Chapter 115

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Flashback #7

Jungkook’s eyes fluttered open. Slowly. Heavily. Like even his eyelids had forgotten how to work properly.

The first thing he registered was white. White ceiling. White walls. The quiet, steady beeping of machines beside him. An oxygen mask sitting over his nose. IVs running into both arms.

He lay there for a moment, blinking against the light. Then the memory came back. The pills. The water. Lying down. Closing his eyes.

I should be dead by now.

The thought arrived quietly. Simply. And with it came something he hadn’t expected disappointment. Heavy and sharp and pressing down on his chest with a weight that had nothing to do with the medication still moving through his body.

He was still here.

Still breathing.

Still alive.

The tears came before he could do anything about them not from sadness exactly, but from a frustration so deep and exhausting that it had nowhere else to go. He was so tired. He had been so tired for so long. And even this even this hadn’t worked.

He lifted his hand.

It felt like lifting something that weighed a hundred kilograms. He got it there eventually fingers closing around the oxygen mask and pulled it away from his face slowly.

He tried to sit up.

The dizziness hit him like a wall. The room tilted violently and his hands shot out, gripping the bedsheet with both fists, squeezing his eyes shut and waiting for the world to stop moving. His hair long and dark and silky fell forward across his face.

He sat up anyway.

He looked down at his right arm. At the IV lines running into his wrist. He reached over and pulled them out one sharp, graceless motion and barely registered the sting of it. The blood ozed down.

He moved to stand.

The door opened.

Hyunwoo stepped in and the moment his eyes landed on Jungkook sitting upright on the edge of the bed, IV removed, oxygen mask discarded he was across the room in seconds.

“Hey! hey, Kook-ah…” His hands closed around Jungkook’s shoulders, steadying him. “You’re in the hospital. You need to stay lying down”

Jungkook whimpered at the contact a small, involuntary sound and immediately tried to push Hyunwoo’s hands away. Weak. Barely any force behind it. But trying.

“You are not okay,” Hyunwoo said firmly, holding on. “Your body is exhausted. Please sit down. Please….”

Jungkook pushed again. Couldn’t get free. He looked up. And Hyunwoo saw it.

A tear.

Just one at first running down a face which be hadn’t shown anything in almost a full year. The face that had been blank and closed and unreachable for so long that Hyunwoo had begun to grieve the expressions it used to make.

Then another tear fell. And another.

“Kook-ah…” Hyunwoo’s voice cracked immediately. His own eyes filled. “I’m here. Samchoon is right here with you”

Jungkook shook his head. Small and desperate and lost.

And then he broke.

The sound that came out of him was raw and loud and completely unguarded a wail that tore up from somewhere deep inside him, from wherever he had been storing everything for the past year, from every day of silence and pain and nothingness that had been building and building with nowhere to go.

He cried loud. He cried hard. He cried like a child because underneath everything, that was exactly what he still was.

Hyunwoo didn’t hesitate for a single second.

He pulled Jungkook into his arms completely, fully, wrapping around him and held on tight. Jungkook buried his face in his samchoon’s chest and just let it all come. All of it. Everything he had locked away and pressed down and refused to feel for three hundred and sixty five days.

It all came out now.

“I’m here, I am here” Hyunwoo said over and over, his own tears falling into Jungkook’s hair, his arms holding that small, broken, eighteen year old boy as tightly as he dared. “I’m right here. You’re going to be okay. Samchoon is here. I’m not going anywhere.”

He held him. And let him cry. For as long as it took.

But for a moment Hyunwoo’s movements stilled. Because Jungkook was speaking.

After almost a year of complete silence after three hundred and sixty five days of nothing his mouth was forming words. Broken, fractured, barely held together but words.

“I… I… I d-don’t want to….” Jungkook’s voice came out hoarse and rough, scraped raw from disuse. It didn’t sound like him. It didn’t carry any trace of the soft, warm, bubbly voice that had once filled rooms so easily. This was something hollowed out. Something that had been left alone in the dark for too long. “I don’t wa-want t-to l-live….”

Hyunwoo’s tears fell faster.

He pulled back just enough to cup Jungkook’s face in both hands gently, carefully tilting it up so he could see him properly.

“Why don’t you want to, hmm?” he asked softly. “Tell samchoon.”

Jungkook shook his head. Just crying. Just shaking. “I… I… I am s-sc-scared”

“Of what, Kook-ah?” Hyunwoo kept his voice low and steady, even as everything inside him was breaking. “Who are you scared of, hmm?”

Jungkook’s breath hitched. He struggled with it for a moment the words catching, stuttering, fighting their way out.

“A-ap-appa….” he managed. “I… I d-don’t want him…. H-he… He made me…. He made me k-ki-kill…. He m-made me a k-killer….”

He dissolved back into crying harder now, the words having cost him enormously.

“Okay.” Hyunwoo nodded, thumbs moving gently across Jungkook’s wet cheeks. “Okay. You don’t have to live with him anymore. Hmm? That’s okay.” A pause. “Are you scared of samchoon?”

Jungkook looked at him. Then slowly very slowly shook his head. “W-wh-what if….” He struggled. Swallowed. Tried again. “What if he m-makes me k-kill you t-too?”

