Chapter Text
Wind swept away the fallen leaves, red and gold rustled on the ground before taking flight, hardly graceful before they were slammed back on the earth.
There was hardly any ecstasy that lasted.
The sweeper cursed under his breath as his work increased. When he sensed someone looking at him raised his hair to spot a boy covered from head to toe in winter clothing standing a few feet away his eyes lit up with the sort of sympathy towards misery that the boy was used to seeing when people looked his way. The boy looked away at once.
Under his covered face the sweeper gave him a small apologetic smile, a quick whisper of a prayer, nothing eloquent, just a chant of Yoongi and protection and God towards the heavens and then moved on with his life.The short spell of deep sorrow that he felt on the behalf of the boy slowly reduced to a simmering unpleasant feeling right below his skin and then vanished out of his pores to nothing but a deafening indifference and not unkind sort of carelessness as life moved on.
Yoongi slowly disappeared out of his sight.
You don’t matter to people even when you matter to them.
Walking further Yoongi pulled at his scarf further up when a bunch of people from my school passed.
They don't hate you, they won't hurt you. Stop worrying.
Even if they hate you, they probably won’t hurt you in public. It will be okay.
Even if they do hurt you, just take it.
Submit.
Don’t fight back.
Sit. Take it. Submit.
It will pass like the wind. Even hurricanes pass. Submit.
He tried to calm himself and took deep breaths. Doing so always calmed his nerves, it helped him submit and accept.
When you submit to those who want something from you, or want to hurt you, then they don't hurt you so bad. They cooperate if you do.
If they want power, give it to them. Life is not a balance, it is a transaction as Yoongi learned way early in his life. Life is a transaction.
It does not have to be a fair transaction, or a consensual one. It just is a transaction. One person wants and they demand.
You either give them or they will come to you to take what they want. If you just give, it is over. The transaction is over, and no one is hurt. If you fight…..
You can’t fight a hurricane. So don’t fight. Just submit. And it will be over soon. The hurricane will pass.
Shhh.
He kept walking through the park until the carefully cut plants and paved paths bled into the seething, virgin, rioting beauty of the untamed wilderness.
Alaska was a vision during autumn and it took away Yoongi’s breath every time he went there.
The open tundra was a catastrophe. An unforgiving habitat and right now it felt like the floor was really lava. The colours varied from dull, laid back red to a tangy orange and the cracks were filled in between by a yellow so vibrant as if the sun itself poured its essence.
He lifted his head and removed his scarf when he reached a clearance, trees coming to a halt in an impossibly perfect semicircle as if it was an amphitheatre of audience bewitched while watching as the Earth coiled in on herself —wide and tumbling downwards to form a vast, bumpy land— untainted by the tourists whose flocks had already begun to fade by now.
A river jutted over the large rocks, sharp and focused in its pursuit, the rage she carried easing away into smaller rocks and pebbles to form the river bank. Yoongi daintily eased down onto the same small log that he always did.
Unlike most significant moments in his life for which he had a skewed timeline in his head, the moment he started coming to this place was pretty clear in his mind.
Five and hurt, five and scared, five and bullied.
Five and running away from the bullies, but not towards home because everything hurt at home. Not on his body but somewhere deep within.
Yoongi used to think he imagined the hurt. Because home shouldn't hurt. Home shouldn't feel like it was closing in on him, like every crunch of the drywall or every lint on the coat was out to hurt him. None of his friends hurt when they are at home.
And so, Yoongi found this place, a place too open and far and scary for his bullies but too wide to ever bend into two and snap on him. So, since Yoongi was five he came here, as often as he could to stare at the water, the fields, the winds.
And it awoke something in him. Something deep in his veins, in the inner hollows of his bones, in the fluid brushed along the inside of his skull.
A feeling his psychiatrist identified as the beginnings of anger.
And then Yoongi tried to fight it. Because that is the only thing he would allow himself to fight. Because trying to fight that feeling was the only part of his day that didn’t hurt.
Because you don’t tickle when you tickle yourself and you don’t hurt when you hurt yourself. So he fought that feeling, if only to curb its violence because it was the only violence he could ever curb.
“It is anger, Yoongi.” Dr. Lee had said, her tone calm and placating. And Yoongi walked out after his appointment thinking about it.
That time anger tasted like a foreign word on his tongue. An emotion he was a victim of for years. Anger looked like a belt on his skin and a back that bled like a saturated watercolour painting.
Anger didn’t look like staring at a dandelion fly through the winds, on its accord and with no master. Anger didn’t look like envy for the rocks that had the privilege of never being carved.
Today, he was here for a new purpose. And Yoongi now thought of it a little differently. A narrative in his head a little more skewed but sensible. Now, these soft wisps of fallen leaves swirling in the wind like their own mini hurricane, Yoongi thought of it as a deathbed of his childhood. A mourning of emotions.
And if there was one thing he could do good with, it was sorrow.
