XII

Jimin woke up when the sun shone mercilessly through his window. He groaned and cuddled closer to the warm thing beside him, burying his face in it to avoid the sunlight. He stopped and blinked his eyes open when it didn't feel like a pillow. That was his shirt. On someone else's body.

His gaze moved upwards until he saw Yoongi's peacefully sleeping face and he almost shrieked, only barely holding it in, but he did his best to squirm out of the hug that he was being held in. It was no use; Yoongi's grip was like steel around his waist and he was being drawn in closer every time he tried to move away.

He sighed in disappointment. That wasn't working at all, so it's time for plan B.

Jimin squirmed enough so that his arms were above his head and he slowly slipped between Yoongi's arms and his body. All was going well until Yoongi frowned and tried to hug him tighter but didn't feel him there.

Jimin let out a small noise of despair when his arms were caught in Yoongi's grip. He was holding Jimin's wrists right up against his chest tight enough that Jimin couldn't get his arms free.

And that caused the second problem.

Because of how this had all worked out, he found himself face to face with a part of Yoongi that he didn't want to get acquainted with.

(Yet, his mind told him. He just told his libido to shut the fuck up and mind its own business.)

Jimin tried fruitlessly to move just right to get free. Nothing he tried worked. He huffed and blew his ash blond bangs out of his face slightly, a frown on his face.

"Ok then," He mumbled to himself, "When in doubt, plan C."

He really didn't want to have to do this, but sacrifices were necessary for the greater good. His dignity and pride would just have to be some of them.

Jimin moved his leg back and kicked Yoongi in the leg as hard as he could manage. Yoongi let out a yelp of pain and woke up immediately.

"What the fuck was that for!?" He grimaced and clutched at his leg with a wince. "Oh come on. That's gonna bruise."

Jimin sat up on the bed and smoothed his shirt back down since it had ridden up while he was trying to slip away. At least he was out of that… awkward situation.

"Oh just suck it up, Yoongi. We slept for hours and we missed dinner. I'm hungry as fuck and I'm sure you are too," Jimin rolled his eyes as he stood up.

He waited in the doorway for Yoongi to check his phone and come to join him.

"Oh. Your friend texted," Yoongi said as he scrolled through something on his phone.

"What did he say?"

"Apparently he's sick again."

"Man the flu must be going around or something," Jimin sighed.

Yoongi only shrugged.

"Maybe."

He pocketed his phone and they both went downstairs to eat something. Jimin's parents exchanged a worried look when they showed up in the kitchen but still said nothing to them, letting them wake up in peace.

"Sleep well?" His father asked with a chuckle. He had heard the wake up apparently. Yoongi glared at Jimin with a glare that could melt ice.

"I was having an amazing sleep. Until he woke me up," He grumbled and Jimin smiled sheepishly.

"I'm sorry, I was hungry and I had to go pee, ok? I had to get out of your death grip somehow," Jimin stood there defensively before he noticed the room went silent.

"So," his mother smirked and looked between them with interest, "a death grip, huh?"

ABORT ABORT ABORT

"Uh, nope, what death grip are you talking about?" Jimin panicked, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. "Definitely never said anything about a death grip."

His father let out a deep laugh and ruffled his hair.

"Calm down, Jimin," he said, "we already know. We came in to check on you two."

Jimin blanched and buried his face in embarrassment.

"Please tell me you didn't-"

"You two are so huggy, I'm jealous," He laughed and Jimin just wanted to disappear into some other dimension where parents didn't embarrass their children at every given opportunity.

"Dad, stop, please."

"Your mother took so many photos," His father exclaimed and his mother's face beamed with pride.

Oh god. Yoongi probably hated him now.

He chanced a glance at Yoongi expecting to see a horrified expression. That wasn't what he saw at all.

"Can I see them?" Yoongi asked.

"Yoongi, no!" Jimin shrieked. He was mortified, actually, mortified wasn't a strong enough word. Jimin didn't even have a word in his vocabulary that would accurately describe just how embarrassed he was at that moment.

His mother always said that he had the dumbest expressions while he was asleep. Like hell he would just let Yoongi see that.

His mother pulled out her phone and began showing off the photos with too much enthusiasm for 1he morning.

"Aren't you two adorable?" She cooed.

Jimin wanted to die. Yoongi was staring intently at the photo and he just wanted to slowly crumple to the floor, melt into a puddle of goo and vanish.

This was so embarrassing.