“He won’t.” Hyunwoo said it with complete certainty. No hesitation. “He will never do that. I promise you.” He held Jungkook’s face steady. “What if we lived together just us two in samchoon’s apartment? No guards. No maids. No appa.” He searched Jungkook’s eyes. “Just you and samchoon. Would that be okay?”

Jungkook stared at him for a long moment. Then he nodded. Small and exhausted and tentative but real.

“That’s it then.” Hyunwoo smiled watery and broken but certain. “You’ll live with me. No one else. And nothing is going to happen to you. Nothing is going to happen to anyone. I promise.”

Jungkook’s lip trembled. “R-really?”

“Really.” A pause. The smallest pause.

“P-promise?” Hyunwoo let out a breath that was almost a laugh soft and devastated and full of love all at once. He lifted his hand and held out his pinky finger.

Jungkook looked at it for a moment. Then slowly, with a hand that was still trembling he lifted his own and wrapped it around Hyunwoo’s.

Hyunwoo pulled him back in immediately. Both arms around him, holding him close tucking Jungkook’s head against his shoulder, pressing his cheek against his hair, his own tears falling freely now and making no effort to stop them.

“I’m here, hmm?” His voice was heavy and cracking and barely holding its shape. “Samchoon is always here. Always. Everything is going to be okay. Everything is going to be fine.”

Jungkook just cried into his shoulder.

After a long moment, Hyunwoo gently broke the hug. He kept both hands on Jungkook’s face cradling it, tilting it up and looked at him properly. At this boy. This child who had been through more than anyone should survive and was somehow still here.

“My baby,” he said softly. “Don’t ever think about leaving us again, hmm? You have me. You have people who are waiting for you who need you here. Please.”

Jungkook held his gaze. Tears still streaming. “I… I h-hate myself….” he whispered. The words came out small and broken and ashamed. “I… I am d-di-disgusting….”

“No.” Hyunwoo’s response was immediate firm and gentle in equal measure, shaking his head without a single moment of hesitation. “No. You are the most precious thing in our lives. Do you hear me? Don’t you ever call yourself that.” He held his face a little tighter. “Samchoon is here. You are not alone. Not anymore.”

He leaned forward and pressed his lips gently to Jungkook’s forehead.

Jungkook closed his eyes. The tears kept falling quietly now, slowly but the desperate, wrenching quality of them had softened into something else. Something that wasn’t peace exactly, but was perhaps the very first edge of it.

Outside the room, on the other side of the door, Kim stood there.

He had been there for a while. Long enough to have heard most of it. Long enough to have heard his son’s voice for the first time in a year broken and hoarse just to hear that his own son is scared of him and to have stood there in the corridor and taken every word of it without making a sound.

He didn’t move for a long moment. Then, slowly, he took one step back. Then another.

And he turned and walked away down the corridor alone, and quietly, without anyone seeing him go.

(End of flashbacks)

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“After that day he came to live with me. I didn’t allow hyung to see him. Not once. Not for a long time.” Hyunwoo’s voice was quieter now. Like he was getting to the part that had cost him the most to carry.

“The first few months were rough. He still got panic attacks a lot of them. Some severe. His hospital visits lessened a little as time passed. Slowly he started coming out of his room. He would watch TV. Listen to music. Play music. He started reading. Little things. Quiet things.” A pause.

“It took a full year for him to find something close to normal again. He started school again. He went back to the mafia. He didn’t speak much not to anyone, and especially not to hyung. But he spoke. That was enough.”

He folded his hands together.

“Hyung didn’t touch him that entire year. He didn’t make him suffer. He gave him that much, at least.” His jaw shifted slightly. “But before coming her like 4 months before Hyung wanted him living in the mansion again. And Jungkook went. He went back without hesitation and tantrums.” Hyunwoo’s voice dropped lower.

“And hyung sent me abroad again. But this time Jungkook didn’t lock himself away. He didn’t go silent. He spoke sometimes. He smiled rarely. Maybe two or three times a year, if that.”

The room was completely silent.

“But then he came here.” Something shifted in Hyunwoo’s expression. Something that wasn’t quite a smile but carried the memory of relief.

“And here…. he smiled. Really smiled. He laughed. He opened up. He started speaking the way he used to speak before all of it. And when you took him to noona’s parents’ home….” he stopped briefly.

“He me he had enjoyed it. That he was truly happy there.” He looked down. “But even then even in the middle of all that the guilt never left him. Smiling made him feel like he didn’t deserve to. Laughing made him feel like he was forgetting something he had no right to forget.”

He exhaled slowly.

“And I am so sorry. For hiding all of it. For every single day I kept Suho’s death from you. For keeping what hyung was doing from you. For keeping Jungkook’s pain from you.” His voice cracked slightly just at the edges. “I regretted it every day. Every single day. But I….”

He stopped.

Looked at Jin directly. Who sat completely still no emotions.

“The first time Jungkook attempted suicide I thought about bringing him to you. I genuinely did. But you had just started smiling again after years of pushing yourself through your own grief. You were just beginning to recover. And I couldn’t….” he shook his head.

