Chapter Text
A lot of things were quiet in the middle of the night, but this night, to Beomseok, every little thing was so terrifyingly loud. Even as he lays in his bed, utterly still, he feels hyperaware of it all.
The air being inhaled and exhaled through his nose as he tried to keep his breathing calm sounded like a shaky breeze, and his heartbeat was thudding ominously in his chest, making its way up into his ears, the echo sounding like an alarm bell trying to warn him.
He felt like he was already doing something wrong, and like his father was going to catch him before he even dared to take a single step outside of his room. Maybe he was already waiting for him right outside, knowing how much of a bad seed Beomseok is, knowing he must be planning to do such a stupidly brazen act, and must be swiftly punished before he could even make an attempt.
Beomseok got punished a lot, over small things, never daring to do anything more, never even thinking of it, until tonight. He’s learned to keep his mouth shut, to submissively obey any demand, even the ones that would leave him humiliated and bruised.
A strip of cloth, a strip of dignity getting taken away as he meekly turns and kneels to present his back at the cold order, towards the cold golf club that would soon get swung down, reddening his skin and making it swell.
And his stupid, stupid idea was a big thing, an immense transgression, that would surely leave him bleeding and breaking out into all sorts of colors by morning, and maybe gotten rid of by night.
Was he willing to risk it? Was he even capable of such thought and ideas? What else did he know, other than to bow and take it?
When he dares to shift off his bed, it doesn’t feel like bravery. It feels like a dumb, audacious suicide mission. He is a dog that is daring to leave its kennel, venturing outside with its tail tucked and legs trembling, knowing its owner is in the house and going to kick him right back into his place if he’s caught.
But it would be worth it.
If he could just get his desperate hands on his fathers watch. If he could just make his own choice for once, a good one, instead of being a pathetically passive boy. If he could just get the money for that threatening loan shark so his friends didn’t have to get hurt.
That’s what would make it worth it. Even if in the end, he’s the one who will end up hurt.
He would surely get belted and beaten, left bedridden if not just abandoned on the streets to die. He supposes his father would say he ran away, since he was such a troublesome teenager burdened with emotional issues from being abandoned by his real family at birth. As if running would be an option for him with his bruised body, useless legs struggling to hold his own weight.
But right now, his body wasn’t bruised. His legs are working fine as he tiptoes towards his bedroom door, and it would be self-preservation to stop now. Yet he keeps going, carefully creeping along until his shaky hands wrap around the door handle.
His heartbeat thuds louder when it creaks, loud loud loud, dangerous dangerous dangerous, and he swallows hard, eyes squeezing shut as he waits to either get busted or until it feels safe to move again, as if that concept was a possibility in this household.
His chest feels hot, tightly tangled with nerves blocking out the air, enough so that he has to part his lips to breath through his mouth instead of his nose to be able to take in sufficient oxygen. He breathes and breathes and breathes, heavy, shaky, but carefully slow, and hopes he’ll still be breathing by tomorrow as he steps outside of his room.
He steps so lightly, but the floor creaks too, a betrayal when he takes a full minute to calculate his each and every movement. It’s pitiful, how slowly and warily he’s walking in his own house, the hallway seeming dauntingly long in a way that he hadn’t noticed before.
His heart and the soles of his feet have teamed up against him with their light thumps that make him feel dreadfully worse, sounding too loud compared to the quiet night. He’s terrified the noise is echoing and somehow gravitating towards his fathers room, but that area stays blessedly silent.
It doesn’t help his peace of mind much either way when he creeps past, the air feeling tensely still and suffocating, but he continues to unhelpfully hold his breath in fear of making any more noise.
He anxiously swallows the thick lump in his throat as he finally, blessedly, reaches the door to his fathers office where he knows his expensive watch is kept. His hand is shaky and sweaty as he slowly opens the door and slips inside after one quick backward glance.
His exhale is ragged as he lets his shoulders slump, as if he was safe in this room. As if his father hadn’t beaten him here once before too. Re-entering all of the rooms he’s bled in makes him automatically feel smaller, his shoulders wilting further.
Stupidly, he feels like sliding to the floor and taking a breather, or just giving up and abandoning the mission right there, despite making it so far, overcoming that horrendously long and creaky hallway. He can’t afford to relax or give up right now though, the stakes for both options are too high, so he exhales a few more times to let his chest loosen before he starts tiptoeing again, towards the desk.
His face pinches nervously as he flicks the lamp on, the click sounding sharp in the silence. The careful opening of the drawer is even louder, the scrape of wood making him gulp and feel almost dizzy with anxiety. His gaze flickers to the half open door before dropping back down to all the objects revealed.
