Archive of Our Own

Jungkook met Yoongi for the first time in a dim lecture hall, under floating dust motes and that slight fog of apprehension which usually characterised all his first meetings with prospective team members. Jungkook watched him approach, this unassuming guy who walked with his head tilted slightly downwards, a few files carried in his left arm. His red-jacketed frame was a shadow, haloed by that white-lit doorway.

I’ve got someone much better, Dr Mok had promised Jungkook. He came to ask her for help again, to find a new person for his team. They waited in silence for this person, Jungkook seated at one of the wooden lecture benches while she stayed down at the table grading papers.

He focused on the scratch of pen against paper, the flipping of pages, the way all of those minute sounds echoed in the cavernous lecture hall.

“Yoongi.”

Now she held an outstretched hand in Yoongi’s direction as he came, reticent in his approach.

“Thank you for coming.”

They could still hear echoes outside, footsteps and idle chatter of students moving between rooms for classes.

“Mr Jeon, meet Min Yoongi. Graduate student.”

She looked at Yoongi and tilted her head slightly in Jungkook’s direction. Yoongi turned his gaze from Dr Mok to Jungkook. He quickly shifted the files from his right to left arm and held a hand out, a little hesitant.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said.

Jungkook liked the sound of his voice. Measured and deliberate, someone not prone to outbursts. Even in the poor light, Jungkook could see how Yoongi’s gaze flickered quickly over his whole frame. Sizing him up. Taking in details like one would assess the facade of a building.

Dr Mok nodded. “Mr Jeon here has a job for you. If you could spare a few minutes to allow him to talk you through the requirements, he would be very grateful.”

Yoongi gave Jungkook a wary glance.

“An internship?”

“Not really,” Jungkook said, giving him a suitable smile. “Better than that.”

The attempt at friendliness worked; Jungkook could see Yoongi slowly releasing the tension in his shoulders. Yoongi met his eye for a few seconds and quickly cut his gaze away, looking back out to the doorway like he was expecting someone to walk in at any moment.

“Okay,” he said, with the subtlest of shrugs. Like, why not?

They went out to the rooftop of the architecture building. The city was spread out below them, a grid of slowly moving cars, people, dead leaves blowing along the sand-coloured sidewalks. A thick layer of fog rose off the tops of the street horizons.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” Jungkook said, hearing his own voice soften in the muted daylight. “You come here often?”

“Just to cram before my exams.”

They stopped at the parapet, standing an arm’s length apart from each other. Jungkook could see the way Yoongi shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“What did you ask me here for?”

Jungkook turned to face him, resting one elbow on the railing. “I’ll have to let you know one thing before I begin describing the work to you. It’s not a legal job.”

Yoongi continued to stare down at the street, eyes searching. Like he could find his answers there.

“You alright with that?”

There was no reply. Jungkook reached for his breast pocket, taking out a notebook and a pen. Yoongi finally looked up. Jungkook turned to a blank page and held the pen out.

“You have two minutes. Draw a maze that takes me a minute to solve.”

Yoongi took the pen and stared at the paper for a few seconds, breathing steady and calm. Jungkook watched him, holding his hand out to check his wristwatch.

Yoongi began to draw. Carefully, making neat lines.

He passed the paper back after two minutes. Jungkook ran the pen through the maze easily, shaking his head as he did. He tore the top sheet off.

“You’ll have to try harder than that. Come on.”

Yoongi was watching him now, doubt growing on his face. He took the paper back and tried again.

“Stop.”

This one took a little more effort, but Jungkook finished it easily. He tore the sheet off and tapped on the blank page with the pen.

“Again.”

Yoongi let out a harsh exhale, the only sign of frustration he’d displayed all morning. “How old are you, Mr Jeon?”

Jungkook lowered the pen and notebook. “Twenty-two.”

A bird chirped somewhere above them. The brown one, perched on one of the antennas above the water tanks.

“You’re smart for someone so young.” Yoongi dropped his gaze as he said this, scrutinising their shoes.

The wind that blew through the space between them was cold and laced with the smell of rain. Jungkook waited for it to pass.

“Dr Mok says you’re one of her star students.”

Yoongi kept quiet. His dark hair was getting tousled by the breeze.

“Age doesn’t matter in this assignment, Mr Min. I just want to know if you can do the job.”

Yoongi reached out and took the notebook from him, nearly snatching it out of his hands. He started drawing a series of concentric circles with messier lines, using the dotted grid paper as a guide. He was done even before a minute had passed.

Jungkook took the notebook back.

Yoongi waited in silence as Jungkook started tracing from the top, moving down in a vertical line until he stopped.

He was stuck.

“That’s better,” Jungkook said, nodding despite his relief. He continued to work through the maze.

__

“Tell me how you start conceiving a design,” Jungkook said. “Where do you get your inspiration from?”

They were walking down the street. Cobblestone pavements. Fancy streetlights.

“I read the newsletters from the architectural society.” Yoongi stopped when Jungkook did. They were looking at the front of a café. Iron-wrought chairs, paper-covered tables. “People send in their ideas and we take a bit from each building to put together.”

“Your mind does that thing, doesn’t it?” Jungkook said, indicating with his hand. “Externalised thinking. You start out in random places and coalesce them into a cohesive product which makes sense.”

Yoongi nodded slowly.

“I have a – a sort of idea bank,” he added. “Just sketches. A lot of designs that usually never leave the drawing board. But sometimes one does.”

“And how do you decide that?”

“We have some rules of practicality and utility that we need to follow. I’m … not the sort who’s prone to flights of fancy for my designs. They need to be realistic, in one way or another. I mean, you’ve probably heard of that saying.”

Jungkook waited.

“The one about an architect’s dream being an engineer’s nightmare.” Yoongi sounded a little embarrassed. “It’s, uh, just a silly quip we had going around in the workshops.”

