Chapter Text
“Yoongi! Yoongi, what happened? Where did you go?”
“You’ve been missing for three days! Where have you been, Yoongi?”
“Are you okay? Were you alone?”
“Were you with Hoseok?”
“Yoongi, where’s Hoseok?”
“Yoongi . . . what happened to Hoseok?”
For whatever happens, the night everything begins to end, They are so, so quiet.
It’s dawn, and Yoongi gets up quietly. He’s still humming a tune to himself, very quiet. His mother always told him They don’t like happy things, musical things, so he hums it as he pulls on his warmer layers. It’s summer, but this high up in the mountains, the air is always frosty at dawn.
The bells at the end of the porch are tinkling in the wind. Yoongi feels himself relax a little as he makes his way to the kitchen, the stove sputtering until the gas catches alight, and he sets a kettle on to boil.
The forest is sighing in the morning breeze, drawing itself back in for the day, and Yoongi throws open the curtains.
Red at dawn; shepherd’s warn. It will rain today. Heavily, with any luck. Yoongi’s gotten tired of the light, humid showers.
The house is small and empty, now that he’s let the rosy, dawn light in. The piano glows under it, and Yoongi spends a second, leaning on the bench, watching the dust float between the shafts of light. Household fae, his mother used to call them.
His mother’s bedroom door is closed now. Nowadays he’s not sure if it’s out of respect or avoidance.
The kettle warms up and the sky brightens, and Yoongi begins to unlatch the back door. Over the years it’s amassed quite the collection: 4 deadlocks, 3 bolts, 2 chains. Opening them is as much of an exercise as ritual. All the keys are hidden around the house. Yoongi and his mother used to be pedantic about it: never place things all together. Energy gathers when you put things like that in one place.
The potted plants at Yoongi’s door have been knocked over during the night. He bends down to right them, shoving the dirt back into the pot by hand. The air is still cold and nips at his face, but it’s refreshing.
The dirt is warm in his hands.
The bells are silent, despite the wind. When he looks up, something catches his eye.
There’s something in the woods.
“Yoongi.”
Something between the trees.
“Yoongi.”
There’s someone in the woods.
“Yoongi!”
Yoongi startles so hard he knocks the plant back over, and Seokjin frowns at him. Of course. His pesky fucking neighbour comes up to him in the morning. He’s standing at the edge of Yoongi’s porch, under the silver bells and between the foreign bushes his mother planted there years ago to ward Them off.
When Yoongi looks back to the woods, there’s nothing amiss at all.
“Come to town,” Seokjin says over coffee. He’s brought some food from his own house, a few hundred metres away from Yoongi’s. Yoongi’s never looked out the window at night, but he imagines he’d be able to see the distant orange glow of Seokjin’s window.
“Why?”
“People are asking if the forest’s taken you, yet.” Seokjin smiles thinly, like he’s testing the waters. The joke’s a sore one, for sure, but Seokjin, though empathetic, is not coddling. It’s been over ten years. “When was the last time you spoke to someone else?”
Yoongi’s still thinking about the figure in the treeline. He thinks it was a person, but they were pale all over. Naked? A naked person in the forest?
It screams bad omen and Yoongi isn’t sure what to do. His mother told him to listen to his gut, but Yoongi almost can’t feel anything.
“I spoke to Jimin and Jungkook the other day,” Yoongi mutters. “We had dinner.”
“That was a week ago.”
“Saw Namjoon in the library.”
“Last month.”
“Saw you, like, a day ago.”
“Two days ago, but getting closer.”
“Wow, hyung. Okay, fine—I never see anyone! This town’s so small I could get a pair of binoculars and see you all at once anyway, so what’s the issue?”
“You have to talk to people, Yoongi.”
“Since when?”
“You think you can coop yourself up in here for another five years, just to play your piano?” Seokjin raises one of his harsh, bold eyebrows as he stares at Yoongi. The mug sends steam into his face and Yoongi sometimes watches the way the wisps of it curl around his chin, float in between the man’s eyelashes. “Yoongi.”
“There’s something in the woods.”
The air goes silent, just saying it. Like the household fae are holding their breath, thinking, how dare you bring the woods into our home! and Yoongi is, too. He feels a stone in his throat and Seokjin is looking at him so strangely, so anguished.
“Yoongi,” he says lowly, hesitant. “I think you should get out more.”
It’s not that Seokjin doesn’t believe Yoongi. Everyone believes Yoongi. Everyone agrees. There is something in there. The woods are something bad but today’s the first day he’s ever seen one of Them in the daylight. He’s never seen one in the treeline before. He’s never seen something come out of the forest in the day.
Nothing, except for himself.
“I dunno,” Yoongi says softly. “I was looking at it, just as you showed up.”
The dust particles swirl, even though there’s no wind. Be silent be silent be silent do not say their name in these four walls!
“You know it isn’t good to talk about,” Seokjin says quietly. “Regardless. I’m going into town today, and you should come too.”
Half an hour in Seokjin’s busted-up car sounds like a nightmare, but the only other option is sitting in front of the piano all day, listening to his old house creak and groan and waiting for the sun to set. Waiting for Them.
“Sure,” Yoongi says.
But he doesn’t stop thinking about it.
There’s something in the woods.
“Hyung!” Jung Hoseok is ten, in this memory. He’s ten and his teeth are too big and his head is too small. “Hyung, let’s go play!”
“Okay!” Yoongi is eleven. It’s summer and everything is warm. They spend all day playing in Yoongi’s huge backyard. Never the woods. Yoongi’s mother always tells him never to play in the woods. “Where?”
“I want to go to in the forest,” Hoseok says eagerly. “Noona said it’s super fun!”
Yoongi still remembers his mother lying out a sugar cube for the ants that morning, ruffling his hair and telling him, ‘stay home today, okay? It’s a bad day.’
“I don’t know,” Yoongi says. “Mum told me not to.”
Hoseok pouts sullenly, planting himself on the ground. “Hyung,” he whines. “Please!”
The forest doesn’t seem that dangerous. It looks a little dark, and the birds are always quiet, but in the spring it’s full of insects, and Yoongi’s mother always tells him that insects mean good things. The trees look tall and full of fun branches to climb.
“Tomorrow?” Yoongi glances down the side of the house. It’s a small place, raised a foot off the ground on concrete stilts. The wooden boards used to be painted but Yoongi’s mother likes them better brown. There’s a line of ants crawling up the side, taking down the sugar cube grain by grain.
