#forever n have mentions in journals since the 1890s

[prince-steele]

ppl who act like the unifying factor for being lgbtqia+ is suffering are inherently backwards ab what it means to b queer in the first place. we didn't come into existence because we were oppressed, queer ppl have always existed. it's ridiculous to try n draw lines n borders around what identities r valid and which aren't just so u can justify bullying people u don't like

[gukyi]

interconnection | myg

⇒ summary: you can never trust anything in the wizarding world. not even your own goddamn journal. 

⇒ {hogwarts!au}

⇒ pairing: yoongi x female reader

⇒ word count: 8k

⇒ genre: fluff

⇒ a/n: all poetry in y/n’s journal written by yours truly! obviously, anything written in yoongi’s journal is written by him. also, i know the word count’s pretty short in comparison to my seokjin fic, but a majority of this fic is in messaging format, which explains both the great physical length and the shorter word count. inspired by this drarry fic, which rocks and u should read. edit (04.20.18): the poems in this fic are now formatted strangely because tumblr mobile took away the foundation for this entire piece: the indent. thanks, tumblr mobile, for absolutely nothing.

“all art is quite useless.” — wilde, 1890.

The first thing your mother bought you in Diagon Alley, age eleven, was a worn, brown leather journal, its pages tinted and stained but empty nonetheless. She got it off of the highest shelf in the top corner of the crowded bookstore, stretching her arms and legs to reach it, the last of its kind.

“What’s this for?” You asked as she placed it in your open, waiting palms.

“For you to write in while at Hogwarts,” she said. “I find that words always seem to have a better way of flowing when on paper rather than out loud. Don’t you?”

“I dunno,” you responded, shrugging your little shoulders as you placed the journal in your cauldron along with the rest of your required schoolbooks. “Isn’t it dumb to keep a journal?”

“Only if you treat it as such,” your mother replied, as sage as she always was. “Come, let’s get you a wand.”

With the mention of a wand, your mind wandered far from the beaten leather journal in your cauldron as you skipped out of Flourish and Blott’s, unaware of how significant the journal would end up being in your later years at Hogwarts.

When you first opened the journal on your first night at Hogwarts as an empty-minded eleven-year-old, the blank pages frightened you. A world of words only you could come up with was millions of miles away, and staring at the tan pages wasn’t going to make it come closer. That night, you shut the journal roughly, cursing your mother who wasted her money on a journal that would never be put to use.

Six years later, eleven-year-old you wouldn’t know that journal like you do now, know the feeling of its worn pages and smooth, wrinkling leather, what you have become so keenly familiar with over the years. Sure, this journal doesn’t hold your deepest, darkest secrets nor your wildest dreams directly, but the allusions never end, forever continuing on in each poem you write.

You��ve always been a fan of poetry, ever since your mother taught you about the greatest works of the great poets as a child. Wordsworth, Poe, Keats. They are names you know, names you admire. There was never anything spectacular about Wizard poets, not when everything is easy and everything is simply done with magic. No, people like Poe and Keats and Wordsworth wrote about life like it was a struggle, like there was always something you were missing in it. In a sense, there always is.

Perhaps your Muggleborn background is another factor in your love for poetry, but verse knows no blood status and even the greatest Wizards need to sit down and read a little bit of Eliot once in awhile, you think.

The poetry you write is mundane, nothing compared to the greats that they were, but it is home and it is an odyssey all the same, the words flowing off the page and smeared from how frantic you were when you wrote them.

You cart the notebook around with you wherever you go, knowing that keeping it in the confines of the common room will likely lead to its exposure one way or another. Gryffindors were never really good at keeping out of other people’s business. The journal is as precious to you as your wand, never letting it out of your sight.

It’s not uncommon for students to keep a journal, especially for their first couple years as they adjust to the school, to the sleepless nights and forbidden hallways. What is uncommon is the fact that you’re fast approaching graduation, merely a few months left before you’re thrust into the real world and treated like adults with responsibilities and taxes, and the journal has never left your side, staying with you through every standardized test and every Hogsmeade visit. You are, dare you say, the last of your year to hold onto something as menial as a diary.

“Are you going to keep writing in that after Hogwarts?”

You look up at the sound of the voice, knowing that it’s directed towards you. Your fingers are still holding onto the pages of your open journal, lying on the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall, as you pause, mid-browse.

“This?”

“Yeah.”

“Probably not.”

“Why not?”

“I want to keep it as my school journal. A specific time in my life.”

“But surely, if you’ve written in it for so long, you might as well want to keep going?”

“I feel like seven years is a pretty substantial amount of time to write in a journal.”

“You’ve never run out of room?” Another friend butts in, her potions homework forgotten in front of her. No wonder she’s failing the class; she lets herself get too distracted.

“I asked the librarian for spells to add pages.”

“Oh,” they say.

“Yeah,” you say.

Your journal is not often the topic of conversation between you and your friends. Your friends have long known that the journal is not theirs to look through, so they don’t bother asking, but occasionally they will have questions as they see you scribbling down something before your next class period. It’s strange to see you writing in it so out in the open like you do sometimes, since you often reserve your writing time for when you are curled up in the common room, sitting by the fire as you guard the pages from view. Inspiration, however, strikes at the most inopportune moments.

