Thursday the 1st, Nov 2018

Hoseok’s head throbbed mightily without proposition. His ears felt clogged and his mouth tasted sour. He rubbed a hand round his exposed stomach—his cotton shirt was ridden up to his chest—and his lips mildly shuddered, unconsciously agape. His eyes fluttered open, and his hazy view met with the palely hued ceiling.

He laid there and stared, unmoving—momentarily blinking as his nerves willed. Then he sat up and yawned, his head throbbing harder with every moment. He drove a hand through and pulled gently at his hair, eager to work the knots out of his brown curls.

He sat still in that position, his brain working quick, despite the dogged protestation hammering from the sides of his skull.

What had happened the night before?

And how had he gotten back home, when he was very much aware he couldn’t have, all by himself?

Hoseok stared at the duvet draped over his lower half. By familiarity, his mind had registered yellow material, drawn all over with abstract swirls and variously sized circles that somehow merged into wired flowers.

The one currently on him however, was in the softest shade of blue, and all over it, multiple bold horizontal and faint vertical lines met at points and created squares.

It didn’t belong to him. The duvet wasn’t his, and it terrified him.

He spun his head up and around him, searching for obvious signs that told his whereabouts: round the walls, to the little fridge near the door, to the little table in the centre of it all.

His ears suddenly picked up something, loud and clear. He didn’t know how he hadn’t heard it before, but he did now, and it rang heavily through the room.

Deep, heavy snores. Snores that came from a boy sprawled carelessly on the floor by Hoseok’s left, his hands over his head and his legs askew. Abandoned next to him was a duvet that twinned with the one Hoseok had on him.

Hoseok knew who the boy was, and it surprised him even more. He was about to call out, when a door to the left opened and another boy walked in, toothbrush in hand and towel slung around his neck.

‘Oh? Hoseok, you’re awake’.

A shrill cry broke out at that moment. Hoseok swerved his head to the direction of the sound, his heart in his mouth.

Taehyung swiftly moved to where the alarm clock laid on the bed side table beside Hoseok’s bed and turned it off. He looked at the older and smiled, taking a sit beside him on the matress.

‘Good morning’.

Hoseok blinked, his mind in a jumble.
‘How am I here?’

Taehyung opened his mouth in sudden remembrance. He smiled again, the corners of his mouth caving in the subtlest dimples.

‘We brought you here, Joon and I.’

The grimace on Hoseok’s face spoke disarray in enough volumes. Taehyung continued, his friend’s confusion as motivation.

‘Actually we met Yoongi yesterday at “Lustre”, and coincidentally you were there too, but you were too drunk for anyone to meet you, so we let you be where you were on your chair for the rest of the night, and we really couldn’t have left you all alone when we were leaving, so we brought you here to spend the night in our dorm, since we don’t know the code to your apartment’.

Hoseok stared at Taehyung, his eyes wide. ‘You guys were at “Lustre”’?

Taehyung told him how Yoongi had been their guide the night before. ‘He said he greeted you when he arrived, but you barely noticed him.’

Hoseok slowly shook his head. ‘I had no idea’.

‘Figured’, agreed Tae, nodding. ‘Anyway we brought you to our dorm, and this idiot over here,’ he got up, walked to where Namjoon slept deeply on the floor and gave him a hard kick in the shin,’ gave up his bed for you, because yesterday Jin slept in my bed, and I wasn’t ready to sleep on the floor two nights in a row, sorry’.

Namjoon grunted, and turned to the other side, ignoring Taehyung and slipping smoothly back into slumber.
Taehyung gave him another kick.

‘Wake up, dude. The alarm already rang, and you didn’t hear it, again’.

Namjoon grunted once more.

Taehyung bent and pulled him out of his makeshift bed and unto the bare floor, and the blankets didn’t disturb, because none of them were clung to any part of Namjoon’s body.

Namjoon yawned and brought a hand to his stomach and scratched. Then he looked around the room, and when his gaze fell on Hoseok, he simply yawned again, and lay back on the floor, not minding how cold it felt without any blankets layered on it. Taehyung sucked his teeth in frustration.

Hoseok visibly shivered and rubbed his palms up and down his arms. ‘Um... was Jin there too?’

Taehyung looked away from Namjoon’s form on the floor and nodded. ‘Yeah. He offered to share his apartment with you for the night too, but you vehemently refused’.

Hoseok thickly swallowed. ‘He wanted to let me sleep at his apartment?’

‘Yeah. But the second he was done talking you began thrashing around and screaming “No!” as though you knew of a monster that lives under Jin’s bed and you were so trying to avoid having to meet it’.

Hoseok picked at his shirt, his eyes forlornly set on a fraying thread.

‘Do you know of a monster that lives under Jin’s bed?’

Hoseok had a response, but he couldn’t voice it.

