Chapter Text
The words on the page began to bleed and mould together into something intangible.
Sieun had spent the better half of the past hour trying to make sense of the equations, but what usually took him seconds to digest was proving an impossible final stretch under the growing weight of his fatigue. He sighed a hassled huff into the quiet lull of the empty apartment, closing the algebra book and massaging his temples with closed eyes.
Around him white noise saturated the space and filled every room. The weatherman on the living room TV drivelled on with some distant promise of a rainstorm, the washing machine in the bathroom whirred and clunked as a zipper caught in its mechanism and the Youtube video of one of his mother's many lectures on his computer screen hummed at a lower volume in the mundane of his bedroom.
For someone so partial to silence, Sieun couldn't navigate his evenings without the humdrum. Without a range of noise frequencies around the threshold to stop the feeling of abandonment from sinking its claws any deeper.
He needed the noise to anchor himself — to remind him that he was still alive even when every inch of his home was all but dead.
His life was a rinse and repeat routine, something so innately dull in its pattern that it was as banal on the world around it as its complier. Wake up, take the bus to school, keep your head down, take the bus to hagwon, keep your head down, take the bus back home, microwave dinner, study then sleep. Rinse and repeat.
Someone unlike Sieun might've been wrung bone dry by structure so monotonous and rigorous, but Sieun was meticulous in a way most kids his age weren't. He always had a point to prove, an insecurity woven into the fabric of his character, something born and bred of neglect. An early independence cast upon a child who had no choice but to adapt. Sieun did ultimately adapt, quicker than some, but not without an abundance of resent that left him guarded and stoic and barricaded in the confines of the walls built around him for survival.
Cold to the world around him, withdrawn and stationary against the ever-moving tide of conventional adolescence.
He opened his eyes in a moment that stalled lethargically, a pang of something ugly aching in his chest as his gaze flickered to the computer screen. The digital image of his mother moved across the lecture hall, a wide smile on her face as she answered a student's question. A smile Sieun's eyes lingered on longer than he would usually allow them to — an expression that would otherwise be foreign to him if it wasn't something he'd seen in his own reflection. It was a fake smile, didn't quite reach the eyes the way it should, yet Sieun despised it all the same.
The way his own smile never quite reached his eyes too, the way he could count on one hand how many times he'd seen either smile.
He flicked the computer shut before the emotion grew uglier, staring for a second at the black screen. He finds the motivation somewhere in his exhaustion to pull himself up and into the living room to turn off the TV. A trivial step in his routine, when noise was reduced to total silence as he wound down for the night — the type of silence that rung the ears almost deafeningly and let unbidden thoughts run amuck.
He picked up the remote and pressed the red button, tossing it haphazardly on the sofa before making for the bathroom.
Just as his fingers curled around the doorknob, a sound stills him in place.
A sound that didn't follow routine. A spanner thrown in the works of his carefully crafted order.
The ring of his doorbell.
"Delivery!"
He was cynical enough to be wary as a rule of thumb. His eyebrows furrow and he remains rooted to the spot a moment as he racks his brain. He didn't order anything, that much he was sure of.
Although he was rigid in his internal mantra to keep his head down at school, that didn't fare in going unnoticed by bullies with nothing better to do. If for nothing other than achieving high grades, that's all it took to earn their hatred. He'd somehow blipped on the radar of Yeongbin and his knee-jerk lackeys without rhyme or reason, and turning up to his apartment wasn't something he'd put past them.
"Delivery! Hello? Anyone home?"
The man on the other side of the door was growing more incessant with every slipping second, punctuating each holler with a furious pound of a fist that rattled the doorframe.
Sieun moved with the rhythm of the thuds.
Slowly, quietly — each hesitant step measured so as to not arouse suspicion to any signs of life. He sauntered to the kitchen first to arm himself, clutching the first utensil closest to him before drifting to the door, all within a few bated breath strides.
He exhales carefully, every tread counted until he closes the distance of the hallway — loitering at the door a beat.
"Yah, I can hear you moving in there! Open up will you, I don't have all day." He bellows again, muttering, "What kind of person ignores a delivery they ordered, tsk.."
Sieun's clench tightens around the makeshift weapon now tucked behind his back. Teeth gritted as he considers and appraises his every move.
He'll open the door, maybe just a partial crack, maybe wide enough for the man to bear the brunt of his withering glare. He'll jut his foot out in preempt, to wedge against the door and limit the access. He'll hoist the shoe rack hooked to the wall on his right to hinder the assailant should he attempt entry.
If all else fails, he'll blindside the intruder with the weapon snug against his rear when he least expects it.
His eyes dart around his foyer in one last cursory sweep to discern if there's anything else he can use to his disposal, if his strategy is ample enough and primmed up to par.
But the door is thumped once more, clattering the panel against its jambs and he's kicked into gear despite himself.
He makes quick work of the security mechanism with nimble fingers, swinging the door open at a breakneck pace aimed to catch off guard. The man lurches unsteadily forward into the threshold like he was leaning against it, catching himself at the last second of a stagger before he goes smacking into the door that Sieun had opened with restricted width — not too much so he was exposed, not too little so he imposed, just enough to size up the threat.
