Some serious-heavy topics will be discussed, might be a trigger, proceed with caution.

Rule #31:Your personal experiences will help you detect a change in behaviour of other people in the same situation

"Do you like it? Does it taste good?" Jinyoung asked nervously as he watched his little sister take another bite of the banana nut cake he was working on.

Saera hummed before scrunching her nose, "It's good but I don't like nutmeg."

Jinyoung threw his hands up in the air dramatically, "Welp there it is! It's all ruined. This won't do, I need to start again from scratch!"

Saera laughed and was about to take another bite when he slapped the fork out of her hand, "No! Don't eat this garbage, it's not good enough for a princess like you to consume."

"Awww, but I liked it!" She whined while swinging her legs against the stool of the Soliloquy Bakery after hours.

He gave her a blank look, "My little sister will only eat the best."

Saera smiled and watched him start on another batch. He looked up at her and raised his brows "Where's Youngjae? He's not with you?"

"He's at daycare." Saera's face darkened, "Mother and father won't let me walk with him to daycare because they know  that I just bring him here."

Jinyoung shot her a look, "Mother? Father? Come on, Sae, what happened to calling them 'mom' or 'dad'? They're your parents."

"Our parents. Unfortunately." She muttered.

Jinyoung gave her a soft smile before going back to the dough, "They stopped being my parents around the same time that I stopped being their kid. Now, quit being so sulky, it's killing my vibe."

"Your vibe?" She snorted while taking a spoonful of icing.

Jinyoung kicked his leg up in the air, "I'm an artist and I need to be surrounded by positive energy."

"Don't tell me what to do." She pouted while the spoon.

Jinyoung flicked flour in her face, making her cringe, "Remember what I told you?"

Saera sighed and hunched forward, "Life is like baking, there's a specific recipe to it and the only way to make sure that you turn out okay is to make sure the right combination of ingredients go in."

"And what's the most important ingredient?" He asked in a sing-a-song voice.

Saera met his eyes and smiled brightly.

"Family."

-----

"I didn't know you had a brother." Mark said slowly, trying to absorb the new load of information.

"Not a lot of people do." She replied blankly with a shrug.

Mark watched Youngjae talk to the headstone, "His surname is Park?"

"He kept my father's last name but me and Youngjae took our mother's maiden name. You know…to start over." Saera explained simply.

Mark shifted awkwardly on his feet before clearing his throat, "How come you didn't mention him before?"

"I guess I never felt comfortable to just bring it up. You see, I feel like I was born with a leak, and every last good part of me dripped out until I had nothing left and any goodness I had just slowly spilled out of me. Life was just a series of closed doors and after a while I just got used to the misery." She breathed out.

"Wha--"

"Jinyoung committed suicide." She said suddenly, her voice sounding like a thousand bricks were lifted off her shoulder.

Mark's eyes widened and his breath caught in his throat as he watched her.

"And I hated him for it. For leaving us, but I missed him so much that I couldn't stay mad. I just flip flopped." Her voice came out awkward and strained as she stared straight forward.

Mark felt his heart drop for her and immediately glanced at Youngjae who looked like he didn't have a care in the world.

"He was everything to me especially before Youngjae was born. He was 3 years older but sometimes he felt like 10 years older because he was so mature. He was our rock. He had this presence to him where you knew that if anything ever went wrong, he would know how to fix it." She said whimsically.  

"If I was ever in a tough place, I'd call him before my parents without hesitation, because I knew he'd always be there." Her voice held a sort of warmth that he had never heard from any human in his life.

It was impossible for someone to speak about someone with that much love and adoration. It left him in awe.

Saera shook her head with a sad smile, "He was full of love…all the time. He smiled every second of the day because he said that you shouldn't take you're bad day out on someone else."

"What happened?" Mark asked softly.

Saera took a deep breath, "I was 13 and he was 16 when he told me that he was gay."

"Oh." Mark said breathlessly, as he watched her face turn red and blotchy, as if she was crying.

"He told me one year before he told my parents. I had my suspicious but when he finally told me, I was ecstatic. He had finally come to terms with and accepted who he was. He was scared but when I hugged him he bursted out into tears, telling me how happy he was. He embraced who he was. I was so ing proud to call that man my brother." Her face fell and her voice cracked with hatred, "My parents didn't feel the same, though. "

Saera stared at Youngjae who was actively talking to their brother with a blinding smile.  It looked like he was actually talking to Jinyoung and not his tombstone, "We asked Youngjae, just out of curiosity, what he thought about that. He couldn't have been more than 3 or 4 years old and we sat him down and asked him what he would think if his big brother, whom he idolized, loved another man."

"What did he say?" Mark asked in interest.

"He looked Jinyoung up and down and said that as long as Jinyoung was happy he would be happy. Can you believe that? A five year old child with no understanding of the world managed to be more open minded and accepting than the two adults that raised us."

Mark's eyebrows creased, "How did your parents react?"

Tears started to rim her eyes, "When my parents found it, it was a catastrophe. They screamed and yelled and for the first time, my father raised a hand to him. My mother kept crying, saying that it was just a phase, and my father kept saying that Jinyoung was an abomination and brought shame to our family. He said that he disgusted him and that he wasn't a real man. A real man? My father had guts to talk to my brother like he knew what it meant to be a man."

Mark's arm came around her when he heard the raspy laugh.  

She curled her fingers into fists, "I never, ever looked at them the same way when I saw the way they treated their own son.  How could you treat your flesh and blood that way just for who he was? For a week they wouldn’t look or speak to him. He was a pariah. And the next week, they told him to move out. He was only 16 and he had to move out and live on his own with no support from his family."

Mark's fingers tangled into the back of her head and wound around strands of her hair as she tried to pull herself together. He tugged on them softly, it was his strange attempt to soothe her and it actuallyy worked on her.

Saera kicked at the ground, "He used to work at the bakery that I own now, but back then an old woman owned it. She was like the mother he deserved to have. She knew he was gay and she loved him regardless. He used to work there after school but once he got kicked out, he started picking up more shifts. Sometimes I'd sneak out and visit him instead of going to school. Or I'd lie to my parents and tell them I was taking Youngjae to daycare and take him to the bakery."

She shook her head, "He seemed happy when we stopped by but I never really considered how he would feel when we weren't there with him. When he was alone."

Saera felt her heart constrict as the harder part of the story came up.

"Then, suddenly, he stopped coming to work for a week and the owner was worried. He never missed a shift."

Mark