HIT

Epilogue

"Hello, Jimin," Dr. Park greeted him with a smile.

"Hello, Doctor."

"How are you doing today?" It was always the same question at the start of their sessions, and still Jimin had trouble answering it every single time. Because this was not just a nicety, this was an honest interest in how he was doing, and he was not sure about that.

After an intense week of questioning regarding his time undercover and the things he had learned there, all under the surveillance of Dr. Park who would stop the ordeal in case she noticed his discomfort, they had finally let him go to rest and recuperate. Apart from transferring back to the patrol department this consisted mainly of him working on his fear to sleep without checking every door and window twice before going to bed. They had been able to talk down the unreasonable fear to an amount where he just checked the door twice.

"Fine, I suppose," he answered. Waking up every morning at six and going to the station for sorting through files of traffic violations and pending speeding fines was relaxing. It had helped him to find a rhythm that he had been unable to establish for a while after coming back from undercover work. He did not miss the pictures of corpses and blood, yet. He was sure that there would come a point when he would want to do something more again, but he would tackle that problem once it would arise. White collar crimes were a busy bunch, so maybe he could go there.

"You suppose?" she asked with a risen eyebrow.

"I feel normal most of the time. I meet with colleagues after work, go out with friends," he replied. There was a damper over his emotions. At first, he had been angry most of the time, snapping at Dr. Park and at his colleagues, but now he was too calm. It was like back when his grandma had passed away, so he assumed that it would go away with time.

The doc sighed but nodded. "How is the progress on the door checking?" she wanted to know.

"I'm still doing it," he admitted without shame. She had told him that he did not need to be ashamed of anything in front of her. Fears that resulted from a trauma were hard to come by and many people were plagued with it.

"Do you want to proceed with working on that, or should we leave it be from now on? Because I think this is at a level where it does not influence you negatively anymore and time will help," she stated.

Jimin nodded. He could manage the rest. After all, the triads were after Yoongi and not after him.

"So, what about the guilt you talked of last time? Did you think about what I said?" she proceeded with the topic they had started at their last session.

Jimin had mentioned to her that he felt guilty about having killed a man. He had rolled it over in his head for a long time, but since his life had not been threatened, had never been threatened because Taehyung had chosen him to help them, he felt like a murderer and not like someone who had acted in self-defense. What made it much worse was how easily he had been talked into thinking that he was doing something good by ending some human trash. He was disgusted by himself for that.

So with no idea how to handle that, he had brought it to Dr. Park. The lady had pointed out to him that between being a murderer and acting in self-defense, there was still self-preservation. In a situation where one could not know how great the danger for the own person was, it was excusable to go along with whatever to protect oneself.

Emphasizing that he had not known about the criminals' plans of using him back then, she had left him to think about this, and it had somewhat eased his guilt, but it still could not change anything about the fact that he had opened his mind so easily to the manipulative words of a dangerous man.