A threat that had manoeuvred its balance steady with an ease that didn't go amiss on Sieun's astute eyes.
His peeved stare pins Sieun down, lingering longer than the moment necessitates. Sieun doesn't know him. Has never seen him before. Thinks he would've missed him even if he happened upon him in the hustle and bustle of daily life. He was monotonous in looks the way Sieun's life was.
Unimpressionable, passing.
Strong jawed, broad shouldered and high cheek-boned, hair a military crew cut and a boyish reminisce to his masculine features, like he'd just broken the rut of adolescence into something more rugged and contoured — all things Sieun didn't take notice of if ever he was looking.
What he did notice though was a bright green windbreaker thrown over a white t-shirt that instantly earned his distaste — too harsh against the colourless monochrome of his apartment and staggeringly bright in the drab cast of his life.
"I didn't order anything." Sieun says with wary reserve. Low enough for the height and breadth endowed man to see him for the adversary he's squaring his shoulders up to be.
Sieun's spite seemed to break him out of his senile transfix, and he shakes his head with a little too much vigour, almost animatedly, like he's shaking an unbidden thought out. "This is unit 902 of Dongbaek apartments building 102, isn't it? Just take it, you've already kept me here long enough. So much damn build up to opening the door you'd think I was seeing my bride for the first time." He swings the delivery bag in his hand with some trial, as though the short interaction had taxed him to his limit already and pushes it forcefully into Sieun's embrace.
Sieun's grasp wrings around the make-do bludgeon, knuckles white with the stress and his jaw muscles work a tension. "This is building 101."
The man's gaze levels his own again, though this time the intent of linger is deliberate. "You, are you clenching your teeth at me right now?" He scoffs, disbelief exaggerated in the dynamic contorts of his expression. "Are you this hostile with every visitor or do you particularly look down on delivery drivers?"
"You've got the wrong apartment, take your delivery and leave." Sieun weighs his words to keep them taut and concise. He's still dancing the dance of an animal cornered into agonistic display as a bluff tactic — trying to appear more formidable than he was in threat and capability.
Sieun doesn't know what presses to shift the man's demeanour, if it was the deadpan of his words or the deader pierce of his glare but he suddenly breaks into an easy, toothy grin that played into the boyish edge of his features, shoulders sagging down as a chuckle wracks through him. "You're really something, huh? Trying so hard with that bravado charade, what kind of situation could you have gotten yourself into that you greet deliverymen with a weapon behind your back blocking your door with a death stare?"
The tension of his grip on the utensil falters a skipped heartbeat, the ground cut from beneath him.
Sieun observed better than most everyone, it came naturally after spending long enough on the outside looking in.
He never read people wrong.
Not so much a talent if context was considered. Par for the course of the sidelines he never overstepped the mark of, it was only a given he noticed things others didn't when he didn't busy himself with the trivialities of life, when he saw things from a hundred metres out as opposed to a close, limited focus.
The real talent worth its praise was the level of observation he was just met with.
Perception that wasn't tried by time or honed by circumstance — something that came easier, more casual, more innate. Something that didn't need pin drop silence or white noise to find its way.
The man had just blotched the mental ink of every one of his carefully thought-out tactics with nothing more than a desultory moment's glance and Sieun had read someone wrong for a first. He shorts out trying to accept that fact, even though he wielded the weapon and the upper hand of layout awareness, Sieun couldn't swallow down the gnawing feeling that as it happens, he was in fact the one blindsided between them.
"Who are you?" He asks warily with some effort after a stretch of strained silence.
If compromise flashed in his eyes as his brain short-circuited and tried to reboot, the man doesn't seem to weaponise it to his advantage, only smiles disarmingly more. Sieun only bristles more, steeped in that bunker mentality that sirened all of his defence facilities into kickstart. He'd read him wrong for the knucklehead, boyish, cocksure type and Sieun was never wrong.
This made him categorically more dangerous because he was unpredictable and Sieun didn't manage well with unpredictable.
Still donning that roguish smile that rubbed Sieun the wrong way, he says. "Not who you think I am, I'm guessing. I'm really just a delivery guy. Is someone actually out to get a dainty guy like you?"
Sieun's glare only grows in intensity and the man receives it with another laugh, like it didn't even scratch where it punched holes in others. As though there was humour in the way he'd thrown a monkey wrench in Sieun's internal apparatus, jamming the cogs and frying the electric.
Sieun was wrong about him, a fact he couldn't overlook or overcome. A realisation that bridled him leaden from the calcium of his teeth to the phalanges of his toes.
He'd underestimated the threat, miscalculated — and he didn't have the time to recalibrate because the man just wouldn't shut up.
He needed silence to think.
He always exceeded in thinking on his feet when it was quiet in his head, but there was a ruckus in the labour of remediating his wrong and Sieun has never heard such noise before because he was rarely wrong.
