Drama Club | kth.jjk

10.

"Taehyung! You're finally home, my sweet boy!"

The mint haired boy stares weirdly at his mother's approaching figure. She was wearing more comfortable clothing, which was definitely weird because Taehyung had only seen her wear her fancy, silk, evening dresses or her usual pantsuit combo. But seeing her wearing jeans and a simple t-shirt with an apron (that was frilly, needless to say) was absolutely shocking. She leaps up onto Taehyung, wrapping her arms around him, which makes him freeze. The feeling of her arms on his body unfamiliar and cold. No, it didn't feel like a motherly embrace at all, it felt cold and distant.

"M-mom?" Taehyung whispers, trying to make sense of the situation.

His mother's smile never falters, and Taehyung wonders if this is a glitch in the system. Because she's never embraced Taehyung before, or even spoken to him with a smile that wasn't forced, and most importantly, she never ever asked about his day, which was why the next question she asked absolutely rocked Taehyung deep into his core. "How was your day honey?" Taehyung, with soft wide eyes, steps forward with hesitation, standing close to his short mother, his height he had (apparently) gotten from his father.

"Y-you want to know how my day was?" Taehyung asks softly, so quiet, afraid that someone was going to hear him and snatch this moment away from him. As weird as it was, and eventhough it felt a lot like a dream, this is what he wanted from his mother for all of his life. This is what he was scrambling to get from his mother, scraping at the edges of her love, just trying to get a pinch of her praise and attention. But why all of a sudden? There had to be a different motive to this.

And Taehyung knew that. Because...he knew that his own mother was sly, but charming. She had her own way of being very persistent and persuasive, and always got her way. No one could stand up to her, and no one dared either...neither did Taehyung. He had never dared to talk back to her, not once. Not to tell her to stop badmouthing his dead father, or the fact that homosexuality existed. Yes, Taehyung believed that everyone should love who they want to love, regardless of gender, but he would never say that to her face.

Problems always were deeply rooted into how long ago they started, and in Taehyung's case, from the start. Since he was born, he'd never had a father, a male role model to teach him anything. All that he had was a distant mother (more or less) figure that didn't even care about her pained son. Every time she promised him things, he would never get them, she dismissed him all the time, and most importantly, not once was she ever proud of her little boy. And sometimes, just sometimes, even though he knew it was wrong, Taehyung wished that it was his mother that was dead, and not his father.

He rarely got information about his father. Didn't know how he looked, talked, acted like. All he got for the years that he's lived is that his father was gay and dead because he was gay. And all Taehyung knew was that his father had committed suicide because he wasn't happy to be gay... because he knew it was wrong to love and lie with another man?

Taehyung was always confused about that story. Why would he be gay if he knew it was 'wrong'? It just didn't make sense. And many many years ago, Taehyung had asked an old maid that had been working for his mother from before he was born. He knew that this maid knew because she hated Taehyung's mother, but always stayed because she couldn't get money anywhere else. Long story short, Taehyung had asked the maid (Carla was her name, a sweet old lady) and she had just begun to tell her story before his mother caught her and fired her effective immediately. Taehyung still remembers the short words Carla was able to utter before his mother caught them red handed.

"Taehyung, there's always more than one side to a story. You just need to find the right side, the side with the truth."

And those simple words stuck with Taehyung for the rest of his life. But he had never asked again, not understanding those words. But now, as he grew older, he was starting to understand many things that he didn't when he was younger. Like how his mother always lied, and how she never genuinely put her heart into things, she was always less then expressive, and more dismissive. Did she not care about anything at all? Did she just give two shits about herself for her whole life?