“Alright, kids.” Mr. Brown, the 9th grade Honors Chemistry teacher at Brookhaven High, points to a large word on the board: PROJECT, written in red Expo marker. “You’ll be assigned a partner to work on this lab- hey, stop groaning! At least you don’t have to do it alone!”

    “Fingers crossed that we get put together,” Yoongi mutters to Namjoon, his only friend in this class.

    “Fingers crossed that I get put with Brittnay,” Namjoon whispers back, shooting the beautiful blonde cheerleader a cheeky grin.

    “The first pairing will be Namjoon and Brittnay.”

    “Yes!” Namjoon subtly pumps his fist in the air, and then slaps Yoongi on the back. “Good luck, bro. I’m going to go over and get comfortable with Brittnay.”

    “Thirsty,” Yoongi fake-coughs.

    Mr. Brown keeps reading off pairings. Yoongi’s gaze drifts over to Jessica Stevenson, who is sitting diagonally from him and has been flirting with him for the entire year. He blows her a little kiss and she giggles, pretending to catch it in her palm. Send another one, she mouths, and Yoongi chuckles.

    “Mr. Min. Mr. Min.”

    Yoongi’s eyes snap to Mr. Brown. The entire class is staring at me, hiding sniggers behind their hands.

    “If you’d been paying attention, you’d have heard me say your partner’s name.”

    Yoongi smirks. “My bad. Who is it?”

    “Lina Nguyen.”

    The smile immediately drops from his face.

    “Do you have a problem with that?” Mr. Brown asks testily.

    “No.”

    “Then go join your partner at a lab station.” He turns to the rest of the class. “Remember to grab goggles, gloves, and an apron! You’ll be working with acetic acid, and you definitely don’t want that stuff in your eyes or on your skin!”

    Stone-faced, Yoongi grabs his things and walks over to a lab table near the back of the classroom, where Lina has already started on the experiment. She does not say a word as Yoongi sits down in front of her. The rest of their classmates are chattering away, discussing the lab analysis and splitting up the work for the project. Only Yoongi and Lina are quiet.

    “I’ll write the report,” Yoongi finally says, breaking the tense silence between them.

    “No,” Lina says, not looking at him. “I’ll do it.”

    “But you’re already doing the lab. You shouldn’t have to do all the work.”

    Lina ignores him. She continues to pour the acetic acid into a beaker.

    “Lina. Lina.”

    She remains silently cold.

    “Listen to me,” Yoongi says, grabbing her hand, and Lina gasps as some of the acetic acid from the container splashes onto her bare wrist. She drops the vessel and clutches her hand in pain, and for the first time in years she actually looks at him in the face, her eyes filled with angry tears and her jaw clenched. Yoongi’s eyes widen; he moves to take her wrist but Lina slaps him away with her other hand.

    “Don’t touch me,” she hisses, hiding her red skin, and he is left staring after her as she reports her rash to Mr. Brown- “Sorry, I was being clumsy and accidentally spilled some acetic acid on my wrist,”- and does not spare Yoongi another glance.

    All he ever does is hurt her.

    The next 2 years are relatively carefree for Yoongi. He is at the top of the school’s social hierarchy, he is surrounded by friends, girls, and admirers, he feels good. There is a part of him that forgets that he is a member of one of the biggest crime syndicates in the world. He does not have to be Min Yoongi, member of BTS, a trained fighter and assassin- no, at school, he can be Min Yoongi, the star point guard on the Brookhaven Lions basketball team, the attractive guy with a new girlfriend every month, the cool prep who is one of the most popular people in school.

He does not have to know Lina Nguyen. The chance encounters he has with her are marked by cold glares and empty silence. Yoongi speaks a total of 4 sentences to her in those 2 years, half of which are snide insults meant for his friends but are actually directed towards her. She does not seem to care.

The animosity on his side is all show. He avoids her for her own sake. He does not want to hurt her anymore.

But Yoongi cannot pretend to notice that she has been getting better over the course of time. Lina laughs more freely now. She is growing out her hair. She does not come to school with that tired, ragged face, those dark half-moons under her eyes. Lina has joined the legions of those snarky nobodies at the bottom of the social ladder who delight in insulting every aspect of the school they attend: from the materialistic cheerleaders to the school’s infatuation with the sports program to the incompetence of half the teachers.

It seems like Yoongi has become another faceless jock to her- another jerk to despise just because of the fact that he is popular.

Lina is moving on.

And Yoongi knows it’s unfair but it hurts.

