HAPPY BTS FIC WRITING ANNIVERSARY!!!! thank u so much sharing your incredible writing FOR FREE. FOR. FREE. I CAN NOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH: YOU WILLINGLY SHARE YOUR WRITING WITH US. FOR. FREE. AND YOUR FICS ARE LIKE LONGER THAN THE LONGEST HARRY POTTER BOOK??? THATS FUCKING CRAZY LIKE I WISH NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT I COULD JUST FORGET SO THAT I COULD GO IN BLIND AND REREAD EVERY SINGLE FIC OF YOURS ALL OVER AGAIN. I WISH I COULD RELIEVE THAT FEELING OF BEING SO FULL OF AWE EACH TIME I READ A SENTENCE. IM SO GLAD YOURE AN ARMY OTHERWISE I WOULD HAVE NEVER FOUND YOU!!!! regarding the drabble request, could you maybe (if you COULD AND WANT TO, PLS DONT FORCE YOURSELF TO WRITE IT IF YOU DONT WANT TO) write a drabble where lily finally calls jk dad for the first time after calling him kookie for so long 🥺 that, or namjoon and sylvie dad-daughter bonding time 🥰 IF THATS NOT TOO MUCH FOR YOU OFC!!!! THANK U SO MUCH FOR THE DRABBLE OFFER ANYWAY!!!!! ILL READ WHATEVER YOU DECIDE TO WRITE EVEN IF NONE OF IT IS FROM MY REQUEST!!!! I LOVE WHATEVER YOU WRITE 🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗
I've had this beautiful long note in my inbox for so long and I'm excited to finally have a drabble for you! I'll no doubt do some more Jungkook Lily too, but here's Namjoon and Sylvie for you. Thank you so so so much for reading my stories and I'm really all gooey inside that you enjoy them so much!
Bonus thank you to the person who wrote in asking about Namjoon doing origami!
Story: Amended
Characters: Namjoon & Sylvie (Namjoon x Gina, Sylvie is Gina's daughter)
Length: 2353
CW: some cursing about deadbeat dads :)
Namjoon sat on the couch and looked at Sylvie. Sylvie looked right back at him, but standing, with her arms tucked into the back of her Mirabel dress through an impressive feat of contortion. Namjoon knew who Mirabel was; he’d seen the movie twice and made a point of learning the soundtrack. Coco too. And Moana. And Frozen, back before he knew which Disney movies Sylvie and Diego actually liked. They had not yet been impressed by his knowledge of the lyrics but Gina had made him butcher the Spanish lyrics of ‘Dos Oroguitas’ again for her later and swayed with her arms around his neck and kissed him hard so… yeah, no regrets. It was nice languages came to him relatively easy. He hadn’t told her he was learning Spanish in his spare time yet, not wanting to embarrass himself before he reached a minimum threshold of competency, but obviously that was a thing he needed to do. She spoke Spanish with her kids as much as she did English. Her whole family spoke it as their first language. He wanted to be in her life, so he needed to speak it too.
Now he decided to try it out a little during this afternoon alone with Sylvie for the first time.
“Qué quieres hacer?” he asked her to show off.
Her lips bubbled out with her breath and she tilted her head and scrunched her eyebrows together. Fuck, had he said something wrong? Or did he just sound stupid?
“What are we going to do together, Sylvie?” he asked her.
“I don’t know,” she giggled. Then tilted her head the other way. “No sé.” Then “Podemos comer dulces?”
“Ok ok, you passed my Spanish,” he laughed. “I don’t speak much yet.”
“Do you have candy in your pocket? Can I have it?”
One time he’d had candy in his pocket when they saw each other while he was in uniform.
“Sorry, I don’t…”
She didn’t say anything but looked disappointed. Strike one. Namjoon pursed his lips and templed his fingers, elbows on his knees, and waited. One of them had to figure out what they were going to do. They had several hours before Gina and Diego would be home for his afternoon of appointments. Gina was stressed as shit about Diego’s school trouble lately –Diego acting out, doing poorly on his schoolwork, not wanting to do his homework or even read anymore. So off they went to the doctor for something Namjoon hadn’t asked the details about and Namjoon had volunteered to keep Sylvie before Gina could ask Isabella.
