The tie around Seokjin's neck suddenly feels like a noose, so he pulls at it and opens it up. Lets the knot unfurl and the tie fall to the table. With that hand he picks up his beer, brings it to his lips and tips as much as he can allow down his throat before he drowns himself in it.

"So," Yoongi sighs as he looks off somewhere in the bar, eyes unfocused but tense. "There's going to be another murder."

Seokjin nods and feels himself lament silently over the rim of his glass of beer. One hand in his hair, fingers running through it like he's trying to relieve some of the stress running around the skin of his scalp, but it doesn't help. His skin is still tight, still suffocating. It doesn't help.

"Your little brother was the one who found the anonymous letter. He showed me, but neither of us could figure it out."

Seokjin just licks his lips and reconstructs the image of the letter Jeongguk had taken a picture of and sent to him in his mind, and he takes another jab at deciphering what it could mean, but nothing comes to mind. Neither he nor Namjoon at the time could decode it, but what did Seokjin expect? The letter that foretold Jang Jaewon's murder was impossible to figure out until after his murder, and only because they knew what to look for. Jang Jaewon's name.

Right now, they don't have a name. The name is what they're trying to figure out so that the murder could be prevented, but Seokjin doesn't even know how to tackle the problem, let alone what the answer could be.

So instead, he pulls his hand down from his scalp and uses it to cradle his chin, to keep his head up. "There's one other thing I haven't mentioned yet," he huffs, and keeps his eyes latched onto the middle of the table even as he realises from the periphery of his vision that Yoongi has raised his head to look up at him. "Just before Jeongguk called me to tell me about the letter, I received a bouquet of flowers. Red spider lilies."

He hears Yoongi shift uncomfortably at that.

"Sorry for your loss, it said," Seokjin continues. "On my first day back to work after my mother's passing."

For a moment, neither of them speak. Seokjin, because there's absolutely no words he could think of that will explain anything that's been happening. Yoongi, because he's trying his damned hardest to help Seokjin with that.

"Seokjin," Yoongi sounds after a moment, and Seokjin looks up to meet Yoongi's serious face. There's a shadow cast over his face from how deeply he's furrowing his brow, but none of it elicits a response from Seokjin. He'd expected it. He's expecting something to hit the fan, and he's pretty sure it's absolute shit. "Do you have any enemies?"

"None that I can tell you the names of," Seokjin replies flatly.

"Does that mean you think you have enemies, you just don't know who?"

Seokjin apathetically shrugs one shoulder. "I'm sure I have enemies. I've sent to jail people who have hid from the law. But my job aside, there will always be people who hate other people. Maybe it's my personality. Maybe it's something I can't explain."

"Can you think of anything that may make someone want to target you?"

Seokjin shakes his head.

"I would tell you to ignore the bouquet," Yoongi sighs, "but don't. Red spider lilies aren't normal flowers you give to a grieving person. Especially to someone leading a case like the ones on our hands."

Seokjin just nods and finishes off his beer before the two of them head out of the bar. He waits with Yoongi until their cabs arrive, and Seokjin climbs into the back, rolling his head back against the headrest. The driver glances at him momentarily through the rear-view mirror and doesn't ask any further questions past Seokjin's destination.

He feels like he's stranded on an island. Immediately after finding the flowers waiting for him on his desk, he'd stormed over to Hanyu's office to look at security footage. Surely enough, there was a man who'd come in to deliver the flowers while Seokjin and Namjoon were out to question the defendant. The man who'd delivered the flowers had nothing to do with the bouquet; he was just the delivery man. But the flowers themselves came from the flower shop Seokjin is well aware of: Floral-Lee.

So he and Namjoon paid a quick visit to the store. While Lee Mirae was being detained, he'd had his brother look after the shop.

But the trip itself was futile. The flowers were purchased with cash, and the only figure to show up on the security tapes was clad entirely in black, completely unrecognisable.

And the anonymous letter sent to the station that Jeongguk and Yoongi worked at may as well have been for naught. The first letter contained a crossword that spelled out the victim's name in English. This new letter that's currently being speculated over by the police doesn't seem quite so straight-forward.

A large empty triangle in the centre. An animated eye at the top corner of the triangle, and down at the first corner on the bottom side of the triangle, the roman numeral for the number two. The final corner points to a straight vertical line.