“What do you write about?” They ask you whenever they catch you jotting something down.

“Art. Love. Work. Emotions. You. Me.”

“Us?”

“All of us.”

“That’s lots of people.”

“Not everybody. Just people that interest me.”

“Who interests you?”

“Those that don’t try to.”

If there’s one thing that your friends complain about, it’s the fact that, whenever you do talk about your journal, your sentences become clipped, fragments of full phrases lacking in conjunctions. It’s not that you don’t want to make your sentences, well, actual sentences, it’s just that you never really want to say too much about your journal. It is yours, after all.

“Well, who are you writing about now?”

“I don’t know.”

Truth is, you don’t. The boy that’s caught your attention this time is nothing but a stranger, someone you’ve never spoken to, a face lost in the sea of students. From his build, he doesn’t look to be much younger than you, meaning he might even be in your year. He’s got platinum bleached hair, the mop the only thing you can make out as he snoozes on some textbook. Next to him is a boy a couple years younger—you recognize him, he’s the Quidditch commentator for most of the matches—prodding him gently with his pointer finger. The platinum boy does not budge.

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“You’re a real mystery, you know that, Y/N? A goddamn mystery,” one of your friends comments, scoffing.

You chuckle to yourself, closing your journal and smiling. “I sure hope so.”

he sleeps to forget or, maybe he sleeps to remember but in his dreams he is somewhere and nowhere and he is everything  and nothing all at once. zzzz… his brain says do not let me leave… for i am finally at peace.

You had originally believed that after writing about a person, a stranger, in your journal, you’d go on to forget about them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case this time. Since you wrote that single poem about the platinum-haired boy, fast asleep on a textbook in the Great Hall, you can’t help but notice him everywhere you turn. He’s in the library, in the hallways, in the bleachers of the Quidditch field. It’s his hair—or maybe it’s that soft, hazy smile he has permanently etched onto his lips—that makes him stick out, makes him so easy to spot even in the oceans of students that surround the both of you.

He’s in your year, you’ve found out that much, but you can hardly remember anything about him. You don’t remember him on the train, nor at the Sorting Ceremony, nor in any of your classes. It is only now that he’s left a mark on you, made a wrinkle in your brain that you can’t seem to forget about.

If you were brave, you would speak to him. If you were brave, or daring, or unafraid, you would approach him and say hello, introduce yourself. But you are none of those things, and so all he is is another boy you’ve written about, another student lost in the haze.

Perhaps in a perfect world.

Though, you suppose, if it was a perfect world, you would never have anything interesting to write about.

Shit begins to hit, pelt, the fan while you are eating supper in the Great Hall, surrounded by your friends as your journal lays forgotten on the sidelines, open to a blank page as you happily chat about nothing and everything in particular.

“How’s tutoring going?” You ask your one friend, the one who’s not doing so hot in potions.

“It’s going,” she jokes. “I have a good tutor, I’m just shit at applying myself.”

“Story of my life,” you chuckle.

The chatter goes on like this, friendly banter between buddies as you swallow down the meal in front of you. This is the only time after classes end that you actually get to spend socializing, before you bury yourself under layers and layers of schoolwork. It’s just another night, the days always flowing by like clockwork, no variation with each passing hour.

It’s just another night, until your ridiculously clumsy self somehow manages to elbow a discarded cup of tea, knocking it onto its side and spilling its contents all over your opened journal.

“Oh no,” you declare, not even making to try and clean up the mess, watching the liquid stain your blank pages with futility.

“Y/N! Aren’t you gonna do something?” Your friends exclaim, watching as you stare helplessly at the mess beside you.

“Me? What?”

“Y/N!”

It’s then that you finally come to, shaking your head as the panic overtakes you. You stand up quickly, rushed as you dart to the closest napkin, dabbing it on the spill to soak up whatever hasn’t already damaged your journal.

Your friends are all the help, gathering the disregarded Daily Prophets from that morning and running over. Once you’ve let the tea take its toll, you place your relatively damp journal on top of the newspaper to dry, pushing it down the table so it can get the most air, away from your scraggle of friends as you continue to chat as if the whole incident lay forgotten.

You’re knee deep into a conversation about whether having dragon heartstring or unicorn hair is more beneficial to doing transfiguration, you, a firm believer that dragon heartstring reigns supreme, when a foreign voice invades your discussion.

“Do you write all this stuff?”

You whip your head around to find a Gryffindor by the name of Namjoon, holding your dangling journal between his thumb and his pointer fingers as he shuffles through the pages with his other hand. You can see the tea dripping slowly from the corner of the cover to the newspaper below it. You recognize Namjoon quite well, he’s a tutor, sort of a know-it-all as far as you’re concerned.

“What?” You snap, beginning to feel yourself seethe.

“Do you write this stuff? It’s really good, you know. Very interesting,” he comments like it’s nobody’s fucking business. The problem is, it is very much your goddamn business.

“Were you raised in a barn?” You ask incredulously, rushing up to him and snatching your journal from his fingertips. “Who on this godforsaken Earth taught you that it was perfectly fine to fish through someone else’s journal?”

