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When Seokjin was young, his father had brought him along to visit a museum where it's main attraction was a wax princess; Sleeping Beauty, to be exact. Her skin was pale and tallow, and her chest rose and fell as she 'breathed' with the help of the small motor implanted in her body.
Something about Yoongi and Jimin's stillness and pallor reminded him now of the wax girl. Both boys were laid partly covered with blankets on their beds, their only movements being their breathing. Seokjin's stomach dropped. It was his fault. All of these. If he had told Soyeon the truth, if he hadn't tried to protect him...
The older Kim sibling ran a hand through his hair in distress. He longed for nothing more than to see their fingers moving, or a twitch of their facial muscles, anything to assure him that everything was going to be okay-
"Are they...going to be alright?" he said in a half-whisper. He sounded vulnerable, terrified. Nothing a second-in-command of a powerful clan should sound like.
His younger sister was huddled in a corner of the big empty room, her back against the wall, legs drawn up. She had her head lowered until she was spoken to.
"I don't know," The neutrality of her voice hurt Seokjin. "You're the medical student."
"Yeonie-"
She looked up, her face completely devoid of any sort of emotion. "Yoongi likes familiar things. He won't know where he is when he wakes up. We should make sure something he likes is next to him."
"His bag in there," Seokjin pointed to the closet between Yoongi and Jimin's beds. Without looking at him, Soyeon got to her feet and went over to it. She unzipped the black duffel and took out a fistful of something colored and thin, like ropes. A pair of earbuds spilled from her grip, and on the metal of it were three sets of tiny initials carved; MYG, KSY, KSJ.
KSJ.
His numb heart twinged in pain.
"Brother."
He turned to her despairingly.
"If you wanted the role of Clan Heir that badly, you could've just told me," she said. "All these unnecessary blood needn't be spilled." She pressed the back of one of her hands on Yoongi's forehead. "Did you really think Kim Taehyung would let you live after he killed me? You're supposed to be the smarter one of us two, brother. His goal is to be the Clan leader. He will not let you stand in his way."
"I know, it's just-" His heart pounded furiously in his rib-cage as he struggled to form his reasoning into words mentally without sounding absolutely ridiculous.
"Then why did you try to hide his identity from me?" The blankness of her face clenched Seokjin's heart again. "Don't you dare tell me you don't know it was him. Irene unnie told me she'd trusted this information to you because you'd claimed that you would kill him in her place." She twisted around slowly, "And, Seungmin told me Park Jimin paid you a visit when i was out. He confirmed that the one who sent the killer was Taehyung, didn't he?"
