Chapter Text
Kim Taehyung and Park Jimin knocking frantically on his door at 11:58pm was not exactly how Jeongguk imagined his night would go. It was a Tuesday. He had class in the morning. Taehyung had class with him in the morning. Jeongguk was in his pajamas, had been sitting on his couch with remote in hand, ready for his customary 10 minutes to an hour of YouTube before bed. Hell, he still had the remote in his hand when Taehyung and Jimin shoved themselves into his apartment, radiating urgency so intensely that Jeongguk got goosebumps from it.
“Gukie, listen to me,” Taehyung said, panic all around the edges of his voice. He put a finger on Jeongguk’s chin to guide his eyes away from where he was watching Jimin systematically look through and then close every curtain and blind in the apartment. Jimin turned a lamp off.
Jeongguk looked at Taehyung and blinked. They were being weird. Well, weirder than normal. Or weird in a different way maybe. Taehyung and Jimin were admittedly a little weird in general.
“Jeongguk, you have to go pack a bag, ok?” Taehyung paused, searching Jeongguk’s face, tongue peeking out to wet his bottom lip. A nervous gesture, Jeongguk thought. Taehyung squeezed his shoulder.
“What?”
“You’ve got to trust me, because there’s no time,” Taehyung said. His voice was usually so mellow, rich and deep in a way that Jeongguk had found soothing from the first time they met at the beginning of the fall term. But it was full of jagged edges now. Jeongguk could feel them in his own throat.
“What?” he croaked again. It felt like the gears in his brain had ground to a halt, simply refusing to process, the fear dripping off his friends clogging up all the machinery. “How did you know where I live?”
Taehyung huffed. “We’ve got to get you out of here. We don’t have much of a head start. Maybe thirty minutes, if we’re lucky.”
“Twenty,” Jimin said, pulling back from where he’d been peeking through the blinds he’d already closed.
Taehyung’s face turned grim, mouth a straight, tight line. “Twenty. Grab essentials and a couple changes of clothes, anything you aren’t willing to never see again.”
“Hyung,” Jeongguk said helplessly. “It’s Tuesday.”
Jimin held his phone up and looked at the screen for a second, blue light casting a kind of foreboding shadow on his face. “Wednesday now,” he said.
“Thank you for that, Jimin,” Taehyung said dryly, and kept right on talking through Jimin’s sing-songing little You’re welcome. (It couldn’t be too dire of a situation, right? If Jimin was still being sassy?) Taehyung grabbed Jeongguk’s hand and started leading him to his own bedroom. How did Taehyung know where the bedroom was? “I know this is confusing and maybe scary, and I wish I could explain it to you, but we really don’t have time, I’m sorry, Guk-ah. Is this your laptop?”
“Uh, yeah,” Jeongguk said. Having Kim Taehyung in his bedroom would have been overwhelming enough without all the extra strangeness happening—not that Jeongguk spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Taehyung in his bed, it was a perfectly normal amount of time, thank you very much (because sometimes he was thinking about Jimin in his bed, and on a couple of special occasions, both of them.)
Suddenly, a low boom rattled through the apartment building, a sound like a firework going off in the distance. Jimin came slamming through the door so fast that it banged off the wall behind it, and Jeongguk’s heart rate practically doubled. “We overestimated our head start. I'll try to keep them distracted, but we’ve got to move.”
“Shit,” Taehyung muttered, a duffle bag in his hands Jeongguk thought he lost a few months ago. But it appeared to be back, and it also appeared as though Taehyung was pulling clothes from their hangers and shoving them roughly into said previously-missing duffle bag.
“Keep who distracted?” Jeongguk asked the room at large. “What distraction?”
Jimin didn’t answer, and Taehyung was pulling open Jeongguk’s underwear drawer. Ok, yeah, definitely acting weirder than normal, because why was Taehyung reaching into his underwear drawer? “Jimin’s taking care of it.”
Sure enough, when Jeongguk looked back over his shoulder, Jimin was gone.
“Huh, big,” Taehyung said and Jeongguk swung his eyes back to him only to decide that actually he might want to face whoever was currently setting off small explosions at the front door of his apartment building, because that would be an easier death than the death by embarrassment he was currently experiencing. “You want this?” Taehyung asked about the (completely reasonably sized, thanks) tentacle dildo he was holding in one elegant fist.
