The Fastest Man in the World [bts; suga/j-hope]
The Fastest Man in the World
suga/j-hope
pg-13, 5000 words
Yoongi never wanted to be a superhero; he'd only ever wanted one thing. AU (AO3 Mirror)
written for idolrapper for bangtanexchange!
A tremor ripples through the ground. The shelves along the convenience store shake; rows of chips, throat lozenges, and condoms fall to the floor. The ramen cup in front of Yoongi teeters backwards, spilling soup onto his shirt at the same time Hoseok goes flying out one side of an aisle, ramming into the wall stocking beef jerky at the back of the store.
“Aw, fuck,” Yoongi says, rubbing at the stain. “I just did the laundry this morning.”
“V,” Hoseok wheezes, struggling upright on his elbows. “Stop. This is madness.”
Taehyung cackles gleefully. He takes a deep breath, puffing his chest, and exhales. A silvery cloud billows from his lips, leaving everything in its wake lined with frost. Ice rolls across the tiles like swash on a beach, coming to a stop right at the leg of the table Yoongi's sitting on. The temperature in the room plummets, and Yoongi’s gotta give credit where credit’s due- they’ve gotten five SOS calls this week thanks to Taehyung alone, but this is by far the closest they’ve gotten to something actually ominous. It feels like they’re in an evil refrigerator.
Hoseok’s still on the floor, pale-faced and shivering. Taehyung levels him with a victorious smirk. He stalks forward slowly, like a cat who'd finally caught the mouse- and promptly slips backwards, long legs knocking into a display case of bubblegum, sending it crashing down on top of him. Yoongi manages to bark out half a laugh before a sudden blur whizzes past him, making his fringe flutter. When he blinks, Hoseok has Taehyung pinned to the counter at the front of the store. His hands are gripping Taehyung’s wrist, bending him backwards.
Yoongi raises an eyebrow.
“Why are you doing this?” Hoseok pleads, and something in Taehyung’s face shuts down. He looks so open and vulnerable that it feels wrong for Yoongi to be standing here watching, he needs a better view. He gets up from his seat and moves closer.
Taehyung hesitates. “I…”
“Just ignore him, Hoseok,” Yoongi says, in between slurping up another mouthful of ramen. Taehyung startles, like he’d forgotten Yoongi was even there. Yoongi can’t really blame him. “He’s only doing it for attention. Don’t give it to him and maybe if we’re lucky, he’ll die.”
Hoseok, acting contrary to good advice as usual, ignores Yoongi and keeps his eyes trained on Taehyung. ”Why?” he asks again.
“For fuck’s sake,” Yoongi groans, throwing the cup in his hands over his shoulder. “Taehyung, can’t you just pine like a normal person and go fuck up some loose college kids instead of fucking up society?”
Taehyung shoves Hoseok back, whirling around to confront Yoongi. “I bet that advice comes from experience, doesn’t it hyung-” he chokes, makes a garbled noise, and falls to the floor.
“Hyung! I mean, Yoongi. I mean, Suga!” Hoseok yells.
“What?” Yoongi exclaims, affronted. “He was lying, so I set his pants on fire. It’s poet-“ Hoseok strips off his jacket, using it to try and suffocate the flames inching up Taehyung’s trousers. “It’s poetic justice, I mean-“ Taehyung finally manages to kick his pants off, babbling hysterically as Hoseok rubs his shoulders to try and calm him down.
Yoongi sighs. “I’ll get the burn ointment.”
When awed citizens (their fed up landlord), starry-eyed damsels (Yoongi’s aged grandmother), and the press (the local high school newspaper club) ask them how their small business got started, they go with Hoseok’s story.
Two friends gifted with great powers, no longer able to rationalise all the evil in the world, drop out of college, work a number of odd jobs to raise enough money for a startup, and open up their own independent Superhero Firm 'Spine Breaker Superheros'. They’re aimed towards the little people, regular civilians who can’t afford to shell out ten, twenty million won for some over-glorified dude in a spandex suit and a fuck-ton of personal baggage to swoop in and save the day. In practice, there's very little actual spine breaking involved, which Yoongi's thankful for.
“A hero is relative,” Hoseok had said to Yoongi when he’d proposed the idea. “Imagine. Your car breaks down, and you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere two hundred kilometres away, Rap Monster is rescuing the CEO of Samsung from an elaborate kidnapping.” He panned a hand across Yoongi’s field of vision. Yoongi stole some of his drink. “But where you are, some truck driver pulls up next to you, opens your hood, and gets your engine revving again. Now, tell me. Who’s the hero?”
That’s their selling point. Literally. They’d even gotten Jungkook - before he went rogue on them - to act as Rap Monster in the infomercial they’d filmed. Namjoon hadn’t been happy, ranting about portrait laws or whatever, but Yoongi knew he wouldn’t actually sue them.
That’s the gist of it. No convoluted origin story, a little underwhelming, but ultimately functional. Just like the small 3x4 metre office they work out of. Suga and J-Hope: ordinary superheroes for ordinary people.
“Sure, we don’t have our own franchise, figurines, or fancy costumes.” Yoongi tugs the edge of his heat conductive jacket - it’d originally belonged to a scientist Hoseok dated three years ago. The teenage journalist in front him nods eagerly, scooting to the edge of her seat and holding the mic closer to Yoongi’s lips. “But we get the job done. We’re not just business partners, we’re friends. We work well together. As a bonus, we won’t bore you with ten-minute long soliloquies like most superheroes, because we’re both well-adjusted people.”
It’s a white lie. Because hey, Yoongi might be pyrokinetic, but he’s still human.
“Hoseok,” Yoongi says, stepping around the room divider. They’d decided to forego actual cubicles while looking for office spaces, and as such, the only thing separating Yoongi’s “office” from Hoseok’s is a simple rice paper screen. Always a fun time when Hoseok gets bored on the job and starts playing video games without his headphones plugged in. “You know we’re not an NPO, right?”
Hoseok beams up at him. “Yeah, why?”
Yoongi waves the receipts in his hands. “Then why are you selling our services for free?”
“Only a few of them!” Hoseok protests, grabbing the papers off Yoongi and flicking through them. “Like, come on, do you really want to charge Mrs. Kim when all we did was catch the guy who keeps stealing her GQ subscription?”
“Uh, yes,” Yoongi deadpans. “Or else we’ll have no money.”
“It’s just.” Hoseok leans back in his chair. “It’s such a trivial thing.”
“All of our work is trivial,” Yoongi snaps. “That’s our thing. That’s why people come to us.” Hoseok frowns, and guilt crawls it’s way up Yoongi’s stomach. He tries to backtrack. “I mean, we barely make ends meet as it is, we’re in no place to start doing pro bono shit.”
“Work’ll get better,” Hoseok says. “We’re just getting started.”
