· ————— · · 『• ⚜️ •』· · ————— ·

My eyes refuse to watch you leave,

so tears will blur the memory.

· ————— · · 『• ⚜️ •』· · ————— ·

Kim Namjoon sat in front of his computer, pondering over a doubt that had been pestering him for over a day. The possibilities of that ever occuring were so slim that he grew concerned of his abilities to look into people that has been his source of income for the past four years.

"Can't be," Namjoon hissed as he took in a sharp breath, "she couldn't be a refugee from North Korea. But...how?" He scrolled endlessly on the page but to his dismay, he found nothing.

The blue ray radiating from the screen illuminated his distressed features as his irises followed the movements of the page very closely but even after, he couldn't find anything. Sighing in defeat, he took off his glasses before aggressively rubbing his face and got up from his swivel chair resulting in an unceremonious creak.

He should text Taehyung about this, it would be for the better.

Namjoon:
Hey Tae, the people you asked me to look into.
It is done for the man but weirdly, I couldn't find anything
about the girl
it was blank tae
you should be wary of her
if you ever encountered her that is
hello?
Tae-tae?

Namjoon hurriedly switched off his phone when a co-worker burst in through his room. Namjoon glared disinterestedly at the man but the latter was busy huffing and panting his lungs out.

"Aish, don't you know about basic etiquettes Kwon? Do I still have to remind you to knock before you come insi—"

"Unfortunately, there is no tim-time to do that Sir," the man wheezed out, "I have just recieved a very shocking news of your interest."

Namjoon squinted his eyes as he went to pour the man a glass of water, "What is it?" He asked without looking up.

"Dohui was liquidated just as you predicted Sir,"

The glass of water fell from Namjoon's grasp as it shattered into millions of pieces.

"When was it?" He looked up.

"Now."

Namjoon:
Taehyung-ah
You were right

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☁︎

Lee Younggeum trudged under the neon-coloured signboards as each of the tacky colours illuminated her defeated face.

The streets, the cars, the buildings, the shops and even the strange words written on the signboards were very strange and new to her. Back in her place, only the stars enveloped the horizon as far as their eyes got with a slight rusting of leaves and cricket chirping in the distance.

But here, the stars seemed to have been hidden very cleverly. She could hardly spot one or two with great difficulty and even the moon itself seemed old and exhausted of witnessing such monstrosity developing underneath.

Wine, the moon, pink petals and a man...

"You are pretty brazen you know,"

"Yeah, I've been told that."

Younggeum suddenly stumbled with her own feet as she grasped onto a nearby streetlight to save her dignity. The dizziness that was slowly gulping up her rationality and eyesight was sending her into an overdrive of extreme headache and ear pain. A constant defeaning ringing reverberated in her ears as all the mortal racket fell silent at its arrival. A slicing, low pitch vibrating sound overtook her senses as she heard someone sharpening up their knives nearby.

And there it was, the familiar ticking that soon advanced whenever she felt this threshold of pain.

Tick, tick, tick.

She didn't now for how long she stood on the road, unmoving, while her bones shook out of cold. Her tears were the only source of heat as they trailed down her cheek, burning each cell as it went. The pain in her head was unbearable and she had no one to tell about how it felt.

Simultaneously, a repeated honking caused the throbbing of her ears to worsen which aggregated her anger before she finally released her rage of Taehyung on the source of sound.

"WHAT?!"

"Woah miss, calm thyself. I was just trying to grab your attention." A smooth voice replaced the honking earlier and Younggeum felt like she could finally breathe.

She cracked open her eyelids to find a man curiously staring at her features while he was seated in a weird looking polished box with lights. The pain in her ears was the last thing in her mind as she looked at the man scrunching up his nose. The amount of disrespect she witnessed today is just immaculate. The man didn't even bow down for goodness'sake!

But strangely, she felt that she had known this person forever.

"Who are you?!" She asked, while giving the man a stink eye.

"You don't know me?!" He rolled down his windows with an astonished shriek, "you seriously don't know me?!"

"Do you not know me?" Younggeum flipped the question when she assumed that the man wasn't going to bow down anytime sooner.

"Am I supposed to know you?"

"Same here peasant, am I supposed to know you!?" Younggeum 'tched in offense.