All Seokjin could understand from the diagram is that there was always meant to be three murders. Why he didn't see it before, Seokjin doesn't know. Why no one else saw it, he doesn't know.

But it was so clear, in hindsight. It was right in front of his eyes! In the bedroom of the first victim, three out of the four walls had little bunches of red spider lilies taped to the walls. In the bedroom of the second victim, two of the walls had the lilies. By that extrapolation, someone should've known there would've been a third murder. There would be a third victim, found in their bedroom, with one of the walls adorned with the flowers.

Or perhaps... perhaps the police did think about that possibility, but had brushed it off because they'd apprehended the killer. Lee Mirae. Arrested him and eliminated the possibility of the third room with just one set of red spider lilies. And the only reason why Seokjin overlooked that circumstance was because he did not believe Lee Mirae was the killer.

Either way, both Seokjin and the police blinded themselves to the prospect of a third victim. He wants to give himself the comfort of knowing that the third murder hasn't happened yet, but how long Seokjin and the police have to prevent it, he doesn't know either.

Ten days transpired between the first and the second murder. Anyone with two braincells to rub together and try to make fire could tell you that the third murder would happen ten days after the second, on January the second. But it's now the eleventh and no third victim. Yet.

Yet.

The triangle with the eye only tells Seokjin one thing: that there was always going to be a third victim, that it was never going to end with just two. He can come up with all the ways in which it tells him that, but what it doesn't do is tell him who the victim will be, and when they'll be murdered.

There are unread messages from Namjoon when he finally lets his head hit his pillow, but his brain feels like it's on fire right now and he can't bear to open his eyes to try and form any kind of response. He'll speak to Namjoon tomorrow.

He falls asleep almost as soon as he lets his eyelids flutter shut, but when darkness falls, the curtains pull back, and a garden of red spider lilies come into full bloom.

Seokjin can not and will not deny the way his mood elevates, even if by a little, amongst the shit and darkness swirling around his head when he grasps the handle on the door to his office, knowing that Namjoon will already be inside, sitting pretty at his desk. Seokjin's only human: he absolutely detests mornings but walking into his office knowing that Namjoon's gonna be inside makes his mornings bearable. But this morning, when he walks into the office, Namjoon isn't here yet.

So he frowns at the empty seat where Namjoon should be, and he sulks all the way to his own seat. Pulls the chair in, hands on top of his desk, and he lets his shoulders sag.

There's so much that Seokjin should know, that Seokjin needs to know, and it aches to reach out desperately for answers like his fingers are scrambling around in the darkness. Nothing makes sense, and there's too many factors that are keeping Seokjin's mind from stopping and calming down.

Not that he believes he should calm down, that's for sure. There's no way he's going to stop thinking. He needs to figure out what that diagram meant, who the next victim will be and when, and who the murderer is if it isn't Lee Mirae. He needs to find out why Namjoon's lifespan has suddenly changed, but more importantly, how to stop it or change it back before Namjoon dies, too.

He stops.

He lifts one butt cheek off his chair so that he can reach efficiently into his pocket to fish out his phone. Unlocks it and quickly opens up his chat with Jeongguk, finds the photo he'd taken of the second anonymous letter, and stares at the diagram, pinching his brows together harshly.

There's the number one, the roman numeral for the number two, and then an eye up at the top. The entire diagram looked like it was drawn in a marker pen with little to no effort because none of the lines look straight or clean. The eye up at the top is just a horizontal ellipse with pointed corners, a circle in the middle of it, and a few short, stubby lines for eyelashes pointing upwards. Seokjin hadn't realised it before because it was just so unspeakably obvious that it was drawn so roughly, but now he sees it. Or rather, he doesn't. Any signs that the eye is a right eye or left eye, that is. There's no pointed medial canthus, no rounded lateral canthus. Seokjin had, at first, disregarded the lack of those details as a fault of the one who drew the eye, but now Seokjin realises it was intentional.

It's not a right eye, nor is it a left eye. It's placed at the upper vertex of the triangle, on its own, in between the numbers down below. It's neither the right eye or the left eye, but the third eye. Third eyes see things that normal eyes don't.

Like lifespans.

The door opens and Namjoon walks in, eyes wide when he notices Seokjin is already here. His lips part, his thick bottom lip nearly stealing Seokjin's attention just before his eyes quickly rush back up to the numbers floating above Namjoon's head. Sixty-six days left until he dies.

