✔ Far Cry | JJK x OC

✔Chapter 37 // Reflection

"He's awake!"

Jungkook sat up in the improvised bed and saw people raising their glasses to celebrate his waking up before returning to their affairs. Next to him, the apprentice was taking care of the tools while the priest who tattooed him was nowhere to be seen.

His left arm was stinging in multiple places and he raised it to see it. Just above his elbow, a dark stripe circled it with jungle motifs. Carefully in between, three little figures showed: a heron, a shark, and a spider. He didn't linger on the meaning because he heard a quiet painful moan.

He turned to the side and saw Leah still lying down on her bed and the priest still doing his work on her. Jungkook got up and stood at Leah's feet and his chin dropped. The old priest's eyes were completely white as if his eyes had rolled inside his head. He was frantically murmuring something while his hands systematically punctured Leah's skin with a wooden bone chisel. The wood was engraved with jungle patterns, and the bone was like a needle, only thicker. The apprentice was keeping Leah's skin taught.

His eyes dropped to her tatau; it was far more complex than his. Leah was being held on her right side to expose her left side with her arm held up. In her skin, delicate black lines formed as if sprouting from inside her. These lines waved beautifully in all directions and it was clear that at points they were stems and at times waves. Some of these lines disappeared onto her back, which he couldn't see, but what the priest was so arduously working on now was her front. Not too far from where everything sprouted, her lines actually moved upwards in the form of a stem that ended in a flower he had seen before. The flower was marked on her ribs before it could reach her bikini line.

Leah moaned again and Jungkook quickly grabbed her left hand over her head. She couldn't move now. He leaned forward and saw that she was waking up.

"Hm..." She was uncomfortable and he knew it. "Is it done?"

He was conflicted; he had decided to do this and was ready to face the consequences. His tatau wasn't even that impressive or flashy, he was fine with it, but Leah's was... a statement. He thought she'd also have a small one, why was that happening? Should he stop it? But then it would be incomplete and that would be worse than never doing it at all. Ella said the tatau was like a rite of passage and that whoever failed to complete it would not be allowed to fix it in order to wear their shame for the rest of their lives. She said it jokingly because it hardly ever happened, yet he couldn't condemn Leah to something like that.

He squeezed her hand and brushed her hair out of her face. "Not yet, just a little longer..." he murmured. He would pay whatever would be necessary for her to remove it once they were back. It was the least he could do.

For a while, that system worked: him gently stroking her hair while holding her hand. However, as the medicine wore off, her pain increased significantly and it was hard for her not to move. He was surprised she wasn't asking more questions about it; instead, she bit her lip hard and used her left arm to cover her face as she waited for it to be done.

Time passed as the flower became more and more perfect, every single trace exactly where it should be. The priest stopped then and sat in the chair behind him with his eyes closed as if thoroughly exhausted. The apprentice rushed to apply a balm on Leah before carefully helping the elder up and guiding him off the improvised stage. Jungkook recognized the apprentice that had worked on him come back and help clean everything up.

He stroked Leah's hair one last time and murmured against her forehead, "It's done."

She sat up, eyes blinking with confusion and a grimace that revealed her pain. It was more a sting than actual pain. She looked down at herself and her world turned upside down. It wasn't possible. She was in complete shock.