Chapter Text
Taehyung was in fact a private investigator, and he did have his own seedy little office in which he was sitting with his feet up on the desk, but still nothing could have prepared him for a breathtakingly handsome older woman to come through his door in a pantsuit that could have been purchased from “Boutique Femme Fatale” to tell him she needed his help. Taehyung couldn’t stop himself from glancing down at the corner of his computer screen to confirm that the year was still 2025.
“Sure, what kind of service do you need?” Taehyung asked, hastily lowering his feet and standing up respectfully.
“My grandson is missing,” she said, her eyes dry but a deep sadness in her voice nonetheless.
“Ma’am, that’s a job for the police,” Taehyung said, finally sitting back down once she had taken the guest chair in front of his desk.
She shook her head determinedly.
“He’s been missing for twenty-eight years,” she said heavily. “The police gave up on helping me a long time ago.”
Taehyung sat in silence while he digested this bit of information - a cold case indeed.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she said with steely determination. “I’ve heard it from ten other P.I.’s already. It’s been too long, he’s almost certainly dead, it’s an impossible task. But I refuse to give up. I should have pressed more at the time he vanished, but I was so overcome with grief…”
She paused then and looked down, putting her fingertips genteely on her lips.
“I won’t say no immediately, but I am going to need a lot more information. What makes you think he’s alive?” Taehyung asked, intrigued despite himself.
“Because I saw him,” she said, raising her head back up defiantly.
There were tears glistening in her eyes now.
“I was in a conference room on the second floor of the Gongjag building, you know, on Wolbae road, discussing the upcoming - well, that doesn’t matter.”
She flapped her hand to dismiss the digression, and took a deep breath and got herself back on track.
“I looked out the window down at the street, just idly, as one does when listening, and I saw a face…just so you understand, he was my only daughter’s only child. I saw him every day when he was a baby and a toddler. And that man I saw last week walking down Wolbae road, he had that child’s nose, and my daughter’s eyes, and my son-in-law’s chin - and everything! It all screamed to me, that was my grandbaby! I ran out of there like I was possessed and tried to chase him down, but of course it was impossible - by the time I made it down to the sidewalk he had vanished into the crowd and I never caught sight of him again no matter how hard I ran and screamed his name.”
Taehyung couldn’t help but be moved by this impassioned speech.
“What w- is his name?” he asked softly.
“Yoongi,” she replied, wiping her eyes. “Will you help me find him?”
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“What on earth is this?” Jimin asked when he came in an hour later, squinting at the article Taehyung had pulled up on his computer screen.
“I’ve got a new case for us,” Taehyung informed him. “Missing person. Min Yoongi, vanished at the age of four right here in Daegu in 1997. His parents were found dead in a manner that suggested they’d fallen out of a building, but Yoongi wasn’t with them. There was a search at the time, but they never found a single trace of the kid. Now his grandmother is convinced she saw someone just last week that was the spitting image of that long-lost four-year-old, but all grown up.”
Jimin, still leaning over his desk, gave him a skeptical look.
“Here’s the twist - you know the fashion label Spoon Tiger?” Taehyung went on.
“Yeah, I see their billboards around town all the time. Pricey stuff, out of my range for sure.”
“Their CEO, Lee Myungsook, is the grandmother in question. And this is the good-faith amount she deposited up front for us to take on the investigation.”
Taehyung opened up a different window, showing his business partner the figure in question. Jimin widened his eyes and looked impressed.
“Well, I guess they must make a tidy profit on all those bags and necklaces after all,” he said with a wry shake of his head.
“She’s given me digital copies of some family photos - I’ll send them over to Jungkook to create a digital age-progression of what he might look like now, and our main contact for anything else we might need from her is her executive assistant. His name is Jung Hoseok.”
“Twenty-eight years,” Jimin mused as he walked over to his own desk. “You know we’re not going to find anything, right?”
“I know,” Taehyung said stubbornly, still remembering the haunting look on Ms. Lee’s face when she recalled seeing the mysterious stranger’s face in the crowd, “but we can at least give it a shot.”
