Life and time.

These are two stretchable terms if you ask Oh Sehun, because each person had his or her own definition of them. But what did these words mean to him? What explanation had he found for himself? Well, he had never given it much thought - or had never had to do any. 

As the youngest of two sons, he grew up well protected in a family where the word 'worry' seemed to be a foreign word. Because no matter how much trouble he got into, with his father's influence and wealth he was always able to somehow get out of trouble. And crap was as good as commonplace for Sehun. Therefore, life had become a game for him and time was only an insignificant companion - a side effect, so to speak, which Sehun took note of but which had no weight for him.

'Those who sought the sense of responsibility and conscience with him, sought in vain', he always stressed. For he certainly did not have the faintest idea of this. But why was this so? Why did he live his life according to his own standards and ideas without thinking about the consequences of his actions? Without giving a thought to what his parents, his friends and even the law had to say about it? Clearly because he didn't care.

He just didn't give a damn, and he didn't care what you or I, or even the Pope, would have said against it, because he was - to put it simply - fed up. He was so tired of being constantly bossed around by everything and everyone and yet always having the feeling that he had failed, that at some point he had reached the point where he just didn't want to go on. It all started when he slowly but surely began to form his own judgment about certain situations in his life. 

At some point he had grown out of childhood to take at face value everything his parents preached to him and what they thought was right and wrong, and above all when he noticed an ever-widening gap between himself and his older brother, Minho. It should be noted that the two of them had been one heart and soul since he could remember, two brothers who, despite the three-year age difference, could not live without each other and who, over and over again, supported each other. 

Minho was there whenever his little brother was feeling bad but also when everything was fine. Whereby Sehun had to admit that the good things outweighed the bad ones by far - at least at that time. And this had always been like a necessity for him, something essential that gave his life meaning in the first place - the knowledge that Minho was his brother. A person whom he loved above all else and to whom he could entrust every detail of his thoughts, no matter how insignificant.

Because no matter what happened, the two brothers would always stick together. No matter what happened, the two would always look out for each other. How naive he was in retrospect to believe that this wishful thinking really was true and that nothing and no one could ever succeed in separating Minho and him. Because of course, there was one person who managed to do so and who pulled it off consistently and mercilessly, even without any consideration of losses.

It’s his father. What an irony of fate that he, of all people, was responsible for the fact that life within the family had changed from one day to the next with one blow to the negative - after all, it was he who had made Sehun and Minho the very people they had been since birth: brothers.

Sehun's father, Jiyong, had never been a man of great words or sentimentality, but he was always a man of great deeds. After only ten years, he had achieved what many a man could only dream of all his life: Worldwide fame, a multi-million-dollar corporation, and a beautiful, beautiful woman by his side. But of course, all the happiness in the world came at a high price, and Sehun gradually became only too aware of that. Unfortunately.

How? Well, for Sehun himself, the price was the painful experience that his father had made different plans for Minho than for his youngest son. Minho as the firstborn, had the duty to ensure the advancement and security of future generations. And that was the crux of the matter. Sehun, of course, did not immediately understand the meaning of his father's statement. Especially since he had hardly been older than ten years back then. 

Only when they took away the dearest and most expensive thing he owned by sending Minho to a private school far away from his home country to prepare himself for his upcoming life in the best possible way - yes, only then came the disillusionment. And the certainty of being different from his beloved brother. Someone who could never measure up to his big brother in any way. Someone who was a seemingly unimportant part of the whole, an unwanted appendage that you just couldn't get rid of.

Only when Minho was sent far, far away to a foreign country at the age of twelve did he realize that he himself was nothing more than the notorious black sheep of the family. However, it wasn't only the fact that his brother was sent away that gave him this feeling or rather this certainty. No, it was of course also the way his father looked down on him after Minho had left. How he had always had only words of praise for his big brother, while Sehun himself never received the slightest encouragement or the tiniest, nice gesture. Or felt anything like love or even security within his own four walls.

