“I’m sorry, Kookie, but no.”

“But hyung-”

“No!”

Jeongguk sighed, raking a hand through his freshly-washed black hair. Arguing against Seokjin and Yoongi hadn’t worked. Pleading wasn’t going too well, either. In fact, it seemed to be annoying them, as evidenced by Yoongi sighing and walking into his shared bedroom, leaving the youngest and oldest members of BTS alone in the living room of their dorm. Well, maybe it was for the better. Jeongguk had a better chance of getting what he wanted from Seokjin than Yoongi. With renewed hope, the boy looked to Seokjin's face, but instantly his heart sank. “No, JK,” the older boy said. “You can’t go. I’m sorry, I know tomorrow’s your birthday, but we’ve got too many things going on and it’s too late to go out. We’ll make it up to you as soon as we can, okay?”

And that, it seemed, was the end of the discussion, as Seokjin then hurriedly walked out the door.  Jeongguk wanted to keep protesting but knew that arguing had already made his hyung late for last-minute vocal training. Part of the boy wanted to walk out the door then and there, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hoseok standing, obviously making sure that Jeongguk wasn’t going to do what he wanted to do. After giving Hoseok an angry glare, he sulked back to his room.

Of course, the room wasn’t fully his. It was shared. Yet another thing that being a part of the K-pop franchise took away - he couldn’t even sulk alone. Well, actually, he probably could. If he asked Namjoon to leave so he could be angry alone, the older boy would probably oblige without a word and find somewhere else to go. But, Jeongguk wasn’t actually mad at that particular hyung, so that would be rude of him. Jeongguk guessed he wasn’t supposed to hear it, but he knew for a fact Namjoon had tried to get him out of practices and the concert the next day. He knew how much Jeongguk wanted off on his birthday. It didn’t happen, but Jeongguk couldn’t help but feel grateful to Namjoon for trying.

“Kookie?” Namjoon asked, and Jeongguk dragged his attention back to the boy at hand, who was staring at him with a mixture of concern, sympathy, and curiosity. At least, Jeongguk was going to guess that. He didn’t even want to begin imagining all the various thoughts that would be going through his hyung’s mind at any given moment in time. His head would probably explode. “Are you okay? You look kinda…” his voice trailed off and he gestured with his hands, “weird.”

Jeongguk smiled faintly. “Yeah, ‘m fine. Just frustrated,” he said, before falling backward onto his bed.

“Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“S’ok. It’s just…”

“Yeah, I know.”

The younger boy appreciated not having to explain his feelings. The person he was talking to understood already. Hell, everyone in the dorm probably understood, but Seokjin, Yoongi, and, (to a point) Hoseok were the ones keeping him captive on his birthday. Jimin and Taehyung probably sympathized for the maknae, but they couldn’t do anything about it besides give him sad looks that expressed what they thought. Namjoon was different.

Wait a minute…

Jeongguk sat up quickly and turned to the window on the opposite side of the room. It was open a bit to let the warm end-of-summer air in. His mind working rapidly, he looked at Namjoon, who looked even more confused. Specifically, he looked at Namjoon’s face. “You still have your makeup on, right?”

“What? Yes? Why?”

“Jus’ in case someone sees,” Jeongguk answered as he went to the window, opened it up further, and looked through the milky shadows on the wall of the building to the ground. “How far up from the ground is this floor?”

“What?” Namjoon was confused, but he was usually pretty quick, and sure enough, he muttered. “You have got to be kidding me.”

Jeongguk turned to him and smirked, both at his reaction and the look of disbelief on his face. “Nope.” The younger boy went back to his bed and crawled under it (much to the confusion of the other one in the room).

“And people say you’re the normal one in BTS…” Namjoon groaned, trying to get back to the book he had been reading. The main character had just learned how to play piano and he really wanted to know what was going to happen, but-

-But Jeongguk appeared with a coiled rope in his hands, and some part of Namjoon knew that he wouldn’t be getting back into that book anytime soon. “Why the hell do you have a rope.”

