Continuum

열다섯

Taehyung continued to send messages, his once-faded panic now returning in full force. Meanwhile, the user "Main BeThSce" just stayed online, never messaging back. For some reason, it seemed as if this person was just watching these messages coming in. Maybe he - or she, for all Taehyung knew - just thought he was crazy. Hell, he thought he was crazy.

Hours passed.

And in a horrifying moment, the user went offline. Taehyung was definitely going crazy now. Just as he was about to start screaming or crying or both -

seokJ is online. Would you like to message?

seokJ: Where are you?

Seokjinnie-hyung. Thank God.

Thus began the typing mania. Taehyung felt a sense of security come over him as he wrote to Seokjin and, he assumed, the others.

If he had known what was about to happen, maybe he wouldn't have felt so safe.

When he was told he had to go meet the boys in Tokyo, he was confused, to say the least. But anything to be able to see them.

They seemed hesitant to speak to him at first. As time continued, they got more used to messaging him. He spent his time on that huge cargo freighter hiding from everyone and messaging them whenever his phone had battery life and there was a cell connection.

When there was a call that the boat was about to dock, he jumped out of his place in the bottom of the stern and ran up to the deck. What he saw confused him though. It wasn't the colorful skyline of Tokyo - it was a drab, small port city.

"Hey, kid!" a gruff male voice called. Taehyung stopped his gazing and looked for the source of the voice. An older, wizened man with long dark hair pulled into a ponytail was staring at him from several meters away at the edge of the boat. "You're the one that wanted to get to Tokyo, right?"

Taehyung nodded, and the man waved his hand at the truck. "My friends and I are headed there. We can give you a lift if ya need one." The boy nodded again, and saw the man and a few others his age, each with their own dark hair, piling various cargo into a rusted pickup truck that was probably once a bright cherry color, but had since faded into a dull brick red. When it seemed they were done placing items into the back, three of the men got into the cab of the car and the rest jumped into the truck bed.

One of them saw Taehyung and yelled, "C'mon kid, we'll take you where ya need to go!"

Taehyung got into the bed of the truck and settled down in between two large boxes, trying to ignore the stab in his heart that was caused by the fact that BTS had done just this while filming Prologue.

Riding in the back of a pickup truck isn't necessarily comfortable by any stretch of the imagination. Especially when the roads were filled with potholes and bumps. After a few hours of Taehyung hanging on for dear life and probably getting covered in bruises, one of the men tapped his shoulder. He looked up and the man gestured. "We're gettin' to the city. Have ya ever seen it?"

Taehyung nodded, but still shakily rose to his feet while attempting to not fall over due to the rough terrain. When he squinted his eyes, he saw the outline of a city. What surprised him though, was that he recognized the skyline, and more than one that he just visited. This was a city that he knew because he lived there.

Sure enough, as the truck entered the outskirts of the city and went further in, Taehyung became sure: this was Seoul. The city was different from what he knew in many ways, but it was Seoul. He was sure of it. And yet, they were calling it Tokyo.

Taehyung became acutely aware of his surroundings quickly and knew that he was close to the place he called home. "I'll get off here," he told the man who had spoken to him. The man stood with far better sea legs than Taehyung had and pounded his hand on the metal roof of the truck. The old vehicle pulled to the side of the road and groaned to a stop. Taehyung grabbed his bags and hopped off the truck bed onto the paved road.

"Ya sure ya know where yer goin', kid? Ya don' wan' a ride there?" one of the men asked.

In response, Taehyung smiled at them all, this one fully genuine as he felt his heart beating faster in his chest at the idea of being home. "No, thanks. I know exactly how to get there." He thanked them once more, and the old truck roared back to life and drove away from him down the road.

The boy walked down the roads that he knew by heart, even if they weren't where he had grown up. Out of a kindle of curiosity and a fire of hope, he took a detour to find the BigHit building. He wasn't sure what he was expecting, (perhaps the same exact building as he knew,) but what he saw certainly wasn't it. Instead of an industrial company headquarters, all that was there was a dilapidated, abandoned gas station.

For some reason, that was the moment that this all became real. The moment that Taehyung realized that what was happening wasn't a prank or a dream. The reason he knew his friends, the thing that made him V of BTS, it was gone. It wasn't there.

If it wasn't there, then what he was he? Who was he?