i have a drabble request for your anniversary 🥺
it’s not related to any of your stories… but since you’re so good at writing about kids, could we please have a drabble where yoongi is a dad calmly letting his tiny kiddos crawl all over him (maybe one running a teeny tiny car up his arm and one draped over his thigh pointing at things on his laptop screen etc) as he quietly works on his computer or something like that 🥹🥹 like never once telling them to get off of him, just letting them be like his irl counterpart whenever the tannies bother him 🥹 then maybe eventually oc feels bad for him and rounds them up so that their daddy can work in peace 🥹
Ok I sort of got carried away and I'm not sure I checked all the boxes but I hope you still enjoy this!
Characters: Dad Yoongi x Y/N, their two kids Length: 4878 World: It can stand alone but it's the same kiddos as this one shot
----------------------------------
“The cat forgot to lock the door. Mouse came to visit and the door was…”
“Ajar,” Yoongi said, not even looking away from his laptop, balanced precariously on the armrest of the couch.
Kija remained silent. He contemplated. Yoongi didn’t look at him, just waited.
He resumed reading but did not repeat the word the way he used to. Before, if he found something he didn’t know, it was easy to offer the answer. His spongy young mind latched onto every new discovery and wanted to immediately try it his new knowledge. But now, suddenly, he didn’t want the help. He refused it. Didn’t even acknowledge with a tantrum unless you pushed it, he just moved right along after a pause, as if he wanted to pretend he hadn’t heard.
Yoongi continued to half-listen, half-let Kija’s voice fade into the background as a third half of his brain tried to make sense of the session notes –wait that wasn’t the right number of halves. He closed his eyes and let out a slow, quiet breath.
Joo reached over and rolled her toy car across the keyboard. Ah, that’s where the other half of his brain was supposed to be.
“Hey,” he cooed, and gently nudged her hand away. “That’s not a road, aegiya. Not on the keyboard.”
“Appa are you listening to me?” Kija demanded.
“I am.”
A catch-22: Kija wanted to be simultaneously closely listened to and unperceived.
Kija gave him a hard glare, then turned back to the book. First grade was a struggle so far, that was the truth. But Yoongi swallowed the smile because his son still wanted to be heard, and tuned more of his brain to it, and more of his brain to shuffling Joo to the other side of the couch, even though it meant he had to move towards the middle and shift his laptop to balance on his knees. It wasn’t conducive to answering emails. Nor was having two halves of his brain now focused on two children with no more halves left for email reading. Especially an email with label notes on the recent album, notes he needed to ingest and consider and then spit out into two categories: those I will consider, those I reject completely.
He looked at Joo. Her eyes widened, two dark starry orbs. At two, she could already speak in full sentences but often chose not to, keeping most of her odd little thoughts to herself until she’d suddenly surprise you.
Now she pointed at the computer and asked him, “Is it a good one?”
“A good one? Is what a good one?”
“Make the music, Appa.”
“No, not yet, we’re listening to Kijaya read right now,” he reminded her. He touched a finger to his lips to shush her.
Kija grumbled behind them and huffed, “Don’t listen to me.” Yoongi glanced over his shoulder; Kija glanced over his own shoulder to check if Yoongi was watching, then quickly looked away. He resumed reading, his little voice slow and soft, caressing each word with uncertainty, as if waiting for Yoongi to correct him.
Yoongi did not. Mistakes were nothing to be ashamed of. Yoongi was all too familiar with performance anxiety and wouldn’t create it in his son by interrupting his storytelling for something trivial like a mispronounced word. You could be right later, your first contributions to the world should just be about presence.
“Don’t listen so much to me,” Kija complained in the silence. “It’s too quiet. I can’t read when it’s quiet.”
“You’re doing well,” Yoongi said. As soon as he spoke, Kija started reading again, like he could slip his words beneath his father’s and leave them half hidden, half heard. So Yoongi asked Joo quietly, “Do you want to see the audio?”