His eyes dwell the angular lines of the man's rigid physique as he wills himself to calm and regain his faculty. He can tell there's muscle beneath the swathes of obnoxiously coloured clothing and something about the sporadic swells of his arms as they shift tells Sieun he was right to grab a weapon. There was a touch too much strength concealed under the deceiving deliveryman getup and notice of that discrepancy felt like an achievement to his buffering brain. The gears of his comprehension are doused with oil and finally churn to work in synchrony and do what Sieun does so well in heat of the moment perfunctory plunges and one fell swoops.
Think Sieun, think.
He needed to throw him off the cuff, slam the door shut and engage the deadbolt. If he was a pit viper coiled back on its underbelly before, now was the time to puff out his head and strike — that's when his attention tracks to the hand too comfortably perched against the door hinge.
He never planned to attack really, in spite of the groundwork he'd covered in preparation. Sieun never attacked first as an unwritten rule to avoid consequences. His M.O. was always rooted in self-preservation. It was all preventative, never offensive always defensive. Never this early in confrontation with so little words exchanged. Yet the circumstances demand and Sieun's hand is forced to give.
Now Sieun, now.
In the prod of a headlong rush, he pistons into motion as quick as his internal engine could crank on a cold start, flourishing the utensil concealed behind him — a metal ladle, he now distinguished with quick analysis. He lunges.
The deliveryman doesn't read his sudden advance fast enough to go unscathed despite a tried dodge at the last second, Sieun lands his blow to the unsuspecting hand and the bludgeoned knuckles cave under the thrust of steel, recoiling instantly.
Maybe it was the height advantage that allowed him to move quicker or maybe the man wasn't as deft as afforded to have realised Sieun for the wolf in sheep's clothing he was. But Sieun's ruse seems to work and he was baited all the same, jostling back into the porch railing with the force of impact, nursing the blossoming pain in his cloven fist with a loud shriek.
Sieun took the moment's offered opportunity to toss the delivery bag at his feet, careless for the way its contents spilled as he slammed his door shut and engaged the deadbolt, all in record pace.
The security system beeped into life just as the man pummelled his unharmed fist against the door with an onslaught of profanities.
"You little fucker! Shit, son of a bitch I can't believe it, did you just break my knuckle?" He barks with a shrill pained groan. "Yah, what kind of psycho attacks someone in the middle of a conversation? You fucking lunatic. You better hope I don't get another delivery in this apartment complex!"
Sieun breathed slowly, feeling the tension bleed from his body on the exhale as the earlier fatigue settled in its stead. The adrenaline of the altercation made him forget just how tired he was and his legs begin dragging to his bedroom before he guides them and not until he heard the final fleeting threat of the incensed deliveryman.
"Next time I won't be so easily distracted by that stupid sparkly eye thing. I'll see you coming you little psychopath!"
He pounds the door one last time for good measure before Sieun is ultimately reunited with his routine silence and the dreaded possibility of a next time.
———
Few were smarter than Sieun and that statistic certainly went uncontested by the sample pool at his school.
He knew better than to hope the threat was neutralised because he was safe in the shields of his home — the walls have to come down eventually as they always do, deadbolts are after-all made to be unlocked and security alarms to be disarmed. He would have to leave and confront his repercussions when the time comes and nothing was quite as arbitrary as time. Inevitable and ever-moving, with or without you.
That con deliveryman knew where he lived and probably scurried off to report back to Yeongbin with that intel and his newest glove accessory as testimony. Sieun knew that at this moment he was probably better off wandering through the seedy underbelly of Seoul's shadiest crevices than skulking through his school's network. Byeoksan was a jungle with an array of predators all lying in wait, on the hunt for their next feed and right now Sieun was all but smothered in blood and smelling a lot like the next kill.
He'd only scented the sniffing snouts to the target on his back by protecting himself.
With that knowledge he braced himself for a gruelling day at school when the time comes and as Sieun pat down the creases of his uniform, he couldn't help but feel that maybe time was cruelest on him of all.
Prowling the halls earlier than anyone, he trudges to the window of his empty classroom, pulling the latch open and remaining idle there a moment — as he does every morning. Letting the daybreak dew caress his skin and clear his airways.
A moment where time stood still as he did. Where he finally caught up with it the way it always caught up to him.
That dawn of morning when night transitioned to day and everything shifted and came alive. Sieun would always close the window just as the city began to move to bate the bitter bile that starts to burn at his throat like regular scheduled programming.
The movement always unsettled him. Always a wounding reminder of his own stalemate. How the tides always passed and left Sieun behind. How the world with its axis and all its time and rotations always moved on and around him but never with him.
The straggler he was. Fading into the backdrop of a group picture he didn't quite fit the frame of.
Never worthy of being taken with the current, never worthy of passing time with. Always passed on by.
Sieun didn't particularly hate it.
He was for the most part indifferent, except in that pocket of melancholy he'd allowed in his routine, when he stared out the window with eyes glassed over and a grief buried deep within, turning round and round in the pit of his innards to remind him that pretend as he might, it was always there, it was alive and it wouldn't die no matter how much he hacked and maimed. There were other times away from the window when it would kick to signal its existence, times like now, when Sieun was downcast by an impending sense of doom waiting him out and he was cued to choke back that sorrow moving inside.
