#the image had this as the caption in top bottom meme text

[oyesteryells]

reblog if you want this squirrel in your bed tonight

[disabled-is-not-a-dirty-word]

do you think we could get a white cane version is the why do we have (insert mobility aid) meme... for all the blind and visually imapired folks like me :)

Of course! I don’t use one, so I had to do some research. Please let me know if any changes should be made!

White Cane version (you are here!)

Cane version

Crutch version

Rollator version

Wheelchair version

Power Chair version

[ID: Image of an edited "Why Do We Have Hands" meme. The top says "Why Do We Have White Canes?" and just beneath that is a cartoon picture of a white cane in black and white with the bottom half of the cane having a dark stripe. This is followed by the text "There Are Many Reasons:". Beneath that is a series of black and white pictures in a square formation. The first picture on the top left is of a basic outline of a person with spikey black hair, sunglasses, and a spiked collar. They are using a white cane with alternating black and white stripes. The caption is "look badass." The next picture to the right of it is in the same style and depicts a person being hit on the head with a white cane. The caption is "HIT the ableist." The bottom left picture is a cartoon-style hand holding up a white cane, and the caption is "shake stick at God." The final image on the bottom right is a picture of a person using a white cane with a black tip, poking an unknown creature. The caption is “poking stick” /end ID]

[the-autistic-agoraphobe]

Autistic April Day 25: Meltdowns and/or Shutdowns

As an Autistic person I have had my fair share of Meltdowns and Shutdowns. Both are very different to eachother. Sometimes I have a shutdown because I know if I don't have a shutdown I would end up having a Meltdown and I would rather pick the lesser of two evils.

Meltdowns on the outside for me can look like alot of crying. I can also have bursts of anger during a meltdown and shout and yell. Quiet a few things can trigger me to have a meltdown and two of the triggers include frustration because I miss out on things because of my Agoraphobia and seeing a girl who bullied me in high school. There are other triggers to that I prefer not to mention. To me meltdowns feel like a volcano erupting.

Shutdowns on the outside for me can look like not being able to talk and laying on my bed and watching youtube videos on my phone. Shutdowns can sometimes be caused by having trouble doing something because of my Agoraphobia and feeling disappointed in myself. There are other triggers to shutdowns I would also prefer not to mention. To me a shutdown feels like everything is too much and I need to have a break so talking goes out the window.

Unfortunately meltdowns and shutdowns are inevitable for Autistic people but they can be reduced and prevented with allowing Autistic people to have a break if they need one and prevent triggers if you can't prevent triggers try to reduce them. Accept that sometimes the Autistic person can't do things that they can do other times.

Image Descriptions:

1: Long John is a long furby with dark blue ears. He is knitted and his head is yellow at the top and white at the bottom of it. He has a red 3D printed faceplate with holes for his eyes and beak and for his light sensor. His body starts off dark blue than goes dark green than a lighter green than yellow than orange than a brighter orange than lastly Red with a streak of purple. His head is made from a 1998 furby with white eyelids and purple eyes. His feet are light green with red thread separating the toes. He also has a red spot on the green part of his body. Long John is laying down with his head on a red pillow. He is looking at a phone. There is a caption that says "Long John shows what Autistic shutdowns can look like"

2: There are a list of prompts for each day of the month for Autistic April. The top and bottom of the image is light purple and the middle part of the image is white with black text on it. The black text says "Autistic April 2024 Prompts: 1: Special interests 2: How you found out you were Autistic 3: your favourite stim 4: alternative forms of communication 5: your favourite fidget toys 6: textures you hate 7: safe foods 8: other disabilities you have 9: LBGTQI+ 10: childhood special interests11: comfort items 12: your favourite Autistic celebrities or characters13: unmasking 14: sensory aids 15: misdiagnosis 16: Autism friendly places 17: Disability support you have received 18: animals 19: favourite thing about being Autistic 20: echolalia 21: idenity first or Person first language 22: the spoon theory

23: colours that represent Autism (not blue) 24: Autistic owned small businesses 25: meltdowns and/or shutdowns 26: Your clothing prefences 27: Self care 28: Relatable Autism memes 29: Accessibility 30: routines" There is an infinity symbol that is half red and half gold on the top right corner of the white section. End Description.

[ophthalmotropy]

I had a dream where I saw a meme. I'll try to describe it. The image was square. The background was a diagonal gradient from fuchsia to blue. At the top were the words "things that are real" in bolded, black sans serif font. Below (in the middle of the vertical axis, so there was empty space left at the bottom) were three pictures with captions. From left to right, they were a transparent PNG of Machiavelli, a picture of some equations, and a finger pointing at the viewer. The text below read, in order, "machiavelli", "math", and "you (maybe)" in the same font as the title.

[creacherkeeper]

just a factual and accurate summation of LoL game 13

[ID: five memes edited to be about the characters from the home campaign library of lensa

image 1: bernie sanders labeled as "wren & ezzy" with the caption "i am once again asking for you to not embarrass us at the tournament"

image 2: the buttons meme with one button labeled "cuss in front of southern grandmas" and the other labeled "eat fried dough until you're sick" and the sweating man labeled as "kai"

image 3: the car swerving meme with the straight path labeled "use divine magic to heal" and the direction the car is swerving labeled "tums"

image 4: the catching a ball meme with the yellow ball labeled "getting away from a bad home environment" and the creature clinging to the person in the second panel labeled "your parents not telling you they had another kid"

image 5: the hand holding meme. the top portion says "it doesn't have to be like this" with the two held hands labeled as "bo" and "eabha" with the hand not being held labeled "bubba". the second portion says "when it can also be like this" and has "bo" holding hands with both "bubba" and "ezzy". the bottom text says "bo has 2 dads". end ID]

[gougarpaw]

[Image Description: A digital drawing of a dark green gradient background with “2021″ highlighted and written in white. There is a line under 2021 and the words “Ciao for now!” written in white. End Description.]

My Top Posts in 2021

#5 - "ashfur rory"

[Image Description: A digital redrawing of the screaming cat with sad eyes edit as Ashfur from the Warrior Cats books. Ashfur is a gray spotted cat. He is screaming with the crying cat eyes edited onto his face. Besides his face “Nugs-Art” is written lightly. He is on a light gray background. End Description.]

SO WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY

DON’T YOU LOVE ME BACK?

154 notes

#4 - "Cooler Patchpelt"

[Image Description: A digital redrawing of the “Daniel and the Cooler Daniel” meme with Patchpelt from the Warrior Cats books. Patchpelt is a black and white cat with orange eyes. End Description.]

I don’t plan on shutting up about Leopardstar’s Honor’s allegiances ever <3

two patchpelts....

179 notes

#3 "This is getting out of paw, Graypool"

[Image Descriptions: A digital drawing of Graypool from the Warrior Cats books and a screenshot of two lines from the Warrior Cats book Forest of Secrets. Graypool is a gray cat with yellow eyes. She is on a dark gray background with the subtitles “this is getting out of hand. Now there are two of them!” from “Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace.” She is sweating nervously. The screenshot reads ““this is Fireheart, and this is Graystripe,” meowed Silverstream. “They-” “Two of them,” Graypool interrupted. “There had better be a good explanation for this.” End Description.]

Forest of Secrets (2003)

194 notes

#2 "Blood will spill blood."

[Image Description: A digital drawing of Tornear and Mudclaw at various stages of their lives. The first three stages show them on a circle background, progressing from light blue to dark blue. The first stage is as kits. Mudkit (a brown spotted cat with black dots for eyes, Tornkit’s twin) is rearing up on his hind legs. His mouth is open playfully. Tornkit (a gray spotted cat with black dots for eyes, Mudkit’s twin,) is down in a playful pose with his mouth open. The second stage is as apprentices. Mudpaw and Tornpaw are walking side by side. Mudpaw is saying something with his mouth open. Tornpaw looks happy to listen. Tornpaw’s right ear is almost completely gone. The third stage is as warriors. Mudclaw is yelling angrily at Tornear with his claws extended. He is spitting. Tornear looks confused, with his left front leg raised as he steps back. There is a small question mark beside his head. The fourth stage is Tornear sitting beside a large tree stump. He looks uncomfortable and sad. The stump is jagged, and there are a few pieces of black bark laying around the base of the stump. In the bark, StarClan’s logo can be seen. In front of the stump is a small blue flower. End Description.]

tornear’s last interaction with mudclaw is when they meet in battle, fighting against each other. in this essay, i will explain how the blood will spill blood prophecy was about both mudclaw and tornear and brambleclaw and hawkfrost.

249 notes

#1 "Brokenstar's Streak"

[Image Description: A digital redrawing of the “Big Bird is Faster” meme with the Warrior Cats characters Brokenstar, Tallstar, Deadfoot and Ashfoot. Brokenstar is a dark brown tabby with red eyes and a bent tail. Tallstar is a black cat with white patches and orange eyes. Ashfoot is a pregnant gray and white cat with blue eyes, and Deadfoot is a gray cat with green eyes and a twisted front right leg. Brokenstar’s eyes have been edited to be brightly glowing. Brokenstar is chasing the other cats. Tallstar is in front of Brokenstar, and Ashfoot and Deadfoot are to the far right of the screen running. At the bottom of the picture a pixelated “2003” is typed in blue text. Underneath this is a caption reading “WindClan is fast, but Brokenstar is faster.” Underneath this caption are two tumblr reblogs. The first is from “fireboi1234,” with a profile picture of firestar looking nervous and sweating. He has written “what happened in 2003?” The user “xx_blackstar_xx” with a profile picture of Blackstar smiling reblogs this and writes “That’s not the year, that’s his kill streak.” End Description.]

Into the Wild (2003)

1407 notes

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[illneverrecover]

call you mine (M) | changkyun

➛pairing: Im Changkyun (I.M.) x reader ➛genre: friends with benefits!AU,  non Idol!AU, angst, smut, fluff. ➛word count: 2,741 ➛rating: M ➛warnings: idk this is truly some sweet soft shit, mentions of alcohol, friends with benefits, standing sex, slight rough sex, biting/marking because clearly I have a kink, unprotected sex, creampie, mentions of Mingi!!, lots of kissing, soft clown Chaingang truly.  ➛summary: Changkyun knew he ruined your friends with benefits arrangement when he let his feelings be known, and now you’ve left him on read for weeks. So he does the only thing he can to stay sane - he religiously watches your Instagram stories. ➛notes: Another first for me - my first Monsta X fic! I’ve played around with writing Changkyun for a while now, mostly because I live to torture @taetaesbaebaepsae​ (which she deserves from all the PAINFUL and RUDE Baekhyun shit she’s written for me). However, she decided to actively commission her own demise, because she stays not listening to Namjoon and refuses to love herself. I’m glad I finally got a chance to take a stab at writing her ult, and I hope I did him justice! Enjoy your tomfoolery, Kristin! 💖 ➛song: Call You Mine -  The Chainsmokers & Bebe Rexha | Horizon - I.M. & Elhae

It’s pathetic, he knows.

The way he can’t stop watching, the way he seeks your face out in an app full of millions of others. The way he can’t get you out of his bed, his head, his thoughts.

He fucked up, scared you off, and now he’s left with the aftermath of his own stupidity. Watching you through a screen to fight the withdrawals off, to keep his heart beating.

Changkyun knows you would laugh at him if you saw what he was doing. 

Watching your Instagram stories is the only reason he’s heard you laugh in over two weeks, the only way he’s been able to see your eyes light up, your lips curve into a salacious grin. Things he fucking missed, thought he would have plenty of time to indulge in - until he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and ruined it.

He had taken you back to his place after a few shots of whisky at the dingy local bar, hands and mouth unable to leave your skin - just like the hundreds of times before. It had been four months since you had started this friends with benefits relationship, and despite having freedom to see whomever he wanted, Changkyun found himself only starving for you. So hungry that he couldn’t stand another moment in that place, watching you share your smile with anyone other than him. So he had tugged you close, nipped at your ear, told you that you were so damn beautiful that he couldn’t stand there another minute without you coming undone around him. 

You had smirked, slid your hand down the front of his pants, grabbing his cock like you owned it, purring out the words “prove it” before following him outside, just like the hundreds of times before.

Pressed up against his wall, his pelvis flush with yours, Changkyun whispered filth in your ears as he ground up against you, swallowing your moans in greedy kisses. Desperate fingers had pulled at your top, freeing your breasts for him to worship as he worked your skirt up around your waist, thrusting his clothed length against your core until you were whining.

Changkyun always promised to take his time with you, to work you over until you were drunk on his touch and pleading for more - but you never let him, always knowing the right thing to say to get his gaze to go dark and lust to turn frantic, to unzip his jeans and press inside your dripping cunt right there in the hallway. 

Just like the hundreds of times before.

You had come around him, digging your nails in his back so hard it left marks, made him growl your name against your collarbone as his thrusts picked up speed to fuck you through the high. You urge him on in the way only you can manage, begging for his release, whispering how much you want his come deep in your cunt. Biting down against the skin, he had spilled inside you with a final groan, hips twitching as he pumped you full of him, forehead resting against your shoulder.

Instead of pulling away immediately, Changkyun remained collapsed against you, breathing heavy. You had smacked at his shoulder, but he just chuckled, arms adjusting to continue a firm hold of your legs as he stayed inside of you, trapping you against his body and the wall.

“What are you doing, Kyun?” scoffing, you had grasped his jaw, forcing him to look at you. “I let you fuck me dirty against the wall without even demanding you buy me food after. Least you can do is let me get cleaned up.”

He had gazed up at you then, eyes piercing as they looked through you, and your heart clenched tightly in your chest. 

He knew he shouldn’t say it. Knew it would scare you off. And yet….

“I would, you know.” Swallowing thickly, his tongue darted out to wet his lips. “Take you to go get food. If you - I mean, if you wanted. If you’d let me.” 

It was like he could see the carefully crafted defenses go up, the pain etching your brow and making your eyes go cold. Anxiety flooded his veins as you wiggled out of his grasp, sliding your clothes back into place as you moved towards his bathroom.

“You don’t mean that,” you murmured, faking a smile. “You know what this is, Kyun.”

“I do mean that!” He knew he sounded too eager, too pitiful, but he couldn’t stop himself. “I’d take you out to dinner. Or,” following you, he paused in the doorway, watching you appraise yourself in the mirror. “We could just get take-out and go somewhere private, drive to a park, bring a blanket and some booze, eat somewhere no one would know or bother us.” 

Your answering laugh had sounded wrong, like it had cost you something - like it was the last thing you had wanted to do. 

“Like a picnic? Changkyun, you’re saying you want to take me on a picnic? Like a proper date?”

Stuttering, he tried to explain himself, but you had cut him off with a single wave. 

“Listen, we both know I’m not that kind of girl, and you don’t want me to be.” Leaning forward, you had pressed a kiss against his mouth, your eyes somber when you had pulled away, moved towards the door. 

“What if I do?” His voice broke, wanting to reach out but his arms remaining stiff at his sides. “What if I want you to be that kind of girl, with me?”

Tears stung your eyes, your stomach sinking like you had been punched. You couldn’t do this, couldn’t handle the inevitable disappointment that would come when you got your hopes up.

“I’ll see you around,” you threw over your shoulder before shutting the door, and shutting him out. 

Just like the hundreds of times before.

It had been two weeks now since he last saw you in person. It wasn’t for lack of trying; texting you at all hours had proven fruitless, even when he tried to send the usual ‘you up’ message like he didn’t just lay his heart out on the line. You responded airily, non committal, and he knew what you were doing. 

You were trying to let him down easy.

So here he was, phone glued to his hand as he scrolled through to find your picture, clicking on it to see if there was any update. You didn’t post a bunch in your feed, but you had a tendency to update your stories often - filling them with silly memes and cute selfies, little videos of you going about your day. Cuddling with your cat, attempting to cook something for lunch. His favorite was when you would do tarot readings for your followers; the way your face would turn serious as you read the cards, passionate fire in your eyes as you helped deliver the message to its owner. 

Seeing you that excited and genuine did something to him, made his chest feel like it was going to explode.

He knows you can tell that he’s watching, can see the icon of his profile showing up at the bottom of the video under “seen by.” He can only imagine what you’re thinking when you see it - that he’s a loser, this friend with benefits who turned lovesick puppy, but he can’t make himself care. It’s the only way he feels close, can pretend you’re still in his life.

He never thought that he would need you, now all he wants is to see you - for you to answer him, to come back to him. 

Changkyun still sends texts, unable to stop his fingers from reaching out, despite knowing you’ll shut him down. He calls sometimes too, late at night when his blood is more whisky than plasma, though you never answer those. Instead he listens to your voicemail, eyes closed to stop the world from spinning, letting your voice lull him to sleep. 

He convinces himself he’s fine with this arrangement, that things would be alright. He can just miss you from afar, observe you live your life through the pixels of a screen. That watching your stories is enough for him, will keep him afloat.

Until he sees you with someone else.

It was another Friday night he was spending alone, half drunk and on his phone, looking for your picture. Taking a deep breath, he had felt his heart stop when he saw the rainbow ring adorning your profile photo, meaning you had updated your story. Sighing, he tapped it, hoping that it would be a few videos so he could pretend for just a moment that he was beside you instead of wasting space on his bed.

The first clip was a selfie, your heavily lidded eyes staring seductively at the camera through your lashes, making his pulse jump and pants tighten. The caption “gonna get drunk tonight!” scrolled across the image, right below the pout of your lips. The next was a small video of you making a drink, giggling about the mixture of tequila and soju you were tossing in your cup, whispering to the camera how it was going to get you ‘all the way fucked up’. But it was the third clip that had his chest heaving, his lungs forgetting how to work.

You were walking out your door, a few people cluttering your front porch as you asked if anyone had a light. Some tall red headed kid - Changkyun refused to acknowledge him as anything more than that - had shouted out, and you squealed as you ran up to him, sliding directly onto his knee before switching the camera into selfie mode to capture the two of you. The next clip was you in his lap, one of your delicate hands sliding through his hair as he gave you a big dopey grin, a cigarette perched on your lips as you cooed at him and told him just how cute he was.

Fuck. He knew that look of yours, knew those moves. Knew exactly what you were doing, what you were hoping to do with that fucking Mingi kid, and he couldn’t stand it, not anymore.