He tells himself that he should be doing the same. He has so many girls who want to be with him. He tries using them to wipe out the memory of her face, over and over and over again.

But he just can’t seem to forget about Lina Nguyen.

Everything else, however, is going quite well.

Until Yoongi sees Ami Hwang hopping onto a bus in Brookhaven, a MacBook in hand, and then sprinting through the Carroll Street bus station 20 minutes later, laptop nowhere to be found.

Jungkook has shut himself up inside his room.

“Jungkook,” Namjoon says softly, tapping on the door. “Let me in.”

Taehyung and Jimin exchange a nervous glance behind him.

“This is really bad,” Jin says in a low voice.

Yoongi is scared. Really, really scared. He does not know how Jungkook is taking this news- what if he relapses into his old self? What if he wants to quit BTS and protect Ami? There is no good option for this situation. Jungkook is ed either way.

Yoongi recalls what Jungkook had told him one night, ages ago, as they sat on the roof of his house, sipping beers.

“She’s the one person I want to keep away from all of it,” Jungkook said.

Yoongi turned to him in confusion. “Huh?”

“Ami. I... I never want her to find out about the stuff we do. The gangs and the murdering and the criminal activity. And I especially don’t want her to know about... what I am. Can you imagine? She would be... horrified.”

Yoongi slung an arm around his shoulders. “Yo, dude. If you two really do somehow get together- which won’t happen unless you stop going for other girls and ask her out-,”

“I don’t want to date her,” Jungkook protested. “I don’t even like her like that-,”

“Shut up. Anyway. I definitely don’t think she’d despise you for it. She’d understand that it’s all a part of your past, you know? And from what I know about Ami Hwang, she doesn’t seem like the kind of person to judge someone like that. She would try to get the full picture and understand what was happening and stuff. You know?”

“I don’t know.” Jungkook sighed. “It’s not just that, I mean. The last thing I would want is for Ami to get hurt because of me. I would never, ever be able to forgive myself.”

“Jungkook, don’t worry about it. Besides, why would she even get mixed up in all this gang stuff anyway? She’s not relevant to any of it at all. Calm down.”

Yet here they are right now.

Suddenly, the doorknob turns. Yoongi’s eyes widen.

Jungkook’s face is bleary, his eyes slightly bloodshot and his hair in an absolute mess. The faint smell of alcohol hangs around him.

“What did they say?” he whispers. “Are they going to eliminate her?”

Jin anxiously bites his lip, staring at Jungkook, and then nods.

Jungkook lets out a deep breath. He stares blankly in front of him, his eyes unseeing.

And then he takes the closest object- a lamp- and flings it across the room. It hits the wall and shatters, causing his friends to jolt in surprise and horror.

“!” he screams, picking up his alarm clock. It joins his lamp in a million pieces on the floor. “, , ! No!”

“Jungkook, calm down!” Namjoon shouts, grabbing onto Jungkook’s arms. It takes 4 of them to restrain Jungkook, and by the time they have physically subdued him, he is crying, his entire body shuddering with sobs.

“They can’t kill her,” Jungkook says in a shaky voice. “Not Ami. She- she doesn’t deserve it- it’s some kind of mistake- please, no.”

Yoongi’s heart is absolutely breaking. He has never seen Jungkook look so despondent and broken. Resentment fills his insides, directed towards the 4 Flames, his parents, himself, and most of all, Ami Hwang. He had trusted her as the one aspect of Jungkook’s life that would always bring a grin to his face. A constant. A source of happiness for him. Now it turns out that she was just as entangled in all of this as they are.

She hurt Jungkook and betrayed his trust.

Yoongi hates Ami Hwang.

    “No, this isn’t going to happen,” Jungkook mutters, suddenly standing up. “I’m going to talk to Command. There has to be some way to- I don’t know- they can’t kill Ami.”

    “The question is, how did she even manage to hack into our website?” Taehyung asks in wonder. “Marge slaved over it. She said it was virtually impenetrable.”

    Jungkook’s eyes light up. “Yes. But Ami hacked through, which shows that she’s incredibly talented with computers. She could be an asset. We- we could use her-,”

    “You want to bring Ami Hwang into the 4 Flames?” Jin asks, his eyes wide.

    For a moment, Jungkook falters. The implications of this statement hit him and he wonders if it would be crueler to subject her to the wicked wrongdoings of the 4 Flames or simply let her die.

    And then he clenches his fists.

    “That’s our only option,” he says in a low voice.