robot rock
robot rock
bts, gen
pg, 7400w
the crew of the cypher head to polluted planet earth in search of a big bounty, and wind up with more trouble than they bargained for.
--written for bisteu for nugu_seyo 2014.
ao3 mirror
It starts as a normal day on the Cypher, with the three of them in the main living space: Namjoon on the computer keeping one eye on the all-planet police bulletins and the other on a side-scrolling RPG, Hoseok attempting to do handstand pushups and mostly failing, and Yoongi lying on the couch with the latest issue of Big Ammo, a gun magazine which Namjoon suspects is actually hiding a pin-up magazine he picked up on their last stop on Mars. “Hey, listen to this. Yoongi hyung, stop looking at porn and listen.” Hoseok tumbles to the ground and into a sitting position and Yoongi ignores Namjoon, calmly flipping a page. “Hacker known as V, real name unknown, wanted for six counts of theft and three counts of embezzlement. Reward is... eighty thousand units?”
“Eighty thousand?” Hoseok echoes.
Yoongi puts his magazine down on his chest, his brow furrowed. “Wait, who is this guy? That bounty is not normal.”
Namjoon’s already opened up the all-planet criminal database and is typing into the keyboard attached to his screen. It only takes a few seconds before the entry for V comes up, six counts of theft and three counts of embezzlement, complete with a mugshot of a scrawny guy with an exaggerated frown. “Terrible picture, but there you go.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Yoongi says. “Find him, bag him, take him to the nearest APP. Boom.”
Namjoon switches back to the bulletin. “Last seen on... Earth, southwestern hemisphere,” he says. “Huh. That’s a new one.”
“Earth?” Hoseok makes a face. “Pass.”
“Uh, are you crazy?” Yoongi lifts his head up to look at Hoseok, but otherwise doesn’t move. “I’d go to Pluto for eighty thousand right now.” He picks up his magazine again. “Hell, I’d go to Pluto for eight thousand, the way things are going lately.”
“Earth is gross,” says Hoseok. He rolls onto his back and sticks his legs in the air, bending them into different shapes and trying to keep his balance. “No one goes there. It’s all polluted and it smells like garbage. That’s why everybody left. And everyone who didn’t leave is weird.”
“Like you’ve ever been to Earth.”
“Like you have!”
Yoongi lowers his magazine to roll his eyes to Namjoon as if to say, Stop him. Namjoon folds the screen closed and stands up. “Let’s just focus on the one weird person who’s worth eighty thousand,” he says.
“Earth,” says Yoongi, still reading but putting one arm up in the air. “Two to one.”
“Fine.” Hoseok plants his hands on the floor and bends his elbows back, then crab walks toward Yoongi before he collapses again in front of the couch. “Why don’t these guys ever pick nice places to hide out on? Like Venus, or-”
“Io, yeah, we know, we know. Try going to Ganymede one day. Now that’s beautiful.”
Hoseok reaches up and pulls at Yoongi’s magazine. “No thanks, I’ll stick with the one that isn’t crawling with rats. Hey, this isn’t guns-”
“That’s not for you, you’re too young!”
Grinning, Namjoon slips out towards the Cypher’s control room to set a course for Earth. The fuel gauge looks low as usual, but they’re not that far out, and once they land this bounty, they could even afford to fill the tank on Venus, or visit Yoongi and Hoseok’s home colonies. The thought of 80 thousand units in their collective pocket is exciting-ridiculous, even-but he also feels a weird twinge at the idea of going back to Earth. Truthfully, he hasn’t seen it in almost seven years, nor has he heard from any of his old friends since he left. Not all of his memories are bad, but he hadn’t planned on ever going back. For all he knows, Hoseok could be right: everything he knows there could be gone by now.
---
Jungkook wakes up to Jimin shaking him. “Get up, get up!” It takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the light and read the time.
“It’s too early,” he says, as Jimin moves on to Taehyung, crouching over him.
“There’s a ship on the radar.” Jimin shakes Taehyung and Taehyung growls and rolls over violently. “Taetae, get up! There’s a ship!”
Jungkook rolls off his mattress and looks out the window. The sky does seem like it’s a different colour today, maybe a little more red than usual. He turns around and for the first time he notices the regular beeping noises coming from the old radar scanner in the corner of their room. “It’ll be here in twenty minutes,” he tells Jimin, reading the output. He’d hooked up the scanner a week ago, once Taehyung had put his plan into effect, but he hadn’t expected it to actually do anything. Taehyung had made plans before that didn’t work at all.
They scrape together a cereal breakfast and Taehyung eats inside, still half-asleep, while Jimin and Jungkook watch the ship come in to land. “I’ve never seen a ship so close,” says Jimin in awe. His voice is muffled through his dust scarf.
“It’s not a ship, it’s a spaceplane,” says Jungkook. He shields his eyes from the sun with his hand. “Looks like five hundred metres out.” It’s actually exactly 497.13 metres away from where he and Jimin are standing, but lately it makes him feel uncomfortable that he can tell that right away.
It’s a small plane, personal-pilot size, probably a racer. It once had black and white stripes painted on it, and the edges are scuffed and scratched now. It raises a huge cloud of dust when it scrapes into the ground on landing. “You don’t recognize it, huh? It’s so beat up. Who even drives that?” Jimin asks, adjusting his binoculars.
Jungkook squints, adjusting his vision. Through the dust he can see two guys getting out of the plane, dressed in a jumble of dark clothes, more stylish than functional. “Bounty hunters?”
“Whoa, it worked!” Jimin’s face is mostly hidden by the bandana tied around at his nose, but his eyes are broad and smiling as he bounces up and down. “Can you believe it? Some people really will do anything for money.”
Jungkook watches the bounty hunters talk to each other. The shorter one hacks in the cloud of dust before he puts a mask on over his mouth, and then they start heading towards him and Jimin, watching trackers in their hands. “Shit, they’re coming this way.” At their pace, it will take them around 6 minutes to reach the house. “Shit, shit, shit. What do we do, we just run?”
Jimin laughs nervously. “I guess so.”
It had seemed super easy when they’d made the plan with Taehyung, but now that it’s actually happening, Jungkook feels like everything is going to go wrong. Running will take them four minutes, but Jungkook could do it even faster if he doesn’t bother waiting for Jimin, which is tempting right now so he can just get this over with. If only he could start moving.
“Okay. Let’s do this.” Jimin looks at him, and Jungkook suddenly hopes he’s not going to do anything mushy like try to hold his hand or something, because they don’t have time for that. But instead he leans forward and starts to move at a slow gallop, and then he breaks out into a full-speed run. Jungkook takes a breath, then starts running after him. He’s fast, but Jimin is fast too, faster than he’d expected.
They pass the two bounty hunters who are still heading toward the house. By the time they turn around to see what just passed them, Jungkook’s already booting up the plane, with Jimin in the backseat and the canopy sealed. “Too slow,” he mutters under his breath while his brain and his fingers find the right sequence of buttons on their own. He can hear the bounty hunters yelling outside. “Too slow, too slow.”
Suddenly the engine roars, and they’re off the ground, like something’s lifting the plane from above. “So long,” Jungkook says, looking down at the two bounty hunters on the ground, and Jimin laughs behind him. Then the plane tilts sharply onto its left side and starts spiralling, and they both scream.
“I thought you knew how to fly this,” Jimin shrieks, scraping blindly at Jungkook’s shoulder.
“I did too,” Jungkook screams back. He pulls at the steering wheel in the opposite direction and the plane rights itself, and he pulls back and tries to point it at the sky, away from Earth, out to where he knows Mars is. “Okay, I think I got it,” he says. He knows that he doesn’t. Something in the engine is grinding and it’s hard for him to keep a steady grip on the steering-it wants to keep swinging out of his control.
“Hold on.” Jimin leans over and reaches over Jungkook, his fingers fumbling over the control panel.
“What are you doing? Don’t-”
Jimin stabs at a switch on the dashboard, and suddenly the grinding stops and the wheel releases all tension in his hands. The plane holds steady, taking them further and further away from the ground, until they burst through the last layer of atmosphere and there’s suddenly silence around them. Jungkook lifts his hands from the steering wheel and nothing changes.
“Wow,” he says, not bothering to hide his shock, “you actually did it.”
“I’m not a genius like you, but I know some stuff,” Jimin replies, not bothering to hide his pride, either. “Didn’t you ever read up on bounty hunters? All of their planes have preprogrammed ride control. It’s like law.”
“Bounty hunters don’t have laws, stupid.” But Jungkook feels relieved when he slumps back in his seat. “Ride control. So is that like autopilot? It just keeps going wherever we point it?”
“I guess so,” says Jimin. “You’re the one who’s supposed to know this stuff, not me. Next stop Mars, right?” He turns his head to look out the window, and then he flinches away from it. “Oh, geez, that’s really high up.”
Jungkook looks up. They’re surrounded by the winking lights of stars, the same as looking at them from Earth but without the filter of hazy air and distance. Between the stars is not sky; between the stars there is nothing, emptiness, like what the plane is taking them through now. “It’s pretty,” Jungkook says.
There’s a few moments of silence, drifting in space, and then Jimin says, “I think I’m gonna throw up.”
Jungkook reaches back blindly and pats where he thinks Jimin’s shoulder is, which turns out to be his face. “You’re gonna be fine.” He returns his hands to the wheel. It’s still not moving very much, but it looks like they’re heading in the right direction. “Hey, at least you’re out here with me and not back on Earth with-”
---
“V,” Yoongi repeats, keeping his gun squarely pointed at the kid-Taehyung, he’d introduced himself brightly, aka V-and his hand on his throat. “Your name is also V.”