"The last time you arrived to work before me was the day of my interview," Namjoon remarks as his expression softens. He looks down and smiles an easy, relaxed smile as he shrugs his coat off and heads over to his desk. "Do you remember what happened that day? I was so sure I would get rejected, straight up."

Seokjin licks his lips and watches, intently, as Namjoon flattens his tie against his chest, re-tucks a little part of his shirt back into his pants with his fingers, and then pulls his chair out. Sits down and smooths his hand over his hair that's always styled perfectly, pushed back like he's some kind of celebrity. "I remember," Seokjin replies lightly and watches, unabashed, as Namjoon turns his computer on. "You were so nervous that you dropped all of your documents on the floor."

Namjoon laughs lightly. "And when I went to pick them up, I banged my head on the edge of your desk. I thought to myself that you'd never want someone like me as your subordinate."

"Well," Seokjin sounds, finally looking away from Namjoon to look back at his own computer. He checks his emails. "I thought to myself that if I took you on, you could bang me on the edge of my desk as hard as you banged your head."

He doesn't look at Namjoon, pointedly, for a second or two before he lets his eyes pan over to where Namjoon is, undoubtedly, about to crumble. He is, understandably, wide-eyed and surprised, but when he meets Seokjin's gaze he chokes, coughs into his fist a few times, and quickly looks back at his screen. Seokjin's lips stretch wide but he tries not to laugh, because his focus drifts from the embarrassment on Namjoon's face to the numbers floating above his head. He sighs, deeply and despairingly.

"Do you have any enemies?" Yoongi had asked him. "Can you think of anything that may make someone want to target you?"

The letters sent to the station where Jeongguk works. The third eye on the triangle. The flowers sent to his office. Seokjin's pretty sure he knows who the next victim will be, but that realisation makes him feel sick to his core. He swallows.

It's going to be Namjoon.

"What's going through your mind, now?" he asks, and Seokjin snaps back into reality, and forces himself to relax the tension growing between his brows. He looks across the room to where Namjoon is watching him, a soft mix of concern and curiosity on his face. "You look pensive all of a sudden."

"I'm thinking about you," Seokjin replies, easy, breezy and light-hearted, or so he wishes. No, he can definitely hear how thin his voice sounds, how strained it feels. Like he's holding his vocal chords between pinched fingers and he's stretching them out, seeing how far he can pull them, and holding them at the point just before they snap. There's so much tension in his voice, tension he can't hide or cover up. Namjoon isn't blind to it either.

"What about me in specific?"

Seokjin licks his lips and takes his gaze away from Namjoon's bright eyes. "The case at hand," he huffs, changing the subject abruptly, "is messing with my head. Ten days transpired between the first and second. How long do you think it'll be before the third?"

"Are you sure there'll be a third?"

Seokjin nods, but whether Namjoon is watching him to see that nod he doesn't know. "Yeah. The triangle. There's the number one, the roman numeral two, and the eye at the top... which is a third eye. One, two, three. The murderer is warning us. And then who knows what'll happen after that one? Maybe there'll be a fourth."

He doesn't hear anything from Namjoon save for some shuffling and shifting, so he glances over and finds him scribbling something down on a piece of paper. He chucks the pen onto the desk and extracts himself from it, striding over to Seokjin's desk. Slaps the page down.

It's a replica of the diagram send anonymously to the police station. Namjoon half-parks his ass on the edge of Seokjin's desk and leans forward to tap his finger on the drawing of the eye. "That's a third eye, for sure. But if we're saying this is the murderer's tally of victims, then you're reading it wrong. It's not one, two, three. It's three, two, one."

Seokjin purses his lips.

"The third eye at the top," Namjoon says as he points to the eye. "The roman numeral two," he points to the symbol on the bottom left side of the triangle, "and the number one. It's a countdown, not a tally. There's only going to be three murders."

Namjoon straightens back up, and Seokjin licks his lips.

"Well, two murders if we can stop the third."

Seokjin looks up at Namjoon, and Namjoon looks down at Seokjin. For just a second, because he quickly looks away from Seokjin's straight and taut expression before he lifts up off the desk.

"We just need to find out... who and when the murderer is planning to kill. I feel like the answer is in the letter like it was in the first one, but... I can't imagine what it could be," Namjoon sighs as he makes his way back to his desk.

