Chapter Text
“Thank you, Seoul!”
He waves at the thousands of fans in the audience, hearing their screams and chants in response. Despite the sweat sticking to every inch of his body, he can’t stop smiling. He’s given his all so far tonight and the fans are more than appreciative.
With one final wave he disappears below stage as the lift lowers. The cheers chase him as the fans already start their calls for an encore. His pulse is racing from the adrenaline of it all, even after doing dozens of live shows for the last three months.
This is his last show of the tour, and it’s extra special. The fans just don’t know it yet.
You’re waiting backstage with that sultry look he knows so well now. He may have acted up on stage since he knew you were watching. It clearly worked.
“Min Yoongi, I’m going to sue you for being hot.”
He drops into the nearest chair to catch his breath. “You think I look hot?”
You throw your arms around his neck, lowering onto his lap. “So hot. Especially when you do that tongue thing.”
He knows exactly which tongue thing you mean. He parts his lips just enough for you to see him tease the back of his teeth with it.
Before you can kiss him, Naeun smacks you with a towel. “No, no, no. You can’t be horny here.”
“But–”
“Off!”
You obediently climb off Yoongi’s lap and she shoves a water bottle into his hand before patting at his sweaty forehead and neck.
“Why do I feel like you’re a chaperone?” he asks.
“Why are you always about to make out in public?” she retorts. Catching sight of you still standing here, she adds, “Aren’t you supposed to be getting changed for your surprise appearance?”
You drag your eyes away from Yoongi, who is still giving you a suggestive smirk. “Uh, I have five minutes?”
“Go get changed! What has gotten into you two? You’ve been together for over a year now, aren’t you sick of each other yet?”
“But it’s been months,” you whine.
“Like you haven’t shown up at his hotel for half of his shows. Go get your lace-covered ass into your stage outfit!”
“What color lace?” he asks, and gets a towel thrown into his face.
“So help me God, I will beat you,” says Naeun, waving someone over with a blow dryer.
You mouth the word “red” to him before disappearing to get changed. He smiles even after you’ve left.
“You two are something else.” Naeun starts combing shape back into his damp strands as another stylist blow dries them.
He finally cracks open the water bottle and gulps it down. “Like you and Namjoon are any different.”
“Excuse me! You don’t see me climbing into his lap when I’m supposed to be working.”
“You might feel differently the next time he’s on tour,” replies Yoongi. “Besides, I’ve heard stories.”
She deliberately pokes him behind the ear with the pointed edge of the comb. “I’m sure you have, and you’ll keep them to yourself.”
The other stylist shakes the blow dryer harder and pretends she can’t hear anything.
Yoongi shrugs off his jacket while they work, pulling on the final stage outfit. Naeun finishes mussing his hair just right.
“Are you ready?”
He knows what she’s asking about. “I think so.”
“You’re about to be in front of thousands of fans. You’d better know so.”
“Yes, I’m ready.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” he says firmly. He’s more than sure. He’s known for the last three months, since the night he did his first show of the tour and you surprised him in his hotel room in Los Angeles. That lace was pink.
This tour has been a miracle. After the scandal at Music Bank, Yoongi was sure his career was over. After all the media exposure following the scandal, plus the ensuing court case, his name left a bad taste in people’s mouths. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t to blame for the scandal. The media circus dragged up every bad decision he’d made in his career to the point that the end result didn’t matter as much. He kept his head down and quietly made music, all the while dating you. Then, as pictures began to circulate of the two of you in public and very obviously together again, interest was reignited.
Fans began to inquire about his comeback. Big Hit very cautiously began to promote. He released a surprise single that shot up to number 3 on the charts. By the time his full album dropped, everyone was ready to embrace him again. More importantly, “So Far Away” charted at number 1, beating out even his title track.
And now, a year after everything, he’s finishing his tour.
You return dressed and ready to perform, fitting on your in-ears. He’s never going to get over how beautiful you look. You catch him staring and give him a warm, radiant smile.
“Ready?”
“I should be asking you that.”
“I’m always ready,” you tell him. “I’m a professional.”
He’s pretty sure that tonight he can throw you for a loop. “Can I have a kiss?”
“Lipstick,” you tell him, still smiling.
It’s a mild disappointment. Staff motion him towards the stage so he follows, knowing you’re close behind. When he steps back out, the fans scream and throw up their hands. Thousands of glowing lights bob across the extent of the venue.
It’s exhilarating every time. Tonight is even more special because he never thought he’d get to experience this again.
The opening to “So Far Away” begins, just a backing track of your voice. You both agreed that it would be better for you to reveal yourself during the chorus, so for now it’s just him. The lyrics escape his mouth like muscle memory, having gone over this song so many times. It’s not old to him, just part of him now.