“Yep!” Taehyung-aka-also-V’s unfailing smile and squiggly, loose arm movements in Yoongi’s grip would make Namjoon feel sorry for him, if he weren’t so freaking annoyed right now.
“And you’re not the V that’s worth eighty thousand units in bounty. You’re just a fucking dumbass kid who gave a false lead to the APP, so that your buddies could steal our plane and leave us stranded here on Earth.”
“Yep!”
Yoongi stares at him for a moment, then lets go and puts his gun back in its shoulder holster. “Eh, I knew that bounty was too good to be true.”
Taehyung rubs at his throat, then springs up again. Namjoon can’t believe he smiles so much; it makes him want to smile too, despite everything else. “Seriously? You’re not going to kill me?”
Yoongi whirls around. “You want me to?”
Taehyung puts up his hands and giggles nervously. “Just kidding.”
“Don’t worry, he’s not gonna do it,” Namjoon says. Yoongi grunts. “But you gotta understand. Not finding a bounty? This shit is average to us. I’d say one in every five times this happens. Now, stealing our only way to get back home, that’s unacceptable.”
“It’s not stealing,” Taehyung says. “They’re just gonna go to Mars and come back when they’re done with it.”
“Go to...” Namjoon starts laughing; he can’t help it. Yoongi sighs and flops down on one of the rickety chairs at the table. “How long have you been living on Earth?”
“A long time?”
“Your friends aren’t going to make it to Mars.” Taehyung’s mouth drops open a little and his eyebrows lower, as if he doesn’t quite understand the language Namjoon’s speaking. “The plane, it doesn’t have enough fuel for that trip. Only enough to make it to Earth, to catch the person who we thought you were gonna be, and then back to our big ship which is docked in orbit.”
“Don’t tell him about the big ship,” Yoongi mutters, his eyes closed.
Namjoon shrugs at Taehyung. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. You didn’t just fuck us over, you fucked yourselves over too.”
Taehyung slumps and looks down at his feet. He’s silent for long enough that Namjoon feels bad, but just as he’s about to say the first comforting thing that pops into his head Taehyung straightens again. “I can get you a ship.”
“Bullshit,” says Yoongi. “What are you gonna do, lure some other sucker here to catch you and give us theirs?”
“No, no! There’s this a guy, he told me I could talk to him if I ever needed anything. Well, he said it on a poster in town.” Taehyung grabs a keyboard from seemingly out of nowhere and starts typing rapidly, clacking the keys so loudly that it almost seems like he’s just faking it. “Anything includes a spaceship, right?”
Namjoon scratches his head and looks at Yoongi. “Hyung?” Yoongi raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t say anything. Namjoon sighs. “Well, what choice do we have, I guess.”
“Cool, cool!” Taehyung chuckles deeply and finishes typing with a flourish of keystrokes. “Okay, we’re meeting him in...thirty minutes in town, we gotta go.”
“Two things,” says Yoongi, pointing directly at Taehyung. “One, you go unarmed. Two, no stupid hacker shit.”
“Got it,” Taehyung chirps. Yoongi rolls his eyes at Namjoon, and Namjoon shrugs. Then something hits him in the stomach, and he nearly drops it while trying to get it in his hands. It’s a blue helmet with the letters JI MIN scratched into the back. Taehyung throws a red one at Yoongi, who catches it calmly with both hands. “Are you ready to meet my baby Kkanji?”
Kkanji is a red Daytona motorbike, the kind that Namjoon hasn’t seen since he left Earth. He’d wanted one, and tried to save enough money for one, before it became possible for him to go into space instead. Taehyung jumps on the bike right away with no helmet on, just a pair of goggles and a dust scarf, and Namjoon recognizes this style right away. Taehyung had probably wanted his bike for a while, too. “Bounty hunters, meet Kkanji. Kkanji, meet... Uh...”
“It’s Namjoon,” Namjoon says, holding out a hand, “and this guy is Yoongi.” Yoongi whirls and scowls at him.
“Nice to meet you!” Taehyung revs the engine and grins at them both with his eyes, like the expression he’d had before when Yoongi was holding him down. He’s trying not to be scared, Namjoon realizes. With a smile, he gets on the bike behind Taehyung, and Yoongi squats on the back, gun in hand, muttering to himself. “Here we go! Ready?” Taehyung steps on the gas, and Yoongi nearly falls off the bike and into a thick plume of orange dust until Namjoon grabs his arm.
“Who the hell taught you how to ride this thing?” Yoongi screams through his helmet over the roar of the engine.
“I taught myself!” says Taehyung. Yoongi’s response is unintelligible but sounds horrified, but Namjoon is thrilled. He’s home.
---
According to the plane’s odometer, they’re 13,526 kilometres out from Earth when there’s a sudden bump underneath them, and then a tiny clicking sound in the cockpit, on and off every few seconds. “I think that’s the fuel light,” says Jimin, gesturing to the dashboard from his curled-up position in the backseat. Jungkook looks down and sees a blinking yellow bulb.
“Great,” he says. “What do you do when there’s no more gas?”
Jimin snorts. “Find a gas station, dummy.”
“I thought we could do that once we got to Mars.” Jungkook groans and punches at a few buttons on the control panel, hoping to make the light turn off, but the ease his fingers had before is gone. “Shit.”
There’s silence in the cockpit for a few moments, except for the dull, slow clicking of the fuel light. “Do you think we could turn around?” asks Jimin. “There’s like ten gas stations near our house.”
Jungkook shakes his head, his jaw tight. “No. We won’t make it back if we turn around. And there are not ten gas stations near our house.”
“We’re not even gonna make it there.” Jimin sighs, and it’s quiet for another few seconds, before he says, “We should’ve done Plan A. Taetae was totally ready to build that satellite.”
“This was Plan A. And I didn’t want them to come pick me up, I wanted to surprise them. Bam! Kick down the door and shit. Badass.” Jungkook slumps back in his seat, arms crossed, and stares at the blinking fuel light. It had been so perfect in his head. The first part had worked. Why was it failing now?
“Hey, we can still do that,” Jimin says. “Look, isn’t that a gas station up there?”
Right in front of them, among all the dead satellites and space debris, there’s something moving. It’s a ship-not a plane, but a real ship with engine hulls and everything, painted in black and red. “Have you not ever seen a gas station?” Jungkook scoffs. “That’s a ship. D-class raider. It’ll just pass us by.”
“Uh, it’s heading straight for us,” says Jimin. “Really fast.”
“Shit.” Jungkook’s fingers scramble over the dashboard as the ship grows bigger and bigger in their windshield. “Why is it doing that?”
“I don’t know, but it’s freaking me out.”
Jungkook huffs. He needs to unlock the wheel of the ship. He tries toggling the switch Jimin had turned on earlier, but there’s only a shallow clicking when he does, like it’s broken off whatever it was attached to. “Preprogrammed ride control,” he says to Jimin. “You mean preprogrammed as in the route we take is preprogrammed?”
“Maybe?” Jimin replies, his voice rising. “I already told you I don’t know any of this stuff. You’re the mechanical genius.”
“You flipped the switch!” The ship is getting closer, and their plane is still pointed directly at it. “Shit.”
“Jungkook,” Jimin says, “I’m sorry. I really didn’t know what it was gonna do when I flipped it. And I’m sorry I took us out here without Taetae. He would’ve known what to do.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Jungkook says. His mind won’t stop racing through possible exit scenarios, and the stream of data is making him dizzy. “I took an extra piece of meat last week when you weren’t looking. No, that’s not what I meant. Oh my God.”
As the ship draws closer, almost crashing into them now, Jungkook can see a door sliding open along the port side. “Oh my God,” he says again. The two of them sit rigid with fear as the plane slides smoothly into the open door, then bangs around as it comes in for a landing inside the ship and the door seals closed behind them. Then it’s silent.
“Are we being taken hostage?” Jimin whispers. The idea makes Jungkook’s spine go cold, but he shakes his head.
“No, dumbass,” he says. “This is the ship where the plane came from.” Something clicks in his head. “Hey.”
The lights in the ship’s docking bay all flicker on at once, and Jungkook’s vision temporarily darkens and then adjusts to the dim light. It’s just big enough for the plane. “Come on,” Jungkook says, and he pops the canopy open and hops out of the plane, landing on the metal floor.
Jimin gets up more slowly before he jumps out too. “Why are we getting out?” he asks Jungkook.
Before Jungkook can respond, the door to the ship slides open. “That was fast,” says the person who comes in. His lanky torso sticks out of his jumpsuit around his waist, and he has the thick accent of one of the moon colonies. “So, now that we’re rich-” He freezes, seeing Jungkook and Jimin there under the lights. “Uh...”
Jimin glances to Jungkook, his eyes blank. Jungkook sticks out his chin. “Hi,” he says, and his voice comes out squeakier than he wants it to. He clears his throat. “We need to get to Mars, and we need your help.”
The man stays frozen for a moment, and then his lips move. “Fffuck that,” he spits. “What did you do with my friends?”
“They’re on Earth with one of our friends. Don’t worry, he’s keeping them safe. We’ll bring them back, but first we need you to-”
“Jungkook!” squeaks Jimin, and Jungkook looks up mid-sentence to see the man leaping at him. Without thinking, he grabs his arms and throws him to the ground with a bang so loud it echoes around the room. Then he squats down and expertly folds up the man’s arms behind his back in a few seconds.
“Take us to Mars,” he barks.
The man grunts. “And why should I?” he says, lowering one eyebrow even as he grimaces under Jungkook’s grip. “Just because you’re really...weirdly...strong?”
