Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Namjoon entered the library and stopped in his tracks.

A book was not where it was supposed to be.

It wasn't supernatural librarian powers that told him so. No matter his co-workers' accusations, he didn't actually have those.

All he needed was his own eyes, because anyone could see the problem here—even Yoongi, who both refused to wear his glasses and was remarkably adept at ignoring chaos, to the point that he could unflappably walk a straight line through the crowd at toddler story time. Namjoon, chronically flappable, could never manage that. He could be stationed at the opposite end of the library from said toddler story time, yet somehow he'd still end up with sticky handprints on his clothing and creepy singing finger puppets in his nightmares.

No, even Yoongi would be able to see something was wrong, because it was very, very obvious.

A hardcover book was sprawled open in the middle of the entryway. It was far from the book drop. The most overzealous of book returners wouldn't be capable of catapulting a book through the book drop chute all the way into the middle of the library. (Namjoon was sure of this because Seokjin and Jungkook had tried. It was exclusively the fault of their competition last summer that the book drop sign now read "No Trash, No Donations, No Spring-Loaded Launch Devices.")

And the book hadn't been there last night. Namjoon knew, because he had locked up, and everything had been where it was supposed to be. Everything had been orderly. Not a book or a chair out of place. Quiet. Boring. Normal.

What Namjoon was looking at right now was something different from that.

He straightened his shoulders, and maybe he was deceiving himself, but he could've sworn he felt a little fizzle of excitement sharpen his senses.

He glanced up to the ceiling, then crouched down to cast his gaze along the ground level. It was possible a wild animal had gotten trapped in the library and scattered the book here. But there was no sign of any creatures, let alone any further destruction. No indication that anyone had broken in overnight.

Just one solitary book, out in the middle of nowhere.

With his phone, he snapped a picture of the scene, just in case he needed photographic evidence. He might have been taking this too seriously, but if there was something wrong in the library—his library—he needed to know. He needed to document it and fix it.

And if he also started recording a voice memo as he approached the book, it was out of that same continued and sensible caution. Not at all because this little mystery tripped all his brain's long-starving curiosity sensors. Not at all because this was, sadly, the most exciting and unexpected action he'd been involved in for months.

He was just being cautious.

"The book is a hardcover with a dust jacket," Namjoon narrated, kneeling beside it. He managed to resist the half-self-deprecating urge to find a piece of chalk to mark the book's outline on the floor. With his foot, he nudged the book shut and peered at the cover. "It's a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the sticker indicates it originated from our adult speculative fiction section. No obvious signs of foul play. It appears to be in good condition, no corners folded, no sign of any insertions within its pages. It's just…somehow in the middle of library entryway, for no reason."

He stopped recording, sat back on his heels.

The book remained motionless and disappointingly boring before him.

There were mysteries in this world that were worth pursuing. This probably wasn't one of them. Most likely it was just a reflection on the banal routine of his life that Namjoon had found an out-of-place book intriguing. He ought to just delete that over-dramatic voice memo and move on with his day.

He reached for the book to return it to its designated shelf.

The moment he touched the cover, a gentle tickling sensation zipped upward from his fingertips to his elbow to his shoulder to his chest.

To his heart.

Namjoon gasped. He yanked his hand back and shook out his arm. The feeling dissipated, leaving just the trace of an echo of an impression. Barely anything.

It hadn't hurt. It hadn't even been an unpleasant feeling. But feeling anything at all? Very disconcerting. His brain pinged through possibilities: a fluke of static electricity? A sign of carpal tunnel syndrome? Some kind of nerve damage?

But why would it have happened at the exact second he touched the book?

Namjoon glared at said book before tentatively touching it again. No further zinging.

Good.

Perhaps this was just the universe's way of telling him that wanting a little excitement in his life was a dangerous thing. If so, Namjoon would consider this a lesson learned.

He sighed, and then he picked up the recalcitrant book and marched it back where it belonged.

~

A few days later, Namjoon heard the hiccuping before he saw the hiccuper.

The whole "libraries should be silent" thing was, in Namjoon's professional opinion, bullshit. The natural cacophony of a busy library doing its job as a community center, Namjoon thought, was charming and homey: squeaky carts navigating corridors of shelves, books accidentally thudding to the floor, the front desk phone chiming serenely (the "zen windchimes" ring tone that Hoseok purposely installed for its calming sound), friends greeting each other and chatting quietly, children shrilly excited to recognize their favorite books before remembering to use their inside voices. As long as everyone respected the fact that the library was a shared space that everyone had equal right to, then a little noisiness was fine.

So it wasn't the fact that someone was making noise that alarmed Namjoon. It was the nature of the noise that had him darting from the front desk and stalking toward the stacks where the hiccups were originating (adult nonfiction section, health and wellness shelves). In addition to his lack of supernatural librarian powers, Namjoon also did not have supernatural echolocation powers, but he did have a good sense of sound and space, and the noise the hiccuper was making was distinct: one loud hiccup, followed by a soft, moaning lament.

When Namjoon drew closer, he could hear the words the hiccuper was saying after each hiccup. "Pull yourself together, diaphragm!" the person whispered furiously to themselves. Or to their, uh, diaphragm. "Literally and figuratively! Please!"

And then they hiccuped again before whinily grumbling, likely because their bodily muscles weren't listening to them—and hopefully not because their hiccups actually hurt. But either way, Namjoon was here to help. He almost passed the exact row where the hiccuper was ensconced, but he skidded to a stop and said in a rush, "Hi! Can I help you?"

Belatedly, he hoped he sounded friendly and helpful and non-judgmental, and not simply over-excited at having an unusual emergency to deal with.

Then the hiccuper—sitting on the aisle floor—looked up at him, and Namjoon's heart skidded to a stop of its own.

The man was beautiful. Incongruously beautiful, the way he was sitting on the questionably-cleaned library carpet, his legs askew and books scattered open in front of him—and around him, and behind him. The combination of the gentle curve of the man's cheeks and the soft definition of his jaw struck Namjoon as some kind of art, especially as those features drew his eyes down to the man's lips, pursed and perfectly plush. Namjoon's gaze flickered upward, just in time to see the man's eyes widen as he, in turn, took in Namjoon.

They held each other's gaze, and with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, Namjoon suddenly understood why people described eyes as pools. He was definitely being sucked in by the intensity of this stranger's eyes, head under water and lungs under pressure. The wildness in the man's energy felt like some kind of natural force. Like, there was gravity, and there were hurricanes, and then there was whatever this man was. Whoever he was. That's how it felt, being looked at by this man.

And then the stranger spoke.

"How?" he demanded. "How do humans do it? I don't understand. These bodies are impossible! Delightful, but impossible."

Namjoon glanced behind him, expecting to see whoever this conversation was directed to. No one was there.

The man hiccuped again, his whole body jostling like he was on a roller coaster. "How have humans been hiccuping for thousands upon thousands of years, and no one's yet figured out how to prevent them? How? And how have humans not evolved to avoid this?"

Namjoon realized he probably was the intended recipient of these questions. Shaking off his stupor, he answered, "I would think it's because it's not evolutionarily critical that we stop hiccuping. The cases in which the hiccups last for more than a few minutes are infrequent, and hiccups that last for more than a few hours are rare. So, in the grand scheme of things, it's a mild and temporary inconvenience, and not worth putting either research dollars or evolutionary energy toward solving."

The man glared at him, clearly taking that personally. "Mine arrived after breakfast, and as they're threatening to remain through lunch, it feels like more than a mild and temporary inconvenience." He hiccuped again, the stern expression on his face rolling right off, leaving him wide-eyed and flustered in a way that Namjoon tried to resist thinking of as cute. "See? Awful! How has the human race not focused its talents toward eradicating these?"

