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AWAKE
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Yi-Seo

On the other side of the bed in the small space next to the wall, Taehyung is lying sprawled out on the floor in an inebriated state. In a corner, there is a toppled-over empty bottle of alcohol—the sight of which makes my head spin, and my mouth go dry.

I thought I took away all his bottles, and how the hell did he get access to this? Shit!

I watch with apprehension as Jimin goes down on his knees and lifts Taehyung’s wrist in his shaking hand to check for his pulse.

“His pulse is okay,” Jimin mutters weakly, relief evident in his voice as he dismisses a drop of sweat that rolls down his temple and towards his jaw.

“I have no idea where he got that bottle from. He isn’t going to wake up now, is he?” My fears hit an all-time high, and my chest feels tight when the powerful smell of weed attacks my nostrils the closer I get to Taehyung.

The answer is unquestionably a big fat ‘NO’ because the stench of alcohol and weed surrounding Taehyung is too strong, implying that he had probably been drinking and smoking until an hour or so ago.

“Taehyung,” Jimin taps Taehyung’s flushed cheek and tries to jostle him out of his drunken slumber, but as expected, there is no response from him.

“Taehyung-ssi!” I call out in a shaky voice, falling on my knees and vigorously rustling him by his knees.

Only his body sways weakly, but there is absolutely no other reaction except for his head that lulls about and his arms that flap in slow motion, and these are sufficient to break my tears free. Anger, disappointment, frustration, and helplessness are all fighting it out inside my chest, not knowing which emotion should burst out first.

“How the HELL can he be like this? He’s so damned irresponsible! We’re doing all of this to get him what he deserves, and look at what he has done now!” I cry out furiously, rising to my feet and slamming my handbag on Taehyung’s bed as I break down on the spot, my forehead buried in my hands.

Jimin stands up on his feet and nervously keeps combing his hair with his fingers, and I’m unable to catch his facial expressions because my glasses are fogged, and my eyesight is so blurry right now.

“Yi-Seo, please calm down,” Jimin holds my arms on both sides and tries to console me. “Taehyung is addicted, for God’s sake. Right now, he is heavily drunk, and we only have less than two hours to show up at court. He must be present in court, and we need to think,” he summarizes the situation in a voice so stable, and he is being in his best composure given how shitty the entire setting is.

I’m the exact opposite of him right now—crying, shattered and unable to think straight.

“He isn’t going to wake up,” I cry out, shaking my head, resulting in more tears pouring out of my eyes, and Jimin’s hold on my arms tighten.

“No,” he insists. “He has to wake up,” Jimin’s voice grows intense, and there’s grim determination in his tone. “He will… Yi-Seo, we’re too deep into this to lose now,” upon hearing his words, I take off my glasses and wipe away my tears with the back of my hand to look at Jimin.

His eyes are blazing with a kind of unnerving perseverance, and they’re dead set on me, but I have no clue how to wake Taehyung up now.

“But how?” I whisper creakily.

Jimin’s hands slide off my arms as he turns his head to look down at Taehyung, who is on the verge of slipping into unconsciousness, and then he looks back up at me. He keeps threading his fingers through his hair anxiously and pacing back and forth a few times before he suddenly stops to look at me with a sort of clarity on his face, and it looks as if he just had his eureka moment.

“Stay with him. I’ll be back in a while, okay?” His rushed question makes my eyebrows knit together in utter confusion.

Jimin storms out of the room without answering me.

“Where are you going? What am I supposed to do?” I’m jogging behind him to the front door now.

“Yi-Seo, just do whatever you did when you slept over after he got drunk in the past. Just stay! I’ll be right back,” Jimin almost commands me in a loud voice to just shut up and stay, bringing my short jog to a screeching halt at Taehyung’s doorway.

I stand there, slack-jawed and utterly confused while he places a call to someone as he quickly jogs towards his car. Jimin drives away shortly after, and that leaves me alone with an almost unconscious Taehyung lying half-naked on the floor of his bedroom. He is making some obnoxious noises, and it is making all my veins pop in fury.

