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They weren’t the same age, never even shared the same recess let alone classroom or lunch time, but Taehyung was perhaps the most acquainted with Kim Namjoon of any child in their town by virtue of their proximity. Not the boy next door, but the boy at his backdoor. The homes on their street were small enough that Taehyung, even at the ripe age of ten, could easily throw a stone from his backyard to Kim Namjoon’s. Mostly, he did it to irritate the old men who patrolled the street like they were the cops, but from it came a budding friendship and heartache that even if foretold, Taehyung would have never been able to ignore.
“That Kim Namjoon,” his father says while Taehyung kicks at his sister in the backseat of their car. “You both stay away from him, understand?”
It might as well have been an invitation hand drawn by his father to him.
Taehyung presses himself into the window to see a boy who looks a little older, definitely a little taller, sitting on a rope swing hanging off a lone tree in the front of a little house that his mother only had words of what she called concern for.
His body doesn’t move, but Kim Namjoon’s eyes follow Taehyung all the way down the street in their moving vehicle.
“He’s creepy,” his little sister says. Taehyung easily snags the front of her shirt with his foot without looking.
He does leave a muddy print on it though, so he gets in trouble all the same.
Kim Namjoon is an idea of a plaything just dangling in front of Taehyung, made all the sweeter by the fact that his parents, for whatever reason, do not like him. He thinks it maybe has to do with him being older, maybe even a little dangerous because he’s older.
Taehyung thinks it’s cool.
It’s too difficult to meet up with older kids at school, so Taehyung has to bide his time until his mom leaves him alone with his sister as babysitter while she runs her weekly errands that she refuses to let them come along for now that Taehyung is what they deem old enough. He knows it has less to do with that and more to do with the fact that his sister has a habit of picking up and opening packages she wants before their mom can stop her.
As soon as her car is out of sight, both he and his sister walk off in different directions. He knows his sister is going hardly any further than he: her neighborhood friend lives just down the block although she always insists on riding her bike there despite the short distance, something he always yells at her for because she then leaves it in the front yard where someone will see and potentially rat them out.
But Kim Namjoon’s house is so close.
It isn’t as nice as others in the neighborhood; the front is full of dead things, leaves so withered they look older than Taehyung. They crunch delightfully under his feet, so he runs and stomps on them in lieu of knocking on the front door. Behind him, the rope swing swings and there’s a word for it that Taehyung can’t remember but it looks like something else entirely.
They have a stone wall backyard like most of the homes, but this one is dark, almost black, but not everywhere. In some places, still red and tan. When Taehyung touches it, the black comes off on his hand, like dirt, but not.
“It was a fire,” Kim Namjoon says, head peeking over the wall down at him. Taehyung blinks up. There are holes in the wall, but he didn’t see anyone on the other side when he looked through a moment ago.
“Hi!” Taehyung puts one foot into a spot with missing bricks and pulls himself up so they’re face-to-face. “I’m Taehyung.”
“I know.” Namjoon smiles. His hands are black.
“My mom told me not to talk to you,” Taehyung says. “I wanted to talk to you at school, but I couldn’t find you.”
“I don’t go to school,” Namjoon replies.
“Really? Cool!” Taehyung smiles at him, getting a little closer to Namjoon’s face to see if he has any freckles like his.
He has one under his lip.
Or maybe it’s dirt? Namjoon doesn’t look particularly clean - his hands are black from whatever is on the wall and his pants have mud on them. There’s even something on his face that doesn’t look like a freckle, but when Taehyung reaches for it, Namjoon falls backwards off the wall.
When Taehyung heaves himself up over it completely, Namjoon grins up at him shyly.
There’s nothing in the backyard. “Do you want to come to my house?” he asks. “We can play video games. My dad likes them too so we have all the good ones.”
Namjoon shakes his head. “I’m not supposed to go anywhere.”
Taehyung frowns, looking around. “Are your parents home?”
“Adoptive.”
“Huh?”
“They adopted me. I have to formally address them by their first names.”
“Oh.” Taehyung isn’t even sure what that means. “Do you wanna -”
What’s something just the two of them can play? Namjoon’s bigger and older than him. He’ll have an advantage no matter what, and Taehyung wants to impress. “Wanna draw?”
“I don’t have anything to draw with,” Namjoon mumbles, but Taehyung can barely hear him and he can’t see his face.
“Yes, you do.” Namjoon looks up at him. Taehyung raises his hand.
His first introduction to Namjoon then ends like this: an hour or so later, an elderly woman, too old to be Namjoon’s real mom, Taehyung realizes, opens a back door to shuffle out and yell at them.
“What are you doing?” she screeches, barefoot outside. “What have you done?”
Taehyung giggles. He drew a butterfly on Namjoon’s cheek and a horse on an area of the wall that wasn’t as black smudged. When Namjoon hesitated to even touch a dot on Taehyung’s cheek, Taehyung stepped up to hug him and draw a little heart on his back to find later.
“Get out! Get out this instance!” the woman screams at Taehyung. She walks towards him like she’s gonna chase him, but she’s way too slow to catch him. He quickly scales the wall.
“See ya later, Namjoonie!” He laughs all the way home, where his sister arrives all of five minutes before his mother bustles through the door, hair undone from her bun. She takes one look at Taehyung and sighs.
“You didn’t sit on the couch, did you?”
He meant to bathe before she got home, he did. “Nope!”
She sends him off to the bathroom.
Taehyung, at the tender age of ten, just didn’t know that mothers might do more than that, adoptive or not.
