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toasecretsanta · 23 days ago

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For @worlds-oldest-teenager from @nagisachan1, using the prompts “Lester gets kidnapped by Santa Claus as revenge for Artemis always being mistaken for Santa,” and “Something you’ve been really wanting to make but have no excuse to. Blame me!”

This ended up being a bit more loosely inspired by your first prompt than a direct adaptation, but since you had a wild card option, I figured you wouldn’t mind. Fic under the cut!

You Better Watch Out (Santa Claus is Coming)

Creepy Mall Santa

Oh gods, stop shooting at me

Wait a minute, you’re—

My name is Apollo. You might know me as the dashingly handsome god of the sun, god of archery, god of music, god of oracles, god of healing, or as the god of several other domains. What can I say? I’m a deity of many talents.

You might also know me as Lester Papadopoulos — an extremely average-looking seventeen year old with curly brown hair and not a single godly power to his name. My father, Zeus, had decided to punish me by turning me into a mortal teenage boy, subjecting me to the horrors of “acne” and “flab” — frightening stuff. I had to complete some challenging trials (I won’t bore you with the details, but it involved restoring my oracles, defeating three wannabe Roman emperor-gods, and nearly dying far too many times to count), but earlier this year I was finally restored to my godly form and resumed my place on Olympus.

You might then be wondering why Lester Papadopoulos was standing in line at a mall in Palm Springs, California, waiting to meet Santa Claus. Frankly, I myself was wondering the same thing.

I looked over to my young companion. “Meg, remind me why we’re here again?”

Meg McCaffrey — a child-turning-teenager with a fashion sense that could most charitably be described as “bold,” who happened to be both a daughter of Demeter and my former master — rolled her eyes. “I told you that you didn’t have to come.”

“No, no, I’m happy to join you,” I assured her, “I just don’t fully understand…”

She shrugged. “It’s my first winter not living in Nero’s house — the first one I can really remember, anyway. I wanted to, I don’t know, see what all the hype was about Christmas.”

Nero — one of the aforementioned wannabe emperor-gods. He was Meg’s abusive former stepfather, and a man who had a penchant for burning Christians alive on crosses — no, I couldn’t imagine he would have tolerated any inklings of a Christmas celebration under his roof.

“Why this, though?”

“I looked up a list of Christmas activities,” she said matter-of-factly. “This was at the top.”

We shuffled forward as the line moved.

“Hey Apollo, is Santa Claus real?”

“Well, the man we’re waiting in line to meet is just an ordinary mortal in a costume,” I answered.

The woman in line in front of us covered her son’s ears, then glared at me.

I lowered my voice. “But as for whether a real Santa exists…” I shrugged. “I’m honestly not sure.” We gods tend to keep our noses out of other pantheons — things get too confusing otherwise.

Meg hummed. We inched closer to the giant candy cane-striped poles at the front of the line.

“Artemis inspired a lot of the legends around Santa Claus, you know.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded. “Yeah, like the whole sleigh-pulled-by-reindeers thing — that’s all her.” It was hilarious, seeing some of Artemis’s mythology co-opted by a jolly old man. I always remembered to tease her about it when the weather turned cold.

“Are you not a little old to be sitting in Santa’s lap?” a female voice drawled from my left. I turned around to see a young woman dressed in a green dress and stockings, with turned up shoes and a hat with a jingle bell dangling from the point. She was very pretty.

“I could always sit in your lap instead,” I said with a winning smile. It should have made her melt… but I had forgotten that I currently looked like seventeen year old Lester Papadopoulos.

Her lip curled, and I was struck with the sudden feeling that I should recognize her. “I would rather eat this stupid hat than—”

“Ohhhh-kay!” Another young woman dressed as an elf pushed her way between us, steering Meg and I towards the dais. “Santa can see the next guests now, here you go.” She shoved us (well, me) rather unceremoniously towards the bearded old man.

I had to admit, the man hired by the mall to play Santa Claus was a good fit for the part. Seated on the throne-like oversized green armchair was a plump old man dressed all in red, whose snowy white beard looked to be the real deal. His cheeks were indeed rosy, and his silvery-grey eyes seemed to twinkle behind the pair of spectacles perched on his cherry-red nose.

“Ho ho ho,” he motioned towards Meg, who climbed into his lap. “What is your name, my dear?”

“Meg.”

“And what would you like this year?”

“I—” Meg glanced at me, then whispered in Santa’s ear so I couldn’t hear what she said.

He raised his eyebrows. “That is your desire?”

She nodded.

His eyes softened. “I will do what I can, young Meg.”

Meg smiled, then gestured for me to come over.

“Oh— No, I don’t think…”

“Come on Lester,” said Meg, getting up and physically dragging me towards the armchair. “You’re holding up the line.”

Thankfully, I managed to sit myself down on the cushion next to Santa, rather than in the man’s lap. “Um, hi,” I said.

His hand came down on my shoulder, harder than I expected. “I don’t think I need to ask you what you want,” he said in a voice for my ears only, “do I, Apollo?”

I froze. “How— How did you—?”

He chuckled. “I think you’ll get what you deserve.”

A shiver went up my spine. “Meg—”

Santa cut me off. “Yes, come back young Meg. We will now take a photograph.”

The photographer was another young woman dressed as an elf. “Everybody smile for Santa.” She said it so unenthusiastically I could hardly believe she’d been hired for the job. “Three, two, one, Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” Meg and I chorused as the camera flashed.

Later, I saw a copy of the photo — Meg was smiling. I looked like someone had whacked me over the head with the giant candy cane.

We went into the Hallmark store next.

“I’m telling you Meg, that Santa was creepy.”

Meg breezed past the stuffed animals without interest. “He seemed nice to me.”

“You didn’t hear what he said to me! He was all ‘you’ll get what you deserve.’” I gestured with my hands to emphasize the creepiness.

Meg snorted. “Does that mean you’re on the naughty list?” She bent over to inspect the bin of wrapping paper rolls, then picked up a tube decorated with unicorns, twirling and brandishing it like a weapon.

“He called me Apollo.”

That, at least, gave her pause. “Maybe he overheard us talking earlier.”

“But—”

She bonked me on the head with the roll of wrapping paper. “Hey, what are these for, anyway?”

After she was done with the wrapping paper, Meg moved onto the rows and rows of holiday greeting cards. I stood next to her, waiting for her to finish — and no, I was not sulking.

The jingling of bells at the entrance told me that someone else had entered the shop. I peeked around the corner and immediately regretted it.

“Meg,” I hissed. “Meg!”

She looked up from a card that read, Christmas is always a CLAUS for celebration! “What?”

“I think Santa Claus is stalking me.”

“Okay.” She flipped through a few more cards, including one that blasted a very tinny rendition of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. “Can we go ice skating next?”

Meg and I argued all the way to the ice rink, which was conveniently located inside the mall.

“You’re overreacting, Apollo. It’s like that time with the two-headed snake man. You were totally convinced he was gonna attack you.”

“Two-hea— The amphisbaena?!”

Meg snapped her fingers. “Yeah, that guy.”

“The one who recited part of the terza rima prophecy, telling us our lives depended on Nero’s own?”

Meg gestured as if to say, what’s your point? “Did he attack you?”

“W-well, no.”

“See? Overreacting.”

“That’s hardly fair,” I spluttered. “Luguselwa shot him dead less than two seconds later! We don’t know that he wouldn’t have tried attacking me.”

Meg gave me a pitying look.

“In any case, why would Santa have gone into the Hallmark store if not to follow me?”

“How about because it’s near the North Pole area and he was on a break?”

I… didn’t actually have anything to counter such a reasonable explanation. But the ice rink was four floors away and on the opposite side of the mall. I knew that if Santa appeared there, it would be proof that he was following me.

Despite my misgivings, the skating was actually quite fun. Artemis, of course, enjoys all manner of outdoor activities, so ice skating is something I occasionally do with her, and I actually enjoy it. Meg was also better than I’d expected. I must confess that I thought she would cling to the sides the whole time, but she took to it the way she does with most athletic activities — a decent amount of skill, and enough enthusiasm to make up for the rest.

The trouble didn’t come until afterwards.

After exchanging the rental skates for our shoes, Meg and I split up briefly — Meg to get us a table, and me to buy hot chocolate from the concession stand. I had just gotten in line when I saw him around the corner, leaning casually up against the wall. As if he could sense I was looking at him, Santa turned to meet my gaze.

Then he winked.

“That was fast,” Meg remarked as I approached the table. “Wait, where’s our hot chocolate?”

“I’ll buy you some somewhere else,” I promised, ushering her through the mall. “I’ll make it myself, even. But we need to get out of here, now.”

We made it through the mall without incident. When we got to the parking lot I had almost started to relax, which you should never do when you are being followed by a creepy-stalker-mall-Santa. Because somehow, he had beaten us there, and he was standing in the middle of the lot, staring right at me.

I ran.

Now Apollo, you might be thinking, you’re a god! Why not use your godly powers to smite him, or at least draw upon your bow and arrow, or combat ukulele? A reasonable question. But dear reader, I’m afraid I must admit…

I forgot.

Look, after a long period of being a mostly helpless mortal, certain habits just get ingrained, you know? Especially since I was currently in my Lester form. If I’d had more time to think about it I could have done something else, but as it was, all my thoughts were devoted to getting away as fast as possible. Meg, not wanting to be left behind, had little choice but to run with me.

We were making good ground — when I glanced back I couldn’t even see the red-suited man among the cars behind us. But then I said the five words you should never say when you are being pursued.

“I think we lost him!”

As soon as the words left my mouth, a looming shadow overtook us. I looked up to see Santa on his flying sleigh, pulled by a team of eight reindeer.

Well, at least that confirmed my suspicion that he wasn’t an ordinary mortal.

As Meg and I watched in stunned horror, the old man reached into a sack and pulled out… A bow and arrow?

The whizzing of an arrow narrowly missing my ear was enough to get us back into motion.

“Does Santa Claus have a bow and arrow in the stories?” Meg shouted, ducking and weaving to avoid the volley of arrows.

“I don’t think so,” I shouted back, “but I don’t know enough about Christianity to say otherwise!”

Meg yelped as the elf-women appeared seemingly out of nowhere, separating the two of us. I tried to go after her, but the arrows from above kept me from moving in that direction.

I turned the other way, running down an alley that I hoped would be too narrow for the sleigh to follow. Unfortunately for me, it was also a dead end. I stared aghast at the brick wall, listening to the clunking, scraping sound of boots on the asphalt behind me.

“Nowhere to go, Apollo.”

I turned around, expecting to find myself on the wrong end of Santa’s bow, with an arrow aimed straight at my chest. Instead, I saw something far stranger.

Before my eyes, the old man began to transform. The red suit warped and changed, lightening in color until it was a dress whiter than the freshly driven snow. In contrast, his hair darkened to a deep auburn, growing in length until it was past his shoulders. Wrinkles and the beard melted away, and the body shrunk from an old man to the figure of a girl who appeared no more than fifteen. The only feature to remain unchanged was the eye color — the silvery-grey eyes of my twin sister, Artemis.

“You should see the look on your face, little brother,” she cackled.

A million questions flooded my brain, but the first one out of my mouth was, “What happened to Meg?”

Artemis rolled her eyes and grabbed my wrist, dragging me out of the alley. There I saw Meg, standing unharmed amongst the group of elf-women. No, I realized, not elves.

They were the Hunters of Artemis.

I looked back to my sister, my mind still reeling. “What… Why… Why did you do this?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Isn’t this what you wanted, brother of mine?”

“…What?”

Artemis smiled. It was not a friendly expression — more akin to the baring of a wolf’s teeth than a gesture of good intentions. “You do so well to remind me every year when the air chills and the mortals decorate their homes with potted conifer trees.” She raised her voice to a high falsetto. “‘Oh Artemis, is your chariot prepared with toys for the little children?’ Or, ‘Are you ready for the big day? No, not the winter solstice, the other thing.’ Or—” Her eyes flashed. “Any number of comparisons between myself and one who is wrinkled, bearded, and a man.”

Ah. Teasing my sister had come back to bite me.

I gulped. “W-well, I’m afraid there’s really only one thing I can say…”

“And what is that?” asked Artemis.

I locked eyes with Meg. “Run!”

#toasecretsanta #trials of apollo #pjo apollo #meg mccaffrey #pjo artemis #nagisachan1 #worlds-oldest-teenager

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lucysarah-c · 3 months ago

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Mounting Spring Ch. 2

Summary: Paradis has opened its doors to the world, and the Rumbling has not yet occurred. The military board insists, "We need more Ackermans!" to avoid ruining Mikasa's life. Levi agrees. Arranged marriage, explicit consent, Omegaverse. Alpha! Levi x Omega! Y/N. Mentions of underage marriage but it doesn't happen, the reader is over 21.Age gap but they are both adults. (I would say enemys to lover but they don't even know eachother to be enemys lol.) Author note: I've had this idea for so long… Omegaverse is my guilty pleasure, and I decided to treat myself with it. From the creator of "Not in season?" I bring to you "Mounting Spring" lmao haha sorry it's just that my first omegaverse was rather a success… so I decided to do another. Masterlist to the previous parts! Ao3 link in case you prefer to read there!

Teeth sank into the reddening pulp, grimacing as she swallowed its overly sweet pulp. She’d had more than her fill of them by now. Her hands gripped her hips as her mother tugged at the back of her dress, tightening it with relentless precision.

“How many more of these do I have to eat?” she muttered, her mouth half-full.

“Do not touch the dress,” her mother insisted, exasperated. “Figs stain like crazy.”

Her grandmother, seated by the intricately decorated vanity, glanced up. “As many as it takes. Don’t you want your chest to be pump for the wedding?”

With shallow, uneven breaths, she turned to face herself in the triple-panelled mirror with its gilded frame. The multiple angles revealed the full grandeur of the white dress she wore. She, somehow, seemed tiny compared to the size of the grown. “Isn’t it... perhaps, a little much?”

Doubt settled into her mind as a servant pinned her hair in an elaborate updo. This was the third fitting, just three days before the big day; any change now would be nearly impossible.

