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Jung Jae Hoon never wanted to be a monster.
He always wondered what made him different, because he so clearly was. Others avoided him as if he were a plague, or perhaps a tsunami swirling into their path.
Either way, he was bad news. Dangerous. Different. And they all knew it.
And he knew it too.
He was merely curious. What would happen if he cut the rabbit’s stomach open? It was so fat and he was impatient. Was it so wrong to find out himself whether it was pregnant or just a fat lump of useless fur? And his teacher looked at him so oddly when he admitted that she was frustrating him. Of course she was frustrating him—she was asking him weird questions that she didn’t ask others and he didn’t like it. But he had to keep himself in check. It would be bad to retaliate against someone. He knew that was wrong, so he wouldn’t do it.
Even though he really wanted to.
Was it so bad being honest? He hadn’t actually hurt anyone. Adults always seemed to be able to vent their frustrations, but kids like himself had to hold themselves back. How was that fair?
And he really wasn’t going to hurt Jae Min… he had just wanted to teach him a lesson about tattling. It was bad to tattle, especially when they were brothers—and he had heard others talk about how their siblings always had their backs. He’d trusted Jae Min not to tell dad that he’d poisoned the fish or killed Choco (who was an annoying mutt anyway, always yapping at his heels), but he’d been betrayed.
So of course Jae Min needed to be scolded for betraying him. He wasn’t going to seriously hurt him or anything.
After all, he couldn’t hurt a person. That was bad.
Did his mother really have to try to kill him? Or had he imagined that? Jae Hoon really couldn’t be sure of his memory. It all felt foggy and off and he second guessed all of it. He also wasn’t sure how he was supposed to feel about any of that.
Feelings other than basic annoyance and boredom had always confused him, but at least he had those two down. He’d always seen the kids around him smiling and laughing, but he didn’t know what any of that meant. Did they know what that meant? Jae Hoon knew it was supposed to symbolize happiness, but what exactly did that feel like?
He struggled trying to think of something that had ever made him feel happy, but without knowing what happiness was, how could he ever know whether or not he had experienced it?
When he thought back on it, his heart had raced and his blood had pounded as he sliced the rabbit open and killed Choco. It had been a good feeling, he supposed, in the way that it had felt what he would describe as “nice”.
Was that what others called “happiness”? But everyone had seemed so horrified when he cut the rabbit open. Were the things that made them happy… different?
That boy… the stupid one who had taken care of the cut on his hand, the same one who didn’t even realize he was being followed, what made him happy? And how could Jae Hoon get that for himself?
When his family was killed, he didn't really know how to feel. He didn’t like it, that much he knew. He certainly didn’t like being subjected to the questioning, but it was simple enough, especially as he really didn’t kill them. There had been that simple emotion of annoyance with underlying anger that someone had killed his family.
What right did they have to kill his family? And his little sister… what had happened to her?
Now he was on his own with the answer to the question he had wondered so long—just why was he different?
Apparently he had been born with a gene, a monster gene, but he wasn’t the only one; there was another like him, and Jae Hoon couldn’t help but wonder where they were. Did that boy feel the same things he felt? Or rather, did he feel the lack of them?
Jae Hoon really didn’t want to be a monster, and for the first time, he felt another sort of emotion—desperation.
He prayed to God, begged him, to not let him become the monster that his mother said was in him. He’d never wanted to be that, he didn’t want to hurt anyone . Wasn’t that enough to stop him from becoming one?
But he opened his eyes the next day, and he didn’t feel any different. Perhaps… if he couldn’t be like the others, perhaps he could at least pretend to be like them.
So Jung Ba Reum was born.
He practiced. A lot. It was strangely exhausting pretending to be normal and Ba Reum couldn’t help but wonder if it was as exhausting for those who didn’t have to pretend. Surely they got tired of being so nice all of the time?
It definitely took trial and error to keep the mask up, to figure out who exactly Jung Ba Reum was. Plus, there was one other thing that weighed heavily on Ba Reum; the murder of his entire family.
He still didn’t feel much emotion towards their actual deaths, but he certainly felt irritation and anger at the fact that whoever it was hadn’t been caught yet. Just what were the police doing exactly? Weren’t they supposed to catch the bad guys? Wasn’t the person who killed his family a bad guy?
Someone like him who, away from prying eyes, might step on a mouse as it tries to scuttle past, someone like him whose fingers twitch at the sight of blood… or someone who whenever he was forced to swallow and listen to Chi Kook’s extreme humbleness wanted to turn around and vomit.
It was all growing, festering like rotten skin on an open wound, but he still managed to keep it at bay. He held off the monster that grew inside of him and clawed at his lungs, desperate to escape from the cell that he’d imprisoned it within.
He even became a cop. He wanted to find the person who’d killed his parents and give him what he deserved, wasn’t this the easiest way?
Would doing that make him a monster? Ba Reum didn’t think so. After all, it was just a fracture for a fracture, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth… all would be fair. Nothing that the murderer hadn’t done to his family—beaten his mother, stabbed his father, burned his little brother alive…
But of course, that was only a fantasy, one he allowed himself. Thoughts weren’t a sin. Thoughts didn’t make that monster rear its ugly head.
At least, it wouldn’t, had those thoughts not become his action when he suddenly received the murderer’s address and Ba Reum watched in majestic euphoria as flames licked at the ceiling.
His knuckles ached, but it felt good . This was nothing like gutting a rabbit or killing a dog. They couldn’t even compare to this .
This? This was… divine retribution—justice against the sinner who killed his family and it tasted like heaven .
The monster was fed. It had gorged itself until there was no going back. However, his stomach stretched, demanding more, it’s appetite growing larger and larger until Ba Reum almost forgot that he had been trying to be normal . This was God’s fault anyway. He’d asked and begged, and where had that gotten him?
Slitting the throat of a Father in a Holy House and filling his stomach with stones. Oh, how he wanted to see Go Mu Chi’s face when he saw his brother hung from the chapel. What a fool—never even realizing that the person he was hunting was the very same person right next to him through it all.
It made Ba Reum laugh. Was this joy? Amusement? His own form of happiness?
Funny how letting the monster come out let him feel alive for the first time.
Jung Jae Hoon never wanted to be a monster, but Jung Ba Reum didn’t think he ever wanted to go back to not being one.