He can’t stay away after that, even if Namjoon isn’t allowed to leave his house and his yard somehow becomes more and more sparse. The little rope swing one day is gone, and when Taehyung turns up later that fall with leftovers from Chuseok to share with Namjoon, the wall has been patched and scrubbed clear. Namjoon doesn’t come out that day, no matter how long Taehyung loiters beneath the side window he knows is the older boy’s. He tries quietly knocking, but nothing.
Taehyung wonders if he leaves the plate on the window sill if it will immediately fall or not. He just really wants Namjoon to try his mom’s songpyeon! She even made a batch in a special color for Taehyung, a slime green! He thinks they look like caterpillars, and Namjoon loves caterpillars.
The next day, he comes back, plate in place with only the faint residue to show anything was ever there. Taehyung assumes Namjoon ate everything, if not a bird was very clean.
But no matter the knocking, Namjoon does not answer or open the blinds over his windows. The next time he sees Namjoon he’s wearing the same clothing he always wears, looks overall very clean, but also - different.
“Joonie,” Taehyung runs up to him before he can run away. When Namjoon sees him, he waits patiently, a small smile for him. He hooks one finger around Taehyung’s pinkie.
“Thank you for the food. It was a treat.”
“What did you do for Chuseok?” Taehyung asks. It was weeks ago now, but Taehyung’s been busy because his mom enrolled him in piano lessons after school even though he wanted to learn the violin.
Namjoon doesn’t answer.
“Hey, do you play any instruments?” Taehyung asks, pulling at Namjoon’s hand so he can look at it. Maybe he can tell by looking.
“No. But I love music.”
“Everyone loves music!” Taehyung says. “There’d have to be something wrong with them otherwise.”
“My parents don’t like music.” Namjoon looks back at the house.
“You mean your adoptive parents.”
“Yeah.” Namjoon takes his hand from Taehyung. He’s probably too old to like holding hands.
“Do you want to come over for dinner? I don’t know what we’re having, but - my mom’s a good cook.” Taehyung shrugs.
“Taehyung -” Namjoon nervously wipes at the front of his shirt. It’s a men’s shirt, too big for Namjoon even though he’s bigger than him. Long sleeves that cover his hands even though they’re folded back, and there are tiny cigarette burns along the hem which comes mid thigh on him. “You know I’m different, right?”
“Whaddaya mean?” Taehyung asks. Someone at school told him about a boy who could never go outside because of how ill it made him.
Namjoon shrugs. “I guess you’ll find out.”
That’s the last time Taehyung stands out in Namjoon’s backyard with him. In days to come, he still stops by the house to run and jump to check if he might be outside in his backyard, but he never is. In fact, his parents have nailed plywood over all of the windows.
In his own home, his parents take him by the arms and expressly forbid him from going over there. His dad actually shakes him when Taehyung rolls his eyes, and the gaming console goes on vacation for a while. In his sister’s room, Taehyung can look out the window at Namjoon’s house without his parents spying on him.
“They always have all the lights on,” his little sister whispers to him. “I wish Mom would let me keep my light on all night.”
“What do you mean?” Those Kims never keep the lights on during the day. It always looks dark inside Namjoon’s house.
His sister doesn’t answer, busy brushing out her doll’s hair. Taehyung takes it from her. “Hey! Give it back, or I’m telling!”
Taehyung drops the doll on her bed and rolls out.
But he does look out the other windows in their house at night.
She’s right. They always have lights on once the sun goes down, just never any during the day.
Taehyung doesn’t see Namjoon or his parents for weeks. It gets cold out, then one day: “What’s that?” Taehyung asks. There is a group of people outside Kim Namjoon’s front door, and they’re dressed funny. Long black dresses, and they’re ugly.
Taehyung’s mother says nothing, but when they’re home and Taehyung tries to run outside to see if they’re still there, she snatches his hand. “Tae-ah,” she sighs. “I told you: leave that kid alone.”
“Why? He’s nice.”
She shakes her head, but Taehyung hesitates, because usually she raises her voice when she asks him, but today she sounds too quiet. “Those people at his door. Those are church people.”
Taehyung frowns. He knows lots of kids at school who go to church every week, but his parents do not and do not allow him to go with friends either. “Why are they there? They don’t go to church.” He says this because they don’t wear any of the cross necklaces that Taehyung is pretty sure they have to wear, but also they never seem to go anywhere.
“That Kim boy isn’t well, honey. I told you. You need to stay away from him.”
Taehyung still has no idea what she means, but he stays inside that afternoon, and the next when he’s out riding his bike with his little sister because she’s too little to go on her own, they pass Namjoon’s house and the lights are on inside.
On the other side of a boarded up window, curtains are jerked closed in an eye-catching motion that makes Taehyung swerve on his bike.
His sister goes in because it’s cold, but Taehyung makes loops up and down the street until his father comes out to tell him to get inside.
The next day is a weekend when Taehyung catches them - the church people, or a priest or a pastor, Taehyung isn’t really sure what the difference is, walking out the front door, all in a row, dressed in black head to toe in their robes, not dresses, his father told him. The priest has the biggest crucifix necklace around his neck that Taehyung’s ever seen. The others are nuns.
When they climb into a black car, both of Namjoon’s parents stand in front of their house and watch them drive away. Taehyung’s pretty sure his mother cries.
He’s pretty sure there is blood on the father’s hands.
