Chapter Text
The day after Seollal. Korean New Year.
It was the tail end an important time, a time of celebrating the arrival of a new year, of family and ancestors and wishes for fortune.
It was an odd thing to celebrate as a hybrid. The celebration of spring and the hopes for luck, those were normal. But the rest…
How do you celebrate your ancestors when your blood line arguably only consists of two generations? Who would you be doing the charye for? How Korean are you, really, when your parents were created in a lab?
It didn’t bother Taehyung most days. He looked Korean. He spoke Korean. He was born and raised within the county. It was all he knew. And yet.
Taehyung was well used to feeling like an outsider, but Seollal only seemed to make it worse.
He’d spent the day before with Jungkook’s mother at the urging of his own parents, the two of them insistent that he and Jungkook spent Seollal’s main day of celebration with her and her boyfriend. It hadn’t been bad by any means. Kim Sanghoon was as friendly as he was tall, a man of smiles and easy laughter. He’d met Jungkook — and Taehyung by extension — plenty of times before, but that hadn’t quelled his enthusiasm for playing host for their first Seollal with him. He’d wrangled them into helping him cook tteokguk and mandu, and then playing yut, chattering away about Seollals he’d spent with his family as a kid. He’d even pulled out a set of hwatu cards that’d been passed down to him by his grandmother.
It’d been okay. It had mostly distracted Taehyung from the dreary mood that always settled on his shoulders this time of year. But Sanghoon’s huge, expensive apartment, filled with too many empty spaces and large windows, had left him feeling somewhat exposed. It hadn’t helped that Sanghoon had innocently hung up a sehwa in celebration of the new year , a jakhodo of a grinning tiger and a chirping magpie, right in the entranceway where it seemed to stare at Taehyung regardless of where he stood in the open floor plan. Reminding him what year it was.
The tiger’s eyes stuck with him even a day later, safe in the smaller, cozier apartment belonging to his parents.
He could hear them in the kitchen talking quietly as they drank their morning tea, probably already wearing their hanboks. They’d likely woken up early to get the rice cakes, fruit and red envelopes ready.
Taehyung was awake, but he wasn’t up and about. Instead, he was sitting on the floor by the bed, staring at the framed photograph that hung on the wall just slightly down the hall from his bedroom, visible from the gap the ajar door left.
It was an old picture, one of many seasonal household photographs. His parents were sat on the floor beside a plush, royal purple couch, their hanboks pillowed over their legs and a young Taehyung balanced between them on their knees. All three of them were groomed to perfection, his mother’s hair pulled into a tidy bun and his own unruly waves tamed into a slicked back look that resembled his father’s own hair. Their orange and black ears and tails stood out against the pastels and neutrals of their clothing.
There was the makeup, too, purposely delicate and doll-like: their cheeks dusted in orange blush, white painted along their inner eyes and waterline, framed with thin black lines meant to replicate their stripes, and gold flakes glued at the corners of their eyes.
It was a picture-perfect photograph, but the photograph was shredded at the edges, torn diagonally and leaving some of the backing paper exposed. The other half was lost to a landfill somewhere, the face of their former master and his family left to rot.
It was picture-perfect photograph, and it left a sour taste in Taehyung’s mouth.
He knew why his father kept it up — it was the only picture he could find of the three of them together. It was the only family picture in their possession that was taken before he turned ten.
Taehyung understood the sentiment, but he could never look at it with any kind of fondness, because he didn’t see them in that photo. That wasn’t his family. Those three people were just dolls; pristine treasures to show off one minute, and to abuse like toys the next. Pretty things to be prodded and twisted to one’s liking without complaint, because their master could have easily sold Taehyung off after he was born, could have easily sold any of them off and separated them. The fact that they’d been allowed to stay together was a privilege, and that privilege could have easily been revoked.
Their master had been obsessed with tigers. He appraised them as the most beautiful creatures on earth, regal in every way. A true symbol of Korea. Yet with all the grooming he did to Taehyung’s family, not once were they ever enough for him. Never were they more than just playthings.