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They threw themselves into the work over the next week. Taehyung focused on tracking down things in the present day, whereas Jimin focused on the original disappearance itself. So while Jimin was visiting the alley where Ms. Lee’s daughter and son-in-law had been found, Taehyung was searching adoption records from 1997 and 1998. Jimin went through all the news reports and requested the police records for the investigation. (He’d gotten a thumb drive of many such files from Hoseok, who’d compiled them on behalf of Ms. Lee, but he wanted to do his own research.) Taehyung looked through the local news from the nineties through the present, looking for any reports of school activities, awards, business openings, or any other stories involving someone named “Yoongi” of the right age.
Taehyung and Jimin more usually worked on drier stuff: fact-finding for civil lawsuits, or sometimes digging up evidence of infidelity. Taehyung felt oddly energized by the idea that he got to work on something that could actually have a happy ending. Ms. Lee had spent almost thirty years mourning her only child and grandchild, something that surely no amount of the luxuries she had acquired could truly offset. But now there was this chance that her grandchild could be returned to her. And that Yoongi could reconnect with his grandmother, no matter how he had been raised or whether he realized he’d been missing in the first place. This was something that truly could be very impactful - and profitable. Their contract with Ms. Lee involved a very large reward if Yoongi were successfully found and reunited with her.
They got a few tiny hits, but nothing that panned out. There was a Yoongi who got in the news for being on a championship-winning high school basketball team, but he was ten years too old. They found records of five different adoptions occurring in the few months after the disappearance, but four were girls and the lone boy had been only a year old. Jimin tried to get in contact with a witness from the original incident who claimed he’d seen a toddler near the scene an hour before the supposed time of death, but he had passed seven years ago. But they scraped onwards, determined to live up to the very large and motivating fee they’d been given.
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Their next big step forward came when Jungkook finished his digital wizardry and had some age-progressed pictures he wanted to show to Ms. Lee. He had taken the pictures of the missing toddler and his parents and generated a few possible faces, and now he wanted to get some direct feedback from Ms. Lee, to see how they matched up with the man she’d glimpsed. With her stamp of approval, Taehyung could make use of the picture to try to find him. Through Hoseok, Jungkook and Taehyung made an appointment to come to her office and go through it there.
The Spoon Tiger headquarters were even more impressive than Taehyung was prepared for. The architecture was all gleaming white, with aggressive jutting shapes and cutouts in every wall, and huge mysterious objets d’art lurking in every corner and on every shelf-like niche and protrusion. But Taehyung couldn’t feel too intimidated when Hoseok, full of sunny smiles, was the one to escort them up to the glass-walled elevator and then into Ms. Lee’s office. There, at least, were more human-friendly touches: chairs that were actually comfortable to sit in, and several enormous rolling pinboards absolutely crammed with photos, swatches in every color and texture imaginable, and anything else flat enough to get pinned in place. Her desk was, of course, an enormous white expanse shaped somewhat like a jelly bean, with a floor-to-ceiling window backing it that looked out on downtown Daegu. The CEO herself was in a sharp navy suit with giant shoulder pads and an aggressively tailored waist, her hair impeccably styled in an equally-sharp bob.
“Thank you for making time for us,” Taehyung started off. “This is my colleague Jungkook, who does reconstructions and age progressions and so forth.”
“Thank you for your efforts so far, I appreciate it,” Myungsook said warmly. “Hoseok has been keeping me up-to-date with all the avenues you and Mr. Park have been pursuing.”
Taehyung nodded politely and gestured to Jungkook.
“I’ll let you take it from here.”
“Thank you. I’m going to show you some possible faces - but first, let’s get his hair to look like the man you saw, just for comparison. Can you describe it to me?” Jungkook said.
“Of course,” she agreed.
Jungkook pulled out his tablet and stylus, and listened carefully as she described a fairly standard hairstyle for men (short on the sides and back, a little bit of length to frame the forehead). He swiped back and forth through something on his tablet, using his stylus to make adjustments of some kind as she answered.
“Okay, thank you for all that. Now, I’m going to show you four different versions. I want you to look carefully and tell me which one looked most like the man you saw.”
