Chapter Text
To be one hundred percent honest, Seokjin should not have been out this close to curfew. He also should not have been cutting through the parking lots of privately owned buildings, but again -- it was close to curfew, and he was late.
“You're not gonna make it," Hoseok joked over the phone. "No one told you to leave my place so late, you know."
Seokjin scoffed, kicking off against the ground and skating faster. Or trying to, at any rate. He was already going top speed and balancing his phone to his ear. "Says the one who called me the second I made it around the block?"
"And out of sight!" Hoseok clarified cheerfully. "I have to make sure you don't get snatched up between my place and yours.”
Seokjin leaned his weight forward a bit to swerve around some leftover trash blowing through the empty lot. The flicker of the giant PARK INDUSTRIES sign overhead was eerie in its fluorescent white. Seokjin had always thought it was weird, that a big time science company would never turn their lights off, essentially, even long after it looked like all the lights inside had been dimmed out. But maybe Seokjin was just incorrectly lumping together scientists and environmentalists.
Kicking off against the ground once more, Seokjin scoffed at Hoseok again. It was a kind scoff, or at least a soft one, and a semi-common way of Seokjin expressing general affection for Hoseok. And of course Hoseok knew that, after years of being close.
"Pretty sure distracting me with idle chit chat puts me at more risk of being kidnapped in the dark of the night,” Seokjin pointed out with a laugh. Hoseok laughed back, full-bodied and lively and obviously a precursor to him saying something in response.
But then -- anything, whatever, Hoseok was getting ready to say, it was swallowed by the roaring explosion that was happening the next moment.
There was the loudest boom Seokjin had ever heard in his life, and then a hot, percussive blast exploding from the building Seokjin was skating past. It threw him gracelessly off his board, sending him flying. He hit the ground, dazed, then felt scorching heat all around him.
Seokjin panicked for a moment. Was he on fire? He couldn't hear anything except for a distant ringing noise, everything just muffled silence and the long drawn out shriek of tinnitus. His vision had whited out too, the pressure of the air around him tight and squeezing everything from his eyes to his sinuses to his lungs. He could barely breathe in the dry, heated air. Even though he was disoriented and half blind, Seokjin suddenly remembered stop-drop-and-roll, and tried to put it in effect, just in case he was, in fact, on fire.
Just as suddenly as the world had gone up into blazes, it calmed and cooled and dimmed. The air stilled and a little of the nighttime chill and damp returned. As Seokjin's hearing steadily came back to him, he shakily began to take stock of himself and his surroundings.
His vision was spotty, and his hoodie was scorched and scratched up in some places. Luckily, though, it didn’t seem to be on fire. His palms had been skinned up and were oozing a little blood, but all in all he seemed to be in one piece. The Park Industries’ building, however, was less fortunate.
It was wrecked, the front windows and doors all blown out, the brickfront itself cracked. There was the distant crackling of fire coming from inside the building. But technically it was still in one, damaged, smoldering piece.
So...that had to mean it hadn't been a particularly bad explosion, Seokjin reasoned to himself as he gathered his skateboard and his phone (the screen was cracked and it wasn't turning on. Great). ...Right? As far as explosions went, from what Seokjin could gather from miscellaneous TV and blockbuster movies, it hadn’t been that bad. Otherwise there'd be fiery debris everywhere, the building caving in on itself, and Seokjin would be much worse off.
That didn't mean he was going to stick around for the fire department and police to show up, though. He was just a passerby. One that was definitely late for curfew, at this rate.
Seokjin tucked his board under his arm -- he wasn't sure if his equilibrium and balance were completely alright yet, and he'd rather not wipe out trying to skateboard home on top of everything else -- and he ran. Finished trekking through the parking lot as fast as he could, and headed towards home.
The strangest thing, though -- Seokjin was maybe three minutes away from his house, cutting through the lawn of his neighbor two houses down from his own, when he felt the most inexplicable pain. It shot through his neck, both up and down the column of his spine and all along the width of his entire shoulders. It was -- a sharp, biting pain, his nerve endings suddenly so on fire that he dropped to his hands and knees and reached desperately for the spot just above his shoulder blades, where the waves of pain were localizing.
His fingers touched a spot that was smooth and -- wet? Cool. He must have scraped his back somehow, under the soft material of his favorite hoodie. Maybe there had been flying debris that Seokjin hadn't noticed and -- the pain throbbed and wrenched through him, and Seokjin curled a little tighter on himself.
By the time the pain passed and Seokjin could breathe again, he wasn't entirely sure how much time had gone by. He was aware, all at once, of the damp grass soaking through the knees of his pants; of the way he was shallowly gasping for the next breath; and, against his fingers, the smooth wet-cool patch along the bump of his vertebrae, especially prominent with how his head was bent down.
What time was it? His phone was dead, and he hadn't worn his watch today. Distantly, he thought that might have been a good thing, since his watch would have been scratched up and broken too if he'd had it on...