Pens, notepads, your average mundane office materials, none of which had any worth to Beomseok, certainly none of which capable of helping him get 15 million won. He digs quietly through the drawer for a bit, each light clank of an item making his heart pause for a moment, until his eyes finally catch on the shiny, definitely 15 million won worthy watch.
He lets out a relieved breath, shakily lifting it out of the pile to take, but then his breath catches for another reason. He wasn’t just borrowing it. He was taking it to steal, and then sell. Like a thief. Because that was what he was now, wasn’t it? Maybe, when his father noticed it was missing and beat him for it, it would just be what he deserved. A fair punishment for a scoundrel excuse of a son.
He remains frozen for a moment, fear rooting him in place, the cold metal of the watch making his filthfully insolent fingers numb. Cold metal, always cold, hard metal, like that damned golf club his father liked to use on him so much, or the end of his belt where the buckle lay. He feels too dazed to remember which one was used on him in this very room, but just the reminder of that cold brutality hits him hard enough that he almost drops the watch and backs away from the desk, shivering.
Would he be beaten in this room again? Would it be his fists, his feet, his belt, or his club?
He suddenly feels sick. Sick and cold.
He wants to run back into his bedroom and hide under the warm covers, or beg for forgiveness regarding his crimes, but he’s been hit in that room too. There was no sanctuary in this house, no place that was safe from his fathers cold and angry, all-knowing eyes.
He would be found out, and he would be hurt. He would be screamed at and left to pathetically snivel at the floor.
But wouldn’t giving up now be more pathetic? He thinks, numb fingers curling more around the watch. Isn’t it better that I get hurt, instead of them?
He thinks that he’d certainly deserve it more than them.
Suho and Sieun, who treated an imbecile like him with nothing but patience and had done nothing to deserve this threat looming over them revolving around owed money. Versus Beomseok, who was nothing but a cowering, blubbering fool, complicit in all the harm done to himself and others around him.
And he could take the harm. He could handle it, make it all his and hide it all away, the bruises, the tears, the words, and make it so his friends that had faith in a incompetent human being like him would never have to deal with any of it.
His trembling fingers tighten around the cold watch. It felt like a damnation. It felt terrifyingly right, as he slipped it into his pocket.
His pulse races as he puts everything else back in order, exactly how it was before his covetous fingers disarranged it all. He just needs to leave quietly, and to be quiet is a thing his father taught him well.
He creeps back into his room, nauseous when he has to sneak past his fathers first, cold fear crawling down his spine, cold like a blunt, metal object getting whacked against it-
He softly closes his door, and lets himself slide down to the floor where he must belong. For now, he was safe, but all he felt was dread, knowing that when his father discovered his crime he would be on the floor all over again.
He would be on his knees, kneeling, and holding back all his tears and cries from the pain that would be brought upon him. He was in for a world of it, until all he knew was pain, but right now, he doesn’t know what he’s feeling at all.
He accepts what’s going to happen in a resigned sort of way, his relief that things might turn out okay feeling a bit numb around the edges. The sense of assurance is fragile, and he wouldn’t dare to feel something like purpose just because of a small attempt at doing something right for the first time in his wretched life.
For now, he could just rest, sell the watch in the morning, pay that conniving loan shark, and stay out of his fathers way for as long as he could, until the man figured everything out and ordered him to take his punishment.
It was simply something he could do, is willing to do, as long as Suho and Sieun would be okay, and not get a taste of this misery. Beomseok is a deplorable boy, but he’s glad that he can do this much for them. He could take it, and feel terrified and hurt and all sorts of bad things, but there would be no sense of regret to come along with it.
For once, he just wanted to make a choice, one he didn’t have to be ashamed of, one that wasn’t just a state of sad and weak nonresistance. It felt like a dangerously hopeful chance, as he shakily got back up on his feet and made his way over to his bed. He pulls out his phone and researches places he could sell the watch, pausing dubiously on one that said it was open 24 hours.
To go there now, when it’s past the middle of the night, sounded sketchy and risky, like he was going to get robbed in the dark as soon as he walked nearby, or they would be suspicious of him going there at such an odd hour, even if they said they were open.
Maybe they’d take one look at him, see through him and know how bad of a child he was, a miscreant thief, and turn him away or call the cops right then and there.
The loan shark had given them three days to turn up with the money, but it didn’t feel safe to wait it out. Waiting it out meant more time for his father to find out, and for the evidence to just be sitting there for him to find. If he sold it now, and gave the money to his friends in the morning, there would be no proof of him having anything to do with the missing watch for his father to discover.
With the looming threat of his father uncovering his crime in mind, he clicks on the address after going through the fortunately good reviews. It’s a thirty minute drive, so he’d have to call an uber with the money his father occasionally gave him for show, so people would think he’s such a great dad when they noticed Beomseok always had some cash to buy whatever he wanted.
