Namjoon slips into the city almost unnoticed, though not for lack of trying. Trussed up in his father’s second best suit and a pair of shoes his mother had been determined he would grow into, he staggers out of King’s Cross in a mess of oversized fabric and teenage optimism, blinking up at the sun through a morning fog that he will come to grow weary of as the years pass.

The station is overflowing with activity, from the seemingly never ending stream of passengers jostling for space on the platforms, to the vendors clamoring for the largest market shares of their wares on the pavement outside. Namjoon lets himself be pulled along by the tide of busy people with places to be and casual observers with places to get to, and for a moment he becomes so caught up in their sense of purpose that he forgets he barely knows where he is.

“S’cuse me sir, do you know the way to Southwark?” he asks a young man leaning against the bus stand. His clothes are rather well worn, patches at the elbows of his jacket and holes in his gloves but his eyes are bright and alert. He stares Namjoon down with benevolent indifference that manages to be equal parts comforting and intimidating before holding out his hand,

“I’ll tell you for a penny.”

His father had warned him that things would be more expensive in the capital, but even so, a penny is a steep cost for directions. Namjoon flinches and debates turning tale back into the throng, but the man holds his gaze steady, and there’s nothing like a handsome face to make one reconsider one’s priorities.

And he is handsome. Despite his clothes, despite the grease in his hair, despite the stubble begging for a shave a richer man wouldn’t need to think twice about, despite Namjoon’s common sense screaming that trustworthy individuals don’t exchange money for information. But his lips are full and his nose is neat, and there’s no reasoning around that.

Namjoon presses a penny into the man’s hand, already chiding himself for reckless spending, and smiles expectantly.

Five minutes later and he’s standing alone on York Way, derisive laughter still ringing in his ears and no better idea of how to get to Southwark than when he started. Carriages rattle past, speeding on to destinations that Namjoon’s never even heard of, and he sorely wishes he hadn’t spent his travel money on a boy who had nothing more concrete to offer than a winning smile.

London is a big place. And as Namjoon discovers over his first year there, it’s impossible to be intimately familiar with the whole city. He finds he doesn’t take to Southwark or the workhouse, and instead shacks up in Shepherd’s Bush, sleeping above the bookshop he works in and watching the fields dissolve into streets and houses around him.

He works for Mr Bang, who’s better than the workhouse master and a whole lot worse than most respectable business owners. The shop keeps long hours that stretch days into each other as Namjoon stares out of the window, his nose half buried in a book at all times as he tries to sneak extra wood onto the fire when winter approaches.

Mr Bang always catches him, sometimes he screams up a storm about it, sometimes he’s cold too.

On Wednesday afternoons Namjoon minds the shop alone, which is a simple enough task save for the lies he has to tell to cover for the fact that his employer is down the road at the Pig’s Head drinking the weeks profits with the help of a few choice friends.

“Is the owner about?” a customer asks from the doorway.

Namjoon doesn’t look up from Great Expectations when he shakes his head. In his mind he’s half a world away, in a parallel version of London where grateful convicts have paid for his induction into the upper classes and he doesn’t need to worry about how much wood has fed the fire that day.

The door clicks closed, and a pair of boots tread lightly over the floorboards. Namjoon’s eyes flicker in the customer’s direction only to narrow when they fall upon a familiar face. He closes the book with a snap and steps out from behind the counter, “you!”

“Me,” the man smiles, his eyes just as infuriatingly enigmatic as they had been on the day Namjoon first arrived in London.

“You owe me a penny,”

“Well according to the law-”

“To hell with the law”

The man smiles wide in Namjoon’s direction, “well it sounds like you’ve learned something of use since we last met.”

He turns his attention to the volumes lining the walls, running a thumb along the spines of books that no doubt cost more than he’s spent on food in the past month. Too early in the day for the lamps to be lit, the man looks filthy in the waning light filtering through the windows, dark shadows creeping across his clothing and across his face. It’s with apparent deference that he shuffles from book to book, till he selects a copy of Jane Eyre with a flourish.

“This will do nicely,” he beams, passing it to Namjoon without so much as glancing at the cover.

Namjoon scoffs, “I bet you can’t even read.”

“I may not be well versed in the practice but I read well enough. I take it slow, you see, but I always get to the end,” the man smiles at Namjoon with unflinching courtesy - he is forcefully reminded of the day at King’s Cross, when this man had taken his money and laughed in his face for being fool enough to expect services in response to his currency.

