Kai-centric
Continuity: Pre-Chapter 1- Chapter 5.
Warning: Yeah if Kai’s involved there’s gonna be angst :| Get your tissues ready.

#7: Love Will Find A Way

Anywhere I go I'm home
If you are there beside me

Jongin had a very rough start to his life. His mother all but abandoned him from the time of his birth—he lived with her, but he knew was that if he cried or tried to go near her, she’d run away from him. She never touched him, she never spoke to him in a tone that wasn’t condescending or cold, and she barely looked at him. He wondered if it was due to depression, because his father had died not long before he was born. Or maybe she’d always been a cold person to everyone, nobody ever came to their house. Maybe she just hated him.

Whatever the reason, Jongin learned to survive on his own pretty much from the time he was born. Sometimes he wondered if he developed his affinity as a means of survival, because for sure being able to teleport at age two made it easy for him to steal clothes and food without getting caught. He got away with it for about a year, and then his mother caught him reappearing in the kitchen in a flash of black smoke. She’d yanked up his shirt and gasped when she saw the mark on his chest, and that was the first time Jongin ever saw his mother smile. She had been genuinely happy to know that he was Gifted, he thought it was because she now had a legal way to get him out of her house.

Jongin came to live at the Northern Sanctuary when he was three and a half, along with Kyungsoo. Minseok, Jongdae, Chanyeol and Joonmyun already lived there. It was soon after they arrived that there was a renaming ceremony for Jongin and Joonmyun, after which they became Kai and Suho.

Kai had liked his new name, but that was about it. Living in the Sanctuary meant he had to start listening to people, and he’d never had anyone tell him what to do a day in his life. He resented anyone who tried to make him do anything he didn’t feel like doing, and he fought tooth and nail against the matrons and teachers. Suho was the one who wound up taking responsibility for Kai, and made him get up at a certain time, eat with everyone else, wear shoes, wash up…all the things Kai should have learned from his mother. Part of Kai resented Suho for what he did, because Suho had no business caring for him like a parent. Kai thought all parents were like his mother—deep down they really didn’t care. The other part of him wanted nothing more than to cling to Suho every minute of every day, and to follow his orders and make him proud. But he thought doing that would only make it hurt more when Suho eventually turned his back on him.

One of the only things Kai liked about moving to the Sanctuary were the books. He’d taught himself to read when he was still very young, because he had to know what food he was stealing, but also because he’d been very bored as a child. Kai was his only friend for the first three years of his life—he craved mental stimulation the same way the other guardians did, and once they came together they had it, but until then all they had was themselves, and so they had each learned from a young age how to fill the gap that was left when they were rejected by their peers. For Kai, it had been books. He became fascinated by medical books in particular, because he found the subject matter intriguing. As he grew older psychology books would also pull him in, but that was because he was old enough to understand that he had a problem, and they gave a name to it—abandonment issues.

Kai would struggle with this problem for most of his early life, well after he reached Maturity. After the Southern Guardians came to live with them, Kai got a little better. He mostly thanked Kris for that, because Kris’ style of “parenting” or “leading” was vastly different from Suho’s. Suho liked to hover and to correct Kai’s behavior as it happened. Kris was more of the mindset that mistakes were lessons, and he let Kai make mistakes and learn from them. Mostly Kai would learn that Suho and Kris were right and he should’ve listened to them. Suho saw that Kris’ way worked and followed his example, and that was when Kai stopped thinking of Suho like a parent and more like an older brother. He still pushed back and fought Suho occasionally, but now it was less hostile and more of him just being a brat.

It also helped that Sehun, his friend since Sehun came to the Sanctuary, started hanging out with Lu Han, crazy as it seemed, because from that Kai learned that you could divide your time and attention between two people and love them both equally. It also opened him up to interact with people who weren’t Sehun, Suho or Kris, and he became friends with the other Guardians. He still struggled with accepting Suho’s authority though.

He only started to really appreciate Suho after the incident in the woods. It had easily been the most terrifying event in Kai’s life, and he wasn’t used to being afraid of anything. Fear had never had a place in his vocabulary until that moment, and now that it seemed to overtake him and control his every move Kai didn’t know what to do with himself. That was when Suho’s coddling and constant attention came in handy. Suho never left Kai and Tao alone for very long after that, especially since Kris had been preoccupied. The event brought Kai closer to Suho and really made him grateful that his leader was so gentle and loving.

The night of the incident, Suho had announced that Tao would be sleeping with him that night, and he’d asked Kai if he wanted to stay in his room too. Kai shook his head and declared that he could sleep in Lu Han and Sehun’s room, in his own bed like he usually did.

“Okay,” Suho told him, and later he took Kai to his room, tucked him in, told him goodnight and walked out of the room. Kai stayed very still in his bed for about five seconds before he leapt up and ran out of the room after Suho, crashing into him and throwing his arms around his waist before bursting into tears.

“I can’t do it,” Kai told him almost incoherently. “I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

Suho had hugged him tightly and let him cry into his shirt. “You don’t have to be sorry,” he whispered. “It’s okay to need someone, and it’s okay if you’re afraid. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but if you do someday then I’ll always be here for you.”

“You promise?” Kai asked tearfully.

Suho brushed tears from Kai’s face and kissed his forehead. “Always,” he promised.