Taking a few deep pulls directly from the liquor bottle, his fingers flew over the keys of his phone, sending you text after text -  all of which were ignored. He knew calling would be pointless, that you would rather light yourself on fire than answer your phone - especially at a party - and he felt desperation creep up his throat, choking him.

Changkyun couldn’t let this happen. Couldn’t let you just forget about him.

Clicking back onto Instagram, he started sending you responses to the story video as he got dressed, throwing on the nearest pair of jeans and sliding on his boots.

<What are you doing? Why won’t you answer my texts? I fucking miss you.>

<And not just fucking you. I miss you. I miss us. If you want me to stay for the rest of my life, I will. You already got me.>

<Answer me, Y/N. Or I’m going to come over, see if you can ignore me to my face>

<Baby?>

<I’m on my way. Don’t take that kid to your bed.>

It took painfully long for the Lyft to show up, and he gritted his teeth the whole route there, knee bouncing to stop himself from demanding the driver to go faster, to just hurry the fuck up and get to you. 

When the car had pulled into your neighborhood, he tried to send another message, instead clicking a video. Too frustrated to change it back, he lets it record, his voice low and pained. 

“I’m on my way, please let me in.” 

You were alone on the deck when your phone started vibrating, the ding of an Instagram direct message making you click the app, eyes widening in surprise when you saw the number of notifications. 

Changkyun, all from him.

Awestruck, you scrolled through every line, your heart throbbing with each word he had written. 

You didn’t think he cared, not like that. Sure, he missed the sex, but that’s what you expected. That’s what all of them wanted when they sent you late night texts, when they called your phone at three in the morning. Empty promises and broken vows were what kept you company in the dark, when they’d predictably leave you alone with an ache between your legs and in your chest.  None of them really wanted you, cared about you. After a few weeks of ghosting, they’d all disappear into thin air like expected, and your heart would harden just a bit more.

But now…

Another chime pulls you from your thoughts, eyes flicking back to the light of your phone. Instead of another direct message, it’s a notification that Changkyun had updated his story for the first time in months. 

Shaking fingers slide against the screen, your vision blurring as you take in the shadowed back seat of another person’s car, the only light  neon pink from the sign of the Lyft drivers decal. For a moment, all you can hear is the quiet chattering of a distant radio, of someone breathing heavily. 

And then his voice croaking over the speaker, raspy with need. 

“I’m on my way, please let me in.”

The video fades just as a car pulls up to your curb, a flurry of movement as Changkyun climbs out, stumbles towards you. He all but collapses into your arms, his breath dripping with liquor, eyes reddened but burning fiercely.  

“Y/N,” he mumbles, hands coming to cup your face, thumb dragging against the smooth skin of your cheek. “I want to take you on a picnic.” 

You laugh, though it comes out more like a sob. “What? What are you talking about? Did you call a Lyft and come all the way across town to tell me that, you clown?”

His finger taps against your lips once, twice. “Shh. Just let me-” he sighs, stomping a foot. “Let me talk.” 

He waits until you nod before continuing, words surging from his mouth as if he couldn’t hold back a second longer. 

“I came all the way here because I want to take you on a picnic. I want to buy you food and take you on cute little dates and do cheesy things that make you smile at me like you are right now,” he grins, pulling you until your chest rests against his own. “I’m here because I couldn’t stand you ignoring me anymore. I meant everything I said - that I miss you, that I want to be with you, if you’ll give me the chance. I want to call you mine.”

Pressing his forehead against yours, his eyes fall shut, his voice fervent and barely more than a whisper. 

“I love you, Y/N.”

Tears brim your eyes, and you fight every old wound that tells you to shove him away, to call him a liar. Instead you allow yourself to follow your gut, your heart for what feels like the first time, leaning back to give him a watery smile in return. 

“I love you too, Changkyun.” 

His mouth immediately lands on yours, tongue eagerly tracing the seam of your lips until it’s slipping inside, tasting every inch of you, ravenous and unsatisfied until your knees are shaking. He’s walking you backwards towards the door, tugging at your clothes, and you giggle at his impatience.

Pulling away, you gasp for air, palm pressing against his shoulder to hold him back for a moment. “But listen, if I give you a chance, that means you have to stop stalking my Instagram, you creep. And don’t try to deny it, I see you all over my stories, lurking around.” 

He chuckles then, nipping at your bottom lip as his eyes darken. “Please, don’t act like you don’t love the attention,” 

Pushing the door open, he guides you inside, mouth working over your neck, arms wrapped around your waist until your back is flattened against the wall. 

“Plus, there’s no need, now that I got you,” he confesses, his nose swiping against yours gently before he captures your lips between his own, hitching your legs to drape around his waist as he grinds against you, humming words of praise.

Just like the hundreds of times before, but now as his.

[slapkorsesbaldhead]

[Image ID: The Eric Andre "Do you think Margaret Thatcher had girl power?" meme, split into three panels. 

Panel 1: Eric sits at his talk show desk, with a microphone in front of him and looks to the side with a curious expression. The caption reads "Do you think Madame Director has girl power?"

Panel 2: Mel B sits on a white chair, labeled "neutral." She looks at Eric with an amused expression. The caption reads "Yes, of course." 

Panel 3: Eric looks offscreen towards Mel with a confused expression. The caption reads "Do you think she effectively utilized girl power by giving droids sentience then leaving them to die with no replacement parts when she has infinite parts at her disposal?" / End ID.]

[Image ID: An edited version of the "anyone wanna admit" meme. Rapper J Cole has his arms up in a "stop" motion against a purple background. The top caption reads "Before DESTROYA frees us", and the bottom caption reads anyone wanna admit they got a crush on me?", followed by a double heart emoji, a see-no-evil monkey emoji, and a weary face emoji. / End ID]

[ID: An edited screenshot from Wikihow. The first image shows a drawing of light-skinned hands holding a white pill bottle labeled "Hard to swallow pills." The second image shows one hand pointing at pills in the other palm, which are labeled "Destroya probably doesn't have a huge ass". / End ID]

[ID: The "she wasn't lying" meme, showing a very windswept dog closing its eyes as if bracing against a strong breeze. Text above and below it reads: "bli wasn't lying / that Destroya can destroy". / End ID]

[Image ID: the "choose a pill" meme. In the first image it shows 4 different colored pills, with labels saying what will happen if you choose that pill. It is captioned "Choose One". The pink pill is labeled "Free replacement parts", the gree pill is labeled "Madam director dies", the yellow pill is labeled "Destroya frees us", and the blue pill is labeled "Destroya frees us (in all caps) and (end caps) hes looking for a partner".

The second image is two hands dumping out a bottle of blue pills. It is blurred to look like they are moving fast.

[bubmyg]

dare to begin - jjk

pairing: jeongguk x reader

genre/warnings: college!au, f2l (idiots to lovers), amateur model!jeongguk, aspiring photographer!jeongguk, amateur stylist!reader, graphic design student!reader, a touch of angst, mostly tooth rotting fluff

word count: 16,748

summary: jeongguk has a camera and you have a pirated editing software so what better for two broke college students to do than to open a photography business to their…closest friends on facebook or where kim seokjin’s modeling agency wants to sign jeongguk and you don’t know the first thing about curling his hair.

a/n: this was inspired by that random dispatch photoshoot in vegas...i’m not even sorry

“Oh fuck off.” 

Jeongguk’s head lifted from where his forehead was pressed between the crook of his elbow, squinting at you through bleary eyes. “...for once, I didn’t even say anything—”

“Not you,” You clicked so angrily on the notification, it didn’t register and you had to jam your index finger into the button again, “The bursar’s office.”

“Oh, did they—” Jeongguk rolled to his back, head half dangling off the end of your bed as he pulled his phone to his face. “—oh. Tuition statements.”

“How can they make us pay for something that hasn’t even started yet? We haven’t even finished this semester.”

“What are they going to do if we don’t pay by the first day of the semester—” Jeongguk’s eyebrows peered at you underneath his phone, “—kick us out?”

You glared at the mass of numbers twisted into the statement until they muddled together and gave your conscious the mirage that the cost was an extra digit more. Your phone skidded across the surface of your desk, coming to a stop in the pointed corner next to a decorative jar of pens and a concert ticket you’d pushed through the cork board material substance lining the back. 

“They won’t kick me out?” You didn’t look up from studying a fray of graining wood on the pointed corner of your desk but cocked an eyebrow at the waiver of uncertain concern in Jeongguk’s voice paired with the change in position from we to me, “Will they?”

“I don’t know,” You answered truthfully, arm slung over the back of your desk chair to face his pouted lips still slung backward over your bed. An unspoken why would they kick you out? “I really don’t.”

He answered your rhetorical with closed eyes and his phone pressing to his abdomen, “I don’t know if I’ll...have enough. That much. By then. Even if it’s not until the end of the summer…”

You scolded the glaring image of your bank statement when you gently tried, “There’s all kinds of loans you can apply for. What about scholarships? Isn’t the science department like...the biggest at the university? Surely they offer something—”

“I don’t think I have the grades,” There was a silence occupied by his notebook with messy organic chemistry notes rewritten twice from the previous semester when he’d taken the exact same class. Jeongguk dropped your gaze, shifting until the back of his head was resting on the side of your mattress while he went for his cuticles, picking at the edge of his thumb while soft red crept into his puffed cheeks and flaring nostrils. 

You abandoned the open animation file on your laptop that you’d forgotten to click save on for the seventeenth time within the hour, a final project you just had to turn in with a semi coherence to the material of the semester to maintain your existing grade. You stumbled, desk chair catching on the edge of your crumbled rug but it didn’t deter you from flopping in beside Jeongguk, leaning over him with both elbows pressed into his stomach to snatch his notebook. He eyed you curiously under wavy fringe until you settled on him, chin pressed into the bottom of the pages as a concentrated scrunch met the pass of your eyes over his handwriting. 

“What are you doing?”

You glanced up, gradual in the drag of your hands up his sides until you could jam your index fingers into the sensitive spots around his ribs, coaxing a soft squirm and a gasping giggle from his lips. 

“Helping you get those grades. Do you really want to take organic chemistry for the third time?” Jeongguk didn’t flinch because your inquiry wasn’t teasing or jabbing, it was serious for the sake of never seeing him on the verge of tears over three credit hours again. He shook his head in negation instead, reaching behind him to snatch one of your pillows to drag behind his neck, propping him up just enough to study the curl of your stature against his chest. 

“No, ma’am.”

“Good, now pay attention.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

You watched Jeongguk sink his teeth into the mint chocolate ice cream balanced two dollops high on a cone with a wrinkle to one side of your nose, the smile on your lips forced when he swallowed the green between his cheeks and quipped, “What?”

“You know what,” You twirled a string of hot fudge onto your plastic fork, mouthing your lips over it until the sweet substance melted on the roof of your mouth, “Forget it.”

He shrugged, happily taking another, literal, bite off the opposite side of the treat tower, lips sponging down the length of his hand to noisily suck on the melted stream of ice cream that had rippled across his knuckles. 

You sighed. Jeongguk grinned mint green, “Tastes like freedom.”

“My summer job says otherwise.” The bookstore wasn’t a fun place of employment during the school year let alone when three fourths of the student body was gone. 

Jeongguk dabbed at the corner of his lips with a napkin, a sharp contrast to the way he’d been barbarically gnawing his way through the ice cream, “So does my summer tutoring. A lesser of two evils.”

“I suppose…”

“At least we can drink on Wednesday’s now and only feel slightly guilty.”

“You don’t drink.”

“I drink a little—” 

“Is this your way of asking me to come over for beer tonight?”

He grinned sheepishly, “Doesn’t have to be for beer. Hoseok moved back home yesterday. I’m extra alone.”

You eyed his prize possession, his camera, encased snugly inside it’s over the shoulder case that Jeongguk kept within grasp on the tiny cafe table shared between the two of you. He followed your gaze, a careful hand coming to rest on the strap even though he knew you respected his comfort enough not to touch it. 

“So, what, you talk me into following your wandering ass around the park for hours to take pictures and now you want me to hole up in your apartment and watch whatever terrible nature documentary you’ve found on Netflix?”

Jeongguk mumbled around another chunk of the treat in his palm, unaffected because he knew you were going to show up at his apartment regardless of invitation, “I bought us ice cream, didn’t I?”

You grumbled your thanks into your deviation of attention, pulling your phone to your eyes as you jabbed another spoonful of sundae into your cheeks. Jeongguk continued to happily munch while you scrolled through one social media and then the other, finally landing on Facebook with a disgruntled roll of your eyes the second the first post appeared. 

“What?”

“Facebook.”

“Did Yoongi post another Area 51 meme?”

You scrolled to the next post just to confirm that yes, sadly, before scrolling back up to the original source of your offending scoff. You eyed the generic smile plastered on the lips of the girl you’d went to high school with, the same as the generic caption on the generic set of pictures she’d taken of her dog and someone’s baby, advertising a brand new photography business, one she’d be doing on the side with no prices listed and simply a shoot me a text to book an appointment!, a service exclusive to those who knew her and who would pay her a little extra because of that connection and a business page created exclusively for a business that would be forgotten by the end of the summer. 

Your lips parted to explain, unfortunate in absently scrolling past Yoongi’s string of laughing emojis at whatever Area 51 meme his conspiracy theorist group chat had sent him that morning, before you were pausing. Thumb freezing, lips parted in a perfect circle, eyes the only thing moving as they swept upward. 

Jeongguk watched you like you were seconds away from shedding a shell or sprouting a second head or both, ice cream sticking to the pout of his bottom lip and a new melted stream lipping into the stretch between his thumb and index finger. He didn’t follow your gaze when it jerked from him to his camera bag, watching as your entire being lit like the thing you were sprouting wasn’t a second head but instead a hovering light bulb. 

“You know what we should do?”

“...go to the park and take pictures of the playground equipment in obscure angles that strangely turn out to be aesthetically pleasing?”

“Close,” Your nail dug into your screen until you were at the top post again, flipping your phone over while you continued to study the zippers wrapped to the width of Jeongguk’s camera bag. When he’d squinted at the screen for what you deemed necessary to get the gist of the post, you continued, “We should open a photography business.”

Jeongguk squinted, “A what now?”

“A photography business. You take the pictures, I edit them. Foolproof way to earn extra cash.”

“In order to have a photography business we have to have something to photograph…”

“I bet we can get Yoongi to pay us twenty bucks to take pictures of his dog.”

“It’s almost not worth the twenty—”

“Okay, forty dollars,” You shrugged, reaching out with your own clean but crumpled napkin to dab at the excess ice cream on his hand, “I’m sure there’s some of our friends back home who need pictures of their baby. Or their cousin’s baby. Or their little brother’s senior pictures—” You blinked at the confused round of his doe eyes, “—what could it hurt to try?”

After a second of silence and swatting your hand away to lick at the dried ice cream instead, “...well we’ll need examples.”

“Good thing we were just about to go to the park—” You gestured toward his camera bag, “—and that thing is virtually attached to you.”

Jeongguk gradually began to loosen, “You want to do this right now?” 

You stood then, binning your virtually untouched sundae before reaching out for his mostly eaten treat. He shoved the last of the cone between his cheeks instead of handing it to you, puffed cheeks innocent as he handed you his mass of crumpled napkins to throw away instead before you were taking both his hands to pull him up. 

“What better time than now?” You grinned when he cocked an eyebrow, still holding onto your hands, “C’mon. You can help me edit them tonight.”

Skeptical, “Okay…”

Jeongguk dropped one of your hands to reach for his camera, shrugging it messily over his shoulders while you squeezed the remaining appendage in your grasp, teasing, “Don’t act like you weren’t going to take a ton of pictures of me, anyway.”

You weren’t immune to the soft blush that spread outward from the center of his cheeks, chin dropping as he shouldered his way out of the nearby door, holding it open for you and when you skipped through he grumbled, “Shut up.”

You were fresh off a playful argument about whether he could arrange your hair into a halo of hearts around your head when it happened. 

“Not possible,” You dismissed, a disguised threat as you glared up at him from your seated place on the grass. He stepped closer and you held up a steady palm, “Do not touch me or my hair.”

Jeongguk whined, fingers wrapped around his lens as he crouched, twirling and snapping a picture of your indignation. “At least lay down for me? The flowers look nice…”

“These are weeds—”

“Please?”

You obliged because the stars in his eyes told you to, falling backwards to the plush earth with an arm tucked behind your neck and a hefty sigh. He’d stepped between your legs, one foot at your knees and one at your hip as he craned, tongue in cheek in concentration until he mumbled, “I still think the hearts would look cool.”

“I thought you were good at this whole photography thing.”

You retracted into yourself before he could grab you, a shriek of laughter tumbling out of your lips even before his fingers curled into your sides and you flailed an absent foot at his stature squatted over you, chanting I’m sorry, stop! until Jeongguk relented to a messy sitting position next to you in a soft cloud of grass clippings and dust, camera plopped in his lap as he glared at you. 

You rolled until you were perched on your elbows, reaching out your previously assaulting foot to prod the light denim on his thighs. When he cocked an eyebrow, you tried, “Any good ones?”

Without missing a beat, he hummed, “As good as we can get with that face of yours.”

“Hey!—” 

The tiniest of smiles pressed the ghost of a dimple in Jeongguk’s cheek and he tossed his head, “Come here.”

An awkward waddle over and you were pressed into his side, cheek on his arm as he scrolled through the shots on the digital screen. It was something about his ability to capture shots at just the right moment in just the right lighting with just the right angle that elicited a feeling of fond within you, that even if you didn’t particularly like the squash of your chin between your neck or the way the wind had curled the material of your shirt around your torso, it was still a glimpse into how Jeongguk saw the world, saw you. A strange fuzziness bubbled to the tips of your fingers as he continued to scroll through his lens to what he perceived as your beauty, focused more on the gradual smile that grew higher on his teeth as he flipped past candid shots of you telling him off to staged shots of you perched on a park bench looking as skeptical as you could about the barking squirrel perched just out of frame above you. 

“Good, don’t you think?” His fond faced you, further melting the numbness on the edge of your appendages to the entirety of your stature. 

You relaxed into his so that your nod brushed against his bicep, afraid of what your face would say if you met his gaze and you mumbled, “Told you we didn’t need heart hair.”

