Seokjin doesn't know what happened. One moment he's going to get more drinks for the bunch of them and the next he's being slammed into the wall by something. There's someone in his face, and Seokjin tests the strength of whatever that black thing (shadows? he thinks) is that's holding him down.

He can sense the sweat coming off the guy, even though he can't see his face, what with all the shadows shrouding it. He knows he can overpower the guy, but his thoughts are interrupted when the guy growls at him. "Show your true face, imposter."

Seokjin stares at the guy. What is he talking about?

"What are you talking about? This is my real face," Seokjin says. The guy growls and slams him into the wall, the sound covered by the loud thumping bass in the bar. "Reveal yourself, metamorpher, before I kill you."

"Metamorpher? I'm not a metamorpher," Seokjin says, not wanting to reveal his hand so soon. The guy is just about to slam him into the wall again when the shadows start retreating. It's getting brighter, and the guy flinches away from the source.

"Get away from Jin-hyung," a familiar voice says, coldly. The guy snarls, his shadows climbing up his body as he turns to face the light manipulator that had the guts to approach him. He's the strongest shadow manipulator his 'parents' have seen, and he'll be damned if he let a measly light manipulator beat him.

All thoughts of crushing the stupid light manipulator disappears, however, when he sees another familiar face looking back at him. He stumbles back in shock. "It can't be," he thinks. "It can't be him, he's dead! They told me he was dead!"

The familiar face is staring at him, narrow-eyed and angry, faintly glowing, and Seokjin is next to him. The sight of the two of them together makes his knees buckle, just as someone else comes up and asks, "What's going on here, Tae?"

Seokjin is still looking at the guy who slammed him into the wall, as the shadow manipulator retreats in shock at the sight of Taehyung. The shadows shrouding his face are weaker, like he's distracted, and Seokjin is able to make out his mouth and eyes. His eyes are wide in shock, and he's mouthing the two names that were called.

"What are your names?" the shadow manipulator asks shakily, rage nowhere in sight. "What business is it of yours to know?" Taehyung says, not in the mood to be nice when this guy was slamming his hyung into the wall not five minutes ago. Hobi-hyung and Jin-hyung are on either side of him, eyeing the guy.

"Please, please just tell me your names." The desperate tone surprises them, and Seokjin tells him, out of pity. "I'm Kim Seokjin, and that's Kim Taehyung. The guy next-" Before Seokjin can finish, the shadows swirl angrily about the guy and he turns and runs for the back door, immediately disappearing amidst the inky blackness of his shadows. Taehyung relaxes, but Seokjin does not.

"He should run. He's probably heard of us before," Hoseok is saying, but Seokjin thinks- he thinks-

He hears himself talking but the thought is inconceivable. He had died, back then. Seokjin had been so sure. "Taehyung, we're going after that guy. Hoseok, tell the others, yeah?" He takes off after the guy, Taehyung right on his heels, and Hoseok is left terribly confused, but goes to tell the other three what happened.

"Jin-hyung, Seokjin-hyung, what's going on?" Taehyung asks between pants. "I have to check something. Can you find him?" Seokjin answers, trying to locate the guy by sight, but it's night, the shadow manipulator's domain, and only someone like Taehyung will be able to sense anything. "I'll try."

Taehyung searches for an absence of light that could hide a human. They're still running in the general direction that Seokjin saw the guy flee in, and Taehyung grabs his arm and tugs him in a certain direction.

"Hyung," he says, a nervous tone in his voice, "there's a very large absence of light there." He points to a house, one of many in the quiet street Taehyung tugged him towards. Whatever Taehyung or Seokjin is going to say is interrupted by a wave of black breaking a window of the house Taehyung pointed to, the sound of glass shattering loud.

Seokjin drags Taehyung closer to the house, and he can hear screaming and shouting. "You told me they were dead!" he hears someone yell. There's more screaming, and more yelling. The door is ajar when Seokjin and Taehyung walk up to it, and Seokjin enters, pulling Taehyung with him, behind him.

They walk through the living room, and enter the kitchen. It's trashed, and there's a couple kneeling in front of the shadow manipulator, repeating "I'm sorry" and "We didn't know" over and over. The shadows grab hold of a chair, raising it above the couple's heads, and Seokjin's blood freezes.

"Jeon Jeongguk, put down that chair right now." Seokjin's voice thunders throughout the room, and he feels Taehyung freeze behind him, barely breathing. He wasn't sure back at the bar, but now, looking at the shadow manipulator, he can't be more sure of it.

Jeongguk stills, eyes fixed on the trembling couple in front of him. He doesn't want to look at the person that spoke, because it can't be true. Seokjin-hyung and Taehyung-hyung died eight years ago, and they can't be standing at the entrance of his foster parents' kitchen.

