They Can See Us

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/21154964.

Rating: Explicit
Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Category: M/M
Fandom: | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Relationship: Jeon Jungkook/Kim Taehyung | V
Character: Jeon Jeongguk, Kim Taehyung, Park Jimin, Kim Namjoon, Min Yoongi,
Jung Hoseok, Kim Seokjin
Additional Tags: Horror, Thriller, Paranoia, Blurred Reality, Supernatural Injuries,
Moderate Blood and Violence, Halloween, Dark Comedy, Angst with a
Happy Ending
Series: Part 1 of The Ones Who Watch Us
Stats: Published: 2019-10-24 Words: 31554

They Can See Us

by mindheist

Summary

There are two things that you should hope always follow you. Number one: your shadow.
Number two: your reflection.

Notes

b-grade horror au. demonologist au. insidious meets coraline meets it follows. everyone
lives + happy ending + some comedy! moderate blood and violence, but no body horror. to
my horror junkies: this is just a Compilation of the Top 10 Worst Horror Movie Tropes
including “weirdly timed sex” and “mirror scares.” to my non-horror junkies: you are safe,
because i am offering the protection of good boy koo, he will shield you from all evils

some music: the further , darkness, the conjuring, time of the season, season of the witch,
last train home

happy spooky season!

CONTENT WARNING: supernatural themes, semi-graphic depictions of violence

involving supernatural injuries, blurred reality, blood, imagery of drowning; creepy
things happening - in places of residence, while driving alone, with mirrors, with
technology. may induce feelings of paranoia. this fic is in the horror genre. please heed
all warnings and exercise reader discretion.

See the end of the work for more notes

If asked to write a list of things that are inherently not eerie, yet make the fine hairs on his arms
rise, Jeongguk could fill a book.

Empty corridors. Gas stations at night. Deep drawers. Food, half-sliced in the kitchen, with the
knife still on the cutting board and the juices staining the wood. A door that’s two thirds of the way
closed—not halfway, not all the way, just two thirds, as if someone had meant to close it and never
made it there. It stands ajar, grey mouth hanging open agape and attracting flies. Sometimes there
isn’t enough light to spill over into the next room, so the other side is in shadow. You expect to see
eyes because it’s wide enough to fit a face.

Things that imply the existence of life nearby, yet seeing none.

And, somehow, this list gets longer. There’s Taehyung sitting upright in bed in the middle of the
night. He is not sleeping, not looking at his phone, not scratching an itch, nor taking an ibuprofen.
Just sitting, awake in the part of the night that moves thick and slow, pudding through sieve, and
Jeongguk does not realize it until he rolls over and starts doing The Reach. The Reach is the name
that Taehyung has fondly given for this, when Jeongguk tosses and starts pawing at Taehyung’s
side of the bed until his hand meets warm body. He doesn’t have to look that hard, usually.
Taehyung is always there.

He isn’t, tonight.

“Babe?”

The bed is still warm. Jeongguk swings his arm in a wide arc, casting around blindly. It’s a few
seconds of this and then his hand thuds, thwack! against Taehyung’s tailbone. Then he fumbles
over the line of Taehyung’s spine, grooved and cutting against his back. He grunts.

“Babe, what’re you doing awake?”

“I’m having,” his voice floats and settles on Jeongguk’s shoulders, “the strangest dream.”

The words trickle through the grooves of Jeongguk’s brain, and when they’re chewed down, he sits
up. The bed creaks beneath him, angry at being woken. Taehyung’s eyes drift to him when he
does, and he’s very much there.

“You’re awake, Taehyung. Was it a bad dream?”

Taehyung’s face is haunted.

“A dream about you.”

Jeongguk is a heavy sleeper.

So when he wakes with the ache of someone who hasn’t caught a wink all night, not a familiar
sensation for him, he thinks he’s sick. He always gets heavy sleep, no matter the surface he’s on,
deep enough that it’s drugged. Unless he’s climbing off a pan-Pacific flight, he dives deep down
beneath the surface.

Today, he feels it: the slow grind of bones.

Taehyung is out of bed but not pleased about it. His shadow quivers in long sheets down the
hallway, toothbrush jammed between foamy lips, and he’s frowning at his phone. When Jeongguk
appears in their doorway, he looks up, smiles, and glides back into the bathroom. He never brushes
his teeth in front of a sink, preferring instead to traipse around the apartment as if to scavenge for
treasure.

“A house call request,” he says over breakfast. Breakfast is grilled kkongchi out of the can and juk
out of one pot, set between them and steaming. Taehyung added too much water and it’s soupier
than it is thick, but Jeongguk likes it anyway. It settles the ache in his joints. He does not much
enjoy feeling like a geriatric, overweight cat. “And some interesting news.”

“If it’s not about IU’s comeback, I’m uninterested. Tell me about the house call.”

Taehyung ignores him, spooning more juk into his bowl. “Jung Hoseok.”

The juk slops off Jeongguk’s spoon halfway to his mouth and back into his bowl.

“Like, the famous one?”

“How many Jung Hoseoks do we know? Yes, the dancer Jung Hoseok, the one you watch so
religiously whenever you’re on the elliptical.”

“I do not use the ellipti—”

“Anyway. It seems like he needs our help. I got a DM from him on Twitter, but I told him that
you’re usually the one that scopes out the house calls first. You should talk to him.”

Taehyung gets many a DM on Twitter. Half the time it’s someone asking if they can show him
their dick with a shitty, spooky pickup line; Jeongguk usually asks if he can see those just to judge
(“Eight out of ten, what the fuck, it looks airbrushed—does he exfoliate his dick? Should I? Babe,
be honest.”). A quarter of the time it’s a teenager asking them what it takes to be a demonologist,
and Taehyung usually tries to answer their questions, and also tag on a singsong caveat that they
should stay in school and decide if they still want to do this when they’re older, because Buzzfeed
Unsolved is not necessarily a teeming job sector.

A quarter of the time it’s house calls.

Most of them don’t hold up. The process is simple: Taehyung checks their account for pranks, and
if he thinks it’s anything worth putting time to, he tells Jeongguk. Jeongguk visits, makes a
decision, and if it’s something hair-raising, he’ll call Taehyung.

“Okay. I have to head in for a bit today, but I should be able to leave semi-early. Maybe?”

“Cool. Call me. I’m going to go holiday shopping.”

“What? We already decorated for Halloween.” There’s a hideous acrylic fixture of a black horned
owl near their shoe rack, more annoying than it is scary.

“I know, but Jinae asked me to get something ‘not boring’ for the Halloween block party.”
Taehyung props his chin on the heel of his hand and chuckles. “Apparently, cursed objects in glass
cases are both too dangerous and not interesting enough for young kids.”

“Fuck them kids,” Jeongguk says around a mouthful of fish.

Taehyung’s gasp is scandalized. “What have they ever done to you!”

Honestly? One of them threw up on Jeongguk’s feet once.

“Just don’t get zombie things.”

“Why don’t you worry about Hoseok, and I’ll worry about the block party supplies.”

Jeongguk shrugs. Fair enough. He fishes in his can of mackerel for any straggling chunks. “But,
Hoseok. Did he tell you what the problem was?”

“Somewhat. Not all of it.”

“Jumpy?”

“Yeah.” Taehyung’s chopsticks flash as they streak past and he nabs the last bit of mackerel before
Jeongguk can fish it out of the sauce. “I get the feeling he doesn’t want to discuss over messages.
Says he feels like he’s being watched.”

Taehyung didn’t tell Jeongguk right away what he can see, or what he can do, or that he’s a demon
hunter.

The first time Jeongguk had mused aloud about this, around their fifth, sixth, or maybe seventh
date, collecting in his pockets heavy and warm as marbles, Taehyung frowned and said, “I prefer
demonologist. Also, I figured I could just show you what I can do once I got your dick in my
mouth.”

Which, true.

Demonologist, demon hunter, speaker to the plane of evils—whatever name anyone wants to call
it, Taehyung has always been this. Jeongguk had cycled through all the questions, once: can you
see ghosts, too? Is it only demons? Why? How?

Taehyung had answered like he was telling Jeongguk his measurements: ghosts and demons
overlap; no, it’s knowing things by energies sometimes; I don’t know, but if I can help people with
it, then why not?

“I’ve never told anyone else,” Taehyung confessed when Jeongguk was processing all of this in
pensive silence.

“What? Why not?”

“Not anyone else ever, but new people. Dates, you know. I tried once. People don’t usually take it
well. So I don’t tell anymore.”

“Well, I think it’s cool,” Jeongguk said.

“That’s because you said one of your favorite movies is Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum.”

But it felt like fitting together. Taehyung, with his cat eyes, who’d go still and stare at something
that wasn’t there. Jeongguk, whom his mother had called ‘sticky,’ as a child, can’t do what
Taehyung does, but invited spirits to cling to him. Once, before he’d even gotten their door
unlocked, Taehyung had shouted, “Don’t come in!”

“What? Taehyung, what’s wrong?”

“Hang on.”

He’d opened the door with a tiny fire contained in a cake tin and Jeongguk shouted in alarm.
“Taehyung—!”

“Step over it.”

“What? What is going on?”

Taehyung’s eyes had flashed, once. He was level with Jeongguk, but he was looking past his
shoulder. Jeongguk had been seized with sudden dread, cold enough to bite his stomach, and he
hadn’t dared turn around.

“Just do as I say.”

So he had, and Taehyung dumped a pitcher of water over the fire to put it out just before the alarm
went off.

Jeongguk has never asked what Taehyung had seen. Sometimes, when you hear footsteps behind
you, it’s safer not to look back.

October is still warm, the air wet on his skin between the walk from the subway station to the
boutique. When he lets himself in, the chilled air inside hits him, and his bones throb dully, almost
cracking, like the clatter of ice hitting the bottom of a whiskey tumbler.

“Hey, there you are.” Seokjin is impeccably pressed, unruffled as a freshly printed book, and he
stands with a bulging binder. He’s not wearing a tie today. He always wears a tie. There must be a
special occasion. Regular tie-wearers going without is as staggering as Jeongguk putting a tie on,
ever, at all. “We just got all these prints back you did for the fall/winter campaign you did in the
summer—look through them and pick which ones to edit, will you? We want emphasis on abstract.
Orchid and drapes are in again, Eunjung liked your closeups on those.”

“But—” Jeongguk holds his hands out for the binder, swinging his camera bag out of the way just
in time to catch it. “Seokjin, I have—”

Seokjin raises his eyebrows.

“I have another appointment. Uhm—later.”

“Work less today, work more tomorrow. Doesn’t matter how long you take or don’t take. Just
remember you need to choose, edit, run through legal and marketing, run it through the graphic
design company, and still get it past Eunjung. Give yourself some buffer time.”

Jeongguk parks himself in one of the open workspaces on the second floor of the boutique. This is
what he gets working for fashion. Not even in fashion, for fashion—there’s a difference. It started
out as freelance, only because he took all of Taehyung’s photos. Blue Hanbok is a mishmash of
modern meets history, a boutique specializing in hybridizing western runway fashion with
traditional Korean designs. Eunjung, the head designer, had outfitted their space with glass, glass,
and more glass. It’s supposed to be half museum, half department store.

He slouches, peels open the binder with the sound of plastic unsticking from laminate, and gets to
work.

“Here.”

Midday, Seokjin brings Jeongguk a matcha smoothie. It’s nearing noon and Jeongguk has a text
from Taehyung: are u leaving soon? , followed by a photo of a four Halloween dolls holding hands in
a seance. this is on sale.
pretty sure that still falls under ‘cursed objects’!!!!! look at the one with braids, thats some annabelle shit right
there. find something fun :(

“Thank you.” Condensation slides down the sides of his drink, pooling in a miniature rain puddle
on his desk. “I might leave soon. I really do have an appointment.”

“I know,” Seokjin laughs. “I just like scaring you a little.”

Jeongguk rolls his eyes.

“It’s really satisfying.”

“If you like seeing me scared, you should just come on a house call with me.”

“Didn’t you tell me that most of those aren’t real, anyway? I remember the last one you told me
about, the people who called were convinced someone was living in their apartment but it was just
because their cat had toilet-trained itself to use the human toilets.”

“I’m not impervious to scary things.” Jeongguk’s straw pulls on empty where the smoothie is too
thick, sludging its way up the straw.

“I will not come on a house call with you. Thanks, but no. I need a talisman first. I’ve been thinking
about getting one.”

Jeongguk snorts. “If what you’re facing really is a demon, no gods can protect you. The last thing
you want to do is pray. Beginner’s mistake.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Because you can bet something is listening. And it won’t be your god.”

Seokjin leans in and sits on the edge of Jeongguk’s desk, one leg hiked against the side of the
glass. He does this a lot, a tall, pinstriped tower over Jeongguk’s work. “Sounds like you speak
from personal experience.”

“Mmpf.”

“No, tell me! Come on. Or is it gonna come haunt me too, if you do?”

“It won’t.” Taehyung made sure to that. “It happened on one of my first house calls. I’d visited a
mudang the week before, and she’d written me a talisman. I hadn’t thought anything of it. I hadn’t
even gone because of the house call request, it was a family thing, and I’m—well, she gave one to
me. I had it in my wallet, forgot about it, and hadn’t mentioned to Taehyung.”

Seokjin had asked him with the air of someone mostly kidding, of a skeptic, a ghost of a snicker on
the corners of his mouth. He’s not smiling anymore.

He’s also usually not this interested in Jeongguk’s work outside of the boutique. Maybe the lack of
tie means his thoughts are spilling loose today.

“What happened? Did something hurt you?”

“Nope. Something followed me home.”

“A demon.”
“I don’t know. I never saw its face.”

Seokjin gapes at him in silence for another heartbeat. The hum of glass is low around them.

Then he says, “And then what?”

“Well, I’m alive.”

“That doesn’t make for a very good story.”

“These usually don’t. But I also don’t know if it’s a good idea to tell you exactly what Taehyung
does to get rid of them, and I’m not going to get any more work done before the hour if I explain.”

Seokjin leaves him to it. There’s still skepticism on him, Jeongguk can tell, but maybe it’s given
way a little. Something in his eyes has been drawn and spooked since this morning. He feels oddly
triumphant about creeping Seokjin out, then wiggles his mouse to wake up his monitor. One, he
decides. When the hour hits one, he’ll take off for Hoseok’s place.

There’s a notification under the time on his phone.

found something~ it’s fun~ it’s perfect for a block party~

what?

Taehyung sends a mirror selfie of himself with his feet propped up on their coffee table, peace sign
angled over his head.

i dont get it

it’s a trick mirror~ from this side u just see ur reflection, from the other u can see me. its cool! jinae has that
long box she always has wooseok lie in like its a coffin. we could use it as a lid and light it up from the inside
when people don’t expect it. like those prank shows hehe

shit thats brutal

^w^

^w^ is still an uwu

TwT

Jeongguk puts his mind to actually working for the last forty or so minutes at the boutique, even
when the streets below and behind grow noisy and restless with office workers skittering on quick
mice feet to grab lunch. He’s only about halfway through, and the last twenty or so shots that he’s
picked were only picked because he felt like he needed to do visible work. Jeongguk will probably
have to retcon this entire gallery.

The minutes snail by. Taehyung texts him ten minutes to one.

here’s the address that hoseok sent btw. don’t do anything stupid.

Taehyung sends a screencap of the maps app.

i think dilapidated, decaying houses with boarded up windows and trees growing thru the doors are charming!

:(
Jeongguk snorts to himself, powering down his monitor and just about to lock his phone when
Taehyung texts him again.

be careful. i know you’re not an idiot, but come back before dark, okay?

He stares at the text. Taehyung used you, the full you, not just a u.

i know babe, talk soon

Jeongguk sets his phone down to start gathering his memory cards and camera bits, the guts of it
spilling into one of the drawers of the desk. It’s easier to store some of it here than to lug it back
and forth across the city, and Jeongguk groans internally at the dull ache that stretches warm and
lazy over his back when he bends. He straightens up, cracking his neck to see if it’ll go—

He blinks at his monitor, screen dark and flat as summer lake. Seokjin stands behind him, as if
waiting for him to notice, and he whirls.

“Jesus, you gave me a fucking heart atta—!”

But there’s no one there.

He turns to look back at his dark monitor screen: expensive, blue-black glass, quiet and asleep.
Jeongguk looks over his shoulder, at floor-to-ceiling window, in the space Seokjin should be but
isn’t.

What had Taehyung said in the morning?

I’m having the strangest dream.

Jeongguk stands up, slinging his bag over his shoulder, and darts for the doors. Seokjin waves at
him from the front desk. He ignores him.

Hoseok lives on the outskirts of Gangnam, mostly in Songpa-gu, in an area where people are rich
enough to afford the real estate but not rich enough to swim in the same waters as the money
sharks of Apgujeong.

It pays to be an influencer. Jeongguk invested his time in the wrong social media when he was
thirteen years old.

He’s also extremely unconvinced that an area this busy could be haunted, much less by a demon.
Taehyung had said Hoseok was jumpy, so maybe he’s just put off by an open window, or an odd
but benign neighbor.

But then he’d said, come back before dark, okay?

“Hey, thanks for coming!”

Hoseok is smaller in person, and if Jeongguk weren’t already unsettled by the thing in his monitor,
and Taehyung’s odd behavior that morning, then he’d be more excited right now. Maybe ask for an
autograph, or something. “I know it’s short notice. Taehyung said people usually make
appointments in advance.”

“No, no,” Jeongguk waves. He’s swapped his camera back for a lumpy black bag of equipment
that he totes to house calls; it’s basic stuff, but it usually tells him what he needs to know. He hasn’t
been wrong yet. “I’m a subscriber! Hope Dance—I love your channel.”

“Oh, no shit?” Hoseok’s face brightens as he lets Jeongguk inside. Normally, he looks like the sun
has warmed him from the inside out, like embers burn in the swells of his cheeks. He’s wan, now,
like he hadn’t gotten enough sleep after too many nights of dancing, or like he’s coming down with
the flu. “I’m flattered. Have you watched any of the recent videos?”

Jeongguk toes his shoes off. He does a quick sweep for details. Just in case Hoseok plans to turn
him into dinner. He doesn’t, because.

“Yeah, I…”

He trails off. Between the two of them, Taehyung is the one that picks up on insidious energy right
away, but Jeongguk doesn’t think he needs anything except his naked eyeballs for this.

One: all the doors in the apartment are closed.

Two: Hoseok is a neat person. Jeongguk knows this from his house tour videos. Right now, his
living room looks like it’s been upended in a home burglary.

Three: every surface is covered in a sheet. Some of the sheets are patterned with an eye-straining,
overly cheerful blue-orange-electric green chevron print. Some of them are bath towels.

“Uh.” Jeongguk slips his bag from his shoulder. “Are you moving somewhere?”

“It has to do with this house call,” Hoseok says.

“Taehyung didn’t tell me much about what you contacted us with. Fill me in?”

Jeongguk unpacks as Hoseok does. He tries not to look at all the things strewn in shambles around
them: the shoes without pairs, molded home furnishings, plants with dirt spilling from their guts.
It’s impolite to stare at people’s possessions more than he has to. That’s Taehyung’s job.

If this thing finds the need to tear his apartment apart, Jeongguk hopes faintly that it at least spares
his lowest underwear drawer, where Jeongguk only goes if he’s scraping on empty after too many
skipped laundry days. Jeongguk does not skip laundry days.

“I wrote it off at first. Just one of those things, you know? ‘I’m just tired, I imagined it.’ That’s
usually what it is, and I’ve had quite a few late nights at the studio. There’s a showcase coming up,
and I’ve been doing choreo work for some agencies.”

“What’d you think you imagined?”

“I live alone. But I keep hearing people move around outside my bedroom when I sleep. Not like a
few footsteps or a few creaks here and there—full-blown noise. The TV turns on by itself in the
middle of the night. I hear the cupboards opening and closing. Those,” Hoseok adds, pointing to
the ones visible from the foyer. “And all of that scared me, sure, but then it started with the
mirrors.”

Jeongguk is halfway through feeding a color wheel into his UV projector. It jams, choking around
the stiff disc of paper out like a grotesque cough drop. “Mirrors?”

“It happened a few nights ago. I was in the bathroom. And my reflection didn’t follow me in the
mirror.”
A familiar bite of teeth and nails and cold singes Jeongguk’s belly. Something over his shoulder
and he can’t bring himself to look back.

“Unsettling,” he says, just to keep it light. “What did you do, and what didn’t your reflection do?”

“Uhh. Well, I was waiting for the shower to warm up, so I was chilling naked,” Hoseok says,
sounding like he’s trying to explain his masturbation patterns to his doctor instead of telling
Jeongguk about chilling naked waiting for the shower to warm up, “and then I turned when I felt
the water get warm enough. In the corner of my eye, I know what I saw, my reflection didn’t
move.”

Jeongguk says nothing. Hoseok has more to say.

“That was the first time. But again, I was tired, so even though it scared me more than the TV or
the cupboard thing, I wrote it off. Then the second time, when I was brushing my teeth. I was
standing up straight, then I bent over to rinse, and I saw myself in the mirror. I was still standing. I
screamed and fell, but when I stood up again, my reflection was normal again.”