She nodded and sat up even straighter than she had been. Jungkook turned the tablet around so it was facing her. Taehyung and Hoseok shifted around so they could more easily see it as well.
The first face was somewhat rounded, with a large mouth and a nose that looked like Myungsook’s. She looked at it and then shook her head.
“No, not really…” she said, sounding regretful.
Jungkook swiped to the next picture. This one had the same roundness to the face, but a larger nose and stronger eyebrows.
“No, definitely not.”
Jungkook swiped to the third, and Myungsook gasped.
“That’s him! That’s Yoongi, exactly the way I saw him!” she cried, leaping out of her seat.
Taehyung leaned in to see it himself, noting the sharpness of the eyes and roundedness of the nose.
“Please look closely, and let me know if you can see anything that should be adjusted,” Jungkook said politely, handing her the tablet. Myungsook didn’t have eyes for anyone or anything else in the room, extending a trembling hand for the tablet and holding it right in front of herself on the desk.
“That’s him,” she whispered again, sounding awed.
She rested her chin in her other hand so she could gaze at it in contemplation. Taehyung marveled at the way the years seemed to flow off of her face, and she well could be a woman barely into middle-age, looking tenderly at the baby that had made her a brand-new grandmother. Her finger tips rested on the side of her cheek, with the pinky especially curled. Taehyung could definitely see the resemblance with the digital recreation Jungkook had made - the curves of her face and the shape of her eyes made them believable relatives.
“Thanks for making time for this,” Taehyung said. “We’ll take it from here and let you know if we find anyone who matches.”
“Of course,” Ms. Lee finally replied.
She took a deep breath and collected herself, reluctantly handing the tablet back to Jungkook.
“I’ll send this file to Hoseok too,” Jungkook assured her.
She nodded gratefully, and then with more thanks Taehyung and Jungkook were taken back out again by Hoseok.
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Taehyung thought the next part was going to be the most frustrating and lengthy part of the whole investigation, because even once you had a likeness of someone, it still didn’t make them that easy to find. Their target wasn’t a wanted criminal, after all, so a certain level of discretion was necessary. The mystery man had been spotted in the heart of Daegu’s fashion district, however, so that seemed like the best place to start.
Fortunately, even though he wasn’t very knowledgeable about said industry’s workings, he at least had a friend who was. Seokjin was a computer programmer now, but he’d had a brief stint as a model in his younger days, and still kept in contact with a number of casting directors and other insiders. It was mostly for the purpose of his current job - lots of fashion companies needed short-term help with website updates and one-time events, after all, and word-of-mouth was still as key for steady employment as it always had been. Taehyung usually talked to Seokjin if he needed help trying to unlock a lost email account or decrypt a file, but this time he asked him for the use of his network.
“Ok, so here’s what I think we can do,” Seokjin said, staring at the age-progression picture. “I’ll contact a few casting agents and let them know there’s a client that has a very specific look in mind.”
“Will that sound too strange?” Taehyung wondered.
“Mmm, not really - these things happen. Like trying to find a model that looks exactly like someone from a specific painting for an ad campaign, I know I’ve seen things like that before,” Seokjin assured him.
Taehyung decided to trust his judgement, transferred him the money to put in the “casting” requests on his behalf, and added it to the list of expenses for which to get reimbursement from Hoseok.
At that point, things moved much more quickly than Taehyung thought they would. As it turned out, the very first director that Seokjin approached recognized him right off the bat.
“Oh, yeah, that’s Yoongi!” the man had said, according to Seokjin’s report to Taehyung.. “Kang Yoongi. Small-time designer, he’s been putting out, like, t-shirts and little bags and stuff for a few years.”
“His name really is Yoongi?” Taehyung asked, somewhat gobsmacked they’d hit a bullseye already.
He’dl been operating under the assumption that, if the missing Yoongi really were out there, he would still be going by that name. A child of four was quite old enough to know his own name and resist being renamed, even after being ripped away from his birth family. Taehyung knew he’d have a very hard time from getting his hopes up at this point, but he still tried to stay calm. Finding out the man’s supposed age would be the next critical piece of information.
