Monday, 2nd November 2015
8:10PM | The Centennial Park
Downtown often felt more like home than the apartment itself. The soft orange ambience of the streetlights pooling onto the pavement, the continuous hum of vehicle engines as they chugged along the busy roads, the constant stream of beings that clicked heels and tapped tailored shoes and swallowed identities whole within a sea of crowds. Yoongi could walk the streets as himself, no dye slick in his hair or contacts itching at his corneas, just another man strolling to work or home or dinner with his wife at that highly rated restaurant down the lane in a grey pinstripe suit and a charcoal hat dipped low over his eyes as the day gave way to the evening, navy bleeding into the violet setting of the sun upon the skyline. The man felt comforted between bodies waiting at crosswalks, occasionally brushing shoulders or elbows with a soft murmur of an apology, because among the downtown atmosphere he was a kid again with his fingers slipped into the palm of his mother who would show him all of the sights and attractions, pointing them out with her lips whispering velvet into his ears and a prettily manicured finger pointing his gaze into the right direction.
She always knew which way to take him. But now, Yoongi was beginning to feel lost as ever, and all he could ever think about lately was you.
When his thoughts would become stuffed with cotton, so entirely focused on a single mission, he would stroll down to the Centennial Park. It was a lush haven among buildings of concrete and stone, the borders surrounded by flourishing hedging and trees with branches that hung low to conceal any idea that the fifty acres of flora and park benches even existed within such a populated area of the city. It was an escape, a breath of fresh air, black iron gates wide open and welcoming until ten in the evening. Yoongi often frequented the ethereal place with his mother as a child, perched on wooden seating as she would thread her delicate fingers through his wispy locks and tell him all about the world outside of the city, beyond their sterile apartment, far away from his father. The young boy was always enthralled by her stories of the country town she grew up within, the endless fields of grass that swept over the hills behind the family cottage, the tiny deli on the corner of the main street that was owned by the neighbours across the road. Though since meeting her husband, the Centennial was the closest she ever got to home. The nearest she was ever allowed.
Yoongi had not yet been home to see you. He needed a break from hostages and forgotten secrets and the unfamiliar warmth that would pool at the base of his stomach whenever your eyes would roam off into the distance with thought, time off from the constant nervous edge that had attained his mind with every word you uttered since that single memory returned. I remembered I am a good cook. If the way he reacted to that was anything to go by, then he did not want to know how he would feel once you remembered precisely who you were among society. He would never have the heart to tell you himself.
The park was dimly lit as it enveloped him in an embrace, an aroma of tulips and petunias replacing the stench of fuel and garbage. Yoongi leisurely walked down the path that lead to his usual place among the beauty, a park bench marked by the backs of his mother's thighs, stretching his legs and crossing ankles and tilting his head back to look up at the empty sky. It was forever void of stars, the city smog swallowing up their beautiful constellations and instead leaving the night to look bleak and grey. When the man truly thought about it, he realised that he had never witnessed the stars in all of their vibrant might, scattered across the blanket of navy darkness in silver speckles; only ever seeing them in photographs inked into the pages of a book or digitalised on a screen. He knew nothing but the city and you.
"I miss the stars too."
Yoongi smiled fondly at the gentle voice that had sat down beside him, round black eyes gazing up at the thick pollution to search for even a flicker of light. After a moment of silence, the blonde sighed and tilted his head to the side to be met with drawn together eyebrows and pursed lips still staring at the lifeless sky. The fearful boy from the farm would always be etched into his expression, a year of training enough to conceal it from the eyes of others, but the Boss could only ever see him as a child covered in blood.
"How have you been, kiddo?" Yoongi quirked the corner of his mouth, clasping his fingers together on his lap.
Jungkook was the one to sigh this time, finally dragging his eyes back to earth to face the man who made him the person his is today. "Good, fantastic. And you?"
"You look it," Yoongi chuckled at the monotone voice in which the boy had emitted his emotions, the blank look. "I've been better, I guess. The work is beginning to weigh down on us."