“We’ve been getting started for two years,” Yoongi mutters. Hoseok pinches his forehead, but before he can form a retort, the landline starts ringing. A grin grows on Hoseok’s face, and he flashes his eyes towards Yoongi in a way that very clearly says, ’I told you so.’
“It’s gonna be Jimin calling about Taehyung being a dick and freezing the pond in the park,” Yoongi says. “Like it always is.”
“Or,” Hoseok says pointedly. “It could be an ordinary citizen being terrorised by Taehyung freezing the pond in the park. Like last time.”
“Last time was literally just Jimin talking in a Daegu accent that was, frankly, quite offensive.”
Hoseok raises a finger, silencing Yoongi as he puts the phone on speaker. “Hello, Spine Breaker Superheroes here to save your day.”
“Heeeeeeey Jimin!” Yoongi trills. Hoseok waves him away.
There’s a friendly laugh on the other end of the line. “Not Jimin, unfortunately,” a voice says. “But it’s been a while, Yoongi.”
If anyone bothered to ask Yoongi how their small business got started, the story they’d hear wouldn’t be all that different from Hoseok’s. Except halfway through, Yoongi would have to take a pause and add a disclaimer - that he never wanted to become a superhero. He didn’t not want to become a superhero either, but there’s a part of him, coal black and entrenched deep into his heart, that knows it’s his Godforsaken purpose, and hates it.
He watches the news. He watches the strongest men and women in the world get beaten to within an inch of their life. He reads autobiographies. He reads about losing loved ones, having the people you hold dear to you held hostage like some bargaining chip. He stands outside the National Assembly Building and watches these so-called superheroes stand proud, saying they’d do anything to protect the people.
Yoongi has nothing in common with them - nothing in common with Hoseok - except for the singed DNA that he should only use for good.
Seokjin’s office is sleek, monochrome, and way out of their league. White leather sofas, black tiles, and a gigantic electronic atlas taking up an entire wall in lieu of a window. Yoongi hasn’t seen Seokjin since he’d dropped out of college. They’d been roommates, and the impression Seokjin left had been mostly positive, largely consisting of him bringing Yoongi coffee every night during the run up to finals. This impression sours considerably in the first five minutes of Seokjin speaking.
“I’ve been keeping tabs on you for a while,” he says, spreading out various newspaper clippings over the table. Suga and J-Hope stopping a bank robbery, Suga and J-Hope finding a lost child in a mall, Suga and J-Hope keeping the homeless warm for New Years Eve. “Both your powers are formidable, but severely underutilised.”
“I don’t know, man,” Yoongi says, “We save a lot of money on a radiator.” Discretely, under the table, he rubs a hand against Hoseok’s knee.
Seokjin gives them the bare bones. He works for Big Hit Heroes, and they’re about to embark on a large scale mission fronted by J.O Kwon that involves thwarting a guerilla group of South Korean defectors with plans to blow up Kori Nuclear Power Plant in Busan. They’re dangerous, they’re equipped with state-of-the-art arms, and J.O Kwon needs all the manpower he can get to back him up.
Seokjin slides a grey business card over the table, blank aside from eight silver digits embossed in the middle. “I’ll leave you two to think about it,” he says, smiling kindly before taking his leave.
The room is completely silent save for the steady blip blip coming from the large map in front of them. Hoseok takes a shaky, excited breath. “This is-”
“A suicide mission,” Yoongi says, at the exact moment Hoseok goes, “Everything we’ve ever wanted.”
They turn to face each other. Hoseok looks taken aback, and Yoongi is fucking incredulous. “You’re kidding me,” he says. “What happened to doing it for the little people?”
Hoseok blinks. “You’re the one who said what we do is trivial.”
“Yeah, but did I say I have a problem with it?”
“Come on, you know our profits haven’t been… great,” Hoseok says. “We’d make so much money with this. Not to mention it’d really get our names out there, and we’d get more clients, and-”
“Hate to break it to you,” Yoongi interrupts. “But nobody wants to hire dead superheroes. Seokjin, or Big Hit, or whoever, just want us there as pawns so J.O Kwon can defuse the bomb and still make it in time for his next press conference. Also, since when do you do shit for the money?”
“I’m not doing it for the money,” Hoseok insists. “I’m doing it for… purpose.” Yoongi gawks at him. For once in his life, he can’t seem to find words.
Hoseok shakes his head. “Look, I don’t hate what I’m doing now but… I’m going to do this,” he says resolutely. “You can’t stop me.”
With that, he grabs Seokjin’s business card off the table and stands up. When he walks to the door he waits- for Yoongi to follow? To apologise? Who the fuck even knows - and then sighs. The door clicks shut softly behind him, and Yoongi looks down at his hands. He bends his fingers into claws, drags his nails across his jeans. The trail they leave behind is discoloured.
Hoseok doesn’t have a superhero origin story. He’d been like Yoongi- born with his super speed and not knowing a life without. Even though you don’t see comic book panels about it, the decisions you make while lying in bed undergoing an existential crisis (Yoongi) or trying to catch your breath after saving a life (Hoseok) matter just as much as being thrown into a vat of radioactive waste.
It had been Yoongi’s junior year of college. They’d both been walking back from a party at Namjoon’s dorm, leaning against each other, a little bit tipsy but still coherent. In front of them a freshman they didn’t know stumbled disorientatedly, completely sloshed.
It happened in a split second. Yoongi hadn’t even seen the car. But suddenly Hoseok’s face wasn’t pressed against his shoulder anymore. Instead, he was on the other side of the road, holding onto a sobbing freshman while the driver of the Hyundai swerved into a lamp post.
After that night, Hoseok found a better use for his power, and Yoongi had felt like he’d lost him.
“Did you know, on his official profile,” Yoongi says, wiggling his fingers to conduct energy into his palm, “J.O Kwon has Mad Scientist Yang Hyun Suk down as his arch nemesis?” He flicks his wrist back, the crack of his bone accompanied by a rush of air, and then his entire hand is radiating fire. From the entrance of the alleyway-turned-battleground, Taehyung backs away slowly, hand at his side, ready for combat.
Yoongi swings his arm and flings the fireball forward. At the same time, Taehyung splays his hand and shoots a barrage of icicles in Yoongi’s direction. The attacks meet midway, consuming each other, causing steam to shroud the air between them. Through the mist, Yoongi watches Taehyung’s shadow bolt around the nearest corner. He’s debating exactly how worthless it’d be to chase after him, when Hoseok speaks.
“What’s your point?” he calls from above Yoongi, leaning over the rails of the fire escape he’d been climbing on. He’d followed Jungkook up there, who’d decided to take the form of a monkey for this round of Make Min Yoongi Undergo Strenuous Physical Activity, and scaled all the way to the roof of the apartment complex before pulling a disappearing act.