Taehyung was five or six in that photo, but this year he would turn twenty-seven, the same age his parents had been approaching when the government had given them their freedom.
That was 2005.
It was 2022 now, the Year of the Tiger.
He couldn’t escape it. It followed him in the form of decorations on the streets and storefronts and the graphics his friends and colleagues reposted to their social medias. The gilded tiger imagery was suffocating to him. It was too familiar to the gold-flaked eyes and golden collars of his childhood.
He, once again, felt stuck in the past. Like he’d never quite moved on like everyone else had.
It made him bitter, if he was being honest with himself.
How many hybrids in South Korea celebrated Seollal? Of those who did, how many felt as uneasy as he did? And the other hybrids who happened to fall under the lunar zodiac’s roster, did they feel as alienated as he did when their year rolled around? He knew Jungkook didn’t.
…Jungkook.
It was so easy for Taehyung to compare his experience with that of everyone else’s, especially when he lived with a hybrid who was so different from himself.
Jungkook didn’t struggle like Taehyung did. He didn’t live his life in a constant cycle of freeze or flee. He kept his head up and kept going. And Taehyung knew there were so many factors that caused their differences: the lives they’d lived both pre- and post-Liberation, the the opportunities they and their parents had after, even just their personalities.
But it always seemed to come down to one thing, really — the DNA scientists had used in a lab once upon a time.
Canine, feline.
Dog.
Tiger.
Dogs were predators, but no one really acknowledged that. No one looked at a dog and immediately thought it was dangerous. The “man’s best friend” title had extended to dog hybrids in the eyes of pures. A dog hybrid was still a dog. They were trustworthy.
Who was going to trust a tiger hybrid? Tigers themselves, while considered beautiful to look at, were seen as reserved and detached, just another big cat on the prowl, waiting for their chance to rip you apart. Only the insane fully trusted a real tiger — why trust the hybrid?
That was the difference between the categories of hybrids. The prey and the pet-aligned hybrids, they lucked out with curious glances and maybe some underestimation of what they were capable of. But the predators were given the short end of a stick they didn’t even draw themselves. They were stuck with the stares and glares, the muttered comments, the people who gave them wide berths as though predators were always five seconds from exploding.
Did anyone else notice it? Was that just the consequence of being someone who tended to gravitate to the sides, someone who could never quite feel like they belonged — your own otherness shoved into your face at every turn?
And to be caught in this awful twelve year cycle…
Why couldn’t he have been something else? Why did the golden Year of the Tiger have to hurt ?
The sheets whispered behind Taehyung, a whine letting him know that Jungkook had woken up, but that he wasn’t quite happy about it. It took another few minutes of sniffs and huffs before Jungkook’s voice, adorably groggy, broke the silence.
“Wha’ you doin’?”
“Sitting.”
“…By y’self?”
“Mhm.”
Jungkook sighed, apparently still too asleep to put much thought into it. “Okay.”
Endeared, Taehyung tore his gaze away from the photograph and twisted to look at Jungkook, finding the dog hybrid already blinking slowly at him. They stared at each other for a minute before Jungkook tilted his head.
“D’you feel okay? You’ve been… sluggy.”
“‘Sluggy’?” Taehyung repeated, a bit at a loss for what that meant. Jungkook nodded. “I just feel a little off, puppy.”
His boyfriend squinted at him. “Sick kind of off, or brain kind of off?”
“Brain kind of off.”
Jungkook hummed. He wiggled closer on the bed until he could hang his head over the side, leaning to nuzzle into Taehyung’s neck. “Wanna get out today? Get some sunshine?”
Taehyung sighed, tilting his head to the side, letting him scent him. “It’ll be crowded, though. And we’re supposed to be celebrating with my parents,” he mumbled.
“We can go to a park or somethin’, so it’s not so closed in,” Jungkook reasoned, his voice muffled against his skin. “We could have a picnic. Your mother likes those, right? She’d be excited. Plus, what could be better than enjoying outside and enjoying food?”