“And the third,” Jeongguk asks.

Hoseok’s face goes even more pallid and grey than before Jeongguk had walked in, skin like
surgical latex gloves. His hands are thin, a little bony, shaking like autumn leaves. “The third was
last night. I got up to use the bathroom—in my own room—and before I even went inside, I saw
myself in the mirror. There’s no way that you can see your reflection at the angle I was standing at.
I saw myself. It looked at me, into my face. Then, my reflection, it smiled. The empty kind, with
nothing behind the eyes.”

The silence is dark and oily between them.

“I’ll go take a look,” Jeongguk says. “Come on.”

The bathroom mirror has the pleasure of being covered in, not a bedsheet, but a fleece throw.
Jeongguk’s seen this one in the background of Hoseok’s videos, usually folded primly over the
armrest of his loveseat. It’s pinned up with velcro-fastened command hooks, cascading bright and
cerulean to pool around the sink. The hems are wet.

“I’ve just been functioning without mirrors since then,” Hoseok says when Jeongguk thumbs at the
wet bits of blanket. His fingers come away smelling like soap. “People did it in the past, we can do
it now.”

Jeongguk lifts one end of the blanket away from the mirror—flecked with hard water, but mostly
clear, it’s beveled at the edges and set into the tiled wall. He puts his fingernail to it, and it doesn’t
meet itself in its reflection, so no trickery there. The glass is cool and serene when he places his
palm against it. When he lifts it away, a thin, foggy imprint of his palm lingers before evaporating.

He sets his meter on the counter and raises its antenna.

“What is that?”

“Mel meter. Taehyung modified it, but it does magnetic field readings and changes in temperature.
It’ll pick up irregularities in either.”

It whines when he powers it on, then buzzes quietly. Hoseok hangs like an uninvited guest in his
own bathroom doorway, watching Jeongguk study the Mel meter. It takes some time to settle.
Hoseok tells Jeongguk about his dance students as the meter calibrates. His eyes light up like they
had when Jeongguk had first walked in, and his words begin to trip over each other in a clamor to
be heard. Some of them are rising stars—Hoseok knows they’ll make it into entertainment
companies. Some of them don’t want to go that route, but are too good to go unseen. Others are just
there to be there. Some of them dance to escape.

Jeongguk understands that.

Taehyung taught him this early on, that it’s one thing to march into someone’s space and soullessly
cleanse their life of dark entities. That makes them little more than hotel housekeeping, and frankly,
it doesn’t work.

“You wouldn’t believe in a soulless doctor,” he said. “And if reality was like a body, the one we
know is like a heart.” He’d put his hand over Jeongguk’s chest, and Jeongguk’s heart had
thundered beneath his palm. “And all existence flows around us, like blood. The heart remains
unchanged, but sometimes things get in. Things that shouldn’t be here. Demons that don’t belong.
It takes a soul to heal.”

The meter dings gently. It used to be a rasping, breathless shriek of a beep, but Taehyung had
changed that, too.

“Hm,” says Jeongguk.

“Is that bad?” Hoseok peers around him skittish as a fawn.

“Higher than normal, but that’s common for a place that has a high population density. You’re right
by Gangnam.”

Hoseok scampers after him as Jeongguk walks around the apartment with the Mel meter. It shifts as
he walks, a few numbers here and there. Down the hallway the reading drops slightly, not by
much, where there are no mirrors. Jeongguk frowns.

“Anyway, that’s why I waited so long to call—the showcase is coming up, I’ve been trying to
check in with everyone to make sure they feel okay doing it, I figured I’d be seeing things from
stress. I keep dreaming about the showcase turning out perfectly, or horribly.” Hoseok crosses his
arms. “Last night was weird, though, weird dreams. I couldn’t ignore it anymore after that.”

Jeongguk eyes him.

Then the meter jumps, numbers scrambling. Jeongguk stares at it, then heads for the living room,
where he’d first come in. The couch is still draped in its summery chevron sheets, and nothing has
moved.

“Any mirrors here?”

Hoseok has gone ashen again. He climbs up onto his couch, feet pressing valleys into the cushions,
and of course, he has a set of cascading mirrors on the wall behind it. Jeongguk has seen these in
his videos, too. He tugs the sheet down, and Jeongguk appraises it.

Both of them blink back at their own reflections. Jeongguk picks up the UV reader.

“Move out of frame for me?”

The colors swing by as Jeongguk clicks, curtains falling, opening, falling, opening. He squints
harder, peers through the viewing lens, and keeps clicking the wheel of colors. Red: nothing:
Ochre: nothing. Heat orange: nothing. There’s a dust mote on the film.

“Anything?” Hoseok asks. His breathing is shallow.

The meter buzzes, searching for a base line.

“Not yet,” Jeongguk murmurs. “Let me—”

Dark green: he’s gone.

Jeongguk looks up from the reader again. The floor of his stomach swoops. There he is, solidly in
the mirror, eyes wide and swallowing the light overhead.

Through the lens, his reflection vanishes.

“What the fuck?” he murmurs.

Hoseok visibly tenses. “What is it?”

“Let me see.”

He rotates the color wheel again, and indigo:

Taehyung is there, standing behind his shoulder with a hand at Jeongguk’s neck. He’s smiling,
mouth stretched too wide to be human.

Jeongguk stumbles back, reader fumbling from his hands. It hits the ground with the sound of a
skull cracking across glass, and he backs into Hoseok’s TV stand before he trips and plants himself
onto the polished surface.

“What? What did you see?” Hoseok is almost yelling.

“Get a hotel,” Jeongguk says, heart pounding in his ears so loudly they might rupture his eardrums.
“I’m going to call Taehyung.”

The time Jeongguk had forgotten a talisman in his wallet was the only time a demon touched him.

There’s a scar across his cheekbone now for proof. Except for Taehyung, everyone thinks it’s from
a bike accident. It’s not a lie, it’s just not the entire truth. That’s how it is with a lot of demonology.
There are moth-eaten gaps in every story.

This is the cost of being sticky. It makes it harder for Taehyung to drive demons out of this plane
and out of the blood that flows along the frames of this reality. He’s only failed on his first try
once. First try. What happened then is the only reason that Taehyung ever even uses those words.

“How’d it go?”

Taehyung is spread on the couch with his laptop on his lap, business on top (button down) and
halfway to bed on the bottom (Jeongguk’s pajama pants). Sometimes, he’s on call for the church.
They’re not a fan that he’s agnostic, but they also don’t have a ton of choices.

As promised, a long mirror leans against the wall by the TV, nestled in bubble wrap. Jeongguk
fights down a shudder. This fear is silly and it’s clouding him, the shit looks like a funhouse
mirror.
“I,” Jeongguk looks at the swollen pot of ramen sitting on their dining table. The noodles are
engorged and bright orange. “I’m going to take a shower first.”

“Oh no. Is it bad?” Taehyung swings his legs off the couch, muting the TV show in the
background, and closes his laptop. He’s the type that can’t work without background noise—the
clink of coffee cups, chatter, the roar of the washing machine, or the inane drone of an infomercial
channel promising an eight-pack with the singular power of a magnetized belt. Get yours today!

“I think it might be. Tell you over ramen?”

“Okay.”

The shower starts in a cascade of hard, icy bullets. Jeongguk takes the time between turning it on
and climbing in to strip down until he’s naked. He hisses when he extends his hand into the stream
and it still stings on his arm. He shakes his hand to scatter the wet. Some if it lands in tiny
pinpricks on his bare thigh.

He sighs, then catches sight of himself in the bathroom mirror.

Jeongguk blinks. It looks stupid, but he turns his body toward the shower, then back to the mirror.
He tries looking away—how far does his periphery go?

His reflection certainly follows as he climbs into the shower. The glass door slides shut with a
gentle clang, fogging up in the steam. The water spills over his skin, sheeting down his legs.
Nothing moves, and then he blinks again, and feels as stupid as he looks.

Taehyung is on the phone outside. The sounds filter muffled from beneath the door, loud, but
without laughter. So it’s not Jimin, who has a tendency to call when he’s drunk. Taehyung humors
him, sometimes too often. Such is the fate of having a boyfriend who has no boundaries with his
best friend: he’ll pick up a call from him when you’re balls deep in him.

Jeongguk wonders if this call is from the church.

He closes his eyes to shampoo. His joints still hurt, and Jeongguk dreams vaguely of submerging
himself in a real bath—not the half-assed kind. One where he’d be up to his throat in bubbles, deep
enough that he could slide under the surface for a while. His body is tight with nerves.

Hoseok’s voice wheedles its way around his neck, settling there like a demented necklace. It
looked at me, into my face. Then, my reflection, it smiled.

Against his better judgment Jeongguk opens his eyes. The sting of shampoo comes, painful and
plum-scented, but he looks up through the steam, rising in soft columns around him. Through the
glass, his face is blurred. The world and streetlights outside a coffee shop window on a rainy day.
Dreamy, only the suggestion of an outline. Faces through wet glass are always crying.

Jeongguk doesn’t hear the door open when he puts his head under the stream and rinses, combing
his fingers back to get all the suds out, but he does hear the clothes hitting the floor and the shower
door sliding open. Cool air hits his back, and he’s just dragged a hand down his face to get the
water out of his eyes when he feels Taehyung’s arms come up to hug him around his waist.

“Hey,” says Jeongguk. Taehyung laces his fingers together just over Jeongguk’s bellybutton and
rests his cheek on Jeongguk’s warm, wet shoulder. “Hey, what’s going on? I heard you talking
outside.”

“Just a call. You looked a bad way when you came back, it worried me.”
“Call from who?”

Taehyung grunts noncommittally.

Jeongguk rests one of his hands on Taehyung’s wrist. “I’m almost done with my shower.”

Taehyung presses himself harder into Jeongguk’s body. Most of the spray of the shower misses
him.

People have tells for lying. Jeongguk’s is touching his nose—he’s never trained himself out of it,
though he played enough League of Legends as a prepubescent teenager to know how to at least lie
to his parents about it without shifting his eyes. Jimin, on the other hand, is a horrible liar. His
existence is a tell.

Taehyung’s is silence. Usually he has a word for anything.

This isn’t lying, exactly. The biggest lie Taehyung’s told Jeongguk was that he had to be out of
town for Jeongguk’s twenty-fourth birthday last year, and it was only big because he’d started
telling it months before. As in, in June. He’d also had on hand an amazing cover story, justification
as to why Jeongguk couldn’t just travel with him, and a backup plan in case the first plan fell
through. Seokjin will never admit to it, but Jeongguk suspects he had something to do with it.

With their work, Taehyung doesn’t lie, period.

He buries.

Sometimes Jeongguk can feel it, the weight of all the horrors Taehyung digs graves for, beneath
the tilled earth, waiting for the day it germinates and sprouts to become something beautiful. He
buries, and hopes what comes up isn’t the same cursed thing that goes underground.

So he doesn’t speak. Jeongguk unlatches his hold around his waist, turns around. Taehyung’s hands
stay on him. The touch of warm skin is grounding. His bangs are wet where they’d pressed into the
back of Jeongguk’s freshly shampooed head. Jeongguk brushes them off his forehead, presses his
palm to Taehyung’s cheek, and leans in to kiss him. It tastes like shampoo and ramen, not a
mouthwatering combination. Then they kiss more, and it just tastes like shampoo. Then only the
mineral of water on their tongues. Taehyung wraps his arms around Jeongguk’s neck, secure even
between slick bodies.

“Call from who?” Jeongguk asks again, mouth at Taehyung’s jugular. He can feel the wingbeat of
Taehyung’s pulse beneath the skin.

“Stop thinking so hard about it,” Taehyung breathes. He drags his fingers through Jeongguk’s hair,
anchoring his grip there to pull Jeongguk’s lips back up to his mouth. Then he gasps, pulling back
with his forehead pressed to Jeongguk’s, when Jeongguk reaches between his thighs.

And Jeongguk stops thinking so hard about it when Taehyung puts a thigh between his legs.

Fifteen minutes later, Jeongguk sinks into one of the dining room chairs with jelly legs and hair
drying in curls at his temples. Taehyung tugs on one of them, a soft, frizzy bit where it’s already
mostly dry. Jeongguk keeps telling him he’s fine with eating ramen left out for too long. This is,
evidently, blasphemous for Taehyung, who insists on adding eggs and spam. Jeongguk doesn’t like
eggs and spam in his ramen, so he knows Taehyung just wants to fish them from the pot himself.

“Something’s in the mirrors.”

Taehyung has his face buried in the fridge. At Jeongguk’s voice, he straightens. Three eggs bulge
from the gaps between his fingers. The door shuts with a chilly whoosh. Shoop.

“Is that so.”

He doesn’t say anything else.

“You already knew,” Jeongguk says. It’s not a question. Accordingly, Taehyung doesn’t give him
an answer.

The silence isn’t icy or pointed. Just muted. Jeongguk’s heart is loud in his chest.

“I,” the first egg cracks on the rim of the pot. “I had a bad feeling.”

“Just a feeling?”

“I saw something in the news.”

“About Hoseok?”

“No. Other people.”

Jeongguk leans back. “Hoseok’s case is definitely something we have to look at. I mean, you
probably already knew. I’ve never heard anything like it. I was expecting something tame even in
our worst case scenario. He’s near Gangnam, I don’t know how a demon could get away with
being in that area without being noticed.”

“Best not to assume what demons can and can’t do, just because we haven’t heard of it,” Taehyung
finishes cracking all the eggs into the pot as it boils again. The noodles must be disintegrating by
now, cooked and steeped and cooked again. “Are you busy tomorrow? I’m going to go take a
look.”

“I might be. There’s a lot of work to cover at the boutique, and I left early today, so I need to make
up for it tomorrow. Do you think you can wait another day?”

“No, no,” Taehyung waves soupy chopsticks at him. “I’ll go myself. I have Hoseok’s number. I’ll
text you all the juicy bits.”

Taehyung winks.

Jeongguk gets the feeling he doesn’t want him to come.

Admittedly, maybe biking alone along the Han River near midnight hadn’t been the smartest
choice Jeongguk’s ever made. It also wasn’t his most stupid choice, either, so he thought it was
failsafe. Foolproof.

It wasn’t abandoned just yet; the city was still alive. The bridges glowed like eyes. They followed
him like the moon would follow him as a child in the car windows, galloping and leaping over
telephone lines.

He’d thought he was safe on a bike. A bike is faster than two feet.

Oh, if only.
“He’s never been wrong before, right?”

“Yeah, but,” says Jeongguk. Yeah but, or Jeongguk’s favorite way to point out that Jimin is right,
but he doesn’t like it. Jimin is right, and usually is, but both of them are good at overthinking their
own issues while clearly understanding the other’s.

Jimin is the only person that can say he knows about what happened on Jamsil Bridge two years
ago. Even then, he doesn’t know the full story, but he knows that the story he was told isn’t the
whole picture. That’s as much as Taehyung will give him.

“I know you’re going to tell me that it’s not that you don’t trust him, it’s just that you’re afraid, or
whatever the fuck it is.” Jimin opens his mouth to jam a sushi roll the size of his face between his
lips. “Try to remember your boyfriend has told demons to eat his ass. If he doesn’t want you to go
with him, he has a reason.”

“Yeah, but,” Jeongguk repeats. This time he actually has a follow-up. “I mean, you’re right. But
I’m afraid this time not because of anything I saw. It’s because he’s afraid. He won’t say it, but I
can see it. Something’s wrong, and I know he won’t tell me. But usually, he tells me everything. It
just doesn’t do to have secrets when you hunt demons for a living.”

“Maybe he figures your worry for his silence is a better option than to tell you whatever it is.
What’s the case about this time?”

“Mirrors.”

“Ooh, I don’t envy you,” Jimin dissects his last two sushi rolls, peeling the sashimi off the top and
placing them to the side.

“I don’t envy me either.”

Jimin looks at him seriously now, points of his chopsticks resting against the rice-sticky surface of
his plate. A trail of brown-green soy sauce and wasabi dots runs in little bird’s feet along the edge
where his roll had dripped.

“If something happens, call me. I know Taehyung doesn’t like it when I say that, but I’d much
rather get my ass ate by a demon than know I sat here and let you guys die.”

“Thanks,” Jeongguk says dryly. “I take you are still not getting any.”

“Oh, Jeongguk. You don’t understand how hard it is these days,” says Jimin like a maiden scorned.
He smiles, crooked, and Jeongguk feels better. “A demon would treat me right, eat my ass, obtain
my worldly goods, indulge in my niche kinks.”

“Jesus,” Jeongguk mutters.

“I’m kidding.”

“About what part?”

Jimin considers this as he swills his sashimi in his soy sauce. “The worldly goods.”

“I gave you my manager’s number. I thought he’d be your type.”

“Is he a demon?”

“He probably is.”

“Jeongguk, you’re so sweet, and so oblivious. You and Taehyung are practically married. You
need to stop giving me dating advice.”

Jeongguk has no idea what that means.

By the time Jeongguk leaves the boutique, it’s after dark.

Behind him, Seokjin’s keys jangle, angry windchimes, as he locks the front doors. The temperature
has dropped steeply since the morning, and Jeongguk shivers in his thin hoodie. His phone is quiet.
Taehyung hasn’t texted since early afternoon, right when Jeongguk had gone back to work after
lunch with Jimin.,

It had just been hoseoks apartment is so nice id live here even if a demon was sitting on my chest every
night wtf!!!

a cat, Jeongguk replied. you’re thinking of a cat.

“Anything fun tonight?” Seokjin asks.

“Halloween block party planning.”

“Block party?” Seokjin raises his eyebrows. “As in, your apartment complex?”

“Yeah. Annual thing. There’s a whole committee that puts it together. A couple of the younger
moms who wanted to do something fun for their kids got together like, ten years back or
something, and it ballooned into this whole neighborhood party. Taehyung is an honorary guest
every year.”

“As he should be.”

“You wanna come? It’s on Halloween night.”

Seokjin regards him with mild surprise. “I’m your manager,” he says.

“And a friend? Don’t make this weird. One of our other friends comes too.”

Jimin will probably kill him for this if a demon doesn’t do it first. Jeongguk almost prefers the
demon.

“I’ll—okay, I’ll think about it.” But Seokjin is smiling, so Jeongguk knows he’s won this one.

Jinae is on the eighth floor of their apartment building, door decorated with glitter pumpkins and a
singular crumpled bat drawn by her oldest. The screen door is closed, but the wooden door stands
ajar, sounds of conversation floating through like cathedral organ notes. “Jinae?” he calls.

There’s a shriek and a tumble, followed by yipping. A wild-eyed four-year old, tornado-quick and
just as destructive, tears down the hallway for the front door. A white pomeranian follows,
jumping for the doorknob.

“Hey, Soojung-ah,” Jeongguk laughs down at her. “Isn’t it way past your bedtime?”

“Teacher’s holiday tomorrow.” Jinae unlatches the front door. “Where’s Taehyung? He said he
would be bringing over the surprise thing he got for the block party.”
“Oh. Did he? I haven’t heard, he’s been busy today.” Jeongguk checks. Still no texts. He wonders
if he should call, but he knows the cell signal can disrupt anything Taehyung might be doing. “It’s
a trick mirror. That’s the surprise. It’s kind of big—you want to come take a look?”

Jinae calls into the hallway for the others to keep an eye on Soojung and their equally excitable
dog, and follows him to the elevators. Their apartment is on the seventeenth floor, one stop before
the top floor.

“It’s not like Taehyung to work so late,” Jinae says once the doors have closed.

“It’s not,” Jeongguk agrees. “Usually he texts me when he’s going to be late.” He checks his phone
again, obsessively. His tranquil lockscreen, featuring Taehyung asleep with a hideous Rilakkuma
sheet mask still on, quivers at him.

Someone’s watching him when he looks back up.

The elevator passes the eleventh floor.

He’s standing beside Jinae, a little behind her, so he can see her neck where her ponytail is held off
her shoulders. She’s looking at the doors, humming. There’s a soft stain near her shoulder, no
doubt where her new baby must’ve spit up.

Twelfth floor.

She’s facing forward, but her reflection in the elevator wall on their right has her head turned at an
unnaturally stiff angle. Its eyes stare at him. Jeongguk stumbles back.

Then she smiles.

Thirteenth.

Nothing behind the eyes.

His back connects with the left side of the elevator as he stumbles, tripping toe over heel. Clang
and the elevator car shakes on its cables, then a symphony of squeaky, sticky clicks when
Jeongguk shrinks into the corner and his body mashes against the buttons.

“Jeongguk!”

He doesn’t say stay away from me or what was that or did you see that, just now? Her eyes are
wide and concerned, and Jeongguk feels ridiculous for shrinking away from someone at least a
head shorter than him, reaching out with a hand of concern. His eyes dart between her face and the
polished steel, and her head resolutely faces him now. As it should.

“I thought I—” He straightens and clears his throat. “Sorry, I thought—never mind.”

“You should stay in your apartment and rest if you’re not feeling well,”

Sixteenth.