“Hyung, what the fuck,” he replied.
Taehyung gave one more considering look to the dildo, shrugged, then seemed to make up his mind when they both heard the sick crack of wood from the front door of the building finally giving way in the distance. He shoved it in the bag just as Jimin was back again.
“Looks like we’re going up. Hobi-hyung, can you meet us there?” Jimin said.
Before Jeongguk could ask who Hobi was and how he could possibly have heard Jimin talking, Jimin’s shadow behind him gave them a thumbs up and then was gone. Just gone. It had moved and then it had disappeared. His shadow. But that’s not how shadows worked; Jeongguk wasn’t a genius at science but he was pretty sure on that point. The clatter of the TV remote hitting the floor snapped him out of his stupor; he had forgotten he was still holding it. Things were moving way too quickly for his brain to catch up.
“Hyungs, what the fuck?!” Jeongguk asked, and this time he thought he must have sounded a bit more shrill than he meant to, because both Taehyung and Jimin looked at him with the same complicated expression on their faces. Something Jeongguk did not know how to even begin deciphering.
Jimin grabbed his wrist. “I promise I will explain as soon as we can, but you aren’t safe here, Jeongguk-ah.”
Something hit Jeongguk’s apartment door hard. Jeongguk nearly jumped out of his skin. “Okay, okay, okay,” Jeongguk said, shaking his hands to get his nerves out enough to get a move on. “Alright - but explanation later.”
“You got it,” Taehyung said, then he was opening Jeongguk’s bedroom window, duffle bag slung over his shoulder, one stray black sleeve hanging out the top like a tongue. “Up we go,” he said, and clambered out like it was perfectly normal to climb onto a fire escape in the middle of the night.
Jimin didn’t react to it, either, so maybe they made this a habit. Jeongguk wouldn’t put it past them.
Just as Jimin was starting to push him towards the open window, Jeongguk heard his front door give, hinges creaking and then the sound of heavy boots on his living room floor. He wondered for a second if that meant he wouldn’t get his security deposit back.
“Fuck,” Jimin said under his breath. “Go! I'll follow in a second!”
So Jeongguk did as he was told, hoisting himself out of his windowsill, Taehyung helping him up onto the metal platform before taking off up the rickety ladder. Jimin stuck his head out through the window just as Jeongguk was stepping onto the ladder himself. There were figures all in black behind him flooding into Jeongguk’s room like human-sized insects, one, then two, then more of them, faces obscured, crawling over each other like a wave of bodies, black-clad hands from those in front reaching like they might be able to get ahold of Jimin before he escaped. But Jimin turned halfway out the window, ass on the fire escape, and kicked one of them squarely in the face, sending him flying backwards into the others in a way Jeongguk had thought was only possible in the questionable logic of an action movie. Then Jimin’s hands flew out in front of him and something like a dark cloud formed in the air between them before shooting out in multiple directions.
Jeongguk didn’t get to see what the dark cloud did, though, because Jimin was shoving at him. “Go! Go!”
It wasn’t until his foot hit the first metal rung of a ladder that Jeongguk realized he hadn’t put on shoes. Or a coat. When he looked back at his bedroom window, though, there was black smoke writhing against the window and in the gap they’d just crawled out of, so he didn’t imagine turning back was an option. The only way was up. He blinked the hair out of his eyes and started climbing, shivering against the cold while Jimin urged him to move faster from below. Jeongguk’s heart was beating out of his chest and his lungs felt like maybe that black smoke was keeping him from breathing, too.
He made it to the rooftop not long after he watched Taehyung duck over the edge, just in time to see a man he had never met grab Taehyung’s face between his palms and gently but firmly turn him this way and that, inspecting him with sharp eyes and a fretting click of his tongue. “Tae-ah, you’re ok?”
Taehyung nuzzled one of the man’s palms briefly before he pulled back. “Of course, hyung. This is Jeon Jeongguk, who I was telling you about.”
The man smiled at Jeongguk like they weren’t in the middle of the strangest crisis Jeongguk had ever experienced in his life. It was a good distraction from the crisis, though, Jeongguk had to admit. The man’s smile was big and heart-shaped and lovely; he practically lit up with it. He was a pretty man, too, his features both sharp and delicate, and he was thin, but Jeongguk could see that he was all muscle even with the heavy jacket he was wearing. “Ah, Jeongguk-ssi, what a pleasure to meet you! I’ve heard so much about you!”
