Archive of Our Own ^beta

The day Namjoon goes chasing after Mirror shards is a Tuesday.

Technically, it’s a Wednesday, just after midnight, but, as he hasn’t slept yet, it’s still, for all intents and purposes, a Tuesday.

“Start from the beginning,” Seokjin says, rubbing the bridge of his nose. When Namjoon had arrived at his and Hoseok’s apartment and banged on the door, Seokjin had been the one to answer, robe hastily tied around his waist and hair flattened at the back of his head. He doesn’t, in all fairness, look much more awake now.

Namjoon frowns at him. “This is the beginning.”

“No, it’s not,” Hoseok says. He doesn’t look any more awake than Seokjin, but he’s frowning much more heavily. “You shouldn’t have even had that Mirror, for starters. Neither of you should have. Start there?”

“You know what it’s like,” Namjoon says, rolling his eyes. “Artefacts come into the Shop, get put in storage, and then either someone comes in to claim them or they get lost forever. I don’t even remember who brought in that Mirror, it must’ve been years ago.”

“And, what, you didn’t recognise it when it came in?” Hoseok asks sceptically.

“As I said, we get a lot of stuff brought in,” Namjoon repeats. “Shit, you know as well as I do that there’s more than one magic Mirror in the world.”

“But not every magic Mirror kills people, Namjoon,” Seokjin says through gritted teeth. Namjoon winces.

“Don’t say that,” Hoseok says immediately. “We don’t know what that Mirror does, we’ve only ever heard rumours.” He turns to look at Namjoon sharply. “Which is why you need to start at the beginning. What happened to Yoongi-hyung?”

So. The beginning.

Namjoon met Yoongi for the first time in the spring, in the park by the river. He spent a lot of the spring cycling along the river, but that had been the first day he remembered seeing Yoongi; he’d been sitting on a grassy knoll, and a combination of luck and happenstance – the time of day, the partially cloudy sky, the angle of the knoll, the placement of leaves in the tree overhead – meant that, just as Namjoon was cycling towards him, a sunbeam illuminated Yoongi’s face.

The sound of Namjoon’s brakes was almost embarrassingly loud, but Namjoon had been beyond the point of caring. It did, however, make Yoongi startle, blinking up at Namjoon with wide eyes.

“Hi,” Namjoon had said, the word feeling small and inexpressive in his mouth. He swallowed. “Do I… I’m Kim Namjoon.”

Yoongi had blinked again before smiling slowly, widely. “Min Yoongi. Do you want to sit? Do you have somewhere to be?”

He did, technically – the Shop wasn’t going to open itself, after all. However, the great thing about working for yourself and by yourself meant that, if the most beautiful man you’d ever seen invited you to sit next to him in the park on a sunny spring day, you had the option of saying yes.

There was usually a moment, whenever Namjoon met anyone new, where he had to determine whether he could tell them what he actually did for a living. Technically, witches weren’t supposed to show themselves to humans, although in practice it happened more often than not, and was easily remedied with a quick spell. Most witches had a knack for identifying one another – Seokjin and Hoseok had both recognised that Namjoon was a witch within seconds of seeing him – but it was something that Namjoon had never quite mastered.

With Yoongi, though, Namjoon had just known. There was something about him, a familiarity, that made it so easy to open up to him, to tell him about the Lost-and-Found Shop hidden behind the clock face of the city’s clock tower.

“What do you do?” Namjoon had asked, resting back on his palms once he had realised he had been talking almost non-stop for ten minutes.

“I’m between things at the moment,” Yoongi had said, shrugging. It didn’t look like his unemployment bothered him in the slightest, but Namjoon had still said;

“If you need a job… I could use a hand at the Shop?”

Yoongi had grinned at him again. “Do you often offer jobs to strangers? I might not know how to do math, then where would you be?”

“No one needs to know how to do math these days, that’s what the calculator app is for,” Namjoon had joked. “Besides, I’m very good at math, so we can cancel each other out.”

When Yoongi laughed, Namjoon had learned then, his shoulders shook up and down with the force of it. He had stood up, dusted off his shorts, and then held out one of his hands to Namjoon to help him up. “I’ll look you up.”

“You are, without a doubt, the thirstiest man I’ve ever met,” Hoseok says flatly, jolting Namjoon from his retelling. “Is that why he started working at the Shop with you? Because he looked pretty in a park one time? Joon.”

“No!” Namjoon protests. “No, that’s just how we met. He didn’t start working with me until a few weeks later.”

In all fairness, Namjoon had assumed that Yoongi wouldn’t look him up – that he’d just said it to be polite in order to make a quick getaway from the man who offered jobs to strangers he’d just met in the park. However, a few days later, the bell over his Shop’s door had rung, and Yoongi had stepped in, looking just as at ease in the dimly lit, haphazardly organised aisles of lost things as he had sitting outside in the sun.

“How do you ever manage to find anything in here, though?” Yoongi had asked on that first visit, pulling a box from one of the shelves, setting it onto the counter, and rifling through it. “I mean, just in this box alone you’ve got a handkerchief, a green candle, a photo album from…” He’d opened it and flicked through the pages, the spine creaking with disuse. “…the nineties-”

“How can you tell?”

“I’m very smart,” Yoongi had said, glancing up at Namjoon from underneath his eyelashes before fluttering them. “Also, all of these photos have the date printed in the corner.”

“Smartass,” Namjoon had muttered as Yoongi grinned. “And I don’t need to be able to find anything, the Daybook records everything that comes in. That’s how magic works, it just… Does things.” He’d never quite been able to figure out how the Shop works, honestly. “If someone comes looking for something they’ve lost, I just tell them to look in the Book.”

“Customer service at its finest,” Yoongi had replied. “Next you’ll be telling me you don’t greet people when they come into the Shop.”

Namjoon didn’t, usually – he spent most of his time reading next to the big clock window, and if his book was engaging enough, he would often miss the bell over the door entirely. However, he couldn’t tell Yoongi this, because then he would have to admit that, for the last few days, he had been conscientiously manning the front desk just in case Yoongi had decided he wanted to come and visit.

The day that Namjoon had officially hired Yoongi was almost three weeks after that first meeting, the tenth time he had dropped by the Shop, and the seventh day in a row he had stayed for at least one meal, if not two – two of those days, Namjoon hadn’t even been officially working, but Yoongi had stopped by anyway.

“So, say I was interested in working here,” Yoongi had said, batting a palm-sized crystal ball along the table. “What would I be doing? Because, no offense, it just doesn’t seem like there’s much work for you here, let alone two people.”

“I want to spend less time working on the Shop floor, and more time doing research behind the scenes on how the Shop works,” Namjoon had explained, watching the crystal ball roll back and forth. “We usually only get a handful of people come in a day, but the work I want to do is so intensive that even one person coming in can distract me, and if I get distracted it renders all of the work I’ve already done useless.”

Yoongi had nodded thoughtfully, allowing the ball to roll off the side of the table, and catching it with the surety and ease of someone that didn’t often break things out of clumsiness. “Okay, I’ll take the job, if you’re still offering?”

“Don’t you want to know anything about your hours? Pay?”

Yoongi places the crystal ball back on its little stand, angling it so that the light from the clock face window shines through it, casting a prism of light across the table. “Hours don’t really matter to me, and I trust you’ll pay me fairly.”

“How is this related to the Mirror?” Seokjin asks suddenly.

“You told me to start from the beginning,” Namjoon reminds him.

“I meant start from whatever happened to make a Troll’s Mirror break!” Seokjin says. “Not the beginning of your relationship with Yoongi, god, if we follow that story we’ll be here forever!”

Namjoon shrugs and looks away. “I don’t know – he was out on the Shop floor, I was in the office, next thing I knew I heard something shatter. When I came out, the Mirror was on the ground, and Yoongi was… Not there.” He frowned. “Not anywhere.”

“Did you bring the pieces with you?” Hoseok says suddenly. Namjoon nods, reaches into his bag for the little cloth parcel filled with shards, and lays it out on their kitchen table. Hoseok takes out a knife from the knife block and, using the point, gently separates each piece from the others, arranging them into something vaguely remembering the once perfect circle. “One’s missing, there should be seven shards.” Namjoon nods again. “Did you dowse for it?”

Namjoon nods a third time. “It doesn’t exist. And yeah, I know I’m not great at dowsing, but this was different – this wasn’t me not being able to see it, this was the Mirror shard not existing at all.”

Seokjin, finally, starts to brighten. “That’s good.”