“ So far away ,” you sing, and the crowd shrieks and cheers as you step out next to him. He can see the first several rows of fans grabbing and shaking each other in their excitement. It makes him smile in spite of the somber mood of the song, because he loves seeing how much you’re loved.
This is a new experience that he loves, too. It’s one thing to sing a song with you in a recording studio; it’s completely different to perform together live. You orbit each other on stage, exchanging smiles, and all he can do is count down the seconds remaining.
He fixes you with his gaze as the two of you sing the outro: “ Dream, you will fully bloom/After all the hardships/Dream, your beginnings will seem humble/So prosperous will your future be.”
He couldn’t ask to finish on a better song, or sentiment.
The fans give you a standing ovation afterwards. You’re ready to slip away backstage, but he stops you. “Stay, stay,” he tells you, and you stand awkwardly for a moment before returning to your bright stage self, grinning and waving. He knows you’re confused. You’re about to be absolutely baffled. Or livid. He might choke on his heart in a second, it’s so high in his throat.
There’s a woman in the audience holding a “Yoongi Marry Me” sign. He points at it and says “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m hopefully about to be taken forever.”
An excited murmur runs through the crowd. You look perplexed, your smile faltering for a moment as you look at him. Then he lowers onto one knee and your smile disappears entirely, your mouth dropping open.
“Yo–”
“I’ve never done this before,” he announces, “so this might be a little embarrassing. And of course I’ve decided to do it on stage in front of thousands of people. So I’m really hoping you say yes.”
You’re rapidly cycling through every possible expression, your personal and professional selves crashing into each other right now as you realize what’s happening. It scares him that he might have read everything wrong. Maybe you’re legitimately upset with him for doing this. But he has to plunge straight ahead. He’s committed.
“I never thought this would be me someday. Today. Tonight.” He tries to gather his thoughts, hand shaking around the microphone. “See, I never thought I would love someone as much as I love you. But I do. And I want to continue to share my life, my tours, my happiness with you, forever.”
“Where’s the ring?” shouts someone from the audience and titters echo through the arena.
“Ring, oh God, the ring,” he mumbles, reaching into his pocket. “Thank you for that.”
He pulls out the ring box, which looks so small suddenly. What if you hate it? What if you hate all of this right now? But he glances up at you and you have the warmest, sweetest expression. He opens the box and holds it up to you.
“There were a lot more words I had prepared, but I’ve lost them now. But I hope you can understand my heart. I don’t want to go through this life without you. Any success I find, I want to find with you. Any hard times we experience, I want to experience them together and support you, no matter how difficult or easy.
“Lee Soonja, CALICO, my warm breath on a winter morning…will you marry me?”
There’s a beat where the entire arena waits with hushed breath. He’s so painfully aware of how exposed he is right now. You look like you want to cry, and he doesn’t know if that’s good or bad.
“I don’t have anything beautiful to say,” you tell him, your eyes glossy.
“‘Yes’ is probably the most beautiful word you could say right now. Also, my knee is starting to hurt.”
You let out a choked laugh. “Yes! Yes, of course, yes a million times.”
The venue erupts into loud cheers, lightsticks waving wildly as he rises to embrace you. The audience is still chanting “The ring! Put on the ring!”
He has this horrible image of himself dropping the ring on the stage to be lost forever. You offer your hand to him. After a tense moment, the ring slides onto your finger and you hold it up to them as proof.
You’re giggling and crying at the same time. Confetti explodes from the front of the stage and you drop your mic in surprise, immediately folding your body into him for protection.
“Good? You good?” he asks, though he’s not sure you can hear him over the noise.
You nod, rubbing at your eyes, still laughing.
After bowing deeply to the audience, you both make your way off the stage, hand-in-hand. The entire team of staff whistle and shout as you make your way back, someone dumping more confetti over the both of you. Naeun and Junho are waiting with matching grins.
“You knew!” you accuse Naeun.
“Of course I knew. I’m the one who gave him your ring size, idiot. Let’s see it!”
You stretch your hand out for everyone to admire your ring. It’s a delicately carved platinum band, the center stone a brilliant sapphire to feed your love for everything blue. Everyone “oohs” and “aahs” over it appropriately.
Junho claps him on the shoulder. “You did good.”
Yoongi watches you recount your proposal to the staff, who are all listening intently as though they didn’t just see and hear the entire thing. “I’m just very, very lucky.”
“That’s true, too.”
Someone’s snagged an abandoned “Yoongi Marry Me” sign from the concert floor and you take it gleefully. “Can we do the post-concert photos with this?”
The staff exchange worried looks, but Junho just chuckles. “Sure, we’ll do a few. May as well.”
The next hour is all about work. Yoongi poses for photos for social media, does the post-concert interview, and manages to steal one kiss from you that Naeun doesn’t bother to prevent.
“My shift’s over,” she says. “Make out to your heart’s content.”