“Ok, this is all very cute,” Jimin said as he jogged up behind them, huffing a little for breath. “But I don’t know how long that’ll hold them so we have got to go. Now. Hobi-hyung?”
The man who Jeongguk now assumed was Hobi stretched up on his toes to peek over Jimin’s shoulder, then nodded with an expression so opposite the sunshine he'd just been projecting that he seemed like an entirely different person for a second. “Right. Hold on,” he said, and took hold of Jimin and Taehyung’s outstretched hands just as they were grabbing for Jeongguk. “Oh, and try to hold your breath—helps with the vertigo,” he added.
Then he tipped backwards, dragging them all with him. Jeongguk fully expected that he was about to land face first somewhere in the vicinity of Hobi’s chest, but then—Hobi disappeared into the shadow behind him like dropping into a soundless, inky pool, and Jeongguk found himself tugged after him like there was a rope stretching from his belly button and Hobi held the other end. The shadow was cold as he passed through its surface. Landing on his feet was abrupt; he stumbled, had just enough time to take in the swarm of black-clad figures on the street outside his apartment building, and then they were all falling into nothing again.
This time, they were a block away from where they had been, if Jeongguk had his bearings right. Which, frankly, he couldn’t be totally confident was the case. His knees nearly buckled underneath him, and he was pretty sure he’d have fallen completely if Jimin hadn’t caught him and righted him back up on his feet. “What the hell was that,” he croaked. His head was spinning.
Taehyung sighed, “You really should have held your breath.”
“In the car, babies,” Hobi’s voice called, and Jeongguk started. He hadn’t noticed they were standing by a car at all—a sleek, black SUV, expensive by the looks of it—and he hadn’t heard a car door, either, but Hobi had apparently already taken the driver’s seat.
Jeongguk entertained the idea that he might be dreaming, actually, because that was the only way any of this made sense. It felt real enough, though, when Jimin opened one of the backdoors and Taehyung started shoving him in the car, careful enough to cover the top of his head so he didn’t smack it, but fast enough to keep Jeongguk feeling unsteady and a little tossed about, if he were being honest. While he’d imagined Taehyung manhandling him before, it had never been quite like this.
Jimin clambered into the front seat mere moments before the wheels squealed with sudden speed beneath them. “Tae, get the lights,” Hobi said.
“Already on it,” Taehyung said, and Jeongguk watched as what had been a red light in front of them seconds before suddenly turned green and then red again just as quickly after they passed, cars skidding and honking in their wake. Jeongguk looked over his shoulder at the near accident they had caused and caught a burst of movement out of his periphery.
“Shit, these roaches are fast, hyung,” Jimin said, and, yep, there they were, more of those black clad figures. Under the glow of the street lights, they were sleek and shiny, robes fluttering in the breeze like they could be wings. They leaned forward as they ran–how the hell they were keeping pace with a moving vehicle, Jeongguk couldn't even begin to think about without considering that he might be losing his mind–leaned too far forward, nearly parallel to the ground. The movement seemed almost inhuman, skittering, but Jeongguk had fallen through not one but two shadows just a few minutes ago, so he wasn't really one to judge.
Well, that was until he saw one of those same figures flutter onto the street light just ahead of them. Its face was lit up from below, a large, black grin spreading sickly over its face, stretching its cheeks impossibly wide, teeth like shiny beetle shells. It grinned and then the streetlight exploded in a sea of sparks. Hobi jerked the car to the left, cursing, sending Jeongguk sprawling into Taehyung for a beat before getting slammed back the other direction.
Hobi looked at him through the rear view mirror, just a beat, but long enough that Jeongguk had the feeling he was being assessed.
“I’m going to try something,” he said. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
Jimin’s eyes snapped to Hobi’s face, then to Jeongguk, then back to Hobi, eyes growing wider each time. “Hyung, you can’t, we don’t know—”
“I can feel it, Jimin-ah. I can make it work.”
For as fast as Jeongguk’s heart was beating, it stopped dead in its tracks when something landed on the roof of the car with a metallic bang. Then to make matters worse, whatever had landed on them was shoving its weight back and forth, rocking the car with it, forcing Hobi to swerve left and right. They clipped a parked car, almost took out a city trash can. The streetlights ahead of them flashed and then went dark one by one, closing in on them.
