|《ʙ ʟ ᴀ ꜱ ᴘ ᴇ ᴍ ʏ》|

(xi) SCEPTICISM☆

"You have to stay!"

"No Appa I hate it here!"

"I don't care Taehyung, you're staying. There's no way in the world I'm letting you back into this house without you being totally pure first. There's just no way."

This was the conversation currently being held between Taehyung and his father Mr Kim. Jimin and Jungkook were situated on his left, both nodding their heads in approval at the acting Taehyung was doing. 

"Fine, but can I come home on Christmas?"

"No."

His father hung up on him after saying the said word and Taehyung grinned at Jimin and his boyfriend. 

"I did it!"

Yesterday had been his birthday. The best one he'd ever had. In all eighteen years of his life, he had never had a birthday as epic as this. His parents never celebrated his birthday. Nor wished him. To have six people barge into his dorm at 12am and exclaim happy birthday as quietly as one can exclaim something was heart warming. He had actually thought they'd forget. But they hadn't. They went out to eat and it felt like a really scripted dream. I mean, he was having a normal birthday like normal people. Was it too much? Normal felt like too much for him. 

But now, with aching realization, he sat next to Jungkook and Jimin quietly whispering about a certain topic. They thought they were being discreet but Taehyung was not a child. He may be treated like one through this chain of miserable events but he certainly had the maturity of an adult, which he now was.  

Normal people would move away from home once they hit that eighteen year mark, but Taehyung's parents never gave him that option. They hadn't discussed it, it was just an unspoken fact: Taehyung would have to get married to a pure Christian girl of his parents choice. But now, he was realising he DID have a choice. He was an adult. He COULD make choices by himself. The group of boys would constantly talk about moving away from home once this boarding school shit was over and he just... wow? Was he really planning to marry a GIRL of his parents choice and basically ruin his life all his entire life? He had been staring at a blind spot this whole time, not bothering to look around him. Perhaps if he had decided a few years earlier that he WAS going to escape this nightmare, things would've been easier. 

Sitting on the sofa with his boyfriend and bestfriend in his line of vision, he came to the conclusion that family wasn't always defined by blood. You have to make your own family sometimes.

__________

Six words. 

"I don't believe a single word."

Six words was all it took for Mrs Kim to bash and disregard Jungkook's explanation. He spent two weeks planning on what he was going to tell his boyfriends parents. Namjoon and Yoongi had the unfortunate task of looking through the hours of footage stored in the tiny camera and cropping it down. And it took this woman a mere three seconds to accuse it of being false.

"Mrs Kim. This had happened once. Which is why I bought my friend Taehyung a camera disguised as a brooch. I now have a footage of the assault and I'm practically begging you to at least consider watching the evidence."

A moment of silence filled with hesitance lingered in the air. Jungkook knew she was aware he was telling the truth. Maybe she didn't want to believe him. That she wanted to live in her little bubble of lie and tell herself that her son was going to be a hetero and that no school teacher was sexually abusing him.

"Send it through."

Jungkook sighed in relief and briefly thanked her before hanging up and sending the video via SMS.