“Jieun is never going to forgive you for this,” you remark as the two of you head to the car. You’ve got your hand stretched out in front of you again. He keeps catching you looking at the ring with a dreamy expression.
Yoongi tries not to roll his eyes. “If I waited for Jieun to like me again before proposing, we’d both die first.”
He is slightly worried about what your manager will do to him when she finds out, but you seem happy enough so he’s counting on you to defend him. Possibly physically. Your fans have started calling you the Muscle Couple. The moment your wrist healed, you were back doing boxing lessons with Jungkook. Which just made Yoongi have to work even harder. Sure, he looks great, but at what cost?
Junho drops you both off at Yoongi’s apartment, which is mainly your apartment these days, too. You still have your own place, but before tonight the two of you were already looking at getting a bigger place together. After all, you have babies to worry about now.
They greet you as soon as you open the door, winding around your legs. “Hotteok, come here my honey boy,” you tell a plump orange-and-white cat with a feather duster tail. He immediately starts meowing until you lift him up, cooing.
“I thought I was your honey boy,” complains Yoongi. Bungeoppang comes over to him the moment he puts his hand out, bumping her head into it and purring.
“Not anymore,” you say, nuzzling Hotteok.
Yoongi mock-glares at the cat. “You thief. You criminal.”
Hotteok places his paw on Yoongi’s cheek in response.
“He’s saying ‘go take a shower because you smell bad,’” you say.
“He eats food out of a can,” Yoongi retorts, but he’s eager to shower in his own home again. At first he was disappointed that the last leg of the tour was in Seoul, but it’s fulfilling to come home to you and not have to leave again.
After his shower, he finds you in the kitchen heating up leftovers. The cats are busy with their own dinner. You’ve changed into a pair of his joggers that you love to steal because the inside is soft. You love to steal most of his clothes. It’s like any other night, minus the gleaming ring on your finger.
You catch his gaze. “It’s so distracting.”
He reaches over to steal a piece of stir-fried pork. “It’ll seem normal soon enough.”
“Hey! Also, I don’t think it will ever be normal. Us. Married!”
“Is it really that strange? Haven’t you thought about it before?”
“Well, sure,” you admit, carrying the plates to the table. “But it was always kind of abstract.”
“You didn’t think I would ask?”
“I thought it would be me.”
To be fair, he can see that. You both take a few bites of your dinner. The cats, sensing there’s nothing left for them to benefit from, abandon their cleaned bowls and climb onto their tower to snuggle up together. You watch them with a smile that fades.
“Is it too soon?” he asks, feeling worried.
“It’s not that. I was just thinking of how far we’ve come. A year ago things were so different and now look at us.” You set down your spoon to stare at your ring again.
“Don’t stress about it too much,” he urges you. “After all, the engagement can last as long as you want. Well. Not forever. Please don’t make me wait forever.”
“Are you telling me you won’t wait for me forever?”
“I’m telling you that the waiting might kill me.” He told himself that he was going to be relaxed about everything. That it wasn’t going to change too much about the way the two of you already live. But he eats without processing what’s even going into his mouth. All he can think about when he looks at you is “ That’s my wife. She’s going to be my wife. ”
“You like me,” you tease him, and he gives you an exasperated look.
“I just proposed to you.”
“Because you like me.”
“I’m reconsidering.”
You flick a grain of rice at him.
No one does the dishes tonight. You’re both going to regret it in the morning, but you’re so eager to curl up on the sofa that it’s not a priority. You hug him like you haven’t seen him in over a month, which you haven’t. Before tonight he’d been touring overseas, and neither of you like to leave the babies for very long.
They came to you by accident. Someone had found kittens on the side of the Big Hit building five months ago. Two together that cried and cried and wouldn’t sleep. Until you held them.
You had looked at Yoongi then with that desperate hope in your eyes and that was it. Of course you had to take them. That was the same night you unofficially moved into his place.
He hasn’t known a moment of peace since, but he’s glad.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Telling people.”
Yoongi fights back a laugh. “Babe, I proposed to you on a stage. Everyone is going to know by tomorrow.”
You swat his chest. “Don’t call me babe!”
“Darling, loveliest of lovelies, my treasured childhood book, my tangerine…”
You settle back against him, appeased. “I should at least tell Jisoo tonight.”
“She knows. She helped me pick out your ring.”
“Really?”
“She took it very seriously.”
Your grin disappears. “You didn’t ask my mom and stepdad for permission, did you?”
“No way,” he says, and you relax. “You’re your own person.” After a moment he adds, “I did visit your dad, though.”
You turn to look at him in shock.
“Not to ask permission, but more like…just to let him know my intentions.”
“Did anything happen?”
“If you mean did a lightning bolt strike me down, no. But given that nothing did happen, I choose to believe he accepted me.”