“Hush,” Jeongguk’s screen went black as he set it gently on the cross of his ankles, leaning on his palms to accommodate your stature better, “Do you think we got plenty of examples?”

You continued to stare at his blank screen, skin warm on the fabric covering his arm and suddenly it happened when you blurted, “Let me take some of you.”

A possessive hand curled to obscure your view of the blank preview screen, shoulders jumping as he tried to laugh it off, “No, that’s okay.”

Chin on his shoulder, you dared to look at him and utter, “What? I’ll edit them. I mean, I know your face looks like that but that’s the beauty of technology.”

“My joke,” Jeongguk’s neck craned backward to observe you, smile flustered like the pink that had overtaken more of his cheeks, “...why do you want to?”

You shrugged, “You always take pictures of me. I just thought we could change it up—” You swallowed, “You know. For our business.”

“Ah, marketing technique, huh,” Slowly, he uncovered the device, flicking it back to life with a seasoned thumb as he was stretching it to place it softly on your thigh, “Okay, boss. Where do you want me?”

You’d used a camera before but something so expensive to the price tag but priceless to the wary man before you made it an extra weight in your palms, fumbling at first to get anything that wasn’t blurry. One of your first clear shots was after you’d shoved on broad shoulders until he was seated on a wooden bench, awkward and small at first until you sighed with the camera at your hip. 

The exasperated relax that sighed from your lips opened up a new realm that had the strange bubbles from earlier lodging into the base of your throat when Jeongguk reclined, both arms framing the back of the bench and his legs flopped open, that slight crinkle to one edge of his nose still present until you slowly rose the camera and it erased into something effortlessly smug. 

“I can’t...I can’t get it to focus.” For two reasons now.

Jeongguk nodded in seeming understanding and you had a hunch he didn’t entirely understand why but he patted the spot next to his thigh on the bench nonetheless. “Come here. Rest your elbow on this and then try. It’ll stabilize it a little bit more…”

You startled yourself and him when you bypassed the bench for his thigh, digging your elbow into the taut muscle as you pulled the camera to your face, catching his surprise first and then the slow smirk that melted back into his features, chin tilting as you got a few more shots before pulling your touch away. 

The next set of shots was you frantically ordering him to stay like a dog until you’d jogged the proper distance away (Don’t trip! Watch my camera!) and motioned for him to walk to you. It was rigid at first, just as before, a little too fast and his face was on the edge of bursting into audible giggles. You continued to back away, holding up a palm for him to pause again and then you shouted, “Relax!” louder than before and more important. 

There was an easy gait to his walk now, feet crossing as they stepped in front of each other, one hand finding the front pocket of his jeans as the oversized hang of his striped blue shirt crinkled at his thin waist. One hand dared to fluff at his hair, gaze going out to the occupants of the park rather than the desolate intersection to his other side and you couldn’t help but giggle at the unsure smile that crossed his lips immediately after the action. 

Jeongguk settled for an easy saunter after that, one hand in his pocket, both in, both out, until you were tired of the clench of his jaw and you called over the raise of his device to the lower half of your face, “Hey! Are those yellow converse you’re wearing?”

He frowned at first, “What’s wrong with my yellow converse?” before breaking into a gentle grin, one that started at the crinkles around his eyes and traveled into the wide pull of his teeth as the easy swing of his steps stumbled into his louder laughter and you continued to click away all the same until he set his sights on you. Hunched back, rolled shoulders, arms comically splayed out behind him as he darted for you, a squeak of surprise leaving your lips and before you could think to hold onto his camera and run, he was on you, arms around your waist to direct his giggles directly over your ear. 

The excitement died with gentle sways in the center of the sidewalk. Jeongguk continued to hold your hips as he pulled away, quieter now, “Do you think we have enough now?”

“Plenty,” You held his camera out to him until his grip was secure on it, prodding your index finger to the center of his chest, “Did you want to take anymore? I know you originally wanted to come because you had some ideas for your portfolio…”

He beamed, slightly apologetic in the slant of it on his lips, “It’s okay, we have all summer. I’m...kind of hungry anyway.”

“We just had ice cream!”

“We’ve been here for four hours.”

You eyed the time on your phone and then the dip of the sun behind some wisped clouds in the horizon. “Oh.”

“You’ll come with me another day, though?”

You patted Jeongguk’s chest instead of prodding it. “Of course, Guk.”

He plopped in beside you, two paper plates balanced between his long fingers and the curve of his wrist, each piled high in fresh slices of pizza. One plate was deposited to the coffee table beyond the sway of your ankles, the latter pulled over his thighs to begin happily munching at the toppings while you continued to hack at the keys on your laptop. 

“Any progress?” Jeongguk leaned closer with grease stained lips, “Making us look good?”

You hummed, dragging your finger over your touchpad. Another notch down on contrast, another notch up on the chosen filter, some color correction, and lessening of shadows to compensate for the natural lighting. 

“Trying my best. And…” You navigated to save the image on the screen, one of Jeongguk walking toward you with a hand in his pocket and an easy expression adorning his otherwise tentative features. “I’m done!”

He pouted, grease stained finger trailing to the screen, “You cut off my shoes.”

“I blame your camera,” You exited out of the program, pulling up your internet browser instead. You paused, the cursor blinking on the search engine and you turned to observe the fish of Jeongguk’s lips as he gnawed on another bite of pizza dough, “...do you really want me to post some of these?”

He dusted his fingers on the edge of his joggers, leaning closer until his cheek was smooshed against the crook of your elbow. “I mean, what can it hurt.”

You began to type then, slow in entering the cursed Facebook and you chatted as you typed, “Should we create an official page for the business and everything?”

“Absolutely we should,” Jeongguk made grabby hands at your laptop until you relented and let him pull it into the awkward curl of his lap. His eyebrows furrowed at the first post on your feed, the same Yoongi Area 51 meme that continued to fester in your feed because Taehyung couldn’t and wouldn’t stop commenting on it and his tongue sandwiched in his molars with further confusion, doe eyes scanning down the length of the screen until the tip of your nail pointed him in the right direction. 

Jeongguk hesitated again on the first question. Name. 

“Uh…”

“I got it,” You leaned your head against his, softly, “Dare to Begin…” 

Dare to begin a new semester that neither of you knew if you could properly pay for. Dare to begin a summer of trying to figure out how to pay for that semester. Dare to begin a new semester by some miracle and then what (figure it out when you get there, survive) with a major you adored and a major he did because photography wasn’t a viable career option. Dare to begin a friendship with someone who photographed the world like the beauty he saw it in but photographed you like he was in love with the world because you existed in it. 

Dare to begin a new business on Facebook, of all things.

He wrinkled his nose, “I was just going to go with Flash Fiends or something.”

“Oh, come on,” You reasoned your prior thoughts to something that wouldn’t cause suspicion of your sentiments, “Dare to begin, like weddings? They’re beginning their journey with us. Senior pictures? Beginning a journey. Baby pictures? Again...beginning a long life journey—”

“You’re serious about this?” Jeongguk had already typed Flash Fiends in the name box and you squeaked in indignation. 

“I guess not,” Suddenly bashful, “I just thought it was creative…”

“It is,” You blinked and he’d navigated through three other windows before he was typing dare to begin with Flash Fiends as the opening line in the description box. He hacked away some more, a generic description and you equally agreed to put prices in the album with the pictures of the two of you. Another jam of his pinky into the enter key and he lifted up off your side to hand you your laptop back. “There! Okay, now do your thing.”

Doing your thing included dragging all the files into an album, adding searchable hashtags, making the post public, choosing to set the last photo of Jeongguk you’d edited as the cover photo. A couple more clicks to make the post, navigating to share it onto your profile and dropping a tag of his profile and, “My thing is done.”

He took your laptop from you to replace it with the extra plate of pizza, sliding the remote into his hand in the same movement and flicking on the television. “Now,” He gestured solemnly to the litter of devices in front of you, both your phones and the still open laptop, “We wait.”

You remembered two of the share notifications before you dozed off underneath the cozy puff of Jeongguk’s duvet and the heavy weight of his arm draped across your waist. One from Yoongi, an oh so serious I’m going to help my friends! share that included the obligatory you’re very talented, Guk-ah! I’d love to have you shoot Holly one day...comment. One from Taehyung, a less than serious share that included a string of laughing emojis solely on the image of Jeongguk lounging seriously on the wooden park bench. 

The notification you most definitely did not remember was the email from Kim Enterprises titled internship inquiry. 

You crawled from Jeongguk’s embrace to snatch your laptop, afraid to pull the email up on the tiny screen of your phone in fear you were reading it wrong. The light off the screen roused him from his sleep before your suddenly-not-tired-anymore gasp did. 

“What? What’s wrong?” He misjudged the search of his hand for you, gently sliding across your cheek instead of your arm like he’d been aiming but you barely flinched, covering your lips with both hands instead. 

“This can’t be real,” The words muffled through your fingers before they were in action again, highlighting the email address and jamming it into the search engine. 

“I’m not following you…”

“To be honest,” You clicked on the first result of the search, another gasp raw in your throat when the website, that website, emerged, “Me either.”

“B-Bloom?” Jeongguk squinted at the screen, turning your laptop towards the sleep still coating the fringe stuck in his eyelashes, “What is Bloom?” 

“A magazine. An extremely popular magazine.”

He brushed your fingers out of the way to navigate back to the tab with your email on it, squinting at the address, “Why did an extremely popular magazine email you?”

“Let me read this email to you, Guk.”

“I can read—”

“Greetings owner of Flash Fiends. We were extremely intrigued by the contents of your recent business inquiry not for the service at hand but rather the individual seen in some of the photos. The social media entity tagged him as Jeon Jeongguk, and if that is the identity of this individual, we’d be interested in signing him—” You paused, swallowing half your tongue and holding a singular finger up as you inhaled audible through your nose, “—for a summer modeling internship in the interest of some of our newest summer spreads, paid of course. If that is something that would be of interest to you, please reply to this email with an updated resume and we will be in touch. Thank you again, and we look forward to hearing from you. Park Jimin, Department Head of Kim fucking Enterprises and Bloom fucking Inc.”

There was a passing moment of silence, some shifting as Jeongguk fell back into the sheets with his pillow curled in his bare arm and he mumbled, “I told you Flash Fiends was an incredible name.”

“Jeongguk! Did you hear me?” 

He hummed, “I saw it, too.”

“And? They want to pay you! This is the perfect opportunity to earn the money you need for next semester!”

When he was silent for a frightening second, you shut your laptop and shucked it to the floor, turning until you were facing him. You’d barely settled when a tiny, forced smile was dimpling into his cheeks. “I’m not going without you,” He tried to provide and you frowned. 

“Uhm, yes you absolutely are.”

“I’m not a model, babe.”

“You’re entirely more attractive than you give yourself credit for,” You blinked at him, soft fingers subconsciously reaching to stroke wavy tresses from his gaze, “Come on. What could it hurt to try?”

“You said that about the photography business idea, too, and now look where we are,” He flushed under your touch between his eyebrows, “Besides, are you going to run that alone if I leave?”

You bypassed his sarcasm, “We’re in a place where you could get that money you need for next semester. One step closer to graduation. And all you’d have to do is pose for some pictures. They’ll probably pay for your housing and shit too—”

“Okay, but I’m still not going without you,” You waited on Jeongguk to exhale through his nose, considering something over the top of your head before elaborating, “...if I’m going to try this, you’re going with me. Just like the photography business.” Just like everything. 

“You need a resume first.”

“And you need some sort of skill that goes hand in hand with a famous model—” He beamed, “—like yours truly.”

“Fuck off—”

“You could be my assistant.”

“Fuck off twice.” 

“What about my stylist?” Jeongguk let the suggestion hang in the air for a second before teasing, “Your eyeliner looks half decent sometimes.”

“And does any part of you genuinely think I want to go with you at this point—”

“We also need someone to fake these resumes for us—” His features wrinkled up, “—can we get arrested for that? Should I apologize to my FBI agent now?”

You ignored him, instead saying simply, “Taehyung.”

The software engineer blinked at you past artificial blue, the light coating the dyed grey locks that parted in all the right places around the circumference of his head, baggy flannel wrapped around his knuckles that drummed absently into his desk. 

“So...you were serious about that Facebook post?”

“Not really, but—” You exchanged a glance with Jeongguk, “—now we kind of are.”

Taehyung spun slowly in his desk chair, making one full rotation until he pondered, “So, let me get this straight. You want me to fake resumes for the two of you so that you can get a paid internship at Bloom, aka, one of the biggest fashion magazines in the country, because they somehow, through the power of the internet, found your half-joking, half-serious photoshoot and want to sign the amateur model that is Jeon Jeongguk.”

Jeongguk exchanged a glance with you this time, “Correct.”

The older boy blinked, once, twice, four times before shrugging, pushing sleeves up to his elbows as he dug bare heels into the floor, dragging himself closer to the computer to begin hacking away. The blue light turned white and he mumbled, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Twenty minutes later you were sitting across from Taehyung at his tiny dining table with a manila folder in hand containing two pieces of paper, stapled together neatly in the corner, and printed with thick ink you were almost afraid to touch. The man across from you sucked noisily on coffee from a Pikachu themed mug, taking a massive bite from a chocolate energy bar in the same movement and he spoke through the crumbs gathering on the corners of his lips, “I think you’ll find those sufficient.”

You ignored Jeongguk’s flat out whine at the contents of his papers, gleeing, “Oh, good thinking, Tae. I’ll absolutely take credit for RM’s cheekbones in the Seoul music video.”

“Wait—” Jeongguk placed his hand on your arm until he could drag your fake resume close enough to scan it. Another whine, high pitched and through slanted eyebrows and pouted lips, “—why do you get to be attached to Namjoon?”

“Your crush is showing.”

“At least yours doesn’t say you were a former foot model!” 

You couldn’t suppress the snort in your throat, gently prying the wrinkled papers from Jeongguk’s death grip to confirm that Taehyung did, in fact, write that Jeongguk had an impressive track record of modeling for various small shoe companies with posters plastered in every massive mall on the south side of the country. 

“Why—” 

“Because you can’t see your face, dumbass,” Taehyung finished the bar in hand in two bites, shucking the wrapper into a pile of various other trash on the edge of his dining table, “It’s easier to fake if they do check references. What do you think they’re going to do, pull your socks off to check?”

“There’s approximately a million other parts of my body that aren’t my face.”

“Not quite a million…”

“Anyway,” You flattened both your resumes to the table, tapping on the section that said references with a singular reference, “What is this phone number?”

“Mine,” Another energy bar had materialized from somewhere and the wrapper was loudly crinkling in Taehyung palm as he shrugged into another bite, “I’m your manager now.”

“There’s no way this is going to work.”

“This will work,” He took another swig from his mug and when something like a belch rumbled in his throat you figured out that it wasn’t coffee but something carbonated, “What? Do you not have any trust in me?”

You fiddled in the backseat of the cab, the seat belt too tight on your shoulder and digging into that spot on your neck the more you shifted. You tore your gawking gaze away from the city skyline trailing along outside the window to Jeongguk prodding at his thigh with your index finger. 

“You think they’ve called Taehyung yet?”

“If they haven’t yet they’re probably not going to,” His chin swiveled from the window to look at you, gently taking the nervous tap of your hand into his palm and holding it in his lap, “They’ve already said we’re in. We’re already here. It’s okay.”

You were silent through another stop sign and the anger of honking traffic over the soft radio before you uttered, “So Taehyung must be some kind of wizard, then.”

Jeongguk’s palm caught on the back of the driver’s seat when the brakes slammed again, offering you another gentle smile as his thumb swiped over your knuckles, “Evidently.”

“We’re here,” The driver informed you over the ambiance of unmoving traffic and screeching tires, holding out an expectant hand for Jeongguk to jam a wad of cash into before he was pulling you out onto the sidewalk after him. 

Backpacks on and suitcases barely lifted over the lip of the trunk of the cab before he was speeding away off the curb in a rare moment of serenity on the street. Your easy going shrug in Jeongguk’s direction was short lived until you turned toward the building in question, your building for the next few months, nonchalant turning to ice even as summer heat burned through the fabric of the hoodie you’d adorned since five am that morning at the airport. 

A skyscraper was the easiest way to explain it in layman's terms, towering endless stories high so it almost appeared to curve and sway into the flecks of clouds skimming through the blue sky. It seemed to be made entirely of windows, tinted enough and if you squinted, covered in elegant curtains or outlined with towering succulents in molted clay pots. The front door was sliding glass, accented in gold like the name plate jutting out in an awning over a massive outdoor rug with the same name and logo etched in a shag of the same hue. The longer you gaped, the more people entered or exited through the very glass doors, ingraining the soft mechanical hum they made into the forefront of your conscious along with the polished leather shoes and designer purses and singular wedding bands that likely costs more than you would pay in tuition for four years combined. 

“This can’t be it,” You panicked from Jeongguk’s arm again, finding it to dig your fingernails into and turn back onto the street, frantically trying to catch sight of your long gone taxi driver but the street had filled in your moment of disbelief and all shades of yellow and orange began to look the same. “Surely we told him the wrong address.”

“Babe,” He didn’t move his arm so as not to startle you, wincing the further your nails curled into his skin but gentle in his call nonetheless, “Baby, hey—” His eyes trekked the jump of your throat as you swallowed, finally meeting his eye contact, “—let’s just go inside. The worst they can tell us is no.”

They didn’t tell you no but the look from the receptionist told you to be self conscious of the joggers shrunk just above your ankles and the tattered edges of the hoodie curled around your knuckles that curled your skin anemic into the handle of your suitcase while Jeongguk easily chatted through her questions and paperwork, confirming that yes, you were the guests of Kim Enterprise. When you uttered purple to his under the breath pick a color inquiry, you didn’t expect it to be for a spiraling wrist band with a shiny metal key attached to one end, an end that pressed into the pulse point on your wrist. He turned from the desk, a folder in hand and a matching blue band on his wrist, one he shook at you so that the key twisted softly underneath the massive crystal chandelier taunting the space above the front desk. 

