Meridian ◈ Seungjin

31 ◈ Long Way From Home

Hyunjin fiddled with the Rubik's cube in his hands as he laid on Seungmin's bunkbed, flush on his back with an ankle folded over a raise knee as he waited for the younger to communicate. Rotating the colors, flipping the puzzle, slotting the separated levels of squares this way and that to find the optimal route for the optimal pattern, attempting to fit the clues together to paint the perfect picturesque portfolio on the children's toy. Or, not a children's toy. Is a children's toy? Seungmin argued with him anytime he mentioned that it was, but Hyunjin remembers the familiar package of the gadget stating that it was for those who were 'Three and Up'. So, technically not a children's toy, but heavily implied by the team and company which produced and developed the multicolored square of frustration.

He spun it around in his hands, inspecting the separate planes as he realized he managed to complete all nine squares of the red side. And the white side. And the blue. And the green.

Wait...

He flipped it to orange side.

Eight orange squares.

One yellow.

Hyunjin slammed his head back against the pillow beneath his hair, muffling a light scream into the back of his lips as his cheeks deflated miserably with the puffed anger.

Just as he was about to chuck the infuriating "children's toy" across the room and spill profanities so explicit that humanity would mark him as a failure, Seungmin wordlessly came to stand from the shared desk's rolling chair. The vampire clutched the Rubik's cube back to his chest and flipped his gaze to land on the human's bouncing strands as he fiddled with a few papers atop the desk, waiting patiently for the incoming string of epiphanies from Seungmin as the ruffled sounds of the pages rapidly moving across the surface of the desk occupied their silence. The human, unwilling to turn to face the older for one reason or another, or for multiple reasons which he didn't particularly care about, set the ruffled papers to the side. Hyunjin saw him lift a corner, the leverage of his fingers flipping through the stack as if it were a flipbook.

Finally, Seungmin stopped checking the papers and said, "A page is missing."

"What?" Hyunjin furrowed his eyebrows. He set the Rubik's cube down on the mattress next to him as he straightened out his legs and kicked them over the side, forcing himself to face the image of the human's back and sculpted shoulder blades through the white fabric of their uniform shirt.

"A page from the dorm logs is missing. I can't believe it's taken me this long to realize. The record suddenly skips a portion of the student body. There must be at least... Fifty, possibly seventy, student names missing here," Seungmin elaborated at the prompting question, his fingers once again coming to rifle through the stack of papers resting on the desk to ensure. To double check. To triple check. To confirm, he hadn't lost it yet. To reassure himself, that one of the necessary pages was, without a doubt in their eyes, missing from the stack of papers. He finally plucked the stack off the desk, ironing out the uneven bends in his grip as he turned to face the vampire sitting on the edge of his bunkbed, "Are you positive what you had grabbed was all that was in the security room?"

Hyunjin shook his head, afterwards murmuring in confirmation, "I grabbed what I saw."

"Then, we're missing a page. It could have been moved but seeing as how every other page is in order," Seungmin broke his sentence off. He gently bent the front page of the stack in his hand, his fingertip brutally shoving the inanimate paper forward to scan over the words on the log behind. His hip cocked to the side as his eyes slotted back and forth like the repetitive loops of a typewriter pressing out a inked novel, each line seeming to shove his weight farther to the side he leaned into, each line seeming to tilt his head farther to the side and prop his chin farther up as he inspected the words. Seungmin dropped the paper in order with the rest of the pages, his hold raising to present the stack up in his grip high enough for the vampire to see his deduction, "I'll assume there might be something on that page that someone doesn't want us to see."