Nothing waited for Sieun, not the world, not time, not a loving family to go home to or a loyal friend loitering in lookout for him on the courtyard — nothing except predators in school uniforms, fear dressed in brittle-armour bravery and fake deliverymen who probably signed his death warrant with a broken fist.
It's long into the afternoon, at the end of his second to last class when he finally peers up from where his head had been buried in the solace of his books in an effort to remain unnoticed. An effort that didn't need work as it settled into customary disposition when the hours wore on. He hadn't even realised he'd gone untroubled when time had passed him by again like flowing water around a stubborn rock, until the bell sounded and chairs screeched against wooden floors.
His final class is PE and he straggles reluctantly at the rear of the student traffic funnelling into the changing room. The only exercise Sieun outvied in was the mental kind so it went without saying he didn't deal any favour to physical education.
He makes for his locker through loops around acquainted quads and trios, his fingers working the coded padlock and prying it open to fetch his change of clothes — only to find it wasn't there. None of his effects were. Sieun was careful enough not to keep any of his scarce valuables in there for fear of exactly what he got the sneaking suspicion was happening right now.
"Yah Yeon Sieun, can we get a hand in here?"
Yeongbin emerges for the first time from a shower cubicle on the left end of the locker room, where it wasn't a far-fetch presumption he'd likely lurked in wait the entire school day. His shirt sleeves and pant cuffs were damp, rolled up to the forearms and calves, a smarmy smirk pulled at his lips as he proffered the helve of the plunger in his hands as offering.
Sieun knows it's bait dangled. He's being led by crumbs like a lamb to the slaughter, but he was never one to back down from a challenge — devised trap or otherwise. He's already proven once before he can be a wolf in sheep's clothing if the circumstances demand and now as his expression remains steadily stoic and he roves the distance to Yeongbin, with each step he feels the phantom itch of a coat of wool he wears like a mantle for the bloodthirsty wolf within.
"Something's stuck in the drain, we need more muscle to yank it." Yeongbin says, thrill of the lure distorting his features into something almost impish. All teeth, too-thick eyebrows and jarred angles and Sieun couldn't think of anything uglier. He doesn't give Sieun the plunger when he draws near, prompts him to look inside the shower with a jut of his jaw instead.
Sieun obliges against his better judgement, skirts the swivel of the cubicle to find Yeongbin's henchmen Lee Jeongchan and Han Taehoon shouldered together in the tight space, careened on the partitions on either side of the stall. They're smirking too and it's just more teeth, more ugly.
Sieun didn't need to wonder when he'd chance upon the pair, wherever Yeongbin went they were never far behind. They flocked together like birds of a feather and birds of prey weren't the hunters they were without their learned behaviours and their herd mentalities. There was not an original thought between them, it was all monkey see monkey do and Sieun was reasoning with the impression that they wouldn't ever spare him until he went open season and shot them inflight for blood sport.
He doesn't do much of anything when he glances down at their feet where they seemed so desperate for him to look.
Hardly moves on the outside, not even a giveaway twitch to break the surface of his steeled posterior. Inside though, that blood-thirst simmers to a seething boil, hot, climbing to a fever pitch and so heady it dehydrates. He's suddenly parched for something untoward, copper and metallic. He recognises the bowels of his locker furnishing the tiled shower floor. His personal belongings sodden and soiled with water, muddy boot-prints and other inconspicuous yellowish staining.
Piss, if he were to hazard a guess.
His sports uniform plugs the drain, swamping ankle-deep where his spare pencil case, his shattered reading glasses and his hagwon workbooks float.
"You should thank us really." Jeongchan says, prodding Sieun's soaked pants with the toe of his shoe so some of the water drained with a gurgle. "We gave you a free hand wash. The label says delicate fabric, a washing machine could've ruined them."
"Yeah, most laundromats would make you cough up the money for this level of service. Aren't we too nice?" Yeongbin sneers over his shoulder, his patented shit-eating smile skewing his voice to a hiss.
Sieun can't hear them. Can't hear anything over the penetrating ring in his ears. His stare is rooted to his reading glasses, the frame snapped in two and the lenses splinter constellations, buoyed up and drifting in a circular motion as the flood spiralled lost water. He's sheet white and his chest clinches around a painful emotion, a lacerating pang in his middle in the thumping sequence of morse code. A distress signal from his core accelerating in urgency and intensity.
The glasses were the last thing his mother had bought him. Sieun was only nine at the time and the words of his worn copy of Jane Eyre had begun to merge together. The book was read ten times over and worse for wear but Sieun's hands were anchored to it like mooring pins. In the laboured strive of his eleventh reread, his mother had noticed him squinting at the pages on one of her sparse visits and towed him to the nearest opticians on a whim. The frame was now too tight around his temples, the nose pads didn't quite sit right and the lens prescription had long depreciated its period of validity. Sieun's far-sight grew worse and he's been through three more prescriptions with increasing strength since.
