Falling || Taejin

Chapter 12

It was so cold.

Taehyung's bones shivered and his skin was spotted with a thousand goosebumps. His fingertips had gone numb long ago and his mind was registering nothing but the chilly air that slithered through the miniscule window on the wall right below the ceiling. He didn't even find the strength to close it because the weight of the chains around his wrists and ankles felt heavier that night.

He slowly folded his wings around him like he did every night to shield himself from the freezing cold. He had really forgotten how torturously cold the nights were in the Light realm even in the middle of summer.

After a lot of wincing, his wings wrapped themselves around him like a cocoon, except that the butterfly inside it did not wish to emerge at all.

He had forgotten how to sleep properly (sleeping only at the break of dawn) because all he could do at night was stare at the walls which had become his canvas. He would collect shards of broken pots or bits of brick or rocks and scrape them against the walls to distract his mind. He had lost track of time.

He did not know how long it had been since he had walked- yes, walked back to the Light realm and turned himself in.

He traced the feathers with his finger, smiling in a dazed manner because he was proud of how invincible those wings were. They had tried to break them but the bones mended themselves, tried to tear off every feather but they grew back within a few hours, tried to cut them off but the blades split in half.

Seokjin had given him warriors.

Seokjin...

They wanted to imprison Seokjin as well but Taehyung swore up and down after being injected by a truth serum that Seokjin was oblivious to his crimes. He was thrown into jail right afterwards so Taehyung did not know if they bothered Seokjin later on.

There hasn't been a day that passed without Taehyung's mind straying off to Seokjin. His heart ached every time Seokjin's face swam in front of his eyes- his crestfallen face, his eyes that shrouded his emotions by rising new facades, his hollow voice, his hands slipping out of Taehyung's... Their last moments together were bitter.

" No, not our last moments ," Taehyung resolved in his mind.

He would return to his Seokjin.

_________

"What is so hard about chopping wood?! Chop faster!"

Taehyung wanted to throw his axe at the jailer. He gritted his teeth and brought the axe down on the log with newly profound energy generated from anger. His body was absolutely drenched from working tirelessly under the blazing sun for the past two hours. Everytime his arms would feel like giving up, the jailor would bark some snarky comment that would fill him with enough rage to chop the dead tree faster.

"Pile them up! What are you waiting for?!"

The prisoners began to stack the logs on their arms before flying up to the storage shed attached to the fourth floor of the prison building. Taehyung, on the other hand, took the stairs. He had convinced himself that he would not use his wings until he was worthy of Seokjin's forgiveness even if that meant having to labour three times harder than everyone else.

He could feel eyes on him everytime he refused to fly, as if having black wings alone did not draw enough attention already. But he didn't care. He loved those wings because Seokjin gave them to him, he loved them because they were a mirror image of Seokjin's wings. And that's why he loved to wrap them around himself when he was alone in his cell or just sitting in a corner of the prison yard.