Jeongguk lost the floor of his stomach somewhere around the fourteenth.

“I—yeah, maybe.”

But nothing happens again. Jinae waits as he unlocks the door, making half-hearted apologies for
the state of their apartment. They don’t usually have guests over, unless he counts Jimin, which he
doesn’t.

“This is cool!” she says when she sees it. Jeongguk had unwrapped it last night after the odd, tense
conversation with Taehyung, just to get a look at it. As promised, it reflects from the side facing
the living room, but stepping behind it, he can see the living room as it is. “No, this is awesome.
We really can use it for the coffins, line it with some extra white fairy lights for shock. Finally!
You guys always have the scariest stories but the fewest decorations.”

“I can see this traumatizing a lot of kids,” Jeongguk says.

“Like when Minjun oppa made me watch Poltergeist as a kid and I had to sleep in our parents’ bed
for a week.”

“Perfect.”

She leans in, trying to peer through the reflective side, squints. “Wow. It really is completely
opaque from here. Let me just—you have a towel? These are some pretty big fingerprints you got
on it already.”

“Yeah, in the kitchen. Just grab any, they’re all for dishes.”

Fingerprints?

Jeongguk had tapped it with his fingernail last night at most. He doesn’t remember there being
visible fingerprints then, but Taehyung might have shifted the mirror out of the way to get to the
thermostat controls this morning.

“Hey, sorry, the ladies downstairs are calling me. Can I do anything without a fire starting?” Jinae
holds out Jeongguk’s dishtowel that he believes was last used to wipe gochujang off his elbow.
“Here.” She mouths a sorry again as she picks up, and Jeongguk waves her off.

The fingerprints speckle sides of the mirror, with a few in the center, in no particular pattern. He
starts wiping it down. It’s a little odd, he thinks, and Jeongguk finds that even though he’s applying
enough pressure to call this scrubbing more than wiping, the smudges don’t come off.

“No, it’s fine. Just order. Even if we don’t use them, we can use it during everyday.”

Silence save for the resonant squeal of wet cloth on glass. Jeongguk stands back, not
understanding, and tugs at the bubblewrap.

It’s not just fingerprints.

The mirror is covered in handprints.

They go under the wrapping. Down, down, down, he pulls, tugs, rips off tape and wrap. It peels
away with hair-raising crackles, the pop of knuckles.

The bit of his stomach that he didn’t lose near the fourteenth floor dives again, going for his knees.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

Jeongguk stands back as Jinae’s voice lilts and fills the empty spaces. The handprints are so dense
near the bottom of the mirror, packed together in a swarm, that it looks fogged with steam.

He takes another step back and sees Jinae, over his shoulder, on the phone. She’s watching him,
eyes unfocused, and then turns away. All her motions are fluid, normal. “Okay, good,” she says,
nodding and going back to walking in elongated loops in their hallway.

The towel is unpleasantly damp and smells of peppers in Jeongguk’s hand. He kneels down and
tries, futilely, to wipe some of it away.

His hand falls through the glass and his body pitches, knees hitting the floor.

“No, I trust you. Just use your best judgment and order what you like, it’s not like children will
remember it after the hour even if it’s bad.”

Jeongguk makes a gargled noise and throws himself backward, scuttling away on his elbows and
heels like a mangled crab.

The dishtowel is gone.

His chest heaves in his reflection. Jinae is on the far end of the hall, closest to their bedroom, and
she mustn’t have seen. Distantly, she says, “Alright, Facetime me. I’ll be down soon, anyway, but
if it’s time sensitive.”

Jeongguk sits up. His heart pounds behind his eyes.

When he looks behind the mirror, there’s nothing there. No dishtowel. He looks at his hand. It’s
still very much attached to his arm.

What the hell had happened?

“Can you see me?”

What would Taehyung do? Well, first of all, Taehyung wouldn’t be on his ass on the floor,
sweating through his underwear in fear. It’s weird, because—Jeongguk isn’t one to get scared
about odd things happening in their apartment. Things follow them home. Taehyung cleanses this
space. It’s a way of life.

Something about this feels all wrong.

“How about now?”

Taehyung would sit up, collect himself, and note that down. Alright: so the mirror must be hiding
something. If you can put your hand through it, then something must be able to come back out
from the other side. A hole, a window, a door. Let’s test that.

Jeongguk puts his fingers to the glass.

He puts a little pressure, and they slip through. Water, unsure if it’s in the mood to let guests in. It
doesn’t hurt—there’s no sensation at all, just like waving your arm in the space of an open
doorway. Jeongguk slides in up to his elbow, then gropes for the towel. It only takes a few seconds
for his hand to meet something damp and cottony.

This, Taehyung wouldn’t do, but Taehyung also wasn’t the one who biked along the Han River
half-knowing there was a demon who had developed a taste for his blood. This is stupid.

Jeongguk shifts closer to the mirror, takes a deep breath as if it really were water, and leans in.

He goes through. Not all the way—stupid, but not mindless. Just the surface of his face, holding
his breath underwater. A long, darkened hallway greets him. At the end of it, a door. Cream,
benign, fitted with a burnished doorknob that looks quite new. That has to be a fresh coat of paint.
Nothing moves. Jinae’s voice is muffled from this side.

Then, banging.

“Let me in!”

A pound of fists from the other side. It shortens the hallway, rattles the world. “Let me in! Let me
in! Let me in!”

Pound: the hallway shortens.

Let me in: the hallway shortens.

“Can you see me now?”

Jeongguk scrambles back again, falling, once more, on his tailbone. He’s back on this side, the
right side, whatever that side is, and—

Jinae smiles where she stands behind him, barely a hair from the back of his head, face distorting
to fit the stretch.

“How about now?”

A strangled, startled cry tears at his throat just as the front door opens, so violently it bangs against
the doorstop.

“Jeongguk—Jeongguk?”

“I saw,” he sits up, reaching wildly for Taehyung as he strides across the foyer and into the living
room without even removing his shoes. Highly treasonous behavior. “I saw a, there was—in the
mirror—”

“Okay, okay, slow down. Tell me slowly.”

“In the mirror—there’s—wait, where’s Jinae?”

“Who?”

Jeongguk’s intestines go from panicked to cold. “Jinae?”

“She’s downstairs. What are you talking about?”

“She was—wait, what? She was in our apartment! Just now, when you came in! She was on the
phone, I—I brought her here to show her our trick mirror.”

“Babe.” Taehyung has one hand on Jeongguk’s shoulder, one on his cheek, and Jeongguk is
clinging with both hands to one of his wrists. “Jinae’s on the eighth floor, where she lives. I stopped
by to apologize for not texting her to say I wouldn’t make it tonight. She was in her apartment
when I got on the elevators.”

Jeongguk stares at him.

“Has something followed us home already?” he asks, barely above a whisper, like he can’t bear to
entertain the idea.

“I think it’s accurate to say,” says Taehyung, “I’m not sure if this ever left us.”
 ✢

For such a small, insignificant planet orbiting such a small, insignificant star, this world carries
more demons in its dress pockets than it can hold.

Like a child’s pockets. Reach into their pockets and you unearth a complete, functioning
ecosystem of mismatched marbles, twigs, clay and scraps of fabric no doubt torn from other
children’s hems, and berries to stain your fingers. Every once in a while you’ll find something
worthwhile to keep, like, oh, there’s your movie ticket that we thought you lost immediately after
we bought it. Don’t do that again.

Taehyung’s good at what he does, finding the movie tickets in this world’s pockets, and making
sure the rest goes where it belongs: out of sight.

He’s good, but he’s not great. He was, once. He tells himself he lost that title the night he almost
lost Jeongguk on Jamsil Bridge.

Jeongguk doesn’t know it, how close it was. He doesn’t remember it and Taehyung considers that
a blessing. Jimin thinks it’s unfair, that it’s important to be honest with someone you love and see
spending the rest of your life with. He’s not wrong, but he also doesn’t know what Taehyung saw
on the bridge that night. Thankfully, Jimin is also smart, and after Taehyung had shaken his head,
he knew.

“Well, if you have to keep it from him, whatever it is,” he’d said, “just promise me it won’t harm
either of you to keep it. Some secrets are better known.”

And some secrets mutate. Some secrets escape through their cage bars when your back is turned.
Taehyung had hoped this wasn’t one of them.

Now Jeongguk is sprawled on the floor, face wild with preylike fear. His grip on Taehyung’s wrist
is a lot stronger than it’s really comfortable. He pries him off, gently.

“It’s okay. It’s okay, I got you,” Taehyung says, pulling Jeongguk to his feet. He sways when
Taehyung hugs him. His body thrums with unused adrenaline, though he clings to Taehyung,
vibrating out of the circle of his arms. “I got you.”

He deposits Jeongguk on the couch for him to come down from the fear. Taehyung rummages
through the kitchen for water, shedding his shoes along the way, hanging his jacket up as a seltzer
tablet fizzes in Jeongguk’s drink. The shaking has stopped when he gets back to him and
Jeongguk’s face has color again, but he stares blankly at himself in the dark TV screen.

“Want to tell me what happened?” Taehyung sits with one leg curled up on the couch cushion, one
stretched down towards the floor, in a soft half-curl. His knee presses into Jeongguk’s thigh, I
promise I got you.

“There’s something on the other side of that mirror.”

Jeongguk’s hand shakes when he points, single leaf on branch disturbed. Taehyung stares at their
reflections in it.

“I know.”

This much seems to get Jeongguk’s attention. “You do?”

“Yeah. I visited Hoseok’s apartment today again, with him. He’s as skittish as you said he was, but
with good reason.”

Jeongguk sits up, putting his water on the coffee table, untouched. “What did you see?”

A demon, Jeongguk. A demon that knows my face. A demon that knows yours.

“You know when I banish a demon, I have to send them back to a plane beyond this one.”

“Yeah, the plane of evils.”

“Sometimes they don’t get there.”

Jeongguk regards him blankly. “You’ve never failed,” he says.

“I’ve never failed to banish a demon,” Taehyung corrects. How close is this to the line? Did this
secret already mutate? Nothing but a bloodied lump of flesh in its cage now. “But not all of them
always get back to the plane of evils.”

Only one of them has ever come back.

“One of them is back?” Jeongguk asks, hushed.

Taehyung nods mutely.

“Well then, we’re old friends now,” says Jeongguk. “Practically coworkers at this point.”

Jeongguk shrugs, and this optimism is just one of the reasons Taehyung fell in love with him.
Optimistic to a fault, this naiveté, something that no one else has spared on him. It’s childish to be
optimistic. Taehyung could never explain that if he doesn’t cling to optimism, he’ll have nothing
but demons. Literally.

Optimism gets you killed in demon hunting.

“I don’t know how dangerous this demon is,” Taehyung says. He hates how soft and weak these
words sound in his mouth. “I thought I knew the first time we dealt with it, but I was obviously
wrong.”

“No demon’s been too much for you, though. How many dark entities have you banished from
houses? From bodies? If you could even unlatch the spirit of that chaebol’s wrongly murdered
sister from his back, then this is going to be okay. It has to be.”

“Not this one.”

Jeongguk’s eyebrows draw together. “How’s it any different?”

“It knows me. It’s not going to like me. The others don’t see me coming, that’s the advantage.”

“Maybe it doesn’t know me. I’m not a medium, right?”

Taehyung swallows. “I wouldn’t bank on that, you’re always around me.”

“Yeah. I guess that’s true.” Jeongguk runs his palm down the length of Taehyung’s thigh. It’s not
sexual, just comforting, leaving a path of fading sunlight in its wake. “So what do we do?” Then
his face clears when he remembers. “Wait, so what did you see at Hoseok’s? Any answers?”

“Not entirely sure yet. I’ve got some ideas. There’s actually a few people I want to visit.”
“Other demon hunters?”

“No. Other victims.”

Jeongguk drifts into a fitful sleep that night, even after he promises he’s okay. Taehyung can feel it
in his arms. The one resting over his waist doesn’t slacken. It’s like he’s trying to sleep with a
spider.

In college, he started snoring—not freight train snoring, the kind that sounds like a passing fighter
jet all night, but air passing raspy through his nose, slow, like the pull of tides. Taehyung could tell
time by counting Jeongguk’s breaths.

He’s not snoring tonight.

This is the worst time to start thinking. Taehyung doesn’t panic if he thinks too much, but
Jeongguk can always feel it. As if Taehyung’s thoughts are loud enough to bleed through the seams
of Jeongguk’s dreams, and he’ll inevitably wake up, and start doing The Reach, and Taehyung’s
not sure what he’ll tell him.

Sorry babe, sorry. Can’t sleep. Thinking about the time a demon ambushed you on Jamsil Bridge
looking like me and almost possessed your consciousness. Or killed you. Haha, remember that?
Classic.

After midnight, he finally falls asleep. Strange dreams return to plague him: dreams of standing in
darkness, facing a door at the end of the hallway. The more he walks, the farther it gets. The
hallway cranes it neck. After a while, the stretching seems to stop, and Taehyung starts to get
closer. He’s not sure he wants to.

What’s on the other side?

It has fresh paint and a new knob. The metal is warm, like a hand has been resting on it for a while.

Taehyung opens the door to a mirror.

“You let me die!”

Jeongguk’s voice tears at his ears and Taehyung thinks he jumps, but his body is congealed in this
dream. Over his shoulder, just in the mirror, he sees him—Jeonguk, barely visible in the dim glow
of the single light over the door, with his curly hair in his eyes, skin the grey of meat frozen too
long, eyes sunken and dark.

“I didn’t!”

“Look what you did.” Black, sticky liquid floods from his lips. “Look at what you did!”

Waking up is a crash: he’s not sure where all of him is when he does. The bones in Taehyung’s
body feel dislodged until they aren’t, he can’t see until he can. He’s too scared to blink, the small,
breathless seconds of darkness flirting with the image of Jeongguk looking wizened, hollow, a
vessel only for ghosts.

He sits up. He gets up.

Taehyung’s shirt is damp and clings like overwrought fruit skins to his back. He moves around the
kitchen mainly on touch; Jeongguk likes to leave the water jug in the fridge at night so that it’s ice
cold in the morning. When it hits the floor of Taehyung’s stomach his organs jump and writhe,
disturbed snakes, and he shudders as his teeth ache. Then he shotguns the rest of it down, standing
in front of the fridge as though he’s having an argument with his own shadow on the brushed steel.

Only then does he notice that, behind him, the TV glows, shapes moving soundlessly. It’s
Jeongguk, watching a late-night rerun of a reality show. Onscreen a girl group whose name escapes
him dances in salmon, flesh-colored tights.

Without music, it’s unsettling. The camera angles makes him dizzy.

“Babe,” sleep makes Taehyung’s voice tires on sand, “what’re you doing up?” He hadn’t noticed
Jeongguk out of bed when he’d rolled onto his feet, but his hand had come down on empty mattress
—he hadn’t thought to check. Jeongguk will get up after stress dreams for quick sets of pushups,
which is frankly disgusting and probably amoral. Taehyung doesn’t think too much of it.

Jeongguk doesn’t seem to hear him—his head is cocked to the side, the way it gets when he’s
nodding off.

“Hey, come on. Let’s go back to sleep,” Taehyung says. He runs his hand over Jeongguk’s
shoulder and dips his thumb under the neckline of Jeongguk’s shirt. “Jeongguk?”

Finally, Jeongguk hears him, turns his face. He hadn’t been sleeping. His expression is tight, the
kind that he gets when he’s upset. Jeongguk’s mouth, even resting, looks like it’s smiling, but the
corners are pulled down and his lips are too pale. Taehyung blinks the grit of sleep from his eyes,
then pulls back

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I had some nausea,” Jeongguk whispers. “I thought I’d feel better out here.”

Nausea? Taehyung has watched Jeongguk eat spoiled cheese before and feel nothing. “Any idea
why?” He rubs the pad of his thumb against the knob at the base of Jeongguk’s neck.

“I don’t know. I must’ve eaten something bad.”

Taehyung thinks about the black tar that had dripped from Jeongguk’s mouth.

“Feel ready to come back to bed?”

“I’ll come back in a sec. You go first, you have to go talk to all those people later. I don’t want to
throw up on you.”

“Okay,” Taehyung whispers, and Jeongguk gives him a weak smile before leaning in and giving
him a soft kiss. It tastes metallic and doughy, like kissing a sponge. He wants to say something but
Jeongguk is looking green again, so he sets the miniature compost bin near Jeongguk’s feet and
gives him another kiss on the crown of his head. “Wake me up if you get worse. I can move the
meetups.”

On the TV, the girl group programming has been traded for a dull infomercial magic ab belts.

Get yours today!

Taehyung crosses his arms to pad back to their bedroom. It’s barely three in the morning. He can
squeeze in a few more REM cycles if he tries hard enough.
A gargling noise suctions his throat closed. On Jeongguk’s side of the bed is someone bundled up
in the blankets, leg hanging off the side of the mattress, toes barely brushing the floor. Taehyung
backs into the doorjamb, stumbles, then backpedals down the hallway.

“Jeongguk,” he barely hears his own whisper, “Jeongguk, there’s something in our—”

He turns.

“—bed.”

The ice water churns in his stomach. Adrenaline trickles down his legs. He can’t feel his feet.

The living room is pitch black. The TV is not on. The fridge hums, the only sign of life, because
there is no Jeongguk on the couch.

The compost bin sits, innocently, where Taehyung had left it, beside the cushions, mouth open with
eggshells and vegetable peels half-chewed.

Taehyung’s breath rushes through his skull. Here, he hangs in the balance, in the middle of the
hallway—between real and not real. The body in bed doesn’t move, John Doe under morgue
sheets.

His feet go. He doesn’t tell them to, and Taehyung hesitates in the doorway of their room again,
watching the rise and fall of breathing. For a while he hangs behind the threshold, a bad parody of
found-footage film, before he makes it up to the edge of the bed.

It’s Jeongguk. That’s definitely his face. He sleeps with his mouth open when he’s on his back, one
arm thrown onto Taehyung’s side, an unsuccessful Reach.

“Jeongguk.” He puts his hands on Jeongguk’s chest and his heart thunders beneath Taehyung’s
palms. Jeongguk’s head lolls when Taehyung shakes him. “Jeongguk. Wake up. Jeongguk.”

Like he always does, Jeongguk wakes up slowly, always delayed. His eyes will open first but not
all of him is there right away. He opens them, then he closes them. Then he opens them again.
Terrified silence hangs between their faces.

“Taehyung?” He starts sitting up. “Hey, what’s going on? You okay?”

“Oh my God.” Relief surges through Taehyung strong as morphine. “Oh, my God.”

“Did something happen? Did you see something?” he asks. Jeongguk has his hands curled around
Taehyung’s upper arms and he’s grateful. He might topple without them.

“I don’t know if it was me, or if it was real, or what it was. I think it was real, Jeongguk. You were
—I got up for water. I was in the kitchen, and then I noticed you were at the couch, watching TV.
You said you felt nauseous. You didn’t have the sound on. Just watching the TV in silence, and
you said—to go to sleep, you’d join me afterwards.”

Jeongguk simply stares at him.

“You gave me a kiss and everything,” Taehyung adds weakly.

Wordlessly, quietly, Jeongguk tips until he can look over Taehyung’s shoulder, past the doorway,
down the hall, into the dark living room.

“What do you think it was?” Taehyung’s throat is extremely dry. So much for water.
“I.” Ugly pause. “I don’t know.”

Even when Namjoon isn’t writing, he’s composing, making sense of the world through sound.

When Taehyung finally finds him, tucked away in a corner of a cafe busy enough for conversation
to be lost in but quiet enough for them to hear each other, he’s drumming his fingers to a three-note
tune. Maybe it’s in D. He hears that’s a good scale to write to.

“Sorry to make you wait,” says Taehyung. He pulls at the buttons of his jacket.

“You didn’t.” Namjoon doesn’t have a face that smiles when it’s relaxed, but his cheeks dimple
when he does. “Thanks for meeting me, and I apologize if I sounded wary at first. It’s been a lot of
talking to press and very little sympathy.”

“I know a bit about the press,” Taehyung says after putting in an order. He always gets the same
pomegranate tea here. The press—the vultures, the coyotes. They slip in and out without being
noticed and all have developed a taste for carrion. Taehyung’s just here to mop up the carnage.
“You can trust me not to talk to them.”

“Thank you.” Namjoon is well-adjusted for someone who’s going through what he is. Mentally,
Taehyung notes that down: Kim Namjoon does well under pressure. “So, what would you like to
know?”

“Catch me up to speed on your version of the story. I’ve read some of the news, but tell me what
you think happened.”

This is what the press said about Min Yoongi’s disappearance: he’d been in a dressing room, trying
on a suitjacket. One that would be tailored to him specifically, because it doesn’t do to look
raggedy in front of an orchestra, and all the other suits he owned fit him like ones that didn’t
belong to him—too long in the waist, too wide in the leg, too big in the shoulders. He’d walked in
and never came back out. The only reason Namjoon wasn’t a prime suspect for battery or
abduction was that an attendant had been there, watching him tap away at his phone waiting for
Yoongi to come out. The press called Namjoon watery, with a kind, limpid handshake, one that
doesn’t beg the idea of a criminal.

