Chapter Text
Taehyung would be comfortable being dead. He returned from the jaws of it and the bed is a little too soft for his liking, the room too bright, the smell the same as four years ago. The smell he had almost forgotten now forces him to get familiar with it.
Despite the obvious, the apartment is quite unlike his previous one. The layout is the exact same. There are two bedrooms, one room that also has been turned into a studio, a kitchen with a marble isle, and a living and dining area with glass windows overlooking a dead lake that ushers in the smell of rotting bodies if you leave a window open. The furniture, the tv, the kitchen appliances are all the same. Someone has gone through a lot of trouble to trick Taehyung. But the mattress gives it away. The place is wrong. Sunlight hits the windows quite differently.
There is a strange man living in the apartment. He goes to bed late at night and wakes up at the crack of dawn. He lingers around the door to Taehyung’s room, not always letting himself be seen. His smell wakes Taehyung up from his shallow sleep throughout the day. Taehyung can hear everything. His eyes may be closed, his mind may be conjuring up charred images blending into one another that he can often guide, but he is aware of everything that is going on.
The stranger is quiet most of the time. He moves with leisure. Three times a day, he brings Taehyung food. Afterwards, he offers Taehyung pills. The pale pills are what drag Taehyung’s consciousness into something dazed and blurred. He refused to take them. The stranger urged, and Taehyung was afraid. He pretended to take them and then spat them out later. The stranger could tell.
In the middle of the night, Taehyung listens for him to go to bed. He listens to the click-click of the lights being turned off one by one – the living room, the dining area, the kitchen, the toilets. The padding of soft feet on cement floor comes to a halt around Taehyung’s bedroom door. The stranger hovers as Taehyung glides through these lucid dreams. The stranger then turns the lights off in his own room but never closes the door. He sleeps in the thick darkness with the heavy curtains drawn. With no other lights on in the house, only his breathing lets Taehyung know if he is there at all. The door is open but nothing can be seen. This was where the suspicions began – Yoongi never slept with the door open when he lived with Taehyung, could never get comfortable enough to fall asleep with the door open. The stranger has made a den where Yoongi’s old room was supposed to be. Taehyung has not been there since.
Taehyung’s dreams morph into each other and bring him back to a place. It takes a while to know whether he really finds himself in his real bed, because often he wakes up in his bed, then wakes up in his bed, and wakes up in his bed, and wakes up in his bed again, hoping that if there is a reality to be reached, this is the one. During this hour, when the night is weighted with darkness, there is almost always a gnawing at the lining of his stomach. He finds himself in the kitchen, flicks the lights on. Stacks of home cooked meals wait for him in the fridge in separate containers. Often, he finds bibimbap with bulgogi, cabbage kimchi, and gochujang and sesame paste. Sometimes there is jjigae, seaweed soup. Sometimes dumplings. Always in ovenproof tupperware. Sometimes there is a box of family-size pizza. Once he found tiramisu. Boxes of guava, pomegranate, and orange juice. Frozen nuggets, spring rolls, dumplings in the freezer. On the kitchen isle, there is a variety of packaged snacks on a rack. He collects whichever he wants, usually of different textures. Potato chips with creamy noodles. Pickled jalapenos with kimbap. Heats what needs to be heated and takes it all to his room. Never without a tall glass of sweet juice. Smells it for a while, trying to smell the poison until the gnawing in his belly grows impatient. His eyes and nose leak as he eats.
When the blue hour has just passed, the stranger stands half hidden behind Taehyung’s ajar door. When Taehyung wakes from his gaze burning holes into his skin, the stranger brings him his breakfast with pills and picks the dirty dishes off the floor to take to the sink. It is not as though Taehyung cannot go to the dining area to eat. There is simply no point to this breakfast-in-bed charade unless it is poisoned. His infections needed to be operated on twice, to cut out the pus and rotten meat, but they have healed almost to normalcy now. His fractured limbs recovered completely last month. He is slightly sore but can move very easily now. Some wounds on his face have left a sprinkle of scars that no longer hurt. But none matches the stranger’s. A wiggled line of dull-red raised skin, like exposed muscles, rives his pale skin, from his right brow down to his undereye, leaving a dead grey eye in its path that flitters when Taehyung asks too many questions. That was what made Taehyung question everything.
The stranger mirrors Min Yoongi. He says his name is the same. He asks to be called hyung. He brings food and pills every morning. Often, Taehyung makes him taste it first to prove that it is not poisoned. For the medicine, Namjoon was called. Taehyung was expecting to see his cousin. But another stranger showed up. When Taehyung could not trust him, this stranger gave him his old phone back and said that Taehyung could do some research and contact any doctor he saw fit. And he had.
Doctor Kim Woosung is very nice. Nicer than the strangers. He is a medicine specialist who took a very long time observing Taehyung’s medical reports and prescriptions and said that everything was in order. The next day he brought new sets of his meds and arranged them in Taehyung’s pill box himself. He comes by every other day, not just to arrange the medicine, but to check up on Taehyung. The hours go slow when he messages Taehyung that he will drop by that day. When he arrives, Taehyung makes their conversation steer from his health to what is going on outside of the apartment. The doctor has a handsome one-sided smile. He smiles when he talks about his baby nephew, work, the movie he watched last night. Smiles when he promises to take Taehyung out for a walk sometime. It will be good for him, he says. “Doesn’t your hyung take you outside?” he asks.
The stranger does not hover when the doctor is here. He hides in the studio that mirrors Yoongi’s half-finished one. He is not Taehyung’s hyung. Once the confusion cleared, Taehyung could tell early on that he was the stranger’s captive, that he would not be allowed out.
The stranger seems very busy throughout the day. When he is not cooking or cleaning, he is on his computer either typing or speaking with someone in a strange tone. Sometimes he is on the phone. He addresses his appa a lot.
“He doesn’t have time,” Taehyung tells the doctor.
And when the doctor leaves, Taehyung finds the stranger in the studio. “Did you get the stuff from my apartment?” He looks at the equipment he does not know the name of. He only knows the MIDI because he was there when Namjoon and Yoongi brought it to the apartment and explained what it was and what it did and how it did it with large smiles plastered on their faces. The stranger sits near it now. “Yoongi hyung wouldn’t like it. He cherished those. Do you know where he is? Is he in Daegu still?”
The stranger shakes his head.
“I wanted to call him. But you took my SIM out.”
“Namjoon did.”
Taehyung wonders what else they have done to his phone.
“Do you want it back?”
“Yeah. But I don’t think hyung would want to talk to me. I did something,”
A scratchy bang starts to sing out of the corner of the room. It jerks the earth Taehyung stands on, gives him a much-needed shake. An out-of-place gold and maroon battered grandfather clock stands against the dark blueish gray wall, chiming. It is nine o’clock.
“I fixed it,” says the stranger.
“He’ll kill you when he finds out.”