Jeongguk is not immediately able to figure out where he is when he wakes up. There's a huge gap in his memory that begins a little while after he enters the club. He doesn't recall going home, nor does this room feel like home. Or anyone else's home. It's too bright and smells of chemicals. When a woman in seafoam scrubs leans over him, he realizes.
I'm in the hospital.
Why am I in the hospital?
The woman says something to somebody across the room, but Jeongguk's head is too foggy to make out what she's saying. Then she turns her attention to him and Jeongguk finds himself struggling.
"—ou—ear—e?"
God, this is fucking insufferable.
"...an you... ear me?"
"Can you hear me?"
Ah, yes. Yes, now he can. Finally. Jeongguk parts his lips, but his tongue feels like it's been glued to the roof of his mouth and the most he manages is a strangled, indecipherable noise. He does hear her, he does. Despite his lack of comprehensible response, she seems satisfied that he acknowledged her at all, and says something else to the person across the room.
Things seem to fade in and out for a little while after that until somebody new enters the room and comes over to take a seat on the edge of Jeongguk's bed. It's him, and Jeongguk can't figure out whether to be happy or not.
"Wh're's 'min?" he mumbles stickily.
"Outside," Zodiac replies. "He started crying again, though, so he wanted a few minutes to calm down."
The assurance that Jimin is, in fact, somewhere in the building and wants to see him settles Jeongguk a little bit. "M'kay."
"Do you know what happened?"
Mutely, Jeongguk shakes his head, but even that little movement causes the whole world around him to swim.
"You got really drunk," Zodiac says, "and overdosed on cocaine."
Jeongguk's heart stops. He what? That wasn't what he... He doesn't— "Don'... 'member."
"You called Taehyung at some point last night, and he called me, but we were in New York by then," Zodiac explains. He pauses for a few moments, looking down at the floor. "This is probably the part where I should embellish a little bit to make myself look better, but it's not very likely that I'd be able to get anyone to corroborate my story. I told Taehyung to fuck off because I was pissed that Jimin left to drive back home, and I didn't give two shits what was happening to you."
They hadn't agreed on a set time frame for Jimin to be away, but Jeongguk assumed he would be the one contacting them once the deed was done, and even though that had gone down... last night, evidently... he doesn't remember contacting Jimin afterwards. "Why was he coming back?"
Zodiac sneaks a quick glance at him. "Dutch told him to."
"Why? 's not what we agreed."
It takes Zodiac a long time to answer. He's been more tight-lipped about Dutch than usual. Their relationship was always something that Jeongguk, try as he might, could never truly be a part of. Even when all three of them were together, it was Zodiac and Dutch, featuring Jeongguk. In Zodiac's perfect little world, Jeongguk was just as enamored with Dutch as he was, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Jeongguk tried to make friends with him at first, but Dutch shut him down at every turn. Dutch was mean and abrasive and used the fact that Zodiac would leap the moon for him to get whatever he wanted—more sex, more attention, to cut out whoever he didn't like from their lives. But, in Zodiac's opinion, Dutch was perfect. Jeongguk was allowed to fuck him, like it was some kind of special privledge, because Zodiac was just so fucking in love with him that he couldn't even comprehend the idea of someone else not worshipping the ground Dutch fucking walked on.