There were long roads, canals filled with water and people brushing past them on both sides. Jungkook turned and continued walking down another section of the street. Yoongi followed him.

“So you’re more of a realist,” Jungkook said.

“You could say that.”

“Okay. That’s fine. But I’m going to need you to abandon that line of thinking for a little while.”

Yoongi glanced up at him, hesitating. “Okay.”

“Hear me out. When you’re in the brainstorming stage, there’s usually a point in time when all your possible ideas seem to converge. All of them, merging into one big mess on the drawing board. A point where anything is possible.”

“That’s just the brainstorming part. Yeah.”

“When you go into the actual planning stage, you see different iterations of every building. Each building can have, say, six to seven variations, to be realistic. You take one feature and blend it with another. At that point you’re still in control, because you have all your ideas laid out on the table before you.”

“That’s right.”

“But when you start digging deeper, looking through your own mind. Looking through ideas that you don’t have in front of you, putting in ideas from other things you’ve seen, figments and illusions of structures that could plausibly be used in buildings, but aren’t plausible yet, and you –”

“– It feels like you’re discovering it.”

Jungkook nodded, not making any effort to hide his grin. He slowed his pace down, to match Yoongi’s. “That’s where your real inspiration comes from.”

They stopped again, at a café.

“This is the same café,” Yoongi said after a while. “We were here just now.”

Jungkook nodded. “You’re sharp. Let’s have a seat.”

They sat outside. People were walking past them, not paying any attention. People were sitting at the tables, eating and talking.

“This is the same café, isn’t it?” Yoongi asked again, lowering his voice. “I didn’t realise we were walking in circles.”

“Yes. The reason why we’re at the same café is because you’ve been limiting yourself to thinking about this section of the city. You’re not expanding hard enough.”

Jungkook waited as Yoongi pushed his chair in.

“You’re still thinking along that same line of reasoning, that everything must adhere to the fundamental laws of physics and geometry.” Jungkook drew in the air with his finger to demonstrate. “You’re still conditioned to think that one street must logically lead to another, and both must exist on the same plane, and that space has a limit.”

A car went by on the road.

“But what else is there?”

“I’m not blaming you for that, because you need practice. Nobody breaks out of that habit so easily and I can tell you that it’s difficult.”

“Okay.” Yoongi paused to collect his thoughts. He looked up at the buildings across the street from where they were seated. “Okay. We’re in a city. Some kind of city that’s a combination of all the different things I’ve seen.”

“Yes. You got the place right. This table –” he rapped on it with his knuckles, “– the café, everything is part of the dream world. Your world. You built it subconsciously.”

“How?”

“You created it, simple as that. Your mind perceives and creates simultaneously. The process goes by so quickly that we don’t notice it most of the time.”

Yoongi looked down and ran the tip of his finger across the paper tablecloth.

“But this feels real.”

“You didn’t need to construct it. It materialises based on your impression of what these textures feel like in the real world. When you’re in a dream, everything feels real until you wake up.”

Yoongi was frowning now – examining the people around them, the concrete pavements, the walls.

Jungkook let him do this for a while before quietly leaning across the table.

“Do you remember what we were doing before this?”

Yoongi snapped his attention back to him. “Yeah,” he said. “We were, uh –”

He trailed off. The realisation was dawning on his face.

“Relax,” Jungkook said, touching his elbow. “Take it all in.”

This city was brown and grey. Plain, dull light over people and buildings. Concrete and steel and tarmac.

“We’re chatting in the streets of your mind, Mr Min.”

Yoongi turned to face him. “We’re dreaming.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve been dreaming the whole time.”

“This is your mind,” Jungkook said, scraping his chair a little closer. “The people around here are projections of my subconscious. I’m the subject inside your dream.”

Something started to shake. The tables were moving slightly, a low rumbling in the ground beneath them.

Yoongi slowly got up from his chair.

“This is your first lesson in shared dreaming. I think you’re ready to wake up.”

Yoongi backed away from the table, unsteady on his feet, the ground still shaking. Behind him, the café interior crumbled and exploded, sending shrapnel flying in all directions. Jungkook quickly led Yoongi away, out to the street. Cars stopped behind them and they watched the tips of the skyscrapers distintegrate.

One by one, the storefronts were breaking down, the ground buckling and cracking up.

“What happens now?” Yoongi asked. There was blood on his face from the broken glass, but he didn’t seem to know it.

Jungkook let go of his arm. “The dream collapses.”

__

On the second lesson, Jungkook took him through the various tried-and-tested structures most dream architects used to build their environments. There were a number of staples used: mazes, upside-down architecture, optical illusions and geometrically impossible constructs.

“You have to make it real enough that someone – The Mark, in our case – can believe it, but fake enough to make sure the dreamer doesn’t confuse it with reality. Your work straddles that thin line between the dream and reality.”

They ascended a flight of stairs. At the top, Jungkook held a hand out to stop Yoongi from walking any further.

“Look down,” he said. Yoongi did, and saw the drop to the ground.

“A Penrose,” Yoongi said under his breath. “Four stairs leading into one another. Infinite loops.”

“One of my favourites.” Jungkook loved how easy it was to introduce Yoongi to new ideas. “Can you integrate something like that into a design?”

“I can. In a building. A twisted version of the fire escape. But that would confuse people.”

“That’s the point.” Jungkook smiled. “The dreamer mustn’t know that they are dreaming. Complex structures like this are developed to coerce them to keep their secrets in here. The more valuable the secret, the more complex the structure has to be.”

Yoongi stared back at the way they had come.

“What kind of dreamer are we talking about?”

“You don’t need to know yet.”

They spent a few moments looking down at the congregation of life-sized prototype structures below them. Yoongi was already etching something into a sketchbook he’d been carrying along. Jungkook found himself watching the way Yoongi’s pale large hands moved across the paper. He could be delicate. So delicate in his movements.

“Am I supposed to create one for you?” Yoongi asked. Jungkook startled from his thoughts and looked up at him.

