the death of you | knj | two
→ pairing: eventual namjoon x f!reader; seungcheol x f!reader (top 10 anime crossovers) -> warnings: angst. fluff. discussions of engagement and marriage. depending on your perspective, possible emotional cheating and infidelity. supportively irritating bff taehyung. side commentary about korean society and its misogyny. seungcheol doesn’t look great here, and is also a lawyer. drinking. food. children. sports. daddy issues. a rebellious little sister. -> word count: this chapter - 5.0k (9.7k total) -> notes: hehehehehehe. in which you see namjoon (again), and we learn more about who namjoon is.
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Your father calling is never a good thing.
For one, he doesn’t call often. He’s a busy man, and between flights to New York and Singapore and firm-hosted happy hours and sorting out partner conflicts, there are several things he’d rather be doing than calling you. Which you don’t take personally. Really. In fact, you wake up most mornings hoping he won’t call. No news is good news, and all that.
Which brings you to your second point—your father, needless to say, isn’t exactly the warm and fuzzy type. He barks orders at you and your sister and your mother the same way he barks orders at his administrative assistants, and expects everything to be done in order and in a certain way, and God help the person who can’t read his mind. The whisper-thin threads of blood relation holding you all together have been made even weaker by you and your sister's decisions not to follow in his footsteps, and now you just consider yourself lucky if you get a gift—always something with a ridiculous price tag, impersonal, and no doubt wrapped and shipped by some poor schmuck at his office—sent to your door at Christmas.
You can think of maybe three times he’s called in the years since you moved out of your parents’ place and into the studio apartment. The first time was to tell you that your paternal grandmother, a distant and formidable figure in your life, had passed and that you were expected at the hospital funeral hall. The second was to tell you that he’d just met the son of an acquaintance, a fine and capable young man named Choi Seungcheol, and that you were expected to meet Seungcheol for dinner at the Shilla Hotel that Friday evening. The third was an accident—he’d meant to call your sister, and anyway, have you heard from her, she has the nerve to funnel money from my bank account straight to Boston College but can’t be bothered to let us know how she’s doing, I have to go just let us know if you ever receive a sign of life. Click.
So this would be the fourth, and it crashes down upon you from on high on a Sunday morning. Last night’s tension plus a lame excuse from Seungcheol about working until midnight meant going home to sleep in your own bed, and you’ve just managed to quiet the voices in your head until the blare of your ringtone obliterates the possibility of rest.
You squint at the screen and tap the green button, against your better judgment. “Hello?”
“What’s this I hear about you and Seungcheol setting a wedding date?”
You roll your eyes. “Gee, news travels fast.”
Your father sighs, like he can’t believe he has to deal with you at seven AM on a Sunday. “Good. You’ve been dating for too long, and you know Seungcheol’s father is a good friend of mine. I’m glad you two have finally decided to stop beating around the bush.”
“Who said we’re getting married?”
“I had drinks with Chairman Choi last night. You know we’re in talks for a merger. Imagine my shock when he casually brought up the fact that my own daughter is getting married.”
You do know that your father and Chairman Choi are in talks for a merger. You also know that marrying Seungcheol would practically pave the way for a buyout of your father’s firm by Seungcheol’s family’s firm, and that your father desperately wants to retire in a multibillion-won blaze of glory, and if you aren’t a Stanford MBA grad or even an SNU grad, you might as well prove useful by doing this one little thing.
Almost embarrassing, how dramatic it all is, but nonetheless: “It’s not decided, yet. I mean—he hasn’t proposed, or—we’re not actually getting married yet, okay?”
A beat passes. “And why the hell not.”
It really is too early for this, you think. “It’s not like we’ve broken up. I’m just not ready to be married?”
“No one’s ever ready to be married. Don’t be ridiculous. I married your mother the fourth time I met her, and we were both 26. You are 29 years old. You’ve been dating that boy for three years, and I don’t see why you’re still together if you’ve had no intention of marrying him.”
He has a point. (It’s horrifying that your parents were married off to each other at such a young age by forces beyond their control, but he does have a point.) You don’t believe that marriage is something to be rushed into or forced just because you’re “at the age.” Marriage is something that you think should come naturally. You’ve heard the horror stories—women your age getting married to the person they just happened to be dating in the latter half of their twenties. Throwing the requisite hotel ceremony and reception, moving into an expensive Seoul apartment in a good school district, getting pregnant, and pushing out babies before realizing that they weren’t right for each other, after all.
