Continuum

-きゅう

 The group stared at the stream of messages for several seconds. The heater in the room had started churning away, creating an ambient hum that filled the silence in the air nicely.

"Why does he call you that?" Jeongguk asked after a long time. "'Hyung'."

Seokjin thought for a long time, unconsciously tugging on the earring hanging from his right earlobe. "Maybe it means something else to him?"

"If it were to mean something else in a language besides Japanese, why would he use it?" Yoongi countered. "He understands that we're Japanese, right?"

The oldest boy in the room buried his face in his hands. "Who the hell knows?!" he cried out. Immediately, the boys closest to him jumped and shifted away, their eyes wide. It wasn't unusual for Seokjin to yell or to swear (he did both often), but he never took it out on one particular boy. It was always all or nothing for the boy's rage.

Mentally noting that he needed to apologize soon, Seokjin took the tense silence as a chance to think. An insane fan or not, this was not what Seokjin had signed up for when he'd taken this job. Though, to be fair, he had - and did - put up with a lot of things that he hadn't signed up for. All he had signed up for was a nice paycheck. So, of course, meeting the other boys had been something he hadn't signed up for.

And yet, they were now a part of his life.

The Universe has a funny way of doing that to people.

"Calm down, Jinnie," Jimin said, in a soothing tone that was both cold and soft, if that made any sense. The slight hitch in his breath helped.

Seokjin gave the younger boy a look, but didn't say anything. He understood what he had done wrong. He gave Yoongi a quick apologetic glance, who smiled a bit and shrugged with just his shoulders.

Ah, Yoongs. Always the silent, understanding one. Except when he wasn't.

"Hey," Jeongguk said, snapping the fingers of his right hand twice. "Back to what we were doing?"

"Folie à deux," Namjoon muttered quietly.

Even though he wasn't looking at the boy, Seokjin could once again actually hear Hoseok rolling his eyes as he sighed. "That isn't what this is."

"How would you know?" Namjoon asked. "The whole point of shared psychosis is that the people involved don't know it's happening."

"Shut up, Joon," Yoongi said under his breath. There was no malice in the words, of course. When the same words are repeated hundreds of times, they sort of lose any and all meaning.

Namjoon huffed. "Myopic zombies, you are."

The oldest boy in the room looked back at the computer screen and sighed. This boy - Taehyung - needed help, there was no denying that. But what could the boys do? Despite the bravado they carried with them at all times for the sake of the show, they were all kept on a too-tight leash. There was absolutely no way any of them could go and find Taehyung and help him figure out -

Seokjin blinked.

Well, there was one idea.

"Hey," he said, chewing the inside of his left cheek in thought as he turned to the people behind him, "are we sure this guy isn't a Svengali? And I mean, absolutely sure?"

They looked at each other, silent conversations and shrugs being passed around, and eventually they all nodded.

"Pretty sure," Jeongguk said.

"You guys want to hear a painfully obvious and even more painfully stupid idea?" Seokjin asked, keeping his tone sarcastic.

"Oh, goody," Yoongi muttered.

"What if we ask him to come here?"