I slowly padded into the dorm. It was 3am and I had just came back from producing in my studio. I knew the members constantly asked me to come home earlier so that I had enough rest before practice the next morning but I would always not take note of the time and come home in the wee hours. I walked into my room carefully to not wake any of the members up. 

I slipped of my pants and changed into shorts, before lifting my shirt. What stared at me was a beautiful tiger, bright orange and fierce, staring right at me. My tattoo. It was right at my heart, a tattoo of a tiger that looked as if it was alive. It reminded me of a certain person and his tiger agenda. I was going to reach out to wear my shirt when I heard screams coming from what seemed like opposite my room. I hurriedly slipped on my shirt before running to the room.

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH~~~~~~ I-It h-hurts..."

The screams got louder as I slowly opened the door to hoshi's room. 

I gasped.

He was thrashing around on the bed, face morphed in fear as beads of sweat ran down his face and tortured screams came out of his mouth. I hurriedly ran over and tried to constraint him to stop his thrashing but to no avail. 

"Soonyoung, its ok. I'm here."

I hugged him close to me as I felt him stop thrashing and rocked him back and forth, like a baby. 

After awhile, he finally calmed down and went back to sleep. I put him on the bed and slipped under the duvet with him. I figured that sleeping with him was the best I could do to help him right now.

I took a glance at the calender. 1st April 2017. No wonder...

1 April 2011.

A new trainee was arriving today. Me and seungcheol hyung were in the tiny dorm which was an apartment, waiting for the new addition. What we didn't expect was our manager carrying a bruised boy who looked around our age, his left cheek badly burned and blistered.

Both of us were shocked.

"Manager hyung, what happened to him?" I heard seungcheol hyung ask from behind me as he recovered from his shock of seeing the boy like that but I was still gaping at the scene. Manager hyung set him on one of the thin mattresses on the floor and rushed to get our first-aid kit from the closet.

"He was abused. I found him like that along the road near the house where I was supposed to fetch him. He was awake just now but most probably fainted from the pain."

Manager hyung slowly raised his shirt, showing many cuts crisscrossing each other on his stomach, torso, back, literally everywhere. Red and angry cane marks overlapped each other, some even bleeding slightly. I internally winced as I saw them. Manager hyung slowly added ointment to each and every of the cuts, before changing his shirt which was slightly stained with blood. 

If the cane marks were bad, his face was many times worst. It looked as if someone poured boiling water on his cheek relentlessly, causing it to scar and blister his face. But what caught my attention was a beautiful black treble clef on his left cheek, still visible among the scar and blisters. 

His tattoo.

It was beautiful, the most beautiful treble clef I ever saw in my 10 years of learning music. 

How could a parent be so ruthless to try to destroy the tattoo and injure his face, making it look so disfigured, I could not comprehend. All I knew was that I wanted so so much, to help the poor boy on the mattress in any way I could, even though I had just met him. 




Tattoos . SoonhoonWhere stories live. Discover now