hide your heartbeat - vmon/taejoon

fact #10

words: 1840//

10. Kim Taehyung is his soulmate.

He stands in the empty hallway, his fingers hovering above the screen as he waits for Soha's response, and watches the little three dots dance together until they stop. He frowns, wondering if she was too busy to text him back right away, and then he realises that everything has stopped.

The entire world has gone silent.

He pockets his phone and looks at the first door, which leads to Hall 5. No sound is coming from behind it, but Namjoon can swear that—

Has he gone deaf?

He runs towards the next door — Hall 6 — because it's the most familiar place in this entire building, and he opens it. He's not deaf, because the door creaks painfully and he can hear it, but he doesn't feel relieved. It's loud—

It's loud enough to echo through the deserted hallway behind him and the frozen hall before him. The lights are on and there are people — but they aren't people. Namjoon's eyes widen and he hesitantly walks inside. They're frozen, all these people. They're mannequins. Artists with paint brushes held mid-air, models who have probably been frozen since before whatever the fuck has just happened, and—

There's a boy with a scared expression on his face; his eyebrow furrowed together, his eyes bulging out, his mouth hanging open in a gasp. Namjoon circles him; he's squeezing a paint tube a little too hard, and there's paint. In the air. There's an actual lumpy string of red paint hanging in the air, shooting from the tube clenched between his fingers.

Namjoon reaches out his hand slowly and touches it. It is paint. It feels cold, and it gets stuck on his fingers. He wipes it on the first dirty cloth he sees, but his fingertips are still stained red.

Namjoon stares at his hand. He can move.

"Hello?" He says experimentally. Nothing happens, but he can hear his voice, and he can hear its echo in the hall. He can move, he can breathe, and he can make sounds. He pulls out his phone, tries to unlock it, but the screen remains black. He tries again, but it's to no avail and — that's confusing.

It should work, but it won't. It's supposed to work — he has just used it, and it was still on when this — this happened.

"What the fuck?" He voices, then looks around. He doesn't know what to think. When he was a child, he dreamt of this — he wanted to wake up someday and find the entire world empty so he could just hit the road and live entirely on chocolate bars stolen from empty grocery stores, but this is not what his dreams had once entailed. The world isn't empty. The world is frozen, and for some reason, he isn't.

Maybe he's dreaming. He has decided to tell his mother that he's dropping out of med school and she took it fairly well, so, maybe he is dreaming?

He runs out of the studio and through the hallway, stopping only whenever he comes across someone frozen. He's about to leave the building — he needs to leave, he needs to see his friends, he needs to see if the entire world has frozen, he needs to wake up — when he hears something.

It's a sound he doesn't own.

Someone — someone — is banging on the doors while yelling incomprehensibly and — it hits Namjoon. The entire world is frozen except for him and this person and—

It's the universe intervening. He has a soulmate, and his soulmate is someone who has constantly avoided him. Or someone he has constantly avoided. The universe has personally gotten sick of this bullshit and decided to set them up together by freezing time.