All day Taehyung tries to watch their house. Their backyard touches theirs so he’s always watched the yard, but now he only has a couple of windows to stare at for changes that don’t come. This night, when the sun goes down, it stays dark inside.
That should be good. That should mean back to normal.
But then other people start showing up.
“Mom, why are all those people in front of their house?” Taehyung asks as they drive by. In front of Namjoon’s home there is a crowd of probably ten people, and because nothing ever happens in their part of the neighborhood, it feels like a lot.
“I don’t know, sweetie.”
Taehyung crosses his arms. “Adults aren’t supposed to lie either.”
She glances in the rear view mirror at him. Once inside the house, she quietly enters his room and sits on the floor with him. He doesn’t even notice the newspaper under her arm at first. “Baby, have you ever seen anything strange over at that house?”
“What? No. Why?” Taehyung squints thinking about the ashy bricks. That wasn’t too weird though.
His mother unfurls the paper in between them, and Taehyung, who has only ever looked at a paper for a school project, doesn’t even glance at it until she taps at the printed picture on the front page.
It’s Namjoon, but he looks even less like Namjoon than the last time he saw him. For starters, he is so thin that his eye sockets sink back in, insinuated by dark circles under them, so that he looks like a living corpse, which is kinda cool, but also kinda scary. In the photo he is neither smiling or crying, the two emotions Taehyung would expect to see in a newspaper; instead, his eyes are open and unfocused, his mouth open and slack, which makes him look almost more zombie like, but right behind him is a very large standing clock as big as him. A grandfather clock, he thinks. Taehyung’s never seen one in person, but he’s seen them in old movies and thinks they’re neat because they have surprises in them, given to you only at a certain time.
“Why’s he in the paper?” Taehyung asks because he can’t imagine anything interesting happening in their neighborhood, let alone at Kim Namjoon’s house. Is it because he has the coolest clock in South Korea? Where’d his boring parents get something like that, he wonders.
He wishes he could go inside and see it, but Namjoon told him before Taehyung isn’t allowed inside. Namjoon then joked he was barely allowed himself which didn’t make sense to Taehyung because Namjoon wasn’t really allowed outside either.
“There are… things happening at his house,” his mom says.
“What do you mean?” Things happen at every house.
“Strange things, honey. Things that might scare other people,” she says, and Taehyung’s mother, who usually doesn’t sit on his floor to talk to him or talk to him longer than two sentences without sighing, sounds scared.
“Are you scared?” he asks, and his mom looks too surprised to answer. “Namjoon is my friend.”
“I told you - stay away from him!” She stands, taking the newspaper with her. “He isn’t your friend!”
But over the next week, more and more people show up at the Kim’s house. Not just people, but things too, like food left on their steps like the house is a monument to be honored or one morning, some red paint.
“Is that a crucifix too?” Taehyung asks, because he isn’t sure if all crosses are crucifixes, but his parents aren’t Christian or any religion so they wouldn’t know either.
His mom doesn’t answer and she speeds past the stop sign next to their house.
By the time Taehyung walks home from school, the red cross painted over their front door is mostly gone, but there are still some flecks of red. It looks almost like someone tried to scratch it off rather than paint over it.
“Dae at school says they’re a haunted house,” his sister says. She made him hold her hand while they walked past it.
In Taehyung’s mind, a haunted house means someone is buried out in the yard and their ghost in the house. He stares out the back of their windows into the yard and wonders if he could find the body himself.
He decides to go ask the only kid on the block with answers. “Do you know if anyone died in Kim Namjoon’s house?” Taehyung asks Min Yoongi, older, wiser, cool.
Yoongi grimaces at Taehyung; he’s thirteen and looks like he smokes but it’s only his older brother who does. Both Yoongi and his brother are always outside playing basketball and if you ask really nicely, they’ll buy ice cream for anyone.
At the very least, he usually has a smile for him.
“Possession isn’t real, and even if it were, that’s not how you get it,” he says. Today, he offers Taehyung some gum since it’s too cold out for ice cream.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“You’re asking about the homeschooled kid with the religious zealots for parents, right?” Yoongi squints.
“I guess. Kim Namjoon? He’s my friend but I haven’t seen him in a long time and now there are always people at his house when no one used to be at his house.”
Yoongi looks at the empty basketball court, and because he has no one to play, he tells Taehyung to follow him, and that’s how he, Kim Taehyung, gets invited inside the Min brothers’ home. It’s smaller than theirs, but no parents are around. His brother isn’t there either. Yoongi gives Taehyung some corn chee and pushes him to sit on the couch.
When he turns on the television, he says, “One of the news channels will have it on.. Just gotta wait…”
He flips back and forth between channels like they have a lot, but it looks like three. “Here it is.”
“He’s on TV!” Taehyung yells, then covers his mouth, because he didn’t mean to be so loud in someone else’s home.
Yoongi looks at him. “You haven’t seen this? Maybe I shouldn’t be the one…”
“No! I saw the newspaper!” Taehyung puts a hand on top of Yoongi’s with the remote and gives his best pleading-for-dessert puppy eyes. Yoongi sighs. Taehyung excitedly looks back to the television where Namjoon sits in a dim living room on the floor in between a coffee table and couch.
He’s just sitting there, doing and saying nothing. Taehyung knew the news was boring, but he didn’t know they’d just film a kid sitting at home. “What’s -”
“Just watch.”
For a long time, nothing happens. Namjoon doesn’t even blink. He just sits there, hunched over in a way that his mom would yell at Taehyung for. It’s quiet, but quiet in a way where Taehyung hears the silence because it’s a recording and it sounds like static that you don’t even know is there until the next sound which is a woman gasping.