Point being, you don’t see marriage as an end goal for anything. If you’re plenty satisfied with the way things are now—the way your relationship is going now—then you see no point in rushing into the legally binding commitment. In theory, you’d be perfectly fine just dating someone forever, so long as you were happy.
But it does have you thinking. If you can’t even picture marrying Seungcheol, why the hell are you still dating him?
“Abeoji, I have to go,” you say. (A lie, because where the fuck would you be going at seven AM on a Sunday, but he doesn’t have to know this.) “I don’t know what Seungcheol’s father heard, but it’s not true. We haven’t made any plans. If we do, you’d be the first to know.” (Another lie, because Tae has all but made you sign a contract to ensure that he’ll have that distinct honor, but you digress.)
“I’m not done,” your father manages to bark, before you can hit End call. “I want to see you and Seungcheol at Kojima for dinner this Saturday. I’m inviting Chairman Choi and his wife, too. It’s been too long since I’ve seen Seungcheol, and I’m done wasting everyone’s time.”
“Abeoji, I—”
Click. Unbelievable. You glare at the phone, like your father can see you, and toss it down on the duvet.
Another thing about your father: He is a man used to getting his way. You wish you could say you’ve cut him off; that the two of you have no relationship, that you owe him nothing now that you’re out from under his roof. But working at a library doesn’t pay what it should, so this studio you’re sitting in right now? He’s the one making those rent payments. Seoul, you quickly learned, would be criminally unlivable otherwise. If not for your father, you would be living in some desolate sharehome with strangers, subsisting on nothing but Shin Cups and CU-issued gimbap.
Looks like you have dinner plans on Saturday. Fat chance that you’ll be able to go back to sleep now.
You drag yourself upright, rubbing the crust out of your eyes. Sundays are the most divinely blessed day of the week, at the very least because you don’t have to work. Plus, Sundays mean waking up in Seungcheol’s place, with his down comforter and fancy espresso machine and a whole day ahead to do nothing. If he’s in the mood and not busy, the two of you will do nothing but roll around in bed before his afternoon basketball game; otherwise, he’ll retreat to his office to work, and you’ll end up dragging Tae out to grocery shop or people-watch at the Han River or psychoanalyze his last hookup. Depending on the mood.
Today, though…. You kind of just feel down. Now that you have the prospect of a forced engagement looming over your head, all menacing and Damoclean, your plans to accompany Cheol to today’s game feel like entirely too much. All you want to do is lie down, pull the comforter over your head, and—
Ding, ding, ding. Your doorbell.
No. You flop back into your nest and turn over, back to your front door. Probably just the Coupang delivery guy—you made Tae order you a new tablecloth a couple of days ago, after he spilled soy sauce all over the last one.
Ding, ding, ding. You frown, glaring at the door. This Coupang guy has zero noonchi if he’s assaulting your doorbell this early in the morning. They’ll usually just drop the package by the door and leave—a second ring is almost unheard of. You crawl under the duvet, burrito yourself in it, and hope that whoever it is has the good sense to leave before trying you a third—
Ding, ding, ding. For Christ’s sake. You groan, put on your slippers, and head toward the security panel on your wall, which shows you that the person outside your door is—
“Unnie!”
Unbelievable. This day could not possibly go any more awry.
You squint at the video display. Rub your eyes. Squint again, because this cannot possibly be real.
“Unnie, let me in, it’s fucking freezing out here!” Eunbi whines into the camera. “And I need a hundred thousand won. I took one of those airport taxis here since you live so fucking far and the guy’s waiting to be paid outside.”
Nope. Still not real. Because Eunbi is in Boston, going by Ella, studying biology at Boston College. Because it is the middle of her spring semester, and her international student tuition is extremely expensive, and there is no way she blew off her classes and dropped two grand on a plane ticket to Incheon and is standing on your doorstep right now.
“Unnie, I know you’re in there! I heard your footsteps!”
You yank open the door. “Eunbi, what the actual fuck—”
She looks like the Eunbi you sent off in a taxi mid-January, at the end of her last winter break. Sounds like her, too. Except this stranger standing in front of you has an eyebrow piercing, her hair cropped into a chin-length bob and bleached horribly blonde, and lipstick so flagrantly red that it would give your poor mother a stroke.