Namjoon merely smirks, and it makes you frown, disgust lacing your features. “So it is yours, eh, Y/N? Didn’t know you were so deep.”

“Stuff it, Namjoon. I never fucking asked,” you say. Namjoon’s gotten absolutely unbearable, ever since his Head Boy friend graduated last year, leaving him to completely his own devices without anyone to keep him in check. You miss that Head Boy. He was nice.

“But your journal did. I mean, it was lying out in the open, far away from any person who displayed any signs of ownership. It was practically begging to be read.”

“You’re a goddamn piece of shit,” you spit, and he chuckles at your comeback. “Go shove a textbook up your ass.”

“Not a fan of people reading your writing, I get it,” Namjoon says, hands up in surrender as he begins to back away, the cheeky smile still drawn on his face. “I, for one, think you are an excellent writer, Y/N. You should let people read your stuff. They’d like it.”

“Not a chance.”

He walks away, leaving you breathless and boiling.

“He’s such a tool,” your friend says, hand rubbing your arm to calm you down. “That’s why I didn’t want him as my tutor. I couldn’t stand being around him.”

“I think Y/N needs some time to calm down. Look at her. She’s practically overheating.”

Your friend pulls your journal from where you’re clutching it to your chest, smiling awkwardly as she places it back down on the newspaper, pushing it over to where you sit so you can have a better eye on it.

You’re never dealing with this again.

You spend the rest of the night shuffling through the innumerable books in the library, desperate to find a spell that will prevent anyone besides you to fish through your personal, private journal. Anything to prevent the Namjoon Situation from ever happening again. God, what an asshole. Has he never heard of respect? Personal space?

Admittedly, doing this instead of your homework is a terrible move on your part, because not only are there no spells designed to resolve this type of predicament—which you find outrageous, especially because aren’t wizards supposed to come up with solutions to every problem? That’s why they have magic, obviously—your search takes up a good few hours hunting through the table of contents of each library book that piques your interest, and by the time it’s nearing curfew and you’ve collected a grand total of zero spells, all of your homework lays incomplete on your bed, begging to be finished. But you are determined, and the librarian is trying to shuffle the last scraggle of students out of the room so they don’t miss their curfew, so you merely pick up the pace.

You and the librarian are mutual friends at best, since she’s always helping you out with your journal and recommending her favorite wizard poets, but when she peeks her head down the aisle and sees you frantically shuffling through a dusty old thing, she hisses.

“Ms. Y/L/N! Do you know what time it is?”

And just as it so happens, that dusty old thing that your fingers speedily flip the pages of happens to have the one spell you think will work, a little scrawled piece of handwriting that sticks out like a sore thumb in comparison to the rest of the book’s printed text. At least someone tried.

“Can I take this, Professor?” You ask hurriedly as she walks over to you, a hand on your back as she gently shoves you towards the exit.

“Yes, sure, whatever,” she waves off your request, waiting until you’re outside the library before she brutally shuts the door in your face, but you couldn’t care less.

You’ve finally found what you’re looking for.

The door to your common room creaks closed, and then the curfew bells sound, echoing along the stone walls as you sigh a breath of relief, grateful you and Filch will not be meeting in the darkness of the empty hallways tonight. Most of the other students in your house are also lounging around in the main lobby of the common room, chatting amongst themselves or struggling to work in the quietest place they can find, which isn’t very quiet to begin with—Gryffindors, to put it nicely, don’t know how to shut the fuck up—anyway. You’re pleased about this, because this means you can go straight up to your dormitory without anyone bothering you, perform this slightly sketchy spell on your journal, and begin the daunting task of finishing all the homework you refrained from doing.

“Y/N!”

You whip your head to the source of the sound and see Namjoon waving you down, nursing a bottle of Felix Felicis in his hand, a telltale sign that you should avoid him tonight. If he’s awful when he’s sober, imagine how much of a nightmare he is drunk.

In hindsight, turning around was an abysmal idea, because now Namjoon knows you’ve acknowledged him, and he’s going to capitalize off of it.

You keep walking, pushing through the conglomerations of students and making for your dormitory, hoping he won’t try to engage you any further.

There’s a hand grabbing onto the sleeve of your robe, and you’d rather die than have another conversation with him, but you look at him regardless.

“Can I help you?” You ask, trying to make your voice sound as ticked off as possible.

“I wanted to apologize for earlier,” Namjoon says, and suddenly, you’re starting to like drunk Namjoon a lot better than sober Namjoon. “I didn’t know. My friend schooled me on it.”

“Cool, apology accepted,” you spit quickly, desperate to get his grubby fingers off of the edge of your sleeve and your body up to your bedroom, where your journal waits to be protected. “Leave me alone?” Even though it comes out as a question, it’s more of an order.

Namjoon is much easier to get rid of tonight than he normally is. He backs away from you, leaving you with a pleasantly friendly smile as he makes his way towards where he was chatting with his friends, letting you scurry up to your room in peace.

