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Everything was unfair. His life had taken three steps and fallen into shambles similarly to a toddler trying to wobble around for the first time, and now here he sat, slumped in the dark corner of a biting stone room, staring out the bars that taunted him with freedom. He had blood on his hands- not real blood, not in that moment, but metaphorical blood. The type you couldn’t wash away.
He leans his head back, closing his eyes and bringing his fists to his mouth, breathing as evenly as he could. It was lonely in the prison, the cells around him clear and the aisles free of even guards. When he opens his eyes again, the walls have turned a lighter shade of grey, and he’s slumped on a thin bed. When he turns his head down, he’s staring at the untoned door just a few feet away from where his bed ended, the only connection he had to the outside being the small window towards the top of the door that was currently slammed shut.
The room was too small. Had no color. In the other corner was a silver toilet and paper to go with it, but he had nothing else. The only activity he had was to remain sane. Spend his time counting the days, focusing on never losing count. Day 1,853. 5 years, 1 month. 5 years, 1 month. He closes his eyes. He wanted to stay sane because he wanted to remember. He would never let himself go, even if it often felt like the best option. So he remembered.
-
“Why can’t I go out with the others?” Taehyung, speaking with a childlike slur, stared out the window of the large but vaguely warehouse-like building’s children’s room, watching kids he didn’t know play in a patch of grass on the opposite side of the street. His mother, a frail woman with sunken eyes but perfect skin and dramatic makeup, follows his gaze with sadness that he didn’t understand. “We aren’t like them, Taehyung. We can’t go out. It’s… well, it’s dangerous.”
Taehyung turns his head to look at her, watching her fumble with her corset. “Why is it dangerous?” He speaks innocently, being only 3, his mother having kept horrible secrets from him. “You’ll find out in two years.” His mother flinches at her own words, as if they scare her. A bell rings distantly and she rushes off when she’s called with particular urgency.
This happens two years later. He discovers that she died, but he is given no explanation. None other than, “she bled out,” and meaningful, devious giggles from rich men and women who looked down upon him in his squalor.
Taehyung tightens his eyes.
-
“You!” Taehyung, who had been trying to follow someone away, flinches as his ear is snatched and he is dragged backwards. “You’ll never make money looking as sad as you do. Come on, you’ll be eighteen someday too. You need to learn how to do it like your mom could.” The man releases him roughly and wipes his hands on his trousers with a disgusted expression, “It’s rats like you that make this business so complicated. We’re just lucky that bitch couldn’t have more of you.”
Taehyung says nothing towards the comment about his mother. The nine year old heard the same thing near daily.
-
It was his sixteenth birthday. And he was being sold. He sat in a room of old men, forcefully latched to some chair, sitting silently as they discussed him like he were not even there. As if he were a product.
“He’s not eighteen, that much is obvious, but he is at the age of consent, right? So let’s just sell him, who cares? They’re offering a generous amount.”
“But maybe not generous enough! I mean, look at him. He’s young, born into this, a virgin, and quite beautiful if I do say so myself.” The ugly, greasy old man laughs heartily, so much so that he has to adjust his large, sweaty stomach. The other men riot with him. Taehyung is silent.
When he meets the couple who had bought him, he doesn’t know what to expect, really. They were a devious pair, a husband and wife who wanted to make money. He was silent that night. Silent as the virginity the old men had gushed about like toddlers was stolen from him by the husband. He said nothing that night or the nights afterwards, as stranger after stranger taught him the lesson he should have learned when he was five.
-
The years between 3, 5, 16, and 19 are a messy blur for Taehyung, but he remembers. He remembers what is important to him. His mother. The day he chose to become silent. The day he took the role he was born into. And the day he broke that silence. It had been like any normal day, really. His body ached and burned and a man sauntered out the door, sparking up a casual conversation with his owners as he tipped them for their good little serviceboy.
He listened as they laughed and dropped each coin into a jar like they were running a restaurant. He stared at the ceiling as the door opened and closed and sat up as the two came into the room, tense looks on their faces. “You got less of a tip than usual!” They spit. He listens as they scream at him, as they accuse him of lying there like a dead fish, as they call him useless.
It isn’t until they’re done that a hot flash runs through his body, shaking him to the core and making his eyes glow with the intensity of a supernova. His toes curl, his body shakes, veins tight as fire scratched and tore at the sides of his body. He felt the pain caused by others amplified as he slid off the bed with, to the couple, seemed like a sickeningly uncaring demeanor. They shouted at him again. He stalks out of the room without a word and like stupid sheep, they follow, screaming the more he walked away, threatening him with beatings. With rape. With death.
