When Jimin woke up, the first thing he noticed was that he was in a sitting position, and that for some reason he was getting jostled around. Groggy and disoriented, he looked to his left to see Taehyung, who was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel of a vehicle that definitely wasn’t the younger man’s usual car. Further investigation revealed that the two of them were in the cab of what appeared to be a small, rental moving truck, which was currently driving down a dark, empty highway.

“Oh, good; you’re up,” chirped Taehyung cheerily. “Did you know you’re a really heavy sleeper?”

Jimin panicked as he fumbled with his seatbelt, trying to unbuckle it in his frenzy of confusion.

“Yah! Didn’t anyone ever teach you to keep your seatbelt buckled when you’re in a moving car?” reprimanded Taehyung. “Where are you even planning on going, anyway? We’re going way over the speed limit.”

“I don’t know!” shouted Jimin. “I don’t even know where the we are right now.”

“Right, right,” recalled Taehyung. “Well, I was planning to wake you up, but I already had everything under control, so I figured I should give you a little more time to sleep. You seemed really exhausted after this morning.”

Jimin was able to calm down slightly as he realized that he would need to have all his wits about him if he hoped to get any semblance of a sensical answer from Taehyung. The younger man was still focused on the road, oblivious to Jimin’s panic attack as the moving van barreled down the highway, passing road signs too quickly for Jimin to get a good look at them.

“Okay, Tae. I need you to explain this to me slowly,” instructed Jimin. “Where are we going, and why didn’t you bother to tell me before you dragged me into this truck?”

“Was your life, like, really boring before I showed up?” wondered Taehyung. “You always want all the answers right away, and that’s no fun. There’s never any room for mystery with you, Chimchim.”

Jimin groaned. The last thing he needed right now was another nickname, and Taehyung was being unnecessarily difficult.

“You didn’t answer my questions at all.”

“Oh yeah. Whoops. Well, in the interest of keeping a bit of the riddle alive, I would suggest that you look in the back of the truck,” said Taehyung proudly. “That should help you to come up with some of the answers yourself.”

✧✧✧

Jimin wanted to refuse, but he accepted that that was probably going to be all the information he would be able to get out of Taehyung until he looked in the storage area, so he twisted around in his seat to pull back the plastic partition that separated the two front seats from the back of the truck.

Yoongi was awake and sitting up, but Jin was passed out on the floor of the van, snoring lightly. The former whipped his head up to glare at Jimin as the window opened, but the older man’s expression softened and turned to shock when he realized who he was looking at.

“Jimin?”

The young man closed the window as he turned around to face the gloomy road. He tried to keep his voice and features calm while addressing his companion.

“Taehyung?”

“Yes!”

“Why are my friends in the backseat?”

“Technically not a seat,” Taehyung corrected. “It’s the bed of a storage truck. And they’re there because there aren’t enough seats up here and I didn’t want them interfering with my concentration while I’m driving. The shorter one - Yoongi - he asks way too many questions. I see why he’s friends with you.”

There was a forceful knock on the covered window.

“Yeah; he was doing that for a while, too. I am really impressed at your ability to sleep through things.”

Jimin rolled back the barrier, and was met with a fearful, confused, and angry Yoongi.

“Jimin, what the is going on here?!” demanded the older man.

The younger wished that he understood it himself, but Jimin could do nothing besides stare at Yoongi as contempt flamed in the latter’s sleep-deprived eyes.

“What the hell are you thinking?!”

“Hey, leave Jimin alone,” asserted Taehyung, not taking his eyes off the endlessly straight road. “The poor guy just woke up.”

Indeed, Jimin had, and Taehyung’s directions to look in the back of the truck had resulted in generating significantly more questions than answers for the already-confused young man. Jimin couldn’t decide where to look as he glanced rapidly from Yoongi to Taehyung to the unrecognizable road.

“I don’t care if he was just ing born,” barked Yoongi. “I want some answers.”

✧✧✧

Jimin finally settled on looking into Yoongi’s dark, fiery eyes as the younger man tried his best to speak collectedly.

“Yoongi, I’m sorry - but I really have no idea what’s going on.”

“I don’t know if I actually believe that,” grumbled Yoongi, “but even if you don’t know, he sure as hell does.”

Yoongi jabbed his pointer finger at Taehyung, but was stopped from actually moving far by the pane of plexiglass that separated them. There were several coin-sized holes drilled at the top of the plastic, and this was where Yoongi positioned his eyes to glare at the two younger men in front of him.

“Who; me?” chuckled Taehyung. “I suppose I do have a guess as to what’s going on. But of course it’s all just a theory.”

Jimin felt his heart sink again before the sensation was replaced with rage. This was certainly no time to be coy, and Taehyung had once again proven himself to be evasive and unpredictable - just as Jimin had thought he was really starting to get to know the other man.

“What the are you talking about?” interrogated Yoongi.