Because on screen, behind Namjoon’s head, lights flicker, which doesn’t seem like anything to gasp at, but then a lamp sitting on one side of Namjoon suddenly flies across the screen in front of him, hitting the wall loudly although it is unseen off camera, and Namjoon still doesn’t move or blink.
“How’d it move?” Taehyung asks, because technically, he was watching that lamp the entire time. The segment repeats, this time cut back directly to the moment when the lamp seemingly leaps up out of nowhere.
“That’s the question,” Yoongi remarks, sitting back with his hands crossed on his tummy.
“Is it a magic trick?” Taehyung asks. The new story still seems to be about Namjoon, but now there is the priest that Taehyung saw on screen with Kim Namjoon’s parents. They’re all standing above him. “You said possession earlier. What’s that mean?”
“Possessed by the devil,” Yoongi says. “It’s a superstitious religious thing. The Catholic church. I don’t know. They think the devil lives in him.” He shrugs.
“Who? The catholic church thinks the devil lives in Kim Namjoon?” Taehyung has seen some movie clips before, especially last Halloween when he stayed over with his friend Yongsun. “Don’t they, uh, exercise them or something?”
“Exorcize, yeah.”
Taehyung remembers what the girl in the movie looked like. Dressed in all white, but with vomit all down her front and red eyes. Kim Namjoon doesn’t look like that - not exactly, but he does look different from the first time he spoke to him, and that wasn’t so long ago. “Pretty sure Namjoon doesn’t believe in god.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t think that matters.”
Taehyung walks home more confused than ever; he isn’t really sure how it’s all supposed to be connected. People who believe in god also believe in the devil and even though no one seems to believe god takes over bodies, they believe the devil can, and the devil doesn’t want to do more than knock some stuff over?
That night, the red paint on the door is gone, completely scratched off, and it looks like the scratches their cat leaves on the side of the furniture, like claw marks. No one’s out front right now, so Taehyung walks around the side of the house to Namjoon’s window. He heaves himself up so he can rest his chin on the ledge, well aware that the window will be closed and sealed tight, and he’s right. It’s dark inside, nothing to see. Taehyung idly traces a pattern on the window and hopes Namjoon will know he still thinks of him as a friend.
Through the curtains, a flight flickers on and off again. Taehyung pauses with one finger still attached to the window.
The light flickers so quickly that Taehyung doesn’t think he would be able to do that just by playing with a light switch. He presses his nose up to the glass.
THWACK.
Taehyung jumps - something hit the window on the other side so hard it echoes in his ears. He stands there, waiting, hoping.
The curtain peels back from the other side. Through the boards on Taehyung’s side, he beams, because there he is - Namjoon.
He looks like he did on TV - tired, thin, unhealthy, and Taehyung at his tender age hasn’t ever really thought about that someone before, that they look unhealthy, but the thing is Namjoon smiles at him. He smiles and waves, so Taehyung smiles and waves back, even if Namjoon looks a little like a zombie. Even through the dirty window, Taehyung can see that Namjoon’s lips are so chapped they look white, peeling, and there is red under his fingernails.
Namjoon reaches out, reaches out to put his hand on the glass. It’s a struggle for Taehyung to wiggle enough of his hand under a board, but he manages to mostly line up his hand over Namjoon’s.
As cold as it is out, Taehyung feels the warmth from Namjoon’s skin through the glass.
His parents put up these boards to keep them apart or to hide them away inside, but Taehyung is here, and he sees Namjoon.
He opens and closes his mouth; he said something, but Taehyung didn’t hear a word. The window isn’t so thick, he should be able to hear anything he says. “What?” Taehyung asks. Why is he just mouthing?
Namjoon’s eyes get bigger. He shakes his head and looks over his shoulder back into his dark room. Taehyung hears footsteps, so he would hear anything Namjoon said right in front of him.
“Namjoonie?” Taehyung taps at the window. Namjoon turns back to him, a tiny crooked smile overcoming a look of terror.
“Don’t forget me.”
That’s what Taehyung is pretty sure he hears. He hears the words just fine, muffled but fine.
“Joonie hyung!”
Something on the boy’s bed moves, jerks just once, then the top covering and everything on top of it sails off the bed. Taehyung gasps, not in fright, but in delight.
Namjoon doesn’t move to acknowledge it, hasn’t moved at all. His hand is still on the window, his gentle eyes smiling at Taehyung even as his mouth turns down.
Behind him, his bedroom door opens, but this time the culprit is there - Namjoon’s father stalks into the room. Taehyung barely gets a look at him before Namjoon yanks the curtain closed. It’s dark in the room without any flickering light, so Taehyung can’t even see a shadow across the curtain, but he hears more loud noises.
Hair stands up on the back of his neck. Taehyung takes a step away, then another. When another loud smack hits the window, he takes off running for home, he even runs through the back of their yard into his for the shortest route. It’s such a short distance, and yet Taehyung can’t quite catch his breath even in the safety of his kitchen. His dad is already home, scolding him for the dirt on the front of his clothes. His mother holds up the discarded shirt and looks at him, as if she can peer into his soul and see exactly where he’s been.
The next day, everything changes. There isn’t a crowd outside Namjoon’s home so much as a mob. The news is back, and not just the local news, but national news, their bulky vans blocking the entire street so no one can go anywhere other than by foot. When Taehyung’s father asks them to move so he can get their car out, a man gives him such a look that Taehyung hears his father curse for the first time ever, which is one of the scariest parts of it, up until the removal of Kim Namjoon.