Because, hey, he and Gina were kind of a thing now –no, not kind of. A thing. They were a thing. And he needed to impress her kids quick. He didn’t have tons of nieces and nephews running around like Jungkook did to give him that leg up. He didn’t know much about kids at all and suspected they both knew Diego and Sylvie. He felt big and clumsy with kids. He’d felt that way when he was a kid.
“So uh… what do you want to play?” Namjoon asked.
Sylvie just shrugged.
“Um, you’ve got like… Princess stuff or Legos or–”
“Those are Go’s,” she corrected. “I don’t play Legos.”
“Oh. Ok, well… we could uh…” He racked his brain, trying to think of what Jungkook mentioned he did with Lily, or what he’d seen Sylvie do when he was over any other time, or any movies he’d seen. “Um… tea party?”
“No,” she said in her little soft voice, a gentle rejection.
“Uh… art?”
A pause, then, “Ok.”
“Ok. What art stuff do we have? I’m not a great artist but maybe you can teach me something…”
“Anyone can be an artist,” she corrected. “All you have to do is take a crayon and make your mark.”
“Wow.” She went over to get a box from against the wall but he just stared after her for a moment. Had she thought of that on her own? That was fucking profound. “Does your mom say that?”
“No. It’s in that crayon book.”
“What crayon book?”
“You know, the crayon book.” He still didn’t know, but she didn’t clarify further, because apparently he ought to just know what book she was talking about even though he was positive he’d never read a book about crayons in his life. Or, well, recently. When she began to drag the box to the coffee table, he picked it up and set it beside the table and lifted the lid off, peering into a chaotic nest of broken crayons, pipe-cleaners, half used sticker sheets, dry glue sticks, uncapped markers, loose sequins, and colored popsicle sticks.
Sylvie plopped right down and pulled out some paper and crayons. Damn, she was cute, little face bright and happy, loose hair wispy around her face from her long ponytail with a sparkly scrunchie.
“What are you drawing?”
“Uh….” She paused and looked at the lines she had made, then giggled and whispered shyly, “I don’t know yet.” He wasn’t sure why that had made her shy, but decided to give her some space. She was shy, much shyer than Lily, who saw everyone as a friend she just hadn’t met yet. Each time he was around Sylvie, he felt like it took time for her to warm up to him again. It was faster if Lily and Jungkook were around, like Sylvie just accepted Namjoon was her Jungkook stand-in for the moment.
But he wanted to be more than that to her. Even if the reality of what it took to be more than that for her felt beyond him right now because he couldn’t even figure out how to spend an afternoon with her. What business did he have dating a woman with children when he knew next to nothing?
But he wanted to. He wanted to figure this out. He felt like Gina and Diego and Sylvie were worth it. He got it, why Jungkook had felt like Isabella, Ezra, and Lily were too.
So he folded his long legs under the coffee table and dug around in the box and pulled a few pieces of paper out to draw on too. In holding it, though, he realized it was a lighter weight, and had pretty designs on each side.
“Ok…” Didn’t answer his question but she seemed to think it did. “Well what do you make?”
“Um…” She blew her lips out unhappily. “Swords.”
“You… make origami swords?”
“Yeah… and a diamond.”
“And a diamond.” He had no fucking clue what she was talking about.
“Here, I can show you!”
“Ok!” Yeah that seemed good. He watched as she started folding up her current paper without even bothering to make it square. “Wait. I need tape.”
“You shouldn’t need tape…”
“Well I do,” she said and sounded so much like her mother it made him laugh. He went to find some tape, but all he could find was packing tape, so he had to fight with the end of it and tear her off small pieces to use and then fight with the end again when it would inevitably cling to itself again.
“You can say bad words. I know not to say them too,” she assured him, either reading his mind or lips.
“Ah… I won’t… it’s better to stop saying bad words, you know?”
“Mami says bad words don’t count if you say them in Spanish so maybe you should learn Spanish.”
“Yo estudio español.” As soon as he said it, he worried it was wrong,even such a basic phrase. She giggled, which could mean either way.
“Ok do what I do,” she told him.
He tried. She kept checking his work and telling him he was doing it wrong, but then she’d tell him “very good” probably like her teacher did. Then she held out the thing she’d made. “Aquì. A diamond” and motioned to his.
“Ahh, yes, hm.” He looked at the two things in his hands. This was not origami. This was paper folded and taped to resemble a crunchy wad roughly in a shape alluding to a diamond. In a way, hers was better, because his looked like it was trying too hard. “It’s really cool. Thanks for teaching me.”