“Today,” Hoseok grumbles sullenly. Yoongi, even this young, is soft for him. Hoseok must see him hesitate because his expression brightens.
The sky is clear and the weather is warm. Hoseok’s smile is hopeful and young.
Yoongi is naïve and foolish.
“Okay,” he says, and feels gratified the instant Hoseok’s face breaks into a smile.
The town isn’t that far, but it takes them nearly twenty minutes just to roll Seokjin’s car down the winding mountain road. Seokjin’s always been a little reckless when the mood took him, and driving is no exception. Seokjin doesn’t believe in brakes.
The valley opens up beneath them as they wind down the mountainside. Bangsang-meyon is a short drive further, but that many people has always unsettled Yoongi, used to being alone. Their small, intermediate town on the slope of the mountain is enough for him.
There’s a library here, a gas station, two supermarkets and a town hall that farmers come to on Saturday mornings to sell fresh produce. A small, rural school. One or two B&Bs that sell the valley view. It’s nice. Small. Just enough for Yoongi.
“I have to run some errands,” Seokjin says when he gets out. “Be back in an hour?”
Yoongi doesn’t wear a watch but he’s grown very good at counting down the time to nightfall. It’s going to rain in a few hours, he thinks. There aren’t any clouds yet but the air smells like rain.
“See you later, Jin-hyung.”
Yoongi doesn’t really have anywhere to go except the library. He has a handful of friends in this town, the few that actually dare speak to Min Yoongi, the one who came back. One of them is Seokjin. Another is Kim Namjoon, the local librarian.
It’s hard to navigate town knowing what kind of people live here, but Yoongi manages. Grandmothers cross the road to be away from him. Dogs off leads trot over, friendly as ever, but they’re quickly scolded and pulled away by their owners chasing after them. Yoongi offers them the same wan smile, gets one in return—but that’s that. Yoongi doesn’t know any names despite knowing all the faces. He doesn’t blame them. It’s bad luck to give your name to bad things.
The library is a small, squat building perched on the hill next to Yoongi’s old school. Usually it’s full of students trying to cram as best they can, but in this late Spring weather it’s calm. Quiet. The fans are going to try and get the air moving through the stuffy old building. The staffroom is full of friendly chatter. Libraries have always felt safe.
“Hyung!” someone calls, and Yoongi peeks around a shelf to see Namjoon struggling with an armful of books. “You’ve left your isolation cell.”
The books are about to fall, so Yoongi steps over to take them off him. “It’s not isolation. Chill out.”
“You go days in complete solitude,” Namjoon tells him, smirking a little because he’s right, even though it concerns him. “I’m glad hyung brought you down.”
“I could come down on my own.” Yoongi hands him a book. Namjoon reaches up to the top shelf to slip it between two aging volumes. Higher than Yoongi could reach. Even being short, his arms are short as well. Namjoon is tall and long-limbed.
“You just hate us, huh?”
“Yeah.” Yoongi smiles. “Boring as fuck. Country bums.”
“Don’t let Jungkook hear that.” Namjoon smiles. His dimple deepens. His hands are elegant but clumsy when they take another book. They move further down the aisle. “Why are you even here today?”
“Jin-hyung.” Yoongi rolls some loose carpet fibres under his toe. “Said I was gonna go mad and roped me into coming.”
“Knew it.” Namjoon takes the final book from Yoongi’s arm. A new edition. Unsolved Mysteries of the Twenty-First Century. Yoongi thinks he knows too well what mystery might feature. “Jungkook’s doing his shrine duties, so you can’t have your daily dose of that bugger. Jimin’s doing the usual.”
Jimin and Jungkook are more or less joined at the hip. When they’re forced apart, Jimin sits and sulks, always watching. Waiting for it to be over. Yoongi smiles at the thought. Cute.
The sky darkens very suddenly, the light indoors changing to come from the white fluorescent bulbs, and Yoongi thinks of the thing in the woods.
“Saw something in the forest today,” he says as calm as he can. The library fae, the loose flecks of dust, are invisible in this light. No one to tell him to stop. “At dawn. Weird, huh?”
“You’ve got too much going on in that head,” Namjoon says with certainty, despite being the least qualified to tell Yoongi that. He pauses. Namjoon, of all people, takes Yoongi seriously. Hoseok had been his friend, too. “But. I dunno. Humour me.”
Yoongi wonders if Namjoon’s mother used to tell him to walk as he talked, too, because he gets more antsy as the topic gets clearer. He wanders back to the counter. The library feels safe but Yoongi knows better than to think things untouchable.
“Just. A thing.” Yoongi can’t even picture it clearly. Something slim and tall, swaying amongst the trunks of the trees. Spindly? Pale? Yoongi tries to think but it feels more like an impression than anything else. Like something. Something that maybe doesn’t feel sinister. “I’m sure there was something.”
Maybe it’s still watching. Sometimes the forest feels hollow. Other times Yoongi swears he feels it inhale, like one giant lung. Like a sigh. Like a huff. Impatient, maybe.
Yoongi feels, a little oddly, like it could have looked like a person.
He’s not sure, so he says nothing. Namjoon doesn’t press that far.
“At dawn?” Namjoon shifts the vase of onion flowers left on the counter. Water ripples. Flowers droop. “They’re usually gone by then, right?”
“That’s what I thought, too.” The unease picks at him, but it’s not much worse than usual. Yoongi’s lived his whole life in that house, next to that forest. There are locks and plants and bells. “So . . . yeah.”
“Was it scary?” Namjoon boots up the computer; an old, clunky thing. “Like, did it . . . did it feel bad?”
“It felt like nothing,” Yoongi says. The air is heavy and stagnant despite the fans overhead. “It was just there.”
Namjoon is silent for a long time. Yoongi fidgets.
“I guess that’s just how it is,” Namjoon offers.
“I guess so.”
Yoongi is ten. The sun and the sky is so, so bright when he stumbles into the clearing he wants to cry. He can see his house. His house is right there but he feels like he can’t move, like there’s something tied around his ankles.
“Hoseok?” he calls, but there’s no response. He looks to his left, to his right, and he’s a child and he’s good at playing hide and seek, good at tucking himself away and seeing people, but he can’t see Hoseok. The trees are so, so still, but there’s a breeze on his forehead. Something being pulled back into the forest.
“Hoseokie?” he yells, louder, and his voice is reedy, breaking apart. “Hoseokie, this isn’t funny! Where are you?”