Suddenly, Seokjin remembered with urgency -- curfew. That he had to get home, especially because his phone was dead. If his parents tried to reach him and couldn’t get an answer, he would be in extra trouble for worrying them further. Seokjin took another deep breath, and took stock of how he felt: the pain was receding into a dull throb, his nerves and muscles protesting as he uncurled and slowly stood.
He was lucky no one in the neighborhood had seen him like that, all crumpled up in someone else’s yard, and come out to ask about it. It was late, but not late enough that people weren’t perfectly capable of still peeking out their windows every now and again to be nosy. If someone had spotted his little episode, they'd maybe think it was drugs or something else equally over the top. Suburbia, he’d found, didn't trust teenagers to not be delinquents, no matter how uncharacteristic it might be.
When he dragged himself into the house, unlocking and going through the front door with his key because there was no point in trying to sneak in, he found his family in the living room huddled around the television. There were images of explosions on the screen.
Ah, Seokjin thought, that must have been why no one in the neighborhood had seen him in the -- Seokjin glanced at the clock and grimaced at the forty-two minutes past curfew that blinked back at him -- so maybe three? five? ten, at the most? minutes he'd spent writhing in a neighbor's yard. They were all probably too engrossed in the first truly eventful thing to happen around here.
"Was there another explosion?" Seokjin asked dully as he took in the increasingly demolished appearance of Park Industries on the news, now with more uncontrollable fire and huge, blown off chunks of cement and brick littered everywhere. He tried to make sense of the ticker line at the bottom of the screen to catch new information.
His mother, father, and brother all jumped and spun around at the sound of his voice. "Where were you!" His mother said, every worry line creased on her face. "Seokjin."
"Hoseok kept calling, said your phone went off in the middle of you talking to him," his brother informed him, frowning a little.
His father just stared, eyes wide. "What in the world happened to you?"
Seokjin suddenly remembered his appearance. He probably looked a hundred times worse under the overhead lights of the living room. "Oh. I, uh, was skating through the parking lot of Park Industries to save time. I got a little caught up in the -- first? I guess? Wow, lucky that I left when I did -- explosion. Sorry."
Seokjin had never been all that great at striking a good balance between being dramatic and being far too casual about very upsetting things in his life. Either he was too over the top or too drab, depending on how done with the situation he was. Right now, he just wanted to take a shower, check out this probably really bad scrape on his back, and then fall into bed to sleep for a million years.
His family, however, began exclaiming all kinds of things, worried and appalled and exasperated -- “You know you're not supposed to cut through there! For heaven's sake, Seokjin -- " "Do you have a concussion?" "Dad, how would he know? We'd have to go to the emergency room to find out." -- and Seokjin felt some sort of breath he didn't know he'd been holding sigh itself out of him.
"I'm okay?" Seokjin volunteered, but it didn't deter his family from fretting and talking over one another.
~~~
Seokjin had a really hard time convincing everyone to not pack up and head to the ER.
It was late, he'd pointed out. His real saving grace had been that the news kept reporting on how whatever electrical impulses had caused the explosion (or explosions) at Park Industries had affected a lot of high functioning equipment at places like hospitals. That meant the ER had their hands plenty full running on backup power and trying to fix some unseen problem.
It wasn’t a strong argument, but it was enough to deter the initial panic of his parents. So instead of a frantic trip to the ER when Seokjin was still pretty lucid, his parents called some late night concussion clinic that gave them advice on signs to look for until the morning, and which symptoms meant they should drop everything to go the hospital after all. This meant no one went to bed for a good few hours, as his family watched him for off behavior.
Seokjin, though a little annoyed at not being able to go to sleep like he wanted, wasn’t dumb. He knew it was obviously for the best. So he counted his blessings, and spent the time sitting in the living room with his family and looking up news about the explosion on his laptop.
There wasn’t a lot of information out yet (Park Industries had always been notoriously tight-lipped when it came to PR, and this was some bad PR), but there were already rumors floating around that those impulses had actually come from the labs. That the company had been testing something that maybe they shouldn’t have been testing, that something had gone wildly out of control.
Seokjin didn't know what that meant, if those rumors were true, but he also figured it was very likely that it was all just the conspiracy theories side of the internet filling in the vacuum of actual information.
Regardless of what was the truth, it felt pretty safe to say that those same electrical impulses that’d maybe been the cause of everything had been what took out Seokjin's phone. Unfortunately, he wasn't sure if it was dead for good or if it would come back to life in the morning.
Once Seokjin was cleared by his family to head to bed, he just plugged it up on the bedside table, hoped for the best, and fell onto his soft mattress, exhausted. He'd already used his brother's phone to text Hoseok that he was okay and would see him on the way to school tomorrow -- he was too tired to call and talk to him, when Hoseok would be just as worried and have just as many questions.
Seokjin exhaled sleepily into his pillows, then winced at the twinge between his shoulder blades. Right. He’d forgotten, he needed to check out his scratches and scrapes and try to tend to them somehow. His hands had already been cleaned and sprayed down with neosporin and bandaged appropriately, the scrapes turning out to be very superficial after the blood had been cleaned away. But he’d forgotten about the one on his back in all the chaos of coming home.