“Nonsense!” her mother chided, fussing with the train to ensure it cascaded perfectly. “You only marry once.” Noticing the way her daughter’s leg tapped nervously, she gave her a sharp slap on the arm. “Stop it. Calm yourself, or you’ll faint before you even reach the cathedral.”

“Ouch!” she pouted. “I can’t help it—I’m so nervous. I want him to think I’m beautiful. I want him to think I’m... perfect.”

“He should count himself lucky,” her grandmother muttered with a groan, “You could do so much better than some Military Police officer, high-ranking or not.”

“Grandma,” she replied, weary of the topic, “Dietrich is an angel... he even worked extra hours so we could have the wedding at the main cathedral, just like I dreamed.”

Her voice softened, eyes shining with a blush on her cheeks, visibly lovestruck. Her little sister, tugging at her own flower girl dress, looked up and grinned, “You’re getting married where princesses do!”

“Yes,” Y/N beamed, crouching with a rustle of fabric, “and we’ll both look like princesses.”

“What if... what if my heat comes early? Or late?” Her breathing turned shallow. “We’ve been planning this for years—”

“Goodness, calm down!” her mother scolded, sounding weary. “You’ll get it next week as planned, and by then, you’ll already be bonded.”

Her grandmother sat at the table, grumbling to herself. The room around them was awash in white and gold, with intricate floral patterns adorning the walls and hidden doors blending with the decor. The house was full of energy as five children dashed about, all at different ages. The two eldest—a pair of identical teenage boys—moved with a synchronized mischief, while the remaining three, two boys and a girl, looked close enough in age to practically be triplets. The girl, rapidly growing taller than the other two. The three of them in that state of childhood that they can’t kept still.

But the simplest conclusion was that she was the oldest. “Oh, say what you like, Grandma, but without Dietrich and father’s connections, we’d all still be waiting at the military tower, just like after the uprising.”

She turned, smiling warmly at another woman standing quietly in the corner. That woman’s facial features had no resemblance to the rest of the people in the room. “And thanks to Mrs. Irma, who’s so generously taken us in,” she said, offering a small bow of respect.

“Oh, think nothing of it,” Mrs. Irma replied. “In times like these, traditional families need to stand together.” Her expression darkened as she glanced at the clock. “It’s absurd that they’re keeping Anthony at the board this late. Can you imagine? These are family hours!

One of the older boys, recently old enough to entertain more adult conversations, muttered, “Well... it’s not like the Scouts have any family to go back to.”

“Arthur,” Y/N snapped, her voice severe, “don’t say that.” He shrugged, but she held his gaze firmly. “What if someone hears you? Don’t be foolish, especially while Father is still imprisoned.”

Unfazed, the boy rolled his eyes. “You’re not my mother,” he muttered, looking toward their actual mother for backup.

“Listen to your sister,” she replied, more out of habit than strictness.

She smirked at Arthur, satisfied. Despite him recently presenting as an alpha, she remained firmly in charge.

Just then, the front door swung open so loudly it echoed through the house, drawing everyone’s attention.

Her head snapped up, her nose catching a familiar scent. Gathering the skirts of her dress, she hurried down the hall. Two older men stood in the entryway, and her heart leaped. “Dad!” she cried with excitement,

Her exclamation raised the family that quickly moved behind her. “I knew they’d let you out for the wedding,” she said, her voice shaking with joy as her father lifted her off the ground in a tight embrace.

When she withdrew her arms around her father’s neck and he set her down, he looked at her with an unfamiliar intensity, almost prideful. “Oh, darling, aren’t you a blessing?”

She blinked, caught off guard by the expression. But before she could question it, the rest of the family surrounded him, eagerly pulling him into their midst. The owner of the house still cladded in his military uniform moved to his wife, Irma, and whispered something in her ear. Whatever he had said made the colours from her face drain and her eyes flicked toward Y/N, filled with an unsettling mix of shock and pity.

‘...What is going on?’ The bride-to-be began to sense the tension in the air. Her confused eyes moved to her father, who was still talking to the children. Her confusion was only slightly veiled as she heard him declare, “We are going back to the house!”

“To the country manor and all?” one of the teens asked excitedly.

“Yes, all of it. The Crown is returning the territories.”

Y/N smiled, but a shadow of confusion crossed her face. The news seemed almost too good. Had her fiancé put in a word with the military board? But then, ‘One thing is him being free, another is having our lands returned.’

None of her friends with family under military trial had gotten their properties back after the uprising. Most nobles still waiting for military trail at the tower, begging to not be executed. As she mulled this over, the scene repeated in front of her eyes. Her father bent down to whisper something to her mother, and both turned to glance at her.

The younger children ran around, cheering, the teens celebrating the prospect of leaving the borrowed home. Y/N, however, watched the four adults as they slipped into the study.

The sound of the double doors sliding shut with a finality that stirred her nerves was hard to forget. She could swear she felt the wind of air that the action produced slamming against her face. Just like her, her grandmother didn’t share the enthusiasm. Perhaps, Y/N was no longer a little girl to be easily tricked as her siblings.

While they conferred in private, she changed out of her dress into something more comfortable, scooped up her large white Persian cat, and settled in with her grandmother for tea. But neither took a sip. It felt like the eye of the hurricane, with a silence that gnawed sanity.

‘Calm down... it’s just nerves,’ she reminded herself, clinging to her mother’s earlier words.

But minutes passed like hours, and hours passed like days. When the adults finally emerged, she stood quickly, meeting her father with a hopeful smile. “Dad, you’ll be able to walk me down the aisle!”

But the man placed both hands on her forearms, giving them a gentle squeeze before he spoke. As he did, her smile slowly faded, replaced by a torrent of messy tears. She couldn’t quite recall how he delivered the news, having dissociated in the moment.

“No...” she whispered as tears ran down her cheeks, her head shaking slowly in disbelief. “Don’t do this to me...”

“Dad,” she cried, her voice like a frightened child’s, pleading against the monsters of the night.

He simply cupped her head with one hand, lowered it gently to plant a kiss on her crown, and said softly, “Make him happy, alright?”

—

Perhaps it wasn’t the time or place to think about it, but his mind kept drifting back. Maybe it was the season—spring—that stirred his body’s instincts with an eager pull toward mating. There was no rut, no nearby omega to trigger one, yet his body reacted to the shift in weather, sensing that if he wasn’t so stubborn, it might be the perfect timing for breeding.

Maybe it was because he’d been informed that everything was settled and that the wedding was set to happen as soon as possible. He had no say in it; within three days, it had been arranged. He absentmindedly spun a small red velvet box with a single ring on the wooden table. He had asked for the most common ring size and bought the only one he could afford—the cheapest, hoping blindly that it would fit her.

Or maybe it was Hange’s idea of ‘lifting his spirits’ with a bachelorette party, despite his protests. But his mind kept circling back to one persistent question: ‘Have I ever... actually slept with an omega in heat?’

The answer was clear: no. In his days in the Underground, he’d had encounters with a few omegas, but they were rare, and none had been in heat. Omegas hid during their heat. Understandably so, since an omega in heat risked being claimed by any alpha nearby. Any decent alpha in rut would do the same, locking themselves away to avoid the instinct to claim someone they didn’t even know.

‘The closest... was that time her roommate went into heat. and she smelled faintly like an omega in heat,’ Levi mused, trying to dig up memories. ‘I remember thinking it was the best fuck I ever had...’ And it had only been a faint trace of pheromones, not even the real thing. Neither of them was a ‘high-bred omega’ or anything like that, yet the curiosity of what it might truly feel like lingered in his mind.

Especially after they’d informed him two days ago that his fiancée—his future wife—was expected to go into heat by the end of the week. The wedding had been fast-tracked to ensure he could claim her once they were married.

‘I shouldn’t be thinking about this—it’s creepy, to say the least,’ he reprimanded himself, ‘It’s just because it’s spring,’ he reasoned.

The season was clearly affecting him, sparking memories of times he’d been with betas or even alpha women. He’d never cared much about it, aside from the frustration of having to squeeze his own knot. He’d always assumed there was no difference, though he had no experience to confirm it. Attempting to knot a beta or alpha wasn’t just difficult; it was painful for them. All these thoughts spun around in his head, mirroring the ring box as it spun under his fingers on the polished table.

The day was annoyingly warm; his jacket hung on the back of his chair. The previous day, he hadn’t brought it and nearly froze; now he had, and it felt like he was boiling. ‘Damn spring,’ Levi cursed, clicking his tongue and glancing from the open door to the end of the hall, where Zackly had left the meeting for an emergency. The cadet he’d been grumbling to looked visibly nervous, though his expression read, ‘It’s not my fault, don’t yell at me.’

Then he saw Zackly returning, visibly tense, trying to mask his irritation. ‘What’s got him so riled up now?’

The three men sat down across from Levi, one slapping a stack of papers onto the table. The gray-haired man rolled up his sleeves, pushed his glasses up, pinched the bridge of his nose, and then looked straight into Levi’s dead-set eyes.

“There’s been a last-minute issue,” he grunted. “Would you consider choosing another girl?”

“What?” Levi scowled. “Hell no. We already agreed on this.”

“I know, but—”

“No.” Levi crossed his arms, leaning back in his seat. “What’s the problem?”

“Lady Y/N is feeling unwell—” began the youngest cadet timidly on Zackly left side, only to be interrupted by a brash MP on the other side of the higher in rank. “She’s bleeding. The chick missed her heat.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the room, and Levi raised an eyebrow, grunting, “Huh?”

“Her heat’s gone. Her mother said it was stress-related. Doesn’t matter; the point is, she won’t go into heat this spring,” Zackly clarified, clearly annoyed. “So, pick someone who can still be bred this season.”

Levi didn’t respond right away, sitting in silence and letting his annoyance simmer as he waited, half-hoping that a sliver of humanity might surface among these men. “What’s the problem? Everything’s set—let’s carry on.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” Zackly insisted, his patience thin. “She won’t be fertile—possibly for an entire year.”

“Yeah, I heard you. I’m not an idiot. And?” Levi replied, his tone making it clear he found their point absurd. “There’s a chance of omegas going into heat in autumn too,” he added dismissively.

“The odds are too low, and a year’s too long. Who knows what fate this island faces in that time? We need a child now,” Zackly jabbed a fat finger against the table for emphasis. “Choose another.”

Levi snorted, letting out a mocking chuckle. “The arrangement was marriage, and I agreed to that. The rest of this is your own twisted, old-man wet dreams. Whether I knock her up next week or next year—that’s my problem.”

Zackly sighed in frustration, resting his face in his hand. Levi, unbothered, shrugged. “Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. I’ll get the chance to learn her name before I’m a father.”

The MP, that Levi could tell he was an alpha by the scent, sneered under his breath, muttering, “She had one job and couldn’t handle it—the little hysterical chick. What’s she stressed about, eating cake? And omegas wonder why we call them the weaker sex.”

Levi’s sharp gaze pinned the soldier, who straightened in defiance. In the standoff that followed, it became clear: the first to look away would concede dominance. “Watch your mouth,” Levi warned, “or pray I don’t hear that crap again—ever.”

Scoffing, the soldier held his ground, teeth slightly bared as if it would grant him authority. “You don’t even know her,”

But Levi, humanity’s strongest, didn’t need to bare teeth. “I don’t care. If she’s an inconvenience and a pain in the ass, she’s my pain in the ass now. So, the rest of you better shut up.”

The room grew tense, and the youngest cadet shrank in his seat, barely fifteen and newly presented, terrified of being caught up in an alpha standoff. At last, the MP turned away in frustration, shifting into a submissive posture, acknowledging defeat.

Levi snorted, settling back into a relaxed stance. It was typical alpha posturing—territorial nonsense. Or perhaps, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my ally,’ he mused, because whether they liked it or not, she had managed to annoy them all. Levi took that as a personal win.

‘See...we already have something in common,’ he mused, a bittersweet smile flickering across his face at the thought.

—

“You! Last night as a single man! How do you feel?” Hange shouted, downing an entire pint.

Levi sat with his drink clutched between his hands, his elbows resting on his knees. “Like shit,” he muttered.

“Nah, that’s just your usual mood,” Hange joked. “Thought bachelor parties were supposed to be fun? Where’s everyone else?”

Levi glanced up; his gaze heavy. “Dead.”

Hange’s smile faded; their lips pressed together as the realization sank in. They were the only ones left. The night shifted from bittersweet to just bitter.

“If eyebrows were here… he’d put a stop to all this nonsense,” Levi added, sounding defeated, like he’d grown addicted to ‘if onlys’ as the days passed. Hange raised an eyebrow, eyes scanning Levi’s words as if trying to make them fit, but only managed a grimace, like someone watching a mismatched eulogy at a funeral.

“Who am I kidding? That jerk would’ve planned everything behind my back and dragged me to church without explaining why,” Levi muttered, chuckling softly.

Hange burst into laughter. “Honestly! We miss Erwin, but let’s not kid ourselves,” they said, refilling Levi’s glass before slumping back into the couch. “Come on, you’ve got to face marriage like an alpha!”

Levi looked at them, puzzled. “Heavily drunk?”

Reluctantly, Levi raised the glass to his lips. Just then, a flash of lightning illuminated the sky, followed by the rumble of thunder.

—

‘It’ll stop eventually.’

But it didn’t. The storm only worsened. By midday, it was as dark as night inside the chapel.

“Can I leave?” the priest asked, breaking the silence. The small-town chapel was empty—not just because it was a workday, but because the Church had lost much of its influence under the new government. But, to Levi’s annoyance, they still upheld the entire marriage ritual as if nothing had changed.

“You’re a priest. What else have you got to do but wait with us?” Hange replied, leaning back in the uncomfortable wooden pew. Turning to Levi, they whispered, “Are you sure she said today?”

At first, both had sat upright, coats adjusted for the formality of the occasion. But after four hours of waiting, with no sign of the bride, both Scouts had slouched against the benches, waiting for a miracle or release from this silent punishment.

