Bangtan's Baby | 18+

twenty-threeˋˏ ༻❁༺ ˎˊintervention

TW: Breakdown and mentions of past abuse

Li's POV

I wake up a few hours later with my face resting in the crook of Jin's neck. He smells nice and warm and safe, but I carefully untangle myself from him. I know that I have to go clean up my mess.

He and Jimin are sleeping, and I happily take note of the empty bowls of soup.

Picking up the tray, I walk to the door. I wobble, slightly off from just waking up, but with a shake of my head, everything's mostly back in order, and I continue toward the door.

I walk down the stairs, past the living room where my three snoring men are, and into the messy kitchen.

I place the tray in the sink, trying to ignore every unsettling feeling frolicking in my gut. There are unanswered questions in there, questions that scare me, and I don't have the answers to them, so all that's left is anxiety.

I don't like feeling anxious, but I don't know how to stop feeling anxious.

The condiments are staring at me, their eyes boring into my back while I wash the dishes.

"I'll clean you up in a second," I tell them, knowing very well they can't hear me. I scowl at them. "Don't be fucking mean."

I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate me calling them 'fucking mean' if they were actually alive, but as they're not, they keep staring with their taunting, little lids.

I'm so angry with them.

They didn't do anything wrong; they're just condiments.

I scrub the dishes harder.

Maybe I'm angry with myself. I know that's what it must be.

I should've put Minju's condiments away that day. I should've never gone to his apartment and tried to make dinner for him. It would've tasted horrible anyway. As a matter of fact, the soup I made today probably tasted horrible. It probably tasted just awful, and everyone will tell me when they wake up.

I pour more soap onto the sponge, shoving it into the water and slamming it onto the bowl.

They'll probably tell me how mad they are because I made a mess in their kitchen. Even though Jin and Jimin said they're not mad, they probably didn't have enough time to think about it. Now that they've slept on it, they'll be mad. That's what happened with Minju. He would say he wasn't mad, but he would be mad later, and I would have to make up for it. I would have to do something he wanted to do, something I didn't want, and I hate how I did that.

I hate how I let him manipulate me. I hate how it's still difficult to differentiate between manipulation and reality. Maybe it was all manipulation. Maybe that was the point.

Frustrated, I grab the next bowl much too quickly, much too roughly, and it slips between my fingers. It crashes to the floor, and I step back, surprised. Pain shoots through me at the motion, and I cry out, my eyes filling against my will.

I stumble back, falling back onto my hands. I hiss at the searing pain in my foot, realizing I must have stepped in the broken shards of the bowl that now surrounds me.

Angrier than before, I pick up a part of the broken bowl and hurl it across the room. It lands near the fridge, and I stare at it before grabbing another shard and throwing it, too.

There.

Now there's an actual mess everyone can be mad at me for, and I won't have to question if or why they're mad. I'll know why; I threw the broken bowl. That was my fault, and now I know they'll be mad. This shouldn't comfort me, but it does. At least I'll know. At least I'm not stuck with the anxiety of not knowing.