Work Text
As Namjoon headed to the fae’s house he thought to himself that this was his least favorite type of job. He’d much rather be writing a marriage contract, or even an agreement for the granting of firstborn, than a
will.
It was just so sad, so he really had to grit his teeth to get through it whenever such a task came his way. Sometimes his clients could remain professional in the face of having to outline exactly what would happen once they were permanently gone, but most of the time it dredged up all kinds of feelings of regret and grief and even anger. He sometimes ended up acting as a therapist, almost - getting them to focus on what actually mattered in the moment; what they wanted to see preserved and precious for the people they were leaving behind.
And of course it was harder when death was already in sight. It was one thing to write a will well ahead of time, when one was young and healthy and just getting everything written out as a wise, thoughtful precaution. It was a different feeling entirely to write one for an elderly client, who’d lived a full life and just wanted to get all the details wrapped up. In this case, the client he was meeting today
was
young - but unfortunately terminally ill. A fae, he had nonetheless apparently been getting worse and worse his entire adult life, from some mysterious illness that no other fae or doctor or shaman or witch had been able to identify, treat or reverse. He was, tragically, simply wasting away.
Namjoon had been informed, in the beautifully hand-written letter that had summoned him for this job, that the fae - with the use-name of Taehyung - had finally decided to stop any kind of treatment and had accepted his inevitable end. So, before he started telling his friends and family about it, he wanted to get his will squared away, and then spend his remaining days peacefully and quietly. So discretion on Namjoon’s part was a key part of his task.
Namjoon, though a human, was a lawyer specializing in fae business. It was actually very hard to find a fae willing to take up practice as a lawyer, as they had such a love of tricks, specifically of tricking other fae, that they often couldn’t resist the urge to slip in weird clauses and loopholes into every document they got their hands on. So, on the whole, fae tried to find human lawyers to mediate such matters instead - not that it was particularly easy to find human lawyers who had the training and experience for it. Namjoon just happened to fit into that box, however: he’d grown up in a little village that regularly had fae visitors, so he knew about them from childhood. And then he had gotten a Master’s degree and passed the bar so he was a fully real, honest-to-gosh lawyer even for humans; and he had an impeccable eye for detail.
Soon, Namjoon had made his way through the little village where Taehyung lived, and was knocking on the door. It was a very traditional thatched-roof cottage with wattle-and-daub walls and thickly-hewn frames around the door and windows.
“Hi, are you Kim Namjoon?” asked the solemn, sad-eyed fae, dressed in lavender robes, on the other side of the door as soon as he opened it.
“Yes, the lawyer, here as requested,” he confirmed with a nod.
“Thank you for coming - you can call me Jimin,” the other replied, letting him in.
Once Namjoon stepped inside, he could see that the interior was traditional as well - a single room that combined kitchen and living areas, with a ladder up to a curtained-off loft area above them.
“You can go straight up,” Jimin told him, gesturing to the ladder. “He’s expecting you.”
Namjoon heard Jimin take a long, steadying breath behind him as he headed towards the ladder, adjusting his messenger bag to his back so that it wouldn’t get in his way. He supposed Jimin must be a close friend - perhaps the only one Taehyung had told of his decision so far. Namjoon quickly scaled the ladder and then paused at the top, his hand resting against the blue tapestry curtain.
“Good morning, sir,” he called out, “this is Kim Namjoon, your lawyer. May I come in?”
“Yes please,” a deep voice replied from the other side.
Namjoon parted the curtain and stepped off the ladder into the loft. He carefully put the curtain back down and then turned to take in his surroundings. It was a very cozily decorated loft, with lots of potted plants and flowers and crystals and ceramic objects on shelves, illuminated by the lovely sunlight filtering through lace curtains on the large, high windows. Most of the room was taken up by a luxuriously large bed, occupied by a fae lying against the headboard, propped up with many soft and comfortable pillows and heaped with warm, colorful blankets. Despite his gorgeous blue hair and honey-toned skin, it was clear he was seriously ill due to the dark circles under his eyes, the thinness of his arms that were visible from his loose white shirt, and the general eerie sense of
tenuousness
about his person.
“Thank you for coming,” Taehyung said, lifting a hand in greeting.
“Of course,” Namjoon said, “I’m happy to be of assistance in producing any document you need in your circumstances.”
Taehyung nodded, and then gestured to the upholstered armchair next to the bed.
“Please, take a seat,” he invited Namjoon.