“We’re on the tenth floor,” He seemed entirely too at ease in the drape of his oversized crew neck and baggy joggers over open-toed sandals amongst luxuries like a jar of pens perched on the edge of the front counter you commended him for grabbing because the shiny ballpoints seemed to be carved of the same, close-to-real gold accented every inch of the building. He flicked his head again, soft bangs bouncing, and you were left to stumble after his stature until his advancements had to pause for a tall man in a matching tracksuit walking a happy looking doberman from the direction that you smelled chlorine. 

“Does this place have a pool?” You whispered with your hands braced between his shoulder blades, waiting until the man was out of sight to navigate for the elevators. 

Jeongguk waited until he stabbed the button, stepping back to jostle the folder in hand to squint at one of the pages. “Looks like it—” His eyes glinted for a second, “—and a full gym!”

He continued chattering about the amenities while you stepped onto the elevator, listing off the various delivery services that would come to the front lobby versus the ones that would bring it to your door, only pausing through a rant about what the in house cafe coffee cost when you jammed the key on your wrist into the lock of the apartment, your apartment, and pushed the door open. 

Jeongguk mirrored your panicked thoughts from earlier when he let go of the handle of his suitcase, causing the lopsided storage to tumble to the hardwood below. He articulated it next, “This can’t be it. There has to be a mistake. We’re in the wrong apartment or something—”

“Guk,” You comforted him with a hand on his hip, “Our keys wouldn’t have worked if this wasn’t the right place. They wouldn’t have called us by name at the front desk…”

You followed the awe of his gaze as it tilted upward and in swivel, taking in the muted caramel hardwood glossed underneath fluffy white rugs and hues of blue leather furniture, similar wood color to the floor marking that of the cabinets and tables nailed to walls or pushed into corners, accent pieces and fake flowers doused in blacks and whites sprinkled throughout the various nooks. The windows you’d noticed from the street stretched out in the opposite direction from where you’d came in, allowing you a view not of the street but through the city, a birds eye view through buildings taller and shorter than your own, some close enough to theoretically touch and others just an unworldly as they would be from ground level. Thin black curtains swayed from gold accented rods, a result of the white ceiling fan and the chill of air conditioning seeping out through various vents pressed into the crown molding of the rippled ceiling. A staircase marked the far corner, spiraling upward into an open concept hallway that disappeared into another handful of doors, the wood a slightly darker shade than that on the floor but the railing coated in a curved gold metal. 

He swayed next to you and when he shuffled forward, you registered that he’d stepped out of his sandals, picking his feet up like prolonged contact would dirty the immaculate condition. He’d no much as peeked around the corner, the curve of broad shoulders a sliver in your peripheral, when a noise of surprise came high pitched from him. 

You peeled off your tennis shoes by the heels, taking long steps until you were behind him. In the kitchen, an open concept room marked onto by the black marble bar that made an L shape to the hum of shining appliances. 

“The lights are motioned censored,” Jeongguk provided at a breath and the two of you were still enough in silence that they flicked off. You moved to test his theory, flailing a hand out and frosted globes curled into the ceiling in threes illuminated once more. 

You stepped around him, hardwood trailing into slick white tile and you nearly stumbled into the edge of the countertop when you tried to step for the neatly folded triangle of paper perched in the center next to a bowl of fresh fruit. You plucked it into your grasp, not without dislodging a yellow apple that rolled a few paces across the specks of silver shining through in the countertop, using your thumb to smooth out the creases to squint at the printed type. 

“What the fuck are we doing?” Jeongguk uttered finally, still rooted in place but slumped against the wall. 

You flipped the paper over, “Apparently heading to the agency for a meeting with Park Jimin.”

His eyes closed, feet shuffling until his entire back was pressed into the wall, “I knew that. They said that in the confirmation email. I meant—”

“—we can figure out what to do with this place when we get back. We need to get ready,” You glanced at him, “I mean, you can go in our airport clothes but I’d rather...not.”

“Right…” Jeongguk squinted, eyes trailing over your shoulder to the nestled staircase as he pushed himself up off the wall, “You think the bedrooms are up there?”

You frowned, “Why not just change down here?”

“On account of giant ass windows and thin curtains I don’t entirely trust yet,” His voice echoed to you no matter where he ventured into the house, going first to snatch his fallen suitcase and then secondly making his way for the ascend. 

You almost tripped trying to collect your own bag, heaving by the time you caught his stature on the stairs and he turned to you with an amused cock of his eyebrow. “Coming with?”

“Don’t leave me down there alone,” You countered, shoving at his waist, “Too big for me to be by myself. This makes my dorm look like a thimble.”

Jeongguk laughed, a soft sound as his feet hit the next level, glancing down each hallway and then at you. It was an unspoken race until your coiled muscles jumped the opposite direction, meandering into bedrooms at each end of the upper level. You heard his cackles grow louder from within the first door your reached and your conscious had just began to affirm the same thing he yelled to you, “These are fucking huge too!”

A massive queen bed with a white duvet and two white blankets neatly folded at the end, two white wicker rocking chairs, a white throw rug peeking out from underneath the bed frame, white tile in an en suite bathroom like that in the kitchen cut off where the slightly darker wood floor began. 

You dropped your suitcase unceremoniously in the threshold, picking your feet like Jeongguk had been before as you dug into the top pouch of the bag to retrieve a different outfit. Three splashes of water to your cheeks and a struggle with a jean button confirmed you were very much still alive and you dared to wander out into the hallway after a fight with an automatic sink faucet. 

There was one more bedroom half the size of the one you’d claimed on your side of the hall, one you inspected with a quiet hum, dragging the door shut behind you as your sweeping steps brought you back outside. The false sense of serenity your anxious mind had calmed you into immediately erased when there was a figure standing at the head of the stairs, forcing a scream from your lips. 

“It’s me—” But it didn’t look like Jeongguk, not the Jeongguk you were used to anyway. Neatly pressed black slacks falling neatly around his ankles, a black baggy top that curled into his elbows with vertical blue stripes cutting down the surface of the fabric, the material tugged and cinched with a thin belt at the point of his thin waist, new jewelry curled over his exposed wrists and collarbones and fingers, hair slightly damp and parted effortlessly. 

“What the fuck?” You barked. 

He glanced down at his shirt, picking at one of the loose buttons and then finally deciding to do it up, a muted, “Does this look okay?” catching in his throat when you rushed for him, catching his wrists and quickly undoing his previous action. He was flushed harsh at the neck when you glanced up at him, sheepish in the smile that crossed the own heat flaming through your stature. 

“Yes,” You affirmed, “You look great, but…”

“But—” 

“Aren’t I supposed to do your hair?” 

Jeongguk blinked at the pink in his cheeks worsened. “Yeah, I was thinking…” He seemed to wince but you knew it as embarrassment, “Maybe you could curl it for me some time? More of a wave than what’s naturally there...you know.”

You eyed one of the wispy strands that swayed out over the top of his ear, not included in the wet swipe of his brush through his tresses. 

“What do I look like?” You teased, grabbing his wrist to tug him down the stairs two at a time, “Your stylist?”

“Jeon Jeongguk and…” The man behind the counter trailed off, reading your name a bit quieter from the front of a blue file folder with a raised eyebrow. You nodded with a smile nonetheless, nudging Jeongguk who was still fixated on an oak tree sized fern resting in front of the sleek wall beyond the counter. 

“Perfect,” His chair clicked across the plastic mat underneath the wheels, head disappearing into a file cabinet before returning with two laynards. He passed them across the desk, blank ID badges encased in thick plastic sleeves that would earn you clearance. “Your headshot will accompany the ID—” He was addressing Jeongguk point blank, “—once you take an appropriate one. Company protocol.” 

Jeongguk passed you one lanyard, untangling his absently and he inquired softly, “...when will those be taken?”

The man frowned, “In just a few moments? Were you not aware?”

“I thought we had a meeting scheduled with Park Jimin,” You drew the man’s attention to you, stretching the lanyard around your neck. 

“Oh, you do,” He smiled, “His meeting is running late, so we’re going to send you to the studio first.”

“We weren’t prepared for a shoot…” Jeongguk tucked his own badge over his neck. 

The man willingly addressed you this time, smile tight lipped as an obnoxious office phone began to ring behind him, “Well, I’m sure your extremely talented stylist will be able to make you presentable from the shoulders up, yes?”

You swallowed, “Absolutely.”

“Perfect. The studio is down the hall to the left. Follow the signs posted on the wall,” More plastic wheels clicking across the floor and the ringing silenced as he placed the speaker against his shoulder, “Now if you’ll excuse me. Hello, Kim Enterprises—”

“Hey,” Jeongguk nudged you as you trailed down the mentioned hallway, squinting at an array of plastic signs drilled in a row on the wall. He tripped when you abruptly turned, pointing to direct him instead but he just nudged you again, “You can try out the whole curling my hair thing a bit sooner than expected.”

You dared to glance away from the scattered map in your brain to the shag of his locks of his eyebrows, ones that had already begun to dry and scrunch into soft waves. “Yeah,” You nodded, nudging him in the direction of the arrow for headshot studio, “Maybe.”

There was a woman stationed outside one of the open doorways, absently scrolling through her phone and she jerked when you approached, pocketing her phone in a messy fumble. “Ah, hello!” She greeted, and you rushed for the plastic at your chest to flip it over to display your name. “You must be the new duo...Jeongguk and—” She squinted at your name, uttering it too. “—perfect!” Soft curls bounced around her shoulders and when she turned you were knocked backward by the overwhelming smell of vanilla, but it faded like her figure into the room. “If you’ll follow me…”

The room opened into rows of empty makeup counters, bright lights burning hot over the top of walls half coated in mirrors. A few of the chairs were pulled out, like they’d been used earlier in the day, and some spare makeup bags were left sprawled with the products rolled onto the white counters. The woman was standing in a far corner at a clean counter aside from a neatly packaged makeup bag, a hair dryer, and a curling iron with the cord wrapped neatly around it’s head. 

“I think you’ll find this sufficient,” She chirped in reference to the items at the table. She pulled out the chair, just for extra measure. “If not, there are extra of everything in the cabinet on the far side of the room. If the skin tone is not correct, your welcome to any of the others, as well. This bag is yours for the duration of your stay so I recommend keeping it stocked so you do not waste time before shoots.”

“Other than that, have fun!” Her hand centered between Jeongguk’s shoulder blades, pushing until he followed her unspoken lead and collapsed into the chair. “Come across the hall when you’re prepared. I’ll notify our photographer of your arrival.”

He stared at you through the mirror until she’d slipped out of the room and then some, finally uttering slow and gentle, “Uh. So, what are you going to do to me?”

You decided to place your fingers in his hair to calm yourself in the slightest, fluttering the strands in both palms, and even your teasing was absent, “I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to fix this—” 

“Should you start with makeup?”

Both your gazes absently trailed to the rolled up black bag and your gradual nod came before your steps trailed to the opposite side of his chair. “I’m not going to do much…” You rambled while you discarded a liquid foundation that was a shade too light for Jeongguk for a powder one that appeared to match. “You don’t need it…”

You shook some of the substance into a tray, marveling at a clean powder brush before jabbing the soft end into the pile of dust curled in your palm. Your nose wrinkled when you moved for him, using your free hand to nudge his bangs out of the way before your internal monolog told you fuck it and the same stabbing motion became the end of the brush into the center of Jeongguk’s nose. 

He spluttered and you panicked when the fallout of the clumped dust spread below to the black fabric of his shirt. “That how you do it, huh?” He spoke through powdered stained lips and you frowned, spreading it up and over his cheekbones. 

“Close enough,” You finished evening out the powder before dropping the brush, reaching to dust at his shirt instead. He let you, waiting until you’d dulled the color into soft, barely there blots along the surface of his chest and watching with rapt attention as you straightened, settling curled fists onto your hips with a huff. 

“I think that’s enough makeup.”

“It’s just powder.”

“Exactly. You can’t even tell it’s there—” Jeongguk gestured to the drying and fraying mop on his head before sanctioning his hands underneath his thighs again, like you’d bite him if he moved while you worked, “—now fix my hair.”

You unraveled the cord, plugging it into the row of outlets lining the far wall before stretching the warming end of the iron toward Jeongguk’s face so quick he ducked, an attempt to loosen the perpetual frown that was carving a discolored circle into your bottom lip from the harsh suction of your teeth into the plush substance. When it didn’t work, he rounded his lips and blew upward so that the section of hair you feathered into your fingers fluttered out of your grasp. You cracked a smile then, dropping the curling iron to your side and you cocked an eyebrow at him. 

“Behave.”

He giggled, a soft sound that matched the crinkle of his powdered covered nose and his hands went back to being stiff underneath his legs. “Yes, ma’am.”

If it weren’t hard enough teaching yourself to curl short strands of hair on someone else, it was worse that the someone was Jeongguk, wide eyes coated in celestial bodies peering quietly up at you, a soft encouragement paired with tender giggles when you cursed. You nudged at the last strand, waving it over the tip of his right ear and you leaned back against the counter to inspect your work. 

It was his expression that faltered you now, an absent fondness that stared deep into your gaze when you met the very things that could rival any planetarium and you stuttered, “I-I think I’m done?”

“It looks good,” Jeongguk leaned forward to confirm, squinting at himself in the mirror, fixing a few strands to his liking and then he added a bit slower, “We can practice…”

A squeak left your lips and you went to cover your face because we can practice meant it wasn’t that good, but you weren’t allowed to wallow in it for long when two hands wrapped around your wrists, prying your cover away and drawing you closer until you were all but leaning over Jeongguk. 

“It’s okay,” More absent swiping to your knuckles and the freckle on the center of his bottom lip prominent when dimples pressed into his cheeks, “Ready?”

You let yourself smile, “You’re the model here, Guk.”

His headshots developed instantly and were sprawled in massive print sizes on the grain of Jimin’s desk, a glaring documentation of Jeongguk’s first professional shoot, your first time curling his hair, and the endearing little smile he allowed to adorn a sliver of his teeth. But even if you found it endearing, Park Jimin’s cross expression seemed to suggest the opposite. 

“Are these the ones you chose?” He mused, dragging a finger across the thing white space framing one of the photos. It was a pre-teeth smile, pulled lip dimpling the freckle on his chin, nose a second away from wrinkling at you flipping him off behind the scenes. 

Jeongguk considered his affirmation as a failure and it showed in the way it slid off his tongue, “...yes?”

Another handful of heartbeats into Jimin’s silence and Jeongguk uttered, “I mean...uh. T-they probably would look a little better if you’d adjust your umbrella lights. Or, you know, purchase new ones. They seem to be out of date. And are worsening the contrast—”

A second longer and Jimin shrugged, effectively cutting off Jeongguk’s rambles, and he gripped the edge of the photograph instead, sliding it into a neat pile with the others. They were quickly slipped into a folder, one he passed aside to make room for intertwined fingers in the center of his desk. 

“They’ll suffice for now,” Thin eyes studied you fully now, disregarding the hunch of Jeongguk’s shoulders in the chair next to you, snake like black peering out from beyond bleached blonde fringe, “...can I ask who you are?”

“His stylist.”

“Name?” You uttered it and Jimin nodded, leaning back into the plush back of his chair. “So is there a reason you’re here…?”

“I think I’ll need to know about Jeongguk’s future endeavors here if I’m going to, essentially, be responsible for his look—” You ignored the dry texture cracking at your tongue on the roof of your mouth with each new syllable, all the moisture instead clamming your palms that roughed out of sight on your thighs, “—don’t you think?”

He seemed impressed with that answer, two hands threading at the nape of his neck to let plush lips quirk with the raise of one eyebrow. “I think you may be correct,” Jimin drawled slowly, “You may stay.”

You bit down the sarcastic thanks for the permission because he was done targeting you, testing you, instead focusing his attention back on Jeongguk. The man fell forward again, dragging his chair closer with two hands between the languid part of his thighs before they transferred to rest on the round, plastic arms. 

“It’s a relatively simple internship. We already have you booked for some very specific shoots for our advertisements and the main magazine alike. I’ll email you a calendar, but for now—” Fluffy blonde locks disappeared from view before he resurfaced with a highlighted piece of paper in hand, slapping it the table and pushing it until it fluttered at Jeongguk. “—you’ll see your shoots highlighted in pink. Anything else you need to attend is in yellow. Meetings, check ins, things of that nature.”

Jeongguk still seemed like a fish out of water so you leaned toward him and questioned, “And the green color?”

“Retreats, bonding opportunities. Things of that nature,” Something genuine sparked in the smile on Jimin’s face as he glanced at you, “Seokjin is very into the team aspect of our company. You’re welcome to any of them, assuming you have the time between other schedules.”

Jeongguk still hadn’t spoke, drilling a hole into the paper, so Jimin took the social cue to inquire, “Any other questions?”

You were about to wonder about the glaring pink and yellow overlap for the Monday of the upcoming work week when Jeongguk spoke, firm and assuring as he glanced up. 

“I understand I’m here for modeling, but I’m extremely interested in photography. Independent and contracted, studio and otherwise. The times between schedules, would I be able to shadow some of your techs? Just for...the experience?”

Jimin barely faltered at the hopeful fidget of Jeongguk’s fingers in his lap, “I don’t believe we have the opening nor the time for that kind of request. I’ll check for you, but I wouldn’t count on anything.”

Translation, don’t ask questions, do what you’re here for. 

“So,” Jimin was still chatting as he pushed himself off his chair, back arching into a stretch, “We’ll see you Monday morning for the cover shoot?”

You froze into standing, the hand you were about to offer to Jeongguk consulting the chair you perched in as a vice as your knuckles bled anemic into your bone, “Excuse me...the what?”

“The cover shoot,” Jimin blinked as though that should be common knowledge to two rookie interns, “Seokjin recruited you with this concept in mind. You’ll be on the front cover of the next issue of Bloom.” 

More silence that Jimin was unaware to, moving around the side of his desk to make it to a row of towering file cabinets in the corner. He had the folder of Jeongguk’s headshots in hand, filtering it with careful thumbs even when you uttered a half octave softer, “Can we know what the concept is?”

Jimin smiled, the answer obvious as the mentioned cabinet rebounded audibly into a magnet placed on the inside of black metal. 

“They’ll be happy to explain it to you in your pre-shoot meeting Monday.”

