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Hobi is a collector. He used to collect cell phone charms in school, then figurines when he could afford them. After debuting with BTS, he would collect stickers from each stop on their tours, sometimes also magnets, and quite a few small bags too. Later, it became designer shoes and clothes.
In the army, he can’t collect anything physical. Instead, he collects stories for Yoongi, jokes for Seokjin, and experiences to share with Namjoon to inspire more music. He hoards advice for the younger ones, his own to give and some given by others. Every momentary revelation —when the sun shines through the trees and it makes patterns he thinks Taehyung would enjoy— he stores away to share with them later. He didn’t think it would affect him as much as it does not having them within arms reach to share the moments in the moment with them.
He’s always wanted, needed, preferred instant gratification. Having to wait to share the good and the bad of his life feels like a festering wound. His bleeding heart growing mold with no one there to sop up the mess.
If time waits too long, he’ll be a different person when he returns and they won’t know his front from his back. He doesn’t want to grow tall without them. Doesn’t want new, rough branches on his tree to overtake the old ones smoothed by constant touch that are falling into shadow below.
He returns eighteen months later to 1.
It’s not like he expected differently. He knew their plans. He’d talked to all of them several times before and during his service. He knew when they enlisted, was there in person on the days, and could calculate their end dates. But still, a part of him had wanted to return to 6.
——
He sees to his family first upon his discharge, of course. He spends time with his parents, his sister, and his dog, in his familiar home and in his familiar yard in his familiar town. None of it feels so familiar anymore. It feels like another lifetime when he lived between these walls and had breakfast at the table with his mom and dad talking over him.
But it’s good and welcome and he buries himself under the blankets of his bed and soaks in the smells of his childhood to try to gain back that facet of himself.
He had to strip himself bare in the army. It was all so new and different and, he will admit, terrifying. Past the boredom of every day being about training and nothing else, no music, no dance, no hobbies, it was having to hold a gun and learn the value of pulling the trigger.
He compartmentalized himself so the him from before that didn’t know the weight of life and death wouldn’t be tainted by the him from now. Uncovering those older parts of himself feels a bit like lifting up a band-aid. Sometimes wounds have fully healed and sometimes there are scars.
——
He returns to Seoul second. He waits until he’s ready to live there full time again so he can fully sink in his roots.
His apartment had been cleaned before he arrives. There are still clothes in his closet and toys on his shelves and dishes in his cabinets. He didn’t ask for it, or doesn’t remember asking for it, but his manager filled his fridge with food staples and his pantry with his favorite drinks and snacks. His digs in immediately. They’re still his favorites.
It altogether feels untouched and lived in at the same time and for a while he feels like a guest in his own home, despite having been back here and there throughout his service. It takes a night or two in his bed before it stops feeling like a hotel room.
He walks the paths around his neighborhood, visits the Han river, calls up old friends.
He calls Seokjin.
“Oh, finally!” Seokjin ribs.
“Missed me that much, Sergeant?”
Seokjin had been his first call once he’d returned, in the sanctuary of his father’s car, not even an hour from discharge. They’d seen each other within the first 24 hours. But it had been a brief reunion and then Seokjin had left him to his family. He knew firsthand how important that phase of returning was.
They’d been waiting until Seoul before having a real reunion.
“What have you been up to?”
“Me? Oh, well, I called ARMY every day for the first two weeks at different times just to keep them on their toes. One time I called them just to show them I’d leveled up and then turned off the live.”
“I’m sure they loved that. Before you hang up on me, wanna grab dinner?”
“Tonight? It’s already 5 o’clock… you know you have to give me like a day’s warning before I’m ready for plans.” For once, Hoseok wouldn’t mind a little warning either. He’d gotten used to a less demanding social calendar while in the army and had started spreading things out over time to make them last.
“Tomorrow then?”
“Yeah, sure.”
——
They eat at Seokjin’s place. Being fresh out of the service means there is heightened public awareness of Hoseok’s goings-on and he doesn’t want to deal with that when he wants to be real and honest and at ease with his friend. Also, he missed Seokjin’s cooking.
Seokjin moans about it, about being a hyung again, a slave in the kitchen, never a moment for himself. Hoseok joins in with his antics because he knows it’s all talk. He was a provider in their group too, a caretaker, and if Seokjin misses that role as acutely as Hoseok does then there’s no point in confronting it. They can both laugh about it now knowing they’re one step closer to getting that back than they were a month before.
It’s an informal night, except that Hoseok wears his nice button-down with the embroidery Seokjin once said he liked and except for the crystal glasses Seokjin sets out. It’s another thing that doesn’t need to be said, or confronted, how tonight is special for them.
They act like adults and sit with good posture and get butterflies in their stomach like it’s a first date.
The scarcity of this simple act of being together heightens everything.
Hoseok shares some of the jokes he stored up and Seokjin laughs at them all, even the ones Hoseok thinks are too cheesy. No surprise, Seokjin laughs harder at those.
Hoseok doesn’t ask how it was for Seokjin in the army, because he knows, but he does ask, “How has it been being back by yourself?”
They had plans, both of them, all of them, and Seokjin dove headfirst back into them upon his return. Not just the daily video calls with ARMY at the start, but working on a new solo song and starting to set down the bricks on the road of their solo lives becoming their Bangtan life again. He won’t let BTS go, even if he feels old, even if he feels changed.
But that’s not what Hoseok’s asking.
“I thought I got used to it,” Seokjin says plainly. His masks are gone and Hoseok is inordinately pleased that it didn’t take days or weeks of reuniting before they could be this raw with each other again. It feels like it was only yesterday when they spent everyday with each other.