Yoongi’s tongue slipped out of his mouth to wet his lower lip, a habit Jungkook had come to pay close attention to in the past few weeks. Why was it so distracting now?

“Yes.” Jungkook nodded hastily. “The upcoming assignment will require different layouts for every level. Everyone’s going in.”

__

Yoongi was given materials to work with. Cardboard, polystyrene, paper, metal, plaster, the likes. He sat down inside the workshop, a brightly-lit glass-encased space, and started drawing. Jungkook watched for a while, then left.

He went down to the old workshop, where previous architects had stored their old prototypes. All ready to be taken apart and clobbered together into new structures. It was damp, dustier than the rest of the workshop. Metal warehouse shelves held delicate structures of plaster and cardboard, plastic models of buildings with intricate corridors and labels of what was to happen inside each one of them.

He had lost people before. When the architect built a place based on things from real-world memories, they were bound to begin confusing it with the actual thing. The distinction began to blur, and those people he recruited didn’t like the idea of losing control of their minds, of their own sense of reality.

He wondered if he’d bared too much of himself to Yoongi in the past few days. Did he tell him too much about why he was looking for a new person? About the things he had seen and lost?

He wanted to start on a clean slate with this guy. He wanted Yoongi to make places that would be new, yet familiar enough for the team to navigate when it came down to each of their respective levels of the dream. Better that he didn’t know the full layout of things until the time came.

A few days ago, Jimin came in to take a look at Yoongi’s prototype sketches. He and Jungkook were chatting inside that same storeroom one of those late nights, looking through the old designs.

“He’s got that world-weary brood about him,” Jimin explained, stopping to look at a plaster cast spire with intersecting staircases. “Like he’s seen it all. When he was explaining it to me, I got the sense that he’d gone through these ideas very thoroughly in his head before putting them out there.”

“He’s a realist,” Jungkook said, then regretted it. “I mean, that’s how he’s been conditioned to think.”

“Yet you said that he seems open to discovery.”

“Most of the people I pick are. They have to be, or they wouldn’t have agreed to do this in the first place.”

Jimin laughed and rolled his neck back and forth in a semicircle, rubbing at the hollow near the base of his skull. He’d been sitting in the basement all the day, working through blueprints and tracking the movements of a certain Kim Namjoon.

“Sometimes I need to remind myself why we’re being so secretive about all this. You do it long enough, it starts to feel legitimate to you. Legitimate enough to blab about to other people.”

Jungkook chewed on the inside of his cheek.

“I think he’ll be alright,” Jimin finally said, patting Jungkook’s shoulder reassuringly before heading for the exit. “Dude’s got an eye for detail.”

__

They were looking through a few half-finished projects when Jungkook noticed something familiar in one of the models.

“That looks like the lecture hall we met in.”

“With modifications,” Yoongi appended, and used a pen to point out the features he’d added. “The corridor of endless meetings. Mirrored walls which rotate when the Kick is performed. You can keep encountering the same person here many times, until an answer is given. Would be useful for people like the Forger. For instance, if you want to get information out of people.”

“So, a similar concept to the Penrose staircase.”

Yoongi nodded. “A sort of Groundhog Day loop, if you will.”

“For Hoseok-ssi,” Jungkook said, folding his arms. “I think he would like this very much.”

Yoongi turned the model around. “This one over here is a variation of the parapet, or the rooftop of the architecture block. The one above opens out to another parapet, leaving the projection with no room to run. The one below faces a brick wall. That’s a trap which can be closed and manipulated in the dream.”

“I see you’ve created another trap here,” Jungkook said, pointing at one of the lower rooms in the buildings. A pair of paper curtains were folded apart to show a grey plaster cast wall.

“People think they can escape through the windows,” Yoongi said, clearly relishing the attention given to his work, “but they find out that there are no windows. A Schroedinger's cat box variation - the windows are simultaneously there and not there. Opening the curtain collapses it into one inevitable outcome.”

“Impressive.”

Yoongi stared at the model for a few moments, eyes roaming the network of tiny structures, like he was searching for imperfections in the work. Something caught his attention and he pointed at it.

“The vertical maze.”

Jungkook followed his line of sight. “What does it do?”

“A variation of the maze, but it progresses downwards. You have to navigate your way down the stairs, except that some of them stop at dead ends. There’s only one exit.”

Jungkook nodded along, not saying anything. Yoongi stopped talking and wrote something down in his sketchbook.

“Do you like it, Jungkook-ssi?” he asked after a beat.

“It’s good. Very well-made.”

Yoongi paused, bending slightly to look at his face, testing his reaction. “It’s yours.”

Jungkook inhaled sharply. “You mean –”

“I mean what I said. That’s your level of the dream for the extraction. It’s still being constructed, so I’ll polish it up and explain the mechanics to you nearer the date.”

“How much time did you spend on this?”

“About a week to conceptualise.” Yoongi tapped the edge of the pen on his sketchbook. “Three weeks to build.”

“I hope you didn’t reveal all of it to me.”

“No.” Yoongi grinned, showing teeth and gums. “You’re too smart for me to do that. I made sure to keep some secrets for myself as well.”

__

Jungkook soon explained to Yoongi what his purpose in the extraction was.

“You were supposed to be the dreamer for each level. You created the dream space and you’ll have to host the architecture that supports it. But this time I need you to come down all the way to the final level with me.”

They were seated at the workbench for lunch, eating black bean noodles out of paper boxes. Jungkook’s totem was lying on its side in the space between them, after an earlier demonstration of what the tiny silver-grey top was supposed to do.

“I’m going to need you to input one of those traps for me,” Jungkook said, indicating with his chopsticks. “Create a safe place that will lure my subconscious into trapping something important in there. I want to see … if I’m still projecting my old memories.”

Yoongi chewed his food quietly, scratching the bottom of the plastic box with his utensils.