"Heh," Yoongi chuckled. Jimin prepared himself for rejection and hate and devastation.

Jimin hid his face and looked away.

"Cute."

Bitch, what the fuck?

"What?" He asked dumbly, staring at Yoongi.

He shrugged. "I said it's cute. Is there a problem?"

Jimin paled. "Uh NOPE NOPE NO PROBLEM HERE NO SIREE."

Yoongi looked at him strangely before rolling his eyes.

"Sure," Yoongi said flatly. "Let's pretend for a second that I actually believed that."

Jimin totally didn't glare at his parents when they burst out laughing. Definitely not. He wasn't that immature.

(He totally did)

He pouted and Yoongi didn't do anything to make him feel better after all that humiliation.

"So are we gonna eat? I'm fucking starving." Yoongi grumbled.

Jimin's parents laughed and told them to eat all they wanted. As he sat there at the table, Jimin looked around at all the people he loved and wished that the world could just stay like this.

It was a hopeless wish and he knew it.

Neither him or Yoongi could be happy while it lived.

After breakfast, Yoongi and Jimin got ready to leave the house. Jimin's parents were watching nervously from the hall.

"Come back safely," His mother said, anxiously wringing her hands.

"Don't worry, we will," Yoongi assured her. With a last hug, the two left to either go get Jimin's phone fixed or a new one.

If Jimin had known what would happen that day, he probably wouldn't have left home.

But he didn't know.

So they left the house and walked down the street towards the center of town, staying as far away from the main plaza as possible.

Neither of them wanted to go there just yet. It was too soon.

They arrived at a small shop and Jimin just decided that it wasn't worth the repair fee when he got told how much it would cost. He just bought a new phone and moved his SIM card over.

All in all, they didn't spend very long in the store at all. It was still decently early, not that one could tell with all the fog, and they didn't feel like heading back to the house quite yet.

"Do you want to go to the coffee shop?" Jimin asked Yoongi after a moment of pointless wandering.

"Why not?"

Yoongi just shrugged as he started walking towards the street it was on. Jimin chattered excitedly, completely the opposite of what he had been like the day before.

He was so caught up in talking about his friends back in Seoul that he didn't even notice Yoongi staring at him fondly.

As they got closer to the street the coffee shop was on, they gradually stopped talking.

Sounds of whispering filled the air and they exchanged a horrified look. If it was what they thought it was...

"Yoongi, what do we do?" Jimin hissed. "We're too far away from the circle to make it there in time."

"I know."

Yoongi seemed extremely tense and he grabbed Jimin's hand tightly as if he were afraid that if he didn't hold on, that Jimin would vanish into thin air.

They walked slowly towards the street but were on their guard. The atmosphere was tense and they jumped at every sound.

"It will be okay," Yoongi whispered with only a slight tremor to his voice. "Trust me."

"What do you mean by that?" Jimin whispered back. Yoongi looked at him with an expression that Jimin couldn't identify but he was sure it wasn't good.

"If something - anything - happens," he began seriously, "I want you to leave me behind and run away. You have to live, Jimin."

Jimin turned and grabbed onto Yoongi's jacket with a bit more force than was necessary.

"No! I'm not leaving you behind, Yoongi. We promised that we'd do this together and I'm not going to abandon that so easily." He shouted, letting the pain take control and lash out at Yoongi for even suggesting that Jimin would - no, could - leave while Yoongi stayed behind.

"Jimin, please," Yoongi pleaded him, desperation clear in his eyes.

Jimin stood his ground. The whispers hadn't gotten any louder. He could afford to use this time.

"Whatever happens, happens," Jimin whispered back as he continued walking forward, "I'll make that decision if I ever have to."

Yoongi caught up to him quickly and kept looking around suspiciously at every sound. They were both nervous, more nervous than they had been before.

But they had each other and maybe that was enough.

They soon found the source of the whispers. Townspeople stood around the coffee shop, whispering to each other quietly.

"Never would have thought..."

"... such a shame..."

"No family..."

The two approached a woman and Jimin tapped her on the shoulder.

"Um, excuse me, what's going on?"

She turned around with a strange smile on her face and he stepped back. Jiyong's mother let out a broken laugh when she caught sight of Jimin.

"One by one the sinners return to the earth from which they came," She sang quietly. The key was strange and it sounded haunting.

"In scarlet, floating and disappearing, I stand at the infinite corridor. Giving myself to slumber for eternity. Ashes to ashes," she murmured "dust to dust."

