Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You don’t know the first thing about tomorrow.

-

τέλειος

“The beginning of wisdom,” Professor Bang Sihyuk announces, leaning over the podium, “is to seek and acquire wisdom.”

Under the rows of too-bright lights burning his corneas to dust and the stagnant hum of recycled air rattling through the air-conditioning vents, Namjoon yawns, and hopes no one notices. His notes are splayed open in front of him, but there’s nothing more than illegible scrawls along the margins, evidence of his war against persistent drowsiness.

(Namjoon firmly clings to the theory of diffusion, all that dull and droning knowledge seeping into his subconscious as his eyelids droop lower, and then lower, and lower.)

Here’s the assignment, he thinks he hears their professor say, something about a pursuit of wisdom and pair work and worth-thirty-per-cent-of-their-grades. He yawns again and lets his eyes slip shut. He’ll just bully Hoseok into catching him up with everything later.

A deep exhale —

He jolts right up in his seat before his mind registers the resounding slam, ringing with the crashing dissonance. There’s a stack of books right by his ear that wasn’t there when he’d last forced his sleep-smudged eyes open, but it’s the figure towering over him that catches his attention, tall and broad-shouldered and Kim Seokjin.

“Morning,” the older greets him cheerfully, as though as he didn’t just almost give Namjoon a heart attack and permanent hearing loss.

Namjoon blinks, and wonders if he’s still dreaming.

Because there’s something strange about this picture, something odd about Kim Seokjin beaming down at him with a lopsided grin too wide to look entirely genuine, and just the slightest hint of flushed red creeping up from under his collar like strained embarrassment.

Kim Namjoon and Kim Seokjin, though branded with the same family name, are not friends.

It’s not for any reason in particular; Namjoon certainly does not harbor any ill will against the other, but Seokjin had never been anything more than a face in a crowd, a name passed around in the fleeting grapevine that is their class. He faintly recalls someone — possibly Hoseok — telling him about the older being scouted on university grounds for a trainee position in one of those famed idol-factories that make money off of young emaciated star-struck hopefuls with aspirations bigger than their forcefully restricted diets. Seokjin, presumably, had run away screaming bloody murder after socking the talent scout in the gut with his ‘charmingly good looks’.

Hoseok has always been a tad bit dramatic.

Seokjin pulls out a seat and sinks expectantly into it, across the table from Namjoon.

“Can I… help you?”

“We’re partners,” Seokjin answers simply, and folds his arms neatly atop the table, pulling against the creased cuffs of his sweater. “And the theme of the project we’re working on, as you evidently were not paying attention to, is about finding wisdom.”

“We- What?”

“Finding wisdom,” the older repeats, as if that’s the most important thing of all, the sole answer to the questions brimming by Namjoon’s lips, caught in the shock.

“Not that,” Namjoon waves off impatiently, “We’re partners?”

And maybe it comes out a little more brash than he intends it to, because where Namjoon is known for his brains, Seokjin is quietly murmured about for his looks, which, all in all, amounts to little in the vicious pursuit of academics. Namjoon is ready to fight tooth and nail for his 4.0 GPA average, and that means putting his grades on the line for a back-row student who scrambles in twenty minutes after lecture starts just to get two bags of lunch, is so indisputably a definite no-no, it’s almost laughable.

Because that’s what it must be, right? A joke?

Seokjin curls his fist, so quietly Namjoon might have missed it if his eyes weren’t fixed somewhere between the tension in the older’s shoulders, just on the side of guilty enough to avoid the older’s gaze. “If you haven’t noticed, everyone else has already paired up and left. Unless you’re looking to fail this project, you’re stuck with me.”

The air-conditioner exhales wearily overhead, resonating defeat in the suffocating silence. So perhaps Seokjin hadn’t approached him for casual conversation about the blue of the sky, or that strange grumpy lady who works the salad bar, and Namjoon tamps down the niggling part of him that’s just a little too disappointed to be rational.

“I- I didn’t even know we had to do one,” he admits, and it feels a little like defeat, backed into a brick wall with nowhere to turn.

Namjoon has lived his whole life learning the difference between the best, and the rest, the outstanding, and the secondary, to strive for the galaxies and settle for nothing less, because less is average, and average is to be no one.

For all the contrived optimism of the ordinary crowd, the way the world works is this: it doesn’t matter whether you’re second or third or in the hundredth place, you’re either the champion, or you’re not.

And Namjoon, he refuses to fall between the ranks again.

He’d just have to do all the heavy-lifting, he resigns, work on it like a solo assignment and get Seokjin to sign off wherever necessary to make it look enough like a shared workload to not be questioned.

“Yeah, I know, sleepyhead. Clearly, you’re not as wise as I thought.”

He startles, knees ramming against the underside of his desk at the sudden intrusion to his thoughts. “Hey — ”

For a split second, he thinks he might have heard Seokjin stifle a laugh. But it passes just as quickly as it came, and he’s left wondering if it wasn’t just misplaced wishful thinking.

“Finding wisdom,” Seokjin says again. In the corner of Namjoon’s eye, the older stands, pushing off from the table, and pauses just long enough to level him with an unreadable glance. “You better get started, you’ve got a long way to go.”

Seokjin is by the door when the words register, and he jerks up in his seat, his chair whining in protest. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The door swings shut.

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.”