“Am I allowed to know what it is?”

Jungkook scanned the workshop. The only other person in the vicinity was Hoseok, fiddling with his key totem at the table.

“It’s an old colleague. Reseng.” A pause. “He’s dead.”

“Dead in the dream? Or –”

“Dead for good. But he keeps coming back to compromise all our missions.”

“He was the old architect.”

Jungkook put his chopsticks down. “How did you know?”

“I’m the only new guy here.” Yoongi looked away from him and spoke very quietly. “Obviously, you brought me in to replace someone else. That, and the fact that the only way anyone dies from doing this is if they’re caught for doing it or they kill themselves in the process.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this earlier.”

Yoongi waved his hand in the air dismissively. “There was no need to.”

__

The next shared dream sequence saw them strolling through the same city. Jungkook wanted a test-run of some of the prototypes Yoongi had constructed in the early stages of the design process. His buildings were all up there, along with the various building-encased labyrinth designs, bridges and canals and street signs.

Jimin would administer the Kick once time was up. They had five minutes to complete an hour’s worth of testing, dream-time.

“You’ve done a good job,” Jungkook commented, pointing out several stretches of shopfronts along the road. “You got the same bakery, the same café, the same grocer. You just missed the bookshop.”

“I’m still getting used to the feeling of solidity in the dream,” Yoongi said, stopping by the sidewalk to test the ground beneath his feet. “I like how solid everything feels.”

Jungkook stopped behind him, watched the cars move up and down the street. Yoongi dragged the toe of his shoe along the pavement, then stomped down on a spot of concrete with one foot.

“It’s tangible, good enough to fool anyone. I thought everything in the dream would be more visual, more illusory, but …”

Yoongi cut himself off to look up into the sky. Jungkook glanced up and saw it again, that smouldering concentration in Yoongi’s gaze. He forced his attention from Yoongi’s face to the city street in front.

The ground ahead of them was rising, folding backwards on itself. Reaching up towards the sky, like levelled brutalist walls breaking out of the ground, growing up to the sun as a light-starved plant would. People and vehicles continued to move along the road like before, growing smaller as the street rose higher above them.

Jungkook watched, his heart pounding – from excitement, shock, or admiration, he didn’t know. Today Yoongi was wearing a shirt and he had left the top two buttons undone, which was doing a lot of things to Jungkook’s concentration. He tried not to look there.

Like a puzzle piece, that part of the city fitted perfectly along the side of the one they were standing on. This stretch of road bent double again, forming a ceiling. The city closed down over them, boxing them into a bone-pale cage of buildings, roads and people, each side held in place with its own internal sense of gravity.

Yoongi turned back to glance at Jungkook. There was colour in his cheeks: a very healthy shade of pink. Jungkook would have smiled back if he wasn’t caught off-guard by how sublimely confident Yoongi suddenly appeared at that moment. In his element, bending designs in real-time to his every whim. Like he was finally getting the hang of this thing.

They walked towards the vertical section of city street, moving easily up to the next section as they would if they were walking up a wall. The flat ground lay behind and under them like a dizzying illusion.

There was a waterfront ahead. They moved out from the under the shade of the viaduct and Jungkook watched as a metal helix bridge rose out of the water, the reflective glass boards and railings falling into place.

A few people sitting along the waterfront turned around to look at Yoongi. Placid stares, like how passers-by would look at an oddly-dressed person crossing their path on the street.

“Did I do something wrong?” Yoongi asked, walking ahead with hands in his pockets. He turned around and stopped in the middle of the road. One of his shoelaces had come undone along the way, but Jungkook didn’t say anything.

“That’s because you’re changing the environment.” Jungkook caught up with Yoongi and nudged at the small of his back gently, prompting him to go on. “Think of it like white blood cells and bacteria. You’re the bacteria and my projections are the white blood cells. They’ll attack you because you’re something like a foreign entity that’s altering their environment.”

“Do they do anything?”

“Well, they’ll kill you if you start changing too many things. Especially if you start building and copying from memories of real-world places.”

Yoongi toyed with the hem of his shirt, thinking. “What’s the limit?”

“I don’t know. Directing their attention to something else usually works.” Jungkook looked down at Yoongi’s hand, at the fingers playing with the shirt fabric.

“Right now, you’re being very visible.”

Yoongi stopped in his tracks. Jungkook bumped into him and immediately stepped away. “What –”

“A mirror,” Yoongi said. He placed his palm on the flat surface. The glass started to crack in a cobweb spiral, spreading outwards from where his palm was, and fell to the ground in a clatter of shards. Yoongi winced and stepped back.

A new corridor lay ahead of them, an extension of the waterfront.

Jungkook stayed where he was, dumbfounded.

And then Yoongi was warping pillars and staircases out of nowhere, directing them into dead ends, sticking them out in the marina. A balcony was being constructed in the side of the viaduct above them. Dams broke out on the canals, water rushed in to fill the marina.

“Yoongi-ssi –” Jungkook began, sensing the growing hostility around them. “I think you should stop.”

Yoongi turned around. They regarded each other silently for a beat, the barriers of people passing by on both sides of them.

“I’m going to be killed soon, aren’t I?”

“It’s too much.”

Jungkook reached out to grab his wrist and moved them out to the edge of the marina, where the passing streams of people wouldn’t be able to see them.

“Why can’t you collapse the dream?” Yoongi asked. He started to disassemble one of the bridges, breaking it off somewhere in the middle. The pieces crumbled and fell into the air, showers of cement and grey metal.

“Because we’re both aware that we’re dreaming. Realising it isn’t going to change anything.”

They stood there, looking out at the boats and the sudden sunlight that was pouring out of the sky. Pieces of broken concrete from the bridge floated in the dark water towards them.

“Should’ve known I’d be sweating in the dream too,” Yoongi suddenly quipped, looking down at his shirt. “Guess I’ll wear better clothes next time.”