She looked straight into Jimin's eyes and reached for him.

"Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Return to the earth with blood like rust."

Jimin took a step back and clung to Yoongi in fear.

"What's going on-" he stammered as he watched her smile at him in a way that made him extremely uncomfortable, "What happened to her?"

"The sinners march forward, deprived of their names. Return to the earth from which you came," She sang as she staggered forward and reached for him again. "Return to ashes. Return to dust. Return to the earth with blood like rust."

Jimin could only stare in frozen horror as she pulled out a knife from her bag and lunged at him. His breath caught in his throat and he couldn't scream, and only closed his eyes in fear.

Like a marionette with its strings cut, she crumpled to the ground and the knife tumbled out of her hand. Jimin looked up and noticed one of Jiyong's friends (lackeys?) looking as if he'd just knocked her out.

He said nothing, just turned around and left. No one moved to help her.

Jimin didn't really want to either.

He picked up the knife and pocketed it nervously, not wanting to touch it for any longer than necessary. Yoongi held him close as they walked around the woman on the ground and closer to the front of the crowd.

"No," Jimin breathed. "Please no."

Yoongi tightened his grip on Jimin's hand and tried to send him a reassuring squeeze.

It didn't work.

Jimin felt weak and he wanted to pass out. He wished it were all just a terrible dream and he was actually still in bed back home, stuck in a nightmare.

But it was real. Too real.

Yoongi was the only thing keeping him standing as he stood there in shock.

The steady dripping of blood made him look up to find the source.

The crimson liquid dripped, drop by fucking drop, down from the limp body of the old woman.

Her eye sockets were empty and sunken in, her lower jaw had been completely ripped off and her body was cut open from her sternum to her stomach.

Her hair, her beautiful silvery hair, had been hacked off in places and was bloodied everywhere else.

Jimin stumbled backward when he saw the metal stake that was speared through her body to keep her pinned to the side of the building.

"No..." Jimin reached out and his hand closed on thin air. "Not her. Anyone but her."

Not the first person he actually befriended in this godforsaken town.

He would never hear her call him love again.

He could never drink another cup of hot chocolate like hers.

"YOU CAN'T DO THIS! GIVE HER BACK!" Jimin screamed. He didn't even process the tears running down his cheeks in his despair.

He let out a scream, one primal and filled with so much pain that his throat felt like it was being ripped apart from the inside. Yoongi reached over and held him back from walking closer to her.

"Jimin! You have to stop this! You have to calm down!"

"No!" He screamed as he began to push away Yoongi's arms and even began clawing at them.

"Let me go! I have to go to her! I have to-"

"Jimin come to your senses!" Yoongi shouted through the grimace of pain, tightening his grip on Jimin.

"I'll never forgive you," Jimin's voice got oddly quiet and it felt like the temperature had dropped by several degrees.

"I'M GOING TO FIND YOU!" Jimin screamed suddenly, "AND I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!"

He pulled himself out of Yoongi's hold harshly and stumbled over towards the shop, tripping and falling on his way. Sharp glass and stones dug into his palms and knees, drawing blood but he never noticed.

The windows were completely shattered and the entire coffee shop was trashed. There were blood splatters everywhere inside and Jimin felt sick to his stomach.

There was a message written in blood on one of the walls. It didn't say much but what it did terrified him

'It's all your fault.'

And like a glass smashing against the concrete, he broke.

He stopped and a wail escaped from his lungs, hoarse and full of hurt.

Something cold dripped onto his cheek. He wiped it off and stared at his hand blankly.

It was red.

He hated red.

He had seen too much red. No more.

No more.

He never wanted to see red again.

He felt like a blank canvas as he sat there.

Wait, not blank.

The canvas had red on it.

He felt himself being picked up and he tried to fight it, but his punches were too weak and couldn't do anything.

He gasped and reached out as he saw her getting further and further away.

"Let me go!" He cried out. "I gotta... I gotta go back. I hafta get her down!"

"You're not going anywhere," The voice said. He liked the voice. It meant something to him. It was more important.

"I'm taking you home," It whispered. "We can sit and drink hot chocolate instead of coffee if you want. We can call your ridiculous friends from Soul. You can cuddle me as much as you need to."

Jimin relaxed slightly in his hold but his eyes never looked away from the direction of the coffee shop.

"Yoongi," He whispered with a trembling voice, "I'm scared."

"Me too, Jimin. Me too."

Jimin felt Yoongi hugging him tighter and he hugged back just as tight, tears flowing freely down his cheeks.