There was nothing cute about this situation, Namjoon reminded himself. Nothing fun, either. This was a patron with a problem. "I'm sure it's very annoying and I too harbor a few misgivings about the directions in which the human race is progressing," Namjoon added soothingly. "I'm sorry. What have you tried to get them to stop?"

"I'm looking into how to control the muscular activity of the respiratory system," the man said, gesturing to the books around him. "And I'm trying to figure out just how that's connected to the digestive system. I think if I do that, I can stop these"—he hiccuped again, scowling the entire way through—"obnoxious malfunctions, if not for everyone, then at least for me."

Namjoon blinked. The man looked back at him, all innocence and hiccup-y frustration. Namjoon opted for a different tactic. "Okay. What about holding your breath? Have you tried that? When I get the hiccups, that usually works for me."

The man shook his head solemnly. "How?"

"I think it kinda forces a reset on the respiratory system, smoothing out the contractions?" Namjoon didn't actually know, but obviously this man was the sort of person who cared very deeply about scientific explanations, and Namjoon hoped to ease his concerns. "We can look it up after we get your hiccups to stop."

"No, I mean, how do I hold my breath?"

It was Namjoon's turn to stare. Strangers often visited their small town library: people from nearby towns that lacked libraries of their own, people on vacation, people passing through and wanting to know more about the local history or needing to use the computers. That sort of thing. This stranger was on a different level entirely, not just because he was so sharply beautiful, but because no matter what baffling words came out of his mouth, he appeared to mean it all sincerely. His frustration about the imperfection of their evolutionary arc, his confusion over holding his breath, the way he was looking at Namjoon as if he implicitly and thoroughly believed and trusted whatever Namjoon had to say…the man's sincerity radiated outward, and all Namjoon could feel was a corresponding compulsion to reassure him.

He didn't know who he was dealing with, but he was starting to think that his first impression—that this man was a wild force of nature—was correct.

He started to lower himself to the floor to join him, but in doing so, lost his balance and slipped on the books littered around.

The man quickly shoved them aside and reached out his hand. "Here. I'll steady you. These bodies are a menace, aren't they?"

Namjoon hesitated. The size difference between the two of them had been obvious even before the man had offered his far smaller hand, and then there were those continued outbreaks of convulsive hiccups. He shouldn't be needing this man's help to sit down without breaking anything. Accepting this man's help might make the situation even worse.

But sincerity should be met with sincerity, Namjoon believed. So after a moment of doubt, he slipped his hand around the stranger's.

To his surprise, the man's grip was steady and strong, and with his guidance, Namjoon managed to fold himself downward to safely squeeze himself on the aisle floor, too.

"Okay," Namjoon said. Despite sitting on solid ground, he was somehow feeling shakier. He held himself still, trying to keep his knees from knocking into the stranger's. "Hold your breath like this."

He shut his mouth. He raised his eyebrows meaningfully at the other man.

"That's all?"

Namjoon nodded.

"Okay. I can do that." With exaggerated deliberateness, the man clamped his lips shut. And then he widened his eyes again and stared at Namjoon. Waiting.

This man was beautiful and weird and sincere, and he was looking at Namjoon like he saw those same qualities in Namjoon and he liked it.

A different kind of breathlessness started prickling in Namjoon's lungs, and he could feel a blush creep its way across his skin.

"Gah!" A hiccup violently burst out of the stranger, and he folded himself forward to the floor. "That was miserable! I am never doing that again!" Seized by another hiccup, he groaned. "Human bodies are the worst!"

"Only someone who's never contemplated duck penises can think that," Namjoon said.

The man sat up straight, the liquid grace of the movement reminding Namjoon of a dancer. Or a cat. "What?"

"I just read a book about the complicated history of human sex, and it mentions duck penises as a contrast. The book was interesting. I can recommend it to you."

"And I'll read it. But I might die of the hiccups before then."

Namjoon smiled, and the man smiled back at him, sly and sweet, and Namjoon stopped thinking of dancers and cats and returned his thoughts to hurricanes and other forces of nature. "You'd be the first person in history to die directly of hiccups, if that happens," Namjoon said. "It'd be more likely the hiccups would kill you indirectly, like if you cut yourself with a knife during a hiccup fit, or crashed your car."

"No, thank you. I will not be doing that. That could hurt someone else." He hiccuped again, then frowned. "If I replaced my lungs with artificial ones, would that make hiccups more or less likely, do you think?"

Almost certainly if Namjoon told him artificial lungs would prevent hiccups, the man would run out and procure some. After only a few minutes of acquaintance, that much was obvious: this was not a man who considered anything impossible. So Namjoon said, "I have another idea. It's kind of weird, though."

"I like weird, and I trust you." The man immediately bounced upward, and before Namjoon could even blink, he was standing and offering Namjoon his hand again. "Let's try it."

~

In quick succession, Namjoon learned a few things about his new friend.

First, there was the fact that they were now friends. As they made their way to the staff restroom to try Namjoon's next hiccup solution, the man announced he would like to be friends and introduced himself: he was Park Jimin, he'd moved here last week, and yes, this was in fact the first time in his entire life he'd ever had hiccups, and while he was aware that librarian responsibilities didn't ordinarily encompass providing patrons with cures for such maladies, he was grateful that Namjoon was making an exception for him.

Namjoon assured him that it wasn't a problem at all. "The library is where the community goes to access resources," he said. "I'm both someone who can help with that and a resource myself."

Jimin nodded. "That's a way to describe my job, too. Back home, I mean. I don't have a job here yet."

"Well, the library can help with that, too. We have resources for job-seekers, and I can find out who in town is hiring and, if you'd like, I could give you recommendations."

"Though I might choose to spend my time here solely devoted to eradicating hiccups," Jimin said. That statement was punctuated by his body being wracked by yet another fit of said hiccups, and Namjoon remembered he wasn't supposed to be doing vocational outreach. He was supposed to be helping Jimin.

Which. Well. Another interesting thing he learned about his new friend: that Jimin was flexible enough to do a backbend after just a moment of preparatory stretching.

"Like this?" he asked. He was curved back against the restroom sink, his head thrown back underneath the tap. "All I have to do is drink water upside down, and that'll make my hiccups go away?"

Namjoon, eyes following the sweep of Jimin's body, somehow found his voice. "Uh. Yeah. Like that, I guess. Or we could fill a cup with water, and you could just hang your head down and drink."

"No, I like this. It's a lot easier than holding my breath," Jimin said confidently.

With that, he nimbly reached back and turned on the faucet.

And promptly choked underneath the rushing stream of water.

The next few moments were chaotic.

Jimin shrieked and, in the process of yanking his head out from the sink, he somehow managed to bang both his elbow and his knee. Namjoon, though no stranger to clumsiness himself, had no idea how that was possible. For his part, he managed to shove back the faucet handle and shut off the cascade of water, but then in his reactive panic, he starting pulling paper towels from the dispenser beside the sink and throwing them Jimin's way, and he might have yanked too forcefully, because he suddenly found himself holding the entire dispenser, completely disconnected from the wall. Little metal bolts clanged to the floor.

"I'm so sorry," Namjoon said, though how everything went wrong, he still wasn't sure.

Dripping and sputtering, Jimin pushed his wet hair out of his face. The gesture revealed a smile that turned his entire face into the sunniest of sunflowers.

A shiver of pleasure slid through Namjoon at the sight. Still stupidly clutching the broken paper towel dispenser, he couldn't stop staring at Jimin. Truly, it wasn't the time to be nurturing an attraction, but he couldn't help it. Jimin was hot, but maybe even more importantly, he was baffling. There was nothing Namjoon was more attracted to than someone who engaged his curiosity. These days, in the life he'd chosen to live, there was little opportunity for it, and Jimin and his hiccups had burst through the darkness like a lightning bolt.