“You don’t have to,” Jungkook blurted out. Then he tried to explain, flustered. “I mean – it doesn’t look that bad. As in, the shirt looks good on you. It’s a nice shirt.”

There was a faint smile on Yoongi’s face, but it was something so subtle and wispy that Jungkook couldn’t be sure if it was there at all.

He looked around, suddenly at a loss for words.

“I … I guess we can wait for Jimin to wake us up. The projections are responding to your manipulation of the dream space.” Jungkook paused. “That means you can create obstructions to prevent them from getting to the dreamer at each level of the dream.”

As he said this, he studied the things which had risen up from the marina water. They were variations of structures in the old warehouse. An improvement of the intersecting spire he and Jimin were looking at that night. That bridge which tapered off into nothing. They stood there like eerie sculptures, out of place, ominous and towering. Twin towers of … of –

But the bridge suddenly began to look familiar to him. The marina suddenly began to look familiar to him.

He’d been here before.

Jungkook turned around slowly. This was the place where Reseng died. So that’s why the usually disturbing projections of him hadn’t appeared yet. That’s why he hadn’t killed them yet.

The bridge which had been cut off. The water in the marina around them. Reseng drove himself off a bridge when he died.

Yoongi had isolated them from any and all possible ways that the projections might access this part of the waterfront. The broken bridge, the repurposed spires which blocked the entry of large boats and vehicles. He’d planned all this.

There was a car bobbing in the water, upside down, like a dead fish. It wasn’t there before. Jungkook stared at it, suddenly feeling very sick. That was never a good sign.

He stepped away from the water reflexively, just as Yoongi turned around to look at him. There was something in the water. Something wasn’t right with it. That thing inside … too dark and large to be a fish or another boat.

“Yoongi-ssi …”

Yoongi froze where he was, the questioning look dropping from his face. A hand, wet and pale, clinging to the concrete edge of the waterfront with the vice-like grip of a person hanging on for their life. A body pulled itself up next, dragging a good-sized shard of car window glass behind it. Dressed in a dark suit, wet hair and blood dripping all over his face, just as he looked like before he died. It was Reseng. Jungkook’s projection of Reseng, coming back again and again.

And again.

Reseng was going for Yoongi. Jungkook cried out, deaf to himself. Reseng held the glass and brought it down to Yoongi’s neck in a neat, vicious arc, and –

Jungkook was on the floor, dazed and looking up at Jimin. Jimin, his point man with an uncharacteristic shit-eating grin on his face and an extended hand to help him stand up.

“Woke you up, didn’t I. Hoseok-ssi bolted as soon as you were out.” Jimin gave him a once-over. “Also, your fly is down.”

Jungkook looked down, sighed as he got to his feet and adjusted his pants.

“You didn’t have to kick the chair over all the way.”

“Well, you’re both very deep sleepers.” Jimin shrugged and turned a bottle of brownish-pink liquid around in his hand. “Sometimes I wonder if you really need the Somnacin at all.”

“Reseng,” Jungkook said, breathing hard. “Reseng came back. I saw him.”

“I know. Yoongi-ssi just told me.”

Yoongi sat pale and upright in his chair nearby, one hand still massaging the left side of his neck.

Jimin turned to glance at him briefly, then back at Jungkook. “He’s still in shock. The pain in the dream can leave some … phantom sensations when you wake up.”

“We need to make sure he’s alright,” Jungkook said, trying to go over, but Jimin stopped him.

“He needs to get over it alone.” Jimin nudged Jungkook back onto the chair. “Leave him be.”

Jungkook looked down at his right arm and pulled the intravenous drip out, wincing as he did so.

“How long did we take to fall asleep?” he asked, discarding the needle.

Jimin checked the reading on the device, laid open on the floor. “A minute and a half.”

“Anything on Kim Namjoon yet?”

“He’s moving, as we expected. Hoseok-ssi says he’s renting a van this evening. He’s intending to use that for the Kick when it comes to his level of the dream. Gotta learn the structure and appearance of the van and all that, so he can replicate it in the dream as accurately as possible.”

“How so?”

“Drive it off a bridge, like we did for the Saito job.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“It wasn’t my idea.” Jimin set the bottle down on the workbench and started disassembling the intravenous device. “I can promise you he wasn’t thinking of Reseng when he proposed it, though.”

__

Jungkook decided to visit the trap he’d requested from Yoongi one afternoon, when they were doing test runs on the system. Jimin sent them both into a dream sequence which would last fifteen minutes, unless something happened.

Jungkook had already warned Yoongi about the possibility of Reseng moving in again to compromise things at an unexpected time. Although he would never know when, there were a few precautions Jungkook took to prevent this from happening. He made it a point never to fully learn the layout of the dream architecture, especially the more secure traps and escape routes. Knowing about them meant that the Reseng projection could still find its way into any of the secure safeholds where the team was supposed to hide in, should Jungkook’s subconscious start acting up again.

And even though Yoongi took great care in building his traps and mazes, there was a chance that Reseng, or some derivative projection of him, could find them.

This time, they were walking along the periphery of a hedge maze.

“This is the spot?” Jungkook asked. They stopped at the entrance. Yoongi looked about them, fidgeting slightly, this preoccupied air about him.

“I’ve made it as difficult as possible to navigate your way to the centre. Your subconscious should have stored whatever secret you want to find in here.”

Jungkook moved to stand in front of Yoongi. He reached out and put both hands on either of his shoulders.

“Just –” Jungkook looked down at the ground between their feet. “If you see Reseng – or anyone who isn’t me – coming towards you, just look for safety. You built this place. You know all the traps and how to outrun him.”

“I can’t leave you here.”

Jungkook looked up, saw Yoongi watching him with a kind of rueful fondness. Like someone thinking about something they’d lost a long time ago. A thing that was painting his eyes with all the colours of worn-down regret.

“You can.”

“You’ll go into limbo.”