“Yup, really, genuinely a Yoongi!” Seokjin confirmed with a laugh.
He’d come to Taehyung and Jimin’s office in person - Taehyung suspected he was getting much more enjoyment out of delivering the good news this way rather than over a dry text message. So now he was slouched in one of their guest chairs, glowing with triumph.
“What else were you able to find out about him?” Taehyung prompted him.
“Quite a bit, actually - first of all, here’s his business’ instagram. And apparently he stuck in the director’s mind so much because of how respectful he was of the models he’d hired. ‘Always so polite, always making sure they were comfortable, paid way more than the going rate, and gave them freebies to boot,’ that’s what he said. Apparently all of that was rare enough that it really stuck in his mind.” Seokjin explained, as he sent a link to the account in question.
Taehyung opened it up. This Yoongi’s operation was called Lotus Lab, apparently, and the feed indeed featured a lot of shirts with graphic designs on them and some little bags in various finishes. Seemed pretty cute and nicely made, from what Taehyung knew of such things. The pictures were mostly just product shots and various promotions, but with enough scrolling he did come across a few pictures of the man himself. He certainly did resemble the picture - and Ms. Lee.
But, the fact that he was a fashion designer! Taehyung marveled at the coincidence. Assuming it was the right Yoongi, it was a pretty amazing coincidence that he’d gotten into the same line of work as his grandmother and mother, completely unknowingly.
“I don’t know his exact age, but he certainly looks like he could be thirty-two,” Seokjin went on.
Taehyung had to agree. There wasn’t anything about his appearance that could rule him out as being the one Ms. Lee had seen - or, more to the point, actually being Min Yoongi.
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Taehyung thought long and hard about how to approach the next stage. Being potentially reunited with a rich grandmother was one thing, but learning that your parents had died under unclear circumstances (most likely brutally murdered) was another thing entirely. Taken as a whole it would be a terrible shock to anyone. Taehyung hoped that at least Yoongi was aware he had been raised by adoptive parents, to not add yet another layer of turmoil to the whole thing.
He decided the key thing was to not give any hope that his birth parents were alive - that would be the worst order to reveal things in. So as unpleasant as it was, he decided that had to be the first thing he mentioned once they were actually talking in person. So first, he sent an email, using the contact information that was so helpfully available via the Lotus Lab instagram.
To Kang Yoongi:
My name is Kim Taehyung. I’m investigating a missing persons case. I believe you might have information about this case, and I’d like to meet in person to discuss it. To be clear, you are not under any kind of suspicion, and I would be very grateful for your help. My goal is to give a grandmother closure on what happened to her dear grandson.
Thank you,
Kim Taehyung, P.I.
He included a link to their agency website, which featured himself and Jimin, all their contact information, and quite a few testimonials. He did not get a reply. Three days later, however, he did get a phone call.
“Hello, this is Kim Taehyung of the Kim-Park Detective Agency, how can I help you?”
“Hello, my name is Yoongi. You sent me an email a few days ago.”
Taehyung sat up straight, electrified. Yoongi’s voice was quite deep and a little raspy, not at all what he’d been expecting.
“Ah, yes, thank you for your call! I’m so glad we could get in touch!”
“Sure…but can you clarify what exactly you think I might know? I can’t ever remember seeing anything that could have to do with someone’s disappearance.”
He did sound suspicious, and rightfully so, Taehyung had to admit.
“I very much want to clarify for you, but some of the details of this case are disturbing and upsetting. I didn’t want to just share them up front, or so suddenly, without giving you a chance to prepare yourself.”
He thought he heard a little sigh on the line.
“What time would work for you to come to my office to talk about it? Or we could meet at a restaurant or somewhere else. You can bring any one you want for support, of course.”
“Listen, I’m trusting you not to be messing with me, right? Do you promise this is really to help a grandmother?” he asked, sounding exasperated.
“I promise,” Taehyung assured him. “Look, I’m a working man too, I don’t want to spend my time messing with people either.”
“Alright,” Yoongi agreed with a slightly put-upon grumble.
