Archive of Our Own ^beta

“I don’t think this is a good idea-“

“Nonsense,” Jeongguk replies, waving away Namjoon’s concerns despite how they hang heavily between his furrowed brows as he grasps the handles of the canvas bag in each hand. “This is fool proof.”

Somehow, Namjoon doubts that. He looks down at the contents of the bag and screws up his lips, confused and sceptical, but when he looks back up to meet Jeongguk’s confident face he just sighs. “I mean… if you say so.”

“I know so. Now, run along,” Jeongguk shoos as he turns in his computer chair, letting it swivel back to face his screen. His hands edge up to grab his headphones from where he’d let it circle around his neck to place them back over his neck before he pauses and looks back at Namjoon, still waiting at his door. “Oh, and don’t keep them for too long. They’re my sister’s. She’ll want them back soon.”

“Right,” Namjoon nods and closes the bag up. Carries it in his right hand as he steps back out of Jeongguk’s dorm and begins to head down the hallway, to his own dorm. Swallows down nervously as he anticipates what he’s going to learn.

It’s not until he sits down on the floor in front of his bed, reaches into the bag and picks out his first shoujo manga on loan from Jeongguk, that he realises that Jeongguk doesn’t even have a sister, and that all these books belong to him.

Fool proof, my ass.

But Kim Namjoon is a desperate, and more importantly stupid, man who thinks that he can win Kim Seokjin’s heart.

Luckily, Namjoon’s roommate couldn’t care any less about the ministrations of Namjoon, not from the moment he’d walked back in with a huge tote bag that he’d dropped right in the centre of their room, nor from how he’d sat cross-legged on the floor and surrounded himself with a plethora of shoujo manga. Yoongi had spared him a quick and unbothered glance before returning to his assignment at his desk.

Sure, Namjoon’s a little hurt that Yoongi doesn’t seem to care enough about him to ask what he’s up to, but mostly he’s relieved. He’s not sure if he wants Yoongi to know about his embarrassing plans on how to bag a boyfriend.

He grabs a notepad from his desk, flicks past the pages he’d scrawled numbers and calculations and formulae in and heads straight to the back, smoothing down the unblemished paper. Uncaps his pen and touches the nib to the fresh paper.

he writes in big, bold characters at the top of the page. Then, he etches out numbers along the margins of the paper, mapping out his list that he’ll fill out as he works through the mini library of manga Jeongguk had loaned him.

Namjoon licks his lips as his eyes scan across the beautiful front covers of all the manga lying around him. There are pinks and purples and flowers Namjoon doesn’t know the names of. There are female leads with long flowy hair and serene looks on their faces that say I am oblivious to how good I look as they look on to something off page. The male leads on the covers almost all have blonde hair and their school uniforms are a little askew, and the looks on their faces say I am better than you, and you know it.

He isn’t going to argue with the logic behind these shoujo manga, so he lifts his pen again quickly.

Completing the second item on his agenda, Namjoon realises, will help him complete the first. He smiles to himself with that realisation because he didn’t need any of the manga to figure that out, which means the following: he’s smart.

“Alright, Yoon,” he begins resolutely, pushing himself up off the floor. He dusts himself off purposefully as Yoongi doesn’t spare him even a glance. “I’m going to go dye my hair blonde.”

This, finally, snatches Yoongi’s attention. “You’re going to what?!” he exclaims, but Namjoon just hums and skips out of their dorm. He’s a man on a mission and nothing is going to get in the way. Whether it’s Yoongi or common sense. If the manga dictates he needs to dye his hair, then he will dye his hair.

One bottle of hair bleach, purple toner, some bowls and brushes later he returns to his dorm and proudly enters. Yoongi pushes his headphones down and watches him curiously, straight-lipped and wide eyed. “You’re actually going to do it,” he mumbles as Namjoon gets to work with the hair bleach.

“Fuck, yeah,” he answers brightly and pulls on a pair of plastic gloves.

“Are you going to tell me why?”

Namjoon gets comfortable on the floor between their two beds and spares Yoongi only a short glance. “Sometimes you just have to follow your heart,” he tells Yoongi while glancing at the cover of a manga by his knee, titled Follow Your Heart. Yoongi’s facial expression turns sour.

“And your heart is telling you to… bleach your hair?”

“Look, I’m not going to sit here and pretend I have all the answers,” Namjoon tries to explain as he squeezes out some of the hair bleach onto his gloved hands, “but sometimes in life you just have to get up and go, you know what I mean? Life is too short to sit around waiting for good things to come to you. Sometimes you have to be the one that goes towards good things.”

Yoongi pinches the bridge of nose. “Are you going through an existential crisis again?”

“No, no,” Namjoon wiggles a plastic gloved finger at him. “Not this time. This time, I’m ready to go.”

“You keep saying that, but I’m still just as confused.”

Namjoon huffs, his shoulders sagging with Yoongi’s lack of understanding. “You know what? Enough questions. Just sit back and watch,” he suggests, and then proceeds to slap the bleach onto the top of his head.

As he works the product into his hair, trying (and most likely failing) to coat each and every strand on his head in the hair bleach, Yoongi climbs down from his chair and looks around to all the manga novels Namjoon had laid out. He peers into the tote bag curiously at the many more novels Namjoon had yet to unpack. Then, he picks up the notebook. “Kim Seokjin?” he mutters questioningly, and Namjoon nods. “The hot dude from your class?”

Namjoon nods again. “I’m done moping around. I’m gonna win his heart.”

Yoongi angles the list towards Namjoon and points at the title. “Yeah, no, I see that. You wrote it here,” he points, “Operation: Win Kim Seokjin’s Heart, you cringy bastard.”

“What’s so cringy about it? I’m going to sweep him off his feet.”

“Right…” Yoongi drawls, settling the notebook back down. “You’ve never even spoken to him before because you’re too shy to.”

Namjoon purses his lips as he squeezes out more bleach and applies it to the ends of his hair. “That’s why it’s a mission. I’m going to read all these manga and learn about the art of romance,” he informs Yoongi and uses his elbow to point to one of the titles, The Art of Romance.

“Oh, god. If only you put this much effort into your studying, you might not have failed your last assignment.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Shoujo heroes are all effortlessly smart, straight A students. I’ve never failed anything in my life, ever.”

Yoongi scrambles up to his feet and Namjoon mildly watches him as he approaches his desk and pulls out a paper from amongst textbooks. “I literally have it here, look, you got a big fat-“

Namjoon lobs a manga at Yoongi’s head.

He picks at little strands of his newly bleached hair, making faces at the mirror as he wonders about how to style it. He’s got, like, five minutes to choose a hairstyle and an outfit before he needs to dash out of his dorm, and he wishes like hell that he’d gotten up earlier to make these decisions, but like an idiot he’d spent the entire night reading shoujo manga and making points on his list.

Sure, he’s just a little more equipped to face Seokjin when he lays eyes on Namjoon and his new hair, but to what effect? He’s got five minutes to style his hair and dress himself, and he doesn’t know what to do. All the boys in the manga wear their hair down so that it falls slightly in front of their eyes, but Namjoon’s hair isn’t long enough to style it the way they do. He huffs and curses himself mentally for not preparing for this years ago by growing out his hair.

He curses at himself for a minute before he runs a frustrated hand through his hair and pushes it all back. Stomps over to his wardrobe and promptly realises yet another discrepancy: all the shoujo heroes are still in high school, so they still wear school uniforms. Namjoon’s in university, and his wardrobe almost solely consists of sweatpants, hoodies, and t-shirts. He licks his lips and digs through everything he owns until he finds a pair of jeans and a button-down shirt. He doesn’t quite look like a school boy, but he’s close enough.

Fuck, Namjoon thinks as he stuffs his notebook into his backpack. It’s the first day of Operation: Win Kim Seokjin’s Heart and he’s already screwing up. His hair being blonde won’t mean anything if the rest of him doesn’t look the part.

But whatever, this’ll have to do. Yoongi watches him with amusement dancing on his lips as Namjoon leaves the dorm, his head held high, as he makes his way to the lecture hall. He’s a little late, which is okay, because if he strolls in late, he’ll

and be one step closer towards winning his heart.

It’s almost comical, Namjoon thinks, just how many heads turn when Namjoon walks into the lecture hall. Many eyes go wide, many of them follow him as he tries to find a seat quickly and just before the professor begins the lecture, but his mind is in two places. He wants to find a seat quickly so that he can blend into the background and cease the staring, but he also wants to find Seokjin and see if he’s looking at him, too.

Someone tugs on his arm as he passes through the aisle, and he looks down to find Hoseok, urging him to sit down in the empty seat next to him. He looks at the seat, whips his head around one last time, and finally he finds the back of Seokjin’s head across the room.

Notice me, Senpai, he wants to cry. He pushes his bottom lip out as he pulls his backpack onto his lap and takes out his laptop and his notebook. Opens it to the next fresh page solemnly.

The professor coughs into his fist, clears his throat. Signals that he’s about to start the lecture, but Namjoon couldn’t care less about biochemistry at this point, to be completely honest. Intermolecular forces? Fuck off. Namjoon doesn’t give a shit about van der Waal forces of attraction – he only cares about the forces of attraction he’s trying to exert on Seokjin.

“What’s up with the hair?” Hoseok whispers at him. “You look like a delinquent in a mainstream fighting anime.”

Namjoon groans. “Oh, fucking hell.”

When the lecture ends, it takes all of Namjoon’s willpower to not shoot right up and look for Seokjin. He bites on his lip, he clenches his fists, and he packs his bag slowly. He stands up when everyone else stands up, and that’s when his eyes flit about the lecture hall in pursuit of Seokjin. He tiptoes to use his height to his advantage, and spots Seokjin just as he’s laughing with one of his friends before he turns around and heads for the exit.

Fuck!

Seokjin hasn’t seen him, yet.

Operation: Win Kim Seokjin’s Heart is proving to be much, much harder than Namjoon had anticipated, and it hasn’t even begun, yet. He strikes his hands up into his pushed-back hair and messes it up, grumbling as he does.

“Are you going through another existential crisis?” Hoseok asks as they head towards their lab session, which unfortunately, Namjoon doesn’t share with Seokjin.

“No!” Namjoon shouts at Hoseok. “Yoongi asked the same thing.”

“Probably because you’re acting like the last time you went through an existential crisis, you dickhead.”

“Shut it,” Namjoon groans. “I’m just having a bad morning.”

Hoseok cocks his head to the side curiously. “And why’s that?”

“Nothing’s going according to plan.”

“And your plan is…?”

“None of your business, that’s what it is.”

Now, Namjoon knows what you’re thinking. Why is he so grumpy? How is he going to win Kim Seokjin’s heart like this? But it’s all according to keikaku (translator’s note: keikaku means plan), because in the few manga titles he’d read overnight he’d discovered that most of the shoujo heroes were aloof and distant. They weren’t friendly or cheerful. Namjoon didn’t even have to try with that part – there was a reason why he didn’t note that down on his action plan: it’s because he’s already a grumpy bastard. He’s perfect.

Hoseok doesn’t stop bugging him in trying to find out why Namjoon had bleached his hair – and even as they partner up with other students during the lab session Hoseok still shouts it across the lab, drawing more attention to Namjoon that he didn’t want.