He stops in the kitchen and turns hard to face them, face hard, stomach tightening and untightening. Every step he had taken sent him sinking further and further into fury. Every step he had taken caused pain to tear holes in his back. The couple stops, clearly starting to sense his anger. But it only served to make them more mad. “What, you think we’re scared of a dirty little mute prostitute like you? Think you can do anything to us?”
Taehyung absently feels his fingers curling around the handle of a knife. He relishes in the fear that flashes on their faces. He bathes in their panic when he opens his mouth. “I’m so fucking tired of living like this!” He screams. All he had wanted was to play with the other children. And instead he sat in a pool of blood, watching it flood out of the people who had murdered him.
Taehyung, when he thinks about most of his life, starts to wonder why he tries so hard to remain sane. But the truth was that he had tricked people into loving him, and he hoped to trick them again if he ever saw them. After all, while he had fooled them into thinking he was innocent, they had changed how he viewed the world. It was because of them that he no longer saw complicated, icy pathways. There were no red glares from dark forests, no roads made of sharp red spikes. No, there was only a golden brick pavement in which they had built.
He remembers the way his friends took him in. The way he had been homeless for months before Kim Seokjin began feeding him money. How, after two months of that, the man refused to let him stay outside in the brewing winter and had invited him to stay with him. He met all of the man’s friends rather quickly after that.
Seokjin made awful old man jokes and loved to cook for Taehyung. He was so surprised when Taehyung acted like he had never seen an egg before, but it was nothing compared to the shock he had when Taehyung then spat them out upon eating. He learned not to dislike Jin’s cooking, even if he just generally didn’t like eggs.
Hoseok would laugh and everybody laughed, and Taehyung stared at them in quiet awe for the longest time before he too burst out at the sound of Hobi’s laughter. He was truly his hope, a stupid phrase the man repeated all the time but somehow wormed his way into Taehyung’s heart.
Namjoon was too clumsy and awkward to be as flirty and perverse as he was, but it was a bad blend that did exist. He was respectful and smart, too, which lead to Taehyung admiring him greatly despite how deviantly he acted. He often lead and taught the group, and was always there to explain things to Taehyung, even give him advice. He was the only person Taehyung considered telling about the murders.
Yoongi was sarcastic and enraptured by music and, because of his passion that was easily translated into everything he did, Taehyung became enamoured with it too. He liked to sit behind Yoongi while the man was working and watch him compose the music for his underground rapping career. It fascinated him entirely.
Jimin was the reason Taehyung became comfortable with speaking again. He was caring and funny, didn’t push Taehyung, and genuinely loved the younger man. He could sense the heaviness in Taehyung that nobody else seemed to catch and treated him with sensitivity that Taehyung adored.
Jungkook.
Jungkook was his lover. His humanity, his world. He was sweet, awkward, caring, beautiful, and worried so much for Taehyung that it showed in almost all of his actions. He was cute, had the face of a baby and the body of a man. He was unbelievably talented and Taehyung didn’t realize how much he loved cuddles until he met Jungkook.
Jungkook was the reason Taehyung remembered.
He remembered waking up curled in Jungkook’s chest, morning light washing out their features as the other dozed sweetly above him.
He remembered how scared he was when he realized he loved Jungkook, but how Jungkook brushed all his fears away with one kiss.
He remembered how when they made love, it healed slowly the gruesome memories that always haunted him.
He remembered how Jungkook had, with the grace of a five year old with a crush, passed a ring box over the table at dinner. How he had opened the box and found a golden ring topped with a diamond, one that Jungkook had admitted was fake, but Taehyung loved it even more for that.
And he remembered saying yes.
Taehyung opens his eyes. He’s staring at the faces of his friends in the crowd, all of their eyes looking anywhere but at him. He was sitting in the witness stand in a mostly brown courtroom, and the lawyers were trying to grill him down, but when the time came, without a second thought he did what he thought was right.
“I’m guilty.”
He closes them again. He doesn’t think anything would have turned out much different if he had lied, but a part of him feels better about being honest. Partly so. He never admitted his motives. He never got a chance to tell his friends either- and a part of him is aware that they’ll long have forgotten him by the time he’s free, if he ever is.
Even Jungkook.
Murderers don’t get a second chance.