Levi, resting his head back, hands in his pockets as the storm turned colder, shrugged “Maybe I read it wrong,” he said, his eyes fixed on the chapel floor, utterly devoid of expression.

“What?!” Hange exclaimed. “Does that mean I got drunk last night for nothing?”

“Nobody forced you to.”

“Well, what kind of bachelor party would it be if someone didn’t get drunk?” It was obvious Hange was trying to lighten the mood with a joke or two.

Levi, though, was too wrapped up in his thoughts to appreciate it. “It wasn’t a bachelor party, Hange. It was just you and me.”

“Sorry for annoying you with my friendship,” Hange replied, feigning offense. After a moment of silence, they continued, “Maybe she ran away…”

“Maybe she threw herself from the Walls, as I should have.”

Hange chuckled. “You’re being a bit overdramatic.” They could tell Levi was beyond stressed; his leg bounced restlessly, pacing each second with the beat of his boot against the floor.

As the storm worsened and time dragged on, Levi turned to Hange. “Go back to the Scouts.”

“What?” the newly appointed Commander asked, visibly confused. “No way, I’m staying! My baby is getting married!” they joked, earning an eye roll from Levi.

“I’m older than you, idiot.”

Hange slung an arm around Levi, grinning. “Yeah, but you’re shorter, so age doesn’t count.”

“Tch. Just go. We left the brats alone, and the sky’s falling. They’ll need help with the horses, and someone has to check on the coastal supplies. Without proper squad leaders, someone’s got to be there giving orders.”

Though Hange had taken up the Commander’s role, Levi’s support had often provided the final push they needed to take full responsibility. Most of the time, the captain could tell that the brunette felt like the role was too big for them. Levi seemed to feel that push was necessary now, especially in the storm’s chaos.

Hange, however, hesitated, reluctant to leave a friend who’d seen better days. “But—”

“Go,” Levi said, resigned but not angry. “I’m a big boy, Four-Eyes. I’ll be fine.”

Using their old teasing nicknames was the closest they came to camaraderie now. “Who’s going to sign as your witness, then?” Hange asked, rising reluctantly.

“If” —Levi stressed the word— “if she shows up, we’ll improvise. Now go. The cadets need you.”

Levi shifted uncomfortably, glancing once more toward the doors, his patience worn thin as the storm outside seemed only to grow angrier. The priest fidgeted, muttering under his breath while Hange’s retreating footsteps had already faded, leaving Levi alone with his swirling thoughts.

The hours dragged on; the storm’s fury unrelenting. Levi, alone now in the dim chapel, had nearly let go of the thought that she would show at all. His head rested against the back of the pew, eyes half-closed, the rhythmic pounding of the rain on the roof above almost hypnotic.

He felt himself drifting off, exhaustion creeping in after he didn’t sleep a wink the previous night. He couldn’t decide which he preferred—her not showing up at all or going through with it. If she didn’t come, he’d have to endure this ordeal all over again. If she did, it would finally bring this chapter to a close, forcing him to confront a new way of life.

For a split second, he found himself comparing it to waiting for an execution. ‘No... let’s not turn into those bitter old men who think of marriage as a prison; the poor kid’s done nothing wrong.’

And just when Levi resigned to leave, a loud creak of the chapel doors shattered the stillness. Levi sat up abruptly, and two soldiers, rifles in hand and soaked through, marched into the aisle, flanking a lone figure in a drenched, greyish-white cloak. The hood hung low, obscuring her face entirely. Her face was obscured beneath the soaked hood, and the dress beneath the cloak—if it could be called a wedding gown at all—was stained with mud up to her knees. It looked far more like an ordinary dress than something intended for marriage, its hem torn and splattered with the earth she’d trudged through.

The two soldiers from Zackly’s meeting earlier that week were here, and Levi quickly understood why—they must be trusted to carry out the job of escorting her. When she finally stepped into the chapel, an unexpected aroma hit him like a punch. He couldn’t tell if it was the lingering aroma from the lost heat, adjusting to the sudden shift in plans and hormones. But she smelled—

‘Divine, for fuck’s sake,’ he thought, feeling ashamed at how quickly his own body reacted.

The soldiers stepped forward, both offering quick, sharp salutes. One spoke in a low, weary voice. “Captain, apologies for the delay. The main road’s flooded out. We lost the cart about a mile back—it’s stuck deep. We had to finish the journey on foot.”

Levi gave a curt nod, his gaze fixed on the figure between them. Levi could only see her hands—pale, trembling slightly. She didn’t move, her posture utterly still, almost as if she were an apparition more than a bride. The cloak’s edges trembled with each tremor from the cold. Levi had to fight the urge to bend lower and see if he could catch a glimpse of her face.

The priest, seizing the moment, gestured toward the altar. “Well, no use delaying further. Let us proceed.”

Levi remained still for a beat. He took a deep breath and stepped forward, his boots echoing on the stone floor as he approached the altar. But before he could locate her fully, the priest’s voice rang out, “Bring her forward.”

He glanced over his shoulder.

The same MP from before took hold of her arm, pushing her forward with an irritating smirk. “Come on, sweetheart. We don’t have all day.”

Levi almost stepped in to object; there was no need to shove her around like a rag doll. He shot a deadly glare at the soldier. ‘That’s strike two, asshole.’

Perhaps he was too focused on expressing his disapproval to notice at first, but she raised her head slightly, her delicate fingers reaching up to push back her hood, finally revealing her face as she turned toward him.

Levi froze. ‘Holy shit... maybe I should start choosing blindly.’ His reaction must have been obvious, as he could hear the two soldiers chuckling behind him.

“Look at how the bastard’s face changed,” one MP muttered, his companion nudging him in an attempt to avoid further reprimand.

Her hair was styled in a simple half-up, half-down braid, woven with white laces in an attempt to add a touch of glamour. Perhaps it had looked better when it was first done; now, it clung to her head, and the small, loose locks meant to lend an ethereal appearance were now plastered to her damp face. Her eyelashes, soaked from the rain, mimicked the look of mascara—though most of it had already smudged around her eyes. Despite it all, Levi thought she looked gorgeous.

As the ceremony began, the priest asked, “Are both of you here of your own free will?” It was standard procedure.

Levi, completely fed up with the situation, glanced at the man in the black robe, ‘You gotta be kidding me,’ he thought.

“Yeah,” he bit out.

On the other hand, she muttered as quietly as a mouse, “... yes.”

As the ceremony resumed, the priest’s voice echoed softly in the empty chapel, only slightly drowned by the relentless rain. Levi stood with his hands stiffly at his sides, listening to the murmured words without taking them in fully, his gaze repeatedly drifting to the shivering figure beside him.

When the priest finally motioned for the rings, Levi reached into his pocket and pulled out the plain, golden band. His hands were steady as he took hers, but he felt her flinch slightly, the coldness of her skin seeping through his fingers as he held her trembling hand. Her fingers, nearly numb from the chill, barely closed around his. He slipped the ring onto her finger, only to notice it was too large; the band slid loosely over her knuckle.

If it weren’t for Levi’s ability to keep his composure, he swore anyone else would have either cursed in the middle of this holy place or broken down in tears. It was just one more detail that seemed off-kilter, and he felt his jaw clench.

‘Come on, just one damn thing has to turn out right.’

A brief pause followed, broken only by the priest’s voice. “And now, the witness,” he announced, glancing around the empty space and catching Levi’s eye. Levi cursed inwardly, remembering that Hange had left at his urging.

‘For fucks sake.’

One of the soldiers caught on quickly. With a muttered, “I’ll find someone,” he strode down the aisle, pushing open the chapel doors and stepping into the storm. The silence grew heavy as they waited, the soldier’s footsteps echoing away and leaving only the rain in their place.

After a few tense moments, the soldier returned, ushering in a grizzled farmer who looked every bit as baffled as he was drenched. The MP walked the man to the altar and said confidently, “Problem solve,"

Second hand embarrassment run through his body as the farmer approached the altar with a respectful nod, casting Levi and the bride a curious look before taking the pen offered to him. With a swift scratch of ink on the paper, the witness line was signed.

Levi took a quick check on the bride and she seemed completely dissociated. The priest completed the ceremony with a "By the power vested in me by law I, now, pronounce you man and wife."

He took a loud sigh of relief, at least it was over. Turning to his right to look at her and perhaps attempt to say something for the first time. He even tried to force himself to do a subtle side smile to ease out the situation, much unlike him but he wished with all his heart that he knew how to be outgoing enough to bring some easiness into the situation.

—A soft, broken sniffle. She lifted her hand to her face, half-covering her expression and lowered her head. Her shoulders trembled just a little, the strands of damp hair falling forward, hiding her face. Her cries began to echo in the chapel.

Levi’s throat tightened, and he swallowed, a pang of guilt pressing on him. He glanced at the priest, who seemed as serene as ever, his hands hidden inside the long sleeves of his gown.

With a peaceful smile, the priest offered Levi a reassuring look, seeing his obvious discomfort. “Tears of happiness, I’m sure,” he replied softly.

Before Levi could even shoot him a deadpan glance, the situation had become so awkward that the youngest cadet tried to lighten the mood by tossing a handful of rice at them.

“Congrats…” he muttered with the least enthusiasm possible.

But as the rice landed on her, she began to wipe her face, where most of the grains had stuck to her wet skin. Spitting a little as the water made them cling to her, she cried, “It’s in my eyes,” a small sob escaping her.

The two cadets froze, glancing at each other before mumbling, “We should get going.” “Yeah,” they muttered, then made a hasty exit.

Seeing her struggling, Levi quickly realized the problem and pulled out a handkerchief. “Here, wait,” he said, brushing the cloth over her face, then patting her shoulders and hair to clear away the grains of rice.

When she finally opened her eyes—red either from the tears or the rice—she looked at him. ‘Say something,’ he thought, clenching his teeth against the uncomfortable silence.

“We should get going; you’re soaked,” Levi finally broke the tension, noticing they were completely alone in the chapel. “Maybe you can take a shower or something.”

“Is your house close by, sir?” she asked softly, her voice barely above a whisper.

Levi hesitated, feeling strangely at a loss. He lived at headquarters, of course, not in a proper household, but something about her question held an unspoken hope. “Not exactly. I stay at the Scout facility… it’s inside the forest. I was going to rent a cart, but in this weather, it wouldn’t make it through,” he explained.

She didn’t respond, just stared out at the heavy rain pouring beyond the chapel doors. Her expression made her thoughts clear. ‘Nothing could make this day worse,’ Levi thought with a quiet huff, scratching the back of his head. “Tch.”

She absently fiddled with the loose ring on her finger, holding it with her other hand to keep it from slipping off. Disappointment and resignation were etched across her face—until she straightened up, surprised, as something heavy draped over her shoulders.

“There,” Levi said, pulling the green military trench coat snugly over her head. “It’s not much, but at least it’s waterproof. The last thing I need is you catching the flu less than a week into this arrangement.”

A subtle blush rose to her cheeks, bringing a hint of colour back to her pallid face. She lifted the coat’s collar to her nose, breathing in his scent, which sent an unexpected shiver through her. She pressed her lips together, feeling strangely affected. ‘So strong,’ she thought. Though the arrangement itself felt far from ideal, her body seemed to be very glad.

“Thank you, sir,” she murmured.

“Levi,” he corrected her, sounding tired.

“Huh?”

“My name is Levi,” he repeated. “If we’re going to do this, let’s at least start by using our names.”

“Y/N, then.”

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professorcalculusstanaccount · 26 days ago

Text

actually he's 96 years old

checkmate

"Tintin, quel âge as-tu ?"

Today marks 96 years of The Adventures of Tintin, and readers have spent at least the last 78 of those years asking the same question: "How old is Tintin?"

The series is infamously coy about giving a definite answer, as was its creator, but I argue in the first part of this post that 1) there was indeed a specific intended age range for Tintin and 2) it is very much possible, using evidence from many different sources including the albums themselves, Tintin magazine, other BDs of the time, and interviews with Hergé, to say exactly what that age range was. Let me be very clear: I'm specifically making an argument about how old Hergé saw him as and how old Hergé wanted him to be seen as.

The second part is less concrete; it presents how a few scholars have interpreted the ambiguity of Tintin's age, plus some of my own thoughts about it that build on their claims. That part is less trying to find an answer to the age question and more trying to explain why his age is so much in question.

This is a long post.

I. Intent

Official sources

When asked about Tintin's age in a 1960 interview for Cinq colonnes à la une, Hergé judged that "il doit rester aux environs de quinze ans" ("he must still be around 15 years old," 0:33-0:44).

In 1962, he gave a very similar response on the Canadian program Premier Plan: "Une quinzaine d'années ? Quinze ans, seize ans, je ne sais pas, moi" ("About 15? 15, 16, I don't know"). "Donc c'est l'adolescent" ("So he's a teenager"), pursues the interviewer, and Hergé answers with a firm yes.

Nearly ten years later, in 1970, he added some nuance: "What age do I give him? I don't know... 17? In my mind, he was about 14 or 15 when I created him, a Boy Scout, and he practically hasn't budged. Let's say that he's picked up three or four years in forty years... All right, let's take the average: 15 plus 4, 19." (translation mine)

In 1979, his interviewer on Apostrophes preempted him on the age question, saying that "c'est un reporter de quinze ans" ("he's a 15-year-old reporter"). Hergé agreed: "C'est ça, à peu près" ("That's right, more or less").

Today, the official Tintin website run by Moulinsart declares him to be "Seize, dix-sept ans (dix-huit tout au plus !)," that is, "16, 17 years old (18 at most!)."

Responses to reader questions in the Journal Tintin

Early in the Journal Tintin's run, between 1946 and 1954, readers who wrote in with questions had a chance to see the responses to their letters published in the magazine each week. Supposedly it would be Tintin himself who was answering - questions addressed to him would be answered in first person, which probably only increased the urge to ask about personal details. So there were naturally many questions about his age, which provoked a range of responses.

Who was actually answering the letters? It's hard to say. But seeing as the responses were being published in the official Tintin Magazine as the voice of Tintin himself, Hergé would surely have been at least consulted on questions concerning his character, especially as the team running the magazine was still very small when it was regularly publishing responses.