“What if we’re doing all this—” Jeongguk winced for the fifteenth time when you lowered the curling wand to another strand of black, “—and it’s a shoot for my feet.”

You resisted the urge to accidentally let the edge of the iron graze his cheek in the unwind from the soft wave of his tress. You shifted where you perched on the marble, letting your thighs fall further apart for his waist to lean against the edge of the counter. With a hand on his shoulder, you pushed until his eyes trained on you, slightly sheepish, slightly shameless, entirely endearing and you sighed at the last attribute. 

“You think they’d put a whole ass foot on the cover of Bloom?” When he whined, you reached for another, untouched piece of hair, twisting and pressing it to the heat, “Nothing else. Just a foot. Maybe some scandalous ankle—”

Jeongguk pinched your thigh, “You’re mean.”

“This meanie can let you style your own hair and look like that on a magazine that everyone on campus is definitely going to see,” You ducked until he met your gaze again, serious despite the upward curve of your lips, “How mean am I now?”

“You’re not,” He grumbled, glancing off to the side, “You’re the best.”

“Thought so,” You let the curling iron teeter to its stand on the counter, bracing your hands on either side of you to inspect your work, “I...think we’re done.”

You resisted the urge to scream when Jeongguk ruffled searching fingers through the front, letting the styled strands fluff outward in the carefully done part you’d established with a complementary pen you’d found in a drawer in the kitchen. He arm fell limply to his side, latter tucked firmly in the unzipped pocket of his joggers and he looked at you from the winced corners of his eyes, “Does it look okay?”

You were gentle in pinched his chin between your thumb and index finger, turning his head so doe eyes were peering at your from the center of their endearing glory, but your lips fished and you hummed in Park Jimin fashion, “I mean, it’s still your face, but from what I have to work with—”

“That’s still my joke and it’s not funny anymore.”

You surprised Jeongguk and yourself when you used your grip on him to lean forward, feathering your lips to the center of his cheek, drawing a natural shade into the artificial blush you’d rubbed in light doses to his skin. “You look great, Guk,” To amend the tingle lingering on your lips, you added, “Only be, like, three-fourths as nervous as you were before.”

He disappeared from between your legs and was six steps up the spiral staircase to retrieve his bag when he managed to choke out a less than threatening, “I’ll leave your ass here alone.”

You hopped down from the counter, shuffling through the apartment to retrieve your key still stuck to its spiraling purple bracelet next to your phone that set on a charger attached to an extension cord (fatal flaw of the millions invested in the apartment: outlets placed in inept locations) when you heard two footsteps behind you, a descend on the staircase, and then a long pause. 

And then, “...do you think I should change shoes just in case it is of my feet—”

You were lost on one end of a long conference table while eight experienced professionals chattered on the likes of composition and aesthetics and ambiance and the vision of the newest issue, a list of words that meant similar but different things in the digital world with the manipulation of graphics at the tips of your fingers and you were more entertained with the aesthetic of the swirl of auburn color bubbling upward in your coffee when you stirred it with the tiny black straw. You were seemingly forgotten among the bustle that ended the meeting, a cattle like usher toward the singular door when the room was barely filled anyway and you found yourself hopeless in a room three times the size of the previous one with equipment you didn’t understand, more terminology you couldn’t grasp, and an entire missing Jeongguk. 

The woman from your check in was back, bringing you your makeup back with a disapproving tut, ushering you with the heel of her palm on the small of your back toward a tiny collection of tables in the corner of the studio, a shortened version of the one you’d been in the day before, and you found it all but occupied by a new set of strangers. 

You nudged the roll of your bag into the only empty spot, turning in time with the soft hush that met the other individuals milling about your general vicinity and you squinted because oh god, what now? 

Words like alluring, sensual, lithe could all be replaced with much simpler adjectives, one in particular that struck bluntly at the forefront of your conscious, one you wished to express to the various shoot executives mulling over a concept they could easily direct in a hands on fashion without needing a briefing. You’d thought that into the swirl of your coffee and you assumed the cloud of cream that had surfaced, breaking into various puzzle pieces outward toward the rim of the cup agreed with you. 

You understood why the bolded letters of various synonyms taking up a bullet point list on two pages of an outline, a waste of space and trees, was needed because your crude, one bullet wasn’t enough to encompass the entirety of Jeongguk’s being as he made his way toward you. 

All eyes were trained on the rookie subject of the shoot but he was focused on you, a soft excuse me to the woman standing in front of you as he shouldered around her to tower over you. It was Jeongguk, your Jeongguk, but you felt some fraction of what everyone else did with him that close looking like that. 

Tight jeans ripped in strategic places hugging taut thighs, cuffs buttoned loosely on relaxed knuckles, a sheer black shirt coated in metallic specks tucked neatly at the cinch of his lithe waist and secured in an equal V to the dip of defined collarbones. His hair was like you’d left it but frayed from the heat and softening from the lack of product, parting more on one side than the other and flopping into his eyes that blinked curiously at you. 

“Hey...hello—” Jeongguk snapped his fingers, waving his hand so you felt the brush of his palm on your nose, “—did you hear me?”

The neanderthal corner of your conscious had enough sensibility to not utter what you wanted, instead bypassing his inquiry to all but shout, “Where are your other clothes?”

“They’re...in the dressing room? With my other things?” Someone yelled something you didn’t quite catch but the slide of Jeongguk’s palm down your elbow suggested he did, “Look, they sent me to you for a last minute check. Do I fit whatever concept they were talking about?”

Your subtly was forgotten, buried by the singular word that continued to expand into your thoughts, likely dilating your pupils the same way and the culprit of the saliva that pooled back by your molars. 

Graphic design didn’t mean you were above putting size seventy-two Comic Sans font onto a document to print and plaster everywhere but even Comic Sans wasn’t worthy of whatever the concept was Jeongguk embodied. Nonetheless, you let the muted scream in your throbbing head takeover. 

“You look sexy, Guk.”

He flushed at his neck first, traveling around to dip into his chest but it didn’t crack at the clench of his jaw this time, something lingering in the flash of black in his irises and his throat jumped, fingers curling over your arm and you briefly forgot where you were until someone’s stature was intentionally bumping into Jeongguk’s side, breaking his grasp on you to shove him in the opposite direction. 

“Shooting in five.” You felt like you were underwater, coherent enough only to register you can’t see lightening under the sea (the flash of a camera) and you were fairly certain you’d been pitched off the edge of Atlantis when you came to enough to realize the prior five was up and they’d created a makeshift “wall” (a piece of plywood coated in white plastic) for Jeongguk (the, very sexy, “model”) to lounge against with his hands shoved into his pockets. 

Part of Jeongguk’s shirt had come untucked from his belt, fluttering at the apex of his thigh, and it made your fingers itch to fix it until words of encouragement from the photographers elicited him to lift the arm on that side, palm smoothing down the back of his head until he found comfort in threading long digits into wavy tendrils. The sensible part of your brain moved to fire the necessary neurons to be annoyed that he’d just touched his hair again, hair you’d practiced on all weekend, burning yourself four times and the sheets of the unoccupied bedroom of the apartment once. 

But the feral cloud in your conscious won and you chose to focus on the sliver of his waist that appeared instead. 

You continued to eye it as he approached you again, sensibility pouting when you didn’t acknowledge that his sweat had smeared some of his carefully applied eyeliner or the lackluster gloss left on his lips wrapped around the ribbed edge of a water bottle, by passing all of those things in favor of his neck as it jumped and gulped. 

Jeongguk pulled off the water bottle with a labored breath and the only thing familiar in his stature was the slight slouch toward you, gentle fingers brushing past your wrist to grip the table behind you and lean into it. 

“Good?” He breathed, heat off his aura suffocating you and you wondered is the bottom of the ocean hot? too.

“Y-yeah. Yeah! Talented. Brilliant. Incredible. Amazing. Show stopping—”

He laughed and that was sexy too, shrugging into another languid gulp of water, pointed in stretching his neck out and he held the open bottle toward you until you took it. “As good as that Vine, huh?” His teeth appeared into the teasing smile that whipped away from you as he sauntered for the array of computer monitors in the corner displaying his shots. 

You fumed.

“That’s a Lady Gaga quote, dumbass.” 

Your knees, crossed albeit, were digging into the side of Jimin’s thigh and for a table to be so small in a quaint corner of a bustling rooftop restaurant, it garnered well over the decibels needed to make other patrons glance your way when a round of applause waved through the group. 

It was Jimin who had elicited the reaction with the piece of paper in his hand, firm and glossy and making that distinct flop noise when he’d untucked it from it’s folder pocket and maybe if you didn’t have to crane from your position next to him to see the image splayed out over the front, your knees wouldn’t be invading his space. He didn’t seem to care, wearing a charming smile that flashed over the top of your head to the man most affected by the various interest levels of stares gathered from around the general vicinity of the restaurant. 

There was a chunk of steak still stabbed through the throngs of Jeongguk’s discarded fork, meticulously cut by his focus that so desperately tried to evade the situation at any given opportunity. You noticed the pink in it before the pink spreading outward on his cheeks, framing the grateful smile he gave as acknowledgement before bowing his head at the audible emissions of praise.

“Quite the cover photo,” Jimin was still speaking, on the tail end of his reveal speech. He pulled the photo away to glance at it again, “And for an amateur on their first job as well. Phenomenal, truly.”

You touched Jeongguk’s thigh and it was the strength he needed to utter his thanks, soft at first and then louder as he addressed the other occupants at the table, “Thank you. It...it means a lot—” He turned and you followed his gaze to the one individual at the table who you’d yet to hear speak, seated at the head of the table opposite Jeongguk, wearing a black waistcoat and an easy smile to petal shaped lips. 

“—and thank you, Mr. Kim, for this incredible opportunity. I-I...we—” He glanced at you for permission to include you in his speech and you squeezed his thigh in encouragement, “—we wouldn’t be here without you.”

Seokjin bowed his head in a similar fashion to Jeongguk, dropped the cloth napkin scrunched in his palm to hold that hand up in solace, “You’re very welcome but please, call me Seokjin. Before you ask, my father wasn’t Mr. Kim, I just don’t want to be called that.”

Jeongguk didn’t know whether to laugh and he wasn’t the only one so Seokjin tried to amend further, “Formality is outdated. Am I right?”

Someone, a marketing tech for the specific cover shoot, murmured quietly to sate the CEO, “Correct, Seokjin.”

Other customers had gone back to their previous dinner table discussions, returning the restaurant to the dull roar of before, and your table was no exception to the seemingly mundaneness. Ice cubes against frosted glass, the click of cutlery into glass plating, an occupied silence filled with content chewing and thoughtful swallows. 

Questions to proceed the cover shoot reveal. 

“What exactly were you doing before this? I understand you’re still in university?”

Jeongguk didn’t have to lie on that question because Taehyung hadn’t lied on your resumes. Or your cheat sheets, depending on who was asking. You’d forced him to sit on the floor in the living room of the apartment and recite back any and everything contained on the email attachment Taehyung had begrudgingly sent you again, from the way your name and phone numbers were ordered on the header to the exact digits, a forward and back recitation of Taehyung’s phone number (a series you’d, unfortunately, never forget). 

“Yes, I’m going to school for, uhm...chemistry,” He winced because that also wasn’t a lie. Unfortunately. 

You kept quiet because they hadn’t asked you. On guard. On call, maybe. Eager to recite your major and list of minors like you were at a family barbecue with cousins who refused to talk to you for three years. 

An impressed murmur rounded the table in a wave. “Chemistry...What will you do with that?”

Like clockwork. “Med school, possibly. Maybe teaching. Not sure yet.”

“And your modeling experience—” Now into the flashcards once stacked in the need to review pile, “—who did you say you were signed with?”

“Ah…” His knife hit in a resounding rebound through the slab of meat he was attempting to dice into another tiny cube, “Well I wasn’t really signed, I just—”

“You weren’t signed?” 

You swallowed because it wasn’t Seokjin who’d ask the question but the smile on his lips had wilted into the furrow of his eyebrows, two elbows hitting the table as his fingers clasped in front of him. 

“The company has changed names since then,” Jeongguk jammed the cube into his cheeks but chewing didn’t let him off the hook as ambient dinner noises paused in wait of his answer, “It’s been a while…”

“Your resume says you’ve had published billboards up until last year. Were you not signed then?”

“It’s been a while since I originally signed. I had that contract for five years time and the company changed possession three times in that period. Who knows what it’s called now, you know?”

Safe. 

Your on call button beeping eagerly in the forefront of your conscious gradually flickered until it was off because your lie wouldn’t be as easy. You couldn’t produce a selfie or even a fake contact that would ring to rap superstar Kim Namjoon. Even Taehyung wasn’t that good. 

“Your manager, agent, whatever you have—” It was Jimin who asked this time, curious, “—would we know him?”

“Kim Taehyung,” Jeongguk offered up the name with little hesitation and you almost choked on a clump of parmesan tickling at your throat. The cheese convinced you there were a million Kim Taehyung’s in the world, the name not your eccentric, software engineer group project partner who’d once recited the HTML of the university’s financial aid office web page to you by memory and you managed to swallow down a gulp of your ice water, cube included, with minimal tears pooling due to your choke. “He’s our manager.”

The introduction of our caused eyes to fall upon you and blinked through the bleary tears remaining in makeup coated ducts. Some of the product smeared into your eyes then, worsening the tears of pain, but no one addressed you still. You just nodded to ensure they didn’t. 

The end of the meal meant goodbyes and goodbyes meant brief instances of small talk with each individual at the table. For you, they were limited to thank you for the meal. For Jeongguk, it was a sentence or two more, ones you were in earshot of. 

Seokjin came last, a soft hug wrapped around your shoulders that was awkward in the way that he patted at your arm. It was a firmer hand he reached for Jeongguk a firm shake in the middle of two broad statures as he stared directly through the haphazard fringe stringing into Jeongguk’s lashes. 

“Congratulations,” Another firm shake that traveled up into a pat on Jeongguk’s shoulder, “I look forward to seeing more of your work.”

You trailed Jeongguk’s pointed trek through the front door of the apartment building, taking three strides to his normal one and you tried to slow him with a tempting, “Should we go get ice cream? We should go get ice cream.”

He was slowest when in front of the elevator, jamming his middle finger into the up button. “Why should we go get ice cream?”

“To celebrate?” Your toe caught on the small gap between the ground floor and the elevator, “They seemed to really enjoy it—”

“I’d rather just go to bed,” It was harsh in delivery but his eyes softened and his chin tilted down toward you, “...if that’s okay. Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” You affirmed and as an afterthought you teased, “Beauty sleep for the superstar.”

His smile was a ghost on the dimples in his cheeks, eyes downcast so his eyelashes shadowed on his cheekbones and his head dipped away from you to stride down the hall, staying that way as he fiddled with the blue spiral on his wrist and pushed into the apartment. 

Jeongguk was with you in peeling off your shoes onto a makeshift welcome mat, a plastic takeout bag from the Thai food you’d gotten the second night, before affirming again, less harsh and almost tentative, not to ask but that you’d say no and he wouldn’t get to complete his request. 

“...it’s okay if I go to bed? If I leave you alone down here?”

“Yeah,” You reached to touch his wrist, feathering your fingers over his knuckles, “Maybe I’ll figure out the TV so you don’t have to do it for me every time.”

He tried to smile. It didn’t fool but you let him go anyway, watching mute as he ascended the stairs, sluggish and slow like his fingers fiddling at the buttons of his creased button up. 

“Jeongguk—” He looked at you now, fingers braced on the railing, shoulders slumped as he turned, “—take your makeup off.”

“Thank you, baby,” A soft murmur that echoed in the silence of the house, “Good night…”

You tried the television twice and gave up on the third time’s the charm, trekking the route Jeongguk had made up the stairs but turning the opposite direction for your room. You saved the shower for the morning, pocketing your jewelry in an empty pouch of your suitcase, swiping a baggy t-shirt off the floor that smelled like your roommate, washed your face in the facet you’d mastered in three weeks time, tucked yourself underneath cool sheets, raising your phone to your face where it was attached to a looping extension cord plugged into yet another inopportune outlet on the far side of the bed. 

A makeup tutorial that was less of a tutorial and more of a demonstration of the guru’s skill set elicited the sleep in your eyes and you’d nearly dozed off when another light peeked from your peripheral, one that startled you to lock your phone and squint. 

It was Jeongguk, body language like you’d left him but pajamas on in place of his dress clothes with a blanket sanctioned over one shoulder and dragging against the ground like his sluggish footsteps. A pillow was clutched in his latter arm, squished against his chest with his chin resting on the plush surface, forming a natural pout on the purse of his lips and the wrinkle of his nose. 

“Hey,” You didn’t question, the initial startle of your heart morphing into something fond and heavy in your ears that caused you to spread your arms, “Come on.”

Mindless shuffling was domestically mundane, tugging apart the made side of the bed, replacing the pillows with his, tucking the duvet at his waist and his blanket over his shoulders, shifting further into the warmth to let him drape a hand to your hip, contact, while you propped yourself up on the curve of your arm. 

“You okay?” You thumbed soft strands of his fringe between your thumb and index finger and when he didn’t jerk away, you went to stroking the tresses between the spaces in your digits. It was wet, shower fresh, not dry enough to curl yet. 

Jeongguk grumbled, voice muffled and raspy into his pillow that he mushed his cheek further into, “Just couldn’t sleep, is all. Your bed is comfier.”

You ignored the way his fingers fist further into your shirt at your hip. Carefully, you nodded, “You sure that’s all?”

He hummed again, a mixture of hesitation affirmation and the reaction to your nails scraping into his scalp. You repeated the motion just to hear him mewl and feel him relax, melted shoulders shifted until he was close enough to wrap an arm around the small of your back. 

“The shoot turned out really well, huh?” Jeongguk snorted, the breath fanning against your neck and you frowned, “I mean, it’s really cool. That you’re going to be on the cover. Looking like that—” 

“I guess.”

You went to scrunching his hair at the back of his head between your palm, “The other things we’ve been working on since...they’ll turn out great too. Who knows, maybe you can erase the foot modeling for something legitimate and credible.”

Jeongguk’s hair ruffled in your grasp when he adjusted his cheek on the pillow, pulling away from your chest to be eye level. 