Joo sounded so serious as she answered, “Yeah.” She got that ‘yeah’ from Yoongi, he knew that. He didn’t babytalk his children much, just certain words, certain pet names, but mostly he spoke to them with respect and trust from the time they were babies, and it provided him endless amusement when they repeated him later. “Just live life,” Kija used to say when he meant I don’t know. “Ah, I see,” Kija used to say, an exact copy of Yoongi. “Ah, I see,” Joo would repeat now too, her expression even more of a mirror. And then sometimes, “You think so?” A little toddler, short ponytails sticking straight out from her head like antennae, asking, “You think so?” as if taunting about how the attempts to get a nap out of her were going to go. She badly needed the nap but God forbid you try to get her down if Kija was home. She could not miss out on a single minute of whatever her favorite older brother was doing.
Yoongi opened an audio file, muted, but let her watch the visualizer on his screen. Her eyes reflected the rising and falling bars, the red, orange, yellow, and green blocks she recreated with wooden blocks. He was certain that’s what she was doing, stacking them next to each other, adding and subtracting blocks. You insisted he was projecting but he knew what he knew.
Kija glanced over and his voice faltered before he returned his attention to his book, little face a scowl. Suddenly he slammed the book shut and threw it to the floor.
“Hm?” Yoongi prompted, gentle. Joo’s gasp was loud.
“Oh no! Book is down!” she cried, and instantly lowered herself to the ground to fetch it. “Kiki you drop him!”
“I don’t want it,” he scoffed. His arms crossed and he turned his back to her, awkwardly facing the back of the couch in a full sulk.
Yoongi held his hand out for the book and said again, “Hm.”
“Hm.” Kija mocked. Angry. Such an angry little boy sometimes lately, and it scared Yoongi. He hadn’t expected Kija to feel that kind of anger until he was at least a rebellious adolescent –and hopefully Yoongi would be able to help him manage that better than he had his own. You were the one who better knew how to handle the emotions and behavior of this age; Yoongi never knew what was normal and what wasn’t, what online articles to believe, or which pediatrician could be trusted. You’d gone through three now, each one shed after some perceived failure on Yoongi’s part. In life, he was open to compromise on most things. But not music. Not his devotion to you. And not the health and needs of his children.
“Do you not like the story anymore?” Yoongi asked gently. “Or are you frustrated?” The boy who at other times could wax poetic about the shenanigans of his friends at school now just grunted and twisted further away on the couch. “We can read a different book if you’re bored with that one,” Yoongi offered as a way out.
“Diff book!” Joo cheered and went right to the stack by the door to get her favorite National Geographic book, one of those big heavy glossy coffee table ones –a gift from Uncle Namjoon, as if he didn’t think Yoongi would instill enough appreciation for nature in his own kids. The book was clunky in her arms as she determinedly hauled it over.
“You’re doing great at reading,” Yoongi assured Kija. It was true. He was a little behind his peers, but nothing alarming; the fact he could read at all by six seemed insane to Yoongi. He hadn’t been reading at six. Kids these days… everything in the schools was so different. Everything in the world too, frankly. Phones, computers, video games, social media–
Yoongi pushed away the bigger worries and continued, “I had a hard time with it in school too but it worked out in the end, I just had to keep at it.” Even as he said it, Yoongi hated his own words. He still didn’t read much for pleasure, though sometimes he found articles that were worth the effort. Music had always come more easily to him, the notes on a staff making more sense to him than letters on a page. He liked poetry, too. Lyrics. Heavy prose bored him, he had no patience for dense pages.
“I don’t have a hard time with it!” Kija shouted and spun again to keep Yoongi from reaching for him. Just as he reached for his son, Joo dropped the book on her foot and began to wail. The heavy cover opened so the book landed standing upright, and when she reached down for her foot, she bashed her mouth on the corner.
In moments like this, with both kids crying, Yoongi found his steadiness overwhelmed. He felt like a bad dad because inside his calm resolve began to fracture and his cool exterior was a lie. Dads shouldn’t have to lie like that. He didn’t have the right words or energy to wrap two crying children up in a tornado of hugs and kisses that would distract them with warmth the way you did. You’d always recognized his steadiness, his caretaking, even though it was lowkey. He was dependable. But a frustrated six year old and a two year old with a boo-boo didn’t need cautious reliability, they needed… you.