“Is it another priest? Are they filming the exercising?” Taehyung asks. Now, all of his family stands and watches out the back window.
“No, honey, exorcism isn’t a real thing,” his mother says.
“Neither is the paranormal,” his father quips under his breath.
“What’s that mean?” Taehyung’s sister asks, and he’s glad she did. It’s past her bedtime, but they’re all watching because now there are people crawling over the walls in the backyard, filming through windows or crouching down to wait and surprise whoever comes out.
“Someone came from a university to see their son,” his mother replies, smoothing back her hair.
“Why? Because he’s scary?” she asks.
“Namjoon isn’t scary!” Taehyung protests. “He’s my friend.”
For once, neither of his parents say anything, but his father does ask the same thing as his mother the other week: “Taehyung-ah - have you ever seen anything strange at that house?”
“You mean like flickering lights and moving objects?” Taehyung replies.
His parents sharply look at each other, then his mom takes the bedtime dodger to her room and his dad puts one hand on his shoulder as if it’s a lie detector. “You saw it with your own eyes?”
Taehyung hesitates. He knows he wasn’t supposed to be over there.
“Kim Taehyung.”
“Yeah, I did.” He doesn’t want to lie about it or lie about Namjoon. Namjoon is his friend.
“Who else was in the room? Were you in the room?” he asks, his other hand coming to Taehyung’s second shoulder.
“I was outside, looking in - but it was just Namjoon in the room.”
His dad nods like he understands something even though everyone acts like they can’t understand at all. “Stuff just doesn’t move on its own,” Taehyung whispers.
“No, it does not.” His dad stands up. “It’s time for bed, I think.”
The man from the university is on the news the next afternoon, and Taehyung very bravely asks Min Yoongi’s older, even cooler brother if he can watch it at their place when he knocks and Yoongi isn’t home.
His name is Dr. Sung, and he’s a university professor who studies the paranormal, which includes a lot, Taehyung learns. Basically anything that can’t be explained, but an interview with the man explains that Namjoon is someone who displays telekinetic powers. There are clips of him teaching students, but also sitting behind people with things attached to their heads or hands. People playing cards and guessing numbers.
“Kim Namjoon is one of the most impressive cases I’ve ever seen,” he says on national television. “He is proof of everything we cannot see in this world, and more.”
And then there he is again - Namjoon on the television, but this time, it’s a phone, one of the old fashioned ones with a cord that looks like a pig’s tail, and it flies across the room in front of him with the professor sitting in an armchair across from him, face shocked but happy laughter.
“Wow,” Taehyung whispers to himself. When he puts his hand on the television, it isn’t quite as warm as it was feeling Kim Namjoon through glass. Somehow, that felt like the closest he’s ever been to the older boy, even if one time they held pinkies once.
“Hey kid - I gotta go, so you gotta go!” Yoongi’s brother yells at him, hand on the door.
Taehyung walks home - it’s a short walk - and sees the most people he’s ever seen in his neighborhood at one time standing in front of the Kim’s house. Some are yelling, a small group in the middle chants something, and a lot of people silently sway this way and that way as people struggle against each other. There are two police officers trying to push them back from the doorstep, but the most striking thing is that all of the windows are open. All the boards gone. Under the feet of the crowd, Taehyung sees the trampled goods of food and Bibles and pieces of the house. They move across these things like they can’t see or feel them.
“Taehyung!” his mother screams, running down the street towards him. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick!”
She holds his hand the rest of the way home just like Taehyung has to hold his sister’s hand. Inside their home, the curtains are closed.
Taehyung never got to say goodbye, is what he thinks. He goes to bed thinking of Namjoon and when maybe he’ll see him next but understanding it might not be for a while because he’s like a local celebrity now, but the next morning everyone is gone. There is a thick fog through the neighborhood, brought all the way in from the sea, and the crowd is gone and -
“Namjoon is gone?”
His mother sighs. Heavily. “Yeah, honey. They took him to Seoul.”
“His parents?” Hard to imagine them in any city, Taehyung thinks.
“No, baby.” She glances at Taehyung’s sister, currently struggling to do her own hair in front of her cartoons. “The people from the university took him.”
“Oh.” Taenyung recalls the news story about the professor and how he studied people like lab rats. “Are they gonna put things on his head to measure his brain waves?”
He thought his mother might laugh; she often does at his questions. “I don’t know, baby. Maybe.”
Taehyung thinks the fog is really cool so he presses his nose against the window on the way to school. Looking at it feels like looking into the pitch of his stomach - the same sort of vague unease when he thinks about how Namjoon is gone and he doesn’t know when he’ll be back.
The only people left in front of the Kim household are the Bible holders. “It’s black again,” Taehyung says.
It isn’t just the brick wall of the backyard, it reaches the house, ash wrapping its fingerprints all the way around the front to the doorstep. “There was a fire,” his mother says.
“Did the people outside cause it?” his sister asks, reaching for Taehyung’s hand even in the protection of the car. Why would the church people start a fire, Taehyung thinks to himself.
“No. No, the fire started inside.”
For months to come, Taehyung walks past Namjoon’s house and looks for signs of life. He still doesn’t see much of the old man or woman that lives there, and their mail and newspapers stack up for days at a time before they disappear. He knows they still live there, and sometimes the curtains will flutter, or sometimes a bit of fog rolls in through their backyard, but Taehyung doesn’t see Namjoon again.
