When Shadows Fall | BTS Kim Namjoon

Chapter 31: Good Day

A/N: I finally updated again! Hope you enjoy; thank you so much for reading! I really appreciate every read, comment, and vote very much and I'm really thankful to be at 8.8k reads even though I'm so bad at updating! Thank you and please enjoy <3

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Namjoon stared at his phone in shock, reading and rereading the letter Chunhwa had written. Holy shit. What a terrifying experience it must have been; he could hardly imagine it.

What was even harder to imagine was... he'd almost been killed? Just peacefully standing outside the apartment hoping to talk with Chunhwa for another minute, he'd almost been shot? A heated anxiety swept through him despite the dance-practice sweat cooling on his skin. Someone had been ready to shoot him through Chunhwa's door. He'd almost died.

He located the nearest chair and sank into it, staring somewhere between his phone and the practice room mirrors. All of it, everything – the band, the members, the music, the fame, the fans – everything that made up his life right now, it all suddenly seemed tiny. It was like he'd been crouching low to the ground to observe an ant colony so long that he'd forgotten the scale of the real world.

This near-death experience that he hadn't even known about – it had made him stand up for a moment, shift his perspective. When was the last time he'd contacted his friends? When had he last written something for himself, purely because he wanted to write it? When was the last time he'd called home?

He often felt like he was too busy for any call home to be long enough to make it "worthwhile." Well, now he was wondering if he'd only been thinking about whether it was worthwhile for him, not about what his family needed.

He always thought he'd have plenty of time to spend with his family later. He always figured he'd see his friends some other month. He always let his favorite song ideas, if pronounced unmarketable, become neglected files in his computer.

He woke his phone back up and read the pertinent sentences again. It was easy to forget that "later" was not guaranteed.

"Why're you sitting there looking like that?" asked Jimin. "Bad news?"

Namjoon cleared his throat, ditching his phone on the seat as he joined the others in the middle of the room for another run-through of the choreo. "Not really. Just...." He sighed. He didn't know how to talk about how he was feeling for once. "I need time to process," he said.

"Process what?" asked Seokjin, screwing the cap onto his water bottle.

"Nothing."

"It's not nothing," Yoongi said from where he still sat against the mirror. "You don't have to tell us about it, but it's definitely not nothing."

"No, he does have to tell us!" said Taehyung. "I bet it's about that incident he won't give any details about."

"That's because I didn't know any details!" Namjoon protested.

Taehyung grinned. "See, he said 'didn't'. He knows more now!"

"Really? So what happened?" asked Jungkook.

"Yeah, I've been holding back on asking again but I'm really curious," said Hoseok.

Namjoon shook his head. "Seriously? Now? I literally just said I needed time to process."

"Are we ready to start the next song?" the dance teacher asked from across the room.

Voices chorused "Yes" as they all moved to the middle of the floor space. Namjoon threw himself into practice, feeling both more and less focused than usual. As the minutes flew by, the thought of nearly dying began to feel less and less real. Maybe he had misread the letter.