Continuum

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The scene when Seokjin got home was the usual chaos - the younger boys screaming at each other, the older two yelling at them. (Honestly, it was his apartment. Why did they spend so much time there?) He observed the scene for a few minutes, softly humming a tune. Even though they were running all around, they didn't seem to notice him. (Which he was entirely fine with for the time being.) It wasn't until he realized that they seemed to actually be arguing over something instead of just their usual bickering that he felt he should intervene.

He cleared his throat gently, making sure his internationally-known vocal chords were in proper working condition, then - "SHUT IT!"

The effect was immediate. Yoongi and Namjoon stopped yelling at each other; Hoseok dropped Jimin, who fell with a squawk and landed on the floor with a thump; Jeongguk hopped off the top of the refrigerator. (Which was normal. The boy had an odd habit of ending up places where he really ought not to be. For example, Hoseok, who lived a few rooms away, had once entered the condominium at three in the morning reporting that Jeongguk was sleeping in a janitorial closet on the fourth floor of an adjacent building that he notably did not live in.)

"Hullo, Jin," they said in unison from exactly where they were, be it the floor of the living room or the conjoined kitchen.

Seokjin looked at all of them. "So, what happened now," he deadpanned. "And why are you-" he pointed to Jeongguk, "here? I thought you were going out with friends."

A few of them glared at each other. Sensing that another round of fighting was approaching, Seokjin raised a dyed eyebrow. "The first person who speaks to someone other than me spends the night out handcuffed to a rail on my balcony." All five of the boys shuttered at the legitimate threat, knowing how cold it was supposed to be that night.

"Taehyung," Jeongguk said, and once again, the boys flinched.

Seokjin rolled his eyes. "You guys were talking about that before. Who or what is Taehyung?"

"It's a person that keeps messaging us," Namjoon said quickly before worriedly looking at Yoongi, as if he were asking for permission to continue speaking. "We think it's a he, so we've been calling him he."

The oldest boy in the room didn't understand why this was such a large discussion topic. "So an overzealous fan hacked into our private computer messaging account. So what?"

"But that's not it!" Jimin squeaked, picking himself off the carpet. His eyes had a strange sort of wildness to them. "He's not - it's not - it's not like a fan."

"What."

"Taehyung seems to know us," Yoongi said. "He keeps trying to tell us that he knows us, that we know him. Personally."

Seokjin scoffed and pulled off his jacket to put it in the closet. "Great. So a crazy overzealous fan hacked into our private computer messaging account. Hope you guys didn't have anything on there that the public can't find out about."

"There's something else," Hoseok said. He was fidgeting in the way that he always did when he was nervous about saying something, which was looking down at the ground and scratching his arms raw. It was rare for him to be doing such a thing, so Seokjin began taking what his boys were saying seriously for the first time.

He grabbed Hoseok's wrists to stop him from scratching his arms. "What 'something else'?"

"We think he might be Korean," Yoongi said.

Seokjin's blood ran cold. "What?!"