Archive of Our Own ^beta

Jeongguk wasn’t a bad guy.

He wasn’t. He didn’t rob banks, break into houses, or — or steal candies from babies. He wasn’t a ‘bad guy’.

Granted he wasn’t going to laud around pretending he was a ‘good guy’, either. Jeongguk knew himself; in the choice between jumping into a situation to help another person out or standing around awkwardly hoping that the entire thing would resolve itself quickly, he was the ‘stand around’ type. He exuded bystander energy. When a problem happened and it wasn’t his problem, he made himself scarce. So, no, he wasn’t a ‘good guy’, but he also wasn’t a ‘bad guy’. He was a normal guy. An ‘another 24 hours of experiencing the weight of the human condition’ kind of guy. A broke guy.

Out of all the ways humans could be categorized, Jeongguk was pretty sure the scale of money was the most important. Unfortunately, as a freshly graduated student trying to get a job — in the city — during the worst job market in fifty years without the fat wallet of nepotism bolstering his pockets, he was on the lower end of that scale. Double unfortunately, he’d gotten his degree in computer science. Like every other person in the world, apparently.

“And there’s no other openings?” Jeongguk asked, looking but not seeing the street or the people crowded on it. The hum of the light above his head was obnoxiously loud. Jeongguk wondered if he’d get kicked out for standing up on the table to properly screw the lightbulb in.

“The company is looking for engineers that are closer to home,” the recruiter said, the English accented and heavy. “Visa sponsorship requires a lot of hoops, Mr. Chun. I’m sorry it’s come to this.”

Jeongguk didn’t think the recruiter sounded very sorry. They couldn't even get his name right. “Couldn’t they have told me that four weeks ago?” He wasn’t trying to sound bitter, but he’d gone through six rounds of interviews. Six. For the company to suddenly decide sponsoring his visa would be too much now, a whole month later, was a slap in the face.

“It’s unfortunate,” the recruiter said. Jeongguk scoffed. “But we’ll keep your resume on file in case anything changes.”

“Thanks,” Jeongguk said, swirling more of his leftover ramen broth. “Thanks for keeping me in mind.”

“You’ll find something.” The recruiter was trying for comforting. Jeongguk knew he was never going to hear back from this recruiter ever again. “Good luck.”

Jeongguk swallowed the rest of his soup after the line clicked off. There wasn’t anything he could do about his now officially eight-month long stretch of unemployment, but that was the funny thing about the world; no one cared. He still had an apartment to pay for and food he needed to eat. The cost of survival was staggeringly high, especially in Seoul.

The convenience store doors chimed as he was throwing his ramen bowl away, the rush of winter biting his exposed toes.

“I can’t believe it’s snowing!” a girl chirped, her face bright and wind-kissed red at her cheeks. Her arm was wound around the man next to her, who was very unsteady on his feet. He smiled at her and patted her head. “It’s our first snow, babe! So romantic!”

“Yup,” was all the man replied. “Gonna fuck you right through it.”

The girl giggled. Jeongguk didn’t personally find the phrase romantic, but to each their own. She smacked the man’s arm. “Babe! So naughty.”

The man wobbled them over to the aisle Jeongguk knew had condoms in it. “Naughty for you, baby. Gonna fuck you so good, Jihee.”

The sound of shuffling stopped. Jeongguk pushed his chopsticks into the trash, too.

“Who the fuck is Jihee!” the girl screeched, making the cashier look up from his phone. “I can’t believe you fucking — are you cheating on me, you motherfucker?”

“No, no, no, Min… Minsu, Minsu, baby, no, I would never—”

Jeongguk tore the wrapper off of his water bottle. He tossed the bottle into the recycle and the wrapper into the trash.

There was a distinct sound of flesh hitting flesh. The cashier shot out, phone in hand.

“Ma’am! Sir! You can’t fight—”

“Did you just fucking slap me?” the man roared, “You fucking bitch!”

“Call me a bitch again you motherfuc—”

More flesh hitting flesh. The cashier was diving in, shouting for them to stop. There was more screaming. People were beginning to look through the glass.

Jeongguk didn’t stay for the show. He didn’t turn around to help. He stepped through the convenience store door, pulled his hood over his head, and delicately, quickly, unobtrusively, fled.

His bank account was running low.

Jeongguk knew this not from a keen sense of his finances — he was in denial he even had such a thing as finances; didn’t he need actual money for that? — but because of his landlady’s arrogant nephew (who claimed himself to be the building manager but did absolute shit) texting him at 6:30 in the morning that his funds were officially nonexistent.

Parasite
Tried to pull this month’s rent and utilities from the account. Short ₩50,000. What gives?

Jeongguk didn’t see the text until noon when he woke up, but it reminded him once again how uncannily similar gangsters and micromanaging building managers could be.

Me
Sorry, I’ll deposit the difference as soon as I can

Jeongguk replied back then sighed. ₩50,000. About $45, huh?

He rolled out of bed to wash himself up, ate a stale roll of kimbap from his fridge, and checked his calendar for the day.

There weren’t any interviews today. Which was good for his wallet but bad for his mental wellbeing. At the moment, however, one was more pressing than the other.

Jeongguk crawled back over his bed and tucked himself into the corner of his studio that he pretended was his office. He booted up his laptop, put on his headset, and hunted.

Jeongguk wasn’t a bad guy; he was just broke. He wasn’t proud of how he currently made money, but desperate times.

The metropolitan police database was laughably easy to get into, and it’s from there that Jeongguk selected his sponsors. Because he wasn’t a good guy, either, but if he was going to scam people out of money, he was going to at least scam the people who deserved it.

In five quick keyboard taps his custom filter pulled up the list of names matching his criteria: repeat offenders, bailed out by personal bank accounts, no history of technical anything. It was a long list, but for such a small amount of money a single sponsor would do. Jeongguk selected the first name, turned on his voice transformer, and waited for the call to connect.

It picked up on the third ring.

“Hello?”

Jeongguk hesitated for a moment, because the voice — it didn’t sound evil. It was light and airy, with a clear tone that was almost high but not quite.

Jeongguk checked his filter again, looked more closely at the small columns of information attached to the name Kim Seokjin. Eighteen prior arrests. Bail of ten-thousand each time. Twenty-seven years old. Sounded like a trouble making spoiled kid. He knew exactly which of his scams to run.

Jeongguk cleared his throat. “I have your nudes.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Seokjin’s voice came, sounding confused, “What?”

Okay, yes, the extortion of money to not release nudes he didn’t actually own (not that he would ever! Ever!) was incredibly scummy, but it was one of his best scams. Most everyone over the age of 21 had nudes out there somewhere, and who didn’t want to keep those sorts of photos private?

“I have your nudes,” Jeongguk repeated, pulling up his script so he wouldn’t forget what to say. “I’m going to release them on the internet.” The best part about targeting criminals, Jeongguk had found, was that you could cut out a lot of excess words. Criminals understood crime. They didn’t need fluff. The pay me to stop me was an implication they understood without him having to spell it out.

Seokjin didn’t answer immediately, but that was normal. He’d even written it in his script.

SPONSOR: [Deep silence ensues.]

Something shuffled on Seokjin’s end. “How much?” Seokjin asked, sounding annoyed.

Jeongguk smiled to himself. “Forty-five,” he said. One always used American currency with crime, but he wasn’t greedy. He took what he needed and nothing else. That was what he’d put in his script:

ME: [Gives price amount. No more than needed or bill/3.]

SPONSOR: [Confirms price amount.]

“Forty-five?” Seokjin asked.

“Forty-five.”

“…forty-five? Dollars?”

“For your nudes, yes,” Jeongguk said, because sometimes his sponsors got distracted and forgot what he was calling for.

Something shifted again on Seokjin’s side of the call. “That’s it?”

SPONSOR: Where do I send it to?

Jeongguk squinted at the line. Seokjin wasn’t following the script. “Yes. You need to send it to—”

“Shouldn’t you charge, like, way more?”

SPONSOR: I’ve sent the money. Never call me again.

The document cursor blinked at the empty line below that line.

“No,” Jeongguk said, scanning the script for a place to start from. He couldn’t find one that made sense with what Seokjin had said, so he started from the beginning. “I have your nudes.”

Kim Seokjin hummed. “Yes. You’ve said.”

“I’m going to release them on the internet.”

“What site?”

Jeongguk frowned at his script. Why wasn’t Seokjin following his script?

“I mean there’s better sites to sell my pics on, especially at a rate of forty-five dollars.” Why did that sound like a grumble? Why was Seokjin grumbling? What was happening right now? “Like I’d expect three-thousand at least.”

For nudes?

“Actually, you know what.” Jeongguk heard the phone shuffle again and Seokjin’s muffled voice yelling, “Jimin-ah!”

“Yeah, hyung!”

“If you were going to sell my nudes, how much would you sell them for? In dollars?”

“Oh, like, two-thousand for ten I think? Two-hundred a pic?”

Seokjin’s voice was clear now. “Do you only have a quarter of a picture? I have a five count minimum. It’s really hard to capture a theme with a quarter of a picture, you know?”

What?

“Hyung.” That was Jimin, Jeongguk thought? Though really he was convinced he was having a fever dream. “Is someone selling your photos? What’s your cut?”

“Oh, right! I can’t believe I forgot. What’s my cut, mystery man?”

Jeongguk didn’t know. He didn’t know anything. “I—”

“Usually I take seventy, but you sound cute, so I’ll do ten.”

“Hyung.” That was Jimin again, sighing deeply. “That’s just bad business.”

“Oh, shoo. He sounds cute! And fresh to the industry. He was going to ask for forty-five dollars with my nudes! He needs a win, Jiminie.”

“Oh, yikes. He really does.”

What was happening right now?

“I—” Jeongguk tried again, his brain reeling. Money. He needed money. He was doing this for money. “F-forty—”

“Do you need a place to stay?” Seokjin asked, almost at a coo. “Are you eating properly? I know this industry is really tough. It even took me a few months to get my bearings. How old are you? Don’t let the haters fool you, even sixty and seventy year olds can be cam models these days. If you ever need a place to film or setup—”

Jeongguk hung up the call, pushed the laptop off his lap, and crawled back into bed. He’d ask for an extension on his payment instead. There was no way he was going to deal with all of that.

Jeongguk did, eventually, get over the shock of his early morning call (his early morning, despite it being lunchtime for everyone else) and scam a two-bit thug out of the needed forty-five dollars with a quick prepaid card scheme. He converted the amount to digital coins and then converted that coin into something usable by other human beings before sending the sum to his landlady’s nephew. Which meant he was free to live in his tiny studio apartment in peace once again for another wonderful month and starve until tomorrow, when he would pick someone else to scam so he could afford food.

He was half-drooling, half-dreaming his way through an episode of The Great British Bake-Off courtesy of borrowed convenience store internet when his phone rang. Jeongguk picked it up without thinking because it was near midnight and when one applied for jobs overseas you also applied for the working hours.

“Hello?” Jeongguk kept his eyes trained on the lemon treacle tart Merta had made. She needed to get it out of the oven now or it would burn and ruin the coloring of the short crust. “Jeon Jeongguk speaking.”

“You sound different. Were you sick earlier?”

Weird thing for a recruiter to ask him, but not the weirdest thing a recruiter had ever asked him.

“No,” Jeongguk said, silently clicking his tongue. Merta had chosen to leave her bake in the oven for another five minutes. What a loss. “I’m sorry, who is this?”

“Kim Seokjin?” Kim Seokjin said, sounding way too amused for the way Jeongguk’s heart plummeted into the core of the Earth. “I was calling to see if you’d sold the pictures. The quarter-of-a-picture, with my rate, but I’m assuming it was, at the very least, a single photo. Maybe one of my PCs? Do you need more? I can give you some.”

How had Seokjin gotten his number? Why was Seokjin offering him pictures? No. PCs? Did cam models—

Jeongguk’s heart snapped back into his chest with a ferocity that made him gasp. Pictures. Pictures! Seokjin was offering to send him pictures! He squeaked. “I don’t need — Seokjin-n-nim, you don’t understand, I—”

“There’s no need to be embarrassed. Even I needed help starting out. And if you were going to sell anyone’s pictures, mine were a very good choice. I can send you a few! Package them as an exclusive and say we’re besties, I don’t mind. Craft a good story, though. That’s really the secret to capturing an audience; a great story. What’s your theme? Actually, it would be faster for me to just look you up. What’s your channel han—”

Jeongguk hung up. His body was so warm he was certain he was running a fever. Had he considered sex work? Yes. Had he gone through with it? He broke into the metropolitan police database on a regular basis and scam-called people for a means of living; you tell him.