“My point,” Yoongi begins, craning his neck to meet Hoseok’s eye, “is our arch nemesis is the rat that lives in our office, and the Powersuck Girls. No offence, Jimin.”
“No problem!” Jimin pipes from the dumpster Yoongi had thrown him in after tying him up. “Sorry about the whole… mental torture thing. I’m really just here for Taehyung and Jungkook.”
“Honestly, Jimin,” Yoongi says, holding a hand to his chest, “In another life, we could’ve been friends.” He turns back towards to Hoseok. “So yeah.”
Hoseok raises an eyebrow. “So yeah?”
“So yeah. You were a fucking dunce and overestimated yourself. But it’s fine. You can take it back.”
Hoseok narrows his eyes, stepping down so both feet are levelled. “Listen, I don’t know what your problem is, but-” He stops abruptly, cocking his head to the side, listening for something. “Hold on a sec.”
Hoseok jumps down from the fire escape, feet barely touching the ground before he’s zooming past Yoongi. Yoongi crosses his arms and counts down from ten in his head; he barely gets to eight before Hoseok materialises in front of him, grinning and holding up a mouse by it’s tail. Yoongi squints.
“A rat? Is this because I mentioned one like a second ago? Really, Jungkook?”
The mouse squeaks and begins squirming, swinging in Hoseok’s grip like a defunct yoyo. Then it starts enlarging, elongating and losing hair, features slowly becoming more human-like. Yoongi grimaces and takes a step back; he’s seen the process a hundred times over, but it never gets any less disturbing.
Seconds later, Hoseok holds a glowering Jungkook by the collar of his black and white skin suit. “It isn’t Jungkook anymore,” Jungkook spits out.
“Right. Sorry, what is it this week?”
“Sergeant Gull.”
Yoongi winces. “Christ.”
Hoseok releases Jungkook, who slumps onto the ground with a small oof. He growls at Yoongi and Hoseok, low in his throat, before crouching down on all fours, shifting into a dog, and padding away.
“Yeah, you better run!” Yoongi yells after him. “Anyway, back to your inexplicable death wish,” he says, turning his attention towards Hoseok again.
“We’re not talking about it,” Hoseok says, finality in his voice. “It’s done.”
A twinge of annoyance reverberates through Yoongi, and he wants to push back. But the rational part of his brain tells him it’s none of his business, and Hoseok’s only doing what they'd both signed up for just by being born.
In the end, Yoongi shrugs nonchalantly and strides past Hoseok, bumping their shoulders together, maybe on purpose, maybe not. “Whatever,” he says. “It’s your funeral.”
The last time Namjoon had been in the Seoul for more than a week was a year ago. He’d been dispatched to China by the National Intelligence Service, and spent two weeks hunting down a chemist who, if reports were to be believed, was running human experiments on illegal immigrants in Shenzhen. It turned out the chemist also doubled as the Human Scorpion, and even with his super strength, the battle had left Namjoon wounded enough that he’d been granted a month's leave to recuperate. Yoongi had been glad to have him back, but Operation Scorpio was slated for a movie adaptation in 2017, so he made Namjoon pay for dinner anyway.
Despite not having seen each other for eight months prior, Namjoon had only granted Yoongi fifteen minutes of blissful ignorance before candidly asking: “What’s wrong?”
Yoongi froze in the middle of ripping his breadstick in half. “This place is too fancy,” he said eventually, “and I need to be at least halfway wasted.”
In the end, Yoongi didn’t have to be wasted at all. He’d only needed a text message from Hoseok to light up his phone before he’d spilled his guts all over Namjoon on the sidewalk, halfway to relocating to Yoongi’s favourite second-rate diner.
“I don’t know if I like being a superhero,” Yoongi admitted, feet in the gutter with his face buried in his hands. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Why the hell did I drop out of college to become some neighbourhood vigilante?”
“It’s not like you to force yourself to do things you don’t want to do,” Namjoon said, taking a seat beside him on the pavement.
“It’s not, is it?” Yoongi mused. “But why do I feel like I’m turning my back on a duty.”
Namjoon hummed. “What can you do, really?” he said. “With great power-”
“Comes great responsibility,” Yoongi finished. “I know. That’s why I went through with Spine Breaker Superheroes thing. And I don’t mind it, but I’m not cut out for it.” Yoongi swallowed. “Is it cowardly that I don’t want to get hurt?”
“Nah,” Namjoon said, a hand coming up to squeeze Yoongi’s shoulder. “But most of the assignments you get don’t really involve bodily harm, do they?”
“For now. But you know Hoseok always wanted the firm to grow bigger. I don’t think he’ll be happy until he actually feels like he’s risking his life for something.”
“But then…” Namjoon hesitated, rubbing the toe of his shoe against a discarded cigarette butt. Yoongi watched him absent mindedly, all the things he’d been trying not to think about weighing him down with fatigue.
“What?” Yoongi prompted.
Namjoon looked up at Yoongi, eyebrows furrowed. “Why did you say yes to him in the first place?”
When Yoongi comes back from his shower to find the glass of his living room window frosted over - on one of Seoul’s hottest summer nights to date, no less - it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who’s behind it.
“For the love of-” Yoongi flings the wet towel around his neck onto the sofa and stalks towards the window. He hefts it open and sticks his head outside to find- to no surprise but much irritation- Taehyung jiggling the now frozen handle of his front door.
“Oi,” Yoongi calls, and Taehyung jolts, looking around frantically before his eyes lock onto Yoongi. He smiles sheepishly, and folds his hands behind his back like it had been someone else trying to use their cryokinesis to break into Yoongi’s apartment.
“Sorry, I just wanted to talk to you,” Taehyung explains.
“I have a doorbell.”
“But this is funner.”
Yoongi rolls his eyes. “Climb in through the window,” he says.
Yoongi’s apartment is a one bedroom, one bathroom, cluttered shithole situated above an internet cafe on a highway. He loves it dearly. Taehyung takes one look at the single couch, buried underneath piles of paperwork and half of Yoongi’s wardrobe, and takes a seat on the floor. Yoongi nods approvingly.
Taehyung doesn’t beat around the bush. “You need to talk to Hoseok,” he says as soon as Yoongi beckons towards him. Yoongi freezes, and whatever’s showing on his face makes Taehyung run a hand through his hair in frustration. “I don’t know all the details, but I know enough. You can’t let him go, please talk to him.”
Yoongi squares his shoulders and grips the windowsill behind him. “Do you think I haven’t tried? If you care so much, you try and talk some sense into him.”
“He won’t listen to me. He-” Taehyung looks like it’s sucking the life out of him to say the next few words. “He’ll listen to you.”
The back of Yoongi’s neck starts prickling. “Maybe if you stopped wrecking havoc everywhere, he’d take you more seriously,” he says. He knows he’s derailing, but even though he isn’t completely sure where the conversation is going, he knows he doesn’t want to get there anytime soon.
