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Beethoven’s Seventh, as its full name suggests, starts with a single A Major chord, shared equally between the orchestra. When Liszt transcribed the whole symphony to be played by just one piano, that first A Major chord was shared between two hands – half of the notes of the chord played with the right hand, half with the left, with a dominance of the A note to mimic how most of an orchestra would ring out with that note.

First, then, the A Major chord; abruptly cut off, a beat of silence that would be filled in the symphony by the ringing of the oboe. Then the proceeding bars, which start out slow, precise, like each note has been carefully considered. Next, an avalanche of ascending scales, and a succession of trills just as good as any violinist can do, although Yoongi would rather take that thought to the grave than say it to Seokjin’s face.

But where Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 really starts to shine, in Yoongi’s opinion, comes in his interpretation of the bright, joyful flute solo a few minutes into the first movement. Liszt’s arrangements are hard work, and if he doesn’t stretch properly before and afterwards, Yoongi will sometimes really feel it in his shoulders and back the day after, but it never feels like work in the moment as he’s practicing that part.

It’s the bit after that makes him glad he plays piano, because he thinks that if he had a lighter instrument, he would’ve tossed it across the practice room by now. Although, to be fair, if he played a different instrument, he wouldn’t be attempting to battle his way through Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s Symphonies. He’d just be playing Beethoven.

The score he’s borrowed from the Orchestra’s online collection says, plain as day, leggiero – light, lightly, implying that he should be playing delicately, that his fingers should not feel like they currently do as he practices this section, over and over and over, like strong magnets between his fingers and the keys are making his fingers crash into each note. It’s like his hands are starting to crescendo too early, even though he can see in the score when he should be crescendoing. It’s the sort of thing a casual listener wouldn’t catch, but it’s all Yoongi can hear as he plays, blood boiling as he tries to overcorrect, presses on the keys so delicately that he can hear more of the physical action of the downward press of the key than he can the actual note itself. He can’t tell whether he’s just using a bad score, or whether it’s a problem with him, specifically.

Thankfully, he’s just practicing his general playing, rather than for any specific performance – good job, really, because if he had a performance of this coming up imminently, he would almost certainly have to cancel.

Rather than going back and playing the same few bars again, he moves on to the end of the crescendo, which feels like it suits his current mood a bit more, hands flying across the keys, his hair bouncing a little with the force of his playing, timpani booming along-

He frowns, stops mid-bar, and turns to look at the door where, sure enough, Seokjin is standing there, fist still raised as he grins at Yoongi.

“You switching to percussion, hyung?” Yoongi asks, spinning on his piano stool. It’s one of the older ones, the ones that sigh when you sit in them, but the nice ones are kept in storage for performances, not left in the practice rooms for people to bounce up and down on when they’re angrily playing Liszt. “That was a pretty good timpani.”

“Yeah, didn’t I tell you?” Seokjin leans against the door frame. “I’m not going to be concertmaster any more, Taehyung can do it.”

“He plays the oboe,” Yoongi points out.

“And in this imaginary orchestra, I’m playing percussion,” Seokjin replies. “The last time I held a mallet, our actual timpanist recommended I get one of those Wii Remote straps, he was so worried I was going to fling it across the room. I’m sure Taehyung can manage being concertmaster, we already tune to his oboe.”

Yoongi snorts, kicking his feet a little to stretch them out. “What’s up?”

“I need a favour,” Seokjin says bluntly. That’s one of the many reasons Yoongi likes Seokjin – if he wants something from you, he never beats around the bush, always asks outright. “Are you busy?”

“Just practicing,” Yoongi replies. “And if it’s a practicing sort of favour, I’m up for it.”

“It is.” Seokjin rolls his eyes a little. “I know you, I’m not going to ask you to do anything but practice during your designated ‘angry at Liszt’ hours.”

“I’m not angry at Liszt,” Yoongi insists. “In the same way you’re never angry at Paganini.”

“Funny you should mention him!” Seokjin says brightly. “Our new cellist is coming in to rehearse with me, and originally I was going to ask our marimbaist to play piano for us to rehearse a trio, but then I remembered we now actually have a pianist in the orchestra.”

“You’ve had a pianist in the orchestra for three months,” Yoongi points out, waving at himself vaguely. “Let me guess, the marimbaist forgot she had teaching scheduled?”

Seokjin shakes his head. “No, she got a paid gig playing for some life insurance commercial.”

Yoongi frowns, trying to work out what piece Seokjin wants to practice. “Paganini wrote something for the violin, cello, and piano?”

“Oh, no, no, we’ll be doing Debussy’s Piano Trio with the cellist,” Seokjin explains. “For one of those community outreach pieces, I want to get at least one under my belt before we start the concert season in the autumn. If you wanted to do it with us, that’d be helpful.” Yoongi nods – the orchestra does just under forty community outreach performances a year, and he doesn’t want to leave his share of performances until the last minute. “But I want us to be practicing Paganini’s La Campanella when he walks in. Are you free?”

“For fuck’s sake,” Yoongi mutters.

“He’s already on route to practice!” Seokjin pleads. “And a cello’s a big instrument, it’s not like me with my little violin, or you, who rocks up to a place and a piano is presented to you, he’s got to lug his instrument around on the subway. The subway, Yoongi-yah.”

“You’ve never cared this much about the tribulations of cellists before,” Yoongi says, squinting at him. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I remember you once getting drunk and saying most cellists were just glorified metronomes.”

“We are both going to pretend I’ve never said that,” Seokjin says.

“And that’s not why I said ‘for fuck’s sake’,” Yoongi clarifies. “That was aimed at you, and you showing off for this new cellist. Oh, this?” Yoongi does his best Seokjin impression, which is, if he does say so himself, pretty damn good. “I’m always practicing La Campanella at this time of day, it’s normal for me. Like a violinist peacock,” he finishes, dropping back into his regular voice.

Seokjin shrugs. “Guilty. But when you see this guy, you’ll understand. Are you free?”

“I mean, yeah, but I’ve not played La Campanella’s piano accompaniment for a long time, and it’s been even longer since I last played that Debussy piece,” Yoongi says. “So if you’re using that shit sheet music brand you always seem to prefer, the page turns might take me a second longer than normal.”

“I’ll let your rudeness about my sheet music slide, because you’re doing me a favour that I really, really need help with,” Seokjin says, his eye visibly twitching. “But don’t worry about page turning, I’d already asked Namjoon to be a page turner for the marimbaist before she bailed on me.” When Yoongi raises an eyebrow, he just grins back. “Namjoon? You’d know who that is if you talked to more of the orchestra than your designated two friends, he’s in the woodwinds.”

It's true, Yoongi doesn’t talk to everyone else all that much. He’s only been at the Seoul Philharmonic a few months, although he’d played with them as a guest a few times before that – the increasing inclusion of piano as part of the ensemble in modern orchestral pieces had convinced the Philharmonic to hire a permanent pianist, meaning that, for the first time, Yoongi doesn’t have to have a second, third, even fourth job to make ends meet. He still teaches piano on Mondays, because he enjoys it, but he doesn’t have to.

But because he’s still relatively new, he doesn’t have a lot of friends yet. He’d been friends with Seokjin since school, so he didn’t really count as a work friend, and he’s friends with Taehyung because he’s been listening to Taehyung tune the orchestra for years, even before he’d started working with them full time. Obviously he talks to people if he walks past them in the hallways, or if they’re in rehearsals together, but that’s the thing – no one can feasibly take part in every performance, but Yoongi’s limited by the fact that he plays piano, which is simply an instrument that doesn’t feature in most symphonies. Most of his work here is currently chamber music and piano reductions for other soloists, so if they’re not a regular soloist, Yoongi just… Doesn’t see the other members of the orchestra all that much.

“I’m sorry I said you only had two friends,” Seokjin says, apparently mistaking Yoongi’s distraction for irritated silence. “You’re friends with the librarians! And Jeongguk likes you.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Yoongi says apologetically.

“Unbelievable,” Seokjin mutters.

“The piano isn’t exactly conducive to making friends!” Yoongi laughs. “You lift the lid up and I’m basically hidden from most of the orchestra. Some layouts even shove me behind the harpists, and then no one can see me.”

“Next rehearsal, I’ll ask everyone to take a turn sitting with you on your stool,” Seokjin teases. “Good luck with your eardrums when I tell the cymbalist to sit next to you.” He glances at his watch, and then looks at Yoongi beseechingly. “He’ll be here in fifteen minutes, please?”

“This had better be the most handsome man in the world,” Yoongi mutters. “Fine, but I’m not changing practice rooms, I like this piano.” A fair few of the practice rooms have pianos, and most of the others are newer – shinier, deep black, the white keys glistening like marble. Yoongi likes this one, though, the brown wood and the aged keys reminding him a little of the piano he’d grown up learning on.

“Deal, let me just text Namjoon and Hoseok, let them know the room change,” Seokjin says, immediately pulling out his phone.

“…And get your violin, right?” Yoongi suggests; Seokjin looks down at his other hand, as though surprised not to see his almost ubiquitous violin case in his hand, and then hurriedly leaves the room.

There are, of course, versions of La Campanella arranged for the piano (including one by Liszt, but just the thought of tackling another Liszt piece right now is making Yoongi antsy), but that’s not Yoongi’s current job here – he’s supposed to be accompanying Seokjin with relatively easy chord plunks, the occasional solo run. Seokjin, in contrast to Yoongi’s relatively easy time, is cursing up a storm as he practices. They haven’t actually made it anywhere close to the bottom of the page, let alone to a point where Yoongi needs to work out where he should think about flipping to the next page; which is fortunate, because the page turner, Namjoon, hasn’t arrived yet, apparently having to come from across the building to do so.

Yoongi’s played at venues across the world, and while he wouldn’t currently trade the ease and stability of working in Seoul for anything, he wishes the Philharmonic had its own building. They’re currently sharing the Sejong Center for Performing Arts with seemingly every arts institution that falls under that giant umbrella – it’d be nice to have all of their practice rooms close together, not least to prevent long treks like this. At least Yoongi’s rehearsal room is on the third floor today, so the new cellist doesn’t need to lug his cello up to the fifth floor.

“Again, again!” Seokjin says frustratedly. As a pianist, Yoongi can’t hear the problem with what he’s playing, but as a musician, he gets it, so he dutifully stops, waits for Seokjin to start up the opening bars again. He sighs explosively midway through the fifth bar and stops. “This is ridiculous, I can play this in my sleep!”

“Are you…” Yoongi’s not facing him, but flattens his mouth into a straight line anyway. “Hyung, are you nervous?”

“I have never been nervous a single day in my life,” Seokjin says shortly. “I’ve obviously rosined my bow wrong.”

“Oh, of course,” Yoongi says kindly. He waits until he can hear Seokjin sit down and open his violin case before turning around. “If it’s stressing you out, why not not play the Paganini?” He suggests. “Don’t forget, you’ve got to actually practice Debussy after this, and that’s not really something you want to go into if you’re already pulling your hair out.”

“It’s stressing me out more that I can’t play it,” Seokjin says, finishing up with his bow. He pulls his violin up to his shoulder and plays through the opening nine bars blindingly fast, somehow managing to keep his intonation clean throughout the whole display. He nods. “Okay, good, I haven’t forgotten everything I’ve ever learned.” He stands up again, so Yoongi turns on his stool to begin from the top.

They get pretty far, far enough that Yoongi has to chaotically time a page turn right in the middle of a split-second break in his left hand during his piano solo. But then Seokjin starts playing again, and even Yoongi can hear it this time, his bow sliding so chaotically across the strings that Yoongi can physically feel his own shoulders bunch up in alarm.

“Thought I saw someone at the door,” Seokjin laughs.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be going out of your way to impress this guy,” Yoongi suggests. “If a shadow at the door is enough to make you sound like you’re scoring an avant-garde horror film.”

“One day, Yoongi-yah, you will be in this position, and see how little sympathy I’ll give you then,” Seokjin sniffs.

“I don’t think I’d ever use difficult piano pieces as a means of showboating,” Yoongi says flatly. “Way too much pressure.”

“You mean to tell me you weren’t trying to seduce me with Liszt when I came by earlier?” Seokjin says, but Yoongi can tell his heart isn’t 100% in the tease; he turns around again on his stool.

“This guy’s really that good looking?” Yoongi says.

Seokjin sighs, sets his violin down, and pinches the bridge of his nose. “His smile is shaped just like a heart.”

“Wow,” Yoongi says.

“I know, it’s incredible, right? I didn’t know people’s smiles could be anything other than, you know, smile-shaped-”

“No, I mean, wow, you’re down bad,” Yoongi interrupts, turning back in his seat yet again as Seokjin squawks indignantly. “Come on, let’s see if we can attempt the final crescendo.” Notoriously difficult to solo, it’s even more difficult to coordinate between two musicians, and Yoongi thinks Seokjin could do with the distraction.

It works, and it also helps Yoongi work through some of his earlier frustration with Liszt, triumphantly pounding away at the keys as Seokjin flies through the notes behind him with no inclination that he’d been struggling at all just a few minutes earlier.

Somebody coughs; Yoongi, startled, plays a discordant chord, while Seokjin’s piercing trill judders like a faulty windscreen wiper.

“Oh, it’s just you,” Seokjin says.

“Thanks, hyung,” somebody says flatly.

Just you, Yoongi would assume, is Namjoon, who’s hovering by the open door to the practice room. He’s vaguely familiar, in the way that Yoongi would doubletake if he saw him in the street. He’s tall, and he’s dressed casually, tan slacks and a white t-shirt that shows off his arm muscles – Seokjin had said he was in the woodwinds section, so Yoongi assumes he’s a bassoon player.

“Oh, Kim Namjoon, my favourite dongsaeng, the apple of my eye, the light of my life,” Seokjin says, almost like he’s reciting it. Yoongi knows he’s reciting it, as a matter of fact.

“Do you say that to everyone, hyung?” He says drily, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Of course not,” Seokjin says dismissively. “I’m not everyone’s hyung in this orchestra. For starters, our conductor is in his seventies.” He smiles at Namjoon as he enters the practice room. “Thank you for coming by, Namjoon-ah, we’re just warming up.”

“With Paganini?” Namjoon asks, peering at Seokjin’s sheet music. When he looks at Seokjin, Yoongi can see the exact moment he registers Seokjin’s beatific smile, because he lets out a laugh, a short, sharp ha that makes Yoongi want to smile, too. “Ah, you’re trying to impress Hoseok?”

“Hoseok?” Yoongi asks. “Is that the cellist?”

Namjoon nods. “I was at college with him – we were in the same year.”

“The cellist will be here any minute,” Seokjin says pleasantly. “So if you could pull up a chair next to Yoongi-yah over there on the piano, we can get started.”

“It’s nice to finally meet you, Yoongi-ssi,” Namjoon says politely as he drags over a plastic chair. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Yoongi doesn’t mean to show his surprise, but he apparently can’t mask it fast enough, because Namjoon elaborates further. “You’re friends with hyung and Taehyung? They talk about you a lot. Also, I actually saw you give a recital just after I started working here? Well, not really a recital, it was just one of those after work things we do when there isn’t a performance on in the hall, but the effort you put into it made it feel like a recital, you know?”

Before Yoongi can ask him more about this, Seokjin, very pointedly, plays the opening bars of La Campanella again. Yoongi snorts, rolls his shoulders back, and begins playing.

He doesn’t work with page turners often. He’s increasingly working digitally anyway, and he’s got a Bluetooth pedal for page turning for the pieces where he needs it; when he does work from paper sheet music, he tries to choose brands that format the scores as best as possible to allow for time to turn the pages, or he asks the orchestral librarians to reformat pages for him if he needs it. But Namjoon is an example of somebody that treats page turning as a genuine skill – surprisingly unobtrusive, for someone so tall, and he seems to almost anticipate Yoongi’s nods for him to turn the page. He makes playing easier, frees up a little more of Yoongi’s brain to concentrate on his playing.

Seokjin’s seemingly loosened up too, and, in Yoongi’s humble opinion, when the door opens five minutes later, they both sound incredible. They manage to time Seokjin’s final pizzicato note with Yoongi’s triumphant chord perfectly, without even needing to practice it, and Yoongi can’t help but grin to himself. The person who’s just come in claps, but the clap sounds odd; when Yoongi turns to look, he sees the cellist trying to balance his cello bag against his hip and a huge folder tucked under his arm as he tries to clap, eyes bright and smile huge and, yes, heart-shaped.

“Sorry to intrude!” He says cheerfully, closing the door behind him with a gentle tap of his foot. “I’ve been listening outside for a few minutes, I almost didn’t want to interrupt you, you both sounded so in the zone!”

Considering they’d only been playing this piece for this new cellist to walk in on them playing, it would’ve been pretty funny if their playing it had prevented him from coming into the rehearsal room. When Yoongi chances a glance at Namjoon, their eyes meet; when Namjoon, very quickly, raises his eyebrows at Yoongi, looks at the sheet music, and then rolls his eyes back to Yoongi, he has to look away before he bursts out laughing.

“You’re not intruding,” Seokjin says. “We were just warming up – Yoongi-yah’s very kindly offered to be the pianist in our Debussy trio.”

Yoongi opens his mouth to correct that very generous assessment of why he’s here, but Seokjin shoots him a very pointed look as the cellist starts unzipping his bag. “Yes, it’s true,” Yoongi says. “I jumped at the chance.”

“It’s so cool, the amount of community outreach this orchestra does,” the cellist says enthusiastically, looking around the room for a chair – Seokjin immediately pushes the one he’d been using earlier over to him. “Thank you! Oh, wait, sorry, I completely forgot – I’m Jung Hoseok, the new Associate Principal Cellist.” He bows, first to Yoongi, then to Namjoon, although he offers the latter a cheeky, friendly grin as he does so.

“Min Yoongi, pianist,” Yoongi says.

Hoseok smiles brightly. “Right, I read that you’d been hired as the orchestra’s first full-time pianist! I actually listened to one of your first recordings after I heard – Shostakovich? It was with the Seoul Philharmonic before you started working here, right?”