“I’m a robot,” says Jungkook, “and I will kill you if you don’t. And I’m not kidding.” Jimin gulps on one side of the room. Jungkook ignores him. “So, are you gonna do it?”
---
The Daytona pulls up to a market, behind a restaurant, and out of habit Namjoon hops off just before the bike has fully stopped, even though he stumbles and nearly falls onto his hands and knees in the dirt. It’s been a while. Yoongi gets off more carefully, taking off his helmet and setting it on the back of the bike. Even through his dust scarf, Namjoon can smell the market, spicy peppers and the whiff of rotting fish, and he flings his arms out to stretch as he inhales so deeply his eyes squint shut.
“Hoseok was right, this planet reeks,” Yoongi says. He claps Namjoon on the back gently. “Feel good to be back?”
Namjoon lets out his breath and slowly releases his arms to his sides. He chuckles sheepishly. “I didn’t think I missed it this much. Oh, and remind me to tell Hoseok you said he was right about something.”
“Okay, see ya!” says Taehyung, revving the engine.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Namjoon yells. The red Daytona takes off into the market, raising a cloud of dust under the awnings.
“Motherfucker!” Yoongi takes off in a sprint. “Come on!” he yells over his shoulder at Namjoon, and Namjoon scrambles to follow.
They turn the corner sharply and they can still hear the bike rumbling through the market, crashing as it goes. “Should we split up?” Namjoon says, struggling to keep up his volume through the dust mask. It’s too hot to be running like this.
Yoongi skids to a halt in front of a stall where a man is getting off of his scooter. “Sorry,” he says to the man, pushing him out of the way to get on the scooter. The man stumbles into Namjoon and their heads collide, knocking them both to the ground. “Shit. Hey, Namjoon. I’ll bring him back here, okay? Hang tight.”
“Oww,” says the man, rubbing his head. He looks up to see Yoongi and his scooter disappear around a corner. “Hey!” He gets up to his feet but can’t get upright, as he fumbles with one hand in his jacket. “Stop! Police! I’ll...” He whirls around and with his free hand he grabs Namjoon, who’s staring at his face, wide-eyed. “All-Planet Police, I’m arresting you for property theft. I gotta get another bike and...” He trails off, meeting Namjoon’s stare.
“Jin?” says Namjoon.
Jin’s eyes widen above his dust mask. “Oh my God.”
Namjoon breaks out in a grin. “Jin! Remember me? Namjoon.” He reaches out to shake his hand or hug him but his wrist twists in Jin’s grip and he winces and laughs awkwardly, trying not to show how sharp the pain is. “That’s the grip they taught us in the academy, right? You’ve kept it up.”
Jin looks down and then drops Namjoon’s wrist like he’s touched something hot. “Oh my God. You disappeared, like, a week before graduation. Nobody knew where you went.”
Namjoon stands slowly, rubbing the feeling back into his wrist. “Yeah, I left you a note, maybe you didn’t get it. It’s cool.” He looks Jin up and down. He doesn’t look like an APP officer, wearing a plain black jacket and ill-fitting jeans like he used to on their days off at the academy. “You, uh, on duty right now?”
Jin scrunches up his face. “It’s complicated. Uh, classified, I mean. You know how it is.” He nods firmly.
“So you’re undercover.”
“I didn’t say anything!” Jin glares at him. “And what about you? People were saying all kinds of weird stuff, like you went to be a cattle rancher on Phobos. Why are you back?”
“The ranches on Phobos are beautiful,” says Namjoon. “But nah. I got into bounty hunting, actually.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “So we’re on the same side, still.”
“Kind of.” Jin sighs, looking down the street. “I still have to arrest your friend though. Damn, he’s probably long gone. I need a bike. It was nice talking to you, but...”
Namjoon cocks his head. “Hold on,” he says. “Just wait a sec, okay? Trust me.” Jin frowns, but stays where he is, arms crossed over his chest. “Wait for it.” They both wait, and then the distant rumble of an engine catches Namjoon’s ear, and he grins. “There it is. You hear that?”
Yoongi roars back into view from the same direction he’d left, throwing up a cloud of dust. He’s riding Jin’s scooter and he’s holding firmly onto Taehyung by his shirt, even as he hops off the scooter. Taehyung is groaning at Yoongi. “You killed Kkanji,” he’s saying, his voice so thick and full of tears it’s almost comical, “you killed my baby, you terrible person.”
“Sorry about that,” Yoongi says to Jin, ignoring Taehyung. “I need you to do me one more favour, though.”
“I don’t think so,” Jin says, his voice impressively tougher than when he’d been talking to Namjoon, and he advances toward Yoongi, pulling out a pair of handcuffs. “I don’t do deals with criminals. And you-”
“Oh,” says Taehyung, suddenly straightening, and he points to Jin. “See, I told you I’d lead you to the guy with the plane.” Jin freezes, and his eyes flicker from Taehyung to Yoongi and back again. A delighted smirk forms on Yoongi’s face.
Jin scowls, and he closes one of the handcuffs around Taehyung’s wrist, then the other around Yoongi’s.
They go to the nearest restaurant and all fold into a booth, with Namjoon and Jin across from each other and Yoongi and Taehyung keeping their handcuffed wrists out on top of the table. The restaurant’s owner, an old woman with fleshy hands and a gun visible behind the counter, approaches the table cautiously. “It’s okay, ma’am,” Jin says, with a big smile. “It’s just for their own good.” Namjoon smiles too, partly for her benefit and partly because he’s impressed by Jin. The alarmed look doesn’t go out of her eyes, but she brings them orange milk tea, and Jin orders food for everyone. “It’s this place’s specialty,” he says, clapping the menu shut. “It’s a really rare wood mushroom rice soup.”
“I don’t care,” Yoongi grumbles, twisting away as Taehyung leans across the table.
“I can’t believe that you’re back,” Jin says to Namjoon. “No one comes back once they go out into space.”
“We had the right motivation,” Namjoon responds, his eyes sliding to Taehyung as he carefully gnaws on the handcuffs, “even if it ended up being total bullshit. But nothing’s changed much. I’m surprised there aren’t more bounties hiding out here.”
“Ugh, it’s just impossible to keep track. A lot of GPS and satellites don’t work because of the dust, and the local registries are a huge mess. Some of them leave after a few days because they don’t like the weather, but we can’t catch them.” Jin shakes his head. “That’s why we have to resort to things like this to draw them out.”
Namjoon sips his tea, then puts it down, smacking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He’d remembered the murky, sour taste, but it’s so much sharper in real life than in his memories. “It’s not what you wanted to do in the academy.”
“I wanted to go out into space.” Jin stares out of the window up at the sky, at the sun beating down white-hot through the clouds of dust. “But it takes like ten years to get an external assignment. So, I’m waiting, I guess.”
Namjoon pushes his teacup around the table. Next to him, Yoongi knocks back his tea in one shot and a grimace, so Namjoon passes him his own. “You know, nothing’s keeping you here.”
Jin laughs. “I have a job.”
“Yeah, but you have a dream.” Namjoon looks out the window too. Somewhere in the sky is the Cypher, orbiting slowly, waiting for them to come back. “I mean, you know what I’m gonna say. If you have a dream you should take it.” He smiles at Jin. “Just look at me.”
“Taken in by a false lead with your spaceplane stolen?”
“Hey, no need to be rude.” Namjoon leans forward. “So, uh, were you really going to get us another plane, or was that just a trick?”
“It was a trick,” Jin admits. “But I do know where to get one.” He looks down at his teacup. “I’d just need a few hours.”
Namjoon raises his eyebrows. “Seriously? That’d be really cool.” Then he looks around. “We’ll keep it quiet, of course.”
Jin smiles. “I don’t know. I don’t trust that one.” He points to Taehyung, who looks back at him blankly.
“Well, you know, if you get in trouble, you could always come back with us.” The owner comes to their table carrying a stack of bowls in one hand and a heavy black pot full of porridge in the other, and sets them all on the table with a crash before skulking away. “Seriously, consider it, man.”
Jin starts spooning the rice porridge into bowls and passing them around the table. “I’ll see what I can do about the plane.”
Yoongi peers into his bowl. “This has sticks in it.”
“Oh, you gotta eat those,” Taehyung says, looking up from his bowl with his mouth full. “The sticks are the best part.”
---
Hoseok is sitting at the control board of the ship and programming the navigational computer, while Jimin keeps watch and Jungkook paces back and forth behind them. (Of course Jimin had asked for the guy’s name as soon as Jungkook had let him stand, like they were going to be friends or something.) Jimin keeps looking at Jungkook, opening his mouth and taking a loud breath like he’s going to say something and then shutting it again. He does this a few times, inhaling and then shutting his mouth, until it finally gets too annoying to ignore. Jungkook stops pacing. “What,” he says.
“What?” Jimin answers.
“Stop doing that thing,” Jungkook hisses. “You’re freaking me out.”
“Uh, you’re freaking me out too,” says Jimin. He glances at Hoseok, who’s frowning at his navigation computer, and then drops his voice to a whisper. “This isn’t like you, man. All the death threats and stuff.”
Jungkook turns away. “You knew what I was like already.”
“I knew you were a robot or whatever. I didn’t know you were cool with killing people.”
“Here,” Hoseok says, and he turns and eyes Jungkook warily. “I need you to show me where it is you want to go.”
Jungkook scoffs at Jimin, like Hoseok wouldn’t be so stupidly cautious if Jimin hadn’t said anything, and walks over. He examines the computer’s interface, and then pushes Hoseok. “Move over.”
“This computer’s probably older than you are,” Hoseok says, but he gets up out of the chair anyway.