"Stay with me," Jimin said, voice cracking in the middle of the sentence. He hiccuped and cried again.

"Always. You won't be able to get rid of me anymore even if you wanted to."

Jimin tried to calm down while in the safety of Yoongi's arms, but it wasn't helping. He cried into the crook of Yoongi's neck and shoulder, traumatized and unable of doing anything else. Yoongi's steps slowed to a stop.

"What's wrong?" He asked without moving his head from where it lay.

"Jimin. You need to see this," Yoongi's deep voice rumbled, a pleasant vibration on Jimin's cheek.

Jimin looked up hesitantly and his heart sunk in his chest.

"Why..." He whispered. "This isn't fair. Why me? No..."

"We'll do this together. I'll be right with you," Yoongi tried to whisper reassuringly as he let Jimin down from the carry, but it wouldn't help. He couldn't feel anything other than the overwhelming sense of despair that threatened to consume him whole.

They stood on the street in front of his house, staring at the door that had been ripped off its hinges and the deep gouges left in the walls.

"Mom...Dad..." Jimin whimpered, reaching out toward the ruined house. It couldn't be possible. Not his house. Not his family.

He took a staggered step towards his house and choked back a sob. The doorway was scratched and deformed, the door barely in one piece on the ground.

Yoongi steadied him as they walked inside.

It was worse in there. The furniture was overturned and ripped to shreds, the carpet was torn up, revealing the floorboards underneath and the walls were scratched and ruined. Yoongi leading him by the hand into the kitchen was the only thing that kept him from crumpling to the floor.

The fridge laid face down on the floor and was spilling water everywhere, the back sparking dangerously where the power cord was only partially torn. The table was split in half and splinters were everywhere.

Through his shock, he could hear the sound of running water. The tap had been left on, something his parents would never have done willingly, and the water was overflowing onto the floor.

There were no other sounds except the creaking of the floor as they walked into the hall.

They split up, checking every room on the main level with no luck. It was as if his parents had simply vanished into thin air with barely a trace that they had ever been there. He felt numb.

Jimin hurried up the stairs and checked his parent's bedroom. It was equally trashed as the rest of the house. Deep gouges were displayed on the wall in plain sight, the plaster falling to the floor piece by piece. Clothes were strewn about haphazardly on the floor and on the torn mattress. The only evidence that the pillows ever existed were feathers and torn scraps of fabric.

Jimin slowly backed out of the room and walked towards his. He didn't want to know what would be behind the door, to see how much destruction was left behind.

Yoongi approached him and nudged him forward. The hall wasn't long in the least, but it felt like it took forever to walk the few meters to his bedroom. He stared at his feet and the scratched hardwood as he thought.

Why did this happen? Where did his parents go? What happened?

Jimin looked at Yoongi in confusion when he heard a sharp intake of breath.

"Jimin. Look," Yoongi pointed at the door.

His legs felt weaker than before and his breath was stolen from his lungs.

"No..." He whispered, reaching out to trace his finger across the words scratched into the door.

ALL YOUR FAULT

ASHES. DUST.

THEY ARE ASHES. DUST.

He crumpled to the floor, eyes never leaving the words. The words that haunted him, the words that were spat at him, the words that carried too much meaning with them.

"Jimin, stay calm," Yoongi said to him grimly, but how could he? His parents were gone. Two people had died. Were they next?

Yoongi carefully twisted the door handle and peeked inside the bedroom, gasping when he saw what was inside.

"Jimin, you've gotta see this."

Jimin looked inside and his eyes widened from the shock.

Nothing was out of place.

Not even the dust in the corner seemed to have been disturbed.

It was disconcerting to say the least, a single untouched space while the rest of the house had been all but destroyed.

Jimin rushed in and checked frantically through his things. Nothing was gone. Nothing was missing. Nothing was damaged even the slightest bit.

"The hell?" Yoongi growled. He turned and punched the door. "The fuck is the meaning of this?"

Jimin returned nervously. "I don't know. Before this, we would have just checked at the library, but I don't know if there's a point to that anymore."

Yoongi looked away, trying his best to think. "What section haven't we checked?"

Jimin thought for a moment before grimacing.

"English literature."

Yoongi rolled his eyes. "We'd have more luck running around aimlessly than at understanding any of that."

Jimin looked up, determined. "But is it worth a shot?"

Yoongi just shrugged and walked out of the room, throwing a teasing smirk over his shoulder.

"You coming?"

