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Kim Dokja was never sure when the dreams began, but he knew they had always been there, lurking just beyond the edges of his consciousness. Long before he could name them, the nightmares had started, relentless and suffocating, tangled up in memories he wished he could forget.
As a child, sleep had never been an escape. It had only been another battlefield. He’d lie awake in the dark, listening for the sound of his father’s heavy footsteps, the click of the door and the unmistakable scent of alcohol that followed. There was no peace, even when he closed his eyes. In his dreams, there was always the shadow of a man who loomed over him, cold and merciless, whispering that he was worthless, that he was nothing more than a speck of dust in this world.
He learned early that crying didn’t help. Neither did begging. His father’s fists didn’t care if he screamed, and his mother’s silence was a weapon just as sharp. So Kim Dokja stopped crying. He stopped begging. He let the bruises bloom on his skin like a twisted kind of art, each one a reminder that he was real. He existed. And maybe that was enough. Dokja learned early that silence was safety. Speaking, moving, even breathing too loudly could trigger his father’s rage. And he didn’t want that.
✦
It started with words, venomous insults that dug into his skin like needles. “You’re worthless,” his father would hiss, his breath reeking of alcohol. “A mistake.” The words echoed in Dokja’s mind long after his father stumbled away, leaving him alone in the dark. And then came the fists—heavy, unforgiving, like hammers against his frail body. Every bruise, every cut, became part of a secret map, a landscape of pain that only he could read. It has become a new normal for him.
How could you hurt a little kid and even more, your own son?
His mother? She was always absent, even when she was home. Sometimes, Dokja would catch her standing by the window, staring out into the city as if she were trying to disappear. Other times, she would lock herself in her room, pretending nothing was happening. It was easier to pretend, after all. Easier to imagine that her son wasn’t being broken apart just outside her door.
But the worst of it—the incident—came when Dokja was ten.
One night, his father came home drunker than usual. His face was twisted with anger, his eyes bloodshot. Dokja could feel it in the air, the storm that was about to break. He tried to hide, curling up behind the couch, but his father found him easily. Dragging him out by the collar, he screamed at him—about everything and nothing at once. Dokja didn't understand most of the words, but the rage in his father’s voice was clear enough. Then came the strike—harder than ever before. It knocked the wind out of him, and sent him sprawling across the floor.
That’s when it happened.
Dokja’s mother finally appeared, (he didn’t know why suddenly she care for him. or maybe she did care but doesn't show it to him.) her face pale as she tried to intervene, her voice shaking as she pleaded for him to stop. But his father was past reasoning, past caring. He turned on her instead, shoving her against the wall. She crumpled to the floor, and in that moment, something inside Dokja snapped.
He grabbed the nearest object—a knife —and swung it with all the strength his small body could muster. It pierced his father's abdomen, sending him reeling backward, blood streaming down. The silence that followed was deafening.
Dokja stood frozen, the bloodied knife still clutched in his trembling hands.
In that moment, all he remembered was the silence. And the blood.
When the police arrived (his neighboor is the one who called the police. Strange, before this they didn’t even care about what happen to us), it was like waking up from a nightmare. His mother was calm, eerily calm, as she was led away in handcuffs, her hands stained with blood. But the blood wasn’t hers, and it wasn’t his. It was his father’s, pooling around his f■th■r lifeless body on the floor.
Kim Dokja just stood there, numb, watching as they took his mother away. She didn’t resist. She didn’t cry. She didn’t even look at him. She simply walked away, disappearing into the flashing lights and the crowd of officers. And as they took her, the weight of what had happened began to sink in.
It wasn’t his mother who had killed his father. It was himhimhimhimhimhimhimhimhimhimhimhim.
He was too young, too afraid, too consumed by years of terror and helplessness to understand the gravity of his actions. All he had wanted was for the nightmare to end. And when his father had fallen, crumpling to the floor, the world had gone silent.
He had dissociated from the moment, his mind retreating into itself as if to protect him from the horror of what he had done. He hadn’t realized, not fully, what had happened. In that haze of blood and fear, he hadn’t processed the fact that his hands were the ones stained red. That he had killed his father.
But his mother had understood. She had seen what he had done, and without hesitation, she had taken the blame. She had wrapped her arms around him, shielding him from the truth even as the police arrived. She had told them it was her, that she had done it to protect herself, to protect her son. And they had believed her. They had taken her away.
It wasn’t until much later (after the apocalypse happens), after she was gone, that Kim Dokja began to remember. The memories came back to him in flashes—his father’s angry face, the knife in his hand, the feeling of it sinking into flesh, the sickening thud as his father hit the floor. He remembered standing there, staring down at the blood, his hands shaking, his heart racing in his chest. And he remembered the relief.
The relief that it was over. That the years of abuse, of terror and pain, had finally come to an end. But that relief was quickly swallowed by guilt, by the overwhelming horror of what he had done. He had killed his father. He had become the monster he had always feared(father).
But his mind couldn’t handle the weight of that truth. So it buried it, it buried deep within the recesses of his consciousness, locking it away where he couldn’t reach it. He dissociated from the memory, from the trauma, because that was the only way he could survive. He couldn’t face the reality of his actions, couldn’t bear to live with the knowledge that he had taken a life. So he didn’t. He let his mother take the fall, let her shoulder the blame, even though he knew, deep down, that she hadn’t done it.
But he hated her for it. He hated the way she had turned his life into a story, a narrative that she controlled. By claiming the murder as her own, she had robbed him of his agency, of his ability to come to terms with what had really happened. She had rewritten their lives into something she could control, something she could sell. And in doing so, she had left him to drown in his own guilt and confusion, abandoned in a world that now saw him as nothing more than a tragic footnote in her tale.