The most common response was to dodge the question entirely. The stock phrases were "Qu'importe mon âge ?" and "Tintin n'a pas d'âge !" ("What does my age matter?" "Tintin has no age!").

In a small number of cases they related Tintin's age to that of his readers; an 11 1/2 year old was told that Tintin can be "l'âge que tu souhaites : entre dix et vingt ans !" ("whatever age you want: between 10 and 20!", 1953), and for a couple others, where the age of the writer wasn't listed, Tintin's age is "un peu plus que le tien" ("a little older than you," 1951) or "un peu moins que le double du tien" ("a little less than twice your age," 1950). The target audience of the Journal Tintin - as it was for the Petit Vingtième, and for comics magazines of the time generally - was 8-15 year olds.

The only definite answer that appeared with regularity put Tintin's age between 15 and 20:

(TIntin nos. 19, May 8, 1947; 26, June 26, 1947; 6, February 5, 1948; 2, January 12, 1950; 9, February 27, 1947. The second and third examples also have Tintin declare that "I've travelled so much that I no longer remember where I was born," a fine example of the de-Belgicanization he underwent after the early years.)

("As I've already told several of my friends, I'm older than 15 but younger than 20." (1947) "My age? Let's say 15… or a little older." (1947) "My age? Between 15 and 20 years old." (1948) "Tintin? He has no age! Seeing him move about, he seems to be about 15." (1950) "I'm not yet 20 but I'm older than 15." (1947))

Real-life incarnations of Tintin

When the end of Soviets was celebrated with "Tintin" arriving at the Gare du Nord in Brussels, the role was played by 15-year-old Lucien Pepermans. When the event was repeated for the end of Congo, two years later, Pepermans was replaced by Henri Dendoncker, age 14. About thirty years after that, Jean-Pierre Talbot was declared Tintin's spitting image at 16 ("Same age, same silhouette, same face, same hair," reads the announcement of his casting in the Journal Tintin). He was 20 at most when Blue Oranges (released 1964) was filmed. Hergé told Numa Sadoul that he unconsciously based Tintin in Soviets on his younger brother Paul, who was 16 when it started. Additionally, Palle Huld, often cited as an inspiration for Tintin, completed a tour of the world in 44 days in 1928 at age 15 (and in plus-fours).

(Lucien Pepermans, Henri Dendoncker, Jean-Pierre Talbot, Palle Huld)

In the play Tintin et le mystère du diamant bleu (1941), which Hergé was very involved in the writing and production of, the role of Tintin was played by Mlle. Jeanne Rubens, a woman - a common theater trick for portraying young boys. He was played by a woman again in Radio Luxembourg's 1950s audio adaptations: Claude Vincent, "qui interprétait à merveille les rôles d’enfants et d’adolescents" ("who played children's and adolescents' roles wonderfully"), was the voice of Tintin. Sadly those broadcasts appear to be lost, but she can still be heard in the likely similar role of Alix.

(Shared on forum-tintinophile.com, "Tintin aux Indes, ou le mystère du diamant bleu." Certainly the only adaptation that got his height difference with the Thompsons right.)

In 1959, the Journal Tintin invited readers who thought they looked like Tintin to send in their pictures; five candidates for "Tintin's lookalike" were chosen by the magazine and presented to the readers for them to vote on. The winner was a 15-year-old, and while the ages of the other contestants aren't listed, they appear to be the same age or younger.

(Tintin nos. 25, June 24, 1959 & 31, August 5, 1959)

Comparisons with contemporary characters

Mainstream BD in the first half of the 20th century was not particularly inventive, especially as it was contending with its relative youth as a medium, a focus on the children's market, and, especially after WWII, heavy scrutiny from both religious and secular moral watchdogs. In the specific case of the Journal Tintin, Hergé's iron-fisted artistic direction in the early years led to a high level of artistic homogeneity across the magazine, while restrictions on the types of stories that could be told (from both the threat of censors and expectations about reader interests) limited variety in plots, characters, and settings.

All that is to say that a lot of what was being published alongside Tintin in the 40s and 50s looked more or less like Tintin, and even was likely directly modeled on it, which makes it useful for comparison. The protagonists of the time can be generally divided by age into children, the "15-20" range, young men, and middle-aged men. Each category is visually distinct (comics are a visual medium!) and each results in a slightly different kind of story with different character dynamics.

Here's Tintin with a couple of the teenage protagonists that appeared alongside him in his magazine:

(L'Affaire Tournesol (1956), p. 51; La Griffe Noire, Tintin no. 6, February 5, 1958; Les Deux Visages de Kid Ordinn, Tintin no. 1, January 2, 1957)

Hergé's no. 2 collaborator Jacques Martin created Alix (center, 1948), a Roman Gaul confirmed to be 16 in the original albums. Chick Bill (right, 1955), who in looks and narrative role is effectively just Tintin as a cowboy, is identified (by none other than Franquin) with the 15-20 age range. Some shared visual markers of their youth are a short and slight build, rounded shoulders, a round head, and a soft jawline. While all very independent, they are all three semi-accompanied by a much older man and a child sidekick.

Now, here are some examples of characters from the next age range up:

L'énigmatique Monsieur Barelli, Tintin no. 44, November 2, 1950; L'ouragan de feu, Tintin (Kuifje) no. 37, September 15, 1960; Défi à Ric Hochet, Tintin (Kuifje) no. 8, February 25, 1964)

Hergé's no. 1 collaborator Bob de Moor had a humor-adventure series using the same style as Hergé, but his character, stage actor Georges Barelli (left, 1950), is a grown man. Martin's second series was required by publishers to somehow be a modern AU of Alix, but Alix's counterpart, reporter in the same way that Tintin is a reporter Guy Lefranc (center, 1952), is clearly older than him. So-called reporter, really amateur detective Ric Hochet (yes, that's his name, right, 1955) is kind of an odd case; he started out a child, then looked basically exactly like Chick Bill (they were both drawn by the same artist, Tibet), then finally settled into his final form as a young man in his mid-twenties - a 1969 album places him at age 26. All three own their own cars (admittedly a moot point for Alix and Chick), and, compared to their teenage counterparts, they're much more likely to have friends and colleagues their own age instead of being supervised by someone older.

It should be clear from these six pictures that Tintin was not drawn in a way meant to make readers think he was an adult. And besides, there's really no reason to believe that Hergé, who once declared that "my primary objective is to be legible. The rest follows," would have chosen to give his main and titular character an appearance that was somehow deceptive. I'm prepared to say with confidence that Tintin looks young because he's supposed to be seen as young.

Textual evidence

For this section, I first look at a few ways that the albums actively present Tintin as a non-adult character. However, most of what follows is about showing that what happens in the albums does not contradict the argument that Tintin is intended to be a teenager. The Adventures of Tintin may be deceptively timeless, but not only is the series nearly a century old, it also was written during a time of extremely rapid and intense social, cultural, and technological change. Consequently, I want to make sure that I'm not judging the past with the attitudes of the present; in order to put the series in its proper context, I try to identify viewpoints and conventions expressed in texts created at the same time (and, when possible, by the same author) to see if a teenaged Tintin fits in with them.

In looking over how other characters refer to him across the albums, one sees that Tintin's most distinctive feature to those around him is his youth. This is, I think, more visible in the original French, where other characters address or describe him with a whole array of words commonly used for children: jeune homme, (jeune) garçon, gamin, galopin, blanc-bec, enfant de choeur, fiston, freluquet, moussaillon, (mon) petit (used as a noun), and morveux, not to mention many, many instances of characters appending "jeune" or "petit" to another word ("reporter," for instance). In English, he's variously (a) young man, (young) boy, kid, boyo, whippersnapper, wonderboy, lad, brat, puppy, young fellow-me-lad, and cabin-boy, along with liberal use of the corresponding adjectives "young" and "little." (I've collected specific panel examples for reference in another post.)

As @professorcalculusstanaccount has pointed out, there's no question of Tintin being called up for the draft as Haddock is in Black Gold; that album also contains the only example of Tintin's competency being questioned because of his age, on page 7: "So you're the new radio officer... You look a bit young to me..." (There's one similar remark, in America, after Tintin is injured in a car accident on page 6: "The poor kid..." "He looks so young...") Him not being called to war is particularly striking because Belgium historically required young men to do compulsory military service at age 18 or 19, after which they would be enrolled in the reserve army (p. 274). Thanks to a hard-to-translate joke in the original French for Emerald (below), we know that military service exists in Tintin's world and that the Thompsons have done theirs; Hergé did his at age 19, and then was called up from the reserves in 1939, interrupting the magazine publication of, precisely, Black Gold. Given his longtime anti-war stance and the peace sign sticker he wears in Picaros, though, one can easily imagine Tintin becoming a conscientious objector after it was legalized in 1964 - but by 1964, most of the series was already over.

(Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, p. 37)

He also doesn't dress like an adult: the plus-fours look very childish after the 1930s, as @illegally-blind-and-deaf pointed out. He also never wears a proper hat, only a flat cap in a few early adventures, and from Temple on (that is, after 1948) he runs around in his shirt and sweater with no tie or jacket. Some of that can be put down to the importance Hergé placed on his characters being maximally recognizable, but it certainly doesn't make Tintin look any older - look at a few of Hergé's crowd scenes and compare how the background characters are dressed.

Next, he doesn't seem to ever need to shave. In fact, in the original French for Black Island, Tintin remarks that the bad guys have gotten away "à mon nez et à ma barbe," an expression equivalent in English to "right under my nose" but literally "at my nose and at my beard," to which Snowy incredulously responds "Your beard? What beard?"

(L'Île Noire, p. 29)

It's true that nearly everyone who meets Tintin, including his adult friends, addresses him respectfully with the formal pronoun "vous" instead of with the informal "tu," as you typically would for someone much younger than you. However, Pierre Assouline attributes this to a dislike of over-familiarity on Hergé's part, citing him as saying that "Le tutoiement est la fausse monnaie de l'amitié" ("Using 'tu' is the counterfeit money of friendship").

(There are a few moments where Haddock slips and uses tu with Tintin, but I won't go into them here. Suffice to say that the majority of them are indeed moments where he's treating Tintin more as a child.)

Much has been made of Tintin's nonchalance about drinking alcohol as proof of adulthood, but evidence from other BDs indicates that this perception is a result of a shift away from historically looser attitudes towards drinking. Early comics for children frequently carried moralizing messages, but there's no marked moralizing present around youths drinking like there is around them smoking.

Compare, for example, the difference in tone between these two Quick & Flupke pages, where the kids are sternly warned off from tobacco...

(Originally published in Le Petit Vingtième nos. 4, January 28, 1932 & 43, October 24, 1935)

...Versus this gag, where Flupke's own relatives getting him drunk on New Year's over his protests is played entirely for humor.

(Le Petit Vingtième no. 1, January 3, 1935. "Tu es un homme et tu dois boire!")

There was even a follow-up comic at the same time the year after, in which Flupke imagines the alcohol he'll be plied with on January 1st and attempts to move to the North Pole to avoid it.

If a kid as young as Flupke is being given alcohol, then Tintin really doesn't have to be much older to be drinking as well. In fact, one might even note an echo between Flupke's reluctance to drink here and Tintin's in Picaros, when he's pressured to take a swig of whisky by Arumbaya custom (p. 34). On the other hand, since Quick and Flupke are so young, the ban on smoking is stronger for them. Tintin is old enough to occasionally be offered a cigarette, but still young enough that he always must refuse: Hergé was adamant that Tintin remain a good model because of the children who identified with him, while Haddock smoking his pipe, for example, never raised the same issue.

Beyond that, for a non-Hergé example and a later one (from 1960), here's child tennis prodigy Jari, hero of an eponymous strip in the Journal Tintin. He's just bicycled from Belgium to the Netherlands and wants a refreshment, so he goes to a drink stand and orders a beer - and no one bats an eye. Similarly, the only alcohol that Tintin orders casually, in a cafe or pub, is beer (Golden Claws p. 2, Black Island p. 41).

(Jari et le Plan Z, Tintin (Kuifje) no. 40, October 6, 1960)

At the same time, this relaxed attitude has limits. Tintin won't share a friendly drink with Haddock, for example when returning to Marlinspike after an excursion (though Haddock pours two glasses anyway in Affair (p. 3)). Calculus scolds Haddock severely when he thinks that Haddock has given Tintin champagne at breakfast in Tibet (p. 4: "Vous avez bien tort de lui faire boire du champagne de grand matin, à ce garçon !…"). Later in that same album, Haddock drunkenly warns Tintin against alcohol, telling him it's "very bad for young people like you!" (p. 38).

Next, while Tintin is undeniably capable of driving a car, there's actually no indication outside of the earliest stories that he can legally drive. (A quick Google search also tells me that Belgium has historically been notoriously lax on road safety.) At no point after the first four albums - that is, after Hergé became interested in telling a story that makes logical sense, a development typically placed at Blue Lotus - does Tintin drive a car that was acquired legally, not commandeered or outright stolen. (In Soviets and Congo he buys a car; in Cigars he drives the two Rajaijah victims to the asylum, though I doubt anyone was worried about him getting pulled over in the jungle.) On the few occasions where there isn't an emergency, it's always Haddock who drives; see for example Crystal Balls or the few pages of Thérmozéro. When Tintin finally gets a vehicle of his own, in Picaros, it's... a motorbike, which one can get a license for at a younger age than for a car. And in Alph-Art, where the motorbike plays a much larger role, Haddock still drives Tintin into town (p. 25) - and then gets left in the car while Tintin investigates!

Hergé also apparently didn't think flying a plane was particularly difficult. In Jo et Zette, one of his other series, Hergé has little Jo be able to fly his father's "Stratonef" and even land it from a glide, despite only ever hearing his father talk about how to fly it. Over the course of the two-part story (Le Testament de M. Pump and Destination New-York), Jo manages multiple successful flights - more than Tintin ever does! - despite unambiguously being a child.

(Destination New-York, p. 41)

And as with the cars, every plane Tintin ever flies is stolen, so whether he has a legal license or not really doesn't matter.

