Candle Queen | OT7

10|Quest for the Moon's Embrace

"Is this the guardian for Mr. Jeon? I'm sorry to tell you there's been an accident."

✩★✩

The moment seemed to unfurl like a haunting melody played on a broken piano, its melancholic notes reverberating through the hospital's white walls.

The atmosphere was perpetually shrouded in a gloom that seeped into Taehyung's bones, leaving him feeling as though he were trapped in a sepia-toned world devoid of vibrancy. The colors of his life were muted, like a faded painting that had lost its luster over time. The once-bright tapestry of youthful innocence was tarnished, replaced by a palette of gray, symbolizing the absence of warmth, laughter, and unconditional love.

His heart felt like a fractured prism, fragmented and starved of the kaleidoscope of emotions that should have colored his formative years. He felt like a wilted flower, yearning for sunlight amidst the frigid depths of winter.

If this was any other situation, his hyungs would have called him dramatic, that he was simply having an overreaction. But it wasn't a normal situation, it felt as though he was submerged in a frigid winter, where icicles dangled from branches, coating leaves, and swaying grass, stopping all sources of movement. The type where the glass beneath your fingertips is chilled to the bone, colder than ice, sending a shiver down your spine and a shard of ice into your heart.

And why shouldn't it feel that way, when the sun of their universe had set, but this time for forever? When their sky and earth had vanished never to be touched by the sands of time again?

Taehyung finally let himself think of the earth-shattering thought that hung above his head like one of those pianos in cartoons. It was a painful thought, one that shredded his heart into multiple pieces of cloth.

Jungkook was dead.

✩★✩

Jungkook often stood at the intersection of his past and present, all of them knew this.

Their maknae often stood at the crossroad of his young life, the weight of a lifetime's worth of disappointment pressing upon his small shoulders.

Whenever he thought about Jungkook's family, his thoughts painted a vivid picture of a fractured family, where love was but a distant whisper carried away by the winds of neglect. The shadows of his childhood loomed large, casting an ominous veil over his relationship with his parents, though none of them had tried to pry.

Jungkook talks about it sometimes, and whenever he does, it feels as if all the warmth that they had sustained had been discarded to make room for the bitter frost that leaves their fingertips numb no matter how much they blew on them.

Jungkook had told them how most of the time the silence in his old home was suffocating, how the air had always hung heavy with unspoken words, stifled emotions that dared not be expressed. He had told them, about how most of their interactions were mere transactions, devoid of warmth or connection, their gazes constantly passing over each other as if in search of something they could never quite find.

The one thing that had stayed with them forever, haunting their hearts till this day and probably would till the end of time, was the small confession that Jungkook had made during one of their soulful moping sessions, was how Jungkook had said that the perfect way to avoid conflict was to play dead, stay silent and wait for the bear to stop playing with you.

It had been something that gnawed on their minds till this very day, and they had promised Jungkook, that he'd never have to act that way with them. But they had broken that promise, and it was only now when Taehyung looked back at it all, that he saw how Jungkook's behavior fit with it all, play dead and wait for the final blow.