Serendipity {Vmin}

25. The thief - part two

The scene in front of Jimin blurred together and became incoherent. He could barely see through his tears, and the ringing in his ears merged with Jungkook's screams and pleas. Rationally, he knew what the right choice would be: sacrificing three lives – their lives – to save a lot of others' health; do, what the parents of the Kim brothers and Yoongi's did too. If they could do it, then who was he, a nobody, a gangster seedling to disregard these people, and make their deaths lose its meaning?

Of course, not everything could go by the plan all the time. That was how Jimin found himself struggling in the grip of a man, shouting the exact words that the people of the Estate wanted to hear. His brain simply turned off when Jungkook started to get choked with pain, and he had lost all sense of rational thinking. If he had been the one who was tortured, his breaking point never could have come, he would've just let them do whatever they wanted. It suddenly made sense why the kids had to raise up each other at the Estate. To have a weakness. People were crueler and more devious than he would've thought.

And he was rasher.

In one moment, he was still under all of... The effects of the horrifying scene; with his stomach turning and heart beating in his throat, his ears ringing while the skinhead held him up with a strong grip, while he was at the edge of fainting, when... And in the next moment, he already said out loud pretty much the only thing that he was supposed to keep about the family. For a moment he wasn't even able to react to his own thoughtless words, before he suddenly fell into panic about the image that now he would need to push a gun to one of his friends' head so they would open the cabin for him. What on Earth will they be thinking of him? Not only that he's the person he is, but if the others get to know this too, all of this will get worse, and...

"Well-well. Then we are very lucky that I'm talking to one of the brothers right now."

Jimin looked at the old man with an unfocused gaze. He had no idea what the man was talking about.

"What?" he whispered. After a few seconds realization started to awaken in him, but he still couldn't get to the point to actually understand what the words meant.

"It's been sixteen years that our man at the area of the government's secret developments reported the special experiment" the old man started. "These scientists could bring home every kind of tasty things. Infectious agents spreading epidemics, deadly diseases. And of course, even those things that they already discovered were two-bladed weapons, but we still wanted something more. Something, that could hit really big, something fatal. Then, sometime three years later the news came: they had what we were waiting for. An enormous mutant virus, with the antidote. If someone gets their hands on it, they can infect anyone they want, then heals whoever they would like to. Anyone who has it has the power too. Obviously, they wanted to make something good out of this virus, get bodies to react to it, then make an antidote from the built-up defense, so that they could heal other, similar diseases. Honestly, I don't really have the knowledge to all this medical nonsense."

Jimin listened to the man in aghast, and he could only thing about the nearing end of the story. Murder. Experiments ending with fail. Blood. Children, who never really got to know their parents. A trauma for life, and a dead brother for Min Yoongi... Unless...

"So, we made up a team, we went out, held four adults at gunpoint, took them down to the basement, then... Nothing." The old man punched the electric chair irritably, making the half-unconscious Jungkook tremble in fear. The boy turned his head from the man and shut his eyes tight, as if he were in fear that the next it would land on him.

"They kept everything that we needed at a closed unit, and they wouldn't have opened the lock even for god. As they were part of the government's development unit, they've got a kind of security equipment which was impossible to hack as we didn't even know about its existence. No matter how we forced them to open it, they tried but the system didn't let them in. It watched hormone production from blood tests, pulse rate, and every kind of nonsense that filtered that they weren't trying to get in by their own will. Actually, they didn't even try, if they wanted to, they could have gotten in. But no, they rather choose to watch as their stupid kid got his head beat into a wall, then they died; and we got what we wanted in front of our eyes, but we still couldn't get it. Before they died, they told us that no one else could open the door but them. Turns out, that was a lie. Anyway, as we didn't have any other ideas, we grabbed the kid that we persuaded them with, to see if he might know something; to our misfortune however, when he woke up at the basement, the kid didn't even remember his own name."