Work Text:
"Yoongi is a hopeless romantic who covers himself in spines and thorns so no one can find him out and break his heart."
—anonymous
"What do you know about the Grievers?"
Jeongguk looks up from the folder he's been handed, catching Namjoon's eye, his gaze more heavy than usual. He's young, but his hair has always been a silvery shade of white, at least as long as Jeongguk has known him, and it's been a while.
"Not much?" He shrugs, glancing down at the name on the first page.
Min Yoongi
sleep coma
Griever connection suspected
"Aren't they just a myth?" Jeongguk thinks about the rumours, the people who say they've seen them lurking at the fringes of burials, in hospital waiting rooms, behind bars where people go to drink their sorrows away. Some people think too much.
Namjoon leans forward over the desk, resting his elbows on the wood and his chin in his hands. His eyes are bright, and Jeongguk blinks, fighting against the sudden urge to step back.
"Have you ever lost anyone?" Namjoon asks, and Jeongguk has to shake his head because no he hasn't. He still has his mom and his dad and his grandparents on both sides, something he's never really thought about. But staring into Namjoon's eyes, he images suddenly not having them anymore.
It's surprising, how much it hurts, the stabbing pain of possibility.
"Exactly," Namjoon says quietly. "Grievers promise something everyone wants." Jeongguk glances back down at the first page in the file, the words sleep coma standing out in sharp relief, black on white. They aren't new, he has a wide portfolio and he's worked with coma patients before, but it's never been something. . .
"This is intentional?" Jeongguk blurts out, startled. "But what do the Grievers get out of it?"
"That's a very good question," Namjoon says, and Jeongguk feels chills crawling down his spine.
Before Jeongguk decides a plan of attack, he usually tries to familiarize himself with his target as much as possible, the papers from the file spread out onto the wall and held up with tiny silver pins that catch the light, a galaxy of the tiny pieces that make up Min Yoongi.
"You can't call a patient a target," Mihyun says from where she's standing in the doorway, leaning back against the frame, but her eyes are sparkling and Jeongguk can tell. He shrugs, doesn't bother to answer, because they both know that where he started, there were no such things as patients, only targets and paychecks. Even though his work is all above board now, old habits die hard.
"Do you know anything about Grievers?" he asks, tossing the words carelessly over one shoulder, when he hears a sudden intake of breath.
Mihyun is pale now, standing in the doorway as she clings to her arms as though to hold herself together, and that more than anything is what rattles him. Mihyun, the no-nonsense girl with a reputation for getting things done right the first time, looks scared, and if Mihyun is scared then Jeongguk better be fucking terrified. The silence stretches, seconds pulling into minutes before Mihyun takes a deep breath and purposefully relaxes her shoulders, a false appearance of calm.
"Pray as hard as you can that you never meet one," she says finally, and steps back into the corridor, disappearing around the corner.
Jeongguk stands, in the room and looks at the photograph in his hand, of a blond man staring, not into the camera, but past it. Jeongguk wonders what Yoongi is looking for.
"You have to wear him down or figure out how to get him to admit the presence of his weak spots."
—anonymous
Yoongi was a pianist. Jeongguk looks at the photograph, the young man sitting at the piano, fingers poised above the keys, back light glowing around his profile. The key to building a dream for a target, shaping them to draw them in, is to make them familiar, something that Jeongguk is good at.
"You're handsome," Mihyun always says, ruffling his hair, "but you look like the kid who lives next door." Her words are always followed by a smirk, and Jeongguk grins back, because they both know that's an advantage.
He's not sure, though, about the Grievers angle. He's built dreams for coma patients before, when someone needed information they couldn't extract in any other way, but Yoongi is different.
The sponsor just wants him to wake up.
“But how can I tempt someone with something I don’t have?”
Jeongguk steps back, twirling a lollipop in his mouth and humming a guitar riff as he takes in the wall that is Yoongi's life, imagining the sound of fingers hitting the keys over the backdrop of the rain falling outside.