“You know something?”

You let your hand flop out of his hair to the pillow, “What?”

“I haven’t taken a single picture since we’ve been here. I haven’t even thought about touching my camera.”

“I hate it,” He continued, blunt with his nose crinkled at the bridge, “I miss it…”

“We have a day off in a few days. Maybe we could go exploring with it—”

“—and I can’t believe I’m saying this but I miss school. I miss being at university,” Jeongguk blinked, a prolonged blink that scrunched at more parts of his face, “Okay, I don’t miss that. I...I don’t know what I miss. It’s...something. Mostly photography probably but I think it’s just…”

“...I think it’s just knowing. I miss knowing. As in having at least a sense of what I’m doing. Where I’m going. What I want to do.”

Your features softened into something grim, nodding when he glanced at you. His laugh was bitter as he held your eye contact, “In short, I hate this. I, frankly, hate that you convinced me to do this. I...I can’t wait to go home.”

“I’m sorry, Guk, I didn’t—”

“It’s not your fault,” He breathed in, holding it, eyes closing, “Please don’t apologize. It’s been like this for a while. Me not...knowing.”

“I thought you were right. Money can fix a lot of things, like paying off my loans and tuition. But paying my tuition means I’m stuck in an unspoken contract of sorts with a major I hate that’ll propel me toward a career I’m unsure of but already hate, anyway.”

“The only thing I’m sure of is my camera,” Jeongguk shrugged, eyes open and wide and starred in natural celestials and a shimmer of tears, “and I don’t even want to touch that anymore.”

“I mean I do, but I don’t...you know?” His voice broke then, a glisten falling to his cheek now as a tear finally lipped over and you cooed, rushing forward to intercept him back into your embrace. 

“What’ll make it better?” You held him with two arms around his neck, cheek pressed into the damp strands at the crown of his head. 

“Don’t know. Leaving probably. But...I’m not going to do that. It’d make me feel worse. Quitting, you know.”

“What can I do? Anything? I already made you come here…”

Jeongguk pulled away from the damp spot he’d rounded on the collar of your shirt and the base of your throat, cheeks blotchy and tearful and he scolded, “I told you not to worry about it. I’m the hot mess.”

“Yeah, but you’re my best friend,” You thumbed at his cheek, collecting the drying tears, “My hot mess.”

You didn’t expect Jeongguk’s strawberry tulip bud lips to taste like salt the first time you kissed but you cleared the culprit of the taste with your thumbs while he pressed desperate affections into the seam of your mouth, holding you tight to him at the waist. You let him because you wanted it too but took his lull for a breath to cup his face, still working at clearing the fresh wave of tears on his cheeks while you hushed, “Not now.”

“M’sorry,” He apologized this time, a messy blubber through your tender touch, “I didn’t—I didn’t want to do it like this.” 

“If I don’t get to apologize, neither do you,” You kissed his nose in lieu of his lips, “You can kiss me all the time once you figure you out.”

Jeongguk sniffled, “Be careful. That’s incentive.”

“Maybe that’s why I said it,” You kissed his eyelid in tandem with another swipe underneath it and you mirrored the action on the opposite side, “And you never answered me. What can I do?”

He smiled when he noisily advertised the snot in his nostrils this time, squeezing your hips, “Just be you. You’re the last thing I photographed.”

“You’ll always be the thing I photograph.”

You were halfway through waving a strand of his hair down the battery powered wand in your hand, an online purchase with your second intern check. It was a seasoned movement now, easier with his hair that had grown without cut since you’d been in the city. It was an advertisement shoot, a casual look that would be perched above bar codes and brand affiliates on the back page of the magazine. 

“Crouch for me,” You paired it with a light smack to his shoulder, catching attention where it had wandered to a loose strand on the baggy t-shirt draped over his stature. Jeongguk was purposeful in being awkward, bending at the waist and the knees and he dramatically sat a hand on his thigh, cocking a hip out and sticking his tongue out at you. 

“Better?”

“I can’t stand you—”

“Is it their break?” 

You managed to maneuver your surprise into the jerk of the curling wand away so it didn’t burn Jeongguk, both of you glancing toward the new presence in the room. It was a frantic looking intern from the front desk, one that came and went on an odd schedule you couldn’t quite pinpoint but he looked two seconds away from tearing his hair out at the roots anyway. When the photographer nor the set manager didn’t respond, he took it as an affirmation, forward in grabbing Jeongguk’s arm to tug and motioning you with his free appendage. 

“I guess it is now,” You exchanged a glance with Jeongguk when the intern scoffed, not letting go of the larger man before him until you were halfway down the hallway and an abrupt turn to another later. 

“You’re needed with one of the head executives.”

The cover shoot magazine was set to go in print within the next few days and urgent around the studio meant they went about airbrushing the static in Jeongguk’s curled hair a different way and were seeking approval of the talent. You assumed Jimin was about to tutt in disapproval when you couldn’t see the smudge his stocky finger was gesturing to on the life sized image plastered across the center of his desk. 

But you turned past the sign indicating his office and you almost parted your mouth to gently correct the frazzled twenty-something, help him out for something that was bound to be corrected anyway, but he paused in front of an office, that office, one with a name plate bigger than the rest and the only one displaying the company logo in tandem. 

“Seokjin requested to see you personally,” The intern knocked but didn’t look inside, just propped the door open and gestured, “In you go.”

An excuse was on the tip of your tongue and you ran into Jeongguk on the way to express it but the intern had already coaxed at Jeongguk’s larger stature and you both were shoved into a shut room before your brain could even process that I have to use the bathroom on the first floor because that’s the only soap I’m not allergic to wasn’t a viable excuse. 

“Hello,” The sheer size of Seokjin’s size seemed to swallow his broad shoulders even in the tight hug of a navy suit jacket to the definition of his shape but the enormity contrasted to the warmth in his voice, smile, and eyes as all gestured for the open chairs turned inward toward his desk. “Please, have a seat.”

He shuffled at two specific sets of papers as you tripped over Jeongguk’s ankles for the same chair, catching and narrowly avoiding a spill of an empty piece of furniture. You settled as the horror set in of what sets of papers Seokjin held, stapled leaves taken from the same blue file folders you’d been greeted with on day one. 

You were useless in noticing you’d left your ID badge in the studio, too. 

“I ran your references, out of curiosity…” Seokjin bent the papers in hand at the thumb, “Tell me about Kim Taehyung.”

“That’s our manager,” A robotic answer spoke in monotone, Jeongguk’s blank gaze on the turtle paperweight perched on the edge of Seokjin’s desk suggesting the same type of mechanical movement. 

“Your manager is a member of two seperate government watch lists for hacking low level search engines?”

Your eyes bulged and you forgot your role, “He is?” 

“I don’t know,” Seokjin smiled gently, “but he probably should be if he isn’t. He’s not very subtle about it. Between him and the conspiracy theorist…”

“Yoongi,” You breathed, “Yeah...probably.”

“You—” He shuffled deeper into his array of papers, plucking one specific piece out to slide across the desk at Jeongguk. You recognized it as a screenshot of his online portfolio, the chosen album one of fresh summer wildflowers (weeds, you’d informed him behind the scenes) from the summer prior, “—you’re very talented.”

“And you…” This time a screenshot of your commissions profile, various examples of your work scattering the black and white screen cap, “You have an eye for design. My layout team could learn a thing or two from you.”

“I checked with your university and don’t worry, not your grades. I don’t care about those numbers frankly…” He tapped on something on the top paper in his pile, “Your majors. You didn’t lie about those. Graphic design, that suits your passions, from what I can tell at least.”

You nodded. 

“But chemistry?” Seokjin blinked, “I can’t imagine that fulfills you in the slightest. You said you plan to be a doctor?”

“I don’t know,” Jeongguk answered, quick and honest and for once he didn’t slump into the answer. “You’re right. It doesn’t.”

“Can I let you in on some cheesy but true advice?”

More nodding, this time from both. 

“It’s not worth it if it doesn’t fulfill you. Certainly not something so far in left field from what you clearly love to do. I said I didn’t care about grades but…” Seokjin cocked his head, a knowing smile on his lips, “Those grades don’t match someone who's passionate about their field.”

“I’m going to have to pull the cover shoot, for obvious reasons. I’ll have to send you home as well, with the rest of your internship pay, of course.”

You rushed to deny that in the same sentence that Jeongguk did, apologetic and hot at the neck when Seokjin held up a hand. 

“You get the pay on one condition. You go home and do something with it. Something something, not just continue on with that boring chemistry degree.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I told you to call me Seokjin but I’m going to change that, too—” Seokjin stood, rounding his desk for a handshake that Jeongguk rushed to straighten and intercept, “—call me Jin when you book your first photography gig, alright? Even if it’s just your conspiracy theorist friend and his fried chicken looking poodle.”

Jeongguk laughed, loud and unabashed and you were the first person he directed his joy at, only causing your elation to grow tenfold in your heart. 

“You too, after you design the new McDonald’s logo or something. I’m getting pretty tired of those golden arches…”

You thumbed at the tassel dangling off the graduation cap flopped top down on the edge of Jeongguk’s mattress. It fit Jeongguk’s head better than yours, so you brought it over for him to borrow so that the fight in the bookstore was one less stress his graduation checklist had to suffer from. 

“Taunting me with that?” Jeongguk’s neck hinged over the side of the bed, blinking backward at you. 

You glared, breaking away from the yellow fringe to crouch in front of his face, squishing his cheeks together to plant a chaste kiss on the exaggerated pout of his lips. One of many you’d planted on him after he’d met with his advisor to change his track from chemistry to digital imaging, adding an extra summer semester onto his graduation while he watched you take your leatherbound diploma in only muted jealousy from beyond the lens of his obnoxious camera obscuring the view of a dad in a Hawaiin shirt and sandals. 

Your headshot, the original one you’d taken messily after burning your arm and testing eyeliner thickness over the same mark, was framed in his room but not hung, leaning against the wall where he’d nailed a hanger but couldn’t get the cheap balsa wood to center. You pointed to it, “Taunting me with that?” 

“No,” He reached for you, grabby hands until you stepped into his embrace, allowing him to pull you down onto his bed, “I think you look cute.”

“I think you’re a sap.”

“I think I’m allowed to be considering you’re moving next week.”

“You’re renting a space in my bed in eight weeks,” You sat up to poke his nose, “We both lose.”

Jeongguk pouted, “Hey.”

You just grinned, “Hey, what?”

“That was the best part of that internship,” He marveled, blissful as his eyes shut, “Living together.”

“Oh yeah? Not the whole introspective finding myself thing?”

“Nope—” The fullness of his teeth shined even as his eyelashes stayed glued, “—the whole getting to cuddle the secret love of my life thing.”

“It wasn’t that secret.”

“It was.”

“Hmm, okay,” You folded your arms at your chest to prop yourself up on his stomach, “Speaking of secrets. Have you checked your phone?”

“Did Yoongi add us to another group chat?” 

You snorted, “Check your phone.”

You huffed when Jeongguk used the top of your head to hold his phone, thumb flexing against your forehead as it scrolled, and you giggled when all his motions, breathing included, gradually stalled. 

“Did Taehyung figure out how to hack email addresses too?” When you didn’t respond, Jeongguk peered at you underneath his thumb, “Ha-ha, very funny.”

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I got another email from Jin.”

“Oh, that,” You grinned, “Yeah, I do know about that.”

He grumbled, thumb moving into action again as he clicked around, opening the email and enlarging the font to read. 

“Jeongguk. I’m happy to hear you’re graduating soon and in something you seem to enjoy! It just so happens that we have an opening here in our photography department and we’re seeking someone with your exact credentials. I’ve reviewed your updated profile and can’t say I’m anything less that thoroughly impressed. If you can provide me with an updated, and legitimate, resume, the spot will be yours upon graduation.”

“Thanks for not spending my money on booze,” Jeongguk added with a laugh, “Seokjin (Or Jin. Just not sir. Or Mr. Kim).” 

“Really?” You rewarded his face with a kiss to his chin, moving the affections up his cheek as he marveled, “They really want to hire me?”

“They really want to hire you. For real, this time.”

“But...but wait—” He stopped you with the heel of his palm into the center of your forehead and you huffed, “We...we just got things figured out. And I’m going to have to move closer to the company…”

You did your best to plaster indignation onto your features, “You really think you’re going to get away with leaving your stylist here?”

Jeongguk’s eyes bulged, hopeful but not following, “...what?”

“Grab my phone for me.”

He happily obliged in dipping his hand into the back pocket of your jeans, handing you the device with a smile but deeply concerned, singular, eyebrow. You huffed, fumbling at the screen of your phone until you pulled up your own email, one you’d received two weeks ago and you enlarged the font to hand to Jeongguk. 

He frowned through his intense scanning before whining, “Is this why you wouldn’t tell me anything about your job offer?”

“Yes.”

“...did he hire you to run the design department?”

“Not yet but I am working there.”

“...so we’re not getting that apartment back home?”

“Nope.”

“...are we still moving in together?”

“Absolutely.”

An extra silence and you could feel the gears churning behind his skull in the rapid thrum of his heart at your palm, “...back to the previous apartment?”

“I don’t think that’s available anymore but no. I asked for something a bit more our taste.”

“So we can buy real welcome mats this time?” Jeongguk propped himself up on his elbows, curling his stature so you were drawn closer to his face and he happily rubbed his nose to yours.

“You didn’t like our bachelor pad chic decor?”

He ignored you, “And can we build IKEA tables together? Oh, what about name our apartment, you know, like people name their cars—”

[memes-whome-are-dummy-thicc-blog]

Title: when sleep🅾️  ng

Artist: @memes-whome-are-dummy-thicc

Medium: Digital

Description: The main feature of this meme is the girl in the background, smirking bleakly at the viewer, her eyeshadow messy and cascading with glitter. The caption of this piece reads “when sleep🅾️ ng,” making use of the bubble effect over the blood type O emoji. In the top right corner exists the words “This is so sad. Can we get Melania on All Stars 4,” also implementing the bubble effect. There is a word covered up after the “Can we...” implying that the artist originally had written some other inspiring doctrine before ultimately deciding on the phrase in the final, published work. Scattered across the foreground are 3 emojis – “Cry” (top right), “Shock” (bottom left), and “da good kush” (bottom right). The entire piece is painted with a grainy-orange wash, otherwise known as being “deep fried.”

Analysis: Starting again with the girl: this woman of a human being originates from the historic vine, coming back from the club, whereupon she sits in the backseat, having seemingly done her own makeup, appearing exhausted and/or distressed. She has become a staple in modern memery. The caption, combined with the emojis, is reminiscent of “cringey” instagram posts consisting of a local meme with a caption in the format “when you___” followed by a few overused emojis, such as “💯 ,” “🔥 ,” or “🤣 .” The term “sleepong” specifically comes from a tumblr post which I am unable to locate, where the punchline is “sleepong zzz.” The O is naturally replaced with the Blood Type O emoji, following the trend of replacing letters with blood types, a common meme format of late 2016 – 2018. In the upper right corner, one may or may not recognize the phrase “This is so sad, can we get 50 likes.” However, the “50 likes” portion is crossed out, replaced instead with “get Melania on All Stars 4.” The Melania in question is the one and only Melania Trump, and All Stars 4 is in reference to the (at the time) unaired fourth spinoff season of the popular reality televisioñ competition, RuPaul’s Drag Race. The “deep fried” essence of this piece implies that it has been shared many times, with the image file being distorted slightly with every screenshot.

Interpretation: At a first glance, this meme seems purely random. But one can take the caption and emojis as a reference to popular, mainstream meme pages who post basic memes without much substance, which all follow an identical format. The emojis, more specifically, allude to instagram pages dedicated to posting movie clips that everyone has seen with a very obvious caption, followed by a series of cringey and repetitive emojis. The text in the upper left alludes to the accounts who would say something along the lines of “one like = one prayer,” another cringey meme style which has recently been made fun of by internet culture. These captions represent the old style of memism, with the new style, represented by the girl, coming up behind. She smirks because she knows the new wave of absurdist memes is taking over, here to replace the predecessors which this meme pokes fun at. This meme depicts the birth of the modern era of the youths’ humour.

Evaluation: Visionary, Profound. 3/10

[jungkookienoona]

The Meme and His Tutor

Part 13: The Time There Was A Meme War

Recommended Song: I Luv It by PSY

|All Chapters|

Summary:

Jungkook started something he could not finish and you begin to question yourself.

Genre: Fluff, comedy

Pairing: Jungkook X Reader (Y/N)

Warnings: Swearing

Word Count: 3745

Length: 13/?

Since your first lesson back after returning from Korea, you had taken Jungkook's advice to study harder. For the past few weeks your lessons focused on correcting the errors brought to light on your trip, and you were slowly gaining a better understanding of how to speak less formally.

When Jungkook rang you it just so happened that you were busy studying, a highlighter between your teeth as you answered the Skype call.

"Annyeonghaseyo Kookie." A small smile gracing your lips as you gave a wave.

A mischievous grin appeared on his lips, "Hello Noona."

There was a look in his eye that had you feeling suspicious.

"I don't like that look." You said, closing your textbook. "What are you up to?"

"Nothing."

"Do you really expect me to believe you?"

He ran a hand through his hair and you felt your heart stutter a little at how attractive he looked while doing so. No, stop. It wasn't the time for that.

"I'm not doing anything Noona."

"Okay... so what have you done?"

He bit his bottom lip in a failed attempt to stifle an amused chuckle. Why did he have to look so good? You shook your head. That look plus his amusement meant only on possible thing. You quickly opened your browser and typed in the address to his blog. There it was. The first thing to greet you on his site, a meme of you.

"Jeon Jungkook."

"Ye?"

"Prepare to die."

Jungkook started laughing, leaning back in his seat with an arm thrown across his face as you open up that one folder on your desktop. You were prepared for this day. Since spotting his folder full of memes on your first day in Korea, you had been plotting your revenge. And when you arrived safely at home you put your plan into action, screenshotting Skype and downloading pictures sent over KaKao. And with each new image, you created a new meme for your arsenal. It was time to release your creations onto the world.

Having recovered from his little laughing fit, Jungkook was watching you intently from the other side of the screen.

"Noona..."

