Namjoon, Yoongi and Jimin had gathered around Jungkook ready to grab him in case he couldn’t control his temper again.

‘Why didn’t you tell me Tae?’  He asked him quietly.  His voice seemed to cut a knife through the room.  ‘I’m your brother, your twin brother.’ He implored him. 

‘You’d have sent her back to prison.’  Taehyung answered him dropping his head. 

‘Maybe it’s where she needs to be.’ Jungkook growled.

‘Easy Jungkook.’  Yoongi warned him.

‘How can you say that?’  Taehyung asked him.  ‘You know what it feels like to have your soulbond pulled.  Do you know how it feels to have it pulled so hard because someone is literally killing your soulmate?’ Taehyung’s voice was beginning to rise.

‘She’s killing you.’  Jungkook’s voice broke back.

‘She is innocent.  She’s been abused, tortured, violated, persecuted her entire life.  I’d have been surprised if she had accepted me.  I work for the people who take her to the brink of death every single day.’  Taehyung yelled at him. 

‘Taehyung -,’ Jungkook made a move forward towards his brother. 

‘I love her Jungkook, you always knew I loved her.  I cannot blame her for what society has done to her.  I cannot let her go back there and feel her pain every time she starves, every time she’s hit.  I’ll die before I let that happen.’

‘And what then Taehyung?  After you’re dead.  What then?  She’ll go back to prison no matter what you do.’ Jungkook spat. 

Alexa was dazed listening to their argument.  It was hard to think clearly, everything Jungkook said was right, but everything Taehyung said broke her heart.  She could feel the pain of the lashings again as raw as if they had just happened. She could feel the stab of hunger eating away at her insides, despite the food in Seokjin’s kitchen.  She could hear the laughing of the guards at her screams. 

Her feet moved before she could think.  No one seemed to stop her, though she couldn’t hear them if she did.  She ran, through the front doors, somehow in the direction of the beach.  It wasn’t until she fell on her knees in the sand did she realise what she had done. 

She was crying.  Sobbing struggling for breath her whole body heaved with every cry.  How could she fix this?  Taehyung couldn’t die, he didn’t deserve to die.  Being thrown back in prison didn’t even register in her mind as she thought about Taehyung being gone.  She did love him, the thought of him dying was the worst thing to her. She would rather die than him.

‘Alexa?’ 

She turned her head, staring up at the huge figure of Namjoon.

‘Don’t cry,’ he said softly, sitting down next to her and tentatively putting an arm around her. 

‘I know it’s a shock.’ He told her.

‘How did I do this?’ she gasped.  She still couldn’t understand. 

‘Subconsciously,’ he explained.  ‘When they first discovered soulmates and soulmatching, the world was full of distrust, no one trusted anyone else, and people died everywhere from unconscious rejection.’ 

Alexa sniffled back her tears as she listened to him.

‘My dad’s the president, I’ve been sneaking into the underground offices, looking up everything I can.’ He continued.  ‘It’s been many, many generations since the first soulmates, they hid the truth, all the world governments.  The population was so big at that time, but it dropped so quickly, people were dying everywhere.  They came up with a plan, to culture the whole world into trusting again, and accept their soulmates without even the idea of rejecting them.  It helped to stomp out evil, bring more love and peace into the world.  They hid the files on people who had unrejected their soulmates and recovered, putting out the lie that if you rejected them that was it, they were dead.  They wanted people to not be able to reject, unless they needed to get rid of someone.’

‘Like a criminal.’  She breathed, making sense of his words.

‘Yes exactly.  They turned soulmates into a weapon, a way to grow the population and a way to rid the world of people they thought were undesirable.’ He sighed. 

‘How do I undo it?’ she implored him.  ‘There’s no time left.’

‘I’ve been looking, to see if there was ever a serum invented to undo the rejections.  But so far, I haven’t found it.  I don’t even know if such a thing exists.  Every document says love cultured a trust, and suddenly the rejected stopped dying.’ 

‘I don’t want to live if he doesn’t live.’ She told him after an age of silence taking in his words. 

‘He wants you to live.’  Namjoon told her.  She met his eyes, though she could only feel disgust with herself. 

‘How can he want that when I’ve killed him?’ she asked him sadly.

‘He’s loved you his whole life, you heard him, he knows it’s not your f