The same goes for his guns. In all but the first albums and Ear where, surprised in his flat, he really does pull a revolver out of nowhere, Tintin's guns are explicitly either given to him or taken from a disarmed enemy. The series doesn't make a point of him owning and carrying his own gun - just the opposite. And while it seems to us now that Tintin has a lot of firearm use for a children's comic, proficiency with guns was honestly a genre expectation for all adventure heroes of the time (just don't put a gun on your cover). For example, Chang, who from his introduction on acts like a second Tintin, wields a pistol at the end of Lotus and is even implied to be the one who makes the shot that breaks Didi's sword despite appearing even younger than Tintin. (See also the previous section of this post; Chick Bill is carrying a gun in the picture I included.) What's more, the gunplay in Tintin is actually a step down from its predecessor Totor, where Hergé's titular Boy Scout kills a man with a rifle shot to the face.

In short, Tintin is able to do a lot of things he shouldn't legally be able to do by simply not doing them legally.

The fact that Tintin lives alone isn't necessarily a mark of maturity either. It's hardly uncommon for a young adventure protagonist to be unusually unsupervised; it's effectively a demand of the genre. Hergé learned why that is from experience when he created Jo et Zette for the editor of the French, ultra-Catholic children's magazine Coeurs Vaillants, who had raised concerns about how unrealistic Tintin was. In Hergé's own (translated) words:

(From Entretiens avec Hergé, reproduced & translated in The Comics Journal no. 250, p. 191)

Parents are a nuisance, one that Hergé was only too happy to dispense with in Tintin's case. And besides, Tintin isn't completely alone forever; with the introduction of the Marlinspike "family," not to mention Marlinspike Hall itself, during the war, he at least ends up with a home and some adult supervision, however dubious it may be at times.

As for his schooling, according to a report on the Belgian education system from 1932, education was only compulsory there (not to mention free) from ages 6 to 14. That same report records that in 1928, the number of students in the higher level of secondary education - corresponding to high school in American terms - was only 1% of the number of students enrolled in compulsory primary school. Even adjusting for the fact that primary education enrolls children for twice as long, the percentage is still a paltry 2.6%. And then the number of students in university that same year was only about three-quarters of the number of students in secondary education.

What that means is that at the time when Tintin was getting started, only very, very few people stayed in school beyond age 14. Hergé himself was one of those few, but to many of his readers in the early years, the idea that Tintin was already working at age 14 or 15 would have been not just reasonable but recognizable - especially as he has no apparent family to support him. (Not that Tintin isn't knowledgeable: judging from the number of books in his apartment, we can presume that he's quite the autodidact.) Of course public education was broadened after WWII, but by then the character was already firmly established.

As for how Tintin is already a reporter, well, Hergé freely admitted that he gave him the job just because that's what he thought was cool at the time. "Of course it was a pretext," he said on British radio in 1977. (The announcer for that interview describes Tintin as "a 16-year-old Belgian boy with a strange lick of hair, a pair of plus-fours, and a terrier." In it Hergé, questioned about the outsize success of his series, responds that for him "he [Tintin] keeps to be a little boy. Only that.") The tone of the series would be very different if Tintin were just an office clerk or a paperboy, after all - and besides, all but the youngest readers of Le Petit Vingtième would have understood that it's not a real newspaper, just a little children's magazine, so the idea of it having its own official reporter was not to be taken fully seriously.

It's important to remember that our current cultural idea of the teenager as a separate, unique stage between childhood and adulthood was largely a post-WWII American innovation - in fact, the word "teenager" only entered popular use in the 1940s. By contrast, fully half of the Adventures of Tintin (up to the first 2/3 of Crystal Balls) were written either before or during WWII. Hergé himself, born in 1907, began submitting illustrations to a magazine (Le Boy-Scout) at 14, was hired at the Vingtième Siècle at 18, created Totor and did his military service, reaching the rank of sergeant, at 19, and before turning 22 had been given full responsibility for creating and running the Petit Vingtième, gotten engaged to his first wife, Germaine Kieckens, and created Tintin. Being young looked different then.

To close this section I'll also note that, as far as I can tell, positioning Tintin as a teenager never seemed to pose much of a problem to anyone reading the series while it was actively running. Anecdotally, nearly every published source I've read takes for granted that he's an adolescent, and an exception like writer of multiple books on Tintin Renaud Nattiez saying on the air in 2016 that he thinks Tintin is at least 22 (~03:30-03:50) seems to be a uniquely 21st-century development.

TL;DR: Everything I can find indicates that Tintin was always intended to be around 15, and never older than 20, years old.

II. Interpretation

Finally, it's important to not overstate Hergé's commitment to realism. At the end of the day, Tintin can do whatever the story needs him to be able to do, because he's the protagonist of a very straightforward adventure serial. He's always been aspirational, even for Hergé himself: "Tintin is me the way I'd like to be: heroic, flawless." And yet Tintin, victim of its own success, has always been held to a higher standard of realism than its fellow comics, not to mention a higher level of scrutiny in general. Even if, as I've tried to demonstrate, Tintin's feats aren't entirely out of the range of possibility (or at least the norm for comics characters) for his time period, I'm not arguing that he's supposed to be a perfectly accurate representation of the average boy of any point in the mid-20th century. I also don't deny that he typically does act like an adult. So the guiding question here is: How can this dual nature of Tintin's - his adolescent status and adult aspects - be interpreted?

Jean-Marie Apostolidès writes that as "il unifie dans sa personne deux aspects opposés de l’existence, l’enfance et l’âge adulte" ("he brings together in his person two opposing aspects of existence, childhood and adulthood"), Tintin represents "un mythe réconciliatoire" ("a reconciliatory myth") of which the "fonction implicite est de ressouder entre deux générations une confiance brisée" ("implicit function is to mend a broken trust between two generations"). He names this type of child-adult character the "surenfant" ("superchild"), and argues that it is specific to the 20th century and the cultural shock of WWI.

For Pol Vandromme, who wrote the first book of analysis on Tintin (or on any BD), Tintin is simply a perfected version of the teenage boy, one that other teenage boys can aspire to. First, he cites as conventional wisdom that Tintin is around 15, and concludes that "c'est dans tous les cas un adolescent" ("in any case he's a teenager"). While Vandromme accepts that Tintin is presented as a teenager, he also points out that Tintin doesn't represent the experience of being a teenager; Tintin "ne présente [...] que les apparences de l'adolescence" ("only displays the appearance of adolescence") because he's so self-assured and stable, traits antithetical to "l'époque de la métamorphose" ("the time of metamorphosis") that is adolescence.

And yet "il [Tintin] demure malgré tout suffisamment proche pour que les garçons se disent qu'ils auront un jour la chance de lui ressembler, d'imiter son style de vie. [...] Ce que Tintin propose à ces garçons de quinze ans, c'est la figure achevée de leur âge. Il les venge de leurs insuffisances" ("he [Tintin] remains all the same close [i.e. similar] enough that these boys tell themselves that one day they'll have the chance to be like him, to imitate his way of life. [...] What Tintin offers to these 15-year-old boys is the perfected version of their age [group]. He makes up for their shortcomings"). Consequently, having put themselves in Tintin's place, these boys "ont l'illusion d'être déjà de la tribu des jeunes gens qui ont découvert dans leur sac de voyage les clefs qui ouvrent les portes de la fable du monde" ("have the illusion of already being part of the clan of young people who have discovered in their travel bag the keys that open the doors of the world's fable"). In plainer language, being able to identify with Tintin as an apparent peer lets teens imagine themselves as being more capable and powerful than their age allows in reality, an attractive illusion.

I'll add that the static quality of Tintin as a character that Vandromme identifies is dictated by the form of the series. When presented with a teenage protagonist in a work, the novelistic expectation is that what follows will be some kind of bildungsroman, where the events of the story will push the protagonist to change and mature into adulthood. However, I believe that it's a mistake to approach The Adventures of Tintin as a novel when it is fundamentally a serial - even late in his career, when he didn't need to do prepublication anymore, Hergé's approach to plot was still oriented around the page-a-week format. Serial characters, as a rule, change very little. Tintin gets compared to Sherlock Holmes more than once in the series, and it's also true on a meta level: Holmes has a few minor moments of character development, but he largely remains exactly the same over the course of Conan Doyle's stories, which were likewise published in a magazine. In a true serial, the status quo is god, because the main aim of the serial is to perpetuate itself - theoretically forever. And so Watson always finds a reason to return to Baker Street, and Tintin never gets old enough to think of settling down and getting a real job.

Like Holmes, Tintin does change and grow somewhat as a character over the course of the series, but also like Holmes, that growth is not a planned arc with an endpoint, as you would expect in a novel. Instead, it's just a result of Hergé himself maturing and changing. In his contribution to L'archipel Tintin, Benoît Peeters notes that "Grande est la tentation, pour beaucoup, de lire la série comme une totalité, un monument où tout signifierait" ("The temptation is great, for many, to read the series as a totality, a monument where everything has meaning"). And yet he declares that "si accomplies soient-elles... Les Aventures de Tintin se sont élaborées en l'absence de tout grand dessein" ("however polished they may be... The Adventures of Tintin were created in the absence of any grand design"), citing the testimonies of both Hergé and those who knew him at the beginning of the series. Hergé never really had a plan for Tintin as a character; he really did just put him in situations over and over again for a little more than fifty years. However, now that the series is only read in album format and serial publishing is less common, the "temptation" Peeters describes is even stronger. This mismatch in narrative expectations may be part of why modern readers might struggle to view Tintin as a teenaged character.

There's one more element to Tintin's strangeness: the world of the series was built around Tintin himself to facilitate his adventures. Vandromme recalls the fact, so obvious that it's easily forgetten, that "Tintin étant ce qu'il est et ne pouvant être un autre, infléchit l'intrigue d'une certaine manière. [...] Remplacez Tintin par le père Fenouillard et il vous faudra modifier l'album de fond en comble. Dans un roman les personnages déterminent les événements avant d'être déterminés par eux" (Tintin, being who he is and unable to be anyone else, influences the story in a certain way. [...] Replace Tintin with the father of the Fenouillards [character from a 19th-century comic about the misadventures of a French family abroad, n.b.] and you'll have to change the album from top to bottom. In a novel, the characters define the events before the events define them"). This point is especially relevant to Tintin given that the series' beginning was, to put it mildly, haphazard. Starting from Soviets, where Tintin is alone with his dog in a bizarre world where he can sneeze down a sewer grate, cut down a tree with a pocketknife, or fistfight a bear - whatever it takes to keep the plot moving - set a precedent for the character: that Tintin, and nobody else, will always triumph over whatever enemy or obstacle he is faced with.

Because it's founded on Tintin himself, there are no real adults in the Adventures, and in fact there can't be any. Preserving Tintin's Soviets-era boy hero status as the world of the series became steadily larger and more realistic created a kind of 'competency warp' where Tintin, along with his young "doubles," Chang and Zorrino, is effectively always the most capable, the master of the situation, while those closest to him who are much older (the Thompsons, Haddock, Calculus...) tend to act rather childishly. I think it's telling that the 1946 introduction of Blake & Mortimer is often hailed in terms like these: that "pour la première fois, les héros n'étaient pas des enfants, mais des adultes responsables dont la psychologie était en parfaite harmonie avec leurs fonctions" ("for the first time, the heroes were not children, but responsible adults whose psychology was in perfect harmony with their roles," emphasis mine). All the major adult characters in Tintin had been introduced at that point, but apparently none of them qualified as "responsible" or properly suited for their positions.

Apostolidès similarly notes a deforming effect: "Tintin est un adolescent qui, sans jamais entrer dans l’âge adulte, rajeunit le monde en se confrontant à lui. Au lieu que le personnage se soumette passivement au monde adulte, s’intègre dans une histoire, vieillisse et meure, c’est l’univers extérieur qui se fige dans le temps au contact du héros" ("Tintin is an adolescent who, without ever entering adulthood, makes the world younger by confronting it. Instead of the character submitting himself passively to the adult world, fitting in to a history, getting older and dying, it's the outside world that freezes in time at the hero's touch"). Not only does Tintin resist adulthood himself, he also protects others from its effects.

There are characters who escape the warp, but they must stay on the very edges of Tintin's orbit. One example is the efficient and no-nonsense Mr. Baxter from the Moon books. He has a real job: he's director of the atomic center, and every time we see him he's actually doing it. He also remains disengaged from the antics of the Marlinspike crew, often exasperated and confused by them. They don't belong in his serious space program, and he doesn't belong in their funny adventure series - hence the clash. Another (and very different) example is Jolyon Wagg. I wish I could remember where I read it, but I once saw it pointed out that Tintin and Wagg almost completely ignore each other; their only direct interaction in the whole series is saying hello to each other exactly once (Emerald p. 17). The unidentified author's point was that Wagg inhabits a world so intensely banal, so different from Tintin's - one with community organizations, salesman jobs, an old mother, an Uncle Anatole, a wife and (a lot of) children - that the two can't even come into contact. Wagg may be almost preternaturally obnoxious, but he's also a genuinely ordinary man in a way that the major characters really aren't.

Tintin must remain the sole and main driver of action, because if he isn't, the series would have to change fundamentally. That means no other character can threaten his role by being more competent and responsible than him - and so the adults become ridiculous and/or irrelevant, and Chang and Zorrino are only allowed to act for one album each. And yet Hergé created Tintin as a teenager, and suggested that a Tintin who progressed past teenagerhood would also grow out of adventure: "Il est difficile, pour un personnage comme ça, à le faire vieillir. Parce que s'il vieillit, il va avoir vingt ans, il va avoir vingt-deux ans, il va rencontrer une jolie fille, il va se marier, il va avoir des enfants..." ("It's hard to make a character like that get older. Because if he gets older, he'll be 20, he'll be 22, he'll meet a pretty girl, he'll get married, he'll have children..."). Tintin passing into adulthood, 'real' adulthood, symbolized here by settling down and starting a family, would make the series just as unsustainable as demoting him to a more technically age-appropriate role would; both sides of the tension between Tintin's youth and his maturity are required to make him a proper adventure hero for children.