Who the murderer will kill, Seokjin knows is Namjoon. When he's planning to kill, Seokjin knows is in exactly sixty-six days. Seokjin licks his lips and keeps them shut, for the love of all that's keeping him going, Seokjin keeps his mouth shut.

"What's going through your mind?" Namjoon asks once more when he's seated, hand flattening his tie against his chest.

"You seem eager to find out," Seokjin's reply is empty and hollow.

"Of course, I am. I would be honoured to know what goes on inside your head."

Seokjin forces himself to smile a little. "What did you say last time...? Pure gold with layers of bullshit guarding it?"

He isn't sure if he's imagining the fine dusting of a blush on Namjoon's cheeks. "Yeah," Namjoon admits, and Seokjin tries to keep his smile on as he returns his focus to his screen. Namjoon is cute, he's too cute for Seokjin to handle, but oh, so wrong. There's layers of bullshit up in that wretched skull of Seokjin's, but that's all there is. Varying layers of bullshit, bullshit of different forms and densities and sizes. The gold that Namjoon speaks of doesn't exist.

His phone starts to ring, and it snaps Seokjin out of his mind. He quickly looks down and away from Namjoon's light blush and to the screen of his phone. It's Yoongi. Seokjin lets a breath whistle through his lips before he accepts the call and presses the phone to his ear.

"Yo. What's up?" he asks just before he watches Namjoon wipe his little smile and blush off his face, return to stoicism and his work. Seokjin licks his lips and turns back to stare aimlessly at his screen.

"Hey. You sound half-dead," Yoongi grunts through the receiver.

Well, Yoongi isn't wrong about that. He is the grim reaper, after all. He chuckles cynically. "Yep. That, I am," he jokes, but when Yoongi laughs in response Seokjin just lets it go.

"Anyway, I was just calling because I haven't stopped thinking about the letter. Lee Mirae's trial has been pushed back to accommodate for it, but we're all pretty much stumped. We've got no clues."

"Yeah, us too," Seokjin admits.

He hears Yoongi sigh. "Anyway, I want you and your subordinate to investigate a little. This afternoon, you can head into the crime scene of the first victim. My team have already investigated it, but I'm hoping you and your subordinate might see something else we might have missed."

Seokjin furrows his brows and purses his lips. "Why would we investigate the f- you know what, sure," he concedes and runs a hand through his hair. "I'll head over there after lunch if that's cool."

"Sure. We need to get to the bottom of this before someone else dies."

"Yeah," he breathes, and bids his farewell to Yoongi before he hangs up. Looks up to tell Namjoon the news and finds Namjoon already looking at him. "So. We're going to investigate the first crime scene this afternoon," he tells Namjoon.

Namjoon just nods slowly. "Alright. Some hands-on experience. Good."

"I'll give you some hands-on experience if you just take your pants off."

"Seokjin-ssi, that's borderline harassment."

"Alright, I apologise."

But then he hears Namjoon laugh, and that seems to lighten up some of the layers of bullshit in his mind.

Seokjin stumbles on a step walking up to the dorm where Jang Jaewon resided before his life was taken from him. He would've tripped forward, probably would've smacked his front teeth against the edge of a step falling forward, if it wasn't for Namjoon's fast reflexes in the way he quickly reached forward and grabbed at Seokjin's waist, holding him steady from behind. Seokjin's heart stutters a little in his chest in between the fear of ruining his face on a step and from the way Namjoon holds him so firmly. But he lets go, and Seokjin has to straighten himself up. Has to laugh it off.

"You okay?" Namjoon's smooth voice filters into his ears, silkily and disarmingly.

"Yeah. Of course," Seokjin tries to laugh, but it comes out nervous and shaky. He bites down on his lip and resumes walking up the stairs to hide his embarrassment, but he feels Namjoon's hand curl around his forearm, stopping him.

"Hey. Seokjin-ssi."

Seokjin presses his lips together. He's got one foot on one step, one foot on the step above it. He's paused, halfway up the stairs and he's hesitating, but he's not entirely sure why. He swallows painfully and supposes that whatever confusing thoughts and emotions are swirling inside his head alongside dust and debris and all the shit that's been slowly accumulating over the years he'll have to push aside, once again, and turn around. Twists at the waist, and looks down at Namjoon. His brows are pinched together in concern.

"I want to know," he starts, and that smooth, deep voice of his disarms Seokjin once again, "before we go in there, what's going through your mind."