"It sure is," The younger muttered, causing Yoongi to frown slightly, knowing that he had not been assigned any missions lately. His entire demeanour was a little off, different to usual, normally the type to grin and joke around with his leader. Today, he was almost too stoic.
Shifting on the park bench, sitting up straighter, Yoongi gave him a pointed look. "Why are you here, Jungkook?"
When the answer left the lips of the boy, Yoongi felt numb. Stiffening into a statue of ice before white hot fire was melting his joints, licking up his limbs with an uncontainable agitation.
"I think the real question is why is she still here?"
Jungkook was more satisfied with the reaction of his Boss than he should have been. An endless array of emotions were glancing through his pitch black eyes, fear and rage and curiosity and then the words that he was voicing. Disbelief.
"How?" The blonde sounded a little defeated, deflated. "Did you see her when she went downtown?"
A nod slotted the final piece of frustration into Yoongi's thoughts. He was more upset with himself than you for not taking the extra measures to ensure your obedience, spitting threats that were not made of glass, changing the codes and locks into ones that your prying eyes and fingers could not decipher. But he had grown soft, had warmed to you like a moth drawn to the thin flame of a candle bending in the breeze of a cool night. He became weak, and he hated you even more for it.
"I spoke with her in a supermarket," Jungkook paused, awaiting for Yoongi to make a response. But when the man maintained to silently stare at him, he continued on with a tone that held an element of hesitancy. "She... Something has happened, right? Y/N didn't even recognise me, yet the last time she saw me she was yelling a threat to snap my neck with her own two hands. Or is she just up to her usual games again?"
Yoongi blinked slowly. He looked unsure as to how much information he should disclose, but there was practically no use in holding back now, not when the boy already knew so much. "Y/N has no clue at all of who she is. She has memories of her childhood, the upbringing, but they are distorted. She remembers her parent's business, but not specifically what it involved."
"Yet she is the one who runs it," Jungkook murmured, looking off into the distance. Her face formed in the shadows, a picturesque expression of her clueless eyes in the supermarket before they were melding back into the black. "But after all this time, after everything she has done to us, why are you keeping her alive?"
Silence hung thick in the air between them, Yoongi soundlessly tapping the toe of his shoe against the pavement as thoughts ticked over into minutes. He noted the way Jungkook patiently sat in the quiet atmosphere, one to always attain a demeanour of placid calm no matter if his curiosity were entirely killing him. The boy would endure days of waiting in order to collect secrets.
Four minutes passed before Yoongi was dragging a hand down his face, clutching at his chin, not directly gazing at the younger and rather a little past his shoulder. "She has - well, had a shitload of information that would be detrimental to overthrowing them. We organised an incognito mission to capture her from the prison and take her to a place where we could throttle the details out of her locked up little mind before killing her off. It was supposed to be swift, a fucking flawless plan of kidnapping before those other bastards could grab her - her death by our hand would be a benefit to us, we would be gaining more than revenge from it. We were going to throw her body into the river, but we didn't even get as far as implementing torture before she was admitting that she knew nothing, that her memories were gone."
"That girl is not the person we once knew, Jungkook," Yoongi sighed, finally shifting his eyes back to the boy with hair as dark as the night surrounding them. "She's something else entirely, practically a normal girl. Keeping her alive was a back-up method to test whether her memories would begin to return, and they are, gradually. But at the moment, she's a broken little bird, completely harmless. And she wants to die, desperately."
"Would you be able to kill her though? After all these years?"
The silence returned, heavier this time. The lamps that lined the pathways winding through the park appeared to dim, succumb to the shadows that lurked with their fingers outstretched, reaching for his throat to constrict and fill with thick black tar to suffocate the lie he wished to speak. Jungkook could see the fear in the eyes of the blonde, the stone cold acceptance that-
"No. No, I wouldn't."
Chewing at the inside of his cheek, the boy stood up and faced his Boss, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his black coat. Yoongi stared up at him, alarmed by his own blatant confession, inhaling sharply as though he wished he could suck the words back into his lungs. He had always felt a soft spot for the kid, attained a comfort around him that he had with no other members of his gang besides Seokjin. But he often forgot that the boy was simply that, a member of his gang, as unruly and untrustworthy as the rest.