Here it was just the earth and water. Between the large boulders near him, squirrels played and moved down the meadow. He sat there for a long while, just taking everything in. Sorrow, was awful. But sorrow sure was a companion.
It was already an hour, he realised.
Need to go.
His heartbeat quickened, thinking of everything that waited for him at home and nausea took over me. His nails dug into my palms and he squeezed my eyes shut.
Shh. Take a deep breath.
He wouldn't be punished any longer.
Home doesn’t make him bleed anymore.
She is gone. Home is gone.
The relief hit him like a gust of wind, blowing me away, as did the sounds of another pair of footsteps far in the distance.
He looked around, startled and scared. First, he could see nothing and it scared me even more. It always happened like this. He could never see anything. Home would come and tie him, cover my eyes and deprive him of his senses.
The only thing he could do at home was feel. Every sense of touch was enhanced and every pounding, every tear on flesh, every word of hate whispered against my skin dripped deep into my soul and it stayed there.
It was then that my eyes landed on a person.
A boy?
No. A man.
He never saw someone out here. In all his years of coming to this place, never.
The man moved without worry towards his Alaskan Malamute. The dog barked with what looked like a branch between his teeth and the man laughed at the antics.
Even from my distance Yoongi could hear the high pitched gurgle of laughter, it bordered near squealing, like the wind singing between the tree canopy.
Poetic and pretty.
Possibly pretentious and punishing.
It set him on alarm. He had heard countless such smooth laughters, calming and soothing. He knew the effect it had on people. But he was also there when the doors closed, he was on the other side, inside the house with nowhere to escape.
No wonder that the others who left with the image of a happy family never really believed him.
Not every family is like yours Yoongi, calm down.
Submit, Yoongi. Submit.
But right now, he was past the point of submitting. His one hour was already up. He had to go soon. He should go soon— away from a person he had never seen before.
Still he kept looking, despite all of my instincts telling him to run. In all the fourteen years that he had come here everyday he had never witnessed anyone here, ever. So why today of all days?
Why on the day of the court hearing?
Could this be a ploy?
Run.
Submit.
Yoongi looked at the man, he was tall and well built. Even from afar he was clearly beyond beautiful. His eyes sloped and Yoongi probably imagined a happy crinkle that accompanied the still unstopping laugh. His skin was a fine blend of earthy colours like the one between ivory and olive. His smooth full cheeks thudded down to a stop at sharp jawbones. He leaned back when his large dog came to climb on him and Yoongi thought that this man was very flexible. He was very tall. And gorgeous. And flexible.
And Yoongi wanted to puke.
But he stayed and let the whistling infectious laughter— that was slowly dying down— seep into his pores and tingle down to the nerves of his fingertips.
In a perfect world Yoongi would stop staring. In a perfect world this sort of joy would not be an alien concept to Yoongi. In a perfect world he would not probably not even cast it a glance because joy was a normal thing and it wouldn’t make him want to claw his skin out.
In another perfect world Yoongi would probably laugh along, not chew the inside of his cheek out. He would probably go say hi and not want to run.
But his one hour was up now.
He had to go.
Not to home, because home was gone.
But to a courtroom.
His lawyer had told him to strap his belt tight because he would be there for a while. So he stood up slowly, didn’t make much noise, didn’t take too much space, didn’t attract any attention and slowly very slowly made an attempt to walk back to the trail.
Yoongi could swear that something called him, not a voice, but a tug. Something that wasn’t real.
He turned back around to a new concept. A phenomenon too bright and pure for this world. The man was standing there and he was smiling wide, a small camera in his hand as he ran backwards and away from his dog. It was such a simple scene, a normal happy scene but it caused a flutter in his heart.
This was what it looked like when people were genuinely happy. They looked beautiful. Angelic.
Then suddenly as if his heavenly dream ended with a snap his eyes fell on Yoongi. It was still too far for him to tell his eye colour and he could barely recognise his expression but he could see his mouth open wide as he stared at me. His eyes squinted in the sunlight and he took a step towards me.
The man came closer and Yoongi’s feet were stuck to the ground. Up closer, he looked even more beautiful, more dangerous.
His mouth opened to reveal a set of pearly white teeth, he was too beautiful to be good. “Hi—”
Strangers were never good for him. Their attention was never good. Not in his household. But he knew better than to run.
They always hurt him more if he ran.
If he were to act like a prey, he would attract a predator.
Don’t run.
Shh.
No one is going to hurt you.
Everyone hurts everyone.
It is just a person.
People are monsters.
But this time, he was not in a clearance in the woods. No arctic wind blew in his nose. No, this time he was inhaling home cooked meth.
Because you should submit when there is a hurricane. Cower. Not fight.
Submit. Submit. Submit.
“Submit, you stupid slut. Stop fighting.”
But Yoongi was sometimes terrible at understanding logic. At submitting. And that is something a lot of people dropped cash for. For him struggling, crying, running like a prey.
Because he was a prey. Is a prey.
And like a prey, he was always the prey, he ran.