"THE PRETTIEST SMILE HIDES THE DEEPEST SECRETS.
THE PRETTIEST EYES HAVE CRIED THE MOST TEARS.
THE KINDEST HEARTS HAVE FELT THE MOST PAIN."

"What if I tell you the truth?"

Seokjin heard the tremor in her voice, sensing it as she finally let her guard down, her tense shoulders easing in sorrow.

"Will you believe me if I tell you the truth? If I tell you how I really feel?"

He nodded his head.

She pursued her lips together. "The truth is, I am terrified. I feel like I'm falling apart and slowly losing myself. I've been in mourning ever since I left my parents' house, I've never felt more alone and scared than I do here, I feel absolutely broken and worthless. I thought coming to Korea would help. I thought it was a place where I would belong, I thought the pieces would fall into place. But everything has been in disarray.

"Most of the time, I don't feel much. I keep myself busy and do things I've always wanted to do. Then suddenly, there's a roller coaster rush of negative emotions, blind rage and insecure thoughts that I've been keeping under control since I was young, traits I got from my parents. Then I realize what's happening, the ghosts of my past are still haunting me. I thought I could fight them by running away, I thought I would forget everything and live afresh, I really thought I would be happy."

When he guessed something was wrong, he didn't think it was this far worse. He looked at her in concern, his own heart squeezing in agony.

"But I couldn't. They're still here. I can still hear my parent's roaring voices and inhumane swearings. I can still see their violent and outrageous fights in my mind. I can still feel my old scars stirring and hurting me all the way again. Somehow, I can't get rid of these memories. I try...I try a lot to forget, but every time I close my eyes, I just go back. I keep going back to that terrifying period of my life every single time." Her throat burned with poison.

At this point, he couldn't describe how she looked at that moment. She didn't look like a woman in her 20s who was a proud fan-girl. To him, she was just a little child, confused and scared of the world.

Her words evoked pity and regret in his chest, stirring his heart with compassion upon realizing the depth of her suffering.

With a lick to her lips, she breathed heavily. "The most triggering memories are the times when my mother used to h-hit my father."

Seokjin had no idea how he controlled his facial expressions then. The cold air felt glass-sharp against his skin.

"She was 9 years younger than him. But that didn't stop her at all. Occasionally during fights, she used to hit my father with whatever she could find, throw stuff at him, kick him, slap him, and many times attempt to kill him.

"I remember one time she was beating him so much that Father shut the door to protect himself. You know what she did? She took a bug-spray and sprayed all of it inside his room through the gaps and holes to suffocate him. If that wasn't enough, she took an axe and hammered on his door like a psychopath. She once hit him so hard in the head that he bleeded a lot. Sometimes at night, she would go to his room, pour water on his bed so that he couldn't sleep. A few times, she threw away all the food he brought for her and starved us. She even ousted him out of the house in the middle of the night. She would keep him under tight pressure every day, showing him who's the boss. She never let him forget who was in control, what kind of woman he married, what would happen if he disobeyed her."

It was too much. Too much gory and bone-chilling that he went pale and quiet. He wondered if he should stop her because none of her words were making sense. How can a woman attack her husband so aggressively? They didn't sound true. It was impossible.

Yoon Min was panting now. "Mother did all of those most of the time when she was high on drugs. She had a habit of taking sleeping pills in a concerning amount. That's how she used to defend herself, you know? She used to say after every fight that it wasn't her fault, it was the pills, that made her do it. But sometimes she did all of those in a sane mind. Even then, she would know a way to defend herself.

"I remember a lot of things. I have so many memories of her being ruthless and merciless to my father. I remember how much she hated him, I remember how she destroyed his favourite things, I remember the brutal nights we had to stay awake because of their fighting, I remember the ugly names she used to call him by, I remember just how much she wanted him to die."

She gasped for air to inhale as if she was suffocating. But that didn't stop her. She continued like if she didn't tell him everything, it would cost her life.

"But you know what bothers me the most?"

The question was sudden and threw him off guard. But he refused to look away from her bloodshot eyes. It would be heartless to do that.

She wasn't expecting an answer, she choked out the next words. "Never once did my father hit her back. Never once."

Large pillows of grey clouds were forming, blotting out the silver light of the moon. He could hear the murmuring of the heavy clouds. But he was more shocked than he was supposed to be. His throat burned in the absence of uttering a word and the tendons in his body tightened.

"He never hit her back. He let her do whatever she wanted. He would keep quiet all the time during her complaints and swearings. When she would go for hours, he would shout back. When she would go too far, he would tell her to stop, to calm down. He would apologize multiple times but her heart could never melt. She would never be happy."

Yoon Min's eyes were wide and glossy with future tears. Her expression was indescribable, how pathetically hurt she looked and at the same time, how much she fought not to drop even one tear. It surprised him more how she was holding back.

"I tried, you know? I tried telling him to divorce her, to free himself from this cursed marriage, told him not to worry about us and just leave her. But he refused every time...He used to say it wasn't her fault and he would never divorce her because he loved her."

The crack in her voice was enough to bring tears to his own eyes. Despite the unrelenting torture, her father stayed with her. After all, he didn't want to let her go, because he loved her. It sounded something like out of a fairytale.