"But-" Jimin began but Yoongi just kept walking away from him. He wasn't sure if he could

"We might as well be thorough. It'll also give us time to cool off and think rationally," He looked back over his shoulder into Jimin's eyes. "If we act impulsively, we might as well be dead."

He couldn't argue with that, but he couldn't help feeling that no matter how much they searched, they were only going in circles. Jimin hardened his resolve and followed Yoongi out of the remains of his house after grabbing his cell phone charger.

They stuck close to each other and flinched at every sound that wasn't their own footsteps or breathing. The walk to the library felt much longer than usual and Jimin couldn't help but feel as if he were still screaming on the inside.

They only relaxed once the heavy doors were closed behind them and they were safely inside the library. Jimin squeezed Yoongi's hand nervously as they walked over to the dreaded English Literature section.

"So, where do you want to start?" Yoongi asked with contempt as he grimaced at a book that he had carelessly pulled from the shelf

"I can start from the other end and we can meet in the middle?" Jimin suggested. He still hadn't let go of Yoongi's hand and he was hesitant to do so. He knew that Yoongi could feel him trembling and also hadn't loosened his grip yet.

They looked at each other for a moment before reluctantly separating.

Jimin reached the other end of the stacks and pulled down about five books. He settled in for the long haul and began skimming them one by one.

When he finished those, he put them back and got another five.

Hours passed doing this, and he was so lost in the books that nothing bothered him. He locked himself in another world where the person known as Park Jimin didn't exist and hadn't seen two corpses in less than forty-two hours.

He moved his way through them at a relatively constant pace, and he actually occasionally enjoyed something that he could understand. He had just gone through Shakespeare and was reaching the R's. Thank god for that, he thought he would cry if he had to read any more prose.

There wasn't anything overly interesting in the R section either.

The Q section was basically nonexistent and he vaguely wondered if Yoongi was having any more success in the first half of the alphabet.

Probably not, at the rate this was going.

He put back another five. Nothing.

The P section was hardly worth mentioning in his opinion.

A few Powells, a Potter here and there as well as other names he couldn't pronounce.

His hand hovered over the spine of one book.

"Poe," He read aloud. The name sounded vaguely familiar. "Have I read this before?"

He pulled it down and looked at it. It seemed to be a collection of many of his stories. Jimin felt bored just looking at it and was about to set it back on the shelf when he remembered Yoongi's words from earlier.

Thorough. Right.

He sighed and flipped to the first page.

The stories were more interesting than he had thought. He began to read instead of just flipping through them. The Raven. The Tell-Tale Heart. A Dream Within A Dream.

Jimin felt fully engrossed in them, allowing himself to visualize them and watch them play out.

He flipped the page to the next one.

The Masque of the Red Death.

It was an interesting story, to say the least. He flipped another page and saw something strange in the book. He paused and stared at it for a moment until he processed what, exactly, was in his hand.

"What the-" he whispered.

"Yoongi!?" He shouted completely uncaring about the librarian. This was potentially way much more important than speaking loudly in a library. This could be a matter of life or death.

There was a small piece of paper shoved in the middle of the story with strange symbols written on it that he couldn't recognize. Jimin could hear Yoongi's hurried footsteps as he ran from the other end of the shelves toward him.

"What is it Jimin?" He asked, only slightly out of breath. Jimin said nothing and only held out the book, open to the page, for him to see.

It was covered in line after line of swirls, dots, dashes and curves that spanned the whole page and there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to their placement.

Yoongi stared at the paper for a moment. If he didn't know any better (and if all of this wasn't written in ink), he would have thought that it was a little doodle of some kind that a four-year-old had made and stuck in the book, but something wasn't adding up.

"That's it? A paper with weird lines?" He said in disbelief. Jimin crossed his arms after pulling the paper out and putting the book back on the shelf.

"Well, do you have anything better to go off of?"

Yoongi wisely stayed silent knowing full well that they didn't.

"Well, then it's settled," Jimin said probably louder than necessary. "We're going to try to figure this out if you can't find anything else."

Yoongi grumbled but agreed. "You're coming back to my house until this is done. I'm not leaving you alone out there."

"Thanks," Jimin mumbled, "I wasn't so sure if I wanted to go back to my house or not."

"Now you don't have to," Yoongi said as he turned to go back to his pile of books. Jimin smiled brightly at him, uncaring if he actually saw it or not. He knew Jimin was appreciative, and they both knew that he was aware of it even without the smile.