Friday, 23rd October 2015
7:18PM | Forest Edge Motel, Room 7
Smoking is bad for you were the first words your pretty lips spoke when you walked, no drifted into the boxy motel room that was stained with the smell of toxic exhalations, past drug abused residents, long forgotten love. You did not ask who the new face was, why he was assumedly the one who had you brought here by Seokjin, just simply gazed at the way he ground the tobacco between his teeth with nothing less than interest gleaming in the silver flecks of his eyes, perched on the coffee table that was marked with the hard press of a pen on paper and fading smears of what could have been blood but you chose not to speculate.
Yoongi felt as though every fibre of his body was blazing, simply by the sight of you. The three years of separation from the real world was noticeable in the lack of meat on your bones, the careless edge to your every blink, your bony fingers curled into loose fists. You were a sight for sore eyes, yet you still managed to hold an element of beauty about you, something about the way your lips were tilted up at the corners, the curiosity laced through your eyelashes. He absolutely hated it.
"So," Yoongi took a drag of his cigarette, exhaling smoke while offering his hand towards the bed. "Do sit down. It has been a while, hasn't it? How was being pent up with security watching your every move?"
You shrugged indifferently once you were settled on the edge of the musky mattress, which irked him a little bit. A tactic of dismissal, dodging bullets, something you always had a finesse for and too, added onto the list of things that Yoongi simply could not stand about you. "It doesn't really matter now, since you are going to kill me anyway, aren't you... Who are you?"
At your words, Yoongi's expression went from smug to stone cold, watching you with pitch black eyes that glowed with warning. It was not unalike you to play such games, but you were being too obvious already. Normally you would string them out like a performance, each a refined act of the truth with hints of dishonesty threaded through hand gestures or the glint in your eye or the wit that would be slick on your tongue. But now, you were blatantly challenging him, and doubled with the boredom that was painted onto your features - backing down, rattling your shoulders and screaming you know my fucking name into your ears would mean his immediate defeat.
So there was only one thing he could do. Play along.
"Min Yoongi, though some know me as MYG," He stated, inhaling more smoke, ashing it carelessly onto the motel carpet. His eyebrows drew together as he stared down at the crumbling white flecks. "But you preferred to call me Suga, for reasons unknown to me. Either way, it was hideous and I hated it, so I think that may be why you stuck with it."
"Suuuga," You drawled, disinterestedly picking at a fingernail as you let the first vowel roll slow and lengthy from your lips. "Are you just as sweet?"
Yoongi flicked his eyes back up to you, smouldering flames meeting nothing but vacancy. The behaviour that oozed from your body was entirely unalike to the past few times the pair of you had encountered, all washed away, nothing but indifference, imprudence fitting into place instead. But playing facades, swapping masks was as effortless to you as breathing, capable of shifting attitudes, entire personalities within the blink of an eye. Yoongi of all people knew this best, your trickster capabilities, for that was all he had been analysing for the last three years. But even he felt there was something off, not right in the way your eyes were wide and staring. Not with surprise, nor fear, just two windows simply hanging open to reveal nothing but vacant rooms within.
Nobody he ever knew was home.
Yoongi cleared his throat, grounding the end of his cigarette against the table until the embers were suffocated by the wood and the filter was flicked into the provided ash tray. He sauntered over to you, leaning down so that you were eye to eye, close enough that anybody else would have leaned away. But you were not just anybody.
"Listen sweetheart, I have things to do," Yoongi murmured, irritation brimming his tone. "So cut the shit, your games are old knowledge. You know what you are here for, and you better get those pretty lips of your spilling all of those secrets otherwise every more minute that you stall, I will make your death all the more torturous."
From this distance, you noticed he was rather handsome. Light scarring along an angular jawline and high cheekbones, eyes of welded iron and just as hard, as though they had seen more than anyone could possibly imagine in one lifetime, an upper lip that protruded a little further than the lower, which completely softened his entire demeanour of steel. You were almost tempted to trace the fine lines of blonde that were attractively slicked back by gel and comb, if it did not mean your wrist would be snapped in half. The man was but a boy cloaked in suits purchased with illegal funds and too many bodies stuffed into his closet, dresser drawers. And to be honest, looking at Min Yoongi almost made you not want to die.
