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IV

ENTRY 3.IV: JIMIN
January 2, 2009: 03:07
Seoul, South Korea
Ever since Jimin first spotted his family looking for him out in public, they'd seemed to follow him everywhere, almost as if they somehow knew exactly where he was going and when he was going there. This had easily made him more restless than he already was, making him now even more desperate to get away. For hours, he would lay on the roof that he took shelter on top of during the night, gazing up at the stars that painted the endless sky and waiting for sleep to come to him. It never did.

He'd felt the insanity building up inside of him. Coming back to his senses, Jimin remembered all of what had happened earlier, and how he'd risked himself and his secret not too long ago by flying for over an hour straight from his hometown to Seoul, which, even at this odd time of night, was filled with even more people than the Busan markets on New Year's Eve.

Time was frozen again, and the bath didn't do anything but remind Jimin of his childhood. He'd needed the water desperately to wash down whatever was making him feel so unusually insecure about himself, but sitting there in his own wake, all he wanted to do was drown himself in it, to put an end to all his suffering. He was alone, confused, helpless, and going insane, screaming and crying inside a pool of his own filth and soaking back up whatever negativity he had just washed off. His screaming and sobs echoed loud throughout his lonely hotel room, and he wasn't at all worried about someone hearing him. He knew for sure that no stranger would care enough to find someone working around the facility to unlock the supposedly vacant room and check for the source of the noise.

That's when he remembered that no one could hear him anyway. Jimin had almost completely forgotten that he froze time.

His slamming his back against the sides of the tub during his panic session had been so rapid and so intense that the movement had caused his wing scars to break open and start bleeding. They still were prone to this, seeing as they had still only been there for a few weeks and were still scabbed. He'd never been a quick healer. Jimin's blood stained the rim of the tub, the water unable to reach up high enough to wash it away. The blood on the tub that ended up dripping down into the water beneath Jimin mixed in with it, staining it red, and he had no care for this. He ignored it as if nothing was happening, having been too caught up in the depths of his mind to realize it.

The lies stuck inside of him mixed in with the paranoia of his family following him corrupted his mind. He was shaking, sweating, and unusually fatigued for a reason he could not come to realize. Jimin knew something was wrong with him from the moment the unhappiness faded from him so suddenly in the park. Was this what it was? Was he always like this inside? Was he always so insane? He didn't know and never would come to figure it out.

The bed that night did nothing to help Jimin's worsening state of mind, just like the bath had. It was the first time since he had left home that he had the chance to sleep in an actual bed, yet he felt no different and slept no different than from when he was still stuck sleeping on top of the buildings he had watched from during the day. Yet again, he was stuck restless, seeming to never reach out and touch the hands of sleep. His eyes bloodshot and stinging from endless tears and lack of sleep and his shirt slightly stained from his previously bleeding scars, Jimin sat on the edge of the bed, his mind wandering aimlessly in his own thoughts with memories of his misery blocking his vision.

Somehow, in his mind, Jimin knew where his parents were as if he'd attached some sort of a tracker to them in secret the last time he'd seen them.

They were there. They were in Seoul looking for him. They knew he was there.

This began to make Jimin wonder in a troublesome thought if he would have to force himself to go back to them and live with this newfound insanity of his for the rest of his life.

Stay alone, or go home? Stay alone, or go home?

The question repeated itself over and over again in his head up until the point where he had begun asking it to himself out loud in a barely audible murmur. Jimin had done this for a while until the sun began to appear over the horizon, forgetting that he had time unfrozen after the bath.

As the sunlight began to peek through the window of his lonely room that looked out over the Han River, the question was suddenly replaced in Jimin's mind with another thought, not with one of suffering and insanity, but with one of hope. Hope, in this instance...

...in the form of a stranger.

This person, after he'd thought about it, he didn't know at all, yet he still knew all too well why he was suddenly thinking of them. This being he was thinking of now was like him, stuck with wings just like his, but something told him that they were also a lot more than that. He knew this for a fact, a definite certainty, but he had no idea how this was so.  As these thoughts came to mind, he watched as the peeking sunlight suddenly formed the bright silhouette of an older-looking kid that, from first glance, looked to be somewhere in their early teens. They were small for their age, and their short hair that was present in their figure made their gender uncertain to him. The light of the silhouette was extremely bright, almost blinding to him, and it looked like it wasn't at all a product of the sunlight that was coming through the window like he thought it was; it looked to be its own light. Jimin stared with bewilderment at the bright silhouette for about a minute before it slowly began to fade, the drops of light dancing away from the floor like dust particles in the air. His eyes followed these drops through the transparent surface of the window and into the sky, soaked orange and blue from the rising sun.

Sitting there with the thought of this being still in his mind had given Jimin a slight feeling of hope. It was as if discovering and seeing this new stranger had suddenly released himself from his insanity and suffering. He knew it. This is what this being had come here for. He knew where and from whose hands they had come from, but he had no idea how he knew this or how any of what he had just discovered was possible. Before the Reveal, he would never have thought that any of this was possible. To have such a being like that around would've been impossible to pre-Reveal Jimin, but here he was, realizing that all of it was real and most certainly possible.

This was when Jimin realized that if none of this had happened, if he had never gone through the pain he had to go through to get where he was, then he would've never known any of this. If he wasn't what he was, then he would've been kept out of all of this, forever secluded from this hidden group of otherworldly beings that he was a part of, and he would've been left to live a normal, mortal life.

At this point, he had realized that when he turned 18, he wouldn't age anymore.

He would live forever...

A wide smile appeared on Jimin's face as he suddenly discovered the beauty within this new world of his, and he laughed happily for the first time in weeks.

He had finally been lifted of his misery. Simply discovering this being was what finally brought him back to his senses. He was happy again, and this time, he knew that it would never go away.

Jimin willingly decided that he would return to his family that day, but in order to do so, he would have to reveal his true self to them.

This was something that he didn't mind at all.