Jimin's grin grew even bigger as he met Namjoon's gaze. "My hiccups," he said. "They're gone. You did it! You got rid of my hiccups! I can breathe again!"

"Well, you were always breathing the entire time," Namjoon said.

His pedantic correction was overridden, however, by Jimin's excitement. Jimin threw his arms around Namjoon in a hug, and if Namjoon had thought he was a hurricane before, the power with which Jimin hugged him was like two hurricanes on top of a typhoon in the middle of a monsoon. "I can breathe again! Breathing! It's just so great, isn't it?"

"It's the best," Namjoon agreed, but a little squeakily, because Jimin—substantially smaller Jimin—was crushing him. It felt—nice. Really nice.

"I'll be devoting the rest of my stay here in your town to eradicating the scourge of hiccups from the human race. All in your honor, Namjoon-ssi."

Namjoon, awkwardly holding the broken paper towel dispenser over Jimin's head as they hugged, managed to say, "Thank you."

Someone knocked at the restroom door. "Namjoon?" Hoseok's voice cut through the celebration. "Are you okay in there?"

"We're both fine!" Namjoon called back.

There was a pause. "Both?"

"Me!" Jimin yelled cheerfully, letting go of Namjoon. "He helped me with my hiccups. They're gone now."

The pause from the other side of the door this time lasted even longer. Namjoon scrambled for a non-nonsensical explanation of the situation, but before he could think of something, Hoseok said, "Okay. Cool. I'll leave you be now."

Namjoon carefully set the broken dispenser on the floor and evaluated the rest of the damage. He'd definitely be spending his upcoming lunch hour mopping up the water and attempting to affix the dispenser back on the wall. Or, more likely, watching Yoongi reinstall it for him.

"My hiccups are gone, but I'd still like to check out some books," Jimin said. "Can you help me with that?"

Anything to delay having to clean up, really, but also, Namjoon obviously would jump at a chance to help Jimin in any way, and hopefully, checking out books would be straightforward and non-injurious. "I'd be delighted," he said, with utmost honesty.

Back at the front desk, Namjoon assisted a now non-hiccuping Jimin with his library card application. Curiously, he didn't recognize the home address Jimin filled out on the form, and he thought he could name every street in this town. After all, he'd lived here his entire life. Sometimes that felt like the length of multiple lifetimes.

Not today, though. Today had been a breath of fresh air. A hiccuping breath of fresh air. He smiled at Jimin, who was using the self-scanner to check-out a pile of reference books—yes, he was still serious about his quest to research the possibility of eradicating hiccups—and then said, "Oh! Wait! Do you still want the book that explains duck penises? Or, well, explains them as far as duck penises are explainable?"

Suddenly, Namjoon could hear the tell-tale clunk of the wheels of the reference desk chair, and he looked over his shoulder to see a clearly intrigued Hoseok rolling his chair closer. The expression on his face was, without question, that of a man gleefully putting together the story he was going to tell Yoongi about how Namjoon was trying to hit on a patron by talking about duck penises.

Merciless, Namjoon kicked the chair, rolling Hoseok back toward the reference desk. Then he turned back around to Jimin without a guilty conscience and shot him a fresh smile.

"I'd love to read it," Jimin said, looking amused. "Who knows, it might end up being helpful for my research."

"It could be! That's the great thing about reading and learning widely. Sometimes, the most disparate elements can cause a spark and create something new." Namjoon grabbed the book from the to-be-shelved cart. "I just finished reading it, and it had me thinking about a lot of things about the nature of humans as animals and as people who are capable of taking care of each other better than we have been."

He held out the book, and the smile Jimin gave him as he reached for it was both earnestly sweet and just a little impish, like he—

"Oh!" Jimin yanked his hand back. "Oh!"

Namjoon immediately dropped the book. It thudded to the counter between them. "What? What happened? Are the hiccups back?"

"No, I—" Jimin cradled his hands to his chest and looked back and forth between the book and Namjoon. "Oh. Just—oh."

A memory ping-ponged itself into Namjoon's brain. "Did you get some kind of static shock when you touched it?" he asked. "That happened to me last week. I found a book lying on the library floor, and when I grabbed it, it gave me a little shock. It was so weird."

It shouldn't have been possible, but Jimin's eyes grew even wider as he stared back at Namjoon.

"I know, it's probably not possible, and it made me realize I don't actually know much about static electricity. I should look it up. Gosh, if only I knew a place with the resources to do that, right?" Namjoon smiled at his own terrible joke and pushed the book back across the counter toward Jimin.

With an obvious delicateness, Jimin placed his hands back on the book. This time, he didn't react. He curled his hands around the cover, almost protectively. "So did you read this book?" he asked, his voice suddenly soft. Very soft.

"I did! We just got in the copy last week, and I took it home to read it, so it hasn't actually been in circulation yet. You're the first patron to read it."

"Oh. Oh." Every time Jimin said the word, he said it differently, like he was infusing new meaning into it with each time. As if each new wave of feeling was something different, a new tide crashing down. "Oh."

"Are you okay?" Namjoon asked cautiously. "Did the little shock hurt?"

Jimin shook his head. "So you were the last person to read this."

"Yep. Last and only."

"Oh."

"You've said that."

"Sorry. It's just—a surprise, I guess."

"Just wait until you learn about duck penises," Namjoon said. "That'll redefine the concept of 'surprising' for you."

"I look forward to it." Jimin finished scanning his pile of books. The look on his face was less bright than it had been before he'd gotten shocked by the book—there was a seriousness to his expression now, despite the lightness in his tone. "I can't thank you enough, Namjoon-ssi. Hopefully I can repay you with a way to eradicate the human race of hiccups. If I can do that for you, I will."

Namjoon was certain he was blushing again. "Just returning the books on time is enough, really."

Jimin pressed his books to his chest and started heading out, but before he reached the library doors, he turned and gave Namjoon one more look.

It was hard to read, but it felt like Namjoon was being assessed. The intensity was still there, as was the sincerity, but all that lightfooted joy of earlier felt…subdued.

But before Namjoon could figure it out, Jimin smiled a little, lifted his hand in goodbye, and went out the doors.

Once Jimin had completely disappeared, Namjoon whipped around and glared in the direction of the reference desk.

Hoseok was still in the rolling chair, hands pressed to his face as his whole body shook with laughter. Yoongi sat on top of the reference desk, spinning Hoseok's chair with his foot as he stared at Namjoon with clear disbelief. "'Just wait until you learn about duck penises'?" Yoongi repeated, flat and incredulous. "Really, Namjoon-ah? That's the best chat-up line you have?"

"It wasn't a chat-up line!"

Hoseok stopped spinning his chair and exchanged a look with Yoongi. After a moment, the two of them said in unison, "That's even worse."

Namjoon threw his hands in the air. "I will not be mocked for having a perfectly normal interaction with a perfectly normal patron." Yes, in a few minutes, his brain would inevitably and involuntarily flashback through his and Jimin's conversation, and yes, he would subsequently probably die of embarrassment. But he wanted to have a few moments to enjoy what had been the most interesting, most fun, most surprising thing that had happened to him in a long time.

"We're just teasing," Hoseok said cheerfully. "Clearly, he's into whatever it was you were putting down."

Yoongi nodded. "He was looking at you like you hold the secrets of the universe. And not just because of your knowledge of duck penises."

"Let's all stop saying the words 'duck penises' and move on with our day," Namjoon said authoritatively. But it did kind of warm him from the inside out, that his friends thought Jimin had been into him, too.