He clung to what they represented and hated what they represented in equal parts. Bittersweet was the word, except the bitter far outweighed the sweet and yet — Sieun still clung.
For better or worse, he couldn't find the courage to throw them away, but it wasn't for lack of trying. Many times he ricocheted between his bedroom and the kitchen trashcan — discard, fish back out, discard, fish back out — and when he couldn't bare the sight of them on a particularly bitter day when words on pages bled nonsensical and his head throbbed, he stowed them away in his locker. Out of sight out of mind.
Until it wasn't.
Now they whirlpooled on the filthy shower pan of a foul stenched locker room as the drain spouted and purled, drinking its fill and all those years Sieun toiled with the complex emotion were reduced to the guzzle of a drain.
"Are you a mute or something? Say something." Yeongbin shoulder-checks him from behind and he staggers limply forward to no effect. Sieun looked down at his glasses. He couldn't react. He couldn't speak.
He was hollow.
Robbed of one of the few instances he felt complexity ebb through him below the surface, pushing and pulling at two emotional extremes. There wasn't much of that contrast now. No to and fro of a crashing wave. No struggle of a push against a pull. The water was eerily still. The peal in his head was eerily quiet. The throes of morse code pain in his chest had eerily died. And the lever of moderation was so far wrenched radical it sent one disproportionate extreme through him like a wrecking ball.
Wrath.
He inhaled, chillingly calm. Exhaled, harrowingly flat. Then scoped, terrifyingly placid.
A deodorant spray canister on the shelf to his immediate right. A backpack bound loose down the arm of one of his deltoids. A strewn gym towel hung in low reach on the eave of the partition to his left. The plunger in Yeongbin's hands.
Wait.
The odds stacked in his favour are slim, but not none. He could make do with not none.
Just like that, battle plans were drawn.
Now, Sieun.
All is still a moment, then the charged static building nuclear momentum coursing through Sieun's arterial map, sparks. He jerks back his leg, dealing a fierce punt into Yeongbin's knee from where he shawled behind him. It sends him staggering back and he howls as the joint distends. His all brawn no brain lackeys rally closer, crowding Sieun like he knew they would. He wrests the backpack strap from his shoulder when they close in, pivoting as he swung its across. It whistles when the buckles torque and the bag rotors, cuffing them both in the face as it pummels. They too blunder back against the cubicle plinths, one cradling his eye, the other smacked dizzy.
"Fuck, bastard cut my eye!"
One of them screams. Sieun doesn't care which. He goes for the deodorant in the trough of opportunity. He uncaps it in the nick of time when the burlier of the two, Taehoon, pulls back round. There's a slit on his eyelid steadily bleeding from where the buckle of Sieun's backpack caught him and Sieun lets him gain some ground until he's joined in stride with a recovered Jeongchan. They prowl towards him like ravening wolves and Sieun carefully counts their steps.
One. Two.
On the third step, he rams the spray can's nozzle down at eye level. The aerosol mists and spits and Sieun can smell victory cresting in the scent of cheap musky amber. The propellant burns and frostbites and they're both decidedly down for the count. Blinded, sputtering and wailing as they each shrink to a cower on the floor, furiously kneading at their eyes.
That leaves one — and the crackling scorch of fire that licked at rage's dry kindling and leaped inside Sieun's empty chest — roars.
The room is an attestation of his hellfire ruin. Bystanders stifled with figurative fume inhalation, startled stiff and choked affright — vying to take cover and elude their reckoning. They avert their gazes skittishly when Sieun fields the room to yank the dangling towel, he shrugs their horrified stares off his skin, he was a monster of circumstance and consequence, of cause and effect. They had no right to fear his destruction when they stood idly by and watched his construction. Thread through thread, weave upon weave.
He flanks back to where Yeongbin kneeled on the ground crimped over his knee, casting him down a grimace of repulse. Sieun had dislocated the joint, he could tell from the awkward jut of the bone in the shallow groove of his thigh where the kneecap had locked.
He should stop.
It's enough really. It was enough a while ago.
Only then he feels a phantom tightness around his temples and the ghost of nose buds pressed into the bridge between his eyes and the fire picks up explosive velocity again, hungry for its fuel — and suddenly it's not enough. It might never be.
He twists the towel to a wring in several quick coils, hitching it around the column of Yeongbin's neck when it looked enough like a noose — and then he pulls. Yeongbin instantly throttles against the ligature, coughing, retching and scratching at the towel with all his spirit. Sieun wrenches and wrenches until he starts to lose his fight and his body starts to go limp, the plunger peels from his fist as his energy reserves deplete and thuds against the ceramic floor.
Sieun only lets go when his morbid satisfaction is thoroughly fulfilled and not a moment sooner. The image of Yeongbin's purple swollen face, his bloodshot capillaries and near-gouged eyes exhilarates him, spurs him on, makes him push. He wants to see where else blood can spurt from. Where else can bruise and swell. What else he can dent and skew.