“Everyone hold on tight!” Hobi shouted.
A blink and a dizzying lurch later, they had come to a complete stop. Another blink, and Hobi was suddenly outside the car, just outside Jeongguk’s window. He grabbed something dangling from the roof of the car, then threw his body weight back to pull it down: one of the people who had been following them. Hobi threw the person to the ground, and Jeongguk gasped in horror when he brought his foot up right over the figure’s head, intentions clear—
“No, don’t!” he choked, but he was too late. Before he could even close his eyes, Hobi’s foot came down with a sickening crunch.
But when Hobi lifted his foot, the human-sized figure he’d slammed it down on was gone, and in its place, there was a cockroach on its back, legs twitching in the air.
Jeongguk leaned over and puked on the floor of Hobi’s very nice car.
When Jeongguk turned thirteen, he’d woken up in the morning and his whole family had been gone. He hadn’t noticed right away; he made it all the way through one of his favorite Saturday morning TV shows and a bowl of sugar cereal before it registered that he hadn’t heard his mother starting the coffeepot, nor had his father bounced down the stairs after the morning paper, and it had been well past time for both. So he’d gone to look for them, first calmly poking his head into the kitchen, then out into the garden from the back door, then upstairs to knock on and finally, when he got no answer, to open their door. It wasn’t until he’d found their car still parked in the garage that he’d started to really panic, and even then, he could still breathe at least until he’d discovered his brother’s bedroom was also empty and every suitcase in the house was in its rightful place. That’s when it got hard to breathe. The panic had taken him so completely that he hardly remembered anything about the rest of that day, just the feeling: unable to focus, lungs squeezing tight, palms cold and damp with sweat, the sinking nausea in his stomach, the deep emptiness that came from knowing nothing would ever be alright again.
He dreamt of that morning sometimes. Often enough that he suspected the emptiness of his dream had started to replace the memories he had of his parents, their sudden absence such a shock to his system that his mind had simply decided they must have never actually existed in the first place. He was so afraid that he would prove himself right that he couldn’t even stand to look at his memories to see if he found them there.
That was the dream he woke up from, blinking blearily at the ceiling above him—ceiling? He blinked harder, to make sure he was seeing it correctly, and yeah, he appeared to be surrounded by a thick, burgundy curtain suspended from four heavy, intricately carved posts. The blankets covering him were just as thick and rich, and the sheets so soft to the touch that Jeongguk was immediately certain he’d never touched anything with as high a thread count before. The bed beneath him was so comfortable he felt like he might be floating on a cloud, actually. What in the rich people had he gotten himself into, he wondered. He sat up and tried to rub the lingering feeling of the dream out of his eyes.
“Oh, you’re awake!” Jimin chirped, flinging one side of the curtain open with a flourish. The curtain stayed where it was flung, but Jeongguk had more pressing questions than how that particular feat was accomplished. It was hardly the weirdest thing he’d seen in the past—
“How long have I been out?”
“You slept all night! Jin-hyung sent me to fetch you for breakfast. You threw up, like, a lot,” Jimin said, almost like he was a little impressed by it.
Jeongguk grimaced. “I’m sorry—wait, Jin-hyung? How many hyungs are there?”
Jimin laughed, that tinkling, high laugh of his that threw his head back with the force of his humor. “The perfect amount,” Jimin said with a wink. “C’mon, lemme introduce you. Hyung made haejang-guk.”
Jeongguk thought about lodging a protest for a minute, because he still had no idea what the hell was happening, but then his stomach gurgled uncomfortably. He shrugged and got up to follow Jimin; if he had learned anything in life, he had learned not to pass up free food when it was on offer.
The room he woke up in, he discovered after he had wrestled his way out from the huge blankets and the heavy curtains, was pretty big. Next to the bed, there was a wooden dresser that looked like it was probably an antique, and across from that, there was a small desk and a bookshelf full of books. He didn’t really have time to take them in, though, before Jimin was tugging him along by the wrist, happily chatting away.
“Your stomach is probably not feeling great this morning—well, I mean, from the puking, obviously,” Jimin said.