His throat aches and his eyes sting, and he stumbles out of the shadows, and—
And there’s someone there, gripping his shoulders. “Yoongi!”
There’s someone there and it’s not Hoseok.
Yoongi doesn’t know where Hoseok is.
The heavens open just as Yoongi and Seokjin climb back in his car. It took ten minutes to load everything into the boot. Seokjin probably feels like making kimchi again. Yoongi doesn’t blame him. The days are painfully long in summer. It’s good to have something to do.
Rain thunders on the windshield, and with it the temperature changes from humid to muggy, the sky dark and grey. Seokjin battles with the radio for a while before they start driving. He’s always liked this kind of rain, sentimental bastard.
“Did you go see Namjoon?” Seokjin asks. The car hisses as he turns it on. Jimin will have to come over and take a look. It’s been years since Seokjin had the battery replaced.
“Yeah.” Yoongi turns up the music dial. “It was cool.”
Nothing in their town ever changes.
“’Cool’,” Seokjin scoffs. The winding road is treacherous but Seokjin doesn’t care, never dropping below fourth gear. “Now you get to spend another month in your cabin in the woods.”
“Thank God,” Yoongi sighs, and Seokjin smacks him on the chest.
“I swear.” Seokjin is miffed, that’s for sure. “If you keep this up you’ll go mad.”
Yoongi thinks of the thing in the woods and wants to say he already has.
Seokjin’s a fucking bastard, so he ropes Yoongi into helping him unload the car and having lunch with his mother. Mrs Kim is lovely, but it kind of freaks Yoongi out, how welcoming she is. His own mother had been kind of a bitch. Respectfully, of course, but every time someone needed their hospitality Yoongi remembers it being punctuated with complaints and muttered curses. Mrs Kim genuinely likes having his company. Like he said: freaky.
“You should come by more often,” Mrs Kim tells him. She’s started weaving. Yoongi’s never seen the method before, but she makes small bracelets of thread. “I only have Seokjinnie here for company.”
“You poor soul,” Yoongi says dryly, and Seokjin flashes him a look that says if it were not for my mother, I would have destroyed you.
Seokjin’s house is farther from the woods than Yoongi’s is. They don’t deal with the same trouble on a nightly basis but the cow they used to have disappeared after a week. Back then Yoongi was too awkward to say anything but Mrs Kim looked only disappointed, like she’d expected it.
They’ve always been kind of like that. Yoongi thinks that's why Seokjin used to intimidate him.
“What do you even do all day in that hut of yours?” Mrs Kim leans back in her chair. She doesn’t have Jin’s eyebrows, but her nose is the same shape. Her lips, too, but they’re less full than Jin’s. Everything about her is subdued but still striking. Sometimes she doesn’t even look related to her son. “Play songs?”
Yoongi rubs the back of his neck. “Well, basically.” His piano needs a tune but Yoongi’s too lazy, nowadays. The humid weather will stay for ages. “I borrowed a bunch of music stuff from the library the other day. Still playing those.”
He literally has nothing else to do.
Mrs Kim huffs. “Help us with the kimchi this year, then.”
“You know I’ll fuck it up,” Yoongi says, nearly clapping a hand over his mouth once he realises he’s sworn in front of Mrs Kim. She grins at him. Seokjin looks like he wants to smash his head onto the kitchen bench.
“You literally just shove some leaves into a box,” Mrs Kim says dryly, “but whatever. Go play your emo rock for pianos at home.”
“Well, someone has to,” Yoongi grumbles, and Mrs Kim looks just shy of hitting him.
The summer days are long and boring, and Yoongi dreads sundown with routine.
It’s nearly midnight when the first thump on the door shakes the house. Weather-beaten boards groan against the strain. Yoongi swears the house shifts on its concrete stilts.
Yoongi pulls the covers over his head and holds his breath.
Another thump. The door rattles. The image of it flying off its hinges flashes in Yoongi’s mind but he squashes it down.
It’s still raining. There’s no wind.
In El-hairm, Yoongi recites to himself, there lived a man. A man with yellow eyes.
Yoongi puts the pillow over his head. Everything smells like home and bedsheets. He thinks of the figure in the woods and breaks out in cold sweat. Something brushes by Yoongi’s window. He half thinks he feels it against his skin.
To me, he said, ‘Beware of the whisper, for the whisper lies!’
Yoongi breathes in; breathes out. Taps a rhythm against his arm. He can hear something walking along the porch, creeping along the wall. Step, step, step. Bipedal. Yoongi wants to throw up.
‘Do not wrestle with the demons of the dark, else upon your mind they’ll leave a mark.’
The walking stops at his window. Yoongi never leaves the blinds up at night, and even with the pillow over his face, he swears he sees a shadow fall over him.
‘Do not listen to the shadows of the deep, else they’ll haunt you even when you sleep.’
The walking continues around the house. Something in the forest shrieks. Despite all silver and bells around his house there is no sound. No sound from them at all.
Another thud at the door. They knocked his fucking plants over.
And then, something softer.
“Help me.” It’s a voice. Yoongi pulls the pillow over his ears so tight he can barely breathe. His mother used to cover his ears when they spoke. Don’t listen to Them, Yoongi, she used to whisper. You can’t ever listen.
“Please.” They’re crying. Whatever it is, it’s crying. Yoongi thinks of the poem as loud as he can, as fast as he can, on repeat in his head.
“Yoongi, please,” They say, and Yoongi curls around the pillow under the covers, willing the night to pass.
Hoseok is Yoongi’s best friend. They’re in the same grade despite Yoongi being a year older, because his mother kept him home. Every day after school, Yoongi goes home with Daewon, Hoseok’s older sister, and her older friends that have a car and a license and can drive them up the hill.
Hoseok has Pokémon cards. Yoongi keeps trying to learn how to play, but Hoseok changes the rules every time. He hates losing. Yoongi smacks him for it sometimes, and then Hoseok pushes him and cries and Yoongi feels bad. Hoseok always says sorry and they keep playing together.
Hoseok is Yoongi’s best friend.
When the kids at school stare at Yoongi because he’s the witch’s son, Hoseok comes to cheer him up. Hoseok’s good at being loud. Yoongi’s mother always makes him be quiet.
Yoongi picks up beetles and cicadas in the playground that Hoseok won’t touch. Hoseok is friends with Namjoon, who is quiet and bookish and can’t run that fast so they always play tag with him. Namjoon is friends with Jimin. Jimin is friends with Jungkook.