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They met at a cafe. Taehyung made sure to get there first, and seat himself such that Yoongi got the spot closest to the door. He recognized Yoongi as soon as he got through the door, having pored through the few photos of him on instagram. Another man came in right behind Yoongi, a bit taller and broader, and with a somewhat more steely look in his eyes.
Taehyung stood up and waved to them.
“Kim Taehyung?” Yoongi asked once he’d walked over.
“Yes, that’s me,” he confirmed.
“I’m Kang Yoongi and this is Kim Namjoon. He’s going to stay nearby,” Yoongi explained gravely as Taehyung and Namjoon nodded to each other.
“Great, that’s a very smart precaution,” he said agreeably.
Namjoon looked like he was stopping himself from rolling his eyes. Taehyung didn’t care too much - he didn’t have any bad intentions, so he didn’t have much to fear from this muscly friend.
“Good luck,” Namjoon said, clearly not including Taehyung in his blessing.
Then he took his leave to lurk just out of easy earshot.
Yoongi sighed and rolled his shoulders as if shaking off nerves, and then he and Taehyung sat down across from each other. Taehyung had spent quite a bit of time by that point looking at Yoongi’s baby pictures, and he didn’t think he was imagining a very close resemblance to them - closer even than the reconstructed face, especially seeing him living and breathing.
“First off, thank you for your time, I really do deeply appreciate it,” Taehyung started off.
“I do want to help, if I can,” Yoongi replied politely. “So, let’s hear it then.”
Taehyung had already spent a while deciding exactly what he was going to say, so he was more than ready to launch right into it.
“The woman who hired me lost her daughter, son-in-law, and their child - her grandson - all at the same time. The daughter and the son-in-law were found dead, but the grandson, who was only four at the time, was not found with them. And in fact, he was never seen again. This happened right here in Daegu,” he said.
“That’s awful,” Yoongi said quietly. “What do you think I might know about it?”
“This happened back in 1997,” Taehyung went on.
“Well, nothing, then,” Yoongi replied with a slightly nervous, breathy little chuckle.
“Yoongi, there’s a chance you are the missing child.”
Taehyung bit his lip - he’d never had to do anything quite like this. Yes, he’d told people he’d found evidence of their spouses cheating, but they’d all suspected it anyway. He wasn’t even sure how he’d feel finding out this kind of information if he were in Yoongi’s place, so he couldn’t imagine what Yoongi might be going through.
“Nah,” Yoongi said, crinkling up his nose and forehead. “C’mon.”
“Do you have any memories of when you were very small? Three or four years old?” Taehyung asked.
“Not really,” Yoongi said slowly, smoothing out his face into a closed-off expression.
Taehyung waited, giving Yoongi a chance to elaborate, but he didn’t say anything else. He did look like he was deep in thought.
“These are the Mins in 1997: Sungjin, Hyunjung, and Yoongi,” Taehyung said gently, pulling the family photo out of the top of his folder of documents and sliding it over to Yoongi.
He didn’t touch it, but he did peer down at it. A happy family, in dated clothes and hair, with their little round-faced toddler looking a little impatient sandwiched between the two adults.
“And you think that’s me,” Yoongi said flatly. “Just because I’m the right age and also named Yoongi?”
“I had a digital artist do an age progression based on photos of Min Yoongi, and this was the result,” Taehyung went on, this time pulling out the picture Jungkook had made (and Ms. Lee had approved).
Yoongi stared at it, and looked back and forth between the two pictures intently.
“Well,” he finally said reluctantly, “I guess that does look like me. But how did you find me?”
“Sure, I’d be happy to tell you the whole thing. First of all, the woman who hired me is named Lee Myungsook, and-”
“Hold on, the CEO of Spoon Tiger?” Yoongi interrupted him incredulously.
“Oh, yes, you know her?” Taehyung asked in mild surprise.
“I know of her, of course, everyone in the fashion business in Daegu knows her!” Yoongi explained impatiently. “I mean, I wouldn’t know her face but of course I know her name. Wait wait wait.”
He paused and looked down at the table.
“You’re trying to tell me that you think Lee Myungsook is my grandmother, and that my biological parents are her dead daughter and daughter’s husband,” he stated flatly.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Taehyung replied softly. “I am sorry, I know it’s a lot to process at once.”
