When your roommate is a spectre, you learn to stop flinching at many things.

Jimin doesn't bat an eyelash when Hoseok materializes right in front of him, the space in front of him slowly pigmenting from nothing into solid skin, and Hoseok is shoving his face right into Jimin's personal space, the frog whose stomach he had been about to split open in a clean cut almost swept off his workbench. Maybe he's a little relieved.

“I need,” Hoseok begins, but effectively shuts up when Jimin picks up the dead amphibian and waves it in front of him, earning them a startled hiss of “!”

When Hoseok manages to wrestle the frog out of Jimin's grip, he drops it onto the plastic with a grimace and jerks a thumb to the door of the lab. “Coffee?”

“I'm in the middle of lab—” If anything else, when your roommate is a spectre, you also learn to appreciate the opportunities in which you get to have a taste of teleportation. In the time the professor takes to turn around, both Jimin and Hoseok are gone, the only evidence of them ever being there now tucked into the fading pixels of where their shoes had been.

Jimin has his lab coat over his arm when they enter the cafe, it's an odd time, smack in the middle of the day, and the handful of patrons are the usual. Two from their dorm building are huddled together at a table near the corner, Taekwoon and Sanghyuk, who lifts his gaze and immediately waves at them, about to call out in greeting when the senior slaps a hand over Sanghyuk's mouth in warning.

The sirens are generally soft spoken, and they don't speak, if at all. There are exceptions like Sanghyuk who has wrecked chaos more than once due to his love for belting out tunes in the shower, and Jimin has a gut feeling that if Taekwoon weren't so quiet, they'd all be deaf from his yelling.

Sanghyuk allows them a sheepish smile and Hoseok gives them a thumbs up before piling at the counter with Jimin in tow.

“Do you ever feel sorry for them?” Jimin's squinting up at the menus behind the counter now, trying to make sense of the illegible scrawls that have been slathered over the black boards in white chalk. “I think I've heard Taekwoon sing once, drove me insane. He'd be such a great singer.”

Hoseok props his elbows up on the counter and raises a brow, sarcasm blatant and thick on his tongue. “Sure, and he would drive his entire audience into madness, like how he did you the day Jungkook and I had to haul you away from the common showers.”

“Rude,” Jimin mutters under his breath, finally managing to decipher something akin to “caramel frappuccino” among the rest of the drinks items.

Then Hoseok gasps, “no”, and shoves his face right by Jimin's ear, whispering hastily. “You know what's rude? That.”

That is indeed very rude, Jimin thinks, as the barista turns around, white blond hair tousled atop his head as if he'd just gotten out of bed. Rude, because Jimin had been this close to getting over his little (read: huge, gigantic, absurdly enormous) crush on the senior from the music department, only to have his infatuation pitched right back into his face.

It's a home run.

He's seen Min Yoongi hang out with the werewolves — Namjoon? Seokjin? — on more than a few occasions, but never when it's near full moon. It's safe to say that Yoongi is a normal human being, a smoking hot human being, and of the same rare species as Jimin.

“ me,” Jimin groans (and Yoongi's brows raise sky high in amusement as the younger flails to cover up by clearing his throat multiple times), then squeaks out a soft, “caramel frappuccino.”

“He would love it heavy on the whipped cream,” Hoseok quips, winking so sporadically that Jimin wants to curl up under the nearest bridge and combust.

Yoongi lets out a laugh.

It's low and raspy and makes Jimin feel like a mess inside, recoiling from faint memories of himself as a freshman gushing to Hoseok about that sophomore who'd helped pay for his cup ramyun survival stash for hell week when Jimin had been hugging the food to his chest, hoodie over his head at 4:30 in the morning because he had been short on spare change and the cashier was adamant on doing her job.

Yoongi had tucked some notes down the front of Jimin's hoodie and laughed that same laugh, patting him on the head before leaving with a careless “hang in there, Princess”, the chime at the door of the convenience store ringing stark in the night silence.

There's a faint hint of smoke that seems to emanate from Yoongi, and Jimin catches himself peering at the barista, unconsciously checking for cigarette stained teeth. He types in Jimin's order, asks Hoseok for his, and directs them to the collection counter.

(Jimin wheezes the entire time, much to the amusement of Hoseok, who makes kissy faces and pats him on the back way too hard to be of any help, making Jimin almost choke in addition to his sudden lack of ability to breathe.)

They collect their drinks, and Jimin's cheeks are flushed.

Yoongi pats him on the head, right then, and says, “see you around, Princess.”