Yoongi nods – he doesn’t perfectly remember every single performance he’s ever done, but his performance of Shostakovich’s first piano concerto had aligned so perfectly with his headspace in his early twenties, that it’s hard not to remember every moment of it, like the serrated edge of snapped glass. He still can’t listen to the end of the second movement, the piano notes trembling higher and higher until the movement resolves on a poignant, shivering high E, without feeling a lump in his throat. The conductor at the time had asked him to hold that note for as long as the piano would allow, and had then held the whole orchestra in a taut, suspended silence for even longer than that, and the whole experience had left him feeling wrung out to dry.

“…does this from time to time,” he hears Seokjin saying; he shakes his head to clear it. “Ah, there we go.”

“Sorry,” Yoongi says – Seokjin’s used to him getting lost in his own head, his brain working a mile a minute from one topic to the next in a way he struggles to keep up with in conversations, but he usually tries not to do it in front of strangers.

“Don’t be,” Namjoon says; Hoseok vehemently nods. “I was just asking how old you were when you recorded that performance?”

“Twenty-four,” Yoongi says. “It was my first professional performance after I’d finished my enlistment.”

“So young,” Namjoon says; his tone, and expression, are indecipherable.

“That’s so cool!” Hoseok says, his tone and expression very clear in his enthusiasm. “I thought you looked young in the recording, but the video was recorded with a flip phone, it looks like, so I wasn’t sure.” He’s finished setting up his music stand and sheet music, but he doesn’t look in any immediate hurry to start practicing.

Seokjin, however, is attempting to surreptitiously slide his second copy of the Debussy sheet music onto Yoongi’s music rack without moving from his spot, so he’s bending ridiculously at the waist to do so. Yoongi turns back to the piano, adjusts the sheet music, stretches his hands, and then looks over his shoulder at both Seokjin and Hoseok. “Ready?”

They both nod. Yoongi’s used to seeing Seokjin focused on his music, but he watches as Hoseok’s smiley face shifts into an utterly serious expression, almost intimidatingly so. He turns back to Namjoon, who looks just as intense when he nods too.

Debussy’s Piano Trio in G Major begins with Yoongi playing a typically pretty, light collection of chords and harmonies before Seokjin comes in with his solo a few bars later, followed swiftly by Hoseok’s answering solo.

It’s as the three of them start playing together for the very first time - a heartrending combination of harmonies between the strings and, in Yoongi’s opinion, a brilliantly composed piano melody in counterpoint, especially considering Debussy had still been a student when he wrote it – that Yoongi notices how much of a pain the page turns are going to be for this sheet music. There’s one coming up that’s right smack in the middle of a run of sixteenth notes, as though whoever’s formatted this score has never once met a pianist in their life.

He doesn’t even know where he’d go about signalling for Namjoon to turn the page, but he needs to decide, quick – Debussy’s not exactly going at a breakneck speed, but the end of the page is coming along.

It’s as he begins the sequence of sixteenths that he decides; as the notes start climbing, he waits until he hits the highest note, then nods, hoping that his muscle memory will carry him through the descent as Namjoon turns the page, giving him a split second to look at the score on the next page before he continues playing.

And Namjoon times it beautifully. His page turn is so seamless that Yoongi not only has longer than he’d thought to look at the previous page, but longer to look at the next page, too – which is just as well, because the second ascent and descent of these quick, nimble notes involve a lot of tricky additional flats and naturals that he wouldn’t have had a chance of remembering off the top of his head.

Considering how long it’s been since he last played this piece, he’s surprised by how well he’s playing – their first stop in their rehearsal doesn’t come until they’ve run through the entire first movement. They all sit in silence as the last echoes of their instruments fade away.

“Wow,” Namjoon says eventually.

Yoongi has to agree, but as he turns to say something, he’s struck by how close Namjoon’s standing. He hadn’t really noticed it while he’d been playing, but this close, he can really see just how muscular Namjoon’s arms are, and his brain is suddenly invaded with the very unhelpful thought that, if Namjoon’s arm and his own thigh were side by side, they’d probably be similar sizes. Then, his brain starts providing scenarios for why their limbs would be side by side in that way –

Yoongi’s never really felt like this about someone he’s literally just met – a combination of not meeting huge amounts of new people in the decade since his enlistment, and a hectic practicing and working schedule since high school dissuading him from wanting to be in a romantic relationship, means that he can count his partners on one hand, and he’d never wanted to immediately jump their bones.

He deliberately looks back at his sheet music, because it’s one thing getting distracted by memories of fraught performances that remind him of his early twenties, it’s another thing entirely getting distracted by getting horny because somebody with nice arms has been competently page turning for him for the past ten minutes.

“I’ve got some notes,” Hoseok says, already holding a pencil aloft. “The 128^th bar, where it tells us to play fortissimo, I think we-” he points his pencil at Seokjin without looking up from his score; which is just as well, because Yoongi can see how pink his ears have gone from the attention “-could probably play that even louder than we did, otherwise we run the risk of not matching Yoongi-hyung’s dynamics.”

Hoseok goes through the rest of his very thorough notes – when he finishes talking he smiles, a little weakly. “Sorry, I haven’t let either of you say anything, sometimes I get so hyper focused on feedback that I forget to stop to breathe.”

“No, don’t apologise!” Seokjin says, a shade too frantically. “It was very good feedback, right, Yoongi-yah?”

Yoongi nods quickly, and not just because Seokjin looks close to offering Hoseok the world if it’ll stop him from looking as unsure as he is. “I don’t think I’ve ever been offered such great piano feedback from a non-pianist.”

“I took a little piano when I was in middle school,” Hoseok admits. “But my hands were smaller then than they are now.” He holds up his hand and gives them a little wave. “So I switched to cello, where it also helps to have big hands to play, but you can get smaller cellos – you can’t really get smaller pianos.” Yoongi looks at Hoseok’s cello properly for the first time – he hadn’t noticed it at all while they were playing, but, sure enough, he’s playing on a 7/8, not a full-sized cello.

They run through the first movement again with Hoseok’s suggestions. Yoongi can tell that he’s playing better, but he can also tell that he’s more cognisant of Namjoon’s presence at his side. Every time he leans in to turn the page, Yoongi has to actively try not to look at his hand; every time he stands up from his seat, Yoongi has to prevent himself from inhaling as he tries to determine what it is that Namjoon’s smells of. It’s a good job he’s as good at page turning as he is, because it means Yoongi has a little bit of extra brain processing space left to stop himself from ending their rehearsal right then and there by asking Namjoon to take him home.

The rest of their rehearsal doesn’t fare much better, but Yoongi does come to the conclusion that this is all happening because he’s not had somebody in his personal space for this long in a while. He’s just touch starved, and Namjoon – a handsome, clearly musically intelligent, and competent man who seems to be about Yoongi’s age – just so happened to be in the right place at the wrong time. Yoongi’s sure that, once they’re not right up in each other’s space like this, he’ll be able to treat Namjoon like a normal colleague.

When the music director tells them in orchestral rehearsal that they’re getting a guest conductor in for a night of Saint-Saëns performances next month, Yoongi’s in the middle of resigning himself to getting assigned Liszt’s transcription of Danse Macabre to perform (one of the few times where he’d actually prefer playing literally any other transcription, especially the ones for two pianos, or four hands – Liszt’s version just feels hollow in a way so few of his transcriptions do, perhaps because he’s just asking so much from one pianist) when the program gets emailed out to them.

He breathes an actual, audible sigh of relief when he sees that Danse Macabre hasn’t made the cut – and then he grins at the choice of Symphony No. 3, which will give him a chance to play with the full orchestra as part of the orchestra, and not as a solo pianist. He’s also listed as performing the Oboe Sonata and, sure enough, when he looks through all of the violinists towards the oboes, Taehyung’s already looking back at him, grinning boxy wide.

While he’s looking in that general direction, he looks at the rest of the woodwind section, paying especial attention to the bassoonists to see if he can spot Namjoon, but he can’t, and their conductor is walking in before he has a chance to look at everyone in the woodwind section more carefully. He silences his phone and shoves it back in his pocket.

Their current conductor, an ahjussi in his late seventies, doesn’t come in to rehearse as much as he used to, even in the brief period that Yoongi’s been working with the orchestra full-time. So many musicians have physically demanding jobs, whether it’s the strength needed in a pianist’s hands or the mindboggling lung capacity of the woodwind and brass players or the core strength of the string section, but Yoongi has seen conductors get physically winded by the end of more strenuous pieces.

He does, however, always try to come in for their rehearsals for contemporary Korean classical performances; he’s a genius when it comes to conducting Korean composers, and Yoongi’s been looking forward to performing their current piece, Jeajoon Ryu’s Concerto per pianoforte e orchestra, for weeks.

It’s their last full orchestra rehearsal before their performance of this piece on Friday, and somebody doesn’t sound like they’ve practiced. Yoongi had thought, given that he is an adult professional in an adult, professional orchestra, that he wouldn’t have to put up with unpracticed performers in final rehearsals ever again, and yet. At least in high school he could get away with calling time wasters assholes and just get a tut from the teacher – he’d imagine that if he tried to call one of his coworkers what he’s thinking right now, he’d probably get formally reprimanded, if not fired.

But their conductor apparently can’t hear their first flautist’s butchering performance, or is just choosing not to hear it. Everyone else can, though; during a pause in Yoongi’s playing, where the violins and flutes take prominence in the score, Yoongi quickly glances over at the flutes, and sees the two tutti flautists, two men much, much younger than the first flautist, shooting him resigned glances at every sharp note (and they’re always sharp, which is a skill in itself) he emits.

“Well, that was a shit show,” Seokjin mutters to him during a brief pause in their rehearsal. Funnily enough, they’d been subjected to a mediocre first flute for well over an hour, but the second one of the tutti horns had made an intonation error, the conductor had swooped down on him like a hawk; Yoongi can see him still over there now, making big, sweeping gestures with his arms as the horn player makes furious notes on his sheet music.

“Is he going to say anything?” Yoongi replies quietly, swivelling both of his wrists gently at the joint.

Seokjin shakes his head. “They’re friends, they go way back. I think they used to perform in the pit for Phantom of the Opera when it was performing here?”

“And that’s very sweet,” Yoongi says exasperatedly. “But if he can’t play it, then they need to let one of the other flautists take over. This isn’t just a slight dynamics issue, this is a ‘the audience will want a refund’ problem.”

“I’ll speak to the conductor after,” Seokjin promises hurriedly over his shoulder as the conductor returns to his podium.

Yoongi’s not even made it up the first flight of stairs back to the individual practice rooms before he gets a text from Seokjin.

Apparently 1^st flautist is thinking about retiring, so conductor doesn’t want to speak to him in case it pushes him over the edge.

Yoongi rolls his eyes and sends back, Thanks for trying, hyung :]

He’s pretty fortunate that his position in the orchestra was originated by him; he’s seen outstanding musicians get sidelined for years because the first musicians in an orchestra, especially the ones who’re friends with conductors or directors, will cling onto their seats for far longer than they’re really deserving of the position. But he’d figured that, what with this being Korea’s most prestigious orchestra and all, that the behind the scenes staff would care more about their first flautist sounding like absolute ass, regardless of how long they’d known him for.

As he makes his way through the winding hallways, trying to decide whether to go practice or to head to the orchestral library, he hears it – a lone piccolo coming from somewhere. Almost like a bird’s trapped somewhere in the building with him, notes ring out, tripping over themselves as the piccoloist plays staccato notes while their previously held notes are still echoing through the halls. Yoongi follows it, almost helplessly, and vows not to mention this to Taehyung, who’d tell him, quite sombrely, that it’s this sort of behaviour that gets people ensnared by magical creatures.

He doesn’t think it’s a magical creature, although it certainly sounds whimsical, whatever the piccoloist is playing. They’re suddenly joined by a flute, its melody sounding comparatively low when compared to the answering trill of the piccolo. The piccolo then holds its note for one bar, two, three, four, just keeps going as the flute suddenly starts rising, taking over the melody for a while before the piccolo takes it back.

Yoongi finally finds the flautists’ practice room just as the alto flute joins in, and he hovers outside, fascinated, as Namjoon, the flautist, shifts keys, and then again, each successive bar echoed by the alto flautist and harmonising with the piccoloist. He recognises the alto flautist and piccoloist as the two from rehearsals earlier, but the piccoloist suddenly looks up from his sheet music, beams (rather impressively, considering he’s in the middle of playing) at Yoongi, and then pulls his piccolo away and says, “Yoongi-ssi!”

The alto flautist stops playing too, turns to look at Yoongi, then looks him up and down a few times. The piccoloist nudges him. “Sorry,” the alto flautist says, with an unapologetic shrug. “I’m just surprised, you’re not as tall as you look sitting on a piano stool.”

“You’re not exactly towering yourself,” Yoongi replies flatly, earning him a pleased grin from the alto flautist.

“Ah, Seokjin-hyung was right about you,” he says, raising an eyebrow, as though daring Yoongi to ask him to clarify. When Yoongi doesn’t, it just makes him smile even wider; he holds out his hand for Yoongi to shake, which means Yoongi has to actually enter the practice room, rather than hover at the door like an enchanted deer. “Park Jimin, flautist – I usually play the alto flute, but sometimes I get out the old contrabass flute if I’m feeling fancy.”

“Min Yoongi, pianist,” Yoongi says.

Jimin snorts. “Yeah, I know, if it’s not Seokjin-hyung or Taehyung-ah talking about you, it’s one of these two.” Namjoon’s still holding the flute to his lips, but he hasn’t moved since the piccoloist had spoken; the piccoloist himself, meanwhile, holds out his hand.

“Jeon Jeongguk, piccolo.”

“Right! Yeah, hyung’s mentioned you. Seokjin-hyung, I mean.”

“And he’s not mentioned little old me?” Jimin teases.

“Must’ve slipped his mind,” Yoongi responds immediately, not even needing to think about it. Normally, he would never dream of being so combative with somebody right out of the gate, usually needing months, if not years, to work up to that sort of friendship, but something about Jimin seems to be drawing it out of him.

“Did you need this practice room?” Jeongguk asks. “We didn’t book it or anything, so we can go if you need the space.”

“No, no, I was thinking of heading to the library, actually,” Yoongi says. “I heard you all playing, I don’t often get to hear flute ensembles.” He looks at Namjoon, who is still holding the flute in place. “I didn’t know you were a flautist?”

“Yeah,” Namjoon says; a little breathily, because his flute whispers a C in response. Seemingly realising that he’s still holding his flute aloft, Namjoon lowers it to his side. “Yeah. What did you think I played?”

“The bassoon,” Yoongi replies honestly, before remembering that the reason he thought Namjoon played bassoon was because he’d spent the first day of their acquaintance looking a little too closely at his arm muscles while he page turned for him.

“Huh, that’s a new one,” Namjoon says thoughtfully. “Usually people think I’m a double bassist.”

“I can see that,” Yoongi says, nodding.

Namjoon smiles at him, a warm, friendly quirk of his lips that Yoongi can’t help but return; Jimin clears his throat, which makes Namjoon blink a few times before saying, “So, Min Yoongi-ssi, what’re you heading to the library for?”

“I’m down for the Saint-Saëns evening,” Yoongi explains. “Figured I’d pick up the sheet music now while I’ve got a spare half an hour.”

“Ugh, the Saint-Saëns,” Jimin says exasperatedly, flopping back on one of the benches to stare up at the ceiling. “I was so excited for it, until I realised all the great flute parts go to the first flautist. I was so embarrassed during rehearsal, everyone kept looking at us.”

“I feel bad for him,” Jeongguk says with a frown.

“You shouldn’t,” Jimin says. “He’s keeping Namjoon-hyung from his rightful, full-time first flautist position.”

Yoongi raises his eyebrows at Namjoon, who shrugs modestly. “I sometimes take the first flautist seat, when I’m needed.”

“Yeah, when first flautist-nim can’t be bothered to come in, usually for community performances or composers that aren’t venerable enough,” Jimin says. He sucks his teeth. “You watch, I bet he pulls out of the Jeajoon Ryu at the last minute. He won’t pull out of Saint-Saëns, though.” He sits up suddenly, looking at Yoongi with a keen eye. “Jeongguk-ah!”

Jeongguk jumps, eyes wide. “Hyung?”

“You’ve been practicing Saint-Saëns’s Romance, right? And you were looking for a pianist to practice with?”

It takes a second, but then Jeongguk flushes so pink that Yoongi almost wants to insist he sit down, just in case he passes out. “I – Yoongi-ssi’s busy, that’d be – hyung-”

“I don’t mind,” Yoongi says mildly. “I’ll head to the library, pick up the sheet music I need, then come back?” He leaves before Jeongguk can stop him, although he can hear his spluttered half-protests all the way down the hall.

When he returns, Jimin’s left, but Jeongguk is more than filling the space of the practice room with his fast wall-to-wall pacing; Namjoon’s sitting on the piano bench, watching Jeongguk speed back and forth like he’s spectating a tennis match. He raises an eyebrow at Yoongi as he enters, but doesn’t say anything to interrupt Jeongguk, who is mid-flow in a very intense, frantic version of Saint-Saëns’s Romance, his flutter tonguing sounding more like a nervous stutter because he’s playing so fast.

“Right?” He says suddenly, turning to Namjoon. “The thirty-seconds sound muddy.”

“Well, they did, but that’s because you’re playing them too fast,” Namjoon says mildly. “But you know that, because you’re good at your job. Also, you’re out of breath, but that’s because you’re running around the room. And again, you know that, because you’re good at your job.”

“Right, right.” Jeongguk nods, his back still to Yoongi. “But, hear me out-” He plays the run again – slower this time, but still too fast.

“You’ll be fine when you play it at the right speed,” Namjoon reiterates.

“I’m trying to get in last-minute practice before hyung gets back, he’s already wasting his time, he’s probably busy-”

“I’m not wasting my time,” Yoongi interrupts. He’s not sure whether it’s a good idea, revealing the fact that he’s standing behind Jeongguk so suddenly, but he just can’t abide the thought of Jeongguk thinking that he’s wasting his time practicing with him – not only can Yoongi make any practice into worthwhile practice, he’s also genuinely excited to rehearse with Jeongguk. He doesn’t play duets with flautists often, and he’s always eager to play with and learn from other skilled musicians.