Once there, you grab your journal from where it was locked up in your trunk and place it on the floor in the middle of the dormitory, since you would like to avoid lighting yourself or your bed aflame should this spell go horribly wrong, thank you very much. Shuffling back to the page in the book with the scrawled little handwriting in faded quill ink, you hold out your wand tentatively. For some reason, your hands are shaking. The professors always told you never to perform spells not taught to you, and only use the ones from a trustworthy adult or a renowned book. Well, you’re already in your last year, so what’s the worst that could happen?

You know you have to get this spell over and done with, especially because you can’t have someone walking in and seeing you screeching unfamiliar magic at your inanimate journal, so you take a deep breath, focus all your energy on the journal, and read out the words written on the page, loud and clear. A burst of purple light flies out from the end of your want, hitting the journal square in the center of the cover. For a mere moment, the journal looks to be levitating, sparkles flickering around it, before it hits the floor with a thud, like nothing happened to it in the first place.

You shut the book in your hands, throwing it on your bed carelessly as you step towards the journal, hand stretched out to grab it but the rest of your body as far away from it as you can go, just in case you happen to electrocute yourself or something. That’d suck.

When your fingers finally gloss over the leather and nothing happens, you smile to yourself, pleased. Picking your journal up and making your way back to your bed, you quickly finger through the pages, and all of your poetry seems to be perfectly in tact.

One of the other girls that shares your dormitory traipses up the stairs, significantly worn out, and you rush towards her, journal in hand.

“Hey,” you say, catching her by surprise. “Could you open this for me?”

She doesn’t even question your request—no wonder why, people ask some strange favors in this school—and does what you ask, opening the journal with no effort as all. However, before you let yourself deflate in disappointment that the spell was simply a dud, you see that all of the pages before her are blank, your words erased entirely, like they were never written in the first place.

“Is that it?” She asks you, holding your notebook out in front of you.

You take it gladly, smiling to yourself. No more Nosy Namjoon, as far as you’re concerned. “Yes, thank you.”

Only the next day do you learn why teachers always told you never to use spells not taught to you properly. You’ve been spending the whole day boasting to your friends that you found a spell that makes your journal your journal, for your eyes only, letting them bubble with friend-anger and envy, anger at the fact that now they, truly, won’t be able to snoop through your journal (though it’s not like they were evil enough to be planning on doing that), and envy at the fact that you solved your issue with a single wave of your wand, easy as that.

You’re skipping around campus, very delighted with yourself and your superior problem-solving skills—that’s what being a witch is all about, right?—when you look around for a bit too long and make eye contact with the boy with platinum hair, the one that is incessantly present in your brain, seeing him sitting on a log in the courtyard, writing his homework, probably. He looks up at the same time that you look at him, and you stop in the middle of the hallway you’ve been happily gamboling down, and you stare at each other.

It’s actually not staring. It’s more like, gazing. You gaze at each other, and he doesn’t make a move and neither do you, but you’re finally meeting his eyes for the first time and even though he’s so far away it looks like he’s lived a lifetime—no, several—already, aged and wise and experienced. It looks like he has the secrets of the universe hiding out in his irises, his pupils, and he’s waiting to find someone to share them with.

You’re a bit more daring today, so you wave, cracking an awkward smile as you raise your hand, shaking it ever so slightly. A small, puny little smile grows on his, or maybe you’re just imagining it, but that’s all you see before you turn, skipping off to the library, where you have a feeling you know what your next poem is going to be on.

the universe. it is not in the sky where it should belong but rather it rests in the eyes of a boy who is too young, too innocent to have seen such a lifetime before him and every time he blinks he sees another story, another tragic end and he hopes that the next time he closes his eyes this story will be a happy ever after.

And now, the realization that you should usually always listen to your professors because they tend to know what’s best for you soon comes to fruition, because you’re about to close your journal, when you see handwriting that does not belong to you, scrawling itself on the bottom of the page where you wrote your poem about the boy.

nice poem

Excuse me?

[you] WHO ARE YOU

[stranger] WHO ARE YOU

[you] WHY ARE YOU IN MY JOURNAL

[stranger] WHY ARE YOU IN MINE

[you] ???? this is my journal???

[stranger] i believe this is my journal.

[you] i fuckin hate wizards.

[stranger] are you a muggle?

[you] no, i just hate us.

[stranger] relatable.

You’ve filled up nearly an entire new page, but you’re noticing your words fading as you write them, disappearing into thin air on the parchment in front of you, like invisible ink, but only backwards. Every word that pops up onto the page from whoever is on the other end of your weirdly transcendent journal disintegrates about ten seconds after you’ve read it, the speech literally sinking into the paper.

[you] how did you get into my journal?

[stranger] pretty sure this is still my journal.

[you] but i can see you writing.

[stranger] well, i can see yours.

[you] this makes no sense. how can you see my writing when you don’t have my journal?

[stranger] it’s not like i know.

[you] i literally cast a spell on my journal so people wouldn’t be able to read it.

[stranger] and how trustworthy is said spell?.

[you] …

[stranger] well, that explains that.

[you] are you judging me behind a goddamn journal cover?????????

[stranger] i’m not not judging you.

[you] can you read what else i’ve written?

[stranger] i can see your poems, if that’s what you’re asking.

