[3] Code: REBIRTH || KTH

Ch9: Code: RED

Taehyung understands death. He understood it the moment his grandma refused to wake up two weeks after he had turned ten. He understood it the moment her sons visited for the first time in years and prepared a funeral. The moment they took her body away and started emptying out the house because its theirs to inherit now. The moment they looked at Taehyung with so much contempt before looking at each other.

"What do we do with him?" One of them had asked the other.

The latter shrugged. "I don't know. Put him in a shelter or something? They have these things for his kind."

Taehyung now wishes they had indeed put him in a shelter, but instead they threw his clothes and toys away, and beat him with a broom when he refused to leave the only home he ever knew, then threw him in the streets to fend for himself, where he met an older boy who promised him they will change the world someday. But the boy, Seokjin, told him that they can't live on the streets forever, even if it meant that they have to be separated.

Taehyung remembers clearly the night he found a new home. He was twelve, standing in the rain on the pavement when a beautiful middle-aged woman passed by him. She had a yellow umbrella with a smiley sun on it, so she stood out in the crowd. She stopped in her tracks and turned around to look at him before carefully approaching him.

"Hello there," She murmured softly as she crouched down and looked up at him.

Taehyung examined her face, taking in the bruise under her eye and her busted lip.

"Where's your mom?" She asked, tilting her head to the side.

"I don't have a mom," He said.

The woman stared at his face for a while, studying his features closely as if trying to recognise him from somewhere.

"Well, dumpling, do you want to come home with me?" She asked.

Taehyung was standing by her house's front door as the woman fought with her husband to let him stay.

"You're crazy! You've gone mad!" Her husband had yelled at her, "You picked up some kid from the street! And a hybrid! Heaven knows where he came from!"

"He looks like him!" She yelled back, her voice cracking as tears fall down her face, "Please, please, I promise he won't cause any trouble, please."

The man glared at Taehyung with the same look his grandma's sons have thrown at him before kicking him out to the streets. But the man didn't kick him out. He just glared, clenched his fists then turned around and left. It wasn't difficult to put two and two together, Taehyung knew where the woman's bruises came from.

There was a room in the house that Taehyung wasn't allowed inside. The door was always closed, but not locked, and the woman made it very clear that he shouldn't go anywhere near it. But Taehyung's curiosity got the best of him, and one day he found himself turning the doorknob and walking inside the room.

The room's walls were yellow, and the bedsheets had sun prints on them. The shelves were stacked with framed pictures of a boy. There was one of him as a baby, then on his first day at kindergarten, then on his first day at school, and on his 10th birthday, and on an ice skating rink, and one with his parents. The dates and details were written at the bottom of every picture, with "my dumpling" written instead of the boy's name. "My dumpling at 4 months", "My dumpling's first day at kindergarten", "My dumpling's first day at school", and so on.

So she has a son, Taehyung had thought to himself. But where is he? Maybe...

The woman had walked in furiously, tears immediately falling over her face once she set her eyes on Taehyung standing in the middle of the room as she yelled at him to get out. Taehyung was shocked; she had never yelled at him before. In fact, she rarely even spoke to him. She spent her day sewing and cooking and watching TV, but never uttering a word to Taehyung. She would cook for him, buy him clothes and books, occasionally take him out to malls and parks, and their only conversation was when he said "thank you" and she would smile at him from the other side of the room.

She didn't tell him anything about her son. She just locked the door, and acted like normal the next day as if nothing had ever happened, so Taehyung acted the same and never asked about the dead son.

He lived with her for five years, but still barely knew anything about her. He would wake up, help her with some chores or go grocery shopping when needed, then watch TV and read books until her husband came back from work. When he did, Taehyung would go to his room and shut the door, because the man's presence was exhausting. He would get drunk and shout and occasionally lay his hands on the woman, but Taehyung never did anything about it.

"He will kick you out," She had once told him, "So don't you ever try to stop him, or protect me in any way possible, because I want you to stay."

Taehyung learned to stay silent, because it got him out of trouble. And although he and the woman didn't talk much, he couldn't help but grow fond of her. And because he grew fond of her, he couldn't help but feel protective over her, so he naturally couldn't help but meddle in one of her fights with her husband one day, when he couldn't stand silently anymore.

"Don't let them classify you as a Code: RED" Seokjin's words stayed in the back of seventeen-year-old Taehyung's mind as he smashed a vase over the husband's head and he dropped to the floor. All Taehyung could hear was the woman's screams and the sound of his heavy breathing. His hands were bloodied, and the neighbours had called the police.

The approaching sirens sounded like Taehyung's approaching doom, because he knew he fucked up, and he will be a Code: RED, forever in an electric collar inside a prison cell disguised as a shelter.

But he also knew that Seokjin was smarter than letting a mere classification stop him from finding him again so they can go on with their plans to change the world.