Taehyung huffed a laugh at the enthusiasm in his tone. He pulled on his hair gently to urge him to pull back, and when he did, he pressed a peck against his cheek. “I adore you,” he murmured.
He could hear Jungkook’s tail thumping hard against the mattress. “I adore you, too, cub,” he whispered. He turned his head, catching him in a proper kiss, and Taehyung couldn’t help the flustered giggle he let out when they separated.
“Come on.” Jungkook pushed himself up from the bed, and, offering his hand, pulled Taehyung up, too. “We should get up before your mom comes in to round us up herself.”
Taehyung stretched his legs that had cramped from the time spent on the floor. He watched Jungkook stop to lovingly pet the raggedy stuffed tiger toy on the nightstand before he ambled towards the door. The fur of his tail was in absolute disarray, matching his messy bedhead. Taehyung smiled to himself.
The chaos in his head ate at him sometimes, begged him to turn his resentment at the whole system on Jungkook, instead. But even the smallest grain of begrudgement usually fell away at Jungkook’s feet.
Jungkook had it easier in some ways, but he was also someone who truly saw Taehyung. He was a person of greys, not black and white, and he was the person that held Taehyung together when he was coming apart, that comforted Taehyung through every breakdown, yet reminded him that there was more than meets the eye.
Taehyung was bitter. But he could never hold a single thing against Jungkook, not when Jungkook never held a single thing against him.
❇︎
When he was a kid, Taehyung worked out that his parents were nothing like the characters in the romance movies he’d occasionally stolen glances of.
Their only kisses were pecks to the forehead or knuckles, never to the cheeks or lips. They didn’t cuddle one another. Or hug, really, unless it was a side hug. It was sort of like they just existed side by side, not together.
He’d known there was something , though, because they did touch. He remembered his father’s hands holding back her hair when she was sick, or gently supporting her that one awful month where she’d gasped in pain every time she got up or down or moved her tail wrong. He remembered his mother’s hands on his father’s arm, silently begging him to not pick a fight with their master he couldn’t win, or tenderly wiping blood away from the cuts in his back.
His parents had loved each other in some form or fashion — loved each other fiercely — but it hadn’t been in love at that time.
That was what made moments like this all the sweeter.
Just as Jungkook predicted, his mother had happily taken them up on the picnic idea. While he and Jungkook sat down to eat a quick breakfast, she’d hunted up her well-worn basket and started to run circles around the kitchen, her kinked tail lashing excitedly as she packed the snacks she’d already prepared into Tupperware and added new ones, too. His father was at her side, handing her things before she could even ask with a fond glint in his eyes.
“Jinnie, don’t go overboard,” he teased. His mother leaned out of the refrigerator, pouting.
“I’m not, Joon.”
“No?”
“I’m only getting the leftover yaksik. Nothing else.”
“Are you sure? You sure are taking your time.”
“I am not!”
“Okay,” he chuckled. He didn’t say anything when she retreated with both the yaksik and bags of grapes and cherries, but he gave the two boys a small smirk. Jungkook giggled around his toast, and a smile slowly grew on Taehyung’s face as he watched her feed his father grapes between every few she halved.
His parents hadn’t picked each other back then, but they had chosen each other now , and it gave Taehyung a sense of peace to see them act like the young-and-in-love couple they should have always been able to be. They were an example of the good in the bad that he held close to his heart.
When she was satisfied with what had been put together, his mother herded them back to the bedroom to change and gather their things, then out to the streets. The subway thankfully wasn’t packed quite yet, them managing to get on before the midday rush could hit — Taehyung didn’t know if he could handle the crowd today.
Jungkook secured them a set of seats farthest from another small group, sitting closest to the doors and tugging Taehyung down beside him while his parents settled on Taehyung’s other side, his mother beside him. Her tail brushed lovingly against his as she chatted softly with his father. Jungkook nudged him and offered an earbud that he took gratefully, leaning against his boyfriend and refocusing his brain on the jazz and lo-fi playlist that’d been picked out. Jungkook’s quiet humming and his thumb stroking across the skin of Taehyung’s forearm lulled him into a doze until there were lips on his forehead, whispering for him to wake up.