For fucks sake. This is all totally against anything and everything you wanted from Sketchy Book Spell. You don’t know if the Namjoon incident is worse or better than this, a random stranger that you can’t even visualize, access to every single thing you’ve written down in your duration of Hogwarts attendance.

[stranger] can you see my stuff?

[you] you write?

[stranger] can’t you see it??

You flip backwards a couple of pages, and printed right where your poems used to reside are words that do not belong to you. It looks like poetry, when you see it from a first glance, artsy and cut off and short, but when you investigate a little further, it’s not poetry. It’s lyrics. The stranger writes lyrics, and holy shit, they are good.

give me some drinks, i want to get drunk today please don’t stop me anything will be fine alcohol is a luxury for a bum but i can’t stand it sober everyone else is running why am i the only one here

You suppose that in exchange for inadvertently sharing your entire life story in the form of verse, it would only make sense for the person on the other end to have their private lyrics revealed. Neither of you are getting much out of this, other than a nice, jovial chat.

[you] i can.

[stranger] guess it goes both ways then.

[you] yes, i guess it does.

[stranger] do you know how to fix this?.

[you] no, i found the spell that caused this in the first place in an old book.

[stranger] okay, but wouldn’t that book have the counterspell?

[you] no, someone wrote in the spell at the bottom of the page.

[stranger] didn’t your mother ever tell you not to use spells not put in print?

[you] i’m not very good at following rules.

[stranger] clearly.

[you] hey! it’s not like i WANTED this to happen.

[stranger] well, it happened.

[you] no shit sherlock.

[stranger] so can you fix this?

[you] i’ve never been very good at solving problems.

[stranger] ?

[you] that’s literally why i have a journal. because i can’t solve my problems.

[stranger] so you write about them instead?

[you] yes.

[stranger] i do that too.

[you] do you mind telling me why you write the lyrics you do?

[stranger] what goes on in my mind isn’t necessarily stuff other people want to hear.

[you] i have the opposite problem. everyone wants to see what i put in this thing.

[stranger] and that’s why you cast that spell?

[you] precisely.

[stranger] well, no one else can see it except me.

[you] i don’t know if i prefer that.

[stranger] you’ve read my lyrics. i won’t judge you.

[you] i won’t judge you, either.

[stranger] do you trust me?

[you] i’m not sure.

[stranger] i trust you.

It’s not like you can get any more personal with whoever is on the other end of your messaging journals.

[you] i guess i trust you too.

[stranger] i’m suga.

[you] i’m Y/N.

[suga] nice to meet you, Y/N.

[you] nice to meet you too, suga.

And for some strange reason, as you sit in the quietest corner of the Gryffindor common room, scribbling away on your journal, wasting ink as you watch it disappear on the page before you, you feel like whoever this Suga person may be, you are comfortable with them. It’s as if you were meant to share your writing with them all along.

Keeping the majority of your identities offers some sort of security blanket between the two of you, a safe haven, where neither of you have to specifically worry about the other finding out who you are, or where you are, or why it was you who chose to write in your respective journals. When Suga doesn’t know who you are, and you don’t know who they are, it’s easier, because you feel like you can say anything without worrying about repercussions.

[suga] i never asked you,

[you] hmm?

[suga] are you a she?

[you] do i seem like a she?

[suga] your words definitely read like one, not to be gender stereotypical. i don’t mind if you’re a he, or a they, for that matter.

[you] you read well.

[suga] so i’m right? you’re a she?

[you] got it.

[suga] i’m a he. in case you wanted to know.

[you] i didn’t, but thank you for telling me.

[suga] i’ll tell you anything you want to know.

You’ve refrained from informing your friends that the reason you’ve been so engaged with your journal recently is because there is a mystery man on the other end, responding to you like he’s know you his whole life. You don’t really think they need to know this.

What your friends have noticed is your particular affinity for trying to sneak glances at a certain boy, because they know you and they watch you look around each room you enter, like you’re searching for someone. You’re not exactly very good at being discreet, especially when it comes to the boy with the platinum hair and hazy smile.

“Hello? Earth to Y/N?” A hand waves in front of your face, snapping you out of your mindless trance. When you look down, the inked quill in your hand has drawn a squiggly line all across one of the blank pages of your journal, but this time, it vanishes.

“What?”

“Were you looking at someone?” Your friend asks, an eyebrow raised in something that looks like curiosity and excitement.

“I think so!” Another chimes in. “I think it was him.” She points towards the boy, who’s currently sitting quietly, a quill pointing towards his textbook. He’s surrounded by other boys, all from different houses, and they’re chatting away, tossing bits of food at each other.

“Jungkook? Isn’t he the commentator?”

“No, not him, the Slytherin boy.”

“Yoongi?”

Yoongi. The boy finally has a name. You glance up at the mention of his name, smiling to yourself as you think about him. There is something that makes him stick, something about him that keeps him afloat in your mind, refusing to sink.

“Aha!” One of your friends shriek, making some of the younger students in the Great Hall look towards you, trying to find the source of the exclamation. “You do like him, don’t you?”

Your cheeks heat up furiously, and you scowl, bested by your friends. “No comment.”

“I knew it!”