It's quiet as Jimin walks with Hoseok out the door of the cafe. Once they're two streets away from the cafe and one away from campus grounds, Jimin promptly puts his frappuccino into Hoseok's hands and opens his mouth.

They're gone, plucked right out of thin air, and the second half Jimin's screech is released muffled against his own pillow, its initial counterpart still reverberating in the air from where the both of them had been, terrifying a group of freshmen cat hybrids.

If his friends notice Jimin's increasingly creepy obsession, then they don't mention it. On more than one occasion, Taehyung finds himself queueing for sandwiches (despite the fact that his only dietary requirement is blood) because Jimin had spent every cent on caramel frappuccinos.

“Right,” Jungkook finally says one day, when they're all sitting together at the long table in the library, taking the opportunity since it's become rare for Jimin to actually be found after classes. “This has got to stop.”

“What?” Jimin's immediately defensive, then he notices his mistake the moment Jungkook raises his brows, backing down and mumbling a quiet “I don't know what you're talking about” at the table.

“Your crush on that barista,” the drawl in the younger's voice is evident, and Hoseok lets out a snort at the speed in which Jimin's cheeks flare pink. “Man up and go ask him out, or something. You've been thirsting over Min Yoongi for two years.”

“I am not thirsting over him,” there's the sound of paper rustling angrily as Jimin flips the pages of his Anatomy textbook and scratches his pencil onto the blank notes spaces so hard the lead breaks. “It's just... it isn't every day I meet another human...”

“There are—”

“...who's this hot.” So maybe Jimin had been thirsting over Min Yoongi for two years, but that's not the point and who is Jungkook to point that out with no discretion whatsoever?

“Thought so,” Jungkook says drily, and Taehyung elbows him in the side, making the younger bare his fangs at him playfully. “I only speak the truth.”

“Tell him,” Taehyung sighs, reaching out and stuffing a gummy into Jimin's mouth, patting his shoulder sympathetically.

(Jimin spits the gummy out almost right away, and it isn't only because he's offended.

“Holy , Taehyung. How long have you had this? It tastes like expired mould and mould doesn't even bloody expire.”

“I think I remember buying it sometime in freshman year. But you know, I don't actually consume anything but Jungkook's—”

“Holy .”)

The next few times Jimin visits the cafe, Yoongi grins at him; a quick flash of his lips as his eyes nearly disappear into crescents, almost a mirror of Jimin's own smile. He would mouth “the usual?” over the counter, and Jimin would nod, settle down at his usual table and pore over his textbook.

He doesn't know when cafes had started serving their customers their drinks at their seats, but he's not about to complain. “Thanks,” Jimin tries not to babble more than that, focusing so much on keeping the heat on his cheeks down that he doesn't catch what Yoongi is saying.

“Something on your mind, Princess?”

This, Jimin hears, and his efforts to keep his cool go completely to waste as he stutters, “n-no. It's just... hell week, and I've got a few reports to worry about.”

Yoongi purses his lips, and it takes all the dignity that Jimin has left to keep his gaze on the other's eyes instead.

“All right, wait here.”

Jimin blinks, disoriented by the sudden lack of proximity as Yoongi stands up from the seat opposite him and disappears back behind the counter to tend to the group of girls who'd just entered the cafe.

It's a while before Yoongi returns, but when he does, Jimin recognizes an apple cinnamon muffin placed onto his open textbook, and he glances up from his laptop in bewilderment.

“Med student, aren't you?” Yoongi chuckles and reaches over to flick Jimin's forehead, earning him a soft, confused yelp. “Then you should know that too much caffeine isn't good for the body, and neither is self starvation. You've been losing weight lately.”

“I'm not—” Jimin's red to the tips of his ears, but Yoongi has already left, shooting him an amused smile from behind the cash register as Jimin reaches down to pinch around his stomach, the faint scent of something burning still lingering in the space where Yoongi had just vacated. He wrinkles his nose, swallowing the butterflies raging war at the base of his stomach and mutters, “and what right does a smoker even have to lecture me about health...?”

Yoongi's eyes are laughing, the sides of his lips tinged with mirth, one brow slightly raised. “What's this?”

It's a small stack of notecards bound by a simple red rubber band, and Jimin feels like his blood pressure has spiked up so much that he's about to burst a vein or something (probably the one near his eye).

“A present,” Jimin squeaks, already trying to come up with ways to maybe take the cards back. “To, uh, commemorate the first month of our friendship.”

“Friendship?” Yoongi slips the band off the stack (and Jimin makes a soft, desperate gurgling noise) and flips through them, a faint grin ghosting over his lips. “I give you drinks and muffins on the house for an entire month, sometimes even piggyback you back to the dorms, but all I am to you is a friend?”