"PEASANT?!" the man got out of the box, "Listen miss, I thought you needed help and was offering to give you a ride back home but I guess that's not going to happen today."

"I didn't beg for your help, commoner."

"Commoner?!" the man took in a sharp breath as he released it with his eyes closed and nostrils flared in fury, "Have a good night, Miss."

Just as the man was turning back to retire in the box, Younggeum found herself clutching harshly on the man's sleeves that seemed too narrow for her taste.

"What is it?" He asked with a tired groan.

"You said you would give me a ride back home, is it true?"

The man sighed and pivoted around, "Yes, but I think not after the attitude you gave me earlier—"

"I'll give you money."

"Miss ths isn't an Uber—"

"Kim Younha's house." Younggeum said after pause. She figured the royalty here have big houses instead of extravagant palaces.

The man squinted his features as his eyebrows curled downwards as his blush-tainted lips morphed into a scowl, "How do you know her?"

"It doesn't matter now," Younggeum left the man's sleeve and walked closer to the polished box with lights and signalled at it with her head, "Well good-for-nothing commoner, how do you open this thing?"

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☁︎

Taehyung was greeted with an empty house upon his arrival.

He felt his heart drop drown to his stomach when he didn't spot the figure anywhere in the house. He turned the house upside down two times but he knew that he had done the unthinkable when he had asked her to leave. He knew he was risking it the moment he uttered those words out.

He still remembered the look of absolute devastation on her face when he asked her to leave for an act that could easily be deemed negligible but no, Taehyung just had to channel his anger to the girl who was probably traumatized by it.

That is why he doesn't associate with women. They are so complicated and even sometimes he felt like throwing his sister out of the balcony. According to him, women were always hard to decipher and their emotions were so fragile that you wouldn't even know when they would switch their internal feelings to protect themselves.

But that still couldn't justify his harsh act towards her. No matter how complicated these creatures were, he should've been atleast a little bit considerate to comprehend her inner turmoils before lashing out on her. What he did was totally unacceptable and the regret had already arrived to bite him.

Ting!

Heaving a sigh, Taehyung half-heartedly and looked at the person who apparently had a lot of time to text him in the middle of the night.

Namjoon:
Taehyung-ah
You were right

The lines on his forehead deepened when he read that message over and over again.

Taehyung:
Whaddya mean?
I was right about what?

As he was about put down his phone, the device tinged again.

Namjoon:
About Dohui liberating the shares
Want me to call the bank you're entitled to...?

Taehyung:
Please do
i don't think they'll pick up any of their recipient's call r8 nw

Namjoon:
Want me to dial your pa too?

Taehyung:
No thanks
Just call the bank
I'll have a nice chat with him later

Namjoon:
Sweet

Taehyung sighed as his figure flopped down on the sofa. First of all, Younggeum ran away and second of all, his money was in grave danger. God knows what will the banks do to save the country from the economic crisis. He really hoped the hard-earned money stored in his bank doesn't go down in vain.

His stomach gurgled abruptly, distracting from his worries as he painstakingly looked at the time from the hard-to-miss grandfather clock in his living room. He waited in anticipation for the loud gongs to proceed.

And when they did, Taehyung couldn't help but sense something that a really bad thing was going to happen the next day.

It just might be his faulty hunch but there is an equal probability that it might not be it.

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☁︎

No human adorned the streets as a car, seemingly looking out-of-place, zoomed across it. The sun was merely millimetres away from reaching its peak position and Taehyung questioned why there was no one roaming the usual busy streets of Seoul. He doesn't remember an apocalypse occuring last night nor did he recollect him being transferred to a completely new dimension.

Oh yes, Dohui Life Sciences liquidated its shares last night.

But he didn't expect the effect to reverberate so quickly that the roads were left desolate. Unemployment seemed a common side-effect of such rarely occuring company blunders but the size of it tremendously scared him.

But not until he passed by his father's enterprise.

A crowd was gathered near the entrance of the skyscraper with some people wearing a red coloured band on their foreheads while they aggressively shouted while waving their boards up and down.

He didn't get to witness that scene much partially because his car went past at an alarming speed and partially because he didn't want to look at the consequences of the mistakes that his father made.

