all, like nightly fog lingering in the valley all around and he can't blink it away and focus on the moon high up between blurry stars.
the whole world slips away in these transparent moments, as if it never existed, as if he was born from nothing, nothing but his own heartbeat.
"am i a bad person?" hoseok whispers, the remainders of his voice trembling. his breath fans across yoongi's cheek, warm and alive and smelling like sweet christmas pudding, the exact opposite of the icy wind scraping across his neck and scalp, hoping to kill him with snow.
"i think it's wonderful to wish for things to fall apart sometimes."
hoseok doesn't say anything, he just looks at him with this something in his eyes.
yoongi sits atop the windowsill, death in his neck, behind his back; life right in front of him, standing between his legs, holding his hand between his fingers just like his heart.
he just sits and breathes in what hoseok gives, and looks, looks how the white glowing moon paints him holy, soft features, with specks of snow slowly melting in his long locks, looks at all of him.
"can i kiss you?"
oh.
it's as if the world really slipped away in this moment.
it's as if
he
finally
knows
what
the
universe
sounds like.
"yes."
and then, just when the owl calls again, hoseok leans forward.
they meet in the middle, their lips brushing together in the smallest of touches, barely there, barely existing. it's the faint idea of a kiss, another question, just them exchanging moments of breathing.
this is what the universe sounds like, yoongi thinks, still holding hoseok's hand. this is what it sounds like.
bare feet walking on wooden floor and warm hands resting near his belly, and as if two pairs of lips never met although they did.
"can you do it again?" he asks, whispering against hoseok's lips he wants to taste so bad.
they kiss again, if they're even allowed to call it a kiss, and yoongi thinks he'll fall any moment, just slip from his spot here down into the garden, slips from being awake into unconsciousness, death, and he'll never know if it really would've happened because hoseok sneaks one hand around his waist, careful, barely touching him, but yoongi feels it still.
barely-kisses and hoseok holding him as if he's made of glass —
he doesn't want it to end.
it doesn’t.
THE END
yoongi wakes up because he has to pee, and wonders how he was able to fall asleep in the first place. with everything happening last night — he can't believe it happened.
but it did. he can almost feel hoseok's lips on his, and hoseok's hands around his waist, his lips at his jaw, his hands on his thighs. he can almost feel hoseok's hammering heart against his own chest, his morning breath in his mouth. he can almost see hoseok lay next to him, with his face buried in yoongi's chest, peacefully asleep.
except, hoseok isn't there.
yoongi opens his eyes completely, abandoning the thought of just staying here trying to fall asleep until he feels as if he's about to pee himself any second, and looks around.
hoseok is not here.
the spot on the mattress, right between his empty arms only sports a faint hint of warmth, of a body having been there until a few minutes ago.
what if —
yoongi bolts up. what if hoseok left? packed his bag, whipped out the keys to the beautiful green vauxhall astra from 1980, and left? come to think of it, he had mentioned having to go back home soon to keep his family from forgetting him.
stupid, stupid, stupid yoongi, thinking he could spend a few more days with pretty hoseok who kisses too earnest for his own good. like he had thought, a wonderful day has to end in a pang.
groaning, yoongi slumps back into his mattress, burying his cheek in the warm pillow again.
his eyes sting a little as he opens them to look at the window, the drawn back curtains, the spot on the windowsill he had sat on only a few hours ago, all tangled up and lost in hoseok's kisses, sweet bliss soaring through his chest like a wildfire.
the memories are too fragile to remember them, as if they'd break if he so much as thinks of reliving anything of what went down. so yoongi tries not to think think of anything, just — a few glimpses here and there.