Jungkook hunches over the controls and talks to the computer with his hands. That’s the best way he can describe it. He can type about as fast as Taehyung can, but he’s also always accurate where Taehyung is not. The sounds of the clicking keys and switches echoes around the room for a few beats.
“What were you doing on Earth, anyway?” Hoseok says, leaning on the back of the chair to look over Jungkook’s shoulder. “I’ve never met a robot before, but I don’t think they belong there.”
“That’s right, they don’t,” Jungkook says.
“Of course, I’ve never been to Earth either. I heard it’s a dump, but you guys seem okay.” He pauses. “I mean, besides the part where you left my friends stranded and threatened to kill me.”
“We’ll go get them after this,” Jimin says, but there’s a whine of anxiety in his voice. “Right?”
“Yeah.” Jungkook enters the coordinates and then waits, hands still hovering over the controls, as the computer processes his request. He can practically see the building of Big Hit in his mind, square and grey, flashes of the blue-lit corridors.
The computer squawks. LOCATION NOT FOUND.
“That’s not good,” Hoseok says.
“Quiet,” says Jungkook. He enters the coordinates of the building again, trying to keep the picture in his head as if the computer will not just listen to his keystrokes but his thoughts, like it will recognize their kinship. It squawks again. LOCATION NOT FOUND.
“What are you looking for?” Hoseok asks. He looks at Jimin, who shrugs. “Where are we going? I thought you said Mars.”
“It is on Mars,” Jungkook replies, gritting his teeth as he punches in the same coordinates. “Where I came from. Where...” LOCATION NOT FOUND. He growls and slams one hand on the control panel, then leans his elbows on it with his head in his hands.
“Hey, hey, be gentle with that.” Hoseok’s voice is soothing now, and a little bit annoyed. Jungkook’s eyes well up with tears, which he scrunches up his face to hold in. “What’s up?”
“Jungkook?” Jimin’s at his side now, his hand hovering over Jungkook’s shoulder, like he wants to put it down but isn’t sure.
Jungkook shudders. “Don’t touch me,” he says, but Jimin puts his hand down anyway and draws him in. “I’ll-” He sniffs. “I could still hurt you, you know.”
“No offense, but I stopped believing that a while ago.” Hoseok crouches next to them. “What was it, like your old house or something?”
“No, stupid,” Jungkook says, but it sounds silly now. He coughs and continues. “It’s where I grew up but it’s not a house. I’m not... I’m not a robot. They were going to make me into one but they could only do so many things before it stopped working. So they sent me to Earth and started again with someone else.”
“Oh my God,” says Hoseok. Jimin pats Jungkook’s arm, and Jungkook feels too watery to make him stop.
“I wanted to go back, to show them... I don’t know. I just wanted to go back.” He wipes snot on his sleeve, still hiding his face. “It sounds stupid now.”
“Why go back to people who left you behind when there are people who like you? That’s home.” Hoseok looks down. “It’s why I’m on this ship.”
They’re quiet for a few moments, except for Jungkook’s sniffling. “I’m sorry about your friends,” Jimin says.
“What? Oh, they’ll be fine.” Hoseok stands up, wiping at his eyes. “Namjoon is from Earth. He probably knows every pile of garbage that’s there.”
“Do you think the whole planet is made of garbage or something?” asks Jungkook. He moves over in his seat as Hoseok approaches and lets him take the controls. Jimin’s arm is still around him, but it feels less annoying now.
“Well, I’m from the most beautiful place in the galaxy, so I know it can’t compare to it at all. You ever been to Io?” Both Jungkook and Jimin shake their heads. “Oh, man. Let me tell you all about it.”
He talks, and Jimin answers, but Jungkook isn’t really listening. He’s thinking about Jimin and Taehyung. Maybe he really could be at home anywhere, as long as it was with them.
---
The three of them, Namjoon, Yoongi, and Taehyung, meet Jin a few hours later at a set of coordinates that doesn’t make sense to either Namjoon or Yoongi, but which Taehyung knows immediately. Taehyung insists they take Kkanji there, after Jin had helped them rescue its dented, slightly smoking body from an alleyway in the market. “Runs just fine,” Taehyung said, listening to the engine wheeze, and Yoongi and Namjoon had exchanged a look, but got on the back anyway.
When they get there, Namjoon’s surprised by the size of the plane Jin’s standing with. It’s not huge, and it’s definitely not new, but it’s a sturdier make from the Cypher’s ancient racing unit. It seems like the right kind of plane for Jin, Namjoon thinks. Even Yoongi leans over Kkanji’s backrest and shouts to Namjoon, “Not bad.”
“Better than you expected?”
Yoongi tilts his head. “It’s kind of dorky, but as long as it gets us back to the ship, it’s fine.”
They park a little roughly, and Namjoon hops off the bike and gives Jin a one-armed hug. “Thanks again,” he says. “I don’t know if we can pay you right now, but we can definitely forward you payment within the next month.”
Jin takes a breath. “Actually,” he says, “I was wondering if I could come with you.”
“Well, well.” Namjoon can’t stop the wide grin spreading on his face. “Don’t you need another three years to get your space license or whatever?”
“I quit,” Jin says bluntly. “You were right. I can’t just stay here and wait for someone to tell me when to go. I need to make my own decision..”
“Didn’t he tell you you should go?” Yoongi asks, jerking a thumb from Namjoon to Jin. Jin frowns at him.
“Well, I’m cool with having you aboard.” Namjoon turns to Yoongi. “What do you say?”
Yoongi looks Jin up and down. “Do you cook?”
Jin draws himself up. “I’m a great cook.”
“Great. Done. Earth food is nasty, but I’d rather eat sticks for a year than anything Hoseok cooks again.”
Namjoon shakes Jin’s hand, and Jin looks a bit surprised but shakes right back. “Welcome aboard.”
Taehyung comes running over from where Kkanji’s stopped, goggles askew. “Me too,” he says, coming to stop between Yoongi and Namjoon. “Take me on your big ship too. I can’t cook but I can do other stuff. I can be useful. I can help you track down bad guys. I can massage your feet. Whatever.”
Namjoon raises an eyebrow. “You sure you don’t just want to keep hanging out with us?”
Taehyung grins, ducking his head. “It is fun.”
“All right,” says Yoongi. Namjoon’s head whips around to stare at him, and Yoongi shrugs. “What? If you get to take in a stray, I get one too. Plus, foot massages.”
“Does this plane even have enough room for everybody?” Namjoon walks up to it and peers into the cockpit. Jin comes around and opens it up and the canopy swinging open nearly hits Namjoon in the face, making him stumble backwards.
Yoongi swiftly climbs up into the front seat, stretching out. “Let’s find out.” Taehyung climbs in next to him and Yoongi shoves him over. “No, you sit in the back.”
Jin has a few bags, so Namjoon helps him lift them into the plane. “If this weighs us down, then we gotta chuck ‘em,” he warns Jin. But Jin isn’t listening. He’s looking around at the desert around them, as if he needs to memorize every grain of sand. “Hey, Jin.”
“Huh?” Jin looks up, dazed. “Sorry, I just...”
“It’s okay,” says Namjoon. “We’ll come back here again. Not everybody who leaves has to stay away.” He claps Jin on the shoulder. “But there’s a lot of space to see first.”
The plane takes off surprisingly well considering the combined weight. Jin and Taehyung are in the back, and they’re turned around the whole time the plane goes up, watching their planet get smaller and smaller under them. Namjoon thinks about doing the same, but knows that he shouldn’t. He doesn’t have to, anyway. He’d meant what he’d said to Jin-they would be back.
When they’re far enough out, he adjusts the radio until he gets the Cypher’s frequency. “Hoseok,” he says. “Sorry, but we didn’t catch that guy. Turned out to be a fake lead. We did get a new plane, though, to replace the old one.”
“I have good news for you,” Hoseok replies. “The old plane came right back into the ship.” Namjoon and Yoongi turn to look at each other. “I’m sending you our orbit coordinates, see you soon. I gotta clear some space.”
Hoseok is waiting in the docking bay when their plane pulls in, standing on the stairs to the inside of the Cypher with his hands on his hips and his jumpsuit rolled down around his waist as usual. Namjoon feels a surge of relief, even though the plane is too big for the docking space. “We’ll figure this out later,” he says to Yoongi, who’s looking out the window with a horrified expression on his face. “There’s no way this ship was only ever able to hold one plane at a time.”
Once the plane is fully stopped and the docking bay door is secure, the four of them hop out of the plane. “Oh yeah, did I forget to mention? We picked up some travellers, too,” Namjoon says. “Hoseok, this is Jin, we went to police school together.”
“Then Namjoon dropped out to be a cattle farmer,” Jin says confidently, shaking Hoseok’s hand.
“And this is Taehyung, who we thought was the hacker V, but turned out to be a dud.”
“‘Dud’ is a good nickname,” Yoongi agrees.
Namjoon had expected Taehyung to jump all over Hoseok, but instead he approaches him calmly, almost shy. “Hi.”
Hoseok smiles at him, then at Namjoon. “Well, I’m glad you like people, because you’ll never guess how that plane got here!”
Yoongi groans. “Oh, please, no.”
“Come on in!” Hoseok opens the door to the Cypher and leads all of them in to the main living space, where two kids are draped over the furniture. “This is Jimin and Jungkook. It was nice that they returned our plane!” The two kids perk up immediately when they see Taehyung, and Taehyung rushes past Hoseok and jumps on them.
“This is way too many people, guys, come on,” pleads Yoongi. “How are we supposed to feed everybody?”
“Like I said, I’m a great cook,” says Jin.
Yoongi gives Namjoon a look that says, This is all your fault. Namjoon shrugs.