Fine, Namjoon concedes, I want attention. He feels like a 2008 MySpace kid with raccoon highlights and skin-tight black jeans who just wants people to give him attention with this new hair of his. Sure, it’s just blonde hair. No big deal. People dye their hair blonde all the time. It’s the second most basic bitch hair colour after brown. No one really cares, but with Hoseok’s endless questions that direct all gazes at Namjoon, he feels like everyone does care, and he is a 2008 MySpace kid. Namjoon doesn’t want that kind of attention. He only wants Seokjin’s kind of attention. But senpai isn’t even here to not notice him, and Namjoon’s getting agitated.

“Okay!” Namjoon gives in, setting down the little vial of chemicals as he lets his shoulders sag and faces Hoseok who’s got a shit-eating grin on his face. His partner next to him looks about as annoyed and exasperated as Namjoon feels. “I’ll tell you after this! If you promise to shut up!”

Hoseok pretends to zip his mouth. It’s annoyingly cute.

“I’m a failure,” he laments the second Yoongi returns to the dorm at night. “I’m literally a failure.”

“Aw, come on, don’t say that,” Yoongi drawls in the least enthusiastic voice he’d ever bothered to put on. He walks into the dorm, drops his bag on his bed, and plops down next to it.

“It’s true. I’m the biggest failure in the history of failures.”

Yoongi leans over until he’s lying down on his bed, and Namjoon watches as his eyes close. He waits, patiently, but Yoongi doesn’t respond – almost like he’s gone to sleep.

“Hey!” he yells at Yoongi. “Aren’t you meant to tell me I’m being ridiculous and that I’m not a failure?”

The older male is startled awake. “So you know you’re being ridiculous?”

“Mind your own business.”

“Gladly.”

“Asshole.”

“Blonde bitch.”

“That was uncalled for.”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry.”

Namjoon picks at strands of his hair. He can’t slick it back the way he did yesterday because, and he hates that he has to admit this, but he really did look like a delinquent in a fighting anime as Hoseok had told him. The kind that other people would be scared to even walk past, even though he isn’t scary at all. Sure, he’s tall, and sure he’s got a perpetual resting bitch face on, but Namjoon is not intimidating all. He’s big and soft and kind.

A tsundere, he tells himself.

“Why don’t you do that hairstyle that all celebrities do?” Yoongi suggests as he changes. “You know, it goes up and whoosh and shows a little bit of your forehead.”

“I don’t want to look like a thug. I want to look like a shoujo hero.”

“Don’t worry. Let me see what I can do.”

Sighing in defeat, Namjoon lets his arms flop to his side as he walks over to Yoongi, who sticks his tongue out between his lips in concentration as he tries to fix Namjoon’s hair. Even uses hair wax, but at this point Namjoon stops paying attention to what Yoongi’s doing because he knows he probably won’t ever do this on his own. That would require buying hair wax.

But once he looks at himself in the mirror, he snaps back into focus. “H-hey. It’s looks alright,” he stutters nervously at his reflection, turning his chin this way and that. He looks over at Yoongi. “Do you think I’d catch his attention like this?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether you actually go and talk to him, you shy bastard.”

Namjoon purses his bottom lip as he shrugs on a denim jacket, and once it’s on he flashes Yoongi a pissed-off look.

“Be mad if you want, but your plan was to be a shoujo hero, right? So be a shoujo hero. Not a passive and timid background character.”

He casts his eyes down as he holds Yoongi’s words in his mind and leaves the dorm. He’s got one hand on the strap of his bag, his laptop packed along with his notebook that has his action plan scribbled in the bag. He’d read a few more of the manga when he’d gotten back to the dorm yesterday, and he would’ve liked to think that he was better prepared to tackle the agenda today, but now he’s not so sure. He can change his hair colour and his outfits but would that make him a perfect shoujo hero? Would he be able to sweep Seokjin off his feet?

This time, he doesn’t arrive late to the lecture. He’s here on time, and he sits down somewhere in the corner of the hall and can’t seem to care about standing out. He just wants to blend into the background and/or dye his hair back to black.

The hall starts is filled up with the last few remaining students, and Namjoon lazily watches them walk in. Looks out for Hoseok so that he can wave him over.

And Seokjin walks in with two of his friends, talking and laughing about something, and Namjoon blames all of the shoujo manga he’s read in the past few days because he swears he sees Seokjin surrounded by sparkles and flowers. He blinks a few times to stop hallucinating and rubs his eyes. When he opens them, Seokjin looks at him from across the hall and smiles at him.

Namjoon quickly looks down at his notebook, and suddenly cupid shoots an arrow through his heart. It’s thumping, hard, and his cheeks grow warm. He curls his fists against his knees.

“Seokjin just smiled at me,” he whispers urgently to Hoseok when the dude finally arrives and sits next to him. “He smiled at me.”

“You know he smiles at everyone, right?” Hoseok replies half-heartedly as he lowers his bag onto his lap and pulls out his laptop.

“It’s the hair, I’m tell you, it’s working.”

Hoseok sighs and rests his chin on his fist, angling toward Namjoon. The professor walks in and starts to set up, so Hoseok takes the time to open up Namjoon’s notebook and flick to the end, to where his action plan was scribbled in, and he reads through it once again as he did the day before. “You really… wrote a whole list out,” he cringes.

“Yes. I came prepared.”

“To turn red when he smiles at you like he smiles at everyone?”

“Fuck you.”

It starts to rain lightly when Namjoon steps outside after a few hours spent at the library. He doesn’t have an umbrella with him, and his denim jacket doesn’t have a hood. He stands on the steps going down, unable to will himself to move from the shelter and into the rain. He just pushes his hands into his pockets and sighs heavily. Literally nothing is going the way he wanted it to. Because on the last page of his notebook, he’d written

and it’s raining, so this would’ve been the perfect opportunity to protect him from the rain, but here he is, umbrella-less, wondering why the fuck the universe seems to work against him. It’s raining and he doesn’t have an umbrella and he doesn’t even know where Seokjin is to even make that offer. He licks his lips and curses himself for being so useless.

“Hey, you can use this,” someone appears next to him, holding a folded umbrella in front of him. Namjoon stares at it, surprised. “You probably need it more than I do.”

He looks up at the kind person offering their umbrella to him when he comes face to fucking face with Seokjin. When their eyes meet Namjoon’s heart somersaults in his chest, it goes doki-doki and Namjoon almost squeaks. Seokjin just smiles even though Namjoon probably looks like a bewildered deer caught in headlights.

“Wouldn’t want the rain to ruin your hairstyle,” Seokjin explains, and pushes the umbrella into his hands. Nods once before pulling the hood of his jacket up and over his head, and then runs out into the rain.

Namjoon doesn’t know how long he stands there, shell-shocked. The umbrella almost feels like a foreign object in his hand. It’s only when he can no longer see Seokjin running in the rain that he realises he’s got an umbrella in his hand, and more importantly it’s Seokjin’s umbrella. He brings it up to his chest and wraps his arms around it. There’s no way in hell he’s going to let some rain dirty Seokjin’s umbrella.

He tucks it inside his jacket and makes a run for it.

Namjoon spends that night reading every manga Jeongguk had loaned to him. In the morning, he looks like absolute shit.

But he’s prepared. He’s never been more prepared in his life.

He pockets his phone and heads out of the dorm. It’s been three days since he’d embarked on this mission of his and he isn’t going to let that little shit bring him down with his negativity. Namjoon’s mind is clear. He knows what he’s doing. He’s going to take control of this and complete every action he’d listed on his action plan. He’s going to win Kim Seokjin’s heart.

One shoujo trick at a time.

Mustering up all the courage available in his body, he approaches Seokjin in the lecture hall just before the lecture starts. He’s sitting in between two of his friends and Namjoon’s heart is thumping way too loudly in his chest for him to hear what they’d been talking about, but it all ceases when Seokjin turns around and looks up at him. And smiles.

“Here’s your umbrella,” Namjoon quickly announces out, and thrusts the umbrella towards him. With his unwavering smile, Seokjin graciously takes the umbrella back. “Thank you for letting me use it,” he begins, and then reminds himself of his agenda. Specifically,

so he scratches the back of his head and opens his mouth before Seokjin can so that he can blurt out, “you’re cute.”

“What?”

Namjoon coughs. “Your umbrella. It’s cute,” he freaks out and rectifies.

Seokjin looks a little confused, so he looks down at his umbrella in his hand. Namjoon looks at it, too. It’s a plain black umbrella. “Um… thanks?”

“You’re welcome.”

He spins on his heel and walks to the other side of the hall where Hoseok is watching him with a huge, amused grin on his face. He sits down and doesn’t look at Hoseok at all even though he can sense that Hoseok is staring straight at him, trying his hardest not to laugh. He huffs and tries to focus on the lecture, and mentally prepares himself to step his game up.

Step his game up, he tells himself when the lecture ends and immediately shoots up to find Seokjin again. To talk to him again. To do something on his agenda, and do it properly. But when he finds Seokjin, it’s just before he exits the hall. Fuck.

He sighs in defeat and just accepts that he’ll have to wait until after the weekend, until Monday so that he can talk to Seokjin again. His shoulders sag as he and Hoseok walk to their lab session because he honestly didn’t think that it would take this long to Win Kim Seokjin’s Heart. He thought he’d be inspired by the manga, go to uni the next day and sweep him off his feet. That Seokjin would fall in love with him, hook line and sinker, with just one look. The way Namjoon did for him on the first day of universitiy.

He plops down on a stool in the lab, right at the back. The lead walks in and starts to send around handouts for the lab, and right behind him, Kim Seokjin walks in.

Namjoon’s eyes go wide at the sight of him. What is Kim Seokjin doing here? This isn’t his lab group. He looks around, says hello to the few people in the group that he knows, but he spots Namjoon sitting with Hoseok at the back and his eyes seem to light up. He weaves through the students to reach the back and grabs a seat besides Hoseok. “Hi.”

The greeting is stuck in Namjoon’s brain before it even has the chance to reach his tongue. Hoseok seems to notice so he greets Seokjin quickly. “What are you doing here?” he asks, and Namjoon is grateful for the distraction. Seokjin doesn’t have to witness him gaping at him like a fish above water.

“I can’t attend my lab later today, so I swapped with someone and came to this one,” Seokjin explains as he gets comfortable and peels his jacket off his shoulders. “I don’t really know a lot of people in this group, but I recognised you,” he says as he leans forward and pointedly meets Namjoon’s eyes, “blonde guy who said my umbrella was cute.”

There’s something in Seokjin’s smile that Namjoon can’t make complete sense of. A knowing glint in his eyes (his sparkling eyes), and a cheeky pull to the corners of his lips (his luscious and pink lips). He licks them.

“You called his umbrella cute?” Hoseok asks quizzically. “Why?”

“Because I’m an idiot,” Namjoon whispers, quiet enough that only Hoseok can hear, but momentarily he’d forgotten just who Hoseok is because he laughs out loud and claps his hands.

“Seokjin, this idiot has a name. It’s Namjoon.”

Seokjin smiles at Namjoon again, and it goes straight to his heart. “Namjoon,” he repeats after Hoseok as if he’s testing the sound of it out on his tongue. “Your umbrella is cute, too.”