“That’s very self-serving,” you point out, but you still snuggle into his side. After a moment you stretch your left hand out to admire your ring again. “I can’t believe the company gave their approval for this.”
“Oh,” he says lightly. “They didn’t. Tomorrow should be interesting.”
You sit up again so fast you almost knock your head into his chin. “Yoongi, you’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“You proposed to me on stage at your concert and you didn’t tell Big Hit?”
“Yep.”
“I don’t know if I should be horrified or impressed.”
He just shrugs. “I just felt like it had been too long since I inconvenienced them. Besides, it’s my revenge.”
You don’t ask what for. You both remember him being escorted out of the building and how you got hurt protecting him. He’s never let that go and he doesn’t plan to. This just evens the scale a little bit. They wanted him with you, and they’re getting exactly that. Permanently.
You reach under his shirt to stroke his chest.
“Handsy.”
“Mhm.”
So you’re still in that kind of mood, then. He slips his hand under the waistband of your joggers, only to feel smooth cotton. “You said lace.”
“Naeun said lace,” you correct him. “And I went along with it because I wanted to get revenge on you for acting sexy on stage.”
“I’ve been tricked,” he says, but there’s no heat in it. Lace, cotton, nothing at all–he doesn’t care in the slightest what you wear. You’re always sexy to him.
“I can change.”
“No need.”
He shifts off the sofa, then hooks his arms under your knees and back.
“Yoongi…”
“Shh.”
“What are you doing?”
He doesn’t reply, focused entirely on getting this right the first time. He’s done months’ worth of upper body workouts for this and he’s not about to dump you on the hardwood floor. With a stifled grunt, he lifts you up and into his arms.
“Yoongi!”
As he carries you towards the bedroom he has a moment of terror thinking the door is going to be closed. Thankfully, it’s ajar and he kicks it all the way open.
You have your arms around his neck and you’re giggling nervously. “At least let me put on something sexy first.”
“Why? I’m just going to take it off of you.”
“This is our first time as an engaged couple. It should be special,” you protest.
He nudges the light switch with his elbow and the room brightens. He really should have put more thought into being spontaneous. Ignoring the burning in his arms, he lays you onto the bed a little awkwardly. You don’t tease him.
“It’s already special and you’re always sexy,” he replies, pretending that he doesn’t want to shake out his arms.
“Correct words to say but you’re just horny.”
“What am I supposed to do when my fiance looks like this?” he asks, sliding his hands under your butt and squeezing.
“Close the door.”
“Hm?”
“The cats,” you remind him, and he hurries to close them out. He can remember a few ill-fated romance attempts that ended when he found claws suddenly in his skin and a rambunctious cat on his back. Bungeoppang looks offended as he shuts the door in her face.
When he turns back, you’re kneeling on the bed with a playful smile. “How do you want me?”
“I get to choose?”
“Yes, sir.”
He groans. “Don’t say it unless you mean it.”
“I always say what I mean,” you protest.
“In that case, will you marry me?”
“Yoongi! I already said yes,” you laugh. “I’m trying to be sexy, here!”
“Then everything off. Except the ring, of course.”
“Of course,” you retort, but you slide your fingers under the hem of your shirt.
He takes in your figure with hungry eyes, never sick of seeing you no matter how many times he does. He can’t wait. Not just for sex, but for the whole damn future ahead of him. He wants to buy that new place, he wants to move in with you officially, he wants to see you walk down that aisle.
You’re only half undressed but he can’t wait any longer to kiss you.
“Mm, Yoongi, you’re giving me a lot of confusing instructions here,” you murmur against his mouth.
“Then I’ll do my best to clear things up.”
Before he can do anything, the cats let out matching pitiful wails from the other side of the door. You burst into laughter, leaning your head against his chest.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he grumbles.
“They’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you . They can wait.”
The wails grow increasingly louder, as if to say no, they very much cannot. A small orange paw reaches underneath the door. Yoongi relents and opens it.
Both of the cats bound into the room and leap on the bed just as you’re putting your shirt back on. You coo and squish their faces while Yoongi just scowls at them, trying to express his utmost disappointment in their behavior.
Sensing that he’s lost completely, he climbs into bed beside you. Bungeoppang immediately crawls into his lap and settles.
“When I said yes, let’s take the cats, I didn’t mean to exchange my sex life.”
“We just need a babysitter.”
“How soon can you find one?”
You think for a moment. “Sunhee definitely owes me a favor or two.”
“Sold.”
With all the stress and excitement ebbing, he feels suddenly exhausted. Maybe it’s fine to just sleep tonight after all.
“Yoongi.”
“Hm?” he murmurs, drowsing.
“Will you marry me?”
“I’ll have to think about it,” he replies. You don’t respond, but he hears the rustle beside him.
He opens his eyes just in time to see the pillow before it hits his face.