"Loosen your tie, looks like you decided to hang yourself with it today," Taehyung grumbled from the left as he loosened Seokjin's tie himself.

Seokjin wanted to make a good impression on his first day of high school so much that he spent a lot of time perfecting his appearance. But perfection didn't come to someone who was used to running and falling on a muddy soccer field or coming home from school with their uniform torn.

"But I have to be-"

"Perfect, we get it Jinnie," Jimin said to his right, laughing before pointing out, "but I find you perfect when you're yourself. That top-of-the-class haircut doesn't suit you."

"Exactly," Taehyung said, ruffling Seokjin's hair back to its original state.

"Hey!" Seokjin protested, unsuccessfully trying to comb his unruly hair.

"Shhh! You don't want to stand out from the first day, do you?" Taehyung replied.

Seokjin widened his eyes and immediately clamped a hand over his mouth, remembering where he was and looking around frantically. He was in the large amphitheater of Eunma High School where the back-to-school meeting was going to take place with all the students as well as the high school staff. 

The room was so vast and luxurious with its red velvet armchairs which rose to the top of the room, its ceiling richly decorated with bas reliefs and paintings, its gilding on the walls, its polished parquet floor platform downstairs for those who went to speak, that Seokjin didn't know where to look, too impressed.

All the students of the school were present there, divided spatially into three sections separated by aisles of stairs. This division into sections made it easy to identify the three levels of the high school: first, second and third year. Eunma's uniform was gray but accompanied by some specific color notes for each level: red for first year students, blue for second year students and green for third year students.

Everyone was talking excitedly and the large room echoed with the hubbub of conversations, which left Seokjin thinking that no one must have been paying attention to his conversation with Taehyung and Jimin. However, he suddenly saw, in the section reserved for second year students, a boy smiling at him and looking at him curiously. 

Embarrassed, Seokjin smiled back and was about to quickly look away but saw that the other was giving him a friendly wave. So he raised his hand to do the same but following his gaze and seeing Hoseok, Taehyung quickly grabbed his hand.

"What?" Seokjin asked, looking at his friend with perplexity. 

"Don't look at that guy and stop smiling to him like an idiot," Taehyung ordered, annoyed.

"Why?" Seokjin protested, trying to remove his hand from Taehyung's grip without success. "He greeted me, it would be rude not to-"

"Jin, he's Yoona's brother, you shouldn't talk to him," Jimin cut him off, who didn't want Seokjin to be involved in any way in the affairs of the devious Hoseok.

"Really?!" Seokjin exclaimed. But to Taehyung and Jimin's great displeasure, this didn't seem to turn him away from Hoseok, quite the contrary: "my mom told me that it was him who revealed Yoona's meanness towards me so he must not be a bad person, besides, he seems nice now that I see him, so I should go talk to him to say thank you and maybe also-"

"What? Be his friend?" Taehyung cut him off. "And that's why I told you that you wouldn't have survived away from me in another school: you're way too gullible. There's nothing nice about Hoseok, he only has a fake smile and bad intentions behind it."

"How do you know it's fake?" Seokjin protested.

He thought that Hoseok, apart from a family resemblance that suddenly struck him indeed, did not resemble Yoona in the energy he gave off: his smile and gaze could appear similar visually but the intentions and emotions seemed different. If Yoona's smile was cruel, Hoseok's was bright and contagious; the brother's gaze was as sparkling as the sister's was hard. 

"Are you really going to continue to contradict me when you're so bad at understanding people's true nature? Remember you thought Jungkook was nice because he played football!" He refrained from also calling Namjoon back because he knew that this betrayal was still painful for Seokjin.

At these words, Seokjin couldn't help but look sulky. In his eyes, it was the most humiliating mistake of his life, he wasn't ready to forget it.

"I didn't say Hoseok seemed nice because he played football, did I? So it's different!" he quickly exclaimed and looked away, starting to gaze around the room again and pretending to be interested in it, so that Taehyung would leave him alone and not talk to him about his mistakes anymore.

Taehyung swallowed back all the frustration he currently wanted to pour out on Seokjin while Jimin was giggling on the other side, seeing Taehyung fight against his urges to have the last word.

"Ah, I'm so glad Jin is in Eunma with us," Jimin said for himself, who wouldn't have wanted to end up with just Taehyung and who thought about how Seokjin made his life funnier. 

Without the three of them noticing, a few rows from Hoseok, in the central section of the second years which stood out from the others by its blue color, Namjoon was watching them attentively and even further back, Yoongi, who gave the impression of being completely bored, did not miss a bit of these silent exchanges of glances. 

At the back of the first years section, it was Jungkook who, from the shadows, was observing the interactions between Taehyung and Seokjin, and also between Seokjin and Hoseok from the shadows. The day had arrived when, finally, they were all gathered together: hostilities could begin...

The high school principal Mr. Kang, whom Seokjin vaguely remembered seeing among Mr. Kim's guests at the party, arrived with his deputy, his teaching team and his school life team, whom he quickly introduced to the first year students after welcoming them to Eunma High School. He also reminded everyone of the internal rules, looking intently at certain students, and everyone understood that these were the students considered disruptive.

Then, he introduced the two students who had been named student presidents this year for their merits from the previous year and who represented all the students of the school, while having a certain authority over them. 

"Third grader Kim Joonwoo," Kang called a third grade boy with a pleasant face, "second grader Kim Namjoon!"

The students applauded politely without sincerity as the two boys joined the principal to receive their president's armband and instinctively as well as surprised, Seokjin was also going to applaud as well, but Taehyung stopped him, reminding him that Namjoon didn't deserve any support from them. 

"Don't you even dare be proud of him," he added grumpily. 

