NECROMANCER

3

Stumbling to his feet Jungkook took a few steps away from the desk as the man sitting behind it raised and set his glasses down. Jungkook was expecting a mammoth of a man but instead got a man only a bit taller than him and slightly more muscular with horns that curled from his forehead and the set of jagged teeth. The only thing that came to mind was a demon, although the eye-catching soft decor of the library looked more like a rich baby's bedroom than it did the pits of hell.

Suddenly a softer, more human looking man popped out from around a bookcase, a heavy leather bound book in his hands. "What is it?" He asked not bothering to look up until he neared the desk.

"Holy hell!" he screamed, dropping the book onto the table where it tumbled off the edge. The man with horns caught it before it hit the ground. "You're here! A little bit younger than what we expected but it's you."

The sudden rupture of excitement had him stepping even further back. He wasn't sure what was going on but he was certain he wasn't the one they were looking for. It was Taehyung's family heirloom, not his. "I'm not who you think. This isn't my watch.. I didn't know." Jungkook mumbled out brows tense hands shaking as he lifted the gold watch off of the ground.

"Of course it's you. Come see for yourself." He offered, a large smile playing across his beautiful face. Jungkook wasn't blind he knew beauty when he saw it and this man looked as if he'd stepped right out of a movie screen. People would spend a lot of money to get features like this and this guy was running around with it naturally, at least Jungkook assumed they were natural. Soft cherry shaped full lips, round almond eyes, a tall nose bridge. Not even his face shape was out of line. He looked like a korean prince.

Jungkook decided to follow, leaving the demon man behind until he was finally out of sight. Of course his head was spinning like a toddler who'd just learned how to ask questions. Every damned thing he saw was otherworldly. Taehyung would know the name of the European architecture. He would have been able to recognize the paintings of angels delicately replicated on the ceiling that looked vaguely familiar to the ones in his textbooks.

Grief washed over him in different ways, at times it was overbearing making it hard to think straight in a sea of tears, while at other times it was a dull aching emptiness that made his entire body feel numb. If it hadn't been for the numbness he might have been hysterically excited and frightened at the same time. Like the rush he got when Taehyung and him hired some guy to pretend to be their father and sign a waiver that let them go bungee jumping when they were still underage.

It had been Jungkook's idea and Taehyung chickened out at the last minute. He ended up having to comfort him for being afraid of heights as they left.

The man who's name he didn't remember stopped, swiftly pulling a dusty sheet off of the back wall revealing a painting. Jungkook might have remembered the man's name if he wasn't preoccupied with the man who looked like he stepped off the set of hell boy. He wasn't worried about that at the moment, his attention set on the painting of himself. It wasn't a portrait of just himself, it was a landscape painting of a battlefield, the kind you'd see video game designer, himself at the center of it all.

Jungkook recognized his own features, the shape of his eyes and curve of his cheekbone. Another painting was unmasked, this one of his face. His hair was longer than it was now and his eyes cloudy white. He looked hauntly, like a ghost trapped in a painting from a horror movie.

"You're Jeon Jungkook, the last true air to the throne, descendant of both the Korean seelie and unseelie courts." The man spoke, brushing his hair back with a swift wave of his hand revealing a set of oddly pointed ears. "This is your proficy, the one your ancestors painted."

Jungkook threaded his brows looking over the painting of the battlefield once more. His fingers traced over a familiar face. "This guy is dead, your prophecy is bullshit." He spoke flatly, turning to look at the man, his surprise seemed genuine. "This is his watch not mine." Jungkook pulled the watch out from his pocket. It shimmered in the window light.

The dark haired male gasped looking down at it, fondly reaching out to touch it, Jungkook pulled it away before he could. "Yes, I know, I gave it to the Kim family years ago when they took the queens baby to Earth." He confessed, sensing Jungkook's disbelief. "Trust me, my immortality has given me plenty of tricks up my sleeves. Why else would you have appeared here in front of me and not somewhere else?"

He'd learned a lot the first night he stayed in the castle. First things first, Namjoon was far from demonic. In a literal sense Seokjin, who dabbled in witchcraft as a young elf and was now cursed with immortality was more demonic in nature than Namjoon. The man with the horns and red skin was really just a dragon, a nerdy 200 year old dragon who turned out to be less badass than Jungkook had imagined. From what he gathered the man was just a regular old librarian who could breathe fire.

Seokjin had offered to teach him how to portal him back to Earth; the watch had a proper way of being used to create more stable portals that didn't involve smashing it against concrete. Jungkook declined the offer, on Earth he was he'd be sleeping alone in his apartment with no one to notice he was gone. He stayed in the king's quarters, a dusty room that had been vacant for years. He wasn't surprised to find that Seokjin, In all of his filled princely glory, had filled the king's roles in the absence of a king. He definitely held himself like royalty and had the respect of the entire castle behind him.

Jungkook was thankful that he had shooed the servants and maids off for him. It seemed the entire castle was buzzing with noise the moment word got out that the air to the throne had finally come. With what little information he had Jungkook sat at a desk with a pile of books in front of him.

This should have had him buzzing with excitement, exploring, asking questions about his family and Taehyung's family. He should have been in the library picking Seokjin's brain piece by piece. Not fiddling with the watch wishing to confine in the one person he could no longer see, body achingly numb.

Did Taehyung know that the watch was a portal to faerie? About this other world and its people? He'd always known that Taehyung's family and his family had known each other for generations but he never could have imagined it running this deep. Taehyung's family had made a promise to protect and raise his great great grandfather, to protect the Jeon family until Jungkook was born and came of age. That the both of them had faerie blood running through their veins. It was likely that he didn't and that the kim family had forgotten all of magic and the promise all together. According to Seokjin, over the years as the kims became more human their ability to remember, use, and see magic drained away. If Taehyung knew he wouldn't have been able to keep it a secret from him, not for long, he was terrible at keeping secrets.

Jungkook spent that night sleeping on a desk instead of in the bed the servants had changed the sheets of and dusted out the mattress, terrified that if he slept for too long the tape would rewind and he'd wake up from another nightmare about that night. By morning he'd only had three hours of dreamless rest before a man, steadying a gold platter of food in his hands, startled him awake.