His phone chimed.

Unknown Number
Weird I think the call disconnected
anyway, what’s your channel?
I can audit it for you! Give you some pointers if you want

He wanted to die. This was karma coming up to slap him in the face and fart right up his nose. This was the summation of his sins. He should have been kinder in life. He should have studied photography so he could at least pretend the disappointment in his mother’s tone was because the arts was an incredibly difficult field to make a name in. He should have stayed in contact with his favorite TA like he promised he would when the man graduated five entire years ago. He should have never thrown away that two day old expired kimchi. It was kimchi. It never really expired?

Kim Seokjin was his penance, all rolled into one. The anti-hacker, who’d somehow managed to get his phone number; probably rich, or well to do, because he’d offered him a place to live; probably had the world’s proudest parents who kept his picture in their wallets and went, “Oh! And this is my darling boy, Kim Seokjin! He’s a cam model!” to all of their friends.

Jeongguk groaned. He was twenty-two. In his many years of living, he'd learned that there was only one true way to please karma: groveling.

Me
im sorry
im seriously so so so so so sorry
i dont have your photos
i never had your photos
it was a scam

The message he received back was succinct.

Unknown Number
For $45???

Followed by a very fair:

Unknown Number
Are you serious?

Jeongguk whined pitifully in his bed and sank back down to the mattress with a whimper. He turned his phone off, pushed his face into his pillow, and screamed.

He tried for three hours to live a life of high-standing morals and righteousness. Jeongguk didn’t scam anyone within the first fifty minutes of waking up, even though his stomach was cramping from hunger. He cleaned his apartment instead, which took fifteen minutes; did his laundry, which took an hour and a half including folding; and he didn’t steal convenience store internet until he was physically sitting inside of the convenience store, because then it wasn’t stealing. Stores gave out their wifi password freely as long as you were a paying customer. Which he was, because he found an unopened bottle of red soda sitting on top of the trash can, drank it in a minute flat, then bought a 75% off soon-to-be-expired banana milk bottle and was sipping about a milliliter an hour.

The chemical taste of the milk was off in a vinegary way that lingered something weird on his tongue, but it wasn’t going to kill him. Jeongguk knew from experience how off packaged milk had to be before it became a medical problem. For him that was a week past the expiration date. He could deal with weird chemical tastes in food. Besides, watching another episode of The Great British Bake-Off like this, the banana milk taste fresh on his tongue, he could almost imagine himself in the tent at Bishop’s, waiting eagerly on a stool for Merta (who’d salvaged her treacle tart last episode with a bout of citrus ingenuity) to finish baking her banana pudding inspired—

“Jeon Jeongguk?”

Jeongguk squawked and floundered, the heat of an arm on his elbow the only thing keeping him upright and not a fallen mess on the floor. He gaped, tearing away from Merta’s recipe to nicely confront his surprise guest, and promptly felt the rancid banana milk make its way back up his throat.

The man in front of him, dark sunglasses covering a large portion of his face, black mask covering the rest, didn’t move. “Are you drinking that?”

“Yes,” Jeongguk answered because it was true. He’d once sarcastically answered ‘no’ and a convenience store employee had thrown the rest of his expired kimbap away. Honesty kept food on his metaphorical table. Like. After he bought it. Honesty after he bought the food. “You can’t have it.”

Jeongguk couldn’t see the eyebrows moving up but he could see the effects of the eyebrows moving up, chestnut brown bangs shifting slightly. “Why would I want it? Isn’t it expired?”

“No,” Jeongguk said, petulant. “It expires tomorrow. See?” He turned the bottle around to show the stranger the expiration date. “February 21st. Tomorrow.”

The bangs moved again. “It’s the third?”

Something in Jeongguk’s stomach area gurgled. “The twenty-third?” he asked, just to clarify. His stomach gurgled again.

“The third. Of March.”

“He’s right, you now,” Jeongguk’s stomach said straight to his brain in only that special way it could. “It’s the third of March. That milk you gave me is past our one week agreement, and now it is time for me to purge the poison you have fed us all over Kim Seokjin’s beautiful leather shoes.”

Jeongguk almost wished his stomach did have the capability for speech, because then at least Kim Seokjin — he recognized the voice now that his stomach had pointed it out — wouldn’t think it was personal.

“I’m so sorry about this,” Jeongguk said. Then his stomach gurgled again, preened (Jeongguk imagined), and happily followed through on its promise.

Seokjin bullied him to a hospital.

Jeongguk didn’t really feel comfortable arguing not to go, especially after he puked all over the man’s Italian loafers (“My Guccis!”) and said man was now sporting neon pink convenience store slides that clashed with the long tan trench coat wrapped around his body. It definitely helped that whatever his stomach had decided to dump looked disturbingly foamy and slightly tinged pink, which Jeongguk was sure it was supposed to not, so he let himself be thrown unceremoniously into a Mercedes parked outside of the convenience store and driven to the nearest hospital, smelling like bile and overly-ripe banana.

Worst than scamming a man, being hunted down by said man, and then throwing up on said man’s shoes, however, was finishing his appointment and the barrage of tests required of not-normal colored vomit to be told at the end that 1) he wasn’t bleeding internally or dying; remember that red soda you drank? Yeah and 2) the visit was going to cost thirty times as much as it would have if he was regular person with a regular job and contributed to society and therefore had a right to national health insurance.

“I’m so sorry,” Jeongguk said, cringing at the efficient way Seokjin signed something to pay for his hospital visit. “I’ll pay you back. I promise.”

The bangs shifted in an invisible eyebrow raise. “With the money you scam from other people?”

Jeongguk winced. That was well-deserved.

Seokjin waved his hand in the air and finished his signing. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s get you some food.”

“Please don’t.” Jeongguk diligently followed the man out, their slippers loud on the linoleum and parking lot concrete. “I’ve imposed enough. I’m sorry for scamming you, again. Really.”

“You didn’t scam me,” Seokjin said, sliding into his car. “I almost wish you had. Get in the car, Jeongguk-nim. We need to talk.”

Jeongguk lowered his head and slid into the passenger seat. This was how he went. Murdered by a masked cam model in pink convenience store slippers. Karma. “Just… please don’t dismember me too badly? So my parents have a body to properly mourn.”

“No promises,” Seokjin said. Jeongguk couldn’t see it, but it sounded like there was a smile in the words. “Now take a nap.”

Jeongguk shifted slightly in the leather seat to get more comfortable. “Are you going to murder me while I sleep?”

“Maybe,” Seokjin said, reaching over and pushing a button that was making Jeongguk’s chair go back, back, back. “Guess you’ll find out if you wake up.”

It was such a silly thought, but Jeongguk was sure his parents wouldn’t mind too much if he were murdered in a Mercedes.

Jimin was smaller than Jeongguk thought he would be. Prettier, too. And nude.

“Who is this?” Jimin asked, blue sheer robe open and showing expanses of light beige skin kissed by the sun. Jeongguk tried to gawk. He was rarely ever led into mansions and greeted at the front door by mostly-nude men. The tight white underpants and see-through robe certainly didn’t cover much of anything. The only part of Jimin that was covered was the man’s face, sheet-mask opaque and blonde hair pushed back with a fluffy headband that had cat ears. He wanted to gawk, but he didn’t have time.

“This is Jeon Jeongguk,” Seokjin said, tugging Jeongguk into the mansion by his elbow. “Take your shoes off, Guk-ah. Hyung will make you dinner.”

There wasn’t any reason Jeongguk could think of that would allow Seokjin to be so comfortable with him already, especially since he was unconscious for the entire drive to his doom, but he was indebted to the man and maybe he was a hyung? What did he know?

“Okay, hyung,” Jeongguk said to appease, slipping his sandals off. Jimin frowned at him feet. “Do you need any help?”

“You’re not helping him,” Jimin said, grabbing his vacant elbow and bodily dragging him into the house toward a light grey couch. “What is happening with your feet? Do you even moisturize? Goodness.”

“Play nicely with Jimin-ah. Jeonggukie,” Seokjin said, peeling off into another direction, “he’ll make you look pretty.”

“Pretty? Please,” Jimin said. A hard push sent Jeongguk to the couch with a bounce. “This face? I’m going to make it a killer.”

That was rather kind, Jeongguk thought.

Jimin stuck his nose in the air and wheeled around to pop open the storage ottoman. For some reason Jeongguk couldn’t dictate if you’d paid him to, his attention faltered from the beauty of Jimin’s face to two round globes of flesh unencumbered by sheer blue.

Jeongguk screamed.

He was resting in Jimin’s lap, eyes closed, sheet mask on his face with Jimin’s fingers in his hair, pleasantly enjoying what was surely the last few moments of his life when it abruptly ended.

The hard smack to his thigh surprised Jeongguk so much he bolted upright, colliding his forehead with Jimin’s so hard he immediately went back down.

“Fuck!” Jimin flopped back against the couch and groaned. “What the hell, hyung!”

“Don’t what the hell me, I should be what the hell-ing you,” a voice covered in black drawled before a foot met Jeongguk's thigh once again, making him yelp. “And you, brat. Five years of radio silence and the next I hear of you it’s because you’re scamming my hyung?”

Jeongguk squinted the tears out of his eyes but kept his head heavy on Jimin’s writhing lap. “Hyung?” he asked the black and white blur. “Yoongi-hyung?”

Yoongi snorted. “Am I hyung? You haven’t called me once.”

“Sorry,” Jeongguk said, moving his feet up to allow Yoongi space to sit in the couch. Yoongi’s couch? “Are you a cam model too?”

“Please, Jeongguk-ah.” Yoongi sat down, rolled his eyes, and stretched Jeongguk’s legs back across his lap. “I only showed up to TA sessions because I’d lose my scholarship if I didn’t. You think I would willingly masturbate on camera? When Jimin and Jin-hyung exist?”

“Is that a compliment?” Jimin asked, rubbing furiously at his forehead. It was a pinkish-red now. “No wonder you’ve made it so long in your sorry state, Jeongguk-nim. You’re too hard to die.”

“Well, Seokjin-hyung said he was going to kill me,” Jeongguk offered.

“I never said I was going to,” Seokjin said from somewhere Jeongguk couldn’t see. “You assumed I was going to. Those are very different things.”

“I sent him to pick you up,” Yoongi said to the widening of Jeongguk’s eyes. “Do you want to explain to me why you’re scamming people, Jeongguk?”

Jeongguk tried to take his feet out of Yoongi’s hands to curl himself into a tiny ball and then further compress into an atom size of existence, but Yoongi was bracing his shins to keep him steady. It was incredibly upsetting. Even back at university, with him, a freshman, and Yoongi, a senior, he’d always been able to overpower his hyung.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk whined.

“No. I didn’t help you all of those hours so you could pass comp sci for you to use your powers for evil.”

“It’s not evil,” Jeongguk said, trying to wiggle his feet again. The sheet mask was slipping off his face.

Jimin flicked him in the forehead. “Stay still! Your sheet mask still has ten minutes to go.”

It dawned on Jeongguk the timing of it all.

“This was a trap!”

“Yes.” Yoongi worked off one of his socks. Jeongguk tried escaping even harder. “Now talk, or I’ll tickle you.”

“I’ll talk! I’ll talk!” Jeongguk was wiggling so hard but he wasn’t going anywhere and what did that say about the state of his body? “I scam criminals for money! Only as much as I need!”

“Criminals?” Jimin gasped, affronted.

“But why?” Yoongi asked, which was a question that Jeongguk could answer.

“I can’t get a job,” Jeongguk said, moving his foot out of the way of Yoongi’s impending finger. “I’m not lying! I’m not! I haven’t been able to get hired anywhere, hyung, please don’t tickle me!”

“Why didn’t you call me?” Yoongi asked and tickled him anyway. Jeongguk screeched. “I’m your hyung. You were the only person at university I even liked and yet you ignored me—”

“I’m sorry, hyung! I’m sorry! Mercy! Mercy!”