With a deep inhale, breathing in the reminder of smoke from his lips and the strong scent of the cologne clinging to his clothes, you began.
"My name is F/N L/N. I am the middle child of two parents, who died as a result of their business, which I now run. My older brother should have been the one to take over, but he died when I was ten years old for reasons unknown to me, though I believe because of the business as well. I know the business made us wealthy, famous or infamous, I cannot really remember-"
"Wait, stop," Yoongi silenced you with his hands gripping onto your upper arms, voice low, raspy. "What do you mean you cannot remember?"
Clasping your hands together in your lap, you gave him a smile that hinted at no emotion at all.
"Do you know why they released me, even though I should have been sentenced to death?" You spoke loud and clear while Yoongi shook his head in what appeared to be disagreement, but you could tell was denial in the way his scrutinising eyes began to widen. He thought he had covered all of the possibilities, sealed all the potential loopholes in how this marvellous plan could go wrong, but he could see the map tearing open before his eyes, revealing the one flaw in his plan that he did not even think to consider.
"They exchanged those secrets for my memories. I have no idea how I landed myself in prison, what kind of life I lead beforehand. They released me on a clean slate."
The silence was ironically deafening, the kind where you would be able to hear every individual grain of sand roll beneath the flow of moving water, nothing but Yoongi holding onto you with an expression so stoic, so unreadable that you mused maybe he had solidified into a statue. That was until he was releasing you, leisurely reaching into his jacket and revealing a gun that was swiftly pressed to the centre of your forehead with ease, his face unchanging.
"Don't fucking lie to me," He whispered, finger looping around the trigger tauntingly, though your eyes did not shift into fear, concern. You gazed at him with the same empty look as you had since you entered the motel room.
"What would be the point in lying?" You answered, unmoving as you memorised the sensation of the cool circle against your skin. "I have no idea what I did, though it must have been pretty terrible to be lined up for the death sentence. And once you are on death row, there is practically no chance you will be able to come back from it, unless they discover a way that benefits them. The Government love secrets just as much as you seem to, Min Yoongi. It sounds logical, doesn't it?"
He knew you were right, he knew that there was something odd about your behaviour the entire time, yet the excitement of simply having you here had completely overpowered him. He was more angry with himself for not noticing, for not considering such an obvious possibility, because why else would somebody like you be so easily given a sentence as small as three years? Yoongi thought it may have been money, even may have been the trading of secrets for a shorter time behind bars because those bastards would have known you would be dead within the day they released you, but he did not even contemplate that they would completely wipe your memory.Seokjin, that fucker, Yoongi thought as he brought the gun back to his side,he would have noticed, yet he didn't say anything.
Wordlessly, Yoongi twisted on his heel and picked up one of the tacky chairs seated at the small table he was previously perched upon, hurling it at the mirror on the opposite side of the room. You jumped a little at the earsplitting sound, watching amusedly as the shards shimmered down onto the carpet like glitter, fragments of shining beauty embedding into the filthy material as the blonde continued his rampage around the room. He lifted bedside tables, hurled lamps at walls that flared before popping, upturning the desk and letting the filter in the ashtray join the rest of the ashes he had scattered onto the floor. Yoongi was heaving by the time he was done, suit and hair dishevelled, a vein bulging at his throat with the tense clench of his jaw. He spared a glance at you before motioning for you to not move, exiting the motel room, the door slamming splinters behind him.
The phone only rang once before the line was picked up.
"They wiped her, didn't they?"
"God fucking damnit, Jin," Yoongi growled, thumping his forehead against the cracking plaster of the hallway wall. "What are we going to do?"
Seokjin sighed, and Yoongi could hear his fingers drumming against the wood of a desk. He had already made it back to the headquarters. "I was hoping it would not be true. She was acting different to her usual self in the car, but I thought that maybe doing time just changed her."