No point in trying to dig yourself out now. The only thing that you can do is prevent yourself from getting buried any further. “I’ve never even spoken to him before.”

“That’s ridiculous,” your friend says, at the same time another one speaks, saying, “That’s understandable.”

“Why?”

“He’s a quiet kid. He’s in our year, but I never notice him anywhere. He’s always writing something down—doing homework, probably—he’s got fantastic grades—or sitting amongst his friends, that rowdy group of boys from all different years and houses,” your friend explains, and suddenly it all makes sense, why you never see him. It looks to you like he doesn’t want to be seen for whatever reason he may have.

“Trust you to have a crush on him,” your other friend jokes, nudging you with her shoulder as she smirks.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You act exactly like him,” your friend spells it out for you. “You’re quiet unless you’re with friends, and you’re always writing shit down in that spell-ridden journal of yours.”

“Don’t bring my journal into this,” you say, hugging the book to your chest tightly, like a security guard.

“All I’m saying is that you should go talk to him.”

Like that’s going to happen.

[you] how old are you?

[suga] eighteen. you?

[you] 17.

[suga] you write well for a seventeen-year-old.

[you] you write well for an eighteen-year old.

[suga] do i, now?

[you] i don’t know what it is, but you write like you’ve already lived a life, and you’re looking back on it.

[suga] like a sad old person?

[you] yes.

[suga] -_-

[you] i’m kidding! you just seem sage. mature mind for an immature body.

[suga] that’s one way to put it. who’s the boy you keep writing about?

You were going to get there eventually. Yoongi, whoever he is, has become somewhat of a recurring character in your poems, the same platinum boy who keeps making a comeback in your writing as he slowly overtakes each crevice in your brain.

[you] just some boy.

[suga] doesn’t seem like ‘just some boy’ to me.

[you] my friends think i have a crush on him. how juvenile.

[suga] do you?

[you] not you too!

[suga] i just wanted to know! it doesn’t seem like you do. it just seems like you’re interested in who he is.

[you] at least you’re not as persistent as they are.

[suga] your poems don’t exactly scream ‘unrequited love with fellow schoolboy’ to me, if it’s any consolation.

[you] at least you’re on my side.

[suga] you haven’t given me a reason not to be.

[you] i don’t know how i feel about him. he just won’t get out of my head.

[suga] in a bad way or a good way?

[you] both? neither? god, i don’t know.

[suga] judging by your poetry about said boy, it must be in a good way. you don’t really write about boys and universes if you’re thinking that they’re a piece of shit.

[you] yes you can! what if i had written something like ‘i wish the universe eats you up so i don’t have to see you again’? that’s not very positive.

[suga] haha i guess you can, then.

[you] i mean, you’re right, i’m not bothered in the slightest with his presence in my head. it’s quite comforting, actually.

[suga] let me guess, you’ve never talked to him?

[you] HOW CAN YOU TELL?

[suga] not hard to. if you had spoken to him, you would’ve written something else, something about his voice. maybe his lips.

[you] what are you, some sort of psychoanalytical journal whisperer?

[suga] shit, you’ve revealed my true identity. i hide out in worn leather journals so innocent, unsuspecting schoolgirls like yourself can come chat to me, then i take their souls and make myself immortal by consuming them.

[you] creep.

[suga] haha. listen, i don’t really know who this boy is, but i, for one, think he’d be lucky to chat to someone like you.

[you] you do?

[suga] you’re witty, sarcastic, well-spoken. i don’t see why any boy would turn down a conversation with you.

[you] thanks, suga.

[suga] hey, i might be a serial killer whose primary method of soul-extraction is via journal, but i’m always here to help.

And alright, so maybe you’ve never met Suga before, but revealing all of your concerns with your crush-not-crush on Yoongi to him doesn’t seem like the worst idea in the world. In fact, you just might take Suga up on his advice. He seems to know what he’s talking about.

Your subsequent interaction with Yoongi happens the day after Suga told you to actually talk to him, and he’ll be very pleased to know you do just that. Your friends were right—he is always writing something down, even as he’s lying flat on the lawn of the courtyard, textbooks and scrolls of parchment decorating the area around his strewn-out hair, inkwells and used quills among the mix. He looks, for one thing, irrevocably photogenic, and a little bubble of envy pops in your brain. How dare he always look good. That is Not Allowed.

You tentatively approach him, journal resting in your hand by your side, almost blending into your black robes if it weren’t for the difference in the fabric. He’s craning his neck as he writes something down, in some sort of notebook, as he occasionally glances to the side, stretching to see the tiny little font in the textbook to his left. It looks like the most uncomfortable position you could ever somehow warp your body into, but for some reason, he looks perfectly fine.

“Hello.”

Yoongi shoots up, quickly shutting his notebook as he turns to you, eyes blown impossibly wide. Clearly, he’s not used to people talking to him.

“Hi,” he says, short and sweet.

“I’m Y/N.”

“I know.”

It makes absolute sense that he would know who you are, but not you him. It just seems so cliche, how you’ve hardly noticed him throughout your schooling but he’s already seen you in the hallways, his classes, a name easily put to the face.

“Oh, of course you do,” you say awkwardly, chuckling to yourself as you fiddle with the journal in your hands, switching it between your left and your right so you don’t look stiff as a statue.