“How could that possibly be-”

“It means that, wherever the Mirror piece is, that’s where Yoongi will be.” He stands up, moves to leave the kitchen, and then pauses in the doorway, turning to look at Namjoon with his hand on the doorframe. “Do we still need to have a serious discussion about how to store dangerous magical artefacts within your Shop’s premises? Absolutely. Will I be warding my home against your entry during the night for the foreseeable future? Without question. Is this a problem that we can fix? Yes.” He smiles at Namjoon, who feels a weight lift instantly from his shoulders. “We can fix this.”

He returns to the kitchen table a few moments later with three things – a shoebox wrapped in garish wrapping paper, his wand, and his phone. He set his phone down in the middle of the table, open to a map, and shoos Hoseok and Namjoon aside before dumping the shoebox out next to his phone.

Hoseok sighs. “We eat food off of this table.”

“We eat off of plates,” Seokjin points out, sifting through the stones and crystals with such ease that it almost seems random. “Also, what are you talking about? I cleaned them just last week.”

“Leaving rocks out in the sun does not clean them, it cleanses them,” Hoseok says; he looks set to say more, but when Seokjin purses his lips and frowns suddenly, Hoseok leans closer. “What?”

“Well,” Seokjin says, carefully laying out black tourmaline, jet, obsidian, onyx, and hematite in a circle. “These are the stones I’ve always associated with Yoongi in my practice. I’ve just never really looked at them, you know?” After a moment of looking at the black crystals, Seokjin reaches his hand back into the pile of other gemstones and grasps a lump of chalky amazonite almost the same size as his palm. “Ah!” He jerks his hand back in surprise and drops the crystal in the middle of the circle.

“What?” Namjoon says as Hoseok snatches up Seokjin’s hand to inspect it.

“Nothing, it just suddenly got freezing cold,” Seokjin says, looking at the pile of gemstones; as he’d pulled his hand out, he’d dislodged a piece of quartz. “Huh.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you pull that,” Hoseok says, tilting his head.

“It’s really pretty,” Namjoon says, bending to get a closer look, knowing better than to touch crystals without permission. The quartz point was about the length of Namjoon’s finger, the same colour as diffusing tea, with dark lines running through it that looked a lot like silhouetted fir trees. “What is it?”

“Dendritic quartz,” Seokjin replies, picking it up and placing it in Namjoon’s palm. “You’ll need it to find Yoongi, I think.” Namjoon places the quartz into his bag as Seokjin attaches the amazonite to a piece of string and begins the long, arduous process of dowsing, allowing the amazonite to swing over the circle of black crystals and meticulously swiping along the map on his phone.

Seokjin had always been the best of them at purposefully finding lost things – ironic, considering Namjoon was the one who ran the Lost-and-Found Shop – but it still takes him almost half an hour before he sets the amazonite down, breathing heavily through his nose.

Namjoon, who had been standing at Seokjin’s shoulder the whole time, leans forward onto his toes in anticipation.

Seokjin jabs his finger at his phone screen. “I can’t get you any further than that.” Namjoon leans forward further to squint at his phone screen. “There’s something blocking me from probing beyond that.”

“Something?” Hoseok asks from the kitchen door. Unlike Namjoon, who had been watching like a hawk, Hoseok had been wandering around their apartment restlessly, his hand occasionally reaching towards his broom, as though he was debating whether to just fly out into the night to find Yoongi himself.

“Like a… Wall? No, not even that, it’s just… Nothing. As though there’s nothing there.” He brightens. “Which is a good thing, because when you dowsed for the Mirror piece, it didn’t exist. Which means if the Mirror piece, and Yoongi, are anywhere, they’re there.”

‘There’ was a nondescript path up the mountain; Namjoon takes down the coordinates and searches for the location on his own phone, swiping around to get a good look at the location’s surroundings. It seems to just be a walker’s path – even when he zooms in to see the street view, it just looks like a regular path. A little stone wall on one side, a brook on the other. The slope of the path is gentle, and there’re trees lining the path on both sides.

“Thanks, hyung,” Namjoon says, locking his phone and shoving it into his pocket.

“You’re not going now,” Seokjin says immediately.

“Uh, yes I am?” Namjoon replies.

“Namjoon, it’s the middle of the night,” Hoseok says, waving his hand at the kitchen window. “If you fly now, you’ll hit a tree.”

“Yoongi’s already been gone for nearly two hours, I’m not going to leave him wherever he is while I have a nap,” Namjoon shoots back.

“Two hours?” Hoseok says. “What were you both doing in the Shop after you’d closed?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Namjoon says stiffly. “What matters is going after Yoongi.”

“Then we’re coming with you,” Seokjin says, making to stand up, a little wobbly after dowsing for so long.

“No, what if all three of us get stuck there too?” Namjoon points out. “No one will know where we are.”

Namjoon can tell that neither of them like this reasoning, and he watches as both of them make a series of increasingly expressive faces at one another. Eventually, Hoseok huffs irritably and turns his face away.

“Fine. But take this.” He opens a drawer, takes out a spare front door key, blows on it, then tosses it to Namjoon. “To find your way home.” Namjoon nods in thanks and puts it in his bag. “Oh, and leave the Mirror pieces here.”

“Why?” Namjoon asks.

“Because you don’t want whoever has their one piece of a Troll Mirror getting their hands on the other half a dozen shards,” Hoseok points out, as though this is obvious.

“Don’t destroy it,” Namjoon says, taking the little folded parcel of Mirror shards and laying them out on the table.

“It’s already pretty destroyed,” Seokjin says flatly, looking over the viciously sharp shards of Mirror. Six in total, each piece had snapped away from the others so cleanly that it was as though the Mirror had been sliced like butter.

“You know what I mean,” Namjoon says. “The Shop won’t like it if you break the Mirror, it needs to be collected by its owner.”

“Whoever owns this does not need to find it again,” Seokjin says, his expression sharpening into a scowl as he continues to look at the shards. Hoseok puts a tentative hand on his arm; he shakes his head and looks away from the Mirror. “See what I mean?”

“It’s not up to me to make value judgements on who finds their lost things again,” Namjoon says, a little helplessly - he and Seokjin have had this argument many times before, every single time Seokjin hears that some dark magical item has turned up, and been collected, at Namjoon’s Shop.

But Namjoon believes that you can’t judge someone solely through the things they’ve lost - the owner of the suspiciously hypnotic self-playing piri had been using it to accompany herself on the daegum, and a painting that looked like somebody had taken Dorian Gray as a role model rather than as a warning was actually a painting that was aging alongside their naturally aging owner.

And, okay, maybe he can’t think of many reasons why somebody would own a Troll Mirror to use for good reasons, because a Troll Mirror’s sole purpose was as a means of killing someone, but they’d apparently had the Mirror in the Shop for a while, and neither of them had been killed by it, so maybe it did have some positive uses?

Okay, well, yes, Yoongi was missing because of it.

But he wasn’t dead.

There is something wrong with the mountain.

Perhaps it was wrong in Seoul, too, but he’d been flying so fast that he hadn’t spotted it until he had stopped to walk for a while (Hoseok’s voice echoing in his head, suggesting that he’d fly into a tree, may have been part of his decision to walk instead of fly).

It’s autumn.

He likes autumn, there’s nothing wrong with autumn, but as it had been the middle of summer just that morning, he’s inclined to think that something’s wrong.

“You’ve noticed, too?” A deep voice asks, making Namjoon jump. The low stone wall, the one Namjoon had seen on the street view on his phone, is just starting to slope out of the ground, and a man is sitting on it.

Or, not a man. Men don’t usually have shiny black raven wings, after all.

“You’re quiet, for a human.”

“I’m not a human,” Namjoon says. “And I’m not usually quiet. I… You startled me.” He debates whether he should stay or go – if he goes, there’s a possibility that, whoever this person is, they’ll become vindicative. However, he needs to find Yoongi, so he starts walking away slowly.

The person doesn’t seem to take offense though – he hops up onto the wall and walks alongside Namjoon. “My bad - Jimin always says I should get better at identifying humans, but I don’t spend much time around them, so. I’m Taehyung.”

“You’re giving me your name?” Namjoon asks, surprised.

Taehyung shrugs. “You’re not a name stealer. If you were, you’d know not to steal mine.” He looks up at the sky again.

“Do you know what’s happening?” Namjoon asks. Taehyung looks back down at him and blinks, his dark eyelashes fluttering with the movement.