That knowledge was the consolation he took with him when, a half hour later, Hoseok went into the staff restroom and shouted something about how it'd been destroyed, and Namjoon remembered the state he and Jimin had left it in.

Namjoon's prediction turned out to be correct: he spent his lunch hour mopping up the mess while Yoongi figured out how to reinstall the paper towel dispenser.

~

Park Jimin, Namjoon discovered, quickly settled into life in their small town. More than settled: he, very literally, became the talk of the town.

The walking club aunties cornered Namjoon one morning on his book delivery bicycle route. They all wanted to know what he thought of the newcomer. Namjoon told them he found Jimin very friendly and very polite. (Which was true! He wasn't going to share anything else with the auntie pack, however.)

"Oh yes, his manners! They're a little old-fashioned, but he's so charming about it."

"A little roguish, don't you think? In a good way."

"And that smile! If only I were fifteen years younger!"

"Yah! Fifteen years younger? Try thirty!"

"I don't want to be his age, I just want to my knees to have a little more spring to them. That'd be helpful!"

The aunties giggled like schoolgirls.

"I have to go now," Namjoon announced loudly, stumbling as he hurried to get his feet back on the pedals of his bike. "Thank you for this enlightening conversation!"

Less traumatic was the discussion with the town baker when Namjoon dropped by the bakery with new books for him. "Have you met Park Jimin yet? Nice fellow," the baker said enthusiastically as he brushed stray flour off last week's stack of manga he was returning. "He helped me when my van's engine was going haywire. Said he didn't know a thing about cars, but he thought through the problem right alongside to me, and together, we got it working again. He's a lot like you, Namjoon-ssi. A man with a good sense of curiosity and willingness to learn is a man who can go anywhere in this world, you know."

Cycling out to his other delivery, Namjoon mulled over those words. The baker was right, and it was truly kind of him to ascribe those qualities to Namjoon, too. Except…it was entirely possible for a person with curiosity and a drive to learn to not go anywhere in the world. At least not literally.

Namjoon was living proof of that, wasn't he?

He didn't mind it. People who said small towns were full of small minds were simply wrong. The depth of life he lived here, the depth of life lived by everyone here, was no different from people who lived in big cities. He loved this town. He loved this community. And being in charge of the library meant that he had a pivotal role in keeping this community going. He belonged here. He belonged to here.

The wider world could come to him—through books, through people—and he'd always been happy to live this way.

His other book delivery was to the Kangs, an elderly couple on the edge of town. Given their age and their infirmities, they rarely left their house, but true to form, the rest of the community brought the town to them. Every day, the Kangs entertained at least one visitor, delivering what they needed or simply spending time with them. On Tuesdays without fail, Namjoon brought the Kangs their weekly book picks (invariably gory mystery novels; Namjoon did not judge) and caught up with how their week had gone: the wild animals that had visited their garden, what Seokjin had cooked with them when he delivered their groceries the day before, what new slang they'd learned from the dramas they watched—and all the town gossip. Somehow, the Kangs were even more in the know than the walking club aunties.

This week, their topic of conversation was the same as everyone else in town. The Kangs hadn't even met Jimin, but it turned out they had a lot to say about him.

"According to Seokjin, Park Jimin is from an another world entirely."

Seokjin never missed a chance to exaggerate, but Namjoon conceded, "Well, he is a little offbeat. But aren't we all?"

"Only the best of us. So is he cute?"

Namjoon nearly choked on the tea he'd just accepted. "Excuse me?"

"Your co-workers dropped by yesterday, you know. They changed our fire alarm batteries for us, and they mentioned that the two of you were flirting."

Only the one time, Namjoon thought, before mentally kicking himself for how whiny he sounded, even just in his head. Over the past couple of weeks, he'd seen Jimin around town; Jimin had always greeted him in that friendly, upbeat manner of his, but there was something different in the way he held himself at the sight of Namjoon. Something cautious, something serious.

It just wasn't the same as when he thrown his soaking wet self at Namjoon in the world's strongest hug, back in the library restroom when they'd managed to cure his hiccups. What had changed, Namjoon didn't know.

"So?" The Kangs exchanged a knowing look over their own cups of tea. "Is he cute?"

Extremely, but that was irrelevant. Namjoon sipped his tea and changed the subject.

Back at the library that afternoon, Namjoon sorted through a stack of returned books. He recognized a thick medical reference book as one that Jimin had borrowed. Disappointment pinched inside of him when he realized that Jimin had dropped by the library but hadn't even said hello.

That disappointment fizzled out into confusion, though, after Namjoon scanned it back into the system and, as he tried to toss it into the to-be-shelved cart, it fell to the floor and splayed open.

Namjoon groaned and bent to pick it up, but he stopped short.

The book's pages opened to reveal lines and lines of golden orange ink added to the text.

Not just lines and lines of golden orange ink: whole sentences, scripted in an admittedly beautiful handwriting, in between every line of printed text.

Not just any writing: a whole running response to the text.

Namjoon picked the book up and placed it back on the counter. Baffled, he read the lines silently. "Maybe humans should evolve more stable chest muscles to prevent the contraction of the diaphragm from reaching the vocal cords." The lines of golden orange handwriting continued in that fashion. "Though honestly, vocal cords should just realize when they're involving themselves in anatomical business that has nothing to do with them in the first place."

Did Jimin write this?

Stupid question. No one else thought about human anatomy the way Jimin did, and he was the one who'd last borrowed this book. Namjoon flipped through more pages. Scattered throughout was, indeed, more commentary that only Jimin could have written.

"Sneezes are a perfectly sensible reflex. Nothing at all like hiccups. Good job, sneezes."

"Human fetuses get hiccups? This is more dire than I imagined."

"Do birds get hiccups?"

"I wish I paid more attention in my advanced xenology classes. The idea of humans needing to evolve more efficient evolutionary processes makes me very, very impatient."

Namjoon turned to the computer to look up what "xenology" meant—and as a result, he was more confused than ever.

As far as librarians went, Namjoon considered himself fairly laid-back. Writing in library books, however, was universally discouraged for obvious reasons: it was disrespectful to property that belonged to the entire community. It interfered with other people's own, private relationship to the text they were reading.

Did Jimin just not know he shouldn't write in library books? Were library books a totally foreign experience to him, the way hiccups were?

What kind of life had he been living before he moved here, anyway?

From the other side of the front desk, Yoongi interrupted him. "What's got you so mad at that book?" he asked, mimicking Namjoon's frantic paging through the book.

"Ji…someone wrote in it." Namjoon tilted the book toward Yoongi.

Yoongi leaned over the counter to peer at the pages. "Where?"

"Here." Namjoon pointed to the obviously extraneous lines of orange ink.

"I don't see anything."

"It's right here," Namjoon said. "A lot of ridiculous imaginary stuff about the muscular system. Someone wrote throughout the book like that, in bright orange ink."

"I don't see any writing. I don't see any orange ink." Yoongi frowned at the pages, and then frowned at Namjoon.

"Maybe you should get your eyes checked. Or wear your glasses for once."

Yoongi looked at him curiously before leaning further over the counter and hailing down Hoseok, who'd been busy with the computer in the back office. "Seok-ah, can we borrow your twenty-twenty vision?"

"Absolutely," Hoseok said. He joined them at the front desk, miming taking out his eyeballs and handing them over to Yoongi. "What do you need me to look at?"

"This," Namjoon said, gesturing harshly at the book. This wasn't funny. "Hyung can't see the bright orange writing in here."

Hoseok examined the book. He turned pages. He frowned.

Shit. Namjoon's stomach plunged straight to the floor.