Taehyung listens to Namjoon talk—about the tailor’s boutique, about the high glass ceilings, about
the style of their clothes, why they even made such a point to go to that particular boutique at all.
His hands open, close, nervous as a clam, on the table in front of them. His latte is half-empty.

“What did you say the name of the boutique was?”

“I didn’t. It was Blue Hanbok.”

Taehyung runs the tip of his tongue over the bite of his teeth, then reaches for his tea.

“Is there something wrong?”

“Mm, no, no, keep going,” he says.

“I remember every minute of it.” Namjoon’s hands don’t shake, but he’s gone back to drumming
his fingers again. Taehyung could fit the OST of Sky Castle to the rhythm if he tried. “I’ve told this
to the police a hundred, a million times, enough that when I hear it myself now, I think I might be
crazy. I keep thinking I imagined this and that it’s just a really bad episode of sleep paralysis.”
“So tell me.”

“There’s a blue lounge outside the dressing room. I remember looking at it and drawing a smiley
face in it with my finger. It was suede, the nice kind, thick as velvet. I went back to my phone—my
coworker was panicking to me about a last-minute arrangement they needed to make for an SBS
promo for an upcoming movie. The attendant was there the whole time. He even asked what we
did that was so important that we got a custom suit created at Blue, in Eunjung’s signature hybrid
style. So I told him. He seemed really fascinated, told us that one of his childhood aspirations was
acting.”

“This attendant,” Taehyung interrupts. “You happen to catch his name?”

“Seokjin. He had a little nametag. The fancy kind, brushed steel with engraving, the whole nine
yards.”

“Right. And then?”

“Well, you know.” He stops drumming, and the silence almost makes Taehyung’s skin crawl. “We
realized Yoongi had been in the dressing room for a really long time, and hadn’t made any noise.
Seokjin asked if he needed help. Then he asked if everything was okay.”

Namjoon finally slips here, reaching for his latte, and his hand shakes just enough to make the
glass clatter—splinter sharp, quick, tingtingting. “Seokjin was going through the formalities of
asking if he could draw back the curtain, if Yoongi’d be okay with that. He was saying that even
passed-out people still have rights to consent.”

“Which they do,” Taehyung nods.

“Seokjin was saying that it wouldn’t be the first time someone passed out in the dressing room, just
that it was rare. The only other time was an engaged bride who had an iron deficiency and was
overwhelmed. I just—I don’t know. You know that feeling you get when you know you’re being
followed, but you don’t want to look back and let whoever it is know that you know they’re there?
I had that kind of bad feeling. Knowing something without seeing it. I knew something was wrong.
Yoongi’s small, but he’s like an oxen,” Namjoon adds, weirdly defensive, as if he expects
Taehyung to disagree. “Annoyingly healthy. When Seokjin pushed the curtain back, he was gone.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Still had all his own clothes in a pile on the matching suede stool. Shoes and
everything, just left behind. Seokjin swears up and down there’s no other way in and out of that
single room except the curtain. We checked the security cameras, too. Obviously there isn’t one
pointing into the room, but no one came in nor went out from any entrance in the store.”

“There’s a mirror in there though, I presume?”

Namjoon is mid-inhale, like he’d been winding up to launch into another explanation. He blinks.
“Yeah. It’s a dressing room.”

“Hmm.”

For the first time since sitting down, Namjoon’s expression sharpens. Though kind, or “watery,”
the press had called it, his face had been lost, like his gaze was wandering for something to hold
onto—a balloon floating alone with its curled ribbon hanging free. Now it comes to a sharp point.
A cat that has spotted prey, crouched low on its haunches.
“What are you suggesting?”

“Well, Namjoon, you contacted someone who specializes in paranormal investigation. I think there
are darker forces at work here than any iron deficiency. That’s still important, though, please
ensure healthy consumption of vitamin A.”

“You’re saying something in the mirror got him?” There’s a fire in Namjoon’s face. Taehyung
feels horrible for him, that the first real, hopeful lead that he’s getting is from a demonologist. Not
to deprecate himself or his own work. Still, having no hope until someone who can see demons
tells you that you should hold onto seems like a pretty dismal way to see the light at the end of the
tunnel.

“It might have something to do with mirrors. Something strange has been happening to others, not
just you, and I’ve got a good feeling they’re all connected.”

Namjoon stares at him.

“Uh, bad feeling. Bad feeling that they’re all connected,” Taehyung amends.

“What kind of darker forces are we talking about?”

“Demons. Usually, demons are tied to a place or a person, so their view of the world and of life is
pretty limited. We can’t see them, and until someone like me makes trouble with them, they don’t
make much of an effort to expand their horizons. They’re worrisome, bothersome, but they’re not
scary. Not if you get to me early.”

“So what about this demon? Are they scary?”

“They might be.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t see them,” Taehyung says, and this time he thinks his own hands shake. “But they
can see us.”

out at dinner with one of the people i’m talking to today. come pick me up after you’re done? i’ll tell you when
we finish. might be a while TuT

still an uwu variant babe

Night has fallen again by the time Jeongguk stretches in his seat and calls it a day. The time on his
monitor blinks a sleepy 9:17 PM at him, and his eyes burn just looking at it. He’s combed his
gallery of photos for legal and marketing so long that everything in his field of vision is tinted
violet. The mouth of his camera bag hangs open, hungry, and Jeongguk decides to start packing
even though Taehyung still hasn’t called back. Jeongguk wonders how difficult this person must
be.

“Seokjin, I’m heading out!” he calls, as he takes the stairs down two at a time. His keys jingle a
merry tune in the silence. Blue Hanbok closes after eight PM, but Seokjin often stays behind,
especially if Jeongguk is in late. He’d seen Seokjin laughing quietly at his phone during lunch,
hiding it behind a napkin stained with chili oil.

how come you can text during work and get away with it, but i get lectured? Jeongguk had texted him later,
following with a red, angry emoji.

because i’m trying to seduce someone and you’re coming up on your 50th anniversary. aren’t you supposed to
be editing?

Jeongguk had groaned.

Now, the first floor is quiet and serene, a single light turning the edges of the clothing racks soft
and satiny. Jeongguk pauses on the second to lowest stair. He’d finally registered the silence.

“Seokjin?”

Odd. He checks his phone again; if Seokjin needs to leave first, he usually sends a text telling
Jeongguk to lock up, and how to lock up, as if Jeongguk hasn’t done locked up enough to know
how to do it with his teeth, blindfolded.

hey im leaving for today. didnt catch you before you left ig, see you later??

A high, bleating chirp echoes through Blue Hanbok from the front desk where Seokjin always sits.
Jeongguk startles, then snorts at himself.

“Seokjin?”

Seokjin’s phone lies dark and cold on the counter, along with his bag, his keys, even the marbled
water bottle he takes with him everywhere. Jeongguk frowns, snagging the keys so he can lock up,
then taps the screen of Seokjin’s phone so it lights up.

He has a whole afternoon worth of texts that have gone unread, and something in the back of
Jeongguk’s brain goes cold.

From someone he doesn’t recognize, just after lunch, with only a bird emoji for their name:
haha you’re right!!! yeah!!! fuck yeah, i can do this
just kidding, i can’t do this
seokjin oppa help meee what do i say to him though
:(
help!!!
:((((

From someone named Kim Namjoon:

sorry to bother. i’m meeting someone named kim taehyung today about yoongi’s disappearance, and i was
wondering if you’d want to have dinner with us.
i promise he’s not press, i’ve had enough of them. just someone who might help. understand if you’re busy.
let me know!

And, from Taehyung himself:

hello!! seokjin right? im taehyung, i got ur number from kim namjoon. hope thats okay! he told me what
happened at blue hanbok with yoongi and i think i can help. do u like hotpot?

Why is Taehyung texting Seokjin and about a client they have?

Is Kim Namjoon one of the victims that he said he wanted to meet?

Then Jeongguk’s blood goes gooey and cold, like honey refrigerated too long.

What happened here, at Blue Hanbok?

He looks up, around himself, heart pounding in his throat. It’s so loud it’s not even a steady rhythm,
more like a hiss, a ringing in his ears, blood rushing so fast through his temples his head swims.
Jeongguk swings his gaze back and forth on the ground floor of the boutique and nothing moves,
not a thread nor button out of place, and—

“Let me in!”

The sound of fists striking glass booms around him and Jeongguk stumbles back.

“Let me in! Let me in!”

The glass walls of Blue Hanbook rattle, skeleton in winter, and Jeongguk’s stomach rolls with
nausea. He sees spots in the corners of his vision as he stumbles from behind the desk, grabbing
Seokjin’s phone with the keys, before crashing through the heavy glass doors. Jeongguk spills into
the street the same way ice shatters—in pieces, his things hitting the concrete, and he can’t hear
over his heart.

“Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me, I’ll die, we’ll die—”

Blue Hanbok shakes with the weight of these words. Jeongguk lurches forward, locking the front
doors with clumsy fingers, then grabs all his things from the sidewalk and runs for his car.

He’s glad he drove today. He does whenever he knows Taehyung might work late. They own a
clunker of a car, one that’s seen better days, one that had been loved, that’s probably been driven
through mud, water, forest, mountains, been fucked in (they have), been fucked on (they haven’t
yet). Nothing has ever smelled better than the slightly stale smell of fried chicken Taehyung always
orders on late nights that still clings to the faded upholstery. Jeongguk throws the gears into drive,
forgets his lights for a good fifty meters, and peels away from Blue Hanbok.

Only when he’s been on the road for a while does he remember that he never asked Taehyung for
an address. At a stoplight, he reaches for his phone on the console. His hand still hasn’t stopped
shaking, and Seokjin’s keys gleam like dripping teeth in the glare of the sodium lamps on the
passenger seat. He shivers. It’s not cold.

Taehyung had already sent him a text—he must be done with dinner. It came through just a few
minutes ago, no doubt when Jeongguk was escaping by the skin of his teeth. The address is for a
place quite far from Blue Hanbok, in Danyang, no doubt tucked at the foot of the mountains.
Jeongguk raises his eyebrows. Where was this Kim Namjoon from, exactly? He sets his GPS to the
address, then places his phone on the dash clip.

The light shifts green, and Jeongguk drives.

His head is full of questions, writhing like a tub too full of eels and too little water. Jeongguk thinks
about the mirrors, the odd morning he woke with Taehyung upright in bed, of the strange, furtive
way Taehyung hadn’t wanted him to come along to any of his visits with Hoseok or even with
Namjoon. The lights begin to fall away as he leaves the city, the brilliance of Seoul pulling away
from him like a gaudy, bejeweled cape. Out here, there’s only light enough to see.

The GPS chirps at him to take a turn, so he does. The land is rockier here, with more ups and
downs, sparse shrubbery sprouting along the sides of the road.

Jeongguk thinks of the texts on Seokjin’s phone. From Namjoon. From Taehyung. What had
happened at Blue Hanbok? What did Seokjin know that Taehyung wanted to get information
about? Seokjin’s nobody—not to say he isn’t the real-world embodiment of Miranda Priestly from
The Devil Wears Prada, which Jeongguk loves almost as much as he loves The Titanic, but
Taehyung wouldn’t need to seek information about demons from a guy who could probably
bargain his way out of a demonic possession.

Was that why Seokjin had been acting strange, that morning he showed up without a tie?

The foliage grows deeper, taller. The dropoff between the city and the backroads had been steep.
Every hundred yards, probably more, there’s a thin, bony streetlamp. It hangs its neck over the
asphalt and peers dolefully over his lone passing car.

Jeongguk turns his high beams on.

How did Taehyung even find his way out here? Namjoon might have driven them, Jeongguk
supposes. During the daytime, this area probably looks like emerald ocean. Driving down this road
might have felt like being underwater. Sunlight would filter through the leaves and turn them into
seafoam where they were thin, bright green and veiny in the burn of daylight.

On his dashboard, his phone whimpers, distressed. Jeongguk takes his foot off the gas. The maps
app makes a funny noise, like a call is coming through, but it never does. Then it says it’s
recalibrating.

He pulls his phone out of the clip, watching the arrow quiver as his phone searches for another
route. Recalibrating… it tells him. He scowls, looking at the screen, then down the road. It’s
abandoned, ruler-straight, and one-way on this side of the road. There are no turns to miss. It told
him he was supposed to keep going for ages.

Still, the arrow quivers, hung needle.

Then his screen freezes, goes black, then glows back to life.

Recalibrating…

“Come on, you piece of shit.”

The light of his high beams flickers, the way a flame does when a moth flits past.

Jeongguk looks up. The car rumbles beneath him. Dust and dirt motes and floating forest bits
dance through the caustic white shine of the high beams, but nothing—

—wait.

The seatbelt tugs on Jeongguk’s shoulder as he leans forward. Something moves on the road,
beyond the reach of even his high beams. A lonely road sign telling him that the street starts to
wind up ahead flashes at him, coyote eyes.

“Better get back now before you forget how to.”

Jeongguk whirls, a muted, high noise of fear stinging his throat. He doesn’t even know how to
scream. The voice had come from behind his shoulder, and his back cracks when he whirls.

There’s no one in the back seat. The breath rushes in and out of him, his eyes watering.

It had sounded like Seokjin. How could it have been? He checks the phone on his passenger seat,
tongue drier than sand. Nothing. The last text was still from Taehyung.

Recalibrating…
Jeongguk breathes out, settling back into his chair, and reaches for his gearshift. Fuck this, he’s
going to keep going and wait for his phone to recalibrate later. It’ll figure itself out.

He checks his high beams, that they’re as bright as the car allows, then his mirrors. Left. Right.
Nothing except road and forest in each, and in his rearview—

Someone is standing in his rearview mirror behind the car.

It’s Taehyung.

“Tae—?”

He turns again, and Taehyung is gone. Jeongguk’s heart is still in his ears, and he twists around to
look in his rearview mirror.

Something strikes the windshield, like the crack of knuckles. Hard enough that the sound is
breaking bones, just like the glass in Blue Hanbok. The impact is hard enough to make his car
shake, the windows rattle, and Jeongguk doesn’t know which way to drive. He doesn’t care,
actually, putting the car back into drive and gunning the gas.

It doesn’t stop. The windshield starts to splinter. Then, following one particularly hard strike— the
glass fractures in a wide, sprawling cobweb over the passenger side. He finally does cry out in fear,
pulling the car in a swerving U-turn before peeling down the road the way he came.

Only enough time passes for him to remember to breathe, because he’s going lightheaded, before
his phone dings with a cheerful recalibration and sets back back on his path. Then a call comes.

It’s Taehyung.

Jeongguk misses the green call button three times before he puts him through.

“Babe! Where are you?”

“Taehyung,” Jeongguk slurs, tongue knotted with fear. “Sorry. I’ll be there soon. I promise I’ll
pick you up, I’ll be right there, but I don’t—I think there’s something on the roads. There was—”

“Wait, what? I’m still at dinner.”

Thin hissing as blood pounds in Jeongguk’s temples.

“What?”

“I’m still talking to someone, at dinner. But I want you to go home. Okay? Go home, right now. I
thought I saw—I don’t know. I want you to go home right now, I don’t care what you’re doing.”

“What? What do you mean?” Jeongguk looks at the name on the phone again. Yes, this is
Taehyung. “You sent me a text with an address to come pick you up. Just now. What do you mean
you’re still at dinner?”

A chilling silence.

“I haven’t texted you since early afternoon, Jeongguk.”

There’s a quiet murmur on the other end of the line. “Yes, thank you. I’m fine. I’m just worried
about—” Taehyung’s voice comes back to the receiver. “Babe?
“Yeah, yeah, I’m here.”

“Go home. I’ll finish up here and come back myself. Don’t worry about me, I’ll get back without
any problems.”

“But—”

“Go home and stay there,” Taehyung commands. “And cover all the mirrors.”

Taehyung comes home with someone model-tall, buttery blond hair slicked back in an ice-cream
swirl over his forehead. This must be Kim Namjoon.

The lapels of Taehyung’s coat are crooked, like he’d been running, and when he crosses the foyer
into the living room and puts his hands on Jeongguk’s knees, they’re cold through the denim.

“Babe, are you okay? Tell me if you’re okay.”

Jeongguk has spent the last hour in their apartment trying to relearn how to translate thoughts to
words without shaking. The couch sinks around him as though making to swallow him, and across
the living room, Jeongguk’s bathtowel is starting to slip from where he draped it over the TV. His
feet are asleep. His lips are numb. His joints might have fused in his arms, too stiff to even reach
for the phones he has on the cushion next to him. Still, he says, “I’m okay.”

“What’s my name?”

“Taehyung.”

“What’s yours?”

This is what he does every time they have a bad brush with any clients’ demons. Jeongguk had
been fearful the first time Taehyung had grilled him, but it’s needed. It’s necessary.

“Jeongguk.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Okay, tell me something only we’d know.”

Jeongguk casts out for something—he can’t ever use the same thing twice, because that proves
nothing, anyone can remember an answer. Last time he’d said, once in college, you dared me to
skinny dip in the school fountain because the other option was telling you the truth of how long I’d
had crush on you.

Today he goes with, “Once you ordered a buttplug that really looked like kunai for my Naruto
cosplay, but then we thought it looked too buttplug-y and decided it was better for anime roleplay
instead.”

“Oh, uh,” Namjoon stammers from the doormat.

Taehyung blinks, unruffled. “Well, that certainly counts,” is all he says, standing up. He seems to
remember that Namjoon is in the foyer. “I’m so sorry. Sorry, I had to make sure.”
“Don’t apologize. I understand. But—I should get going now, then. I’ll catch a train home.”

“No. Don’t. It’s not safe.”

Jeongguk stares at Taehyung, who’s frowning at Namjoon, who has his eyebrows raised and a
hand on the doorknob.

“It’s not?” he asks, voice pitching high.

“It’s already taken Yoongi. Hoseok and Seokjin are missing, as of today. I don’t know if it’ll come
back for you, but I don’t want to risk it.”

“You don’t have to worry about me.”

“I do, and even if I didn’t, I’m blind from this side without you.”

“Hoseok’s missing?” Jeongguk asks, adrenaline piercing his chest afresh.

“He was supposed to text me this afternoon after I met with Namjoon.” Taehyung shakes his head,
and for a moment, the shadows beneath his eyes are dark. They only show up when a case is
starting to weigh on him. “No word from him at all. I called Hope Dance while I was at the cafe,
and they said he didn’t show up for dress rehearsal.”

“Fuck, hang on. Seokjin’s missing?” Jeongguk asks. “Hang on. When I left, he wasn’t there. I
thought he left early, but. I have his phone here. You both were texting him and he hasn’t replied
all day, all his things were still at Blue Hanbok. He never goes anywhere without his phone, not
with our boss breathing down our necks any minute.”

Taehyung holds his hand out for it, and Jeongguk passes it over with wooden fingers.

“I think he is, but I’m not sure yet. Unlike Yoongi, we don’t know who the last person is that saw
Seokjin. Namjoon was in contact with him up until last night. You saw him this morning though,
right?”

“Yeah. But—wait. Okay, this is a long shot, but. What if Jimin was the last one to see him?”

Taehyung’s eyebrows knit together. “Why would he know Jimin?”

“I, uh,” Jeongguk doesn’t know how this is embarrassing considering what he just said about
buttplugs, “might have given him Seokjin’s number. We should call him. Maybe he’ll know
something?”

Taehyung puffs his cheeks up, lips a small rosebud in his face, then releases the air like a deflating
balloon. “Go shower, babe. I need to think. Yeah, we should call him, but go shower. You look
frozen down to the bone.”

Jeongguk’s eyelashes flutter when Taehyung leans over to kiss him, just on the forehead, but he
runs his thumb over his cheek. Still, Jeongguk’s skin has grafted to the fabric of the couch in his
fear, so Taehyung takes his hand in his and pulls him to his feet.

“Come on. Just a moment, Namjoon.”

It’s been years since Jeongguk has been led to the bath. More than twenty, he guesses, when he’d
still been a pink-faced, cherubic toddler that had to be dragged to the bath, and only was convinced
to climb in when Jeonghyun said they could play pirates in the bathroom. Once it had been silly, a
little juvenile, tinted sepia on the edges now when Jeongguk remembers it. Now, Taehyung will
barge in when Jeongguk is down to his socks and say, “For the environment,” before dragging him
into the shower stall together.

Having Taehyung zigzag through their bedroom picking out clothes for Jeongguk to change into,
now that’s just embarrassing.

Jeongguk doesn’t come to until Taehyung starts going for the underwear drawer, the one with all
the shitty bits and pieces of clothes that Jeongguk never wears but never wants to throw out. The
drawer with the box. His body reacts before his mind does, and he garbles a cross between a “No,
wait!” and an “Oh, uh!” and it becomes, “Uh, no!”

Taehyung blinks, hand on the drawer knocker. “Babe?”

“There was,” Jeongguk thinks on cold feet, “a spider in that drawer. Don’t open it.”

“A spider?” Taehyung asks, taking his hand off the knob. Okay, good, now back away.

