The Missing Piece

Chapter 25

"Namjoon-ssi!"

Namjoon stopped, spinning around and narrowly missed colliding with a random staffer who was walking it the opposite direction. He apologised, setting his colleague right, then turned to see who had called him.

Down the hall, Sejin and Sihyuk were beckoning him. He backtracked to where they were.

"A moment of your time, please." Sihyuk asked and started walking off to the lifts, or more generally in the direction of his own office.

"I was just headed to the RUN filming." Namjoon explained, pointing the other way.

"They can wait. Come with us." Sihyuk called over his shoulder. Namjoon raised his eyebrows at Sejin but they both started following along.

Once they were safely in Sihyuk's office, Namjoon's took his regular seat and noticed that Sejin was hovering by the door.

"We want to talk to you about Jungkook." Sihyuk started out, clicking errantly on different windows on his computer.

Namjoon raised his eyebrows once more. "Jungkook?"

"Yes. He's not very well at the moment." Sihyuk started again. More a statement of fact than a question.

"Yes, he's been ill for a few days. Some kind of flu." Namjoon confirmed. His soulmate had been bed-bound for half a week mow. Nothing too severe, probably just a bug. He probably could have joined them for practice but everyone wanted him well for the Grammys at the end of next week so he was excused.

"Hmm." Sihyuk mumbled thoughtfully. "Anything else going on?"

"Err." Namjoon was more than a little confused. "I'm not quite sure what you mean."

"Well, just anything else going on with him that you think we should know about?"

Namjoon leaned back in his chair, eyeing both the men critically. "I really don't know what that means, but if you think there's something else, you should talk to Jungkook. Other than the flu he seems fine to me. What's this about?"

Sihyuk did a bit more clicking and started talking while keeping his eyes on the screen. "We had a tip off from the social team. There a fair bit of traffic starting to appear, worrying about the health of several members, Jungkook chief amongst them.

"People are always worrying about our health. What we eat, how much sleep we get, resting plenty. You know that." Namjoon acknowledged. It was true. ARMY loved worrying about them, whether or not they needed to.

"Yeah, well, some of the stuff that's appearing is pretty compelling." He turned his screen round for Namjoon to see. An email from someone he didn't recognise detailed some statistics and was worryingly titled "BTS decline." There were twitter captures, YouTube links and image thumbnails showing hashtags and individual concerns for the members and the group.

"Okay?" Namjoon said, willing to agree that these were attention grabbing. He didn't know what to say.

"We pulled up the files from the last medical you guys had." Sejin said, and he sat down next to Namjoon, looking softly at the young leader.

"The extra one we had after new year?"

"Yes. Individually there's nothing really to worry about, so we fed it back to your fitness coaches and dieticians as normal, but when you look at it all together, it made us a little concerned."

"What did?" Namjoon asked, turning back to Sihyuk, assuming he had the results on his computer.

"Nothing too alarming. Blood tests all show a little bit of a decline in immunity, decline in iron, everyone's lost some weight." Sejin continued.