( bookshop kismet ) ✾ ijb + myg
he stared at the banner hanging just below the bookstore’s name. half-off all items until the end of the month! it cheerfully read.
“what—are they insane…” he muttered under his breath, ignoring the passers-by bustling to and fro on the sidewalk. if they want me to buy out the entire store, so be it. okay, yoongi didn’t really have the funds to do so but—you get what i mean. it was tuesday afternoon and yoongi realized there had not been a day this past week on which he hadn’t found himself standing outside this very establishment.
if he were to make excuses for himself, he just needed some down time, alright? down time to recover from the released guillotine blade that was the results of the latest science test. some people would kill for an eighty-nine out of a hundred, but yoongi would kill for the missing point that threw him below ninety. yoongi wasn’t some people, he thought, swinging open the door and leaving the bell tinkling behind him.
bookshops were otherworldly. and therapeutic. he holed himself up in places where he was surrounded in books the way other kids holed themselves up in their rooms. he bookmarked the pages of his own life with books—he was reading park kyungri’s toji the first time he heard his parents fight; nick joaquin’s cave and shadows the first time he stole something; kim yongik’s moon thieves when he had graduated from high school; murakami haruki’s 1q84 by the time he moved to fantasia. the books he read were time capsules in the form of bound stacks of paper, but sometimes they were all he had.
the classics section was always the first part he visited. he didn’t have the whole elitist thing (“classics are better than contemporary trash five hundred percent of the time!1!!”) going on but he found out that the more he went forward in time, the less books he picked up. it was just his personal preference. his eyes ran along the english titles—the secret garden, canterbury tales, the complete works of william shakespeare, the old man and the sea …
hold up one fresh second.
he backtracked over a few titles to look over the volume of shakespeare they had on display. “beautiful,” yoongi breathed, appreciating the sleek material of the hardbound cover, the embossed gilt title on the front, the rich red of the pages’ edges. definitely worth whatever its original price was.