But Hoseok is Yoongi’s best friend.
“Best friends forever,” Hoseok tells him, when Yoongi’s ten and Hoseok’s nine and they’re in Hoseok’s back yard, playing in the dirt while Daewon sits with her friends on the front porch smoking cigarettes. “Promise.”
“Best friends forever,” Yoongi agrees. Hoseok beams.
The next morning is much the same. Chilly. The sky is wan and blue. No rain.
Yoongi waits for everything to turn properly daylight before he moves to unlock the door. He feels unsettled, now, by seeing something in the woods. He opens the curtains, lets the light in. Everything is damp and weighed down from the rain yesterday. Mist hangs over the fields, stretching down the hill. Seokjin’s house is small and squat from here.
Yoongi busies himself with the stove. He has to light it with a match for the flame to catch. He forgot to buy a lighter in town. Fuck. He knew he forgot something.
He opens the kitchen window last, because it faces the woods. The lace curtains that have been up since before Yoongi was born flutter weakly as air rushes in. Yoongi peeks through the blue-purple light and stares at the slim, pale trees.
There’s something in the woods, again.
There’s no Seokjin coming, no one to distract him, so Yoongi stares and stares. It’s not a deer. It’s not an animal. It is most definitely on two legs but that's all Yoongi can see from here. It almost blends into the tree trunks.
It shifts. Yoongi flinches back, dropping the curtain and crouching behind the stove out of habit.
It looked at him.
Yoongi has to press a hand to his chest, as if he can force down his heart. All his life, his mother has said to keep Them at an arm’s length. To never interact. To pretend they’re not fucking there. You don’t look at Them, They don’t look at you. But Yoongi looked at it. And fuck, it looked right back at him.
What’re you looking at, hyung?
Yoongi squeezes his eyes shut as hard as he can. Holds his breath. Thinks of his poem, over and over. He hates being in the dark but if he opens his eyes he’s scared he’ll see whatever it was right in front of him, right inside his fucking house despite all the silver and all the bells and all the chalk lines his mother drew onto the foundations.
He doesn’t think of his mother. He doesn’t think of Hoseok. He doesn’t think of what’s in the woods.
He thinks of El-Hairm and a fucking angry man with yellow eyes yelling at him. Thinks not wrestling with the demons of the dark, closing his ears to the shadows of the deep. Thinks of chewing at his nails on every day except Sunday. Thinks of how he should be afraid of anyone who says he has nice hair or nice nails. Thinks of the library in town. The shrine on the hill.
The whistling of the kettle draws him out of it, and when Yoongi opens his eyes there’s nothing in the room with him except the steam of boiling water. When he looks out of the kitchen window there’s nothing. Nothing at all.
Yoongi doesn’t make any tea. He tears some sage from the plant and lets it steep in the water by the window, too antsy to do anything else. Burns a candle. Plays some piano.
He feels jittery and unhinged, so bad he locks up his house and walks all the way down to town instead.
The walk up the mountain is long and scary. Hoseok is never quiet but he is now, and Yoongi is scared. The forest is dark but it’s a wrong dark. A bad dark. Like a nighttime dark but during the day dark, when all the bad things come out and the sun can’t stop them. Sun filters through the leaves but Yoongi feels like he’s sleepwalking.
The air smells funny. Yoongi’s breath is fogging in front of him but it’s not cold; it’s hot. There’s sweat down his arms and Hoseok’s palm is clammy in his. They’re climbing; the incline keeps going, but there’s no trail and Yoongi knows they’re lost. If they can go up the mountain until they can see down into fields below, then he can lead them home. That’s why he won’t tell Hoseok. Because Hoseok will cry.
Yoongi hates it when Hoseok cries.
The forest is so quiet around the sound of them walking that Yoongi feels like he shouldn’t be here. He can’t hear any bugs, any animals. It’s as if they’re the only things here, even though Yoongi knows the trees have ears and eyes and there’s something in the leaves, like his mother’s always told him. He knows that they’re being watched, being listened to—and he’s scared. Everything feels wrong and scary in this forest, and Yoongi wants to go home.
Ash.
The funny smell is ash, like something is burning.
There’s no wind to carry the smell, the leaves all still and silent. The air fogs with their breath even when it’s so warm. At the same time everything smells pull of petrichor, like after a rainstorm. Everything feels upside down and inside out.
Yoongi holds Hoseok’s hand tighter and starts walking faster. He wants to go home. They were wrong to come here.
It takes over an hour to walk down to town, not that Yoongi minds. He doesn’t want to be alone, and he can’t ask Seokjin after he was such a douchebag yesterday. Yoongi keeps a careful eye out for anything and everything, more than a little rattled. He has to walk through paddocks to stay on the path and a cow or two meander over to him. Yoongi feels kind of comforted. Cows are big and warm and just a little useless. He’s very fond.
In town, he doesn’t bother going to the library, instead climbing up the steps to the shrine. He wants to talk to two people very specifically. He’s not sure who else there is to offer him any sort of moral support.
“Hyung!” Jimin calls when he finally makes it to the top, out of breath. Jungkook’s half a metre away, probably asleep. “Yoongi-hyung, it’s been, like, two weeks!”
Jimin is touchier than Seokjin, so he has no qualms about tackling Yoongi into a hug. He smells like incense.
“Hey, Jiminie.” Jimin’s hair is plastered to his head with sweat. Yoongi was so determined to get to town he hadn’t even realised how hot it was. He might even be sunburnt. The back of his neck is burning. Black shirt too hot. Great work, Min Yoongi.
Jimin’s studying him now, with those dark eyes of his. Yoongi wouldn’t be surprised if he could look someone up and down and just know what their deal is.
“Is something wrong, hyung?” Jimin asks, and Yoongi suddenly can’t find any words.
Because something is wrong. Something is so, so wrong but Yoongi can’t tell what the cause is.
“I don’t know, Jimin,” he says. “I don’t know.”
The Shrine, Yoongi thinks, is the safest place. Jungkook has all the doors open and the fans on so the air can move. Incense smells safe. Smells like something the forest wouldn’t touch.
“Namjoonie-hyung said you saw something,” Jimin says after a beat. Jungkook is silent but observant next to him, staring at his hands but his ears keep twitching. Literally like a cat. It’s kind of cute but Yoongi’s afraid to tell Jungkook that. He’s way too shy around Yoongi. “Is that why you’re so . . . ?”