Namjoon hands the book back to him, “we don’t sell to thieves.”

He realises his error a second too late. Before he can clarify that he has no intention of letting this would-be customer leave the shop with the book in hand, the man has flung the door open and declared that if no payment will be taken from him, he shall have to take the book without paying.

And so he does. By the time Namjoon thinks to do anything about it, the street is empty and the book is gone along with the thief. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice…

Namjoon growls and stalks back to his inadequate fire and his Dickens. He prays that when the morning comes, Mr Bang will be too taken by liquor to notice the missing stock

Time passes, Namjoon learns how to keep his head above water and his feet on the ground. He goes walking by the Thames on long summer evenings because he likes to track the progress of the rebuilding of the houses of parliament and because the wind whistling up from the sea clears the smog from his lungs. He drinks saloop from a cart at the base of Westminster Bridge, while urchins crowd around him begging for scraps.

Poverty is rife in London, it makes Namjoon stop and think about the value of money in a way he never needed to before he arrived. he has never been rich, but out in the country there was always enough to go round even when they wanted for plenty. Here rich men stroll past the poor, seemingly oblivious to their plight.

At first Namjoon thinks he’ll help them, but he doesn’t reckon on the sheer weight of street children that line the streets of public places. He learns to turn a blind eye, he learns to ignore it.

Some evenings though, there is a familiar face in the crowd. A man who made it to adulthood without dying or finding fortune; he greets Namjoon like an old friend.

“Long time, no see,” he smiles, innocent as anything.

Namjoon’s hackles raise but he doesn’t shy away, “evening.” He wants to run, but something holds him still. The way his face fits together under the beginnings of a beard and who knows how many days of filth seems too perfect for regular street trash, the calm smile with which he greets the world too enigmatic.

The man holds out a hand, “my name’s Seokjin by the way.”

He didn’t ask, but Namjoon’s shocked to discover that he wanted to know. He takes the offered hand and doesn’t think about where it might have been when he shakes it. “Namjoon.”

He gets back to the shop that night to find his pocket watch missing. A copy of Jane Eyre lies on the counter, winking up at him through the dark - he supposes he should have known.

Fortune never finds Namjoon entirely, or at least not in the way it found Philip Pirrip. He makes money though, enough for a small flat off Oxford Street and nice enough clothes to land himself a job in a nicer shop. He still sells books, but he needn’t worry about Mr Bang any longer.

Seokjin appears like a shadow between the emergent mass of work goers and tourists that crowd the roads and slow the traffic. One moment he’s here, then the light shifts and he moves, trailing behind unsuspecting fools and reaching for their coin purse when they least expect it.

These days Namjoon isn’t the victim, he’s the bystander who doesn’t step in either to alert the poor fools of their loss or to remove the source of the trouble. It’s more than the knowledge it is none of his business that keeps him back, he’s reported thieves in the past. To his eyes Seokjin stands out as a diamond in the rough, a space clearing in the smog where he stands.

“Think he’s up to no good?” his manager mutters one afternoon when he catches Namjoon staring at Seokjin through the window for far too long.

Namjoon starts, “um…sir…I suppose…”

“Tell him to clear off then.”

He steps outside and marches up to Seokjin with practiced indifference, “I trust you’re up to your usual tricks.”

Seokjin graces him with an uneven smile and a heavy gaze, it makes Namjoon’s stomach turn in the most wonderful way. That’s new, and old, and everything he should have been expecting to feel for years now.

“You’ve got to learn to stop trusting me,”

Seokjin leans in to plant a kiss on Namjoon’s cheek, and leaves him blushing in the street. It’s with the greatest of embarrassment that he returns to the shop in the fond hope that no one takes the red of his cheeks as compliance with the sentiment.

“Just a nancy then?” his manager snorts, “good riddance.”

“You need this more than I do,” Namjoon scowls.

Seokjin doesn’t listen, just pushes Namjoon back into his seat and flips open the razor, peering down at him like a benevolent executioner. He sets to work with the brush and soap to form a lather, then smooths it over Namjoon’s cheeks with little care.

“Hold still,” he mutters, bringing the razor forward.

Namjoon tries not to think about the number of times Seokjin has made plain that he is not someone to be trusted as the blade ghosts across his skin. He’s sat on a chair in his own bathroom, his own home, letting a man who’s done nothing to earn his trust play with sharp edges at the cut of his jugular.