“All right,” he says, looking around at the six people now on board the ship, who all stop to listen to him. “Where to next?”
bts, gen
pg, 7400w
the crew of the cypher head to polluted planet earth in search of a big bounty, and wind up with more trouble than they bargained for.
--written for bisteu for nugu_seyo 2014.
ao3 mirror
It starts as a normal day on the Cypher, with the three of them in the main living space: Namjoon on the computer keeping one eye on the all-planet police bulletins and the other on a side-scrolling RPG, Hoseok attempting to do handstand pushups and mostly failing, and Yoongi lying on the couch with the latest issue of Big Ammo, a gun magazine which Namjoon suspects is actually hiding a pin-up magazine he picked up on their last stop on Mars. “Hey, listen to this. Yoongi hyung, stop looking at porn and listen.” Hoseok tumbles to the ground and into a sitting position and Yoongi ignores Namjoon, calmly flipping a page. “Hacker known as V, real name unknown, wanted for six counts of theft and three counts of embezzlement. Reward is... eighty thousand units?”
“Eighty thousand?” Hoseok echoes.
Yoongi puts his magazine down on his chest, his brow furrowed. “Wait, who is this guy? That bounty is not normal.”
Namjoon’s already opened up the all-planet criminal database and is typing into the keyboard attached to his screen. It only takes a few seconds before the entry for V comes up, six counts of theft and three counts of embezzlement, complete with a mugshot of a scrawny guy with an exaggerated frown. “Terrible picture, but there you go.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Yoongi says. “Find him, bag him, take him to the nearest APP. Boom.”
Namjoon switches back to the bulletin. “Last seen on... Earth, southwestern hemisphere,” he says. “Huh. That’s a new one.”
“Earth?” Hoseok makes a face. “Pass.”
“Uh, are you crazy?” Yoongi lifts his head up to look at Hoseok, but otherwise doesn’t move. “I’d go to Pluto for eighty thousand right now.” He picks up his magazine again. “Hell, I’d go to Pluto for eight thousand, the way things are going lately.”
“Earth is gross,” says Hoseok. He rolls onto his back and sticks his legs in the air, bending them into different shapes and trying to keep his balance. “No one goes there. It’s all polluted and it smells like garbage. That’s why everybody left. And everyone who didn’t leave is weird.”
“Like you’ve ever been to Earth.”
“Like you have!”
Yoongi lowers his magazine to roll his eyes to Namjoon as if to say, Stop him. Namjoon folds the screen closed and stands up. “Let’s just focus on the one weird person who’s worth eighty thousand,” he says.
“Earth,” says Yoongi, still reading but putting one arm up in the air. “Two to one.”
“Fine.” Hoseok plants his hands on the floor and bends his elbows back, then crab walks toward Yoongi before he collapses again in front of the couch. “Why don’t these guys ever pick nice places to hide out on? Like Venus, or-”
“Io, yeah, we know, we know. Try going to Ganymede one day. Now that’s beautiful.”
Hoseok reaches up and pulls at Yoongi’s magazine. “No thanks, I’ll stick with the one that isn’t crawling with rats. Hey, this isn’t guns-”
“That’s not for you, you’re too young!”
Grinning, Namjoon slips out towards the Cypher’s control room to set a course for Earth. The fuel gauge looks low as usual, but they’re not that far out, and once they land this bounty, they could even afford to fill the tank on Venus, or visit Yoongi and Hoseok’s home colonies. The thought of 80 thousand units in their collective pocket is exciting-ridiculous, even-but he also feels a weird twinge at the idea of going back to Earth. Truthfully, he hasn’t seen it in almost seven years, nor has he heard from any of his old friends since he left. Not all of his memories are bad, but he hadn’t planned on ever going back. For all he knows, Hoseok could be right: everything he knows there could be gone by now.
---
Jungkook wakes up to Jimin shaking him. “Get up, get up!” It takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the light and read the time.
“It’s too early,” he says, as Jimin moves on to Taehyung, crouching over him.
“There’s a ship on the radar.” Jimin shakes Taehyung and Taehyung growls and rolls over violently. “Taetae, get up! There’s a ship!”
Jungkook rolls off his mattress and looks out the window. The sky does seem like it’s a different colour today, maybe a little more red than usual. He turns around and for the first time he notices the regular beeping noises coming from the old radar scanner in the corner of their room. “It’ll be here in twenty minutes,” he tells Jimin, reading the output. He’d hooked up the scanner a week ago, once Taehyung had put his plan into effect, but he hadn’t expected it to actually do anything. Taehyung had made plans before that didn’t work at all.
They scrape together a cereal breakfast and Taehyung eats inside, still half-asleep, while Jimin and Jungkook watch the ship come in to land. “I’ve never seen a ship so close,” says Jimin in awe. His voice is muffled through his dust scarf.
“It’s not a ship, it’s a spaceplane,” says Jungkook. He shields his eyes from the sun with his hand. “Looks like five hundred metres out.” It’s actually exactly 497.13 metres away from where he and Jimin are standing, but lately it makes him feel uncomfortable that he can tell that right away.
It’s a small plane, personal-pilot size, probably a racer. It once had black and white stripes painted on it, and the edges are scuffed and scratched now. It raises a huge cloud of dust when it scrapes into the ground on landing. “You don’t recognize it, huh? It’s so beat up. Who even drives that?” Jimin asks, adjusting his binoculars.
Jungkook squints, adjusting his vision. Through the dust he can see two guys getting out of the plane, dressed in a jumble of dark clothes, more stylish than functional. “Bounty hunters?”
“Whoa, it worked!” Jimin’s face is mostly hidden by the bandana tied around at his nose, but his eyes are broad and smiling as he bounces up and down. “Can you believe it? Some people really will do anything for money.”
Jungkook watches the bounty hunters talk to each other. The shorter one hacks in the cloud of dust before he puts a mask on over his mouth, and then they start heading towards him and Jimin, watching trackers in their hands. “Shit, they’re coming this way.” At their pace, it will take them around 6 minutes to reach the house. “Shit, shit, shit. What do we do, we just run?”
Jimin laughs nervously. “I guess so.”
It had seemed super easy when they’d made the plan with Taehyung, but now that it’s actually happening, Jungkook feels like everything is going to go wrong. Running will take them four minutes, but Jungkook could do it even faster if he doesn’t bother waiting for Jimin, which is tempting right now so he can just get this over with. If only he could start moving.
“Okay. Let’s do this.” Jimin looks at him, and Jungkook suddenly hopes he’s not going to do anything mushy like try to hold his hand or something, because they don’t have time for that. But instead he leans forward and starts to move at a slow gallop, and then he breaks out into a full-speed run. Jungkook takes a breath, then starts running after him. He’s fast, but Jimin is fast too, faster than he’d expected.
They pass the two bounty hunters who are still heading toward the house. By the time they turn around to see what just passed them, Jungkook’s already booting up the plane, with Jimin in the backseat and the canopy sealed. “Too slow,” he mutters under his breath while his brain and his fingers find the right sequence of buttons on their own. He can hear the bounty hunters yelling outside. “Too slow, too slow.”
Suddenly the engine roars, and they’re off the ground, like something’s lifting the plane from above. “So long,” Jungkook says, looking down at the two bounty hunters on the ground, and Jimin laughs behind him. Then the plane tilts sharply onto its left side and starts spiralling, and they both scream.
“I thought you knew how to fly this,” Jimin shrieks, scraping blindly at Jungkook’s shoulder.
“I did too,” Jungkook screams back. He pulls at the steering wheel in the opposite direction and the plane rights itself, and he pulls back and tries to point it at the sky, away from Earth, out to where he knows Mars is. “Okay, I think I got it,” he says. He knows that he doesn’t. Something in the engine is grinding and it’s hard for him to keep a steady grip on the steering-it wants to keep swinging out of his control.
“Hold on.” Jimin leans over and reaches over Jungkook, his fingers fumbling over the control panel.
“What are you doing? Don’t-”
Jimin stabs at a switch on the dashboard, and suddenly the grinding stops and the wheel releases all tension in his hands. The plane holds steady, taking them further and further away from the ground, until they burst through the last layer of atmosphere and there’s suddenly silence around them. Jungkook lifts his hands from the steering wheel and nothing changes.
“Wow,” he says, not bothering to hide his shock, “you actually did it.”
“I’m not a genius like you, but I know some stuff,” Jimin replies, not bothering to hide his pride, either. “Didn’t you ever read up on bounty hunters? All of their planes have preprogrammed ride control. It’s like law.”
“Bounty hunters don’t have laws, stupid.” But Jungkook feels relieved when he slumps back in his seat. “Ride control. So is that like autopilot? It just keeps going wherever we point it?”
“I guess so,” says Jimin. “You’re the one who’s supposed to know this stuff, not me. Next stop Mars, right?” He turns his head to look out the window, and then he flinches away from it. “Oh, geez, that’s really high up.”
Jungkook looks up. They’re surrounded by the winking lights of stars, the same as looking at them from Earth but without the filter of hazy air and distance. Between the stars is not sky; between the stars there is nothing, emptiness, like what the plane is taking them through now. “It’s pretty,” Jungkook says.
There’s a few moments of silence, drifting in space, and then Jimin says, “I think I’m gonna throw up.”
Jungkook reaches back blindly and pats where he thinks Jimin’s shoulder is, which turns out to be his face. “You’re gonna be fine.” He returns his hands to the wheel. It’s still not moving very much, but it looks like they’re heading in the right direction. “Hey, at least you’re out here with me and not back on Earth with-”
---
“V,” Yoongi repeats, keeping his gun squarely pointed at the kid-Taehyung, he’d introduced himself brightly, aka V-and his hand on his throat. “Your name is also V.”
