Work Text:
Yoo Joonghyuk hates the rain.
But he hates when someone disturbs his routine even more.
“This place is mine.”
His hair is dripping wet. It falls into his eyes, and he hates the sensation of his damp clothes against his skin.
In front of him, sitting on the floor of the little shelter of the playground area, a boy looks at him in silence. He wears a pretty dirty shirt and shorts that expose his legs full of bruises and bloody scratches. Every boy in Yoo Joonghyuk’s class has the same marks from playing football during breaks at school.
He doesn’t really like those boys. So, naturally, the one in front of him irritates him a bit.
“I said: this place is mine.”
The boy shrugs.
“For now, it’s mine too.”
“What-”
“It’s raining. And I need it. And, technically speaking, this is a public space so it can’t be your place.”
He takes back what he just said. This boy doesn’t irritate him: Yoo Joonghyuk already hates him.
“I come here all the time. And I never ever saw you here.”
“I never saw you either.”
“Because you don’t come here often. I do.”
He notices a smile on the boy’s face. Now that he looks at it, his lips are hurt, and he has a bruise on his cheekbone.
“When it stops raining, you leave.”
“Okay.”
“Fine.”
The boy doesn’t say anything after that. He just looks outside and Yoo Joonghyuk can’t see his face anymore. The sound of the rain is almost too loud and when it finally stops he wants to ask him his name.
Now that the moment has passed, he thinks that maybe playing with someone doesn’t seem like a bad idea for once.
But, as requested, the boy gets up and leaves without saying anything more.
Yoo Joonghyuk watches him walk out of the playground and finally disappear. He feels a little bad.
Two weeks later, it’s the boy that finds him.
Yoo Joonghyuk reads his books under the sunlight, on the floor. It’s been at least five minutes that he’s on the same page, lost in his thoughts, when he hears rapid footsteps on the gravel.
The next moment, someone slides into his secret place, breathing hard and sweating.
It takes a little more than nine seconds for the boy to acknowledge that someone is already here. Yoo Joonghyuk has his eyes fixed on him.
“Oh,” says the boy.
“It’s you.”
He thought of him. Sometimes. Especially at school, when the bells rang and Yoo Joonghyuk had nobody to go to during break. Not that it bothers him because most of the time he likes being alone, but it’s true that sometimes he would like to have someone. Just one person is fine.
“Sorry,” says the boy. “I wasn’t going to come back, but…”
He swallows. His cheekbone is almost entirely blue, this time. And his hair is messy.
“I needed the place again.”
“It’s… okay. I thought about it, and you can come back.”
The boy raises his eyebrows. His knees are all bruised and bloody again, and his clothes are dull.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I can share. But only with you, you can’t take your friends here.”
The boy smiles, like Yoo Joonghyuk just said something funny.
“Not gonna happen, I don’t have any friends.”
Oh.
“Oh. Okay. I don’t... have a lot of them either.”
He clears his throat. Today is a lot warmer and his shirt sticks to his skin.
“What’s your name?”
The boy makes a funny expression. It only lasts a moment before he answers:
“Kim Dokja. You?
“Yoo Joonghyuk.”
The smile that Kim Dokja makes is a little weird. It’s not a wince, but he doesn’t really seem happy. He’s polite. A little bit detached.
But, in the end, it’s Dokja that comes closer first and asks him:
“What are you reading?”
Kim Dokja loves reading. Yoo Joonghyuk understands that pretty quickly. If the boy doesn’t talk a lot about him and keeps being pretty calm, he suddenly comes alive every time books are mentioned: BD, novels, if there are words then he seems more than happy to read them.
The first few times, they only talk about books. Yoo Joonghyuk doesn't know where Dokja lives, or which school he attends, or why does he need to come hiding in his secret place so often.
The heart of summer is here and soon it’s the holidays and they can stay together all day long.
“Why do you come so often if you live here?” asks Kim Dokja one day while pointing at the luxurious building in front of the playground.
Yoo Joonghyuk shrugs.
“I don’t really like being at home.”
“Really?”
He can’t read the expression on Kim Dokja’s face.
“Well, nobody’s ever at home. It’s lonely. And…”
“Your parents work a lot?”