Taehyung shrugged, moving away from where his friend was beginning to snore again on the floor. ‘Must have been the drunk speaking’.

‘Is this your shirt?’, asked Hoseok, after his tongue had thawed.

‘Yeah,’ the black haired boy answered, and raised a pointer finger at the bathroom door. ‘Your clothes reeked man, I had to’.

Hoseok slowly nodded, his gaze still printed on the shirt. ‘Thanks’.

Taehyung dunked his towel in a little basket at a corner of the room and sank down on his own bed, (which was on the left of Namjoon’s makeshift space on the floor) and faced Hoseok, who sat with his view on the front wall of the room, his eyes out of focus and his lips closed up, because his mind was in a daze. His head still hurt from veisalgia.

‘Were you alone?’

Hoseok didn’t know he was being referred to.

‘Hoseok?’

Hoseok turned to Taehyung, eyebrows questioning.

‘Did you go to the bar alone?’

Hoseok registered the question, and he nodded.

Taehyung’s eyes widened. ‘Those people in the chairs beside yours weren’t your friends?’

‘I wasn't aware of any people. The chairs were all empty when I arrived’.

‘You drank that much? Without your friends too? Did you have layouts to get back to your apartment?’

Namjoon yawned and sat up, his hair resting in uncultured wisps on his head. He looked over at Hoseok, subconsciously waiting for a response to a question he couldn’t pinpoint.

Hoseok squeezed gently at his neck, softly gliding a thumb over his clavicle. His lips surlily set down into a frown—that  lopsided shape again—before his hand dropped from his neck and joined the other in a fingers wringing fest.

‘I...,’ he sighed, his eyes glancing over at Taehyung, before looking away at the wall again, ‘its nothing. It just so happened that I went there by myself, and I ended up drinking a lot’.

Taehyung raised an eyebrow. ‘No one else along?’

‘Do I have to be trailed around?’

Taehyung shrunk at Hoseok’s tone. Then he straightened and placed his left fist in his right palm, readying himself to a matter-of-fact speech.

‘No, I’m saying that people go in groups to places they know they won’t be responsible for themselves, so they’d be sure that there’s others—’

‘I don’t want to have you lecturing me, Taehyung’. Hoseok jerked his legs from under him, so that they dangled dully from the edge of the bed. ‘Its nothing. You don’t have any say in—’, he sighed, and his head flopped down.

Taehyung warily eyed at him.

Namjoon blankly stared, blinking once in long moments.

‘I’m sorry,’ continued Hoseok. His right hand slid repeatedly up and down his right thigh. ‘I’m thankful, to you and Joon...’

Namjoon sheepishly waved a hand.

‘And I admit I was irresponsible and I should have thought long and clear before I made decisions’, Hoseok went on, his voice soft and low. ‘I just don’t know how to tell you—’, he dropped his head in his hands and sighed for the umpteenth time. His breath poured out his nostrils and evaporated on his palms, warming them for a brief second and a half. Then he looked up again.

‘Can I use your bathroom?’

Namjoon pointed a hand to the door Taehyung had come out from earlier.
Hoseok wordlessly got up and made his way to the obstruction. He opened the door and went in, shutting it after him with a slight thud.

From without, the running of the tap could be heard distinctively, and so could Hoseok’s deep breaths.

Namjoon and Taehyung exchanged a concerned look.

--

Minutes before a professor’s arrival, as it usually did, the theatre buzzed with a dispersive murmur, occasionally rising with a student’s pitch skidding out of zone and falling back as quick as it had surfaced.

Jin could see Namjoon and Taehyung sat in their usual row, from where he stood at the base level of the theatre. Namjoon caught sight of him and waved. Jin waved back, and a second after he was climbing—bounding up two steps in a hop to join them.

Taehyung clapped Jin on the back as the latter plopped down on the seat next to him. Namjoon moved his palm back and forth in yet another wave.

Jin cocked his head to the left and raised a brow, after he was comfortably sat and his bag was lounging on his knees.

‘No hangover? Joon you had like twelve drinks last night, at least.’

‘Make that eleven’, huffed the brunette, his smile turning upside down in a jiffy. ‘Taehyung stole my first drink.’

Taehyung spoke up, intentionally ignoring Namjoon. ‘The drinks had no alcohol.’

Jin questioningly raised his other eyebrow, so both stood angled to his forehead, almost disappearing behind his partitioned bangs. ‘The drinks you had were non alcoholic?’

Namjoon’s irises danced in amusement. ‘Of course they weren’t. We’re super model students that care about class attendance, remember?’
And then he made a sarcastic gagging noise.

Taehyung nodded, his hair softly slapping his forehead. ‘You didn’t know?’

Jin shook his head, mouth slightly ajar. ‘But, but Hoseok...’

Namjoon chuckled. ‘Did you give some of your knowledge away, Seokjin? Since when can you not tell the difference between obviously high drinks, and innocent fruity concoction?’