Jeongguk bit his lip and shrugged. “No idea.” He tied one end of the rope to a bedpost, then threw the rest of it out the window and listened for the other end to hit the ground. When it did, he smiled. “Perfect.”

“You know you can’t go, Kookie,” Namjoon said quietly.

“Bet I can.” He turned and smiled his best ‘you know you love me’ smile. “And I bet you won’t stop me.”

Jeongguk knew it was fighting dirty to use his hyung’s caring for him as a weakness, but hey, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do sometimes. And besides, it was technically his birthday tomorrow. So.

The small lip bite Namjoon did while averting his eyes told Jeongguk that Namjoon wouldn’t be trying to stop him.

“The hyungs are gonna kill you,” Namjoon muttered before his eyes widened. “And then they’re gonna kill me for letting you go.”

Jeongguk took his phone out of his pocket and tossed it on his bed. He grabbed the rope with his hands and jumped out the window, balancing his feet on the wall so he could partially stand. “Yup,” he said, popping the p.

“So what the hell am I supposed to do?” Jeongguk cringed at how loud the older boy’s voice was. He was trying to sneak out, after all.

“Quiet!” he snapped, forgetting that he was talking to someone older than him. “They might hear!”

Namjoon didn’t seem to miss the tone of the younger, as he raised one sculpted eyebrow. “Say that again?”

The boy’s face flushed. “Sorry, hyung. I mean.... Um, well, I was hoping, y’know, that you could come with. Me. Please?”

A random sudden coughing fit took over Namjoon. Jeongguk’s arms were getting tired. “What?” Namjoon sputtered.

“Oh come on, they’re gonna kill you anyway. Maybe they would kill you extra if they knew you had let me go out into the city at night alone.”

“You can take care of yourself.”

“Yeah,” Jeongguk said, not masking the bitterness in his voice, “but no one else seems to acknowledge that.”

And now his arms were too tired, so he quickly slid down the rope, feeling a stinging burn in his hands from the chafing. His feet hit the soft grass with a muted thud. As he expected, when he looked up, he saw Namjoon with an indecisive look on his face.

Well, now or never. Jeongguk pulled out the best pleading face he could muster. Little known fact: the leader of BTS had a soft spot for the maknae. But, once Jeongguk had revealed that he had chosen to work for BigHit, a tiny, unremarkable company when other more important companies because he admired Namjoon - well, these days, if Jeongguk prodded enough, one could actually see Namjoon melt. And that’s exactly what he did then. There was a frustrated yell and Jeongguk smirked before getting some distance between him and the rope. With a surprising amount of grace, his hyung climbed out the window and went down the rope with a lot more finesse than Jeongguk. It was eerie.

Okay, and yes, the smack across the back of the head he got was probably deserved.

“So, birthday boy, where are we going?”

Oh. “Um…”

“You don’t know?!”

Jeongguk sensed another smack to the head coming. “No?”

Instead of a hit, Namjoon stormed past Jeongguk with a huff. “Very well, come on then.”

STOP ONE - THE AMUSEMENT PARK

Jeongguk knew where the two of them were going ten minutes before they got there. After all, the brightly-lit park full of temporary amusement park rides that created sky glow on the Seoul night horizon was pretty hard to miss. He squealed in delight. “I forgot this was in town this week!”

Another huff from Namjoon. “I figured you did.”

The younger rolled his eyes at his less-than-happy hyung, grabbed Namjoon’s hand, and pulled the two of them into the park.

~

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Hell no.”

“Pleease?”

“Godammit, Jeon Jungkook, stop using those puppy eyes on me!”

“I will if you go on the Ferris Wheel with me!”

“I said no!”

“Fine, then more puppy eyes. This time with a pout! See? How’s my pout?”

“What - I - no, , FINE! Just stop looking at me like that!”

Which is how, five minutes later, the two of them ended up being the only passengers on a large Ferris Wheel overlooking the city, with Jeongguk cooing at the sight of his hyung trying to hide.

“Joonie-hyung, do you not like Ferris Wheels?” He only injected a little of mocking into his words at his friend who was curled up in a ball.  