So Namjoon walked over carefully, unslung and put down his bag, sat in the seat, and got his folio out of the bag along with a few pens, which he placed on the little carved wooden side table that was within reach of both himself and Taehyung.
“I have a standard questionnaire I go through for creating wills,” Namjoon explained, getting his worksheet slid into his elegant back clipboard, “so I figured we would start with that, unless you had something specific in mind?”
“That’s fine,” Taehyung agreed calmly.
So they sat and worked through the document, Namjoon easily failing into the routine of it all. Taehyung didn’t have anything all that unusual or difficult to handle. Jimin was to be the executor, and besides a few dozen things earmarked for Taehyung’s parents, siblings, and friends, he would get the house and everything in it to use as he wished.
“All right,” Namjoon concluded once they reached then end of those pages, “is there anything else you wanted added, that we haven’t covered yet?”
Taehyung stared off into space, chewing his lip as he pondered. Finally he shook his head and looked back to Namjoon.
“No, that was everything,” he said.
“Excellent,” Namjoon said. “I’ll write up the official document very quickly based on this.”
He pulled out his computer, and transferred over the things he had written, filling in the template with the details Taehyung had supplied. Then he brought out the little single-page printer he kept in his bag, so that he could produce a physical document right there and get it signed before he left.
“To make it legally binding, you understand that I will need to include your True Name?” Namjoon prompted Taehyung once everything was ready to print.
True Names were never entered into computers - so Namjoon would need to write it out by hand in a few key places once he had printed the rest of it out.
Taehyung nodded, looking resigned, so Namjoon trotted out his usual boilerplate speech.
“Do you, Taehyung, consent to me, Kim Namjoon, reading and writing your True Name, for the specific and limited purpose of creating a legal Will and Last Testament, with the understanding that if I do anything to misuse said True Name in any way, you have the right to pursue triple damages against me, up to and including fines, imprisonment, and curses not exceeding level seven?”
Taehyung lips quirked into a little smile.
“Yes, I consent,” he agreed. “They really make you say all that each time?”
Namjoon smiled back.
“Honestly, if I committed any ethics violations, my senior partner at the firm would probably have me in a shallow grave long before any fae could catch up to me,” Namjoon joked, “but yes, I’ve found that it reassures clients to recite all the consequences. I understand it’s difficult to let a stranger - a human! - have access to something that can make you vulnerable, so I don’t mind making it plain.”
Taehyung nodded gratefully, then gestured to the shelf to the right of the windows.
“The scroll is in a scarlet case, on the second-to-the-top shelf, behind the jade plant,” he directed.
Namjoon set the printer going, then stood up and easily found the red silk cylinder and sat down and untied it. He pulled out the parchment scroll inside and unrolled it carefully, admiring the traditional calligraphy and embellishments all around it. Taehyung’s true name was at the top, of course, in the largest text. He read it several times carefully, to make sure he was parsing it correctly.
김 金 태형 泰亨 Björn 곰 vetur 겨울
It was a fairly standard format for a True Name: his clan name in two scripts, his use-name in two scripts, then two forms of words that meant “bear,” and two forms of words that meant “winter.” Overall, a classic - a beautiful name, chosen with love by this fae’s parents, no doubt full of hope for their child to have a long, happy life at the time they dictated it to the scribe making this document.
Namjoon had to clench his jaw to prevent himself from tearing up.
Stay professional,
he chided himself. He read through the name one more time before he prepared to add it to the will to make it official and binding.
Then, he noticed something odd, and paused.
“Excuse me, Taehyung,” he asked politely, “I hope this isn’t insensitive to ask, but I do want to make sure that I write it down correctly. In the second-to-last section of your name, is it supposed to be a lowercase or uppercase letter v?”
He held up the naming certificate and rotated it so that it faced towards Taehyung. The fae squinted at it in confusion, then reached out with his shaking arm to take it from Namjoon so he could peer at it carefully.
“It’s supposed to be an uppercase V,” he finally whispered.
“Okay, thanks for clarifying,” Namjoon said.
“No, you don’t understand,” Taehyung burst out, suddenly agitated. “It’s wrong! They wrote it down wrong!”
“Does that mean-” Namjoon tried to ask, suddenly feeling as if there were more at play here than just deciding how the name needed to be written on the will.
“Get Jimin!” Taehyung cried. “I mean, please, please tell Jimin to come up here!”
Namjoon swiftly stood up and stuck his head out of the curtain and was ready to call for the other fae, only to discover that he had obviously heard the commotion and was already clambering up the ladder, consternation on his pretty face. Namjoon stepped back so that Jimin could get in unimpeded.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, leaping into the loft space and towards Taehyung, who now had tears streaming down his cheeks.