He drops the chair, but remains in place. Seokjin breathes a sigh of relief, and hears Taehyung say shakily, "Gukkie?" The boy in front of them shudders visibly at the sound of Taehyung's voice, and Taehyung launches himself at the boy, who stumbles as they collide.

"Gukkie- Jeonggukkie- it's really you, oh my god, it's really you-" Taehyung is crying into the younger boy's embrace, and Jeongguk stares down at the lilac-haired boy clinging to him, hands limp by his side.

Slowly, though, his hands come up, and embrace Taehyung hesitantly. "T-tae-hyung?" he whispers softly, and the boy in his embrace just sobs even harder. It isn't long before Jeongguk is tearing up as well, and the two sink to the floor, crying in each other's embrace.

Seokjin tears his eyes away from the sight, and goes to help the couple up. "I'm sorry for what he did," Seokjin says, gently, helping them into chairs. "I-it's fine. I get where he's coming from. It's just that it's the first time I've seen him so angry, so betrayed," the lady says.

"I'm glad he found you guys again. When we took him in..." she continues, and her husband picks up from where she trailed off. "He was barely responsive when we took him in six years ago. He's better now, but we're glad he still hasn't lost the last people he knew before us."

Seokjin remains quiet, tending to their wounds. "He didn't tell us much about the two of you and about his childhood, but it's enough for us to know he belongs with you two," the man says, looking at the two still crying on the floor.

Seokjin smiles tremulously at them, keeping his tears at bay. "Thank you for taking care of our Jeongguk," he says, and the couple smile at him. "It was our pleasure. He's so bright, and energetic when he manages to break free from his memories... I'm only grateful he was willing to open up to us."

Seokjin leaves the two at the kitchen table, miraculously not broken, and goes over to the two boys on the floor. "Alright, you two, up you get." He hoists the two of them so that they're standing, and is dragged into the hug by Taehyung.

Seokjin smiles fondly at his younger brothers, one long-lost and just found, the other whom he watched grow up, and ruffles both of their hairs. Jeongguk cries harder, emotions spilling out of him, and says tearfully, "Jin-hyung, Jinnie-hyung, thought you guys left me-"

Seokjin's heart breaks, and he hugs them even tighter. "Not willingly, Guk-ah. Definitely not willingly."

It's to this scene that the others stumble upon, and they all stand there, staring at the scene until Yoongi can't stand the silence any more. "What the hell happened here?"
 

After they help to clean up the mess that Jeongguk made in his fit of anger, and after Jeongguk apologises guiltily and sincerely to his foster parents for the way he acted, Seokjin and the others bring Jeongguk back to their home, a two storey brownstone building that they bought together.

Taehyung and Jeongguk have stopped crying, and the two of them are catching up with each other, having missed eight years of their lives. Seokjin had promised explanations when they returned home, and bears with Jimin and Hoseok's unabashed staring of the two youngest, as well as Yoongi's glaring and Namjoon's wariness.

When they have finally reached their home, Jeongguk gapes at it before following them into the house, and Seokjin tells him to sit anywhere he wants. Aware of all the eyes on him, Jeongguk hesitantly sits down on the sofa, and the others put themselves around the room, settling into chairs or the floor.

Jeongguk's seated in between Taehyung and Seokjin, and Seokjin waits for everyone to settle down before he begins with the story.

It starts with a twelve-year-old Jeongguk, a fourteen-year-old Taehyung, and a seventeen-year-old Seokjin. Seokjin stops, thinks about it, and rewinds. He tells a tale of two-year-old Jeongguk moving into the neighbourhood and meeting Taehyung and Seokjin, who are his new neighbours.

They grow up together, and when Seokjin comes into his powers one day, at the age of fifteen, he shows Taehyung and Jeongguk. Seokjin tells his parents, who smile at their oldest and teach him how to control his powers.

He often regals Taehyung and Jeongguk with stories and fairy tales, making them more exciting by shaping figures in the air, forming them from the water vapour all around them.

Every person grows into their powers at the age of fifteen, he relays to the two wide-eyed boys staring at him as he manipulates the water in the air effortlessly. He smiles when Taehyung exclaims that he wants to be a water elementalist like Seokjin, and laughs when Jeongguk complains and starts arguing with Taehyung over who gets to be 'just like Seokjin-hyung'.

However, tragedy strikes when Jeongguk is twelve, when a metamorpher goes feral. Just the day before Jeongguk and Taehyung had gotten free candy from the guy, but that day, the metamorpher runs down the street, striking at anyone in sight.

He then transforms into something big, stepping on houses like nothing. Taehyung and Seokjin are separated from Jeongguk, and gets dragged away from the area by their fleeing, panicking parents. They have no home now, and Seokjin, as much as he tries, cannot break free from his father's super-strength grip.