“Hyung!” Jeongguk whirls around, then points his flute at Yoongi, a little accusingly. “How long have you been there?” He seems to realise that he’s brandishing his flute like a weapon, because he lays it down on one of the practice room’s tables. “I mean, Yoongi-ssi, sorry, Taehyung-hyung talks about you a lot-”

“I don’t mind,” Yoongi says, wiggling the sheet music like a flag to show he’s been successful in his quest. “Hyung is fine. And I’ve been here long enough to know I’m not wasting my time helping you out.” Namjoon stands up, allowing Yoongi to set up his newly acquired sheet music on the music stand. “What’re you practicing this piece for?”

“I was thinking it’d be good for a smaller scale community outreach peace,” Jeongguk explains. “Maybe a hospital? Although I’m not sure how many hospitals around here have pianos to hand…”

“You’d be surprised,” Yoongi says. “They’re great for patient wellbeing workshops – obviously all musical instruments can be, but pianos are one of the easiest instruments to get some sort of musical sounding noise out of. Most percussion instruments, actually. Wind instruments, you run into the problem of breath control pretty quickly, and a lot of wind and brass instruments need a specific level of skill to get a nice sounding note out of them, and with bowed string instruments you run into the problem of a lot of complete beginners not being able to make any sound with them at all, and you can’t play them for very long if you haven’t developed calluses on your fingers…” He turns around when he realises he’s talking to a silent room. “Sorry, sometimes I go off on tangents if I’m just left to talk, feel free to like, stop me or whatever.”

Jeongguk shakes his head, and Namjoon half stands out of his seat in his haste to answer. “No!” He says emphatically. He coughs and sits back in his chair. “It’s interesting. The only hospital outreach I’ve done has been waiting room performances, I’ve never done patient workshops.”

“They’re pretty fun,” Yoongi says. “I used to do them on weekends when I was in high school, my teacher thought it’d be good experience.”

“And was it?” Jeongguk asks curiously.

Yoongi hums thoughtfully. “Not in the sense that I was learning to perform technically,” he says. “But it was great for teaching me about performing for the enjoyment of my audience. That’s a skill a lot of teachers don’t bother to teach their students, I think.” He chuckles, turns back to his music. “Sorry, you wanted to practice, I got distracted.”

“Don’t be sorry!” Jeongguk says; Yoongi can hear him pick up his flute again. “You’re doing me a favour anyway.”

“Do you need me to page turn?” Namjoon offers.

Honestly, Yoongi doesn’t – there are enough natural pauses in the piano’s part of the piece that, unless the formatting of the score is truly dreadful, he’ll have more than enough time to turn the pages himself.

“If you wouldn’t mind?” Yoongi says, because he’s so, so weak in the face of Namjoon’s helpfulness.

Namjoon’s obviously a good enough page turner that he’d be able to tell, immediately upon looking at the score for Romance that Yoongi had picked up from the library, that Yoongi does not need a page turner. He doesn’t say anything, however, sitting at a polite distance just to Yoongi’s left as Yoongi begins to play.

In college, Yoongi had played accompaniment for almost every possible type of instrument – just as a piano can be a beautiful solo instrument, it works just as well accompanying everything, so he’d never been without requests to accompany people for rehearsals, recitals, even pretty significant performances. One of the violinists in the year above him had even recorded a chamber pop album after graduation, and had asked him to play keyboards on nearly every track.

He's always enjoyed playing accompaniments for Saint-Saëns pieces, though. Some piano accompaniments can be mind-numbingly dull – he once had the opportunity to play Pachelbel’s Canon on a genuine Baroque organ, which sounded interesting until he realised it meant he’d need to play the accompaniment for Pachelbel’s Canon – but Saint-Saëns’s Romance gives him the chance to play a beautiful, rippling melody. Understated, still clearly letting Jeongguk’s flute shine, it’s still interesting for Yoongi to play.

And, sure enough, Jeongguk sounds incredible. Yoongi almost wishes he wasn’t accompanying him, so he could focus solely on how much yearning he’s managing to pack into his playing.

He nods to Namjoon to get him to turn the page, and Yoongi had thought it wouldn’t hit him like a bus just how nice Namjoon’s hands are, but they are. Namjoon smells great, too, unfortunately, so every time he politely leans over to turn to the next page, Yoongi’s left to seethe about how it isn’t fair that this tall, handsome, talented man also smells nice. Yoongi’s willing to bet he talks to small animals he sees, too. Maybe he even takes care of plants. Devastating.

As Jeongguk holds his final A flat for an impressive four bars, and Yoongi interjects with increasingly quiet, fragile sounding chords, he muses over the fact that maybe he needs to go out and meet some people, so that he doesn’t act like he’s never seen another man in his life every time he sees the curves of Namjoon’s knuckles when he turns the page, or every time he curves his body around Yoongi’s to reach the score, never quite touching Yoongi, but so undeniably present.

“What did I tell you?” Namjoon says to Jeongguk as soon as the last echoes of Jeongguk’s flute have died away. “You know the piece.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re so wise, hyung,” Jeongguk says with an eyeroll. He bows to Yoongi. “Thank you for helping.”

“That was it?” Yoongi says.

“Did you think I needed more practice?” Jeongguk asks. “What did you have in mind?”

“No, no, it’s not that, I just was enjoying playing with you,” Yoongi says.

“Oh!” Jeongguk grins, a quick flash of his front teeth. “That’s kind of you to say, hyung, I was having fun playing with you, too! Let’s run through it a few more times, I’d like to try the easier fingering alternative for measure 102…”

A ‘few more times’ turns into a solid hour, including a long stretch where Jeongguk just plays measure 102’s two variants, over and over and over. Yoongi prefers the one with the descent of notes, rather than the other, where the notes sound like they’re jumping up and down, and says as much.

“Yeah, me too,” Jeongguk admits, wriggling his pinky finger. “Good practice, I guess.”

“Good practice?” Yoongi asks.

It’s Namjoon who answers; he gets up out of his seat next to Yoongi, grabs his own flute case, and assembles it. “Face me a second, hyung.” Yoongi does, and Namjoon lays it across his lap. “Okay, now give me your right hand.” Again, Yoongi does (he suspects Namjoon could ask him to sit on the piano keys and he’d do it unquestioningly), and Namjoon lays Yoongi’s hand out so his fingers are resting on the keys. “Jeongguk, can you play measure 102 slowly for hyung?”

Jeongguk does, drawing out each note well beyond their quaver length as Namjoon, very gently, guides Yoongi’s fingers into place. The measure is a workout for his pinky finger, constantly needing to flit between different keys – he knows part of it is his general unfamiliarity with the flute, but even so, this feels especially difficult.

Once Jeongguk finishes performing the D flat at the end of measure 103 to emphasise just how much harder the more difficult measure 102 makes its proceeding measure, Namjoon keeps hold of Yoongi’s fingers for a moment. Then, he pats them – it’s so quiet in the practice room that Yoongi can hear the little put sound the keys make as they press underneath the combined weight of his and Namjoon’s fingers.

“Yeah,” Yoongi says, if only to fill the silence. “That’s pretty difficult.”

The issue with the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh for the piano specifically is that any decent pianist can play the opening, but it’s very easy to slip into the territory of advertising a piano app that claims to teach you how to play in a week. It’s the deceptively simplistic rhythm, Yoongi thinks – rely too heavily on its repeating pattern of dactyls and spondees, and you risk sounding clunky, robotic; try to stray too far from it, and you’re no longer playing Beethoven.

Yoongi tries to lean into the rhythm, drawing on millennia of the rhythms of dactyls and spondees in everything from poetry to rap to make his recital of it sound natural. He tries to build the volume of his playing as he travels up the octave, but it’s there he’s running into a catch-22 – if he starts too loud at the beginning of the movement, he physically can’t produce a loud enough sound on the higher octaves later on, but if he overcompensates, the start of the movement will sound like he’s mumbling, slurring his way through it.

He's getting it the way he likes it on most playthroughs, but he doesn’t want to stop practicing for the morning until he can get it right on nearly every playthrough he’s doing. He doesn’t even need to be spending this long practicing a piece he has no set performance date for, but he can’t help himself – besides, all practice is good practice, even if there are other pieces in his repertoire that could perhaps do with being rehearsed more immediately than this one.

Nevertheless, he needs a break of some sort, so he loosely plays melodies with his right hand while he flicks through his phone for somewhere to order lunch from. He’s not really paying attention to what he’s playing, just little snippets from things he’s heard recently – a pretty pop song with a rap segment that makes Yoongi giggle to play on piano, the same staccato note played over and over like he’s drumming his finger impatiently; the Debussy he’s preparing to perform with Seokjin and Hoseok; a waltz with notes that trip over the highest octaves.

The last one makes him frown, go back and play it a few times over. Usually when he distractedly plays pieces he doesn’t recognise, it’s because they’re songs he’s heard on the radio. This doesn’t sound like a radio song, though, unless he’s heard, and somehow forgotten about, a singer with the most piercing voice imaginable. It’s too barebones for him to search up on any music recognition software, so he’s stuck playing this melody until he gets a text message.

Seokjin-hyung: Lunch? I have it on good authority that the director’s going to be looking for you this afternoon, and it’ll be embarrassing if your stomach rumbles because you’ve played through lunch.

Yoongi: is this going to be like that time during college when you told me to meet you for lunch because the café you were in had ‘somebody that looked like a hot celebrity’ and then when i got there you showed me your reflection in a mirror, but you got so embarrassed that you couldn’t finish your joke, so we just had to eat in awkward silence

Seokjin-hyung: You typed that suspiciously quickly?

Seokjin-hyung: It’s also hardly even relevant?

Yoongi: yeah i have it saved as an auto-fill on my phone whenever i type in ‘lunch’ in our chat

Seokjin-hyung: Here I am, trying to warn you that your boss wants to see you this afternoon, maybe even offer to buy you lunch as your generous hyung, and this is the thanks I get? Subside on your ancient pocket mints then, see if I care.

Yoongi: hyung 🥺

Seokjin-hyung: I’m downstairs in the lobby, hurry up before I choose a different dongsaeng to treat.

Yoongi packs up his sheet music and heads downstairs; sure enough, Seokjin is down there, leaning against the wall and watching as the Youth Traditional Orchestra gather around for a final rehearsal. Seokjin’s wearing big sunglasses, which is only serving to draw more attention to him – some of the youths are casting nervous looks at him.

“That kid over there forgot to wear socks and keeps trying to nervously hide their ankles,” Seokjin says, nodding at a young musician who’s clearly trying to not draw attention to themselves by standing incredibly still.

“I used to bring spare socks with me for years for that reason,” Yoongi says. “You turn up to a recital with weird socks on one time, and the memory of it haunts your nightmares for the rest of your life.”

“What were they?” Seokjin asks, not showing any inclination to move. “The socks.”

“Hyung, I’m not telling you, you’ll end up giving me pairs of them forever.” A college friend had bought him socks covered with Pusheen in various poses – a comfy, fun pair of socks that he liked wearing at every other time except when he sat down for a recital and realised that a variety of Pusheens were peeking out from under the hem of his trousers. “Where did you want to go for lunch?” Yoongi continues, in an attempt to distract Seokjin.

Seokjin’s not listening. He lowers his sunglasses to peer over the top of them, then outright takes them off to use to point with. “That kid over there is just coming to the realisation that they’ve forgotten their suit jacket.”

Yoongi can only watch for a moment before the second-hand mortification gets the better of him – he has to physically turn away. “Hyung, if I wanted to relive my youth orchestra days, I’d just plan to do something that would cause me to have anxiety nightmares.”

Seokjin shakes his head, but leads them out of the foyer. “Kids these days, I don’t think I ever forgot my entire suit jacket before a performance.”

“You say ‘kids’, but most of the people in the youth orchestra aren’t that much younger than you,” Yoongi points out as they step out into the sun. “I mean, you would’ve still been able to join the youth orchestra up until last year.”

“Not sure the director or the conductor would’ve been happy if I’d told them I was quitting my job to join the youth orchestra,” Seokjin says. “Oh! Speaking of the director, a little birdie told me he was going to ask you to do a performance this autumn.”

“Was the little birdie the director himself?” Yoongi asks flatly.

Seokjin smiles a pleasant little curve. “Yes. I told him I’d see you at lunch and let you know so you have a little time to think it over before he asks you officially. I also told him I was pretty sure I knew what your answer would be, but he said he still needs to ask.”

“Like I’m going to say no,” Yoongi says with an eyeroll. “Any idea what he wants?”

“It’ll be right smack in the middle of our Romantic Retrospective season, so he’d probably like something in that vein.” Seokjin shrugs. “Honestly, I think you could probably do whatever, he’s got a soft spot for you.”

“That’s… Super convenient, actually.”

“What, that the director has a soft spot for you?” Seokjin shepherds Yoongi into one of the nearest places for food, a French-style charcuterie that isn’t necessarily Yoongi’s go-to favourite, but does win points for being super close to the Arts Center. “Don’t worry, Yoongi, you don’t need nepotism, you can get by on your good looks and charm.”

“Thanks,” Yoongi says flatly. “I actually meant that it’d fall in the middle of the Romantic Retrospective, I’ve been picking away at Beethoven for a while now, it’ll be nice to have a definitive date to work towards.”

“Which one?” Seokjin asks curiously as they approach the counter. He’s apparently ordered ahead – the baker not only recognises them, but has their order packed up neatly in a box, ready to go.

“The Seventh Symphony.”

“Liszt?” Yoongi nods. As Seokjin leads them back outside, box of pastries in hand, Yoongi can tell, from the look on his face, that he’s about to say something ridiculous. “If the director had a soft spot for you before, now he’s basically going to want to suck your dick for filling the Beethoven-less spot in the performance schedule.”

“They’ve got no one performing Beethoven?” Yoongi says, choosing to ignore the majority of Seokjin’s statement.

“It’s a big period,” Seokjin says. “Lot of guys writing music. Not to mention schedules like this always mean we get loads of Europeans over who want to perform some weird no-name composer so they can make their name as the musician who rediscovered, I don’t know, yet another guy named Johann.”

“But still, Beethoven?”

“Like I said, the director’s going to be very, very grateful,” Seokjin says, waggling his eyebrows until Yoongi snatches the box of pastries away from him.

The director doesn’t, thankfully for their HR department, offer to suck Yoongi’s dick for choosing to perform Beethoven, but he is incredibly grateful, to the point where he even gives Yoongi his pick of dates to perform on.

It does mean he needs a proper score, though. While he’s just been casually working on the piece as a hobby, he’s been using loose leaf print outs of slightly grainy jpegs, and while he’s holepunched it and threaded some string through to bind the pages together, there’s no way he can go on stage with something that looks like it’s been cobbled together by a child.

He’d ordered one online so he could make notes in it, but within the first few pages he can tell it’s just not going to cut it, the score not being remotely performance ready - so, he heads to the orchestral library to see if they’ve got anything more appropriate.

“Min Yoongi-ssi,” the librarian says, bowing her head. “What can I do for you?”

Yoongi bows back, then hands her his sheet music. “I’ve got a performance of this coming up, but I can’t use this score for the actual performance.”

“Congratulations,” she says genuinely, before holding the score up with a slight frown as she examines the publisher with a keen eye.

“Do we have any scores already in the library?” Yoongi asks pleadingly. “Preferably something I can make pencil notations in? I can’t use this.”

She flicks through the pages and audibly hisses through her teeth at something. “Where did you even get this? There are three notation errors on this page alone.” She flicks through a few more pages, then winces.

“Online.” The librarian looks at him with a furious little furrow in her brow. “I was in a hurry!”

“And look where your impatience has brought you,” she teases. “These page turns are dreadful.”

“That’s my main problem,” Yoongi says. “I’d like to avoid needing a page turner, if I can.”

The librarian hums, skewing her mouth to the side as she reads through the sheet music for a moment. “That might prove difficult,” she says eventually. “We’ve got clean copies on record, and I can tidy up one so it’s more or less performance ready for you, but I’m not sure I can format it in a way to completely avoid a page turner…” She disappears through the door behind her desk, to the mysterious world of the archives; she’s not gone for as long as Yoongi had thought she’d be, and she returns with a plain-bound score. “Here’s the blank one, which should be easier to use than the one you’re currently using – the notes are correct, for starters - and I can have the edited copy ready for you by the end of next week. If you’re desperate to avoid a page turner, I can look into what I can do, but that could take me weeks, maybe even a month.”

“A month?” Yoongi asks – he doesn’t think he’s ever asked for an edited manuscript that’s taken them more than two weeks to get ready for them, just how difficult will the Liszt be without a page turner?

“We’ve got a shipment of nineteenth century Sijo notations coming in this week, which we need to store,” the librarian replies, looking genuinely apologetic. “I don’t want to promise something I can’t deliver.” A month without the sheet music he’ll be using is too long, especially considering that it’s less than six months until his performance date. She lays the score on the desk, then gently slides it towards him. “Do you know any page turners you could ask?”

“One?” Yoongi says. “But it’s a big commitment, the Seventh is forty minutes long…” It’s why he’d wanted to avoid a page turner – with such a long piece, at relatively short notice, his list of people he likes to ask is limited. He could try asking one of his students at the university he teaches at once a week, but the risk of asking a student is that if they overcommit during exam periods, page turning is one of the first commitments they’ll drop.

There’s really only one person that comes to mind, and that’s even more of a huge ask. Namjoon’s only page turned for him in a few rehearsals, after all, so Yoongi has no idea if they’d even work well together in a performance setting. Not to mention that Namjoon’s probably gearing up for his own performance responsibilities during the big autumn season.

Yet, whenever Yoongi thinks about needing a page turner, he can’t help but imagine Namjoon’s hands turning the pages for him, Namjoon at his side. (In his head, Namjoon is much, much closer than any respectable page turner would ever sit, but that’s nobody’s business but Yoongi’s.)

“Well, we keep a list of people in the orchestra, trainee orchestral librarians, and local students who are happy to page turn if needed,” the librarian says. “So I can ask around, but as you say, it’s a big commitment, so if you’ve worked with this page turner before, I’d recommend asking them first.”

