Serendipity {Vmin}

22. Be it anything...

Hoseok stood at the foot of the stairs of the Estate's basement while biting his nails. He nervously patted the dirty floor with his foot while he stared worriedly at the heavy metal door upstairs. Frustration flowed from his whole being, as his eyes hadn't moved from the frame; no wonder why no one dared to confront him. Nobody, except a blonde, braided-haired girl.

"Not now" growled the boy, not even looking at her.

"Jungkook?"

The leader of the kids raised his brows.

"How did you know?" he asked, making the girl laugh.

"You never would frown like that for anyone else... And no one makes as much trouble as that kid."

Hoseok had to agree with Lisa, but that didn't make him less worried.

"I have a bad hunch." The boy gulped and glanced around the room. Down there, in one half of the basement, all people of the Estate were busy with their own business. Some tried to sleep on the dirty clothes placed on the cold stone floor, others sat in small groups, and one would have thought that they were conversing... But the fact that they were talking to each other didn't mean that they were having a conversation. Conversing would've meant bonding, and that lead to the scene of them waiting with trembling body and soul for the return of the person in question to the basement, after he destroyed everything around himself.

Hoseok was well aware how much he messed it up after he got to love the first children. Almost none of them was alive now. Some couldn't bear the winters, others did the work wrong, a few tried to escape. The girl who he was the closest to was sold at the age of eight. There wasn't a day in Hoseok' life that went by without the braided-haired little girl's struggling and screaming echoing in his head as she was dragged out to the outside world where she already knew what kind of future was waiting for her. They hadn't heard of her since then, and the boy almost wished that Jennie was dead, rather than being the sick toy of someone for fifteen years.

By time, Hoseok strengthened his heart and tried to distance himself from the others. The thing worked, up until at the age of eight, a chubby little child was thrown in front of him with bleeding head and the name "Jimin" embroidered in his clothes. This was the only thing that told him the boy's name, because when he woke up a few hours later he remembered nothing. Neither how he got to them, nor who he was, but not even what his name was. Hoseok pitied the little child, because he couldn't even give him the chance to write his full name and his address down to one of the papers he was collecting. Not like the others got anywhere with it, but at least they had a tiny bit of hope in Hoseok's eyes. However, Jimin was just like him: hopeless. Maybe that was why he began to like him. His kind nature at the beginning, his incorrect speaking, his smile, in which his eyes narrowed into little crescents, and which only made its way to the boy's face less and less often at first, until it had completely disappeared from it over the years. It only took Hoseok a few days to finally fall asleep while embracing the little boy so that wouldn't freeze to death in the middle of winter in the unheated basement. It was another moment that got engraved in his memory forever. The heat of Jimin's body, that not only warmed up his ice-cold skin, but also his heart. And in that cloudless moment, the boy raised his head up from the floor without a second thought and pushed his lips to the little kid's still pleasant scented head covered with black locks.

"I'll be your family from now on" he whispered then, with raspy voice from his cold, half asleep, but very serious.

And if he loved one person, he got to love others too. Of course, he couldn't like some kids either, others he just barely tolerated. A lot of them got to be violent youths from cute children, and Hoseok hated to see them change, but didn't prevent it. It was better for them this way. He simply distanced himself from them and let them live their life as they wanted to. Even after he got to be the leader.