Monsters Within Us || Taekook AU

둘

Jungkook drops his overnight bag on the floor of the unfamiliar room and exhales. It’s been almost forty-eight hours since Tae disappeared and he couldn’t stand it any longer, staying at home feeling useless.

Unexpectedly, he found this place thanks to a notepad on his boyfriend’s nightstand. He was searching for possible answers when he realized something was written on it. The original note had been torn off but the imprint of it was still visible. Some simple detective work revealed an address pointing him to a budget inn, only a twenty-minute drive out of the city.

It’s not a typical place for either of them to be familiar with. They’ve never stayed here, nor talked about staying here. It’s an anomaly in their lives, a completely random name that just happened to show up in their home, written down for reasons only Taehyung knows. Jungkook has no choice but to treat it as a clue.

The inn is nowhere near fully booked at this time of year. The place is fairly peaceful so he might as well use it to regroup before he rushes into anything. He must stay calm and think things through.

The room is nothing more or less than what the one-night price promised. There’s only one window, permanently frosted with a duct-taped crack running through it. A small TV sits in one corner, seemingly not hooked up to anything, and next to it is a mini fridge and a water boiler. A table has been stowed away to one side and there’s a small sliding cupboard for the futon. The room is a cube with thin walls and the floors are not exceptionally 'clean'. It’s fine for now. He’ll be leaving tomorrow anyway.

He drags the table to the middle of the floor and takes out his dinner (a gas station sandwich), his bottled water, and his phone. His phone has been turned off since yesterday because the notifications from friends and family eventually became too annoying. There’s obviously a layer of suspicion underneath their worry, a portion of blame that’s being pushed onto him as the longtime boyfriend. It’s not unheard of to blame the better half in disappearance cases. Jungkook is aware of this.

He turns his phone back on, quickly sets it to airplane mode, and pulls up his gallery. He scrolls until he finds a picture from last year, when they went on a trip to Seoul forest to see the deer.

Taehyung stands next to a large buck with magnificent antlers, one of the biggest animals in the park at the time. It was lingering behind the rest of the pack, only observing instead of begging for food, like it was above that sort of behavior. It had approached Tae slowly and in the end it was eating carefully out of his hand, an animal that was neither tame nor wild. It’s Jungkook's favorite picture.

He zooms in on Taehyung's face. He can see the sunlight in his hair and the sparkle in his eyes, even through pixels. He brushes his thumb over his smile, leaves a smudged print on his blushing cheek.

Jungkook went to the police, the morning after Taehyung's disappearance. He actively asked for help, despite not having much faith he’d actually get it.

“Missing person cases like these are a bit tricky,” the officer told him, an elderly man with a tired smile and faded laugh lines. He looked like he’d stayed one day too many at the station, stuck with paperwork, and was now just looking forward to his retirement.

“What’d you mean, ‘tricky’?” Jungkook repeated. “I’m telling you, this is out of character for him. Something’s happened.”

“You said there aren’t any signs of a break-in or a struggle, nothing’s missing or stolen, and there’s no ransom note – your partner just up and left, apparently.”

The officer sighed, his chair creaking as he leaned back.

“Tens of thousands of people disappear every year, by their own choice, because they don’t want to be found or because they want to start a new life somewhere else. I hate to break it to you but you might have to consider the possibility that he chose to leave. He’s a grown adult. I sympathize with you but if he wanted to disappear then it’s not required of the law to search for him.”

Those words were like a foreign language. They passed through Jeon's brain but he perceived them without grasping the meaning. He drifted out of the conversation, instead noticing a dead fly on the windowsill. It was just lying there belly-up, its crooked legs sticking up in the air, a dry husk of its former self. Up until its death it had probably been trying to break through the window and into the freedom on the other side of that strange force field. Jungkook had felt a bit like that fly in that moment. If he continued to butt his head against the window of that police station he’d eventually find himself belly-up, going nowhere.

The phone dims in his hand, leaving Taehyung's boxy smile in the shadows, and Jungkook takes himself out of the police station and back to his temporary room.