"How's it coming along?" Jeongguk looks up to see Namjoon standing in the doorway, a wry smile on his face, briefcase in hand. His watch glints gold in the light of the lamps.
"There's nothing about the Grievers in here," Jeongguk says, waving a hand at the folder flung onto the bed. "And I ran a search and came up with nothing."
Namjoon stares at him consideringly, as the rain beats against the glass. "I think," he finally says, "that the less you know the better."
"Mihyun looked scared," Jeongguk says, after a moment. They both know that Mihyun doesn't get scared. Namjoon doesn't say anything, just nods and leaves, and that's the scariest thing of all.
That there's no argument, no refuting, nothing to say.
Everyone works differently when it comes to building things that don't exist. Mihyun works with words, weaving a texture of sounds that she uses to shape the structure of dreams in her head.
Jeongguk, on the other hand, prefers something physical, a maze of tactile objects whose presence he can use to pin down the shape of the dream. He lays out small things along the ground in a growing spiral, the photograph of Yoongi at the piano, a note that bears his writing, and in between he lays out his deck of cards.
"You're building a house of cards," Mihyun had said, the first time she saw it, and Jeongguk had laughed.
"My house is more impressive than a card trick," he said. Mihyun had merely shrugged.
Sometimes he wonders what it would be like to build his dream on something else, but this is how it's always worked for him, ever since he built that first house of cards as a child and spun a thought that had spiralled into something too big for him to keep to himself.
He wonders, now, what Yoongi's dream will look like. He's built it of course, he knows the shape and the space and he's holding it in his head, stretched between his fingers like scaffolding and the house of cards, spiralling in a coil around him, holding everything together, but that's different from stepping into it.
When the dream becomes real.
"Emotions run deep with him and old wounds don't close up until a very long time has passed,
and even then they're still raw in the dry air."
—anonymous
Yoongi is lying in a hospital bed in a white room, a vase with a single hyacinth stalk standing on a small bedside table. It's quiet, except for the sound of the rain again, falling against the glass, trickling down in streams.
Jeongguk pauses, just inside the doorway, where the smell of disinfectant and sadness from the hallway is less potent. Yoongi looks so small, against the white sheets; he'd seemed bigger on paper somehow. Jeongguk shrugs.
"Let's get started," he says, even though there's no one to listen. It feels better, somehow, and this isn't a job like one of his old ones. Maybe he misses the thrill, the secrets, but he doesn't miss the change of a knife in the ribs or a gunshot to the head. Some sacrifices are easy to make.
Jeongguk pulls off his messenger bag and takes out the box, hooks the line into the IV drip already hanging from the stand affixed to the head of the bed. Then he takes a deep breath, swallows, and slips the needle into his arm.
"I'm scared of needles," he'd told Namjoon, who'd only shaken his head, holding out the box.
"It's safer this way," Namjoon had said, and he was the boss, and Jeongguk needed this, because he couldn't stop building if he tried, and this way was safer.
The needle still hurts though, as it pierces his skin, as it lodges in his veins, as he looks at the strange dichotomy of metal and flesh. He could try to avoid looking at it, but Jeongguk knows from experience that molehills avoided in the waking world become mountains on the other side.
Sinking into the chair at the side of the bed, hand hovering over the switch, he sees the frame, face down on the nightstand.
"Who were you looking for?" he asks, but Yoongi doesn't answer, and Jeongguk doesn't turn over the frame, but rather reaches for Yoongi's hand as he flips the switch.
It's not dark, when he opens his eyes. Jeongguk knows that out there, in the waking world, he's slumped back in the chair, sleeping, but here his eyes are open and he's standing—
He's not sure where he is, actually, which is the first sign that something isn't right. His hands feel empty, and as he stretches them out in front of him, the darkness lifts slightly, the darkness that shouldn't be there, not in the dream he created, spiralling out from the center. Jeongguk takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and presses his hands together for a heartbeat before pulling them apart, the threads of the structure he built stretching between his fingers until the web connecting his hands is too heavy; he throws his arms up and out, flinging the weave of threads at the same time as he opens his eyes.
