BTS Christmas drabbles 2020 [BxB]

22- Sweater Stranger - jikook

Prompt: Jimin loses a bet and has to wear a different ugly Christmas sweater everyday till Christmas. Jungkook works at a clothes store.

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Like a magic shop concealed to the commoners' sight, Tae's Bazaar was a cavern of wonders hidden in one of the smallest alleyways in the outskirts of London. The front of the shop was of purple painted wood chipped in some parts, the sign was obviously hand-painted and the name of the shop displayed in golden cursives, the windows were veiled with thick velvety curtains of a deep purple. While it didn't look old and dusty and on the verge of collapsing, Tae's Bazaar didn't look very inviting and popular either. How the shop managed to stay afloat despite its unconventional location and its risible number of daily customers was a mystery to Jeongguk, but he wasn't about to complain. It provided him a very decent pay cheque and the shifts were easy.

What was Tae's Bazaar selling? Well, clothes, mostly. It was said that the owner of the shop, a mysterious man whose name — Tae — was the only thing Jeongguk knew about him, had started off by selling clothes. Those were clothes you wouldn't normally find on the market, not following the trends or of peculiar size. Some of them were unique pieces, confectioned by hand by anonymous people, their material and patterns speaking of unfathomable stories.

But Tae's Bazaar wasn't only selling clothes. You could find a vast array of crockery, glasses and silverware that undoubtedly had amazing stories of their own; pieces of jewellery that looked like they had been found in a chest pulled out from the bottom of the sea, or had belonged to the finest duchesses, marchionesses and countesses of the erstwhile Courts of England, France or Russia; all sorts of dry plants, herbs and teas; leather-covered books engraved at the spine in various languages; and other oddities that belonged to different cultures, areas and eras, having absolutely nothing in common but the fact that it was a wonder in itself that all of them would be gathered in the same place.

In other words, Tae's Bazaar could probably be considered as a fancy thrift shop, a place full of wonders frozen in time and space, and Jeongguk was one of its shop assistants.

It was a normal, boring winter day, the first of December. The weather was cold and rainy, the sky a muddled grey that poured its sorrows on the city and drowned its inhabitants in a languid torpor. Jeongguk was trapped inside of Tae's Bazaar with Megan, a coworker, and the shop was as void of customers as ever. The shop assistants had taken to doing other things during their shifts; homework, drawing, or playing cards were some of their daily activities once inventory and receiving new items had been dealt with. On really peaceful days, some of them would even take a nap in the back room. That was precisely what Megan had decided to do, leaving Jeongguk alone at the counter with some colouring books and notepads waiting to be filled with random doodles. Nothing announced any perturbation in the peaceful atmosphere of the shop, so the sound of the door chime suddenly echoing in the shop nearly threw Jeongguk off his stool.

A man with a long black coat and a fedora hat — a fedora hat — and shiny black boots barged into the shop, his gait assured in manifest anger. He pulled the hem of his silver scarf down to reveal his face, standing in front of the counter and a startled Jeongguk. This close, the shop assistant noticed that the man was Asian, shorter than him, and had the cutest hands, small and smooth-looking but adorned with silver rings that matched the long earrings glistening under strands of a shockingly bright orange hair. Jeongguk would have cooed, maybe, if the man didn't look so irked that he could barely contain his murderous glare when he looked over at him.

"U-Uh, hello, you've successf—"

"Hi", the guy cut him off in Korean, his voice still mellifluous despite the annoyance lacing his tone. "Bring me the ugliest Christmas sweater you might have. Please." Jeongguk blinked, mouth agape at the rudeness of the customer — their first in probably three days. He sighed internally, straightening his posture. The pretty ones were always just that. Pretty.