Jin slid him a fed up look.

‘Speaking of Hoseok’, Taehyung began, sliding a pen left and right on the table, ‘we needed to get him home, and there’s no way the four of us would have made it back to the dorms wasted.’

Namjoon agreed. ‘It’s true. You know how I get when drunk’.

Taehyung shuddered in remembrance. ‘Remember how he freaking Sister Abigail-ed you to the ground and sat on your back throughout that night, on my birthday, Jin? And he growled if anyone tried to get him off you?’

Jin blinked. ‘What?’

‘Imagine if I had done that to the bus driver’, Joon mused to Tae, his eyes wide and a hand under his jaw.

Jin blinked once more.

Taehyung crossed his arms over his chest, he too with his eyes unfocusedly wide. ‘A month in jail, max’.

Namjoon shook his head in disagreement. ‘Three months, bro’.

Taehyung’s mouth flew open. ‘You’d never last that long’.

Namjoon slowly nodded, gaze shifting to his friend’s. ‘I swear, you’re freakishly right’.

Jin blinked, again.
‘So how’s Hoseok?’ He spoke, shaking himself from his daze. ‘He seemed really beat last night.’

Joon and Tae gave each other a quick glance.

‘Well’, started Namjoon.

‘He’s really hungover’, Taehyung finished.

Namjoon nodded. ‘Really hungover. He seemed as though he were super—’

Tae elbowed Joon in the side. Joon shot the older a hot glare and gently sent a hand rubbing at the pain that was beginning to bite his ribs sore.

‘He’ll get over it’, Tae finalised, leaning back into his seat and resuming to twirl his pen.

Jin’s eyebrows wrung in bewilderment. ‘Get over what?’

Namjoon shrugged, taking his hand off his waist and bringing it to rest dormant on the table. ‘His hangover, what do you think?’

Jin nodded, having nothing to say as a reply to the open question. ‘And Yoongi?’

Namjoon scoffed. ‘Yoongi skips classes as though attendance lists were a myth. He’s most likely out cold somewhere on his dorm floor. Goodluck to Sanha for having to cope with that.’

Taehyung wanted to say something about Sanha in response, but the professor’s entrance forced his tongue to a halt.

--

The wind sang voicelessly across the atmosphere. It bellowed between the trees, shrilled between the autumn leaves that mingled with the yellowed grass on ground level, and it ran falsettos through the brown threads of Namjoon’s hair, ever so softly that he didn’t feel it.

His form was bent over the screen of a laptop, and his fingers flew in a shambolic sequence all over the keyboard.

Seconds skipped by, before he suddenly turned his head up to the sky and stilled, his eyes clamped shut.
The sun shone down on his eyelids, but it brought no sting. He heaved a deep breath, and it united with the singing wind in an incessant journey around the planet.

Namjoon suddenly had a thought. A very interesting thought.

What if... scientists came up with an innovative way to gain knowledge; where in cases we would read a book,

we’d rather eat the book, instead?

And then, boom! Knowledge digested?

He shook his head. He turned back to his laptop and stared at the words he’d typed. He wondered about knowledge shared digitally, and how they’d be digested if the eating book invention came to being.

Would licking the screen be it?

He sighed again. He registered he wasn’t making any sense. He dropped his body fully on the ground, so his form was basking in the glow of the sun. His laptop laid by his knees, the pointer blinking rhythmically.

The sounds of other students milling about the field floated and registered in his ears: the sounds from talking, from laughing, from cracking a can open, from turning pages of books, and from other fingers on other laptops.

The sounds of musical instruments faintly wandered from the theatre where Tae and Jin were having their class.

Lunch after the second lecture had been very nice. Pleasantly steaming Jjapaguri, warm flavoured steak and a superbly refreshing milkshake. And then a pickled burger five minutes after. With curly fries. Then some orange squash a minute ago. The plastic squash bottle laid empty next to the brunette on the grass, its body still covered in chilly droplets from being housed for long in an electric winter box.

Namjoon sighed yet again, and then yawned.

No way... was that sleep?

He sprung into sitting, and picked up from where he paused on the laptop.

The coordination of multiple parallel lines through optical lens enunciate...

His hands halted. Then they fell ungracefully on the keyboard.

Namjoon was frustrated, and a bit cross too. He was starting an assignment much farther than the turn in date, but as much as he tried to put in effort and a lot of thought towards the work, he just couldn’t bring himself to crank out something good.

Seokjin had drilled it into his ears countless of times; of how he gets to work early, and puts everything in order quickly—that it makes him feel at ease knowing that he’s got lots of time to review his projects before submitting. Joon had always argued that it didn’t work that way for him. Pressure was the way, and despite it being really frustrating to have to cram everything into a few days—hours, even—before submission, it didn’t matter.

