Phantoms | jjk.

[71]: Thorns

You sat alone, outside on the step before the drive of Kim Seokjin's small home.

You stared ahead of you. Your breaths were slow and sterile, barely enough effort to inflate your lungs anymore.

The snow that littered the pavement before you wanted to glisten. It wanted to shine and to gleam a dazzling white.

But, the sun was setting.

And it was taking every lingering fragment of light left in you, with it.

The snow - now lacking any sunlight - was starting to look more like shadowy puddles of lumpy, grey mud. Ugly and dull and pointless.

You remembered a time when you loved the snow.

When it was sharp, and clean and smiling. When it once was enough to brighten you.

But now, now that your core had been beaten and brought down with so much violence, you simply couldn't find the optimism to see anything other than frozen water.

The realisation and the weight of your decisions had dawned upon you, like the cold ocean drift was dragging your disembodied corpse out to sea. Your hands were tied. There was nothing that you could do or say to change your fate.

There was nothing you could do to change how much you had been deceived. And the truth was indeed a very hard pill to swallow.

And your fate seemed to be changing right in front of you.

Just as your reflections start to grow darker, you heard the front door behind you creak open. It sent a shiver down your spine. But you didn't look back - you only waited.

Hoseok, without uttering a word, took a seat beside you on the step. He was dressed in all black, resting his elbows on his high knees, as he looked off into the bleak horizon that you had been lost in.

Silence kept you both company. For a while.

But Hoseok rippled the water of the still lake between you when he twisted his torso to reach for something in his pocket. And through your peripheral, you saw him pull a small blue, cardboard box.

"So, you're scared."

You blinked. Still looking ahead.

"Terrified."

Hosoek nod his head once. His very presence beside you had turned into a greater relief then you ever would have expected.

You were wrong about him. And the others.

For they were just like you.

Filled to the brim with reasons to hate the world. Lists and sentences and stories that should give them the green card to curse the very world itself, into a never-ending black void of anguish, if they so pleased. They should hate everyone and everything.