"I don't see any orange ink," Hoseok said hesitantly. "No extra writing."

Namjoon slapped a hand to the page. "Right here. A bunch of criticism about the way human vocal cords have evolved. Bright orange ink!"

Hoseok and Yoongi exchanged a look, and Namjoon realized too late that this was going to be a problem for him.

He knew he wasn't imagining seeing the orange ink. He knew he wasn't imagining what he was reading.

He just didn't know how he was the only one who could.

"Never mind!" he said, throwing his hands in the air. "Maybe I'm the one who needs to get his eyes checked. Maybe I need to get more sleep."

"Maybe," Yoongi said, very slowly.

"What you need is a vacation," Hoseok said firmly.

Irritation scrabbled at Namjoon's shoulders, and he shut the book—with its very obvious orange ink scribblings that were absolutely and definitely there—decisively. "I don't do vacations. I don't leave. You know that."

"We do know that. But even just a day off might be nice. You could go up to the city for an evening. Or even just the next town over."

"And," Yoongi said, "you could ask Park Jimin to join you."

Namjoon considered whether it would an acceptable librarian practice to throw this book at Yoongi's head. Maybe then he'd be able to see the ink. "I'll consider taking an afternoon off. Maybe. And it'll be by myself."

Quick as a flash, Hoseok plucked Namjoon's identification badge off his shirt. "This afternoon," he said. "You have this afternoon off. Go enjoy the sunshine."

Namjoon reached for the badge, but Hoseok tossed it to Yoongi, who immediately hid it behind his back.

"Excuse me," Namjoon said. "I'm your boss. You can't give me the afternoon off."

"Too late," Yoongi said. "Leave. Don't come back until you've either written a poem or discovered a new species of crab."

"Or asked out Jimin," Hoseok said. "If you think that might be easier."

Twenty minutes later, Namjoon was riding his bike near the river and, despite the fact he was still cursing to himself, he had to admit: it was a really lovely afternoon. The sun was shining. The clouds were fluffy. The air was sweet.

He decided to sit down along the waterside and write a poem entitled "Why My Friends Are the Worst."

But instead of granting free-range to his pettiness, Namjoon found himself admiring the little flowers growing in the grass beside him, and he considered what Hoseok and Yoongi suggested.

He could maybe take a vacation. One little vacation couldn't hurt.

The library would be okay without him.

The town would be okay without him.

He would come back. He always came back.

It wasn't that Namjoon never left his town. He traveled all over the country during family vacations in his childhood. He got his degree from the college in a small city a short train ride away; he commuted for his classes, and he even rented an apartment there one summer when he had an internship. He visited his grandparents at least once a year, and last year, during a snowstorm, he even stayed there overnight.

It was just that Namjoon never left for long. He was someone who stayed.

He was born here. He grew up here. He grew into a life here. He built a life here, amid the people he loved, in a community he loved. In a community that depended on him.

He'd spent his life tending to this corner of the world, growing a tidy garden out of his days and nights devoted to the people and the place he loved.

He'd made this corner of the world a better place. This corner of the world was better because of the work he put into it.

Why would he leave? What would be worth leaving?

He let his fingers drift through the grass. Gently, he touched one of the tiny flowers, its bright white petals so bright and clean of a surprise among the greens and browns of the landscape.

"I bloomed where I was planted," he said out loud. And there was nothing wrong with that. It felt like the most basic truth of his life. The most basic truth of who he was. For good measure, he wrote those words down in his notebook.

It wasn't a poem. Or maybe it was.

He was thinking about writing another line when he heard the unmistakable sound of someone trudging heavily through the grass on the other side of the hill.

And then he heard a similarly unmistakable voice: soft and melodic and brighter than any star. "I'm telling you, Tae, the specific details of moonrise aren't going to fix things. We'll give it a try, but if it doesn't work, please don't get upset."

Namjoon sat up straighter.

Park Jimin came down the hillside, holding…holding a phone? Something about the size of it was wrong, as was the fact that he seemed to crush it in his hand when he stopped at the sight of Namjoon.

And that was what happened: Jimin stopped the very second he noticed Namjoon sitting by the river. He stopped, and even from this distance, Namjoon could see his eyes widen. He stopped, and even from this distance, Namjoon could see his chest stutter against a held breath.

He stopped, and even from this distance, Namjoon could feel a connection snapping into place inside himself.

A recognition. A recognition, small and real, and as vivid as orange ink on a page.

"Hi," Namjoon said, with a little bow and a wave.

"Hi," Jimin said, repeating both gestures.

Like before, Namjoon could feel that little bit of coolness, that tiny sliver of aloofness that hadn't been there before. When Jimin was hiccuping, he'd been open and trusting. But after that stupid static shock, he'd held himself back.

And it felt like Jimin was doing that again now, despite the look on his face that was part-surprise, part-concern.

"I was just leaving," Namjoon lied, standing up.

"Don't leave just because I got here," Jimin said. "I'm just searching for a good spot to watch the moonrise."

"When's that?"

"Pretty soon. I'm not good at any of those calculations, though, so I could be wrong. My friend's frustrated at me for not knowing."

As per their first conversation, half of what Jimin said was incoherent, but curiosity filled every empty space inside of Namjoon. Just being around Jimin turned all of Namjoon's nerves into radars for intrigue. "Your friend cares a lot about moonrises?"

"Deeply. Very important to him." Jimin sighed. He sat down beside Namjoon. He pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his chin on top of them, staring out morosely at the river before them. Namjoon resisted the urge to reach out and pat him consolingly. "And they're important to me, too, due to circumstances. I just never really paid attention to all those tiny details before I…moved here. And if it was my friend staying here, he'd have it all figured out, but I don't. It's me. I'm the one here. And I'm messing it all up. I just…it's just that everything's a mess already, and I keep making it all worse."

"I can look up the moonrise time," Namjoon said, pulling out his phone. "I'm sorry about everything else, but figuring out what time the moonrise time is something we can actually do right now."

"Oh, don't," Jimin said. "You actually can't. It's not your moon I'm tracking. It's the other moon."

"The…other moon?"

"Yes. Long story." Jimin pouted. "Ignore me. I know I don't make any sense to you, and it's rude of me to vent. Especially to you."

"Why especially me?"

Jimin turned his head, looking surprised. "I…that's another long story. Please ignore me."

Namjoon set his phone down. He set his notebook aside. He looked at Jimin, who looked small and young and sad, sitting like this. Given the circumstances of his life, Namjoon wasn't really familiar with homesickness, but he wondered if that's what Jimin was experiencing. "I know you don't know me well," he said, "but being told to ignore something just makes me pay more attention to it." He kept his voice gentle, but he could feel the strength building up inside him, inside his words. This felt like maybe the next line of his poem about blooming. "Someone wanting me to look away only makes me more intent to keep my eyes there, because there's something important there."

He didn't know why it felt so significant to say this to Jimin, to explain himself. But he knew two things.

He was telling the truth.

And he didn't want to ignore Jimin. Not at all. Not with any fiber of his being.

"Also," Namjoon said, "you wrote in a library book, and I can't ignore that, either."

Jimin groaned, returning his face to his knees. "This keeps getting worse. How does this keep getting worse?"

"I mean, if you didn't know you're not supposed to write in the book, that's okay. We'll have to buy a new copy to replace it, unless you know how to erase your words, but the ink you used, I don't think it'll come out. It's pretty distinctive."

Jimin lifted his head. "Is it? What…what color is it?"

For half a second, Namjoon felt vindicated: Jimin was basically admitting to writing in the book, which meant Yoongi and Hoseok were wrong. Ha! But then he realized that Jimin asked what color the ink was, which meant…he didn't know what color ink he wrote with. Which was strange. Further strangeness in an already extremely strange situation. "Are you color blind?" Namjoon asked tentatively.

