Continuum

열아홉

And people thought BTS was crazy. This group of howling lunatics was insane, Taehyung decided as he held onto the handle of the door with a death grip. The Ferrari he, Hoseok, and Jeongguk were in was speeding through the city streets of Seoul/Tokyo at a rate that could not be safe.

The other boys didn't seem bothered by the speed at all. Next to him, Hoseok pulled out his phone and scrolled down an app that looked a bit like Twitter. In front of him, Seokjin hummed softly. Jeongguk's face was covered with shadows.

"Um, aren't we going a little fast?" Taehyung asked, hoping his voice didn't sound as shaky to the others as it did to him. "What if there are cops around?"

Seokjin laughed. "Where have you been living the last decade? There haven't been police pulling over people in years."

Well, okay.

"So," he started nervously. "Where do you guys come from? What do your parents do?"

Hoseok turned the screen of his phone off, which was nice. The glow it had been giving his face was creepy. "I'm from Aomori," he said. "My parents were store owners."

"Were?"

"Were."

"Way to say it gently, Hobi," Seokjin said with a scoff. "I'm from Omotesando, so not too far from here. I was born into money, technically, but then my parents got scammed and we lost pretty much everything, which is how I ended up here."

There was a moment of silence before Jeongguk spoke up. Taehyung hadn't been expecting him to. "Chiba," he stuttered out. The car went into a brightly-lit tunnel, and only then did Taehyung notice that the younger boy had a white-knuckled grip on the black leather steering wheel. Whatever that meant, it couldn't be good. "My parents were fish merchants, just like everyone else, for a while." He paused, and Taehyung heard as his wrists cracked when he moved them. "But then they decided to try their hand at a new business... farming."

"Farming?" Taehyung repeated.

"But only one type of plant - poppies."

Hoseok sighed. "He means they sold opium on the black market," he whispered.

Well, holy fucking shit.

"Problem was," Jeongguk continued. "While they were great the production of the plant, they weren't very good at selling it in secret. So a few years into what they were doing, our house got some cops knocking on the door. Which is why I shall be wearing this until I die," he said, raising his right wrist, revealing what appeared to be a bracelet, but had a small flashing light on it.

"Is that a tracker?" Taehyung asked.

Jeongguk nodded and put both hands back on the wheel before hitting the gas pedal and making the car go impossibly faster, bolting the Ferrari out of the tunnel and back into darkness and shadows.

Taehyung triple-checked that his seatbelt was fastened. "What about the others?"

"Jiminie's also from Chiba," Hoseok said. "But his story is the typical backstory there. Fishing, poverty, etcetera, etcetera."

Seokjin took up the next person. "Yoongs, as you already know, is from Kanagawa. His parents were just regular laborers, so he wasn't incredibly poor or anything like that, there just wasn't anything for him there, so he came to Tokyo in hopes of finding something. But, for being so smart, the guy's really quite often an idiot, and when he got here, decided to gamble with some guys that he didn't know would rob him blind. So, like most of us, he signed the contract out of desperation."

"And Joon," Hoseok started. "Is complicated. He was raised in Shibuya with some other boys by an all-male Yakuza group."

Taehyung blanched. "Yakuza?!"