And so he remained, as he remains today, the world's most competent teenager.

#happy birthday tintin #the world's oldest teenager #jokes aside this is a genuinely interesting read!#reblog #long post

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winterzsurprise · 5 months ago

Text

Change My Mind [3]

Pairing: BTS x reader

SUMMARY: As a make-up artist, you were expected to glamorize your clients with brushes and products that cost a week-worth of food, not to befriend them outside of work, let alone have them save you from dates yet here you are five years later as one of their closest confidants.

Being a stylist of the world's biggest boyband is no easy feat, someone is doing flips, someone can't stay still and one's asleep but its fine, you can work around their chaos but then one day, you find out they're all your soulmates, a whole different can of chaos you don't think you can handle.

Tags: Soulmates AU, Friends to Lovers, Eventual Smut, Not Beta Read, Slow Build, Polyamory, Attempts at Humor

Words: 8.8k

ao3 is down so I'll update it first here. Chapter got delayed since this wasn't originally part of the roster. its currently 1am so there will be mistakes I missed but that's for future Winter's problem.

edit: please comment if you want to be added to the tag list :DD

<<<Prev || MASTERLIST || Next>>>

__________

For a guy with his heart on his sleeves and his emotions displayed so loudly on his face like neon signs with gigantic arrows, Taehyung is an enigma.

It didn’t help that he had experience in acting, if anything it made it harder to understand him.

One moment he's supportive of your quest for a perfect husband then another, he's raging with a jealousy even the power of the thousand burning suns couldn't replicate. Even when Guwon has long disappeared, Taehyung didn't stop from hanging off of your arm when the three of you had entered your home.

In the short time they had stayed over, he made sure he was somehow close to you or having you within his sight while Jimin returned to being the sweet boy he had always presented himself as but the glint of something dark in his eyes never disappeared.

But it didn't make any sense. All of their behaviors, even Jimin, is confusing.

Taehyung had introduced a date to the group before, and had hooked up with a few people from the after-parties if the others’ words were anything to go by. Jimin is the same, although he took every chance to flirt with you at any time and everywhere, you always thought it was him being his playful self. But after last night?

You don't know.

And you hate not knowing.

To find out that Jin still liked you was shocking already, then comes this new realization—along with the impacts of Jungkook’s confession—to knock you off of your feet. You thought he had moved on like he had said years before, but last night's conversation had told you otherwise.

“That's the tenth time I've heard you sigh just this hour alone and we're only drinking coffee, what’s wrong?”

Your head shot up to meet the concerned gaze of the oldest make-up artist. Jihae is one of the original staff back from 2013, the woman who had picked you up when you tripped in front of the BigHit building crying with your bag spilled out, having been given a low grade in one of your subjects.

They were lacking in staff back then, urgently searching for another body to help with the debut look and when she saw your cosmetic bag, she tugged you inside and told you to agree with whatever they were going to ask.

Stunned, you followed the woman without question.

A month later, you dropped out of the nursing course your mother had insisted you take and pursued cosmetology.

Many times have you looked back at the memory and grimaced. It could've gone wrong, she might've been leading you into a trafficking ring but nonetheless, you're glad you had accepted it.

All because Jihae had seen you with mascara-stained tears and somehow deemed you skilled enough for the job. Up until today, you still wonder what she had seen in an emotional teenager who had comically tripped face-first in the company’s front yard, mascara running down her face and thought: ‘She’d be a good addition’.

Whatever it is, you're thankful.

“Hey, you still with us?”

Snapping out of your trance, you wearily smiled at her. “Yes I am, unnie. Just frustrated about something...”

At this, multiple heads turned to you, their stares a varying mix of curiosity and teasing. Suddenly reminded of the group lunch Jihae had proposed that day, a bonding exercise for the entire make-up artists roster, for better teamwork, she had said and internally facepalmed. You had forgotten that it wasn't just your friends sitting on the table with you and you had just aired your problem out in the open for them to hear.

Fuck Kim Taehyung and his confusing attitude. You should beat his ass next time you see him for being the catalyst to the dilemma haunting your mind.

Leaning closer to you, Nabi—another friend of yours—crossed her arms and flashed a shit-eating grin.

“Is it boy problems?”

Instantly, the table explodes into chatters, all of their questions drowning each other.

“Which one of them?”

“Did someone from Bangtan confess to you, unnie?”

“Is it Hoseok? Please say it is! I have a bet with someone from the styling department.”

“Was it Taehyung? I always thought he had a crush on you for a whi—”

“It's not any of them, please we're just friends.” You interjected before they dig further and find truth in their questions. “It's a different guy I've had two dates with.”

Never had you sounded more unsure of yourself until now and you had wished nobody had noticed. But one look around the table says differently. Your friends’ eyes glinted, all of them telling you that this discussion was far from over and you find yourself already dreading opening the groupchat once you're home. But unlike them, someone wasn't satisfied with your answer and crossed her arms from the other end of the table.

“Why so dismissive, unnie? We're all friends here, no need to be so defensive.”

Immediately, the ones closest to her snapped their heads at her with a scandalized look. Alexa was a new recruit, A half-Korean and half-Chinese who lived in the States for a better half of her life, had just joined the week before the first leg when one of the crew went into labor and had recommended her cousin as her last minute replacement until she could return.

In the short time she had been in the company, there had been whispers and none of them were positive. Rumors of an unhealthy obsession hidden beneath the skillfully applied make-up that granted her a younger and cuter appearance, hushed stories of their encounters where she'd reveal her soulmate mark—inked initials, and written on her wrist is a K.S.J, something she boasted around with a smug look, as if to imply something you refuse to entertain.

It was absurd.

Seokjin was untethered, if he got a soulmate mark out in the open, he would've screamed it on top of the world. Delighted and in cloud nine at the thought of having someone destined for him. Not to mention, it meant that he didn't need to go through any of the shit you've gone through, going through dates after dates looking for someone better to settle down with only to be met with constant disappointment at the end of the day.

(You'd also be the first to know. He would've ran to you and asked if you manifested a mark too, but for your sanity, you pushed the thought at the back of your head as soon as it came.)

To say, to imply that Seokjin’s soulmate is the kid on the side of the table, it almost made you grimace.

“Hey Alexa, I know you're just new and a foreigner but that doesn't mean we'd let you disrespect your seniors!” Minhyuk, someone who had quickly wormed into your friend group last year, had jumped to your defense.

Alexa scoffed. “I'm just saying, no need to be so secretive, unnie. Everyone in this table knows how close Bangtan is to you. Everyone is wondering if you've at least dated one of them.”

“Hey Alexa, that's a bit…”

“Why are you guys looking at me like that? I'm just saying what you're all thinking,” She looks back at you. “I've seen how they look at you, surely you've at least had a fling with someone.”

Your brows shot up, incredulous and shocked by her audacity but before you could bite back, Minhyuk stood abruptly, face darkened with pure unadulterated anger.

“Oh this—” Nabi and you were quick to tug him back down to sit.

At the commotion, everyone in the cafeteria shifted their attention to your table, inquisitive and curious of what might've set off the resident social butterfly, someone who everyone knows the name of and has been at the end of his constant kindness.

Minhyuk is a passionate soul, especially towards his job and friends. Having been kicked out for being himself, he turned to the very skill that had his father screaming expletives at him. Recommended by Jihae, who had been visiting a nearby friend at the time and was passing by his street, had found him crying in the rain, outside the gate of his family house. She had taken him home and the rest was history.

There's never been a time when you've all hung out, five emptied bottles of Sojus later, where he wouldn't be crying, thankful for the chance your eldest had given him before turning to you, sobbing loudly and hugging you and the rest of the group in a tight grip. Heart full of gratefulness for his new found family.

So there was no shock that he had been the first one to jump at the first sign of aggression towards your group.

“Everyone is looking, hyuk. Let's calm down.” Nabi whispered to him, eyes cautious and Minhyuk grunted.

“She's lucky we're in public, I would've torn her down for that comment.”

At the end of the table, Alexa scoffed, incredulous. “Are you seriously mad that I'm saying my opinion? Is it a crime to express their own opinion these days?”

“Not when it's as rude as yours.”

Jihae sighs. “Calm down the both of you. Remember that you're working right now.”

You didn't doubt that everyone in the company has speculated about your relationship with Bangtan. It's hard not to when the maknaes hang onto your words and comfortably play around with you, especially not when you have dinner at their dorm every other week so you didn't blame the newbie for being curious.

That's what you would've felt if she hadn't been going around planting ideas into people's heads that she might be Jin’s soulmate like the delusional slug she is.

You had half a mind to loosen your grip on Minhyuk and let him wipe the floor with her unnecessarily expensive work clothes.

Shrugging both your and Nabi’s arms from his, Minhyuk stands up again only to walk away from the table. Instantly, the rest of your group follows him as he marches through the gathered crowd in the cafeteria and in front of the closed elevator.

You trailed behind him, waiting for his eventual frustrated explosion as he always does after an encounter with Alexa since she was hired. Once you were all far enough, hidden away from the prying eyes of the public, he threw his head back and let out a loud, exasperated groan.

“That girl I fucking swear!” He growled as combed his long hair back. “Why did we even let her continue working after the tour?! We could've just found a better alternative, she's getting into my fucking nerves!”

Nabi sighed. “It's not like we have a final say in this, hyuk. Whether you like it or not, we'll be stuck with her until Hyuna comes back.”

“God,” He groaned. “You should've let me hit her once! I'm so tired of hearing her bullshit! Surely, you've heard the lie she's spreading around right?!”

“Like Nabi has said, we can't do anything unless it starts to hurt the reputation of the idol. She's smart for not saying it outright and somehow containing it within the styling departments.” Jihae responds with a defeated shake of her head.

The answer didn't satisfy Minhyuk, who then turned to you with a pout and wide puppy eyes before promptly stomping over and taking both your hands in his.

“Surely you can pull some strings, noona? Tattle off to Namjoon hyung or Seokjin hyung, surely one of them would do something, right?”

You almost considered his suggestion. Alexa had been grating your gears ever since she arrived to replace Hyuna. You had excused her lack of cooperation with the team for being a newbie and clumsy mistakes of haphazardly leaving her items everywhere for the stress of the new environment she was suddenly put in. But for her to go around implying Seokjin is her soulmate is another can of worms you didn't even want to open.

The mere thought of her existing on the same floor as Seokjin invokes an unsettling feeling in the pit of your stomach.

But unfortunately, even if you had tattled to Namjoon about her, nothing would happen since it's not too drastic of an event to fire someone over for. It's also just not a good idea overall. The tour is set next Wednesday and while Alexa doesn't cooperate with most of the team, she unfortunately got the skill to back her up. Her skills nearly compensate for her rude personality.

Almost.

“They won't fire someone over a small argument, Hyuk. Just suck it in until Hyuna returns.”

“Which will be in December after Japan,” He mulls it over before shaking his head. “Yeah no, I don't think I can tolerate her nasty ass that long.”

The elevator opens—Jihae had called it the moment they've arrived, bless her—and everyone piles in. It was a quick ride, the stylists being on the floor below the cafeteria. In a flash the metal doors parts opened and you all walked out. But before you could follow your friends back into your department, your phone vibrated from your pocket.

Slowing down, you pulled the device out and looked at who's texting you.

[13:02] Hobi: can ask you a favor [13:02] Hobi: just an itsy bitsy favor 🤏🤏 [13:02] Hobi: I promise it's harmless😁

There's also a text from Guwon not too long ago. Something you missed while you were lost in your thoughts earlier.

[12:30] Guwon: Eat your lunch soon! [13:03] You: hi sorry late reply, I was having lunch with my co-workers, couldn’t use my phone during. [13:03] You: I hope your lunch was good😁

You grimaced at how robotic your reply sounded before returning to Hoseok who had sent another text.

[13:03] Hobi: don't leave me on seen please😢 [13:03] Hobi: noona noona noona noona noona [13:04] You: hoba hoba hoba hoba hoba [13:04] Hobi: YAY [13:04] You: how can I help you? [13:05] Hobi: can you deliver lunch to hyung?😁 [13:05] Hobi: I would do it myself but I'm currently helping Seokjin hyung and Namjoon with the dance [13:06] Hobi: and we both know Yoongi hyung wouldn't eat on time if I do it [13:06] Hobi: can you do it for me?🥺 [13:06] You: sure, you guys still in the dance practice room? [13:07] Hobi: ur a life saver [13:07] Hobi: an angel in disguise [13:07] Hobi: but yes😁 [13:08] Hobi: just knock on the door when you're here😁

“Y/N?” Jihae asks and you look back up to see your group waiting for you.

“Who is it?” Nabi adds.

“Better be news of Alexa getting fired. If not, I don't want to hear it.” Minhyuk says as he crosses his arms. You shook your head and he threw his hands up in frustration.

“Got asked to help with something but I'll be back in a moment.”

With a brief goodbye, you turned back to the elevator and directed yourself to the floor where the dance practice rooms are at.

The walking distance from the elevator is not too far from the dance room but seeing five familiar teenage boys speaking in hushed whispers and hitting each other's arms in front of the vending machine just a feet away from the door easily distracted you.

If they had been crowding around the machine, you would've thought they were fighting over the last snack but instead they were all facing the same direction as your destination.

Sneaking up to the five giants, you're slowly introduced to the dilemma they were hitting and pushing each other for.

“You're the oldest, you should go and knock!”

“Just because I'm the oldest doesn't mean I should always be the first! Why are you even ordering me around?! Go ask Huening Kai instead!”

“Why me? I can't talk in Korean, I-I’m foreigner.”

“Oh don't you pull that shit on us. How are you only a foreigner when it matters?!”

“What are we talking about?”

Three shrill screams pierced through the air as the five of them jumped back, awkwardly long bodies falling against and clutching onto each other for dear life, all of them huddling onto the next body for protection. But once they recognize you, Yeonjun immediately regains composure and breaks off from the cluster to stomp over to you with his bottom lip jut out as he dramatically latches onto your arm.

“Noonaa, why would you scare us like that?!”