“Oh, yes. It’s autumn,” he says helpfully.

“Yes, but… It shouldn’t be.”

“Well, I can’t help you with that, I’m afraid.” Taehyung hops off the wall, falling just a little too slowly, enough to be unnatural to the eye. “I’m here to help you through the veil.”

“The… Veil?”

“The veil, the river, the stairway, the ocean, the bridge, whatever takes your fancy, I’m not going to judge,” Taehyung says, stretching his arms over his head and then shaking his wings a little, ruffling them from root to tip. Up close, his wings look huge, glossy black and blue. “Jimin said you needed help crossing, so, here I am.”

“You keep mentioning Jimin, who is he?”

“My best friend,” Taehyung says. As they start walking again, he wordlessly unfurls a wing just as a sudden storm kicks in overhead, and he shelters Namjoon from the worst of the rain. Just as quickly as it had come, it vanishes, and Taehyung shakes his wings dry before tucking them back behind him again.

“Your best friend? That doesn’t tell me anything,” Namjoon says exasperatedly. “Who are you? Why do you want to help me, when you don’t even know what I’m trying to do? You don’t even know my name.”

“It tells you everything you need to know. Haven’t you ever had a best friend before?” Unbidden, Namjoon immediately thinks of Yoongi. “That’s why we’re helping you.”

They come to the point on the map that Seokjin had dowsed for him, and Namjoon expects… Something. A ritual, a portal, a salt circle, something that will get him from point A to point B, but Taehyung just carries on walking. The only indication that something has happened at all is Namjoon’s cell phone signal cutting out.

“You’re not going to be very warm where you’re going,” Taehyung says with a frown, eyeing up Namjoon’s rucksack dubiously. “Do you have a coat in there?”

“When I left my apartment, I thought it was still summer,” Namjoon points out. Taehyung sighs, unfurls his wings again, and ruffles them vigorously until a single feather drifts to the ground. He bends down to pick it up, pinching the stem between his thumb and forefinger, and then holds it out to Namjoon. “Is this… Going to keep me warm?”

“Of course not, it’s a feather.”

“Right. Sorry, I just assumed your question and you handing me one of your feathers were related, given that they happened one right after the other,” Namjoon says, a little bitingly.

Taehyung takes it in stride, snorting as he spins the stem of the feather between his fingers. “The feather’s for something else.” He waits until Namjoon takes it from him and puts it into his bag before he continues. “You’ll just need to get in and out quickly, I suppose.” He smiles expectantly at Namjoon.

“Uh… Thanks, I guess?” Namjoon says.

Taehyung shakes his head, still smiling. “Don’t you know you need to pay the psychopomp, Namjoon?”

“The what?” Namjoon frowns. “Wait. I don’t remember giving you my name.” Taehyung’s smile turns pitying. “Are you the psychopomp? What do I pay a, uh, psychopomp?” The word is vaguely familiar, but outside of magical artefacts and their owners, Namjoon’s a little rusty when it comes to magical creatures outside of his fellow witches.

“Something true,” Taehyung says. Every fact Namjoon’s ever learned seemingly vanishes like smoke from his mind. He can’t think of anything he knows that’s objectively, factually true, and this seems like the sort of thing where a subjective truth just won’t cut it. “Tell me why Yoongi stays for so long.”

“I… Wasn’t aware he was staying away from anywhere,” Namjoon says slowly. Taehyung hums, looking disappointed. “That’s something true!”

“I don’t doubt it,” Taehyung says. “I was just hoping for an answer, that’s all, but you can’t tell me what you don’t know.”

Maybe, Namjoon thinks, this isn’t a trick. Maybe Taehyung just wants to hear about Yoongi.

Thankfully, talking about Yoongi is a task Namjoon’s always up for.

“I need to follow this path, I think,” Namjoon says, looking up the winding mountain path. “But if you come with me, I can tell you more stories about the time I’ve spent with Yoongi? I can’t promise it’ll be true, but I’ll be honest.”

Taehyung looks pleased. “You’re very wise, most people don’t know that there’s a difference.” He falls into step with Namjoon, listening interestedly as Namjoon tells him the first story that pops into his head.

Yoongi liked to stockpile things.

Namjoon had first noticed it about a month after they’d started working together – he’d find long-life snacks squirreled away behind the counter; little jars of shiny, translucent objects that Yoongi would hold up to the clock window’s sunlight to examine during quiet moments; hastily scribbled notes of half-baked ideas tucked as bookmarks in books Namjoon had never seen him touch, let alone read.

But the thing Namjoon had noticed he stockpiled the most was memories; he carried a diary with him everywhere he went. It was clearly magical, and not just because Yoongi was the one who was carrying it - it never ran out of pages, even though Yoongi wrote in it all the time, and the stab-bound blue thread binding the pages seemed to shimmer whenever Namjoon wasn’t looking directly at it.

“You’re watching me again,” Yoongi had said, not even needing to look up from his writing. “Ask the question, whatever it is, I can hear it bouncing around in your head from here.”

“How do you have so much to write about?” Namjoon had asked. He was supposed to be working – that was how he’d justified Yoongi’s hiring to both himself and Yoongi, after all – but instead he was the one standing behind the counter, watching Yoongi where he was sitting in the bay of the clock window. Yoongi was, probably, supposed to be on his break, but they’d spent the whole day with both of them out on the Shop floor, changing between who was manning the counter and who was sitting in the window semi-regularly.

“A lot’s happening,” Yoongi had replied. He stood up, stretched so deeply that his mouth flattened into a content line as he was doing it, and then had come over to the counter to show Namjoon the page he’d been working on.

Namjoon’s been watching me write for a while now. I can hear him thinking from here. I’m going to ask him what he’s thinking about.

Everything Namjoon could see was written like that – short, simplistic sentences, all about what Yoongi was currently seeing, or hearing, or doing, or about to immediately do.

“You look surprised,” Yoongi had said with a laugh. “I never said I was a good diarist.” Namjoon had laughed too, grateful that Yoongi was aware that his diary was a bit shit. “I just like having a record of what I do, you’d be surprised how much you forget over the years.”

“Even if it’s just boring stuff, like me watching you write?” Namjoon had asked.

“Especially the boring stuff.”

Taehyung frowns. “That doesn’t sound like Yoongi.”

“Oh.” Namjoon’s not really sure how to respond to this – does Taehyung think he’s lying? And how – and when – did Taehyung know Yoongi? Despite the distinct otherness of Yoongi, Namjoon had always just chalked that up to him being some sort of magical being, even if he didn’t seem to be a witch. But if he knew Taehyung, did that mean he came from this peculiar place, where time seemed to be slipping by so oddly that Namjoon could see leaves changing colour as they walked up the path?

“Is he happy?” Taehyung asks.

Namjoon’s immediate reaction is to say of course Yoongi’s happy – the days they spend together have taken on a golden tint in his memory, and he can remember Yoongi smiling more often than not.

But that’s the thing – there have been times, especially recently, where Yoongi’s appeared pensive, frustrated, even sad, staring out of the clock window at the sky for long enough that Namjoon’s seen the colours of the light shift across his face.

“Most of the time,” Namjoon admits.

Taehyung smiles widely. “I’m glad – he’s never very happy here.” Before Namjoon can question him about this, Taehyung uses one of his wings to push aside some branches hanging low over the stone wall, and gestures for Namjoon to step off the path. The logical part of Namjoon’s brain starts questioning whether it’s safe to let a stranger lead him off the path and into the forest, before an even more logical part of his brain points out that, not only has Taehyung had ample opportunity to do him harm, he’s also Namjoon’s only lead on Yoongi’s whereabouts.

So, he steps over the wall, and heads deeper into the forest.

As far as Namjoon can tell, they don’t walk for long before they come across a lake so clear that Namjoon can see a cottage totally submerged in its waters. Far off in the distance, he can also see storm clouds gathering.

Taehyung starts turning over pebbles with the toe of his boot. He kicks one up into his hand, stares at it consideringly, then tosses it into the lake.

“You’re gonna hit me with a rock one of these days,” a voice says crossly from behind them. Namjoon jumps; Taehyung just laughs.

“I mean, I haven’t yet.” They both turn to look at the newcomer – they look like any number of normal people Namjoon could walk past on the street, if normal people on the street wore a mismatch of billowing fabrics in dark green, lemon yellow, and fuchsia. “Namjoon, this is Jimin, he’s my best friend.” Taehyung doesn’t introduce Namjoon to Jimin, but Namjoon’s not too surprised – Jimin had been expecting him, after all.