How many times has Namjoon asked that? It hurts Seokjin's brain to try and recollect. It hurts him even more to wonder why. How many times has Seokjin slipped up that it's become obvious there's something bothering him, something weighing him down? Something so heavy that it's impossible to carry. His mother, once, had told him that this life will never give him a burden too heavy for his shoulders, and he'd been stupid enough to believe it at the time. Stupid enough to carry that hope. Because wasn't it his mother who had lost her sight so early in her life? Lost her life soon after? Didn't she say that she could share some of her own burden with Jeongguk's father, but what happened when he died, too? The burden came back to her, tenfold, to carry alone.

Seokjin can't fathom how she managed to cope with that kind of loss not once, but twice. Seokjin doesn't remember much about his own father, he was so young when his father passed, but his mother remembered. She kept it close to her heart. She held everything together. She held it all in until she no longer could, and her life was taken from her.

He has lost his father, he's lost Jeongguk's father. He's lost his mother, and he's about to lose Namjoon, too. These eyes of his aren't a burden he can carry. He doesn't have any hope. It's only a matter of time until his shoulders crumble like old, weathered stone under the weight of it all. He doesn't have any hope, at all. All he has is delaying disappointment.

So he parts his lips and tries to delay it for as long as possible, just so that he doesn't have to inject his poison into Namjoon, too.

"Don't try to joke your way through this," Namjoon warns him before Seokjin could get a word out. His brows are pulled down, now, stern and serious. Unwavering.

"I'm just thinking about who the killer is," Seokjin evades, and turns back to continue up the stairs. Namjoon doesn't let go of his arm.

"I've seen you deal with difficult cases before. But this is different. There's something else."

Seokjin presses his lips together, tightly, like that's going to help him hold himself together. "I'm... mourning a loss. But don't worry about me, I'll be okay soon. I promise. Sorry for worrying you."

The tight hold around his arm loosens, slightly, but it doesn't let go just yet. "Don't apologise to me," Namjoon tells him softly, and take another step up the stairs. "I just want you to be okay. If there's anything I can do to support you... or even if you just want to talk and have someone listen to you... I'll be there. Whenever you want. However much you want me."

Seokjin turns around, and Namjoon's hand falls from his arm. He looks down at Namjoon, standing just a step below him, and evaluates the look on his face. His expression is laced in concern and something that looks like pity, Seokjin can only tell by the way he feels like absolute shit, but it's also sincere and genuine.

"I know what it's like to hold everything inside," Namjoon continues. "You're only one human. You might not be able to hold it all. But you're not an island, I promise. You can joke all you like and try to keep everyone at a distance all you want, but you're not an island."

In that moment, there's an overwhelming force brewing inside Seokjin that wants him to fall into Namjoon's arms, to unleash everything that's worrying him, that's ever worried him and made him despair. It fills him up like water, and the waves are crashing against the seams that hold his human body together. And he feels it along his skin, oedematous and tender to touch, like one more word from Namjoon might just poke a hole in his skin and let everything ooze out. He pulls in a breath through his nose, and lets it out through his mouth, and forces the waves to calm down.

He stands at the shore, the water up to his knees. He's stranded on an island, the water level is steady rising, and he's looking out at the far stretch of blue water in front of him. One day, the water will knock him off his feet and drown him. One day. His burden is not something he can carry, and one day it's going to make him crumble, but he's going to keep fighting to keep himself together until that day comes.

"Thanks, Namjoon," he replies lightly, and smiles. Namjoon doesn't return that smile. "I'll keep that in mind. But for now, let's go investigate."

"Sure," Namjoon breathes out.

The dorm looks like what a dorm would look like if it belonged to a university student in his early twenties. Small, a little dingy. A tiny kitchen attached to a tiny shared living area, with three doors; two leading into bedrooms and one to the bathroom. On the thirteenth of December, Jang Jaewon was murdered in his own bedroom while his roommate was out. He was first knocked out with some sort of drug before his throat was sliced open. There were no signs of struggle – all things considered, a smoothly executed crime.

Seokjin opens the door to the bedroom, his hands already gloved, with Namjoon following behind him. It'd been three weeks since the murder, but the police were obviously keeping the place clean. There isn't a speck of dust anywhere.

"The entire dorm's already been dusted for prints, from top to bottom. Nothing was found," Namjoon reminds him as they head into the room. "Not a single fingerprint. He was clever enough to wear gloves."

