Switzerland was a portrait of serene order—pristine lakes, sharp alpine peaks, cities that ran with clockwork precision. It was a beauty that felt almost cruel given the tragedy they had come to document, one that had begun here, in a Geneva terminal, and ended in the cold Atlantic waters off Nova Scotia.

They met Daniel Moreau in a quiet, sunlit park overlooking Lake Geneva, a place he said he used to bring his daughter, Élise, to feed the swans. He was a man in his late forties, well-dressed but seeming slightly disconnected from his own clothes, as if he’d dressed for a self he no longer recognized. In his hands, he constantly turned two small, worn rectangles: the passport photos of his wife, Sophie, and his eight-year-old daughter.

The interview began with the facts, delivered in a flat, rehearsed monotone. “Swissair Flight 111. New York to Geneva. September 2nd, 1998. An electrical fire. They lost contact. It went down near Peggy’s Cove. All 229 souls.” He recited it like a news bulletin, a story that had happened to other people.

Y/N, translating softly between Daniel’s French and the team’s Korean, gently steered him away from the public record. “Can you tell us about them? About Sophie and Élise?”

That was the key. Daniel’s eyes, which had been fixed on a distant sailboat, dropped to the photos in his hands. His thumb stroked the edge of Sophie’s picture. “Sophie… she was laughter. She could fill a silent room just by walking into it. Élise… she had her mother’s smile.” His voice cracked on the last word. “The last time I spoke to her, Sophie said, ‘The weather in New York was beautiful. Élise bought a snow globe with the Statue of Liberty. We’ll be home soon.’” He swallowed hard. “À bientôt. See you soon.”

He described the agony of the wait, flying to Nova Scotia, the grim, slow recovery process, the hollow return to a Geneva apartment that still smelled of them. “I found these,” he whispered, holding up the passport photos. “In a drawer. The last official images. Now, they are the only ones I carry. I talk to them. I tell them about my day. It is… my only connection.”

As Daniel spoke, his grief a palpable, trembling thing in the Swiss air, Y/N’s attention was split. Her role was to listen, to translate, to empathize. But her gaze kept flicking to Jungkook.

He was behind the main camera, his posture rigid, his eye pressed to the viewfinder. But she could see the side of his face, the tight clench of his jaw, the way the muscle there jumped repeatedly. His knuckles were white where he gripped the camera rig. As Daniel described the “last official images” and the act of carrying them, speaking to them, Jungkook’s free hand, hanging at his side, curled into a fist so tight his tattoos strained against the skin.

When Daniel broke down, describing the sound of his daughter’s voice on that last call, a single, traitorous tear escaped the corner of Jungkook’s eye, tracking a swift path down his cheek before he angrily swiped it away with his shoulder. His eyes, when they briefly flicked up from the viewfinder, were glassy and red-rimmed, swollen with the effort of holding back a dam of his own.

Y/N translated Daniel’s words, her voice a steady conduit for his sorrow, but internally, her heart ached with a new, sharp clarity. She wasn't just watching a subject being interviewed. She was watching a reflection. Daniel Moreau’ carried passport photos; Jungkook carried a burnt-edged locket. Daniel spoke to ghosts in an empty apartment; Jungkook screamed at them in a hollow mansion. The father’s raw, spoken agony was a mirror held up to the director’s silent, tortured one. She could read Jungkook like an open book in that moment, and the story was one of devastating, personal recognition. Every word about a lost wife was a needle pricking a wound that had never closed.

Y/N, keeping her own voice a soft, steady anchor, continued. “Daniel, you speak to them. What do you… what do you say to Sophie? To Élise?”

Daniel Moreau looked at the photos, his thumb tracing the outline of his daughter’s face. “To Sophie… I apologize,” he whispered, the confession raw. “For arguments that seem so stupid now. For times I was late from work. I tell her about the garden. The roses she planted are still there. They still bloom.” A shaky breath.

“To Élise… I tell her about the swans. That the big one, the one she named ‘Monsieur Glisse’, he had cygnets this spring. I tell her about her friends, the ones who are now grown, who still ask about her. I… I tell her about the books I think she would have liked. I imagine her voice, asking questions.”

He looked up, his eyes swimming. “It is not living. It is… surviving. With these,” he held up the photos again, “as my compass in a world that lost all its north.”