“How are you at rowing, Kim Namjoon?” Jimin asks, looking him up and down.

“Uh, I’ve never done it?”

“It’s easy.” Jimin leads them to the ricketiest looking rowboat Namjoon’s ever seen (although, admittedly, he hasn’t seen many rowboats in his life). “You sit there, and Taehyung, you sit at the back…”

“I don’t want to get my wings wet though,” Taehyung says glumly.

“But I don’t want your wings in my face,” Jimin says. They have a silent stand-off for a moment, but eventually Taehyung steps into the boat when Jimin pouts out his bottom lip, just a little. Namjoon steps in next, and half expects the boat to creak, but it feels surprisingly sturdy underfoot.

Jimin steps in with the otherworldly lack of gravity Namjoon’s beginning to think most of the people he’ll meet here will have. He first hands Taehyung an oar, then Namjoon. “Taehyung’ll do the steering, you just focus on rowing.”

“Where’re we going?” Namjoon asks.

“To talk some sense into Yoongi-hyung, of course,” Jimin replies. “Trying to hide from a Troll’s Mirror, honestly, should’ve just destroyed the thing properly when he next had the chance, save all of us a bunch of time and effort…” He trails off into mumbling, but Namjoon’s focused on one thing and one thing only.

“You know about the Troll’s Mirror?”

Jimin hums. “It’s the only reason he’d be back so soon.” He falls into silence for a moment, so the only thing Namjoon can hear is the rhythmic splash of their oars hitting the water. “How much do you know about him?”

“Do you… Want an honest answer, or a truthful one?” Namjoon asks warily.

Jimin laughs, a delighted giggle that rings out over the surface of the lake like a bell. “Taehyung-ah, you’ve already gotten to him?”

“No, no!” Taehyung shakes his head so vigorously that Namjoon can feel the boat rock with it. “He just came like this.”

“I don’t mind,” Jimin says gently. “Whatever you’re willing to offer. The lies we tell to ourselves and to others are just as revealing to me as truths.”

Namjoon ponders this for a moment, and then thinks about the question carefully.

How much does he know about Yoongi?

He and Yoongi had fought twice in all the time that they’d known one another.

(And it’s thinking this that Namjoon realises – he can’t put a timeframe on how long they’ve known each other for. He knows he met Yoongi in the spring, but which spring? Maybe Yoongi has the right idea about writing everything down.)

The first time had been relatively soon after Yoongi had started working at the Lost-And-Found Shop. Seokjin and Hoseok had stopped by, in part to invite them over for dinner but mostly out of curiosity, wanting to meet Namjoon’s new hire. Seokjin had mentioned, in passing, that he hadn’t been expecting anyone new to Magical Seoul, and Yoongi had smiled, tight-lipped, and said that maybe Seokjin didn’t know everything.

Seokjin had laughed, but Namjoon had frowned at Yoongi after he and Hoseok had left. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Yoongi had said, looking genuinely confused.

“That, with Seokjin-hyung.”

“Oh.” Yoongi had fussed about with the Book for a moment, even though there was nothing about the Book that needed fussing with. “He’s nosy.”

“He’s one of my oldest friends.”

“He’s still nosy.”

“There’s nothing nosy about pointing out that you did kind of just appear out of the blue,” Namjoon had pointed out, feeling his nerves start to fray.

“He pointed it out because he wanted to know why I appeared ‘out of the blue’,” Yoongi had replied, looking up from the Book and giving air quotes that dripped with so much mockery that Namjoon had taken a step back, stunned. Yoongi had let his hands drop then, looking contrite, and mumbled, “That’s nosy.”

“Okay, look,” Namjoon had said slowly. “Your past, that’s your business, and if you never want to tell us, fine. But there’s no need to be rude to my friends, especially when you’ve never actually told me that you didn’t want to talk about where you’ve come from.”

“You’re right,” Yoongi had replied. “I’ll apologise to your friends at dinner.”

And he had – he’d told them that he’d come from elsewhere; that, while not ashamed of his past, he didn’t want to talk about it, but that that hadn’t given him the right to lash out.

And that had been that.

“In retrospect, I kind of wish I’d pushed it a bit more,” Namjoon muses. He rather likes rowing – it’s just physical and rhythmic enough that it makes it easy to think. “Tried to at least get out of him where he’d come from, whether or not he wanted to go back. You said the Troll’s Mirror is the reason he came back so soon? Maybe we could’ve…” He trails off.

“But he told you where he’d come from,” Taehyung says bewilderedly.

“…When?”

“Elsewhere,” Taehyung says. “He literally said Elsewhere. That’s here.”

“Elsewhere,” Namjoon repeats. “Like a proper noun, not an adverb?”

Jimin snorts. “Like a proper noun, yeah. You know this place by a lot of names – the afterlife, the underworld – but we like Elsewhere.”

“The after – am I dead?” Namjoon asks, aghast.

“Do you… Feel dead?” Taehyung says. Namjoon, suddenly, hearing him speak, remembers him introducing himself as a psychopomp, and feels like kicking himself for not cottoning on sooner.

“Would I even know if I was?” Namjoon shoots back. “How do I know that I’m not already dead, and you’re both ferrying me away while pretending to help me?”

“You’d know,” Jimin says flatly. “Also, dead people don’t tend to be rude.”

“Not to mention that Jiminie isn’t a psychopomp,” Taehyung says. “He’s a witch, like you.”

“Oh.” Namjoon glances over his shoulder. “Sorry. To both of you.” Jimin shrugs, but Taehyung shoots him a thumbs up and a grin, which is something. “So, Jimin, why do you and Yoongi-hyung live here?”

“I didn’t used to,” Jimin says, nudging Namjoon’s arm to get him to start rowing again; Taehyung’s been steering them towards the storm clouds, and they’re close enough now that Namjoon can see snow pluming out from them. “But you know as well as I do that magical borders are living things – the borders of Elsewhere and your world got redrawn a while back, and my lake switched from one side of the border to the other.” Namjoon can feel him lean out of the boat, and hears him drag his fingertips through the water’s surface. “I like my lake, though, and I have more friends here than I ever did back in the other world, so this works nicely for me.” He huffs a laugh through his nose. “I can see why Yoongi-hyung doesn’t like it here, though – he splits his time pretty evenly between this world and yours.”

“He’s been to my world before?” Namjoon asks, frowning.

Taehyung makes a noise that sounds like a wounded animal.

“Yeah,” Jimin says softly. “Yeah, he has.”

When the little boat bumps up against something resembling a shoreline, Jimin hums worriedly. “The ice is fast this year.” When Namjoon turns to look at him, he glances up and down his bare arms. “Do you feel cold?”

“Not as cold as I should, I think,” Namjoon says slowly, taking stock – it feels rather like he’s been sitting in the sun all day, and now the summer night air feels comparatively cool. It doesn’t, at any rate, feel like he’s sitting in shorts and a t-shirt amongst ice forming so rapidly that he can hear it.

“Well, that’s good?” Taehyung says unconvincingly. “That means he’ll be able to get in, right?”

“Don’t people dying of hypothermia say they feel warm?” Namjoon asks. “And what do you mean, get in? Get in where?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never died of hypothermia,” Jimin says, ignoring Namjoon’s other questions. He floats out of the boat, testing the sturdiness of the ice before he lets his full weight drop down. “We’ll come with you as far as your next stop, but you’ll need to do the last part of your journey on your own. It’s too cold for us where you’re going.”

“I’m just a guy from Seoul, I’m not immune to freezing to death!” Namjoon says indignantly.

“You’ll be fine.” Jimin pats him on the shoulder. “Come on.” They trudge a little ways from the boat, and then Jimin suddenly makes a little, “Ah!” sound, runs back to the water, and cups some in his hand before it freezes. “You’ll need this.”

“I’ll need… A handful of water?” Namjoon says, frowning when Jimin gestures for him to open his bag. “You want to just dump a handful of water in my bag?” Jimin nods expectantly. “Uh… No?”

“You can’t carry it in your own hand,” Jimin says, with the tone of someone saying something completely reasonable.

“But there’s stuff in here that I don’t… Want to get wet?” Namjoon tries to explain.

“You’re acting under the assumption that this is water like your water,” Jimin says patiently. He pours it from one hand to the other.

Well, pours is the wrong word. Although it had certainly looked and sounded like water when they’d been rowing on it, up close it’s more like a smog, and it billows disconcertingly as it ebbs downwards between Jimin’s hands.