You wouldn’t blame her. You feel one coming on yourself.
Eunbi thrusts out her hand expectantly, the other resting on the handle of a gigantic, beat-up Rimowa. “Hundred thousand. Pay up, the guy’s probably pissed by now.”
You sigh. What choice do you have? You find your purse on the hook by the door, locate your wallet, and extract a couple of bills. Without so much as a thanks, Eunbi snatches the cash and tears off toward the elevators.
Typical. So painfully typical. While she runs off to settle her bill, you tug her thousand-kilo suitcase into your tiny entryway and up the half-step into your living space.
Exactly two minutes later, Eunbi’s back in your doorway, kicking off her Golden Gooses and throwing her arms around you. “Thanks, unnie! You missed me, didn’t you?”
You wriggle out of her grasp. Which is no easy feat—to your chagrin, Eunbi is at least three inches taller than you and much, much stronger, a fact she likes to lord over you at every opportunity.
“What the hell,” you start, shoving a finger in Eunbi’s face, “are you doing here and not in Boston where you belong.”
Eunbi holds up her hands, eyes wide. “Okay, let me explain—”
“Because the last I checked,” you thunder, your borderline maternal anger shooting through the roof, “you were enrolled! In classes? As a student? Classes that are, conveniently, still in session for the spring semester? Or am I missing something?”
“Unnie, please—”
“So you’d better have a really good explanation for how you managed to get on a flight here when you’re supposed to be in class, you insolent little—”
“I dropped out, okay?” Eunbi shouts, throwing her hands up in the air. “I left for the spring semester.”
You just gape at her for a second, stunned into silence, but recover enough to shout back, “Well, un-withdraw!”
“Unnie,” Eunbi mutters. That brave, happy-go-lucky facade crumbles instantly. “I flunked out. I didn’t withdraw. They kicked me out because my grades were so shit. They put me on academic probation last semester and gave me until last week to demonstrate improvement, but I didn’t. So they ‘released’ me. I can go back in the fall, but for now….”
She trails off, voice soaked in despair. Starts rubbing at her face, and some ghost-white foundation gets on the cuff of her jacket, but you don’t comment on it.
“I fucked up, bad,” Eunbi whispers.
“But wait,” you say, disoriented. Something isn’t adding up. “You send umma and appa your grades at the end of every term. They never—you never said—”
“Turns out it’s mad easy to photoshop a transcript.”
You sigh again, pinching the bridge of your nose. “Okay. So what’s your plan?”
Eunbi just blinks at you. She’s six years younger than you are, a non-negligible age gap—in fact, you’ve long suspected she was an accidental creation—but you’re suddenly reminded of the fact that you are her older sister, and she is the baby of the family. A little foolish, a little helpless, and a lot irresponsible.
And now, she’s looking to you to help her fix her problems. Again. Like the time you’d talked your father down from his rage after Eunbi’s rejection letter from Harvard arrived; like the time you quietly picked her up from a hookup gone sour near a sleazy Hongdae club.
You’re the inevitable answer, it seems, to all of her fuck-ups. After all, why toe the line when you know there will be someone there to rescue you, no matter what happens?
You sigh again, crossing your arms. “What’s your plan?” you repeat. “You hopped on a plane, took a taxi to my house. Now what? You’re just going to hide out here without umma and appa finding out? You’re not going to land at Incheon in June, when they come to pick you up? You’re going to take an extra semester to graduate next year, and they’re not going to ask you about it?”
Eunbi buries her face in one of your throw pillows, and it takes everything in you to not comment about her getting mascara stains on it. “Cut me some slack, okay?” she says, muffled. “It’s been a traumatizing twenty-four hours for me.”
For me, too, you think ruefully, but keep that to yourself. For now, you just sigh a third time. Run a hand through her hair, which, honestly—”Looks like shit.”
“Fuck off,” Eunbi mutters, face still nestled in the pillow.
“God, do you even use a conditioner? Or get it toned? You can’t just bleach your hair and be done with it, you know. It’s all frizzy and brassy because you haven’t been taking care of it properly.”
“Little hard to do when you’re flunking out of every fucking class you’re in, unnie.”