how he asked for kiss after kiss, practically begging for hoseok's lips ghosting his, not even embarrassed about how messed up — how hoseok held him close, their chests heaving against each other, how red his cheeks were, his ears, his neck. how yoongi bumped their heads together in search for another kiss. how he almost, almost wrapped his leg around hoseok's hip, how his mom came home in that exact moment, throwing her purse onto the steps of the stairs leading up to the first floor louder than usual, ripping them out of their whatever it was. how she went to bed, steps a little uncoordinated after a fun evening with the parks and kims. how yoongi exhaled a shaky breath after holding it in for so long, worrying she might open the door to whisper a good night to him. how hoseok stole the breath right away from his mouth in the best way possible, how a wave of unexpected bravery washed over him. how he leaned back, out the window, daring hoseok to follow his lead, kissing him again with only his own hands holding onto the wood keeping him from falling.
oh, by merlin.
hoseok's coat will be all rumpled up once someone picks it up to smooth it out and put it where a guest's coat belongs.
for the second time this morning, yoongi sits up way faster than he's used to.
if hoseok's coat is here, he most likely didn't leave already. if his coat is here, he won't have left in a cold, freezing cold car.
the floor is even colder under his feet as he gets up, impatiently trying to swat away the black temporarily obstructing his view, and shuffles over to the sofa hoseok had napped on last evening.
if his coat is here, his bag might be as well, proof of his presence.
and yes, there's the dark blue sports bag, carefully packed for two or three days away from home, neatly closed.
that's nice, he thinks to himself, it's nice knowing hoseok didn't leave without a proper goodbye. it's nice to know that hoseok will be here a little longer, maybe until the afternoon or early evening.
and then yoongi remembers — his blood seems to freeze in his arteries. it's as if there's a frying pan colliding with his forehead, pa-powing its way straight towards his brain, the useless good-for-nothing lump of supposed wisdom juice.
his grandmother, his granny, grandma, the small lady of seventy-two years, with a weird taste in tea and manners, this old lady looking like an innocent, grandchildren-loving lady, is a legilimens.
and hoseok might just run into her, spilling all of yoongi's secrets without ever realizing. every little secret that ever slipped over his lips when they were just the two of them, or the big ones he never told anyone else.
yoongi's grandma is a legilimens, reading people's heads like the morning paper, keeping the family in power back in her days when her family's support for grindelwald threatened to exile them. she intrudes minds as if it's nothing, and that's one of the few things he never told hoseok, because no matter how accepting he is, a grandma looking right into your head is a bit too extreme for a casual conversation. or any conversation.
and now hoseok is somewhere in his house, maybe searching for a bathroom or the way back to the kitchen for breakfast, and his grandma is too. she knows yoongi has guests, and she always, always insists on meeting everyone he ever invited, to get a taste of their heads.
his life will be over when she reads hoseok's mind, unprepared and innocent, where the memory of yoongi's subjects at school, which do very much not correspond to what he had told her, is stored away.
yoongi is out the door in the blink of an eye, slamming it shut behind him, not caring about the noise echoing through the hall, and turns left, running toward the opulent staircase leading down to the first floor, the dining room. it's empty.
panic makes the hair on his arms stand up. what if his grandma lashed out? she is a handful to handle even on average days, but when she's growing angry…
she's old, and hasn't practiced magic in years, except for teapots and cups floating around her, pouring themselves for her, and she wouldn't dare to hurt anyone under yoongi's hospitality, none of his friends, because she knows his anger can be far more dangerous than anything she's able to do in her old days. but still.
he passes the living room, empty, another bathroom, empty, his grandma's bedroom, silent, until he reaches the ancient servant stairs, a narrow spiral staircase worming itself through the mansion.
the door creaks as he pries it open; it hasn't been used in years, since the house elves simply apparate everywhere and yoongi stopped trying to find a secret room when he was thirteen. inside, it's hot. the heating pipes run together at the ceiling, effectively heating up the whole staircase.
yoongi doesn't stop to avoid the spiderwebs spreading around everywhere, simply rushes down step after step, almost slipping and falling to his death, until he crashes into the door at the end of the stairs. the rising dust makes him cough as he stumbles out into the hallway.
his brain is filled with this all-consuming panic and, making him wonder what is wrong with him, some sort of weird calm disinterest. because, he reminds himself, at the end of the day he has to tell his family about his plans anyway. if it happens today or in six months, it doesn't really matter.
the door to the kitchen opens smoothly, without a sound, he didn't expect it after the barely-working door, and yoongi bursts into the room as a panting, dust-covered mess, making flimmy shriek in shock and confusion.