“I don’t want to put him on the spot,” Yoongi says. He doesn’t know why he’s offloading on their librarian, but she’s got that sort of air about her – patient, mild-mannered, deeply wise, like they source a particular personality type for librarians. “He works full-time here in the orchestra, so it’s not like he’s got unlimited free time to practice a forty minute symphonic reduction with me.”

“Oh, are you talking about Namjoon-ssi?” The librarian asks.

“You know him?” Yoongi frowns, then snorts. “Wait, of course you do. I meant you know he page turns?”

She nods. “He’s on our list of people who’re happy to volunteer as page turners if they’re needed. You should definitely ask him – he’s page turned Elgar’s Violin Concerto for Seokjin-ssi before, and that’s longer than Beethoven’s Seventh.”

“I don’t want him to feel like he has to, just because…” What? They’re friends? Coworkers? Some weird, nebulous relationship, where they’ve got mutual friends and he enjoys hanging out with Namjoon, but they’ve really only actually done so a handful of times? “… he’s page turned for me before.” Yoongi finishes limply.

“Maybe he’d want to, because of that?” She skews her mouth to the side as she thinks. “I mean, I’m not a page turner, but if I was good at something, and somebody I was friendly with needed help with that something, I’d want to know that whoever was helping them was good at it, so who better than me, right?” She shrugs. “What’s the worst he could say, right?”

Yoongi thinks about this as he walks up from the basement. He’s not sure, honestly, that ‘no’ would be the worst thing Namjoon could say. Yoongi could understand a no – they’re all busy, after all. The worst would be something people-pleasing and vague, a half-commitment that he’d try and worm out of at the first opportunity.

He doesn’t think Namjoon seems like the kinds of person who’d do that, honestly, but his brain helpfully supplies countless scenarios of trying to track Namjoon down for page turning rehearsals, scenarios that get increasingly fantastical as he gets closer and closer to the hall they’re using for orchestra rehearsal, until he’s walking over to the piano imagining that Namjoon commits to helping him page turn, comes to every rehearsal, only to change his mind the afternoon before the performance.

None of them know what they’re rehearsing today, a secrecy usually only reserved for when a record label wants to record an orchestral version of one of their songs. It means Yoongi’s day could vary greatly, and not necessarily in a good way – some companies provide excellent orchestral scores for their songs, really showcasing the best of their song and the instruments playing it. Other times, somebody who’s clearly never heard an orchestra play beyond a MIDI file just assigns random instruments to random bars. For one song, Yoongi had had to sit through hours of rehearsals just to play a two-bar trill, the sort of technique that sounds impressive in the wider context of a full piece, but is mind-numbingly boring to just play on its own.

Yoongi can spot the company executive from a mile away; she’s sitting in the front row, right next to the stage, typing on her phone with one hand and her laptop with the other. Their conductor is standing in front of her, looking a little impatient, which is how Yoongi can tell that this executive is from one of the big companies – they must be paying a lot of money if their conductor is willing to waste everyone’s time waiting for her to finish her work.

Eventually, she seems to remember that the orchestra can’t actually play without sheet music, and she leans down, lifts up a briefcase, and pulls out a thick wodge of papers, which she hands to the conductor before immediately going back to work. Yoongi can practically see the irritated little judder that goes up the conductor’s spine, but he just wordlessly turns away, seeks out one of the orchestra assistants, and hands her the sheet music to give out.

Because the piano, and by extension Yoongi, are pretty close to the stage stairs, Yoongi gets his sheet music early. He doesn’t know the song, but he doesn’t know every song in existence, and more likely than not they’re recording an orchestral version as part of this song’s promotion schedule.

What he does know, however, is the song’s melody, because it’s Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major.

Well, he thinks it’s supposed to be. For starters, the song’s in C major, for some reason – he knows enough about pop music to know that G major is a pretty well used chord, so maybe it’s been written for an artist that needed a different key? The rhythm’s off, too, each note given equal length and weight, like somebody first learning to play music and focusing more on getting the pitch right than the rhythm.

Yoongi can see, like a ripple, the rest of the orchestra recognise what they’re playing, and he can hear a sigh from all the way over in the cellos that he’s sure comes from Hoseok, possibly when he notices that they’re not just being relegated to the Prelude, they’re being stuck with just the very famous first sixteen bars, which loops back on itself with a particularly nasty transition from a B to a G.

Yoongi plays his bit to practice, although he’s not sure he needs to – the piano’s been confined to some basic chords for most of the song – but Yoongi quickly realises his problem when he starts to automatically correct the song to sound more like Bach, rather than whatever artist this song is going to be given to.

He’s not the only one, either – from the sounds of the violins, somebody keeps playing on from bar sixteen, muscle memory kicking in, and almost the entire percussion section is infinitesimally out of time with one another, creating a soupy, muddy rhythm.

“Okay, any questions?” The conductor says, climbing the stage stairs. Yoongi has a few – mostly wondering what Bach ever did to deserve this treatment, and questioning why they need to be complicit in this aural crime – but he knows why. Funding for the arts is never quite enough, too few grants to go around, the public making trips to the orchestra never as often as they’d like, regardless of how much public outreach they do. They need to take jobs like these, the cheesy adverts, the flash mobs, and, yes, the covers of pop songs of varying quality, just to be able to do things they want to do.

Which reminds Yoongi that he needs to find Namjoon at the end of rehearsal. It’s a distracting enough thought that it takes the rest of his concentration just to play the song properly, and not divert immediately into Bach’s actual intentions for the piece. The rest of the orchestra play, technically, well, but he can hear their stiff apprehension. He doubts a layman would be able to tell, and the executive certainly doesn’t seem to care, but the conductor looks like he’s about to pop an aneurysm; he waves over the assistant, mutters to her, and she runs off again.

“Quick break – we’re going to play Bach to loosen up, then try that again,” he says. Yoongi would argue that playing Bach and then returning to this fake shade of Bach-adjacent music won’t help, but he gets the impression the conductor is less concerned about loosening them up, and more concerned with preventing them from losing their minds.

Regardless, they now have a few minutes to kill, so Yoongi gets up and heads over to the woodwinds.

Namjoon’s playing first flute today (from what Yoongi’s heard about the first flautist, pop covers don’t exactly strike him as the guy’s general vibe), and he’s accompanied by Jeongguk, who grins at him when he spots Yoongi walking over.

“No Jimin today?” Yoongi asks.

Jeongguk shakes his head. “Jimin-hyung and Taehyung-hyung are doing outreach at an anime convention, playing music from that one film, you know the one.” Yoongi doesn’t, but he’s positive they’re having a better time playing whatever piece they’ve chosen than the rest of the orchestra are having playing this song. “I heard about your Liszt performance, hyung, congratulations!”

“Thank you,” Yoongi says, once again baffled by just how fast news travels in the orchestra. He’s never seen the water cooler where this type of workplace chat happens – maybe there’s some group chat he forgot to sign up for?

“What’s this?” Namjoon asks. He’s got his sheet music set up to make it look like he’s making notes in pencil, but from this angle Yoongi can see that he’s actually making notes in an entirely unrelated textbook.

“I’m doing a solo performance of Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Seventh,” Yoongi explains. Namjoon opens his mouth to reply, but Yoongi barrels ahead. “I wanted to ask you a favour, actually.”

“Me?” Namjoon looks bewildered for a moment, then his face brightens. “Oh! You need a page turner, right? Yeah, of course.”

“I feel like you should give it a bit more thought before agreeing to such a huge commitment?” Yoongi says, trying not to laugh.

“Right, right,” Namjoon says. “Text me the date, and maybe let me see the sheet music? I’m pretty sure the answer will be yes, though, I don’t think I’ve got any plans during the Romantic Retrospective beyond one solo and my orchestral commitments, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be playing first flute for any of those.”

Jeongguk sighs. “Oh, of course First Flute-nim will be mysteriously available for every piece then. I’m going to hide his flute one of these days, just you wait.”

“I’m not sure hiding his flute will do any good, he could just borrow one from storage,” Yoongi says. “What you want to do is put a little bit of glue on his flute keys so that his fingers get stuck.”

Namjoon laughs, loud, as Jeongguk grins up at Yoongi. “Hey, if First Flute-nim turns up to work soon with a severe case of flute fingers, don’t look at me.”

Yoongi could quite happily spend more time here chatting to Namjoon and Jeongguk, but the orchestra assistant is running up the aisle between the audience’s seats, sheet music in hand, so Yoongi hastily returns to the piano.

The thing about not having your work friend’s number, and working in such a huge place as this, and in a workplace environment where people don’t check the emails daily, or sometimes even at all, is that he has no way of finding Namjoon.

“That’s dramatic,” Seokjin says, looking up from where he’s rosining his bow. They’re rehearsing the Debussy for their community outreach performance again, which means that Seokjin has asked Yoongi to arrive for their practice earlier than Hoseok so that they can warm up with something more difficult. At this point, Yoongi would imagine that Hoseok doesn’t need impressing, they’ve been working with each other for a while now, but he’s not going to turn down the opportunity to listen to Seokjin practice Vivaldi’s Winter. As First Violinist, Seokjin obviously has excellent intonation, but it really shines whenever he plays pieces Yoongi’s heard countless mediocre violinists play.

The piano accompaniment score Seokjin has given him is fun, too – the piano is clearly not the point of the piece, but is instead relegated to the tension-building chords, spine-tingling harmonies that really take advantage of the huge octave range of the piano.

Yoongi’s playing these chords as Seokjin’s talking to him, which is making him scowl as Yoongi keeps ramping up the tension. “You’re going to see the guy tomorrow afternoon at rehearsals. Not to mention that you could literally just ask me for his number.” Yoongi plays louder, just to be annoying; Seokjin responds by picking up his violin and, obnoxiously loudly, playing the melody.

“Why are we yelling Vivaldi at each other?” Hoseok asks as he comes into the room.

“Yoongi’s being dramatic, acting like he and Namjoon have been flung to the far corners of the universe because he didn’t think to get Namjoon’s number from him.”

Yoongi doesn’t say anything, just flips to the Allegro of Winter to play the solemn, sombre, repeated F note on the lowest octave of the piano. It’s not even supposed to be played that low, he just likes the way it settles into his bones; not to mention it pairs exceptionally well with the indignant look he shoots Seokjin over his shoulder.

“You need Namjoon’s number?” Hoseok says. “I’ve got it on my phone, if you want it.”

It’d be weird to say no to this. Seokjin’s known him long enough to know that sometimes he just like to be overly dramatic about a problem with a very simple solution, and saying, No, thank you, I’ve refused to take Namjoon’s number from Seokjin for the bit, you see makes him sound like a madman, so he just politely thanks Hoseok.

Hoseok holds out his phone, and Yoongi gets a brief glimpse at the contact details for Namjoon followed by a bunch of emojis, before Hoseok takes his phone back and says, “Wait, I can just text them to you! What’re your details, hyung?”

So, that’s how Yoongi ends up with not just Namjoon’s number, but Hoseok’s, too. He doesn’t text Namjoon immediately, though, because Seokjin looks ready to jump out of his skin if Yoongi delays any more.

Thankfully, they’re ready for the performance – Yoongi’s changed his sheet music so that he doesn’t need a page turner, and he’s rehearsed this enough that he’s memorised most of the piece anyway. This is more of a courtesy rehearsal than anything else, just in case any of them had had any major interpretation epiphanies since their last rehearsal that they wanted to implement, so their warm up ends up taking longer than a start to finish run through of the Piano Trio.

Yoongi pulls out his phone and sends Namjoon a text that he tries not to overthink too much:

Yoongi: Hello Namjoon, this is Min Yoongi – I got your number from Jung Hoseok. I picked up a copy of the sheet music for Liszt, are you somewhere in the building? I can drop it off if so. I’m about to go get some lunch, then I’ll be doing general practice for the rest of the day, so I can find you whenever.

As soon as he sends it, he wishes he’d spent more time thinking it over. It’s ironic, overthinking his wish not to overthink, but he can’t help it, so he tries to distract himself by playing the piano. He immediately falls into that high, bell-like melody that’s been plaguing him for a while, notes flitting from one to the other.

“Oh, wow, I feel like I’ve just stumbled into a flute rehearsal!” Hoseok laughs.

Yoongi spins around on his stool. “You know the piece? What is it, it’s been driving me mad for weeks.”

“I don’t know the name of it,” Hoseok says apologetically. “But I know I’ve walked in on Jimin, Namjoon, and Jeongguk using it to warm up a lot.”

Suddenly, Yoongi remembers – he’s been playing the melody of the piece that had hypnotised him when he’d heard it coming out of the flautists’ practice room.

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

Kim Namjoon: hi hyung! i’m actually in the green practice room rn, if you’re nearby?

Yoongi looks up from his phone. “Do either of you know where the green practice room is?”

Seokjin shakes his head, frowning, while Hoseok says, “I’m still getting turned around in this place, having us based across multiple buildings is so confusing!”

Yoongi: Sorry, I don’t know which room that is?

Kim Namjoon: ah, my bad! we call it that because the window looks out onto the park, and in the summer the light shines on the trees and turns the room green?

Kim Namjoon: there’s not a piano in here, though, which is probably why you haven’t seen it!

Kim Namjoon: it’s the room at the end of the hall, the one next to the room that gets used for the youth orchestra’s rehearsals.

Kim Namjoon: we’re in here all day!

Yoongi bids his goodbyes to Hoseok and Seokjin, and heads over there. Namjoon’s right – Yoongi’s limited to the practice rooms that have pianos in them, so he hasn’t really explored them all, and the few he has been in don’t look like this one, brighter and airier with big windows, clearly designed to look good in promotional materials. Even through the glass panel in the door, Yoongi can see just how much light is getting into that room.

He hasn’t knocked yet, and he sees, and faintly hears, Namjoon, Jimin, Taehyung, and Jeongguk rehearsing something for a moment before Taehyung catches sight of him in the window. He doesn’t stop playing, just stands up and approaches the door, oboe and all, waiting for a brief pause in whatever they’re playing to let Yoongi in.

Yoongi goes to sit down off to the side to wait for a lull in their practice. It takes him a moment to recognise it, but that’s mostly because they’re playing the oboe, two flutes, and piccolo part of something that clearly seems to involve a full orchestra, judging by the pauses where none of them are playing the melody. He’d imagine it’s an opera, and his suspicions are confirmed when Namjoon and Taehyung begin playing the duet from the Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld. In Yoongi’s mind, the most prominent colour when he thinks of the Overture is the brass section, but as they start to get into the galop, he’s surprised by just how much flavour the woodwinds provide. Admittedly, he doesn’t spend too much time thinking about Orpheus in the Underworld – he’s sure that, if he’d ever given it more than a passing thought, he’d have noticed how prominent the woodwinds are in the piece – but it’s nice to hear the piece bifurcated like this, to appreciate what the smaller parts of the whole sound like.

“Thanks for waiting, hyung,” Namjoon says when they’ve finished.

“No, thank you,” Yoongi says, opening his briefcase, pulling out the score, and handing it to Namjoon, who flicks through it quickly. “September 23^rd is the date of my performance, by the way.”

Namjoon nods. “Sounds good, I’m happy to help.”

“Namjoon,” Yoongi says. It feels like looking a gift horse in the mouth, except the gift horse is kind, and generous, and has perfect teeth, and he’s worried that if he keeps looking the gift horse in the mouth, the horse is going to turn around and tell him to find a different page turner. Nevertheless, he barrels on. “I really think you should think about this a little more.”

“All right,” Namjoon says easily. “You said you were going to grab lunch, right?” Yoongi nods. “How’s about we both go grab lunch, I look at this while we eat, and then I give you my answer, which I can almost guarantee you is still going to be yes?”

“Are we invited to lunch?” Jeongguk asks.

“Nope, we need to run through the opening of the finale for Swan Lake!” Taehyung says. “Ideally we’d have Namjoon-hyung too, but he’s going to help Yoongi-hyung.”

“I don’t mind waiting?” Yoongi offers.

“Yes, you do,” Namjoon interjects immediately. “If you want to get to lunch in the next three hours, you do.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” Taehyung says with a frown. “But yes, Yoongi-hyung, we’d end up keeping you.”

“Taehyung,” Jimin says gently. “I think we’re good with Tchaikovsky.”

“Sorry if I think playing 122 semiquavers in a row is worth spending a little bit of attention on, especially considering that we immediately follow it with so many bars of sustained notes, I haven’t even bothered to count them,” Taehyung replies, with a speed so practiced that Yoongi would bet that they’d had this argument before.

“Taehyung’s family are coming up for the Tchaikovsky night during the Romantic Revival season,” Namjoon explains as they walk downstairs a few moments later. “I think he’s a bit nervous, it’s the first time his whole family have come to one of the performances since he started at the orchestra.” Namjoon looks at him out of the corner of his eye, which Yoongi only notices because he’s already looking at Namjoon the exact same way. “I noticed you weren’t down to solo for Tchaikovsky?”

Yoongi shakes his head. “Just orchestral accompaniment for the ballet pieces we’re performing.” He’s actually performing earlier in the Swan Lake segment, and then he has to sit onstage through the rest of the Swan Lake snippet, all of Romeo and Juliet, most of Sleeping Beauty, and then he gets to perform one glissando during the Sleeping Beauty Pas de Deux before he has to sneak away from the piano as unobtrusively as possible during the Waltz of the Flowers to sit behind the celesta for the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy segment. He’s seen the videos filled with gut-squirming second-hand embarrassment of people fucking up instrument changes during orchestral performances, and he usually tries to avoid doing instrument changes in performance settings entirely for that reason, but it can’t be helped. “Although you could argue Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy is a solo of sorts.”

Namjoon tilts his head in acknowledgement. “I honestly meant Piano Concerto No. 1, or Valse Sentimentale, but yeah, you’re right.”

“Have I not signed up for enough solos during the Romantic Revival?” Yoongi teases. “Is a forty minute performance on my own not enough? Must you work me to the bone?”

“As far as I know, you’ve signed up for one solo performance and Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy during the whole month, you’re hardly going to wear your fingers down to the bone,” Namjoon teases right back; Yoongi snorts. “Seriously though, do you know what you’ll be doing for the rest of the performances?”

