Taekook Oneshots

Taepunzel

I've been here for as long as I can remember. Alone. Waiting for somebody to explain to me what life is for. Waiting for somebody to help me.

But nobody ever comes.

It's a lonely life, here, but I manage. I clean up after myself, I teach myself how to do various things, via the books I request from my mother, who keeps saying that I won't have to stay here forever. She keeps insisting that she's going to find someone to save me. The whole point of me being here is so that I have the perfect man.

I just want to stop being lonely. I don't care about anything else anymore.

And anyway, how can she be so sure that I want to be with the person she chooses? What if I want to choose that perfect person for myself?

And what if she can't find anyone? Then what? Do I just stay here forever?

I don't think I could bear that. Being lonely for sixteen years is bad enough. But being lonely for an indefinite amount of time, until my heart gives up and stops beating would be horrible. I hope she realises all of this soon, before I waste away up here, all on my own.

I want to explore the world, see cool things. I have a whole bucket list to complete before I die, and at this rate I won't even get started on the first thing. I'm only sixteen, but I don't have anything to wait for, anyone to live for.

My tower is approximately two hundred feet tall, in the middle of a mountain forest. I can't jump down, therefore, as it would kill me. I don't have long hair, like in the fairy tales I've read to myself whilst waiting for my mother to visit. I don't have a stunning voice that can travel a million miles to my so called true love either. I don't have anything that can help me.

My mother owns the only key.

The tower itself isn't that bad. I have a large bedroom, a kitchen diner area, a bathroom, everything I would need to look after the basics. I've even got a mini library, filled with all of the books my mother has given me. It's got about three hundred at the moment, but I've read every single one three times, mainly because they're my only education. I want to know as much as possible about the dangerous world my mother hides me from.

Maybe one day she'll let me explore it. But I doubt it.

I've taught myself how to sew, how to cook, how to hack into somebody's wifi and use it (even though I don't actually have a phone or network here, there wouldn't be any reception), how to beat somebody up with a frying pan. I've learned endless knots, ones for sailing, ones for assassination, ones for safety and climbing. But I only have one rope, and it's not even long enough to hang a person, let alone allow somebody to abseil down this tower wall.

In short, I've done everything I can to avoid boredom, but it never feels like enough. Something is always missing. I've asked my mother endless times to give me a phone, but she never agrees. She says somebody could find me and hurt me, through that. She tells me stories of people that were badly treated because they trusted somebody they met over text or the Internet and met up with them and died.

I'm not as scared of that as I used to be.

"Taehyung, I'm here!" my mother calls out, and I perk up, excited to finally have somebody to talk to, even if it's the person that put me here. I hear her unlock the door at the bottom of my tower, open it and then close it lock it behind her, and then I hear her footsteps echoing up the countless steps to my little apartment section. "How are you, my dear child?"

"Better for the company," I return, and she sighs, unlocking the door to my apartment and walking in, allowing me to have my first look at another human for the last month. "Have you brought food?"
"Did you run out?" she asks worriedly, and I nod awkwardly.