He moves for the shaft of the plunger. Taking it up into his clenched fist and towering over Yeongbin again. He's clawing at his throat, spluttering for what he can manage in laboured oxygen and gawking up at Sieun with raw trepidation in his red-rimmed eyes.
"Thank you for the hand wash." Sieun drawls low and slow and vacant, knocking the wooden shaft on the bracket of the cubicle door Yeongbin had flinched against twice to test its durability. Sieun's chest rises and falls in heaves, his face the picture of rancour, his mouth a dry coppery savour. Sieun was doomsday. "I should probably pay you now."
"No, please, don't!" Yeongbin whimpers, trying to crawl further back into a dead-end with a stilted drag of his busted leg.
The coach barges into the locker room at the same moment Sieun hitches the plunger. With a huff and a bark he asks, "Why are none of you on the field yet?"
———
They were all suspended.
Sieun's neck was the only one on the line to begin with when the coach gave the principal his account. Some fanatic overkill about walking into a carnage of fallen soldiers with Sieun the last man standing.
"They peed on my PE uniform and jammed it into a shower drain," Sieun had told him when the principal asked for his turn of events with some concern. It was unlike Sieun and that leveraged the principal to want to hear his side of the story. "And they broke my glasses."
"Cool your heads off and come back when you're serious about school." The principal had dismissed, waving the four of them away with a flick of his hand. The verdict a 2 week suspension.
Taehoon, Jeongchan and Yeongbin left the room first. A triad of plasters, ice packs and crutched limps. Sieun tarried back in the hallways to grant them some headway across the courtyard and down to the gates. The friction between them was still chafed tender and could spark alive at any given moment, leaving when they did was sealing his own fate.
When coasts had to be clear and a half hour of pacing back and forth to bide his time had passed, Sieun made his way down. He pulls both straps of his backpack around his shoulders and winces. His hand stung with residual aerosol burns blistering the pads of his thumb and index and his muscles ached and cramped with overexertion. He just wanted to sleep the day away and forget all he can about lenses too weak, frames too small and nooses not tight enough.
"Hey dickhead, lookie here!"
Sieun would be lying if he said his blood ran cold. It didn't. He anticipated this, he ran warm. He fastened his bag straps in case of this. He could've written this in a fortune cookie and called himself a prophet. He stills his stride and trails Jeongchan's hoot on his two o'clock with a blank stare.
It seems his dalliance was discounted miscalculation on his part and actually wound up costing him more. Jeongchan waved at him with that sinister fleer on his slap-stricken face, in his mitts a steel baseball bat gleaming under the midday beam.
Oh, and Sieun was royally fucked because three had suddenly turned into seven. Bat and metal-rod wielding, crowing and heckling, and his chances weren't just slim now, they were a destitute nil.
They used that half hour to rally the troops and Sieun had fractionally less time to try muster up a strategy. He was outnumbered and outgunned. There was no scoping now, no counting or weighing, no game plans. His life hung at the balance and there was only run.
So run he did.
Like the wind, he ran. Hightailing it at a breakneck pace down the street. Footfalls thunder behind almost immediately giving chase and Sieun is single minded with the motivation of self-preservation. It sustains him with bouts of flight adrenaline and he sprints as full pelt as his legs could take him.
Run, Sieun, faster.
His muscles labour and contract, twinge and burn, his chest so tight it might implode and every breath feels serrated and sharper than it ever should. Less numbers than seven pursue and he chalks it up to some of the damage he'd divvied out in prequel, less than seven is a better hand dealt nonetheless, he can lose less than seven — he has enough tenacity to at least try. It was fight or flight and there really was no fight left in him today.
Turn the corner.
His body language reads linear then he feints left all of sudden, a stealthy manoeuvre that bargains him a silver of time to put more ground between them. Two of them are shortchanged by the bluff, the other three not so much.
On his approaching left is a rundown passage that winds into an underpass beneath a bottleneck clearway and disembowels onto the platform of a crowded train station. On his right is a busy thoroughfare that wreathes around alfresco dining restaurants and cafes, then hems into a tented street market brim with vendors and customers of a piece. Sieun has to make a caprice decision between left or right. Obtuse marketplace or acute subway. They gain on him and he recalls the narrow staircase at the hind of the underpass likely to stagnate him. His body levies him right before he accords it.
"Get the fucker, he's shorter than you for fuck sake!" He hears one of the laggers poke at one of the frontiers.
There's a stitch growing in agonising persistence on his flank as he laces and weaves between pedestrians and Sieun thinks he can't keep this up for much longer. He has to throw them off his scent while he still lucked in lead. He needs to work his environment to his advantage as he always does.
Improvise, Sieun.
He slows his tread just enough for the one with the longest legs to think he's caught his second wind, then he hoists the chair of a passing restaurant to the asphalt between them. Long legs overturns to his kneecaps and that's one down. Sieun keeps running when the others filter around their man down and stampede ahead.
There's a couple holding hands blocking the stretch of pavement forth, Sieun's eyes rivet on the coffee in the girl's hands and his brain whirs to action. "Really sorry," He placates breathlessly, snagging the styrofoam cup from her grip and turning on his heel, he comes to a startling hard-stop brake. Face to face with the runner-up, he tips the scalding beverage onto him with one fell douse.