But you weren’t here right now. Hour twenty-six of the fifty-four you’d be away. Not that he was counting or anything.
Yoongi scooped Joo up to comfort first, only to realize she was bleeding. Not hospital level bad, but more than he wanted his daughter to bleed, her little lip red where she’d hit the book. For a moment he had parental panic because steadfastness didn’t teach you how to soothe a bleeding toddler. He grabbed a napkin from the pile he’d accumulated from takeout bags over time and pressed it to her lip and bounced her around and tried to think of a silly song to distract her but his mind was blanking on children’s songs because it rattled him. Even a little bit of blood was an unwelcome reminder of how little he could truly do to protect his children.
“Are we ready for ice cream? I think it’s a good idea,” he decided. Suddenly Kija was more interested. Joo stopped wailing and nodded at him with her big watery eyes still leaking tears. At least today the hurt was something he could fix with a special treat.
While funneling ice cream into his mouth, Kija returned to his more cheerful self. Chocolate smeared across his cheeks, he suddenly poured out a stream of stories from school as Yoongi tried to keep Joo from getting chocolate all down the front of her white dress. It was hopeless. Only a stylish person with no kids (Hoseok) would give a child such an expensive all-white dress. You had sagged against the wall laughing later when the two of you discovered it was dry-clean only after a messy meal, and Yoongi had fallen in love with you all over again, that you could laugh so hard about what others might cry over. Into the regular wash the white dress had gone and so far it was still rotating through, though the chocolate might finally be the stain that took it down.
“And then my friend Tum had to clean the whole house all by himself and it took him four hours,” Kija shared. “His family didn’t even help! It was so mean.”
Belatedly Yoongi realized he wasn’t really listening, and quickly prompted, “How did you hear about this?” despite his initial impulse to point out this was unlikely to be true.
“He wrote about it for Daily.”
“What’s daily?”
Kija suddenly looked very serious. Yoongi could practically feel him shrink away. Suddenly he perked up and started talking about something else completely, “Giganotosaurus was bigger than the t-rex but not as smart.”
“Who would win in a fight?” Yoongi asked, taking a page from Jungkook’s parenting book without meaning to. The question never failed to get kids talking though, he had to hand it to him.
“Um… I don’t know how to answer that because they lived in different places.”
Yoongi didn’t try to contain his laughter. It confused Kija and Joo, though it didn’t slow down their ice cream consumption.
“You are so much like me sometimes,” Yoongi muttered.
“No I’m not.”
“No? I think you are. That’s a good thing, I hope.”
“You don’t want to be like me?”
Yoongi quickly corrected, “No, maybe you don’t want to be like your dad. Sometimes kids don’t want to be like their fathers. You can be your own person too, I don’t mean you have to be exactly like me. Just that we think alike sometimes.”
“So what?”
“Yea, so what,” Yoongi nodded. But his brain cycled back in the conversion and he pressed, “Hey, what’s the Daily thing you mentioned?”
Kija answered easily this time, “Every day after Morning Meeting the teacher tells us something we have to write about in our journal.”
“What do you write about?”
“Um… stuff. I don’t know. Dinosaurs and dogs and… dumplings.”
“Only things that start with ‘D’?”
“Huh? They don’t all start with D.”
“Those things all do. Dinosaurs, dogs, dumplings–”
“No they don’t,” Kija huffed. “Stop saying that!”
“But they do. Each of those words begins with–”
He clamped his hands to his ears and shouted, “Stop! You don’t know that!”
Yoongi let out a deep sigh and began trying to mop Joo up.
“More,” she demanded.
“No.”
“Ice cream for din-din. More please.”