“Y-you haven’t seen my umbrella.”

The knowing smile is back, Seokjin shows it to him for just a second, before he turns to look towards the front. The lab lead starts to take attendance and calls out everyone’s names before he starts the lab session, and asks everyone to partner up.

Now, even though Namjoon and Hoseok are friends, they’ve decided to never partner up, never again. They realised what partnering up meant back when the year started and their lab lead had said something about everyone being adults now and that he trusted everyone to make their own smart decisions about who to work with. Namjoon and Hoseok were ecstatic about that. Linked themselves at the elbows and got to work straight away. But what they didn’t realise was that a) they were still children at heart and b) they were not smart. Like, at all.

“What happened there? On your eyebrow?” Seokjin peers closer to Namjoon’s face after Hoseok had insisted Seokjin partner up with him so that he doesn’t feel out of place in this lab group. Namjoon quickly leans back and away from Seokjin.

“Um… I burnt it a little.”

Seokjin presses his lips together and looks down at his gloved hands. “How… how do you burn your eyebrow?”

“It was the first lab of the year, Hoseok and I partnered up. Stupidest decision we ever made. Anyway, long story short, most of my eyebrow is back.”

Namjoon tries not to look at Seokjin as he tries to repress the memories from back then. “I remember the first lab,” Seokjin recalls, “it was on histology. We weren’t using Bunsen burners.”

Finally, Namjoon meets Seokjin’s eyes. “Yeah.”

“So how did you burn your eyebrow?”

This was not how it was meant to go. Seokjin was not meant to find out how totally useless and pathetic Namjoon really is. Memories of that time were so far behind him that it hurt to try and drag it up to the forefront of his mind. His eyebrow had almost completely come back and was only noticeable if you looked very, very closely. He gulps. “We were dumb,” he replies, “and we’ve learnt our lesson. We’re never working together ever again.”

He hopes that Seokjin doesn’t pry any further and force Namjoon to explain just how dumb he really is. He doesn’t. He just throws his head back and laughs. “You seem so smart.”

Briefly, Namjoon remembers all the shoujo manga back in his dorm, and he licks his lips. Shoujo heroes are smart, but effortlessly so. He’s going to have to answer this question like a shoujo hero. “Oh, I’m just average,” he tries to say with an airy tone.

“And humble, I see,” Seokjin nods as he starts to organise their tubes. “I’m not humble in the least. I’m clever as fuck,” he adds with a grin as he looks down at the handout.

Namjoon swallows. So Kim Seokjin is hot, smart, and unapologetically confident? Shit! He’s proving to be a better shoujo hero than Namjoon is! “Good thing you’re my partner, then,” Namjoon tries to hide his nervousness, “too bad you’re only here temporarily.”

Seokjin doesn’t react to that. He just walks around the worktop and goes to collect the slides he needs, leaving the handout with Namjoon. Apparently he doesn’t need the handout. He’s got them all memorised. He brings everything back and even remembers to bring a bottle of oil immersion, and sets them down on the worktop. Fixes his safety goggles over his eyes, and Namjoon does the same. Seokjin gets to work straight away with setting up the microscope. “Maybe I should switch to this lab group, then,” he says as plucks up a slide. Meets Namjoon’s gaze and smiles that knowing smile again.

He throws his shit into his dorm, barely taking a step inside. Luckily Yoongi hasn’t come back yet, because he hates it when Namjoon throws his bag onto his bed because he always misses and never tries to pick it back up. Luckily, Yoongi hasn’t come back yet so Namjoon doesn’t give a shit about where his bag lands and skips back out of his dorm. His arms swing a little by his sides as he makes his way down the hallways, down the stairs, and towards the dorm Jeongguk shares with Taehyung. Doesn’t even bother to knock. He just lets himself in.

The two of them are sitting at their desks, their backs to each other, clad only in t-shirts and boxers. Neither of them look up at Namjoon because they’ve got big headphones over their ears and they’re too absorbed in the videogame they’re playing to give Namjoon the time of day.

Namjoon coughs into his fist in case they didn’t hear him come in. But Jeongguk raises a finger to him, silencing him. Quickly brings his hand back down to smash a button on his keyboard repeatedly and rapidly. “Shit shit shit shitshitshitshitshit-“

“Take that, you dirty cock fucker!” Taehyung yells at his screen.

“Ow!” Jeongguk yells and winces like he’s been hit.

Taehyung starts laughing manically and Jeongguk keeps smashing keys so Namjoon turns his back on them, walks out of the dorm, closes the door and waits until the sounds of Taehyung and Jeongguk screaming at their screens ceases before he walks back in. Jeongguk draws one leg up onto his chair and lets his headphones circle around his neck as he looks, unimpressed, at Namjoon. Taehyung, too, huffs and turns to face him.

Namjoon couldn’t care less if they’re not thrilled about his presence. “Jeongguk. I need some help,” he lays down his request straight away.

“Help with what?”

“Like- like the stuff that would make Seokjin fall in love with me,” Namjoon scratches the back of his neck, bashfully.

Taehyung snorts when he tries to hold back his laugh.

Jeongguk just sighs and removes his headphones from around his neck, dropping them onto his desk as he pushes himself up from his chair. “Look. All you gotta do is this,” Jeongguk closes the distance between himself and Namjoon, making him furrow his brow in confusion. He’s just about to ask what Jeongguk plans to do when the younger male strikes his hand out, causing his heart to jump up in his throat, and slams it against the wall beside Namjoon’s head. “The ultimate move, the Kabedon.”

Namjoon licks his lips, and then presses them together. “This isn’t romantic at all,” he tries not to laugh.

“It’s meant to be sexy,” Jeongguk leans a little closer in.

“Yeah, you missed the mark on that, too.”

Jeongguk sighs and leans back. “It’ll be different when you do it to Seokjin. You’re taller than him, so it’ll work properly.”

“Are you sure?” Namjoon asks, concern pinching his brows together as he peels himself off the wall. Jeongguk nods and walks back to his chair, plopping back down and scratching along the top of his thigh.

“Trust me, I’m an expert in this shit.”

Taehyung scoffs. “How?” he snorts derisively and spins around in his chair to face Jeongguk who’s objectively trying not to face the other. “If you were an expert, wouldn’t you be dating Hoseok already?”

“You like Hoseok?” Namjoon cocks his head to the side. “Should I ask him to do the kabedon to you?”

“I will rip your dick off,” Jeongguk warns.

“Or do you want to do the kabedon to him?”

“Fuck off, please.”

Namjoon clasps the door handle, ready to fuck off as Jeongguk had requested, but before he flees he gives Jeongguk a thumbs up and smiles widely. “Hoseok is single! Last thing he fucked was his hand! Go for it!”

He ducks out of the dorm before the pillow could connect with his head and hears it thump against the door when he slams it shut behind him and skips back to his own dorm contently.

Now, Namjoon isn’t as big of a dork as you might think. He has more friends than Jeongguk thinks is justifiable and goes out every weekend. To a party, to the arcade, or just to get wasted on soju at one of those tteokbokki stands with Hoseok or Yoongi or the both of them. Well, that’s what he usually does on weekends, but this week it’s a different story. This week, Namjoon has embarked on the path to love (as indicated by one such title, The Path to Love), and it’s proving to be quite difficult so far. The shoujo heroes in these manga all have confidence, and Namjoon apparently has none.

He spends the entire weekend cooped up in his dorm room, studying every single manga Jeongguk had loaned him, and even searches for more scans online. To be a shoujo hero, he needs to understand the role inside out. He needs to know the science behind it, the inner workings. For example, where to perform the Kabedon™, where to place his hands, the angle at which he should lean in. Namjoon studies it and practices it on Yoongi’s pillow.

And so on Monday morning he waits in the hallway, hiding a little behind a potted plant, waiting for Seokjin to walk by on his way to the lecture hall. He is, as always, with two of his friends on their way, and suddenly Namjoon feels nervous. Can he do this in front of other people? Is he going to chicken out?

Shit, Namjoon thinks as Seokjin almost gets lost amongst the students, and he springs into action. He’s a shoujo hero, he tells himself. He’s got this. He can do this.

“Seokjin!” he calls out, his voice suddenly sounding foreign to him. And it must sound foreign to Seokjin too, because he whips around, searching eyes looking for who’d called him, lips pursed in a circle. It takes a moment, but he finds Namjoon and waves his friends to go on without him. And he walks towards Namjoon.

“Hey, Namjoon! What’s up?” Seokjin asks as he reaches Namjoon.

Namjoon swallows down his nerves and reaches forward to clasp Seokjin’s wrist by his side. Seokjin doesn’t see that hand coming, nor does he anticipate the way Namjoon pulls, turning him to the side, and crowds against him so that his back hits the wall. And, just like Namjoon had studied, he slaps one hand against the wall besides Seokjin’s head. He completes the Kabedon™. Pride wells up in his chest.

“Um… Namjoon…”

He blinks and his unfocused eyes quickly snaps into focus on Seokjin’s handsome, beautiful face inches away from his own. His thick, dark brows are drawn down, his lips pursed with concern.

“What are you doing?” Seokjin asks, his voice small and thin.

“U-um,” is all Namjoon can utter out. He swallows, hard, and his eyes that are finding it difficult to stay strong on Seokjin’s eyes wander down to his plump lips seconds before his tongue peeks out to lick them. Fuck, Namjoon curses in his mind. There’s no purpose behind this Kabedon!

“Is everything okay?” Seokjin asks, finally looking down and away from Namjoon. He brings one hand up, and coughs into a curled fist. His ears are coloured ever so slightly pink. “I’m confused.”

Me too, Namjoon’s mind responds unhelpfully. “I, um- you-“

Seokjin brings his eyes up to meet Namjoon’s, slowly but steadily. His cheeks are tinged just the palest shade of pink, and Namjoon is more than ninety percent sure his own cheeks are a much, much fiercer shade. His mind stops working when Seokjin brings a hand up and lays his palm flat on Namjoon’s chest. “Sorry, our lecture is going to start in like two minutes,” Seokjin tells him quietly. Then, he pushes. “We can speak later.”

Namjoon watches as he jogs to the lecture hall and disappears behind the doors. He takes a step towards those doors, but not before he pulls his phone out of his pocket.

Taking a deep breath that he hopes will clear the blush away from his cheeks, he pockets his phone and tries to calmly walk to his lecture. He sees the back of Seokjin’s head, sitting with two of his friends, and quickly swerves so that he’s sitting as far away as possible. Hoseok’s sitting alone, but honestly at this point Namjoon couldn’t care any less. Namjoon has far greater problems to deal with right now to be able to join Hoseok and make sure he’s not bored and alone.

Halfway through the lecture, his phone buzzes in his pocket.

He barely listens to the lecture. He only pays attention to the time and clocks the fuck out as soon as it hits twelve. He’s on his feet and out of the hall before anyone else has even finished packing up their laptops. He heads straight to the cafeteria, buys two meatball subs and heads over to a table right in the corner of the hall. Jiggles his leg under the table as he waits for Jeongguk to appear, and when he does, he sticks his hand up in the air and waves it around for Jeongguk to notice him.

The younger male notices him and makes his way slowly over. He pulls the hood down and drops into the seat opposite. Reaches out for one of the subs and digs in. Namjoon slowly gets to work on his own.

