Blood Ink ✔️

60: Tell Me a Secret

The men in the car are silent, and so is the world.

You can't breathe in here.

Outside on the street, back at Wooseok's house, anywhere else on the planet Earth has air more breathable than the oppressive quiet that you're choking on inside the muted interior of the car.

Because on the street, and back at Wooseok's house, and anywhere else, there's something left between the eight of you and Taehyung's rescue mission. There's another step, another day, another plan that needs to be made - another something that you have to spend time on and perfect.

But now?

Now, all your plans will come to fruition.

Now you'll see wether they'll actually work or not.

It's strange, how every time there's something to achieve and you make a plan to achieve it, you spend the entire hour before sitting back and looking at all the possible wrong outcomes.

There are so many wrong outcomes.

So many factors that you haven't prepared for, and variables that could change in an unexpected way in the blink of an eye. Opposed to the confidence of Namjoon's statement when he said, without a doubt, that you would make it out with Taehyung in tow, no one feels like that.

What if you don't make it out with Taehyung?

What if you don't make it out at all?

In the backseat, Jungkook's thigh is pressed to yours on one side, Jimin's on the other. Jin is driving with Yoongi beside him in the front, and Hoseok and Namjoon are split in the middle seats.

No one looks at each other.

No one speaks.

Midway through the silence, Jungkook's hand finds yours in the evening light, his fingers threading between yours and intertwining so tightly that it feels like he'll never let go.

His hand trembles a little against your palm.

"Tell me a secret," you say. "Tell me something I don't know."  The void of quiet eats your voice whole.

For a moment in the tense silence, no one speaks.

"I used to have dreadlocks," mumbles Namjoon. "When I was younger. I thought they were cool. They weren't."

You want to laugh, but it feels like there's no joy left in you.

Another minute of silence.

Another voice.

"I have special glasses that I always wear on the drive to a mission. To lighten the mood," Jin says. He reaches forward and pulls open the glovebox at Yoongi's knees, taking something out.

It is indeed a pair of oddly shaped glasses, dark framed to protect from the sun.

They're rectangles, thin and long in the frames and tapered on the outsides, so when Jin puts them on his face he looks like the biggest dork on the planet. Said dork pulls them down in the rear view mirror and winks at you.

This time you do laugh.

"Why haven't you been wearing them?" you ask.

Jin goes still; he pulls the glasses off and returns them to the glovebox. "It didn't feel appropriate," he murmurs.

The suffocating blanket of silent returns in full force. 

Quiet.

Quiet.