Yoongi’s voice was always thoughtful, always so measured and reasonable.

“That’s my fault.” Jungkook took his hands away, immediately missing the solidity of Yoongi’s shoulders under them. “It’s a risk and I’m taking it. But I’m not going to drag you down with me if I fail.”

“You think Reseng is inside the maze?”

The wind blew, and somehow that only made Jungkook feel lonelier.

“He’s still somewhere in there, inside my subconscious as a projection. I want to see if I can get rid of him.”

A hushed silence, during which only the rustling of the leaves on the hedge maze could be heard.

“What did he do to you?”

Jungkook looked up at Yoongi and swallowed. He wouldn’t be able to tell him why. He always thought about it in images, never being able to form sentences.

“He didn’t do anything to me.” Jungkook paused to lower his voice, to match Yoongi’s quiet drawl. “He killed himself thinking he was still in the dream. When the Architect dies, you … lose one of the most important people in the team.”

Yoongi took his hand carefully, held onto it like he would break it if he wasn’t gentle enough.

Of course, it was more than that. There was more Jungkook wanted to tell him – about those near-death experiences, the fear he had of falling into limbo in every extraction. About how some of the structures in the old warehouse were to blame for how easy it was for Reseng to kill himself.

Because Reseng was confident and knew too much of the dream world. He did his job well, made dreamscapes which were so realistic that even he couldn’t tell the difference between the real world and his own creations.

And Reseng really only wanted to wake up, but he died.

Jungkook had seen what it could do to people. If the Architect could die, anyone else could. He didn’t want it to happen to himself, or anyone else in his team. He didn’t want it to happen to Yoongi too.

When he started walking, it was aimless, drifting. Running into dead ends. Wondering what was going through Yoongi’s head when he plotted out this maze, as if by following his train of thought, he could get closer to him.

Jungkook realised, only after a while, that there was a red yarn going along the wall of the hedge. It appeared at certain intervals, weaving its way in and out of the leaves. He decided to follow the line.

Little by little, he worked his way towards the centre. He was getting somewhere.

The grass grew thicker the further he went in. By the time he got to where the landscape changed into open space, it was up to his waist. The red yarn trailed off the hedge wall and traced its way to the ground. A single arched leaf-laden doorway separated him from what lay beyond.

Jungkook pushed through the grass blades and went in. The middle of the square was thick with vegetation. Here, seated with his head hanging down and draped over with bundles of thick red thread, was –

– Yoongi?

Jungkook stopped where he was. The grass blades around him were quivering lightly in the barely-there breeze.

It was almost obscene how tranquil Yoongi looked sitting there, the red yarn tied up all over his head, thick around his neck, all over his body like a pretty decoration that was consuming and killing him.

“Yoongi-ssi,” Jungkook said weakly, feeling his head lighten. “What are you doing here?”

Yoongi was wearing the same thing that Jungkook saw him in on that first day – the red jacket, the files in a messy heap by his side, except for the tangle of red yarn that was now spilling onto the ground around the chair, forming a puddle of messy string.

“Yoongi-ssi,” Jungkook called. He didn’t seem to hear. Jungkook moved towards him, but the grass grew thicker, sprouting up, holding him back.

The grass was alive. Something was holding him back.

What are you afraid of?

A projection. This was a projection. It wasn’t really Yoongi who was there, in the middle of the maze.

What’s a secret? What’s something so important you want to lock it away in a safe place?

A deep rumbling noise in the distance broke his train of thought. It sounded like thunder at first, but then the sound came nearer, dissolving into the sickening roar of a machine. The ground began to shake. Jungkook turned in the direction of the sound and waited with horror and paralysis, for that great ugly thing to come at him.

Seconds later, the hulking mass of a freight train hurtled through the thick hedge walls, coming in his direction, coming straight for him. Jungkook didn’t even have time to close his eyes.

Jungkook was floating on water when he woke up. He lay there for a while, waiting for all his limbs to come back to life.

Alive. Still alive, even after being run down by a train. He faced the sky, saw the roiling masses of thunderclouds above him. He moved his arms and legs experimentally, like he was re-learning the weight of his own body.

He could hear nothing but the sound of water lapping in his ears. It was slow, very gentle and consoling. He could fall asleep in this, in the way that it rocked him back and forth.

A warm mass was suddenly pushing against his side, what felt like hands grabbing at his arms, at the neckline of his shirt. A head emerged from the water beside him, fringe plastered to their face, dark eyes trained on him.

“Hold on,” the person was saying. “Please hold on.”

He was being dragged back to shore. The water grew warmer as he was pulled up, weak limbs and blurry vision. When he rolled onto solid land, his hands grabbed at the ground only to come up with fistfuls of sand. There was sand in his mouth.

Jungkook groaned and turned over, turning his head to spit it out.

The person was looking down at him, had one hand on his chest somewhere near where his heart was supposed to be. He liked the feeling.

Waves were licking at his feet. He wriggled his toes. No shoes. The person pushed Jungkook’s hair out of his eyes – with clinical precision, strand by strand, yet with the feather-like touches – to take a closer look at him. Brought their face down so close to his that it blocked out his view of the light from the sky.

“Jungkook-ssi, are you still there?”

There was a cool, wet hand on the side of his face. It shook his head slightly. Jungkook twisted his head away, irritated.

“You were hit by a train.” The voice was more muffled now. The person stopped to cough a few times, then took a deep breath and sneezed.

Jungkook frowned, still looking blankly out to where the waves were crashing, a few metres in front of his face. His cheek felt hot against the sand.

The person continued talking.

“I came back to find you.” The voice sounded thin and tired. “It’s been a year.”

Jungkook suddenly remembered.

He was hit by the train and he died. But a year ago? That wasn’t possible.

His mind paused on this logical improbability and got stuck there, refusing to reason its way out. Jungkook grimaced, rolled over and forced himself to sit up.