Yes, even though Minho had always been a great role model for him, shining and shining like the summer sun, he never managed to do justice to his big brother. No matter what he tried. The disillusionment that even a life as Minho's shadow was too much expect hit him as hard and as fiercely as only lightning on metal could normally do. As if a truck weighing several tons rolled over him in the middle of a delicately overgrown flower meadow.

And so it came about as it had to. Sehun didn't want to know about any of this anymore. No more duties, no more responsibilities. Not even about his brother. He knew that his father wouldn't stop with disapproving remarks like 'You and Minho are worlds apart' or 'You're going to be a big failure one day', no matter if he tried hard - which tired him so incredibly or if he let himself go. There would never be an end to it anyway, he told himself. So why complicate things when you could take the easier way?

Well, and that's why Sehun drew a line one day, a clean cut, under this chapter. It was the day when he realized that the boundless love he had once felt for his older brother had turned into unbelievable hate and envy. Dark and bleak feelings that just wouldn't let go of him. The carefree childhood they once had suddenly seemed like nothing more than a distant dream. An old memory that was gradually fading. 

Reality, however, was all the more merciless. On the one hand there was Minho, the glimmer of hope of the family Oh - hard-working, conscientious and responsible. And Sehun, the failure - lazy, incorrigible and unimportant.

At the tender age of thirteen, Sehun finally began to break every rule set by his father - and on purpose. Be it his performance at school, which sank rapidly into the basement, or his behaviour towards others. He simply didn't want to be just Minho's little brother anymore, but only himself - Sehun. Well, that didn't mean that he mutated from one day to the next to one of those typical 'bad boys', that's not the case at all. After all, he didn't have anyone on his conscience, nor did he deliberately trample on the feelings of others out of pure malice - although he would have had more than enough opportunities to do so. 

Rather, it was that he wanted to test his own limits. Be it several drinking marathons lasting up to thirty-six hours, the excessive use of cannabis and other ominous substances or ship in a club that organized illegal motorcycle races - Sehun did not want to leave anything untried in his life. In spite of his tender age and of course he didn't want to miss any opportunity to show his father that he could do more than being just a little brother that nobody wanted to have.

However, this led to Sehun making acquaintance with the local judges and prosecutors much more often than his father would have liked. He was also expelled from his former school almost twice. But Sehun was completely indifferent to this, of course. After all, as he said, he had already finished with his 'usual' life anyway. His father, on the other hand, was furious - which is not unusual for a parent. Which father would want his own child, his own flesh and blood, to fall into a dark abyss and let himself go more and more?

Well, the sad thing about the whole thing, though, was that Jiyong actually didn't give a damn what Sehun did. Who he was meeting. Or what substances he ingested. However, the success of his business put the family - and thus the good name of the Ohs - under pressure from the public at large. And Jiyong knew that as a member of such importance, you had to live up to a certain ideal - otherwise you would perish and sink, just as the Titanic had once done on the high seas. 

Therefore, he - quite the diplomatic businessman - drew the only conclusions from Sehun's behavior which he thought were the right ones and did everything possible to ensure that his youngest son would never be talked about by the people. Never, really. This meant that Jiyong had to pay for his youngest son a lot of money to help him get his head out of the noose just in time for every crime he was caught doing. In this way he was able to compensate people for the evil things Sehun had done, as he always tried to emphasize. 

For him, however, this meant nothing else but that his father bribed the people to keep them quiet. Jiyong had never thought about what the reason for his behavior might have been. However, he had never thought that he was one of the main culprits when he had the glorious idea of separating his two sons and treating Sehun like a leper while praising Minho to the skies. And his hatred for the family then grew stronger and stronger. Like fire in a mine shaft that raged deep below the earth's surface and fought its way further and further out into the open.

It had been shortly after his seventeenth birthday when Sehun for the first time in years allowed himself to reflect on the course of his own actions so far. Maybe because he had grown older in the meantime - but maybe because he had excellent grades in his report card despite his poor exams. Or maybe it was simply because he had met this boy at that time. As he throws a secret party at