Bargain (Not Met) (JungHope)

Interlude - Approach

"You're not exactly pulling your own weight, Kook," Hoseok sighed while turning around to meet Jungkook's eyes. He crossed his arms disapprovingly at the hardened glare sent his way. "Don't get mad at me. It's the truth; you need to stop with all this brooding if you want to make any sort of progress on the whole USB thing."

Hoseok observed the way Jungkook clenched his fist; watched as his scarlet pupils constricted in a sudden rage.

"I'm not brooding!" he spat, another one of his snarls making its appearance. "I just...don't like...confrontations..."

Hoseok had enough sense to not snort, incredulous, at the demon's weak-willed argument. His disbelief would probably be seen as mockery in Jungkook's sensitive state of mind.

He breathed in deeply and mentally prepared himself for the conversation he was about to have.

"I understand that," he began, soft and coaxing—disgustingly so. "But, Jungkook—"

"Don't—!"

Hoseok paused and stared at Jungkook as the demon immediately flared up, both in attitude and flush.

"Pardon?" Hoseok approached after a moment of unsure silence.

Jungkook groaned and obscured his blossoming blush with his hands. "Just—forget it," he ground out, eyeing Hoseok's pensive form from between his fingers. "It's dumb. Just continue on with your lecture or whatever."

Hoseok rose a brow at the demon's behavior. He was used to innocently flustered Jungkook, but not shamefully embarrassed Jungkook.

He smartened his posture and decided to take offense to the demon's attitude, being that it was the immediate emotion Hoseok was able to grasp onto in his shock.

"No," he said evenly, crossing his arms contemptuously. "What was so important that you had to interrupt my old man lecture?"

Hoseok knew that his obtuse questioning wouldn't be nearly as impactful with the jab he made at himself, but he kind of needed to lighten up the tension with mirth or else he was going to implode in on himself.

He knew his jest had landed; Jungkook's lips quirked into a half-smile before he forced the frown back onto his face, still trying to keep up the image of a brooding teenager.

He watched as Jungkook struggled with himself. A shuffle of his feet; the lowering of his hands; the nibbling of his lips.

"I don't..." Jungkook began, soft and with a hitch of mortification that Hoseok was uncomfortably familiar with. "I like it when you just call me...Kook...Hoseokie."

The blush had spread to his ears as his gaze lowered in shame. Hoseok didn't really get what the big deal was with that announcement.

"O...kay...?" was what he offered after the sentiment. "But, I usually call you Jungkook, and yet you've never complained before?"

Jungkook's frown turned into a pout, and Hoseok was slowly beginning to become bewildered by the demon's attitude change.

"I just—never mind," Jungkook sighed, leveling Hoseok with a gaze of frustration and finality. "What was it you were saying before? Something about my issue with confrontation, right?"

Hoseok was slightly flabbergasted at Jungkook's complete control of the flow of the conversation.

"Uh, yeah." He bit the bullet and conceded to the demon's whim: ignore and proceed. "Just..." His thought process was jumbled, his filter was fried, and exhaustion laid just beyond the horizon. "Suck it up and don't act like a brat when I ask Taehyung-ah about the drive, okay?"

If Jungkook was surprised by his tired bluntness, he didn't show it. With a stone-faced nod and grunt of affirmation, he was already out of the restroom before Hoseok could even blink.

Hoseok stumbled after him after a moment of silent contemplation.

Taehyung welcomed them back with the same cheer he'd been expressing since the beginning of their lunch shift. Hoseok returned the gesture with a smile that he was sure looked as exhausted as he felt. He sent a wary glance toward Jungkook, who took the seat beside his own with a gracefully calm demeanor.

Hoseok sat beside the demon with slight trepidation. Although he talked with a cocky sort of attitude, he really had no idea how to approach the whole hidden drive thing. Not only was there the fact that Taehyung would question how he even knew of its existence, but also how and why it was significant to the grand scheme of things.

"Is something on your mind, Hoseokie?"

Hoseok startled from his thoughts upon Taehyung's voice breaking pass the wash of silence. He glanced up at the manager with wide eyes and a half-formed question on his tongue's tip.

The eloquent question of approach that Hoseok was in the midst of bringing into coherency ended up being:

"Jimin robbed you, you know?"

Not the best way to breach a complicated subject, but it got its point across, and Hoseok counted it as a success.

Taehyung blinked at him with muted shock, and with a glance out his peripheral, Hoseok could see Jungkook mirroring the manager's expression.

"Excuse me?" was Taehyung's retort to the flubbed statement.

Hoseok felt sweat crawl down his back. "Jimin, the angel I told you about that one time, robbed you." The sweat crept to his brow. "Like, I dunno. He just snooped around your place to look for a solution to our problem, and he found this USB drive locked up in your room and just took it."

He could feel Jungkook trembling beside him, knee bouncing from either impatience or anxiousness—Hoseok couldn't tell. The demon's face was still a stone mask when he sent it a brief glance.

A sharp inhale from Taehyung had Hoseok whipping his attention back toward the manager, heart keeping a rapid pace against the adrenaline in his blood.

"So, did it help?" Taehyung asked, throwing Hoseok off his precarious kilter.

"Honestly?" Hoseok replied after taking a few seconds to get his bearings back. Taehyung sent him a nod, and Hoseok wondered if he, Jungkook, and Jimin were making a big deal out of nothing what with how nonchalant the manager was acting.

He steeled himself with a breath before uttering, "It didn't."

The sheen of hope in Taehyung's expression turned dour.

"It made things more complicated, actually," Hoseok continued, urging himself to be unperturbed by the manager's reaction.

"Jimin found incomplete song tracks on the drive," Jungkook interrupted with a gruff tone. "Do those hold any special meaning to you?"

Hoseok balked and turned toward Jungkook with an incredulous expression. He didn't know what the demon thought he was going to gain from his interrogation; if Taehyung had remembered anything from his past, they wouldn't be in their current predicament.

Hoseok turned back toward Taehyung after a few moments of pointed silence, mildly perplexed as to why the manager was taking so long to answer a simple-minded question. He blinked and stared at the open expression of contemplation on Taehyung's face, face scrunched with deep, troubled thinking.

No way... he thought with a note of disbelief.

"Maybe...?" Taehyung settled on eventually, bringing the high-rising tension in the air to an unsatisfactory end. "I mean, I can't really remember what the songs were, so it's hard to say if they're significant or not."

He felt more than heard Jungkook release a breath of agitation beside him. "So, if you listened to them, you'd be able to tell us if they bring back your past memories, right?"

Taehyung gave a slow nod of his head, eyes trained on the burger in front of him, still trapped in thought. "Yeah, maybe..."

Lunch continued on in silence, the three of them occupied by their own thoughts.

A/N - the plot thickens.