“Accompaniment, mostly,” Yoongi says with a shrug. “I think they’re still finalising who they want me to perform with.” The thing about being the only pianist on the orchestra’s payroll means that there’s just not enough of him to go around for accompaniment, so the director is currently picking pieces to slot into the spaces left in the performance schedule, and then they’ll tell Yoongi what pieces he’ll need to practice accompaniment for.

“Oh, no kidding?” Yoongi raises an eyebrow. “Well, I’ve been scheduled for Elgar’s Salut d’Amour, and unless they’re going to put me with the harpist…”

“Not likely,” Yoongi says. “If they can get away with using a pianist, they usually do, because if they need a harpist, they need a harpist, you know?”

Namjoon nods as they walk into the convenience store. “So now you know at least one of the pieces you’re probably going to be performing.”

“Makes a nice change,” Yoongi says. “Usually I just get sent an email uncomfortably close to the performance dates.” He’s accompanied performances with less than 24 hours’ notice before – admittedly not since college, but there’s still a persistent assumption that, as he’s just accompanying the soloist, he can just get away with sight-reading a piece.

The weather’s just nice enough – cool enough for a jacket, but the wind is still and it hasn’t rained in a while – that they can sit outside and eat their convenience store lunch while Namjoon looks through the score. Despite his insistence that his answer’s going to be yes, he still examines the score carefully, asks Yoongi questions about his intentions for certain bars. For a flautist, he’s surprisingly knowledgeable about the piano.

“I took a few years of lessons when I was a kid,” Namjoon explains when Yoongi asks him about it. “My parents wanted me to take lessons, and I think they just picked the first instrument they found a teacher for.”

“What made you switch to flute?”

Namjoon hums thoughtfully. “You know, it was kind of an accident. I needed to join an afterschool club, because my parents worked late and they wanted me to spend time under supervision, but the only music related club my school had was orchestra.” He looks at Yoongi significantly. “And, as you know, most orchestras don’t have pianists.”

“So you learned flute from scratch?” Yoongi asks, impressed.

“We were only kids, it didn’t take me long to catch up to the level everyone else was at,” Namjoon says with a laugh. “It helped that I could read music pretty okay by then, so it wasn’t like I was joining with no experience at all.” He takes out his phone, snaps a photo of one of the pages of the score, and starts highlighting certain bars. “What about you, what made you choose piano?”

It’s a question that gets thrown around a lot, by musicians and non-musicians alike. With non-musicians, Yoongi’s found that they expect some sort of bone-deep, inherent knowledge, an understanding when a musician finally finds their instrument. With fellow musicians, on the other hand, they’re usually just asking in the same way you’d ask somebody what school they went to, or where they grew up.

“We had a piano at home when I was growing up,” Yoongi explains with a shrug.

Namjoon nods, as though he’d been expecting something as simple as this. Then he taps his fingernail on the score. “Can I keep this as my copy if I say yes? So I can make notes.”

“Yeah, of course,” Yoongi says, trying not to look overly relieved by the knowledge that Namjoon does seem to know what he’s doing.

“And one last question – are you free to do a once-through of the whole piece this afternoon?” He must see Yoongi’s hesitance, because he immediately clarifies with, “My answer’s still going to be yes either way, don’t worry. I’m just curious about the bars that’ll need page turns.”

“I’m free,” Yoongi says with a little frown. “I’m warning you, though, I’m nowhere near performance-ready.”

“Don’t worry,” Namjoon says, with a quirked grin and a raised eyebrow. “Neither am I.”

Yoongi’s worked with page turners before, obviously – he’s been playing enough that that’s unavoidable – which means he’s worked with the full spectrum of page turners, from the ones that had just rocked up to the performance, asked Yoongi to give them a signal when he wanted a page turned, and then done just that (to very varying degrees of success), to the one who had insisted on rehearsing with Yoongi every single time he practiced.

Namjoon seems to be falling into a very comfy middle ground. When he asks Yoongi what his signal is for when he wants a page turn, he asks specific questions about that – does he want the turn to be on the next note after the nod, or is he telling Namjoon to turn after a full bar? Does Yoongi know if he has any involuntary movements while he plays that could be mistaken for a page turn nod?

Yoongi watches, fascinated, as Namjoon makes his own notes, too. It’s Namjoon’s job to remain as unobtrusive as possible, so he watches carefully in the lead up to where Yoongi will want page turns, and makes careful annotations in his own copy of the score to ensure he’s never in a position where he’ll be standing up while he could distract Yoongi in his peripheral vision. He highlights sections  where he’ll need to curve himself around Yoongi carefully, because Yoongi will, almost immediately, need room to play in the lower octaves.

They’re practicing that now, as a matter of fact. Yoongi had done the full playthrough while Namjoon sat and made notes, and now Namjoon is asking him to go back over the places in the score he’d made note of. During the second movement, there’s a part where he plays a descending scale that trips down multiple octaves, and the sheet music has a page turn right at the start of it, apparently on the understanding that he’ll have a page turner and his muscle memory will kick in while he plays, leaving the page turner plenty of time to turn the page.

And it’s true, it’s easy enough to remember how to play a three-note chord as it descends down every note in the A minor scale. However, if Namjoon doesn’t get in, turn the page fast enough, then sit back down, Yoongi ends up bumping right into him.

“Sorry, that one was on me,” Namjoon says with a sigh, flopping back down. “I was trying to give you more time with the part before the descent.”

Yoongi shakes his head; Namjoon gives off a lot of warm body heat, so every time Yoongi knocks into him, he has to contend with the knowledge that he’d be great to sit with during the winter months. It’s surely not fair that this man is talented, attractive, and cozy to sit next to? “I think I’m just going to have to learn the bars before by rote. I’ll get there eventually.” He doesn’t like having to commit a part to memory like that – obviously with repeat playthroughs there are huge chunks of the piece he can play by memory, but the score is there for a reason, and the less room in his head he specifically devotes to memorising a piece, the more room he has for remembering what interpretation he prefers to play.

“No, no, we can get this down,” Namjoon says firmly. “I’ve got an idea.” He flips the page back over. “Start from there.” He points to a bar midway down the page, and as soon as Yoongi starts playing, he notices Namjoon standing. It’s much earlier than he’s ever stood for this part before – makes sense, if he wants to try something new – but as Yoongi starts creeping closer to the descent, he still hasn’t turned the page. Then, as he starts playing down the octaves, he thinks Namjoon’s going to turn the page – and he does, but he’s curved himself around Yoongi’s body in such a way that Yoongi would have to deliberately curl himself into and around Namjoon in order to touch him.

It does mean, however, that he’s basically doing the equivalent body posture of any number of overdone romantic tropes – holding his jacket over Yoongi’s head, standing over him on public transport while he dozes, even the obnoxious kabedon, and Yoongi is supposed to play Liszt under these conditions?

“Thoughts?” Namjoon says, sitting back down.

Honestly, Yoongi doesn’t have any thoughts about pretty much anything right now, but he needs to say something, because Namjoon’s doing him a huge favour, so he opens his mouth and says, “Yeah, that works.”

And it does. It’s not a conventional page-turning posture, but Namjoon is using his height and his long limbs to both of their advantage. He’s not obstructing the audience in any way – in fact, unless they’re page turning experts, they probably won’t even notice how Namjoon’s closer than the usual page turner would get. Even if they are experts, they probably won’t be able to see anything amiss unless they’re sitting at a specific angle in the audience. It is, by most metrics, the perfect workaround.

And if Yoongi gets goosebumps every time Namjoon does it as they practice it over and over? Well, that’s something he needs to ignore, at least for now.

Yoongi tries not to date colleagues. It doesn’t always work out that way – he really only meets musicians these days, and usually classical musicians to boot. Jobs are scarce, and he usually ends up meeting the same people again and again, further down the line. But he does at least try not to get crushes and start relationships with people he’s actively working with.

“What have you done, hyung?” Taehyung says as soon as Yoongi walks into the practice room. Yoongi’s not sure how Taehyung managed to get access to a pianist’s practice room, but he’s not sure how Taehyung gets away with most of the things he gets away with in this place.

“Nothing,” Yoongi says, far too quickly.

“You look like a kid who’s turned up to practice and forgotten to, you know, practice beforehand,” Taehyung says. He frowns. “You did rehearse this piece, yeah?”

“Of course I did,” Yoongi says – you can’t blag Saint-Saëns.

“Then why do you look so guilty?” Taehyung presses as Yoongi sets himself up at the piano. The Saint-Saëns night is tomorrow, and with most other musicians Yoongi would have really preferred to have a last run-through of a piece before now, just in case something crops up. With Taehyung, though, he trusts that if there are any sticky spots they need to go over, Taehyung will be more than happy to spend more time rehearsing, even if it means a late night.

“Hypothetically,” Yoongi says, taking enough care to straighten his sheet music that he could use it as a spirit level. “Have you ever known somebody to date a fellow orchestra member and it go well?” Taehyung doesn’t reply. He doesn’t reply for so long, in fact, that readjusting his sheet music just means that he’s inching it incrementally across the music shelf, rather than actually accomplishing anything, so he finally turns around on his stool.

Taehyung’s looking at him with wide eyes, hands frozen mid-oboe assembly. Seeing Yoongi looking back at him seems to jolt him back into action, because he says, “How did you find out? Wait,” he says, before Yoongi can ask him what on earth he’s talking about. “Are you asking because you’ve found out about me and Jimin, or because you want to date me?”

“Uh… Neither?” Yoongi says, bewildered.

“Oh. Uh, surprise?” Taehyung says, going back to assembling his oboe. “If Jimin asks, can you pretend I didn’t accidentally tell you? We were going to wait for a few weeks before we told anyone, we didn’t want the whole orchestra to know about it before we’d told our families, you know what the gossip in this place is like.” Yoongi nods, satisfied to have gotten an answer on Taehyung’s opinion about dating a fellow orchestra member, even if it had been indirectly.

While Yoongi had been practicing the Oboe Sonata, he’d accompanied as many different recordings as he could get his hands on, but of course hearing it from an oboe in the room changes things. Not only that, but getting to watch Taehyung physically play it changes Yoongi’s interpretation of the piece. He plays the key change like it pains him, and it helps Yoongi to imbibe his subsequent crescendoing ascents with a frantic energy.

Taehyung stops suddenly towards the start of the Sonata’s second movement, so what’s supposed to be a sustained high C comes out of his oboe like a wet little squawk. “Wait,” he says, enviably not out of breath even after playing the difficult introduction to the second movement. “Why did you ask?”

“Why did I ask what?” Yoongi replies, still in the zone from concentrating on the piece.

“Earlier, you asked me what I thought about dating another member of the orchestra,” Taehyung says. “But you didn’t know about me and Jimin, and you don’t want to date me…” He trails off significantly.

“You say that like I’ve just turned you down,” Yoongi tries to deflect.

“You basically have,” Taehyung teases. “And don’t change the subject, hyung, who is it that you want to date?”

“That’s not important,” Yoongi says; Taehyung raises an eyebrow at him. “It’s not!”

“All right,” Taehyung says sceptically. “But to answer your question, I don’t think it’s any more or less difficult than anybody else dating their coworker. It makes sense that you could get a crush on somebody you spend a lot of time with nearly every day. And yeah, it could suck if you end up breaking up, but breaking up sucks nearly all the time anyway.”

Yoongi already knows this, is the thing – he’d mostly been asking in the vague hope that Taehyung would tell him, outright, that dating a fellow orchestra member was a bad idea, so then he’d have a good excuse for not pursuing anything more with Namjoon. Now his only real excuse is that he still doesn’t know Namjoon all that well, and that’s something that’s probably just going to change gradually over time, an excuse with an indeterminable expiration date.

The concert days dedicated to a singular composer can, at times, feel a little bit like a slog. Long concerts are tiring anyway, but when they’re so singularly focused, it can sometimes feel never ending, especially with a composer like Saint-Saëns, who struggled to adapt to the changing classical music scene, and composed in the same Romantic tradition for his entire life. It’s a great casual introduction to the orchestra’s Romantic Retrospective coming in the autumn, but it does add a new level of challenge to playing the pieces.

Nevertheless, Yoongi’s performances have gone well so far, and he and Taehyung had even received a standing ovation for the Oboe Sonata. Now there’s just Symphony No. 3 to complete, and then they’re done for the day.

The first movement gives him, quite literally, nothing to do – in comparison to the second, which has passages that are so vigorous and rapid he has anxiety nightmares about having to play them with mittens on – so he can more or less appreciate the movement from one of the best seats in the hall. They’re performing at the Lotte Concert Hall, in part because it’s one of the few venues they have access to that includes an organ. It’s a beautiful venue, but that can only hold Yoongi’s attention for so long before he starts paying attention to the music.

Yes, it can be draining to play a long concert day focused exclusively on one composer, but there are moments, sometimes even extended passages, where it’s so easy for Yoongi to look beyond his workday exhaustion, ignore the fact that his new concert shoes have given him a blister uncomfortably close to where he presses down on the piano pedal, and just appreciate the fact that he gets to perform music as his job.

However, his general inaction in the first movement of the symphony means he can’t help but notice that something’s… Off. It’s not an immediately apparent problem – it’s not like somebody’s egregiously out of key, or out of step with everyone else. He tries to isolate where the problem’s coming from, going through each section of the orchestra, and he notices that the issue is with the woodwinds at the exact second the first flautist plays a solo.

He’s not playing anything wrong, his interpretation is a perfectly valid one, it’s just not the one the conductor is conducting. It’s fascinating to watch, in a sort of horrifying way, like watching a singer lip sync just a fraction out of time. Yoongi’s sure the audience won’t notice, but the conductor certainly is, and because it’s the guest conductor, she’s not even attempting to hide how furious she is. While Yoongi’s alarmed at the fact that the first flautist doesn’t seem to care about the fact that this is an orchestral piece, not a full solo, he’s at least a little comforted to know that surely, surely the orchestra can’t justify keeping the guy as first flute after this stunt.

Now that he’s noticed the problem, it seems glaringly obvious to him, especially in the sections where the orchestra all play together. The thing about this symphony, and any piece involving an organ, is that the organ is the hero of the piece – there’s a reason it’s called the Orgelsinfonie, after all. Regardless of how many solos any of the other instruments have, most audience members will go away remembering the organ.

Because of this, most orchestral musicians Yoongi knows will almost bend to the whims of the organist, who’s playing with his back to the conductor. Yes, he does have a mirror that gives him a Lady of Shalott view of the conductor, but Yoongi’s seen the field of vision that view grants an organist, and it’s not wide. The orchestra should not be capitulating to the wants of a capricious flautist, and every time the first flautist plays his own interpretation that puts him at odds with the ] rest of the orchestra, it feels like he’s getting up and waving a red flag in front of a bull. It’s maddening to listen to, especially in a performance setting, because Yoongi has no doubt that any of the other three flautists could do a much better job.

Speaking of the other flautists, Yoongi tries to peer around his piano discretely to see what they’re up to. It’s Jimin and Jeongguk today, and he can tell that they’re just as irritated, if not more so, by what the first flautist is playing.

Namjoon, meanwhile, is sitting behind Yoongi, ready to page turn for the handful of times where Yoongi will be playing for long enough that he’ll need a page turner, and Yoongi can’t even bear thinking about turning around to see what Namjoon’s thinking about all of this. He’s heard Namjoon play the first flute’s part for this piece as a warm up for when they’re rehearsing Salut d’Amour, and he’s maddeningly good at it.

When the second movement starts, Yoongi’s vicious energy bleeds into his performance, but at least he has the common decency to play as the conductor wants him to, even if he can hear the rage underlying every note. It’s an energy that pairs well with the organ chords and cymbal crashes of the second movement, though, even if the occasional spots where the first flute comes back into prominence make Yoongi want to frisbee his sheet music over the string section to knock his flute out of his hands.

Even his anger at the first flute, however, isn’t enough to pull him out of how stunning the final moments of the symphony are. With almost everyone playing at once, and the first musicians of each section given just a handful of bars each where they’re fully prominent, the brass section crescendoing, the strings building up tension, the organist interjecting with brash chords, the percussion going wild as they barrel towards the end, the resolution in the final moment is enough to give him goosebumps.

The audience cheers, and while the logical part of Yoongi’s brain wasn’t really expecting anything less, there’s still the inherent relief that comes with knowing that not only have they played well, but that they’re not about to be lambasted for the faults of the first flute.

“You all right?” Namjoon murmurs in his ear under the cover of applause, his breath warm. “You look like you’re about to leap over the piano.”

“I heard the first flute go rogue and it was all I could notice for the rest of the symphony,” Yoongi mutters back as they all stand to take their bows. It’s only as they’re all walking off stage that Yoongi turns to Namjoon, who’s walking at his side, and continues with, “It was driving me crazy.”

“I didn’t hear it,” Namjoon says with a chuckle. “Although, to be fair, I was watching you perform for most of it.”

Yoongi blinks at him. The piano has some difficult segments in this symphony, true, but there are long, long swathes where he’s not doing anything at all. It’s something he and the other pianist, who’d been doing even less than him, needed only for a short four-hand segment, have joked about during rehearsal – he’s even caught her doing personality quizzes on her phone underneath the piano before now, which he can’t really blame her for.

All that to say, he’s not sure what Namjoon could even have been watching him do in a forty minute symphony where he does, proportionally, not a lot in it.

“Did you just zone out for the, what, thirty-five minutes I wasn’t doing anything?” Yoongi jokes. After some performances, people in the audience might seek him out to talk to him about the performance, but not only is he expecting people to seek out the organist, the brass section, and the percussion before him, he also doesn’t want to stop walking at Namjoon’s side, who seems to be making a beeline for the exit.

“No,” Namjoon says, looking surprised. Then he shakes his head. “You’ve never seen yourself perform, I suppose. Even when you’re not playing anything, you’re still performing the piece, it’s interesting to watch – although I guess in your head you’re actually plotting ways to assassinate the first flautist?”

Yoongi hums, thinking this over. He’s never really thought of his moments of silence during an orchestra performance as part of his performance, although he supposes they are, like the texture of a canvas behind a painting, or the white page the text of a book is printed onto. It’s an interesting perspective, and one he’s looking forward to thinking about some more.