Yoongi made a grimacing face, but stayed silent. So Taehyung continued on and told him the main arc of things: how Ms. Lee had spotted someone (possibly him, or possibly some other similarly-featured man) out the window one day, and kicked everything off. And then how Taehyung’s team had created the reconstructed image, and then a casting agent had recognized him from it and passed on his contact info. Yoongi listened intently, mostly staring off into space, sometimes chewing his lips. Taehyung let the silence sit when he’d finished, wanting Yoongi to have a chance to lead the conversation.
“I was adopted in 1997. When I was four,” he finally said, his voice quiet and his face unreadable.
Taehyung nodded and remained quiet. A wrinkle of consternation appeared in Yoongi’s forehead.
“Okay, but-” he suddenly blurted out in protest, ”that story of yours actually makes me less convinced. Age progression is very unscientific, and besides, she saw me at the start of all this! Obviously the mockup was going to end up looking like me! And, assuming I’m not the right Yoongi, now she’s biased it against looking like the real one.”
“Mmm, the artist did all of his work on the face off the photos, and only used Ms. Lee’s input for the hair. Plus, in times past we’d be stuck here, but we have DNA tests now,” Taehyung reminded him.
“Doesn’t this all seem a little too convenient?” Yoongi grilled him. “Spoon Tiger sales have been flat for a good few years, and now they’re trying to turn it around with their big seventy-fifth anniversary celebration - among other things - and the CEO just so happens to choose this year to find her long-lost grandson, and lo-and-behold he’s a designer too!”
“She’d have no way of knowing that though,” Taehyung pointed out.
“Unless she set you up!” Yoongi insisted. “The fashion scene in Daegu is not that big. I can easily imagine she’d have heard of someone named Yoongi trying to do a little t-shirt line, and she concocted the whole scheme from there. That building she said she spotted me from overlooks four of the ten most popular lunch spots in downtown. She could say she’d seen anybody and of course they’d have been there at some point!”
“You do make some valid points,” Taehyung reluctantly agreed, more to pacify him than out of being convinced.
(He did think to himself, though, that he should have done a little more background research on Spoon Tiger - he did so hate to be surprised by little facts like those Yoongi had brought up.)
“How much is she paying you?”
Taehyung stared off into space, trying to decide whether he should be honest or not.
“It’s a lot, isn’t it? More than you’d normally get paid for something like this?” he went on, sounding almost mocking.
“You’re a very suspicious man,” Taehyung said, trying to keep any trace of sulking out of his tone.
“You’re a private detective! Aren’t you supposed to be suspicious of everything?” Yoongi argued back with a wry chuckle.
Taehyung just looked at him, feeling rather woebegone. He had known that there was a good chance that Yoongi wasn’t going to like the news he was trying to deliver, but he hated the feeling that he’d wasted everyone’s time most of all.
“Ah, c’mon, don’t make that face - aren’t you also supposed to be, I don’t know, all hard-boiled or something?” Yoongi grumbled, his cheeks a little pinker than they had been.
“Over easy,” Taehyung quipped, forcing himself to smile at least a little. “These days the job is more tracking down people’s secret social media accounts or trying to undelete files from discarded hard drives. It pays more to be friendly!”
“Look, I’m not trying to be difficult - uh, I mean, I guess I am, actually - but you have to see that this looks like a scam to me, even if I’m not seeing what your angle is. These sorts of things just don’t happen in real life, you know?” Yoongi said, sounding somewhat apologetic.
“No, I get it,” Taehyung assured him. “But a DNA test would give all of us a definitive answer.”
“I’ll have to think about it. I’m not sure I even want to be involved in all of this,” Yoongi replied, his face going back to the guardedness he’d had before.
Then he sighed and put his chin in his hand. Taehyung saw the way his fingers curled and the tips touched his cheek. And his pinky was especially curved, causing a frisson of recognition that made the hairs on Taehyung’s arms stand up.
Lee Myungsook had made the exact same unconscious pose. Taehyung was sure, then, that this was worth going for.