Stranger | Jikook/Kookmin

Namjoon (Point of View)

[A/N: I can say that I had the pleasure to study Namjoon, his early life and lyrics through the excuse of scripting his point of view. He is someone hard to understand, his thoughts are too layered to capture in a bunch k of words, but the past month of trying to infiltrate into his brain fell nothing short of beauty. I mean this wholeheartedly.

The events in this chapter aren't real, but you might be able to find a piece of the real life Kim Namjoon in between the lines, I hope. Also, I have a feeling this character is going to give you a good gasp lol! Kudos to those of you who might have predicted it but I doubt a lot of people caught the signs — anyway, talk to me at the end of the chapter. Now get reading!]

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"Let's talk about your mixtape. If you can give a context of this mixtape?"

The room is silent, cameras pointed at him, the key light swarming heatwaves in his direction. Every breath is audible as if the room is wired with micromics, aiming to capture more than the words but the feels, the intimacy, the meaning behind those very words.

"The context of this mixtape..." Namjoon lets out an indecisively ironic laughter. "The context is that there is no context," he winds with, head tilted low, brainy gaze leaching the interviewer.

She is a middle-aged woman with a challenging demeanor. As much as Namjoon came here today to shoot the first interview about his new mixtape, he didn't walk inside thinking, lemme serve some answers. After all, the obtrusiveness is the context of this mixtape.

"Nobody is supposed to know what the theme is, including myself. I'm aware, it's not the answer you were expecting. Everyone is wondering what The Grand Message is, but there is nothing I can say that would sum it up."

"You wanted to do whatever you wanted to do," the interviewer nods with a smile, and Namjoon mirrors her expression, throwing his hands to the side openly, calling  on a challenge. "Fair enough. Was there any structure you had in mind while working on it?"

Namjoon shakes his head, certainly, promptly. "Nah, nope," it sounds funny to his ears how meaningless he makes his work sound but where is the lie in the truth? "It was all pure... spontaneous... an amalgam of pent-up things I wanted to say without really thinking about how they would be perceived."

"That's it."

He nods, big and slow.

"That's it."

An amateur could easily assume that complexity is the target of an artist's output. But complexity has always come easily to Namjoon. The twists of his brain make up for the turns of the intricate world, and he doesn't struggle with finding deeper meanings or making profound observations.

He could write songs about fate by the pattern that a flying bird draws on the sky. He could write songs about hope and the light at the end of the tunnel by the falling of a single leaf. Give him a mountain of paperclips and he could spend a year dismantling them, turning each into a standalone song in itself. Stories would be endless, feelings would burst the tank but he wouldn't run out of observations to make. The world happens to have that many coincidences in the occurrence of the littlest things for Namjoon to unravel.

He comes from a place of questioning, naturally so.

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[9 years ago]

"Don't even think about it," his desk-mate and close friend Doust leans in, noticing Namjoon squeezing the straps of his bag. They stare at each other enough to get Namjoon to control his breathing, tone down the greedy flaring of his nostrils."Put your head down and pretend to sleep if you don't want to study," he warns him with big eyes, the frowny lines on his forehead betraying his advice for itself.