“Sorry, was that weird?” Namjoon says, misinterpreting his silence. “I didn’t mean to make you feel weird by watching you, you’re just a fascinating performer.”

Yoongi shakes his head, but doesn’t elaborate further, because what it actually makes him feel is hopeful. Hopeful that he’s not alone in this burgeoning crush.

Yoongi’s stuck on the third movement of Beethoven’s Seventh.

It’s ironic, because it’s sort of the odd one out of the movements – the black sheep, the one that’s not really anyone’s favourite, an afterthought. Very few people seek out a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and eagerly anticipate the third movement above all of the others, and he absolutely could get away with playing it at the stage he’s at.

But he can’t stomach the thought of going on stage and playing it like this, when it sounds like he’s scoring a mediocre, low-budget drama set in a made up European country, where all of the characters are wearing costumes from different eras, and they’re all dancing at a ball that has no bearing on the plot except for the fact the directors wanted a ball scene.

“You’ve given this some thought,” Namjoon says. Yoongi doesn’t usually do this, doesn’t ask people to give him their opinions on his interpretation before he has some solid ideas himself, but he’s desperate – his Liszt performance is in just over a month, and he hasn’t even got started on ironing out the fine details of the fourth movement yet. Sure, he could play the whole thing right now, but it would be, at best, fine. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that you’re evoking an older style of dance in a movement that’s supposed to sound like a traditional dance?”

“Yes, but didn’t you hear me say a mediocre, low-budget-”

“Drama set in a made up European country, yes, I did,” Namjoon says. “Lean into the fact that it’s a scherzo, then.”

“You might as well have just told me to “just do it”,” Yoongi says, clunking his way through the opening bars for a moment.

“Make it like, I don’t know, a bacchanal or something,” Namjoon says. “It was supposed to be the complete opposite of those old ballroom dances, right?” He looks at the sheet music over Yoongi’s shoulder. “I do think you’re at a disadvantage here with the reduction, especially in the parts where you’re literally just playing one note at a time, but I think you can really lean into the woozy drunkenness of the slower parts with a piano.”

Yoongi plays it with that image in mind – tentatively at first, and then it’s like a switch flips in his mind. The scenario Namjoon’s laid out for him, combined with his heat and scent and the press of his shoulder against Yoongi’s, the whole situation makes it much, much easier for him to really embody the raucousness he’s needed to go for. Beethoven would be proud.

He’s not sure what Beethoven would feel about his dick stirring in his pants at the thought of Namjoon pressing close to him, sweaty and grinning from dancing, but he really tries to avoid thinking about dead composers in the same context as his dick.

“Cool,” Namjoon says simply once Yoongi’s run through it again, as though he hasn’t just turned Yoongi’s world upside-down. “Want to take a break? Because I got recommended a video yesterday about the best movements in classical music, and I want to know if makes you as angry as it made me.”

Yoongi and Namjoon have been texting a lot outside of work, and Yoongi always marvels at the fact that they both seemingly never run out of things to talk about with one another. Considering he was at work with Namjoon yesterday, was texting him yesterday evening, and has been in full orchestra rehearsal with him all morning, it stands to reason that they shouldn’t still have things they’ve been wanting to discuss.

And yet.

“Why do you watch them?” Yoongi asks, nevertheless getting up from the piano stool to sit next to Namjoon at the practice room’s table. “If it’s a top ten of anything classical music related, unless it’s made by a classical musician…” He trails off as Namjoon hovers his thumb guiltily over the video thumbnail, which has very clearly been created – generated, perhaps more likely – by a channel that churns out dozens of these videos a week. “Namjoon.”

“I can’t help it!” Namjoon says, clicking on the video. Yoongi’s already pissed off, a few seconds in, because they’ve got Bach’s Air on G String at number 10, which is a great piece, but number 10? Of all time? On what metric? “And then I’ve got no choice but to show you, because I know you’ll hate it, too.”

“Well, thanks for sharing,” Yoongi says mildly. “I’m incensed by this.”

Namjoon laughs like it’s bubbling out of him, which is enough to trump the fact that this listicle has put Flight of the Bumblebee at number 9.

“Who are you texting?” Seokjin asks. It’s their final rehearsal for their community outreach piece, and they’re finally at the stage where Seokjin doesn’t feel the need to try to impress Hoseok by having him stumble in on them rehearsing something obscenely difficult. “Wait, don’t bother answering, I can tell from the grin on your face that it’s Namjoon.”

Seokjin has known him long enough that it would be nigh on impossible to lie to him, so Yoongi just rolls his eyes to distract from the pink blush on his cheeks. “Like you’re any better about texting Hoseok.”

“I’m not texting him right now, am I?”

“No,” Yoongi acquiesces. “But that’s because he’s literally en route here, and I bet you’re fighting the urge to text him.”

“Irrelevant,” Seokjin says. Ironically, his phone buzzes on the table, and he flicks his eyes to the screen immediately.

Unfortunately, before Yoongi can tease him about this, his own phone vibrates, and what follows is a stand-off between the two of them, both of them maintaining eye contact with one another far longer than either of them are comfortable with, both daring the other to break first.

“Are you two having a staring contest?” Hoseok says, lugging his cello into the room. “Is that why you didn’t reply to my text asking what practice room you were in, Seokjin-hyung? Usually you’re playing something, but I couldn’t hear anything from outside so I thought I’d gotten the wrong room.”

“Sorry, sorry, I was making a point to Yoongi,” Seokjin says, turning to Hoseok; Yoongi uses the break in eye contact to check his own phone, where he sees that Namjoon’s sent him a video of a cat walking across a piano simply captioned, you?

Yoongi snorts and texts back, have you ever seen me and this cat in the same room?

I’m onto you, hyung, is the immediate reply.

“You see what I mean?” Seokjin says; Yoongi looks up from his phone.

“Ah, I think it’s cute,” Hoseok says cheerfully as he sits down. “I smile like that when you text me, hyung!”

This seemingly puts Seokjin out of commission, because Hoseok’s able to get himself seated, his sheet music set up, and his cello settled between his legs before Seokjin’s finally able to say, “I like when you text me, too.”

“Good!” Hoseok says, pleased. “You should text me to ask me out sometime, I’d like that even better.”

It’s so alarmingly smooth that Yoongi feels swept off his feet, and the comment’s not even directed at him; Seokjin manages to squeak out a solitary “Okay!” before he’s rendered speechless for almost the rest of the rehearsal.

“Hey,” Hoseok says as they’re packing up. “No pressure about asking me out if you don’t want to, I just kind of figured we were both interested-”

“No, no, I am!” Seokjin says hastily. He picks up his phone and sends a frantic text; Hoseok’s phone chimes in his pocket, which makes him grin, a smile that only grows wider as he leaves the room, reading the text as he goes.

Yoongi, who has been silently present for this whole exchange, perhaps a little obnoxiously, picks out the melody for the Love Theme from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet on the piano – in part to remind Seokjin that he’s still sitting here, but mostly to make himself laugh.

“Just you wait,” Seokjin says, the threat falling a little flat because he’s unable to contain the smile blooming on his face. “When you get yourself sorted with Namjoon, I’m going to follow you around playing Mendelssohn, because I’m not limited to being annoying just in the presence of a piano.”

Yoongi’s supposed to be walking to the metro station with Seokjin and Hoseok for their community outreach performance, but he’s not sure where they are. It’s too early for them to have already left – and he hopes they haven’t, because Seokjin is the one out of the three of them that knows exactly where they’re performing, which is important because Yoongi doesn’t want to accidentally turn up at the wrong public street piano – he’s mostly just looking for them so he can hang out with them before they need to leave.

He sends them both a text, and immediately gets a call from Seokjin.

“I’m in the theatre,” he says. “Could you meet me here? I want your opinion on something.” Yoongi can hear voices in the background, but the sound isn’t clear enough for him to be able to tell who it is.

“I’ll be there in a few minutes, hyung,” Yoongi says.

Sure enough, Seokjin’s on stage when Yoongi walks into the theatre, and the mystery of the background voices is answered immediately when he sees Namjoon on stage too, and Jeongguk and Jimin sitting as a makeshift audience of two, right in the front row. Seokjin and Namjoon are standing next to the orchestra’s celesta, probably excavated out of storage for Yoongi’s imminent Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy performance, which is good to know – now he can actually practice it on the proper instrument, and not on a piano.

“Yoongi, perfect timing!” Seokjin says, as though he hadn’t asked Yoongi to come himself. “Come look at this great celesta.”

“I’ve seen a celesta before, hyung,” Yoongi points out, but he can’t help but inch nearer for a closer look. The Philharmonic’s celesta doesn’t come out of storage all too often – usually around the winter holidays, specifically for performances of Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, or in the very rare instances when they need it for anything else. It’s a beautiful sounding instrument, and he likes the novelty of getting to play it, but playing it for any length of time leaves him feeling like he’s been trying to play a child’s piano, the keys much smaller and closer together than he’s used to. “It’s very nice,” he says eventually.

“Yes, I thought so.” Seokjin smiles triumphantly at Namjoon.

“Hyung, I didn’t say it wasn’t a great instrument,” Namjoon laughs. “I’m saying it can’t play Mozart’s Adagio and Rondo in C minor.” He scrunches his face up. “Okay, well, it can, but not properly.”

“The glass harmonica one?” Yoongi asks, even though he’s pretty sure he knows the answer; nevertheless, he gets confirmation when Seokjin nods. “Hyung, I think Namjoon’s right, the celesta’s too pretty for that piece.” He sits down at the celesta, unable to help himself, and pulls out his phone; he squints at Seokjin. “I’m going to pull up my totally legal sheet music for this, don’t look at me.”

“I would never,” Seokjin promises, turning away as Yoongi tracks down and downloads the sheet music for the piece, transposed for celesta.

“Oh wow, look at that, I’ve found it in my extensive library,” Yoongi says flatly, setting his phone up on the sheet music stand. “Amazing.”

“The Library of Alexandria had nothing on you,” Namjoon says seriously as Yoongi plinks his way through the opening bars. “Okay, hyung, you see? It doesn’t sound the same at all.”

“Of course it doesn’t, it’s for a different instrument,” Seokjin agrees. “But could you perform it?” Namjoon winces, but nevertheless walks downstage to pick up his flute, which is resting precariously on a chair.

“For what?” Yoongi asks curiously, dutifully playing as Namjoon tries to play along on his flute.

“Namjoon-ah’s auditioning for first flute,” Seokjin says. “They’ve not announced the audition repertoire, they’re not planning to hold auditions until the winter, so we’re trying to find difficult pieces for the community outreach chamber performances for us to do, so that he can get some good practice in.”

“About time we got somebody new,” Yoongi mutters. “The current one can’t read sheet music.”

“He can,” Seokjin laughs. “He definitely can, how else would he have gotten the position?”

“He’s been working here longer than anybody else, he could’ve just turned up one day and said I’ve always been first flute, and who would know to correct him? He’s been playing flute for longer than this orchestra has even existed.” He smiles at Namjoon over the top of the celesta. “You’d be great.”

Namjoon snorts, pulls his flute down from his mouth, and says, “We’ll see. Jimin’s adamant he’s not interested, and Jeongguk’s said he wants to work here a while longer before auditioning for something like that, but I know the conductor’s pretty keen for Jeongguk to audition, and he’s, you know…” He waves his hand vaguely. “Jeongguk.” He glances over his shoulder at Jeongguk, who seemingly hasn’t heard them, chatting to Jimin so animatedly that his hands are waving all over the place.

Yoongi gets it. He doesn’t like to call musicians jacks of all trades, thinks it devalues the genuine hard work they put in when they’re proficient at more than one instrument, but from what he’s seen, Jeongguk seemingly excels at every instrument he puts his hands to.

“I think if Jeongguk’s said he doesn’t want to audition, it’s best to take him at his word,” Yoongi says. “No point making yourself anxious over something that he’s said he doesn’t want to do.” He goes back to playing Mozart; the celesta’s already making him feel Christmassy, and it’s the middle of September.

“Is that Mozart?” Taehyung says, making Yoongi jump; his fingers land on the prettiest, most delicate sounding discordant notes he’s ever made. It takes him a moment to locate Taehyung, but he eventually finds him standing at the back of the hall with Hoseok, who waves when Yoongi spots them. “And you didn’t invite us, the oboe and cello to your flute and…” Yoongi sees Taehyung pointedly raise his hand to his eyes and squint down at them. “That’s not a viola or a glass harmonica.”

“We’re improvising,” Seokjin calls back. “We don’t have a glass harmonica to hand.”

“What’s your excuse for the viola?” Taehyung says.

“I would never have a viola to hand,” Seokjin replies, which makes Hoseok laugh, a peal of laughter that, for a wild moment, Yoongi wants to try and imitate on the celesta. “Where are you going?” He asks Taehyung as he climbs up on stage.

“To the storage room to pilfer one of the spare oboes, of course,” Taehyung says. “It won’t sound as good as mine, but if you’re trying to play the Adagio and Rondo, you need to hear it with the oboe and cello, and Hoseok-hyung’s already got his cello on him.”

Hoseok shrugs, the movement nudging his cello case straps on his shoulders. “I’m happy to play, if you want to hear it in full?” He offers.

“Do we have time?” Yoongi asks.

Seokjin checks his watch. “We need to leave in half an hour, so we’ve got time to play enough to hear how Namjoon would sound playing this piece if we accompanied him.”

Namjoon was right. With the celesta, the piece just sounds too pretty, nothing like the teeth curling, spine peeling tension of a glass harmonica. It renders the subtlety of the flute useless, just two too sweet instruments battling with the warm sweetness of the oboe, the shade too high violin, the mellowness of the cello.

“I’m going to get a cavity from this,” Namjoon says exasperatedly, which makes Yoongi blink, surprised to hear his own thoughts vocalised in a voice not his own. “Then again, maybe it’ll be perfect for a community performance, I think we might get kicked out if we try to play this piece on a glass harmonica in a hospital.”

“Speaking of which,” Seokjin says, glancing at his watch again. “We should get going.”

“Can we come?” Jeongguk asks.

“Sure, but aren’t you supposed to be working?” Seokjin asks.

“Today’s actually my half-day off,” Jeongguk says with a shrug. “I just used the practice rooms this morning to film some TikToks, and now I’m killing time before a performance this evening.”

“I’d love to come,” Jimin says with a frown. “But I’m teaching.”

“I’m judging an elementary school music competition,” Taehyung says. “That’s why I’m in here, actually, this is where it’s taking place.” Yoongi hates judging children’s music competitions, hates seeing their little faces wracked with nerves and worry. He’s sure Taehyung hates that part of it, too, but he’s equally sure that Taehyung is just the right amount of soothing and encouraging that a children’s judge needs to be.

“I’d like to come,” Namjoon says. “I’ve been hearing you rehearse this Debussy for a while, hyung, it’ll be nice to hear you perform it.”

It’s almost like a field trip, or like they’re bunking off school, as they take the metro to the admittedly sketchy looking underpass this piano is allegedly in. They find the spot easily enough, but part of Yoongi just wants to pretend they weren’t able to find it and leave.

The piano itself is eye-catching, as an upright piano painted bright red in the middle of a city typically is, but there’s no getting over the fact that the underpass they’re performing in looks like a movie setting in which they’re extras about to get dragged into the plot of an action-thriller, not somewhere to perform Debussy. Because they’re restricted to places where there are pianos, this is, technically, Yoongi’s fault, but in his defence he’d been expecting the outreach co-ordinator to schedule them to perform in somewhere more suitable – he knows for a fact there’s a piano at City Hall, because he’s played it.

However, there’s no denying that the acoustics are beautiful. As Yoongi starts the Piano Trio, his notes ring out through the underpass, an almost cathedral-like echo that only becomes more heartbreaking as first Seokjin, then Hoseok, chime in with him. It’s the sort of piece that’s perfect for a public performance – accessible enough that it’s not long before people start to drift towards them, summoned like sailors to a siren as their music resonates through the underpass, but not one of the easy, popular pieces that Yoongi’s played so much that it’s mind-numbing to slog through.

It's on the longer side for an outreach performance, usually clocking in on their playthroughs at just under twenty-five minutes, and because it’s not one of the most instantly recognisable classics, Yoongi half expects the crowd to drift away out of boredom; however, when he looks up, briefly, after the first movement, it’s to see that the crowd has almost tripled in size, and quite a few people are filming. The orchestra do sometimes send a dedicated cameraman out to outreach performances so they can post clips on social media, but Yoongi always thinks there’s a charm to the grainy, wobbly footage captured by the public, a statement that they were so moved by the performance that they couldn’t help but film it.

It's during the third movement, as Hoseok plays a series of low, extended notes underneath Yoongi’s piano, followed by Seokjin’s tremolo warbling through the underpass, that Yoongi feels his breath catch in his throat, goosebumps raising on his arms. He’s played this piece with the two of them countless times, but there’s something about not just performing it, but performing it for free in front of a crowd of people who are there for nothing other than a genuine love of what they’re playing, that’s really getting to him.

The fourth movement is the one that really shines in this unconventional performance space though, the three of them playing quiet at first, until the movement builds and builds in tension and loudness, dropping back down into calm with Hoseok’s plucked notes, Seokjin’s quiet melody, and Yoongi’s simple chords in the upper octaves, before the speed and loudness ramps back up for the final minute. It’s the sort of ending that almost always prompts raucous applause, and this crowd doesn’t disappoint, their clapping bouncing back off the curved walls of the underpass until it sounds just as loud as a concert hall.

The three of them take their bows, and then, helplessly, Yoongi’s eyes immediately seek out Namjoon.

He’s surprisingly close to the piano, clapping just as hard as the rest of the crowd, and he’s already looking at Yoongi – when they make eye contact, Namjoon offers him a broad grin and two thumbs up.

“He was watching you for almost the whole performance,” Seokjin says to Yoongi under the cover of putting his violin away.

“It’s the Piano Trio, of course he was watching me play the piano,” Yoongi tries; he can tell from Seokjin’s side-eye that he finds this explanation as ridiculous as Yoongi had felt trying to give it.