"The opposite. But…what color were the words written in?"

"I'll tell you if you tell me what you meant by 'the other moon.'"

Jimin rolled his eyes. "I can't believe I'm negotiating with you."

Namjoon moved his foot, nudged his shoe against Jimin's. "I am negotiating with you, actually."

"That you are." Jimin sighed. "Okay. If I told you I was here for the moonrise of a moon not in your solar system and not visible to either human eyes or human technology, would you believe me?"

Namjoon considered this. "I wouldn't disbelieve you. I'd question how we aren't aware of this moon's existence, even if it's just through physics calculations or whatever. And I'd ask you how you knew about it and also how you can see it." He shrugged. "But I wouldn't disbelieve you just because I didn't understand something. As a general rule, I don't make my ignorance other people's problem."

Jimin sighed a deep, dramatic sigh and fell backward into the grass. "You are a very kind person, Namjoon-ssi. I wish I could properly express how special it is, your open-minded kindness. Are you aware that everyone in this town loves you?"

"I—" Namjoon blushed. "No. Everyone here is just very nice. That's all."

Jimin shook his head. "No. That's not all. Everyone is nice, but when it comes to you, it's something different. As soon as I say I've been to the library, they ask if I've met you, and they tell me how nice and helpful you are. How much you do for everyone in this town. How you spend so much time making sure everyone gets books and music and other things, even if they don't have time or the physical ability to go to the library. How you spend so much time organizing activities for the kids, for the elders, for everyone. How you spend so much time making the library a welcome place. How it's the heart of this community, and that's all because of you."

Carefully, Namjoon lay back and joined Jimin in the grass. The late afternoon sky was still lovely, and at this moment, it was far easier to look at than at Jimin. Jimin and his obvious melancholy and his compliments and his kind sincerity and that still-lingering sense of holding himself back. "I'm proud of the work I do here," Namjoon said finally.

"Good. You should be."

"Did you recover from that static shock you got?"

"Excuse me?"

"Back at the library, when the book shocked you when you touched it. You seemed really rattled by it. Did you recover?"

Jimin laughed. "Physically? Yes. Emotionally? Yet to be determined."

Of all the inscrutable things Jimin had said to him over the course of their acquaintance, Namjoon felt this one hit him straight in the heart, and he wasn't sure why.

"Are you going to tell me what color ink my words were in? In the book I returned?"

Fair was fair. Jimin had answered Namjoon's question, even if it'd left Namjoon with further questions, and now Namjoon would answer Jimin's question, even if he didn't understand how Jimin didn't know. "Your ink was orange. A warm and golden orange."

The quietness emanating from Jimin shifted into something else: just as quiet, but somehow more intense.

Namjoon turned his head to look at him.

Jimin was staring up at the sky. From this angle, Namjoon could see his eyelashes—perfect, unsurprisingly—and the curve of his jawline, soft and strong and still. Warm and golden described him, too.

"I can pay for a replacement book for the library," Jimin said softly.

"I kinda think you don't need to," Namjoon said. "Because, apparently, other people can't even see the ink. I asked my co-workers to look at it, and they thought something's wrong with me. That's why I'm out here, actually. They forced me—their boss, mind you—to take the afternoon off, because I was seeing things that weren't actually there."

Jimin made a little squeaky noise. "So you figured that out." Then, another sigh. "Of course you did."

"I noticed it," Namjoon corrected him. "I haven't figured it out yet."

"Do you want an explanation? Or do you want to leave the mystery as it is?"

Namjoon watched the clouds overhead. The silence between them was comfortable, as if Jimin understood that Namjoon was thinking, processing, considering. He felt like he was being given space for the most honest answer he could give.

He could feel it: he knew, true as anything, that the way he answered this question would determine a lot of things. How the rest of this conversation would go. How his and Jimin's relationship, whatever it was and whatever it would be, would proceed.

Who Namjoon was and who he wanted to be.

So he thought, and he let his whole self feel quiet, be quiet. No talking, no fidgeting. Simply breathing and being and letting his thoughts drift down deeply to the core of himself. He let his stillness fill the space between them, meeting Jimin's own quiet stillness, combining their mutual peacefulness.

Finally, he spoke up. "I want whatever will enable me to be as kind and helpful to you as possible, and vice versa," Namjoon said. He could feel Jimin turn his head and look at him, the weight of his gaze something heavy. He wasn't ready to turn and meet his eyes, though. "And I think, given all the things you clearly know that I clearly don't know, you're in the best position to judge whether that means I want an explanation, or if I want a mystery."

"Okay," Jimin said.

For a while, they remained together in silence. In his head, Namjoon turned all these mysteries—Jimin and the moon, Jimin and the orange ink, Jimin and things no one else could see, Jimin and the first-time-ever hiccups, Jimin and everything he'd said and done, Jimin and everything he was—over and over, shifting through what he knew and what he knew he shouldn't assume.

He listened to Jimin breathing beside him, steady and quiet, and he wondered how much the puzzles mattered, really.

"Where I come from," Jimin said, "books are very important. But books aren't always the same as they are here."

Back when he was getting his degree, Namjoon had taken a class on the global history of books and reading. It'd been one of his favorites. So he was familiar with the concept of different cultures considering different things to be books and considering books to be different things. This wasn't a radically new idea for him.

"Books aren't the same anywhere, actually. Everywhere, books are different. Right before I arrived here, I was visiting somewhere where books are…well, this specific culture makes books the way your bees here on Earth make honeycomb. The individuals have glands that secrete a malleable substance, and they used that wax to build a communal, multidimensional structure in which others of their species fill the hollows with carefully organized data that, when later consumed, reveals a story. Gives information. Gets read."

Okay. Maybe this was, in fact, a radically new idea for him.

A hundred questions filled his head. A hundred thousand million questions. But he went with the one that piqued his curiosity the most. "Did you consume any? What does it taste like?"

"It depends on what type of text it is. There's a mild sweetness to autobiographical stories, often with a bitter aftertaste. It really tastes like retrospection. The flavor of their poetry comes in rhythmic patterns, strong and weak, heavy and light. And their speculative fiction! A tartness mixed in among this cool, liquor-y taste, like they know they're stretching your imagination by sharing it. But their taste spectrum is far wider than mine. Even though I was inhabiting a body like theirs, I couldn't taste their stories like a native could."

Namjoon considered this, running his tongue along the inside of his mouth as if he expected to be able to taste this story for himself. Each word Jimin spoke had struck Namjoon like a gong, ringing true inside of him.

"So you're not from Earth."

"I'm not."

Namjoon sat up slowly, looking at Jimin as he did so. Jimin remained where he was: lying on his back, eyes closed, chest rising and falling in a steady pace. He looked and sounded calm, but the energy Namjoon felt between them was at its sharpest it'd ever been, like an orchestra conductor had just raised his baton, and the electrical impulses flaring through Namjoon's nerves were at attention.

At attention, and coordinated with Jimin's.

Affection, wild and witless, suddenly softened every edge inside of Namjoon: all his unanswered questions, all the things he didn't comprehend, all the mysteries Jimin contained and perpetuated. Everything melted into comfortable hues—warm and golden, perhaps—where it was okay not to understand everything.

What he could understand was important enough.

He wasn't afraid. He wasn't in disbelief, and he wasn't in shock.

What he was was excited. Happy. Relieved. Thrilled.

What Jimin had given him was an explanation, but inside of Namjoon, it felt like he'd found himself. He felt more like himself than he had in years.

He kept his own voice calm, trying to match Jimin's energy. "Are you from this solar system?"

"No."