He wails in agony. That's two down. The girl screams in horror. Sieun hits the ground running.
Up ahead the market looms and Sieun paces towards it. He's losing momentum and every step is proving more torturous than the last, his gait is beginning to look a lot like a hobble and there's still three more hot on his heel. The stitch isn't a stitch anymore — it feels more like an impale just below his ribs, skewering again and again with every gasping inhale. Luckily, the market is a maze of turns and tuckaways and Sieun knows its blueprint well enough to elude. Fruit and veg at the front, poultry and fishmongers in the middle, street food on the exit.
He makes midway progress between the fresh produce kiosks when he hears them clamouring behind. It's quickly ramped up in chaos in the smaller space. Shoppers scream as they're barged out the way, traders yell and curse for damages, and Sieun yanks what he can of vegetable crates and fruit hampers to the floor, still bargaining on the underhanded angle to work its trick. He picks up on the stray conversation of a saleswoman's phone call to the police, she's an older lady with greying hair and a fraught grimace, — 'Batters in school uniforms, they don't look to be the baseball team.' She reports, 'They're chasing a smaller kid in a grey hoodie.'
She'd thrown him a lifeline even though Sieun galed through the market like a typhoon of spoilage. Not sparing her goods either. He wants to stop and thank her, bow and give all his graces, he really does — but there's still ground to cover and he's still very much not out of the woods yet.
Sieun goes to tow at a slate of avocados sat atop another booth to stall time for the police to arrive, when he's suddenly plucked to a halt by the cuff of his forearm. His haste breaks, his balance upsets and he goes barrelling into a plane of firm muscle that braces his fall.
The jig was up. It was finally over, he could finally alight from his flight and maybe that means it's time to fight but Sieun's body was blaring for a stop and he couldn't say he wasn't relieved to just stop running.
Or so he thought.
Until he looked up and dread diffused through him from stem to stern when he realised he was nowhere near dancing his last dance, he'd only just switched to the next song and the heat was hiked up under the soles of his feet.
"Building 101 I should've known you'd be responsible for all this vandalism." He can see recognition move in the fake deliveryman's eyes and then his mouth splits a too-easy grin, clinching Sieun's wrist with eclipsing strength to keep him from fleeing. "Seriously, there's a loony bin not far from here I can get you a referral for, it might help."
Sieun glowered, frayed. His eye twitched ever so slightly.
This well and truly had to be his worst day yet.
The deliveryman was dressed an awful lot like a grocer and Sieun couldn't help but speculate how many more guises he had in his closet. He has a red apron secured around his midriff, folded twice over and cinched at the waist with a front tie. A wad of receipts tucked into the crease between the apron and his waistline, with a ball-pen wedged behind the helix of his ear. There is a faint scent of citrus and sulphur in his proximity but that could have very well been the whole market and Sieun wouldn't have noticed. What's more, his white t-shirt had stains of vibrant colours like juice spills - orange, cherry and green. Sieun thought white was impractical considering the line of work, but maybe that was part of the carefully considered ploy.
He couldn't fault the man's pristine costume otherwise, the props were so authentically true to life, Sieun would be none the wiser to the man's ruse had he not met him before. He really looked like he worked here.
When he could ill afford the distraction most, Sieun's attention was uncharacteristically divided and he was curious about someone for the first time in his life.
Sieun never cared to know about anyone, he was a compendium of bookish knowledge striving for encyclopaedic, the know how's and why's of people at a subjective level were inessential, frivolous, trivial and always proved useless to him — so why was it he was suddenly unusually interested in a pretence of all things? In the outfits of a con artist of all people?
A spate of questions hoarded his mouth in such quick succession and with enough wrangle in ceding priority to one another that he overwhelms himself inarticulate instead. He wants to ask — Who are you? How many more sham getups do you have? How do you know Yeongbin? — and it's really the final question that ironically grounds him to the gravity of his circumstances.
So he asks none and tries to find his bearings. He tells himself the curiosity was brought on by an irrationality of overstrain and nothing more.
This guy was the newest thorn in Sieun's side and to know one's enemy was to know oneself — good sense is all it was.
Clangs of aluminium striking table legs echo through the tent as if on cue, Yeongbin's footmen extend their search for Sieun under kiosk tables and behind booth tills. The deliveryman had pulled Sieun from their patrol trail when he grabbed him and prised him to a sideline so he now stood against their searchlight sweep as opposed to under it. At this angle his larger physique swathed Sieun's, offering cover.
The gesture seemed almost intentional, deliberate, and another question sears a quick heat on his tongue: Friend or foe? — Sieun's gaze flits down to where a hand still fetters around his arm and he starts to question whether the hold was a leash or an anchor rode.
"Let go." Sieun experiments, testing the shackle with a jerk of his arm but the deliveryman doesn't budge an inch, fastens his grip some more and stares at Sieun intently, amusement working his expression.