My jaw tightens, and my shoulders tense up in anger, and it hasn’t even been an hour since I started my day. I was floating in the clouds just about an hour ago, thinking about that prospective kiss and everything, and now Taehyung has made me so furious that I don’t even bother to step inside his bedroom to check on him when Jimin is gone.

Chewing away my nails, I anxiously wait at the edge of my seat on the couch, and the minutes suddenly seem to be ticking away in fast-forward. Five minutes become ten, ten turns twenty, but Jimin isn’t here yet. We only have an hour and thirty minutes to get to court, and at this point, I’m almost convinced that this is the dead end.

This is it. The finale. And Taehyung has ruined it all with this grand act. Not just for himself, but he has behaved so recklessly and invalidated Jimin’s work as well as mine. Not just invalidated, but he has outright disregarded and disrespected everything that we have done.

Even though he has an attorney, if Taehyung doesn’t turn up at court today, the hearing will be postponed. And that would mean that Sammy will get more time to think and plan something. It would also mean that Se-Young has to hang on for longer, and he would also have to be protected from Sammy’s hands. Above all, any delays in this case could potentially lead to the expiry of the case itself, given the statute of limitations which holds good only for two more weeks.

My mind begins to phrase derogatory curses targeted at Taehyung, but, luckily, I don’t get to materialize them into words as I soon hear Jimin’s car pulling up outside. From the moment he left, I left the front door ajar, and as soon as I hear the sound of his car, I rush to the door and see him speeding toward me with a look of borderline triumph on his face.

“Jimin-ssi, what happened? Where did you go? How are you going to wake him up?” I run behind him, bombarding my questions to the back of his head as he takes long strides and reaches the dining table.

Just like he did earlier, Jimin doesn’t answer any of my questions right away, and even though it seems extremely rude, at this moment, I can’t expect such trivial things from him when we have a mountainous task lying ahead of us.

I watch with wide eyes as Jimin pulls out a small packet with some kind of white powdery stuff in it that looks like soda bicarb to me, but it most certainly isn’t that.

“Get me a pair of scissors, quick!” His loud and demanding voice summons me to the kitchen, and I rush back to him with a pair of scissors in a few seconds.

Tapping the contents of the packet away from one corner, Jimin cautiously snips away a small part of that corner of the packet and pours out a thick line of the white powder on the dining table. From his back pocket, he then retrieves the plain white key card that he used earlier and carefully cuts out the thick line of the powder and aligns them into three perfect and thin columns, set parallel to one another.

“What is this? What are you going to do?” I ask him when I notice him flicking his head around looking for something desperately, and my eyes follow his every move, totally clueless about what is going on.

The lack of answers is driving me insane at this point, and my confusion only grows deeper when Jimin rushes to pick up the pack of sticky notes from Taehyung’s work desk and pulls out one, rolling it into a thin cigarette kind thereafter.

He meticulously seals the free end of the rolled paper and sets his humble, handmade contraption down beside the white powder lines on the dining table and looks up at me.

“Help me bring him here,” he doesn’t wait for my answer or give me answers to my previous questions, and I’m forced to run behind him into Taehyung’s bedroom. I have absolutely no clue what is going on; I’m sweating bullets, and my heart feels as if it might explode from how fast it is beating right now.

Jimin takes a moment to roll up the sleeves of his shirt, and then he crouches down, hooking his arms under Taehyung’s limp arms and lifting his torso along with his.

Together we struggle a little, but somehow, we manage to haul Taehyung up and each of us slings an arm around our necks as we practically drag his droopy body to the dining table.

Taehyung is weakly muttering something under his alcohol-laden breath, but his words are slurred and low, entirely incomprehensible, and neither I nor Jimin bother to decode them because we have lost another fifteen minutes in this whole process.

We drop his body onto one of the chairs, and Jimin instructs me to stand beside Taehyung and hold up his hanging head on both sides, which I do just as I’m told to.

