C52 - Soul-ed MATE

“It was you, all along.”

“I don’t know why anyone didn’t realize. When they found the equipment in the walls, I was sure they’d guess. Why would I only talk to the beautiful Minali when her lovely little son slept under the same roof every night?”

“Because they don’t think like you,” I whisper, horrified. Not only horrified at the man hanging in front of me, but at myself.

“Don’t blame yourself,” he says, sympathetic. “Repression is a powerful instinct. Much like fight-or-flight. You thought you could forget me.”

“Until you reminded me.”

I’m a little surprised that Yoongi left me here, even believing I needed a doctor. But I still won’t have much time. Maybe fifteen minutes? Until Yoongi reaches the Inferna and finds it in shambles. He might find Namjoon, still waiting on an ambulance, or only broken glass.

Either way, he’ll come right back here.

“I had hoped that you would come to me on your own. And then Min Yoongi took an interest in you. I knew I had to act or I would lose you forever.”

“You never had me.”

“Didn’t I?”

“Never,” I say, shocked by the sharpness of my voice. There’s rage inside me that I never even knew about, never dreamed about. Even in my nightmares I was afraid.

“Who taught you about your body? About your pretty pink nipples and the other things you were growing?”

My teeth clench together. “Shut your mouth.”

“Who told you to touch yourself to make it feel good? Which parts were soft and hard, which parts to pinch or stroke around?”

“You’re disgusting,” I hiss, my body remembering each pinch, each circle.

“You didn’t think so at the time. You said it felt good.”

“I was a child.”

He lifts one shoulder, arms still tied above his head. “What’s wrong with teaching a child about his body? What’s wrong with showing him what pleasure feels like?”

I pick up the poker, pressing it into the small bed of hot coals. They don’t look as red as when I came in, but they’ll have to do. Steam rushes from between the coals, nudged aside by the iron I hold. It’s heavier than I thought, but still not as hard or as sharp as I feel inside.

“Are you going to show me pleasure?” he asks, his voice low. He wants me to hurt him. We’re linked enough for me to know that about him. It feels like a loss, to give him what he wants, but it also feels like winning.

“I wasn’t afraid of you,” I tell him, holding the iron poker in the air.

“And I loved that about you,” he says, earnest, coaxing. “Little girls and boys run away from me. They know, without me ever speaking a word.”

My bitter laugh echoes off the grimy tile. “I guess that makes me a fool.”

“Don’t pretend,” he says, fierce. “Don’t pretend that you didn’t know what I was. You knew it was wrong. You knew enough to keep your mouth shut when you talked to your mother. She never knew that we talked.”

“I’m glad she never knew. Because she loved you.”

“She didn’t love me. Is that what your jealous father has you thinking? Or maybe that was you, coming up with tales. You always were a romantic.”

“Based on what I told you as a child?”

“Yes, based on that. It’s everything, those innocent words. So pure. But your mother only loved herself. Looking in the mirror, having the world fawn over her. She didn’t love me. She didn’t love your father.”

“Stop.”

“And she didn’t love you.”

“You would say anything to hurt me.”

“Come, little boy. You knew that already. You’ve always known.”

I hold the iron poker with both hands, ready to swing like a bat. “How much damage do you think this will do? How many times will I get to swing it? Five? Six? Or will you be dead on the first one?”

“Mama never pays attention to me,” he says in a strange, soft voice.

My voice, I realize.

“She only looks at me when I’m wearing a new dress. And then says I look just like her. But she doesn’t seem happy. She seems sad.”

He’s repeating my words back to me. Entire conversations a little kid might have had with an imaginary friend at a tea party. And I spoke with the voice in the wall, the disembodied man who told me he cared about me, who whispered things to try in the cover of night.

My hands grip the iron bar tighter, palms slick with sweat. “I really can’t decide whether I want to aim for your head or your heart. I mean, you deserve whatever will be most painful. Head, I think. But I should get satisfaction, too.”

“Satisfaction?” His gaze sharpens, his lips curl into a smile as he looked so much like Kim Taehyung that chills run down my spine. “Satisfaction for hurting the one man who cared about you most?”

“How dare you.”

“How dare I? It’s the truth. Stab my eye out if you want it to hurt the most. Jab the pointy end in my ass. There are countless ways to hurt me without killing me. I’ll walk you through them as long as I can talk. I’m excited for it, actually. It’s the first time we’ll be together like this. Intimate, of course.”

I’m horrified to realize that he is excited. His dress slacks bulge at the front with an erection. Pain makes him hard. The threat of it turns him on. And it would be sexual, with all that history behind us. Now that I’ve remembered all of it, I can’t stop thinking about it.

Are you getting bigger, little boy? Are your lips plump? Nipples pink enough? One day you’ll surpass your mother’s beauty. Your mother’s very lovely. All the men look at her, don’t they? One day they’ll look at you like that. One day they’ll fight for you the way they do for her.

I understand how Pandora felt, bearing the burden of knowledge that she didn’t ask for, pained with the vengeance of gods who created her, her very existence a punishment.

A footstep echoes from behind me. Without turning I know who it is. “You never left?”

His voice is gentle as he takes the iron poker from my hand.

“Never.” Yoongi pulls me into his arms as I begin to weep.

He heard everything, so he knows what happened to me as a child. That the only person I learned to trust was the one who betrayed me, that the only man who cared enough to try was a dangerous predator. That hurts the most. Not that he loved me, in his dangerous and obsessive way. That he was the only one.

I sob against Yoongi’s shirt, dampening the fabric beneath my cheeks. “Please.”

“No, Jimin.”

“He deserves it.”

“Yes, but I heard you before. That it would destroy me to torture him. To kill him. And I have more experience in the language of violence. What would it do to you?”