“Yep!” Taehyung-aka-also-V’s unfailing smile and squiggly, loose arm movements in Yoongi’s grip would make Namjoon feel sorry for him, if he weren’t so freaking annoyed right now.
“And you’re not the V that’s worth eighty thousand units in bounty. You’re just a fucking dumbass kid who gave a false lead to the APP, so that your buddies could steal our plane and leave us stranded here on Earth.”
“Yep!”
Yoongi stares at him for a moment, then lets go and puts his gun back in its shoulder holster. “Eh, I knew that bounty was too good to be true.”
Taehyung rubs at his throat, then springs up again. Namjoon can’t believe he smiles so much; it makes him want to smile too, despite everything else. “Seriously? You’re not going to kill me?”
Yoongi whirls around. “You want me to?”
Taehyung puts up his hands and giggles nervously. “Just kidding.”
“Don’t worry, he’s not gonna do it,” Namjoon says. Yoongi grunts. “But you gotta understand. Not finding a bounty? This shit is average to us. I’d say one in every five times this happens. Now, stealing our only way to get back home, that’s unacceptable.”
“It’s not stealing,” Taehyung says. “They’re just gonna go to Mars and come back when they’re done with it.”
“Go to...” Namjoon starts laughing; he can’t help it. Yoongi sighs and flops down on one of the rickety chairs at the table. “How long have you been living on Earth?”
“A long time?”
“Your friends aren’t going to make it to Mars.” Taehyung’s mouth drops open a little and his eyebrows lower, as if he doesn’t quite understand the language Namjoon’s speaking. “The plane, it doesn’t have enough fuel for that trip. Only enough to make it to Earth, to catch the person who we thought you were gonna be, and then back to our big ship which is docked in orbit.”
“Don’t tell him about the big ship,” Yoongi mutters, his eyes closed.
Namjoon shrugs at Taehyung. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. You didn’t just fuck us over, you fucked yourselves over too.”
Taehyung slumps and looks down at his feet. He’s silent for long enough that Namjoon feels bad, but just as he’s about to say the first comforting thing that pops into his head Taehyung straightens again. “I can get you a ship.”
“Bullshit,” says Yoongi. “What are you gonna do, lure some other sucker here to catch you and give us theirs?”
“No, no! There’s this a guy, he told me I could talk to him if I ever needed anything. Well, he said it on a poster in town.” Taehyung grabs a keyboard from seemingly out of nowhere and starts typing rapidly, clacking the keys so loudly that it almost seems like he’s just faking it. “Anything includes a spaceship, right?”
Namjoon scratches his head and looks at Yoongi. “Hyung?” Yoongi raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t say anything. Namjoon sighs. “Well, what choice do we have, I guess.”
“Cool, cool!” Taehyung chuckles deeply and finishes typing with a flourish of keystrokes. “Okay, we’re meeting him in...thirty minutes in town, we gotta go.”
“Two things,” says Yoongi, pointing directly at Taehyung. “One, you go unarmed. Two, no stupid hacker shit.”
“Got it,” Taehyung chirps. Yoongi rolls his eyes at Namjoon, and Namjoon shrugs. Then something hits him in the stomach, and he nearly drops it while trying to get it in his hands. It’s a blue helmet with the letters JI MIN scratched into the back. Taehyung throws a red one at Yoongi, who catches it calmly with both hands. “Are you ready to meet my baby Kkanji?”
Kkanji is a red Daytona motorbike, the kind that Namjoon hasn’t seen since he left Earth. He’d wanted one, and tried to save enough money for one, before it became possible for him to go into space instead. Taehyung jumps on the bike right away with no helmet on, just a pair of goggles and a dust scarf, and Namjoon recognizes this style right away. Taehyung had probably wanted his bike for a while, too. “Bounty hunters, meet Kkanji. Kkanji, meet... Uh...”
“It’s Namjoon,” Namjoon says, holding out a hand, “and this guy is Yoongi.” Yoongi whirls and scowls at him.
“Nice to meet you!” Taehyung revs the engine and grins at them both with his eyes, like the expression he’d had before when Yoongi was holding him down. He’s trying not to be scared, Namjoon realizes. With a smile, he gets on the bike behind Taehyung, and Yoongi squats on the back, gun in hand, muttering to himself. “Here we go! Ready?” Taehyung steps on the gas, and Yoongi nearly falls off the bike and into a thick plume of orange dust until Namjoon grabs his arm.
“Who the hell taught you how to ride this thing?” Yoongi screams through his helmet over the roar of the engine.
“I taught myself!” says Taehyung. Yoongi’s response is unintelligible but sounds horrified, but Namjoon is thrilled. He’s home.
---
According to the plane’s odometer, they’re 13,526 kilometres out from Earth when there’s a sudden bump underneath them, and then a tiny clicking sound in the cockpit, on and off every few seconds. “I think that’s the fuel light,” says Jimin, gesturing to the dashboard from his curled-up position in the backseat. Jungkook looks down and sees a blinking yellow bulb.
“Great,” he says. “What do you do when there’s no more gas?”
Jimin snorts. “Find a gas station, dummy.”
“I thought we could do that once we got to Mars.” Jungkook groans and punches at a few buttons on the control panel, hoping to make the light turn off, but the ease his fingers had before is gone. “Shit.”
There’s silence in the cockpit for a few moments, except for the dull, slow clicking of the fuel light. “Do you think we could turn around?” asks Jimin. “There’s like ten gas stations near our house.”
Jungkook shakes his head, his jaw tight. “No. We won’t make it back if we turn around. And there are not ten gas stations near our house.”
“We’re not even gonna make it there.” Jimin sighs, and it’s quiet for another few seconds, before he says, “We should’ve done Plan A. Taetae was totally ready to build that satellite.”
“This was Plan A. And I didn’t want them to come pick me up, I wanted to surprise them. Bam! Kick down the door and shit. Badass.” Jungkook slumps back in his seat, arms crossed, and stares at the blinking fuel light. It had been so perfect in his head. The first part had worked. Why was it failing now?
“Hey, we can still do that,” Jimin says. “Look, isn’t that a gas station up there?”
Right in front of them, among all the dead satellites and space debris, there’s something moving. It’s a ship-not a plane, but a real ship with engine hulls and everything, painted in black and red. “Have you not ever seen a gas station?” Jungkook scoffs. “That’s a ship. D-class raider. It’ll just pass us by.”
“Uh, it’s heading straight for us,” says Jimin. “Really fast.”
“Shit.” Jungkook’s fingers scramble over the dashboard as the ship grows bigger and bigger in their windshield. “Why is it doing that?”
“I don’t know, but it’s freaking me out.”
Jungkook huffs. He needs to unlock the wheel of the ship. He tries toggling the switch Jimin had turned on earlier, but there’s only a shallow clicking when he does, like it’s broken off whatever it was attached to. “Preprogrammed ride control,” he says to Jimin. “You mean preprogrammed as in the route we take is preprogrammed?”
“Maybe?” Jimin replies, his voice rising. “I already told you I don’t know any of this stuff. You’re the mechanical genius.”
“You flipped the switch!” The ship is getting closer, and their plane is still pointed directly at it. “Shit.”
“Jungkook,” Jimin says, “I’m sorry. I really didn’t know what it was gonna do when I flipped it. And I’m sorry I took us out here without Taetae. He would’ve known what to do.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Jungkook says. His mind won’t stop racing through possible exit scenarios, and the stream of data is making him dizzy. “I took an extra piece of meat last week when you weren’t looking. No, that’s not what I meant. Oh my God.”
As the ship draws closer, almost crashing into them now, Jungkook can see a door sliding open along the port side. “Oh my God,” he says again. The two of them sit rigid with fear as the plane slides smoothly into the open door, then bangs around as it comes in for a landing inside the ship and the door seals closed behind them. Then it’s silent.
“Are we being taken hostage?” Jimin whispers. The idea makes Jungkook’s spine go cold, but he shakes his head.
“No, dumbass,” he says. “This is the ship where the plane came from.” Something clicks in his head. “Hey.”
The lights in the ship’s docking bay all flicker on at once, and Jungkook’s vision temporarily darkens and then adjusts to the dim light. It’s just big enough for the plane. “Come on,” Jungkook says, and he pops the canopy open and hops out of the plane, landing on the metal floor.
Jimin gets up more slowly before he jumps out too. “Why are we getting out?” he asks Jungkook.
Before Jungkook can respond, the door to the ship slides open. “That was fast,” says the person who comes in. His lanky torso sticks out of his jumpsuit around his waist, and he has the thick accent of one of the moon colonies. “So, now that we’re rich-” He freezes, seeing Jungkook and Jimin there under the lights. “Uh...”
Jimin glances to Jungkook, his eyes blank. Jungkook sticks out his chin. “Hi,” he says, and his voice comes out squeakier than he wants it to. He clears his throat. “We need to get to Mars, and we need your help.”
The man stays frozen for a moment, and then his lips move. “Fffuck that,” he spits. “What did you do with my friends?”
“They’re on Earth with one of our friends. Don’t worry, he’s keeping them safe. We’ll bring them back, but first we need you to-”
“Jungkook!” squeaks Jimin, and Jungkook looks up mid-sentence to see the man leaping at him. Without thinking, he grabs his arms and throws him to the ground with a bang so loud it echoes around the room. Then he squats down and expertly folds up the man’s arms behind his back in a few seconds.
“Take us to Mars,” he barks.
The man grunts. “And why should I?” he says, lowering one eyebrow even as he grimaces under Jungkook’s grip. “Just because you’re really...weirdly...strong?”
“I’m a robot,” says Jungkook, “and I will kill you if you don’t. And I’m not kidding.” Jimin gulps on one side of the room. Jungkook ignores him. “So, are you gonna do it?”