Freaked out? Rattled? Unhinged?
“I didn’t want to be alone,” Yoongi admits. “And I couldn’t go to Jin-hyung’s because that bastard will literally say I told you so.”
Jimin cracks a smile. “So? What was it?”
“I think it was a person.” Jungkook had them served warm tea, but Yoongi thinks of the sage he left steeping and he’s put off despite sweating away his body weight. “I dunno. I looked at it—and it was, like, seven o’clock. Not even dawn. I looked at it and then it fuckin’ looked back at me.”
“Jesus,” Jungkook mutters lowly, and Jimin makes a noise in agreement.
“In conclusion,” Yoongi goes on, afraid of upsetting the mood, “I think I’ve gone stir-crazy and I wanted to be in sane company.”
“Not choosing Seokjinnie-hyung,” Jimin says wryly. “Good choice.”
“I love being validated,” Yoongi says, equally dry. The shrine is always calming. The chimes rattle when a worker rushes by, otherwise silent from the lack of wind. Everything here is a little distant. Safe, even.
Yoongi prefers his house.
“Have you found a place to sprinkle her ashes yet?” Jungkook says softly, after a minute or two of silence. He isn’t looking at Yoongi. That’s to be expected. Four years is a big age gap in one small town.
“No,” Yoongi admits. “I don’t . . . I don’t go anywhere, and I don’t think she’d have liked it on the forest.”
Jungkook pulls a face, and Yoongi snickers.
“It’s not good to leave that shit lying around, though, hyung,” Jungkook says, and Yoongi goes quiet. He’s right. Yoongi’s mother would have whacked him by now and told him to stop being sappy.
“But anyway,” Jimin interjects, leaning forward on the table. Based on the angle of his arm, Yoongi can tell he’s got a hand on Jungkook’s knee. That’s kind of cute. “This guy. Woods.”
“I dunno if it was a guy or not,” Yoongi admits. “I don’t know if it was a person. Bold of you to force that mortal concept of gender onto a fucking cryptid.”
“For someone who lives in a fifty-square-metre box, you sure know a lot of memes,” Jimin grumbles. “Talk about it. Joonie-hyung said it was, like, weird.”
“No, I was being weird about it.” Yoongi swirls his tea so he has something to do with his hands. He can’t remember if that’s rude or not. “And I’m still being weird about it. ‘Oh, shit! The woods are haunted!’”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Jimin says. “He said you weren’t scared.”
“Yeah, well, I nearly shat myself this morning,” Yoongi admits. He still can’t get over the body-long snap that went through the thing, locking him onto Yoongi like a fucking heat-seeking missile. “So, maybe redact that statement.”
“And you just got up and walked down into town.” Jimin’s tone is humoured, but there’s no smile on his face. Yoongi’s seen a lot of shit in the woods, arguably worse than this, but Jimin’s never seen Yoongi literally march himself away from it. Usually he just bums around at Seokjin’s house.
This is something different. Yoongi thinks of steeping sage and his mother’s tiny leather slippers nailed above the door.
He thinks of what the valley looks like from up the mountain, so small.
The Missing Persons poster is the worst part.
They’ve chosen Hoseok’s school picture; his teeth are so big but his face hasn’t grown into them yet. Everything looks lopsided. He’s smiling.
MISSING BOY: JUNG HOSEOK, 10 YEARS OLD
Yoongi is in hospital an hour away from home. The air is weird and the people are odd. Reporters come to the door but Yoongi’s mum yells at them.
“What happened to Hoseok, Yoongi?”
That’s what they all ask.
Yoongi has to stare at them and say “I don’t know.”
Yoongi wastes the day away and hitches a ride home with Seokjin after Jimin does aegyo for him over the phone. Seokjin bullies him literally the entire way but whatever.
“I can’t believe you just walked all four kilometres down the mountain,” Seokjin says for, like, the sixth time. “In your all-black outfit. You fucking dumbass.”
“Thanks.”
Seokjin snickers, veering to the right sharply to avoid another car. Yoongi notes he doesn’t shift down gears and just speeds right up around the bend. Yoongi stares out the window at the sheer drop below. Sweet release of death, please claim him. Save him from this hell of being gloated at by Kim Seokjin.
“Just because you saw some rake-looking bastard in the trees,” Seokjin continues, knowing well and probably respecting Yoongi’s fear but lacking any compassion for the actual person. “You fucking dipshit, what the fuck.”
“Look, hyung,” Yoongi grumbles, “I wasn’t going to sit in your tiny ass house while you had an apron on and probably danced to country music making kimchi, okay? Fuck you.”
“I had a great day doing that exact thing, thank you very much.” Yoongi hates it when Seokjin roasts him with his perfect fucking Seoul accent. Bastard. Imagine growing up an elite and then moving to this dumbass town as a teen.
“Death to the bourgeoisie,” Yoongi mutters lowly.
“Min Yoongi, I will drive us off this fucking road, you ungrateful bastard.”
Yoongi’s always been the obligatory weird kid, even if this town. His mother was kind of a ‘witch’, or whatever you could call her. Yoongi’s dad was out of the equation. Probably dead but like, everyone dies. No big.
Like he said, his mother was like, low-key a bitch. He’s very proud of that.
He supposes no one else would have been able to live in their house, near the woods. No one else would know to nail up silver chains or put up tiny, silver bells. No one else lays chalk in the ground in a circle around the house. No one else would think to draw it along the walls. No one hangs up tiny shoes above doorways or plants special herbs and leaves them in doorways. It’s the little things.
Yoongi’s pretty sure the Jungs had always lived in the next house over. Or at least, that's all he knew growing up and there’s no way he’s motivated enough to find out now. The Jungs, a family of four, were welcoming people when they lived here. Hoseok had more or less adopted Yoongi to be his older brother since Daewon was a fucking hardass.
They went to the same school, so small there was one class per year level, and Yoongi and Hoseok were best friends.
Yoongi would like to say he’s forgotten what Hoseok looks like, now that it’s been nearly twelve years, but that’s not how it is. Hoseok’s face has been plastered on newspapers and missing persons posters for years. Eternally ten years old. Yoongi’s got him memorised.
The Jungs left, of course, after that. Not that Yoongi can blame them. He kind of wishes he’d left too.