Taehyung shrugs. “It’s fun,” he says simply. “Also, I think deep down he enjoys it too.”
The corner of Yoongi’s lips quirk up. “Not deep down, he flagrantly lives for that shit.” It’s true. For all that Hoseok prattles on obliviously about what Taehyung’s motivation could possibly be, no other SOS call gets him quite as hyped. Taehyung’s fully aware of this, looking proud as he nods in agreement.
They exchange looks and there’s a stretch of silence, where the only sound comes from the traffic outside. It feels like Yoongi and Taehyung are adjusting into some mutual understanding. For all him and Taehyung butt heads, they both care about Hoseok, and not nearly as differently as Yoongi had liked to believe.
“Please talk to him,” Taehyung says again, picking at the carpet. “Tell him you don’t want him to go.”
Yoongi frowns. “I told you, I already did.”
Taehyung meets his gaze. “No,” he says, voice hardening. A chill trickles down Yoongi’s skin. “Tell him honestly.”
Yoongi brings it up the next day at the office. The room divider is shoved to the side, and Yoongi sits on his desk watching Hoseok pack his minimal superhero gear with growing anxiety. Hoseok is humming to himself, choosing between two pairs of sneakers, and Yoongi is dying a little bit inside.
“Won’t they give you proper gadgets and gizmos?” Yoongi blurts out. “It feels like the least they could do in exchange for your life.”
Hoseok stills in the middle of folding one of his running pants. He looks up at the ceiling and breathes in deeply through his nose. “I knew this was coming,” he says.
“Good foresight,” Yoongi remarks. “If only you could apply it to other-”
“Can you shut the fuck up,” Hoseok snaps, slamming a hand against the backpack on his desk.
It takes Yoongi a moment to register what’s happening. He and Hoseok don’t fight often. In fact, they don’t fight ever. Even though they function completely unalike, they’ve managed to stay friends and work together for so long because of one main reason: they like each other as people. Yoongi’s lazy and disillusioned, but eighty per cent of the time, he sucks it up and follows Hoseok out the door for whatever Heroic Endeavour they’re about to undertake for a base rate of forty thousand won per hour. The other twenty per cent of the time, Hoseok smiles and laughs through Yoongi’s snarky commentary, throws an arm over his shoulder, and makes Yoongi wish he was a better person.
“I don’t get you,” Hoseok plunges forward before Yoongi can even open his mouth. “You don’t think I’m scared? That I don’t know what I’m getting into? We’re meant to be partners. You’re meant to be my friend. Why do you think I asked you, hyung? We were meant to be in this together and instead you leave me out here alone.”
”Tell him honestly,” Taehyung had said. Where does Yoongi even start? “If… if you leave,” he tries. “I’m the one who’s going to be left alone.”
“Then come with me,” Hoseok says quickly. “It’ll be fine. We’ll come back together, get bigger jobs and-”
“I don’t want bigger jobs,” Yoongi cuts in. It’s taken two years to finally come to this point, but faced with the possibility of every single one of his morbid nightmares becoming a reality, he can finally admit what's been eating him up since the beginning: “I wish you wouldn’t either.”
Hoseok deflates, and when he looks at Yoongi the expression on his face is so defeated. “I want to do this, hyung.”
If Yoongi tried, he’s sure he wouldn’t be able to muster up enough energy to even light a match. He feels hollow, like if you opened him up there’d be nothing but a charred and empty cavity inside. “You’re really going to do this then? You’re going to go and get yourself killed.” Yoongi’s voice cracks in the middle and he swears, inhaling sharply and looking away.
“I’m a superhero,” Hoseok says, slinging his backpack over his shoulders, “It’s what I do.”
Hoseok is, by all technicalities, the fastest man in the world. Yoongi’s never felt it more than he does now. Hoseok walks away from him at a measured pace, and the space between their desks and the front door is so small it can barely be called a distance. But Yoongi knows that even if he ran, he’d have no hope of catching up.
Hoseok and Yoongi had waited for the paramedics to arrive. The injured driver was taken into the ambulance on a stretcher, and Hoseok had panicked until one of the EMTs assured him it didn’t look like he'd require anything more than a neck brace. The freshman Hoseok had saved from narrow death was wrapped in a shock blanket, face pale and mute to any attempts at extracting information.
Yoongi should have seen it coming, the lights from the sirens flashed across Hoseok’s face like a warning. Still, it felt like the bottom of his stomach fell out when Hoseok turned to him and said, “I wanna be a superhero.”
Back then, Yoongi had felt like he’d be in the wrong to say no. He’d stared at Hoseok blankly, hoping he looked bored and not conflicted.
“Are you with me?” Hoseok asked.
Hoseok could run from one end of the country to the other in less than 30 minutes. His super speed was impressive. But Yoongi always considered Hoseok’s real superpower to be something more intangible and innate. Something that came out in his smile- that drew Yoongi in and never let him say no.
It’s a six hour drive from Seoul to Busan, Yoongi makes sure to fill his tank with gas the night before he leaves. He’s self-aware enough about his own sleeping habits to not try and set out at sunrise, despite that being the more suitably heroic thing to do, instead setting his alarm for 9:30am. Early enough that it's still going out of his way, but late enough to miss the hellish morning traffic.
He doesn’t know what he’ll do once he gets there. He’d seen the hotel reservations printed out on Hoseok’s desk, but any decent superhero firm would set that up as a red herring. The plan in his head is vague, only half thought-out with no real objective. But somehow, it still manages to go to shit when Yoongi's car starts sputtering halfway along the Gyeongbu Expressway .
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Yoongi groans. His exhaust makes a noise somewhere between a burp and the sound of the last of Yoongi’s sanity finally falling apart.
His car survives long enough to deliver him to the nearest rest area in one piece. Once there, he buys a packet of aspirin, and tries calling Namjoon only to find that he’d changed his number again. He’s pacing around the gas station, deciding whether or not he appreciates irony enough to call Taehyung for help, when he hears a familiar voice behind him.
“Imagine. Your car breaks down, and you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere,” Hoseok’s voice speaks, and Yoongi’s pacing comes to a halt. “Somewhere, two hundred kilometres away, J.O Kwon is trying to prevent a bunch of defected douchebags from blowing up a nuclear power plant.”
Yoongi looks up slowly. Hoseok stands in front of him, looking haggard in a suit Yoongi doesn’t recognise, hair messy like he hadn’t bothered to look in the mirror before running out the door in the morning.
“Where you are,” Yoongi says, soaking in Hoseok’s face like it’s his first time seeing it. “Some guy realises he made a big mistake-”
”-Pulls up next to you-”
“-And asks you to forgive him.”
Hoseok smiles at him. The one Yoongi returns is watery.
