Work Text:
2003
Jimin is given the raggedy doll a few days after his mother had left.
In a fit of sadness and anger he had merely thrown the tiny thing away, opting instead to wallow in his room with the little rabbit his own mother had given him a few years before. He forgets about the doll until a few months later, stumbling into it accidentally while looking for a new toy he could play with.
He stares at it for a while, its limbs tangled with the rails of a train set he had used to play with when he was younger. Its hair was the color of corn, its full-lips stretched into a little smile, enunciating its rosy cheeks. He reaches towards it and a name comes to his mind, unbidden. Seokjin.
He cradles the doll in his arms, wondering at the almost knowing look in its glassy eyes. A shiver passes through him and he drops the doll, running from the toy room to the safety of his father's arms who was quick to carry him, asking him what was wrong.
Jimin finds himself unable to speak, not even after a few hours later in bed, his father crooning beside him as he sang lullabies to lull him to sleep.
2008
Awake, he always feels as if there was something watching him.
Just something else barely there, seemingly bidding its time.
He finds himself always racked with sudden shivers and more sickly than the other kids his age; now forbidden to play with the other children as he used to. He sits by the window and watches as the other kids clamor around the streets, loneliness like a blanket cradling him.
Asleep, he finds no relief.
He dreams of fields of poppies turning into a sea of blood, red coating his fingers until he could see nothing else. He dreams of grotesque monsters with claws and teeth aching to tear into his skin, mouthing his name like a curse. He dreams of someone, too, just barely there: features shifting from razor-sharp to indistinct. A caress, almost, in his cheeks. Dreams so vivid he aches.
2013
Somehow years pass and his body becomes sturdier, enough for his father to send him to a boarding school two towns over.
He had hated it at first sight, not liking the iron gates and the boarded up windows, the stern faces of the administrators he and his father had met during the tour--the school seeming more as a penitentiary than anything someone could actually study in.
His protests to study somewhere else falls on deaf ears and he starts the semester away from the only home he’d known for years.
He meets Jeongguk and Taehyung--step-brothers so close knitted and attached at the hip that he had never seen one without the other. It bothers him, almost—their codependency—but having dealt with loneliness all his life, Jimin takes what friendships he can get.
Life then becomes a cycle of studying and coming back home every winter and summer breaks for a few years, the mundane routine and monotony unbroken until he finds himself blinking the last dregs of sleep one night, body frozen in his bed.
Jimin had always had issues with sleeping—prone to fits of sleepwalking and nightmares. Yet this was the first time he had found himself dealing with sleep paralysis. He tries to recall his psychiatrists’ words and tries to move his fingers first, eyes straining in the dark, but it is as if his room had suddenly become unfamiliar.
He blinks and a shape materializes at the edge of his feet, humanoid yet indistinct.
He blinks and it is much closer, a hand reaching towards him, eyes like black tar meeting his in the darkness. Something in his chest caves as dread creeps in and he fights to scream, move, anything.
He blinks and it is right above him, fingers cupping his jaw, mouth opening to seemingly swallow him whole.
He blinks and finds himself suddenly awake, sunlight streaming through his open windows, body no longer immobilized, to find the same doll he had thrown all those years ago staring back at him, sitting benignly at the top of his dresser.
“Seokjin,” he whispers, unable to stop himself.
And like a puppet finding its strings suddenly cut off the doll falls into a slump, falling with a light thump into his bedroom’s floor.
2014
“Will you be okay on your own here, Jimin?”
“Yes, Dad. And I won’t be alone—Jeongguk and Taehyung are coming over.”
“Right. Sorry,” his father places a soft kiss against his forehead, sighing. “I just can’t help but worry about you. You’ve been having more episodes since last year.”
“I’m fine. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“What are parents for, if not that?” His father smiles grimly and moves back. “I’ll be going now, then. There’s spare change in the counter if you need anything.”