“Yeah. A big one, I didn’t get it. It was too fast? Don’t go in there.”

“You didn’t get it?” Taehyung says, voice rising shrill.

“I’ll get it right now. I’m fine. I’m okay. You should go talk to Namjoon, I think he’s seizing up
out there.”

Taehyung stands, and he looms tall in the dim warmth of their bedroom. Jeongguk wishes that they
could just curl up in here, in this tight cocoon, and forget about the world outside. He knows that’s
not possible.

“Okay,” says Taehyung, and he steps in close for a kiss. His clothes smell like hotpot. “Just shout
if you need anything.”

“Yeah. Of course.”

Jeongguk waits until he knows Taehyung’s not coming back. Not until he’s out of the door, but
until his voice floats down the hall from the kitchen, the creak of floorboards as Namjoon stands
on the floorboard by the counter that was never nailed down properly. It squeaks like a crushed
mouse every time.

“Namjoon, can I get you anything to eat? Sorry I rushed us out of dinner.”

“No, no. I’m fine.”

“We actually need to get rid of some grapefruit juice if you’re interested.”

Then the breath rushes out of his lungs. Jeongguk drops to his knees, jerking the underwear drawer
out towards him, and plunges his hands into the mulch. The box is buried deep. He draws his lip
between his teeth, joints aching with the twist he puts his arm in, and skitters his fingers across the
back of the drawer until they close around molded leather that fits in his palm.

“I wouldn’t mind grapefruit juice, thanks.”

“Awesome. Jeongguk does most of the grocery shopping, and he buys so many juices.”

The sock drawer. That makes more sense. Taehyung barely ever goes into it, never mind
Jeongguk’s, since he only ever wears the same five pairs that Jeongguk launders every week. It
jams when Jeongguk tugs it open, folded socks rolling against the wood, as though pulling a
tongue out of an unwilling mouth. This one spits folded socks onto the floor.

Jeongguk stretches his arm deep into the recesses of it with his box, feeling for the corners,
shoving his secret against the wood. Then he pushes a wad of aggressively thick fleece socks on
top, and—there. That should do it.

When he starts to pull back, something wet and clammy grabs his hand from the back of the
drawer.

“Fuck!” he curses, jumping so hard that his shoulder cracks. He yanks his hand from the armoire
and a photo frame of him and Taehyung squinting in the spray of Erawan Falls rattles, then falls
facedown.

“Jeongguk? Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I just! Caught the spider! I caught the fucker!”

Does Jeongguk’s voice shake?

“I love you!” Taehyung calls back.

What the fuck was that?

“You can catch demons but you can’t deal with a spider?” Namjoon asks.

“Do demons have eight legs and eyes and lay egg sacs in my apartment? No.”

Jeongguk swallows, then kicks the drawer shut. The armoire doesn’t budge again. When he
emerges from the bedroom, clothes clutched to his chest, he gives Taehyung a weak thumbs up,
and even flashes a crumpled tissue for extra effect.

Something has followed them home.

He’ll tell Taehyung after he showers. Maybe when Namjoon isn’t listening. After he gets the cold,
slimy sensation off his hand. Under the warm bathroom lights, his skin is dry, knuckles even a
little chapped, with nothing to suggest the feel of shoving his fist into a dead mouth.

That’s what it was.

A shiver wracks him.

Jeongguk closes the door of the bathroom, and their voices go muted. Taehyung and Namjoon’s
voices are both low, like the deep thrums of the lowest strings on a harp. They weave around each
other as Jeongguk peels his clothes off, remembering how his limbs should bend. He leaves them
on a pile on his toilet.

The shower runs, as always, first in icy needles. Jeongguk stares across the tile floor at the sheet
that hangs over their bathroom mirror, and he remembers Hoseok, unsettled and fearful with his
cerulean blankets over his bathroom mirrors. He thinks about Seokjin, with his pressed ties, and
that single morning where he didn’t have one, absent of his corporate amethyst noose, smiling,
shifty, scared, haunted. Cracks in his smile.

The water warms and spills in pearls over his shoulders when he steps into the water. Thin streams
of it run down his thighs, over his knees to pool in the tub. He should be reaching for his shampoo,
but he stands motionless, getting wet, body locked.

The sensation of wet, slimy flesh in his fingers doesn’t wash away.

Namjoon laughs. It’s awkward but infectious. Jeongguk imagines it, what it was like for him. What
he saw. What he knows. He doesn’t really look much like a demon hunter to Jeongguk, if that’s
what he is, but neither did he look at Taehyung and think he dealt hands with monsters.

He should be making more of an effort to get in and out of the shower so they can call Jimin and
see if he has information on Seokjin. Namjoon, Jimin, two openings as fine as fishing lines, the
only way to get a handle on what they’re facing. Taehyung’s face is gaunt. Something eats at him,
and it’s not just this case.

Jeongguk plugs up the bottom of the bathtub. He’ll just sit here until he can unclench. Water
begins filling the bottom of the tub, sloshing as he putters around gathering his soap and body
wash. Taehyung has a bottle of body wash for sensitive skin, tinted rich, royal purple, with plum
extract. Jeongguk had gotten it for him one day on a whim and Taehyung hasn’t used anything else
since; now, the scent calms him. It smells like Taehyung.

He waits for the water level to get to his ankles before he squeezes the bottle.

It hits the water in a long, sticky ribbon of purple. Bubbles start to rise steady as dumplings as the
water rolls.

Taehyung’s low murmur crescendos in a “Well!” outside, the way it does when he finishes a story.

He sets the bottle down. The water laps at his shins.

Jeongguk pushes his face under the showerhead, eyes squeezed shut, water streaming past his lips.
He lets himself admit he’s scared. It’s such a small, weak, angry feeling. Jeongguk has been doing
this for years, hasn’t felt scared in a long time—freaked, sure, all the time, he’s not a machine.
Freaked goes fast, living and dying quick as moths. Freaked is static on his spine. Scared is a
different feeling. Scared is slow-release.

The door opens and shuts gently. It’s quiet outside now, and Jeongguk ducks his head further as the
bath fills up. “I’m okay,” he says, because he hates that he’s making Taehyung worry. “I’m sorry.
I’m on edge, but I’m okay.”

But Taehyung knows better than to entertain this nonsense. The shower door opens, closes,
accompanied with the usual flash of chilly air rushing into the bathspace. Warm, big hands at his
waist. They don’t shake. Taehyung holds them up in demons’ faces to banish them; his hands
never, ever shake.

“I’m really okay.” Jeongguk can’t even muster the energy to bring his hands up to lace them with
Taehyung’s. “You should go back outside. We have a guest here. I’ll be out soon.”

Lips on his shoulder, kissing the gentle crest where Jeongguk’s clavicle ends. Taehyung hugs
Jeongguk more securely at his waist, swaying them a little, comforting.

The water tickles at his kneecaps.

“Let me shut the water off, it’ll overflow,” Jeongguk says. He leans forward.

Taehyung’s grip on him tightens.

“Babe, I’m just shutting the water. I’m not gonna chase you out, promise.”

When Jeongguk pulls away, Taehyung bodily yanks him back.

“Hey, what’re you—fuck!”

There’s no one in the shower with him.

Jeongguk slips when he turns, then stumbles. His back hits the wall of the shower and the water
roils, sloosh, at the kick of his feet. He’s under the slope of the showerhead now, peering through
the curtain of water, looking for someone that’s not there.

He’s alone in the bath.

He hadn’t imagined it. There’s no doubt in his mind. Sure, Jeongguk has missed Taehyung before.
Of course he’s missed Taehyung enough to feel the weird phantoms of his hands on Jeongguk’s
body on nights that he sleeps in their bed alone. Jeongguk knows those hands, knows them from
nights of holding them, he knows those lips, from years of kissing them. He knows Taehyung’s
body. He knows Taehyung’s warmth.

A force strong enough to dislocate his bones shoves him from behind. Jeongguk’s head cracks
against the wall and he slips in earnest, dazed. A wet trickle starts at his hairline.

“Taehy—?”

He’s shoved under water. Then held there. Jeongguk screams. Then pressure appears at his neck,
holding him down, boom. His head smacks the bottom of the tub. The pain of it thunders through
his skull. He can’t breathe, but is it the water or the vise around his neck? A faint, scarlet cloud
drifts from his hair towards the bright, rippling surface. His screams are nothing but a frenzied nest
of bubbles rising, frantic but quiet, to the surface of the bath, the shower pounding on, his limbs
thrashing as he reaches for anything for purchase. Boom. The handrail, the glass, anything.

A face appears above the glimmer. It smiles.

“Taehyung!”

Just the sound of water.

Boom.

When blood touches the water, it turns into dark, thin fingers.

Then it’s black.

The first time Taehyung had met Jeongguk, a demon had been sitting on his shoulders.

So call Taehyung stupid for asking him out on a date. It was the first thing that came to mind. The
truth is, Taehyung meets dozens of people every day that have dark entities and shadows clinging
to them, licking at the shells of their ears, toying with the collars of their shirts. Sometimes he’ll
meet someone particularly slimy, who complains about back pain, and Taehyung has to fight not to
look at the massive demon wrapped smug as a snake around their neck. It takes a certain kind of
person to attract demons. The more rotten their guts and their blood, the darker the demon. It’s a
stench. Taehyung can smell it. Not quite death, just meat going bad in the sun.
But he’d seen Jeongguk, someone who he knew just by looking didn’t have a heart rotting out of
his chest, and he’d seen the demon: a smoky, faceless one. One that had met Taehyung’s eyes. One
that he could see, but one that could see him.

And, “Hey, my date bailed on me, and you’re cute, and I have a free dinner voucher. Do you like
Mongolian barbecue?” had slipped from his mouth.

Jeongguk had agreed. He’d been surprised, maybe even shocked, and in hindsight, Taehyung
figures he would be too. When he’d asked, they weren’t strangers, but even acquaintances was a
stretch. Still, Jeongguk had agreed. They’d gone to get Mongolian barbecue, stuffed themselves
full of lamb and pork, and left with the sizzle of tabletop grills still ringing in their ears, smelling of
meat.

But the demon stayed.

Some days, it was lighter. Just a shadow. Other days it was darker than storm and rainclouds,
sitting on Jeongguk’s belly as he wheezed with the flu. It stayed like that, always, until—

“You fucked? Oh, come on. Come on, Taehyung, that’s some bullshit right there.” Jimin had been
inconsolable.

“I mean, I don’t disagree. But we had sex. Uh, have been having sex? I don’t know. And that
demon hasn’t been back since.”

“Did you conduct a fucking seance like, with his dick inside you? Does it work like that?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t tried before. We did it in front of a mirror, though, maybe that did
something.”

“Jesus. Doggy?”

“Kind of. He held my back to his chest. It was kind of hot.”

So then, Jeongguk stayed, and the demon left.

A while later, Taehyung learns that Jeongguk is sticky—like flies to honey. Rot to sweet.

Sometimes, Taehyung wonders if he regrets this. If he should have let Jeongguk get on the dingy
bus without asking him to dinner, let him move through the world with the faceless demon on his
back, burying its face in his hoodies, like Taehyung does so many other people. Maybe, like so
many other people, it would never have gotten malevolent enough to need a demonologist’s
intervention. Jeongguk always tells him that this is a stupid way to think, that he wants this,
demons or no demons, that he would choose this even if he knew what would come.

Today, Taehyung regrets it.

Today, Taehyung would turn back time and let Jeongguk get on the bus, would have let them stay
strangers, would never have said yes when Jeongguk clumsily asked Taehyung to be his.

Then, maybe—

“What? What happened?”

Namjoon balks in the doorway, in the steamy fog of the bathroom, as Taehyung gropes for nothing
in the water. It’s tinged a light pink, no doubt from blood. A smear of it grins at him from the wet
tile, and Taehyung puts his fingertips to it. They’re trembling. The shakes travel from his shoulder,
down the length of his arm, through his knuckles.

“Oh, fuck,” Namjoon breathes. “That’s not good.”

He jumps out of the doorway when Taehyung lurches to his feet. He thinks he’s sobbing, but he’s
not sure; there’s a noise coming from his mouth, but it’s not words. Some of it is supposed to mean
Jeongguk and please don’t take him away from me again but most of it is wet and unintelligible.
Namjoon trails after him into the living room as Taehyung starts ripping the covers off the surfaces
around them.

“What are you doing?”

Taehyung’s nail screech down the TV screen, across the glass paneling of the coffee table, and
then he stops in the length of the full-body trick mirror. His eyes are bloodshot, mouth a sharp,
twisted wound. He puts his hands to the surface and they’re stuck against the ungiving, uncaring
glass.

“Come on!” he shouts. The blotch of his cheeks stands out when he yells. He punches the mirror as
hard as he dares. What if it shatters the only bond between this plane and the next? “Come on, let
me in! Let me in!”

“Taehyung!” Namjoon wedges his arm between him and the mirror, holding back. Taehyung is
skittish as a bloodied animal, and Namjoon pulls away as soon as he stills. “You might not be able
to get to—wherever that demon lives from here, but what about Blue Hanbok? It’s all glass and
mirrors in there. And—two people vanished in there. Maybe it might be easier.”

“But,” Namjoon is right, and Taehyung would, if he could, teleport there right now. “I don’t want
you to come, because that demon’s seen you. What if we all get stuck inside the mirrors? What
then?”

Namjoon’s lips flatten.

Then, “Who was that guy Jeongguk said might’ve seen Seokjin last?”

When Jimin picks up, Taehyung gets an earful of skull-pounding EDM music that rattles through
his cochlea so hard he has to hold the phone away from his ear and put him on speaker. Faintly,
through the strains of synth, he hears Jimin’s voice. “Hello?”

“He’s gone.”

“Hang on, let me—excuse me—”

Feedback noises float through the receiver and then the music goes muted, filtering through walls
and from the open-close sway of the front door. “Sorry, I’m in Hongdae right now.” His voice is
tipsy, lilting and blushed pink. “What’s up?”

“It took him, Jimin. It took Jeongguk.”

“Oh, fuck,” Jimin says, steadying immediately. Taehyung pictures him standing up straight from
leaning against the pole of a streetlamp. “Oh, shit. When?”

“Just now. Something assaulted him in the bathroom. I’m so stupid, I’m so fucking—why did I let
him out of my sight?”

“Okay, now is not the time to go into a self-destruct spiral,” Jimin says. Weirdly, with just enough
alcohol, he has razor-sharp focus in situations. “What do you want me to do?”

“Jimin, did you meet Seokjin today?”

A long pause. “Yeah,” he says, and his voice goes pinched. “He stood me up, though. I’m not sure
how this is important right now.”

“No, no, it’s super important. Seokjin might’ve been taken, too.”

“What? How? By the same thing that took Jeongguk?”

“Yeah. We think so. When was the last time you saw him?”

The music starts to fade. Jimin must be walking. “Okay, uh. This morning, around lunch. I got—
Jeongguk gave me his number, so I texted him, we got lunch together. We’d only just gotten our
orders when he got a text about going back to Blue Hanbok, from his manager. He said that we
should get dinner, and we agreed to go get seafood at this restaurant he likes. He seemed excited.
Then he never showed.”

Namjoon stands across Taehyung, with the phone held aloft between them. Taehyung breathes in,
trying to calm the lines of his thoughts, arranging them so that he can think. He tucks his free hand
under the elbow of his arm holding the phone.

“So the last time you saw him, he was leaving the lunch place?”

“Yeah. Sandwiches, near Blue Hanbok. And the last text from him was like,” Jimin’s voice pulls
away as he goes through his phone. “‘Do you ever get this feeling you’re being watched?’ And I
replied, ‘Like in the sexy way or the scary way?’”

“Christ,” Namjoon says.

“And then he went quiet,” says Jimin.

The screen of Taehyung’s phone is shiny and black and his own face stares resolutely back at him.
He wants to scream, but he also doesn’t want to make Jimin panic.

“I need to go to Blue Hanbok.”

“Wait, what? Like, right now?”

“Yes, right now! I can’t—I can’t just sit here! I have to do something! Who could get Jeongguk
back? I only know people that know how to keep demons away, no one that can—what if no one
can get him back?”

There’s a silence where even Jimin is quiet.

“If anyone can, it’s you,” he says. “But don’t go alone.”

“He won’t be alone. I’m going with him,” Namjoon says.

“Oh, hello! Who was that?”

“No, Namjoon, you can’t,” Taehyung says.

“I can and I will. Yoongi is in there, too. If it means I can help you, or do anything to help get them
all back, then I’m going.”

Taehyung looks at him long and hard. His usual question: can I get this person back if I lose him?
is too uncertain right now.

“For fuck’s sake—taxi!” Jimin shouts over the phone. “Okay, I’m going too. Don’t fucking go in
without me. I’m leaving Hongdae right now.”

Namjoon has a Polaroid photo of himself with Min Yoongi in his wallet, because he doesn’t have a
license to put inside the window pocket.

“He’s got dark hair right now, though,” Namjoon says. “After one too many delirious late nights,
he said he needed a change and had it dyed back to black.”

Taehyung squints at the film. Yoongi is smaller than Namjoon, chin barely reaching the line of
Namjoon’s shoulder, with a cheeky, half-crooked smile. He obviously wasn’t ready for this photo,
and Taehyung guesses he must’ve made some cranky comment right after it was taken, but
Namjoon clearly loves it. He pinches the white border on the bottom when Taehyung hands the
photo back to him, smiling at it quietly before sliding it back into his wallet.

“I’ll try to find him.”

“Thank you so much,” says Namjoon. “But please, make sure Jeongguk is okay, too. That was a
lot of blood. At least Yoongi disappeared unscathed.”

The subway is full of people on their way to Hongdae and Gangnam and Itaewon, to go clubbing.
There’s too much perfume and cologne in his nose, but he welcomes it, to chase the smell of
lingering body wash that Jeongguk had been using. He must have struggled. There were suds and
water soaking into the bathmat.

Taehyung is on the subway to go kill a demon.

“I think I know why,” he says.

“You do?” Namjoon raises his eyebrows. “Have you seen this demon before?”

“I think I have.” Taehyung twists his fingers in his hands, then clamps his teeth down on his lower
lip. It’s not professional to unleash his own fear on a client that’s seeking him for his work and his
help. Still, it’s hard to hold himself together. Not when so many lives are on the line. Not when it
feels like failure. Not when he’s afraid he might not ever get Jeongguk back.

“How, if you don’t mind me asking?”

It hadn’t been a call from the police, the hospital, or a jogger that happened to be in the right place
at the right time.

Taehyung had been in a crafts store.

He likes to paint. Taehyung actually doesn’t care how good he is, or isn’t; the point is that putting
a brush to canvas is sometimes the only thing that holds his cords and wires together on long
nights. The touch of color to a solid surface. Deeper than just what it looks like. The bend of bristle
and the gentle burble of dirty brushes in mugs of water. Art tells him there’s more to see than only
demons.

Jeongguk had only recently gotten a contract to work freelance with Blue Hanbok. His first project
had finally come back approved, by head designer Eunjung herself. The runway trend that year had
been neo-military and uniform, and Blue Hanbok had taken that right in stride. Jeongguk’s photo
made it to the window display that year. Taehyung insisted on framing it.

“Why are we framing it? In such a giant frame? It’s not like we’re Blue Hanbok.”

“God, I can’t believe you are this uncultured for an artist,” Taehyung says. “Obviously, we’re
going to frame what you do for fall/winter, then whatever you do for spring/summer. Then we’ll
repeat. Or we’ll put in whatever your favorite photo of the month is. It’s reusable and a pragmatic
purchase. Then, after it gains sentimentality points after being well-loved and used so many years,
we’ll put our wedding photo in it, and everyone will ask, ‘Wow! Where did you get that beautiful,
vintage frame!’ And I will tell the whole story of how my naive artist husband once said that we
didn’t need it, but thank God I disagreed.”

There’s an extended silence on the phone.

“Wedding photo,” Jeongguk repeats intelligently.

“What, you disagree? I mean, give it a few years, weddings are time and money sucks. We are not
rich. But I think it’ll look good. Wood looks good with anything, none of that floating glass edge
bullshit.”

“Sure,” Jeongguk says. He sounds like he has a whole, unpeeled navel orange lodged in his throat.
“Yeah. That’s. Wedding photo. Cool. Cool, cool.”

“Where are you right now?”

“Uh, biking along Han River.”

“Right now?”

“Jimin says it’s good for inspiration and thinking.”

“Well, he’s not wrong, but it’s late.” Taehyung checks the time on his phone, pulling it away from
his ear. “Start heading home, I’ll meet you there.”

“Okay. Love you.”

“Love you too, babe.”

And Taehyung doesn’t see anything, know anything, or feel anything that gives him any reason to
think that Jeongguk is in danger. Not when he rolls up to checkout, nor when he watches the sales
associate wrap the glass frame in butcher paper and tissue so it’s safe on the way home.