"Yes, Kookie?" You said, creating a new Tumblr post and selecting your meme. It was a tough choice.

"What are you doing?"

You recycled his earlier words. "Nothing." You added a few hashtags and pressed post with a smile.

You heard Jungkook's phone vibrate. He picked it up and quickly checked it with a shocked gasp.

"Noona! That's so mean! I look ugly in that."

"I looked ugly in your one!... Also, do you get notifications every time I post? How long have you been doing that?"

"Since I followed you." You were going to ask why when you noticed a new notification had appeared. Clicking on it, you were not surprised to see Chubs’ ship blog reblogging the posts. You had an audience already.

"Noonaa~" Jungkook called and you refreshed the page.

Sitting at the top of your dash was your face, eyes wide and mouth open as if prepared to sneeze. Beneath it was the caption: 'when Jungkook Skypes you'. He'd even watermarked it.

"You little shit!"

You went into your folder again as he cackled in the background. It didn't take long to find one you wanted to use. It was the screenshot you had taken from when he was shirtless (the one that was still your desktop background) but with "Yokhareulharyeoko fuck boi cheoreom (Tries to act like a fuck boi)" at the top and "Hajiman geu-i museowo yeosang aidol. (But is afraid of female idols.)"

Jungkook was wiping tears out of his eyes when his phone went off. He paused and narrowed his eyes at you.

"Yah! What's a fuck...boi?" He glanced back at his phone, "And I'm not afraid of female idols!"

You lost it, covering your face with your hands as Jungkook mulled in his own confusion.

Between laughs, you managed to explain that a fuck boi was similar to being an international playboy, but meant acting even more like a dickhead.

"I'm not a fuck boi." He pouted.

"I don't know, going on Skype shirtless seems pretty fuck boi type behaviour to me." You grinned evilly.

"I put on a robe for you!" He said then winced at the sound of his voice. "I have to be quiet. Hoseok went to bed early."

"And how can you say you're not scared of female idols? You move away from them and hide behind the members."

"I'm being polite and respectful."

"There are compilation videos of you avoiding them. You backed away from a few with a terrified expression."

"... I was scared of accidentally starting career damaging rumours."

"Yeah right."

"If I was scared of women I wouldn't be friends with you." He gestured across the screen to you.

"I'm not an idol. It's different."

You got another notification about Chubs' ship blog reblogging from you but this time with a caption. 'HOLY SHIT! HE LET HER SEE HIM SHIRTLESS! AND SHE HAS BLESSED US BY SHARING IT WITH US!'

"What is it?" He asked.

"Check the ship blog." While he was doing that you scrolled through your folder, deciding what to post next.

"I don't see what the big deal is about me not wearing a top."

You sighed and minimised the folder to look at him. "Why do you have to wear swim shirts when you do things involving swimming on camera?"

"Because we don't want ARMY dying at the sight of our abs?"

"Exactly- wait, no!"

"Yep."

"It's because BigHit makes more money by teasing us with little glimpses of skin."

"And because in Korea we have to swim clothed."

There was another notification waiting for you on your Tumblr.

"Are you not going to look, Noona?" He was sitting smugly and you wished you were there in Korea to push him off his chair. "It's a good one. One of my best!”

It was you in your panda onesie, face bright red. 'Says she isn't adorable but is adorable af.'

"Next time I'm in Korea you're going to die."

You decided your next attack would include more than one meme. You found the ones you were looking for and started uploading them. Meanwhile, Jungkook was staring intently at his screen. A pair of circle glasses had found their way onto the bridge of his nose and you had to tear your eyes away from the Skype window. They were your weakness.

You heard his phone go off and sat back while he took a moment to look at them.

"Yah! Noona! Why so many?!"

"Don't call me cute!"

"...At least you Korean is improving."

You smirked and remembered the ones you had selected, one of him being shook, another of him spinning in his chair out of boredom and a selca of him with a bad hair day.

"I've been practising."

"Good." It was his turn to smirk when you saw he had uploaded half a dozen pictures of you including ones he'd taken on your trip to Korea.

"Is...Is that me sleeping?" You enlarged one particular photo you'd never seen before. It looked like it was taken using the front-facing camera and you could just make out the leather of Jungkook's jacket as you leant against his shoulder.

"It was after you landed. Remember?"

"Oh yeah... You took a picture of me sleeping?"

You swore you saw a hint of pink get added to his cheeks as he scratched the back of his neck with a sheepish smile.

"I couldn't help myself. Noona looked so peaceful and childlike."

"I'm just glad it's dark. You can't see a lot of my face."

"I didn't want to use flash and wake you."

"How considerate," you grumbled, going back to looking at the other images. "I need to stop wearing my panda onesie. All the worst pictures are of me in it."

"Noooo~ Noona should wear it more. Noona looks best in her onesie. See."

Your Skype chat was then filled with screenshots of you in the onesie as well as some pictures that were sneakily taken on the movie night.

"How did you take those without me noticing?" You said, eyeing one particular picture. It looked like a failed attempt at taking a photo of you from the side as all he managed to capture was your linked hands in his lap.

He tapped the side of his head with a smirk, "That's a secret."

"Aish. You're an impossible child."

He frowned, "I am not a child!"

"You act like one. I have proof."

You uploaded a dozen more screenshots to Tumblr all with various pieces of text of the images. There was a candid one of him you snuck at the restaurant after going to the market. He was cradling his phone in his hands, eyes bright as he stared down at his new phone case it in adoration. A screenshot of him pressing a kiss to Honey's head was followed by one of him with a blanket draped over his head.

"See, a child."

His frown deepened.

"Does Noona only see me as a child even after all my goodnight selcas?"

By some miracle, you didn't blush as he reminded you of the selcas he sent you when he was preparing for bed every night.

"T-t-that has nothing to do with your child like behaviour."

"But I have muscle." Jungkook pushed up his shirt sleeve to give you a better view of his flexed bicep. "Does this look like a child to you?"

"Stop!"

"Or this?" You noticed his hand grip the hem of his t-shirt and in a burst of panic, you slammed the laptop shut.

You got a message over Kakao.

'Or this'

It was followed by the image that you wanted to avoid. His shirt was pulled up revealing his abs and he had the cockiest smirk you had ever seen.

'By the way, you were very rude just now. You're going to pay for that.'

Your eyes went wide as you opened up Tumblr on your phone to see even more memes. This was meant to be your revenge. Why the hell were you taking turns?

Jungkook was waiting for you on Skype, his shirt back in place. You coughed to get his attention.

"Has Noona recovered?" He teased.

You scowled at him, "You're the biggest little shit. I'm supposed to be getting back at you and it turns into a competition."

"Which I won."

"You think you won?"

"I always win."

"Prepare to lose then."

There was a video file from back near the beginning of Jungkook's lessons when his English was still broken and he frequently switched between the two languages. You had recorded it to see if you could find a way to improve your teaching strategy. With a merciless grin, you uploaded a small segment of it to Tumblr.

He tripped over his words and stuttered often. It was adorable and was sure to make him angry. It always embarrassed him when you reminded him of how he started off. And sure enough, not a minute later, Jungkook had his head buried in his hands.

"Noona~ delete it!"

"Not until you admit I won and upload a post saying you concede."

You were lying. He looked thoughtful for a moment then nodded.

"Fine Noona. You win."

And then he was clicking and typing away. You waited patiently for the post to appear on your dash. When it did you were a little confused. It was a video with Honey as the thumbnail and the caption: 'Noona wins (this was filmed before I changed her name)'

You pressed play and was met by the familiar intro to Cypher Part 4. Jungkook was nowhere to be seen as the camera pointed at the wall of his bedroom you had grown accustomed to seeing.

All of a sudden, Jungkook's head popped up over the edge of the desk in a pair of oversized sunglasses. He mouthed the words 'ireum, ireum!' And then ducked back down only for Honey to pop up in a matching pair of glasses in time to 'Sorry bae.'

The video continued like that until the end of Namjoon's verse where the video also ended. You were bent over, clutching your stomach in a fit of laughter, temporarily forgetting that you were still in a Skype call with Jungkook.

"Oh god. Why is he like this?" You said when you finally regained composure, wiping a tear from your eye.

"It's a talent of mine." He said, surprising you enough to yelp. "Did you like it?"

You pressed a hand to your chest, willing your heart to stop hammering. "You're the biggest meme possibly on earth."

He gave you a smile and then he was clicking and typing again. It didn't take long for a new post to appear. Another video. It was a video of him singing along to Very Very Very by IOI but when it got to a certain point he would chug a little Thomas the Tank engine along. It was captioned: 'I'll be a meme more because I like Noona's laugh.'

A giggle slipped out while you watched him push along the little train. Where he got it from you didn't know but it didn't matter.

"That was adorable, Kookie!"

He ducked his head but you could see he was smiling proudly for making you laugh.

"Losing was worth it."

You decided to check on the ship blog to see how Chubs was handling the memeage. Apparently, not very well. She had moved on to flat out saying she was dying. Jungkook noticed you had gone quiet and asked you what you were doing.

"Are you plotting something? Because I have no other videos to post."

"I'm checking in on Chubs. She's said she's dead five times now."

"Ask her whose memes killed her!"

"Jungkook!"

"Judging by the tags on each meme post she reblogged, it was both of us... tell her not to die. I need someone to document our history."

This time your cheeks did heat up.

"I'll get right on that."

You heard a door open and Jin came into view, peering over Jungkook's shoulder.

"Igeos-eun jeolm-eun sarang-i doen geos? Naneun neohui dul-ege silmanghaessda. (Is this a young love thing? I'm disappointed in the both of you.)"

There was that word again. Why did it keep popping up so much recently? And why is it always Jungkook? You noticed Jungkook glance at you before apologising and giving his attention to Jin.

"Do you need something?"

"Oneul sueob-e chekeu-inhaneun geosman-eulo, Kookie. (Just checking in on today's lesson, Kookie.)" Jin caught your attention with a wave. "Igeos-eun yeong-eo sueobcheoreom boiji anh-eoyo, Y/N. (This doesn't look like an English lesson Y/N.)"

You sent your message to Chubs and gave Jin a sheepish smile. "Urin swigoiss-eo? (We're taking a break?)"

"... Seoloui mim-eul mandeuneunga? (By… making memes of each other?)"

"Geuneun geugeos-eul sijaghaessda. Naneun modu sueob-eul gajil junbigadoeeo iss-eossjiman, geuneun yaggan-ui ttong-idoegiro gyeolsimhaessda! (He started it. I was all prepared to have a lesson but then he decided to be a little shit!)"

"Noona!"

"If I'm going down I'm taking you with me!"

Jin braced himself on the back of Jungkook's chair as he broke into laughter.

Jungkook pouted, "But I didn't do anything!"

"You know what you did!" You nodded in Jin's direction, hoping that despite being on Skype Jungkook caught on to not wanting to say anything in front of Jin.

"Neo dul-eun neomu isanghae. (You two are so strange.)"

Chubs finally responded to your message about not dying.

'How can I not die when you two act like you were made for each other.'

'Don't say stuff like that. I'm just Y/N-chingu.'

'Yeah right. You two are totally not just friends. I see the way you look at each other.' Was her immediate response.

You let out a huff and typed out a reply. 'Even if I did feel something more for him (which I don't!) he doesn't like me like that. Nothing is ever going to happen.'

'Keep lying to yourself.'

"Noona~ don't get distracted. You're meant to be spending time with me!" Jungkook whined, drawing your attention back to him. You noticed Jin rolling his eyes.

You got another message from Chubs, 'You seriously need to sit down and have a think about how you actually feel about him. It's not good to be in denial for so long.'

"Noona~!"

"Sorry Kookie, Chubs was over reacting to our little meme war."

"Chubs-i nuguya? (Who's Chubs?)" Jin asked at the same time Jungkook wondered what she was saying.

"Geunyeoneun nae chingu ya. (She's my friend.)" You told Jin before looking at Jungkook, "Nothing important."

"Why won't you tell me?"

"I told you it's nothing."

"Noona~"

Jin smacked his shoulder, "Neoneun Y/N-i anj-aseo agicheoreom uneun geos-eul deudgo sip-eo handago saeng-gaghanayo? (Do you think Y/N wants to sit and listen to you whine like a baby?)"

"Geunyeoneun geugeos-eul saranghanda. (She loves it.)" He said with a smug smile.

For some reason, you couldn't bring yourself to argue with him about it. Jin chuckled to himself and ruffled Jungkook's hair, "Jeulgeoun aireul gaj-ja! Neomu heungbunhaji mala. Geuneunleohji anh-eumyeon oneul bam jamdeulji anh-eul geos-ida. (Have fun kids! Don't get too excited. Otherwise he won't sleep tonight.)"

"Hyung!"

You waved goodbye to Jin and watched Jungkook shake his messy hair back into place. You couldn't help what you said next.

"Messy hair suits you."

He paused at that looking slightly shocked.

"R-r-really?"

"Ye."

His hands immediately shot up into his hair, messing it up again.

"Like this Noona?"

You pursed your lips in thought, "Separate your fringe... Ye, like that."

He grabbed his phone and took a picture. Your phone buzzed. He sent the selca to you over Kakao.

Your heart skipped a beat. What on earth was wrong with you? This was only Jungkook. Jungkook, your tutor and tutee. Jungkook, the Golden Maknae of BTS. Jungkook who saw you as Y/N-chingu and nothing more.

You cleared your throat, "It really suits you Kookie."

"Taehyung tells me he likes my hair different but if Noona likes it messy, I like it messy too." He smiled and the sight of his dimple made your tummy do a little flip.

"You can't like something just because I do. What do you prefer?"

"Messy."

"Honestly?" You asked, ignoring the flashing light on your phone alerting you of Tumblr notifications.

"Honest. I don't like the product they put in it. It feels icky."

"Icky? You're such a child." You laughed.

"Yah! What do I have to do to make you see me as a man?!" There was a hint of annoyance in his voice.

"Why does it matter?"

He hesitated for a moment, "I don't want Noona to treat me like a child. To see me as a child. I'm an adult."

You started to giggle which only riled him up further. "I am the strongest member and only an inch shorter than Namjoon-hyung!"

"That doesn't necessarily make you a man. You still act like a child." You were dragging it out, seeing how far you could push him. And watching him grow hot and bothered was an extra.

"Was I not a man to you when you visited? I drove you around Seoul and bought you things. I treated Noona like a princess!"

"Yeah... you did. So it seems you can only act like an adult when I'm there in person."

Your phone screen lit up with yet another Tumblr notification. You decided to check it.

"Next time you visit I'll show you how much of a man I can be. I'll treat Noona like a queen."

The next time you visited...You had yet to tell Jungkook that even after picking up a few more hours at work it didn't look like you were going to be able to afford to visit after exam season like you had discussed. He'd only insist on paying if you told him and you couldn't have that. Not again.

"Yeah. Next time."

"You're going to love it, I have so much planned!"

You felt your heart sink with guilt. Maybe you could get a second job... you scrolled through the notes you had received on the mobile app. The responses were overwhelming. Jungkook's video had already hit a thousand notes in just under an hour. The ship blog was thriving with activity; a new post appearing every time you refreshed. You were suddenly aware of all the attention on the two of you.

"Noona?" You heard Jungkook call but you were busy reading one of Chubs's responses to a very annoyed anon yelling at her to 'spill the details on the couple'. "Noona!"

"Yes, Kookie?"

"When are your exams over?"

You bit your lip thinking about it.

"My last one is in three weeks time."

"Okay, I'll-"

Before he could finish what he was saying Jin came back into the room.

"Neuj-eoss eo. Neoneun jaleo gaya hae. (It's late. You should go to bed.)"

"Hyung~"

You giggled as he pouted and crossed his arms.

"Neoneun naeil malhal su iss-eoyo. Jam jal sigan-iya. (You can talk tomorrow. Time to sleep.)"

Jungkook nodded, "Okay, I'll say goodnight."

You said goodnight to Jin who left the two of you alone.

"Go to sleep, Kookie."

"I'm not tired."

"It doesn't matter. If you stay up you will be tomorrow."

"Fine... Goodnight Noona... I really had fun today. Your laugh is beautiful."

A warmth burned your cheeks, "Your hair makes you look handsome."

"Don't you mean more handsome?" He teased, wiggling his eyebrows.

"Go to bed!"

"Goodnight Noona! Sweet dreams, think of me."

"It's still the afternoon here. Sweet dreams Kookie."

He smiled, then an idea seemed to have popped into his head as the smile gained a hint of mischief. You wondered what on earth it could be until your thoughts were interrupted by him imitating Jin's signature flying kiss. You sat there, a little stunned not knowing what to do.

Jungkook was quick to tell you, "You're meant to catch it!"

"Oh, uh, try it again."

He blew you another and you reached out to grasp the kiss then clutched your hands to your chest as if holding something precious.

He grinned. "Have a good day and think of me tonight."

"Goodnight BunBun."

He grinned and gave a little wave then hung up.

What the heck just happened?

A/N: Co-written with @tragicshadows . So Y/N is finally beginning to question herself thanks to Chubs and the constant appearance of the L-word. And Kookie seems to be trying his best to make Y/N see him as a man, I wonder why that is? As always we would love to hear from you guys so feel free to message either one of us.

This work of fiction is copyright © JungkookieNoona and protected under UK and international law. All rights reserved. Any unauthorised broadcasting, copying or reposting will constitute an infringement of copyright.

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Remembering Advice Animals, one of the internet's first viral memes

It’s Viral Market Crash week on Mashable. Join us as we take stock of the viral economy and investigate how the internet morphed from a fun free-for-all to a bleak hellscape we just can’t quit.

Today's internet is an endless buffet of memes. Bountiful GIFs, viral videos, and an innumerable amount of tweets are bestowed upon us on a daily basis. But before that wide and glorious selection was available to us, there was really only one entree on the table: Advice Animals.

Remember Advice Animals? Those early internet memes like Scumbag Steve and the Overly Attached Girlfriend, that consisted of a picture and two lines of text delivering a rudimentary joke. In 2006, these guys started spreading snarky jokes, embarrassing stories, and musings. They positively dominated sites like Reddit, Tumblr, and 4Chan in the late aughts. 

