SCARRED | TK

Chapter Four

***

"But did you see the flares in the sky?
Were you blinded by the light?
Did you feel the smoke in your eyes?
Did you, did you?
Did you see the sparks filled with hope?
You are not alone
'Cause someone's out there, sending out flares."

The sound of his footsteps echoed around the empty hallway he was walking on, completely overwhelming the silence that dwelled in it. The building he was inside was extremely spacious, modern, and it looked like something taken out of those ancient films they were able to watch on their screens at times. At first, he hadn't even been able to perceive how something that looked like that could be real.

He didn't know what to think anymore—how to think. He wasn't sure if if he should've been nervous, angry or confused. All those feelings had somehow started to merge within him, offering him a state of panic and confusion he hasn't experienced before.

He did not understand how such a thing was real, could not understand, not until he would see it—that person, with his own eyes.

Once he was standing in front of the steel door, his destination, the young doctor stopped in his tracks, taking a deep breath at the same time in order to prepare himself for what was to come. His heart was pounding and his hands were sweating so much that he felt the need to wipe them off on his coat. Those were certainly the effects of the fear that had taken ahold of him. I shouldn't be afraid, he kept repeating in his mind as he unlocked the door and pushed it forward with shuddering legs.

As the door opened, his eyes were overwhelmed by a bright light from the far too white walls of the room, a burning pain making him squint a little as he tried to adjust his sight to the new environment. Once he could finally see, he moved his eyes around the room in search for that boy's body, finally finding it in a corner. The boy was sitting in the corner of the room, looking at the door, at him, with curious but shallow eyes. He seemed to have been sitting there for a long time, waiting for someone to come in like he knew they were supposed to—like he was waiting for them.

The doctor took a deep breath and approached him with small steps, watching carefully as the boy's black eyes slowly followed him.

Just like a predator.

He had expected him to be like that, withdrawn, blank, devoid of any sign of humanity, but the image in front of him was perhaps far too frightening. Those eyes, those dark eyes, looked lifeless, but somehow they seemed more humane than most of the looks he'd encountered during his life. He could clearly remember the voice of his friend, Seokjin, as he listed the things he should have expected in front of that boy.

Jeon Jeongguk was the only person believed to have been born immune to that virus but something was different about him, something that didn't have anything to do with the virus at all.

He showed no signs of illness, but rather signs of unseen abilities.

The doctor, who had been shown the boy's report a few hours prior, had felt surprise and shock fill his body up once he had come to learn that Jeongguk's blood was not pure, as everyone had initially thought, but was completely radiated and contaminated by the virus.

At that point, according to his medical report, Jeongguk should have been already dead but there he was, alive before him, and looking healthier than any other man on earth. The doctor had not understood why the boy was being held captive in a secure building if he could not be affected by the virus so Seokjin, the chief physician in that department, showed him another report.

Jeon Jeongguk, 6 years prior, on the exact day he had been found, had killed his own parents without even touching them. Apparently, the other doctors in that facility believed that the radiation levels he had been exposed to during his mother's pregnancy had made his brain work much faster—and better— than that of a normal person. If the brain of ordinary people worked only with 10% of its true power, Junkook's brain used over 70% of it, maybe even more.