The Scale of My Happiness - 1
Yoongi x Reader - Fluff/Angst/Eventual Smut
Summary - Our favourite girl Y/N is an internationally respected musician in her own right and, at her manager's insistence, meets Bangtan at an awards ceremony at which they are both performing. After a brief interaction, Y/N finds herself enchanted with the members and is excited about the prospect of a potential collaboration, right up until she meets a Yoongi.
A/N - Hello lovelies, I've crawled out of my cage just in time for Genius Min Suga's birthday to post the first chapter of my next fic. It will more than likely be a full-ish length fic, so I hope you look forward to the story and bear with me! I hope you all enjoy, please please let me know if you do! It really means so much <3
You grimaced as the tape holding the mic wire in place pulled out small hairs at the back of your neck as it was peeled away, taking a long pull from your water bottle and rubbing your fingers over the area as one of your many assistants apologised profusely and repeatedly before disposing of the offending tape in a nearby trash can.
You smiled and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder – what was her name again? - surprised when she squealed at the contact and whirled around, the look on her face terrified as though she were about to be flogged.
“It’s okay...” you paused to allow her to furnish you with her name. When none was provided you continued. “If I burst in to tears every time a few hairs got pulled out I’d stop letting them send me to get my bikini line waxed.”
She flicked her eyes down to your stage costume, this one in particular leaving very little to the imagination, and you were as ever endlessly grateful for the existence of thick dancers tights. She still looked unsure but gave a wonky smile before scurrying out of the dressing room. You leaned against the counter with your back to the mirror and raised a greeting hand to your manager as he walked through the door, his face beaming.
“Another incredible show, y/n,” he enveloped you in a brief but sincere hug, reluctant to get any of your sweat on his obnoxiously loud suit which probably cost twice your booking fee. “I don’t know why they keep printing those stories about you.”
“Because it sells papers Michael, and the world needs to know what a heinous bitch I am,” you responded with a wry smile.
You were only half-joking with each other. The fact of the matter was, you didn’t know the assistant’s name as she was a replacement who had been on the job less than a week. The previous girl had tried to use her position to get a foothold in the music industry, and when you had informed her kindly – but in no uncertain terms – that she would need to put the work in and that she couldn’t expect success by using you as a stepping stone, she had quit.
That would have been upsetting enough on its own, a lot of your staff had been with you for years and you considered the majority of them to be friends, but she also decided to go to the media, apparently determined to use your name to acquire fame in one way or another.
It hadn't taken long for the rumours to spread, such was the voracity of netizens looking for their next target on which to bestow a plethora of snarky accusatory comments parenthized in snake emojis. When the news of your "diva behaviour" broke, you decided to take a break from social media, reluctant to have to deal with the contempt of those who were certainly not your fans; and to avoid the defence tactics of those that were.
You knew they meant well, all rushing to defend your honour, but the arguments they got in to sometimes and the casual way in which barbarous words were thrown around like so much confetti often made you physically wince.
By the time you had girded your loins and decided to get back to your instagramming and tweeting a week or so later, to your great surprise – and relief – no one was talking about you anymore.
They were all talking about something called BTS.
Sitting in Michael’s office, scrolling open-mouthed at the fierce enthusiasm with which the group were referred to in the news articles regarding their much-anticipated appearance at the impending award show, your manager appeared over your shoulder as though he had been summoned.
"Incredible isn't it?" He asked, his eyes almost glittering as he bent closer to the screen in your grip. "They don't look real do they?"
They were certainly like nothing you had seen before, seven perfectly groomed and styled beautiful young men all standing in a line posing impeccably before a huge crowd of press photographers. “They look computer generated,” you finally managed in agreement.
He walked around the armchair you were sat in and lowered himself on to the end of the sofa to your right, placing his laptop down on the glass coffee table and lifting the screen excitedly. “Wait till you see them dance.” You leaned forward in your seat to better see the video he brought up. He tapped the space-bar to set it playing and it was clear he had prepared it quite some time in advance.
You watched, enraptured, at the sheer precision and synchronisation of the complex moves. Not a foot placed wrong and every gesture – every facial expression – obviously repeatedly rehearsed to perfection. When it had finished, Michael looked so proud it was almost as if he had choreographed the routine himself. “So,” he leaned back on the sofa once it had ended. “What do you think?”
You frowned at your manager and friend of almost a decade. “What do I think?” Oh god, he didn’t expect you to be able to start doing routines like that did he? “I think I’m about five years too late to train enough to pull that off Michael, and there’s only one of me.”
It was his turn to stare incredulously at you. “What? No, ugh for god’s sake,” he reached in to his trouser pocket and retrieved his own phone, impatiently tapping his passcode on to it before lifting it to your eye-level to show you an email. “They want to meet you.”
And so, some three weeks later, dressed in your awards show finery and re-primped and de-sweated after your performance, you were hustled around the labyrinthine corridors of the award show venue and shown in to a room which was somehow even more manic than your own.
Michael leant over and whispered covertly in your ear. “We should have had them come to you really, doesn’t seem right you having to make all the effort.”
You shrugged, it wasn’t really something you had thought about. Besides, it was Michael that had set it up so you weren’t sure what he was expecting. “It’s easier for the two of us to come here than vice-versa. I mean,” you swept your gaze across the room and gestured at the hubbub. “Can you imagine trying to navigate those hallways with all of this?” There were about four handycams running from various angles and two professional looking photographers standing around.