The crash landing on Earth tore apart any kind of progress Kai had made in dealing with his issues. Living alone on a foreign planet with one of his best friends broken beyond repair and the other one consumed with grief had Kai into a position of leadership that he was not ready to handle. The most he’d ever been responsible for was himself, and he could not deal with two other lives in his hands. In the beginning Kai had been so convinced that they would be rescued, that it was only a matter of time before Suho or Kris or Baekhyun or Lay came running into their camp. But days and weeks went by, and Kai’s mantra of ‘They will come, they will come,’ turned into ‘They’re never going to come.’

He still remembered that night with Suho, and he thought himself a fool to believe that it had been true. Everyone leaves, he thought to himself. There was no always, no forever; not even for the Guardians.

It was unbelievably hard when Kai saw Kris and Tao and later Lay, Chen and Baekhyun for the first time. He could forgive Kris and Tao when he’d learned they had been essentially imprisoned, but in his mind there was no excuse for the other three, who had been roaming the world freely for eight years. Even after finding out that they had been on the other side of the planet, Kai had no sympathy for them, because to him, they had it easy. They could never fully appreciate what he had gone through, what it had been like to see Lu Han, once a genius, unable to feed himself. Or to watch bright, curious Sehun cry endlessly at the prospect of losing the one he’d loved.

He treated Lay, Chen and Baekhyun very coldly for the first week and he took a sick kind of pride seeing the hurt on their faces when he did. He wanted them to feel as hurt and betrayed as he had, only then could he forgive them and move on with his life. One night, Kris pulled him aside and told him it had to stop.

Kai laughed in his face. “You think you have any right to tell me what to do after what I’ve been through?” He spat.

Kris didn’t even flinch. “Yes, because it’s not my fault. Nor is it anyone else’s.”

Kai growled at him. “So it’s my fault, then?”

“No, of course not. It’s nobody’s fault, Kai. I’m so sorry that it happened to you, believe me if I could trade places with you—”

“Don’t you dare!” Kai shrieked. “Don’t you even say that, because it won’t help anything. You can’t trade places with me and you can’t change what happened and you can’t make me feel better!”

Kai stood there with tears in his eyes, his heavy breathing on the verge of turning into sobs. Kris didn’t move.

“You’re right,” he agreed. “I can’t make this better. I can’t make you better, or Lu Han, or anyone else here,” Kris’ voice broke and he paused for a moment. “But you’re not going to help yourself in the long run by making your brothers lives miserable. All you’re going to do is chase them away—”

“Stop it,” Kai muttered.

“And then you’ll be all alone—”

“Shut up!” Kai yelled, hands over his ears. To his surprise, Kris actually stopped talking. Kai hesitantly took his hands away and looked up, and he saw that Kris was crying.

“I can’t make you feel better,” he repeated. “And it kills me every single time I look at you and I see how much you’ve suffered. And I am so, so sorry that I can’t help you.” Tears trickled down Kris’ cheeks and he made no move to brush them away or try to stop them. “Every night I fall asleep trying to think of ways that I can fix you and Lu Han and Sehun, and then I think of everyone else and how they’ll be in a similar situation…don’t you understand, Kai? You may have had the most obvious loss but we’ve all gone eight years without being a whole group. We’ve never been separated for that long. Yes, Lay, Chen and Baekhyun have no idea what you’ve been through but they’ve imagined it every day for the last eight years. They are hurt too, we’re all hurting. And there’s nothing that anyone can do to make it go away, and that is the part that kills me because it’s my job to make sure you’re all okay and I failed. I failed everyone and I am sorry that it wasn’t me who was stranded with Lu Han and Sehun, I am sorry that I couldn’t stop the ship from crashing, I am sorry that I couldn’t stop the darkness from consuming our home and there are a hundred thousand other things I’m sorry for. But being sorry isn’t going to help anymore, Kai. It’s not going to fix anything.”

Kris stopped because he was crying too hard to continue and Kai wasn’t much better at this point. They somehow wound up clutching each other and sobbing into each other’s shoulders, even after they’d calmed down they didn’t let go.

“We can’t keep being sorry,” Kris muttered, his voice scratchy. “At some point we have to forgive each other and forgive ourselves. We are all we have left, and we can’t lose each other again.”

Kai inhaled shakily and forced himself to think about what Kris had said in a logical manner.

“Okay,” he whispered. “I get it now. I understand…and you’re right.”

Kris pulled back and smiled at Kai. “You are so brave,” he whispered. “I’m really proud of you for that. And no matter how you behave or how messed up you think you are, I’ll always love you. We all will.”

Kai could literally feel the years of hurt and anger slipping away from him. He leaned his forehead into Kris’ shoulder and for the first time in a long time he reminded himself that he had a family, he had eleven other boys who would stay with him no matter what, and even when they were away from him they never stopped thinking about him and loving him.

“I know,” he whispered, and for the first time he believed it.

Title/caption  from the song “Love Will Find a Way” from The Lion King 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XhufW7-c_k

I started crying at the end--when Kai and Kris were taking to each other. And then I looked up the video and lyrics for the song I used and I cried some more. I tell you, the Lion King series as a whole is a master piece, and the second movie especially is vastly underrated.