Seokjin shakes his head. "No, this guy is a maniac. He might've worn gloves, he might not have. This guy... apparently, he wiped clean every fingerprint in the house. Not just in this room, but in the room of Hong Haejoo, too."

Namjoon clicks his tongue. "Oh, yeah. I remember reading that in the report, but I didn't think anything of it... everything was wiped when the police came to investigate."

"I mean, fine, wipe things down if you're scared you left fingerprints. But this guy wiped down the bookshelves, each spine and cover of every single book, and even the tops of the shelves. Why the fuck would you have touched the top of the shelf when your goal is to murder someone?" Seokjin scrutinises as he walks into the centre of the room.

"So he's a clean-freak. Or a maniac, as you called him," Namjoon concedes.

Seokjin huffs and looks around the room. The bookshelf on one side of the room is clean, fully intact. The books shoved in there are all pristine. The other three walls are bare now that the flowers that were taped up there have been taken down. The bed where the victim was found is clean, made up. Just three weeks ago, Jang Jaewon had laid there, dead, slashes to his throat and chest. Seokjin reaches into his bag and pulls out photos of the body, and scrutinises it. "He's a clean-freak who left an indiscernible mess of cuts to the victim's chest. Usually, when the killer engages in this kind of meaningless destruction of the body post-mortem, they have a deep-seated grudge against their victim... but Jang Jaewon was a poor university student who didn't have any enemies. And even if he did, there's absolutely no connection between him and Hong Haejoo."

"What if the killer had a grudge against Jang Jaewon, and Hong Haejoo was murdered to disguise that? Throw us off?" Namjoon suggests, pushing his hands into the pockets of his slacks.

"Well, if you want to think of it that way, then you could argue that Hong Haejoo was the one he had a grudge against. Jang Jaewon was murdered quickly. Hong Haejoo was beaten until she died. If anything, she was the one the killer had a grudge against... but why would anyone want to do that to a young girl?"

"He's sick," Namjoon shivers.

"That's for sure."

Seokjin continues to look around the room, peering closely at the walls where some of the sticky residue from the tape used to stick up the flowers was left behind after they were taken down. He looks at the photos in his hands several times as he moves around the room.

"The police received a letter three days before, forewarning the murder," Namjoon pipes up after ten minutes or so, and Seokjin looks up and across the room to where he's stood, peering intently at the bookshelf. "A crossword nobody could solve until after the murder, the answer being the victim's name. And now, we've got another letter, most likely forewarning a third murder."

"Yeah," Seokjin sounds, furrowing his brows as he waits for Namjoon to continue.

"Why didn't he send a letter to the police forewarning the second murder?"

Seokjin purses his lips. "Maybe he didn't want the second murder to be predicted."

"But he wanted the first one to be predicted. And the third. Why not the second?"

"Maybe..." Seokjin trails off, crossing his arms over his chest, "maybe the forewarning was the flowers."

"No," Namjoon shakes his head, "the flowers aren't a warning if there's only one incidence. Three sets of flowers on each wall means nothing. It only means something when the second murder has occurred, and there's only two sets. Only then can you say that the flowers in the first murder are a forewarning of subsequent murders."

Namjoon touches his chin like he's in deep thought, and Seokjin watches him. He can see the way Namjoon's mind is on fire, electricity running through him, and Seokjin wishes he wasn't so preoccupied. He wishes he could be the superior that Namjoon regards him to be. He doesn't want to let Namjoon down, but right now he feels too sluggish to catch up. He huffs and tries to let everything go. Joins Namjoon by the bookshelf.

"I think," Namjoon breathes out when Seokjin joins his side, "that a message was sent. It just wasn't received."

He looks at Seokjin like he's just pitched in an idea and he's concerned about what Seokjin thinks about it. "What are you thinking about?"

Namjoon looks away and reaches out, dragging a gloved finger lightly down one of the spines of a book packed into the bookshelf. "The first warning was a crossword. The second... I don't know what the fuck that could be. But it was written on paper, and it looks like a rebus pictogram. We just don't have the information at this time to figure it out. Both those clues involve words. And here..." he gestures to the bookshelf, "we have a lot of words."