“—for five whole years, and now you’re an unhealthy looking stick. You used to be able to throw me around, Jeonggukie. You’re not leaving here until hyung fattens you up.”

“Don’t eat me!” Jeongguk tried to plead, jerking his legs even harder. Jimin flicked his forehead again. “I wouldn’t even taste that good!”

“What is up with this kid and dying?” Jimin asked, giving Jeongguk a look that he couldn’t understand.

“Depression hits in a lot of ways,” Yoongi said, and Jimin’s look became more look-y and Jeongguk didn’t understand it at all.

“I’m not depressed,” Jeongguk said, because he wasn’t. He hasn’t been depressed since the sixth grade, when he got his diagnosis and decided he wasn’t a person who deserved to be depressed. What was there to be depressed about? He had the sort of life that everyone in the world wished for. He just really sucked at it.

Yoongi ignored his announcement. “Are you alright with us keeping him here a while? I know I’ve kind of sprung him on you, but…”

“Of course the baby can stay,” Jimin said, pushing his fingers back into Jeongguk’s hair. “You stay here until you’re better, alright?”

“Better for what?” Jeongguk asked because he felt like he was missing something. “I’m perfectly okay.”

“You were at a hospital. You threw up,” Yoongi said, putting the sock back onto his foot. Jeongguk blushed. He wasn’t a child! He could put on his own socks! “You don’t currently have a job, you’re drinking rancid milk for sustenance, and you’re scamming people for money. You need better, Guk-ah.” Yoongi sighed. “And your digital protections have gotten sloppy. You’re lucky it was me who coded you and not someone who would have done you real harm.”

Ah, so Yoongi had coded him. That would explain how Seokjin had gotten his number and then his address.

“Though next time don’t use your actual phone number for a scam call?”

Or maybe he was a really bad scammer.

“I thought I scrambled it,” Jeongguk said, embarrassment coloring his cheeks. “Usually my program would scramble it.”

“Your computer probably patched and the encodings didn’t work anymore. That’s setup one-oh-one, Jeongguk, something you would have never missed at school. Do you see my concern?”

Jeongguk did. If he was messing up something as simple as double-checking that his encodings weren’t failing, he was never going to get a development job.

“I’m going to starve to death,” Jeongguk said to up the ceiling. Jimin’s fingers stilled for a two second count before they continued. “I’m never going to get a job. And I’m going to starve. And then die.”

Yoongi hummed and squeezed his foot. “Not today, Guk-ah. Not today.”

They wouldn’t let him leave. Not that Jeongguk wanted to leave. But it was easier for him to pretend he was being kidnapped, surrounded by opulence for the first time in a long ever before his cruel, doting kidnappers did away with him, than it was for him to accept that caviar for breakfast was someone's normal, human existence.

“Cream cheese?” Yoongi asked him, half-asleep at the breakfast table, his laptop out and openly blaring the sound of Jimin’s moaning.

Mansion. Caviar. Six-in-the-morning sex sounds. Normal.

Jeongguk slid the crystal container over slowly. The rasping sound of it on wood woke him up a little better. “Do you need any help, hyung?”

Yoongi lazily blinked up from his bagel. “Help?”

Jeongguk gestured at the laptop. “You‘re on the computer all day. I don’t think that’s good for you.”

Yoongi stared at him. Jeongguk looked back. Yoongi plastered his bagel with cream cheese. “Are you sure you’d want to? It’d be free labor until our lead gets back, which isn’t until next month.”

“You’re feeding me,” Jeongguk said, which was payment enough. Even though it had only been two weeks, he felt more awake than he had for the past couple of years. “And letting me sleep here. It’s the least I could do.”

Yoongi sighed through his nose, held the bagel in his mouth, and began typing furiously. “How much do you remember of the systems and networking coursework?”

Jeongguk bit his lip. “Not enough, I don’t think. I can brush up on it, though.”

Yoongi’s sharp eyes looked at him from above the laptop screen before looking back down. “How comfortable are you watching cam shows?”

Jeongguk didn’t know. He wasn’t sure how to explain his complete lack of libido. He couldn’t even get hard anymore, not that he’d ever even tried since his junior year. His will to do anything sexual had petered out his sophomore year and never returned. “Very?”

Yoongi swiveled his laptop around.

“Is that safe?” Jeongguk asked, watching as Jimin, somehow tied with his hands behind his back, moaned loudly as a machine pistoned into him. Jeongguk could make out the small shape of a remote in the man’s hands and felt part of himself relax. “He has a remote. That’s good.”

“He has a remote and a handler. We don’t ever let the talent do streams on their own,” Yoongi said, taking the bagel out of his mouth and continuing around the bite, “That said, it’s hard to monitor comments, keep an eye on what Jimin or Jin-hyung are doing, and make sure the connection is stable enough to support the stream all at the same time. We’re one of the few sites that cares about stream quality.”

Sure. Jeongguk had no idea about any of that. “Is that why you all live here?”

“Part of it, yes,” Yoongi said, turning his laptop around again. “But also, aesthetics. And also, also, we don’t pay for rent or utilities.”

“In a mansion?”

Yoongi shrugged. “That’s what happens when you’re uber-wealthy.”

Jeongguk gaped. “Hyung. Are you uber-wealthy? Have you been uber-wealthy this entire time? Was your working scholarship just a ploy to make friends at school?”

The scathing look Yoongi gave him made Jeongguk chuckle.

“At least your weird sense of humor is back,” Yoongi said, taking another bite.

The landlady’s nephew gave him a hell of a time trying to move out, but Jimin contained more might in his pinky than Jeongguk did in his entire body, and after a brief eight-minute yelling match that brought all of the neighbors out into the hallway to watch, the landlady’s nephew whimpered his way back to his commandeered building floor and let Jeongguk out of the rest of his lease without complaint.

“No wonder you’re depressed,” Jimin whined as he lamented in the bathroom door. “This is worse than jail! Jeongguk-ah — Jeon Jeongguk, you listen to me: no matter where you go after moving out from the house, if you move out of the house, promise me you won’t ever live again in a place like this. Promise. Bad shit happens in places like this. I’m serious! Don’t laugh at me, Jeongguk! I spent the first three months of my life in a prison, so I know what I’m talking about—”

Jeongguk continued packing the one single box that contrained all of what he owned and definitely did not laugh.

“Hyung, why were you arrested?”

Seokjin looked up from the pan he was stir-frying in and turned around. “What?”

Jeongguk indicated his hand toward his laptop that Yoongi was furiously typing away on to get him the proper credentials to maintain and monitor the website. “When I was scamming people, I would always choose people with criminal records. That’s why I called you. Your name came up in the database.”

Seokjin’s eyebrows rose, which Jeongguk could see now. To be honest, Jeongguk was still getting used to Seokjin’s face. Every once in a while during the day, he would find himself staring at Seokjin simply because he couldn’t quite reconcile the fact that there was a human being that actually existed and looked like that. Nowadays, nearly a month into living with his hyungs, it only happened, like, three times a day instead of last week’s ten to fifteen. Jeongguk wasn’t sure the feeling would ever go away, though.

“You saw my record?”

Jeongguk nodded. “Yeah.”

Seokjin flicked his wrist to turn the vegetables, moved them off the burner, and turned off the stove. He put his hands on his hips and frowned. “How? My parents spent a lot of money to get my record expunged.”

“Oh,” Jeongguk said, looking over at Yoongi, who raised his brows without even looking up from the keyboard. “You definitely still show up there.”

Yoongi sighed and stilled his fingers. “What’s the code?”

“Should still be in the terminal. Five line feed,” Jeongguk said.

“Why wouldn’t you just program a script for that?”

“It’s five lines, hyung. It would take me longer to script than it would for me to run the lines.”

Yoongi rolled his eyes. Jeongguk heard the six taps on his up-key (his one and only blue switch key) and saw the subsequent five taps on the enter key, and then—

“Jesus fuck, Jeongguk,” Yoongi said, looking up at him. “Are you serious?”

“What? What is it?” Seokjin asked, scooting around the kitchen to stand next to Yoongi and peer at the screen. He gasped dramatically. “Jeon Jeongguk! It’s — it’s blue!”

Jeongguk couldn’t help his laugh.

Yoongi rolled his eyes. “No, hyung. It’s the metropolitan police departments’s database. See?”

Seokjin squinted at where Yoongi was pointing. “That just says S1MPD-v6.13.”

“Right. Seoul Metropolitan Police Department. One; the headquarters. This is their database.”

Seokjin squinted harder. “I feel like we shouldn’t have access to that.”

“We definitely shouldn’t,” Yoongi said, giving Jeongguk a look that was maybe supposed to be parental and scolding but looked a little proud. Something in Jeongguk’s chest swelled. “But mostly it’s their fault for being so easy to hack.” Yoongi focused on the task at hand and in a few clicks, Seokjin was frowning.

Jeongguk could understand Seokjin frowning, but Yoongi frowning made a sense of unease settle into his stomach.

“What’s wrong?” Jeongguk asked. Had he done something wrong? There was no way the police department had hired a technical enough person to track them down. If they had, surely they would have updated their vulnerability enough to trigger his error warnings.

Yoongi didn’t answer him. “I thought the last time you were arrested was when you were seventeen, hyung?”

“It was,” Seokjin said, pointing at something Jeongguk couldn’t see. “Ten years ago. Right here.”

“This picture is not you from ten years ago.” Yoongi sounded stressed.

“It’s not,” Seokjin agreed. “That’s my passport photo. The one I got taken and renewed. Three months ago.”

Yoongi pinched his nose. “Hobi isn’t going to like this.”

Seokjin groaned and hung his head. “He’s going to be so mad.”

Jeongguk looked at the dejected expression on both of them. “Who’s Hobi?”

Hobi — or Hoseok-hyung, as Jimin had scolded him when he’d asked during another one of their mini-spa dates — didn’t return from California (another tidbit courtesy of Jimin) alone.

“Heyo!” Hoseok cheered as he strode into the house with his tall, tanned guest in tow, making Jeongguk drop his spoon into his cereal and Yoongi growl. Yoongi hadn’t had his coffee yet. It was still percolating and bearing the brunt of Yoongi’s early morning glare. It was also five in the morning because they needed to do some extra networking setup to run Seokjin and Jimin’s concurrent streams during a special guesting episode, which Jeongguk was sure was contributing to Yoongi’s mood. “How are my favorite people?”

“Shut up,” Yoongi said to the coffee maker.

“Aw, I love you too, hyung,” Hoseok gushed, and Jeongguk awed.

Hoseok was bright and affable, somehow carrying the light of the sun with him even in the pitch black darkness of an early morning in winter. Jeongguk could practically feel himself cheering up in the man’s presence.

“And is this the illustrious Jeon Jeongguk-nim? It’s a pleasure to meet you!”

Jeongguk was engulfed in a hug so tight he heard his ribs creak. He needed to get back into working out. Being hugged by the sun was wonderful but being crushed by it would be a terrible way to go.

“You need to pay him, like, a month and half’s worth of IT labor,” Yoongi said, viciously poking the coffee machine. “And get me a new machine. Not one of these pod things. I need real beans, Hob-ah, and real caffeine. I need espresso. Six cups a day.”

The tall stranger began speaking as Hoseok pulled away from the hug. “The recommended maximum amount of caffeine a day is 400 milligrams. Six shots of espresso would be up there.”

Yoongi wheeled around to glare. “I didn’t say six shots, I said — Hoseok, who the fuck is this?”

“This is Kim Namjoon,” Hoseok said with a smile and a happily waved introductory hand.

Namjoon smiled and nodded. “Kim Namjoon. I’m a writer.”

“I invited him to stay at the house.” Hoseok’s happy nod almost made Jeongguk believe it was his house to be able to invite people into. “He's writing a novel and one of his characters does sex-work.”

“I thought it would be nice to write a liberating story about sex-work for once,” Namjoon said. “No drudgery or heavy angst or heavy-laden trauma stories. Not to make light of people who have experienced that sort of life—”

“Oh, no, of course not!” Hoseok agreed.

“—but I want the focus to be on the story and the story’s journey. They’re just a character who does sex-work. That’s the sort of occupation that they have consciously chosen to do. But saying all of that, watching pornography and cam shows can only tell me so much, and most models aren’t willing to spend three hours answering my questions. I've been told several times they're too philosophical and to shove a boot up my ass. They were very kind before that, though.”