He cocks his head forward all of sudden, crowding into the threshold of Sieun's personal space with a chuckling smile. "Why? Are you running out on someone else's hospital bill too?"
Sieun bridles at the startling intimacy executed so casually. It throws him off balance and he feels a new emotion disarm him at once. Something that turned his gut and roused his pulse to a thrum. He doesn't let that emotion rise to the surface. Doesn't pick it apart. Swallows it down whole. Expressionless as he always is when it scratches its way down and he rasps around the thick of it, "Let go. While I'm still asking nicely."
He wrenches his arm again. No give. Tight as a drum. Nothing like an anchor — this was the leash that penned him like a feral animal destined for the zoo. A brow is raised at his threat with a touch too much mirth for it to be nothing short of condescending.
Foe, his head chants and his cheek muscle tics, foe, foe, foe- escape.
He reels back his focus, steadies his pulse to an orderly rhythm, clears his throat to bate the itch. Shaking off the last morsels of the strange emotion still throwing him for a loop with an imperceptible exhale.
Once he's fine-tuned back to default blank settings, his eyes get to work. Darting about the backdrop, itemising an inventory of what he can put to use.
He thinks a kick to the groin might work at first, but when he twitches a plausibility check through his leg, the stitch contracts and seizes in protest. He's still shuddering his breaths too, a steady burn in his chest and the phantom taste of blood in his mouth. Between the physical tax of the altercation and the chase, he needs to count his pennies and spread the costs. Brawn won't do, he needed something low effort.
Then he spots it, opportunity in the shape of a box cutter peeking out of a hem in the deliveryman's denim jeans where he'd pocketed it.
The fingers of Sieun's free hand itch and flex preemptively. He needs to time it just right.
The cheshire grin on the man's face eased into something more immersed, like he sensed the shift in Sieun's motivation, brows fleetingly creased, tonguing into the flesh of his cheek, as if he was trying to read a prediction into Sieun's unpredictability.
"Why would I let go?" He asks with a curl of his lip that parts his mouth just enough so Sieun can see the pink of his tongue coast across his molars as he slants his head. "I've got a bone to pick with you."
"Get in line, asshole." They hear someone say.
Then Sieun fell hard. Or he'd been rammed. He couldn't tell between the loud burst of a fruit crate splintering into a thousand wood-chips under the barrel of a baseball bat and the bruising impact on his tailbone as he plummeted. What was left of a toiled inhale was forced from his lungs in a short, pained gasp.
The deliveryman was in a similar stance on the gravel across from him, except he didn't fall flat on his ass like Sieun did, he expertly stooped into a squat and his plunge looked practiced — more a duck than a drop.
Sieun pulls himself to a crouch with some effort and looks up. That's when he realises the deliveryman had shoved him off to drive a wide berth between them where a bludgeon swung. Otherwise the spalled wood-chips would have been fragments of Sieun's skull. A red-eyed Jeongchan stands in that berth now, tugging at his bat jammed in the wreckage of the till he'd cleaved with poor aim.
Sieun's eyes flick between the two of them.
"Fuck it's stuck." Jeongchan jostles the bat some more with panting grunts, struggling profusely. His vision was still compromised, Sieun surmises, — he won't pose much challenge. "Yah, get him!" He hollers for the other two, still floundering in the rush of panicked foot traffic — they will.
The deliveryman stays slouched on his hinds and looks at Sieun warily with the precaution of a hunter trying not to spook an animal prone to fleeing. He presents the biggest challenge.
The window of opportunity is golden.
Sieun stares back at the deliveryman turned grocer — or whatever he was. Breaths hitched. Muscles pulled taut as a tension spring. Neither makes the first move. They're observing one another's microexpressions for the cue. Tailoring their approaches. Sieun's finger flutters, the deliveryman's eyes track the subtle movement—
Now.
The starter pistol fires in his head and Sieun is belting on his feet with dizzying momentum.
A motion too fluid considering every pore of his skin, scalp to soles, was threadbare. The trigger wasn't pulled by him, his body was on an erratic autopilot. Fight-or-flight addled every fibre of his nervous system, firing signals here, there and everywhere. Sieun doesn't know what takes him, wind or thrill, can't fathom how he even finds the willpower, he's been driving on empty for a while with every one of his reserves depleted. But he's a one-track mind who saw light at the end of the tunnel. So he tucks tail and hotfoots it past the remaining greengrocers, through the butcheries and fishmongers, weaving shapes around marketers, left, right and on forth.
"Suho-yah!" The greying elderly lady who'd given the witness report yells after him as he flashes by. Sieun glances over his shoulder at full tilt to gauge who she calls for and—
Well fuck.
This really was his worst fucking day yet.
Hot on his heels with disconcerting speed, a cut above the rest, was none other than deliveryman turned grocer turned Suho — or whatever the hell he was. Behind him a diligent Jeongchan and the rest of Yeongbin's (definitely bribed to keep sweet) goons tail. Three goes back up to four and Sieun wants this day to just go to hell already.
So he runs until everything is numb and nothing is not blind reliance on survival instinct. Then he runs some more, and he never stops.
———