The interview delved deeper into the surreal horror of the aftermath—the identification process, the memorials that felt like performances, the loneliness of a grief that was both a public spectacle and an intensely private torture. “People say ‘time heals’,” Daniel said, a bitter edge entering his voice for the first time. “It does not heal. It simply makes you more accustomed to the pain. You learn to walk with the limp.”

Throughout it all, Y/N’s gaze kept returning to Jungkook. He hadn’t moved from behind the camera. But she saw the way his shoulders had hunched slightly, as if absorbing a physical blow with each of Daniel’s revelations. The father’s description of “surviving, not living” seemed to resonate with a violent clarity. When Daniel spoke of the public pity and the private, gnawing isolation, Jungkook’s eyes briefly squeezed shut behind the viewfinder.

As the interview wound towards its close, Daniel held the photos out, not to the camera, but as if offering them to the universe. “This is all that is left. Two small pieces of paper. But they are my entire world. I will carry them until I can give them back to her, to her, in whatever comes next.”

The finality of the statement hung in the air. The camera’s red light went out. Daniel slumped forward, the photos pressed to his forehead, his body wracked with silent, exhausted sobs.

Y/N remained seated, giving him space, her own heart heavy. But her attention was drawn inexorably to the man who had been recording it all. Jungkook slowly, stiffly, lowered the camera. He didn't look at anyone. He turned away from the scene, presenting his back to the team and the grieving father.

His head was bowed, and she saw his broad back rise and fall with a single, shuddering breath that looked like it had been torn from the very depths of him. He stood there for a long moment, a monument to contained agony, before walking a few paces away to stare, unseeing, at the serene, sparkling expanse of Lake Geneva, the interviews’s echoing truths—two small pieces of paper… my entire world—now a silent scream in his own soul.

The formal end of the interview brought a flurry of subdued activity—Yoongi, who had been handling logistics elsewhere, was not there to provide his usual steadying presence for Jungkook. The team moved to pack equipment and offer quiet words to the still-composed but shattered Daniel Moreau.

Jungkook didn't participate. The moment the camera was off, he had turned from the lake view and walked away, not toward the van, but down a gravel path that led away from the park, his stride long and hurried. Y/N, helping to gather a microphone, watched him go. She saw the rigid set of his shoulders, the way he shoved his hands deep into his pockets as if to physically contain himself.

He was heading for a narrow pedestrian bridge that arched over a small canal, its stone railings offering a view back toward the painful interview site. He was alone. Yoongi wasn't there. No one else seemed to notice his abrupt departure, absorbed in the technical wrap-up.

Y/N’s own carefully maintained boundaries wavered and then crumbled. Her personal rule was to observe, to translate, to comfort within the confines of the work. But her deeper, more fundamental weakness—the one that drove her to write letters to the dead and offer obituaries to strangers—was an inability to abide solitary suffering. She couldn't stand the sight of a person drowning in silence, especially not after what she had just witnessed in his eyes.

Without a word to the others, she set down the gear in her hands and followed him. Her steps were quiet on the gravel, her own heart thudding with a mix of trepidation and resolve. She wasn't sure what she would say, or if he would even acknowledge her. But she couldn't let him stand on that bridge alone with the ghosts Daniel Moreau had just given fresh voice to. She reached the foot of the bridge as he leaned heavily on the stone railing, his back to her, his head bowed as if under an immense, invisible weight.

-

The sound of the canal water was a gentle, indifferent rush beneath the stone arch. Jungkook’s frame was rigid, his hands gripping the cold railing so tightly the tendons stood out like cables. His shoulders were hunched, and as Y/N stepped closer, she saw the unmistakable tremor in them, the quick, furious swipe of his sleeve across his eyes.

She stopped a respectful distance away, the space between them charged with his raw, escaping pain. The professional titles fell away. He wasn't her director here. He was just a man breaking apart.

“Are you okay?” she asked, the words leaving her lips softly, almost stupidly. Of course he wasn't.

He stiffened at her voice, but didn't turn. He wiped his face again, a rough, angry motion. When he finally spoke, his voice was a shredded, watery rasp, thick with tears he was still fighting. “What are you doing here?” He didn't ask as her boss. The question was more fundamental. Why are you seeing this?

“I saw you leave,” she said simply.

He finally turned his head just enough to look at her from the corner of his eye, his profile ravaged. “You shouldn’t have followed me.” A bitter, choked sound escaped him.

“Aren’t you afraid?”