Hangang Art Park wasn’t too terribly busy when they reached it, but quite a few families were scattered throughout the open areas. Most seemed too wrapped up in their conversations and meals to pay them any mind as they passed. Any lingering gaze Taehyung did catch sight of, usually snapped away rather quickly. The kids at the playground they passed, though, were far less conscious of what was considered impolite. Taehyung usually didn’t mind the hushed squeals about his ears and tail, not when it came from kids — their wide-eyed stares and endless curiosity were blessings, not burdens, as far as he was typically concerned. But the words “Like this year’s zodiac!”, whispered with pure awe, made something sickly writhe in his stomach. He tucked himself closer to Jungkook, wishing his boyfriend was big enough to completely hide him from view.
The west side of the park tended to be more deserted, sitting the farthest away from most of the facilities. It gave them their pick of the shaded picnic tables offered. His mother selected one up a boardwalk path, providing them with a view of not just the Han River and Wonhyo Bridge, but also two art installations, one of two ginormous yellow snails facing one another, and the other a gaggle of flamingos that looked like their frames were covered with pink trash bags.
His father passed out the food that’d been packed, and they all settled into their lunch. His parents made conversation as they ate, simple questions like “How has work been, Jungkook-ah?” and “Are you ready to finish you first year teaching, cub?” It then, of course, trailed into less formal conversation: “How has your shoulder been holding up, kid?” and “You two should come over some time.” It was meandering enough he didn’t have to concentrate too much, mostly listening to his boyfriend’s happy chattering as he let himself feel the breeze.
“Eat a little more for me, cub,” his mother murmured, sliding him another slice of yaksik. “You’re too skinny.”
“I’m not,” he refuted, because really, he was eating better than he ever had. But one pout from his mother made him concede and pick the treat up, humming exaggeratedly at the taste until she huffed in amusement and tickled him under the chin.
“Can we go down to the water, Eomma?”
Jungkook asked, his voice muffled by a mouthful of fruit.
“You ask like I control the lot of you,” she sniffed.
Jungkook giggled, tail wagging as he swung his legs out of the bench. “C’mon, let’s go look at the penguins.”
Back down the boardwalk, past the snails and flamingos, there were, in fact, penguin statues on the main deck. Bright pink penguins. A long string of them lined the deck, looking out to the Han, while nine or ten of them stood on the rocks below the deck, positioned as though they were ready jump into the water one by one.
Jungkook flung one leg up, easily climbing and swinging his legs over the railing.
Taehyung grabbed the back of his shirt in a hurry. “What are you doing?” he hissed.
“I’m going to go down,” he huffed back. He jumped down, Taehyung making a rumbling noise in the back of his throat when he lost his hold.
“You shouldn’t be, though,” Taehyung chastised him, reaching out to bop him on the nose. Jungkook pulled away with a grin. “They railed it so you couldn’t go through on purpose, Jungkook.”
“There’s no sign saying you can’t. The path that way isn’t railed, either,” Jungkook sniffed, jerking his head back the way of the facilites. “C’mon, I’ll help you over.”
“You’re literally a cop, shouldn’t you be behaving?” he complained even as he reluctantly hauled himself up. His boyfriend’s hands lifted into the air, hovering as he put one leg over the rail at a time.
“Again, no signs.” Jungkook took his hands and steadied him as he tentatively hopped down. His tail balanced him, but his ankle still twinged at the hard landing on an uneven surface. “When was the last time you went all the way down to the water?”
“Never,” Taehyung snorted. “The river is a lot less clean than a pool. I didn’t want to trip in and get sick off of whatever got in my mouth.”
“You won’t fall in if you’re careful,” Jungkook huffed softly.
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, there’s where the issue comes in. Tiger doesn’t mean not clumsy .”
Jungkook laughed with a quick wave of his tail. Taehyung reserved himself to just leaning back against the deck, safely away from the water, while Jungkook picked his way a little further down, blinking at the penguins.
