SWEET • chanbeak ✔️

0.1

All Baekhyun could feel was the cold.  His fingers and toes were numb, among other parts of his body.  It was very cold outside.  Winter was turning upside him down; it was only October and there were almost under five degrees.  Beakhyun shook his head the way someone does when they feel bothered by a thought and the need to physically get out of it.  He refused to count the months again.  Or the years.  Twenty to twenty-five years, without the possibility of parole.  The next time he breathed air as a free man, he would be thirty-seven years old at best, forty-two with the maximum.

Tears welled up in her eyes at the thought.  Could he be dead.  This is how the bus felt, like a coffin carrying it to the cold ground.  His skin looked like ice.  Baekhyun shuddered again, his dull eyes watching the land go through the window.  Green fields.  Freedom.  So close and yet so far.  His eyes burned with tears, but even they felt icy cold.  Cold Cold Cold. 

Baekhyun hated the cold, but could not escape it.  He couldn't escape anything;  neither the cold bus, the cold seats, nor the air blowing through the crack in the broken window or the cold handcuffs attached around his slender ankles. Baekhyun wished he could wake up when every thing was done.  Just freeze him like a corpse and put him in a drawer and be able to wake up with out wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and return as stranger to everyone he meets.  Their lives will have passed and he will stay still. 

The things would never be the same again.  Your life is over.  Your dreams will never come true.  A wife, children, school, a career; everything you had planned is gone now, everything out of reach. All his dreams are shattered.  Maybe he can get professional training while in the penitentiary, but that's the best he can hope for and everyone knows that no one hires an ex-convict if they can help it.  That is all it will be when it comes out, an ex-convict.

The teenager or young adult was not a bad person.  He had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people.  And those people had been sitting in an underground methamphetamine lab in the basement that was overdue for a raid. 

When the dust had settled, a the officer laid on the ground bleeding to death and Baekhyun, the poor and bewildered, was the only one who had managed to be taken into custody.  Frustrated that everyone else escaped, a malevolent judge settled on him to the fullest extent of the law. 

Baekhyun was currently being sent to Gyeolgwa Island, to the most secure penitentiary in South Korea.  It housed about 14,000 prisoners but most of them were local offenders who could not post bail.  But Baekhyun was not going to be housed with that population.  The young man was going to be with the rapists, the murderers, the drug lords and all the other prisoners considered too violent to be housed with the general population.  They were treating him like a police killer instead of a silly boy with bad taste in friends.

Baekhyun blinked back tears once more.  Cold.  It was cold, so cold that everything inside him seemed to have gone numb.  It helped numb the pain he felt when his mother cried, the pain he felt for the shame in his father's eyes and the agony of saying goodbye to everything and everyone he loved.  His parents would be in their 90s when he got out.  If they were still alive.  The cold settled in his throat like a block of ice that refused to melt.  He could barely breathe around.  Baekhyun made a small suffocating sound and one of the other prisoners looked at him suspiciously.  Baekhyun's jaw wobbled, but he managed to hold back his sobs.  He would not let the other prisoners see him cry.

The bus stopped and the prisoners began to say goodbye one by one. Outside the windows, Baekhyun could see the high walls of the prison. They were imposing, made of stone and steel and supervised by guards on towers with high powered rifles held through their broad chests.  The landing process was slow as each prisoner who placed his feet on solid ground was chained to the man in front of him by the leg cuffs and chains around his waist.  Most of the inmates were large men;  older and stronger.  They were all tall, with broad shoulders and large, thick muscles.  Compared to them, Baekhyun looked like a fragile little Chinese doll, he seemed infinitely fragile.