Kim Seokjin and his mother moved in after. Yoongi was fourteen when he first met them. They walked all the way down to their house. Yoongi remembers answering the door after his mother bitched at him. Seokjin was just as tall and impressively broad-shouldered back then, too. Kind of intimidating.
“Hello!” Mrs Kim had said. “We’re new.”
“Hi.” Yoongi’s a man of few words. Mrs Kim looked like she expected this.
“We made food,” she says, gesturing to the pot in Seokjin’s hands. “And you’re going to eat it with us.”
“Um.” Yoongi wasn’t used to hearing a Seoul accent off the television. It kind of terrified him. “Let me just . . . ask my mum—”
“No!” Mrs Min had yelled. “No salespeople. I’m not interested.”
“The Seoulites made dinner!” Yoongi snapped back at her. “They want to eat it with us!”
“But you’re so ugly, why would they want that?”
“Wow, thanks.”
“Your son isn’t ugly at all!” Mrs Kim had yelled. “Thank you for your hospitality!”
They kind of forced their way in. It was pretty typical.
Seokjin and Yoongi have begrudgingly been friends ever since.
Yoongi’s feeling festive, obviously, because as the sky starts to get closer to evening than afternoon he waddles out and pours the sage water he’s left steeping all day around the house. Preparation. Festivities.
He’s not usually so cynical, right?
With the evening comes a breath of wind Yoongi doesn’t like. Wind in general has always made him uneasy, but the sky has gone grey and low, clouds heavy, and the wind feels too mild on this side of summer. The bells jingle and Yoongi feels like it’s time to go back inside.
There are silver chains nailed along the porch, and Yoongi checks them all to make sure they’re secure. Rights the potted plants at his door. There’s little to do and Yoongi is antsy with the need to do something.
The wind picks up. Yoongi swallows hard and goes back inside. Locks up. Everything smells like sage but Yoongi hasn’t ever liked the herb.
He kind of wants to read, but all his books are grossly uninteresting, and playing piano against the wind just feels bad. So Yoongi locks up the door, one deadbolt at a time, and hides the keys back in their spot. He’s as thorough as can be, just so it takes extra long. He lights a candle—he even goes so far to find the old candle-shade his mother used to use, buried in some storage in one of the cupboards. There’s a small forest design on it, with a deer. Lit up, it looks safe.
Yoongi’s not scared. Totally not scared.
It’s just that something feels wrong. Ominous. The sky is a shade took dark to be cloudy or too pale to be rain, and the whole world is suspended in that uneasy half-light. The wind blows out from the forest and it feels wrong through his hair, along the bare skin of his arms. When he’s locked inside it sounds wrong, warped, like the forest is howling but its voice is all wrong. It chills Yoongi to the bone and has him climbing into bed even tho the sun has only just set.
Seokjin used to have a cat, back when the Kims first moved in. A small thing—completely white, one blue eye and one green eye. Yoongi’s mother was never one for cats, always thought they were a little too enigmatic. What was it she used to say? Oh, yeah:
What’s a mammal got with eyes like a snake?
Yoongi doesn’t think of the cat often, but he remembers her now, since the wind’s picked up and the bells are chiming, leaves hissing in the distance, carrying over open land—she used to sit on Yoongi’s porch, just watching the forest. Cats do that, Yoongi guesses. Just like to watch things. Make sure they stay still.
Then one night the old thing disappeared and no one ever saw her again. The Kims were distraught—or, well, Seokjin was. Yoongi’s mother pinched his ear and told him to be done with the grief. She was a cat and whatever she got herself into was her own damn fault and it’s time to get over it. There’s no use to the living to get hung up on the dead.
But on nights like these, Yoongi knew that cat would be watching. Knew that cats could see something Yoongi and his mother couldn’t. And he’s sure he’d appreciate it, right now, because he’s so damn sure—he’s so sure that there’s something in the woods, and it’s coming.
There’s a white deer in the woods. Yoongi is fifteen, whittling away at a branch with a small knife, just to kill some time. His mother’s at work and he’s home alone. He would have stayed later at school but he hitched a ride with Seokjin instead, and now he’s too awkward to talk to the guy.
So, it’s late afternoon. Just before the sun starts to turn the sky red and orange and there’s a white stag in the woods, just standing there. Watching him.
Yoongi’s not a child, not anymore. He knows to show your respect to the deer. So he bows, just once, to the deer over one hundred metres across the field. The stag bows back and then starts to walk, diagonal to Yoongi, crossing their paddocks and walking to where the tree line starts up again.
It comes close. So close Yoongi can tell it’s taller than a horse, but nimbler. It’s antlers aren’t normal, they’re easily two metres across, twisting and winding and sharp like some nightmarish tree branches, perfectly symmetrical. When it glances at Yoongi he bows again. The deer bows back and keeps walking.
Yoongi wonders if it’s rude to turn your back, so he stands and watches the deer until it wanders back into the trees.
His mother doesn’t ask him why he’s carved a small deer carving when she gets home, instead using it for kindling in the grill for dinner. It’s not good to keep those kinds of things around.
The wind whispers, and it feels like fingertips tracing the boards of Yoongi’s house. Like something pressing their mouth against the tiny gap of the window and murmuring through it. Yoongi feels like he should listen and that’s probably the scariest part.
Yoongi’s recited the same poem ever since he learned it, but even that can’t calm him down. Not fighting the demons of the dark has never been harder. Every time he tries to recite in his head he can’t tell if it’s his own voice, can’t quite ignore the other smattering of thoughts. Is the door locked properly? Will something come in? Is there something at the window? Am I really safe in here? The woods want something.
What happened to Hoseok?
Yoongi claps his palms over his ears so hard his head rings, eyes aching like he’s nearly slapped them out of their sockets. It doesn’t help. Yoongi feels trapped inside his own head and it’s wrong and wrong and wrong and—
“Help me.”
It’s a different voice. It’s at his door but its not pounding at it. It sounds like it’s pawing at the wood like a fucking dog, and it freaks Yoongi out that he can hear it even when his skull is aching and there’s so much ringing in his ears.
“Let me in, please. Please. Yoongi, please.”
The voice is different but it’s nothing. There’s nothing to it except foreign. Nothing except wrong. Yoongi can barely tell that it’s not him making it up. Yoongi’s never even once entertained running off in the night to at least be around other people, but he’s never in his life been scared shitless like this.
There’s something in the woods.
Some spindly figure, snapping towards him.
A white stag walking through the clearing.
A clammy hand in his, walking up the mountainside, everything smelling like ash and rain, humid yet so cold his breath fogged.