“Kookie, if I liked Ferris Wheels, I wouldn’t have argued going on one,” the other boy muttered into his hands. The cart they were in lurched a bit, and the Joon-ball stiffened.

“Aw,” Jeongguk said. “Don’t be scared, hyungie! We’re only…” he looked down at the ground, “um, really high up.”

Namjoon muttered something that sounded a hell of a lot like one nasty insult. Jeongguk might have been offended if he didn’t kind of deserve it and if the situation hadn’t been so funny.

“Okay, it’s high up, it’s not dangerous!”

“Yeah, well, neither are snakes but Hobi is still scared of those. And neither is talking to strangers, but well, you seem scared of that.”

Jeongguk let out a dramatic gasp, meant to sound insulated. He wasn’t though, he didn’t blame Namjoon for being scared. “That was a low hit.”

“Sorry.”

The younger of the two looked out at the Seoul skyline. It was really an oddly beautiful sight. Jeongguk wasn’t really a fan of living in the city. He liked living near water. Busan wasn’t great (smelling a lot of fish), but it wasn’t busy and it was home. Still, Seoul at night, when the lights were out and people weren’t, was rather beautiful.

“Okay,” he said, poking Namjoon, “I’ll forgive you if you look up.”

There were a few seconds of silence, the Namjoon slowly unfurled himself. As soon as he looked up, the fear left his eyes and was replaced with wonder. Biting down the feeling of triumph, Jeongguk leans into Namjoon, who was staring at the lights. He poked him again. “Hey, hyung. If you’re scared of heights, why did you bring us here?”

Namjoon smiles and rakes a hand through his dyed hair. “‘Cause I know you love rides.”

Jeongguk definitely did not lean more into Namjoon then.

STOP TWO - THE… “RESTAURANT”

“What is this place?” Namjoon asked Jeongguk, who shrugged in response.

“I don’t know for sure, actually. I think I once overheard one of the staff say he used to come here.”

The restaurant was odd-looking, to say the least. It was decorated like a formal restaurant but didn’t have the atmosphere of one. Music with loud bass pounded from other rooms, muffled by thick walls. It was dark inside, only a few string lights that reached across the walls like tendrils given to provide any sort of visibility.

“Well, not to be rude or anything, but the fact that you don’t know who makes me automatically not want to do that -” Namjoon was cut off by a booming male voice that made both of the boys jump. They squinted into the darkness to find the source of the voice, and immediately regretted doing so, as it turned out the source was a suited man that could dwarf their fathers. The man came closer to them, and they found themselves shrinking away from him. The man was shouting in a language they couldn’t understand.

“What?” Namjoon asked.

Upon the boy speaking, the man immediately stopped yelling and his eyes widened. He raised one eyebrow and looked down at Namjoon’s body like he was analyzing what he was seeing. Jeongguk could actually feel how uncomfortable the older boy was becoming under the stranger’s critical gaze.

Then, before either of them could react, the man grabbed Namjoon’s wrist and began pulling him away. Both of the boys shrieked, and Namjoon began clawing at the man’s hand. The man didn’t even seem to notice. Automatically, Jeongguk reached into his pocket for his phone to call for help, but then, with icy realization, remembered that he had left in their room.

“Jeongguk!” Namjoon yelled as the man dragged him through a door at the end of the hallway. The younger boy’s brain seemed to slow time down, and, with his heart pounding, he looked between the exit and where his friend had been taken. What was he supposed to do? Get help? Try to help?

His body made the decision before his mind did - he went running after his friend.

As soon as he passed the doors, he entered the most bizarre room he had ever been in. It was colored a dark shade of crimson, and along the walls, there were several smaller rooms. Of course, the decorating in the room was not the strangest part of the room. What was the strangest part was what the people in the room were doing. For the record, it was disgusting, and will not be retold. Either way, Jeongguk was starting to get the idea that the place he had brought himself and his hyung to was not a restaurant, as he had thought.

Well, .

If they made it out of this okay, he was seriously going to have to question the morals of the people working as staff for BigHit.