“I need to be destroyed,” I beg. “Like the marble. Broken apart.”

He pulls me in closer, cradling me in his strong arms. “I’m not going to let that happen. Understand? You’re mine to protect. Whole. Strong. Beautiful, inside and out.”

“I’m not whole,” I say, breath shuddering. “You know what he did.”

“He toyed with a child. He played with your mind. He fcuked with you the way he fcuks with everyone, because he’s sick. It doesn’t taint you, Jimin. Not even the auction can do that.” He pulls back, pressing the back of his hand on my chest. “None of it touches you here.”

“I blocked it out,” I whisper. “All of it.”

“I know.”

“How long?”

“I knew you were hiding something. From me. And from yourself. I didn’t know what.”

“Go away, Min.” Kim Yongdae rattles the chains, making a creaking sound. “He and I aren’t finished here. You can have him when I’m done with.”

Yoongi’s eyes are bronze and dispassionate as they gaze at Kim. “Your hold on him was over the moment he left that house. You’re done with him long back.”

“Oh, and you have a hold on him? I can make him do anything I want. You think I talked to him for years and never figured out how his mind works. Never planted any little trap doors.”

I stiffen. “What are you talking about?”

“Why do you think you went to my son for help? Of all the gin joints in all the world? You went to Kim Taehyung, a man who isn’t exactly known for being charitable.”

“That was a coincidence.”

“Or your obsession with Greek mythology.”

“No,” I whisper, but I remember now. The stories he would tell me.

“Oh yes. How the titan god Cronus was so paranoid and so jealous that he feared every child would take his throne. So, every time his wife gave birth, he swallowed the child.”

The words spill from me, more wound than salve. “When she gave birth to her last child, she gave Cronus a rock swaddled in cloth instead. And she sent the child away.”

“That god grew up to be Zeus.” Kim Yongdae laughs, his eyes crinkling in a way that reminds me of Taehyung. “I was never humble enough to be anyone else.”

“You’re not a god at all.”

“Of course, he was raised by nymphs, fed honey and milk on the island of Crete. A much better childhood than a ward of the state in an experimental mental institution.”

I swallow hard. “You grew up here?”

“Home sweet home.”

“That’s sick,” I whisper.

“How many children do you suppose Zeus had?” he says, studying me. “They would be demigods. Half human. Half gods.”

I take a step back. “You’re lying.”

“Perhaps,” he says vaguely, but I know the truth. I was never my father’s child.

“Oh, my sweet little son. You had known all along that you belonged to me. In and out”

“I’m not your son.”

“You are and you always were.”

And maybe he always knew that. Some part of me always knew we were different, always knew that I had to work to ingratiate myself with him, learning chess and hosting his parties like the perfect omega. It doesn’t even matter now.

Because the man who is my biological father? He’s the one who whispered to me about bodies and pleasures. He’s the one who taught me how to make myself...cum.

Taste it, he said from the darkness of night. I’m sure you’re sweet.

I answered back: Not sweet. Salty.

A laugh filled the room. That means you’re all grown up.

My stomach churns, and I’m afraid I’m going to throw up. There’s nothing in there. I haven’t eaten in hours, but then my diaphragm spasms and I bend over, gagging.

“Go outside,” Yoongi says in a low voice. “I’ll take care of him.”

I manage to straighten, still breathing hard. “By killing him?”

“Don’t think about it.”

“I am thinking about it. You can’t. I mean you can but—don’t. For me.”

His eyebrows lower. “You’re asking for his life?”

“Please.”

I don’t know whether I want Kim Yongdae to live because he’s my biological father or because killing him would irreparably harm Min Yoongi. All I know is that if this night ends in death, my soul will be imprinted with this night.

“It will break me,” I whisper.

Yoongi is silent a moment. “Go outside. I promise not to kill him.”

I eye the torture implements strewn over the broken tiles. “What will you do?”

“I’ll make him go away. If that’s what you want.”

“But how? You said the prisons couldn’t hold him.”

“He already told us the answer. We put him in a mental institution. That’s where he belongs.”

“Won’t the people who helped him out of jail help him out of that?”

“Only if they know where to find him. He isn’t the only one with influence. If you want him to stay alive, then he can spend his days in a psych ward at the far corner of the world, his name changed, where most of the nurses don’t even speak English. He’ll be drugged. Restrained. God knows he’ll fail any test they put in front of him.”

I glance at Kim Yongdae, at the endless network of scars on his body. “I know he’s evil. What he did to my mother, what he did to me. Even Jungkook. For that he deserves anything that happens to him, but…”

“They won’t torture him,” Yoongi says gently. “He’s been through enough of that.”

“What about the price on my head?”

“I’ll call it off,” Kim Yongdae says, his voice rough. “There’s a number. A code word.”

“Why?” I ask softly.

“It was never about killing you. My own flesh and blood? It was closing off the exits.”

Like the hedge maze on Yoongi’s estate, this one built around me, with guns instead of branches.

“How do I know it’s real?” Yoongi asks, expression hard. “The code word.”

“You don’t. I guess you’ll just have to trust me.”

I put my hand on Yoongi’s arm. “It’s okay, Yoongi. I’m not afraid.”

And for once that’s not a lie. I’m not afraid of dying, because I’m more afraid of living. It isn’t Yoongi who’s going to survive.

It’s me.

Yoongi murmurs something about handling the logistics of moving Kim Yongdae. I think I manage to respond back coherently.

Then I walk out the front door and cross the cracked lawn with its thick- stemmed weeds. My knees hit the earth a second before vomit presses into my throat.

I throw up everything and nothing beside a sign with faded lettering that reads Suburbia, an Asylum.

!!~~~~!!!!~~~~!!