There’s something in the woods.
No.
Yoongi, what happened to Hoseok?
There’s someone in the woods.
Yoongi bites hard on his tongue, and he knows it’s impossible to kill yourself like that but he bites and it hurts and hurts and hurts and he tastes blood but it’s anything to keep him in bed. He balls up under the covers, pulls the pillow over his head and thinks In El-Hairm there lived a man, a man with yellow eyes.
Yoongi thinks it must have taken them all day to climb to the top of the hill, or the mountain, Yoongi isn’t sure. They climb until they’re above the canopies below and until they spot a clearing where they can look down onto the valley. Look down onto their houses.
It’s daylight, bright and pearly like morning. Yoongi scans the sky and spots the sun in the east. Morning. It’s morning and there’s no way they walked all night.
“What time is it?” Hoseok asks, and he’s a child—just a child, in this memory, and it torments Yoongi—and he wasn’t raised like Yoongi and he doesn’t know what the sun’s position in the sky means. “It looks . . . it looks early.”
“Yeah,” Yoongi says. He’s just a child too. He should have known better but he doesn’t, not right then. “Maybe we should walk back. Our parents are probably worried.”
Yoongi’s mother is usually left to work by this time in the morning. Usually she’s hung up the washing along the house because the sky is painfully clear in that won’t-rain way. Usually there’s a car rolling up to Hoseok’s house to take Daewon to school.
There’s nothing. Nothing at all.
“What’re you looking at, hyung?” Hoseok’s voice is small, but taunting in that trying-to-be-brave way.
Yoongi feels dizzy, like he’s going to fall. In the silence, Hoseok’s smile fades.
“Let’s go home,” Hoseok says, and he’s a child so he starts to cry. “I’m—I’m scared, hyung.”
“It’s okay.” Yoongi pats his hair in that clunky, childish way. He’s scared. He’s so scared. Something is wrong. “Let’s—let’s walk home. This way.”
This is where his memory gets spotty. This is where he starts to hear things between the trees and he lets go of Hoseok for a second—just an instant—and then it’s all a blur of rushing down the mountain, screaming. Screaming for Hoseok or just screaming. Where is Hoseok? Where is Hoseok? Where is Hoseok?
Dawn comes painfully slowly. Yoongi’s eyes ache and he feels like he’s gone mad. His arms are tensed and numb from how hard he’s gripped the pillow around his ears. The woods are silent. The wind has stopped. Yoongi feels painfully, painfully alone.
Yoongi crawls out of bed once the slivers of light under his blinds glow white with morning. He feels shaky, like if Seokjin were to come see him now he’d look at Yoongi like he was mad, or like a fucking addict or something. Jittery. Like something foreign and cold has crawled under his skin and no matter what Yoongi does he can’t shake it off.
He’s glad the seasons have changed, because now even will the morning chill it’s pretty mild to climb out of bed bare-foot and slowly put the kettle on. His candle blew out during the night, and it kind of freaks Yoongi out that he totally forgot to keep an eye on it. He could have burned to death. Like, kind of funny, but still. Yoongi’s never been that rattled before. He’s lived here his whole fucking life.
It’s not cold, but Yoongi throws on a large, ratty jumper on. There’s probably some whack psychological explanation for why he wants to feel like he’s still wearing a blanket, but whatever. Yoongi keeps the kitchen blinds resolutely closed and turns on the kettle, battling with the gas stove for a few minutes.
There’s no wind and the air doesn’t smell like oncoming rain, but when Yoongi throws open the curtains to the living room, the sky is still heavy and grey. That exact not-quite weather that feels ominous and dangerous and settles a little too deep in his bones.
Yoongi unlocks the door slowly. There’s no wind at all so the bells are silent, everything deadly still. Yoongi feels winded even though he’s done nothing. Like he’s holding his breath.
Like the world is holding its breath.
Its summer, but there are no ants along the window. Yoongi’s left them a sugar cube but it remains untouched.
The household fae are invisible. The light is not bright nor clear enough to see them, and Yoongi feels isolated without being able to see them, specks of dust or not. The house feels empty, filled with only himself and that urn on the dresser in his mother’s closed-up room.
The door is heavy when Yoongi opens it, like the house is trying to tell him something. Something like don’t do it or you will regret this.
There’s something on Yoongi’s porch.
There’s someone on Yoongi’s porch.
The first time Jungkook came to his house, it was because of his shrine duties.
Yoongi thinks they stared at each other for a very long time.
Yoongi is eight when he first meets Jungkook—the boy is only just four years old. He’s pudgy and small and he holds onto his older brother’s hand like a lifeline.
“Hello,” says Jungkook’s father, whose name Yoongi can’t remember because he died not long after. Junghyun said hello next and then Jungkook, voice small and shy. Little kids are always shy before they warm up. It only takes about an hour when you’re that small.
“Ah, the Jeons.” Yoongi’s mother takes the reins from there, inviting them in. Yoongi, Junghyun and Jungkook crowd the small couch in the living room in a show of little-kid-solidarity. Jungkook sits on his older brother’s lap in silence until Yoongi catches him staring. They laugh.
Yoongi doesn’t remember what his mother and Jungkook’s father talked about, but it involved burning incense at the stove and staring at the forest for a long time.
A stray bit of dust lands on Jungkook’s nose. “Fairy,” Yoongi says, unsure of what else to say, and Junghyun looks at him oddly but Jungkook looks overjoyed.
“Fairy!” he giggles.
Odd, that fairy is the first thing that Yoongi thinks of when he sees the man at his doorstep.
There’s nothing magical about him. He looks like if haunted took a human form.
He’s shrunken in on the threshold, curled into a ball against the door. He’s dressed in what was probably a uniform but has turned to rags, stained hopelessly with dirt and leaves and there’s—
Blood. So much blood.
When he looks up at Yoongi, his eyes are a piercing shade of blue.
“Help me,” he whispers, and Yoongi can’t see past the blue eyes or the red, red blood coursing down the man’s face. Round, wide gashes across the man’s forehead, hair matted to it, across both cheeks, down his chin.
Fairy, Yoongi thinks.
“Who the fuck are you?” Yoongi says. He’s ready to slam the door right back but something in his chest seizes and he can’t move. “What the fuck are you doing at my house?”
“Please,” the fair— the guy says. He’s breathing hard, like he’d sprinted from somewhere. “Please, the forest—I just got out, please.”