“Being alone?” Hoseok prods.
“Yeah. I mean, we weren’t alone in the army, of course, there were always people around. But alone without the six of you. You were so much of my identity and who I thought I was.”
Hoseok internally flinches at the word “thought” but waits to hear Seokjin out.
“I thought I got used to being just myself, but I’m never not thinking about when we’ll finally all be back together and I get to feel like the real me again.”
Hoseok’s first instinct is to smile, but instead he scowls.
“We have to wait so much longer,” Hoseok continues because this is Seokjin and he can be unreasonable and selfish in front of him without judgment, “I don’t want to wait anymore.”
“I didn’t want to wait at all.” Seokjin’s tone is bitter, the sharpest Hoseok’s heard it in recent memory, maybe ever. “We shouldn’t have had to—”
Hoseok thinks the only thing that cuts Seokjin off is the national loyalty that was literally drilled into them.
It’s more comforting than it probably should be seeing residual anger in a man who lives without regret. Hoseok had been starting to feel guilty that he was hanging on to any of his own anger. He isn’t sure he can purge it until this mandatory service is over for all of them. It will linger until the last of them returns.
And it’s not that he doesn’t understand the need for compulsory enlistment. But knowing why they need a standing army makes him even angrier. Angry for his country and the history that has led them to this point. Knowing the reasons behind it all helped validate him while serving, but they just frustrate him more now that he’s back.
When he tunes back into Seokjin, he’s pressing his lips together and looking out the window. It’s the version of personal space they adapted during quarantine when they couldn’t just walk outside and take a few deep breaths. He waits, patiently, knowing that Seokjin will turn to face him when he’s ready to continue their conversation.
Hoseok realizes at that moment that he hasn’t had this kind of implicit understanding for years and he’d forgotten what it feels like to know someone, to know someone’s emotions, so well that he knows when to give space or when to refuse it. His heart swells with sudden affection. This is his hyung —his hyung— who accepts his leaping hugs and blushes when he asks for fashion advice.
“I missed you,” Hoseok admits, probably apropos of nothing from Seokjin’s point of view.
Seokjin laughs immediately, his anger or whatever resignation was left fleeing like it was never there and his eyes returning to Hoseok. His hands flatten against his thighs. Hoseok looks at them and tries to remember how to reach out.
“That’s what did it, huh? Not seeing me at the door or eating the food I made you, but me getting mad.”
Hoseok laughs too now. It is a bit ridiculous. He hadn’t realized that he hadn't say those words when he entered the apartment or when they ate dinner. They’d been on an endless loop in his mind and he assumed he’d verbalized them twenty times over by now.
“It wasn’t obvious?” Hoseok challenges with a cocked eyebrow. He knocks their shoulders together, his hand never having found a way to meet Seokjin’s. He’d moved to Seokjin’s side of the table for after dinner tea. Well, tea for him, something stronger and worthy of the crystal glasses for Seokjin.
“Sometimes it’s nice to hear the words.” Seokjin pokes his cheek.
Hoseok’s mind flashes back to a time when Jimin had said the same thing. He swears he does say the important words more than he’s being accused of not saying them. But sometimes the words feel cheaper than the emotions behind them and he wants to express them in different ways.
His hand finds Seokjin’s then, made brave by the drive for expression. Seokjin intertwines their fingers without thinking. Hoseok watches it happen and is filled with another surge of affection.
“I missed you,” he says, pointedly this time. He lifts Seokjin’s hand and kisses his knuckles. “I even missed your hands.”
Seokjin is looking back at him a little slack-jawed. It’s the open, honest face he gets when he’s truly surprised.
“My hands?” Seokjin croaks with a nervous laugh.
Hoseok supposes it was a little bold to start in with a kiss on the hand like that. They’ve done a lot of skinship over the years, but he admits that is something new for them. He’s kissed the others, on the mouth even, but not Seokjin. Before he enlisted, Hoseok went around collecting kisses from the members like they were patches he could sew on his pack and take into the military with him.
He and Seokjin weren’t there yet. Between the seven of them, there was a complex spiderweb of interlocking relationship threads. Some of them were so close they were knotted together and others were loosely connected from one outside edge to the other. His brotherhood with Seokjin was a tight knot. Their romantic relationship, though… it was a long, single thread they’d only just barely taken hold of before enlistment.
Hoseok spends too long tracing the lines of the web in his mind and trying to figure out how to take the next step, when he’s interrupted by Seokjin’s long index finger lifting his chin.
“You’ve never kissed me,” Seokjin says like he’s reading Hoseok’s mind.
“Yet,” Hoseok jumps in with. “We’ve never kissed,” Hoseok rephrases because it’s not just on him. Neither of them were in that place before. And they were okay with that. Relationships between all seven of them had been advancing at different rates.
Seokjin chuckles at how immediately defensive Hoseok gets. It relieves the tension that had started building between them and both their shoulders relax.
“You’re not making this easy.”
“I’m not?” Hoseok straightens up to scoot in closer, warming Seokjin’s hand between both of his own.
“We’ve waited long enough, don’t you think? If there’s one thing military service made clear to me, it’s that I don’t want to waste more of my life not being your boyfriend.”
Hoseok catches his breath and smiles so wide he can’t purse his lips for something better than a smile. “Really?”
“Really.” Seokjin frees his hand so he can squish Hoseok’s cheeks together and give him a peck on the lips.
6 of 6 kisses. Collection complete.
Hoseok surges forward for a few more. Duplicates are allowed.