Hoseok grinned and clapped Namjoon on the back. “This guy, right!”

Jeongguk nodded. He had no idea what he was nodding to, but he felt it.

Jeongguk still couldn’t get hard — Exhibit A, your honor: he spent every day watching Seokjin, or Jimin, or both of them pleasuring themselves, and they were two of the most beautiful men he’d ever seen — but that didn’t mean he didn’t underhand sexual tension when he saw it, and there was a lot of it.

“I don’t understand why they don’t just fuck each other already,” Seokjin whispered to himself, but really he was whispering it to Jeongguk because Jeongguk was right beside him at the table, watching the scene.

Yoongi was doing that thing he did where he pretended not to exist when Namjoon was in the room. Namjoon was doing that thing he did where he pretended to be writing when Yoongi was in the room. It was kind of cute, in Jeongguk’s opinion. And very, incredibly, painful.

“It’s cute,” Jeongguk said to Seokjin’s sigh. “What? It is!”

“It’s cute in the way watching a tiger get its fill of meat while covered in blood and viscera is cute.” Jeongguk thought that was a very specific example, but it was very Seokjin. “As in: it needs to stop. Like. Now.”

“Well, we can’t force them.”

“I’ve already locked one couple in a closet this week. I’ll do it again.”

Jeongguk stared at the profile of Seokjin’s face. “Seriously? Who?”

Seokjin blinked at him. “What do you mean who? Did I lock you in a closet with someone?”

“No.” Jeongguk thought about it. “Did you lock yourself into a closet with someone?”

“No, Guk-ah. I locked Hoseokie and Jiminie into a closet.”

“So you’re single?” Jeongguk asked. He didn’t know why he asked. It felt right to ask. “Because I’m single.”

“I like my men with more meat and managed depression,” Seokjin said easily with a soft smile that made something in Jeongguk squirm. “Or none at all, I’m not picky, but managed, at the very least.”

Muscles and managed depression? Jeongguk didn’t think he was depressed but… he could handle the first part of that.

Six months later, Namjoon and Yoongi still hadn’t kissed, Jimin and Hoseok were still tiptoeing around each other (even though they fucked at least once a week on cam, which was very confusing for Jeongguk), Seokjin was still single and annoyed, but Jeongguk had changed.

First: he’d put back on the muscle he’d not quite promised his hyung he would. He remembered why he loved the gym so much after every set and every time Jimin smacked his butt with a cheeky whistle.

“Bad boy coming through!” Jimin would always say. “Hot stuff! Wee-woo! Wee-woo!”

Second: he had an actual balance in his bank account for the first time in Ever. With zeroes and everything.

“Camming pays,” Hoseok explained when Jeongguk got his first deposit and was certain that there was a miscalculation. “And when you don’t have to pay for headroom, it pays a lot.”

Third: he got his first three tattoos.

He loved them. Every time he went to the shop in lieu of buying clothes (to Jimin’s chagrin) or updating the internals of his laptop (to Yoongi’s disbelief and ire), he added more to what was slowly becoming a sleeve on his right arm. He could feel it.

“I like your flower,” Seokjin said one day while they were sitting next to each other on the couch watching a movie to celebrate Seokjin’s birthday. As the only two not in a couple, it was bound to happen. “What is it?”

“A tiger lily,” Jeongguk said, turning his arm so it could be more properly admired, plastic wrap and all. “My birth flower.”

“Vibrant, beautiful, and invasive,” Seokjin said, staring at the orange flower with a smile on his lips. “It suits you.”

Jeongguk wasn’t sure invasive was a compliment but when Seokjin said it that way, it felt like it was.

It was mid-July when Jeongguk finally got the courage to sit down with a therapist. It took a lot of work on his Namjoon-hyung’s part to convince him that therapy was not a weakness, despite everything society said, and needing medication was not a mark of failure if it came down to it.

“You wouldn’t tell someone with a broken leg to just grin and bear it and not use crutches or a wheelchair,” Namjoon had said.

“Some people would,” Jeongguk mumbled back.

Namjoon had chuckled. “Some people would. But you wouldn’t. So if your brain has an injury that can’t be healed unless you use the crutches — extend yourself that same kind of grace.”

Jeongguk talked for thirty minutes about how he felt because that’s what you were supposed to do during these, according to the movies. It was a rant, really, about nothing incredibly important, and at the end of it his therapist asked, “How long have you been feeling ‘blah’ about life?”

“Oh.” Jeongguk wondered how they’d known he’d ever felt ‘blah’ about life. “Since sixth grade.”

“Did anything happen in sixth grade? Anything significant?”

Not that Jeongguk knew of. He’d thought about it a lot in college during late nights with Yoongi. Why was he depressed? He didn’t want to die but living felt like such a chore. But why was he this way? He didn’t have a trauma based background like his hyung did, he wasn’t abused, he’d never gone hungry. He remembered being able to laugh and actually feel the tickling brightness of something pleasant simmering in his body. Then one day, he woke up, and he couldn’t anymore.

It didn’t seem very fair, now that Jeongguk pieced it out like that. No one deserved to be depressed; to have their lights stolen was by a weird amalgam of confused chemicals.

“No,” Jeongguk said. The therapist nodded and wrote something down, but — Jeongguk didn’t like the way the pen scratched the weight of his future, so he blurted, “I had a happy childhood. I used to be happy. I had friends. I looked forward to growing up. I used to… to play soccer, too. That’s what I wanted to be. A soccer player.”

The pen stopped. “What stopped you from becoming a soccer player?”

Jeongguk stared. The usual list of culprits came to mind: life, reality, expenses; but really it came down to one moment.

“A bad collision when I was thirteen.”

His therapist set their pen down. “Could you tell me more?”

Jeongguk shrugged. “I broke my shin and tore all the ligaments in my left leg. I landed wrong, too. Hit my head on the ground at just the right angle and concussed myself. I was unconscious at the hospital for two weeks. Medically induced coma to get the swelling under control. I was told to never play contact sports again. Soccer, am I right?” He laughed. This was always the part where he laughed.

His therapist did not laugh but gave him a smile. “That sounds traumatic.”

Jeongguk stopped laughing.

His therapist did not stop poking holes in him. “Do you consider your injury traumatic?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Jeongguk hesitated. How did he say this without sounding like an absolute asshole? “It’s not like I was beaten or… raped.”

“You also weren’t in a war zone.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“And your house didn’t burn down.”

“My parents still live there.”

“You weren’t bullied, either?”

“I was one of the most popular kids at school. No. I wasn’t bullied.”

“Did you parents have high expectations of you?”

That sounded right. “I think so,” Jeongguk said, fidgeting with his hoodie. Right outside of where the tiger-lily’s petals were, if he could touch his own skin. “We all expected that I was going to be a soccer star. It was my dream.”

“Liverpool?”

Jeongguk felt the ghost of a smile. “Manchester, of course.”

The pen picked back up. “And your hopes and dreams weren’t shattered one random Tuesday out of the blue?”

Something in Jeongguk’s chest got uncomfortably tight.

His therapist shook their head. The smile never left, but it was softer now: understanding and kind. “I can’t imagine how overwhelming it would be to wake up one day and have to deal with the fact that I couldn’t be me anymore. I don’t know how I would do it. A lot of support, I think. A lot of tears. Guilt. A lot of grief.”

“Oh,” Jeongguk said, his voice barely audible in the room.

The therapist met his eye, softening even further. “Often times I find that we’re so conditioned by society to not label things as trauma unless they’re ‘big’ things — rape, abuse, war. Like you see in the movies, right?”

Jeongguk nodded. That’s all he could do.

“Trauma isn’t a contest,” his therapist said softly, “you were told at — What, twelve, thirteen? — that you couldn’t be who you were anymore. Everything you’d known until that point was thrown out of the window: that connection you had with your parents, the dreams of your future, the way you related to your peers. A lot of things changed for you overnight. Not to mention the physical injuries you still had to recover from.”

Jeongguk felt solidly trapped in place. No one had ever explained it to him like this before. His father told him to suck it up. His mother always reminded him of how blessed he was. He’d cried with his brother, sometimes, but what could a fifteen-year-old do to help?

“It’s—” his voice cracked “—my fault. I could have… I could have con-continued after my phys-physical therapy, but I just — was so scared. I couldn’t—”

Jeongguk cried.

His libido came back with a vengence at worst time possible.

He was grocery shopping for the house. It was October, officially a year since he’d moved in. He had several months of therapy (and the last of his rounds of magnetic resonance therapy) under his belt, and he was talking to Seokjin on the phone to workshop the script for a three-way Halloween special when Seokjin popped the ‘p’ on his whiny Nope! in a way that made Jeongguk’s brain whirl.

One second, he was leaning against the trunk of Hoseok’s car, trying to figure out if it was better, artistically, to hear Hoseok say ‘pussy’ or ‘hole’; the next, he could vividly imagine Seokjin on his knees, whining petulantly around his favorite pink colored dildo. The second after that, someone shoved him, hard, against the back of the car.

“Get down!” the someone yelled, pulling them both to the ground. Jeongguk heard a pop-pop-pop of something and screaming. “Jesus, didn’t you hear the annoucements?”

“No,” Jeongguk said, feeling his heart pound in his chest and looking at the man who’d grabbed him. Pop-pop-pop. Screams. “What’s going on?”

“SOU is here,” the man said, gesturing his arm so violently the curls falling forward across his eyes moved with him. “They’re doing a drug raid. We evacuated this area ten minutes ago. What are you even doing?”

Pop-pop-pop.

“Grocery shopping.” Jeongguk gestured vaguely at the trunk. “Workshopping a script.”

“Workshopping a script?” the man asked, his eyes widening. “Fuck, man. You have to pay attention to the world around you! Do you want to die?”

“No,” Jeongguk said. For the first time in many, many years, he felt it. “No, I’m good. How long do we have to stay here?”

The man sighed and sagged against the back of Hoseok’s cherry red car. “Until the raid is over. Might take twenty minutes. Might take an hour. I’ll let you know when I get the all-clear text.”

Jeongguk looked at the man next to him. Wild, curly hair. Crafted face. Leopard print headband across his forehead. Dirty blonde hair. Torn black jeans and an open leopard print shirt showcasing the black tank underneath. “You don’t look SOU.”

The man laughed. “It’s called being undercover.”

“Neat.” Jeongguk tucked his phone back up to his ear. “Sounds fun. Weird question: if you were watching gay porn, would you prefer to hear the top say ‘pussy’ or ‘hole’?”

The man’s eyes drifted down. He gestured at Jeongguk’s crotch. “Is this a thing for you?”

“Please ignore that. Medical issue.” Not a lie. His therapist and doctor had told him his libido would come back eventually. Jeongguk just hadn’t considered ‘eventually’ to be him fantasizing about his hyung pleasuring himself on a random Tuesday seconds before meeting a police officer. “‘Pussy’ or ‘hole’?”

The man rolled his eyes. “If someone is saying ‘pussy’ or ‘hole’ and it’s not a full on scene, it’s too much talking in a porno. I’m a fan of circumventing the words altogether.”

“That would be pretty hot,” Seokjin said into his ear. No, he hadn’t disconnected the call. Not Jeongguk’s finest moment. “Hobi could say nothing. Strong ‘Ghost of Christmas Future’ energy.”

“We can do that for Christmas. It’ll make more sense to the audience,” Jeongguk said, making himself comfortable on the concrete.

“Is your new friend cute?” Seokjin asked. Jeongguk heard something rustle and then vibrate in the background.

Jeongguk looked over at his raid companion who was looking at him. “He’s certainly handsome.”

“Would he be willing to help us workshop this script?” The buzzing turned off. Seokjin was checking his toys. “It sounds like he watches gay porn, so he has some experience. And I need to get the script to Hoseok by Friday, or he says he’s going to do a scene with Jimin and then I’ll be left alone trying to do something Halloween-y again and you can only dress up as a bunny so many times, Guk-ah.”

Personally, Jeongguk thought his hyung looked amazing dressed as a bunny, but he kept that thought to himself.

“Hey,” he said to the man beside him, “Since we’re stuck here, do you want to help us workshop this script?”