Jimin's positively lightheaded by now, staring across the table at Yoongi as his eyes skim through the words that he'd scrawled onto the cards (a bunch of reasons as to why Yoongi should quit smoking. He may or may not have added “because you're a hot human and it would be such a shame to lose you to lung cancer” into the list. Yoongi has seen it, probably, from the way he lets out a snort, mumbling, “a hot human?”)

“What are we, then, if not friends?”

Maybe it's the way Yoongi's looking at him, dark gaze smouldering into Jimin's own, and Jimin swears that there's something akin to red flashing across Yoongi's eyes. “Park Jimin,” he says, and it's an entire octave lower that Jimin has prepared himself for. “Why don't you let me take you on a date?”

It is Hoseok who's fussing around most on the day of their date, making Jimin stand in front of their closet mirror, arranging and rearranging Jimin's hairstyle, making him change from a t-shirt to a button down, to a pullover and then back to a t-shirt again.

(“Look casual, don't be a desperate hoe.”

“What the , I'm not desperate!”)

“Okay,” Hoseok is grabbing onto Jimin's shoulders, “breathe. Be classy, do not give in to the on the first date—”

Jimin lashes out at Hoseok, but the latter has already disintegrated out of the air, the sound of him chuckling still lingering in the empty space.

Yoongi's shift ends at eight, and Jimin makes sure to wait on the opposite side of the street until five minutes after that so he can pretend that he's less excited than he actually is, although checking his hair and outfit with his phone's front camera wouldn't help his case to anyone watching.

It's a while before he spots Yoongi pushing the door open, backpack slung over his left shoulder as he steps onto the street and glances around, for Jimin, probably. Jimin waves with both hands, composure completely abandoned in favour of catching Yoongi's attention. The latter grins and lifts a hand in acknowledgment, and Jimin steps off of the pavement, onto the road.

In moments like these, Jimin wishes that he weren't human. Maybe a spectre, perhaps, like Hoseok. Something, anything.

It's a silver Audi, small and compact, but Jimin is aware that he isn't that big himself, and Yoongi does, too. When he glances up, Yoongi's eyes are at the widest that Jimin's ever seen, right before Jimin squeezes his eyes shut, and there it is again; they flash red.

When Jimin's eyes flutter open again, he's wrapped up within rough, coiled skin, his nose burning from the smell of sulphur and smoke.

“Jimin scored a date with the dragon.”

Jungkook lifts his gaze, lips grazing over the unscathed skin of Taehyung's neck, humming quietly. “Yeah?”

“Maybe we should have told him earlier,” Taehyung murmurs, breath catching in his throat when Jungkook lets his fangs slide into the flesh, tongue lapping gently over the punctures.

Jungkook doesn't answer, rendering Taehyung's speech ability into soft moans and breathy whispers of his name, only shrugging as he pulls Taehyung closer in his lap, watching the bite wounds knit together into smooth skin. “That would have been cruel of us. He was so intent on insisting that Yoongi's human.”

“Yeah, but he had to find out by almost dying!”

“But Yoongi found his wings,” Jungkook pinches Taehyung's cheek lightly, chuckling. “Unorthodox, risky, and probably stupidly, but you know how important wings are to a dragon. Jimin gave him a reason to protect, don't you see?”

Taehyung wrinkles his nose, “true, but still... one of them could have died.”

“You know what they say, we have to leave everything to fate.”

The first time Jimin tells Yoongi “I love you”, it is another month later, and Yoongi is trailing his hand over the curve of Jimin's bare shoulder.

He pauses, blinking as if caught off guard, but before he's allowed to say anything, Jimin scoots closer on the pillow to peck his cheek.

“Granted,” Jimin murmurs, his gaze dropping lower to where a tattoo of a dragon is inked across the expanse of Yoongi's chest, lifting his hand to touch it, feeling the shape burn faint beneath his fingertips. “I thought you were just a smoker at first, and it's kind of stupid but now I'm glad you're not human, because then the smoke wouldn't jeopardize your health.”

“Ever heard of secondhand smoke?” Yoongi chuckles, cupping Jimin's cheek with his palm, thumb rubbing soothing circles. “That's ninety percent more hazardous than being a smoker, and I've still got a long, long way to go before I can learn to completely mask my scent.”

“I—”

“But I will learn,” Yoongi interrupts, a soft smile on his lips. “Thank you for loving me, Princess.”

Jimin tucks his head beneath Yoongi's chin, smiles wide against his skin.

“Thank you for giving me wings.”