Seokjin takes a quick count – there's seventy-four volumes of a manga. They're packed so tightly in that when he tries to pull one out at random he has to pry it out. He flips through the pages, but he is well aware how pointless this is. He's just keeping his hands busy while he figures out what to do. It would've been great if there was a message slipped in between the pages of one of these books, one that has HONG HAEJOO written big and bold in a thick black marker pen, but that was too much to hope for. According to the extensive files, every book had been checked, and each page was unmarked, unblemished

Or perhaps, as Namjoon suggested, there was a message hidden in here in such a way that the police had not noticed, something that looked like an ordinary bookmark, maybe, but there was nothing of the sort in any of the books. Jang Jaewon didn't use bookmarks.

He looks around the room. Cranes his neck back and becomes just the slightest bit desperate. "There must be a message here, then... but where..." he mutters to himself quietly. "Under the carpets...? No, that's been checked. The wallpapers, maybe...?" he rambles on, but then he stops himself. "Wait," he turns to Namjoon. "He sent the crossword straight to the police. He wants the message to be found. He didn't hide it the first time, so why would he hide it now?"

Namjoon looks a little lost. "If he wants it to be found, why hasn't it been found?"

"Because he wants to mock us. To show us that we're beneath him. He sent us a crossword, we couldn't figure it out, and Jang Jaewon was murdered for it. He left another message, and we didn't find out, and then Hong Haejoo was murdered."

"Then..." Namjoon purses his lips, "the message has to be something that's obvious... right in front of our faces. The first thing we see. Because the crossword was the first variable in the first murder. So... the message this time has to be the first thing we see."

Seokjin furrows his brows harshly, and he starts to feel a headache brewing behind his brow, so he closes his eyes and squeezes them shut. Takes a deep breath, and lets it go through his lips.

He imagines himself as the roommate. He doesn't explain himself to Namjoon as he runs out of the bedroom, and thankfully Namjoon doesn't question him.

He's in the centre of the small living area. He imagines himself calling out Jang Jaewon's name and imagines getting no response from him. So he walks towards his bedroom, the door shut. He wraps his hand around the handle, and opens it. The first thing he sees is the wall opposite the door. He imagines the bunch of red spider lilies taped to it at eyelevel.

But it's not the flowers. He knows that. The flowers aren't the message. It has to be something that can be written down, can form words or numbers. So he looks away from the flowers he envisages on the wall, and the next thing that catches his eye is the dead, mutilated body on the bed. Jang Jaewon is lying face up on the bed, his throat slashed open, his eyes gouged out, and an indiscernible mess of cuts on his chest.

Seokjin looks down at the photo once more. Turns it this way and that, peers closer at it, brings it away from him.

"Hey, Joon. Is it just me, or do these cuts... kinda look like letters...?"

Namjoon rushes over to his side, peers in close over his shoulder. He doesn't say anything, and Seokjin wonders if he's reaching for an answer he's also imagining.

"V... C... I?" Seokjin mumbles, regardless. "Is that an L? And that one... an X? Some of them are in a row..." he huffs and closes his eyes for a moment. But something flashes in his mind and he jerks himself awake. Stuffs the photo under his armpit as he fishes his phone out of his pocket and finds the picture of the second letter. The symbol on the bottom left corner of the triangle was a roman numeral for the number two.

"Hey, Joon. You're good with numbers," Seokjin says gingerly as he hands the photo to Namjoon. "What are these roman numerals?"

Namjoon takes the photo from Seokjin's hand but he can feel Namjoon's eyes on him, so he looks up. And finds Namjoon smiling lightly at him. "I knew you'd figure something out."

He quickly takes the photo and looks down at it. His eyes scan across it several times before he sits down, cross-legged on the floor, and pulls out a little notebook and pen. Opens up to a fresh page and starts scribbling down.

Seokjin joins him on the floor carefully a moment later, but by then Namjoon's already etched several things in. He sits down and he watches as Namjoon blooms.

XCVII – 97
CI – 101
CCXXXVII – 237
LXIII – 63
CCLVI – 256
XXXII – 32
CLIV – 154
CXCII – 192
CCI – 201
CCXL – 240

"That's all the combinations I could find that make any sense," Namjoon huffs when he leans back, but he flickers his eyes across the photo again in case he can find any more roman numerals etched into Jang Jaewon's chest in the photo, but he doesn't. He hands the notebook to Seokjin as if the numbers will mean anything to him. "Of course, there's a huge chance we're making mountains out of anthills."

Seokjin sighs. "And this doesn't change anything unless we know what this means. If it means anything at all."