There isn’t even a trace of him left, because there was never a trace to begin with.
He never sees any of the follow up newspapers. His parents probably didn’t hide them from him, Taehyung over time stayed busy growing up, playing sports and music, making all sorts of friends, and eventually, like so many of his peers, he moves after finishing school. They move out of that neighborhood when he’s fifteen so he never sees that the Kim house burnt down in its entirety, and all the ash before that was simply the blueprint for the final event.
He may think of Kim Namjoon from time to time over the years, but by the time Taehyung is near thirty he’s mostly forgotten the details of his earlier childhood in that neighborhood, all except Namjoon. Namjoon he remembers crystal clear - his hand on the window reaching for him, the items that moved on their own around him, and all of the people who came looking to see him.
As an adult, Taehyung has differing views about it, of course, mostly in the way that outsiders treated Namjoon and by extension his family. Some looked at him like a miracle, a visualization of all that they want to be true, but mostly they looked at him with fear or condescension, someone who faked it all.
If there is any part of Taehyung forever preserved from their short friendship, it is that Taehyung remains open and willing to consider any possibility. He isn’t a believer in the paranormal, per se, but he has friends who have seen ghosts and he doesn’t disbelieve them.
“So you think this kid really moved stuff with his mind? Or what - that something attached itself to him that could move things?” his friend Jeongguk asks, pierced eyebrow raised. Taehyung thought someone with that many piercings might be more open to it.
Namjoon comes up in conversation, of course. Any time someone talks about something mysterious, the best personal anecdote he has is Namjoon. Nothing else interesting of the sort has ever happened to him, but Taehyung can tell them about his friend who was on the news and was studied at SNU, not studied at SNU, but he was studied, the subject.
And Taehyung always shrugs at the skeptics. He can’t blame them, on some days has half a mind to join them, but he saw it. He saw it with his own eyes. When it was just the two of them alone, things happened. He also thinks often of that first day Taehyung approached Namjoon - of the black soot all over the dusty brick wall with punched out holes in it.
But of course the greatest mystery will always be how it is possible to find himself face-to-face with Kim Namjoon almost twenty years later. They aren’t even crossing paths, Taehyung has an appointment with a university archivist who will be showing him some of the works Taehyung requested months ago.
Kim Namjoon is literally his appointment.
He looks different - still tall but now wide to match it, healthy looking with healthy muscle mass, healthy fat on his cheeks. He wears glasses and has a laminated lanyard ID that could look dorky but somehow looks academic instead on him, but his hair is buzzed short like he wants to blend in with soldiers. He’s smiling at a coworker when Taeyhung’s stomach jerks and he realizes that those dimples would have been his gay awakening had they known each other maybe a few years later, but Taehyung at the time of their acquaintance was too young to question why he wanted to hold hands with him.
It’s clear Namjoon recognizes him too. He stops, mid stride, to look up, see him, mouth open, nearly dropping whatever papers he has in his hands. Sheepishly, he grins at him, a faint blush on his cheeks and shuffling his toes back and forth.
“Oh my god,” Taehyung says, mostly to himself. “You grew up shy!” He points, rather aggressively.
“Eh? I think I was always shy?” Namjoon chuckles, rubbing at the back of his fuzzy head. Taehyung would like to touch it too.
“I wasn’t.” Taehyung links his arm through Namjoon.
“And aren’t,” Namjoon mumbles, head ducked down like he forgets Taehyung is shorter than him so he’s looking up anyway.
Kim Namjoon may be the archivist with whom he has an appointment, but Taehyung gallavants through the halls like he is the one showing Namjoon around, giddy to see him again. He can’t believe it! Kim Namjoon.
“Taehyung-ssi-”
“We know each other, why are you speaking to me like that? Can’t I still call you hyung?”
Namjoon blushes bright enough that even in the specialty dim lighting for ancient artwork housed in the basement, Taehyung thinks he looks nice in pink. “Knowing each other as kids is different,” he says.
“Yeah, I would say it makes us forever linked!” Taehyung teases him, leaning into his space because Namjoon's body, despite all of the blushing, is actually quite open, shoulders and feet always pointing to him. He catches him leaning, doesn’t push him away. “Don’t you want to rekindle the flame?”
“What?” Namjoon barks, and he laughs.
“Of our friendship! C’mon. I know you’re the hyung, but I’ll pay for dinner.”
Taehyung does indeed pay, although he makes Namjoon pick the spot. He takes him to a hole-in-the-wall family restaurant where they split soup dumplings and scallion pancakes and Taehyung witnesses the abuse of an entire bottle of hoisin. Taehyung catches him up on his entire life story - not that there’s much to tell - and Namjoon patiently listens, bobbing his head along.
“Makes sense you became an artist,” Namjoon says, chin propped up in hand on the cramped bar they eat at. “Remember when you drew on my face? What was it that you drew - I never got to see before my mom scrubbed it off.”
“Butterfly, I think.” Taehyung sighs wistfully. “I assure you, my technique has improved!”
Namjoon quirks an eyebrow at him. “And your choice of canvas? Has it changed?”
Taehyung gapes. “Kim Namjoon!” he bellows, and the sole other diner in the restaurant jumps. “Are you flaunting innuendo at me?”
Namjoon squirms in his seat until Taehyung pitches over into him, and they both laugh. “I just, uh…” He does the thing Taehyung has only ever seen in anime, tapping his two thumbs together awkwardly.