The man stared at him. He had a very intense stare. “I’m a cop.”

“Do cops not watch porn?” Jeongguk asked.

Surprisingly, the man laughed. “No, we do. Trust me, we do. Whatever, we have time to kill. I’ll help. Maybe inside the car, though? We shouldn’t be making this much noise.”

They both snuck into the backseat of the car as quietly as they could and once the door was shut and the man gave Jeongguk the all-clear did he put his phone on speaker to continue.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk said, setting the phone on the middle seat between them and reaching forward to pluck a grocery bag from the passenger seat. He pulled out his four pack of not-rancid banana milk and passed two of them to the cop. They weren’t rancid now, but who knew how long they were going to be stuck here. “We have a guest helping us write. Make sure he gets writing credits.”

“Welcome to the team, Mister Man-In-Uniform-When-Not-Undercover,” Seokjin said. “What are you feelings on the word ‘bussy’?”

The man’s mouth dropped open. “J-Jin-hyung?”

The line was silent for two beats.

Seokjin sighed. “Guk-ah. Out of all the cops in the city you could have run into, why did it have to be my cousin?”

Taehyung went home with him, half because Seokjin insisted and half on orders from his squad commander, a tall and equally handsome man named Park Seojoon.

“Yeah, someone’s keeping tabs on your cousin alright,” the man had explained in his tiny little office to the both of them. It was a bit weird to see Taehyung in his gangster outfit standing perfectly at ease like a model soldier, but Jeongguk admired it. “Seunghwan’s figuring out who, but this is disturbing, at the very least. I’m assuming your cousin hasn’t gone to trial for attempting to mug a person with an accomplice in the past year?”

“No,” Taehyung said with an assuredness that nearly made Jeongguk swoon. “He can barely do a pushup. He can’t mug anybody.”

The commander laughed. “It says he had an accomplice. They could have mugged someone.”

“Am I allowed to be here?” Jeongguk asked.

“Who is the accomplice?” Taehyung asked, which was a much better question.

Seojoon looked at the screen again. “Min Yoongi.”

Jeongguk snorted. He couldn’t help it. At the confused look from the two men, he added, “Yoongi-hyung is about as physically capable as a wet paper bag.”

“So, no mugging last month.”

“Unless you count the thousands in tips and revenue from streaming, no,” Jeongguk confirmed.

“And I’m going to go out on a limb and say there wasn’t an ill-fated carjacking performed last week with the help of one Park Jimin?”

“So Jimin-hyung could possibly ruin his fresh manicure? Not a chance in hell.”

“And this Park Jimin couldn’t have been the one assisting with the mugging?”

“I mean, he could,” Jeongguk said, “but Jimin-hyung is definitely the type to poison a man over physical murder.”

Taehyung’s brows shot up in warning. Right. Cops.

“Theoretically,” Jeongguk hastily added.

“Well, then,” Seojoon said with a grin, “theoretically, I believe this calls for an agent on the inside, just to keep an eye on you all.”

Taehyung sighed and rubbed his nose. “Hyung, I just got off an undercover case—”

“He’s your cousin, Taehyung-ah.”

Taehyung’s pout was very cute, Jeongguk thought.

“But hyung!” Taehyung whined. “If I go undercover again, Wooshik-hyung is going to give me so much shit—”

“Oh, definitely,” Seojoon said, “but Wooshik is just mad he’s still on punishment from the last time he was undercover and he blew up that boat for no good reason.”

“—especially since I’ll be babysitting at a… a sex house all day!”

“It’s really more of a sex mansion,” Jeongguk said, earning himself a glare.

“See Taehyungie? A sex mansion. How elegant.” Seojoon pulled a few sheets out, wrote three things down, and then stamped them with a flourish. “And that’s where you’ll be staying, keeping an eye on all the parties at the house.”

“We don’t have parties,” Jeongguk said. They really didn’t. For a house of men all in their twenties they were very low key. In the entire year Jeongguk had lived at the house, he was pretty sure they’d entertained a grand total of two guests. Both of which eventually moved in. “Should we have more parties?”

“I’m sure it would draw whoever is doing this out.” Seojoon smiled at him. “But first, let’s find Taehyungie a job, yeah? Every good undercover agent needs just as good a backstory.”

“You look very cute, Taehyung-nim,” Jeongguk said softly, driving them back to the house after their long-term detour. “If I didn’t know you were a police officer, I think I’d think you were a regular IT professional.”

Taehyung groaned and flopped back into his seat, his fake glasses — a cackling Wooshik’s contribution to Taehyung’s new ensemble of, well, what Jeongguk was wearing in shades of blue — sliding up into his now pure black hair. “I hate this. I hate this so much. I don’t know anything about computers! What am I supposed to do with this?” Taehyung aggressively tapped the black plastic of Seunghwan’s borrowed laptop on his lap. “And what is it with hackers and stickers?”

“From what I’ve heard—” Jeongguk had no plans of going to jail because he talked too much, thank you very much “—they’re like, badges of honor. ‘Hacked the Pentagon’, ‘Got into NASA’, ‘Best places to get the entire Disney catalog’, things like that.”

Taehyung frowned at his laptop. He pointed at a sticker of a brown hat wearing toy cowboy. “And Woody from Toy Story?”

“Does Seunghwan-nim like Toy Story?”

“Obnoxiously so.”

“There you go.”

Taehyung threw the laptop into the backseat and screaming into his hands.

Yoongi was not pleased at having a third developer, especially not one that didn’t know how to do anything networking related, doubly not one that was related to Seokjin, and triply not one that was a cop.

“Be nice, Yoongichi,” Seokjin said with a click of his tongue over ‘family’ dinner, as Hoseok called it, “and stop giving Jeongguk-ah all of your beans. What are you, five?”

“Yes,” Yoongi said, petulant, “and as your favorite five-year-old son, I demand you return your cousin to the depths of whatever legal hell he crawled out of.”

“Very eloquent son you have, hyung,” Namjoon said, not looking up from his book. “Poetic.”

“If Yoongi-hyung’s your son, what am I, hyung?” Jimin dutifully nibbled at his salad. “Can I be your eldest daughter?”

“Granted.” Seokjin spooned more beans onto Yoongi’s plate. “Eat up, son. You need your greens or you’ll never grow up big and strong like your sister.”

Jimin preened.

“You guys are weird,” Taehyung mumbled, steadily practicing his touch typing as per a livid Yoongi’s direction. Jeongguk heard the chime of a finished level. Taehyung’s face lit up. He turned the laptop around for everyone to see. “Look, Yoongi-nim! I’m at five words a minute now!”

Yoongi groaned all the way down his chair to the floor.

It was a lost cause trying to make Taehyung do any sort of coding and they couldn’t put him on camera, so Taehyung became the official Jimin stream handler.

“Wow,” Taehyung said, lounging at the table, his eyes rapt on his screen. “It’s only six in the morning. How can Jimin-nim already stick in a dildo that huge?”

“Lots of practice,” Yoongi grumbled, clutching his coffee with a death grip. “And lube. Guk-ah, how’s your patch holding up?”

“It’s holding,” Jeongguk said, smiling at his grumpy hyung. “As it has been for days. You can go back to bed, hyung. Seokjin-hyung isn’t streaming until noon. There’s no reason for all three of us to be awake right now.”

Yoongi scratched the back of his neck. “It’s not… that. I’m awake because of… something else.”

Something else turned out to be Namjoon coming downstairs not fifteen minutes later, his face grave, and pulling Yoongi into a room with a quickly latched door.

“What’s that about?” Taehyung asked, looking at the door with a frown. “Is that normal?”

“No.” Jeongguk switched over to his editor and tweaked a few more lines of code. If his hunch was right, the latest patch he was working on would keep the server stable up to three and a half million simultaneous streams. “But Namjoon-hyung is heading back to California to meet with his agent and won’t be returning for weeks.”

“Oh.” Taehyung turned back to look at his computer. He gasped. “Two? Holy shit. That’s a talent!”

Jeongguk switched back to the stream. Jimin was expertly bouncing on two dildos attached to the shower wall.

Yeah. He had to agree.

The second time his libido betrayed him wasn’t as bad as the first, but it was much more significant.

Seokjin had been out all day celebrating his birthday with estranged family (it was weird for him to think of Seokjin as the proverbial black sheep of his family, but he was; Seokjin and Taehyung had had an entire fight, falling out, and reconciliation about it), then with them celebrating his birthday, and at 2:24AM, while Jeongguk was watching ridiculous meme videos in a mindless haze, Seokjin stumbled into his room and turned on the lights.

Jeongguk winced at the brightness. “Hyung,” he said, sitting up in his bed, “it’s two in the morning—”

“Do you want to do a show with me?”

Jeongguk’s chest flipped weirdly. “What?”

Seokjin shut the door. He didn’t move away from it, though. Jeongguk could see the redness of his ears. “It’s — m-my followers, they… they’d like to see me actually be fucked by someone. By a real, uhm, penis.”

“W-what about… uh. Wait. What?” Jeongguk flipped through all of Seokjin’s shows that he’d seen. Dildo. Dildo. Jimin’s fingers. Dildo. Holy shit. “Wh-what about Hobi-hyung?”

“He’s not really my type,” Seokjin nearly whispered, “and he and Jimin have their whole thing, and I don’t want to step in the way of that.”

And Namjoon or Yoongi weren’t options in the same regard. Jeongguk wasn’t even going to think of Taehyung.

“Uh,” Jeongguk said, watching Seokjin deflate against his door, “it’s not… that I don’t want to?” That was… maybe too honest. “I just don’t know if… uhm. My… equipment works.”

Seokjin peered at him. “You wouldn’t be handling the stream. Is something wrong with your laptop? You should tell Hoseok-ah. As your employer, he’s obligated—”

“Not my laptop.” Jeongguk could feel the red of his face. “You’re very attractive, hyung, I just don’t know—”

“Oh, my god. I never even asked if you were gay or pan or bisexual or anything! I am so, so, sorry, Jeongguk-ah, I can’t believe—”

“No, no, hyung, it’s not that I wouldn’t want to—”

“Is it the positioning? I’m not assuming you’re an exclusive top or anything, it’s just for one stream, but if you’re an exclusive bottom then—”

“It’s not that, either, hyung. What I’m trying to explain—”

“Is it me?” Seokjin’s eyes were big. “Do you… are you not interested in having sex with me?”

Sometimes in life, one had to take a very embarrassing stand.

“It’s my dick,” Jeongguk said. Embarrassment be damned, he wasn’t going to let some miscommunication ruin his relationship with Seokjin. Plus, honesty or something? “I don’t know if I can get hard.”

Seokjin cocked his head to the left and blinked. “Wait. You watch our streams everyday and you don’t get hard?”

Jeongguk shook his head. “No.”

Seokjin frowned and crossed his arms. “Honestly, I’m a little offended. Me? You don’t get hard to me?”

“I could?” Jeongguk didn’t know why he admitted that, but Seokjin looked more upset than Jeongguk thought he should. “It’s not you. I literally don’t get aroused anymore.”

“Ah.” Seokjin relaxed his arms. “The depression.”

“Yeah,” Jeongguk echoed, “the depression.”

“Don’t worry about it then,” Seokjin said with a smile. “I’m sorry I sprung this on you. Please forget I ever asked.”

“We can find someone, if you want,” Jeongguk said, patting his mattress. “For now, you should join me in bed.”

“Wow, you move fast.” Seokjin kicked off his slippers and crawled his way up the bed to flop right on top of him. “My muscle bunny.”

Jeongguk rolled his eyes and physically moved Seokjin into the comforter to the man’s laughter. It made him smile. He was strong enough to manhandle his hyung, now. That was nice. “You’re more than welcome to leave and try your luck with not catching sight of something unsavory.”

Seokjin shivered, shifting lowering into the blanket. “God, I thought Jimin and Hoseok were bad. How are Taehyung and Yoongi even worse?”

“I just want to know how all of this will go down when Namjoon-hyung comes back,” Jeongguk mumbled, digging around for an extra pillow somewhere near his feet. “Two couples is bad enough. A couple and throuple might make me cry. Should we move out?”

“And downgrade from living the high life? No way.”

Jeongguk found a pillow. He pulled it out of the confines of the bed and threw it at the light switch, plunging the room into darkness.