They and the snails reminded Taehyung of hybrids, oddly enough. They stood out amongst all the other art exhibits littered around the park, even in close proximity to the flamingos, who at least looked like plain, realistic versions of the birds until one got closer. No, these were bright, eye-catching, and abnormal, a far departure from the colors (and in the case of the molluscs, size ) of their real counterparts. Hybrids were like that, too; in a sea of normal, average humans, they were easy to spot, the movement of their ears and their tails drawing attention. Even when those appendages were hidden from sight, someone always seemed to guess the truth.
Hybrids were organic, but they were unnatural, just like these pink plastic penguins.
Taehyung wrinkled his nose at himself.
His literature classes had rotted his brain. That, or Namjoon.
Jungkook suddenly spun around and threw his fists up in front of his face, pretending to square up against one with a playful growl. His hand smacked against it.
“Jungkook,” Taehyung scolded, trying to bite down the laugh that bubbled up. “Don’t assault the penguins.”
The shuffle of footsteps made him turn his head back towards the deck. His father stood above them, his own lip twitching as he blinked at the installments. “…What do you think they mean?”
Taehyung looked back to the penguins.
“I don’t know, really.”
Jungkook had an ear tilted in their direction, listening to the conversation, but his focus was now clearly on beating rhythms against his penguin of choice, which he’d found to be hollow. “They’re plastic,” he chimed in unhelpfully. Taehyung eyed him, worried he was going to accidentally dent the poor thing. Its etched eye glared at the dog hybrid like it was wary of the same thing.
“So they probably aren’t very good for the environment, then,” his father concluded thoughtfully.
Taehyung shrugged. “There’s a good chance that’s part of the point of them.”
“Jungkook!” His mother shouted from up the hill, cutting their conversation off. The dog hybrid halted his impromptu drum session, his ears shooting straight up in the air. “Your mom is calling!”
Jungkook patted the pouch he’d tied to his hanbok for his phone, cursing and scrambling back up the shore and jumping the railing. Taehyung snorted at the metallic twang that followed his tail smacking against it on his way past.
“I’ll bet you 5,000 won Daeun-ah’s just being nosy,” his father mumbled.
Taehyung sniffed good-naturedly, leaning back against the deck. “Why bet on what’s certain?”
The elder chuckled. They stood silent for a minute or so, both watching the river’s water lap at the feet of the furthest penguin, before his father cleared his throat.
“You’ve been a little quiet today, cub.”
His lips twitched upwards at the awful attempt at subtlety. His father wasn’t someone who ever learned how to beat around the bush. “I’m just thinking a lot, is all.”
“Thinking about what?”
“Nothing much.”
“Well that’s an obvious lie,” his father scoffed.
Taehyung smiled guiltily. He could be honest with him, he knew that. It could just be hard. How much did he really want to bring up?
But that was his problem, wasn’t it? He never really healed, because he was always too cowardly to deal with the pain of properly stitching the wounds.
He could hear Jungkook’s words from previous conversations in his head, nagging but gentle, nonetheless. “How do you not explode, Hyung? You can tell people things, you know that, right? No one thinks you’re silly.”
Taehyung swallowed his pride, clearing his throat. The nervous lump didn’t really go away. “Appa, do you ever… Do you ever still feel alienated? It’s been, what, sixteen? Almost seventeen years since the Liberation? But I still feel out of place.”
His father’s shoes scraped against the wooden deck as he crouched down to sit, hanging his legs over the edge. “I do,” he answered honestly. “But there must be more to it than that, for you to be so off today.”
“Have I really been that quiet?”
His ears tilted back, feigning despair. “Like you were nineteen again,” his father lamented.
Taehyung huffed a small laugh. “Yeah, that wasn’t a fun time for either of us.”
“It wasn’t. That’s why I don’t want to see you like that again.”
(“Even if what I’m upset about is silly?”
“Hyung, if it genuinely makes you upset, is it really that silly?”)