The boy put mental blinders on and ran through the room, dodging drunken, shaking hands that were reaching out to him. It wasn’t difficult to follow his captive and terrified friend, the man pulling him along was huge.

And as if things couldn’t get worse, someone grabbed Jeongguk and yanked him downwards. He hit the floor of the room, not noticing or caring if it hurt. When he looked up, there were various people staring at him. “You’re pretty,” a middle-aged woman wearing a copious amount of makeup slurred out.

“Thanks. Buh-bye now!” he yelled before picking himself up and sprinting away. There were a few startled cries, but Jeongguk had a feeling that those people would fall down if they tried running, so he wasn’t exactly concerned about that. What he was concerned about, though, was that he had lost sight of Namjoon.

“Joon!” he yelled.

“Kookie!” Namjoon’s voice called back. “Where are you?”

Jeongguk took off running in the direction of the voice, and saw Namjoon standing in one of the smaller rooms.

“What are you doing?” the younger shouted. “We gotta get out of here!”

“Yeah, that isn’t gonna work very well,” Namjoon snarled, then half-raised his hand. The movement was abruptly stopped by something that looked like a chain.

He was handcuffed to a table.

“Oh come on!” Jeongguk shouted. “Could this get any worse?”

“Never ask that question! Whenever someone asks that question, things always get worse!”

“This isn’t a movie.”

“I’m not taking any chances. Now go find something to break these with!”

Jeongguk saluted and went running off. More people with giving him odd looks, looks that made his insides squirm. Just find a way to get out of here, just find a way to get out of here…

His eyes landed on a swinging door that had a brightly lit room visible through small windows. A kitchen, maybe? It was a restaurant, technically. He ran through the doors, was temporarily blinded by the sudden brightness, and was met with - more people yelling at him in a language he didn’t understand.

This night was just getting better by the minute.

On the bright - no pun intended - side, these men weren’t nearly as big as the last one, appeared to be cooks, and seemed to just be annoyed by a stranger in their workspace.

“Don’t mind me!” Jeongguk shouted as he ran around the kitchen, dodging a few pots and pans that were being thrown at him. “Just looking for something!”

There was a bright red EXIT sign over one of the doorways, and, much to the boy’s relief, there was a clear-glass case painted red with a huge fireman’s axe in it. “The hell kind of place keeps an axe in the kitchen?” he asked as he ran to it. There were words printed in a few languages, and his eyes skimmed them until he found Korean. “‘In case of emergency, break glass,’” he read aloud. “Well, this counts as an emergency!” He punched through the glass, which easily shattered under the force. The yells from around him increased in intensity, changing from annoyed to angry. “Sorry!” he called, pulling the axe from the case. “I just need to borrow this! I’ll bring it back!”

And with that, he ran out of the kitchen, axe in hand. Women shrieked as he ran back into the red room with the axe in hand. When he ran back to where Namjoon was, the older boy yelled in surprise. “Where in the hell did you get that?!”

“Avoid getting hurt now, ask questions later!”

Namjoon looked around, then placed his handcuffed hand on the table, maximizing the amount of chain to break. Unfortunately, it meant that his arm was dangerously close to where a freaking axe would be landing.

“Um, hyung…” Jeongguk started saying.

Namjoon clenched his eyes shut. “Just shut up and try to not kill me, please.”

Jeongguk bit his bottom lip so hard he could taste iron. “But-”

“Just do it!”

Without the boy noticing that he did it, Jeongguk raised the axe and brought it down with a crash on the table. He opened his eyes, not knowing he had closed them, and saw the axe embedded into the mahogany table. The chain of the handcuffs lay broken.  

“Oh my God, I still have my hand!” Namjoon shouted with a smile that quickly disappeared when the boys heard the booming voice of the large man again. “Time to go,” he said, then tightly held Jeongguk’s hand and the two ran together.

