sometimes  his leniency gets the better of him.

sometimes he likens himself to forget the strain of his mental leash, the desire to bid those thoughts their freedom to wreak a personal touch of havoc. it's a noose he bares his neck for when he's feeling particularly numb. when the seconds bleed into countless days that greet him with the comfort of a shoulder bumping stranger.

if he focuses enough, he can hum along to her phantom voice. his mother joked all the time that her performances were meant for only the shower's unjudging walls and taehyung's tiny ears. for no child at that age could ever find his mama to be anything less than perfect. if he imagines hard enough, prods the backdoors of neglect behind his temples, he can still make out the cresent half-curve of his father's smirk--- surely a habit he'd picked up from the source. if he wants to, taehyung can still be there in the flicker beat fragments that haunt his fitful eves.

but he isn't. 

because greed in the husk of calloused hands stole him away from that happiness too soon. and with no inkling of agreement, he'd been sacrificed to the ludicrous ventures of science. reborn a test tube baby, a lab rat molded into the 'chimera project'. where dna samples were extracted and reformed to become puzzle pieces, malleable suits for hybrids to don all at once. wherein no longer could there be simply a hint of one breed in the bloodstream, but many. taehyung, renamed "v" at the time, was no closer to being alone than he was to being dead. hundreds of children prodded and spliced where their signature biology should've been snapped tight in a bow. and by the time the government caught wind of these events and opted to step in, taehyung was one of five remaining survivors.

he needn't the team there. the horror flitting across the gazes of his saviors told him all he needed to know: it had been a success. now a tiger and lion hybrid, taehyung became the world's first known liger--- a breed marked as tainted and illegal almost immediately. the media play prevented executions of the chimera survivors, but the ridicule taehyung received was akin to a slower sort of torture. by then, he was 19 years of age. no career, no means of education, and a family who believed (now 'hoped') him to be dead. but as his new genetic bred an instinct within him, he fought to survive.

he scrabbled for work wherever he could. still does. bouncing from dead end jobs before ultimately losing them to an 'incident' of sorts. because his body now wages war against itself, finding no recognition in the foreign blood that incites his veins. on his good days, he's ravenous. on his worst, outright feral. though he knows when to steer away from his triggers, he can't always deny the beast within him the bloodshed it so deeply craves. he makes use of it these days, partaking in streetfights and caged matches that ultimately end in his victory. it leaves bitterness to sit at the back of his throat, but it's enough to fend off each day at a time. he's not living, per say, but at least he's alive.

but he wonders, even now, just how long he can beat back the invevitable. just how long he can fight his own shadow to protect a world that wants him dead.

how long until he finally lets go.

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