"hoseok, don't —"
hoseok is sitting at the counter, bedhead and all, changed into softer pants and a white shirt, morning glory and a shocked expression on his face. yoongi coughs again, too much dust in his throat to get out another word, and before he can say anything further, hoseok is by his side, abandoning the tray filled with toast and scrambled eggs and coffee in front of him.
"by merlin, yoongi, you scared the hell out of me," he chuckles as he pats him on the back.
(pathetic coughing could just become his new favourite thing, screw stitching.)
but the weight is being lifted off of his shoulders, the fear of yoongi's grandma intimidating hoseok and reading his mind, of secrets not yet meant to be revealed being brought to broad daylight. it's all vanishing at the sight of the empty kitchen, not very bright at this hour because the sun is just on the other side of the house, only flimmy preparing all sorts of breakfasts and hoseok being all relaxed and calm.
things are okay. nothing happened.
he sits down next to hoseok once his coughing fit died down again, their shoulders bumping together on their chairs. were the barstools always standing this close together? not that he's complaining.
"master yoongi," flimmy squeaks with a worried crack in her voice, "would you like a glass of water?"
he nods, accepting the glass floating over immediately with both hands.
"thank you."
"is everything alright?"
hoseok has his cheek in his hand, propped up on the counter. soft black curls fall into his eyes. yoongi doesn't know where to look, what to think, what to do with his fingers itching to cup his cheeks himself and brush any lost strand of hair out of his beautiful face.
so he just nods.
"cool," hoseok smiles, sporting a mysterious expression he doesn't know what to do with. then he turns all of his body to yoongi, his knees pressing against his thigh.
"you could've told me your grandma is a legilimens," he pouts.
yoongi almost drops the glass upon understanding what the other had just said, almost choking on a sip of water, almost slipping down the chair into a puddle of panic and despair at the words.
"you met her?" his voice is hoarse.
his brain is empty.
he will have to leave. yoongi will have to leave his home, pack a few things and look for a place to stay until he's allowed to practice magic. he'll have to say goodbye to his mom and jimin and taehyung, because his grandmother will forbid them to talk with or help him, and her word is law in their circle of pureblood families.
sometimes yoongi wonders how he even got so lucky; to be accepted — a halfblood born into a proud pureblood dynasty — and loved in his family. he had heard of other families exiling children born not pure wizards and witches, and their parents along with them. he was lucky enough to have a caring, loving family accepting him as one of their own and taking him in. it should be the default, but given the circumstances they did an extraordinary thing, and he's grateful for it.
at least he had a good childhood here, something to look back on with fondness when he's being kicked out now.
"why yes, of course," hoseok furrows his brow in confusion and places his hand under the glass to keep it from shattering should he actually drop it. "you missed her by two minutes. she's …" he searches for words while yoongi contemplates his whole life and tries to guesstimate how heavy a backpack could be for him to carry it comfortably. how many books could he take with him?
"she's a handful. eccentric. in a funny way, you know." satisfied with his answer, hoseok nods as if to confirm his choice of words.
"you —" yoongi is at a loss for words. "you met her and aren't… freaked out? what did she do?"
"oh," hoseok chuckles, "she tried to read my mind, if that's what you mean."
"and you — she didn't — you're here ?"
"i don't understand what you mean, to be honest."
yes, the confusion is obvious, on both their faces. it just makes no sense.
"you aren't weirded out?" he whispers to avoid his grandma — possibly eavesdropping — from hearing anything. "she read your mind and you aren't running?"
