Beyond Repair (Min Yoongi)

3. Hello, Old Friend

Four and a half months.

That's how long Yoongi had been missing.

Four and a half months, from October third to February twentieth.

It had taken less than half a year to reduce a fun-loving, carefree musician to something less than human. When the officers told him how long it had been, Yoongi had a hard time believing it.

Four and a half months.

It felt like four and a half lifetimes.

He had missed Christmas, he noted immediately, and Thanksgiving, Halloween, the New Year, and three of the members' birthdays. Had they celebrated without him?

Yoongi shook his head. He had to quickly divert his thoughts from them. They were too painful to think about at a time like this.

"Yoongi? Are you okay?" Nurse Isobel asked, snapping him back to the present.

Yoongi blinked up at the people around him, all of them staring at him in some mixture of confusion and concern, and drew his hand back into his lap from where it had wrapped protectively around his neck. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay, sweetie, you didn't do anything wrong. We just want to ask you some more questions," Officer Armstrong assured him.

Yoongi just nodded. His skin suddenly felt too tight for his skeleton. He felt like, any second now, his bones were going to erupt from his body one by one, like baby snakes hatching from their eggs.

"So, starting from the beginning: did you know who abducted you?" Officer Holt asked.

"Ab...abduct?" Yoongi said hesitantly, unfamiliar with the English word. He had hit himself before it even registered to anyone that his hand had left his lap.

"Hey, it's okay. You have permission to talk, remember? You don't have to hurt yourself," Holt told him. He waited for Yoongi to nod his understanding before explaining. "What I meant was, before your kidnapper took you, had you ever met them?"

Yoongi shook his head. Until he had been stolen away from his life, he had never seen the man responsible for ruining it. He was sure he never wished to again.

"Alright, do you have any idea why you were taken?"

Of course not. If he had known someone was after him, in the first place, Yoongi might have been able to protect himself. He would have stayed home that day or taken a bodyguard with him. If he had known what he had done, what he was being punished for, maybe he would have been able to ask forgiveness for whatever crimes he'd somehow unknowingly committed against his owner instead of paying for his sins with his soul.

It was a stupid question, at least in Yoongi's opinion. He obviously couldn't say that, though, so he just shook his head again.

"You didn't owe anyone money? Your family and your company don't have any enemies?"

Yoongi shook his head again.

"Alright." Holt wrote something down.

"Okay, so, we know you were drugged during your captivity, but do you remember anything? Anything relating to the way you were taken?" Armstrong asked. "The vehicle, how many people were involved, where it took place?"

Yoongi nodded.

"Are you able to tell us what happened?

Yoongi brought his hand up to tug on his hair so he wouldn't lose what remained of his sanity as he forced himself to think back on how all of this had begun. "I thought I was safe," he started. And hadn't that been his first mistake, to begin with? His guard had been down—after all, who kidnaps a person in broad daylight?—and he hadn't noticed there were no possible witnesses around until it was too late.