It’s not until Taehyung is outside, in the nip of winter chill. He rummages in his bag for the tiny
peach-shaped charm that he’d found in the scrapbooking section, one that he couldn’t pass up
buying for Jeongguk. Jeongguk’s not the type to accessorize himself, but Taehyung will get him
trinkets, and Jeongguk will always say ‘you know I don’t hang these anywhere,’ and said trinkets
always appear taped to his monitor. Or looped on his keys. They fit somewhere into the tapestry of
his being, because Taehyung likes to weave with gold.
He turns over the heavy glass frame to dig, and that’s when he sees it: the deep, gooey red stain, as
if a dollop of paint had dripped into the wrapping paper. He frowns. He hadn’t gotten paint today,
much less red paint, so it couldn’t have been a tube exploding in the bag. Unless there had been
something at the checkout counter, and maybe Taehyung hadn’t—

His fingers touch it, and he knows it’s not paint.

It’s warm, sticky in a way that paint isn’t.

The other bags hit the sidewalk with a quiet thump as Taehyung tears at the wrapping paper bound
around the frame and glass, and he feels his breath shallow. It’s a trick of the light—no, it’s not.
Light doesn’t do this.

Taehyung shakes, because light does not cast the figure of two bloody handprints onto glass, no
matter how dark the shadows. It’s so fresh it’s warm, as if someone had just put their hands to it.
Then he recoils when he sees it.

“Taxi!”

He runs into the street, head wild, still clutching the bloody glass. Peach charm forgotten outside
the craft store.

“Taxi! Please! I need—I need to get to Jamsil Bridge!”

“When I got to him, he wasn’t breathing. I was so sure I lost him.”

Namjoon is still, even with the rabbit-quick bolt of the subway car through the dark tunnels.

“The demon that had attacked him was still there. They were so solid, so corporeal, I thought it was
just a thug. They certainly were standing over him like they’d just beat him up. There was blood on
the concrete…”

Namjoon’s hand twitches, as if he considered for a moment putting his hand on Taehyung’s arm,
but decided not to.

“But then they stood up and they had my face. They looked like me down to the last detail—an
outfit I had worn before. The hair. Everything. I saw smoke coming of the edges of their body, and
I knew—I knew it was the same demon that had haunted Jeongguk since the moment I met him.”
Taehyung nods, then adds, “So I instinctively smashed the photo frame I’d bought over its head.”

“And that was that?”

“They vanished, like that, and I hadn’t seen them since.”

“Until the mirrors,” says Namjoon.

“Surviving in a mirror world,” Taehyung said. “Waiting. Watching.”

The subway pulls into a stop and most of the train gets off. It’s only Namjoon, Taehyung, and
another couple clearly already drunk and making out. A lone businessman, tapping away on his
phone, top button undone.

“What happened after that?”

“He didn’t remember any of it, except that he’d been running from something. He knew he’d been
attacked, but he didn’t have any recollection of what the demon looked like, what it said to him.
Any of what happened between him hitting the ground and him waking up in the hospital, he told
me,” Taehyung shakes his head. “All gone. I don’t know if it’s a good thing. I don’t want him to
remember something like that, to see my face and feel fear.”

Namjoon hums, understanding. He tangles long, pianist fingers in the fringe of his scarf. Taehyung
stares at it, at the material. It’s rich wool. He thinks about if Yoongi had bought it for him.

“What had you seen tonight?”

“Huh?”

“At dinner. You choked when we were eating, and then you were tearing at your pockets looking
for your phone, trying to call Jeongguk to make sure he was okay. Was it like that?”

“I...”

Dinner tonight had been different. Arguably worse. Namjoon is keen to ask, putting two and two
together so quickly.

But they’d been eating. Taehyung had ordered more beef tendon than he could finish, and
Namjoon was dunking a slice of lamb into the half of the pot that boiled tongue-numbing
peppercorn broth. Taehyung’s not a fan of a ton of spice, and even less of the tongue-numbing
variety. Namjoon had laughed at something he quoted from Yoongi. It wasn’t funny, but he was
remembering something that Taehyung wasn’t privy to, a joy-drenched memory that he had pulled
out for display.

Taehyung had just ladled a bowlful of broth into his soup bowl. Garlic and jujubes floated to the
surface like holiday baubles. He rummaged over the table for his spoon, leafing under half-finished
bowls of cabbage and meats.

Then his head swam, and the hotpot restaurant vanished. Only for a second, he saw the door at the
end of the hallway.

Taehyung righted himself before Namjoon could notice anything, hand finally landing on his soup
spoon. He gripped it in his fist, swallowing.

“You okay?”

Namjoon’s face warped.

“Yeah. I’m fine, I’m great. What were you saying? I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I was—but that’s Yoongi, you know? Pragmatic to a fault. Then, when you’re not looking, he
throws you a curveball. Oh, this is another part of him, you think. I’ve lived with him for eight
years and some days I feel as though I’m—”

He balked when Taehyung spat a mouthful of soup out onto the table.

“I—whoa. Taehyung, are you sure you’re alright?”

“Sorry, I don’t,” Taehyung looked down at his bowl. “My soup.”

The soup, just then a rich, stewed yellow, had turned red-black and sticky. Stringy chunks of it
dripped from his spoon. On the table, a softened clove of garlic, coated dark with—

He almost vomited into the boiling hotpot then and there.

“My bowl had filled with blood,” Taehyung whispers. “And I knew it was a warning.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah, I—I don’t know if he saw me again tonight. Maybe he did. But I hope he didn’t. God, I
can’t think about the possibility that he’ll see my face and see nothing but a demon.” That might be
who I am. That might be who I’m losing myself to.

Namjoon understands what it means to sit in silence to let words settle, sand settling to the bottom
before the water clears. “Can I say something about that, by the way? About him seeing you.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think he’ll fear you, just because a demon presents itself with your face. It’s a whole
psychological thing. Sorry, I read about this kind of stuff for fun, it’s weird.”

“What—you don’t think he’d be afraid, looking at me?”

“I’ve never seen a demon, but I don’t think one pretending to be you would convince him. You
know? That’s a demon. We’re human because we have light in our eyes, and smile when we’re
happy. Both things you have when you look at him. Sorry if that’s personal,” Namjoon adds
sheepishly.

“No—it’s okay, no. You don’t need to be sorry.”

“They tested it on babies. It’s an innate instinct. They had parents sit with their infants and laugh
and play with them, and the infants always loved it. They reacted because they knew these were
their parents. People they loved and who loved them. But then the study had the parents sit there,
unmoving, expressionless, and were asked to not respond to their children physically or verbally.
Three guesses how the babies felt about that.”

“They didn’t like it.”

“Crying, trying to crawl away, trying to push these people, who so obviously were not acting like
their parents, away from themselves. For babies it’s two different people. You get older and you
can tell, of course, that it’s just acting, but that instinct never goes away.”

You let me die!

“So when it really is two different people—when it’s your lover, and a fucking demon pretending
to be your lover—then that difference is night and day.” Namjoon nods, like he’s happy with the
way his words have sounded. “So I don’t think you need to be scared.”

The advice is welcome warmth in Taehyung’s belly. What dinner he ate roils uncomfortably in his
intestines, as if they’re considering whether or not they should have him regurgitate it all anyway.
If they decide, yes, he hopes it’s at an opportune moment. Hopefully on the demon.

Taehyung’s hands are shaking when they reach Blue Hanbok. This night is unbearably cold, a
sharp dip from the warm runoff of summer. He reaches for the ring of keys he’d plucked from
Jeongguk’s bag, and there are at least ten on the hook, hanging like gory, drying meats on a line in
the sun.
He picks the biggest one, silver. A blue bead set into the head winks at him.

“I see them.”

The keys clatter when Taehyung drops them, and he catches them on his foot.

“What?”

“In the glass,” Namjoon whispers. He’s frozen, a few steps behind, and Taehyung blinks at him. “I
see Seokjin in the glass.”

Very, very slowly, Taehyung turns his head back to the doors.

There is no one behind Namjoon.

“Where is he?”

“Behind you.”

But there is no one behind Taehyung, either.

He slides the key into the lock, and it gives him a metallic click when he turns it. The door gives,
doesn’t open, it’s so heavy; but Taehyung nods minutely and Namjoon hurries in after him.

Blue Hanbok is lit with a single white light in the evenings, just over the glass case of the newest
release styles and over a massive hanging banner of abstract textiles and appliques. The photos are
Jeongguk’s. Beneath the fear is a twinge of pride.

Like Jeongguk had said, all of Seokjin’s things are still on the front desk, save for his phone. That’s
in Namjoon’s pocket.

“Do you see anything now?” Taehyung asks.

“No, I don’t think so.” Namjoon casts his gaze around, peering from surface to surface. There are
so many mirrors and glass surfaces at this boutique that Taehyung begins to lose track of himself.
Begins to lose himself. “He’s gone.”

He’s gone. Namjoon is talking about Seokjin, but the words sound so final. Gone means a place
that people can’t come back from. Taehyung swallows around the thorns in his throat. Yoongi,
Seokjin, Hoseok, Jeongguk. Jeongguk.

When he blinks, the blood on Jamsil Bridge is tattooed into his eyelids.

“Hey!”

Jimin barrels in, still club-warm, smelling of citron soju and cigarettes. His leather jacket and shoes
are wildly out of place here in Blue Hanbok. There’s literally a loop and a chain around his belt.
He really dressed to seduce tonight.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” Jimin crosses the boutique lobby in three strides and pulls Taehyung into
him. He feels limp, joints belonging to an unstrung doll. “It’s going to be okay. We’re gonna find
him.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” says Taehyung.

“I told Jeongguk that I would rather get my ass ate by a demon than know I let you walk into
danger alone, so I’m here and you won’t be getting rid of me. Hi,” Jimin throws over Taehyung’s
shoulder. Namjoon looks terrified. “I’m Park Jimin. You must be Namjoon?”

“Yeah.” Namjoon shakes his hand with the air of someone who cannot unthink the fact that the
other person is a voyeurist. “Nice, uh, nice to meet you.”

“So, what are we doing?” Jimin rubs his hands together, happy as a fly to carrion. “Seance?”

“I don’t know if that’s going to work this time.” Taehyung keeps sweeping his gaze across their
surroundings, looking for something out of place. “We have to wait for an opening.”

The bathroom door creaks.

Namjoon shuffles.

Then:

“Taehyung.”

“Yeah?”

“Your…” Jimin raises a quivering finger, pointing at the mirror-wrapped support pillar that
extends floor to ceiling. “Your reflection is smiling.”

Taehyung steps into the angle where Jimin is standing. His reflection follows him, doesn’t smile
when he doesn’t, and behaves.

“Do you see it?”

No—

Wait.

In the mirror, Taehyung raises his hand, slowly, and waves, Cheshire smile spreading over his
face. It’s far too wide, wider than a human mouth can stretch. He steps forward. His reflection
never follows.

“Taehyung—”

“Taehyung, wait!”

“Help me get one of those clothes racks,” Taehyung whispers. His reflection turns his hand, then
beckons. “One of the hefty ones, if you can lift it.”

Jimin is, momentarily, motionless with confusion, but Namjoon cottons on. He jumps into motion,
gangly limbs folding over themselves in his enthusiasm to finally be able to help. He begins
unhooking dresses and pressed blouses from a cedarwood rack, tossing them onto a display nearby.
“Come help!”

Then Taehyung’s reflection stops smiling.

“Guys,” he says.

“Almost there—fuck—” Jimin unhooks the last hanger, a filmy poplin shirt hitting the ground with
a wooden clatter when he aims and misses for the display. “Here!”
Taehyung reflection stops smiling, and his eyes grow sunken, and it starts stalking up towards the
mirror.

“Hurry!”

It’s heavier than it looks. Taehyung doesn’t allow Jimin to help him, but the adrenaline runs
through his arms and hands. He lifts the rack up behind his shoulder, ready to take swing.

At the height of his arc backwards, smoke begins to come off his reflection. It’s almost made it up
to the mirror.

“Get away!”

Then the ear-splitting crash of glass shattering. Taehyung squeezes his eyes shut and ducks best he
can to avoid the shards. He can only hope Jimin and Namjoon weren’t in the trajectory of any
flying bits. The ground shakes beneath Taehyung’s feet, and he drops the rack away from his toes.
It comes with a crunch of glass, like bones between teeth.

He opens his eyes. There’s pain in his temple, carving a sharp line up towards his forehead.
Around him, Blue Hanbok is bathed in dark, eerie blue, a bit of teal, the color of tropical ocean
after deep nightfall. Taehyung touches shaking fingers to the pain and they come away black and
sticky. He has his eyes, so he counts it as a win.

Namjoon and Jimin are still behind him, motionless and stiff.

“Guys?”

Neither of them reply. Their skin is a sallow green in this light, eyes pale, glowing translucent in
the darkness. Taehyung walks towards them, feet dragging through the shards. The bits crunch like
leaves beneath him.

“Jimin?”

Taehyung leans into his face, but Jimin doesn’t even blink, staring straight ahead with nothing
behind the eyes. Even when Taehyung angles his face, trying to see if there’s movement, Jimin
does nothing.

Namjoon is the same.

The pillar on which the mirrors were mounted still stands, lone and bare. Taehyung crouches low,
sifting through the bits of mirror on the ground. He picks up a particularly jagged piece. It sits in
his hand like a dagger. It’s comical that Jeongguk does all the cooking in their house and now
Taehyung is here handling something far deadlier and less artful than the santoku Jeongguk always
uses.

His temple pounds.

Just as Taehyung moves to stand, a dark bend of metal catches his attention from behind the pillar.
He frowns, picking delicately over the sea of mirror fragments. His broken reflection slides with
him, as if he’s treading across the surface of a frozen lake about to give.

It’s a bike. A bike, overturned, with the wheel still spinning lazily in the air. Taehyung frowns.

Then his breath hitches when he realizes, and he whirls.

“Jeongguk?”

Sound is warped in this mirror world. His voice echoes, but cuts off as if meeting a soundproof
wall.

“Jeongguk!”

Taehyung slip-slides as he begins to tear through the boutique. Was it always this large? The walls
seem to shrink away from him as he darts around, looking for signs of life, as if the space expands
and contracts to his movements. A stomach, he thinks. They’re being swallowed. Digested.

“Hoseok! Seokjin!”

The curtain of the dressing room flutters.

“Yoon—?”

A choke gets stuck in Taehyung’s throat when something grabs him from behind. The hands are
soft, a little calloused, and they don’t yank his head back.

“Shut up.” He doesn’t recognize this voice. “Don’t let it know you’re here.”

Taehyung sucks in gulping breaths when the hands release him. For a moment he can’t move.
Luckily, the other person does, sliding in front of Taehyung with a glower on his face.

“You must be Yoongi,” Taehyung says, throat sandpaper. Just as Namjoon had promised, Yoongi
has dark hair, glowing a watery blue-black. He’s even smaller than Taehyung had imagined. His
clothes are torn and there’s a healing bruise in the corner of his mouth, but he’s walking and
talking. That’s as good as he could’ve hoped for. “Oh, fuck, I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“Who are you?”

“The help,” Taehyung says. Yoongi does not like this answer.

“Nothing can help,” he says, pulling away. “Nothing and no one.”

“But I—”

“You’re deluded. If you’re here, it’s because it wants you here. We’re not getting out and you
should stop looking for a way.”

“Wait!” Taehyung shouts before Yoongi can vanish back into the shadows. This house of glass is
alive, and he wonders how many ghosts live in these walls. “Wait. Just—tell me if you’ve seen
these other people. Uhm, a dancer, Jung Hoseok. And a man who must’ve been in a suit, Kim
Seokjin. He worked here.”

Yoongi regards him, face half in shadow.

“And—Jeon Jeongguk. Jeongguk. He’s. He must’ve appeared just earlier.”

Taehyung gestures uselessly to the bike behind them.

“Why?”

“Because, like I said. I’m the help.”

“And how do you expect to get us out of here?”

The honest answer is that Taehyung doesn’t know. He’s been to the plane of evils, usually during a
seance, leaving his body enough to lead someone back if they’ve wandered too far. It’s dangerous,
but he’s done it before, and he knows what to expect. The blue of this world is strange and
treacherous. It drowns them.

“I’ve done it before,” Taehyung says, half-true, and prays Yoongi isn’t also a master lie-detector.
“I can do it again.”

Yoongi’s mouth is a thin, perforated line in his face. Then he turns, as if expecting Taehyung to
follow.

“Aren’t you coming?”

“Where are we going?”

“They’re all in here, somewhere,” Yoongi says. He waves a ghostly, pale hand at their
surroundings. “We just have to find them. If you’re really the help, then maybe you will. I met the
jumpy one. The one who dances. He spends a lot of time hiding. He’s gotten good at it.”

Yoongi leads him close to the shadows, and even though Taehyung doesn’t pick up any faces, he
feels them—eyes on them, following their movements. He wonders how many people are trapped
in this world. Should he help them all? Can he, even? Is it selfish to only look for the ones he cares
about?

They find Seokjin in the dressing rooms. He’s hunched in the shadows, tighter and smaller than
Taehyung ever would’ve imagined someone of his stature compressing into. The blood on him is
fresher, still crusting at his eyebrow. His ever-spotless button-down is torn and stained. It looks
like he’d been clawed.

He jumps when Taehyung puts a hand to his wrist.

“Holy fuck—Taehyung, right! Fuck, did it get you too?” His eyes are wild, and he tries to peer
behind Taehyung, then Yoongi. “I don’t understand. No one else can see me.”

“I can,” says Taehyung. “I can see you. I’m here to get you out. Have you seen Jeongguk?”

“What—no? Is he in here, too?”

“Yes. Along with another person, the client that hired me for this case,” Taehyung says. “We need
to find him.”

Seokjin stands on shaky knees. He’s limping, and holds a hand to his injured ribs. “I’m fine,” he
says, waving off support from Taehyung, but Yoongi grabs one of his arms and slings it around his
shoulders without wasting any breath. He protests, only verbally. “I said I’m fine!”

“Shut up. That thing will hear us.”

“Did that thing,” Taehyung asks, “hurt you like this?”

“I think so.”

“You think so? You’re not sure, or you didn’t see?”

Seokjin coughs and Taehyung hopes blood doesn’t come up. “I—I saw it. But it looked like me. I
looked at it and I saw me, that’s how it got me.”

Taehyung exchanges a look with Yoongi, who responds to him with an expression that says, why
are you looking at me aren’t you the one that deals with this bullshit?

They keep walking. Some of the glass here has been replaced by mirror, so much that they cannot
walk without seeing what must be a dozen versions of themselves walk, too. Taehyung drags his
eyes across them, sifting through them.

In one of them, his reflection is simply standing, immobile, smiling that wide, inhuman smile at
him. He’s standing in a breathless slice of mirror that only is visible for a moment, mid-step, and
then Taehyung’s breezing past.

His throat hitches, and he takes a step backward.

It’s gone.

“What did you see?”

“Let’s,” Taehyung stares harder, but nothing moves again. “Keep going.”

Seokjin’s breathing is labored, and Yoongi grunts with the weight of Seokjin’s body knocking
rhythmically into him as they walk. Guilt eats at Taehyung’s nerves, but he’s not letting them out
of his sight now that he has them.

“Why did it hurt you all so badly?” Taehyung asks, aiming for conversation. Sometimes,
understanding a demon’s motives makes them easier to defeat. “Is everyone like this?”

“I think it’s looking for Jeongguk, and it was angry that none of us were him. And it wanted info,”
Seokjin says. He shifts gingerly, hissing as he holds his wound away from Yoongi. “Fuck, I’m
sorry. I promise when we get outta here, I’ll get you a new shirt.”

“Looking for Jeongguk,” Taehyung says, mostly to himself as Yoongi tries to wave away Seokjin’s
offers. “Why?”

“Spirits here speak of the demon hunter,” Yoongi says. “I’m assuming that’s you.”

“Me?” Taehyung turns. This gets his attention. “And what do they say?”

“That the mirror demon has spent years trying to get to you. That it tried a long time ago. It’s been
trying, and never succeeded. So it followed the boy that follows you. That it was easier to follow
him, like a scent trail.” Yoongi’s face is ice blue. “Like a bloodhound.”

Taehyung’s hands are shaking again. He shoves them into his pockets. One of his fingers scrapes
against the shard of glass and his skin bursts open and begins bleeding like punctured fruit. He
ignores it. The pain almost helps him focus. “We keep moving,” he says, but the shake is in his
voice, too.

They trek their way up the stairs. Taehyung recalls Jeongguk saying that he works up here, and
that he’d see the city fill and empty during lunch hours. It’s not any brighter up here. If anything,
it’s darker.

It’s where they find Hoseok, standing with his face to a mirror, as if waiting to be struck from
behind.
“Hoseok,” Taehyung whispers. On the second floor, his voice seems to stretch, thrum, a note
plucked on a single violin string. Waving in the silence. “Hoseok, it’s me. Taehyung. Are you
okay?”

Hoseok’s eyes dart to look at him. He doesn’t turn his head, and he shivers so hard his teeth chatter.
Like Seokjin, like Yoongi, he’s injured. His fingers are bloody and some of it runs in a thin, drying
rivulet along the side of his jaw.

“Don’t go any farther.” His voice is barely intelligible. His teeth can’t stop clattering, beads in a tall
glass. “It’ll see you.”