When he returns to the area a few months later, there's nothing there. Nothing to show where the three of them used to play hide-and-seek at the playground, and nothing to show where they used to play, the entire street of houses crushed to nothing but rubble and debris. Seokjin accepts the fact that Jeongguk could be dead, and goes back to his new house.

There's silence for a while, then Jeongguk starts relaying his part of the story. Jeongguk, who is out with Taehyung and Seokjin and is on the way home, gets separated with the two and runs back home, horrified to see what remains of his house.

His parents are nowhere in sight, and he remains there even as the ambulances and police show up, staring at the house, his house, in shock. One lady brings him to an ambulance, giving him a shock blanket, but even when Jeongguk's not directly looking at his house, he sees a very familiar hand sticking out underneath the rubble, a familiar ring glinting at him.

The very same ring is in his pocket now, sitting in the ambulance, removed with shaky hands. There's no sign of Seokjin and Taehyung, and Jeongguk accepts the fact that he's lost everyone he'd known throughout the years to a kind young man who had given him sweets yesterday. Even then, he doesn't cry.

He's taken to a foster home, withdrawn and quiet, a far cry from the cheerful, playful boy he used to be, and is taken in two years later, when he has opened up slightly, enough to smile every once in a while. Even so, his eyes are still empty.

Fast forward to now, when he'd seen Seokjin at the bar, his first time in one after becoming of legal age, but it couldn't be him, Seokjin died eight years ago, crushed under rubble, and Jeongguk's blood burns at the fact that even now, someone has stolen the face of his beloved hyung, pretending to be him.

It isn't until he sees Taehyung that the truth of the situation hits him, that no one could have Seokjin-hyung's mannerisms down pat, not when Taehyung is also right there, next to him.

Jeongguk is crying again, his mother's ring in plain sight hanging around his neck. Jimin has teared up silently. Hoseok has too, and Taehyung has Jeongguk in a side hug, squishing him between Seokjin and himself. Yoongi sighs and mutters something about 'soft-hearted children' but the fondness is evident in his voice, and Namjoon goes to get everyone tissues.

When everyone has calmed down, Seokjin introduces everyone. "That's Park Jimin, he's a siren." At Jeongguk's confused look, Jimin elaborates. "That means I can control sound. Make things louder, softer, make people do things with my voice." Jeongguk nods in understanding.

"Kim Namjoon, earth elementalist," Seokjin continues, and Namjoon waves. "Min Yoongi, fire elementalist," Yoongi is slumped in a beanbag, and grunts in acknowledgment, "and Jung Hoseok, air elementalist." Hoseok grins at him.

"Taetae's a light manipulator, and you already know I'm a water elementalist." Seokjin finishes, and Jeongguk nods. "I'm Jeon Jeongguk, a shadow manipulator." His voice is hoarse from crying, but his tone is firm.

"Can he join us, Joonie-hyung?" Jimin pipes up. "Join you?" Jeongguk scrunches his face up in confusion. "Oh god, he looks like a bunny." Yoongi's quiet mutter is covered by Hoseok's explanation. "Have you heard of Bangtan, Jeongguk-ah?"

Jeongguk thinks for a while, and says, "The students in my school say that Bangtan is a gang. They're all scared when they hear that name."

"So we're a gang now? How did we get famous enough for high schoolers to know about us, even?" Yoongi snorts.

"Well, it can't be helped. You and Namjoon look really intimidating when you don't smile, and word travels fast, you know that," Hoseok complains.

"You're Bangtan?" Jeongguk's question is soft, but Seokjin hears it and nods. "We're not a gang, though. We don't even do anything gang-like."

"All we did was get revenge on a few people that we caught harassing Seokjin-hyung and bullying Jiminnie, I have no idea how it became us being a gang," Yoongi complains.

"And you want me to join you?" Jeongguk asks, voice soft. Next to him, Seokjin nods, and says, "It's really up to you whether you join us or not. Regardless of your choice, you're stuck with us. I'm not letting you out of my sight again."

Taehyung hugs him again, and Jeongguk squirms. "Tae-hyung, let go of me, gah!" He breaks free and Taehyung pouts. "Enough hugging today," Jeongguk states, arms up to fend off Taehyung, who seems determined to cuddle him to death.

His shadows come out to help as well, and everyone inhales in shock when the swirls of darkness appear. The living room lights up as Taehyung brings in his light, and the shadows shrink back as the light gets closer, unable to get to Taehyung to push him away.

It ends with Jeongguk firmly in Taehyung's embrace, bickering over who cheated in their little play-fight, light and shadow nowhere in sight.

"Alright, enough bickering." Seokjin breaks them up, and asks Jeongguk. "So? Do you want to join us?" Jeongguk looks at everyone seated around the room, Namjoon and Hoseok talking quietly, Yoongi dozing off, and Jimin now disturbing Taehyung.

"I would love to, hyung.