“Who’s the hero?”
a/n: as always, thank you to concordances for beta-ing!
suga/j-hope
pg-13, 5000 words
Yoongi never wanted to be a superhero; he'd only ever wanted one thing. AU (AO3 Mirror)
written for idolrapper for bangtanexchange!
A tremor ripples through the ground. The shelves along the convenience store shake; rows of chips, throat lozenges, and condoms fall to the floor. The ramen cup in front of Yoongi teeters backwards, spilling soup onto his shirt at the same time Hoseok goes flying out one side of an aisle, ramming into the wall stocking beef jerky at the back of the store.
“Aw, fuck,” Yoongi says, rubbing at the stain. “I just did the laundry this morning.”
“V,” Hoseok wheezes, struggling upright on his elbows. “Stop. This is madness.”
Taehyung cackles gleefully. He takes a deep breath, puffing his chest, and exhales. A silvery cloud billows from his lips, leaving everything in its wake lined with frost. Ice rolls across the tiles like swash on a beach, coming to a stop right at the leg of the table Yoongi's sitting on. The temperature in the room plummets, and Yoongi’s gotta give credit where credit’s due- they’ve gotten five SOS calls this week thanks to Taehyung alone, but this is by far the closest they’ve gotten to something actually ominous. It feels like they’re in an evil refrigerator.
Hoseok’s still on the floor, pale-faced and shivering. Taehyung levels him with a victorious smirk. He stalks forward slowly, like a cat who'd finally caught the mouse- and promptly slips backwards, long legs knocking into a display case of bubblegum, sending it crashing down on top of him. Yoongi manages to bark out half a laugh before a sudden blur whizzes past him, making his fringe flutter. When he blinks, Hoseok has Taehyung pinned to the counter at the front of the store. His hands are gripping Taehyung’s wrist, bending him backwards.
Yoongi raises an eyebrow.
“Why are you doing this?” Hoseok pleads, and something in Taehyung’s face shuts down. He looks so open and vulnerable that it feels wrong for Yoongi to be standing here watching, he needs a better view. He gets up from his seat and moves closer.
Taehyung hesitates. “I…”
“Just ignore him, Hoseok,” Yoongi says, in between slurping up another mouthful of ramen. Taehyung startles, like he’d forgotten Yoongi was even there. Yoongi can’t really blame him. “He’s only doing it for attention. Don’t give it to him and maybe if we’re lucky, he’ll die.”
Hoseok, acting contrary to good advice as usual, ignores Yoongi and keeps his eyes trained on Taehyung. ”Why?” he asks again.
“For fuck’s sake,” Yoongi groans, throwing the cup in his hands over his shoulder. “Taehyung, can’t you just pine like a normal person and go fuck up some loose college kids instead of fucking up society?”
Taehyung shoves Hoseok back, whirling around to confront Yoongi. “I bet that advice comes from experience, doesn’t it hyung-” he chokes, makes a garbled noise, and falls to the floor.
“Hyung! I mean, Yoongi. I mean, Suga!” Hoseok yells.
“What?” Yoongi exclaims, affronted. “He was lying, so I set his pants on fire. It’s poet-“ Hoseok strips off his jacket, using it to try and suffocate the flames inching up Taehyung’s trousers. “It’s poetic justice, I mean-“ Taehyung finally manages to kick his pants off, babbling hysterically as Hoseok rubs his shoulders to try and calm him down.
Yoongi sighs. “I’ll get the burn ointment.”
When awed citizens (their fed up landlord), starry-eyed damsels (Yoongi’s aged grandmother), and the press (the local high school newspaper club) ask them how their small business got started, they go with Hoseok’s story.
Two friends gifted with great powers, no longer able to rationalise all the evil in the world, drop out of college, work a number of odd jobs to raise enough money for a startup, and open up their own independent Superhero Firm 'Spine Breaker Superheros'. They’re aimed towards the little people, regular civilians who can’t afford to shell out ten, twenty million won for some over-glorified dude in a spandex suit and a fuck-ton of personal baggage to swoop in and save the day. In practice, there's very little actual spine breaking involved, which Yoongi's thankful for.
“A hero is relative,” Hoseok had said to Yoongi when he’d proposed the idea. “Imagine. Your car breaks down, and you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere two hundred kilometres away, Rap Monster is rescuing the CEO of Samsung from an elaborate kidnapping.” He panned a hand across Yoongi’s field of vision. Yoongi stole some of his drink. “But where you are, some truck driver pulls up next to you, opens your hood, and gets your engine revving again. Now, tell me. Who’s the hero?”
That’s their selling point. Literally. They’d even gotten Jungkook - before he went rogue on them - to act as Rap Monster in the infomercial they’d filmed. Namjoon hadn’t been happy, ranting about portrait laws or whatever, but Yoongi knew he wouldn’t actually sue them.
That’s the gist of it. No convoluted origin story, a little underwhelming, but ultimately functional. Just like the small 3x4 metre office they work out of. Suga and J-Hope: ordinary superheroes for ordinary people.
“Sure, we don’t have our own franchise, figurines, or fancy costumes.” Yoongi tugs the edge of his heat conductive jacket - it’d originally belonged to a scientist Hoseok dated three years ago. The teenage journalist in front him nods eagerly, scooting to the edge of her seat and holding the mic closer to Yoongi’s lips. “But we get the job done. We’re not just business partners, we’re friends. We work well together. As a bonus, we won’t bore you with ten-minute long soliloquies like most superheroes, because we’re both well-adjusted people.”
It’s a white lie. Because hey, Yoongi might be pyrokinetic, but he’s still human.
“Hoseok,” Yoongi says, stepping around the room divider. They’d decided to forego actual cubicles while looking for office spaces, and as such, the only thing separating Yoongi’s “office” from Hoseok’s is a simple rice paper screen. Always a fun time when Hoseok gets bored on the job and starts playing video games without his headphones plugged in. “You know we’re not an NPO, right?”
Hoseok beams up at him. “Yeah, why?”
Yoongi waves the receipts in his hands. “Then why are you selling our services for free?”
“Only a few of them!” Hoseok protests, grabbing the papers off Yoongi and flicking through them. “Like, come on, do you really want to charge Mrs. Kim when all we did was catch the guy who keeps stealing her GQ subscription?”
“Uh, yes,” Yoongi deadpans. “Or else we’ll have no money.”
“It’s just.” Hoseok leans back in his chair. “It’s such a trivial thing.”
“All of our work is trivial,” Yoongi snaps. “That’s our thing. That’s why people come to us.” Hoseok frowns, and guilt crawls it’s way up Yoongi’s stomach. He tries to backtrack. “I mean, we barely make ends meet as it is, we’re in no place to start doing pro bono shit.”
“Work’ll get better,” Hoseok says. “We’re just getting started.”