"oh, well, she would've had to succeed to maybe make me run," he leans closer conspiratorially, his fingertips brushing against yoongi's elbow.
oh?
"you are able to block her?" he asks breathlessly, the implications of what hoseok said setting into his stomach. "you blocked her fifty years of experience out of your head just like that?"
that's insane. he had needed four years intense training to be able to do it, only blocking, and hoseok — hoseok does it as if it's nothing? without a warning.
he shrugs, a shy blush on his cheeks.
"well, yes. i don't appreciate someone poking around in my memories. despite," he leans even closer, "i do have some secrets to keep."
this is insane. insane.
"are you a trained legilimens?"
"no," he shrugs, "not by someone else. i did it myself?"
he scratches his neck sheepishly, as if he's embarrassed to admit he — what? taught himself the high art of mind-reading, a branch of magic that is so rare, complicated and difficult, and at the border to dark art, with probably nothing more than a few stolen books? that he used his free time to practice locking his mind away behind sandstone walls, soft enough to allow thoughts to flow, thick and resistant enough to keep anyone out?
hufflepuff sweetheart jung hoseok, sick of school and others using him for their own advantage, studied the mysteries of legilimency in secret, probably stealing books out of the library and book stores in the diagon alley to stay under the radar of the ministry. probably practicing his skills on students in passing or wizards in hogsmeade, maybe muggles, anonymous in the crowd in case anyone felt him intruding.
by merlin, it's too much.
"you —"
yoongi doesn't know what comes over him, but the next time he blinks, he leaped up from his stool, abandoned his glass, and crashed their lips together. as if his brain short-circuited at the thought of hoseok hiding in the shadows of a pub, acting as if he read the newspaper while actually stealing glances into open minds.
it's so new, so beautiful, to see this side of him. or maybe, yoongi thinks, it’s not new, not at all. not when he remembers the way hoseok seems to know a lot of things about the people around him, things yoongi always wondered how he could possibly know from acquaintances. it’s beautiful to see this side of him.
how the lines between good and bad, a concept yoongi never truly understood anyway, smeared around hoseok, how every single moral the wizarding world cultivated vanished in his presence, how everything they were supposed to believe in gets blurry when hoseok smiles with that sweet legilimentic smile of his.
"woah, yoongi," hoseok breaks them apart, and yoongi would feel embarrassed by his own actions and the rejection if he wasn't distracted by hoseok's hands around his waist; the reassurance his warm palms bring. "what was that for? you didn't even get your present yet."
yoongi chuckles nervously, more than a little surprised by this implication, and allows himself to rest his forehead against hoseok's chest, staring down to the stone-grey floortiles between their barstools.
"sorry, i won't do it again. you're just so—" by merlin, he can't even begin to think of what hoseok is, really. "incredible."
"stop," hoseok laughs, a low rumble against his head, "you're making me blush." it looks beautiful on him. "but, you know, i'm not opposed to more kisses. with warning, maybe."
yoongi buries the apologies under his stomach, next to where the thing sleeps.
“i mean. i can help you with that?”
❊
“do you miss them?” hoseok asks.
yoongi has never seen anyone this beautiful, especially not someone sitting on his bed in the slytherin dorm as if it’s his home. maybe it is; the whole world should be hoseok’s home, everything should make place for him.
nobody is here, yoongi’s roommates have long gone to dinner, so they don’t bother with a muffliato charm to talk freely.
