FIVE

I don’t know where you’re going but do you have room for one more troubled soul?

I don’t where I’m going but I don’t think I’m coming home, and I said I’ll check in tomorrow if I don’t wake up dead.

This is the road to ruin—and we’re starting at the end.

The first hybrids were created by accident.

Hybrids are first raised in labs; all white and sterilized. From the moment they are born, they are simply nothing but bones caging in souls, defined by nothing but the series of unique numbers and letters tattooed onto the back of their necks. They are nobodies, they do not belong anywhere nor to anyone. They do not fall into place; an odd piece jutting out from the perfectly ordered human society in an ugly way. He was entirely different from the feline animal, yet he was not completely human.

It was only until he had turned the human age equivalent of thirteen that he had gained a proper name. He was no longer Hybrid-101KR, but Taehyun. Taehyun— defined as honorable and great. The irony, Taehyun thinks, because he is everything but what his name holds.

/ / /

The first person who takes Taehyun in, Soohyuk, introduces him to a world filled with glamour and parties. Taehyun doesn’t see him much except for when he brings him out. He dresses him in branded clothes that cost way more than Taehyun himself could ever be worth, he gives him a huge room with silk sheets and Scandinavian furnishing. All he needed to do in return was to be pretty beside hyung and don’t say anything.

Maybe Taehyun was born with a malfunction in his mind, because since the very beginning he sees a world with a twisted system.

/ / /

Taehyun remembers the cat hybrid from China he meets at one of the many huge parties he attended in a hotel in the middle of Gangnam. 132-CN, a Siamese with ash blonde hair, large doe eyes and porcelain pale skin. He looked like a doll— flawless, fragile and lifeless. He tries to pour alcohol into Taehyun’s glass, but Taehyun politely declines, saying he was only seventeen. Curiosity and mild shock flickered through the other hybrid’s eyes for a short moment before he recoils back to his former position. Dressed in a red and gold silk robe draped over his pale and tiny frame, with a thick ribbon tied around his waist. The intricate design embedded in the silk made him look even more exquisite and Taehyun thinks that he could never be as perfect as him, as graceful, as beautiful. He suddenly feels oddly out of place in his casual blue collared shirt and white shorts.

“You know, they don’t really care about that kind of stuff. You can drink if you want.” The hybrid speaks lowly with a slight accent, almost a whisper with a voice as smooth and soft as the robes he wore.

Taehyun simply shrugs, not really caring. “I don’t really want to.”

The hybrid blinks, before smiling. “I’m Luhan. I’ve never seen you around before. You are?”

/ / /

Soohyuk was a stranger to Taehyun, he’s constantly either in his office or his study. When he’s home, he rarely speaks to Taehyun unless it was necessary, but mostly when he had social events to attend. It was a cold and lonely life that Taehyun had lived with him, and in the middle of the night, Taehyun’s thoughts start to drift, he often wonders if it was all worth withstanding.

Taehyun makes his first mistake when he was seventeen, ten months after he was adopted. He asks if he could head outside by himself to attend a performance held in the underground club of Myeong-dong. Soohyuk slams the table with his files, cold eyes boring into Taehyun’s own pair. “What did you just say?”

Taehyun clears his throat, voice as tiny as his courage. He instantly regrets his decision, wondering what he could do to swallow his words back. “I-Its fine… I don’t have to—”

“I gave you a cellphone, I gave you the freedom of going back to your center, speak to whoever you want, is this not enough for you?” He speaks with a voice as stern as his expression. Taehyun feels a lump at his throat caused by a mix of fear and regret.

“I’m sorry I brought this up, s-sir, plea—”

“No. It’s fine. You may go.” Soohyuk says, eyes glinting with a dangerous expression.

“Go may out on your own. If you can handle it.”

