Station zero: Seven days until dawn

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The wind on the rooftop of the high-rise was glacial, cutting through the thin fabric of his jacket straight to the bone, but Taehyung barely felt it. His body had gone numb long ago, sealed inside a cold cocoon. He sat on the very edge with his legs dangling over the void, where far below the night city of Seoul pulsed with the glowing arteries of its lights. Through worn headphones, Jeongguk's voice reached him — tender and aching — singing Blue and Grey, the song that had become his personal anthem of loneliness, the only mirror that still showed him his own reflection. It didn't heal anything. It simply whispered that he wasn't alone in his darkness. Taehyung was only seventeen — an age when the world is supposed to feel like infinite possibility — but the face in the mirror was that of a man who had lived a heavy, exhausting century. Ash-blond hair, extraordinary grey-green eyes now swollen and red from endless tears. His beauty was painful, frighteningly fragile — a porcelain doll that had been dropped too many times and then clumsily glued back together, piece by piece. And that was exactly how his life had been assembled: piece by piece, from the day his father first made it clear that his birth had not been a gift, but a punishment. Today, his father had dropped him for the last time. That same man who had once worn a police officer's uniform with pride, who had been an example to the entire neighborhood, had finally become a monster. After his mother's death in childbirth, his father had broken. Something inside him had ruptured, burning away everything human. Taehyung had often heard the neighbors say, He wasn't always like this — grief consumed him. But for Taehyung himself, his father had never been a hero. He had always been the acrid smell of liquor, a heavy leaden fist, and uncontrollable bursts of rage. Memory, unwilling to let go, pulled him back — to where it all began. Little Taehyung, barely six years old, curled into a tiny knot beneath the old kitchen table. He had wedged himself into the corner, knees pressed to his chin, palms so hard against his ears that a dull roar filled his skull. It didn't help. Above the tabletop, hell had broken loose. He could hear a plate of unfinished dinner shattering against the wall, shards ringing plaintively as they scattered across the linoleum. "It's your fault! If it weren't for you, she'd still be here!" his father roared, and there was nothing in his voice but hatred. Taehyung saw his feet — heavy military boots kicking a stool aside, sending it flying close enough to brush his small fingers. The kitchen air was thick and sticky with cheap soju and cigarette smoke. His father's drinking companions laughed somewhere in the doorway, egging him on, and that laughter seemed more terrifying to Taehyung than any scream. He squeezed his eyes shut, feeling a cold tear scald his cheek against the dusty floor, and tried to imagine he was just a smudge on the wallpaper. That he wasn't there. That he didn't exist. It was his grandmother's hands that pulled him out from under that table — warm hands that smelled of lavender and fresh baking. She had been his little ray of sunshine, the only living soul who had ever looked at him with love rather than reproach for the very fact of his birth. She had been his mother in every way that mattered. She had taught him to see beauty in details: the shape of clouds, the cracks in the pavement, the first leaf of spring. She had shown him that the world was larger than one kitchen with its shattered plates. But two years ago her heart had stopped, and Taehyung's world had finally lost all color, sinking into shades of grey asphalt. It was then he arrived at his understanding: if you wanted to leave, you had to earn that right on your own. Taehyung had worked three jobs, literally wearing his hands to bleeding: handing out flyers at intersections in the cold during the day, mopping floors in a twenty-four-hour convenience store until dark each evening, breaking his back at a warehouse on weekends. Every hard-won won had been carefully set aside in an old tin box — toward a dream, toward the only chance he had of escaping this hell. An architecture program. He wanted to build homes where people would