Bang.

Taehyung wakes up with a jerk, almost sending his laptop tumbling to the floor from where it was resting on his knees. The reverb of the explosion lingers in his chest, and his ears are ringing painfully.

The blueish glow of the screen is the only source of light in his apartment. 3.28am. He carefully puts his laptop on the coffee table and tries to untangle himself from the fleece blanket he's wrapped in. His back pops when he stretches. I need to stop falling asleep on this damn couch.

He shuffles to the window and peeks behind the drapes, heavy dark grey fabric that keeps any light from flooding in and muffles the sound of traffic from Seoul's busy streets. He can hear two more bangs, further away, barely audible.

The bang that woke him up was closer. Too close. Taehyung rubs his ear absentmindedly as he scans the street below. There are people passing by, even at this hour, but none of them look agitated or hurried, the early morning traffic lazily cruising by. Taehyung shudders as he steps away from the window again. It must have been someone in the building.

Taehyung thinks about the friendly girl from 2B, a pixie-like creature with a sad smile and track marks on the inside of her arms. He thinks about the the old couple, Mr and Mrs Oh, who live on the far side of the hall and always invite him over for coffee and cake when he runs into them. He always politely refuses, but Mrs. Oh keeps asking anyway. He thinks about the newly weds who moved in a month ago in the apartment next door. He had overheard the woman mention she was pregnant just last week.

Taehyung hopes it's not one of them. He pads towards the door of his apartment, the tiles feeling cool under his bare feet as his ears strain for familiar sounds of distress, grief.

He grabs the handle but stops himself from opening the door. A sense of morbid curiosity is pulling him forward, wanting to look, wanting to know, who is it this time?

But Taehyung has long ago learned not to chase the source of these bangs.

He checks the lock on the door and turns around, carefully moving towards his bedroom instead.

++++++

Taehyung has lived most of his life to the banging soundtrack of death. He wasn’t born with it.

When he was eight, his mom and dad had taken him, his brother and his sister to Naksan beach. His father had helped him dig a pit. There had been other boys too, older - Taehyung hadn’t known them, but they had let him play along, helping him dig a tunnel in the sand, “to the other side of the world”. Taehyung didn’t know where that was, exactly, but it sounded exciting. Maybe the tunnel would lead to Japan, or America, or other exotic places.

When Taehyung crawled in after forty minutes of digging, the tunnel collapsed on itself.

Taehyung doesn’t remember it happening, but he can imagine the scene: his mother screaming, his little brother crying, his father cursing and praying under his breath while frantically clawing away the sand crushing his oldest son.

He doesn’t remember being dragged from the sand after 8 minutes, nor the face of the retired nurse who’d given him CPR, nor the sirens from the ambulance that took him to the hospital.

He only remembers being woken up in the hospital by a series of bangs - loud, deafening explosions at random intervals that only Taehyung could hear.

Tinnitus, the doctors had called it. But after running every possible test, the hospital staff came up empty on what could have caused it, or what triggered the deafening sounds.

The bangs continued, sometimes a muted rumbling in the distance, sometimes powerful and close, like lightning striking right next to Taehyung’s ear. Brain damage, the specialist had concluded. Taehyung had made a full recovery. His parents were told it was a miracle he’d survived at all.

The frequency of the bangs lowered when Taehyung was released from the hospital, but he’d never go another day without hearing them.

He didn't figure out until later the bangs he heard occurred when people died.

++++++

Taehyung wakes up at 5.37am from a dreamless sleep. There's a commotion in the hallway - hurried footsteps, muted voices, doors opening and closing. A man sobbing. 

He listens for a few more minutes, then gingerly pushes away his blanket and gets out of bed. The wrinkled shirt he wore yesterday is on top of the pile of discared clothes next to his bed. He fumbles around in the dark, looking for the jeans he left somewhere on the floor last night. He doesn't need to turn on the lights to know he looks like .

When Taehyung opens the door and steps out into the hallway, he sees Ms. Nam from across the hall standing inside her doorway, a white dressing gown wound tightly around her body. She catches his eye, nods tersely and moves back inside, closing the door behind her. 

The noise is coming from the left side of the hallway, where the Oh family lives. Taehyung sees paramedics, a police officer. And Mr Oh, crying.

++++++

“Hey,” Seokjin grunts as he dumps a box of files next to Taehyung’s desk. “Jonghyun asked if you could put these away and collect everything from the Jang Dong Weon account.”