Chapter Text
"I think I saw a guy go that way." He pointed to an alley on the opposite side of the road.
Cursing, the group of men shouldered past him and headed towards the alley. Kim Dokja knew that that alley was long and winding, full of abandoned buildings with ample hiding spots. It also opened into a busy intersection where cars came and went. The typical escape route.
Whoever those men were they would be occupied for a while in their wild goose chase.
Kim Dokja let out a quiet breath of relief.
Glancing over his shoulder into the narrow gap between the two buildings behind him, the "wild goose" remained slumped over concealed by a particularly dense patch of tall weeds, unmoving, only letting out the occasional faint breath to show he was still alive, though how barely Dokja didn’t know.
Did he make the right choice? If him and those men were together…what if Dokja had accidentally ruined the man’s chance of being saved? Was more blood on his hands now? Dokja berated himself as thoughts swirled in his head on habit, biting at the skin on his thumb.
But Dokja, even with his head down low, bangs hiding his eyes, could tell that that group of men definitely did not mean well to whoever they were trying to find. They were familiar to him in that regard.
When they spotted Kim Dokja, a random boy in a disheveled school uniform that happened to be trudging along on the empty street, they rushed up to him.
"Where’d he go?!” One of the men grabbed his shoulder in a tight grip, out of breath and incoherent in his questioning. Dokja cowered, lowering his head and curling in on himself. “A guy! A guy came this way right? Did you see him? Which way’d he go?" The man shook him and raised his voice. "Fucking brat! Quickly!"
Dokja floundered, he heard bits and pieces of -
“How’d he…”
“You sure it was this street?…”
“…fucking monster.”
- from the other men as they continued frantically looking around and cursing. Their hands kept inching towards the inside of their coat pockets whenever random sounds sounded in the distance.
Dokja’s head jerked up at a rough shake, his bruises aching in protest.
"I think I saw a guy go that way." Dokja had said and the group had ran off to follow the bone he threw.
Dokja stared after them, adrenaline coursing through his body. He closed his eyes to calm his shaking.
Dokja was scared, yes, but a fool he was not. Life had beaten its lessons into him well enough.
He knew that if he told them that he hadn’t seen anyone, they would’ve continued to rough him up to vent their agitation, better to give them a piece of what they wanted to distract them. It always worked out better that way.
Or worse, if they had lingered around to search the area and found that man, or if he had actually revealed the man's hiding spot, Dokja knew he would just be inviting trouble. A lone child that just so happened to witness something he shouldn’t have. Loose ends like him were easy to tie.
It was just a random chain of events that he had happened to have spotted the man on the ground a few moments prior to the men rounding the corner to the street he was on. He had only been bending down to pick up a plaster that fell off his arm when he saw the figure in the dark alley in front of him.
Kim Dokja opened his eyes slowly and walked over to sit on a bench at a bus stop near the small alley where the man lay, waiting for his bus.
That would never come because this wasn’t part of its route, which Dokja knew but pretended he didn’t just for today.
He took out his phone to scroll through some webnovels to kill time, waiting for a nonexistent bus, but the words on the screen all looked like jibberish to him, his mind elsewhere.
Specifically, his mind was still stuck on that small alley behind him.
He kept scrolling as his mind kept wandering.
After sunset faded to twilight, Dokja deemed that the coast was clear and got up. The group of men he misdirected probably wouldn’t be doubling back this way, he justified.
Hitching up his bagpack, he tried to nonchalantly walk over to the alley, as if he just so happened to need to walk over to some dilapidated buildings and not that there was some hulking mass of a man who was probably involved in some shady business slumped over on the ground.
No one was around but he supposes he should still keep vigilant.
He ignored the rational voice in his head that reminded him that this was how all bad horror movies started off and how all bad situations began.
He snuck a glance at the man on the ground, still in the same spot as he found him earlier, and mustered up his courage.
“A-Ahjussi?” Dokja stuttered as he whispered towards the man. He figured that if the man were to be conscious, better that Dokja find out sooner when he could still bolt out of there rather than later when that man’s hand be wrapped around his throat. “Um…hello? Ahjussi? Are y-you okay?”
The man gave no indication that he was conscious.
After some internal debating wherein his sense of self-preservation seems to have lost out, Dokja inched closer.
“That dark stain on his shoulder…” he thought to himself. In some strange bout of fixation, Dokja tried getting a closer look at the man and stepped into the bramble of weeds.
Snap!
Dokja went deathly still, eyes wide. A broken branch lay beneath Dokja’s foot.
Hidden in the darkness, Dokja waited.
One.
Two.
Three.
Fou- Did the man just move?
Dokja stared at the man in tense anticipation.
A minute passes.
But the man remains motionless save the slow rise and fall of breaths, showing that he was still alive.
Maybe it was just the wind…
After remaining tightly coiled up for a few seconds more, Dokja let his breath out in a quiet puff. Him and his clumsiness.
He shook his head, trying to focus his thoughts and salvage some sort of rationality, and he made to walk away. Admonishing himself for his curiosity. What if the man had actually woken up when he was that close to him? He had managed to avoid trouble with that group earlier but…
But what if this man was much worse?
Dokja would be pushing his, admittedly scarce and routinely bad, luck if he stayed any longer.
However, after taking a few steps away towards the mouth of the alley, taking care to avoid any more stray branches and debris, Dokja finds himself turning back towards the dark.
Towards the body shrouded in the weeds, alone, and bleeding out in the twilight.
He just... maybe saw something all too familiar in that lone figure.
He reaches into his bagpack and takes out a small bundle he got earlier that day.
“Its fine, Dokja. The suppliers accidentally gave us too many of these and I don’t have room to store them. You’d be doing me a favor if you took them.” The school nurse had insisted with a kind voice, pushing the bandages towards him again. “You should change those bandages on your knees over the weekend, okay?”
But after another unfortunate run-in with his dedicated cohort of tormentors after school, Dokja had thought, eyes blank and detached as he felt another kick to his side, he would have to use the bandages for today's scrapes instead.
Looking at the man in front of him now, Dokja figured that the man needed them more than he did. Besides, he could wash the bandages on his knees in the sink like he usually did if they got dirtier.
After some hesitant maneuvering, he tiptoes closer to the man and slowly begins wrapping the bandages around the man's shoulder, over his white coat and all, where the red stain bloomed from a bullet-sized tear in the fabric, panicking halfway when he realized that the bandage might not be long enough to adequately wrap. The man was rather large. Maybe Dokja should have taken off the man’s-
Dokja stopped that train of thought before he actually began to consider it. His mind seemed to be all over the place today.
Biting his lips in worry, Dokja thought to himself, if the man woke up and tried to attack him, maybe he could make up some sort of excuse saying that he was trying to patch him up out of goodwill. Its less an excuse and more of, well, it was a simplified version of the truth. Maybe the man wouldn't snap him in half then.
Time crept by in a tense sort of peace and eventually Dokja secured the bandages in an imitation of how the school nurse usually did them for him. He sat back on his heels and judged his handiwork.
Well, it was the best he could do all things considered. The man was still breathing, so at least there's that.
After dusting himself off to stand, his tiredness catching up to him, Dokja peered up at the man's face having been too caught up in everything to take a look earlier.
His breath hitched slightly.
If Dokja had stared at the man for perhaps a very generous minute more, and if he had shyly stuck one of his new plasters on a cut on the man's chin, hands trembling all the while, it was nobody's business but his own. And the man's he supposes.
He ran the rest of his way home, face hot against the twilight chill.
In the quiet night, a golden eye peered out at the shining figure of the boy.