MALEVOLENT HEART | TK

Chapter Nine

Trigger warning: mentions of child abuse; blood

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"You've got me surrounded
It feels like I'm drowning
And I don't want to come up for air
I lost everything
I threw myself in and you took me
Where no one was there."

The world around him had collapsed long ago.

Being there was not as reassuring and comfortable as he would've thought. There, he had food. There, he wasn't forced to listen to the sound of glass breaking, to the sound of his mother—who wasn't even his mother—get beaten up every night. In that place, in what everyone seemed to call Hell, Kim Taehyung thought he would find his Paradise. It was the closest thing to peace he's ever experienced, the closest thing to home. He thought that, after getting away from that place he had spent his childhood in, he'd finally find a home.

He didn't.

He never had a home. He didn't even know if he'd ever get to experience the feeling of one.

The place in which he had spent his childhood was never his home and those people weren't his parents. At that time, Taehyung didn't know that. In the mind of the five years old child, the man and woman shouting outside his room every night were his parents. As he hid under the dirty covers and cried, begged for them to stop, he wondered if all families were like that. He used to wonder if all children starved every day, only to beg for food and get beaten up for being disrespectful.

He used to wonder if he could ever get away from there.

From his own Hell.

Taehyung never expected to get away. He never thought he'd be able to. He stayed there, hidden in a room, for two more years, before a glint of hope appeared in the form of an unknown teenage boy. The cottage Taehyung was kept in was deep into the woods, he had realized that as time passed and his childish mentality was ripped away from him, overtaken by a sense of maturity no child his age should've had. It was hidden deep into the woods and there was no way to contact the outside world, he had tried before and, after getting a few broken ribs and a bruised body for doing so, he had decided to never try again.

By then, Taehyung had realized that those weren't his parents and that he certainly wasn't their child.

Memories had come to his mind, slowly, but steadily. His brain, too undeveloped to realize what had happened to him when he was only four years of age, had pushed those memories away in an attempt to protect itself from long lasting mental damage. However, as time passed, those memories resurfaced, reminding Taehyung that he wasn't supposed to be there.

He had been kidnapped at the age of four while he was playing in the back garden of their house. His parents were of high status in their world, he couldn't remember who they were or what their job was, but he knew that, whenever he went outside, wherever he went, tall men dressed in suits would always follow him. He was never alone but, that day, someone made a mistake. They turned around for a second—a second was all it took for Taehyung to disappear into the woods in search of butterflies, a second was all it took for his life to be snatched away.

His kidnappers were the people who often visited that cottage. Sometimes they came in groups, other times there was only one person who brought him water, food and books for Taehyung to entertain himself. He wasn't sure how, maybe he had learned along the way or maybe he had been taught before his kidnapping, but he knew how to read. So he read because there was nothing else he could do. No matter how much he tried, Taehyung was too young, to weak and malnourished to run and find help.