Taehyung wrung his hands against the fabric of his hanbok. “It’s Seollal, I guess, that makes me feel so put out. Both of our major holidays celebrate family and ancestry. That’s always… It feels weird as a hybrid, celebrating those things when our families are either separated or severely limited. We don’t have hundreds of past generations to honor. Not ones we feel connected to, anyways.” His father hummed in agreement behind him. “And then the Lunar New Year thing, with a zodiac animal every year… It shouldn’t upset me because they’ve been doing it for a long time, but…”
“But?”
“It’s the Year of the Tiger,” he whispered shamefully, the water on the rocks almost overpowering his voice. “There’s all this celebration over tigers, for the new year but also because it’s our national animal, right? We love them, they’re in our stories and in our art. So now it’s their year and everyone is celebrating but we—” Taehyung hated, hated how his voice sounded choked. “But we’ve never been celebrated. We aren’t enough. We’ve never been enough.”
His father made a sound that tugged at his heart, one that he remembered vividly from when he was still a cub and terrified of their shouting master. A hand settled against his nape and he melted against it, sniffling.
“We are enough,” his father mumbled softly. “It might not feel like it sometimes. There will always be pures that look at us hybrids and tell us that we are worthless. That because we can no longer be owned, that because we now take up more space, we are not worth the cost of our creation. Those pures, and other hybrids, too, will look at us predators and fear us, will tell us that we are not worth their discomfort. But we are predators, and we’re as human as the rest of them. We can’t change what we are, and we shouldn’t have to be ashamed of that. No matter what they say, we are enough.”
“But I’m not,” he admitted. His father’s hold tensed on his nape, but Taehyung ignored it and plowed ahead at full speed despite the shake in his hands, because fuck it, vulnerability was healthy, right? “I’m always too much or not enough, and I can never just be normal . At twenty-six, you were navigating personhood for the first time, all while supporting a whole family, and at that same age I’m only just now getting myself together.” He shook his head. “All the second-generation hybrids around me have soared and I’ve just fallen sh-short, Appa.”
His father was silent for a heavy moment. Then his fingers toyed at Taehyung’s hair. “Look at me, cub.”
Taehyung reluctantly turned to better face him and was met with an earnest expression. “Other than us, how many hybrids do you know, Tae-yah?”
“…I-I don’t know,” he whispered, his ears turning outwards with his nerves as he tried to think. “Personally? Eight… Nine? Something like that?”
“And how many of those are predators?” came the gentle encouragement.
Taehyung’s eyes dropped to his feet. “None. There… There aren’t many of us left, Appa.”
“And yet you’re here,” his father murmured. “You’ve struggled through things many of your peers can’t relate to, but you keep trying. I don’t care what age you are. I don’t care how many times you fall, either. You’re our son, and we’ll always be proud of you. You’ll always be enough. You’ve done so well these last few years, but I think it’s time you start to let yourself grow. Start opening up more and facing the things that scare you.”
Taehyung wrinkled his nose, but smiled at his father’s responding chuckle.
“I know. I’ve been thinking about things more. Probably because I’m getting older and nothing is fixing itself.” He got a snort for his sardonic joke. “But I’m trying to do better. It’s just hard to not… to not feel bitter. To look at everyone and have to mourn the things we missed out on.” He laughed wetly. “I feel so bad for you sometimes, you know? You never got to be the cool dad who showed his son how to fish or skip rocks or build things or… I don’t know. I just feel awful for all of us.”
His father was quiet for a minute, but Taehyung didn’t mind, soaking in comfort from his continuing touch. But then his hair was being ruffled, and his father way standing, trying to climb up over the rails in a way that made Taehyung gasp for him to be careful of his back.
“Here’s the good thing, cub,” his father announced as he lowered himself down beside him, his tone so genuinely boisterous that it gave him pause, confused. “We can’t change all of that. But we can learn that stuff together.” He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the rocks below them. “How hard can it be to make a stone hop on the water, anyways?”
Taehyung stared at him, lost, before the smile slowly started to grow on his face. Laughing, he wiped some of the moisture lingering under his eyes away and reached down, picking up the smallest, flattest rock he could find. “I guess we’ll find out. Bet I can do it better than you.”
“You’re on, fluffball.”