Like most mornings over the course of the past two weeks, I woke up with with a pounding headache, and a hangover that felt closer to a brain aneurysm.

My head was spinning, and my mouth felt dry, but that was to be expected considering the night I'd had the day before.

What was not to be expected, however, was the sight of my second butler, Kim Taehyung, standing right beside my bed with a breakfast tray clutched in his hands and a silly smile painted on his face.

My headache instantly intensified.

"Paper," Taehyung said, handing me the morning paper and pointing at the front page headline.

SON OF BANKER STRIPS HALF-NAKED AT LOCAL CLUB

I groaned and buried my face in my hands. Of course they had a picture of me. Of course I looked absolutely blasted, standing on a table and swinging my shirt around in circles like a wild caveman.

"Very nice," Taehyung said with a grin, setting a cup of tea and a plate of scones down on my nightstand.

"No, not nice," I sighed, rubbing my tired and red eyes. "Quite the opposite, actually."

This was my third appearance in the papers but, surprisingly, I hadn't heard a thing about it from my father. Did he not care about what this could do to his reputation? Didn't he mind the things people would way? I couldn't believe how far I had fallen... he was probably too disappointed in me to even call.

"Dance."

I looked up at Taehyung with a frown. "What?"

"You like dance? You... move hips, move feet? I myself, no dancing. I suck."

I closed my eyes as a chuckle managed to sneak out of me. "You suck, huh?" I asked, shaking my head at my own immaturity.

Taehyung nodded. "Yes, much! So bad."

I rubbed my browbone. Why did Jin and Namjoon think teaching him a word like that would turn out well? "Thank you for bringing me breakfast, but I'm not very hungry. I think I'll just spend my entire day in bed... decaying, or something."

Taehyung curiously cocked his head, and I knew I had spoken too much. He was lost.

"Food very good!" The man said, petting his stomach. "Scones I tasted. Very nice."

"Yes, well, that might be so, but I--"

Taehyung grabbed a scone, dipped it in strawberry jam, and brought it to my lips. "Eating? Tasting, please?"

For some reason, despite my non-existing appetite, I didn't have it in me to refuse the boy. I opened my mouth and took a bite, chewing slowly and with a forced smile as the butler stared down at me.

He seemed pleased, his eyes crinkling like a proud mother as I ate. "I helped make," he said after I swallowed, dipping the scone into a swirl of whipped cream.

I raised my eyebrows, my body moving on autopilot as I opened my mouth again and let the butler feed me. "What? Why? We have a cook now, don't we? Jung Hoseok... I haven't actually met him yet, but--"

"Small," Taehyung interrupted. "You is small. Scone make... bigger."

I huffed, unsure whether I had to be offended by that comment. I liked being small. I used to hate it, but I no longer cared if I looked masculine or threatening in any way. The time for that was later. All I wanted now was to be pretty. Pretty like a doll, so I could be loved by men.

"Outside, maybe? Air? Hm?" After somehow making me eat an entire scone, Taehyung opened my closet and threw a shirt and a pair of trousers onto my bed.

I cringed back underneath my silk covers. "No, I don't wish to leave the house today. The sun is shining, it'll give me a headache."

"No, sun good!" Taehyung said as though I had said something absolutely preposterous. He took my hand and guided me out of bed, and though I really truly wished to refuse him, I somehow simply couldn't.

"You are quite persistent, you know?" I mumbled as the butler pulled my nightshirt over my head. I wrapped my arms around my naked torso and stared at the butler through my fringe. "Emilio normally dresses me."

"Oh, him went market, pick up something," Taehyung explained, crouching down to help me step into my trousers. "Jin, Namjoon, gone, don't know where. So, Emilio ask me go, but I can't speak what he need, so he go himself."

Somehow, I understood what Taehyung said.

The boy rose to his feet again and began to fumble around with the button of my pants, and I swallowed thickly as he struggled to close it. An awkward smile played along his lips, our faces only inches away as his fingers kept dancing around my crotch.

"D-different on other person..." Taehyung murmured, and I had to bite away a smirk when I caught sight of his reddening cheeks.

"I could... do it myself," I whispered, though I couldn't bring myself to care about how long the butler was taking.

"No, no," Taehyung said right away, kneeling down to get a better look at the situation. He brought his face way too close to my groin as he tried to close my pants once more, and my jaw dropped at his obliviousness.

"See? I do it," Taehyung said, sticking out his tongue with a concentrated glare before finally getting the button into the hole.

I looked down at the boy, feeling a little breathless. "What..." I gulped. "What about my shirt?"

Taehyung looked over at my dress shirt, which had about seven small buttons running along it from top to bottom. "Ah... oh, I- I do too."

He snatched the garment off my bed and helped me slide my arms into each sleeve with awkward movements. Neither of us could stop smiling and chuckling in soft, gentle tones as he began to fumble with the first button of my shirt, and when I saw the boy's hands tremble, I realized that I made him nervous.

"I will practice," Taehyung promised me, coming up a bit higher after every button he closed.

"It's okay," I said right away, looking into the butler's sunset eyes for what felt like the first time in ages. "You can take your time."

