A/N: in honor of the Cassini spacecraft. rip, it was a good 13 years. 

Kim Namjoon

Sweat coated my face and neck as I watched my close friend Kim Taehyung examine something on his computer screen. His methods were unorthodox, closer to hacking on the spectrum of investigation, but he was good at what he did and if anybody could locate the computer that uploaded the video, it was him. Beside me stood Park Jimin, his partner. We’d all gone to the same school, but they had been sophomores when I was a senior. They had been quite the pair, constantly getting into trouble in school. If I was in any other situation I would be teasing them yet again about how they decided to study law and justice.

“Don’t worry, sunbae,” Jimin placed a hand on my shoulder. He could tell that I was nervous. “We’ll find the location and then we can find out who they are.” I nodded several times. My phone buzzed in my pocket and I glanced at it quickly before rejecting the call realizing it wasn’t Yoomi.

My label had been calling me, but any call that wasn’t Yoomi wasn’t worth answering. There were some things that were more important than my career. One thing. And I couldn’t bear to see the look of utter horror and sadness on her face, the tears that she rarely allowed, and know that I was the cause. My only hope of somehow getting her back was to prove something that I couldn’t remember.

“This could take a while, hyung,” Taehyung pauses from his work to look up at me. “I’m working as fast I can but I’m trying to do this as legally as I can.”

“I know, thank you,” I sigh, as I feel Jimin gently guide me to a free chair.

“She really meant a lot to you, huh?” I hear Jimin asks as he moves away for a moment to grab his coffee mug.

“I have never loved anyone in my life like how I love her. Not my wasted excuse for a family, not myself, not anyone,” I tell him confidently. “I’ve wasted all this time thinking that I needed to become someone to take care of her. And God willing, I’m going to marry her after all this.”

Jimin’s eyebrows raise and I can hear a momentary halt in Taehyung’s keyboard.

“I didn’t know-” He starts,

I shake my head. “I’m not. But that’s all I can do right now. Pray. And hope that I didn’t just make the biggest mistake of my life.”

I don’t know how much time I spent sitting in that chair watching Taehyung’s fingers fly over several keyboards. Enough time for Jimin to refill his coffee three times. I’d finally answered the phone after seeing Yoongi’s caller ID. He’d been angry that I wasn’t picking up my phone and hopefully, it was because he was worried about me. Once I’d told him about my situation and what I was trying to do, he’d promised to talk to our manager.

“Done,” Taehyung pushed himself away from his screens for a moment. I scrambled to my feet, making eye contact with Jimin as he stood up from his desk. He displays a large tired smile and popped me two finger guns. “Told you I could do it, completely legally that too.”

Jimin shook his head, standing up and walking around his desk. “I wouldn’t hold my breath.” He moved to stand behind Taehyung’s shoulder. “Do you have an address?”

“Yes, I do. An IP address that I traced to a private computer room on the campus of this university,” he scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

“A kid did this?” I asked, utterly confused. “What would a university student want with me?”

Jimin shrugs. “Probably an overconfident computer science major with far too much time on his hands.” I looked down at the university address. It didn’t look familiar. “Come on,” Jimin says grabbing his keys from his desk. “We can take my car.”

It didn’t take long to find and interrogate the kid that uploaded the video. One look at Jimin’s badge and he flaked completely snitched on the what he and his friends had done. The model in the video had paid them to film something short of her with her boyfriend posing as me. We were both around the same height and build, and with enough grain in the video as well as an article that clearly stated my name, it wasn’t hard to blow the interest up with the hoax. I didn’t have any memory of it because we’d gone out for drinks and I passed out.

The Spanish model I had never heard of in my life, her boyfriend, however, was a rapper that I used to work with when I was signed to my old label. Apparently once Yoongi, Hoseok, and I had left, the entire label had collapsed. He didn’t like being left in the dust.

“You seriously don’t want to place charges?” Jimin asked me incredibly, “after all they made you go through?”

“No, they’re kids,” I say, looking over to where the three kids were sitting together, handcuffed. “They look like they’re about to themselves, all I want is the video taken down and replaced with an apology.”

Jimin still doesn’t look convinced but he turns around and swaggers up to them. Barely ten seconds into their conversation I can see them nodding their heads. Jimin grabs one of them by the scruff of his shirt and leads him over to a desk with one of Taehyung’s many laptops.

“Do it now,” he ordered sternly. The kid didn’t have to be told twice.

Some of the pressure had lifted off my chest. I hadn’t done it, I hadn’t slept with another woman. I hadn’t crossed that line. But what about all those months that I’d treated her like she wasn’t the most important thing in my life, all those months that I had been more devoted to my dreams and making money that she wanted to go back to when we were barely making it. What about all the nights she’d spent alone in our apartment, curled up in an empty bed. The missed holidays, her birthday, our anniversary?

I stared at the front door to our apartment. This had been the first time in my life that I’d never hesitated to enter a room with Yoomi in it. My fingers stalled on the keypad before typing out her birthday.

“Jungkook you know that I needed that update three days ago.” I can hear patient voice as I step inside and find her sitting on the kitchen countertop with her back to me. Her laptop is open in front of her with a smartphone pressed to her ear. Papers are spread out front everywhere, pen littered around her with several fabric samples.

“I know that you’ve been working hard, that’s why I extended the deadline. But that was a week ago. I’ll give you until the end of the night.” She pauses to let them speak. “I’m not messing around, when I check the website tonight I better see the update.”

I shut the door quietly behind me.

“Alright, bye.” She pulls the phone away from her ear and sets it down on the counter, her hands already moving to the keyboard of