"I'm not," Seokjin replied, not saying that was the emotion he instinctively felt when he saw Namjoon take the stage alongside the director. Habits die hard, and sometimes he forgot that he was no longer Namjoon's friend and that the other didn't care about him at all. "He added in a concerned tone, worried about Taehyung's feelings: "And you Tae, aren't you too frustrated that he's the student president?"

"I'm not," Taehyung lied. "I'm not surprised that hypocrites like him reach this kind of position, it suits him well."

Indeed, he was frustrated to see Namjoon occupying an important position in this school. He listened with annoyance to his brother's inauguration speech. He had not been informed of He had not been informed that his brother was the student president but their father must have been particularly proud to learn it. Clearly, Namjoon really played the perfect son. 

"This year," Mr. Kang resumed, turning towards the row of first-year students as Namjoon and Joonwoon went back to their seats, "the population of our prestigious high school is diversifying with, for the first time, a student from modest origins who was entrusted to us by our distinguished partner Mr. Kim Young-Jae alongside his sons and whom I invite to stand up."

Stunned, everyone turned with interest to the row of first years and among them, everyone looked at each other frantically, wondering who the boy Mr. Kang was talking about was and who was not from their social background.

Seokjin exchanged a nervous look with Taehyung because they both understood that Mr. Kang was talking about him. But why did he feel the obligation to publicly display Seokjin's humble origins at the start of the year? Didn't he know that this would cause the other students to be contemptuous and hostile towards him?

"What the hell is his problem?" growled Taehyung, who had planned to keep the difference between Seokjin and the other students a secret so that his friend could have the peaceful schooling he had dreamed of. 

"The secret wouldn't have been kept for long anyway, since there are a few of Gugbo's former students with us but also others who were at your house at the time of the incident with Jin," Jimin said.

Even if Jimin was telling the truth, Seokjin would have preferred not to have to be publicly singled out in front of the entire school. He wasn't shy but being stared at for such a reason made him uncomfortable.

"Come on, Kim Seokjin, don't be shy," Mr. Kang insisted, searching for him because he didn't know what he looked like.

Only then did Seokjin understand that he couldn't run away. Embarrassed, he stood up and stared at the principal, forbidding himself from looking around at the other high school students who were staring at him probably judging him inferior to them and starting to call him a beggar.

"Ah, there you are, Seokjin," the director appreciated, looking at him. "You don't have to hide or to be ashamed, you are now one of us as you belong to the family that Eunma's students form."

The staring looks from the other students and some sniffles seemed to contradict the principal and Seokjin only got more nervous.

"Don't worry," Kang continued, "here, it is not your parents' distinctions that will count but yours, so I recommend that you do your best to distinguish yourself through your good academic and sporting results. You will have to work very hard, probably harder than the others, but it is through this work that you will prove yourself worthy of this success.  I wish you welcome and complete success within this prestigious establishment." 

Relieved by these encouraging words and having found a bright smile again, Seokjin was going to thank him warmly and promise that he would work hard but Kang did not give him the opportunity, adding without warning:

"Oh, one last thing my boy : you obviously made an effort to have a suitable outfit and that is commendable. However, you'll have to fix that haircut, because it is never very serious to present yourself publicly without having combed your hair. Other than that, your appearance is a credit to our establishment, it's very good Seokjin."

He seemed to speak to Seokjin as if he was a child who lacked education unlike the other students but Seokjin didn't pay attention because at that moment, a few students giggled and Seokjin was red with shame. If he hadn't been so intensely scrutinized from all sides, he would have glared at Taehyung because it was he who had messed up his hair. 

"There's no need to laugh, young men," Mr. Kang said, his tone suddenly cold. "Kim Seokjin distinguished himself by an honorable success at Gugbo Private Middle School as Mr. Kim's ward and he should have studied at the sports high school but I stole him for our school," he clarified, allowing himself a little satisfied laugh and Taehyung glared at him. 

He knew this man had just taken advantage of a delicate situation at the Kims for his own benefit. It was clear that he had no goodwill towards Seokjin, he was just going to take advantage of his presence. 

"I therefore ask you to welcome him among you as a deserving student and I do not want to see any of you treat him differently because of his modest social origins, I hope I have been clear."

Relieved, Seokjin allowed himself a look at the other boys and saw that they seemed stunned by this announcement from the principal. Many began to whisper frantically and some, thinking that this would contribute to the humiliation of the Kim family more than to its prestige, threw a mocking look at Namjoon who remained unmoved. 

"I'm going to kill some of them very quickly if they don't calm down," Taehyung grumbled, grabbing Seokjin's jacket and forcing him to sit back down to extract him from this crowd of mocking looks.

In doing so, he attracted the attention of those around him and a few recognized him as Namjoon's little brother. However, few showed him the slightest sign of respect and that annoyed him because he remembered what Namjoon had told him: Eunma was a world apart where the influence of families was not everything.

 This was also what Kang had just said to Seokjin but for all the other students: it was not their parents' distinctions that would count in this school but their own. You had to build a reputation on your own and that was what Taehyung intended to do quickly. He wouldn't let others think they could make fun of his family or pick on Seokjin with impunity. Namjoon no longer had any say in Seokjin and it was therefore up to him to protect Seokjin, he had promised.

"Good, good," the director replied. "Now, I give the floor to our Senior school administrator and also Dormitory Head, Mr. Ra."

A stern-looking forty-year-old stepped forward in front of the speaking desk that Mr. Kang had just left empty and, seeing that some students, especially from the first years side, were still talking about Seokjin and the Kim family with animation and lost interest in him, he yelled:

"SHUT UP, YOU SCRAPS!"

______

A/N : Oh wow, it's Christmas... Here's a gift from your not-so-secret Santa.