Namjoon’s still not sure he wants it in his bag, honestly, it looks a little too sentient for him to feel comfortable carrying it around, but Jimin’s starting to look impatient, and even Taehyung’s tapping his foot, so Namjoon opens his bag and lets Jimin dump the weird lake slime juice in there.

As he pours it in, he peers down at the items already in there and raises his eyebrows approvingly at what he sees. “What prompted you to bring that?” He nods down at Yoongi’s diary.

“I had it on me when he disappeared,” Namjoon admits. “Honestly, I wasn’t really thinking, I just stuffed it into my bag and flew to my friends’ place.”

Jimin nods. “Good instincts.” He goes to stand with Taehyung and waits for him to envelop him in one of his wings. “Okay, let’s go track down Jeongguk.”

Their progress is slow – in part because the snow’s getting thicker and thicker the further they go, but mostly because Jimin and Taehyung are clearly getting colder, huddling closer together. Namjoon still feels fine, though, if a little tired from all the walking.

“Just tell me where to go!” He shouts over the howling of the wind.

Taehyung shakes his head, which transfers into a full-body shiver so violent he almost dislodges Jimin from underneath his wing. “We promised we’d go with you!”

“You’re both freezing!” Namjoon protests.

“I don’t think it’s much longer!” Jimin yells back. “Jeongguk’s usually around here…” He squints into the snowstorm and then points excitedly, his finger vigorously enough that he needs to use his other hand to steady it. “There he is!”

It takes a few more metres of walking, but eventually Namjoon can see it – a squat little cottage and, as they draw even closer, a man pacing around outside it.

“You’re late!” He shouts over the howling wind.

“No, the ice’s just faster than we thought it’d be!” Taehyung calls out, teeth chattering. Jeongguk bundles them all inside, although not without a bemused stare at Namjoon’s legs.

“Thighs,” he says once they’re all inside, door firmly shut on the snowstorm. He shakes his head. “Why did you come in shorts and a t-shirt?”

“When I dressed this morning, I wasn’t planning on needing to go on a katabasis,” Namjoon replies. Jeongguk looks at him blankly. “A journey to the underworld? It’s a literary tradition?”

“I don’t read much,” Jeongguk admits, waving a vague hand towards a yanggeum sitting in the otherwise entirely empty room they’re in. “I play for most of the year, and then sleep for the rest.”

“That sounds nice,” Namjoon says, although he’s not sure he means it – the room’s more like a prison cell than a house.

“I don’t play in here!” Jeongguk laughs. “That’d be depressing. I play where the border’s the thinnest, whenever someone needs inspiration.” He pulls a bamboo stick seemingly out of thin air and strikes the yanggeum; the brightest, sweetest note Namjoon’s ever heard rings out of it. “Oh! You’re easily inspired, huh?”

Namjoon shakes his head. “I wouldn’t say so?”

“Being easily inspired isn’t the same thing as finding it easy to create,” Jeongguk says; the bamboo stick disappears.

“Jeonggukkie,” Jimin says gently. “Focus.”

“Right, right, my bad,” Jeongguk says. He turns to Namjoon and sighs. “What led Yoongi-hyung to break a Troll Mirror?”

The second time he and Yoongi had ever argued had been in the hours before he’d disappeared.

They’d been taking inventory – or trying to, at any rate. Yoongi insisted that the Shop’s chaotic organisation was stressing him out, but every time they tried to tidy things up a little, they ended up distracting each other and just using the time to hang out.

Yoongi had been slowly going through a cardboard box, laughing at the story Namjoon had been telling (some story from his schooldays with Seokjin and Hoseok, he can’t even remember which one he’d been telling), when he’d literally stopped, mid-laugh, and pulled out the Troll’s Mirror. “Holy shit, why do we have this?”

Namjoon had shrugged. “We get a load of stuff, you know that, hyung.”

“Yeah, but, do you know what this does?” Yoongi had looked frightened and, in hindsight, Namjoon wishes he’d taken his distress more seriously, but instead he’d just laughed, shaken his head.

“I mean, I’ve heard the rumours, yeah! But it’s been in the Shop with us for a while, I’d imagine, and we’re not dead.”

Yoongi had pursed his lips, jammed the Mirror back into the box, and said, “Why do you never take things seriously?”

“Excuse me?” Namjoon had said.

“The maintenance of the Shop, your life, our relationship – you just breeze through, day to day, as though everything will be the way it is forever-”

“He stormed off out the back after that, taking the box with him,” Namjoon says. “I didn’t…” He sags. “I didn’t know he felt that way about me. About the way I live my life.”

“He doesn’t,” Jeongguk insists.

“Do you know what a Troll Mirror actually does?” Jimin asks. Namjoon shakes his head. “It takes all of the deepest, darkest fears in your heart, and blows them up big in your heart until it’s all you can see. The reason the Mirror’s got the, ah, reputation it does is because fear can drive people to do extreme things.”

“So Yoongi’s deepest fear is what, exactly?” Namjoon asks.

“You can ask him that when you see him,” Taehyung says. “What happened next?”

“I don’t know,” Namjoon says. “He came back out with the box later and started doing inventory again, so I went out the back to give him space – I found his diary, so I was going to bring it out to him as an excuse to talk to him when I heard this crack. When I went to look, I just found the six shards of the Mirror.”

“Six?” Jeongguk asks.

“Magic always has a sense of humour,” Jimin says. “Which reminds me, Jeongguk-ah, you need to give Namjoon-”

“Right, right.” Jeongguk frowns consideringly, then brightens, waves his hands through the air and unspools a golden string, similar to the ones on his yanggeum but much, much longer. He hands it to Namjoon. “Multi-purpose.”

“Show off,” Taehyung mutters.

“Thanks,” Namjoon says, putting the string into his bag. He thinks about voicing his worry that it’ll get tangled up in there, what with the diary, the dendritic quartz, the key, the feather, and the weird water, but he figures that a thread that can’t be tangled wouldn’t even the fifth weirdest thing he’s seen today, so he lets it slide. “Where do I go now?”

“Just go as deep into the storm as you can,” Jeongguk says. “You won’t lose your way from here.”

“Thank you.” Namjoon hoists his bag up onto his back. “All of you. I couldn’t have gotten this far without your help.”

“No, you couldn’t,” Jimin agrees cheerfully. “But you’re helping us too, don’t forget, so it evens out.”

“Will I see you again?” Namjoon asks.

They all look a little sad at that question, which worries some bone deep part of him. “Of course you will,” Taehyung says.

Taehyung deals in truths, which only worries Namjoon more.

Namjoon knows he’s reached the heart of the storm when the wind, which he has felt battering him even if he can’t appreciate how cold it is, suddenly drops.

The heart of the storm is a lake at the top of the mountain. Unlike Jimin’s lake, this one has totally frozen over, and the ice is strangely greenish under the dim light of a very early dawn. Normally, Namjoon wouldn’t dare set foot onto an unfamiliar iced-over lake, especially with no one else around - however, the small island in the middle of the lake has been covered with a huge labyrinth of ice, and he’s too curious to really consider his safety as well as he should. He’s got his broom, if he needs it.

The ice is startlingly clear, and disorientating to walk on - the sky is light enough now that he can see the bottom of the lake sloping away as he walks further out, and his eyes are telling his brain that it should be taking his feet much longer to hit the ground than it actually is. It’s like he’s walking in a dream, and he finds himself taking slow, deliberate steps, waiting for the moment in the dream where the ice gives way and he finds himself plummeting.

But he doesn’t - he makes his way across the ice, and the only reason he knows he’s made it to the island in the middle of the lake is because he can see flash-frozen grass underneath the sheet of ice, rather than the pebbles and algae of the lake. There are even wildflowers down there, frozen suddenly as they had swayed in the breeze.

Now that he’s closer to the labyrinth of ice, he can see, distorted, that they are surrounding something. He tries to circumnavigate the maze, to find a spot where the ice will thin out enough and allow him to see whatever it is, but he has no such luck.

He does, however, find an entrance, so he rummages through his rucksack for the golden thread Jeongguk had given him. He unspools a little, lays it down on the ground, and then pours a little water (his own, regular water, as opposed to Jimin’s, which has coagulated unsettlingly at the bottom of his bag) over the top of it - just as he’d hoped, the water starts to freeze quickly, locking the thread in place.

