in the event of an early demise | yoonkook

Part 1

After all the years he had known them, Yoongi's list of reasons why he was pretty sure his friends were trying to kill him had gotten quite long. He liked to imagine that he kept the list as a necessary precaution, a vital piece of evidence for the police in the event of his early demise, inevitably at the hands of his friends.

They'd claim it was an accident, of course. They would swear they loved Yoongi and would never want to hurt him. But his list would show the truth.

It would show how he had nearly died when Jimin and Taehyung set his entire kitchen on fire after watching exactly two episodes of MasterChef, swearing they knew what they were doing. How Hoseok had once kicked him while practicing a turn for his dance class, almost knocking Yoongi out of the open fourth-floor window. How he had nearly bled out when Namjoon broke a cup one night while they were eating dinner, hastily cleaning it while Yoongi was in the bathroom and almost getting away with it, until Yoongi took a bite of his kimchi jjigae and felt a shard of glass slice his lip, requiring a full three stitches.

Yoongi liked to imagine that, someday, justice would be served. At his funeral, he was certain that at least one of those bastards would be in handcuffs.

Of course, in practice, he mostly just used the list for extortion purposes. It was much easier for Yoongi to talk Taehyung into helping him finish a project for the art history elective he had foolishly signed up for when he could point to the list and remind Taehyung of the time he brought a rabid cat into Yoongi's apartment, and didn't Taehyung owe him for that, really?

The list hung on the front of his refrigerator, affixed with a purple cat magnet that Hoseok had gifted him last Christmas. It was a simple sheet of lined paper torn from one of his notebooks, creased in places and crumpled at the corners. Each incident had its own bullet point, complete with the date of the event, the names of the perpetrators, and a brief summary of the actions that had culminated in an attempt on his life, all detailed in Yoongi's narrow scrawl.

The ink of the earliest entries was already beginning to fade with age, but even just counting the last few months, the list was quite damning. Any evening with all six of them together in one room was a surefire recipe for a trip to the hospital, or at the very least to Yoongi's bathroom to find the first aid kit. The sheet of paper containing the list was almost full at this point, a chronicle of years of assassination attempts by his five closest friends.

But little did Yoongi know that all his previous near-death experiences would be like child's play compared to the real killing blow. Out of all the many attempts on his life, by far the worst thing any of his friends had ever done was introduce him to Jeon Jungkook.

In hindsight, Yoongi should've seen it coming. The night that Seokjin brought Jungkook over to Yoongi's apartment had been going much too smoothly. There were no drunken dance-offs happening, no dangerous bets being made; no one had "accidentally" ordered a dish that gave Yoongi food poisoning so bad he was throwing up within an hour of eating it. The night was almost entirely unremarkable, just the five of them sitting around Yoongi's living room, eating a mountain of fried chicken while playing a game of Monopoly. And even that was uncharacteristically tame, with only one or two minor threats of violence that Yoongi could count.

Yoongi should have known better than to let his guard down, should have known it was all a ruse intended to lull him into a false sense of complacency before they went in for the kill. But he was warm with cheap beer and on the cusp of bankrupting Jimin with his hotel on Boardwalk, and for a moment, Yoongi almost forgot that his friends were out to get him.

The living room table was struggling under the weight of too many bottles of soju and beer, arranged around the crowded setup of the board. Taehyung and Jimin were curled up together on one side of the sofa, half on top of each other as always, while Hoseok sat on the other end, his cheeks already flushed red with alcohol. Namjoon sat in the only armchair, the pamphlet of game rules still in his hand, while Yoongi had taken up residence on the floor opposite the sofa and was fiddling with a spare game piece, a tiny silver battleship. It was a typical Thursday evening, nothing at all out of the ordinary.