"So you're from somewhere very far away."

"Relatively speaking, I guess."

"And you don't normally have a body like—" Namjoon gestured and blushed. Well, no one normally had a body like Park Jimin, humans included. "Like a human body?"

"I had to transform into a body native to this planet, but my original body isn't too dissimilar. My people do have what humans would understandably if self-centeredly call humanoid bodies. But our insides are arranged differently. A lot more efficiently. A lot less hiccup-y."

"Are you here for reasons of exploitation or invasion? If you are, I think I might have an ethical obligation to report that to authorities. I mean, as we've previously discussed, I have mixed feelings on the general direction in which humanity is headed, but even so, I'd rather we not be vanquished by hostile forces."

Jimin sat up so that he and Namjoon were sitting eye to eye. He studied Namjoon for a moment, his gaze gleaming bright, before he broke into an entire sunrise of a grin.

Giddiness crashed through Namjoon, causing every neuron inside of him to fucking levitate. Jimin's smile had to be the sweetest and loveliest sight on this planet and on any other.

He really hoped Jimin wasn't about to tell him he was in the middle of an extraterrestrial military invasion.

"First of all," Jimin said, "it's adorable that you think telling me that would stop me, if I were an evil invader. But I'm not. My exploration is scientific. Or literary, I suppose. And the reason I'm here is that I misplaced myself. I wasn't supposed to visit Earth at all."

Gloom cast a sharp and sudden shadow over Namjoon's happiness.

"Technically, I'm stranded. And although you and your town have been lovely hosts, as soon as Taehyung—that's my best friend, and my navigator, and the person currently mad at me for not calculating moonrises correctly—well, as soon as he and I figure out how to get me off this planet, I'll be on my way."

Namjoon's stomach twisted itself. "How long will that take?"

"I don't know. It's difficult, because Taehyung is stuck in the spaceship, and coordinating what we know and what we're doing is complicated. And that's when I'm not being assaulted by involuntary reflexes of my diaphragm."

"Wait." Namjoon's mind tripped over something, and he started getting excited again. "You have a spaceship?"

Jimin nodded.

"How have you managed to hide it? I know you lied about your address on your library card application, but I didn't even think you might be hiding a spaceship!"

"Oh, it's not here. It's out in space. I took a little detour on my own."

"On a space shuttle?" If Namjoon couldn't see an alien spaceship, then he at least wanted to see an alien space shuttle.

For the first time in this conversation, Jimin seemed…shy. He rubbed a hand along the back of his neck and looked off, obviously reluctant to say something. "No. Through, um, a book."

Namjoon stared at him. "Through a book."

"Through a book."

"Do you mean books like how I think of books, or the more expansive idea you talked about earlier? Literally? Figuratively? Metaphorically?"

"No. I mean there was a glitch in my narrative resonance matrix, and I ended up falling out of a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in your library, without a way to get back to my spaceship."

Okay, perhaps Namjoon had reached his limit for nonchalantly upending everything he'd ever known, because this had him scrambling to his feet. He started to pace the hillside. "That was you? I found that copy on the floor, and it gave me a shock when I touched it!"

"I'd already left the book by then," Jimin said. He curled his knees to his chest again as he watched Namjoon pace.

"How does that even work?"

"Extremely unusual and complicated genetics, even for my species. As far as I know, I'm the only person of my generation who can do it."

"But…what do you do? How do you literally travel through books?" Namjoon stopped his pacing to look at Jimin.

It wasn't that he doubted the truthfulness of what Jimin was saying. He hadn't, not since the first moment they met. He wasn't about to start now.

It was just that this sounded amazing.

Jimin being an alien was, sure, amazing. But this?

Namjoon had spent his entire life enamored with books. Books had always expanded his life. Sharing books with family and friends and lovers was always one of his greatest joys: bedtime stories with his parents, reading books over the phone to his grandparents, playacting stories on the elementary school playground, trading favorite books back and forth with Yoongi in high school. Studying hard and earning his library degree. Working at and eventually running his hometown library.

Happy, every step of the way, feeling connected in that network of the entire sum of human knowledge. The entire sum of human existence, deepest of thoughts and the deepest of feelings, all in those books. All a part of Namjoon's life. Namjoon a part of all that.

Books had always been his life.

And now he was learning that there was someone out there in the universe who could teleport through books? That there was someone out there with access to something called a narrative resonance matrix?

And not just someone, but this someone, the most exciting and curiosity-inducing person (not a person? the appropriate nomenclature was unclear but not Namjoon's biggest priority at this point) he'd ever met?

"It's complicated," Jimin said. "I'm very good at tapping into narrative resonance. All it is is the rhythmic movement of words and emotions and bodies. Recognizing the same pattern across different frequencies. The basics come naturally to me, and I've worked hard and studied hard my whole life, just to be able to do this safely."

"And this lets you teleport? Physically, through books?"

Jimin nodded. "I can demonstrate. Do you have any books with you?"

Namjoon sat back on the ground and picked up his abandoned notebook. "Just this. My notebook. Will that work?"

"Have you written anything in it? Anything that you're comfortable sharing with me?"

"A lot of lists. To-do lists, grocery lists, songs my friends think I should listen to, books I've been recommended." He flipped through the most recent pages. "And, um. Some lines. Of maybe poetry."

Jimin made a little breathy sound, then clapped a hand over his mouth. "Sorry," he said. "I just got excited. Of course you write poetry. Of course. I love that. You definitely don't have to share if you don't want to. But I promise I would never make fun of you for it or think it's bad. At all."

"I wouldn't mind if you read it, but it's all very rough." Namjoon fiddled with the corner of the notebook's cover, a little caution seeping into his excitement. He could barely remember what he'd written lately, aside from today's one line, but he didn't know if it was good enough to share, even like this. "It's just miscellaneous imagery and words and random ideas. And I don't think it's embarrassing, just, you know, not impressive."

"It's never not impressive when someone is brave enough to try to write down their perspective on their life. It's a honor, getting to do what I do. Sharing in people's stories, in both ordinary ways and extraordinary ways."

The solemnness of Jimin's statement had Namjoon resolved to not be ashamed. And he really, really wanted to see Jimin in action. "Here," he said, passing the notebook Jimin's way. "I don't know much you need, but—"

"Oh!" Jimin lurched backward, out of reach of the notebook. "Oh, I forgot about this."

"About what?"

Jimin looked from the notebook to Namjoon. "Um. If I touch this book, it won't be the same afterward."

"Like the shock the copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gave me, when I touched it?"

"It's connected to that, but it's not the same thing. More like the copy of the medical reference book where you read all my thoughts on how inefficiently humans have evolved their respiratory system. The orange ink thing."

"Do you leave that ink when you travel through books?" Namjoon asked. "Like the slime a slug leaves when it travels?"

Jimin scrunched his face in disgust. "No! Not at all! Not that slime isn't lovely and useful for some creatures. But my ink is…not that. It's something different."

"I don't mind if you leave orange ink all over my notebook," Namjoon said. "You can leave orange ink all over the library, for as much as I care, especially if no one else can see it but me. This is so much better having pristine books." He tossed the book to Jimin.

Jimin caught it easily, and it didn't look as if it shocked him. Namjoon looked at the still-closed book, imagining that pretty orange ink flooding the pages he'd already written in, interweaving with his own dark ink and heavy handwriting.

"I might…read more into your words than just what you wrote," Jimin said, poised to open the notebook. "Is that okay? I probably won't need to read very much, but I'll…I'll be able to see more than just the literal words on the page."

"That's literally what any writer wishes for from their ideal reader," Namjoon said. "Go ahead."

Jimin nodded, his eyes flickering over Namjoon's face one more time before opening the notebook.