As he makes his way through the maze, past more and more sheets of ice, he starts to get a better view of whatever it is that the labyrinth has grown around. It looks like a small tree, to begin with - the tendrils at the top resemble branches, and there’s a sturdy base that looks kind of like a trunk. Then, from a different angle, he sees that the trunk has a portion cut out of it, deep enough that it would kill a tree.

Once he reaches the other side of it, he can see that something is sitting behind it. They’re humanoid shaped, but that doesn’t mean anything, especially considering that they’re sitting in what appears to be the eye of a sudden winter storm.

And then he reaches a snag - the heart of the labyrinth, the part encasing the object and the person, appears to be entirely closed off. He circles it a few times, running his hand along the ice to doublecheck, but its seamless.

He’s still not close enough to see who, or what, is sitting there, but he stops where he thinks they’d be able to see him, and then starts hammering his fists against the ice to get their attention.

The person’s head shifts, so he starts waving.

“You shouldn’t have come,” a voice echoes through the labyrinth, reverberating from every direction until it sounds like a choir.

Namjoon clenches his fists. “I’m not leaving without my…” He pauses. “Yoongi. Without Yoongi.” The voice takes so long to respond that Namjoon starts to think that he might’ve imagined it.

Eventually, though, it says “It’s winter.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Namjoon says, gesturing expansively. “I know what winter looks like. What, are you saying that he’s disappeared because of the sudden, weird winter?” Namjoon frowns, thinking over the logic of that, and the timeframe. “…Or that there’s a sudden winter because he disappeared?” He cups his hands against the ice and tries to peer through. “…Yoongi?”

The ice he’s peering through suddenly melts, drenching his feet and almost sending him tumbling forward. When he stabilises himself, he looks over at the figure sitting in the middle of the labyrinth.

It’s Yoongi, in the same shirt and jeans he’d been wearing when he had disappeared a few hours ago. Namjoon looks him over, a little desperately, checking for injury, but he looks… Fine. Tired, maybe, judging by his slouched posture as he leans against the back of what, Namjoon can now clearly see, is a chair made of ice. Namjoon doesn’t know why Yoongi’s sitting behind the chair, rather than in it, but Yoongi doesn’t give him a chance to ask.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he says, drumming his fingers against his knee. “You didn’t need to.”

“I thought you were dead,” Namjoon says, feeling rage begin to bubble up hot in him – and Taehyung had been worried that he’d be cold. “And then, when Seokjin told me you weren’t, you think I wouldn’t follow you to the ends of the Earth to find you? To bring you home?”

“Home,” Yoongi says tonelessly.

“Yes, home,” Namjoon says. “Where you’ve lived for...” He waves his hand irritably. “Look, I don’t know, and I’m starting to realise there’s a lot going on that I don’t know, and I don’t know what all this is,” he waves his hand again at the ice. “But you have a home, and it’s with me.”

“You can’t have spring without winter,” Yoongi says. “You can’t have winter without spring.”

“Yoongi!” Namjoon shouts. “I’m sorry we weren’t speaking when you disappeared, but it was a petty argument! I know the Troll Mirror was just making your fears seem bigger than they were, but whatever they are, we can work through it!”

Finally, there’s a flash of an expression across Yoongi’s face – frustration. “I know what a Troll Mirror is supposed to do, Namjoon. You’re the one that thought it killed people, not me.”

“Oh.”

Yoongi’s starting to look more like the Yoongi Namjoon knows. There’s the current frustration on his face, sure, but more emotions are starting to bleed into his expression – patience, fondness…

Love.

There’s always been love on his face, Namjoon realises suddenly, from the moment they’d laid eyes on each other in the park on that spring day.

“I smashed the Troll Mirror because I didn’t want you to see me like that,” Yoongi says. “All that fear and doubt… Namjoon-ah, we get so little time together, I don’t want to spend it in fear of the day I have to come back here. But it turns out if you go around smashing extremely powerful artefacts, you get blasted from one world to another. I arrived back here when it was supposed to be summer, and everyone was extremely pissed to see me, considering I bring winter whenever I arrive.”

“Hyung, I’m confused,” Namjoon says.

“You always are,” Yoongi says gently. “Whenever I explain it, you’re always confused.”

The first time Yoongi had seen Namjoon, it had been spring.

The first time Namjoon sees Yoongi, it’s always spring, but the first time, that first time, it had been spring, too.

Yoongi had been a regular person. Not a witch, not a psychopomp, not a muse – just a boring person working an eight-to-six in an office in Seoul.

“Not boring,” Namjoon would always complain whenever Yoongi brought it up in passing. “You’re you.”

They’d both fallen fast, that first time, and Namjoon had told him as much about magic as he knew – which, even then, had been limited to what he’d needed to know to run the Shop. Namjoon had lived life simply – his work and his friends had always been enough, and they took their relationship slowly, too, happy to live day to day.

The problem had arisen when Yoongi had accidentally gotten caught on the wrong side of one of Elsewhere’s border redrawings. It happened on occasion, people would get stuck on the wrong side of the border, and it’s how he’d come to meet Jimin later, but he was the first, and only, mortal to get stuck.

Namjoon had come for him, that first time, and Elsewhere had struck a deal with them – they’d let Yoongi return to the mortal world at the start of spring in Elsewhere, and they could begin life anew.

Nobody had taught Yoongi then, of course, that you should really consider what the word ‘anew’ means. And ‘spring’, too, because it turns out that spring in the mortal world and spring in Elsewhere don’t necessarily happen at the same time.

That second spring had been rough – no one had any memory of Yoongi; much, much more than three months had passed in the mortal world; he had nowhere to live; and it had only made things worse when Yoongi, in an attempt to prove who he was to Namjoon, had spouted off things about Namjoon that nobody but Yoongi had known. However, without any memory of telling Yoongi these things, Namjoon had been mistrustful of Yoongi, and that had been the first, and only, Winter where Namjoon hadn’t tried to come after Yoongi.

Every subsequent spring, Yoongi had tread more carefully, and tried to guard his heart against falling even more deeply in love with Namjoon. In most cycles, Namjoon falls in love right back, and charges into Elsewhere to bring him home.

Around cycle seventy (honestly, Yoongi lost track what he thinks are centuries ago), Elsewhere had made another bargain – if Yoongi can find his way out of Elsewhere before the end of winter, he can stay with Namjoon in the mortal world.

“But it’s pretty difficult to find your way out of winter when you are Winter,” Yoongi says wryly. They’re both sitting, cross-legged, on the ground.

“We love each other?” Namjoon asks, still feeling a little hung up on that deal.

“Most of the time,” Yoongi says. He laughs suddenly. “Wait, no, that sounds awful – I love you all of the time, you love me most of the time.”

Namjoon laughs, shocked. “That sounds just as awful! I think I love you all of the time, just sometimes I haven’t realised it yet.”

“Oh.” Yoongi smiles down at his lap. “Really?”

“There’s just something about you,” Namjoon admits. “And I recognise it, even if I don’t know why.” He shakes his head to clear it. “But we can talk about that once we get home.” He tips his bag out on the ground in front of Yoongi and looks at him expectantly.

“I don’t know what this is,” Yoongi says. He blinks. “Well, I know that’s my diary.”

“You don’t?” Namjoon asks, disappointed. “I was hoping these were the things that’d help you find your way home, that’s why I’ve been carrying them.”

“Tell me what they are?”

So Namjoon does – tells him about the dendritic quartz Seokjin had pulled (and Yoongi has a good laugh over Namjoon’s explanation of the crystals Seokjin associates with him, tells him that Seokjin’s almost always the first one to pick up on something about Yoongi, in almost every cycle); Hoseok’s enchanted key (“No, I didn’t ask him what enchantment he blew on it, I was kind of in a hurry to leave.”); Taehyung’s feather, Jimin’s water, Jeongguk’s thread.

“The three of them seemed so sure these things would help,” Namjoon says glumly. “Seokjin too, he said he thought I’d need this, and Hoseok said the key would help us find our way home.”

Yoongi smiles, although it’s a little sad around the corners. “It’s nice that everyone sent things with you, though.”

And Namjoon sees it.

At Yoongi’s fingertips, the ice melts, just a little.

“Has Winter always followed you around in here?” Namjoon asks, staring at the little melted patches.

“Not always,” Yoongi admits. “Some years it’s better than others – this year seems like it’s gonna be a bad Winter.”