Picking up the rolled paper in his hand, Jimin places one end of it just touching the start of the first line of white powder on the table, and then he tilts Taehyung’s head forward with my help, positioning the other end of the rolled paper at Taehyung’s left nostril with fine precision.

“Yi-Seo, this is cocaine powder, and he must snort it in right away. Don’t ask any more questions, and just do as I say,” Jimin explains in a rushed manner, in an intimidating tone, but his words only cause my pulse to race and blood to rush. It absolutely isn’t helping with anything at the moment, but I nod furiously and zip my mouth shut, not daring to ask him any more questions.

“Taehyung, snort this in! Come on!” Jimin shouts out, powerfully whacking the back of Taehyung’s head once, making me flinch and shudder. His sudden move causes Taehyung to sniff in the powder while Jimin slaps my hands off and grips onto a bunch of hair at the back of Taehyung’s head and swiftly guides the sticky note cigarette down one line of the cocaine powder arranged on the table. The entire line of powder disappears when he reaches the end of it, meaning that it has now entered Taehyung’s system.

The cocaine powder seems to have flipped some kind of magical switch in Taehyung’s body and brain, and within ten seconds, his eyes fly open—wide and alert. His chest heaves and his jaw drops agape as if his lungs are in dire need of all the oxygen that he has been deprived of for a long time.

“Yes! Yes! Come on!” Jimin exclaims in a slightly ecstatic tone, handing over the rolled paper to Taehyung, who is suddenly attentive enough to handle it on his own.

My jaw drops to the floor seeing the events that are unfolding in front of my stupefied eyes, and my muddled brain is unable to process anything.

Taking the paper from Jimin’s hand, Taehyung snorts in another line of cocaine with his eyebrows furrowed deeply, and then his head falls back, and his mouth opens wide as does mine.

With every line of cocaine powder that he consumes, Taehyung’s brain seems to flicker back to normalcy much more rapidly. The next line is snorted in at a much shorter interval, and my petrified eyes stay glued to Taehyung watching his sobriety rush into his body in a matter of just a few seconds, though they were arguably the most grueling few seconds of my life so far.

The commotion in the room settles, and a sudden and eerie calmness prevails in the air. Flicking the paper to a corner, Taehyung keeps his head low and his outstretched hands are resting on the table as he repeatedly keeps tapping his fingertips on the dining table before he raises his head to look at me.

His big eyes are bloodshot and wide, almost ready to pop out of their sockets, and his forehead is sprouting beads of sweat.

My head is whirling, and my eyes are still wide in sheer shock, blinking as if I just witnessed an exorcism, and my mouth refuses to seal shut. Taehyung then turns his head to look at Jimin, who actually looked and sounded thrilled and ecstatic just moments ago, but now there’s so much disappointment and anger crossing his features.

Sucking in a sharp breath and clenching his jaw tight, Jimin harshly grabs Taehyung’s bicep and yanks him up, forcing him onto his feet. Taehyung staggers as Jimin drags him and pulls him along to his bedroom.

I follow them as if in a trance, and Jimin forcefully pushes Taehyung inside his bedroom. He watches Taehyung stumble onto the edge of his bed before he turns around to look at me. His eyes are filled with so much anger and pain that it terribly scares me as much as it worries me.

“Stay here, unless you’re also some delusional fangirl who fantasizes about being with him in his bedroom,” he points with his thumb in Taehyung’s direction, and the toneless but intentionally sarcastic nature of his comment snaps my jaw shut.

“I- I get it,” I say weakly, nodding as I take a step back before the door in front of me slams shut with such a loud noise that makes me jump.

I have nothing more to do now than to just wait and say my prayers, hoping that the two men would talk it out and step out of the room so that all three of us could go to court at the right time.

⚜
My most fave chapter of Infamy is coming up next. YES! It is a VMin interaction written in author POV, and it is going to be full of heavy emotions.
🤧🤧🥲🥲💕💖💞

Any idea about the chapter title?
😉🤔

Published on : 02/15/2023