“Can I, uh, help you?” Yoongi asks. His voice is a little rough, but still smooth, like ice cream with cookie bits crushed into it.

“Me? No, I just wanted to say hello, you know. Get to know you,” you reply, your hand gestures wildly out of control. It seems that you can’t keep still in front of him, fidgeting and squirming like an impatient child, desperate for some sugar.

“Oh,” Yoongi says, hands behind him, propping his body up. “Well, I’m Yoongi.”

“I know.”

Yoongi grins to himself. “Glad we’re on a first-name basis, then, Y/N.” He motions to the journal getting tossed back and forth between your hands, an eyebrow raised in curiosity.

“This? Oh, um, just homework. You have one too, don’t you?” You say, desperately trying to get the conversation off of your journal. You don’t really want to discuss it with him, especially not when there are poems inside of it about him.

He looks to where you’re pointing, the black book beside him, and he chuckles awkwardly, a forced laugh. “Guess we got one thing in common, then.”

“I’m sure we have more in common than that,” you insist.

Yoongi begins to gather up all of his belongings, shoving them into one uneven pile, quills and parchment alike, holding it with both of his hands, his little black book sitting neatly on top. He looks at you, grinning a smile that’s gummy and sweet. “I guess we’ll have to find out about that, won’t we, Y/N?”

With the last word tucked under his tongue, he’s off, walking in the opposite direction from where he was facing you, leaving you embarrassingly breathless in the middle of the courtyard.

That night, when you open up your journal to write down your thoughts of the day, you see that Suga has already beaten you to it, claiming a fresh page for a new batch of lyrics, as beautifully wistful as always.

the awkwardness was only for a moment, i touched you again even though i was gone for a long time without repulsion, you accepted me without you there’s nothing after the dawn, two of us we welcomed the morning together don’t let go of my hand forever, i won’t let go of you again either

You decide to add to the mix, letting the words leave your brain and engrave themselves on the page before you, soft and gentle.

his grin he may have the universe written amongst his eyes but his grin oh, his grin it has hell and heaven all across the outline of his lips. it’s lopsided, like he knows something i don’t, and of course he does, after all, there are nebulas in his irises, comets on the inside of his eyelids, a galaxy painted across his vision, and i see stars.

It’s only a matter of time before Suga opens his journal to see your addition to the mix, sappy words of love, making the both of you terribly hopeless, terribly romantic.

[suga] i take it you spoke to him?

[you] what gave it away?

[suga] all the universe references. i feel like i’m reading a young adult romance novel.

[you] you sort of are, aren’t you?

[suga] it’s a very well-written young adult romance novel. lots of verse, little prose. i’m not good with prose.

[you] is that why you’re a lyricist?

[suga] one of the reasons.

[you] why else?

[suga] to hide behind my words.

[you] hmm?

[suga] i’m a new person when i’m writing. i’ve created an identity for myself.

[you] am i currently speaking with this identity?

[suga] you are.

[you] you’re fascinating.

[suga] that’s the last word you’d use to describe me if you knew who i really was.

[you] i already find it fascinating that you, whoever you decide ‘you’ is, have channeled such emotion into your lyrics that you’ve shaped a new persona out of it. that takes true dedication.

[suga] it’s more of an escape, actually.

[you] tomayto tomahto.

[suga] did you realize halfway through writing that that you couldn’t necessarily emphasize the different enunciations via written text?

[you] maybe.

[suga] you’re fascinating, also. how’s the boy?

[you] don’t tell my friends, but i think they’re right.

[suga] i kind of already figured they were.

[you] hey!

[suga] it’s not hard to tell. only a person in love would start comparing their lover’s body parts to falling meteors.

[you] did my poem scream ‘unrequited love on fellow schoolboy’ to you? well, what do you suppose said person in love should do about it, love expert?

[suga] love expert, huh?

[you] you seem to know what you’re talking about. ever dated someone, suga?

[suga] can’t say i have, but i could offer you some words of wisdom.

[you] fire away.

[suga] do your best.

[you] my best?

[suga] i can’t imagine why this boy wouldn’t want to talk to you. there’s no reason why he would avoid you.

[you] isn’t there?

[suga] no. there isn’t.

With great practice, your conversations with Yoongi slowly transition from awkward, empty small talk to mindless chatter you don’t mind listening to, not when you find yourself lost in the haze of his voice as it settles around you, invading your senses. Listening to him speak is like listening to the white noise in The Three Broomsticks, soothing and peaceful. It is so difficult not to drown in the sound.

“How long have you known about me?” You ask him one day as you’re secretly camping out in the Slytherin common room, completely immune to the confused and snarky looks the other Slytherins are sending your way, you, a Gryffindor with that obnoxious red collar of yours.

Yoongi tilts his head back on the edge of the couch, revealing that beautifully smooth neckline that you want to do things to, but you won’t mention that. “Since first year, I suppose. I remember your name.” He looks at you, a cheeky smile on his face. “You didn’t remember me, though.”

“Hey! You were a quiet kid,” you defend yourself.

Yoongi chuckles heartily at your indignation.

