Hustlers || Taekook

Chapter 24

Yoongi had grown up without learning how to smile.

He knew the technicalities behind smiling, he knew the reason for it and everything, but he'd never learnt when he was meant to smile, because those moments never existed.

His story was a little cliché and a little tragic, but he'd long since stopped giving a shit about it. Until now. Until Jimin spoke his mind to him and stood up to him for the first time since they'd met. It'd been after six months of static silence. Yoongi stood in the corridor beside the warehouse now, alone with his thoughts as the door swung shut behind Jimin and the shadows settled across the tiled floor again.

To put it simply, Yoongi had grown up in a bad neighbourhood. It was the type of place in which fists spoke where words were lost on ears deafened by screeching tires and rowdy shouts. The number of street fights won was the local currency. The scars left on opponents was a person's worth in numbers. Yoongi had been introduced to the brawls and violence of life on the streets younger than anyone else. It wasn't anyone else's choice but his. He chose to go out on the streets and immerse himself in the fist fights and familiarise himself with hitting, getting hit, beating, getting beaten, killing, and, well, not getting killed. All from a very young age. He did it to escape from his house for as long as he could every day. He chose the lesser evil.

He'd been watching his father hit his mother since he was three. He'd been taking punches and kicks in silence since he was six. He covered the bruises with more bruises, and he collected them like trophies from fights both won and lost. Soon his skin started hardening. His pain tolerance started toughening. His movements became sharper, his punches landed harder.

Violence was all that he knew, violence was all that was dealt to him and all that he dealt in turn, and unsurprisingly, it became the only way he knew how to deal with anything. And so he fought... and he killed. He killed so many times without the intention of murder because he got carried away, then after a while it was no longer on accident. It neither thrilled nor disgusted him. He didn't really enjoy killing people, not so much the endgame as the chase. He'd been hooked on the high of the hunt since he was young, after all. Even after it was no longer necessary to fight for his survival, he didn't discard his ingrained habits.

He wasn't using that as an excuse, though. He wasn't an idiot. He knew it was a shitty lifestyle. He knew he had a short temper with an even shorter fuse, and he knew his anger issues went way beyond the normal level of brash and hotheaded. He knew he was a shitty person doing shitty things, he just couldn't be fucked caring enough about it to change. He'd stopped caring about being a decent, respectable human being since the day his father kicked his mother's stomach so hard she coughed out blood, and Yoongi lost his unborn little brother.

He committed his first murder when he was fifteen. He vowed to get out of there, out of his house and out of that tiny, dirty, barbaric town when he was seventeen, when he snapped out of his rage-induced daze to see his fingers wrapped around his father's neck.

He left the day he graduated high school, and arrived in Seoul with nothing but the clothes on his back and loose change in his pocket. His parents had been asleep when he left without saying goodbye, but his mother must've known what he'd been thinking, for she packed a small lunch, technically more of a snack as that was all they could afford, and left it on the kitchen table for him. He'd finished the small bundle of food on the train, and he wished he'd saved some as he stepped off the train and took in the sights of the big, sprawling city for the first time.

He became a member of a gang that very night, both purposefully and because of coincidence, after bumping into a guy he'd met on the streets back home, and after settling their usual spontaneous fistfight in lieu of a greeting, he'd been invited to join. The gangs and laws of the street weren't that different in Seoul. Everything was just a lot bigger scale. There was a lot more at stake. And there were a lot more opponents.