005
JUNO : A BTS Military Story
“This is about your parents, Ara.”
Ara snorted as she walked to the coffee shop after her all-too-quick shower back at her dorm. The sun was high now, making the day seem a bit brighter than what it felt like. Thoughts ran through her head. She was overthinking again.
She walked into the cafe and found the colonel sitting in a shaded corner with two cups of coffee. She slowly approached him and sat down. She searched his gaze for some sort of lead, but the man gave away no emotions. He took a sip of his coffee and gestured for her to do the same.
“Is Jimin doing okay?”
She nodded curtly. “I had to console him a bit, but he’ll be just fine,” she replied. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Colonel?”
“Just Chanyeol is fine for now,” he said, making the young lieutenant blink with slight surprise. He leaned forward in his seat and slid a manilla folder across the steel table. “In here is everything you need to know.” He exhaled shakily. “I’m sorry, but we had to hide everything until now. We couldn’t risk you knowing too much about the project.”
“ROMAN,” she murmured, her eyebrows furrowed as she read the words on the cover. “I thought that was terminated ages ago.”
Chanyeol nodded. “When your parents passed, they brought the information down with them. No soul has tried to recover anything since then,” he said. “It’s best not to meddle with things you don’t know about, and some things are better when left in the dust. The government didn’t want to open up another means of penetration from the North.”
She cautiously opened the folder to find profiles of her parents. She was only allowed to remember their faces through pictures, not with the luxury of her own memories. “Wait,” she started. “My parents were scientists part of the ROMAN program?”
“Yes,” the colonel replied.
“But I was told they died in a car crash.”
Chanyeol shrugged. “The car crash is how everyone saw it as. It was much more serious than that.”
She gazed at the profiles and the mathematical formulas behind them. She shook her head slightly. “Why didn’t anyone tell me…?”
“It was for your own safety,” he said. “If the North ever found out about the rest of these plans, they would’ve gone through drastic measures to try and infiltrate you, your brother, or anything they could get their grubby fingers on.” He grimaced.
She narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean ‘the rest of these plans’?” she shot.
Chanyeol blinked and looked away. “Like I said, some things are better left in the dust. Your parents died defending their country to the best of their ability, even when it meant they would be giving their own lives,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to find out about it this way.”
Ara ran her fingers over the experiments that they had managed to recover. So many of the sheets had to do with the anatomy of the human body and the physiology of the brain. Many topics and theories she didn’t understand made her stomach sink. Math formulas filled her vision as she pushed the file away and caught Chanyeol’s concerned gaze. “You’re not telling me something,” she said. Her lips were pursed. “Spill it.”
Comments