Chapter Text
Keep sound wisdom — then you will walk safely in your way, and your foot will not stumble.
D1
“I don’t get it, what’s the point of any of this?”
There’s something, about eating steaming instant ramyun fresh from the hot water dispenser in the shivering cold by the Han River, that’s distinctly satisfying and cathartic for the bleary-eyed college student more intimately familiar with the restless tug of sleep deprivation and bitter aftertaste of cheap coffee than his own reflection. Bonus points, if you add ahot bar and boiled eggs to the mix.
Yoongi ignores him in favor of dumping a whole packet of instant rice into his soup, humming around the chopsticks in his mouth. Namjoon doesn’t blame him; convenience stores might just be the closest thing to heaven for the broke-college-student majority, with its assortment of questionable health choices for an affordable and mouth-watering feast.
It also makes Namjoon feel a little less guilty for splurging a little more than his fifteen-won daily budget allows, on pepero and banana milk.
“I mean,” he continues anyway between mouthfuls of soggy noodles, “how’s that in any way related to social psychology? I gave up food and my Bearbrick collection for my tuition fees, you know, I want to learn actual knowledge, not look up wise sayings from dead people on goodreads.”
Yoongi eyes him skeptically over his plastic bowl and jiggles the ear bud plugged absent-mindedly into his left ear.
If Namjoon listens intently, he might just be able to make out the beat filtering through the other ear bud dangling from around Yoongi’s neck, something low and thrumming and vaguely familiar. He thinks it might be the latest track the older’s working on, all that pent up penchant for writing melodies and beats and everything in between, bleeding out into bars and waveforms under Yoongi’s careful fingers.
It had taken two hours for Namjoon to convince him into hanging out tonight.
The older sets his meal down on the frost-covered bench between them. “You know knowledge isn’t enough, right?”
“Knowledge gets me through school.”
“And yet there’s a whole world out there who doesn’t care about what grade you got on your midterms,” the older muses. He reaches over and unceremoniously steals Namjoon’spepero box for himself.
“Well, yeah,” Namjoon concedes, rocking back onto the bench. It’s cold, it’s freezing, and he’s shivering even under the layers. “I wouldn’t care about a stranger’s grades, except unless I happen to be an employer looking out for the brightest and most brilliant minds of our generation. I’m not saying that being well-rounded isn’t important, but wisdom is not something you can put on your résumé.”
Giggles flit lightly about in the brisk wind. Over by the river, a couple is lounging by the side of the river feeding each other ice cream under the spray of dim multi-colored lights — in the dead of winter, no less, huddled under ten pounds of winter wear, but who’s Namjoon to judge their life choices right?
Yoongi chews thoughtfully, crunching the pepero stick between teeth. “That doesn’t mean it’s not important, though. Look at it this way, knowledge is knowing boiling water is hot, and wisdom is having the sense not to dip your hand in it to test it out. Wisdom isn’t just an add-on to knowledge, it’s a manual for living.”
He twirls his chopsticks around the noodles, shoving it into his mouth in one go; when he exhales, he almost seems to breathe out smoke, clouded fog hanging in the air those brief few seconds to accentuate his words like his own personal fog machine.
“Look you already know this stuff, Joon, you’re not dumb, you’re just — ”
“Lamenting, I know,” Namjoon finishes for him, thrusting his hands into his pockets. There’s a scrunched up heat pack in one of them, a spare pair of socks that he’d resignedly labeled ‘missing’ a month ago in the other.
For all that genius supposedly entrapped in the chaotic inner workings of his brain, Namjoon is a class A wreck, cursed with more intellect than finesse. He’s unwitting destruction on two feet on the regular, disorganized and scatterbrained at best, and Hoseok once theorized that it’s the world’s way of compensating for his marked intelligence to restore its teetering sense of balance — because if there’s anything fair about life, it’s that it’s completely and indiscriminately unfair.
Truthfully Namjoon is a little too familiar with the cost of replacing everything he’s destroyed or lost, to whole-heartedly disagree.
“I was gonna say whiny, but lamenting, sure,” Yoongi says, “Stop lamenting already, it’s giving me indigestion.”
And if Namjoon rolls his eyes in half-hearted indignation, it’s to the silent wink of stars overhead, and certainly not in Yoongi’s line of sight; he has, at the very least, enoughwisdom for some semblance of self-preservation.
“I saw that.”