Serendipity

Part 1

A/N  The story is written in present day and then the flashbacks are in italics. 

 2017

As I looked around the room at my family a tear started to slowly make its way down my cheek. I loved them all so much and couldn't imagine any kind of existence without them, but most of all I was proud of them, proud of the obstacles we had all overcome together, proud of the hard work and effort we had put in to building this family and this life together.

Yoongi raised his glass

"to the 8 of us, lets go forward together always"

We all raised our glasses and repeated the toast, and I looked at them all again standing in a circle arms entwined my 7 boys, my 7 lost boys who all came from different places and different lives from good places and some very bad places, to become my family and my life.

SERENDIPITY: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. luck that takes the form of finding valuable or pleasant things that are not looked for.

2004

For as long as I can recall it was just the two of us, my brother and I. we knew how to take care of ourselves, we had to, we had no one else and we had no need for anyone else. It wasn't always like that of course, our parents were very happily married and my brother Yoongi was born 2 years after their wedding, I came along 2 years later, and we were complete. My father had a dream the night before I was born that an angel came down from heaven and told him his daughter would be born in the morning. I duly arrived the next morning and, so he named me Cheonsa (angel). my mother thought it a strange name and nicknamed me SaSa and that's what I have been called ever since. Our mother had died when I was a year old and my brother was 3, it was a car accident, and my father never recovered from the shock, he took to alcohol to numb his pain forgetting that he still had 2 children who were in pain and needed him. By the time I was 10 and Yoongi was 12 he was yelling and beating us daily, mostly Yoongi was the one who got hit, I was merely subjected to screaming and pushing, we would huddle together afterwards my brother and I and cry together while I soothed his bruises with cold compacts and the kisses only a 10-year-old believes can heal. One night after a particularly heavy drinking session I was getting ice for Yoongi's bruises when I accidentally spilt the ice tray and scattered ice across the kitchen floor, that was the first night my father ever really beat me and the last time I ever saw him. Yoongi took my hand that night and we left, better to face the unknown outside than the expected at home. That was also the night our story really began.