And why? Because he feels sorry for him? Because he likes the way Seokjin’s eyes strike sparks across the back of his mind? Because he’s determined to get the balance of power right one of these days? Namjoon’s not entirely sure, but he thinks the answer lies somewhere within and without all of that.

This right here, is a paid service. Seokjin says he knows how to shave (though too look at him you’d never guess it) and Namjoon figures the money he’d normally spend at the barber’s is better used in the pockets of someone who rarely knows where their next meal is coming from.

Seokjin works quickly, scrapes the stubble away with the foam and wipes the razor on the towel thrown carelessly over his shoulder. The furrow of his brow is a barely noticeable indication that he’s concentrating, the soft line of his lips unbroken by tension.

This would all be so much simpler if Namjoon couldn’t feel himself trying not to stare. Seokjin appears unphased by the scrutiny with which he is regarded, but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch him so closely.

Namjoon likes to tell himself he watches so closely because Seokjin has given him so little reason to think he won’t do wrong by him should he turn his back - and in a world where we are once bitten and twice shy every slight comes back to haunt us long after the fact of the matter.

That’s not quite true though, Seokjin never sneaks up on him, even when it would be so easy to do so. All he ever does is gets Namjoon’s attention only to distract him, like an honourable scoundrel, he looks his victims in the eye as he stabs them in the back.

The blade nicks his cheek, Namjoon hisses in irritation when he watches Seokjin wipe red onto the towel among the white of the foam.

“I thought you said you were good at this,”

“I’m excellent,” Seokjin smiles, and this time when he leans in to clear the hair from Namjoon’s philithrum he comes so close that their breaths mingle, “but I’ve got to keep you on your toes.”

Oxford Street is enough of a hub that the lamps in Namjoon’s area are always lit when they need to be, so when he spends an evening away from his residence he need not worry that his street will be consumed by darkness when he gets home.

On one such evening, as Namjoon returns from some pub or other after a skinfull with a selection of friends and colleagues, he spies a familiar silhouette sauntering through the glades of light thrown by the gas lamps. He’s not surprised, this is a regular meeting spot for the two of them, even if it is an irregular hour.

“They say it’s gonna be cold tonight, we might even get a frost,” Seokjin calls to him. There’s no need to greet each other any more.

Namjoon shrugs and smiles, “a bad night to be out on the streets.”

“I’ll say.”

The sound of horses hooves on distant cobbles echoes through the night, carried by the voices of other patrons of the witching hour, flickering out of alleyways in time with the lamps. Namjoon’s feet fall heavier than Seokjin’s, and so as he walks to his front door they are the sound that swallows everything else.

“Can I stay with you?”

Namjoon’s hand is already wrapped around the key in his pocket when Seokjin speaks. He turns around and sees him framed by the light of a streetlamp, pooling in the crevasses of his neck and the holes in his clothes. He looks like a rag doll angel.

Namjoon laughs and shakes his head, “no.”

For the first time, he sees the smile that’s forever playing at the corners of Seokjin’s mouth falter, his shoulders sag, “why not?”

“Because I don’t trust you.”

“After all this time.”

“Especially after all this time.” Namjoon leans back against the front door to his building. He surveys Seokjin with a wary appreciation, and imagines that this is what it feels like to be holding all the cards. “You know which building I live at, you know which flat is mine. You can get in easy, with or without my permission. You’re only asking because you like to make a total fool out of me.”

Seokjin hums in amusement, and resettles his posture, “you’re saying you wouldn’t mind if I were to wind up in your home by other means.”

“My dear fellow, at this stage I expect it.”

Truth be told he more than expects it, he hopes for it, but they’ve been playing this game for long enough that he refuses to hand every victory to Seokjin on a platter.

So for now they fall back into their predestined roles, Seokjin melting into the shadows of a street he isn’t dressed nice enough to live on and Namjoon settling himself at his desk, to read Shakespeare by candlelight. Till sleep tugs heavy on the backs of his eyelids and he surrenders to the night.

He knows that by morning Seokjin will be curled up on the floor by the fireplace, and that he will have taken things or left things as he thinks will best annoy Namjoon. They will be friendly with each other, then they will go their separate ways.

Or perhaps Seokjin will eschew the floor and barge his way into his bed, curling around him like early morning fog over the houses and grinning against the scar he once left on Namjoon’s cheek.

That could be nice, or at least interesting. Namjoon doesn’t imagine it’s all that likely, but he can’t say he doesn’t trust Seokjin not to.