“Do I have to make a sword?”
“No, of course not. Want me to make something?”
“Yes,” she grinned.
“Ok, let’s see…” He looked around for something he could use to crease the paper and settled on a shitty pair of safety scissors. It had been a while since he’d actually made anything with origami and he worried at first he’d need to look up directions which would make it seem a little less cool. But once he started to crease the paper, he felt the directions come back like a video he could watch just by closing his eyes. His fingers remembered –probably because he’d made dozens of these trying to impress a girl in middle school. It had not worked. Resulted in nothing but papercuts and blisters.
Sylvie leaned close on the table, watching his hands closely. No one ever paid that much attention to anything he was doing, it was really sweet. He kept glancing at her face until he made the final fold and held it out to her.
“It’s a butterfly!” she gasped and held her hands out for it. When he set it in her palm, she cradled it like it was real.
“It’s pretty, right?”
“It’s so cute!”
“Ok, let’s see, what else do I know how to make…” Namjoon racked his brain as Sylvie leapt up and made the butterfly fly around the room. She was so pleased with it, it made Namjoon feel really good.
“Teach me how to make it!” Sylvie begged, crashing back down and gently putting the butterfly on the table. “She needs a sister and we can make a bed. No, two sisters!”
She was talking to him so much!
“That’s a lot of sisters,” Namjoon laughed. “All right. It’s kinda tricky though so I may have to help you sometimes…”
He thought that might be frustrating for her to need help. Kids were supposed to get impatient if they couldn’t do it themselves, right? But she didn’t mind at all, just leaned around his hands to see when he’d reach forward to assist with the more complicated bends and folds. Her butterfly came out a little wonky but he praised it and she glowed. She chose the paper for his and then they looked up on his phone how to make a box, which he folded while she tore up paper to be the “blankets.”
“Hmmm, should I try to make a bird? It’s pretty hard!”
“You can do it!” Sylvie insisted. “If it gets hard I can help you.”
Ah, she was adorable. She was really cute. Namjoon watched her smile to herself and arrange the trio of butterfly sisters carefully in their new little bed and couldn’t fathom how a father could just walk away from this little girl. That’s what the fucker had done! Gina had minced no words when, in response to Namjoon asking her on a date, she had said, “I already picked the wrong dad for my babies and now they’ve got a basket of abandonment issues. They already know you. I know no guy wants to hear it, but I can’t date you unless we figure out fast if we’re serious about it, because they don’t need another guy tossing a wave over his fucking shoulder at them.”
And Namjoon had straightened his shoulders and looked her in the eye and said, “I debated it a long time before I asked because of that. You deserve better than that, they deserve better than that. You tell me what the best thing is to do for them, and for you, but… yeah. I’m serious about this. I mean it.”
And so they were a thing, even though they’d only been on a few dates, and Namjoon was doing his best to earn the warmth he felt in his chest every time her kids played with him or asked for help with something or hung off his arms to see if he could still walk or just shouted and waved, “Hi, Joon! Bye, Joon!” Always Joon.
The crane hadn’t turned out great but Sylvie loved it. She loved the frog too, even though he had to find instructions on his phone. He made it with daisy paper and Sylvie squealed with more glee than he’d ever heard from her. She loved his shitty frog, his lopsided crane, the butterflies. And it was soothing to make, too. Something about the focus on such a small task, the dexterity required, the smoothing and folding and pressing, the doubting it until it finally came together, it was all very calming.
Maybe that was spending time with Sylvie too though. She was so quiet when her brother wasn’t around; Jungkook said Lily barely stopped to breathe, but it was obvious Sylvie on her own was a gentle soul. She seemed perfectly happy doing this too; he was amazed how long it entertained her.
“Ok what else can we make…”
“Make a… hm…” Sylvie trailed off staring at the screen as Namjoon scrolled to see what else there were tutorials for. “MAKE A ELEPHANT!” she shouted, pointing at his phone so hard it fell from his hands. Her eyes got wide. “Sorry…” she grimaced.
“Ahh, it looks really hard, but let’s see if we can do it together,” he said. “What paper are we going to use?”
“Pink.”
“Pink it is.”
Sylvie giggled and snuggled close to his side so their hands could work together and it didn’t matter that the girls in middle school hadn’t been impressed with his origami. It was worth every second to spend this afternoon making Sylvie happy instead. Worth every papercut.