---
The Daytona pulls up to a market, behind a restaurant, and out of habit Namjoon hops off just before the bike has fully stopped, even though he stumbles and nearly falls onto his hands and knees in the dirt. It’s been a while. Yoongi gets off more carefully, taking off his helmet and setting it on the back of the bike. Even through his dust scarf, Namjoon can smell the market, spicy peppers and the whiff of rotting fish, and he flings his arms out to stretch as he inhales so deeply his eyes squint shut.
“Hoseok was right, this planet reeks,” Yoongi says. He claps Namjoon on the back gently. “Feel good to be back?”
Namjoon lets out his breath and slowly releases his arms to his sides. He chuckles sheepishly. “I didn’t think I missed it this much. Oh, and remind me to tell Hoseok you said he was right about something.”
“Okay, see ya!” says Taehyung, revving the engine.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Namjoon yells. The red Daytona takes off into the market, raising a cloud of dust under the awnings.
“Motherfucker!” Yoongi takes off in a sprint. “Come on!” he yells over his shoulder at Namjoon, and Namjoon scrambles to follow.
They turn the corner sharply and they can still hear the bike rumbling through the market, crashing as it goes. “Should we split up?” Namjoon says, struggling to keep up his volume through the dust mask. It’s too hot to be running like this.
Yoongi skids to a halt in front of a stall where a man is getting off of his scooter. “Sorry,” he says to the man, pushing him out of the way to get on the scooter. The man stumbles into Namjoon and their heads collide, knocking them both to the ground. “Shit. Hey, Namjoon. I’ll bring him back here, okay? Hang tight.”
“Oww,” says the man, rubbing his head. He looks up to see Yoongi and his scooter disappear around a corner. “Hey!” He gets up to his feet but can’t get upright, as he fumbles with one hand in his jacket. “Stop! Police! I’ll...” He whirls around and with his free hand he grabs Namjoon, who’s staring at his face, wide-eyed. “All-Planet Police, I’m arresting you for property theft. I gotta get another bike and...” He trails off, meeting Namjoon’s stare.
“Jin?” says Namjoon.
Jin’s eyes widen above his dust mask. “Oh my God.”
Namjoon breaks out in a grin. “Jin! Remember me? Namjoon.” He reaches out to shake his hand or hug him but his wrist twists in Jin’s grip and he winces and laughs awkwardly, trying not to show how sharp the pain is. “That’s the grip they taught us in the academy, right? You’ve kept it up.”
Jin looks down and then drops Namjoon’s wrist like he’s touched something hot. “Oh my God. You disappeared, like, a week before graduation. Nobody knew where you went.”
Namjoon stands slowly, rubbing the feeling back into his wrist. “Yeah, I left you a note, maybe you didn’t get it. It’s cool.” He looks Jin up and down. He doesn’t look like an APP officer, wearing a plain black jacket and ill-fitting jeans like he used to on their days off at the academy. “You, uh, on duty right now?”
Jin scrunches up his face. “It’s complicated. Uh, classified, I mean. You know how it is.” He nods firmly.
“So you’re undercover.”
“I didn’t say anything!” Jin glares at him. “And what about you? People were saying all kinds of weird stuff, like you went to be a cattle rancher on Phobos. Why are you back?”
“The ranches on Phobos are beautiful,” says Namjoon. “But nah. I got into bounty hunting, actually.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “So we’re on the same side, still.”
“Kind of.” Jin sighs, looking down the street. “I still have to arrest your friend though. Damn, he’s probably long gone. I need a bike. It was nice talking to you, but...”
Namjoon cocks his head. “Hold on,” he says. “Just wait a sec, okay? Trust me.” Jin frowns, but stays where he is, arms crossed over his chest. “Wait for it.” They both wait, and then the distant rumble of an engine catches Namjoon’s ear, and he grins. “There it is. You hear that?”
Yoongi roars back into view from the same direction he’d left, throwing up a cloud of dust. He’s riding Jin’s scooter and he’s holding firmly onto Taehyung by his shirt, even as he hops off the scooter. Taehyung is groaning at Yoongi. “You killed Kkanji,” he’s saying, his voice so thick and full of tears it’s almost comical, “you killed my baby, you terrible person.”
“Sorry about that,” Yoongi says to Jin, ignoring Taehyung. “I need you to do me one more favour, though.”
“I don’t think so,” Jin says, his voice impressively tougher than when he’d been talking to Namjoon, and he advances toward Yoongi, pulling out a pair of handcuffs. “I don’t do deals with criminals. And you-”
“Oh,” says Taehyung, suddenly straightening, and he points to Jin. “See, I told you I’d lead you to the guy with the plane.” Jin freezes, and his eyes flicker from Taehyung to Yoongi and back again. A delighted smirk forms on Yoongi’s face.
Jin scowls, and he closes one of the handcuffs around Taehyung’s wrist, then the other around Yoongi’s.
They go to the nearest restaurant and all fold into a booth, with Namjoon and Jin across from each other and Yoongi and Taehyung keeping their handcuffed wrists out on top of the table. The restaurant’s owner, an old woman with fleshy hands and a gun visible behind the counter, approaches the table cautiously. “It’s okay, ma’am,” Jin says, with a big smile. “It’s just for their own good.” Namjoon smiles too, partly for her benefit and partly because he’s impressed by Jin. The alarmed look doesn’t go out of her eyes, but she brings them orange milk tea, and Jin orders food for everyone. “It’s this place’s specialty,” he says, clapping the menu shut. “It’s a really rare wood mushroom rice soup.”
“I don’t care,” Yoongi grumbles, twisting away as Taehyung leans across the table.
“I can’t believe that you’re back,” Jin says to Namjoon. “No one comes back once they go out into space.”
“We had the right motivation,” Namjoon responds, his eyes sliding to Taehyung as he carefully gnaws on the handcuffs, “even if it ended up being total bullshit. But nothing’s changed much. I’m surprised there aren’t more bounties hiding out here.”
“Ugh, it’s just impossible to keep track. A lot of GPS and satellites don’t work because of the dust, and the local registries are a huge mess. Some of them leave after a few days because they don’t like the weather, but we can’t catch them.” Jin shakes his head. “That’s why we have to resort to things like this to draw them out.”
Namjoon sips his tea, then puts it down, smacking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He’d remembered the murky, sour taste, but it’s so much sharper in real life than in his memories. “It’s not what you wanted to do in the academy.”
“I wanted to go out into space.” Jin stares out of the window up at the sky, at the sun beating down white-hot through the clouds of dust. “But it takes like ten years to get an external assignment. So, I’m waiting, I guess.”
Namjoon pushes his teacup around the table. Next to him, Yoongi knocks back his tea in one shot and a grimace, so Namjoon passes him his own. “You know, nothing’s keeping you here.”
Jin laughs. “I have a job.”
“Yeah, but you have a dream.” Namjoon looks out the window too. Somewhere in the sky is the Cypher, orbiting slowly, waiting for them to come back. “I mean, you know what I’m gonna say. If you have a dream you should take it.” He smiles at Jin. “Just look at me.”
“Taken in by a false lead with your spaceplane stolen?”
“Hey, no need to be rude.” Namjoon leans forward. “So, uh, were you really going to get us another plane, or was that just a trick?”
“It was a trick,” Jin admits. “But I do know where to get one.” He looks down at his teacup. “I’d just need a few hours.”
Namjoon raises his eyebrows. “Seriously? That’d be really cool.” Then he looks around. “We’ll keep it quiet, of course.”
Jin smiles. “I don’t know. I don’t trust that one.” He points to Taehyung, who looks back at him blankly.
“Well, you know, if you get in trouble, you could always come back with us.” The owner comes to their table carrying a stack of bowls in one hand and a heavy black pot full of porridge in the other, and sets them all on the table with a crash before skulking away. “Seriously, consider it, man.”
Jin starts spooning the rice porridge into bowls and passing them around the table. “I’ll see what I can do about the plane.”
Yoongi peers into his bowl. “This has sticks in it.”
“Oh, you gotta eat those,” Taehyung says, looking up from his bowl with his mouth full. “The sticks are the best part.”
---
Hoseok is sitting at the control board of the ship and programming the navigational computer, while Jimin keeps watch and Jungkook paces back and forth behind them. (Of course Jimin had asked for the guy’s name as soon as Jungkook had let him stand, like they were going to be friends or something.) Jimin keeps looking at Jungkook, opening his mouth and taking a loud breath like he’s going to say something and then shutting it again. He does this a few times, inhaling and then shutting his mouth, until it finally gets too annoying to ignore. Jungkook stops pacing. “What,” he says.
“What?” Jimin answers.
“Stop doing that thing,” Jungkook hisses. “You’re freaking me out.”
“Uh, you’re freaking me out too,” says Jimin. He glances at Hoseok, who’s frowning at his navigation computer, and then drops his voice to a whisper. “This isn’t like you, man. All the death threats and stuff.”
Jungkook turns away. “You knew what I was like already.”
“I knew you were a robot or whatever. I didn’t know you were cool with killing people.”
“Here,” Hoseok says, and he turns and eyes Jungkook warily. “I need you to show me where it is you want to go.”
Jungkook scoffs at Jimin, like Hoseok wouldn’t be so stupidly cautious if Jimin hadn’t said anything, and walks over. He examines the computer’s interface, and then pushes Hoseok. “Move over.”
“This computer’s probably older than you are,” Hoseok says, but he gets up out of the chair anyway.
Jungkook hunches over the controls and talks to the computer with his hands. That’s the best way he can describe it. He can type about as fast as Taehyung can, but he’s also always accurate where Taehyung is not. The sounds of the clicking keys and switches echoes around the room for a few beats.