As Namjoon had anticipated, Yoongi has been assigned to accompany him for Elgar’s Salut d’Amour, which means the two of them are now spending even more time than usual together. It’s incredible, how quickly Yoongi’s let these new people into his life, but especially Namjoon, who’s wormed his way in and settled down like he’s always been there.

“Stop it,” Namjoon laughs, trying to play the highest A note he needs to play in the piece and only managing to produce a spluttering fart noise because Yoongi keeps showing off how easy it is for him to play the equivalent note on a piano. “Stop it, stop it, I’m a serious musician, I know how to play this note-” He tries again, but Yoongi sees Namjoon’s eyes track to Yoongi’s finger, already hovering expectantly over the note, and he splutters out another laugh into his mouthpiece. “You’re so annoying, has anyone ever told you?”

Being a concert pianist could be lonely at times. He’d be travelling all over the world, true, but he very rarely spent longer than a month in one city, so while he has plenty of nice, casual friends around the world, it wasn’t a lifestyle conducive to forming deep bonds with people. Now, though, having a permanent position in an orchestra makes him feel like he’s settling down.

Perhaps it’s just Elgar making him feel wistful, yearning, but he could well imagine spending a significant amount of the rest of his career working in this orchestra.

Perhaps it’s Elgar, or perhaps it’s the fact that he and Namjoon sound incredible together. Admittedly, he sounds incredible with almost everyone in the orchestra, First Flute-nim notwithstanding – although Yoongi’s heard, through the orchestra gossip grapevine, that he’s been placed on extended leave since the Saint-Saëns debacle, which will take him up to his retirement in the winter, so maybe that could get bumped up to Yoongi, in fact, sounding incredible with the whole orchestra. Nevertheless, there just seems to be something about getting to play with Namjoon, who seems to anticipate whenever Yoongi decides to change up his interpretation of a phrase and matches it with a change of his own.

Yoongi’s played more duets than he can count, but this one feels particularly special – it’s one of the rare ones where he wants there to be a recording, for the soul purpose that he’ll want to keep a copy of the exact moment they perform the piece together, wants there to be a record of who they were and how they played together, like a decades-old photograph of a young couple, or a fragment of poetry slipped from one hand to another.

Namjoon’s taking a break – or he’s supposed to be, anyway. What’s actually happening is Yoongi’s playing the flute snippets transcribed by Liszt, and Namjoon is repeating them back to him. It’s an interesting exercise – obviously Yoongi does not want to wholly replicate each individual instrument in Beethoven’s orchestra on the piano, but Namjoon has the limit of breath control constricting the way he plays certain passages, which means he has ways of interpreting the music that Yoongi hasn’t considered. An infinitesimal pause in the music as he sucks in a breath; an ascent that has the notes slur together because they’re all played in one exhale, a perfect glissando as opposed to the individual notes a piano makes.

“You know, I’ve never asked,” Namjoon says suddenly as Yoongi makes a note on his phone to try playing with the sustain pedal to get a similar effect. “Why Liszt?”

“I was already playing around with it for fun,” Yoongi says. “And you know what orchestra gossip is like, one tutti percussionist walks past your practice room, next thing you know the orchestra director thinks it’s a perfect idea for you to perform it as part of a concert season.”

“Okay, but why Liszt?” Namjoon presses. “Why not one of the transcriptions for four hands?”

Yoongi shrugs – usually, he only thinks to do a four-hand piece if there’s a pianist he wants to work with. True, there are parts of Liszt’s transcription where the fullness of an orchestra is sorely missed, but Yoongi likes that about the work. It’s a piece meant to be listened to in the knowledge that it’s an interpretation of a fuller whole, a piece that showcases the flexibility of the piano; the transcriptions for four hands are excellent, true, but if he’s going to play a reduction, he’s more interested in the technically more interesting two-hand piece than the four.

Namjoon nods thoughtfully after Yoongi attempts to explain this. “Would you want to do the other eight symphonies?”

“Let me get through this one, then we’ll see,” Yoongi says with a laugh.

“If anyone could do it, I think you could, hyung,” Namjoon says earnestly.

“Maybe,” Yoongi says. “As long as you’re there to page turn for me.”

“I’ll be there,” Namjoon says.

Yoongi laughs again, but it’s less because he finds Namjoon funny and more because he doesn’t know how else to deal with the swell of emotion in his chest. “That’s a long time to commit to being my page turner, Namjoon. Nine full symphonies? You’re probably looking at ten years, at least.”

“Hyung, even if Beethoven had managed to complete his tenth symphony, I wouldn’t hesitate to committing to being your page turner for as long as it takes you complete them,” Namjoon says. “You’re one of my best friends, you know? It’d be an honour to help you to make music for as long as both of us can.”

“Guess who has a second date?” Seokjin asks, leaning on the piano. They’re in the middle of a break from full orchestra rehearsals, and Yoongi has been absentmindedly playing the flute solo from the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh for the past few minutes.

“That’s great,” Yoongi says. “Although I wouldn’t have expected anything less, considering he’s as gone for you as you are for him.”

“You should ask out Namjoon, then we could double date.”

“Would you keep it down?” Yoongi says hastily, looking around.

“He’s all the way over in the woodwind section, calm down,” Seokjin says, rolling his eyes.

Yoongi, inadvertently, looks over to the flutes – Namjoon, acting as interim first flute full-time, is talking to Jimin and Jeongguk, pointing something out on his score with his pencil. Apparently sensing Yoongi’s eyes on him, he looks around for a moment, meets Yoongi’s gaze, and lets the stern expression on his face melt into a grin. “He told me he’d page turn all of Beethoven’s symphonies for me, even if there were ten.” Seokjin whistles, low. “It’s not just me reading into it?”

“I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me,” Seokjin replies. “What’s stopping you from asking?”

Yoongi gives this some thought over the rest of the rehearsal. Honestly, the big thing stopping him from asking Namjoon out is precisely the same thing that’s brought them so close together – because they’re working together a lot, if it turns out that Namjoon doesn’t return his feelings, it could make things supremely awkward.

Admittedly, he finds it pretty hard to dwell on all the things that could go wrong if he asks, because he keeps imagining the things that could go right if Namjoon wants to date him, too. They spend so much time together, never really running out of things to say, that he can’t help but think that it’d be so easy to shift into a romantic relationship with Namjoon. He’s physically and emotionally attracted to Namjoon, and he thinks Namjoon might feel the same way about him.

He can’t help but beam when Namjoon heads straight for him at the end of rehearsal, weaving through the violinists and violists to get to Yoongi quicker.

“I had an idea during rehearsal,” Namjoon says, foregoing a greeting in favour of just continuing the conversation they’d been having before rehearsal had started. “Why not just do our Liszt run-through here? This is where you’ll be performing it anyway, right?”

Yoongi nods, pleased that Namjoon knows, even though he hasn’t mentioned it to him. Likes the thought of Namjoon checking the upcoming performance schedule not just for himself, but for Yoongi’s dates, too. It’s one week, almost to the hour, until he’ll be sitting down to perform the piece in front of a sold-out audience, and while he fully intends to spend as much of the next week rehearsing the fine details of the piece, today is the last day he and Namjoon will have where they can both fit in a full, forty-minute run-through from start to finish.

“Is there anybody booked in here?” Yoongi asks, watching as the rest of the orchestra starts to trickle out.

Namjoon shakes his head. “I checked, just in case you’d be up for it.”

Yoongi has his sheet music in his bag, so he waits for the concert hall to clear out before he sets himself up while Namjoon pulls one of the chairs behind the piano stool. This run-through is a formality more than anything – Yoongi can’t imagine them hitting any snags at this late a stage, and he’s proved right as they run through the whole piece smoothly, Namjoon timing his page turns to perfection.

“I just wish I was free to practice this with you closer to your performance date,” Namjoon says apologetically as Yoongi packs up his sheet music again.

“You’ve got a student preparing for a conservatory audition,” Yoongi reminds him. “We’re ready, you need to focus on her for the next few days.”

“She’s coming to the performance, actually,” Namjoon says.

“No kidding?” Yoongi asks as he closes the lid on the piano.

He turns just in time to catch Namjoon nodding. “I mean, I’ve been talking about your performance of this constantly to anyone who’ll listen, so I think most people I know are going to be there.”

Yoongi’s so touched by the thought of Namjoon, who’s heard this piece enough times that he really should be sick of it, going out of his way to recommend Yoongi’s performance of it to as many people as he can, that Yoongi decides to be brave, to bite the bullet, and say, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure, hyung?” Namjoon responds easily.

“When the performance is done, do you want to go out to eat?” Yoongi asks, resting his hip against the piano in an attempt to mask the fact that he’s almost vibrating with nervous, anticipatory energy.

“Uh, yeah?” Namjoon laughs. “I kind of figured that was a given, I know you like to break down your performances after you’ve given them!”

“No,” Yoongi says; Namjoon tilts his head in confusion. “Well, yes, I do, but do you want to go out to eat like… You know.”

Namjoon frowns. “Like…?”

“Like a date?”

He’s given this conversation a lot of thought in his head, but, surprisingly, he hasn’t considered this as an option – Namjoon, staring at him in mute silence, mouth slowly falling open like he’s anticipating Yoongi saying something else, something that he could form a response to. Yoongi’s drawing a blank, though, he’s not sure what else he could say that would make his question any clearer.

“I… I didn’t…”

Yoongi has to fight the urge to flee from this conversation – either metaphorically, by trying to play it off as a joke or like it doesn’t really matter, or quite literally, perhaps even off the edge of the stage. He’s said his piece, it’s only fair that he gives Namjoon time to think about it, to respond, even if his face is screwing up in disbelief, confusion, alarm.

“I hadn’t thought about you like that,” Namjoon says quietly.

“That’s all right.” It’s not – Yoongi feels like he’s skipped a step coming down the stairs, his stomach lurching as the ground doesn’t come up to meet him. Everyone else had seemed so sure; he himself had thought that Namjoon was at least interested in him, how had they all managed to misjudge this so disastrously?

“How long?” Namjoon asks.

“I’ve liked you since we first met,” Yoongi admits, his mouth feeling numb, like his body’s trying its utmost to physically prevent him from saying anything else.

“So… Are we even friends, or is this-”

“Yes, you’re my friend!” Yoongi interrupts. “The fact that I want to date you doesn’t stop you from being one of my best friends, they’re not mutually exclusive!”

“But you just said you’ve liked me since we first met!” Namjoon, always demonstrative with his hands while talking passionately, almost tosses his flute case across the room. “That, to me, sounds like you just got to know me because you were interested in getting more!”

“That’s not true!” Yoongi says.

“Oh? Then what is? What is true?”

“I thought you were hot when I first saw you,” Yoongi says, wishing that he’d chosen to have this conversation in any of the soundproofed practice rooms, rather than downstage in the Opera Theatre. No matter how quietly he tries to admit his feelings, the acoustics bounce his own voice back at him, echoing all around as Namjoon stares at him like he can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. “Then we became friends, and I like you more because of it. But you’re still my friend above all else, I only told you because...” Because I thought you felt the same, Yoongi almost says, but thankfully his brain manages to catch up to his mouth before he can barrel ahead with the end of that sentence.

Namjoon’s still staring, intently enough that Yoongi wants to squirm. “I don’t know what to say,” he says eventually.

“I’m sorry I brought it up,” Yoongi says.

Namjoon shakes his head. “Don’t be. Thank you for… Feeling that way?” It’s so supremely awkward that Yoongi almost wants to pinch himself, convinced that this situation is just bizarre enough that he could’ve concocted it in a dream. Instead, he just nods once, a brittle jerk of his head. “Give me a few days to think about it?”

“Yeah, of course,” Yoongi replies. “I’ll ask the librarian if she can find someone to page turn for me for the concert-”

“Oh, no, you don’t need to do that!” Namjoon says frantically, leaning towards Yoongi. He seems to think better of it at the last second, takes a step back, and holds his arms at his sides. “Unless you want to, I mean.”

“If you’re still happy to do it, I’m happy,” Yoongi says, not appreciating the irony of saying that he’s happy when he feels one stiff breeze away from crying.

“Yeah, I’m happy,” Namjoon says, looking utterly bewildered.

“Eat,” Seokjin says, sliding Yoongi a bowl of jjajangmyeon across the table. Yoongi feels a little guilty, interrupting Seokjin while he had Hoseok over, but in his defence the two of them had invited him over when Yoongi had rung Seokjin as soon as Namjoon had left the Opera Theatre.

“I’m sorry, hyung,” Hoseok says guiltily. “I think I helped convince Seokjin-hyung that Namjoon liked you, too, but I was so sure…”

Yoongi shrugs, puts a mouthful of noodles in his mouth, then shrugs again, because both Seokjin and Hoseok look sceptical. “What’s done is done.”

“For a guy as introspective as Namjoon is, he’s not spectating his intros very well here,” Seokjin says with a sniff. “The other day he asked me what your opinion on mixtapes was.”

“What kind, the kind that hip hop and R&B artists self-produce and release for free, or a compilation of music that you put in a specific order?” Yoongi asks.

“I said you’d give an answer like that – he said the one we used to record on cassette tapes and give to people, and then he went off on a long tangent about what your opinions on the former might be-”

“Hyung, friends give each other mixtapes all the time, it’s not that weird,” Yoongi says. The jjajangmyeon is warm and comforting, and it’s doing a good job at filling him up and distracting him from how sad he feels, provided that he doesn’t examine that sadness too intently.

“Friends don’t ask mutual friends for their… Approval?” Seokjin says, looking for the word. “Blessing? It was like he was asking me if he could propose to you, Yoongi, not like he was going to give you a mixtape.” He frowns. “I don’t know if that was meant to be a surprise, actually.”

Yoongi shrugs. “He’s probably not going to give it to me now, hyung, he might think it’ll lead me on or something.”

“Oh, so you agree, a mixtape is a gift that can very easily sway romantic?” Seokjin says. When Yoongi shoots him a look, he picks up a mouthful of noodles and slurps them, very slowly, into his mouth. For once, however, Yoongi maintains eye contact long enough to wait out his noodle-slurping, so once he’s finished with his mouthful he continues with, “Okay, look, I know friends can give each other mixtapes. But I am sure that Namjoon has romantic feelings for you, he just doesn’t know it.”

“Namjoon was never a big dater in college,” Hoseok confirms. “Maybe he’s gotten his wires crossed, and can’t untangle his best friend – you,” he clarifies. “From someone he might want to date. He’s used to keeping his friends and romantic interests separate, I think he got burned a few times in the past.”

“How so?” Yoongi asks. Hoseok looks uneasy. “Don’t share if it’s too personal.”

“I don’t think he’d mind you knowing,” Hoseok continues. “But he’s had a few friends in the past who became romantically interested, he turned them down, and they just drifted apart afterwards.”  

“Did he turn you down?” Seokjin asks suddenly.

“He said he’d never thought of me that way,” Yoongi says. Seokjin and Hoseok exchange a look. “That’s just a longer way of saying ‘no’, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means that he’s going to end up thinking about it, now that you’ve put the idea in his head,” Seokjin says.

Hoseok nods in agreement. “Namjoon always says what he means – if he wanted to turn you down, he’d have said that almost exactly.”

“It’s not a puzzle,” Yoongi says. He’s running out of jjajangmyeon, which means he’s running out of an excuse to ignore his feelings. “It’s a yes-no question. I like you, do you like me, yes or no? It’s not a ‘let me reply to you in three-to-five business days’ situation.”

“I mean, think of it from Namjoon’s perspective,” Hoseok says fairly. “He, for whatever reason, doesn’t think he’s thought about you romantically before. Now you’ve come to him and shifted his whole worldview on its head-”

“Hardly,” Yoongi mutters. “I just said I wanted to take him on a date.”

“A thing he’d never even thought about happening, apparently,” Hoseok argues.

“I’d argue that planning universally agreed to be romantic gifts, and spending nearly all of your free time together, and talking about your five year, ten year, twenty year plans to perform Beethoven together sort of trumps thinking about your first date, but alright,” Seokjin says.

“It’s still a lot to take in,” Hoseok finishes. “He said give him a few days?” Yoongi nods. “Then give him a few days.”

Thankfully, he’s in the final days of preparing for his Beethoven concert, so he, quite literally, does not have time to dwell on anything other than two things – Beethoven, and keeping himself healthy to perform Beethoven.

He tries to maintain a good routine anyway, because he’s watched too many classical musicians run their bodies into the ground, some even permanently affecting the way they play their instruments, in pursuit of perfection. He wakes up at the same time every day, plays piano for fun, does some stretches, gets ready for work, eats his breakfast, then more or less does the same routine but in reverse when he gets home from work. In the run up to an important performance, however, he’s even more diligent.

Right now, he’s lying on the floor of one of the practice rooms, arms spread in cactus position, breathing deeply with his eyes closed. He’s got a full practice schedule lined up for the day, with the morning devoted to études, and then the afternoon reserved for a start to finish rehearsal of Beethoven’s Seventh as he records it, listening back to it, and making any last minute notes to his score. He doesn’t expect he’ll need to, but he’s also not going to have any more time before Friday to have a full run through of the whole symphony, start to finish – he’s in full orchestra rehearsals all day Wednesday, another one on Thursday morning, then rehearsals with Jeongguk for their upcoming community outreach performance on Friday morning.

Next, he sits up, then shuffles around until he can lay out his palms flat on the ground. He stretches his fingers, taking extra care to ensure that his thumb is placed properly and not curved up like a little hook, which is how it had once sat during this exercise before a fellow piano student in college had pointed out that he should probably stretch his hands more.

Finally, he sinks down into extended child’s pose for a while, because he knows, from experience, that trying to play piano with a stiff back is like trying to draw water out of a stone.

He stands up, shakes himself loose, then sits down at the piano. He’s already laid out his sheet music for the first étude he wants to play, Ligeti’s Touches bloquées, because Ligeti looks like he’s doing some very interesting things with silent note presses that Yoongi wants to try.