________

"What a mess," I groaned, looking around at the ugly, forgotten swamp that was my garden. The place was ruled by weeds and tall grass, with patches of dead, dried out flowers here and there which perhaps once were beautiful, and it was tragic.

"Not very nice," Taehyung mused, resting his hands on his sides.

"Getting a groundskeeper for this place seems insane," I said, shaking my head at the unending ocean of green and brown. "I won't be outside much anyway and in a couple of years this house will be empty again."

Taehyung frowned. "Groundkeeper?"

"Besides," I went on, kicking a rock into the bushes. "I don't think anything pretty could even grow in circumstances this chaotic."

"What flowers you like?" Taehyung suddenly asked me, inspecting the weeds and the grass like some kind of botanist.

I shrugged, my eyes slowly gravitating toward the place where I found Emilio's dead wife. "I'm not sure," I mumbled. "My father says people should spent their time looking up instead of down."

"Hm?" Taehyung blinked at me, resembling a lost puppy dog once more.

"Roses," I blurted out, simply choosing the first flower that came to my mind. "Red... roses."

Taehyung clapped his hands and nodded vigorously for reasons I could only guess at. "Ah! Yes! Nice, nice... yes."

I wheezed, the strange, foreign footman confusing me like nothing else while still having an odd charm about him. His words made little sense, and his actions were even less coherent, but what puzzled me the most was his immense meekness toward me.

He trailed after me like a baby chicken following it's mother, and though I wished to find it endearing, it mostly just unnerved me.

There was no reason for him to like me.

He was absolutely innocent, and yet he'd been imprisoned and enslaved by my father.

The boy had every right to hate me.

I turned around when I heard the purring of a car engine closing in on the property, and could feel my heart tighten in my chest when I caught sight of my other butler, Emilio.

The man had returned from the market carrying bags of fruits and vegetables with that ever-present frown of his, and my eyes crinkled with a smile.

Before I knew it, I was running up to him, and called out to the man as though he'd been away for years.

"Emilio, let me help!" I said, eagerly taking one of the bags off his hands.

"I don't need your help, demon child," Emilio muttered under his breath, though he had been struggling quite a bit before I came to his aid. "Weren't you talking to that halfwit just now? Go bother him some more."

I shook my head and followed Emilio into the house with the groceries. "We barely has a conversation," I said, the existence of my other manservant pretty much disappearing from my mind. "And I've said all I had to say to him."

_____

"Attention everyone. I'd like to inform you all that it will be my seventeenth birthday in two months, and for that reason, I'll be throwing a big party. There will be lots of dancing and drinking, and I have to say I'm actually quite thrilled. I'm inviting lots of people so I'm going to need everyone's help to put this thing together. I'll need food, decorations, probably some extra footmen, music--"

"Demonic festivities... how exciting."

Every member of staff simultaneously looked to Emilio, each of them carrying their own hateful glares.

"For the love of all things, would you attempt thinking instead of speaking every now and then, Emilio?" Jin spat. "Shitting on a kid's birthday, honestly... do you realize how wretched you sound?"

"A kid? Funny," Emilio chuckled, picking at his nails. "Ese chico no es un niño. Es un parásito."

I perked up, my eyes widening at Emilio's remark. A parasite? What did he mean by that? If he didn't see me as a child anymore, did that mean he was starting to think of me as a man?

"What's so funny you dense fool?" Jin asked with a look that could kill, only to be reeled right back in by Namjoon, who confined him into a hug.

"I-if I need to hire more staff to help out, please do let me know," I said, choosing to ignore everyone's disdain for Emilio. "I'll soon hand out a list with all my requirements. Thank you for listening."

Taehyung began to clap out of the blue, awkwardly filling up the silence within the servant's quarter's kitchen. "Very nice," he said, smiling wildly at me. "Very nice."

_______

I knocked against the door to Jin's room feeling entirely unprepared for my own set of questions. It was nearly midnight, but I hadn't been able to sleep, and my need for human interaction had become too severe to ignore. It felt as though I was slowly becoming translucent when I roamed the halls of my estate in isolation, and it was too late to drink away my consciousness at a club. I didn't have any friends to talk to, but I had servants, so for now, my servants would simply have to do.

"M-master Park!" Jin said, sounding a little startled to see me, which I could understand. It wasn't a normal thing for a master to be within the servant's quarters so often, but I didn't mind being different from most sirs. Or at least, not anymore.

Jin's hair was tousled, and his eyes were big as saucers. I didn't think my coming into the servant's quarters would've mattered much to the footman because of his usual careless attitude, but I might've been wrong.

I swallowed thickly, immediately feeling guilty about infiltrating the servant's stay so late at night. "I'm terribly sorry about this but, I have a couple of things on my mind and I think you're the only person I can talk to about them."

"Oh..." Jin glanced over his shoulder. "Well, consider me flattered, master Park."

The footman opened the door and allowed me to enter his room, which was small, ill-lit, and musty.

He sat down on his creaky bed and crossed his legs, giving me his undivided attention. "Please, do ask away."