The next time someone said that Namjoon was uncoordinated, Jeongguk was going to verbally disagree with him or her. Because, in that moment, he had never seen a quicker, more lithe person. The two of them maneuvered out of the building, but Jeongguk was merely being pulled along as Namjoon did all the thinking and avoiding people. They ran as fast as they could through the dark streets, no destination in mind, just to get away. They could hear that some people, definitely not drunkards, were following them. The youngest’s arm was brutally yanked as Namjoon pulled them both down under some sort of broken table in a dark alley. The two of them then broke all unspoken laws of personal space and practically held each other as they listened for their pursuers to leave.

It was an oddly calming moment after the terrifying and bizarre experience they had just had. Jeongguk felt Namjoon’s warm breath on his collarbone and could hear his heartbeat. He didn’t usually want to know what was going on in that particular hyung’s head, but just for that moment, he wanted to know. Was he thinking the same thing? Was he feeling the same?

“I think they’re gone,” Jeongguk said after several long minutes of only the wind moving through the alleys.

“Yeah,” Namjoon breathed quietly.

And, completely unexpectedly, he burst into laughter.

Jeongguk stared at him. This is it, he thought, he’s finally lost his marbles. “What are you laughing at?”

Namjoon looked at him with bright eyes that reflected the moonlight. “What the hell just happened? How did we end up there, how did you get a freaking axe, and why are our lives like this?”

Finally grasping at the ridiculousness of the situation, the younger boy burst into laughter as well.

They stayed like that for a while, just laughing. Jeongguk pressed a kiss into Namjoon’s hair before standing up. “Any idea where we are?”

“Nope.”

“Fantastic.”

They began walking around, looking for a place that had lights. Eventually, they found a place - an old street store.

STOP THREE - MARIA’S STORE

Yeah, right. Like things were magically going to work out fine the moment they entered the store. The store was in most ways average, with the exception that it had an abnormally large food section. The two boys walked to the back of the store, where an old woman was standing behind the checkout counter. Her hair was salt and pepper and her skin was wizened with age. She looked up at them with no surprise in her expression.

“You’re here rather late,” her gravelly voice said. “Are you looking for something?”

“You tell us,” Jeongguk said. He was still feeling brave from aftereffects of the adrenaline rush.

She raised an eyebrow at that, then looked at them closer. When her eyes landed on Namjoon’s hand, which still had half of a pair of handcuffs attached to it, her eyes widened. “Are you a couple of that evil man’s boy toys?” she asked angrily, and without waiting for a response, she backed away and picked up a broom, waving it threateningly at them. “Get out of here! I don’t take your kind in this store!”

“Whoa! Auntie!” Namjoon yelled, leaping back a few feet. “We’re not!”

“We accidentally went in there and then my friend got handcuffed and I stole an axe and cut the other half off and then we ran away and then we got here!” Jeongguk shouted, holding up his hands in an effort to seem defenseless. The woman lowered the broom and looked at them quizzically. After a few seconds, the angry expression faded and she started laughing.

“How on earth did you accidentally enter that place?” she asked.

“We thought it was a restaurant.”

She chuckled. “Well, it kind of is.” She held out her hand. “I’m Maria.”

“I’m Joon, and this is Kookie,” Namjoon said as Jeongguk shook the woman’s hand. “Why are you here so late?”  

She sighed. “I need all the money I can get to keep this store running,” she said. “Sometimes I miss the days when no one knew what Korea was. We may have been poor, but at least then we weren’t surrounded by huge businesses. We weren’t all robots with no feelings.”  She brushed a few frizzy strands of hair behind her ear. “You kids wouldn’t know about it, I doubt your parents even do, but there was once a time where Koreans weren’t nearly as monotone as we are now.”

“We try not to be,” Namjoon said.

She gave him a long look. “But do you even know how?”

That silenced him, and he looked down.

“Oh, don’t look so sad,” she commanded softly. “It’s not like you boys had anything to do with it.”

That may not be totally true, Jeongguk wanted to say, but he kept it to himself.

“Would the two of you like something to eat?” the woman asked. Jeongguk felt his mood rise instantly at the mention of food. “I have a lot of food here that didn’t sell today. You could have some.”

Ten minutes later found the two of them trying foods they had never heard of before. Maria found some metal cutters and cut the handcuffs off of Namjoon’s wrist. Immediately, he rubbed the area, which had been cut by the metal. Jeongguk winced at the sight.