The hallway Jimin was leading him through had doors and picture frames lining both walls, too many doors, it looked like to Jeongguk, like none of the rooms behind them could be larger than closets with how close they were.
“But traveling with Hobi-hyung’s shadows is a little rough the first few times, too. Hence the haejang-guk. Was the vertigo really bad?”
“What,” Jeongguk said, before his brain managed to process what Jimin was actually saying. Then, “Oh, uh, I mean, yeah, it wasn’t great. How the hell did he do that?”
“Should have held your breath,” Jimin said, shaking his head a little.
“Yeah, I’ve heard.”
The hallway gave way to a large staircase that swept in a wide spiral down to a landing, dark wood with soft carpet down the center, worn in that homey way of a place well-lived in. At the bottom of the stairs, there was something like a foyer—something Jeongguk was absolutely positive only ridiculously rich people would have in their house—but warm and welcoming. There was a fireplace on one end with a few nice armchairs and a couple of couches around it, a thick rug and a low coffee table between them. Jimin kept encouraging him along a bit too fast to take in the details.
“Honestly, I’m just glad that last jump worked. Hyung is good, but not usually transport-a-car-and-several-people-over-multiple-kilometers good, you know?”
“Kilometers?” Jeongguk repeated.
“I know! Pretty amazing, right?”
They entered a dining room, one heavy wooden table right in the middle of the space, six chairs around it, and past the table, an open kitchen. At a big marble island, one of the most beautiful men Jeongguk had ever seen—and he’d been hanging out with Taehyung and Jimin for months, so that was quite a feat—was chopping green onion with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up. He was dressed casually, but it was clear the clothes were expensive, designer probably, though Jeongguk didn’t know enough about that kind of fancy stuff to identify anything more about it. He had a crisp, white apron tied around his waist and a kitchen towel slung over his shoulder like a chef in some corny romance film. When he spotted Jimin and Jeongguk, he wiped his hands off on that towel with a smile that Jeongguk thought might make him faint.
“You must be Jeongguk, it’s so good to meet you,” he said, sticking his hand out for a shake. “Kim Seokjin, ‘92-liner.”
“Jeon Jeongguk, 97-liner,” Jeongguk managed to mutter, but all he was really thinking about was that his hands were kind of sweaty and the pajamas he was still wearing from when he had intended to go to bed in his own apartment were rags compared to what Seokjin was wearing. He was probably too poor to even touch this man. Or anything in this house. He was going to get his poor all over it. Shit, if this was where Jimin and Taehyung lived, it was no wonder they’d never invited him over.
“I know,” Jin said. His smile was so friendly that it was disarming. “Our Tae-yah and Jiminie haven’t stopped talking about you for months. Come, come, take a seat, would you like some food?”
Jeongguk took the stool at the island Jin pulled out in invitation. “Um, yes, please, thank you, Seokjin-ssi.”
Seokjin practically squealed. “Yah, listen to how polite he is, Jimin-ah! You and Taehyung must not have rubbed off on him yet!” He laughed, and it sounded like windshield wipers. Somehow, that just made him prettier. It didn’t hurt that he turned around with two bowls in his hand, both steaming, one piled high with rice and the other filled to the brim with soup. As soon as he set them down, he bustled off again only to come back laden with banchan dishes: multiple kinds of kimchi, sukju-namul, gamja jorim, gyeran mari, and more, vegetables Jeongguk wasn’t even sure he recognized. Jeongguk could have sworn at least a couple of them floated along beside Seokjin as he walked, but that was impossible. “Eat up! You’ll feel better!”
The haejang-guk was incredible, salty and warm, just the perfect level of spice to start clearing his head.
“Jin-hyung, don’t I get any?” Jimin said with a pout, plopping down on the stool next to Jeongguk. He even plopped gracefully. Jeongguk hoped that if there were any more hyungs, they were less attractive than the ones he’d met so far, because he was going to lose his gay little mind at this rate, and there were things he probably should be more worried about than embarrassing himself in front of the hottest men on earth.
Like the fact that he apparently teleported, and then he watched a man turn into a bug–he’d felt the monotony of bullshit jobs, certainly, but he never imagined his life would go full Kafka.
Without missing a beat, Seokjin put bowls of rice and soup in front of Jimin. Then he tilted his head a little, as though he was listening to something, and pulled two more bowls down from a cabinet. Less than a minute later, two more men came walking into the room—one of them, at least, he recognized.