Namjoon focused on Jimin's own face as he read, the way Jimin's gaze tripped lightly across the page, the way little waves of emotions flickered in his expression. He seemed to be reading for a long while, and Namjoon wondered what page he'd ended up on, and whether it was simply a long to-do list or one of those times that whole stanzas of rhymes and imagery flowed out of his pen or—

"'I bloomed where I was planted,'" Jimin said, closing the book. "That line has a lot of narrative resonance. That's all I needed."

"That's all? It took you that long to read one line?" Namjoon asked. "Sorry, I apologize, it's perfectly all right to read slowly, but—"

Jimin interrupted him, firmly but kindly. "I was reading more than the words you wrote."

Oh, right. He said he'd do that. Namjoon didn't understand just how literally he was supposed to interpret that.

Jimin tossed the notebook back to Namjoon. "Set it on the other side of you, where you can see it, but maybe a couple arms lengths away. For safety purposes. I don't always exit gracefully. Please don't hold that against me."

Namjoon leaned over, setting the notebook in the grass at an appropriate distance. "All right," he said. "It's ready."

"Okay," Jimin said. "Again, please know that I'll look ridiculous. Even when my body is my original one, I look ridiculous doing this."

Namjoon couldn't really imagine thinking Jimin ever looked ridiculous; even when he was hiccuping, he was at the very least cute.

Jimin stood up and brushed off his knees. "I'm going to think about the stories contained in that line, 'I bloomed where I was planted.' I'm going to imagine those stories, all the frequencies on which they exist, to myself." He shut his eyes and drew in a deep breath.

Namjoon held his own breath.

Jimin peeked open one eye and regarded him. "I don't know how long it'll take for me to travel, but don't be alarmed if I'm silent for a few minutes."

"I won't be. I'll happily wait, however long it takes."

"Okay." Jimin closed his eye. "'I bloomed where I was planted.'"

Again, he drew in a deep breath.

And disappeared.

Namjoon barely had time to blink before he felt something like a gust of wind, and he whirled around to see his notebook—previously still and unexceptionable in the grass—toss itself upward, pages fluttering open, and Jimin somehow tumbled out. He fell to the ground beside Namjoon in a stumbling flail of limbs.

Namjoon jumped up to pull Jimin to his feet. "Oh. My. God."

"Okay, that didn't take long at all," Jimin said, his voice and his body both a little shaky. "I don't think I've ever traveled that fast before."

"Oh my God," Namjoon said again. He gripped Jimin's arms, not feeling any steadier himself.

"I have some theories why," Jimin continued, holding on to Namjoon's arms, too. His voice was growing in strength and volume and excitement. "But maybe I should have guessed it would happen that quickly. It's a wonderful line, and of course, I have a personal connection to the thematic territory, and—"

"Oh my God," Namjoon said, ruthlessly interrupting. "Do that again. That was cool."

Jimin laughed, throwing his head back in pure delight.

"Or at least tell me more about how you do that." There was no distance between them anymore, Namjoon realized dazedly. They were both swept up in the same whirlwind of excitement. "I want to know."

"It's…it's mental and emotional, and the only reason I'm good at it is because I have so many other stories, of so many different kinds of lives and so many different kinds of beings, in my head and in my heart, so I have access to so many frequencies, and that increases my ability to do what I do." Jimin was giggling now, and he tightened his hands on Namjoon's arms. "It's hard to explain. But I think of a target, and I let myself think of both the literal text and the emotional core of it, and I let it resonate with stories from my own life, stories I've acquired from others, and stories I don't yet know but that flow into me when I stay open to them."

Every word of what Jimin said…well, it resonated inside of Namjoon, too. There was no other word for it.

It felt like what he always thought reading was.

He just didn't know something like this was possible. Or possible for one person, at least. (One alien. One Park Jimin.)

"And I hold them all, in both their resonance and their dissonance, and I listen, and I catch the rhythm, and I—well, I go. I can't really explain it more than that."

Namjoon's mind was spinning. Sure, it'd been interesting meeting Jimin. Sure, it'd been interesting learning Jimin was an alien. But this? Traveling through books? This was astonishing and it felt like a basic truth of the universe that Namjoon had always held in his heart: the connectedness of every story, of everyone's stories, was magical. It was the lifeblood of what he did, of who he was. "This is amazing," he said. "Truly amazing. It's like you're a walking library. A living library."

"Well, when you told me about your work as a librarian, how you help others access resources and are a resource yourself, I saw myself in that. I'm a librarian, too, in a way. Except I haven't nearly enough resources regarding how to eradicate hiccups."

"Everything you wrote in the reference book, though, was a good start," Namjoon said encouragingly. They still weren't letting go of each other, and he couldn't even begin to describe how much the universe felt broken, in the best of ways, by the last few minutes of his life. "If you've mastered superluminal space travel, and if you know how to travel through books like that, I'm sure you're going to figure out how to prevent hiccups in humans."

He thought back to what all of Jimin's orange ink commentary in the borrowed reference book. How much knowledge Jimin must have brought to the page, even if he was disappointed in not having paid enough attention in xenology classes. (Advanced xenology classes. Now Namjoon understood.) But if beings could evolve to the point where Jimin was, then surely, the whole preventing-hiccups thing wasn't impossible.

Namjoon's thoughts and feelings swirled excitedly. Hiccups, maybe like stories, had a resonance, too, right? And maybe that would be key to figuring out to control them! He tried to remember whether Jimin had already made that connection, in everything he'd written in that reference book, and—

Namjoon's first conscious realization was that Jimin had let go of him. Or that he'd let go of Jimin. He wasn't sure what had happened, because one second, the two of them were standing together, grinning like the dorks they clearly were, as Namjoon's thoughts and feelings were spiraling out of control, trying to recall the details of Jimin's annotated reference book.

And the next second, everything was different.

"Ow!" His head hit the ground with a thump. His back hit the ground with a bigger thump.

But underneath him wasn't the expected grass of the riverbank.

Underneath him was carpet, rough and in need of a good cleaning.

He looked upward and, as panic crawled up and down and under his skin, he didn't see the bright afternoon sky above him. Instead, it was uninspiring ceiling tiles.

Uninspiring ceiling tiles he recognized instantly.

He sat up. Somehow, he was sitting on the floor beside the library's front desk.

Beside him, the orangely-annotated medical reference book sprawled open. Its pages fell motionless almost mockingly just as Namjoon looked at it.

One second, he'd been out by the river with Jimin. They'd been holding on to each other. They'd been excited.

Namjoon had been thinking—very hard—and feeling—just as hard—about that reference book. About the words in there, and about the words that Jimin himself had brought to those pages.

About resonance. About the way hiccups resonated, and about how maybe that was connected with the way narratives resonated, and about how knowledge of one those things could be used to help with the other.

About the possibilities all that resonance held.

And the next second...Namjoon hadn't even blinked, and now he was in the library.

"What the fuck?" Hoseok poked his head out of the office. "Did you seriously come back to work?"

"I—" Namjoon looked around wildly. His brain frantically scrambled itself, even more so than it had all afternoon. Was there any other explanation besides the possibility he'd just teleported through the narrative resonance matrix the way that Jimin had described? The way Jimin did?

Dim in Namjoon's awareness, Hoseok knelt down beside him. Namjoon squinted at him and tried to focus. Hoseok looked very blurred but also very concerned, which Namjoon found strange, because he had no idea of all the things that Namjoon had spent the afternoon learning. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing," Namjoon said. It was the truth. It was also a lie. His brain was about two seconds away from short-circuiting. "Absolutely nothing."

Dizziness clouded its way past his conscious thoughts. Namjoon passed out.