“They wrote my name down wrong on my naming certificate,” Taehyung told him in a wobbly voice, sniffling and holding up the document for Jimin to see.
Jimin sat down on the bed and hugged Taehyung first, then turned his head to look at the document.
“The
V!”
he said urgently, then looked back at Taehyung, aghast. “Could this be why…?”
“Yes! It must be!” Taehyung said, devastated.
“This
is why I’ve always been sick! I was never properly named, my whole life!”
Then he burst into sobs completely, abandoning the document in his lap as Jimin carefully wrapped him up in his arms. Namjoon delicately leaned in to grab the naming document, carefully rerolled it, and put it back into its case and then onto the spot on the shelf where it had been stored. He quietly packed his things back into his bag and climbed back down the ladder, feeling awkward and intrusive. He picked one of the chairs in the living room to sit in, figuring he’d wait to see if Taehyung still wanted to continue finalizing the document, or if he was going to be dismissed.
Taehyung’s sobs stopped soon after, followed by some quiet conversation. Then Jimin appeared and came down the ladder - followed by Taehyung himself, now wrapped up in a voluminous sage-green dressing gown, moving very slowly and being watched intently by Jimin. Namjoon sat nervously, even more unsure of what he should be doing.
Jimin helped Taehyung sit on the couch in the living room, then bustled off to the console on one side that had pens and stationary on it.
“We’re going to summon a calligrapher,” Taehyung said to Namjoon, squeezing his hands together excitedly, an eager, hopeful light in his still red-rimmed eyes.
“Oh, I see,” Namjoon said cautiously. “So can- is there a possibility it can be fixed?”
Taehyung nodded, smiling tremulously. Namjoon exhaled in amazement.
“There,” Jimin said, folding up a very thin little piece of paper and opening the closest window. “I don’t know if he’s at home now or at work, so bee-post is going to be the fastest way.”
He placed the folded paper on the windowsill, and less than three seconds later, a pair of big fuzzy bees flew in, picked it up, and left again, the very picture of efficiency. Jimin closed the window with a satisfied smile and then turned to the other two.
“Fortunately, we’re friends with a calligrapher,” Jimin explained to Namjoon with a hopeful smile. “While we wait, would you like some tea?” he asked, already walking to the kitchen.
“Oh, well,” Namjoon said, “I don’t want to impose. Perhaps I should come back another day?”
“Please stay!” Taehyung replied urgently. “I’d like you to be here for the next part, whether we can fix it or not.”
Namjoon nodded and shifted in his seat.
“Okay, if you’re sure,” he said cautiously, getting beaming smiles from Jimin and Taehyung alike. Taehyung asked Namjoon about how he got started in this field of work, so he happily explained his background while Jimin bustled around and supplied all three of them with tea and pastries.
They had just about polished it all off when knock came at the door, and Jimin excitedly hopped up and yanked it open. A compact, very fair-skinned fae with a feline face, green hair, and lovely iridescent silver wings, came bustling in, dressed in black robes and carrying an even larger messenger bag than Namjoon’s.
“Thank you so much for coming so quickly!” Jimin greeted him, then turned quickly to Namjoon for the introduction, “You can call him Yoongi. Yoongi, this is Namjoon.”
“Hey Yoongi!” Taehyung called out from the couch
“Greetings, hey Tae, and of course,” the newly arrived fae said, nodding to Namjoon and then Taehyung and finally Jimin. “Though I’m not sure I understand what could constitute a calligraphic emergency?”
“We discovered an error in Taehyung’s Naming Scroll,” Jimin told him in a more solemn tone.
Yoongi’s eyes flitted over Namjoon again, a little skeptically this time, who was still sitting out of the way in the kitchen.
“Namjoon is Taehyung’s lawyer,” Jimin supplied, as Namjoon gave an uncertain wave.
Yoongi just made a little humming noise in response.
“I trust him,” Taehyung said confidently, making an effort to sit up straight.
“Okay,” Yoongi replied mildly. “May I see the scroll?”
“I’ll go get it,” Namjoon offered, feeling responsible as he was the last person to put it away.
So it was barely a moment’s work for him to climb the ladder, carefully grab the silk cylinder again, and then kneel at the edge to hand it down to the waiting Yoongi before climbing down. They had gotten the kitchen counter cleared off so there was space to unroll it where they could all see. Yoongi carefully untied the case and removed the scroll, the same way Namjoon had done earlier. By then, all four of them were sitting at stools around the counter, watching as he worked.