SEE ALSO: The Origins of the Word 'Meme'

Now, however, Advice Animals have largely fallen out of favor. It's not really surprising, given the short shelf life of a meme in the wild world of the internet these days. What's more shocking is how long Advice Animals lasted — and how they met their demise. 

A brief history of Advice Animal memes

Advice Animals are a category of memes originally derived from the Advice Dog meme — hence the name, though they aren't just limited to animals.

The Advice Dog meme first appeared in 2006, according to Know Your Meme, an online database dedicated to cataloguing all internet phenomena. Advice Dog's construction is simple: a goofy dog's face was placed in the center of a bright rainbow pinwheel, and (typically) terrible advice was superimposed on the top and bottom of the image. The use of the image macro format  — a general term for a captioned image — made the meme fairly easy to replicate and expand on.

Soon after Advice Dog's popularity grew, so did its spin-offs, dubbed Advice Animals.

Some of the most popular Advice Animals: Business Cat, a cat sporting a tie and offering advice fit for feline co-workers; Socially Awkward Penguin, a penguin lacking in self esteem and social graces; Scumbag Steve, a youth known for his sideways cap and flair for getting into precarious situations; and Bad Luck Brian, a braces-clad teen wearing a vest who suffers from perpetual bad luck. 

(Know Your Meme has an extensive Periodic Table of Advice Animals if you want to dive deep). 

In 2009, Memegenerator.net became one of the first websites to allow users to create memes with their own desired text, according to Know Your Meme, with copycat sites like Memebase and Quickmeme following. 

By 2010, Reddit had become a hotspot for sharing Advice Animal memes with the addition of the r/AdviceAnimals subreddit. In 2014, the subreddit had 4.2 million subscribers and was featured prominently on Reddit’s front page, according to the Daily Dot. 

And then ... people slowly lost interest.

Did Reddit kill Advice Animals?

On May 7, 2014, the r/AdviceAnimals subreddit was removed from the front page. The platform issued a statement explaining that its old defaults were determined by popularity and that the company wanted to shake things up a bit with some new subs. 

Amanda Brennan, a Know Your Meme alumna and current Tumblr employee who has been dubbed the "librarian of the internet," told Mashable that Advice Animals' removal from Reddit's front page could have definitely contributed to a decline in the subreddit's reach and the memes' appeal.

"Having something removed from the Reddit front page, you lose that audience that you would get from someone who is logging into Reddit, or who may just come casually," Brennan explained. 

Instead, people would have to intentionally seek out the group in order to see it. 

The subreddit brought in 83.7 million page views and 8.3 million uniques one month prior to its removal from the front page. The following year those numbers went down to 29.8 million page views and 3.5 million uniques, according to a 2014 report from Kernel.

Google Trends also point to a decline in "advice animals" searches after May 2014, when r/AdviceAnimals was removed as a default subreddit.

There are a handful of things that could have encouraged Reddit to remove the Advice Animals sub from its front page.  

The Quickmeme Scandal

In 2013, Advice Animals faced one of its biggest scandals — the infiltration of Quickmeme.

Quickmeme, a popular meme-generating site, was launched by brothers Wayne and Stephen Miltz in 2010, generating about $1.6 million a month, according to the Daily Dot. Quickmeme links were frequently submitted to r/AdviceAnimals, though other generator sites like memegenerator.net were submitted somewhat regularly.

By June 2011 r/AdviceAnimals began looking for a new moderator to help run the growing subreddit, and Redditor gtw08 was voted into the position. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until 2012, when fellow r/AdviceAnimals moderator ManWithoutModem started to notice that gtw08 was deleting links from Livememe. 

Livememe, which debuted in 2012, was one of Quickmeme's largest competitors due to its ability to support GIFs. It struck ManWithoutModem as odd that only Quickmemes were getting upvoted while Livememe's were being deleted. 

ManWithoutModem's concerns were dismissed by the other mods, but after talking to suspicious members of the subreddit in a private chat they decided to go some digging. In 2013, it was discovered that gtw08 was actually Quickmeme owner Wayne Miltz, clearly gaming the Reddit system. The Miltz brothers and Quickmeme ended up being placed on a site-wide ban.

Brennan believes that the perceived manipulation of the Reddit subculture could have created a sense of distance.

"Seeing someone try to manipulate it [the subreddit community] and being called out for manipulating it gives that hive mind a, 'Oh, I don't want to get involved with someone that's trying to manipulate our culture for their own personal gain,'" Brennan said.

Advice Animals saw an influx of bigoted content

Like many internet communities, Advice Animals fell victim to racist and bigoted comments and memes.

According to a recent  r/TheoryOfReddit thread dissecting why Advice Animals have become less popular, racism was cited as a big contributing factor.

"Years ago around when the Racist Unpopular Opinion Puffin was starting to take over the sub and they were starting to build a certain reputation, Reddit expanded the default subs from 25 to 50 and dropped AA as a default," wrote u/diiejso. "It's possible that at this point new users weren't automatically seeing the sub and it started a gradual decline then."

Racist Advice Animal memes are still found on the subreddit, though the community now has strict rules against using Advice Animals (specifically the Unpopular Opinion Puffin) to make bigoted statements or remarks. The new rules were instated by its moderators July 14, 2015 and have been pinned to the top of r/AdviceAnimals for newcomers and old subscribers to see. 

"We're here to have a laugh; hate speech, bigotry, and personal attacks are not allowed," state r/AdviceAnimals' rules in bold. 

But with millions of subscribers it's not easy for unpaid mods to catch every crude meme or remark.

Reddit has had a longstanding struggle dealing with hate speech and controversial communities. So, it's not a surprise that a subreddit as popular as r/AdviceAnimals got tangled up with the bad side of Reddit.

Brennan explained that often times people will use use popular joke structures (like those of the Advice Animals) and language online to make racist statements to see if others agree with their ideology.

"As Advice Animals get more mainstream, more people are shown that structure of language and it's like, 'Oh people are joking about this stuff, maybe let me just test the waters and see if my ideology lands with people and then I can find my racist friends,'" Brennan said. 

This can create a kind of snowball effect, gathering more and more people through the use of mainstream language and mainstream attention, according to Brennan. 

We can't blame it all on Reddit 

Now in 2018, the still active Advice Animals subreddit has risen to 5 million subscribers, so it seems strange and a little bizarre to hold Reddit solely accountable for the decline of Advice Animal memes.   

Though, even with such a high number of subscribers the interest in Advice Animals just isn't there like it once was. Memes evolve on a daily basis, reaction GIFs became a form of communication, and Advice Animals became tired, and almost juvenile.

Now, memes tend to avoid the goofiness of their predecessors. Instead they're digestible bites of complex and surreal content, think Change My Mind meme, or the Gym Kardashian memes. They're in conversation with pop culture, current events, and nuanced human emotions in ways Advice Animals never were. The crude and sophomoric language of Advice Animals just can't compete with the offbeat and irreverent memes of today. 

"It is full of low effort content that just isn't enjoyable," said namer98, in a r/TheoryOfReddit thread, a year ago. 

Advice Animal memes are played out and unoriginal: the pumpkin spice latte of memes.

Brennan offers an explanation for the subreddit's continued userbase: "I think that it still has subscribers out of nostalgia, people who are maybe a little older, who really participated in the 'memey-ness' of it [the subreddit] in its heyday and don't want to unsubscribe because they still find them funny."

The likelihood of Advice Animals seeing a full resurgence is slim, according to Brennan, in large part because the technology we use to view and absorb memes has changed drastically.

"If you think back to 2012 or 2011 and the way that we spoke online and the power our phones had, it was easier to download a photo than it was to download a GIF," Brennan explained. "And now WiFi is everywhere. Our phones are faster, we can make more videos with our phones. Cameras are getting better."

Still, there's a little bit of Advice Animals to be found in all present day memes, says Brennan: "There's always iterations of Advice Animals that you can find. Like, you can find some evolved version of it [Advice Animals] no matter where you look in meme culture, because all the archetypes are there. It's all about fleshing out what you understand about these ideas of people through whatever the structure of the language is."

As far as the future of memes goes, it's unclear. But Brennan says that she knows one thing to be true: people will always use memes and their language to connect to others, in addition to connecting with themselves.

WATCH: Drake's 'In My Feelings' challenge has gotten completely out of hand

[gta-5-cheats]

From Salt Bae to Distracted Boyfriend, 10 Memes We Loved in 2017

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From Salt Bae to Distracted Boyfriend, 10 Memes We Loved in 2017

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Looking back, 2017 has been a strange sort of year – we were all so convinced that the world had hit rock bottom in 2016 that few of us ever considered that this year could get even worse. At this point, we’re not even going to make any guesses about next year. At least 2017 saw some really cool memes, and here were some of our favourites from the year in no particular order.

Needless to say, this isn’t a thoroughly scientific list, and it’s not exactly completely exhaustive either. These are just some of the highlights from the year that took over social media and were used in creative and interesting ways, practically taking over sites like Twitter and Reddit.

1. Salt Bae We know what you’re going to say. No way this happened only in 2017, right? Well, yeah, it did. Salt Bae (Turkish chef Nusret Gökçe) first became famous after salting meat in January this year, and he blew up right away.

The hype around Salt Bae has definitely died down by now, but he had a good run, practically taking over our social media at the start of the year.

2. Roll safe Another meme that feels like it’s a lot older than it really is, Roll Safe is a meme that’s used to give “useful” advice, such as: “You can’t be broke if you don’t check your bank account”.

  Your dreams can’t be destroyed if you don’t have any pic.twitter.com/HuTc7oHaJa

— EL LOCO (@SbastienLiegeon) February 3, 2017

  The meme grew big early in the year, but you still see it on social media quite a bit even now. The humour is very tongue in cheek and self-deprecatory, which is always welcome on the Internet, though again, this one feels like it’s finally slowing down.

3. Zoom in One of our favorite memes from early this year, the idea is simple – you hide text around an image, and tell the viewer to zoom in on one part of it. There, you give instructions for the next step, and so on, until you reach the end. It started with a picture of a dog, with instructions taking you from the nose, to the bottom left corner, to the hidden text, “you are beautiful” on the top right.

Open image to see the hidden text

  Doing this turned us from consumers to collaborators, participating in the meme, and it’s not hard to see why it became quickly popular. Soon after, a lot of variants of the tweet were there on the internet, and it was definitely fun while it lasted.

4. Distracted boyfriend Possibly the meme of the year, distracted boyfriend features a man walking on the street holding a woman’s hand, turning his head to look at a second woman walking by, while his partner looks at him disapprovingly. The source is a stock image, and it was used with captions convey a number of different messages. Creative people even photoshopped in different characters to show their messages, rather than relying on captions. It was huge and even now, you’ll see people using the meme.

It turns out that there’s a whole series of images from the same photographer that give a full backstory to the seemingly random image, and this made it even more interesting. What’s more, with the number of variants available, people were quickly creating multiple meme formats based around the original, keeping it going for much longer than you would have imagined.

5. This is just to say Memes based around William Carlos Williams’ poem ‘This is just to say’ have actually been around for a really long time. Something about the structure of the poem, the fact that it’s so obviously a poem without having to worry about rhymes, makes it a tempting inspiration. With Twitter raising doubling the character limit this year, it opened up a fresh wave of funny memes based around the famous poem.

  this is just to say

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i have given the clues that were in the snowman

which u could probably have used to save her

forgive me mister police

— jomny sun (@jonnysun) October 21, 2017

  There have been some incredibly clever takes on the poem since then, rearranging the words or replacing them to make different points in a humorous fashion.

6. I watch Rick and Morty There are few shows which have ignited the Internet like Rick and Morty, completely disproportionate to the viewership. On social media, you’d imagine that it was the most watched show out there, so it’s no surprise that there are a tonne of memes around it. The show also has a famously toxic audience, so many of the best ones make fun of that fact.

You’ll find any number of memes out there making fun of the fact that angry defenders trot out some variant of “you have to have a high IQ to appreciate Rick and Morty��, and the meme was everywhere after the latest season aired, although things have cooled down a little now.

7. Pennywise from It The reboot of Stephen King’s It did a lot better than many of us were expecting, and the memes had to follow. There are a few different ones around the movie’s villain, Pennywise the demonic clown, and they’re all still floating around.

The most popular ones seem to be related to the sewer scene, where Pennywise offers something ridiculous and then people climb in to the sewer, though Pennywise dancing, and Pennywise looking into the camera with a caption are also popular.

8. Porgs The latest Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, released this month, but ahead of the release, its trailer included a tiny clip of a creature called a Porg. Some people loved them – Porg toys are big sellers in stores – and others hated them more than they hated Ewoks from Return of the Jedi. Either way, the Porgs were taking over the Internet this fall.

The screaming Porg in particular really caught on, as it works well with other memes – the best example being its crossover with Distracted Boyfriend. With Star Wars out now, it’s going to take a while to die down, we’d guess.

9. The floor is… The floor is lava is a game most people would remember from their childhood. This meme takes that as a starting point and then changes lava for anything that is disagreeable. It’s pretty simple and straightforward, but also effective. Then however, an important change happened – photoshop in a caption or face and then the floor can become something you want the person/ company pictured to do, that they refuse to do – something relatable like the floor is sleep, for example.

The format lends itself to easy jokes about topics such as companies like Valve not releasing Half Life 3, political ones such as US lawmakers being against net neutrality, and a whole host of dumb jokes in between too. It’s a great format, and as of now, doesn’t look like it’s dying anytime soon.

10. Expanding Brain The expanding brain also picked up earlier this year. It has a series of images, showing a brain getting bigger and bigger, while text on the left shows the different things that this enlightened mind corresponds to.

The joke is that while the first few panels usually appear to move forward, the last one is an over the top usage which is clearly meant to be satire. The result is a meme that can be hilarious, if done right, but one that goes poorly at least half the time. It turns out that you actually need an expanded brain for this one – perhaps it’s best left to Rick and Morty fans to use?

These were our favourite memes of the year – what about yours? Tell us via the comments.

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Hey r/Entrepreneur,After reading u/voscility’s post, I figured that I would try and add some value to this sub. I actually helped a buddy out with all this information yesterday, and I thought that some of you guys could definitely benefit from it.I’m not going to link to my social media accounts unless you guys would like me too and I have no affiliation with any of these apps. These are the ways I figured out how to do everything from growing the account from 0 to 165k. I post quite a bit of memes, gifs/videos with text above them, and create a lot of graphic design images. I will try and go as in depth as possible! Feel free to ask any questions or clarify anything I put that doesn’t make sense. If you have a better way of doing something, comment it!My methods are what I use to create mainly memes and viral-type content, but you can use them to create content for whatever type of account you are running, doesn’t have to be memes because I know memes are not appropriate for many types of businesses.My #1 RecommendationGET YOURSELF AN IPHONE 7 PLUS WITH AT LEAST 128GB OF MEMORY. I can’t really stress this enough. It could just be my preference, but I have seen friends and coworkers create content on their iPhone 5s and then when I look at it on my phone, it is grainy and blurry. Not to mention it is much slower creating graphics on an older phone. My iPhone is a literal substitute for my computer and for an iPad. I pay like $45/month through apple for it and I think that if you’re serious about social media, you should think about investing in one yourself. I’ve never been an Android guy, so if you use an Android and it works for you, great. But I still say iPhones are king for social media.My iPhone Apps (Not sure if they’re available on Android)#1 - Canva (Both Desktop and Mobile) App Store LinkCanva is the holy grail of graphic design. With it, I have created nearly every single meme, website graphic, header images, blog images, email templates, you name it. It is the absolute easiest and straightforward tool I have used. The only thing I don’t like about Canva is the lack of ability to outline text or add any shadows, but that’s alright, I highly recommend it.#2- InstaSizeWhat I Use it For: I use InstaSize mainly to add an image to a square, white background to leave space above for text. This is pretty much the standard meme format these days. You can add text with InstaSize, but Canva IMO has a wider selection of higher quality fonts and freedom for styling fonts.#3 - SquareFitWhat I Use it For: I use SquareFit for creating videos with text above them. If you have a video file on your phone, you can upload it to SquareFit, center it, add text to it, watermark it, add shapes, colored backgrounds, or their stamps (which I’ve never used). I think that you can only work with videos up to 1 minute long, but since that’s the limit on a single post in Instagram, I’ve never had a problem with it.#4 - GifShareWhat I use GifShare For: I use GifShare to turn gifs into videos in pretty much the same way I use InstaSize and Canva. If you have a gif and want to post it to Instagram, it needs to be a video. Upload the gif to the app, and leave some space above to add text. I don’t recommend adding text inside GifShare, because when you export it, it usually saves off-centered and gets messed up in the process. Save the now video to your phone, then open up SquareFit to add your text and watermark, then post to IG.#5 - RepostWhat I Use Repost For: I use Repost to literally repost videos from other IG posts. Depending on what the video is, or if I am exchanging a post with an account, I may or may not leave the little watermark with the OP’s username on it. Choose either light or dark, whichever looks better on that specific video. To repost without the OP’s watermark, you have to pay for the app, which I recommend doing if you’re constantly finding yourself needing the app and you can repost unlimited videos. If you don’t have explicit permission to repost another accounts video, always use their watermark. Really no account will get mad if you repost their video and they’re credited in both the caption and on the actual video.If you have a video that somebody Direct Messaged you on IG, you can save it to your phone directly from the DMs. Just press and hold down on the video (while it’s still small and the text box is visible, not when it’s full screen and the video is playing or it won’t work) and you can choose either “save” or “report.” Obviously, choose to save.#6 - EnlightWhat I use Enlight For: I use Enlight if I ever need any tools that match with Photoshop tools. I know there’s a Photoshop iOS app, but I’ve been using Enlight for a while and it’s never let me down. With this app, you can mix and blend images together. So if you wanted to combine 2 photos and make them look seamless, use this app. Once you mix the images, you can erase parts of the image, blend and overlay them, rotate, etc with pretty precise precision. You can also heal images to remove blemishes, add filters, tilt-shift, decals and quite a bit more features that make enlight a core app for me.I also use Enlight to create actual memes like the OG memes with the white font outlined in black on the top and/or bottom of the image.#7 - FlipagramWhat I use Flipagram for: I use Flipagram really only to add music to a video, speed it up, slow it down, or to duplicate a short video (