You pat her shoulder gingerly. Despite your utter shock and horror at seeing your sister disgrace your doorstep in the middle of March, you feel for her. Really, you do. After all, your father had been fine with sending you to any college in Seoul. He’d hoped for SNU but settled for Kyunghee, and when you chose to study library sciences he nearly disowned you, but his silent treatment defrosted after only a month or two.
Meanwhile, he refused to send Eunbi to a school in America if it wasn’t in the Ivy League. It took weeks of your mother wearing him down for him to finally agree to Boston College. Eunbi might have been the one who insisted on broadening her horizons, yes, but she’d also been eighteen at the time—still so young, still so unsure of what she wanted. And she’d gone to an international school as a teenager, picking up fluency in English as a result, but you imagine it was still a culture shock for her to go to university in a completely different country. To study biology as a pre-med, no less, at your father’s insistence.
Despite the sight in front of you, you have sympathy for her. You really do. The kind of inevitable, hopeless sympathy that gets clawed out of you whenever you see your little sister like this. Your life isn’t coming up all sunshine and rainbows, either, but objectively, you think Eunbi might have a bigger storm coming than you do.
“You haven’t eaten, have you?” You get up, heading toward your closet to find a jacket. “Come on. I’ll buy you seolleongtang.”
——
You end up going to the fucking basketball game, after all.
You hadn’t planned to. In fact, it’s rare that you do go. You’re more of a baseball person, really, and all you end up doing is lounging in the bleachers with the other bored girlfriends, occasionally handing Seungcheol water and a towel and feeling distinctly like you have nothing meaningful to contribute to the whole affair.
But Eunbi looks hollow, her cheerful self still nowhere to be seen even after a bowl of her favorite seolleongtang, and you think maybe it’s best that you don’t give her the opportunity to mope around in your tiny studio all day. So you go. Even though you and Seungcheol left things at an awkward place last night; even though you feel nauseated just thinking about him, knowing what’s to come next weekend. You can suck it up for Eunbi’s sake, and besides—you feel guilty for reacting so poorly to Seungcheol’s suggestion of marriage. Like maybe you were being unreasonable for shutting down someone who, predictably, might want to marry you after almost four years of dating with no hiccups.
Sunday at 3 PM finds you sitting on the second row of the bleachers, Eunbi visibly perking up at the sight of sweaty, fit men in their late twenties in basketball jerseys. Seungcheol’s IM team consists of his college classmates—sunbaes, hoobaes, and everyone in between, all friends of friends from economics classes or shared dorm rooms or film clubs. The league is lowkey, loosely organized, not all that competitive; the prize is the pot of whatever’s leftover of their registration money, once they’ve paid the gym rental fee.
You rummage around in your bag. Pocari Sweat, Jeju Samdasoo water, the washed spare towel you keep at your place for Seungcheol.
Seungkwan used to poke fun at you, whine about how you never brought him a towel. They all did—the boys on Seungcheol’s team were sweet, playful, plucking at your elder sister heartstrings like the little brothers they were. And then Soonyoung got too close and spilled Pocari all over the front of your (very white, suddenly very sheer) shirt one afternoon, and Seungcheol shot him a look that could have killed a Victorian child, and that quickly put an end to that. Now, they all just give you polite nods when they spot you in the bleachers; never speak to you outside of bare pleasantries.
You miss them, and that’s maybe part of the reason why you don’t show up to these games very often anymore. It just feels lonely. Lonely when you watch everyone else gathering after the games for dinner and drinks and Seungcheol just wants to take you home; lonely when you see them laughing and slapping each other’s backs on the other end of the gym, and remember a time you were privy to their inside jokes, too.
Now, though, Eunbi’s talking a mile a minute next to you, seemingly recovered from her slump.
“Who’s that one? The cute one with the adorable eyes? The back of his jersey says ‘Kwon.’ Unnie, come on, I promise I won’t try to fuck around with anyone, I know they’re all hyeongbu’s friends—ooh, wait, I want to meet that one. The one with glasses. Can’t see the back of his jersey, though—Jeo something. Jeon? Jeong?”
You ignore her, pointedly keeping your eyes trained on Seungcheol. He hasn’t spotted you yet, busy practicing free throws at the other end of the gym. Until Soonyoung nudges him and nods toward you, and when Seungcheol spots you and Eunbi, his expression is unreadable.
