A thousand different emotions surged through Taehyung as his eyes focused on the two people he’d never dreamed of seeing again. When the fire occurred, everyone had assumed the bodies of his parents burnt to ashes with the house. Taehyung didn’t allow himself to expect their survival out of fear of being disappointed, choosing to move forward with his life. There was no glimmer of hope, nothing to convince him that his parents were anything other than dead in all those years. So now, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him or that he was dreaming. It just felt too good to be true.

“Taehyung, if you’re watching this right now, it means the fire has already occurred. It means years have gone by since then and you’re a fully-grown man now,” his mother started, tears shining in her eyes.

His father rested a soothing hand on hers before taking over, “you’re probably feeling confused and shocked right now, which is completely understandable. You have the right to. We can’t imagine the amount of pain and hardships you faced in these past couple years and we are infinitely sorry for that, but we want to reassure you that we’ve always been with you – silently and secretly checking in on you. To explain everything we’ve created a secret email account for you through which we’ve sent numerous letters and other things we couldn’t share with you in our time apart. The account information will be displayed at the end of this video. As soon as you log into the account, we will be notified and the content of this memory card will be erased. Please burn this card as soon as possible.”

“One last thing before you close this video,” his mother continued, a tear freely streaming down her cheek but her voice strong with determination, “we don’t expect you to forgive us for leaving you so suddenly, but we do hope that our emails will help you understand why things had to be this way. We always have and always will love you, our only precious son.”

After that, the video cut to a black background with simple, white text with the email address displayed and a hint for the password.

Taehyung paused the video and stared at the screen in complete and utter shock. He felt, warm, wet drops soak the back of his hand that was stiffly frozen in place on the keyboard of his laptop. He hadn’t even realized he was crying. Emotions were running so quickly through him that he couldn’t even pinpoint each one. Overwhelmed was an understatement.

To go through more than a decade of being an orphan, grieving by himself, crumbling to the lowest pit of sorrow and having to learn how to crawl out of it only for everything he knew to be a lie was shattering. The fact that this lie was orchestrated by the people he trusted most, his parents, was even more unbelievable. He felt betrayed. His parents were right, he didn’t know if he could forgive them. He didn’t even know if he wanted to open their emails.

He slammed the laptop shut and tried to put it away, but Chaeyoung’s soft grasp of his wrist stopped him.

“Tae,” she said softly, “you should open it.”

He turned his glossy eyes towards her, his jaw firmly clenched, “I don’t want to.”

Her eyes searched his deeply and he could tell she could see right through him, “yes, you do.”

“They left me,” his tone became harder as he felt a fresh wave of anger wash over him, “they didn’t die, they left. I grieved for so long, nightmares have been haunting me for years!”

His voice had risen to a shout now and he saw her flinch slightly, but he was so high-strung on his feelings that he couldn’t feel bad, “I was just a damn kid-“

Before he could finish that thought Chaeyoung pulled him in for a fierce hug and shushed him.

With a shaky breath, he wrapped his free arm around her tightly, his voice much more gentle when he said, “you know that better than anyone Chaeng.”

“I know,” she murmured, his back gently.

They stayed like that for a couple minutes, her touch doing wonders to calm him down. When his breathing had become slow and even, she pulled back slightly.

“You have every right to be angry, Taehyung, but you also have the right to understand why they did what they did. I know you, Tae. I know you don’t rest until you find the answers you’re looking for and I know the mystery of your parents’ “death” has been like a dark cloud looming over you. Maybe this will be the closure you need or maybe this will be a new door opening for you. You’ll never know unless you take this opportunity to find out.”

“I’ve been doing fine without them,” Taehyung shrugged, “this will just make everything even more complicated than it already is.”

Chaeyoung’s eyes softened as she looked at him, “you haven’t been fine, Tae. You’ve been coping. Everyone deserves to have a family.”

“You’re my family,” Taehyung murmured automatically, seeing emotion flicker in her eyes before explaining, “you