“Okay, tell me,” Jeongguk finally begins after getting half-way through his sub. “What did you fuck up on, and how bad was it?”

“The fucking kabedon,” Namjoon laments, groaning and leaning to one side, his hand striking into his bleached blonde hair that feels a little crunchy. He supposes he can steal some of Yoongi’s hair treatments when he returns to the dorm. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

“Why not? The kabedon is the main show! Don’t you dare insult the kabedon.”

“Listen,” Namjoon brings a fist down onto the table, “I did the damn kabedon, and Seokjin looked so uncomfortable. I don’t think he liked it, at all.”

Jeongguk purses his lips thoughtfully and strokes his chin with his thumb and index finger. “Hmm…”

“What are you thinking about?” Namjoon wonders apprehensively.

“I’m thinking about how you can fix this. What if,” he begins, and meets Namjoon’s eyes determinedly, “you apologise to him, and bring him flowers?”

“Like, a bouquet of flowers?”

Jeongguk nods confidently. “This could be, like, your redemption arc.”

“My what?”

Jeongguk leans forward, his forearms on the table, hands outstretched like he’s about to pitch a million-dollar idea. “In every shoujo manga, there’s the beginning where the guy catches the girl’s eye. After that, they get to know each other a little, and some feelings start to grow. Then, the guy does something that hurts the girl’s feelings, but then he proves himself worthy of her forgiveness and her love.”

“So what you’re saying is…” Namjoon starts off, furrowing his brows as he tries to collate all the information from every manga Namjoon had read in the past week, “that it’s not over for me and Seokjin?”

Jeongguk shakes his head and wiggles his finger at him. “No, no. So long as you apologise sincerely and that you prove to him that you’re a good guy, all will be well.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah, of course,” Jeongguk reassures with a smile. “So long as you don’t forget to set me up with Hoseok.”

Namjoon waits outside Seokjin’s lab, waiting for it to finish so that he can apologise. He’s squatting by the wall, his knees are beginning to ache, but he’d run outside right after he’d finished eating and found the nearest shop and bought a really small and cheap bouquet of flowers. It rests on the floor besides him, now, as he waits.

The doors open, and Namjoon shoots up to his feet. The first few students out of the lab aren’t Seokjin, so his heart sinks a little in his chest. He bites down on his lip as he watches students filter out, alert and patient, until finally it’s Seokjin.

He quickly launches himself at Seokjin. Seokjin, who was talking to one of his friends, startles and blinks like a deer caught in headlights when Namjoon appears in front of him. His lips part, and then he looks at his friend. “Jimin, I’ll catch up to you later, okay?” he promises. Jimin nods and tells him where he’ll be. Seokjin nods and returns his focus to Namjoon.

His brows are pinched in concern, and Namjoon’s brain feels like it’s about to blow up. He thrusts his hands out to hand Seokjin the bouquet, but it’s only after the two of them look down at Namjoon’s empty hands that he realises he’d left it on the floor. He spins around quickly, locates the sad little bouquet, and makes a dive for them. Snatches them up as fast as he can, and shoves them into Seokjin’s hands. “Sorry. For earlier,” he blurts out quickly and recklessly.

Seokjin looks down, wide-eyed and slightly bewildered, at the bouquet. “Y-you got me flowers? For that?!”

Namjoon nods, but Seokjin continues to stare, mouth open, at the flowers. “I’m really sorry,” he repeats, hoping that his sincerity shows in his limited vocabulary, as he scratches the back of his head nervously. Seokjin looks around, quickly, and then returns his attention to Namjoon.

“You didn’t need to get me flowers, Namjoon.”

“But-“

“Really. It wasn’t that big of a deal.”

“Ah,” Namjoon sighs, and licks his lips. “Shit. Sorry. Again. Damn it. Fuck.”

He lowers his head and strikes both hands up into his hair, agitated and annoyed with himself and Jeongguk and all the shoujo manga that had given him so much false hope. He grumbles to himself for just a second until the sound of Seokjin laughing dispels every frantic thought in Namjoon’s mind. “You’re a funny guy,” Seokjin laughs, and Namjoon snaps his head back up, blinking, to find Seokjin laughing in front of him, his eyes turning into crescents.

Namjoon bites on his lower lip. Shoujo heroes are never funny guys. The funny guys in shoujo manga are always side characters; the comic relief – they never have their own stories to tell and are never important enough to be given a happy ever after. Namjoon doesn’t want to be that guy. He wants to win Kim Seokjin’s heart, but with every step he’s taken in order to secure it he just keeps drifting further and further away from it.

“Are you going to tell me what this is all about, then?”

“Uh, no?” Namjoon replies almost instantly, humiliation burning up inside him as he thinks about his stupid plan. “I just, um, yeah. Wanted to be your-“ Namjoon pauses, and he panics. “Uh, friend.”

Seokjin laughs again. “Okay,” he giggles, and grips the bouquet in one hand to hold his other one out to Namjoon. “Let’s be friends.”

Namjoon stupidly takes the hand and shakes it.

It’s been a few days since Namjoon had told Seokjin that he wanted to be friends with him, and he feels like pure shit. He doesn’t want to be friends with Seokjin. This isn’t how the stories in shoujo manga are meant to go. The shoujo hero is meant to woo the shoujo heroine and they fall in love. That’s how it’s meant to be, but right now it feels like Namjoon is merely the obligatory best friend in the manga that no one even remembers the name of. This isn’t how Namjoon wanted it to be.

Jeongguk tries to come up with another plan of action, tries to rework the list Namjoon had written down in the back of his notebook, but Namjoon barks at him, baring his teeth to make sure he stays away. Jeongguk isn’t going to stick his big nose into this, anymore. He’s had enough of Jeongguk’s stupid ideas. The first idea of his saw Namjoon pinning Seokjin to the wall against his will and without his consent, and the second idea saw Namjoon giving Seokjin a bouquet he was embarrassed to receive.

Then, they’d become friends rather than lovers. That wasn’t Jeongguk’s fault, Namjoon is willing to concede, but he’ll blame Jeongguk all the same. That bastard.

Namjoon’s gonna have to up his game, but this time, he’s got to be a little smarter. No more kabedons or bouquets of flowers. He returns to the drawing board (and by that, he means the shoujo manga littered on the floor of his dorm) and devises a new and improved version of his action plan, complete with ten points that will guarantee success.

“You’re gonna dye your hair back to black?” Yoongi asks curiously as he peers over Namjoon’s shoulder. Namjoon runs a hand through his not-so-soft hair.

“Yeah. I’m trying a different approach, now,” Namjoon looks up at Yoongi like he’s waiting for approval. “Most of the shoujo heroes have blonde hair, but some of them have black hair. From my research, the blonde ones are the confident and proactive ones, but the black-haired ones are softer and quieter.”

“So plan A failed, and now you’re trying plan B?” Yoongi asks, and Namjoon nods. Yoongi pats the top of his head. “I think you should wait before you dye it back. Your hair feels like the bristles of my toothbrush. Shoujo heroes are meant to have soft, silky hair.”

“Let me use your Olaplex bullshit, then.”

“No way. Foreign products are expensive as fuck.”

“Asshole.”

Okay, maybe Namjoon was being overdramatic. Being friends with Kim Seokjin isn’t the worst thing in the world, because right now he’s sitting in a lecture hall, Hoseok on one side, and Seokjin on the other. The beautiful student who looks like he jumped straight out of a shoujo manga had located him when he walked in, called out his name, and came to sit next to him with two of his friends. Namjoon is nervous as fuck and his leg is jiggling under the desk, his knee hitting the underside of it several times, and he’s pretty sure he’s sweating.

He almost doesn’t even want to look in Seokjin’s direction because he’s pretty sure that there are sparkles and flowers all around Seokjin if his clean and fresh scent is anything to go by. Namjoon’s pretty sure he’d be blinded by the light radiating off Seokjin’s face.

“You barely made any notes,” Seokjin leans a little towards Namjoon, peering at the nearly blank page in front of him. “Are you struggling with neuroscience?”

“Neuro-“

Namjoon quickly looks up at the screen up at the front of the lecture hall and realises which class this lecture is for, and he look back down at the notes he’d made – or lack thereof. He licks his lips.

“Uh…”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” Seokjin laughs. “I suck at endocrinology. But I’m alright with neuroscience, so I can help you out with it if you want?”

“I mean, I’ve already-“

Hoseok elbows him in the ribs. Namjoon wheezes and whips his head around to face Hoseok, his mouth ready to fly a mile a minute in cursing Hoseok, but Hoseok shushes him. “Let him tutor you,” he mouths at Namjoon, and a lightbulb clicks on in his brain. He whips back around to face Seokjin, who’s staring at him with wide blinking eyes.

“Yes, I’m super dumb when it comes to brain stuff. I don’t even have a brain myself.”

Seokjin laughs again. “Is that so?”

“F-”uck. Shoujo heroes aren’t stupid. They’re smart, and they should be the ones offering to tutor.

Seokjin smiles at him, good-heartedly.

He doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the lecture, and Namjoon decides to keep his mouth shut because he’s almost completely certain that he’s just going to make a fool of himself yet again. He tries to take notes, but his mind is far off, somewhere else entirely. It’s almost non-existent right up until the point that the lecture ends and Namjoon begins to pack away his belongings as if they were put to use at all that Seokjin turns to him once more, a slip of paper between two of his fingers that he holds out towards Namjoon. “I can tutor you in the evenings, just text me when you’re free.”

Namjoon dumbly takes from Seokjin the slip of paper that contains the holy grail: Seokjin’s phone number. He holds it in his hand like he’s afraid to let it go. “Are you sure you want to?”

Seokjin nods. “I always tutor my friends. It helps me remember things, too. Win-win situation.”

“Oh. Well, in that case, thank you. I’ll uh, let you know when I’m free.”

“Cool. See you around!”

And with that, he rises and gets out of the lecture hall with his friends, leaving an astonished and shell-shocked Namjoon behind. Hoseok nudges him. “You should’ve set a date and time!” he scolds him as he shoves his books into his bag. Namjoon ignores it and packs his own, but not before tucking the precious slip of paper into his jeans pocket securely.

“I didn’t want to seem desperate,” he answers as coolly as he can.

Hoseok smacks him. “You are desperate.”

“I don’t want him to know that!”

With a deep sigh, Hoseok shakes his head. “Pathetic.”

He tells Yoongi what’s up the second he returns to his dorm even though there’s not much to tell; Seokjin had sat next to him in the lecture hall, and offered to tutor him. Gave him his number. There was nothing even remotely romantic about any of it because it was Namjoon who had stupidly asked to be friends with him, and Seokjin was only holding up his end of the agreement in being a friend. Offering to help him study and giving his number. Friends do that. It’s no big deal.

It really is no big deal, but when Namjoon blasts into his dorm that evening he runs his mouth like it’s a huge deal. Saves Seokjin’s number on his phone and then slips the piece of paper into his wallet like it’s a precious photo of his family. Kisses it just before he secures it in there. And then he finishes dumping all his feelings on Yoongi, who doesn’t look interested at all in anything Namjoon has to say, before he drops onto his bed and runs his hand through his straw-like hair.