There’s no wind but Yoongi feels something rush through him like a blizzard gale. There’s a stranger. A stranger—a thing—on his porch, in front of his door, and it’s dawn and there are things in the forest and—
And he doesn’t look like Hoseok at all.
“Okay,” Yoongi says, and he hates it, hates this decision, he’s a fool, he’s an absolute idiot—his whole life being taught against this and he does it anyway, because the man is crying and he’s bleeding and he’s not Hoseok. “Okay, okay, okay—fuck, okay. Here, give me your arm.”
There’s blood and dirt on the sleeve but the man lifts his arm from where it’s wrapped around his knees for Yoongi to take. He’s just as slight as Yoongi, easy enough to get to his feet. Blood drips. His eyes are so sunken they look bruised. His lips are split and dry, bleeding when he moves them.
He’s human. He’s damn fucking human—Yoongi can’t fathom him being anything else.
“Thank you,” he whispers, and he’s crying—what the fuck, he’s crying—and Yoongi leads him inside. “Thank you so much.”
Yoongi’s got no idea what he’s doing, he’s taking someone in from his doorstep and putting them on the couch. Leaving the door open behind them scares the shit out of Yoongi, the thought of the forest watching, looking in, so he closes it.
“You,” Yoongi starts, turning once he’s bolted the door. The stranger is reclined across the back of the couch where Yoongi once sat with Jungkook and Junghyun (and Hoseok). Where his mother used to sit, where guests sat, and he’s just—he’s just there. “Who the fuck are you?”
“My name,” he starts, but he’s panting heavily, like he can’t believe he’s alive. “My name is Taehyung. I’m—fuck. Shit.”
He has a dialect—or at least an accent not from these parts. Something about him feels different and it unnerves Yoongi, and he feels the regret setting in but it’s abated when Taehyung raises his head to look at him, still crying and bloody and so, so thankful. “Thank you. Thank you for taking me in.”
“Don’t thank me for shit.” Yoongi wants to tell him his name and that scares him. He roots around the stove for the first aid box, but he makes sure to keep a careful eye on this Taehyung. “The fuck are you doing here? How did you get here?”
“The forest,” he says, and he’s calming down, voice gravelly now that he’s not panting as hard. “I’ve been stuck there—trapped there for weeks. Months, even. I don’t . . . I don’t know how I got here.”
Yoongi is ten. The sun and the sky is so, so bright when he stumbles into the clearing he wants to cry.
“Fuck,” Yoongi whispers. He finds the kit. Everything in it is probably out of date but what other option does he have? Seokjin? Mrs Kim would beat him with a stick until he begged for mercy if he told her he took in some stranger from his doorstep. Maybe not if they lived in the city, but Yoongi lives in the middle of nowhere. There’s just forest and forest and then the border. No one is here.
“Are you a defector?” he asks at last, once the thought hits him. “Holy shit, did you run away from the North? Dude. Taehyung, fucking—answer me.” Yoongi’s got no fucking time for a North Korean soldier in his house.
“I—I don’t know.” There’s that funny accent again. Fuck. He’s Northern. Shit. What’s Yoongi done? He’s even wearing a fucking uniform, now that Yoongi looks. It’s definitely something military, but—but there’s something wrong. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. Please don’t send me back out there. Please.”
He looks so broken, bloody and teary that Yoongi pauses, sighs, and gives in. His eyes are piercing and blue and they watch his every move. Making that pitiful expression must be hard when his face is cut up to smithereens like it is. Yoongi’s scared but he’s fucking weak. The household fae aren’t here to tell him what to do and he knows—he fucking knows he’s making the wrong choice but he can’t help it, walking over and opening up the supplies.
“Fine,” Yoongi snaps. “But you’ll fucking tell me later, holy shit. What the fuck? Taehyung, right? What’s your clan name?”
“Kim,” he answers. “Kim Taehyung. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Stop thanking me.” Yoongi always lashes out when he’s scared, but it’s been so long since he’s had to yell about anything. He hates himself for the way Taehyung recoils. “I’m sorry, I’m just—fuck. How did you get here? You just fucking walked through all that forest? Are you insane?”
Yoongi rips open an old packet of disinfectant sachets and slowly sets about peeling the hair out of Taehyung’s cuts. He bites his bleeding lips, hissing in pain, but Yoongi can’t stand to look at them anymore. Once they’re out—tendrils of plasma being pulled with them, showing the full extent of Taehyung’s scab—it looks barely an hour old, fresh and open, bleeding. It’s about as wide as Yoongi’s thumb in some ovular shape. It creeps Yoongi the fuck out and he presses the alcohol swab against it. Taehyung writhes, knuckles clenching and unclenching, but he doesn’t move away.
“What happened to you?” Yoongi continues gruffly, wiping all the dirt and grime away, just the way Seokjin taught him once. “Oi. Answer me.”
“I don’t know,” Taehyung admits, voice strained from the sting. “I can’t remember. It must’ve happened in the forest.”
It doesn’t appease Yoongi at all, but it’s one of many things wrong with what he’s doing so he lets it go. Wipes the forehead off Taehyung’s face and presses down a dressing pad and then tapes it. Does the same with his cheeks and nose. All his cuts are that same oval shape—like an eye, Yoongi realises. An eye shape.
That’s fucking creepy.
Yoongi decides not to think about it.
He’s none too gentle scrubbing the grime and dried blood off Taehyung’s face—in a (probably concerning) way, Yoongi finds solace in the way his skin turns white and yellow with pressure before the blood ruses back in. Reaffirms that he’s human. Alive. Because shit, Yoongi could sure use some reassurance.
Taehyung says nothing, just lets Yoongi use the harsh ethanol until his face is somewhat clean, his cuts covered and taped over, hair still matted and gross but at least off his forehead and out of the open wounds.
“Okay,” Yoongi says eventually, tossing the first aid kit aside now that he’s done with it. He feels winded. “Okay, shit. You’ve gotta . . . you’ve gotta explain shit to me, man. What the fuck’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Taehyung stresses, and he looks really, truly anguished, the medical tape holding down his forehead plaster wrinkling with his brows. “I don’t—my—”
Yoongi watches the guy’s furrowed brows smooth out before him, almost like it’s happening in slow motion. The world is heavy and grey but there’s no rain and suddenly Taehyung’s face is perfectly blank.
“I can’t remember,” he whispers hoarsely. “I can’t fucking remember.”