Single Father • Namjoon + BTS!Kids

xc.

Jimin heard the phone and ran into Namjoon's room to pick it up, shutting the door after him for some privacy and quiet, as Mark and the others were playing Twister, which really meant that the others were just giggling as Mark tried to bend into odd contortions before smacking his face on the floor and pseudo-swearing ("how in the broken rectangle am I supposed to put my right foot on red without snapping off my flip-flopping leg").

"Dad?" he asked, his foot bouncing up and down in excitement as he crouched down in the small alley of space between the bed and the wall and listened to the person on the other end.

***

"Why not?" Jimin asked.

Jimin was confused by what he was told, but he nodded. "Okay..." His confusion was swept away as he heard the next question.

"How is everyone doing?"

"They're..." Jimin swallowed. He didn't know how it was possible to feel full of emptiness, but he did. Somehow, emptiness had filled every crack and crevice, every pore of his being. "We're..." But that didn't sound right either. He was part of them but he wasn't. He wasn't sure that he would ever be.

He would always be "the one that got abducted."

He would always be different, separate apart from the others. Special, in the worst way.

But it was too late to go back to they're, so Jimin had to soldier onward. "We're...we're fine," he said, but the emptiness inside of him was screaming at his words, at his lies, screaming into the silence that he'd fallen into, a silence so harsh and painful that Jimin didn't know if it was him screaming out loud or just his mind anymore.

"Jimin?"

He was sure by now that it was just in his head, or else he wouldn't have been able to hear the voice. "We're not fine," he whispered, sinking lower against the wall. He felt like he was betraying them all by admitting what none of them wanted to admit, what they refused to admit. "We're not fine," he repeated, feeling like if he said it again, maybe it wouldn't hurt so much. Maybe he wouldn't feel like he was selling them out, ratting out their secrets, stabbing them in each of their backs. "We're not...They're not...I'm not...fine," he said, his voice even softer as his eyes stared blankly at the bed sheets in front of him.

"Tell me what's wrong, sweetie."

Those words broke the dam that Jimin's misgivings had erected, and suddenly, the silence that he'd tried so hard to preserve shattered around him as he fought to spit out all the words he needed to, all the words he needed to get out to feel sane and understood and loved.

"Jin talks to himself. Well, not to himself. To me. Only, not to me. He...he has this imaginary version of me, a better version of me, and he tells that version everything even though I'm right here now and he can talk to me instead but instead he chooses that version over me even though I'm real and I'm alive and I'm back home...

"And Yoongi gets in trouble a lot. He was in suspension the other day, and it wasn't his first time. He has friends, but they can't stop him, and I know that he's only being bad because people expect him to be bad. If people just trusted Yoongi, he wouldn't do bad things, I don't think...but because they've all made up their minds already, he doesn't see the point in trying to be different, in trying to be good, so he doesn't bother. He just gives them what they want, only it hurts him so much more than it will ever hurt them...

"And Hobi...I don't know how to help Hobi," Jimin said, fighting against his tears because he knew he'd have to face the rest of them at some point in the night, and he didn't want them to know he'd been crying, but he couldn't stop himself when he thought of his hyung. "He can't eat. I don't know why, exactly, but when he's at school, he's supposed to eat his lunch, only he can't...it makes him sick...and then the other kids, they make fun of him, and that makes it worse...He has a friend, Wonpil, that's always there for him, but Hobi told him to leave because Hobi feels like he's holding Wonpil back, only Wonpil doesn't care about that, only...only I think he got mad at Hobi, and they haven't made up yet and it's so hard for me to look at Hobi now and not realize how thin he looks and how little he eats at dinner and it scares me so much...