He can’t truly bring himself to be grateful for the money when it always had a side dish of a few kicks being aimed at him, but at least it would get him to where he needs to go and back. Did that make him rudely unappreciative? Should he just be thankful? For the money, the shelter, the food?
His father would tell him he should be, and it was probably true.
Nevertheless, when he grabs the watch and cash and sneaks past his fathers room again and feels sick, a part of him wishes he could live anywhere else. He takes the house keys and wishes he didn’t have to come back. He puts on his shoes, and wishes he could just run, even though he didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Avoiding the front cameras, he leaves through the back instead and walks a few blocks away to request a 24 hour available uber, and luckily gets told that the arrival time is soon.
It seems surreal that he's really doing this, going against all of his fathers orders so strongly. He guesses the man was right, and that in the end he really is a bad child. He wonders how he always knew, if there was something that gave it away to the whole world and made it so easy to dissect him and all his flaws.
He feels disturbed and cold, laid bare despite his oversized sweater and sweatpants, and just waits. Always waiting for something to change, but it won’t. After this, he will still just be waiting. To get beaten, probably.
After five more minutes, the uber arrives and he gets inside, politely nodding along to the greeting from the man, quietly saying his own greeting, and then telling him the address of a park nearby, saying that he was going to meet an old friend there, not wanting to have to explain his actual destination.
The man chuckles and says he remembers meeting up late with his friends too when he was in college with a fond sort of nostalgia, luckily not just kicking him to the curb thinking he was an insolent teen sneaking out. And, well, Beomseok was still in high school, not college, but he wasn’t about to correct him.
He just smiles passively, not sociable enough to even attempt to continue the conversation or start up his own, so the drive mainly goes by in silence, the man seeming understanding and just putting on the radio at a low volume.
He seems calm, but Beomseok feels awkward and anxiously sure that there’s something wrong with him, some level of disconnection to humanity that made him unable to do such a basic thing.
He still at least had manners engraved into him though, thanking the driver after paying him and bidding him a good night, which the man returned in a way that was more smooth and natural, compared to Beomseok’s fumbling.
He exits the vehicle into the park, trying to not look too suspicious as he looks back to see the car drive off. Realistically, he probably just looks abandoned instead. He does feel lost enough for it, lost and free at the same time, being so far from his house. It almost feels more safe and calm, but utterly isolating at the same time.
He thinks that he wouldn’t ever be brave enough or have the heart to actually run away one day, since he was a selfish and spoiled boy who was too scared to leave the shelter his father provided, even if that shelter came at a price. It would mean leaving Suho and Sieun behind now that he had them, and he didn’t have the heart to do it when they were the first people to treat him with kindness, despite how he’s sure they could tell he was just a witless waste of space.
It was with them in mind that he was even daring to sneak out of his house in the first place anyway, and he resolved to go through with it despite the punishment it would bring. He’s still a bit nervous as he walks to the store, but he’s coming up with a story as he walks, so maybe he’ll be fine. Or maybe he’ll be arrested. And then beaten once his father bails him out of jail. But he’s going to be beaten either way, so he figures it’s fine.
He rubs his nervously sweaty hands on his sweater before opening the door, embarrassing himself and feeling like a failure when he struggles a bit because of its weight. Maybe it was a security measure to slow down any thieves, or maybe he was just pathetically weak.
The two staff members present are already staring at him from behind the counter, dissecting him before switching into customer service mode and calmly greeting him in an assured way that he wishes he could do too.
Instead, he says hello in an obviously nervous manner, voice shaky. He stays frozen in the entrance way, feeling like he shouldn’t even be allowed inside.
“What can we help you with tonight?” One of the workers asks politely, but his eyes are sharp, and the other is scrutinizing him too as he stays quiet.
“I have a watch.” He gulps. “To possibly sell. Please.” He sounds like he might start crying, and the workers seem to notice it too, shifting. Probably debating whether he was a scam and should call the police or if he was too pathetic to even be worth it.
“We can certainly help you with that. Did you bring it with you tonight, or do you know what type it is?” The same one who spoke before asks, apparently taking charge while the other continues to just observe.
“I brought it with me.” He shuffles forward nervously. “It… it was my dads. Passed down to me.”
The workers' faces immediately turned into sympathetic mode, but maybe it was fake, just as fake and lying as him, and it would be something he deserved.
He takes the watch out of his pocket and hands it to them.
“I don’t really know anything about it… could you just… look it over?” He gulps. “I- I was considering keeping it anyway, but it’s too big, so I was wondering how much it might be worth… if I do end up selling it.”
The worker nods and takes it. “Of course. I’m sorry for your loss. We can certainly help you out.” He says, politely quiet.
He looks it over for a moment, the other worker poking his head in to do the same.