“We’ve been getting started for two years,” Yoongi mutters. Hoseok pinches his forehead, but before he can form a retort, the landline starts ringing. A grin grows on Hoseok’s face, and he flashes his eyes towards Yoongi in a way that very clearly says, ’I told you so.’
“It’s gonna be Jimin calling about Taehyung being a dick and freezing the pond in the park,” Yoongi says. “Like it always is.”
“Or,” Hoseok says pointedly. “It could be an ordinary citizen being terrorised by Taehyung freezing the pond in the park. Like last time.”
“Last time was literally just Jimin talking in a Daegu accent that was, frankly, quite offensive.”
Hoseok raises a finger, silencing Yoongi as he puts the phone on speaker. “Hello, Spine Breaker Superheroes here to save your day.”
“Heeeeeeey Jimin!” Yoongi trills. Hoseok waves him away.
There’s a friendly laugh on the other end of the line. “Not Jimin, unfortunately,” a voice says. “But it’s been a while, Yoongi.”
If anyone bothered to ask Yoongi how their small business got started, the story they’d hear wouldn’t be all that different from Hoseok’s. Except halfway through, Yoongi would have to take a pause and add a disclaimer - that he never wanted to become a superhero. He didn’t not want to become a superhero either, but there’s a part of him, coal black and entrenched deep into his heart, that knows it’s his Godforsaken purpose, and hates it.
He watches the news. He watches the strongest men and women in the world get beaten to within an inch of their life. He reads autobiographies. He reads about losing loved ones, having the people you hold dear to you held hostage like some bargaining chip. He stands outside the National Assembly Building and watches these so-called superheroes stand proud, saying they’d do anything to protect the people.
Yoongi has nothing in common with them - nothing in common with Hoseok - except for the singed DNA that he should only use for good.
Seokjin’s office is sleek, monochrome, and way out of their league. White leather sofas, black tiles, and a gigantic electronic atlas taking up an entire wall in lieu of a window. Yoongi hasn’t seen Seokjin since he’d dropped out of college. They’d been roommates, and the impression Seokjin left had been mostly positive, largely consisting of him bringing Yoongi coffee every night during the run up to finals. This impression sours considerably in the first five minutes of Seokjin speaking.
“I’ve been keeping tabs on you for a while,” he says, spreading out various newspaper clippings over the table. Suga and J-Hope stopping a bank robbery, Suga and J-Hope finding a lost child in a mall, Suga and J-Hope keeping the homeless warm for New Years Eve. “Both your powers are formidable, but severely underutilised.”
“I don’t know, man,” Yoongi says, “We save a lot of money on a radiator.” Discretely, under the table, he rubs a hand against Hoseok’s knee.
Seokjin gives them the bare bones. He works for Big Hit Heroes, and they’re about to embark on a large scale mission fronted by J.O Kwon that involves thwarting a guerilla group of South Korean defectors with plans to blow up Kori Nuclear Power Plant in Busan. They’re dangerous, they’re equipped with state-of-the-art arms, and J.O Kwon needs all the manpower he can get to back him up.
Seokjin slides a grey business card over the table, blank aside from eight silver digits embossed in the middle. “I’ll leave you two to think about it,” he says, smiling kindly before taking his leave.
The room is completely silent save for the steady blip blip coming from the large map in front of them. Hoseok takes a shaky, excited breath. “This is-”
“A suicide mission,” Yoongi says, at the exact moment Hoseok goes, “Everything we’ve ever wanted.”
They turn to face each other. Hoseok looks taken aback, and Yoongi is fucking incredulous. “You’re kidding me,” he says. “What happened to doing it for the little people?”
Hoseok blinks. “You’re the one who said what we do is trivial.”
“Yeah, but did I say I have a problem with it?”
“Come on, you know our profits haven’t been… great,” Hoseok says. “We’d make so much money with this. Not to mention it’d really get our names out there, and we’d get more clients, and-”
“Hate to break it to you,” Yoongi interrupts. “But nobody wants to hire dead superheroes. Seokjin, or Big Hit, or whoever, just want us there as pawns so J.O Kwon can defuse the bomb and still make it in time for his next press conference. Also, since when do you do shit for the money?”
“I’m not doing it for the money,” Hoseok insists. “I’m doing it for… purpose.” Yoongi gawks at him. For once in his life, he can’t seem to find words.
Hoseok shakes his head. “Look, I don’t hate what I’m doing now but… I’m going to do this,” he says resolutely. “You can’t stop me.”
With that, he grabs Seokjin’s business card off the table and stands up. When he walks to the door he waits- for Yoongi to follow? To apologise? Who the fuck even knows - and then sighs. The door clicks shut softly behind him, and Yoongi looks down at his hands. He bends his fingers into claws, drags his nails across his jeans. The trail they leave behind is discoloured.
Hoseok doesn’t have a superhero origin story. He’d been like Yoongi- born with his super speed and not knowing a life without. Even though you don’t see comic book panels about it, the decisions you make while lying in bed undergoing an existential crisis (Yoongi) or trying to catch your breath after saving a life (Hoseok) matter just as much as being thrown into a vat of radioactive waste.
It had been Yoongi’s junior year of college. They’d both been walking back from a party at Namjoon’s dorm, leaning against each other, a little bit tipsy but still coherent. In front of them a freshman they didn’t know stumbled disorientatedly, completely sloshed.
It happened in a split second. Yoongi hadn’t even seen the car. But suddenly Hoseok’s face wasn’t pressed against his shoulder anymore. Instead, he was on the other side of the road, holding onto a sobbing freshman while the driver of the Hyundai swerved into a lamp post.
After that night, Hoseok found a better use for his power, and Yoongi had felt like he’d lost him.
“Did you know, on his official profile,” Yoongi says, wiggling his fingers to conduct energy into his palm, “J.O Kwon has Mad Scientist Yang Hyun Suk down as his arch nemesis?” He flicks his wrist back, the crack of his bone accompanied by a rush of air, and then his entire hand is radiating fire. From the entrance of the alleyway-turned-battleground, Taehyung backs away slowly, hand at his side, ready for combat.
Yoongi swings his arm and flings the fireball forward. At the same time, Taehyung splays his hand and shoots a barrage of icicles in Yoongi’s direction. The attacks meet midway, consuming each other, causing steam to shroud the air between them. Through the mist, Yoongi watches Taehyung’s shadow bolt around the nearest corner. He’s debating exactly how worthless it’d be to chase after him, when Hoseok speaks.
“What’s your point?” he calls from above Yoongi, leaning over the rails of the fire escape he’d been climbing on. He’d followed Jungkook up there, who’d decided to take the form of a monkey for this round of Make Min Yoongi Undergo Strenuous Physical Activity, and scaled all the way to the roof of the apartment complex before pulling a disappearing act.
