Dark Matter | JJK

16. The Three Brothers

Hoseok, when he entered the apartment still wearing his white coat over dark green scrubs, smiled weakly at the trio. Operating injured patients and running forensic tests had deprived him of sleep for the past forty-eight hours, and it showed.

Then came Taehyung with his arm around Jimin's shoulder, looking at all of them with a pointed look in his eyes that warned them to wait on their questions. Jimin appeared strangely quiet, his eyes downcast the entire time and chapped lips pressed into a thin line. He did not have to speak for Jungkook to understand his guilt.

Seokjin arrived next, grease patches and sweat covering his face and hands from all the hours he and his team had spent extinguishing countless fires around the town. For once, he did not complain about the trashed shoe rack and took it upon himself to prepare coffee for them all.

Yoongi was the last to arrive, his styled hair, black suit and the subtle make-up on his face evidence enough that he'd just finished delivering his latest broadcast show.

They all sat silently for a few minutes, the gravity of the situation weighing their shoulders down into a slump, with the only sound being Jungkook clinking his fingers against his coffee mug in the tune of an unknown song. When Jin shot a withering glare in his direction, he scowled and stilled in his actions.

Suddenly, Namjoon sat up in his seat and leaned to the side to remove something from his back pocket. It was a slightly crumpled, folded square of paper. "Look at his picture," he said.

When the picture reached Jungkook, Petra and Hoseok leaned from either side of him to have a look. The photo was of three men, perhaps in their early thirties, smiling gleefully at the camera. Albeit a bit fuzzy, something about the way the men in the photo had their arms slung around each others' shoulders gave Jungkook the idea that they were intimate. One of them he recognized after a few moments of observation: a young Kim Hwanwook with healthy black hair and animated eyes behind round wire-rimmed spectacles, unaware that in a few decades he would rule this country. The man to his right looked older and unfamiliar; the one to his left the appeared youngest of the three.

But what was most intriguing about the antique photograph was the jagged edges on one side of the paper, as if somebody had torn a part of the picture away from its entirety.

"I don't think you've called us here to show us a picture of the males of your family," Yoongi said, sitting slouched in his chair, the first few buttons of his dress shirt open.

Namjoon looked at Yoongi and shook his head. "You're right, I haven't. The three men in the photo are members of my family - the one in the middle our very own President Kim Hwanwook, the one to his left my father, Kim Hwanjong, and the one to the right the eldest of the three brothers."

"I didn't know you had another uncle," said Seokjin, looking up from the photo, his finger pointed to the oldest of the three brothers.

Petra nodded in agreement. "I never saw him back in Incheon, Joon, not even on News Year's. Did he live with you?"

"No," Namjoon responded. "He liked to stay away from the family's social gatherings, for his own reasons. Didn't socialize more than necessary. Stayed inside most of the time."

"You didn't tell us his name," Hoseok observed.

Namjoon ran a tongue over his lips. "Gwonhan," he said. "His name is Kim Gwonhan."

Jungkook could not comprehend the look that clouded his eyes, then. It was an expression bordering a sort of unexplained eagerness at the revelation of something so seemingly ordinary, and fine-drawn fear at having disclosed information so vital that it had the power to change the course of history.