Underground Killer became her confession (salvation), but it wasn’t the truth. It was a carefully crafted lie, a story that painted her as the victim, the one who had finally snapped after years of abuse. But Kim Dokja was the one who had snapped. He was the one who had finally had enough. He was the one who had killed.
And yet, no one knew. No one would ever know. Because his mother had made sure of that. She had taken his crime and turned it into her own redemption arc, and in doing so, she had erased him from the narrative. She had written herself as the hero, as the protagonist, and he had become the forgotten child once more.
‘Dokja-yah, Don’t worry. I’ll love you even if no one does.’
As the years passed, Kim Dokja tried to bury the memory, tried to convince himself that it hadn’t really happened—that it was just a dream, a nightmare that he could wake up from. But the dream reminded him. Every night, it whispered to him, showing him glimpses of that night, of the blood on his hands, of his father’s lifeless eyes staring up at him. And no matter how hard he tried to forget, the dream wouldn’t let him. (But upon waking up, he didn’t remember the dream at all.)
It wasn’t until much later that Kim Dokja began to understand the true weight of his dissociation. The years of numbness, the detachment from his own life, the constant feeling of being on the outside looking in—it all stemmed from that night. From the moment he had taken his father’s life, his mind had fractured, splitting him into two halves: the boy who had killed, and the boy who had survived.
But the world only saw one half. The world saw Kim Dokja, the son of Lee Sookyung, the boy from Underground Killer, The son of a murderer, the tragic figure whose life had been shaped by the sins of his parents. They didn’t see the truth. They didn’t see the blood on his hands.
And maybe that was for the best. Because Kim Dokja wasn’t sure he could live with the truth, either.
✦
The book rocketed to fame, reaching the bestsellers list (What the fuck?). Suddenly, the world was fascinated by the tale of the broken woman who had risen from the ashes of her torment to take control of her fate. People spoke of her like she was a tragic hero, a survivor. Lee Sookyung became a name on everyone’s lips—a symbol of strength, of defiance against abuse.
But to Kim Dokja, it was a betrayal.
She hadn’t written about a stranger. She hadn’t created a work of fiction. She had taken their lives—their most intimate, painful moments—and sold them for profit. She had turned their suffering into entertainment, a spectacle for the media. His life had become nothing more than a plot point in her twisted narrative.
Worst of all, she left him to face it alone. While Lee Sookyung became a household name, her son was left behind to pick up the pieces. He couldn’t escape the eyes of the world now; everyone knew who he was. They whispered behind his back at school and stared at him on the streets. That’s Kim Dokja, they would say. The boy from Underground Killer. The son of a murderer. They would pity him or gawk at him as if he were a character in the story, not a real person trying to survive.
He hated it. He hated the way his life had become something so public, so exposed. He hated the way people assumed they knew him, knew his pain, just because they had read about it. But more than anything, he hated Lee Sookyung for what she had done. For turning his trauma into a bestseller book. For abandoning him to the spotlight she had created while she remained safely locked away in prison, unreachable, untouchable. She is his mother, isn’t she? so how could she do that?
The attention was suffocating. People, specifically reporters would come up to him, asking questions, wanting to know more about his life and his thoughts, as if his suffering belonged to them now, as if they had a right to pry into his wounds. The book had turned his life into a spectacle, and everywhere he went, he could feel their eyes on him, like vultures circling a dying animal. (Maybe he is a dying animal.)
Lee Sookyung had written about the abuse in vivid detail, describing the horror of living under the constant threat of violence, the suffocating fear that had clung to her every breath. But what she didn’t write about was the aftermath. She didn’t write about the son she had abandoned. She didn’t write about the loneliness that had swallowed Kim Dokja whole once she was gone, the way he had to fend for himself in a world that only saw him as the tragic boy from the book, in a world that cursed him for living quietly.
In her story, Lee Sookyung had found freedom through murder, through the act of severing herself from her abuser. But Kim Dokja had found no such freedom. The chains remained, invisible but unbreakable, keeping him trapped and caged in a life that was no longer his own.
As the years passed, the anger inside him grew, festering like an open wound. He resented her for what she had done—for reducing him to a character in her story, for leaving him to suffer the consequences while she basked in the glory of her newfound fame. He resented the way she had taken their shared pain and twisted it into something that no longer resembled the truth, something that the world could consume and then discard when they were done with it.
Underground Killer wasn’t just a book. It was a curse. A constant reminder that no matter how far he ran, no matter how much he tried to distance himself from the past, it would always follow him. He would always be Kim Dokja, the boy from the book. The boy whose mother had killed his father and turned their tragedy into a bestseller.
And yet, in his dream, he could never escape her shadow. The presence that lurked behind him, the ancient storyteller who had walked the same road before him—it wasn’t just a metaphor for loneliness. It was his mother. Her story had been etched into his bones, written into his very being, just like the stories he read to escape his own reality.
Kim Dokja would always be the reader. The one who watched, the one who followed, the one who walked the road but never reached the end. And his mother’s story would always be there, following him, no matter how much he hated it, no matter how much he tried to forget.
Because the truth was, Lee Sookyung had not just turned her own pain into a story—she had turned his life into one too. And Kim Dokja had been abandoned in the pages, left to navigate a world that no longer saw him as a person, but as a character in a narrative he never wanted to be part of.
His dream was not just a dream. It was his life.
And it was a story that would never end.
the end.