“yes.”
it’s crazy — or maybe it isn’t — but yoongi misses taehyung and jimin more than he had anticipated. it’s been harsh, returning to hogwarts without them after everything that went down, but he did it, and he’s okay now.
yoongi’s grandma was smitten with hoseok, his mom too. the holidays went by in a whirl, with flustered kisses and snow-filled afternoons that made yoongi’s heart swell with joy and adoration, with playful banter and countless embraces. it’s been perfect, almost too wonderful, but he doesn’t want to give that thought a place to live anymore. not even the duelling yoongi had to do with jimin and taehyung was able to taint it. and it was good, everything, with hoseok sitting on the terrace with a pile of enchanted, hot blankets to warm his bones, and a steaming teapot, watching yoongi duel his closest friends in the snow to keep them save. the fights were growing more dangerous by the day, as requested by jimin’s parents. and, okay, sue him, yoongi used the opportunity to show off his skills, the things he’s able to do with a wand. but it’ll always been worth it when hoseok kissed him afterwards and smiled so brightly and dangerously, whispering into the dark of yoongis room: “can you teach me?”
because this is how hoseok is — a wizard who doesn’t shy away from anything that yoongi shows him. a wizard who wants to learn, someone who’s sweet and intelligent and dark, not very deep down; anyone daring to look past the strained smile and bright eyes could see it. hoseok is someone who enjoys the forbidden things, someone who’s not afraid to work for his success and cross lines, who wants to be seen and step out of his sister’s shadow, doing great things. someone learning things like poking around in other people’s heads in his free time, snooping through memories and business ideas for a merchandise line of tiny pocket monsters, doing as he pleases, because he’s bored. he is cunning, dangerous, someone who should be feared. but yoongi doesn’t have it in himself to even think about staying away or doing anything else than loving him.
because that is how yoongi is, he admits in the first night back at hogwarts, when he can’t sleep — a wizard who loves too deep for his own good. but it’s okay. it hurts, especially when jimin and taehyung don’t wait for him at dinner or in the common room and don’t drag him down to hogsmeade for butterbeer or try to transform the stairs into waterfalls, it hurts to know they won’t come back and watch him crawl out of bed after a night of learning or how he’ll receive his diploma because they are in france, in beauxbatons, on command of their parents.
it hurts when hoseok smiles for him only.
hoseok sits across from him on his bed in a white shirt that’s way too cold for january but drapes over his collarbones so delicately and makes it impossible to worry about anything. it hurts, but it’s okay, because it’s proof that yoongi cares. and that’s everything that matters, he thinks.
“did you finish the potion?” hoseok asks, a history book on his lap, quill mindlessly twirling between his fingers.
yoongi nods, thinks of how bad it had reeked in the potions classroom a few minutes ago, sits down at the edge of the mattress and tosses one of the violet vials over to hoseok, who catches it with quick hands and smiles.
“i just hope snape doesn’t notice i used his classroom for it. or the missing alihotsy.”
he had used his free afternoon and the lazy post-christmas atmosphere around the castle to brew a baneberry potion to send to jimin and taehyung. he doesn’t know what they could possibly need a dangerous poison for, but he’s the last person to deny them anything.
yoongi wipes his face in exhaustion and plops down next to hoseok’s shins.
the days seem longer than ever before, now that he’s back.
he gets ups again immediately, turning to hoseok and pulling his legs up to his chest, as if to curl into a ball right here on top of the crumpled blanket.
“and there wasn’t any arnica, for whatever reason, so i had to substitute with amanita phalloides. it’s not red now, but should work the same, maybe a tad slower and more painful, who’s to say. i’m trying not to think of what happens if i fucked it up.”
“yoongi.”
he hums, looking up from his knees to face hoseok after a few seconds of silence.
“what?”
“you’re unbelievable.”
he opens his mouth to protest, because he’s very believable, and just thinking rational, he tries to think of everything that could go wrong with producing a highly toxic, most likely illegal, pain-inducing potion in a school’s cauldron, with stolen ingredients, and exporting it to another country. he’s not unbelievable. he’s just worried, because it’s his second time brewing it, and he didn’t get everything he needed and had to improvise and it could all go terribly wrong.
but he doesn’t get to say anything, because hoseok has silently abandoned his book and paper and gotten up on his knees.
then there are soft hands at yoongi’s shoulders, and the next time he has time to think, he’s shoved down onto the mattress, lying on his back, hoseok hovering over him, the damned shirt slipping off his left shoulder, long strands of hair framing his eyes, dark and bright at the same time.