“They’re always busy. And soon, I’m going to have a little sister. She’s almost there, but my mom is not at home now more than before. She didn’t even take a break. So I wonder if…”
Dokja looks at him. His hair always falls into his eyes. Last week, a hairdresser came at Yoo Joonghyuk’s home to cut his hair, even though it didn’t grow much from last time. But Kim Dokja’s hair grows and grows, and nobody is doing anything.
“When my sister will be there, who’s going to take care of her? I’m… scared that it won’t change anything for them.”
He shoots in a rock on the floor.
“At least,” Kim Dokja says after seconds of silence, “she will have you. Sometimes it’s enough.”
One day, Yoo Joonghyuk is pretty sure that Kim Dokja is going to cry.
“I’m sorry.”
He hands him a book that Yoo Joonghyuk gave him three days ago. The pages are all crumpled, and the jacket is ripped off.
Kim Dokja’s hands can’t stop shaking. His cheekbone is blue again. There is dry blood in the corner of his lips.
Anger rises in him.
“I’m so sorry,” Kim Dokja says again, “I’m…”
Yoo Joonghyuk takes the book back brutally and throws it away. Dokja jumps up, startled.
Under the heat of summer, Yoo Joonghyuk takes one step ahead and reaches out to grab his face and expose his cheek.
“Who’s doing this to you?”
Wet eyes, trembling lips. Yoo Joonghuyk would like to release him, let him go and calm himself down, but he just can’t. His jaw is so tight that it hurts his teeth.
“Who is doing this to you?” he asks again.
But suddenly, Kim Dokja fights back with all his strength and bites his hand off. He almost hits him in the chin.
“Dokja…”
“No!”
Dokja shakes his head.
“No,” he says, “I’m so sorry about the book but you just can’t… you can’t, okay?”
“I’m not an idiot!” says Yoo Joonghyuk, ignoring the pain in his hand and the angry look that Kim Dokja is giving him. “Tell me. My mom is a lawyer, she can helps you, she can…”
“Shut up! No, it doesn’t concern you, this doesn’t have anything to do with you so –”
“Doesn’t concern me?”
“It really doesn’t” he repeats with a loud voice. “Take care of your own problems first before—”
“Dokja” Yoo Joonghyuk growls.
But suddenly, Kim Dokja shakes his head again, breathes, and starts running the other way. Yoo Joonghyuk thought he could catch up quickly, but Dokja is so fast that – the next moment, Yoo Joonghyuk is alone and Dokja is nowhere to be seen.
When the night comes, he feels so angry that he keeps his little sister against him all evening, in the quiet apartment.
He doesn’t see Dokja again for a whole month.
School starts again and this time he’s in middle school. He doesn’t want to make any friends again. He hates the new nanny that his parents hired who comes every night to make them food. He hates coming home and having to go to day-care to take his sister Mia back home before changing her and giving her her baby bottle when the nanny’s not here before 5PM.
He loves his sister. He really adores her. She’s cute, she eats well, she doesn’t cry much, she likes to be in his arms and she loves being on the sofa with him when Yoo Joonghyuk is playing video games.
One night, Mia is in her stroller and he walks while trying to make her smile: he almost doesn’t see the boy sitting on the floor, a few meters away from the door of his building.
Knees tight against his chest, face on his arms: Yoo Joonghyuk recognises Kim Dokja almost immediately.
“My neighbors are going to call the police if you stay here.”
Kim Dokja is startled.
When he straightens up, Yoo Joonghyuk clenches his fists. Brow bone open, purple eye, split lip, blood flowing from his ear. He almost wants to yell.
Kim Dokja doesn’t say anything more. He keeps his eyes down, ashamed. It makes him so mad to see him like that.
“Come with me.”
“Where?”
His voice is all rusty.
“My home. The nanny isn’t here for an hour.”
He doesn’t even know what to do anymore.
Two weeks later, it’s everywhere. On TV, in the paper news. They talk about it at school.
“Tragedy in a neighborhood home, a wife kills her husband”.
There are dates and names.
Son. Kim Dokja.
There are details, proof, witnesses.
Violent for years. Gambling. Bad father. Yelling for hours.
There are accusations.
Not enough. Justice. Still a murder.
This time, Yoo Joonghyuk cries.