Wasn’t this supposed to be a dressing room?
A smartly-dressed woman approached and shook Michael’s hand before turning to you. “Y/N it’s honestly such a pleasure to meet you. We have some people here who have been really looking forward to seeing you today.” With that she gestured to a vaguely horseshoe shaped line-up of men, all of whom you recognised from the various articles and videos you had examined perhaps a little more closely than was necessary after learning you were to meet them.
She spoke to the group in what you assumed to be Korean and you smiled as warmly as you were able while simultaneously being dazzled by how much more attractive they were in person. Based on what you had seen over the past few weeks, you wouldn’t have believed that that would be possible.
One-by-one they greeted you, clasping your hand in theirs briefly with a slight bow as they introduced themselves. For the most part, they seemed as shell-shocked as you, each sort of laughing and jostling one another to stand the furthest back away from you, and you might have been offended were they not so utterly charming.
One of the group, Namjoon you had learned, spoke English with an impressive fluency and seemed entirely comfortable in your presence, assuring you how much they all enjoyed your music and how much they were looking forward to the possibility of a collaboration. You cast your eyes towards Michael at this sudden revelation and found him standing and looking like a pig in shit as he emphatically nodded and stuck his thumb in the air. So, you smiled and told him you were very much looking forward to it too.
Another – quite frankly unreasonably good-looking – member of the group with mint-green hair and a broad, wide-eyed smile stepped forward with one of your albums held out before him like an offering. “I really like this, it’s really nice. Could you sign it?”
You were touched by his words and the effort he had clearly put in to ask you in English. You felt bad for not even learning the basics of Korean and made a mental note to memorize a little should this collaboration that you had literally only just heard of in the past five minutes ever come to fruition.
Before turning to leave, you told them as a group that you were excited to see their performance later that evening. They had been placed as the penultimate act for the evening, the predominant theory from the internet being that it was a ploy by the show's producers to keep viewing figures high throughout the three-and-a-half-hour ordeal that was usually the awards ceremony. It made total sense, you yourself could never quite bear to watch them in full even when you were attending the damn things.
Just as you were about to make your way back through the maze of corridors, you heard a frantic “photo, photo!” somewhere back in the centre of the room, and the smartly-dressed woman placed a hand on your shoulder. “Would you mind taking a quick photo with the boys before you go?”
“Of course,” you were surprised Michael hadn’t mentioned it first, he was clearly thrilled at the prospect of milking this meeting for all it was worth from a business standpoint, but when you saw him cast a surreptitious wink in your direction, you knew it was a contrivance on his behalf to have the other party do the leg work. A sort of “playing hard to get” move. You rolled your eyes, both exasperated and endeared with your manager in equal measure, before positioning yourself in the centre of the six ludicrously beautiful men, feeling somehow graceless and frumpy in comparison to them.
Wait a second...six? Weren’t there supposed to be seven?
As though reading your mind, a brunette with a heart-shaped smile and the sharpest jaw line you were sure you had ever seen suddenly stood upright from his slightly crouched, blatantly well practised group-photo pose, looking around the room confusedly. “Yoongi-hyung eodi iss-eoyo?”
You exchanged bewildered glances with Michael, casting your eyes around the room at the moderately chaotic clamour that ensued for a few moments, dying down to almost nothing as a young man with dyed light-brown hair and dark feline eyes strode in to the room.
After a few moments of silence, Namjoon spoke first. “Eodi iss-eoss ni hyung?”
“Hwajangsil,” came the man’s perfunctory reply, before he sat himself down in a chair in the far corner of the room, lifting an iPad from the counter beside him and studying it with a level of concentration that could only be described as intense.
The room was still and silent for a few moments but for the monitor mounted to the wall showing what was taking place in the auditorium, everyone but the man on the tablet too unsure of what to do next to hazard a guess and take action.
After what felt like an hour the translator finally spoke to the latest arrival to the room. You had no idea what had been said but whatever it was caused the man in the chair to lower his device and turn to where you were standing, his eyes widening for the briefest of moments in reaction to your presence, clearly seeing you for the first time.
He rose from his chair and took a few steps towards you. You couldn’t pin-point if it was his unflinching stare or the fact that he seemed so uninterested in meeting you, but something about him made you feel uneasy.
He took your hand in his in much the same way as the other members had, except when he lowered his head in a bow he retained eye-contact with you the entire time. His voice was deeper than you had expected, and he spoke throatily as though he had just awoken from a nap. “Hello, I’m Yoongi, it’s nice to meet you,” his tone implying that it was, in fact, anything but nice to meet you.
He didn’t give you a chance to respond before returning to his seat and his iPad, seemingly not deigning you worthy of any further attention.
You could almost hear the offense in Michael’s harrumph at the rebuff, the “hard to get" approach evidently forgotten as he declared loudly and pointedly. “We still haven’t taken a picture yet!”
The dismay in his voice while announcing such a trivial fact was amusing enough to break you from the somewhat perturbed stupor from your interaction with the seventh member of BTS, and you laughed good naturedly and resumed your position in the centre of the six young men.
The resulting photo was flattering for everyone in the frame, and was a strong competitor for the most retweeted picture of the year; the publicised interaction exposing each respective fanbase to the work of the other artist.
Only you would be able to make out the thinly-veiled look of disdain which was thrown in Yoongi’s direction as the picture was taken, and the camera was incapable of capturing the dark look he shot you in return.
