Collision

Chapter 117

The world has always been a harsh place. You learn that early on. They tell you about it, sitting in your tiny desks, brains stuck on the idea of snack time and hoping it's a cookie with some of your favorite juice, and they tell you about the circle of life.

What comes around, goes around, or whatever those fucking lions sing about.

And it's true. Yoongi knew that. He knew that when he was only six years old, toddling around, facing the piano that stood over him. Firm. Grounding. The way his little fingers traced over the worn out brown wood, and pressed on ivory keys.

When he was six years old, he already loved the piano. He would press the keys and giggle at the sounds that rang out in the room. He loved it, but he walked away. He would always walk away, because the piano couldn't always hold his hand.

When he was seven years old, he learned what death was.

Death was loud sobbing over a phone, these heartbreaking wails of his parents as he hugged his brother tighter. His brother who cried silently, only little crystal tears that fell into his dark hair and whispered words if it's okay, Yoongi-yah. It's okay.

Death was a whirlwind of people, the color black around, and too many suffocating hugs of people he had only met once and didn't really recall or care to remember.

Death was whispers. Whispers of it was his heart and he was young, but such a good grandfather and, of course, his grandmother that smelled of mothballs holding his hand with tears running her makeup and the black clothes.

"Why is everyone crying? Where is grandpa?"

"Grandpa is up in Heaven now, sweetheart. It was his time to go."

"Go where? Grandpa doesn't go anywhere without you, granny."

"I couldn't go with him this time, love. He had to go somewhere far away, and not even I can go yet. But I will. Someday."

That "someday" was three years later, in her chair, clutching the picture of her husband that went ahead of her.

Yoongi understood death better, that time around.

When his brother had died, though, the whole idea of the circle of life became something bitter to taste. Along with the it was God's Will. He couldn't stand hearing that- hearing that God had taken his brother, or that his parents couldn't seem to find peace in hearing that, either, since they drowned their sorrows in other ways.

There was this part of him that hated his father. Hated the way that liquor became his saving grace, and drunk himself until his liver couldn't tell the difference between vodka and water.

When he was living on the streets, desperate to make a name for himself, he hated his parents just a little bit more. Hated the darkness that was swallowing him whole, keeping him locked in that dingy bathroom- forgetting how to breathe, how to speak, and when he did speak, he was spewing poison.

His anger at the world.

There was a lot of it, at the time.

I have never heard someone rap like you before," a tall, gangly man says. Young, so young, but his eyes were old. Knowledge resides within the soft brown irises, and Yoongi paused. "You rap to make the world listen."

"The world doesn't listen. That's the point," Yoongi had said, eyes narrowed into slits and fingers twitching to grip the cold knob and escape. "The world just takes and takes, and the people here take more and more."

"So, you rap?" the man continues, slight amusement glinting in those eyes smuged with kohl and his hair a stupid fucking bright pink. He looked familiar.