Blood Ink ✔️

63: Family Kills Family

Jungkook steps closer to the monitor, his fingers pulling slightly away from yours.

For a moment, the screen goes completely blank with a gray mist of dust and rubble, flooding through the room and blanketing the camera like a sandstorm. Eventually, the particles start to clear away, leaving the camera lenses speckled with grit but functional.

Something vague and corporeal shifts in the dust still hazing the doorway.

With wide and gleeful black eyes, Jungkook watches as a familiar figure steps cautiously through the gloom and into the camera's picture.

The muted tones of the monitor cast the high angles of Jung Hoseok's face into sepia and ash-grey, his hair a murky brown streaked through with pale dust. The darkness of his clothing and hair make him momentarily blend into the rubble still drifting around him.

A shade amongst shadows.

Hoseok flushes out of the ash cloud and into the room like some grand hero, his shoulders back, spine straight and proud, clad in that sharp-cut tux that outedges his slender figure.

For an unending second, pride swells in your chest, almost to a breaking point.

There he is - your luck and your friend, the unexpected, uninvited, unstoppable force.

The dark horse, out to play.

Then Hoseok sucks in a lungful of air, and loses any intimidation factor he could've just gained.

He breaks into an epic coughing fit, face creasing in distress at the sudden attack of dust particles, and clutches his chest like he's dying. The wheezes of his breath are silent through the monitors, but his body wracks with the coughing in a visible ode to allergies.

Jin sighs.

Your father tilts his head, watching with distant fascination as Hoseok starts crying - a result of the grit in his eyes as well as his violent coughing fit. "One of yours, I presume?"

Jimin grins with a fierce, angry satisfaction, unperturbed by his hyung's unfashionable entrance, and Namjoon's eyes have gone flat to calculative brown slits.

You exchange a glance with Jin, whose lips are pursed up into half of a smug smirk, and half an embarrassed grimace.

When did Hoseok even get away? You ask with your eyes, narrowing them in question.

Jin shrugs, just as clueless as you.

As his coughing finally begins to subside a little, Hoseok peeks his head in through the wreckage and looks around with surprise, as if the wreckage is unexpected. He looks up and down, left and right at the blasted remains of the door, lifts a single eyebrow, and nods in impressed satisfaction.

"I made that bomb." Yoongi grins proudly. "It was just a prototype, but I think I've got a knack for it."

As he's speaking, Hoseok finally spies Taehyung and the man with the knife. They watch each other through the hazy dust, Hoseok's stance loose and ready.

Taehyung's eyes are wide above his gag, diving between his friend and his captor in bloody, scarred exhaustion.

Hoseok's opponent squares off to him.

The man's knife is a deadly flash of monotone on the screen, and he swirls it in his grip in a way that means he knows how to use it. Worry sprouts a bloom in your chest at the obvious skill of knife handling. Hoseok watches him for a moment, tilting his head at the knife, then at the man using it.

Then he shrugs, pulls a handgun out from the hem of his pants, and shoots the man in the chest.

"That settles that," Jin mutters as the man falls like a downed tree, sending up a puff of dust when he smashes to the ground.