“What language were they speaking there?” he asked. “We didn’t understand what they were saying.”

Maria looked surprised. “They’re from Hong Kong,” she said. “They were speaking Cantonese.”

“Really?” Namjoon asked. “Why are they here?”

She smiled. “Neither of you have lived in Seoul very long, have you?”

He shrugged. “Not really.”

She chuckled again and began telling the two boys stories of older times, long before the two boys existed. She told them about how the country used to be so different. She told them about how the war that shook the world brought attention to a country that no one cared about before. Hours must have passed, but not one of the three noticed. When she finished her tales, the two boys looked at each other, having a silent conversation before they looked back at the woman.

“Thank you for telling us this, Auntie,” Jeongguk said, bowing his head.

She smiled again, her wrinkles more accentuated. “Thank you for listening. My grandchildren never pay attention that well.” Her face then changed to concern. “Wait a minute, shouldn’t you boys be at home? Won’t your parents be worried that you’re not there?”

The two looked at each other and smiled, instantly thinking of Seokjin, Yoongi, and Hoseok. “Yeah, probably,” Namjoon said.

“Then shoo!” she said, waving her hands at them. “I’m not going to be responsible for keeping a couple of boys away from home in the middle of the night!”

They laughed, standing up. “Don’t worry, no one’s going to be blaming you, ma’am,” Namjoon said.

“They’ll be too busy yelling at us,” Jeongguk finished.

With a few more ‘thank you, Auntie!’s, the boys walked out of the store. When they looked to the East, they could see a few warm colors, signaling that dawn was coming. Just them, Namjoon stopped walking, much to Jeongguk’s surprise.

“Be right back!” the older boy shouted before running back into the store they had just exited. A few minutes later, he reappeared with something in his hands. With a laugh, Jeongguk realized it was a cupcake covered in pink frosting with an unlit candle on it. Namjoon reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver lighter (more than likely a gift from Yoongi) and quickly lit the candle.

“Happy birthday, Kookie,” he said.

Jeongguk laughed, blew out the candle, and then grabbed a handful of frosting and smeared it over Namjoon’s face. “Thank you, hyungie,” he said, fully meaning it.

Namjoon blushed in the rosy light. “Yeah, well, it’s better than that prank we pulled on you a few years back.”

“That was mean!” Jeongguk shouted, his voice squeaking a bit. “I thought everyone was mad at me!”

“Consider this night your revenge then.”

“Will do. Ready to go face the hyungs?”

“Not at all.”

“Me neither.”

- 

The moment the two entered the dorm, five boys jumped up. The two groups looked at each other in surprise.

“Hi, hyungs,” Jeongguk said.

And that's when the yelling started. For example:

“Where the hell have the two of you been?” Yoongi.

“You can’t just go running off into the night like that! You could have gotten hurt!” Seokjin.

“You didn’t even leave a note or anything!” Hoseok.

And so on and so forth.

“Why is your wrist red?” Taehyung asked at one point, pointing at Namjoon hand.

“Oh, um, well, you see…” Namjoon’s voice trailed off as he pulled the broken handcuffs out of his pocket. He’d kept the thing as a souvenir. “The guy put the handcuff on too tight.”

“WHAT!!?” five voices asked.

“You know what, nevermind, I don’t wanna know right now,” Seokjin said, throwing his hands in the air. “Tell us in the morning. Or later in the morning. Go to bed, you two, now!” he yelled.

The two laughed as they dodged Yoongi’s hands when he tried to hit them.

“Oh, and Jungkookie!” Seokjin yelled.

“Yeah?”

“Happy birthday, you brat,” Yoongi finished.

A/N: Happy birthday to me! Which reminds me - I had barely had any time to write this in time for my birthday, which I gave myself as the deadline. I succeeded - but I sincerely apologize for any glaringly horrible grammar or spelling mistakes (or more likely a word that doesn't belong).

Thank you for reading, and please leave a comment about what you thought of it! 

#CelebrateSoftNamjoon