MERCENARY 3: Descent into Madness |BTS JIMIN FF|

109

RAIN POV

'What are you doing?' I laughed through my rapid breaths, watching him for some reason slap himself

'Just checking.' He murmurs incoherently

'Checking what?'

'If I'm alive.'

Finding some bits of my miserable strength, I pulled myself over to lay on his chest. Draping my arm around his waist and slipping my leg to lay comfortably between his, I laced his chest with kisses.

'It does feel crazy, doesn't it?' I murmur as I lay on him. 'After everything, after all the shit, it's hard to believe that we made it out.'

He turned slowly on his side, letting my head slip down and settle on his arm. His other hand slipped to my knee, lifting it slightly to hook it around his hips, making us face each other fully.

'Sometimes...' he started, his voice quiet and soft, '... I wake up... and it takes me a good half an hour of looking at you sleeping next to me to, just to try and convince myself that you're really there.' His hand traced up my leg, over my hip, over the side of my body, and slipped to my back. His fingers gently caressed the scar, tracing the cut. 'I have to convince myself every single morning that I didn't lose you.'

'I do that, too.' I offer him a tiny smile, one of understanding. 'My nightmares have gone down, but I still have an occasional dream where I see him. And every time I wake up and see you asleep next to me, I think that I'm still stuck down there and that seeing you is just one of the good dreams.'

'He can never hurt you again.' His lips pressed to my forehead, lining the little spaces above my eyebrows from side to side with kisses as he murmured softly, 'He can never touch you again.'

Closing my eyes for a short moment, I took a deep breath and nodded a little. 'I know. Thanks to you, no one can hurt me.'

'I failed to protect you before. I will never let that happen again.'

'Jimin, it wasn't your fault.' 

'Maybe not all of it, but it was partly my fault.' Gentle slip of his fingers under my cheek didn't do much to calm my heart down. How I explain to him that he didn't do anything wrong? How do I take his guilt away?

'If I wasn't to weak and if I didn't do something as stupid as beg for your life when I could have killed him then and there, you never would have been nearly killed. You wouldn't have been taken and kept locked up and hurt for months. If I was even a bit smarter and listened to my gut, I never would have let you go to his place, and you never would have been taken in the first place. I could have saved you all the pain and fear if I just-'

I had to stop him. I couldn't listen to the pain pouring out of him, out of each word that came out of him. I couldn't handle watching the suffering in his eyes, and the fight he's been having with himself for so, so long. So I kissed him, not letting him pull away until he slowly relaxed into my touch and was returning the kiss.

'I want you to listen to me and hear what I'm telling you.' I cupped his face, holding his gaze captive in my own. 'It is not. Your. Fault.' Is annunciated each word, giving an extra point to the 'not'

His throat moved, with the little ball going up and down with the harsh swallow, but he didn't say a word.

'Whether you went with me or not, I would have been taken. They had tranquilizers, and Ren was a piece we never saw clicking into the other side. You could have ended up dead or hurt, but there is no guarantee that you could have saved me. And do not think for a second that anything they did was your fault, because it wasn't. They thought you were dead, and they still did whatever they wanted, because they wanted it. They didn't do it t piss you off. They did it cause they could. And the night when you begged for my life, it was the right choice to make. You stalled him long enough, and he had to run. And you lived. If you've done what you wanted and attacked him, we might have actually been dead. Both of us.'