“Hob-ah, please, you traveled nearly 10 kilometers in an SUV and managed to land parked perfectly straight in our garage. That is far outside the range—” The man walking with Hobi stopped when he caught sight of Jeongguk, and Jeongguk promptly dropped his spoon into his soup bowl. “Oh, he’s awake.”
“Your—you—thighs,” Jeongguk said, because he was completely incapable of being cool. And also because this man had walked into the room wearing a fitted henley and black boxer briefs that did nothing to hide the thick muscle of his thighs. He was tall and broad and muscular, and he was smiling at Jeongguk, and oh no, did he have dimples? Jeongguk was doomed. He really couldn’t be blamed for his reaction.
When everyone except for the man in question started laughing, Jeongguk could feel his cheeks starting to burn.
“Right to the point, hm, Jeonggukkie?” Jimin teased.
“Kim Namjoon,” the man said, sticking out his hand with a quick bow of his head, thankfully uninterested in teasing Jeongguk. “‘94-liner. Nice to finally meet you!”
“We didn’t get a chance to properly meet last night,” Hobi said, walking up behind Namjoon, one arm snaking around Namjoon’s waist. “Jung Hoseok, also ‘94-liner.”
“Namjoon-ah, can you coax some of the bean sprouts to hurry it up? I could use another handful for the haejang-guk,” Seokjin said over his shoulder from where he was busying himself over the pot again, stirring it and seemingly fussing over it. There were a few jars next to the stove full of substances Jeongguk didn’t recognize that Jin seemed to be considering adding to the soup. Maybe Jeongguk wouldn’t have seconds.
“No problem, hyung,” Namjoon said, crossing to the window sill over the sink where there were several potted plants and one jar with some small bean sprouts just starting to fight their way upwards.
Hoseok set a glass jar of his own on the kitchen island, this one firmly closed. There was a cockroach in the jar, angrily throwing itself against the glass at Hoseok, hissing. “I’ll need you to see if you can get any info from this little pest, too, Joonie, when you get a chance.”
“Ugh,” Namjoon replied. “I hate trying to talk to roaches.” He wrapped a hand around the jar of bean sprouts and murmured to them in soft tones. Jeongguk was so busy trying to make out what he was saying that he almost missed the implication that Namjoon was somehow going to talk to a roach. But then the bean sprouts started stretching upwards, growing right before Jeongguk’s eyes.
“Such a nuisance,” Jimin said, flicking the jar right where the cockroach was hitting the side.
“I know, but it’s one of the only leads we have right now,” Hoseok said, and Namjoon hummed an affirmative, if unhappy sound.
“Can you get it out of my kitchen at least, Hob-ah?” Seokjin asked, clicking his tongue. “Bad enough to have one in the house at all. Oh thank you, Joonie.” Seokjin pressed a quick kiss on one of Namjoon’s cheeks.
“You’re welcome, hyung,” Namjoon said, a pleased little smile on his face as he handed Seokjin the beans he had just somehow miracled into being several centimeters longer. He turned to Jimin, rubbing a hand—big, Jeongguk’s mind helpfully replied—down Jimin’s back affectionately. “Did Taehyung get any kind of read on them? The person pulling their strings?”
“Nope,” Jimin answered. “Which is deeply suspicious, if you ask me.”
“You’re right,” Hoseok said around a bite of soup. “Mmm, Jin-hyung, this is good.”
“I know.” Seokjin nudged the unclaimed bowls of soup and rice on the island towards Namjoon. “Where is Taehyung, anyway? It’s not like him to miss breakfast.”
“Aish, well,” Jimin started, eyes darting to Jeongguk and then away again a little too fast to be coincidence.
“I see,” Seokjin said, which was a little bit crazy, because Jeongguk was pretty sure Jimin hadn’t given him any kind of answer at all. “And Yoongi?”
“Here,” another man said, voice deep and raspy, making his way around the dining room table and into the kitchen. He squeezed one of Namjoon’s biceps on the way to pecking a kiss on Seokjin’s jaw. “I’m here, hyung. Is there coffee?” He was sleep rumpled, long hair falling messily around his pretty features, but that was not what caught Jeongguk’s attention.
“Holy shit,” Jeongguk said, and the black, feline ears sitting on top of Yoongi’s head twitched. The tail that had been nearly limp hanging behind him slowly stood up.