“My point,” Yoongi begins, craning his neck to meet Hoseok’s eye, “is our arch nemesis is the rat that lives in our office, and the Powersuck Girls. No offence, Jimin.”
“No problem!” Jimin pipes from the dumpster Yoongi had thrown him in after tying him up. “Sorry about the whole… mental torture thing. I’m really just here for Taehyung and Jungkook.”
“Honestly, Jimin,” Yoongi says, holding a hand to his chest, “In another life, we could’ve been friends.” He turns back towards to Hoseok. “So yeah.”
Hoseok raises an eyebrow. “So yeah?”
“So yeah. You were a fucking dunce and overestimated yourself. But it’s fine. You can take it back.”
Hoseok narrows his eyes, stepping down so both feet are levelled. “Listen, I don’t know what your problem is, but-” He stops abruptly, cocking his head to the side, listening for something. “Hold on a sec.”
Hoseok jumps down from the fire escape, feet barely touching the ground before he’s zooming past Yoongi. Yoongi crosses his arms and counts down from ten in his head; he barely gets to eight before Hoseok materialises in front of him, grinning and holding up a mouse by it’s tail. Yoongi squints.
“A rat? Is this because I mentioned one like a second ago? Really, Jungkook?”
The mouse squeaks and begins squirming, swinging in Hoseok’s grip like a defunct yoyo. Then it starts enlarging, elongating and losing hair, features slowly becoming more human-like. Yoongi grimaces and takes a step back; he’s seen the process a hundred times over, but it never gets any less disturbing.
Seconds later, Hoseok holds a glowering Jungkook by the collar of his black and white skin suit. “It isn’t Jungkook anymore,” Jungkook spits out.
“Right. Sorry, what is it this week?”
“Sergeant Gull.”
Yoongi winces. “Christ.”
Hoseok releases Jungkook, who slumps onto the ground with a small oof. He growls at Yoongi and Hoseok, low in his throat, before crouching down on all fours, shifting into a dog, and padding away.
“Yeah, you better run!” Yoongi yells after him. “Anyway, back to your inexplicable death wish,” he says, turning his attention towards Hoseok again.
“We’re not talking about it,” Hoseok says, finality in his voice. “It’s done.”
A twinge of annoyance reverberates through Yoongi, and he wants to push back. But the rational part of his brain tells him it’s none of his business, and Hoseok’s only doing what they'd both signed up for just by being born.
In the end, Yoongi shrugs nonchalantly and strides past Hoseok, bumping their shoulders together, maybe on purpose, maybe not. “Whatever,” he says. “It’s your funeral.”
The last time Namjoon had been in the Seoul for more than a week was a year ago. He’d been dispatched to China by the National Intelligence Service, and spent two weeks hunting down a chemist who, if reports were to be believed, was running human experiments on illegal immigrants in Shenzhen. It turned out the chemist also doubled as the Human Scorpion, and even with his super strength, the battle had left Namjoon wounded enough that he’d been granted a month's leave to recuperate. Yoongi had been glad to have him back, but Operation Scorpio was slated for a movie adaptation in 2017, so he made Namjoon pay for dinner anyway.
Despite not having seen each other for eight months prior, Namjoon had only granted Yoongi fifteen minutes of blissful ignorance before candidly asking: “What’s wrong?”
Yoongi froze in the middle of ripping his breadstick in half. “This place is too fancy,” he said eventually, “and I need to be at least halfway wasted.”
In the end, Yoongi didn’t have to be wasted at all. He’d only needed a text message from Hoseok to light up his phone before he’d spilled his guts all over Namjoon on the sidewalk, halfway to relocating to Yoongi’s favourite second-rate diner.
“I don’t know if I like being a superhero,” Yoongi admitted, feet in the gutter with his face buried in his hands. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Why the hell did I drop out of college to become some neighbourhood vigilante?”
“It’s not like you to force yourself to do things you don’t want to do,” Namjoon said, taking a seat beside him on the pavement.
“It’s not, is it?” Yoongi mused. “But why do I feel like I’m turning my back on a duty.”
Namjoon hummed. “What can you do, really?” he said. “With great power-”
“Comes great responsibility,” Yoongi finished. “I know. That’s why I went through with Spine Breaker Superheroes thing. And I don’t mind it, but I’m not cut out for it.” Yoongi swallowed. “Is it cowardly that I don’t want to get hurt?”
“Nah,” Namjoon said, a hand coming up to squeeze Yoongi’s shoulder. “But most of the assignments you get don’t really involve bodily harm, do they?”
“For now. But you know Hoseok always wanted the firm to grow bigger. I don’t think he’ll be happy until he actually feels like he’s risking his life for something.”
“But then…” Namjoon hesitated, rubbing the toe of his shoe against a discarded cigarette butt. Yoongi watched him absent mindedly, all the things he’d been trying not to think about weighing him down with fatigue.
“What?” Yoongi prompted.
Namjoon looked up at Yoongi, eyebrows furrowed. “Why did you say yes to him in the first place?”
When Yoongi comes back from his shower to find the glass of his living room window frosted over - on one of Seoul’s hottest summer nights to date, no less - it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who’s behind it.
“For the love of-” Yoongi flings the wet towel around his neck onto the sofa and stalks towards the window. He hefts it open and sticks his head outside to find- to no surprise but much irritation- Taehyung jiggling the now frozen handle of his front door.
“Oi,” Yoongi calls, and Taehyung jolts, looking around frantically before his eyes lock onto Yoongi. He smiles sheepishly, and folds his hands behind his back like it had been someone else trying to use their cryokinesis to break into Yoongi’s apartment.
“Sorry, I just wanted to talk to you,” Taehyung explains.
“I have a doorbell.”
“But this is funner.”
Yoongi rolls his eyes. “Climb in through the window,” he says.
Yoongi’s apartment is a one bedroom, one bathroom, cluttered shithole situated above an internet cafe on a highway. He loves it dearly. Taehyung takes one look at the single couch, buried underneath piles of paperwork and half of Yoongi’s wardrobe, and takes a seat on the floor. Yoongi nods approvingly.
Taehyung doesn’t beat around the bush. “You need to talk to Hoseok,” he says as soon as Yoongi beckons towards him. Yoongi freezes, and whatever’s showing on his face makes Taehyung run a hand through his hair in frustration. “I don’t know all the details, but I know enough. You can’t let him go, please talk to him.”
Yoongi squares his shoulders and grips the windowsill behind him. “Do you think I haven’t tried? If you care so much, you try and talk some sense into him.”
“He won’t listen to me. He-” Taehyung looks like it’s sucking the life out of him to say the next few words. “He’ll listen to you.”
The back of Yoongi’s neck starts prickling. “Maybe if you stopped wrecking havoc everywhere, he’d take you more seriously,” he says. He knows he’s derailing, but even though he isn’t completely sure where the conversation is going, he knows he doesn’t want to get there anytime soon.