"Save the small shareholders! Save us!" A man yelled at the top of his voice and others echoed that with equal intensity. That was all he heard before he drove past them and pulled over to his workplace with was coincidentally just a few junctions away from Haeron.

As he stepped in an elevator, his eyes roamed over tiny figures scurrying helter-skelter that deteriorated in size as he advanced closer to his floor. A shrill voice of the elevator ushered him out as the cogs in his brain moved at a million miles per minute speed to register the situation in front of him.

All of the people were running here and there and all around the place. Women with distressed features and men with a look of despair became a common sight as occasionally, few of the people pushed past him to reach the elevator with big, brown cardboard boxes in their hands. In those boxes, Taehyung could only make out their name plates and a few of their personal things before the doors of the elevator closed on him.

A hand on his shoulder caused him to shriek as he immediately turned around with a racing heart that calmed down as soon as he digested the face.

"Goodness, you gave me a fright!" Taehyung exclaimed at Jimin who was gazing upon him with his eyebrows scrunched together in worry. In his hand, Taehyung noticed a similar cardboard box that contained his name plate, a picture of them and a few of his family members, a calendar and a coffee mug that Jimin used to frequent as soon as he was listed here.

"Ya' know I should probably shut you up with a snarky remark but this is really not the time, Tae. You might want to see your desk yourself."

"Why?" Taehyung asked laughing, not knowing the depth of the situation.

"Come with me, you'll see for yourself." Hesitantly, Taehyung trailed after the disappearing figure amongst the sea of people running around the place. It was hard to keep up but he finally reached his office where Jimin turned around to give him a smile of reassurance but that only made him anticipate what was inside more.

Reciprocating the smile with his own awkward one, Taehyung pushed open the door with all his might and he finally understood why Jimin was prepping him up before he opened the door.

There on his desk lied, a very familiar cardboard box of his own with his name plate facing downwards to the table and beside it, resided a white sheet that Taehyung didn't want to even imagine the content.

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☁︎

Jungkook scornfully glared at his wallet but he knew that staring at his wallet won't let money grow in it. Sighing, he then diverted his attention towards the aisle containing rice. He gave one last look of longing towards his wallet and took a bag.

Manouvering past aisles upon aisles, Jungkook reached the cashier with a look of disdain on his face. That was the last of the money he had earned from working part-time and he was going to spent it on rice. Sometimes, Jungkook pleaded the God to take away his ability to feel hunger but that was only a figment of his imagination that was far from being completed.

The cashier ogled at the boy questioningly as the latter placed a single bag of rice. She picked it up and scanned it for him before giving him another look. All this while, the boy stared out of the water-droplet stained glass that overlooked the neighbourhood.

"That'd be 4,600 Won." The cashier spoke loudly which caused the boy to flinch momentarily. His soul almost left his body when the cashier was expecting him to pay up. Reluctantly, he handed her the money and took the bag before leaving the store.

Humid shadows engulfed the cosmos as Jungkook whistled a tune his mother used to sing it to him when he was a child. They were so happy back then, he had a materially and emotionally secure childhood then what changed it now? Why was a basic necessity a luxury for him?

As he trod upwards on the hill, passing by several slums and areas that were being redeveloped without a plan, Jungkook couldn't help but feel the sky was a bit melancholy today.

But he didn't trust his instincts and walked ahead with a bag of rice dangling in his hands. Unaware, the boy was in a store for an expensive rollercoaster ride heading directly towards his way.

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☁︎

A/N: I'm SO SO SORRY for the delayed updates AND for not adding more Taehyung×Younggeum's scenes BUT TRUST ME and THE BOOK! We'll get there...atleast some day we'll.

Also a little story: I carpool to school with four other kids and there is this guy who looks attractive with only his face mask on. So in the backseat of the vehicle, the two seats are facing eath other so I'd be facing him directly when I sit. So one day, I was attempting to catch the class he was studying in on the ID card he wore. But the prob was that he didn't tuck the card in and it dangled from his neck so I was trying to catch a glimpse when I realised the card was positioned right over his dick and he might've caught me UNINTENTIONALLY staring at his dick-

That was long, whew. And you guys might think I've the potential to become a universal weirdo.