The man kneeling on the sand opposite him was holding a small grey object in his palm.

“This should be familiar to you.”

Jungkook looked up at his face. Something in those features was dredging up a withered memory from within his mind, but it was murky and rotten that he couldn’t clearly define its edges. He recognised the object, but not what it was for. He recognised individual features, but not a face.

“Who – who are you?”

“This tells you whether you’re still in the dream.” The man paused for emphasis. “We’ve been in limbo for a year, Jungkook-ssi.”

Jungkook opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out.

“It’s me.” The man sighed. “It’s me, Yoongi.”

Yoongi. Yoongi. That was ringing a bell. The one he’d met at the architectural college at some point in his life.

“That was a long time ago,” Jungkook murmured, rubbing at his forehead. “We were … we were more brilliant, back then.”

“No. You haven’t changed. We haven’t changed.” Yoongi was taking one of his shoes off, pouring seawater out of it. “A year. It’s not a lot, when you think about it in terms of the time we spent back in the waking world.”

Jungkook watched as Yoongi turned his shoe upside down, leaving the flat side of the sole up. Yoongi held the top up to show it to him, then set it down on the sole of the shoe and spun it.

It kept spinning. Jungkook watched, his languid mind stalling with that slow, hypnotised feeling of watching a gently repetitive movement.

Yoongi watched the spinning top with him for a few minutes. Then he reached out and touched the back of Jungkook’s head, brought his face very close to him.

For a while, Jungkook just felt Yoongi breathing against his ear; this pleasant, buzzing feeling. Then, a light brush of lips against his cheek.

The top continued to spin.

“Look at this. We’re still in the dream, Jungkook-ssi.” Yoongi said, sitting back and raising his hand. The hand was holding a gun, and there was an apology in his eyes. “This world isn’t real.”

Jungkook was on the floor again. This time, he was staring up at Jimin, who beamed back at him with that sweet smile of his, a chipped mug in his hand. The strong smell of overboiled tea filled the air. Light was coming in through the glass walls somewhere behind him.

“You kicked my chair over.”

“You’re back,” Jimin said, ignoring the comment. “I tried to stay up while Yoongi-ssi went back in, but I fell asleep somewhere along the way. Three a.m., maybe. That’s when the body is the weakest.”

Jungkook didn’t say anything.

Jimin shrugged and walked out of the storeroom, leaving the door open. Jungkook sat up and righted the chair he had been sitting on. He noticed Yoongi in a corner of the room on the other side, rubbing his eyes. The intravenous machine lay open on the floor between them.

“A year,” Jungkook said out loud, feeling something clench in his chest. “You spent a year in there waiting for me.”

The words sounded abrasive in the same way his voice cut into the ambience of the room, still thick with the tension of sleep.

“Jimin-ssi says it only took a day.”

Yoongi turned around to face him. Messy hair, the whites of his eyes still reddish from sleep. A strangely intimate picture, like they’d both slept in the same bed and woke up, finding themselves feverish and far apart from each other. Jungkook’s brain lingered lazily and painfully on this thought.

“You were knocked out by that freight train,” Yoongi continued. “I waited. Then I heard the caboose coming. It crashed through the whole thing, and I woke up.”

The wall clock ticked away in the background.

“You went into limbo. That’s dangerous.” Jungkook paused and took a deep breath. There was a terrible taste in his mouth, a curious shiver in his throat. “If you didn’t make an effort to remember why you were there, you might have –”

“– What did you find in the maze?”

Yoongi picked at loose threads on his pants, waiting for an answer.

“Not … not Reseng. He was the freight train –” Jungkook broke off and shook his head slightly. “It’s just an image now. I can’t forget it.”

“Forget what?”

“You were inside the maze. You seemed like you were bleeding out. Red strings everywhere.”

Yoongi looked at him with eyes that were a little haunted, but glowing.  

“The train crashed into the centre of the maze and it’ll be trapped there.” Yoongi was phrasing his words carefully, voice meditative. “Reseng’s projection gets caught in the middle of the maze. You … you were supposed to follow the red string out.”

“But I followed it in.”

“If that string led you into the maze, it can also lead you out.”

It sounded so simple. Yoongi made it sound so simple.

Jungkook got up and went over to the dark corner where Yoongi was still crouched on the floor. He lowered himself to the ground and grabbed Yoongi’s hands, which he realised were shaking.

“I don’t want to do that ever again.”

Yoongi waited for a long time before replying.

“Neither do I.”

Jungkook pulled him into a tight hug. His hands went all the way around, pressing into Yoongi’s shoulder blades and ribs like the red yarn did back in the maze, only gentler and with more meaning. Feeling him for what he was: solid and real and uncannily fragile.

They sat there leaning into each other, just listening to the morning minutes pass. Listening to the sounds of Jimin outside in the workshop, clattering around with his equipment and scraping his chair back to get more tea.

__

The date of the extraction grew nearer. On the night before the team was slated to move off to a hotel in another city in preparation for their flight, Jungkook found himself dreaming again.

There was nobody around. Not a single person. No projections of the subconscious, no strange stares directed his way. Just him and Yoongi. They were standing at the foot of a staircase and it was damp and grey all over.

Jungkook looked up the stairs. Instinctively, he tried to remember what he was doing before this. He came up with nothing.

Yoongi started to speak, but Jungkook shushed him. He went to the foot of the stairs and crouched down, taking the totem out of his pocket, where he always kept it. The second test.

The top kept spinning.

“This is a dream,” Jungkook said, grabbing it off the stairs. “Yoongi-ssi, I don’t remember giving anyone the green light to launch another sequence.”

There was a long pause. “You didn’t.”

“So you were the one who did it. Hooked me up without asking me.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Yoongi exhaled sharply, amused. “It’s all illegal, anyway.”

Jungkook got to his feet and turned around. Yoongi stood behind him, looking so casual with his characteristic slouch, the way he raised one side of his mouth in a lopsided smile.