Yoongi unrolled the scroll and held it up vertically. His eyes went immediately to the troublesome letter in the name at the top, at which he scowled and tutted.
“I want to find out who did this one originally,” Yoongi groused as he smoothed out the document onto the kitchen counter, “I mean,
really.
What a lack of professionalism.”
“So can it be fixed?” Taehyung whispered, his eyes huge and his hands clutching the front of his plush dressing gown.
“Yes,” Yoongi said simply, though his eyes didn’t leave the paper and he seemed lost in thought already.
Taehyung gasped, on the verge of tears again, and Jimin grabbed at his hands and interlaced their fingers while they waited hopefully.
Yoongi, imperturbably focused on his task, got a little suede bag out of his backpack, and pulled out four little stones. Those ended up being weights, which he put down on each corner of the parchment to keep it from rolling back up. They were carved into the shapes of frogs. Then he got out a stick of ink and an inkstone, and Jimin brought him over a little cup of cold filtered water without having to be asked. Yoongi ground up some ink and added some water, mixing and adjusting it until he was satisfied.
Then he got out a little roll of brushes, hemming and hawing over which was the best one, holding up the bristles on top of the letter v on the document to find the right width. Once he was contented with that, he gave his tray of ink one last good mixing and scraping and made a very pleased expression.
Namjoon, Taehyung, and Jimin all watched breathlessly as he carefully dipped the chosen brush into the ink, pressing and tapping it this way and that to get a perfectly distributed load into the bristles. Then he moved the brush over the paper.
Namjoon watched raptly, unblinking, as Yoongi quickly and expertly made two precise motions with complete confidence. He could see the new, slightly thicker, taller capital letter V on the paper as soon as Yoongi lifted the brush back up again. The new letter gleamed slightly, the light reflecting off the still-wet ink as it rapidly soaked into the paper. He was tempted to applaud, actually.
Then, the magic took effect. Even Namjoon could feel it. A foamy invisible tingle swept through the room, and he gasped as Taehyung started to glow. Taehyung grinned, and laughed, and jumped to his feet as sparks of magic drifted out of him, dripping out of his fingertips and his hair and his wings. Then he spun, sending a cascade of glowing points of light flying and bouncing around the room, and with a sensation like a musical chime that was just a fraction too quiet to actually be heard, the magic settled and Taehyung was healed.
Jimin cried out wordlessly, and jumped up with his friend and hugged him. They jumped up and down together yelling things like
I can’t believe it
and
it worked
and each other’s names, until finally they were able to contain themselves and sit back down. By then, Yoongi had gotten his brushes and inkstone carefully cleaned off and dried and was in the process of packing them back up again. Namjoon could already see an improvement in Taehyung’s appearance - that weird, off putting sense that he wasn’t quite
there
was gone, and he looked just as glowing and magical as the other fae.
“Oh Yoongi, thank you,” Taehyung said blissfully, jumping over and wrapping the stone-faced fae in a huge embrace.
“Ack, hey!” Yoongi protested, but didn’t fight against it.
“And thank you, Namjoon,” Taehyung said next, running over and similarly hugging Namjoon.
Namjoon was equally, if not more so, as startled as Yoongi, but smiled - feeling like he was even blushing a little - and hugged him back. He was surprised to find that Taehyung was actually almost as tall as he was - surely not more than one or two centimeters shorter. The other two fae were noticeably smaller, so Namjoon hadn’t been expecting it.
“Anyway,” Yoongi said roughly though with pink cheeks, now packing his frog-weights back up and carefully re-rolling the now-dry scroll, “I had better get going. I have to finish all those wedding invitations I was in the middle of.”
“Here, take a pastry with you,” Jimin said, slipping a paper-wrapped sweet roll into Yoongi’s bag without waiting for an answer.
Both he and Taehyung thanked and hugged Yoongi again before he picked up his bag and started for the door. Then, the calligrapher turned back and pinned Namjoon with a glare.
“Make sure you don’t think you can get an advantage over him because of this,” Yoongi told him darkly. “We’ll all be keeping an eye on you!”
“Of course I won’t,” Namjoon protested defensively. “I do have a code of ethics, you know.”
Yoongi just gave him one last unimpressed glare and headed out the door.
“Ah, don’t mind him,” Jimin reassured Namjoon blithely, wiping happy tears out of his eyes as he shut the door behind the calligrapher, “he’s a giant softie.”