Jimin waves at his father as his car slides out the driveway, shutting the door firmly behind him once the car rounds off the corner.
He turns back towards the stairs, hoping to sleep some more before his friends arrive—when he feels something in the air shift. The overhead lights flicker and he tenses, body stock still against the closed door as he waits for something.
Since that first night he’d had his first sleep paralysis episode similar events had happened whenever he was alone: lights flickering and temperatures dropping to a freezing cold, claw marks appearing in his body only to disappear a few hours later. Jimin was no idiot. He knew what the signs pertained to, but telling his father would render him worse off than he already was.
He hears a thump from upstairs and steps back, a hand reaching behind him to the door knob. A shiver racks his body as more thumps follow, as if something was slowly, slowly making its way down the stairs.
He catches sight of something just rounding their stairwell—barely a glimpse of elongated limbs and a gaping mouth before a cry wrenches its way out his throat and he runs, already knowing that the door behind him would never open.
He makes his way towards what his father calls their prayer room, slamming the door closed and locking it before falling to a stop before the makeshift altar at the center of the room. His parents were devout Catholics—and despite the loss of his mother his father remains as faithful to his God, enough to build a little room in their house for prayers when he didn’t have the time to go to church.
Frantically Jimin eyes the various icons that had been laid out above the altar, eyes meeting that of the weeping Christ. Help me, he thinks at it, over and over. If you are real—if you are there, pleasepleaseplease make it go away.
His heart sinks as something thumps just outside the door and he screams as it breaks in half, its hands inching against the walls towards him, as it slowly slides it head in.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” it rasps out.
“Please,” he whispers, and his knees buckle beneath him, his head meeting the floor with a painful crack.
“Hey, are you alright?”
“What?” Jimin shakes his head, blinking against a sudden bright light as he hears what seems to be the raucous sounds of characters fighting and Jeongguk yelling.
He pushes himself up to find Taehyung and Jeongguk sitting next to him in the couch, giving him odd looks.
“You suddenly fell asleep while we were playing Overwatch.” Jeongguk says, rolling his eyes before turning back to the screen.
“I don’t—when did you two even get here?”
“Right after your dad drove off—are you sure you’re okay?” Taehyung lifts a hand towards him and he flinches. “Oh. Sorry.”
“No, I—it’s okay.” Jimin gingerly touches his head, checking for any wounds. He turns around in his seat to look at the prayer room—letting out a sigh upon seeing the fully intact door. He notices the doll sitting just right outside it, and doesn’t say a word.
2016
The episodes eventually stopped, but the nightmares didn’t.
Jimin thinks there was never a day in his life that he didn’t feel haunted. He goes to sleep fearing what he’d find in his dreams, if it would be as bad as the night before, if it would end again with that doll.
He had drifted from Taehyung and Jeongguk after a bad episode that had ended with the youngest hospitalized, claiming that Jimin had tried to kill him. (Jimin only ever remembers waking up with blood in his hands and Jeongguk seemingly asleep beneath him, if not for the hand marks in his neck and the bruises and lacerations in his arms. He tries to think of what may have happened and can only recall waking up to find the doll above him before blacking out.)
His father had done exactly what he’d feared and sent him to a ward where he claimed Jimin could be better taken care of, despite his pleas about not wanting to be somewhere he would mostly be alone.
Jimin looks out the window, past the handprints that appear over and over despite his room being situated at the highest floor of the building. He’s long stopped wondering if other people sees them too.
He wonders now if his father was right and all of it had just been in his head.
But a shadow moves in his peripheral and he turns to find the doll sitting at the edge of his bed—just as it always does, no matter how many times he requests that it be burned or thrown away.
“Seokjin,” he finally whispers, acknowledging it.
The doll says nothing but he feels a sudden presence behind him, cold and suffocating. Dread creeps up inside him but he’s learned to be familiar with that, too.
An arm curls around his shoulders and he no longer protests, letting himself be pulled back into the other’s chest.