“No– shit, it is almost dinner time,” he mumbled. Normally dinner was his part of the managed schedule so it wasn’t like him to forget it, but with you gone, the whole schedule was harder to maintain. The hours dragged on but then a whole afternoon passed and he hadn’t gotten anything done. It felt like you’d been gone for days; your absence was so achingly loud in a house never silent thanks to the two children. They hadn’t slept well last night with you gone, and neither had Yoongi; tonight would probably be the same, and tummies full of nothing but ice cream wouldn’t help.
“I know all the letters,” Kija muttered. He dragged his fingers through a splash of chocolate ice cream on the white counter. “I know them more than you.”
Yoongi shrugged, “I’m a lot older so it’s normal that I know more about reading and writing. But you know more than me about dinosaurs and Pokemon.”
“Yeah you don’t even know the difference between Dodrio and Diglett.”
“Don’t they both have three heads?”
“Well…” Kija’s eyes narrowed like he suddenly suspected Yoongi was hiding some vast Pokemon knowledge. He was not. That was basically the only thing he knew. “Yes,” Kija admitted.
“So am I a Poke-Champ now?” He knew it was Master but he liked seeing Kija’s eyes light up to correct him. He didn’t usually play that kind of game with Kija, he was direct and honest with his son, but he felt like Kija could use the confidence boost right now.
“Appa carrots please?” Joo demanded, resting her sticky fingers on Yoongi’s arm.
“You want carrots now?”
Joo nodded and smiled. He glanced at the clock and understood this was dinner for real now. Might as well ply them with carrots and yogurt and anything else he could get them to eat after ice cream.
Kija had clammed up again but Joo chatted happily enough for them both as Yoongi chopped up fruits and vegetables, microwaved some rice, and reheated yesterday’s noodles. As the kids picked at the offerings, he realized he’d forgotten to take their lunches out of their backpacks after picking them up from school and hurried to do that before he forgot again and had to deal with a gross surprise in the morning when it was time to repack.
In pulling Kija’s bento out, he noticed a couple papers crumpled at the bottom of the backpack, like they’d been shoved in and then forgotten. Sometimes Kija brought home drawings and he got upset if they got wrinkled like that; many times now you’d carefully smoothed them out, even painstakingly ironed one when Kija sobbed that it was ruined by the creases.
Kija felt things so big. He stayed out of sight so as not to set Kija off again if these were precious crumbled art. Yoongi felt so inadequate as a father when Kija felt things so big; it wasn’t that his own feelings were never big, but that his expression of them was so different than his son’s. Joo seemed to handle things more like him. He felt like he disappointed Kija sometimes when he wasn’t dancing and leaping with him, and like he failed him when he couldn’t comfort during his worst moods. He was trying harder to do both… at least Joo thought his attempts at dancing when Kija beat a level in his video game were funny. Kija had just thought he was mocking him and you had needed to smooth it over.
Yoongi flattened the first paper and surveyed the cartoonish ice cream cone with big sparkly eyes. The second was a drawing of… things. Yoongi had no clue what, all very boxy, lots of lines, but he got the impression they were things –robots or Pokemon or animals he couldn’t recognize.
The third was a writing sheet, a printed template that said “Daily Journal” at the top. Kija had written his name and the date, both shaky and clunky. The prompt was “I am good at ________.”
And in the space left to write, twenty lines meant to contain Kija’s little boy pride in all the things he was good at, his son had written only: i am thee fort fast runer in my klas.
Yoongi studied that response for a moment. Kija was good at lots of things. Up until recently, Kija would have been all too eager to tell you all the things he was good at, true or not! But when given the opportunity to brag or even lie, he’d written so little..
Yoongi carried the paper over and asked, “Kija, what is this?” Kija glanced at the paper and said nothing. “This is what you meant by a Daily, right? Why do you have only one thing listed here? What about all the other things you are good at?” Kija rested his chin on the table and wouldn’t look at Yoongi. Joo thought this was funny and started to giggle until Kija shouted at her, then she turned to tears.
“Do not yell at your sister. No one deserves to get yelled at ever. Only yell if someone is in danger, right?”
Kija suddenly lunged and took the paper from Yoongi. He slid from the stool and began to crumple it again, clearly headed for the trashcan. Yoongi let him do it. He leaned against the counter where the kids ate and waited until Kija came back, dusting his hands like a job well done.