Namjoon was a bit skeptical about that, but he said nothing.
“Listen, I’m sure you must have a million things you want to do now,” he said, turning to Taehyung, “people you need to talk to and all that. So we can table the document for now, and I’ll get our of your hair, okay? Feel free to reach out to me any time.”
Taehyung, still beaming and glowing, came over and hugged him again, which made Namjoon chuckle (a bit awkwardly) as he accepted the gesture again.
“Thank you so much,” Taehyung said. “Really. I can never express how much of a difference you’ve made.”
“I’m just happy I could help,” Namjoon replied, and then after a few more hugs, he finally made his escape and walked back across the village and then down the road to his office in town, in an entirely different state of mind than when he had arrived.
The next day was perfectly normal for Namjoon. Still riding the high of his accomplishment yesterday - of contributing to actually
saving someone’s life!
How often did a
lawyer
get to do
that!
- though, everything had a sort of special tinge to it, and he felt full of ebullience and joie de vivre. All of his mundane activities - eating breakfast, heading to his office in the little concrete-and-glass business park a few streets away from the main shopping district, catching up on his email - seemed special and worthwhile. So, encased in a happy glow, he
almost
didn’t question it at all when an absolutely gobsmackingly enormous arrangement of flowers was delivered to his office mid-afternoon.
His secretary Jungkook, and indeed everyone else in the practice, gave him astonished looks when the delivery person brought it in, practically staggering under its weight. It barely even fit through his doorway, and he had to shift things around on his desk for it to even be put down. He had to rummage around in it for a moment to find the little tag embedded inside. It was a fancy little golden envelope, and the note it contained - in the same beautiful handwriting as the note that had originally summoned him to Taehyung’s house in the first place - said:
Thank you again for your incredible help yesterday. I’ll never be able to express the depths of my gratitude.
Regards,
Taehyung (your special V ♥)
Namjoon smiled to himself and carefully put the note away in his desk drawer. Few things could beat the pride of a job well-done. He put an item in his todo list to write a letter back to Taehyung. Which he did that afternoon, right after he had a break for lunch. He kept it short, just thanks for the flowers and general well-wishes. He even used the traditional tissue-thin paper so that he could send it by bee-post, as Taehyung seemed to appreciate old-fashioned gestures. Namjoon smiled to himself again at the sight of the two hired bees bumbling off, carrying his envelope off between themselves. He was a little sad, though, because it occurred to him that that was probably the end of the whole thing. He’d done his appointed task, and now all the necessary thanks and post-event communication were over. Certainly, Taehyung would have no reason to want to come and finalize his Last Will and Testament any time soon.
It turned out, however, that he was wrong.
When Namjoon came to his office the next day, Taehyung himself was waiting there, smiling brilliantly. And it made Namjoon glad all over again, because he could see the contrast for himself, of how healthy and present Taehyung looked now as compared to the first time Namjoon had seen him. He was all dressed up in brilliant ruby-toned robes, with gold embroidery and gold jewelry to match - a stunning fantasy concoction planted in the neutral tones of his legal office.
“Good morning!” Taehyung greeted him instantly upon his arrival, from the little seat in the entry area next to Jungkook’s desk.
“Good morning,” Namjoon greeted him back cordially. “It’s nice to see you - you seem like you’re doing well?”
He glanced over at Jungkook as he spoke, with raised eyebrows. Jungkook just widened his eyes and shook his head as if to say -
no idea, boss.
Well, alright then.
“I am doing
great!”
Taehyung enthused. “I came by to see you.”
“Oh, of course,” Namjoon said, opening the door to his office and beckoning Taehyung in with him. “You still want to finish your will? It’s good sense to have these things written down, even if you don’t think you’ll need them for a long time to come.”
“Aw, you kept my flowers in here,” Taehyung said softly and happily as he stepped in behind Namjoon.
“Yes, I
love
flowers,” Namjoon replied warmly.
“Good to know,” Taehyung mused. “Anyway, yes, I suppose I do want to finish the will. It seems a little silly to leave it so close to being done.”
“Great!” Namjoon said. “Let’s get it wrapped up then.”
So he closed his office door, and Taehyung in all his finery sat down in the chair across from him, and with a few strokes of the pen his official name was placed on it, and then he himself had signed it - with the proper capitalization, of course. Then it was sealed and filed and that was that.
“What do I owe you?” Taehyung asked politely.