“my shirt will be all wrinkly,” he whines, playful, careful. grinning up at hoseok is the easiest thing in the world right now, the only right thing.
yoongi sneaks one hand up to the side of his head, to wrap around hoseok’s lean wrist, and the other up under the dumb shirt, tracing a pattern that only yoongi knows onto hoseok’s waist, cool fingers on hot skin. always teasing, always testing. always asking for confirmation, for hoseok to take the first step. he’ll come around to taking, he thinks, yoongi will come around to ask for what is his and growing more confident; he just needs time. and hoseok said he’ll wait for him.
“i swear you’re the most intelligent, attractive person i know but you’re so stupid. i love you.”
and before yoongi can counter anything, think of any witty remark, any snarky comment, or maybe even a sappy answer to the last part that comes across whispered, hoseok leans down to kiss the brains out of him under the soft lights of a bunch of teenagers’ bedroom in a thousand year old castle somewhere in the cold, empty scottish mountains.
and that’s fine, too.
❊
jimin calls that night, when hoseok has long fallen asleep in yoongi’s bed — a thing he has a hard time to believe it could happen although it does happen about every other day.
yoongi had decided to work on an essay that’s due in a little less than two weeks and settled on a couch near the fire to keep himself warm and awake. then the familiar fwoosh murmurs throught the common room and yoongi abandons his care of magical creatures homework to greet whoever it is that calls at half past eleven, basically already knowing it’s either taehyung or jimin.
“hyung,” jimin pouts, his head in between the flames, “you have to teach us that translator spell.”
“good evening to you too,” yoongi rolls his eyes but can’t help his lips curl into a smile. “i’ve been doing fine, thanks for asking, my dearest friend.”
“outrageous!” taehyung yells somewhere off-fireplace. he shoves jimin out of the flames. “say that to my face!”
“i lied,” yoongi whispers, holding up his hands, “you’re my dearest friend. don’t tell jimin.”
“traitor,” they both laugh after two seconds of silence.
jimin reappers, violently pushing taehyung aside, his pink hair no longer pink but blond. “are you happy?”
the question comes sudden, amidst harmless banter, and yoongi doesn’t know what to say at that. is he happy? with hoseok, yes. but he can’t depend his life on hoseok — or anyone, for that matter. he’s supposed to be happy on his own. is he? without jimin and taehyung? not really. with hoseok? yes, almost.
he doesn’t know what to say, so he shrugs. “i don’t know. i am, but you’re not here. i miss you.”
“we miss you too, hyungie!” taehyung screeches. yoongi flinches at his volume, probably waking their whole house (because apparently, beauxbatons insists on separating children at a young age to raise them to be perfect copies of some thousand-year old founders, too). then he leans into the flames upside-down, from somewhere above their fireplace, his dark hair touching jimin’s. “speaking of, do you maybe happen to own an old transfiguration homework on — what was it — the development of animagi from the seventeenth century to today? just so i can compare it with my own.”
yoongi sighs, not voicing his question how exactly this was a matter that justified the use of “speaking of” or his doubts about taehyung’s allegedly existing homework.
“sure, i’ll send it with the baneberry potion. don’t copy it word for word, though.” he pauses.
“what do you need the potion for, by the way?”
“oh, just a few assholes here and there who need to be put into place,” jimin shrugs, the hint of an annoyed smirk on his lips. taehyung pulls a face, scrunches his nose and goes cross-eyed.
“ah,” yoongi offers lamely. yes, it makes sense, he just had forgotten they’d have to re-establish their dominance at a new school; their reputation apparently didn’t follow them to france, after all. “sucks. don’t go overboard with the potion, though—”
“yes, it’s highly toxic, we know,” jimin swats impatiently. maybe, yoongi thinks, he should grow concerned now, with their blatant dismissal of instructions, but he doesn’t, because he knows them. they might not know how to brew the potion, but they do know how to use it. and they are careful. “what are you and loverboy up to this weekend?”
yoongi winces at the stupid nickname. the both of them had taken to refer to hoseok as loverboy and nothing else, and they are very good at ignoring yoongi’s protests.