“Aren’t you gonna text him, then?” Yoongi asks a few minutes after Namjoon had stopped talking like he was waiting to make sure there wasn’t anything else Namjoon wanted to add.

“Shoujo heroes never text straight away. I gotta wait a little,” Namjoon replies, staring up at the ceiling.

“Why?”

“For a little mystery,” Namjoon answers matter-of-factly.

Yoongi spins in his chair and faces Namjoon, coming forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “Joon. First of all, your shoujo manga are all romances. Not mysteries. Secondly, Seokjin offered you help out of the goodness of your heart and you’re going to ignore him?”

Namjoon pushes himself up on his forearms. “Uh… when you put it like that…”

“Besides,” Yoongi sighs, “how long has it been since you came up with this plan of yours? We’re, like, 9k in and you haven’t progressed with Seokjin at all. The readers are getting antsy.”

Namjoon furrows his brows and purses his lips, his confusion painted on his face. “Nine what? Readers? What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” Yoongi leans back in his chair and spins back around to face his laptop. “Just text the damn boy.”

Namjoon sighs, and reaches into the back pocket of his jeans, hoisting his ass off the mattress to do so, and then opens up a new chat. “Help me write this text,” he beseeches, and Yoongi huffs.

“Help with what? Just say when you’re free and ask if he wants to tutor you in his dorm or ours.”

“Okay, but how do I start the text?”

“God, you’re so annoying. Just type hi Seokjin thank you for agreeing to tutor me or something.”

“That sounds too formal.”

“Write your own fucking text, then.”

Namjoon flips him the bird.

Namjoon puts his phone down on the bed beside his hip and stares up at the ceiling, feeling his heart racing with adrenaline from texting the man of his dreams. He lets go of his phone and uses that hand to press against his chest. His phone buzzes.

“Yoon!” Namjoon yells out. “He said tomorrow! At his dorm!”

“Accept it, then,” Yoongi replies flatly, unbothered.

Namjoon squeals, kicks his legs around on his mattress, and clutches his phone to his chest until Yoongi tells him to shut up. But then he peers closer to the screen of Namjoon’s phone and says, “you named him Senpai?”

“Yeah,” Namjoon answers, “because I want him to notice me.”

Yoongi sighs like he’s had enough of Namjoon.

Yoongi literally tells Namjoon that he’s had enough of him when, the following day, Namjoon asks Yoongi to help him pick an outfit and style his hair for Seokjin’s tutoring session. Hoseok was just as excited about the study date, as he’d called it, as Namjoon was, so he had followed Namjoon back to his dorm like an attached puppy and is currently strewn across Namjoon’s bed chewing on one of the cords of his hoodie.

“No, no,” Hoseok waves his hand as if his input was wanted. “Don’t brush his hair down. Show that forehead.”

“I don’t want him to look like a delinquent again,” Yoongi doesn’t hesitate to answer as he continues with his own plans. Hoseok huffs and pushes himself up and off Namjoon’s bed, swinging his legs over it, reaching out to Namjoon’s head.

“That’s because it was slicked all the way back,” Hoseok refutes and pushes Yoongi out of the way. “He’s got a nice forehead. I’m gonna make him look like Lee Jongsuk.”

Namjoon keeps his mouth shut. He doesn’t know who Lee Jongsuk is but he assumes it’s someone famous, so he keeps his mouth shut and he leaves his hair in the capable hands of Hoseok while Yoongi picks out an outfit.

He remains quiet and patient only because he’s a nervous mess on the inside. He stands for Yoongi to hold up different items of clothing against him, scrutinising this way and that, until he finally decides on an outfit. A plain grey t-shirt and a pair of black straight-legged jeans.

“You spent half an hour coming up with that?” Hoseok sneers, his eyes flickering back and forth between Namjoon and Yoongi.

“I put a lot of thought and consideration into this,” Yoongi crosses his arms. “It looks good, but it’s comfortable and casual. Seokjin might find it weird if he turned up in a shirt or something.”

“Hmm… true.”

Namjoon zips up his jeans as a confirmation that this outfit was it; this was the one he’d wear and that he isn’t accepting any more changes. He huffs and picks up his bag from the floor and checks one last time that his laptop and books are all accounted for. They are. “Well, thanks for the makeover,” he says as he makes his way to the door.

“Go get ‘em, tiger,” Hoseok shakes his fist encouragingly at him.

“Who even says that,” Namjoon hears Yoongi mutter, but both he and Hoseok ignore it. Namjoon hoists the strap of his bag onto his shoulder.

“Okay, I’m off,” he bids his farewell as he pushes the door open. Then, he pauses and looks back into the dorm and says, “Oh, Hoseok. Go ask my friend Jeongguk out on a date.”

Hoseok blinks a few times, lips set in a straight line. “Is he single and lonely?” he asks curious.

“Single, yes. Lonely, not really. Thirsty for you? The boy is parched.”

And with that, Namjoon leaves the dorm, still nervous as hell. He heads over to where Seokjin’s dorm is following the address that the older male had texted to him, and every step he takes that brings him closer to the beautiful dude that looks like he’d just stepped out of a manga makes his heart race more and more. By the time he reaches Seokjin’s dorm and stands outside of it, he’s a mess.

He knocks once, twice, thrice, and then he curses himself out loud for knocking too many times. He raises his hand to run it nervously through his hair, but he can’t. Hoseok had styled it so that he would look like Lee Jongsuk and he can’t ruin it. He keeps his hand by himself.

“Who is it?” comes a voice Namjoon doesn’t recognise, and he immediately frowns.

“Uh… Namjoon?”

“Oh, it’s Namjoon,” he hears Seokjin call out, and then hears scrambling, and then the door opens. Seokjin’s smiling widely, his thick lips stretched out and his teeth on show. “Come in.”

He returns to where he was, sitting on the floor of his dorm between the two beds. Namjoon slowly shuts the door behind him and looks around the dorm as if it’s not structured the same way his own is, but he drinks in the way it’s so much tidier, livelier, better looking. Seokjin’s roommate waves at him and puts his headphones back on before he returns to whatever it was he was doing on his laptop.

“Come, sit down,” Seokjin pats the floor beside him, and Namjoon slowly takes a seat. Crosses his legs under him and lets his bag down on the floor, and takes out a textbook. “Let’s get started. What do you need help with, most?”

“Uh,” Namjoon begins cleverly, taking a hold of his textbook. He flicks through the pages and when his mind says stop, he stops flicking. Namjoon isn’t really that bad with neuroscience, in fact, it’s one of his favourite topics out of the whole degree, but if Kim Seokjin is going to tutor him then Namjoon will play the part of someone who needs tutoring. He looks down at the page he’d stopped at. “The thalamus,” he reads out from the top of the page.

Seokjin also crosses his legs and peers in closer to Namjoon’s textbook, and by doing so he brings his head alarmingly close to Namjoon’s face, so much so that his vision is temporarily disrupted by a head of Seokjin’s black hair. “Okay, the thalamus,” Seokjin identifies quickly, and leans back. Pulls up one of his own textbooks. “It’s a paired structure, right and left, that’s separated by the third ventricle. Do you know where it’s located?”

“Uh… in the forebrain,” Namjoon answers vaguely. He could elaborate on that and tell Seokjin more, but Namjoon doesn’t want to

or

so he leaves it at that.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Seokjin replies, and points down to the picture of the structure in his textbook. “It’s located right here, the dorsal part of the diencephalon. Superior to the midbrain, near the centre of the brain. Do you know what its main functions are?”

This question, Namjoon decides that he will not know. So he shrugs and tries to look curiously at Seokjin.

Seokjin laughs. “It relays sensory and motor signals to the cerebral cortex, and regulates consciousness, sleep and alertness. If you dare lose consciousness while I’m tutoring you, I will karate chop your neck.”

Namjoon blinks a few times, his eyes opening wide. “H-“

But before he can get a word out, Seokjin laughs again. “That made you alert. Because we’re studying the thalamus, right? Haha.”

From the corner of his vision Namjoon sees the roommate push his headphones down. “Do you see what I have to live with?” he asks Namjoon with an exasperated look on his face that makes Namjoon wonder how long ago he’d given up with Seokjin. “Biomed isn’t fun, but this guy seems to think it is.”

“Shut it, Jangmin,” Seokjin barks at him.

He returns his attention to Namjoon, smiles, and goes straight into teaching Namjoon about thalamic nuclei and intercortical connections.

A couple of hours later when Namjoon’s just about had enough cramming, Seokjin yawns and calls it a day. Sometime during their tutoring session he’d stopped sitting upright and decided to lie down on his stomach, legs straight out behind him, his elbows and forearms propping him up. Now, he rolls over onto his back and stretches his arms out, his fist hitting Namjoon’s thigh.

He’s tired, but the sight of Seokjin sleepy and stretched out in front of him makes him wake up indefinitely. He gulps and watches, and his throat goes dry just before Seokjin sits back up and starts to close his textbooks. “Did you find that helpful?” he asks, his voice light and quiet.

“Yes, very,” Namjoon answers quickly.

“Good,” Seokjin smiles. “We can do this again if there are more topics you want help with.”

Namjoon nods and stands up, his knees feeling tight and locked in place. He stretches his legs out, his arms, and then packs his bag. “Thanks, again, hyung.”

He heads to the door, and Seokjin stands. “I’ll walk you back,” he decides.

“Oh, no, you don’t have to,” Namjoon tries to dissuade him, turning his back to the door as he waves Seokjin back. Seokjin yawns, but he doesn’t look any less adamant about it. He grabs a jacket from the foot of his bed. “Really,” Namjoon pushes, “it’s like, a minute’s walk and I’m a grown-ass man.”

Seokjin laughs sleepily and shrugs the jacket on. “Still. Let me walk you home.”

Namjoon swallows, hard, at the sight of Seokjin rubbing his eyes and blinking lethargically as he ushers Namjoon out of the dorm, closing the door behind him. They walk together, slowly and quietly, through the hallway and down the stairs, and all Namjoon can think about is how he should be the one walking Seokjin home, not the other way around. Namjoon is meant to be the shoujo hero, and it’s the shoujo hero who walks the other home. Logically, it doesn’t make any sense and the list Namjoon had written out in his notebook is at the forefront of his mind, scolding him for yet again failing to be a shoujo hero, but he yawns and suddenly he doesn’t care anymore. He’s with Seokjin, and Seokjin wanted to walk him home. Even though he didn’t need to.

The sky is dark and the streetlights are flickering when they arrive at Namjoon’s front door. He unlocks it, puts his hand on the handle, and turns to face Seokjin. The shitty streetlights are flickering, illuminating on and off across Seokjin’s face. Under the run-down sodium lamps in the night time, Seokjin looks absolutely breath-taking. Namjoon swallows, nervously.

“Thanks,” he manages to get out.

Seokjin smiles at him, plush lips and full cheeks, and waves a hand dismissively. “Don’t mention it. I had fun.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Seokjin nods. “You’re a funny guy. I’ve thought so ever since that day you returned my umbrella.”

Ah, shit, Namjoon curses in his mind, and his hand tightens on the handle. He had tried to call Seokjin cute, but he freaked out and failed embarrassingly. Hoped like hell that Seokjin had forgotten about it, but apparently he didn’t – or rather, he kept that memory with him. Namjoon feels himself grow warm.