“Hot,” Seokjin said and giggled. “I’ve been in this industry for five years and that is hands down the hottest thing I have ever seen.”

“I aim to please,” Jeongguk said, laying back down and fishing his phone from its place under his pillow. “Anything you want to watch?”

“Can you find that new Brad Pitt movie? I’ve been meaning to see it for ages.” Seokjin wiggled over and rested his head on Jeongguk’s chest. “Just like, Brad Pitt, you know?”

Jeongguk did find an illegal version of that Brad Pitt movie, but it only took six minutes for Seokjin to pass out on him and start drooling. It took thirty minutes for him to start getting sleepy himself, so Jeongguk turned the movie off, slipped his phone back under his pillow, and started his night time meditation.

It was when he woke up at seven in the morning, Seokjin tucked into his arms, his bed smelling like sweat and his hyung’s lavender-vanilla shampoo, that Jeongguk belated realized he felt really fucking good.

“Fuck,” Jeongguk grumbled, feeling his breath kick up at the realization that Seokjin was asleep and rubbing against him with those patented, petulant little whines. That was nice. Cute, even. That’s not why he was feeling good.

His underwear was wet; proof that he’d cum sometime during the night. Worse yet, he was still hard. Aching. Wanting nothing more than to bury himself in Seokjin’s heat and — get this — enjoy it.

Pro: his penis wasn’t broken.

Con: fuck.

Bodies were cruel. Maybe it was just his libido being extra cruel, but his dick was acting like he was fourteen again and he was hard all the time.

Waking up in the morning? Hard. Catching the sound of Seokjin moaning from Yoongi’s laptop? Hard. Seeing the way Jimin fell over himself to please Hoseok in silent, secret ways and hearing the low-rumble of Hoseok’s “That’s my good boy,” each time he was successful? Hard. Watching the Minions? Hard.

“You’re going to put an eye out with that thing,” Seokjin whispered into his ear as some minion did something minion-y. Jeongguk didn’t know. He wasn’t paying attention. Taehyung was not subtly fingering Yoongi on the loveseat under a blanket and Hoseok was pinching Jimin all over to make him moan and the room smelled like sex and — this was a kid’s movie. They were supposed to be hanging out and bonding, not having semi-public sex in the living room. Jeongguk missed Namjoon. This never happened when Namjoon was around.

“Don’t put your eyes near it and it won’t be a problem,” was the quip Jeongguk’s hormone addled brain could come up with. Seokjin’s brow rose. Great. Apparently hormones made him mean. “Sorry, hyung, I didn’t mean it.”

Seokjin looked down at his crotch and back up to him. “How does it feel about hands?”

Jeongguk felt himself twitch. He was masturbating three times a day to keep himself under control. He’d just finished a quick session in his bathroom not two minutes before they started this damn movie. What more was there for his body to give? Why was his dick like this?

“Uh,” Jeongguk said, the epitome of eloquence.

“I can just hold it,” Seokjin said, his whisper tickling Jeongguk’s sanity. “Not even skin to skin. It’ll feel better to rub against something that’s not your own hand.”

It would, wouldn’t? Seokjin’s hands were so soft.

“Yes,” Jeongguk whispered back, because fuck propriety. “Please.”

Seokjin tucked his hand into Jeongguk’s pants but not into his underwear and left it there, cupping him gently.

Jeongguk can gladly report that he only came once during the movie. They didn’t even get caught.

He blatantly ignored the sharpness of Taehyung’s gaze when he hobbled his way upstairs, blanket held tight to his lap.

“If you break Seokjin-hyung’s heart, Jeon Jeongguk, I’ll kick your ass.”

Jeongguk blinked through the haze of sleep to look at Jimin. Panty-clad, gamer-girl styled, cat-eared Park Jimin.

“Huh?” Jeongguk asked. His brain was trying to catch up with panty-wering gamer-girl cat-eared Jimin. “Huh?”

“I saw you two last night. Hyung was all over you. You defiled him!”

Jeongguk gasped. “Defiled? We haven’t even had sex!”

“Hyung is a precious vanilla bean of sweetness, Jeon Jeongguk! He is pure and holy and not one to be defiled by the sins of sex and pleasure—”

“I’m — Jimin, what? You’re both cam models!”

“Exactly! And work is work, but with you it’s not work, do you understand?” Jimin put his hands on his hips and glared harder.

Jeongguk didn’t understand, but there was one person in the world that he knew of who could control Jimin, and Jeongguk was pretty sure Hoseok had about a 30% success rate with it.

“Understood,” Jeongguk said.

Jimin grinned, pretty and docile. “Good boy.” He skipped out.

Jeongguk focused on brushing his teeth and vehemently forced down the fantasies of Seokjin wearing a cat tail, too.

Taehyung cornered him next.

“So,” Taehyung said, monitoring Jimin’s stream and taking notes. If it was for the investigation or for inspiration in the bedroom, Jeongguk didn’t know, but with the number of times he could make out the scribbling of the word cat he had his hunches. “Are you and Jin-hyung a thing?”

“Are you and Yoongi-hyung?” Jeongguk asked back, a little sour at being confronted about this twice in just as many hours.

“Yeah, when Namjoon-hyung comes back we’ll make it official,” Taehyung answered, looking up with a grin. “I’m excited to see how Yoongi-hyung holds up between us. I think he’ll be cute.”

Jeongguk pinched the bridge of his nose.

Hoseok was next. He caught Jeongguk in the kitchen with a smile.

“You’re both adults, but this is policy,” and Jeongguk suddenly had a piece of paper in his hands. “Let me know when you and hyung sign it. And congrats! You two look good together.”

Jeongguk didn’t even get a chance to protest before Hoseok sauntered away.

Namjoonie
I’m glad you’ve found someone, Jeongguk-ah.
I’m glad hyung’s found you.
If you ever need to chat or feel like you want to talk about things, I’m here for you.
Love is beautiful and ephemeral. Enjoy every moment.
There’s this poem by Robert Frost that I enjoy about how love can conquer all, even the darkest moments of life. Would you like it?

Me
yes, please!

Yoongi didn’t even say anything. He stood, leaning against the doorframe of Jeongguk’s bedroom door and stared at him for three solid minutes before walking away.

He finally got the message.

“Hey, hyung, just to clarify — do you like me?”

Seokjin looked up from his book, unbearably soft. His hair was fluffy, he was in a cozy-looking pink sweater, and he was covered by a knitted grey blanket; everything that screamed boyfriend.

Seokjin raised his brows. “Do you think I don’t?”

Jeongguk sighed and stepped into the room. He fidgeted with his hoodie. “Hyung, I’m serious.”

Seokjin put his book down. “I like you.”

It was so simple and straightforward Jeongguk didn’t know what to say. “You do?”

Seokjin’s smile was soft. He blew up at his bangs. “I do.”

“But… I’m not…” Jeongguk didn’t want to say anything special, because he was unique, but he didn’t feel like he deserved something as large and amazing as Seokjin’s attention or affections. “I’m me.”

“That’s why I like you, I think,” Seokjin said, smiling softer. “Even if you don’t like me back.”

Jeongguk bit his lip. “It’s not that I don’t like you, hyung. I just don’t know if…”

His hyung waved his hand in the air. “I know, Guk-ah. It’s okay. I can like you without you liking me back. I’m an adult. You’re an adult. We’re not obligated to anything.”

“I’m sorry,” Jeongguk said because he felt sorry and weird.

“No need to apologize.” Seokjin patted his blanket. “Maybe one day. For now, do you want to cuddle me? I’m cold.”

Jeongguk felt his face warm. “Uh… l-last night, we… y-yeah, uhm. I think if I h-hold you right now I’m going to…” there were probably better ways to communicate that he had zero control over his erections then holding up his pinky, but it was what it was. “Y-yeah. And I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“Au contraire, my muscle bunny. An erect penis poking at my ass is exactly what I want right now. So come over here and make me wildly horny for my show later tonight.” Seokjin made grabby hands at him and smiled.

Jeongguk scrunched his nose and crossed the room to cuddle his hyung, erection and all.

They weren’t dating, they just went on dates.

Seokjin invited him out for ice cream once, because he’d walked into the living room to relax and Hoseok and Jimin were attempting a horizontal tango on the couch, Jeongguk not even a full cushion away from them and trying to watch the news. (California was hit with torrential rains, grounding all flights. Namjoon had been trying to return back home for a solid week now.)

“Ugh. Let’s get some ice cream, Jeongguk-ah. Away from these heathens.”

Jimin moaned something that sounded like garbled mess, but Jeongguk got up, took Hoseok’s car keys, and drove them to get ice cream anyway.

The ice cream was delicious, and Seokjin kept making him laugh.

“I love your laugh,” Seokjin said during one such laughing-wheeze. “I’m glad we get to finally hear it.”

Jeongguk didn’t know what it meant but it made him feel warm and fuzzy inside and light. It was a wonderful feeling, and he wanted his hyung to feel like that too, so three days later he invited Seokjin out for a walk at the park with a bouquet of flowers.

The red ears and shy smile was worth the five minutes of biting cold and the bruise on his ass that he got when he slipped on a patch of ice.

They went back and forth. Seokjin invited him out to a fancy tea parlor and they pretended that the different floral teas did indeed all taste very different. He took Seokjin to the movies to watch a movie that he thought was action but turned out to be horror. Seokjin baked him cupcakes for no good reason at all. Jeongguk fixed his hyung’s off track closet door while Seokjin napped in the quiet of his bedroom.

“I know you and hyung secretly think Namjoon and I were the most disgusting thing on the planet to watch,” Yoongi said one morning, sipping at his coffee, “but watching you two is like being stuck in a never-ending Hallmark movie montage.”

“So you’re saying we’re cute,” Jeongguk said, not looking up from his code.

“And disgustingly sweet,” Taehyung added, standing up abruptly to steal his boyfriend’s coffee and kiss the man’s protest away. “We should be that sweet too, hyung. You, me, Namjoon-hyung. Matching tattoos? Underwear? Rings?”

Yoongi spluttered.

The winter passed in sheets of white, gray skies, and nipping winds. Jeongguk spent everyday laughing with Seokjin, holding his hyung’s hand, and doing everything he could in his power to make Seokjin smile.

The spring brought rains and flowers and more of Seokjin’s pink sweaters. Jeongguk bought a pink sweater for himself and a black one for Seokjin, and Seokjin bought him a giant sticker of his face for his laptop. Jeongguk pasted it right in the middle, so the light on the back lit up sticker Seokjin’s nose.

The start of summer wasn’t hot quite yet, but it was getting there. The couple and throuple now occupied two separate rooms instead of five, and Jeongguk was laying in Seokjin’s bed, watching him get ready for a stream by putting on his makeup, when it occurred to him, suddenly and unbidden, that he liked him.

“Hey, hyung,” Jeongguk said, watching Seokjin put a light sheer of pink onto his lips, “I like you.”

Seokjin’s eyes met his in the mirror. “You do?”

“I do,” Jeongguk agreed, settling down into the mattress with a smile.

Seokjin turned to look at him. “Why?”

Jeongguk spent three hours telling him why.

The first time they kissed it was during a ‘family’ movie night.

Jimin screamed like he was being murdered and Taehyung threw a pillow at his head with a yelled, “About damn time!” that got him cuffed by the ear and dragged out of the room by his taller boyfriend.

“My Jinnie-hyung! Hyung! No!” Jimin was openly sobbing. “My chance! At love! Ruined!”

“Sorry,” Hoseok said, picking Jimin up in his arms, “his medication.”

That was the reason for most of Jimin’s weirdness, these days. Jimin had thrown out his back during a stream but said nothing, choosing instead to power through the rest of his performance even though he was in tears. It took six seconds before Taehyung realized something was very wrong. Yoongi shut down the stream and Taehyung rushed upstairs shouting Namjoon’s name for a quick medical check.

Hoseok had not been pleased. Jimin was shortly taken to a hospital because the ice packs, heating packs, and at-home pain relief weren’t making it any better, and he returned shortly after loopy and in a wheelchair.

Hoseok assured them all that Jimin was going to recover just fine.

“He dipped his arch too hard,” Hoseok had said, lifting the giggly man out of the chair to bring him upstairs. “His entire lower back is strained. He needs rest, and the doctor prescribed him stronger anti-inflammatories, but he’ll be fine.”