It starts off well enough. Playing modern études is a different beast entirely to anything pre-20^th century – so many of the older, more well known études have entered the canon in their own right, shaping music even beyond classical (he still gets a thrill every time he hears the Chopin sample in Nas’s A Queens Story, even though he’s heard the song countless times), that playing them can feel less technically adventurous than more modern études. To begin, he really has to concentrate on the shifting silent presses between his left and right hands. He gets it wrong a few times, but not as often as he was expecting, except for one bar where he accidentally plays both hands silently.

However, there’s a relatively long section where his silent presses on his left hand are the same E flat minor chord, over and over and over again, and while his right hand is plucking out a trippy little melody, it’s just not enough to distract him from the fact that he hasn’t heard from Namjoon in a few days, and he wasn’t expecting to, Namjoon had told him he’d need a few days, but they’ve not gone a day without speaking to each other in months, and sue him, he misses his best friend-

He's gone on autopilot, but as the music picks up into discordant eighths with both hands, he doesn’t need the sheet music to tell him to play fiercely and clamorously – he’s doing that all on his own.

Sighing, he stacks the Ligeti sheet music into something resembling a pile, sticks it on top of the piano, and pulls out his next practice piece, Unsuk Chin’s Étude No. 5, Toccata. It starts with a startling number of variants on the same basic melody for the right hand before it balloons into a constantly spiralling piece with only a faint resemblance to its original motif, left hand intruding with bursts of chords before the whole piece crescendos with an absolute rampage of notes that Yoongi has to stop and really look at before he attempts, a deluge of black dots that could be mistaken for a juddering printer. It's fun, and needs him to really concentrate.

Unfortunately, the piece is also less than three minutes long, and while it takes him nicely up to lunch, he can’t spend the next few days solely focused on this one étude, regardless of how nice a job it’s doing at taking all of his concentration.

So, once he’s had a quick lunch, he plays the Seventh again – and again, and again, faster and faster and faster until he’s tearing through it at a blistering pace, hammering his hands down on the keys until his fingers start to feel hot. Then, frustrated and sad, he slowly, gently, rests his forehead on the keys, hearing the piano’s hammers press down on the discordant notes his forehead is playing.

Yoongi’s waiting in the wings, using a mirror to retie his tie for the seventh time while he listens to the audience taking their seats. It was probably perfectly fine the first time he tied it, but he’s filled with nervous energy, fingers twitching and eyes skittering around, looking for something to distract him. There’s not a lot backstage to distract him – one or two stagehands hurrying around to get things ready for the performance of Robert Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 2 happening almost directly after Yoongi’s recital; black, sound-dampening curtains; somebody standing behind Yoongi in his reflection.

He finishes tying his tie before he turns around, because he’s due onstage any moment and he doesn’t want to get caught off guard with his tie flapping around like a windsock. When he does turn, he kind of wishes he hadn’t; Namjoon’s standing there, making his non-descript page turner’s suit look like something from a movie set.

“Hey,” Namjoon says quietly.

“Hi,” Yoongi replies.

Namjoon opens his mouth to say something – to wish him luck? To apologise for not returning Yoongi’s feelings? Yoongi doesn’t know, because the stage manager appears in the narrow space leading onto the stage.

“Min Yoongi-ssi?” She says, hand already raised to her ear piece. “Are you ready?” It’s a performative politeness rather than a genuine question – he needs to be ready, even if he wants nothing more than to tell her ‘no, just give me a few minutes to find out what my friend wants to say to me’. So he nods, watches as she murmurs into her headset, and then walks onstage as she waves him on.

The second he steps under the lights, the nervous tension wracking his body melts away, as though it bleeds out through his feet and into the stage itself. By the time he gets to the piano, situated centre stage, he feels ready to perform, and once the audience falls silent, and he hears Namjoon adjust his chair quietly on Yoongi’s left, he feels completely at ease.

Beethoven’s Seventh, as it’s full name suggests, starts with a single A Major chord, shared equally between the orchestra. For Liszt, it’s shared between two hands – half of the notes of the chord played with the right hand, half with the left, with a dominance of the A note to mimic how most of an orchestra would ring out with that note.

Yoongi’s played this part hundreds, if not thousands of times, and he can’t even count the number of times he’s placed an A chord in his life. So, when he hears Namjoon’s breathing stutter at his side, he has a very brief, very alarmed thought that he’s somehow managed to fuck up one of the most basic chords. His muscle memory kicks in for the next bar as he firmly tells himself no, he hasn’t, Namjoon probably just got some dust up his nose or something.

Performing something just once always comes with a twinge of melancholy, even in the middle of the performance – each time he plays through the passages that had taken him weeks, if not months, to master, it could very well be the last time he ever performs them for an audience. Months of hard work, leading to a performance which will take up just a flash of a moment in the lives of everyone here, himself included.

Mostly, though, he just feels determined to make that flash of a moment as bright as possible in everyone’s memory, so he plays on.

The fourth movement is physically demanding in isolation, but after the first three it’s gruelling, almost furious in its rhythm as it tries to keep up with the melodies of the strings and the rhythms of the brass and woodwinds. It’s hard not to get swept up in it, especially because Liszt really gets the most out of nearly every note on the piano, so Yoongi has to make big, expansive movements just to keep up with the sudden octave shifts. Short, punchy chords that need him to really put his weight behind them are immediately followed with light, airy sixteenths, his fingers fluttering lightly.

Namjoon leans past him to turn the last page he’ll need to turn in the score; it’s just before both of his hands need to play in the bass octaves, so Namjoon really needs to curve around him to reach the pages. And Namjoon hovers for a moment too long – still unobtrusive, still not noticeable to an untrained audience eye, but Yoongi notices. It’s like Namjoon’s forgotten what he’s supposed to be doing, and his perfect stillness – Yoongi would wager he’s holding his breath – gives Yoongi the surge of frantic energy he needs to power through the unbelievably increasing franticness of the final bars.

He can feel the sweat beading underneath his collar and in his hairline as he plays the final A major chord, and then, with the A major chord still echoing through the Theatre, Yoongi hears two other things, the three sounds making a chord of their own; the audience, erupting into applause, and Namjoon, quietly exhaling a shuddering breath.

Yoongi’s in the entrance to the Opera Theatre, being shepherded around by the orchestra’s director from classical music journalist to composer to fellow classical musician, everyone wanting to ask questions about future plans for any performances, recordings, travel to foreign cities and their orchestras. Yoongi answers honestly – that’s he’s not given it too much thought, that he won’t say no to any opportunities, but he won’t say yes to any tonight, either, content to just live in the aftermath of this one performance.

He's used to all of this. What he’s not used to, however, is having someone wait quietly for him to be done. Namjoon’s standing by the door, coat in hand, and every time Yoongi looks over Namjoon is looking right back, as though he’s worried Yoongi’s somehow going to slip away if he’s not always watching him.

Yoongi speaks to everyone who’s waited to talk to him though, even though he wants nothing more than to talk to Namjoon, who clearly has something he wants to say. Eventually, the crowd thins out until it’s just Yoongi’s friends and, seeing that it’s just orchestra members left, the director begs his leave, ready to do the same thing all again with musicians due to finish the Schumann performance in mere moments.

Speaking of – Yoongi turns to Seokjin. “Why aren’t you doing the Schumann?”

Seokjin rolls his eyes. “Are you asking me why I didn’t jump at the chance to perform a piece with a pianist that wasn’t you?”

“The pianist is very good,” Yoongi says, even though he doesn’t know who it actually is.

“Yes, but they’re not you,” Seokjin says. “Also, I wouldn’t have had time to watch your performance and then run on stage to perform Schumann.”

“You were amazing, hyung,” Jeongguk says, his eyes a little red-rimmed.

“I wanted to perform with you anyway, but now I really want to perform with you,” Jimin says. “Especially considering you’ve performed with everyone else.”

“We’ve all performed with him, we’re in the same orchestra,” Taehyung points out.

“You know what I mean,” Jimin insists. “Seokjin-hyung, and Hoseok-hyung have done an outreach performance with him, Jeongguk’s doing one with him soon, you got to do a stage recital with him, Namjoon got to page turn and they’re going to do Elgar later this month-”

“Speaking of Namjoon,” Hoseok interjects, jerking his chin in the direction of the door. “I think we’ve kept you long enough, Yoongi-hyung.”

“Right, right, yeah,” Yoongi says, glancing toward the door again. “Uh, wish me luck?”

“Yoongi, I really don’t think you need it,” Seokjin says, clapping him on the shoulder and then giving him a little shove towards the door.

Namjoon watches him the whole way, staying silent long past the point where Yoongi would’ve been able to hear him speak. He stays quiet until Yoongi’s at his side, and Yoongi can tell he wants to say something, his lips parted, ready to speak, but nothing comes out.

“I’m going to drive back to my place,” Yoongi says carefully – Namjoon looks alarmed, eyes wide. “Did you want to come?”

Namjoon nods, looking relieved.

The car ride back to Yoongi’s apartment is silent, just the quiet hum of his car’s engine providing a constant soundtrack to their journey. Yoongi doesn’t expect Namjoon to say his piece in the car, but he’d expected him to say something, because that’s how their friendship has worked – they don’t usually sit in silence, one of them always having something they want to say.

But Namjoon stays quiet, so Yoongi does, too. He said his piece last week, after all.

Namjoon stays quiet as Yoongi parks in his building’s carpark, he stays quiet as Yoongi leads him up to his apartment, he stays quiet as they both sit in Yoongi’s living room. Yoongi’s hungry, like he always is after a long-anticipated performance, but he’s hoping that if he sits next to Namjoon, rather than retreating to his kitchen, he can prompt Namjoon to say what he needs to say.

It takes him a moment, but then Namjoon sighs, running his hand back through his hair. He’s cut it at some point in the last few days, cropped short and fluffy against his head. “I thought I’d know how I wanted to say this by now.” Yoongi waits patiently, but Namjoon doesn’t say anything else. What he does instead is stretch out his fingers towards Yoongi’s hand, resting his fingertips against Yoongi’s knuckles. Namjoon’s hand is shaking with nerves, so Yoongi turns his hand over on his knee to let Namjoon thread their fingers together.  

“Take your time,” Yoongi says, trying to sound a lot calmer and more patient than he’s actually feeling.

“That’s not fair to you,” Namjoon blurts out, his hand twitching in Yoongi’s. “You’ve already been waiting for my answer for a while.” He huffs out a sharp, steeling breath. “I guess it all just comes down to yes, I’d like to go on that date with you. If you’re still asking.”

“I am,” Yoongi says. “What changed your mind?”

“Nothing,” Namjoon says. “I think… I was so scared of things changing between us that I hadn’t let myself think of you like that? But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve already been treating you like we’re dating, or like we’re about to start dating, because that’s what I wanted. I wanted us to be dating, without having to put myself out there and actually ask for what I wanted.” He smiles faintly. “You’re braver than me, and I guess it freaked me out.”

“In your defence,” Yoongi says. “I only asked you out because I was convinced you were going to say yes. If I’d had any doubt, I probably wouldn’t have asked at all.”

Namjoon snorts. “A pair of overthinkers. It’s like we’re made for each other.” He sounds like he’s joking, but when Yoongi turns his head to look at him, he looks impossibly earnest. “Did you still want to go out for dinner?”

Yoongi thinks, then shakes his head; Namjoon looks a little disappointed, so Yoongi says, “I’ve got stuff to make dinner here?”

Their first date goes well. And their second, and their third, but Yoongi thinks that’s because they’re doing almost the exact same thing they’ve been doing for the last few months; spending their free time together, chatting about anything and everything that comes to mind.

The only difference is that Yoongi is more hyperaware of all the time they spend touching. He hadn’t thought there would be a higher level of awareness for him to reach, but now whenever Namjoon rests a hand on his lower back, gently touches his wrist to get Yoongi’s attention, wraps his arm around Yoongi’s shoulders, Yoongi feels like his nerves are heightened.

He’s not specifically waiting for a particular moment to kiss Namjoon, but he knows it when he sees it – or rather, when he hears it.

They’re right smack in the middle of performing Elgar’s Salut d’Amour in front of a full audience, which is a terrible time to realise that he wants to kiss his performing partner, but Namjoon plays the piece’s highest note, the note he’d struggled with during rehearsals, and Yoongi wants nothing more than to rush over there, yelling his congratulations, kissing every part of his face that he can reach. He still has over a minute left to go in the performance, and every passing second is only exacerbating the feeling.

He knows that they have a responsibility to mingle after a performance, answer questions and provide soundbites and nod earnestly when some executive gives them pointers in how they can break through into the mainstream, but before all that Yoongi corners Namjoon backstage. Namjoon looks surprised, just for a moment, but then he must see something in Yoongi’s eyes because he’s leaning down just as Yoongi’s pressing up, kissing Yoongi back just as frantically as Yoongi’s kissing him.

“What brought this on?” Namjoon pants into Yoongi’s mouth. “I mean, do it again, absolutely.”

Yoongi does, again and again. He has to rock up onto his toes to press his lips to Namjoon’s, and the feel of his hair underneath his fingertips is just as soft and fluffy as he’d expected.

“You played that note,” Yoongi tries to explain, struggling to find the words when he’s so distracted by the thought of how well their mouths fit together. “You know, the high one? I wanted to kiss you for it.” Namjoon’s eyes go wide, then he huffs out a breath of a laugh against Yoongi’s lips. “What?”

“That note’s an A, right? It’s just kind of ironic that you realised you wanted to kiss me because of an A note, and I realised I wanted to date you when you played that first A chord of Beethoven.”

“We’re so fucking ridiculous,” Yoongi murmurs, crashing his mouth to Namjoon’s again to hide the fact that his heart is soaring.

They fall through the door of Namjoon’s apartment, Yoongi trying to take off both his suit jacket and Namjoon’s whilst Namjoon kisses him. Namjoon kisses like each time is the first, something to be memorised and treasured, which is wonderful, but it’s not helping Yoongi get them undressed.

So he manoeuvres them to Namjoon’s couch, pushes Namjoon back until his knees hit the couch cushions, then sinks to his knees in front of him as Namjoon collapses onto the cushions. “I’d really like to suck your dick.”

“I’d also really like you to suck my dick,” Namjoon repeats, a little helplessly.

“Where’re your condoms?” Yoongi asks, running his hands up Namjoon’s thighs before dipping his fingers in the waistband of his slacks. He can see the outline of Namjoon’s hardening dick and, as his hands move over Namjoon’s legs, Yoongi can see his dick twitch in interest.

“I’ve got some in my wallet,” Namjoon says immediately. “In my jacket pocket.” He glances over his shoulder, back down the hallway to his front door.

“I’ll go get them.” Yoongi squeezes Namjoon’s thighs gently. “You get these off.”

He can hear Namjoon scrambling around behind him as he bends down to pick up Namjoon’s suit jacket, and by the time he’s pulled out his wallet, taken out a condom, removed the wrapper and turned around, Namjoon’s pants are strewn over the arm of the couch, and his underwear is around his knees. He’s still got his shirt on and done up neatly, which just makes him look even more impossibly debauched.

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to take my underwear off, too,” Namjoon says as Yoongi rounds the couch.

“You look perfect,” Yoongi says, crouching back down again to slide the condom onto his dick. Namjoon’s big enough that Yoongi knows he’s not going to be able to take his whole dick into his mouth, at least not without some practice, so for now he closes his lips around the head, sinks his head down as low as he can comfortably go, then uses his hand to cover the rest. Namjoon doesn’t seem to mind, though – judging by his high whine when Yoongi pulls back, hollowing his cheeks as he goes, Yoongi would say that Namjoon’s enjoying himself well enough.

He bobs his head up and down, watching Namjoon to see what sorts of movements he reacts best to. Namjoon tips his head back to pant for breath when Yoongi focuses on the tip; he tilts his head back with a low moan when Yoongi touches his balls. When Namjoon’s fingers start flexing on his own thighs, Yoongi takes his hands and nestles them into his hair, which makes Namjoon’s eyes fly open as Yoongi, still watching him, sinks down on his dick, the lowest he’s gone so far.

“You’d-” Namjoon huffs out another breath when he looks down and sees Yoongi staring back up at him. “You’d make an excellent flautist.”

Yoongi pulls off of Namjoon’s dick. “I’m not about to start flutter tonguing your dick.”

Namjoon flushes a brilliant red, even as he grins. “I just meant your breath control, hyung, I’m not even sure how you’d go about flutter tonguing a – fuck,” he finishes as Yoongi sinks back down.

He doesn’t last long, fingers clenching in Yoongi’s hair as he finishes. Namjoon goes boneless quickly after his orgasm, shuddering as Yoongi carefully takes off the condom.

“Now you,” Namjoon says as Yoongi comes back from the bathroom; Yoongi shakes his head, and Namjoon tries to sit up. “Why not? You’re not leaving?”

Yoongi shakes his head. “I’m honestly a little tired – would you be up for round two in the morning? I don’t need to be at work until we’ve got full orchestra rehearsals in the afternoon.”

Namjoon smiles at him softly. “Me neither. We could even sleep in.” He stands up, shucks off his underwear, and starts unbuttoning his shirt. “My bedroom’s this way – want to share?”

Yoongi honestly can’t think of anything he wants more at this moment.

Despite them both saying they’d sleep in, not only does Yoongi wake up at his usual time, but he wakes up to an empty bed. When he swipes his hand across the space, the sheets still feel warm, so he can’t imagine that Namjoon’s gotten far; he pulls on Namjoon’s discarded shirt and goes looking for him.

He finds him in the sitting room, sitting in front of a keyboard as he sets it up on a stand that looks one glissando away from snapping like a twig.

“Ah, sorry, did I wake you up?” Namjoon asks, looking up from the keyboard.

Yoongi shakes his head. “I usually wake up at this time. What’re you doing? I didn’t think you’d played piano for a while.”

“I haven’t,” Namjoon explains, flicking the keyboard on. “This one’s pretty old, but I kept it because it’s a shame to throw out a perfectly good instrument.” He shoots Yoongi a look, quick and furtive. “I know you like to play first thing in the morning? It’s not a piano, but I figured-” He stops in his tracks as Yoongi steps up behind him, cups his fingers under Namjoon’s jaw, and tilts his head back. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Yoongi says, leaning down to kiss Namjoon gently. “Thank you.”

Namjoon grins up at him. “No, thank you.”