be happy, where walls wouldn't tremble from screaming, where the windows let in only sunlight. That tin box had been his anchor, his later, his reason to breathe today. Today, his father had found the hiding place. When Taehyung came home, he found him standing there with a fistful of bills. For trying to protect his savings, his father had beaten him half to death, venting every ounce of his worthless, festering rage. He took every last coin, destroying years of punishing labor, and left to win it back with friends at a poker table — leaving his son lying on the cold floor in a pool of his own blood. Taehyung hadn't gotten up right away. He'd stared at the ceiling for a long time, counting the cracks. His grandmother used to say cracks looked like rivers on a map, that each one led somewhere. But that evening, they led nowhere at all. And it wasn't only the money. School had been no better — his final year, the suffocating pressure of exams, and a complete, ringing emptiness inside. Even his first love, which should have been salvation, had turned to ash and humiliation. At fifteen, at a loud party at Jimin's place, Taehyung had kissed a boy on a dare and, in that moment, amid the laughter of strangers, had understood his own true nature. But a more recent relationship — one into which he had poured the last of his wounded heart — had ended in disgrace: the boy had left him immediately after their first night together, not even bothering to get dressed before delivering his verdict with an expression of distaste. "You know what, Taehyung, you're too complicated and depressing. Being with you is like attending a funeral." Those words had settled on top of everything else — his father's fists, his grandmother's empty room, the burned-up dream of architecture school — and pressed down so heavily that breathing became genuinely difficult. Jimin, the one friend who had understood him without words, had moved to Busan. Distance, the lack of money, and Taehyung's relentless schedule of exhausting work had gradually reduced their communication to rare, dry messages that no longer brought warmth. Where there had once been a living voice, there were now only read receipts and long silence. Only the music remained. The group Animals had been his sole consolation. Namjoon, Hoseok, and Jeongguk had become his invisible older brothers. Their music had stood in for therapy; their voices had been a bandage over his soul's ragged wounds. But a year and a half ago, the group had announced a hiatus — the members had left for mandatory military service. The last stronghold of stability, the last thread holding him above the abyss, had broken. After that, he stopped counting reasons to wake up in the morning. Taehyung wiped his tears with the back of his hand, smearing blood from his split lip across his cheek. His gaze snagged on the distant, indifferent lights of the city. Millions of people — and not one would notice if one of those lights went out. I am not needed by this world. I am simply a mistake that killed its own mother. I am simply a shadow that gets in everyone's way. The thought arrived with a frightening clarity. He set his phone down carefully, almost tenderly, on the cold concrete. Blue and Grey continued to play, its rhythm aligned with his fading heartbeat, but he no longer heard it. Taehyung stood, swaying from weakness, straightened his shoulders — as though, in this final moment, he meant to fly — and stepped forward. Into the void. The air struck his face, knocking the last of his breath from him. The seconds of falling felt like an endless eternity in which his entire brief, unhappy life rushed past. But instead of the expected hard impact of asphalt and instant darkness, there came a deafening, crumpling sound of metal and the splintering of glass. Taehyung crashed onto the roof of a parked van. The metal buckled beneath his weight, absorbing part of the force and softening the blow, before his shattered body slid limply to the ground. Chaos erupted around him instantly. Bystanders cried out. Tires screeched. "Call an ambulance! Hurry!" someone's voice broke into hysteria. "Is he alive? God, look at him, he's just a child... Someone check his pulse!" While strangers gathered on the asphalt around Taehyung, across the city, police were already knocking on a familiar door.