But right now, Jimin was still not in the realms of mentally fine.

“Hyung, Jin-hyung, p-pr-promise me you’ll choose me forever!” Jimin sobbed. “I can’t live without you! Hyung!”

Seokjin smiled and kissed Jeongguk’s cheek.

“I’ll choose you forever,” Seokjin said, and then he kissed Jeongguk full on the mouth.

There were alot of ways they were official, but Jeongguk knew it was really, truly, absolutely a thing when Yoongi swivelled his laptop around one morning and violently tapped on the screen.

“Look at this,” Yoongi said with no other preamble.

Jeongguk looked. Seokjin was spreading himself out on the bed, fingering himself and moaning, and yes, Jeongguk was getting hard. He was just about to ask the why of the random torture session when Yoongi tapped around Seokjin’s shoulders, still clothed though he was naked from the waist down. Also probably naked under the hoodie he was wearing, from what Jeongguk could see of the exposed skin of his boyfriend’s stomach. Pale, light skin contrasting beautifully with the black hoodie. Seokjin didn't own black.

He blinked four times to make sure he was seeing what he was seeing. “That’s — that’s my hoodie.”

Yoongi’s grin was wicked. “Oh, is it? I thought it was mine. Thanks for the clarification, Jeongguk-ah.”

“Mean,” Jeongguk grumbled and stood up. “I’ll be back in ten.”

Taehyung didn’t even look up from Jimin’s stream. “Maybe more like fifteen. Trust me. Once you start thinking about it, you’ll never stop.”

Jeongguk came back in twenty.

“I’m thinking we should hold a party.”

“Why?” Jeongguk asked, tearing his eyes away from the sex scene of Seokjin’s novel. Seokjin was lounging in his lap, reading the third part of an erotic novel series that Jeongguk was pretending to not read over his boyfriend’s shoulder. He was pretty sure Seokjin knew, though. “We don’t even like parties.”

“I’m with Jeonggukie on this one,” Yoongi said from his bundled up blanket cocoon. “I barely like you all. What makes you think I would like strangers?”

“It’s better if you don’t like them,” Taehyung said, sitting down on the couch next to the blanket cocoon, “because it’s less an actual party and more a trap.”

“For who?” Hoseok asked.

“Whom,” Namjoon said.

“For whom?” Hoseok asked again.

Taehyung gestured at Yoongi. “The creep who wants to steal my boyfriend from me.”

“That’s a weird way to refer to me, Taehyung-ah,” Namjoon said.

“Not you, hyung. The online creep that’s been fabricating a criminal record for Jin-hyung, Jiminie, and our meow meow.”

“Call me that again, Taehyung-ah, and the criminal record won’t be fabricated any longer.”

Taehyung chuckled and kissed the side of Yoongi’s blanket covered head. He ignored the threat. “Seunghwan has finally got a username for us. He tried to track them down, but it’s a burner account. So we need to lure them out.”

“Is that safe?” Jimin asked, playing with Hoseok’s fingers.

“My hyungs will be here. They won’t let anything happen.”

“Promise, Taetae?” Jimin pouted.

“I promise, Minnie.” Taehyung leaned over to kiss Jimin’s cheek. “So what do you say, Hoseok-hyung? It’s your house. What you say, goes.”

Hoseok squinted at the ceiling. “I don’t know about a party…” He squinted harder. “Ah!” Hoseok looked at them all and beamed. “I’ve got it! We’ll host a fansigning!”

“Ew.” Jimin frowned.

“A themed fansigning?”

Jimin lit up. “Oh?”

“Oh, god,” Yoongi moaned, sinking further into his cocoon. “Jimin-ah, please. Please, for all that is good and right in the the world—”

“Rococo!”

Jeongguk tried not to laugh as Yoongi disappeared into his blanket with a muffled fit of curses, but boy was it difficult.

Hoseok booked a very expensive ballroom in a very expensive hotel downtown, hired fifteen separate photographers, and spared no expense for everyone’s historically accurate costumes.

“You will be the best looking men there, mark my words,” Hoseok declared with a smile so bright Jeongguk had to squint to see his hyung in the morning light. “You’re going to die when you see Seokjin-hyung in his costume, Jeonggukie! Mark my words!” Hoseok was excited enough to repeat himself, so Jeongguk marked the words.

(He found out later that week why Hoseok had been in such a giving mood because Taehyung silently wrote down how much the man had made selling fansigning tickets for the event at different tiered rates. Jeongguk had to take a break and lay down for a while to comprehend all of the zeroes.)

Aside from organizing the event itself, there were things for them to learn in the month and half until the signing.

“If someone tries to kidnap you, you need to know how to fight,” Taehyung explained to them all in the gym. “All of you have to learn this. Namjoon-hyung, Jeonggukie, and Hoseok-hyung will be my assistants.”

“Why do they get to get out of class?” Yoongi asked, flopped back on the mat already from their light warmup run. “I can be an assistant!”

“Babe, I love you, but we’re trying to simulate real events and I need assistants that can, you know, lift people.”

“I can lift people,” Yoongi grumbled to the ceiling, “all the way up to heaven.”

“Why can’t I be an assistant, Taehyung-ah? Who’s even going to try to kidnap me? I’m too tall,” Seokjin said with a shake of his head. “They’d have to be taller than Namjoonie to even have a chance. How may men like that even exist?”

“Enough. Plus, it’s not hard to kidnap someone when they’re inebriated, no matter their size.” Taehyung thought for a moment. “Except really, really heavy people. Like Dwayne Johnson. And — no offense Seokjin-hyung — you weigh less than a piece of paper.”

Seokjin gasped, affronted. “I do not!”

Jimin patted his leg. “You tell him, hyung. You weigh two pieces of paper.”

“Wow. Wow. This is the thanks I get for raising all of you? Jeongguk-ah! I’m your boyfriend! Defend my honor!”

“Uh.” Jeongguk kept his eyes trained on Taehyung and scooted a bit a ways away from Seokjin’s gasping pout. “How can I help, Tae-hyung?”

He was assigned Yoongi, because Taehyung said something about working with unfamiliar bodies, which would have suited Jeongguk just fine, if Yoongi were actually trying.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk sighed, lifting the man up easily and setting him down again. Yoongi sprawled back onto the mat. “You’re not even trying.”

“What’s the point?” Yoongi closed his eyes. “No one is going to kidnap me, Guk-ah. There’s no point.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that.” Yoongi flopped over and curled up into a ball. “I’m not pretty like Jimin or whatever the fuck hyung is. No one wants me. No one is going to kidnap me. It’s fine.”

Jeongguk frowned. “Hyung, are you alright?”

“Yup,” Yoongi said, but he didn’t lay back down sprawled out, so Jeongguk was not convinced.

Jeongguk sat down behind Yoongi’s back. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Do you want to listen to me talk?”

“Not really, no.”

Jeongguk looked at Yoongi’s back. Yoongi struggled with his own demons in a very different way.

“Do you want me to curl up into a ball behind you, facing the other way, so you don’t feel so alone?”

Yoongi shifted enough to look at him. He bit his lip and looked away again. “If you wanna.”

Jeongguk smiled to himself and pressed his back against Yoongi’s. He curled his legs up to match his hyung. Seokjin gave him a funny look from across the room, Namjoon hovering over him.

“Wait a bit,” Jeongguk mouthed to his boyfriend. Seokjin nodded, directed Namjoon’s attention to them, and relayed the message.

Namjoon’s shoulders tightened, then sagged. Dimples peeked up at him with Namjoon’s smile. “Thank you,” the man mouthed. “I’ll come when he’s ready.”

Namjoon moved.

Jeongguk had the intimate thrill of watching his boyfriend be effortlessly picked up, flipped, and thrown back down on to the ground.

Training with Jimin was the worst.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk whined, trying to wiggle his arms free so he could get some space. “This isn’t how this is supposed to work!”

“But it’s working, isn’t it?” Jimin asked, grinding down into his lap even harder. “You’re not kidnapping me.”

“Jimin-ah,” Seokjin’s strained voice came. He was in a headlock. Taehyung was enjoying today’s training too much. “Please stop giving my boyfriend a lap dance.”

“This is not a lap dance. I am suffering,” Jeongguk tried to jerk his face away from Jimin’s sudden kissy lips. “Hyung!”

“You’re doing great, Minnie!” Taehyung choked Seokjin harder.

“I learn from the best, Taetae!” Jimin cackled and grinded down harder.

The Namjoon and Hoseok rescue team were greatly appreciated.

Seokjin crawled into his bed that night with too bright eyes, too beautiful makeup, and too few clothes.

“I refuse to let Jiminie be the last lap dance you have today,” Seokjin said as Jeongguk gawked.

“You’re going to give me a lap dance?” Jeongguk squeaked, feeling the warmth of Seokjin’s skin against his hands with the wiggle of his boyfriend right into his lap.

“Among other things,” Seokjin said, meeting his eye. “If you want.”

Jeongguk let his hyung perform his lap dance, like the patient, pure, loving boyfriend he was. When Seokjin finished — Jeongguk made sure he was finished — he gently pushed his boyfriend to the bed, took off that fucking cursed thong that was shortcircuiting his brain, and for the first time in their relationship, the first time in his life, he enjoyed a night of other things.

Namjoon was sitting at the table the next morning when Jeongguk woke up. Hoseok was busying himself around the kitchen cooking breakfast and suddenly Jeongguk felt like a child three seconds from learning a big secret from his parents that was going to change his life.

“Am I in trouble?” Jeongguk asked, sitting down stiffly on the furthest chair from his hyungs. “Am I getting a baby brother?”

“No,” Namjoon said with a dimpled smile.

“We have considered getting you a dog,” Hoseok said and beamed. “You’ve been asking for one for ages.”

Jeongguk perked up. “Really?”

“We have considered it, but that’s not what this talk is about.” Namjoon neatly folded his newspaper and set his coffee cup down. Jeongguk was struck with a sudden and very clear understanding of why he always heard Taehyung calling Namjoon ‘Daddy’. “Hoseok and I are here to talk to you about sex.”

“Kill me,” Jeongguk said.

“None of that, now.” Hoseok shook his head fondly and added another pancake to the every growing plate. “We’re not going to force you to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about; you’re an adult, and you have full access to the internet. There’s really no need.”

“So why are we talking about…” Jeongguk gestured vaguely. “I’ve watched porn. I know how things work. Where things go.”

Namjoon sipped at his coffee. “Porn isn’t a good representation of all that sex should entail and what it shouldn’t. Even Jiminie’s and Jin-hyung’s cam shows are catered toward a specific point of consumption, and we don’t want you to feel pressured or beholdened to that mentality.”

Jeongguk stared. “What?”

“Exactly,” Hoseok said, turning off the stove. “What Namjoon is trying to say in way too many words is that we’re available for any questions you might have.”

“And we want to assure you that despite what you see in porn, the point of sex is to have a good time,” Namjoon said, moving his newspaper out of the way for Hoseok to set the plate of pancakes down. Jeongguk got up to move closer. He couldn’t get pancakes from the end of the table. It was probably a trap, but it was also six in the morning and he was hungry.

Jeongguk snagged a few pancakes and put them onto his plate. “I had a good time. No. A great time.”

“We heard.” Hoseok sent him a wink.

Jeongguk groaned and sank down into his seat, his entire face warm.

“You don’t have any questions for us?” Namjoon asked, putting a few pancakes onto his plate and letting Hoseok spray a sizable amount of whipped cream on top. Namjoon and pressurized cans didn’t get along. “Anything at all?”

“Well…” Jeongguk kept his eyes everywhere but on his hyungs. “There was a point, uhm, last night. A-and hyung was, uhm, o-on top? You know, uhm, r-riding me, and I just…” He stabbed at his pancakes. “He l-looked like he was enjoying it more than… more than me.”

“More than you on top?” Namjoon asked, to clarify.

Jeongguk nodded. “Not that it didn’t feel great! Hyung was just — you know, he was enjoying himself more than he did when I was, uhm. Pumping.”

Hoseok nodded sagely. “That’s not uncommon. It was your first time. I didn’t know how to hit Jimin’s prostate when I was in control until like our fourth or fifth go around.”