“you can tell us, hyung,” taehyung giggles as yoongi remains quiet, “we don’t judge, and we don’t spill.”
yoongi considers. he knows he could tell them, he trusts them after all, but speaking it out loud would make it real and he doesnt know if he’s ready for that yet. especially without hoseok. but then he thinks he might as well tell them now, because even if they were against it — which he highly doubts —, they couldn’t do anything about it from their secluded little chateau tucked away in the pyrenees.
the common room is completely empty save for him, but he still casts a silent muffliato charm. they go quiet, serious.
“hoseok identified everyone involved in … you know. and we’ll take care of them over the weekend.”
taehyung’s eyes twinkle with mirth. jimin nods, a faint smile on his lips.
“discreetly?”
yoongi shrugs lightly; now that the secret’s out to everyone involved, he feels better by a whole lot. “maybe, maybe not. i’d do it in silence, but hoseok wants to go with a spectacle.”
“go out in style” he had called it, and yoongi has been once again reminded that hoseok is reckless — ruthless. he had seen how excited hoseok grows when practicing forbidden spells with stolen wands out of yoongi’s mother’s collection, has seen the dangerous glint in his eyes when he’s about to do something evil. but the prospect of taking revenge on people who hurt yoongi and his friends, seeing him plan everything meticulously, it takes yoongi’s breath away. it makes him wonder, admire, even.
“so you’ll transfer to beauxbatons, too?” taehyung asks, overjoyed. he disappears from the frame for a few seconds before popping up again, squeezed into the little space that’s left next to jimin. “let me tell you, they don’t have any security here, you can steal anything.”
“oh, yes,” jimin adds, grinning widely at his boyfriend and then yoongi. the flames flicker. “it’s shiny everywhere. and there are so many places to hide, it’s insane. hogwarts looks like a boring cube in comparison.”
“yes, maybe,” yoongi smiles.
he doesn’t add anything, nothing about the insecurity or the question of what will happen once they set their plan in action, if they’ll be expelled or leave voluntarily beforehand, or if they won’t get caught. it doesn’t really matter. so he doesn’t say anything. it will work out for them in the end. it has to, it just has.
they deserve a happy ending.
“by merlin, and when you’re here, you can teach me that translation spell. french is so complicated, i don’t understand shit! why is ‘l'œil’ written like that, it makes no sense! please, you have to come around and, dunno, charm a quill or something, tae doesn’t help me even a tiny bit with his perfect fucking pronunciation.”
yoongi laughs, surprised by jimin’s outburst and taehyung’s fake outrage, once again reminded of how worked up jimin tends to get behind his calm, collected façade. how taehyung and him are the best dynamic, how they simply fit together, two thieves and lunatics balancing out, how they click and how proud they make him. how they had almost lost jimin.
it fuels his rage, the thing in his belly that has been restless for days and weeks, the thing that has started to claw at his throat the moment he had set a foot into hogwarts once again, the thing that devours everything these days.
the thing that hoseok manages to calm.
when the clock somehwere in the ombrelune common room all the way in france strikes one am and jimin and teahyung yawn completely in sync, yoongi wishes them a good night, promises them to call — from anwhere; hell, if necessary — and ends the floo call.
he slips into bed not long after. hoseok waits for him. he rolls around, long hair sticking to his cheek, mumbles something inaudible (“turn down the volume, i can’t see anything” maybe?).
and as hoseok blinks up at yoongi with one dark eye, makig sure it’s him who’s finally coming to bed, yoongi knows everything will be alright.
because twisted, proud, ambitious hufflepuff hoseok, who resents with a force nobody could ever think possible, is here, in this bed, by his side. because they have so much to lose that they are willing to give it up.
it’ll be alright.
it’ll be okay.