If the scrape on his back looked particularly bad, Seokjin figured he could give in to his parents wanting to take him to the doctor's after all. But with how little trouble it’d given him in the past few hours, he didn’t expect much from it. Still, he had to try and clean it and check it out. Seokjin sighed, and grunted as he pushed himself up out of bed and trudged down the hall to the bathroom, feet dragging the whole way. He was tired.
Seokjin flipped on the bathroom light and tugged off his shirt, closing the door behind him. He rummaged in the drawers for a handheld mirror while yawning, mind wandering briefly to how hard getting through school tomorrow was going to be. He was going to be half asleep in all his classes, he thought idly while holding up the mirror just so. Turning and angling both the mirror and his body, he tried to get a good look at the injury so he could get a better idea of how it looked and what to do about it.
When he actually saw it, Seokjin nearly dropped the mirror in shock.
There wasn't a scrape there. That -- coolness that he'd thought was from the skin being scrubbed raw and bloody? That was because currently, sitting neatly on the curve of his spine, seamlessly attached and embedded in his skin like it'd been there all his life, was some kind of insect-looking...thing. Seokjin's heart pounded hard at the foreign sight. What in the world...?
Staring at it further, he noticed that it was shiny and a deep dark blue and sort of metal-looking -- and definitely an insect. A beetle, maybe. Seokjin reached back carefully and smoothed a finger over it, to see if it'd move or bite or something. It didn't. Made sense, since he'd touched it before, out in his neighbor’s yard, and nothing had happened. It only sat there, protruding as the exaggerated ridge he'd earlier thought was just his vertebrae.
It was on a ridge of his spine, taking up the space right below the start of his neck and spanning about halfway down the skin between his shoulder blades, not that big but very noticeable. The area all around the protrusion was tender still, the skin and the muscles (and the bones, even) faintly throbbing now that he was focusing on it.
So, he thought, oddly calmly. So, he had debris embedded in his -- spine, basically. He'd have to go to the ER after all --
And then, it happened. Unexpectedly, strangely, and without warning. There was a clicking sound inside his head. Very distinctly inside his head, like a chorus of cicadas. A chorus of mechanical cicadas.
Seokjin paused, breath caught in his chest. That...was strange. He wondered if he should be scared, be freaked out, be screaming. As of right now, he was only distantly wary, because he was so out of his depth that he could only think faintly, 'Am I about to drop dead because my spine is severed or something?’
The clicking sound happened again, less a chorus and more a vocal fry of chittering. Still totally foreign, but -- but Seokjin was somehow getting the distinct feeling that it was...words? It was the sound of words that he wasn't understanding.
...But wow, that was a dumb thought. He was overtired and hurt and thinking weird things, was all. "You," Seokjin told his reflection. "Are crazy. Let's go show Mom and Dad, and -- "
The clicking, chittering, whirring sounds were instantly back and more urgent, and suddenly Seokjin blinked and saw -- blue, everywhere. Like a steady, bright glow coming from just behind his eyes, whiting out his vision a second time tonight. There were glimpses of images and impressions that Seokjin couldn't catch and couldn't recognize --
-- And then, in the next blink, he was staring up at the ceiling of his bedroom.
What...? Seokjin tried to say, but immediately found that he couldn't open his mouth and say it. It was like his body wasn’t his own, and every order he sent out to it, to move or roll over or scream, was carefully suppressed and neatly filed away into a box in the corner of his mind labeled, Oh, that's nice, but anyway. What was this?
He couldn't say it, so instead he thought it, angrily this second time, and for some reason he knew to think it at the insect on his spine. 'What is this?'
The insect -- it had to be the insect, the beetle, making those sounds and moving his body for him -- clicked and whirred back. It sent more impressions, the faint aura of calmness, and Seokjin only sent his own, angry impressions back. If he couldn't understand it, it probably couldn't understand him. Fine. Didn't mean he was going to take blacking out and being controlled like a puppet laying down.
Well. Figuratively. Since, literally, he was laying down right now, though of course against his will.
Seokjin entertained the thought for a moment, that he was out of his mind. That he was concussed. Maybe he'd actually blacked out and his body had moved autonomously? Maybe he just couldn't recall the past few minutes of putting his shirt back on and walking calmly back to his room and laying down on top of his sheets. Maybe he couldn’t move in some sort of sleep paralysis type deal. But something told him that no. No, his gut was right and it was this insect pulling his strings.
Seokjin sent more angry, annoyed thoughts. The insect sent back a flash of emotion of its own -- and was that exasperation? Seriously? -- and Seokjin only had a second to be confused and then momentarily livid, as he felt the insect tweak something in him (in his...neural pathways, maybe? He wasn't a science buff) that had Seokjin fading out into unconsciousness.
‘I can't believe my body's being hijacked by -- by a freaking *beetle*,’ he thought at it with all the outrage in the world, before he completely dropped off into a heavy, dreamless sleep.