✖「YOUNG GOD 」✖ Serial Killer!AU [COMPLETED]

13 | give and take.

They say when you have a close brush with death, you see your life flash before your eyes.

Jeongin supposed there was some truth to that. One moment he had been squinting at the golden-haired boy in the darkness; the next he had found himself collapsed against the forest floor. The sky had spun above him like a broken kaleidoscope, until the unbearably hot throbbing in his head had finally forced his eyes shut. He had felt the strength seeping from his limbs, like blood being drained from livestock, and had let the numbness wash over him like an icy tidal wave.

That was when Jeongin's life had flashed behind his closed eyelids — choppy flashes of memories and people's voices, warped and dizzying.

"Life in prison?" Jeongin's own voice sounded tinny in his ears, and his father gave him a sad smile on the other side of the plexiglass. "B-but all you did was—"

"A man lost his life because of me," his father spoke slowly, eyes steady on Jeongin's distraught face. Slow, steady, careful. Kind. That was how Jeongin had always known his father — a gentle man who wouldn't hurt a fly — yet now he was sitting across from him in an inmate's uniform, handcuffs locked tight around his wrists.

"But he—he hurt Mum first," Jeongin whispered, barely able to push the words out of his throat. "He—you said he—"

"He did." His father's face had darkened, his normally soft jaw clenched. "I...lost it, and what happened to him was what that bastard deserved — but nothing changes the fact that I...killed him." He let out a deep, weary sigh, and Jeongin was suddenly struck by how much older his father looked. "He got his punishment for his sins one way, and now I'm paying for mine. It's as simple as that, my boy."

The buzzer sounded and the door behind him clicked open, a stone-faced officer stepping into the room as his father stood. "Take good care of your mother, would you?"

"Dad, if—" Jeongin's shaking voice made his father turn back around. The question was odd, but it had been burning at the back of his mind since the beginning of the visit. "If you—had the chance to go back. Would you still have...done it?"

Silence fell between father and son like a curtain. His father inhaled deeply, raising his eyebrows before meeting his son's eyes again. "I don't doubt it," he finally replied, voice soft. "What could I do? It was for someone I loved."

From then on, Jeongin's mother had spent the better years of her life working whatever job she could find, and the two of them lived off minimum wage and money sent by estranged relatives — until the poor woman had finally fallen ill. No one would hire a sickly old woman — especially not one that had been involved in a sexual assault case, all those years ago.

That was why Jeongin worked with four different delivery companies at a time; that was what he could never bring himself to tell Hyunjin or you. Work four jobs, graduate, and make proper money to pay his mother's hospital bills, to dig himself out of the poverty he'd known his entire life. Yang Jeongin's one-way, masterplan. Until...

The coma.

He had become almost comfortably numb, like a body submerged in the middle of a pond — yet occasionally, something would pull him above the surface, even if just for a brief moment. A voice, a pressure, a light. It was almost always Hyunjin, the soft-hearted barista talking to him about his day as if Jeongin had simply sat down to chat in Glow Cafe, not rendered immobile and unresponsive by a concussion. Sometimes, though, the older boy would be crying, silent sobs shaking his lean frame until he was so exhausted he'd fall asleep by Jeongin's side. And Jeongin wanted nothing more than to reach out to reassure him, to pull his friend into a hug, but he couldn't will his body to move no matter how hard he tried.