“Ah, Jungkook - my secretary that you were sitting with, I’m assuming he introduced himself - will give you the invoice,” Namjoon explained, pointing out through his office window to the spiffy young man, typing away at the desk out there.
Namjoon had long learned that the business side of things was not his strong suit. Despite his care with legal details, he was clumsy in other ways. He’d misplaced more than one client check or message, and so he was careful to leave the handling of those things to Jungkook, who excelled at it.
Taehyung gave him a smile, and then with a final bow, left his office and had a short, pleasant conversation with Jungkook to pay his fee. Then, with a last glimmer and flash of his robes and jewelry, he swept back out of Namjoon’s life.
Until the next day, when Namjoon got a letter from Taehyung - just as gorgeously written as the one he had gotten from him the first time - inviting him over to his house for dinner. Namjoon accepted, of course - this seemed like an excellent way to maintain his connections and good standing with the local fae community. So just a few days later, he was outside of Taehyung’s house again, this time with a bottle of sparkling cider instead of a bag of papers, and with the expectation of a much more pleasant time.
Taehyung opened the door, already grinning at him. He was in emerald green robes this time, again with plenty of golden jewelry on his ears, fingers, and wrists. Namjoon, remembering how Taehyung had dressed just to show up to the office to sign paperwork, had put in a little bit of effort: he was wearing his second-nicest suit, with a tie that had a subtle iridescent shimmer to it.
“Come in, come in!” he said enthusiastically.
So Namjoon came in and put his cider in the kitchen, and admired the hot, home cooked dishes that were stacked up in it, ready to eat. It reminded him greatly of his childhood, when sometimes his parents or his friends would have visiting families of fae over, and they’d cook feasts together, combining human and fae dishes together in a big boisterous potluck. He had been half expecting Jimin to be there too - but it was just the two of them. Otherwise, the house was the same as when he had been there just a few days before: cozy and colorful.
“It’s great to see you again!” Namjoon said, taking a seat at the kitchen counter when Taehyung motioned for him to do so. “What have you been up to these few days?”
Taehyung sat across from him, and still smiling just as much, told him all about how he’d gotten together with all the groups of his friends and family to tell them the good news, while he dished out two plates for them to eat. By the time Namjoon had started eating, Taehyung was describing the giant party his parents had thrown in celebration, with just twelve hours notice. The original scribe’s mistake had to be explained to everyone, of course, and Taehyung laughingly explained that so many people had started calling him “V” because of it, that he was on the brink of changing his use-name.
Namjoon was charmed, enjoying the little glimpses into fae life here in Taehyung’s village.
“Thank you for the food!” he added, once there was enough of a gap in the conversation for him to change the subject. “I remember this dish from when I was a kid - we had a family friend who would cook it every so often.”
Taehyung scooped another portion of it onto his plate. And so the evening whiled onward, with Taehyung telling Namjoon a bit more about his family, and all the plans he’d started coming up with now that he was healthy - all the things he wanted to do and catch up on, that he hadn’t felt well enough to handle before. Traveling, art, sports - all kinds of things. Namjoon smiled and smiled, feeling buoyed and a little giddy at the power of Taehyung’s gladness and zest for life. In his turn, he shared a few more stories from his childhood, and funny stories from law school, and even a tale or two of Jungkook’s escapades in the office.
By the time they had stuffed themselves, and split the bottle of cider, it was dark out and the frogs and crickets were chirping loud enough outside to be a third voice in the conversation.
“Well, thank you for having me over,” Namjoon said, standing up. “It was very nice to get to know you better.”
“Thank you for coming, the pleasure was all mine!” Taehyung said, standing as well, though with a touch of shyness to his smile. “I hope to get to know you even further, actually.”
“You know, as a lawyer, I often get called a buzzkill,” Namjoon replied with a self-deprecating laugh, “but I do want to mention that if we become friends, I wouldn’t be able to do further work for you, such as updating your will or most other contracts, due to the perception of conflict of interest.”
Taehyung smiled even more widely than he had before, and held out his hand to Namjoon to shake it. Namjoon, slightly puzzled, extended his hand as well. Taehyung grasped it firmly, his hand big and warm, so Namjoon grabbed back, and indeed they shook hands in the style of humans.
“It’s a deal!” Taehyung said triumphantly.
Namjoon laughed again, amused at his antics, and reclaimed his hand. They said their final farewells then, and Namjoon began his journey back to his own house for the night.
Reflecting back on the evening as he walked through the cool evening, though, Namjoon started to wonder what,
exactly,
Taehyung had been getting at.