When you first met Yeonjun, he was standing in front of the cafeteria bar in front of the exhausted cashier and the long irritated line of workers, peering up onto the menu before looking down to count his money. He looked like a little kid lost in the sea of busy adults, painfully alone and helpless as the hungry customers behind him began to complain loudly.

He had been holding up the line as he recounted his change once more, hoping he had miscounted and that he could afford what he was eyeing. Seeing his hopeful expression crumble into defeat was enough to make you approach him and buy him lunch.

Yoongi had teased you when he found you being trailed by another kid, saying you were collecting every doe eyed kid in the company and becoming their reliable older sister. Especially when his soulmates began to follow his footsteps.

“What were you guys doing? Fighting against who gets the last chip?”

Beomgyu then ran to wrap his arms around yours, the sweetest and most innocent smile plastered on his face as the two boys began to walk you forward, the destination? The dance studio.

“You know that we love you right, noona?”

Why these kids are genuinely intimidated by your sweet Hoba is beyond you. The man screams and flinches at the smallest of bugs daring to exist two feet away from him. Still, you entertained them with a raise of an eyebrow and Yeonjun continued.

“Our favorite make-up noona, the greatest sister figure we have ever had, my savior and my salvation, our dearest credit—”

“Okay, what do you guys want?”

You all stopped in front of the dance room door. IDOL was blasting on the other side of the wall, the floor vibrating with the beat. Although muffled, you could pick up the sound of shoes squeaking against the floor and heavy footsteps accompanying the song.

“Could you pretty please knock on the door?” Beomgyu asks, pleading and also hopeful and the rest of his brothers chimed from behind you with their own versions of the request which ended up sounding like a bunch of warbled words.

“Couldn't you have done that yourselves?”

“But they're busy and J-Hope sunbae is scary.” Taehyun quietly adds behind you.

“Hoba? He's the sweetest though?”

“Okay, let's not lie to ourselves now,” Huening Kai shoots back before motioning to the door. “Just… knock and we'll handle it from there. We promise!”

“Cross our hearts.” Taehyun says, drawing a cross over his chest. The other four follow.

Dance teacher Hoseok to you is a hoax. You've never been subjected to his intense scrutiny and harsh perfectionist side, always managing to slip past or only being able to meet him outside of the workplace where he'd be far relaxed and cheerful.

Sure there's been plenty of photographic and recorded evidence posted in the group chat but you still find it hard to believe he's more frightening than the bugs that scare him off the room.

“He's not that scary, guys.”

Taehyun scoffs. “Easy for you to say.”

“Crush privileges.” Soobin quietly adds.

“What—”

The door swings open before you could ask what he meant and Jungkook steps out of the room.

In a span of a second, the memories of his drunken confession flashed before your eyes. From the moment he had entered your home with bags of snacks to the way his voice had sounded, hushed and shaky, when he asked you for a kiss.

Seeing him again outside the concert where Namjoon and Yoongi had made sure there were no contacts between the two of you, evoked a weird sense of longing within you. Having absolutely no contact with Jungkook for two days had you missing and recollecting your past memories with him. In the short amount of time you've been away, you wondered about many things.

From something as headache-inducing variations of hows and whys questioning his attraction to you to something more simple and short like ‘how is he feeling right now?’.

It was a dumb question with an obvious answer yet you wanted to know. Curiosity and anxiety clawing at your chest.

Is your friendship still okay?

Did rejecting someone this time finally ruin your entire dynamic with the group?

Should you have chosen someone like your sister had told you to do?

They have plagued your mind and haunted you in your waking days yet the moment you finally see him, your mouth dries up and your voice dies in your throat.

But before you could even muster the courage to talk to him, he turned his attention to the boys who had retreated behind you the moment the door opened and greeted them with a short bow before walking away, completely ignoring you. Pain blooms in your chest like a thorned vine wrapping and strangling your heart tighter and tighter as you watch his back disappear around the corner.

“Did sunbae just ignore noona?”

“Is that even possible?”

“I didn't hallucinate that, right?”

“Noona, are you okay?” Soobin’s concerned voice, soft and cautious, brings you back to reality and you turn to them, a precariously built smile on your face.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

The five shared a look as you stepped into the studio, exposing you to the two figures laid on the floor, heaving and panting. The main topics of your thoughts were sitting at the far corner next to the black plastic table while Hoseok stood in the middle of the room, unaffected by whatever had happened and was chugging the water from the small bottle in hand.

As if he had grown a sixth sense for you, he suddenly spun around, a wide grin brightening his stern face.

“Noona!”

At this, the two men on the floor perks up. Namjoon merely waves before promptly dropping back down, Jimin and Taehyung only smiled at you, looking spent from whatever routine Hoseok had them do before turning to the two tallest. Seokjin had pushed himself up to stand and approach the black plastic table from the other end of the room where a dozen take outs were.

As Hoseok approached you, his gaze then found the cluster of five heads peeking through the sides of the entrance and laughed.

“You’ve got five ducklings following you, noona, didn't know you started collecting more after our maknaes.” He jokes before turning to the teens and waving them over. The group then spread to occupy the space in the doorway and bowed. “What can I do for you guys?”

They suddenly disappear behind the wall but you hear them hitting each other and their whisper-shouts, it took a long while before Soobin was pushed out of the shadow and forced to talk to their sunbae. The painfully shy teen shuffles over, shoulders folded forward and taking the smallest of steps forward before stuttering a bow.

A wide smile brightens Hoseok's face, endeared by the boy’s overly formal actions.

“H-Hi sunbae.”

“Hello, Soobinie.”

“We-we we're just wondering if we-we could watch you guys? Practicing dancing I mean—Not that you sunbaes need it cause you're professionals!—I mean of course you still need to practice to be better at dancing and—wait no—”

“Yah Soobin, stop embarrassing us like this!” Yeonjun scolds and immediately, the boy almost broke his neck with how face he looked over his shoulder.

“Then go do it yourself!”

“We don't mind, as long as you guys stay in a corner like good kids then we'll all be good!” Hoseok cuts in before an argument ensues.

There's a tap on your shoulder and you look over to see Seokjin standing behind you, a gentle smile playing on his plush lips, both hands hidden behind him.

There's an awkwardness that hung in the air as you both gazed into each other's eyes before he cleared his throat and began.

“Have you eaten yet?”

“Yes.” You lie. Jin caught it.

Turning to face him fully, he then takes one of your hands and forces your fingers to hold the neatly folded top of a paper takeout bag.

“I've packed Yoongi’s portion here as well as an extra for you.”

“You didn't need to, I already ate.”

“I even had them order some soft tofu soup, you were craving it last week, right?”

It was sweet being loved so selflessly by him. It tasted like the sweetest nectar from the garden of Eden with a foul aftertaste once your mind reminded you of your sins against the man and the thorned tendrils of guilt coiled tighter around your chest, its sourness easily overlapping the sweetness of his love.

After Jungkook pretending you didn't exist earlier, having Jin, someone who you didn't even know still admired you all these years while you had messed around with many faces and came to work with some of their marks on your skin, expressing his care had you almost bursting at the seams.

It enrages you thinking about Alexa going around spreading her bullshit spiel about being Jin’s soulmate. As if she deserved a morsel of his attention.

Nobody deserves Seokjin, not even you.

“Thank you Jinnie, but I already ate.” You then remembered your promise to return to your friends soon. “And Jihae is expecting me back immediately.”

“Coffee and toast is not lunch.” He deadpans as he takes your hand and forces it to close around the pack. “Just eat it with Yoongi, he'd be happy to be able to eat with someone and I’ll handle Jihae noona.”

“How the hell did you know what I had for lunch?”

Shock crossed over his face and he brought a hand over his mouth. “I was right? I just had a hunch on what you ate.”

“That’s a bit creepy, old man.”

“Maybe it’s a soulmate mark manifesting.” He shrugs but you doubt he meant it in a joking way.

“You’re way past the age, give it up hyung.”

You both turned to the door at Jungkook’s voice. Like earlier, he had strode in without acknowledging your presence, something Seokjin had noticed immediately. His eyes slid to the five boys tentatively pushing each other to the empty corner of the studio before looking back at their youngest.

“How could you insult me like this? I fed you with my hands, you should be addressing me formally with a full 90° bow!”

“I should’ve bitten your hands at least once back then.” Jungkook jokingly muses.

Before you could witness their banter explode, there’s a tug on your shirt and you spun around to face Hoseok who had nudged his head to the door. Jin had already marched towards the maknae before you could even thank him so you left.

Once you were both outside the studio, Hoseok closed the door behind and hugged you.

“Wh-what is this?”

“A thank you hug for being the sacrifice and feeding the grumpy dragon instead.” He says with a laugh but you knew what he was trying to do.

“I’m fine, Hoba. I didn’t expect us to be buddy buddy again after what happened.”

He sighed.

“He still shouldn’t have done that. I’m sure Seokjin hyung will talk to him about it later.”

Stepping back, you shook your head. “No need, I understand why he’s acting like that.”

His eyes regarded your face for a moment before pulling you back in for a hug and nuzzling his head on top of yours. “You don’t have to defend him noona, he’s acting like a child. It's our duty as his hyungs to fix that up.”

“Please don’t. It feels like you’re taking sides, he might think it's unfair.”

He laughs. “Are you kidding? ‘Cause from what I’m seeing, he’s being a petulant child. He should handle the rejection with more grace when it's his fault he’s in this predicament. You know Seokjin hyung warned him, right?”

“He told me when he and Tae took him home.”

“Then you should know better than defend him.” You opened your mouth to refute but he pressed a finger to your lips. “Don't start. He's not the same sixteen years old we had to raise back then, he needs correcting.”

With two hands on your shoulders, he then spun you around and began to push you towards the elevator, leaving no room for an argument.

Once he had led you back to the locomotive, he briefly stepped in to push the correct button for the production floor and stepped back and waved as the elevator wall slowly closed to a shut.

“Now go feed hyung and yourself before you go back to work. Thank you again noona and see you later.

“Special delivery for a grumpy hairless cat!”

A beat.

Then came a grumbled: “Come in.”

Punching the proper strings of numbers on the door code, you open the door to the genius lab to find Yoongi sitting in front of his computer, one ear off of his headphones as he goes back to a specific second again and again.

Situating yourself on the couch next to the door, you place the paper bag on the coffee table and slowly unload all its contents, hoping its smell is enough to deter him from his work just for a second.

Taking one of the containers, you open it to see bulgogi generously sprinkled on top of rice. The savory smell of the dish wafting out almost immediately, and Yoongi visibly perks up from his table; if perking up meant him temporarily stopping his incessant clicking and head tilting a little to the side.

“Is it all bulgogi?”

Placing down the container, you opened the other one to reveal the same dish except this time with fried rice.

“Yeah, you want fried rice or no?”

“Whatever you like less.” He grumbled as he returned to his work.

“That's not a proper answer.”

“Just take whatever you want, I like either.” He muttered.

Staring at the food on the table, you found yourself at a crossroads. The fried rice looks more appetizing than the plain white rice on the other container but you've had enough sodium for the week, having challenged Taehyung, Jimin and Jin to who can eat more ramyeon in one sitting the day before the concert.

But today just doesn't feel like a plain rice type of day.

But fried rice isn't healthy.

“Just choose please, I don't know what I want either.” You groaned out, frustrated.

With a grunt, the man took off his headphones and turned to face you before maneuvering himself closer to the table and picking up the container with the plain rice.

“Stop thinking so much about what is healthy or not,” He remarked as he took a pair of chopsticks from the paper bag. “I could hear your thoughts even with my headphones on and my back turned.”

“Then why tell me to choose if you already knew?”

Yoongi only shrugged as he took his first bite, prompting you to take yours. He seems to mull over something as he chews, staring at the food on the table for a while before placing the container down and leaving the room without a word.

You had learned not to question his confusing actions throughout the years, even then you couldn't help but be bewildered.

When he returned, he was carrying two drinks in one hand. Sprite and Kombucha. Settling back on his chair, he placed down the bottle of Kombucha in front of him before opening the can of sprite and placing it in front of you.

“I don't have any straws on me so you'll have to just chug it.”

People don't usually notice it but you think Jin and Yoongi are more similar in how they show their affections, just in different volumes. Seokjin’s care is always voiced out, always asking whether you want something or not and offering to do or make it for you while Yoongi just somehow always knows what you want and does it wordlessly. Both of them are always willing to provide.

If you had asked them for something as ludicrous as fried cotton candy with melted cheese on top, Jin would complain and express his disgust openly, ranting about the strenuous process while holding the handle of the pan and a spatula in the other while Yoongi would cook it without questioning your sanity.

Either way, it never fails to make your chest warm.

“Thank you, Yoongs.”

He suddenly takes a huge bite, bringing the container close to his face before humming out his response, easily flustered as ever.

You both eat your food in silence. With years of friendship under your belt, you have learned to enjoy the serenity Yoongi brings. It had been rough at the start, his quietness matched with his stoic expression had often led to misunderstandings where you often thought he thinks of you badly for being close to his brothers, especially after Jin’s confession.

He had confronted you once he heard it from Namjoon—who had immediately tattled onto his hyung after you had told him not to tell anyone—, saying he simply had problems expressing himself. You could remember how his hands, despite being entangled with each other, shook with his voice, could recall how he had forced himself to hold eye contact with you when he always had difficulties in holding one.

It was thoughtful and that was the first time you had felt the tingles of warmth in your chest. Teenage you had her feet swept off by a stuttering mess of a guy with eye contact issues.

Despite Jin being the first in the group to confess, Yoongi was the first to touch your heart.

“Why are you looking at me like that?’

You tilt your head. “Like what?”

A conflict of emotion crossed his eyes as he struggled to find the words but before he could, your phone vibrated from your pocket.

[13:54] Guwon: I'm at the cafe close to your building

You almost choked on your spit, surprised by his message and Yoongi hurriedly put his food down to pat your back. His office was on the other side of the city, why would he drive so far just to get some coffee with you during work days?

Love, a voice answers and you immediately waved it off.