“It’s a Rolex Submariner.” The one who hadn’t spoken yet says, leaning in some more. “Pretty good condition,” he says as he takes it into his own hands and turns it over in the light. “This model could go for… a bit less than 17 million won, maybe.” He looks back up at Beomseok, eyes sharp again, maybe preparing to haggle.
“Oh, okay,” Beokseok says, awkwardly casual, unsure how to proceed as he stays utterly still.
The more talkative worker clears his throat after the moment of silence. “There’s no rush to decide, of course. We understand if it’s… a hard decision.”
Beomseok nods along distractedly, heart beating fast.
“I- I guess I should sell it, since it’s too big for me anyway.” His voice comes out wobbly with nerves again, but he supposes it’ll help the workers think it’s just because he’s a grieving boy, so he’s not too upset with himself for it this time.
The worker nods. “Of course. It’s whatever feels right to you. Did you want to go through that process tonight, or just learn more about it?” He responds politely.
“I… I can sell it now,” Beomseok replies. “...17 million won, you said?” He asks to confirm, careful to not sound hopeful, knowing he still has to play the ‘grieving kid who doesn’t know what to do’ act.
The other worker scrutinizes it some more. “Yes, yes,” he muses. “Do you have any of the paperwork from when your dad bought it?”
Beomseok’s heartbeat stutters. “Um… no. I didn’t find anything like that.”
The worker hums. “That’s alright, but it might drop the price a bit without it. Do you have any identification on you?”
Beomseok’s heartbeat drops. “Um… no. Well… my… school ID?” His voice is shaky again. They stare at him blankly for a moment.
“Did you… want to find the paperwork and maybe have another relative come in with another day?” The first one asks, looking a bit nervous now too.
“No,” he answers shakily, sounding like he might cry.
“W-well, don’t worry! We can still take it, just… the price would drop a bit. Could we see that school ID then?”
He gulps and nods, handing it to them since it was luckily already in his wallet.
They quickly look at the picture and back at him, confirming his identity, or whatever, to make sure he wasn’t a lying scam artist. A thief. Even though that was indeed what he was now. Well, jail time or a beating, he would get his punishment either way.
The worker smiles and hands it back. “Alright, you’re good to go.”
“About the price…” the other worker muses.
“Uh… I’m sorry for the trouble. Is just… 15 million won okay then?”
The workers quickly nod at the downgrade, the downgrade that would work perfectly for Beomseok. 15 million for the loan shark, and nothing extra for his father to catch him with.
“Yes, that sounds just fair and fine.” The first worker smiles. “I’m guessing you want it in cash, or do you have any more questions or concerns before we get that for you?”
God, Beomseok knows it’s probably just customer service, but he feels terrible for being so deceitful towards this kind person.
“Cash, please. I don’t think I have any more questions, thank you.” He says quietly.
The worker nods and takes an exit towards where he can only assume has their cash. He’s a bit surprised they have that much, worried that he would just get a check that he had to go to the bank for, but he guesses it made sense in this business.
The second worker and him stare at each other awkwardly, unsure what to say until the first comes back with the cash and a receipt.
“Here you go.” He says politely as they make their trade.
“Thank you.” Beomseok nods and takes it. “Have a good night, then.”
“You too. Get back safe and rest well.” Says the worker, a hint of sadness in his voice, since they still think he’s someone whose father just died and everything. But no, his father was very much alive, and very much going to beat him when he found out about this, he thinks glumly as he leaves and calls another uber to head back to his demise.
It all still feels surreal, but all the cash sits heavy in his pockets, evidence of his misdeeds. He’s still surprised it worked at all. He ponders over this numbly until the uber arrives to snap him out of his glum daze.
More polite greetings and some small talk that still didn’t feel natural to him for the ride, just serving to remind him how much of a blunder of a human being he was. Dread instinctively crawls down his spine the closer they get to his house, but he has no choice other than to reenter the unsafe area.
He thanks the driver quietly, pays his fee, and sneaks back inside, holding his breath when he creeps past his fathers room again.
He will inevitably be found out soon, but he’s still dazedly shocked he’s made it this far without it happening yet. He feels sick, knowing it will happen eventually.
But for now, he just hides the cash under the sink in his restroom, covering it with any extra hygiene and cleaning products until he takes it out to bring to school in the morning. He’s exhausted, both from the stress of his escapade and because it must be past three in the morning by now. He’ll only get a few hours of sleep tonight, but it was worth it.
It was all worth it. It had to be.
With that dangerous hope in mind, he lays in his bed and stares at his ceiling until exhaustion drags him under, but the state of sleep is fitful, fading in and out through the night. His mind refuses to let it claim him fully as it spirals and cycles endlessly through every fearful scenario that will inevitably come.