Namjoon sighs, too, and leans back. Plants his hands into the floor behind him and looks around the room. For a moment neither of them talk but the both of them are ruminating, desperate to come up with some kind of answer that'll satisfy them, because until they can figure out how to decipher the message left behind in the first murder, they won't be able to figure out the message left behind most recently. And Seokjin knows he shouldn't hope, but he sure does wish that he was wrong about what the triangle meant. He looks over at Namjoon and wishes like hell that he's wrong about this. Namjoon's staring at the bookshelf, intently.

"Namjoon?" he calls out softly, but Namjoon doesn't look away from the bookshelf. "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah..." Namjoon mutters. "I mean, no. Look," he detaches one hand from the floor to point at the bookshelf. Seokjin slowly follows his finger but doesn't know what Namjoon's trying to direct his gaze at. "Jang Jaewon's bookshelf is filled with every volume of the manga, Bleach."

Seokjin squints a little to stare at the spines of the books. Sure enough, Namjoon's right.

"But there's one volume missing. Volume twenty-two. It's been replaced with a book," Namjoon states, and launches off the floor to head to the bookshelf. He pulls the book out of the bookshelf, and flips through the pages, and a part of Seokjin expects something from the book, a note, a message scribbled in, but he finds nothing. Namjoon pulls his phone out and starts to search something online. "This book has the same number of pages that volume twenty-two of Bleach has. Two hundred and sixteen."

"Someone replaced it with a book with the same number of pages... so that there's no gaps in the bookshelf," Seokjin mutters.

"The killer. He's meticulous," Namjoon notes, and returns to where he'd been sitting to snatch up his notebook. "I'm gonna take a shot in the dark and say this might be the message left behind."

He looks at his notebook. The first number scribbled in is the number ninety-seven. Namjoon flicks through the book until he hits page number ninety-seven and his eyes zero in on the first word. Scribbles it down in his notebook. "Some of these numbers are bigger than two hundred and sixteen... so maybe we have to work around it. Two hundred and thirty-seven... if we wrap it around two hundred and sixteen, we get page twenty-one. We'll use that page instead for numbers bigger than two hundred and sixteen," he talks to himself. Seokjin will tell him later that he's completely enamoured by Namjoon right now, watching him buzz with these ideas, and whether he's going in the right direction or if he's completely off or not, it doesn't matter. Namjoon's brilliant, and Seokjin will not deny it. He watches Namjoon work.

97 – heart
101 – ordinarily
21 – end
63 – gesture
40 – charismatic
32 – another
154 – even
192 – justified
201 – or
24 – together

He pushes the book back into it's place in the bookshelf and sits down again. Seokjin follows him. "If we take the first letter of each of these words..." Namjoon ventures, writing down the result of his trials, "we get... hoegcaejot."

"Which means absolutely fuckall, Namjoon."

Namjoon presses his lips together sheepishly, and he tries his best not to blush out of embarrassment just before a lightbulb seems to click inside his mind. "Wait. These letters... kinda... have a vague resemblance to... to Hong Haejoo's name. There's only three letters different."

Seokjin licks his lips. "Yeah... but three letters out of ten is too many. The killer's first message perfectly spelled out Jang Jaewon's name. Unless this one spells out Hong Haejoo, your theory is moot. It's not worth calling a message."

He almost laughs at the way Namjoon looks so defeated. "I thought... I thought I was on to something. It's such a coincidence."

"If they don't match, they don't match," Seokjin huffs, and rubs his hand against his cheek. He's getting tired. He needs a coffee. He doesn't know how Namjoon has so much energy to do all of this, so he looks at the notebook and just stares at it, blinking slowly and lazily. "Wait," he stops himself, and clasps Namjoon's knee. "All the letters that are wrong match up with numbers over two hundred and sixteen."

Namjoon quirks a brow. "Was there another way to deal with those numbers?" he asks, confused but alive, once again. He looks down at his notebook. "How else do we get words from the numbers that exceed two hundred and sixteen?"

"But we're not getting words," Seokjin tells him. "We're getting letters. You took the first letter of the first word on the pages that match up with the roman numerals you found, but since you had to wrap the numbers around for three of them... what if you took the second letter of the first word, instead? That turns the e in end to an n, the c in charismatic to a h, and the t in together to an o."

He looks up at Namjoon, and his expression is mirrored in Namjoon's face. "That spells out Hong Haejoo."