Seokjin laughs again. “Go inside,” he tells Namjoon. “I’ll see you tomorrow? And again, maybe, if you want to be tutored again?”

“Yeah, sure,” Namjoon breathes. “I found today really helpful. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He pushes the door open and lets his dorm swallow him in before he melts into a puddle at Seokjin’s feet. The door closes, and he retires to his bed immediately. Yoongi’s in bed, already, but he shuffles and turns around in his bed to face Namjoon.

“I’m fucked,” Namjoon tells him as he shimmies out of his jeans, leaving himself in his t-shirt and boxers, and he crawls under the blankets. “I’m totally fucked. I’m a shitty shoujo hero.”

Yoongi doesn’t say anything, so Namjoon pushes his bottom lip out, annoyed, and glances over at him. He’s fast asleep. Namjoon huffs and turns around to face the wall.

The next day, during their tissue pathology lecture, Seokjin arrives and sits beside Namjoon and Hoseok like they’re now good friends, like they’ve always been sitting with each other during their lectures. Part of Namjoon thinks that this is normal, comfortable, and that he’s happy with the current predicament. Another part of Namjoon says fuck that! because he doesn’t want to be Seokjin’s friend. He wants to be his shoujo hero.

He wants to be the one offering Seokjin an umbrella when it rains, and he wants to be the one offering to tutor, and he wants to be the one walking the other home. That’s how it goes in all the shoujo manga that he’d read, and that’s how wants it to be.

However.

However, despite the way Namjoon feels somewhat unsatisfied, he can’t deny that at the very least, he gets to talk to Seokjin and he gets to sit with Seokjin and sometimes when Seokjin brings snacks to the lecture, he shares them with Namjoon. Namjoon’s grateful for that, at the very least.

But there are still a few tricks left up Namjoon’s sleeve, and he’s ready to deploy them in order to win Kim Seokjin’s heart. He’s just gotta wait for the perfect time to carry them out.

In the meantime, however, he continues to be tutored by Seokjin. He’d told himself at first that he didn’t even need to be tutored, that he was only being tutored so that he could spend time with Seokjin, but the truth was that after their first session Namjoon felt like an expert in the topic. Seokjin’s an excellent tutor, and Namjoon is sure everything he was taught was imprinted into his mind. If Seokjin could teach him everything, Namjoon probably wouldn’t need to study anymore. It’d be cemented into his brain, and it wouldn’t leave. So Namjoon continues to pretend like he’s struggling so that he can continue to be taught by Seokjin.

So when the lecture ends and everyone is packing up to attend their lab sessions, Seokjin turns to face him just before he jets. “Primary visual cortex, tonight?” he asks, brows raised and a little smile on his lips. Namjoon, though he’d been a little dejected at the thought of not being with Seokjin during their lab sessions, perks right up.

“Yeah,” he smiles. “See you then.”

Seokjin smiles once more and leaves with his friends, and Namjoon stays sitting until Hoseok nudges him to move. “You enjoying your little study dates?” he asks, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively at Namjoon.

There’s something scandalous about the way Hoseok wiggles his brows, and Namjoon could only wish.

He attends his labs, he tackles some of his assignments, and then returns to his dorm so that he could change clothes. He finger-combs his hair and tries his best to recreate that Lee Jongsuk look that Hoseok constructed for him, and he heads over to Seokjin’s dorm. This time, Seokjin opens the door without asking who it is, and waves Namjoon in.

“I’ve got a couple of snacks,” he says, pointing to one of the beds topped with a mini mountain of snacks.

He turns around to walk back to the centre of the room, but his foot catches on something and he stumbles forward. Namjoon sparks into action, his mind bursting with the image of a shoujo hero stopping the heroine from falling flashing through his memory. He lunges forward and grabs Seokjin’s hips, holding him back.

“Oh, thanks,” Seokjin laughs awkwardly when he’s upright.

“It’s nothing,” Namjoon mumbles, a little flustered.

(And briefly he asks himself why he’s the one getting flustered, but that’s neither here nor there)

Seokjin seems unaffected as he doesn’t even acknowledge it, returning to the centre of the room. He points to the snacks again. “Help yourself.”

So he does. Seokjin’s roommate isn’t in, so the two of them don’t bother to keep it down. In between talking about Hubel and Wiesel’s ice cube model and the lateral geniculate nucleus, they talk about school and life and Seokjin tells shitty jokes that Namjoon laughs at only because it’s funny that Seokjin thinks he’s so funny, and they stuff their faces with sweets and snacks.

Seokjin covers his mouth with one hand, trying to hide the fact that he’s laughing with his mouth full of food, and uses his other hand to slap Namjoon’s thigh. “Okay, okay,” he mumbles, “we need to get back on track. Where was I? Right, hypercomplex cells and size selectivity.”

“That’s shallow,” Namjoon mutters as he pops another chip into his mouth. “Size doesn’t matter.”

Seokjin presses his lips together and looks at Namjoon like he’s trying to hold back both laughter and the urge to smack him. He lets his breath out through his lips and lets both of those urges go, focusing on the topic at hand instead.

And Namjoon isn’t even tired by the time Seokjin calls it a day. Perhaps it was all the snacks, perhaps it was the shitty jokes. Either way, Namjoon doesn’t really want it to end, and he would’ve gladly spent another hour listening to Seokjin talk about parallel processing if only just to hear him talk. But it’s okay, because Namjoon feels a little giddy, a little light, when he and Seokjin both put their jackets on and Seokjin offers to walk Namjoon back. This time, he doesn’t protest, and this time he doesn’t feel bad about it or about how he should be the one walking Seokjin home. He doesn’t care, anymore.

Sure, it’s not going according to his plans, but this is pretty good, too.

He almost forgets about the list, until he pulls out his notebook from his bag, flicked through the pages to find the next fresh page, and flicks all the way to the end. Seokjin is sitting next to him, Hoseok on his other side, and for about half a second the words

stare back at Namjoon and he quickly shuts his notebook. Seokjin glances at him briefly, but he quickly loses interest and returns his focus on his own notebook. Writes down the date at the top of the page, and then Endocrinology underlined twice. His handwriting is pretty and cute. Just like him.

His attention on Seokjin’s notebook doesn’t go unnoticed. “I hate this topic,” he laughs as he underlines it once more, his pen pushing into the paper harder this time, leaving an indentation. Namjoon flicks his eyes up to Seokjin’s face, and Seokjin looks up to meet his gaze.

“How about I tutor you on endocrinology?” he asks mildly, hopefully.

Seokjin raises his brows, a little hint of pleasant surprise pulling his features up. “That would be great! Things stay in my head better if I study with another person.”

“I’ve realised,” Namjoon replies with a smile. “How about tonight, my dorm?”

A tiny, almost undetectable smile peeks through on the corners of Seokjin’s mouth. “Not tonight. Some of us are going noraebang later. Why don’t you come along? You too, Hoseok,” he leans forward to tell Hoseok.

“Uh… I wouldn’t wanna intrude.”

Seokjin waves his hand like he’s trying to push Namjoon’s reservations away. “Nonsense. My friends will like you.”

“We’ll be there,” Hoseok speaks for Namjoon when Namjoon doesn’t reply for a second. And Seokjin smiles wide.

“Great! I’ll text you later, okay, Namjoon?”

Namjoon licks his lips and gives Seokjin a smile he knows is awkward as hell and he looks back at his notebook, the professor down at the front, and he presses his lips together. Clenches his fists under the desk nervously.

“Here, put this on,” Hoseok throws something at Namjoon, and Namjoon reacts instantly to bat it away before it hits him. A t-shirt falls to the ground by his feet. He looks up and meets Hoseok’s eyes and they both sigh, loudly and exasperatedly. “Are you really not going to go?” Hoseok asks, his hands on his hips.

“No,” Namjoon replies, looking down at his phone as he scrolls aimlessly through Twitter.

“Why not?”

“He only asked me because he felt bad. If I didn’t offer to tutor him tonight he wouldn’t have mentioned that he had other plans.”

Hoseok licks his lips and watches Namjoon, lips pressed into a taut line for a few moments before he huffs and walks over, picks up the t-shirt from the floor. “You let him spend sweet, sweet time tutoring you. You let him walk you home. And now you’re going to say that he didn’t mean to invite you tonight?”

Namjoon purses his lips as he tries to look at anything but Hoseok. “That was different. Tutoring me helps him out, too. And we did that alone, just the two of us. But this is an outing with his friends. I’m sure he doesn’t like me enough to- oof!”

His words are cut off when Hoseok tackles him, grappling at the bottom of his sweatshirt to pull it off him. He starts yelling but he was caught off guard, the sweatshirt already halfway up his abdomen, and now he holds onto as much of it that he can while Hoseok tries to yank it off him. “You stupid shit!” he yells at Namjoon as he wrenches one foot onto the edge of the bed to help him in the tug of war. “You fucking-ass dyed your hair blonde for him! And now you can’t even show your face in front of his friends?!”

“Two different things!” Namjoon tries to yell back but his head is lost somewhere in a sea of fabric as Hoseok has almost pulled the whole thing off.

“How?!” Hoseok growls and gives it one last tug before Namjoon’s hands slip on the material and it pops off his body, and Hoseok stumbles backwards with it. “You say you’re going to make him fall for you and that you’re going to make him your boyfriend, but how do you expect that to happen if you can’t even meet with him outside of uni?”

Namjoon brings both his hands up to hide his nipples. “This isn’t about my wishes. This is about him. I know he doesn’t really want me there, so I’m going to respect that. I can get back to trying to win him over afterwards.”

“How do you know he doesn’t want you there? Did he tell you that? Or did he invite you?”

Namjoon bites on his lip just before he gives up on the challenge in his eyes that he’d kept up this long. Instead, he stands and he walks to his wardrobe.

“Are you serious? You’re really going to bail on Seokjin after he told you to come?”

“Shut up.”

“Ever since you two became friends he started sitting with us in every lecture. Him and both his friends. Do you really think he’s fake enough to do that, and then invite you tonight without meaning it?”

Namjoon pauses at Hoseok’s wardrobe, hands stopped where they’d been rifling through his clothes looking for something soft enough to sleep in. He pauses, a frown catching him in the midst of a whirlwind of confusion. He doesn’t say anything because now he’s scared he’ll say something he doesn’t mean.

“If you think he’s fake like that,” Hoseok says, ending the silence, “then you shouldn’t like him at all.”

He takes a deep breath and turns around to face Hoseok. His brows are still pushed low over his eyes, and his mouth is set in a taut frown, but he sighs and feels his shoulders sag. “Don’t insult Seokjin,” he says quietly.

“I’m not the one insulting him,” Hoseok counters mildly. “It’s you, with all your bullshit. He invited you out, but doesn’t actually want you to come? He spends so much time with you, but he doesn’t actually want to be around you? You want to be a shoujo hero but you get upset when you’re more like the heroine? Well, news flash, moron. You’re both men. You could both be heroes. Who gives a fuck.”

Namjoon stares at him, a little wide-eyed and a little taken-aback. “Shit,” he mutters, his brows low over his eyes in disbelief, and he brings one hand up to cover his mouth. They’re both men. They’re both men. “Shit, I fucked up.”