“Hoseok, come with us. We’re going to get you out of here. I have Seokjin and Yoongi with me,
they’re two friends of mine. It’s going to be okay.”

“Shut up.” Hoseok is whispering, but his voice pitches squeaky with fear. “Shut up, it’s going to
see you. Oh, God,” he squeezes his eyes shut. His lashes turn into a row of spikes.

“What is?”

“It’s looking at you. Oh, God. It’s looking right at you.”

Taehyung frowns, and peers beyond Hoseok’s shoulder, in the direction from which he cowers.

There’s nothing. Nothing but pitch black. The division between where the sunlight reaches, and the
deep sea. Light ends here.

But—no, it doesn’t. A light flickers deep in the gloom.

It shines weakly, with the flutter of moth’s wings, over a door, painted fresh.

The pounding in Taehyung’s ears returns. He recognizes this door—he’s seen it. The same door in
his dream, the same door that had flashed through his vision that night with the hotpot steam rising
in broth-sweet columns over his face. This time, the door stands ajar, two-thirds of the way closed,
as if someone had just passed through.

“Hoseok,” Taehyung says, nearly inaudible. “Do you know where Jeongguk is?”

He raises his shaking hand. At first, Taehyung can’t see there he points, the dark swallowing his
limbs, but he can see the shake of it. Hoseok points at the door at the end of the hall. Then he drops
his hand.

So Taehyung starts walking.

“Taehyung!” Seokjin hisses. “Taehyung, wait!”

“He’s going to die,” Yoongi says.

“Please.” Hoseok’s voice is but a whimper. “Taehyung, don’t do this.”

“I can’t let him die!”

His voice is loud enough to finally make Hoseok jump. Yoongi snags the back of Hoseok’s shirt
with a finger and yanks him towards them, and he collapses into Seokjin.

“If I die looking for him, then so be it,” Taehyung says. “But I can’t leave him here and cower in
the dark. Not when he’s here because of me. Not when this demon has followed him all this time
just to get to me. It wants me? Fine, it’ll fucking get me. I hope it’s ready. I hope it knows that I’m
angry.”

Hoseok is stricken, but Yoongi’s frowning. He knows there’s no argument against this.

Just like the dream had promised, this hallway stretches as Taehyung walks. He wants to run.
Maybe this is a nightmare, because his legs can’t seem to remember how to. His heart says, run!
His brain says, run! But his body isn’t his. It moves as if it doesn’t belong to him. The hallway
groans, yawns, convulses, the esophagus winding into this stomach. Taehyung is the acid that
won’t stay down.

The doorway gives him legs, bloodied jeans, and bruised feet. Taehyung feels the shakes come
again, suddenly cold. Tingling explodes up his legs as he feet slap the ground. He runs as best he
can, an arrested, terrified shuffle, arms reaching out like a child.

“Jeongguk,” he shouts. The body is so still. “Jeongguk!”

The hallway begins to shorten.

The swallow comes.

“He’s gonna die.”

Nothing behind the eyes.

Ugly silence.

“Jeongguk!”

Above the door, the light flickers as though to shut off, and finally, Taehyung wraps his hand
around the door and pushes it back.

“Jeongguk!”

In dreams, you can’t seem to run. You can’t seem to hide, either, as if all the monsters in your head
already know all your nooks and crannies. In dreams, you can’t cry much, and if you do, the tears
never taste like anything.

But god, in dreams, you can scream.

The noise that comes from Taehyung’s mouth is not one he even thought he could make. Torn
bloody and shredded. His throat might give out. The sockets of his eyes burn as if this scream
scares the very blood in his skull, singeing his veins and arteries and Jeongguk, no, no, Jeongguk,
oh God, oh God, come on—

Taehyung’s fists meet glass and he screams again:

“No!”

Jeongguk is slumped on the other side of the glass, blood running from his nose and his mouth,
blood streaks on the glass where he must have slid against it, there’s a horrible pool of gore under
his leg, jeans dyed indigo:

“No!”

The glass cracks in filigree cobwebs as Taehyung throws his fists into it, and blood comes in fine
sprays when his knuckles split open:

“No! Fuck, Jeongguk! Jeongguk!”

Then it begins to give, cutting grit and shards:

“Please!”

The glass collapses inward, a thousand pieces of shattered sky raining over them.

“Jeongguk,” Taehyung sobs, reaches down and props Jeongguk up. He doesn’t know where to
touch him; so much of him is bruised. Jeongguk’s head lolls lifelessly against the ground and
Taehyung hiccups before he shoves his hands under Jeongguk’s armpits to haul him out of the
glass bits. His body drags some of it along, crunching sickeningly beneath him. There are cuts on
his arms and shoulders from falling pieces. “Oh, fuck. Oh, my God.”

Up close, he looks even worse. Taehyung lays him out across his lap, and even when he pulls
Jeongguk up close to his chest his hand lands in sticky, exposed wounds, fingers coming away
bloody. Bruising sits in gentle shadows over his eyelid, and another is starting to bloom to the side
of his mouth. The edges of it are red, the center dotted purple, a sickly green.

“Come on, come on.” His voice comes weak and pathetic. Taehyung cradles Jeongguk’s head
against his shoulder, fits his hand to Jeongguk’s jaw, feels the give of his cheek and the jut of his
bone. “Please. Come on, open your eyes. It’s me.” Jeongguk’s head rolls back and forth as
Taehyung gives him a little shake. “Come on!”

“Taehyung, bring him over here and let’s go!”

Seokjin’s voice comes as though he’s shouting down a long, narrow tube.

“He’s not waking up! What if his soul is trapped in here somewhere?”

And then, then, as if sensing Taehyung’s fear and panic, Jeongguk’s eyes flutter.

“Babe,” Taehyung sniffles, he’s so congested. Adrenaline keeps clearing his senses, and then tears
keep stupidly clogging them. His hand flits over Jeongguk’s cheek. “Babe, it’s me. Hey, can you
hear me? Can you walk? We need to get out of here right now.”

Then Jeongguk’s eyes crack open a hair, two slices of light in his face.

“Hey,” Taehyung stops shouting for a second, voice small. “Hey, Jeongguk. Can you hear me?”

Jeongguk’s chest gurgles. Taehyung chokes back more tears. It sounds like his lungs have liquefied
in his ribs.

“Babe, come on. Can you walk on that leg?” The blood has started to soak into Taehyung’s pants
and the smell of iron is so pungent his stomach roils. It’s thick enough for him to taste it on the
back of his tongue, the way he can with the burn of smoke and alcohol after sitting in a bar for too
long. “We have to go. You’re okay, let’s go.”

“I love you,” Jeongguk slurs.

“Hey!” This is shouting again, the ricochet and the subsequent muffle. “No, no no no, you’re not
allowed to die on me. Jeongguk!”

Even as he’s shouting, Jeongguk comes in and out.

“Jeongguk, please! Fuck!”

He’s losing too much blood.

Taehyung’s thinking is hazy, a plane in nosediving freefall. Should he strip out of his shirt and
staunch the bleeding? Will it even help?

He’s losing him.

Maybe this is the price. Everything comes with one. This is what’s assigned to knowing you’re a
demon hunter, pursuing a life in it, and then falling in love with someone who attracts monsters.
Piss off enough of them, and they figure that you deserve to be just as alone as they are.

“Last drawer,” Jeonguk says. A fresh trickle of blood worms out of the corner of his mouth. His
coughs are wet.

“What?” Taehyung clutches Jeongguk tighter, then lowers his ear down to Jeongguk’s lips. “Babe,
what?”

“Sock drawer. Back, look in the back.” His eyes are restless, as if he’s searching for their armoire
at home right now. “There’s a ring. I’m sorry. Should’ve done it sooner.”

“What? Jeongguk, I—”

“I love you always.”

A ring?

Taehyung’s brain chugs like waterlogged machinery.

The image of Jeongguk’s shrill, panicked face when Taehyung reached for their armoire. The
spider that must’ve been all a story.

Oh, God.

Jeongguk sighs, breaths leaving him. Taehyung clutches him tighter, scrambling to trap all the
oxygen in his lungs.

“Jeongguk—hey! Fucking stay with me! You’re not allowed to die.” The tears fall unchecked on
Jeongguk’s face to speckle the bloodstains on his cheeks. “You can’t! You can’t just tell me that
and—! If you die, if you die, then who am I supposed to get married to?”

Jeongguk drifts in earnest this time. His body slackens and panic earthquakes through Taehyung’s
chest.

“Please! Jeongguk, no!”

“Taehyung!”

Seokjin and Hoseok and Yoongi are small and pale, the tiny face of a clock, at the end of the hall.

“It’s no use,” he says. Says, doesn’t shout, voice hoarse and tattered. “I’m gonna lose him.”

“Yeah, if you fucking stay sitting there and not running! Come on!”

Then Jeongguk’s eyes fly open, a surge of life, and he sucks a rattling breath into his lungs. “Oh,
my God,” he says, body shuddering with the effort of speaking, and shoves Taehyung away from
himself. Taehyung—

—never lands, because something grabs his neck so hard from behind he briefly feels his vision go
black.

“Taehyung!” Seokjin shouts, down the hallway.

And then he’s tossed, like a doll. There aren’t any visible surfaces, but Taehyung’s body meets
wall before he collapses to the floor. His head cracks against the floor like stone to glass. Stars
burst in a kaleidoscope across his eyes.

Something breathes very close and heavy to him. Wet, hot, with the rank of sour meat cooking in
the sun, the mouth of this monster. Taehyung blinks through the dizzy haze, and there’s Jeongguk.

But not him. It’s the one from the dream, with skin the color of greywater, veins deep algae-bloom
green, sockets sunken deep as calcified tide pools. It’s a nightmare come alive.

“Look what you did.”

“You did that,” Taehyung mumbles, tasting blood on his lip. “You did that. You hurt him. You’ve
always hurt him. I know—I know you. I’ve always known you!”

The demon doesn’t stop him as he pulls himself to his feet. His ankle must have twisted in his fall.
Putting weight on it is shoving an iron rod up his heel, through his calf, heat radiating up towards
his knee. Taehyung falls again, crawling on all fours where Jeongguk had rolled to his side, when
Taehyung had been seized from him.

“Come on,” he says. Not so much to Jeongguk as he says to himself. Keep moving. Keep crawling.
He’s almost there, Jeongguk’s limp, outstretched hand one more miserable shimmy out of reach.
Taehyung’s shoulder shrieks in pain when he cranes forward for him. “Come on. We have to go.”

Then the pummel comes again. The demon is storm and tornado, and in this realm, Taehyung is
the leaf torn by the wind. He feels the hot breath on his skin return, ducks away, but then his body
is airborne again. This time he hits the door, and it slams shut. This noise finally echoes. The sound
says this place never ends. The bang of the door never comes back to them.

He chokes when a hand the size of a dinner plate covers his face, bending his head back. Taehyung
shudders through his gasp. Through its fingers he can see its face, see the almost-perfect mimicry
of Jeongguk that it’s pulled from all these years following him. His hair is a shade too light. His
nose is too long. His face isn’t round enough. Taehyung scrabbles for purchase on something,
anything, to throw the demon’s weight off of himself.

“You want to kill me so bad,” Taehyung bites into its palm, and it tastes like raw flesh. “Then let
him go. And do what you want.”

Then the pressure lightens. There’s confusion on its face, as if Taehyung’s started speaking in a
different language. Maybe he has.

His hand slips into his pocket and he keeps talking.

“You followed him all this time for me. Fine, you have me now. The one who can see demons.
The one that hunts all of you. Now do what you want. And let the others go.”

Behind it, Jeongguk has started to stir. As soon as he shifts, glass clatters.
The demon whirls.

Taehyung yanks the mirror shard from his pocket like a dagger, skin cutting on the edges, and
slashes down as hard as he can. He aims for anything—the face, the arms, maybe he’ll get lucky.
He doesn’t check. He ducks.

Blue Hanbok is filled with unearthly screeching and a stomach-turning shower of licorice-black
fluid bursts from its neck. Taehyung barely dodges it, getting some on his arms, and it burns. He
scrambles past the demon as it writhes. The noise is an unbroken car-crash screech of metal in his
ears.

“Baby, come on,” Taehyung says. Adrenaline surges through him and he pulls Jeongguk, hard,
afraid he’s dislocating Jeongguk’s elbows, onto his back. Jeongguk’s arms dangle heavily over
Taehyung’s shoulders as he hitches Jeongguk’s thighs around his waist. “Come on, just hang in
there.”

“Come on! Run!” Seokjin yells. “Hurry!”

“Hurry!” Hoseok cries.

“Fucking run!” Yoongi’s voice booms. Taehyung would never have pictured a voice so loud
bundled in someone so tiny.

Running is sprinting across live wires and hot coals. One foot is tingling, one foot is sharp, fiery
pain. Taehyung has never been a runner; hell, he’s never been much of an athlete, period.
Jeongguk is the one with a nauseating workout routine and has the muscle mass to prove it.
Taehyung can feel Jeongguk’s weight slamming against his back as he runs, fingers slipping in the
blood of his wounded leg, and Jeongguk is so far gone and whatever pain that comes with
Taehyung’s hand digging into his wounds does not even register. That scares him the most, more
than anything.

“Come on, let’s go go go!” Yoongi commands as Taehyung reaches them at the edge of blue and
black. “Stairs! Don’t fucking trip, you’ll split your brains open!”

Taehyung stumbles, once, twice, three times on the stairs. He puts his elbow on the railing for
support.

“Taehyung,” Jeongguk says, voice separating. Like the dreamy float of blood in water.

“We’re almost there.” He can even see Namjoon and Jimin’s frozen bodies in the lobby. “Almost
there. Hang on. We’re almost outta—”

Jeongguk is torn from his back, and Taehyung cries out as he twists, back cracking as he reaches
for him. He cries as if his own limbs have been torn and—for what it’s worth, that’s how it feels.
He lunges forth. Then something yanks him just as hard back, so violently he thinks that this is
how it feels to dislocate your pelvis, if that’s possible.

“I’ve got him!” Hoseok calls, stumbling away from Yoongi and Seokjin to lift Jeongguk’s head
from the floor. “I’ve got you, Jeongguk. Stay with us. Stay with us and you can be in my videos.
Okay?”

Taehyung drags himself off his stomach and face on the tile, but a shadow looms over him.

His own self looms over him.

“Shadow walker,” it hisses, and this form of himself has blood running down its face from the
crown of its head. The same self he faced that night on Jamsil Bridge, with nothing but Jeongguk’s
gnarled bike to witness it. The wheel of it still spins, still lying like a mangled animal in the street
behind the pillar. “Foolish enough to think you can leave this place. Foolish to think you will ever
leave it.”

“What do you want from me,” Taehyung says. His mouth tastes like blood, like glass, like the acid
of putting everything on the line. “Just fucking say it already! Just tell me!”

“No more hunting us. Let the demons,” it says, “run their course. Let this world eat itself.”

“I can’t promise that.”

“Then I will make you promise,” it says, and Taehyung sits up in fear when he hears Jeongguk
choke from Hoseok’s arms. “Him. Or you stop hunting us. You stop seeing us.”

Stop seeing us.

“Taehyung,” Hoseok says, voice high with terror, cutting over Jeongguk’s wheezing gurgles.
“Taehyung, do someth—they’re gonna kill him! Do something!”

The demons on the trains. The demons in the houses. The demons in Gangnam, in Gwangjin, in
Songpa, in Yongsan. The demons in hospitals. The ones that hang over babies newly born. The
ones that sleep under beds. The one that clung to Jeongguk’s shoulder. This demon.

That’s so many people that Taehyung would have to give up on. Even in here, who knows how
many people are trapped? He thinks about the tears of relief, the gratitude, the parents that cried in
his arms when he said that their child was finally rid of demons. What of them, when he can’t do
this anymore? What if Hoseok had vanished, and that was that? What if Yoongi had disappeared
and Namjoon, never married but still a widower, would have spent his life wondering what could
have happened to him?

But what of Jeongguk?

In a haunted world, only love can burn back the shadows.

So the choice is easy. The choice was made, really, years ago, before the trick mirror, before the
Halloween committee, before the showers-turned-too-long, before the snoring started in college,
before the skinny dipping in the fountain and before, even, the Mongolian grill. The choice was
made on a dingy bus with one free meal voucher.

“Then so be it.” Taehyung sits up. “Let him go.”

The demon watches him, smiles wide, too many teeth.

“Let him go!”

Jeongguk’s body starts going frightfully still.

“Taehyung!”

“I will never see you again,” he says, and stumbles to his feet. He grips his bit of mirror. “Ever,
ever again.”

Then one last, exploding shout:

“You will die here!”

The demon lunges for him, fingers clawing, jaw gaping, losing the semblance of being human.

“And you,” Taehyung sways, but he’s never been more sure than this. Blood pours down his back.
Blood pounds through his ears. Blood drips from his fingers, and he stands tall, a tower that stands
in the storm. A hunter that won’t be killed. “Will never see me again.”

He brings the mirror up over his head—

and plunges it down into the demon’s face.

(“Hey, my date bailed on me, and you’re cute, and I have a free dinner voucher. Do you like
Mongolian barbecue?”

This boy is scarf and dark hair in the winter. The sky says: sleet is coming. Anyone with any sense
darts for the warmth of shelter. When the bus pulls up, the lights flicker, too tired to stay on,
yellowed with age.

“Me? Why?”

“No reason. I don’t like eating alone. And—you’re alone, aren’t you?”

“Well.” Winter boy pulls his scarf down over his chin, buried beneath merino wool. His voice is
one long, clear note. “Not if I’m with you.”

“I’m Taehyung.”

“Oh, I—and I’m Jeongguk.”)

Red-blue-red-blue-red-blue lights, the chill cut of autumn night, “Jeongguk, give me Jeongguk,”
something plastic and tight pinching rubber on his face, eyes closed, “where is Jeongguk?”

“Breathe.”

“I need you to calm down, breathe.”

There is something behind his eyes.

He sees himself. He faces himself. He watches himself. Framed by the groove of glass.

Then the reflection turns and walks, farther and farther and farther, until it’s a needleprick of light,
swallowed by the dark blue.

Taehyung wakes up to beeping and a hospital room painted an uninspired beige, the color of a latte
gone cold. At the foot of his bed sits a vase full of daffodils. The flowers are too tall, and Taehyung
realizes the vase is a dinner glass, no doubt from the cafeteria. They hang like sunlight spilling
through a window. He shifts, and the bed creaks.

“Taehyung?”
It’s Jimin’s voice, followed by pressure on his hand.

“You awake? Can you hear me?”

Jimin’s face is blurry as Taehyung tries to focus on him. Then he croaks, “You look a lot better
than I feel right now.”

“Oh, thank God. Oh, fuck me.”

“I’m flattered, but no thanks.”

“I can’t believe you. You could’ve died.”

Taehyung blinks, trying to cobble together how he’d gotten here. Shattering glass, pain in his
hands, blood, the sickly, shadowed reflection of Blue Hanbok. Then panic grips him, the beeping
going from a steady beat to an uneven, frantic alarm.

“Jeongguk,” Taehyung tries to sit up, winces at the pain in his arm. There’s an IV drip in him.
“Jeongguk, where’s Jeongguk, I want to see—”

“Jeongguk is fine,” Jimin puts a hand on Taehyung’s chest and pushes him back into the pillows.
“You’ve probably brought the nurses in here without even needing me to go call them, but he’s
completely fine. He was in surgery for a blood transfusion and some internal bleeding in his leg,
but they said it was minor. He’s stable. Look, I set up a Facetime in his room so you can see him
right away!”

“Is that allowed?” Taehyung asks, both impressed and confused.

“No,” Jimin says. “But Seokjin said he just survived a demon possession, so fuck the rules. It’s his
corporate phone.”

“That technically wasn’t a possession.”

“Yeah, whatever. Here. Looks like he’s still asleep, he came out just earlier this morning.”

Jimin’s phone falls warm and heavy into Taehyung’s palm. He leans over, hair tickling Taehyung’s
forehead, to turn up the brightness. The phone on the other end is angled on a bedtable to the side.
It’s dark, curtains half-drawn, but with the brightness on max Taehyung can make out Jeongguk’s
face.

Bruises pattern the corner of Jeongguk’s lips and one of his sockets, blooming in purple around his
eyelid down to his cheek. His head lolls with sleep, bed propped up so the bruises don’t throb. The
humidifier in the corner puffs out a thin, gentle stream of warm air. Beneath the sheets, Jeongguk’s
chest rises, falls, rises, falls. A quiet push and pull of the tide.

Taehyung’s nose burns as tears prick the corner of his eyes and he pushes the phone back at Jimin,
thrusts it, really, as he shoves his drip-free hand into his eyes.

“Wh—what?” Jimin fumbles as he grabs his phone. “Why are you crying? He’s okay, he’s totally
okay.”

“He’s in here because of me.” Taehyung cries one of three ways—in the middle of an argument,
when he’s wet-angry; silently, when he’s watching a movie where a dog dies; or without abandon,
with chest-heaving sobs. The kind of crying where you can’t breathe in or breathe out, where your
throat rattles, where it feels like every organ in your body swells with the weight of holding in
water. Like rainclouds, and the sobs come crackling with thunder.