Taehyung shrugs. “It’s fun,” he says simply. “Also, I think deep down he enjoys it too.”
The corner of Yoongi’s lips quirk up. “Not deep down, he flagrantly lives for that shit.” It’s true. For all that Hoseok prattles on obliviously about what Taehyung’s motivation could possibly be, no other SOS call gets him quite as hyped. Taehyung’s fully aware of this, looking proud as he nods in agreement.
They exchange looks and there’s a stretch of silence, where the only sound comes from the traffic outside. It feels like Yoongi and Taehyung are adjusting into some mutual understanding. For all him and Taehyung butt heads, they both care about Hoseok, and not nearly as differently as Yoongi had liked to believe.
“Please talk to him,” Taehyung says again, picking at the carpet. “Tell him you don’t want him to go.”
Yoongi frowns. “I told you, I already did.”
Taehyung meets his gaze. “No,” he says, voice hardening. A chill trickles down Yoongi’s skin. “Tell him honestly.”
Yoongi brings it up the next day at the office. The room divider is shoved to the side, and Yoongi sits on his desk watching Hoseok pack his minimal superhero gear with growing anxiety. Hoseok is humming to himself, choosing between two pairs of sneakers, and Yoongi is dying a little bit inside.
“Won’t they give you proper gadgets and gizmos?” Yoongi blurts out. “It feels like the least they could do in exchange for your life.”
Hoseok stills in the middle of folding one of his running pants. He looks up at the ceiling and breathes in deeply through his nose. “I knew this was coming,” he says.
“Good foresight,” Yoongi remarks. “If only you could apply it to other-”
“Can you shut the fuck up,” Hoseok snaps, slamming a hand against the backpack on his desk.
It takes Yoongi a moment to register what’s happening. He and Hoseok don’t fight often. In fact, they don’t fight ever. Even though they function completely unalike, they’ve managed to stay friends and work together for so long because of one main reason: they like each other as people. Yoongi’s lazy and disillusioned, but eighty per cent of the time, he sucks it up and follows Hoseok out the door for whatever Heroic Endeavour they’re about to undertake for a base rate of forty thousand won per hour. The other twenty per cent of the time, Hoseok smiles and laughs through Yoongi’s snarky commentary, throws an arm over his shoulder, and makes Yoongi wish he was a better person.
“I don’t get you,” Hoseok plunges forward before Yoongi can even open his mouth. “You don’t think I’m scared? That I don’t know what I’m getting into? We’re meant to be partners. You’re meant to be my friend. Why do you think I asked you, hyung? We were meant to be in this together and instead you leave me out here alone.”
”Tell him honestly,” Taehyung had said. Where does Yoongi even start? “If… if you leave,” he tries. “I’m the one who’s going to be left alone.”
“Then come with me,” Hoseok says quickly. “It’ll be fine. We’ll come back together, get bigger jobs and-”
“I don’t want bigger jobs,” Yoongi cuts in. It’s taken two years to finally come to this point, but faced with the possibility of every single one of his morbid nightmares becoming a reality, he can finally admit what's been eating him up since the beginning: “I wish you wouldn’t either.”
Hoseok deflates, and when he looks at Yoongi the expression on his face is so defeated. “I want to do this, hyung.”
If Yoongi tried, he’s sure he wouldn’t be able to muster up enough energy to even light a match. He feels hollow, like if you opened him up there’d be nothing but a charred and empty cavity inside. “You’re really going to do this then? You’re going to go and get yourself killed.” Yoongi’s voice cracks in the middle and he swears, inhaling sharply and looking away.
“I’m a superhero,” Hoseok says, slinging his backpack over his shoulders, “It’s what I do.”
Hoseok is, by all technicalities, the fastest man in the world. Yoongi’s never felt it more than he does now. Hoseok walks away from him at a measured pace, and the space between their desks and the front door is so small it can barely be called a distance. But Yoongi knows that even if he ran, he’d have no hope of catching up.
Hoseok and Yoongi had waited for the paramedics to arrive. The injured driver was taken into the ambulance on a stretcher, and Hoseok had panicked until one of the EMTs assured him it didn’t look like he'd require anything more than a neck brace. The freshman Hoseok had saved from narrow death was wrapped in a shock blanket, face pale and mute to any attempts at extracting information.
Yoongi should have seen it coming, the lights from the sirens flashed across Hoseok’s face like a warning. Still, it felt like the bottom of his stomach fell out when Hoseok turned to him and said, “I wanna be a superhero.”
Back then, Yoongi had felt like he’d be in the wrong to say no. He’d stared at Hoseok blankly, hoping he looked bored and not conflicted.
“Are you with me?” Hoseok asked.
Hoseok could run from one end of the country to the other in less than 30 minutes. His super speed was impressive. But Yoongi always considered Hoseok’s real superpower to be something more intangible and innate. Something that came out in his smile- that drew Yoongi in and never let him say no.
It’s a six hour drive from Seoul to Busan, Yoongi makes sure to fill his tank with gas the night before he leaves. He’s self-aware enough about his own sleeping habits to not try and set out at sunrise, despite that being the more suitably heroic thing to do, instead setting his alarm for 9:30am. Early enough that it's still going out of his way, but late enough to miss the hellish morning traffic.
He doesn’t know what he’ll do once he gets there. He’d seen the hotel reservations printed out on Hoseok’s desk, but any decent superhero firm would set that up as a red herring. The plan in his head is vague, only half thought-out with no real objective. But somehow, it still manages to go to shit when Yoongi's car starts sputtering halfway along the Gyeongbu Expressway .
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Yoongi groans. His exhaust makes a noise somewhere between a burp and the sound of the last of Yoongi’s sanity finally falling apart.
His car survives long enough to deliver him to the nearest rest area in one piece. Once there, he buys a packet of aspirin, and tries calling Namjoon only to find that he’d changed his number again. He’s pacing around the gas station, deciding whether or not he appreciates irony enough to call Taehyung for help, when he hears a familiar voice behind him.
“Imagine. Your car breaks down, and you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere,” Hoseok’s voice speaks, and Yoongi’s pacing comes to a halt. “Somewhere, two hundred kilometres away, J.O Kwon is trying to prevent a bunch of defected douchebags from blowing up a nuclear power plant.”
Yoongi looks up slowly. Hoseok stands in front of him, looking haggard in a suit Yoongi doesn’t recognise, hair messy like he hadn’t bothered to look in the mirror before running out the door in the morning.
“Where you are,” Yoongi says, soaking in Hoseok’s face like it’s his first time seeing it. “Some guy realises he made a big mistake-”
”-Pulls up next to you-”
“-And asks you to forgive him.”
Hoseok smiles at him. The one Yoongi returns is watery.
“Who’s the hero?”
a/n: as always, thank you to concordances for beta-ing!