“I asked Jimin-ssi,” he continued. “Learning how to operate the intravenous wasn’t hard.”

“And you say that I’m smart.” Jungkook squeezed Yoongi’s shoulder. “What time is it now?”

“I administered Somnacine at 3 in the morning. That’s the point when the human body is the weakest,” Yoongi said with a wry smile. “You succumbed easily.”

“So it looks like I’m stuck here with you, huh.” Not that Jungkook minded. He didn’t mind at all.

Yoongi gestured towards the stairs, an almost shy smile creeping onto his face. “It’s probably obvious that I wanted to show you something, right?”

Jungkook nodded, grinning back. “Lead the way.”

There was a house, or what looked like a prototype of a house. They stood at the door, this pearl-coloured affair with a fancy doorknob.

“Another maze?” Jungkook asked.

“Better than anything you’ve ever seen.”

Yoongi pushed the door, and they went in. There was a long corridor inside. Jungkook stayed on the threshold, watching the inside of the house pulsate with that iridescent, underwater quality of jellyfish and coral in an aquarium.

“I call this the three and a half-minute hallway.” Yoongi gestured at the walls, which were starting to slowly shift. The hallway began to expand and lengthen in size. The walls, smooth and grey, grew outwards and away from them. Soon the back wall of the corridor dissolved into a pinprick point, lost in the lines of perspective.

“What’s this for?” Jungkook couldn’t help asking.

“It’s a house,” Yoongi said simply, walking inside with hands folded behind his back. “A house that I’m building with my mind. A house that’s bigger on the inside than the outside.”

Now this was dream architecture. Jungkook wandered down the middle of the hallway, watching the walls grow and fold into one another, creating a long, yawning tunnel which pushed ahead and grew downwards. He found himself thinking of migratory birds and how they swelled and moved in mesmerising patterns. That was how it felt like, watching the walls of the hallway move.

Yoongi gestured for him to follow. They went down the tunnel.

“How long does this thing last?”

“As long as I want it to.”

“So you can keep walking on forever?”

“Yes.”

Yoongi stopped where he was, and so quickly that Jungkook couldn’t see it, everything around them collapsed, folded back on itself, until they were standing in the plain hallway again.

“This is amazing. You’re amazing.” Jungkook turned around, searching for words. “You – you’ve finally done it. You built a crazy house. Something that can’t exist in the real world.”

“I know.”

“But why?”

Yoongi shook his head and looked away. “Maybe I just wanted to impress you.”

“You’ve impressed me enough.”

“Did you notice the stairs outside?”

Yoongi opened the door and they stepped out. The house was situated on one corner of a large floating set of stairs – four flights, all ascending, connected together in a square. A gigantic Penrose staircase which tumbled over, repeating into itself.

“It's like you can keep walking on forever.” Jungkook couldn’t help laughing. “Ah, you remembered I liked the Penrose stairs.”

“Come on, everyone likes them. They’re confusing. We’re fascinated by things that shouldn’t make sense but actually do.”

They stood at the door for a long time.

“Why did you call it the three and a half-minute hallway, anyway?”

“That’s the time I wanted to bring you here. Three to four a.m.” Yoongi turned to look back into the house. “Because –”

“Because that’s when the human body is the most vulnerable in sleep.” Jungkook reached out and delicately tilted Yoongi’s face towards him. “You thought I’d go weak for you.”

“Well, when you put it like that –”

He didn’t forget what happened at the beach. None of them did.

“To be honest,” Jungkook said, standing closer, then moving in. “I always have been.”

He’d been waiting for this. Waiting for a long time, throughout all those afternoons and evenings, those tired crystalline nights. A thousand imagined kisses; now a single, real one. But he never expected it to be out here, in the house built for him.

Yoongi built cities for him, cities which spanned the eternities of the mind. Yoongi could walk down the backbones of every single one and remember the turns of all the streets, every corner, every maze and dead end.

“You’re full of surprises,” Jungkook whispered into the air, somewhere between their lips. Like an optical illusion. A puzzle that you could study for hours on end and still find new things in every time.

They pulled apart after a few desperate moments, both too eager and afraid of this new thing growing across them. This thing of red strings and bleeding out into labyrinths, leaving parts of themselves behind everywhere they went.

They woke up at six in the morning. Dawn was just starting to seep into the sky outside the workshop. Jungkook saw Jimin’s sleeping bag laid out, crumpled across one of the benches. The guy always got up early.

He turned and saw Yoongi lying next to him, arm outstretched and showing the drip tube. Jungkook propped himself up on one arm and reached over to pluck the needle out.

“Good luck for the extraction tomorrow,” Yoongi whispered, adjusting the collar of his shirt and sitting up. “I think all of us need it.”

“I’m confident it’ll be a good one.”

There was comfortable silence. No distractions, just the sound of their breathing.

“I’m so glad you’re here.”

Yoongi’s hand moved over the bare tiles separating their sleeping bags and found Jungkook’s, curling over it, fingers tangling and fitting together with the ease of two kittens snuggling up. His thumb trailed across the undulating terrain of Jungkook’s knuckles, tracing them, mind probably thinking again, about structures, and the solidity of things.

Jungkook closed his eyes and let himself feel the air on his skin, the warmth in his hand, the remaining Somnacine trickling out of his veins. It was enough for him, this moment. It was not a dream.

And stretched out on the floor of that stuffy workshop, sweating lightly, feet cold with early morning chill, it occurred to him that the magic of all these labyrinths always boiled down to one thing. The knowledge that there was always something to be found at the centre of the puzzle. Believing without seeing.

He brought himself back to where it all started: mental images of the dusty lecture hall, the parapet, the hedge maze. Found that in every single one of them, Yoongi was always there – the newest constant variable.

Like two ends of a red string, threading themselves through the cruel eyes of all needles; in every permutation and in every iteration, always finding their way back to each other.