“I did a little digging,” reported Taehyung. “And I think I have an idea about what Jin is.”

“What he is?” repeated Yoongi. “What are you-?”

The older man stopped, and backed away from the window as Jimin kneeled to watch him sit heavily on the floor of the vehicle. He was about to say something when Yoongi issued a command, cutting Jimin off.

“Close the window.”

“Yoongi, I-”

“Close it.”

✧✧✧

Jimin slid the opaque panel back into place, not sure what to make of Yoongi’s strange behavior. He was sure that the older man couldn’t know what Taehyung was talking about, as Jimin had little to no idea himself. Yet, at the same time, Jin was undeniably some kind of non-human creature, as Jimin could clearly feel the string attached to the man sitting not two meters away from him.

“What is happening to my life?” moaned Jimin.

“It is happening,” replied Taehyung. “Your life is incredibly interesting, Jimin. You should really try to start actually experiencing it.”

“How am I supposed to experience life when you drag me unconscious out of my ing house in the middle of the night and put me in a van with my kidnapped friends?!” Jimin shouted.

“Well, we’re all here now - willing or not - so I say we should focus on trying to enjoy the journey,” smiled Taehyung.

“Oh my God - Tae! You can’t just go around kidnapping people whenever it suits your motives,” cried Jimin.

“Oh can’t I?” teased Taehyung.

“It’s not a question of ability,” fretted Jimin. “It’s illegal to-”

“If it makes you feel any better, Yoongi at least agreed to help me help you,” offered Taehyung.

“You lying to one of my childhood friends doesn’t make me feel anything but betrayal,” mumbled Jimin.

“It wasn’t a lie,” insisted Taehyung. “You really do need some help, Chimchim. I saw how much it was driving you crazy - finding out that Jin isn’t human - so I took it upon myself to arrange a little field trip for all of us. I remembered you mentioning Yoongi a couple of times, so I thought maybe he’d be useful in trying to solve this little mystery.”

“So you lied to him about me being in trouble,” accused Jimin, “and then stuffed him into the back of your truck?”

“Well when you say it that way…”

“Forget it, Taehyung,” snarled Jimin. “I don’t even care anymore; just - please try to not do anything else blatantly illegal.”

✧✧✧

The truck was silent as it continued traveling down the highway. Jimin hadn’t heard a peep from Yoongi, and Jin was still snoring and asleep. He wondered if Taehyung had actually knocked the older man unconscious.

The young man feared that his friends would never want to talk to him again once they arrived at wherever it was they were going, and thought with a pang of remorse that he really wouldn’t be able to blame them if they chose not to. What must this look like to Yoongi and Jin? Their childhood friend goes crazy as he gets wrapped up in a crime spree with an unfamiliar, morally-questionable lunatic of a neon-haired man. What a great news story that was going to be. Jimin wondered if they would take out the parts about cryptozoology and long-hidden Sensor societies, or if those would be left in for dramatic effect. He buried his face in his hands, no longer interested in even attempting to read the road signs.

“Tae, why couldn’t we just try to talk to Jin, y’know?” mumbled Jimin. “Why did you have to go crazy and kidnap him?”

“Well, I said I had an idea about what Jin is,” explained Taehyung. “And if I’m correct, then I know some people who would be very interested in meeting him.”

The younger man smiled, as if this were a perfectly acceptable line of reasoning. Jimin let his arms slacken as he stared numbly up at the ceiling, questioning how his life had come to this. Hadn’t he been living a boring life in a boring suburban house less than a week ago? He sighed as he watched the stars pass overhead, brighter now that he wasn’t near the light pollution of any cities or towns.

“That’s the kind of thing you need a person’s consent for,” whined Jimin. “You can’t grab people and expect them to go along with whatever plan happens to be passing through your scatterbrained head at that moment.”

“I’m starting to realize that,” confessed Taehyung, and Jimin saw with astonishment that the other man was serious.

How could anyone be so ridiculously incognizant as to honestly think they could kidnap someone to introduce them to their friends? Jimin had no idea, but he didn’t have time to think about it before Taehyung continued, interrupting the elder’s mental stream of disbelief and doubt.

“But I still worry that Jin wouldn’t have agreed to help us if we had gone about this too directly,” he finished.

“So you decided to go the indirect route, and throw him in the back of a rental van,” supplemented Jimin. “It’s fine. I get it. You’re completely ing insane, and we all just have to learn to deal with it. Okay.”

Taehyung was quiet for several seconds before trying to make amends with Jimin, who was still silently fuming in the passenger seat of the cab.

“I can tell you where we’re going, if you think that’ll help,” offered Taehyung gently.

Jimin grunted, leaving it ambiguous as to whether or not he actually would be comforted by the additional information.

“Think of it as a fun little road trip,” encouraged Taehyung, already perking back up despite Jimin’s cold shoulder. “I’m not sure if you’ve ever been there, but Seoul is beautiful this time of year.