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The hospital smelled of bleach, antiseptic, and a particular kind of bleak hopelessness. In a narrow corridor flooded with dead-white light, his father sat with trembling hands clasped together. The alcohol had evaporated instantly the moment the police knocked and produced his son's blood-stained phone. The realization that he had personally pushed his only child into that abyss settled on him like a concrete slab, making it difficult to breathe. Kim Seokjin — his father's elder brother — came running down the corridor, his dress shoes striking the tile with sharp, rapid blows. A composed, successful man who had always been the complete opposite of his diminished younger brother, he crossed the distance and seized his brother by the lapels, hauling him to his feet. "What have you done, you animal?" Jin hissed, barely containing the scream tearing through him. His eyes burned with righteous fury. "The boy tried to take his own life because of you! You drank his future away! You destroyed him!" "I... I didn't think... Jin, I didn't mean to..." his father mumbled, covering his face with shaking hands, trying to hide from the truth. "Didn't mean to?" Jin shook him hard enough to snap his head back. "If he dies, I will personally ensure you rot in prison. You will never touch him again." The words were still hanging in the air when the operating room doors opened with a heavy exhale. The surgeon emerged, slowly pulling off his mask. His face was pale and held no good news — only the deep professional exhaustion of a man who had done everything possible and knew it might not be enough. "Family of Kim Taehyung?" The doctor let out a slow breath, his gaze fixed somewhere past them. "We did everything we could. Multiple fractures, severe internal hemorrhaging, closed traumatic brain injury. His body survived by a miracle — the van saved his life. But his brain..." "What about it?" Jin whispered, feeling something inside him turn to ice. "Your nephew is in a coma. His condition is extremely unstable. Everything now depends entirely on his will to live. But judging by what we can see..." — the doctor paused, choosing his words — "he stopped fighting before the fall." Taehyung's father slid down the cold wall, keening with helplessness and belated remorse, while in the sterile, empty resuscitation ward, only the monotonous, soulless beeping of the machines broke the silence — replacing the melody he had loved so much, the one under which he had hoped to slip away forever.

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The sterile ICU chamber was filled with nothing but the measured, mechanical breathing of the ventilator, which pumped air into the young man's lungs with disturbing indifference. In the vast white bed, Taehyung looked impossibly small — almost translucent, as though he had already begun to dissolve into the whiteness around him. Seokjin sat beside him, still in his sterile gown, and gazed at the pale hand of his nephew — mottled with bruises and the marks of IV needles. Every hematoma on that thin skin screamed of pain Taehyung had endured in silence, pain Seokjin had never known and had never allowed himself to know. Seokjin had paid for the best room, engaged the most distinguished intensive-care specialists in the city, but now, looking at the flat and frighteningly calm pulse line on the monitor, he understood with sharp and devastating clarity: money was just paper — cold and useless when a soul had already packed its bags and was standing at the threshold of oblivion. He was accustomed to solving problems with checks. But death did not accept bribes. The thought was unbearable precisely because it was true. His gaze moved across the tubes, the cannula at the crook of the elbow, the bandage wrapped around the head — and something inside Seokjin began to break apart, slowly, with a sound like cracking bone. His thoughts drifted involuntarily back eighteen years, to a time he had locked away in the darkest corner of his heart, and which was now forcing itself free. Seoul had smelled of rain and cherry blossoms then — the freshness of hopes that had seemed eternal. Seokjin had looked at her — at Suyeon — and his heart had stalled, skipping its beats. She had laughed, tucking back a loose strand of hair, and in that laugh there was so much life, so much genuine light, that Seokjin had been nearly blinded by it. She had been his first and only true attachment. But Suyeon's eyes were not on him. They were on his younger brother — still tall and driven then, an ambitious police officer in whose eyes the darkness had not yet taken root. Seokjin had loved them both. He saw how happy they were, how they lit up in each other's presence, and that love was so clean that he hadn't been able to bring himself to taint it with a confession. He hadn't wanted to be a shadow on their celebration. He had simply stepped aside, assuming the role of the silent observer. If you are happy, brother, then so am I, he had lied to himself, swallowing the scream of his own solitude. He had called it nobility. Now he understood: it had been cowardice, simply wrapped in elegant paper. Suyeon's death in childbirth had been, for Seokjin, a personal catastrophe — the end of his own world. He