“Why did you throw it away?”
“Because it’s bad.”
“What’s bad about it?”
“It’s not even true,” Kija told him. “Logan, Nolan, Kasi, Do, Win, and Iseul are all faster than me so that means I’m not even number six.”
“So what?”
Kija glared at him like he just didn’t understand.
“You don’t have to be the best to be good at something,” Yoongi corrected, recognizing this as a big teaching moment. “Who cares how good other people are? Don’t get into the habit of comparing yourself to other people. Just look at yourself and all that you accomplish.” Kija leaned his cheek in his hand and stabbed his chopsticks into his rice. “We’re going to make a new list,” Yoongi decided, going for the notepad you kept by the fridge for making shopping lists. He brought it back with a pen and set it on the table.
Kija just stared.
“You can name some things you’re good at.”
“Kiki is good at stories!” Joo offered.
“Yes. And you’re good at helping with your little sister,” Yoongi nodded. He wrote these down. “You’re good at drawing and at helping me pick out the best fruit at the market.”
“Those are dumb things.”
“They aren’t dumb. You are good at being a friend, you know all the things your friends like and don’t like. You are good at throwing a ball with Uncle Taehyung, right? He said you were good at it.” Yoongi could see none of these things were making Kija feel even a little better though. “What’s going on? What are you thinking about all this?”
Apparently it was the right question.
“I’m not good at writing the words so it doesn’t matter,” Kija insisted. “And at math class the numbers don’t stay the same in my head.”
“What do you mean, they don’t stay the same?”
“I can’t remember the numbers and what they do and I don’t remember all the sounds the letters can make either so I’m basically dumb.”
“You aren’t dumb.”
“I am dumb,” Kija insisted.
“You are six years old, it’s not possible for you to be dumb because you aren’t supposed to know anything yet. You’re just supposed to be learning.”
“Everyone else learns faster than me.”
“It’s not a race–”
“Everyone else gets papers on the Daily Wall but not me and I don’t get smiley faces on my Dailies.”
Yoongi paused and really took in the serious things his son was telling him. Joo got quiet too, looking between them. He understood. Boy, did he understand the feeling of failure when your papers came back red. He remembered what it was like when he stopped trying in school because then it didn’t hurt so bad when he failed. He remembered what it was like thinking he was stupid too, when in reality he just hadn’t found his place yet. Once he was free of school and the pressure was gone, he learned more easily, and he always had his music skill and passion to lean on.
“There are lots of ways to be smart and school is only one way,” Yoongi told him. Six was too young to already be worried. He deserved smiley faces on his papers, even if they weren’t quite right, even if it was just a smiley face for trying. “Do you remember how happy you were when you started reading stories to me and Joo at bedtime?”
“Yeah…” Kija admitted. “But I just memorized them.”
“So what? That is a very smart thing to do.”
“It’s not the same as reading.”
“No, it’s not, but that doesn’t make it worse. Memorizing things is a very hard thing to do too. So how about after dinner we read that book again, but I’ll read it slowly to you and you can practice memorizing it. Then you can read it to Eomma when she gets home.”
“But I won’t be reading it.”
“It still counts,” Yoongi assured him. “She’ll be so impressed and you like to do that, don’t you? Tell us stories?”
“Yes.”
“Then it doesn’t matter, it’s ok to do things just because you enjoy them. I enjoy when you read to us, no matter how slow you need to take to sound the words out. I’m not in a rush.”
“Me too!” Joo added. “I am not russ too.”
Kija smiled at her, “Rush, not russ. Shhhh.’” He reached out and brushed a few grains of rice off his sister’s cheek. “She’s cute but she’s not very good at feeding herself yet.”
“Well she’s two. And you’re six. You learn things when you learn them.”
“How old are you?”
“It’s not important.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t remember. When you get to be as old as me, it’s hard to remember what the number is.”
“Oh.” Kija gave him a gentle look. “You don’t count very good, huh? Only music counting?”