“Taehyung, you know that’s not true.”

“It is, because if I’d banished that demon properly—if I’d made sure of it, if I hadn’t fucking
failed! This wouldn’t have happened!”

Jimin holds Taehyung’s hand and says nothing. He’s good at knowing when there’s nothing to say,
simply holding Taehyung’s hand until he runs out of tears. At some point, he hands Taehyung a
papery hospital tissue that feels like it should be used as giftwrap filler and not for noses. He’s
grateful anyway.

“You should go talk to him when he wakes up. You’ll feel better when you see him moving
around. He’ll tell you all the same things I said, but I think you need to hear him say it.”

Taehyung nods mutely, feeling his face crumple again, but he has no tears left to cry. He opts to
unfold his soggy tissue and refold it into a tiny, wrinkled square.

“How did we get out?”

Jimin tells him the story where there’s a long, unwritten gap in Taehyung’s memory. How they fell
through the glass, Taehyung half-mad, covered in Jeongguk’s blood and refusing to let go of him,
even when the paramedics arrived. Yoongi barking orders at these people he’d just met and
Namjoon grabbing him, hugging so hard his toes came off the floor. Hoseok kissing the tile floor,
glass bits and all. Seokjin running into Jimin, sheepish. They’d all been checked into the hospital,
and Seokjin had only stayed long enough for stitches. Namjoon and Yoongi had brought the
daffodils, but couldn’t find a vase.

“There’ll probably be a news story about it this evening,” Jimin says with a wince. “Sorry.”

“What are they passing it off as?”

“Hostage situation. Perpetrators fled the scene.”

“Yeah, well, not untrue,” Taehyung grumbles.

Jimin gives his hand a brief squeeze. “Your parents are going to visit in the afternoon. You want
me to come back, then?”

“No. You look like shit. Go home and sleep. If you want to finish seducing Seokjin, you’ll
probably want to do a sheet mask.”

“Yeah. Seokjin apologized for a shitty first date when you guys got out of there, despite being
covered in blood. Lowkey hot, to be honest,” Jimin says, leaning back in his chair. “I don’t know. I
think it was still better than the one where that guy’s wedding ring fell out of his pocket halfway
through dinner.”

Taehyung is cleared to get up and walk around mid-afternoon, after his parents stop by and fuss
after him.

His mom begs him to go into another line of work, as she usually does, and his dad wordlessly hugs
him, as he usually does. Taehyung doesn’t have the energy to explain that he’ll have to find
different work now whether he likes it or not. She’ll be happy to hear it. In some ways, deep down,
and Taehyung won’t admit to himself yet either, he thinks he wouldn’t mind something new. He’ll,
he doesn’t know, work retail for a while, or something. He’s already got plenty of work experience
with demons.

“If you start feeling dizzy, tell one of the nurses right away. You should be discharged by
tomorrow morning if everything looks okay.”

“What room is Jeongguk in?”

Technically, Taehyung is supposed to go to the front desk, declare who he is and his relationship to
the patient, and then go back up to Jeongguk’s room—even though he’s a patient himself—but she
gives him a funny look, passes it to him with a murmur, and sweeps from the room. They’ve
disconnected Taehyung from the IV as well, so he doesn’t need to wheel his little baggy of fluids
around on a rolling pole, and just shrugs on a jacket. It’s oversized, because it’s Jeongguk’s,
smelling of his freesia and jasmine perfume. Jimin had brought it from their apartment using
Taehyung’s keys.

Jeongguk is situated in the inpatient ward one floor below. Taehyung wraps his hand around the
brushed steel door handle, his reflection warped and nothing but a shadow in the metal. He stares
at himself, then pushes it open.

He thought Jeongguk would still be asleep. At the sound of the door opening, he turns his face
away from the window.

“Taehyung!”

“Jeongguk,” Taehyung says, and that’s all he manages to say before the tears come flooding again.
One moment, he’s still at the door, it’s still shutting, he hasn’t even heard the click yet. He doesn’t
run, but he makes it across the room without registering his legs, and then he’s got Jeongguk in his
arms. His nose is squished in Jeongguk’s shoulder, and Jeongguk smells all wrong, like iodine and
antiseptic, the caustic smells of medicine, but he doesn’t care. It means he’s real and alive and
maybe a little broken. Living things fall apart sometimes. Iodine and antiseptic means trying to put
them back together.

“Oh my God. Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.” He’s crying ugly again. “I thought I lost you for real this
time, oh God, I’m sorry. I love you. I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

He pulls back to look at Jeongguk. In real life, and not through Facetime, his face looks even
worse. It’s nearly lopsided from the swelling, from the painkillers, from the drugs. There’s a
massive lump beneath the blankets where he guesses Jeongguk’s right leg is, two times the size of
his left. Taehyung leans in and gives him a wet kiss. This effectively stops his crying for the five
seconds it lasts before he pulls away and resumes, like a leaky faucet.

“Please don’t cry,” Jeongguk says. “You know I always cry when you cry, and it like, hurts to
laugh right now, so I don’t think I want to test crying.”

Taehyung laughs through his tears just to demonstrate his respiratory prowess.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Holy shit, I can’t even look at you. I’ll just keep crying more.”

Jeongguk sighs. Not wearily, but because he understands, and like Jimin, he knows not a whole lot
of words are going to make any of this better. He tugs on Taehyung to sit down on his bed, and
then again for Taehyung to scoot closer. Then, with the hand that doesn’t have an IV drip feeding
into it, he gathers Taehyung’s head to his chest. Taehyung hiccoughs when Jeongguk tucks his
chin over his hair.

“I saw the demon. I saw what it looked like.”

Taehyung goes from gasping for breath to not breathing at all.

Jeongguk’s chest rumbles with a chuckle. “I saw what happened on Jamsil bridge that night, when
I was in that place. I thought it was the plane of evils, but it must’ve been different. We’ll have to
look into it, at some point.”

“What,” Taehyung tries to remember how to use spoken language. “What did you see, exactly?”

“You,” Jeongguk says simply. Taehyung’s skin gets very hot, then goes cold, but he forces himself
to hold still. He thinks he does well. “The demon, trying to be you. Is it funny if I say that, when I
saw it, the first thing I thought was ‘I can’t wait to tell Taehyung how bad this acting is’? It got
your eyes wrong. The color of your hair wrong. And they tried with your hands, but maybe
monsters will always be monsters. The fingers were too long. It was like being choked with leeks.”

Despite himself, Taehyung laughs. He coughs, body not ready for the whiplash of emotion.

“And then I knew. I just knew.”

“Knew what,” Taehyung asks. He feels fragile, not ready to hear what Jeongguk knows, crunching
twigs in autumn. Jeongguk’s voice could carry him away.

“I knew that you’d seen. That you’d tried to protect me from it,” Jeongguk says. He wraps his arm
around Taehyung’s shoulder. “Ever since this case started, I knew you were scared.”

“I.” Taehyung pushes himself up, holds all his weight off Jeongguk’s body. He props the rest of it
with his hand against the raised mattress. “Jeongguk, I—I’m really sorry. I don’t—I know I should
have told you. I should have told you that it wasn’t the talisman that attracted it. That demon’s
been hunting you since I met you, and all the talisman did was piss it off. God, I should have told
you. Ages ago. That night, at Mongolian barbecue. But you’re right, I was scared. I’ve seen
demons for as long as I can remember, and that was the first time I’d been scared since I was a
child.”

“You didn’t have to be.”

“I was scared, because what if I’d lost you, and it was because of me? I was scared because—
because I didn’t want you to look at me, and see a demon. I would become the thing that we were
hunting.”

“That’s not going to happen. That’s not ever going to happen.” Jeongguk brings both of his hands
up to cradle Taehyung’s face in his palms. His IV catheter swings from his hand. “I’ve been doing
this for a while with you, you know. I know when it’s you, and when it’s something pretending to
be you. Remember that I know. Remember that I love you. Remember what you said yourself, that
this reality is like the heart, that we’re just the blood of it. These demons are the sick. I know when
it’s your body.”

Taehyung bites his lip, because he refuses to cry any more. Jeongguk’s eyes do look wet, as
promised. “Okay,” he says.

Jeongguk presses his thumb lightly into Taehyung’s cheek, frowns at the scabbing wound that he
knows is there. “If it ever becomes too much—for you, or for me—promise that we’ll say so. The
job market sucks, but I think we can deal with anything after demons.”
“We, uhm. We’ll have to, actually.”

“Oh?” Jeongguk raises his eyebrows. “You’re sure?”

“I can’t see them. I can’t see demons anymore.”

Jeongguk blinks uncomprehendingly at him. His bruised eyelid blinks slightly less nimbly, but it
does. “Really?” he asks, hushed.

“Yeah. I lost it, to get you out of there. I chose to give it up. It’s apparently a privilege to see them.
I would disagree, but that was the price. It was more than fair a trade.”

And—Taehyung expects Jeongguk to say, “Why would you do that for me?” To which he’d say,
I’d do anything for you. Or for Jeongguk to say, “But what about your work, what will happen to
it, wasn’t it your passion?” To which he’d say, There will always be work that needs to be done, if
not in the realm of demons, and your life takes precedence over a passion. Or even, “What if that
demon comes back anyway?” To which he’d say, then what’s important is that we’ll be together.

Instead Jeongguk says, very softly, “Are you okay?”

Taehyung nods. HIs throat fills with cotton again. “I’m fine,” he says. “Kind of enjoying it, I’m not
going to lie. Hospitals are usually crawling with demons and spirits. It might hit me later.”

Jeongguk pulls Taehyung down until he can press his lips to Taehyung’s forehead.

“We could make a YouTube channel, talk about our adventures. People love Buzzfeed Unsolved.
We have so much footage we could use. Then we’ll get big, and then make bank.”

Jeongguk talks like he’s just daydreaming, but the idea is good. Maybe it’s the painkillers
unlocking an entire, usually inaccessible part of his brain.

(Jimin would later suggest, “Isn’t this a good time for you guys to get married? I know you guys
already are, but just, on paper. With the ceremony and stuff.”

Instead of accusing Jimin of just wanting to bone one of their hot guests, Jeongguk would also
follow this up by stammering that he already has a ring, got it five months before, and hasn’t yet
worked up the courage, or frankly, a plan. Accidentally spoiling the surprise on certain pain of
death doesn’t count.

Still.)

“I wouldn’t mind it,” Taehyung says. He thinks he’d like it very much, actually. Then he tacks on,
“I love you,” again, for good measure.

“I love you too,” Jeongguk says, leaning back. He slides his hand to Taehyung’s neck, then trails
his fingers along the rumpled fabric bunched around Taehyung’s body until he finds his hand. The
Reach, just awake, and in a hospital. “Through the demons. Through the dark.”

“You should talk like this more. It’s very romantic lead-y of you.”

“I’m concussed.”

it’s just me, jimin, i promise this isn’t some demon ^-^ ← would a demon know emojis? answer: no
hey guys! i took it upon myself to leave some food in your fridge. i know both of you are gonna eat
like crap now that jeongguk’s down for the count and won’t be able to cook for a while. there’s
yeonggye baeksuk and sigeumchi namul. jeonggukie, your mom also left a whole tupperware of
kimchi with me so that’s in there too. seokjin’s a weirdly good cook and he said he was
experimenting...so don’t worry about this being trouble. we made extra.

as for rice: three handfuls and enough water to cover your middle knuckle, taehyung.

“Why’s he calling out me specifically?” Taehyung asks, putting down the folded note, miniature
tent on their countertop. “I can make rice just fine.”

“If by ‘just fine’ you mean you somehow cooked a whole batch of white rice on the brown rice
setting set to forty minutes, then yeah, you’re great,” Jeongguk says, snorting. Taehyung nearly
swats him until he remembers Jeongguk can’t dodge, so he settles on a forehead flick. A light one,
away from the bruises.

The first order of business is to get rid of the mirror. Maybe doing so is obsolete. It might not even
make a difference, and deep in Taehyung’s belly he knows that it really doesn’t. A demonic entity
that wants to return that badly will find a way.

But he has to do it, just so he can close his eyes at night. After they’ve showered, and Taehyung
has sat on the bathroom floor swabbing gently at Jeongguk’s stitches and rebandaging them, he
takes the mirror out onto their balcony.

“What do you plan to do, exactly,” Jeongguk asks. His eyes are wary. Right now, he’s parked on
dining chair that Taehyung had pulled up to the screen door, injured leg propped up on a step stool.

“Just shatter it. Then throw it out.”

So they do. Methodically, rhythmically, with a rock Taehyung lugged upstairs months ago from
the apartment compound’s gardens to use as a doorstop. The thwack of stone to glass cracks across
the quiet of the late afternoon. It’s the part of the day when the sun bathes the city honey-orange,
when the light is wet, and lays in dewdrops over the buildings. Taehyung sits up, wheezing, better
than Jeongguk but not necessarily in peak condition. Jeongguk holds a bowl of shrimp chips for
him to snack from.

“You should stop if you’re tired. We can sweep later.”

And Taehyung looks at him—bruises on his face getting worse before they get better, the swaths
of gauze and tape around his thigh, the healing scabs on Jeongguk’s arms. He really looks at him,
where Jeongguk is squinting against the sun, who keeps trying to peek up at him through its lashes.
Jeongguk’s wearing a T-shirt that fits on him like a dress and no pants, just undies, so nothing can
chafe the bandages.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. “Do your hands hurt? I can go get the painkillers.” He’s already started
to reach for his crutches.

Love like this is like a ghost. Something everyone talks about, but few have ever seen.

Jeongguk squeaks in his throat when Taehyung steps delicately over the bits of shattered mirror,
house slippers crunching where he doesn’t dodge them all, and leans down to kiss him. The bowl
of shrimp chips is half-aloft in Jeongguk’s hands, as if he’d thought Taehyung wanted to come and
scarf them down properly. Nope—he rests his hand against the back of the chair so he doesn’t
topple into Jeongguk’s lap, and bends down to kiss him. In any other circumstances, Taehyung
would oh-so-accidentally do it anyway, but no lap time for a while. He’ll live.

Jeongguk kisses him, tasting of shrimp, mouth warm until Taehyung feels himself losing balance
and pitches back.

“Oh,” Jeongguk says, dazed, punch-drunk like he’s taken another particularly strong dose of
painkillers. They make him loopy. “I thought you just wanted more chips.”

“I’m just,” Taehyung holds Jeongguk’s face in his hands. His right is bandaged to match
Jeongguk’s leg, and he’s certain it chafes unpleasantly against Jeongguk’s tender bruises. “Happy
to have you.”

“You always have me.”

“I almost didn’t.”

“Taehyung,” Jeongguk says. Not babe, or baby, or homeskillet, though he only uses that when he’s
trying to be annoying. “What matters is that you do. Okay? You do.”

Jeongguk doesn’t leave room for any argument, because he tips his face up, reaching for another
kiss, and Taehyung would not be so cruel to withhold it from him. He winces when he puts his
weight onto his foot wrong, and it stings, hard, up the front of his shin.

“But I should really get you your meds.” Jeongguk pulls back.

“No, don’t. I’m fine, don’t get up. Just a little tired. Let’s sit for a while.”

Sitting for a while means they fall asleep, with Jeongguk’s head in Taehyung’s lap, leg propped up
on throw pillows. Jeongguk dozes off first, with the soft feathering of his hair caught in
Taehyung’s fingers. Even in his ordeal, it hasn’t lost its thick, shiny gloss. Taehyung has and will
always have hair envy.

Then Taehyung drifts, too, in Vicodin dreams.

When he comes to, cheek smushed into the curving armrest of their couch, the sky outside is
midnight purple with only the blink of distant planes to mark the darkness. Jeongguk has turned his
face into his belly, nosing at Taehyung’s skin. His eyelashes quiver in sleep.

Their hands are tangled. Taehyung runs his thumb over the knuckle of Jeongguk’s fourth finger,
smooth, empty yet, and quietly pictures the flash of platinum and jewels there.

They go as sushi and sushi chef to the Halloween block party.

Jeongguk is an ebi nigiri, and Taehyung helps wrap his crutches with athletic tape and paint them
so that they look like chopsticks. He also finds an apron at HMart with dancing fish on it, waist-
down only, and it looks very chef-like, thank you very much. He doesn’t know how to cook
anything but ramen, but at least he looks the part. Taehyung’s accessory is—

“I don’t understand why you’re holding a bowl full of grape gummies,” Jinae says, after declaring
these their cutest costumes to date, surpassing even the Morticia and Gomez Addams outfits from
last year. Taehyung’s not sure about that. Jeongguk makes a very nice Morticia.

“It’s supposed to be wasabi,” Taehyung says.

Naturally, Jeongguk holds a bowl of Lotte chocolates when he sits down, for soy sauce. They’ve
arrived after the party’s already started, and the apartment complex kids have already filled the
compound’s clubhouse to the brims with shrieking laughter. Taehyung dodges glitter, masks, tiny
Avengers, tiny clowns, and the occasional toddler waddling by in a Magikarp suit.

“It’s still too bad that the trick mirror didn’t work out,” Jinae laments. “I think it would’ve been a
hit. The rest of the committee thought so, too.”

“I’m sorry.” Taehyung hands a grape gummy to a girl dressed up as Eleven, season one,
specifically. “Yeah, I agree. But it was more trouble than it would be worth. That much I know.”

Besides—they have a different idea. Maybe not better, but it’s definitely cool. This year the block
party movie of choice is Hotel Transylvania, after Coraline scared one too many kids in the
apartment complex the year last.

They’re supposed to finish the night with scary stories. They do every year, but this year is a little
different. This year, there’s a storytelling group, with Taehyung, the sushi chef, and Jeongguk, the
ebi nigiri. But there’s also Yoongi, who makes en entirely too convincing Chucky, and Namjoon,
annoyingly regal in his vampire cape; there’s Jimin, in seifuku, and Hoseok, dressed in retina-
searing neon, and Seokjin, with copious amounts of red makeup and spray-dyed hair.

“I am a sexy clown,” he deadpanned when Taehyung opened his mouth after an extended once-
over.

No one argued with him about this.

Jimin is a usual fixture, but the others are new, and the younger children are all too happy for more
people to climb on. Namjoon and Yoongi had come in looking fearful and out of place, but a
Halloween party full of kids on sugar highs meant that they wasted no time dragging new friends
into games.

Hoseok invites them to participate in his next video, too.

“Like what?” Jeongguk asks, conversation floating over bobbing heads. He’s sitting with his half-
empty bowl of grape gummies, fingers sticky with sugar crystals when he hands them to kids who
come running by. “I don’t know if I’m fit to dance for. A while, to be honest.”

“Not a dance video, no.” Hoseok scratches at his neck. He’s wearing a zany tie that looks like it
was done too tight. “Maybe a storytime? You guys could back me up.”

Already, Taehyung can see the title: STORYTIME: I WAS POSSESSED BY A DEMON?!? [NOT
CLICKBAIT]

Trick-or-treating is almost over, which means that the movie’s about to wrap. It’s just after eight,
and the kids usually spend another half an hour trading candy until everyone is satisfied with their
ratios of milks to darks, chocolate crunches with nuts, sticky taffies, hard candies, and anything
that melts on the tongue. Taehyung is helping to clear the chairs away, move equipment back into
carts so parents can wheel them back up to their apartments, when he catches his reflection in the
clubhouse windows.

Jinae is holding a carton of apple juice to Soojung’s lips, packing up a snack tray with her other
hand. Wooseok talks to her, rapidfire, looking far too serious for someone dressed as Tuxedo
Mask. A couple of the older kids are playing a twisted game of “catch the chocolate-covered
popcorn in your mouth or get spanked,” and someone fully dressed as Pennywise has the Magikarp
 baby up on his shoulders, bouncing to make him laugh.

And his reflection smiles when he does.

The soft metallic sound of crutches comes up behind him, and Jeongguk appears in the glass beside
him. “What are you looking at?”

Taehyung turns to him. There’s a glittery flower painted on his cheek. His tongue is blue, no doubt
from being offered blueberry suckers all evening. He smells of caramel.

“Nothing.” Taehyung smiles. “You look like you just got motorboated by the Candy Man.”

“Sounds like a niche horror-porn genre.”

“Maybe that’s our calling.”

Jeongguk laughs. “Maybe. I’m going to go sit down now, okay? The kids want to hear about the
Weeping Woman of KTX, and also, I suck at crutches, still.”

“Okay.” Taehyung kisses him on his unpainted cheek.

He hobbles off, so Taehyung takes one last, long stare at the glass.

Then, without looking back, he turns and goes.

End Notes

- mirrors facing your bed is bad fengshui

- in 2010, giovanni caputo published a study on the “strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion,”
conducted on 50 people after he himself noticed that staring at your own face in a mirror in
a dimly lit room led to drastic deformations in one’s reflection; some participants reported
feeling like they were being watched by their own ‘other’
- thank you marienadine for the yelling and @muu_shaa for the amazing art!!!
- i shitpost on twitter.

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