Jeongguk gaped. “What? Seriously? But in all the pornos—”

“What did we say about porn?” Namjoon said with a smile. “See? This is what I meant. You had a great time last night. Hyung had a great time last night. That is what matters.”

“Oh!” Jeongguk understood it now. He was comparing himself to unrealistic sexual ideals! “Oh! Then, hyungs, is it totally weird that I want Seokjin-hyung to put on cat ears and a tail? Jiminie cornered me in the bathroom one time—”

Hoseok stood with a fond sigh. “I’ll get more coffee going. I think we’re going to need it. But continue, Guk-ah? This is what hyungs are for!”

Jeongguk learned a lot that day.

“Stop staring,” Seokjin said, poking him with his socked foot and a teasing smile, “it’s unbecoming of my designated chaperone.”

“I don’t think I can,” Jeongguk confessed, grabbing the foot and squeezing it gently. “You look… I have no words. Beautiful? Magnificent?”

“Like your most royal wet dream come true?” Jimin asked, skipping back into the room with a breezy smile. “Or is it me, Jeongguk-ah?”

The fansigning event, thus far, had been quite a success. They had over a hundred guests in the largest hall, where everyone was allowed to take photos with Jimin or Seokjin for a fee, and were moving the different tiers into more private rooms as the night wore on.

The second room had a touch event included with the picture and Hoseok had a selection of debauched photo card mystery packs for sale to the smaller audience of fifty. Jeongguk bought four, which were all Jimin, and Taehyung bought one, which contained five ultra-rare holographics of Seokjin, to Hoseok’s shock.

(Naturally, Jeongguk was now indebted to the devil because Taehyung was not a sucker no matter how much he didn’t want the PCs, and he wasn’t going to chance trying to compete for the cards at market value.)

The third and final room, the smallest that was comfortably rated for a sum of 40 people, was the fanciest. This was the fansign room. There would be hor d’ourves, classical music, and a three-course meal with dessert once the autographs were done.

“Are we ready?” Yoongi asked, keeping his eyes trained on his checklist. “Our guests are refreshed and changed. Everyone’s accounted for. They’re ready when you are.”

“We’re ready.” Hoseok quickly kissed Jimin’s cheek and navigated the man to his designated plush chair.

Jeongguk bent down to slip Seokjin’s shoe back on, earning him a smile from his boyfriend, and nodded at Hoseok’s gaze. “We’re ready.”

“Keep your eyes open,” Taehyung reminded them. “Don’t take any food or drinks from anyone; not even each other. Buddy-systems to the bathroom. Someone should know where you are at all times. Please check in.”

“Promise,” Seokjin said.

“I’d never betray your trust, Taetae.” Jimin wiggled further into his plush seat.

“I’ll be next to hyung,” Jeongguk said. With his all black ensemble and his close proximity to Seokjin all night, most people were assuming he was a very dapper looking bodyguard. It was a wonderful cover story and Jeongguk was sticking with it.

“Joonie and I will be managing the guests around the perimeter,” Hoseok nodded at Taehyung. “So we’ll check with your boys when we see them.”

“Good. And Yoongi-hyung?” Taehyung asked, raising a brow at Yoongi who rolled his eyes.

“You’ll be right next to me,” Yoongi grumbled, but Jeongguk could see the man’s blush. “What trouble am I going to get into when you’re beside me?”

“I was going to say ‘Don’t tempt me, I’ll be working, stop looking so delectable’, but that works too.”

Yoongi was so pink, Seokjin cooed.

Jeongguk knew it was the man they were looking for — he felt it in his bones. He was too perfect: as tall as Namjoon; as broad as Seokjin; a killer smile like Hoseok; a chiselled softness like Taehyung; an exuberance that felt like Jimin.

Seokjin giggled and turned red as he signed the man’s PC album, and Jeongguk just knew.

It was the little things. The way the man kept telling Seokjin jokes. The completely unnecessary Jimin lifting competition he’d won with a boisterous laugh. The erect posture. The freaking straight nose and symmetrical face and chiselled jaw. The little things.

That, and the weird unblinking, blank-faced stare Jeongguk kept catching the guy do whenever Yoongi’s back was turned.

“Hey,” Jeongguk said as Taehyung’s commander strolled up to Seokjin’s table, all smiles and looking weirdly in-place for a cam model Rococo-themed fansigning. “Do you see that guy?”

“Officer Gyu Hwanlee, yeah.” Seojoon slid over a sleeved Seokjin holographic that Jeongguk did not have, the traitor. “He’s been watching Yoongi-nim like a hawk.”

“Any ideas why?” Seokjin asked, signing his name as slowly as he could. “Yoongi doesn’t even stream with us.”

“He’s cute. He doesn’t stream with you, but he’s shown up on camera a few times when things weren’t going to hot for you or Jimin-nim. Back in the beginning.”

“When we were still using a third-party platform, yeah,” Seokjin said, adding a couple of hearts.

“It only takes a glance to spur an obsession.” Seojoon grinned widely as Seokjin finished his last heart and slid the card back over. “Thank you, Seokjin-nim! I’m a huge fan!”

It was so exaggerated and loud, Jeongguk wasn’t sure how anyone believed it to be genuine.

Seokjin giggled. “Thank you for supporting me.”

“How could I not?” Seojoon gasped. “Your shows are pure artisty. The way you and Jimin-nim play together puts the vile, complacent objectification style of the modern consumable sex industry—”

This was sounding very Namjoon.

Jeongguk’s eyes widened. “Wait, where—”

Taehyung shouted. Porcelain shattered. Jeongguk heard the distinct recognizable sound of a sheet of aluminum crashing onto a head.

“Who the fuck do you think you’re touching?” Yoongi yelled from some where Jeongguk couldn’t see. “Try it again, fucker! Try to put your hands on my boyfriend one more fucking time and I’ll fucking—” another thunder crack “—castrate you with this fucking piece of blunt fucking— why the fuck are you trying to touch me? You must be a seasoned fucking delusional—”

Seojoon shook his head and scoffed. “As physically capable as a wet paper bag, huh?”

Choi Wooshik was a human that was somehow eighteen times more chaotic than Park Jimin but still somehow twenty-three times more sensible. It didn’t make any sense to Jeongguk at all, but he did have a much more intimate understanding of why Taehyung was a really great yet really terrible cop now.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Wooshik said, looking incredibly innocent as another police officer took his statement. Jeongguk wasn’t hiding behind the man, but he’d been explicitly told to not move and look as confused as possible. Jeongguk was sure he was acing the confusion part. “Did you hear anything, Taehyung-ah?”

“Nope.” Taehyung’s eyes were bright and dangerous, one arm wrapped firmly around Jeongguk’s waist. “No, not at all. Are you sure you have the right person?”

The police officer checked her notes. “Yes. Several witnesses claim that Min Yoongi made a threat of castration—”

“Min Yoongi? That man is a saint!” Wooshik stomped his foot. “He saved my dog from a tree once! Climbed right up there to carry my beloved back down to me. He would never! He’s the epitome of non-violence. He is what Gandhi and Martin aspired to be! He practices the ancient art of Qigong and donates every hard earned physical dollar to charity—”

The police officer looked dubious. “Is that so? What’s the name of your dog?”

“Dog,” Wooshik deadpanned.

The police officer sighed. “Choi-nim, as a fellow officer, you know—”

“Do you think I’m lying? Here. Look.” Wooshik reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, shoving the device in front of the woman’s haggard face. “This is Dog. He’s a doll, if not a bit tiny — runts, you know? — but we’re working on it.”

The officer squinted at the background photo. Wooshik rolled his eyes and opened his photo roll instead, navigating around expertly before showing the officer his phone again. “See? I got him a few weeks ago. Such a cute puppy. Taehyungie’s met him before.”

“He’s really sweet.” Taehyung nodded eagerly. “Drools all over the place, though. Leather is never the same once dog drool is on it, but I forgive him.”

Wooshik rolled his eyes. “What forgiveness? He made me pay for a dry cleaning service in Italy. I had to have his pants shipped all the way to a leather servicer in Tuscany named Valentino—”

“Vincenzo,” Taehyung said.

“—Vincenzo, when I told him that it was a total scam. We’re police, right? What does he even need leather pants for? Speaking of leather, have you heard that this small village in the Philippines has invented an eco-leather out of pineapple ski— wait, Officer Lee, where are you going?”

“Clearly you’ve escaped from a local hospital and have no idea what’s going on here, so I think this interview is done.” Officer Lee flipped her notebook closed and took another hasty step away. “I’ll talk to other witnesses. Have a great day, Officer Choi.”

“But I have so many more pictures of Dog! Look! In this one—”

Jeongguk let himself be led away by his hyung. Away, away, and away, until Taehyung whispered softly into his ear, “Wooshik-hyung had to pay like three thousand dollars for the dog and the breeder won’t let us return it. Do you want a doberman puppy by any chance?”

He knew better than to accept an overly expensive mysteriously acquired dog, but Jeongguk was a sucker at heart. He said yes.

Yoongi was not arrested for assault or threats of castration. It took the crowd a little while to understand that they were lying to keep Yoongi out of jail, but one very dramatic sob-scene from Jimin about how positively devastated he would be to lose his hyung to those wolves in the slammer (Who else would say ‘slammer’ but Park Jimin?) the crowd quickly turned.

“That guy was such a creep!” Jeongguk heard one young woman ranting to Officer Lee, who looked like she wanted to be on any other planet but the one she existed on right now. “He kept staring at Yoongi-nim, like staring staring. Unbroken eye contact and everything! I even brought it up to my friend…”

If Hoseok, perhaps, returned the cost-per-entrance fee to all of their third room guests in thanks for their complicity, Jeongguk didn’t know anything about it.

“So.”

Jeongguk smiled at his hyung in the mirror, watching the pink lip balm settle onto his favorite plushed lips. “So.”

Seokjin met his eye. “So, it’s your birthday in—” he woke up the screen on his phone “—three minutes.”

“I know,” Jeongguk said. “I’ll be twenty-four.”

Seokjin hummed. “I know. So. Will you still be here?”

“Here in the house or here with you?” Jeongguk asked, rolling over on the bed to stare at the beautiful boyfriend upside down. “Do people ever move out of mansions? Why would they?”

“I mean, Yoongichi did.”

Jeongguk snorted. “Hyung, moving to the secret other wing of the mansion is not moving out.”

Seokjin pouted. “But he’s so far now. It takes him an entire six minutes to walk here! He never visits me anymore. He says it’s too much effort.”

“We just saw him at dinner.”

“He’s too far,” Seokjin whined. “I don’t like the people I love being far away from me, Jeon Jeongguk!” and then he settled him with a Look.

It made everything in Jeongguk thrill.

Jeongguk rolled back over so his hyung was right-side up. “Do you mean it?”

“Do I mean what?” Seokjin crossed his arms and huffed. “I didn’t say anything special or big or significant to mean. We’re just boyfriends who sleep together every night, and know each other’s bodies, and share all of our deepest, darkest secrets, and all of our bestest, brightest moments, and are, together, raising a dog. Plus, we were given the main house area of the mansion, and Hoseokie keeps calling us the ‘Lords of the Manor’, which hasn't been giving me any ideas at all—”

“I love you, too.” Jeongguk plucked Seokjin up, light as a feather, and pressed a kiss to those soft lips. “I’m staying. Here. At the house. And with you.”

“Oh, thank god.” Seokjin practically sagged into his arms, which wasn’t the response Jeongguk had been expecting. “Because I love you too, and if you don’t love me back, this birthday present was going to be very, very awkward.”

Jeongguk looked his boyfriend’s face up and down. “What birthday present?”

Seokjin poked his chest with a hard finger. “The one in my pants! You don’t think I noticed how you keep re-watching that video of Jimin in his cat-girl gamer-girl outfit? And your porn history, by god! Every other video is lingerie! You’re an absolute deviant! A fiend! A criminal! I’ve had this cat tail in my ass for hours but it’s the stupid frilly thong that’s giving me a wedgie, which doesn’t even make sense—”

Jeongguk didn’t hear the rest of the rant. He wasn’t enough of a good guy to avoid the temptation.

He was a lucky guy. A foolish guy. A naive guy. A good guy sometimes, a bad guy others.

Finally living his life?

Jeongguk was more than okay with all of it.