The blonde picked at the plaster, white flecks lodging beneath his fingernail as he thought. An endless stream of ideas coursed through his mind - you could be lying and he could torture you until you screamed the truth, or he could simply kill you as originally planned, since you were now of no use to him. But then something occurred to him, the motions of his finger against the wall stopping, ignoring the fact that he had managed to draw blood, a small bead of red rolling past his knuckle.
"I... I could keep her."
"Keep her?"
"Yeah," Yoongi muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. It was a distasteful thought, having you in his personal space, but it was not necessarily irrational. "I mean, something could trigger those memories back, right? There is always a loophole. Keeping her alive until her memories come back to her may not be such a bad idea, and she is weak as anything, so she could stay on lockdown at my apartment. Even if she tried to escape, the others would find and kill her nonetheless, or I would hunt her down and do it myself."
"Why not keep her at the headquarters?"
"A lot of kids in there have grudges against her. I don't give two shits about her being tortured, but if it has the potential to fuck up the process of reminding her who she is, then it's not worth risking."
Seokjin hummed, fingers drumming once again. "It could work, if you are prepared to have the one person in this world who has wanted you dead from the start living with you."
"Well," Yoongi barked a humourless laugh, pushing back from the wall and starting towards the door for room seven once again. "She is certainly not that person anymore."
Hanging up, Yoongi re-entered the room, and you curiously watched as he paced towards the only upright chair in the space and dropped his body down. You noticed the phone that he slipped back into his coat pocket, wondering whether it had been Seokjin that he called as he leaned his elbows onto his knees, pressing his palms together and resting them against his lips, like he was trying to decide on how to word his thoughts to you. The pair of you stared at the shards of the mirror as the quiet thickened, throwing distorted reflections of the room and your faces back.
"So," You decided to break the silence first, looking as though you would twiddle your thumbs if you had the nerve, the energy. "Now that you know I am useless, I guess that this is the end for me now?"
Yoongi looked up from his hunched over position on the chair, glaring. Keep her.
"Unfortunately for you, not today," Yoongi sighed, running a hand down his face before clutching at his chin in thought. "Those little secrets must be pent up in there somewhere, and you are still useful until we get them out."
"So we are going to be roommates for a while," He continued. "Sharing my place while I figure out a way to get your memories back."
"How noble of you," You stretched your arms, wondering whether living a few more days was something to be grateful about. It felt unlikely. "I guess my demise will occur once I remember, then?"
"Of course," Yoongi immediately responded, standing up and turning his attention to his briefcase, and you subconsciously noted the code that unlatched the lock, curiously wondering why you were so observant of such petty things. 0317. "You look like shit, get some rest. I don't want you drooling those secrets."
Compliantly, you shrugged off the trench coat and ungraciously allowed it to heap in a pile of cotton beside the bed before crawling up to the thin pillows. Yoongi eyed you through the remains of the mirror that clung to the frame, the way you so indifferently lifted the sheets and settled against the lumpy motel mattress, almost instantly welcoming the gentle oblivion of sleep as though your life was not being threatened just moments before. He spent most of the night like that, staring at you from his position on the chair before shifting through his papers on you once again, a process that he rinsed and repeated until the digital clock was declaring four in the morning and he was locking the files away, shrugging his own jacket off. Yoongi made his way to the opposite side of the bed, analysing your curled in body before making himself comfortable atop the sheets that you slept beneath, resting his hands over his stomach.
Sleep barely reached him, heavy fingers of lethargy tugging at his lashes, but not enough to prevent the dark marks that carved half moons beneath his eyes. It came with being somebody in his position, always alert of who the next person will be that sinks a knife into his back or a bullet through his temple. But when Yoongi thought about you, the one being in this world that would have used an opportunity like this three years ago to her absolute limits, fingers locking around his throat as he sleeps - his concerns were weightless.
No, you certainly were not the same person anymore.