Perhaps this is crossing the line, but every marker has been blurred over the past few weeks that you’ve been talking, the border between you two nothing more than fuzz, so you reach over, twirling a bit of his platinum bangs in between your fingers. “When’d you do your hair?”

“This summer. Can’t you see my roots?” He asks, tipping his head forward to reveal the most beautiful blend of ivy black and lightning blonde atop his head.

“It looks good.”

“I need to dye my hair again,” Yoongi huffs. “What color should I do?”

“Green? Like your robes?” You suggest jokingly, and he scrunches his nose up at the thought of him, with bright green locks.

“Maybe not. How about pink, like yours?” He contemplates.

“My robes aren’t pink.”

“Close enough.”

“You’d match all the Gryffindors,” you remind him.

He shakes his head. “No, I’d just want to match you.” When you look at him, his cheeks are tinted the same shade of pink you’d imagine would decorate his hair, a soft rose color that makes him glow in the morning, afternoon, and evening.

[you] is suga the only identity you’ll allow me the pleasure of meeting?

[suga] i wouldn’t exactly call it pleasure.

[you] i find it pleasurable. you’re wonderful to talk to.

[suga] i feel like you’ve become too trustworthy of me.

[you] maybe you’re right. i mean, i haven’t heard of many pedophiles who write crushing lyrics about loneliness and the loss of youth, but you never know. you could be a serial killer.

[suga] and you’re making jokes about it?

[you] you’re not a serial killer, suga, though it would be nice to know who the person holding the quill is.

[suga] i’m not so sure you’d like to know.

[you] what’s not to like?

[suga] most things.

[you] you say you’ve created an identity for yourself, but i highly doubt that identity varies much from who you really are. we don’t have to meet or anything. i’d just like to know who you are.

[suga] i feel like meeting is the only way we could do this.

[you] i’m in school, i can’t just up and leave. i don’t even know where you are.

[suga] i’m in school, too.

[you] are you, now? where?

[suga] i don’t imagine i make it difficult to guess.

[you] let’s see. you write in english, which could mean nothing considering lots of foreign schools are teaching english anyway, but you write lyrics in english, which means you have a greater understanding of the language, so you’re a native speaker. this could put you in america, england, or australia, for the most part. if you said you were in school as any sort of consolation, then that means us meeting isn’t at all implausible, which places you in england, at hogwarts. and judging by that, you definitely know who i am.

[suga] who’s the sherlock now?

You wish you could say it would surprise you that you’ve narrowed it down so well, and that the very person you’ve been messaging via journal has known you this entire time, but it doesn’t. And in the dusty crevices of your brain, there lies a sneaking suspicion as to who you’ve been speaking to, and it both excites and terrifies you.

[you] where do you want to meet, fellow hogwarts student?

[suga] the courtyard?

Suspicion confirmed. Guess you are quite the Sherlock, after all.

When you turn the corner of the hallway and the courtyard comes into view, a certain platinum-haired boy with unruly roots and a lopsided smile catches your eye as he sits on the ledge of the wall, foot tapping on the ground to some imaginary song, probably one of his own. You walk up to him happily, your arms swinging by your side, the journal resting in your hands.

He sees you, too, and he stands up when you near him, mouth open to offer some sort of explanation, but you beat him to it.

“Suga, huh?” You say somewhat loudly, your voice unwavering, filled to the brim with confidence.

Yoongi’s eyes widen, the same look he had on his face when you approached him but a few weeks prior. “You knew?”

“Not until yesterday,” you admit. “But I had a feeling.”

“What gave it away?”

You grin. “I hate to break it to you, Yoongi, but you and Suga speak the same way, an aura of concern and disregard lacing your words. If you were trying to run from the police by hiding under a different name, you’d be absolute shit at it.”

“Wow, thanks for telling me that,” Yoongi says, chuckling. “I guess I better work on my soul-sucking tactics.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Can I—can I see that, for a second?” Yoongi asks, motioning to the journal in your hands.

You hold it out for him, and when he takes it from you and opens it up to compare it with his, sure enough, your messages, poems, and lyrics cover the pages of both of your journals, the scrawl completely mirrored. He gives it back to you almost instantly, shoving it into your outstretched hands as he fumbles in the pockets of his robes, pulling out a quill with a bit of dry ink on the end. Quickly, he flips his journal open to a clean page, untouched by the both of you, and wets the end of his quill with his tongue. When you look down at that exact same page, you watch him draw on one page, curving the line to reveal half of a heart, split right down the middle where the books are bound.

“May I?” You ask in response, and he lets you grab hold of the quill in his hand. You look down, finishing the heart out on the opposite page, and the both of you look down at your respective journals, watching the ink fizzle into the journal like it was never there in the first place.

“Good to know we’re both on the same page,” Yoongi jokes, shooting his beautifully gummy smile your way, making your cheeks heat up at the sight.

You shut your journal and hold out your hand, a symbol of peace, friendship, romance, or all of the above. He takes it gladly. “Haven’t we always been?”

When you go back to your dormitory that night, you open up your journal to find a message from your one and only, written in the same spot where that heart once was.

[yoongi] i love you.

[you] i love you, too.

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