“I couldn’t be the one to take that from you. I can’t watch any of my boys suffer. You seven…” his voice thickened “I see all seven of you as my sons. Every single one of you. And those three years I spent away from my own work, my own life it was for him. For my nephew. Because someone had to stay.”

He paused. Let the weight of that settle.

Then he continued and his voice steadied, carrying something urgent and certain underneath the grief.

“Right now he is shocked. He is angry. He is drowning in guilt. And in his mind, he has gone back to being that sixteen year old boy on the floor of that basement.” He looked around the room at every face, every pair of red-rimmed eyes looking back at him.

“He had even got five panic attacks in a single day. He hides every pain from everyone around him he would rather suffer in silence than let anyone see it. He hates the scars on his body. He hates being touched. For years, being touched meant pain that was all it meant.”

His voice dropped.

“But when you touch him….” He looked at Jin. Then at the others. “He relaxes. In the exact place where he used to panic he relaxes. The healing that I could not manage in four years of trying…” a single tear slipped down his face, and he didn’t wipe it “you did in ten months which I couldn’t do it in years. Just by being there. Just by being his family.”

He held Jin’s gaze.

“So don’t think that he ki-killed suhi…. It wasn’t his fault.” His voice was quiet and absolute and completely certain. “It wasn’t him.”

He stopped speaking. The room stayed silent.

And Jin sat there eyes dry, jaw tight, hands still folded in his lap listening to the last of it settle over him like something he would never be able to put down.

The room was filled with silence except for the quiet sounds of sniffling, of breath being held and released, of grief being swallowed back down.

Then a broken sob cut through it. Not from any of them. Everyone turned.

Eunwoo. Lying in his hospital bed, face crumpled, tears streaming freely crying in the open, unguarded way of someone who had been trying to hold it together and simply couldn’t anymore.

Haein was beside him in seconds, wiping her own face as she moved. “Eunwoo-ya, what’s wrong? Hey…”

Eunwoo reached his arms out toward her wordlessly, just reaching and she gathered him in without hesitation. He pressed his face into her shoulder and held on.

“I heard it,” he wept. “I heard everything…. Jungkook…. He was depressed…. He wasn’t fine…. He was never fine…. And we weren’t there with him.” His voice broke on the last words. “We weren’t there with him.”

We weren’t there with him. The words moved through the room and landed in Jin like something sharp.

“I wasn’t with him…….” He said it barely above a whisper. To no one. To himself. His breathing had grown shallow without him noticing short and tight and not quite reaching the bottom of his lungs.

He stood up slowly. And walked out.

No one stopped him. They all watched him go and a moment later Yoongi rose quietly from his chair and followed.

Jin walked until he found an empty hallway. He didn’t go far just far enough. He stopped at the wall and leaned his back against it, staring at the ceiling, trying to breathe properly and failing.

“I… I wasn’t there with him….” he said again. Louder this time. Like saying it out loud was the only way to make himself believe it. His eyes welled up slowly.

“He was suffering. He was depressed. He tried to…. he tried to end his own life and I was… I was just living my own life thinking he was fine. Thinking he was happy. And…. I was la-laughing and giggling when my… My brother was on the verge of death….” His voice shattered. And the tears fell.

“What did he ever do to deserve any of that? What did he do? He was just a child. He was just my baby”

His legs gave out.

He slid down the wall and collapsed onto the floor, and the crying that came out of him silent yet still broken and completely without restraint, his whole body shaking with it, hands pressed over his face, shoulders heaving.

He felt arms come around him. It was Yoongi.

Dropping down beside him, pulling him in, not saying anything yet just there. Solid and present and not leaving.

“Yoongi-ya……” Jin’s voice came through his hands. “I was such a bad hyung…. My Kookie…. he was suffering through all of that and I thought he was happy. I genuinely thought he was happy.” He pressed his fists against his eyes. “What did he ever do to deserve that? What did he do, Yoongi-ah? What did any of them do to him? Ahh waree?”

Yoongi held him tighter. His own tears were falling now quiet and steady, dropping into Jin’s hair.

“He…he will be fine, hyung,” he managed. His voice was rough and cracking but he held it together because someone had to, and right now that someone was him. “We are with him now. We are right here now. That’s what matters….”

Jin only cried harder.

The sobs came in waves each one subsiding slightly before the next one pulled him back under. Yoongi held on through all of it, one hand on his back, one arm around his shoulders, keeping him anchored.

Then, gradually the crying slowed.

And then Yoongi felt it the weight against him shifting, increasing, going heavy in the particular way that had nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with consciousness leaving.

He pulled back instinctively. Jin’s head lolled against his shoulder. Eyes closed with tears wet on his lashes. Body completely limp.

“Hyung…” Yoongi grabbed his face with both hands. “Hyung! Look at me hyung” Nothing.

“HYUNG” His voice echoed down the empty hallway. Jin had fainted in his arms.

Well well! How are you all? I genuinely cried when jin cried tho!

And everything is know to them now. What is going to happen!?

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Some comments like bang Kim’s head and also that hyunwoo  feeding Kim and Kim throwing tantrums was just peak! 🤣

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