Dollhouse | bts ✓

26. Enchantments

BREAKING NEWS: Local woman kills intruder out of self-defense, the newspaper that was laying on the floor in front of me read.

A sob hurtled through my entire body as I remembered what had happened—how I didn't mean to kill the man.

In the moment, some instinct I didn't know I had turned me into someone I knew I wasn't. Before the man could shoot me, I twisted the gun so that it was pointed at him as he pulled the trigger...

My fingers tightened around Kitty's fur as she snuggled further into my body to comfort me. The tears rolling off my face continued to soak her fur but she made no move to get away from me.

I blankly stared at my apartment, which was still a mess from when the police had been there.

There were still blood stains on my floor. My window was still open. There were items still knocked over and trashed all around me.

But I never made an effort to clean the mess or myself since the incident.

I glanced where my dolls were neatly placed on my countertop to stare at the towel I draped over their bodies. I left it there so that I didn't have to constantly be reminded that they were gone.

My bottom lip quivered.

Even though I was let go with a non-criminal homicide ruling, it didn't make me feel any better. It didn't make the nightmares about what I had done go away.

I pulled my blanket tighter around myself and Kitty as I continued to cry, inaudible whispers escaping my lips as I tried to comfort myself.

The two of us stayed like that for several minutes, possibly hours, until there was a knock on the front door.

"No," I groaned at the door, knowing that whoever was behind it couldn't hear me. I just didn't have enough energy left in my body to raise the volume of my voice.

Whoever it was, they didn't knock again. In fact, there was such a long stretch of silence following the knock that I began to wonder if I imagined hearing the knock in the first place.

It was enough to pique my interest, so finally, I used the counter to pull Kitty and me off of the floor. I waddled to the entrance, my blanket still tightly wrapped around my legs and swishing around my feet.

When I pulled my door open, there was nothing but a small box resting at my feet. The moment felt familiar, and I realized it was because it was similar to the morning I received my dolls.

I lifted the box and closed the door behind me, already collapsing against the floor again as I tore the box open to find a packet of dust with a sticky note attached to it. Kitty wandered away from me to plant herself by the couch, watching as I discovered the package's contents.

The note had a simple message imprinted into it: Sprinkle on their bodies to revive.

No way, I thought to myself.

I was on my feet in an instance, uncovering the dolls and throwing the towel aside in the process.

I immediately reached for the closest doll and sprinkled a small portion of the dust all over his body, watching with a mixture of horror and fascination as it soaked into his skin and made him glow.

The rest happened too fast for my brain to decipher.

What I assumed to be legs suddenly appeared and knocked me off my feet. I landed on top of another body, a body that automatically wrapped its arms around my waist and opened its eyes to stare into mine. My breathing hitched.

My doll had grown into a full-sized human.

Jungkook's eyes widened in shock as he drank in my features up close and in proper proportion to his own. With fascination and surprise bursting in his eyes like fireworks, he moved a hand up to trace my cheek, my chin, and then paused at my lips as he looked back into my eyes.

My breathing unsteadily resumed.

I remembered thinking that the dolls were beautiful in the past, but I was never able to fully comprehend or appreciate the true beauty of their features.

Now that Jungkook was no longer the size of a doll, I could really look at him.

Warm, chocolate eyes. Soft brown hair with streaks of gold. Beauty marks scattered across his skin. Uneven lips. The prettiest smile that revealed a set of bunny-like teeth—a smile that stretched wide and painted innocence across his gentle eyes.

Memorizing his features came to a halt when he abruptly grabbed the back of my neck and pulled my head down so that our lips could connect.

It took me a full minute to comprehend what was happening enough to relax into his touch.

It was awkward. He was awkward. We were awkward. Our lips were awkward. Awkward and unresponsive.

However, before I could process what was happening, my eyes fluttered shut and I found myself wanting to be able to melt into him completely. Our mouths began to mold together like missing pieces of a puzzle.

But the moment was ruined by the mental reminder that there were six other dolls that still needed to be revived.

My eyes flew open in panic.

Frantic, I rolled off of a confused and flustered Jungkook. He tried to hold onto me, to reconnect our lips, but the situation was too strange and awkward and many other things that I didn't want to think about in the moment that I shoved him away.

"Noona," he whined. "Why'd you stop? Come back, don't go."

Flares of heat rose in my chest and spread through the rest of my body, freezing me in place.

This is so wrong. The moment between us shouldn't have happened.

"I, uh. I have to take care of the rest of them," I nervously choked out, facing away from him.

"They can wait," he paused from the same position on the floor that I abandoned him in. "I—I liked... it. It was nice. Can we—"

"No," I cut him off, the shyness in his voice being too much for me to handle. I gripped the countertop. "Just pretend it didn't happen. I have to wake the others up now."

"Oh," his tone was sad and defeated. "Okay, I guess."

It wasn't like I didn't enjoy those few seconds. I just didn't know what to make of any of it.

But Jungkook didn't need to know that. He was one of my dolls, for crying out loud.

He watched in silence as I lined the other dolls up on the floor and then gave myself enough space to sprinkle the dust across their vacant bodies.

Once all the boys were full-sized and alive, over the shock of it all, and finished with analyzing their fully human features, they captured me in a life-threatening group hug.

And it was in that moment, wedged between my most favorite people in the entire world, that I knew everything would finally be okay.