There was no way he had fallen in love with you in such a short time. You have been on two dates with him yet he hadn't asked you to be his girlfriend when there's been multiple times throughout those days and nights he had the chance to do so.

During nights where you'd restlessly toss around on your bed, you found yourself facing one more problem outside of your friends.

You didn't notice when it started when Guwon began to make your stomach churn and it bothers you to the nines at how you were being suspicious of him.

Guwon is a genuinely nice guy with a legit and grand background from what you learned throughout the short time you've been hanging out, his case stories of helping out women stuck in abusive relationships and bringing justice to those the law has failed once proven true when you've typed his name on Naver. The man didn't deserve the doubt twisting in your stomach nor the aversion you were slowly gaining towards him.

Your conflicting feelings surrounding your friends' confessing and odd behaviors shouldn't be affecting your relationship with the man you will marry at some point yet it ended up doing so.

There was something foul and bitter simmering in your guts these days whenever you force yourself to think about him during your time. It burns like bile and tasted like betrayal, almost like unfaithfulness; you try not to think hard on why you feel this way but it's hard not to when Jimin and Taehyung's jealousy keeps flashing behind your eyelids with every blink.

[13:55] You: Oh wow, which one? [13:55] Guwon: The one on the left side, Areum Cafe. [13:55] Guwon: Are you free to get a cup of coffee with me? [13:56] Guwon: Sorry for springing this up on you [13:55] Guwon: I missed you🙁

“Who is it?”

“It's Guwon,” You say, scratching your head. “He says he's at the cafe down the road and wants to meet up.”

Yoongi placed down his food and stared at you, long and hard. Cat-like eyes narrowed and observing as he leaned back on his chair. You feel his eyes regard your body language before sighing.

“I assume you need help getting out? I'm not as… bold as the younger ones but I think I can help… somehow”

His appearance would surely help tamper down the discomfort that had bloomed with the recent revelations. Yoongi is intimidating as he is caring, having him next to you would ensure you a shorter time spent with the man, as well as prohibit him from pulling another surprise kiss on you.

But why are you so uncomfortable spending time with Guwon anyways?

You didn't have any problems before, even wanted to sleep with him the night prior so why now?

“How’d you know I need help?”

“You looked like your mother just told you to come to another date.”

Immediately, you ironed out the frown you didn't realize had marred your face.

“I thought you would've been delighted you've finally met your match?”

“I-I am.”

Yoongi clicks his tongue, the sound echoing louder in the silence of the room. “Try again. A little more sure this time.”

You sighed and relented, knowing the man wouldn't let you take a step out of the door if you lied to him again.

“Everything just started feeling wrong for some reason.”

He raised an eyebrow at that, eyes widening with surprise. “How so?”

“You know, when Jimin and Taehyung came over last night to make sure I got home safe, they were acting strange towards Guwon.” When he made no move to respond, you continued. “When Guwon suddenly kissed me, Taehyung looked… scary. Jimin too, if you can believe it.”

“I actually do.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Yoongi goes silent again, mulling over something as his gaze finally met yours for the first time that day. “For someone so perceptive, you're a bit oblivious.”

“What is it?”

“I won't elaborate, I'll let you realize things on your own.”

You groaned, facepalming because ain't no way Yoongi just added more fuel to the forest fire that is your thoughts. The man doesn’t even look aware of what his words had done, reaching over and innocently sipping on his kombucha once more.

“Back to what you were saying, why do you think it felt wrong to see Guwon?”

With his calm voice and the deafening silence of the room, you found yourself comparing Yoongi, who even has his hands folded over his crossed jean-clad legs, to a therapist and laughed.

“Didn’t know I was due for a therapy session when I dropped off your lunch.”

“Well I did, so deal with it,” He placed down his bottle. “Do you need my help or not?”

“Is breathing important? Obviously yes.”

He nods and stands, but not before saying, “I hope you know this conversation is far from over.”

While his presence had given you more peace of mind, leaving the BigHit building with Yoongi—who had forgone his usual outdoor style of beanies and big prescription glasses matched with a black mask in order to appear more intimidating, claiming the beanie softens his edges, something you playfully rolled your eyes at—still felt like walking into your doom.

The moment he steps out of the building, suddenly everyone's eyes are on him. The cool stoicness surrounding him commanded attention and the people listened without complaint, not when Yoongi looked like every highschool teenager's bad boy wet dreams.

Strolling into the cafe is easier with Yoongi trailing behind you like a guard dog; or in his case, a guard panther.

There's something about having the rapper, who has never shown a hint of romantic attraction to you in all your years being their friend, accompanying you to meet the man you might marry once the discomfort born from conflicting feelings subsides. It makes your heart jittery and your stomach twisting uncomfortably, the nerves from meeting Guwon only adding fuel to the fire.

It felt improper somehow, as if you were breaking an invisible rule you're yet to uncover from the depths of your soul.

The tempting aroma of freshly baked buttery goods and roasted coffee beans greeted you the moment Yoongi had pushed the door open for the both of you. In the controlled volume of mixed chatters from different tables, a calm acoustic instrumental flies through the air and you almost forgot what you came here for.

It didn't take long for you to find Guwon sitting on the table farthest from the entrance, secluded and away from the wide glass pane windows. When the door had opened with a chime, the man had raised his head from his phone and met your eyes. You try not to linger on how his expression stiffened when he realized you had Yoongi in tow before a smile wipes it away.

“You see him?” Yoongi’s voice grumbled from behind and you nod. Guwon stands, the sound of the chair scraping against the floor catching his attention. “That him?”

“Yeah, I don't think he's happy I brought you with me.”

He chuckled lightly. “Good.”

Guwon met you both halfway, arms opened wide to greet you with a hug and you let him. When you pull away, his hand casually falls to your waist and your skin scrawls.

Immediately, Yoongi’s eyes drop to look at it but before any hint of emotion breaks onto his face, his cool eyes are already back on your suitor’s face.

“Which one of your kids am I given the pleasure of meeting this time?” Guwon asks before offering his free hand to Yoongi who had taken it with a carefully crafted blank expression and unrelenting stare.

Seeing him remain in eye contact with Guwon surprises you. The man, even after your years of being friends, had never held eye contact for longer than five seconds outside the time he had opened up to you about his struggle with expressing himself.

It made you curious. Why is he provoking him? Is he testing Guwon?

“I'm not one of her kids, I'm actually older than her. Min Yoongi.”

“Yoo Guwon, a pleasure to meet you.”

Even when both their hands had long pulled away from each other, their eyes lingered longer. Challenging on Guwon's part, and taunting on Yoongi's as he stared back, completely unfazed.

Seeing them silently engage in a dick measuring contest, something you didn’t expect Yoongi to ever partake in since he had been loud in his distaste for his own gender, irked you. The tightening grip on your waist didn't help, wanting nothing but to slap it off if it wasn't for your promise to your mother to not fuck this up.

‘If you don't tell them what you're uncomfortable with, then they'll continue on doing it. The other guys out there aren't like us who'd feel guilty if we knew, I fear that they might take advantage of you instead, noona.’ Hobi’s voice echoes in your mind.

Sorry Hoba, I'm trying to make this work. But if this behavior continues, then I'll listen to you.

“I thought you idols are often more busy than the average folk?”

Yoongi sucks air through his teeth before responding. “We were in the middle of a fitting prior. I hope you don't mind me keeping watch, can't have our staff getting distracted by heartthrobs like you.”

Guwon laughed, a little louder than usual.

“She's been telling you guys about me?”

“All the good things, don't worry.” He then turns to you, eyes searching your face for a hint of extreme discomfort before continuing. “I'll go order the others some food.”

Sparing one last nod of his head at the man next to you, Yoongi then turns towards the counter to order. The moment he was out of earshot, dread drops onto your stomach like an anvil and you looked up at the Guwon whose eyes were already trained onto yours, a lazy smile stretched on his lips.

“I assume you’ll be needed back once he’s done?”

“ Yeah, I’m sorry it's just… Wrong timing.”

He waves you off. “Nonsense, it’s my fault for bringing you out of your work. They won’t fine you for this, right?”

“I went with one of my bosses, of course they won’t.”

His eyes studied your face for a moment, searching. For what? You don’t want to know. When he had found whatever it was, his face melts into a softer, more mellow expression and your heart clenches. The outpouring of awe in his eyes felt heavy and thick, it clogs up your throat and weighs your already strained form.

“I missed you.” He whispers with the sweetest of voices. “Did you miss me?”

“I-I do, kept thinking about you...”

The lie weighted like lead on your tongue and burned like acid. Compared to the genuineness practically dripping from his lips, your words fall short in your ears. With the way his softened expression crumpled into a frown, you knew he also noticed the hesitance in your voice.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry. With the tour being so close and more sponsorship offers coming in, it got a bit stressful than usual.”

When his arms reach around your shoulders and pull you flush to his chest, you will yourself not to tense. You were both hugging in the middle of the coffee shop and you could feel the nearby patrons’ stare pressing onto your body, judging and unpleasant. Embarrassment burns your cheeks and the desire to push him away grows.

Even Jimin and Taehyung doesn’t dare to get affectionate in public, none of your friends ever did anything more than a hand on your shoulder to lead you to the correct direction or a pat on the back when Jungkook had more sleep and food ingested, and was bouncing off the walls and you just happen to be assigned to him.

You wanted nothing more but to tell him to back off but the words got stuck in your throat.

“Just a tip, she doesn’t like PDA so maybe step away?”

Immediately, Guwon scrambles off of you.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” Guwon says, his hand falling from your shoulder and down to your arm. You shivered.

A firm and familiar hand lands on your shoulder before Yoongi tugs you back to stand next to him. There’s a set in jaw as his eyes narrowed down at Guwon, the hand replacing Guwon on your arm is tense and rigid but not enough to hurt.

You sensed that he had a lot to say once you were out of sight, all of them expressing his distaste for the man you’re set to eventually marry. Even when you were all standing there, you could already imagine the curses and nitpicked details pouring out of his lips.

“We’ll be going back now,” Yoongi says to Guwon, voice tight as if holding back his emotions as he curtly bowed. “Our leader is already demanding us to come back so we’ll have to cut this meeting short. It was nice meeting you.”

Guwon looked incredulous at the turn of events, eyes shuttering before he nodded in understanding and turned to flash a smile at you.

“Message me when you’re home, alright?”

Yoongi didn’t even linger long enough for you to respond, already walking away. By the time you turned to look at him, he was three gaits away from leaving the coffee shop. With a dip of your head, you sprint to follow closely behind the man now pushing through the door.

You could understand the reason for his irritation, always the most protective out of the bunch and the one with the most to say about men. To see your closest female friend be made uncomfortable by her suitor, a stranger in his eyes, there was no doubt he’d be livid.

But why does he have to walk so fast?!

You’re not physically built to match his pace, he takes one step and you have to do three. It was infuriating but you couldn’t exactly scream at him to slow down in public, catching the attention of other people would only create more problems than you both could take on.

He eventually slows down to a halt in front of the double glass doors of the BigHit building and you were able to finally catch up to him. In the lobby, you both calmly approached the elevator, a complete juxtaposition of how hasty you two were not a moment before.

But the moment the metal doors of the elevator shuts, isolating you and Yoongi from the rest, he begins.

“I don’t like him.”

It was stupid but you wanted to know what specific trait he had found irksome.

(Deep down, you knew you were finding a reason to stop, to let go of Guwon and stop this stupid charade.)

“He didn’t even notice you were uncomfortable earlier. When you told us that he’s good, I thought he’d be decent, not top grade bare minimum.”

“H-He was actually good, believe it or not.”

“So he's a pretentious prick?”

You sighed. “H-He just—”

“Hyung wouldn't approve.” Yoongi cuts in, his hardened eyes now piercing through yours, almost taunting you to bite back. “Not just him, everyone wouldn't. You'd break poor Jiminie’s heart if you continued seeing him once he found out how he acted today.”

You knew he was guilt tripping you and it was working. But you swore Guwon was better than the others, he had treated you with a gentleness and care your friends had shown yet something had changed after that night.

Was Taehyung's clinginess, their presence in general, been the catalyst?

Had he felt threatened by them showing up? You had established early on that they're your boss and your mother would've mentioned your relationship with the boys in passing at least, so why would he feel threatened by them?

“I know what you're thinking but it doesn't work like that.” His voice, now softer than it had been earlier, pierces through the trance you’ve submerged into. “Even if you had said you’re only friends with them, it's human nature for us to still feel intimidated even if we're just friends.”

“That's dumb.”

He shrugged. “Men are dumb, I'm just slightly better than the rest.”

“That's debatable.” You joked and he raised an eyebrow.

“Your taste is questionable.” He shot back and you hit his arm in response, making him laugh but it dissolves as fast as it came. “I'm serious, hyung won't like it if you continue meeting Guwon.”

“I know, I can already hear him and we're not even there yet.”

“Don’t be dumb, if you want a husband so bad, tell aunt to wait for us to renew our contract this October then I'll marry you.”

He meant it as a joke, you knew that, but you couldn't stop the butterflies in your stomach from fluttering wildly. You're suddenly reminded of a scene from years ago, his alcohol-flushed cheeks pulled taut by the dopey smile stretching his lips wide and his slurred voice admitting something you—until today—have no recollection of what had been uttered.

You both have been battered to the nines, drunken out of your minds and stumbling over the smallest rocks on the street by the time Seokjin and Namjoon had found you halfway home. It was a miracle you both got off unscathed with how giggly and dumbed down you both were.

“Bold of you to assume I'd say yes.”

“I got wealth, I got a good mug on me, what else would you need?”

“Seokjin also got those.”

He pondered long and hard, sucking air through his teeth before he turned to you again with a glint in his eyes.

“You know what they say about my tongue right?”

He couldn’t say he didn’t expect the punch in the arm that followed soon after.

When the elevator door opens and you both go straight for the dance studio, the conversation about Guwon is put on pause and you dread the moment Seokjin hears what had transpired in the coffee shop when suddenly, Yoongi stills and hissed out a curse.

“Shit, I forgot Jungkook’s muffins.”

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