It's night. Buildings stretch up on either side, blank windows like mirrored eyes, moonlight on asphalt.
A piano, sitting in a spotlight in the middle of an intersection.
"Yoongi," Jeongguk breathes, and he can see flicker of eyes peering at him before the man raises his hands in the silence, then lets them fall onto the keys with a crash that resolves into something that sounds like goodbye.
Jeongguk knows, somehow, that Yoongi is telling him to leave. He walks forward instead, as the music crashes louder, as a wind picks up, as he can hear the sound of glass breaking behind him, the tempest crescendoing to a roar like ocean waves crashing onto shore and then. . .silence.
Jeongguk is standing a arm's breadth from the piano; he could reach out his hand and—
Yoongi turns, staring him in the face, and something slams into Jeongguk's chest, throwing him backwards and up and out as he opens his eyes, gasping for air.
The white hospital room is quiet.
"It's just. . .a maze to get him to fall in love/trust people."
—anonymous
"He threw me out," Jeongguk says to the silence hanging around him, viscous, seconds hanging in the air. His arm is still hooked up to the box, his breath catching in his throat, too slow for the rapid heaving of his chest. "He threw me out." He sounds like a broken record, but he can't stop.
Glancing over at the bed, Yoongi is lying as still as before, hands lip on the sheets. It's strange to see his like this, empty, when in the dream he was everything the opposite, and Jeongguk feels an undercurrent of frustration, an old friend that he hasn't felt in a long time.
"This is useless," he says, and pulls the IV out of his arm, wadding a fold of his sleeve to press against the weak blood flow. He detaches the other tube from the IV drip attached to Yoongi, and stuffs the box back into his bag. "We're going old school." Saying it out loud makes it more real, makes it feel like he's in control, even though he hasn't done it this way in years.
"I don't want to hear you've been soloing," Namjoon had said, and Jeongguk had nodded, eyeing the box suspiciously.
Now he feels like he's gotten too attached.
Jeongguk takes a deep breath, reaches for Yoongi's hand again, and closes his eyes, slipping in.
"I don't want to talk about it," Yoongi says. He and Jeongguk are sitting across from each other at a table, and Yoongi is drinking coffee from a teacup.
"What did the Griever offer you?" Jeongguk asks, forging ahead. It feels like they've been having this argument for a very long time.
Yoongi laughs, the sound sharp, as he tosses the teacup over his back, as it crashes onto the ground in a pile of smashed porcelain. "The same thing they always do," Yoongi says. He reaches forward for another teacup of coffee, and Jeongguk realises he has one too, lifting it to his lips, when Yoongi reaches an arm forward and sweeps it off the table onto the ground.
"Hey—!" Jeongguk bursts, exclamation cut off by Yoongi's glare.
"Don't eat food in the underworld," he says, and drains another teacup, the sound of the crash echoing.
"This is my dream," Jeongguk retorts, reaching for another cup.
"Oh is it now?" Yoong says, raising an eyebrow as he knocks the next cup out of Jeongguk's hands, as the light changes, and it begins to rain.
"Why is it always raining?" Jeongguk complains, and stands, covering his head as they rush under the cover of the coffee shop awning, as he glares up at the storm clouds that weren't on the agenda. He's startled though, when Yoongi turns suddenly, reaching for Jeongguk's hand and shoving him behind him, into the building as a glass window in the opposite window explodes.
"What—?"
"They found me," Yoongi says quietly, "they always find me. You have to go."
"But—?" Jeongguk's protest is cut off as Yoongi rests a hand over Jeongguk's eyes, and the world falls apart.
"Kind of like porcelain."
—anonymous
Mihyun stands in the middle of the white room, looking at the figure in the bed. On the bedside table, there's a frame face down; she reaches over to turn it up before she turns and leaves, her footsteps echoing down the hallway.
Jeongguk's photograph stares out from the confines of the frame.