had not been able to bear the sight of his brother, once powerful and now utterly broken, or of the empty house where every smell, every object, spoke of her. He had fled to Japan. He had buried himself in business, in endless work, in anything that would prevent him from watching their family fall apart. At the funeral, he had seen Taehyung — a tiny, defenseless bundle for whom Suyeon had given everything she had. Seokjin had not been able to take him in his arms that day. His fingers had trembled and his throat had tasted of ash. It was too painful to see her features in that infant, and simultaneously to see the reason she was gone. He had left, and convinced himself it was a mercy. For himself. For the child. For everyone. Pulling himself back to the present, Seokjin exhaled heavily. All these years he had not lost sight of them, though he had kept himself at arm's length. He had hired someone who sent him brief monthly reports: The boy started school. The boy has taken up drawing. The father is still on the force. Seokjin had regularly transferred substantial sums to his brother's account, entirely certain those funds were going toward private tutors, clothing, food for Taehyung. The horrifying truth had come crashing down on him only a few hours ago. The call from his brother had found him in Osaka, in the middle of an important meeting. His brother's voice — drunk, dissolving into a wail, barely coherent — had managed three words: Taehyung... he jumped. He's in the hospital, Jin. I lost everything. In that instant, the illusion of wellbeing had crumbled to dust. Seokjin had learned everything: the millions drunk away, the bribed informant who had been feeding him comfortable lies with Seokjin's own money while Taehyung died by degrees — alone, being beaten. He had left everything and run. A private flight, endless hours in the air during which he aged by years, and here he was — at the bedside of the boy he should have protected eighteen years ago. The guilt was nauseating. While Taehyung had been freezing at the warehouse and hiding money in a tin box, Seokjin had been reading tidy lines about progress at school and sleeping soundly. His refined caution, his foolish pride — they had nearly cost Taehyung his life. He had missed the moment when home became a torture chamber. Seokjin gently took Taehyung's cold hand between his own — warm and dry. To cut through the antiseptic smell, he drew a small vial from his pocket: lavender extract. He knew this scent was Taehyung's one luminous memory. It was how his grandmother had smelled — Seokjin's own mother, the little ray of sunshine who had been the boy's only shield against his father's fury until her death. Seokjin hoped that this familiar fragrance, which smelled of home and safety, might reach Taehyung through the thickness of the coma. He pressed the tip of his finger lightly to the boy's wrist, leaving a barely perceptible trail of blossom. "Forgive me, little one," his voice fractured, collapsing into a ragged whisper. "I was a coward, Tae. I told myself I was helping by staying in the background. I thought money would solve everything — but what you needed was simply for someone to come and take you out of that house." He pressed his nephew's hand to his own cheek, feeling how frightfully lifeless it was. "Tae... listen to me... I know you can hear this. Your mother... she gave you every breath she had so that you could see this world. Please don't return that gift so soon. Don't let the darkness win." Seokjin swallowed the bitter knot in his throat, his eyes on the monitors. "Just come back. Do you hear me? I swear to you, Tae — everything will be different. You will never again have to work until your hands bleed. You won't need to hide your dreams in tin boxes. We'll build those houses you used to dream about, together. I will become the wall that no one can break through. Your father will never touch you again. Taehyung... please. Come back to me." At that moment, the heart monitor emitted a short, jagged sound. The line on the screen lurched sharply upward — as though Taehyung's heart had stumbled, just for an instant, against a voice that was calling to him with more hope than any voice had held in years. It was a faint response. But Seokjin felt it in his skin — the way one feels the first ray of sunlight after a long winter. He went perfectly still, afraid to move. "I'm here," he whispered, tightening his grip on the thin fingers. "I'm not going anywhere. Just breathe, Taehyung. Just keep breathing." The quiet of the ward was broken by the soft sound of an opening door. Seokjin didn't turn. His brother entered the room slowly, unsteady beneath the weight of what he now knew. He had gone home and pulled himself together — changed into a clean shirt, washed his face, scrubbed his son's blood from his hands. But the cleanliness was only exterior. His eyes now held a dead, hollow vacancy. He had brought a bag of Taehyung's belongings: old t-shirts and worn headphones that looked pitiful in this sterile, expensive room. Seokjin felt the cold fury rekindle inside him. He looked at this man and found no words. But he did not release Taehyung's hand. Only this mattered now. Life against the void. And Seokjin was prepared to fight for every beat of this battered heart.