“It’s not tied to you,” Namjoon says. He looks up. “Well, it is, but not to your physical location. It’s tied to your emotions.” He grins, and he can feel it’s a little wild, but he doesn’t care. “That’s why I’m not cold here! Because you’ve loved me for so long, the Winter can’t reach me!”

“Oh, that’s…” Yoongi wrinkles his nose and pretends to gag. “No, I refuse. Stop it.”

“So these things…” He waves his hand at the assortment of what appears to be nothing more than rubbish. “They have sentimental value, because they show how much you’re loved, and how many people want you to be truly happy.”

Yoongi, it turns out, cannot maintain eye contact when he’s being told how much he’s loved – Namjoon wonders how many lifetimes he’s delighted in this knowledge. “So, people love me, fine,” Yoongi says gruffly. “That doesn’t explain how we’ll get home.”

“You follow me,” Namjoon says simply. Yoongi blinks slowly. “Have we tried that before?”

“No,” Yoongi says. “If we get to this stage, our plans usually end up much more convoluted than that. Last time, you attempted to argue that me being here was me being, technically, ‘lost’, and you tried to exploit the magic of your Shop, except the one constant in every single cycle is that you’ve never gotten around to figuring out how your Shop works.”

“We’ve already established that the one constant is that I’m always at least a little bit in love with you, we can’t have more than one constant,” Namjoon jokes, sweeping everything, except the golden thread, back into his bag. He stands up and offers his hand to pull Yoongi to his feet.

“This seems too easy,” Yoongi says warily. He goes to take his hand away, but Namjoon holds on tight.

“It relies on you remembering that you’re loved, even when everything in your head’s telling you otherwise,” Namjoon says. “It’s not going to be easy.”

Sure enough, they make it as far as the other side of the frozen lake, and Namjoon’s finally finished winding up the golden thread to put back in his bag, when Yoongi huffs in a breath.

“We should just… Think about this more.” Namjoon takes his hand back into his. “No, no, hear me out, I know that people probably like me-”

“We love you,” Namjoon says simply.

“I just don’t think the power of love, affection, whatever, is gonna be powerful enough to keep winter at bay,” Yoongi says.

“I watched you melt ice when you looked at one of Taehyung’s feathers,” Namjoon points out.

A faint smile pulls up the corners of Yoongi’s lips. “It wasn’t just his feather. Why did he even give you a feather?”

Namjoon shrugs. “Beats me. It’s kind of a funny story, actually – he gave it to me after asking if I was going to be cold, so I assumed that he was giving it to me to keep me warm…”

Namjoon keeps that up, talking and talking and talking about anything that comes to mind until they reach the cottage; he can see Jimin, Taehyung, and Jeongguk’s faces peering out of one of the windows and, when they see him, Jeongguk opens the window, having to yank at it to dislodge it from its frozen position.

“We can’t come with you!” Taehyung calls out.

“Why not?” Namjoon shouts back.

Yoongi snorts. “Because if this goes wrong, I’ll be the epicentre of the worst blizzard you’ve ever seen. You’re the only one immune, remember?”

“Oh.” Namjoon thinks about this for a moment. “How’ll we find our way back?”

The three of them discuss this for a moment, and then Taehyung climbs out of the window, beats his wings heavily, and takes off into the sky.

“Taehyung led you in, he can lead you out!” Jeongguk shouts. He cups his hands around his mouth to make his voice echo even louder around the clearing. “Just don’t freeze him out of the sky!” Jimin swats at his shoulder a few times and Namjoon, Yoongi’s hand still in his, sets off after Taehyung’s distant figure, giving Jimin and Jeongguk a wave.

“Jimin’s going to be cross that I’ve frozen his house over so early,” Yoongi says, and Namjoon has to pause to consider his reaction to this. Normally, unthinkingly, he’d just laugh, point out that yes, Jimin probably would be mad about being unable to get into his home! However, he’s not sure that gentle mockery will help Yoongi keep Winter at bay – as it is, Namjoon can see frost spider-webbing out from his footprints with every step they take across Jimin’s lake, almost entirely frozen over.

He's also grappling with the fact that he doesn’t know their relationship as well as he thought he’d had. He’d never dream of saying that he knew anyone in their entirety, but he’d kind of always assumed that he knew most of what there was to know about his friendship with Yoongi.

While he doesn’t necessarily believe in the concept of a ‘best’ friend – he loves Yoongi, Hoseok, and Seokjin in different, parallel ways – Yoongi’s is the opinion he wants first on most things, Yoongi’s is the smile he thinks of first when he imagines recounting something funny that’s happened to him, Yoongi is the one he’s imagined right there at his side whenever he’s considered what the future will entail.

Learning that he’s fallen in love with Yoongi over and over again, lived relationships with him that he’ll never remember… It’s not a bad thing, but it is recolouring every interaction they’ve ever had in his mind.

“That’s a lot of thinking for an offhand comment about Jimin,” Yoongi says. “You don’t need to think about a response that deeply.”

“It’s not that,” Namjoon says; when he looks over at Yoongi, he’s raised an eyebrow at him, although, like always, Yoongi immediately whips his gaze away when Namjoon meets it. Namjoon smiles at the familiarity of the gesture, and then wonders how many times he’s forgotten it before. He sighs. “Well, it started with me thinking about that, but then I got to thinking about us.”

“Us?” A vein of ice ricochets from his foot as he steps his toe down, zigzagging out in front of them; they both pause to stare at it, and then Yoongi takes a deep breath and places the rest of his foot down. Namjoon squeezes his hand when no more ice appears.

“How many lifetimes we’ve lived together that I’ve forgotten,” Namjoon says. “You said you lost count at seventy?”

“Seventy cycles,” Yoongi corrects. “A season here doesn’t match up with a season in the mortal world – sometimes I’m stuck here for a few days in your time, others…” He presses his lips together; when he releases them, they flood pink as blood rushes back in. “There was once when I came back and I could see you’d aged.”

Namjoon frowns. “Witches age slower than humans.”

“As I said,” Yoongi smiles grimly. “A season here doesn’t match up with a season in the mortal world.”

“What about your family?”

“You’ve been my family for longer than the people who raised me,” Yoongi says simply, stating a fact.

Namjoon can feel himself flush to the roots of his hair, a supremely odd feeling when he can see the thick snow piled up on the lakeside up ahead. “Hyung, you say such romantic things so easily…”

Yoongi laughs, his shaking shoulders jostling his hand in Namjoon’s. “I didn’t used to. You used to find it so funny to say the most romantic shit just to get me to blush, but I’ve had years of practice.”

It’s strange, hearing an intimate account of what he’s like as a partner – as far as he knows, he’s never had a relationship as encompassing as the ones he’s shared with Yoongi. “When we get back, do you want to go on a date?” He asks.

“You seem pretty sure this’ll work,” Yoongi replies.

“You’re avoiding the question,” Namjoon accuses.

“I am, because I’m trying to decide whether you’re asking me on a date because you want to, because you feel like you have to, or because you want to know whether I want to go on a date,” Yoongi admits.

“Aren’t the first and third one the same thing?”

As they step onto the thick, crunchy snow on the lakeside, Yoongi hums, then shakes his head. “The first one is you asking me out, the third is you wanting to know if I want to be asked out, and I’m not sure I want to give you my answer if…” He trails off with a frustrated huff. “Namjoon, I don’t want us to date because you feel like you owe it to me or some shit like that.”

“But we’ve dated in the past,” Namjoon points out. “Hell, unless you’re breaking up with me before every winter, I’d imagine we’re still dating from all those other times! We obviously work well together!”

“Yes, because you were either in love with me, or on the way to being in love with me,” Yoongi argues back. “We worked because it was always mutual.”

Namjoon, immediately, wants to argue back – how can he determine his own feelings if Yoongi’s going to be this wary, if he’s going to hold him at arm’s length, creating a catch-22 where Namjoon’s never given the chance to fall in love because he can’t get close enough? But he stops to think about his response, listening to the left-right-left rhythm of his feet sinking into the snow as the path they’re on begins to slop downwards.

“I’d like to be given the chance to try,” Namjoon says eventually.

It’s the answer he’d wanted to give, and it gets him the response he wanted – Yoongi’s smile rises on his face like the first sunny day after the height of winter.

Taehyung lands up ahead of them, wings poised stiffly – ready to take off at a moment’s notice, Namjoon realises.

It takes Namjoon a second to recognise his surroundings, now that they’re under a thick layer of snow, but it comes to him suddenly – it’s the spot Seokjin doused for him, the place where Taehyung had helped him cross from his world into Elsewhere. He’s got no idea how long it’s been, or how long it will have been in his own world. Yoongi had mentioned that, on one occasion, enough time had passed that he’d visibly aged – what if he’s been missing for years?

