Raw [Vkook]

114: Backstory

Mount Everest - Labrinth

As a kid, Taehyung was never given the chance to be a regular little boy.

He was raised by his mother and father, had a little brother that came a few years after, and they seemed like the perfect family from an outside perspective.

That's what Taehyung wanted to believe, praised actually, manipulated himself to engrave in his head.

Yeah, Taehyung loved his family.

He really did.

The only problem was, he hated the business.

Mafia business that is.

Since it would make everyone angry.

By the time Taehyung was five years old, he has stopped crying for little things. Not even for big things either. He just stopped crying in general. Get scolded every time he would cry has became a punishment he dreaded to face, far more than the pain he received at the moment that made him cry in the first place.

If he was going to be the leader of this empire, he had to not show weakness.

He had to suck it in.

So, whenever he would want to cry, he would tie his tiny wrists with a nylon rope and ask his parents to slap his hands as a reminder that crying meant he will get hurt.

And they did it.

With a ruler.

He had to do this process every day for three years before he managed to get electric cuffs instead, torturing himself whenever he wanted to cry with a simple press of a button down to remember that being emotional meant he will get hurt.

That he will be weak.

That he won't be a man.

He won't be a leader.

When Taehyung turned eight years old, he saw someone get tortured for the first time. In his basement, by one of the goons - who wanted to teach the young heir how to be a strong leader when someone messes with him.

The victim was a small boy like him, who he never has met in his life. The boy pleaded him, crying hysterically to let him go.

Right before they began to hurt him.

With every scream the victim eased out of their lips, Taehyung swallowed it down while pressing on the button of the cuffs to not feel anything. To not let the screams get to him as the boy got kicked on the abdomen repeatedly, filling the room with the cracks of his bones when they would snap a rib or his spine.

Because if he cried, he would get hurt.

And if he's going to be strong, he has to take it in.

Every single pain.

That's all he thought about just as the boy took his last breath of life before his eyes.

Being raised as a mafia kid meant having a heart of stone, and after Taehyung's first kill at the age of eleven - through a fit of rage when a boy aggressively slapped his little brother at the playground down the street - he felt his heart not only turn to stone.

But become ruthless with this new emotion of anger than pain.

After his first kill, Taehyung's training began.

At times in the midst of his training, he would wonder what life would be like if he was just a regular kid. Would he be able to feel things again? Would he explode in rage because of the time he wasn't able to express his feelings? Or would he genuinely be happy?