“That’s right, you did,” Hoseok agrees, and throws the t-shirt he picked out back at Namjoon. “Now, get changed, you dumb fool.”

He obeys Hoseok immediately, quickly pulling the t-shirt onto him, stretching his arms to get it on properly. But once it’s on, he quirks an eyebrow and looks down at him, confused. “It’s a bit… tight.”

“Yes.”

“Like… I don’t think this is my size.”

“Technicalities,” Hoseok brushes him off as he hands Namjoon a pair of black jeans, and those, too, are tight. They hug Namjoon’s hips, his thighs, his calves. When Namjoon stretches upwards, the t-shirt rides up and the bottom of his stomach is exposed.

“Hey!” Namjoon screams at him. “What the hell is this?!”

Hoseok hands him a blue denim jacket. “Look, I’m not gonna argue with you anymore. Just wear it and shut up.”

“But…”

“Look, Namjoon, do you trust me?”

“I mean, I guess…?”

“Then trust me when I say you look like a fine piece of ass right now.”

Namjoon would really, really love to shed these clothes off. He feels a little uncomfortable, a little strange. He feels like he’s got everything on show, and he’s not sure about how he feels about that. He keeps his mouth shut and waits for Hoseok to finish dressing himself – in something a lot less figure hugging than what Namjoon’s wearing, by the way – before they head out. Namjoon pointedly avoids looking at himself in the mirror because he knows it’s only going to make him feel even more awkward and that isn’t what Namjoon needs right now. Right now, Namjoon needs to learn how to walk like a human in jeans as tight as these.

Luckily, the material is thick. Namjoon thinks he may have felt his ass jiggle in them if it wasn’t thick.

“I can literally feel you overthinking. You just look like a dude who knows he has nice legs. Stop freaking out,” Hoseok reprimands him as they head towards the noraebang that Seokjin had texted him to come to.

Namjoon can’t believe he’d almost bailed on Seokjin. He’ll never make that mistake ever again.

A few minutes before they arrive Namjoon texts Seokjin and asks what room they’re in. He pockets his phone in his jacket and continues walking with Hoseok who’s telling him something or another, but Namjoon isn’t really listening. His hands are stuffed into the pockets of his jacket, hand curled around his phone, all of his attention focused on his palm waiting for his phone to buzz. It buzzes pretty quickly, and Namjoon pulls it out of his pocket even quicker.

Hoseok peers over his shoulder and squints at Namjoon’s screen. “You named him Senpai?” he asks curiously, pursing his lips when Namjoon returns his scrutiny.

“Yeah. Because I’m waiting for him to notice me.”

Hoseok snorts. “Dumbass. He’s already noticed you.”

Namjoon’s brain pauses for a moment, everything’s completely blank, and then he mutters, “oh. Okay.”

He looks down at his phone, dumbly, and then taps around on the screen haphazardly as he walks before he replies.

He pockets his phone one last time.

Hoseok walks into the room that Seokjin and his friends had booked out, first, because Namjoon was too nervous to go in first. But he peers into the room over Hoseok’s shoulder, at the song menu on the screen up at the front, at the bright neon lights inside the room. Hoseok greets everyone and Seokjin jumps up to his feet and approaches Hoseok, clapping his hand and pulling him into a bro hug. The he points to the sofas and tells Hoseok to sit.

“Namjoon!” Seokjin effervesces when he finds Namjoon. He holds his arms out and Namjoon gets ready to return the bro hug, to drink in his appearance after, but Seokjin puts his arms around Namjoon’s neck and hugs him – properly.

Their chests are pressed together for a moment too long, too short, Namjoon doesn’t fucking know. He feels Seokjin’s soft, silky hair brush against the side of his face and his arms tighten ever so minutely, and then he feels his heart picking up pace, feels it thumping away. His face grows warm, hot, and he pictures the heroine in any of the shoujo manga he’d read blushing bright red when she’s hugged, and Namjoon wonders if he, too, has gone red. Seokjin lets go and steps back, and smiles at Namjoon. Pulls him into the room. Namjoon recognises all of Seokjin’s friends from biomed, so he gives them quick greetings before he sits down.

Seokjin snatches up the wireless keyboard left on the table in front of the sofas and uses the touchpad to find a song. “I feel like singing Dean,” he announces to no one in particular as he settles on a song, selects it, and hands the keyboard to one of his friends. He takes the microphone and starts to nod his head to the beat that starts to fill up the room.

“Guys, help yourselves,” one of Seokjin’s friends, Jimin, tells Namjoon and Hoseok, gesturing with his chin. “We went ahead and ordered enough for you two, as well.”

“Oh, thanks!” Hoseok is already leaning forward. He pulls a bowl of nachos towards him and grabs a can of beer. Cracks it open, and that’s when Namjoon notices the few other opened beer cans and realises Seokjin might not be entirely sober. That’s probably where the hug that made Namjoon go all doki-doki came from. He keeps telling himself that even as he downs half a can of beer and still feels sober enough to keep feeling all doki-doki and googly-eyed at Seokjin who’s belting his fucking heart out.

Honestly he sounds like he’s pointedly not trying his best, but even then Seokjin’s voice is heavenly. It’s clear and it’s full and Namjoon thinks he can melt into the sofa and listen to it all day long. But the song comes to an end, and Seokjin turns around to hold his arms out before he bows comically, and then plops down on the sofa when one of his friends gets up and chooses a song to sing to.

He leans forward and looks over Jimin to find Namjoon. “So? What do you think?” he asks, yelling just a little over the music thumping in the background. “First time you heard me sing.”

“Y-you were great,” Namjoon stutters a little, and his face grows a little warm again.

Seokjin looks just the smallest amount of surprised, but it wears away quickly. “Why don’t you get up and sing something?”

Namjoon laughs. “Not drunk enough.”

At that, Seokjin plucks up his can of beer.

Hoseok grabs Namjoon’s wrists and pulls him up and off the sofa, forcing him into the middle of the room. “Don’t be shy,” he keeps chanting to Namjoon as he scrolls through the song menu in the pursuit of something Namjoon would be willing to sing along to. Namjoon curls his hands into fists at the seams of his jacket, nervously, as he watches Hoseok try to find a song, as Seokjin’s friends are munching on snacks, and as Seokjin himself has his eyes on Namjoon, patient and unyielding. He feels nervous as fuck. He really doesn’t want to do this. He’s a shit singer.

But Hoseok apparently settles on something and pushes the microphone into his hands. “Here, you don’t have to sing. You can rap,” he tells Namjoon, and Namjoon turns to face the screen. It’s a Zico song. Namjoon licks his lips.

“I’m not sure if I know all the words,” Namjoon begins hesitatingly as the song begins to play.

“Don’t give a shit,” Hoseok replies back curtly and settles back into the sofa comfortably. Namjoon huffs out and squeezes his eyes shut. Tries to pretend like there’s no one behind him.

Words appear on the screen and Namjoon starts to rap. He doesn’t know how well he’s rapping, and his voice sounds weird through the shitty microphone, but whatever. He hopes that Seokjin and his friends don’t mind. He’ll only sing this one song and then retire from the noraebang scene forever.

So the song finishes and Namjoon awkwardly places the microphone back down on the table without making any eye contact with anyone. He sits down on the sofa and kinda wants to get swallowed up by it. Hoseok goes up to sing and he’s so full of energy, bouncing around the whole damn room that Seokjin’s friends get up and sing with him like they’re his backup dancers. Jimin’s even got a tambourine in his hands that Namjoon has no clue where it came from. He almost zones out and lets himself melt into the sofa when Seokjin shuffles closer to him, close enough that their knees are touching, and he leans back.

“I didn’t know you were so good at rapping,” he says mildly.

“Oh I’m… I’m alright. I used to rap a lot in back school.”

“Can I hear you rap more often?” Seokjin asks, and immediately Namjoon knows that Seokjin is being genuine. He’s genuine.

“Sure,” Namjoon replies even though it was hard to do so.

He feels Seokjin shuffle a little on the sofa, trying to get comfortable, for just a moment. After he stills the two of them just sit there, watching the live show in front of them, quietly and comfortably. Seokjin’s leg is touching Namjoon’s. He doesn’t seem to mind, so Namjoon tells himself not to mind, either.

“I like your outfit,” Seokjin pipes up after a minute. “You look really nice.”

Namjoon presses his lips together and wills himself not to turn into a blushing maiden again. “T-thanks,” he stutters. Seokjin turns his head against the sofa to face Namjoon, and Namjoon stupidly does the same.

His face is right in front of him, and it takes his breath away. Namjoon can see every individual eyelash of Seokjin’s, every hair on his brows. His deep, dark eyes. Namjoon gulps nervously, but his throat has suddenly become very, very dry. Shit, he curses in his mind. He’s seen this happen in shoujo manga, before. He can deal with this. He’s educated. He can deal with this.

But in this moment, nothing comes to his mind. It’s gone completely blank. He just gulps again, but that helps with absolutely nothing. He watches as Seokjin’s eyes narrow, slightly, just before he starts to laugh and turns back to face Hoseok’s performance.

Namjoon waits, but Seokjin doesn’t explain himself.

It’s late when they start to head back to their dorms and it takes twice the time to return than it did to get there. Jimin and Hoseok had hit it off and don’t want to separate. They exchange numbers. Someone was telling a story about something, Namjoon isn’t even sure what, but he laughs when Seokjin laughs, which is almost constant. By the time they return to the dorms Namjoon’s cheeks are hurting, he feels just a touch lightheaded, and he doesn’t want to split from Seokjin just yet. It’s late and Namjoon has a lab in the morning, but it’s way too early to stop looking at Seokjin’s face right now. He doesn’t want to go.

But they split up because they have to. Everyone waves their goodbyes to each other, and Namjoon’s ready to turn on his heel to head to his room when Seokjin skips forward and pulls him into a hug, again. This time, it only lasts for a second. This time, Namjoon doesn’t get to launch himself into doki-doki blushing maiden mode, at all. Seokjin lets go just as quickly as he’d held on, and then Namjoon watches his back as he rushes off.

He turns to face Hoseok.

“I thought I told you to ask Jeongguk out. Why are you flirting with Jimin?” he asks, his voice mostly flat but with just the barest hint of accusation.

“I wasn’t flirting with Jimin. Besides, I asked Jeongguk out a few days ago like you told me to.”

“Oh, really? And?”

“And we’re dating.”

“As easy as that?”

“Yeah, because I’m not dumb like you.”

Namjoon opens his mouth to refute that claim, but he realises he has no evidence with which to raise an objection. “Understandable,” he accepts.

“Anyway,” Hoseok coughs into his fist just before he turns to reach his dorm, “I saw you getting cosy with Seokjin. You should just ask him out, now.”

“Ugh,” Namjoon groans. “I’m scared.”

Hoseok licks his lips and looks wholly unimpressed. He stares Namjoon down with that look that makes Namjoon feel so inadequate until he gives up, shaking his head. “I can’t be bothered for this, now. I’ll chat to you tomorrow.”

And with that, he walks away. Namjoon just presses his lips together into a straight line and heads off to his own dorm.

He doesn’t see Seokjin the next day. There’s a lab in the morning, a tutorial, and then Namjoon spends most of the day working on an assignment. There are no lectures scheduled, so Namjoon doesn’t get to see Seokjin. Unfortunately.