/ / /

The first time Taehyun gets a small glimpse of his life after Soohyuk was in the clubs of Myeong-dong. Flashing lights, heavy bass, crowded dance floor. The crowd of people smoking outside the club trying to the life out of their cigarettes and the people inside the club devouring shot after shot to forget the reality of it all.

The rapper on stage has a deep voice, and he pumps the crowd up until it’s past 2AM. The conscious in his mind reminds him that he should probably leave now, but his body is to entranced by this newly found freedom. But it breaks when someone suddenly tugs the collar of his shirt and slams him hard onto the nearby wall. “What the hell is a stray doing here?”

Taehyun panics and curses at himself for forgetting to wear his collar and making the mistake of not his ears and tail, but before Taehyun could explain himself the man starts manhandling him, dragging him out of the club harshly. He bursts the back door open and throws Taehyun out with a hard push in the chest. Taehyun collides with the wall of the alleyway with a loud crack, and his vision starts to blur with black spots.

“Go back to where you belong. In the filth.” The man spits.

/ / /

It was during one of Luhan’s many frequent visits to Taehyun’s place when it happens. “Taehyun, what happened to your face?!” Luhan almost shrieks.

“It’s nothing.” Taehyun tries to shrug it off, slightly annoyed by all of the unnecessary fuss Luhan was making.

“What happened to your cheek definitely does not look like nothing!” Luhan tries to touch the blue-black bruise formed on Taehyun’s skin, only to make the other hybrid hiss in pain.

Luhan presses a ice pack against his cheek and then starts to smear the aloe gel he found in one of the bathroom closets. “You know, people like Soohyuk— he only adopted you for one sole reason. To look pretty. What do you think he’ll do to you if you get a bruise?” Luhan’s voice sounded tight, as if he was about to cry.

In that moment, Taehyun sees something in Luhan’s eyes. The expression that he mistook for emptiness during the first time he had met him was something different now, an expression that was hard to decipher. It was as if his world had already been provoked by cruel whispers, a world that had already been destroyed by a fatal blow to the gut by something far more larger than the then seventeen year old Taehyun could ever understand.

That was the last time he got to see Luhan.
When he looks back, he regrets not saving Luhan from whatever that made him struggle, but how could he possibly save another, when he was barely coping himself?

/ / /

Hybrids are raised with an idea that they will be taken in by someone and they’ll live a comfortable life. Only then would their existence hold purpose, only then would they fit perfectly into the puzzle that is the world. Only if you were adopted, only if you had a collar around your neck, then, and only then, would you be worth something. In turn, unspoken harsh words of stray hybrids float through the air,  of violence and stealing to survive threatens the young hybrids to be as perfect as they can.

And so they embed values of grace and beauty into their DNA, but Taehyun realizes at the tender age of seventeen that they are nothing but pretty trophies. He learns that the moment he slips and fall, the moment that his perfect exterior breaks to show the twisted hollowness inside, they’ll be thrown to the side. They’ll be left to rot at the corner of the street until they are reduced down to nothing but the same set of bone and numbers they were born with, returning to what they started out as. A mistake.

/ / /

At the age of seventeen, Taehyun’s pale skin gets stained a deep dark red. It seeps into his skin down to his bone and right into his very being until it became who he was. An ugly color, red. It could be life—the color of the blood coursing through his veins, the substance keeping him alive and breathing. But red is also the striking color of danger. For him, it comes in a form of a man clad in a black expensive suit, who adopts him but leaves him in the street with nothing but a backpack only eleven months after because he was no longer perfect enough.

Red is also the color of violence, destructive and shocking. Taehyun had became a product of what he feared the most. Living on the streets, following the wind, wondering where his pain will lead him to next. His neck felt free without a collar; the leash that once choked his soul now gone. But now the cold reality of it all replaces the leather collar with far more suffocating noose that threatens to take his life and the little amount of hope he has away.

He had became dangerous; he destroys (sometimes other people, but most of the time, it’s self-destruction).

/ / /

Taehyun used to live