WHEN THEY CRY.

☤twenty four

everything from the bright different colored cars passingly on the relatively still early morning traffic to the neon lights illuminating through the empty streets in this foggy, dark wet weather felt so foreign. the random honks of horns when people cut drivers off on the road and the bustling of the city life felt so strange. jimin could hear some faint music playing in stores he was passing, never once stopping to look inside any of them or direct his eyes from the straight path he was taking to his old apartment building.

honestly, it was quite far from the hospital, but he really wanted to walk home even with the rain pouring down on his unsheltered body. he knew he was going to catch a cold, his hands and face already freezing from how the harsh wind nipped at his drenched clothing and hair, but he didn't care. he needed to stretch his legs for once. walk down something that wasn't just around a couple of pure white hallways followed closely by guards. he needed to feel the world beneath his feet instead of that hard marble under those ugly slippers.

he felt like a prisoner who just finished his sentence and was finally free after centuries for his crimes. he was a prisoner who had just been released from his jailcell. that place was awful. it was so claustrophobic and suffocating. he didn't even understand how those medical professionals worked there. surely they felt similar.

after crossing the final street in his route he caught site of his apartment building. the old red brick building looked haunted next to all the much newer buildings and shops on the block, but he was more than excited just by the sight of it. after two and a half hours he had finally made it from that wretched place. it felt so good to just be somewhere familiar to him.

even if this place wasn't much better than that institution, at least he felt comfortable here.

he entered the building, eyes looking around as if it was his first time back in years, though it had only been about a month away. everything was so quiet and dark. if even a mouse ran across a floorboard on another floor he had no doubt he'd be able to hear it.

'we're back here'

'i liked the hospital better'

'i have a bad feeling'

jimin took steps towards the wooden staircase, the plain vacant old lobby he was in now had nothing to offer him.

the wood creaked under his wet sneakers, the shoes also squeaking with every step upstairs. as he passed the second floor he could see the shadows standing at each stories railings to watch. he then skipped over the third floor, eyes trained ahead to the fourth. shadow figures lined the walls, watching him as if he was the star of their favorite movie. as if something interesting was about to happen any moment now.

park jimin headed directly towards the familiar door on the fourth floor, already grabbing his keys from his pockets. his gaze momentarily switched to the door of one of his two neighbors, this one belonging to the women who had made his suicide attempt fail with her 'heroic' phone call to the police that day. his chest flared up with pure disgust as he tore his eyes away from her apartment. she had no right. she should've just minded her own business when he didn't answer the door, instead of coming in uninvited to the scene of him hanging from a pillar of his own home. he hated her too.

he shoved past a shadow figure standing in his way, the black mass disappearing into thin air at the collision. he kept on his way, finally meeting his destination. he slid his keys into the old lock, having to jiggle the doorknob a bit before it finally opened up for him.

his old apartment.

jimin looked around in wonder, barely remembering how the very aged, simplistic place looked. multiple crumbled pieces of paper laid messily by his coffee table in the living room, all having a note started on them, but never quite getting the words he wanted right on them. the past jimin had decided after forty two times of trying to write a suicide note that he didn't want to. he spent over two hours obsessively jotting down whatever the hell the movement of his pen lead him to. none of the letters were genuine and felt so forced to him, thanking his family for always being there for him in his youth and apologizing to his parents he had come to this point that he was going to take his own life.

none of that was true. he wasn't thankful and he didn't feel sorry.

his life was a living hell by the age of seven. that one day in the middle of class when he suddenly saw his first ever hallucinations that started it all. ever since then his life was hell. his family never understood. they thought he was weird just like all the other kids at school. they got creeped out by the way he'd randomly start screaming at nothing, crying at the top of his lungs while he flung his limbs around in an attempt to fight off the scary black figures that would randomly pop up and say bad things.

he would go around telling everybody he was being haunted by demons and they would think he was making some over dramatic joke or tantrum. his parents finally had enough when it continued in middle school and locked him inside of his room whenever he started acting up saying he was hearing or seeing something that wasn't there. while they were having family dinners with his siblings, he would be locked up in his bedroom hiding under his covers trying to keep his screams of horror quiet enough to not get punished for them because of the scary shadows standing above him calling him names like 'spaz' or 'freak'. trying their best to scare him so he'd keep getting in trouble for simply being a troubled kid.

by the time he was in high school he stopped talking completely about these figures, turning himself into a class clown to make the peers he grew up with think he really was just poking fun back in the day. he would stay up all night forced to listen to them speak aloud his deepest secrets and doubts, but could do nothing but cry and pass out sometime the next day from sleep deprivation.

he stopped eating as much, skipping meals for days even because his family had a rule of eating at the table with everyone and he didn't want to get yelled at or locked up alone because he was caught staring at some figure intruding in. his parents despised when he brought up that 'childhood nonsense', even if it was literally torturing him to try not to react to sudden triggers or slurs they spit out just to watch him suffer.

one day however, only four years ago, park jimin's hallucinations spiraled out of control. one day in the middle of class the shadow figures started to cry at the top of their lungs, something he had never heard before. his eyes widened in absolute terror as they whispered things like 'he's coming' and 'i'm scared' if these- things, whatever they were, were afraid of something to the point they were literally sobbing on the ground cowering into balls, jimin knew he should be twice as worried. everyone stared at the boy as he randomly stood up in the middle of the teacher's lecture and held his hands over his ears as he ran as fast as he could out of the room. he didn't even bother taking his stuff. he could feel the fear radiating off these beings that scared him, so he didn't want to know what could possibly be tormenting them.

he raced down the empty hallways trying to block out even a bit of the siren-like screaming. it was so loud in his head he thought he was going to faint. suddenly, everything stopped. the boy looked up at the sudden silence, tears racing down his face in confusion and worry. he backed up, noticing all the hiding shadow figures were gone when he had bumped into a rock hard chest.

that's when he met him. jungkook.