Her reddened eyes looked scary now. "So they stayed together. No matter how barbarously they hurt each other, no matter how often they fought and caused turmoil, no matter how much they hated their marriage, they were determined not to separate. They would rather kill one another than fill for a divorce, and this fact pretty much traumatized me and my sister's lives. Because every time their fights ended, we knew it was gonna happen again. We knew they would fight again, hurt each other again, again and again-"

It was the final straw. Any normal person would have cried by now. He saw her slack face, filled with such misery and pain, that it tore his heart to keep looking at her. He shouldn't be just standing and doing nothing.

She wailed, "I should've gone insane. Normally, any child in my position was supposed to go into serious depression or grow into a sociopath. Any person could've taken one look at me and told me something was wrong. But what did I become? What happened to me? The answer is, all my life, no one realized what was going on in my life. No one saw my tired eyes and fake smiles, no one saw the tears I cried in front of them. No one understood I was falling apart, that I was barely holding on, that I needed help and I needed to be protected. There was not one person who cared and saw right through me.

"Because everyone thought I was okay. They believed me so easily whenever I told them I was fine. People believe what they want to believe. And so they wanted to believe I didn't need help, that whatever was going on with my family was quite normal, that every parent fights.

"So whenever I take a peek in myself, I always find a child sitting in the bathroom, scared, alone, hugging her knees, waiting for the clock to announce it's over for now. I find her standing up, wiping her tears and pretending to be okay. I see her with her friends, smiling; but only I see she was begging them to help her. Sadly, they were too busy with their own lives to notice her misery."

He wondered who were they. He wondered how blind they had to be to not pity this girl, to not help her or at least tell her she was going to be okay, to at least hold her hand and say they were with her. She was petrified in that family, witnessing scenes no person should, hearing words no person should. And the people around her, how selfish were they to not notice the thousand tears on her face, the shattered pieces of her heart and the million hints she sent for help?

Then he realized he was one of them.

He had known her for a few months now but never asked genuinely about how she felt. He never asked about her problems or fears, maybe he did, but not enough for her to answer honestly. Anyone could tell from spending time with her that she was the kind of girl who would sacrifice herself in a heartbeat. So of course, she never talked about herself, at least not the topics that wouldn't help him. She only stuck to the parts that would show how much he mattered.

It wasn't until tonight she shared the darkest truths about her. Tonight, she took off the mask in front of him. Because she believed he would help her.

The pain she went through, the pain she was suffering now and the pain she feared would always follow her - he wanted to make that disappear. He wanted to put a shield around her, wanted to heal her scars, wanted to tell her she didn't need to be scared anymore.

Because two broken people will either fit together perfectly or destroy each other beyond repair. He believed they would manage to create something whole.

"But there's this one thing that I can't stop doing. I hate myself for it, I hate myself for a lot of reasons and this one particularly is the worst." She took a shaky breath. "After all this damage and bullshit, I miss my family so much and I feel terribly guilty that I left them to save myself."

The clouds spat out their beads of water then. With the beginning of the rain, his heart truly broke for her then. His eyes couldn't hold back the tears anymore. They rolled down slowly, tickling his skin in discomfort.

As if the display of his tears triggered her strength, the walls around her crumbled in a devasting display. Her emotions became too much to bear, the pain distorted her world. Yoon Min broke down for the first time. For the first time, he saw the tears breaking through their cage and spilling over her cheeks. She ended up crying in front of him and for the first time, she didn't look special or extraordinary like she always did.

She looked like a human.

The overwhelming amount of misery and surprise was almost too much to bear. He couldn't keep watching her writhing in pain and crying helplessly. After everything she told him about her parents and her own battle against herself, he was truly taken aback by her incredible power to smile all the time. Then he realized she had been smiling all along for him only.

That thought pushed him to reach towards her. She sobbed like a heartbroken child. He knew how much it could hurt, how much her heart might destroy itself every day and the blame she put on herself when it wasn't her fault. He knew it wasn't easy trying to run away from your past because there will always be some parts of it that will haunt you.

The rain grew more intense, but Yoon Min couldn't care less. But hands were itching to comfort her, do something to stop her pain, save her soul. He wanted to help her more than anything.

He took the umbrella from her hand and opened it over their heads. Bravery clouded his chest as he placed his hand on her shoulder and pulled her closer to him. Wrapping his arms around her, he let out a nervous shaky breath and closed his eyes before tightening the hold. His own heart hammered against his chest at the feeling of her body in his embrace.

Yoon Min didn't try to push him or wriggle her way out. In fact, she accepted the hug helplessly as if she needed it. She leaned onto him and wailed her lungs out. Emotions growing too much to handle, the world distorted in the name of the pain in her heart.

Without complaining, he accepted her pain. It was so blatantly revealed throughout her body that it hurt him to see her like that. He was relieved she let him hug her, let him help her. With a faint smile, he held her tight in his arms, welcomed all of her memories and scars as well.

For the past three years, no one had made him feel as happy and safe as she did in the last few months. And for the past 30 years of his life, no one had looked at him with eyes as full of admiration, attraction and undying feelings as she did. No one gave him excitement in the mind, butterflies in the stomach or dreamlike feelings like she did.

Now Seokjin was willing to do anything to let her know he was there. He will be there as long as she needed him. He wanted to belong to her like she belonged with him.

Even for a moment.

☆THE FAULT IN OUR STARS☆

THANK YOU FOR READING
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