“Well, glad to see you too, hyeongbu,” Eunbi mumbles, clocking this immediately. “What, lover’s spat or something?”
“Hush,” you snap. “He’s coming.”
Seungcheol takes his time to wander over to where you and your sister sit. For a moment, you let yourself remember how good he looks like this: a fine glimmer of sweat on his brow, bolded eyebrows furrowed, the way his exposed arms swell against his dark jersey. As he gets closer, he finally breaks into a shy smile.
That, you think to yourself, waving at him. That’s who I fell in love with. You know you’re lucky to have him—who wouldn't fall for fairytale-prince looks like this?
“Hi,” he says, stepping up on the first row of bleachers. He leans in, kisses you swiftly on the lips. He tastes like sweat, and like mint lip balm, and like… Seungcheol. Familiar. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Hi, hyeongbu,” Eunbi interjects.
“You, either,” Seungcheol adds, raising an eyebrow. He gives Eunbi a high-five. “And why aren’t you in Boston, cheoje?”
“Don’t ask,” you sigh. “I’ll explain later.”
“Are you joining us for dinner on Saturday too, then?” Seungcheol asks, turning to Eunbi. “At Kojima?”
“Not if she doesn’t want to get flayed to within an inch of her life, she isn't,” you rush out, before Eunbi can open her mouth. “Go, Cheol, your friends are looking for you.”
“Rude!” Eunbi huffs, as Cheol pecks you one last time and jogs back to his team. “I want Kojima!”
You roll your eyes. “You will not be going anywhere until we figure out what you’re telling umma and appa.”
Eunbi seemingly has no response to this. Instead, she leans back on her palms and gazes out at Seungcheol’s teammates, who have all gathered in a circle closer to where you two are sitting. “Ooh, looks like the game’s about to start.”
Your eyes skim over the familiar group. Soonyoung, Seungkwan, Wonwoo, Junhui, Jeongguk, Yoongi….
And…
Mr. Feminist Poetry. Mr. Missing Library Card. Kim Namjoon.
You wouldn’t be certain that it’s him, given your laughable memory for faces, but he stands a few inches above the rest, and it’s not often that you come across someone that tall.
You don’t remember seeing him before, although maybe you’ve been missing him, given how few games you’ve attended recently. You watch as he joins the huddle by the bench and bends his head to listen to Seungcheol, their de facto leader, hype them up for the first quarter.
“Unnie, unnie, who is that?” Eunbi squeals, clapping a hand over her mouth, and even before you can follow her line of sight, you have a funny feeling you know who she’s referring to. “Oh, my god. I think I might actually pass out. The tall one. Unnie, please tell me you have no idea who that is. I need to fuck him raw, upside down, over a counter—”
“Eunbi.”
“Sorry, but it’s true. God, look at him. I mean, hyeongbu’s good looking and all, but… god.”
“God called,” you deadpan. “He says you’re not allowed to fuck your brother-in-law’s teammates. It’s in the Bible. And also to please stop using His name in vain.”
“Ha-ha.” Eunbi’s eyes round as the bell goes off and the ball bounces into action.
“Don’t stare too long. Your eyes might fall out.”
“Shut up,” Eunbi whispers, her eyes following no one but Namjoon. “I’m having a spiritual experience.”
——
Namjoon didn’t want to come, at first.
Sports aren’t really his thing. Never were, and if he’s being honest he still has war flashbacks to middle school. Before he grew into himself, before puberty erased the softness of his limbs and the roundness of his cheeks. Being the last one picked on every field day, dreading the hot afternoons running laps on the rubber track behind the school. Spending every lunch hour studying in the library, reasoning that if he couldn’t beat Han Jiho at soccer, he could surely outrank Jiho’s exam scores.
So when Yoongi, one of his best friends from college, asked Namjoon to join some of the other alums on an IM team, Namjoon already had half a mind—fine, ninety-nine percent of a mind—to decline. Weekends are tough for him to give up, and he doesn’t particularly enjoy the idea of wasting away his Sunday afternoons in exactly the kind of place he had stress dreams about as a child.
But this weekend…. Well, he had some unexpected free time, and he’d rather not be moping around in his shoebox apartment. So he consented, against his better judgment, and now he’s standing in a corner of a high school gym, just barely listening as Yoongi explains the basic rules of basketball.