But that’s fine, he tells himself. He’ll see Seokjin again. It’s not the end of the world, because as he’d realised last night, he and Seokjin are friends and Seokjin does, actually, like him. Maybe he doesn’t like Namjoon the way Namjoon likes him, but that’s fine, too. Being his friend is good, too. Namjoon still enjoys being Seokjin’s friend.

So he’s a little down because it’s, like, the middle of the afternoon and he hasn’t seen Seokjin’s face yet. It almost feels like the day won’t start until Namjoon catches sight of him. Like the sun has yet to rise.

Fucking shoujo manga, he curses in his mind.

Midway through a sentence he’s typing out on his laptop, his phone buzzes and he fishes it out of his pocket, thankful for any distraction right now.

Namjoon’s heart stutters in his chest at the sight of Seokjin’s name on his phone. He holds the device tightly between both his hands.

Oh, Namjoon realises, and looks back on Seokjin’s joke. He presses his lips together and wishes he would laugh, but nothing leaves him. It’s a pretty crap joke.

It takes Namjoon a few moments to will himself to hit send. And then he holds his breath in wait of Seokjin’s reply.

The day has finally started.

He’s literally about to lose his mind by the time Yoongi skedaddles out of the dorm room because apparently he doesn’t want to listen to Namjoon flirt awkwardly with Seokjin, and that was great when he first suggested it, but now Namjoon is losing his mind and his bed is unmade and Yoongi’s socks are on the floor and there’s no fucking way he’s going to be okay with Seokjin coming into his dorm when it looks like this. He kicks the socks under Yoongi’s bed and he tries to make his bed as quickly as he can, tries to smooth out the wrinkles, but midway through that there’s a knock on his door and he halts.

“Namjoon, it’s me,” Seokjin calls through the door.

“Shit,” he mutters. “Coming.”

He’s breathing heavily when he opens the door, and Seokjin picks up on it straight away, quirking an eyebrow in confusion and curiosity. Luckily, though, he doesn’t say anything about it or ask why Namjoon’s out of breath, he just lets himself in and sits down on the floor, unpacking his books and emptying out the contents of a plastic carrier bag. Snacks and drinks tumble out of the bag and scatter onto the floor besides the books.

“Sorry for the mess,” Namjoon laughs nervously as he joins Seokjin on the floor. Seokjin looks at him like he’s ridiculous.

Namjoon’s nervous as hell, he doesn’t even know what the endocrine system is anymore, but he figures the best way to keep his nerves at bay is to open up his textbook and start telling Seokjin about the pituitary gland.

“It looks like a ballsack,” Seokjin blankly points at the diagram in the textbook.

“I- yes, you’re right.”

He continues to teach to the best of his ability and sometimes he ignores Seokjin’s jokes or his dumb commentary, and other times he can’t ignore it because he ends up laughing. But they work through it together, chomping on snacks in between glands and hormones.

Soon, Seokjin climbs onto Namjoon’s bed and lies flat on his stomach, his arms hanging off the edge of it as he looks down at Namjoon’s book while he talks. He tries, really really hard to not focus on the fact that Seokjin is lying on his bed (his bed!) as he talks about laevothyroxin. He tries not to let his reddening face show. So he just continues to talk until he reaches the end of the paragraph, and Seokjin declares another snack break.

He reaches down from Namjoon’s bed and plucks up a gummy, popping it into his mouth. Namjoon just watches him as he chews, and just before he reaches for another, he looks down, under Namjoon’s bed.

“Oh, is that manga?” he wonders curiously as he reaches in, pulling out the first manga his fingers touch.

It’s one of Namjoon’s shoujo manga. There are coloured sticky tabs littered throughout the pages.

“It’s shoujo manga,” Seokjin pouts. “I prefer shounen,” he says as he thumbs through the pages, stopping at a page that’s been marked by Namjoon. “You know, all that dumb fighting, insane abilities and power of friendship stuff. Top of the range, high quality shit.”

Namjoon laughs as Seokjin kisses his fingers like a chef, but after that he peers back at the pages of the manga, and he squints at the sticky tab Namjoon had made.

His cheeky smile falls away, and Namjoon’s heart sinks. Oh, fuck.

“Namjoon… were you reading these for tips on how to…” Seokjin trails off as he opens up the manga on several other pages that he’d tabbed, “how to get a girlfriend?”

His mind goes blank, and there’s nothing he could think of saying. But what could he possibly say? He’d made those sticky tabs, there was no denying that. And Seokjin’s conclusion was valid, because he and Jeongguk were both dumb enough to turn to straight shoujo manga. He licks his lips and Seokjin looks up at him, eyes wide and brows raised, lips in a straight line.

He doesn’t know what that look means.

Seokjin climbs down from Namjoon’s bed and coughs into his fist. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to look through your stuff.”

“No, no it’s fine, I-“

“I need to use the bathroom,” Seokjin quickly cuts him off, and stands up, leaving Namjoon on the floor, shell-shocked. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

And then, he’s out of the dorm.

Namjoon sucks in a loud and deep breath, and quickly scrambles on the floor for his phone. Once it’s in his hand he goes straight to his list of contacts, and he calls Jeongguk. He doesn’t usually call anyone, but this is a fucking emergency. Jeongguk picks up on the third ring.

“I fucked up,” Namjoon breathes the second Jeongguk answers.

“What did you do this time?” comes Jeongguk’s bored voice.

“Seokjin saw the manga. H-he asked me if I was reading them to get a girlfriend. Then he got a little weird and walked out.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah.”

For a moment, neither of them talk. Namjoon just sits there, phone pressed to his ear, panicking like crazy inside his mind. He continues panicking and replaying the scene over and over in his memory until he hears a resolute sigh come from his phone. He snaps back into focus. “Okay, look. It’s fine. Hyung, it’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. In every shoujo manga there’s always a misunderstanding due to lack of communication. This is your misunderstanding scene. It’s fine. It works out in shoujo manga, so it’ll work out now.”

“Dude,” Namjoon barks down at his phone, “we’re both fucking idiots. Shoujo manga is straight. Seokjin and I are both guys. This whole plan was doomed from the fucking beginning.”

“Oh shit,” Jeongguk whispers, and Namjoon nods like Jeongguk can see it. “Shit, I should’ve given you my yaoi manga ins- I mean, my sister’s yaoi manga.”

“You don’t have a sister, you moron,” Namjoon curses. “What’s yaoi?”

“Hold on, let me send you some screenshots.”

Namjoon peels his phone away from his ear and navigates to his chat with Jeongguk and waits for a minute until a few images pop up from him. He clicks on one of them and sees two ripped manga dudes, naked, and having some really creepy and dubious-looking sex. He quickly clicks off the image, deletes it and all the others. Slams the phone back to his ear. “What the fuck was that?”

“Yaoi.”

“I’m gonna pull all your hair out the next time I see you. I ain’t reading anything you recommend to me, ever. Just tell me how to fix this misunderstanding.”

Namjoon hears Jeongguk tut through the phone, and his blood boils. His other hand clenches into a tight fist. “Not so fast. Misunderstandings usually last a few chapters.”

“This is a oneshot, you dickhead,” Namjoon spits and then hangs up on Jeongguk.

The door opens, and Seokjin walks back into the dorm, brows raised and lips forming an o. “Who were you arguing with?” he asks slowly and flatly.

“No one. Sorry. Um.”

Seokjin slowly sits back down on the floor, folding his legs under him. “Sorry for looking through your stuff,” he apologises again, his voice ever so marginally flatter than usual. “I didn’t know you wanted a girlfriend.”

The intonation of his voice dipped when the word girlfriend left his mouth, thought Namjoon tells himself he was imagining it. Still, he looks down at the space between himself and Seokjin and he curls his fists on his thighs and musters up all the courage he can, forcing himself to be brave. “I don’t,” he starts, his voice thin. “Want a girlfriend, I mean.”

Seokjin looks up at meets his eyes. “You don’t?”

Namjoon shakes his head and tightens his clenched fists. “I uh, I’d rather have a, um. A boyfriend.”

He pulls in a deep, sharp breath. Holds it in his lungs and wishes to disappear. But then Seokjin laughs and he releases that breath involuntarily. “I thought so,” Seokjin laughs. “But the manga threw me off.”

“You thought that I... liked guys?”

Seokjin nods. “It was the only explanation I could come up with about why you did those weird things when we first met and why you kept blushing around me.”

Namjoon’s pretty sure he’s blushing even harder, now.

“I didn’t want to say anything in case I was wrong. Didn’t want to offend you. So I just became your friend.”

“Oh.”

“Namjoon. Are you single?”

It’s difficult, now, to keep up this goddamn eye contact with Seokjin so he looks down. At his legs, at Seokjin’s legs. Anything but Seokjin’s sparkly shoujo manga eyes. He nods in response.

“Then, will you go out with me?”

Namjoon snaps his head up, eyes wide and disbelieving. His heart is hammering away in his chest and in the low lighting of their dorm room Namjoon sees sparkles and flowers surrounding Seokjin like he’s the handsome hero of a shoujo manga. He smiles at Namjoon, and Namjoon feels like his face is on fire.

He parts his lips to answer, but he can’t. So instead, he just nods.

His eyes are still glued to the floor so he doesn’t see Seokjin’s hand until it’s right in front of his face, until it’s cupped his cheek and pushes Namjoon’s face up. “Can I kiss you?” he asks softly.

“Yeah,” Namjoon breathes, and he leans in just as Seokjin leans in, and they meet in the middle with their lips.

They kiss softly, gently, just the right amount of push and pull from the both of them. It’s not how Namjoon knows first kisses are from shoujo manga, because they’re both shoujo heroes and they’re both kissing each other and it’s not like what Namjoon had in mind. It’s better. Seokjin’s hand is on Namjoon’s thigh, and Namjoon’s hand is clasping Seokjin’s neck. They kiss sweetly and tenderly until Seokjin breaks it, first.

“Hey,” he sighs as he pulls back. “I was wondering when you would kiss me ever since I suggested these tutoring sessions, but you’re kinda slow. And because we were studying hormones and shit, I’m a little hormonal,” he laughs at himself, “so I think I’m gonna head back now. I don’t want to go too fast.”

“Yeah, of course,” Namjoon replies quietly, standing up when Seokjin does the same. He helps Seokjin pack up his books, and then he follows Seokjin to the door. “I’ll walk you back.”

Seokjin just smiles up at him.

And twenty steps later, Seokjin’s hand bumps against Namjoon’s, once by accident, and twice before he slowly slips his hand into Namjoon’s.

He doesn’t want to let go of Seokjin’s hand when they reach his dorm, and Seokjin doesn’t seem to want to let go, either, because he stands outside his door with his hand still holding on tightly. “Tomorrow is Saturday,” he begins, swinging their hands side to side between their bodies, “I was thinking we could spend the day together. I’ll introduce you to some good shounen manga. How about it?”

“Yeah. Yeah. That sounds great.”

“Good.”

Namjoon licks his lips, and he feels his face begin to grow warm again, but he pushes aside the blushing maiden image in his head. He distorts that image in his mind, and the blushing maiden becomes a blushing dude. He steps forwards, lets go of Seokjin’s hand, and he places a sweet kiss on Seokjin’s lips.