Yoongi just raised an eyebrow at him and took a sip from the mug Seokjin handed him. “So this is Jeongguk, huh?” he said. He sounded unimpressed. Which made sense considering Jeongguk had done an excellent job making himself look like a fool. “Min Yoongi, 93-liner.”
“Nice to meet you,” Jeongguk thought he managed to say. “You’re—you’re a cat.”
Yoongi snorted into his coffee. “Not quite,” he said. “Oh, is that the roach that followed you home, Hob-ah?”
Hoseok held up the jar where the cockroach was now waving one little bug arm up in the air like a very angry old man. He really did look for all the world like he was trying to scold them all, and Jeongguk had never seen any kind of bug that did that. “Yep! He’s lucky to be alive, but he’s still complaining.” Hoseok shook his head like this was very confusing behavior.
“I’d happily squish him right now if it made him feel better,” Jimin said with a sharp little smile, and Jeongguk would swear that he saw the cockroach’s little arm go down, and it looked for all the world like it was cowering.
“Then at least I wouldn’t have to try to have a conversation with him,” Namjoon said with a sigh, picking up the jar himself to take a closer look.
“Did I not say to get that thing out of my kitchen?” Seokjin said over his shoulder.
“It does look like he’s been spelled for increased intelligence,” Namjoon said as though Seokjin hadn’t spoken at all. “The good news being that he’ll be easier to talk to. The bad news is he’s sentient.”
“Why would that be bad news?” Jeongguk asked. He was sincerely confused. Not just about the cockroach. “And how is that even possible?! What the fuck is going on?”
“Has anyone bothered to tell Jeongguk anything about what’s going on?” Yoongi asked. His whiskers and the tip of his tail were twitching for all the world like an annoyed housecat.
Jimin, Namjoon, and Hoseok all turned to look at Seokjin at the same time, but he threw his hands up and shook his head. “Don’t look at me! This one is all Joonie’s.”
Namjoon frowned for a second, but then he cleared his throat and looked right at Jeongguk. “Ok, so, you see, there exists—well, I mean to say, Jeongguk-ssi, that—”
Yoongi rolled his eyes and then cut Namjoon off. “Jeongguk, do you know anything about magic?”
“Magic?” Jeongguk deadpanned, raising one eyebrow and looking around at all of them. It had to be a joke, didn’t it? But none of them were laughing or smiling, so that was concerning. “Like card tricks and pulling rabbits out of hats? Or like, Dungeons and Dragons magic? Because I can do a couple card tricks, but I don’t really know much else—”
“No, not that kind of magic,” Namjoon answered. He was quiet when he spoke, but he still managed to stop Jeongguk’s galloping mouth.
“Shit,” Hoseok suddenly interrupted, looking at his phone. “Sorry, sorry—Jimin-ah, we gotta go.” He darted his eyes over to Jeongguk for just a second. “Important business.”
“Let me grab my shoes,” Jimin said, stuffing one last big bite into his cheek. “Thanks for the breakfast, Jin-hyung!”
Jeongguk had had enough. He slammed his palms on the counter when he stood, and it worked to get all of their attention on him, including Hoseok and Jimin, who had frozen where they stood. “First, Taehyung-hyung and Jimin-hyung show up at my door in the middle of the night demanding I pack a bag, and a bunch of—” he glanced at the cockroach, “something broke my door down and were in my apartment doing gods know what, then I fell through a fucking shadow. Twice. Only to wake up in the nicest house I think I’ve ever been in, surrounded by some of the most gorgeous men I’ve ever seen, but they all sound crazy, and in the meantime, I have no idea what time it is and I have class today!”
“Gorgeous, hm?” Jimin asked with a sly smile, leaning into Hoseok with a hip popped out, like that was the point Jeongguk had been trying to make.
“Oh, honey,” Hoseok said. There was real sympathy in his voice but it grated on Jeongguk’s nerves.
Yoongi snorted. “You’re definitely not going to class today.”
That brought Jeongguk up short. “I can’t miss class.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to,” Namjoon said gently.
But Jeongguk shook his head. “Where’s Taehyung? Taehyung has class, too, he’ll tell you.” Jeongguki was a little convinced, at this point, that he might just be losing his entire mind.