Stuff just happened to flow better, to work better, to come together faster in Namjoon’s brain, when he was aware that failure was rocking classy platforms and chewing bubble gum just outside his door.

But then, Namjoon had said all of that—he’d come to believe all that because he felt it was right for him, because he’d never really tried otherwise; he’d never given Seokjin’s way some hope. It had never really mattered—he never really thought he had to, because no matter how late he worked to submit an assignment, the results mostly resulted in a positive grade.

Life was lucky like that.

But then again, it was always through hardened clumps of sacrifice; lack of sleep, terrific nervousness, bitten-through fingernails, and forever-sleep-wishing extreme headaches, which he definitely admitted to despise.

So Namjoon had given himself up to a resolution attempt.

He had thought of postponing it to the New Year’s beginning to make it feel more official, but he knew the ginger would be long gone by then, if he dared.

He was trying to begin his middle of December due project on the very first day in November.

He was trying out a slice of Seokjin’s life.

And he was failing miserably.

He glanced at the screen of his laptop. Only six lines in two hours, out of an essay that by solid instruction, had to comprise at least two pages.

He sighed. He drew a finger over the mouse area, using it to guide the cursor to the start button. He clicked on it, and then on “shut down”.

The Microsoft outro whined out softly, quickly fading into the sea of hundreds of other sound waves.

Namjoon clammed the laptop shut and set it beside the squash bottle. Then he lay back on the drying grass, this time with an arm over his face, shielding from the sun’s rays that continued to kiss, and not sting.

--

Taehyung jammed his books into his bag, thankful for doors that provided exits to rooms, especially doors that led professors out of lecture theatres. He didn’t think anyone would understand how glad he had been, when the professor grabbed her teacherly stuff and vanished through the door.

‘My, was I glad to see her vanish through that door!’ Jin blared, his hands raised over his head in a large “V” shape.

Oh. Well there Taehyung had it—someone else had understood. But that person wasn’t who he thought would, and it made the twenty-two year old contort his brows and scrunch his lips puzzledly at the surprisingly exited boy.

‘Why are you happy about that?’

Jin dropped his hands from above and turned to Taehyung, joy still flavouring his irises. ‘She finally left. Why wouldn’t I be happy?’

Namjoon rose from his seat and threw his purple hued bag over one shoulder. ‘You like her.’

Jin whisked a questioning stare at the younger.

‘What Joon is trying to say,’ Taehyung began, eying the flannel adorned chap, ‘is that you like her teaching methods, and the fact that she abruptly flings tests in our faces when we least expect them.’

Namjoon nodded, his hand propped on the table to hold his leaning weight. ‘Like today, she knew we’d be expecting a test, since she didn’t give one last week, but voila, au promto!’

Taehyung hotly shook his head. ‘Nope, that’s not how French goes, Joon’.

Namjoon ignored, and threw his hands, gesticulating furiously around him. ‘No test! Again, she does the evil you so fascinatingly like!’

Jin slowly nodded in realisation. ‘Seokjin likes irritatingly strict professors’.

Taehyung stared at Jin, befuddled. One brow went up and fell back just as quick, and his bottom lip quivered from sifting out the appropriate words. ‘I’m not going to ask if you just referred to yourself in third person’.

‘I’ll answer for you,’ Joon chimed, gesticulating again. ‘He did refer to himself in the third person point of view’.

Taehyung looked at Namjoon. Namjoon returned the gaze. Jin sat, still in his seat, glancing from one boy to the other.

‘Is this where you both kiss?’

Tae gave Jin a mouldy look, then glided out of the row and unto the stairs of the theatre. Joon span his head to Jin, a glare stinkier than a pair of month old socks smeared all over his face.

‘Where are you going?’ Jin directed at Tae, who was beginning to descend.

‘The library’.

‘Me too’, Namjoon said, and he slid past Jin and the other seats and joined Tae on the stair walk. ‘Yes, bask in the rarity of my going to the library, Jin'. He tried to proudly flip his short hair, but flapped idiotically at the air instead. 'Enjoy it now—it’s once in a very long while’.

Jin softly shook his head and smiled, following Joon with his eyes as he went a few steps further down so he could stand with Tae.

‘What are you going for?’

Namjoon slowly turned to look at Taehyung, and the latter gave him the exact look he was expecting to see.

‘Um, I’m not going to answer that’, drawled Namjoon, his astonished gaze now on Jin.

‘You’re the one supposed to be dealing out hundreds of reasons’, agreed Taehyung, and he swerved on his heels and continued his descent down the stairs. Namjoon followed, but not before giving Jin a facetious grin.

‘You’re good to go, Seokjin. You’ll find your time, like you always do.’

And then he climbed down the stairs too and joined Taehyung at the base, before disappearing through the chiselled boards of cedar, into the chilly November 5;32pm air.

Jin felt his heart rate speed up.