“I can’t help you cross here,” Taehyung explains, turning away from them and drawing a line in the snow with his boot. Namjoon steps close to inspect it. While one side of the line is a little wobbly, following the natural curve of Taehyung’s boot, the other side of it is perfectly straight, as though drawn against a ruler, or a wall. “Well, I can take you over, Namjoon-hyung, but I’d imagine you don’t want to go alone?”

Namjoon shakes his head. “What happens when we try to cross?”

The question’s aimed at Taehyung, but Yoongi’s the one who answers. “We’ve never gotten this far.”

“Never?” Namjoon asks sceptically. “This seemed…”

He doesn’t want to say ‘easy’, doesn’t want to jinx it, but it’s obviously heavily implied, because Yoongi immediately replies, “Although you’ve looked for me after almost every cycle, you don’t usually find me. Most of the time, you don’t even make it to Elsewhere – remember, I’m not always carrying a shard of traceable Mirror for Seokjin to douse for.”

“We’ve only met you a couple of times,” Taehyung confirms. He shoots Yoongi a grin. “Although we’ve heard loads about you, we’re practically old friends.” Yoongi rolls his eyes, and his grin softens. “I know Jimin and Jeongguk would want me to tell you that we hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Yoongi frowns. “Did the three of you play rock-paper-scissors to decide which one of you would lead us here and say goodbye?”

“Ah, hyung,” Taehyung says exaggeratedly, pouting. “How could you accuse us of something like that, at my moment of emotional vulnerability?”

Yoongi sucks in a breath through his teeth. “So that’s a yes.”

“Okay, yes, we did play rock-paper-scissors, but it’s because we all wanted to lead you here, even though clearly it should be me, because I can fly and I’m a psychopomp, leading people places is sort of my thing, and Jimin said he could fly, too, and I said yeah, but not without a broom, and Jeongguk said that just because he couldn’t fly shouldn’t rule him out, not to mention that me being a psychopomp meant that I shouldn’t be leading people out of Elsewhere, so I said-”

“Taehyung-ah!” Yoongi says, pitching his voice a little louder; Taehyung snaps his mouth shut, eyes wide. “Hyung loves you too, yeah? All three of you, even if I do bring winter with me every time I come here.”

Even from his safe distance, Namjoon can see Taehyung’s eyes well up. “I hope I don’t see you – either of you – for a very long time.”

“Yeah, us too,” Yoongi says. Namjoon nods – while he doesn’t have the memories of Taehyung that Taehyung clearly has for him, he’s grown fond of him in the last however long they’ve spent together. “You’d best clear off, just in case.”

And with that, Taehyung beats his wings, and takes off into the sky. When Namjoon looks up, he can see him hovering, a little black dot shadowed against the storm-grey clouds.

“He’s still too close,” Yoongi mutters, scowling up at him. “Not to mention that winter’s most dangerous parts come from the sky.”

As he continues muttering about Taehyung’s recklessness, Namjoon steps closer to the line Taehyung had drawn. “So, when Taehyung led me in, it was literally as easy as walking.”

“That’s because he’s a psychopomp,” Yoongi says, stepping closer too, but not quite as close as Namjoon. “It’s literally his job to make it as easy as walking.”

“Then I’ll lead the way out,” Namjoon says. Yoongi immediately opens his mouth to complain, but Namjoon cuts him off. “I’m not supposed to be here anyway, so I might have an easier time getting out if I go first.”

“People leading each other out of the underworld never goes well,” Yoongi says slowly.

Namjoon doesn’t want to promise that they’ll be the ones to do it, never wants to make a promise to Yoongi that he can’t keep, so instead he says, “Then we’ll keep trying. I’ll come back for you, again and again and again, until we get it right.”

Yoongi huffs a laugh. “And you say I’m the one that says romantic shit like that so easily. I learnt it from you.” He shakes himself loose, inhales deeply, then squares his shoulders. “Okay.”

Namjoon looks down at the line in front of them, and then carefully positions himself so that he’s standing between the line and Yoongi, his back to the line. “I’ve got an idea.” He takes Yoongi’s face in his hands, slow enough that Yoongi can see what he’s doing. It makes Yoongi smile. “Wait, why’re you smiling? You don’t know what I’m planning.”

“Every single time you go for our first kiss, you kiss me the same way,” Yoongi explains gently.

“Yes, but have I ever kissed you for the first time as I try to bring you home?” Namjoon says.

Yoongi smiles wider, and Namjoon quietly marvels over the fact that he can feel his cheeks swell with it. “You’ve tried to bring me home many times, yes. But never like this.”

“Finally, a first for both of us,” Namjoon teases. As he leans in, Yoongi closes his eyes; practiced, easy.

Kissing Yoongi feels easy for Namjoon, too, although he’s not sure how much of that is his subconscious remembering lifetimes with Yoongi, and how much of it is the fact that Yoongi’s an incredible kisser. He’s both tactile and gentle, one hand coming up to the back of Namjoon’s neck while the other comes to rest on Namjoon’s waist, pulling him in closer; Namjoon doesn’t often feel delicate, but Yoongi’s hands are so big and encompassing that Namjoon feels cradled in his embrace. Yoongi’s mouth is soft and warm, although a small part of his bottom lip is warmer than the rest, and Namjoon’s mind helpfully supplies memories of Yoongi biting that specific part of his lip as he thinks.

Yoongi’s such a good kisser that, for a moment, he distracts Namjoon from remembering that he’s actually supposed to be doing something here besides kissing Yoongi; once he does remember, he takes a step back over the line.

And it’s as easy as walking, easy as breathing, easy as falling in love.

When he opens his eyes, Yoongi’s still standing in front of him, eyes wide and lips kiss-red.

Before either of them can say anything, they’re both tackled to the ground.

“…gone for days, couldn’t work out a way through-” Hoseok babbles into his chest, arms still wrapped around his middle; as he pats Hoseok on the back, Namjoon can hear Seokjin saying something very similar to Yoongi.

“Be grateful it was just days,” Yoongi mutters.

“I’m sorry, was there an option for this whole ordeal to have gone on for longer?” Seokjin says incredulously. “Hoseok and I have been pacing up and down this mountain path looking for you both, but there’s literally nothing here but a dumb mountain trail.”

“I’ll explain everything,” Yoongi promises; he turns to Namjoon. “But can we go home first?”

“…That explains the crystals,” Seokjin says.

“The… Babe,” Hoseok says faintly. “We’ve just learned that our best friend has disappeared from our lives countless times so that he can go be, what, King of Winter in the afterlife, and we’ve forgotten him almost as many times, and your first thought is that this information explains your crystals?”

“Yes!” Seokjin replies defensively. “It’s rather a lot of information to take in, so I immediately went to the thing that was easiest to process first! Sue me!”

“I wasn’t the King of Winter,” Yoongi explains patiently. “Just the personification of it.”

“Oh, of course,” Hoseok says sarcastically.

Yoongi chooses to ignore him, looking out of the window. “I don’t know what they’ll do without winter in Elsewhere. Find someone else, I suppose.”

“You said you were a mortal who got stuck on the wrong side of a border redraw, right?” Namjoon asks. “Does that mean you’re human again?”

Looking down at his hands, Yoongi shakes his head. “I know too much, I think – I can’t imagine knowing all this with a human brain, anyway.” He snorts. “That sounds conceited, but it’s true. I’ve lived too long to be fully human.” He rubs his thumbs on his fingerprints. “No ice, though, which is nice.”

“So, what now?” Seokjin asks.

Namjoon and Yoongi both answer simultaneously; while Yoongi says, “I’m just going to live my life, I suppose.” Namjoon says,

“I’m going to take him on a date.”

“Oh, finally,” Seokjin says as Hoseok offers them a thumbs up.

“What, right now?” Yoongi asks.

“Well, it doesn’t have to be right this second,” Namjoon says hastily. “But in the imminent future, yeah.”

Yoongi nods thoughtfully. “I’d like to have a nap first, then I’m all yours.” Namjoon’s not sure if he’d intended the double meaning of ‘all yours’, but he thinks about it – thinks about the lifetimes Yoongi’s spent loving him, and the lifetimes where Namjoon’s fallen in love right back, and thinks that, as much as a person could be someone’s, Yoongi is his, and he’s Yoongi’s.