“I’m gay, don’t worry,” Taehyung huffs. He also takes that moment to push back his hair because he knows it does things for him, and Namjoon, who has very little hair, does seem to notice, so it works.
“Oh. That’s good. For me, personally.” He nods. Taehyung nods. They both nod.
“Feels a little like fate, doesn’t it?” Taehyung asks him, then in Kim Namjoon’s bed in Kim Namjoon’s cute little apartment in Hongdae. It’s small but clean and filled with stacks of books on every flat surface and a small collection of Ryan stuffies around his bed which he seemed a little embarrassed of which only delighted Taehyung because he likes to think that means he doesn’t often bring people home like this.
Namjoon pants under him, both of their lips red and raw from the long walk home. Taehyung sits on top of him and looks around - if he’s honest, he hasn’t spent time thinking about what he thought Kim Namjoon would be like as an adult, but the cutesy items around him in a brightly lit room complete with a cloud shaped night light wouldn’t have been it.
“Meeting again?” he asks, lips following Taehyung’s any time they part.
He hums. “Meeting now, meeting then, right before you left.” Taehyung drags his hands down Namjoon’s thick chest. He jolts at the feeling. “I’m so glad we met.”
“Taehyung-”
“Namjoon hyung.” Taehyung kisses him thoroughly, until Namjoon moans and Taehyung quietly slips his fingers under his shirt to feel that glorious chest. “Fucking gorgeous, so big, so handsome.”
Namjoon blushing looks pinker here in this light. “So pretty,” Taehyung says, just to try, and Namjoon makes this sound that Taehyung hasn’t heard in a person before.
“I’m not, please don’t-”
“You are!” Taehyung takes the time to take both of Namjoon’s cheeks in his hand and give him a gentler kiss, just for now, just for this moment so Namjoon may know that he doesn’t need to be handsome, he can be pretty, or he can be both. “Baby, you can be pretty.”
He resumes earlier kissing - kissing with intent. Taehyung wants to unravel all of Namjoon and he hopes that he’ll be able to stay the night in this charming little room in this charming little apartment with this now charming man. Taehyung felt something earlier today when he saw Namjoon again; so visceral, like all of his insides were outside and he spooned them back in with flirtatious gusto in hopes that it might get him somewhere, and here they are.
Not so secretly, Taehyung believes relationships, friendships, those people who he met during childhood, even if they were not so close then, they still share the background that makes a relationship easier. They may not have known each other well back then and of course not now, but Taehyung feels so comfortable in his bed. He wants to make Namjoon feel good, feel just as comfortable, and he will do anything to put him at ease. Taehyung is a caregiver. He wants to take care.
Taehyung removes his shirt and takes Namjoon’s hands to press them to his skin, starting at his neck and moving them down. Namjoon huffs these little noises like he’s in pain, but Taehyung loves kissing him already and kisses through them.
“Is this okay?” he asks. Namjoon looks up at him with eyes so wide it doesn’t look like they could conceal an untruth, let alone be the source of one. “Do you want this?” he asks when Namjoon doesn’t move, doesn’t blink.
“I - I do, but-” Namjoon swallows down the hoarseness in his voice. Taehyung smiles; it is both cute and sexy at the same time, something Namjoon seems to excel at. He’s just Taehyung’s type.
This really was fate.
Taehyung dives back into kissing, encourages Namjoon to feel around, anything he wants. He wants to touch and be touched. He wants to get them both naked so it’s easier, ready to appreciate and show appreciation.
Near giddy with it, his fingers clasp onto the hem of Namjoon’s top to give it a tug up. “Wait!” he says, an arm suddenly around his stomach and Taehyung’s hand.
“What is it? You wanna keep it on?” Taehyung nibbles on Namjoon’s earlobe while he waits for an answer and Namjoon squirms under him.
“It’s not - I’m not pretty,” he breathes.
This again. “Baby, you’re so pretty,” Taehyung assures him. He pets his fingers along the waistband of Namjoon’s bottoms.
“But - you get it,” Namjoon says. “You know.” He makes a vague motion over himself, and Taehyung has to wonder what kind of shitty exes Namjoon had that made him feel so self conscious about what is clearly a gorgeous mind, body, and soul.
“I know, baby, I know.” Taehyung kisses him sweetly, gives the hem of the shirt one more tug, content to let it go and move on if he protests more, but all Taehyung wants is to cherish him and make Namjoon fervently aware how gorgeous he is.
Namjoon gives in - he lifts his arms up. Taehyung can hear it in the room, the way he goes quiet, breathing choked off. Taehyung’s mind simmers in excitement, in lust. He wants this to be so good for his hyung.
But he mistook the silence.
It was not excitement on Namjoon’s part.
It was dread.
This is the moment, Taehyung realizes, when their past catches up to them.
It isn’t the way he hoped it would be.
Taehyung hoped they would be able to reminisce about their childhood and the homes they grew up in together, their quiet and boring little neighborhood where Namjoon was the most interesting thing that happened, but how much further from the truth could he have been?
Throughout the night he’d thought about bringing it up, of course - hey Namjoon-ah, can you still move things with your mind? He hadn’t, because he thought he might have another day for that. Now, Taehyung realizes maybe he should have, but he also wonders if they would be here doing this if he had brought it up at all.
Namjoon’s chest is scarred.
It isn’t the type of here or there clumsy scarring, it’s everywhere, and it is patterned.
“Wh - what?” Taehyung touches. He pet the bottom of Namjoon’s belly earlier under his shirt, but the traces of hair there obscured the truth exposed everywhere else. “Hyung?”