Jungkook gave him a small smile. "It's no fun chasing a ghost, is it? I mean, what's a man without his enemies?"
Yoongi eyed him warily, nodding solemnly. "A very lonely man indeed."
"Well said," The boy saluted his Boss, rolling his shoulders before twisting to face the shadows. "Anyhow, gotta go. Thank you for donating that information to me. But of course, I owe you some information back, and that is I think you should go now too."
Yoongi felt his heart twist in the most unpleasant of ways, boiling infirmity swirling in the pit of his stomach. "And why is that?"
Jungkook turned his head back, expression one that bordered sorrow, hinted future forgiveness. He smiled again, and it was no different to the one that Yoongi witnessed the day he found him at the farm, the moment he promised him a future while he was covered in sweat and tears and blood that belonged to neither of them.
"Just remember that I'm merely an information broker, nothing more and nothing less."
Before the blonde could part his lips, the boy was melding with the shadows that lurked between the trees, swallowed into oblivion. The bell tower a few blocks from the Centennial chimed to notify the passing of nine in the evening, faint yet resonating around the thick trunks and the curve of his ear.
And then Yoongi was running.
Monday, 2nd November 2015
9:16PM | Location Unknown
For those who walked the streets, nobody would know of the man who lay atop the roof of the investment firm building that had its doors closed between six in the evening and eight in the morning. The shadows were his friends, dancing about him in swirls of darkness to shield him from a prying eye, a gazer of the skies, looping about his form that lay stomach-down on the flat cemented area that was designated for daytime smokers. With the black athletic attire that he wore, slim jacket and even slimmer trousers with beaten sneakers and a flatcap twisted backwards on his head, he almost appeared to be one of the shadows himself.
"Mightyena, you prick!"
The Gameboy held viscously between fingertips, A and B button repeatedly being mashed, made a sound of defeat as the opposing Pokemon defeated his Swellow almost instantly. The man groaned with agitation, smacking the screen with a flat palm as though it would make the game miraculously decide to revive his flying type from the pixels, but of course there was no such luck. However, luck decided to finally flicker past in the scope positioned right before his eyes. Geez, it had taken him long enough to get here.
Abandoning the gaming device, the man shifted forward on his stomach, hands settling onto the scope as he zoomed steadily onto the setting of a room flooded with bright white light. The curtains were drawn apart to reveal a scene of destruction - upturned black leather chairs, a shattered glass coffee table, a sizeable pool of crimson that was leaking onto the corner of what appeared to be a very expensive rug - and among it all stood Min Yoongi, his tiny expression twisted into one of confusion, outrage, fear as he processed the eyesore of the ruined apartment. A fleeting range of emotions that he only ever displays when nobody is there to see.
"If only he knew," The man sighed, shifting the sniper rifle slightly to the right to track the movements of the MYG leader while he stormed around the room. He was visibly screaming at the top of his lungs.
The man continued to observe as Yoongi crouched down before the puddle of blood, his face crushed into his hands, fingers tugging at the strands of blonde while he shouted and yelled inaudible words. It was quite a sight, unfamiliar to the sniper who had never seen the leader look so defenceless, entirely raw with emotion as he smacked a palm down into the red liquid. But after a minute, Yoongi was suddenly stilling, rising back to his feet and staring at the crimson dripping to the tiles from his hand with a newfound peculiar edge to his features. Atop the building, the curious eyes gazing through the scope watched him pull out a cell phone with clean fingers, talking almost immediately from the second he brought it to his ear.
One blink was all that it took. A simply flutter of eyelids that drew the line between safety and vulnerability. For the man atop the roof blinked once, and when he focused his gaze back onto the scope, there were eyes staring wide back at him.
And then the man could suddenly make out the words that the infamous Min Yoongi was screaming, because the name that his lips were savagely contorting into belonged to none other than the sniper in the shadows.