I Need U

[pt. 1]: Fools

The first time you laid eyes him, you guys were children.

He didn't feel your gaze boring a hole in the back of his neck then. He didn't know that their distant family friend's daughter was hiding behind the corner of the beige walls, watching him through narrowed eyes. Oblivious, he sat alongside his parents, legs kicking in the air absentmindedly. He was a good child, caring and sensitive. He didn't make his parents worry, even when he slid his small body off the leather couch and headed down the foreign halls, looking for the bathroom.

He did not feel your presence, lurking around the turn of the narrow aisle like a shadow. When he passed by where you hid, he didn't know that he was going to be startled, jumping at least a couple inches in the air.

"You should've seen your face," you clutched your stomach and rolled on the floor, tears threatening to roll from the corners of your tightly clenched eyes. "Only fools fall for that. It's the oldest trick in the book."

He watched you clap your hands in hysterical laughter, and tried to calm his pounding heart.

"I guess I'm a fool then."

At the dinner table, he kept sneaking short glances at you. He noticed how you used your left hand better than your right, and how you liked to talk loudly to your parents with food still half-chewed in your mouth. He noticed how you would pout unhappily when your parents scolded you to stop that bad habit, and how you seemed to forget in the next five minutes because you would do it again. He noticed how bubbly and talkative you were, and almost saw it as a glowing aura that surrounded you wherever you walked. He continued looking at you throughout the night.

When he stepped out your house later that evening to return home with his parents, he heard your footsteps pounding behind him as you grabbed him by his hood and spun him around to face you.

"You didn't tell me your name!"

"It's Yoongi."he murmured.

"Hi, Yoongi. Or bye, actually, since you're leaving. I'm (Y/N)"

The next time he met you, you guys were strangers.

He didn't recognize you as the girl who had frightened him 12 years ago, and only watched as the truck pulled up against the curb, tires screeching against the concrete, through his bedroom window. He watched you step out the car slowly, as if you carried something heavy upon your shoulders, and walk into the house across the road from his. When the driver asked you where he should put your luggage, which was only a small carryon, he noted how you only nodded your head towards the house.

When Yoongi first approached you that one summer day, it was not because he sympathized you as you held your knee crying silently on the pebble road behind his house. He walked up to you with complete and pure curiosity instead, his mind boggled by the girl who lived across the street but seemed like she didn't because she never came out the house. It wandered to the endless possibilities of why he never saw you open your mouth, and why you never made a single sound.

You didn't understand why you chose to accept his outstretched hand, which was covered in dirt, grass, and grime, as you squinted at him under the mid-July sun. And you definitely didn't know that your lives would, from that moment on, entangle themselves together the same way the grapevines in his backyard grew.

Unaware and unprepared for what would come several years later, you watched him pick his way into your silent and colorless life, and did nothing to stop him.

He, since that day forth, sort of considered himself a hero, your hero. He bragged to his friends in calculus class how he befriended the anonymous mute girl who casted her gaze away from anyone that came her way. He stopped by everyday at the house you stayed in, which he would later discover to be your aunt's, to drop off his backpack by the backdoor and peek, standing on tiptoes, into your room, beckoning you to come outside. He would slide his fingers into your hand the moment you opened the screen door, and drag you to the pomegranate tree the two of you sat under every time he came to visit. And the two of you, side by side, would go through the novels that he always carried in his backpack for you, pages illuminated by the warm afternoon sun. He was always the one to read and you were always the one to listen attentively, and this routine continued for the next two years.