Namjoon now looks just like the kid he used to know. Same hollow eyes, vacant look.
“What is all of this?”
“What do you mean?” Namjoon asks, voice dripping in sarcasm. It sounds hateful. “It’s the source of all my power.”
Maybe he shouldn’t, but Taehyung has to trace the lines in his skin where they are so clearly raised, almost like zigzags, almost like - “The bottom of a shoe,” Namjoon says. “They were creative, I’ll give them that. They found all sorts of things to warm in the fire before they branded me. Gotta say - cheap plastic was the worst. Stuck the worst. Smelled the worst.”
“The fire?” Taehyung doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing at all.
Somehow, this is harder for him to believe when he sees it with his own eyes.
“Yeah. I mean - you saw.” Namjoon sits up, hunching over so his chest constricts from sight. Taehyung remains in his lap, all traces of the rest of the evening withering away. He wishes he could push him back so he doesn’t hide, but how could he do that to him now? “You saw all the ashes, the soot. It was always in the yard.”
“When I drew on you…” Taehyung knew what it was, he knew, and yet.
“There was always a fire burning in the house,” Namjoon whispers, eyes directed somewhere in a corner of the room. “Until I started to scare them, and then they put out all those fires. Fortunately, I had one left for them, didn’t I?”
“What do you mean?” Although a part of this conversation, Taehyung cannot keep up, cannot quite comprehend. It’s all there. Namjoon is right. He saw it all.
“The so-called spontaneous combustion?” Namjoon prompts, eyebrow raised. “The one that led Dr. Sung to collect me from their home? That was the last straw for them. They thought the devil might give me powers to move things, but not fire. That couldn’t just be the devil.” He laughs, a short humorless thing that sends a shiver down Taehyung’s spine.
“If he hadn’t offered to take me away at that point, the next one would have been spontaneous human combustion,” Namjoon laughs, like that’s a laughing matter. “Wouldn’t that have been a story for the papers?”
“What are you saying?” There are tears in Taehyung’s eyes; that always feels the worst in the worst moments. Here is someone else’s trauma, and Taehyung has to be the one to cry. “You would have set yourself on fire?”
Namjoon’s anger disappears from his face. “Taehyung - those people set me on fire almost every day. In one way or another, they tortured me from the day I arrived in their house to the day I left.”
“Your - your adoptive parents?” Taehyung didn’t know.
He didn’t know.
But he should have.
If not then, now, as an adult.
“Yeah. Whoever they were, whatever they were.” Namjoon gently pushes Taehyung so he sits on the bed and they can sit next to each other rather than across. “Parent should be a kind word. They weren’t parents.”
“Hyung.” Taehyung is still thinking. He was young back then, young enough he doesn’t have great recall but not so young he has none. “All that stuff that happened. The things that would move on their own?”
Namjoon slowly turns to look at Taehyung from the corner of his eye. Taehyung does not dare to meet it. “Taehyung-ah.”
Why would he call him that now?
“I moved all of those things. There was nothing ever - nothing ever special about it,” he says. “Didn’t you know?”
Taehyung knows nothing.
“But I saw - I saw that night in your bedroom! It was just the two of us, and you were touching me through the glass.”
“Tae-yah.” Namjoon smiles so sadly. “If my hands were busy, I was well practiced with my foot.”
“But what about all those other people? Plenty of people believed it!”
Namjoon gives a tiny shrug. “People who want to believe will believe, no matter the evidence. When there were cameras in the room it was harder, but I just had to wait. Wait until the fewest eyes were on me, move something at the right angle away from the camera. There were even times when the cameras were purposely set up in a way that they wouldn’t catch an entire room. Those people wanted to believe. They wanted a story.”
It’s not that Taehyung spent all these years believing with every fiber of his body, it’s just that it feels like something has been taken away all the same. Does this make him gullible, or naive?
Does all of this make him guilty?
“I knew there were the believers, but…I didn’t know you were one of them,” Namjoon adds quietly. Taehyung takes his hand.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks. “The truth, back then. About those people who were supposed to care for you?”
“Why would I?” Namjoon snorts.
Because Taehyung believed. One of the few who believed with childlike innocence back then, and unspoken as it is between them, he thinks he might have been the only one to believe him about this too if that was the explanation given.
“Taehyung, you were a kid. I was a kid. I did something stupid to get out of a bad situation. It’s hard to say I regret it, but there were consequences to those actions. I’m here today because I got out, but that doesn’t justify the means, I know. I guess - I guess I would have thought you understood that by coming home with me tonight.”
They’re both quiet after that, and neither of them look at each other, although Taehyung refuses to let go of Namjoon’s hand.
Now Taehyung doesn't know where the rest of the night will go, and he certainly doesn’t know if Namjoon will want to see him again after this. After all, he failed him once and didn’t even know it, and now he’s done nothing but dredge up the past Namjoon would probably rather forget.
But Taehyung also knows he would like to do the things now he couldn't do back then.
He would like to offer Namjoon some sort of protection.
“Hey, come here,” he says, a gentle hand on the back of Namjoon’s neck. “Come here, pretty.”
Now, Namjoon’s eyes mist. He has no resistance left in his body as he slumps across the bed with his head in Taehtyung’s lap. “I’m so sorry all of that happened. I’m so sorry you had to create theater just to escape a horrible situation, but I’m so glad you did. Namjoon-ah - you did it. You survived.”
People call Taehyung an artist, a creative.
They have no idea.