“What were you doing on Earth, anyway?” Hoseok says, leaning on the back of the chair to look over Jungkook’s shoulder. “I’ve never met a robot before, but I don’t think they belong there.”
“That’s right, they don’t,” Jungkook says.
“Of course, I’ve never been to Earth either. I heard it’s a dump, but you guys seem okay.” He pauses. “I mean, besides the part where you left my friends stranded and threatened to kill me.”
“We’ll go get them after this,” Jimin says, but there’s a whine of anxiety in his voice. “Right?”
“Yeah.” Jungkook enters the coordinates and then waits, hands still hovering over the controls, as the computer processes his request. He can practically see the building of Big Hit in his mind, square and grey, flashes of the blue-lit corridors.
The computer squawks. LOCATION NOT FOUND.
“That’s not good,” Hoseok says.
“Quiet,” says Jungkook. He enters the coordinates of the building again, trying to keep the picture in his head as if the computer will not just listen to his keystrokes but his thoughts, like it will recognize their kinship. It squawks again. LOCATION NOT FOUND.
“What are you looking for?” Hoseok asks. He looks at Jimin, who shrugs. “Where are we going? I thought you said Mars.”
“It is on Mars,” Jungkook replies, gritting his teeth as he punches in the same coordinates. “Where I came from. Where...” LOCATION NOT FOUND. He growls and slams one hand on the control panel, then leans his elbows on it with his head in his hands.
“Hey, hey, be gentle with that.” Hoseok’s voice is soothing now, and a little bit annoyed. Jungkook’s eyes well up with tears, which he scrunches up his face to hold in. “What’s up?”
“Jungkook?” Jimin’s at his side now, his hand hovering over Jungkook’s shoulder, like he wants to put it down but isn’t sure.
Jungkook shudders. “Don’t touch me,” he says, but Jimin puts his hand down anyway and draws him in. “I’ll-” He sniffs. “I could still hurt you, you know.”
“No offense, but I stopped believing that a while ago.” Hoseok crouches next to them. “What was it, like your old house or something?”
“No, stupid,” Jungkook says, but it sounds silly now. He coughs and continues. “It’s where I grew up but it’s not a house. I’m not... I’m not a robot. They were going to make me into one but they could only do so many things before it stopped working. So they sent me to Earth and started again with someone else.”
“Oh my God,” says Hoseok. Jimin pats Jungkook’s arm, and Jungkook feels too watery to make him stop.
“I wanted to go back, to show them... I don’t know. I just wanted to go back.” He wipes snot on his sleeve, still hiding his face. “It sounds stupid now.”
“Why go back to people who left you behind when there are people who like you? That’s home.” Hoseok looks down. “It’s why I’m on this ship.”
They’re quiet for a few moments, except for Jungkook’s sniffling. “I’m sorry about your friends,” Jimin says.
“What? Oh, they’ll be fine.” Hoseok stands up, wiping at his eyes. “Namjoon is from Earth. He probably knows every pile of garbage that’s there.”
“Do you think the whole planet is made of garbage or something?” asks Jungkook. He moves over in his seat as Hoseok approaches and lets him take the controls. Jimin’s arm is still around him, but it feels less annoying now.
“Well, I’m from the most beautiful place in the galaxy, so I know it can’t compare to it at all. You ever been to Io?” Both Jungkook and Jimin shake their heads. “Oh, man. Let me tell you all about it.”
He talks, and Jimin answers, but Jungkook isn’t really listening. He’s thinking about Jimin and Taehyung. Maybe he really could be at home anywhere, as long as it was with them.
---
The three of them, Namjoon, Yoongi, and Taehyung, meet Jin a few hours later at a set of coordinates that doesn’t make sense to either Namjoon or Yoongi, but which Taehyung knows immediately. Taehyung insists they take Kkanji there, after Jin had helped them rescue its dented, slightly smoking body from an alleyway in the market. “Runs just fine,” Taehyung said, listening to the engine wheeze, and Yoongi and Namjoon had exchanged a look, but got on the back anyway.
When they get there, Namjoon’s surprised by the size of the plane Jin’s standing with. It’s not huge, and it’s definitely not new, but it’s a sturdier make from the Cypher’s ancient racing unit. It seems like the right kind of plane for Jin, Namjoon thinks. Even Yoongi leans over Kkanji’s backrest and shouts to Namjoon, “Not bad.”
“Better than you expected?”
Yoongi tilts his head. “It’s kind of dorky, but as long as it gets us back to the ship, it’s fine.”
They park a little roughly, and Namjoon hops off the bike and gives Jin a one-armed hug. “Thanks again,” he says. “I don’t know if we can pay you right now, but we can definitely forward you payment within the next month.”
Jin takes a breath. “Actually,” he says, “I was wondering if I could come with you.”
“Well, well.” Namjoon can’t stop the wide grin spreading on his face. “Don’t you need another three years to get your space license or whatever?”
“I quit,” Jin says bluntly. “You were right. I can’t just stay here and wait for someone to tell me when to go. I need to make my own decision..”
“Didn’t he tell you you should go?” Yoongi asks, jerking a thumb from Namjoon to Jin. Jin frowns at him.
“Well, I’m cool with having you aboard.” Namjoon turns to Yoongi. “What do you say?”
Yoongi looks Jin up and down. “Do you cook?”
Jin draws himself up. “I’m a great cook.”
“Great. Done. Earth food is nasty, but I’d rather eat sticks for a year than anything Hoseok cooks again.”
Namjoon shakes Jin’s hand, and Jin looks a bit surprised but shakes right back. “Welcome aboard.”
Taehyung comes running over from where Kkanji’s stopped, goggles askew. “Me too,” he says, coming to stop between Yoongi and Namjoon. “Take me on your big ship too. I can’t cook but I can do other stuff. I can be useful. I can help you track down bad guys. I can massage your feet. Whatever.”
Namjoon raises an eyebrow. “You sure you don’t just want to keep hanging out with us?”
Taehyung grins, ducking his head. “It is fun.”
“All right,” says Yoongi. Namjoon’s head whips around to stare at him, and Yoongi shrugs. “What? If you get to take in a stray, I get one too. Plus, foot massages.”
“Does this plane even have enough room for everybody?” Namjoon walks up to it and peers into the cockpit. Jin comes around and opens it up and the canopy swinging open nearly hits Namjoon in the face, making him stumble backwards.
Yoongi swiftly climbs up into the front seat, stretching out. “Let’s find out.” Taehyung climbs in next to him and Yoongi shoves him over. “No, you sit in the back.”
Jin has a few bags, so Namjoon helps him lift them into the plane. “If this weighs us down, then we gotta chuck ‘em,” he warns Jin. But Jin isn’t listening. He’s looking around at the desert around them, as if he needs to memorize every grain of sand. “Hey, Jin.”
“Huh?” Jin looks up, dazed. “Sorry, I just...”
“It’s okay,” says Namjoon. “We’ll come back here again. Not everybody who leaves has to stay away.” He claps Jin on the shoulder. “But there’s a lot of space to see first.”
The plane takes off surprisingly well considering the combined weight. Jin and Taehyung are in the back, and they’re turned around the whole time the plane goes up, watching their planet get smaller and smaller under them. Namjoon thinks about doing the same, but knows that he shouldn’t. He doesn’t have to, anyway. He’d meant what he’d said to Jin-they would be back.
When they’re far enough out, he adjusts the radio until he gets the Cypher’s frequency. “Hoseok,” he says. “Sorry, but we didn’t catch that guy. Turned out to be a fake lead. We did get a new plane, though, to replace the old one.”
“I have good news for you,” Hoseok replies. “The old plane came right back into the ship.” Namjoon and Yoongi turn to look at each other. “I’m sending you our orbit coordinates, see you soon. I gotta clear some space.”
Hoseok is waiting in the docking bay when their plane pulls in, standing on the stairs to the inside of the Cypher with his hands on his hips and his jumpsuit rolled down around his waist as usual. Namjoon feels a surge of relief, even though the plane is too big for the docking space. “We’ll figure this out later,” he says to Yoongi, who’s looking out the window with a horrified expression on his face. “There’s no way this ship was only ever able to hold one plane at a time.”
Once the plane is fully stopped and the docking bay door is secure, the four of them hop out of the plane. “Oh yeah, did I forget to mention? We picked up some travellers, too,” Namjoon says. “Hoseok, this is Jin, we went to police school together.”
“Then Namjoon dropped out to be a cattle farmer,” Jin says confidently, shaking Hoseok’s hand.
“And this is Taehyung, who we thought was the hacker V, but turned out to be a dud.”
“‘Dud’ is a good nickname,” Yoongi agrees.
Namjoon had expected Taehyung to jump all over Hoseok, but instead he approaches him calmly, almost shy. “Hi.”
Hoseok smiles at him, then at Namjoon. “Well, I’m glad you like people, because you’ll never guess how that plane got here!”
Yoongi groans. “Oh, please, no.”
“Come on in!” Hoseok opens the door to the Cypher and leads all of them in to the main living space, where two kids are draped over the furniture. “This is Jimin and Jungkook. It was nice that they returned our plane!” The two kids perk up immediately when they see Taehyung, and Taehyung rushes past Hoseok and jumps on them.
“This is way too many people, guys, come on,” pleads Yoongi. “How are we supposed to feed everybody?”
“Like I said, I’m a great cook,” says Jin.
Yoongi gives Namjoon a look that says, This is all your fault. Namjoon shrugs.
“All right,” he says, looking around at the six people now on board the ship, who all stop to listen to him. “Where to next?”