Yoongi snorted, “I like math more now that I’m not in school. In school it was hard when the teachers wanted me to do things fast but I needed more time… so if that’s how you feel, you’re just like me that way too.”
“Oh.” Kija watched Joo fondly for a moment and Yoongi figured he was about to learn something new about dinosaurs, that Kija’s mind had already slipped onto more enjoyable thoughts. Instead he said after a moment, “I guess I’m good at being like my appa.”
“Yeah.”
“Everyone always says Joo is more like you but maybe I can be good at being like you too.”
“You want to be?” Yoongi couldn’t help himself asking. It was so damn flattering.
“Yeah but I like being like eomma too.”
“It’s like I said, you can be good at lots of things. Just like you’re good at being just yourself, not like anyone else in the world.” Yoongi nodded and smiled and felt slightly more competent as a father for just one brief moment. It was wild to realize his parents must have had these same thoughts. They’d been such adults to him when he was Kija’s age and yet they’d been even younger than he was now. At what point did you become the competent adult your six-year-old thought you were?
“The first dinosaur ever was named the eoraptor,” Kija told him, interrupting his thoughts. “It means ‘dawn stealer.’”
“Did it wake up early every day?”
Kija rolled his eyes, “No, appa, because it was the dawn of the dinosaurs, get it? It was the size of a dog. I think we should get a dog and name it Eoraptor.”
“Isn’t it too much like Eomma? She might get jealous.”
“Ok we can name a dog something else,” Kija grinned.
“I didn’t say we could get a dog.”
“I’m telling eomma you said we could get a dog.”
Joo sighed loudly, “I want a cat.”
“We have a cat.”
“More cat!” she cheered.
“I’m telling Eomma you said yes and then she’ll never want to leave us again.”
“We’re enough to bring her back,” Yoongi assured them both. “Let’s just show her how well we can do things even when she’s gone so she knows we were all really good at taking care of each other. Who’s going to help me wash the dishes?”
Both kids wanted to, a pleasant surprise. They behaved for a bath and got to watch a few cartoons after you called to say goodnight so Yoongi could have a moment longer with you. He decided not to mention yet Kija’s school frustration –not that you didn’t know, you were such an attentive parent, but that maybe it was worth looking into. Was he too young, would it add pressure, would it make Kija feel like some possible diagnosis defined him? Yoongi had never been diagnosed with anything and he’d made it through and found his way in life. But damn, he’d been miserable for a lot of years. He didn’t know if there was other help available for him at the time, if his parents could have done more than they did… Maybe he could do better both at helping Kija know school didn’t define him and getting him whatever extra help he needed to feel supported…
He wouldn’t put that on you right now, not when this was such a short time for you to try and catch a break from round-the-clock parenting. For now he just showed off that he and the kids were doing well, proud they were both freshly scrubbed in the video call. He made sure to angle the camera so you wouldn’t see the parts of the house he hadn’t managed to tidy yet. It was hard being down his partner, but he was glad you could get the break.
Snuggled down in bed all together, Yoongi read books slowly so Kija could read closely along with him. He’d never felt like he had a great reading voice, he read in fits and starts, so it was better for him to take his time anyway. Kija read the last book, an old favorite he had already memorized, while Yoongi pointed at the words as Kija said them.
Once Kija fell asleep, curled up with the book he’d been struggling with earlier, Yoongi carried him to his own bed. Joo proved more challenging, waking as soon as Yoongi lifted her. He knew he ought to have put them in their own beds to start, but hey, he was lonely with you gone too. So he let Joo stay in his bed after all. And when Kija came tip-toeing back in an hour later, while Yoongi was still checking the final emails on his phone, he welcomed him back and let him stay. He didn’t make it through the emails. Instead he sent you an email with nothing but a heart emoji in it. It was simple, but it would make you smile. You never seemed to mind when his affection was simple.
You had now been gone for thirty-two of the fifty-four hours.
Yoongi had never missed you more.
But at least he had two little pieces of you to sleep sprawled across him, just like you would have if you were here.
