Chapter Text
It was a chilly winter day, early morning, when Hotaru came rushing into his room, out of breath and with worry all over her face, pointing back, imperatively.
Dongmae dropped his brush and stood to follow her immediately.
Her problems usually involved rude people or nasty insects, apart from that, Hotaru never worried about much else. Especially not up to this degree. So he knew this was something serious.
She took him outside, to their private garden, and under the frost-bitten canopy of their cherry tree was a wailing being, howling into the half-light, surely alerting everyone around that it was there. (He suddenly questioned how he didn’t hear it himself, even if he was inside…) He looked closely: it was a baby. Rosy fat cheeks, and dirty nose. A baby!
Hotaru looked at him, expecting something, and Dongmae looked back at her, confused.
“No. I can’t take it inside. Where would I put it?”
She rolled her eyes like he never saw her do before and crouched under the tree. When she came back up she was holding the baby in her arms and smiling sweetly at it. He fought hard to think on what the appropriate reaction would be to this ridiculous situation.
His head was empty, only concerns resided in there for the moment.
“Listen,” he started, but she ignored him and got inside the house still cradling the creature tightly. “Hotaru!” He followed her again, (slower this time round).
Gu Dongmae was uncomfortable around children. It’s not that he disliked them… It’s that he wasn’t sure what to do around them.
A few times he gifted candy to them, casually, of course. It wasn’t a source of sustenance, he knew, but they could do for a hungry body. If they were high class he wouldn’t really bother to look at them; except for that one time at the American house he ransacked. That baby kept crying, looking at him like he’d done something to her. He was almost offended. Almost. Then, again, sometimes a poor kid would be in trouble (tried at the hands of violent men) and he'd killed before for that. He’d killed for much less. Taking advantage of someone that can’t fight back is cowardice. He hates cowards.
Apart from sweets, confusion and blood drawn, he hadn’t had much experience with the little people.
Now, he had a baby looking at him, with no discernible expression on its face, sitting on his tea table, big-eyed and squishy-looking. Thankfully, it wasn’t making alarming noises anymore…
“It appears I have given you shelter in my home, agissi. Is that what you were crying out there? “Asylum”?” The baby didn’t even blink.
Dongmae was starting to think there was something interesting on his face that elicited strange reactions from babies every time. “What even are you anyway?” He decided to be a bit less respectful, since the master was acting oddly.
“Heh,” it said. “Booo-agk. Mmmheh!” He wasn’t entirely sure if the kid didn’t speak yet or if that was the language the parents spoke. After all, the baby was clearly foreign to this country, if the blond hair and overall fair complexion were any indicatives… Also, nobody knew where it came from or how it ended up in his backyard. Emphasis on BACKyard. He didn’t think the baby climbed through the buildings and walls to make a nest on a tree. Someone put it there purposefully.
“I see…” He answered, simply, still pretending to have a conversation with the unidentified intruder. He had to get to the bottom of this.