Until We Drown : Vhope

【パート7】

"Hey, Hoseok, did you hear what I just said?" Jimin flicks the tip of his nose, and suddenly Hoseok's line of vision is filled with the boy's goofy grin and clear eyes.
Hoseok blinks his eyes dazedly. He'd been distracted lately, more so than usual, and the previous nights had been a mess of tossing and turning and staring resolutely at the ceiling for sleep toovercome him. Taehyung's words had really struck a chord inside him.

"Sorry, what were you saying?" Hoseok presses his pointer finger to Jimin's forehead and pushes
him away teasingly.Jimin frowns but sits back, "I said I passed Stage 3 of the test."
Hoseok's face splits into a smile and he sits up in his chair, "Shit, that's great, it really is!

You're active!" He reaches across the table and pats Jimin on the head affectionately, "I'm proud of you, kid!"
Jimin's smile widens by a hundred watts, and he waves him off bashfully, "I still have a long way to go though." "Don't we all?" Hoseok raises his brows and rests his chin in his palm. "Anyway I'll send in a request to the captain to get you put on my squad, yeah?"

Jimin nods excitedly, "Yeah. Yeah, that'd be really awesome." He pauses, and his expression grows serious, "Thank you so much, you know, for everything. I wouldn't have gotten this farwithout your help."

Hoseok ruffles his hair this time,"Hey, thank yourself. You worked hard to get it." Jimin nods again, and this time Hoseok can see the confidence in his eyes.

"So what's up with you? You look really tired," Jimin comments. Hoseok rubs an eye, "I've just been having trouble sleeping lately."
Jimin furrows his eyebrows together, "How come?"
Hoseok shrugs heavily. He'd spent hours trying to answer it himself, but eventually, it all came down on him like a hammer when he realized it:
Taehyung had connected with him on a deeper level than anyone who'd ever came into his life.

He opened doors that no one had ever opened. They hardly talked, and he doesn't know anything about Taehyung, and Taehyung doesn't know anything about him, but somewhere in the mix, they understood each other better than anyone else.
Hoseok shifts his gaze, he says, "I don't really know."

Since their first encounter, Hoseok notices the way he and Taehyung slowly warm up to each other. They'd broken the ice, and just like that, conversation eased like water. There was something in the tremors of Taehyung's voice that pulled him in completely, and Hoseok found himself opening up like a glass door.

Talking to strangers about irrelevant matters was always easier, and there was no sense of commitment. He could walk up to anyone and tell them a life of lies, create a fake identity of what he wanted to be when he was twelve, maybe John, age seventeen with a young face, artist. No one would ever know. But the thing was, Taehyung wasn't a stranger, just the perfect listener.
On some nights, Taehyung would tell him about the tall, green building down Larimer, old and rustic where all the broken kids went to smoke away their troubles. Hoseok sometimes rants about the shitty cafeteria food on that day or the kids that would fail their combat tests.

Hoseok doesn't mind it, the talking, but he feels so comfortable engaging in small talk with him that he thinks he should be more bitter about the whole situation, he thinks he should be feeling something close to hatred for Taehyung. But he doesn't.

He'd spent an entire day forcing himself to become angry towards Taehyung, thinking of all the innocent humans he and the Syloe had killed, but Hoseok was never one to become angry. He was logical, rather, and it wasn't their fault that they needed to feed, he'd tell himself each time.
He couldn't find it in him to hate their kind because humans were just as awful. To put it simply, Hoseok was indifferent.

Instead of channeling his anger towards Taehyung that day, he ended up becoming cranky towards everyone that looked at him and easily lashed out at the younger members for giving him dirty looks, which was very unlikely of him to do. Seokjin had punched him in the stomach duringcombat later and told him to chill the fuck out.