“And—okay, I want to think that even you know this already, please feel free to stop me at any point if any of this sounds familiar—traveling is when—”
“Hyung,” Namjoon says, voice jagged. He clears his throat. “Who is—who are all the people in the—”
“Yah, have you even been listening? Do you understand how serious this is? This is the first time you’ve attempted to play a sport in months—”
“The bleachers, hyung. Who are the people in the bleachers.”
Yoongi sighs, eyes rolling to the ceiling. “The girlfriends. The wives. We’re, like, in our mid-thirties—”
“Speak for yourself, hyung, I’m still the picture of youth. I swear I got carded the other day.”
“You look like shit and you know it. And stop interrupting me. Anyway, traveling is when—”
But Namjoon’s not listening anymore, because all he can see is you.
Maybe it was a fool’s errand to give you his number. Or maybe the truly foolish thing was expecting you to, you know, use it. The fact of the matter is that he spent most of his evenings after work this week waiting for his phone to ping with a call, a Kakao, anything. But nothing ever came, except Yoongi’s extremely reluctant invitation to play basketball, which is why he’s here.
And you’re here, too. Namjoon can’t remember the last time someone piqued his interest. Can’t remember a time when his nails weren’t bitten to the quick, navy blue worries about his job and family bleeding into his every waking moment.
He can’t explain it. Can’t explain anything, except that you’re here, and not in the library, and he’s trying awfully hard to avoid feeling like this is fate. Or divine intervention. Namjoon has plenty of reasons to believe that God and fate don’t exist, but watching you, feeling his lungs swell and his heartbeat pound at the mere sight of you, looking so soft and so lovely against the drab wooden bleachers—he’s not so sure.
“... Got it?”
Yoongi’s voice snaps back into his consciousness, rough and gravelly, and Namjoon starts. “Yeah, hyung, I’m good. I’m not, like, totally unfamiliar with basketball, you know. You used to make me watch all those NBA games on that shifty website back in college—”
“It was not shifty,” Yoongi insists. “But okay, whatever. It’s your funeral. If you embarrass me out on the court today I’m going to pretend I don’t know you.”
“You always act like that,” Namjoon jabs, unable to resist.
“Aish, fuck off. Cheol’s calling us. Let’s go.”
Namjoon’s familiar with the other guys, but he found it hard to maintain most of his friendships after… everything. He knows Seungcheol is some bigshot lawyer, knows Wonwoo streams for a living, knows Seungkwan does something in the entertainment industry. But he hasn’t spoken to any of them in years.
The only friends who refused to let him cut them off back then were Yoongi and Jeongguk. Jeongguk, who didn’t know better and was too young and sweet and stubborn for his own good; Yoongi, who claimed he’d been through entirely too much with Namjoon to give him up now, and what, did Namjoon expect Yoongi to go to all the effort of making friends with someone else, what did Namjoon take him for, a moron?
So it’s only Jeongguk who looks pleased to see him, that boyish grin emerging full-force. The others smile guardedly, some of them inclining their heads or raising hands in greeting. Too familiar to act like total strangers; too distant to act like good friends. Namjoon’s only been here for about fifteen minutes, but already all he wants to do is turn right back around and walk out.
“Alright,” Seungcheol says, gathering everyone in a loose huddle. Namjoon bends his head to hear a little better through the squeaks and groans of the bleachers behind him. “We’ve got Namjoon-ssi joining us for the first time—you all remember him, yeah? Glad you could join us. This is really meant to be casual, so let’s just have fun.”
Something about Seungcheol’s speech sends a flash of irritation shooting through Namjoon, a lightning bolt of warning. The words themselves are innocuous enough, but it’s something about the way Seungcheol introduced Namjoon, like Namjoon should be a near-total stranger to these people, all of these guys who went to college with him. Something about the way Seungcheol emphasized that the game was casual and just for fun, like he didn’t expect Namjoon’s skills to actually measure up. Vaguely patronizing, vaguely belittling, and yet Namjoon has zero reason to believe Seungcheol meant it that way.
Call it a defense mechanism, the way his radar is so finely honed that it’s apt to trip at the most imperceptible hazard. Maybe Han Jiho really did a number on him in middle school, after all.
Or maybe he’s just become more guarded. Protective.
After all, he has more at stake than he did then.
——
