Terrible Things

Chapter 17 - Now

"A baby?" Taehyung squeaks. "Is that me? Am I in the story now, Daddy?"

I press a kiss to the top of his head, his pink locks tickling me. "Yes, TaeTae. It's you."

"I can't believe you couldn't tell your mate was pregnant," Joon scoffs.

I glare at him over Tae's head. "What was I supposed to assume? He told me he didn't feel well, not that he was pregnant."

"I mean to be fair, Jimin himself didn't even know," Jin pipes up. "When Yoongi left for the studio I asked Jimin if he had anymore symptoms. I was already pregnant with Kook so I knew what to look for." He laughs. "You should've seen his face when that test came up positive. He was as excited as he was scared."

"Shouldn't you have been able to smell it on him?" Hoseok asks. "Isn't that an Alpha and Omega thing?"

"I wasn't really home," I mumble. "And when I was, I noticed his scent was different but I just put that towards him not feeling well."

"It's early to miss the smell when it's that early on," Jin explains. "It's not like when we get upset and our scent spikes, it's more subtle than that."

"You guys can smell each other?" Kook scrunches his nose. "Gross."

"Incorrect. They-" Hoseok points to us, "-can smell eachother. I, your resident Beta, cannot."

"Do I have a smell, Daddy?" Tae asks, peeking up at me.

"You're too young to have much of one right now, Tae." His face falls. "But when you're upset, you smell almost exactly like your Dada did."

"Really?" He beams, thrilled at the possibility of having more in common with this man he's never met. "What's it smell like?"

"Overripe fruit." I grimace, still remembering the smell even now. "When Jimin got upset, it would smell like strawberries were left out. The sickeningly sweet scent used to drive me crazy."

"I smell like that don't I? Then why doesn't it still drive you crazy?"

"I smelled it so much back then. When he was pregnant he was so moody. And then towards the end when he-" My breath freezes, my heart squeezing painfully in my chest. I stare towards the wall, my jaw clenched to keep my emotions at bay. "I both love and hate that smell," I say quietly.

"I don't smell any of you," Jungkook whines.

Jin rolls his eyes, ruffling his son's hair. "If Tae isn't old enough to smell or be smelled, then why would you think you are?"

"I'm older," he grumbles, crossing his arms.

"By like three months," Tae yells. "It doesn't count."

An argument ensues, my friends chuckling but doing nothing to stop it. Pulling the box closer, I rifle through it - careful not to let my eyes linger on any photo too long - before pulling out two photos.

I hand him the first one, a small Polaroid, and his argument cuts off - his eyes on the photo.

Jimin lays on a hospital bed, his eyes filled with tears as he points at a screen beside him. It's too dark to see in the picture, but I know he's pointing at our first ever sonogram of Taehyung.

Jimin had cried for almost ten minutes, unable to take his eyes off the screen. He even asked for a recording of Tae's little heartbeat.

And for the rest of that night, he couldn't keep his eyes off the little bulge on his stomach.

That was the night he told me Taehyung was boy, that we were having a son. I had asked him how he knew and he just smiled and told me he just knew. I didn't question him, instead just going

"What's he pointing at, Daddy?" Tae asks, as if he knows what I was just thinking about.

"That's the first time we ever saw you," I explain. "Our first real picture of you."

Bringing the picture closer to his face, he squints at it, his nose scrunching as he focuses. He drops the photo down with a sigh, "Dad I can't see anything on the screen."

"Yeah, yeah," I chuckle, handing him the second photo. This one's glossy, the edges starting to curl up around the edges. Taehyung takes it carefully, his fingers tracing over the black and white image. "You won't know what this is," I explain. "But this-" I point to a little space of black, a small, bean-shaped blob of white inside of it "-is you."

"I'm not a bean," Tae grumbles.

"Well not now, you're not," I laugh, mussing up his hair. "But you started out tiny and then you grew and grew until-" I clap my hands together "-you were a baby!"

"Do all babies start out tiny? Even Alphas?" Kook asks.

"Alphas, Omegas, and even Betas," Hoseok explains. "All babies start out small. But Omegas and female Betas keep their babies safe, protecting them until they're big enough to thrive on their own."

"Jimin protected me? My Dada?" Tae asks me quietly, tugging on my sleeve.

"You were the most precious thing in the world to your dads," Namjoon speaks. "Just as Kook is to Jin and I."

"Jimin always did what was best for you," Jin says. "Straight up to the day you were born."

"Even when it wasn't best for himself," I mumble, my mind fading off into a memory.